Fighting to Lose

by John Bryden

  26. Clausen and Lee, Pearl Harbor: Final Judgement, 354. There are two typos: No. 2363 should be 2353 and No. 09127 should be 098127. I have rendered “communications” as “commercial cable and radio-telegraph services” for clarity, since that is definitely what was meant. British and American companies overwhelmingly dominated cable and radio-telegraph communications worldwide, and a clash with either the U.S. or Britain would see these services terminated instantly. There was another version of this “winds” message decrypted and released at the same time.

  27. “Foreign Minister Tokyo to Ambassador Berlin, 30th November, 1941 (In Chef de Mission Cypher recyphered on machine),” Clausen and Lee, Pearl Harbor: Final Judgement, 360–61. The American version — Tokyo to Berlin, 30 Nov. 1941 (Purple CA) — was available to Roosevelt the day before: PHH, 37, Hewitt Inquiry, Exhibit 18, at 664. It is more muted in tone, but the message is the same. The fact that the British version was marked BJ means it was definitely read by Churchill. The two leaders would surely have discussed it during their next transatlantic scrambler telephone conversation.

  1. Endnotes are not provided for incidents described and sourced in earlier chapters.

  2. “European Axis Signals Intelligence in World War II as Revealed by TICOM Investigations,” prepared by chief, Army Security Agency, 1 May 1946. Short title: TICOM Report, NSA, DOCID 3560861. Found online. The Germans had not broken PURPLE, however.

  3. Colville, Fringes, 419; and Liddell Diary, 6 Aug. 1941. See also, Joseph P. Lash, Roosevelt and Churchill, 1939–1941 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 393, and the allusion to “leakage” in Churchill, Grand Alliance, 430.

  4. Nicolai, German Secret Service, 208. It was not a healthy practice. Spies caught with such documents would be shot.

  5. OKW issued a directive postponing the invasion to 21 Sep., with the go-ahead order to come a minimum of ten days in advance. It was then postponed indefinitely on 14 Sep. See “12 Top Secret Directives” of OKW, U.K. Air Ministry translations, LAC, RG24, 981.013(D29). This means both spies were dispatched when Canaris knew that the invasion order was unlikely to be given.

  6. Andrew, Authorized History, 129–30, 158–59. It could, of course, have been simply a matter of purging Scotland Yard by dumping the infected part onto MI5.

  7. Jeffery, MI6, 328–30. The very fact that his name was put forward to be considered by Hankey, Wilson, Cadogan, et cetera, gives him this stature. The governing Establishment centred on members of the Privy Council. (See Appendix.)

  8. And they did have them. A set of topographical maps of major British cities belonging to OKH were captured by the Canadians. For the originals: LAC, RG24, 20440. This file also contains ground photographs of potential air targets collected by German spies before the war.

  9. Farago, Game of Foxes, 280 Farago sourced his other books extensively and used primary documents. The complete lack of endnotes in Game of Foxes suggests they existed in a draft manuscript but were dropped prior to publication.

  10. Churchill, War Speeches, I, 210–14.

  11. Churchill to Paul Reynaud, 16 May 1940. War Cabinet minutes, 15 May, TNA, CAB 65/13/9.

  12. Indeed, in response to a German questionnaire Robertson submitted to him, Boyle specifically said that the Group locations of Fighter Command were not to be disclosed: Robertson, Note to File, 24 Jul. 1940, PRO, KV2/448, Doc. 900a. He did approve directing the Luftwaffe’s attention to Harrogate, however, which is certainly a case of sending the bombers onto an innocent target.

  13. The operations room at Uxbridge was completed just before the war, and built sixty feet underground. RAF Stanmore Park was in the London borough of Harrow with Fighter Command itself housed in nearby Bentley Priory.

  14. Frederick Winterbotham, The Ultra Spy: An Autobiography (London: Macmillan, 1989), 208. Winterbotham is the “I” in this description.

  15. Curry, Security Service, 247. This is the only direct reference to diverting German bombers on to cities of British choice that this writer found in available documents of the period. It apparently escaped the MI5 censor’s scissors.

  16. This would apply especially during 1940 and early 1941 when Robertson was still B3 and Arthur Owens’s case officer.

  17. Winterbotham, Ultra Spy, 128, 136–40.

  18. Winterbotham, Ultra Spy, 153, and passim. In the Westminster parliamentary system, government department heads (ministers) normally sit in the House of Commons, where they are theoretically required to truthfully answer the questions put to them by Opposition MPs during the daily Question Period. The upper chamber — the House of Lords, the Senate of Canada, et cetera, — does not have the same onus of truth because the members are not elected. (Author’s opinion.)

  19. Winterbotham, Ultra Spy, 158–59, 164–66. Churchill had been in this loop before the war, which might explain why he did not object to releasing the weather information in 1939, although then the head of the Royal Navy.

  20. Message 174 from 3504, 8 Aug. 1940; NARA, T-77, Reel 1540, Frame 419. Notice “Betrifft Identity Cards” followed by “Bezug ISAR.”

  21. Both frequented the Reform Club, which catered to political “progressives,” so an investigator could easily have linked them there. According to Russian sources, Burgess claimed Grand had once given him the task of planting misinformation on Rothschild, designed to disrupt efforts to secure Palestine as a homeland for Jews, which, if true, Grand would certainly have remembered: John Costello and Oleg Tsarev, Deadly Illusions (New York: Crown Publishers, 1993), 239–40, citing a letter from Burgess in his NKVD file.

  22. Kim Philby, My Silent War (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1968), 12.

  23. Andrew, Authorized History, 270–72.

  24. The entry for 24 Sep. in his diary, where he mentions dining at the Reform Club with Burgess to 11:30 p.m. the evening of the Registry fire, establishes an alibi for Burgess, except that Liddell got the date wrong! See Chapter 7, Note 21.

  25. See Hesketh, Fortitude, passim.

  26. NARA, RG2 42, T-77, I540, Frame 0282.

  27. PRO, KV2/674. This is MI5’s CELERY “folder,” which when examined in 2008, contained little more than some biographical material and copies of CELERY’s correspondence with Robertson and Commodore Boyle. Dicketts’s real name had been removed from all documents and on one the name had been cut out with a razor blade. See also, “Ripples in Time,” Straits Times, 24 Oct. 1930; and “Charming Crook,” Milwaukee Sentinal, 13 Nov. 1949. For straight gin, see PRO, KV2/451, Doc. 1658z.

  28. Ritter, Deckname, 213–15.

  29. Ritter, Deckname, 242–52. He places the meeting in Oct. 1940, but this does not properly fit into the sequence of his descriptions of the other 1940 spies. For evidence it was February: Hamburg to OKW, 27 Feb. 1941; 3504, meldet bei einem Treff in Lissabon am 17.2.41; and regarding the latest FLAK guns being developed in Britain, NARA, T-77, Reel 1540. There was one report a day taken from Owens between 15–20 Feb. and all were sent on 27 Feb. The message numbers in the lower right corner are consecutive. This proves the meeting took place and Ritter then returned to Hamburg to file his reports.

  30. Popov, Spy/Counterspy, 76.

  31. Deutsch, Conspiracy, 149–66; and Hoffman, German Resistance, 60–61. See also, Chapter 6.

  32. PRO, KV3/3.

  33. Postwar interview with Madame Szymanska, Colvin, Chief of Intelligence, 91–2, 138. The available intercepted movement messages have him in Vienna in April, and Salonic, Athens, and Sofia to late May, PRO, KV3/3. For Szymanska being used by Canaris as a contact with MI6, see Lahousen, III,1. Also, Jefferys, MI6, 380–82. He suggests she was an agent developed by MI6 but the facts are she was provided to MI6.

  34. Colville, Fringes, 346–47. This particular item is especially valuable because accounts of the informal meetings of the Allied decision-makers by independent observers are rare, but one can be sure these informal sessions were where much of the real work was done. Colville was a minor staffer in Churchill’s entourage who happened to be in the room. He ke
pt a diary, which is preserved in longhand.

  1. John Campbell, “A Retrospective on John Masterman’s The Double-Cross System,” International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence 18 (2005): passim; and C.J. Masterman, On the Chariot Wheel: An Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 348–55. This is a valuable social document for the insight it gives into Britain’s privileged class of the 1930s.

  2. Masterman, Chariot Wheel, 176 and passim.

  3. Apart from anything White knew from his own secret sources, he had at hand the postwar, after-action report of Roger Hesketh dealing with deception operations in 1944. Thorough and honest, the case it makes for the success of Plan Bodyguard and Fortitude is very weak, and Hesketh dismisses earlier efforts like Plan Starkey. It was released by MI5 in the late 1990s. See Roger Hesketh, Fortitude: The D-Day Deception Plan (New York: Overlook Press, 2000). One must ignore the claims in the “Introduction” and read the book.

  4. Curry, Security Service, 247. He mentions that details can be obtained from the “B1A sectional report.” Because it was a directorate that included the XX Committee, this was probably the “history” Masterman wrote, co-opting it to his own credit. The permission to report the weather had actually been obtained in 1939. See Chapter 3.

  5. This writer was an overseas post-graduate student at Leeds University 1966–68. Student militancy was very strong, but to a Canadian looking on, the demonstrations seemed to have more show than depth. The protest marches were huge, however, and certainly would have worried the authorities.

  6. Tom Bower, The Perfect English Spy: Sir Dick White and the Secret War 1935–90 (London: William Heinemann, 1995), passim. Blunt and Liddell were exposed by the accusations of Michael Straight and Goronwy Rees.

  7. Farago listed Masterman’s The Double-Cross System in the Second World War in the Unpublished Documents section of the “Bibliography” of The Game of Foxes (662). Note the slight variation from the actual title of Masterman’s book and the fact that Farago finished his in 1971. See Note 14 below.

  8. Farago, Game of Foxes, 269. The messages he describes are all to be found in NARA, T77, 1540.

  9. Farago, Game of Foxes, 175, 270–71, 662. In addition to his reference to Masterman’s book-to-be in his “Bibliography,” Farago’s designation of Masterman as the “official historian” of double-cross is further evidence that Farago had a preview of his work. The “two allusions” refer to the giving of the location of an aircraft factory and the attempt to draw air attacks onto aerodromes, an ineffectual strategy adopted for TATE after establishment of the Wireless Board: See Masterman, Double-Cross, 11, 83.

  10. PRO, KV2/451, Doc. 1803a. It is bracketed in the file by “Extract from Ritter’s final interrogation report,” 16 Jan. 1946, Doc. 1802b; and Gwyer to Major Vesey, 15 May 1946, Doc. 1804a. Apparently Owens and Caroli were still in custody when Doc. 1803a was written.

  11. PRO, KV2/451, Doc. 1803a. Some mistakes: McCarthy was planted on Owens (Chapter 18) and the first meeting at sea was set for 21 May 1940. See Spruch nr 115 von 3504, NARA, T-77, 1540.

  12. Farago, Game of Foxes, 159.

  13. Farago, Game of Foxes (New York: David Mackay, Advance Reading Copy — tentative publishing date, 14 Jan. 1972).

  14. CO U.S. Naval Advanced Base Weser River to CO British Army of the Rhine, 19 Jan. 1946, with attachments, PRO, KV3/207. Bremen was in the British occupation zone, so liaison had to be with the U.S. Navy presence in the port. Note Farago’s description of finding the microfilms in a U.S. Navy footlocker at NARA: Farago, Game of Foxes, xi.

  15. Campbell, “A Retrospective,” IJIC: 326. He bases his statement that the two books came out “within weeks” of each other on a collection of newspaper reviews.

  16. Anyone who doubts the seriousness of the “war” in the 1960s in the inner sanctums of Western governments should be reminded that the Cuban Missile Crisis took place in 1962, and brought the world within a hair’s breadth of nuclear conflagration.

  17. White used the term. See Campbell, “A Retrospective,” IJIC: 320–53.

  18. For how the Pearl Harbor controversy played into disillusionment with the war in Vietnam, see Frank Paul Mintz, Revisionism and the Origins of Pearl Harbor (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985), 69–77.

  1. Schellenberg, Invasion 1940, 26.

  DHH

  Directorate of History and Heritage — Ottawa

  LAC

  Library and Archives Canada — Ottawa: Record Groups 24 20518; RG 25 2859, 5742

  NARA

  National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) — Washington: Record Group 65, IWG and FBI WWII HQ files; RG 165; RG 242, T-77, reels 1529-1569; RG 319, IRR and XE files; RG 457, HCC, SRH, SRIC; RG 65, FBI WWII HQ files

  NSA

  National Security Agency — Washington

  PHA

  Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack: Report of the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack, Pursuant of S. Con. Res. 27, 79th Congress, A Concurrent Resolution to Investigate the Attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and Events and Circumstances Relating Thereto, and Additional Views of Mr. Keefe, Together with Minority Views of Mr. Ferguson and Mr. Brewster. 39 vols. Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1946.

  PRO

  The National Archives (TNA) a.k.a. the Public Record Office — London: Record Groups CAB, KV2, KV3, KV4, FO, WO

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  ————. The Second World War. 6 vols. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 19
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  Eade, Charles, ed. The War Speeches of the Rt. Hon. Winston S. Churchill. Vol. II. London: Cassell & Company, 1952.

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