The Secret War

by Max Hastings

  French Indochina witnessed the most intense Anglo–American conflict of all. OSS officers were determined to prevent France from regaining control of its cherished colony, while the British strove to assist the French cause. The clash plunged to a symbolic nadir on the night of 23 January 1945, when P-61 Black Widow night-fighters of the US 14th Air Force appear to have shot down two RAF Liberators carrying French agents into Indochina, with the loss of all on board. The Americans hoped that the episode would prove a salutary warning, deterring the British from providing any further help to France, but in the first two months of 1945 the RAF flew seventy-one Special Duties sorties to Indochina, some of them carrying French officers in defiance of an explicit veto from the White House. Churchill, probably wisely, decided to avoid a direct confrontation with FDR about the issue, and a British investigation into the loss of the Liberators was abandoned. In the last months of the war, both London and Washington despaired of imposing order on their nation’s clandestine operations in South-East Asia, and left the officers on the ground to fight it out – which they did, to no conclusive outcome.

  By 1945 there were few delusions among intelligence chiefs about the failure of SOE’s mission in the old Asian colonies as standard-bearers for the restoration of British rule. The depth of the divide between the European imperial powers and the Americans was also plain. On 26 April the Political Warfare Executive discussed the prospects at a meeting in London. It recommended that spokesmen ‘should admit frankly the loss of prestige in empire: this grave situation must be repaired by implanting the conviction in the oriental mind that the people of the British Commonwealth of Nations have in fact contributed decisively to the defeat of Japan … Unfortunately this task is one of considerable difficulty, since our American Allies are playing the major and the spectacular role … Successfully emancipated colonials themselves, Americans itch to free others from the yoke under which, they feel, they once groaned … We are thought to be returning [to liberated colonies in South-East Asia] under the aegis of our American Allies who are known to orientals to be fundamentally opposed to a great deal for which we, as an Asiatic power, necessarily stand … Only by skilful manipulation … can we hope to regain our lost prestige.’ In another similar paper, the authors urged with shameless cynicism that Britain’s liberators should be less than explicit about acknowledging their commitment to restore imperial rule: ‘we should make as much capital as possible out of not defining precisely the details of the future set-up’. By the summer of 1945, the Japanese had become the least formidable of Britain’s foes in South-East Asia.

  3 THE ENEMY: GROPING IN THE DARK

  Bizarre though it seems to Westerners, for much of the Second World War the Soviet Union and China – where most of the Japanese army was deployed – loomed larger than the United States and Britain in the minds of Tokyo’s decision-makers. They sought to conduct the war they wanted, rather than the one they had got. The army originally planned for the Pacific struggle to end in the spring of 1942, with the Americans accepting peace terms, whereupon Japan would fall upon the carcass of the Soviet Union. On 14 January that year, the Operations Department in Tokyo told the Kwantung army in Manchuria to expect to receive major reinforcements by March, in time for the intended assault on Russia. Only in October 1944, after suffering crushing naval defeat at Leyte Gulf, did the Japanese formally recognise the US, rather than the Soviet Union, as its foremost intelligence target. They left their generals to collect whatever information they needed in their own operational areas, with whatever means were to hand. They never exploited clever civilians in anything like the fashion the British and Americans did. The military’s hubris was undiminished by early setbacks. Maj. Gen. Kenryo Sato, chief of the Bureau of Military Affairs, made a speech to the Diet in Tokyo in March 1943, after Japan suffered defeat at Guadalcanal, asserting that American troops were undisciplined and amateurish: ‘They are good at shooting, but their fighting spirit and morale are very poor … Most US soldiers do not understand why they are fighting.’

  The Japanese were slow to understand the importance of attacking British and American codes – the ease with which they read Chinese Nationalist wireless traffic had perhaps made them slothful. In any event, only in 1943–44 were Japanese officers dispatched to Germany, Hungary and Finland to study codebreaking. In 1943, when Japan’s defeat was already looming, the army created the Tokushu Joho-bu – Central Special Intelligence Section – to gather sigint, belatedly acknowledging that ‘codebreaking activities against the United States and United Kingdom are extremely inadequate, with few qualified staff’. This initially employed three hundred personnel, which swelled to over a thousand by 1945. Several hundred additional intelligence and codebreaking staff served in Manchuria with the Kwantung army, the air forces and field armies. In May 1944 its chief started to recruit graduates in maths and languages, and acquired a few IBM machines. A Military Cryptographical Research Association was created, with some help from Tokyo’s Imperial University.

  Yet all this was much too little, far too late. Even the emperor expressed bewilderment that the army spent so much time talking about a prospective war against the Russians, when it was fighting an actual one against the Americans. The Japanese claimed for a time to have broken into some US codes in MacArthur’s theatre, but these were soon changed. One of the Special Intelligence Section’s officers claimed after the war that on 11 August 1945 it had decrypted the word ‘nuclear’ in a signal sent by an American M-209 cipher machine. Even if this was true, however, it contributed precious little to the Japanese cause, any more than did their intermittent breaks into Soviet traffic.

  The Imperial Japanese Navy’s intelligence department logged the statistics for its incoming reports from different sources between 1 October 1944 and 19 July 1945, a fair representation of the balance throughout the war: 393 sigint, almost all based on traffic analysis; 102 attaché reports from neutral foreign embassies; twenty-seven from PoW information; two captured documents; seven foreign-agent reports; 110 open-source radio broadcast items; 769 newspaper items. The Japanese had always placed more faith in information acquired through espionage than from sigint, yet they never showed much skill in recruiting and running foreign agents. Commander Nobuiko Imai wrote sourly: ‘In New Guinea we hired native Chinese and Australians, but they eventually double-crossed [us].’ Tokyo paid substantial sums to informants in Mexico, Chile and Argentina, though it is hard to imagine how these could have contributed to its war effort. The Japanese had no greater luck running agents in British India. Forty-five – the bulk of the crop – were captured in 1942, most of whom proved to have been seconded from Tokyo’s Indian National Army, recruited from PoWs in their hands. In 1944 Japanese intelligence starting taking a keen interest in Islam as a potential focus for anti-Allied activities. A large party of Muslim saboteurs was landed on the coast of Baluchistan early in 1945 – but promptly surrendered to the British.

  Japan’s intelligence service tried hard in the continental United States. On 3 May 1944, Tokyo’s minister in Madrid sent a melodramatic report to his Foreign Ministry about a Spanish agent who had supposedly been serving Japanese interests in America, and had now returned to Spain to report, since he lacked wireless or a courier: ‘I have secretly warned him that since he came home with the woman early in April not only the British and Americans but the Spanish also have been keeping him under close observation. He is therefore acting outwardly as though he had no connection with me at all … Since it would be as good as signing his death warrant if we were to meet direct, I have instructed him to furnish me with a written report … [He] is due to return to his duties in America on 17th May and he is going ahead (as matters stand at present the Americans see no objection to his re-entry).’

  The attached agent’s report was written in the manner of a period thriller: ‘Living in an enemy country and collecting information while facing all manner of danger, it was unavoidable that I should have to depend to a great extent on my memo
ry. To ensure accuracy I naturally used special ink and small photographs on every occasion when matters of importance were involved.’ Since what followed represented a summary of fourteen months’ alleged observation, it was scarcely being delivered in real time. The spy reported, among much else, the fabulous fiction that four US battleships had been sunk in the November 1942 Solomons battles, and devoted several hundred words to listing America’s senior commanders and their posts, information readily available in the Washington Post. There was a final twist: the Japanese agent’s dispatch survives only because it was decrypted by Arlington and Bletchley, and has reposed since May 1944 in American and British files.

  From 1944 onwards Japanese commanders showed themselves chronically reluctant to consider evidence, preferring instead decision-making by instinct, with a growing appetite for fantasy. The navy devoted even fewer resources to codebreaking than the army, and focused most of its sigint activities on direction-finding and traffic analysis. A Japanese admiral, Rear-Admiral Yokoi Tishiyuji, observed despairingly after the war: ‘Our navy was being defeated in the battle of the radio waves. Our cards were bad, and the enemy could read our hand. No wonder we could not win in this poker game.’ The IJN nonetheless had some modest codebreaking successes, by monitoring lower-grade American logistics communications. Intelligence officers read about half the 1944–45 BAMS traffic – Broadcast For Allied Merchant Shipping – which enabled them to forecast major US amphibious assaults through tracking the huge support ‘tail’ that accompanied each one. They anticipated the January 1944 Marshalls operations, the Marianas in June and Iwo Jima in February. Yet the high command chose instead to believe that, rather than go for the Marianas, the Americans would target the Philippines, northern New Guinea and the West Carolines. And even when Japan’s admirals and generals correctly anticipated American intentions, they were repeatedly and decisively outfought on land, at sea and in the air. Hard power was lacking.

  During the summer and autumn of 1944, the climate of fantasy at imperial headquarters became feverish. US deception activities convinced them that the Americans were building up forces in Alaska with a view to invading the Kuriles. Thus, in June Japanese intelligence estimated that the US had 400,000 men and seven hundred aircraft in Alaska, whereas the true figures were 64,000 and 373. Tokyo increased its own forces in the Kuriles from 25,000 men and thirty-eight aircraft in January to 70,000 and 589 in June. Japan’s senior officers chose to believe that the 12–16 October air battles off Taiwan, which devastated their own air force, had cost the US nineteen carriers and four battleships. Japanese radio monitors correctly reported that traffic analysis showed all the elements of Halsey’s Third Fleet still afloat – but their views were dismissed as unacceptable. Captain Kaoru Takeuchi of the Intelligence Department raved: ‘The staff of the Operations Department are inexcusable … They are insane! It’s unbelievable that the mad officers have their own way.’ It was the surge of optimism about American losses off Taiwan that persuaded Japan’s admirals to launch the Combined Fleet’s Operation ‘Ichi-Gō’, which ended in disaster at Leyte Gulf.

  Yet Leyte prompted an even more frenzied Japanese flight from reality. The Navy Intelligence Department’s broadly accurate assessments were ignored, while wildly inflated claims were accepted for the success of kamikaze attacks on US warships. On six occasions the navy’s Operations Department declared the carrier Lexington sunk, and four times wrote off Saratoga. The emperor noticed these reports, and suggested that they might be a trifle fanciful. The army high command relied increasingly for intelligence about the Pacific theatre on its ‘Special Information’ staff in Harbin, north China, which had a source in the Soviet consular office. Unfortunately, this was controlled by the NKVD. When the intelligence staff realised this, its officers warned the high command, but the generals preferred to believe what Moscow wanted to tell them, rather than any portion of unacceptable truth.

  The army’s intelligence chief, Gen. Seizo Arisue, deplored the Operations Department’s hubris, saying that its officers ‘disliked even listening to the opinions of others’. He cited the March 1944 assault on British and Indian forces at Imphal. For once, Arisue had been consulted in advance, but as soon as he expressed strong opposition to the plan he was expelled from imperial headquarters’ debate on the operation. The Japanese as a race, according to the 2nd Department’s Kiichiro Higuchi, prefer a subjective approach to problem-solving to objective analysis of evidence: ‘The affairs of individuals may be determined by subjective criteria, but it is most dangerous to use these to determine the fate of nations.’ The most conspicuous example of this came in April 1945, when intelligence warned of a dramatic increase in Soviet military traffic towards the Manchurian border and concluded: ‘The 2nd Department concludes that the USSR has already started to prepare for a war against Japan.’ Because this represented the worst nightmare of Japan’s generals, they dismissed the reports out of hand, and continued to do so until the Red Army launched its overwhelming offensive in Manchuria in August. All Japanese military planning in 1945 assumed an American invasion of their homeland, upon which they believed they could inflict intolerable losses. It is a fine irony that the Western Allies could most plausibly have confounded their enemy’s high command by announcing publicly that they did not intend to invade Japan, but instead to bomb and starve it into submission.

  Whatever difficulties the British and Americans faced in working with each other, these were as nothing compared with the lack of trust, the cultural chasm, dividing the Germans and Japanese. Though the two nations had an intelligence-sharing agreement, little was done to implement it. Senior Wehrmacht intelligence specialists despised their Japanese counterparts. One German officer described them as ‘very poor’, noting that they often identified an American division as opposing them in the Pacific when Berlin knew that it was in France. Col. Ohletz of the RSHA said after the war that his service had ‘an uneasy and unprofitable partnership with the Japanese I[ntelligence] S[ervice]’. Canaris, while he ran the Abwehr, maintained tenuous links with Tokyo. An officer named Hauptmann Plage was retained as Berlin’s supposed resident expert on Japan. The Germans passed on to Tokyo fragments – for instance, a report supposedly from a British source (one of MI5’s double agents) – about the US landings at Leyte Gulf in September 1944.

  As the war situation deteriorated, so too did the relationship between the two allies. Each regarded the cause of the other as doomed, but the Germans strove to keep the Japanese in the fight. OKW urged the RSHA’s chiefs to tell their Oriental brethren anything that might stiffen their resolve – for instance, about prospects for the December 1944 Ardennes offensive. One night just after Operation ‘Autumn Mist’ had been launched, Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Walter Schellenberg hosted a big Japanese party for dinner in a villa on the Wannsee. This was not a success. Col. Ohletz got the impression that the Japanese ‘wanted nothing to do with the SD’. Kaltenbrunner emerged asserting contemptuously that ‘the Japanese had become so “soft” that, if the [Ardennes] offensive did not succeed, they would probably “rat”’. The Germans nodded contemptuously to each other when, soon afterwards, the Japanese began to evacuate their Berlin embassy archives to Switzerland, Sweden and Spain.

  In the spring of 1945 Makoto Onodera, the Stockholm-based head of Japanese intelligence in Europe, made an offer to take over control of the Abwehr’s stations in neutral capitals. Seeing the Nazi ship foundering, he observed that the Japanese wanted to take over its intelligence apparatus as a going concern. Yet when Japan had been unwilling or unable to use intelligence effectively since at least 1942, it is hard to imagine what service the Nazis’ sclerotic European spy networks could have done for imperial headquarters, as Hirohito’s commanders gazed upon the ruin of their own ambitions, and of their empire.

  20

  ‘Enormoz’

  In 1944, when the young American physicist Ted Hall, working on the atomic bomb project at Santa Fe’s Camp 2, told all that he knew to Moscow Centre,
he justified himself by saying fervently to his NKVD handler, ‘There is no country except for the Soviet Union that could be entrusted with such a terrible thing.’ Perhaps fifty of those on both sides of the Atlantic who were privy to the atomic bomb programme surrendered portions of its secrets to the Soviet Union. The betrayal of the Manhattan Project by British and American informants was the most important espionage story of the war. It had no effect on the outcome of the struggle against the Nazis, of course, but a major influence on what happened thereafter: when the first Soviet bomb was exploded in 1949, it proved to be an exact copy of the July 1945 Alamogordo test device. Apologists for Moscow’s informants have ever since made two points: first, that with or without the traitors, the Soviet Union would have built its own bomb soon enough, because that is how science and technology evolve around the world; second, that the NKVD’s informants performed a service to the cause of peace, because they ensured the creation of a balance of terror, making it impossible for America’s right-wing fanatics credibly to advocate a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union. Both arguments merit consideration. All that seems certain, however, is that the atomic spies dramatically strengthened Stalin’s strategic hand, and provided the NKVD with one of the biggest coups in its history.