A Man Called Intrepid

by William Stevenson

  A typical incident on this Thursday was the encounter between twelve Spitfires and 105 enemy bombers approaching the Northumberland coast. The bombers split into two groups. One was intercepted by Hurricanes rushed into the air by pilots supposedly snatching a rest on a northern airfield. The other German group lost eight aircraft while bombing a northern base. In the south, RAF squadrons frantically tried to split up German attacks on vital airfields; and aircraft were fighting, retiring, fighting again—with all the RAF’s twenty-two squadrons fully engaged. The Germans flew nearly 1,800 sorties; the RAF almost 1,000. The British rate of “pilot wastage” rose astronomically. One Spitfire staggered back to base, the dying pilot grimly keeping control until certain the aircraft was safely down. The need to save machines was as great as the demand for more pilots. Knowing the growing crisis in the RAF’s loss of pilots, some Germans machine-gunned those who bailed out as they helplessly dangled from their parachutes.

  On this day, Churchill went to the Operations Room of 11 Group, Fighter Command, and stared in unaccustomed silence at the gigantic map table. Every squadron was engaged. No fighters remained in reserve. Still the enemy’s aircraft could be seen moving, wave after wave, across the Channel. Even the taciturn Chief of General Staff, Hastings Ismay, describing the scene, said: “I was sick with fear. Churchill said: ‘Don’t speak to me. . . . I have never been so moved.’ There were tears in his eyes.”

  Later, Churchill rose heavily in the House of Commons. Harold Nicolson reported: “He did not try to arouse enthusiasm, only give guidance.” It was then that he spoke the words that fixed for all time the role of the pilots who held back the invaders: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

  The words were directed as much to Roosevelt as they were to Churchill’s own people. The Prime Minister regarded the RAF’s Fighter Command as a typically British institution: the pilots were mainly reservists, young men at a university or training for a learned profession. They invented new tactics day by day with fellow volunteers from the United States and the Commonwealth. One pilot in ten was an escapee from Poland. (The Poles were doing in the air what their comrades would have to do, without the glamour, in the secret armies of resistance.)

  Churchill regarded this struggle in the skies as crucial to his campaign to win American help. He described to Parliament, that day when both sides in the aerial conflict had fallen back in temporary exhaustion, America’s own needs in air and naval defense, and announced that “without being asked or offered any inducement” the British proposed to place suitable facilities at America’s disposal. This was the first hint of the destroyer deal. There would have to be some “mixing up” of British and American organizations. This Anglo-American mixing-up process, said Churchill, would not be stopped: “Like the Mississippi, it just keeps rolling along. Let it roll. Let it roll on—full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant, to broader lands and better days.”

  The mixing-up process, already underway, was Stephenson’s job. The day after Churchill’s vision of an Atlantic alliance rolling along, Stephenson cabled him:

  DONOVAN BELIEVES YOU WILL HAVE WITHIN A FEW DAYS VERY FAVOURABLE NEWS. . . . THINKS HE HAS RESTORED CONFIDENCE AS TO BRITAIN’S DETERMINATION AND ABILITY TO RESIST.

  Two days later, he was able to cable:

  MOST IMMEDIATE. FIFTY DESTROYERS AGREED LAST NIGHT . . . FORTY-FOUR ARE IN COMMISSION FOR DELIVERY. . . .

  Shaking out the mothballs from these antique vessels was the symbol of Roosevelt’s commitment, and gave the British a tremendous lift, although few realized that the destroyers marked another step forward in secret matters. Now the British could operate from the United States all their different secret-intelligence agencies and undercover operations, so that even a German occupation of Britain need not impede the prosecution of the shadow wars fought by secret armies. For the first time in the four centuries of British espionage, there was a central agency to bring together the manifold strands so that one man could survey the global scene. Having this central agency on neutral soil was of inestimable value. New York was an ideal center of communications. It was not harassed by the enemy, or subject to bombing, or impeded by wartime shortages and restrictions. Experts could work on specific problems in relative calm, their conclusions dispatched to London by way of mechanical coding machines perfected by Stephenson’s own team of inventors.

  The organization, even prior to its official birth, had grown grotesquely in size and shape. Some respectable title had to be given it before Americans began to ask awkward questions. Here was an invisible man directing four major British intelligence departments—SOE, SIS, Security Executive, and now MI-5—plus a communications-intelligence web whose threads ran in every direction abroad, and a secret police force on American soil. To gloss over this unprecedented situation, an organization, British Security Coordination, was registered with the State Department with the following official explanation:

  Consequent on the large scale and vital interests of the British Government in connection with the purchasing and shipment of munitions and war matériel from the United States, coupled with the presence in this country of a number of official British missions, a variety of security problems have been created [and] call for very close and friendly collaboration between the authorities of the two countries. . . . With a view to coordinating the liaison between the various British missions and the United States authorities in all security matters arising from the present abnormal circumstances, an organization bearing the title Security Coordination has been formed under the control of a Director of Security Coordination, assisted by headquarters staff.

  Stephenson’s name was never mentioned. Even in 1971, more than thirty years later, a former Assistant Secretary of State, Spruille Braden, named BSC’s director in his memoirs, Diplomats and Demagogues, with evident hesitation: “General Donovan asked if I wanted to meet the head of British Intelligence. I assented and Donovan said: ‘All right, Mr. So-and-So will call you.’ I later learned that Mr. So-and-So had a quite different name.”

  There was no need for Braden’s discretion in the 1970s. INTREPID’S identity had been revealed by then. But in 1940 there was every reason for caution. Hitler was sure that the Nazis could conquer America by propaganda. One of Stephenson’s jobs was to counter that propaganda. Paradoxically, if he was caught in that role, or in any violation of American sovereignty, he would contribute to the propaganda against Britain.

  And Nazi propaganda was not merely a war of words. It was a strategy of terror. The blood purges, the pogroms, the Black Mass in worship of force at Nuremberg, the concentration camps, the fifth columns operating openly behind the frontiers of Germany’s next victims were demonstrations of Nazi boasts and threats leading to action. Civilians were driven to hysterical flight by fifth columnists in one European country after another; but there was cause for their panic, and force backed up the propaganda. Stukas dive-bombed the women and children who choked the roads. Nazi propaganda was as good as its word. The Germans really were supermen, and it was folly to resist.

  Hitler intended that message to deflate Americans. Fear, he hoped, would encourage isolationism. Later, he planned there would be a repetition of those events in the Americas.

  Churchill did not think that Anglo-Americans were in any less danger of self-betrayal than Europeans. He was blunt about the risk of a pro-Nazi puppet regime in London. And he gave Stephenson the task of outfoxing the Nazis in America. BSC was to give direction to those who would rather fight than surrender. The next step was to create an American intelligence agency on the larger scale that American resourcefulness warranted.

  “Britain was a nursery bed of ideas,” said Stephenson. “But the seeds had to be transplanted. This was true of intelligence and all our new weapons of destruction.”

  * In Seven Major Decisions, Sumner Welles described reaction to “so flagrant a violation of American sovereignty” when British intelligence rounded up alleged dese
rters from ships in Baltimore.

  19

  “The most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores” was the description given by the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development to the incredible bundle of secrets dispatched on August 14, 1940 by Winston Churchill. The custodian of this cargo was Tizard the Wizard, as he was known to the Royal Air Force. In Washington, he went by the rakish but quite misleading name of “Whizzbang,” an effective disguise, because in reality Sir Henry Tizard was a gentle soul who had been Scientific Advisor to the Chief of Air Staff. In the middle of the Battle of Britain, he was told to take confidential information to Washington rather than have it fall into enemy hands after ULTRA had revealed Hitler’s invasion plans, which depended upon the air battles then in progress.

  “Tizard called me in Washington from the Shoreham,” Stephenson said later. “He was housed in an apartment so stuffed with blueprints, scientific data, models, and working plans packed in wooden crates that you could barely maneuver. When I went over to discuss certain arrangements, he shocked me by saying: ‘An officer of the FBI has just telephoned asking when I can see him to make arrangements to place my luggage in secure hands.’

  “I phoned Hoover at once. He said he knew nothing about it and would ‘drive right over.’ We discovered the call came from some person unknown to and certainly unconnected with the FBI. I sent one of my own security men, John Hart, of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, to keep both Tizard and his cargo under surveillance.

  “Later, Sam Foxforth, who was chief of the FBI office in New York City, told me headquarters had checked the discs of the routinely monitored telephone calls by German Embassy staff and friends. They’d traced the call that had gone to Tizard. It had come from a Nazi agent who spoke with a convincing American accent.”

  The German attempt to hijack the Wizard’s tricks was alarming proof of the enemy’s vigilance. Stephenson had urged Churchill to trade secrets for aid. The British Uranium Committee had the theory to make an atomic bomb: TUBE ALLOYS was the cover name for the project. Radar, jet engines, chemical weapons, and a “magic black box,” which was to be the most effective of the new weapons invented in Britain, were also offered either in blueprint form, in models, or in research documents.

  The “magic black box” was the cavity magnetron. It generated short-wave-length electronic beams and made possible the centimetric radar that was small enough to fit into destroyers and aircraft. The device was eventually manufactured in the United States in such numbers that it turned the tide in the struggle against the U-boat. The exploitation of this electronic valve, which the Wizard had transported in a commonplace black metal box purchased hurriedly from the Army and Navy Stores, near Victoria Station, led to countless benefits. With it came films of new weapons in action, and papers on proximity fuses, rocket defense of ships, multiple pompoms, and other examples of Britain’s most forward thinking.

  “The President scraped the bottom of the American barrel for half a million rifles, eighty thousand machine guns, shells, bombs, TNT, and aircraft in return,” Stephenson recorded later. “He got us Flying Fortresses, having them secretly pushed over the frontier into Canada because this way their delivery was less likely to draw hostile attention. He was getting us hundreds of thousands of tons of metals for British arsenals, all done in what Bob Sherwood called a ‘damn-the-torpedoes’ spirit when men close to the White House were shouting that this represented suicide for Roosevelt and possibly for the nation, and amid cries that Britain was finished and all this material would fall into Hitler’s hands!”

  Roosevelt had no delusions about Britain’s condition. He got from BSC the Bletchley readings of the Nazi mind, showing that waves of German bombers would try to complete the destruction of RAF defenses by mid-September. The timetable called for occupation of all southern England by the end of the month and a victory march through London in early October. Hitler had 1,900 bombers and 1,100 fighter aircraft to hurl against 350 bombers and 700 fighters. During the final month of the Battle of Britain, the Wizard and Stephenson put into safekeeping in Washington all the “lightweight / high-value” secrets that Hitler would have within his grasp if he reached London.

  Intercepted German military orders confirmed that if the islands resisted, and invasion was either repelled or postponed, Hitler was still committed to an attack upon Russia. With the President’s approval, Stephenson and Donovan concocted a counterplan to delay fatally the march on Moscow: a plan that would further strain American neutrality.

  First, the Battle of Britain had still to be won. Stephenson flew back in the week after the invasion alert, code-named CROMWELL, had been sounded, on Saturday, September 7. Intercepted signals showed that enemy squadrons were bedeviled with servicing problems. The repair-and-supply units, as Stephenson had foreseen when listening to Nazi boasts about blitzkrieg tactics, were inadequate. Consequently, only three-quarters of the 3,000 warplanes arrayed against England were ready for operations at any one time. This was vital intelligence for the defending RAF squadrons.

  On September 15, ULTRA revealed a statistical picture of preparations to invade Britain, by piecing together orders to individual military units. Vast preparations were being made on Belgian and Dutch fields for the loading and fast turnaround of troop-carrying planes, based on the assumption that the RAF would be no longer capable of putting up opposition. Invasion was expected momentarily.

  “Churchill drove over from Chequers to Number 11 Fighter Group Headquarters,” said Stephenson. “It covered most of southeast England with only twenty-five squadrons. Commanding was Keith Park, the air vice marshal whose decisions had kept one step ahead of the enemy the past five weeks. Keith had spent all morning fighting off the heaviest waves to reach England. Winston was feeling talkative and kept asking questions. The tension mounted all afternoon. The red lights, each indicating a squadron in action, were coming up one after another. Now every fighter in every squadron was either fighting or gulping fuel for another go. Winston asked, ‘What other reserves have we?’

  “Keith said there were none. And then Winston understood. The RAF had reached its limit. Unless a miracle happened, Germany had the mastery of the skies, which was Hitler’s prerequisite for invasion.”

  Part of the miracle was Bletchley’s analysis of German orders. It told Park that he could gamble all his fighters. The enemy, too, had reached the end of his resources. Churchill went home for his afternoon nap. He was emotionally exhausted and slept for three hours. When he awoke, John Martin, his private secretary, came in with the familiar budget of disastrous news. “However,” he ended, “all is redeemed in the air. We have shot down one hundred and eighty-five for a loss of forty.”

  President Roosevelt heard this account with more than ordinary interest. The basic German cipher machine, Enigma, which had been rebuilt in England to serve ULTRA’S organization, was also duplicated in Japan. American cryptanalysts had built an apparatus like the Japanese version and called it “Purple.” By September 1940, the U.S. Army’s Signal Intelligence Service had completed the Purple solution, and the resulting recovery of Japanese ciphers was code-named from this point onward MAGIC. What held the President’s attention was the apparent flow and flexibility of British secret intelligence based on interception and decipherment, for which there was not yet an American counterpart.

  Roosevelt was recovering from a false alarm he had passed along to Stephenson just before his latest fast trip to Britain. On Monday, September 23, Churchill warned his ministers that an invasion attempt seemed imminent. The German High Command had confirmed OPERATION SEALION. What Churchill did not tell the War Cabinet was that on the previous day he had received an urgent message from the President through Stephenson. The Americans had irrefutable evidence that the German invasion was to start at 3:00 P.M. “It doesn’t say,” wrote the head of the Foreign Office, Alexander Cadogan, “whether it’s departure Calais at 3 or arrive Dover!”

  Churchill had phoned his Secretary of State fo
r War, Anthony Eden, who was home for the weekend in Kent. Eden expressed polite interest in Roosevelt’s “conjecture.” Churchill said testily that this was not a matter of conjecture. Would Mr. Eden kindly walk down to the cliffs and see if anyone was coming? The War Minister grumpily thrust his way through the damp wind into sight of the Channel. The sea was choppy, the waves blown into spindrift. He phoned Churchill back: “If the Germans try to cross in weather like this, they’ll arrive excessively seasick.”

  The days passed with no invasion. Confidence in the President was not shaken, however. He had been right in his original warning of an invasion—but it was an invasion by the Japanese into French Indochina. A cipher clerk had confused the code names for two different places.

  The President was “getting the hang of it,” noted Stephenson, who had arranged that some of Churchill’s routine questions to BSC should be summarized to give FDR a sense of the pressures on the Prime Minister. One typical day’s barrage of memos was impressive. “Do the Americans know of the Knickebein beacon?* There’s a new guidance system for German bombers. What progress in getting the American bomb-sight? There are reports of a German plan to drop poison-gas bombs. Can rumours be sent through American pipelines suggesting there’s a secret weapon the British will use in retaliation?” The range of topics was bewildering and indicative of wide knowledge, a fertile mind, and an energy beyond belief in a man past his mid-sixties. Stephenson’s replies bounced back with equal rapidity—from “French patriots are being processed here for training as agents” to “Wendell Willkie opposes the war but is open to reason.” Glancing over the thousands of messages, knowing what fears and disasters pressed upon the Prime Minister, Stephenson admitted later that he had never felt more alive and well as when he was being stretched by these demands. Nothing was forgotten. If the highly secret Norden bombsight was refused to Britain on the grounds that the American device, fitted on RAF bombers, might fall into enemy hands, then proof was found that German intelligence had already stolen the blueprints from the U.S. manufacturer. By the end of the “Spitfire Summer,” White House and Whitehall were learning to work together on pooled intelligence.