by John Bryden
We know what that was. During his travels, he took time to visit Madame Szymanska in Berne. He had saved her from the Russians in Poland and had set her up in Switzerland, where she opened up contact with the MI6 office in Geneva. After the war, she told how in conversation he had casually mentioned that Hitler was about to invade Russia. This information she had in turn passed to her MI6 contacts.33
What happened seems clear. Britain had sent out a distress call. Canaris had replied through Dicketts and Madame Szymanska with a comforting reply, “Hold on. Help is coming.” The reprieve was Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s ill-advised invasion of the Soviet Union.
Scarcely three weeks later, on July 15, a Spaniard who could not speak English turned up at the British embassy in Lisbon with a spy’s questionnaire indicating that Japan was planning to attack British possessions in the Far East. A few weeks later, Popov was given a similar questionnaire suggesting that Hawaii and the U.S. Pacific Fleet were threatened.
As noted at the beginning, Popov’s questionnaire shows signs of having been put together quickly, not in Berlin, but in Lisbon, at KO Portugal. It was a rush job, composed within days of the German intercept services learning that Roosevelt and Churchill were about to meet by ship in the Atlantic.
One must also note that Canaris would have had on his desk decrypts of the SS messages dealing with the exterminations in Russia. They would have been small in number compared to those on the same subject he was getting from the Abwehr field commandos attached to the armies. It must have made sickening reading. Since he had seen to it that the SS messages were in simple ciphers, he could be reasonably certain that Churchill was reading them, too.
Now one must flash back to the beginning of this sequence of events, to the end of January 1941, just before Dicketts set off for Lisbon and then Germany the first time. An informal talk took place between Churchill, a few of those closest to him, and Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt’s principal civilian adviser. Hopkins had come over to England to see how bad things were and to sound out Churchill as to Britain’s chances of survival. The real bread and butter of war planning occurred at such meetings, where records were not kept. In this case, one of Churchill’s junior secretaries was present. He noted the pith of their conversation in his diary.
They sat after dinner in a circle in the Great Hall at Chequers, with only Churchill standing, leaning on the fireplace mantel. The prime minister declaimed at some length about the need for the United States to get into the war against Germany, while acknowledging there was little appetite for it in the U.S. Congress. Hopkins then had this to say about helping Britain:
The important element in the situation was the boldness of the President, who would lead opinion and not follow it, who was convinced that if England lost, America, too, would be encircled and beaten. He would use his powers if necessary; he would not scruple to interpret existing laws in the furtherance of his aim…. He did not want war … but he would not shrink from war.34
Hopkins added that if America were to come in, “the incident would be with Japan.”
The question then is: Did this somehow get back to Canaris? Did Menzies, on Churchill’s order, send Dicketts to Germany in February to sound out the Abwehr chief, and then again in May to deliver the vital intelligence: “Japan, then Germany!”? We will never know.
Canaris was famous, among those who knew him, for his creative solutions to intractable problems. So was Churchill. Menzies of MI6 was not short of imagination either. Maybe, just maybe, Popov’s Pearl Harbor questionnaire was an idea born of the three of them.
In any case, giving the president of the United States the excuse and the means to get into a fight with Japan saved Britain and, as a bonus, saved Russia. On December 7, 1941, when Japanese planes dived on the battleships of the Pacific Fleet, the war for the Allies was as good as won.
19
A Rogue Octogenarian
They had mostly died off by 1969, those members of the Wireless Board who knew of the Pearl Harbor questionnaire and of Churchill’s attempt to influence the German bombing of England. One of the first to go was Guy Liddell, dead of a heart attack in 1958. Stewart Menzies died in 1968 and with him those MI6 secrets that he never shared. Commodore Boyle was gone, too, and with him his private knowledge of what really had gone on between MI5 and MI6. Left were the younger men who attended those meetings of 1941, meetings that were so secret that the participants were not given the minutes: Ewen Montagu, the recording secretary, and “TAR” Robertson of B1A, both in their late fifties. It was not going to be long before the secrets of the Wireless Board would be secret forever.
Enter John Cecil Masterman, former chairman of the XX Committee. At the time seventy-eight, he could look back over a long but colourless career as an Oxford academic and see that his finest hours were during wartime, when, so he thought, he had carried England’s counter-intelligence banner against Hitler’s Huns. He decided it was time to tell the world. He proposed to publish the report he submitted at the end of the war.
Reaction from the government was swift and firm: No! He was not to seek a publisher. He was still under the Official Secrets Act. No, no, no.
Masterman, however, was not prepared to take no for an answer.
The primary objector was Dick White,1 retired after a postwar career that had included stints as director of both MI5 and MI6, but serving now as a special advisor to the government on intelligence. He had joined MI5 in the late 1930s, served as deputy to Guy Liddell of B Division, and in late 1940 was instrumental in the recruitment of Masterman.
Masterman was given the XX Committee chairmanship at the outset, while White went on to other duties in B-division, none of which required him to attend the meetings of the Wireless Board and the XX Committee, or to be told the details of Dusko Popov’s Pearl Harbor questionnaire.
White knew, however, that the “double-cross system” had been a flop. If there was not a postwar internal paper somewhere in the secret service archives saying so, his wartime predecessor as MI6 chief, Stewart Menzies, would have passed along the basic message verbally: MI5 had been inept, amateurish, and definitely penetrated by the Germans and the Soviets. White might have reddened when told how silly it was to have thought that the Abwehr was genuinely using First World War ciphers; that it would allow its spies to communicate with one another; that it did not know how to equip them properly; and so on. On the other hand, perhaps he had known. The wartime documents in which he features indicate a well-travelled, well-informed person with a keen mind.
Masterman was the opposite. In his fifties in the 1940s, he was the quintessential Oxford/Cambridge don. A bachelor, he lived with his mother or in rooms at his club or the university, sealed like a sardine from the rest of the world. He taught modern history, where the choice of courses did not come closer than the 1880s on the theory that present-day events could not be profitably studied until at least a half-century had elapsed. Cricket and all-male dinner parties, where obscure ideas were brandished like rapiers, were his chief recreations, and like many of his type of that era, he had written a detective novel. Otherwise, his contribution to learning was like a mist on the Thames.
He had been brought into MI5 in late 1940 without any background whatsoever in the art of espionage, with little previous interest in contemporary affairs, and with little direct experience with people outside his class.2 He had ignored warnings that war was imminent while at the University of Freiburg in 1914, and spent the next four years in spartan but comfortable internment at Camp Ruhleben outside Berlin. The life there, amidst other male prisoners of culture and privilege, was not unlike his normal life at Oxford.
In his autobiography, he comes across as a thoroughly artificial person — vain, pleasure-seeking, and self-indulgent. The type was much satirized in the plays and novels of the 1920s and ’30s. It is possible that he had been chosen to head the XX Committee for these very qualities; he was not the sort to ever dream that MI6 and the Abwehr might secretly
be co-operating.
There is no fool like an old fool, White may have thought as he turned down Masterman’s request. He knew his claims in his 1945 report on MI5’s double agents were hollow in terms of the “achievements” that Masterman put such stock in. These primarily were the deception operations through 1942 and 1943 that dangled false threats of cross-Channel attacks before the Germans, culminating in using double agents to try to deceive them as to the time and place of the June 6, 1944, Allied invasion of Normandy. White had much reason to doubt the success of any of this.3
More delicate were the descriptions in Masterman’s “B1A Sectional Report” dealing with luring the Luftwaffe onto residential areas of London and onto the cities of the Midlands. His original report has vanished from MI5’s archives, but there is good evidence it covered this topic. MI5’s in-house history of the war, John Curry’s The Security Service, confers on the XX Committee major though undeserved credit (see Chapter 3) for getting the permissions necessary to have MI5’s double agents send the Germans daily weather reports and true information, “diverting their bombers to other cities or places.”4 As this had been ongoing, Masterman undoubtedly went into some detail.
The British public knew nothing of any of this and the threatened disclosure could not have come at a worse time. In the late 1960s, left-wing militancy in Britain was on the march in the unions and universities, and there was widespread hostility against the political Establishment, fuelled by the example set by the student protests in the United States against the war in Vietnam. A homegrown example of workers being sacrificed would have been greedily seized upon.5
There was also the very human concern that twenty-five years was not a long time for those who had lost their homes and loved ones. No matter how well it could be argued that directing the bombers onto residential areas of London and onto other cities had been necessary, many would still feel a keen sense of betrayal to learn that their own leaders were partially the cause of their personal tragedies.
Masterman persisted, later claiming he was motivated by the desire to use the story of MI5’s wartime double-cross triumphs to help restore public confidence in the British secret services, wounded by the recent defection to the Soviet Union of Kim Philby, a senior officer with MI6. This had come on top of the defections of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in 1951. White and Whitehall could hardly try to dampen Masterman’s tell-all zeal by admitting that MI5 itself had provided ample soil for traitors to grow in.
It was true. The suspicions generated by the Registry fire in 1940 had coalesced once more around Guy Liddell, this time over his possible role in the escape of Burgess and Maclean, to which were added new accusations that Blunt and Liddell had been covert communist fellow-travellers. In the 1950s it was enough to block Liddell’s chances of reaching the top in MI5, but in 1964 White received positive confirmation that Blunt and Burgess had been co-conspirators. By then, being dead, Liddell did not matter, but Blunt did. He was art adviser to Her Majesty and a respected veteran of MI5. To avoid the disastrous publicity that would result by arresting him, it was decided — with government approval — to confront him, but to offer to keep his treachery secret in exchange for his detailed confession.6
So the answer to Masterman was still no, but there was no explaining the real reasons. The Oxford don is not to be admired for the action he then took. He leaked his report to Ladislas Farago, an American author of a number of well-researched books on the Second World War.7 He was then in the process of writing a comprehensive history of the German secret intelligence service and apparently contacted Masterman in the course of his work.
Farago was to give Masterman considerable credit for his accomplishments. Farago’s The Game of Foxes (1972) goes on at some length about the messages sent to the Germans by MI5’s first double agent, Arthur Owens, in the late summer of 1940. These described the effects of German bombing: “Wimbledon hit … hundreds of houses, railway station and factories destroyed at Morton-Malden … private dwellings damaged at Kenley … Biggin Hill hit … Air Ministry moving soon to Harrogate.” And so on. And then:
On the 19th, he began to transmit a series of reports recommending targets for the raiders. The first directed them to a munitions plant and aircraft factory at Seighton….
None of these messages was, of course, written by Owens. He had no part in the collection of the information they contained. All of them were concocted in MI5 where the Double-Cross organization was beginning to gain its stride under the management of John Cecil Masterman, now a major “specially employed.” But if the British themselves produced johnny’s reports, what was to be gained by giving the enemy such detailed, pinpointed intelligence about his handiwork?
This was the first attempt — feeble as yet — to gain a measure of control over the Luftwaffe’s selection of targets by manipulating the damage reports beamed to the Germans by double agents…. It was to become highly effective and was used broadly with a degree of ruthlessness under Mr. Churchill’s personal supervision.8
Ruthlessness may not be too strong a word if applied to deliberately drawing German bombers onto factory targets embedded in densely packed residential areas.
Farago clearly indicates that he was getting his information from Masterman’s The Double-Cross System, before it was published, spending several more paragraphs lauding the XX Committee’s “cruel responsibility” of having to carry the “burden” of giving the Germans true information so that there would be no suspicion of fakery when the double agents snow and summer sent messages designed to steer the bombers onto targets of British selection, including Coventry. Masterman could not have bragged about it better, except that he never did. There were only two mild allusions to directing German bombers in the book version of The Double-Cross System when it came out in 1972. Evidently, much more was in Masterman’s manuscript when Farago saw it, but was deleted before it went to print.9
There had been a deal, and here is how we know.
In his preface in The Double Cross System, Masterman wrote that the book was the report on the double-cross work performed by the British, a report he was asked to write at war’s end by MI5 director-general David Petrie, which is consistent with the after-action reports that were asked of all section heads. He said that he started it early in July 1945, and completed it in mid-August. This is a half-truth. All but the first page of Chapter 2 and half of Chapter 3, plus bits and pieces here and there, have been lifted word for word from a lengthy essay in the MI5 “snow” files entitled “snow, biscuit, charlie, celery, summer.” The last page of this nine-page case summary of some six thousand–plus words is missing, so the author is unknown, but the first page is date-stamped 23 April 1946. Its document number — 1803a — also positions it in the file in that month and year.10
Obviously, Masterman did not write this paper. He only joined MI5 in the last two months of the 1939–40 period it covers, and if he had been called back after leaving the service to do the very considerable research needed to write it, he would have surely said so. The most likely author was Major John Gwyer of B1B (Analysis). He is everywhere to be found in the MI5 files, for it was his job to look at as much as he could, see how it connected, and write reports. The two documents in the file on either side of Doc. 1803a are from him. He could only be as accurate as the available information, however, for this particular summary overlooks the trip Owens made to Lisbon in June 1940, and accepts Robertson’s incorrect conclusion that it was Ritter that McCarthy saw in Lisbon that July. Otherwise, it largely reflects events as they are to be derived from the pertinent documents that remain in the “snow” files.11
Clearly, a deal had been struck. It was probably handled by White. In exchange for dropping the bomb-target material, Masterman appears to have been offered a document that more comprehensively tells the story of the 1939–40 double agents, giving him the basis of a book even more attractive to publishers. Masterman agreed, for he certainly would not have got Doc. 1803a otherwise. The question
remains: When did this occur?
One must try to puzzle things out from the available hard evidence.
There seems to be no certainty that Farago had access to the “snow files” as he claimed. In the first place, it is unlikely anyone then in MI5 would have allowed it, given that he was an uncontrollable foreigner and already a well-known popular writer on wartime espionage. Second, there appears to be nothing about snow in Game of Foxes that he could not have got from the Abwehr files he discovered or from contact with Masterman.
His description of the other 1939–40 double agents can be traced back to previously published sources, especially Lord Jowitt’s Some Were Spies, and to his interview with Owens’s wartime German controller, Nikolaus Ritter. His research had led him to the captured German records section of the National Archives in Washington, where he stumbled (as did this writer) upon microfilmed documents pertaining to the agents Ast Hamburg had been running in Britain. The Hamburg-to-Berlin message of September 18, 1939, conveying A-3504’s report on radar probably convinced him that this A-3504 was a genuine German spy operating in England. By finding and interviewing Ritter in 1969–70, Farago learned his identity — Arthur Owens.12
Advance copies of The Game of Foxes were released sometime in 1971, and a tentative publishing date of January 14, 1972, was set. These releases mark at least one sure moment when the British authorities learned what was in Farago’s book,13 and they would have been appalled. Not only was there the stuff about controlling German bombing, but by revealing that the secret of radar had been sprung before the Battle of Britain, Farago showed that MI5 had been decisively duped by the Abwehr from the outset. There must have been an instant scramble to get someone to Washington to see what records he had found.
