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

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СКАЧАТЬ stationed in the Netherlands, Richard Stevens and Sigismund Payne Best, were lured to the town of Venlo on the Dutch–German border on the pretext of meeting a group of anti-Hitler German officers. In reality, the ‘resistance’ group was controlled by the Gestapo. The two SIS officers were immediately arrested, dragged from neutral Dutch territory across the German border, and imprisoned for the rest of the war. Inexplicably, they had come to the rendezvous with a complete list of their agents in Germany, all of whom were promptly arrested and neutralised (with many executed) by the Nazi authorities. In one fatal swoop, Britain’s network of agents in the Third Reich was dismantled.¹⁰

      The ‘Venlo incident’ seems to have cast a long shadow. Although little information is currently available in British records, it does not seem that after Venlo SIS assisted or sponsored any significant anti-Hitler resistance groups within Germany. This may have been caused by anxiety after Venlo, or it may have been due to fears within Whitehall that killing Hitler would simply create a martyr and unleash further demons. None of the various wartime attempts made on Hitler’s life by German officers, the most famous of which was the ‘July Bomb Plot’ of 1944, appears to have been sponsored by SIS or any other part of British intelligence. Armchair assassins and ‘critical historians’ today rarely comprehend the genuine bravery shown by these plotters, but even with that concession, contrary to what has been suggested in a recent Hollywood film, Operation Valkyrie in July 1944 was not intended to oust Hitler and establish democratic government in Germany. Instead, it was an attempt by a group of German officers to replace the Third Reich with a non-democratic military dictatorship.¹¹

      One of the reasons the British secret state had such poor intelligence on Nazi Germany at the start of the war was the extreme difficulty of gaining reliable information on a closed police state like the Third Reich. To this day, understanding its power structures is still one of the most controversial, and voluminous, subjects in modern history. Historians today, equipped with German records, which British intelligence at the time was not, are unable to agree on such basic questions as who was ultimately in charge of Nazi Germany and whether Hitler was a ‘strong dictator’ or a ‘weak dictator’. That said, in the pre-war years British intelligence as a whole failed catastrophically to understand the mindset of the Nazi leadership. There were a few pre-war officers, in particular MI5’s John Curry and Dick White, who grasped the true nature of the strategic threat posed by the Third Reich, but their attempts to convince the rest of Whitehall of this came to little. The Oxford historian and wartime recruit to SIS Hugh Trevor-Roper was shocked to find that none of his colleagues had bothered to read the ‘sacred texts’ of those they were fighting, such as Mein Kampf. To make matters worse, MI5 and SIS had given an overwhelming priority in the pre-war years to Soviet and Comintern activities, and had largely neglected the growing threat of Nazi Germany. This also meant that they viewed the Nazi threat through the paradigm of the Comintern, and erroneously concluded that fascist organisations such as Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF) were run along similar lines to the British Communist Party, which was controlled by Moscow. In fact the black-shirted members of the BUF were above all British, and contrary to what MI5 believed, were not willing to bow to instructions from Berlin or Rome in the way that the ‘internationalised’ British Communist Party followed instructions from ‘the centre’, Moscow. That said, it is impossible to know exactly how the BUF would have reacted if there had been a Nazi invasion of Britain.¹²

      The remarkable failures of Britain’s intelligence services before the war led them in some astonishing directions during it. By 1942 the intelligence chiefs in Whitehall had become so desperate in their bid to understand the mindset of the Nazi leadership that they employed a water-diviner, nicknamed ‘Smokey Joe’, and a Dutch astrologer, Louis de Wohl, who both claimed that they could predict Adolf Hitler’s behaviour from his star sign (Libra rising). It was only after de Wohl had been employed for several months that MI5 and SIS realised he was nothing more than a con artist.¹³

      One of the main reasons why, despite the meagre intelligence Britain had at the start of hostilities, its intelligence machinery achieved such phenomenal wartime successes was because of Winston Churchill, who, as the world’s leading intelligence historian Christopher Andrew has pointed out, more than any British political leader before or since was an enthusiastic believer in intelligence matters. Churchill had probably first become interested in ‘cloak and dagger’ activities while serving as a reporter in the Boer War from 1899 to 1900, but his interest blossomed after he became Home Secretary in 1910. As Home Secretary he helped the fledgling Secret Service Bureau in its early days – he was a contemporary of Sir Vernon Kell’s at Sandhurst – providing it with increased powers to intercept letters (HOWs) and steering a revised Official Secrets Act through Parliament in 1911, which made it easier to bring prosecutions for espionage. Churchill’s fascination with intelligence continued after he became Prime Minister in May 1940, Britain’s ‘darkest hour’, which under Churchill became its finest. As Prime Minister he was an avid consumer of intelligence reports, and allowed for vastly more resources to be given to the intelligence services. Under Churchill, the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), which had been established in 1936, came into its own, operating as a streamlined assessment body for all of Britain’s intelligence services, and producing concise weekly reports for Churchill and his cabinet on threats to British national security – a legacy that lasts down to the present day. Britain’s separate intelligence services began to collaborate in ways they previously had not, thus effectively becoming the British intelligence community.¹⁴

      It was in the realm of signals intelligence (SIGINT) that Churchill’s support of the intelligence services paid the biggest dividends. The unprecedented successes gained by British intelligence during the war were caused largely by the herculean efforts of the code-breakers at GC&CS, based at Bletchley Park. In the course of the war, Bletchley Park would come to preside over mass-espionage on an industrial scale. In May 1941 Churchill received a top-secret request from Bletchley Park begging for more resources. He was so perturbed that he demanded ‘Action this Day’, and instructed his military assistant, General Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay, to give GC&CS all the resources it needed and to report that this had been done. In December 1940 Bletchley Park had managed, with the assistance of Polish code-breakers, to crack the first of the famous German Enigma codes. With the resources that Churchill now threw behind it, GC&CS expanded rapidly: by 1943 its code-breakers were reading on average 3,000 German communications per day. These decrypts were codenamed Ultra, but were also known as ISOS, standing for ‘Intelligence Services Oliver Strachey’ (ISOS), named after a high-ranking official at GC&CS, and more generally were termed ‘Most Secret Sources’ (or MSS for short). The Ultra decrypts were passed by SIS, which had formal control over GC&CS during the war, directly to Churchill himself on an almost daily basis. Ultra provided such accurate and rapid ‘live’ intelligence that some German communications from the Eastern Front or the deserts of North Africa actually arrived on Churchill’s desk in London before they reached Hitler in Berlin. Bletchley Park code-breakers also acquired chilling ‘real time’ messages about the Holocaust. As early as 1941, intercepts of low-grade German traffic from the Eastern Front were revealing to Bletchley Park what, with hindsight, we can see was the evolution of the Nazi ‘Final Solution’ – the mass murder of European Jews and other supposed racial subhumans (Untermenschen). There is some existing but disputed evidence that the British and US governments refused to release what Bletchley Park had discovered about the Holocaust because to do so would have jeopardised the Ultra secret. On present evidence, it is impossible to state whether this was the case or not.¹⁵

      Over 12,000 people are thought to have worked at Bletchley Park, and their voluminous Ultra decrypts contributed to Allied military successes in a number of areas. The leader of British forces in North Africa in 1942, General Sir Bernard Montgomery, was provided with a stream of high-grade Ultra decrypts that revealed the location of his opponent Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps. The decrypts flowing to Montgomery were so accurate that after the war the JIC worried that when the history of the North African campaigns came to be written, historians would realise that he had some kind of foreknowledge of Rommel’s movements, and would be able to piece the puzzle together. As it turned СКАЧАТЬ