Читать книгу The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers - Richard Aldrich - Страница 15

Phew! What a week, the place buzzes with rumours and our own Secret Service continually reports information ‘derived from an absolutely reliable source’ of the most alarming character. I don’t know how many times we have been given the exact date and even hour when the Germans would march into Poland.

Neville Chamberlain1

It is easy to forget that Britain had not one, but three prime ministers during the Second World War. Neville Chamberlain presided until the invasion of France in May 1940, and Clement Attlee arrived in Downing Street shortly after the general election of July 1945, overseeing crucial end-of-war settlements and the final weeks of the war against Japan. Yet the story of intelligence and the Second World War overwhelmingly remains a mythologised Churchillian romp. Newly released documents show Attlee to have been an improbable action hero, or at least a fan of covert operations, quietly learning the intelligence trade alongside Eden and Macmillan in Churchill’s wartime training school for future occupants of Downing Street. By contrast, Chamberlain remains something of a cipher.2 Amongst a mountain of books about Chamberlain and the road to Munich, the interaction between intelligence, appeasement and re-armament is hard to find. Despite significant intelligence disasters in the first six months of the war, Chamberlain’s own impact on intelligence through to May 1940 is almost unknown.3

Chamberlain took little interest in British intelligence before 1939. He eschewed it partly because it was weak. MI6 had suffered budget cuts, and was underperforming against Nazi Germany. It had ceased to recruit agents in Mussolini’s Italy, while its representatives in the Far East were a standing joke. Britain’s small band of talented codebreakers had valiantly and successfully filled the intelligence void for much of the interwar period, but during the late 1930s they progressively lost access to the high-level communications of Russia, Italy and finally Japan, while never gaining access to German ciphers. Japanese communications, the last substantial insight into Axis activity, were lost in late 1938 when Tokyo radically improved its communications procedures, probably as a result of its thorough penetration of the British embassy there. But this was not just a failure of spies to collect. Those responsible for assessments at the centre of government concentrated on counting aircraft and tanks, rather than thinking seriously about Hitler’s intentions. During the intense argument over appeasement, intelligence could not speak truth to power simply because it did not know what the truth was.

Chamberlain made a bad situation worse by filling this intelligence void with his own arrogance and assumptions. Although hampered by the slow pace of British rearmament, he nevertheless made some real choices among a range of alternative policies, deliberately using his wilful and obstinate personality to prevent a serious debate about these options. He had an overwhelming confidence in his own judgement, and believed that his personal skills in diplomacy would overcome any problems and allow him to make robust agreements with untrustworthy leaders. Worst of all, he punished those who purveyed negative intelligence assessments of Hitler, and with MI5’s connivance used his own private system of surveillance to destabilise his political rivals.

Although lacking effective intelligence or a proper assessment machine, Chamberlain did have a range of information sources on Hitler available. He chose to rely on Sir Nevile Henderson, the British ambassador in Berlin, who was close to Herman Goering and believed Hitler’s assurances of good faith concerning his intentions for Czechoslovakia. Robert Vansittart, the able permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, took the opposite view. Understanding that MI6 was struggling, Vansittart had taken pains to develop his own ‘private detective agency’, which delivered surprisingly good, if sporadic, reports from secret contacts inside Germany. Instead of patiently evaluating these competing views, Chamberlain chose to persecute and marginalise Vansittart. In the interwar period very little MI6 material and very few intercepts from GC&CS were circulated to the Treasury, which may help to explain why Chamberlain, despite considerable government experience, was so naïve about intelligence.4

Nevertheless, Chamberlain loved conspiracy. He sent endless secret diplomatic missions behind the backs of his foreign secretaries. He also used his family as emissaries to outwit his own Foreign Office. New and secret documents have recently come to light that show just how far Chamberlain was prepared to go in using the hidden hand against members of his own party, and even his cabinet colleagues. He also manipulated public opinion to artificially create the impression that his views were widely supported. During the ‘Phoney War’ of late 1939 and early 1940, some of the most intricate games of espionage were not focused on Germany, but around Chamberlain’s immediate circle.

The greatest intelligence failures are those of the imagination. Chamberlain and his government underestimated Hitler because it was difficult to conceive of someone who was bent on world domination and genocide – doubly so given that the horrors of the First World War were only a decade or so in the past. Yet for those willing to listen, Hitler calmly set out his plans in some detail. In the summer of 1933, for example, John F. Coar, a retired American professor specialising in German literature, reported to the American ambassador in Berlin a conversation he had had with Hitler and his deputy Rudolf Hess: ‘Hitler talked wildly about destroying all Jews, insisting that no other nation had any right to protest and that Germany was showing the world how to rid itself of its greatest curse. He considered himself a sort of Messiah. He would rearm Germany, absorb Austria and finally move the capital to Munich.’

Even hearing these words, no one believed that Hitler meant literally killing millions of people. Many assumed that his talk of ‘destroying all Jews’ meant merely removing them from influential jobs and limiting their economic power.5

Although Britain appears to have been deeply divided about intelligence in the late 1930s, there was broad consensus on strategy. Everyone wanted to avoid war, not least because British leaders realised it would expose the nation’s weakness as an imperial power. Faced with threats from both Germany and Japan, and latterly from Italy and Russia, they had agreed to prioritise Germany, quite simply because this enemy was closest to Britain’s shores. Many also agreed with Chamberlain’s grand strategy, which was based on deterrence and diplomacy, not fighting. The prime minister, however, wrongly assumed that the dictator states feared conflict as much as he did. In reality, those around Hitler, Mussolini and Hideki Tojo, the Japanese prime minister at the time of Pearl Harbor, were looking for war. As a former Treasury man, Chamberlain brought an actuarial approach to intelligence that involved counting guns and assessing military capabilities, not political intentions.6

British intelligence amplified Chamberlain’s misunderstandings. On the raw size of German forces it was quite accurate, but more importantly, it did not understand Blitzkrieg. Having lost the First World War, Hitler chose a military doctrine emphasising highly mobile conflict. In 1936, he began a second and more rapid phase of rearmament – so rapid that the German armed forces found it hard to spend all the additional money. British intelligence began reassessing the German military’s power, and grew increasingly worried between 1936 and 1938 about growing Nazi capabilities. After 1939, however, the intelligence community became more optimistic about the balance of numbers, and this ‘bean-counting’ approach, which so appealed to Chamberlain, helped to persuade the prime minister to declare war, because he thought Britain was now relatively stronger. In reality, the Wehrmacht’s real capability did not lie in its size but in its new doctrine. Hitler’s audacity and his use of surprise were far more important.

Britain’s biggest intelligence problem was codebreaking. It had lost the battle over secret communications, and so lacked deep insight into Hitler’s intentions. Although GC&CS numbered only two hundred staff between the wars, it was still perhaps the world’s biggest codebreaking organisation. Up until 1935 it was also the most effective. But just as Britain confronted the crises of the late thirties, its rivals adopted modern electromechanical cipher machines, and British codebreaking, then still a bespoke handicraft activity rather than an industrial organisation, went into a sharp decline. By 1937, GC&CS had lost access to Russian and Italian diplomatic messages. The following year, the Japanese improved their code systems, shutting Britain out there too. Political communications between the four revisionist powers, Russia, Germany, Italy and Japan, would have been especially revealing regarding enemy intentions. Intercepts would have made Chamberlain’s appeasement strategy hard to sustain, and would also have prevented Mussolini from manipulating the prime minister with such pathetic ease. Axis diplomacy was a sealed box, and it was only opened in 1940, when the Americans began to break high-level Japanese diplomatic ciphers, and generously shared this secret with Britain.7

Human spies could not fill the gap. The years of economic crisis in the early 1930s cast a distinct shadow over MI6. Its chief, Quex Sinclair, explained that although his main task was to provide raw intelligence for the services against all potential enemies, the lack of funds meant only partial coverage of secret fascist plans to rearm. Heeding the exhortations of the Foreign Office, Italy was designated ‘friendly’, and there had been no MI6 agents there when Mussolini invaded Abyssinia in 1936. MI6 concentrated on Germany, but there was little work on either her allies or the neutrals in Europe. This meant an underestimation of German total long-term industrial capability.8

Britain’s embassy in Berlin was worse still. The ambassador, Nevile Henderson, a close friend of Herman Goering, head of the Luftwaffe, took German reassurances at face value. For their part, the Germans treated Henderson and his staff as idiots. During the Anschluss of 1938, Henderson asked his military attaché to call up German military intelligence and ask what was going on. Senior staff officers there assured him that no unusual troop movements were planned for that day, and everything was calm. The attaché was suspicious, and decided to go on a private reconnaissance expedition out into the countryside. He had only reached the outskirts of Berlin when his car became embroiled in a huge traffic jam caused by a column of 3,000 soldiers, police and SS ‘moving towards Austria in buses, bakers’ vans, pantechnicons and a mass of other miscellaneous vehicles’.9

Britain’s weak intelligence was not just about collection. Whitehall lacked a central analytical brain that could assimilate and assess material from all sources. The resulting fragmentation, combined with the focus on capabilities, allowed Chamberlain to manipulate or ignore intelligence. As early as late 1933, Sir Warren Fisher, head of the home civil service, had decided that Germany was the ‘ultimate potential enemy’ against which long-term defence planning had to be directed.10 But subsequent efforts to determine Germany’s strength were frustrated by interservice rivalries between army, naval and air intelligence. ‘Bitterness and mistrust’ – especially between the Air Ministry and the Foreign Office – dominated relations. The British intelligence apparatus was not yet a community, but rather a number of factions at odds with each other. In 1936, the first glimmerings of central intelligence appeared with the creation of a Joint Intelligence Committee, or ‘JIC’, but this was then a lowly body, and only served the chiefs of staff. Surprisingly, it did not at this point include representatives from MI5, MI6 or GC&CS.11

Intelligence work accelerated after Germany’s occupation of the Rhineland in 1936. All the service ministries boosted their assessment efforts accordingly. Yet there was ‘remarkably little discussion or collaboration between them’. As we have seen, the only effective cross-Whitehall body was Desmond Morton’s Industrial Intelligence Centre, undertaking detailed study into the German war machine. Morton, therefore, might well be credited with the whole idea of central intelligence machinery that would eventually support Downing Street and the Cabinet Office. Even had this existed at the time, Chamberlain was such an incompetent and wilfully blind consumer of intelligence that it would have made little difference. The impact of Morton’s work on Chamberlain was to generate anxiety, then paralysis, and ultimately to accelerate appeasement.12

Despite not understanding intelligence, the prime minister spied shamelessly upon his cabinet colleagues. He also appreciated the value of covert propaganda and manipulating the press. Nothing underlines this more clearly than his personal friendship with the mysterious figure of Sir Joseph Ball, an MI5 officer who became Director of the Conservative Research Department in the 1930s, when Chamberlain was party chairman. Ball secretly controlled a weekly journal that engaged in what the leading historian of the Conservative Party has called the ‘venomous anti-semitic character assassination’ of Chamberlain’s enemies.13 One of his colleagues recalled that he was ‘steeped in Service tradition, and has as much experience as anyone I know in the seamy side of life and the handling of crooks’.14 Ball was so determinedly secret that he destroyed most of his own papers in an attempt to vaporise himself from the historical record. Devoted to Chamberlain, he not only ran spies inside the Labour Party but also spied on the prime minister’s enemies within his own party, especially the anti-appeasers led by Churchill and Eden, even claiming to have had some of their telephones tapped.15

Chamberlain also used Ball to conduct a separate overseas policy behind the back of his first foreign secretary, Anthony Eden. Rightly suspecting Mussolini of being a thug and a double-dealer, Eden preferred to look to the United States for support. Chamberlain, however, paid little attention to Washington, believing that he could reach a binding agreement with Hitler and charm Mussolini into alliance. He sought to cultivate Dino Grandi, the Italian ambassador in London, who had previously been Mussolini’s foreign minister. Grandi’s power base came from the most radical and violent Italian fascists; he was also an adept covert operator. Knowing that his masters in Italy had a low regard for the British, he enthusiastically encouraged the secret channel in order to poison relations between Eden and Chamberlain, reportedly meeting Ball in the back of London taxis.16

Ball’s many London friends included a Maltese barrister called Adrian Dingli. A lawyer for the Italian embassy, Dingli knew Grandi well, and was also a member of the Carlton Club in St James’s, the oldest and most important of all Conservative clubs. Chamberlain and Ball therefore decided to use Dingli to try to open talks with Italy behind Eden’s back.17 In early 1938, they concocted a letter, purporting to be from the Italians, addressed to Eden offering talks, and gave it to Grandi to pass to Eden. Grandi was nervous, and insisted that if the letter were made public he would have no choice but to reveal Chamberlain as the real author ‘in order to protect Italy’s honour’. The scheme went ahead, and when Grandi finally met Chamberlain and Eden on 18 February he greatly enjoyed the open disagreement between them, recalling the ‘two enemies confronting each other like two cocks in fighting posture’.18 There was a fearsome row, and further meetings between cabinet colleagues over the weekend could not mend the subsequent crisis. Eden grew annoyed that exchanges with the Italians increasingly came secretly via Ball rather than via the Foreign Office. To Grandi’s impish delight, Eden resigned on 20 February 1938 and was replaced by Lord Halifax.19

Chamberlain had been using his sister Ida as a further secret conduit to Mussolini. Visiting Rome in early 1938, she was enthralled by the Duce, who ‘took both my hands and kissed them’. She reported that he was ‘kindly & human’, and only wanted peace. Italian diplomats told her they liked Chamberlain, but nurtured a deep dislike and distrust of Eden. Mischievously, they promised to call off their anti-British propaganda if only London recognised Italy’s conquest of Albania. In further meetings with Mussolini and his foreign minister Galeazzo Ciano, Ida read out long private messages from Chamberlain. After getting rid of Eden, Chamberlain thanked her for her ‘invaluable help’.20

The Eden resignation was a potential source of embarrassment. Ball’s influence over the Conservative press, however, helped to limit the damage. The BBC barely mentioned the resignation at all, and Ball assured the prime minister that he had ‘taken certain steps privately’ to manage the story. Amazingly, in the following months Ball watched for counter-attacks on Chamberlain by tapping ‘the telephones of the Eden group’ and of staff working on their journal the Whitehall Newsletter.21 Various Conservative groups had their own news-sheets and outlets. Ball secretly took control of one named Truth, and developed it as both a mouthpiece for appeasement and a weapon with which to discredit his opponents outside and inside the party. Chamberlain was well aware of this, happily confiding to his sister that Truth was ‘secretly controlled by Sir J Ball!’22 Remarkably, Truth was not only anti-Eden and anti-Churchill, it was also overtly pro-German and pro-Italian. Most striking was its anti-Semitism, attacking mainstream journalists with phrases such as the ‘Jew-infested sink of Fleet Street’. Even after the outbreak of war in 1939 and the formation of the national government, Truth conducted attacks on behalf of Chamberlain against his cabinet colleagues.23

Chamberlain’s subsequent visit to Italy was a failure. The Italian secret service had free run of the British embassy in Rome, and used their burglary team, the ‘P Squad’, to gain access to British communications.24 They therefore knew what cards the British held. In addition, Chamberlain played his hand badly, and his excessively polite approach seemed craven to the Italians. Ciano rightly concluded that Chamberlain would make almost any concession to avoid war, which underlined the value of a German military alliance. With Hitler’s support, Ciano now felt the Italians ‘could get whatever we want’ from the British.25 Chamberlain continued to communicate with Rome via the Dingli ‘secret channel’ until the outbreak of war.26 Thereafter, Ball, ever attentive to detail, continued for years to tidy up the evidence of his and Chamberlain’s spectacular failures. Their go-between, Adrian Dingli, died unexpectedly and violently in Malta on 29 May 1945. Two days later, British security agents seized copies of his highly compromising diary.27 Fortunately, his wife preserved an extra copy to tell the real tale. Dingli officially died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. But writing to a friend after the war, Ball explained how he had employed a double agent to work on Italian policy. He added casually that this agent became ‘untrustworthy’, and so ‘I arranged for M.I.5 to look after him in the usual way.’28

On 14 May 1938, an odd incident underlined Chamberlain’s desire to appease Hitler. The England football team was playing Germany at the Olympic Stadium in Berlin. Hitler missed the match, but Goebbels, Goering, Himmler and Ribbentrop sat amid a crowd of 110,000. Controversially, before kick-off the England captain led his team in giving the Nazi salute during the German national anthem. The instructions for this came direct from the Foreign Office, and were delivered to the players in the dressing room just before the game.29 Stanley Matthews, who was a member of the team that day, felt that this was no mere football match, and that the Nazis saw it as a test of the New Order: ‘This day as never before we would be playing for England.’ England won 6–3, with Aston Villa trouncing another German team in Berlin the following day.30

The Czechoslovakia crisis dragged on throughout the year. Hitler demanded that the Czechs cede the Sudetenland to Germany, and it fell to a private intelligence network to shake Chamberlain’s complacency. In the 1930s, such networks thronged within Europe’s capitals. The most important was run by Robert Vansittart, who as we have seen understood how intelligence worked inside Whitehall. Having served as private secretary to two prime ministers and a foreign secretary, and being on extremely good terms with Quex Sinclair, Vansittart had more experience in this field than almost anyone else.31 Chamberlain, however, removed him as permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office in 1937, on account of his strong anti-German views. The prime minister privately rejoiced that he had managed ‘to push Van out of the F.O.’, adding that this was ‘deathly secret at present’.32

Vansittart had forecast doom and destruction almost as soon as Hitler swept to power. He consistently pressed cabinet ministers to encircle and isolate Germany. These warnings reflected thinly disguised prejudice against Germans generally rather than hard intelligence, and Vansittart’s shrill voice often proved his own worst enemy.33 His replacement, Alexander Cadogan, considered Vansittart to have a one-track mind, exclaiming: ‘He’s an idiot with an idée fixe – a very simple one. He’s all façade and nothing else.’ Vansittart may have had a fixed idea, but it was essentially the right idea. Now sidelined as a mere ‘diplomatic adviser’ at the Foreign Office, he nevertheless understood that the key intelligence question was German intentions rather than capabilities.34

MI6’s own intelligence capability was badly damaged in the mid-1930s. The key MI6 station in Europe for watching Germany was based in The Hague, and was an indirect casualty of the Nazi persecution of the Jews. MI6 operations there, as in much of Europe, were hidden behind the Passport Control Office, which issued visas. These now became flooded with Jews escaping Germany and seeking permits for Palestine. The MI6 head of station, Major Dalton, took sizeable bribes in return for visas and was then blackmailed by one of the clerks, subsequently committing suicide in 1936. The blackmailer was sacked after an inquiry, and sold his services to the German secret service, which allowed it to uncover Britain’s best human source reporting on the German navy. Inexplicably, Dalton’s MI6 replacement in The Hague took the blackmailer back onto the payroll, along with another German agent. Unsurprisingly, the station was soon flooded with German deception material.35

Further disasters followed. On the morning of 17 August 1938, Captain Thomas Kendrick, the MI6 station chief in Vienna, was arrested near Salzburg when he became unacceptably close to German army manoeuvres while driving towards Munich. He was taken to Gestapo headquarters at the Hotel Metropole in Vienna. After being subjected for three days to non-stop harsh interrogation carried out by security teams in eight-hour relays, he was expelled from Germany on grounds of espionage. His staff shut down the station and burned all their papers. Sinclair recalled all the remaining MI6 personnel back to London from Vienna, Berlin and Prague – the key cities in central Europe. If the Germans’ intention had been to blunt Britain’s operational capacity to gather intelligence on military operations against the Czechs, this was a resounding success.36

Vansittart’s greatest asset was his ‘private detective agency’, established by his friend Malcolm Graham Christie. Serving as air attaché in Washington in the 1920s, Christie had come to Vansittart’s attention because of his technical and commercial espionage against the Americans. He developed contacts in journalism, government circles and the aircraft industry, and used ‘grey methods’ alongside borderline illegal techniques. Vansittart knew exactly what to do with Christie, and sent him to Berlin as air attaché. Because Christie had a degree in science from a German university and was an experienced pilot, he immediately made friends high up in government and industrial circles. In January 1930, he left government service and became an international businessman, using his German connections. He deliberately socialised with the German political right, and reported back to London. Like Vansittart, Christie loathed the Nazis, but he was skilled in the collection and interpretation of intelligence. He not only used Nazis as sources, but also courted political rebels, and was close to the dissident Nazi leader Otto Strasser, as well as German Catholic circles. The virtue of the Vansittart–Christie network was therefore its broad base, including both Nazis and different types of opposition. True to the tradition of the best spymasters, Christie’s most useful sources remain anonymous, but they included ‘Agent X’ in the German Air Ministry, ‘Agent Y’ in the Catholic Church, and ‘Agent Fish’ who was close to Hitler himself.37

Vansittart and his ‘private detective agency’ jubilantly rode the waves of the Czechoslovakia crisis. Hitler’s increasing belligerence served to improve their standing. On 10 August 1938, Halifax, the new foreign secretary, met Christie to hear his reports of another imminent crisis over Czechoslovakia. But the constant reports of Nazi plotting still seemed fantastic, and neither Halifax nor Cadogan knew what to believe. Cadogan later recorded, ‘There’s certainly enough in the Secret Reports to make one’s hair stand on end. But I never quite swallow all these things, and I am presented with a selection.’ Like Chamberlain, they still could not imagine the leader of a major European country undertaking the violent course of action that was now predicted.38

Vansittart’s most remarkable achievement occurred on 6 September 1938. A shadowy figure slipped noiselessly through the garden gate of 10 Downing Street to pay a secret visit. This was Theodor Kordt, chargé d’affaires at the German embassy and one of Vansittart’s ‘private detectives’. He met Horace Wilson, head of the civil service and Chamberlain’s most trusted adviser, to warn him that whatever agreements were made on paper, Hitler intended to invade all of Czechoslovakia. Wilson was unimpressed. The next day, Kordt returned to give the same message to Halifax in a private audience. Whether or not Halifax was convinced was immaterial. Chamberlain had increasingly taken personal control of foreign policy together with Wilson. Similar messages from German generals opposed to Hitler had already been dismissed. Instead of listening to Vansittart’s private network, their main alternative source of ‘intelligence’ came from the straight diplomatic reports of the credulous Nevile Henderson.39

Henderson had been appointed as ambassador to Berlin in April 1937 because of his uncanny ability to ‘hit it off with dictators’. In the early 1930s, he had formed a close friendship with King Alexander of Yugoslavia. Ironically, it was Vansittart who had identified him as a rising star and promised him a place in the Foreign Office ‘first eleven’. Before Henderson departed for Berlin, Chamberlain sent for him, and after this meeting Henderson became convinced that he was the prime minister’s personal representative rather than a mere diplomat. His positive reporting of Hitler’s assurances underpinned the Munich Agreement that autumn. Early in the morning of 30 September 1938, Hitler, Chamberlain, Mussolini and French prime minister Édouard Daladier agreed to German acquisition of the Sudetenland and postponed the issue of other areas. The Czechs had no choice but to capitulate. Chamberlain returned to a tumultuous welcome, and spoke of ‘peace for our time’.40

Halifax now stepped away. He had initially agreed with Chamberlain that Hitler merely sought a racially coherent Germany, had no real ambitions beyond areas of German population, and would not aggravate Britain by using military force. But the increasingly angry arguments within Whitehall over the Czechoslovakia crisis changed his mind. The foreign secretary eventually confronted Chamberlain and told him that although Hitler had not won a conflict, the Führer was effectively dictating terms. Chamberlain hated being contradicted. ‘Your complete change of view since I saw you last night,’ he said, ‘is a horrible blow to me.’ Lacking in official and reliable intelligence, the prime minister continued to use his own personal estimation in his attempts to predict Hitler’s intentions. He believed he had established a personal connection with Hitler when the two had met, and so invested strongly in Hitler’s promise that he had no intention of invading all of Czechoslovakia if an arrangement could be made about the Sudeten territories with majority German populations. In September 1938, Chamberlain noted that ‘In spite of the hardness and ruthlessness I thought I saw in his face I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word.’ The prime minister assured his cabinet colleagues that he had secured ‘some degree of personal influence over Herr Hitler’ – but they were increasingly sceptical.41

From Christmas 1938 to the invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Vansittart’s circle were on the rise. Their main weapon was intelligence on Hitler’s future intentions. Although Cadogan found Vansittart’s reports from Germany ‘bloodcurdling’, their growing number forced him to conclude that Britain had to assume that Germany was now aggressive. In January 1939, Vansittart was suddenly invited to join the Cabinet Committee on Foreign Policy. He patiently explained to Horace Wilson and Samuel Hoare, two of Chamberlain’s most trusted allies, that his intelligence now indicated that Hitler planned an invasion of the Netherlands. But although he was winning the intelligence argument about the German threat, his prescription was unpalatable and he was never welcomed back into the fold. He recommended an alliance with Russia, something about which even his friends in MI6 were sceptical. Many argued that such an alliance would simply drive Germany into the arms of Japan.42 Indeed, there was some evidence of this from GC&CS. On 14 September 1938, it distributed one of its last successful Japanese intercepts, which showed that Tojo had received a proposal from Berlin for precisely this kind of full offensive military alliance.43

Throughout the Munich episode, Joseph Ball continued to spy on Chamberlain’s political rivals. Chamberlain even boasted of this in a letter to his sister Ida, gloating that Churchill and the Czech minister in London were ‘totally unaware of my knowledge of … their doings and sayings’.44 Most observers suspect that these telephone taps would have been hard to arrange without some assistance from elements within MI5.45 Yet the senior officers inside MI5 were vigorously anti-appeasement, and busily informed Cadogan and Halifax of Chamberlain’s private diplomacy with Germany.46 Bizarrely, while all of this was going on, Churchill was receiving secret intelligence on rearmament from the former MI6 officer Desmond Morton. Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and then Neville Chamberlain had approved this arrangement in more peaceful times, but Chamberlain had forgotten his own instruction, and was horrified when Morton reminded him that Churchill was on the circulation list for some of the most sensitive intelligence circulating in Downing Street.47

At the centre of all this absurd internal political espionage and counter-espionage was the young Harold Macmillan. Although only a backbench MP, he was the key link between the various anti-appeasement factions, including Eden’s ‘Glamour Boys’ and Churchill’s ‘Old Guard’. Their supposedly secret meetings at Conservative MP Ronnie Tree’s house in St Anne’s Gate seem to have been bugged by Ball and his team. Meanwhile, Harold Macmillan, a passionate opponent of Hitler, had taken in forty refugees from the German Sudetenland at his country estate, Birch Grove. In early November 1938, his new Czech guests had joined in the Bonfire Night celebrations, replacing Guy Fawkes with an effigy of Chamberlain. An enthusiastic Macmillan had personally donated his black homburg hat and a rolled umbrella to ensure a perfect likeness of the prime minister.48

By Christmas 1938, few in the cabinet shared Chamberlain’s confidence in his ability to divine Hitler’s intentions. MI5 had recruited further sources inside the German embassy in London, including the former military attaché.49 The Foreign Office also understood that the majority of the Nazi Party saw Great Britain as ‘Enemy No. 1’, and that a full-scale military confrontation was likely. A blizzard of rumours, often picked up by military attachés, suggested that Hitler’s generals had been told to plan an attack in the west. Halifax noticed a troubling consistency in the myriad fragmentary intelligence. Chamberlain, by contrast, preferred to believe Henderson’s assurances from the embassy in Berlin that these were all ‘stories and rumours’. The absence of reliable sigint meant there was little decisive material to help.50 At one point, MI5 resorted to highlighting Hitler’s personal insults about Chamberlain in order to shock him out of his complacency. Playing on Chamberlain’s vanity, Hitler’s use of the word Arschloch, or ‘arsehole’, to describe the prime minister was underlined. It made a ‘considerable impression’.51 At the same time, however, Hitler’s regime was genuinely chaotic, with different groups continually developing plans and cancelling them. German exiles and opposition groups, including elements of the German secret service itself, deliberately invented stories in the hope of inspiring action by London or Paris. There were constant rumours and continual mobilisations, making it very hard to distinguish between ‘signals’ and ‘noise’. All of those earnestly warning about German plans, including MI6, worried about the danger of crying wolf and sowing confusion.52

In January 1939, perhaps encouraged by Halifax’s visible defection from the Chamberlain camp, MI6 changed its tune dramatically: ‘Germany is controlled by one man, Herr Hitler,’ it reported, ‘whose will is supreme and who is a blend of fanatic, madman and clear-visioned realist.’ It added: ‘his ambition and self-confidence are unbounded, and he regards Germany’s supremacy in Europe as a step to world supremacy’, and offered the somewhat belated warning that Hitler might well come west in 1939. Of the Führer himself, MI6 assessed that he was ‘barely sane, consumed by an intense hatred of this country, and capable both of ordering an immediate aerial attack on any European country and of having his command instantly obeyed’.53

The last valuable sigint from GC&CS underpinned this new certainty. At the end of 1938, the German foreign minister, Joachim Ribbentrop, explained to the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, Baron Ōshima, that Hitler wanted to transform the Axis from a mere ideological pact against communism into a platform for a joint war on Britain. Ōshima immediately telegraphed the news back to Tokyo. These were some of the last Japanese messages that GC&CS read during Chamberlain’s administration before Tokyo improved its cipher security. Diplomats in the Foreign Office panicked when they read this new intelligence on Hitler’s intentions. It suggested that he was planning nothing less than global war.54

Remarkably, Chamberlain chose to disregard this definitive sigint, which, taken with the material collected by MI5 in London, pointed only one way: to impending war. The prime minister continued to do so right up until the German attack on Czechoslovakia in March 1939. Although the Foreign Office loathed Chamberlain because of his private diplomacy, diplomats had still held out hopes that he was right about Germany. But with the crushing of the Czechs there could be no doubt. Alexander Cadogan, who had been appointed at Chamberlain’s instigation to replace the violently anti-German Vansittart, conceded that he and the prime minister had been wrong. The story was turning out ‘as Van predicted and as I never believed it would’. Meanwhile, he continued, Nevile Henderson, the prime minister’s single source in Berlin, had been ‘completely bewitched by his German friends’.55

British intelligence failures came thick and fast after the German troops marched into Prague in March 1939. On 7 April, Italy invaded Albania, to the general bewilderment of Whitehall and Westminster. Chamberlain, who had sent another craven message to Rome via the ‘secret channel’ using Ball and Dingli only four days previously, was especially shocked. ‘Musso has behaved to me like a sneak and cad,’ he moaned. ‘He has carried through his smash and grab raid with complete cynicism.’56 Although MI5 had given a direct warning as the result of its excellent sources in the German embassy in London, Halifax had absurdly then gone to a cabinet meeting two days before the invasion and insisted it was unlikely.57

In the subsequent debate in the House of Commons a familiar backbencher rose to speak. Winston Churchill chose the British secret service as his subject, praising it as the ‘finest service of its kind in the world’. The subject was an unusual one for an MP, but Churchill was uncommonly expert on the subject. He attacked the government for failing to use the service’s excellent product properly, insisted that it had received plenty of intelligence about both Czechoslovakia and Albania, and wondered aloud if some sinister ‘hidden hand’ was at work, withholding intelligence from ministers. On balance, however, he thought it more likely that Chamberlain’s obsession with appeasement and striking a peace deal with Germany had blinded him:

It seems to me that Ministers run the most tremendous risk if they allow the information collected by the Intelligence Department, and sent to them I am sure in good time, to be sifted and coloured and reduced in consequence and importance, and if they ever get themselves into a mood of attaching importance only to those pieces of information which accord with their earnest and honourable desire that the peace of the world shall remain unbroken.

Churchill’s accusation that Chamberlain had ignored good intelligence in his blind search for peace was true, but in reality was only one of several problems. As yet, Britain lacked a central brain to undertake proper analysis of intentions as well as capabilities. Although this machinery was emerging in the JIC even as Churchill spoke, the challenge for intelligence analysts everywhere at this time was to abandon pre-formed notions about the way civilised world leaders generally behaved. Policymakers of every persuasion would be surprised by the political events of the next few months.58

On 23 August 1939, Britain was hit by a bombshell. Ribbentrop met Molotov, his Soviet counterpart, in Moscow to sign the Nazi–Soviet pact. This was not only an intelligence failure of the first order, since no one had even begun to contemplate such a possibility, it was also a disaster for British foreign policy. Talks aimed at producing an Anglo–Franco–Soviet alliance were in progress, and a joint British–French military mission was in Moscow for this very purpose even as the Germans and Soviets embraced. The result was abject and public failure. Chamberlain had never been keen on these talks in the first place, confessing in his private diary that he felt ‘a profound distrust of Russia’ and doubted its military capabilities. He believed that Stalin’s objective was to absorb the small states around the edge of the Soviet Union – or, in his words, ‘getting everyone else by the ears’. But he had been forced to pursue a deal, because Halifax and the chiefs of staff now saw containment as the only rational alternative given the bankruptcy of appeasement.59

The Nazi–Soviet pact was a classic case of surprise despite many warnings. Chamberlain and his senior colleagues did not believe these because they did not fit in with their preconceived stereotypes and assumptions about the world. But those with inside knowledge of Moscow had warned publicly of precisely this eventuality. Walter Krivitsky, formerly a senior officer in Soviet military intelligence, dramatically predicted the agreement. He had fled the Soviet secret services the previous year, and taken refuge in America. In April 1939, he wrote a remarkable article for the Saturday Evening Post alleging that Stalin had long been contemplating an understanding with Nazi Germany. When Stalin dismissed his foreign minister, Maxim Litvinov, in early May, Krivitsky knew what was coming next, perhaps because Litvinov’s Jewish heritage had served as a potential obstacle in negotiations with Hitler. Krivitsky then predicted the Nazi–Soviet pact. But London was sceptical, and indeed Daniel Lascelles, who superintended relations with Russia at the Foreign Office, dismissed Krivitksy’s prediction as ‘twaddle’.60

Oddly, the invasion of Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1939 triggered a surge of British intelligence optimism, even belligerence. Combined with the invasion of Albania, these various shocks resigned Whitehall to the increasing likelihood of war. The JIC perceived Britain’s military chances as improving, especially in terms of air power, and London suddenly offered military support to countries as far afield as Poland, Greece and Turkey. The strategy formed a belated attempt at Vansittart’s Eastern Front plan to encircle Germany, but now without the vital addition of Russia. It was this very effort, with its guarantee to Poland, that would bring Britain and France to declare war in September 1939. During the summer of that year, MI6 predicted, confidently and correctly, that if war broke out it was most likely to begin with a German strike on Poland. Although MI6 did not predict the Nazi–Soviet pact, it did observe that there was some evidence that many in Germany sought better relations with Stalin. By late August 1939, the JIC assessed that it was now a question of when war came, rather than if.61

Even at this late hour, Chamberlain still ignored the facts and remained preposterously hopeful. MI6 had reported that Herman Goering wanted to come to London for talks, and Sidney Cotton, an extraordinary airman and pioneer of advanced aerial photography, together with the deputy head of MI6 made intensely secret preparations for a meeting with Chamberlain at Chequers.62 Quex Sinclair then brought news of a possible revolt by the German high command. But both of these rumours were probably elaborate Nazi deceptions designed for Chamberlain’s consumption.63 A week later, on 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland.

At exactly eleven o’clock on 3 September, Britain declared war on Germany. One cabinet minister later reminisced about how Chamberlain said quietly, ‘Right, gentlemen, this means war.’ The rain was pouring down outside, and hardly had he said it than there was a most enormous clap of thunder and the whole Cabinet Room was lit up by a blinding flash of lightning. ‘It was the most deafening thunderclap I’ve ever heard in my life.’64

The outbreak of war had an equally startling effect on intelligence. The many secret service and analytical elements in Britain instinctively started to behave like a community. A diplomat began to chair JIC meetings, and the committee now considered political intentions rather than mere capabilities. The new chairman Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, heir to the Duke of Portland, had the advantage of having served in the military before becoming a diplomat in 1918. He was renowned for crossing St James’s Park accompanied by his pet dog Angus, who would spend all day with him in the office, and soon became known as ‘the Intelligence Dog’. Unfortunately, Angus did not last long. Crossing Hyde Park Corner one day he noticed another dog coming up Constitution Hill. Leaping forward and barking, he ran under a taxi, making him one of the few British casualties of the ‘Phoney War’. Dog accidents aside, Cavendish-Bentinck was an excellent chairman, and played a key role in the JIC’s wartime rise.65

The only person who appeared not to be shaken by the events of 1939 was Chamberlain. His mental concepts were so fixed that he seemed to see the ‘Phoney War’ as an extension of appeasement. Four weeks into the war, the prime minister told his sister that he thought Hitler would not push beyond Germany’s western borders, and would carry on with a peace offensive. Mysterious emissaries came and went between Britain and Germany throughout the entire year to discuss possible truces, and there is evidence that Chamberlain launched several further secret attempts at backstairs diplomacy shortly after Munich.66 Meanwhile, there was no real fighting. ‘I may be quite wrong’, Chamberlain predicted, but ‘however much the Nazis may brag and threaten I don’t believe they feel sufficient confidence to venture on the Great War unless they are forced into it by action on our part’. ‘It is my aim,’ he naïvely continued, ‘to see that that action is not taken.’ Alluding to the national government he had formed at the outbreak of war, containing both Churchill and Eden, Chamberlain believed he had ‘the unanimous consent of my colleagues, including Winston’.67

Chamberlain ‘gave his personal approval’ for MI6 to ‘continue discussions with the Germans’. Early in October 1939, two MI6 officers in The Hague, Richard Stevens and Sigmund Payne Best, informed London that they were reasonably confident of persuading two dissident senior German officers, one of whom was General von Rundstedt, to visit Holland. They wanted to talk about overthrowing Hitler and establishing a regime run by the army. Best was intoxicated with excitement, and ‘saw in this a possibility of literally winning the war off his own bat’. This affected his operational judgement, and also that of those around him. They rushed forward impetuously. The person who should have stopped the ill-fated mission was Sir Nevile Bland, the British minister at The Hague. Having previously served as the go-between for MI6 and the Foreign Office, Bland had considerable experience, and a few years later would serve as a strategic reviewer of all of British intelligence. On 7 November, the MI6 officers excitedly reported that ‘a coup would definitely be attempted’. But the German SD, or security service, had in fact used a double agent to lure Best and Stevens into a superbly executed trap. On 9 November, when they went to meet their contact again at Venlo, near the German border, the agent gave the prearranged signal by taking off his hat. A German snatch squad immediately ran forward firing machine guns into the air and took the two MI6 officers prisoner. What became known as the ‘Venlo incident’ compromised many British agents and damaged relations with the Dutch government.68 Even ten years later, the intellectually mediocre Stewart Menzies, chief of MI6, still believed that the overtures from the German army via The Hague had been genuine.69

The ‘Venlo incident’ is symbolic of a wider credulity at this time. Chamberlain failed to understand that a global war was imminent. It was typical of his overconfidence that the longer the Phoney War went on, the more he disregarded intelligence reports and believed that he was right. In fact the war was widening. The Soviet Union joined Hitler in his invasion of Poland, occupying the east of the country and liberating German soldiers captured by the Poles in the first days of fighting. Two months later, Stalin embarked on his disastrous ‘Winter War’ with Finland. British intelligence saw things more clearly, viewing the conflict as a struggle between the British Empire and a four-headed monster that consisted of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, fascist Italy and militarist Japan. Its answer was to plan secret missions and covert actions against Russia as well as Germany.70

While MI6 busily planned special operations, including a team of ‘volunteer’ commandos that they intended to despatch to Finland, Hitler sprung his next surprise: the invasion of Norway. On 3 April 1940, German vessels secretly headed out in advance of the main force, and with shameful Swedish complicity, all of Scandinavia was soon under German control. In a further embarrassment for Chamberlain, a beautiful Russian ballerina turned Nazi spy, Marina Lie, managed to acquire British plans for Norway’s liberation, allowing the Germans to claim another victory.71

Again Britain had no warning of the invasion, and even Chamberlain recognised that this was a classic case of intelligence failure. He ordered an investigation. It turned out that the Air Ministry had suspected something was up as a result of reconnaissance flights, and that MI6 had passed on some general hints, but had no specific information about timing. The problem was explained to Chamberlain by Arthur Rucker, his principal private secretary: ‘The position is that we were fully warned of the preparation by the Germans of an Expeditionary Force on a big scale.’ But, he continued, ‘we could not, of course, foretell where that Force would be sent’. Senior officials began to realise that even when good intelligence was collected, it was not being assimilated. The JIC needed to be strengthened further. Discussing the matter with Horace Wilson and cabinet secretary Maurice Hankey, Chamberlain agreed that the JIC should be instructed to maintain ‘a running and connected story based upon such Intelligence material as seems to point to the need for action’.72 Norway had sounded a warning that even Chamberlain could not ignore, but although he had now begun to think about substantive intelligence reform, the invasion of France in May 1940 swept his government away.73

Neville Chamberlain did not have as much room for manoeuvre as his detractors suggest.74 He faced enormous challenges, but his elementary error of ‘mirror-imaging’ his enemies as civilised leaders naturally averse to war made them much worse. So often, premiers disregard intelligence, preferring to believe that the enemy shares their values and thinks like them. Chamberlain was also an intelligence bungler. Not only was he a reluctant consumer of intelligence that did not concur with his world view, he was also a poor manager, and the central machinery did not develop much during his time in Downing Street. His incompetent efforts to use a private secret service to open diplomacy with Rome and Berlin radiated weakness and contributed to an emerging Axis triple threat. At the same time, he marginalised the most experienced intelligence professionals and went shopping for ‘intelligence’ that would confirm his preconceived ideas, fixing on single-source reports from Berlin.

Chamberlain was not the only bungler. In the higher echelons of government, few understood intelligence or had any idea how it might organise collectively to meet the challenge of fast-moving Blitzkrieg warfare. Halifax, a deeply intelligent and capable man, was bemused by the contradictory stream of material coming out of Germany, on scraps of paper pinned beneath the collars of secret agents. His senior official, Cadogan, was uncomfortable with the secret world and gladly delegated such matters to Gladwyn Jebb, his private secretary. Jebb recalled how his boss seemed to have ‘the impression that the reports of the SIS which are circulated in the office are obtained by “hired assassins” who are sent out from this country to spy out the land’. The fact that such a naïve view was entertained at the highest level is revealing.75

Hitler was inherently unpredictable. German historians who have immersed themselves in the archives for their entire careers still disagree about whether he was at the outset merely a German nationalist like Bismarck, or whether he always had diabolical plans for world domination. In any case, Hitler loved springing surprises, not least upon his own long-suffering generals. Britain’s codebreakers, so celebrated in the context of the Second World War, simply could not read Hitler’s intentions. Had they been able to decipher even a sliver of top-level German communications in 1939, Chamberlain could not have sustained his arrogant commitment to a personal appeasement policy. But ironically, the weakness of the codebreakers in 1939 became their future strength. Thereafter, a vast influx of young civilians, irreverent students and unorthodox thinkers forced change, powering the intelligence revolution that became Bletchley Park.76 With Winston Churchill at the helm, the relationship between intelligence and Downing Street could finally undertake the long-awaited revolution.