by Max Hastings
Ultra came fully into its own, serving up to Allied warlords a daily feast of secret knowledge, only between late 1942 and 1945, when the recipients knew that they were anyway certain to win the war. It is impossible credibly to quantify its contribution to final victory, to foreshortening the conflict, because it was a Western Allied tool, while the Red Army bore the principal burden of destroying Nazism. What can be said, however, is that Bletchley Park and its brilliant civilian brains, together with their American counterparts, went far to compensate for deficiencies in the fighting qualities of the British and US armies against the Wehrmacht and the Imperial Japanese Army. As I asserted in All Hell Let Loose, for all the genius of the German soldier and courage of the Japanese one on the battlefield, the Allies made better war than did the Axis nations. The superiority of their strategic, if not always tactical, intelligence apparatus was a key element in this achievement. Despite the criticisms of Western Allied secret services in the narrative above, they were much more effective than those of their foes, and of the Soviet Union. Winston Churchill deserves credit for his personal engagement with the secret services in general and with Bletchley Park in particular, upon which he conferred a benign patronage unmatched by any other war leader. The indispensable element in making all intelligence useful, in peace or war, is that it should pass into the hands of a wise and effective leader; if such a person is absent, whether general, admiral or statesman, then even the most privileged information is worthless.
It is sometimes argued that certain nations display a genius for intelligence which others lack. Although the Japanese conducted meticulous tactical reconnaissance of the targets for their initial 1941–42 assaults on the Western Powers, thereafter their mindset proved ill-suited to the collection or objective analysis of intelligence. The Russians sustained their historic gift for conspiracy, but made little effective use of what they learned. The Americans’ wartime intelligence activities were dominated by successes in breaking Japanese codes, though they also developed – through the Research & Analysis division of OSS – a more effective arm for economic and political assessment than MI6 possessed, or even recognised a need for. Rather than distinguishing relative intelligence skills by nationality, it seems more appropriate to do so by culture. Many of the finest intelligence officers of all nations were Jews. The Third Reich paid heavily for excluding them from its secret services, as also did the Soviet Union when it purged them in the early 1950s: Semyon Semyonov, Moscow’s brilliant agent-runner in America, was among those then dismissed. The nations that gathered and used information best in the Second World War were those committed to intellectual honesty and the pursuit of truth, while those that failed were the dictatorships to which truth was inherently alien, unacceptable, antipathetic – which included the Soviet Union. While democracies do not always trade in frankness, as the modern experience of the 2003 Iraq War vividly demonstrates, at least most of their citizens are reared to regard truth as a virtue, while those of dictatorships are not.
As for the guerrilla campaigns conducted in Axis-occupied nations, only in Yugoslavia and Russia between 1943 and 1945 did partisans make a significant contribution to the final outcome, and even there all the big things had to be done by the Red Army. In the Far East, SOE and OSS could achieve nothing that mattered in societies overwhelmingly preoccupied with ridding themselves of their colonial masters, as well as of the Japanese. In Western Europe, the Anglo-American secret services performed a useful function by sustaining an Allied presence, and marginal military activity, in advance of D-Day, when the process of liberation began in earnest. Their foremost contribution, however, which justified their existence, was to raise banners throughout the occupied countries beneath which fighters for freedom could rally. The Allied agents who went forth into occupied Europe offered a symbolic sacrifice which many of their inhabitants – the non-communist ones, at least – never forgot.
Most of the supposed military achievements of guerrillas, especially in connection with D-Day, were negligible: for instance, the story that the Resistance ‘liberated’ parts of France in August 1944 is a fairy tale – the German army retired because it had suffered defeat in Normandy, with mobs of maquisards snapping at its heels. ‘Resistance is small business,’ said a shrewd OSS officer, Macdonald Austin, who served in occupied France. ‘Any attempt to make it more than that is bound to go wrong.’ Yet the moral contribution of secret war, which would have been impossible without the sponsorship of SOE and OSS, was beyond price. It made possible the resurrection of self-respect in occupied societies which would otherwise have been obliged to look back on the successive chapters of their experience of the conflict through a dark prism: military humiliation, followed by enforced collaboration with the enemy, then by belated deliverance at the hands of foreign armies. As it was, and entirely thanks to Resistance, all European nations could cherish their cadres of heroes and martyrs, enabling the mass of their citizens who did nothing, or who served the enemy, to be painted over on the grand canvas cherished in the perception of their descendants.
Finally, a hindsight and a foresight. This book has trafficked little in romance, much in harsh realities. Yet no account of the secret war would be complete without acknowledging that for many agents serving their countries abroad, especially when they were winning, the experience was irresistibly thrilling, even when their own lives were imperilled. A wartime SOE officer posted to the Levant described the impact on local listeners when he used the French word ‘intelligence’ to describe his mission: ‘The sharp intake of breath by Arabs who had read their romans policiers, and knew the omnipotence, omniscience and ruthlessness of the British Secret Service, was flatteringly audible. Some instantly asked me if I was a lord.’ He loved it. So, too, did many other spies of many nations. Why else would they have taken the work?
Between 1939 and 1945, secret war was still in its infancy. The victories that decided outcomes were secured by great armies, fleets, air forces. In the twenty-first century, however, it seems ever less plausible that mass uniformed forces of the Great Powers, numbered in millions, will again clash in arms. By contrast the importance to national security of intelligence, eavesdropping, codebreaking and counter-insurgency has never been greater. Cyber-warfare is a logical evolution of the process that began in Room 40 during World War I, and expanded vastly at Bletchley Park and OKH/GdNA, Arlington Hall and Op-20-G during World War II. It would be extravagant to suggest that conventional strife has become redundant: in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin finds main battle tanks highly serviceable. But he also employs tactics of subversion backed by Moscow’s secret soldiers that would command the immediate sympathy and applause of Pavel Sudoplatov.
Electronic surveillance of communications has become the foremost weapon of both Britain and the United States in identifying and monitoring terrorists within their own frontiers and abroad, to the dismay of some civil libertarians. The 2013–15 revelations of Edward Snowden, the former NSA employee who has seen fit to disclose the scale of Western eavesdropping, from the awesomely inappropriate sanctuary of Moscow, has done important damage to American and British security, and invites a stab of relief that he did not serve at wartime Bletchley or Arlington Hall. He inhabits a new universe, in which old definitions of conflict, and also of patriotism, are no longer universally acknowledged. The balance of tactics and methodology in struggles between nations has changed, is changing, and will continue to change. Secret war, as it was practised by the nations that fought the conflict of 1939–45, may well prove to be future war.
* The author made such a request for information to today’s ‘C’ in December 2014, and was told, albeit in the most courteous terms, that there can be no breach of the principle that MI6’s post-1949 archive remains closed.
Picture Section
Soldiers of Hitler’s Wehrmacht use an Enigma cipher machine to encrypt secret signals. Breach of Enigma by the codebreakers of Bletchley Park became one of the greatest British achievements of the Second World
War. (© Scherl/Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo)
RUSSIAN SPIES AND SPYMASTERS: Zoya Rybkina, pitiless as she was beautiful. (Baikal Press)
Pavel Sudoplatov, whose memoirs provide some of the most vivid testimony about Soviet espionage against both enemies and supposed allies. (From Pavel Sudoplatov, Special Tasks)
A charming snapshot of evil out of hours – Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s foremost secret policeman, holds Stalin’s daughter Svetlana, while in the background the master of the Kremlin relaxes with his pipe. Beria proved better at guarding Stalin from the Russian people than from his foreign enemies. (Sovfoto/Getty Images)
Vasily and Elizabeth Zarubin, two of Russia’s most successful agent-runners in Europe and the United States. (From Pavel Sudoplatov, Special Tasks)
Richard Sorge of the GRU, greatest secret agent of his time, though his influence on Kremlin policy is more doubtful. (© Ullsteinbild/TopFoto)
THE CODEBREAKERS: A scene in Bletchley Park’s Hut 3, probably in the latter half of the war, because conditions look less primitive than they were at the outset. (Bletchley Park Trust/Getty Images)
Bombes, created by Alan Turing in 1940, were revolutionary electro-mechanical aids, here tended by Wrens. They did not decrypt Enigma signals, but provided vital accelerators for doing so. (Bletchley Park Trust)
KEY PLAYERS at GC&CS: Welchman, pictured in his Cambridge days. (By permission of the Master and Fellows of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge)
Alexander, who played chess for England. (From Harry Golombek, Golombek’s Encyclopedia of Chess)
Milner-Barry. (From Harry Golombek, Golombek’s Encyclopedia of Chess)
Turing in youthful incarnation as a Cambridge athlete as well as mathematician. (King’s College Library, AMT/K/7/41: AMT)
THE WAR AT SEA was more dramatically influenced by Ultra intelligence than the land struggle. A convoy escort depth-charges a U-boat. (National Archives & Records Administration, 26-G-1517)
A German survivor pleads for rescue. (National Archives & Records Administration, FDR-PHOCO 195468)
A remarkable sequence of pictures of the November 1940 German scuttling of the British merchantman SS Automedon, after its capture by the commerce-raider Atlantis while carrying cabinet documents that detailed for the Japanese British military weakness in the Far East. (Abt. Militärarchiv/Bundesarchiv)
SPYMASTERS: Canaris of the Abwehr at a dinner party with Reinhard Heydrich of the SS. (Scherl/Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo)
Schellenberg of the RSHA, who took over the Abwehr in 1944. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of the Berlin Document Center)
František Moravec, who ran Czech intelligence from 1937 to 1945. (Military History Institute Prague)
‘C’, Stewart Menzies, chief of MI6. (Evening Standard/Getty Images)
ONE OF CANARIS’S MEN: Hermann Görtz, who spied for the Abwehr with heroic incompetence, here enjoying harmonica accompaniment from Marianne Emig, who accompanied him on a 1935 tour of English airfields which took him to Brixton prison. In 1940, he parachuted into Ireland from a Heinkel bomber. (IMAGNO/Austrian Archives (S)/Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo)
AMERICA’S CODEBREAKERS: The Registration Room of the US Army’s monitoring unit at Avon Tyrell, part of the out-station of Arlington Hall in Britain. (From Stephen Budiansky, Battle of Wits)
Joe Rochefort of the US Navy, the man who made possible American victory at Midway in June 1942, wags a finger at fellow domino-players aboard the cruiser USS Indianapolis, in a fashion that helps to explain senior officers’ disdain for him. (Photo by Carl Mydans/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)
Tommy Dyer, most brilliant cryptanalyst of Rochefort’s team in ‘the Dungeon’ at Pearl Harbor. (From Elliot Carlson, Joe Rochefort’s War)
Stars of the US Army’s Signals Intelligence Service. In the centre, standing, is Frank Rowlett, credited as ‘the man who broke Purple’, with Abraham Sinkov to his left and below, in civilian clothes, the pioneer William Friedman. (From Stephen Budiansky, Battle of Wits)
LEADERS OF THE RED ORCHESTRA: Libertas and Harro Schulze-Boysen. (Collection Megele/Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo)
Arvid and Mildred Harnack. All four suffered dreadful deaths in Nazi hands. (Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand/Bundesarchiv, Plak 009-009A-020)
SOVIET SPIES IN EUROPE: Alexander Foote. (Jay Robert Nash Collection/CRIA Images)
Alexander Radó. (The National Archives, KV 2/1647)
Anatoli Gourevitch. (From Anatoli Gourevitch, Un certain monsieur Kent)
Rudolf Rössler. (dpa/Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo)
Ursula Hamburger. (Jay Robert Nash Collection/CRIA Images)
Leopold Trepper. (The National Archives, KV2-20741)
SECRET WARRIORS: Italian SOE agent Paola del Din in parachute kit, an image that captures the terrific emotional charge many agents gained from their roles. (From Marcus Binney, The Women Who Lived for Danger)
Oluf Reed-Olsen stands on the right in a photograph of two carbine-wielding Norwegians. (From Oluf Reed-Olsen, Two Eggs on My Plate)
French agent-runner ‘Colonel Rémy’. (Rue des Archives/Tallandier/Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo)
‘Cicero’ relaxes. (From Elyesa Bazna, I Was Cicero)
Nigel Clive of MI6. (From Nigel Clive, A Greek Experience)
Ronald Seth of SOE, ‘Blunderhead’, pictured while in German hands. (From Ronald Seth, A Spy Has No Friends)
Sterling Hayden of OSS. (© John Springer Collection/CORBIS)
Hugh Trevor-Roper of MI6, who by 1945 knew far more about the opeions of the Abwehr than any German. (The Literary Estate of Lord Dacre of Glanton)
Bill Bentinck, chairman of Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee. (Photo by Tony Linck/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)
A wardrobe specialist at OSS’s London station dresses an American agent for a mission in the latest Continental fashion. (Joseph E. Persico Papers, Envelope A, Hoover Institution Archives: Courtesy of Hoover Institution Library & Archives, Stanford University)
TRAITORS: The young Anthony Blunt, before he became an officer of MI5 and an informant of the NKVD. (Photo by Lytton Strachey/Frances Partridge/Getty Images)
A Russian stamp celebrating Kim Philby’s contribution to the Revolution. (Photo by Terry Ashe/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)
Donald and Melinda Maclean with their children on a transatlantic liner. (Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone/Getty Images)
Alger Hiss successfully bluffing out his evidence to the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1948 – he was long dead before his treason was confirmed. (Photo by Thomas D. Mcavoy/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)
John Maynard Keynes in amicable converse with Harry Dexter White, one of Moscow’s most important US secret sources. (Photo by Thomas D. Mcavoy/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)
GERMANS: Hitler, the Allies’ best friend in frustrating intelligence analysis, with courtiers including Keitel, Göring and Ribbentrop. (Ullsteinbild/Getty Images)
A general staff officer extends himself to explore Soviet deployments. (Courtesy of the National Cryptologic Museum)
The V-2, which alarmed the Allies and set them one of the most intractable intelligence puzzles of the war. (From R.V. Jones, Most Secret War)
RESISTANCE: One of the seminal images of the secret war – Frenchmen use a bren gun supplied by the British to harass Germans fleeing France in August 1944. (© Bettmann/CORBIS)
An SOE trainee sets charges on a railway line. (Imperial War Museum, HU 056936)
An SOE trainee wires London. (National Archives, HS 5/121)
Three SAS officers of the ‘Bulbasket’ mission to France, June 1944. Lt. Twm Stephens wears the civilian disguise in which he rode a bicycle to Châtellerault to reconnoitre petrol trains, intended to fuel the Das Reich 2nd SS Armoured Division, for attack by RAF Mosquitoes. Only John Tonkin, on the left with the pipe, survived the operation. (From Max Hastings, Das Reich)