A Man Called Intrepid

by William Stevenson

  Hitler would later sneer that Roosevelt became president “when I became Chancellor. . . . This tortuous-minded Jew was born to riches. I knew squalor and harsh poverty.” FDR was not, of course, Jewish. Nor did he seek pity. He was recognized by his magnificent head and his confident grin. He commanded such personal devotion that, for instance, press photographers loyally avoided showing the heavy braces that encumbered his withered legs. In 1933, President Roosevelt had written to Britain’s socialist Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald: “I am concerned with events in Germany. An insane rush to further armaments is infinitely more dangerous than any number of other squabbles.”

  FDR was anything but a warmonger. But, like Churchill, he was forced to look danger squarely in the face. He relied for disinterested reports on foreign dangers upon Bill Donovan, who traveled abroad using vaguely defined legal interests as an excuse. Donovan had returned to law practice after a fling at politics, and was now established at 2 Wall Street. “If Bill Donovan had been a Democrat,” said Roosevelt at a class reunion at Columbia Law School, “he’d be in my place today.”

  Donovan bore the same relationship to FDR that Stephenson bore to Churchill. There was mutual respect and trust. Donovan, knowing war, hated it. His investigation of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia had been followed by discreet visits to Hitler. At home, Donovan enforced antitrust legislation for the Justice Department in such a way that the big corporations respected his fair play as well as his incorruptibility. He knew, in consequence, a great deal about the corporate structure of international firms controlled or influenced by the Nazis. It was inevitable that Stephenson would renew their brief World War I acquaintanceship. Donovan was the logical American to discuss how Nazi intelligence proposed to use dummy U.S. subsidiaries. Donovan was also a friend of the director of U.S. Naval Intelligence, Rear Admiral Walter S. Anderson, and Stephenson was the protégé of a British admiral, Blinker Hall. Though open co-operation between the two navies was restricted by political considerations, and the U.S. government continued to deplore the interception of communications on ethical grounds, nonetheless, it was impossible to stop Americans peering into the expanding world of codes and cryptology. Roosevelt did not intend to stop them. The field of cryptanalysis had an aura of sorcery, but the basis was highly scientific. Stephenson had a natural interest as a scientist, experience in signals transmission since childhood, and a talent for abstract mathematics that would be needed in meeting the challenge of Enigma. The existence of the cipher machine in its new Japanese and Nazi garb was vaguely understood. Stephenson’s knowledge was welcome on both sides of the Atlantic. Interest in Enigma was a minor note in the overture to calamity.

  Donovan agreed that dictatorship was made vulnerable by dependence on secrecy. “The soft area in a totalitarian state is the security system,” he said. “So much has to be kept secret that machinery to process information is cumbersome. A dictator is apt to think he functions in a totally secure environment and he gets careless.” Nazi Germany was forging a military machine that relied on secret communications, the weak link in Hitler’s armor.

  “I was delighted someone on the American side had come to this conclusion,” Stephenson was to recall. “It laid the foundations of our partnership and put emphasis on the vital area of secret warfare. There could be no story about wartime intelligence that was not the story of Donovan and his activities before the outbreak of war. It was understood without anything being spelled out that Big Bill was the President’s personal agent.”

  The two Bills saw the world in similar terms. Neither took pleasure in military affairs. Donovan never saw himself as a military hero, though General Douglas MacArthur was to describe him as “the most determined, resourceful and gallant soldier I have ever known in my life.” Donovan replied that “I know too much about war to glory in it. But wars are made by politicians who neglect to prepare for it.”

  While the Americans groped for the secret of the Japanese version of Enigma, the British gathered evidence of Enigma variations in Nazi Germany. In 1937, Stephenson learned through his contacts in the German communications industry that Enigma was serving the Nazi party’s own secret intelligence. It had come under the control of a few men with all the powers of spying, police interrogation, and execution. One of these men was Reinhard Tristam Eugen Heydrich.

  “The most sophisticated apparatus for conveying top-secret orders was at the service of Nazi propaganda and terror,” Stephenson noted. “The power of a totalitarian regime rested on propaganda and terror. Heydrich had made a study of the Russian OGPU, the Soviet secret security service. He then engineered the Red Army purges carried out by Stalin. The Russian dictator believed his own armed forces were infiltrated by German agents as a consequence of a secret treaty by which the two countries helped each other rearm.* Secrecy bred suspicion, which bred more secrecy, until the Soviet Union was so paranoid it became vulnerable to every hint of conspiracy. Late in 1936, Heydrich had thirty-two documents forged to play on Stalin’s sick suspicions and make him decapitate his own armed forces. The Nazi forgeries were incredibly successful. More than half the Russian officer corps, some 35,000 experienced men, were executed or banished.* The Soviet Chief of Staff, Marshal Tukhachevsky, was depicted as having been in regular correspondence with German military commanders. All the letters were Nazi forgeries. But Stalin took them as proof that even Tukhachevsky was spying for Germany. It was a most devastating and clever end to the Russo-German military agreement, and it left the Soviet Union in absolutely no condition to fight a major war with Hitler.”

  Heydrich, the architect of this triumph in Nazi deceptive operations, was Stephenson’s opponent in the developing battle of wits. He was tall, blond, clear-eyed, and handsome. He played down his part-Jewish origins, and was driven by a personal and unlimited vindictiveness that had nothing to do with Nazi ideology. “His cold eyes glinted with icy pleasure when he gave directions for a Jewish family of shopkeepers, discovered by the Gestapo in a minor infringement of the law, to be murdered by whipping and strangulation,” reported one of Heydrich’s own intelligence rivals, Walter Schellenburg. “His schizophrenic hatred of his Jewish ancestry led to monstrous actions against Judaism in general. He was ambivalent even in sex. Simply to win advancement, he married the daughter of a secret sponsor of Germany’s rearmament and close friend of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris.”

  Admiral Canaris was the name that always sprang to mind in connection with Germany’s foreign-intelligence operations. Like Admiral Hall in Britain and Admiral Anderson in America, he commanded naval resources for espionage that could be expanded into foreign and political affairs without civilian interference. Although Heydrich had been kicked out of the German Navy for “dishonorable conduct” when a youngster, Canaris continued to groom him for a career in intelligence.

  Stephenson awoke with a jolt to the full significance of this Nazi spy whose usefulness to Hitler had seemed to be mainly in cheating Allied watchdogs enforcing the Treaty of Versailles. Later, when the Allied Control Commission prepared to inspect German factories to see if Germany adhered to the treaty’s arms limitations, it was Heydrich who warned the managers. If the Commission arrived at Krupp’s, in Essen, it was to see household articles come off the assembly line instead of the guns and ammunition of a few hours earlier.

  These deceptions were spotted by Stephenson because he could look into the records as a bona fide businessman representing, among other things, new industries created by discoveries in synthetic materials, prefabricated construction methods, and propulsion technology. As owner of the Pressed Steel Company in Britain, he negotiated with German United Steel and thus found that this conglomerate made howitzers as well as hairpins. He saw where tanks were hidden among the blueprints for tractors. Submarines were now constructed in prefabricated sections in Finland, Holland, and Spain, where the separate bits would not be recognized.

  Heydrich was identified with the authors of such schemes, and with that typical Nazi weapon the St
uka dive bomber, which struck terror when it fell upon its victims. The Stuka’s scream was intended to destroy morale already undermined by bombs. Typically, the plane combined propaganda and terror. One required the other. The Stuka was unthinkable, and those who might have resisted Hitler preferred not to think about it. Stephenson’s reports failed to budge British leaders who wished to believe that the Stuka factories were making lawn mowers.

  What Stephenson saw was reinforced by what he was told by Germans like Fritz Thyssen. The German steel king poured a fortune into Nazi party coffers, and then in 1938 lost control of Hitler. Hoping to separate the Führer from the Nazi movement, Thyssen sought sympathy abroad and unwittingly betrayed crucial information, including a clue to the greatest secret of all. Hundreds of new, portable versions of a cipher machine were being built to Heydrich’s specifications in a factory near Berlin. This proved to be the new Enigma, for carrying the top-secret signals that would guide the massive Nazi war machine. It would be the nervous system of Germany’s blitzkrieg.

  Heydrich was in charge. His stature was to become, in secret warfare, greater than any rival within the Nazi camp. Knowing this in advance made it possible to study Hitler’s chief thug and most malevolent practitioner of the politics of terror. This knowledge would prove as valuable as the discovery that the new portable Enigma was very different from the original. The machine had a keyboard like a typewriter. The keys were linked electrically through a system of drums. The relationship between the drums could be changed swiftly in a multitude of ways. The sender of a message would hit the keys as if typing routinely. The machine switched each letter to a different one. The operator might press A, and Z would be transmitted. The receiving Enigma, its drums adjusted to the prearranged setting, would respond by translating Z back into A. Anyone intercepting the signals between the two stations would pick up gobbledygook. This elaborate system seemed foolproof. Not only was the portable Enigma itself a mystery, but so also were the schedules for setting the drums.

  The advantage in intercepting the signals and making sense of them would be incalculable. In the wars of rapid and surprise movement envisaged by the Germans, armadas of aircraft and tanks and troops could strike without warning. Their first aim would be to occupy vast areas before effective resistance could be mounted. Once some territory or an entire country had been occupied, it was likely that fighting would end with Hitler dictating terms. Possession would become the law. The success of blitzkrieg would depend on total secrecy and swift communications. Unless the secret signals were intercepted and solved, there would be no effective defense against blitzkrieg.

  Stephenson estimated it would take a month for one combination of the drums to be solved by a team of brilliant mathematicians. The Greek name, Enigma, meant puzzle. No puzzle had been invented of greater complexity. The job of capturing a machine would be only a beginning. Day and night, a vast number of experts would have to concentrate to determine the specific settings of the originating cipher drums. Stephenson came back to London distressed and frustrated. Little was being done to penetrate these Nazi secrets. Only Hall’s band of volunteers still worked at code-breaking. Working against similar odds with greater success, the U.S. Navy was making headway in analyzing the Japanese version of Enigma and in the development of its own ship-borne coding machines. In January 1938, the U.S. Navy’s Director of War Plans, Captain R. E. Ingersoll, was sent to London to co-ordinate work against the potential enemy’s ciphers. But Britain’s Prime Minister of the time, Neville Chamberlain, was not much interested in American apprehensions. He was busy brooding on “Russians stealthily and cunningly pulling all strings to get us involved in war with Germany,” as he confided to his diary on March 20, 1938. (His notes were quoted later by Sir K. Fielding in The Life of Neville Chamberlain.) Chamberlain added, with unconscious irony, “Our Secret Service doesn’t spend all its time looking out of the window.” Its preoccupation with Russia made Ingersoll’s secret mission unpopular. Furthermore, Chamberlain’s naval friends were not impressed with proposals for carrying coding machines on warships, and their disinterest ensured that the Royal Navy went into World War II without equipment that was by then standard with the U.S. Navy. Worst of all, press publicity made it seem that Ingersoll’s consultations were a breach of the ban against Anglo-American co-operation. Incredibly, Ingersoll returned to Washington with nothing accomplished in the one field where preparation would have saved Britain from near-catastrophe. He did accomplish much by informal means; and became commander in chief of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet at a critical time, thanks to the fundamental good sense of regular naval officers on both sides who risked offending their political masters.

  In September 1938, Hitler was fed another bloodless victory at Munich. The screaming Stukas were not even needed to strike terror in Chamberlain. Hitler caustically sketched a symbol for the sellout: Chamberlain’s rolled umbrella broken across the German sword. Munich was to become the historic crossroad where the words “Chamberlain” and “appeasement” merged. And the independence of Czechoslovakia vanished.

  The terms of the agreement between Adolf Hitler and Neville Chamberlain were studied by a retiring but exceedingly honest man, Alfred Duff Cooper. He was First Lord of the Admiralty, loyal to his prime minister, incapable of subterfuge, and the kind of Englishman upon whose sense of fair play the Führer had counted in his policy of deceit. Duff Cooper read the terms of the Munich agreement. “I said to myself,” he wrote later, “if these are accepted, it will be the end of all decency in the conduct of public affairs in the world.”

  Then he resigned.

  Duff Cooper’s action represented an attitude that was alien to Hitler’s experience. Men did not resign in protest in the Nazi world. They risked losing everything. They stood to gain nothing. Sensible German insiders kept quiet and hung on to their jobs. In England this was not always so. There were resignations during this period; none perhaps as significant as that of Duff Cooper. He was an intimate of Admiral Hall. Quite soon, the post he vacated as First Lord of the Admiralty was filled by Churchill. Meanwhile, Duff Cooper set about organizing the groups of men and women who were amateurs in intelligence but professionals in business, science, and the arts. With Blinker Hall’s help, he paved the way for secret intelligence operations once war broke out.

  “I have given up an office that I loved, work in which I was deeply interested and a staff of which any man might be proud,” Duff Cooper said in 1938. “I have given up the privilege of serving as lieutenant to a leader whom I still regard with the deepest admiration and affection. I have ruined, perhaps, my political career. But that is a little matter. I have retained something which is to me of great value—I can still walk about the world with my head erect.”

  Much was lost at Munich. The Nazis could now harness some of Europe’s largest arsenals, and the Czech chemical industry was an immense prize. Stephenson recited the list of economic victories, speaking at a weekly luncheon chaired by Churchill, who sat with head bowed. Later, Stephenson was drawn aside.

  “We not only betrayed our Czech friends,” Churchill growled, “we gave that guttersnipe new slingshots.”

  Stephenson nodded. “Hitler now has the means to perfect the blitzkrieg.”

  “Czech brains—?”

  “Their own Nazis will equip Germany with the new coding machine from mass-assembly lines.”

  “Can we get one?” Churchill demanded.

  “Skoda is said to be making them.”

  “The sinews of war have become whispers in the ether.” Churchill took Stephenson by the arm. “If you recover the whispers, I’ll find the interpreters of what they say.”

  A professor of mathematics brought together the men and women who would interpret Enigma if it came their way. The professor was at this private luncheon, attended by civilians who became the core of Stephenson’s secret intelligence. Occasionally the luncheons attracted sympathizers from the United States. One was President Roosevelt’s “Elder Statesman,” B
ernard Baruch. The American millionaire was a powerful ally because of his skepticism about Nazi self-justifications. Baruch recalled Stephenson at these gatherings: “He was very serious, frightening even. He could think seven stages ahead of you. It was terrifying to watch. If he was absorbing information, not a muscle in his face moved, nor did his eyes shift around as you would expect from someone reflecting. He looked straight ahead, a sort of chess champion seeing three possibilities for a mate in five and debating which to choose. When he spoke, he cut clean through the matter. Never wasted a word.”

  What Stephenson said after the Czech disaster was that war was coming, the United States would be in it, and “you might as well work with us now.”

  At Baruch’s suggestion, Roosevelt chose Canada for the setting of a little-known speech. At Queens University, in Kingston, Ontario, he said: “We in the Americas are no longer a faraway continent to which the eddies of controversies beyond the seas could bring no interest or no harm. . . . The vast amount of our resources, the vigor of our commerce and the strength of our men have made us vital factors in world peace whether we choose it or not.” To the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, in early 1939, he added in privacy: “Our frontier is on the Rhine.”

  Stephenson received word from Ottawa of this implied commitment. “FDR sees the Atlantic Ocean as no barrier, but, rather, a highway,” he advised Churchill.

  This was the time to mobilize powerful influence in Churchill’s support from across that ocean. Churchill was never more isolated in his own country than now, never more unpopular, never more divorced from orthodox sources of political power. Ironically, the strong right arm he needed was being provided by none other than the President of the United States.

  In April 1939, Roosevelt appealed to Hitler and Mussolini to give a ten-year guarantee of nonaggression to thirty-one nations. Hitler replied in a sarcastic speech to the Reichstag: “Mr. Roosevelt! I fully understand that the vastness of your country and the immense wealth of your nation allow you to feel responsible for the history of the whole world. I, sir, am placed in a much more modest and smaller sphere. I have re-established the historic unity of German living space and, Mr. Roosevelt, I have endeavored to attain all this without spilling blood.” It was a speech described by Hitler’s biographer Joachim Fest as “a moral declaration of war.”