The Secret War

by Max Hastings

  While Gourevitch reposed in his Moscow cell, in London an army officer, Brigadier Tristram Lyon-Smith, appeared one morning late in 1945 at MI5’s St James’s Street headquarters to complain that a Gestapo officer kept writing unwelcome letters to his daughter from Germany, claiming that she had promised to marry him. This was of course Tonia Lyon-Smith, the English girl last seen at Gestapo headquarters in Paris, who was suspected of giving information to the Germans about Leopold Trepper and Georgie de Winter. She had returned to England following the French liberation. An MI5 officer who saw the brigadier and discussed his daughter’s year-long sojourn as a guest of the Nazis on not uncomfortable terms reported sardonically: ‘I did not think it advisable or necessary to ask for details of the precise quid pro quo.’

  A subsequent interrogation of the girl concluded: ‘The story is a little complicated, and she herself has been far from candid. She certainly became Karl Gagl’s mistress and almost certainly disclosed to the Germans all her knowledge of the SPAAK [French Resistance] organisation, which I believe to have been considerably greater than she admits.’ MI5 nonetheless concluded, with what seems compassionate good sense, that although she could probably be prosecuted for treason, given her age and her unhappy story – she had been fourteen when marooned in France in 1940, and was still just nineteen – it seemed that it would have been mistaken to take the case further. The Gestapo officer was nonetheless told there would be no wedding bells – in 1946 Lyon-Smith briefly married a young naval officer – and that he should abandon his passionate letter-writing. She died in 2010.

  As for Gourevitch, he never saw Margaret Barcza again, and after his release married a Russian woman. Only in 1992 was he reunited with his son by Barcza at Sacha’s home in Spain. There will never be a conclusive answer to the question of who gave away what in the matter of the Red Orchestra and the Trepper network; none of the protagonists’ accounts are remotely trustworthy. But if SMERSh and the GRU, instruments of the least merciful regime on earth, were insufficiently sure of Gourevitch’s culpability to shoot him, he seems to deserve the benefit of doubt. He died in 2009, aged ninety-five.

  Alexander Radó, sensing the way the wind was blowing, made a break from a Soviet flight in transit to Moscow during a Cairo stopover in September 1944. His appeal to the British for asylum was rejected, however, and in August 1945 he reached Moscow under guard. He remained imprisoned without trial until 1954, but was then rehabilitated and allowed to retire to Hungary. The Lausanne wireless-operator Alexander Foote spent two years in Moscow before defecting back to Britain through Berlin in 1947. Conspiracists cherish a theory that Foote was always an agent of MI6, at whose behest he supposedly channelled some Bletchley material about the Eastern Front to Moscow, under the pretence that it derived from the ‘Lucy’ Ring. Such a narrative wildly overrates the subtlety of Broadway. Moreover, it would assuredly have been known to Kim Philby, who would have tipped off the Russians. Foote could scarcely have risked flying to Moscow in 1945, nor would the GRU have allowed him later to leave the city alive, had he served Britain during the war years. It is most plausible that the Englishman was what he seemed – a communist adventurer who enjoyed the game for its own sake.

  Rachel Dübendorfer was released from compulsory treatment in a Soviet prison’s mental hospital only in 1956, when she was allowed to retire to East Germany. In 1969 she and several members of the anti-Hitler Resistance were awarded the Order of the Red Banner. Rudolf Rössler was bailed from his Swiss cell in September 1944, but remained subject to Swiss police scrutiny. He made several further court appearances for alleged foreign espionage activities before his death in Lucerne in 1958, aged only sixty-one. Though he had received large sums from Moscow, Rössler died broke. Nothing ever came of a proposal inside Centre that he should be decorated for his services, on the reasonable grounds that he served the ‘Lucy’ Ring as a mere mercenary, rather than as a true believer. Meanwhile Alexander Demyanov, ‘Agent Max’ or ‘Heine’, returned to work as an electrical engineer. The NKVD in the 1950s sought once more to exploit his White Russian connections, by dispatching him with his wife to penetrate the émigré community in Paris. But its members rebuffed him, and after months of inactivity the couple were recalled to Moscow. Demyanov died of a heart attack in 1975, aged sixty-four.

  In Tokyo in 1949, Hanako Ishii prompted the exhumation of Richard Sorge’s skeleton, still clearly identifiable beneath the yard of the prison in which he had been hanged five years before. She arranged his cremation and reinterment in the Tama cemetery, preserving for herself his spectacles and belt. Pathetically or grotesquely, she had the gold bridgework from his teeth reset as a ring which she wore for the rest of her life. She composed an epitaph for his grave, which would have aroused mixed feelings among others with whom he lived – spies, friends and lovers alike: ‘Here lies a hero who sacrificed his life fighting against war and for world peace.’ She died in 2000.

  Any student of the wartime era who explores the conduct of the Soviet Union, and especially of its intelligence services, is likely to emerge bewildered that the word ‘ally’ could ever have been used to describe Russia’s wartime status alongside the democracies. Stalin accepted their assistance to secure the destruction of Hitler, an association that was inescapable for embattled Britain in June 1941, and thereafter saved countless British and American lives, because the Red Army accepted most of the human sacrifice necessary to defeat Germany. It is difficult, however, to perceive the smallest moral superiority in the Soviet system over that of the Nazis, though the West has always seemed willing to accept in mitigation the considerations that Stalin confined his programme of mass murder to his own people and those of Soviet satellite nations, and did not commit a Jewish genocide.

  The failure of both the British and American security services to catch the multitude of Soviet spies and informants in their midst incurred criticism and indeed scorn in the Cold War era. Amid the climate of paranoia which overtook British intelligence, Guy Liddell of MI5 was denounced as a possible traitor, partly because of his friendships with Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt. In truth, it is wildly implausible that Liddell, a first-class intelligence officer who became deputy director of the security service, betrayed his country; but he gave his confidence to some men who were undeserving of it. He died in 1958.

  Although the West’s intelligence services appeared foolish when the British and American betrayers were exposed, there is nonetheless a powerful, surely overriding argument that the presumption of trust which was and is the default mindset within Western democracies, and which made treason relatively easy for the likes of Blunt and Maclean, Hiss and Harry Dexter White, was vastly preferable to the climate of oppression, suspicion, denunciation and near-madness which prevailed in the Soviet Union throughout the communist era. The Russians were more successful in identifying their own traitors, with a few notable exceptions, but at what cost to the humanity of their society?

  Although Joseph McCarthy had a point when he asserted the scale of treachery in high places, the senator went on to conduct a witch-hunt of such gross extravagance that in the eyes of the world, as well as of his own people, the reputation of American justice was besmirched for a generation. The moral and historic stature of Britain and the United States was better served by indulging a certain naïveté about their traitors than it would have been by instilling into the FBI and MI5 the thought processes of Moscow Centre. That assertion holds good even after acknowledging that post-war revelations of treason in secret places created within the Anglo-American intelligence community a distrust of colleagues which sometimes approached Soviet paranoia, and persisted for a generation.

  The final triumph of Hugh Trevor-Roper was to interrogate Walter Schellenberg, who returned from Sweden to face Allied captivity. This experience enabled the MI6 officer to demonstrate that he knew far more about the German intelligence service than did the Nazi high functionary. Trevor-Roper asserted in his April 1945 valedictory report that in 1939–41, Brit
ish knowledge of the Abwehr was ‘very imperfect’, while in 1943 it became ‘adequately representative’, and from then until the end was ‘probably complete’. He exaggerated only a little in asserting that all the Abwehr’s agents deployed overseas were either fictional – such as those created by Dr Kramer in Stockholm – or controlled by London, as were ‘Garbo’ and his kin. In Trevor-Roper’s contemptuous words, ‘Those officers of the GIS who were intelligent enough to see the necessity of central evaluation were corrupt enough to see the necessity of preventing it.’ He was probably right to suggest that the Germans secured better intelligence about the Allied war effort by purchasing it from open sources than by running incompetent spies.

  In the autumn of 1945, at the instigation of the senior MI6 officer Dick White, Trevor-Roper was commissioned to travel to Berlin and explore the circumstances of the Führer’s death, which enabled him to translate his subsequent report into a best-selling book, The Last Days of Hitler. Thereafter he resumed his career as an Oxford historian, unflaggingly controversial, cantankerous, snobbish and brilliant, his last years tarnished by a foolish endorsement of the authenticity of the 1983 ‘Hitler diaries’. He died in 2003. Dr R.V. Jones also returned to academic life, as professor of natural philosophy at Aberdeen University, having been driven out of the intelligence community by its time-servers, who found him too clever by half. Jones received appropriate recognition of his wartime contribution only in 1994, when he was made a Companion of Honour. He died in 1997.

  Walter Schellenberg served a remarkably brief term of imprisonment, given that he had held senior posts in the Nazi hierarchy: he was released on compassionate grounds in 1951, the year before his death at forty-two from liver failure, and spent his last months in Switzerland, writing a memoir with the assistance of his favourite secretary, Marie-Luise Schienke. When Germany’s intelligence services were wound up, Reinhard Gehlen’s self-promotional skills enabled him to achieve a coup. Long before the end of the war, in anticipation of Germany’s defeat he prepared his military intelligence apparatus to exploit the looming new struggle between the Soviet Union and the West. In 1945 he offered the Americans his services, complete with personnel and files. They accepted enthusiastically, and the Gehlen Bureau later became an important arm of the CIA’s activities in Europe, proving the only branch of the Wehrmacht general staff which survived virtually intact into the Cold War.

  Gehlen’s new role was warmly welcomed by his old adversaries of the NKVD and GRU, since almost all his sources in the East were either controlled by or known to Centre. Erich Hüttenhain, principal brain of OKW/Chi, joined the Gehlen organisation as its chief cipher expert, and later ran the German government’s codemaking and codebreaking operations, dedicated to improving upon its wartime performance. Arthur Schlesinger was among the Allies who recoiled from the spectacle of the OSS’s Frank Wisner enlisting such men as Gehlen and Hüttenhain: ‘There was something aesthetically displeasing about Americans plotting with Nazis, who had recently been killing us, against Russians, whose sacrifices had made the Allied victory possible.’

  On 28 June 1945, the British chiefs of staff drove to Bletchley Park, where Sir Alan Brooke addressed four hundred of its staff, thanking and congratulating them for their extraordinary contribution to the Allied war effort. The new mood of the time was illustrated by the fact that, soon after VE-Day, traffic analysts at the Park who had been monitoring German transmissions were ordered to switch to French and Russian wavelengths; this caused some to down tools in impassioned protest, and indeed to resign from GC&CS. Almost all the codebreakers soon returned to academic life. Max Newman, the mathematician who had joined Bletchley reluctantly because he feared that the work would bore him, told his section: ‘One of the prices of peace must be the losing of the most interesting job we’ve ever had.’ It was fortunate that he had derived such satisfaction from his work, because a grateful nation offered him only a lowly OBE, which he rejected with scorn. Gordon Welchman accepted his own OBE. Alan Turing and John Tiltman became CBEs, at a time when scores of indifferently competent generals, admirals and air-marshals were being awarded knighthoods. Bill Tutte, who had led the way towards breaking the German teleprinter traffic, got nothing at all save his prize fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge. He emigrated to Canada in 1948, and spent the rest of a distinguished working career as a mathematician at Waterloo University, Toronto, among people who knew nothing about his dazzling wartime contribution but admired the energy of himself and his wife Dorothea as leisure hikers. He died in 2002.

  The men and women of Bletchley left behind a formidable technological legacy, which enabled GC&CS’s successor, the Government Communications Headquarters or GCHQ, to become Britain’s foremost contribution to the Atlantic alliance from 1945 to the present day, the nuclear deterrent not excluded. It was not by chance that GCHQ became an institution independent of MI6: never again would Broadway’s bureaucrats wax fat on the achievements of the codebreakers. In the United States, the National Security Agency exercises the codebreaking responsibilities once fulfilled by Arlington Hall and Op-20-G, while the CIA conducts US intelligence operations abroad on a scale that would gladden the heart of ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, who died in 1959.

  Although Bletchley was supremely a team achievement by one of the most remarkable groups of human beings ever assembled within a single organisation, there is no doubt of Alan Turing’s primacy. In twenty-first-century Britain it has become a source of national shame that Turing killed himself in 1954, aged only forty-one, following a criminal conviction for gross indecency. The 2014 Hollywood film about Turing, The Imitation Game, offered a version of his experience at Bletchley Park that was a travesty of the reality: far from suffering persecution, he was treated there with a respect verging on reverence, albeit tinged with bewilderment at his eccentricities. Alastair Denniston, in the movie Turing’s sinister nemesis, was in reality an enlightened administrator notable for his kindness. It is nonetheless rightful cause for amazement that when the great mathematician and pioneer of computing faced prosecution and ruin only seven years after the war ended, nobody in Britain’s secret community, knowing of Turing’s personal contribution to victory, intervened to save him from chemical castration.

  MI6 today still declines to open its archive, to establish whether Turing’s case attracted the notice or sympathy of its senior officers – most plausibly that of Stewart Menzies – in 1952, but it seems reasonable to assume that it did not.* There are grounds for dismay at the British government’s populist 2013 decision to grant Turing a posthumous pardon, since his conviction was perfectly proper by the inhumane legislation of the day, which imposed similarly harsh punishments on thousands of other homosexuals, no less deserving of rehabilitation, if such gestures are to be made. It seems much more significant that the British public today salutes Turing’s supremely lonely genius. It is ironic, but also right and fitting, that this man known to scarcely anyone outside BP and the Royal Society during the war years and for half a century thereafter is today the most celebrated 1939–45 secret warrior in the world.

  The Second World War witnessed a huge expansion of the intelligence services of every belligerent nation, so that in Richard Aldrich’s words, ‘secret service became the struggle’s growth industry’. Never in the history of conflict had such vast resources been deployed by all belligerents to compile and assess so much information about their enemies. The overwhelming bulk was wasted, of course. As late as January 1943, in the heyday of Bletchley Park, Lord Beaverbrook expressed scepticism about intelligence, telling Bruce Lockhart that in cabinet he heard ‘very little secret information which was of real value. Secret Intelligence Service reports were of doubtful quality, and their quantity made it difficult for anyone to sift the good from the bad.’ Beaverbrook even expressed caution about Ultra intercepts, saying that ‘The enemy could put out deception messages in a code they knew we had just as easily as we could.’ Today we know this did not happen, but it deserves notice that, at
such a relatively advanced stage of the conflict, a grandee privy to the affairs of the Allied intelligence community, albeit also a professional cynic, could speak in such terms; contemporary witnesses did not always regard Allied secret war operations with the reverence conferred on them by a twenty-first-century generation.

  The historian Paul Kennedy argues that an objective assessment of wartime intelligence should highlight its preponderance of failures: the Russians’ underestimate of Finnish defensive capability in 1939–40; British misjudgement of the Norway campaign; the confounding of French expectations by the German thrust through the Ardennes in May 1940; Stalin’s rejection of predictions of the German invasion of Russia in June 1941; American blindness about the threat to Pearl Harbor; German failure to anticipate the Russian envelopment at Stalingrad, the reverse pincer movement at Kursk, or the central thrust of Operation ‘Bagration’ in 1944. The Western Allies misjudged German responses to their landings at Salerno in 1943 and Anzio in 1944, and to the Arnhem airdrop. The Americans were surprised in the Ardennes in December 1944. The Japanese began by grossly underrating America’s moral strength as well as industrial capability, and were then blindsided by almost every US initiative of the later Pacific war. Kennedy concludes his catalogue of failures: ‘even if one can readily concede that the Allied record on intelligence was far better than that of the Axis, it is easier to demonstrate where smooth logistics helped win the war than to show where intelligence led to victory’.