Intelligence in War: The Value--And Limitations--Of What the Military Can Learn About the Enemy

by John Keegan

  INTELLIGENCE IN WAR

  KNOWLEDGE OF THE ENEMY FROM

  NAPOLEON TO AL-QAEDA

  JOHN KEEGAN

  Alfred A. Knopf

  New York 2003

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Maps

  Introduction

  CHAPTER ONE: Knowledge of the Enemy

  CHAPTER TWO: Chasing Napoleon

  CHAPTER THREE: Local Knowledge: Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley

  CHAPTER FOUR: Wireless Intelligence

  CHAPTER FIVE: Crete: Foreknowledge No Help

  CHAPTER SIX: Midway: The Complete Intelligence Victory?

  CHAPTER SEVEN: Intelligence, One Factor Among Many: The Battle of the Atlantic

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Human Intelligence and Secret Weapons

  EPILOGUE: Military Intelligence Since 1945

  CONCLUSION: The Value of Military Intelligence

  References

  Select Bibliography

  About the Author

  Other Books by John Keegan

  Copyright

  To Rose

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I have tried to steer clear of the intelligence world all my working life. For good reason: As a young lecturer in military history at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst I was told that any contact with intelligence organisations, those of other countries especially but also our own, would attract official disapproval (I should have answered, but did not, that I possessed no shred of information that could have been of the slightest interest to any sensible intelligence officer). Later, as defence correspondent, then defence editor of The Daily Telegraph, I decided that entanglement with intelligence organisations was unwise, having concluded, by that stage of my life, through reading, conversation and a little personal observation, that anyone who mingled in the intelligence world, in the belief that he could make use of contacts thus made, would more probably be made use of, to his disadvantage. I continue to believe that to be the case.

  Nevertheless, and probably inevitably, given my career first in the Ministry of Defence, then as a newspaperman and continuously as a military historian, I have come to know over the years more inhabitants of the intelligence world than I would have deliberately set out to meet. Some of my Sandhurst pupils became intelligence officers; one died, heroically, at the hands of the Irish Republican Army. Some of my Sandhurst colleagues served in Special Forces, which are on intimate terms with the intelligence organisations and often act as their executive arm. Academic life, improbably as it may seem, sometimes brought me into touch with the intelligence services, though, it should be explained, with their analytic rather than operational branches. Fleet Street—where the offices of The Daily Telegraph were still located when I joined in 1986—had then, and still has, its own informal relations with the intelligence services; at the outset the newspaper encouraged me to get to know what were called “the contacts.”

  The first to whom I was sent was also the most important, the then chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, which oversees the work of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and the Security Service (MI5), dealing respectively in foreign and domestic intelligence. It was arranged that I should meet him in one of London’s grand gentlemen’s clubs. I was not told how I should recognise him. I remembered, however, from the novels of John le Carré—someone with whom Fleet Street would also bring me into touch—that a good agent always sits in the corner of the room from which he can see the entrance and has access to two separate exits. On arriving, I spotted the chairman instantly.

  I later met the head of MI6 and, much later still, the then head of MI5, (Dame) Stella Rimington; I have no hesitation in mentioning her name since, to the outrage of some of her colleagues, she insisted in retirement on publishing her memoirs. I met her in the company of my then editor and great friend, Max Hastings, who had invited me to join them for dinner, perhaps to assure her that the occasion was purely social and not an attempt on his part to extract information. In the event I had a strong feeling of playing gooseberry; I certainly took little part in the conversation. A few days later an outraged Max cornered me in the office. “Do you know what a friend has just told me? The morning after our dinner with Stella she posted the gist of what we discussed on the Whitehall e-mail. Can you credit it?” My memories of civil service thought processes came to the fore. “All too easily,” I said, “she was getting her retaliation in first. Government servants are terrified of accusations of treating with the enemy.”

  I found the American intelligence services altogether more human. At an academic conference I bumped into a genial character who knew my work as a military historian and asked what aspect of it I enjoyed most. “Order of battle analysis,” I replied unhesitatingly; the order of battle is the list of units involved in an operation, often surprisingly difficult to establish. “Really,” he said. A little while later I got a message from him to say that he was responsible for training American government servants to whom order of battle was a matter of great importance. Could I come to Washington to give a lecture on the subject?

  Washington turned out to be Langley, Virginia, and the government servants in question were trainee analysts of the Central Intelligence Agency; analysts process the information which is assembled by the Agency’s other branch, its field officers. My first lecture was a success. Invited to give it a second time, I found myself delivered to CIA headquarters and put into the hands of an escorting officer. I was impressed by the Agency’s attention to detail. “You’ll need a pass,” my escorting officer said and put before me a sheet of paper for signature. It contained more personal information about myself than I could have readily assembled. “We’re going to see the Director,” he said, “but not yet. Let’s have a cup of coffee.” He took me round the corner. The husband and wife running the coffee stall were blind.

  “Now we’re going to the Director’s office.” He set off confidently, first one floor, than another. I sensed a loss of confidence. After a bit he stopped to question a passer-by. “Wrong floor,” he said, with a touch of embarrassment. Eventually arrived—all doors looked identical and had minuscule nameplates below eye level—we entered an anteroom full of muscular young men with bulges near their armpits. “The Director is expecting you,” one said.

  I entered the adjoining room. A very large man, who I subsequently learned was William Casey, Director of Central Intelligence, indicated a seat and began to speak. I had by this stage formed the impression, by intuition alone, that the CIA wished to communicate with The Daily Telegraph; the trouble was I could not discern quite what. I shuffled my chair nearer Mr. Casey’s desk. He continued to speak, unintelligibly. I shuffled nearer. Eventually it dawned on me that the Director was not talking about current intelligence affairs but military history; he was a reader of my books and wanted to discuss technique, as he wrote himself. It was still difficult to understand what he was saying.

  Eventually, and clearly as a sign that time was up, he rose from his desk, extracted a book from a shelf, wrote in it and said goodbye. The book turned out to be Where and How the War Was Fought, a surprisingly gripping account of the War of the Revolution related in terms of its geography; the warm inscription stated that my books had been of use to him in composing his. Slightly bemused, I returned to the corridor. My escorting officer was there and so were several other senior CIA agents. “What did he say?” was their collective question.
“I couldn’t really understand,” I answered. There was a collective burst of laughter. I had said the right thing. I later learned that the Director was known as “Mumbles” and described as “the only man in government who doesn’t need a secure telephone.”

  The last encounter with the intelligence world I shall mention was more complex and perhaps more sinister, though I would mislead if I implied that it was really dangerous. During the nineteen-eighties I formed a connection with the American magazine The Atlantic Monthly, then the highest-paying publication in the world. For The Atlantic I went to Lebanon, during the Civil War, and later to the Northwest Frontier, during the Russian war in Afghanistan. My reason for accepting its commissions was simple. I had four children at expensive schools and the sums it paid, $10,000 an article, went far to meet the costs of tuition. My last Atlantic commission was to report on the security situation in South Africa, just before the collapse of apartheid.

  The arrangements were made by the magazine, which had contacts in South Africa. I was grateful for its intervention because I was still on the staff of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and, though I would be absent during the Academy vacation, was well aware that I should not be visiting a country not then a member of the Commonwealth for a foreign magazine without official permission, which I had not secured or indeed requested. I was told I would be met on arrival. When I landed at Jan Smuts airport I found myself the only passenger whose suitcase was missing. I reported the loss and, with my guide, went on to Pretoria. During the next week, in which I bought clothes to replace those missing, I visited the Voortrekker Monument, the headquarters of the 1st Light Horse and the South African Ministry of Defence, where I was briefed by a commodore in the South African Navy. I also went to lunch in the Pretoria Club with the retired head of South African military intelligence, General du Toit. Over lunch he enquired casually, “Are you still at Sandhurst?” I felt a twinge; I thought I was travelling as a freelance journalist. He clearly had other thoughts. The disappearance of my suitcase suddenly seemed significant.

  The suitcase eventually reappeared, at Johannesburg Central Police Station, the day before my departure. In the weeks following, I forgot about the oddity of the episode. Then, a month or two later, I got a telephone call from someone at the Ministry of Defence. Could we meet for lunch? Perhaps I didn’t listen very carefully. Anyhow, I jumped to the conclusion that the caller belonged to the Defence Intelligence Agency, an open and indeed very helpful body which I telephoned frequently for information when writing about wars in obscure parts of the world. We arranged to meet.

  The young man from the ministry was impressive, well-dressed, well-mannered, well-spoken, what my generation would call smooth. After preliminaries, I said how pleased I was to meet a representative of the Defence Intelligence Agency, which was such a helpful source. A slight flicker passed across his brow. It was clear that there was a misunderstanding. “I’m not from the Defence Intelligence Agency,” he said. Without specifying which, he indicated that he came from another agency. I realised at once that he was an officer of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). I wondered what on earth he wanted with me. He shortly made that clear.

  With remarkable frankness, he told me that he knew me from the past, having been at Sandhurst, felt he could trust me and had read my Atlantic Monthly article about South Africa. South Africa was his beat. He went there frequently. Alarmed, I blurted out the question, “Do they know about you?” Imperturbably he answered, “They know some of my names. I hope they don’t know them all because that would mean twenty years.” While I digested that he went on, “I found your account of your interviews in South Africa very interesting. Do you think you could go back again and ask more questions? I would tell you what to ask. Everything paid, of course.”

  I was struck dumb and remained dumb for some time. Eventually lunch came to an end. His parting words were, “Do you think you will have to mention this conversation to your Editor?” Words returned. “You bet I do,” I said. Max, when I got back to the office, erupted. “John, don’t touch it with a barge pole. You haven’t even been to spy school. They’d eat you for breakfast.” I had already come to the same conclusion.

  This terminated my one and only encounter with the inner secret world. I have not a single regret that intimacy ended there. I know with certainty that I lack any of the qualities, courage and self-confidence foremost, to serve it usefully. On the other hand, I am grateful for having met some of those who do. I do not wish to mention names. I would say, however, that among those to whom I have been introduced during my on-off encounter with the world of espionage is one of the most celebrated traitors of the twentieth century. He served the West, at great danger to himself, and is a fascinating and charming human being. About him, however, I share the feelings of my wife, in whom burns the true fire of British patriotism. “I like him,” she said, after our only meeting, “but I can’t suppress the knowledge that he betrayed his country. I would die rather than be a traitor.”

  So to her, my beloved Susanne, I make my first acknowledgement. I also wish to acknowledge the help and support of our children and children-in-law, Lucy and Brooks Newmark, Tom and Pepi, Matthew and Rose, and to thank them for the entry into our lives of their wonderful children, Benjamin, Sam, Max, Lily, Zachary and Walter. I particularly want to thank Lindsey Wood, my indispensable assistant, for her help; and my publishers, Anthony Whittome, Simon Master, Ash Green and Will Sulkin; my brilliant picture researcher, Anne-Marie Ehrlich; and the master mapmaker Reginald Piggott. Geography is the key to military history.

  Without breaking confidences, I would also like to thank Alan Judd, John Scarlett, Sams Smith, George Allen, William Casey, Bill Gates, Percy Cradock, Anthony Duff, Jeremy Phipps and John Wilsey. Among my colleagues at The Daily Telegraph I would like to thank Charles Moore, Michael Smith and Kate Baden.

  Finally, let me thank my literary agent, Anthony Sheil. He set out in life, as a rich young man, to make a fortune betting on the horses. He retired from that undertaking to backing authors, of whom I have been gratefully one. About horses he remarked, memorably, “You can never know enough.” It might be the motto of this book.

  MAPS

  Nelson in the Mediterranean, 1798

  The Shenandoah Valley, 1862

  Von Spee in the Pacific and Atlantic, 1914

  The Eastern Mediterranean, 1941

  Midway, the Pacific Theatre, 1942

  Battle of the Atlantic, 1939–43

  V-1, V-2 Offensives, 1943–44

  The Falkland Islands, 1982

  Introduction

  This book sets out to answer a simple question: how useful is intelligence in war? The volume of literature on the subject suggests that it is very important indeed. Shelves groan under the weight of books on the German Enigma machine, on the British code and cipher school at Bletchley Park that attacked Enigma, on the American unlocking of the Japanese ciphers, on the parallel deception operations which sought to delude the enemy, on the agents who risked their lives to help make deception work or to seek to discover the enemy’s secrets from within. The literature of fact is exceeded in bulk by that of fiction. The spy story became, in the twentieth century, one of the most popular of literary forms, and its masters, from John Buchan to John le Carré, grew rich and famous by their writing.

  The climate created by the masters of spy fiction deeply affected popular attitudes to intelligence work. The sheer fascination of the techniques unveiled, in the use of cryptic writing, dead letter boxes, agent running, the “turning” of agents to become “doubles,” surveillance, interception and a dozen other practices of the secret world, had the effect of representing technique as an end in itself. The “spy” achieved the status of hero, or sometimes anti-hero, a mysterious and glamorous figure who was made to seem significant because of what he was rather than what he did.

  It is notable that very few of even the most celebrated spy stories actually establish a connection between the spy’s
activities and the purpose for which he presumably risks his life in the field. In Greenmantle, for example, John Buchan’s wonderful romance of intelligence work in Turkey during the First World War, it becomes impossible for the reader to discern at the end what exactly Sandy, as Greenmantle, has done: has he frustrated a Muslim jihad against Britain and her allies or, contrarily, has he himself become a Muslim prophet? In The Riddle of the Sands, the first serious novel of intelligence to appear and still one of the best, Erskine Childers subtly suggests how the Germans may mount an invasion of Britain’s east coast through the secret channels around the Friesian islands, but the dénouement of his tale does not demonstrate that his two patriotic yachtsmen actually cause the Admiralty to take appropriate precautions. In Kipling’s marvellous Kim, ostensibly an unforgettable panorama of Indian life on the road but essentially a spy story, his hero does, unwittingly, help to frustrate a rising in one of the princely states, but the climax results in nothing more than his making fools of some Russian spies on the Himalayan border. In almost none of John le Carré’s brilliantly convincing constructions of spy and counter-spy life does he show an objective outcome for what his characters do. They are fighting the Cold War; but, after all their intricate delusions and deceptions, the Cold War goes on.

  The author might rightly say that he was representing reality; the Cold War thankfully did not have an outcome, certainly none in military terms, and it was the function of the intelligence services on both sides to see that it should not. They were playing a game, and the point was to keep the game going, not to win. No one would disagree with that or ought to complain, in the absence of a tangible result, that intelligence is a vacuous activity.