by John Keegan
The result in Greece was civil war, which persisted long after liberation in 1944 and was not finally suppressed until 1948. Civil war was also the outcome of the Cetnik–Partisan conflict in Yugoslavia. Both conflicts led to widespread loss of civilian life, amplified by the occupiers’ reprisals, which often fell on the innocent. Yugoslavia lost a higher proportion of its population than any other combatant country in the Second World War, the majority the victims of internecine violence; the Greeks also suffered heavily.
At the time, and for years afterwards, the guerrilla campaigns conducted under the auspices of the SOE within occupied Europe were celebrated as significant ingredients of the anti-Nazi war effort. The story of the SOE contributed heavily to the myth of “intelligence” as some mysterious means of war-winning, cheaper than battle and somehow more deadly, that captured the popular imagination during the early years of peace. The SOE’s leading operatives—the organisers of the major networks in occupied France, the most prominent of the liaison officers dropped into the mountains of Yugoslavia and Greece—were celebrated as Second World War equivalents of Lawrence of Arabia, as glamorous as he and even more effective.
The heroism of the SOE’s agents should never be diminished. Those who parachuted into France risked exposure every day they spent on operations, and the courage shown, particularly by such women as Violet Szabo and Noor Inayat Khan, swept up into the espionage world simply because they were French-speakers, humbles anyone who reads of their conduct and terrible deaths.6 The dashing Balkan bravados, who endured bitter winters in the Yugoslav mountains and risked capture by the enemy day after day, displayed courage that was out of the ordinary also. When the balance is struck, however, the objective military value of what they achieved, measured against the consequences of their underpinnings of what were as much civil as anti-German wars, calls into question the justification for Churchill’s desire to “set Europe ablaze.”
Churchill’s vision of a Europe-wide uprising against the German occupier—a universal ustanka—was fundamentally flawed, by a weakness that has distorted the theory and practice of secret war, and therefore of “intelligence,” ever since. Churchill was an English gentleman, not only committed to the ideas of fair play and respect for the enemy as an honourable opponent but believing that such ideas were held by those his country fought. So they had been in the past, when European armies were commanded by other gentlemen. Not only European armies: J. F. C. Fuller, the great theorist of war and Churchill’s contemporary, called his account of the Boer War of 1899–1902 The Last of the Gentleman’s Wars. The Boers of South Africa, though determined to resist beyond the point of defeat in the open field, nevertheless conducted the guerrilla war they insisted on fighting in the aftermath by gentlemanly rules. They did not kill prisoners and they did not harm non-combatants. Though overcome after three years of resistance, they preserved their code of honour to the end.
Churchill, who as a young Member of Parliament defended the Boers in the House of Commons, though he was a veteran of the Boer War on the other side, presumed as late as 1940 that a repetition of Boer intransigence in a German-occupied Europe would evoke the same response as it had in the British-occupied Transvaal forty years earlier. He imagined that the soldiers of Nazi Germany would refrain from atrocity in the face of resistance, as his Tommy comrades-in-arms had refrained in a still-unsubdued South Africa. He had, alas, made no allowance at all for the ideological shift in continental European morality brought about by the upheaval of world war and political revolution between 1917 and 1939. He did not perceive that the overthrow of all the stabilities on which the Germans counted—monarchy and currency foremost—would usher in a regime which preached hatred against the forces of instability, primarily Communists and socialists but also deviants from traditional morality, non-German nationalists and enemies of the notion of German culture as a directing principle in continental life. He did not see that raising resistance against a regime imbued with self-righteousness, as Nazism was, would bring down vicious cruelty on those who opposed it.
Resistance, in its many forms, was an admirable movement. It kept alive in defeated and occupied countries the vision of the restoration of independence and the return to democratic life, in the longer term, when German domination would, by American and British intervention, be overthrown. In the short term, however, resistance, though preserving national honour, brought nothing but suffering to those who raised the standard and to many others who became involved unwittingly in the struggle. Resistance certainly harmed the German occupiers scarcely at all. Of the sixty German divisions garrisoning France on the eve of D-Day, none was committed to anti-resistance duty. They manned the coasts, awaiting Allied invasion, while the maintenance of internal security was left to a scattering of Gestapo units and the French police and militia. Internal security was not a German concern in the Low Countries and Scandinavia. There was no internal security problem in Czechoslovakia or even in intransigent Poland, where the Home Army observed the philosophy of Mihailovic in Yugoslavia, that of waiting upon events until circumstances favoured a national uprising; when the moment came in 1944, it was betrayed by their Russian liberators, who allowed the Germans to destroy the Polish resistance as an alternative to destroying it themselves.
In retrospect, the confusion of “resistance”—covert operations against the enemy, usually based on the concept of opposition to a totalitarian occupation or oppressive political takeover masquerading as a liberation movement—with “intelligence,” properly the attack on an opponent’s espionage and cipher systems, achieved nothing but harm to both. Resistance, perhaps best exemplified by the opposition of the French to the occupation of their country by the German conquerors of 1940, is entirely honourable, even if often, as French resistance largely was, ineffective. It sustains the concept of national sovereignty and keeps open the possibility of the restoration of legitimate government. Intelligence, in the sense of a national attack on an enemy’s secure communication, surveillance and espionage systems, is both honourable and necessary always in wartime, now, alas, in peacetime as well.
The intermixture of resistance and intelligence in the Second World War was, however, an aberration and a particularly British one. It was eschewed by the Germans who have taken since their wars of unification in 1866–71 against the Austrians and French a highly legalistic view of the duty owed by the occupied to the occupier, a view which, by reaction, underlay their extremely harsh treatment of resistance wherever they met it: the shooting of suspected franc-tireurs in Belgium in 1914, several thousand of them, including women and children, and their vicious suppression of internal disorder in occupied Europe in 1939–44, ranging from transportation of those captured in France to wholesale extermination of partisans in Eastern Europe.7 The British, by contrast, chose to foment resistance, for a variety of reasons. One was the weakness of their military position after June 1940, which encouraged them to adopt any method of warmaking that promised results. Another was their own experience, as imperialists, of rebellion in the empire, which had taught how effectively rebels could cause the dissipation of regular force. The critical reason may, however, have been that a tradition of irregular warfare ran in the British bloodstream, that of its military class at any rate. Much of the empire had been won by unconventional means, by the recruiting of tribal warriors to defeat, under the leadership of British officers, other tribal warriors, particularly in India and Africa. In the process, the British had constructed a hierarchy of most favoured nations, for military rather than trading purposes, and their names supplied the Royal Navy with those of their most powerful class of destroyers—Sikh, Zulu, Matabele, Ashanti, Punjabi and Somali. The British officers who had commanded Sikhs and Somalis admired their martial qualities, took pride in their own command of their soldiers’ languages and in their understanding of their customs and believed that the combination of warrior fighting skills and European leadership made an unbeatable military mix.8 Illogically, the irregular trad
ition at its most effective was personified in British eyes by the Boers, whom some of their opponents, notably Winston Churchill, chose to perceive as a white tribe.
He adopted the Boer term “commando” to denote the raiding forces he deemed should be raised to attack the flanks of Hitler’s Fortress Europe in 1940; at the same time he set out, through the creation of the SOE, to raise a Boer-style rebellion within the occupied lands. No difficulty at all was found in recruiting young officers to enter the enemy continent; their mission, to raise, arm, train and lead local resisters, lay so wholly within Britain’s military tradition that volunteers abounded. Those who went to Greece, many of them distinguished classical scholars, were inspired particularly by the memory of Byron’s Philhellenic mission in the Greek War of Independence against the Turks in the 1820s; something of the same mood animated those who parachuted into Yugoslavia, where the mountainous terrain, rough food, constant need to march, as well as to converse in local languages, recalled both the epic of the struggle against the Turks and the conditions of warfare on the Northwest Frontier of India. The SOE, in many of its manifestations, was a re-creation of the imperial ethic, with the difference that, since so many of its members were products of the leftward mood of the inter-war Oxford and Cambridge, they could imagine themselves to be fellow “progressives” with the partisans, rather than agents of a distant imperial power.
It was all an illusion. The SOE in Western Europe did almost nothing to unlock the German grip on power within the occupied territories; fortunately, neither did it do much harm. In the Balkans, by contrast, it did very great harm indeed, supplying much of the equipment which enabled the partisans to establish Communist governments after the war, and also endorsing indirectly their right to do so. Only by a whisker was Greece spared a similar fate: had Churchill not kept his own counsel and had the murderous Greek Communists not overplayed their hand, Athens, like Belgrade, might have become a Communist capital after 1944.
The damage went wider since, by the confusion of subversion with intelligence, under the common cloak of making secret warfare, the proper intelligence community was compromised. In Britain, after the disbandment of the SOE in 1946, the Secret Intelligence Service unwisely allowed itself to be drawn into the business of subversion, with disastrous results in Albania, where the officer chosen to sponsor the anti-Communist forces was the traitor Kim Philby, and in the Baltic lands, where, as in Holland in 1941–43, the resistance came under the control of the organisation its MI6 contacts were targeting, the Russian KGB. Many anti-Communist patriots in both regions died as a result. In the United States the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), set up in 1947 to replace the too hastily disbanded OSS of the war years, embraced both intelligence-gathering and subversive activities, separately conducted in Britain by MI6 and SOE at the outset. In a world of secrets, which does not disclose what it does or what it knows, it is not for the outsider to judge that such a joint mission was ill conceived. The character of the CIA’s enemies, of whom there are many, suggests that it has right broadly on its side. In principle, however, it strikes this author that the organisation of intelligence-gathering and subversion within the same body is undesirable. Subversion is a weak way of fighting, differing from conventional warfare by the total unpredictability of its results; moreover, in a democracy, it is always liable to disavowal by legitimate authority and denunciation by authority’s political opponents. Intelligence-gathering, by contrast, can yield conflict-winning outcomes and, if securely and soberly conducted, is an activity only those of ill-will can condemn.
Yet in the last resort, intelligence warfare is a weak form of attack on the enemy, also. Knowledge, the conventional wisdom has it, is power; but knowledge cannot destroy or deflect or damage or even defy an offensive initiative by an enemy unless the possession of knowledge is also allied to objective force. As David Kahn puts it simply, there is “an elemental point about intelligence . . . it is a secondary factor in war.” Reflecting on the blitzkrieg defeat in 1939 of Poland, the country whose cryptanalysts broke Enigma by pure intellectual effort, an effort not matched by any other of Germany’s enemies, he goes on: “all the Polish codebreaking, all the heartrending efforts and the heroic successes, had helped the Polish military not at all. Intelligence can only work through strength.”9
Kahn’s measured corrective is of the greatest importance and should be remembered by soldiers and statesmen at all times, particularly in these times of the so-called information revolution and its superhighway. Knowledge of what the enemy can do and of what he intends is never enough to ensure security, unless there are also the power and the will to resist and preferably to forestall him. How often have the rich, the well informed and the complacent known in their hearts what the future threatened. The last Abbasid Caliph no doubt suspected the fate that awaited him in Baghdad in 1258, when he cravenly surrendered himself to the Mongol Hulagu and his stranglers with their bowstrings. The soft Western democracies allowed Hitler to undermine their European security system until, almost too late, they took a stand. Contrarily, the Japanese persuaded themselves in 1941, against all the evidence and the warnings of their leading admiral, that they could attack America and survive. Foreknowledge is no protection against disaster. Even real-time intelligence is never real enough. Only force finally counts. As the civilised states begin to chart their way through the wasteland of a universal war on terrorism without foreseeable end, may their warriors shorten their swords. Intelligence can sharpen their gaze. The ability to strike sure will remain the best protection against the cloud of unknowing, prejudice and ignorance that threatens the laws of enlightenment.
REFERENCES
CHAPTER ONE: KNOWLEDGE OF THE ENEMY
1. N. Austin and N. Rankov, Exploration, Military and Political Intelligence in the Roman World from the Second Punic War to the Battle of Adrianople, London, 1995, pp. 26–27, 209–10.
2. Ibid., pp. 9–10.
3. Ibid., p. 246.
4. E. Christiansen, The Northern Crusades, the Baltic and the Catholic Frontier, 1100–1525, London, 1980, pp. 161–63.
5. S. Runciman, The First Crusade, Cambridge, 1951, Book III, chapters 2 and 3, book IV, chapter 1.
6. P. Contamine, War in the Middle Ages (trans. M. Jones), Oxford, 1984, pp. 25–30, 219–28.
7. J. R. Alban and C. T. Allmond, “Spies and Spying in the Fourteenth Century,” in J. R. Allmond, War Literature and Politics in the Late Middle Ages, London, 1976, pp. 73–101.
8. T. Barker, The Military Intellectual and Battle: Raimondo Montecuccoli and the Thirty Years War, New York, 1975, pp. 160, 242.
9. C. Duffy, The Military Experience in the Age of Reason, London, 1987, p. 186.
10. C. Duffy, Frederick the Great, A Military Life, London, 1985, pp. 59–64.
11. Austin and Rankov, p. 15.
12. For the harkara system and its capture by the British, see C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870, Cambridge, 1996, particularly chapter 2.
13. The origin of the term “Y” is mysterious. It may derive from the symbol used to denote sound-ranging by British artillery officers during the First World War, the arms of the Y perhaps representing the sound waves received at a central interception point.
14. For the question of whether Sorge did or did not influence Soviet decision making, and was or was not believed, see F. W. Deakin and G. R. Storry, The Case of Richard Sorge, London, 1966, particularly chapter 13. See also Walter Laqueur, A World of Secrets: The Uses and Limits of Intelligence, New York, 1985, pp. 236–37, 244. Sorge, whatever his success, is nevertheless an extremely significant figure, since his character, personality and career typify those of the dedicated ideological agent at his most dangerous. Sorge was highly intelligent, very brave and completely dedicated to his beliefs, which effectively took the form of unquestioning loyalty to a country not his own.
