A Man Called Intrepid

by William Stevenson

  “It was all Roosevelt needed to settle in his own mind the morality of supporting those who resisted fascism,” said Stephenson later. “He had made his gesture and Hitler had ranted and raved in derision. After this, the President was one of us.”

  * The Treaty of Rapallo was signed between Germany and Russia behind the backs of twenty-eight other nations attending the Genoa Conference, which failed miserably in an attempt to bring about the reconstruction of Europe in 1922. Had Genoa succeeded, many political commentators considered that there might perhaps have been no Ruhr, no Hitler, no World War II.

  * Stephenson’s intelligence summary concluded that the forged papers led to shooting or imprisonment for three out of five Soviet marshals, fourteen of sixteen military commanders in chief, all Russian Navy admirals of Ranks I and II, sixty of sixty-seven commanding generals, 136 of 199 divisional commanders, and 221 of 397 brigade commanders. All eleven deputy defense commissars and seventy-five out of eighty members of the Supreme War Soviet were liquidated.

  6

  President Roosevelt’s support for Churchill’s rebels must have begun almost unthinkingly. Hitler was set upon a monstrous course that seemed sure to bring disaster. Yet many in the United States, struggling with the Depression and disenchanted with the quarrels of Europe, saw only the economic success of Nazi Germany and not its evil roots.

  “Germany must have markets for her goods or die,” wrote an American military attaché in Berlin. “And Germany will not die.” He found it understandable that this dynamic new Germany should demand more space. Hitler’s interpretation of living space, Lebensraum, was less innocent than might appear to foreign admirers. His real intentions emerged in a four-hour harangue to his military chiefs and the ministers of war and foreign affairs. This was reported, apparently verbatim, by an official German archivist, Colonel Friedrich Hossbach.

  Hitler talked about the “solid racial nucleus” of German Aryans, who must breed selectively and prosper on resources now held by “inferior tribes.” The German Empire was “a spatially coherent” concept of a world governed by Nazi supermen. There would be a series of lightning military campaigns. Each expansion of German dominions would create a new need for still more expansion. The British Empire was 450 million people “governed by 45 million who will have to be removed.” The final obstacle would be the United States, led by “the Jew-loving Roosevelt.”

  This program was condensed to 50,000 words in the summary from Hossbach, who was also Hitler’s military adjutant. It reached Stephenson through Germans horrified by the network of intelligence agencies directed by Heydrich, allegedly created for the security of the state but in practice employed against those who might oppose Hitler.

  The report reached Churchill and Roosevelt about a month after Hitler’s briefing, which took place on November 5, 1937. The sources had to be protected, and neither Churchill nor the President could risk betraying their knowledge. Instead, Roosevelt quietly arranged for the transfer from Prague to Berlin of Sam Edison Woods, a forty-five-year-old Texas engineer-turned-diplomat. Woods had the talents of Stephenson: wide knowledge of industrial techniques and finance, an ability to listen, a sympathetic understanding of people in many walks of life, and devotion to the old virtues. Woods had been commercial attaché for three years in Czechoslovakia before moving to Berlin to serve in the same capacity. He reported directly to the President on such undiplomatic and noncommercial matters as German progress in atomic science and submarine warfare.

  Woods confirmed that Heydrich was a major customer for the new Enigma coding machines, mass-produced on the Czech border near Poland. Several factories by 1938 were assembling parts of what was dubbed the “Heydrich-Enigma.” The British, through their Polish Secret Service contacts, nurtured by a Scot named Gubbins, located a Polish engineer working at the Czech border site who was willing to try to reconstruct a cipher machine from memory. He was brought to Paris, where some of the world’s best cryptographers worked for French intelligence. Two of Stephenson’s men examined the mock-up of the Heydrich-Enigma. They returned with the startling news that it resembled a machine registered in Washington under U.S. Patent 1,657,411. However, it was based on the original Enigma built fourteen years before. The Pole had recalled parts common to all models. He knew none of the specifics that might help the cipher experts. There was only one solution: steal a production model.

  A British intelligence mission was sent to Warsaw early in 1939. Mystery still surrounds it. The operation, like many others, was conducted in defiance of official British appeasement policy. The Warsaw mission was led by an unusual man-at-arms, the Scot named Gubbins, otherwise known as Colonel Colin Gubbins, of the Royal Artillery, who had been working for some time in a shabby office near Stephenson’s St. James’s Street headquarters. Gubbins dressed immaculately, wore a red carnation in his buttonhole, and carried kidskin gloves. One acquaintance remembered him as “an amiable, rather vague sort of chap with no particular talents and some sort of desk job in the War Office.” His middle name was McVeagh, and deep in his ancestry had been planted the instincts of a buccaneer. Years of practice had taught him to conceal this, along with fluency in Slavic languages and a most curious record of travel that one did not associate with officers of the regular army. He was producing handbooks for an underground British guerrilla army. Some of the books were printed on rice paper, to be chewed and swallowed if the owner was caught by the German occupation troops that Gubbins expected to see marching through London any day if Churchill’s warnings continued to be ignored by those in power. He had written three of the books himself. They were The Art of Guerrilla Warfare, Partisan Leader’s Guide, and The Housewife’s ABC of Home-Made Explosives. They scooped Mao Tse-tung and North Vietnam’s unconventional-warfare guides by several years.

  Gubbins had written, in a War Office memo in 1938, “The coming war with Germany will have to be fought by irregular or guerrilla forces at all possible points.” It was a revolutionary statement, against the grain for many professional soldiers. They played their war games according to the rules. There was nothing in those rules about using women and children to manufacture weapons out of everyday articles, or to form partisan units to fight behind the lines, as proposed by Gubbins, who had witnessed in revolutionary Russia and Asia the power of the peasants when united behind an idea and the promise of freedom. His instructions for blowing up enemy tanks by filling bottles with gasoline and rags became known later, when the Russians adopted them, as “Molotov cocktails.” By designing these deadly toys, he was blowing up the hallowed and traditional attitude that war was the business of professionals. Another rebel against this orthodoxy, Basil Liddell Hart, had the bitter experience of seeing his ideas rejected by British Army colleagues and adopted instead as the foundation of German blitzkriegs. Liddell Hart joined one of Stephenson’s intelligence groups, while newspaper cartoonists continued to depict the typical British officer as a stick-in-the-mud Colonel Blimp.

  Gubbins, however unorthodox, was still a member of the British Intelligence Directorate. He came under Prime Minister Chamberlain’s orders. Chamberlain seemed to think that by yielding to Hitler’s demands, he could satisfy them. Gubbins was convinced that yielding to such demands did not terminate hostility, but excited it. The conflict was resolved by the fact that directors of British intelligence are confirmed in their appointment by the Crown. Their jobs are “within the gift of the Monarch” by long tradition. This untidy British arrangement baffles Americans accustomed to constitutional legalities. A story is still told in Washington to clarify British eccentricities for U.S. intelligence chiefs. King George VI once asked “the Chief of the Secret Service” for classified information. The Chief replied: “I must answer that my lips are sealed.” The King said: “Suppose I ordered ‘Off with your head’?” The Chief replied: “In that case, Sir, I would lose my head with the lips still sealed.” This familylike atmosphere, developed over centuries, gives British monarchs head-of-the-family privileges
that are nonetheless open to challenge. That atmosphere depended upon mutual trust between senior members of the family in 1938. It may have seemed medieval then, but it has proved relevant to today’s ideological warfare with its confusions of loyalty.

  Those backing Gubbins were formidable, if eccentric. They had a trained eye, exotic experience, a common sense so uncommon as to seem lunatic. Through their friends at Scotland Yard, some knew the practitioners of crime—illusionists who propagated themselves into all forms of the human comedy with the aid of masks, false faces, hallucinations, and the tricks of magicians—useful to know in times of trouble. They were also successful at transforming themselves into Colonel Blimps—bumbling, slightly stupid, fighting the next war with the lessons of the last. They saw Poland as the potential victim of Hitler’s greed and that of Stalin, too.

  When Gubbins returned there in early 1939, he discussed resistance with his old comrades in the Polish Secret Service. It was known that Heydrich had paved the road for Hitler’s entry into Austria and Czechoslovakia, and Heydrich was reported to be preparing even more elaborate deceptions to justify a German invasion of Poland.

  This was the time of general betrayal. Hitler and Stalin were feeling their way toward a pact, though sworn fundamentally to destroy each other. There had been hints of this pact in the diplomatic traffic that the British were already intercepting through the cryptographers of the Government Code and Cipher School, known irreverently as the Golf, Cheese and Chess Society, quartered at that time near Victoria Station in London. Gubbins warned the Polish Secret Service that their country was to be crushed between these two dictatorships. Then Hitler would bring his frontiers right up to those of the Soviet Union, the mortal enemy he planned to liquidate.

  Gubbins’s men flew back to London from Warsaw on August 22 with a companion and a prize that would remain secret for another thirty-five years. The very next day, the Nazi-Soviet Pact burst upon an astonished world. It sealed Poland’s fate. But Gubbins was already on his way to Warsaw again. One of his colleagues, Eric Bailey, a legendary secret agent himself, commented to Stephenson later: “It seemed madness.” Only Stephenson and one or two others knew that, crazy or not, Gubbins had to do it. The coming world war might be won or lost in consequence.

  “The Second World War began with wirelessed intelligence,” said Stephenson later. “Heydrich was the evil genius. It was a significant fact that the Nazi blitz was launched by coded orders, based on deceit we could not expose, directed by Heydrich. His orders were carried on the new Enigmas. Had we been able to recover those orders, our political leaders might have understood the depth of Nazi wickedness.

  “It was made to appear that Polish troops attacked a German radio station early that morning of September 1, 1939. German forces thereupon fired on Polish-occupied points in the Free City of Danzig in ‘self-defense.’. . .

  “The so-called Polish aggressors were inmates from German concentration camps, taken by Heydrich and dressed in Polish uniforms, then given fatal injections. A few survived to tell the story. They knew they were doomed when they were told to get into foreign uniforms—it’s hard to dress a corpse. They were trucked to the frontier and injected with lethal Skophedal. Then they were spread out and riddled with bullets.

  “The code name given these men was CANNED GOODS. That was Heydrich’s touch. Until he died, he boasted that he started the Second World War.”

  Heydrich’s ruse worked. The New York Times reported that regular Polish Army troops took part in an attack on German positions and that this was the signal for a general offensive by Polish forces. The lie confused the British—bound by treaty to help Poland if she was attacked first—long enough to make intervention too late. The role of Heydrich and his weapons of deceit, terror, and lying propaganda was to give German armed forces time to consolidate the positions they gained in sudden movements of surprise.

  Churchill dined at the Savoy Grill in London that night. “He looked tired and old,” said Stephenson. “All his warnings were proving sound. But the hour seemed late for this solitary man, shunned by much of society, weighed down by grief.”

  The Duke of Westminster had been celebrating with Nazi-minded friends. The two parties collided. The Duke was rich, anti-Semitic, and an admirer of the powerful—and of Hitler. The Duke came yapping at the old man he regarded as the pariah of a twilight society, calling Churchill a Jew-lover who had conspired against Germany and now saw the consequences.

  Churchill stood with head sunk until the drunken tirade ended. The Duke swept off. Churchill leaned on the arm of his daughter Mary. “This country is like a family,” he muttered, quoting George Orwell, “with the wrong members in control.”

  Even as he spoke, other members of that confused family were working on the prize from Poland—a captured Heydrich-Enigma—in a clay field at the very heart of England.

  7

  Britain was in no condition to stop Hitler. Paradoxically, having missed a better time and place to stop Nazism, Chamberlain chose this time to warn the beast which had fattened during the wasted years on cheap victories. Unless German troops withdrew from Poland, he told Hitler, “we shall be in a state of war.” Britain was honoring pledges made to Poland only days before, but the country was far from ready. Churchill noted: “Here was a decision at last, taken at the worst possible moment and on the least satisfactory ground, which must surely lead to the slaughter of tens of millions of people.” Even the news of the German invasion of Poland had been broken first to the British by the Americans, wrote U.S. Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy in a letter to his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull.

  The gifted amateurs of intelligence had the possibility—and it was still no more than that—of reading high-grade German ciphers. A few dedicated code breakers in England, analyzing messages in the basic German diplomatic code, had learned to guess what Hitler planned to do before he did it. They were not yet receiving any serious attention from the Chamberlain clique.

  The amateurs also helped the few obscure and badly paid civil servants of the Government Code and Cipher School. Two days after the Duke of Westminster bullied a downcast and defeated Churchill, that same Churchill was maneuvered back into the Admiralty as First Lord after a quarter-century’s absence. A signal flashed through the Home Fleet: “Winston’s back!” Churchill, while still serving irresolute leaders, now had the power to move great fleets over the oceans. He was also war lord in a field where Britain was mentally prepared—secret operations. From his Admiralty post he commanded weapons of intelligence. As companion, he had Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, known as “C,” chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, and appointed by the King. Churchill and C were secure in the knowledge that they must act to help the King defend his peoples—against government policy, if necessary, although conflict was best avoided by forgetting to mention all that went on. They omitted mention of the strangely named Government Code and Cipher School.

  The GCCS listened to messages between German units whose mobility made them dependent on radio rather than landlines. These messages, it was apparent, were sent in ever-changing gobbledygook over stations transmitting at low strength. So the traffic had to be picked up by extremely sensitive “ears,” transposed from cipher to plain German, then translated and analyzed.

  A small army of “brains” had to be formed; an army too large to keep in London, where it would be vulnerable to bombs and public scrutiny. The nucleus had long existed—a few bright men who once worked in Room 40 breaking the Zimmermann Telegram. They had been preserved through the twenty-year armistice by Admiral Blinker Hall, aided and abetted by C, who went about his business in a bowler hat too small for his head, and who was reported to turn his chair and face the wall when a stranger approached his meager office. C had a hard time adjusting to the high spirits and schoolboy whimsies of the newcomers to the GCCS. In August 1939, they were bundled off, kit and caboodle, to a place as ugly as its name: Bletchley.

  There was no apparent reason for this sudd
en move, apart from C’s preference for keeping scholars, solvers of crossword puzzles, mathematicians, linguists, and classical dons at arm’s length. Bletchley was known for its brick kilns and possibly the grubbiest railway yards in the islands. It lay in a shallow basin in Buckinghamshire. No other place in England, it was said, was farther from the sea—all of sixty miles from the nearest possible invasion beach. A sample of the Heydrich-Enigma had been standing there for several days when the Golf, Cheese and Chess Society, in gray flannels and tweed skirts, descended upon the bemused inhabitants of the tiny market town, which was henceforth a nerve center of the secret wars.

  Where had the Nazi coding machine come from? And why Bletchley?

  When Stephenson had returned from Germany in 1933 with independent confirmation of the new portable Enigma, the task of trying to build a replica was assigned to a taciturn little Scot who had been a professor of German before working in Room 40. He was Alastair Denniston and he typified veterans of World War I Naval Intelligence, kept together through the hard years when spies of fiction lived like kings but the authentic British agent lived on little save a sense of serving his King. The few full-time agents based on foreign stations were drawn from regular Service officers, shipping clerks, explorers, bank managers. Few had private incomes or had gone to the “right” schools, despite the legends. They were men like C. H. (“Dick”) Ellis, an Australian who started out as a musician and advanced his schooling through scholarships before winding up as an Army officer, out of uniform, in Russia. They were men like Eric Bailey, who had marched into Tibet with the first Western mission there; had explored alone the borderlands of Central Asia and India; had, with a price on his head, outwitted the Soviet Security Police; and had given his name to a celebrated Himalayan blue poppy.