The Secret War

by Max Hastings

  It was hard for citizens of democracies to adapt to the iron disciplines of intelligence work – life in a secret universe in which trust in one’s fellow man or woman was a dangerous self-indulgence. It meant much to people who nursed the shame of defeat and occupation to confide in others about the work they were doing for the cause of freedom, so that they might walk a little taller in their streets, but this was mortally perilous. Oluf Reed-Olsen avowed the habitual indiscretion of his own people: ‘it was not exclusively a Norwegian weakness … and in our case the reason may have been that there had been no war in our country for about 125 years. Loquacity was our great difficulty … It was hard to get fellow-workers who could resist the temptation to tell their friends and relations what they were doing.’ An overwhelming majority of dedicated Resisters were drawn from the humbler sections of society. The official historians of MI9 wrote: ‘Escapers and evaders found almost uniformly … every sort of readiness to help them among the poorer sorts of people and every sort of reserve among most of the rich.’ The same was true of all branches of secret activity: it may confidently be said that those with most materially to lose did least to oppose the German occupiers, while those with least property did most.

  George Hiller, who served as an SOE agent in rural France in 1943–44, later gave a thoughtful and moving account of his experiences. There could be no closer bond, he said, than that between the hider and the hidden in such circumstances as those in which he found himself in the Lot: he, a British agent, daily placed his life in the hands of local Frenchmen and their families – almost invariably little people, peasants or teachers or trades unionists – whom he had never met before, from whom in peacetime he would have been separated by an unbridgeable social and cultural divide. They, meanwhile, harboured him in the knowledge that if their hospitality was ever revealed, conceivably by himself as a prisoner under torture, their lives and all that they owned would be forfeit.

  Civilian bystanders who suddenly chanced on manifestations of secret operations were chiefly concerned to save themselves from being swept away in the recriminations or reprisals of the occupiers. One day Reed-Olsen found himself travelling on a Norwegian train which was subjected to a surprise search. He threw open a window and hurled out into the countryside three passports, a revolver and whirling wads of cash, while nearby passengers watched in terror, as well they might. James Langley of MI9 suggested after the war that one Resistance worker forfeited his or her life for every Allied soldier or airman who used a secret escape line. When the famous ‘Comet’ network was eventually penetrated and many of its members lay imprisoned and awaiting death, Langley delivered an emotional plea to MI6 to try to save some of them. Claude Dansey responded with a harshness worthy of Moscow Centre: ‘Your trouble, Jimmy, is that you love your agents.’

  The Mediterranean became the foremost happy hunting ground of SOE, scene of some of its agents’ most dramatic exploits. Critics thought that the wrong tone was set by Grey Pillars, Baker Street’s Cairo headquarters, which seemed too comfortable for the hub of a military operation. In 1941–42 the building’s atmosphere was poisoned by feuds and mutual suspicions: one colonel tried to get a listening device fitted to his phone, so that his conversations with colleagues could be recorded. In 1943 there was a major purge of the organisation, but SOE Cairo never became a happy ship, not least because of tensions between communist sympathisers and indeed promoters among its British officers, and colleagues of more conservative mien.

  There was lasting bitterness about the manner in which SOE transferred its support from the royalist Gen. Mihailović to the communist Tito in Yugoslavia, causing the incidental deaths of several British agents. Personalities powerfully influenced this outcome: the men operating with Mihailović were lacklustre reporters, while the dispatches of Churchill’s former historical researcher Major William Deakin, and later of Tory MP Col. Fitzroy Maclean, were drafted in scintillating and inspirational terms, tempered by a monumental naïveté about Tito’s character, political objectives and dalliances with the Germans. Deakin and Maclean became two of the most influential secret agents of the war; their reports were decisive in persuading the prime minister to throw British support, manifested in huge deliveries of arms and equipment, behind the communist cause.

  From 1943, as resources became freely available, SOE Cairo evolved into a massive operation. By October it was handling eighty field missions in the Balkans, with air transport movements organised by an ex-Nottingham Tramways manager named Wigginton, who gained a reputation for formidable efficiency. Meanwhile ‘Skipper’ Poole ran the superbly named Levantine Fishing Patrol, transporting supplies to Greece. Factional strife was an occupational hazard of liaison with Resistance groups in every target nation. When Nigel Clive of MI6 was parachuted into Greece in December 1943, he spent his first hour on the ground listening to a litany of complaints from SOE’s Fred Wright about the frustration of being unable to do much sabotage, because ‘all his energies had been concentrated on the political assignment of trying to prevent an extension of the civil war between EDES and ELAS’. Clive wrote: ‘Political rather than technical or standard military qualifications were what would be required of those who [organised] the Greek resistance.’

  A problem besetting SOE until the 1944 eve of D-Day in France was that it lacked a clear, overarching strategic directive, setting out the ultimate purpose of stimulating Resistance. ‘Set Europe ablaze’ did not amount to a coherent programme. Was Baker Street seeking to create guerrilla armies to conduct pitched battles with the Germans? To gather intelligence? To sabotage the Axis war effort? Colin Gubbins wrote about the difficulty ‘of carrying out two broad tasks simultaneously, which were themselves hardly compatible, that is action, day by day and week after week, in specific attacks against selected targets in occupied countries, and at the same time the creation of secret armies, equipped, organised and trained, ready to come into action as ordered when invasion should come. Every attack carried out naturally alerted the Gestapo.’ Churchill’s romantic vision never attracted his own service chiefs of staff, who disliked and even deplored the pirates of SOE. They were right, in a narrowly military sense, that the Continent would not have been freed from Nazi tyranny a single day later had Resistance never existed. But posterity may choose to see its sponsorship as a significant element in Churchill’s genius as a war leader, because he understood its immense moral value.

  As the tide of the war turned, from 1943 onwards, in Sweet-Escott’s words ‘there were many more men and women prepared to take risks in the Allied cause than there had been a year before’. By the middle of 1944, SOE’s operations in Western Europe were supported by a thousand air sorties a month, flown by five squadrons of RAF bombers. During 1944–45, German interceptors identified hundreds of Allied agent- or partisan-operated wireless transmitters operating in territories the Nazis were still striving to control, or where they had important interests. They detected twenty in Poland, six in Czechoslovakia, seventeen in Norway, four in Denmark, twenty-two in Holland, twenty-seven in Belgium, thirty-five in Paris, twenty in western France, sixty-one in southern France, fifteen in Normandy and Brittany, ten in Spain, four in Switzerland, twenty-five in northern Italy, eight in southern Italy, thirty in Yugoslavia – and 140 in Russia. The Abwehr’s direction-finders prompted thirty arrests in 1941, ninety in 1942, 160 in 1943 and 130 in 1944; these figures illustrated not so much German vigilance as the ever-increasing energy of Resistance.

  As the story drew to an end, with the progressive 1944–45 liberation of German-occupied societies, there was fierce debate about whether the outcome of SOE’s activities justified their cost. Baker Street could point to such notable achievements as the February 1943 sabotage of the Rjukan heavy-water plant in Norway, and the sinking a year later of the ferry carrying to Germany rail tanker wagons laden with 15,000 litres of precious product from the plant. Three Norwegian agents, Knut Haulkelid, Knut Lier-Hansen and Rolf Sorlie, boarded the ferry disguised as greasers,
and laid delayed-action charges which exploded, sinking the vessel, in the midst of Lake Tinnjo. Only after the war did it become known that Nazi atomic research had made far too little progress for the consignment to contribute anything to their war effort; but this did not negate either the wisdom of launching the mission, or the marvellous courage and ingenuity of the agents who carried it out. In France, before and after D-Day, Resistance groups launched widespread attacks on the German lines of communication which, though much less strategically influential than Allied bombing, caused the occupiers intense annoyance.

  Sceptics persisted, especially in the Balkans, where communist influence was strongest, most ruthless and pernicious. David Wallace, an SOE officer killed in action on 19 August 1944, reported savagely to Cairo shortly before his death: ‘Our effort in Greece, in men and money, has not only been out of all proportion to the results we have achieved against the Germans, but also to the value of the Greek people, who are not capable of being saved from themselves, nor are themselves worth it. This is also the unanimous opinion of all British liaison officers, who have been long in this country.’ Wallace was quite wrong to suggest that his cynical assessment was shared by all his British comrades in Greece, or elsewhere in Western Europe. Nigel Clive described an exuberant party in the community in which he served, held to celebrate the 1944 German withdrawal from Greece. He used the sort of emotional language often adopted by British and American officers who shared secret life in occupied lands: ‘I enjoyed one of those rare moments of pride, that I had lived, worked, struggled and fought with the kind of people who had shared this evening’s celebration. To have gone some way to being accepted as one of them seemed to have made the whole of the adventure worthwhile … Before these people, whose titles were not in their military ranks but in their Christian names, I could only bow my head. They had no great claims on life. They were not dreaming of marble halls and the gleaming tinsel of victory. Their simple village lives had been disrupted by foreign invasions and their consequences. In response they had given all that was best within them: their courage and instinctive guile, their refusal to submit, their intelligent and critical reserve about the motive of some of their leaders … There was an unquestioned acceptance of the value of the British connection.’

  This was a romantic perception. The record shows that in many countries the weapons provided to Resistance by the Allies were used more energetically to promote factional interests – mostly communist – following liberation, than to fight the Axis during the occupation. An OSS major dropped into north-west Italy reported that the partisans were ‘20 per cent for Liberation and 80 per cent for Russia. We soon found that they were burying the German arms they had captured.’ Since 1945, many fanciful accounts have been published, which exaggerate the material damage inflicted on Axis forces by Allied agents and Resistance, especially in the wake of D-Day. It is salutary to compare these with German war diaries, which show how relatively small were the casualties imposed by guerrillas: for instance, the 2nd SS Panzer Division, which travelled from Montauban to Normandy in June 1944, shedding rivers of innocent blood on its way, lost just thirty-five killed out of 15,000 men.

  Sabotage and local attacks often required acceptance of higher risks and losses than targets merited in narrowly military terms. Col. Dick Barry, Gubbins’s very able chief of staff at Baker Street, said long afterwards about its wartime contribution: ‘It was only just worth it.’ Yet SOE’s operations were important then, and seem justified now, by their moral impact and contribution to fomenting insecurity, tension, sometimes murderous hysteria among German occupying forces. It was chiefly thanks to the aid provided to local opposition movements by SOE and OSS that a legend of popular insurrection was created, which contributed immensely to reviving the self-respect of Europe’s occupied societies after 1945. Never could enemies of democracy claim that Britain and the United States had abandoned the occupied nations to their fate.

  Across Europe – the Asian story will be discussed below – the men and women who served as SOE’s field agents offered a sacrifice to the cause of freedom which became evident to the people of most occupied societies after the war, even if they knew nothing of it during their years of trial. Moreover none of the follies, failures and embarrassments described above should be allowed to mask the towering historical reality that some hundreds of thousands of fine and brave people in the occupied countries risked everything in the cause of Resistance. Only SOE’s support – with money, arms, wirelesses – empowered them to make that choice. Too much post-war attention and admiration has focused upon the deeds of the foreigners, SOE’s British agents, who hazarded only their own young lives in the cause of a great and indisputably romantic adventure; too little upon the peoples of Europe, of all ages and both sexes, who joined one of hundreds of Resistance networks. Their contribution should be judged much more by the magnitude of their stakes and their sacrifices than by the military achievements, or lack of them. For all SOE’s extravagances and follies, it became the most effective British secret operations organisation of the war, and justified the Churchillian leap of imagination that inspired its creation.

  11

  Hoover’s G-Men, Donovan’s Wild Men

  1 ADVENTURERS

  ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan’s new-born foreign intelligence service, the Office of Strategic Services, encountered most of the same difficulties, dramas and criticisms as SOE, and more of them. One day early in 1945, deep in eastern France a US Army divisional staff officer held forth to colleagues in front of one of Donovan’s men: ‘Gentlemen, I am going to tell you about the OSS … the most fantastic damned organization in all our armed forces. Its people do incredible things. They seduce German spies, they parachute into Sicily one day and two days later they’re dancing on the St Regis roof. They dynamite aqueducts, urinate in Luftwaffe gas tanks, and play games with IG Farben and Krupp, but’ – throwing up his hands – ‘90 per cent of this has not a goddamned thing to do with the war.’

  The staff officer’s rant may have been influenced by the fact that the visitor who provoked it was a Hollywood film star, thinly disguised as one of Donovan’s men. But it was the actor who recorded the story, and himself half-accepted the cynical view of OSS adopted by many uniformed soldiers: the US War Department in Washington refused to open its files to Donovan’s people, or indeed to include him on the Ultra distribution list. Maj. Gen. George V. Strong, George Marshall’s intelligence chief, regarded Donovan’s activities with unremitting scorn, as did his 1944 successor, Clayton Bissell. OSS was exuberant, ill-disciplined, unfocused and wildly extravagant, in keeping with the personality of its founder. A cooler figure might have built a more measured service. But the United States faced an extraordinary challenge, to create from a standing start in the midst of a world war an organisation with global responsibilities for intelligence, sabotage and guerrilla operations, a range of missions that every other belligerent used several services to fulfil.

  An SOE man visiting Washington in 1942 was enchanted to observe a sign in a side street near the White House: ‘NO PARKING: U.S. SECRET SERVICE ONLY’. America’s not-very-‘secret service’ officers were responsible only for guarding the president and suppressing forgery of the dollar. OSS’s follies and failures were many and various, but little worse than those of its Allied and Axis counterparts. All that was different was that where other nations afterwards sought to bury their excesses and failures, the Americans characteristically avowed them. Moreover, OSS could claim to have created the most impressive research and analysis arm of any intelligence service in the world.

  During the months before and after Pearl Harbor, the British were fearful that Donovan’s ascent to power would be frustrated by anglophobes, because the colonel was so conspicuously enthusiastic about Churchill’s people. Many of his early struggles were not against the Germans, but against J. Edgar Hoover of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In common with the security services of every other nation, the FBI expanded drama
tically during the war years, its 1941 strength of 2,280 rising by 1945 to 15,000, including 5,000 special agents – the ‘G-men’, as tabloid slang dubbed them. By a directive of 23 December 1941, the White House agreed that the FBI should extend its remit to cover counter-intelligence activities throughout the Americas. This empowered Hoover to create a new corporation – Importers and Exporters Services, with quarters in New York’s Rockefeller Center – as a cover for its agents overseas. Later, the Bureau persuaded bona fide companies to do their patriotic duty by providing credentials for its men – Reader’s Digest, Twentieth Century-Fox, Paramount, Procter & Gamble, H.J. Heinz. Special Agent Richard Auerbach, who travelled to Bogotá as a supposed representative of Wall Street’s Merrill Lynch, claimed to have sold $100 million worth of stocks and bonds down there.

  Hoover hurried to pre-empt Donovan by deploying his own men in South America, but the logistical difficulties of wartime foreign travel were immense, even for US secret servants, and far from any combat zone. When Special Agent Richard Crow was assigned to La Paz, he started out by plane, then became stranded in Panama for ten days before catching a flight to Colombia, where he kicked his heels for a further week before flying to Lima. After five days there, he abandoned hope of getting another plane seat and instead rented a car to southern Peru before catching a train ride to Lake Titicaca. He crossed the water in a native boat, then got a train to the Bolivian capital. What he did when he got there is unrecorded, and was perhaps less interesting.