Bateson had to control the formation without using radio, and this meant predetermined signals between aircraft in visual range of each other. Flying in number-three position on Bateson’s port side was a certain “Smith.” He was the commander of the special-duties group, Air Chief Marshal Sir Basil Embry. He had been forbidden to take part in such missions by his immediate superiors. His experience was too valuable. He would be irreplaceable if lost. He knew too much about ULTRA. Still, it was the kind of adventure Churchill would have insisted on joining, and the Prime Minister had given his approval. So Sir Basil was known as Smith. If he crashed and the Germans should identify him, there would be an interrogation accompanied by truth drugs, whose effects were thought impossible to fight. Smith therefore carried lethal tablets, too.
“He was absolutely insistent that he come on the raid,” said Bateson. “One had to accept that, coming from a superior officer. But once in the air, he was under my command. I had to forget who he was, and not worry about his safety.”
Embry planned the raid to hit Copenhagen when, according to Truelsen’s intelligence reports, the maximum number of Gestapo would be inside Shell House. “I wanted to kill as many as I could.”
The whole formation flew straight for Jutland, spread out in a single but manageable formation. They hit their first landmark on the coast of Denmark right on time. “It became very exhilarating,” said Smith. “All the Danes along the flight path stood up and waved. We were weaving between trees, pulling up over power lines.”
A protective force of thirty Mustangs provided escort under the command of the Belgian Baron Michel Donnet. “It was really rather a pleasant trip,” he reported afterward. “Hopping over church steeples, one eye looking ahead so you didn’t slice off a wing on a power line, one eye sideways watching for enemy fighters. We took Copenhagen completely by surprise.”
The first wave was led by Bateson. Ironically, German efforts to hide Shell House made it stand out. It was the only building painted in green-and-brown camouflage. “It was a case of bowling right down the alley, releasing bombs at the last moment, and pulling away in a tight turn up a side street.”
Behind him, Smith saw the first bombs go straight into the base of the building. He pulled up over the roof top and found himself staring into the belly of another Mosquito an arm’s length above him. “I dived into a lane, terrified one of my wings would catch the side of a house.”
The raid came on the eleventh day of interrogation inside Shell House for secret-army leader Paul Bruun. “I could not have held out much longer. Then from nowhere came this bang. Then another. A bit of ceiling came down. A big hole appeared. Walls tumbled in upon me.”
Dr. Mogens Fog remembered later: “I was never so frightened in my life. The cell door fell in, and blocked my escape. The bombs came thudding in, one after another. There were actually thirty-eight hostages in the Gestapo cells. One of us got hold of some keys from a German warder who was stunned by the first blast.”
The Mosquito piloted by Wing Commander Kleobo was caught in the sudden melee of aircraft when the second wave, confused by fires, decided to make another run at the target. Kleobo’s wing struck a pole and his aircraft plunged into the Catholic school of Jeanne d’Arc, killing children and nuns.
Fog stumbled into the street, dazedly aware that this miraculous escape was the result of pinpoint bombing, and then encountered a girl. “She was walking through the smoke across a yard and I thought the Gestapo had shot her in the back until she fell forward and I saw that the back of her head was torn open. Even then we never understood the price paid for our escape.”
Across the yard, Sister Gertrud at first was shouting with excitement: “Look, children, the British.” She saw the RAF markings very clearly, then realized that one of the machines was lurching toward the school. “It crashed and burst in flames.”
The leader of the raid, Bob Bateson, pieced together the story later. “The unfortunate thing was Kleobo crashing. His bombs exploded with him, right on the final run to target. Following pilots were not sure which fire was Shell House. Some had time to see the burning school, realized the smoke obscured the real target, and didn’t bomb. Others did. They mistook the black column of smoke for a marker. Their bombs fell into the school.”
The price for saving Denmark’s secret army was ten airmen, twenty-seven teachers, and eighty-seven children killed, and many more civilians badly mutilated. For this, Gestapo files on Denmark’s anti-Nazi forces were destroyed before they could be acted upon; thirty leading Danish guerrillas escaped from their interrogation cells.
President Roosevelt knew about the raid although the public did not. He recognized in it the moral questions that would plague his successors. He requested, through Stephenson, an assessment. The report never reached him because he was dead by the time it was ready.
Ted Sismore later made a lonely pilgrimage back to the bombed school to try to explain what had happened. The parents of the dead children, to his astonishment, gave him comfort. “They wanted me to know the raid was necessary.”
Merete Jensen was a twelve-year-old girl at the time. “We were all so jubilant because at last here were our friends flying in from the sea. Then there was a terrible crash and everything went dark and it seemed as if after that there was just a long silence. I thought maybe I am dead. So I sat waiting. And then I heard children crying and praying and crying and then suddenly there was the smell again of Spring. It had been such a marvelous day, you know. The first day of Spring . . .”
EPILOGUE
A VIEW FROM
ANOTHER ISLAND
“No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”
—John Donne, Devotions
49
“Does it seem odd, to finish with a young girl’s dream of spring shattered?” I asked.
“No.” Stephenson was silent for a long moment. The manuscript lay on the table nearby. “No. It’s a good place to break off—not finish. Wars are never really won. We still face the consequences of this one. The springtime of our hope was 1945. If the world had fully grasped the essence of the devastating experience we’d survived, we might by now have dispensed with secret intelligence and stopped the creation of terrifying weapons.” He paused again, lost in thought, then continued. “Roosevelt saw the growing contradictions in the last year of his life. On the one hand, there was increasing reliance on technology, on scientific specialists. On the other, secret warfare, depending on intuition, on the individual. Both were essential to bring down the colossus. But intelligence was the key, the nervous system and brain of strength. Peace in the future would rely on the control of this combination.
“After Roosevelt died, the West invested heavily in technology. Mao and Ho applied the lessons of the guerrilla. And more recently the PLO learned how a terrorist could blackmail a government.”
We sat in his study in Bermuda. He was Sir William now, his name on the Roll of Knights, originating a thousand years ago. The recommendation for this distinction, sent to his king from Churchill, carried an unusual, personal inscription: “This one is dear to my heart.” President Harry Truman, making Stephenson the first non-American to receive the highest award for a civilian, the Presidential Medal of Merit, wrote: “Some day the story must be told.”
Was it yet told? The full story could never be told. There were gaps that would always remain mysteries. And the story, even as it can be pieced together, is staggeringly huge. But I had made a beginning.
I thought back to OVERLORD—the final Allied invasion of Fortress Europe. Not even the most senior American and British military chiefs knew at the time how ULTRA was employed to protect the D-day armies. Onl
y Churchill, Roosevelt, and the handful of intelligence chiefs directing these secret operations were aware of the critical deception made possible from intelligence gained through JUBILEE at Dieppe.
ULTRA, intercepting and studying each German reaction to the D-day invasion, was able to feed false information through the Bletchley transmission network to reinforce an error made by German General von Rundstedt. The German commander was persuaded by Dieppe, and by subsequent intelligence “leaks,” that the Allied invasion of Europe would be launched across the narrowest part of the English Channel, at Calais. Even after the D-day landings in Normandy, the Germans did not commit all available forces to smashing the OVERLORD beachhead.
Hitler and his generals (except for Rommel, whose opinion was initially dismissed) thought Normandy was a diversion. Thirty divisions of Allied troops seemed poised to strike at Calais once the Germans were fully committed in Normandy. Those thirty divisions existed only in Bletchley’s fertile imagination and in fake radio messages to Allied agents in Europe.
ULTRA revealed how Hitler vacillated between Rundstedt and those who, like Rommel, now began to suspect the truth. Acting with almost split-second precision, Bletchley redoubled the flood of false information that would back up Rundstedt’s delusions. As a result, Hitler delayed the dispatch of reserves that might have driven the Allies back into the sea.
I thought back further, to the Quebec conference of 1943, when OVERLORD was agreed upon. Two of Stephenson’s secretaries were there: Grace Garner and Eleanor Fleming, young Canadian women who carried the tremendous secret in their heads for almost another year, until D day on June 6, 1944. Grace and Eleanor had a fiery chapter of history locked in their stenographic notebooks—and that was still only a microscopic fraction of the whole. A single drama was concealed in the word “Jedburgh,” which appeared briefly among millions of coded messages. The name had been picked at random from a school textbook—it referred to an abbey that once sheltered Mary Queen of Scots. Its coded meaning covered teams of agents dropped behind German lines before the OVERLORD landings. Each team was known as a Jedburgh and marked a significant merging of American, British, and European intelligence groups in the new Special Forces Headquarters under General Eisenhower. Each team of three agents worked with the secret armies whose final upsurge was to clog the inner mechanism of Fortress Europe while OVERLORD vaulted the battlements.
Stephenson flew with the D-day armies as rear gunner in an Allied bomber and then returned to BSC, now dividing itself between Europe and the Pacific through the most sophisticated system of communications ever to support invisible armies. Its scope could one day be guessed by the Alsop brothers, the Washington newsmen who volunteered for secret operations. Stewart was dropped behind German lines. Joseph, partner of another BSC agent, the British banker John Keswick, was in China. It was years before the brothers pieced together the fragments of their own experiences and traced the links back to BSC in New York. There, too, was a book, but the Alsops never wrote it, out of regard for British intelligence sensitivities. (Though Stewart, with Thomas Braden, covered another facet in Sub Rosa: The OSS and American Espionage.) The British philosophy was “rather than have half the truth emerge, let it all be suppressed,” this based on Lord Chancellor William Jowitt’s theory that a biased history emerges unless every word of testimony is included. To achieve that ideal would require a multitude of books.
The day after the OVERLORD landings, a single German SS Armored Division was directed to counterattack in Normandy. Twenty-three days later, that division finally extricated itself from savage ambushes by DAVID, the network led by Claude de Baissac, who with his sister Lise had been parachuted into the region. Their particular contribution was noted eventually in a London Times obituary when Claude died in 1975. As the thirty-year ban on wartime secrecy ran out, the obituary columns became a major source of these new revelations.
The secrecy continued beyond all reason. One explanation offered was that the details could help hostile powers, DAVID was part of the plan covering Europe to provoke disorder. The instructions given to citizen armies for turning German-held towns overnight into jungles might prove useful to postwar enemies. What happened in Nazi-held territory, it was argued, could be made to happen by relatively small fanatical groups against established Western governments. When telephones suddenly go dead, trains are sidetracked, signposts turned awry, factories crippled by mass absenteeism, postal services rendered unreliable, then anarchy triumphs.
The obvious weakness in this argument for keeping the secret war secret was that some of the guerrillas trained in such methods were already and irreconcilably opposed to the restoration of the old order. Whom were the secrets kept from?
“The secret war was fought by amateurs,” said Stephenson. “And the amateurs were being replaced by careerists with a vested interest in secrecy. And the conventional war had its generals and admirals with an eye to the future, and therefore good reason to downgrade or ignore the role of the resistance movements. They found security could be used to withhold information from the public.”
Almost six months after D day, Stephenson and Donovan drafted an appeal to Roosevelt for the preservation of the partnership that crossed national boundaries. They were looking ahead, though not for themselves. Each had civilian interests to resume. They judged that Hitler’s methods of aggression, the blitzkrieg wars of speed and surprise, could be vastly strengthened with the new weapons available. Even the declaration of wars had become an archaic formality. A future war might be launched and finished within a day or two—or less. The first line of the free world’s defense was the free flow of information. Where this flow was impeded by the censorship and controls imposed within a totalitarian society, it became necessary to secure the information through secret intelligence and disseminate it as widely as possible. A world war had been started because of miscalculations based on lack of accurate and objective information on both sides. The dictators mistook for weakness the normal divisions within the democracies. Their intended victims were unprepared for the ruthless efficiency of the Axis military machines.
On November 18, 1944, Donovan signed the memo that resulted from these deliberations: “Once our enemies are defeated the demand will be equally pressing for information that will aid in solving the problems of peace. This requires that intelligence be returned to the President and a central authority established, reporting directly to you.”
Addressed to President Roosevelt, this top-secret document was leaked to the press by critics of OSS and BSC. The Chicago Tribune published articles attacking “this super-spy plan . . . an all-powerful intelligence service to spy on the post-war world and to pry into the lives of citizens at home.” For a time gossip was revived that Donovan was conspiring with the British in New York. When the fuss died down, Roosevelt prepared to act. It was April 1945. He died before he could put into effect a plan to carry into peacetime the knowledge and experience gained from Allied comradeship.
What Stephenson envisaged was “a worldwide intelligence service to maintain the security of the democracies in the critical years ahead with safeguards against abuse of power.” The safeguards were to have taken the form of a central authority made up of responsible citizens working within the framework of democratic government. The safeguards were the most important feature of the proposals, anticipating the problems and moral dilemmas that would finally explode in the 1970s.
But a month after Roosevelt died, BSC was asked to leave American soil, INTREPID’S wartime operations in Manhattan shrank as the military campaigns in Europe and Asia approached their climax. The sudden requirement to suspend operations might have excused bitterness, but Stephenson loyally refused to discuss the feuds between U.S. agencies that caused the break-up of his partnership with Donovan and OSS, and then even the demise of OSS. President Truman saw no further need for a co-ordinating intelligence agency duplicating what he was assured could be done by the military services, the State Department, and the FBI
separately. Truman signed the fatal order disbanding the OSS on September 20, 1945. All BSC records were hauled away to Camp X, on the Canadian side of the border.
Secrecy had become the ally of rival professional intelligence services. Unfortunately, secrecy was also the ally of the Soviet Union, once again hostile, a massive totalitarian power sealed against outside inspection.
The electronic chatter of the Axis armies ceased, and ULTRA was dissolved. Silence fell over Bletchley Park. The secrecy there was so durable that when I returned thirty years later, the townspeople either knew nothing or would say nothing. The effect of such tight security was that a later crop of leaders knew little or nothing about the secret war. Some veterans, mainly for political purposes, occasionally cracked the silence. Richard Crossman, former deputy-director of British Psychological Warfare, wrote that intelligence agencies “appeal to those who revel in being mysterious men with secret knowledge, loving the moral twilight shrouding activities that by civilized standards are barbaric.”
This was exactly what Stephenson had wanted to prevent by creating out of BSC experience a service that retained wartime integrity, staffed by civilians accountable to their elected representatives. He wrote from his New York office on the last day of 1945, when the last BSC cipher machines had been carted away: “The conception of coordinated operations in the field of secret activities, which BSC originally exemplified, was the basis upon which the Americans built, with astonishing speed, their own highly successful wartime Intelligence Service. It is, perhaps, not going too far to suggest that this conception may properly be regarded as essential to the maintenance of peace. . . .”
A Man Called Intrepid Page 55