But the British had broken the system, and the Germans did not know it, which gave the British a major asset in the Battle of Britain and the Battle of the Atlantic. The way in which the British had earned this asset was in itself a fascinating story, involving spies, double-agents, traitors, and the cream of British universities.3
The French and the Poles had both made contributions to ULTRA. A Polish Jew who had worked on an Enigma machine in Berlin managed to contact MI-6; the British arranged to get him from Warsaw to London to direct the building of a duplicate. The French had obtained earlier, commercial models of the Enigma machine, which they made available to MI-6. With these examples before them, the British proceeded to construct a strange contraption, eight feet by eight feet, called “the Bomb,” which was installed at Hut Three, a Nissen hut under the trees at a wretched estate named Bletchley Park. The Bomb, as described by its chief engineer, Harold Keen, was not a computer, and “there was no other machine like it. It was unique, built especially for this purpose. Neither was it a complex tabulating machine, which was sometimes used in cryptanalysis. What it did was to match the electrical circuits of Enigma. Its secret was in the internal wiring of Enigma’s rotors, which ‘the Bomb’ sought to imitate.”4
Bletchley Park, or BP as it inevitably came to be called, soon had an overflow of British intelligentsia. Nissen huts covered the grounds. They were staffed by German-language experts, military technicians, and code breakers, with a heavy emphasis on mathematicians, which meant a high number of eccentrics and “absentminded” professors.
“There was an amazing spirit at the place,” Alfred Friendly, who was there, later wrote. “Morale was high because everyone knew the fantastically successful results of our daily-and-nightly endeavours. It was one place in the military where there was no sense of futility, or useless work or of nonsense. Had he served there, Heller would have had no material for Catch 22.”5 William Filby, a Britisher who served through the war at BP, later scoffed at the idea of a vacation or even a short leave. “You couldn’t wait to get back in the morning to see what had happened overnight,” he said in an interview. “It was like your baby—you never wanted to leave it.”6 At BP, in brief, there was a tremendous feeling of excitement and contribution. Churchill conveyed some of that feeling to Eisenhower in his description of the place and its work.
Breaking the Enigma secrets open had been a brilliant team effort, but there were problems. The codes needed to be broken on a continuous basis, as the Germans were consistently changing the key. The new settings had to be found before each new code could be mastered. As the war went along the thousands of men and women working at BP got better at it, but in the early years they were baffled more often than not. ULTRA was not an important factor in the August-September 1940 Battle of Britain; even by October, BP, after straining every resource of human intelligence and endurance, could break only one message in three in time to act on the information. With the decoded messages, as R. V. Jones pointed out, “I was able to tell the Duty Air Commodore at Fighter Command the exact place of the German bomber attack, the time of the first bomb to within ten minutes or so, the expected ground speed of the bombers, their line of approach to within 100 yards, and their height to within two to three hundred metres. Could any air defence system ask for more?”
And yet, the bombers still got through. Jones complained that “reading the Enigma signals was just like reading tomorrow’s paper today.” As an extreme example, he recorded that the British knew of the German invasion plans for the island of Crete at least three weeks in advance, and still could not stop the enemy. In part this was because of British military weakness, in part because they dared make only the most limited use of their ULTRA-derived information.7
Ronald Lewin, author of Ultra Goes to War, the first detailed examination of the use of ULTRA in the campaigns of World War II, writes, “It was impossible to risk disclosing its intelligence to those in actual contact with the enemy, or liable to capture for other reasons, even though the knowledge might improve their chance of success or survival.”8 So it was at Crete.
An inability to take advantage of the information, or an inability to use it for fear of revealing its source, put definite limits on what ULTRA could contribute. Another limitation was distribution, getting the right information to the right man at the right time, and without tipping their hand. Only the very highest-ranking officers in the British service knew about ULTRA. It was the best-kept secret of the war, a secret that lasted for almost a full generation after the Nazi surrender.
Then, in 1974, Group Captain F. W. Winterbotham revealed The Ultra Secret in a book by that name.* Winterbotham was the officer who brought the ULTRA intercepts directly to Churchill, who delighted in reading Hitler’s messages. Because Winterbotham was so close to the Prime Minister throughout the war, his memoirs were filled with inside stories that made an exciting tale even more appealing.
In the mid-1970s The Ultra Secret came as a surprise to the public, as well as to most World War II scholars. Its immediate reception was one of puzzlement by the public, anger by the scholars (they would have to rewrite their books). Why, the public wondered, if the Allies listened in on everything the Germans said to each other over the radio, did it take so long to win the war? And why was the victory so costly?
Churchill’s initial reactions to ULTRA were similar. In 1941 and throughout 1942, for example, he kept reading Rommel’s messages from Africa, messages in which Rommel complained that his gasoline had not arrived, nor his spare parts, nor his reinforcements, nor his new tanks, nor his communications equipment. Because Churchill knew that Rommel was short on everything, he could not understand why his Middle East commanders hesitated to attack, and one by one he sacked them. Thanks to ULTRA, Churchill knew what the generals knew, and it made the generals furious and apprehensive because it invited criticism by Churchill, who was always at his happiest when he was dressing down a general.
But although Churchill called ULTRA an oracle (which it was when it worked) and the key to victory (which it could be if the right lock were found), it could provide only intelligence, not a strategy or the power to enforce one. General Bernard Law Montgomery pointed out to Churchill time and time again the obvious fact that knowing about Rommel’s supply shortages did not solve the British supply problems.
The Germans never caught on to the ULTRA operation, however. They used Enigma to the last day of the war. So the question persists: Why did the Allies not win sooner, at less cost? An American football analogy may help the perspective here. Suppose you were coaching against a National Football League team, and your intelligence system was so good that you knew not only the height, weight, speed, and characteristics of every opponent (all gathered from open sources, mainly films) but you also knew every one of your opponent’s plays. Even better, suppose you managed to hook up a radio transmitter in the quarterback’s helmet, while each of your players had receivers in their helmets. Your information about the enemy’s strength and intentions would then be perfect, as would your system of getting that information into the right hands in time to act on it.
But if your team consisted of eleven out-of-shape office workers who had never played together and who were all smaller and slower than their opposite numbers, all that perfect information would do you no good. The professional team would still score on every play.
Code breaking could work both ways, of course, since the Allies also used the radio. Patrick Beesly, who worked in the Naval Intelligence Division of the Admiralty, points out in his excellent work Very Special Intelligence that “no service in any of the belligerent powers during the Second World War succeeded in keeping every cipher it used secure.” Before Winterbotham broke the ULTRA secret, the ups and downs in the crucial Battle of the Atlantic were inexplicable. German sinkings of Allied merchant vessels would rise dramatically one month, then fall off sharply while Allied sinkings of German submarines went up. The explanation lay with the thousands of men and wom
en, in Germany and England, who toiled night and day to break the other side’s code. Success at this tremendously difficult and demanding task was immediately translated into ships sunk at sea. The ups and downs came as one side or the other changed its code, or broke the code the enemy was using that month.
The British won the Battle of the Atlantic partly because the Royal Navy was good, partly because of American reinforcements, but mainly because Churchill’s code breakers were better than Hitler’s. To a lesser extent this was also true on land, although some of Rommel’s victories in North Africa came about because his people had broken the British code and were reading the radio traffic. Beesly points out, “While each nation accepted the fact that its own cryptanalysts could read at least some of their enemy’s ciphers, they were curiously blind to the fact that they themselves were being subjected to exactly the same form of eavesdropping.”10
Curious, too, was the fact that some Americans had to be sold on the value of ULTRA. Ike fairly beamed as Churchill brought him in on the secret, but others were to be dubious at best, especially Eisenhower’s deputy, General Mark Clark. Shortly after Eisenhower’s visit to Chequers, Winterbotham went to Eisenhower’s headquarters in London to brief Clark. Accompanying him was the legendary Menzies, head of MI-6, “to lend a bit of weight to the proceedings.” Eisenhower introduced Clark and three members of his intelligence staff, then excused himself since he already knew about ULTRA. It is a measure of the tightness of security around ULTRA that this visit by Winterbotham and Menzies did not get entered into Eisenhower’s official office log, which makes it a unique event.
Winterbotham recorded what happened: “Mark Clark was restless from the start. I explained not only what the source was, but in an endeavour to catch Mark Clark’s interest gave some pertinent examples of what it could do. I had intended to follow this with an explanation of how the information would reach him, and the security regulations which accompanied its use. But Mark Clark didn’t appear to believe the first part, and after a quarter of an hour he excused himself and his officers on the grounds that he had something else to do.”11
Patton was equally cavalier. When Winterbotham sought to brief him in Algiers, Patton cut him short, saying, “You know, young man, I think you had better tell all this to my Intelligence staff, I don’t go much on this sort of thing myself. You see I just like fighting.”12
Ike was not so foolish. He saw at once the value of ULTRA, both immediate and potential, just as he responded to everything Churchill had told him. One of the reasons Ike had won Marshall’s confidence was his openness to new ideas, new techniques, new approaches to old problems. Marshall liked to say that Ike was broad-based, not narrow or traditional. Churchill and Eisenhower were neither scientists nor engineers, but they both loved gadgets, inventions, technology, especially when the new devices could help them win a war.
As Ike drove back to London after his evening at Chequers, he reflected on how lucky the United States was to have the British for allies. What an inheritance to fall into! Churchill, for his part, looked forward to working with this American general, who did not seem so stuck in the mud, so resistant to scientific and technological change, as his British generals. Together, they would make a fine team.
* * *
* He did so “to the mortification of those of us who had kept our oath of secrecy,” according to one insider.9
CHAPTER TWO
Preparing the TORCH
DAWN, SEPTEMBER 15, 1942. A group of Flying Fortresses is about to take off from an Army Air Force field near Washington, D.C. Their destination is Prestwick, Scotland, where the big bombers will be thrown into the battle raging over Europe’s skies. A tall passenger called McGowan, in a U. S. Army uniform and wearing the insignia of a lieutenant colonel, ducks under the wing of one of the planes and scrambles aboard. He sighs with relief—sure he hasn’t been seen.
MCGOWAN WAS RELIEVED because he was not the man he seemed to be. He had nothing to do with the highly publicized air war that his plane was about to join. His uniform was fake, his name was false, his instructions were secret. Those instructions had come directly from the President himself, after a secret meeting at Hyde Park. Franklin Roosevelt’s last words to McGowan were, “Don’t tell anybody in the State Department about this. That place is a sieve!” The disguise came about because Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall believed “nobody ever pays any attention to a lieutenant colonel.” McGowan’s secrecy was a result of an order from the Commander of the European Theater of Operations, U. S. Army, Lieutenant General Dwight David Eisenhower.1
“McGowan’s” real name was Robert Murphy. He had been a State Department employee for twenty years, but was now on special assignment, reporting directly to the President. His mission was to brief Eisenhower on the political and military situation in French North Africa, and on OSS activities in the area. Murphy thought all the secrecy stuff rather silly and was not inclined to take it seriously until the morning of September 16, when his plane touched down at Prestwick. Murphy got out to stretch while the plane was being refueled for the flight to London and heard a familiar voice call out, “Why, Bob! What are you doing here?” It was an old friend from the Foreign Service, Don Coster. Eisenhower’s chief security officer, Colonel Julius Holmes, had Coster arrested almost before he finished speaking. As Murphy gaped, Coster was hustled off by two burly policemen.
At noon, Murphy landed at a military airfield near London. There he was picked up in an unmarked car driven by Lieutenant Kay Summersby, Eisenhower’s personal driver. They went by a circuitous route around the outskirts of London until they arrived in midafternoon at Ike’s private retreat, Telegraph Cottage.
The first of Ike’s spies had come to report. Over the next twenty years, Eisenhower would hear hundreds of secret reports from dozens of spies, but none ever surpassed Murphy’s in excitement, if only because his was the first. And the first thing Ike wanted to know from Murphy was, “Who is your boss?”2
Murphy really did not know. Although his paycheck came from the Department of State, he was under direct orders from the President to avoid all contact with Secretary of State Cordell Hull or any other member of the department hierarchy. In Algiers, Murphy directed the activities of a few dozen OSS agents, but he did not work for or take orders from the OSS. He was the principal American official in North Africa, which was soon a theater of war under Eisenhower’s command, but he had no connection with Ike’s headquarters. The lines of authority were badly blurred, even nonexistent. In his initial encounter with the world of spies, therefore, Eisenhower had to face problems that would persist for the next two decades and beyond: To whom does the spy report? Who gives him orders? Who decides where and when covert operations will take place? In short, who is in charge?
IT WAS NOT a new problem to Eisenhower, because he had been involved since 1941 in the attempts to create clear-cut lines of authority for America’s first intelligence-gathering and covert-operations agency. On July 11, 1941, Roosevelt, acting at Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s suggestion, had created a new office, the Coordinator of Information (COI) under William Donovan, who had insisted on a military title and had been granted the rank of colonel. FDR’s directive to Donovan had given him a wide scope, and the President’s fondness for Donovan and his interest in the secret war had led him to give virtually unlimited funds to the COI.
The arrangement upset the military, where the chain of command is sacrosanct even in peacetime. With a worldwide war going on, the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted to ensure that all activities carried on by Americans anywhere were controlled by them. Donovan, a free-wheeling type who hated restraint of any kind, resisted. Eisenhower became involved four months after Pearl Harbor, when he urged his boss, General Marshall, to advise the President to make the COI directly responsible to the JCS. But the Army did not want to sully its reputation by having its officers engage in spying or subversive actions, so Ike recommended that such work in foreign countries “should be
conducted by individuals occupying a civilian rather than a military status.” Despite their status, Ike recommended that they “should be subject to the higher control of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”3
Marshall accepted Eisenhower’s proposal, which remained in effect until June 1942. Meanwhile, there was a furious bureaucratic struggle going on for control of intelligence and covert operations between the Army, the Navy, the State Department, the White House, and various other agencies and departments, all of whom could see that however restricted COI was at the time, its growth potential was unlimited. But in wartime, the military usually gets what it wants, and so it was here. In June 1942, Roosevelt changed the name of COI to Office of Strategic Services, put Donovan at its head, and placed OSS directly under the JCS in the chain of command.4
Donovan still hoped that he could operate independently, as FDR had intended that he should, but Eisenhower had not spent a lifetime in the Army without learning the crucial importance of flow charts and lines of authority. After he became commander of the European Theater of Operations and was placed at the head of the invasion force for North Africa (code named TORCH), Ike moved to bring Donovan under his authority. On September 10, a week before Murphy’s arrival in London, he got what he wanted. The JCS informed Donovan that his activities in England, Europe, and North Africa were all subject to the supervision and direction of General Eisenhower, including such matters as paying bribe money, propaganda radio broadcasts, equipment to be supplied to guerrilla groups, distribution of leaflets, and the collection and dissemination of intelligence.5
That directive put Donovan where Eisenhower wanted him, but what of Murphy? He did not belong to the OSS, although FDR had casually placed OSS agents in North Africa under his authority. Eisenhower would not have anyone in his theater of operations who was not under his command. Both as soldier and later as President, Ike was a self-confessed fanatic on the subject of unity of command, perhaps because he came to command so late in life (he was fifty-two years old when he took over at ETO, his first real command). “As I am responsible for the success of the operations I feel that it is essential that final authority in all matters in that theater rest in me.”6* Further, it was important that the Allies present the French with “a clean cut and single authority.”7 Roosevelt then made Murphy a “political adviser,” responsible directly to Ike.
Ike's Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment Page 2