Fighting to Lose

by John Bryden

  To Cathy:

  Wife and editor-in-chief

  Note to the Reader

  Introduction

  Prologue: Corrupt? Inefficient? Stupid?

  Chapter 1: A Spymaster’s Incredible Story

  Chapter 2: Hitler’s Enemy Within

  Chapter 3: That “Stupid Little Man”

  Chapter 4: A Little Too Easy, Perhaps?

  Chapter 5: The Abwehr Spreads Its Net

  Chapter 6: Canaris Betrays the Cause

  Chapter 7: E-186: The Spy Inside

  Chapter 8: Names to the Flames

  Chapter 9: Birmingham is Burning

  Chapter 10: CELERY Hits the Jackpot

  Chapter 11: Menzies Wants to Know

  Chapter 12: Red Sun Rising

  Chapter 13: Whither the Questionnaire?

  Chapter 14: Calm Before Sunday

  Chapter 15: Tora! Tora! Tora!

  Chapter 16: Postscript, Pearl Harbor

  Chapter 17: The Last Hours Revisited

  Chapter 18: Ultimate Secrets

  Chapter 19: Epilogue: A Rogue Octogenarian

  Appendix: The Historical Context

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  About the Author

  Human nature does not change much over time, but politics and technology do. Books dealing with specific periods in the past often crash for the general reader if the context in which events took place is unfamiliar, or if the terminology is outdated and strange. Before beginning, the reader might like to glance through “Appendix: The Historical Context.”

  In his book Chief of Intelligence (1951), British journalist Ian Colvin wrote that he was having lunch with a senior official in one of the ministries a few years after the Second World War and in conversation asked him how he thought British intelligence had done. The man replied with some emphasis: “Well, our intelligence was not badly equipped. As you know, we had Admiral Canaris, and that was a considerable thing.”

  Colvin did not know. The civil servant had made the mistake of assuming that because Colvin had been in Berlin before the war, and had sent back valuable information on the activities of those opposed to Hitler, he had been an agent of British intelligence himself. He had not been.

  The official left it at that, but the incident set Colvin on a quest. He knew from his own experiences that Admiral Canaris, the wartime head of the Abwehr, the German intelligence service, had worked against Hitler. But a British agent?

  “As I walked away from lunch that day it seemed that this must be the best-kept secret of the war.” From then on, however, it was a brick wall with the exception of one veteran of the War Office who said: “Ah, yes, he helped us all he could.” He said no more.

  Colvin had no access to secret documents, especially those of the Foreign Office and War Office, much less those of MI5 and MI6 — Britain’s Security Service and Secret Intelligence Service respectively — but some of the officers close to Canaris had survived the war and he went to Germany and talked with them. Each had his own fragment of the Canaris story, and Colvin pieced together their memories. Apparently, Canaris did tip the British off to Hitler’s moves against Czechoslovakia in 1938, and did foil his attempt to bring Spain into the war in 1940. He also forewarned the British of Operation Barbarossa, the 1941 invasion of Russia, and had been party to two attempts to kill Hitler.

  It may have been a little too much to describe Canaris as a “British agent,” Colvin concluded, but from what he was told, “his omissions in the intelligence field helped the Allies to achieve surprise and brought their certain victory mercifully closer.”1 He also found that Canaris was a passive player in the conspiracies against Hitler, rather than a principal actor.

  Colvin had to rely on hearsay. Thus, the debate has gone back and forth over the ensuing decades, between those writers who portrayed Canaris as an unsung hero of the German opposition against the Nazis and those — mainly British — who have presented him as the ineffectual chief of a corrupt and inefficient secret service. By the end of the 1970s, the latter view had won out.

  Documents released in Britain and the United States since the 1990s, however, combined with captured German records that have been available all along, show Canaris to have been a central figure in the German army conspiracies against Hitler and, even more remarkable, that the Abwehr under his direction had decisively intervened on the side of Germany’s enemies in some of the major events of the war, most notably the 1941 Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the 1944 Battle of Normandy.

  This is much more than Colvin, or most of the contemporaries of Canaris, could ever have dreamed of.

  The newly opened MI5 files are very incomplete. They have been extensively censored and “weeded,” both officially and apparently surreptitiously — the damage being so enormous that the British security and intelligence services themselves may have lost sight of much of their wartime past. It can be recovered at least partially, however, by matching the newly released material to corresponding intelligence documents held abroad, and the surviving records of the Abwehr.

  The situation is better in the United States, the relevant archives being those of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Office for Strategic Services (OSS) — the wartime forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The number of available files is enormous, for the Americans spared no expense in trying to determine how the German secret services, both army and Nazi, conducted operations. Many of the FBI/OSS files complement those of the British, and what is apparently missing on one side of the Atlantic can sometimes be found on the other.

  What are consistently absent, because withheld by both, are the records that directly link the respective secret services with the wartime president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the wartime British prime minister, Winston Churchill. There are no minutes of meetings or correspondence at hand between Roosevelt and William Donovan, or Churchill and Stewart Menzies, even though the OSS and MI6 chiefs reported almost daily. The Second World War can never be reasonably understood, however, without considering the effect secret intelligence had on the decisions of the four top protagonists: Churchill, Roosevelt, Hitler, and Stalin.

  This book specifically addresses that challenge for the period 1939–1941. It has often meant weighing incomplete evidence and inferring conclusions rather than settling only for proof. It has also meant assuming at the outset that the secret services — British, American, and German — sometimes manipulated their own records.

  The following, then, is a fresh perspective on the Second World War.

  Corrupt? Inefficient? Stupid?

  The FBI did not like the idea, but what could it do? Supreme meant supreme, and if the intelligence chief of the supreme commander of the Allied armies poised to invade Europe decided that the British should get first crack at interrogating captured German spies and spymasters, then that was that.

  “With the understanding that G-2 [an army term for military intelligence chief] has agreed that the British shall have priority on all captured prisoners and records,” the internal FBI memo lamented, “it will be seen that the British will be in a position to give the Americans only such intelligence data as they wish us to have.”

  It was early in January 1944. The Second World War was in its fifth year. Although the armies of Nazi Germany still occupied much of Europe, they were about to be crushed between the mainly American military machine gathering in the south of England and the Soviet colossus in the east. Barring a miracle of German secret-weapon technology, the end of the war seemed imminent.

  “From our experiences in South America and … the Ostrich source, we have seen the continual reluctance and refusal of the British to furnish us all pertinent information which we sho
uld normally have,” continued the note to FBI heads of departments. “The British would be in a position to squeeze us out from the intelligence field in the Western Hemisphere; and if they are co-operating along those lines with G-2, it may result in the FBI being squeezed out of the intelligence field in the United States.…”

  Two years of working together against a common enemy had created an abyss of distrust between the FBI and the British secret services, MI5 and MI6.

  The Anglo-American Allies were just then in the final stages of preparation for the cross-Channel invasion of German-occupied France. SHAEF, or Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force — the command organization led by the American general (and later president) Dwight D. Eisenhower — was charged with leading the American, Canadian, and British armies being assembled in England; and if the landings were successful, the Allies expected to capture plenty of prisoners, including those from the German secret services. In anticipation of this, SHAEF G-2, British brigadier-general Kenneth Strong, had asked the FBI to supply a list of individuals the combat forces should be on the lookout for. Unfortunately, from the FBI’s point of view, Strong had also agreed that such prisoners should be offered for interrogation first to the British.

  “The possibility exists,” the FBI memo continued, “that the British may have prompted this request on the part of G-2 and that this may be another move on the part of the British to gain as complete control as possible over the intelligence field. If the request is purely a G-2 request, to say the least it is naive.…”1

  Such bad feeling was somewhat like that of a child rebelling against its parents. The two secret services of the British — MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, and MI5, the Security Service — tended to think that everything of value the FBI knew of counter-espionage it had learned from them, but that the FBI was not a good pupil. Unfortunately, the officers of both services had been a little too loose with their criticisms, and the FBI had caught on.

  The fact was that the two British services had been in the business since the First World War, the “MI” in both standing for “military intelligence,” although both had evolved into essentially civilian agencies. MI6 was responsible for covert intelligence-gathering abroad and MI5 looked after counter-espionage and counter-subversion at home.

  The FBI had been essentially a police investigative organization until war broke out in Europe in 1939 and it found itself suddenly having to deal with German spies on U.S. territory. Informal co-operation with the British followed, with quite pleasant relations, until the United States entered the war at the end of 1941 after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Relations were not so rosy after that, for a variety of reasons. The Americans had too much money to spend on technology, for starters, and seemed to have a mania for arrests. The British were unnecessarily devious, and not nearly as smart as they seemed to think. By late 1944, neither side much liked the other.

  The British were quick to act on General Strong’s generosity. In February, they proposed that SHAEF set up a special joint agency whose particular task would be to identify and interrogate German intelligence personnel as they were captured. The so-named CI (counter-intelligence) War Room came into being in March 1945. Its steering committee was comprised of representatives from MI5 and MI6 for the British, and a British chairman, Lieutenant-Colonel T. A. “TAR” Robertson, the MI5 officer who had been directly in charge of Britain’s double-agent program. The Americans were represented by individuals from U.S. Army G-2, and from X-2, the counter-intelligence division of the Office of Strategic Services,2 the American overseas espionage agency more familiarly known as the OSS, created by presidential order in 1942.

  As feared, so it happened. The FBI was excluded from this new committee. It had no grounds for protest. Its wartime mandate had been confined to the Western Hemisphere, and even though it had maintained a “European desk” in London, the counter-espionage war in Europe was not formally within the FBI’s jurisdiction. Informally, however, the Bureau had tried to maintain close liaison with both MI5 and MI6, particularly where it had involved tracking and catching German agents operating in North and South America.

  It did not matter. SHAEF went by the book. That meant putting the less-experienced OSS on the committee instead of the savvy FBI. The best the Bureau could do was persuade General Strong to direct that the FBI be informed when individuals on a list it provided were interrogated so the Bureau could suggest questions and receive a copy of the subsequent reports. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover himself wrote a letter outlining the topics he wanted covered.3

  An internal memo of this period from Hoover’s office — marked not to be shown to any of the other Allied counter-intelligence agencies — gives a good idea of the FBI’s interests. It outlined what FBI personnel in Europe were to watch for as the Allied armies pressed the Germans back. Of top priority were enemy spies and their controllers, list attached. Next was any “cipher paraphernalia,” such as slide rules, grilles, mechanical devices, instruction manuals, and code books. And finally, anything new on padlocks, combination locks, foreign locks, and luggage locks, with particular emphasis on “special precautionary methods added to insure against the picking of the lock when the owner is away.”4

  The War Room setup was simple enough. Based on a master list compiled by MI5, with contributions from the FBI, G-2, and the OSS, the British, American, and Canadian army units in Europe would screen prisoners of war and suspicious civilians for the particular individuals. Those so identified would first be interrogated in regional centres, then, if deemed important enough, passed on to Camp 020 in England for closer questioning.

  Camp 020 was Latchmere House, a Victorian mansion near Richmond in south London that had served as a hospital in the First World War and had been converted into a high-security prison for the Second World War. Most of the spies so far captured by Britain had been interrogated there.

  Camp 020 had a more formal title: the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre, or CSDIC for short. The name captures the purpose. It was where suspected enemy spies were questioned in fine detail, where hidden microphones listened in on inmate conversations, where long periods of solitary confinement were used to soften up resolve. Short of using physical torture, it was a no-holds-barred institution whose sole aim was to pry secrets from those of the enemy especially enjoined to keep them.

  The Americans forces fighting in Europe did as instructed. When German secret service individuals of interest were picked up during the fighting across France and into Germany, they were superficially questioned in the field and then forwarded with a preliminary report to Camp 020. A significant snag was volume. Both the German army’s secret intelligence service, usually referred to simply as the Abwehr, and its Nazi security service counterpart — the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) — had been headquartered in Berlin, with sub-offices in many of the major cities in Germany and in the countries Germany occupied. Both also had offices in the capitals of neutral nations like Spain, Portugal, and Switzerland. One contemporary British document calculated that the wartime strength of the Abwehr in staff alone amounted to about twenty thousand individuals.5 Add to that the personnel of the RSHA’s foreign espionage and counter-espionage agencies and the number increases by about five thousand.

  All this created a surfeit of plenty, especially after Germany surrendered in early May 1945. Allied army counter-intelligence officers, with MI5’s list tucked under their elbows, still had to question everyone who was found to have had a connection with a German police or espionage service. Did they know this person or that person? How long? When was he last seen? Who did he report to? Who reported to him? These were the questions asked of the secretaries and chauffeurs, of the petty officials and hangers-on who had worked in the offices of the Abwehr and RSHA. For every fish caught, the Allied dragnet swept up innumerable small fry.

  The immediate consequence was the overloading of Camp 020, plus the inconvenience of transporting prisoners to England. In Septe
mber 1945, MI5 set up a satellite interrogation centre in the spa town of Bad Nenndorf in Germany. It became the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre for the Western Europe Area or CSDIC(WEA). The Americans did likewise with a centre at Oberursel, near Frankfurt. Prisoners flowed in and reports flowed out. The total number of German security and intelligence personnel processed is unknown. The CSDIC(WEA) alone handled more than 350 up to the end of 1946. Several hundred more would have been processed at Camp 020 in London and at its other subordinate establishments. The Americans separately dealt with at least as many.6

  These interrogation reports were generally only available to historians by chance or deliberate leakage prior to 1999, at which time they were released as part of MI5’s ongoing program to transfer many of its wartime files to the Public Record Office, Britain’s national archives. Similar (and sometimes the same) files became available in the United States after 1998, following the passing of the Nazi Wartime Crimes Disclosure Act, which required the public release of OSS, CIA, FBI, and army G-2 files relevant to the Holocaust. In both countries, the responsible authorities took a fairly liberal view of what files should be opened, with the result that it became possible to derive a much better insight into the secret-services war between the Western Allies and Germany.

  The FBI’s worry that SHAEF G-2 was giving too much opportunity to British intelligence proved well-founded. The CI War Room was conceived as a kind of clearing house for interrogation reports, each Allied intelligence service contributing those it collected in exchange for those of the others. In theory, it meant that participants would equally be able to build up a comprehensive picture of the German espionage and counter-espionage effort. It was not to be. At the February 1945 founding meeting, the British won agreement whereby the services would retain “ultimate control over their own sources of intelligence.”7 In other words, both the Americans and the British had the option of withholding information or entire reports. Given that the British were to have first choice on whom to interrogate, and be the first to receive captured Abwehr records, the Americans — G-2, the OSS, and, indirectly, the FBI — were put at an enormous disadvantage. Their understanding of the German secret services, the Abwehr and the RSHA, was in danger of only being as good as the British allowed it to be.