Max Hastings - The Secret War

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2015

Copyright Max Hastings 2015

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be identified as the author of this work

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available from the British Library

Jacket photographs Topham/Picturepoint (figure, body); Sovfoto/Getty Images (figure, head); Haywood Magree/Stringer/Getty Images (paratroopers); Shutterstock.com (Enigma machine, clouds)

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Source ISBN: 9780007503742

Ebook Edition September 2015 ISBN: 9780008133023

Version: 2015-09-11

For

WILLIAM and AMELIE

the next generation

This is a book about some of the most fascinating people who participated in the Second World War. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, civilians had vastly diverse experiences, forged by fire, geography, economics and ideology. Those who killed each other were the most conspicuous, but in many ways the least interesting: outcomes were also profoundly influenced by a host of men and women who never fired a shot. While even in Russia months could elapse between big battles, all the participants waged an unceasing secret war a struggle for knowledge of the enemy to empower their armies, navies and air forces, through espionage and codebreaking. Lt. Gen. Albert Praun, the Wehrmachts last signals chief, wrote afterwards of the latter: All aspects of this modern cold war of the air waves were carried on constantly even when the guns were silent. The Allies also launched guerrilla and terrorist campaigns wherever in Axis-occupied territories they had means to do so: covert operations assumed an unprecedented importance.

This book does not aspire to be a comprehensive narrative, which would fill countless volumes. It is instead a study of both sides secret war machines and some of the characters who influenced them. It is unlikely that any more game-changing revelations will be forthcoming, save possibly from Soviet archives currently locked by Vladimir Putin. The Japanese destroyed most of their intelligence files in 1945, and what survives remains inaccessible in Tokyo, but veterans provided significant post-war testimony a decade ago, I interviewed some of them myself.

Most books about wartime intelligence focus on the doings of a chosen nation. I have instead attempted to explore it in a global context. Some episodes in my narrative are bound to be familiar to specialists, but a new perspective seems possible by placing them on a broad canvas. Though spies and codebreakers have generated a vast literature, readers may be as astonished by some of the tales in this book as I have been on discovering them for myself. I have written extensively about the Russians, because their doings are much less familiar to Western readers than are those of Britains Bletchley Park, Americas Arlington Hall and Op-20-G. I have omitted many legends, and made no attempt to retell the most familiar tales of Resistance in Western Europe, nor of the Abwehrs agents in Britain and America, who were swiftly imprisoned or turned for the famous Double Cross system. By contrast, though the facts of Richard Sorges and Ciceros doings have been known for many decades, their significance deserves a rethink.

The achievements of some secret warriors were as breathtaking as the blunders of others. As I recount here, the British several times allowed sensitive material to be captured which could have been fatal to the Ultra secret. Meanwhile, spy writers dwell obsessively on the treachery of Britains Cambridge Five, but relatively few recognise what we might call the Washington and Berkeley five hundred a small army of American leftists who served as informants for Soviet intelligence. The egregious Senator Joseph McCarthy stigmatised many individuals unjustly, but he was not wrong in charging that between the 1930s and 1950s the US government and the nations greatest institutions and corporations harboured an astonishing number of employees whose first loyalty was not to their own flag. True, between 1941 and 1945 the Russians were supposedly allies of Britain and the United States, but Stalin viewed this relationship with unremitting cynicism as a merely temporary association, for the narrow purpose of destroying the Nazis, with nations that remained the Soviet Unions historic foes and rivals.

Many books about wartime intelligence focus on what spies or codebreakers found out. The only question that matters, however, is how far secret knowledge changed outcomes. The scale of Soviet espionage dwarfed that of every other belligerent, and yielded a rich technological harvest from Britain and the United States, but Stalins paranoia crippled exploitation of his crop of other peoples political and military secrets. The most distinguished American historian of wartime codebreaking told me in 2014 that after half a lifetime studying the subject he has decided that Allied intelligence contributed almost nothing to winning the war. This seems too extreme a verdict, but my friends remarks show how scepticism, and indeed cynicism, breed and multiply in the course of decades wading in the morass of fantasy, treachery and incompetence wherein most spymasters and their servants have their being. The record suggests that official secrecy does more to protect intelligence agencies from domestic accountability for their own follies than to shield them from enemy penetration. Of what use was it for instance to conceal from the British public even the identities of their own spy chiefs, when for years MI6s by Maj. Gen. William Donovan of OSS, but official caution did little for national security when some of Donovans top subordinates were passing secrets to Soviet agents.

Intelligence-gathering is not a science. There are no certainties, even when some of the enemys correspondence is being read. There is a cacophony of noise, from which signals truths large and small must be extracted. In August 1939, on the eve of the NaziSoviet Pact, a British official wrung his hands over the confused messages reaching the Foreign Office about relations between Berlin and Moscow: We find ourselves, he wrote using words that may be applied to most intelligence when attempting to assess the value of these secret reports, somewhat in the position of the Captain of the Forty Thieves when, having put a chalk mark on Ali Babas door, he found that Morgana had put similar marks on all the doors in the street and had no indication which was the true one.

It is fruitless to study any nations successes, its pearls of revelation, in isolation. These must be viewed in the context of hundreds of thousands of pages of trivia or outright nonsense that crossed the desks of analysts, statesmen, commanders. Diplomats and intelligence agents, in my experience, are even bigger liars than journalists, wrote the British wartime spy Malcolm Muggeridge, who was familiar with all three, and something of a charlatan himself. The sterility of much espionage was nicely illustrated by Frantiek Moravec of Czech intelligence. One day in 1936 he proudly presented his commanding officer with a report on a new piece of German military equipment, for which he had paid an informant handsomely. The general skimmed it, then said, I will show you something better. He tossed across his desk a copy of the magazine