Читать книгу The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers - Richard Aldrich - Страница 19

… the part your naughty deeds in war play, in peace cannot be considered at the present time.

Churchill on SOE1

Downing Street was now facing a world war. What had begun with minor Italian and Japanese adventures as early as 1936 was now conjoined into a vast global struggle. Britain and the US had declared war on the Japanese; Hitler had declared war on America; and the Soviets had begun a counter-offensive to stem the Nazi march on Moscow. Having been prime minister for nearly two years, Churchill understood the transformative impact of intelligence on strategy and operations on this scale. It would continue to prove vital as the Allies edged towards victory.

For Churchill, the Second World War was a struggle not only against Britain’s Axis enemies, but also against its new allies, including Russia and the United States. In 1942, he discovered that some Foreign Office officials had been talking to Moscow about the post-war settlement without his approval. He ‘emitted several vicious screams of rage’.2 In particular, he hoped to educate the Americans about what he saw as the problem of growing Soviet power, but he knew this would take time. Pressed to discuss troublesome issues with Roosevelt in 1944, Churchill stalled, and replied, ‘The war will go on for a long time.’3 Intelligence and careful timing were part of this delicate game of influence and empire.

Nonetheless, Churchill’s detailed control over intelligence declined during the second part of the war. This was an inevitable outcome of the priority he had placed on its expansion. The flow of special intelligence from GC&CS increased massively: by the middle of 1942 Bletchley’s codebreakers produced between 3,000 and 4,000 decrypted German messages a day, as well as Italian and Japanese material. Churchill could not inspect and interpret even a fraction of this material. The torrent of sigint forced the government machine for central assessment to become ever stronger and better-organised. Intelligence was now being produced on an industrial scale, defeating the prime minister’s preference for personal involvement.

This was especially evident in his acerbic discussions with his Middle Eastern commanders, whom he constantly goaded to attack the enemy. In early 1942, Bletchley Park’s Hut 8 cracked a medium-grade Italian cipher. This new material showed that Rommel was desperate for supplies. Convinced that Rommel had built his successes on a perilously thin supply of armour and air power, Churchill exhorted his commanders in Cairo to attack. Demonstrating his proclivity towards personal intervention, he summoned Claude Auchinleck, the Middle East commander, back to London and unleashed a classic five-hour haranguing in the Defence Committee. Auchinleck refused to launch an immediate offensive, and demanded more tanks.4 By the end of the year, and despite his remaining an avid consumer of the decrypts that passed across his desk, the vast flow of Enigma material to both Downing Street and the commanders in the Western Desert made it increasingly difficult for Churchill to insert himself into such debates.5

Churchill had less to do with MI5. His main intervention had been sacking Vernon Kell and appointing David Petrie as its new director after the great ‘spy scare’ of 1940, and MI5 and the chiefs of staff tried to keep it that way. They regarded domestic security as a sensitive area, and feared Churchill’s impetuous meddling. While Stewart Menzies, the chief of SIS, worked hard on his relationship with Churchill, meeting him perhaps over a thousand times during the course of the war, MI5 shied away from personal contact. Petrie, despite being a Churchill appointee, made no attempt to sell the increasingly important triumphs of his organisation ‘at the top’. This only changed because Duff Cooper, who had taken over from Lord Swinton as head of the Home Security Executive, urged it upon him in March 1943.

Guy Liddell, a senior officer in MI5, summed up the dilemma: ‘There are obvious advantages in selling ourselves to the PM who at the moment knows nothing about our department. On the other hand, he may, on seeing some particular item, go off the deep end and want to take some action, which will be disastrous to the work in hand.’6 For example, ‘When told that a clerk at the Portuguese Embassy in London was spying for both the Germans and the Italians, Churchill scrawled: “Why don’t you just shoot him?”’7 Accordingly, internal security issues rarely reached Churchill. Petrie remained reluctant to see the prime minister personally, but considered sending him monthly bulletins with summaries of MI5’s best operations as a compromise.8 Churchill loved these bulletins, noting in prime ministerial red ink that they were ‘deeply interesting’.9

In the spring of 1944, plans for D-Day finally connected Churchill with MI5 and deception in detail. On Wednesday, 8 March, Menzies joined Churchill, Eden and the chiefs of staff at a special meeting at Downing Street to discuss ‘certain aspects’ of the D-Day preparations that could not be revealed even to the war cabinet. They went backwards and forwards over the deception plans, especially the vast dummy works, supply depots and aerodromes that were being built to misdirect Hitler about the direction of the assault and to persuade him to place his reserves in the wrong location. The conundrum was whether to ban the diplomats of neutral countries based in London from using enciphered messages to report home. The Spanish had passed a great deal of material to the Germans by this means, while the Swedish air attaché had been especially active in spying for the Nazis. Yet Menzies was against a ban. Two years previously, during the invasion of North Africa, the vast volume of conflicting information emanating from Britain through these channels had actually ‘misled the enemy’, and German intelligence officers in Spain had proved delightfully incompetent at sifting ‘true from false information’. Unintentionally, the reports of various spies had also ‘helped us greatly’ in building up aspects of the cover plan and knowing what to stress. Menzies was confident, and rather relishing the deception battle ahead.10

As D-Day approached, the prime minister was increasingly obsessed with the plans and the accompanying cover operations. Again, senior MI5 officers were concerned that he might take some rash initiative of his own. But some activities were high-risk, and required Downing Street’s approval. Thus, at ten in the morning on 15 April 1944, Colonel Bevan of the London Controlling Section, the secret unit charged with coordinating deception plans, arrived at 10 Downing Street. Churchill was sitting in his pyjamas smoking a cigar and reading boxes of secret papers. Bevan had come seeking his personal permission to execute one of the most ingenious deception operations of the Second World War: ‘Operation Mincemeat’. The deception planners wished to create a fictitious ‘Major William Martin’ of the Royal Marines, supposedly on the staff of Vice Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, Chief of Combined Operations. They would eventually use the body of a homeless Welshman, Glyndwr Michael, who had died after swallowing rat poison, and which had been purchased from a hospital morgue for £10. Dressed in the appropriate uniform, and with minute attention to detail, the corpse was to have a briefcase chained to its wrist containing top-secret plans that suggested the main Allied attack would come through the Mediterranean. Churchill was thrilled, and with his enthusiastic blessing ‘Operation Mincemeat’ went ahead.11

Two weeks later the body was dropped into the sea on an incoming tide. Spanish officials recovered it and, very properly, handed it over to the British authorities. But first they opened the briefcase, photographed the documents and handed the evidence to German intelligence. The outline plan carried by ‘Major Martin’ pointed to an Allied attack through Greece and the Balkans in an operation codenamed ‘Husky’. The fact that the Germans swallowed the bait was later revealed in Ultra decrypts.12 Churchill took great satisfaction in further intercepts showing that Hitler had bought the broader deception plan completely.

Sitting with Menzies at Chequers, Churchill gestured in the direction of his cat, ‘Nelson’, who was looking intently out of the window. He remarked that the cat was ‘in touch with the pelicans on the lake’, adding, ‘and they’re communicating our information to the German secret service!’13 One of the prime minister’s perpetual arguments with Menzies was about the extent to which Ultra should be exploited, or protected. He cared deeply about its security, but also directly exploited it on occasion. During the battle of El Alamein in October 1942, for example, GC&CS informed Churchill of an intercept reassuring Rommel that a convoy of Italian ships was on its way with fresh ammunition and fuel. Hesitating for only a moment, Churchill ordered an attack on the convoy. Rommel’s deep suspicions about the security of Enigma were only alleviated when the British sent a deliberately insecure message congratulating a group of fictional Italian agents on their information and for their help in sinking the convoy. Ultra later revealed that the Germans had intercepted the signal and set off in hot pursuit of the fictional Italians.14

Upon hearing about Axis successes against British communications during 1943, Churchill demanded an immediate inquiry into the security of British ciphers.15 As the Allies made their way through Italy and France they rounded up Axis codebreakers, and were shocked to find that many British embassies had been penetrated. Although the Italians had not attacked Britain’s top-grade cipher machine, the Typex, they had broken many other systems. Bletchley Park boffins held prolonged ‘conversations’ with Commander Cianchi, head of the Italian Cryptographic Bureau in Rome, and his staff. Cianchi enthusiastically set out the triumphs of the Italians, especially against British Admiralty communications. The catastrophic Dieppe raid of August 1942 had gone badly because the Germans had been reading Royal Navy messages and had seven days’ warning of this ‘surprise’ attack. Convoy message security had also been weak. The findings of the inquiry did not make for comfortable reading, leaving Churchill at his explosive best. He insisted on the immediate creation of a new body, the Cypher Security Board, to underline the importance he attached to this subject. Soon it had extended its authority over the design, production and operation of all British cipher machines, most of which were made at Bletchley Park’s outstations or at a secret Foreign Office factory at Chester Road in Borehamwood. Ten years later, this had developed into the London Communications Security Agency, a hidden fourth British secret service that worked alongside MI5, MI6 and GCHQ and managed some of the UK’s most sensitive projects.16

Churchill was less bothered about his personal security than about ciphers. Yet MI5 learned of more than a dozen attempts on his life during the war. Some of them were bizarre or childish, including an attempt in May 1943 to kill him or members of his entourage using exploding chocolate positioned among the snacks laid out for the war cabinet. This plot was uncovered by Lord (Victor) Rothschild, MI5’s bomb disposal expert. It was not the only such attempt scuppered by Rothschild, and Churchill personally insisted on his decoration.17

Germany launched numerous attempts to kill Churchill, many of which were more serious. In late May 1943, Menzies received information from Bletchley Park that it had decoded a most alarming message from a German secret service agent in the Spanish port of Algeciras. The agent had observed the arrival of Churchill and de Gaulle by air, and noted that they had headed eastwards. Churchill was travelling to see General Eisenhower in Algiers to make a passionate case for the invasion of Italy and Sicily. He was joined by Eden, General Montgomery and the chiefs of staff. Menzies rightly feared an attempt to eliminate Churchill on his return. The fact that the secret German watchers were themselves being watched protected Churchill. But events unfolded more quickly than Menzies had expected.18

On 1 June, BOAC’s flight 777 took off from Lisbon at 9.35 a.m. and headed towards the Bay of Biscay. Nazi spies were convinced that Churchill was on board. In fact, among the passengers was a man called Alfred Tregar Chenhalls, who unfortunately for himself resembled Churchill, dressed like him and even smoked large cigars. It was clear that the Nazis believed Chenhalls was the prime minister. In fact, he was the business manager of the film star Leslie Howard, who was travelling with him. Three hours after take-off an entire squadron of German warplanes attacked the aircraft. Punctured by shells and bullets, it plummeted into the sea, killing all on board. The attacking aircraft circled the flaming wreckage, and their crew took pictures that were sent to Berlin. Three days later the New York Times reported: ‘It was believed in London that the Nazi raiders had attacked on the outside chance that Winston Churchill might have been among the passengers.’ Churchill too subscribed to the mistaken-identity thesis, and referred to Leslie Howard’s death – which was a severe blow to British morale – as ‘one of the inscrutable workings of fate’. Despite rumours to the contrary, it is overwhelmingly likely that the shooting down of the plane was merely an unfortunate coincidence, and that Chenhalls was not a decoy deliberately sent by Menzies to protect Churchill.19 Meanwhile, Churchill’s RAF York aircraft was given an especially strong escort of P-38 fighters to Gibraltar, and then accompanied by a veritable phalanx of Spitfires on the final leg back to England. The prime minister insisted on helping to fly the plane, to the consternation of senior RAF officers.20

Even as Churchill landed back in Britain, the Nazis were planning another operation against him. ‘Operation Long Jump’ was one of their most ambitious. The NKVD, the Soviet internal security agency, boasted to the British about having uncovered a plot in which Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin would be simultaneously assassinated during the November 1943 Tehran Conference, at which the principal item on the agenda would be the opening of a second front in Western Europe. The Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence service, had learned of the time and place of the conference, having deciphered the American naval code, and put the operation to assassinate the Allied leaders in the hands of one of its most trusted special force commanders, Otto Skorzeny. Although the British had troops in southern Iran to guarantee the flow of supplies to Russia via the Persian Gulf, the conference was principally the responsibility of the Soviets, who had sent troops into the north of the country in August 1941 to shut down German influence. This was the only time Stalin left Russian-occupied territory during the war, precisely because he was paranoid about assassination attempts.

Some have remained sceptical about whether ‘Operation Long Jump’ was a real plot, or merely a Russian propaganda ploy. It did, however, create consternation in London, and Roosevelt was clearly briefed on the episode.21 It has since transpired that from 1941 a team of NKVD intelligence officers known as ‘the light cavalry’, on account of the fact that they constantly whizzed around Tehran on bicycles, identified more than four hundred Nazi agents.22 Some of their operations were conducted with the assistance of the British, as Churchill had authorised careful but effective cooperation with the NKVD – rather to the distaste of Menzies. Their final success was the arrest of Franz Meyer, a top German agent in Iran, in August 1943. By the time of the conference three months later, German intelligence was thin on the ground, albeit the last German parachute team was not rounded up by the British until early the following year.23

Skorzeny later admitted that there had been an assassination plot, but he had thought it hare-brained, and refused any part of it for his commandos.24 In 1968, he recalled irritably, ‘My part in the whole damn thing was to turn it down rather bluntly,’ adding that the basis of a successful commando operation was always good intelligence. ‘We had no information.’ The Germans only had two remaining agents in Tehran, and so ‘had nothing to go on’.25 The plan was taken up by Walter Schellenberg, the brigadier general in charge of the Waffen SS. Schellenberg sent Germany’s top expert on Iran to prepare secret landing sites and conduct the commandos. This was Major Walter Shultz of the eastern section of the Abwehr, who would travel under the alias of a Swiss businessman. Shultz – whose real name was Ilya Svetlov – was actually a long-term agent of the Soviet secret police who had been infiltrated into Germany in 1928 under an assumed identity. His application for the Nazi Party was signed by none other than Rudolf Hess. Therefore the Soviet secret service commander in Tehran, General Vassili Pankov, was informed of precisely when and where the assassination squad would be arriving. An unmarked German J-52 was shot down by the Soviets as it crossed into Iran. The wreckage, littered with the plane’s load of automatic weapons, mortars and ammunition, continued to explode for some time after it went down.26

Gevork Vartanyan, one of the NKVD officers, recalled that the Germans nevertheless dropped a team of assassins by parachute near the city of Qom, eighty miles by road south-west of Tehran: ‘We followed them to Tehran, where the Nazi field station had readied a villa for their stay. They were travelling by camel, and were loaded with weapons.’ All the members of the group were arrested and forced to contact their handlers under Soviet supervision. Vartanyan claimed that in this revised version of the plot, Churchill and Stalin were to be killed, while Roosevelt would be kidnapped. He claimed that the NKVD arrested hundreds of people prior to the conference, and unearthed a German secret service team of six, including radio operators. The Allied leaders were certainly safe by the time of the conference, with some 3,000 NKVD troops saturating the streets.27

Soviet claims that Germany launched an elaborate plot sit uncomfortably with the involvement in it of Schellenberg. He was about to take over most of Germany’s foreign intelligence from the Abwehr, and it has recently emerged that in the same year he launched a covert operation codenamed Modellhut, or ‘Model Hat’, which sought to get a message to Churchill from the SS stating that a number of leading Nazis wanted to break with Hitler and negotiate a separate peace with England. The channel of communication was to be the infamous collaborator Coco Chanel, with whom he had a close relationship, and who remained in Paris throughout the war.28 His plan was to send her to neutral Madrid to meet the British ambassador and former MI6 officer Sir Samuel Hoare, whom both she and Churchill knew well. Although Chanel was brought to Berlin, the plan failed, and Churchill never received the letter. In any case, MI6 was tired of receiving such missives, and Churchill, scenting eventual victory, was certainly in no mood to negotiate.29

If the assassination plot at Tehran had not progressed very far, why did the Soviets make such a fuss about it when Churchill and Roosevelt arrived in Iran? Perhaps it was part of an elaborate Soviet ruse to persuade Roosevelt to move his personal accommodation into the Soviet diplomatic compound, to facilitate bugging. The conference itself, codenamed ‘Eureka’, was held in the Soviet embassy. This gave the Russians the opportunity to bug everything, and transcripts were handed to Stalin personally by Lavrentiy Beria, his intelligence chief, by eight o’clock each morning.30 At one point during the conference, Stalin observed Roosevelt passing a handwritten note to Churchill, and was desperate to know what it said. He ordered his NKVD station chief in Tehran, Ivan Ivanovich Agayants, to get hold of a copy. He succeeded, and reported the message to Stalin. It read: ‘Sir, your fly is open.’31

Further assassination attempts are still coming to light. Newly declassified MI5 documents reveal that one of the last assassination plans of the war was launched by Zionists in Palestine, where the militant Jewish Stern Gang wanted to end the British mandate and establish the state of Israel. One member, Eliyahu Bet-Zuri, decided in 1944 to send an agent to Britain to assassinate Churchill. MI5 soon became aware that ‘he proposed a plan for assassination of highly placed political personalities, including Mr Churchill, for which purpose emissaries should be sent to London’. The Stern Gang were indeed training their members for assassination attempts, and Bet-Zuri was later executed for the murder of Lord Moyne, the British minister resident in the Middle East, in November 1944. Moyne was a close confidant of Churchill.32

Churchill, who was often cavalier about his personal safety, had finally got the message. In December 1944, he visited Athens to have preliminary talks with the various Greek factions, including the prime minister Georgios Papandreou and the Orthodox Archbishop Damaskinos, in what was an emerging civil war between left and right. Some locals worked for the British by day and for ELAS, a militant leftist partisan movement, at night. The women reportedly carried hand grenades in their shopping baskets or under their black dresses. The British delegation drove through areas controlled by the ELAS guerrillas escorted by heavily armed troops, and Churchill opted to sit in an armoured car ‘with a giant 45 Colt revolver on his knees and a look on his face that suggested he would love to fire it’.33

Churchill was willing to pay the Germans back for their plots. The military were more cautious. ‘Pug’ Ismay, Churchill’s senior staff officer, warned the prime minister that ‘The Chiefs of Staff were unanimous that, from the strictly military point of view, it was almost an advantage that Hitler should remain in control of German strategy, having regard to the blunders that he has made, but that on the wider point of view, the sooner he was got out of the way the better.’34 Nonetheless, in June 1944 Churchill approved a vague plan for Hitler’s assassination by a French sniper. In parallel, SOE had developed detailed plans for the liquidation of Hitler, codenamed ‘Operation Foxley’. Like Ismay, however, Colonel Ronald Thornley, head of SOE’s German Section, warned that Hitler’s direction of the war effort was helpful to the Allies, since he often dismissed the sound advice of his generals. Thornley insisted, ‘his value to us has been equivalent to an almost unlimited number of first-class SOE agents strategically placed inside Germany’. In any case, SOE was aware that both the Russian NKVD and the Polish resistance had studied the possibility of assassinating Hitler and concluded that it would be absurdly difficult.35

Churchill loved clandestine activities, sometimes almost regardless of consequence. Unlike his personal support for Bletchley Park, his enthusiasm for SOE and for encouraging resistance has attracted much criticism. John Keegan, one of Britain’s foremost military historians, denounced SOE as ‘a costly and misguided failure’, and the actions of individual agents as ‘irrelevant and pointless acts of bravado’.36 Max Hastings, among the most assiduous and persuasive scholars of Britain’s wartime leader, has gone further. He has denounced Churchill’s interventions in this field as resembling those of a ‘terrorist’, adding that his ‘hunger to take the fight to Hitler made him send thousands of heroes to needless death’, and concludes that SOE exerted a malign influence across Europe by arming local factions that were keener to fight each other than to fight the Germans. There is a growing sense that Churchill was emotional, even irrational in indulging his love of immediate action through SOE, while wasting military resources and promoting needless political trouble in Whitehall.37

This is not the case. Churchill was remarkably astute in his management of SOE. He had appointed Hugh Dalton as its head in part to keep the Labour partners in his coalition government happy. When it became apparent that Dalton’s main talent lay in annoying other interested parties, Churchill rescued SOE by replacing him in March 1942 with Lord Selborne, a steady and effective Tory ally who had previously been director of cement at the Ministry of Works. The calm Selborne was the opposite of the temperamental Dalton. Over the next two years, whenever SOE fell out with Stewart Menzies, Churchill prevented Desmond Morton, an ally of MI6, from manipulating the ensuing inquiries, and ensured that they were led by intelligent and open-minded people such as John Hanbury-Williams, managing director of Courtaulds. Selborne rewarded Churchill by sending him edited highlights of SOE’s successes, which the prime minister found ‘very impressive’. In the summer of 1943 Churchill waded in to support SOE’s demands for more RAF special duties aircraft in the Balkans, arguing that the uprisings there reinforced the need for strategic deception, and also gave ‘immediate results’.38

SOE’s activities in the Balkans are often seen as one of Churchill’s biggest blunders. During 1940 and 1941 all the Balkan countries had come under increasing pressure to collaborate with the Axis. In March 1941, Yugoslavia signed the Tripartite Pact, formalising its alliance with Germany, Italy and Japan. Churchill was furious, and enthusiastically backed an SOE coup d’état that deposed the ruler, Prince Paul. He and SOE basked in the momentary glory of apparent success as an anti-Axis regime took over. Hitler responded by invading not only Yugoslavia but also Greece. On 6 April, German, Italian and Hungarian forces poured into both countries. Belgrade surrendered within a week, and SOE’s protégé King Peter fled the country. Ten days later, the Wehrmacht marched into Athens. In the short term this looked like a disaster. But Hitler had been forced to delay ‘Operation Barbarossa’, his invasion of Russia, by three months in order to secure his southern flank. This had profound consequences for the Russian campaign, which were visible when the German armies stalled in the snow outside Moscow at the end of the year.39

SOE now had a choice of Yugoslavian resistance movements to back. Churchill initially urged it to support the Serbian royalist General Draža Mihailović. However, by early 1943 his support had shifted to Josip Tito, who led the rival communists. The Yugoslav section of SOE sent intelligence about resistance activities to their colleagues in London and to the Foreign Office. James Klugman, deputy chief of SOE’s Yugoslavia Section and a Cambridge-educated communist, ran down Mihailović’s efforts against the Germans and overstated Tito’s.

Churchill and much of Whitehall seem to have been misled by Klugman’s trumpeting of Tito’s effectiveness as a resistance leader. Downing Street certainly had an exaggerated view of the contribution of Tito’s partisans, insisting that they were tying down twenty-four crack German divisions. In fact, only eight under-strength German divisions were in Yugoslavia at this time, and the partisans spent much of their effort on factional infighting. Tito even sent a delegation to German headquarters at Sarajevo proposing a truce so they could both concentrate their efforts against the Royalists.40

Yet the idea that Churchill was misled by a single middle-ranking SOE officer with Moscow connections is little more than a conspiracy theory. The prime minister had many other sources, including his own special envoy to Tito, the redoubtable Fitzroy Maclean. Churchill chose him personally, writing to Eden: ‘What we want is a daring Ambassador-leader with these hardy and hunted guerrillas.’ Maclean, an adventurer after Churchill’s own heart,41 was asked to keep an open mind and to find out, in Churchill’s words, which faction was ‘killing the most Germans’. He parachuted into Yugoslavia in September 1943, and quickly built up a good personal relationship with Tito which persisted for decades. He told Churchill that Tito’s partisans were doing most of the fighting against the Germans.

Much of the criticism of Churchill has been made with the benefit of hindsight. Some of it reflects post-war ‘mole-mania’, brought on by revelations about Soviet spies such as Kim Philby. But it is clear that Tito would have prevailed in Yugoslavia with or without SOE assistance. In the end, British intelligence, and Maclean in particular, became important once again when Tito broke with Stalin in 1948 to develop anti-Soviet communism. Mihailović and his Chetniks were the advance guard of Serb nationalism – with all that this would entail after 1989. In both the long and the short run, Churchill was right to back SOE and support Tito in 1943.42

There was one further source of information for Churchill on Tito. When Maclean parachuted into Yugoslavia with his mission in September 1943, his subordinates were a curious mixture. They included Churchill’s own son Randolph and his friend the novelist Evelyn Waugh. Randolph, a hard-drinking and boisterous officer, had served with the SAS. Admired for his exceptional bravery, he was nevertheless rather tiresome company. Franklin Lindsay, an American who later planned the Bay of Pigs operation and who served with him in Yugoslavia, described him as ‘one of the most aggressively rude men I ever met’. But Maclean valued him for his courage, endurance, and of course his political connections.43

Waugh was also a difficult character, and his superior officers were often desperate not to work with him – when his Commando unit sailed for Italy he was given leave to stay behind and complete Brideshead Revisited. In mid-1944, Randolph Churchill told him that he was going out to work for Maclean in Yugoslavia, and asked Waugh to join him. Both were almost killed on arrival when their plane crashed, killing eleven of the twenty on board.44 Evelyn Waugh and Randolph Churchill were a comic couple. Both professional drunks, they were bound together because most people found them insufferable. Waugh noted in his diary: ‘Further “tiffs” with Randolph … he is simply a flabby bully who rejoices in blustering and shouting down anyone weaker than himself and starts squealing as soon as he meets anyone as strong.’45 But Randolph was fearless, and survived an enemy raid on his camp, fleeing into the mountains without shoes. The prime minister received long and detailed reports direct from his son, fighting with the partisans deep in the heart of the Balkans.46

Critics of Churchill’s attempts to promote secret resistance rarely think beyond Europe. Much has been written about SOE in France and the Low Countries, a great deal of it highly critical. But Churchill encouraged SOE to think of itself as a global organisation operating on every continent, resulting in success as far afield as Brazil, Madagascar and Papua New Guinea. Remarkably, almost nothing has been written about its biggest success, which lay in Burma. During the last year of the war, SOE in Burma carried out its most spectacularly successful campaign of the entire conflict. The main focus was a series of operations employing the fiercely loyal Burmese hill tribes, codenamed ‘Nation’ and ‘Character’. Churchill was instrumental in promoting a wide range of special forces activity in Burma, including the Chindits. This force was led by Orde Wingate, one of Britain’s most eccentric wartime leaders. He was so odd that Churchill had to compel his generals to give him a role, but thereafter he achieved remarkable things. Churchill collected eccentrics precisely because they shook things up, and he thought Wingate ‘a man of genius’. At one point the prime minister considered making Wingate overall commander in India, to the absolute horror of the chiefs of staff.47

From late 1944, the guerrilla levies recruited from the Burmese hill tribes scented victory. Guerrilla intelligence also multiplied the effect of Allied air attacks. Japanese casualties of ‘Operation Nation’ were estimated at between 3,582 and 4,650, with Allied casualties between sixty-three and eighty-eight.48 ‘Operation Character’, conducted in the Karen tribal area, met with even greater success. It consisted of three main groups under Lt. Colonel Tulloch, Lt. Colonel Peacock and Major Turral. By 13 April 1945, Tulloch’s Northern Group commanded a tribal force of 2,000. As the 50,000-strong Japanese 15th Division tried to move south through the Karen areas in a race with the British for the key town of Toungoo, which controlled the strategic road south to Rangoon, it was ambushed.49 Extended fighting developed, and continued into July. Remarkably, on 21 July, General Stopford, commander of the British 33rd Corps, conceded that SOE’s locally-raised Karen forces had inflicted more casualties in the previous month than the regular army.50 Churchill loved secret service, but even more than that he loved empire. Here, in the hills above the Irrawaddy River, they came together.

When Roosevelt and Churchill met off Newfoundland in 1941 they drew up an agreed statement of war aims called the Atlantic Charter. Few people realise that this charter was never signed. To Churchill’s horror it contained clauses offering self-determination to everyone – including Britain’s imperial subjects. He saw the war as a struggle to save the British Empire, and was already thinking about the impact of the post-war settlement on imperial territories. Fearing Roosevelt’s anti-imperialism, he turned the lens of British intelligence on the country’s closest ally, the United States.

Churchill was far from merely defensive when it came to imperial territory, believing that the empire needed to become larger if it was to become safer. After Britain’s ignominious defeat at Singapore in 1942, which he called ‘the greatest disaster in our history’, he was determined to restore British rule to Burma and Malaya, and if possible to expand their territory by annexing parts of Thailand. He told Eden that this could be presented to the world as ‘some sort of protectorate’.51 But the American Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, engaged in special operations behind enemy lines, thwarted the plan by taking the lead in working with the Thai resistance. In April 1945, it was reporting that Thailand should become an ‘incubator of Americanism’ in the Far East.52

Churchill envisaged the Far Eastern war as an exercise in imperial recovery. By contrast, Roosevelt believed that the European empires were a major contributing factor to the outbreak of war. The president was a devout anti-imperialist on ideological grounds, but he also saw the European empires as a barrier to post-war American trade. Some of his secret services were even backing Ho Chi Minh against the French – the future of French Indochina was an issue so divisive that by 1944 Churchill and Roosevelt had refused to discuss it. Instead, they simply spied on each other and sought to subvert each other’s projects.53

SOE was the most powerful British secret service in Asia. It was run by Colin Mackenzie, a friend of Lord Linlithgow, the Viceroy of India, and a director of the textile company J&P Coats. In the early twentieth century, this was the world’s third largest company after US Steel and Standard Oil, and it had vast imperial interests. Its main business rivals were American. Similarly, John Keswick, the senior SOE officer in China, was with the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, while MI6’s Asian operation was run by Geoffrey Denham, a director of Anglo-Dutch Plantations. Like Churchill, they were determined to perpetuate the post-war empire.

The main focus of Churchill’s paranoia was the Indian independence movement. Churchill’s views on India can seem shocking. His private secretary recorded how ‘The P.M. said the Hindus were a foul race,’ and wished that Bomber Harris could ‘send some of his surplus bombers to destroy them’.54 British intelligence followed every move of Indian nationalists, and also discovered covert OSS activity in India. Anglo–American spy rivalry was rife in Delhi. From 1942 onwards, Gandhi’s ‘Quit India’ movement had left the British in the awkward position of trying to fight a war in Asia from a base that was itself effectively occupied territory. India presented a major internal security problem, and the OSS was seen as siding with the subversives. The Americans were not unaware of the ironies. Donald Downes, an OSS officer watching events in Bombay, recalled: ‘I saw the great Gandhi himself come to visit his British dentist in a green Rolls-Royce on which was mounted a sign in five languages saying “boycott British goods”.’55

William Stephenson’s British Security Coordination continued its operations in New York, and busily spied on Indian nationalists in the United States. In return, Roosevelt deliberately provoked Churchill by appointing William Phillips, head of OSS London, as his personal representative in India. OSS officers arriving in Delhi were warned that ‘the British are past masters at intrigue and had planted spies in all American agencies to piece together information’.56 In fact, the British had gone even further, and from early 1943 were intercepting all mail addressed to American consulates in India.57 General Al Wedemeyer, the most senior American officer in India, was told by his staff that the British had tapped his telephone.58

Hong Kong lay firmly in the American sphere of military operations. Although occupied by Japan during the war, everyone expected it to be liberated by American and Chinese nationalist forces. Churchill feared that this prize piece of British real estate would be handed to Chiang Kai-shek. He therefore approved the insertion of a British SOE group under John Keswick conveniently close to Hong Kong to watch events there. In April 1942, the head of the Chinese secret service had them expelled. But SOE was greatly helped by the fact that the Chinese nationalists were fighting the Chinese communists, while the OSS were fighting a rival intelligence outfit run by the US Navy. By 1944, SOE had made its way back into China under the cover of a mission to recover and rescue escaping prisoners of war from Hong Kong. It developed a plan to arm and train 30,000 British-paid guerrillas to ensure that a British force played a part in liberating Hong Kong at the end of the war. Also assisting Britain’s return to Hong Kong was a massive SOE black-market currency-smuggling exercise so large that it paid for all of SOE’s operations in every theatre during the Second World War.

French Indochina had considerable symbolic value for Roosevelt. In conversations with Stalin he remarked that after a century of French rule, ‘the inhabitants are worse off than before’.59 As a result, he tried to prevent French special forces operating in the region under Mountbatten. Unbeknown to the president, Churchill lifted his veto on French secret service operations into Vietnam in late 1944. SOE’s Indochina section had been completely handed over to French control, and essentially became a platform for France’s efforts to restore colonial rule. Colin Mackenzie recalled that the French were a law unto themselves – ‘We let them get on with their own business.’60 By 1944, SOE was dropping French colonial governors and policemen by parachute over the Mekong delta. At exactly the same time Roosevelt’s OSS was assisting and arming the Viet Minh. At one point, an OSS medical team seems to have saved Ho Chi Minh’s life.61

By 1945, SOE and the OSS were parachuting rival paramilitary teams into Indochina to support opposite sides in a messy conflict. Both were under pressure from their governments to inch ahead in a secret race over restored empire in Asia. In this febrile atmosphere, accidents were bound to happen. Accordingly the British operated a ‘ban on informing the Americans’ about their secret flights, meaning there was a very real danger that they might be mistaken for Japanese aircraft. Just before midnight on 22 January 1945, two RAF Liberator aircraft from No. 358 Special Duties squadron set off to drop operatives into Indochina. They never returned, and soon questions were being asked. Air Vice Marshal Gilbert Harcourt Smith eventually reported: ‘It now seems certain that two of the Liberators missing from No. 358 Squadron on the night of 22/23 were destroyed by American fighters.’ He added, ‘I am convinced that it will be in the best interest of all concerned if we adopt sealed lips on these incidents and drop all idea of any investigation.’62

Churchill watched these imperial issues closely. He employed Gerald Wilkinson, an MI6 officer, as his secret contact with General Douglas MacArthur, the American commander in the South-West Pacific. MacArthur loathed Roosevelt, and was a potential Republican candidate for the next US election. When Wilkinson made return trips to England he reported first to Menzies in MI6 headquarters, and then went round to Downing Street to brief Churchill directly.63 One key issue was MacArthur’s prospects as a potential presidential candidate. Wilkinson described him as ‘ruthless, vain, unscrupulous and self-conscious’, but ‘a man of real calibre’.64 On his visits to London, Wilkinson was often summoned by telephone to brief Churchill in the middle of the night.65 His main theme during these midnight conversations was the ‘Wall Street imperialists’ and the danger they presented to British imperial interests in the Far East. Wilkinson visited Alan Brooke, who found him ‘very interesting’,66 and also briefed the editor of The Times, the secretary of Imperial Tobacco, the head of Imperial Chemical Industries and the senior staff from Anglo-Iranian Oil.67 Late in the war, at the suggestion of Ian Fleming, then a naval intelligence officer, he was posted to Washington, where he continued to monitor the American and Chinese threat to British commercial interests in the Far East. As William Stephenson noted, this work was ‘somewhat outside the charter of British Security Coordination’s activities’.68

British covert action in the service of empire was even more remarkable in the Middle East. Recent research in French archives has shown how the British tried to keep the Middle East quiet by means of a vast programme of bribery undertaken by both SOE and MI6.69 As the war drew to an end and the future of SOE came under scrutiny, Lord Killearn, the ambassador to Egypt, reflected that its main job in the Middle East had been the bribery of senior political figures, what he called ‘the payment of baksheesh’.70 At this point, Lord Selborne, the last head of SOE, wrote a veritable essay to Churchill on how SOE defended his beloved empire:

SOE can lend valuable aid to top-hatted administrators by unacknowledgeable methods. Lord Killearn in Egypt and Sir Reader Bullard in Persia have already employed SOE to important effect in nobbling personalities who can make themselves inconvenient to HMG. A ‘loan’ here, a directorship there, pay dividends out of all proportions, and may save battalions … this can be done in conformity with Foreign Office policy, but, it can only be done by those who understand the technique, potentialities, and limitations of subterranean work.71

It is only now becoming clear, with the recent discovery of documents which MI6 hoped had long been destroyed, that the wartime Middle East in particular served as a playground for the British secret service, perfecting their techniques of bribery and covert political influence. Many senior figures, including leaders in Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, were on the payroll. The British not only bribed an astonishing number of ministers, officials and newspaper editors across the region, they even forced them to sign receipts to underline that they were on the take.72

In 1941, Churchill had viewed William Donovan, the head of OSS, as an ally. But by the end of the war, because of these colonial issues, he saw him as a dangerous enemy trying to subvert the British Empire. In April 1945, when asked about the role of guerrillas and the liberation of Hong Kong, Churchill warned Eden, ‘I incline against another SOE–OSS duel, on ground too favourable for that dirty Donovan.’73 Donovan was in much the same mood. He visited London in July 1945 to hold discussions with the large OSS station there, but US intelligence and security officers reported that ‘he did not desire to see “any damn British”’.74 Donovan’s vexation in the summer of 1945 may have reflected a sense that he was losing the anti-colonial war against the British in Asia. Russia was on the rise, and Roosevelt, the great evangelist of anti-colonialism, died in April 1945. One of Donovan’s very last missives to the White House as America’s intelligence chief was to insist that the Viet Minh were fundamentally nice people but naïve, and were being ‘misled’ by ‘agents provocateurs and Communist elements’.75 Other OSS officers in Washington disagreed, and were already warning the new president, Harry S. Truman, that the US should be supporting the European colonial empires, not undermining them, as they would be needed to help contain the post-war Soviet Union. British and American intelligence agencies were increasingly talking the language of anti-communism and an emerging Cold War.

For Churchill, the Cold War had begun in earnest with the arguments over Poland in early 1944. Dismayed at Stalin’s brutal treatment of the Polish resistance, he told Eden: ‘I fear that very great evil may come upon the world … the Russians are drunk with victory and there is no length they may not go.’ He added that this time, at any rate, ‘we and the Americans will be heavily armed’. Clearly he was already thinking about a military confrontation with Stalin – and perhaps even about nascent nuclear weapons.76 Churchill mused that there would soon be nothing ‘between the white snows of Russia and the white cliffs of Dover’.77

A year later, within days of Germany’s defeat, the prime minister contemplated the ‘elimination of Russia’. He ordered plans for war with the Soviets to be drawn up, codenamed ‘Operation Unthinkable’. This called for hundreds of thousands of British and American troops, supported by 100,000 rearmed German soldiers, to unleash a surprise attack upon their war-weary eastern ally. Meanwhile the RAF would attack Soviet cities from bases in northern Europe.78 The military lacked enthusiasm, not least because Hitler had failed to achieve this objective even with more than a hundred divisions.79

Brooke and his fellow chiefs of staff were horrified by Churchill’s idea. The prime minister perhaps felt that nuclear weapons would provide the answer to the question of how to defeat Stalin. Such thoughts and discussions are not ordinarily recorded in formal minutes, but Brooke captured the reality of these intensely secret and private discussions in his diary. Churchill, he recorded, now saw ‘himself as the sole possessor of the bombs and capable of dumping them where he wished, thus all-powerful and capable of dictating to Stalin’.80 This was so secret that it was never taken near the main intelligence machine. The JIC, which had not been told about America’s plan to use the atomic bomb on Japan, remarkably undertook very little work on the issue of the Russians after late 1944, precisely because Stalin’s future course was such a hot potato in Whitehall.81 Only in January 1946 did it feel able to revisit the explosive issue of Russia.82 By this time, Attlee, who became prime minister shortly before the nuclear bombing of Japan, had sought joint action with Russia to stave off an ‘imminent disaster’ in Allied relations. Taking over the helm at the Potsdam Conference of July–August 1945, Attlee wrote, ‘The time is short … I believe that only a bold course can save civilisation.’83

Churchill’s impact on intelligence at the beginning of the war had been formidable. At the end of the war it was negligible. He was simply exhausted, and increasingly overwhelmed by the complexity of post-war settlements. Many important questions about the future of British intelligence were now being pondered. They included the possible merger of MI5 and MI6, together with the future of SOE and sabotage. For over a year, Churchill and Eden had also discussed whether it might be a good idea to merge SOE and MI6, in an attempt to end their squabbling. Churchill had decided not, concluding that the ‘warfare’ between the two secret services was ‘a lamentable, but inevitable, feature of our affairs’.84

By 1945, senior officials were anxious to keep these discussions away from Churchill, judging him too tired to make sensible decisions. Alexander Cadogan, the senior official at the Foreign Office, agreed with the military that there should be a report on relations between MI5 and MI6. The logical person to do this was the cabinet secretary, but then it would come to the notice of the prime minister, who would ‘have wanted to know all about it’. Guy Liddell discussed this review with Peter Loxley, a young diplomat who helped Cadogan with intelligence matters, and said that ‘In my experience once things of this sort reached cabinet level it was the toss of a coin whether they went right or wrong.’ Loxley entirely agreed, and mentioned ‘off the record’ the bizarre atmosphere in which SOE’s future was being discussed. Churchill received minutes on these subjects at the end of a rather tiring day, and scribbled across them: ‘Let Major Morton look into this and advise. SIS [MI6] I know but who are SOE? I know S. Menzies. He is head of MI5.’85 Menzies was, of course, the chief of MI6. By this time, Churchill was in no state to be making important decisions about the future of intelligence.

With Churchill fading fast, square-minded individuals and bureaucrats did their level best to kill off SOE. Diplomats and staff officers, people who saw the world from behind a collar-stud, instinctively feared special forces and ‘funnies’ just as much as Churchill loved them. As the war drew to a close, Sir Esler Denning, Britain’s most senior diplomat in the Far East, insisted that some order must now be brought to the sprawling secret empire, adding tersely, ‘Reforms will be much appreciated by all of us who for our sins are in frequent contact with these organisations.’86 One senior staff officer lamented that SOE had been created outside the regular military, in a place ‘where imagination was welcomed and allowed to have full play, and where resources were readily obtainable. It is to be hoped that this will never occur again.’87

Over the course of the war Churchill had done much to expand and accelerate Britain’s secret state. He had personally driven the creation of most of the nation’s new raiding, sabotage and special operations forces, from SOE to the Commandos to the Chindits. He had boosted Bletchley Park, providing additional resources the instant they were needed. He had encouraged new mechanisms for distributing and integrating Ultra into British decision-making. It was under him that the JIC, the central machine of intelligence, came of age and was relocated close to Downing Street. Above all, he understood the importance of ‘intelligence at the top’, and was the first prime minister to have a special assistant dealing only with intelligence. Impressively, he reined in his impulsive love of immediate action to protect the twin secrets of Ultra and deception.

Ironically, Churchill’s last great Second World War battle involved crossing swords with his own security officials. In the interwar period, he had been deeply dependent on writing to stay afloat financially. As David Reynolds has shown, in the 1930s Churchill’s earnings from literary activities brought him about half a million pounds a year at current values. But it was never enough: he was always mortgaging ahead, and employed an army of accountants and legal advisers to help him avoid tax. Even with extraordinary deals for film rights, somehow he was always in deficit. Accordingly, his six-volume history of the Second World War was begun eighteen months after the end of the conflict by a syndicate of ghost writers and assistants, including R.V. Jones. The prime minister’s official salary in 1945 was £10,000, while this project earned around £600,000.88

Churchill omitted Ultra from his personal account of the war, and touched only lightly on deception and resistance work. But he enjoyed pushing the boundaries, giving detailed accounts of subjects like the ‘Wizard War’ and the passing of intelligence to Stalin. He discussed the Joint Intelligence Committee, something no other prime ministers would do in their memoirs for another half-century. He wanted to include the original texts of telegrams sent to leaders like Stalin, Roosevelt and Truman. This raised the immediate problem of cipher security, for verbatim texts could, in theory at least, compromise much of the other British cipher traffic sent on the same day. Bletchley Park had used just such ‘cribs’ to help break Enigma. Stewart Menzies had dinner with Churchill on the night of 9 June 1948 and explained the problem, trying to ‘tie him down’ to a formal arrangement for changes. Churchill was ‘not impressed’ by his arguments, but eventually caved in.89

As prime minister, Churchill had overseen an intelligence revolution. He had recognised the transformative power of intelligence both in support of policy and in shaping events themselves. He brought intelligence to the heart of government in a manner unknown to earlier occupants of Downing Street. However, his impetuosity at times bedevilled his relations with the secret world. He presided over an informal and personal system rife with impulsiveness. It could work well. But it could also lead to recklessness and acrimony. Churchill could therefore only take the revolution so far. To fully harness the power of intelligence, a prime minister needed to be better organised, to inject a sense of order and rationality into what was becoming an intelligence community. Churchill’s revolution required a straight man to form all this new activity into a central machine. Enter Clement Attlee.