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

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СКАЧАТЬ Great War. The Royal Navy’s codebreakers, such men as Dillwyn Knox and Alastair Denniston, labouring in the Admiralty’s Room 40, provided commanders with a wealth of information about the motions of the German High Seas Fleet. The decryption and public revelation of Berlin’s 1917 Zimmermann Telegram, urging the Mexicans to take aggressive action against the United States, played a critical role in bringing the Americans into the war. For two years after the November 1918 Armistice, the secret service was deeply involved in the Allies’ unsuccessful attempt to reverse the outcome of the Russian Revolution. Even after this was abandoned, the threat from international communism remained the foremost preoccupation of British espionage and counter-espionage.

      Yet amid the inter-war slump, funding was squeezed. MI6 mouldered, to an extent little understood by either Britain’s friends or foes. Hugh Trevor-Roper, the historian who became one of its wartime officers, wrote: ‘Foreign intelligence services envied the British secret service; it was their idealised model … It enjoyed the reputation of an invisible, implacable force, like the Platonic world-spirit, operating everywhere. To the Nazi government, it was at the same time a bogey and an ideal … The reality … was rather different.’ MI6’s senior officers were men of moderate abilities, drawn into the organisation by the lure of playing out a pastiche of Kipling’s ‘Great Game’, and often after earlier careers as colonial policemen.

      They masqueraded as passport control officers in embassies abroad, or shuffled paper in the service’s austere – indeed, frankly squalid – headquarters beside St James’s Park underground station, in Broadway Buildings, a place of threadbare carpets and unshaded lightbulbs. MI6 sustained a quirky tradition of paying its staff tax-free and in cash, but so small a pittance that a private income was almost essential for officers who aspired to an upper-middle-class lifestyle, which meant all of them. Though its budget was progressively increased from £180,000 in 1935 to £500,000 in 1939, few graduates entered the service, because its bosses did not want them. MI6, in the view of one practitioner, was designed merely to receive intelligence rather than actively to procure it. It was run by a coterie of anti-intellectual officers who saw their principal, if not sole, task as that of combating revolutionary communism. The shift of emphasis to monitoring Nazis and fascists during the late pre-war period caused great difficulties.

      Some recruits of that period proved ill-suited to the essential nastiness of espionage. Lt. Cmdr Joseph Newill, a retired sailor posted to Scandinavia in 1938 on the strength of speaking Norwegian, wailed to London: ‘I doubt whether I have the natural guile so essential for this work!’ Newill complained that his role involved much more hard labour than he had expected. He told his station chief petulantly: ‘I am 52 and I am not going to work myself to death at my time of life.’ But he was kept in the job, and contrived to meet Broadway’s undemanding standards. MI6’s Shanghai station chief, Harry Steptoe, operated under cover as vice-consul. A jaunty little cock-sparrow figure who affected a moustache and monocle, he puzzled a foreign diplomat by his appearance at receptions in a lovat-green suit adorned with gold braid. Was this, demanded the diplomat, the full-dress uniform of the British secret service? When the Japanese interned Steptoe in 1942, they dismissed the possibility that such a comic figure could be a spymaster, and instead subjected to brutal interrogation a hapless British 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 СКАЧАТЬ