Burn After Reading

by Ladislas Farago

  Called affectionately the “Old Firm” by its habitués, S.O.E. was housed in two buildings on Baker Street—the brass in Michael House, and the rank and file in Norgeby House, close to Sherlock Holmes’ fictitious dwelling. To passersby, the agency was the “Inter-Service Research Bureau”, or at least that was what the sign said on the door of Norgeby House. Other sections of S.O.E. were scattered throughout London, behind screens of similar secrecy; one occupied premises from which a famous circus had just been gently evicted.

  By the whimsical placing of S.O.E. under the Ministry of Economic Warfare, its supreme chief became a man one would never have normally associated with the melodramatic pursuits of espionage and sabotage. He was the Right Honorable Hugh Dalton, son of a prominent clergyman, Eton-bred barrister and an economist with a doctorate from King’s College. He was the Labor Party’s outstanding budgetary expert, former Chancellor of the Exchequer. Dalton condescended to the management of S.O.E. with a certain professorial aloofness and the righteous indignation of a canon who has wandered by chance into a house of ill-repute. Someone in S.O.E. once said that Dalton reminded him of one of those large dinner gongs which stand on wooden legs in old country houses. “When you beat it with a stick padded with chamois leather,” the quipster remarked, “it gives out a deep, booming sound. That’s Dr. Dalton—but there’s no dinner at the end of it.”

  But Dalton’s mental and physical vigor impressed even the most intellectual and athletic members of this organization, which was composed in equal measure of brain and brawn. “I found him,” Bruce Lockhart remarked, “very receptive to new ideas, decisive and quick in action, and a tiger for work. We christened him Dr. Dynamo, and he deserved the compliment.”

  Aside from S.O.E., Dalton supervised another alphabetic combination, the P.W.E., the initials standing for Political Warfare Executive. It was headed eventually by Bruce Lockhart and was to do in the propaganda sphere what S.O.E. was to achieve in espionage and sabotage, to harass the enemy at home and abroad. Its purpose was to attack people’s minds and move them to controlled action.

  It was P.W.E. that produced the outstanding propaganda appeal of the war: the V-symbol with all its ingenious sideshows, the Morse beat, the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the V-signs scribbled on enemy walls and Churchill’s enthusiastic participation through the display of the sign on all opportune occasions.

  The campaign was thought up by Victor de Laveleye and Douglas Ritchie, assistant to the director of B.B.C.’s European Services, who became well known during the war by his nom de radio, Colonel Britton. One night in the winter of 1940, de Laveleye, a former member of the Belgian Government, found an intriguing item in an R.A.F. intelligence summary. It reported that Belgian patriots were defying the German Field Security Police (a branch of Abwehr III) by writing the three letters “R.A.F.” on the walls and shutters of their houses. De Laveleye got the idea to substitute the letter “V” for the three letters “R.A.F.”, partly because it was more meaningful with its connotation of victory or victoire, and partly because it entailed reduced risk, because it could be written more swiftly.

  De Laveleye was then in charge of the B.B.C. broadcasts in French to Belgium and mentioned his idea in passing on one of his broadcasts. He thought no more about it until he heard that the “V” was cropping up in increasing numbers on Belgian walls.

  At about the same time, and quite independently of de Laveleye’s historic brainwave, Ritchie also thought of a symbol that could, through its powerful visual appeal, inspire and encourage the subjugated Europeans. Eventually, as John Baker White put it, Ritchie’s and de Laveleye’s suggestions came to be fused in the phenomenal “V” campaign. Haphazard though the original idea was, the campaign was executed with the utmost efficiency, and before long the symbol swept occupied Europe.

  By 1942, the activities of the Old Firm leveled off, and Dalton was replaced by the noble lord in whose charge the S.O.E. remained for the rest of the war: Major the Earl of Selborne. At the time of his appointment as Minister of Economic Warfare, he was fifty-five years old, and a cement manufacturer by profession.

  Both Dalton and Selborne were, in the final analysis, only nominal heads of S.O.E. Its actual chief was a seasoned and flexible young officer of the British Army’s General Staff, the legendary Colin Gubbins, then forty-four. He is the forgotten man of the secret war, the least known chief of wartime secret service (and that largely by his own choice). As soon as the war ended and he collected a string of decorations (including the Legion of Merit from the United States), the newly created knight, Sir Colin Gubbins, retired from the Army. He went into seclusion on the Isle of Harris, where he found the peace and tranquility he needed after “the long years of dreadful night”, as he put it.

  Gubbins directed a fantastic clandestine war that was, in his own words, “a day-to-day battle with the Gestapo, the Quislings and the Japanese secret police, one long continuous struggle, with torture and unbelievable suffering and death waiting around every corner at every moment.”

  No problem equal to his faced any other commander of the late war. He had no precedents, no experience on which to build; the Second World War was the first in history in which organized resistance in occupied territories was mounted on this scale, and was directed and supplied from outside. His task was vastly complicated by the multi-national character of his composite force and by the conflicting interests, ideas and aspirations of the émigré governments with which he had to work in close cooperation.

  S.O.E. experienced both misery and grandeur, scored amazing victories and suffered heartbreaking defeats. After all, S.O.E. had to cope with the pitfalls and risks of a hazardous coalition war waged by rank amateurs against seasoned and ruthless professionals. It was by sheer necessity composed of a miscellany of modern buccaneers.

  Ian Colvin, a foreign correspondent whose conscientious coverage of German dissidence took him deep into the bowels of the secret war, remarked that virtually the only survivors of S.O.E. were officers who held wartime jobs in London. It is true that the life expectancy of S.O.E. agents was distressingly brief. In one of his books, Peter Churchill listed some seventy fellow agents, of whom only twenty escaped capture or death. “Hundreds of men like me were sent to the occupied countries,” he wrote. “Some were captured on the very fields where their parachutes landed; some lasted for weeks; some for months; some were captured on the eve of victory, whilst a few were lucky enough to survive the entire war.”

  The high mortality rate of these agents reflected not only the occupational hazards, but also some of the inner shortcomings of S.O.E. As Colvin pointed out, many of its operations were gallant but ill-founded.

  Most of S.O.E.’s history is still suppressed by the application of the Official Secrets Act; the chances are that the whole of its story will never be told. A few of the narratives whose publication was authorized depict the Old Firm as a house occasionally divided against itself, rampant with jealousies, chaos and ignorance, its dissensions and bickerings endangering the men and women whose survival depended on the organizers at home. Jean Overton Fuller’s story of “Madeleine,” a pathetic young woman of the Resistance, abounds in complaints and reproaches, accusing S.O.E. of criminal blunders. Some of these mistakes were so monumental and sustained, so costly in the lives they claimed, that critics of S.O.E. averred there was more than just stupidity, disorganization, jealousy and carelessness behind them. “But corroboration or denial of these facts,” Colvin wrote, “even the investigation by Inter-Allied Commissions of Enquiry, of the possibilities of gross carelessness or treason had, in such instances, been frustrated by an order to burn the documentary records of Special Operations Executive after the war.”

  The influence of S.O.E.’s operations on the future stability of Europe was also questioned, notably by Captain Liddell Hart, who ventured the opinion that their long-range residue effect was deplorable. F. O. Miksche, wartime operations chief of a Gaullist secret service, agreed as stated b
elow :

  “The People’s Underground War [which S.O.E. was called upon to promote and stimulate] destroys the soul of a nation, systematically leading it into disobedience and disrespect of law and order. As in all revolutions, the People’s War means complete chaos, a savage struggle in which the end justifies the means, and vengeance, trickery, and even treachery, play a great part. Each action provokes a reaction, and the consequent reprisals engender hatred to a degree hitherto unknown. The Second World War has already proved all this, and we see in contemporary Europe the dire consequences of the war-time underground struggles.”

  Despite all its shortcomings, S.O.E. made a substantial contribution to victory, and undoubtedly saved many lives. Bruce Marshall, in his account of the White Rabbit, a famous operative of S.O.E., tells how agents “disrupted the enemy’s communications by blowing up railway tracks or hindered his war production by destroying pylons, electricity generating plants and machinery in factories. This form of warfare was both more accurate and benign than aerial bombardment. An agent insinuated into a factory could sabotage effectively and without loss of human life a piece of essential machinery that a squadron of bombers would be lucky to hit by chance.”

  Even the bloodletting caused by S.O.E. blunders, I submit, proved salutary in the end. I, for one, firmly believe that only austerity and anguish and pain can produce the determination and bring forth the sacrifice needed to win the secret war, while pampering and bribery will lead to stagnation and failure.

  10

  The Bitter Weeds of England

  In the summer of 1940, the Abwehr had reached its peak and was imperceptibly deteriorating; British Intelligence had moved out of its stupor and clumsiness, and had become, virtually overnight, a crucial arm of His Majesty’s Government. These changes exerted a decisive influence on history: Hitler needed the Abwehr more than anything else to smooth his way to his next destination; Churchill needed the counsel of his Intelligence Service to prevent the Fuehrer from reaching it.

  After the conclusion of the French campaign, Hitler was again somewhat uncertain about his future course. For a few days he toyed with peace feelers. Among others, the King of Sweden appeared behind the scenes and proffered his services to mediate some sort of a peace arrangement that would have enabled the Nazi to keep his loot. The services of Gustaf V were rejected by both sides; in indignation by Churchill, in puzzlement by Hitler. After that, Hitler no longer hesitated.

  On July 2, he sent orders to the Abwehr to start the assembly of intelligence needed for plans for an invasion of England.

  On July 16, he issued “Directive No. 16/40”, entitled “Preparations for a Landing Operation Against England.” The last sentence of the document’s preamble read: “The enterprise is to be referred to by the cover name, Sea Lion”—as transparent a cover name as there ever was, reflecting Hitler’s conceit and self-confidence.

  However, extreme measures were introduced to screen the operation. Only seven copies of the directive were prepared, one each for the supreme commanders of the Army, Navy and Air Force; one for General Jodl, chief of Hitler’s own general staff; and two for Section L (Landesverteidigung) in Jodl’s bureau, whose officers were to draft the plans. The seventh copy was locked up in Hitler’s own files.

  Despite this secrecy, however, the British managed to penetrate to the very core of Sea Lion. As early as June 27, an intelligence report arrived on Churchill’s desk indicating that Admiral Schniewind’s operations section in the German Admiralty was preoccupied with drafting invasion plans against England. The entire British Intelligence combine was alerted at once.

  Late at night on July 6, Colonel Jacobs presented to the Prime Minister the first of a series of invasion dossiers. It contained abundant data that, however, appeared to be somewhat contradictory. It had several reports from confidential informants indicating that England was, indeed, the Fuehrer’s next goal. But hard intelligence—reports of coast and train watchers and aerial reconnaissance—showed no evidence of German activity in preparation for an invasion.

  This uncertainty lasted until about the third week in July, when Military Intelligence began to identify Wehrmacht units apparently marked for the assault on England. Two mountain divisions, in particular, intrigued the British officers. They had been observed by agents during vigorous exercises with mules at the rocky French coastline near Boulogne. An agent by the name of Bruno was forthwith sent to Boulogne, and it was ascertained that those divisions were training in preparation for scaling the Folkestone cliffs.

  Among other invasion forces, the British succeeded in identifying two regiments of the 7th Parachute Division that were to descend, five thousand men strong, at the southern Downs. Elements of thirteen additional divisions were identified, deploying quietly all along the Channel coast from Ostende to Boulogne. At the same time, train watchers reported troop concentrations in the Pas de Calais and Normandy. Coast watchers noticed a large number of self-propelled barges and motor boats creeping along the French coast; aerial photographs presented a graphic demonstration of the gradual growth of danger.

  It became imperative to land agents on the French Channel coast to discover from close quarters what aerial reconnaissance inevitably missed, a string of painstakingly camouflaged coastal guns. French informants in the area were not yet available, so agents had to be found in Britain. One of the men who seemed to qualify was a prominent Westminster politician named R. E. Hutchinson, who used to visit the area around Cap Gris Nez year after year and also knew a lot about coastal artillery. But he was too well known in that part of France, and it was feared he might be recognized and betrayed. Hasty plastic surgery was performed to alter his features. He was still wearing the bandages over his new scars when he landed in France on his first mission. His journey was justified. He returned with detailed intelligence about those long-range coastal guns around the Cap.

  Then the secret service came through with a phenomenal scoop. Information was procured that Hitler had definitely decided to mount the invasion on September 15; and that it was to be where the Channel was narrowest, to hit the area between Folkestone and Eastbourne, and the beaches both south and north of Brighton.

  The decision was made on July 31. Information about it reached Churchill early in August, together with reports that the Army High Command was by no means enchanted with the prospects of the enterprise. On August 7, General Halder, chief of the Army General Staff, actually remonstrated with Hitler, suggesting that the invasion project, as envisaged by the German Admiralty, was tantamount to putting the army through a meat grinder. After that, some of the German generals referred to Sea Lion by a far less dignified name, Operation Meat Grinder.

  Tension mounted steadily. On September 7, British intelligence reported that the German barges and small ships had begun their move to staging points. The Luftwaffe was being augmented to striking strength. Several observers noticed that concentration of short-range Stukas, the Luftwaffe’s dreaded dive bombers, at advanced airfields had increased.

  In the possession of its vast intelligence dossier, Britain was able to make its dispositions prudently and well in advance. The situation was entirely different on the German side. This confused state was primarily due to the fact that the planners, including Admiral Schniewind and Jodl’s bright young men in Section L, had to make their designs in the woeful absence of up-to-date, comprehensive and trustworthy intelligence. On July 7, Field Marshal Keitel expressed the consensus when he described Sea Lion as “an extremely difficult operation that must be approached with the utmost caution” because, he said, “the intelligence available on the military preparedness of the island and on the coastal defenses is meagre and not very reliable.” Hitler was eyeless, like Samson in Gaza.

  When Hitler had commanded the Abwehr to obtain the necessary information for the invasion, Colonel Busch ordered what he still believed to be his network in Britain to drop everything else and get to work. What he got back was the ringing of the British carillon, a m
ass of data that was either useless or misleading. Hence Piekenbrock and Busch decided to send a new crop of agents into England and also to work with a ready-made network, the Irish Republican Army. This latter idea had a double aim: Ireland could be used as a point of entry for spies into England, and some information could be obtained directly there; also if an I.R.A. rebellion could be co-ordinated with Sea Lion it would provide an extremely handy diversion for further harassment of the British.

  For its first crack at Ireland, the Abwehr decided to employ a most unusual tactic—the use of a spy who had already fallen. He was a certain Herr Doktor Hermann Goertz, a disbarred Hamburg lawyer who had drifted into espionage because he could succeed at nothing else. As early as 1935, Goertz had been sent into England with a pretty “secretary,” Marianne Emig, to spy out the RAF airfields ringing London. It was a far-sighted move, since some of the information he procured helped to guide the Luftwaffe during the bombing of the city years later.

  But Goertz was soon nabbed and served four years for espionage. After his return to Germany in 1939, Busch decided to send him to Ireland. He was dropped by parachute, but through an error of navigation by a clumsy pilot, he came down in Northern Ireland and was spotted. He barely managed to get over the border into Eire a jump ahead of the Royal Constabulary and had to leave his radio and other equipment behind, which was soon discovered. The British promptly posted a price of three thousand pounds on his head. Since a substantial section, even of the I.R.A., was opposed to co-operating with the Germans, Goertz was both a hunted and a haunted man, and he was actually relieved when he was finally arrested. He served some years in an Irish internment camp, and was eventually scheduled to be turned over to the British. The night before the proposed transfer he committed suicide with a capsule of cyanide.