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