The Secret War

by Max Hastings

  Meanwhile in the mountains of Greece, by July 1944 Nigel Clive was using two radio-operators to process a constant flow of military, political and economic material: ‘The good intelligence we were receiving was a reflection of the skill and determination of our agents. They had the advantage, however, that almost everyone believed that the Germans would soon be gone. In these circumstances open opportunities were offered to our agents to approach those who wished to hedge their bets.’ Clive was conscious of the triviality of much of the information: ‘I would be told that Andreas had just been conscripted by the Germans into a labour force for building an airstrip; that Evangelos had a cousin whose brother-in-law was now serving in [the communist] ELAS against his will and wanted to defect to Zervas; that Macros’s uncle in Ioannina had heard that the Germans would definitely be out of Greece before the summer; that Leftheris had heard from his sister in Arta that EDES was planning an attack on the town in the following week … I always listened patiently to everything that was told me and naturally assured Costakis and others who approached me directly that every scrap of information was of great value. This was the only deception I practised and it helped me to be accepted as a member of their community.’

  After the Germans quit, Clive suffered a succession of unwelcome revelations. First, his labours on the enemy’s order of battle had served no useful purpose. The Wehrmacht evacuated Greece of its own volition, without fighting a battle for which his jigsaw-building might have become relevant. He also discovered that German knowledge mirrored his own: the local enemy commander Lt. Gen. Hubert Lanz ‘knew about us what we knew about him’, from informers and interception. It was even more bewildering for the British agent to learn that Zervas, the guerrilla leader to whose group he was attached, had been conducting parleys with the Germans, aimed at achieving a common front against the communists. A signal from Lanz to higher headquarters, dated 7 August 1944 and eventually passed to Clive, spoke of Zervas’s ‘up to now loyal attitude’ – towards the occupiers.

  Finally, the spy found that he had been the victim of cynicism, incompetence or treachery higher up the intelligence food chain: the head of MI6’s political section told him in January 1945 that not one of his long and often perceptive political reports had reached Broadway. It will never be known whether these were suppressed for ideological reasons by communist sympathisers inside the Service, especially in Cairo, or – equally plausible – lost amid the morass of unread paper generated by tens of thousands of intelligence officers of all nations, at risk of their lives. That is not to say that field agent activity was wasted: Donald McLachlan of NID paid generous tribute to the value of the reports of Norwegian ship-watchers such as Reed-Olsen, who warned of some enemy movements and especially U-boat sailings that escaped Ultra’s net, although it was another matter to put the information to practical use: throughout the war the Royal Navy and the Fleet Air Arm had little success in interdicting Scandinavian coastal traffic. As for German troop deployments, whether in Norway, Greece or elsewhere in occupied Europe, while Ultra provided a good picture, this was never comprehensive, and it was everywhere useful for its coverage to be supplemented by men on the ground.

  British intelligence never achieved significant humint penetration inside the Reich. Plenty of anti-Nazi Germans were eager to escape to Allied territory, but not many were interested in returning to Hitler’s empire thereafter as spies or saboteurs. John Bruce Lockhart of MI6 – nephew of the old spy Robert – wrote ruefully in 1944 that there were ‘plenty of rats that leave the sinking ship, and we shall get more, but precious few are prepared to go back to gnaw another hole in her bottom’. In Italy, Broadway abandoned attempts to recruit agents from among Italian PoWs, because the human material available proved so poor. Only when the Allies began to fight inside the country, and partisan groups provided relatively safe rustic havens behind enemy lines, did British and American officers operate there in numbers. Moreover, not all MI6 agents overseas were as conscientious as Reed-Olsen and Clive: the novelist Graham Greene treated espionage, and indeed the whole war, as an absurdity. He signalled Broadway from Freetown, Sierra Leone, in 1942, proposing that the service should open a brothel for Vichy French sailors from the Richelieu on a Portuguese island off the battleship’s base at Dakar. Following his recall to Britain, Greene joined MI6’s sub-section at St Albans, run by Kim Philby. Though the novelist personally disliked Philby while he worked with him, he treated him with indulgence when he was revealed as a traitor, as merely another trader in a ridiculous secrets bazaar.

  The Russians provided the Western Allies with scarcely any information about their own operations, far less those of the Axis. For a time they grudgingly supplied copies of decrypts of low-level Wehrmacht codes they had broken, but on 1 December 1942 this service stopped abruptly, and was never resumed. In the spring of 1944 a Royal Navy mine and sabotage expert, Lt. Shirley, was sent to the Black Sea to survey German demolitions in recaptured Russian ports before the Allies faced the problem of clearing captured French harbours after D-Day. When 6 June came, however, Shirley was still kicking his heels in Sevastopol, vainly awaiting Russian consent to be allowed to inspect harbour installations.

  The need to sustain a semblance of collaboration created other dilemmas in London. Back in December 1941, when British hopes of an intelligence partnership with the Soviets ran much higher than they stood eighteen months later, the NKVD dispatched four Austrians to Britain, whom the RAF were supposed to drop back into their native land. The spies arrived only after long delays and adventures – one man’s ship was sunk en route, with the loss of his wireless. All complained bitterly about the poor quality of their forged identity documents, and a second set sent from Moscow proved no better. The NKVD’s agents flatly refused to undertake their mission with such papers, and also rejected return to Russia on the not unreasonable grounds that they would be executed. The Austrians, who were plainly eager to secure permanent billets in Britain, told their hosts that their mission had little to do with defeating Hitler: they were briefed instead to form a Comintern ‘sleeper’ cell, to promote post-war communist interests. Whether or not this was true, the British felt unable to frogmarch the men aboard an RAF aircraft bound for enemy territory. Yet they also flinched from the diplomatic storm that must follow, if the spies were granted asylum. In April 1943, MI5’s ingenious and humane solution was to dispatch them back to Russia via Panama, where they were allowed to jump ship and disappear.

  Broadway’s activities and staffing expanded dramatically in the course of the war, with departments spilling over into a network of out-stations. Section V, for instance, grew from a strength of eight in 1940 to 250 five years later. MI6’s senior officers, however, remained little changed, and Hugh Trevor-Roper thought no better of them: ‘A colony of coots in an unventilated backwater of bureaucracy … A bunch of dependent bumsuckers held together by neglect, like a cluster of bats in an unswept barn … The high priests of an effete religion mumbling their meaningless rituals to avert a famine or stay a cataclysm.’ An officer who served in MI6 noted that its top brass, who regarded themselves with unflagging seriousness, never arrived on time for a meeting: they excused their unpunctuality by implying that they had been held up attending a cabinet committee. An intelligent and not unsympathetic observer told one of MI6’s officers that in recruiting personnel, ‘we are too ready to be satisfied with good second-raters’. Even at the height of a world war, the Foreign Office treated the Service as ‘poor and rather disreputable relations’. A diplomat complained about the ‘low social status’ of MI6’s representatives on his patch, though this reflected more upon Foreign Office snobbery than on the agents concerned. Waste was prodigious: Broadway purchased an aircraft to scour the coast of Argentina for German shipping, an impossible task given the distances involved, and anyway directed against a non-existent threat.

  An obsession with securing advantage in Whitehall’s wars persisted at Broadway, as in Tirpitzüfer and Moscow Centre. MI6’s o
fficial historian writes of Claude Dansey’s attitude, manifested in his role supervising the escape organisation MI9: ‘He frequently gave the impression that his engagement was as much to deny any other government department the opportunity to meddle on the Continent as it was to rescue British personnel.’ One day Dansey strode into the office of Patrick Reilly, the brilliant young diplomat who served for a time as Stewart Menzies’ personal assistant. ‘Great news,’ he said. ‘Great news.’ His exultation was caused by the collapse of a major French agent network run by SOE, whom Dansey hated even more than the Americans. Reilly wrote: ‘Misery, torture and death for many brave men and women, British and French: and Dansey gloated.’ Reilly recorded that he himself felt sick.

  Menzies’ personal sanctum was guarded by two venerable ladies who addressed each other, even after years of shared service, as ‘Miss Jones’ and ‘Miss Pettigrew’. The former was the milder and better-looking, while the latter was large and formidable. Both were drawn from the same extensive stable of female servants of Broadway – genteel, loyal, discreet, tireless. Malcolm Muggeridge observed, surely rightly, that a common characteristic of people who serve intelligence services is a delight in opacity for its own sake, a conceit derived from access to knowledge denied to others: ‘This sense of importance, of cherishing secrets beyond the ken of ordinary mortals, was characteristic of SIS personnel at all levels, particularly the females, who, however careless they might be about their chastity, guarded their security with implacable resolution.’

  In 1943, Robert Cecil succeeded Reilly as Menzies’ personal assistant, and thereafter became a sturdy defender of his chief. ‘C’s’ most important contribution, he argued years later, was to ensure that the Ultra secret was preserved. The Special Liaison Units which served with commanders in the field, created by Broadway’s Fred Winterbotham, were a brilliant security device, said Cecil. Every Allied commander-in-chief had his personal SLU, living apart from the rest of the headquarters, and charged with filtering decrypts securely into the intelligence process. ‘C’ also retained a clear sense of the purpose of his organisation’s existence. In a memorandum to his staff on 10 November 1942, he expressed its rationale: ‘all Intelligence about the enemy, whether collected by secret means, or by open field Intelligence, should be based on the old dictum that “Intelligence is the mainspring of Action” … SIS’s prime function is to obtain information by secret means which may admit of or promote action … Information on which no action can be taken may be of interest, it may be useful for records or for the future, but it is of secondary importance.’

  Life at MI6’s headquarters was no more free from hazard than in that of any other central London office: on Sunday, 18 June 1944 Cecil and Menzies were working in Broadway Building when a V-1 flying bomb descended, one wing touching Queen Anne’s Mansions next door before the projectile slewed into the Guards Chapel and exploded during a service, killing 120 of the congregation. Cecil argued that a wartime ‘C’ needed to be a man of ‘cool courage and high integrity, seeking only how best to apply the ingenuity of others in the common cause. Menzies was the right man in the right place at the right time.’ Cecil’s case for the defence deserves notice. It has been a source of exasperation to British intelligence officers since 1945 that their service’s best-known chroniclers of its wartime experience were Hugh Trevor-Roper, Graham Greene and Malcolm Muggeridge, all notoriously erratic personalities. Of the three, only Trevor-Roper distinguished himself as an intelligence officer, and even he seemed to recognise in his post-war writing that blander qualities than his own were needed in the managers of a secret service: ‘Apparently miraculous achievements are the results not of miraculous organisations, but of efficient routines. The head of an intelligence service is not a superspy but a bureaucrat.’ Bill Bentinck of the JIC was once canvassed as a candidate to supplant Menzies, but there was no appetite to change jockeys relatively late in the race, when Bletchley’s achievement was being celebrated throughout the councils of the Allied warlords.

  In all the belligerent camps there was fierce debate about the merits of centralisation versus dispersal of intelligence effort. Empire-building and rivalry by Britain’s MI5, MI6 and SOE, especially, caused duplication and wasted resources. But this also enabled disparate groups of men and women, some of the highest intellect, to pursue their own ideas and courses, to the advantage of the Allied cause: a thousand seeds were sown. Though many proved sterile, some produced wondrous blooms, the Radio Security Service and Radio Analysis Bureau notable among them. If intelligence-gathering and sabotage had been centralised under MI6’s control, the weaknesses of Broadway would merely have become more deeply embedded. And even the notorious feuds between MI6 and SOE did less injury to the Allied war effort than did the glacial relationship between the US Army and US Navy.

  The most plausible defence of Broadway’s wartime record is to pose the question: which other nation’s secret service performed better? Stewart Menzies was a limited man, but he showed himself a stabler personality than Donovan, Canaris, Schellenberg, Fitin – his counterparts in the other warring capitals. On the debit side, MI6 created nothing comparable with OSS’s Research & Analysis division. It never forged links with anti-Hitler Germans, especially in the army, as did the Russians and latterly the Americans. But there was a constraint here: the prime minister had imposed draconian restrictions upon any contacts with Germany which might feed Stalin’s morbid fears that the Western Allies wanted a separate peace. It was this that caused the Foreign Office repeatedly to spurn approaches from anglophile members of the German Resistance such as Helmuth von Moltke and Adam von Trott. Only on technological issues, such as the V-weapons discussed below, can it be argued that well-placed humint sources in Germany could have exercised important influence. Ultra provided such peerless insights into the enemy’s camp that it is hard to imagine what spies might have done better.

  2 THE JEWEL OF SOURCES

  The triumph of the US Signals Intelligence Service in securing access to the Japanese Purple diplomatic cipher contributed little to winning the war, because it was not a military channel, but notable among its achievements was recruitment of the Japanese ambassador in Berlin as a source. It was a drollery of the time that the strivings and sacrifices of Allied secret agents secured no humint as interesting as that unconsciously contributed by Baron Hiroshi Ōshima. His dispatches, decrypted by Arlington Hall and Bletchley Park, provided a window on the Nazi high command, and occasionally on Hitler’s intentions. Ōshima was not a clever man – indeed, his military and political judgement was terrible. Until the end of 1942 he remained an unswerving believer in Hitler’s impending triumph, and impatient for Japan to share the spoils. From 1939 onwards, he repeatedly urged his countrymen: ‘Don’t miss the bus!’ His short, chunky figure was often photographed gazing admiringly up at the Führer. In 1942 Göbbels wrote in his diary: ‘Oshima really is one of the most effective champions of Axis policies. A monument ought in due course to be erected in his honour.’ This sentiment would have been echoed, for different reasons, in Washington and London, because the Nazi leadership confided more freely in the Japanese ambassador than in any other foreigner, and the Allies became privy to everything he learned. He sent to Tokyo seventy-five dispatches in 1941, a hundred in 1942, four hundred in 1943, six hundred in 1944 and three hundred in the last months of the war, some of them voluminous, and all read by the Allies within a week or so of their transmission.

  Ōshima was born in 1886, son of a politician who served as war minister in two 1916–18 Tokyo cabinets. He knew Germany intimately, having been first posted there as military attaché in 1934, and became a popular figure on the Berlin diplomatic circuit, a music-lover and keen party-goer who sometimes consumed an entire bottle of kirsch without visible ill-effects. In 1938 he was elevated to ambassador and lieutenant-general. Though recalled to Tokyo in the autumn of 1939, he was reappointed in December 1940, by which time Washington was reading Purple, and soon provided the British with
the means to do likewise. Thereafter until the end of the war some 2,000 of Ōshima’s dispatches and messages were decrypted, translated and circulated to Roosevelt, Marshall, Churchill and senior intelligence officers on both sides of the Atlantic. If his assessments and predictions were often poor, his accounts of conversations with top Nazis appear to have been accurate, and he was an intermediary for important exchanges between Tokyo and Berlin.

  For instance, on 10 May 1941 foreign minister Yōsuke Matsuoka sent a letter to the ambassador for onward passage to Ribbentrop, urging restraint in the German government’s public remarks about the United States: ‘Our mutual loyalty makes me deeply anxious to cause the American President to reflect and check his reckless plans, and … I have been working night and day to this end. By preventing the staging of Armageddon and the consequent downfall of modern civilization (if an act of man can make that possible) I shall thereby discharge my dual responsibility to God and man.’ On 24 May Ōshima reported a conversation with Ciano, Mussolini’s foreign minister, in which the latter said: ‘Do you not think that outbreak of war between Germany and Soviet Union is virtually inevitable?’

  On 4 June 1941 Ōshima reported to Tokyo, and thus to Washington and London, the views of Hitler and Ribbentrop that ‘in every probability war with Russia cannot be avoided’. A few days later he expressed the view that Germany would secure victory too quickly for the Americans and British to be able to offer Stalin useful help; it was the decrypt of this dispatch that belatedly convinced the Joint Intelligence Committee in London that Hitler was indeed determined on war. At the end of July Ōshima told Tokyo of his conviction that the US would soon come into the war; the only doubt in his mind was how far the Americans would be able to give meaningful assistance to Britain. Tokyo, however, told him nothing about its hardening commitment to striking first. Throughout 1941 the Allies remained uncertain about Japanese intentions towards the Soviet Union – as was Berlin. The Tokyo government asserted its intention to join the Germans in attacking the Russians, but refused to specify a time scale. Ōshima sent home full and frequent dispatches about the progress of ‘Barbarossa’, which reinforced American and British perceptions that the Russians were on the ropes. When Ōshima reported on 25 August that the Red Army was estimated to have suffered between five and six million casualties – no great exaggeration – how could Western governments fail to be impressed? By late November, however, Tokyo was telling the baron that it would welcome a peace deal between Hitler and Stalin.