by John Bryden
This theory works well if the Germans knew Owens was being supplied with mostly true information, which he apparently was. It also requires either complicity or a considerable lack of intellectual vigour on Robertson’s part. Most of the messages prepared for sending to the Germans by wireless that he oversaw, or possibly composed himself, are missing from today’s MI5 archives, maybe because they would make Boyle look as guilty as sin.
The German side of the messages are available, however, and if they are examined closely, an alternative picture emerges. The preliminary logic is this: Either the information Boyle approved for sending was good and helped the Germans overall, making him a traitor; or the information was good but did not help the Germans overall, making him a clever counter-intelligence operative. The former is not impossible, but the latter is certainly more likely, since he was a senior civil servant with a long pre-war attachment to the Air Ministry and to its intelligence branch. He also had been runner-up to Stewart Menzies as chief of MI6 when Admiral Sinclair died. He was known and trusted in the highest circles of the governing Establishment.7
Considered in this light, Boyle permitting the sending over of current weather information during the Battle of Britain may not have been such a bad move. Allowing that the Luftwaffe would use it to help schedule its raids, Fighter Command could roughly calculate when it could afford to stand down its exhausted fighter pilots for an extra hour or two. The Battle of Britain was that closely fought that a little extra pilot rest could have made a difference.
This theory puts a different slant on some of the other information Boyle released. Did it really matter if the Germans knew the RAF’s order of battle, or were told the location of factories that were identified on the pre-war British topographical maps that the Germans already possessed?8 Was the availability of these maps deception in the first place, conceived and prepared before the war with the intention of moving production elsewhere once it had started?
The information on the RAF airplane repair facilities at St. Athans and elsewhere, which Robertson attributed to Boyle, does not seem so valuable when compared to the Chain Home radar stations or the camouflaged war-production factories, especially as the hangars could be cleared if attacks were expected. Was exaggerating bomb damage to British industry better than minimizing it? Would this deter repeat attacks? Would German pilots get discouraged if they understood their bombing had cut British aircraft production in half yet the Spitfires and Hurricanes kept coming?
If it was Boyle who was behind the messages on the searchlight locations in London, were they falsified in order to throw German bombers off target when night bombing started? Churchill appears to have been at play here. Ladislas Farago, in The Game of Foxes — from which his source notes are missing — mentions that during the Blitz the prime minister took a direct hand in choosing what intelligence to feed the Germans, presumably through Boyle and Robertson. Farago wrote:
Mr. Churchill’s somewhat fiendish scheme was to direct the Luftwaffe from strategic areas by giving them bogus intelligence that built up expendable areas as desirable targets. He could be quite callous in selecting the latter. They included certain residential districts. This led to a violent clash between the Prime Minister and Herbert Morrison, the Cockney statesman, in a heated Cabinet meeting. The Home Secretary, a leader of the Labour party, protested bitterly and vehemently against Churchill’s choice of targets, exclaiming: “Who are we to play God?”9
There is no reason to disbelieve this anecdote, and it explains why three months into the Blitz it was Boyle who proposed creating the Wireless Board. It capped authority to release target information to MI5’s wireless double agents at the directors of intelligence level, and would have enabled Boyle to deal with Captain Robertson without the War Cabinet, the chiefs of staff, the Home Office, or even his own fellow directors of intelligence knowing. The rule that no one was to keep written records would also spare Churchill the inevitable public opprobrium should it be found out — even long after the war — that he had a hand in determining what neighbourhoods, and beyond London, what cities would be bombed.
This may well be one of Britain’s outstanding wartime secrets. Most people would not understand anyone wanting the power to decide who gets struck by lightning, but being able to give some direction to German bombers gave Churchill limited ability to save the great monuments of London like St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Parliament at Westminster, Tower Bridge, and Buckingham Palace. Their loss would have been a devastating blow to public morale. These were the truly “strategic” targets that, in Churchill’s eyes, at least, might have decided the war.
On June 20, 1940, three months before the bombing of England started, the House of Commons sat in secret session to hear from Churchill what he thought was in store for Britain when France surrendered, and what could be expected in the days to come. No record of the debate was kept, but the prime minister’s notes for his speech survive:
… steady continuous bombing probably rising to great intensity occasionally … our bombing incomparably superior, more precise … enemy has great preponderance numbers but their industry is much more concentrated. Utmost importance to preserve morale of people…. This supreme battle depends on the courage of the ordinary man and woman…. All depends on the Battle of Britain.10
Churchill had reason to expect German bombers to start attacking British cities. A month earlier, with German panzers bursting out of the Ardennes and the French government in a panic, he had ordered night bombing of the Ruhr. In a note to the French, he explained: “I have examined today with the War Cabinet and all the experts the request which you made to me last night and this morning for further fighter squadrons. We are all agreed that it is better to draw the enemy onto this island by striking at his vitals, and thus aid the common cause.”11
Over the following weeks, RAF bombers attacked at least ten German cities with high explosive and incendiaries, always at night, and with little hope of actually hitting industrial or war-related targets. Fires were started, houses destroyed, and civilians killed. The aim, according to Churchill’s note, was to provoke retaliation, and it is in this context that Arthur Owens’s mid-June trip to Lisbon can be viewed. It would explain why Captain Robertson allowed him to go, even though he had been caught red-handed with the William Rolph material. It explains why references to this trip, which are contained in German sources, have been scrubbed from the MI5 records. The reports of E-186 that Owens brought to Major Ritter were intended to tempt Hitler into bombing Britain.
If the E-186 reports dealing with the locations of Bomber and Fighter Command are seen in this way, as bait, it is evident they were chosen judiciously. They were not the real nerve centres of Britain’s air defences. This was RAF Uxbridge, the Operations Control Centre for No. 11 Fighter Group covering London and the Southeast. Bomber Command headquarters at High Wycombe could be lost; and so could Fighter Command headquarters at Stanmore, for these served basically planning and administrative purposes. To cripple Uxbridge, even for a day or two, when the war in the air was hot could be disastrous.12
This had to be coming from the prime minister. Only he could make the decision to invite German bombers onto so apparently choice a target as Stanmore, probably without mentioning it to Air Marshal Hugh Dowding, who stood to be killed. Fortunately for him, Stanmore and High Wycombe were barely touched by the Luftwaffe during the entire war, and then only by accident. Most important of all, Uxbridge was spared, making the whole episode a serendipitous triumph.13
As it so happened, Hitler continued to keep the Luftwaffe on a leash that only reached the docks of Britain’s southern ports, hoping instead that with the defeat of France the British would see the uselessness of continuing the fight and come to terms — terms that he was prepared to make generous. Churchill chose to fight on, and in mid-August concentrated attacks on RAF airfields, radar sites, and airplane factories began. When that battle was at its height, with the RAF near the breaking point, Churchill ordere
d the night-bombing of Berlin. This time Hitler retaliated. On September 15, a mass raid struck London. The RAF was given the vital breather; the ordeal of Britain’s cities had begun.
In fairness, bringing the horrors of war directly to the people was not done without feeling. On September 17, in his underground bunker, Churchill was given an ULTRA intercept that indicated unequivocally that the Luftwaffe had given up trying to defeat the RAF and that the threatened cross-Channel invasion was off. Relief and a sense of jubilation pervaded the group gathered around the prime minister. The Germans would continue to bomb, but the main danger had passed. As one who was there remembered:
There was a very broad smile on Churchill’s face as he lit up his massive cigar and suggested we should all take a little fresh air. An air raid was going on at the time but Churchill insisted on going outside the concrete screen at the door. I shall ever remember him in his boiler suit, cigar in his mouth, looking across the park at the now blazing buildings beyond, all the Chiefs of Staff and Menzies and myself behind him. His hands holding his long walking stick, he turned to us and growled, “We will get them for this.”14
Churchill’s vehemence surely derived from the dreadful decision-making position he had put himself in. He was an elected politician and knew full well that many would never understand him inviting German attacks on Britain as a favour to the French, and then putting bricks and stone, palaces and cathedrals, over people’s homes. Farago, writing thirty years later in The Game of Foxes, could not resist using the pejorative expendable to describe the working-class areas of London that inevitably took the brunt of the bombing. Others, especially in the context of socialist Britain during the 1960s and ’70s, would have been more severe.
The fact was the choices had to be made or the war was lost. Once the Luftwaffe began bombing London in earnest, it became evident that, despite the city’s vast size, it could not handle it all on its own. The city had to be given a respite. Luring the Luftwaffe onto the big cities of the Midlands and onto Bristol and Liverpool was the way to go. Churchill had decided others should share the pain.
Undoubtedly, Clement Atlee, Morrison, and the other MPs in the War Cabinet were glad the responsibility fell to the prime minister. Creating a committee, the Wireless Board, outside the normal reporting channels that took responsibility for giving the Germans information “which might have the consequence of diverting their bombers to other cities and places”15 was probably quite all right by them. Churchill had taken the added precaution of setting up Sir Findlater Stewart to take the blame should it ever be found out that the government was complicit in the bombing of Coventry, Birmingham, Manchester, and the rest. That might have been all right, too.
The XX Committee was just further cover. Usually presented as a kind of operational subcommittee to the Wireless Board, in fact it had no executive powers. It debated possible action, but could not issue orders. Its service members were junior intelligence officers who were to keep no records and share as little as possible with their bosses. Its chairman — Masterman — was a fifty-year-old Oxford teacher of pre-twentieth-century history with no military or secret service experience, and too erudite apparently to read the open literature on espionage. He had been in MI5 less than two months before being given the XX Committee job. In the context of what was going on, it is impossible not to wonder whether he had been chosen precisely for his stunning lack of qualifications.
Meanwhile, there was Robertson. He ran his double agents through the fall and spring of 1940–41 without benefit of the expertise or knowledge of the army or navy “Y” services, MI6 (VIII), or the Government Code & Cipher School. Scotland Yard had no role. Cowgill of MI6(V) looked on from afar. Liddell left it to him. Because the messages had first to be enciphered, the telegraph operators sending for snow and later for TATE did not necessarily know what information they contained.16 It was perfect; Boyle could go straight to Robertson. Given the prime minister’s penchant for keeping his thumb directly on key military matters, he may even have been behind some of the double agent messages himself.
How else does one account for SNOW’s message that told the Germans there were no Spitfires in Egypt? If it drew away some of the deadly FW-190s from the sky above London, it evened the odds a bit in the fight for life between the RAF and the Luftwaffe. Only Churchill, or a real spy, could have been behind that one.
Churchill, Boyle, Robertson — it was a perfect setup because it bypassed everyone else, including the chiefs of staff. It was totally secure because it needed to involve only three people. However, in answering directly to Churchill in an arrangement that circumvented the responsible ministers, it did require that Boyle and Robertson be absolutely reliable and absolutely discreet. Boyle could be depended upon because he was a long-time member of the pre-war intelligence Establishment. Robertson’s credentials for Churchill’s trust are not so obvious, but trusted he was.
Since Churchill did not become prime minister until May 1940, and Boyle had been supplying Robertson with air intelligence for his wireless agents for some seven months before, the idea of luring enemy bombers away from strategic targets must have been conceived much earlier, probably before the war.
Menzies’s predecessor at MI6, Admiral Hugh Sinclair, had recognized as far back as 1930 that air power was likely to be decisive in the next war and, together with Boyle who was then on the intelligence staff of the Air Ministry, recruited and sent to Germany Fred Winterbotham, a thirty-three-year-old former First World War fighter pilot. It was a happy choice. Winterbotham, who had flown with the famous ace Billy Bishop, could talk the language of the skies and easily made a good impression on the Nazis. He was soon running in high political and military circles, supposedly as a junior member of the British air staff. He collected much valuable intelligence on German rearmament and advances in aircraft technology.
It seems Sinclair, finding the government of Stanley Baldwin indifferent to Winterbotham’s reports, passed the information to Churchill, then sitting as a backbench MP. He could feel comfortable doing so because Churchill had been a great user of secret intelligence during the First World War and, as a former cabinet minister, was a member of the Privy Council of England. This entitled him to hear state secrets. Churchill turned this information into questions in Parliament, becoming remembered in the 1930s, thanks to Sinclair, as the Cassandra of the upcoming conflict.
The Nazis hoped that what Winterbotham learned would convince Britain that Hitler’s plans for Europe were to her advantage. On his first trip to Germany in 1934, Winterbotham was given an audience with the Führer himself, who spoke passionately of the need to defeat communism and of his intention to conquer Russia. This was followed a few days later by Winterbotham having lunch with General Walter Reichenau, who described how an attack on the Soviet Union would be conducted. All of this was given to Winterbotham, evidently on Hitler’s order, on the assumption that rational minds in the British government would counsel non-interference.17
Winterbotham’s subsequent report went to Menzies, Boyle, the Foreign Office, Baldwin, and presumably to Churchill. The effect was the opposite of what Hitler wanted. It convinced Baldwin that another war with Germany was probable and that Britain had better look to its air defences. In 1935, the veteran Conservative MP Philip Cunliffe-Lister was named to the House of Lords — which put him beyond reach of questions in the House of Commons — and became Lord Swinton, the new secretary of state for Air. Britain then embarked on a secret program of air rearmament that included the go-ahead to develop the promising Spitfire fighter design and for “the construction of great shadow factories in the Midlands.”18 The organization of Fighter Command and the development of coastal radar coverage followed. Boyle was an insider to all of this.
When Boyle received the request from Robertson in the first month of the war for permission to send the Germans weather observations, he must have taken the matter up with whoever was still in the loop of Britain’s secret air defence preparations. The str
ategy subsequently adopted by MI5 of feeding its double agents true information to pave the way for false information later was an echo of how, before the war, the Air Ministry under Lord Swinton had pretended a free exchange of visits and technology with the Luftwaffe while hiding its most novel advances.19 Hitler was taken in, for he forbade espionage against Britain in 1935, sticking to the ban until 1938.
Indeed, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that Owens was planted on MI5 by MI6 to establish a means of delivering deceptive messages to the Luftwaffe when the bombers started coming. The available evidence fits such a scenario, but, if true, the scheme backfired spectacularly. Owens also delivered hot intelligence to the Germans on his trips across the Channel. It should be noted, too, that Swinton, having left the Air Ministry in 1938, resurfaced in July 1940 when Churchill appointed him chairman of the Security Executive. This put him in overall charge of MI5, and the chaos that ensued when he undertook to reorganize the service during the first months of the Blitz makes it fair to wonder whether the confusion was intentional. It certainly helped hide what was going on between Boyle and Robertson.
