by Max Hastings
The Germans had planned to commandeer Automedon as a supply ship, but on seeing the scale of damage caused by their shells, instead they began to set scuttling charges. Lt. Ulrich Mohr, Atlantis’s adjutant, made a hasty tour of the capture during which he blew open its safe, removing cash and confidential papers along with a weighted green canvas bag found in the chartroom, which Automedon’s dead officers had been tasked to throw overboard in any emergency. The Germans enlisted the aid of British seamen to shift frozen meat, whisky and cigarettes to Atlantis, before the crew was transferred to the German ship. Personal money was confiscated, though their captors issued receipts for the contents of each man’s wallet. Captain Rogge was not only an excellent seaman and tactician, but a man of honour who took pains for the welfare of prisoners from the ships he seized on his remarkable eight-month cruise. Among the British personnel transferred to Atlantis were three passengers, including a chief engineer of the Straits Steamship Company named Alan Ferguson, and his thirty-three-year-old wife Violet, on passage to Singapore. Encountering the Atlantis was only the latest of several unfortunate adventures that had befallen Mrs Ferguson since her marriage in 1936, including a miscarriage and an enforced flight from France in June 1940 aboard the last ferry out of Bordeaux. Now, intensely emotional, she went to Captain Rogge and pleaded with him through tears to save her luggage – two trunks which contained almost all her worldly possessions, including a prized tea set. The German took pity. He signalled Mohr, still on the doomed Automedon, to make a quick search for the Fergusons’ luggage.
Donald Stewart, the only British officer remaining aboard, did his best to deflect Mohr from the locked strongroom below the bridge where the luggage was held, but the Atlantis’s adjutant would brook no distraction. Seeing a door that answered Mrs Ferguson’s description of the baggage space, he had it blown open. Beyond, as well as her trunks he found sack upon sack of mailbags, some of them prominently labelled as containing official communications. The launch that bore Mohr, Stewart and the boarding party to Atlantis’s side soon afterwards repeated the trip heaped with mailbags, as well as Mrs Ferguson’s luggage.
The freighter was dispatched to the bottom a few hours after its fateful encounter with Atlantis. As the German raider hastened to put distance between itself and Automedon’s last known position, Rogge and Mohr set to work on the treasure trove of documents brought across from the British ship. The Merchant Navy’s codes and sailing orders were familiar stuff. But then the two Germans found themselves scanning much more interesting material – a mass of reports and correspondence destined for British military and intelligence outposts in Singapore, Shanghai, Hong Kong. The most secret papers of all included correspondence addressed to Air-Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, British commander-in-chief in the Far East. This gave details of a war cabinet meeting to discuss the strategic situation in Asia, held at Downing Street on 8 August 1940, presided over by Winston Churchill. Appended to this was a highly detailed report on the defences of Britain’s Far Eastern empire, prepared for the government by the chiefs of staff.
Rogge immediately realised the urgency of landing his catch. The British official mail was placed aboard the captured Norwegian freighter Ole Jacob, which sailed with most of Atlantis’s prisoners and a small prize crew to Kobe, in neutral Japan, where it arrived on 5 December. The British documents, now reposing in a locked chest, were forwarded under escort to the German embassy in Tokyo, where naval attaché Paul Wenneker studied them with all the attention they deserved – it is unknown whether he shared their secrets with Richard Sorge. He cabled a digest of the highlights to Berlin, then sent home copies of the key material via the Trans-Siberian railway, in the hands of Lt. Paul Kamenz, Captain Rogge’s prize officer. Five days later, Wenneker was given orders, personally endorsed by Hitler, to pass the documents to the Japanese government, with one stipulation: the Abwehr wanted the credit. The embassy was told to say nothing about the papers having been removed from a British freighter – perhaps partly because this might suggest to the Japanese that Churchill’s government did not much value the material. Instead, Wenneker was told to convey an impression that the prize had been secured by brilliant German secret service work.
On 12 December Wenneker took the documents and translations personally to the offices of the Japanese naval staff, placed them without comment on the desk of Vice-Admiral Nobutake Kondo, Yamamoto’s vice-chief, and sat in silence while they were read. Kondo was appropriately stunned – and grateful. That evening he entertained Wenneker to the best dinner Tokyo could provide, expressing repeated thanks and saying wonderingly, ‘such significant weaknesses in the British Empire could not be detected from outward appearances’. What did the documents contain, that caused Kondo such amazement? By far the most important revelation was a fifteen-page British chiefs of staff report, presented to the war cabinet on 8 August, entitled ‘The Situation in the Far East in the Event of Japanese Intervention Against Us’. It was headed:
SECRET COPY 72
COS (40) 302 (also W.P. (40) 302)
TO BE KEPT UNDER LOCK AND KEY
It is requested that special care be taken to ensure the secrecy of this document.
The British chiefs correctly predicted the likelihood of deeper Japanese incursions into French Indochina, threatening Malaya. Churchill’s government asserted its unwillingness, founded on avowed military weakness, to go to war with Japan over Indochina. It acknowledged that Hong Kong, pearl of the British Empire on the China coast, was indefensible: in the event of war, only token resistance could be offered to a Japanese assault on the colony. The Royal Navy was pathetically weak in Far Eastern waters, but until the tide of war had turned in the Mediterranean, the British acknowledged their inability to send major reinforcements. At best – or rather, in dire emergency – only a battlecruiser and a single aircraft-carrier could be spared for the Indian Ocean. If Japan attacked Australia or New Zealand the only credible response would be an appeal to the United States to send forces to their aid. The dominant theme of the chiefs of staff’s report to government was an assertion of Britain’s strategic weakness: ‘The forces in Malaya are still far short of requirements, particularly in the air … Our own commitments in Europe are so great that our policy must be directed towards the avoidance of an open clash with Japan … Our general policy should be to play for time; to cede nothing until we must; and to build up our defences as soon as we can.’ The paper also showed that the British were unaware of Japan’s formidable strength in naval torpedo-bombers, among the deadliest weapons in its armoury.
This, then, was the thrust of the documents handed over by the Germans in December 1940, at a moment when Berlin’s foremost foreign policy objective was to drag Japan into the war. The haul was passed to the army’s newly established Asia Development Agency, headed by Lt. Col. Yoshimasa Okada, which was explicitly tasked to study the defences of Britain’s Asian empire. His first instinctive reaction was to assume that the papers must be a German plant, fabricated for political purposes – the Japanese rightly declined to believe that any mere spy could have secured such material. But as Okada and his colleagues studied the British order of battle, they found that this closely matched assessments made by the intelligence staffs of both the Japanese army and navy. Belief grew, and finally became absolute, that the papers were authentic. They were passed to Japan’s prime minister, who was as impressed as had been Admiral Kondo and Col. Okada.
It would be as absurd to suggest that the Automedon papers determined Japan to risk war in December 1941 as it is to attribute any other decisive event in history to a single cause. But the evidence is plain that the captured documents accelerated the sea change in Japanese thinking that took place during the winter of 1940–41. Having been allowed to discover that the British themselves believed their South-East Asian empire to be acutely vulnerable, the Japanese army and navy became increasingly persuaded that the ‘southern strategy’ of assaulting the West’s overseas empires offered a more attrac
tive option than the alternative ‘northern strategy’ of engaging the Soviet Union. As is the way of warlords, because the Automedon material encouraged them towards a course they were minded to take anyway, Japan’s leaders wilfully neglected other intelligence from Europe, especially reports from their naval attachés, which cast doubt upon the prospect of German victory, and especially upon its imminence. Tokyo adhered stubbornly to a belief that Hitler was destined to triumph. Conviction grew upon the generals that if they wished to share in the spoils of looming Axis victory, to avoid ‘missing the bus’ they must strike soon against the Western Powers.
Atlantis was scuttled by her own crew south of St Helena on 22 November 1940, after receiving a first salvo from the 8-inch guns of the British cruiser Devonshire. The German raider thus became itself a victim of secret intelligence: it had been ordered to make a refuelling rendezvous with U-126, at a position in the South Atlantic revealed to the Royal Navy by Bletchley Park. Bernhard Rogge and his crew took to the boats, escaped capture, and survived the war. The Automedon documents were recognised in Tokyo as the captain’s notable contribution to Japan’s 1941–42 triumph: after the fall of Singapore Rogge was presented with a samurai sword by a grateful Japanese Emperor – Göring and Rommel were the only other German recipients of this wartime honour.
Alan Ferguson and his wife Violet came through the war, after enduring years of internment. So too, remarkably, did her tea set. The trunk in which it reposed accompanied her to Germany, then was recovered intact by British forces in 1945. It was dispatched to Singapore, where Ferguson resumed his career as an engineering officer, while enjoying his wife’s genteel afternoon entertaining ashore. As for the British government’s priceless documents, their capture with Automedon reflected a notable and by no means unique carelessness with secret papers. Whitehall went to elaborate lengths to conceal the blunder from the world until it was revealed accidentally many decades later, by discovery of some of Wenneker’s messages in a German archive. The saga vividly illustrates the fact that some remarkable intelligence coups are the fruits of raw luck, rather than of inspired espionage.
2 THE JAPANESE
The Automedon documents contributed to Tokyo’s impressively comprehensive local intelligence picture before its forces attacked Pearl Harbor and the Western European Asian empires in December 1941. The Japanese took more trouble to inform themselves about their immediate objectives ahead of the outbreak of war than ever they did afterwards. For months their agents cycled across Malaya, explored the US Pacific Fleet’s Hawaii anchorages, parleyed with the Hong Kong Triads. This, although the bulk of the Japanese army’s attention and resources remained focused on China, where its men had been fighting and dying since 1937, and where intelligence – joho – was easily secured and Nationalist codes readily broken. In May 1940, during the Yichang offensive, army codebreakers enabled Tokyo’s armies to anticipate the movements of almost every Chinese division. In the summer 1941 Battle of South Shanxi, thanks to decrypts they inflicted 80,000 casualties on much larger Chinese forces, while themselves losing only 3,300 men. Captain Katsuhiko Kudo was hailed as Japan’s ace cryptanalyst, and became the first intelligence officer to be awarded the Kinshi Kunsho – ‘Golden Kite’ – decoration for his achievements in China.
The Japanese army’s ‘China hands’ were known as Shina-tsu, of whom the most celebrated was Gen. Kenji Doihara, dubbed ‘Lawrence of Manchuria’ for his espionage activities. In July 1940 Kioya Izaki, the Shanghai intelligence centre’s deputy chief, spent a month visiting Hong Kong, Canton and Taipei under cover as a trader. The station ran covert operations with codenames like ‘Sakura’ (‘Cherry Tree’), ‘Take Bambo’, ‘Fuji-Wisteria’. One of these, in 1941, flooded China with forged currency, printed by the Army Institute for Scientific Research on specially imported German high-speed presses. Meanwhile the Shanghai counter-intelligence branch boasted a strength of 1,500 men. The navy’s Special Duties Section used disguised fishing boats for offshore surveillance of freight movements to the Nationalists, especially by the British, and opened a private trading company as a cover for agent-running.
Yet Tokyo learned little about the communists, partly because Mao Zhedong’s forces used intractable Soviet codes. And despite all the activity described above, an ingrained sense of cultural superiority – which also caused them to condescend to Anglo-Saxons – made the Japanese unwilling seriously to engage with China for intelligence purposes. A staff officer acknowledged after the war: ‘We failed to realise that we were fighting the Chinese not only in the military field but also in the political, economic and cultural fields. We were almost blind in the latter.’ One Japanese agent in Shanghai was reduced to forwarding to Tokyo as source material Agnes Smedley’s bestselling book China’s Red Army Marches.
Until at least 1942 the Russians, across the border in Manchuria, were the targets of much more ambitious Japanese covert operations than the Western Powers. Tokyo was morbidly fearful of its communist neighbours, and after its drubbing at Nomohan in 1939 the Imperial Army sustained a profound respect for their military abilities. Most of the 22,000 Kempeitai military police deployed overseas were either performing security duties in China or watching the Russians. So primitive was their training that Japanese spies were taught to measure the length of bridges in the Soviet Union from inside closed trains by counting the number of bumps as wheels passed over rail joins. At the Manchurian post of Hsinking, 320 listeners tapped phones and monitored voice radio communication. Eight sigint sites monitored Russian wireless transmissions, and the Japanese sometimes changed border guards at Sakhalin just to provoke the Russians into sending signals, in the hope that these could be decrypted. In 1940 a former Polish army codebreaker assisted the Japanese to crack some low-grade Red Air Force and diplomatic codes. Three hundred Japanese officers a year attended the Russian language school in Harbin.
Seven hundred soldiers were continuously employed peering through binoculars across the border from Manchuria into the Soviet Union, recording the movements of every man, horse and vehicle, together with all ship traffic in and out of Vladivostok. Several ex-tsarist officers scraped a living in Harbin scanning Pravda, Izvestia and other Soviet publications for Tokyo’s benefit. A ceaseless pingpong game was played, wherein the Japanese recruited Russian expatriates, dispatched them across the Manchurian border only for the Soviets to ‘turn’ them: the average Japanese agent survived at liberty for just a week. In 1938 Gen. Genrikh Lyushov of the NKVD’s Far Eastern Directorate escaped a firing squad by fleeing into Manchuria. He spent the ensuing seven years under house arrest in Tokyo, but his hosts found that their prize had frustratingly little to tell of practical value. In the wake of ‘Barbarossa’, a steady stream of Russian deserters – 130 of them by the end of 1941 – crossed into Japanese territory, but many proved to be NKVD plants.
Some Japanese initiatives were spectacularly unprofitable: the Intelligence Department enlisted the aid of the Army Institute for Scientific Research at Noborito to devise a chemical to paralyse Russian guard dogs’ power of scent and stimulate their sexual appetite, to make them less manageable; both dogs and handlers remained unmoved. Attempts to use as sources Japanese businessmen visiting Russia achieved little, for whenever such visitors left their hotels they were dogged by NKVD watchers, as were attachés in Moscow. An intelligence officer, Lt. Col. Saburo Hayashi, complained that probing Soviet secrets was ‘like searching for very fine gold dust in mud’.
Japan’s ideas about gathering foreign intelligence focused overwhelmingly upon espionage. Its agents penetrated the Soviet embassy in Beijing, and in 1941 one concealed himself in a cupboard of the library of the British consulate in Taipei, where the safe was located. The man collapsed unconscious in his stifling confinement, but he revived in time to watch the consul open the safe and to memorise its combination, which eventually yielded a few crumbs. Japanese agent networks operated in California and Mexico under cover as fishermen, dentists and barbers; there was a chain
of Japanese barber/agents in the Panama Canal Zone. Some British and American renegades were recruited as sources: former Royal Navy submariner Lt. Cmdr Collin Mayers provided information for cash until his arrest in 1927. An ex-US Navy yeoman named Harry Thompson received $200 a month from his Japanese handler until sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment in 1935.
Cmdr Fred Rutland was a decorated British airman who made his living after retirement by briefing the Japanese and promoting dud companies at their expense – for a time they maintained him in a mansion in Beverly Hills. Both MI5 and the FBI were well aware of his activities. The latter decided that he was Japan’s principal agent in the US, though a May 1935 report to Tokyo from Rutland in California was a fair sample of his unimpressive wares: ‘The [US] Army and Navy want war and in my view this might be put off for a few years … Everyone I have met in America thinks a war with Japan is inevitable.’ Lt. Cmdr Arata Oka, Japan’s naval attaché in London, argued that ‘it would be wrong to rely on Rutland alone in case of war’, which was an understatement. The Japanese nonetheless liked their tame traitor sufficiently to give him another £4,000 when he revisited Japan in 1938. The ungrateful Rutland then sailed to America and approached Captain Ellis Zacharias, the US Navy’s Asian intelligence specialist, to propose a sale of Japanese secrets. This left the FBI bewildered about which side Rutland was on, but he was plainly a troublemaker, and was finally arrested on 6 June 1941. London’s anxiety to avoid a public scandal caused him to be deported to Britain, where he was interned. Four years after his release at the end of the war, Rutland killed himself.
