The Secret War

by Max Hastings

  Malcolm Muggeridge, MI6’s man in Portuguese Mozambique, lodged at the Polana hotel in Lourenço Marques alongside Dr Leopold Werz, the German vice-consul and Abwehr representative – ‘youthful, blond, pink and earnest’. Werz had escaped from internment in South Africa. His history was well-known, because lurid articles about his Nazi intelligence connections had appeared in newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic. Also living at the Polana was Mussolini’s standard-bearer, an Italian named Campini who strutted in emulation of his Duce and even likewise affected a cloak. Much of Campini’s traffic was intercepted at Bletchley, for instance a signal of 13 January 1943, reporting: ‘A convoy of ten American ships with troops, war and aviation material left Capetown on 11/1 for? Sydney.’ In the weeks that followed, Campini also wirelessed: ‘6 Loaded tankers from Persian Gulf reached Durban on 11/1’; ‘The English have raised the salaries of sailors to £27 a month’; ‘28.1.43 a large American convoy bound for Australia passed through Capetown’; ‘4 tankers have left Durban for Persian Gulf.’ On 29 March 1943 an MI5 officer noted on these intercepts: ‘Assume this material comes from LEO. Sending same stuff as Werz. If LEO is Doctor WERZ in Lourenco Marques, he would seem an admirable creature to have stuff planted on him, as his little items, which so far seem to be wholly inaccurate, reach the three Axis capitals in a matter of days.’

  Muggeridge enjoyed access to some facilities denied to his Axis rivals, such as summaries of their outgoing material, forwarded by Kim Philby. The embryo spy learned his trade by experience: when he first attempted to bribe a local police inspector, the man spurned his largesse with contempt, saying that the Germans paid three times as much, the Japanese and Italians even more. The most interesting revelation to come Muggeridge’s way during his early months was that Dr Werz went to bed in a hairnet. More serious tasks including the kidnapping, and transfer to British-administered Swaziland, of an Italian-paid ship-watcher, who was reporting Allied convoy movements. The MI6 agent’s most exciting assignment was to organise the hijacking of a Greek merchant ship, whose captain was discovered by Bletchley to be planning a rendezvous with a U-boat in the Mozambique channel. The arrangements for this coup were made in Marie’s Place, a local brothel. Members of the crew, suborned by large bribes, duly seized their captain and sailed the ship to Durban.

  Muggeridge formed an acquaintance with a glamorous enemy agent, the half-estranged wife of a local German, and with Johann, her lover, who had worked for Himmler and reminisced entertainingly about him. The MI6 man also screened a group of Polish Jews whom the Japanese had released from internment, and who were thereafter dispatched to British Tanganyika. These small encounters and events were the highlights of a two-year sojourn in Lourenço Marques, though like all agents he dispatched copious reports, dominated by trivia. In one sense, and as the cynical spy himself declared, his activities were fatuous. But in the midst of a world at war, it was indispensable for every nation to be represented in such places as Mozambique, if only to ensure that the other side was not left free to make mischief there.

  Neighbouring South Africa was a hotbed of Nazi sympathisers, eager to assist the Reich. Paul Trompke, the German consul-general in Lourenço Marques, a portly fifty-year-old, ran an Afrikaner agent network out of Mozambique. One of these was Sydney Robey Leibbrandt, a former South African heavyweight boxing champion who spent three years in Germany, joined the Wehrmacht and was trained as a paratrooper and saboteur by the Brandenburg Regiment before returning home secretly in June 1941, equipped with a wireless set and ardent Nazi convictions, in a schooner captained by the astonishing Heinrich Garbers. Leibbrandt found friends and sympathisers happy to hide him, but few who wished to join a revolt. On Christmas Eve 1942 he was arrested while driving between Johannesburg and Pretoria, and sentenced to death by a court to which he testified only by giving a Nazi salute.

  Recognising the vulnerability of Afrikaner opinion, prime minister Jan Smuts commuted the sentence on this national sporting hero. Likewise, when Malcolm Muggeridge tried to get Johannesburg police to pick up a courier driving to the city carrying messages from the Lourenço Marques Abwehr station, he was crisply informed that there was not an Afrikaner homestead in the Transvaal which would not be proud to feed Berlin’s man and speed him on his way. Bletchley intercepted a steady stream of wireless messages from Afrikaner pro-Nazis, which prompted occasional round-ups, such as one in July 1942 which resulted in ten arrests and the discovery of some weapons and dynamite intended to be used for sabotage in Durban. But the signal traffic made it plain that most enemy sympathisers were content to await a German victory rather than precipitate an immediate uprising. Two coded messages were found in a pro-Nazi house in East London. The first read: ‘Everything alright work somewhat sluggish people also poor … not much sabotage here in East London.’ The second wailed: ‘It is damned hopeless to work alone.’ It was fortunate for the Allies that the Afrikaners lacked both access to information of value to Hitler and scope for raising much mayhem.

  Switzerland, at the hub of Europe between Germany, France and Italy, was the most important of all intelligence junctions, a teeming souk of spies, refugees, diplomats and crooks of all nationalities. In a single morning, a man might visit the Bern offices of MI6, OSS, the Abwehr and SD, all within a few hundred yards of each other. The city played host to many exiled politicians, some of them prominent and well-connected in Germany, Austria, France. Secret wireless communications enabled the British, Americans and Russians to transmit a mass of information and fabrication derived from sources inside Germany. The Nazis likewise sought to use the country as a window on the world. In Bern, the Abwehr picked up information from Professor Keller, head of the Swiss commercial delegation to London; from the manager of the Bank of International Settlements; and from a few seamen home on leave. One agent codenamed ‘Ober’ brought back from Gibraltar details of football matches being played between British unit teams, which supposedly contributed to order-of-battle intelligence. The Germans’ most valued agent was ‘Jakob’, otherwise Walter Bosshard of Swiss intelligence. The Abwehr claimed in all to have a thousand informants in Switzerland, while it had its own Gestapo branch office, ‘Bureau F’, attached to the Bern embassy.

  The local espionage industry, which involved representatives of the Chinese, Poles and Czechs as well as the major belligerents, posed a constant dilemma for the Bern government about how far to indulge it. Swiss intelligence had been headed since 1937 by the energetic Lt. Col. Roger Masson. František Moravec held Masson in high respect, not least because the Swiss never troubled the Czech intelligence cell in Zürich. The colonel’s responsibility was to preserve Switzerland’s independence by ensuring that no belligerent, above all neighbouring Germany, felt sufficiently threatened or provoked to bomb or occupy the cantons. Among the nation’s population of six million, a small but vociferous minority lobbied and demonstrated for the privilege of incorporation in the Third Reich. Bankers and industrialists made large profits by exporting commodities to Germany, providing financial services for the Nazi leadership collectively and severally, and exploiting the murder of rich Jews. Yet most Swiss, as democrats, preferred that the Allies should win the war. The Germans knew this: following their 1940 occupation of France, they laid hands on documents which revealed discussions between Bern and Paris about joint resistance in the event of a German invasion of Switzerland.

  Masson intervened against foreign agents and made arrests only when a hubbub among the spies of one nation or another became too conspicuous to be ignored. He also strove to prevent Swiss citizens from causing embarrassment by taking sides. In the course of the war, 1,389 people were arrested in Switzerland for betraying secrets. Military courts passed 478 sentences, 283 on Swiss nationals and 195 on foreigners. Life was by no means always tranquil for the local security forces. GRU operator Alexander Foote reported consternation in the international espionage community when a Swiss policeman was blown up by an infernal machine he chanced upon, and attempted to defuse. Th
e Englishman wrote: ‘We never knew whose bomb it was.’

  In most capitals, diplomats were better informed than any spy. The German ambassador in Lisbon, Baron Oswald von Hoyningen-Huene, was sharp, energetic and well liked; he was on close terms with the intimates of Portuguese dictator António Salazar, and ran a special unit for purchasing foreign newspapers, which every warring nation mined as intelligence sources. MI5 became concerned about sensitive material being passed to Madrid – and thence to Berlin – by the Duke of Alba, the Spanish ambassador in London, who was caressed in British aristocratic circles as an impeccably-mannered grandee. His acquaintance, including such members of the government as Sir John Anderson, were content to overlook Alba’s role as the representative of Franco’s murderous tyranny: his dispatches – secretly intercepted and read by Anthony Blunt – revealed him as beneficiary of more than a few well-sourced indiscretions. Guy Liddell wrote: ‘Probably a good deal of information goes west over the second glass of port.’ Alba, like many other diplomats around the world, almost certainly provided more reliable intelligence than his nation’s secret agents.

  14

  A Little Help from Their Friends

  1 ‘IT STINKS, BUT SOMEBODY HAS TO DO IT’

  Guy Liddell of MI5 wrote in June 1943, following the discovery of a communist cell in the Air Ministry: ‘Unfortunately the law is somewhat inadequate in the case of a man who is spying on behalf of an ally.’ The principal link in the ring, International Brigade veteran Douglas Springhall, was attempting to pass to the Russians details of ‘Window’, Bomber Command’s top secret – and then still unused – radar baffler. Springhall eventually served four and a half years of a seven-year prison sentence. In the course of MI5’s investigation, it was discovered that he was also in contact with an MI6 officer, Ray Milne, who was promptly sacked, and with Captain Desmond Uren of SOE’s Hungarian section, who received a seven-year prison sentence. Liddell wrote: ‘Penetration of the services by the Communist Party is becoming rather serious.’

  The Second World War was never a simple two-sided contest between the Allies and the Axis, conveniently definable as the causes of Good and Evil. All manner of forces were in play. Currents swirled ceaselessly within societies, as supporters of left and right, of imperialism and anti-imperialism, or of rival factional interests, vied for primacy in the post-war world. Churchill created the necessary rhetorical myth of the ‘Grand Alliance’, a noble partnership of Britain, Russia and the United States. Yet the three Powers cherished entirely different visions of the new universe they wished to emerge from victory. Stalin was the most clear-sighted warlord: his accommodation with Roosevelt and Churchill to secure the destruction of Hitler did not abate by a jot or tittle his desire thereafter to pull down the edifice of bourgeois capitalism about their heads. Whereas neither the British nor the Americans spied on the Soviet Union during the war years, Stalin’s agents conducted hugely ambitious espionage operations against the democracies. Heedless of Nazi interruptions, the Kremlin never allowed the Revolution to sleep.

  It was hard for Western counter-intelligence services to assess the risk posed by left-wing sympathisers in the tumultuous political climate of the mid-twentieth century. There was mockery then, and has been more since, about MI5 suspicions focused upon such communist journalists as Claud Cockburn. Paranoia is an occupational hazard of intelligence officers: Lord Cherwell’s office once showed R.V. Jones a list of British scientists and engineers whose loyalty was considered doubtful. Among thirty-odd names, Jones saw several whom it was ridiculous to mistrust, foremost among them that of Barnes Wallis, creator of the RAF’s dambusting mines. It transpired that a security officer had compiled most of the list from his own fanciful imagination.

  Yet hundreds of impeccably middle-class British and American men and women – including Ivor Montagu, brother of Ewen, the naval officer who ran the ‘Mincemeat’ deception – did indeed betray their country to the Soviet Union, while a handful of British fascist sympathisers, and many more European ones, lent their services to the Nazis. MI5 initially recommended rejecting the art historian Anthony Blunt for employment in military intelligence, because he had visited Russia and once offered a contribution to a leftist magazine. Posterity would deride the use of such criteria to cast doubt on a man’s trustworthiness, had not Blunt been later exposed as a traitor. Noel Annan, an academic who spent the war in the secret world, wrote about the recruitment of such figures as Kim Philby and Guy Burgess: ‘The intelligence services were staffed in peacetime with men who regarded Stalin as the first enemy, and Hitler a disagreeable fellow but a potential ally; [civilised people] rejoiced to see intelligent men of the left being recruited to redress the balance.’

  It was hard to balance the rival claims of personal freedom and national security in the midst of a war. MI5 had achieved notable successes against Soviet spy rings in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s. Its officers displayed imagination, indeed brilliance, in handling and ‘turning’ Nazi spies. The security service nonetheless failed to identify the most important of the British communist traitors who penetrated Whitehall and the secret community. Anthony Blunt, by then serving in MI5, told his NKVD handler that he found it personally reassuring to discover that the pre-war Soviet informant Captain John King was exposed only when a defector denounced him.

  From June 1941 until 1945 the Western Allied governments, and especially the British, were cautious about how much they told the Russians, above all because they feared leakage of the Ultra secret. They constantly forwarded operational information that might assist the Red Army, but sourced it to non-existent Allied agents in Germany. Even on those terms, the traffic made Broadway uneasy, partly because it went exclusively one way. In the first weeks of ‘Barbarossa’, Bletchley intercepted an order directing Fourth Panzer Army to support the encirclement of Smolensk, while the Luftwaffe bombed rail links behind the Red Army’s positions. On the evening of 15 July 1941 Churchill, after reading this decrypt, scribbled below the text in his red ink: ‘Surely it is right to give them warning of this. Please report before action.’

  Stewart Menzies took strong exception, minuting the prime minister: ‘I am of the opinion that the source [Broadway’s term for Ultra] would definitely be imperilled if this information was passed to Moscow in its present form, as it would be impossible for any agent to have secured such information regarding operations for the 16th July. I have, however, arranged with the War Office for the gist to be incorporated with other material.’ Menzies added: ‘I would point out that General [Mason-] MacFarlane [British military attaché in Moscow] was instructed to inform the Russians that we possess a well-placed source in Berlin who has occasional access to operational plans and documents. This explanation has been accepted by the Russians. I have, however, refused to furnish them with detailed [unit] identifications, which might well arouse their suspicions as to the real origin of the information.’

  Such precautions were confounded by the fact that the NKVD and GRU were receiving a steady stream of documents and Ultra intercepts from highly-placed British informants. Among the most notable of these, John Cairncross worked early in the war as private secretary to Lord Hankey, a cabinet minister, and thereafter at Bletchley and elsewhere for MI6. There is also alleged to have been another Soviet informant at the Park earlier in the war, never identified, and codenamed ‘Baron’. Anthony Blunt worked for MI5. Kim Philby became a senior officer of MI6. Guy Burgess was successively employed by MI6, the BBC and the Foreign Office. Donald Maclean worked in the upper reaches of the Foreign Office. Other British sources provided technical intelligence, above all about the atomic bomb programme.

  Guy Liddell of MI5 wrote in November 1942, amid reflections on the saga of Richard Sorge, which had been reported to London by informants in Tokyo: ‘There is no doubt that the Russians are far better in the matter of espionage than any other country in the world. I am perfectly certain that they are well bedded down here and that we should be making more active investigat
ions. They will be a great source of trouble to us when the war is over.’ Liddell did not know the half of it. Soviet penetration of the British government, scientific institutions and intelligence machine was already more extensive than he could have imagined in his nightmares. Once the Soviet Union became an ally, however, Churchill was insistent that no intelligence operations should be conducted against Stalin’s regime. The Foreign Office formally instructed the secret services that even scrutiny of British communists should be circumspect, and that no informants should be recruited inside the Soviet Union. Very little was done by MI5 even to monitor NKVD and GRU activities in Britain, and Bletchley’s small Russian section was shut down in December 1941. These honourable scruples were not credited by Moscow, of course, far less reciprocated.

  British folk legend treats the so-called Cambridge Five as a unique gallery of scoundrels, exemplars of the rottenness within the class system, a knot of gilded young men who systematically betrayed their country as no others did. It seems more appropriate, however, to consider them alongside Moscow’s British agents from less privileged backgrounds – the likes of the lethally effective nuclear spy Melita Norwood – together with hundreds of Americans who likewise betrayed national secrets to Stalin’s tyranny. Communism as a creed enjoyed widespread support across the Western world, in that era when many people on the left chose to blind their consciousness to the institutionalised inhumanity of the Soviet Union. In their eyes capitalism, whether represented by Republican corporate interests in the United States or by the Conservative Party in Britain, sustained the oppression of the working class. ‘Looking around us at our own hells,’ said Philip Toynbee, the historian who became a communist at Cambridge, ‘we had to invent an earthly paradise somewhere else.’