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Dedication

For

WILLIAM and AMELIE

the next generation

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

1 Before the Deluge

1 SEEKERS AFTER TRUTH

2 THE BRITISH: GENTLEMEN AND PLAYERS

3 THE RUSSIANS: TEMPLES OF ESPIONAGE

2 The Storm Breaks

1 THE ‘FICTION FLOOD’

2 SHADOWING CANARIS

3 Miracles Take a Little Longer: Bletchley

1 ‘TIPS’ AND ‘CILLIS’

2 FLIRTING WITH AMERICA

4 The Dogs that Barked

1 ‘LUCY’S’ PEOPLE

2 SORGE’S WARNINGS

3 THE ORCHESTRA PLAYS

4 THE DEAF MAN IN THE KREMLIN

5 Divine Winds

1 MRS FERGUSON’S TEA SET

2 THE JAPANESE

3 THE MAN WHO WON MIDWAY

6 Muddling and Groping: The Russians at War

1 CENTRE MOBILISES

2 THE END OF SORGE

3 THE SECOND SOURCE

4 GOUREVITCH TAKES A TRAIN

7 Britain’s Secret War Machine

1 THE SHARP END

2 THE BRAIN

3 AT SEA

8 ‘Mars’: The Bloodiest Deception

1 GEHLEN

2 AGENT ‘MAX’

9 The Orchestra’s Last Concert

10 Guerrilla

1 RESISTERS AND RAIDERS

2 SOE

11 Hoover’s G-Men, Donovan’s Wild Men

1 ADVENTURERS

2 IVORY TOWERS

3 ALLEN DULLES: TALKING TO GERMANS

12 Russia’s Partisans: Terrorising Both Sides

13 Islands in the Storm

1 THE ABWEHR’S IRISH JIG

2 NO MAN’S LAND

14 A Little Help from Their Friends

1 ‘IT STINKS, BUT SOMEBODY HAS TO DO IT’

2 AMERICAN TRAITORS

15 The Knowledge Factories

1 AGENTS

2 THE JEWEL OF SOURCES

3 PRODUCTION LINES

4 INFERNAL MACHINES

16 ‘Blunderhead’: The English Patient

17 Eclipse of the Abwehr

1 HITLER’S BLETCHLEYS

2 ‘CICERO’

3 THE FANTASISTS

4 THE ‘GOOD’ NAZI

18 Battlefields

1 WIELDING THE ULTRA WAND

2 SUICIDE SPIES

3 TARNISHED TRIUMPH

19 Black Widows, Few White Knights

1 FIGHTING JAPAN

2 FIGHTING EACH OTHER

3 THE ENEMY: GROPING IN THE DARK

20 ‘Enormoz’

21 Decoding Victory

Picture Section

Acknowledgements

Notes and Sources

Bibliography

Index

Also by Max Hastings

About the Publisher

Introduction

This is a book about some of the most fascinating people who participated in the Second World War. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, civilians had vastly diverse experiences, forged by fire, geography, economics and ideology. Those who killed each other were the most conspicuous, but in many ways the least interesting: outcomes were also profoundly influenced by a host of men and women who never fired a shot. While even in Russia months could elapse between big battles, all the participants waged an unceasing secret war – a struggle for knowledge of the enemy to empower their armies, navies and air forces, through espionage and codebreaking. Lt. Gen. Albert Praun, the Wehrmacht’s last signals chief, wrote afterwards of the latter: ‘All aspects of this modern “cold war of the air waves” were carried on constantly even when the guns were silent.’ The Allies also launched guerrilla and terrorist campaigns wherever in Axis-occupied territories they had means to do so: covert operations assumed an unprecedented importance.

This book does not aspire to be a comprehensive narrative, which would fill countless volumes. It is instead a study of both sides’ secret war machines and some of the characters who influenced them. It is unlikely that any more game-changing revelations will be forthcoming, save possibly from Soviet archives currently locked by Vladimir Putin. The Japanese destroyed most of their intelligence files in 1945, and what survives remains inaccessible in Tokyo, but veterans provided significant post-war testimony – a decade ago, I interviewed some of them myself.

Most books about wartime intelligence focus on the doings of a chosen nation. I have instead attempted to explore it in a global context. Some episodes in my narrative are bound to be familiar to specialists, but a new perspective seems possible by placing them on a broad canvas. Though spies and codebreakers have generated a vast literature, readers may be as astonished by some of the tales in this book as I have been on discovering them for myself. I have written extensively about the Russians, because their doings are much less familiar to Western readers than are those of Britain’s Bletchley Park, America’s Arlington Hall and Op-20-G. I have omitted many legends, and made no attempt to retell the most familiar tales of Resistance in Western Europe, nor of the Abwehr’s agents in Britain and America, who were swiftly imprisoned or ‘turned’ for the famous Double Cross system. By contrast, though the facts of Richard Sorge’s and ‘Cicero’s’* doings have been known for many decades, their significance deserves a rethink.

The achievements of some secret warriors were as breathtaking as the blunders of others. As I recount here, the British several times allowed sensitive material to be captured which could have been fatal to the Ultra secret. Meanwhile, spy writers dwell obsessively on the treachery of Britain’s Cambridge Five, but relatively few recognise what we might call the Washington and Berkeley five hundred – a small army of American leftists who served as informants for Soviet intelligence. The egregious Senator Joseph McCarthy stigmatised many individuals unjustly, but he was not wrong in charging that between the 1930s and 1950s the US government and the nation’s greatest institutions and corporations harboured an astonishing number of employees whose first loyalty was not to their own flag. True, between 1941 and 1945 the Russians were supposedly allies of Britain and the United States, but Stalin viewed this relationship with unremitting cynicism – as a merely temporary association, for the narrow purpose of destroying the Nazis, with nations that remained the Soviet Union’s historic foes and rivals.

Many books about wartime intelligence focus on what spies or codebreakers found out. The only question that matters, however, is how far secret knowledge changed outcomes. The scale of Soviet espionage dwarfed that of every other belligerent, and yielded a rich technological harvest from Britain and the United States, but Stalin’s paranoia crippled exploitation of his crop of other people’s political and military secrets. The most distinguished American historian of wartime codebreaking told me in 2014 that after half a lifetime studying the subject he has decided that Allied intelligence contributed almost nothing to winning the war. This seems too extreme a verdict, but my friend’s remarks show how scepticism, and indeed cynicism, breed and multiply in the course of decades wading in the morass of fantasy, treachery and incompetence wherein most spymasters and their servants have their being. The record suggests that official secrecy does more to protect intelligence agencies from domestic accountability for their own follies than to shield them from enemy penetration. Of what use was it – for instance – to conceal from the British public even the identities of their own spy chiefs, when for years MI6’s* most secret operations were betrayed to the Russians by Kim Philby, one of its most senior officers? The US government repudiated a bilateral intelligence exchange agreed with the NKVD* by Maj. Gen. William Donovan of OSS, but official caution did little for national security when some of Donovan’s top subordinates were passing secrets to Soviet agents.

Intelligence-gathering is not a science. There are no certainties, even when some of the enemy’s correspondence is being read. There is a cacophony of ‘noise’, from which ‘signals’ – truths large and small – must be extracted. In August 1939, on the eve of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, a British official wrung his hands over the confused messages reaching the Foreign Office about relations between Berlin and Moscow: ‘We find ourselves,’ he wrote – using words that may be applied to most intelligence – ‘when attempting to assess the value of these secret reports, somewhat in the position of the Captain of the Forty Thieves when, having put a chalk mark on Ali Baba’s door, he found that Morgana had put similar marks on all the doors in the street and had no indication which was the true one.’

It is fruitless to study any nation’s successes, its pearls of revelation, in isolation. These must be viewed in the context of hundreds of thousands of pages of trivia or outright nonsense that crossed the desks of analysts, statesmen, commanders. ‘Diplomats and intelligence agents, in my experience, are even bigger liars than journalists,’ wrote the British wartime spy Malcolm Muggeridge, who was familiar with all three, and something of a charlatan himself. The sterility of much espionage was nicely illustrated by František Moravec of Czech intelligence. One day in 1936 he proudly presented his commanding officer with a report on a new piece of German military equipment, for which he had paid an informant handsomely. The general skimmed it, then said, ‘I will show you something better.’ He tossed across his desk a copy of the magazine Die Wehrmacht, pointed out an article on the same weapon, and said dryly, ‘The subscription is only twenty crowns.’

In the same category fell the Abwehr transcript of a December 1944 US State Department message appointing a new economic affairs counsellor to the Polish exile government in London. This read, in part: ‘His transportation expenses and per diem, Tunis to London, via Washington, DC, transportation expenses and per diem for his family and shipment effects direct authorised, subject Travel Regulations.’ A page-long translation of this decrypt was stamped ‘Top Secret’ by its German readers. The man-hours expended by the Nazi war machine to secure this gem reflect the fashion in which intelligence services often move mountains to give birth to mice.

Trust is a bond and privilege of free societies. Yet credulity and respect for privacy are fatal flaws to analysts and agent-runners. Their work requires them to persuade citizens of other countries to abandon the traditional ideal of patriotism, whether for cash, out of conviction, or occasionally because of a personal bond between handler and informant. It will always be disputed territory, whether those who betray their society’s secrets are courageous and principled heroes who identify a higher loyalty, as modern Germans perceive the anti-Hitler Resistance, or instead traitors, as most of us classify Kim Philby, Alger Hiss – and in our own times Edward Snowden. The day job of many intelligence officers is to promote treachery, which helps to explain why the trade attracts so many weird people. Malcolm Muggeridge asserted disdainfully that it ‘necessarily involves such cheating, lying and betraying, that it has a deleterious effect on the character. I never met anyone professionally engaged in it whom I should care to trust in any capacity.’

Stalin said: ‘A spy should be like the devil; no one can trust him, not even himself.’ The growth of new ideologies, most significantly communism, caused some people to embrace loyalties that crossed frontiers and, in the eyes of zealots, transcended mere patriotism. More than a few felt exalted by discovering virtue in treason, though others preferred to betray for cash. Many wartime spymasters were uncertain which side their agents were really serving, and in some cases bewilderment persists to this day. The British petty crook Eddie Chapman, ‘Agent ZigZag’, had extraordinary war experiences as the plaything of British and German intelligence. At different times he put himself at the mercy of both, but it seems unlikely that his activities did much good to either, serving only to keep Chapman himself in girls and shoe leather. He was an intriguing but unimportant figure, one among countless loose cannon on the secret battlefield. More interesting, and scarcely known to the public, is the case of Ronald Seth, an SOE agent captured by the Germans and trained by them to serve as a ‘double’ in Britain. I shall describe below the puzzlement of SOE, MI5, MI6, MI9 and the Abwehr about whose side Seth ended up on.

Intelligence-gathering is inherently wasteful. I am struck by the number of secret service officers of all nationalities whose only achievement in foreign postings was to stay alive, at hefty cost to their employers, while collecting information of which not a smidgeon assisted the war effort. Perhaps one-thousandth of 1 per cent of material garnered from secret sources by all the belligerents in World War II contributed to changing battlefield outcomes. Yet that fraction was of such value that warlords grudged not a life nor a pound, rouble, dollar, Reichsmark expended in securing it. Intelligence has always influenced wars, but until the twentieth century commanders could discover their enemies’ motions only through spies and direct observation – counting men, ships, guns. Then came wireless communication, which created rolling new intelligence corn prairies that grew exponentially after 1930, as technology advanced. ‘There has never been anything comparable in any other period of history to the impact of radio,’ wrote the great British scientific intelligence officer Dr R.V. Jones. ‘… It was the product of some of the most imaginative developments that have ever occurred in physics, and it was as near magic as anyone could conceive.’ Not only could millions of citizens build their own sets at home, as did also many spies abroad, but in Berlin, London, Washington, Moscow, Tokyo electronic eavesdroppers were empowered to probe the deployments and sometimes the intentions of an enemy without benefit of telescopes, frigates or agents.

One of the themes in this book is that the signals intelligence war, certainly in its early stages, was less lopsided in the Allies’ favour than popular mythology suggests. The Germans used secret knowledge well to plan the 1940 invasion of France and the Low Countries. At least until mid-1942, and even in some degree thereafter, they read important Allied codes both on land and at sea, with significant consequences for both the Battle of the Atlantic and the North African campaign. They were able to exploit feeble Red Army wireless security during the first year of Operation ‘Barbarossa’. From late 1942 onwards, however, Hitler’s codebreakers lagged ever further behind their Allied counterparts. The Abwehr’s attempts at espionage abroad were pitiful.

The Japanese government and army high command planned their initial 1941–42 assaults on Pearl Harbor and the European empires of South-East Asia most efficiently, but thereafter treated intelligence with disdain, and waged war in a fog of ignorance about their enemies’ doings. The Italian intelligence service and its codebreakers had some notable successes in the early war years, but by 1942 Mussolini’s commanders were reduced to using Russian PoWs to do their eavesdropping on Soviet wireless traffic. Relatively little effort was expended by any nation on probing Italy’s secrets, because its military capability shrank so rapidly. ‘Our picture of the Italian air force was incomplete and our knowledge far from sound,’ admitted RAF intelligence officer Group-Captain Harry Humphreys about the Mediterranean theatre, before adding smugly, ‘So – fortunately – was the Italian air force.’

The first requirement for successful use of secret data is that commanders should be willing to analyse it honestly. Herbert Meyer, a veteran of Washington’s National Intelligence Council, defined his business as the presentation of ‘organized information’; he argued that ideally intelligence departments should provide a service for commanders resembling that of ship and aircraft navigation systems. Donald McLachlan, a British naval practitioner, observed: ‘Intelligence has much in common with scholarship, and the standards which are demanded in scholarship are those which should be applied to intelligence.’ After the war, the surviving German commanders blamed all their intelligence failures on Hitler’s refusal to countenance objective assessment of evidence. Signals supremo Albert Praun said: ‘Unfortunately … throughout the war Hitler … showed a lack of confidence in communications intelligence, especially if the reports were unfavourable [to his own views].’

Good news for the Axis cause – for instance, interceptions revealing heavy Allied losses – were given the highest priority for transmission to Berlin, because the Führer welcomed them. Meanwhile bad tidings received short shrift. Before the June 1941 invasion of Russia, Gen. Georg Thomas of the WiRuAmt – the Wehrmacht’s economics department – produced estimates of Soviet weapons production which approached the reality, though still short of it, and argued that the loss of European Russia would not necessarily precipitate the collapse of Stalin’s industrial base. Hitler dismissed Thomas’s numbers out of hand, because he could not reconcile their magnitude with his contempt for all things Slavonic. Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel eventually instructed the WiRuAmt to stop submitting intelligence that might upset the Führer.

The war effort of the Western democracies profited immensely from the relative openness of their societies and governance. Churchill sometimes indulged spasms of anger towards those around him who voiced unwelcome views, but a remarkably open debate was sustained in the Allied corridors of power, including most military headquarters. Gen. Sir Bernard Montgomery was a considerable tyrant, but those whom he trusted – including his intelligence chief Brigadier Bill Williams, a peacetime Oxford don – could speak their minds. All the United States’s brilliant intelligence successes were gained through codebreaking, and were exploited most dramatically in the Pacific naval war. American ground commanders seldom showed much interest in using their knowledge to promote deceptions, as did the British. D-Day in 1944 was the only operation for which the Americans cooperated wholeheartedly on a deception plan. Even then the British were prime movers, while the Americans merely acquiesced – for instance, by allowing Gen. George Patton to masquerade as commander of the fictitious American First US Army Group supposedly destined to land in the Pas de Calais. Some senior Americans were suspicious of the British enthusiasm for misleading the enemy, which they regarded as reflecting their ally’s enthusiasm for employing guile to escape hard fighting, the real business of war.

GC&CS, the so-called Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park, was of course not merely the most important intelligence hub of the conflict, but from 1942 Britain’s outstanding contribution to victory. Folk legend holds that Alan Turing’s creation of electro-mechanical bombes exposed Germany’s entire communications system to Allied eyes by breaking the Enigma’s traffic. The truth is far more complex. The Germans employed dozens of different keys, many of which were read only intermittently, often out of ‘real time’ – meaning insufficiently rapidly to make possible an operational response – and a few not at all. The British accessed some immensely valuable Enigma material, but coverage was never remotely comprehensive, and was especially weak on army traffic. Moreover, an ever-increasing volume of the Germans’ most secret signals was transmitted through a teleprinter network which employed an entirely different encryption system from that used by Enigma. The achievement of Bletchley’s mathematicians and linguists in cracking the Lorenz Schlüsselzusatz was quite distinct from, and more difficult than, breaking the Enigma, even though recipients in the field knew the products of all such activities simply as ‘Ultra’.* Bill Tutte, the young Cambridge mathematician who made the critical initial discoveries, is scarcely known to posterity, yet deserves to be almost as celebrated as Turing.

Ultra enabled the Allied leadership to plan its campaigns and operations in the second half of the war with a confidence vouchsafed to no previous warlords in history. Knowing the enemy’s hand did not diminish its strength, however. In 1941 and into 1942, again and again the British learned where the Axis intended to strike – as in Crete, North Africa and Malaya – but this did not save them from losing the subsequent battles. Hard power, whether on land or at sea or in the air, was indispensable to the exploitation of secret knowledge. So, too, was wisdom on the part of British and American commanders and their staffs – which proved conspicuously lacking at key moments during the 1944–45 north-west Europe campaign. Intelligence did, however, contribute importantly to mitigating some early disasters: young R.V. Jones’s achievement in showing the path towards jamming the Luftwaffe’s navigational beams significantly diminished the pain inflicted by the Blitz on Britain. At sea, Ultra’s pinpointing of German U-boats – with an alarming nine-month interruption in 1942 – made it possible to reroute convoys to evade them, an even more important contribution to holding open the Atlantic supply line than sinking enemy submarines.

The Americans had some reason to suspect their allies of romanticism about deception. Col. Dudley Clarke – famous not least to Spanish police, who once arrested him wearing woman’s clothes in a Madrid street – conducted a massive cover operation in the North African desert before the October 1942 Battle of El Alamein. Historians have celebrated Clarke’s ingenuity in creating fictional forces which caused Rommel to deploy significant strength well south of the focal point of Montgomery’s assault. However, such guile did not spare Eighth Army from the fortnight of hard fighting that proved necessary to break through the Afrika Korps. The Germans argued that Clarke’s activities changed nothing in the end, because they had time to redeploy northwards before the decisive British assault. In Burma Col. Peter Fleming, brother of the creator of James Bond, went to elaborate and hazardous lengths to leave a haversack full of deceptive ‘secret papers’ in a wrecked jeep where the enemy were bound to find it, but the Japanese took no notice of this haul when they got it. From 1942 onwards, British intelligence achieved an almost complete understanding of Germany’s air defences and the electronic technologies they employed, but Allied bomber forces continued to suffer punitive casualties, especially before US long-range fighters wrecked the Luftwaffe in the air in the spring of 1944.

Whatever the contribution of British tactical deceptions in North Africa, Allied deceivers had two important and almost indisputable strategic successes. In 1943–44, Operation ‘Zeppelin’ created a fictitious British army in Egypt which induced Hitler to maintain large forces in Yugoslavia and Greece to repel an Allied Balkan landing. It was this imaginary threat, not Tito’s guerrillas, that caused twenty-two Axis divisions to kick their heels in the south-east until after D-Day. The second achievement was, of course, that of Operation ‘Fortitude’ before and after the assault on Normandy. It bears emphasis that neither could have exercised such influence had not the Allies possessed sufficient hard power, together with command of the sea, to make it credible that they might land armies almost anywhere.

Some Russian deceptions dwarf those of the British and Americans. The story of agent ‘Max’, and the vast operation launched as a diversion from the Stalingrad offensive, at a cost of 70,000 Russian lives, is one of the most astonishing of the war, and almost unknown to Western readers. In 1943–44, other Soviet ruses prompted the Germans repeatedly to concentrate their forces in the wrong places in advance of onslaughts by the Red Army. Air superiority was an essential prerequisite, in the East as in the West: the ambitious deceptions of the later war years were possible only because the Germans could not carry out photographic reconnaissance to disprove the ‘legends’ they were sold across the airwaves and through false documents.

The Western Allies were much less successful in gathering humint than sigint.* Neither the British nor the Americans acquired a single highly placed source around the German, Japanese or Italian governments or high commands, until in 1943 OSS’s Allen Dulles began to receive some good Berlin gossip. The Western Allies achieved nothing like the Russians’ penetration of London, Washington, Berlin and Tokyo, the last through their agent Richard Sorge, working in the German embassy. The US got into the business of overseas espionage only after Pearl Harbor, and focused more effort on sabotage and codebreaking than on placing spies, as distinct from paramilitary groups, in enemy territory. OSS’s Research and Analysis Department in Washington was more impressive than its flamboyant but unfocused field operations. Moreover, I believe that Western Allied sponsorship of guerrilla war did more to promote the post-war self-respect of occupied nations than to hasten the destruction of Nazism. Russia’s partisan operations were conducted on a far more ambitious scale than the SOE/OSS campaigns, and propaganda boosted their achievements both at the time and in the post-war era. However, Soviet documents now available, of which my Russian researcher Dr Lyuba Vinogradovna has made extensive use, indicate that we should view the achievements of the Eastern guerrilla campaign, at least until 1943, with considerable scepticism.

As in all my books, I seek below to establish the ‘big picture’ framework, and to weave into this human stories of the spies, codebreakers and intelligence chiefs who served their respective masters – Turing at Bletchley and Nimitz’s cryptanalysts in the Pacific, the Soviet ‘Red Orchestra’ of agents in Germany, Reinhard Gehlen of OKH, William Donovan of OSS and many more exotic characters. The foremost reason the Western Allies did intelligence best was that they brilliantly exploited civilians, to whom both the US and British governments granted discretion, influence and – where necessary – military rank, as their opponents did not. When the first volume of the British official history of wartime intelligence was published thirty years ago, I suggested to its principal author Professor Harry Hinsley, a Bletchley veteran, that it seemed to show that the amateurs contributed more than did career secret service professionals. Hinsley replied somewhat impatiently, ‘Of course they did. You wouldn’t want to suppose, would you, that in peacetime the best brains of our society wasted their lives in intelligence?’

I have always thought this an important point, echoed in the writings of another academic, Hugh Trevor-Roper, who served in both MI5 and MI6, and whose personal achievement makes him seem one of the more remarkable British intelligence officers of the war. In peacetime, most secret services fulfilled their functions adequately, or at least did little harm, while staffed by people of moderate abilities. Once a struggle for national survival began, however, intelligence had to become part of the guiding brain of the war effort. Clashes on the battlefield could be fought by men of relatively limited gifts, the virtues of the sports field – physical fitness, courage, grit, a little initiative and common sense. But intelligence services suddenly needed brilliance. It sounds banal to say that they had to recruit intelligent people, but – as more than a few twentieth-century sages noted – in many countries this principle was honoured mostly in the breach.

A few words about the arrangement of this book: while my approach is broadly chronological, to avoid leaping too confusingly between traitors in Washington, Soviet spies in Switzerland and the mathematicians of Bletchley Park, the narrative persists with some themes beyond their time sequence. I have drawn heavily on the most authoritative published works in this field, those of Stephen Budiansky, David Kahn and Christopher Andrew notable among them, but I have also exploited archives in Britain, Germany and the US, together with much previously untranslated Russian material. I have made no attempt to discuss the mathematics of codebreaking, which has been done by writers much more numerate than myself.

It is often said that Ian Fleming’s thrillers bear no relationship to the real world of espionage. However, when reading contemporary Soviet reports and recorded conversations, together with the memoirs of Moscow’s wartime intelligence officers, I am struck by how uncannily they mirror the mad, monstrous, imagined dialogue of such people in Fleming’s From Russia With Love. And some of the plots planned and executed by the NKVD and the GRU were no less fantastic than his.

All historical narratives are necessarily tentative and speculative, but they become far more so when spies are involved. In chronicling battles, one can reliably record how many ships were sunk, aircraft shot down, men killed, how much ground was won or lost. But intelligence generates a vast, unreliable literature, some of it produced by protagonists for their own glorification or justification. One immensely popular account of Allied intelligence, Bodyguard of Lies, published in 1975, is largely a work of fiction. Sir William Stephenson, the Canadian who ran the British wartime intelligence coordination organisation in New York, performed a valuable liaison function, but was never much of a spymaster. This did not prevent him from assisting in the creation of a wildly fanciful 1976 biography of himself, A Man Called Intrepid, though there is no evidence that anybody ever called him anything of the sort. Most accounts of wartime SOE agents, particularly women and especially in France, contain large doses of romantic twaddle. Moscow’s mendacity is undiminished by time: the KGB’s official intelligence history, published as recently as 1997, asserts that the British Foreign Office is still concealing documentation about its secret negotiations with ‘fascist’ Germany, and indeed its collusion with Hitler.

Allied codebreaking operations against Germany, Italy and Japan exercised far more influence than did any spy. It is impossible to quantify their impact, however, and it is baffling that Harry Hinsley, the official historian, asserted that Ultra probably shortened the war by three years. This is as tendentious as Professor M.R.D. Foot’s claim, in his official history of SOE in France, that Allied commanders considered that Resistance curtailed the global struggle by six months. Ultra was a tool of the British and Americans, who played only a subordinate role in the destruction of Nazism, which was overwhelmingly a Russian military endeavour. It is no more possible to measure the contribution of Bletchley Park to the timing of victory than that of Winston Churchill, Liberty ships or radar.

Likewise, publicists who make claims that some sensational modern book recounts ‘the spy story that changed World War II’ might as well cite Mary Poppins. One of Churchill’s most profound observations was made in October 1941, in response to a demand from Sir Charles Portal, as chief of air staff, for a commitment to build 4,000 heavy bombers which, claimed the airman, would bring Germany to its knees in six months. The prime minister wrote back that, while everything possible was being done to create a large bomber force, he deplored attempts to place unbounded confidence in any one means of securing victory. ‘All things are always on the move simultaneously,’ he declared. This is an immensely important comment on human affairs, especially in war and above all in intelligence. It is impossible justly to attribute all credit for the success or blame for the failure of an operation to any single factor.

Yet while scepticism about the secret world is indispensable, so too is a capacity for wonder: some fabulous tales prove true. I blush to remember the day in 1974 when I was invited by a newspaper to review F.W. Winterbotham’s The Ultra Secret. In those days, young and green and a mere casual student of 1939–45, like the rest of the world I had never heard of Bletchley Park. I glanced at the about-to-be-published book, then declined to write about it: Winterbotham made such extraordinary claims that I could not credit them. Yet of course the author, a wartime officer of MI6, had been authorised to open a window upon one of the biggest and most fascinating secrets of the Second World War.

No other nation has ever produced an official history explicitly dedicated to wartime intelligence, and approaching in magnitude Britain’s five volumes and 3,000-plus pages, published between 1978 and 1990. This lavish commitment to the historiography of the period, funded by the taxpayer, reflects British pride in its achievement, sustained into the twenty-first century by such absurd – as defined by its negligible relationship to fact – yet also hugely successful feature films as 2014’s The Imitation Game. While most educated people today recognise how subordinate was the contribution of Britain to Allied victory alongside those of the Soviet Union and the United States, they realise that here was something Churchill’s people did better than anybody else. Although there are many stories in this book about bungles and failures, in intelligence as in everything else related to conflict victory is gained not by the side that makes no mistakes, but by the one that makes fewer than the other side. By such a reckoning, the ultimate triumph of the British and Americans was as great in the secret war as it became in the collision between armies, navies and air forces. The defining reality is that the Allies won.

Finally, while some episodes described below seem comic or ridiculous, and reflect human frailties and follies, we must never forget that in every aspect of the global conflict, the stakes were life and death. Hundreds of thousands of people of many nationalities risked their lives, and many sacrificed them, often in the loneliness of dawn before a firing squad, to gather intelligence or pursue guerrilla operations. No twenty-first-century perspective on the personalities and events, successes and failures of those days should diminish our respect, even reverence, for the memory of those who paid the price for waging secret war.

MAX HASTINGS

West Berkshire & Datai, Langkawi

June 2015

* Agents’ codenames in the pages that follow are given within quotation marks.

* Britain’s MI6 is often known by its other name, SIS – the Secret Intelligence Service – but for clarity it is given the former name throughout this work, even in documents quoted, partly to avoid confusion with the US Signals Intelligence Service.

* The Soviet intelligence service and its subordinate domestic and foreign branches were repeatedly reorganised and renamed between 1934 and 1954, when it became the KGB. Throughout this text ‘NKVD’ is used, while acknowledging also from 1943 the counter-intelligence organisation SMERSh – Smert Shpionam – and the parallel existence from 1926 of the Red Army’s military intelligence branch, the Fourth Department or GRU, fierce rival of the NKVD at home and abroad.

* Americans referred to their Japanese diplomatic decrypt material as ‘Magic’, but throughout this text for simplicity I have used ‘Ultra’, which became generally accepted on both sides of the Atlantic as the generic term for products of decryption of enemy high-grade codes and ciphers, although oddly enough the word was scarcely used inside Bletchley Park.

* ‘Humint’ is the trade term for intelligence gathered by spies, ‘sigint’ for the product of wireless interception.

1
Before the Deluge
1 SEEKERS AFTER TRUTH

The secret war started long before the shooting one did. One day in March 1937, a letter dropped onto the desk of Colonel František Moravec, addressed to ‘the chief of the Czechoslovak Intelligence Service’ – which was himself. It began: ‘I offer you my services. First of all I shall state what my possibilities are: 1. The build-up of the German army. (a) the infantry …’ and so on for three closely-typed pages. The Czechs, knowing themselves to be prospective prey of Hitler, conducted espionage with an intensity still absent elsewhere among Europe’s democracies. They initially responded to this approach with scepticism, assuming a Nazi ruse, of which there had been plenty. Eventually, however, Moravec decided to risk a response. After protracted correspondence, the letter-writer whom Prague designated as agent A-54 agreed a rendezvous in the Sudeten town of Kraslice. This was almost wrecked by a gunshot: one of Moravec’s aides was so nervous that he fired the revolver in his pocket, putting a bullet through the colonel’s trouser leg. Tranquillity was fortunately restored before the German visitor arrived, to be hurried to a nearby safe house. He brought with him sheaves of secret documents, which he had blithely carted through the frontier posts in a suitcase. Among the material was a copy of Czechoslovakia’s defence plan which revealed to Moravec a traitor in his own ranks, subsequently hanged. A-54 departed from Kraslice still nameless, but richer by 100,000 Reichsmarks. He promised to call again, and indeed provided high-grade information for the ensuing three years. Only much later was he identified as Paul Thummel, a thirty-four-year-old officer of the Abwehr intelligence service.

Such an episode was almost everyday fare for Moravec. He was a passionate, fiercely energetic figure of middling height. A keen game-player, especially of chess, he spoke six languages fluently, and could read some Latin and Greek. In 1914 he was an eighteen-year-old student at Prague University, with aspirations to become a philosopher. Conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army, like most Czechs he was unwilling to die for the Hapsburgs, and once at the front seized the first opportunity to desert to the Russians. He was wounded under their flag in Bulgaria, and finished the war with a Czech volunteer force on the Italian front. When Czechoslovakia became an independent state he gratefully cast off these tangled loyalties, to become an officer in its new army. He joined the intelligence branch in 1934, and took over as its chief three years later. Moravec learned the trade mostly from spy stories bought off bookstalls, and soon discovered that many real-life intelligence officers traffic in fiction: his predecessor’s supposed informants proved to have been figments of the man’s imagination, a cloak for embezzlement.

The colonel devoted much of his service’s resources to talent-spotting in Germany for informants, each network painstakingly ring-fenced. He set up a payday loan company inside the Reich, targeted at military and civil service clients. Within a year ninety of the bank’s representatives were roaming Germany, most bona fide employees, but some of them intelligence personnel who identified borrowers with access to information, vulnerable to bribery or blackmail. The Czechs also pioneered new technology – microdot photography, ultra-violet rays, secret writing and state-of-the-art wirelesses. Moravec was plentifully funded, a recognition of his role in his nation’s front line, and was thus able to pay a Luftwaffe major named Salm 5,000 Reichsmarks – about £500 – as a retainer, and afterwards the huge sum of a million Czech crowns – £7,500 – for Göring’s air force order of battle. Salm, however, flaunted his new-found wealth, and found himself arrested, tried and beheaded. Meanwhile other people’s spies were not idle in Czechoslovakia: Prague’s security officers arrested 2,900 suspects in 1936 alone, most of them allegedly acting for Germany or Hungary.

Every major nation probed the secrets of others in the same fashion, using both overt and covert means. After Russia’s Marshal Tukhachevksy visited Britain in April 1934, he conveyed personally to Stalin a GRU agent’s description of the RAF’s new Handley Page Hampden bomber, detailing its Bristol and Rolls-Royce engine variants and attaching a sketch showing its armament:

The Abwehr somehow laid hands on the 1935 fixture list of an ICI plant’s football team, which in the course of the season played at most of the company’s other British factories; Berlin thus triumphantly pinpointed several chemical installations the Luftwaffe had hitherto been unaware of. The Australian aviator Sidney Cotton conducted some pioneering aerial photography over Germany at the behest of MI6’s Wing-Commander Fred Winterbotham. The summer roads of Europe teemed with young couples on touring holidays, some of whom were funded by their respective intelligence services, and displayed an unromantic interest in airfields. MI6 sent an RAF officer, designated as Agent 479, together with a secretary to assist his cover, on a three-week spin around Germany, somewhat hampered by the facts that Luftwaffe station perimeters seldom adjoined autobahns, and neither visitor spoke German. The airman had originally planned to take his sister, who was fluent, but her husband refused consent.

In the Nazis’ interests, in August 1935 Dr Hermann Görtz spent some weeks touring Suffolk and Kent on a Zündapp motorbike, pinpointing RAF bases with pretty young Marianne Emig riding in his sidecar. But Emig tired of the assignment, or lost her nerve, and Görtz, a forty-five-year-old lawyer from Lübeck who had learned English from his governess, felt obliged to escort her back to Germany. He then returned to collect a camera and other possessions – including plans of RAF Manston – that the couple had left behind in a rented Broadstairs bungalow. Unluckily for the aspiring masterspy, the police had already secured these incriminating items, following a tip from the spy-conscious landlord. Görtz found himself arrested at Harwich and sentenced to four years’ imprisonment. He was released and deported in February 1939; more will be heard of Hermann Görtz.

For probing neighbours’ secrets, every nation’s skirmishers were its service officers posted to embassies abroad. Prominent among Berlin military attachés was Britain’s Colonel Noel Mason-MacFarlane. ‘Mason-Mac’ was shrewd but bombastic. One day in 1938, he startled an English visitor to his flat by pointing out of the window to the spot where Hitler would next day view the Wehrmacht’s birthday parade. ‘Easy rifle shot,’ said the colonel laconically. ‘I could pick the bastard off from here as easy as winking, and what’s more I’m thinking of doing it … With that lunatic out of the way we might be able to get some sense into things.’ Mason-MacFarlane did nothing of the sort, of course. In his temperate moments he forged close friendships with German officers, and transmitted to London a stream of warnings about Nazi intentions. But the vignette provides an illustration of the role played by fantasy in the lives of intelligence officers, tottering on a tightrope between high purpose and low comedy.

The US government was said by scornful critics to possess no intelligence arm. In a narrow sense, this was so – it did not deploy secret agents abroad. At home, J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation was responsible for America’s internal security. For all the FBI’s trumpeted successes against gangsters and intensive surveillance of the Communist Party of the USA and trades unions, it knew little of the army of Soviet spies roaming America, and did nothing to dissuade hi-tech corporations from booming their achievements. German military attaché Gen. Friedrich von Bötticher observed boisterously about his years of service in Washington: ‘It was so easy, the Americans are so broad-minded, they print everything. You don’t need any intelligence service. You have only to be industrious, to see the newspapers!’ In 1936 Bötticher was able to forward to Berlin detailed reports on US rocket experiments. An American traitor sold the Germans blueprints of one of his country’s most cherished technological achievements, the Norden bombsight. The general urged the Abwehr not to bother to deploy secret agents in the US, to preserve his hosts’ faith in Nazi goodwill.

Intelligence agencies overvalue information gained from spies. One of the many academics conscripted into Britain’s wartime secret service observed disdainfully: ‘[MI6] values information in proportion to its secrecy, not its accuracy. They would attach more value … to a scrap of third-rate and tendentious misinformation smuggled out of Sofia in the fly-buttons of a vagabond Rumanian pimp than to any intelligence deduced from a prudent reading of the foreign press.’ American foreign correspondents and diplomats abroad provided Washington with a vision of the world no less plausible than that generated by Europe’s spies. Major Truman Smith, the long-serving US military attaché in Berlin and a warm admirer of Hitler, formed a more accurate picture of the Wehrmacht’s order of battle than did MI6.

America’s naval attachés focused on Japan, their most likely foe, though they were often reduced to photographing its warships from passing passenger liners and swapping gossip in the Tokyo attachés’ club. As secretary of state in 1929, Henry Stimson had closed down his department’s ‘Black Chamber’ codebreaking operation, reasoning like many of his fellow-countrymen that a nation which faced no external threat could forgo such sordid instruments. Nonetheless both the army and navy, in isolation and fierce competition, sustained small codebreaking teams which exerted themselves mightily. The achievement of William Friedman, born in Russia in 1891 and educated as an agriculturalist, whose army Signals Intelligence Service team led by former mathematics teacher Frank Rowlett replicated the advanced Japanese ‘Purple’ diplomatic cipher machine and broke its key in September 1940, was all the more remarkable because America’s cryptanalysts had shoestring resources. They made little attempt to crack German ciphers, because they lacked means to do so.

The Japanese spied energetically in China, the US and the European South-East Asian empires, which they viewed as prospective booty. Their agents were nothing if not committed: in 1935 when police in Singapore arrested a local Japanese expatriate on suspicion of espionage, such was the man’s anxiety to avoid causing embarrassment to Tokyo that he followed the E. Phillips Oppenheim tradition and swallowed prussic acid in his cell. The Chinese Nationalists headed by Chiang Kai-shek sustained an effective counter-intelligence service to protect his dictatorship from domestic critics, but across Asia Japanese spies were able to gather information almost unhindered. The British were more interested in countering internal communist agitation than in combating prospective foreign invaders. They found it impossible to take seriously ‘the Wops of the East’, as Churchill called the Japanese, or ‘the little yellow dwarf slaves’, in the words of the head of the Foreign Office.

Britain’s diplomats were elaborately careless about protecting their secrets, adhering to the conventions of Victorian gentlemen. Robert Cecil, who was one of them, wrote: ‘An embassy was an ambassador’s house party; it was unthinkable that one of the guests could be spying on the others.’ As early as 1933 the Foreign Office received a wake-up call, albeit unheeded: after one of its staff put his head in a gas oven, he was revealed to have been selling British ciphers to Moscow. Next a clerk, Captain John King, was found to have been funding an American mistress by peddling secrets. In 1937 a local employee in Britain’s Rome embassy, Francesco Constantini, was able to rifle his employer’s papers for the benefit of the Italian secret service, because the ambassador assumed that one could trust one’s servants. At that period also, Mussolini’s men read some British codes: not all Italians were the buffoons their enemies supposed. In 1939, when Japanese intelligence wanted the codebooks of the British consulate in Taipei, its officers easily arranged for a Japanese employee to become night-duty man. During the ensuing six months Tokyo’s agents repeatedly accessed the consulate safe, its files and codebooks.

Yet nowhere in the world was intelligence wisely managed and assessed. Though technological secrets were always useful to rival nations, it is unlikely that much of the fevered secret political and military surveillance told governments more than they might have gleaned from a careful reading of the press. Endemic rivalries injured or crippled collaboration between intelligence agencies. In Germany and Russia, Hitler and Stalin diffused power among their secret policemen, the better to concentrate mastery in their own hands. Germany’s main agency was the Abwehr, its title literally meaning ‘security’, though it was responsible for both intelligence-gathering abroad and counter-espionage at home. A branch of the armed forces, it was directed by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. When Guy Liddell, counter-espionage director of MI5 and one of its ablest officers, later strove to explain the Abwehr’s incompetence, he expressed a sincere belief that Canaris was in the pay of the Russians.

The Nazis also had their own security machine, the Reichssicherheitshauptamt or RSHA, directed by Ernst Kaltenbrunner within the empire of Himmler. This embraced the Gestapo secret police and its sister counter-intelligence branch the Sicherheitdienst or SD, which overlapped the Abwehr’s activities in many areas. A key figure was Walter Schellenberg, Reinhard Heydrich’s aide: Schellenberg later took over the RSHA’s foreign intelligence-gathering service, which subsumed the Abwehr in 1944. High Command and diplomatic codebreaking activities were conducted by the Chiffrierabteilung, colloquially known as OKW/Chi, and the army had a large radio intelligence branch that eventually became OKH/GdNA. Göring’s Air Ministry had its own cryptographic operation, as did the Kriegsmarine. Economic intelligence was collected by the WiRuAmt, and Ribbentrop’s Foreign Ministry gathered reports from embassies abroad. Guy Liddell wrote crossly: ‘Under our system of government there was nothing to stop the Germans from getting any information they required.’ But the elaborate Nazi intelligence and counter-espionage machines were far more effective in suppressing domestic opposition than in exploiting foreign sources, even when they heard something useful from them.

France’s intelligence departments enjoyed a lowly status and correspondingly meagre budgets. Pessimism overlaid upon ignorance caused them consistently to overstate German military strength by at least 20 per cent. František Moravec believed that politics crippled French security policy as war loomed: ‘Their desire to “know” seemed to decrease proportionately as the Nazi danger increased.’ Moravec the Czech found his French counterparts half-hearted colleagues, though he returned from one inter-Allied conference with a present from a famous French criminologist, Professor Locarde of Lyons: a chemical developer which proved useful for exposing secret writing.

Since the beginning of time, governments had been able to intercept each other’s communications only when spies or accidents of war physically diverted messages into their hands. Now, however, everything was different. Wireless communication was a science slightly older than the twentieth century, but thirty years elapsed before it became a universal phenomenon. Then, during the 1930s, technological breakthroughs prompted a global explosion of transmissions. The ether hummed, whined and crackled as messages private, commercial, military, naval, diplomatic traversed nations and oceans. It became indispensable for governments and their generals and admirals to communicate operational orders and information by radio, to every subordinate, ship and formation beyond reach of a landline. Making such exchanges secure demanded nice judgements. There was a trade-off between the speed at which a signal could be dispatched and received, and the subtlety of its encryption. It was impracticable to provide front-line army units with ciphering machines, and thus instead they employed so-called hand- or field-ciphers, of varying sophistication – the German army used a British-derived system called Double Playfair.

For the most secret messages, the only almost unbreakable code was that based upon a ‘one-time pad’, a name that reflected its designation: the sender employed a unique combination of letters and/or numbers which became intelligible only to a recipient pre-supplied with the identical formula. The Soviets especially favoured this method, though their clerks sometimes compromised it by using a one-time pad more than once, as the Germans found to their advantage. From the 1920s onwards, some of the major nations started to employ ciphers which were deemed impregnable if correctly used, because messages were processed through electrically-powered keyboard machines which scrambled them into multi-millions of combinations. The magnitude of the technological challenge posed by an enemy’s machine-encrypted signals did not deter any nation from striving to read them. This became the most important intelligence objective of the Second World War.

The brightest star of the Deuxième Bureau, France’s intelligence service, was Capitaine Gustave Bertrand, head of the cryptanalytical branch in the army’s Section des Examens, who had risen from the ranks to occupy a post that no ambitious career officer wanted. One of his contacts was a Paris businessman named Rodolphe Lemoine, born Rudolf Stallman, son of a rich Berlin jeweller. In 1918 Stallman adopted French nationality; simply because he loved espionage as a game in its own right, he began to work for the Deuxième. In October 1931 he forwarded to Paris an offer from one Hans-Thilo Schmidt, brother of a German general, to sell France information about Enigma in order to dig himself out of a financial hole. Bertrand accepted, and in return for cash Schmidt delivered copious material about the machine, together with its key settings for October and November 1932. Thereafter he remained on the French payroll until 1938. Since the French knew that the Poles were also seeking to crack Enigma, the two nations agreed a collaboration: Polish cryptanalysts focused on the technology, while their French counterparts addressed enciphered texts. Bertrand also approached the British, but at the outset they showed no interest.

Britain’s codebreakers had acquired an early-model commercial Enigma as early as 1927, and examined it with respect. Since then, they knew that it had been rendered much more sophisticated by the inclusion of a complex wiring pattern known as a Steckerbrett, or plugboard. It now offered a range of possible positions for a single letter of 159 million million million. That which human ingenuity had devised, it was at least theoretically possible that human ingenuity might penetrate. In 1939, however, no one for a moment imagined that six years later intelligence snatched from the airwaves would have proved more precious to the victors, more disastrous for the losers, than every report made by all the spies of the warring nations.

2 THE BRITISH: GENTLEMEN AND PLAYERS

The reputation of MI6 was unmatched by that of any other secret service. Though Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Japan’s generals shared a scepticism, or even scorn, about the old lion’s fitness to fight, they viewed its spies with extravagant respect, indeed cherished a belief in their omniscience. British prowess in clandestine activity dated back to the sixteenth century at least. Francis Bacon wrote in his History of the Reign of King Henry VII: ‘As for his secret Spials, which he did employ both at home and abroad, by them to discover what Practises and Conspiracies were against him, surely his Case required it.’ Queen Elizabeth I’s Sir Francis Walsingham was one of history’s legendary spymasters. Much later came the romances of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, of John Buchan’s Richard Hannay, of dashing ‘clubland heroes’ who played chess for England with a thousand live pieces across a board that spanned continents. A wartime British secret servant observed: ‘Practically every officer I met in that concern, at home and abroad, was, like me, imagining himself as Hannay.’ The great Danish physicist Niels Bohr told the scientific intelligence officer R.V. Jones that he was happy to cooperate with the British secret service because ‘it was run by a gentleman’.

British intelligence had enjoyed a good Great War. The Royal Navy’s codebreakers, such men as Dillwyn Knox and Alastair Denniston, labouring in the Admiralty’s Room 40, provided commanders with a wealth of information about the motions of the German High Seas Fleet. The decryption and public revelation of Berlin’s 1917 Zimmermann Telegram, urging the Mexicans to take aggressive action against the United States, played a critical role in bringing the Americans into the war. For two years after the November 1918 Armistice, the secret service was deeply involved in the Allies’ unsuccessful attempt to reverse the outcome of the Russian Revolution. Even after this was abandoned, the threat from international communism remained the foremost preoccupation of British espionage and counter-espionage.

Yet amid the inter-war slump, funding was squeezed. MI6 mouldered, to an extent little understood by either Britain’s friends or foes. Hugh Trevor-Roper, the historian who became one of its wartime officers, wrote: ‘Foreign intelligence services envied the British secret service; it was their idealised model … It enjoyed the reputation of an invisible, implacable force, like the Platonic world-spirit, operating everywhere. To the Nazi government, it was at the same time a bogey and an ideal … The reality … was rather different.’ MI6’s senior officers were men of moderate abilities, drawn into the organisation by the lure of playing out a pastiche of Kipling’s ‘Great Game’, and often after earlier careers as colonial policemen.

They masqueraded as passport control officers in embassies abroad, or shuffled paper in the service’s austere – indeed, frankly squalid – headquarters beside St James’s Park underground station, in Broadway Buildings, a place of threadbare carpets and unshaded lightbulbs. MI6 sustained a quirky tradition of paying its staff tax-free and in cash, but so small a pittance that a private income was almost essential for officers who aspired to an upper-middle-class lifestyle, which meant all of them. Though its budget was progressively increased from £180,000 in 1935 to £500,000 in 1939, few graduates entered the service, because its bosses did not want them. MI6, in the view of one practitioner, was designed merely to receive intelligence rather than actively to procure it. It was run by a coterie of anti-intellectual officers who saw their principal, if not sole, task as that of combating revolutionary communism. The shift of emphasis to monitoring Nazis and fascists during the late pre-war period caused great difficulties.

Some recruits of that period proved ill-suited to the essential nastiness of espionage. Lt. Cmdr Joseph Newill, a retired sailor posted to Scandinavia in 1938 on the strength of speaking Norwegian, wailed to London: ‘I doubt whether I have the natural guile so essential for this work!’ Newill complained that his role involved much more hard labour than he had expected. He told his station chief petulantly: ‘I am 52 and I am not going to work myself to death at my time of life.’ But he was kept in the job, and contrived to meet Broadway’s undemanding standards. MI6’s Shanghai station chief, Harry Steptoe, operated under cover as vice-consul. A jaunty little cock-sparrow figure who affected a moustache and monocle, he puzzled a foreign diplomat by his appearance at receptions in a lovat-green suit adorned with gold braid. Was this, demanded the diplomat, the full-dress uniform of the British secret service? When the Japanese interned Steptoe in 1942, they dismissed the possibility that such a comic figure could be a spymaster, and instead subjected to brutal interrogation a hapless British Council representative, whose field of knowledge was exclusively cultural.

Broadway struggled to secure intelligence from the Continent. In 1936 a new MI6 department was formed to monitor Germany and Italy. Z Section was run by Claude Dansey, a former imperial soldier who bore a haversack groaning with blimpish prejudices, among them a loathing for Americans. It became an almost independent fiefdom, which operated under commercial cover from offices in Bush House in The Strand. Its sources were mostly elderly retreads such as the Lithuanian Baron William de Ropp, who for more than a decade extracted from the British £1,000 a year – a handsome competence – in return for fragments of German political gossip. The Nazis were well aware of de Ropp’s role, and fed him what they wanted London to hear. In August 1938 the Baron decided that his secret life had become too fraught, and wisely retired to Switzerland.

Naval engineer Dr Karl Kruger’s story had a darker ending. From 1914 to 1939 he fed some good information to the British on a cash-and-carry basis, but vanished from sight a month before the outbreak of war. His file at Broadway was eventually marked ‘Agent presumed “dead”.’ This was not surprising, because Kruger – like most of MI6’s German informants – was controlled by its Hague station, where one of the local staff, Folkert van Koutrik, was on the Abwehr’s payroll. The service’s best pre-war humint source was Wolfgang Gans Edler zu Putlitz, press attaché at the German embassy in London, an aristocrat and homosexual. He was run by Klop Ustinov – father of the actor Peter – a Russian-born journalist who lost his newspaper job in 1935 because of his Jewishness. When Putlitz was transferred to The Hague in 1938, Ustinov followed him at MI6’s behest. After Folkert van Koutrik later betrayed the British operation in Holland, Putlitz hastily sought asylum in London.

The flow of intelligence from the Continent was thin. The Air Ministry complained about the paucity of material on the use of aircraft in the Spanish Civil War, an important issue for planners. Britain’s ambassador in Berlin, Sir Nevile Henderson, shared with his fellow-diplomats a disdain for espionage which caused him to refuse diplomatic status to Broadway’s ‘Passport Control Officers’. Even where MI6 tried to provide German informants with wireless sets, most were reluctant to take them, because discovery of such equipment by the Gestapo ensured a death sentence for the possessor.

Very occasionally, among the mountain of rubbish that accumulated in Broadway’s files there was a pearl. In the spring of 1939 an agent codenamed ‘the Baron’, with good social connections in East Prussia, reported to his handler Harry Carr in Helsinki that the Germans were secretly negotiating with Stalin. He followed this up with a further missive in June, asserting that talks between Berlin and Moscow were making good progress. Yet this sensational pointer to the looming Nazi–Soviet Pact, which afterwards proved to have come from gossip among aristocrats working in the German Foreign Ministry, was dismissed in Broadway. To MI6’s senior officers, a devils’ pact between Stalin and Hitler seemed a fantastic notion. An authentic scoop was missed; first, because MI6, like most intelligence organisations, had an instinctive and usually prudent scepticism about its own sources; second, because what ‘the Baron’ reported ran contrary to his employers’ expectations. At that time, and indeed throughout the war, MI6 had no internal machinery for analysing incoming intelligence, though its chiefs could point out that the Axis Powers lacked this also.

Czechoslovakia and Poland occupied the front line in the European confrontation with Hitler. MI6 showed little interest in collaboration with their intelligence services until March 1939, when the strategic picture changed dramatically: the British and French governments gave a security guarantee to Poland. This galvanised Broadway.

On 25 July, a British delegation composed of a naval intelligence officer together with Alastair Denniston, director of the Government Code & Cypher School, and Dillwyn Knox, one of its foremost codebreakers, joined France’s Gustave Bertrand – himself no cryptographer, but a notable facilitator and diplomat – at an exploratory meeting with their Polish counterparts led by Col. Gwido Langer, held at their cryptographic centre in the Kabackie woods near Pyry, south of Warsaw. The first day’s talks, conducted in mixed French and German, went very badly. Knox, for reasons unknown, was in a vile temper, and highly sceptical that the Poles had anything to tell worth hearing. He seemed unable to understand the methods by which they claimed to have achieved the breakthrough which had enabled them to read some German naval traffic. All the parties present were fencing, to discover each other’s state of knowledge. Warsaw’s decision to involve the British was prompted by new difficulties that had frustrated their own codebreakers since the Germans on 1 January adopted an enhanced stecker board, for their Enigmas, with ten plugs instead of seven. On the second day, 26 July, the conference’s atmosphere was transformed for the better. In the basement of the building the Poles showed off their ‘bomby’, primitive computing devices designed to test multiple mathematical possibilities. Then they produced a coup de théâtre: they presented both visiting delegations with mimicked copies of the Enigma built by their own men. Knox’s scepticism crumbled, and the meeting ended in a mood of goodwill and mutual respect. Everybody at Broadway recognised the importance of the Poles’ gesture to their allies as a contribution to the secret struggle against the Nazis. Marian Rejewski, a former mathematics student at Warsaw University who had joined the Kabackie woods team back in 1932, is today acknowledged as a pioneer among those who laid bare the secrets of Enigma, even if it fell to others, in Britain, to advance and exploit Rejewski’s achievement.

Stewart Menzies, then deputy chief of MI6, was so impressed by the outcome of the Polish trip that he turned up in person at Victoria station to greet Gustave Bertrand – and to inspect the mimicked Enigma. Knox sent the Poles a gift of scarves, decorated with images of Derby runners, with the letter thanking his hosts for their ‘co-operation and patience’. At or around this time also, the Poles provided the British with five of the Enigma’s eight alternative rotors. A chasm still yawned, however, between understanding how the machine worked, and achieving the ability to read its traffic. Though a trickle of German messages were broken by human ingenuity during the winter of 1939–40, traffic was breached on an industrial scale only from 1941 onwards, following the creation of revolutionary electro-mechanical technology. Nonetheless, the assistance of the French and Poles dramatically accelerated progress at the GC&CS, now evacuated from London to a safer country home. Physical possession of the enemy’s encryption instrument enabled its cryptanalysts to grasp the mountainous challenge they must overcome.

Until 1939, and in large measure for two years thereafter, British intelligence remained dependent for its view of the world upon humint – reports from informants abroad. How well did MI6 fulfil its responsibility to brief the government about the mounting threat from Nazi Germany – ‘Twelveland’ in Broadway parlance? It produced many reports arguing that Hitler’s long-term ambitions lay in the East, and this was fundamentally correct. Unfortunately for its credibility, however, in 1940 Germany chose first to seek to dispose of the Western democracies. MI6 was in no doubt that Hitler was rearming fast, but insistently emphasised the weakness of the industrial base from which he aspired to make war. Responsibility for gathering economic data rested with the Industrial Intelligence Centre, an offshoot administered since 1934 by the Foreign Office, but run by the veteran secret service officer Major Desmond Morton. During the ‘wilderness years’, Morton passed to Winston Churchill – with the sanction of prime minister Stanley Baldwin – details of German rearmament which empowered the unheeded prophet to cry forth warnings to the world. Ironically, the Major wildly overstated the growth of Hitler’s military machine: Morton never had much grasp of economics in general, nor of the Nazi economy in particular.

But modern historians critical of pre-war British intelligence failures miss some important points. In those days few people of any nationality understood economic analysis. The IIC was correct in judging that Germany was ill-prepared to conduct a long struggle, and was rendered vulnerable by its dependence on imported commodities and especially oil. The German economy, as Adam Tooze has shown, was not strong enough to meet the huge challenge Hitler sought to fulfil, of conquering the most advanced societies on earth. Germany’s GDP was no larger than Britain’s, and her people’s per capita incomes were lower. In 1939, Hitler’s expenditures on armaments had reduced his country’s finances to a parlous condition. But it was asking too much of any intelligence service to gauge the potential of German industry under the stimulus of conflict: to the very end of World War II, the best brains in the Allied nations failed fully to achieve this. MI6 could not be expected to predict Hitler’s conquests, which dramatically enhanced his access to oil, raw materials and slave labour.

On the military side, neither MI6 nor the service departments learned much about the new technology and tactics being developed by Britain’s enemies. Nor about their limitations: they wildly overrated the Luftwaffe’s ability to devastate Britain’s cities. In 1938, Broadway reported that the Germans had 927 first-line bombers capable of mounting 720 sorties a day and dropping 945 tons of ordnance (this was an exaggeration of 50 per cent), and projections of likely casualties were even more inflated. War Office appreciations of the German army were equally mistaken, especially in estimating its potential mobilised strength. These suggested in 1939 that Hitler was already master of the largest war machine his nation’s resources could bear. Rearmament, coupled with vast public expenditure, ‘had taxed the endurance of the German people and the stability of the economic system to a point where any further effort can only be achieved at the risk of a breakdown of the entire structure’.

A February 1939 Strategical Appreciation by the chiefs of staff, drafted by the Joint Planning Committee, asserted that Britain could survive a long war better than Germany. This was true, but the chiefs said nothing about the danger that it could meanwhile lose a short one. Moreover, they never pressed the cabinet to acknowledge the shocking weakness of Britain’s Far East empire. The three services’ intelligence branches had no contact with each other, and there were no joint staffs.

As for politics, an MI6 officer wrote in a November 1938 report for the Foreign Office: ‘Not even Hitler’s intimates, according to one of them, knows if he would really risk world war.’ A few months later, the service’s credibility was severely injured by its issue of warnings that Germany intended imminently to strike at Western Europe, starting with Holland. Embarrassment was increased by the fact that the Foreign Office forwarded this alarm call to the US government. One of the British recipients, senior civil servant Sir George Mounsey, delivered a blast against MI6 which echoed around Whitehall. The Foreign Office’s standing was damaged, he said, by acting on the basis of ‘a highly sensational and highly disturbing kind of information which [MI6] are unable to guarantee’. Mounsey was dismissive of all covert sources, agents whose rumour-mongering had prompted Broadway’s warning: ‘They have a secret mission and they must justify it … If nothing comes to hand for them to report, they must earn their pay by finding something … Are we going to remain so attached to reliance on secret reports, which tie our hands in all directions?’ Mounsey had his own agenda: to sustain the policy of appeasement adopted by Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, whom he admired prodigiously. His views nonetheless reflected a general scepticism in high places about Broadway’s performance.

Gladwyn Jebb of the Foreign Office, often a critic of MI6, on this occasion leapt to its defence. While acknowledging the frustrations of dealing with secret organisations, he said that he could not forget that its officers ‘did warn us of the September [1938 Munich] crisis, and they did not give any colour to the ridiculous optimism that prevailed up to the rape of Czechoslovakia, of which our official [diplomatic] reports did not give us much warning’. In December 1938 Broadway offered a sound character sketch of Germany’s Führer, at a time when many British diplomats and politicians still deluded themselves that he was a man they could do business with. ‘Among his characteristics,’ asserted the MI6 report, ‘are fanaticism, mysticism, ruthlessness, cunning, vanity, moods of exaltation and depression, fits of bitter and self-righteous resentment, and what can only be termed a streak of madness; but with it all there is great tenacity of purpose, which has often been combined with extraordinary clarity of vision. He has gained the reputation of being always able to choose the right moment and right method for “getting away with it”. In the eyes of his disciples, and increasingly in his own, “the Führer is always right”. He has unbounded self-confidence, which has grown in proportion to the strength of the machine he has created; but it is a self-confidence which has latterly been tempered less than hitherto with patience and restraint.’

It is easy to catalogue the shortcomings of MI6. Like most of its sister services on the Continent, in 1939 it commanded little respect in high places, and had small influence on policy-making. It seems necessary to go beyond this, however, and pose the question: what might its spies have usefully discovered, granted more resources and cleverer people? The likely answer is: not much. MI6’s reporting was matched by a daily bombardment of newspaper headlines, both showing beyond peradventure that Germany was rearming. More accurate and detailed information about Hitler’s armed forces would have been useful to the War Office and Downing Street, but the critical issue, the vital uncertainty, was not that of Germany’s capabilities, but rather that of its intentions.

It seems quite misplaced to blame wrong or inadequate intelligence for the calamitous failure of Britain and France to deal effectively with the Nazis. Both nations correctly assessed the options at Hitler’s disposal for onslaughts East or West. MI6 can scarcely be held responsible for failing to anticipate exactly where or when he would attack, because he himself was an opportunist who reserved his decisions until the last moment. Sir Alexander Cadogan, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, wrote much later: ‘We were daily inundated by all sorts of reports. It just happened that these were correct; we had no means of evaluating their reliability at the time of their receipt. (Nor was there much that we could do about it!)’ Rather than a failure of intelligence, what mattered was the democracies’ failure of will – the refusal to acknowledge that the Nazis constituted an irreconcilable force for evil, which the very survival of European civilisation made it essential to destroy, rather than to bargain with.

Most of Hitler’s opponents inside Germany, and indeed across Europe, were communists who considered the Russians the only people both willing and able to challenge fascism. Everything said and done by the British and French governments before the outbreak of war confirmed anti-Nazis in that view. Thus, people who wished to contribute to undoing Hitler offered information to the agents of Moscow much more readily than to those of London or Paris. It was anti-Nazis’ poor opinion of Neville Chamberlain that made them reluctant to look to his country as a shield against Hitler, not their perception of MI6.

It is far more plausible to argue that Britain’s diplomats should have exposed the dictators’ intentions than to suggest that its spies might have done so. In peacetime, good intelligence officers can assist their governments to grasp the economic, military and technological capabilities of prospective enemies, but it is unusual for a secret service to provide a reliable crib about their intentions. Top diplomats ought to have been cleverer than intelligence officers. Their training, experience and access to sources should have empowered them to assess the world with greater wisdom than Broadway’s old soldiers. It seems far more discreditable that Henderson, Britain’s ambassador in Berlin, was willing for so long to think well of Hitler, than that MI6 with its meagre resources was unable to tell the government what the Führer would do next. If a German anti-Nazi had turned up on Henderson’s embassy doorstep, offering inside information, it is likely that he would have been sent packing.

Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair – ‘C’, as the head of the secret service was always known – died suddenly in November 1939, having occupied his post for sixteen years. Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, pressed the claims of the obscure Gerhard Muirhead-Gould, a former naval attaché in Berlin, to succeed him. Instead, however, Sinclair’s deputy, forty-nine-year-old Guards officer Brigadier Stewart Menzies, convinced the Foreign Office and the prime minister that he had been anointed by the dying Sinclair as his rightful successor. He thus inherited a mantle that he was widely considered ill-fitted to wear. The ninth Duke of Buccleuch, who had been Menzies’ fag at Eton, told a friend that ‘C’s’ contemporaries were mystified ‘how so unbelievably stupid a man could have ended up in such a position’. Hugh Trevor-Roper sneered at Menzies as ‘a thoughtless feudal lord, living comfortably on income produced from the labour of peasants whom he had never seen, working estates which he had never visited’.

This was hyperbolic, as were most of the historian’s private judgements on his colleagues, but it was true that Menzies had learned his craft in a bad school – not so much Eton as service on the staff of Brigadier John Charteris, Field-Marshal Sir Douglas Haig’s egregious intelligence chief on the Western Front. Menzies’ DSO and MC showed that he did not lack courage. His social skills sufficed to win the confidence of Maj. Gen. Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay, soon to become Churchill’s chief of staff, and in some degree that of the prime minister himself. But ‘C’ knew little of the wider world he aspired to spy upon, and tolerated in Broadway a bevy of even less inspired subordinates.

Decisions were powerfully influenced by his two joint deputies, Valentine Vivian and Claude Dansey, who hated each other. Vivian was a former Indian policeman who was credited with a major role in frustrating the machinations of the Comintern – the Communist International – in South America and the Far East; he was also an office intriguer of energy and skill. Meanwhile Dansey went briefly to Bern in September 1939, to try to organise intelligence links from neutral Switzerland to Germany. A plentiful supply of fraudulent informants emerged, of whom by no means the most imaginative was a German refugee in Switzerland who used his nation’s Army List to fabricate a mobilisation programme which he attempted to sell. One of the few useful sources Dansey identified was an Austrian Pole, Count Horodyski. He, in turn, introduced the British to Halina Szymańska, wife of the former Polish military attaché in Berlin, now an exile in Switzerland. She became one of MI6’s most useful conduits, with connections in the Abwehr. Dansey thereafter returned to London, where he exercised a powerful influence on the wartime fortunes of MI6, mostly to its detriment.

During the years that followed, Britain’s secret service recruited numbers of outstanding officers and agents, who did some useful and a few important things for the Allied cause, but its chieftains inspired only limited respect. The stimulus of war would generate an intelligence revolution, and give birth to one of Britain’s most dazzling achievements. However, this did not take place in Broadway Buildings, but instead outside a dreary suburban town in Buckinghamshire.

3 THE RUSSIANS: TEMPLES OF ESPIONAGE

Just before noon on 23 May 1938, Pavel Sudoplatov of the NKVD strolled into the Atlanta restaurant in Rotterdam and greeted a Ukrainian nationalist leader whom he had come to know well, in the guise of being a sympathiser with the man’s cause. Sudoplatov, newly arrived on a merchant ship from Murmansk, presented the man with a handsome box of chocolates adorned with the Ukrainian crest. The two chatted for a few moments to arrange a further rendezvous, then Moscow’s agent bade his companion farewell and moved on. He was a safe distance down the street by the time he heard a sharp explosion. A timing device had detonated a bomb inside the box, killing the nationalist. This was a typical Moscow Centre* operation of the period, one thrust in the relentless campaign to liquidate state enemies, real or supposed traitors. Sudoplatov’s success earned him a four-hour meeting with Stalin’s foremost secret policeman, Lavrenti Beria, who marked him for bigger things, such as managing the assassination of Leon Trotsky.

The Soviet Union owned the most active and best-resourced intelligence organisations in the world – the Red Army’s GRU and the NKVD, the latter controlled by Beria from December 1938. The foremost purposes of Joseph Stalin, master of the Kremlin, were the promotion of socialism abroad through the Comintern and the maintenance of his own power against domestic and foreign enemies. Both required spies in profusion. Throughout the 1930s, Russia pursued a strategy more far-reaching in its means – the plantation of deep-penetration agents – and its ends – the worldwide triumph of communism – than those of any other nation. How far the funds and energy lavished on its secret war profited the Soviet Union will be considered below. Here, it suffices to say that the espionage networks it established in the US, Britain, Japan and Europe were on a scale far beyond those of any other nation, and manifested in big things and small. When Japanese police arrested a Soviet agent carrying a Leica camera, Tokyo’s intelligence officers were pathetically envious: they could not afford to equip their own spies with technology remotely so sophisticated. This was a time when tens of millions of Russians were starving, yet Stalin’s agents spent whatever seemed necessary to purchase information and the deaths of enemies. From Switzerland to Mexico they left roadsides studded with corpses, and created some of the most remarkable agent networks in the history of intelligence.

The Russian addiction to espionage and conspiracy was as old as time. In 1912, when according to official figures Germany spent £80,387 on its secret service, France £40,000 and Britain £50,000, the Russians avowed a budget of £380,000, plus a further £335,000 for the tsar’s secret police. Tsarist codebreakers achieved some notable coups, and their successors sustained the tradition. In the 1930s the NKVD’s Fourth Department, the world’s most lavishly-funded signals intelligence unit, was based in the Foreign Affairs building on Moscow’s Kuznetsky bridge. Its chief, Gleb Ivanovitch Bokii, achieved a reputation as a killer and sexual predator matching that of Beria. Though Bokii’s team never broke wartime German Enigma messages, it enjoyed useful earlier and lesser successes, such as securing the secret protocol to the 1936 Anti-Comintern Pact between Germany and Japan, before its chief faced a firing squad the following year. Stalin personally read many decrypts; like Churchill later, he trusted the codebreakers’ product as he never did humint. The Kremlin displayed as brutal a carelessness about casualties among its spies as it did towards the fate of its soldiers. In 1936 František Moravec of Czech intelligence received a Soviet proposal that his service should provide crash espionage training for a hundred Russians, who would then be dispatched into Germany. Moravec expostulated that such novices would face wholesale extinction. His Moscow contact shrugged: ‘In that case, we shall send another hundred.’

The Soviet Union enjoyed a critical advantage in building its empire of espionage. While fascism gained millions of supporters in Germany, Italy and Spain, it never matched the appeal of worldwide communism during the decades before the latter’s bloodstained reality was laid bare. In every nation, men and women of brains and education, lofty ideals and unbounded naïveté queued to betray their own societies’ secrets for what they deemed a higher cause. From Moscow, hundreds of men and women were sent forth to direct networks in Japan and the United States, Germany, France and other European nations. The NKVD achieved excellent penetration of the French Foreign Office, and frequently quoted its ambassadors’ dispatches. Many of its informants deluded themselves that they were passing secrets not to the Soviets, but instead to the Comintern – which was in truth merely a postbox for the Kremlin.

Pavel Sudoplatov became one of the principal puppeteers of the Kremlin’s danses macabres. He was a Ukrainian miller’s son, born in 1907, who served as a cipher clerk with the Red Army before joining the Bolshevik security service. As a teenager, Sudoplatov ran a network of informers in his home town of Melitopol. Secret police work became a family affair when he married in 1928, since his Jewish wife Emma was a more senior officer than himself in the OGPU, forerunner of the NKVD. He was trained by its foreign department before being posted to Germany as an ‘illegal’, posing as a Ukrainian nationalist. He led a roving life in the years that followed, travelling across Europe and spending a month in a Helsinki jail. He saw his wife just once, when she turned up in Paris as a courier. In 1938 he visited Spain, describing its civil war as ‘a kindergarten for our future operations’. At an early stage of his relationship with Beria, Sudoplatov noted a curiosity: this most terrible of Soviet secret policemen displayed meticulous civility to little people – junior staff – while treating big ones – his rivals in the Kremlin hierarchy – with lacerating rudeness. ‘Beria had the singular ability to inspire both fear and enthusiasm,’ he wrote.

Sudoplatov became one of the spy chief’s most devoted servants, graduating from field work to senior desk roles, assisted by the demise of rivals. Between 1937 and 1939, thousands of intelligence officers of all ranks died before firing squads or were dispatched to the gulag. Stalin lashed out at the intelligence services during a meeting of the Soviet Military Council in language that defied parody: ‘We have defeated the bourgeoisie on all fronts. It is only on the intelligence front that they beat us like small boys. This is our chief weakness … Our military intelligence service … has been polluted by spies. [Its chiefs] were working for Germany, for Japan, Poland, for anyone but us … Our task is to restore the intelligence service. It is our eyes and ears.’ In his madness, Stalin insisted upon not merely the execution of scores of senior officers of the GRU and NKVD, but also on the severance of Moscow Centre’s relations with their informants in the field, thousands of whom were branded as fascist stool-pigeons. The chaos that followed impacted variously upon different departments and regions, but paralysed some networks until 1941 and beyond. After the destruction of Nazism, in Vienna a veteran NKVD officer met an old German source, one of many with whom he had broken contact in accordance with orders back in 1938. Now, this man demanded of the Russian: ‘Where on earth were you all through the war? I was General Kesselring’s personal orderly!’

Among the foremost of the NKVD’s overseas agent-runners was Theodore Maly, a Hungarian who in his youth had belonged to a Catholic monastic order. He was taken prisoner as a Hapsburg officer in 1916, joined the Bolsheviks and forswore God. In 1936 Maly was posted to London, where many of Moscow’s British informants later testified to their respect and affection for him. Yet in 1938 he was among those recalled to Moscow and shot as a supposed traitor, along with the NKVD’s equally talented Rome resident and several of its Berlin men. An obvious question persists: why did any officer with a brain obey the order to go home, when they could surely have read the runes? The most plausible answer is that even in those crazed and bloody days, adherents to the world socialist ideal, such as Maly was, cherished a lingering faith in the Soviet system, though he also professed fatalism if his death was decreed.

Many Russian knees quaked during the Purges. Thirty-nine senior GRU officers, intelligence veterans, are known to have been shot, and the NKVD suffered in proportion. Pavel Sudoplatov survived an investigation and the threat of expulsion from the Party; he believed afterwards that he might have been preserved by Stalin’s personal intervention. Clambering over a mound of corpses, he acquired his own office in the Lubyanka building at 2 L Street – cosily referred to by its occupants as ‘Dom Dva’, ‘Number Two’, a place of dread for every passer-by, and for any prisoner who crossed its threshold. Like all those who prospered in Stalin’s dreadful universe, Sudoplatov learned to regard the grotesque as normal, the unspeakable as familiar. During family conversations in their apartment, for instance, he and Emma never deviated from a rigidly domestic script, because they took it for granted that every word spoken was recorded by Beria’s eavesdroppers. He wrote long afterwards in an apparently half-truthful memoir: ‘I accepted the brutality and stern order that characterised our centralised society; it appeared the only method of preserving the country when it was surrounded by German, Polish and Japanese enemies.’

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the forest an agent of the GRU, who would later become famous, or notorious, for his association with the German Red Orchestra – the extraordinary espionage network to be described later – was putting down roots in foreign parts. Anatoli Sukolov-Gourevitch, born at Kharkov in November 1913, was the son of Jewish parents who were both pharmacists. He started work in 1929 as an apprentice draughtsman in a factory, and hated the life. From an early stage, and like most Soviet citizens, he acquired the habit of obsessive secrecy, writing in his memoirs: ‘I learned to hide my feelings and troubles from my nearest and dearest, my friends, and indeed from everyone.’ Desperate to escape from the common ruck, while still very young he became a communist functionary, and somehow secured an appointment as a lecturer on military studies at a Leningrad school for Intourist guides, thereafter serving in intelligence.

In 1937 he was recruited to travel to Spain as one of the Soviet military group assisting the embattled Republican government. Gourevitch thoroughly enjoyed his subsequent Spanish adventures – as who would not, after sampling Soviet factory life? He was able to dress with an elegance unimaginable at home, and thereafter favoured a Warsaw tailor. He took a trip in a submarine, travelled in France and learned conversational French, Spanish and German. On returning to Moscow, he was selected for training as a foreign agent of the GRU. Asked much later if it had troubled him to join the Soviet Union’s murderous secret services, like Sudoplatov he shrugged that his country was encircled by enemies; he then believed that its defenders did only what they had to.

His chief, the gaunt, jug-eared intelligence veteran Major Simon Gendin, enquired whether he had any marriage plans which could complicate his future career overseas. Gourevitch replied that he was indeed in love, with a girl named Lialia whom he had met when they were both working in Spain, and who was now an Intourist interpreter. Gendin told his staff to add her name to the brief list of intimates with whom Gourevitch might correspond, though that relationship perished, like so much else, during the years that followed. On graduation from the GRU’s spy school, Gourevitch himself expressed doubts about his fluency as a coder and wireless-operator – he lacked a sensitive ear for Morse. Gendin reassured him: he would not need specialised radio skills, for he was destined to become an intelligence-gatherer and agent-runner.

Gourevitch was briefed to travel to Brussels to work with another Soviet agent, codenamed ‘Otto’, then to move on to Sweden after establishing himself and improving his language skills. He would exploit his knowledge of Spanish by adopting a cover identity as ‘Vincente Sierra’, a prosperous businessman with a Uruguayan passport. For the next three years, Moscow furnished him with funds to sustain an appropriately flashy lifestyle. Yet although he was instructed about the importance of dressing smartly, affecting the hat and gloves that were then badges of bourgeois respectability, Gourevitch later complained that he was untutored in social skills. When he checked into a smart Helsinki hotel on the first leg of his journey to Belgium, he was bewildered when a porter picked up his suitcase and carried it upstairs: never in his short life had he received such a personal service. He gasped on seeing an open buffet in the hotel dining-room, which at first he assumed was set for a banquet rather than for the daily fare of guests. Later, in Brussels, as he fumbled his way towards an entrée into relatively smart social circles, he was embarrassed to be taken aside one evening by an acquaintance who told him that only waiters wore white bow ties with smoking jackets. ‘I was completely ignorant of these subtleties,’ he wrote ruefully.

‘Otto’, the Soviet agent whom Gourevitch joined in Brussels, was Leopold Trepper, born in 1904 the son of a Galician shopkeeper, one of the key figures in Russia’s European intelligence operations, and later a heroic Soviet legend. As a young man, Trepper ran a Paris network which was rolled up by the French in 1933. He fled first to Germany, then to Russia where he found employment with Stalin’s spymasters while moonlighting as editor of a Jewish journal. Early in 1939 he was dispatched to Brussels, which was deemed a secure base from which he could forward information from the GRU’s network inside Germany. Centre boasted of running two important Berlin agents: Ilse Stöbe, who worked in the press department of Ribbentrop’s Foreign Ministry, and a diplomat named Rudolf Shelia. Trepper carried a Canadian passport in the name of Adam Mikler, stolen during the Spanish Civil War. He was married with two sons, but only one accompanied him to Brussels – the other, seven-year-old Michael, remained in Moscow. Trepper became known to his sources in Western Europe as ‘le grand chef’, while Gourevitch was ‘le petit chef’. Soviet narratives lavish praise on the Trepper network for its services to the socialist cause, and it was plainly useful as a post office for the messages of Stöbe and Shelia. But it seems unlikely that Trepper recruited useful informants of his own. The foremost achievement of the GRU agents in Belgium was to stay at liberty, make some friends and create lifestyles that supported their cover stories.

Of more importance to Moscow – certainly from 1941 onwards – were the GRU’s organisations based in Switzerland. These would later channel towards the Kremlin material derived from Berlin sources such as Western agent-runners could only dream of. One network had been established in 1937 by German-born Rachel Dübendorfer. A larger group, which became known as the ‘Lucy’ Ring, was run by Dr Alexander Radó – ‘Dora’ – a ‘sleeper’ permitted by his chiefs to slumber almost as long as Sleeping Beauty. A Hungarian, Marxist from his youth, Radó served as a commissar in Budapest’s 1919 Red Terror. Obliged to flee when Admiral Horthy became Hungary’s dictator, for a time he ran an émigré Resistance group in Vienna. He then decamped to Moscow, where he received intelligence training, and was deemed sufficiently significant to be introduced to Lenin. Posted to Western Europe, he served as an agent in Berlin and Paris, under cover as a correspondent for the Soviet news agency TASS. After marrying a German communist with whom he had two children, he tried to settle in Brussels, but was sent packing by the authorities, who held a thick dossier on him. Instead he went to Switzerland, where he parleyed a lifelong passion for maps into the creation of a cartographic publishing business, which quickly became profitable.

The Swiss police watched Radó for a while, then left him alone when they decided he was what he seemed – a quiet-living fellow, forty in 1939, who simply wanted to turn an honest penny. Radó was word-painted by one of his wireless-operators, an Englishman named Alexander Foote: ‘With his mild eyes blinking behind glasses, he looked exactly like almost anyone to be found in any suburban train anywhere in the world.’ Moscow instructed its man to do nothing until Europe erupted. Radó settled down quite happily with his maps, which enabled him to make a living without much recourse to GRU funds. When his handler was recalled to Moscow during the Purges, Radó for a time lost contact with his chiefs. But he made useful local friends, some of them communists, others not. One was a Swiss socialist, Otto Punter, who admired the Soviet Union and had worked for the Republicans in Spain. Punter forged connections in Germany, and with some German émigrés in Switzerland such as Baron Michel von Godin. Von Godin recruited the Vichy French press attaché, Louis Suss, codename ‘Salter’. The Chinese press attaché Pao Hsien Chu – ‘Polo’ – was another source, and Punter also had connections with influential local Catholics.

Radó’s comrade Alexander Foote always claimed to have been an adventurer rather than a communist ideologue. A round-faced, bespectacled, mildly seedy young Englishman, in September 1938 he returned from service in Spain with the International Brigade. A few months later, one of Moscow’s British recruiters offered him unspecified new employment for the workers’ cause in Switzerland. Cheap melodrama was not lacking. In obedience to instructions, Foote reported to the main post office in Geneva at noon one day, wearing a white scarf and holding a leather belt. He was approached by a woman who fulfilled her side of the identification procedure by holding a string shopping bag and an orange. She asked in English where he had bought his belt, and he replied implausibly, at an ironmonger’s shop in Paris. When he had then asked where he could buy an orange like hers, she introduced herself. She was ‘Sonya’, Ursula Hamburger* of the GRU, whom Foote was pleased to find was no squat commissar, but instead an attractive woman of thirty-one, with ‘a good figure and even better legs’. This remarkable personality was the daughter of a Berlin economist. At the age of eleven she was briefly a child actress before taking up an alternative career in espionage. She was already a veteran of exploits in China for which she had been awarded the Order of the Red Banner.

Hamburger instructed Foote to travel to Munich, establish himself in the city, learn German and make friends. He was given 2,000 Swiss francs and told to meet her again in three months in Lausanne – once again, at the post office. Keeping this rendezvous after a German sojourn that was uneventful save for a chance glimpse of Hitler lunching in a restaurant, he was told that he was now on the GRU payroll as a ‘collaborator’, at a salary of US$150 a month plus reasonable expenses. Given the cover name ‘Jim’, and various means of making contact if ‘Sonya’ disappeared for any reason, he was then sent back to Munich with an advance of US$900 in cash. Nothing significant happened thereafter until in April 1939 he was visited by an old International Brigade comrade from Spain, Len Brewer, British-born son of German parents, whom he appears to have introduced to Hamburger, who promptly recruited him. In August he was summoned to yet another meeting, this time at Hamburger’s home, a chalet at Caux-sur-Montreux where she lived in incongruous bourgeois domesticity with her two children, Maik and Janina, and an old German nurse. Foote was disconcerted by the casualness with which his hostess left components of her wireless transmitter lying around the house.

The GRU ring in Switzerland was as traumatised as many other communists around the world by the August 1939 Nazi–Soviet Pact. Foote felt that it hit Hamburger even harder than himself; that her faith in the omniscience of the Party was shattered: ‘I think that from that time onwards her heart was not in the work’ – this seems implausible, since she later became courier for the atomic spy Klaus Fuchs, and died an avowed Stalinist. Desperate to get out of Switzerland, she divorced her husband and married Len Brewer. Initially, according to Foote, this was merely an arrangement of convenience to secure a ‘shoe’ – a passport – but then the couple fell in love. Their plans were momentarily threatened when their maid, Lisa, became disaffected and telephoned the British consulate to denounce them anonymously as communist spies. But the girl’s English was so poor that nobody at the other end understood, or at least took notice.

Days before the outbreak of war, Foote boarded a train bound for Germany once more, only to find his handler suddenly pushing her way along the carriage to reach him, just before departure time. She told him to get off, fast. New orders had come from Moscow: war was imminent; he must stay in Switzerland. During the period that followed, in which the ‘Lucy’ Ring was temporarily dormant, while living at a small pension in Montreux both Foote and Len Brewer learned how to operate a shortwave radio transmitter. They practised on Hamburger’s set, though its performance was not improved by being buried in her garden between transmissions – then waited to be given messages to transmit to Moscow.

Even as the GRU’s Swiss networks were bedding down, Centre’s German sources were already producing information of extraordinary quality. The first musician in what became known to history as the ‘Red Orchestra’ was recruited following an approach to the Soviet embassy one day in 1929, by an ex-Berlin policeman named Ernst Kur. He offered his services as an informant, and was promptly recruited by the local NKVD resident as agent A/70. Kur, a rackety and often drunken boor, had been dismissed from the police, but proved to have a critical contact in its counter-intelligence branch, who was soon designated by the Russians as agent A/201. On 7 September Moscow messaged its Berlin station: ‘We are very interested in your new agent, A/201. Our only fear is that you have got yourselves into one of the most dangerous predicaments where the slightest indiscretion on the part of either A/201 or A/70 could lead to multiple misfortunes. We think it necessary to look into the issue of a special channel of communication with A/201.’ Investigation showed that it was A/201 – an officer named Willy Lehmann, who had prompted Kur’s approach to the Russians, using him as a cut-out during their exploratory dealings.

Lehmann was born in 1884, and served twelve years in the Kaiser’s navy before becoming a policeman. His NKVD file spoke in the highest terms of his character, though noting the existence of a long-term mistress, Florentina Liverskaya, a thirty-eight-year-old seamstress who lived and worked at 21 Blumenstrasse. She was described, somewhat ungenerously, as a short woman with reddish hair and a plump face. When Kur started using his payments from the Soviet embassy to fund extravagant drinking sprees, Lehmann and his handler agreed that this now redundant intermediary must be got out of the way. With unusual sensitivity for Centre, instead of being pushed under a tram, in 1933 the dissolute ex-cop was rehoused in Sweden, where he passed the rest of his days as a small trader, occasionally moonlighting as an informant.

Lehmann, codenamed ‘Breitenbach’, thereafter became one of Moscow’s most valued German agents. For some time his handler was Vasily Zarubin, an NKVD star. Born in 1894, highly intelligent and personable though largely self-educated, Zarubin served successively in China and Europe as an ‘illegal’, latterly under cover as a Czech engineer. A cheerfully gregarious figure, though with ample blood on his hands, he spoke several languages and forged a warm relationship with Lehmann. Although Zarubin occasionally gave the policeman modest sums of money, Lehmann never appeared greedy, and seemed keen to assist the Russians simply because he disliked his own nation’s government – an animosity that became much more marked after the Nazis gained power.

Lehmann gave Moscow details about the structure and activities of Germany’s various intelligence organisations, and warned of forthcoming operations against Soviet interests. He provided samples of Abwehr codes, and passed on gossip about Nazi power struggles. He himself worked latterly in the Gestapo’s Department IVE, ultimately under Himmler’s control, and was made responsible for security at especially sensitive defence plants. Thus in 1935 he attended some early German rocket tests at Peenemünde, and produced a report on them which reached Stalin. He also acquired considerable information about other military and naval technological developments. As the Nazis tightened their grip during the 1930s, Lehmann became increasingly nervous about meeting Zarubin, or indeed any Soviet agent. He found himself under surveillance, as a result of a bizarre coincidence. A woman quarrelled with her lover, and denounced him to the authorities as a Russian spy: this proved to be another Gestapo officer, also named Lehmann. The muddle was eventually cleared up, and the shadow was lifted from ‘Breitenbach’. But in 1935 he asked for a false passport in case he had to run in a hurry, and this was duly provided. When Zarubin reported that Lehmann had fallen seriously ill, the news prompted a panic in Moscow: Centre declared that its most precious German source must be kept alive at any cost, and that the NKVD would meet his medical bills if the money could somehow be laundered. ‘Breitenbach’ recovered.

Later that year the GRU made a sudden decision to wind up its German networks amid the Nazis’ ruthless persecution of known communists, and to make a fresh start, beginning at the top. Both the Berlin station chief and his deputy were recalled to Moscow and liquidated. Early in 1937, the NKVD’s Zarubin also fell victim to the Purges. He was summoned home, and at an interview with Beria accused of treason. After interrogation, unusually he was neither executed nor cleared, but instead demoted. He remained for a time in Moscow, serving as assistant to a novice intelligence officer, Vladimir Pavlov.

Before Zarubin’s abrupt departure from Berlin, he transferred the handling of ‘Breitenbach’ to a woman named Clemens, one of his staff. She scarcely spoke German, but there was nobody else, and he himself expected soon to return. As matters fell out, Clemens was obliged to assume ongoing responsibility for the relationship, exchanging envelopes containing orders and information, which were then passed to another NKVD illegal, Ruben, who soon found himself the sole surviving member of the Berlin station as the Purges claimed ever more victims – the GRU’s Major Simon Gendin, who had sent Gourevitch to Brussels, was shot in February 1939.

Zarubin, in Moscow, contrived to send a note to ‘Breitenbach’, assuring him that he was not forgotten by his friends; that he should continue his intelligence activities, while exercising extreme caution. The Gestapo officer replied: ‘I have no reasons to worry. I am sure that they [in Moscow Centre] also know over there that everything is being done responsibly here, everything that can be done. So far there is no great need for anyone to visit from there. I will inform you if this will become necessary.’ As the NKVD’s silence became protracted, however, Lehmann grew frustrated and impatient. He sent another message to Zarubin via Clemens: ‘Just when I was able to make good deals, the company there stopped being interested in doing business with me, for completely unknown reasons.’ Zarubin responded soothingly that ‘the company’ tremendously valued his work, and besought him to keep going – which he did, until November 1938. But then, as the Soviet intelligence machine became paralysed by its domestic contortions, all contact between ‘Breitenbach’ and Moscow was lost: the relationship was not restored until the autumn of 1940.

Willy Lehmann was by no means Moscow’s only German source, nor even any longer its most important. One day in 1935 a Luftwaffe officer named Harro Schulze-Boysen, who held a senior post in Hermann Göring’s Air Ministry, contacted the Soviet embassy in Berlin with an offer of information, which was immediately accepted. He was given the codename ‘Corporal’, and NKVD file 34122. Schulze-Boysen was a champagne socialist from a smart Berlin family of intellectual inclinations – Admiral Tirpitz was among his forebears. From his desk in the Air Ministry he forged contacts in army staff communications, among Abwehr officers, and also with Hans Henniger, a government inspector of Luftwaffe equipment. Göring gave away the bride at his 1936 wedding, to the beautiful and exuberant Libertas Haas-Heye, who had worked for a time as a Berlin press officer for MGM Films. She now learned to share Schulze-Boysen’s political convictions and the burden of his labours for the Soviet Union, and her bed with a legion of lovers.

At about the same time, but independently, a senior civil servant in the economics ministry, Arvid Harnack, contacted the Soviet embassy, and was likewise recruited as agent ‘Corsican’, NKVD file 34118. Harnack was born in 1901 into a scholarly family in Darmstadt. He qualified as a lawyer and practised as an economist, spending some time in the United States. At the University of Wisconsin’s Madison campus he met Mildred Fish, a strikingly handsome and serious-minded student of English. They were married in 1929, and elected to live in Germany. Both were keenly interested in Marxism – they made a tour of the Soviet Union, and in 1932 launched a political study group. When Arvid began to pass information to the Russians, and to recruit fellow-foes of Hitler to his ring, he joined the Nazi Party to improve his protective colouring. Meanwhile both he and Schulze-Boysen steadily extended their groups of like-minded intellectual foes of Hitler. Between them, by 1939 they had opened windows into some of the most influential institutions in Nazi Germany.

Moscow now made a serious security mistake: it ordered that the two networks should collaborate. Their guiding spirits had very different temperaments. Schulze-Boysen was an exuberant, impulsive extrovert; Harnack was a quiet, intense intellectual, whose impeccable middle-class background enabled himself and his friends for years to escape the attention of the Gestapo and the Abwehr. The two men nonetheless forged a close relationship, driven by shared hatred of the Nazis and romantic enthusiasm for the Soviet Union. Until June 1941 they had no need of wirelesses, merely transmitting information through the Russians’ Berlin military attaché.

One of the most striking aspects of espionage is that its processes, the mere business of living a covert existence, acquire a life of their own, heedless of spies’ achievements as collectors of information. Anatoli Gourevitch, in his memoirs, touches on a weakness in his own training which might be applied to the experience of many other agents. He was exhaustively instructed in techniques – secret inks, passwords for rendezvous and suchlike. No matching effort, however, was expended upon explaining the purpose of his mission: ‘Why was so little heed paid to the means by which I might obtain information, to the whole organisational aspect of the business of intelligence-gathering?’ In other words, and as Gourevitch’s subsequent career illustrated, for many secret agents the management and perils of daily existence consumed a lion’s share of their energies, often overwhelming the function that mattered – the acquisition of information of value to their service and its government.

Arrived in Brussels early in 1939, fresh from the GRU training school, Gourevitch took rooms in a lodging house, enrolled himself in a language school in his guise as a Uruguayan visitor, and reflected that his own absolute ignorance of commerce seemed likely to prove an impediment to his intended cover life, helping to run a locally based business. This concern receded, however, in the face of a more serious one: disillusionment on first meeting his boss, Leopold Trepper. Gourevitch had forged a heroic mental image of this secret agent so much esteemed by Moscow Centre, yet now he was confronted by what he afterwards claimed was a drab, unimposing reality. He had been briefed to suppose that a solid business cover had been established for ‘Otto’s’ network in Belgium, whereas on the spot he found only a little suburban export business employing just three people and peddling ‘the Foreign Excellent Trench-Coat’. Its secretary was a young Russian émigré, married to a former tsarist army officer, who was apparently completely ignorant of the real nature of the firm’s operations. All the managers were Jews, which must make them instantly vulnerable in the event of a German takeover of Belgium.

Gourevitch felt more confidence in his fellow-agent ‘Andre’, a thirty-five-year-old Alsatian named Leon Grossvogel, who had deserted from the French army in 1925, then drifted around Germany before travelling to Palestine, where he became a communist, and forged a friendship with Trepper. After three years there he returned to Belgium, where his parents lived and ran a small trading house named ‘Au Roi’. It was the presence of the Grossvogels that persuaded Trepper to come to Belgium, and to exploit their commercial contacts as a cover, when in 1938 Moscow charged him with the formation of a West European espionage organisation. His new deputy nonetheless decided that Trepper’s supposed network of important intelligence contacts was nothing of the sort. While large allowance must be made for the fact that Gourevitch published his version long after he himself was denounced as a traitor, the thrust of his remarks makes sense. Whatever Trepper’s tradecraft skills, together with his plausibility in composing reports which found favour in Moscow, it is hard to imagine what useful intelligence he could have acquired in low-grade Belgian and French business circles, the only society that he had access to. Centre seemed content to accept Trepper’s claim to have created a system through which material could be gathered and passed to Moscow from its Berlin sources in the event of war with Germany. But Gourevitch dismissed as ‘completely false’ the claims of post-war Soviet historians that Trepper ran a large network of important agents extending into Scandinavia.

On the eve of war, Moscow Centre could boast that the Schulze-Boysen/Harnack groups in Germany provided excellent information from the Nazis’ inner circle. The ‘Lucy’ Ring in Switzerland had established itself soundly, but only began to provide important intelligence from 1941 onwards. The Trepper–Gourevitch networks trod water until 1940. The extensive Soviet secret machine in the US, which will be described elsewhere, produced a steady stream of technological intelligence, which would have been more useful to the Russians in advancing their own defence base if their industries had been capable of exploiting it.

We have left to last the best of all Moscow’s men – or rather, the most spectacular. Richard Sorge grips the imagination of posterity, more because of what he was than through his influence on history, which was marginal. He dispatched to Moscow a flow of privileged political and strategic information, acquired through an access to high places achieved through sheer force of personality. Much of his material was ignored, however, or merely duplicated similar reports from more authoritative Berlin sources. Some historians who selectively quote Sorge’s occasional brilliant insights have ignored his misjudgements and false prophecies – ‘noise’. His character and career as an agent were nonetheless extraordinary.

‘Ika’, as Sorge was nicknamed, was born in Baku in 1895, one of nine children of a German petroleum engineer and a Russian mother. After completing school in Germany he found himself thrust into the Kaiser’s war as a young soldier. While convalescing in Königsberg after suffering a bad wound, he was indoctrinated into communist ideology, allegedly by the father of one of his nurses, though there was already a family precedent: Sorge’s grandfather had been an associate of Marx and Engels. When the war ended he became a Marxist instructor, and acquired a PhD in political science. In 1921 he married Christiane Gerlach, having persuaded her to abandon a previous husband. His communist and revolutionary links attracted the unfavourable attention of the police, and he found Germany becoming too hot to hold him. In 1924 the couple moved to Moscow, where Sorge was recruited and trained as a Soviet agent. Uncertainty persists about his movements in the next five years, though it is known that he visited Britain. Christiane left him, without the formality of a divorce – his immense appeal to women made him careless about whether they stayed or went. The combination of rough-hewn good looks and a hypnotic, driven personality enabled him to attract, and often to maintain in tandem, an impressive range of lovers of all shapes and sizes. Though sceptics later condemned Sorge as a charlatan as well as a betrayer – a fundamentally shallow figure despite his intellectual pretensions – he was a strikingly successful one.

In 1929 the Red Army’s Fourth Department – later the GRU – offered him an overseas assignment. He requested China, and arrived in Shanghai that November under cover as a freelance journalist, with a wireless-operator in tow. He achieved rapid social success in the European concessions, and made well-informed friends. Also agents. He himself was masquerading as an American, but dropped the pose with Agnes Smedley, the American China traveller, whom he enlisted in Moscow’s service. In 1930 he met twenty-nine-year-old Hotsumi Ozaki, a struggling magazine writer with communist sympathies, whom he also recruited and who played a notable part in his subsequent career. Like almost all those who worked with him, Ozaki fell under the foreigner’s spell. Long afterwards, another of his Japanese network said wonderingly of the superspy that Sorge became, ‘You meet a man like him only once in a lifetime.’ The GRU agent threw himself into researching every aspect of Chinese life, and his reports earned warm approval from his chiefs.

In January 1933 he returned to Moscow, where he ‘married’ again: a young Russian girl named Yekaterina Maximova – ‘Katcha’ – to whom he wrote emotional letters through the years that followed. He himself wanted to stay in Russia, but what use was a foreign spy in his employers’ own country? The GRU decided to post him to Tokyo. In preparation for this assignment, Sorge travelled to Germany, now Nazi-ruled, to secure appropriate credentials, and achieved another brilliant social and professional success, while somehow evading exposure of his communist past. He met the publisher of Zeitschrift fur Geopolitik, an ardent National Socialist, and secured from him both a contract as a ‘stringer’ and a letter of introduction to the German embassy in Tokyo.

He also gained the goodwill of the magazine’s founder, Karl Haushofer, a second ‘stringing’ arrangement with Täglische Rundschau, and a letter addressed to Lt. Col. Eugen Ott, a German officer serving an exchange term with a Japanese artillery regiment. The editor-in-chief urged Ott to ‘trust Sorge in everything; that is, politically, personally and otherwise’. Through these sponsors the spy pulled off a further coup: he became a member of the National Socialist Party. Thus armoured, this avowed Nazi set off for Tokyo via the United States with a wireless-operator, Bruno Wendt of the Red Army, carrying in his luggage a copy of the 1933 German Statistical Yearbook to provide the key for his coding. Sorge was thirty-eight, and on the threshold of one of the greatest espionage careers in history.

Arrived in Japan, with remarkable speed he established a relationship with the German ambassador Herbert von Dirksen, a Prussian aristocrat; and a much closer one with Colonel Ott, who embraced another former Frontsoldaten as kin. Sorge, with characteristic recklessness, promptly began an affair with Ott’s wife Helma, an Amazonian six-footer who was herself a former communist. This appears to have done no harm to the spy’s relationship with her husband, who seemed, as he remained, mesmerised by his new friend. The colonel was an austere and unbending figure who perhaps saw qualities in Sorge which he envied, not least exuberance. The newcomer also ingratiated himself with the convivial and charming Captain Paul Wenneker, who joined the German mission in 1934 as naval attaché.

Sorge’s intimacy with the embassy won him some respect and attention from the Japanese, though at this stage the Tokyo government had by no means committed itself to an alliance with Hitler – German residents were subject to police surveillance as intrusive as that imposed on other foreigners. Sorge threw himself into acquiring information of all kinds about the country, its people, history and culture, forming a library of over a thousand books, though he never learned to read Japanese, nor even to speak it well. His sexual indiscretions would have earned censure in any spy school, but his management of the relationship with the German diplomatic community at the colonnaded and handsomely gardened embassy offered a masterclass in penetration. Despite his avowed National Socialist allegiance, he was gaily critical of German government policies.

At meetings with Dirksen and Ott – who was now transferred to become military attaché – Sorge appeared to provide as much information as he received. Indeed, they recognised that the journalist knew more about Japan than they did. He started to assist in the compilation of diplomatic reports for Berlin, and forged a long-distance relationship with the editor of the Nazi Party newspaper, contributing to its columns and attending local Tokyo branch meetings. Meanwhile, patiently and skilfully, Sorge built up his network of informants for Moscow. Hotsumi Ozaki, his old friend and source from Shanghai, was now a respected journalist in Osaka, whence he was able to transfer to Tokyo. In that pre-social-media universe, for the next two years Sorge was able to prevent Ozaki from discovering his real name: the German was known to him only as ‘Mr Johnson’, the American cover identity he had worn in his China days.

Another recruit, Yotoku Miyaki, was a painter born in 1903, whose family had moved to California when he was a child. The American Communist Party talent-spotted Miyaki for the Comintern, and the slightly-built young man was persuaded to move back to Japan, where he proved a superb agent. In keeping with Moscow’s stringent finance policies, though Miyaki received a salary from Sorge, he supplemented this through giving language lessons and selling his pictures, which commanded respectable prices. Another key Sorge subordinate was a Yugoslav-born journalist, Branko de Voukelitch. The Fourth Department peremptorily instructed Voukelitch to strengthen his cover by divorcing his wife Edith and marrying a Japanese woman. This the compliant agent duly did, confusing himself as well as his associates by falling sincerely in love with a well-born local girl, Yoshiko Yamasaki, who eventually married him.

It was a reflection of Colonel Ott’s intimacy with Sorge that when he toured Manchuria in 1934, he took along the Russian spy as his courier in the Nazi interest. Sorge subsequently ghosted Ott’s report to the army economic department, which won plaudits in Berlin. The following year, the Japanese police broke up another Soviet spy ring in Tokyo run by an American, John Sherman, a development which increased Moscow’s dependency on Sorge. He once said, ‘Spying work must be done bravely,’ and indeed he became a famous figure in Tokyo’s social, journalistic and diplomatic circles, careering about the city on a motorbike, drinking heroic quantities of alcohol, bedding every woman within his reach. He rented a two-storey Japanese-style house at 30 Nagasaki Machi, and Moscow kept him supplied with sufficient funds to sustain the rackety life he loved. He had a housekeeper who became devoted to him, together with a maid and a laundryman who were routinely quizzed by the police. But even the pathologically suspicious Japanese had no clue that Sorge might be a spy; they regarded him merely as an influential acolyte of the Nazis.

He performed a daily tour of newspaper offices and the German Club before making his way to the embassy, where he now spent so much time that he was provided with his own office in which to conduct research and prepare material for transmission to Berlin; privacy was also useful for photographing documents for Moscow. A German diplomat spoke later of Sorge as ‘a gay, dissolute adventurer with a brilliant mind and an unassailable conceit’. The spy wrote a memorably ironic letter to his Moscow ‘wife’ Katcha in 1937: ‘it is very hard, above all this solitude’.

It was indeed a ceaseless challenge for the Soviet agent to sustain a masquerade as a Nazi stooge while he partied and womanised. In the evenings he frequented a string of bars and clubs – Lohmeyer’s restaurant in the Ginza, which had a loyal German clientèle; the seedy little Fledermaus; and the Rheingold, whose proprietor Helmut Ketel was an ardent admirer of Hitler. It was there that Sorge met ‘Agnes’, one of many bar girls who fell for him. Agnes proved to have staying power. She was twenty-three, and her real name was Hanako Ishii. She became increasingly a fixture in his house, and he paid for her to take lessons to fulfil a cherished ambition to become a singer. But Sorge was no more faithful to Hanako than to any other woman: he conducted a long parallel relationship with Anita Mohr, wife of a locally based German businessman, who was described as a ‘blonde bombshell’. Hanako appears to have provided a convenience rather than an object of real affection.

Sorge’s priority was always service to Moscow. As the weight of GRU material increased, so did the difficulties of transmitting it. Wendt, his radioman, was incompetent, and Sorge insisted that a better man must be found. In 1935 the spy left Tokyo, supposedly on holiday, bound for the United States. From there he travelled covertly to the Soviet Union, to confer with his chiefs and sort out the communications issues. In Moscow he was rebriefed about priorities, foremost among which was to explore Japan’s intentions towards the Soviet Union. Thereafter, in descending order he was ordered to study the Japanese army and industry; policies in China; positioning towards Britain and the US.

Soon after Sorge’s return to Tokyo, a new wireless-operator and courier joined him from Moscow. Max Clausen held officer’s rank in the Red Army. To provide cover he established a blueprint-copying business in Tokyo, which became a notably profitable pet project. Clausen’s first intelligence task was to build his own wireless set, common practice among agents in countries to which it was deemed too difficult or dangerous to dispatch a professionally constructed one. He used a domestic radio receiver, attached the transmitter to a Bakelite panel mounted on a wooden box, and wound tuning coils from copper tubing intended for motor manufacture. In the absence of instruments to measure wavelengths, Clausen transmitted on a 37–39 metre band, and received on 45–48.

Sorge persuaded a friend and fellow-journalist, Gunther Stein, to allow the Soviet operator to message Moscow from his flat. Stein initially recoiled from accepting this appalling risk, but eventually assented. Since Clausen dared not set up an external aerial, he stretched two copper-stranded wires, seven metres in length, around the room from which he transmitted. Stein also became a useful informant for the Sorge ring, exploiting friendships he had formed at the British embassy. So too did Torao Shinotsuka, owner of a small military-equipment factory in Kansai, who provided extensive material on military aircraft and naval armaments. Anna Clausen, Max’s adored wife, arrived in Tokyo from Moscow to share the wireless-operator’s hazardous existence.

The Soviet network’s membership thus expanded at a period when Japan was entering a period of paranoia about foreign espionage, and reinforcing its domestic security agencies. In 1936 there was a bad moment when Tokyo police arrested Taikichi Kawai at the request of their Manchurian counterparts. Kawai had been an informant of ‘Mr Johnson’ in Shanghai. In captivity he was brutally interrogated. Unlike most agents under torture, however, he gave away nothing significant. Sorge’s luck held. His work was giving the highest satisfaction to both of its beneficiaries, Moscow Centre and the Foreign Ministry in Berlin. The latter was especially delighted by a report which he compiled on the 1936 Japanese army revolt, but which he insisted should circulate among the Nazi hierarchy only under the coy initials ‘RS’, because he remained fearful of a Gestapo investigation of his political past.

He helped Ott and Dirksen draft a cable to Berlin, asking for information about a rumoured German–Japanese negotiation. Sorge sought to promote Moscow’s agenda by urging on the German embassy team the view that such an alliance would be mistaken, and rooted in absurd rumours that Stalin’s fall was imminent. He published an article on the Japanese army in Die Wehrmacht magazine. His reputation with the Tokyo embassy and with Berlin soared after the fulfilment of his prediction that Japan’s war in China would prove protracted. More important, however, was the mass of information about Japanese deployments on the Soviet border which Ott provided to Sorge, who swiftly forwarded it to the GRU. Moscow also professed appreciation of industrial data delivered by Hotsumi Ozaki at monthly restaurant meetings. The journalist had become influential in government circles, and correspondingly well-informed: for a time he even served in the Japanese prime minister’s office as an expert on China. Even though he lost that role when the government changed in 1939, he secured a new job as a Tokyo-based researcher for Japan’s Kwantung army in Manchuria.

In 1938 Herbert von Dirksen was invalided home. His successor as ambassador was none other than Colonel Ott. Sorge thenceforward found himself drafting the German embassy’s dispatches for Berlin, while transmitting his own to Moscow. On his forty-third birthday he was presented with a signed photograph of Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop as a token of Berlin’s appreciation for his services. No foreign penetration of a British diplomatic mission could be compared in significance with that achieved by Sorge of Hitler’s Tokyo embassy. When a Russian general defected to Tokyo in 1938, the spy was immediately able to warn Moscow that its codes were compromised. In May 1939, when tensions on the Russo–Japanese border erupted into local clashes, thanks to Ozaki Sorge could tell Moscow authoritatively that the Japanese had no intention of escalating the ‘Nomonhan Incident’ into a wider war. On this issue as on many others, however, doubts persist about the use made of his material. Sorge supposedly gave the Soviets detailed Japanese order-of-battle information, but Georgi Zhukov as the Red Army’s local commander complained bitterly about the absence of such data. It seems likely either that Sorge later exaggerated his own contribution, or that the GRU failed to pass on his material.

He sought to strengthen his cover by publicly taunting Soviet diplomats when he met them at international receptions, but the stress of his fantastic high-wire act increasingly told on him, and was reflected in massive infusions of alcohol. In the company of Hanako, he succumbed to morose, drink-fuelled monologues, especially when she begged him to give her a child: ‘I am an old man. I am going to die soon. I can do without a baby! Oh, poor Sorge. You should study so that you can get along without Sorge …’ One night he crashed his motorbike, with agonising consequences – many days in hospital and the loss of his teeth. For the rest of his life he could swallow meat only if it was minced.

He had sense enough to abandon biking, and instead acquired a small car. He embarked on a whimsical cultural improvement programme for Hanako, persuading her to read Gone With the Wind, which he himself considered ‘magnificent’. Several hundred pages later she said, ‘I like Captain Butler.’ Perhaps providing a glimpse of his self-image, Sorge demanded, ‘Do you think I am like Rhett Butler?’ But Clausen wrote later about him: ‘He is a true communist … He is a man who can destroy even his best friend for the sake of Communism.’ He could also destroy a comrade. The spy’s treatment of his wireless-operator was cavalier, even brutal. And his lifestyle was ever more at odds with the ideal of a dedicated servant of the Party. Sorge had made himself probably the best-informed secret agent in the world. Nonetheless, his rashness made an ultimate train wreck inevitable, even if in 1939 this still lay a surprising distance in the future.

By the coming of war, the Soviet Union’s huge expenditure on espionage, and its access to highly placed communist sympathisers in many lands, should have made the Kremlin the best-informed centre of government on the planet. Yet those in Moscow who received and processed the reports from the field were far too fearful of offending the only audience that mattered – Joseph Stalin, master of the Kremlin – to forward any intelligence that was likely to prove unwelcome. Even when important information reached Moscow, it was seldom properly reviewed, far less exploited by policy-makers. Christopher Andrew has written: ‘The Soviet capacity to understand the political and diplomatic intelligence it collected … never approached its ability to collect the intelligence in the first place.’ Stalin acted as his own analyst, preferring to drill endless wells of espionage in search of imagined conspiracies rather than to use intelligence to inform policy-making. Soviet intelligence officers feared for their lives, with good reason, if they told Stalin what he did not want to hear. He seemed to credit only reports that identified plots against himself or the state, at home and abroad. Where these did not exist, Russia’s most senior intelligence officers invented them. Stalin used the product of his codebreakers to some effect where and when this was available, but entered the greatest conflict in history almost blind through his own acts of will.

After Munich, with the doom of Czechoslovakia sealed, the Czech intelligence chief František Moravec was approached by three rival bidders for his services: Admiral Wilhelm Canaris for the Germans, Colonel Louis Rivet for the French, and MI6’s local man, Major Harold Gibson, for the British. Mistrusting the French, Moravec determined to throw in his lot with Britain. In anticipation of the Nazi occupation he did his utmost to reinforce links with local informants before himself leaving his country. He was able to transfer to London large sums of foreign currency, and hoped thus to ensure that he could sustain a Czech intelligence service in exile, though few of his agents were ever heard from again. On 3 March 1939 the Abwehr’s Paul Thummel, Moravec’s best German source, met him in Prague and reported that the city would be occupied on the 15th. ‘Agent A-54’ also warned that his entire staff would be seized by the Gestapo, and could expect no mercy. Moravec was amazed that Thummel declared himself willing to continue his own collaboration. The only proviso, said the Abwehr man, was that the Czechs must ensure that everything about himself in their files was destroyed. With that assurance, the two men parted. Thummel said, ‘Good luck, Colonel. This is not goodbye but Auf wiedersehen.’ The German officer took away with him two addresses for future correspondence, one in Holland, the other in Switzerland.

In Prague on the night of 13 March, Harold Gibson of MI6 – ‘Gibby’, as Moravec always called him, a small, slight figure with a moustache in proportion – drove a car into the Czech Intelligence Department’s garage. This was loaded with hundreds of files packed in canvas bags, which were borne away to the British embassy. The following afternoon, a Dutch civilian plane chartered by Broadway landed at Ruzyn airfield outside Prague to collect passengers for England – Moravec and ten officers of his staff. He chose them unsentimentally, he wrote later, taking those who would be most valuable in London, and those who knew too much to be left to the Gestapo. He felt obliged to leave behind his own wife and two daughters, and indeed to conceal from them his intended destination: he said he was merely making an overnight trip to Moravia.

The plane took off with difficulty amidst a snowstorm, which for a time threatened to force them down into the path of the approaching Germans. Moravec carried a briefcase containing 200,000 Reichsmarks and 100,000 Dutch guilders in cash – about £32,000 – to provide his little team with further seed money for future operations. As the plane passed over the mountains where lay Czechoslovakia’s frontier, the colonel buried his head in his hands and sobbed unashamedly at the prospect of exile. After a brief stop in Amsterdam, the party landed safely at Croydon. When former Czech prime minister Edvard Beneš later arrived in London, Moravec reported to his Putney residence to offer his services and those of his officers, which were readily accepted – his role was formalised the following year, when Beneš formed a government in exile. The colonel’s wife and children escaped from Prague and walked to safety in Poland, from whence they joined him in Britain.

In June 1939 Moravec was delighted to receive a letter, forwarded from a Zürich cover address, which began, ‘Dear Uncle, I think I am in love. I have met a girl.’ On the same page was a secret ink message, appointing a rendezvous in The Hague. It was from agent A-54, the Abwehr colonel Paul Thummel. The Czech officer who duly met him early in August warned Thummel that Moravec’s shrunken organisation no longer had cash to lavish upon him as generously as in the past, but the German responded dismissively that ‘more important matters than money are at stake’. He told the Czech that an invasion of Poland was planned for 1 September, and provided details of the latest Wehrmacht order of battle. He also handed over a list of Polish traitors working for the Germans. Thummel subsequently provided the Nazis’ amended timetable, including on 27 August a final date for the Polish invasion of 3 September 1939. For the people of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and now of all Western Europe, the sparring was over: the death struggle had begun.

* Both the GRU’s and NKVD’s officers and agents referred to their respective headquarters as ‘Centre’.

* Hamburger, like many others in this book, used a variety of names in the course of her career, starting out as Kuczynski and ending up as Werner. To avoid confusion, only one name is used throughout for all those described.

2
The Storm Breaks
1 THE ‘FICTION FLOOD’

The first significant excitement of the British secret service’s war came in November 1939. A document later known as the ‘Oslo Report’ was sent anonymously to the British legation in Norway, then forwarded to London by its naval attaché. The parcel that reached Broadway contained several pages of German typescript and a small cardboard box. It represented the outcome of an earlier ‘feeler’ message to the legation, saying that if the British wanted to receive details of new scientific developments in Germany, they should make a minor change in the wording of a BBC broadcast to Germany: instead of starting, ‘Hello, this is London calling’, it was to say, ‘Hello, hello, this is …’ This was duly done, and after a short delay the ‘Oslo Report’ was submitted.

Its narrative covered a remarkable range of enemy activities. The anonymous author asserted that the Germans were developing acoustic and radio-controlled torpedoes; detailed the wavelengths on which German radar stations were operating; suggested bombing the Luftwaffe research station at Rechlin; and much else. The box contained a trigger tube, to be employed for new anti-aircraft shell proximity fuses. But the credibility of the whole document was undermined by the inclusion of two nonsenses: a claim that the Luftwaffe’s Ju-88 bombers were being produced at the impossible rate of 5,000 a month; and that a German aircraft-carrier, the Franken, was approaching completion at Kiel. These mistakes contributed to a verdict by Whitehall that the document should be dismissed as a German plant.

But the report was also read by Dr Reginald Jones, the outspoken, combative, twenty-eight-year-old assistant director of Air Ministry scientific intelligence. Jones shines forth as an authentic star in the wartime secret firmament. He was a social hybrid, son of a sergeant in the Grenadier Guards who displayed precocious brilliance at his south London school, and later proved as much at ease holding forth at grand country-house parties as fighting his corner in meetings chaired by the prime minister. Having had a notable early career in physics and astronomy at Oxford, where for a time he worked under Frederick Lindemann – later Lord Cherwell – he became fascinated by the possibilities of exploiting infra-red technology for the detection of aircraft, and in 1936 went to work for the Air Ministry. He was intolerant of slow-mindedness or bureaucracy wherever he encountered it, and there was plenty of both at Broadway Buildings, where after a brief stint at Bletchley Park he was invited to share an office with Fred Winterbotham.

In the course of the war Reg Jones became one of the foremost British investigators of German air technology. In November 1939, however, his achievements still lay in the future, and he was seen in Whitehall simply as a pushy young ‘boffin’ who seemed too free with his opinions in the presence of senior officers. Jones, almost alone, elected to believe that the Oslo document was authentic. His instinct became a near-certainty in the summer of 1940, when the Luftwaffe began to use the Wotan navigational beam to guide its bombers over Britain, exploiting principles mentioned by Oslo’s author. R.V. Jones, as he is known to posterity, found the information invaluable in devising counter-measures during the ‘Battle of the Beams’ that influenced the Blitz – which gained him the ear and the admiration of Winston Churchill. Again and again through the years that followed, when the British gained hints about new German weapons – the acoustic torpedo, for example – Jones was able to point out to service chiefs that Oslo had warned of them. After the war, in a retrospective on his own intelligence career, the scientist used the example of the 1939 document to urge that ‘casual sources should not be treated flippantly. It was probably the best single [scientific intelligence] report received from any source during the war.’

Only after an interval of almost forty years did Jones establish the document’s authorship. It was the work of a forty-five-year-old German physicist named Hans Ferdinand Mayer, who adopted a scientific career after being badly wounded on his first day in action as a conscript in 1914. He had been employed by Siemens since 1922, doing work that resulted in the award of eighty-two patents and the publication of forty-seven papers, and also spent four years as professor of signals technique at America’s Cornell University. During the inter-war years he formed a warm friendship with an Englishman working for GEC named Cobden Turner, who became godfather to Mayer’s second son. The German was especially impressed by a good deed: when he told Turner about the tragic case of a Jewish schoolchild disowned by her Nazi father, the Englishman arranged for the little girl to come to England, where for eight years she lived as a member of his own family.

When the international horizon darkened, on what proved Turner’s final visit to Germany Mayer told him that if war came, he would try to supply Britain with information about German scientific and technological progress. In late 1939 the scientist exploited a chance business trip to Norway to make good on his promise. He borrowed an old typewriter from the porter at the Hotel Bristol and composed the ‘Oslo Report’, which was dispatched in two parts to the British embassy on 1 and 2 November. Mayer also wrote directly to Cobden Turner, suggesting further contact through an intermediary in neutral Denmark. But although this letter caused two British security officers to visit and question the GEC man, for reasons unknown nothing was done to open communication with Mayer – MI6’s official history makes no mention of this courageous German. In August 1943 Mayer was arrested by the Gestapo in his office at Siemens, and charged with listening to the BBC. He was confined in Dachau, but was fortunate enough to be employed in a technical plant, where he survived the war. His brave gesture was prompted by admiration for Cobden Turner, whom he liked to regard as a representative Englishman. Recognition of Mayer’s contribution, however, came only from Reg Jones.

Among the reasons the ‘Oslo Report’ received such a chilly reception is that it was debated in Whitehall just as the British secret community reeled in the wake of a successful German ruse. On 9 November 1939, during the first, passive phase of the war that became derisively known as the ‘sitzkrieg’, the two senior MI6 officers in the neutral Netherlands, Captain Sigismund Payne Best and Major Richard Stevens, drove with a Dutch officer in Best’s Lincoln Zephyr car to a rendezvous at the Café Backus, situated between the Dutch and German border customs barriers at Venlo. Within minutes of their arrival, they were seized by armed men. When the Dutchman drew a pistol and fired at one assailant, he was himself shot dead. Best, Stevens and their local driver were then hustled 150 yards to the frontier: their kidnappers were Nazi counter-intelligence officers of the SD, led by the branch’s later boss, Walter Schellenberg, who was narrowly missed by the Dutch officer’s bullet. The British spies were fortunate enough to keep their lives, but spent most of the rest of the war in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. In contradiction of myths about heroic silence under interrogation, Stevens and Best told their abductors what they knew about MI6, which was plenty: its Continental operations were chiefly conducted from their own Hague station.

‘The Venlo incident’, as it became known in Whitehall, derived from an approach some weeks earlier by supposedly anti-Nazi German generals eager to negotiate with Britain. MI6 became much excited by the prospect of brokering a deal, though the Foreign Office was prudently sceptical. Sir Alexander Cadogan wrote in his diary on 23 October: ‘I think they [the German “plotters”] are Hitler agents.’ The war cabinet was informed a week later, and Winston Churchill, then still First Lord of the Admiralty, expressed violent objections to any parley. But the government authorised MI6 to continue discussions, provided – as Cadogan strictly instructed – nothing was put in writing to the supposed dissidents. The British ignored the danger that their interlocutors would play not merely a diplomatic game with them, but a rougher one. They should have been alert to such an outcome, because the Nazis had previous form as cross-border kidnappers: in April 1934 they had lured to the German frontier a Czech intelligence officer, twenty-nine-year-old Captain Jan Kirinovic, then rushed him across. A Gestapo witness gave evidence at Kirinovic’s subsequent trial that he had been arrested on German soil, and Kirinovic was sentenced to twenty-five years’ hard labour. Although in the following March the Czech officer was exchanged for two German spies, he died insane a few years later as a result of the drugs administered to him by the Gestapo, notably scopolamine.

In November 1939, it was symptomatic of MI6’s institutional weakness that its Hague station employed Folkert van Koutrik, an Abwehr informant. The supposed representative of the disaffected German generals, ‘Major Schaemmel’, was in truth the RSHA’s Schellenberg, whom the British officers obligingly supplied with a wireless transmitter. Either Hitler or Himmler personally authorised the kidnapping, which the British at first sought to keep secret. When an official asked Cadogan what was to be said about ‘the brawl in Holland’, the subject of fevered rumour and speculation, the permanent under-secretary ordered the issue of a ‘D’ Notice, forbidding mention of it in the British press. Amazingly, for a fortnight after Venlo the German ‘conspirators’ sustained a dialogue with MI6, until on 22 November Himmler lost interest and the Germans shut down the exchange after sending a last derisive message to Broadway. The Nazis then publicly announced that Best and Stevens had been engaged in an assassination plot against Hitler. Meanwhile van Koutrik’s betrayal went so far undetected that he secured employment with MI5 in London, and it was very fortunate that he broke off contact with the Abwehr – perhaps for lack of means of communication – because it was within his later knowledge to have betrayed elements of the Double Cross system to them.

Inside Whitehall, MI6 sought to talk down Venlo, arguing that the Germans had behaved crassly by grabbing the two officers instead of sustaining a double-cross game with them. It is hard to overstate the episode’s significance, however, for the future course of the secret war. British espionage activities on the Continent, such as they were, suffered a devastating blow: the Germans were able to relieve Best of a list of his station’s contacts, which he had taken in his pocket to the rendezvous. The reputation of the secret service within the British government, not high before the débâcle, afterwards sagged low indeed. Guy Liddell of MI5 speculated in his diary that Best, a preposterous figure who affected a monocle, might have been a double agent – ‘the real nigger in the woodpile. [He] had apparently been in fairly low water and it was noticeable that after he became associated with [Dr Franz] Fischer [a Nazi double agent in Holland] he seemed to be very well in funds.’ There is no reason to think Liddell’s suspicions justified. Mere bungling was responsible for the fiasco, though Walter Schellenberg asserted later that Best was willing to be ‘turned’. Meanwhile, the Dutch were embarrassed by the revelation that one of their own intelligence officers had been complicit in a British plot, which strengthened the Nazis’ propaganda hand by compromising Holland’s proclaimed neutrality.

A further consequence of Venlo was that the British became morbidly suspicious of any approach – and there were several, later in the war – by Germans professing to represent an ‘anti-Hitler Resistance’. In one sense their caution was prudent, because most of the aristocrats and army officers who became engaged in plots against the Nazis cherished absurd fantasies about the Germany they might preserve through a negotiation with the Western Allies. Former Leipzig mayor Karl Gördeler, for instance, was a nationalist with views on German territorial rights in Europe that were not far short of Hitler’s. Even had the Führer perished, there would have been nothing plausible for Germany’s enemies to discuss with his domestic foes. At the very least, however, British paranoia about suffering a repeat of the Venlo humiliation permanently excluded MI6 from some useful sources, which the Russians and later the Americans were left to exploit. Moreover, for the rest of the war Broadway’s chiefs maintained an exaggerated respect for their German adversaries, derived from the memory of having been fooled by them in November 1939.

Through the icy winter months of the ‘Phoney War’, the GC&CS at Bletchley struggled with the intractable Enigma problem, while Broadway’s spies produced little or no useful information about the enemy and his intentions. Kenneth Strong of War Office Intelligence wrote: ‘We had a continuous stream of callers from the Services with an extraordinary variety of queries and requests. What were the most profitable targets for air attacks in this or that area, and what effect would these attacks have on the German Army? Was our information about these targets adequate and accurate? How was the German Army reacting to our propaganda campaigns? I found some quite fantastic optimism regarding the effects from propaganda. The dropping of leaflets was considered almost a major military victory.’

Some MI6 officers went to elaborate lengths to conceal their lack of agent networks. Reg Jones cited the example of Wilfred ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale, who was responsible for France, and fed to Jones’s branch a succession of tasty titbits on the German Ju-88 bomber, allegedly collected by spies. First there was information about its engines; then its electrics; and somewhat later its armament. Jones teased Dunderdale that he must have secured a copy of the aircraft’s operating handbook, then fed extracts to Broadway, to create an impression of multiple sources. The hapless officer admitted that Jones was right, but begged him to keep his mouth shut. He could keep his bosses much more interested, he said, by drip-feeding the data. This was not the only occasion when Dunderdale – like officers of all intelligence services – sought to ‘sex up’ the means by which his material had been acquired. He also produced details of German troop movements supposedly secured by agent networks, which in reality derived from French intercepts.

Much could be learned from an enemy’s wireless transmissions, even without breaking his codes, through ‘traffic analysis’ – the study of signal origins, volume and callsigns to pinpoint units, ships, squadrons. Useful information was also gleaned by the ‘Y Service’, eavesdropping on voice transmissions, and by breaking simple enemy codes used for passing low-grade messages. The French forward cryptographical unit was based at ‘Station Bruno’, in the Château de Vignobles located at Gretz-Armainvilliers, fifteen miles east of Paris. Bruno received an important reinforcement following the fall of Poland. Guy Liddell of MI5 recorded on 10 October 1939 that seventeen Polish cryptanalysts were seeking asylum in Britain. Bletchley Park shrugged dismissively that it had no use for them, even though its chief Alastair Denniston had met some of the same men in Warsaw a few months earlier, and knew that their claims to have penetrated Russian and German ciphers ‘can to some extent be maintained’.

Denniston suggested that they would be more useful at the Château de Vignobles, working with Gustave Bertrand, which was where they were sent – though Bletchley later changed its mind and tried in vain to get them back. It was at Bruno, on 17 January 1940, that the ex-Warsaw group broke its first wartime Enigma signal. By 11 March Col. Louis Rivet, head of the French secret service, was writing in his diary: ‘The decrypts of the Enigma machine are becoming interesting and numerous.’ During the months that followed, however, material was read far too slowly – out of ‘real time’ – to influence events on the battlefield. Instead, Allied intelligence officers strove to make sense of a jumble of humint warnings, of varying degrees of plausibility, about when Hitler intended to strike in the West.

The first of these had come in the previous November when Major Gijsbert Sas, Dutch military attaché in Berlin, received a dramatic tip-off from his friend Colonel Hans Oster of the Abwehr: the Wehrmacht, said Oster, would launch a full-scale offensive against the British and French armies on the 12th of that month. This coincided with several other identical or similar warnings – including an important one from Col. Moravec’s Czechs in London, relayed by their man in Switzerland from Agent A-54, the Abwehr’s Paul Thummel. When nothing happened on 12 November, the British and French chiefs of staff assumed that they were the victims of Nazi disinformation. The Dutch already suspected Sas of being a double agent, and the credibility of the other sources, including A-54, suffered accordingly. Yet the warnings were correct. Hitler had indeed intended to strike in November. He was enraged that his generals insisted upon a last-minute postponement until spring, because the army was unready to move. Here was a vivid illustration of a precept later advanced by a British Army intelligence officer: ‘Perfect intelligence in war must of necessity be out-of-date and therefore ceases to be perfect … We deal not with the true, but with the likely.’

The next excitement took place one day in January 1940: thick fog caused a German courier aircraft flown by Major Erich Hönmanns to forced-land in neutral Belgium. Local police arrested the pilot and his passenger, an officer named Reinberger, interrupting them as they attempted to burn papers they carried, and retrieved the charred sheets from a stove. Within forty-eight hours the French and British high commands were reading the Wehrmacht’s plan for its intended invasion of France and the Low Countries, focused on a thrust through Holland and Belgium. Here was a textbook example of a genuine intelligence coup, with wholly unhelpful consequences. The French were confirmed in their conviction that the Germans would attack through Belgium as they had done in 1914, and as all France’s deployments anticipated. The British suspected an enemy deception: the material seemed too good to be true. Guy Liddell of MI5 wrote wearily on 14 January: ‘A German aeroplane came down in Belgium … with certain papers found on the pilot indicating projected attack by the Germans on Belgium and Holland. It looks rather as if this may have been part of the scheme for the war of nerves.’ Cadogan at the Foreign Office described receiving ‘complete plan of German invasion of the Low Countries. Very odd. But one can’t ignore these things, and all precautions taken.’

Kenneth Strong wrote ruefully afterwards: ‘So often I have heard it said that if we only had the plans of the other side things would be simple: when they actually came our way we found great difficulty in persuading ourselves that they were genuine.’ Most important, however, the capture immediately forfeited all virtue, because the German proprietors of the plan knew that the Allies had it. Thus, Hitler insisted on changing the invasion concept, to thrust instead through the Ardennes, which proved the one authentic strategic inspiration of his life. Here was another critical lesson about intelligence, especially important for codebreakers: captured material became worthless if its originators discovered that it was in enemy hands.

Alexander Cadogan noted in his diary for 19 January 1940 that Stewart Menzies now seemed to expect the Germans to attack soon after 25 January, and added dismissively, ‘but he’s rather mercurial, and rather hasty and superficial (like myself!)’. If this remark somewhat short-changed the diarist, it was scarcely a ringing endorsement of ‘C’. There was one further strand: low-grade Abwehr messages decrypted by MI5’s Radio Intelligence Service offered indications about the looming onslaught. At that time, however, machinery was lacking to analyse such material, to feed it into the military command system and ensure that notice was taken by commanders. In that pre-Ultra universe, politicians, diplomats and generals were chronically sceptical about intelligence of all kinds. When a new warning reached MI6 via Moravec’s ‘London Czechs’ – that Abwehr officer Paul Thummel expected a great Wehrmacht thrust on 10 May, it vanished in the welter of ‘noise’ that spring.

The 9 April German invasion of Norway caught the Western Allies totally by surprise. Though no decrypts were available, the Admiralty ignored or misread plentiful clues about Hitler’s intentions. When the Wehrmacht’s amphibious forces began to land on the Norwegian coast, the Royal Navy’s major units were far away, awaiting an anticipated breakout into the Atlantic by German battleships. Through the weeks that followed, Wehrmacht eavesdroppers easily tracked the British brigades struggling to aid the little Norwegian army, while intelligence learned little or nothing about the invaders’ lightning movements.

On 10 May 1940, Hitler launched his Blitzkrieg in the West. The panzers swept through the Ardennes, across the Meuse, and thence to the Channel coast and into the heart of France. Much of the information sent back from the front by French units was so fanciful that a headquarters intelligence officer, André Beaufre, dismissed it contemptuously as a ‘fiction flood’. Gen. Maurice Gamelin, the Allied commander-in-chief, rejected every report that contradicted his obsessive belief that the Germans still planned to make their main attack through Belgium.

The campaign proved a triumph for the German army’s intelligence department, as well as for its generals. An anglophile and bon viveur, Lt. Col. Ulrich Liss, headed Foreign Armies West – FHW, the Wehrmacht’s principal intelligence evaluation department. Liss, who was exceptionally able and energetic, called sigint ‘the darling of all intelligence chiefs’, because it could be trusted as spies could not – and in May 1940 the best of it was in the hands of his own staff. During the long, static winter, German interceptors had identified the locations of most of the Allies’ formations, much assisted by the insecurity of the French army’s wireless-operators and headquarters staffs, who often discussed plans and deployments in plain language. Col. Handeeming, radio intelligence’s interception chief with Army Group A, was explicitly commissioned to monitor the French Seventh Army’s advance into Belgium, which he did with notable efficiency.

Liss’s men also benefited from securing vast numbers of Allied prisoners. All armies gleaned much from PoW interrogation. Throughout the war, even if few prisoners knowingly betrayed secrets, amid the shock of capture most gave their captors more than the regulation ‘name, rank and number’. Rommel’s intelligence staff found that British prisoners talked freely until a late stage of the North African campaign. One of Montgomery’s officers enthused to the Germans, with almost insane indiscretion, that Eighth Army’s radio monitoring service was ‘brilliant in every respect’. A German wrote that British officers were repeatedly captured ‘carrying important lists, codes and maps’. It was a standard technique for intelligence officers to engage PoWs in apparently innocent conversation about non-military subjects. The Wehrmacht’s ‘Guidelines for the interrogation of English prisoners of war’, dated Berlin, 16 April 1940, urged commanders whenever possible to use interrogators familiar with Britain and the British. ‘If cordially addressed,’ said the briefing note, ‘every Englishman will at once answer all questions entirely frankly.’ Beyond immediate tactical issues, the Intelligence Department advised:

Special value is set on probing prevailing economic and social circumstances in England. Answers to the following questions are useful:

a) What are you told about Hitler?

b) What are you told about the Nazis?

c) What are you told about the Gestapo?

d) What are you told about the Jews?

e) What are you told about food conditions in Germany?

f) What are you told about military successes?

g) How do you make propaganda?

h) How are women and children cared for?

i) Do you take care of elderly parents no longer able to work, whose sons are soldiers? …

k) What is the food situation – especially meat, vegetables, eggs, butter, and bread?

l) What do you think of the black-out?

m) Who is currently the most popular man in England?

n) Who do you consider the most forceful personality in the British cabinet?

o) Do you listen to German radio?

p) Do you like [Lord] Haw-Haw [the Nazi propaganda broadcaster William Joyce]?

q) How are your relations with the French?

r) Do you believe that Germany is bent on world conquest?

s) Would you make peace tomorrow?

The behaviour of most PoWs was strongly influenced by their own nation’s immediate circumstances. At this time, when Allied fortunes were plumbing the depths, a report on the handful of German PoWs in British hands recorded gloomily: ‘The officers (and most of the men) were quite immune to propaganda, think Hitler is a god and refuse to believe a single word of the British news.’ By contrast, a South African RAF pilot named Sgt Edward Wunsch provided his German captors with a highly sympathetic view of the Nazi cause, as recorded by his interrogator: ‘Like all South Africans who have entered Dulag Luft, Wunsch is an unashamed anti-Semite … [He says] There is no hatred towards Germany in South Africa, no enthusiasm for the war at all. Most people believe the nonsense press and propaganda tell them about German atrocities but … W. thinks it possible that one day South Africa could agree to a separate peace, if Germany continues to be militarily successful [author’s italics].’

The Allies lost the 1940 battle for France for many reasons. It has been a source of fierce controversy ever since, whether the French army’s defeat resulted from a failure of judgement by Maurice Gamelin, Allied commander-in-chief, or instead from a national moral collapse. It is unlikely that any amount of intelligence or advance warning could have changed 1940 outcomes. The German army showed itself an incomparably more effective fighting force than the Allies’, and there would be no victories until that changed. If British and French intelligence was poor in 1940, so was everything else.

As the Continent was evacuated, there was a late flurry of buccaneering by secret service officers and freelances: MI6’s Major Monty Chidson, a former head of the Hague station, rescued a priceless haul of industrial diamonds from Amsterdam. Peter Wilkinson got most of the Polish general staff out of France. Tommy Davies, a peacetime director of the Courtaulds textile business, escaped from its Calais plant with a load of platinum hours before the Germans arrived. But these little coups were fleabites in the great scheme of affairs. MI6 had made no contingency plans for stay-behind agents, to report from France in the event of its occupation by the Nazis, and Broadway would probably have been accused of defeatism had it done so. Through many months that followed, Britain’s intelligence services were thus almost blind to events on the Continent, to the frustration of the prime minister. Beleaguered on their island, they became dependent for knowledge of Hitler’s doings on the vagaries of air reconnaissance, and reports from neutral diplomats and correspondents.

The security service explored the limits of the possible and the acceptable in handling a stream of Abwehr agents who descended on Britain, and were promptly captured. MI5 spurned torture as a means of interrogation: in September 1940 at Camp 020, one of its officers intervened to prevent the captured Abwehr agent ‘Tate’ – Harry Williamson – being assaulted and battered by Col. Alexander Scotland of MI9. Guy Liddell deplored this episode, saying that he objected to ‘Gestapo methods’ on both moral and professional grounds. Col. Scotland was likewise prevented from injecting Williamson with drugs. Naval Intelligence Division interrogators tested drugs on each other as a means of extracting information, and concluded that it was a waste of time. Skilled questioning, they decided, was not merely more ethical, but more effective.

As the next act of the great global drama unfolded – Hitler’s air assault on Britain – neither Broadway nor Bletchley Park had much to contribute. The most significant aid to Fighter Command in its epic struggle to repel Göring’s air fleets was wireless traffic analysis of the flood of Morse from the Germans’ new French, Belgian, Dutch and Norwegian bases, together with monitoring of Luftwaffe cockpit chatter by the German linguists of the RAF’s infant Y Service, most of them women.

The prime minister and the chiefs of staff were for many months preoccupied, even obsessed, by two questions: would the Germans invade; and if so, when? In the mad mood prevailing in London in the autumn of 1940, a blend of heroic defiance and absurdity, the War Office’s director of military intelligence suggested exploiting captured Abwehr agents to try to provoke the Germans into hastening an invasion, which he felt sure could be defeated by the Royal Navy and the British Army. This proposal found no favour in Whitehall. Meanwhile the disaster in France had endowed the Wehrmacht with almost magical powers in the minds of the generals, many of whom convinced themselves that Hitler might launch an amphibious assault on Britain with only a few weeks’ preparation, offering no notice to the defenders.

The Royal Navy’s Commander Geoffrey Colpoys was responsible for delivering to Downing Street each day at 1 p.m. a report from the Special Invasion Warning Committee, which for most of the autumn took it for granted that a German assault was imminent, and concerned itself chiefly with the timing. The Joint Intelligence Committee, chaired by the Foreign Office’s Victor ‘Bill’ Cavendish-Bentinck, only once sounded the alarm to suggest that invasion was imminent, on 7 September, when, as Bentinck himself noted sardonically later, he himself was briefly absent and the army’s somewhat unstable director of intelligence – the same man who advocated inciting the Wehrmacht to land – temporarily held the chair. Churchill himself was always sceptical about an invasion, but he deemed it politically imperative to sustain the British people’s belief in the threat not only in 1940, but throughout the following year also, to promote their vigilance and sense of purpose. On 31 July Sir Alexander Cadogan expressed his own conviction that the Germans would not come, but would instead thrust at Gibraltar and Egypt, then added, ‘our “intelligence” gives nothing to corroborate this theory. But then they’re awfully bad.’ Nowhere in the world were British agents providing information of much assistance to the war effort. The British C-in-C in Singapore, Air-Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, wrote in frustration: ‘Little or no reliance is placed upon MI6 information by any authorities here and little valuable information appears to be obtained.’ The same was true nearer home.

For many months after the German occupation of Western Europe, the only nation still able to exploit secret sources on a large scale was the neutral Soviet Union, through its networks in Belgium, Germany and Switzerland. In those days its agents did not even need to trouble with wireless: they simply passed reports to their nearest Soviet diplomatic mission. In May 1940 the GRU’s Leopold Trepper moved from Brussels to Paris, taking with him his mistress, the exotically named Georgie de Winter, a twenty-year-old American, and leaving his deputy Anatoli Gourevitch to arrange the Trepper family’s return to Moscow. Gourevitch’s own personal affairs were scarcely uncomplicated. Under his cover as a ‘Uruguayan businessman’ he had a succession of girlfriends, but felt obliged to break off relations with the prettiest when she revealed that her father knew South America well. ‘In other circumstances,’ he wrote wistfully, ‘I could probably have loved her, but such good fortune is denied to a secret agent.’ Thereafter, however, he formed a friendship with a neighbouring family named Barcza, whose elderly Hungarian husband was married to Margaret, a much younger Belgian blonde with an eight-year-old son. Following her husband’s sudden death, Gourevitch began an intense affair with her. Mikhail Makarov, the other GRU career officer in Belgium, was also leading what Gourevitch described primly as ‘an excessively dissipated life’, in which prostitutes played a conspicuous role.

The German invasion of Belgium gave Gourevitch some bad moments: Brussels police arrested his supposed English friend and language teacher, who turned out to be an Abwehr agent; the man was promptly liberated when his compatriots overran the capital. The GRU network’s cover company ‘Au Roi’ collapsed when its Jewish frontmen fled and the business was sequestered. Moscow ordered Gourevitch to take over control of the Belgian operation. He entered Margaret Barcza on Centre’s books – allegedly without her knowledge – as a source unimaginatively codenamed ‘the Blonde’. The most believable aspect of his own later account of the whole saga is its emphasis on the rickety, rackety nature of a spy ring that history – especially Soviet history – has dignified as one of the great secret operations of all time. Gourevitch asserted that Leopold Trepper’s much-vaunted intelligence network in France and Belgium ‘was composed almost entirely of his old Palestinian friends’, and provided Moscow with no usable intelligence about Germany’s descents on Poland, Scandinavia or Western Europe. It seems unlikely that the Russians learned much more from its activities during the year that followed than Churchill and his generals gleaned from their morning papers.

In the absence of serious British military operations save in North Africa, secret war became a massive growth activity, impelled by the prime minister himself. Special Operations Executive was created in July 1940, to ‘set Europe ablaze’, while the armed forces spawned commandos, paratroopers and a string of ‘private armies’, notably in the Middle East. New recruits of all kinds flooded into Broadway, some of them exotic. ‘Writers of thrillers,’ wrote the supremely cynical Malcolm Muggeridge, ‘tend to gravitate to the secret service as surely as the mentally unstable become psychiatrists, or the impotent pornographers.’ Thus was Graham Greene dispatched to Freetown, Sierra Leone, Muggeridge himself – a veteran foreign correspondent – to Lourenço Marques, in Portuguese Mozambique, and the journalist Kim Philby welcomed into Broadway. It became a source of dismay to career intelligence officers, protective of MI6’s reputation, that its wartime recruits who later commanded most public attention were all either mavericks or traitors.

Lacking its own agents on the Continent, Broadway turned to the European exile governments in London for assistance in identifying sources. The Poles began to build impressive networks in their own country, though they suffered grievously from the fact – then of course unknown to them – that the Germans read the ciphers in which they communicated with their agents. František Moravec and his Czech group achieved formal recognition as the intelligence arm of their government; MI6 provided them with wireless facilities and documents. The Czechs established a new base in three little adjoining suburban houses in Rosendale Road, West Dulwich, until these were destroyed by the Luftwaffe, then late in 1940 moved to a new building in Bayswater. MI6 did not, however, give them money. Moravec, after spending the last of the cash he had brought out of Prague, was obliged to negotiate a loan of £50,000, to pay his network’s outgoings of £3,000 a month. For some time he continued to receive East European material via Zürich – Captain Karel Sedlacek had served as Moravec’s station chief there since 1934, under cover as a newspaper correspondent; since he lacked any literary gifts he was obliged to pay a ghost to write copy in his name. The Abwehr’s Paul Thummel used the Czech officer as his link to London; when he was arrested by the Gestapo in March 1942, Moravec’s little group ran out of sources.

The British enjoyed one immense piece of good fortune following their eviction from the Continent: nowhere did the Germans capture people or documents that betrayed Allied progress in cracking Enigma. Between 1940 and 1944 many Frenchmen, including hundreds of thousands of servants of the Vichy puppet regime, collaborated with their occupiers. But Vichy’s military intelligence officers, and several Poles attached to them who were privy to the pioneering Enigma codebreaking operation, revealed nothing even later in the war, when they were exposed to enemy interrogation. The capacious nets cast across Europe by the Nazis focused overwhelmingly on hunting dissenters, not machines. In the early years of occupation, when most people in the conquered societies acquiesced in their fate, Berlin’s spies and policemen uncovered little to ruffle their masters’ complacency, and mercifully nothing that caused them to doubt the security of their own communications.

In the winter of 1940–41, none of the principal belligerents knew much more about each other’s affairs than they learned from studying the international press and watching such movements as they could see of the rival armies, navies and air fleets. Most of the successful codebreaking that was taking place was being done by the Germans, and especially by the Kriegsmarine’s B-Dienst. The British lacked power to accomplish anything save the feeding of their own people. Hitler prepared to launch the most dramatic and ambitious lunge of his career, the assault on the Soviet Union, an act that could only have been undertaken by a man either bereft of accurate intelligence about the economic strength of his intended victim, or recklessly indifferent to it.

2 SHADOWING CANARIS

The Germans had made themselves masters of Europe, and shown the Wehrmacht to be the most formidable fighting force in the world. By contrast, whatever the limitations of the British and other Allied intelligence services, those of Hitler’s Abwehr were incomparably worse. In the summer of 1940 the chiefs of the Nazis’ information-gathering machine toyed with a scheme to plant an agent on a wrecked ship off the English south coast, though they never came up with a credible notion of what such a hapless castaway might achieve there. They also discussed landing agents in Kent, who would be invited to scale the white cliffs, a plan that was frustrated by a shortage of spies with mountaineering skills. Meanwhile the Luftwaffe’s intelligence department misjudged every aspect of the Battle of Britain, from respective aircraft strengths and losses to target selection. In September 1940, following the interrogations of the first enemy spies landed in Britain, Kenneth Strong of War Office intelligence professed himself baffled. He could not reconcile his lifelong respect for German efficiency with the risible management of the Nazis’ espionage activities.

The Abwehr bungled the selection, training, briefing and equipment of agents for service abroad; seldom were they even provided with decent forged passports. It is hard to distinguish between reality and fantasy in the doings of its operational section, Abwehr II, because its war diary was compiled to impress higher authority, and thus included reports from agents who never existed, about operations that never took place. Its chief, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, who was regarded for decades after the war as an important personality and even as a hero of the Resistance to Hitler, was in reality a temporiser who lacked both the moral courage to challenge the Nazis whom he despised, and the skills to run an effective secret service in their interests.

The first man to grasp this was not a German, but a young English historian with a disdain for mankind in general, and professional secret service officers in particular. The manner in which Hugh Trevor-Roper became not the nemesis of Canaris, but instead his shadow, is one of the more remarkable stories of the secret war. The brilliant, testy, supremely arrogant Oxford don who, while not homosexual, professed a deep dislike of women, had just written his first book, a study of Archbishop Laud which he often reread during the war years: ‘I am forever discovering yet more exquisite beauties, lurking unsuspected among yet profounder truths.’ He spent the years between 1940 and 1945 monitoring the wireless traffic of the Abwehr, first for MI5 then for MI6. Trevor-Roper lived and breathed Canaris and his organisation, except on days when he went foxhunting. In growing degree, and comprehensively from 1943 onwards, the English academic learned more about Germany’s intelligence services than any man in the Nazi high command knew – certainly more than Canaris himself, because Trevor-Roper could identify the Abwehr’s many false informants, controlled by the so-called ‘Twenty Committee’ of intelligence officers in London chaired by MI5’s J.C. Masterman. The young academic may have nurtured a private longing, not unusual among intellectuals, to show himself also a man of action. He was immensely respectful of a lanky though never-met cousin, Richard Trevor-Roper, owner of a small estate in Wales, who joined the RAF’s Bomber Command and served as rear-gunner to the dambusting VC Guy Gibson, winning a DFM and DFC before being killed in action on his fiftieth operation, aged twenty-nine.

In December 1939 Hugh Trevor-Roper, then twenty-five, was summoned from Merton College to work alongside Walter Gill, a lecturer in electricity who had achieved celebrity as college bursar by installing lighting in Merton’s quadrangles. During World War I ‘Gilly’ had served in an army wireless section in Egypt, where he ran an aerial up the Great Pyramid. He listed his recreations in Who’s Who as riding, wireless research and ‘rebuking sin’. Now he and Trevor-Roper formed the nucleus of the Radio Security Service, a branch of MI5 initially quartered in the cells at Wormwood Scrubs jail in west London. Day after day, Post Office operators, previously employed to catch unlicensed private wireless transmissions, scoured the airwaves for signals from enemy agents transmitting from Britain, whom it would then be the role of the Merton pair to scotch.

Gill and Trevor-Roper found themselves frustrated by the emptiness of the ether, or rather by the absence of such traffic as they sought. They were failing, so it seemed. Only slowly did they come to understand that this was not because their own eavesdroppers were incompetent, but because no German spies were signalling home. Finding their original function redundant, on their own initiative the two dons widened their researches: they began to gather intercepts from stations in Europe that used known Abwehr callsigns. One evening, in the flat they shared in the west London suburb of Ealing, over tea and biscuits they cracked an Abwehr hand-cipher – a lower encryption system used by Canaris’s bases for communications with out-stations and agents lacking Enigma machines. Trevor-Roper, a fluent German linguist, started to read its messages.

When this came to the notice of Alastair Denniston, chief of Bletchley Park, he was not amused. The RSS’s amateurs were told that they were meddling in matters of no proper concern to them. Denniston added crossly that the Abwehr material was unimportant anyway. In fairness, his dismay about the RSS’s freelancing reflected more than petty jealousy. Months, indeed years, lay ahead before Bletchley’s codebreaking operations achieved maturity, but from the outset it was obvious that if the Germans gained an inkling of what was being achieved, the game would be over. The more diffused was British cryptographic activity, the greater the risk of a leak. Broadway stepped in, to vent its own justified anger, when it was learned that Trevor-Roper’s report on Abwehr activities in North Africa was circulated to a distribution list that included the Post Office wireless section.

Gill and Trevor-Roper, stubborn and mischievous men both, persisted nonetheless; they were soon reading much of the Abwehr’s traffic with its out-stations. To the dons’ glee, even when Bletchley established its own cell to monitor the same Canaris links, it was RSS and not GC&CS which broke the next four hand-ciphers. In the spring of 1941 RSS acquired a new interception centre with American equipment at Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire, and began to establish its own out-stations abroad. In the course of the war, the little service passed on a million signals to Bletchley.

MI6 eventually made a successful takeover bid for RSS, which was logical, given Broadway’s suzerainty over signals intelligence. Trevor-Roper found himself working with Stewart Menzies’ communications supremo, one of the secret service’s more exotic figures, Colonel Richard Gambier-Parry. The colonel was one of many luminaries of ‘secret shows’ who was able to exploit to his own advantage their freedom from accountability to a service hierarchy. Gambier-Parry established MI6’s communications centre at Whaddon Hall in Buckinghamshire, which he also made his personal residence. A keen horseman, he took over the pre-war owner’s pack of hounds and placed the huntsmen on Broadway’s payroll; on one notable occasion, the hounds in hot pursuit streamed through the security gate of Bletchley Park, arousing in the mind of a mounted spectator in the know about its activities an idyllic vision of the brutes gorging on half-digested decrypts. Gambier-Parry lived like a medieval baron. Trevor-Roper, who knew him as a fellow-foxhunter, marvelled: ‘In the world of neurotic policemen and timid placemen who rule the secret service, he moves like Falstaff, or some figure from Balzac, if not Rabelais.’ It should be added that for the rest of the war Gambier-Parry ran MI6’s communications with energy and flair.

Hugh Trevor-Roper became head of the intelligence section of MI6’s Radio Analysis Bureau, run by Felix Cowgill, a former Indian policeman. Cowgill intensely disliked his new junior, whom he deemed guilty of ‘irreverent thoughts and dangerous contacts’. The Oxford historian took it upon himself to go well beyond the production of raw intelligence, conducting evaluation and analysis in a fashion MI6 had always spurned, because it lacked officers clever enough to do such work. The RAB began to produce ‘purple primers’, local guides to Abwehr personalities and agents around the world, which soon ran to many pages. The bureau noted that the Italians, who before the war had enjoyed some notable intelligence successes, were now almost entirely dependent for material on the Germans, and thus acquired their weaknesses.

In the summer of 1941 Trevor-Roper acquired an assistant, twenty-one-year-old Charles Stuart, who had just left Christ Church with a First in history, and the two were joined by another Oxford man, Gilbert Ryle. Patrick Reilly, a gifted young diplomat who became Stewart Menzies’ personal assistant, thought their little cell ‘a team of a brilliance unparalleled anywhere in the Intelligence machine’. Trevor-Roper began to serve as secretary of the joint MI5–MI6 Wireless Committee, in which role he came to know almost everyone significant in the secret world. The peering, bespectacled historian became one of the outstanding British intelligence officers of the war. His mastery of German operations increased steadily, especially after Bletchley’s Dillwyn Knox broke into the principal Abwehr machine cipher in December 1941. While the chiefs of Broadway believed – more so following the Venlo fiasco – that their enemies’ intelligence officers were wizards of guile, from an early stage Trevor-Roper became convinced of the Germans’ institutional incompetence. As for the Abwehr’s chief, he said, far from being a masterspy Canaris was a lost little man drifting on the tides of fate.

Admiral Wilhelm Canaris came from a family of Rhineland industrialists. After service as a U-boat officer in World War I he became engaged in right-wing politics, while playing a role in rebuilding the German navy. A senior officer’s 1926 personal report extolled his skills at the military-political interface: ‘With the finest feel for foreign psychology and mentality, together with uncommon linguistic ability, he knows in exemplary fashion how to deal with foreigners (from the lowest to the prominent).’ Interestingly, however, other naval officers, including Erich Raeder and Karl Dönitz, disliked Canaris, thinking him sly.

During the early years of Hitler’s rule he ingratiated himself enthusiastically and successfully with the foremost Nazis. In 1935, aged forty-eight, he was appointed chief of Germany’s intelligence service, controlling both espionage abroad and counter-espionage at home, though Himmler ran his own domestic security service, the RSHA, under Ernst Kaltenbrunner, with the Gestapo as its enforcement arm. As Trevor-Roper noted, ‘All German politicians of consequence sought to set up their own information bureaus (just as they also sought to establish private armies) as additional supports for their personal authority; and it was essential to the purpose of these bureaus that their results should be the private property of their chiefs.’

The RSHA was no more efficient than the Abwehr, but it wielded more influence through its direct subordination to Himmler. MI6 noted that it achieved good penetration of neutral embassies in Berlin, which yielded useful information. Meanwhile, Canaris’s service had stations around the world and intelligence cells within every formation of the Wehrmacht. The admiral’s early years of office saw a dramatic expansion of his empire; he achieved a reputation for administrative efficiency and diplomatic skills, both in his handling of the Nazi hierarchy and in dealing with prominent foreigners. Until at least 1942, the service’s prestige stood high both inside Germany and abroad.

Canaris was instinctively secretive, even before he became a spymaster, and more so thereafter. Within the rambling warren of offices in a row of converted mansions on Berlin’s Tirpitzufer, where the Abwehr had its headquarters until it was bombed out in 1943, he seemed to glide almost invisibly from one room to another. So he did too on his frequent travels to other countries, especially Spain: a signed portrait of Franco, its dictator, adorned his office wall. He seldom wore uniform – an oddity in Nazi society, which was obsessed with fancy dress. He was elaborately courteous, not least to subordinates, and something of a hypochondriac who took too many pills. He relaxed by riding regularly and playing a smart game of tennis. His passion for animals was much remarked: he was followed around Abwehr headquarters by two dachshunds, to which he talked constantly. One of them once fell ill while Canaris was visiting Italy, and he telephoned at length to Berlin to discuss its condition. His Italian companions assumed that he was speaking in code about great issues of state, but his obsession with the dog was authentic. He often said that he trusted animals more than people; it was probably more accurate to say that he liked them better. In conversation, whether professional or social, he was a master of equivocation. Few people were ever sure what Canaris really thought, which was supposed by contemporaries to reflect his depth of character. More likely, it masked chronic indecision.

Although technically a branch of OKW, the Abwehr quickly became Canaris’s personal fiefdom. Throughout the war his men achieved considerable success in suppressing dissent and capturing Western Allied agents operating in Hitler’s empire, which did much to sustain the admiral’s standing in Nazi high places: Col. Franz von Bentevegni, who ran counter-espionage, was one of Canaris’s few impressive subordinate appointments. Yet the Russians were able to sustain their astonishing espionage activities inside Germany until 1942, and military leakages persisted until 1945, even if the huge matter of Germany’s broken codes lay beyond Canaris’s remit.

The agents his officers dispatched to gather information abroad were almost all unfit for the role. It is odd that Berlin never attempted to recruit spies to dispatch to Britain who might have passed for gentlemen. Even in 1940, the accent and manners of the upper class remained a passport to social acceptance in Churchill’s embattled island. The writer Cyril Connolly wrote an angry letter to the New Statesman complaining that when he himself was detained as a possible spy, he was immediately released when it was discovered that he had been educated at Eton. The experience of the Cambridge Spies, deemed beyond suspicion as members of the upper-middle class, suggests that if the Abwehr had dispatched to Britain a few Nazis with passable table manners and some skill as fly-casters or grouse-shooters, they would have been asked to all the best houses.

As it was, however, when two of Canaris’s key men, Col. Hans Pieckenbrock, the head of intelligence, and Col. Erwin Lahousen, head of sabotage, were sacked in 1943, this was no gesture of Nazi spite, made for political reasons; it was the consequence of their obvious incompetence and of their departments’ failure. German secret operations abroad deployed immense labour for negligible results. One of the Abwehr’s most notable recruits was naval lieutenant Heinrich Garbers. He was a vegetable farmer’s son, a passionate Nazi, who in 1938 had sailed across the Atlantic in a thirty-foot yacht, the Windspiel, which he constructed himself. Amid the Allied naval blockade, the Germans devised the notion of dispatching agents to far-flung places in sailing boats too humble to attract the attention of the enemy. In 1941 and 1942 Garbers made epic forays to South Africa and Namibia respectively. Thereafter he captained the little schooner Passim, which made two immense voyages at an average speed of six knots. The boat sailed under the name of the Santa Maria, and flew successively French, Spanish and Portuguese colours as Garbers deemed appropriate. In 1943 he carried three Abwehr men, codenamed ‘Walter’, ‘Fred’ and ‘Jim’, to Argentina, in what he afterwards described laconically as ‘an uneventful voyage of 65 days’.

In a nautical sense it may be true that nothing much happened, but relations on board were poisoned by the mutual loathing of Walter and Fred, while Jim was perpetually prostrate with sea-sickness, which cost him a drastic weight loss. The passengers were successfully delivered to a reception committee of Argentine sympathisers at Rio del Plata, who presented the Passim’s crew with coffee and oranges before the little vessel turned about and sailed home. Garbers, plainly a man of iron, seemed wholly untroubled by his experiences. He returned safely to Europe and received the Ritterkreuz. There is no evidence, however, that his passengers contributed anything to the Nazi war effort. Likewise, the Hungarian air force officer Count László Almásy crossed 2,000 miles of North African desert to deliver two agents to Egypt in May 1942, a remarkable achievement, and Almásy later inspired the novel and film The English Patient, though its version of this enthusiastic Nazi was fanciful. His passengers, however, did nothing on arrival to justify their epic journey. Nearer home, it became increasingly clear to the British monitoring the Abwehr’s wirelessed reports that its network of overseas stations and informants produced almost nothing that was both new and true.

As Trevor-Roper pursued his researches through the ever-growing harvest of Bletchley decrypts, ‘We soon became aware that “the little Admiral” was a far more complex and controversial character than we had supposed. As the incompetence of his organisation was progressively revealed to us, we discovered, or deduced, something of the politics in which he was involved, and we noted his feverish travels, in every direction, but especially to Spain, which distinguished him sharply from our own more sedentary chief’ – Stewart Menzies. For several decades after the war, Canaris was treated as a major figure of the era, the subject of several weighty biographies. The foremost element in the Canaris mythology was a claim that he had been a secret crusader against Hitler, who had given active assistance to the Allied cause. Several German writers energetically promoted this view, because their post-war society was desperate to identify virtuous men who had dared to raise their hands against the vast evil of Nazism, and suffered martyrdom in consequence.

It is now plain that such claims were unfounded. Until 1938 Canaris was an ardent supporter of the Nazis, and for years thereafter Hitler frequently used him as a personal emissary abroad. The admiral worked amicably with Reinhard Heydrich of the RSHA. The two families socialised: Frau Canaris and the executive planner of the Holocaust sometimes played the violin together. From 1939 onwards, the admiral became increasingly gloomy and nervous – colleagues noted him drinking heavily. Trevor-Roper regarded it as an absurd delusion that Canaris was the directing brain of ‘the other Germany’. The Abwehr’s chief, in his view, was a man of limited gifts, who confined his anti-Nazi activities to making his organisation a haven for officers who shared his rising distaste for Hitler and his supporters, and who resisted active complicity in the Nazis’ atrocities. Canaris’s fastidious nature recoiled from the coarseness of their conduct, perhaps more than from its insensate barbarity.

The only Abwehr officer known to have been a source for MI6 was Hans-Berndt Gisevius in Switzerland, a Prussian lawyer of giant physical proportions who served five years in the Gestapo and hated it, before transferring to the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1938 and thence to the Abwehr. Canaris sent him to Zürich under diplomatic cover as vice-consul, and thereafter he passed information to Halina Szymańska, whom he knew was an informant for both British and Polish intelligence. Gisevius provided material for twenty-five reports dispatched from Bern to Broadway between August 1940 and December 1942, some of them citing Canaris’s professed opinions; also among his sources was Hitler’s finance minister, Hjalmar Schacht.

Szymańska, the conduit, was the formidable and beautiful wife of the former Polish military attaché in Berlin, and once dined with Canaris in Bern. Much of Gisevius’s material was accurate: in January 1941 Szymańska passed on his report about German aircraft stocks, together with the Abwehr man’s opinion that an invasion of Britain was ‘off’. In April she quoted Gisevius’s view, based on information from Schacht, that Hitler would invade Russia during the following month – which indeed was then his intention. But, as usual with intelligence, the German also passed on some rubbish: on 28 March 1941 he told Szymańska that German forces would not take the offensive in Libya – two days before Rommel launched a major onslaught.

Gisevius’s contribution, and those of a handful of his colleagues, scarcely made the Abwehr a pillar of Resistance against the Nazis. Its wartime shortcomings were the product of indolence and incompetence rather than of considered treachery. Canaris was a poor delegator, who chose weak subordinates. German intelligence had one notable success abroad, in suborning Yugoslav officers ahead of their army’s 1941 emergency mobilisation, in time to sabotage the process, but thereafter its espionage operations were uniformly unsuccessful. The admiral was nonetheless too much a German patriot actively to assist his country’s enemies. Like many such people of the time, he harboured muddled political views. A monarchist and a conservative, Franco’s Spain was his spiritual home; he travelled there as often as he could, not merely to visit the large Madrid Abwehr HQ at Calle Claudio Coello 151, but also to commune with like-minded Spanish politicians and grandees. The Abwehr’s ship-watching service in Spain, the Unternehmen Bodden, monitoring Allied movements through the Straits of Gibraltar with the aid of advanced infra-red technology, and reporting them to the Kriegsmarine and the Luftwaffe’s Air Fleet 1 in Italy, formed the most impressive element in the organisation’s overseas operations.

Yet if Canaris bears much responsibility for the shortcomings of Germany’s ‘big picture’ intelligence, he could never have run an honest operation under the dead hand of Hitler, any more than Moscow Centre could do so in the shadow of Stalin. Reports on the condition and prospects of the enemy were permitted to reach conclusions only within parameters acceptable to the Führer. This crippling constraint was symbolised by Hitler’s annotation on an important intelligence report about Russian agricultural conditions: ‘This cannot be.’ Kurt Zeitzler, chief of the army general staff, wrote on 23 October 1942, the eve of Stalingrad: ‘The Russians no longer have any reserves worth mentioning and are not capable of launching large-scale offensives.’ Himmler in 1944 declared without embarrassment that his first requirement from Germany’s intelligence services was not truth, but loyalty to the Führer. This was an important statement, the most vivid expression of the huge weakness of the Abwehr and the RSHA throughout the Second World War.

Historian Michael Handel has written: ‘Leaders in a democratic system are generally more inclined to consider a wide variety of options than those who have always functioned within authoritarian or totalitarian political systems. In authoritarian countries, where the climb to the top is an unrelenting struggle for power, habits of cooperation and openness are usually less developed … Tolerance for ideas that deviate from the “party line” … are seen as personal criticism.’ These features of almost all dictatorships crippled German intelligence activities beyond the battlefield, and sometimes also within it. Himmler’s deputy Reinhard Heydrich, for instance, was far more interested in using the RSHA as a weapon against the Nazi empire’s internal enemies than as a means of securing information about its foreign foes. Hitler never wished to use intelligence as a planning or policy-making tool. He recognised its utility only at a tactical level: the Nazis were strikingly incurious about Abroad.

Yet the fact that the Abwehr was an unsuccessful intelligence-gathering organisation did not mean that Hitler’s armed forces were blind on the battlefield: their access to tactical intelligence was generally good. In the first half of the war Germany’s wireless interceptors and codebreakers enjoyed successes which would today seem impressive, were they not measured against those of the British and Americans. The Wehrmacht had excellent voice-monitoring units, which in every theatre of war provided important information. ‘The Y Service was the best source of intelligence,’ said Hans-Otto Behrendt, one of Rommel’s staff in North Africa. In August 1941, aided by an Italian employee, two agents of the Sezione Prelevamento – the ‘extraction section’ of Italian intelligence – opened the safe of the military attaché’s office at the US embassy in Rome. They removed his codebook – Military Intelligence Code No. 11 – and photographed it. This enabled the Axis to read substantial traffic through the ensuing ten months, and proved a seriously significant intelligence break. In 1942 it had especially grievous consequences for Eighth Army in the desert, since the US military attaché in Cairo, Col. Bonner Fellers, reported in detail to Washington on British plans and intentions. A German intelligence officer paid generous tribute to ‘this incomparable source of authentic and reliable information, which … contributed so decisively during the first half of 1942 to our victories in North Africa’.

At sea, some of the Royal Navy’s ciphers were found aboard the British submarine Seal, captured off the German coast on 5 May 1940, owing to an extraordinary and culpable failure by the minelayer’s officers to destroy its confidential papers. The Kriegsmarine was able to read much of the Royal Navy’s North Sea traffic until August 1940, and some warship communications until September 1941. Throughout the first half of the war, the Kriegsmarine’s B-Dienst read the Royal Navy’s convoy codes, with grievous consequences for Allied shipping losses. Even where signals could not be decrypted, radio-traffic analysis enabled Axis intelligence staffs to judge enemy deployments remarkably effectively, at least until the second half of the war, when Allied commanders became more astute and security-conscious. Patrolling, air reconnaissance and PoW interrogations all provided streams of useful data to German operational commanders, as did open-source information – enemy newspaper and broadcast monitoring.

In the first phase of the war until 1942, while the Wehrmacht was triumphant on battlefields across Europe, these sources sufficed to tell its commanders all that they felt they needed to know about the world, and about their enemies. Victories masked the abject humint failures of the Abwehr. As long as Germany was winning, why should anyone make trouble about imperfections in the war machine? It was only when Hitler’s armies started losing that hard questions began to be asked about the Reich’s abysmal political and strategic intelligence. Hitler himself was, of course, much to blame, but Canaris exercised operational responsibility. The admiral fell from grace, though it was by then far too late – probably impossible, for reasons institutionalised in the Nazi system – to repair his corrupt and ineffective espionage organisation.

While anxious not to be a bad man, Canaris lacked the courage to be a good one. Far from being a substantial historical figure, he was a small one, grappling with dilemmas and difficulties far beyond his capabilities. Trevor-Roper professed to see a close resemblance between the admiral and Menzies, his British counterpart. Both men were conservative, honourable – and weak. By a trifling coincidence, Canaris had a mistress in Vienna whose sister was married to Menzies’ brother. Trevor-Roper came to regard the Abwehr as ‘a mirror image of [MI6], with many of the same weaknesses and absurdities … I recognised, across the intervening fog of war, old friends of Broadway and Whaddon Hall transmuted into German uniform in the Tirpitz Ufer or at Wannsee.’ The admiral did little to merit his eventual fate at the hands of Hitler’s executioners: he frequently talked treason, but did nothing to further it. Far from becoming a martyr to the cause of a ‘good Germany’, he was merely an incompetent servant of an evil one.

3
Miracles Take a Little Longer: Bletchley
1 ‘TIPS’ AND ‘CILLIS’

In the winter of 1939, MI6 came under scrutiny and fierce criticism within Whitehall, intensified by the Venlo fiasco. Stewart Menzies, knowing the precariousness of his position as ‘C’, compiled a twenty-six-page document defending his service, in which he risked playing one card which might – and did – save his bacon. He promised his masters that the country was ‘about to reap the fruits’ of MI6’s liaison with Allied secret services in a fashion ‘which should be of inestimable benefits to the Air Ministry within a few weeks, and probably to the Admiralty within a month or two’. The significance of this vaguely expressed claim was that Menzies believed that Bletchley Park, with the help of the French and Poles, was close to cracking some German ciphers. Such successes could go far indeed towards compensating for MI6’s humint failure. His expectations would remain unfulfilled for much of the year that followed. Few even within the intelligence community dared to hope that Britain could emulate, far less surpass, the 1914–18 triumphs of Room 40. Admiral Godfrey, head of naval intelligence, wrote to Menzies on 18 November, saying that ‘whether or not Cryptanalysis will ever again give us the knowledge we had of German movements in the late war’, MI6 should exert itself to plant agents in enemy ports to report shipping movements. Godfrey did not seem to expect much from the codebreakers.

In peacetime, few nations commit their finest brains to national security. Brilliant people seldom choose careers in intelligence – or, for that matter, in the armed forces. A struggle for national survival alone makes it possible for a government to mobilise genius, or people possessing something close to it, in the interests of the war effort. The British, and latterly the Americans, did this more effectively than any other participants in World War II. A remarkable proportion of their nations’ brightest and best sooner or later found themselves performing tasks worthy of their talents – in higher army staff posts alongside the likes of Enoch Powell, John Freeman, Toby Aldington; in scientific or technical research; and especially in intelligence, which absorbed thousands of outstanding intellects from many walks of life. The outbreak of war enabled the German section of British military intelligence, for instance, to recruit such writers and academics as Noel Annan, Eric Birley and Alan Pryce-Jones. Annan, a Cambridge don who had only a passable acquaintance with German and French, observed wonderingly: ‘Within a week I was piecing together the reports of agents in the Balkans and the early stutterings of Ultra.’

Donald McLachlan, a journalist who served under Godfrey at the Admiralty, afterwards argued that all wartime intelligence departments should be run by civilians in uniform, because they are unburdened by the lifetime prejudices of career soldiers, sailors and airmen: ‘It is the lawyer, the scholar, the traveller, the banker, even the journalist who shows the ability to resist where the career men tend to bend. Career officers and politicians have a strong interest in cooking raw intelligence to make their masters’ favourite dishes.’ MI6 remained until 1945 under the leadership of its old hands, but most of Britain’s secret war machine passed into the hands of able civilians in uniform who – after an interval of months or in some cases years while they were trained and their skills recognised – progressively improved the quality of intelligence analysis. The Admiralty’s Submarine Tracking Room was directed by Rodger Winn, a barrister and future judge. Gen. Sir Bernard Montgomery’s chief of intelligence from Alamein to Luneburg Heath was the Oxford don Edgar ‘Bill’ Williams, latterly a brigadier. Reg Jones made himself a legend in scientific intelligence.

These men, and a few hundred others throughout the armed forces, spent much of the war exploiting and assessing information derived overwhelmingly from interception and decryption of the enemy’s wireless traffic. Bill Williams, who served in the Mediterranean until 1943 and in Europe thereafter, stated in an important 1945 report: ‘It must be made quite clear that Ultra and Ultra only put intelligence on the map.’ Until decrypts began to become available in bulk in 1942, ‘Intelligence was the Cinderella of the staff … Information about the enemy was frequently treated as interesting rather than valuable [though] of course this attitude varied according to the commander.’

Scepticism was often merited, because much material was downright specious. The 1940 war diary of the army’s Middle East intelligence section in Cairo included comically frivolous snippets: ‘All Hungarian cabaret artistes have been ordered to leave the country by the end of May.’ Data about the Italian army was scanty, so that on 9 August the section recorded: ‘The present location and organisation of Libyan troops in Eastern Cyrenaica is obscure.’ A despondent staff officer added a week later: ‘There has been no further reliable information of fresh [Italian] ground units or formations arriving in Libya from overseas.’ On 27 September, the British high command’s weekly intelligence summary included a paragraph on domestic conditions in Germany: ‘A neutral traveller to the Leipsic fair, whose personal observations are believed reliable, reports that relations between the [Nazi] Party and the Army are not good.’ Three months later, the head of MI6’s Political Section wrung his hands: ‘It is piteous to find ourselves in this state of ignorance’ about both Germany’s internal condition and economy.

Only when Allied warlords were empowered to read the messages being exchanged between enemy generals in the field and their higher headquarters was scepticism about the value of ‘intelligence’ replaced by increasingly fervent belief. Ultra forced commanders-in-chief, not to mention the prime minister, to treat senior intelligence officers with a respect they had seldom received in the pre-Bletchley universe. Brigadier Ian Jacob of the war cabinet secretariat said: ‘My impression is that once the Ultra business got well-established, Churchill didn’t look at anything else.’ Eisenhower’s intelligence chief Kenneth Strong wrote in 1943, in a memorandum on training staff officers: ‘We no longer depend on agents and cloak-and-dagger sources for our information. Modern methods have completely transformed intelligence.’

He meant codebreaking, of course, and in Britain the fountainhead of such activity was the Government Code & Cypher School at Bletchley. In the months following the outbreak of war, GC&CS expanded dramatically with the arrival of a stream of academics, many of them earmarked by its recruiters before the war. Though some were seconded from the armed forces, it was understood that there was no need to train the universities’ contingent to march, blanco webbing, and name the parts of a rifle. They remained their sallow, tweedy, pipe-smoking young selves when housed in lodgings around the dreary suburban town, and enlisted on the government payroll without uniform or ceremony. Twenty-year-old mathematician Keith Batey found his landlady demanding an assurance from his employer that he was not a despised ‘conchy’ – conscientious objector – before he joined the growing body of academics working on a task of supreme importance to their country, fulfilment of which might do something to assuage its shocking vulnerability. What was the task? Bletchley’s little band, 169 strong in 1939 including support staff, understood only that the nation’s enemies communicated in a multitude of codes and ciphers, vulnerable to interception. If even a portion of these combinations of numbers and letters could be rendered intelligible, information might be gained of priceless value to the war effort.

Nobody knew, in the beginning, whether a given message hijacked from the airwaves might be an order from Hitler for his armies to march on Warsaw, or a request from a Luftwaffe airfield in eastern Germany for a delivery of filing cabinets. Ahead of the codebreakers lay a mammoth menu of requirements which could only be addressed as mobilisation sluggishly made available ears, brains and hands to monitor the enemy’s frequencies around the clock, log some of his vast output of messages, fix the locations and possible identities of the senders – diplomatic, police, military, naval or air force. Then came the much greater challenge, of discovering what the messages meant.

All radio communications involved a trade-off between speed and security. At the simplest level, battlefield direction by land, sea and air required some voice linkage. This enabled the instantaneous passage of orders and information, at the cost of being overheard by anybody else who cared to tune to a given frequency. Crude security could be introduced by using coded callsigns in place of names and suchlike – during the Battle of Britain fighter controllers added 5,000 feet to indicated altitudes, to confuse eavesdroppers. But voice messaging was inherently insecure: sensitive information should never be passed verbally, though it often was.

Most military messages were instead wirelessed by Morse key. Low-level material could be rapidly encrypted under battlefield conditions by relatively unsophisticated personnel using so-called hand- or field-ciphers, usually involving groups of two or three letters or numbers – the Kriegsmarine employed twenty-seven variants. More sensitive traffic, issuing from higher echelons, was translated by machine-generated or manual ciphers, usually involving combinations of four or five letters or numbers. The British thought justifiably highly of the security of their Type-X machines, though they never had enough of them.* The Americans rightly trusted their Sigaba, a fifteen-rotor system.

For substantial periods between 1939 and 1943 the Germans broke some Allied codes, including those of the US State Department and military attachés, along with the traffic of several exile governments, notably the Poles and Free French. They sometimes also accessed messages of all three British services, including the RAF’s four-character cipher, and later had successes in attacking products of the US Army’s M-209 field-ciphering machine. It deserves emphasis that Allied code-security weaknesses, and enemy achievements in exploiting them, gave the Germans much more operational assistance than some Western historians acknowledge, especially in the Battle of the Atlantic. However, higher British, American and Russian communications defied enemy scrutiny: Nazi eavesdropping on transatlantic telephone conversations between Churchill and Roosevelt told Berlin little of value. Modern claims that the Germans broke into Russian higher ciphers deserve to be treated with caution: certainly from 1942 onwards, there is no evidence that Hitler’s generals profited from any such insights; if they had, they would have been less often deluded by Soviet deceptions.

Most German senior officers – though by no means all their cryptographers – were confident that Enigma ciphering machines, which scrambled messages by means of shifting rotors and a plugboard, and rendered them comprehensible only by a matching machine with identical settings, were immune to the attention of any enemy, and indeed to the workings of the human brain. It is unsurprising that in 1939 they discounted the possibility that electro-mechanical technology might dramatically accelerate exposure of the Enigma’s secrets, because it did not then exist. It is extraordinary, however, that such serene confidence persisted through six years that followed, even following the discovery that the Poles had broken some pre-war Enigma traffic, and several warnings from their own experts. Amazing hubris was expressed by the Wehrmacht’s last signals chief, Lt. Gen. Albert Praun, who preened himself before his Allied captors after the war ended: ‘The achievements of German communications intelligence … may speak in favour of the German type of intelligence organisation.’ His organisation, he said, ‘gave German commanders a hitherto unattained degree of [signal] security’.

The British breaking of the Enigma, then subsequently and separately of German teleprinter traffic, was a progressive, incremental operation which attained maturity only between 1943 and 1945, and was never uninterrupted or comprehensive: even at peaks, only about half of all intercepts were read, many of them too late to provide practical assistance ‘at the sharp end’. What was done at Bletchley Park was indeed miraculous, but the codebreakers were never able to walk on all of the water, all of the time.

The 1939–40 Phoney War conferred few benefits on Britain, but it granted GC&CS precious time to bolster its strength and refine its methods. Without mechanical aids Bletchley’s brainstormers made modest and delayed breaches in a small number of enemy ciphers. The Germans employed acronyms and codenames which took weeks or months for their enemies to interpret. The importance of what happened at Bletchley in the first two years of war was not that it enabled Britain’s generals to avert or arrest a disastrous run of defeats, which it certainly did not, but that it lit a candle of hope about what the codebreakers and their embryo technology might accomplish in the future. It enabled the directors of the war effort to lay upon the board a few scattered pieces of a vast jigsaw, which would be filled only during the Allies’ years of victory.

Bletchley Park – Station X, Box 111 c/o The Foreign Office – was a notably ugly Victorian pile of bastard architectural origins surrounded by fifty-five acres of trees and grassland, located fifty miles from London. It was purchased in 1938 to house GC&CS at a safe distance from German bombs by Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, then head of MI6; as legend has it, he used £7,500 out of his own pocket, but more plausibly he paid with secret funds under his control. Whatever MI6’s humint weaknesses, the service’s chiefs, especially Sinclair, deserve full credit for backing the establishment of Bletchley at a time when resources were desperately constrained. Work began at once on laying direct phone and teleprinter lines to London, and in the following year MI6’s skeleton team of cryptanalysts moved from Broadway to the Park, where they came under the orders of Alastair Denniston. One of his colleagues from the old Admiralty days, Dillwyn Knox, an expert on ancient Egyptian papyri, became an early Bletchley stalwart. The most prominent of the younger recruits were Gordon Welchman of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, Hugh Alexander, Stuart Milner-Barry, John Jeffreys – and Alan Turing.

This last, the twenty-seven-year-old son of an Indian civil servant and the product of an austere and emotionally arid childhood, had just returned from a stint at Princeton clutching one of his own creations, a so-called electric multiplier machine mounted on a breadboard. His headmaster at Sherborne had once written: ‘If he is to stay at a public school, he must aim at becoming educated. If he is to be solely a Scientific Specialist, then he is wasting his time.’ In the headmaster’s terms, Turing had indeed been ‘wasting his time’: he had evolved into a shy, narrow, obsessive. Noel Annan wrote: ‘I liked his sly, secret humour … His inner life was more real to him than actuality. He disliked authority wherever he was … [and] enjoyed games and treasure hunts and silliness … Turing was the purest type of homosexual, longing for affection and love that lasted.’ More even than by his sexuality and his often childlike immaturity, however, his tragedy was to be afflicted by the exquisitely painful loneliness of genius.

Other drafts of young academics followed, variously codebreakers and linguists, together with the first of what became successive waves of young women, who would play a vital role in the operations of ‘BP’. The first two of these were daughters of golfing partners of Denniston, reflecting the importance of personal connections in Bletchley’s recruitment process in the early days, before industrialisation became inescapable. Indeed, the whole wartime intelligence machine emphasised the cosiness of the upper reaches of British life. Oxford University Press was entrusted with responsibility for printing vast quantities of codes, maps and reports, because of its pre-war experience producing examination papers under secure conditions. The Admiralty’s liaison with OUP was handled by Margaret Godfrey, wife of the director of naval intelligence. The Royal Navy’s Topographical Photographic Library was housed in the basement of the nearby Bodleian Library, which eventually dispatched 300,000 images a month to operational areas. The World War I intelligence veteran Admiral Sir William ‘Blinker’ Hall introduced Godfrey, his modern successor, to the City of London banking giants Montagu Norman, Olaf Hambro and the Rothschilds, who helped to identify suitable recruits for the NID.

Candidates being scrutinised for Bletchley were often asked: ‘Do you have religious scruples about reading other people’s correspondence?’ Twenty-year-old Harry Hinsley was interviewed at St John’s College, Cambridge by Alastair Denniston and Col. John Tiltman, the senior codebreaker. They said: ‘You’ve travelled a bit, we understand. You’ve done quite well in your Tripos. What do you think of government service? Would you rather have that than be conscripted?’ Hinsley would indeed, and joined the Naval Section located in Bletchley’s Hut 4. Through the icy winter of 1939–40, such men and women wrestled with Enigma traffic. Working conditions were dismal, with staff muffled in overcoats and mittens. The first break into a Luftwaffe Enigma key – designated ‘Green’ – is thought to have been made on 25 October 1939. In December, by unaided intellectual effort Alan Turing is believed to have broken five days’ worth of old naval messages. By the end of March, the French – or rather, the Poles working at France’s Station Bruno – had broken twenty days’ worth of old signals and BP about thirty, all Luftwaffe traffic.

Turing was much more importantly engaged. He compiled a 150-page treatise on Enigma, studded with schoolboyish blots, deletions and illegibilities. While most codebreakers addressed each other by first names or nicknames, heedless of age and status, almost everyone knew Turing as ‘Prof’ rather than as Alan. When his Enigma study was circulated later in 1940, it became known as ‘the Prof’s book’. He also set about fulfilling his concept for a ‘bombe’, a primitive but revolutionary electro-mechanical device for exploring multiple mathematical combinations. This borrowed its name, though not its design, from the Polish ‘bomby’, and would be capable of examining the 17,576 possible wheel deployments for a three-rotor Enigma in about twenty minutes: the order for the first machine was placed in October 1939, and the prototype became operational six months later. Meanwhile, outside in the park, workmen sawed and hammered at an ever-widening array of low wooden buildings which housed the growing staff. Eventually, only administrators worked in the main building, where the telephone switchboard was established in the ballroom. In the huts, signals were shifted from one section to another on a small trolley pushed along a makeshift wooden tunnel.

Hut 8 attacked German naval traffic, which was then passed to Hut 4 for translation and processing. Hut 3 performed the same function for Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe traffic decrypted by Hut 6. The former would eventually play a pivotal role in Allied wartime intelligence, but in its early incarnation it had a staff of just four. Frank Lucas, who was one of them, wrote: ‘On a snowy January morning of 1940, in a small bleak wooden room with nothing but a table and three chairs, the first bundle of Enigma decodes appeared. [We] had no idea what they were about to disclose.’ A few score yards away, Hut 6 run by Gordon Welchman wrestled with army-Luftwaffe ‘Red’ key traffic, which was the first to be broken in bulk.

From the outset, pains were taken to disguise from all but the most senior operational commanders the fact that information was being gained from codebreaking. This gave an unintended boost to the prestige of MI6, and to that of Stewart Menzies in particular. When Reg Jones gave a disguised report based on an Ultra decrypt to the RAF’s director of signals, Air Commodore Nutting, the airman professed astonished admiration for the courage of the presumed spies who had provided the information, saying, ‘By Jove, you’ve got some brave chaps working for you!’ The ever-growing scale of the enemy traffic to be trawled was intimidating. It is a measure of the expansion of communications as a branch of warfare that by August 1943, 305,000 personnel among the Luftwaffe’s total strength of 2.3 million were employed on signals duties – transmitting, receiving or processing – and the same was true on both sides of the war, and of all armed forces.

At GC&CS there were inevitable personality clashes. Gordon Welchman, whose creative contribution became second only to that of Turing, and whose organisational skills were also priceless, found it hard to work with the highly-strung and fractious Dillwyn Knox, a contender for the hotly contested title of Bletchley’s star eccentric. A notoriously awful driver, Knox giggled: ‘It’s amazing how people smile, and apologise to you, when you knock them over.’ He sustained a stream of intemperate complaints and demands to Denniston, his old comrade from Room 40, about staff shortages, working conditions, low pay, together with the intrusion of and excessive authority conceded to non-cryptanalysts: service intelligence officers ‘who maul and conceal our results’. Knox was seriously ill with the cancer that would kill him in February 1943, but meanwhile he and Welchman bickered: the older man accused the younger of exceeding his narrow initial brief, and was also impatient of Turing, writing, ‘He is very difficult to anchor down. He is very clever but quite irresponsible and throws out a mass of suggestions of all degrees of merit. I have just, but only just, enough authority and ability to keep him and his ideas in some sort of order and discipline. But he is very nice about it all.’ Turing prompted mirth by joining Bletchley’s Home Guard because he was seized by an impulse to learn to shoot, then provoked the apoplectic rage of its colonel by absenting himself from parades once he had fulfilled this private purpose. His unworldliness could provoke real exasperation among those under relentless pressure to produce results. A colleague spoke of Turing’s ‘almost total inability to make himself understood’.

There were plenty of minor tantrums lower down the hierarchy, unsurprising when staff were performing stressful tasks through long hours in bleak working conditions. Angus Wilson, the later novelist, once vented such a storm of rage that a colleague said wearily, ‘Do stop it, Angus, otherwise we’ll put you in the lake!’ Wilson retorted defiantly, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll do it myself,’ and duly plunged into the water in front of the house; on another such occasion he hurled a bottle of ink at a Wren. Many wartime codebreakers suffered temporary or permanent physical or mental collapses, brought on by their work: William Friedman, one of America’s pioneer practitioners, underwent a nervous breakdown in January 1941 which incapacitated him for three months. Hugh Trevor-Roper languished for several months at about the same time, and others regularly succumbed.

German signals were at first intercepted by a battery of army wireless-operators stationed in an old naval fort at Chatham, a role later assumed by Gambier-Parry’s organisation at Whaddon Hall. In the early war years there were never enough operators, and both the RAF and the army were reluctant to acknowledge the priority of meeting GC&CS’s demands. Signals were brought in batches to Bletchley’s guardroom by motorcycle couriers, at all hours and often in dreadful weather, then distributed between the relevant huts. From an early stage, the codebreakers learned to identify German senders by the unencrypted preamble to their message texts, none of which was longer than 250 words. It was then a matter of sitting hunched over a deal table through the hours of a shift, pondering a jumble of numbers and letters from which only men – and Bletchley’s handful of women – with remarkable logical or mathematical powers might hope to extract fragments of meaning. ‘The ideal cryptanalyst,’ Stephen Budiansky has written, ‘was Beethoven with the soul of an accountant.’ When Christopher Morris was a new recruit to Bletchley he heard one of his senior colleagues, asked the requirements for the job, respond laconically, ‘Oh, I suppose a sharp pencil and a piece of squared paper.’ Morris himself thought that the main requisites – except at the exalted level of Knox, Turing, Welchman and later Max Newman – were ‘patience, accuracy, stamina, a reasonably clear head, some experience and an ability to work with others’.

They opened what became vast card indexes, stacked in shoeboxes along the sides of the huts, cataloguing enemy units, personnel, codenames, locations, abbreviations and military hardware; different Enigma keys were distinguished by colour – for instance, yellow, green, red and blue, respectively indicating Norway, Wehrmacht, army-Luftwaffe and air training codes. ‘When a new word came up in the message you were translating,’ wrote Hugh Skillen, ‘a new type of jet fuel, or machine part – you looked for it, and if it was not there, the indexer put it in with a reference time and date stamp.’ Bletchley’s meticulous record-keeping became a critical element in its triumphs.

For security reasons, the Park’s operations were rigidly compartmentalised, and there was little exchange of information or gossip between sections. Even Welchman remarked years later how little he knew about what colleagues were doing a few yards away from his own Hut. As the staff grew from hundreds into thousands, facilities lagged behind: a section head complained that two hundred men and women enjoyed the use of just one lavatory. The food in the Bletchley canteen was poor even by wartime standards. Former debutante Sarah Norton one night found a cooked cockroach in her meat: ‘I was about to return it to the catering manageress when my friend Osla, who had the appetite of a lioness with cubs, snatched the plate and said: “What a waste – I’ll eat it!”’ The nearest available delicacies outside the wire were to be found at the Station Inn in Bletchley town, which offered ox heart. Welchman recalled having to provide his own newspaper to wrap fish and chips at the local shop. The codebreakers worked around the clock in three rotating shifts, starting with 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. When the exhausted men and women cycled or took a bus through the blackout to their lodgings, they found few comforts: dim lighting, hot baths often rationed to one a week, draconian rules about inter-sex visiting.

It is deeply impressive that those who worked at Bletchley sustained such dedication while working day after day, month after month, in a drab world devoid of glamour, excitement, variety, glory and decorations. In Hut 3, the watch sat around a horseshoe table, translating deciphered signals, each one resembling a telegraph flimsy, forwarded from Hut 6. Ideally, decrypts were composed of complete German words, but often there were interruptions and corruptions in the texts, which demanded leaps of imagination from the linguists. William Millward recalled with shame a night when he invented a place named ‘Senke’, near Qatara in the North African desert – having forgotten that Senke was the German word for a geographical depression. Schoolmasters proved ideal as watch chiefs, wrote Peter Calvocoressi, because they were naturally meticulous: ‘If not satisfied, they would throw back a translation at even an eminent professor. It reminded me of Chief Examiners at “A” Level who would send back scripts to an Assistant Examiner to re-mark.’ No one could work at GC&CS who did not love brain games. There were dreary, idle yet sleepless lulls, when no traffic arrived for the watches to work on. Peter Hilton once used such a doodle time to compose a palindrome: ‘DOC NOTE, I DISSENT, A FAST NEVER PREVENTS A FATNESS. I DIET ON COD’.

Although Alan Turing was acknowledged as the highest intellect at Bletchley, its achievement was supremely a team effort; the creative input of some others, Welchman prominent among them, was almost as important as that of Turing. One night in February 1940, several months before the arrival of the first bombe, twenty-one-year-old Cambridge mathematician John Herivel was smoking a pipe before the fire in his billet, and concentrating furiously on encoded messages even as he drifted in and out of a doze. An inspiration struck him as he gazed with the mind’s eye at a German Enigma operator. He perceived such a man starting his morning’s work bored or weary or hungover, and thus not troubling to change the previous day’s ring setting on his machine before starting to cipher messages. Herivel scarcely slept that night, as he went on to deduce how such an act of carelessness might be detected, then exploited to break a message.

Welchman, who had supervised him at Cambridge, immediately saw the importance of this flash of insight, a marriage of mathematical brilliance to a grasp of human weakness. He told the young man fervently that he ‘would not be forgotten’, and indeed his inspiration became known as ‘the Herivel tip’. Dillwyn Knox had already identified another entry point to messages, rooted in operator errors and text settings – what the codebreakers christened ‘Cillis’ or ‘Sillies’. Welchman wrote later that Bletchley remained ‘entirely dependent on Herivel tips and Cillis from the invasion of France to the end of the Battle of Britain’. In other words, until the arrival of the bombes, codebreaking was being done by raw brainpower, without significant mechanical assistance: at this early stage, the British lagged behind their American counterparts in exploiting technology – both the US Army and US Navy codebreaking teams used Hollerith punched-card sorters, of a kind that only began to appear at Bletchley in May 1940, because chief codebreaker Col. John Tiltman had been sceptical about them. Ultra provided no important material during the summer of 1940, but several indications about the postponement of ‘Sealion’, the Nazi invasion of Britain, notable among them a September Luftwaffe message ordering the dismantling of air transport equipment at Dutch airfields.

Fred Winterbotham, the MI6 officer who eventually became overseer of the ‘Special Liaison Unit’ network which fed Ultra decrypts to commanders in the field, described the first bombe – christened ‘Agnus’, corrupted to ‘Agnes’ – as resembling ‘some Eastern goddess who was destined to become the oracle of Bletchley’. It was installed in Hut 11 on 14 March 1940, but suffered substantial teething troubles. Gordon Welchman made an important contribution to Turing’s creation by devising a ‘diagonal board’, an element introduced into the first really effective model, which came into service in mid-August. Agnes and its many successors were not computers, because they had no memory. They were instead electro-mechanical key-finding aids, six and a half feet high and seven wide, mounted in bronze-coloured cabinets, and containing thirty-six banks of high-speed electrically-driven Enigma replicas. Each bombe contained eleven miles of wiring and a million soldered contacts. Built by the British Tabulating Machine Company at Letchworth, they depended partly on components assembled in scores of local village halls, by casual workers who had no clue of the importance to the war effort of the twenty-six-way cables and other small electrical parts they contributed.

With the assistance of a clue or ‘crib’ – a vital identifying link, usually a codebreaker’s guess about the nature of part of a given signal – a bombe could test millions of mathematical possibilities for the settings of three Enigma rotors. Figuratively, Agnes and her kin were bloodhounds needing a slipper or handkerchief to take up a scent. If there was no ‘crib’, the bombe could not solve the key – but mercifully often, there was one. Subsequent machines, miracles of reliability given their continuous operation, were given their own names by the Wrens who manned them around the clock, usually those of warships – Warspite, Victory and suchlike. The bombes did not take in enemy cipher messages and disgorge them in fluent German. They were instead priceless accelerators, once the codebreakers secured an insight into the nature of a given signal or traffic stream. Also useful was a battery of British Type-X cipher machines, modified to match the behaviour of Enigmas, on which Wren operators tested speculative message solutions. One of the principal constraints on codebreaking, especially between 1940 and 1942, was that access to the scarce technology had to be apportioned between competing claimants of the three services, and there was never enough ‘bombe time’ to go around.

Throughout 1940, human brainpower remained the dominant element in Bletchley’s successes, which increased with every passing week. It was ‘the Herivel tip’, not bombes, that enabled the team to crack the army-Luftwaffe ‘Red’ key in May. The overwhelming bulk of enemy traffic read through the rest of the year – around a thousand messages a day – was that of the Luftwaffe, and until the end of the war air force material was accessed more swiftly than that of the other services. An important requirement for success was what the codebreakers called ‘depth’ – possession of sufficient messages in a given key to give them playing space for calculations and speculations.

Luftwaffe signals provided many clues to the Wehrmacht’s parallel activities, but in the early days interpretation was impeded by lack of understanding of German terminology and abbreviations. In September 1940, Bletchley broke some traffic from Göring’s pathfinder unit, KGr100, which enabled it to forecast the targets of several bomber raids. But warning was of little practical usefulness to the defenders when hard power, in the form of radar-guided RAF night-fighters, was lacking in both numbers and effectiveness.

As more bombes were built – by 1945 there were 211 of them – they were dispersed around the London suburbs as a precaution against an enemy air attack on Bletchley. The operators, chiefly young women of the WRNS, found long hours beside the hot, smelly, clattering machines extraordinarily gruelling, especially when they were obliged to use tweezers to adjust the delicate electrical wiring. Some girls were unnerved by the monotonous racket. One of them said: ‘It was like a lot of knitting machines working – a kind of tickety-clickety noise.’ They went home with their shirt cuffs blackened by a fine spray of oil from the bombes’ revolving drums.

Naval Enigma remained for many months impenetrable. This was partly because its system of eight rotors, of which three were used at any one time, posed greater difficulties than the army’s five, and partly also because the Kriegsmarine’s operators were more disciplined than their Luftwaffe counterparts, and committed fewer errors to provide openings for Bletchley. There was a brief spasm of success in late April 1940, when five days’ traffic was read, but thereafter more than a year elapsed – an eternity in the minds of those who wrestled vainly with the problem day after day, week upon week – before the big breakthrough. Denniston said gloomily to Frank Birch, a 1918 veteran of Room 40 who now headed the naval section: ‘You know, the Germans don’t mean you to read their stuff, and I don’t suppose you ever will.’ Alan Turing himself had been dallying with the Kriegsmarine’s traffic almost since his arrival at Bletchley. A colleague, Hugh Alexander, observed that he became engaged because nobody else seemed to be making headway, and in his remote fashion he was fascinated by the abstract challenge.

It was Turing who devised a new method christened ‘Banburismus’, employing long punched paper sheets manufactured in the town of Banbury, which assisted the first important breaks into Kriegsmarine messages by reducing the number of possible Enigma rotor orders to be tested from 336 to around eighteen. This system was introduced in the spring of 1941, just as British losses to U-boats began to become alarming. On land, the British in those days lacked power and opportunity to do much with such knowledge of the Wehrmacht’s movements as they secured, and there was a large element of luck about what messages were broken. In North Africa in early 1941, the British Army profited from some good sigint derived from eavesdropping on the Italians, but few Enigma messages were broken quickly enough to assist decision-making on the battlefield. At sea, by contrast, there was an early golden prize for GC&CS’s labours.

The impetus towards success was provided by a series of captures far out on the ocean, which dramatically increased Bletchley’s knowledge of the enemy’s naval communications. On 23 February 1941, British commandos raiding the Lofoten Islands seized the German armed trawler Krebs, from which spare rotors for a naval Enigma were recovered, though the machine itself had been thrown overboard. This ‘pinch’ prompted the Royal Navy to launch an operation explicitly designed to capture more Enigma material, targeting German weather-reporting trawlers between Iceland and Jan Mayen Island. On 7 May, a sweep by three cruisers located and seized the München – but too late to save its Enigma and associated coding data from the Arctic deep. On 25 June the navy caught its sister vessel the Lauenburg, again minus its Enigma, but with a useful haul of cipher material.

Hut 8 now had enough information to read some U-boat signals, but the seizure which opened the traffic to fluent decryption was the fruit of chance and high courage, rather than of design. On 9 May 1941 a convoy escort group attacked and forced to the surface Julius Lempe’s U-110. A boarding party from HMS Bulldog commanded by Sub-Lieutenant David Balme secured the submarine, prevented its sinking, and brought back to his destroyer pearls beyond price: documentation for current Enigma. Though U-110 later sank under tow – fortunately so, from a security viewpoint – the short signal book, officer ciphering instructions and other material reached Bletchley safely, and the secret of the submarine’s capture was preserved beyond the war’s end. An Enigma machine was also recovered, but perversely this was the least useful element of the booty, because Bletchley had one already, together with assorted rotors seized in other ‘pinches’. Within days, Hut 8 was reading a steady stream of German naval messages. Ralph Erskine, one of the foremost experts on codebreaking at Bletchley, believes that the Park was already close to reading the Kriegsmarine traffic, even without the U-110 haul. What is for certain, however, is that it was impossible to break the U-boat ciphers without the assistance of captured material, which would again become a vital issue later in the war.

The breakthrough into the Kriegsmarine ciphers came just too late to influence the pursuit of the Bismarck in the latter days of May 1941. Conventional direction-finding on the behemoth’s wireless transmissions, supported by air reconnaissance, were the key factors in enabling the Royal Navy to intercept and sink it on the morning of the 27th, though assisted in the last stage by decryption of a Luftwaffe signal revealing Brest as Bismarck’s destination. Thereafter, Bletchley produced a steady stream of messages that revealed U-boat positions and intended courses. The so-called Hydra cipher was laid bare, and other keys were progressively broken: the more the Park knew, the more it was able to discover. The flow of decrypts was never assured, however, and disturbing delays sometimes took place. ‘Huff-Duff’ – High-Frequency Direction-Finding – played an important secondary role in the location of U-boats. The outcome was a relentless shift in the balance of advantage in the Battle of the Atlantic through 1941 and into 1942. Here was a case where intelligence indisputably and importantly influenced events.

Bletchley was also reading a significant portion of Italian naval traffic. On 25 March 1941, one of the small number of women decrypters, nineteen-year-old mathematician Mavis Lever in Dillwyn Knox’s team – he was famously supportive of talented girls in a male-dominated institution – played a critical role in breaking a message which revealed that the Italian fleet would shortly put to sea to attack British convoys. The warning enabled the Mediterranean C-in-C Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham to contrive an encounter off Cape Matapan during the afternoon and night of 28 March which ended in a striking victory for the Royal Navy. By dawn on the 29th, three cruisers and two destroyers had been sunk, while the battleship Vittorio Veneto was damaged, an outcome that deterred the Italian surface fleet from making any further attempt to interdict British troop movements to Greece.

Spring brought an increasing flow of decrypts about Wehrmacht operations in the Eastern Mediterranean. Senior officers strove to streamline the transfer of information from Bletchley to battlefields, so that material reached commanders in real time. One of the most significant intercepts, detailing German plans for the May 1941 invasion of Crete, reported ‘probable date of ending preparations: 17/5. Proposed course of operation … Sharp attack against enemy air force, military camps and A/A positions … Troops of Fliegerkorps XI: parachute landing to occupy Maleme, Candia and Retiomo; transfer of dive-bombers and fighters to Maleme and Candia; air-landing operations by remainder of Fliegerkorps XI; sea-transport of flak units, further army elements and supplies.’ Churchill personally annotated the flimsy: ‘In view of the gt importance of this I shd like the actual text transmitted by MOST SECRET together with warnings about absolute secrecy.’ This information was passed to Wavell and Freyberg, the relevant commanders, at 2340 on 6 May. The loss of the subsequent Battle of Crete, following the German invasion which began on the morning of the 20th, emphasised a fundamental reality about Enigma decrypts: they could change outcomes only when British commanders and troops on the ground were sufficiently strong, competent and courageous effectively to exploit them. Stuart Milner-Barry of Hut 6 said that he and his colleagues looked back on Crete as ‘the greatest disappointment of the war. It seemed a near certainty that, with … every detail of the operation spelt out for us in advance … the attack would be ignominiously thrown back.’

The Cretan signal, informing British generals of German intentions in time to respond, was an exception rather than a commonplace in 1941. Bletchley was able to provide an ever-growing flow of information about the deployments of the enemy, not least in Eastern Europe, most of it derived from Luftwaffe and army-Luftwaffe decrypts. Wehrmacht traffic stubbornly resisted penetration, but German railway codes provided information about – for instance – troop movements to Yugoslavia, Greece and Eastern Europe in the summer of 1941. Hitler’s looming invasion of the Soviet Union, the towering event of the war, was also the first great strategic development for which Ultra intelligence provided explicit warning. While Britain had no power to influence or impede Hitler’s Operation ‘Barbarossa’, it was clearly of the highest importance to Churchill and his generals to be able to monitor its unfolding.

It became a source of increasing frustration to the prime minister that British troops in North Africa failed to frustrate or defeat Rommel when they had not only superiority in men, tanks and guns, but also an ever-growing stream of information about German deployments and movements, for instance at Halfaya Pass in May. Churchill pored intently over his own daily file of Ultra material. When he read a decrypt reporting petrol stocks at various Luftwaffe airfields in Libya, he scrawled on it in his red ink: ‘CAS [Chief of Air Staff] How many hours flying can their a/c do on this – about? WSC.’ Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal responded testily: ‘Unfortunately it is not possible to make any general deduction since the figures only relate to the stock at Benghazi. We do not possess complete figures for the supply and consumption of oil and petrol throughout Libya. All we know is that there are indications of an overall shortage which is limiting operations in the forward area.’ This problem was endemic when decrypts were fragmentary. Stewart Menzies performed an important service by dissuading the prime minister from fulfilling his frequent desire to dispatch raw Ultra direct to commanders-in-chief in the field, as he had done in the case of Crete. ‘C’ was surely correct, on security grounds, and also because decrypts that lacked the context of other intelligence could be highly misleading to untrained eyes.

On land, in 1941 Bletchley provided more guidance to strategy than to tactics: it gave Churchill’s high command an authoritative, though never comprehensive, picture of German deployments in every theatre of war. Ultra could do little to assist the RAF’s ongoing struggle with the Luftwaffe for mastery of the skies. Only the Royal Navy gained immediate advantage, both in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Nothing altered the fact that, until the worldwide balance of strength began to shift in the Allies’ favour in the latter part of 1942, the operational superiority of German and Japanese forces enabled them to keep winning victories. Bletchley was an increasingly important weapon, but it was not a magic sword.

The practices and disciplines of GC&CS evolved progressively, with many wrangles and turf wars along the way. Deputy director Nigel de Grey complained about the ‘very low standards of military behaviour’ prevailing in what was supposed to be a military establishment. But how could it be otherwise? Noel Annan wrote: ‘Many of the cryptanalysts who produced Ultra were agnostic, heterodox dons who did not set much store by the normal interpretations of patriotism and democracy.’ It was not easy to combine the discipline essential to the operation’s smooth functioning with sensitivity to the wayward and frankly eccentric character of some of its resident geniuses. Col. Tiltman wrote ruefully on 2 March 1941: ‘Cryptanalysts have to be handled delicately and do not take kindly to service methods of control, which are essential to the good working of signals.’ When the director of the Royal Navy’s women personnel visited the Park, she demanded indignantly: ‘Why are my Wrens working with civilians?’ WAAFs in the teleprinter room expressed resentment about taking orders from civilians. In December 1940 the War Office’s director of military intelligence staged a grab for Bletchley’s military output. Until 1941, the Admiralty tried to continue some cryptographic work under its own roof. In Hut 3, rows erupted between representatives of the three armed services. Stewart Menzies received a constant stream of complaints from rival interests, while Bletchley staff referred to Broadway without enthusiasm as ‘the other side’. One of the most durable criticisms of ‘C’ is that he was ever eager to accept credit for the achievements of the Park, while declining to engage with its chronic resource problems, which eventually prompted the October 1941 letter to Churchill signed by Turing and his colleagues pleading for more staff, that caused Churchill to send his famous ‘Action This Day’ message: ‘Make sure they have all they want on extreme priority.’ It is a serious charge against Menzies, that he was an absentee landlord of GC&CS.

Yet all this made mercifully little impact on the work of the codebreakers. Edward Thomas, a naval officer who worked at the Park, was impressed by the absence of hierarchical distinctions: ‘Despite the high tension of much of the work … anyone of whatever rank or degree could approach anyone else, however venerable, with any idea or suggestion, however crazy.’ Few people of any rank or status felt denied a voice – an unusually rare and privileged state of affairs in the wartime institutions of any nation. From 1941, the Cambridge scientist and novelist C.P. Snow became a key Whitehall intermediary, responsible for channelling suitable mathematicians and other scholars to Bletchley. GC&CS also employed thousands of humbler folk, recruited chiefly for their language skills. Its files record details of some RAF personnel interviewed, such as Leading Aircraftsman Berry, aged twenty-three, who had started training as a pilot but re-mustered owing to his conscientious objections to dropping bombs. His German language skills were graded only ‘B’, and the recruiters noted: ‘if interested in work might do well, but needs careful handling’.

LAC Gray was also ex-aircrew, ‘grounded as result of crash’, had ‘B’ grade Spanish. Cpl Hodges, aged twenty-six, was unfit for aircrew, ‘anxious to use his German “A”, in civil life worked in architect’s office’. AC1 Tew, a twenty-eight-year-old clerk, had German ‘A’, as well as some Spanish, French and Danish, acquired while working in his father’s leather-trading business. There was much snapping between Bletchley and the Air Ministry about the latter’s reluctance to grant commissioned rank to RAF men seconded to cipher or wireless interception duties. Group-Captain Blandy of the Y Service complained that such people were ‘picked individuals having considerable linguistic qualifications and a high standard of education … [Mere Aircraftsmen] and NCOs lack the necessary authority required to carry out their duties efficiently.’

Not all the personnel posted to Bletchley proved suited to its demands. A March 1941 report on an RAF officer returned to general duties after a spell at BP noted: ‘Although an excellent linguist, he does not appear to me to have any aptitude or inclination for the research side of the work. He had been relegated to clerical tasks, but did not seem thus to justify his pay.’ There were equally bleak verdicts on the performance of some women staffers lower down the hierarchy: ‘Wren Kenwick is inaccurate, very slow and not a bit keen on her work, not very intelligent. Wrens Buchanan and Ford are unintelligent and slow and seem unable to learn. Wren Rogers suffers from mild claustrophobia and cannot work in a windowless room.’ The report concluded: ‘The remainder … are doing most excellent work,’ but the selectors were urged to recognise the importance of the jobs the women were required to fulfil, ‘and not to send us too many of the Cook and Messenger type’.

Enfolded within their oppressive security blanket, Bletchley’s people lived, loved and largely played within their own community. Almost all were paid a pittance: nineteen-year-old mathematician Mavis Lever, one of ‘Dilly’ Knox’s team, initially received thirty shillings a week, of which she paid twenty-one shillings for her lodgings. When staff did escape into the world beyond the perimeter fence, the civilian status of the young men incurred dark suspicions among the uninitiated about their absence from any battlefield. The dramas and pantomimes performed by the Park’s amateur dramatic society became high spots in the annual calendar: Frank Birch, formerly of King’s College, Cambridge and now head of Hut 4, was celebrated for his appearances as the Widow Twankey in productions of the pantomime Aladdin.

By 1942, common sense had achieved some important successes in the Park’s management. Each section worked to its appointed head, irrespective of rank or lack of it. Cryptanalysis for all Britain’s armed forces was handled entirely at Bletchley and its Indian out-stations, a concentration of effort that neither Germany nor the United States ever matched. Gordon Welchman emerged as the foremost lubricator, curbing feuding; several notoriously stupid service officers were transferred out; the popular Eric Jones was appointed to head Hut 3. It was acknowledged that the civilian codebreakers must be ridden on the lightest possible rein, though the director was prone to occasional surges of authoritarianism.

On 1 February 1942, Admiral Karl Dönitz introduced a reflector or fourth rotor into the Atlantic U-boat service’s Enigma, with immediate and calamitous results for Allied fortunes in the Battle of the Atlantic: this imposed a twenty-six-fold increase in the range of possible settings, and blinded Bletchley. Sinkings soared. At sea, the Royal Navy was obliged to rely upon ‘Huff-Duff’ to locate enemy submarines until these approached within range of underwater detection by the Asdics of convoy escorts, which were impotent against night surface attackers. Breaking what was now designated the ‘Shark’ submarine key became the Park’s foremost priority, a challenge unresolved for nine frightening months, by far the most stressful period of the war for those engaged in the task. They knew, as they sat hunched over their labours in those austere huts, that at sea men were dying every day because of their failure – though no rational person would have called it such.

Also on 1 February, coincidentally, Alastair Denniston was pushed aside into a subordinate London role, to be replaced by his deputy, Edward Travis. In some measure this development reflected a clash of personalities – Denniston and Stewart Menzies disliked each other – together with the infighting characteristic of any large bureaucracy. But it was widely felt at Bletchley that its operational head was being overwhelmed by the strains of running an establishment that since the outbreak of war had increased fourfold in size, and many times that much in its importance to the war effort. Power struggles were unavoidable. Denniston was a good and kind man who had done many things well, but Bletchley had outgrown him. Travis, whose edicts were issued in a curious trademark brown ink, was generally considered a success in his new role, not least by such influential creative figures as Welchman. When another codebreaker, Ralph Bennett, returned that summer from detached duty in the Middle East, he found that the atmosphere had changed markedly: ‘I had left as one of a group of enthusiastic amateurs. I returned to a professional organisation with standards and an acknowledged reputation to maintain. Success was no longer an occasional prize, but the natural reward of relentless attention to detail.’

Throughout 1942, Bletchley’s activities were hampered by a desperate shortage of bombes, and thus by argument about their best employment. In January the army-Luftwaffe Hut 6 was receiving 1,400 intercepts a day, of which an average of 580 were broken, a proportion that slowly increased, reaching about 50 per cent by May 1943. Often no more than one three-wheel bombe was available at any given time to work on the Shark U-boat cipher, because the others of what was still only a handful of machines were committed to breaking army and air traffic. The codebreakers said later that they would have needed ten four-wheel bombes – which did not then exist – significantly to accelerate their progress. By November, a note of desperation had entered the Admiralty’s pleas to the Park about Shark. The Battle of the Atlantic, said the navy’s Operational Intelligence Centre, was ‘the one campaign which BP are not at present influencing to any marked extent – and it is the only one in which the war can be lost unless BP do help’. A critical breakthrough was imminent, however. On 30 October in the Eastern Mediterranean U-559 was attacked by an escort group, and forced to the surface by depth-charging. Tony Fasson, thirty-year-old first lieutenant of the destroyer Petard, along with Able Seaman Colin Grazier, hastily stripped naked and swam sixty yards to the stricken submarine, then hauled themselves into the conning tower. The crew had opened the seacocks before abandoning their boat, and the sea was flooding in even as the two men searched the control room with desperate urgency.

They found treasure: the second edition of the Wetterkurzschlüssel, or weather short signal book, for its Enigma. Having wrapped this and other documents in waterproofing, Fasson and Grazier handed them up the hatch to sixteen-year-old NAAFI canteen assistant Tommy Brown, who had followed in swimming to the U-boat. He in turn passed the packages to the crew of a whaleboat, which arrived alongside in the nick of time. Brown, a civilian, lived to receive a George Medal for his daring, but the two supremely dedicated British sailors pushed their luck by plunging once more into the submarine’s control room, possibly in the belief that that they might retrieve a cipher machine. Bletchley did not need this, for it had already reconstructed the wiring of a four-rotor Enigma: it was the signal books that mattered. U-559 suddenly vanished into the Mediterranean, taking with it Fasson and Grazier, both of whom received posthumous George Crosses. The captured documents reached Bletchley on 24 November, and made possible the critical break into the Shark key on 13 December, assisted by data from weather decrypts secured by Hut 10.

That day, the codebreakers teleprinted to the Admiralty’s Operational Intelligence Centre locations for twelve Atlantic U-boats. Their positions were by now a week out of date, but they sufficed to provide critical guidance about the Germans’ likely courses. Thereafter, Shark signals were frequently broken within twenty-four hours, though the delay sometimes extended to forty-eight. This was one of the indisputably decisive moments of the intelligence war. Once regular Shark decrypts began to flow through to the Royal Navy, the balance in the war at sea shifted dramatically. Though Hut 8 later suffered more delays and difficulties with Shark, never thereafter was British control of the Atlantic sea route seriously threatened, and U-boat sinkings soared.

Among much else remarkable about Bletchley were not its periodic rows and tantrums, but that the front-line codebreakers, whose average age was twenty-three, sustained such a degree of fellowship. Derek Taunt described how they felt ‘devoted to the task of outwitting the enemy and happy to be part of a complicated organization designed to do just that’. Rolf Noskwith paid tribute to what he described as the Huts’ ‘exemplary leadership’. The integrity of the decoding operation was much assisted by the personal friendship between Stuart Milner-Barry of Hut 6 and Hugh Alexander of Hut 8. But tranquillity could never be attainable when thousands of men and women were working under appalling pressure around the clock, month upon month, year after year, knowing that lives depended upon their efforts. On 15 May 1943 Welchman wrote to Nigel de Grey, apologising for an explosion of rage during a discussion about organisation and shortage of resources, an ongoing bugbear. ‘My touchiness,’ he wrote, ‘is probably due to the fact that I always have the extreme value and urgency of our work very much on my mind. Throughout the whole history of Hut 6 there has never been a time at which I felt that we were being as efficient as we could be and you can imagine that this has been a heavy and continual strain … The present situation is an absolute scandal, but there is nothing we lack now that has not been asked for again and again. So please forgive me for being somewhat bitter and ill-tempered.’

He added: ‘A great deal of the work is terribly monotonous and deadly dull, and this has a very serious effect on morale over a long period. Some of the girls are almost physically sick at the sight of a Type-X machine. Now, if our girls crack up as many have done, we are absolutely sunk, and no amount of belated assistance will save us … Incidentally, could you possibly persuade Travis to get [Air-Marshal Charles] Medhurst [RAF director of intelligence] and [the CIGS Gen. Sir Alan] Brooke to spend even one minute telling the girls that their work is important? Yours ever Gordon.’ But difficulties persisted in securing qualified personnel, not least because so few people in Whitehall had any inkling of the supreme priority of GC&CS’s work. When BP needed personnel to operate punch-card machines, its recruiters turned to employees of the John Lewis Partnership, the department-store chain which had personnel trained to use them. Astoundingly, after ten women had been selected, the Ministry of Labour insisted that they should instead be dispatched to do land work. An internal memo at the Park seethed: ‘The John Lewis episode is a disgrace.’ The girls were eventually released to GC&CS, but only after a bitter wrangle with the civil bureaucracy.

From the war’s first day to its last, security was an obsession of every Allied officer privy to the Ultra secret. In 1941 a certain Col. Gribble, who had served as an air liaison officer with the RAF in France in 1940, published a book entitled Diary of a Staff Officer, which caused near-hysteria when Whitehall noticed, because it contained references to unidentified ‘secret sources’. Gribble’s work had been passed by a censor who knew nothing of Bletchley Park. What if somebody in Berlin read it, and drew lethal inferences about the vulnerability of Germany’s ciphers? MI5 bought up and pulped 7,000 unsold copies of the book, trusting to luck that none of its existing buyers had German friends. Before the fall of Singapore in February 1942, the key local Ultra and Y Service personnel received priority for evacuation, as did their American counterparts on Corregidor two months later. Had they fallen into captivity, not only would they have suffered a ghastly fate alongside other British and Australian prisoners, and their rare skills have been lost, but the risk to Allied codebreaking was frightening if they were exposed to interrogation and torture.

Most of Bletchley’s staff displayed marvellous conscientiousness about secrecy, all the more remarkable among young men and women – Station X’s footsoldiers – performing humdrum functions. In 1941 a civilian doctor in Nottingham wrote to the GC&CS authorities, reporting that one of his patients, a Wren named Adele Moloney, was in bed with a high temperature, having overstayed her leave with symptoms of acute exhaustion. He wrote: ‘Miss Moloney has hypertrophy of the conscience to such an extent that she will not divulge the smallest detail of what she does, even though it is against her interests. As I find it difficult to believe that this young girl is on work which is so important that her doctor must have his hands tied by lack of knowledge, I thought I would write to ask for your comments.’ Bletchley responded blandly that ‘there is in the ordinary way nothing that we know of in the work that she does that is in any way likely to be prejudicial to her health. The same work is done by a large number of other girls, none of whom so far as we know have suffered in any way.’ But BP told the doctor that Miss Moloney’s discretion was not merely correct, but ‘highly commendable’, and so indeed it was.

There was much unease among the administrators about the security risk posed by the rolling population of cooks, cleaners and workmen who serviced Station X. A 1941 report reflected uneasily: ‘New faces are being sent daily from the Labour Exchange to Bletchley Park.’ A series of flagrant breaches in the spring of 1942 prompted a magisterial memorandum to all personnel from the Park’s senior security officer: ‘There have been recent instances among you of a spirit of such reckless disregard for the consequences of indiscretion as would seem to argue not only a condition of ignorance or folly, but a contempt for the laws by which each one of us knows himself to be bound. In one instance [a BP staffer] disclosed the nature of their duties within her family circle … [this] was repeated by one of its members in mixed company, actually at a cocktail party, whence it was duly reported to me. In another instance one of the most vital tasks in which the organisation is engaged was disclosed, possibly in a spirit of pride or ostentation, in an after-dinner conversation to the Seniors of this person’s old College, whence a report reached me … It would be a reflection on your intelligence to suppose that you do not realise … that an idle piece of boasting or gossip … may be passed to the enemy and cause, not only the breakdown of our successful efforts here, but the sacrifice of the lives of our sailors, soldiers and airmen, perhaps your own brothers, and may even prejudice our ultimate hopes of victory.’

If this broadside was fiercely worded, it was not in the smallest degree extravagant. Bletchley Park was the jewel in the crown of Britain’s war effort, one of its principal assets in the struggle to save the nation from Nazi enslavement. Alan Brooke wrote in his diary after visiting GC&CS in April 1942: ‘A wonderful set of professors and genii! I marvel at the work they succeed in doing.’ Betrayal of its secrets could overnight have crippled the cause of freedom – most immediately by denying to the Royal Navy its key to the locations of Dönitz’s U-boats. Well before the Soviet Union became a supposed ally in June 1941, British traitors were passing to NKVD agents whatever pearls of Ultra they thought might be of interest to Moscow; it was fortunate that Stalin did not inform Hitler of Bletchley’s doings – in the months before ‘Barbarossa’, he was desperate to appease Berlin.

It was an even larger stroke of fortune that Germany’s commanders sustained their dogged belief in Enigma’s inviolability. Early in the 1930s the head cryptanalyst of Göring’s Forschungsamt cipher unit, Dr Georg Schröder, asserted passionately: ‘the whole Enigma is garbage!’ No heed was taken of his warning, which was deemed only relevant to the commercial machine, which lacked a plugboard. In October 1939 Lt. Col. Ruzek, former head of Czech cryptanalysis, revealed to German interrogators that the Poles had been working with the French to break Enigma traffic. In captured Polish files, the Nazis discovered three 1938 plain-language translations of signals from a German cruiser in Spanish waters. Polish PoWs were exhaustively interrogated in attempts to discover how these messages had been decrypted, but the Abwehr drew a blank: almost all the men who knew the answers were at that time beyond their reach. OKW/Chi’s cryptanalysts in Berlin felt intensely frustrated that, while they were supposedly responsible for ensuring the security of the Wehrmacht’s communications, they were expressly forbidden to conduct tests on breaking Enigma traffic. They nonetheless believed the system institutionally safe, and argued that occasional signals could only be broken if dispatched by careless operators who neglected procedure. Even in 1946 the Wehrmacht’s chief cryptanalyst, Wilhelm Fenner, maintained stubbornly: ‘The Enigma was regarded as antiquated, but it was secure when properly used.’

It is possible to identify several moments of the war at which British blunders could have enabled the Germans to recognise that their ciphers were compromised, and plug the gusher of intelligence flowing from Bletchley Park. On 24 August 1941, Churchill made a BBC broadcast in which he alluded to explicit numbers of Jews known to have been murdered by the SS behind the Eastern Front. The Germans noticed, and within days Oberstgruppenführer Kurt Daluege issued an order that details of such killings should no longer be mentioned in radio traffic: ‘The danger of enemy decryption of wireless messages is great. For this reason only non-sensitive information should be transmitted.’ One consequence of Churchill’s slip was that when in October 1942 the Foreign Office compiled a report on known German atrocities, especially those committed against Jews, this was not publicly released, to avoid any new risk of compromising intelligence sources.

It was remarkable that the German high command failed to draw far-reaching conclusions from Churchill’s August 1941 words, and likewise a year later when German interrogation of Allied prisoners revealed that Montgomery’s Eighth Army had been expecting the Afrika Korps’ attack at Alam Halfa in North Africa. Early in 1942 also, Dönitz became acutely suspicious that the Allies were monitoring his communications with U-boats. He was persuaded that his fears were groundless by British carelessness with their own convoy codes, which were being broken by the Kriegsmarine’s decryption service, the B-Dienst. If Enigma was indeed insecure, the admiral reasoned, the British would have learned about this yawning chasm in their own security: a nation clever enough to crack U-boat signals would employ better codes of its own. The U-boat chief was careful enough to introduce the four-rotor Enigma, but insufficiently so to question the fundamental basis of the system.

Potentially the most dangerous threat to the Ultra secret also came in 1942. On 5 May the Australian freighter Nankin sailed from Fremantle for Calcutta with a cargo of explosives, 180 crew and 162 passengers. In the Indian Ocean early on the morning of 10 May, a small floatplane circled the ship. Soon afterwards its parent, the German raiding cruiser Thor, closed in and opened fire. Nankin signalled ‘Raider sighted,’ and her captain jettisoned the confidential books before surrendering an hour after the first shot. The passengers and crew were transferred to Thor and its accompanying supply ship, along with hundreds of sacks of mail. Among these, the Germans identified a consignment from the Combined Operations Intelligence Centre at Wellington, New Zealand. Its contents included a ‘Most Secret’ summary for the period 21 March to 20 April, largely based on Ultra material, which gave the positions of every known Allied and enemy warship and merchant vessel in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. With criminal carelessness, these documents had been dispatched not by hand of Nankin’s captain, but instead with the general mail.

Even though the COIC data was well out of real time, imaginative analysis of the intelligence summary by the Abwehr would have shown the Germans that some at least of their ciphers, as well as those of the Japanese, were compromised. Such scrutiny appears never to have taken place. The Thor’s captain saw no special urgency about sending the captured documents to Berlin. Only at the end of July, after the raiding cruiser’s supply ship docked at Yokohama, did Germany’s naval attaché in Tokyo receive the COIC papers. A further month elapsed before Berlin authorised him to pass the documents to its Asian ally. Thereafter, the Japanese navy changed its main code, so that the US Navy lacked ‘real time’ decrypts to empower its operations during the 11–12 October Battle of Cape Esperance, the 26 October Battle of Santa Cruz, and the 13–15 November Guadalcanal actions.

It would be fanciful to suggest that the Nankin captures thus altered the course of the naval war, because the code alteration was part of a regular routine: the Japanese still doggedly refused to acknowledge that their entire communications system was vulnerable. But if they had read the Allied COIC documents soon after the Germans got their hands on them, and had possessed a more sophisticated capability for assessing intelligence, they would have changed their ciphers weeks, instead of days, before launching their June assault on Midway, with momentous consequences. The British do not appear to have told the Americans about the Nankin loss. This may have been because they suffered an attack of well-deserved embarrassment about a major breach of security. It was the same story when the second of two copies of the Japanese Purple cipher machine, presented to the British by their American creators, was dispatched to the Ultra team in Singapore by freighter. It is known to have left Durban in December 1941, but thereafter vanished without trace, its fate unknown from that day to this.

No Whitehall correspondence concerning the Nankin has thus far been found in British archives, and it would be unjustified to build too high a tower of speculation around its story. The Allies escaped significant consequences from their blunder – and from the others cited above – because the intelligence systems of Germany and Japan lacked the coherence and imagination to profit as they should have done from their haul of Allied secrets. One further critically dangerous moment should be mentioned: in November 1942 the Germans swept across unoccupied France. Among those whom they took into custody in Vichy were three Poles who had served in Gustave Bertrand’s codebreaking department since 1940, and before that had been engaged in Poland’s own cryptographic operation. In March 1943, two such prisoners were interrogated by German sigint experts in the presence of an Abwehr officer. Had the men told what they knew, or could have surmised, about the Allies’ progress in cracking Enigma, the worst could have happened. Fortunately, before being questioned the Poles were briefly alone together, and coordinated explanations which were accepted: that while some traffic had been briefly broken in 1938, improved German systems thereafter closed the breach. Here were two more people to whom the Allies owed a debt for their role preserving the Ultra secret. Cleverer men in Berlin and Tokyo might have made much of the material and prisoners that fell into their hands, and abruptly halted the music for the Allies’ wondrous dance across the ether.

2 FLIRTING WITH AMERICA

From the day Winston Churchill became prime minister until Pearl Harbor nineteen months later, his foremost political purpose was to drag the United States into the war, because only thus could the embattled island hope to accomplish more than its own survival. To that end, the British sought the closest cooperation the Americans would countenance. They professed to wish to extend this to intelligence, but in truth sought a notably one-sided relationship, which protected most of Britain’s secrets. In the spring of 1940, Stewart Menzies asked the Canadian businessman Sir William Stephenson to try to open a link to J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI. Stephenson, eager for a top-table role for himself, set about this mission with a will, using an unlikely mutual acquaintance, the former world heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney, with whom he had sparred in France back in 1918. In those days the Canadian had been a fighter pilot, who went on to make a fortune before creating his own industrial intelligence network in the 1930s, from which he offered material to the British government. This opened a relationship with Desmond Morton and Dick Ellis of Broadway, which continued after the outbreak of war. Hoover, before meeting the ebullient Canadian, took care to secure White House approval. Stephenson reported back to London that the FBI chief was keen to cooperate with MI6, and had suggested that his visitor should secure some official title to formalise his status in the US.

Menzies promptly gave Stephenson a modest cover role as Passport Control Officer in New York, where he set up shop on 21 June 1940. Thereafter the Canadian built a substantial organisation which in January 1941 acquired the title of British Security Coordination. BSC, quartered on the 35th and 36th floors of the Rockefeller Center on Fifth Avenue, was charged with sabotaging Axis operations, liaising with the Americans and gathering intelligence about enemy activity. It also managed anti-Axis propaganda throughout the Americas. In its role as a flag-carrier for Britain and its spies, it enjoyed considerable success until the respective national intelligence services began to bypass BSC in favour of doing business with each other direct, in the spring of 1942 after the US came into the war.

New York became MI6’s most important out-station, from which its agents set forth to try to penetrate Axis-run companies and foreign embassies. BSC could claim credit for such coups as tipping off the FBI in November 1940, when a Mexico City informant revealed that four German ships intended to run the British blockade across the Gulf of Mexico: the US Navy stopped the ships. Likewise, J. Edgar Hoover warned BSC that the Italians intended to transfer to South America almost $4 million in cash, which might be used to bankroll sabotage. Two-thirds of the money got through, but a BSC agent alerted police in Mexico City about the smuggling operation: they opened the bags and confiscated $1.4 million. On the debit side, however, Stephenson was alleged to have recruited some frankly disreputable officers. Guy Liddell of MI5 fumed about one in particular, Ingram Fraser, who was alleged to have been ‘running a mistress in Washington DC who was supposed to be acting as an agent on the Finns. She was getting $500 a month for her flat and $500 for her services, all paid out of office funds.’ BSC wasted as much energy on absurdities as every other intelligence organisation: three of its cleverest officers – Oxford dons Freddie Ayer, Bill Deakin and Gilbert Hignet – spent weeks planning a response to a possible Japanese invasion of South America.

What mattered most, however, was Stephenson’s liaison role: he forged close personal relations with many prominent administration figures, and especially with Colonel William Donovan, who would become the most influential single personality in America’s wartime foreign intelligence operations. Donovan was a natural showman, where the other belligerents’ spymasters were men of the shadows or – in the case of Stalin’s intelligence chiefs – creatures of the night. Born in 1883, ‘Wild Bill’ rose from a poor Irish background in upstate New York to become a classmate of Franklin Roosevelt at Columbia Law School; he later became an influential friend of the president. He fought with Pershing against Pancho Villa, then commanded the New York Irish 69th Regiment on the Western Front in 1917–18, returning home as his nation’s most decorated soldier, a colonel with the Medal of Honor and a reasonably authentic reputation as a hero. Thereafter he fulfilled several fact-finding missions for the White House. Following the first of these, to the new Soviet Union in 1919, Donovan urged Washington against supporting White Russia, describing workers in Siberia as ‘yearning for Bolshevism’. As US Attorney for the Western District of New York, he became famous – or notorious – for his energetic enforcement of Prohibition. Later, though himself a Republican, he visited Abyssinia and Spain as an emissary for Roosevelt the Democrat. He returned home an implacable foe of Hitler, and advocate of US engagement in Europe.

In 1940 and 1941, Donovan made trips to London during which Stephenson ensured that he received red-carpet treatment, including lunch with the prime minister. Some British officers recoiled from the visitor’s brashness. Maj. Gen. John Kennedy, director of military operations, wrote in his diary: ‘Donovan … is extremely friendly to us & a shrewd and pleasant fellow and good talker. But I could not but feel that this fat & prosperous lawyer, a citizen of a country not in the war … possessed very great assurance to be able to lay down the law so glibly about what we and other threatened nations should & sh[oul]d not do.’

Donovan’s influence at the White House nonetheless ensured continuing British gratitude and goodwill. In September 1940 he persuaded Roosevelt to commit the US to a policy of intelligence collaboration with Churchill’s nation. When Godfrey, the director of naval intelligence, visited the US in May 1941 with his personal assistant Commander Ian Fleming, in New York the two men stayed at Donovan’s apartment. The admiral’s trip was not an unqualified success: he was shocked by the depth of hostility between the US Army and US Navy, and got little change out of Hoover, who was less interested in joining the war against the Axis than in securing the FBI’s monopoly control of the nation’s intelligence activities. In this, Hoover was unsuccessful. While his Bureau retained responsibility for counter-espionage – the role of MI5 in Britain – Godfrey and Stephenson played some part in convincing the Roosevelt administration that the country needed a new intelligence organisation, and that Donovan was the man to run it. From July 1941 he held the title of Coordinator of Information, though in reality his new Office of War Information was an embryo secret service, and he set about supervising its birth and precocious growth with energy and exuberance.

Donovan and Stephenson – the latter known in the US as ‘Little Bill’ rather than ‘Intrepid’, which was merely his telegraphic address – were buccaneers both, who shared credit for securing a reasonably free hand for British intelligence operations in the Americas, against the wishes of the FBI and the State Department. Their rapport did not, however, change an overarching reality: the wartime relationship between Britain and the United States was characterised by tensions and suspicions, merely painted over by the magnificent rhetoric of Churchill and Roosevelt. In 1940–41 the British were fighting for their lives while Americans were not, and indeed operated a cash-and-carry policy for the modest quota of weapons and supplies they sold to Churchill’s people. Most of America’s defence community had some respect for Britain, but little affection.

The British officers privy to the Ultra secret knew that they were custodians of one of their country’s most precious assets, which would become instantly forfeit if any hint of their growing successes reached Berlin. American security was poor, as might be expected of a people not yet committed to the struggle, who were anyway constitutionally ill-suited to keeping secrets. British intelligence chiefs were eager for American goodwill, but doubtful how much of practical value their US counterparts could tell them. Pending evidence that a two-way traffic could benefit their embattled island, they determined to give away as little as possible. Moreover, as an anguished Whitehall hand scribbled during the 1941 debate about how much to tell a visiting US delegation: ‘What will they think if they find we have been reading their own stuff?’ – a mild embarrassment about which Churchill came clean to Roosevelt on 25 February 1942, with the assurance that decryption of US material had stopped immediately after Pearl Harbor.

The sparse 1940–41 meetings and exchanges between the two nation’s codebreakers and intelligence officers took place in a climate of mutual wariness, and it was the Americans who displayed greater frankness. On 31 August 1940 the British were told that the Signals Intelligence Service had broken the Japanese Purple key. This revelation prompted no immediate invitation to Bletchley: when the Tizard mission visited the US in September to show off such revolutionary technology as the cavity magnetron – a tempting morsel, key to new-age tactical radar, and intended to promote American reciprocity – information about Ultra was explicitly excluded. On the American side, Laurance Safford of the US Navy’s Op-20-G codebreaking team was likewise opposed to sharing its secrets with the British. In December 1940 the two nations reached an agreement to pool information about codebreaking, but both were slow to bring this into effect. Only on Japanese material was there immediate close collaboration: in February 1941 the British cryptanalysis team in Singapore and its American counterpart in the Philippines exchanged liaison officers, who discovered that both were in about the same place with Tokyo’s codes. In the early war years the British did better than the Americans in monitoring some low-level Japanese armed forces traffic, though they failed to break into their higher ciphers. Nonetheless, when British forces in 1941 requested urgent American assistance in securing high-altitude photographs of Japan’s naval bases, Washington vetoed the proposal.

At the height of the Luftwaffe Blitz on Britain two FBI agents, Hugh Clegg and Clarence Hince, visited London to study ‘law enforcement in time of war’. Guy Liddell of MI5 thought that while the visitors looked somewhat thuggish, Clegg seemed ‘a very good fellow’. Such warmth was not reciprocated. On their return, the two men delivered to Hoover a report depicting the British, explicitly MI5 and the Metropolitan Police, in terms of withering scorn. They complained that it was difficult to arrange meetings before 10 a.m. or after 4 p.m. because ‘the transport situation is very difficult, you know’. They said that ‘The fact “exploratory luncheons” were usually two hours in length made our working day rather limited, particularly when compared to the customary hours that officials of the FBI are engaged in official business.’ They concluded that the British ‘might win the war if they find it convenient’. This report set the tone for the FBI’s view of the British for decades thereafter.

In January 1941, when an American codebreaking team – two army, two navy – paid a pioneering visit to Britain, they brought with them a remarkably generous gift: a mimicked Purple machine, of which a second copy was handed over later. The British, however, reciprocated cautiously. With Winston Churchill’s explicit sanction they admitted the visitors to Bletchley, and explained the Hut system. They revealed the bombes, GC&CS’s most critical innovation, but thereafter prevaricated about fulfilling American requests to be given an example of what Washington described as ‘a cypher-solving machine’. There were very good reasons for this – the US was not in the war, and the bombes were scarce pearls. The Americans recognised that they had seen in action a system way ahead of anything the US armed forces were doing. Alfred McCormack, who became the secretary for war’s special assistant on comint, said later of Bletchley: ‘It’s not good – it’s superb.’

Some people in Washington, however, were irked by apparent British pusillanimity. They themselves made little serious headway in reading Enigma traffic until floodgates opened in 1943, and – in the words of an exasperated British officer – ‘showed no appreciation of the extent of the problems facing Bletchley Park and Britain’. The Park’s Washington representative, Captain Edward Hastings, reported in November 1941 that ‘there is grave unrest and dissatisfaction about free exchange of special intelligence’. Some Americans were doggedly convinced that the British were holding out on them. As late as December 1942, when Alan Turing visited the US, he was denied admission to the Bell Laboratories in revenge for alleged British foot-dragging about collaboration, and was finally allowed inside only after a huge and protracted transatlantic row. Although William Friedman later forged warm personal relations with BP’s senior personnel, he himself made his first visit to Britain only in May 1943, about the time a formal and indeed historic intelligence-sharing pact was agreed between the two nations. Meanwhile collaboration remained wary and incomplete. Even after Pearl Harbor, Bletchley and its owners remained fearful not only about American security shortcomings, but also about the danger that this brightest jewel in the imperial crown might somehow be snatched from them by the boundlessly rich, irresistibly dominant new partner in the Grand Alliance. Alastair Denniston wrote that for Britain Ultra was ‘almost lifeblood’, whereas the Americans seemed to view Enigma, with the detachment of distance and freedom from mortal peril, merely as ‘a new and very interesting problem’.

The War Office’s deputy director of military intelligence wrote on 17 February 1942, ten weeks after Pearl Harbor, that in talking to the Americans, ‘the general policy is to be as frank as possible but no information will be given regarding our own future operations, or sources of information, nor will any information be passed which emanates from special most secret sources [Ultra]’. On 16 March the cabinet secretary Sir Edward Bridges wrote a memorandum warning that telephone conversations between London and Washington ‘still reveal instances of gross [American] lack of discretion’. Stewart Menzies and his officers at MI6 remained reluctant to open their hearts and files to their new brothers-in-arms.

Unfortunately, the British obfuscation which persisted through much of 1942 prompted misunderstandings and mounting anger among some Americans. These crystallised around a belief – entirely mistaken – that Bletchley had broken into the U-boat Shark key, but was refusing to tell the US Navy about it. Op-20-G’s eventual exasperated riposte to Bletchley’s unwillingness to surrender a bombe was to announce in September 1942 – and to begin to fulfil in August the following year – its own commitment to build four-rotor models by the hundred. This was a time when the British had just thirty-two. The American machines proved technically superior to the British models, and also more reliable: in October 1943 thirty-nine were operational and by December seventy-five, though by the time these became operational much of their capacity proved superfluous to US Navy needs.

In the early war years, British intelligence collaboration with the US was cautious; only from 1943 onwards did it become wholehearted. As with so much else about Anglo–American relations, however, it is less surprising that there was so much squabbling at the outset, in the years of Allied defeat, than that the partnership eventually achieved the intimacy that it did, in the years of victory.

* The Type-X was developed in 1934 by Wing-Commander O.C. Lywood and Ernest Smith of Air Ministry Signals, improving upon a borrowed commercial Enigma, and entered British service three years later.

4
The Dogs that Barked
1 ‘LUCY’S’ PEOPLE

The extraordinary incident of the Kremlin’s dogs in the night was that they barked, and barked. Operation ‘Barbarossa’, the June 1941 Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, was the defining event of the Second World War – and its most baffling, because it achieved surprise when its imminence was manifest. It was a tribute to the length and strength of Stalin’s arm that humint – agents of influence abroad – provided him with comprehensive warnings. As early as July 1940, NKVD men operating in German-occupied Poland were reporting intense Wehrmacht activity, barrack-building and troop movements. That autumn, he instructed Centre to open a special file on Hitler’s intentions codenamed ‘Zateya’ – ‘Venture’. In September this showed massive German redeployments close to the Russian border, together with continuing construction of troop accommodation. The Germans’ Moscow embassy was reported by a Soviet agent within its walls to be striving to recruit White Russians and intellectual dissidents for the Abwehr. In November 1940 Stalin was told that eighty-five divisions, comprising more than two-thirds of Hitler’s infantry, were deployed along the Russian frontier.

During the months that followed, however, some of these troops were shifted to threaten, and then to occupy, Romania and Greece. Neither in 1941 nor since have most Westerners grasped the intensity of Stalin’s conviction that Hitler’s ambitions were focused on the Balkans, where Russia also had vital interests. Nor do they acknowledge the depth of his hatred and distrust of Britain. It was barely twenty years since Winston Churchill had led a crusade to reverse the Bolshevik Revolution by force of arms. Stalin saw himself, by no means mistakenly, as the object of a sustained Churchillian campaign to drive a wedge into his pact with Hitler and force him to fight Germany, against Russia’s interests and in pursuit of those of the British Empire.

The master of the Kremlin recognised that war between the Nazis and the Soviet Union might ultimately prove unavoidable. An August 1940 GRU report, quoting Hitler’s ambassador in Belgrade, showed that this was certainly the other party’s view: ‘For Germany the Balkans are the most significant asset and ought to be included in the [Nazi-controlled] new order of Europe; but since the USSR would never agree to that, a war with her is inevitable.’ Stalin, however, remained convinced that it was overwhelmingly against Hitler’s interests to break the Nazi–Soviet Pact that was delivering huge supplies of oil and commodities to Germany. He believed it was in the Kremlin’s gift to appoint the hour for a showdown, which was not yet. He clung to the view, slavishly endorsed by Beria, that Hitler was engaged in a massive bluff, designed to cow Russia into letting Germany have its way in the Balkans. Augusto Rosso, the Italian ambassador in Moscow, wrote on 21 September 1940: ‘The Germans have raised a barrier [against the Russians]: the march to the south has been stopped, the oil is at the disposal of the Germans … The Danube is a German river. This is the first diplomatic defeat of Comrade Stalin … and the defeat is even more humiliating because it explodes the dream which throughout the centuries has occupied a special place in the Russian soul: [dominance] of the southern meridian.’

Friedrich von der Schulenberg, Germany’s ambassador, helped to assuage Moscow’s fears about Berlin’s intentions, because his own honesty and sincerity were manifest, and directed towards preserving peace. Beria told Stalin that once Vichy France and Spain had joined the Axis as expected, Hitler planned to induce him to join a pact that would close a steel ring around Britain: ‘Pressure was to be exerted on Russia,’ the Soviet intelligence supremo wrote on 24 October 1940, ‘to reach a political agreement with Germany which would demonstrate to the entire world that the Soviet Union will not hold aloof, and actively join the struggle against Britain, to secure a new European order.’ In November Molotov was dispatched to Berlin, to discover ‘the real intentions of Germany’s proposals for the New Europe’. The foreign minister made plain that Stalin still sought control of the mouth of the Danube, which Hitler had no intention of conceding, and the visit confirmed Germany’s leader in his commitment to war.

The NKVD’s informants in London asserted, correctly, that many of Britain’s businessmen and bankers favoured a compromise peace. Moscow was appalled by such a prospect, which would make Hitler unstoppable. The Kremlin aspired to see Germany weakened, to make Hitler more biddable. Thus, for all Stalin’s disdain for Churchill and his people, he was delighted by British successes against the Luftwaffe at home and the Italians in North Africa. Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador in London, waxed lyrical about the prospects, writing on 3 November 1940: ‘England has not merely survived, but has strengthened its position compared with that which prevailed after the fall of France … in the “Battle of Britain”. Hitler, like Napoleon 135 years earlier, has suffered a defeat, his first serious setback of this war; the consequences are impossible to foresee.’

Through the winter of 1940–41, Stalin was battered by contrary winds and fears. The NKVD and GRU reported insistently and accurately, on the authority of its secret Whitehall informants, that the British were considering a bomber assault on his Baku oil wells, which were supplying Russian fuel to the Luftwaffe. The Kremlin was even more dismayed by Axis preparations to invade Greece, which could presage seizure of the Dardanelles, a centuries-old Russian nightmare. If Turkey came into the war on either side, Stalin thought its army liable to invade the Caucasus, of which the Ottomans had been dispossessed barely seventy years earlier. Vsevolod Merkulov, Beria’s deputy, reported intense Turkish intelligence activity on the Russian border. Meanwhile the Turks, for their part, were fearful of Nazi aggression, and in January 1941 their embassies began to brief the Russians about the German build-up in Romania. The GRU asserted on 27 January 1941 that the Balkans ‘remained the decisive focus of political events, particularly since a headlong clash of German and Soviet vital interests has arisen there’.

But although Stalin was receiving a stream of intelligence about the Nazi threat to the Balkans, there was a torrent about the direct menace to the Soviet Union. On 5 December 1940 Vladimir Dekanozov, Soviet ambassador in Berlin and a veteran intelligence officer, received an anonymous letter: ‘To Comrades Stalin and Molotov, very urgent. Russia, please be alert, as Hitler is soon going to attack you. It will soon be too late, but Russia is asleep now. Can’t you see what is happening on the borders, from Memel to the Black Sea? East Prussia is filled with troops, new units are arriving day and night …’ Moscow was informed by its Berlin military attaché just eleven days after Hitler signed his Directive 21 on 18 December, calling on the Wehrmacht ‘to crush Soviet Russia in a rapid campaign’. In mid-March 1941 the Soviet military attaché in Bucharest reported a German officer telling a friend: ‘We have completely altered our plans. We aim at the East, at the USSR. We shall seize the Soviets’ grain, coal and oil. We shall then be invincible and will be able to continue the war against England and the United States.’

Beria and Stalin nonetheless agreed that there was alternative evidence to show this to be mere sabre-rattling: Hitler was making a show of force on Russia’s border to advance his Balkan purposes. A 20 March 1941 GRU assessment by Gen. Filip Golikov stated what he knew his readership wished to hear: ‘The majority of the intelligence reports which indicate the likelihood of war with the Soviet Union in spring 1941 are derived from Anglo-American sources, whose immediate objective is undoubtedly to promote the worsening of relations between the USSR and Germany.’ The Swedish minister in Moscow, Vilhelm Assarasson, was consistently well informed about Nazi decision-making, and knew about the commitment to ‘Barbarossa’. But Assarasson’s tip was discounted, because it was forwarded to the Kremlin by Stafford Cripps, the British envoy. The NKVD intercepted the dispatches of Turkish ambassador Haydar Aktay, who also cited Assarasson’s information, along with reports of Hitler’s indiscretions to Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, predicting war. Aktay’s view was also dismissed.

In March Soviet intelligence suffered a shock. Moscow considered it an important interest to keep Yugoslavia out of Hitler’s grasp. When it became aware that Prince Paul, the ruling regent, intended to throw in his lot with the Axis, Gen. Solomon Milshtein and a band of GRU ‘illegals’ were dispatched to Belgrade to organise a coup against him. They were confounded when Britain’s SOE pre-empted them, launching its own coup to install King Peter II. Moscow was even more appalled a few days later, when the Wehrmacht swept across Yugoslavia in the face of negligible resistance. Yet even though the Russians sympathised with its people, as fellow-Slavs, Stalin dismissed their pleas for military assistance. He remained stubbornly determined not to be provoked by the British – as he saw it – into an armed struggle against Germany over Yugoslavia. He merely signed a meaningless non-aggression agreement with Belgrade, shortly before German troops swept its new government aside. He had set a course – to buy time before confronting Hitler – and was determined nothing should deflect him from it, least of all the intelligence reports that swamped Moscow Centre between September 1940 and June 1941.

It is hard to assess the contribution of Soviet agents in Switzerland at this time, because modern knowledge is almost entirely dependent on the principals’ later memoirs. All were compulsive liars, bent upon inflating their own roles. Thus, what follows is even more speculative than most accounts of Russian activities. The onset of war had created financial and logistical difficulties for Alexander Radó. There was no Soviet legation in Bern through which cash could be channelled to him, and his cartographic business languished. He was left with little money to fund himself and his family, far less a spy network. Alexander Foote, trained by Ursula Hamburger to serve as Radó’s wireless-operator, was striving with equally meagre funds to sustain a masquerade as a British gentleman of leisure, hoping to sit out the war in the comfort of Lausanne. Wireless assumed a new importance for the network after the fall of France, because Radó could no longer use couriers to shift paper reports via Paris. To provide greater security for the Ring’s communications, he opened a second transmitter operated by a Geneva electrical engineer named Edmond Hamel, who was trained by Foote. Hamel inspired mockery because he was a very small man married to a very large wife, Olga, but he cherished an idealistic enthusiasm for the Soviet Union.

In March 1940, Moscow ordered Anatoli Gourevitch – ‘Monsieur Kent’ – to travel from Brussels to Geneva to hand over a new code to ‘Dora’ – Radó. This was a breach of every rule of espionage, barring contact and thus the risk of contamination between networks, but the GRU man was pleased to be given such an opportunity to spread his wings. As a supposed rich young ‘Uruguayan tourist’, Vincente Sierra commissioned Thomas Cook to make his arrangements, and took a fat book of travellers’ cheques to support his cover. On the train from Paris to Geneva, a man who looked familiar took the seat opposite him. Gourevitch was amazed when his companion introduced himself as Jean Gabin, greatest French film star of the age, on his way to Geneva to see his son make his debut as a circus performer. The two exchanged visiting cards. The enchanted young Russian decided that being a secret agent had many compensations.

Installed in Geneva’s Hôtel Russie, he divided his time between tourism, nightclub visits to support his cover, and a cautious reconnaissance of 113, Rue de Lausanne, the address Centre had given him for Radó. He called the Hungarian’s number from a telephone box, then went to a cinema and left in the middle of the film, to walk to Radó’s house. He was welcomed warmly, but with surprise, according to Gourevitch. The visitor later claimed that he had been bemused by Radó’s ‘careless air’, and by the agent’s claim that, despite the depredations inflicted by war, he still had some money because his map business was not doing badly. Radó introduced his wife Lena, then the two men closeted themselves in his study. Gourevitch handed over a French novel which provided the new key for coding messages. Over the course of the next few hours they practised the routine repeatedly, until both were satisfied that Radó had mastered it. Then they parted, agreeing to meet again in Lausanne, which was conveniently near Montreux, where the ‘Uruguayan tourist’ had booked a stay of several days. Following this second meeting they lunched together in a restaurant, then wandered the streets.

Most Russians abroad suffered severely from homesickness. When Soviet agents met and had leisure enough to gossip, the first question to a man or woman fresh from Moscow was almost always ‘What news from “the village”?’, as they called their country’s capital. Though Radó was Hungarian, according to Gourevitch they talked indiscreetly about each other’s experiences of Centre. Radó allegedly begged his contact to emphasise to Moscow the lofty nature of his sources in Berlin. The Geneva agent also told him the Germans were planning to attack the Soviet Union. Yet it is implausible that in April 1940 Radó should have said Germany was preparing to invade Russia, because at that time Hitler had made no such decision, nor even come near to it. What seems certain, however, is that Centre was rash in sending Gourevitch to Geneva, and that its spies told each other things they should not have done, dangerous to both networks.

At the end of December 1940 Ursula Hamburger left Switzerland for England, where her German communist brother was already living in exile. She was soon followed by her husband Len Brewer. Her set – a ‘musical box’ in their jargon, just as a forger was a ‘cobbler’ and police ‘the doctor’ – was taken to Geneva. Alexander Foote moved back to Lausanne with his own transmitter. It was too dangerous to install an external aerial on his apartment building. Instead, he persuaded a nearby wireless shop to supply the deficiency, saying that he wanted to listen to the BBC. For months, however, he proved unable to raise Moscow. Despite passing countless hours hunched over a Morse key in the kitchen, his urgent pulses vanished into a void. Then on 12 March 1941 came an electrifying moment: into his earphones flickered a response ‘NDA, NDA, OK, QRK5.’ He was in touch with Centre.

Swiss intelligence must have been aware of the Radó group’s transmissions, but at that stage they made no attempt to interfere, even when the Gestapo protested fiercely to Bern about the flood of signals its operators monitored from across the border. The spies now boasted a third transmitter: Radó had met a young woman named Margrit Bolli, daughter of strongly socialistic parents, who said that she was eager to help the communist cause. The Ring trained the twenty-three-year-old girl in Morse technique. Initially she transmitted from the family home in Basle, but when her parents not unreasonably baulked, she moved to Geneva. The Gestapo, listening in frustration to the signals – still unintelligible to them – flooding across the ether from Bolli, Foote and the Hamels christened them ‘Die Rote Drei’ – ‘The Red Trio’.

Who was giving Radó the information from Germany which was forwarded to Moscow in an average of five messages a day? The activities of ‘Cissie’, Rachel Dübendorfer, had now been merged into those of his group. Colleagues described her as a charmless woman of Balkan origins. She lived with Paul Böttcher, a former German communist illegally resident in Switzerland: Dübendorfer more than once used her nominal Swiss husband’s identity documents to preserve Böttcher’s neck. It is alleged that one of her sources provided an explicit warning of ‘Barbarossa’. Meanwhile one of Radó’s messages, dated 21 February 1941, quoted a Swiss intelligence officer, Mayr von Baldegg or ‘Luise’, predicting a German invasion at the end of May, a forecast perhaps secured by the Swiss Viking intelligence network inside Germany, and endorsed by a prominent Japanese diplomat. The network also became a conduit through which some Czech intelligence was passed to Moscow, most of it ultimately derived from the Abwehr’s Paul Thummel. At the end of May Radó cited a French diplomat, Louis Suss, predicting an invasion on 22 June – this message provoked an icy response from Moscow. So did another report to the same effect from Rudolf Rössler, who would henceforward become the foremost source for the Radó network. His codename ‘Lucy’ has passed into history, since the GRU’s Swiss operation became familiarly known as the ‘Lucy’ Ring.

Rössler, a small, grey, bespectacled German émigré born in 1897, was an impregnably enigmatic figure, of a kind that populates many spy sagas. A socialist journalist, he fled from the Nazis in 1935 and set up a little publishing business in Lucerne – the city that prompted his codename. He began writing under the name of R.A. Hermes, describing the Nazi persecution of Jews and warning that the Nazis would reoccupy the Rhineland. Berlin identified ‘Hermes’, and in 1937 deprived Rössler of his German citizenship. He nonetheless retained many connections in his homeland, especially within the Wehrmacht. Short of both friends and cash in Switzerland, he began to provide information to a private intelligence agency called Buro Ha, based at the Villa Stutz south of Lucerne, and run by an ardent anti-Nazi named Captain Hans Hausamann. Buro Ha had informal links to Swiss intelligence, which for a season thereafter provided some protection for Rössler.

He secured a steady flow of information from Germany, and apportioned varying quotas to Swiss, British, Czech and Soviet purchasers. Though his anti-Nazi credentials were not in doubt, he was principally and of necessity a mercenary – all his customers had to pay cash. By 1942 he had become by far the GRU’s most important Swiss source, the key figure in the Radó network. Moscow Centre, mistrustful of this shadowy figure, insistently demanded that Radó should make Rössler identify his sources, and the journalist equally stubbornly refused to do so. For all his later importance, it remains unclear how much intelligence he provided in 1941. Rössler went to his post-war grave still silent about the identity of the Germans who had provided him with useful, even sensational material. Subsequent speculation has focused on Col. Hans Oster, deputy head of the Abwehr; Hans Gisevius; former Leipzig mayor Gördeler; and two unnamed Wehrmacht generals.

Uncertainty also persists about the timing and wording of some of the Swiss Ring’s messages and their supposed warnings to Moscow, both before and after ‘Barbarossa’. All that can confidently be said is that the GRU received a stream of messages from Switzerland in the spring of 1941, some of which strongly indicated that Hitler intended to attack Russia. Equally significant for the strategic debate in Moscow, Centre learned that Rudolf Rössler had been, and probably continued to be, an informant of MI6’s Bern station. It was only one step from this knowledge to a belief inside the Kremlin that the ‘Lucy’ Ring had become an instrument of Churchill, peddling false information to drag Russia into the war.

2 SORGE’S WARNINGS

Stalin’s Japanese sources told much the same story as his Swiss ones, though since the outbreak of war in Europe the strain of sustaining twin lives, occupying a much higher profile than the ‘Lucy’ spies, had exacted an ever worsening toll on its principal agent. Richard Sorge strove to use his influence to dissuade the Germans from war with Russia. He told the Tokyo embassy that Nomonhan – the summer 1939 Russo–Japanese border clashes – had been a disaster for the Japanese, and that Berlin should notice the effectiveness of the Red Army and of Zhukov, its local commander. Then came the huge shock of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, which stunned the Japanese government.

And Sorge. The spy reported on 12 August 1939 the movement of twelve Japanese divisions to Korea and Manchuria – the real total was twenty – in case the government decided on war, but he expressed his own conviction that Japan would hold back, and indeed on 4 September Tokyo formally announced a policy of non-intervention. Sorge told Moscow, on Hotsumi Ozaki’s authority, that the country would enter the war only when it was confident that it had identified the winner. He added that the German embassy expected the Japanese to remain neutral, and was even nervous they might join the Allied camp.

Sorge’s surreal relationship with Col. Ott’s mission took a new twist when he was offered a staff post as its press attaché. He declined, as usual because he was fearful of the security checks into his past that acceptance would have provoked, but he worked four hours a day in the embassy building, while assuming a new journalistic role as a stringer for Frankfurter Zeitung. It was scarcely surprising that in October the Japanese police foreign section, the Tokko, committed an agent – twenty-eight-year-old Harutsugu Saito – to shadow Sorge. They suspected that he was spying … for Germany. Saito noticed Max Clausen and began to take an interest in him, too.

During the months that followed, stresses on the network intensified. Branko de Voukelitch disclosed his work for the Soviets to his adored Japanese lover Yoshiko. In 1940 the couple were married, and she never betrayed him, but his indiscretion was appallingly risky. Max Clausen became grossly overweight, and his health deteriorated. Bedridden for some time, he had to get his wife Anna to assemble the transmitter before tapping out messages to Moscow from his sickroom. His employers were unsympathetic. Clausen was peremptorily informed by the Fourth Department that funding was tight: pay was being reduced. His little blueprint reproduction company employed fourteen people, had opened a branch in Mukden and was fulfilling assignments for the Japanese War and Navy Ministries. Moscow said that he must henceforth subsidise himself out of its profits. In a farcical twist, Clausen became increasingly admiring of Hitler – who was, after all, now supposedly Stalin’s friend.

But the radioman kept sending: in 1940 he transmitted sixty times, sending 29,179 words of Sorge’s wisdom. Prominent among the spy’s scoops was the draft of a proposed Japan–China peace treaty. It was deemed a vital Soviet interest to keep the China war going, because its termination would free the Japanese army to strike at Russia. When the treaty leaked and the draft was torn up, Sorge was also able to supply the substitute version – though this, too, remained unsigned. From the German embassy he secured data on the Mitsubishi and Nakajima aircraft factories. He provided accurate forecasts on Japan’s aggressive intentions towards French Indochina. He was not infallible, however, and gave Moscow some cause for scepticism. He predicted, for instance, that the British would reject Tokyo’s demand for closure of the Burma Road supply route to China shortly before they did so for three months. As is so often the case with intelligence, Sorge’s original report was not mistaken: Churchill simply changed his mind.

By the end of 1940, Sorge’s standing was higher in Berlin than in the Kremlin. Indeed, the excellence of his reports for the Nazis almost caused his undoing: Schellenberg of the RSHA ran a security check which revealed his communist past. The Gestapo’s Joseph Meisinger was posted to Tokyo as embassy security officer, with orders to look closely at Sorge, though as yet the Nazis had no suspicion of his supreme duplicity. Meisinger was ill-equipped for his task: a creature of Reinhard Heydrich, he was a thug whose reputation rested upon a few months of orchestrating brutality in Warsaw. Much more serious for the spy ring was the fact that some of its principal members were breaking down. Though Sorge sustained his journalistic career, penning fifty-one articles for Frankfurter Zeitung in the first six months of 1941, his nerves were shredded. His drinking worsened, and Hanako found him an increasingly violent lover. When she sobbed and begged him to explain himself, he responded sullenly, ‘I am lonely.’ She said, ‘How can this be, when you have so many German friends here in Tokyo?’ He muttered, ‘They are not my true friends.’ In a September 1940 signal to Moscow, he said that he was forty-four years old and desperately tired. He yearned to be allowed to go ‘home’ to Russia, though he must have known that Centre would never countenance this until the war ended.

Max Clausen became too sick to keep pace with transmission of Sorge’s flood of material, and began secretly to destroy unsent a substantial proportion, arbitrarily selected. Thus, while it is known what information Sorge claimed to have passed on to the Fourth Department, it is unclear what actually reached them in 1941: Russian releases of some of his material in the 1990s must be treated with caution, because selective. From the end of 1940 onwards, Sorge was personally convinced that Germany and the Soviet Union would go to war. He was deeply troubled by the prospect, and by its implications for himself. During the early months of 1941 he reported an increasing Japanese focus on a ‘Strike south’ strategy against the European Asian empires. On 10 March he wrote of German pressure on Japan ‘to invigorate her role in the Tripartite Pact’ by attacking the Soviet Union. But Sorge added that this war would only start ‘once the present one is over’.

In May he asserted that Hitler was resolved ‘to crush the Soviet Union and keep the European parts … in his hands’, but suggested that there was still scope for diplomacy to prevent war. Later that month he said that his German contacts expected an invasion to be launched before June, but then added that some important visitors from Berlin believed that the prospect of such action taking place in 1941 had receded. Both these signals probably reflected Sorge’s conversations with Lt. Col. Schol, a Wehrmacht officer passing through Tokyo en route to taking up the post of military attaché in Bangkok. On 30 May he wirelessed: ‘Berlin has informed Ambassador Ott that the German offensive against the USSR will begin in the second half of June. Ott is 95 per cent sure that the war will begin. The indirect proofs that I see at the present are as follows: The Luftwaffe technical delegation in [Tokyo] has been ordered home. Ott has requested the military attaché to halt the transmission of important documents via the USSR. The shipment of rubber via the USSR has been reduced to a minimum.’

Sorge’s reports were as good as any government at any moment in history could ask from a secret agent, but he was one among many voices that cried in the wilderness surrounding the Kremlin. Stalin was no more willing to trust the word of his Tokyo man than that of any other source. He once described Sorge, about whom he had been briefed, as ‘a lying shit who has set himself up with some small factories and brothels in Japan’. Although the Soviet warlord was notoriously wrong about ‘Barbarossa’, few national leaders have lost empires by declining to accept the unsupported word of secret agents. Historians carve spies’ coups in letters of gold, but seldom detail the vastly larger volume of humint that has been partially or wholly misleading. Molotov said in old age: ‘I think that one can never trust the intelligence … The intelligence people can lead to dangerous situations that it is impossible to get out of. There were endless provocateurs on both sides … People are so naïve and gullible, indulging themselves and quoting memoirs: spies said so and so, defectors crossed the lines …’ Stalin would have been more likely to believe Sorge had the spy reported that the Germans’ posturings formed part of a plot concocted by the faraway British.

3 THE ORCHESTRA PLAYS

The most authoritative intelligence sent to Moscow in advance of ‘Barbarossa’ came from the Russians’ Berlin networks. What became known as the Rote Kapelle – the Red Orchestra – was not a single entity, though supposed to be such by the Germans. It was a cluster of separate GRU and NKVD networks, which only careless tradecraft and operational emergencies caused to become entwined. The Rote Kapelle was less important for its impact on the war, which proved slight, than for the fact of its existence. The Western Allies secured extraordinary military intelligence through Ultra, but never had humint sources of any significance inside Germany – unless we include a product of Purple, described later – until some members of the anti-Hitler Resistance contacted Allen Dulles of the OSS in 1943. The Russians, by contrast, controlled a shaft to a goldmine.

The Harnack/Schulze-Boysen network supplied Moscow with information from an ever-widening circle hostile to the Nazi regime. Although they themselves were people of the left, they appear to have forged links with some conservative Resistance figures such as Dietrich Bonhöffer, and also to have had contact with the White Rose group in Munich. Given the number of informants involved, and their reckless insouciance about security, the group’s survival until 1942 was a reflection of Abwehr and Gestapo blindness rather than of the Rote Kapelle’s guile. Arvid Harnack was so passionate in his commitment to the cause that he involved his group in printing anti-Nazi pamphlets and even acted personally as a watcher while other group members pasted wall posters by night. Such grandstanding was courageous, but endangered his much more important intelligence work.

Throughout the first twenty-two months of the war, while the British strove to pierce the fog obscuring their view of the Continent, the Russians were able to continue spying almost unimpeded. As neutrals, they channelled to Moscow through their diplomatic missions agent reports from all over the world, without need for using hazardous wireless links. In Berlin, the Gestapo’s Willy Lehmann had languished since Moscow shut down contact to him in the wake of the 1939 Nazi–Soviet Pact. Lehmann was a loner, and his self-purpose had come to revolve around his intelligence activities for the Russians. Why had they abandoned him? In September 1940, season of the Battle of Britain, he risked slipping a letter into the Soviet embassy mailbox, addressed to ‘the military attaché or his deputy’. In it, ‘Breitenbach’ pleaded for a resumption of relations. He said that unless he could serve the NKVD once more, ‘my work at the Gestapo will become pointless’, and provided a password for telephone contact.

This letter, and the question of whether to reactivate Lehmann, were referred to Moscow. Draconian instructions from the Kremlin decreed that the Berlin NKVD should neither offer nor respond to any provocation that might help to justify German aggression. Nonetheless, after a debate Centre dispatched an able young officer, Alexander Korotkov, codename ‘Stepanov’, to become deputy station chief. He contacted Lehmann, and reported back after a long meeting: the man seemed sincerely desperate to reopen his line to Centre. On 9 September 1940, a personal order from Beria reached Berlin: ‘No special assignments should be given to “Breitenbach”. [But] you should accept all material that falls within his direct sphere of knowledge, and also any information he can offer about the operations of various [German] intelligence services against the USSR.’ ‘Breitenbach’s’ extravagant enthusiasm kept alive Beria’s suspicion that he was a Gestapo plant, testing the sincerity of the Kremlin’s commitment to the Nazi–Soviet Pact. Hence the security chief emphasised that the Berlin informant should be pressed to provide documentary evidence for every assertion he made. So impoverished was the NKVD’s staff in the wake of the Purges that a complete novice was dispatched to act as Lehmann’s courier: Boris Zhuravlev scarcely spoke any German, and after arriving in Berlin his first step was to hire a language tutor. The young man also bought a bicycle, in order to start learning his way around the city. From the outset he was almost overwhelmed by the flow of documents Lehmann delivered at evening meetings, which had to be copied overnight, then returned before the informant set off for his office.

On 20 September 1940, for instance, the Gestapo man warned Moscow that the Abwehr was planning a honeytrap for Soviet military attaché Nikolai Shornyakov, using a singer from the Rio-Rita bar named Elisabeth Holland, an Austrian friend of the attaché’s landlady. Breitenbach gave a detailed description of the Abwehr case officer, Siegfried Müller: tall, blue-eyed, black hair, small moustache, sunken cheeks, piercing stare, with big ears and a thin neck. Müller was rash enough to seek to pass himself off as a member of the Gestapo. When this was brought to the attention of Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s deputy dispatched a stinging rebuke to Admiral Canaris for allowing the Abwehr man to fly false colours.

Meanwhile Alexander Korotkov was also charged by Moscow to reopen contact with the Harnack/Schulze-Boysen groups. To achieve this, in mid-September he risked repeatedly calling on Harnack at his home. On several occasions he was informed by a housekeeper that Herr Harnack was out. Only on the 16th did Korotkov at last meet his man. Their interview was initially tense, for Harnack was wary. When at last he was convinced of his visitor’s bona fides – if that is not a contradictory term for an NKVD officer – he had plenty to say about his own range of contacts. Most significantly, he told the Russian that he and his friends were convinced that Hitler intended to invade the Soviet Union in the following year, 1941. Back at the embassy, Korotkov messaged Lt. Gen. Pavel Fitin, head of the foreign section of the NKVD in Moscow, under the signature of his nominal boss, Amayak Kobulov, ‘Zakhar’:

Top secret

To comrade Viktor

‘Corporal’ has learned from ‘Albanian’ who has spoken to a top Wehrmacht officer, that Germany intends to initiate a war against the Soviet Union early next year …

16 September 1940

Zakhar

Yet Moscow had reason to be sceptical about these sensational tidings. History shows that they were correct, but on 16 September 1940 Hitler had not yet committed himself. An invasion of Russia was being feverishly debated by prominent Nazis and the army high command. But Operation ‘Barbarossa’ remained a controversial option rather than a settled decision. The fact that Arvid Harnack’s prediction was ultimately fulfilled does not alter the important fact that it remained speculative at a moment when he asserted its finality, as did the earlier report of the ‘Lucy’ Ring’s Alexander Radó. Only in November did Hitler decide.

The affairs of the Berlin NKVD were much complicated by the fact that Korotkov, their best man, was hated and resented by his station chief. The Czech František Moravec, who had extensive dealings with the Russians before the war, has testified to the brutish personalities of most of their intelligence officers. One such, Amayak Kobulov, now ran the NKVD’s Berlin station, where he proved a blunderer more inept than MI6’s Best and Stevens. Kobulov’s only claim on rank was a slavish devotion to the Party hierarchy. Born into a family of Armenian small traders in Tbilisi, he worked as a bookkeeper before joining the security forces in 1927. He owed his survival, and indeed rapid advancement, to his elder brother Bogdan, an intimate of Beria. Kobulov served as a notoriously murderous deputy commissar for Ukraine, and was then appointed to Berlin despite not speaking a word of German. On arrival, he told his staff that he required their absolute subservience. When a young intelligence officer protested about being obliged to serve as the chief’s domestic valet rather than to run agents, his boss threatened to dispatch him to rot in the dungeons of the Lubyanka.

Kobulov also took violent exception to Korotkov, and seized an excuse to return him to Moscow with a highly adverse personal report. Beria, receiving this, summarily sacked the young officer in January 1941. He soon retracted this decision, but for some months Korotkov was confined to desk work in the Lubyanka. Meanwhile Kobulov arranged a personal meeting with Harnack. This encounter went unnoticed by the Gestapo, but could easily have been fatal to the network. At the turn of the year, Centre acknowledged that only Korotkov was competent to handle liaison with its Berlin informants. He was sent back to Germany, with a new brief to pass on to Harnack. The NKVD wanted the German informant’s group to concentrate on economics, not strategy. The NKVD Fifth Department’s orders instructed Korotkov to explore the extent of the German domestic opposition, and how far it might be exploited. Nothing was said about probing Germany’s military intentions towards the Soviet Union – from residual caution lest Harnack prove a Gestapo plant, or find himself under torture.

The order was endorsed in red pencil: ‘Approved by the People’s Commissar. [Pavel] Sudoplatov. 26.12.40.’ Korotkov counter-signed the last page: ‘Read, learned and received as an order. “Stepanov”, 26.12.40.’ He duly passed on the message to the Berlin group, bypassing Kobulov, his nominal chief. Through the months that followed, the Germans delivered a steady flow of intelligence. On 29 January 1941, Harnack reported that the Economics Ministry had been ordered to compile industrial targeting maps of the USSR, similar to those which had been made before the Blitz on Britain. He told Moscow that the head of the Russian Department in Berlin’s Bureau for Foreign Literary Exchanges had been warned for possible duty as a military translator and interpreter; and that the Russian Department of the Economics Ministry was complaining bitterly about shortfalls in promised deliveries of commodities from the USSR, under the terms of the Nazi–Soviet Pact.

Harnack made explicit his own conviction that Hitler was preparing to invade Russia. He also provided copious details on Germany’s economic situation – coal, iron and steel production; synthetic rubber consumption; industrial manpower difficulties, together with German plans to make these good by recruiting workers from occupied Europe – information MI6 would have given rubies to access. Harnack concluded, in terms that weakened his credibility in Moscow, by reverting to gossip: ‘According to Hitler’s circle, he is now in a very unbalanced state, suddenly runs to watch a film during the night, or – as has happened more than once, tore down the curtains in a fit of fury.’ The NKVD’s Berlin station reported to Moscow on 26 February 1941:

Top Secret

To Comrade Viktor

According to information that Harnack obtained from Ernst von Arnim, [Dr Karl] Gördeler’s [anti-Hitler opposition] group has made an attempt to achieve an agreement with the army leadership to form a new German government … The negotiations had a negative result due to the negative reaction from the military leadership. However, according to Ernst, some top generals sympathise with Gördeler’s plan …

Zakhar

The Berlin station was not alone in dispatching warnings to Moscow about the invasion threat: on 7 February 1941 the NKVD’s Third Department cited its source ‘Teffi’ in Ankara as discussing ‘rumours about a possible German offensive against the USSR. According to one version this will only happen after the Germans defeat England. According to another version, which is regarded as more probable, Germany will attack the USSR before striking at England in order to secure its supplies.’ Next day came another report from Harnack, declaring a widespread belief at OKW headquarters that full German occupation of Romania would become a preliminary to an invasion of the USSR. This was followed by a further message early in March, claiming that the worsening food situation in Germany was intensifying the pressure on the Nazi leadership to attack Russia. Col. Gen. Franz Halder, said the Berlin informants, was planning a lightning strike similar to the 1940 French campaign to occupy Ukraine, before the Wehrmacht drove south to seize Stalin’s oilfields. Harnack also described concerns in high places that Germany, instead of profiting economically from invading Russia, would find such a war draining. In another report a few days later, he described intensive Luftwaffe aerial reconnaissance activity over Russia, and operational planning for an offensive that would reach the Urals in forty-five days.

Merkulov, Beria’s deputy, read the 11 March report from Berlin. Like all Soviet officials who wished to survive, he was supremely cautious. Born in 1895, he had worked with Beria in the trans-Caucasian region, and rose yapping at his heels through the Soviet hierarchy; his most recent triumph had been to preside over the massacre of 25,000 Polish officers at Katyn. Now, he demanded of Fitin, ‘Aren’t there other sources on this except Harnack? How can we check the information without letting any informants know what it is? The task should be presented to them in a general and cautious form.’ The March reports from Harnack were correct, though Moscow Centre also received plenty of nonsense. ‘Breitenbach’ reported that the British were preparing to unleash chemical warfare against Germany, and that the Germans intended to use poison gas on the Russians in the event of war. Schulze-Boysen claimed that he ‘knows for sure’ that the American air force attaché in Moscow ‘is a German agent. He passes to the Germans the intelligence data which he, in turn, receives from his contacts in the USSR.’

On 15 March Centre increased the risk level for its Berlin informants by ordering Korotkov to establish a direct link with Schulze-Boysen, cutting out couriers, so as to hasten evaluation of his reports. Their first meeting took place in Harnack’s flat, where Schulze-Boysen gave the Russian a momentary fright by turning up in his Luftwaffe uniform. ‘I didn’t have time to change,’ he explained. Korotkov reported to Moscow: ‘We talked exclusively about the information on anti-Soviet plans that was available to him. He is absolutely conscious of the fact that he is dealing with a representative of the Soviet Union [as distinct from the Comintern]. My impression is that he is happy to tell us everything he knows. He answered our questions without equivocation or any attempt to obfuscate. Moreover, it was obvious that he had prepared for this meeting, by writing down some questions for us on a scrap of paper … We hope to establish a close connection with Schulze-Boysen. However, at present he is confined to barracks and is only occasionally and unpredictably free to travel into town, often while it is still light and even in his uniform, as happened when I met him. Any rendezvous must be flexible.’

On the evening of 19 April, in Harnack’s flat Korotkov met Adam Kuckhoff, a writer and theatre director, who was promptly recruited with the codename ‘Old Man’. Korotkov messaged Moscow about him in frankly condescending terms: ‘Kuckhoff strikes one as a cultured and educated man whose views have been influenced by reading the works of Lenin. He still keeps some of Lenin’s works and thinks himself a communist.’ In Moscow the Comintern checked its files on Kuckhoff and endorsed his credentials. They told Korotkov that ‘Old Man’ ‘was deeply affected by the general crisis of the bourgeois culture and became close to the “union of Intellectuals”’. The writer now became a prominent member of the Harnack group.

The insistent theme of all the reporting to Moscow was that of looming Nazi onslaught. On 8 May 1941 ‘Zakhar’ reported: ‘rumours about Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union are constantly increasing … War is going to be declared in mid-May.’ A.S. Panyushkin, who unusually combined the role of Soviet ambassador to the Chinese government in Chongqing with that of NKVD station chief, reported to Moscow early in May that Hitler was expected to invade. The Chinese military attaché in Berlin even told the Russians of the Germans’ intended axes of advance.

The NKVD team in Berlin was fortunate to escape disaster, living through this uniquely sensitive period in Russo–German relations with an oaf as its station chief. Kobulov’s fall from grace began with a drunken row at a May 1941 embassy banquet for a visiting Soviet delegation: he publicly slapped the face of the deputy trade representative. This episode prompted the ambassador to demand the NKVD officer’s recall. Kobulov counterattacked by asking Beria to bring him home; he claimed to dislike the feuding inside the embassy as much as the British bombing of Berlin. Beria felt obliged to report the banquet episode to Stalin and Molotov, but rejected the demand for his man’s recall in return for Kobulov’s maudlin promise of future good behaviour; he was ordered by Moscow to risk no further personal contact with Harnack.

The NKVD man attempted to redeem himself as a spymaster by recruiting as an informant a Latvian journalist codenamed ‘Lycée student’, who, he assured Moscow, was ‘most reliable’. This man, Oreste Berlings, was already on the Gestapo’s books as agent ‘Peter’, a double of whom Ribbentrop said complacently, ‘We can pump whatever information we want into him.’ This foolishness would have been trivial had it not taken place in the last weeks before the Germans launched ‘Barbarossa’, when intelligence from Berlin should have been of critical importance to Soviet decision-making. Kobulov’s blundering contributed to the Kremlin’s stubborn scepticism about NKVD reporting.

On 18 April 1941, heedless of Stalin’s insistence that no clash with Germany was imminent, Russia’s intelligence services formally shifted to a war footing: the GRU and NKVD warned their networks across Europe, and strengthened their stations in Switzerland and Berlin. But they did little to improve the management of informants in the field, chiefly because experienced handlers were in such short supply. Even more serious, they failed to provide agents with means of long-range communications. Russian-built wirelesses were of poor quality: NKVD communications improved only later in the war, when the Lubyanka secured American sets. In the protracted meanwhile, contact between Moscow and its overseas agents remained precarious. On 1 May 1941 the Berlin station urgently requested transmitters for the Harnack group, in case contact through the embassy was lost. Harnack himself was reluctant to accept such equipment; he said that while he knew nothing about wireless, he was acutely conscious of the ubiquity of the Abwehr’s and Gestapo’s direction-finders. Eventually, however, he acquiesced in a step which merely reflected the logic of his convictions: that war was imminent, and he wished to continue to work against Hitler. After several weeks’ delay, in mid-June his handlers presented him with two sets. The first was a portable D-6, with a range not much over five hundred miles and batteries with two hours’ life. The NKVD man promised more batteries, but these were never forthcoming. The second set was a little more powerful, but required mains electricity.

Korotkov explained that coding procedure was easy: the spies needed only remember the number 38745 and the keyword ‘Schraube’. He urged Harnack to make Karl Behrens his second wireless-operator, but the German baulked. This was a hugely risky assignment, he pointed out, and Behrens had three small children. He would never forgive himself if the man was caught, and paid the price. Behrens was anyway under Gestapo surveillance, having provided false papers for a Jewish brother-in-law. A second possible candidate, Kurt Schumacher, was called up for military duty. Eventually the second wireless set was placed in the hands of a man named Hans Koppi, suggested by Schulze-Boysen. Within weeks, however, Hitler’s hosts had swept across Russia, driving the Soviets many miles back, beyond reach of Berlin’s feeble signals. The sets given to Harnack fell silent. He continued industriously to gather intelligence, but lacked means to pass it on. This impasse persisted through the first five months of the Eastern war.

Meanwhile Willy Lehmann’s material also began to include evidence of Germany’s commitment to war with Russia. On 28 May he told his handler that he had been ordered for undisclosed reasons to organise a twenty-four-hour duty roster for his section. A few days later his health collapsed, and he was obliged to take sick leave, from which he returned only on 19 June. What he then learned in his office caused him to discard tradecraft and call an immediate meeting with Zhuravlev, his courier: the Gestapo had been formally informed of an order to initiate military operations against the Soviet Union. This report was immediately forwarded to Moscow, but it seems unlikely that Beria showed it to Stalin until the last hours before the German invasion.

Another significant NKVD German source was Captain Walter Maria Stennes, once an enthusiastic Nazi stormtrooper and friend of Hitler. Stennes – ‘Friend’ in Moscow Centre’s books – had since experienced a dramatic change of heart, becoming an ardent foe of the regime. Having survived a brief term of imprisonment, he departed for China where he became Chiang Kai-shek’s air adviser and was recruited by the Russians. On 9 June 1941, following a conversation with a high-ranking Wehrmacht visitor, he informed Vasily Zarubin that the invasion had been planned for May, then postponed, and that a three-month campaign was now scheduled to start on 20 June. Zarubin also told Moscow that Stennes had met Sorge in Shanghai, who had heard the same story.

Schulze-Boysen wrote to his NKVD bosses on 11 June, warning the Russians to ‘prepare for a surprise attack’. He urged Moscow to bomb the Romanian oilfields and rail junctions at Königsberg, Stettin and Berlin, as well as to launch a thrust into Hungary, to cut off Germany from the Balkans. This was an extraordinary step for a German officer to take, even one as disaffected from his own government as Schulze-Boysen – explicitly to urge a foreign power to bomb his own country. But to such a pass had matters come. In all, between September 1940 and June 1941, Harnack and Schulze-Boysen provided forty-two reports which remain extant – and perhaps more which have been lost or never reached Moscow – offering ever more circumstantial detail about Hitler’s preparations and operational planning. Moreover, on 20 June a Rome source informed Centre that the Italian ambassador in Berlin had sent his Foreign Ministry a coded telegram reporting that the German invasion of the Soviet Union would start between 20 and 25 June.

4 THE DEAF MAN IN THE KREMLIN

Thus, from early 1941 onwards a flood of intelligence reached Moscow, conveying a common message: Hitler was on the brink, though there were many divergences of opinion about when he would attack – unsurprising, since the Wehrmacht’s timetable was repeatedly pushed back by operational delays. In those days, however, the Soviet Union was better protected against its own people than against foreign foes. Russia’s intelligence chiefs were preoccupied with enemies within. There were fears about rising Ukrainian nationalism. Beria reported subversive activity by Jewish and Zionist organisations – he advanced the implausible claim that these were acting on behalf of the Nazis. Merkulov described successful purges of ‘anti-Soviet elements’ in the Baltic republics, with 14,467 people arrested and 25,711 exiled to Siberia.

The man chiefly responsible for analysing incoming intelligence was Lt. Gen. Pavel Fitin, who had headed the foreign section of the NKVD since 1939, when he ascended to office in the wake of the Purges. He was an unlikely appointment, selected for political reliability. A former Komsomol leader and Party official, he had studied at Moscow’s agricultural mechanisation school before working for some years at a farming advice service. Only then was he selected to attend SHON, the foreign intelligence training school established at Balashikha, fifteen miles east of Moscow. Students – 120 in the first three years, just four of them women – were perfunctorily introduced to bourgeois Western living: teachers with European experience lectured them on dress, manners, ‘good taste’. Trainees spent four hours a day studying languages, two on intelligence tradecraft. Fitin was already thirty-nine in 1938, when he started work at the NKVD. A visiting American, gazing at his long fair hair and blue eyes which conveyed an illusion of innocence, suggested that he looked more like a cruise director than a spymaster. Although no fool, Fitin would never present to his superiors Merkulov, Beria and beyond them Stalin anything likely to incur their anger. When in mid-June 1941 an NKVD agent in Helsinki reported large-scale Finnish troop movements, a nervous Fitin scribbled to his deputy, ‘Please process carefully for Khozyain’ – ‘the Master’, as Stalin was always described.

The last link in the foreign intelligence chain before ‘Barbarossa’ was Winston Churchill. British perceptions of the Soviet Union, and of the potential of the Red Army, were coloured by the loathing of most soldiers, diplomats and Tory politicians for everything to do with the bloodstained Bolsheviks. Moreover, their expectations of German strategy were distorted by a nationalistic conviction that Hitler saw victory over Britain as his foremost objective. When Sir Victor Mallet, Britain’s ambassador in Stockholm, reported in March that ‘all military circles in Berlin are convinced of conflict with Russia this spring and consider success certain’, the Foreign Office dismissed his dispatch as reflecting ‘the usual contradictory rumours’. On 24 March 1941, Stafford Cripps cabled from Moscow, reporting his Swedish counterpart’s information: ‘German plan is as follows: the attack on England will be continued with U-boats and from the air, but there will be no invasion. At the same time a drive against Russia will take place. This drive will be by three large armies: the first based at Warsaw under von Bock, the second based at Konigsberg, the third based at Cracow under List.’

The Joint Intelligence Committee rejected this warning. In early April the JIC’s assessment was not dissimilar from that of Stalin: ‘1. These reports may be put out by Germans as part of the war of nerves 2. German invasion would probably result in such chaos throughout Soviet Union that the Germans would have to reorganise everything in the occupied territory and would meanwhile lose supplies which they are now drawing from the Soviet Union at any rate for a long time to come 3. Germany’s resources, though immense, would not permit her to continue her campaign in the Balkans, to maintain the present scale of air attack against this country, to continue her offensive against Egypt, and at the same time to invade, occupy and reorganise a large part of the Soviet Union … 5. There have been indications that German General Staff are opposed to war on two fronts and in favour of disposing of Great Britain before attacking Soviet Union.’

Here was a manifestation of the foremost sin in intelligence analysis: the JIC reached conclusions founded upon British and not Nazi logic. The prime minister, however, had long nursed a hunch that Hitler would turn East. On 21 April he dispatched a personal warning to Stalin, inspired by Cripps’s message and some Ultra indications. This was received with derision. Maisky, the Soviet ambassador, taunted Brendan Bracken: ‘Since when does Churchill tend to take the interests of the Soviet Union so closely to his heart?’ He told Bracken, Churchill’s intimate, that such missives from London had entirely the opposite effect to that which was intended. He did not add a vital corollary: that Whitehall’s traitors had briefed the Kremlin about the JIC’s disbelief that Hitler would invade. As late as 23 May, the Committee reported that a new agreement between Germany and Russia might be imminent. Foolish though such speculation sounds today, it was then less than two years since just such a satanic pact had been signed. If the two tyrants had struck a bargain before, why should they not do so again? Nor was Moscow the only place where Churchill’s sincerity was questioned. Bjorn Prytz, the Swedish ambassador in London, told Maisky he thought Britain’s prime minister had no idea how to win the war, save by trying to drag the Russians in. Cripps told the American ambassador in Moscow that he could well imagine the British acquiescing in a German invasion of Russia, if Hitler made a compromise peace offer to Britain.

When informed and influential foreigners clung to such opinions, Stalin’s cynicism about war warnings from Churchill, whom he knew to be defying the views of his own advisers, becomes less baffling. In April, Khozyain ordered the Red Army and the intelligence services to ignore both alleged German military preparations beyond the border, and repeated Luftwaffe violations of Soviet airspace. At the end of the month Merkulov submitted a report designed to silence the ‘warmongers’ and talk up prospects for a diplomatic rapprochement with Berlin. He said that German successes in North Africa had encouraged Hitler to finish off Britain before opening any new front. Much was made of the dissension between Hitler and his generals, which was real enough. The NKVD also suggested – a travesty of the truth – that the Luftwaffe was unwilling to fight Russia because of the Red Air Force’s recognised superiority. Stalin briefed his intelligence chiefs that their first objective was now diplomatic: to clarify Hitler’s demands – the price he would seek to extract from Moscow for keeping the peace. They responded that Berlin was likely to want an increased flow of grain, oil and other commodities. Von der Schulenberg’s diplomacy played its part in feeding Stalin’s delusions: as late as mid-May, the German ambassador urged the Soviet dictator to write to Hitler, exploring common ground. Meanwhile Russia’s Neutrality Pact with Japan, signed on 13 April 1941, represented a sincere and desperate Soviet attempt to avert war between the two countries, and thus to reduce the range of threats facing the Soviet Union. When foreign minister Yōsuke Matsuoka left Moscow bearing the signed treaty, in an almost unprecedented gesture Stalin went to the station to see him off.

Soviet embassies and intelligence stations adhered rigidly to orders from Molotov and Beria to report nothing which suggested the inevitability of war. On 24 May, when the Finnish ambassador in Istanbul gave his Soviet counterpart details of German formations deployed on the Soviet border, Stalin’s man asked contemptuously whether the Finn had counted the soldiers himself. A week later, Timoshenko and Zhukov were summoned to the Kremlin, and arrived expecting orders to put Soviet defences on full alert. Instead they were handed Stalin’s acceptance of a transparently fraudulent request from Berlin that squads of Germans should be allowed to roam inside Russia’s border in search of 1914–18 war dead. The generals were obliged to fume in impotence while Hitler’s scouts surveyed their chosen battlefields, protected by spades and Khozyain’s orders.

The British government’s clumsy handling of the 10 May parachute descent on Scotland by Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess converted what should have been a propaganda disaster for Hitler into a major embarrassment for his enemy. It persuaded Stalin that both the Germans and the British were toying with him, while preparing to make a separate peace with each other. Lord Beaverbrook, a supreme mischief-maker whose interventions were all the more damaging because he was a known intimate of Churchill, told Maisky in London, ‘Of course Hess is an emissary of Hitler.’ The press lord claimed, rightly enough, that Hess sought to promote a common front against Bolshevik barbarism. Maisky deduced that Britain’s future conduct depended not – as he had hitherto supposed – on Churchillian resolution, but instead on the acceptability of the German terms he assumed Hess to have brought with him from Hitler.

In the late spring of 1941 Stalin daily expected to receive details of an Anglo–German compromise peace, followed by a demand from Berlin that Russia should join the Axis and accelerate its economic support for Germany. As late as October 1942 Stalin wrote to Maisky: ‘All of us in Moscow have gained the impression that Churchill is aiming at the defeat of the USSR, in order then to come to terms with the Germany of Hitler or Bruning at the expense of our country.’ With breathtaking hypocrisy, he chose to forget that in the mood of panic that overtook the Kremlin after ‘Barbarossa’ began, the NKVD’s Pavel Sudoplatov had been ordered to pass to the Bulgarian ambassador, for forwarding to Berlin, a secret Kremlin message inviting a compromise Russo–German peace. Only because Hitler was uninterested did that approach go nowhere. At an October 1944 dinner in the Kremlin Stalin could still offer a mocking but at least semi-serious toast to ‘the British intelligence service which had inveigled Hess into coming to England’.

In June 1941 the NKVD dragged from a cell in the Lubyanka Captain Aleksandr Nelidov, an erstwhile Abwehr man in Warsaw, to invite his opinion of Hess’s flight to Britain. The old soldier responded immediately: ‘This means war, without any doubt. Hess is recruiting England as an ally against the USSR …’ Nelidov, born in 1893, was a former tsarist gunner officer who had roamed Turkey, France and Germany following the White Army’s defeat in Russia’s civil war. He struck up friendships in the German general staff, and attended several of their 1930s war games. Early in 1939 he was foolish enough to accept from Canaris an assignment to Warsaw, where he was promptly seized by the Poles. When the Russians overran eastern Poland and found him languishing in Lvov prison, as a known Nazi intelligence agent he was dispatched to Moscow.

By the time Zoya Rybkina, the tall, strikingly attractive senior operations officer of the German section of the NKVD, was handed his file in mid-1940, Nelidov was a broken man. Rybkina wrote contemptuously in her 1998 memoirs: ‘His behaviour was servile … I felt amused by him but also ashamed of him, as an officer of the old school.’ The wretched captain was repeatedly summoned from his cell to be quizzed about the Wehrmacht through the day and far into the night: ‘His lunch was brought from our canteen, and when he saw a knife and fork for the first time, he pushed them away and said in terrorised tones: “But I am not supposed to have these.”’

Rybkina set Nelidov to work composing a narrative of the German war games he had attended, complete with maps and order-of-battle details. He told the NKVD officer that the German plan for invading Russia assumed that Minsk would fall on the fifth day. Rybkina wrote: ‘I burst out laughing. “How come, on the fifth day?!” He was embarrassed and swore by every god that this was what [Gen. Wilhelm] Keitel [chief of OKW] reckoned on.’ She passed on the joke to Fitin, who snarled, ‘This bastard is such a liar. Just think about it, Minsk on the fifth day!’ Golikov, the Red Army’s chief of intelligence, laughed even louder: ‘So they have decided to drive wedges forward. And imagine – they plan to take Minsk on the fifth day! Well done, Keitel, you are a strong man, such a strong man! …’ But Nelidov also told his jailers that Gen. Hans von Seekt, the hoary old former army chief of staff, predicted disaster for a German invasion of the Soviet Union, because the logistics were unsustainable.

Doubts persist, unlikely ever to be resolved, as to what precisely the Red Army knew before ‘Barbarossa’. Marshal Zhukov insisted to the end of his days that he was kept in ignorance of much of the foreign intelligence that went to the Kremlin. If the Germans invaded, he himself expected them to drive south-westwards to secure Ukraine and its immense natural resources, though he thought possible an alternative attack on an axis Riga–Dvinsk. Soviet military attachés, especially those in the Balkans, provided detailed and broadly accurate information about German deployments. Russian frontier-watchers contributed substantially more than the NKVD’s or GRU’s foreign agents to the Stavka’s (armed forces high command) grasp of the Wehrmacht’s order of battle. By April Zhukov realised the importance of the central front in German planning – large forces were concentrated in East Prussia and Poland. But conflicting evidence reflected continuing arguments between Hitler and his generals.

It is often stated that the Red Army was wholly surprised when the Germans attacked. This is less than true. In the weeks before war, despite Stalin’s scepticism he allowed large forces to be redeployed in the West and brought to a relatively high state of readiness. The disasters subsequently suffered by the Russians were overwhelmingly attributable to the rotten condition of the armed forces and their leadership, rather than to lack of immediate preparedness. Stalin deserves most of the blame for what befell the Soviet Union in 1941, but surprise was the least of the reasons for catastrophe. The Red Army was outfought by the Wehrmacht at every level, save that some of its units displayed an animal sacrificial courage that astonished their foes. Before the invasion, on 12 May Zhukov had moved into forward positions four Soviet armies, 800,000 men. On 2 June Beria told Stalin that the Germans were at a high state of readiness along the entire border. On the 12th a further report on German deployments went to Stalin, noting a high level of hostile intelligence activity: the Wehrmacht had some two hundred ‘line-crossers’ scouting in the Soviet border region. In response, Stalin grudgingly agreed that war readiness should be reduced to two hours for rifle divisions, three for motorised and artillery divisions. This scarcely constituted absolute passivity in the face of the threat.

Both the Russians and the British were naïve enough to expect an ultimatum to precede hostilities. On 11 June, Sir Stafford Cripps returned home ‘for consultations’. The purpose of his recall was exactly as stated – to enable the British government to discuss with him the bewildering and momentous developments that were unfolding. London was dismayed by a German propaganda campaign, designed to persuade the world that a new Russo–German rapprochement was imminent. The Kremlin was shocked by Cripps’s journey, for the opposite reason: Stalin assumed that the British were preparing some byzantine diplomatic stroke, which would leave the Soviet Union isolated. On 16 June Maisky was summoned to Britain’s Foreign Office and given a cool recital of its latest intelligence on German deployments, based on Ultra. The Wehrmacht was thought to have eighty divisions in Poland, thirty in Romania, five in Finland and north Norway, 115 in all. This was little more than half the reality, substantially fewer than the GRU had already identified. It was a reflection of the limitations of Ultra in 1941, and of the War Office’s poor analytical capability at this stage, that they got the numbers so badly wrong. But even former sceptics on the JIC no longer doubted the overarching reality: Hitler was about to invade the Soviet Union.

In Moscow, the NKVD adopted a desperate last-minute ploy: its operatives intercepted two German diplomatic couriers, about to leave Moscow for Berlin with the German embassy’s dispatches. One man was trapped in a hotel lift, while the other was locked in the bathroom of his suite. In the five minutes before the lift-bound courier was freed, the NKVD photographed the German ambassador’s correspondence before restoring it to its briefcase. The contents, when examined in the Lubyanka, proved equivocal: Schulenberg reported that he was confident Soviet intentions remained peaceful. But he also stated that he had obeyed instructions from Berlin to reduce his staff to an absolute minimum, an obvious preliminary to war.

On Cripps’s way back from London he stopped in Stockholm, where he told the director of the Foreign Ministry about rumours of a new Russo–German agreement. Rubbish, said the Swede. His country’s intelligence service had intercepted orders to German forces in Norway, which made plain that they would attack between 20 and 25 June. The Swedish ambassador in Moscow, doyen of the diplomatic community, reported: ‘The only certain thing is that we face either a battle of global significance between the Third Reich and the Soviet Empire or the most gigantic case of blackmail in world history.’ Zoya Rybkina, key NKVD analyst of Germany, described how on 17 June she prepared a situation report for Pavel Fitin to present to Stalin, based chiefly, but not entirely, on the Red Orchestra’s messages – Sorge, of course, reported to the GRU. She later professed to have concluded that war was inevitable: ‘All of Germany’s military preparations for armed aggression are complete, and an attack can be expected at any time.’ In reality, however, the document was more equivocal than its drafters afterwards tried to claim. To cover themselves, they repeatedly used such phrases as ‘It is not indicated on what data the source has reached his conclusions … Harnack does not know where, when, or in what connection Halder had expressed this point of view … Harnack does not take at face value the statement of Göring, and refers to his notorious bragging.’ Knowing that the Kremlin still stubbornly rejected their own near-certainty, they felt obliged to assert doubts they did not have.

Merkulov and Fitin went together to the Kremlin at noon on 17 June. The latter, who had seldom met Stalin, afterwards acknowledged his own trepidation, which might more justly be called terror. The two grey, bleak, merciless heroes of so many state killings agreed their line before entering Khozyain’s presence: they would describe their own intelligence assessment as merely ‘likely to be true’, rather than certain. They found Stalin calm, pacing the room as was his custom. Fitin saw the most recent decrypt from Berlin lying on his desk. ‘I have read your report,’ murmured Stalin in his accustomed slow, understated fashion. ‘So Germany is getting ready to attack the Soviet Union?’ And he stared at both Fitin and Merkulov.

They had not been expecting him to address the issue so baldly, and felt lost. ‘We were silent,’ recalled Fitin. ‘Only three days before, on 14 June, newspapers had published the TASS statement saying that Germany was still unwaveringly adhering to the conditions of the Soviet-German pact.’ Both he and Merkulov preserved the stone-faced silence that seemed to offer their most plausible path to survival. Stalin fired a string of contemptuous questions about the NKVD’s sources. Fitin described the Schulze-Boysen/Harnack networks, then Stalin said: ‘Listen, intelligence chief, there are no Germans that can be trusted, except Wilhelm Pieck’ – the Comintern’s secretary, now exiled in Moscow. Then followed a silence that seemed to the visitors interminable before Stalin once more looked up, gazed hard at them and barked, ‘Misinformation! You may go.’ In another version of the conversation, he instructed the intelligence chiefs to go back to the sources, check their information and once more review the NKVD assessment. What is certain is that Stalin rejected the war warning.

Rybkina wrote later: ‘It is hard to describe the state of our team while we awaited Fitin’s return from the Kremlin. He called to his office me and [Pavel] Zhuravlev’ – the veteran director of the German section, much admired by colleagues. Fitin tossed the stapled document onto the coffee table at which his two subordinates sat. ‘I’ve reported to the Boss,’ he said. ‘Iosif Vissarionovich studied your report and threw it back at me. “This is bluff!” he said irritably. “Don’t start panic. Don’t deal with nonsense. You’d better go back and get a clearer picture.”’ Fitin told the nonplussed intelligence officers: ‘Check this one more time and report to me.’ Once alone together, Zhuravlev said to Rybkina, with the parade of conviction indispensable to survival in the Soviet universe: ‘Stalin can see further from his bell-tower. Apart from our reports he is being briefed by the GRU, ambassadors, trade missions, journalists.’ Rybkina professed to agree, but added: ‘This means that our agents, who have been tested over years, must be considered untrustworthy.’ Zhuravlev shrugged, with authentic Russian fatalism, ‘We shall live, we shall see.’ Beria, in grovelling anticipation of Khozyain’s wishes, ordered that forty NKVD officers who had passed on warnings of war should be ‘ground into labour camp dust’. He wrote to Stalin on 21 June: ‘I again insist on recalling and punishing our ambassador to Berlin, Dekanozov, who keeps bombarding me with “reports” on Hitler’s alleged preparations to attack the USSR. He has reported that this attack will start tomorrow … But I and my people, Iosif Vissarionovich, have firmly embedded in our memory your wise conclusion. Hitler is not going to attack us in 1941.’

Much ink has been expended by historians on attempts to determine what proportion of the intelligence garnered by Russia’s secret services reached the Kremlin, rather than remaining in the desk drawers of Beria, Merkulov and Fitin. This controversy seems spurious. Beyond doubt, Stalin was provided with overwhelming evidence about the German military build-up on the Soviet border. The Homeric blunder lay in his analysis of its significance. Posterity derides Stalin for rejecting obvious truth. But he merely chose to share the strategic view held by the British, and especially their Joint Intelligence Committee, with the sole exception of Churchill, until the last days before ‘Barbarossa’. This seems important in comprehending the tyrant’s conduct. Thanks to Whitehall traitors, the Kremlin knew that Bletchley Park had begun to read German wireless traffic on a substantial scale, which increased Stalin’s belief in London‘s omniscience. A perversely exaggerated respect for the skill of Britain’s secret services and the guile of its diplomacy thus caused him to accept Whitehall’s view of Hitler’s intentions in preference to that of his own marvellous networks of spies. He could never believe that Churchill’s personal judgement about Hitler’s intention to attack Russia was both honestly expressed, and superior to that of Britain’s intelligence apparatus – until the JIC changed its mind, thanks to Ultra, just before Hitler struck.

Here was the most remarkable aspect of Kremlin behaviour in advance of the invasion: ‘Barbarossa’ did not represent a failure by the Soviet intelligence-gathering machine. Few military operations in history have been so comprehensively flagged. There was, instead, simply a historic misjudgement by the head of state. Stalin’s deafness during the overture to ‘Barbarossa’ emphasised the indissolubility of the links between intelligence, diplomacy and governance. Unless all three did their parts, each one was useless.

In the early hours of 22 June 1941, the Lubyanka was almost silent. The NKVD’s heads of department customarily went home at 8 p.m., though never without a nod from Beria or Merkulov. Pavel Sudoplatov was among the building’s few occupants above cell level when, at 3 a.m., the telephone rang. It was Merkulov, who announced that a German invasion of the Soviet Union had begun. Sudoplatov began hastily calling staff into the building, including his wife Emma, who had abandoned operational work to become an agent trainer. Leonid Eitingon, his deputy, almost invariably cracked a joke or two on arrival in the office; but like every other Russian that fateful morning he found nothing to justify breaching the building’s mood of stunned near-paralysis.

The memoirs of Soviet intelligence officers sometimes convey an illusion that life within the Lubyanka was little different from that in Broadway, but glimpses nonetheless break through of the institutionalised terror. The White Russian officer Aleksandr Nelidov, one of those who had predicted ‘Barbarossa’, was told nothing of its occurrence until on 22 July 1941 he was dragged from his cell into the office of Zoya Rybkina. He grew wide-eyed when he found her sitting behind black-out curtains amid the crump of falling bombs and anti-aircraft fire. ‘Zoya Ivanovna!’ he exclaimed. ‘They are firing real shells. This is war!’ She nodded and said, ‘Today is exactly a month since it started. And Minsk did fall, not on the fifth day as you said that the Germans predicted, but on the sixth …’ A guard came running, out of breath, to take Nelidov back to his subterranean quarters. The old tsarist said gloomily, ‘Farewell, Zoya Ivanovna. You can trust all that I have written here, in this room.’ He crossed himself and bowed as he departed, plainly expecting to be shot.

Two days later, however, he was returned to Rybkina’s office, abruptly handed a suitcase of clothes to replace his prison rags, and ordered to go into an adjacent room and change into them. The guard returned a few minutes later and reported that Nelidov was sitting sobbing, paralysed by fear. The prisoner kept asking why they needed to dress him so smartly before killing him. Rybkina marched next door and told the wretched man to pull himself together. ‘Come on, Aleksandr Sergeevich, how could you let yourself go like this? You need to get a grip. I am taking you to meet my bosses.’ They proceeded first to the offices of Pavel Zhuravlev and his deputy Pavel Sudoplatov, then all together presented themselves before Pavel Fitin. The general invited the astounded Nelidov to become an NKVD agent in Turkey, a country he knew well.

Nelidov said with a choked, hysterical giggle, ‘But first of all I should be … executed …’ Fitin responded impatiently, ‘I am asking whether you would agree to work in Turkey. Turkey, as you know, is neutral.’ Nelidov muttered, ‘Whatever you want.’ Rybkina stared reproachfully at her ungracious protégé, who simply muttered again and again, ‘Whatever you want …’ She took the stupefied man back to her office, where he asked why all the chiefs he met were introduced as Pavel; was this a common codename? No, no, said his new employer irritably, merely a matter of chance. She led him out of the building to a nearby restaurant called the Aragvi, where they sat among tables occupied by Red Army officers, and she recommended the kebab.

Her guest remained too traumatised to eat. When she ordered wine, fearful of being poisoned he begged to be allowed to swap glasses. At last he took a cautious sip, then asked, ‘So when are they coming for me?’ Rybkina responded wearily, ‘Didn’t you hear the order for your release being read?’ Her guest persisted: ‘I don’t understand. How can I be forgiven?’ After lunch she suggested that she show him around a nearby agricultural exhibition, and they drove down Gorky Street, where every shop window was sandbagged and the traffic policemen carried gas masks. She left her man that evening at the Moskva hotel, telling him that Vasily Zarubin had been appointed as his case officer.

Rybkina’s narrative of these events is shot through with merciless contempt for the weakness of Nelidov. For all her striking looks, she was not a woman to whom any prudent man would offer his back, far less his lips. Nelidov never went to Turkey. When Zarubin knocked on his door next morning, it remained unopened. On breaking in, he found his new recruit suspended from a rope made of torn sheets. The transition from doomed prisoner to favoured protégé of the Lubyanka was too much for his broken spirit. Who can say that Nelidov’s last decision was ill-judged?

5
Divine Winds
1 MRS FERGUSON’S TEA SET

The Japanese made less effective use of intelligence than any other warring nation between 1942 and 1945. But in the months before they went to war, their decisions were significantly influenced by an extraordinary British indiscretion. It would be an exaggeration to say that Mrs Violet Ferguson’s tea set, scarcely a masterpiece of the potter’s art, caused Japan to attack the British Empire. But the incident in which it played a part was an example of an intelligence coup that helped to decide the fate of nations.

On 11 November 1940 SS Automedon, a humble 7,528-ton British merchant ship of the Blue Funnel Line, exotically named for Achilles’ charioteer, was ploughing a lonely course for Penang, in a stretch of the Indian Ocean west of Sumatra far from any active theatre of war. Nonetheless, at 7 a.m. when the officer of the watch spotted a distant ship, he woke his sleeping captain. ‘The old man’, veteran seafarer William Ewan, quickly made his way to the bridge, just forward of the ship’s spindly funnel. Ewan peered hard through his binoculars, decided that the stranger was a Dutch liner, and held course. At 8.03 the other vessel was less than a mile distant when it broke out the international flag hoists ‘Do not raise the alarm’ and ‘Stop’, then fired a warning shot across the bows of the freighter, which had left Liverpool on 24 September, just as the Battle of Britain gave way to the Blitz, carrying a mixed cargo of aircraft, cars, machine parts, microscopes, military uniforms, cameras, sewing machines, beer, 550 cases of whisky, 2.5 million Chesterfield cigarettes, and six million dollars in newly printed Straits currency.

The interloper was the disguised German armed merchant-cruiser Atlantis, one of the most successful commerce raiders of the war, which had already captured and sunk twelve Allied vessels since leaving Bremen on 31 March. The ships’ 11 November meeting was not a matter of chance. The Atlantis’s captain, forty-one-year-old Bernhard Rogge, had captured a set of British Merchant Navy codes aboard the freighter City of Baghdad on 11 July, which assisted him in intercepting other vessels thereafter. Moreover, an Italian intelligence unit in the Mediterranean forwarded decrypts which helped to pinpoint the freighter. Automedon’s bridge crew failed to read the German flag hoist, and the ship’s radio-operator began tapping out an ‘RRR’ emergency signal. The doughty Captain Ewan shouted ‘Hard on the wheel!’ and his ship began to sheer away. He then said, ‘Come on everyone, let’s do it – we’re going to fight.’ On the stern deck of the merchantman was mounted a single elderly 4-inch gun. Unfortunately for the British, however, Atlantis carried five 5.9-inch guns and a sophisticated fire-control system. Having intercepted the British ship’s distress call, the Germans started shooting in earnest. The first shell of Atlantis’s opening salvo, fired at point-blank range, smashed into the bridge, followed by a further succession of hammer blows which brought down the wireless antenna, killed or wounded almost a score of men and transformed Automedon’s upperworks into a tangle of twisted steel interrupted by gaping holes. By now Atlantis was so close that when a British seaman ran aft, a German officer called through a loudhailer in English, ‘Do not approach the gun, or we will blow you out of the water!’

Second Officer Donald Stewart regained consciousness on the bridge to find his captain lying dead beside him. First Officer Peter Evan, knowing that protracted resistance was impossible, had dashed for the ship’s safe to destroy the confidential papers as soon as the enemy opened fire, but fell victim to the same shell that killed Ewan: Evan collapsed seriously wounded on the threshold of the captain’s cabin where the safe key was kept. In all, six crew members were now dead and twelve others wounded. Both ships stopped. Stewart and the deckhands watched grimly as a launch bore a boarding party from Atlantis to Automedon. A stream of shocked and scalded Chinese firemen emerged from a hatchway leading to the freighter’s engine room, where blast had caused steam leaks.

The Germans had planned to commandeer Automedon as a supply ship, but on seeing the scale of damage caused by their shells, instead they began to set scuttling charges. Lt. Ulrich Mohr, Atlantis’s adjutant, made a hasty tour of the capture during which he blew open its safe, removing cash and confidential papers along with a weighted green canvas bag found in the chartroom, which Automedon’s dead officers had been tasked to throw overboard in any emergency. The Germans enlisted the aid of British seamen to shift frozen meat, whisky and cigarettes to Atlantis, before the crew was transferred to the German ship. Personal money was confiscated, though their captors issued receipts for the contents of each man’s wallet. Captain Rogge was not only an excellent seaman and tactician, but a man of honour who took pains for the welfare of prisoners from the ships he seized on his remarkable eight-month cruise. Among the British personnel transferred to Atlantis were three passengers, including a chief engineer of the Straits Steamship Company named Alan Ferguson, and his thirty-three-year-old wife Violet, on passage to Singapore. Encountering the Atlantis was only the latest of several unfortunate adventures that had befallen Mrs Ferguson since her marriage in 1936, including a miscarriage and an enforced flight from France in June 1940 aboard the last ferry out of Bordeaux. Now, intensely emotional, she went to Captain Rogge and pleaded with him through tears to save her luggage – two trunks which contained almost all her worldly possessions, including a prized tea set. The German took pity. He signalled Mohr, still on the doomed Automedon

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