Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire. Calder Walton

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СКАЧАТЬ to understand their context. It is only by appreciating how the intelligence services operated domestically, from their headquarters in London, that their activities in distant outposts of the empire can be understood.

      NAZI NEMESIS: INTELLIGENCE FAILURE – INTELLIGENCE SUCCESS

      The unprecedented successes of British intelligence during the Second World War are all the more remarkable when it is considered how weak the collective position of MI5, SIS and GC&CS was in 1939. The British secret state began the war with pitiful intelligence on its enemies, the Axis Powers. GC&CS had failed to make any significant headway in reading German communications, which relied on the famous Enigma code. The situation was similarly bleak for MI5 and SIS: they had such a dearth of intelligence that in 1939 they barely knew the name of the German military intelligence service (the Abwehr) or of its head (Admiral Wilhelm Canaris). MI5’s official in-house wartime historian, John ‘Jack’ Curry, who had worked as a counter-espionage officer before the war, and was therefore well placed to comment on what Britain knew at the time about Nazi intelligence, described MI5 as entering the war in a state of ‘confusion’ that often amounted to ‘chaos’:

      In 1939 we had no adequate knowledge of the German organisations which it was the function of the Security Service [MI5] to guard against either in this wider field of the ‘Fifth Column’ or in the narrower one of military espionage and purely material sabotage. We had in fact no definite knowledge whether there was any organised connection between the German Secret Service and Nazi sympathisers in this country, whether of British or alien nationality.³

      A similarly bleak picture was given by one of MI5’s principal wartime counter-espionage desk officers, Dick White, who went on to become the only ever head of both MI5 and SIS. He later recalled that MI5 started the war ‘without any real documentation on the subject we were supposed to tackle. We had a very vague idea of how the German system worked, and what its objectives were in time of war.’⁴

      Much of the reason why the British secret state had so little information on Nazi Germany at the beginning of the war was that, for most of the 1930s, its intelligence services had been starved of resources. In 1934 Whitehall’s Defence Requirements Committee had predicted that Nazi Germany would be the ‘ultimate enemy’ for Britain and its empire, but in the years that followed, MI5 and SIS failed to obtain any significant increase in funding or staff. Some minority voices, such as John Curry in MI5, warned from an early stage that Britain’s intelligence machinery needed to gear up to face the threat of Nazi Germany. From 1934 onwards Curry was advising that it would be dangerous simply to dismiss Mein Kampf, in which Hitler essentially outlined his vision for world domination, as the writings of a crazed lunatic – which of course it was, but it was also much more. As Curry argued, the problem for Britain (and the rest of the world) was that this crazed lunatic was now in power, so his diatribe in Mein Kampf had to be taken seriously. However, Curry was a voice in the wilderness within Whitehall, and neither MI5 nor SIS managed to secure any major expansion of resources in the pre-war years. While both agencies failed to make their warnings about Hitler sufficiently loud to be heard, Whitehall bureaucrats and bean-counters were only too willing to disregard the warnings they did hear as merely the perennial cry for more resources from intelligence services – after all, armies always ask for more tanks. As late as 1939, SIS was so underfunded that it could not even afford wireless sets for its agents.⁵

      MI5’s lack of reliable intelligence on Nazi German intelligence was made worse by the frenzied ‘spy scares’ that broke out in Britain in the early stages of the war, just as they had in 1914. During the so-called ‘phoney war’, the period after September 1939 when war had been declared but proper fighting had not yet commenced, hysterical reports from the British public bombarded MI5’s London headquarters about German ‘agents’ – and even ‘suspicious’-looking pigeons, which led MI5 to establish a falconry unit, appropriately led by a retired RAF wing-commander, to track down and ‘neutralise’ enemy pigeons. Its efforts were unsuccessful: all of the pigeons killed by MI5’s falcons turned out to be innocent British birds – a new twist on the term friendly fire.⁶

      More seriously than rogue pigeons, the paucity of intelligence on the Axis Powers essentially led to MI5’s near total collapse. In July 1940, amid the Battle of Britain and the so-called ‘fifth column’ crisis, MI5’s internal bureaucracy completely broke down under the strain of checking reports on supposed enemy agents and other ‘suspicious’ activities, ranging from the plausible to the preposterous. So many reports of ‘enemy spies’ bombarded MI5 that its central Registry, the nerve centre of its operations, which in 1940 contained two million cards and 170,000 ‘personal files’ or dossiers, ground to a halt and then collapsed. The chaos that these reports caused – those on ‘enemy light signalling’ alone reached a stack five feet high in MI5’s office – was made worse by the spectre of events on the Continent. Between May and June 1940 Hitler launched an unprecedented ‘lightning war’ (Blitzkrieg) in Europe, which led to the surrender of European countries from the Netherlands to Norway in quick succession. Hitler’s Blitzkrieg was facilitated by ‘fifth column’ saboteurs and agents planted and parachuted into the invaded countries. With their conventional armies obliterated, the Dutch gave up after just five days of fighting; the Belgians after seventeen. At the end of May the entire British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was evacuated from the Continent at Dunkirk, and by mid-June Britain’s greatest ally in Europe, France, had ignominiously surrendered. Britain was standing alone in Europe, fighting for its survival, with only its empire and Commonwealth to support it. The Joint Intelligence Committee, Britain’s highest overall intelligence assessment body, sombrely planned for its own evacuation from London, and speculated on how it could survive (by hiding in bunkers) after the Nazi invasion of Britain that appeared imminent. The JIC was not fantasising: the German leadership had drawn up detailed plans for an invasion of Britain (codenamed Operation Sealion), which included the arrest and likely execution of a number of senior MI5 and SIS officers, whose names the Gestapo had probably found in London telephone directories and entries in Who’s Who, which in many cases, as we have seen with Sir Eric Holt-Wilson, gave their home addresses.⁷

      The situation for Britain was actually even worse than this suggested. Due to the Nazi–Soviet Pact of August 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany entered the war as allies. It is often forgotten that the invasion of Poland in September 1939, which brought Britain into the war, was carried out by German and Soviet forces together. For a nightmare period between the outbreak of war in September 1939 and Nazi Germany’s invasion of Russia in June 1941, it appeared that Germany, Italy, Japan and the Soviet Union would act in uneasy concert and divide the spoils of the world between themselves. Britain nearly went to war with the Soviet Union when the Red Army invaded Finland in November 1939, and as papers of the British Chiefs of Staff reveal, in April 1940 the RAF was planning a devastating bombing attack on the Soviet Union, codenamed Operation Pike.⁸

      In these circumstances, with Britain standing alone against Nazi and Soviet forces, in the summer of 1940 MI5 concluded – inaccurately, as it turned out – that large-scale German sabotage and espionage networks were operating in Britain, as they had done in Europe. The truth would only be revealed later: unbeknownst to MI5 at the time, code-breakers at Bletchley Park had in fact identified virtually all German agents operating in Britain. Unaware of this, in June 1940 MI5 took one of the most controversial decisions it would ever take, recommending the mass internment of all ‘enemy aliens’ in Britain. In total over 27,000 foreign nationals were interned in Britain during the war on MI5’s orders. In Britain, as with the wartime internment of Japanese Americans in the United States, this was a lamentable low point in the history of civil liberties.⁹

      Due to its lack of reliable information on Nazi Germany, British intelligence started the Second World War effectively fighting in the dark. To make matters worse, it was chronically under-resourced: in 1939 MI5 had a total staff of only thirty-six officers. The bungling efforts of British intelligence in the early days of the war were symbolised СКАЧАТЬ