by Max Hastings
There is a scintilla of truth in this, but the evidence shows that knowledge of the enemy’s motions made a more important contribution to the Western Allied war effort than Kennedy allows, especially at sea, both in the Pacific and Atlantic theatres. Ironically, Hitler’s spies achieved more for the Allied cause than did those of MI6, OSS, the NKVD or GRU. The Abwehr agents dispatched to Britain and Russia who were ‘turned’ did better service thereafter to Allied deception operations than did most of the men and women paid by their secret services to operate abroad. Much overseas intelligence work was a zero-sum game: every belligerent needed to be represented by its secret service even in such far-flung places as Lourenço Marques and Santiago, but their foremost aspiration was merely to frustrate the machinations of the other side, whatever those might be.
The information provided by the Sorge ring and the Red Orchestra might have been invaluable to Moscow in preparing to meet ‘Barbarossa’, had Stalin been willing to heed it – but he was not. No British humint source remotely matched the quality of intelligence supplied by the Berlin networks of Harnack, Schulze-Boysen and the Swiss ‘Lucy’ Ring. Allen Dulles of OSS forwarded to Washington useful and reasonably accurate material about conditions in Germany between 1943 and 1945, but there is little evidence that this influenced US policy- or strategy-making.
The towering reality about Western Allied intelligence is that it became dominated by Ultra, which bore an inherent authority no spy’s reports could match. Hugh Trevor-Roper noted that all the important achievements in his field were the product of sigint, not humint: ‘Of the great intelligence triumphs of the war not one was directly or exclusively due to the Secret Service proper … MI6 was marginal, very marginal.’ Noel Annan said: ‘The cryptanalysts did not win the war, but they stopped Britain losing it.’ This is too glib a verdict, but there is something in it: Ultra was a critical force in protecting Allied commanders from making egregious blunders. Even while acknowledging the failures at Arnhem and in the Ardennes, in the second half of the war it became much harder for them to walk blindly into German or Japanese traps.
The practical military value of Allied access to the Japanese diplomatic ciphers was limited, but Gen. Ōshima’s wirelessed dispatches to Tokyo from Berlin provided more useful insights than did any Allied agent into the Nazi hierarchy’s thinking, just as Admiral Abe provided some superb information on German naval technology. The price of having gained such access was that it distorted the wider process of intelligence assessment in London and Washington, and in the field with the armies. If a threat was not flagged through Ultra, it was assumed not to exist. Donald McLachlan of naval intelligence wrote: ‘Experience on both sides in two world wars … has shown that an intelligence organisation which lived on cryptographical expectations alone became spoiled. It lost the skill and application to make the fullest use of other sources such as air photography, prisoner-of-war statements, neutral observers and even press and radio indiscretions. One might say that easy knowledge corrupts and entire knowledge corrupts absolutely.’ Major Lewis Powell, a future US Supreme Court justice, warned in an early 1944 army report on exploitation of sigint in the Mediterranean: ‘There seems to be a tendency to rely too heavily upon ULTRA to the exclusion of all else.’
In October 1945, Montgomery’s intelligence chief Brigadier Bill Williams penned ‘MOST SECRET’ reflections on the wartime uses and abuses of Ultra, in which he espoused the same view as McLachlan and Powell. ‘The material was dangerously valuable,’ he wrote, ‘not only because we might lose it, but because it seemed the answer to an intelligence officer’s prayer … It was liable to save the recipient from doing Intelligence. Instead of being the best, it tended to become the only source. There was a tendency at all times to await the next message and, often, to be fascinated by the authenticity of the information into failing to think whether it was significant … Probably essential wood was ignored, because of the variety of interesting trees on offer … The information purveyed was so remarkable that it tended, particularly if one were tired or overbusy, to engulf not only all other sources, but that very common sense which forms the basis of intelligence.’
Trevor-Roper again: ‘Secret intelligence must always be relevant to real political or military purposes; it must always be contiguous with “open” intelligence’ – information derived from diplomats and published sources – ‘and it must always be verifiable, for if it is not verifiable it is, in the strict sense of the word, worthless; it cannot be believed or used.’ It is striking to notice that the US State Department’s regular bulletins on the world at war, circulated throughout the Roosevelt administration and derived chiefly from open sources, were as informative as and often more sensible than the output of the Allies’ secret services, and the same endorsement might be given to some British ambassadors’ dispatches from overseas.
It was important, noted Bill Williams, for officers constantly to remind themselves that, though the German commander dispatching a given message told the truth as he saw it, ‘it was not necessarily true in relation to the situation as a whole’. There were many gaps, and – especially in the middle war years – much material reached Allied field commanders out of real time. Williams tried to tell himself that he was not doing his job properly unless he evaluated the battlefield situation correctly before the Ultra signals came in, but he admitted that he was no more successful in this than most of his fellow-tradesmen in the Allied camp. Intelligence officers recognised by 1945 that the wartime work of British and American codebreakers had changed the very nature of their business. Henceforward ‘the old cloak and dagger’, as Guy Liddell and a Bletchley friend described pre-war espionage in a fit of nostalgia, was not quite redundant: highly placed agents in the enemy’s corridors of power, such as Col. Oleg Penkovsky, remained important assets during the Cold War. As influences upon strategy and policy, however, they were recognised as entirely secondary to signals intelligence.
Since 1945, historians of some other nations have made large claims for what their own codebreakers allegedly achieved – for instance, Russian assertions that they read Japanese Purple traffic or even broke Enigma. Given what we now know about Izumi Kozo, the former proposition is not incredible. But to credit such successes, documentary evidence is necessary, which is still almost entirely absent in Moscow’s case. Where Russian archives hold copies of decrypts of higher German and Japanese wartime messages – it is undisputed that Centre broke pre-war cyphers – it is more likely these were passed to Moscow by British or American traitors than decrypted by its own codebreakers. Even the triumphs of the British and Americans need to be qualified by studying exact dates on which decrypts became available to commanders – sometimes well beyond ‘real time’. The most important issue about all intelligence is whether it empowered commanders in the field and at sea to take action. Unless this can be proven, all claims to codebreaking prowess become suspect or meaningless.
This book has sought to show that the radio intelligence war between the Allies and Germany was not as one-sided as popular mythology supposes. Hitler’s codebreakers, especially in the first half of the war, could claim some important successes. In North Africa until June 1942, Rommel knew as much about the British Eighth Army as his enemies knew about the Afrika Korps, and the latter’s commander used his information better. Dönitz’s B-Dienst provided the U-boat command with an ongoing stream of intelligence about British convoy operations. Even when Allied ciphers could not be broken, traffic analysis and voice interception gave Berlin ongoing information about Allied operations in both East and West, on the ground and in the air, throughout the conflict.
But not as much as the Allies possessed. Many things about the 1939–45 era remain disputable, but few informed people would question the proposition that Bletchley was one of the most remarkable institutions the world has ever known, and one of the greatest achievements in Britain’s history, towering over any narrative of the nation’s part in the conflict. It does not diminish th
e codebreakers’ achievement to emphasise how extraordinary it was that the Germans never recognised the vulnerability of Enigma and Lorenz. Berlin garnered plentiful clues, and received warnings from its own experts – yet carried on regardless. A most unGermanic laziness of mind persisted. While the Third Reich executed wholesale spies, traitors and saboteurs who threatened its security, its functionaries remained insistently oblivious of the most deadly threat of all – a few hundred tweedy, bespectacled young English academics labouring in drab suburban Bedfordshire. The only credible explanation is hubris: an institutional unwillingness to believe that their Anglo-Saxon enemies, whom they so often humbled on the battlefield, could be so clever.
Granted the brilliance of the American achievements in breaking Purple and forecasting the Japanese strike at Midway, the most innovative codebreaking technology of the war was devised at BP. The United States became in some degree a prisoner of its early success with Japan’s diplomatic cipher: it might have better served its armed forces in the struggle with Japan had Arlington Hall focused more intensively upon breaking the enemy military codes it could not read, rather than Purple, which it could. Its efforts were also handicapped by division of effort – the crippling army–navy rivalry. Painful experience showed that it was more difficult to break Japanese book codes than machine-generated ciphers. Op-20-G and Arlington Hall could boast remarkable achievements, and eventually succeeded where the British had failed with some Japanese communications, but they never fully mastered them.
Allied intelligence made its greatest impact on the war at sea, both in the Atlantic and the Pacific. Nimitz’s FRUPAC at Pearl Harbor achieved more than did Arlington Hall, partly because of the difficulties of reading the Japanese army’s traffic in real time, and partly because decrypts were of limited value to land campaigns in which the enemy manoeuvred little, but instead fought stubbornly from fixed positions. In naval operations, by contrast, the foremost challenge was always to locate the enemy’s warships at sea and concentrate force against them, for which Ultra provided the Royal Navy and US Navy with unprecedented opportunities. If the Allies had not been able to exercise almost unchallenged control of the Atlantic sea route in the spring of 1944, the D-Day invasion of Normandy could not have taken place – and such dominance owed much to Ultra. Nimitz’s triumphs in the Pacific, with both his surface fleets and submarine flotillas, were immensely assisted by Ultra, and sometimes altogether made possible by it.
In 1944–45 the USAAF used economic intelligence more effectively and imaginatively than did the RAF to inform its bomber operations. Nonetheless, no Allied nation achieved a complete understanding of Hitler’s industrial machine, even though some of the best brains in Britain and the US engaged in the attempt. On land, it was of immense value to the Allies to possess a vivid picture of deployments, but only on rare occasions – the most conspicuous being at Alam Halfa in August 1942 and at Mortain in July 1944 – was Ultra directly responsible for enabling Allied forces to frustrate major German attacks. It is impossible and almost irrelevant to judge the rival claims of the Russians and Germans to sigint superiority on the Eastern Front; what is indisputable is that, from the summer of 1942 onwards, the Red Army decisively won the overall intelligence contest.
There was a debate at Bletchley Park in February 1945 about what steps, if any, should be taken to create a historical record of its achievement. Edward Travis, its chief, minuted his own view that unless this was done immediately after the cessation of hostilities, no later historian would be able to make sense of BP’s records and intercepts, in the absence of technical knowledge and context which he believed only a contemporary witness could have. Meanwhile, sustaining secrecy was deemed paramount when so many nations around the world continued to employ in the post-war era communications technology vulnerable to Anglo-American penetration – the Red Army enlisted in its own service many captured Lorenz teleprinters.
When war crimes trials began in 1946, intelligence officers expressed horror at the notion that they might have to give evidence, which would expose the use of stool-pigeons, electronic eavesdropping – and Ultra decryption. These methods, said the War Office, would be indispensable in future wars, and must on no account be mentioned in open court, nor indeed anywhere else. It was a notable irony that some tens of thousands of American and British men and women who shared knowledge of the Ultra secret preserved it through the subsequent three decades with almost religious fervour, while the Soviets – the only enemies who mattered – were privy to it from the outset, thanks to Western traitors. When Bletchley’s story began to be publicly revealed in 1974, enough veterans survived to pen dozens of authoritative accounts of their own roles, while Professor Harry Hinsley led the team which produced the official history of wartime intelligence.
Ideological enthusiasm for communism was the principal force in enabling the Soviet Union’s intelligence services to recruit a host of informants in both the Axis and Allied nations with better access to secrets than the human sources of MI6 and OSS achieved. Much technical intelligence generated from the US and Britain, especially about aircraft design and above all about the Bomb, was of value to the Russians. This bore fruit, however, not during the struggle against Hitler, but in strengthening Moscow’s hand in the Cold War that followed; it not merely influenced the nuclear arms race, but also empowered the Soviet Union to build jet aircraft and much else beyond its native competence. The record of the NKVD and GRU, working under the dead hand of Stalin, shows that their chiefs were no more sensible or skilled, and infinitely more barbarous, than their Western counterparts.
The Soviets profited from the honourable policies of the Western warlords, who sought to treat them as genuine allies, and deployed scarcely any intelligence or counter-intelligence resources against them. Stalin’s paranoia rendered sterile the labours of his admirers in Nazi Germany, who sacrificed so much to influence Soviet actions so little. The master of the Kremlin was able to make formidable use of material secured from American and British traitors to arm himself against Roosevelt and Churchill in the political struggle to shape the post-war world. But probably the most influential wartime elements of Soviet intelligence activities against the Axis were their deception operations, the foremost being that of Agent ‘Max’ through ‘Monastery’, at the time of Stalingrad.
The NKVD and GRU tied up the Abwehr in as many knots as did MI5 through the Double Cross system. The German and Japanese leaderships made their decisions shrouded in bewilderment and ignorance about their enemies, partly because of an institutionalised resistance to the objective examination of evidence, emphasised by Hitler’s refusal to explore the economic potential of the Soviet Union and the United States before he declared war on them. From 1942 onwards the Axis conducted its campaigns with only meagre, or wildly mistaken, ideas of what was happening in the enemy’s camp. In considerable measure, of course, this was due to the madness of Hitler and the wilful blindness of Japan’s generals. In Trevor-Roper’s words, written in the last days of the war: ‘All strategy, and indeed all decisions of policy and interpretations of acts, became increasingly dependent on the arbitrary whims of a group of ignorant maniacs.’ In lesser degree German bewilderment was attributable to the fog of misinformation generated by Allied counter-intelligence and deception staffs.
By far the most important reality about the impact of intelligence on the Second World War – on all wars – is that knowledge of the enemy’s motions does not alter or diminish the requirement for soldiers, sailors and airmen to defeat him on the battlefield. There were some delusions in 1918, wrote Stewart Menzies in a 1942 circular to his officers, that Germany had been defeated ‘by means of the spoken, written word, or some other ancillary war activity’. Not so, he said. ‘Germany was defeated because the German Armies were beaten.’ MI6 would have failed in its primary function, the spy chief wrote, if it did not materially contribute to such another outcome in Britain’s latest conflict with Germany.
A British general onc
e lectured to Allied students at the Haifa staff college on the principles of war. When he sat down and invited comments, a Polish officer sprang to his feet and said, ‘Sir! You have left out the most important: Be stronger!’ The Pole was right. Sir Alan Brooke, as head of the British Army, complained at a chiefs of staff meeting in November 1943 that the Joint Intelligence Committee consistently underestimated the enemy’s military capabilities in all theatres. This was only half-true. Brooke should instead have acknowledged that the chronic problem for the Allies was not that their intelligence staffs misjudged Axis paper strengths, though they sometimes did, but that the enemy consistently displayed superior combat skills to those of the Anglo-American armies, even when the latter had more troops, overwhelming air power – and sometimes foreknowledge conferred by Ultra.
Decrypted signals provided the Allied warlords with a knowledge of their enemies’ strengths and deployments unparalleled in history. ‘Few armies,’ acknowledged Bill Williams, ‘ever went to battle better informed of their enemy.’ But Ultra seldom told Churchill, Roosevelt and their generals much about German intentions, and especially about Hitler’s intended response to a given Allied course of action. The achievements of Bletchley Park, Arlington Hall and the US Navy’s Op-20-G were very great. They elevated intelligence, hitherto a little-respected branch of staffwork, to an unprecedented importance in operational planning. They did not, however, provide Anglo-American forces with magic keys to victory on the ground, in the air and at sea. The Germans, Italians and Japanese always had to be fought. It is unsurprising that good intelligence seldom proved decisive in altering battlefield outcomes in the first half of the war, when Allied forces were weak. Especially in land campaigns, knowing where a blow was to fall did little to improve the prospects of countering it, in the absence of competent commanders and sufficient armed strength. In December 1941, for instance, the British had extensive forewarning about Japanese intentions in the Far East, especially towards Malaya, but their local forces were too feeble and too incompetently led to profit from it.
