The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939–1945. Max Hastings

Western Allies were much less successful in gathering humint than sigint.* Neither the British nor the Americans acquired a single highly placed source around the German, Japanese or Italian governments or high commands, until in 1943 OSS’s Allen Dulles began to receive some good Berlin gossip. The Western Allies achieved nothing like the Russians’ penetration of London, Washington, Berlin and Tokyo, the last through their agent Richard Sorge, working in the German embassy. The US got into the business of overseas espionage only after Pearl Harbor, and focused more effort on sabotage and codebreaking than on placing spies, as distinct from paramilitary groups, in enemy territory. OSS’s Research and Analysis Department in Washington was more impressive than its flamboyant but unfocused field operations. Moreover, I believe that Western Allied sponsorship of guerrilla war did more to promote the post-war self-respect of occupied nations than to hasten the destruction of Nazism. Russia’s partisan operations were conducted on a far more ambitious scale than the SOE/OSS campaigns, and propaganda boosted their achievements both at the time and in the post-war era. However, Soviet documents now available, of which my Russian researcher Dr Lyuba Vinogradovna has made extensive use, indicate that we should view the achievements of the Eastern guerrilla campaign, at least until 1943, with considerable scepticism.

      As in all my books, I seek below to establish the ‘big picture’ framework, and to weave into this human stories of the spies, codebreakers and intelligence chiefs who served their respective masters – Turing at Bletchley and Nimitz’s cryptanalysts in the Pacific, the Soviet ‘Red Orchestra’ of agents in Germany, Reinhard Gehlen of OKH, William Donovan of OSS and many more exotic characters. The foremost reason the Western Allies did intelligence best was that they brilliantly exploited civilians, to whom both the US and British governments granted discretion, influence and – where necessary – military rank, as their opponents did not. When the first volume of the British official history of wartime intelligence was published thirty years ago, I suggested to its principal author Professor Harry Hinsley, a Bletchley veteran, that it seemed to show that the amateurs contributed more than did career secret service professionals. Hinsley replied somewhat impatiently, ‘Of course they did. You wouldn’t want to suppose, would you, that in peacetime the best brains of our society wasted their lives in intelligence?’

      I have always thought this an important point, echoed in the writings of another academic, Hugh Trevor-Roper, who served in both MI5 and MI6, and whose personal achievement makes him seem one of the more remarkable British intelligence officers of the war. In peacetime, most secret services fulfilled their functions adequately, or at least did little harm, while staffed by people of moderate abilities. Once a struggle for national survival began, however, intelligence had to become part of the guiding brain of the war effort. Clashes on the battlefield could be fought by men of relatively limited gifts, the virtues of the sports field – physical fitness, courage, grit, a little initiative and common sense. But intelligence services suddenly needed brilliance. It sounds banal to say that they had to recruit intelligent people, but – as more than a few twentieth-century sages noted – in many countries this principle was honoured mostly in the breach.

      A few words about the arrangement of this book: while my approach is broadly chronological, to avoid leaping too confusingly between traitors in Washington, Soviet spies in Switzerland and the mathematicians of Bletchley Park, the narrative persists with some themes beyond their time sequence. I have drawn heavily on the most authoritative published works in this field, those of Stephen Budiansky, David Kahn and Christopher Andrew notable among them, but I have also exploited archives in Britain, Germany and the US, together with much previously untranslated Russian material. I have made no attempt to discuss the mathematics of codebreaking, which has been done by writers much more numerate than myself.

      It is often said that Ian Fleming’s thrillers bear no relationship to the real world of espionage. However, when reading contemporary Soviet reports and recorded conversations, together with the memoirs of Moscow’s wartime intelligence officers, I am struck by how uncannily they mirror the mad, monstrous, imagined dialogue of such people in Fleming’s From Russia With Love. And some of the plots planned and executed by the NKVD and the GRU were no less fantastic than his.

      All historical narratives are necessarily tentative and speculative, but they become far more so when spies are involved. In chronicling battles, one can reliably record how many ships were sunk, aircraft shot down, men killed, how much ground was won or lost. But intelligence generates a vast, unreliable literature, some of it produced by protagonists for their own glorification or justification. One immensely popular account of Allied intelligence, Bodyguard of Lies, published in 1975, is largely a work of fiction. Sir William Stephenson, the Canadian who ran the British wartime intelligence coordination organisation in New York, performed a valuable liaison function, but was never much of a spymaster. This did not prevent him from assisting in the creation of a wildly fanciful 1976 biography of himself, A Man Called Intrepid, though there is no evidence that anybody ever called him anything of the sort. Most accounts of wartime SOE agents, particularly women and especially in France, contain large doses of romantic twaddle. Moscow’s mendacity is undiminished by time: the KGB’s official intelligence history, published as recently as 1997, asserts that the British Foreign Office is still concealing documentation about its secret negotiations with ‘fascist’ Germany, and indeed its collusion with Hitler.

      Allied codebreaking operations against Germany, Italy and Japan exercised far more influence than did any spy. It is impossible to quantify their impact, however, and it is baffling that Harry Hinsley, the official historian, asserted that Ultra probably shortened the war by three years. This is as tendentious as Professor M.R.D. Foot’s claim, in his official history of SOE in France, that Allied commanders considered that Resistance curtailed the global struggle by six months. Ultra was a tool of the British and Americans, who played only a subordinate role in the destruction of Nazism, which was overwhelmingly a Russian military endeavour. It is no more possible to measure the contribution of Bletchley Park to the timing of victory than that of Winston Churchill, Liberty ships or radar.

      Likewise, publicists who make claims that some sensational modern book recounts ‘the spy story that changed World War II’ might as well cite Mary Poppins. One of Churchill’s most profound observations was made in October 1941, in response to a demand from Sir Charles Portal, as chief of air staff, for a commitment to build 4,000 heavy bombers which, claimed the airman, would bring Germany to its knees in six months. The prime minister wrote back that, while everything possible was being done to create a large bomber force, he deplored attempts to place unbounded confidence in any one means of securing victory. ‘All things are always on the move simultaneously,’ he declared. This is an immensely important comment on human affairs, especially in war and above all in intelligence. It is impossible justly to attribute all credit for the success or blame for the failure of an operation to any single factor.

      Yet while scepticism about the secret world is indispensable, so too is a capacity for wonder: some fabulous tales prove true. I blush to remember the day in 1974 when I was invited by a newspaper to review F.W. Winterbotham’s The Ultra Secret. In those days, young and green and a mere casual student of 1939–45, like the rest of the world I had never heard of Bletchley Park. I glanced at the about-to-be-published book, then declined to write about it: Winterbotham made such extraordinary claims that I could not credit them. Yet of course the author, a wartime officer of MI6, had been authorised to open a window upon one of the biggest and most fascinating secrets of the Second World War.

      No other nation has ever produced an official history explicitly dedicated to wartime intelligence, and approaching in magnitude Britain’s five volumes and 3,000-plus pages, published between 1978 and 1990. This lavish commitment to the historiography of the period, funded by the taxpayer, reflects British pride in its achievement, sustained into the twenty-first century by such absurd – as defined by its negligible relationship to fact – yet also hugely successful feature films as 2014’s The Imitation Game. While most educated people today recognise how subordinate was the contribution of Britain to Allied victory alongside those of the Soviet Union and the United States, they realise that here was something Churchill’s people did better than anybody else. Although there are many stories in this