by Lynne Olson
Forty years later, as France fell and Hitler prepared to hurl his Luftwaffe thunderbolts at Britain, a handful of government officials gathered in a room on the fourth floor of St. Ermin’s to try to figure out a way to fight back. Clearly, the British could not return to the Continent anytime soon: their army was too meager, their arms almost nonexistent, and the ally they coveted—the rich and powerful United States—showed no signs of wanting to join the conflict. In the desperate summer of 1940, Britain’s skimpy offensive arsenal contained just two weapons: the Royal Navy’s blockade of Germany, begun in 1939, and a nascent bombing effort against the Reich by the RAF. The plotters at St. Ermin’s added a third: a campaign to undermine the enemy from inside the occupied countries of Europe.
Thus was born a new top secret government agency, the innocuously named Special Operations Executive, which took over three floors of St. Ermin’s in a matter of weeks. SOE’s assignment was to foment sabotage, subversion, and resistance in captive Europe, a goal that its creators hoped would disrupt and eventually help destroy the German war machine. Winston Churchill, an enthusiastic champion of the idea, dubbed the SOE “the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” and instructed its first chief to “set Europe ablaze.”
Before it could attempt to do so, however, SOE had to deal with the unpleasant reality that, aside from Churchill and a few other leading political figures, virtually no one in high British government circles wanted it to exist, much less succeed. That was particularly true of the top men in Britain’s vaunted Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), who loathed the thought of a new clandestine government agency independent of their control, especially one whose goals and methods were so fundamentally in conflict with those of their own.
MI6, which was responsible for collecting military, economic, and political intelligence from countries outside the British Empire, prided itself on its secrecy and discretion; the idea of a sister agency drawing unwelcome attention to itself (and to MI6 operations) through sabotage and other public acts of violence was anathema. The intelligence historian Nigel West aptly summed up the key difference between the two organizations in his description of how each would react if one of its operatives witnessed enemy troops crossing a bridge: an MI6 spy would observe the troops and estimate their number while an SOE agent would blow up the bridge to prevent the enemy from getting across.
As SOE officials would soon discover, MI6 was a dangerous foe to have. Globally renowned, it enjoyed a sterling reputation as an all-seeing, all-knowing spy organization. Churchill considered the British intelligence service “the finest in the world.” So, interestingly, did Hitler and other Nazi higher-ups, including SS head Heinrich Himmler and Himmler’s murderous deputy Reinhard Heydrich, known as “the blond beast,” who used MI6 as a model when he created the SS’s fearsome intelligence and security operations: the SD and Gestapo. Heydrich even signed some of his letters and memos with the letter “C,” the initial used by MI6 chiefs in their official correspondence.
Yet for all his admiration of the British intelligence service, Heydrich, like his Nazi colleagues, actually had very little substantive knowledge of how it worked. His romantic views of its omniscience and omnipotence came from reading the prewar British spy novels that filled the Gestapo’s reference library. And as it turned out, all those awestruck notions were as fanciful as the fiction on which they were based.
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FROM THE LATE NINETEENTH century on, British novelists found that one of the surest routes to fame and fortune was to write about the fictitious exploits of British secret agents in continental Europe. When the spy novel genre began in the 1890s, the enemy was usually French, but as German military power exploded in the early twentieth century, he became almost exclusively German. The heroes, however, remained remarkably the same.
With few exceptions, they were well-born English gentlemen who belonged to the best London clubs, rode to hounds, and were connoisseurs of gourmet food and vintage wines. Yet all those paragons were willing to forsake their good life for a time to spy for their country in the face of great danger and appalling odds. The protagonist of Robert Erskine Childers’s wildly popular novel The Riddle of the Sands, written in 1902, was typical: he was, according to Childers, “a young man of condition and fashion, who knows the right people, belongs to the right clubs, and has a safe, possibly a brilliant future in the Foreign Office.”
For decades, the adventures of these amateur patrician spies not only attracted millions of readers from around the world but also inspired a generation of young Englishmen to follow in their footsteps. An SOE agent noted after the war that “practically every [SOE] officer I met at home and abroad was, like me, imagining himself as Richard Hannay or Sandy Arbuthnot,” two British agents who were the fictional creations of John Buchan, whose famed adventure novels included The Thirty-nine Steps.
Reflecting Britons’ instinctive distrust of foreigners, the enemy agents in those books tended to be stereotypes as well—unshaven, badly dressed, shifty, and duplicitous. The novels’ overall moral seemed to be that getting involved with foreign countries and individuals was a dangerous undertaking and that Britain—“the supreme country in the world,” as one fictional British agent described his homeland—should do its best to stay well clear of them.
Given the xenophobia of British spy novels, it’s a wonder that foreigners like Himmler and Heydrich were so taken with them. Heydrich, whose addiction began during a post–World War I stint in the German navy, was convinced that the success of the British Empire was due to the brilliance of MI6 and that every upstanding Englishman was “ready to aid the Secret Intelligence Service, regarding it as his obvious duty….The SS has adopted as its idea this English view of intelligence work as a matter for gentlemen.” In an attempt to emulate the British, he focused on recruiting for his own operations young, well-educated Germans from good families.
Even Hitler joined in the chorus of praise for MI6. Speaking to Nazi intelligence officials early in the war, the Führer remarked that “the British Secret Service has a great tradition. Germany possesses nothing comparable to it. Therefore, each [German] success means the building up of such a tradition and requires even greater determination….The cunning and perfidy of the British Secret Service is known to the world.”
Such Nazi paeans, however, could not have been further from the truth. Starved of government funds after World War I, MI6 in the late 1930s was underfinanced, understaffed, and woefully short of both talent and technology. In 1935, two years after Hitler came to power in Germany, the then-current “C”—Admiral Hugh Sinclair—despairingly remarked that his agency’s entire annual budget equaled the cost of maintaining one British destroyer for a year. Although Sinclair borrowed money from wealthy relatives to keep MI6 afloat, it was never enough; at the time of the Munich Conference in 1938, he could not afford to buy wireless transmission sets for the few agents he had in Europe to let them communicate directly with London.
MI6 did indeed tend to recruit well-born young men as its intelligence officers; preferring “breeding over intellect,” it shied away from those who had attended college, seeking instead “minds untainted by the solvent force of a university education.” Many of its operatives in the interwar period were former military officers with substantial private incomes. The early education of “these metropolitan young gentlemen…had been expensive rather than profound,” observed Hugh Trevor-Roper, the noted historian, who, after a stint as an Oxford don, worked for MI6 during World War II. “[They] didn’t have much use for ideas.” They were, he added, “by and large pretty stupid—and some of them very stupid.”
In one area, however, the real intelligence officers had much in common with their fictional counterparts: both groups operated with an air of casual, gentlemanly amateurism. When a new MI6 operative named Leslie Nicholson asked in 1930 about the kind of training he would receive, he was told that “there was no need for expert knowledge.” When Nicholson persisted in seeking “tips on how
to be a spy,” the MI6 station chief in Vienna responded, “You’ll just have to work it out for yourself. I think everyone has his own methods, and I can’t think of anything I can tell you.”
As it happened, Stewart Menzies, who was named “C” in 1939 and who ran MI6 throughout the war, had never himself experienced what it was like to be a secret agent, trained or otherwise. The grandson of an enormously wealthy whiskey baron from Scotland, Menzies had attended Eton, then joined the British Army’s prestigious Life Guards Regiment, many of whose officers were aristocrats. During the Great War, he fought with distinction in France and was awarded a Distinguished Service Order and Military Cross. After being gassed, he signed up with army intelligence, and when the war ended, he shifted to MI6 headquarters in London, where he remained for the rest of his career.
A charter member of the clubby, upper-class “old-boy network” that had dominated British society for generations, Menzies, like many if not most of his contemporaries, was conservative in his social and political attitudes and wary of foreigners. He once said that “only people with foreign names commit treason,” obviously unaware that someone with the very English name of Kim Philby, who was without question one of the “old boys,” was committing treason within Menzies’s own agency.
Tall and slender, with thinning blond hair, the fifty-year-old Menzies belonged to the Beaufort Hunt, the select fox-hunting group sponsored by the Duke of Beaufort, and White’s, the most exclusive men’s club in London, where no bottle of nonvintage wine was ever served and no woman was ever allowed to enter. It was in White’s bar that he did much of his recruiting for MI6, focusing mostly on young men from families in his own cloistered milieu.
An amiable social butterfly, Menzies was generally regarded as an intelligence lightweight by senior MI6 officers, who noted his lack of practical experience in the field and his propensity for procrastination. “He was not a very strong man, and not a very intelligent one,” recalled Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, wartime chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, a Cabinet-level group that oversaw all of Britain’s intelligence operations.
The person who really ran MI6, in the opinion of many, was Menzies’s deputy, Claude Dansey, a shadowy figure well versed in stealth and deceit, who was, as the writer Ben Macintyre put it, “a most unpleasant man and a most experienced spy.” An anomaly in MI6’s upper-crust world, Dansey had not gone to Eton or served in one of the army’s posh regiments. Instead, he had spent much of his early career as a military intelligence officer in Africa, where he had run spy networks that gathered information on and helped put down rebellious native groups. During World War I, Dansey had worked for British intelligence in London, where his myriad duties included rounding up suspect aliens and engaging in counterespionage in Britain and western Europe.
Short, balding, and bespectacled, Dansey had a luxuriant white mustache and, in Ben Macintyre’s words, the sharp, penetrating “eyes of a hyperactive ferret.” He was witty, spiteful, and widely disliked. “Everyone was scared of him,” said the journalist and author Malcolm Muggeridge, who, like Hugh Trevor-Roper, worked for MI6 during the war. “He was the only real professional there. The others at the top were all second-rate men with second-rate minds.” Trevor-Roper was far more jaundiced in his view of Dansey, describing him as “an utter shit; corrupt, incompetent, but with a certain low cunning.”
As dissimilar as they were, Menzies and Dansey shared at least one common trait: an obsessive devotion to clandestine behavior that bemused Muggeridge, Trevor-Roper, and the other young outsiders brought into MI6’s inner sanctum during the war. According to Muggeridge, MI6’s motto seemed to be that “nothing should ever be done simply if there are devious ways of doing it.” Like small boys playing secret agent, the agency’s old hands often used code names when they were not needed, communicated in code when writing innocuous messages, and left those messages in out-of-the-way places such as a potting shed rather than posting them in an ordinary mailbox.
Muggeridge realized he had been infected with that same obsession for secrecy when he found himself tiptoeing past Menzies’s hushed offices on the fourth floor of MI6 headquarters at 54 Broadway, just off Parliament Square. “Secrecy,” Muggeridge recalled, “is as essential to Intelligence as vestments and incense to a Mass…and must at all costs be maintained, quite irrespective of whether or not it serves any purpose.”
While the use of pointless code names and other forms of clandestinity struck newcomers like Muggeridge as richly comic, MI6’s fixation with secrecy served an important purpose for those in its upper reaches, one that had nothing to do with protecting the safety and security of Britain. Its usefulness was far more personal: it helped shield those in power from the scrutiny of Parliament, the British public, and the rest of the government. The novelist John le Carré, who worked briefly for MI6 shortly after World War II, noted how devoted the agency had been to “the conspiracies of self-protection, of using the skirts of official secrecy in order to protect incompetence, of gross class privilege, of amazing credulity.”
In the years immediately preceding the war, MI6, as it happened, had a considerable amount of incompetence to protect.
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ON A DARK, DREARY November day in 1939, a car pulled up to the Backus Café in the small Dutch town of Venlo, just across the Meuse River from Germany. Two middle-aged Englishmen—sporting trim gray mustaches, monocles, and bowlers—got out. They were MI6 officers, come to Venlo on a top secret mission that, if successful, might well lead to the overthrow of Hitler and the end of the two-month-old war.
Ever since the Führer had come to power, the neutral Netherlands, situated as it was next to Nazi Germany, had served as one of the main spy centers of Europe, playing reluctant host to countless intelligence agents from all over the globe. Like most of their foreign counterparts, the two mustachioed MI6 officers—Sigismund Payne Best and Richard Stevens—were based at The Hague, which British intelligence used as its unofficial European headquarters.
For such an important post, MI6 had been astonishingly inept in its selection of station chiefs, who operated there under the flimsy cover of passport control officers. In 1936, station chief H. E. Dalton had killed himself after the revelation that he had embezzled fees paid by Jewish refugees for British visas. Then came the discovery that two Dutch operatives working for Dalton’s successor had been recruited as double agents by the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence agency.
Realizing that one of its most important bases in Europe had been penetrated by the Germans, MI6 chose not to take the logical step of closing down the office and starting over. Instead it created a second, unofficial intelligence service throughout Europe that would exist alongside the old operation but have no connection with it. Known as the Z Organization, it was run by Claude Dansey, who chose as its agents a varied collection of amateurs: businessmen, industrialists, journalists, politicians, and other British subjects who either lived in Europe or were frequent travelers there.
The man Dansey picked for The Hague was Sigismund Best, the owner of a Dutch pharmaceutical and chemical company, who passed on to Dansey mostly worthless items of intelligence. At the same time, he claimed significant amounts of money as expenses for the thirteen agents he alleged he was running, nine of whom turned out to be fictitious.
When war broke out in September 1939, Best was ordered by London to join forces with Richard Stevens, MI6’s latest station chief in The Hague, thereby destroying the whole point of having an alternative intelligence operation. A newcomer to the agency, Stevens, who had earlier served in the British Army in India, was as unimpressive in his job as Best had been in his. Before going to The Hague, Stevens had “never been a spy, much less a spymaster,” he later acknowledged. “I was totally lacking in experience and felt I was altogether the wrong sort of man for such work.” When he told MI6 higher-ups of his fears, they assured him that The Hague was largely an administrative post—a gross misstatement, as Stevens would find out a
few months later when he and Best were thrown into a situation for which neither was remotely prepared.
In October 1939, the month after Germany invaded Poland, Neville Chamberlain quietly let it be known that the British government would consider making peace with Germany if Hitler were deposed. At the same time, Stevens and Best received word that a dissident military faction in the Reich was plotting to get rid of Hitler and open peace negotiations with Britain. After several clandestine sessions with men reportedly from this rebel group, the MI6 officers, with the backing of Chamberlain and the Foreign Office, agreed to a November 9 meeting at the Backus Café in Venlo to meet the German general leading the resistance.
But when Stevens and Best entered the café, they discovered to their shock that there was no general and that the officers with whom they’d met were in fact SS intelligence agents; one of them was Walter Schellenberg, Reinhard Heydrich’s deputy and another longtime British spy novel addict and MI6 fan. After shooting to death a young Dutch military intelligence agent who had accompanied the British operatives, Schellenberg and his colleagues bundled Stevens and Best into a car and sped over the border into Germany.
The intelligence officers’ abduction, one of the most embarrassing episodes in MI6 history, became an even greater disaster thanks to their behavior after the kidnapping. Ignoring London’s directive that captured agents should reveal only the names and addresses of their cover businesses or other jobs, Stevens and Best, without being subjected to physical torture, collaborated fully with the Germans. Stevens was caught with a complete list of Dutch agents in his pocket; he also apparently handed over the names of all MI6 station chiefs in western and central Europe, along with the identities of their foreign operatives. In addition, he and Best provided extensive information about MI6’s hierarchy in London, including the names of department heads and the location of their offices in the Broadway headquarters.