A Man Called Intrepid

by William Stevenson

  There would always be political dangers inherent in this co-operation. Secret knowledge could be used to get rid of awkward opponents. There was a strong temptation to do this in the case of Ambassador Kennedy.

  “My God!” Churchill roared after one of Kennedy’s teetotal sermons. “You make me feel I should go around in sack-cloth and ashes!” Kennedy, for his part, told the President that Churchill “is loaded with brandy from ten in the morning.” Kennedy had been described by the British Foreign Office as a possible future president, and already he threatened to throw his weight into the scales against Roosevelt. If someone else moved into the White House after the elections in November, what would happen to the Wizard’s scientific secrets and all the carefully nurtured apparatus labeled INTREPID in New York?

  Lord Beaverbrook, responsible for the herculean effort of aircraft production that put Spitfires into RAF hands only just in time, kept up a relationship with Kennedy while reporting to Stephenson on the diplomat’s activities. Beaverbrook made no apology for his actions later. “My son was shooting down Germans in the air,” he said. “I was obliged to be ruthless on the ground.” He had made up his mind to “shoot down Kennedy” after Donovan’s midsummer visit, which ended with the Beaver cabling Big Bill on his arrival in Washington: YOU ARE LIKE UNTO RIVERS OF WATER IN A DRY PLACE.

  Although Beaverbrook and Stephenson had a lot in common—they were both Canadians raised in a strict Scottish Presbyterian code, self-made millionaires, and strong-willed—the press baron was not noted for reticence. Beaverbrook described Ambassador Kennedy’s final weeks to Stephenson in these words: “We loyally hushed up the betrayal of U S Embassy communications. But Kennedy was soon back at it. He wanted an unconditional guarantee that we send the whole British fleet to American ports in the likely event of our surrender. To the very last, he was worried about money. The British should be made to pay cash for arms. British-owned securities in the United States should be taken over and sold to raise the money. He feared Roosevelt was holding private conversations with you, so nothing would get on record about the President’s blank-check arrangements for unsecured British credit. When Churchill said we shall defend our island whatever the cost may be, Kennedy warned Washington: ‘Remember all speeches are being made in beautiful sunshiny weather.’ Even Russian Ambassador Ivan Maisky was astonished at Kennedy’s state of panic, and is commenting acidly upon ‘Capitalist Kennedy seeking personal concessions on imports of Haig & Haig whisky and Gordon’s Gin, for which he holds exclusive distribution rights in the United States, in exchange for his help in obtaining American supplies, a crude form of blackmail.’ The London Spectator thinks there seem to be plenty of eminent persons in the United States to give isolationist advice without the Ambassador, knowing our ordeal, joining their number.”

  Beaverbrook said bluntly that Kennedy’s presence threatened the strategy settled upon to carry Britain through the period when “we shall be losing the war in a conventional sense until mid-1941. Hitler has put off the invasion until Spring 1941 and that gives us six months to launch psychological counter-offensives—small secret warfare campaigns designed to play on what we know of the Fuehrer’s temperament.

  “Hitler cannot stand opposition. Our hopes rest upon inciting him to lunatic actions. He must see the insults offered his supermen by barefoot peasants. It will be good for our morale too, knowing we are defeated but still striking back.

  “These plans depend on keeping the right man in the White House. Kennedy claims he can put 25 million Catholic votes behind Wendell Willkie to throw Roosevelt out.”

  Foreign Minister Lord Halifax, now committed to the total-war concept, reported Kennedy as having said he had arranged widespread publication of an article by himself in the United States five days before the presidential election: “Kennedy gave me to understand it would be an indictment of President Roosevelt’s administration. . . .”

  Beaverbrook sent Stephenson a detailed report of the Ambassador’s conversations in which compromising statements were made. The report was submitted to FDR at once. Stephenson described the scene: “I sat back and watched FDR across his cluttered desk. He had a way of reading, tilting the sheet from side to side. You could tell when he was angry by small signs. On this occasion the sign was the sudden acceleration in the tilting of the sheet. Then he folded the sheet very calmly, very slowly, and he tore it just as slowly and calmly into very tiny pieces which he dropped into a wastebasket. And then, in front of me, he drafted a cable to Kennedy which said in essence:

  THE LIQUOR TRADE IN BOSTON IS NOW CHALLENGING AND THE GIRLS OF HOLLYWOOD MORE FASCINATING STOP I EXPECT YOU BACK HERE BY SATURDAY.

  Lyndon B. Johnson later said he was with the President when Kennedy arrived in New York and telephoned on Sunday, October 27. “Ah, Joe, old friend, it is so good to hear your voice,” said the President. “I’m dying to talk to you. . . .” When Roosevelt replaced the telephone, he drew his forefinger razor-fashion across his throat, Johnson later recalled.

  The Kennedys dined with the Roosevelts that evening. Two days later, Joseph P. Kennedy spoke on nationwide radio. A startled public learned he now believed “Franklin D. Roosevelt should be re-elected President.” He told a press conference: “I never made anti-British statements or said, on or off the record, that I do not expect Britain to win the war.” British historian Nicholas Bethell wrote: “How Roosevelt contrived the transformation is a mystery.” And so it remained until the BSC Papers disclosed that the President had been supplied with enough evidence of Kennedy’s disloyalty that the Ambassador, when shown it, saw discretion to be the better part of valor.

  “If Kennedy had been recalled sooner,” said Stephenson later, “he would have campaigned against FDR with a fair chance of winning. We delayed him in London as best we could until he could do the least harm back in the States.”

  Kennedy’s London was being torn apart by a new campaign of terror bombing. Just when the German Air Force seemed likely to swamp RAF Fighter Command, the attacks were switched from vital bases to England’s open cities. Hitler stopped bombing fighter airfields and bombed London instead. It was a turning point in the Battle of Britain; and a decisive factor in making Kennedy get out of the smoking capital despite the efforts of society and the bureaucracy to detain him.

  The Chief Diplomatic Advisor to Churchill, doubtless under stress from the nightly bombing, indulged in an undiplomatic comment that went into the sealed Kennediana file. Robert Vansittart wrote: “Mr. Kennedy is a very foul specimen of a double-crosser and defeatist. He thinks of nothing but his own pocket. I hope that this war will at least see the elimination of his type.” It may seem unfair to exhume this bitter note, years later, but it does give deeper meaning to the generous amends made after the war by President John F. Kennedy when he proclaimed Churchill an honorary citizen of the United States for his leadership “in the dark days and darker nights when Britain stood alone—and most men save Englishmen despaired of England’s life.”

  * On June 12, 1940, a cryptogram was plucked out of German radio transmissions. Bletchley decoded it as follows: “Knickebein Cleves established. . . .” It threw the first light on documents found on a captured German bomber referring to a Knickebein radio-navigation system. Churchill formed a unit at once to check these beacons. Direction-finding vans and old aircraft tracked the guidance beams. Whenever the beacons were switched on, they naturally pointed at the German targets for that night. Deductions from this source had more to do with British anticipation of night raids than any other single intelligence operation, and came under the ULTRA label.

  20

  On the night of November 5, 1940, a few days after he won election to a third term, Roosevelt met his neighbors at Hyde Park. During the recent campaign, his chief opponent, Wendell Willkie, had warned that a third term would mean “dictatorship and war.” FDR had responded that American boys “are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” Now he was, as a placard outside his door proclaimed, SAF
E ON THIRD. What was Roosevelt going to do? Keep his pledge about foreign wars? Or continue to enlarge his extensive and secret commitments to Britain?

  The questions were asked in The Hole, 3,000 miles away. Bombers had dumped fresh loads of fire and destruction on London. Dawn crept through the ruins. Churchill sat thirty-five feet below ground, tossing another cigar butt over his shoulder in the cheerful expectation that it would land in the bucket of sand behind him. In front of him was the red ULTRA box, with signals retrieved by Bletchley.

  One signal shocked and sickened him. Evidently the terror bombing of London did not satisfy Hitler. Raids were to be directed at other centers of population. The danger of invasion had been lifted for the moment, but Churchill saw greater crises ahead.

  The Prime Minister had not dared speak before. “But now,” he wrote to Roosevelt, “I feel you will not mind my saying that I prayed for your success. . . . Things are afoot which will be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe. . . .”

  The President had hardly read this message when he learned of the new horror. Bletchley was discovering ahead of time which civilian targets Hitler planned to strike next. Churchill and his War Cabinet had to decide which was more important: to warn the families marked for punishment or protect the secrets of Bletchley’s growing apparatus for divining Nazi intentions.

  Their agony had begun more than two months earlier, during the airfield-attack phase. A German bomber, by miscalculation, released a string of bombs that struck Buckingham Palace and nearby homes. The RAF scraped the barrel for aircraft that might reach as far as Berlin, and on the night of August 25, bombed the German capital as a warning. Hitler, enraged because his people had been promised that nothing like this could possibly happen, ordered reprisals—the change to the bombing of cities. It was tragic for British civilians, but gave their Fighter Command time to repair bases and patch up pilots and planes.

  The German targets were, of course, coded. However, it was possible to guess the location of a target by studying the Knickebein beams that guided the bombers. These were not always switched on until thirty minutes before the German raiders took off. Then the British hastily notified ambulance and fire-fighting units, concealing the real source of their knowledge by giving credit to radar, aerial reconnaissance, and ground observers.

  Occasionally, German orders did give the real name of a proposed target. This happened a few days after Roosevelt’s re-election, by which time he was familiar with the moral dilemmas faced by Churchill. One reason for this was the presence in Bletchley of America’s greatest cryptologist, William Friedman. He and his U.S. Army team, at work on the Japanese version of Enigma, having developed the equivalent of ULTRA in their own laboratories, had been toiling hand in glove with the British since the August exchange of highly secret weapons and intelligence devices. Of all the confidential matters surrounding Stephenson’s new headquarters in New York, this was one of the most astounding. Like so much else, it remained unpublicized and unknown to all but a few. “Inexplicable is how securely the work has been held for 35 years,” commented another American who worked at Bletchley, Washington Post columnist Alfred Friendly, when the first accounts of ULTRA were published in 1974. Stephenson had earlier argued for the permanent attachment of American specialists to Bletchley Park, and once he had gathered all the intelligence threads together at BSC in New York, this co-operation had begun.

  In the second week of November in 1940, Bletchley obtained the German order to destroy Coventry. The name came through in plain text. Coventry was forty miles northwest of Bletchley, and some of Friedman’s English colleagues had families billeted in the doomed city. Yet they could say nothing. Nearby, too, was the 300-year-old mansion where the first successful Whittle jet-engine blueprints were to be copied for safekeeping in America. Brownsover Hall, center of jet research, was undefended, to avoid drawing German attention to it.

  The name of the target was in Churchill’s hands within minutes of Hitler’s decision. The Führer meant to annihilate nonmilitary targets in his attempt to crush civilian resistance. If the Prime Minister evacuated Coventry, as he so desperately wished to do, he would tell the enemy that he knew their plans. The value of Bletchley and all that ULTRA implied for the future would be lost. If the citizens were not warned, thousands would die or suffer.

  Churchill chose wormwood, and did not warn them, beyond the customary alerting of fire-fighting and ambulance services, normal procedure in areas that might be logically assumed to have appeared on the German list of targets for the night. The Germans struck on schedule: November 14. The raid was so devastating that Berlin boasted that every town in England would be “Coventryized.”

  Roosevelt discussed with Stephenson the issues raised by knowing too much. “War is forcing us more and more to play God,” he said. “I don’t know what I should have done. . . .”

  Coventry was a foretaste of the dreadful dilemmas imposed by the need to conceal secret knowledge. When so much had to be sacrificed to conceal sources, it was unthinkable that individuals should ask for public acknowledgment of their Bletchley labors. This lesson was remarked by William Friedman. Long after the war, he wrote a discreet tribute to his tutor at Bletchley, Alastair Denniston. Like so many others in British intelligence, Denniston could not be rewarded even financially, for fear of arousing curiosity, and he had to go back to teaching in his old age. Friedman wrote a letter to Denniston’s daughter, nicknamed “Y” because she was an unknown quantity before her birth. “Your father was a great man in whose debt all English-speaking people will remain for a very long time, if not forever. That so few should know exactly what he did . . . is the sad part.”

  Silence was imposed on Roosevelt for the same reasons. After his re-election, he appeared to lose interest in the war. In fact, he was involving the nation more deeply than ever.

  The President was being made privy to haunting secrets. He was moving cautiously toward the inevitable, deeply touched by Stephenson’s disclosures. He learned of the torment of the commander of the young Battle of Britain pilots, Hugh Dowding. A row broke over the Air Chief Marshal’s head when his junior commanders criticized his refusal to send up more fighters to meet the early swarms of German bombers. The youngsters were not aware that the enemy had been trying to draw them into battle in the wrong place at the wrong time; nor could they be told that Hitler’s deceptive intentions were understood by Dowding through the Bletchley interpretation of intercepted signals. The incessant strain, heartache at the loss of those pilots he had often called “my sons,” carried him to the verge of a nervous breakdown. In later years, he spoke of his communion with the dead pilots in a spirit world. He was an acutely sensitive man, almost dumb with shyness in any social gathering, who wrote in his diaries about his responsibility for sending the flower of youth into seemingly suicidal combats where the rewards were fearful facial burns, mutilation, death. The criticisms scarred him. But he carried to the grave the secrets of Bletchley and ULTRA that caused him to follow so difficult a policy, although they would have vindicated him.

  Sharing these secrets with the President and with his carefully selected specialists had been a grave decision for Stephenson. In doing so, he felt he was preparing America for grim leadership in a world new to weapons that could condemn innocents to the gas chamber or cities to atomic destruction. Already it was becoming apparent that decisions taken to sabotage Nazi industry or to assassinate a Nazi leader could trigger consequences as awesome as any massacre in history.

  There was no turning back. Just before Coventry, the wires had hummed between Washington and London over the formation of the Axis, the formal linkage of Berlin with Rome and Tokyo.

  “Can we get military staff and joint-intelligence talks underway with the Americans?” Churchill had asked.

  “If it gets out that the President agreed to discussion of Anglo-American global strategy there will be renewed charges of warmongering,” Stephenson replied.
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  Now, the election out of the way, Roosevelt was preparing for these strategy talks. To all appearances, he was basking aboard the U.S.S. Tuscaloosa in the Caribbean sun. In fact, he was studying a 4,000-word letter from Churchill, delivered by seaplane on December 9. It was a study of war from the North Sea to Singapore and dealt in great sweep and detail with the dangers and problems. One was Britain’s financial position: dollar balances that had been on an imperial scale before the war were now gone, including the holdings in America of individual Britons. Britain could not survive if supplies had to be paid for, cash on the barrelhead. “I believe you will agree,” wrote Churchill, “that it would be wrong in principle and mutually disadvantageous in effect if at the height of this struggle Great Britain were to be divested of all saleable assets, so that after the victory is won with our blood, civilisation saved, and the time gained for the United States to be armed against all eventualities, we should stand stripped to the bone.”

  Churchill had consulted Stephenson about this letter: “The most important I ever wrote.” The Prime Minister seemed to his intelligence chief to be strained, irritable, and restlessly prodding for action. The letter was a masterly survey, yet it did not mention the one area in which Churchill was able to hit back at his evasive enemies: secret warfare. History records the results of the letter’s overt proposals and appeals, from Lend-Lease to what Stephenson called “a common-law alliance.”* History does not record, because what then was secret has remained so until now, how the decision to let Coventry burn so moved the President that he initiated a flurry of actions, most of them directed to the training, support, and expansion of guerrilla forces in Europe. A stream of special emissaries crisscrossed the Atlantic, ostensibly performing ambassadorial roles. Averell Harriman took over a mission in London to expedite military aid, reporting to Ambassador-at-large Harry Hopkins through Navy communications, though his mission was housed in the U.S. Embassy. Such surface activity concealed an even greater traffic on behalf of clandestine services, for FDR now felt he shared with Churchill the awesome burden of Coventry’s destruction.