The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939–1945. Max Hastings
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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.