A Man Called Intrepid

by William Stevenson

  To German agents, this seemed to explain the presence of Stephenson. The destruction of Oxeloesund’s facilities would strike a blow at the weak point in the Nazi arms industry. It would jar neutrals like Sweden. It would make all the Fritz Thyssens think twice about their loyalty, already wavering. Thyssen himself was in Switzerland and thinking of changing sides.

  Then the secondary cover story for STRIKE OX spread along the intelligence grapevines. As a decoy, it proved so successful that to this day it persists in espionage tales, embellished with stories of how a British secret agent assigned to guard Stephenson accidentally fired his revolver in the hotel room, and how some explosives were stored under the British Legation.

  This was pure deception. The melodrama reached its intended climax. Sweden’s King Gustav V was frightened into urging King George VI of England to “halt this madness.” In London, Lord Halifax, then Foreign Secretary, was informed. Halifax, hoping that peace could be negotiated if Britain did nothing to further annoy Hitler, thundered that STRIKE OX was “an unprecedented violation of international law.”

  King George kept quiet. This misleadingly modest man, who had stepped so hesitantly into the shoes of his brother, erstwhile King Edward VIII, was an active participant in Britain’s clandestine warfare. He was in confidential correspondence with that other Scandinavian monarch, made of sterner stuff, King Christian X, of Denmark. Christian was the royal patron of Niels Bohr, who refused to move to exile in England, although he had acquired much of his knowledge of nuclear physics there.

  The sabotage mission being conspicuously canceled, Stephenson was left in peace. He had legitimate reasons to visit his Swedish associates and friends of Greta Garbo. As a member of the Stephenson-Churchill group, she provided introductions and carried messages. When Stephenson called on her royal admirers, he was quietly arranging escape routes—especially for Professor Bohr, unaware of the threat hanging over Copenhagen, three months away from Nazi occupation.

  German and pro-Nazi Swedish security agents were satisfied that Stephenson’s operations were wrecked. They continued to watch Alexander Rickman, the British sabotage expert who came to Stockholm with Stephenson, and whose deliberate indiscretions convinced the enemy that Stephenson was attending to business before returning home. Other false trails were laid by Axel Axelson Johnson, who not only controlled essential resources and transport facilities, but also owned a daily newspaper, whose reporters spread extra tidbits among their police contacts.

  Into this cloud of misinformation, Stephenson quietly vanished.

  9

  STRIKE OX misdirected German attention, allowing Stephenson to reinforce a network of friendly Swedes. They had a cryptologic bureau that systematically broke the codes of their neighbors. Some of their work on German communications was important to Bletchley, frantically seeking pieces to the Enigma puzzle.

  The Swedes were also making tactical use of radio intelligence, an unconscious rehearsal of what would shortly happen in Britain. A big, easygoing professor of mathematics, Dr. Arne Beurling, had decoded Russian plans to invade Finland. The Russian invasion was launched on the last day of November in 1939, and Moscow fully expected to force terms on Finland before the end of the year. Instead, the giant was outwitted and outmaneuvered by Field Marshal Baron Carl Mannerheim. A warning to Helsinki enabled his tiny 175,000-man army to harass and delay a million Red Army troops, who then lost the vital element of surprise. Mannerheim was receiving, almost hour by hour, from Sweden an accurate account of the Russians’ every move. The math teacher in Stockholm had simply decoded messages between the Russian fighting units and their headquarters, then forwarded them to Mannerheim.

  Stephenson, equipped with false papers, crossed the narrow Gulf of Bothnia to join Mannerheim, who was holding a line some fifty miles from Leningrad in what was then Finnish territory, the Karelian Isthmus. By the first week of 1940, Finland’s “Skiing Ghosts” were inflicting heavy casualties, arriving at the right place at the right time by courtesy of Sweden’s code breakers.

  In the end, the sheer weight of Russia forced Finland to stop fighting. Stephenson crossed back into Sweden at a point where the Arctic Circle bisects the border. He had learned some valuable lessons. Mannerheim’s brilliant generalship was possible because of his tactical use of intelligence. Finland might have halted the Russians if promises of military aid from Washington had been fulfilled. Soon Britain would face a similar assault from Germany—possibly backed by Russia. When that crisis came, American aid must be committed, not stuck in Congress, as it had been in Finland’s tragic case.

  Stephenson headed now toward the source of German experiments in atomic science—the Norwegian heavy-water plant. On the way, he stopped at the Gallivare iron mines in Sweden. Mindful of Sweden’s neutrality, he was discreet in discussing how the mines could be sabotaged. “I can speak only of industrial ‘accidents,’ ” he told Swedish contacts. “If you have access to insurance-company files, you will see detailed studies of the weak point in any manufacturing process or mining procedure. Insurance companies stand to lose fortunes from an accident, and so they employ experts to figure out every possible way that things can go wrong. Their reports are guidebooks for saboteurs.”

  Next, on the train to the Norwegian port of Narvik, he rendezvoused with Professor Leif Tronstad, the chemical engineer who was familiar with the layout of the Norsk Hydro Electric plant. Norsk Hydro was the world’s only commercial producer of heavy water. Its total output was sought by I. G. Farben, the German industrial colossus whose products ranged from poison gases to time bombs. I. G. Farben was a large investor in the Norwegian atomic plant. To Tronstad, whose future collaboration was vital to Stephenson’s plans, the Canadian confided “the convincing and frightening news” uncovered two months previously by the British Uranium Committee that atomic energy might be used in an explosive. He added cautiously that Norway, a sovereign and neutral nation, would hardly want warlike actions thrust upon her, with the two unpredictable giants, Russia and Germany, wrestling closer.

  “The Russians may have their eye on Hydro,” said Tronstad. “The Germans certainly have. But how can we be sure that your own industrial interests won’t make use of these—” He gestured with the blueprints he carried in a satchel.

  “You’ll have to take my word for it,” said Stephenson, looking him in the eye.

  Tronstad was in his mid-thirties, some ten years younger. He studied the Canadian thoughtfully and saw, he said later, “a tough little man with rather a large head, very fine features, and eyes that changed color with the light. When he shook hands, he had a grip like iron. Otherwise, you wouldn’t suspect physical strength. He struck me as an intellectual who’d got into this by accident.”

  Tronstad handed over a copy of the Norsk Hydro plant layout. It produced deuterium oxide, heavy water that weighed eleven percent more than normal water, and was the favored “moderator” to control an atomic reaction.

  “If the Germans capture the plant, we may have to destroy it,” said Tronstad.

  “In the meantime—”

  “Ah,” sighed the Norwegian.

  “In the meantime, your own Norwegian cod-liver oil loosens the bowels. A cup of it, dropped into an electrolytic tube, won’t be noticed until the process is restarted in Germany. The presence of the oil will seem like an accident, but of course it will make the stuff useless as a moderator.”

  Before the train reached Narvik, the chemical engineer dropped off. When they met again, it would be in Scotland, on the eve of a suicidal expedition against German atomic scientists.

  Stephenson returned to Britain aboard a submarine that collected him near Narvik shortly before Germany struck at Norway. Hitler’s invasion had been blamed on the British Navy’s aggressive behavior in Norwegian waters on orders from Churchill, still at the Admiralty. It is true that Norway’s coastal waters were used by German supply ships evading the British blockade. But Churchill had the waters mined because he possessed the incommun
icable knowledge that Norwegian heavy water was vital to Germany’s search for an atomic bomb. His attempt to disrupt shipments was the best that could be done in circumstances that included a nervous British government still terrified of provoking the enemy.

  On the night of April 8, the German High Command had learned of Churchill’s mine-laying expedition and sent out decoys to divert the British Home Fleet and the 1st and 2nd British Cruiser Squadrons. The British suffered heavy naval losses in battles away from the main thrust of a German invasion fleet. Norway was conquered almost before the British recovered their wits. That disaster eventually shook Chamberlain loose from Parliament and made way for a new aggressive-minded regime. It marked the beginning of the end of the Phony War.

  While German scientists, hard on the heels of German invasion troops, moved into the Norsk heavy-water plant, their colleagues surrounded the nuclear-fission laboratories in Copenhagen and restricted the movements of Niels Bohr. Bohr, only days earlier, had been put in touch with the new British intelligence network in Sweden.

  Stephenson reported in London on what had been accomplished and warned that Britain would be foolish to rely on Germany exhausting herself in a struggle with Russia. The Russians had learned from their misadventures in Finland that they were far from ready for a major war. The theme found its way into a column by George Orwell, writing in the New English Weekly: “The plan laid down in Mein Kampf was to smash Russia first, with the implied intention of smashing England afterwards. Now, as it has turned out, England has to be dealt with first, because Russia was the more easily bribed [by the Russo-German pact]. . . . Russia’s turn will come when England is out of the picture.”

  10

  “Better lose a battle than lose a source of secret intelligence” was Stephenson’s advice to Churchill in the twilight months between Germany’s invasion of Poland and the moment when British appeasement ended. That moment was not far away. A political crisis in London was brewing with the loss of Denmark and Norway.

  The Nazi preparations to move into those two countries had been detected at Bletchley Park. The code breakers in the Victorian mansion could sense, from the change in the volume and source of ciphered traffic, the slow shift of attention. “We seemed to be pygmies around a monster,” a section chief reported later. “We felt the tremor of a nerve, the flexing of a muscle, and then the great head moving toward a new prey.”

  Such hints were hardly enough for British battle commanders to act upon. Churchill understood Bletchley’s intuitions. But he was not yet prime minister. The stolen Heydrich-Enigma was wrapped in secrecy and was not yet producing specific information.

  Churchill’s state of mind is revealed in memos that were not declassified until more than thirty years later. He feared Hitler’s cat’s-paws who masqueraded as neutral “peace envoys.” One was the Swedish businessman Birger Dahlerus, who had been flown back and forth between Berlin and London shortly before the invasion of Poland as an unofficial mediator for Hermann Göring, the Nazi Air Force chief. Dahlerus delayed Britain’s declaration of war by two days, by relaying the German Air Minister’s warning that Poland would betray the British at the last moment. Göring had reinforced this allegation by producing copies of Polish diplomatic cables that Germany had intercepted and decoded. By placing an emphasis here, deleting a passage there, the Nazi leader made it appear that Poland was sabotaging every German move toward negotiation. This German deception was conveyed by the Swede to the British Foreign Office, which incredibly, paid it serious attention. Chamberlain’s appeasement-minded clique welcomed any excuse for postponing a bloodbath. But long after Poland fell, Churchill and his followers had to face the fact that the peace envoys still flew in and out of London in early 1940, had access to Chamberlain and his advisers, and might pick up information that would tell the Germans that their own coding systems were compromised. In one of his confidential memos, Churchill condemned self-designated peacemakers for leaking information that was vital to the defense of an embattled and poorly armed nation. “The King of Sweden’s intrusion as a peacemaker,” he wrote in one such comment, “when he is so absolutely in the German’s grip . . . is singularly distasteful.”

  Other Swedes made a priceless contribution to Bletchley. They recovered German code books that gave a further clue to the manner in which Enigma was being used. As the mystery unfolded, so the population at the Park grew. Nissen huts of corrugated steel dotted the lawns like segments of a gigantic worm. Inside lived and worked the bright young things swept out of classrooms, banks, museums, and universities. Most were aged between seventeen and thirty-five. There was a sprinkling of oldsters who had analyzed the mechanism of Enigma. The nearby monitors gave them increasingly accurate “fixes” on German radio transmitters. How and when the enemy set the drums on his own Enigma coding machines was unknown. The aim was to find a routine way of duplicating in Bletchley the enemy’s continual readjustment of these drums. The size of the challenge was mind-boggling, because there were several different German networks of Enigmas. Each network operated its own schedule.

  By April 1940, progress had been made toward systematic examination of the coded German traffic. Enigma must be duplicated with copies from Stephenson’s electronics labs. Teams of code breakers could then work separately on the duplicates. The work required mathematical minds. One lady professor had an aptitude for juggling the current mystery in her mind and arriving at sudden solutions. She was moved to the hut nearest the mansion so that if she woke in the middle of the night—which she did with increasing frequency—she could rush over to the Watch on duty and impart her latest inspiration. Speed was essential. On her first flash of revelation, she flung herself into the blackness of the rural countryside and tripped over a sunken wall, built to keep out cattle but designed to preserve the view. The lady went headfirst into the adjacent duck pond, struggled out, and made a dramatic entry at the mansion, bursting upon the Midnight Watch with weeds and water, and creating the effect of a fevered genius in disarray. She was still muttering the magic incantation that aroused her from slumber—the call sign of a particular German sending station. Once identified, it enabled others to work on the code, because they could assume that certain technical jargon would occur frequently in the text. A trail was marked in luminous paint in case new brain waves hit the professor, henceforth known as “the Lady of the Lake.”

  Churchill ordered a full-scale mobilization of all human resources. The Enigma system was producing out of the enemy camp a stream of mostly unreadable messages. Yet enough was often deduced by Bletchley to make a guess at German intentions. It was apparent that a massive redirection of blitzkrieg forces was underway, aimed at England by way of France and the Low Countries. Stewart Menzies, a former Life Guards officer and veteran of the permanent Secret Intelligence Service, had replaced Admiral Sinclair as “C.” He decided that Bletchley’s products, spotty though they might be, had better become the subject of a special policy agreement. If there was any risk of jeopardizing Bletchley by taking action on the basis of advance knowledge of enemy intentions, the secret must be kept. The breaking of codes through analyzing the text and searching for terms that might be expected to recur was only part of the code breakers’ art. However, it was a function that lent itself to mechanical computation. Until some form of computer could be devised, Bletchley depended on human brains.

  Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was never told what Bletchley had within its grasp. Nor was the sinister significance of the heavy water in Norway ever explained. It was not a question of distrusting him. Chamberlain was an honorable man. But he had demonstrated, once more, his inability to judge events when he declared, five days before the Germans scored their lightning victories in Norway and Denmark, that “Hitler has missed the bus.” He remained ignorant until the day he died of the atomic sword of Damocles suspended above his head—in the very same region where Hitler not only caught the bus, but was now driving it.

  Meanwhile, Churchill debated with St
ephenson the wisdom of consulting the Americans. He had ordered that no stone be left unturned to get Bletchley the staff and equipment it needed. There was a story, later, that during a visit to the Park, he gazed with some astonishment at the motley crowd of civilians and said finally: “I said leave no stone unturned to get the people you require. I did not think you would take me so literally.”

  He had not been able to use Bletchley to forestall German adventures in Scandinavia. Even now, he could not do much about the coming Nazi onslaught through Western Europe. If Bletchley’s possibilities were to be fully exploited, American help must be obtained, in both brains and technology. That meant a direct approach to President Roosevelt, whom Churchill trusted. Thus the Prime Minister of Great Britain, so long as he was appeasement-minded Neville Chamberlain, was not taken into the confidence of the various intelligence groups, consisting now mostly of gifted amateurs, who were known in general as “the Baker Street Irregulars,” after the amateurs who aided Sherlock Holmes. Like the methods of the great detective, their approach was unorthodox. They were reticent with their own Prime Minister, but agreed to confide in the President of the United States.

  “We put the fate of Britain in Roosevelt’s hands when we made that decision,” said Stephenson later.

  President Roosevelt paved the way for this momentous decision. He had invited the King and Queen of England to Washington the previous summer, before war broke out. He had asked the King and Queen, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her diary, “believing that we might all soon be engaged in a life and death struggle, in which Britain would be our first line of defense. . . .”

  George VI recorded his talks with the President in notes that, read today, seem even more significant than when they were shown to Stephenson. The notes were carried in a dispatch box that never left the King’s side throughout the war. They were later deposited in the Royal Archives. He summarized their talks on June 12, 1939, a good two months before war broke out in Europe: “The President . . . was very frank. . . . He gave me all the information in these notes either in answer to my questions, or he volunteered it. . . .”