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

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СКАЧАТЬ He and his MI5 case officers created a fictional sub-agent whom they called ‘Paul Nicosoff’, in reality a British signals officer, who passed over strategic deception material to Nazi intelligence. By the autumn of 1942 Cheese was providing an almost daily service of reports from ‘Paul Nicosoff’, and in the period leading up to Operation Torch was in direct communication with Rommel’s headquarters, furnishing false information on the mobilisation of British forces in the Middle East. By the end of the war Cheese and ‘Paul Nicosoff’ had transmitted 432 messages to the Abwehr station in Cairo, and Ultra decrypts revealed that the Abwehr classified them as reliable. The success of strategic deception in Operation Torch was clear: General Alfred Jodl, Hitler’s closest military adviser, Chief of the Operations Staff of the German High Command (OKW), told Allied interrogators after the war that the landings in North Africa had come as ‘a complete surprise’.²¹

      The next major use of strategic deception by the LCS was with Operation Mincemeat, which involved the Allied invasion of Europe from North Africa, opening up a ‘second front’ to relieve pressure on the Soviet forces in the east. Mincemeat deceived the German High Command into thinking that the Allied invasion of Italy, the ‘soft underbelly of Europe’, as Churchill termed it, would not take place in Sicily, as was actually intended, but instead in Sardinia and Greece. Operation Mincemeat, begun in early 1943, was the brainchild of an MI5 officer, Charles Cholmondeley, and a brilliant wartime naval intelligence recruit, Ewen Montagu, who was assisted by another naval intelligence officer, Ian Fleming (the future creator of James Bond). Together they devised an outstanding ruse: to drop a dead body over the side of a ship, carrying supposedly top-secret Allied plans for the invasion of Sardinia. The deceivers were so meticulous in their preparations that they created a complete false persona for the dead body, known as ‘Major Martin’, even putting a photograph of his fictional fiancée (in reality an MI5 staff member) in his wallet and obtaining the stub of a cinema ticket from a showing in London a few nights before his ‘death’. ‘Major Martin’, who in reality had been found in a London morgue, a deceased homeless man without any known relatives, achieved more in death than he apparently ever did in life. After his body was found off the Spanish coast, the German High Command was deceived by the documents in his briefcase that outlined the supposed Allied plans for the invasion of Sardinia, and on Hitler’s personal orders troops were diverted there – even though it would have been perfectly obvious to any child with a school atlas that the Allies’ intended destination from their base in North Africa was Sicily, not Sardinia.²²

      The climax of Britain’s wartime deception campaigns was Operation Fortitude, the deception operation paving the way for the Allied cross-Channel invasion of Fortress Europe on D-Day, 6 June 1944 – the largest seaborne invasion in naval history. In preparation for D-Day, MI5’s star double agent Garbo and his MI5 handler, Tomás Harris, passed over voluminous amounts of false strategic intelligence to Germany about non-existent Allied forces stationed in Britain. Garbo helped to fabricate an entire false US army group, ‘the First United States Army Group’ (FUSAG), which was never more than a collection of balsawood tanks and inflatable ships, but just like Dudley Clarke’s previous deceptions in the Egyptian desert, nevertheless looked realistic from the air. The most important misinformation that Garbo supplied to his German spy-masters was a radio message on 5 June 1944 which convinced the German High Command into thinking that the main Allied landings would not be in Normandy, but in the area around Calais. Based on this information, crucial SS Panzer divisions were diverted to Calais, where they awaited an invasion force that would never arrive. Garbo’s deception information, which diverted Nazi forces and allowed the Allies to establish a crucial bridgehead, undoubtedly saved Allied lives. A measure of the value that the Nazi leadership attached to him was that Hitler personally awarded him an Iron Cross, making him the only person ever to have received both a Nazi Iron Cross and a British MBE.²³

      SPY VS SPY: AMATEURS VS PROFESSIONALS

      In the years after the war, some MI5 officers such as Tar Robertson would criticise the deception tricks of Dudley Clarke and A-Force in the Egyptian desert as ‘amateur’. A-Force was certainly not a professional intelligence service in the way that MI5 or SIS were. It was also the case that Clarke was a highly eccentric individual. In a truly bizarre episode, in 1943 he was arrested in Madrid dressed as a woman. At first he told the Spanish police that he was conducting research for a news report on people’s reactions to men dressed as women, but he then changed his story and stated that he had been bringing the clothes to a friend, and decided to try them on as ‘a prank’ – but as one official in the British embassy in Madrid noted, this did not explain why the women’s shoes and brassière he was wearing fitted him.²⁴

      For all of Clarke’s undoubted eccentricities, it was unfair for Robertson to suggest that he and A-Force were ‘amateur’. The root of the tension between MI5 and outfits such as A-Force was that MI5 was concerned with counter-espionage for its own sake – to prevent an enemy from gaining British secrets – and viewed strategic deception as an extreme form of counter-espionage, whereas agencies like A-Force tended to view strategic deception as the ultimate goal. A-Force’s disinclination to regard counter-espionage as an end in itself seems to be the reason Robertson played down its efforts.²⁵

      Robertson was one of MI5’s best agent handlers in the first half of the twentieth century. He was a professional intelligence officer who joined the service in the early 1930s, having served in the Seaforth Highlanders regiment of the British Army – his tendency to persist in wearing the regiment’s uniform of Scottish trews earned him the affectionate nickname ‘passion-pants’ within MI5. During the war he led Section B1a of MI5, which was responsible for running all double-cross agents – 120 in total. Robertson’s success had much to do with his affable manner, which could put even tough enemy agents at ease. Nevertheless, as a professional intelligence officer, he naturally regarded those who saw matters differently from himself and MI5, particularly over the use of strategic deception, as novice upstarts.²⁶

      In labelling A-Force ‘amateur’, Robertson overlooked a crucial point: MI5, like the rest of the British intelligence community, actually owed much of its wartime success to the influx of amateur outsiders into its ranks. A flood of outstanding, if eccentric, individuals equipped Britain’s wartime intelligence services with a degree of ingenuity and creativeness hitherto missing. They included a number of high-powered intellectuals from Britain’s leading universities, with Bletchley Park in particular becoming a bastion of such brainpower. Among its most notable recruits were the brilliant mathematicians Alan Turing, Alfred ‘Dilly’ Knox and Gordon Welchman, all from Cambridge University. Two-thirds of the Fellowship of King’s College, Cambridge, worked at Bletchley Park at some point during the war. Turing was essentially responsible for devising an entirely new system of mechanised ‘bombes’ to power decryption efforts against the Enigma code – for this reason he has justifiably been termed the father of modern computer science. Recruits into SIS included high-calibre Oxford academics such as the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper and the philosophers Stuart Hampshire and Gilbert Ryle. Some notable literary figures also entered SIS’s wartime ranks, sometimes with humorous results: when Malcolm Muggeridge and Graham Greene were given training by SIS on the use of secret inks, which included instructions on how to obtain raw material for an ink codenamed ‘BS’ (birdshit), their reactions were understandably bemused. Intellectual heavyweights who joined MI5 during the war included Victor Rothschild from Cambridge, who became MI5’s in-house expert on sabotage, and from Oxford the academic lawyer H.L.A. Hart and the historian John Masterman. Masterman, a brilliant academic, a bachelor and one of the best spin bowlers in English cricket at the time, became the chairman of MI5’s ‘Twenty Committee’, which oversaw all the double-cross agents that MI5 ran during the war. In a typical example of the wordplay used by its academically-minded members, the Twenty Committee was so called because a double cross, ‘XX’, is the Roman numeral for twenty.²⁷

      Alongside this kind of intellectual firepower, less academic professions also produced some outstanding wartime officers for British intelligence. One of MI5’s СКАЧАТЬ