Читать книгу Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire - Calder Walton - Страница 18

It is easy to romanticise the story of the wartime successes of British intelligence, and to forget a fundamental point: for all of Britain’s wartime intelligence achievements, its secret services were fortunate to face opponents who were generally ineffective, in some cases spectacularly so. The failures of the Nazi intelligence services were ultimately due to the authoritarian nature of the Third Reich itself. Like the intelligence services of all one-party authoritarian regimes, they were extremely good at intelligence collection: keeping detailed records on their enemies, conducting surveillance and using the fear of denunciation to terrorise populations into submission. They enforced the racial conspiracy theories of the Nazi leadership with ruthless zeal, orchestrating the ‘Final Solution’ with a cold, bureaucratic efficiency. They also mounted some successful operations against the British: the notorious Venlo incident was followed by the ‘Cicero’ spy affair, by which classified information was obtained from the British consulate-general in Istanbul from 1943 to 1944. In the Netherlands they identified and overran resistance groups working for the British Special Operations Executive, and recruited double agents from among their members. However, these successes were the exceptions, not the rule.

Just like the Soviet Union’s NKVD operating at the same time, the Nazi intelligence services were astonishingly poor at intelligence assessment: their activities were more concerned with furthering the racial conspiracies of the leadership than with gathering critical information. The Nazi Sicherheitsdienst (‘Security Service’ – SD), for instance, had an entire division devoted to researching church records to identify Jewish and Slavic ancestry, while the SS, Hitler’s murderous elite corps, devoted its resources to researching bizarre subjects like the significance of top hats and Gothic pinnacles at Eton, the suppression of harps in Ulster and the activities of Freemasons.³³

This type of warped activity was accentuated by the fact that there were a number of inbuilt reasons preventing the objective collection of intelligence by Nazi officials: they were often afraid of reprisals against themselves or their families if they produced ‘wrong’ reports, and this inevitably created a large degree of sycophancy among their ranks, with junior staff wary of voicing dissenting opinions. There is some evidence to suggest that, due to their fear of admitting failures to their superiors, some Abwehr officers continued to run agents even when they suspected that their cover had been blown. The head of the Abwehr, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, is known to have been strongly anti-Hitler, and was eventually executed for treason in April 1945 on the Führer’s personal orders. However, contrary to what has been alleged, there is no evidence that Canaris was secretly in communication with SIS during the war to negotiate a peace settlement.³⁴

One of the main Abwehr officers conducting operations against Britain and its empire, Dr Nikolaus Ritter, who also went by the alias ‘Clark Gable’ because, he said, of his resemblance to the Hollywood actor, later unconvincingly claimed to have known that the cover of some of the agents he sent to England was blown, and that he was really running a triple-cross against Britain. By the middle of the war, after a series of failed intelligence missions, Ritter’s Abwehr career was over. He went on to be in charge of civil air defence in Hanover, and was responsible for coordinating the city’s defences on the evening of a devastating Allied raid in October 1944, when his powers of prediction spectacularly failed him. Believing that a diversionary raid was the main thrust of the attack, Ritter stood Hanover’s air defences down. Precisely six minutes after he gave his order, 1,500 Allied bombers arrived overhead. Ritter was immediately retired. One of the last reports we find on him in MI5 records is from 1945, after his capture by the Allies, which notes that he is in charge of sweeping out the canteen in a British interrogation facility in occupied Germany, and that he has one subordinate under him in his sweeping duties – Kurt Zeitzler, the former Chief of the German General Staff.³⁵