The Secret War

by Max Hastings

  Every intelligence practitioner was aware of the distinction between secrets, which were knowable, and mysteries, which were usually not. Once a date was set for a given operation it became a secret, vulnerable to discovery by the other side. But how the enemy would behave in as-yet-unrealised circumstances was often a mystery, because he had not made up his own mind. The JIS made some important misjudgements in predicting German strategic responses to Allied initiatives – for instance, the November 1942 ‘Torch’ landings in North Africa, and the June 1943 invasion of Sicily. One of the JIS staff wrote after the war: ‘Our failures lay really in our inability to appreciate the extreme obstinacy of Hitler. More than once we forecast that he would withdraw to shorter lines either in Italy or Russia or the Balkans in order to economise on divisions.’ He added wryly: ‘I still believe that he would have done better if he had followed our advice.’ The consequences of the JIC’s 1941 scepticism about a German invasion of Russia have been discussed above – it made more impact in Moscow than in London, by feeding Stalin’s expectation of Churchillian conspiracies against himself. But if the difficulties of intelligence assessment in wartime are accepted, even with the assistance of Ultra, the JIC’s record seems impressive. The historian G.M. Trevelyan once wrote of a sixteenth-century English queen’s relationship with her intelligence chief: ‘If Elizabeth had taken Walsingham’s advice on every occasion she would have been ruined. If she had never taken it she would have been ruined no less.’ The same might be said of the relationship between Churchill and the JIC.

  The British command structure was much more centralised than that of the US: while Churchill’s generals in the field were in no doubt that they took their orders from London, across the Atlantic in Washington intelligence staffs became dispirited by consciousness that local theatre commanders, and especially Gen. Douglas MacArthur in the South-West Pacific, made decisions almost heedless of Pentagon or Navy Department opinions. Moreover, although among the British there were frequent inter-service disputes, the principle of ‘jointery’ was sincerely embraced, as it was not between the US Army and US Navy. Meanwhile, President Roosevelt rarely became engaged in operational debates, and seems seldom to have bothered to read much of the Ultra material delivered to him.

  It was much easier to achieve inter-service cooperation on Britain’s side of the Atlantic because its ruling village was such a small place. The senior naval representative on the JIS was an able sailor named Charles Drake. The prime minister approached him one day at his office in Great George Street: ‘I think, Captain,’ said Churchill in that familiar slow-march drawl, ‘we must be kin.’ Drake replied, ‘I think we are,’ which prompted Churchill to test him by asking, ‘Why do you say that?’ The naval officer achieved a triumph by responding that he had read both volumes of the statesman’s Life of Marlborough, in which Churchill recorded the first duke’s pedigree, as son of the seventeenth-century Sir Winston Churchill – and his wife Elizabeth Drake. The prime minister quizzed the naval officer further: ‘And you believe it?’ Yes, indeed. ‘Good, Captain, then we’re kin.’ This anecdote helps to explain why Britain’s supremely whimsical prime minister was so beloved; and how its bureaucratic brain functioned amid an intimacy unmatched by any other warring power.

  The chiefs of staff sometimes deplored the influence exerted by loose cannon outside the formal hierarchy, among them Desmond Morton, whom Churchill had first met in France in 1916. In May 1940 he took the major into Downing Street to serve as his liaison officer with the intelligence services. Morton was briefly influential, but his authority declined as his meagre diplomatic skills became apparent. Hugh Dalton, minister responsible for SOE until February 1942, wrote that the notoriously ill-tempered major ‘spoke ill of many and well of no-one’. The Americans referred to him without enthusiasm as ‘Desperate Desmond’, while Robert Bruce Lockhart dubbed him ‘the P.M.’s Kitchen Door’. Bill Bentinck described Morton unenthusiastically as ‘a curious creature. An awful lot of talk. He didn’t really play an important role.’ Though Morton liked to brandish Churchill’s name in support of his interventions in Whitehall’s wars, he failed in several attempts to make himself supremo of the secret services. Far from being the prime minister’s éminence grise, he shrank into a superior clerk and runner of errands, mostly with the Free French. Although he knew what Bletchley did, his name was conspicuously absent from the distribution list for its output.

  From 1942 onwards Ultra dominated the JIC’s and JIS’s activities. Although thousands of pages of paper were also generated by MI6 and MI5, few, if any, could match the authority of decrypts. It is remarkable that the hierarchies of both services survived the war unreformed. At MI5, the 1940–41 acting director-general was the incompetent Brigadier Oswald ‘Jasper’ Harker, replaced by the slightly more effective Sir David Petrie, formerly of MI6, whose deputy he then became. Kathleen Sissman, one of the security service’s few women and an intelligence officer of the highest gifts, fiercely denounced Harker’s unfitness for his duties, and in consequence found herself sacked and obliged to transfer to MI6. Fortunately for MI5, Harker and Petrie had several outstanding subordinates, such as Guy Liddell and Lt. Col. Tom Robertson, together with some of the civilians who joined for wartime service. The same was true at MI6, though Stewart Menzies and his senior men – Dansey, Vivian, Cowgill – sustained an uneasy relationship with their ‘hostilities only’ staff, Hugh Trevor-Roper prominent among them. ‘When I looked coolly at the world in which I found myself,’ the don wrote, ‘I sometimes thought that, if this was our intelligence service, we were doomed to defeat.’ The historian considered Menzies an honest and decent man, as his most senior subordinates were not, but ‘I do not think he ever understood the war in which he was engaged.’

  Trevor-Roper had little trouble collaborating with such fellow-amateurs as the army’s Brian Melland, his own cousin; the RAF’s John Pope-Hennessy, an art historian; barrister Ewen Montagu at the Admiralty. He had the highest respect for the Bletchley staff, and for Liddell at MI5. But he complained to Lord Swinton, chairman of Whitehall’s oversight body the Security Executive, about the failings of MI6, and wrote in equally savage terms to the prime minister’s intimate, Lord Cherwell, whom he knew well from Christ Church, throwing in for good measure a denunciation of Gambier-Parry, his own superior. These interventions quickly became known in Broadway, and earned Trevor-Roper a formal reprimand from Menzies and Vivian.

  Quite unperturbed, following Bletchley’s Christmas 1941 breaking of the Abwehr’s principal Enigma cipher Trevor-Roper demanded that a new MI6 section should be created to study Canaris’s organisation by exploiting the flow of new Ultra. Finding little enthusiasm for this proposal inside Broadway, he took it instead to Cherwell. It is scarcely surprising that this sort of high-handedness incurred the rage of Trevor-Roper’s bosses. Nigel de Grey, deputy chief of Bletchley, wrote crossly, ‘Is it necessary to argue with a junior officer? … Personally if he were in my employ I should tell him to shut up – if he persisted I should sack him.’ For some time de Grey declined to allow Trevor-Roper access to the Park, asserting that he was ‘not a suitable person’. Internecine warfare escalated in 1942. Trevor-Roper found himself in trouble after a holiday in Ireland during which Frank Pakenham precipitated his arrest by Irish police as a British spy, an episode which did not amuse Broadway. Then Trevor-Roper leaked to Guy Liddell’s staff the fact that MI6 was withholding from MI5 intercepts about British agents abroad whom the Germans had identified or suspected. Vivian and Cowgill, learning of Trevor-Roper’s responsibility for the disclosure, clamoured for his sacking, though Liddell warned them that they would be depriving British intelligence of a huge talent. Amazingly, and to the credit of Menzies, Trevor-Roper got his way, becoming chief of a new Abwehr section, with eventual promotion to major.

  ‘C’ kept his own job partly because Desmond Morton and other Whitehall critics lacked the clout to unstick him. More important, Menzies exploited his supervisory role over Bletchley Park to
deliver personally to the prime minister choice specimens of Ultra intelligence, codenamed ‘Boniface’, which went far to obscure the deficiencies of MI6’s humint activities. In secret services more than most institutions, in the words of R.V. Jones, ‘If good work results in success, the credit will tend to fall on those officers who present the results to the forum where they are made known to the operational or political staffs.’ Likewise Bill Bentinck: ‘Only Bletchley kept [Menzies] in his job. He was not a very strong man and not a very intelligent one.’ Whereas many British institutions were turned on their heads and remade in the course of the war, Broadway Buildings escaped such a fate. But, given that no national security apparatus is perfect, what seems remarkable is not that Menzies and his subordinates constituted a weak link, but that other parts of the machine worked well.

  Arthur Schlesinger of OSS wrote: ‘Intelligence is only as effective as its dissemination … even the best-designed dissemination system cannot persuade busy people to read political analysis unless it affects the decisions they are about to make.’ The prime minister and chiefs of staff were far more likely to take heed of Ultra decrypts, filling at most one side of a flimsy, than long JIS analytical papers, however ably drafted. It would be mistaken to pretend that because Churchill created an admirable system, this always worked smooth as silk. How could it be so, when he himself was a unique human being, whose attitudes and demands were never predictable? It became a familiar moan throughout Whitehall, the chiefs of staffs’ offices and the secret war community that Churchill abused snippets of intelligence which reached him, to make foolish or ill-informed interventions. Sir Alexander Cadogan complained to his diary one day in 1941: ‘It’s hopeless conducting business like this. Anthony Eden [the foreign secretary] sees no papers, he is dragged up to London for 24 hours, dines with P.M. They both happen to see an [Ultra] intercept which makes it look as if we might get Germans out of Afghanistan. So they get on the hop, and I get messages to say that it must be done at once. But there are considerations of which they are blissfully unaware, poor children.’

  On the credit side of the ledger, however, the system for distributing Ultra decrypts to commanders-in-chief in the field became ever more refined. On 5 March 1941, Bletchley Park sent a momentous signal to the director of military intelligence in Cairo, announcing that thenceforward decrypts containing operational data about German forces would be sent to him direct, so that hours would no longer be wasted in transit via service ministries in London. Such messages would be prefixed ‘OL’: ‘They are to be regarded as absolutely reliable, but must receive utmost security … Source of this information though known to you is never to be mentioned. Endeavour to check any laxity of security and drastically confine personnel who see signals to absolute minimum.’ The system of Special Liaison Units was created: cells at main headquarters, whose members – MI6 personnel in uniform – lived and worked entirely separately from the local army intelligence staff, and were alone responsible for receiving and processing incoming Enigma decrypts. These were then passed to senior officers with appropriate warnings about how best to disguise their contents before any part was passed down the command chain. The organisation, and its security arrangements, worked well, though only in the latter half of 1942 did Ultra flow sufficiently regularly and speedily to secure the full confidence of British generals in the desert. Moreover, it remained forever a long march to translate knowledge of the enemy’s deployments into victory over his forces on the battlefield.

  The British service which used intelligence least imaginatively was the RAF. For all the undoubted cleverness of Portal, from October 1940 chief of the air staff, its intelligence department was weak. It was harder to measure the enemy’s operational air strength than to count his ships or tanks. Throughout the war, all air forces wildly overstated their pilots’ combat successes, and thus the number of enemy aircraft destroyed. Perhaps the worst Allied intelligence failure of the war was misjudgement of the German economy. This was partly because Ultra provided far less assistance in informing the Allies about the enemy’s industries, which exchanged information on paper or by telephone landline more than by wireless. The weakness was well illustrated by the report of the Lloyd Committee on German oil resources, which estimated that RAF bombing had by December 1940 already achieved a cut of 15 per cent in enemy fuel availability, at a moment when Berlin was unaware that the British were even engaged in a systematic air attack.

  Matters did not much improve later in the war. Sir Geoffrey Vickers wrote in a retrospective 5 February 1945 report on economic intelligence: ‘The science of destroying organised war industry … an infinitely complex social and material organism, was unborn when this war began … Service commanders, when attacking industry, are even less professionally qualified than their service advisers … The choice of industrial objectives depends on an analysis of factors far more complex than those which determine the strategy of a campaign and can rely less on science or on experience … The correction of appreciations is verified by events much more closely and much less certainly than those which determine strategy in the field … Economic intelligence in this war has suffered continuously from inadequate contact with those who were planning and organising our own war economy.’

  A combination of meagre evidence and poor analysis, based on mistaken assumptions about the Nazi industrial machine, together with obsessive wishful thinking by the RAF’s ‘bomber barons’, caused the airmen consistently to overstate what air bombardment might achieve, was achieving and had achieved, especially against Germany. There was also the problem that Ultra provided much less industrial data than military and naval information. In general, this book argues that what distinguished the Western Allies’ wartime intelligence processes from those of the Axis was that they strove for honesty and objectivity, even if they were not always successful. In the course of the air war, however, this principle was breached. So fixated were senior RAF and USAAF officers with their determination to demonstrate that strategic air bombardment could win the war, that the history of the bomber commands’ intelligence departments shows an institutionalised commitment to fantasy, of a kind more usual in the German and Japanese high commands.

  The USAAF, like the RAF, was for years more resistant to intelligence input from outside agencies than the Allied armies or navies, preferring to employ its own airmen to make their own assessments, especially about bombing targets. In 1939, Gen. ‘Hap’ Arnold convened a board of four officers to study bombing targets. In the summer of 1941 Gen. Heywood Hansell returned from a visit to Britain with a ton weight of RAF target folders, and his own opinion that Americans knew more about Germany’s oil and power systems than did the British, though the RAF seemed quite well informed about enemy aircraft production and transport systems. Arnold told Hansell to set up his own organisation to scour civilian sources for intelligence about economic targets, and an office was duly established in New York City. This recruited a band of civilian academics, some of them very able: Wilma Brun, who taught German at Columbia; Marvin Dickey, a German professor at Cornell; a businessman named Malcolm Moss, who proved highly effective – it was he who suggested hiring a friend named McKittrick, who had studied German and Austrian power stations for American banks. McKittrick, according to Hansell, proved a ‘gold mine’. By autumn, a long target list had been compiled, dominated by economic rather than military objectives. Implausibly, some were located in South America, where Washington had some fears of a German descent. Yet, until 1944, the results of all this energetic delving were meagre. The USAAF joined the RAF in conducting bomber operations against Germany that represented, in Churchill’s phrase, ‘a bludgeon rather than a rapier’.

  Scientists and statisticians who sought to conduct objective analysis of what air attack was, or was not, achieving, such as Freeman Dyson of RAF Bomber Command’s Operational Research Department – a famous figure in the US after the war – found themselves marginalised, their counsel dismissed. Only in the last fifteen mont
hs of the war did the American air staffs do somewhat better, assisted by an ever more formidable increase in hard power – bomber and fighter numbers. The USAAF achieved the destruction of the Luftwaffe in the air, and correctly identified synthetic oil plants as the weakest link in Hitler’s war effort. It is striking to notice that Bletchley Park’s Air Section considered the USAAF, and not Britain’s own airmen, its closest partners and most enthusiastic consumers of intelligence. The Air Ministry could claim no matching access of wisdom.

  3 AT SEA

  The Royal Navy’s intelligence department, indeed the entire Admiralty, fulfilled a very different role from the War Office and Air Ministry, which merely set policy and administered their respective services. The occupants of the magnificent eighteenth-century brick complex on the north side of Horse Guards Parade – the first purpose-designed office building in Britain – not merely administered Britain’s fleet, but also acted as its operational headquarters, daily directing the motions of hundreds of ships patrolling, oiling, convoying, repairing, fighting. From the dawn of naval warfare, the foremost challenge for commanders had been to locate the vessels of their foes: Nelson spent years of his life ploughing the seas at the head of a fleet, merely seeking to find the French. In the twentieth century, however, wireless transformed the story: it enabled commanders ashore at a moment’s notice to give orders to change the course of warships thousands of miles distant, and also made possible the detection and location of those of the enemy.