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Stagnation in the Allied Camp
In stark contrast to the sprawling secret services of Hitler, the democratic countries either had no intelligence services worthy of the name or maintained severely constricted, hibernating organizations. The French and British services were in the latter category. They subsisted largely on shoestring appropriations and coasted on past prestige with the inevitable consequences. To put it bluntly, both the French and British secret services were just plain bad, totally inadequate to the challenge and demands of those fateful years.
In France, which had produced Joseph Fouché, one of history’s most nefarious spymasters, intelligence was a traditional instrument of power, but it was practiced as an art rather than an exact science. In line with the chaotic organization of the French government and the jealousy-ridden, predatory bureaucracy of its permanent officials, intelligence was decentralized and compartmentalized. Each service kept aloof from the others and actually frowned upon liaison or cooperation for fear that concord might compromise autonomy.
In 1939, France had a galaxy of truly brilliant ambassadors stationed at the key capitals. Men like André François-Poncet and Robert Coulondre, successive ambassadors in Berlin during these stormy days, were fully capable of procuring their own information and evaluating it in their reports to the Quai d’Orsay, but they had no control over what was done with their reports back home. In the French table of organization, intelligence per se was regarded as the responsibility of the armed forces; accordingly, the major intelligence services were lodged deep within the military establishment.
On the eve of the Second World War, France had four major intelligence services, but no agency to co-ordinate or synchronize them. The army had two, the Second and Fifth Sections of the General Staff; the former engaged in general intelligence and strategic evaluation; the latter, in espionage and counter-espionage. The navy had its parallel intelligence division. The Air Ministry had a somewhat smaller intelligence section, probably the best of the lot, because, being the youngest, it was not yet encumbered by traditional impediments.
By virtue of its age, influence and adeptness at arrogating power to itself, the army’s Bureau de Renseignement—the Second Bureau—came to occupy a central position in this intelligence labyrinth. It was a cloistered, professorial organization whose distance from the realities of the day was somehow symbolized by its location. It was housed at La Ferète-sous-Jouarre, well away from the hustle and bustle of Paris and also physically separated from the Fifth Section.
Despite its gray pre-eminence, Army Intelligence suffered from various fatal handicaps. For one thing, it was headed by officers of relatively low rank. In 1939, its chief was Gauche, a colonel. Head of the Second Bureau was Baril, a major. Gauche and Baril happened to be men of marked personality and profound intelligence, but their influence did not reach far, even within their own organizations. They were constantly stymied by brother officers who sat closer to the commanding generals, and who were remarkably uninfluenced by hard information when arriving at their own judgments.
Gauché, for example, made several valiant efforts to funnel information about the Polish campaign up to General Gamelin, commander-in-chief of the army. He hoped it would induce the general to alter his outmoded, stolid strategy. He got as far as Colonel Préaud, a friend of Gamelin and head of the commander’s Operations Bureau. Préaud found himself in disagreement with Gauché’s conclusions and refused to forward even the intelligence on which they were based.
The generals themselves were inclined to disregard or dismiss the conclusions of their intelligence officers. When General Weygand was presented with a report on mechanized warfare that proposed a revamping of the French military machine, he scribbled on the margin of the document (which, incidentally, was prepared by Charles de Gaulle) : “What you have written has deeply interested me, but I do not agree.” That was the end of the matter.
Similarly, the Second Bureau differed from the senior French observers in its facts and evaluations of the lessons of the Polish campaign. But so great was General Gamelin’s distance from intelligence that he did not find time even to leaf through the Polish dossier of the Second Bureau.
The Second Bureau was burdened by a number of officers forced down its throat because they happened to be friends or protégés of generals. Military attachés were so chosen and the Bureau had to depend on them for most of its intelligence. During the years immediately preceding the Second World War, Colonel Didelet—a man, who, like his aide and his predecessor, could not speak German—was French military attaché at the crucial Berlin post. Didelet received the appointment because he was one of Weygand’s protégés. In Berlin he lived in a fool’s paradise. The reports he sent to Vincennes read like fairy tales today. He failed to find out the actual strength, the doctrine, tactics and over-all purpose of the German armored divisions, the very divisions soon to be assigned the dominant role in vanquishing France.
And the Deuxième Bureau was frozen stiff in its own tradition. Despite men like Gauchér and Baril at the top, the organization was antiquated and inefficient. Its blunders ranged from minor tactical faux pas to major strategic errors. On the General Staff map put out by the cartographic branch, the German city of Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) was placed inside Belgium. The main Hamburg-Berlin railway line was marked as a branch, capable of carrying only light traffic. The periodic Intelligence Summaries contained fundamental errors of fact and judgment, which in several instances had serious consequences. The historian Marc Block, who served as an intelligence officer during World War II, maintains that the gross errors in the Intelligence Summaries were, in part, responsible for the disastrous defeat of France in 1940.
“It should be the business of Intelligence,” Block wrote in his melancholy post-mortem, “to anticipate … needs, and to provide the required facts even before they are demanded. It should circulate to each, all the relevant information as soon as it is available. But instead of this being done, Intelligence scarcely ever moved outside the narrow limits prescribed for it by a tradition that knew nothing of the needs of mechanical warfare.”
In France, it may truly be said, the intelligence service both mirrored the confusion of France and contributed handsomely to deepening that confusion.
England was only a little better off.
To the outsider the British secret service is a vague, almost chimerical organization. The government steadfastly refused either to confirm or deny its very existence, to blame it publicly for its blunders or to claim credit for its successes. The very motto of the Secret Service is: “Never explain, never apologize.” All attacks upon the Secret Service are mutely absorbed and no charge, however preposterous or damaging, is ever dignified with an answer or denial.
The ironclad secrecy in which Britain wrapped its Secret Service was part prudence and part whimsy; to a large extent, the latter. It was a romantic masquerade that appealed to Britons, a grandiose pageantry of espionage that in 1939, on the eve of another world war, was anachronistic, even childish.
Growing exasperation with this confidential strong arm of His Majesty’s Government induced members of Parliament to breach the sacrosanct tradition and openly discuss the apparent decay of the Secret Service.
In the House of Commons, Geoffrey Mander bemoaned “the frequent appalling ignorance of the British Government on the subject of what is going on abroad.” Mr. Lees-Smith demanded that the Secret Service be removed from the aegis of the Foreign Office because its traditions and methods were “not suited for dealing with the particular methods which have to be adopted with a regime of the Nazi type.”
Most outspoken and eloquent, as usual, was the Cassandra of those days, Winston S. Churchill, who voiced the most direct criticism of the Secret Service. On April 13, 1939, in the wake of Hitler’s occupation of Czechoslovakia, he said: “After twenty-five years’ experience in peace and war, I believe the British Intelligence Service to be the finest of its kind in the world.
Yet we have seen, both in the case of the subjugation of Bohemia and on the occasion of the invasion of Albania, that Ministers of the Crown had apparently no inkling, or at any rate, no conviction, of what was coming.”
The stagnation of the Secret Service was evident both at home and in the field. It was most glaring within the Foreign Office and suffered from all the shortcomings of British diplomacy of that period. Members of the Secret Service adopted the hoary Victorian mannerisms of British diplomats and their penchant for both decorum and intrigue. Political intelligence became a tool abused by department heads, the middle-layer of permanent officials. Anarchy was rampant and the traditional secrecy cloaked, not only confidential transactions, but the anarchy as well.
In time of war, Britain reaches out and enlists the very best brains of the Commonwealth in the secret service. Great writers such as Maugham and Mackenzie; outstanding scholars like Ewing, Hogarth and Lawrence; brilliant politicians of the stature of Wilson and Cox were brought into the service to serve as intelligence specialists in areas they knew best.
But in the lazy and leisurely days of peace, British intelligence falls back on the “corps,” a handful of lifetime professionals. Some of these men prove excellent technicians, well trained, in the legendary “Black Castle” which allegedly houses the Imperial General Staff’s college of spies, but usually they are men with little savvy or imagination. They go by the textbook. They incline to think, along with Falstaff: “Pray that our armies join not in a hot day; for, by the Lord, I take but two shirts out with me, and I mean not to sweat extraordinarily.”
Then there was the question of money. In emergencies Britain can be lavish, but in time of peace she is often unusually miserly.
On the eve of the First World War, His Majesty’s Secret Service received the niggardly appropriation of some forty-seven thousand pounds, as compared with the seventy thousand pounds which Cromwell allocated to John Thurloe two centuries earlier, when the purchasing power of the pound was enormously greater.
The result of this was disastrous. The Foreign Office was forced to dismantle the Political Intelligence Department, to let its best men go, and to get along as best it could. By 1938, the budget of the Service had been increased to more than four hundred and fifty thousand pounds. But most of it had to be spent on combating foreign agents swarming all over the British Isles and the empire. It was not until the Czechoslovak crisis that the Foreign Office suddenly decided to revive the Political Intelligence Department (called P.I.D. or, colloquially, “Pids”) and appointed a brilliant career diplomatist, Rex Leeper, as its chief. This department did not go into actual operation until September 10, 1939, a week after the outbreak of the war. Leeper set it up at Woburn, the estate of the Duke of Bedford—an intelligence service, as Bruce Lockhart remarked, fifty miles from the center of intelligence.
The revival of “Pids” compounded the anarchy, for now the Secret Service complex became even more complex. For one thing Leeper, despite his qualifications, did not become chief of the Secret Service. In fact, his own department was hardly secret at all. The actual chief of the labyrinthian service was hidden somewhere deep under cover and conveniently so, because he had nothing to be proud of or to shout about.
Anarchy and confusion were not confined to London; if possible, they were even worse in the field.
It is the practice of secret services to cover sensitive areas with networks of operatives prepared long in advance; some of these networks are never used. They are supposed to provide assurance that in critical situations they can supply whatever intelligence is needed.
What with its curtailed appropriations and its world-wide commitments, the British maintained the barest skeleton network; even so, both the Foreign Office and the War Office’s Directorate of Intelligence had their own operatives in Germany. These were full-time, indoctrinated, trained espionage agents in the exact sense of the term, working on a preconceived plan and on a long-range basis, quite independent of ad hoc informants and volunteer helpers.
Their presence was evident; from time to time Reinhard Heydrich’s SD and other organs of German counter-espionage managed to catch British spies red-handed. In 1938–1939, they executed twenty-three common, garden-variety spies, all of them German nationals. Among them were several rather minor agents in British employ, working as train-watchers or as local observers of airports, barracks, railroad junctions and the like.
These men and women were managed by either the service attaches at the Embassy in Berlin, or by the British consuls scattered across the Reich, but chiefly by the so-called Continental Secret Service. It was never thought advisable to maintain the headquarters of the Continental Secret Service in the country which was the major target of espionage. The practice was rather to establish this central office under some plausible cover in a nearby friendly country that was expected to remain neutral.
Until midsummer of 1938, the chief Continental base was in Vienna. It operated behind the front of the British Passport Office, traditionally a dependence of the Secret Service. The Passport Officer was Captain Thomas Kendrick, one of the foremost career officers of the British Secret Service.
Kendrick’s position became untenable when, in March, 1938, the Germans annexed Austria, occupied Vienna and instituted a manhunt for spies. It did not take them long to get around to Kendrick who was arrested on charges of espionage. The Foreign Office went through the usual motions of protestation, but all it really wanted was to get Kendrick out of jail and back to London. On August 22, he was expelled. Though he was not any the worse for the experience, his network, of course, collapsed.
After that, the center of British espionage activities against Germany shifted to Copenhagen, but, in November, 1938, this shift also suffered a serious setback. The Danes, disturbed by the increased espionage activities of foreigners on their soil, started an elaborate spy hunt and one Waldemar Poetzsch was caught in the net. At that time all espionage agents were ipso facto presumed to be in German service, but Poetzsch’s interrogation developed the startling fact that he was working for the British. The Danes were most reluctant to interfere with the operations of a British agent, but, since his arrest had been publicized, they had to salt him away. His trial was held in camera, but the Germans managed to procure Poetzsch’s confession, and thus learned a lot about the management and the operations of the Continental Secret Service.
Additional damaging information reached the Germans from another Danish source, the police, which had a special department for counter-espionage. Section III-F of German military intelligence managed to infiltrate this department and enlist the confidential assistant of the chief of police. From this source, the Germans obtained exact information about the activities of the Continental Secret Service, not only in Denmark, but in all of Scandinavia.
After the Poetzsch debacle, Continental Secret Service shifted its headquarters to The Hague. This office was headed by a “lifer,” a professional spymaster named Henry Richard Stevens. He was a major in the British Army who had been trained for espionage in the “Black Castle.” He managed a sizable organization that operated in more or less independent sections. There were political and economic branches, a counter-espionage department and military and naval sections, each under a chief who had considerable autonomy. The Military Section was under an apparently retired officer of the British Army, Captain Payton Sigmund Best, who had first come to Holland in World War I.
Best operated a network of agents inside Germany. They supplied him with whatever military information they could lay their hands on. His chief liaison with this net was an excitable little “refugee” who called himself Dr. Franz and who supplied authentic intelligence about the rapid development of the Luftwaffe. Best confined his interest to espionage proper and, until the outbreak of the shooting war, kept aloof from operatives in the field.
The Holland field office attained an importance second to none. Its excellent prewar performance was largely due to the efficiency of the intell
igence department of the Netherlands Army under General van Oorshot, with which the British worked, and to the competence of a single man, the Dutch Military Attaché in Berlin. He was a soft-voiced, pleasant-mannered, self-effacing colonel of the Netherlands army named Jan G. Sas, an outstanding figure in this twilight world of espionage.
Sas had many good friends within the Wehrmacht and was on especially intimate terms with Colonel Hans Oster, chief of staff of the German Military Intelligence, a determined and energetic anti-Nazi within the Abwehr. Oster was by nature rather suspicious, but about Sas he had no qualms. He talked to him even more freely than to his fellow conspirators. The two colonels would meet in Oster’s house in Zehlendorf, usually after dark, for nominally social visits. During those calls Oster supplied Colonel Sas with all the intelligence to which he had access and part of this material eventually found its way to London.
Britain had still another field office in Berne, Switzerland, but it did not come into its own until after the invasion of Holland in 1940.
The contribution this checkered field service could make was somewhat hampered by the aging of the dormant network. Much of it had been in existence for years, if not decades, and its members had become lazy and stale. Another deficiency was inherent in the quality of the very men who were supposed to manage the various rings.
Britain was unfortunate in having in Berlin an ambassador to whom espionage was repugnant (likely to interfere with his policy of appeasement) and whose preconceived notions precluded the proper evaluation of even the most reliable information if it ran counter to the grain. This was Sir Nevile Henderson, a rather stiff career diplomatist, befuddled by the intricacies and chicanery of the unorthodox Nazi diplomacy. Actual espionage was not in his domain. It was managed in part by the anonymous delegate of the Secret Service and in part by the service attachés, but they nevertheless came under the spell of this pathetic envoy.
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