Stephenson played around with the design of the first Enigma and then forgot about it. In those breathless years from 1924 until 1933, when Hitler became Chancellor of a new Germany, much happened to distract this young man who had made his first million before he was thirty. His friendship with Frederick Lindemann, “the Prof,” allowed him to prod Churchill out of a prolonged mood of depression. The Prof feared that Germany was developing new weapons and would destroy her old enemies when Hitler was ready. Stephenson fed those fears with facts.
Churchill seemed in 1933 to be “politically dead,” in Harold Nicolson’s words. “He is just a great round white face . . . incredibly aged. . . . His spirits also have declined and he sighs that he has lost his old fighting power.”
But Churchill was not out of the battle. He had spent twenty years in governments formed by both major political parties. His detractors said this was proof of instability. His admirers saluted his stamina. He had held more ministerial posts than any man in England. Stephenson’s firsthand reports of what was really happening in Germany now stirred Churchill. With the Prof to lean upon, the seemingly old man made a little-known journey. It took him into the nooks and crannies of Germany, from which he returned alarmed and angry. This near-forgotten German tour would later explain Churchill’s ruthless pursuit of Hitler’s destruction and the Prof’s mobilization of air power to destroy the nation that spawned Nazism. They had glimpsed, in 1933, the possibility of a German atomic bomb and a dictatorship mad enough to use it.
There was a bonfire of books at Berlin University that same year. Stephenson watched students fling into the flames the works of Freud, Mann, H. G. Wells, Proust, and Einstein. Already, the Führer was dictating how the Third Reich should think. “The National Socialist German Workers’ Party,” decreed Hitler, “constitutes the only political party.” In the burning of the books, Stephenson saw the forging of a weapon hard to define: thought control. He was asked by Churchill to seek out more facts and figures on secret German arms, details that would shatter British and American complacency. Thought-control defied such analysis, though H. G. Wells had tried. Hitler had invented the Big Lie, said Wells. “It will be believed if repeated enough.” The Big Lie spread like a gas that poisoned the minds of foreign observers as well as Germans disposed to trust one man’s claim to infallibility.
“The Big Lie takes many forms. It can win bloodless victories for Germany if our leaders are soft-headed. Hitler means to conquer the world,” Stephenson wrote privately to Churchill. “But he will not attack his next victim until he has undermined him first, and digested the previous victim. Europe is rotten with indecision, and corrupted by hopes of making separate deals with the Nazis. Germany’s final enemies are in North America. Hitler will try first to sap our courage by winning friends there.”
Stephenson was pursued by Alfred Rosenberg, the pasty-faced fanatic who dressed Hitler’s ugly intentions in pseudo-scientific disguise. There would come a day when Rosenberg choked while Hitler told him how the Jews were to be exterminated. In 1933, Rosenberg was still the self-deluded Nazi theoretician, earnestly preaching an anti-Bolshevik gospel to foreign visitors.
Rosenberg failed to see Stephenson’s horror at the violence already visible in Germany. A dangerous arrogance blinded Nazi leaders to the reactions of such a foreigner. What Rosenberg did perceive was Stephenson’s control of the biggest film and recording studios outside Hollywood, and his influence in the world of entertainment—a prime Nazi propaganda target. Furthermore, Stephenson conducted business all over the world. He was modernizing coal mines in the Balkans, steel factories in Scandinavia, and oil refineries in Rumania. He led technical missions to help countries like India. His steel and cement companies were the largest outside the United States. The German cartels would love to plug into such a network.
Nazi intrigues led to the rediscovery of Enigma. The cipher machine had been modernized and put into limited German service, its presence noted by American engineers of the International Telephone and Telegraph Company. ITT was becoming involved in German arms manufacture, after talks with Hitler in 1933. The founder of ITT, Colonel Sosthenes Behn, set up German subsidiaries to take advantage of Nazi promises that foreign investors would get preferential treatment and the guarantee of huge global markets later.
A report on these advantageous terms was sent to Stephenson. One of his companies made equipment for ITT’s British subsidiary. He found an opportunity to talk with ITT engineers, who were now in an unusual position to examine the German communications systems. They commented on the large amount of coded traffic. It seemed to result from Hitler’s use of a coding machine for Nazi party business.
ITT’s German interests were handled by Dr. Gerhard Alois Westrick. The German banker Kurt von Schroeder joined the directors of ITT subsidiaries. Both men caught Stephenson’s attention—and would hold it for other reasons for a long time. Schroeder was on his way to becoming Gestapo treasurer and a general in the SS security service. Westrick was a partner of Heinrich Albert, a German propagandist in the United States, and would become an adversary when Stephenson tried to break up Nazi cartels in the Western Hemisphere. Sometimes it was wiser to leave these partnerships alone. In ITT’s case, whatever benefit was obtained by the Nazis from American expertise had to be balanced against intelligence gathered by its technicians. The irony was that in those days this intelligence roused more interest in Enigma among Stephenson’s colleagues in London than it could in Washington.
Several observers in different parts of the world must have guessed Enigma’s importance at the same time. In the U.S., the Radio Intelligence Division of the Federal Communications Commission was peering into Nazi secret-radio traffic. RID was the American counterpart of the British Radio Security Service (RSS). Each worked under the handicap of official displeasure and justified operations by claiming only to watch for pirate radio stations that broke the law, usually by transmitting without government license.
In 1934, when Stephenson discussed Enigma with American friends, a Federal Communications Act became law in which Section 605 prohibited wiretaps and the interception of messages between foreign countries and the United States. The prohibition reflected the mood of the authorities in both countries and made it difficult for worried citizens to exchange information between countries—even if it did concern their mutual survival.
Enigma gleamed briefly on their horizon and vanished again. Within the armed forces of the United States and Britain, there were inadequately paid specialists who might have locked onto the secret more firmly if there had been official channels through which to compare notes. Instead, there were informal groups of men and women who were convinced war was coming. To say so, however, was “unpatriotic.” Nobody in his right senses wanted war in a period of severe economic depression. There was a widespread belief in Britain and the United States that the manufacture of arms was in the hands of “Merchants of Death.” Stephenson and his friends on both sides of the Atlantic had to resort to an almost conspiratorial style to avoid the label. They were becoming reluctant detectives, obliged to get the facts of German rearmament before they could prepare to defend their own people.
There was no financial inducement for Stephenson to chase ghosts like Enigma or to pry into Nazi secrets. Yet everything he touched not only turned to gold, but also involved technical developments that would transform warfare. He was building planes at a time when no British government would put money into military aircraft. His fellow flight-commander from 73 Squadron A. H. Orlebar won the coveted aeronautical trophy, the Schneider Cup, in the plane that sired the Spitfire. The designer, Reginald Mitchell, was dying; Stephenson encouraged him sufficiently that he fought pain and despair to complete the graceful fighter in time to defend Britain against invasion. The inventor of the jet, Frank Whittle, remembered his relief at discovering Stephenson, after the Royal Air Force had rejected his revolutionary concept of flight without propellers. Fortunately, such developments could be financed
by Stephenson’s Electric and General Industrial Trust. Stephenson listened to Whittle’s proposals, sat silent for several minutes, then put his finger on the problem with characteristic brevity.
“He said we’d need a new alloy for the high-speed turbine blades,” Whittle recalled. “Then he found it.”
There were cautionary voices who had a more subtle influence on Stephenson: George Bernard Shaw, George Orwell, and foreign correspondents whose horror stories from Germany were often suppressed by their own publishers. Stephenson had lost his dearest friend, Steinmetz, who died suddenly but whose voice persisted in a period of confusion. On visits to Germany, Stephenson “felt Steiny at my elbow, setting me straight. Everything I did was tangling with the knowledge that we were going to have to fight Hitler and his perversion of Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest.”
The fight against Hitler finally began at home. In Britain and North America, small movements resisted further compromise with Hitler. In London, “Churchill’s activists” were drawn from all sections of society. Their voice in Parliament was Churchill, but the public ignored his warnings. These were what he called the “Wilderness Years.” He was branded a warmonger for writing that “when Hitler began, Germany lay prostrate at the feet of the Allies—Hitler may yet see the day when what is left of Europe will be prostrate at the feet of the Germans.” In articles for the few newspapers that tolerated his opinions, he learned to modify his statements. “We shall be worse off if we get too far ahead of public opinion,” he told Focus, anticipating what an American president would tell his own advisers when pressed to fight Nazism.
Focus was one of those informal groups pulled together by Admiral Blinker Hall. They consisted of men and women who saw war as inevitable, but whose views ran counter to British policy. Some came from the British Secret Intelligence Service itself, whose servants were bound to obey the government of the day. If that government chose to belittle the danger of war, what was a loyal intelligence officer to do? It was an offense even to utter the initials of any department of intelligence, let alone complain to the press. The problem was partly solved by an unobtrusive figure moving between the Directorate of Military Intelligence and these civilian-professional groups meeting in their clubs and company board rooms. He was Desmond Morton, a modest major who would eventually organize an Allied Committee of Resistance to rally civilians against Hitler inside Nazi territories. Major Morton’s experience in organizing resistance within Britain in the mid-1930s offered lessons for the future.
Morton later told a story that caught the flavor of those days: “Our man in Dublin concluded that the chief of German intelligence in southern Ireland was a thug living in Bray. Some of our gentlemen hit him with a rubber truncheon one night, bundled him into a dinghy and rowed him out to one of His Majesty’s submarines. When it reached England, there emerged from the lockers into which he’d been thrust, the bloody and bloody-minded features of the chief of British Naval Intelligence for southern Ireland. . . .”
Morton was Special Assistant to Churchill in 1935, assigned to “discover the plans for the manufacture of arms and war stores abroad.” He was to prepare a shadow organization that in wartime would answer to Parliament as a Ministry of Economic Warfare, secretly responsible for sabotage and assassination. Neither Churchill nor Morton had parliamentary authority. Their support came from the King, that higher authority whose intervention was permissible in times of crisis although it could be challenged. This traditional arrangement, by which the monarchy and the funds set aside for royal functions could be used to protect those acting secretly to defend national interests, was and still is little understood. It was to prove vital in the secret wars to come. Meanwhile, it allowed Morton to shuttle between groups like Focus, Electra, and the XYZ Committee; informal gatherings of men who had respectable reasons for traveling abroad, including adventurers and explorers like Ian and Peter Fleming. (Peter had just walked across Tibet from China to India and was speculating on methods of “strategic deception” if war with Germany broke out again.)
Stephenson’s business office, in St. James’s Street, off Piccadilly, had become the London base of an alliance with Washington between like-minded men. Through this channel came a report in 1935 that the Japanese Navy was sharing its version of Enigma with the Japanese Foreign Office.
A working partnership developed unofficially through Stephenson. The U.S. Army’s Signal Intelligence Service and the U.S. Navy’s equivalent were forbidden to exchange information with the British. But much was possible by word of mouth. Stephenson, with business reasons for talking with key figures, could arrange co-operation in a way that might be embarrassing if documented on paper. To many senior officers and a few politicians, it was clear that Germany and Japan were moving into an ominous stage preceding naked aggression: concealment. Their diplomatic and military traffic was protected by unfathomable ciphers. Part of the method of breaking such codes was to gather quantities of coded messages: the bigger the volume, the better the chance of detecting a pattern that would lead to a solution. With help from Canada, which was part of the Western Hemisphere but also a confidant of Britain, the old Allies could pool the results of their unofficial eaves-dropping. Their clandestine method of co-operation provided useful experience for the hard times to come.
Stephenson, anything but a conspirator, was obliged to seek anonymity. “The less anyone knows about the personal life of an intelligence chief, the better” was an unwritten law. Stephenson was becoming chief of a private intelligence agency. All record of his activities was erased from the newspapers after 1935. Clippings about him began to disappear from newspaper files.
Still, he was in the public eye. This seeming contradiction had a purpose. If war came, such men would be scrutinized by enemy intelligence working through many channels, but largely dependent upon newspaper files. Stephenson’s activities were part of the process of building up contacts abroad in preparation for secret warfare. He had just won the prestigious King’s Cup air race when printed accounts of his past began to vanish. He won it with a machine designed and built in his own General Aircraft factory. This attracted the interest of Hitler’s Air Force chiefs. They had worked on other British and American airmen, appealing to sportsmanship and a shared passion for flying.
Again Stephenson listened. It must have been an odd spectacle. In London, his friends tore up his past. In Germany, he gently interrogated Hitler’s men with little more than a smile and cocked eyebrow.
“At one conference,” he reported, “a description was given of ‘blitzkrieg.’ . . . Dive bombers and tanks would spearhead each offensive, followed by troops in fast carriers. The Nazi war machine would rely on lightning victories, in turn dependent on the swift redirection of mechanized units by means of radio. It follows that blitzkrieg can succeed only by transmission of top-secret orders through the ether in unbreakable codes.”
German chieftains talked so frankly because they took professional pride in their efficiency. Some hoped to overawe any potential opposition. Others used the sly justification that Germany was destined to destroy the ultimate and universal enemy: Bolshevik Russia.
Did Nazi Germany plan to invade Russia, then? The answer was yes, according to Albert Kesselring. The man destined to direct the bombing of London told Stephenson how German armored divisions would strike into Russia. “The secret will be speed . . . speed . . . speed!” Kesselring thumped the table to emphasize each word. “Fast as lightning! Blitzkrieg! Lightning war.”
“How would your Air Force get support, so far ahead of the armies?” Stephenson asked General Erhard Milch, State Secretary for Air, who replied: “The dive bombers will form a flying artillery, directed to work in harmony with ground forces through good radio communications. You, a radio expert, must appreciate that for the first time in history, this co-ordination of forces is possible. The Air Force will not require ground support, any more than the armored divisions will need repair units. Tanks and planes will be disposab
le. The real secret is speed—speed of attack through speed of communications.”
To Churchill, Stephenson reported that the weak link in the German armor would be communications. “If we can read their signals, we can anticipate their actions.”
Stephenson was launched on a search for the modernized Enigma cipher machine, without knowing it.
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Whenever he flew from Berlin to London, Stephenson was angrily aware that the official German airline carried pilots and navigators of the shadow Nazi Air Force who were familiarizing themselves with their future target. In London, Parliament droned on, oblivious to the treachery being prepared in the skies above, intent only upon pacifying Hitler. Those who saw the danger hid themselves in Churchill’s shadow Ministry of Economic Warfare, still informal and secret and unacknowledged. The difference between this clandestine British ministry and the shadow German Air Force was pathetic. The bomber crews had official German support and scarcely bothered to hide their preparations. Not only did Churchill’s ministry run counter to official British policy, but also Churchill was himself a political leper.
Support had to come from outside. Where better, Stephenson argued, than the United States? The U.S. Navy had established a Mid-Pacific Strategic Direction-Finding Net, whose purpose was to locate Japanese units by tracking their radio transmissions. It would net coded Japanese traffic that then could be added to what was acquired by British monitors in India and Asia. The Japanese were making increasing use of their own versions of Enigma, and the Americans were at work on the Japanese machine-produced ciphers.
Small though these American preparations might seem, they could be traced back to a large truth. Churchill had courage but no visible power. In the White House there was a man possessed of the courage so conspicuously absent in Westminster. That man was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
A Man Called Intrepid Page 5