The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939–1945

s) Would you make peace tomorrow?

The behaviour of most PoWs was strongly influenced by their own nation’s immediate circumstances. At this time, when Allied fortunes were plumbing the depths, a report on the handful of German PoWs in British hands recorded gloomily: ‘The officers (and most of the men) were quite immune to propaganda, think Hitler is a god and refuse to believe a single word of the British news.’ By contrast, a South African RAF pilot named Sgt Edward Wunsch provided his German captors with a highly sympathetic view of the Nazi cause, as recorded by his interrogator: ‘Like all South Africans who have entered Dulag Luft, Wunsch is an unashamed anti-Semite … [He says] There is no hatred towards Germany in South Africa, no enthusiasm for the war at all. Most people believe the nonsense press and propaganda tell them about German atrocities but … W. thinks it possible that one day South Africa could agree to a separate peace, if Germany continues to be militarily successful [author’s italics].’

The Allies lost the 1940 battle for France for many reasons. It has been a source of fierce controversy ever since, whether the French army’s defeat resulted from a failure of judgement by Maurice Gamelin, Allied commander-in-chief, or instead from a national moral collapse. It is unlikely that any amount of intelligence or advance warning could have changed 1940 outcomes. The German army showed itself an incomparably more effective fighting force than the Allies’, and there would be no victories until that changed. If British and French intelligence was poor in 1940, so was everything else.

As the Continent was evacuated, there was a late flurry of buccaneering by secret service officers and freelances: MI6’s Major Monty Chidson, a former head of the Hague station, rescued a priceless haul of industrial diamonds from Amsterdam. Peter Wilkinson got most of the Polish general staff out of France. Tommy Davies, a peacetime director of the Courtaulds textile business, escaped from its Calais plant with a load of platinum hours before the Germans arrived. But these little coups were fleabites in the great scheme of affairs. MI6 had made no contingency plans for stay-behind agents, to report from France in the event of its occupation by the Nazis, and Broadway would probably have been accused of defeatism had it done so. Through many months that followed, Britain’s intelligence services were thus almost blind to events on the Continent, to the frustration of the prime minister. Beleaguered on their island, they became dependent for knowledge of Hitler’s doings on the vagaries of air reconnaissance, and reports from neutral diplomats and correspondents.

The security service explored the limits of the possible and the acceptable in handling a stream of Abwehr agents who descended on Britain, and were promptly captured. MI5 spurned torture as a means of interrogation: in September 1940 at Camp 020, one of its officers intervened to prevent the captured Abwehr agent ‘Tate’ – Harry Williamson – being assaulted and battered by Col. Alexander Scotland of MI9. Guy Liddell deplored this episode, saying that he objected to ‘Gestapo methods’ on both moral and professional grounds. Col. Scotland was likewise prevented from injecting Williamson with drugs. Naval Intelligence Division interrogators tested drugs on each other as a means of extracting information, and concluded that it was a waste of time. Skilled questioning, they decided, was not merely more ethical, but more effective.

As the next act of the great global drama unfolded – Hitler’s air assault on Britain – neither Broadway nor Bletchley Park had much to contribute. The most significant aid to Fighter Command in its epic struggle to repel Göring’s air fleets was wireless traffic analysis of the flood of Morse from the Germans’ new French, Belgian, Dutch and Norwegian bases, together with monitoring of Luftwaffe cockpit chatter by the German linguists of the RAF’s infant Y Service, most of them women.

The prime minister and the chiefs of staff were for many months preoccupied, even obsessed, by two questions: would the Germans invade; and if so, when? In the mad mood prevailing in London in the autumn of 1940, a blend of heroic defiance and absurdity, the War Office’s director of military intelligence suggested exploiting captured Abwehr agents to try to provoke the Germans into hastening an invasion, which he felt sure could be defeated by the Royal Navy and the British Army. This proposal found no favour in Whitehall. Meanwhile the disaster in France had endowed the Wehrmacht with almost magical powers in the minds of the generals, many of whom convinced themselves that Hitler might launch an amphibious assault on Britain with only a few weeks’ preparation, offering no notice to the defenders.

The Royal Navy’s Commander Geoffrey Colpoys was responsible for delivering to Downing Street each day at 1 p.m. a report from the Special Invasion Warning Committee, which for most of the autumn took it for granted that a German assault was imminent, and concerned itself chiefly with the timing. The Joint Intelligence Committee, chaired by the Foreign Office’s Victor ‘Bill’ Cavendish-Bentinck, only once sounded the alarm to suggest that invasion was imminent, on 7 September, when, as Bentinck himself noted sardonically later, he himself was briefly absent and the army’s somewhat unstable director of intelligence – the same man who advocated inciting the Wehrmacht to land – temporarily held the chair. Churchill himself was always sceptical about an invasion, but he deemed it politically imperative to sustain the British people’s belief in the threat not only in 1940, but throughout the following year also, to promote their vigilance and sense of purpose. On 31 July Sir Alexander Cadogan expressed his own conviction that the Germans would not come, but would instead thrust at Gibraltar and Egypt, then added, ‘our “intelligence” gives nothing to corroborate this theory. But then they’re awfully bad.’ Nowhere in the world were British agents providing information of much assistance to the war effort. The British C-in-C in Singapore, Air-Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, wrote in frustration: ‘Little or no reliance is placed upon MI6 information by any authorities here and little valuable information appears to be obtained.’ The same was true nearer home.

For many months after the German occupation of Western Europe, the only nation still able to exploit secret sources on a large scale was the neutral Soviet Union, through its networks in Belgium, Germany and Switzerland. In those days its agents did not even need to trouble with wireless: they simply passed reports to their nearest Soviet diplomatic mission. In May 1940 the GRU’s Leopold Trepper moved from Brussels to Paris, taking with him his mistress, the exotically named Georgie de Winter, a twenty-year-old American, and leaving his deputy Anatoli Gourevitch to arrange the Trepper family’s return to Moscow. Gourevitch’s own personal affairs were scarcely uncomplicated. Under his cover as a ‘Uruguayan businessman’ he had a succession of girlfriends, but felt obliged to break off relations with the prettiest when she revealed that her father knew South America well. ‘In other circumstances,’ he wrote wistfully, ‘I could probably have loved her, but such good fortune is denied to a secret agent.’ Thereafter, however, he formed a friendship with a neighbouring family named Barcza, whose elderly Hungarian husband was married to Margaret, a much younger Belgian blonde with an eight-year-old son. Following her husband’s sudden death, Gourevitch began an intense affair with her. Mikhail Makarov, the other GRU career officer in Belgium, was also leading what Gourevitch described primly as ‘an excessively dissipated life’, in which prostitutes played a conspicuous role.

The German invasion of Belgium gave Gourevitch some bad moments: Brussels police arrested his supposed English friend and language teacher, who turned out to be an Abwehr agent; the man was promptly liberated when his compatriots overran the capital. The GRU network’s cover company ‘Au Roi’ collapsed when its Jewish frontmen fled and the business was sequestered. Moscow ordered Gourevitch to take over control of the Belgian operation. He entered Margaret Barcza on Centre’s books – allegedly without her knowledge – as a source unimaginatively codenamed ‘the Blonde’. The most believable aspect of his own later account of the whole saga is its emphasis on the rickety, rackety nature of a spy ring that history – especially Soviet history – has dignified as one of the great secret operations of all time. Gourevitch asserted that Leopold Trepper’s much-vaunted intelligence network in France and Belgium ‘was composed almost entirely of his old Palestinian friends’, and provided Moscow with no usable intelligence about Germany’s descents on Poland, Scandinavia or Western Europe. It seems unlikely that the Russians learned much more from its activities during the year that followed than Churchill and his generals gleaned from their morning papers.

In the absence of serious British military operations save in North Africa, secret war became a massive growth activity, impelled by the prime minister himself. Special Operations Executive was created in July 1940, to ‘set Europe ablaze’, while the armed forces spawned commandos, paratroopers and a string of ‘private armies’, notably in the Middle East. New recruits of all kinds flooded into Broadway, some of them exotic. ‘Writers of thrillers,’ wrote the supremely cynical Malcolm Muggeridge, ‘tend to gravitate to the secret service as surely as the mentally unstable become psychiatrists, or the impotent pornographers.’ Thus was Graham Greene dispatched to Freetown, Sierra Leone, Muggeridge himself – a veteran foreign correspondent – to Lourenço Marques, in Portuguese Mozambique, and the journalist Kim Philby welcomed into Broadway. It became a source of dismay to career intelligence officers, protective of MI6’s reputation, that its wartime recruits who later commanded most public attention were all either mavericks or traitors.

Lacking its own agents on the Continent, Broadway turned to the European exile governments in London for assistance in identifying sources. The Poles began to build impressive networks in their own country, though they suffered grievously from the fact – then of course unknown to them – that the Germans read the ciphers in which they communicated with their agents. František Moravec and his Czech group achieved formal recognition as the intelligence arm of their government; MI6 provided them with wireless facilities and documents. The Czechs established a new base in three little adjoining suburban houses in Rosendale Road, West Dulwich, until these were destroyed by the Luftwaffe, then late in 1940 moved to a new building in Bayswater. MI6 did not, however, give them money. Moravec, after spending the last of the cash he had brought out of Prague, was obliged to negotiate a loan of £50,000, to pay his network’s outgoings of £3,000 a month. For some time he continued to receive East European material via Zürich – Captain Karel Sedlacek had served as Moravec’s station chief there since 1934, under cover as a newspaper correspondent; since he lacked any literary gifts he was obliged to pay a ghost to write copy in his name. The Abwehr’s Paul Thummel used the Czech officer as his link to London; when he was arrested by the Gestapo in March 1942, Moravec’s little group ran out of sources.

The British enjoyed one immense piece of good fortune following their eviction from the Continent: nowhere did the Germans capture people or documents that betrayed Allied progress in cracking Enigma. Between 1940 and 1944 many Frenchmen, including hundreds of thousands of servants of the Vichy puppet regime, collaborated with their occupiers. But Vichy’s military intelligence officers, and several Poles attached to them who were privy to the pioneering Enigma codebreaking operation, revealed nothing even later in the war, when they were exposed to enemy interrogation. The capacious nets cast across Europe by the Nazis focused overwhelmingly on hunting dissenters, not machines. In the early years of occupation, when most people in the conquered societies acquiesced in their fate, Berlin’s spies and policemen uncovered little to ruffle their masters’ complacency, and mercifully nothing that caused them to doubt the security of their own communications.

In the winter of 1940–41, none of the principal belligerents knew much more about each other’s affairs than they learned from studying the international press and watching such movements as they could see of the rival armies, navies and air fleets. Most of the successful codebreaking that was taking place was being done by the Germans, and especially by the Kriegsmarine’s B-Dienst. The British lacked power to accomplish anything save the feeding of their own people. Hitler prepared to launch the most dramatic and ambitious lunge of his career, the assault on the Soviet Union, an act that could only have been undertaken by a man either bereft of accurate intelligence about the economic strength of his intended victim, or recklessly indifferent to it.

2 SHADOWING CANARIS

The Germans had made themselves masters of Europe, and shown the Wehrmacht to be the most formidable fighting force in the world. By contrast, whatever the limitations of the British and other Allied intelligence services, those of Hitler’s Abwehr were incomparably worse. In the summer of 1940 the chiefs of the Nazis’ information-gathering machine toyed with a scheme to plant an agent on a wrecked ship off the English south coast, though they never came up with a credible notion of what such a hapless castaway might achieve there. They also discussed landing agents in Kent, who would be invited to scale the white cliffs, a plan that was frustrated by a shortage of spies with mountaineering skills. Meanwhile the Luftwaffe’s intelligence department misjudged every aspect of the Battle of Britain, from respective aircraft strengths and losses to target selection. In September 1940, following the interrogations of the first enemy spies landed in Britain, Kenneth Strong of War Office intelligence professed himself baffled. He could not reconcile his lifelong respect for German efficiency with the risible management of the Nazis’ espionage activities.

The Abwehr bungled the selection, training, briefing and equipment of agents for service abroad; seldom were they even provided with decent forged passports. It is hard to distinguish between reality and fantasy in the doings of its operational section, Abwehr II, because its war diary was compiled to impress higher authority, and thus included reports from agents who never existed, about operations that never took place. Its chief, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, who was regarded for decades after the war as an important personality and even as a hero of the Resistance to Hitler, was in reality a temporiser who lacked both the moral courage to challenge the Nazis whom he despised, and the skills to run an effective secret service in their interests.

The first man to grasp this was not a German, but a young English historian with a disdain for mankind in general, and professional secret service officers in particular. The manner in which Hugh Trevor-Roper became not the nemesis of Canaris, but instead his shadow, is one of the more remarkable stories of the secret war. The brilliant, testy, supremely arrogant Oxford don who, while not homosexual, professed a deep dislike of women, had just written his first book, a study of Archbishop Laud which he often reread during the war years: ‘I am forever discovering yet more exquisite beauties, lurking unsuspected among yet profounder truths.’ He spent the years between 1940 and 1945 monitoring the wireless traffic of the Abwehr, first for MI5 then for MI6. Trevor-Roper lived and breathed Canaris and his organisation, except on days when he went foxhunting. In growing degree, and comprehensively from 1943 onwards, the English academic learned more about Germany’s intelligence services than any man in the Nazi high command knew – certainly more than Canaris himself, because Trevor-Roper could identify the Abwehr’s many false informants, controlled by the so-called ‘Twenty Committee’ of intelligence officers in London chaired by MI5’s J.C. Masterman. The young academic may have nurtured a private longing, not unusual among intellectuals, to show himself also a man of action. He was immensely respectful of a lanky though never-met cousin, Richard Trevor-Roper, owner of a small estate in Wales, who joined the RAF’s Bomber Command and served as rear-gunner to the dambusting VC Guy Gibson, winning a DFM and DFC before being killed in action on his fiftieth operation, aged twenty-nine.

In December 1939 Hugh Trevor-Roper, then twenty-five, was summoned from Merton College to work alongside Walter Gill, a lecturer in electricity who had achieved celebrity as college bursar by installing lighting in Merton’s quadrangles. During World War I ‘Gilly’ had served in an army wireless section in Egypt, where he ran an aerial up the Great Pyramid. He listed his recreations in Who’s Who as riding, wireless research and ‘rebuking sin’. Now he and Trevor-Roper formed the nucleus of the Radio Security Service, a branch of MI5 initially quartered in the cells at Wormwood Scrubs jail in west London. Day after day, Post Office operators, previously employed to catch unlicensed private wireless transmissions, scoured the airwaves for signals from enemy agents transmitting from Britain, whom it would then be the role of the Merton pair to scotch.

Gill and Trevor-Roper found themselves frustrated by the emptiness of the ether, or rather by the absence of such traffic as they sought. They were failing, so it seemed. Only slowly did they come to understand that this was not because their own eavesdroppers were incompetent, but because no German spies were signalling home. Finding their original function redundant, on their own initiative the two dons widened their researches: they began to gather intercepts from stations in Europe that used known Abwehr callsigns. One evening, in the flat they shared in the west London suburb of Ealing, over tea and biscuits they cracked an Abwehr hand-cipher – a lower encryption system used by Canaris’s bases for communications with out-stations and agents lacking Enigma machines. Trevor-Roper, a fluent German linguist, started to read its messages.

When this came to the notice of Alastair Denniston, chief of Bletchley Park, he was not amused. The RSS’s amateurs were told that they were meddling in matters of no proper concern to them. Denniston added crossly that the Abwehr material was unimportant anyway. In fairness, his dismay about the RSS’s freelancing reflected more than petty jealousy. Months, indeed years, lay ahead before Bletchley’s codebreaking operations achieved maturity, but from the outset it was obvious that if the Germans gained an inkling of what was being achieved, the game would be over. The more diffused was British cryptographic activity, the greater the risk of a leak. Broadway stepped in, to vent its own justified anger, when it was learned that Trevor-Roper’s report on Abwehr activities in North Africa was circulated to a distribution list that included the Post Office wireless section.

Gill and Trevor-Roper, stubborn and mischievous men both, persisted nonetheless; they were soon reading much of the Abwehr’s traffic with its out-stations. To the dons’ glee, even when Bletchley established its own cell to monitor the same Canaris links, it was RSS and not GC&CS which broke the next four hand-ciphers. In the spring of 1941 RSS acquired a new interception centre with American equipment at Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire, and began to establish its own out-stations abroad. In the course of the war, the little service passed on a million signals to Bletchley.

MI6 eventually made a successful takeover bid for RSS, which was logical, given Broadway’s suzerainty over signals intelligence. Trevor-Roper found himself working with Stewart Menzies’ communications supremo, one of the secret service’s more exotic figures, Colonel Richard Gambier-Parry. The colonel was one of many luminaries of ‘secret shows’ who was able to exploit to his own advantage their freedom from accountability to a service hierarchy. Gambier-Parry established MI6’s communications centre at Whaddon Hall in Buckinghamshire, which he also made his personal residence. A keen horseman, he took over the pre-war owner’s pack of hounds and placed the huntsmen on Broadway’s payroll; on one notable occasion, the hounds in hot pursuit streamed through the security gate of Bletchley Park, arousing in the mind of a mounted spectator in the know about its activities an idyllic vision of the brutes gorging on half-digested decrypts. Gambier-Parry lived like a medieval baron. Trevor-Roper, who knew him as a fellow-foxhunter, marvelled: ‘In the world of neurotic policemen and timid placemen who rule the secret service, he moves like Falstaff, or some figure from Balzac, if not Rabelais.’ It should be added that for the rest of the war Gambier-Parry ran MI6’s communications with energy and flair.

Hugh Trevor-Roper became head of the intelligence section of MI6’s Radio Analysis Bureau, run by Felix Cowgill, a former Indian policeman. Cowgill intensely disliked his new junior, whom he deemed guilty of ‘irreverent thoughts and dangerous contacts’. The Oxford historian took it upon himself to go well beyond the production of raw intelligence, conducting evaluation and analysis in a fashion MI6 had always spurned, because it lacked officers clever enough to do such work. The RAB began to produce ‘purple primers’, local guides to Abwehr personalities and agents around the world, which soon ran to many pages. The bureau noted that the Italians, who before the war had enjoyed some notable intelligence successes, were now almost entirely dependent for material on the Germans, and thus acquired their weaknesses.

In the summer of 1941 Trevor-Roper acquired an assistant, twenty-one-year-old Charles Stuart, who had just left Christ Church with a First in history, and the two were joined by another Oxford man, Gilbert Ryle. Patrick Reilly, a gifted young diplomat who became Stewart Menzies’ personal assistant, thought their little cell ‘a team of a brilliance unparalleled anywhere in the Intelligence machine’. Trevor-Roper began to serve as secretary of the joint MI5–MI6 Wireless Committee, in which role he came to know almost everyone significant in the secret world. The peering, bespectacled historian became one of the outstanding British intelligence officers of the war. His mastery of German operations increased steadily, especially after Bletchley’s Dillwyn Knox broke into the principal Abwehr machine cipher in December 1941. While the chiefs of Broadway believed – more so following the Venlo fiasco – that their enemies’ intelligence officers were wizards of guile, from an early stage Trevor-Roper became convinced of the Germans’ institutional incompetence. As for the Abwehr’s chief, he said, far from being a masterspy Canaris was a lost little man drifting on the tides of fate.

Admiral Wilhelm Canaris came from a family of Rhineland industrialists. After service as a U-boat officer in World War I he became engaged in right-wing politics, while playing a role in rebuilding the German navy. A senior officer’s 1926 personal report extolled his skills at the military-political interface: ‘With the finest feel for foreign psychology and mentality, together with uncommon linguistic ability, he knows in exemplary fashion how to deal with foreigners (from the lowest to the prominent).’ Interestingly, however, other naval officers, including Erich Raeder and Karl Dönitz, disliked Canaris, thinking him sly.

During the early years of Hitler’s rule he ingratiated himself enthusiastically and successfully with the foremost Nazis. In 1935, aged forty-eight, he was appointed chief of Germany’s intelligence service, controlling both espionage abroad and counter-espionage at home, though Himmler ran his own domestic security service, the RSHA, under Ernst Kaltenbrunner, with the Gestapo as its enforcement arm. As Trevor-Roper noted, ‘All German politicians of consequence sought to set up their own information bureaus (just as they also sought to establish private armies) as additional supports for their personal authority; and it was essential to the purpose of these bureaus that their results should be the private property of their chiefs.’

The RSHA was no more efficient than the Abwehr, but it wielded more influence through its direct subordination to Himmler. MI6 noted that it achieved good penetration of neutral embassies in Berlin, which yielded useful information. Meanwhile, Canaris’s service had stations around the world and intelligence cells within every formation of the Wehrmacht. The admiral’s early years of office saw a dramatic expansion of his empire; he achieved a reputation for administrative efficiency and diplomatic skills, both in his handling of the Nazi hierarchy and in dealing with prominent foreigners. Until at least 1942, the service’s prestige stood high both inside Germany and abroad.

Canaris was instinctively secretive, even before he became a spymaster, and more so thereafter. Within the rambling warren of offices in a row of converted mansions on Berlin’s Tirpitzufer, where the Abwehr had its headquarters until it was bombed out in 1943, he seemed to glide almost invisibly from one room to another. So he did too on his frequent travels to other countries, especially Spain: a signed portrait of Franco, its dictator, adorned his office wall. He seldom wore uniform – an oddity in Nazi society, which was obsessed with fancy dress. He was elaborately courteous, not least to subordinates, and something of a hypochondriac who took too many pills. He relaxed by riding regularly and playing a smart game of tennis. His passion for animals was much remarked: he was followed around Abwehr headquarters by two dachshunds, to which he talked constantly. One of them once fell ill while Canaris was visiting Italy, and he telephoned at length to Berlin to discuss its condition. His Italian companions assumed that he was speaking in code about great issues of state, but his obsession with the dog was authentic. He often said that he trusted animals more than people; it was probably more accurate to say that he liked them better. In conversation, whether professional or social, he was a master of equivocation. Few people were ever sure what Canaris really thought, which was supposed by contemporaries to reflect his depth of character. More likely, it masked chronic indecision.

Although technically a branch of OKW, the Abwehr quickly became Canaris’s personal fiefdom. Throughout the war his men achieved considerable success in suppressing dissent and capturing Western Allied agents operating in Hitler’s empire, which did much to sustain the admiral’s standing in Nazi high places: Col. Franz von Bentevegni, who ran counter-espionage, was one of Canaris’s few impressive subordinate appointments. Yet the Russians were able to sustain their astonishing espionage activities inside Germany until 1942, and military leakages persisted until 1945, even if the huge matter of Germany’s broken codes lay beyond Canaris’s remit.

The agents his officers dispatched to gather information abroad were almost all unfit for the role. It is odd that Berlin never attempted to recruit spies to dispatch to Britain who might have passed for gentlemen. Even in 1940, the accent and manners of the upper class remained a passport to social acceptance in Churchill’s embattled island. The writer Cyril Connolly wrote an angry letter to the New Statesman complaining that when he himself was detained as a possible spy, he was immediately released when it was discovered that he had been educated at Eton. The experience of the Cambridge Spies, deemed beyond suspicion as members of the upper-middle class, suggests that if the Abwehr had dispatched to Britain a few Nazis with passable table manners and some skill as fly-casters or grouse-shooters, they would have been asked to all the best houses.

As it was, however, when two of Canaris’s key men, Col. Hans Pieckenbrock, the head of intelligence, and Col. Erwin Lahousen, head of sabotage, were sacked in 1943, this was no gesture of Nazi spite, made for political reasons; it was the consequence of their obvious incompetence and of their departments’ failure. German secret operations abroad deployed immense labour for negligible results. One of the Abwehr’s most notable recruits was naval lieutenant Heinrich Garbers. He was a vegetable farmer’s son, a passionate Nazi, who in 1938 had sailed across the Atlantic in a thirty-foot yacht, the Windspiel, which he constructed himself. Amid the Allied naval blockade, the Germans devised the notion of dispatching agents to far-flung places in sailing boats too humble to attract the attention of the enemy. In 1941 and 1942 Garbers made epic forays to South Africa and Namibia respectively. Thereafter he captained the little schooner Passim, which made two immense voyages at an average speed of six knots. The boat sailed under the name of the Santa Maria, and flew successively French, Spanish and Portuguese colours as Garbers deemed appropriate. In 1943 he carried three Abwehr men, codenamed ‘Walter’, ‘Fred’ and ‘Jim’, to Argentina, in what he afterwards described laconically as ‘an uneventful voyage of 65 days’.

In a nautical sense it may be true that nothing much happened, but relations on board were poisoned by the mutual loathing of Walter and Fred, while Jim was perpetually prostrate with sea-sickness, which cost him a drastic weight loss. The passengers were successfully delivered to a reception committee of Argentine sympathisers at Rio del Plata, who presented the Passim’s crew with coffee and oranges before the little vessel turned about and sailed home. Garbers, plainly a man of iron, seemed wholly untroubled by his experiences. He returned safely to Europe and received the Ritterkreuz. There is no evidence, however, that his passengers contributed anything to the Nazi war effort. Likewise, the Hungarian air force officer Count László Almásy crossed 2,000 miles of North African desert to deliver two agents to Egypt in May 1942, a remarkable achievement, and Almásy later inspired the novel and film The English Patient, though its version of this enthusiastic Nazi was fanciful. His passengers, however, did nothing on arrival to justify their epic journey. Nearer home, it became increasingly clear to the British monitoring the Abwehr’s wirelessed reports that its network of overseas stations and informants produced almost nothing that was both new and true.

As Trevor-Roper pursued his researches through the ever-growing harvest of Bletchley decrypts, ‘We soon became aware that “the little Admiral” was a far more complex and controversial character than we had supposed. As the incompetence of his organisation was progressively revealed to us, we discovered, or deduced, something of the politics in which he was involved, and we noted his feverish travels, in every direction, but especially to Spain, which distinguished him sharply from our own more sedentary chief’ – Stewart Menzies. For several decades after the war, Canaris was treated as a major figure of the era, the subject of several weighty biographies. The foremost element in the Canaris mythology was a claim that he had been a secret crusader against Hitler, who had given active assistance to the Allied cause. Several German writers energetically promoted this view, because their post-war society was desperate to identify virtuous men who had dared to raise their hands against the vast evil of Nazism, and suffered martyrdom in consequence.

It is now plain that such claims were unfounded. Until 1938 Canaris was an ardent supporter of the Nazis, and for years thereafter Hitler frequently used him as a personal emissary abroad. The admiral worked amicably with Reinhard Heydrich of the RSHA. The two families socialised: Frau Canaris and the executive planner of the Holocaust sometimes played the violin together. From 1939 onwards, the admiral became increasingly gloomy and nervous – colleagues noted him drinking heavily. Trevor-Roper regarded it as an absurd delusion that Canaris was the directing brain of ‘the other Germany’. The Abwehr’s chief, in his view, was a man of limited gifts, who confined his anti-Nazi activities to making his organisation a haven for officers who shared his rising distaste for Hitler and his supporters, and who resisted active complicity in the Nazis’ atrocities. Canaris’s fastidious nature recoiled from the coarseness of their conduct, perhaps more than from its insensate barbarity.

The only Abwehr officer known to have been a source for MI6 was Hans-Berndt Gisevius in Switzerland, a Prussian lawyer of giant physical proportions who served five years in the Gestapo and hated it, before transferring to the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1938 and thence to the Abwehr. Canaris sent him to Zürich under diplomatic cover as vice-consul, and thereafter he passed information to Halina Szymańska, whom he knew was an informant for both British and Polish intelligence. Gisevius provided material for twenty-five reports dispatched from Bern to Broadway between August 1940 and December 1942, some of them citing Canaris’s professed opinions; also among his sources was Hitler’s finance minister, Hjalmar Schacht.

Szymańska, the conduit, was the formidable and beautiful wife of the former Polish military attaché in Berlin, and once dined with Canaris in Bern. Much of Gisevius’s material was accurate: in January 1941 Szymańska passed on his report about German aircraft stocks, together with the Abwehr man’s opinion that an invasion of Britain was ‘off’. In April she quoted Gisevius’s view, based on information from Schacht, that Hitler would invade Russia during the following month – which indeed was then his intention. But, as usual with intelligence, the German also passed on some rubbish: on 28 March 1941 he told Szymańska that German forces would not take the offensive in Libya – two days before Rommel launched a major onslaught.

Gisevius’s contribution, and those of a handful of his colleagues, scarcely made the Abwehr a pillar of Resistance against the Nazis. Its wartime shortcomings were the product of indolence and incompetence rather than of considered treachery. Canaris was a poor delegator, who chose weak subordinates. German intelligence had one notable success abroad, in suborning Yugoslav officers ahead of their army’s 1941 emergency mobilisation, in time to sabotage the process, but thereafter its espionage operations were uniformly unsuccessful. The admiral was nonetheless too much a German patriot actively to assist his country’s enemies. Like many such people of the time, he harboured muddled political views. A monarchist and a conservative, Franco’s Spain was his spiritual home; he travelled there as often as he could, not merely to visit the large Madrid Abwehr HQ at Calle Claudio Coello 151, but also to commune with like-minded Spanish politicians and grandees. The Abwehr’s ship-watching service in Spain, the Unternehmen Bodden, monitoring Allied movements through the Straits of Gibraltar with the aid of advanced infra-red technology, and reporting them to the Kriegsmarine and the Luftwaffe’s Air Fleet 1 in Italy, formed the most impressive element in the organisation’s overseas operations.

Yet if Canaris bears much responsibility for the shortcomings of Germany’s ‘big picture’ intelligence, he could never have run an honest operation under the dead hand of Hitler, any more than Moscow Centre could do so in the shadow of Stalin. Reports on the condition and prospects of the enemy were permitted to reach conclusions only within parameters acceptable to the Führer. This crippling constraint was symbolised by Hitler’s annotation on an important intelligence report about Russian agricultural conditions: ‘This cannot be.’ Kurt Zeitzler, chief of the army general staff, wrote on 23 October 1942, the eve of Stalingrad: ‘The Russians no longer have any reserves worth mentioning and are not capable of launching large-scale offensives.’ Himmler in 1944 declared without embarrassment that his first requirement from Germany’s intelligence services was not truth, but loyalty to the Führer. This was an important statement, the most vivid expression of the huge weakness of the Abwehr and the RSHA throughout the Second World War.

Historian Michael Handel has written: ‘Leaders in a democratic system are generally more inclined to consider a wide variety of options than those who have always functioned within authoritarian or totalitarian political systems. In authoritarian countries, where the climb to the top is an unrelenting struggle for power, habits of cooperation and openness are usually less developed … Tolerance for ideas that deviate from the “party line” … are seen as personal criticism.’ These features of almost all dictatorships crippled German intelligence activities beyond the battlefield, and sometimes also within it. Himmler’s deputy Reinhard Heydrich, for instance, was far more interested in using the RSHA as a weapon against the Nazi empire’s internal enemies than as a means of securing information about its foreign foes. Hitler never wished to use intelligence as a planning or policy-making tool. He recognised its utility only at a tactical level: the Nazis were strikingly incurious about Abroad.

Yet the fact that the Abwehr was an unsuccessful intelligence-gathering organisation did not mean that Hitler’s armed forces were blind on the battlefield: their access to tactical intelligence was generally good. In the first half of the war Germany’s wireless interceptors and codebreakers enjoyed successes which would today seem impressive, were they not measured against those of the British and Americans. The Wehrmacht had excellent voice-monitoring units, which in every theatre of war provided important information. ‘The Y Service was the best source of intelligence,’ said Hans-Otto Behrendt, one of Rommel’s staff in North Africa. In August 1941, aided by an Italian employee, two agents of the Sezione Prelevamento – the ‘extraction section’ of Italian intelligence – opened the safe of the military attaché’s office at the US embassy in Rome. They removed his codebook – Military Intelligence Code No. 11 – and photographed it. This enabled the Axis to read substantial traffic through the ensuing ten months, and proved a seriously significant intelligence break. In 1942 it had especially grievous consequences for Eighth Army in the desert, since the US military attaché in Cairo, Col. Bonner Fellers, reported in detail to Washington on British plans and intentions. A German intelligence officer paid generous tribute to ‘this incomparable source of authentic and reliable information, which … contributed so decisively during the first half of 1942 to our victories in North Africa’.

At sea, some of the Royal Navy’s ciphers were found aboard the British submarine Seal, captured off the German coast on 5 May 1940, owing to an extraordinary and culpable failure by the minelayer’s officers to destroy its confidential papers. The Kriegsmarine was able to read much of the Royal Navy’s North Sea traffic until August 1940, and some warship communications until September 1941. Throughout the first half of the war, the Kriegsmarine’s B-Dienst read the Royal Navy’s convoy codes, with grievous consequences for Allied shipping losses. Even where signals could not be decrypted, radio-traffic analysis enabled Axis intelligence staffs to judge enemy deployments remarkably effectively, at least until the second half of the war, when Allied commanders became more astute and security-conscious. Patrolling, air reconnaissance and PoW interrogations all provided streams of useful data to German operational commanders, as did open-source information – enemy newspaper and broadcast monitoring.

In the first phase of the war until 1942, while the Wehrmacht was triumphant on battlefields across Europe, these sources sufficed to tell its commanders all that they felt they needed to know about the world, and about their enemies. Victories masked the abject humint failures of the Abwehr. As long as Germany was winning, why should anyone make trouble about imperfections in the war machine? It was only when Hitler’s armies started losing that hard questions began to be asked about the Reich’s abysmal political and strategic intelligence. Hitler himself was, of course, much to blame, but Canaris exercised operational responsibility. The admiral fell from grace, though it was by then far too late – probably impossible, for reasons institutionalised in the Nazi system – to repair his corrupt and ineffective espionage organisation.

While anxious not to be a bad man, Canaris lacked the courage to be a good one. Far from being a substantial historical figure, he was a small one, grappling with dilemmas and difficulties far beyond his capabilities. Trevor-Roper professed to see a close resemblance between the admiral and Menzies, his British counterpart. Both men were conservative, honourable – and weak. By a trifling coincidence, Canaris had a mistress in Vienna whose sister was married to Menzies’ brother. Trevor-Roper came to regard the Abwehr as ‘a mirror image of [MI6], with many of the same weaknesses and absurdities … I recognised, across the intervening fog of war, old friends of Broadway and Whaddon Hall transmuted into German uniform in the Tirpitz Ufer or at Wannsee.’ The admiral did little to merit his eventual fate at the hands of Hitler’s executioners: he frequently talked treason, but did nothing to further it. Far from becoming a martyr to the cause of a ‘good Germany’, he was merely an incompetent servant of an evil one.

3

Miracles Take a Little Longer: Bletchley (#u4fc4ded5-8677-5eda-950d-acfe9e4567f1)

1 ‘TIPS’ AND ‘CILLIS’

In the winter of 1939, MI6 came under scrutiny and fierce criticism within Whitehall, intensified by the Venlo fiasco. Stewart Menzies, knowing the precariousness of his position as ‘C’, compiled a twenty-six-page document defending his service, in which he risked playing one card which might – and did – save his bacon. He promised his masters that the country was ‘about to reap the fruits’ of MI6’s liaison with Allied secret services in a fashion ‘which should be of inestimable benefits to the Air Ministry within a few weeks, and probably to the Admiralty within a month or two’. The significance of this vaguely expressed claim was that Menzies believed that Bletchley Park, with the help of the French and Poles, was close to cracking some German ciphers. Such successes could go far indeed towards compensating for MI6’s humint failure. His expectations would remain unfulfilled for much of the year that followed. Few even within the intelligence community dared to hope that Britain could emulate, far less surpass, the 1914–18 triumphs of Room 40. Admiral Godfrey, head of naval intelligence, wrote to Menzies on 18 November, saying that ‘whether or not Cryptanalysis will ever again give us the knowledge we had of German movements in the late war’, MI6 should exert itself to plant agents in enemy ports to report shipping movements. Godfrey did not seem to expect much from the codebreakers.

In peacetime, few nations commit their finest brains to national security. Brilliant people seldom choose careers in intelligence – or, for that matter, in the armed forces. A struggle for national survival alone makes it possible for a government to mobilise genius, or people possessing something close to it, in the interests of the war effort. The British, and latterly the Americans, did this more effectively than any other participants in World War II. A remarkable proportion of their nations’ brightest and best sooner or later found themselves performing tasks worthy of their talents – in higher army staff posts alongside the likes of Enoch Powell, John Freeman, Toby Aldington; in scientific or technical research; and especially in intelligence, which absorbed thousands of outstanding intellects from many walks of life. The outbreak of war enabled the German section of British military intelligence, for instance, to recruit such writers and academics as Noel Annan, Eric Birley and Alan Pryce-Jones. Annan, a Cambridge don who had only a passable acquaintance with German and French, observed wonderingly: ‘Within a week I was piecing together the reports of agents in the Balkans and the early stutterings of Ultra.’

Donald McLachlan, a journalist who served under Godfrey at the Admiralty, afterwards argued that all wartime intelligence departments should be run by civilians in uniform, because they are unburdened by the lifetime prejudices of career soldiers, sailors and airmen: ‘It is the lawyer, the scholar, the traveller, the banker, even the journalist who shows the ability to resist where the career men tend to bend. Career officers and politicians have a strong interest in cooking raw intelligence to make their masters’ favourite dishes.’ MI6 remained until 1945 under the leadership of its old hands, but most of Britain’s secret war machine passed into the hands of able civilians in uniform who – after an interval of months or in some cases years while they were trained and their skills recognised – progressively improved the quality of intelligence analysis. The Admiralty’s Submarine Tracking Room was directed by Rodger Winn, a barrister and future judge. Gen. Sir Bernard Montgomery’s chief of intelligence from Alamein to Luneburg Heath was the Oxford don Edgar ‘Bill’ Williams, latterly a brigadier. Reg Jones made himself a legend in scientific intelligence.