Читать книгу The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers - Richard Aldrich - Страница 17

Once I was convinced about the principles of this queer and deadly game, I gave all the necessary orders that very day.

Winston Churchill1

Winston Churchill was obsessed with intelligence. He arrived in Downing Street in May 1940 with unparalleled experience of the secret world. For almost half a century, he had seen intelligence in action in both peace and war. Churchill was there at the very creation of MI5 and MI6 in 1909. Most importantly, he understood the importance of intelligence – and especially sigint – in wartime operations, as he had been First Lord of the Admiralty from 1911 to 1915, and then secretary of state for war and air in the last year of the First World War. He then became involved in the minutiae of the post-war reorganisation of British intelligence. Later, he immersed himself in the subterranean connections between domestic surveillance, Irish terrorism and communist subversion. Despite this remarkable wealth of government experience in the realm of national security, he remained an outsider. Regarded as a renegade, he had changed political parties twice, and did not hesitate to challenge conventional wisdom. He transferred these impulsive tendencies to the world of intelligence, accelerating the British secret service community as never before.

Churchill believed passionately in the transformative power of intelligence, and knew it could play a central role in government policy. An incurable romantic, he loved the craft of espionage and all the paraphernalia of secrecy, and was an enthusiastic advocate of undercover activity for its own sake. More than this, he also believed in conspiracy, covert action and special operations – what we might call the power of the hidden hand. Churchill has been celebrated as one of the great champions of British intelligence, but his impulsiveness and unpredictability often caused exasperation on the part of his intelligence chiefs. The British intelligence community undoubtedly expanded, innovated and became more connected to policy during the Second World War as a result of his boundless enthusiasm, but it also had to protect itself from his meddling and his impulsive desire to control its detail.

Most importantly, Churchill’s wartime government served as a school for future prime ministers. Just as he had learned the craft of intelligence in several previous administrations, so his own wartime ministers, including Clement Attlee, Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan, all future denizens of Downing Street, saw intelligence at first hand. Senior figures in their governments such as Ernest Bevin, Hugh Dalton and Duncan Sandys had also been members of Churchill’s wartime government. Unlike previous prime ministers, Churchill taught his pupils that intelligence was of the utmost importance. His entourage were able to see for themselves the transformative power of secret activity at the top.

Churchill was ahead of his time in his conception of Downing Street. He anticipated a more presidential style of government, gathering around himself a cluster of special advisers and personal staff able to respond instantly to his sometimes whimsical enquiries. Desmond Morton served as his intelligence adviser and linked Number 10 with MI5, MI6 and GC&CS – as well as the volatile world of special operations. Although this style would later be adopted by Harold Wilson, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, it did not always prove popular with Churchill’s ministers. As foreign secretary, Anthony Eden found Morton’s interventions with Charles de Gaulle and the French resistance especially vexatious, noting in November 1942, ‘I wish Morton at the bottom of the Sea.’2

Paradoxically, Churchill’s weakest suit was secrecy, which he applied stringently to everyone except himself. In 1923 he had ‘blown’ the secrets of signals intelligence during the First World War in his account of that conflict, and after the Second World War publishers offered him eye-watering sums to write about that global conflict in which he had played such an important part. Once again he was determined to tell all, including the story of secret service, and initially he fought the efforts of the Cabinet Office to enforce secrecy. Sir Stewart Menzies, the chief of MI6, had to be despatched to bring him to heel. After the war, Morton was debating at length with a friend what constituted the ‘essence of Winston’s life and spirit’. Morton thought ‘freelance newspaper correspondent-adventurer’ was the best possible description. Churchill loved secret service, but he also loved to tell stories. He was not a man naturally inclined to keep secrets for very long.3

He was also abrasive. From the moment he entered Downing Street he wanted to see raw intelligence, not just summaries and appreciations. Most of all he wanted to see all the intercepts provided by the codebreakers at Bletchley Park in their original form. Churchill became Britain’s war leader just as the flow of intelligence from Enigma expanded. It would soon become a torrent. Only with great reluctance was he persuaded that he could not see everything. Instead, Menzies personally delivered selections of Ultra to the prime minister in a buff-coloured box.4 Churchill was proactive, too. At moments of extreme tension, such as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he would ring Bletchley Park ‘at all hours of the day and night’ to get the latest news.5 This allowed him to become a ‘do-it-yourself analyst’ of raw intelligence, and he often leapt to the wrong conclusions. The misreading of Ultra or the selective use of intelligence underpinned some of his more hare-brained schemes. As the war progressed, Alan Brooke, the Chief of the Imperial Staff, found more and more of his energy expended on containing Churchill’s ill-judged enthusiasms. From July 1941 the chiefs of staff were given updates on the latest sigint from Bletchley three or four times a day, to help them deal with the prime minister’s ‘proddings’.6

Yet, it was precisely because of these vexing tendencies that Churchill transformed intelligence at the top. Under him, Whitehall developed the first modern system for incorporating intelligence into strategy and operations, not least with the expansion of the Joint Intelligence Committee. The development of the JIC as the central brain of British intelligence was one of the Churchill government’s most important contributions. As we have seen, throughout the interwar period the Foreign Office and the three ministries of the armed services had battled over the control and interpretation of intelligence. This began to be addressed in 1936 with the creation of the JIC, which then worked for the chiefs of staff. But it had remained underpowered and weak. All that changed with the advent of Churchill and his insatiable desire for a daily diet of raw decrypts.7

In May 1940, twin disasters catapulted Downing Street into action. The Germans had shocked Europe with their surprise occupation of Norway and the successful invasion of northern France. The lack of warning bothered Churchill, and he ordered the chiefs of staff to rethink how intelligence connected to high-level strategy and operations. As a result, on 17 May, only a few days after Churchill had arrived in Number 10, the JIC was elevated in importance, being given sole authority for producing strategic and operational assessments, alongside a new warning function. Major General Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay, Churchill’s senior staff officer, was ordered to bring JIC intelligence ‘to the notice of the prime minister at any hour of the day or night’.8

This was less about creating a good government machine than about personal control. In August 1940, Churchill told Ismay that he was fed up with receiving ‘sifted’ intelligence from the various authorities. He renewed his demand for raw material that he could analyse himself, and insisted that Morton ‘be shown everything’, and should then ‘submit authentic documents to me in their original form’.9 A few months later he asked to see a list of all those who were allowed to see this special material from GC&CS. He expressed horror at the ‘vast congregation’, and ordered that it be cut drastically. By November 1940, there were very few recipients of raw Ultra, although many more received the information in a disguised or digested form.10

Churchill constantly surprised the chiefs of staff with questions derived from specific Ultra decrypts. His own understanding of them was often at odds with that of the JIC. He used Ultra to underpin his own eccentric approach to strategy, which was romantic, inspirational, loquacious and often fuelled by alcohol. Talking late into the night, he used intelligence and his alarming ability to orate spontaneously at inordinate length to wear down his opponents in the war cabinet. Both Brooke and Alexander Cadogan, the senior official at the Foreign Office, used their diaries to let off steam by recording the vexations that Churchill caused his immediate circle. Cadogan asked how they ever managed to run the war ‘with the PM spending hours of his own and other people’s time simply drivelling, welcoming every red herring so as only to have the pleasure of more irrelevant, redundant talk’.11

The reinforced JIC was there to help the chiefs of staff resist Churchill. It expanded to include MI6 (which also had responsibility for the codebreakers of GC&CS), MI5 and the Ministry of Economic Warfare (which oversaw special operations), and more personnel joined the analytical team drafting the assessments. Increasing the amount of assessed intelligence would, it was hoped, prevent the prime minister from engaging in DIY analysis. Yet Churchill was sometimes right in his reading of the decrypts, and was far ahead of the ‘professional analysts’ in spotting one of the most remarkable turning points of the war, Hitler’s stunning decision to launch an attack on Russia on 22 June 1941.

Churchill forced Whitehall and Westminster to wake up to the importance of intelligence in modern war. This not only included intercepts, but extended to scientific developments. Indeed, the prime minister backed the creation of entirely new forms of electronic intelligence and the acceleration under R.V. Jones of the ‘Wizard War’, a field that would constitute an entirely new secret world by the 1950s. Most importantly, he understood the strategic importance of special forces and covert action. Britain’s most famous secret armies owed their existence to Churchill’s enthusiasm for wild characters. This included the SAS, the Commandos and the Chindits. Conventionally-minded staff officers detested this sort of unconventional activity. Brigadier Orde Wingate, who led a successful guerrilla revolt against the Italians in East Africa 1940, was actually demoted by his superiors at GHQ Middle East because of his maverick ideas. Churchill rescued him from his military exile and forced the chiefs of staff to take him seriously, allowing him to create the Chindits in Burma, who then inspired a generation of behind-the-lines enthusiasts who believed passionately in what they called the ‘fourth dimension of warfare’.

This was not mere romanticism. Churchill understood the importance of unconventional thinking about warfare, and so was the first to connect organisations like SOE and MI6 to national policy. His inner circle learned these dark arts, and began to conceive of a whole new secret way in warfare – which later extended to peacetime. Churchill’s adherents and associates, including some improbable converts like Clement Attlee, his deputy prime minister, ensured that this revolutionary approach to secret statecraft, in which bribery, blackmail and other kinds of subterfuge were used to exercise British power, extended over the next fifty years.

Churchill’s most immediate concern was closer to home. He worried that Britain might be overwhelmed by Nazi secret warfare. During late 1939 and early 1940, this fear focused specifically on Ireland as ‘England’s back door’, and anxiety about Irish–German links reached fever pitch. In May 1940, MI6 despatched a veteran Anglo-Irish intelligence officer called Charles Tegart to Dublin to investigate. His fantastic reports would not have been out of place in a William le Queux novel of 1913. He claimed that IRA leaders had allowed 2,000 Nazi agents to be landed by submarine, and that they were already at work preparing hidden aerodromes for a surprise German invasion from the west. Churchill and his new cabinet accepted this at face value and panicked, extending a rather desperate offer of Irish unity to Éamon de Valera, who skilfully played up the fifth-column menace. Secretly, the British military prepared for a pre-emptive invasion of southern Ireland.12

Churchill’s long association with both India and Ireland underpinned his views on subversion. During the First World War, Germany had launched elaborate plots conniving with rebels in imperial locations as far apart as Canada, Ireland, India and Singapore. As early as 1937, MI6 warned Robert Vansittart, then still the top official in the Foreign Office, that Germany was advancing similar plans for Ireland in the event of war. All of Britain’s secret services began to turn their attention across the Irish Sea. The IRA, who had been allies of the Soviet Union in the previous decade, sensed an opportunity and began to explore a secret alliance with Hitler. In early 1937, the IRA chief of staff, Tom Barry, visited Germany to discuss opportunities for wartime sabotage. Several other high-level visits followed, and by 1939 even the Irish government were of the opinion that Sean McBride, the IRA’s director of intelligence, was working more eagerly for the Germans than for his own organisation.13

During the summer and autumn of 1939, German emissaries visited Dublin, proving their identities by matching a pound note that had been torn in half with one carried by their contacts. In August, the Abwehr, Germany’s overseas secret service, actually informed the IRA that war was coming – ‘probably in one week’. Meanwhile, MI6 had learned, at least in outline, of further meetings between the IRA and the head of the Abwehr, Admiral Canaris. At this point de Valera denied that there was any connection between the IRA and Nazi Germany, but MI6 knew otherwise.14

British intelligence overestimated the ‘backdoor’ threat because of an IRA bombing campaign on the mainland. The IRA was a small and divided organisation in the late 1930s and early 1940s, with innumerable splits between those who wanted to do little, those who wanted a guerrilla war against Ulster, and those who wished to bomb the British mainland. In 1939, the faction that advocated bomb attacks on England triumphed. Their plans were somewhat eccentric, and included blocking London’s sewers with two tons of quick-drying cement. Many of their explosives were homemade and most of their attacks failed. Even so, in June 1939 there were seventy-two IRA attacks in England. The worst came two months later, when a bomb exploded in a busy shopping street in Coventry, killing five people and injuring a further fifty-one. In early 1940, two IRA operatives, James McCormick and Peter Barnes, were hanged for their role in the bombing, after much debate in cabinet over their possible reprieve. In another incident, five hundred pounds of explosives were discovered in a raid on a chip shop in Manchester. De Valera refused intelligence cooperation against the bombers.15

There were a further fifty IRA attacks in the period up to May 1940. Churchill was particularly exercised, which formed the personal background to the panic about a German fifth column as he arrived in office. It clearly loomed large in the new prime minister’s imagination, and he sought the views of the chief of MI6 on German activity on the west coast of Ireland, asking, ‘Are there any signs of succouring U-boats in Irish creeks or inlets?’ He urged that more be spent on building up a better force of agents in Dublin. Sidney Cotton, an eccentric businessman who cooperated with MI6 and who pioneered aerial reconnaissance, was despatched on a survey of the west coast of Ireland in search of U-boats.16

Churchill arrived in Downing Street on 10 May 1940. Five days earlier, Hermann Görtz of the Abwehr landed by parachute in County Meath. A hardened spy who had been jailed for four years for his espionage activities in Britain in the 1930s, Görtz’s task was to establish a more permanent liaison with the IRA and develop detailed plans for attacks on Northern Ireland.17 The Garda raided one of his safe houses a few weeks later and recovered Görtz’s uniform, his parachute, documents referring to ‘Plan Kathleen’, and £20,000 in cash. The Dublin government brought some of those arrested before the courts, and the affair received considerable publicity.18 Görtz managed to evade the authorities for another eighteen months, and after his capture he committed suicide by biting on a glass phial filled with prussic acid.19 Guy Liddell, a senior MI5 officer, eventually came to regard the Görtz case as ‘fairly conclusive proof’ that the Germans were working in close conjunction with the IRA.20

In reality, the IRA was small and ineffective in May 1940. It admired Hitler no more than it had admired Stalin in the previous decade. These were merely opportunistic explorations on its part.21 But its expansive bombing campaign in England, together with some genuine instances of Nazi agents with secret radios and subventions of cash, gave substance to the largely fictional fifth-column menace. Hermann Görtz and his associates transferred some £50,000 to the IRA in this period. This was more than enough to alarm Downing Street. In May 1940, the nascent JIC warned that the IRA could rapidly grow to 30,000 members, and that German aircraft parts and spares had already been smuggled into Ireland. Churchill ordered plans for an invasion of southern Ireland to be drawn up using newly arrived Canadian troops.22

By the summer of 1940, the fifth-column menace appeared terrifying. The Netherlands and France had surrendered after only limited resistance. For Churchill, and indeed President Roosevelt, the most plausible explanation for this surprising turn of events was an insidious ‘enemy within’. In reality, Hitler’s thrust into Holland, Belgium and France was informed by excellent signals intelligence derived from the intercepted messages of the French high command, which also revealed British plans.23 Nevertheless, in July 1940, with Churchill’s approval, Roosevelt sent William J. Donovan, chief of America’s embryonic intelligence service, to Britain to investigate ‘fifth column methods’. He found a receptive audience. Churchill was now obsessed with the idea that a large fifth column was preparing the ground for a German invasion of Britain.

Donovan found hard facts difficult to come by. The British public were infected with what Churchill himself called a ‘spy mania’ – just as they had been in the First World War. German spies were seemingly everywhere. In one odd case, locals assumed a cattle stampede on the island of Eilean Shona off western Scotland was the work of German agents.24 The police, the army and the security services were inundated with reports about mysterious foreign men on trains, flashing lights assumed to be signals to the enemy, and above all the menace of carrier pigeons, which were seen as the main means for spies sending secret messages to Germany. An army of British birds of prey was marshalled to bring down the pro-German pigeons on their way back to the Fatherland.25 MI5 took the pigeon threat seriously, and even had its own anti-pigeon section under Flight Lieutenant Richard Melville Walker.26

The idea of a fifth column captured the popular imagination. One woman, a rare voice of scepticism, recorded the everyday experience: ‘From every part of the country there came the story of the Sister of Mercy with hobnailed boots and tattooed wrists whom somebody’s brother’s sister-in-law had seen in the train.’ Every unusual occurrence was explained by the hidden hand of Nazi agents. Remarkably, the newly formed Ministry of Information dismissed any doubts as further evidence of subterranean activity. Anyone who thought it could not happen in Britain, it insisted, had ‘simply fallen into the trap laid by the fifth column itself’, adding that the top priority of the fifth column was of course ‘to make people think that it does not exist’. In a perfect climate of conspiracy, doubters were themselves part of the vast plot. The police and security agencies were flooded by absurd reports of suspicious Nazi doings.27

Churchill had personal reasons for fearing subversion. Pro-German sentiment, often converging with virulent anti-Bolshevism, was rife amongst the British aristocracy. Lord Londonderry, Churchill’s own cousin and the government minister responsible for the RAF in the early 1930s, was notoriously pro-German. Although not a fascist himself, he sought to pursue friendship with the Nazis at any cost, flying to Germany to meet Hitler and Goering, and repeatedly hosting Ribbentrop and ‘a noisy gang of SS men’ in his stately home during 1936.28

Evidence of real Nazi spies in important places confronted Churchill within days of his arrival in Downing Street. On 18 May 1940, the Tyler Kent espionage case exploded, shaping the new prime minister’s immediate views on subversion and increasing his fears. Tyler Kent was a lowly cipher clerk at the American embassy in London, but he had close links with the Right Club, a pro-German and anti-Semitic group. He used an intermediary to pass top-secret documents, including summaries of conversations between Churchill and Roosevelt, to the Germans and the Italians. MI5 raided his flat and found 1,929 official documents, as well as Churchill’s cables and a notebook containing the names of people under surveillance by Special Branch and MI5. The haul also included agreements on Anglo–American intelligence cooperation. Kent’s espionage only came to light because MI5 had managed to penetrate the Right Club and the codebreakers at Bletchley Park were now able to read Italian communications.29 Churchill and Roosevelt had no way of knowing how far this subterranean network had spread. Both were horrified by the presence of someone with profoundly Nazi beliefs at the centre of the nascent transatlantic relationship. Guy Liddell noted in his diary: ‘It seems that the PM takes a strong view about the internment of all 5th columnists at this moment and has left the Home Secretary in no doubt about his views. What seems to have moved him more than anything was the Tyler KENT case.’30 Kent never abandoned his beliefs. After serving his prison sentence and returning to the United States he became the publisher of a newspaper with links to the Ku Klux Klan, and spent his time asserting that President John F. Kennedy was part of a communist conspiracy.31

Precisely because of the German offensive in Europe, refugees and ‘enemy aliens’ were now a growing issue at home. Churchill wondered who among them were German or Italian agents. The Chamberlain government had worked hard to avoid mass internment, which had gone badly wrong in the First World War. That said, at least thirty men and women were interned even before Chamberlain declared war.32 In 1939 the procedure had been for local tribunals to screen suspects, and less than one in a hundred, mostly Nazi sympathisers, were interned as ‘Category A’ risks. These now amounted to 5,600 people. Around 6,800 received ambiguous ‘Category B’ status, and 64,000 people, mostly fleeing Nazi oppression, were deemed ‘Category C’ and were left at liberty. In the febrile atmosphere of May 1940, Churchill gave the stark order to ‘Collar the lot.’ In practice this meant interning all male aliens and all women in ‘Category B’. The authorities rounded up some 27,000 people, including 4,000 women, most of whom were Jewish refugees. Because this was a panic measure, many went to temporary camps, including the racecourse at Kempton Park, where conditions were appalling.

Churchill was so anxious about the fifth-column danger that he thought the detention camps might themselves become launch points for insurrection, possibly reinforced by the arrival of German parachutists. Officials tried to address the problem by deporting some of the internees to Canada and Australia. On 2 July 1940 the liner Arandora Star was torpedoed off the Irish coast with the loss of several hundred lives. Many of the dead were Jewish refugees in ‘Category C’. Churchill’s policy had backfired, and caused a furore in Parliament. Under pressure, the prime minister performed a dramatic U-turn, and by August 1941 only about 1,300 refugees were still interned, mostly on the Isle of Man.33 Many of these were dedicated fascists, and on Hitler’s birthday in April 1943 they celebrated by coming together to sing the Nazi Party anthem ‘The Horst Wessel Lied’ in the camp canteen. Importantly, many of those initially interned by Churchill should not have been, while others, often with society connections, escaped detention. One columnist for The Times wondered, if they interned all the pro-Germans in Britain, ‘how many members of … the House of Lords would remain at large?’34

MI5 found itself in a mess in 1940. Spending most of their time investigating aliens and refugees, staff soon became overwhelmed by the huge numbers involved. Because home secretaries had been consistently squeamish about issuing warrants for phone tapping, or intercepting the mail of British citizens, MI5 had no clear idea whether there was a connection between German secret service operations, Nazi sympathisers and enemy aliens. Moreover, while it was tied up with the alien problem it had little time to address other important issues.35 Having moved from the top floor of Thames House to new wartime headquarters at Wormwood Scrubs Prison, and then decamped to Blenheim Palace to escape the Blitz, MI5 described itself as being in a ‘chaotic’ state.36

Unfairly perhaps, this prompted Churchill to sack Vernon Kell, the long-serving MI5 director-general. He moved the control of MI5 from the Home Office to a new Home Security Executive under Lord Swinton, formerly secretary of state for air, and ordered him to ‘find out whether there is a fifth column … and if so eliminate it’. Oddly, Sir Joseph Ball, a Chamberlain henchman and one of Churchill’s detractors, was chosen to run its shadowy Intelligence Committee. Meanwhile, the prime minister’s anxiety about ‘the enemy within’ flitted from aliens to communists and IRA terrorists. But he understood that MI5 badly needed reform. In early 1941, he chose as director-general Sir David Petrie, who had done the same job in India. Petrie restored confidence, and MI5 went from success to success.

Although Churchill had overestimated the number of fifth columnists in Britain, his fears were not entirely unwarranted. Real traitors did exist, and MI5 set up a clever ‘false flag’ operation to catch them. Working from the basement of a London antique shop, it attracted more than a hundred would-be pro-Nazi spies into its web with excited talk of invisible ink and secret plots. Assuming they were aiding Berlin, these individuals, including both foreigners and British fascists, unwittingly offered plans of military defences, reports on amphibious tanks and details of experimental jet fighters to undercover MI5 officers. British security officers even acquired a stock of replica Iron Cross medals to award to especially zealous members of the network for their good work and prove that they really were working for Hitler.37

Churchill did not only fear subversion; he also saw it as a useful offensive weapon. Indirect warfare, including subversive propaganda and economic sabotage, fascinated him. Accordingly, he conceived of an anti-Nazi fifth column in Europe that would beat the Germans at their own game.38 Morton was no less enthusiastic. On 27 June 1940, he told Churchill that anti-sabotage was well in hand under Swinton, but ‘offensive underground activities’ against the Axis were neither centralised nor vigorous. Agreeing with the prime minister, Morton argued that ‘strong underground action … if carefully thought out and coordinated can play an important part in helping to defeat the enemy’. Indeed, Morton now believed that this sort of event-shaping activity was more important than gathering intelligence.39

Churchill acted quickly. On 16 July he gave Hugh Dalton, a Labour MP who had long opposed appeasement, responsibility for what he called ‘the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’. This was the new Ministry of Economic Warfare, which encompassed propaganda, economic sabotage and special operations, including what would soon become the Special Operations Executive, or SOE. Having served as under-secretary of state at the Foreign Office in the 1920s, Dalton understood intelligence, and had experience of dealing with GC&CS intercepts. Churchill also thought that Labour politicians were more suited to underground work because it included the promotion of economic sabotage and labour unrest.40 Nonetheless, subversion was a hot potato in Whitehall. Prior to Churchill’s arrival, it had been owned by a small department of MI6 under Major Laurence Grand. MI6 was underperforming, and this section was especially weak. Although Grand was flamboyant, gregarious and well-liked, everyone knew he was not up to the task, and he had become a universal figure of fun – Dalton nicknamed him ‘King Bomba’, after Ferdinand II of Sicily, who bombarded his own cities in 1849.41 Even Grand’s senior official remarked that to have him in charge of subversion was ‘like arranging an attack on a Panzer division by an actor on a donkey’.42

Dalton’s Ministry of Economic Warfare was essential. But Churchill’s passion for forming new organisations caused trouble. MI6, the Foreign Office and the chiefs of staff all hated SOE for cutting across their jurisdictions, and for two years it remained ineffective while Dalton presided over an unholy amount of bureaucratic infighting. Menzies fought doggedly to resist its growth, insisting that SOE’s desire to stir things up imperilled the safety of his own traditional intelligence networks. Conversely, Dalton’s chief of staff complained that MI6 had ‘a “false beard” mentality … especially those who have been in the show for a very long time’. ‘Times have changed,’ he continued, ‘and “secret” activities are now the rule rather than the exception.’ Precisely because secret activities were now everywhere and seemed to touch everything, Whitehall was ablaze with arguments over subversion. The extraordinary interdepartmental warfare over SOE between 1940 and 1942 was a symptom of Churchill’s determination to change how Britain thought about warfare and to fully embrace subterranean techniques. The infighting only decreased in 1942, when Lord Selborne replaced Dalton. Quietly effective and close to Eden, Selborne enabled some of the frictions that SOE had created to subside.43

SOE was a widely known secret within Whitehall. By contrast, Bletchley Park was not – with a few exceptions, even the inhabitants of Churchill’s private office knew nothing of Ultra: his various private secretaries who handled the mysterious boxes of intercepts only became aware that they had contained Ultra material in the 1970s. The boxes arrived in Number 10 with a strict notice: ‘Only to be opened by the prime minister.’ The secretaries placed them on the prime minister’s desk, ‘and left [them] for him to re-lock’. The Ultra secret really was ultra-secret – even in Downing Street.44

Bletchley Park was only one part of the vast sigint operation presided over by GC&CS. The British codebreaking empire, which numbered some 10,000 people by the end of the war, also intercepted diplomatic traffic (‘flimsies’, also known as ‘BJ’s, or ‘blue jackets’, after the colour of their folders) from dozens of countries. This material was full of political gossip, and Churchill characteristically found it irresistible. His favourite reading included seemingly obscure stuff, such as messages from the Brazilian ambassador in London. The volume was incredible – reaching 13,000 messages in 1941 and increasing dramatically thereafter. It was Morton’s job to sift through this material, selecting those messages that he knew would interest the prime minister.45

Stewart Menzies also brought Churchill human agent reports, known as ‘CX’, from MI6. On the whole, though, MI6 and its human intelligence – or ‘humint’ – underperformed, and Menzies found the flow of decrypts from the codebreakers vital in terms of both maintaining his personal standing and defending the reputation of MI6 within Downing Street. In Europe he was also able to piggyback to some degree on the governments-in-exile by trying to restore their agent networks in Europe, but in other regions, including the Far East, MI6’s wartime performance was weak. In August 1940, a teleprinter circuit connected the MI6 headquarters at Broadway Buildings in St James’s with Downing Street, where Group Captain F.W. Winterbotham helped Menzies to select the ‘headlines’ for Churchill.46 One MI6 agent, codenamed ‘Knopf’, did provide Menzies and Churchill with valuable intelligence on Hitler’s plans for the Eastern Front and the Mediterranean – including the location of the so-called ‘Wolf’s Lair’, Hitler’s headquarters in eastern Prussia. Knopf and his sub-network provided access to the upper echelons of the Third Reich, informing London that, for example, the Führer was ‘determined to capture Stalingrad at all costs’.47 For the most part, however, Menzies relied on sigint.

Unlike Menzies, Churchill adored science, and depended heavily on his scientific adviser ‘Prof’ Frederick Lindemann. Meeting Churchill almost daily, Lindemann enjoyed more influence than any other civilian adviser. Together they helped to create an entirely new form of scientific spying that would come to be called ‘electronic intelligence’. On 12 June 1940, one of Lindemann’s protégés, a young Oxford scientist working for MI6 called R.V. Jones, was asked by the head of the RAF element that worked with Bletchley Park about a puzzling reference to something called a ‘Knickerbein’, or ‘crooked leg’. No one could understand what it was for. Jones developed a theory that the Germans were using radio beams to guide their bombers. The bizarre theory, unsurprisingly, made its way back to Churchill. Shortly afterwards, a captured German flier gave some details of the system under interrogation: when two radio beams intersected, the bombs were dropped automatically and found their target.

On 21 June, Churchill summoned Jones to Downing Street. Ushered into the Cabinet Room, he found himself sitting with the prime minister, his former Oxford tutor Lindemann, and an array of advisers. Jones was only twenty-eight, but was unabashed by the company – he knew the business was simply ‘too serious’. He sensed a lack of comprehension around the table, and decided to tell his tale like a detective story. Churchill, predictably, was captivated, and he described the collective fascination in the room as ‘never surpassed by the tales of Sherlock Holmes’. Without informing the cabinet or the chiefs of staff, he ordered that the existence of the German radio beams be assumed, ‘and for all countermeasures to receive absolute priority’, before adding that the ‘slightest reluctance or deviation … was to be reported to me’. Churchill later recalled that ‘in the limited and … almost occult circle obedience was forthcoming with alacrity, and on the fringes all obstructions could be swept away’.48

The prime minister’s response to the inspired deductions of Jones brilliantly captures his effect on intelligence. Impulsive and romantic as he was, his interventions could be critically important, and often inspired immediate action when the machine had become slow. The RAF created an entire special unit called ‘80 Wing’ to jam the German beams with a counter-weapon codenamed ‘Aspirin’. Sometimes this simply bent the beams, causing the Luftwaffe to drop their bombs in the wrong place. In September 1940 the Germans came up with a new system called the ‘X-beam’, and Jones had to create a new jamming system, codenamed ‘Bromide’. Churchill is often associated with the now heavily debunked story that he allowed Coventry to be bombed to save the secret of Ultra. In fact, the reverse is true. He was at the forefront of deploying a new form of intelligence that saved many of Britain’s cities from greater bombardment just before the onset of the Blitz in the autumn of 1940.49

A year later, the prime minister visited Bletchley Park. On 6 September 1941, he was escorted into the famous huts, and Alan Turing was asked to tell him about the remarkable mathematical triumphs that had been accomplished there. Being a rather shy character, Turing allowed his colleague Gordon Welchman to take over. Before he could finish, the director, Alastair Denniston, interrupted and moved Churchill on. Welchman later fondly recalled: ‘whereupon Winston, who was enjoying himself, gave me a grand schoolboy wink’. The prime minister moved on to tour the machine room in Hut 7. His bodyguards tried to follow him in, but the sentries shouted ‘Not you!’ so they waited obediently outside. Here Churchill could see intelligence being produced on an industrial scale, with forty-five machine operators in action.

He stood on a pile of bricks and gave an impromptu address to some of the codebreakers. ‘You all look very innocent; one would not think you knew anything secret.’ He explained that he called them ‘the geese that lay the golden eggs – and never cackle!’ With deep emotion, he explained how grateful he was for all their work, and how important it was. Privately, he was struck by the informality of the place and its eccentric inhabitants: it reminded him more of a university common room than a military camp. Winding down the window of his car, he said to Denniston, ‘About that recruitment – I know I told you not to leave a stone unturned, but I did not mean you to take me seriously.’

Churchill would have been shocked to know that all was not well at Bletchley Park. Managed by MI6, some of whose officers struggled to understand technology, the codebreaking operations were starved of resources. With Germany’s new Enigma keys coming on stream and a vast amount of fresh material to process, the situation soon reached breaking point, and some of the codebreakers Churchill had met on his visit elected to write to him personally. On 21 October 1941, the anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar, Stuart Milner-Barry, a chess champion turned Bletchley cryptanalyst, was given the unenviable task of conveying their letter to the front door of 10 Downing Street and handing it to a bemused official. The letter thanked Churchill for his visit, and continued:

We think, however, that you ought to know that this work is being held up, and in some cases is not being done at all, principally because we cannot get sufficient staff to deal with it. Our reason for writing to you direct is that for months we have done everything that we possibly can through the normal channels, and that we despair of any early improvement without your intervention … it is very difficult to bring home to the authorities finally responsible either the importance of what is done here or the urgent necessity of dealing promptly with our requests.

They offered him several alarming examples of bottlenecks and hold-ups. One concerned the decoding of German Army and Air Force Enigma in Hut 6, which was especially close to Churchill’s heart, given his obsession with Rommel and developments in the Western Desert:

We are intercepting quite a substantial proportion of wireless traffic in the Middle East which cannot be picked up by our intercepting stations here. This contains among other things a good deal of new ‘Light blue’ intelligence. Owing to shortage of trained typists, however, and the fatigue of our present decoding staff, we cannot get all this traffic decoded. This has been the state of affairs since May. Yet all that we need to put matters right is about twenty trained typists.50

Churchill was apoplectic. The result was one of his famous messages headed ‘Action This Day’. He insisted that Bletchley Park’s needs be met in full, and with extreme priority. As a result, throughout 1941 the British were able to read all German air and army intercepts in collaboration with an American liaison group working at Bletchley Park. The Americans had not made headway with Enigma, but had achieved an equivalent triumph against Japanese diplomatic ciphers. Thus, during the summer of 1941 the British were also reading the secrets of Germany’s Japanese allies, including the vital messages of Baron Ōshima, the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, to whom Hitler liked to talk at length, and who was regarded as his Japanese confidant.51

In October 1941, Churchill and Roosevelt held a top-secret meeting off Newfoundland on board the US Navy ship the USS Augusta to discuss military matters, including America’s then top-secret assistance to the British fight against Germany. On his way to the meeting, Churchill made special arrangements for Ultra to reach him ‘in a weighted case, so that they will sink in the sea if anything happens to the plane’.52 A few weeks later, British codebreakers intercepted a communiqué from the Japanese embassy in London to Tokyo with a remarkably detailed account of the secret meeting. The news stunned Churchill. Even worse, it transpired that one of those who passed the information to the Japanese was not only a highly regarded member of the House of Lords, but a long-time Churchill associate.

In 1919 William Forbes-Sempill, a pioneering commander in the Royal Flying Corps whose father had been an aide to King George V, led a mission to Japan – then a British ally – to help it develop naval air power. When Britain terminated the alliance with Japan in the 1920s, Sempill secretly continued assisting Tokyo, providing it with the designs of the latest engines, bombs and aircraft carriers. He also encouraged the development of Japanese naval air power as a national strategy. In 1924, MI5 had begun watching Sempill and intercepting his correspondence, but it hesitated to act because of his status as a war hero at the heart of the British aristocracy. By the mid-1930s, Sempill had become a member of the House of Lords, and joined a number of British pro-Nazi groups. He believed that Britain should have allied with Germany and Japan against Russia and the communists.53

Sempill avoided internment because of his status. He would visit Churchill, and then relay the content of their conversations to the Japanese embassy. When the prime minister realised the severity of the leak in October 1941 he ordered: ‘Clear him out while time remains.’ A few days later, Morton wrote: ‘The First Sea Lord … proposes to offer him a post in the North of Scotland. I have suggested to Lord Swinton that MI5 should be informed in due course so they may take any precautions necessary.’ At one point, the attorney general secretly considered prosecuting Sempill. But when the Admiralty confronted him and pressed for his resignation, Churchill interceded and required only that Sempill be ‘moved’. This is a classic case of the prime minister protecting himself. ‘If Sempill had been revealed as a spy, it would have been politically calamitous for Churchill at a low point in the war.’ Even when he was caught calling the Japanese embassy several times in the week following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Sempill still escaped arrest. After the war, he was decorated by both the Japanese and the British. The latter award was widely regarded as an effort to cover up his activities.54

Towards the end of March 1941, Churchill read one particular Ultra report ‘with relief and excitement’. It showed a major transfer of German armour from Bucharest in Romania to Cracow in southern Poland. ‘To me,’ he recalled, ‘it illuminated the whole Eastern scene like a lightning flash. The sudden movement … could only mean Hitler’s intention to invade Russia in May.’ The armoured units returned to Bucharest, but this, he correctly surmised, simply meant a delay from May to June because of local trouble in the Balkans caused by an SOE-inspired coup. ‘I sent the momentous news at once to Mr Eden.’55

Churchill observed with some satisfaction that it was not until 12 June – only ten days before the attack – that the Joint Intelligence Committee agreed that Hitler had definitely decided to invade Russia. The idea that he would voluntarily begin fighting on a further front when he was already busy in Western Europe and North Africa seemed improbable. The prime minister’s DIY analysis had triumphed on this occasion, and he added jubilantly in his own account: ‘I had not been content with this form of collective wisdom,’ depending instead on Morton’s ‘daily selection of tit-bits, which I always read, thus forming my own opinion, sometimes at much earlier dates’.56

Unsurprisingly, Churchill’s account of the Second World War often portrays him in a favourable light. Yet newly opened archives confirm that he indeed predicted the German attack on Russia before almost anyone else. On 26 March, Ultra showed that Hitler had indeed moved a vast force, including two whole army headquarters, from the Balkans to southern Poland. Only a few days later, Churchill informed Stalin of this directly, disguising the source by hinting that the intelligence came from ‘a trusted agent’. Stalin did not believe Churchill, and neither did the Russian chiefs of staff.57 Frustrated, Churchill repeatedly pressed Stewart Menzies to send Ultra-based material to Moscow in 1941. However, Menzies worried about both the volume of material going to Stalin and its security. He warned Churchill personally and repeatedly not to let the Russians know about Ultra, and to heavily disguise any intelligence as coming from other sources. Menzies knew from reading Ultra that the Russian ciphers were insecure, and anything Churchill told them might well make its way to Berlin.58

Soviet intelligence agents performed brilliantly in early 1941. Secret reports poured in from Germany, Eastern Europe and even Japan, showing in detail Hitler’s massive preparations for invasion. Stalin received more than eighty separate warnings, but ordered his forces to do nothing. The Luftwaffe was permitted to fly reconnaissance missions deep into Soviet territory – some of the aircraft crashed, spilling thousands of feet of film from their underbelly spy cameras. German commando units crossed the Soviet frontier to plan forward routes for the attack. Stalin, however, wanted to signal to Hitler that the Soviet Union was not about to attack Germany, and so avoided mobilisation. He was certain that Hitler would do nothing until he had conquered Britain. This belief was underpinned by an impressive German deception operation that involved two letters to Stalin, directed by Hitler himself. Therefore, Stalin ignored the massive military build-up on his borders, and dismissed every warning of a German attack as disinformation or provocation right up until the morning of 22 June 1941.59

Stalin regarded Churchill’s offer of British intelligence on German troop movements as a crude attempt to entrap him in the war in Europe. For years, London and Moscow had each thought the other was on the verge of a deal with Berlin. Most importantly, for Stalin the dramatic flight to Britain in May 1941 by Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, was not the erratic act of an unbalanced individual, but firm proof that British talks with Hitler were well advanced. He was obsessed with the idea of a British deal with Hitler, so much so that in October 1944 he was still asking Churchill why British intelligence had brought Hess to Scotland.60 Ironically, Churchill had insisted on Stalin being fully briefed about the arrival of Hess, but this only fed his paranoia.61

Churchill passed his warning to Stalin on 9 April, but there were many other efforts to warn the Soviets. In February 1941, Eden told Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador in London, that the Germans were moving troops into Bulgaria, and had taken over the airfields. Churchill was constantly in touch with Eden about what Stalin might be told and how he might receive it.62 Similarly, Stafford Cripps, Britain’s ambassador to Moscow, passed on a letter from Churchill in which he wrote, ‘I have at my disposal sufficient information from a reliable agent [a disguised reference to Ultra] that when the Germans considered Yugoslavia caught up in their net, that is, after March 20, they began transferring three of their five tank divisions from Romania to southern Poland.’63 Cripps did so reluctantly. He did not know the information was based on Ultra, and underrated its importance, assuming the warning was mere supposition. We now know that Churchill was wise to disguise the source of his intelligence, since German diplomats in Moscow quickly learned the contents of the letter handed over by Cripps.64

By early June, Ultra had provided forensic detail about German troop concentrations on the Soviet border. The Foreign Office passed this intelligence to Maisky, and ultimately on to the Soviet foreign minister Molotov. Cadogan gave Maisky a detailed briefing of more information obtained through Ultra on 16 June, but again disguised its source. By then the German attack was only a week away.65 Churchill later complained to Lord Beaverbrook about the earlier foot-dragging by Cripps, insisting that ‘if he had obeyed his instructions’ his relationship with Stalin would have been better. But in fact, the message was vague, and only told Stalin what others had already told him many times over.66

Churchill did not give up sending Ultra to Stalin. In early 1941 Bletchley Park’s window on ‘the War in the East’ mostly came from Luftwaffe Enigma decrypts. But by the autumn, it was also reading a German Army Enigma key codenamed ‘Vulture’ that carried messages from the German Eastern Front headquarters to particular army groups. This gave wonderful operational information, especially on the drive towards Moscow in October. Churchill sent nine separate warnings to Stalin in the space of a week conveying disguised Ultra information. On the day the Germans launched their October offensive, he ordered a reluctant Menzies to show him ‘the last five messages that had been sent to Moscow’.67 He was unaware that John Cairncross, one of the KGB’s top spies in Whitehall, was sitting only yards away in the Cabinet Office during 1941, and was himself about to transfer to Bletchley Park. Predictably, Stalin only believed Bletchley Park material when it was stolen, and not when it was freely given.68

Did Churchill have advance warning of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor? More precisely, did he withhold this intelligence from President Roosevelt as part of a plot to draw the United States into the war? This question has been debated endlessly, and historians have firmly concluded that he did not. In fact the British passed several intriguing batches of intelligence about Japanese intentions to the Americans, which they ignored. For example, British intelligence sent a wealthy Yugoslavian playboy named Dusan ‘Dusko’ Popov to New York in 1941. Codenamed ‘Tricycle’ due to his fondness for ‘three in a bed’ sessions, he served as a double agent feeding false reports to the unwitting Germans.69 Popov claimed to have warned both the British and the Americans of the impending Japanese attack on Hawaii. Although two senior British intelligence officers, John Masterman and Ewen Montagu, supported him, J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, was unimpressed, and failed to convey any of the information to Roosevelt.70 Hoover distrusted British intelligence, and believed that he was fighting not only Axis espionage and subversion, but also the plots of British agents meddling in American domestic politics and trying to manoeuvre the United States into war. He concluded that Tricycle’s intelligence was a forgery created by the British intelligence office in New York.71 Within Roosevelt’s supposedly ‘Anglophile’ administration, assistant secretary of state Adolf Berle also harboured extensive suspicions of British intelligence.

Churchill’s intelligence relations with Roosevelt were complex. Indeed, Hoover and Berle were partially justified in their suspicions. Although Tricycle’s intelligence was not a British plot, Churchill did authorise a remarkable range of risky schemes in order to draw America into the conflict. He read intercepts of private phone calls between Roosevelt, his secretary of state Cordell Hull, and Joe Kennedy, the US ambassador to London, during which they discussed options ‘if Europe is overrun’ by Nazi Germany. The British also compiled a dossier four inches thick on the isolationist group America First, and then set out to smear it.72

British activities involved not only espionage within the United States, but interference in American domestic polity. Churchill and Menzies chose Sir William Stephenson as their special representative in America. Although Stephenson was head of MI6 in the USA, his organisation, British Security Coordination, was more of a department store, representing the myriad secret services, including MI5, SOE and those engaged in propaganda.73 The British Security Coordination Office in New York occupied two whole floors of the Rockefeller Center, and employed close to a thousand people. Berle was not exaggerating when he claimed that Stephenson was operating a ‘full size secret police’ inside the United States, and he knew that interventionist organisations such as the Fight for Freedom Committee were closely linked to this undercover British apparatus.74 He tried to persuade Roosevelt to ban Stephenson’s agents, who responded by attempting to gather ‘dirt’ on him.75

As Roosevelt edged closer to war, Berle correctly concluded that British intelligence was seeking to manipulate US foreign policy by creating ‘false scares’.76 Historians now have full accounts of a range of remarkable high-risk British operations, often conducted in connivance with pro-intervention Americans. Churchill authorised a complicated influence operation designed to offer secret support to interventionists and to vilify isolationism. Meanwhile, Britain offered remarkable support to interventionist bodies including the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies and Fight for Freedom. Churchill also authorised secret operations to generate support for the ‘destroyers-for-bases’ deal and lend-lease, in which the Americans agreed to supply Britain and Free France with oil, food and military equipment from 1941. Most remarkably, Britain encouraged a hostile US government probe into the prominent New York congressman Hamilton Fish, the leader of the isolationists on Capitol Hill. Unquestionably, British intelligence forged a so-called ‘secret German map’ that set out a German plan to attack South America. In October 1941, Roosevelt gave this map prominence in a public speech, and the document, actually created in an MI6 forgery laboratory in Canada, was placed on public display.77

More than fifty years later, some of the most significant black propaganda operations conducted by British intelligence are still emerging. In 1941, two of the top ten best-selling non-fiction books in the United States were accounts of the Second World War in Europe. One of them was William Shirer’s Berlin Diary, kept by a CBS correspondent who covered Hitler and his regime during 1940.78 The other was the diary of a young Dutch boy, Dirk van der Heide, who recorded the experiences of his family under the first days and weeks of German occupation. Owing to their innocent portrayal of the immediacy and trauma of war, children’s diaries are often amongst the most moving testimonies produced by any conflict.

Dirk was a ‘twelve-year-old blue-eyed Dutch boy with taffy coloured hair’ who lived in Rotterdam with his mother, father and younger sister, Keetje. When the Germans invaded in 1940, his mother encouraged him to begin a diary and make a family record of their extraordinary experiences. Rotterdam was heavily bombed, and his mother was killed. His father had already departed to fight the invaders, and so their uncle Pieter arranged for the two children to make a dramatic escape to England. Arriving in London only to encounter a renewed German Blitz, they then embarked on a further adventure, evacuated on a ship that makes a hair-raising voyage through minefields and submarine attacks in the North Atlantic to eventual safety in America.

Dirk van der Heide’s diary is a fabulous evocation of small people caught up in the vastness of war. It is also a complete fake. Neither Dirk nor any member of his family ever existed. The diary was created for the purposes of anti-Nazi propaganda and published in Britain with the connivance of the publisher Faber & Faber – although this fact was not revealed to its American publisher, Harcourt Brace. It was part of the vast disinformation campaign launched by Churchill and the British secret services.79 The real author remains a matter of speculation.80 Remarkably, this work of propaganda is so good that it continues to be read and commented upon as if it were real. Tellingly, however, it is one of the few wartime diaries in which the child adopts a pseudonym, and no records or photographs of the family have ever surfaced.81 We may never know the full extent to which other plots are waiting to be unearthed. Nicholas Cull, the most important historian of this secret programme, has remarked that the British government seems to have tried to destroy the evidence of its war propaganda in the United States.82 British agents even resorted to putting dead rats in the water tanks of American Nazi sympathisers – a less subtle means of manipulating opinion.83

Churchill also manipulated intelligence himself in an attempt to play the Americans. In July 1940, Ultra revealed the dismantling of German special equipment that was to be used for an invasion of Britain. Photo-reconnaissance confirmed that invasion barges in France were being towed away. Churchill chose not to share this information with Roosevelt or Harry Hopkins, the president’s special envoy. Instead, he sought to keep the Americans’ sense of threat high enough for them to want to support Britain, but not so high that they thought it a lost cause. In November 1940 he ordered that the amount of intelligence passed on to the US be cut back, and ‘padding should be used to maintain bulk’. Controlling Ultra was vital, and this partly explains why Churchill and Menzies were cagey about cooperation with the Americans on that front. Nevertheless, the first American mission arrived at Bletchley Park in February 1941. In return, the Americans gave the British the power to read Japanese diplomatic communications.84

By the end of 1941, the Soviet Union and then the United States had joined what was now a global war impacting on every continent. Increasingly, the international media talked about the ‘Big Three’ (Britain, the USA and the Soviet Union) and how they would shape the future of the world as the war progressed. Churchill, more than anyone, understood that in such a conflict one had to watch one’s allies no less closely than one’s enemies. Deploying the power of intelligence would be even more vital as the war moved towards its climax.