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