Intelligence in War: The Value--And Limitations--Of What the Military Can Learn About the Enemy

by John Keegan

  The reasons for the current overestimation of the importance of intelligence in warfare are twofold: the first is the common confusion of espionage and counter-espionage with operational intelligence proper; the second is the intermingling of operational intelligence with, and contamination by, subversion, the attempt to win military advantage by covert means.

  Operational intelligence and espionage work in different time-frames. Espionage, usually but not necessarily a state activity, is a continuous process, of very great antiquity; so is its counterpart, counter-espionage. States seem to have always sought to know the secrets of each other’s policy, particularly foreign but also mercantile and military policy, and to deny such secrets in return. The apparatus of espionage is common knowledge: the employment of spies, the suborning of foreign nationals in positions of confidence, the use of codes and ciphers and the maintenance of decryption and intercept services. Operational intelligence, by contrast, is specifically an activity of wartime and, at high tempo, is limited to comparatively brief periods of hostilities. The rhythm of the intelligence attack on the German V-weapons programme illustrates that: most lethargic at the outset, when the evidence was scanty and diffuse, growing intense as it became incontrovertible, then slowing again when the British, after their capture of the V-1 launch sites in northern France, wrongly persuaded themselves that the danger had been brought under control.

  The intermittent pattern of operational intelligence activity is explained in part by the positions military intelligence officers occupy in the hierarchy of an army or navy. They are always subordinate to the operations staff and rarely make full careers in intelligence; indeed, most seek transfer to the operations branch, in the all too understandable hope of becoming masters rather than servants. It is difficult enough, in any case, to make a reputation as a staff officer in any branch, but while there are a number of celebrated operations officers and chiefs of staff—Berthier to Napoleon, Jodl to Hitler, Alan Brooke to Churchill—there are almost no famous intelligence officers. The best known of the Second World War, E. T. Williams, Montgomery’s chief of intelligence in the Eighth Army in the desert and then in Normandy, was an Oxford don who had gone to war as a troop leader in the King’s Dragoon Guards. The best known of the First World War, Sir Alfred Ewing, founder of Room 40, was a former Cambridge don who, as a civilian, became Director of Naval Education. Williams, still a young man, returned to his Oxford college after the war.2

  Espionage and counter-espionage by contrast are, or have become in the modern world, the arena of full-time professionals. The CIA and the SIS (MI6) are organs of state and, as they evolved over time, have grown into formidable bureaucracies; the former KGB of the Soviet Union was, in at least one of its aspects, effectively a parallel government, charged to maintain the internal stability of the Soviet system as well as spy on foreign enemies and defeat foreign espionage. In all those organisations, it has been possible, indeed usual, to enter as a carefully selected recruit, to be trained, usually in a particular speciality, and to make a lifelong career. Since the career was full-time, the agencies’ operatives naturally found or made activities to occupy their day-to-day working lives; and as, in practice, serious threats to state security are as intermittent as major military threats to national survival in wartime, the intelligence agencies bulked out their work by spying on each other. Indeed, if asked what spies do, the safest answer is that spies spy on spies. The parallel eavesdropping agencies—the British Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ, descendant of Bletchley) and the American National Security Agency (NSA)—are party to serious secrets, which they pluck from the ether by interception and decrypt. At their most successful, they are able to tell their own governments the most secret business of others. They guard what they know jealously, even, paradoxically, from their companion intelligence agencies. No rivalries are more intense than those between intelligence services working, by different means, on the same side.

  The disdain evinced by the “hard” agencies—NSA, GCHQ—for the “soft”—CIA, SIS—is nowhere better illustrated than by the now endlessly retold story of the Cambridge spies of the early Cold War. Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross and their hangers-on were elegant young men of good family, educated at expensive schools and leading colleges, who had been seduced by the warped logic of Marxism to become Soviet agents before they joined the British Foreign Office or intelligence services. All eventually, after 1945, fell under suspicion, and three, Maclean, Burgess and later Philby, defected to the Soviet Union amid noisy media sensation. They caused great harm to their parent services and to Anglo-American trust, which took many years to restore. Indeed, for a long time the Americans took the view that the British intelligence services were fundamentally flawed, even corrupt; it was not until, much later, the Americans themselves suffered a succession of serious breaches of security inside the CIA and the military intelligence services, admittedly committed by agents who were motivated by greed rather than ideology, that relations returned to an even keel.

  Yet, viewed in retrospect, the damage done by at least two of the Cambridge spies, Burgess and Philby, was superficial rather than substantial. Guy Burgess, a flamboyant homosexual and dedicated alcoholic, never rose high in the Foreign Office hierarchy. Though his background was entirely conventional—his father was a regular naval officer, and he had himself, until ill health intervened, trained as a naval cadet at Dartmouth—his personality and behaviour were not. He was an exhibitionist, a poseur, a professional rebel. Though a brilliant pupil at Eton, he wasted his time at Cambridge and had difficulty thereafter finding a job. A temporary position at the BBC led in the lax war years to a job in the Foreign Office information department; charm, reinforced by his determination to succeed in his chosen vocation as an undercover Soviet agent, then won him promotion to the post of personal assistant to the Minister of State. It did not last. His irresponsible urge to outrage the conventionally minded led to his transfer to a specialist information branch, then to the Far Eastern Department, where he continued to make a bad impression, and eventually to the British embassy in Washington. His position there was humiliatingly junior. The wonder is nevertheless that, after years of bad behaviour, the Foreign Office was still prepared to keep him on. The explanation, easily grasped by anyone who lived then, incomprehensible today, is that Burgess was protected by the indulgence felt by the well-behaved for the professional naughty boy. Their forgiveness of his excesses excused, in a sense, their own unrelenting propriety; their unwillingness to condemn absolved them of pomposity.

  It is doubtful, in any case, if Burgess was ever privy to secrets that could damage his own country. The same might be said of his protégé, Kim Philby. Philby, a truly dedicated Communist convert, began life after Cambridge as a journalist but transferred at the outbreak of war, with the help of Burgess, to the subversive Special Operations Executive. Thence he migrated to the Secret Intelligence Service, which then operated under the cloak of the Foreign Office. As an intelligence officer he undoubtedly betrayed to the Russians a great deal of information about British counter-espionage and subversion and was responsible for the deaths of numbers of anti-Soviet agents, particularly Albanians and Ukrainians whom the British and Americans infiltrated behind the Iron Curtain in the early 1950s. Philby did not, however, have access to war plans or nuclear intelligence. His was a classic example of a spy spying on spies, and the atmosphere of his world is perfectly caught in the novels of John le Carré, which almost exclusively concern the operations of espionage services against each other.

  Donald Maclean was a different and more serious traitor. As a promising young diplomat in the Washington embassy in 1945, he was appointed joint secretary of the Anglo-American committee on nuclear development (Combined Policy Committee) and also acquired a pass which gave him unsupervised access to the headquarters of the Atomic Energy Commission. What information he thus gained remains a matter of speculation. It was probably of less valu
e than that supplied to Moscow by the nuclear scientists Alan Nunn May, a British citizen, and Claus Fuchs, a naturalised Briton of German origin, both committed Communists, though of much humbler social origin than the Cambridge spies. They enjoyed the advantage, however, of actually working within the nuclear laboratories at Los Alamos, where the first atomic bomb was developed, and were undoubtedly the source of the information which allowed Stalin to learn of the atomic secret before Hiroshima. Maclean, who had no scientific training, was not guilty of that betrayal. Because of the seniority of his position, however, he was undoubtedly responsible for poisoning Anglo-American trust during the early Cold War, poison that lingered for years afterwards.

  The peculiar “climate” of the Cambridge spies’ treason, a word chosen by the most perceptive analyst of the episode, Andrew Boyle, goes far to explain the persistent popular interest in it.3 Not only were Burgess, Maclean and Philby privileged citizens of the society they betrayed, products of good family and its most distinguished schools and colleges; they also belonged to the social elite, knowing those who counted and at ease in the company of the fashionable and powerful. All nevertheless insisted in behaving in disreputable fashion, all three by drinking ostentatiously to excess, all three by publicly violating the sexual norms of the day: not only was Burgess a promiscuous homosexual when homosexual behaviour was still a criminal offence; Maclean, too, a married man, regularly succumbed to his homosexual impulses, while Philby, though strenuously heterosexual, treated women with cavalier selfishness. He abandoned his second wife, pregnant with their fifth child, to a lonely death by drink and drugs; he stole his third wife from a journalistic colleague after his dismissal from the secret service; he next stole Maclean’s wife during their Moscow exile and finally married a Russian far younger than himself when the ex-Mrs. Maclean saw him in his true light. The Cambridge spies were not only traitors; they were also, in different but closely similar ways, monsters of egotism. No wonder that they remained for so long objects of fascination to the prurient.

  Since the substance of espionage is duplicity, it should not be thought surprising that its three most notorious practitioners of modern times—they had subordinates, they also had imitators, some Soviet, some American, but none so blatantly complacent—were such unpleasant people. Treason is an intrinsically repulsive activity, so much so that it is difficult not to despise even those who, during the Nazi era and the Cold War, betrayed their countries out of devotion to universally admired ideals, such as respect for truth or democratic freedom. Because the efficient spy lies to protect himself, and evades exposure in order to advance his work, his behaviour is the opposite of what is conventionally regarded as heroic. The hero is a fighter who bares his breast to the blows of the enemy. The spy shrinks from the fight and thinks his work best done when he attracts no attention at all.

  Hence a paradox. The British—and it is a peculiarly British approach to the secret world, though one also espoused by the Americans—devised during the nineteenth century a philosophy of secret warfare in which duplicity but also the heroic ethic were combined. Because Britain has always been demographically weak but strategically strong, a country of moderate population enjoying a commanding position athwart the world’s most important maritime trade routes, it has naturally sought to maximise its power by mobilising what today would be called special and subversive forces in the flanks of its enemies. The practice perhaps began during the Peninsular War of 1808–14, when the British army in Portugal and Spain raised and trained locals to serve in irregular regiments under British officers; the Royal Lusitanian (Portuguese) Legion was such a body. The British also directly subsidised not only the Spanish army, such of it as survived after the political collapse of 1808, but also the bands of guerrillas which took the field in its place after the French occupation. The guerrillas never threatened to end the occupation or overturn French rule, but at the cost of dreadful suffering to the Spanish people, they succeeded in making Spain almost impossible to administer.

  In India, meanwhile, the British applied a reverse technique in order to overcome disorder and restore central government. Acting nominally in support of the effete and effectively defunct Moghul emperors, they made extensive use of irregulars to put down the bands of pillagers who ransacked Moghul territory and to defeat the armies of overmighty Moghul subjects who had set up as provincial rulers in their own right. Typically, at the end of a successful campaign of pacification, they incorporated the defeated warriors into their own forces. By the mid-nineteenth century, the British were running two military establishments in India: a regular army of their own, recruited from Indians but organised on European lines, and, attached to it, a kaleidoscopic collection of irregulars, wearing local dress, observing local customs of discipline and commanded by small handfuls of British officers who had almost gone native: Shah Shujah’s Contingent, the Hyderabad Contingent, the Punjab Irregular Force.

  When in 1857 the Indian regulars rose in mutiny against British rule, their revolt was put down largely by mobilising the irregulars against them; and when the Indian Mutiny was over, the old regular army was almost completely replaced by the irregular forces that had rescued the Indian empire from dissolution. It retained a minimum of British officers—in 1911, the year of the Delhi Durbar, which marked ceremonially the high point of the power of the Raj, they numbered only 3,000—and they, for the most part, wore a version of native dress, spoke Indian languages and prided themselves on their immersion in the customs and culture of their soldiers.

  What went for India went eventually for the rest of the British empire, which came largely to be garrisoned by their own inhabitants under the sketchiest of British control. The King’s African Rifles, the Royal West African Frontier Force, the Somaliland Canal Corps, the Sudan Defence Force were native armies commanded by Britons who exerted power not by force but by imitating native habits of authority.4 The French achieved something of the same effect in their African empire, through their organisation of the goums of the Moroccan mountains and the camel-riding méharistes of the Sahara, units even more indigenous in character than their British equivalents.5 The French, however, never embraced the idea of imperial self-policing as comprehensively as the British did. It became a peculiarly British idea that an empire could be sustained upon the personal bond established between a local warrior and the young white officer-sportsman who had learnt his language and adopted his costume.

  There was a great deal to the idea. The bonds established were very strong and were to survive the most severe tests. The British, however, took the idea too far. They convinced themselves that what worked to maintain imperial authority and even to extend imperial boundaries would work also in war against fellow Europeans. So enthralled did the late Victorians become by the ideals of empire that they persuaded themselves of the overriding appeal of those ideals to the empire’s subjects. No individual was more seduced by the universality of the imperial idea than Winston Churchill. It came to him, curiously, in South Africa, during the Boer War: an attack on, and in part a rebellion by, white Afrikaners against British imperialism.

  Churchill, who participated in the Boer War as both a journalist and a soldier, conceived a profound admiration for the Boer spirit. The Boers’ dedication to their fight to retain the independence of their tiny republics, and their refusal to submit even when they had been objectively defeated by superior force, led him to two conclusions. The first was that, by the exercise of magnanimity, the Boers could be transformed from bitter enemies to close friends; such proved personally to be the case, for Jan Smuts, the outstanding Boer guerrilla leader, became after his people’s surrender the pro-British leader of post-war South Africa and Churchill’s warm political colleague. The second conclusion, which was to have less benign consequences, was that the practice of guerrilla warfare, by people of free spirit, could wear down a superior power, fetter its freedom of action, distort its strategy, and eventually force it to make great political concessions not strictly
won by purely military means. This belief seems eventually to have acquired universal value in Churchill’s world vision. He did not place it in context, calculating the likely reaction of a less or more ruthless enemy confronted by guerrilla action. He seems to have invested the guerrilla idea with autonomous value and come to believe that the guerrilla warrior, by the covert nature of his actions and the support he would enjoy from patriot civilians, ensured his success. Such beliefs, though founded on the Boer example, may have been reinforced by his experience of the Irish Troubles of 1918–21 and his acquaintance with another successful guerrilla leader he came to admire, Michael Collins. At any rate, by the time he became British Prime Minister in 1940, at a supreme crisis in national life, he had been involved in two large-scale guerrilla wars, one concluded successfully only with the greatest difficulty, the other undoubtedly lost, and might therefore be forgiven for holding the view that guerrilla operations were a fruitful means of undermining an offshore enemy.

  “Set Europe ablaze.” That was Churchill’s instruction to Hugh Dalton, Minister of Economic Warfare in his 1940 government, uttered on 24 July. It was to lead to the creation of a network of subversive organisations which would penetrate the whole of Nazi-occupied Europe west of the Soviet Union, as well as the Japanese-occupied territories in the Far East. The Special Operations Executive (SOE) was the principal body; its chief task was to insert parties of agents, usually by parachute, into occupied territory, to make contact with the local resistance organisations, if they existed, to arrange for the delivery of weapons and supplies and to carry out espionage and sabotage. All were equipped with radio to maintain contact with base. In the smaller countries—Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway—where conditions were not suitable for guerrilla activity, the parties mainly attempted to set up reporting services (disastrously in Holland, where they were penetrated by the Germans early on and their radios used to entrap arriving agents as they landed). In France SOE organised country-wide networks of reporting agents but also trained and armed resistance bands which proliferated after the introduction of forced labour in August 1942. The French resistance, which was comparatively slow to emerge, divided from the start along ideological lines; SOE officers in the field had to play a delicate political game, since within the country itself, the Communists sought to create a secret army of their own, principally loyal to Moscow, while, outside, de Gaulle in London strove to unify the resistance and include it within his forces of Free France. In Greece and the Balkans, where there was a long tradition of local resistance to former Turkish rule, guerrilla bands formed soon after the German occupation of April to May 1941. There too, they also divided ideologically, with results disastrous for the populations. In Yugoslavia the royalist Cetniks were the group with which the SOE first made contact; their leader, Draza Mihailovic, believed, however, that his correct strategy was to build up his strength until circumstances would permit the ustanka, a general rising against the occupiers. His Communist opponents, the Partisans, under Josef Tito, preferred to create country-wide war, with the object of politicising the population and securing a position of power that would ensure the creation of a Communist government in the wake of the occupiers’ defeat or departure. On the grounds that Tito was fighting the enemy, while the Cetniks were not, the SOE, whose Balkan directorate was heavily penetrated by British Communists, transferred its support to the Partisans in April 1943. In Greece, the SOE never gave its backing to the Communists, since Winston Churchill prudently thought it essential to keep Greece out of Stalin’s orbit; nevertheless, by the ruthlessness of their internal operations, they succeeded in making themselves the dominant resistance group by 1943, and some of the arms supplied by the SOE inevitably found their way to them.