One Day in August

by David O'Keefe

  Mid-1942 was the desperate “blackout” period for the British Naval Intelligence Division (NID). Thanks to the cryptanalysts working around the clock in Bletchley Park, for nearly a year—from the spring of 1941 to February 1942—the British had enjoyed astonishing success in intercepting and decrypting German navy messages between its headquarters and its surface and U-boat fleets. During that period, German communications were encrypted on a three-wheel Enigma machine—a complex electromechanical rotor cipher machine belonging to a family of machines (the army, navy and air force each had their own version) first developed by the Germans at the end of the First World War. To do their work, the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park relied on pinched material—Enigma machines captured from destroyed submarines, for instance, or, more important, the code books, rotor-setting sheets and instruction manuals used to unravel the German secret transmissions. So great was their success, both in stealing materials from the Germans and in intercepting and decrypting the German messages, that the Naval Section at Bletchley Park euphorically nicknamed 1941 the annus mirabilis, the “year of miracles.”

  But the miracle ended abruptly on February 1, 1942, when the German navy equipped its U-boat arm operating in the Atlantic with a new and vastly more complex four-rotor version of the Enigma machine that left the expert code-breakers at Bletchley hopelessly in the dark. The next ten months were a frantic and dangerous time for Great Britain—in particular for her Admiralty and Naval Intelligence Division. Due to a combination of factors, all exacerbated by the Bletchley code-breakers’ sudden inability to read the German messages and locate enemy submarines before they attacked, merchant shipping losses in the Atlantic suddenly skyrocketed, seriously threatening Britain’s supply and trade routes.

  There was near panic in some circles over the perceived threat to the Allies’ command of the vital sea lanes essential to ultimate victory in the war. Fortunately for the Allies, when the Germans introduced their updated four-rotor Enigma, they possessed only enough of these machines to equip their Atlantic fleet, leaving all the other areas of operation—the Mediterranean Sea, the Baltic, Norway and the German home waters—with the three-rotor machine and still vulnerable to Bletchley’s code-breaking skills. But the clock was ticking: new four-rotor machines would obviously be produced and disseminated as soon as the Germans could manage it. It was this crisis surrounding Ultra that led to the creation of Ian Fleming’s commando unit, operating under the aegis of British Admiralty Intelligence and focused solely on “the pinch.”

  As I read on, the document outlined the criteria for the commandos in Fleming’s new Intelligence Assault Unit: they should be familiar with the materials targeted in a pinch but not indoctrinated into the mysterious world of Ultra and Bletchley Park in case, God forbid, they fell into enemy hands and cracked under interrogation. In addition, the unit would include a special adviser with experience in “commando raids” and “cutting-out parties” to guide in the selection of targets and later compile a list of lessons learned. Here, one cautionary note in the report stood out supreme for me: “No raid should be laid on for SIGINT purposes only. The scope of the objectives should always be sufficiently wide to presuppose normal operational objects.”

  That passage, in light of the Ultra Secret designation, raised some startling new questions: If Commander Ian Fleming’s specially raised and trained commando unit was targeting Dieppe, was this pinch the purpose and intent behind Operation Jubilee, the raison d’être for the raid? Could the initial motive for the raid on Dieppe be, as that last passage suggested, to provide a cover under which the commandos could raid a specific target in Dieppe and then depart without rousing German suspicions? Could it even be that the pinch of the target materials, under cover of the other objectives, was the driving force for the entire operation—a scenario that seems ripped from the pages of an Ian Fleming or Tom Clancy spy thriller?

  Fleming’s inclusion in the raid to oversee his nondescript commando unit, which was making its combat debut, had earlier raised no questions. Traditionally, it has always been viewed as a lark or a “day trip” to Dieppe. But knowing now what his commando unit was targeting opened up an unexpected avenue for a fundamental reassessment of the Dieppe Raid. The potential implications were staggering.

  Fully aware of the importance of Dieppe in the Canadian psyche, I realized that my theory required substantial investigation before it could even be proposed—something that proved daunting and near impossible in 1995 for the simple reason that few classified British intelligence files had been released into the public domain. It was true that millions of pages had become available to historians and researchers on the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s end, but the British, American and Canadian governments still held back key intelligence files that they regarded as too sensitive or potentially too controversial to release at that time. So, over the next two decades, as more documents slowly became available, my investigation continued.

  In 2010, with the vast majority of the research and most of the central pieces in place, it was time to take my journey to another level. I set out my argument to the historians at the Royal Navy’s Historical Branch in Portsmouth and the Government Communications Headquarters in Cheltenham. My thesis came as a shock to both groups but they both separately offered that I was indeed “on to something,” because they too were curious about the Dieppe mystery. The chief historian at the Government Communications Headquarters agreed to a further public release of classified files dealing with the contextual story of pinch operations, including reports of previous similar operations and vital documents on pinch policy or “doctrine.” These documents provided a series of small but highly significant “eureka moments” that helped me to round out the Dieppe saga. Many times I felt I was building a complex historical jigsaw puzzle that had begun with just one tantalizing piece and grew year by year until I felt comfortable enough to come forward with the findings.

  To paraphrase Bruce Cockburn, one of Canada’s great songwriters, this work has kicked at the darkness until it has bled daylight. Now, after seventy years, we can lift the albatross from our shoulders and move past the initial sorrow, anger, excuses, recrimination and bitterness to achieve something essential—a genuine understanding of the reasons for the raid on Dieppe. In this way we can honour those who sacrificed so much on that bloody day in August 1942.

  TWO

  A VERY SPECIAL BOND

  My job got me right into the inside of everything, including all the most secret affairs. I couldn’t possibly have had a more exciting or interesting War.

  IAN FLEMING, THE PLAYBOY INTERVIEWS

  Many of us love to revel in all things James Bond, so the legend of Ian Fleming’s charismatic and unsinkable 007 has fused over the decades with the legend of his creator. Was he a spy himself? Was he a crack commando? Did he or did he not train in Camp X, outside Whitby, Ontario, under the famous William Stephenson, the “man called Intrepid”? Speculation and fantasy, all. Until recently, for the serious historian, it seemed almost inconceivable that Bond’s creator played more than an ephemeral role in planning the tragic raid that August day at Dieppe—and so it appeared to me too, initially. Yet the information I began to unearth as I went deeper into this story reveals a very different Ian Fleming circa 1942.

  It all began three years earlier, in the late spring of 1939, when Rear Admiral John Godfrey, the fifty-one-year-old, silver-haired though balding new director of the Naval Intelligence Division, invited Fleming, twenty years his junior, for lunch at the fashionable Carlton Grill—the restaurant in one of London’s most luxurious hotels off Whitehall, once ruled over by the French master chef Auguste Escoffier. A year later, the Carlton Hotel itself was nearly destroyed by a German bomb during the Blitz, and today the site is occupied by the New Zealand High Commission (passersby are reminded of the hotel’s previous glory only by a small plaque stating that the young Ho Chi Minh, the Communist founder of modern Vietnam, worked there in 1913). At that luncheon on May
24, Godfrey was just three months into his appointment, and he wanted to meet Fleming, a former journalist turned stockbroker, with the idea of appointing him as his personal assistant. Godfrey’s mentor, Admiral Sir William “Blinker” Hall, the legendary spymaster from the First World War, had suggested he should hire someone to help him with his overwhelming pressures and responsibilities in a world verging on war, particularly in the now long-neglected Intelligence Division.1

  The dashing Commander Ian Fleming, RNVR, photographed in naval uniform in the famous Room 39 at the Old Admiralty Building. He appears here in the dark blue jacket of the “wavy navy,” with three undulating gold and emerald-green stripes on his sleeves. His boss, Admiral Godfrey, recalled fondly that the large office, the “cave” as its inhabitants called it, was a “cheerful” place: “The atmosphere was more like that of a commune than one would expect in the nerve centre of an important division.” His motley staff grew in numbers “in almost ragamuffin conditions”: they “worked like ants, and their combined output staggered the imagination.” (photo credits 2.1)

  John Godfrey immediately reached out for suggestions for a worthwhile candidate.2 As with most things in the shadowy world of British intelligence and espionage in those days, Fleming’s name reached him through the time-honoured old boys’ network—specifically Sir Montagu Norman, the longest-serving governor of the Bank of England.3 Fleming, like Norman, had been tempered at Eton, the prestigious boys’ school that had crafted the character of generations of the privileged class, preordained for positions of power within the British Empire. The brief resumé Godfrey received seemed impressive enough: the young journalist had achieved a modicum of notoriety dabbling as an “occasional informant” for the Secret Intelligence Service while covering the Russian beat for Reuters in the 1930s.4 And he was made of the right stuff: he was the grandson of Robert Fleming, the founder of Robert Fleming & Company in Dundee, which produced jute-based products during the American Civil War years before moving on to investments in the lucrative American railroad industry. Eventually, he had transformed “the Flemings” into one of the last private merchant banks that focused on mergers and acquisitions, putting it on the financial map on both sides of the Atlantic alongside J.P. Morgan, Jacob Schiff, and Kuhn, Loeb & Co.

  Robert’s two sons, Valentine (Val) and Philip, followed in the family business until 1910, when Val, Ian’s father, won a seat in Parliament. A product of Eton and Oxford, Val became a rising star in the Conservative Party, “a pillar of the landed squirearchy.”5 On the outbreak of war in 1914, he and Philip joined the dashing Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars.6 After fighting through the second battle of Ypres the following spring, Val was twice mentioned in dispatches and earned the Distinguished Service Order before succumbing to German artillery shells in the fall of 1917, just one week before Ian’s ninth birthday. Val’s friend and parliamentary ally, the brash, outspoken Winston Churchill, penned his obituary for the Times.7 Little did anyone know then that the former First Lord of the Admiralty, at that point disgraced for having staunchly backed the Gallipoli debacle one year into the war, would reappear two decades later out of the political wilderness. Less than a year after Fleming’s introductory luncheon with Godfrey, Churchill reclaimed the political reins of power at the Admiralty and moved on to even greater heights as minister of defence and as prime minister in May 1940—at the darkest moment in British history.

  The young Fleming, confident, sophisticated, and somewhat aloof in manner, no doubt sat comfortably at the table that day. Like many other trust-fund babies who came of age in the wake of his father’s “lost generation,” he lived a carefree life. He had left the Royal Military College at Sandhurst after allegedly contracting a venereal disease; the rumour cast a cloud over his character and general suitability for a King’s commission. His distraught mother, fearing for his psychological well-being, sent him to a kind of finishing school for men in Kitzbühel, Austria, where, along with skiing and mountain climbing, he came under the influence of Ernan Forbes-Dennis, a former British spy, and his wife, Phyllis Bottome, a novelist. They encouraged Fleming’s aptitude for languages and suggested he start writing. Considering a career in diplomacy, he next enrolled in universities in Munich and Geneva but soon developed a reputation as a playboy. He travelled through Europe at his family’s expense, trying sporadically to write between visits to taverns, casinos and brothels, chain-smoking and already drinking too much. When he failed the competitive examination for the Foreign Office, his mother managed to secure him a position as a journalist with Reuters News Agency, where he reported from Moscow on the trial of some British engineers accused of spying. Given his charm, Fleming also made friends in influential circles. When he returned to England, he joined a prestigious brokerage firm.

  Fleming’s ability to operate in French, German and Russian impressed Godfrey, as did his “talent for spare and simple prose,” developed while writing for Reuters.8 But there was much more to Fleming than his social, linguistic and writing skills. Like many people who leave an indelible impression on their peers, he was a wealth of contradictions. “At the first encounter,” recalled his friend William Plomer, who later became his editor at Jonathan Cape for most of the Bond books, “he struck me as no mere conventional young English man-of the-world of his generation; he showed more character, a much quicker brain, and a promise of something dashing or daring. Like a mettlesome young horse, he seemed to show the whites of his eyes and to smell some battle from afar.”9 Fleming, tall and slim, moved gracefully and with purpose. His sad, bony face with its clear blue eyes was strong-featured, despite the disjointed nose he had acquired during his athletic days at Eton, which only added to “his rakish allure.”10

  Most unusually, Fleming had a special interest in typography and book collecting, and by 1939 he had built a remarkable library of first editions of important inventions, theories and scientific discoveries of modern times. In due course it turned out to be one of the best collections of its genre in England.11 Part of what attracted Godfrey to Fleming was surely the younger man’s intense interest in cryptography—an intelligence source that Godfrey knew all too well had been vital to the success of Naval Intelligence during the First World War. Half in jest, Fleming would later argue that the moniker “C,” used to denote the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, did not refer to Sir Mansfield Cumming, as everyone thought, but to Charles Babbage, widely referred to as the “father of the computer.”12

  In 1822, a century and a half before Bletchley Park unleashed the world’s first computer, Babbage, assisted by parliamentary funding, embarked on the development of his “Second Difference Engine.” Unfortunately, official patience soon ran dry, leaving the development of “the computer” on the sidelines until the Second World War, when Britain’s very survival demanded assistance beyond human intelligence. The fact that Babbage’s invention could have rivalled or even eclipsed Gutenberg’s printing press as the most influential technological development in a millennium, affording Great Britain an unmatched industrial advantage, was not lost on Fleming. Babbage and his cryptographic passion became Fleming’s own fervent intellectual pursuit: he studied his writings carefully, captivated by passages on the art and science of deciphering, which Babbage had compared to picking locks.13 Various segments from Babbage’s seminal Passages from a Life of a Philosopher, published in 1864, were, according to Fleming, the “most cherished” in his collection.14

  Apart from his intellectual interests, there was a darker side to Fleming that Godfrey came to appreciate and even foster. One fellow student from Austria had remarked that Fleming was “a totally ruthless young man [who] didn’t consider anyone”—a sentiment shared by Godfrey, who said that Fleming “had little appreciation of the effects of his words and deeds upon others.”15 He was best at dealing with things and ideas rather than people. “He was primarily a man of action,” Godfrey wrote, whose “great ability did not extend to human relations or understanding of the humanit
ies.”16 Fleming’s Machiavellian flair flourished in the Naval Intelligence Division, where an “element of ruthlessness and perfidy, verging on the unscrupulous, [was] inherent in certain intelligence activities.”17

  Fleming was a civilian quite unlike “service-trained officers imbued with the instinct to ‘play the game’ … a maverick who had a gambler’s instinct and a taste for adventure.”18 From Godfrey’s perspective, Fleming possessed an intellectual flexibility that could easily transform, engage with and understand any problem, idea or concept with equal ease, whether in a formal work setting or over drinks and a meal. In many ways, Fleming reminded Godfrey of Churchill: he “had plenty of ideas and was anxious to carry them out, but was not interested in, and preferred to ignore, the extent of the logistic background inseparable to all projects.”19 Or, as Plomer put it, “He always seemed to take the shortest distance between two points in the shortest possible time.”20

  And so it happened that, in May 1939, Admiral Godfrey offered Fleming the job of personal assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence (DNI). He had no obvious training or experience for the role, but neither did most of the men (and fewer women) recruited into the secret services at that time. Rather, the primary traits were initiative, imagination, brains, and a tireless commitment to winning the war, not so much on the battlefield as in the world of intelligence.

  The dignified Old Admiralty Building looks out onto Horse Guards Parade and Number 10 Downing Street, and lies just blocks away from the War Office, the Air Ministry and Combined Operations Headquarters in Whitehall. During the Second World War this was the operational headquarters for the Royal Navy and the Naval Intelligence Division. A bunker designed to withstand the Blitz, resembling an old brown fort, was built alongside it, housing the Operational Intelligence Centre and the Submarine Tracking Room that controlled the intelligence effort for the war at sea. (photo credits 2.2)