by Max Hastings
Meanwhile the U-boat command ignored the urgings of Wilhelm Tranow to use a codebook rather than a cipher machine for its wireless traffic, such as gravely inconvenienced US codebreakers when the Japanese army did so. Later, in August 1943, an informant in Swiss intelligence told an officer of the local Abwehr station that the Allies were breaking U-boat codes, a warning promptly passed to submarine command in Berlin. Dönitz ordered yet another investigation into cipher security. Yet at its conclusion, amazingly, he allowed himself to be reassured.
The admiral wrote after the war: ‘Whether and to what extent the enemy reacted to radio transmissions was something which, try as we might, we were never able to ascertain with any certainty. In a number of cases drastic alterations in the course of the convoy led us to assume that he did. On the other hand, many cases occurred in which, in spite of U-boat radio activity in the area, enemy ships sailing independently, and convoys as well, were allowed to sail straight on and into the same area.’ Having satisfied himself about Enigma’s security, Dönitz chose also to ignore a warning of its vulnerability from Lt. Hans-Joachim Frowein, based on his own researches using punch-card technology. If the Allies’ conduct of the Battle of the Atlantic had suggested omniscience rather than fallibility, however, it is overwhelmingly likely that Dönitz would have guessed the Ultra secret.
On 1 June 1943 the Royal Navy abandoned Naval Cyphers No. 3 and No. 4, introducing Naval Cypher No. 5, also adopted by the Americans and Canadians for Atlantic operations on 10 June, which the B-Dienst proved unable to break. Bletchley was furious that the switch took so long, having warned eight months earlier of the previous ciphers’ vulnerability, but the Admiralty pleaded the huge administrative challenge of issuing new codes to thousands of ships. Moreover, GC&CS’s Cipher Security section had also been blameworthy.
While the war at sea was far more decisively influenced by codebreaking than was any land campaign, it is quite mistaken to view the Battle of the Atlantic exclusively as a struggle between Bletchley and the B-Dienst – here, as everywhere else, hard power was vital. In 1943, beyond GC&CS’s triumph in breaking the Shark cipher, the Allies enjoyed a surge of naval and air strength that embraced new escort groups, escort carriers and Very Long Range Aircraft, mostly Liberators, together with improved technology. This prompted a policy shift away from rerouting convoys in favour of going head to head with attacking U-boats. By the winter, while the B-Dienst was once again achieving good breaks into the British Merchant Ship code, Dönitz’s force lacked the capability effectively to exploit them. The Germans launched spasmodic attacks on convoys until the last days of the war, but their campaign was long lost. The principal reason that Dönitz failed to strangle the Atlantic supply route was that he lacked U-boats in sufficient numbers to achieve such a feat. Ultra much assisted the Allies’ slaughter of enemy submarines in the summer of 1943, especially in providing targets for the air wings of US Navy escort carriers, but to revisit Churchill: ‘All things are always on the move simultaneously.’
After the war Donald McLachlan catalogued what he and his colleagues considered the Royal Navy’s Intelligence Department’s principal wartime blunders and lapses. Foremost was failure to realise that the Kriegsmarine was reading important British wireless traffic. The Scharnhorst’s Channel Dash, and indeed several other forays by German big ships, remained lasting sources of embarrassment. The Admiralty underrated the threat from Italian frogmen, who inflicted some crippling losses in 1941, and responded too little and too late to revelations of the chronic vulnerability of warships to air attack. It failed to revive useful lessons about German U-boat tactics from World War I, and for many months refused to believe that Dönitz’s craft were attacking on the surface at night. Before the war, the Admiralty’s director of signals opposed an extension of the DF wireless network for fixing warship positions by direction-finding: he declared that such equipment would be a waste of resources, because in operational conditions the enemy would maintain wireless silence. All the above represented cases in which the British acquired sufficient information to counter or forestall the enemy’s moves, had the Admiralty made imaginative use of this. Yet the NID was the best of the three British services’ intelligence departments, and its wartime record was more impressive than that of its foes. Dönitz never acknowledged the gaping hole in his most sensitive communications, while the British plugged their own in time to secure victory.
8
‘Mars’: The Bloodiest Deception
1 GEHLEN
How can the incompetence and myopia of German intelligence be explained? Here was a nation of the highest cultural, technological and scientific achievements. Hitler’s army showed itself for a time to be the finest fighting force the world has ever seen, albeit in a ghastly cause. It is no longer supposed by responsible historians that Admiral Canaris assisted the Allied cause – in other words, that he was explicitly a traitor. The Abwehr and Gestapo were proficient in suppressing Resistance activity and capturing Allied agents in occupied territories, even if the Red Orchestra escaped their attention for seven years. Canaris was risibly unsuccessful, however, in conducting intelligence-gathering activities abroad. Beyond losing every spy dispatched to Britain, his agents fared no better in the United States. The admiral’s June 1942 Operation ‘Pastorius’ landed eight would-be saboteurs, who fell into FBI hands within a fortnight. Six of them went to the electric chair, and German operations elsewhere were similarly bungled. Part of the explanation for this institutional failure, banal as it seems, is that most of the Abwehr’s officers did not try very hard. A large proportion of those posted abroad were content merely to enjoy an existence much more comfortable than was available in the Reich, to fiddle their expenses and transmit to Germany any hotchpotch of information fertile imaginations could contrive, assisted by input from double agents controlled by MI5. Nobody in Berlin sought to impose purpose and rigour.
The Germans invaded Russia with such a recklessly arrogant mindset that for some weeks they made no serious attempt to break the Red Army’s codes, because they were confident of victory whatever their foes did. This mood changed dramatically as Soviet resistance hardened. Hitler’s forces received the shock of their lives after occupying Kiev: a series of massive Soviet demolitions erupted around them, triggered by radio control. The Wehrmacht began to acknowledge the necessity of monitoring the airwaves. In the winter of 1941, the most disturbing intimation of the vast residual strength of the Red Army came from German interception of messages from divisions with numbers in a ‘400’ series – this, when at the outset Berlin dismissed any notion that Stalin could muster such vast forces. The distances of Russia created chronic sigint problems: even when a hundred Wehrmacht interception stations were deployed on the Eastern Front, these never sufficed for comprehensive monitoring.
The Germans learned much about Soviet wireless procedures after capturing Col. Kurmin, signals chief of the Russian Twelfth Army. The British were alarmed when Bletchley intercepted signals suggesting that much Soviet communications traffic was vulnerable: ‘the Germans can read important Russian naval, military and air force codes with promptitude … [Yet] this grave handicap is not in the least realised by the Russians.’ There is no doubt of the vulnerability of lower Red Army codes in 1941–42, nor that German radio intelligence read at least some command messages sent by operators who re-used one-time pads. But, in order to believe that the Germans achieved useful and consistent penetration of Soviet higher ciphers, evidence would be necessary that this was exploited by Hitler’s army commanders. Instead, there is only a thin patchwork of decrypted Stavka messages, none of much significance, together with obvious signs that some intercepts derived from Russian deceptions. The dominant facts of the first year of the campaign on the Eastern Front were that, with or without breaks into Soviet codes, the Germans failed to secure Moscow and Leningrad, their principal strategic objectives. The flow of decrypts slowed greatly after 1 April 1942, when the Red Army introduced new codes and callsigns.
Lt. Col. Reinhard Gehlen, senior intelligence officer of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front from that time almost until the end, nonetheless achieved the highest wartime reputation of any German in his field. He was born in Erfurt in 1902, son of a bookseller. He joined the army in 1920, served in the artillery and married a descendant of a distinguished Prussian military family, Herat von Seydlitz-Kurzback. He graduated to the general staff in 1935, and in the early war years won golden opinions as an operations officer. In July 1941 he was promoted lieutenant-colonel and attached to the Fremde Heere Ost, or FHO, the intelligence section of the high command, of which he became chief in April 1942, after his predecessor was sacked for poor performance during the winter battles around Moscow, one among many scapegoats for the Wehrmacht’s failure.
Gehlen was an austere figure, taciturn and physically undistinguished, who skilfully ingratiated himself with his superiors, at the same time masking from his comrades ruthless ambition. He brought to his work a new energy and imagination: while most of his counterparts throughout the army recruited conventional staff officers, Gehlen instead hired clever men heedless of their military accomplishments. He combed the Wehrmacht for linguists, geographers, anthropologists and lawyers, who dramatically raised the quantity, if not the quality, of reporting and analysis. He made good use of patrols, together with interception of low-grade Russian signals and voice traffic. Gehlen also focused energetically on PoW interrogation, exploiting the many senior Russian officers in German hands. He ran a ‘celebrity camp’ in East Prussia, known as Feste Boyen, which held an average of eighty ‘guests’, of whom the most important were accorded single rooms. All prisoners received full Wehrmacht rations, and the most cooperative stayed indefinitely, to provide instant responses to questions FHO needed answering from day to day and week to week.
Some PoWs stubbornly refused to talk to Gehlen’s officers, who noted an oddity: better-educated men often collaborated, while humbler ones stayed mute. Much depended on prevailing battlefield conditions. When the Russians seemed to be losing and morale was low, as on every front prisoners were more willing to give information. When the tide of war turned, cooperation declined, because prisoners who aided the Nazis feared their fate – with good reason – if Stalin prevailed. The chief impediment to getting intelligence out of Russian soldiers was that they served the most secretive society in the world: few even among senior officers knew much about anything beyond their own unit.
Gehlen was no fool, and more of a realist than many of his colleagues, but he was also a skilled waffler. Consider, for instance, his 29 August 1942 analysis of Russia’s condition, and of Moscow’s options into the winter. This was a critical moment of the war, the eve of Stalingrad. FHO’s chief offered the German high command an extensive menu of alternative scenarios. This deserves attention, because it was typical of the material produced by the Wehrmacht’s most celebrated intelligence officer. Gehlen assumed, he said, that Leningrad, Stalingrad and the north Caucasus would be overrun by German forces, and a continuous front established between Persia and the Arctic. Russian actions thereafter would be determined by ‘the results of the summer–autumn campaign; relative resources available to Germany and Russia; the evolving views of the Russian leadership; Russian objectives’. The Russians wanted to husband resources and fighting room for a winter campaign, said Gehlen.
‘They seem willing to accept the loss of Leningrad, Stalingrad, the north and perhaps also southern Caucasus, and even Moscow. Russian losses in 1942 have been lower than in 1941. They seem content to have inflicted not insignificant German losses, and are themselves achieving manpower gains by cutting exemptions from military service, mobilising 1.4 million men born in 1925, and reducing the strength of divisions. It must be anticipated that this winter the enemy will again commit a large number of new formations to the battlefield. On the whole, there is no sign that, in the foreseeable future, the German–Russian balance of strength will shift decisively to the disadvantage of the Russians’ – here was a circumlocution worthy of the NKVD.
Gehlen suggested that British-supplied war material could become a significant factor, especially in the Caucasus. The Russians, he said, were learning fast, and had adopted many German tactics: air force close support for the Red Army, aggressive patrolling, deployment of tanks in defence only behind a forward infantry screen. However, Russian middle and junior leadership had declined. ‘All in all,’ wrote the intelligence chief, ‘it must be expected that the enemy will keep moving on his autumn and winter axes, using tried and tested methods, especially with guerrillas and airborne forces. The Russians will seek to achieve disruption of the German front at as many points as possible, shifting to major offensives where opportunity permits … This possibility seems to exist especially on Army Group B’s front (Stalingrad) and that of AG Centre at Smolensk … On AG A’s front, after the loss of the North Caucasus the enemy has convenient defensive facilities in the Caucasus mountains where it must be anticipated that he will progress to heavy counter-attacks where the ground seems suitable, aimed especially at disrupting German oil production.’
Gehlen concluded that the Soviet armies would approach winter ‘enfeebled but not yet destroyed, and thus with an option to initiate new operations … Depending on the forces available to the Russian leadership and the front positions following the summer–autumn campaign, heavy Russian offensives will be likely at a) Stalingrad and west of Stalingrad. b) Weak sections of the Allied [Axis] front, especially where the Russians hold bridgeheads. c) Voronezh. d) Mtsensk – Orel. e) Sukhinichi. f) Rzhev. g) In the gap between Army Groups Centre and North. h) Leningrad … Only if the Russians fail to achieve substantial successes in the winter of 1942/43; if a second front in [Western] Europe becomes less likely; and if the economic consequences of this year’s losses of territory (including Baku) make a real impact, can we reckon on finally breaking Russian resistance. This will presumably not take place before the summer of 1943.’
This was not a stupid document: it reviewed perfectly rationally the options open to the Russians. It mentioned Stalingrad, though only in the context of six other possible objectives for Soviet offensives. A sceptical reader might be tempted to compare its equivocations to a prediction that, if a man turns over the fifty-two cards in a deck, he will find four aces. But during the months and years that followed, Gehlen gravely misjudged most of the big moments on the Eastern Front. He first insisted that the Russians’ Operation ‘Mars’, their northern offensive against Army Group Centre, was Stalin’s big push, to which ‘Uranus’ – the Stalingrad pincer movement, turning point of the war – was merely opportunistic and subsidiary.
On 25 July 1943, a fortnight after the acknowledged failure of Germany’s great offensive at Kursk, Gehlen assured the high command that the Russians had no plans for a big assault of their own – only local attacks; nine days later, the Red Army drove west a hundred miles. On 30 March 1944, Gehlen’s assessment of the front showed him oblivious of the looming Soviet offensive against Crimea, which brought new disaster upon the Wehrmacht. Before the Russians’ summer Operation ‘Bagration’, greatest Allied offensive of the war, he dismissed Soviet preparations on Army Group Centre’s front as ‘apparently a deception’, and predicted that Stalin would instead strike south, into the Balkans.
Yet Col. Gehlen retained his job, and the respect of Germany’s generals, almost to the end of the war. This was partly because of his unflagging plausibility and palace political skills, but chiefly because of his success in running agents behind the Soviet front who provided information of extraordinary quality, reports that made a real impact on German deployments, and thus on the fate of the Eastern Front. Gehlen may thus be considered one of the most influential intelligence officers to serve on either side in the Second World War. But whose interests did he serve? The latest evidence suggests that he was the victim of Soviet manipulation – maskirovka – on an astounding scale; that far from being the wizard of his self-created legend, Geh
len was a supremely gullible dupe.
2 AGENT ‘MAX’
Early in 1942, during the disastrous phase when Stalin still insisted upon exercising personal control of Russia’s military operations, he decreed a wholesale reorganisation of military intelligence, dissolving its machinery for handling battlefield information, which prompted chaos in its activities through the first half of that year. Igor Damaskin, one of the more credible modern Russian historians of the period, has written: ‘The chaos in the GRU during this period blighted operations and was responsible for heavy losses, as field headquarters were desperately short of information about the enemy.’ Stalin rejected all reports that flew in the face of his own instincts: in March 1942, for instance, the GRU correctly predicted Hitler’s Operation ‘Blue’: ‘Preparations for a spring offensive are confirmed by the movement of German troops and materials … The central axis of [the enemy’s] spring advance will shift to the southern sector of the front with an additional thrust in the north and a simultaneous demonstration at the Central front against Moscow … The most likely date of the offensive is mid-April to early May 1942.’ Stalin castigated military intelligence for succumbing to what he described as obvious German deceptions. He insisted on launching the May offensive at Kharkov, which precipitated a new disaster for Soviet arms. Even as late as 19 June, when documents found in a shot-down German aircraft confirmed Hitler’s emphasis on the southern thrusts against Stalingrad and the Caucasus, Hozyain dismissed them as an obvious German plant.
