War of Shadows

by Gershom Gorenberg

  His faith in airplanes as the key to victory showed the influence of his old friend, Charles Lindbergh. His view of the Middle East as key to the war showed the growing influence of the British officers with whom he spoke. More than that, it showed the influence of where he was physically. From Cairo you could see that the Middle East was the arena where German armies from Russia and Libya might meet, where the Japanese could meet the Germans. You could see that the Middle East was the middle of the world.

  People are best deciphered by their contradictions. To the British, Fellers was a harsh ally, an intensely supportive adversary.

  He did not make friends in Washington. Secretary of War Henry Stimson, army chief of staff George Marshall, and Major General Dwight Eisenhower, now head of the army’s Operations Division, in charge of planning, all agreed: America must invade France and strike toward Germany as soon as possible. It must not give in to British wheedling to fight Germany elsewhere.17 It did not help Fellers’s case that Eisenhower and Fellers had served together under Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines in the 1930s. Fellers worshipped MacArthur. Eisenhower left despising him, with some venom left over for his acolyte.18

  “Middle East is the responsibility of the British,” Marshall finally, tersely answered Fellers. “At the present time accepted strategy precludes the diversion of materiel, personnel and shipping to the Middle East.”19

  UNLIKE CHURCHILL, MARGARET Storey did pay close attention to Kesselring’s April 24 message. But it is not clear whether it got to her desk in Hut 4 by the next day, or if she only found it later, searching for more pieces of a puzzle.

  Storey, the slight young woman in dark cardigans with the smoky voice who could speak many languages, had moved to Hut 4, home of the Naval Section of Enigma intelligence, in February. Her promotion may have partly been a consequence of Travis’s advancement. Travis’s personal assistant, Russell Dudley-Smith, the thin tall man with the rumpled uniform and horn-rimmed glasses, now had more administrative work and less time for making sure that British codes and ciphers were secure. Yet Bletchley Park’s successes at breaking Axis ciphers were seeping into its commanders’ nightmares, in which Germans and Italians were breaking British codes. If this was indeed happening, the echoes of decoded British information would show up in deciphered Axis signals. Someone had to look for echoes.

  Storey, it seems, had shown a quickness that was wasted in the mechanical repetitiveness of her earlier job. (The few people who would remember her long afterward would describe her as “self-effacing,” as “introspective,” as “very intelligent,” as having “daunting intelligence,” “absolutely formidable intelligence,” as having a “rat-trap of a mind” that retained everything she read or heard, as smoking incessantly, as “shy, very shy,” as “the brain.”20) Her new job title was “research specialist,” responsible for sifting through decoded enemy naval messages for hints of Axis signal intelligence. Storey’s mentor was Dudley-Smith, who would teach her how British code systems worked so that she could more easily spot evidence they had been compromised.

  Storey took to the work. She was given more responsibility, or simply took it. By the spring she was dissecting all decoded messages, not just naval ones, for signs of enemy espionage. She analyzed whether the enemy source was a human agent, or a broken code, or traffic analysis, or something else. It’s possible that she got her start working on army and air force Enigma messages when a Hut 3 air adviser or duty officer spotted Kesselring’s message and asked her or Dudley-Smith to attack the problem.21

  Or perhaps it was another message—one that an intercept operator took down and sent to Bletchley Park on the same day, but was only decrypted five days later, on April 29. It came from the German army headquarters in Europe and was addressed to the intelligence officer of the Panzerarmee Afrika—the Africa Armored Army, as Erwin Rommel’s again-upgraded command was now named.

  As part of an assessment of the situation in Malta, it said, “It is reported from a good source that the British will not be strong enough to justify an offensive before 1 June with the limited objective of taking Benghazi.”22

  In Hut 3, an army adviser or the duty officer added commentary before sending out a paraphrase under the brand-new label for Enigma intelligence, “Ultra.”23 This and Kesselring’s message were apparently based on the same intelligence report, the comment said. But this one referred to the source as being “good” rather than “particularly reliable.” The implicit question was: Why the difference?

  There was one clue, handwritten at the bottom on an internal copy saved in Bletchley Park, absent from the copy given to Churchill and the paraphrase sent to Cairo. The notation was an abbreviation for “Chaffinch II.” Chaffinch was Hut 6’s name for three Enigma keys that the German army used in the Mediterranean region. The name, Welchman would recall, came from a “reddish-brown pencil that bore some resemblance to the color of a chaffinch’s chest” and was used to mark the discriminants, the daily call letters, for the key. As the supply of new colors ran out, zoological names for keys became the rule. Chaffinch II linked the German army headquarters in Europe with Rommel’s headquarters.24

  For the first months of 1942, Hut 6 had no luck with Chaffinch.25 Then someone figured out that messages sent in a German air force key for Africa, nicknamed Gadfly, were apparently being resent in Chaffinch keys. One day a piece of a short Gadfly message was decoded as “WEGEN SANDSTURMES AUF PANZERFRONT, “Because of sandstorms on the armored front…” The bombes were set up to test Chaffinch messages for these words. The test failed. Then someone in the Crib Room of Hut 6, the place where people strained their minds to think of what a message might say, suggested that the German code clerk had made a slip. Maybe it was GANZER FRONT, “the whole front.”

  The wheels turned, and the bombes found a Chaffinch key for that day, which produced more cribs, which unlocked it for more days. In April, the Chaffinch problem received just under a quarter of all the hours that the bombes ran, and they ran night and day. This was a sign that breaking Chaffinch was still tough, that most suggested cribs still failed, and that information flowing to and from Rommel was a top priority.

  The week when the assessment from “a good source” was decoded, the Chaffinch II key was broken for only three days, two of them from previous weeks. Hence the message was decoded belatedly.26

  The intelligence services of the German army and air force had both received the information, and they agreed that it was essential. But in the air force’s message sent in Red, the source was called “particularly reliable”; in the army’s message sent in Chaffinch, the source was “good.”

  Slowly, with prodigious effort, Gordon Welchman’s team was beginning to read mail to and from Rommel’s headquarters. In that mail came hints that Rommel was getting mail, indirectly, from Cairo.

  GENERAL UMBERTO PIATTI owned a large estate in Cyrenaica. In one of those moments when Axis tanks were retreating and the British had not yet taken control, Berber nomads chopped down all his olive trees, turning the colonial groves back into grazing land. The riconquista hadn’t stamped out all the embers of insurrection in Libya. They roared into flames when the chance came. Arabs and Berbers raided farms and drove out, or sometimes killed, Italian settlers.

  Then the Italians came back. Piatti was not just a landowner; he was in charge of internal order in rear areas of Libya. He combined personal and professional vengeance. His methods included bombing nomads’ herds and machine-gunning encampments. The Fascist Party’s police force and the paramilitary Carabinieri carried out mass arrests and executions. For natives found guilty of helping the British raiders who came out of the desert, the method of punishment was to put steel butcher’s hooks through victims’ jaws, “hang them up, and leave them to die of shock.”

  After leaving Africa, Rommel would write a memoir called War Without Hate. In one place, he criticized “excesses” by Italian soldiers against local Arabs and rejected the use of mass reprisals against civilians.27 In
the winter of 1942, though, Italian Fascist officials in Libya were in touch with Rommel’s headquarters about signs of Arab rebellion behind the lines. Speaking for Rommel, his officers told the Italians to crack down harder. One aide wrote that “the most drastic measures” were needed. Perhaps Rommel did not know or care about the specifics; perhaps his motivation was not hate but dispassionate efficiency. The distinctions would have escaped the men hanging from hooks.28

  Mussolini concluded that the town-dwelling Jews of Libya were behind the attacks on colonial farmers in the countryside. He aimed his rage not just at Jews in Cyrenaica, who’d greeted the British as liberators from the race laws, but at all the Jews in Libya. Through the Ministry of Italian Africa, he issued a decree on February 7, 1942, to expel them to a concentration camp in the desert.29

  It took time to organize. The Italian colonial authorities started with the Jews of small towns in Cyrenaica. In Barce, fifteen-year-old Rahamim Bukra heard rumors at the end of March, before the holiday of Passover. Bukra was from Benghazi, but when British bombing of the city had grown worse in 1941, his family had fled sixty miles east to Barce. There were a few hundred Jews in the town. After rumors came lists posted in the synagogue, every two weeks, of who would be next. Survivors would remember that forty people were packed onto each open truck, that there were eight or ten trucks in a convoy, that they traveled five days in the sun and slept outside in the desert cold at night, and that at the end they came to the camp at Giado in the desert highland 120 miles southeast of Tripoli.

  Barbed wire surrounded the camp. Inside were long huts. Three hundred or more people were put in each hut—men, women, and children together. The water supply was meager. The inmates received between 100 and 150 grams of bread a day, and rarely any other food. Giado was not a death camp like those the Germans were beginning to operate in Europe. It was not built to exterminate its inmates. Neither, though, was it built to keep them alive.

  In early May, the German consul in Tripoli wrote to the German ambassador in Rome. “Up to now, only 700 Jews have been concentrated in Giado,” he reported. The process was slow because trucks were in short supply, he said. Implicit in that statement was the fact that amid Rommel’s supply problems, trucks were sometimes being used, and drivers and fuel, to transport Jews to a concentration camp.

  Transporting the Jews of Tripolitania was to come later, after Cyrenaica was emptied. But those with French citizenship or French colonial papers were already being expelled to Tunisia. Those with British papers were sent by ship to internment camps in Italy. Foreign citizenship had once been a form of protection for Jews in Libya. Now it was only a ticket to a different destination.

  JOHN TILTMAN TRAVELED to America on an American troopship, squeezed into a cabin with eight large mail sacks full of Bletchley Park codebreaking materials—gifts to the US Navy’s OP-20-G and the army’s SIS, the Signal Intelligence Service. Part of his mission was to convince the two American agencies to merge, copying Britain’s model. He gave up on this quickly. “The dislike of Jews prevalent in the U.S. Navy is a factor to be considered, as nearly all the leading Army cryptographers are Jews,” he wrote. He was also supposed to convince the Americans that they should do all the work on Japanese codes and leave Enigma to Britain. His hosts accepted the part about a US monopoly on Japan. Post–Pearl Harbor, they were going all out to break the Japanese naval code they’d labeled JN-25. The navy people, though, were fiercely suspicious that Tiltman was keeping them in the dark about Enigma. An alliance did not translate into instant trust.

  Tiltman stayed for a month with William Friedman and his wife, Elizabeth. Friedman had recovered enough from his Purple-induced breakdown to serve as an adviser, the old wise man, to SIS. In the evening, Tiltman and Friedman apparently took their minds off codebreaking by discussing ancient Hittite hieroglyphics. Tiltman’s trip home was quicker. He got a lift on a B-24 Liberator bomber, which made a crash landing at full speed at an aerodrome in Scotland.30 He survived. Henceforth, the channel between Bletchley Park and SIS ran between Tiltman and Friedman.

  In early May, Denniston got a radiogram from Bletchley Park’s outstation at Heliopolis, outside Cairo. At Heliopolis intercept operators listened for Axis radio signals too weak to reach Britain, and a codebreaking section solved the simpler, low-grade ciphers used by German and Italian units. The Heliopolis station forwarded any Enigma material picked up in the Middle East to Bletchley Park. It sent intercepted diplomatic traffic to Denniston’s operation in London. Another intercept station operated in Palestine, at the British base at Sarafand southeast of Jaffa.

  Sarafand, said the radiogram from Egypt, had intercepted conversations in cipher between the American embassies in Tehran and Jeddah, the diplomatic capital of Saudi Arabia. “Do you want any American traffic at all?” asked the director of the Heliopolis station, Colonel Freddie Jacob.

  “We are not interested in American traffic,” Denniston answered, “and do not want it at all.”31 Churchill had promised to stop eavesdropping on America. Denniston was very definite that the promise was real.

  ELIAHU GOTTLIEB TALKED his way into the British army in February 1942, at a recruitment office in Haifa, on his third attempt. His story that time was that he was nineteen years old, that he had reached Palestine in 1938 on an illegal immigration boat, and that he’d had to leave his parents behind in Germany.

  The part about being from Germany was true. He was seventeen. He’d been born in Berlin, where his name was Ernst. His parents had brought him to Palestine in November 1933. He’d tried signing up the first time in Jerusalem when the war broke out, soon after his fifteenth birthday. By his third try, he was better prepared. He brought a letter from the association of Jewish immigrants from Germany certifying his false biography.

  That spring Gottlieb was in a training course for truck drivers at Sarafand when an officer came to recruit native German speakers for a new commando unit. Gottlieb and one other soldier signed up.32 The officer was almost certainly Herbert Cecil Buck.

  Captain Buck was twenty-four and had studied German at Oxford. At the end of 1941, near Gazala in Libya, he’d been taken prisoner. He escaped, stole a dead German officer’s uniform, talked his way through encounters with Axis soldiers, and made it to British-held territory. His adventure demonstrated how easily one could move behind enemy lines with borrowed clothes and fluent German.33

  By April, Buck was building the Special Interrogation Group, the SIG, a name falsely suggesting that the unit would question captured German soldiers. The recruits were “fluent German linguists… mainly Palestinians of German origin.” (The writer used the common meaning of the word “Palestinians,” which meant Jews when no further identification was given.) Some, like Maurice Tiefenbrunner, a twenty-six-year-old who had in fact reached Palestine on an illegal ship weeks before the war broke out, had already fought as commandos against Italy in East Africa. There weren’t many of them. One captured German command car and two German three-quarter-ton trucks were requisitioned to take the entire SIG, otherwise known as Captain Buck’s Group, into Libya.

  Intelligence officer John Haselden, now at headquarters in Cairo, wrote to the head of an existing commando force. “For our various nefarious schemes,” Haselden said, “we are particularly anxious to build up a stock of German and Italian accessories… such things as matches, notebooks, rations, etc.” Collect them and bring them in from the desert, he asked. Two German prisoners of war who’d once been in the French Foreign Legion and professed to be anti-Nazis were recruited. At a base in Egypt, they trained the Jewish commandos to goose-step, sing German songs, drive captured German trucks, speak Panzerarmee Afrika slang, and rattle off their invented German identification.

  Eliahu Gottlieb, fictional nineteen-year-old, was now a fictional Aryan soldier, with German matches and a photograph of a blonde girlfriend—actually a British woman soldier—in his pocket.

  “AXIS MAY ATTACK Syria either by passage through Turkey or by seaborne inva
sion,” said the report from Colonel Fellers, as paraphrased for President Roosevelt’s war room. British intelligence sources told Fellers they did “not believe either of these operations probable.”

  Fellers disagreed. The Turks might indeed agree to let a German army through their territory. Moreover, “Brit prestige in Moslem Turkey has been lowered since the episode in Abdine [sic] Palace”34—that is, Lampson’s coup.

  Despite the optimism of his intelligence officers, Auchinleck also worried about his northern front, meaning Syria. In the face of Churchill’s exasperated telegrams, Auchinleck would not move troops from Syria to Libya. If he attacked in the Western Desert, he considered, he might suddenly need to move planes from there to Syria. If he came to London to justify his near insubordination in person, it might be just at the moment when he needed to shift forces to the north. He believed he should be at his post, not off explaining himself.35

  If German armored columns did come from the north, British planners had concluded, the most that could be done in the northern stretches of Syria would be to slow them down. Their goal would be the Suez Canal. To get there, they’d have to get through the mountains of southern Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine to the coast. Mountains favored fixed positions and foot soldiers. Tanks might be new, but the shape of the land was the same as when the Babylonians and Assyrians had come with chariots. On Mt. Carmel above Haifa, by April of 1942, rows of iron rails stuck upward at an angle from the hard earth to block tanks. Trenches zigzagged through the rocks. On high points where tourists might come in peace to look across the hilltops all the way to the sea, the earth had been flattened in semicircles for artillery pieces.

  “Large areas of the defenses are tank-proof,” a British defensive plan said. The exceptions included passes leading to the Jezreel Valley, as at Megiddo on the southern end of the Carmel range, on a route taken by the armies of empires since the time of the pharaohs. The plan’s maps showed heavy fortifications around Megiddo—or Armageddon, as the name appears in New Testament Greek.