Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire. Calder Walton

Bridge was among the targets attacked – which increased MI5’s fears of a ‘fifth column’ operating in Britain. At the time, security threats posed by the IRA were not the responsibility of MI5, but fell squarely on the shoulders of the Special Branch at Scotland Yard – which had originally been established in the 1880s as the ‘Special Fenian Branch’. In the immediate pre-war years, MI5 did have a link with the police in Dublin and Belfast, and also maintained a liaison with military intelligence (G2) in the Irish Free State (or Eire as it was called after 1937). During the war it opened a desk devoted to Irish affairs, led by Cecil Liddell, brother of the wartime Director of MI5’s B-Division, Guy Liddell. However, MI5 only really became involved in dealing with the IRA during the war if there was a clear German connection. Luckily for MI5, all of the German agents sent to Ireland to link with the IRA proved to be spectacularly inept. They were either identified by other agents already in MI5’s custody, tracked down by the Irish police, or identified in Ultra decrypts provided by Bletchley Park. One agent, Herman Görtz, was parachuted into Ireland in the summer of 1940 wearing full Luftwaffe uniform and regalia. His wireless set was destroyed on landing, he nearly drowned while crossing the river Boyne, which also claimed the bottle of invisible ink he was supposed to communicate with, and he was totally unsuccessful in contacting the IRA’s leadership. Although he was not tracked down by the Irish police until November 1941, while he remained at liberty his mission was a complete failure. After his arrest he was imprisoned in Dublin for the rest of the war, and when told that he would be repatriated back to Germany he committed suicide in a Dublin police station.³²

      THE FAILURE OF AXIS INTELLIGENCE

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

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

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

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

      AXIS PLOTS IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE

      One of the most harebrained schemes devised by the Abwehr in the entire war – and it devised many – occurred in the spring of 1941, when Ernst Paul Fackenheim, a Palestine-born Jewish prisoner in a German concentration camp, was recruited and sent on a mission to Palestine to learn what he could of the British efforts to stop Rommel taking the Suez Canal. Unsurprisingly, Fackenheim gave himself up to the Allies after he was dropped into Palestine by parachute. The German intelligence services devised similarly ill-conceived plots elsewhere in the Middle East. Operation Atlas was planned by the Abwehr together with Hitler’s Arab protégé, the virulent anti-Semite Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el Husseini, who from 1940 was exiled in Berlin, installed at the splendid Bellevue Palace where he set himself up as a kind of Lawrence of Arabia figure, and was known as Hitler’s guest in the red fez. The gist of Operation Atlas was that in September 1944 two Arab fighters and three Abwehr agents would be dropped from a Heinkel 111 over Jericho with banknotes and ten cylinders of poison with which to poison the wells in Tel Aviv – apparently in a perverse reversal of the old conspiracy theory that Jews were responsible for poisoning wells in Europe. The Abwehr agents would then help fund anti-British revolts in Palestine and neighbouring countries. Although the Abwehr did not know it, details of the mission had been disclosed to the Allies by Ultra decrypts obtained by Bletchley Park, and its agents were tracked down and arrested. One of the Arab agents, Ali Hassan Salameh, known as ‘the cut-throat’, was wounded in a skirmish with the Palestine police, but limped off to fight another day, waging violent campaigns against Jews in Palestine and, after 1948, against Israelis. Salameh’s son inherited his father’s implacable anti-Semitism. Born in 1940, he was known as ‘the red prince’, and would become notorious as the chief of operations of Black September, the Palestinian terrorist organisation responsible for the massacre of Israeli athletes and officials at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Nothing better illustrates how animosities and hatred can be passed down through the generations in the modern history of the Middle East.³⁶

      Another, equally unsuccessful, Nazi espionage network in the Middle East was the so-called ‘Pyramid’ organisation in Egypt, led by Count László Almásy, a Hungarian explorer and the real-life original of ‘the English Patient’. In the award-winning novel of that name by Michael Ondaatje and film by Anthony Minghella, Almásy is depicted as a handsome airman and hero. In reality he was neither handsome nor a hero, but an unsuccessful Nazi intelligence officer, according to his MI5 file a ‘hunchback … shabbily dressed, with a fat and pendulous nose, drooping shoulders and a nervous tic’. In the novel and the film, Almásy is depicted as dying from a morphine overdose, with his heart broken. In reality, he died of amoebic dysentery in 1951. After his recruitment by Nazi intelligence in Paris sometime in the immediate