Burn After Reading

by Ladislas Farago

  And yet Major White found something interesting. Running along the beach were pipes with holes punched into them at regular intervals. There were fuel tanks and pumps behind the pipeline, feeding a mixture of gasoline, fuel oil and creosote into the pipes. The contraption operated like a garden sprinkler; it spewed flames along the beach and down to the water line. “In operation,” Baker White remarked, “they were a frightening spectacle, with clouds of thick, blinding black smoke through which shot great jets of red flame.”

  On the drive back to London, he could not get that flaming spectacle out of his mind. Suddenly he had a vision. He saw flames extending beyond the water line, setting the Channel itself on fire. “Setting the sea on fire,” he repeated again and again all the way home to London. How about spreading a rumor that Britain was, indeed, as Tennyson had put it, a looming bastion fringed with fire?

  Baker White consulted experts and they assured him that an operation like this would be extremely difficult and prohibitively expensive, but was feasible. Armed with this expert opinion, he worked up a memo and submitted it to the committee that was to pass on all such concoctions. Back came the committee’s okay, with the remark: “No objection, but we think it a pretty poor effort.”

  The rumor now floated out of Baker White’s hands and was planted by other organs of the British secret service in the usual spots: in the lobby of the Grand Hotel in Stockholm, the bars of the Avenida in Lisbon and the Ritz in Madrid, in Cairo and New York, Istanbul and Buenos Aires, wherever the Germans had their listening posts.

  There was not much more that Baker White and his associate rumor-spreaders could do, except to sit back and wait for the playback. For a while nothing happened. Then, abruptly, the first faint echo was heard. A German pilot, shot down in Kent, mentioned during his interrogation at the Cockfoster “cage” something about Britain’s “burning sea defenses.” A few days later, another Luftwaffe prisoner spoke of them again. After that came the deluge. Promoted and stimulated by elaborate instruments of political warfare, the rumor was sweeping the world.

  Two fortuitous events gave the rumor the plausibility and impetus it still needed to be devastatingly effective. An R.A.F. flight of bombers, on a routine mission against a concentration of German invasion barges, caught a battalion of Landsers at an exercise near Calais. A rain of incendiaries was showered on them and the men of the battalion were severely burned. The brand new French underground was already spreading the rumor. Now they could point to the Landsers in hospitals in France and Belgium as “evidence.”

  At about the same time, forty-odd German soldiers arrived in England. They were corpses washed up along the coast. They were members of another invasion battalion engaged in embarkation practice. A few of the barges had put out to sea, strayed into foul weather and sunk. The coming of these German bodies was quickly linked to the floating tall tale.

  “This was,” Churchill wrote, “the source of a widespread rumour that the Germans had attempted an invasion and had suffered very heavy losses either by drowning or by being burnt in patches of sea covered with flaming oil. We took no steps to contradict these tales, which spread freely through the occupied countries in a wildly exaggerated form, and gave much encouragement to the oppressed populations.”

  In France, as soon as a German soldier would enter a café, at least a few young men or women would usually get up and ostentatiously warm their hands at the stove. In Belgium and Holland, people would stop Germans politely on the streets, ask them for lights and then hold the flame of the match or lighter suggestively under the German’s nose.

  To the German High Command, this was no longer a joking matter, especially when the Abwehr received foolproof confirmation from its agents in England. Needless to say, it was again British Intelligence which supplied the corroboration.

  To at least some of the German generals, like Halder, the rumor was a godsend because they could use it as an argument against the whole maneuver. Even those who had thought it practicable now stopped thinking so, seeing the whole venture in a new light, the light of those imaginary flames. Sea Lion’s D-Day was again postponed, pending tests.

  Several tests were made, two of them on an elaborate scale. One was conducted at Fécamp in Normandy, the other on a secluded lake near Friedland in East Prussia. The experts had orders to make their tests as realistic as possible and they took the instructions literally. They covered prototype barges with asbestos sheets, filled them with soldiers, then poured oil on the water, ignited it and steered the barges into the pools of burning oil. All on board were burnt to death.

  Far from alleviating the rumor, these tests merely added to its plausibility. The experts reported to Hitler that the British could create a wall of fire, completely impenetrable, by pouring oil on the waters of the Channel from specially-constructed fuel planes and by igniting it with incendiary bombs.

  The test at Fecamp was still another proof. A few of the dreadfully charred bodies from the test barge drifted out to sea and were washed up along the French coast. The burned bodies provided the final convincing proof.

  How decisive the rumor was on the course of Sea Lion is difficult to say, but those who were close to Hitler during those days believe the rumor unnerved him.

  At any rate, Sea Lion was postponed from September to October and then indefinitely. Hitler no longer bawled out General Halder when the Chief of Staff told him on December 5 that he considered the execution of the enterprise no longer possible. On January 9, 1941, Hitler ordered his High Command to suspend all preparation for an invasion of England, but to continue to go through the motions as a feint to keep the British jumpy. He was fooling only himself.

  But even without Sea Lion, Britain was under savage attack. She was pounded from the air by Goering’s enormous Luftwaffe, which had begun the Battle of Britain on August 12. On the night of August 24–25, the first bombs fell on central London. Hitler proclaimed in a broadcast, during which his voice broke with hysteria: “The hour will come when one of us two will break, and it will not be National Socialist Germany.” Late in the afternoon of September 7, the all-out Battle of London was joined. It was ushered in with a statement by Goering that it will continue “day and night until the R.A.F. has destroyed itself in vain attempts to stop us, and until the people’s will to resist is broken.”

  But Goering, who should have known better, was whistling in the dark. In spite of his stupendous intelligence service, he did not know what the British had and how they were taking it. He looked to Canaris’ Abwehr and to his own chief of intelligence, Colonel Joseph (Beppo) Schmid, for the knowledge he needed so badly, but all he got from them was double talk they had picked up from the British carillon.

  In their ignorance, his generals bickered and made contradictory arrangements for the big battle. Early in September, Hans Sperrle insisted that the R.A.F. still had a thousand fighter planes left. Albrecht Kesselring said they had next to nothing. Beppo Schmid set the “absolute maximum figure” at three hundred and fifty Hurricanes and Spitfires. They were all wrong. In actual fact, the British had six hundred and fifty fighter planes.

  Throughout the Battle of Britain, the Germans were fatally handicapped by such faulty intelligence. “It was a battle of chance and force against science and skill,” wrote Chester Wilmot. “There was no shortage of courage on the German part, though their pilots lacked the zest of the British, but their confidence was undermined by the knowledge that in comparison with their opponents they were blind, deaf and dumb.”

  The British flooded the Germans with contradictory information, now claiming that things were going badly and morale would break momentarily, then insisting damage was slight and morale was better than ever.

  These “blossoms” were scattered throughout the world. A British agent in Washington leaked information to General Boetticher, the German Military Attaché, that London was on the verge of collapse, traffic at a standstill, famine widespread and epidemics rampant. The German Minister in Lisbon repor
ted exactly the opposite, claiming he had received his information from a prominent Portuguese banker who had just returned from London—in fact, another British agent. The German Military Attaché in Sofia then confirmed Boetticher’s information, while his colleague in Rio de Janeiro corroborated the Lisbon envoy’s statements.

  German intelligence tried to tap the intelligence services of the neutrals. The British anticipated this and enlisted the aid of their diplomatic friends. The Duke of Alba, Spanish Ambassador at the Court of St. James’s, played the game as did the Swedish Minister, sending hopelessly contradictory reports to their respective Foreign Ministries whence they expected the Germans to procure them.

  The British received additional help from an unexpected source. The Hungarian Military Attaché in London was an ardent Nazi sympathizer and one of the very few dependable sources the Germans still had in England. He opened his own clandestine radio system in the attic of his house on Grosvenor Place, signaling to the Hungarian General Staff first-rate intelligence. A German agent in Budapest funneled the information on to Berlin.

  But the Hungarian Military Attaché in Stockholm was as close to the British as was his London colleague to the Nazis. The Stockholm attaché tipped off the British to the illicit radio; the British seized it and continued to operate it.

  So much was at stake and so little was known, that on September 17, at the height of the battle, Goering flew to England in person, to survey from the air what his agents failed to report from the ground. He found out precious little.

  But Goering thought he had another ace to play. For some months in the late spring of 1940, a funny German word kept cropping up in radio intercepts and captured documents. To British ears it sounded like the bark of a Katzenjammer kid, though in German it connoted a polite ritual. The word was Knickebein which is the German for “curtsey,” the colloquial application of “weak-legged” or “weak-kneed.” It was assumed that Knickebein had something to do with electronic beams that guided German planes to British targets. These were radio beacons which the Germans had erected in various parts of the Continent. Using directional radio, the Luftwaffe’s pilots could obtain the desired fixes by the angles from which any two of these transmissions came.

  In due course, the British countered these beacons with a system of electronic interference they named “meacons.” The “meacon” picked up the German signal, amplified it and returned it from a different angle. The results were gratifying. The “meacon” helped to lead the Germans astray. Once a Luftwaffe bomber, homing on the doctored British beam, came down in what its pilot confidently thought was France. He had the surprise of his life when he was told he had just landed in Devonshire.

  The British did not expect this to last forever and they decided that Knickebein must have been the cover name for a network of secret agents the Germans had planted in England to neutralize the “meacon.” Agents of the net, it was thought, were to plant in the various English cities secret beacons on which the Germans could home. The entire British counter-espionage organization was mobilized, and a frantic hunt began for those suspected German spies and their secret beacons. None could be found.

  What, then, was this Knickebein? The question was answered by the forces of what Churchill called “the Wizard War.” “This was a secret war,” he wrote, “whose battles were lost or won unknown to the public, and only with difficulty comprehended, even now, by those outside the small high scientific circles concerned. No such warfare had ever been waged by mortal men. The terms in which it could be recorded or talked about were unintelligible to ordinary folk. Yet if we had not mastered its profound meaning and used its mysteries, even while we saw them only in the glimpse, all the efforts, all the prowess of the fighting airmen, all the bravery and sacrifices of the people, would have been in vain.”

  Churchill had prepared for the “Wizard War” in advance. He assigned Professor Frederick Lindemann of Oxford as his scientific adviser and organized, under him, two groups of scientists: one to promote and stimulate war-essential scientific research at home; the other, to find out as much as possible about similar developments abroad, especially in Germany.

  On June 20, 1940, Churchill’s foresight paid enormous dividends. Lindemann came into his office to say, “We have found the secret of Knickebein.”

  Churchill’s elation turned to shock when Lindemann told him what it was. Knickebein appeared to be the cover name of a new German device that was supposed to enable their bombers to attack day or night, irrespective of weather conditions. This was the deduction of a certain Richard V. Jones, Deputy Director of Intelligence Research in the Air Ministry.

  Dr. Jones was summoned to a meeting with Churchill the next day. He spoke for twenty minutes in quiet tones, “unrolling,” as Churchill put it afterwards, “his chain of evidence, the like of which, for its convincing fascination, was never surpassed by tales of Sherlock Holmes or Monsieur Lecoq.”

  Jones was, for all practical purposes, a spy on the grand scale, sitting behind a desk, and yet procuring data about the innermost secrets of the enemy with a sure hand. His raw material was varied. He was fed transcripts of prisoner interrogations, captured documents, radio cable and telephonic intercepts, censorship reports, all the mass of papers produced by a war’s secret service.

  A German bomber had been shot down, and in its wreckage R.A.F. intelligence officers found a far more complicated apparatus than seemed to be needed for night landing by the beam. The apparatus was shown to Dr. Jones and appeared to be a step toward a new system of beams by which the Germans expected to navigate and bomb. Jones tried to envisage the new system and perceived it in the form of an invisible searchlight whose beam would guide the bombers to their targets.

  Jones then combed the interrogation centers for a Luftwaffe prisoner who might know something about this projected system. A few days later, he found the man he sought. Cross-examining him along the lines of his own reasoning, Jones received confirmation. The German broke down and conceded that the Luftwaffe was, indeed, experimenting with this new system and that it was expected to be ready for practical use by the start of the great air attack on England.

  Jones’ report started a chain reaction, with much of Air Intelligence and several secret agents devoting all their efforts to the procurement of additional data about Knickebein. Before long, several Knickebein stations were located near Dieppe and Cherbourg, and stone by stone, the entire frightening mosaic of the new system was brought together.

  No sooner had Jones left the Cabinet Room than Churchill ordered Lindemann to develop a counter-weapon. Knickebein was put to work for the first time on August 23, when the Dieppe and Cherbourg stations trained the beam on Birmingham. As soon as the German stations opened up, the British started up their counter-stations. The supposedly infallible Knickebein beam was twisted and jammed. The Luftwaffe flew in, confident that nothing could go wrong this time, and was startled to find that well-nigh everything was going wrong again. This Knickebein phase of the air war was not much different from the bad old “meacon” days.

  For two whole months, nobody dared to tell Goering that his beams were being twisted and jammed. When General Martini summoned the courage and told him at last, Goering refused to believe it and told his scientific chief, “That is impossible!” By then it was October, 1940. It was past the Q-hour by which the R.A.F. had to be defeated to win the Battle of Britain.

  11

  Barbarossa

  In June, 1940, Hitler celebrated the fall of France with his little jog at Compiègne and then retired to his mountain retreat, the Berghof, where he could brood best. It was there, less than a month later, on July 19, that he invited General Alfred Jodl to lunch. Jodl was chief of Hitler’s personal operations staff which was headquartered aboard a special train, “Atlas,” so that it could follow the Fuehrer wherever he went and always be on hand.

  Almost casually, between luncheon courses, Hitler instructed Jodl to begin drafting plans for an invasion of Russia. Ba
ck aboard “Atlas,” which lay on a siding at Reichenhall, a nearby spa, Jodl called in his planning chiefs, Colonels Warlimont and von Lossberg, Commander Junge and Major Baron von Falkenstein, and issued the necessary orders.

  Within a few days a preliminary plan was sketched out, but of necessity it had to be based on what intelligence was then available, and that intelligence was skimpy. Even cursory study of the plan showed that far more information was essential.

  On September 7, 1940, the Battle of Britain was all but won by the Luftwaffe, had the Germans only known it. Crippled and nearly smashed, her only real weapon, the R.A.F., in splinters, Britain had her back to the wall. She and the rest of the West were preoccupied with the apparently impending Sea Lion which might signal the final end of the war in the West.

  And on that day an officer arrived at the Fuchsbau with a message which he said he would deliver only into the hands of Admiral Canaris himself. It was a document numbered 150231/ 40, signed by Jodl, instructing the Abwehr to open operations against the Soviet Union, Hitler’s unsuspecting ally. Jodl urged extreme caution: “These moves,” he wrote, “must not create the impression in Russia that we are preparing an offensive in the East.”

  Canaris was caught by surprise. Relations with Russia had been friendly; the intelligence organs of the two countries had even exchanged information on occasion. And after the 1939 treaty, the Abwehr had been specifically told to drop espionage efforts against the Soviet.

  Canaris had received that earlier order with relief; he had never been able to establish an effective network inside Russia. That incredible Iron Curtain stretched for thousands of miles from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea. First came a barbed wire fence, spotted at close intervals with watchtowers. Behind that lay fifteen yards of bare earth, ploughed and raked to show the lightest footprint. And behind that was twenty miles of deserted countryside, inhabited only by the frontier guards of the N.K.V.D.