Last Hope Island

by Lynne Olson

  As a result of the Venlo disaster, the MI6 network in western Europe was in ruins by the time of the 1940 German blitzkrieg. Yet despite this fiasco, Menzies and Dansey managed to retain their jobs, thanks in large part to the providential arrival in London of the exile European governments and their intelligence services.

  In exchange for providing financial, communications, and transportation support to the secret services of Czechoslovakia, Norway, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and de Gaulle’s Free French, MI6 gained control of most of their operations. The foreign services, in turn, provided virtually all of the wartime intelligence the British received about German activities in occupied Europe.

  Though hardly a genius as spymaster, Menzies was brilliant at protecting and promoting himself and his agency in the often brutal infighting in Whitehall. One of his major weapons in that bureaucratic war was never to reveal MI6’s sources to anyone, not even Churchill. In that way, he and Dansey could claim sole credit for any successes that came their way.

  As it happened, the European intelligence agencies with which MI6 was now aligned scored many coups. Yet almost nobody outside MI6 knew it. An exception was David Bruce, head of the London branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the United States’ newly formed espionage and sabotage agency. Bruce, who arrived in London in 1942, noted in his diary that MI6’s intelligence capabilities were “lamentably weak. Most of the reports they send us are duplicates of those already received by us from European secret intelligence services.”

  The first foreign intelligence group to arrive in London was the Czechs’. Just before Hitler occupied all of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, František Moravec, the head of that country’s highly respected spy agency, and ten of his top officers, along with dozens of boxes of files, escaped to Britain. Moravec’s arrival was a particular windfall because he brought with him the reports of one of the top Allied intelligence sources of World War II, a disaffected German Abwehr officer named Paul Thümmel. Code-named A54, Thümmel, the chief of the Abwehr station in Prague, provided the Czechs—and indirectly the British—with remarkably accurate information about German military plans for more than two years. Thanks to Thümmel, for example, MI6 learned beforehand of German plans to invade France through the Ardennes in 1940 and to conquer Yugoslavia and Greece in the spring of 1941. (The Ardennes intelligence coup—and Britain’s and France’s failure to do anything about it—prove that, however good intelligence might be, it is of little or no use unless action is taken as a result.) In the fall of 1940, Thümmel also reported that Hitler had abandoned his plans, at least temporarily, for Operation Sea Lion, the proposed invasion of Britain.

  The Norwegian intelligence service, meanwhile, passed on to MI6 reports from hundreds of coast watchers in Norway, who monitored the movements of German submarines and warships. In 1941, one of them informed London that he’d spotted four German warships in a fjord in central Norway—information that led to the sinking of the battleship Bismarck and the crippling of the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen. Hundreds more ordinary Norwegians reported on fortifications, airfields, camps, and German troop movements.

  In the early years of the war, however, France was MI6’s main focus. As the occupied country closest to Britain, it was Hitler’s springboard—the country from which the Luftwaffe bombed British cities and the German navy dispatched submarines to sink British merchant shipping. It would also serve as the launching point for any invasion of Britain. As a result, intelligence about the movements and disposition there of German troops, ships, submarines, barges, and aircraft was of vital importance to the British government.

  To gather such information, MI6 was able to draw on a cornucopia of sources. One was de Gaulle’s fledgling intelligence service, headed by André Dewavrin, a young army officer and former professor at Saint-Cyr, France’s foremost military academy, who agreed to dispatch secret agents to France under British control. The first to be sent was Gilbert Renault, a French film producer who was working on a movie about Christopher Columbus when France fell. He escaped to London and joined de Gaulle’s Free French; six weeks later, he landed secretly on the coast of Brittany to begin what turned out to be a phenomenally successful two-year stint as a spy.

  Renault’s first job was to collect and send back to Britain detailed, up-to-date maps of France. (As with Norway, the only maps the British had of France in the 1940 campaign were those they’d collected from travel agencies.) Once he had done that, Renault, although a complete novice at intelligence, put together a far-flung spy network, called the Confrérie de Notre Dame, that eventually covered much of occupied France and Belgium. The information it provided led to such military successes as the 1942 British commando raids on the northwest French ports of Bruneval and Saint-Nazaire.

  When Renault, whose code name was Colonel Rémy, finally left France in June 1942, he took with him copies of plans for Germany’s defense installations on the Normandy coast, stolen by one of his agents. Those blueprints later proved to be an invaluable resource for the British and American planners of the D-Day invasion.

  While Renault and other Free French agents were vital assets for MI6, so, too, were a number of Frenchmen who at one time or another had been allied with Pétain’s Vichy government. Some of MI6’s closest wartime links in France were with the prewar French intelligence services, many of whose members worked for Vichy. Soon after France’s capitulation to Germany, a group of anti-German officers in the French army formed an underground intelligence organization called Organisation de Résistance de l’Armée (ORA) that accepted Pétain as French head of state but conspired to end the German occupation of France.

  Indeed, among the most important Allied spy rings in France was one organized by Georges Loustaunau-Lacau, a colonel who had earlier served as Pétain’s top military aide. When the colonel was arrested by the Vichy police, his former secretary—a petite, elegant thirty-year-old mother of two named Marie-Madeleine Fourcade—became the leader of the network, called Alliance, which included hundreds of men demobilized from the French army, navy, and air force. At its height, Fourcade’s operation (known as Noah’s Ark by the Gestapo because its members used animal code names) was active throughout all of France and numbered more than three thousand agents, some five hundred of whom were arrested, tortured, and executed by the Germans over the course of the war. Fourcade herself was arrested twice but escaped both times, once by stripping naked and forcing her slender body through the bars of a Gestapo jail cell.

  Marie-Madeleine Fourcade

  Sure that the British would never accept the idea of a woman as head of a major intelligence network, Fourcade kept her identity secret until the end of 1941, when she was smuggled into neutral Spain in a diplomatic bag for a meeting with her MI6 handler. She needn’t have worried about how the meeting would go. Her handler was bedazzled by her “Nefertiti-like beauty and charm,” and although the irascible Claude Dansey grumbled that “letting women run anything was against his principles,” he couldn’t argue with Fourcade’s accomplishments. MI6 continued to supply money, wireless sets, and other equipment to her Alliance network, which repaid that largesse with a flood of top-level intelligence, including information about German coastal fortifications and German troop movements prior to D-Day.

  As good as the French were, however, it was the Poles who provided the lion’s share of British—and Allied—intelligence during the war. In 2005, the British government acknowledged that nearly 50 percent of the secret information obtained by the Allies from wartime Europe had come from Polish sources. “The Poles had the best special services in Europe,” said Douglas Dodds-Parker, a British intelligence official who worked with them during the war. Actually, the Poles were even better than that, according to the deputy chief of American military intelligence, who argued in 1942 that “they have the best intelligence in the world. Its value for us is beyond compare.”

  The Poles were longtime masters of covert activity, having been occupied and partitioned
for more than a century by three powerful neighbors: Russia, Germany, and Austro-Hungary. “With generations of clandestine action behind them,” Dodds-Parker noted, “they had educated the rest of us.”

  From the day Poland regained its status as a sovereign country in 1918, it had given top priority to spying and code breaking, specifically aimed at its two chief historic enemies, Germany and Russia. In the words of a former chief of Polish intelligence, “If you live trapped between the two wheels of a grindstone, you have to learn how to keep from being crushed.” In 1939, Polish leaders were unable to prevent that from happening, but before escaping to the West, they did leave in place sophisticated intelligence and resistance networks.

  From a large town house in the fashionable west London neighborhood of Knightsbridge, Polish intelligence officials maintained close radio contact with a widespread network of agents inside Poland, who provided a flood of information, including statistics about industrial production and the deployment of German military and naval forces. In return, the British gave the Poles, along with the Czechs, a high degree of autonomy. Unlike the other exile intelligence services in London, the two eastern European countries were allowed to operate their own training establishments, codes, ciphers, and radio networks without MI6 control, with the proviso that they pass on all intelligence relevant to the Allied war effort.

  Years after the war, the Polish historian Jan Ciechanowski estimated that as many as 16,000 Poles—most of them members of the Home Army, the country’s highly organized resistance movement—were involved in the gathering of military and economic information inside Poland. “No place in Poland, where there was anything of great significance, could be kept from the prying eyes of Home Army intelligence,” Ciechanowski said. In fact, the Home Army’s network was even more far-flung than that, with contacts throughout Austria and Germany, including outposts in Cologne, Bremen, and Berlin. Much of the information from the Reich came from Poles who had been forced to work in German factories as slave laborers.

  The Poles’ extraordinary talent for spying won admiration, albeit grudging, from German intelligence officials as well. After two days of poring over captured Polish intelligence documents in 1939, Walter Schellenberg wrote in his diary that “the amount of information, especially concerning Germany’s production of armaments, is quite astonishing.” Later, he dourly noted, “One always has to be prepared for unpleasant surprises with the Poles.”

  Besides its spies in Poland, Austria, and Germany, Polish intelligence boasted agents in Scandinavia, the Baltic States, Switzerland, Italy, Belgium, the Balkans, and North Africa. Among its most successful operatives was Halina Szymańska, whose husband had been the Polish military attaché in prewar Berlin. While there, the couple had become friends with Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the Abwehr. One of the most enigmatic figures of the war, Canaris, who had grown increasingly disenchanted with Hitler, was playing a double game: while counterintelligence operatives in his agency ruthlessly tracked down Allied spies and saboteurs, he encouraged other Abwehr colleagues to pass on intelligence to MI6. After Poland’s defeat, Canaris arranged for Szymańska’s escape to Switzerland, where he put her in touch with Hans Bernd Gisevius, who was in charge of Abwehr operations there. For more than two years, Szymańska acted as a conduit between Gisevius, Polish intelligence, and MI6, providing information about high-level Nazi decision making, including German plans to invade Russia in 1941.

  In France, too, the Poles organized and ran several important intelligence networks. The seeds of the French operations were planted by several Polish officers who remained behind in the unoccupied zone after Allied forces were evacuated from France in June 1940. Their first network, called F-1, established an escape route for marooned Polish and other Allied troops that led from Toulouse, in southwest France, to Britain. But F-1’s major effort was to gather intelligence about German aircraft, weapons, and troop movements. Its organizers recruited dozens of additional agents, many of whom came from the large communities of Polish immigrants scattered throughout France. A sizable number of these émigrés were industrial workers, able to provide detailed reports about the output and location of factories producing armaments and other items of interest to the Allies.

  By early 1941, the original Polish network had split into several new cells. The most important of these operated out of a rented room in the heart of occupied Paris. It was organized and run by an intense, adventurous Polish air force officer named Roman Garby-Czerniawski, one of F-1’s original organizers. A fighter pilot before the war, the French-speaking Garby-Czerniawski had been recruited by Polish military intelligence in late 1939. He was, said a colleague, “a man who lives and thinks spying.”

  Garby-Czerniawski’s goal in establishing himself in Paris was to provide London with as detailed a picture as possible of German forces and installations in occupied France. He christened his operation the Interallié network, declaring that “the boss will be a Pole, the agents mostly French, and all working for the Allies.” Hundreds of full- and part-time operatives gathered information for him, among them railway workers, fishermen, policemen, and housewives.

  The agents’ reports were sent to various “cutouts” in Paris—a restroom attendant at the iconic La Pallette restaurant, a teacher at a Berlitz language school, and a concierge at an apartment building, among others—who then passed them on to Garby-Czerniawski. After collating and typing the reports (some of them up to four hundred pages long and containing maps and diagrams), he gave them to a Polish courier, who boarded a train to Bordeaux, in unoccupied France, and secreted them in a hiding place in the first-class restroom. Once the train reached Bordeaux, another Polish operative would retrieve the reports, which were then relayed to London. Eventually Garby-Czerniawski’s network acquired several wireless sets and was able to transmit directly to London, providing such a huge volume of information that those on the other end were hard pressed to keep up with it.

  Stewart Menzies and MI6, meanwhile, happily took credit for the rich mother lode of information they were receiving from Polish and other European spies. But all that intelligence, highly valuable as it was, paled in comparison with what one historian called “the most important intelligence triumph of this or any other war.” Just before the Battle of Britain began, British cryptographers at Bletchley Park, the country’s code-breaking center, succeeded in cracking the Luftwaffe version of Germany’s fiendishly complex Enigma cipher. Ultra—the name given to the information obtained from Enigma—proved critical in winning the Battle of the Atlantic and the campaigns in North Africa and Normandy, as well as the Allied victory as a whole.

  “It was thanks to Ultra that we won the war,” Winston Churchill told King George VI. Actually, according to the noted intelligence historian Christopher Andrew, Churchill was overstating it a bit. “Intelligence did not decide the outcome of the war,” Andrew observed. “The Red Army and the U.S. did. But the successes of Allied intelligence undoubtedly shortened it—and saved millions of lives.”

  What almost no one, including Churchill, knew was that Britain’s code-breaking success had been due in large part to the French and, above all, to the Poles. The Ultra operation “would never have gotten off the ground if we had not learned from the Poles, in the nick of time, the details both of the…Enigma machine and of the operating procedures that were in use,” wrote Gordon Welchman, one of Ultra’s top cryptographers.

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  THE STORY OF THIS top secret Allied collaboration began in July 1939, when the leading code breakers of Britain and France were invited by Polish military intelligence to a meeting at a camouflaged, heavily guarded concrete bunker in a forest near Warsaw. Once inside this newly built transmitting station and cipher center, they were shown a small black device resembling a typewriter, with keys that rotated a cluster of three-inch wheels—an exact replica of Germany’s astonishingly sophisticated Enigma machine. With it, unbeknownst to the British and French, the Poles had been reading much of Germ
any’s military and political communications for more than six years—a feat that, in the Germans’ estimation, should have taken 900 million years to accomplish.

  The visitors responded to the Poles’ disclosure with stunned silence. Alfred Dillwyn “Dilly” Knox, an eccentric former classics scholar from Cambridge and Britain’s top cryptographer, was particularly upset. The son of an Anglican bishop, the tall, bespectacled Knox was, in the words of a colleague, “a bit of a character, to put it mildly.” He combined a keen intellect with an absentmindedness so extreme that he forgot to invite two of his three brothers, one of whom was the Catholic theologian Ronald Knox, to his wedding. Among his closest friends were John Maynard Keynes and other prominent members of the Bloomsbury Group, including Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster, and Leonard Woolf.

  Knox’s early training in deciphering ancient Egyptian papyrus fragments had been instrumental in his emergence as a matchless code breaker, beginning in World War I, when he had cracked the cipher used by the German naval commander in chief. For more than a year, he and his colleagues in Britain’s underfunded code-breaking agency, called the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), had been studying Germany’s latest cipher system, Enigma, but had gotten nowhere in their attempts to decipher it. He found it impossible to believe that the Poles had beaten them to it.

  According to Alastair Denniston, who headed GC&CS and was also at the session in Poland, Knox sat in “stony silence” as he and the other British and French participants were briefed on the Poles’ success. “It was only when we got back into a car to drive away that he suddenly let himself go and, assuming that no one understood any English, raged and raved that they were lying to us,” Denniston said. “The whole thing was a fraud, he kept on repeating—they never worked it out—they pinched [the machine] years ago…they must have bought it or pinched it.”