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

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СКАЧАТЬ that the decrypts assisted Montgomery’s Eighth Army in its famous victory in the summer of 1942 at El Alamein, once an obscure port on the edge of the Egyptian desert, which was a major turning point in the Allied campaign in North Africa. By May 1943 Montgomery’s ‘desert rats’ had effectively driven Rommel’s Afrika Korps into the sea in Tunisia. Bletchley Park’s Ultra decrypts also produced direct benefits for the Allies in the Battle of the North Atlantic: they revealed the locations of German U-boats, allowing the Admiralty to manoeuvre supply convoys away from danger, bring shipping losses down to bearable levels, and contributed to Allied victories in the Battle of Cape Matapan (March 1941) and the Battle of the North Cape (December 1943).¹⁶

      Ultra decrypts likewise made possible MI5’s now-legendary ‘Double Cross System’, the process by which every German agent in Britain was identified, and many of them turned into double agents. It was only after Ultra came on-line in December 1940 that MI5 could establish conclusively whether any unidentified German agents were operating in Britain, and also, crucially, whether the disinformation that MI5’s double agents were passing back to Germany was being believed by the German High Command. The MI5 officer T.A. ‘Tar’ Robertson, who was in charge of Section B1a within MI5, responsible for running double agents, would later describe how Ultra decrypts allowed MI5 to see whether the files of its enemies were being stocked with the exact information that MI5 desired. In several cases, MI5 watched with pride as its disinformation was passed by the Nazi intelligence services across Europe and beyond. The magnitude of these successes was later summarised by Sir John Masterman, the head of MI5’s wartime deception committee, who noted that during the war Britain ‘actively ran and controlled the German espionage system in this country’.¹⁷

      Churchill later reflected on the value of the intelligence produced by Bletchley Park and the secrecy of its operations, describing its code-breakers as ‘the geese that laid the golden eggs but never cackled’. Some historians, including F.H. ‘Harry’ Hinsley, who worked as a junior official at Bletchley Park and who later became the editor of the magisterial official history of British intelligence in the Second World War, have suggested that the intelligence produced by Bletchley Park was so valuable that it shortened the war by up to two years, saving countless lives on both sides. More recently, doubt has been cast on this claim, with historians arguing that the Second World War was really a war of matériel production, and that once the Soviet Union and the United States entered the war, in June 1941 and December 1941 respectively, victory for the Allies was assured. Although counter-factual ‘what if’ postulations can produce endless debates, the reality was that, if the war in Europe had not ended in May 1945, the Allies would have dropped an atomic bomb on Germany – which was the original target for the bombs dropped on Japan in August 1945.

      A-FORCE: THE BIRTH OF BRITISH STRATEGIC DECEPTION

      The idea of strategic deception – that is, providing false information to misguide an enemy’s strategy – was put to best use by Allied forces in Europe, but it was not originally conceived there. During the so-called phoney war, between the outbreak of war in September 1939 and the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940, the Middle East was the only theatre where British forces were directly fighting Axis forces, and it was there that innovative uses of intelligence for modern military affairs were born. Before either MI5 or SIS had begun to envisage the idea of strategic deception, it was being pioneered by a small, crack intelligence outfit attached to the Cairo-based staff of the British commander in the Middle East, General Archibald Wavell. Wavell was one of the best-educated generals in British military history, a quiet, scholarly type who liked to write poetry in his spare time and had lost an eye in the Great War. He knew the history of Lawrence of Arabia well, and valued the use of intelligence in war. The unit he established was known as ‘A-Force’, and the man he placed in charge of it was a brilliant military intelligence officer, Lt. Col. Dudley Clarke, who came up with a number of ingenious deception ploys. In Clarke’s view, it was possible to do more than prevent secrets reaching an enemy’s intelligence service (counter-espionage): secrets obtained through counter-espionage could also be used to deceive an enemy’s strategy (strategic deception).¹⁸

      In 1940 Clarke recruited a young officer, Jasper Maskelyne, who came from a long succession of famous stage magicians and conjurors, to help him build an entire false city out of plywood in the Egyptian desert, three miles from the port of Alexandria. The ‘city’ built by Maskelyne’s group, the so-called ‘Magic Gang’, was apparently so realistic-looking from the air – complete with a false lighthouse and anti-aircraft batteries – that it deceived German bombers, which destroyed it instead of the actual city of Alexandria. To misdirect German bombers, the Magic Gang also used a series of elaborate mirrors to create optical illusions over the Suez Canal in order to obscure intended targets there. A-Force also assisted with deception campaigns before the strategically key Second Battle of El Alamein, fought in the Western Desert of Egypt from October to November 1942. It built 2,000 false tanks to the south of El Alamein, complete with convincing pyrotechnics, which deceived Rommel into thinking that the main Allied attack under Montgomery would come from the south, when in reality it came from the north. Maskelyne had a vested interest in exaggerating his trickery heroics in the post-war account he penned, Magic–Top Secret, because he felt his wartime exploits had not been recognised. Some historians have doubted his tales, but it does seem that he deserves more credit than he has been given. The authors of the official history of British intelligence in the Second World War, who had access to classified records, note Maskelyne’s ‘numerous and valuable contributions’ to Allied visual deception in the Middle East. Thanks to A-Force and the Magic Gang’s trickery, the Germans at El Alamein believed that British forces were 40 per cent larger than they actually were.¹⁹

      In October 1941 Clarke travelled to London, where he briefed the War Office on his ideas of strategic deception. The War Office was so impressed that soon afterwards it established a top-secret outfit known as the ‘London Controlling Section’ (LCS). Although its name does not feature in most histories, it was one of the most important – if not the most important – Allied intelligence agencies in the entire Second World War. The LCS only had non-executive powers – to plan, coordinate and supervise – but this did not mean its influence was limited. In the opinion of M.R.D. Foot, the esteemed late official historian of Britain’s wartime sabotage organisation, the Special Operations Executive, the LCS was more important than either MI5, SIS or GC&CS during the war. Headed from May 1942 by Lt. Col. J.H. Bevan, its purpose was to ‘prepare deception plans on a worldwide basis with the object of causing the enemy to waste his military resources’. The actual running of double agents and other deception ploys was carried out by MI5 and the other services, but it was the LCS that had overall responsibility for coordinating all the disinformation sent to Germany and Britain’s other enemies. A-Force’s pioneering efforts in strategic deception in the Middle East therefore inspired the LCS, which then took it to new heights. As the official history of British intelligence in the Second World War noted, a small acorn planted in the deserts of North Africa by Dudley Clarke grew during the war into an enormous tree, spreading across Europe and the British empire.²⁰

      The first significant use of strategic deception by the LCS was with Operation Torch, the Allied landings in North Africa in November 1942. In the run-up to the landings, one of MI5’s prize double agents, a Spanish national, Juan Pujol García, codenamed ‘Garbo’, sent letters to his German handlers with misinformation about the timings of the landings. One of Garbo’s letters gave information from a fictional sub-agent supposedly operating in Britain stating that Allied ships had set sail from Scotland, apparently destined for North Africa. Although the letter contained accurate information, MI5 deliberately delayed it so that it would not arrive until after the actual landings had occurred. The plan worked perfectly: Garbo’s German handlers were thankful for his accurate information, which had unfortunately arrived too late for them. Similar deception material on the Torch landings was passed to Nazi intelligence by the double agent ‘Cheese’, an Italian of Jewish parentage who had been recruited by SIS before the war, but was then also recruited by the Abwehr in France in 1940, and thereafter served as a СКАЧАТЬ