I
thank Denis Lenihan for his kind words, and for his thorough and perceptive
investigation into the stories about Hugh Shillito, Len Beurton and Sonia. I
sincerely welcome such challenges, as that is the only way that knowledge will
evolve. I would be the first to jettison any of my pet theories should new evidence
to undermine it arrive [Is this right? You don’t need to go overboard! Ed.],
and I am always prepared to modify my conclusions in the light of new facts.
But I wonder whether it would still be a bit premature to do so. Denis’s counter essentially boils down to Shillito’s slowness on the uptake, in pursuing, in September 1942, a request for telephone taps, and inspection of correspondence at 134 Oxford Road, Kidlington, when Len Beurton and Sonia had evidently both moved into new accommodation at Avenue Road, George Street, in Summertown, Oxford. That would (Denis claims) invalidate any suggestion that Len was using the Kidlington address for serious wireless work, while Sonia’s establishment of a wireless apparatus (receiver/sender) at the Laskis’ cottage was intended as a decoy. (I have since studied the file on the Loefflers at KV 2/2927: in fact my analysis simply required a close re-examination of KV 6/41.) Yet we need to ponder over a few questions.
Was Shillito ‘dim’? In general, I would say ‘definitely not’. Pincher described him as ‘terrier-like’. He engaged in a very serious study of the Oliver Green case, and his analysis of it brought him to the attention of Director-General of MI5, David Petrie, for whom he wrote a special report in August 1942. Yet we must recall his career history, and the reorganization of MI5 in July 1941. His initial treatment of Sonia is admittedly casual. Soon after her arrival, in March 1941, Shillito was informing Ryde, of Special Branch in Reading, that he considered that no further action be taken over her, but that ‘an eye should be kept on her’. We can also read that Shillito at that time passes the file on to B4, ‘as her father, Professor Kuczynski, holds Communist views’. This judgment, and the transfer of paperwork, are not surprising, since Shillito was at that time representing B10E, which, according to Curry, was responsible for ‘Preliminary Investigation of Cases of German Espionage in the U.K.’. I do not understand why a specialized section was required for this task, but the implication is clear: suspected spies were considered in terms of their being Nazi agents, and B4 presumably took care of those with communist links. In any case, B10 was disbanded in July 1941, and Shillito became a member of the new F Division. Shillito thus became detached from the Sonia investigation, which was handled by the not very determined Vesey, and Shillito correctly focused on the Oliver Green network until Len arrived from Switzerland in July 1942. (Pincher makes no mention of Vesey, so far as I can gather.) Shillito then started to pick up the pieces. He soon came to the conclusion that Sonia and Len Beurton were probably agents of the Comintern, yet the Beurton files are conspicuously lacking in any coverage from Vesey, or any other B4A officer from this point, as if Shillito, Vesey and others were all being discouraged from peering any further. For what it is worth, Roger Hollis, having earlier expressed enthusiasm for Shillito’s work, complained to Guy Liddell on December 9, 1944, that Shillito was ‘lazy’ – a palpable untruth, but, since that judgment was prompted by a request for Shillito’s assistance from Anthony Blunt, the motivation behind the characterisation must be questionable. In any case, Shillito became very frustrated, and left MI5 before October 1945.
Why would Shillito want to pursue
Beurton in Kidlington, when it was apparent that the Beurtons had moved to
Summertown? There is no doubt that Sonia was living
at Kidlington in July 1942, when Len arrived at Poole Airport from Lisbon (on
the 29th). Len knew of the address: he and Sonia had exchanged
letters (although, rather strangely, Sonia could reproduce in her memoir only
hers, not his). But note that Shillito, in the report of November 30, 1942,
indicates that ‘Beurton has gone to live there (Kidlington)’, as if he had
intelligence that Len had made the move to set up there alone since arriving in
the United Kingdom. He does not say that ‘the Beurtons live there’: he talks
about ‘this man’s number’, not ‘the Beurtons’ number’. He must surely have
known about the move to Summertown by then. His report of December 19, 1942,
shows that he is familiar with the claims that Sonia had been making about Len’s
detention in Switzerland. If, as Denis claims, he was misled by a previous paper on
file, an intercepted letter from Lisbon to Beurton, he would have seen the
other information concerning Avenue Cottage. In July 1943, Shillito even states
to Curry that the Beurtons ‘have been living together since their return to
this country’, which is wrong in two aspects. Was that simply careless? Or was
he covering up an earlier mistake for Curry’s sake? Whatever the explanation,
it does show that he was aware of their shared address in Summertown.
Why would Shillito duplicate and
overlap the surveillance work of Vesey? Vesey was in B4A, under
Major Whyte (head of B4A), and Major Dick White (chief of B4, responsible for
‘Espionage’). Shillito was F2B, responsible for Comintern agents, under Roger
Hollis, head of F2, at that time reporting to John Curry, who in May 1943 was
seconded to SIS, allowing for Hollis’s promotion. Thus Shillito was undertaking
a completely separate investigation. By December 1942, he was advertising
himself as F2B/C, thus incorporating ‘Russian Intelligence’ as well. (On June
23, Anthony Blunt had informed his Soviet masters that Shillito was responsible
for counter-intelligence against the Soviets.) One might well ask, however, why
the task of counter-espionage was so dramatically split: it was because Petrie,
in 1941, had wanted B Division to focus solely on enemy (i.e. Nazi) spies, and
have other subversive threats handled by a different group – hence the creation
of F Division. Yet the fragmentation of the attention to Soviet agents clearly turned
out to be a dreadful mistake.
Would Petrie and Liddell not have
been aware of the possibly duplicated effort? Almost certainly.
There is evidence in the archive of Shillito’s working closely with Petrie, who
admired Shillito’s investigation into Green. Roger Hollis was indeed away on
convalescence for several months in the summer of 1942, and his stand-in was
the not totally impressive Roger Fulford. It seems as if F Division was working
closely with B Division – or, at least, some effort was being made. During the
war, Liddell and Hollis met regularly. Hollis returned from his illness just
before October 7, 1942, on which date he
dined with Liddell: they discussed continued Comintern activity. On November
29, Shillito passed to both Liddell and Hollis his suspicions of Sonia and Len,
and Hollis enthusiastically received Shillito’s report on Green a few days
later. On December 20, Shillito made his first definitive assertion that he
thought Len was a spy. Yet we then have to deal with the a very provocative series
of events: the inquiry into Sonia within B4A is cooled, but as soon as Shillito
becomes involved, writes a very well received report on Oliver Green, and is
then led to the Sonia case through Len, his energies also appear to be quashed.
What evidence is there that Len
‘moved back’ to Kidlington? Admittedly little. But a
close inspection points to a minor paradox. In her memoir, Sonia informs us
that the owners of the bungalow gave her and Len notice, as they required it
for their own use, and that she and her husband consequently found ‘Avenue
Cottage’. Since JM (John Marriott?) of B2A (under Maxwell Knight’s ‘Agents’ –
another group with a finger in the pie) made a request for correspondence to be
intercepted at Avenue Cottage from September 15, the Beurtons must have found
new premises quite easily. That was an achievement in those days: Sonia had
described how difficult it was finding the Kidlington bungalow. Thus the
example of letters arriving between September 19 and October 3 proves that Len
and Sonia were installed in Summertown at least by mid-September. [You
weaken your own case, Denis, by indicating that the surveillance occurred
between August 19 and September 3, when it in fact took place a month later.]
On September 9, when Vesey asks Michael Ryde, of Special Branch in Reading, to
contact Beurton so that he and an officer from SIS may interview him, Vesey
gives him the Kidlington address. We must bear in mind that Shillito was not the
prime Sonia-watcher: when Pincher lists his claims that Sonia was a probable
spy, I believe he should have been identifying Shillito’s suspicions about her
husband. Yet Shillito kept track of their movements, as his forwarding a copy
of the notorious March 3, 1943 letter from the Oxford constabulary shows. He was
informed about the discovery of the wireless set by Major Phipps. Why would
Shillito, if he was mistaken about the Beurtons’ move, assume that only Len had
moved back to Kidlington, and specifically mention the need to intercept Len
Beurton’s communications alone, instead of those of the pair of them?
Why did the GPO not respond sensibly
to the conflicting requests? We note that both
Vesey’s and Shillito‘s requests were sent to Colonel Allan of the G.P.O. One
might have expected Allan to have noticed the anomaly, and pointed it out to
Shillito. But he apparently did not. Allan would also, had new owners moved in
(as Sonia claimed) have informed MI5 that their subject of surveillance was no
longer at that address. But he did not. It is not surprising that Shillito’s
searches were ‘unremunerative’, as Beurton would not have been expecting any
mail at the Kidlington address, but it is surprising that the GPO kept open a
watch on the address without any mail at all being recorded. Nevertheless (contrary
to your claim, Denis), a letter to Beurton from Geneva was registered and
opened on March 9, 1943, in which the sender laments lack of any communication
from Beurton. So the search was not entirely fruitless.
Why did the Beurtons move to
Summertown? In her memoir, Sonia writes that ‘the
owners of the bungalow gave us notice as they required it for their own use’.
This message is intensified in John Green’s A Political Family, where he
writes that ‘on top of it all, and before he even had time to unpack his bags,
the owners of the cottage decided to give them notice as they required it
themselves’. That suggests a speedy departure, perhaps in a matter of days.
Chapman Pincher judges that it is all a fraud: “Sonia was to explain that she
moved into Oxford because the owner of her Kidlington bungalow wished to return
there, but that may have been another part of her legend.” Pincher suggests
that moving to Oxford made it easier for Sonia to meet Fuchs in Birmingham. Yet
he overlooks the fact that Kidlington had a train station that lay directly on
the line between Birmingham and Oxford. There may have been another reason, as
I outlined. Moreover, Len Beurton received a hefty tax demand from the Inland
Revenue days after he arrived. If SIS had truly been managing the premises as a
safe house, they would have wanted to divert attraction from it.
Why would Shillito behave so obstinately over the Summertown address? I accept there are some puzzling aspects to Shillito’s behavior. It carries on until December 1943, when Shillito requests that the Home Office Warrant for Kidlington be cancelled. Moreover, Shillito’s wording is often so obscure and unusual that one wonders what was going through his mind. For example, he writes to Denniston of E5 on August 16, 1943 (after another MI5 reorganisation: E5 is Alien Control, under Colonel Brooke-Booth), seeking opinions on the Beurtons from any contact the group has ‘in their circle’. He continues to maintain, however, that Len lives at 134 Oxford Road, while adding that the Kuczynskis live next door to Neville Laski. Maybe he did not want to give anything away, but his assertion that Len had gone to ‘live’ in Kidlington, while maintain a residence with his wife, without any evidence of his following up to see what was happening in Kidlington, is very problematic. Len Beurton, if he did spend time at Kidlington, had to abandon it by late 1943, as he was enlisted in the RAF as a trainee wireless operator, and thus the trail went cold.
One lesson from all of this is the need to keep in mind a clear understanding of the organisation of MI5 when trawling through the archives. There is a crisper story to be told about the shared responsibilities of B and F Divisions in the surveillance of the Beurtons, and how Sonia appeared to be protected by some agency at a level higher than Hollis.
In
the meantime, I believe that part of the key to unlocking the Riddle of
Kidlington must be determining the identity of the owners of 134 Oxford Road,
and who lived there immediately before and after Sonia took up the lease. If,
as I suspect, the domicile was an SIS safe house (like that of the Skripals in
Salisbury), it may have been registered as being owned by a friendly name. (We should
recall that two of Sonia’s residences were owned by Neville Laski, and the MP
for Oxford University, Arthur Salter.) Two-and-a-half years ago, I pursued this
line of inquiry, and sent a letter to HM Land Registry Citizen Centre in
Gloucester, as an on-line search had indicated that the records did not go back
very far, and offered to pay for a professional search. I never received a
reply.
And then, about a year later, I received an out-of-the-blue email from a coldspur-watcher, Mr Alan Anderton, after which (for one day) we held an intense discussion. I reproduce it in full here (with minor edits):
The 1939 Register of 134 Oxford Road, Kidlington
Hello Mr Percy
I have been reading your
Misdefending the Realm and also Sonia’s Radio. An impressive
amount of work has gone into them.
There was a comment in
Sonia’s Radio about finding the owners of 134 Oxford Road, well I can’t quite
do that but the 1939 Register of England and Wales is now available online. I
took a look and in Enumeration District DJZA and there is 134 Oxford Road in
Kidlington.
The 1939 Register is a
bit weird, they used it to keep tabs on people , my parents married in 1950 and
her new surname has been pencilled in on my mum’s entry.
So there is a Sidney and
Violet Haynes, rather getting on in years and presumably their granddaughter
Diana Haynes who was 21. The black line usually means it was a child. The
Heineken and Carne are the names of Diana’s first and second husbands , I found
a marriage to a Cyril Carne in 1958 but no idea who Heininen was. There is also
a reference to “RADIO SHOP” written in, I guess at some point after
1939 she started working at a radio shop , bit convenient perhaps.
Anyhow, as usual in your
line of investigation , this probably poses more questions than it answers. If
I could be of any further use you are welcome to ask , I have a subscription to
Ancestry which is the reason I can find this
Best wishes , Alan
Anderton
(Percy to Anderton, 8/8)
Dear
Alan (if I may),
How
kind of you to get in touch with me! I hope you are enjoying the slog through
MTR. Yes, there was an enormous number of sources to go through, and the
process continues . . .
It is a
fascinating entry you sent me. I must confess, when I first looked at it, I
assumed that the items ’88’, ’94’ and ’21’ must be years-of-birth, especially
as one would expect the wife in those days to be younger than the husband, and
which would make the arrangement more credible. But I am sure you are right,
familiar with the column headings. Yet what does the ‘July’ indicate,
overwriting a numerical ’11’?
And the
black line means what? That someone was living there who had subsequently died?
And is it not amazing that officials would use the Register to record facts
about persons who had subsequently moved on elsewhere? Did they do this for
everybody, I wonder, or only those who ‘needed to be kept an eye on’? Heininen
appears to be a Finnish name.
The
radio shop connection is odd, is it not? So it all does come back to whoever
the owner of the property was, who next leased it to the Beurtons. I never
heard back from the Land Registry . . . It will probably have to wait
until my next trip to England.
Please
let me know of any fresh information you turn up on ancestry.com or
elsewhere. Do you have a professional interest in all this spy stuff? It amazes
me how many unexplained riddles still exist after all these years.
Best
wishes, Tony.
(Anderton
to Percy, 8/8)
Hello Tony
You may of course call
me Alan , the 1939 Register is entirely weird. It was used until at least the
1950s and was updated. My mum’s entry was annotated with the date 12.10.56
which means nothing to me (I was 5 at the time). She certainly was nobody the
powers would need to keep tabs on. The original entries were quite heavily
modified after the Register was compiled so the JULY has been added sometime
afterwards as has the RADIO SHOP entry. The 88 , 94 and 21 are the years of
birth – where JULY has been added I think the 11 is actually a crossing out ,
it is usually the birth day and month and. The black line is usually children
under a certain age , something to do with not being released for 100 years ,
or as it seems 90 now. Why all three birthdates would be changed to JULY is a
mystery.
There is also a CR283
and 5.9.83 OX plus MIC where the address goes. They only wrote the address once
, all others at the same address had a blank entry there. Diana May H Carne
died in Q3 1986 aged 65 in Cheltenham , maybe she moved there in 1983 ? It is
suspicious that this list was apparently updated for several decades after it
was produced. I have to say that it seems that Diana was still living there
until 1958 at least. My mum’s entry has her new surname (acquired in 1950) and
we lived there until 1957. I would hazard a guess that Mr & Mrs Beurton
stayed there along with Diana and possibly Mr Heininen though I don’t know when
Diana became Mrs Heininen. This is only conjecture based on what my mother’s
entry looks like.
Sorry I can’t help with
the name of the owner , the Land Registry moves in mysterious ways. I have no
professional interest but have always been intrigued by the bland statement
that there were no Nazi spies transmitting from the UK during the war other
than the double cross ones. It seems the Germans had more than one source of
intelligence here though they may have been sending less than accurate data.
Having read your research it is hard to see how they can justify such statements
since it seems all and sundry could transmit with almost impunity.
It may be that Diana
moved out for a while , it may be that the Beurtons lived with her , maybe the
other Haynes had passed on or moved away but I feel certain that Diana was
there in 1958 but I have been known to be wrong before. Having had another
quick look it seems that Diana and Cyril Carne were living in Western Road
Cheltenham in 1962 and 1968 (from the electoral roll). As usual, every answer
generates more questions
It is a national scandal
that the commies were able to penetrate our supposed security services to such
a level, if you wrote a thriller with that story you would be laughed out the
door.
I will try and dig out
something about the uses the 1939 Register was put to
Best wishes , Alan
(Percy to Anderton, 8/8)
Thanks, Alan.
I just read up the
explanation of the National Registry at TNA. I had never realized how it was
undertaken and then modified later. I understand better now why they kept tabs
on everybody.
So Diane was certainly a
daughter of Sydney and Violet, if those numbers are birth-years, not ages?
Obviously more useful to maintain an absolute. You seem confident that Diane
was still at that address: do you think her parents were, too? If not, why not?
The fact that there were other residents there would rather scotch my theory
that it was a safe-house for Len Beurton – unless, of course, they were
complicit somehow. I shall have to return to this topic when I have finished my
research into the radio-detection of the Abwehr agents – which is all related,
as you know!
I am now delving into
the very mysterious cases of Bjornson/Hans Schmidt and ter Braak (Fukken) who,
according to some sources, were for a while able to transmit undetected from
English soil in 1940/41. I believe MI5 was being rather devious in the records
on ter Braak that were eventually released. Look out for the September Coldspur
for an update.
Best wishes, Tony.
(Anderton to Percy,8/8)
Hi Tony
Yes , they are birth
years and Diana was born in 1921. I suspect they were somehow involved , she
presumably went to work in a radio shop after September 1939 and then ends up
in Cheltenham in perhaps the 1950s. I can’t say for sure if they were still
there when the Beurtons moved in but somebody somewhere was keeping tabs on
just about everyone , probably the local councils. I can’t find any trace of
her marrying Mr Heininen , maybe she went to Finland.
MI5 being devious, I’m
shocked
Have a good evening ,
Alan
(Anderton to Percy, 8/8)
Hi Tony
Just found something on
lostcousins dot com
When the National Health
Service was founded in 1948 the National Register was used as the basis of the
NHS Central Register, and this continued in to the early 1990s. As a result
many name changes were recorded as the result of marriages (and divorces) that
took place in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.
I can’t believe they
were still updating that register in 1970 , that is extremely weird – still , I
suppose they couldn’t use the normal census data so were stuck with this
National Register.
It’s a strange old world,
Alan
(Percy to Anderton, 8/8)
Now when did computers
come in, Alan? You’d think the NHS would have digitized all this at some stage.
I wonder what they kept and what they dropped . . . I suspect the answer must
be out there somewhere.
I enjoyed our exchanges
today, Tony.
* * * * * * * * *
Diana
Haynes? Heininen? Carne? Can anyone shed any light on her?
And
then, a few weeks ago, I also received the name of a sleuth who might be able
to track down the owners, this person having performed similar work. He expressed
great interest, but was completing another project. And I suspect the virus
pandemic will close down any research for a while.
I
was reading, in the Times Literary Supplement of January 17, a review of
a book titled The French Revolutionary Tradition in Russian and Soviet
Politics, Political Thought, and Culture. The author of the book was one
Jay Bergman, the writer of the review Daniel Beer, described as Reader in
Modern European History at Royal Holloway, University of London. I came across
the following sentences: “The Bolsheviks could never admit that Marxism was a
failed ideology or that they had actually seized power in defiance of it. Their
difficulties, they argued, were rather the work of enemies arrayed against the
Party and traitors in their midst.”
This
seemed to me an impossibly quaint way of describing the purges of Stalin’s
Russia. Whom were these Bolsheviks trying to convince in their ‘arguments’, and
where did they make them? Were they perhaps published on the Letters page of
the Pravda Literary Supplement or as articles in The Moscow Review of
Books? Or were they presented at conferences held at the elegant Romanov
House, famed for its stately rooms and its careful rules of debate? I was so
taken aback by the suggestion that the (unidentified) Bolsheviks had engaged in
some kind of serious discussions on policy, as if they were an Eastern variant
of the British Tory Party, working through items on the agenda at some seaside
resort like Scarborough, and perhaps coming up with a resolution on the lines
of tightening up on immigration, that I was minded to write a letter to the
Editor. It was short, and ran as follows:
“So who were these
Bolsheviks who argued that ‘their difficulties were rather the work of enemies
arrayed against the Party and traitors in its midst’? Were they perhaps those
‘hardliners in the Politburo’ whom Roosevelt, Churchill and Eden imagined were
exerting a malign influence on the genial Uncle Joe Stalin, but whose existence
turned out to be illusory? Or were they such as Trotsky, Kirov, Radek, Kamenev,
Zinoviev, Bukharin, etc. etc., most of whom Stalin had murdered simply because
they were ‘old Bolsheviks’, and knew too much? I think we should be told.”
Now the Editor did not
see fit to publish my offering. Perhaps he felt that, since he had used a letter
of mine about the highly confused Professor Paul Collier in the December 2019
issue, my quota was up for the season. I can think of no other conceivable
reason why my submission was considered of less interest than those which he
did select.
Regular readers of coldspur
will be familiar with my observations about the asymmetry of Allied
relationships with the Soviet Union in World War II. See, for instance, https://coldspur.com/krivitsky-churchill-and-the-cold-war/,
where I analysed such disequilibrium by the categories of Moral Equivalency,
Pluralism vs. Totalitarianism, Espionage, Culture, and Warfare. The
misunderstanding about the nature of Stalin’s autocracy can be viewed in two
dimensions: the role of the Russian people, and that of Stalin himself.
During the war, much
genuine and well-deserved sympathy was shown in Britain towards the
long-suffering Russian people, but the cause was often distorted by Soviet
propaganda, either directly from such as ambassador Maisky and his cronies, or
by agents installed in institutions such as the Ministry of Information. The
misconceptions arose from thinking that the Russians were really similar to
British citizens, with some control over their lives, where they worked, the
selection of those who governed them, what they could choose to read, how they
were allowed to congregate and discuss politics, and the manner in which they
thus influenced their leaders, but had unfortunately allowed themselves to sign
a pact with the Nazis and then been treacherously invaded by them. Their
bravery in defending their country against the assault, with losses in the
millions, was much admired.
Yet the catastrophe of
Barbarossa was entirely Stalin’s fault: as he once said to his Politburo, using
a vulgar epithet, ‘we’ had screwed up everything that Lenin had founded and
passed on. And he was ruthless in using the citizenry as cannon fodder, just as
he had been ruthless in sending innocent victims to execution, famine, exile, or
the Gulag. For example, in the Battle of Stalingrad, 10,000 Soviet soldiers
were executed by Beria’s NKVD for desertion or cowardice in the face of battle.
10,000! It is difficult to imagine that number, but I think of the total number
of pupils at my secondary school, just over 800, filling Big School, and multiplying
it by 12. If anything along those lines had occurred with British forces,
Churchill would have been thrown out in minutes. Yet morale was not universally
sound with the Allies, either. Antony Beevor reports that in May 1944 ‘nearly
30,000 men had deserted or were absent without leave from British units in
Italy’ – an astonishing statistic. The British Army had even had a mutiny on
its hands at Salerno in 1943, but the few death sentences passed were quickly
commuted. (Stalin’s opinions on such a lily-livered approach to discipline
appear not to have been recorded.) As a reminder of the relative casualties, the
total number of British deaths in the military (including POWs) in World War II
was 326,000, with 62,000 civilians lost. The numbers for the Soviet Union were
13,600,000 and 7,000,000, respectively.
As my letter suggested,
Western leaders were often perplexed by how Stalin’s occasionally genial
personality, and his expressed desire for ‘co-operation’, were frequently
darkened by influences that they could not discern. They spoke (as The
Kremlin Letters reminds us) of Stalin’s need to listen to public opinion,
or deal with the unions, or heed those hard-liners on the Politburo, who were
all holding him back from making more peaceful overtures over Poland, or Italy,
or the Baltic States. During negotiations, Molotov was frequently presented as
the ‘hard man’, with Stalin then countering with a less demanding offer, thus
causing the Western powers to think they had gained something. This was all
nonsense, of course, but Stalin played along, and manipulated Churchill and
Roosevelt, pretending that he was not the despot making all the decisions
himself.
Thus Daniel Beer’s
portrayal of those Bolsheviks ‘arguing’ about the subversive threat holds a
tragi-comic aspect in my book. Because those selfsame Bolsheviks who had
rallied under Lenin to forge the Revolution were the very same persons whom
Stalin himself identified as a threat to him, and he had them shot, almost
every one. The few that survived did so because they were absolutely loyal to
Stalin, and not to the principles (if they can be called that) of the Bolshevik
Revolution.
I was reminded of this distortion of history when reading Professor Sir Michael Howard’s memoir, Captain Professor. I had read Howard’s obituary in December 2019, and noted from it that he had apparently encountered Guy Burgess when at Oxford. The only work of Howard’s that I had read was his Volume 5 of the History of British Intelligence in the Second World War, where he covered Strategic Deception. (The publication of this book had been delayed by Margaret Thatcher, and its impact had thus been diminished by the time it was issued in 1999. I analysed it in my piece ‘Officially Unreliable’. It is a very competent but inevitably flawed analysis of some complex material.) With my interest in Burgess’s movements, and his possible involvement in setting up the ‘Oxford Ring’ of spies, I wanted to learn more about the timing of this meeting, and what Burgess was up to, so I acquired a copy of Howard’s memoir.
Captain Professor
The paragraph on Burgess
was not very informative, but I obviously came to learn more about Howard, this
acknowledged expert in the history of warfare. He has received several plaudits
since his death. In the January issue of History Today, the editor Paul
Lay wrote an encomium to him, which included a quotation from the historian’s
essay ‘Military Experience in European Literature’. It ran as follows: “In
European literature the military experience has, when it has been properly
understood and interpreted, immeasurably enriched that understanding of
mankind, of its powers and limitations, of its splendours and its miseries, and
not least of its relationship to God, which must lie at the root of all societies
that can lay any claim to civilization.”
Now what on earth does that
mean? I was not impressed by such metaphysical waffle. If I had submitted a
sentence like that in an undergraduate essay, I would not have been surprised
to see it returned with a circle of red ink. Yet its tone echoed a remark by
Howard, in Captain Professor, that I had included in my December 2019
Commonplace file: “I had written a little about this in a small book TheInventionofPeace,
a year earlier, where I tried to describe how the Enlightenment, and the
secularization and industrialization it brought in its wake, had destroyed the
beliefs and habits that had held European society together for a thousand years
and evoked a backlash of tribal nationalism that had torn apart and reached
climax with the two world wars.” (p 218) Hallo, Professor! ‘Beliefs and habits
that had held European society together for a thousand years’? What about all
those wars? Revolutions? Religious persecution? Specifically, what about the
Inquisition and the Thirty Years War? What was this ‘European society’ that cohered
so closely, and which the Professor held in such regard? I wondered whether the
expression of these somewhat eccentric ideas was a reason why the sometime
Regius Professor of History at Oxford University had not been invited to
contribute to the Oxford Illustrated History of Modern War, or the Oxford
Illustrated History of World War II.
Apparently, all this has to do with the concept
of ‘War and Society’, with which Howard is associated. Another quote from Captain
Professor: “The history of war, I came to realize, was more than the
operational history of armed forces. It was the study of entire societies. Only
by studying their cultures could one come to understand what it was they fought
about and why they fought in the way they did. Further, the fact that they did
so fight had a reciprocal impact on their social structure. I had to learn not
only to think about war in a different way, but also to think about history
itself in a different way. I would certainly not claim to have invented the
concept of ‘War and Society’, but I think I did something to popularize it.” Note
the contradiction that, if these ‘societies and cultures’ were fighting each
other, they could hardly be said to have ‘held together for a thousand years’. I
am also not sure that the Soviet soldiers in WII, conscripted and harassed by
the NKVD, shot at the first blink of cowardice or retreat, thought much about
how the way they fought had a reciprocal impact on Soviet culture (whatever
that was), but maybe Howard was not thinking of the Red Army. In some sense I
could see what he was getting at (e.g. the lowering of some social barriers
after World War II in the United Kingdom, because of the absurd ‘officers’ and
‘men’ distinctions: no one told me at the time why the Officers’ Training Corps
had morphed into the Combined Cadet Force). Nevertheless, it seemed a bizarre
agenda.
And then I came on the following passage,
describing Howard’s experiences in Italy: “In September 1944, believing that
the end of the war was in sight, the Allied High Command had issued orders for
the Italian partisans to unmask themselves and attack German communications
throughout the north of Italy. They did so, including those on and around Monte
Sole. The Germans reacted with predictable savagery. The Allied armies did not
come to their help, and the partisan movement in North Italy was largely
destroyed. It was still believed – and especially in Bologna, where the
communists had governed the city ever since the war – that this had been deliberately
planned by the Allies in order to weaken the communist movement, much as the
Soviets had encouraged the people of Warsaw to rise and then sat by while the
Germans exterminated them. When I protested to my hosts that this was an
outrageous explanation and that there was nothing that we could have done, they
smiled politely. But I was left wondering, as I wondered about poor Terry, was
there really nothing that we could have done to help? Were
there no risks that our huge cumbrous armies with their vast supply-lines might
have taken if we knew what was going on? – and someone must
have known what was going on. Probably not: but ever since then I have been
sparing of criticism of the Soviet armies for their halt before Warsaw.”
My initial reaction was of astonishment, rather like Howard’s first expression of outrage, I imagine. How could the betrayal of the Poles by the halted Soviet forces on the banks of the Vistula, in the process of ‘liberating’ a country that they had raped in 1939, now an ally, be compared with the advance of the Allied Armies in Italy, trying to expel the Germans, while liberating a country that had been an enemy during the war? What had the one to do with the other? And why would it have been controversial for the Allies to have wanted to weaken the Communist movement? But perhaps I was missing something. What had caused Howard to change his mind? I needed to look into it.
Her Majesty & Professor Sir Michael Howard
The poignant aspect of this anecdote was that
Howard had been wounded at Monte Sole, only in December 1944, some two months
after the Monte Sole massacre. Howard had been commanding a platoon, and had
been sent on a reconnaissance mission with ‘poor Terry’ (an alias). Returning
from the front line, they had become disoriented, and stumbled into an ambush,
where Terry was mortally wounded by a mine, and Howard, having been shot in the
leg, managed to escape. He was mortified by the fact that he had chosen to
leave Terry to die, and felt his Military Cross was not really deserved. He had
fought courageously for the cause of ridding Italy of fascism, yet the fact
that he had not known at the time of the Massacre of Monte Sole (sometimes
known as the Marzobotto Massacre) was perplexing to me.
These two closely contemporaneous events – the
Warsaw Uprising, and the Monte Sole Massacre – were linked in a way that Howard
does not describe, as I shall show later. They could be summarised as follows:
The Warsaw Uprising
As the Red Army approached Warsaw at the end of July of 1944, the Polish government-in-exile in London decided that it needed to install its own administration before the Communist Committee of National Liberation, established by the Soviets as the Lublin Committee on July 22, could take over leadership. Using its wireless communications, it encouraged the illegal Polish military government in Warsaw to call on the citizenry to build fortifications. On July 29, the London leader, Mikolajczyk, went to Moscow, whereupon Moscow Radio urged the Polish Resistance to rise up against the invader. A few days later, Stalin promised Mikołajczyk that he would assist the Warsaw Uprising with arms and ammunition. On August 1, Bor-Komorowski, the Warsaw leader, issued the proclamation for the uprising. In a few days, the Poles were in control of most of Warsaw, but the introduction of the ruthless SS, under the leadership of von dem Bach-Zelewski, crushed the rebellion with brutal force. Meanwhile, the Soviets waited on the other side of the Vistula. Stalin told Churchill that the uprising was a stupid adventure, and refused to allow British and American planes dropping supplies from as far away as Italy to land on Soviet territory to refuel. The resistance forces capitulated on October 2, with about 200,000 Polish dead.
The Monte Sole Massacre
In the summer of 1944, British and American forces were making slow progress against the ‘Gothic Line’, the German defensive wall that ran along the Apennines. Italy was at that time practically in a stage of civil war: Mussolini had been ousted in the summer of 1943, and Marshall Badoglio, having signed an armistice with the Allies, was appointed Prime Minister on September 3. Mussolini’s RSI (the Italian Social Republic) governed the North, as a puppet for the Germans, while Badoglio led the south. Apart from the general goal of pushing the Germans out of Italy, the strategic objective had been to keep enough Nazi troops held up to allow the D-Day invasion of Normandy to take place successfully. In late June, General Alexander appealed to the Italian partisans to intensify a policy of sabotage and murder against the German forces. The Germans already had a track-record of fierce reprisals, such as the Massacre at the Ardeatine Caves in Rome in March 1944, when 320 civilians had been killed following the murder of 32 German soldiers. The worst of these atrocities occurred at Monte Sole on September 29-30, where the SS killed 1830 local villagers at Marzabotto. Shortly after that, Alexander called upon the partisans to hold back their assaults because of the approach of winter.
Site of the Monte Sole Massacre
Now, there are some obvious common threads woven
into these narratives (‘partisans’, ‘reprisals’, ‘invasions’, ‘encouragement’,
‘SS brutality’, ‘betrayal’), but was there more than met the eye, and was Howard
pointing at something more sinister on the part of the Western Allies, and
something more pardonable in the actions of the Soviets? I needed some
structure in which to shape my research, if I were to understand Howard’s
weakly presented case. Thus I drew up five categories by which I could analyse
the events:
Military Operation: What
was the nature of the overall military strategy, and how was it evolving across
different fronts?
Political Goals: What
were the occupier’s (‘liberator’s’) goals for political infrastructure in the
territories controlled, and by what means did they plan to achieve them?
Make-up, role and goals
of partisans: How were the partisan forces constituted, and what drove their
activities? How did the respective Allied forces communicate with, and behave
towards, the partisan forces?
Offensive strategy: What
was the offensive strategy of the armed forces in approaching their target? How successful was the local operation in
contributing to overall military goals?
The Aftermath, political
outcomes and historical assessment: What was the long-term result of the
operation on the country’s political architecture? How are the events assessed
seventy-five years later?
The Red Army and Warsaw
Military Operation:
The most important
resolution from the Tehran Conference, signed by Roosevelt, Churchill and
Stalin on December 1, 1943, was a co-ordinated approach to ensuring that the
planned D-Day operation (‘Overlord’) would be complemented by assaults
elsewhere. Such cooperation would prevent German forces being withdrawn to
defend the Allies in eastern France. Thus an operation in the South of France
(‘Anvil’) was to take place at the same time that Stalin would launch a major
offensive in the East (‘Bagration’). At that time Overlord was planned to occur
in late May; operational problems, and poor weather meant that it did not take
place until June 6, 1944.
Stalin’s goal was to
reach Berlin, and conquer as much territory as he could before the Western
Allies reached it. Ever since his strategy of creating ‘buffer states’ in the
shape of eastern Poland, the Baltic States, and western Ukraine after the
Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939 had been shown to be an embarrassing calamity
(although not recognized by Churchill at the time), he realised that more
vigorously extending the Soviet Empire was a necessity for spreading the cause
of Bolshevism, and protecting the Soviet Union against another assault from
Germany. When a strong defensive border (the ‘Stalin Line’) had been partially
dismantled to create a weaker set of fortifications along the new borders with
Nazi Germany’s extended territories (the ‘Molotov Line’), it had fearfully
exposed the weaknesses of the Soviet armed forces, and Hitler had invaded with
appalling loss of life and material for the Soviet Union.
In 1944, therefore, the
imperative was to move forward ruthlessly, capturing the key capital cities
that Hitler prized so highly, and pile in a seemingly inexhaustible supply of
troops. When the Red Army encountered German forces, it almost always
outnumbered them, but the quality of its leadership and personnel were
inferior, with conscripts often picked up from the territories gained, poorly
trained, but used as cannon fodder. Casualties as a percentage of personnel
were considerably higher than that which the Germans underwent. The Soviet
Union had produced superior tanks, but repair facilities, communications, and
supply lines were constantly being stretched too far.
On June 22, Operation
‘Bagration’ began. Rokossovsky’s First Belorussian Front crossed the River Bug,
which was significantly on the Polish side of the ‘Curzon Line’, the border
defined (and then modified by Lewis Namier) in 1919, but well inside the
expanded territories of Poland that the latter had occupied and owned between
the two World Wars. On July 7, Soviet troops entered Vilna to the north, a
highly symbolic city in Poland’s history. On July 27, they entered Bialystok
and Lvov. By July 31, they had approached within twenty-five miles of the
Vistula, the river that runs through Warsaw, and four days later, had actually
crossed the waterway 120 miles south of Warsaw. At this stage, exhausted and
depleted, they met fiercer opposition from German forces. Exactly what happened
thereafter is a little murky.
Political Goals:
The Soviets’ message was
one of ‘liberation’, although exactly from what the strife-worn populations of
the countries being ‘liberated’ were escaping from was controversial. The
Baltic States (Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia) had suffered, particularly, from the
Soviet annexation of 1940, which meant persecution and murder of intellectuals
and professionals, through the invasion by Nazi forces in the summer of 1941,
which meant persecution and murder of Jews and Communists, to the re-invasion
of the Soviets in 1944, which meant persecution and murder of anyone suspected
of fascist tendencies or sympathies. Yet the British Foreign Office had
practically written off the Baltic States as a lost cause: Poland was of far
greater concern, since it was on her behalf that Great Britain had declared war
on Germany in September 1939.
The institution favoured by the British government to lead Poland after the war was the government-in-exile, led, after the death in a plane crash of General Sikorski in June 1943, by Stanisław Mikałojczyk. It maintained wireless communications with underground forces in Poland, but retained somewhat unreasonable goals for the reconstitution of Poland after the war, attaching high importance to the original pre-war boundaries, and especially to the cities of Vilna and Lvov. The London Poles had been infuriated by Stalin’s cover-up of the Katyn massacres, and by Churchill’s apparent compliance, the British prime Minster harbouring a desire to maintain harmonious relations with Stalin. Mikałojczyk continuously applied pressure on Winston Churchill to represent the interests of a free and independent Poland to Stalin, who, like Roosevelt, had outwardly accepted the principles of the Atlantic Charter that gave the right of self-determination to ‘peoples’. Mikałojczyk was adamant on two matters: the recognition of its traditional eastern borders, and its right to form a non-communist government. Stalin was equally obdurate on countering both initiatives, and his language on a ‘free and independent Poland’ started taking on clauses that contained a requirement that any Polish government would have to be ‘friendly’ towards the Soviet Union.
Stanislaw Mikolajcyzk
On July 23, the city of
Lublin was liberated by the Russians, and Stalin announced that a Polish
Committee of National Liberation (the PCNL, a communist puppet) had been set up
in Chelm the day before. Churchill was in a bind: he realised which way the
wind was blowing, and how Soviet might would determine the outcomes in Poland.
He desperately did not want to let down Mikałojczyk, and preferred, foolishly,
to trust in Stalin’s benevolence and reasonableness. Churchill had been
pressing for Mikałojczyk to meet with Stalin, as he was beginning to become
frustrated by the Poles’ insistence and romantic demands. Stalin told Churchill
that Mikałojczyk should confer with the PCNL.
When Stalin made an
ominously worded declaration on July 28, where he ‘welcomed unification of
Poles friendly disposed to all three Allies’ (which made even Anthony Eden
recoil in horror), Churchill convinced Mikałojczyk to visit Moscow, where
Stalin agreed to see him. On July 29, Moscow Radio urged the workers of the
Polish Resistance to rise up against the German invader. Had Mikałojczyk
perhaps been successful in negotiating with Stalin?
The Partisans:
On July 31, the Polish underground, encouraged
by messages from the Polish Home Army in London, ordered a general uprising in
Warsaw. It had also succeeded in letting a delegate escape to the USA and
convince the US administration that it could ally with Soviet forces in freeing
Warsaw. (It is a possibility that this person, Tatar, was a Soviet agent:
something hinted at, but not explicitly claimed, by Norman Davies.) It was,
however, not as if there was much to unite the partisans, outside a hatred of
the Fascist occupying forces. The Home Army (AK) was threatened by various splinter
groups, namely the People’s Army (AL), which professed vague left-wing
political opinions (i.e. a removal of the landowning class, and more property
rights for small farmers and peasants), the PAL, which was communist-dominated,
and thus highly sympathetic to the Soviet advance, and the Nationalist Armed
Forces (NSZ), which Alan Clark described as ‘an extreme
right-wing force, against any compromise with Russian power’. Like any partisan
group in Europe at the time, it was thus driven by a mixture of motivations.
Yet for a few short weeks
they unified in working on fortifications and attacking the Nazis. They mostly
took their orders from London, but for a short while it seemed that Moscow was
supporting them. According to Alexander Werth (who was in Warsaw at the time),
there was talk in Moscow that Rokossovsky would shortly be capturing Warsaw,
and Churchill was even spurred to remind the House of Commons on August 2 of
the pledge to Polish independence. On August 3, Stalin was reported by
Mikałojczyk to have promised to assist the Uprising by providing arms and
ammunition – although the transcripts of their discussions do not really
indicate this. By August 6, the Poles were said (by Alan Clark) to be in
control of most of Warsaw.
The Home Army was also
considerably assisted by Britain’s Special Operations Executive, which had
succeeded in landing hundreds of agents in Warsaw and surrounding districts,
with RAF flights bringing food, medical supplies and wireless equipment. This
was an exercise that had started in February 1941, with flights originating
both from Britain and, latterly, from southern Italy. By the summer of 1944, a
majority of the military and civilian leadership in Warsaw had been brought in
by SOE. Colonel Gubbins, who had been appointed SOE chief in September 1943,
was an eager champion of the Polish cause, but the group’s energies may have pointed
to a difference in policy between SOE’s sabotage programme, and Britain’s
diplomatic initiatives, a subject that has probably not received the attention
it merits.
Yet
the Rising all very quickly turned sour. The Nazis, recognizing the symbolic
value of losing an important capital city like Warsaw, responded with power.
The Hermann Goering division was rushed from Italy to Warsaw on August 3. Five
days later the SS, led by von dem Bach-Zelewski, was introduced to bring in a
campaign of terror against the citizenry. After a desperate appeal for help by
the beleaguered Poles to the Allies, thirteen British aircraft were despatched
from southern Italy to drop supplies: five failed to return. The Chiefs of
Staff called off the missions, but a few Polish planes carried on the effort.
Further desperate calls for help arrived, and on August 14 Stalin was asked to
allow British and American planes, based in the UK, to refuel behind the Soviet
lines to allow them more time to focus on airdrops. He refused.
By
now, however, Stalin was openly dismissing the foolish adventurism of the
Warsaw Uprising, lecturing Churchill so on August 16, and, despite Churchill’s
continuing implorations, upgraded his accusations, on August 23, to a claim
that the partisans were ‘criminals’. On August 19, the NKVD had shot several
dozen members of the Home Army near the Byelorussian border, carrying out an
order from Stalin that they should be killed if they did not cooperate. Antony
Beevor states that the Warsaw Poles heard about that outrage, but, in any case,
by now the Poles in London were incensed to the degree that they considered
Mikałojczyk not ‘anti-Soviet’ enough. Roosevelt began to tire of Churchill’s
persistence, since he was much more interested in building the new world order
with Uncle Joe than he was in sorting out irritating rebel movements. By
September 5, the Germans were in total control of Warsaw again, and several
thousand Poles were shot. On September 9, the War Cabinet had reluctantly
concluded that any further airdrops could not be justified. The Uprising was
essentially over: more than 300,000 Poles lost their lives.
Offensive
Strategy:
Accounts differ as to how close the Soviet forces were to Warsaw, and how much they were repulsed by fresh German attacks. Alexander Werth interviewed General Rokossovsky on August 26, 1944, the latter claiming that his forces were driven back after August 1 by about 65 miles. Stalin told Churchill in October, when they met in Moscow, of Rokossovsky’s tribulations with fresh German attacks. Yet that does not appear to tally with Moscow’s expectations for the capture of Warsaw, and it was a surprising acknowledgement of weakness on Rokossovsky’s part if it were true. Soviet histories inform us that the thrust was exhausted by August 1, but, in fact, the First Belorussian Front was close to the suburb of Praga by then, approaching from the south-east. (The Vistula was narrower than the Thames in London. I was about to draw an analogy of the geography when I discovered that Norman Davies had beaten me to it, using almost the exact wording that I had thought suitable: “Londoners would have grasped what was happening if told that everyone was being systematically deported from districts north of the Thames, whilst across the river to Battersea, Lambeth, and Southwark nothing moved, no one intervened,” from Rising ’44, page 433). Rokossovsky told Werth that the Rising was a bad mistake, and that it should have waited until the Soviets were close. On the other hand, the Polish General Anders, very familiar with Stalin’s ways, and then operating under Alexander in Italy, thought the Uprising was a dangerous mistake.
General Rokossovsky
Yet
all that really misses the point. It was far easier for Stalin to have the
Germans exterminate the opposition, even if it contained some communist
sympathisers. (Norman Davies hypothesizes that the radio message inciting the
partisans to rebel may have been directed at the Communists only, but it is
hard to see how an AL-only uprising would have been able to succeed: such a
claim sounds like retrospective disinformation.) Stalin’s forces would
eventually have taken over Warsaw, and he would have conducted any purge he
felt was suitable. He had shamelessly manipulated Home Army partisans when
capturing Polish cities to the east of Warsaw (such as Lvov), and disposed of
them when they had delivered for him. Thus sitting back and waiting was a
cynical, but reasonable, strategy for Stalin, who by now was confident enough
of his ability to execute – and was also being informed by his spies of the
strategies of his democratic Allies in their plans for Europe. Donald Maclean’s
first despatch from the Washington Embassy, betraying communications between
Churchill and Roosevelt, was dated August 2/3, as revealed in the VENONA
decrypts.
One
last aspect of the Soviet attack concerns the role of the Poles in the Red
Army. When the captured Polish officers who avoided the Katyn massacres were
freed in 1942, they had a choice: to join Allied forces overseas, or to join
the Red Army. General Zygmunt Berling had agreed to cooperate after his release
from prison, and had recommended the creation of a Polish People’s Army in May
1943. He became commander of the first unit, and eventually was promoted to
General of the Polish Army under Rokossovsky. But it was not until August 14
that he was entrusted to support the Warsaw Uprising, crossing the Vistula and
entering Praga the following day – which suggests that the river was not quite
the natural barrier others have made it out to be. He was repulsed, however, and
had to withdraw eight days later. The failed attempt, with many casualties,
resulted in his dismissal soon afterwards. Perhaps Stalin felt that Polish
communists, because they were Poles, could be sacrificed: Berling may not have
received approval for his venture.
The
Aftermath:
With
Warsaw untaken, the National Council of Poland declared Lublin as the national
capital, on August 18, and on September 9, a formal agreement was signed
between the Polish communists and the Kremlin. In Warsaw, Bach-Zelewski,
perhaps now concluding that war crimes trials might be hanging over him,
relented the pressure somewhat, and even parleyed with the survivors. He tried
to convince them that the threat from Bolshevism was far more dangerous than the
continuance of Fascism, even suggesting that the menace from the East ‘‘might
very well bring about the downfall of Western culture’ (Clark). It was not
certain what aspects of Western culture he believed the Nazi regime had
enhanced. (Maybe Professor Howard could have provided some insights.)
The
Lublin administration had to wait a while as the ‘government-in-waiting’, as
Warsaw was not captured by the Red Army until January 17, 1945. By that time,
imaginative voices in the Foreign Office had begun to point out the
ruthlessness and menace of the tide of Soviet communism in eastern Europe, and
Churchill’s – and even more, Roosevelt’s – beliefs that they could cooperate
with the man in the Kremlin were looking very weary. By the time of the Yalta
conference in February 1945, any hopes that a democratically elected government
would take power in Poland had been abandoned.
Stalin had masterfully manipulated his allies, and claimed, through the
blood spent by the millions who pushed back the Nazi forces, that he merited
control of the territories that became part of the Soviet Empire. There was
nothing that Churchill (or then Attlee), or Roosevelt, rapidly fading (and then
Truman) could do.
The
historical assessment is one of a Great Betrayal – which it surely was, in the
sense that the Poles were misled by the promises of Churchill and Roosevelt,
and in the self-delusion that the two leaders had that, because Stalin was
fighting Hitler alongside them, he was actually one of the team, a man they
could cooperate with, and someone who had tamed his oppressive and murderous
instincts that were so evident from before the war. But whether the ‘Soviet
armies’ deserved sympathy for their halt on the Vistula is quite another
question. It was probable that most of the Ivans in the Soviet armed forces
were heartily sick of Communism, and the havoc it had brought to their homes
and families, but were instead conscripted and forced to fight out of fear for
what might happen if they resisted. By then, fighting for Mother Russia, and
out of hatred for the Germans because of the devastation the latter had wrought
on their homeland, they were brought to a halt before Warsaw to avoid a clash
that may have been premature. But they were Communists by identification, not
by conviction. Stalin was the sole man in charge. He was ruthless: he was going
to eliminate the Home Army anyway: why not let the Germans do the job?
Alan
Clark’s summing-up ran as follows: “The story of the Warsaw uprising
illustrates many features of the later history of World War II. The alternating
perfidy and impotence of the western Allies; the alternating brutality and
sail-trimming of the SS; the constancy of Soviet power and ambition. Above all,
perhaps, it shows the quality of the people for whom nominally, and originally,
the war had been fought and how the two dictatorships could still find common
ground in the need to suppress them.”
The Allies in Italy
Military Operations
The invasion of Italy (starting with Operation ‘Husky’, the invasion of Sicily) had always been Churchill’s favoured project, since he regarded it as an easier way to repel the Germans and occupy central Europe before Stalin reached it. It was the western Allies’ first foray into Axis-controlled territory, and had been endorsed by Churchill and Roosevelt at Casablanca in January 1943. Under General Alexander, British and American troops had landed in Sicily in July 1943, and on the mainland, at Salerno, two months later. Yet it was always something of a maverick operation: the Teheran Agreement made no mention of it as a diversionary initiative, and thereafter the assault was regularly liable to having troops withdrawn for the more official invasion of Southern France (Operation Anvil, modified to Dragoon). This strategy rebounded in a perhaps predictable way: Hitler maintained troops in Italy to ward off the offensive, thus contributing to Overlord’s success, but the resistance that Alexander’s Army encountered meant that the progress in liberating Italy occurred much more slowly than its architects had forecast.
Operation ANVIL
Enthusiasm for the
Italian venture had initially been shared by the Americans and the British, and
was confirmed at the TRIDENT conference in Washington in May 1943. At this
stage, the British Chiefs of Staff hoped to conclude the war in a year’s time,
believing that a march up Italy would be achieved practically unopposed, with
the goal of reaching the ‘Ljubljana Gap’ (which was probably a more durable
obstacle than the ‘Watford’, or even the ‘Cumberland’ Gap) and striking at the
southern portions of Hitler’s Empire before the Soviets arrived there. Yet, as
plans advanced, the British brio was tempered by American scepticism. After the
Sicilian campaign, the Allied forces were thwarted by issues of terrain, a
surprising German resurgence, and a lack of coordination of American and
British divisions. In essence, clear strategic goals had not been set, nor
processes by which they might be achieved.
Matters were complicated
in September 1943 by the ouster of Mussolini, the escape of King Emanuel and
General Badoglio to Brindisi, to lead a non-fascist government in the south,
and the rescue of Mussolini by Nazi paratroopers so that he could be installed
as head of a puppet government in Salò in the North. An armistice between the
southern Italians and the Allies was announced (September 3) the day before
troops landed at Salerno. The invading forces were now faced with an uncertain
ally in the south, not fully trusted because of its past associations with
Mussolini’s government, and a revitalized foe in the north. Hitler was
determined to defend the territory, had moved sixteen divisions into Italy, and
started a reign of terror against both the civilian population and the remnants
of the Italian army, thousands of whom were extracted to Germany to work as
slaves or be incarcerated.
The period between the
armistice and D-Day was thus a perpetual struggle. As the demands for
landing-craft and troops to support Overlord increased, morale in Alexander’s
Army declined, and progress was tortuously slow, as evidenced by the highly
controversial capture of Monte Cassino between January and May 1944, where the
Polish Army sustained 6,000 casualties. The British Chiefs of Staff continually
challenged the agreement made in Quebec that the Anvil attack was of the
highest priority (and even received support from Eisenhower for a while). Moreover,
the Allies did not handle the civilian populace very shrewdly, with widescale
bombing undermining the suggestion that they had arrived as ’liberators’. With
a valiant push, Rome was captured on June 4, by American forces, but a rivalry
between the vain and glory-seeking General Clark and the sometimes timid
General Alexander meant that the advantage was not hammered home. The dispute
over Anvil had to be settled by Roosevelt himself in June. In the summer of
1944, the Allies faced another major defensive obstacle, the Gothic Line, which
ran along the Apennines from Spezia to Pesari. Bologna, the city at the center
of this discussion, lay about forty miles north of this redoubt. And there the
Allied forces stalled.
Political Goals
The Allies were
unanimous that they wanted to install a democratic, non-fascist government in
Italy at the conclusion of the war, but did not really define what shape it
should take, or understand who among the various factions claiming ideological
leadership might contribute. Certainly, the British feared an infusion of
Communism into the mix. ‘Anti-fascism’ had a durable odour of ‘communism’ about
it, and there was no doubt that strong communist organisations existed both in
the industrial towns and in the resistance groups that had escaped to the
mountains or the countryside. (After the armistice, a multi-party political
committee had been formed with the name of the ‘Committee of National
Liberation’, a name that was exactly echoed a few months later by the Soviets’
puppets in Chelm, Poland.) Moreover, while the Foreign Office, epitomised by
the vain and ineffectual Anthony Eden, who still harboured a grudge with
Mussolini over the Ethiopian wars, expressed a general disdain about the
Italians, the Americans were less interested in the fate of individual European
nations. Roosevelt’s main focus was on ‘getting his boys home’, and then concentrating
on building World Peace with Stalin through the United Nations. The OSS,
however, modelled on Britain’s SOE, had more overt communist sympathies.
Yet there existed also
rivalry between the USA and Great Britain about post-war goals. The British
were looking to control the Mediterranean to protect its colonial routes: the
Americans generally tried to undermine such imperial pretensions, and were looking
out for their own commercial advantages when hostilities ceased. At this time,
Roosevelt and Churchill were starting to disagree more about tactics, and the
fate of individual nations, as the debate over Poland, and Roosevelt’s secret
parleys with Stalin, showed. Churchill was much more suspicious of Soviet
intrigues at this time, although it did not stop him groveling to Stalin, or singing
his praises in more sentimental moments.
The result was a high
degree of mutual distrust between the Allies and its new partners, the southern
Italians, and those resisting Nazi oppression in the north. As Caroline Moorehead
aptly puts it, in her very recent House in the Mountains: “Now the cold
wariness of the British liberating troops puzzled them. It was, noted Harold
Macmillan, ‘one vast headache, with all give and no take’. How much money would
have to be spent in order to prevent ‘disease and unrest’? How much aid was
going to be necessary to make the Italians militarily useful in the campaign
for liberation? And what was the right approach to take towards a country which
was at once a defeated enemy and a co-belligerent which expected to be treated
as an ally?”
The Partisans
The partisans in
northern Italy, like almost all such groups in occupied Europe, were of very
mixed origins, holding multitudinous objectives. But here they were especially
motley, containing absconders from the domestic Italian Army, resisting
deportation by the Nazis, escaped prisoners-of-war, trying to find a way back
to Allied lines, non-Germans conscripted by the Wehrmacht, who had escaped but
were uncertain where to turn next, refugees from armies that had fought in the
east, earnest civilians distraught over missing loved ones, Jews suddenly
threatened by Mussolini’s support of Hitler’s anti-Semitic persecution, the
ideologically dedicated, as well as young adventurists, bandits, thieves and
terrorists. As a report from Alexander’s staff said: “Bands exist of every
degree, down to gangs of thugs who don a partisan cloak of respectability to
conceal the nakedness of their brigandage, and bands who bury their arms in
their back gardens and only dig them up and festoon themselves in comic opera
uniforms when the first Allied troops arrive.” It was thus challenging to find a way to deal
consistently with such groups, scattered broadly around the mountainous
terrain.
The British generally
disapproved of irregular armies, and preferred the partisans to continue the important
work of helping POWs escape to Switzerland, where they were able to pass on
valuable information to the SIS and OSS offices there. As Richard Lamb wrote: “However,
the Allies wanted the partisan activities to be confined to sabotage,
facilitating the escape of POWs, and gathering intelligence about the
Germans.” Sabotage was encouraged,
because its perpetrators could not easily be identified, and it helped the war
effort, while direct attacks on German forces could result in fearful reprisals
– a phenomenon that took on increasing significance. Hitler had given
instructions to the highly experienced General Kesselring that any such
assaults should be responded to with ruthless killing of hostages.
Yet
the political agitators in the partisans were dominated by communists – who
continuously quarreled with the non-communists. The British did not want a
repeat of what had happened in Yugoslavia and Greece, where irredentists had
established separate control. The CLN had set up a Northern Italian section
(the CLNAI) in January 1944, and had made overt claims for political control of
some remote areas, seeing itself as the third leg of government. Thus the
British were suspicious, and held off infiltrating SOE liaison officers, and
parachuting in weapons and supplies, with the first delivery not occurring
until December 1943. This encouraged the partisans to think that the Allies
were not interested in widespread resistance, and were fearful of communism –
which was largely (but not absolutely) true. Tellingly, on July 27, 1944, in the
light of Soviet’s expansive colonial intentions, Chief of the Imperial General
Staff Alan Brooke first voiced the opinion that Britain might need to view
Germany as a future ally against the Soviets.
Churchill
expressed outwardly hostile opinions on the partisans in a speech to the House
of Commons on February 22, 1944, and his support for Badoglio (and, indirectly,
the monarchy) laid him open to the same criticisms of anti-democratic spirit
that would bedevil his attitude towards Greece. Ironically, it was the arrival
of the Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti from Moscow in March 1944, and his
subsequent decision to join Badoglio’s government, that helped to repair some
of the discord. In May, many more OSS and SOE officers were flown in, and acts
of sabotage increased. This interrupted the German war effort considerably, as
Kesselring admitted a few years later. Thus, as summer drew on, the partisans
had expectations of a big push to defeat and expel the Germans. By June, all Italian partisan forces were co-ordinated
into a collective command structure. They were told by their SOE liaison
officers that a break through the Gothic Line would take place in September.
Meanwhile,
the confusion in the British camp had become intense. Churchill dithered with
his Chiefs of Staff about the competing demands of Italy and France. General
Maitland Wilson, who had replaced Eisenhower as the Supreme Commander in the
Mediterranean in January 1944, was in June forecasting the entry into Trieste
and Ljubljana by September, apparently unaware of the Anvil plans. He was
brought back to earth by Eisenhower. At the beginning of August 1944,
Alexander’s forces were reduced from 250,000 to 153,000 men, because of the
needs in France. Yet Churchill continued to place demands on Alexander, and
privately railed over the Anvil decision. Badoglio
was replaced by Bonomi, to Churchill’s disappointment. Alexander said his
troops were demoralized. There was discord between SOE and the OSS, as well as
between SOE and the Foreign Office. It was at this juncture that the controversy
started.
Offensive Strategy
On June 7, Alexander had made a radio appeal to the partisans, encouraging sabotage. As Iris Origo reported it in, in War in Val D’orcia (written soon after the events, in 1947): “General Alexander issues a broadcast to the Italian patriots, telling them that the hour of their rising has come at last. They are to cut the German Army communications wherever possible, by destroying roads, bridges, railways, telegraph-wires. They are to form ambushes and cut off retreating Germans – and to give shelter to Volksdeutsche who have deserted from the German Army. Workmen are urged to sabotage, soldiers and police to desert, ‘collaborators of fascism’ to take this last chance of showing their patriotism and helping the cause of their country’s deliverance. United, we shall attain victory.”
General Alexander of Tunis
This
was an enormously significant proclamation, given what Alexander must have
known about the proposed reduction in forces, and what his intelligence sources
must have told him about Nazi reprisals. They were surely not words Alexander
had crafted himself. One can conclude that it was perhaps part of the general
propaganda campaign, current with the D-Day landings, to focus the attention of
Nazi forces around Europe on the local threats. Indeed the Political Warfare
Executive made a proposal to Eisenhower intended to ‘stimulate . . . strikes,
guerilla action and armed uprisings behind the enemy lines’. Historians have
accepted that such an initiative would have endangered many civilian lives. The
exact follow-up to this recommendation, and how it was manifested in BBC
broadcasts in different languages, is outside my current scope, but Origo’s
diary entry shows how eagerly the broadcasts from London were followed.
What is highly significant is that General Alexander, in the summer of 1944, was involved in an auxiliary deception operation codenamed ‘Otrington’, which was designed to lead the Germans to think that an attack was going to take place on the Nazi flanks in Genoa and Rimini, as opposed to the south of France, and also as a feint for Alexander’s planned attack through the central Apennines north of Florence. (This was all part of the grander ‘Bodyguard’ deception plan for Overlord.) Yet in August 1944, such plans were changed when General Sir Oliver Leese, now commanding the Eighth Army, persuaded Alexander to move his forces away from the central Apennines over to the Adriatic sector, for an attack on August 25. The Germans were misled to the extent that they had moved forces to the Adriatic, thus confusing Leese’s initiative. Moreover, the historian on whom we rely for this exposition was Professor Sir Michael Howard himself – in his Chapter 7 of Volume 5 of the British Intelligence history. Yet the author makes no reference here to Alexander’s communications to the partisans, or how such signals related to the deception exercise, merely laconically noting: “The attack, after its initial success, was gradually brought to a halt [by Kesselring], and Allied operations in Italy bogged down for another winter.”
Perhaps
not surprisingly, the message provoked even further animosity from the Germans
when Alexander made three separate broadcasts through the BBC, on June 19, 20
and 27, where he encouraged Italian partisans to ‘shoot Germans in the back’. The
response from Kesselring, who of course heard the open declaration, was
instantaneous. He issued an order on June 20 that read, partially, as follows:
“Whenever there is evidence of considerable numbers of partisan groups a
proportion of the male population of the area will be arrested, and in the
event of an act of violence these men will be shot. The population must be
informed of this. Should troops etc. be fired at from any village, the village
will be burnt down. Perpetrators or ringleaders will be hanged in public.”
The
outcome of this was that a horrible series of massacres occurred during August
and September, leading to the worst of all, that at Marzabotto, on September 29
and 30. A more specific order by the German 5 Corps was issued on August 9,
with instructions as to how local populations would be assembled to witness the
shootings. Yet this was not a new phenomenon: fascist troops had been killing
partisan bands and their abettors for the past year in the North. The
requirement for Mussolini’s neo-fascist government to recruit young men for its
military and police forces prompted thousands to run for the mountains and join
the partisans. Italy was now engaged in a civil war, and in the north Italians
had been killing other Italians. One of the most infamous of the massacres had
occurred in Rome, in March 1944, at the Ardeatine Caves. A Communist Patriotic
Action Group had killed 33 German soldiers in the Via Rasella, and ten times
that many hostages were killed the next day as a form of reprisal. The summer
of 1944 was the bitterest time for executions of Italians: 7500 civilians were
killed between March 1944 and April 1945, and 5000 of these met their deaths in
the summer months of 1944.
The
records show that support for the partisans had been consistent up until
September, although demands had sharply risen. “In July 1944 SOE was operating 16 radio stations
behind enemy lines, and its missions rose from 23 in August to 33 in September;
meanwhile the OSS had 12 in place, plus another 6 ready to leave. Contacts
between Allied teams and partisan formations made large-scale airdrops of
supplies possible. In May 1944, 152 tons were dropped; 361 tons were delivered
in June, 446 tons in July, 227 tons in August, and 252 tons in September.”
(Battistelli and Crociani) Yet those authors offer up another explanation:
Operation ‘Olive’ which began on August 25, at the Adriatic end of the Gothic
Line, provoked a severe response against partisans in the north-west. The
fierce German reprisals that then took place (on partisans and civilians,
including the Marzobotto massacre) by the SS Panzer Green Division Reichsführer
contributed to the demoralization of the partisan forces, and 47,000 handed
themselves in after an amnesty offer by the RSI on October 28.
What
is not clear is why the partisans continued to engage in such desperate actions.
Had they become desperadoes? As Battistelli and Crociani write, a period of
crisis had arrived: “In mid-September 1944 the partisans’ war was, for all practical
purposes, at a standstill. The influx of would-be recruits made it impossible
for the Allies to arm them all; many of the premature ‘free zones’ were being
retaken by the Germans; true insurgency was not possible without direct Allied
support; and, despite attacks by the US Fifth and British Eighth Armies against
the Gothic Line from 12 September, progress would be slow and mainly up the
Adriatic flank. Against the advice of Allied liaison officers, the partisan
reaction was, inexplicably, to declare more ‘free zones’.” Things appeared to
be out of control. Battistelli and Crociani further analyse it as
follows: “The summer of 1944 thus represented a turning-point in partisan
activity, after which sabotage and attacks against communications decreased in
favour of first looting and then attacks against Axis troops, both being
necessary to obtain food and weapons to enable large formations to carry on
their war.” And it thus led to the deadliest massacre at Marzabotto, south of
Bologna, where the SS, under Sturmbannführer Walter Reder, shot about 770 men,
women, and children.
The wholesale deaths
even provoked Mussolini to beg the SS to back off. On November 13 Alexander
issued a belated communiqué encouraging the partisans to disarm for the winter,
as the campaign was effectively coming to a halt. Alexander’s advice was
largely ignored: the partisans viewed it a political move executed out of
disdain for communism. The Germans viewed it as a sign of weakness, and it
deterred any thoughts of immediate surrender. Thus the activity of the
partisans continued, but less vigorously, as air support in the way of supplies
had already begun to dwindle. And another significant factor was at work.
Before he left Moscow, Togliatti, the newly arrived Communist leader, had made
an appeal to the Italian resistance movement to take up arms against the
Fascists. Yet when he arrived in Italy in March 1944, Togliatti had submerged
the militant aspects of his PCI (Communist Party of Italy) in the cause of
unity and democracy, and had the Garibaldi (Communist) brigades disarmed.
Moorehead points out that the Northern partisans were effectively stunned and
weakened by Togliatti’s strategic move to make the Communists appear less
harmful as the country prepared for postwar government.
In addition, roles
changed. Not just the arrival of General Leese, and his disruption of careful
deception plans. General George Marshall, the US Chief of Staff, took the view
that Italy was ‘an expensive sideshow’ (Brian Holden Reid). In December,
Alexander had to tried to breathe fresh life into the plan to assault the
Ljubljana Gap, but after the Yalta
Conference of February 1945, Alexander, now Supreme Commander in the
Mediterranean, was instructed simply to ensure that the maximum number of
German divisions were held down, thus allowing the progress by Allied troops in
France and Germany to be maintained. Bologna was not taken until April 1945, after
which the reprisals against fascists began. Perhaps three thousand were killed there
by the partisans.
The Aftermath
The massacres of
September and October 1944 have not been forgotten, but their circumstances
have tended to be overlooked in the histories. It is difficult to find a sharp
and incisive analysis of British strategy and communications at this time. Norman
Davies writes about the parallel activities in Poland and Italy in the summer
of 1944 in No Simple Victory, but I would suggest that he does not do
justice to the situation. He blames General Alexander for ‘opening the
floodgates for a second wave of German revenge’ when he publicly announced that
there would be no winter offensive in 1944-45, but it was highly unlikely that
that ‘unoriginal thinker’ (Oxford Companion to Word War II) would have
been allowed to come up with such a message without guidance and approval.
Davies points to ‘differences of opinion between British and American
strategists’, which allowed German commanders to be given a free hand to take
ruthless action against the partisans’. So why were the differences not
resolved by Eisenhower? Moreover, while oppression against the partisans did
intensify, the worst reprisals against civilians that Davies refers to were
over by then.
Had Alexander severely
misled the partisans in his encouragement that their ‘hour of rising’ had come
at last? What was intended by his open bloodthirsty call to kill Nazis in the
back? Did the partisans really pursue such aggressive attacks because of
Alexander’s provocative words, or, did they engage in them in full knowledge of
the carnage it would cause, trying to prove, perhaps, that a fierce and
autocratic form of government was the only method of eliminating fascism? Were
the local SOE officers responsible for encouraging attacks on German troops in
order to secure weapons and food? Why could Togliatti not maintain any control
over the communists? And what was Alexander’s intention in calling the forces
to hold up for the winter, knowing that the Germans would pick up that message?
Whatever the reality, it was not a very honourable episode in the British war
effort. Too many organisations arguing amongst themselves, no doubt. Churchill
had many things on his mind, but it was another example of where he wavered on
strategy, then became too involved in details, or followed his buccaneering
instincts, and afterwards turned sentimental at inappropriate times. Yet
Eisenhower was the Supreme Commander, and clearly had problems in enforcing a
disciplined approach to strategy.
At least the horrendous reprisals
ceased. Maybe, as in Warsaw, the SS realised that the war was going to be lost,
and that war crimes tribunals would investigate the legality of the massacre of
innocent civilians. Yet a few grisly murders continued. Internecine feuds
continued among the partisans during the winter of 1944-45, with fears of
collaborators and spies in the midst, and frequently individuals who opposed
communism were persecuted and killed. It is beyond the scope of this article to
describe the events of this winter in the north (see Moorehead for more
details), but a few statements need to be made. The number of partisans did
decline sharply to begin with, but then ascended in the spring. More supplies
were dropped by SOE, but the latter’s anti-communist message intensified, and
the organisation tried to direct weaponry to non-communist units. Savage
reprisals by the fascists did take place, but not on the scale of the September
massacres. In the end, the communists managed to emerge from World War II with
a large amount of prestige, because they ensured that they were present to
liberate finally the cities of Turin, Milan, and Bologna in concert with the
Allied forces that eventually broke through, even though they were merciless
with fascists who had remained loyal to Mussolini and the Nazis. As with Spain,
the memories of civil war and different allegiances stayed and festered for a long
time.
And the communists
actually survived and thrived, as Howard’s encounter forty years later proved – a dramatic difference from the possibility of
independent democratic organisations in Warsaw enduring after the war, for
example. Moreover, they obviously held a grudge. Yet history continues to be
distorted. Views contrary to the betrayal of such ‘liberating’ communists have
been expressed. In his book The Pursuit of Italy David Gilmour writes: “At the
entrance of the town hall of Bologna photographs are still displayed of
partisans liberating the city without giving a hint that Allied forces had
helped them to do so.” He goes on to point out that, after the massacre of the
Ardeatine Caves, many Italians were of the opinion that those responsible (Communists)
should have given them up for execution instead. Others claim that the murders
of the German soldiers were not actually communists: Moorhead claims they were
mainly ‘students’. It all gets very murky. I leave the epitaph to Nicola
Bianca: “The
fact is that brutalization was a much part of the Italian wars as of any other,
even if it was these same wars which made possible the birth of the first true
democracy the country had known.”
Reassessment of Howard’s
Judgment
Professor Howard seemed
to be drawing an equivalence between, on the one hand, the desire for the Red
Army to have the Nazis perform their dirty work for them by eliminating a
nominal ally but a social enemy (the Home Army), and thus disengage from an attack
on Warsaw, and, on the other, a strained Allied Army, with its resources
strategically depleted, reneging on commitments to provide material support to
a scattered force of anti-fascist sympathisers, some of whom it regarded as
dangerous for the long-term health of the invading country, as well as that of the
nation it was attempting to liberate. This is highly unbalanced, as the Home
Army had few choices, whereas the Italian partisans had time and territory on
their side. They did not have to engage in bloody attacks that would provoke
reprisals of innocents. The Allies in Italy were trying to liberate a country
that had waged warfare against them: the Soviet Army refused to assist
insurgents who were supposedly fighting the same enemy. The British, certainly,
were determined to weaken the Communists: why was Howard surprised by this? And,
if he had a case to make, he could have criticised the British Army and its
propagandists back in London for obvious lapses in communications rather than switching
his attention to expressing sympathy for the communists outside Warsaw. Was he
loath to analyse what Alexander had done simply because he had served under
him?
It is informative to
parse carefully the phrases Howard uses in his outburst. I present the text
again here, for ease of reference:
“In September 1944,
believing that the end of the war was in sight, the Allied High Command had
issued orders for the Italian partisans to unmask themselves and attack German
communications throughout the north of Italy. They did so, including those on
and around Monte Sole. The Germans reacted with predictable savagery. The
Allied armies did not come to their help, and the partisan movement in North
Italy was largely destroyed. It was still believed – and especially in Bologna,
where the communists had governed the city ever since the war – that this had
been deliberately planned by the Allies in order to weaken the communist
movement, much as the Soviets had encouraged the people of Warsaw to rise and
then sat by while the Germans exterminated them. When I protested to my hosts
that this was an outrageous explanation and that there was nothing that we
could have done, they smiled politely. But I was left wondering, as I wondered
about poor Terry, was there really nothing that we could have
done to help? Were there no risks that our huge cumbrous armies with their vast
supply-lines might have taken if we knew what was going on? – and someone must
have known what was going on. Probably not: but ever since then I have been
sparing of criticism of the Soviet armies for their halt before Warsaw.”
‘In September 1944, believing
that the end of the war was in sight, the Allied High Command . . ’
Did the incitement
actually happen in September, as opposed to June? What was the source, and who
actually issued the order? What did that ‘in sight’ mean? It is a woolly,
evasive term. Who actually believed that the war would end shortly? Were these
orders issued over public radio (for the Germans to hear), or privately, to SOE
and OSS representatives?
‘ . . had issued orders
to unmask themselves’.
What does that mean?
Take off their camouflage and engage in open warfare? The Allied High Command
could in fact not ‘order’ the partisans to do anything, but why would an
‘order’ be issued to do that? I can find no evidence for it in the transcripts.
‘ . . .and attack German
communications’.
An incitement to
sabotage was fine, and consistent, but the communication specifically did not
encourage murder of fascist forces, whether Italian or German. Alexander admittedly
did so in June, but Howard does not cite those broadcasts.
‘The Germans reacted
with predictable savagery.’
The Germans engaged in
savage reprisals primarily in August, before the supposed order that
Howard quotes. The reprisals took place because of partisan murders of soldiers,
and in response to Operation ‘Olive’, not simply because of attacks on
communications, as Howard suggests here. Moreover, the massacre at Marzabotto
occurred at the end of September, when Kesselring had mollified his
instructions, after Mussolini’s intervention.
‘Allied armies did not
come to their help’.
But was anything more
than parachuting in supplies expected? Over an area of more than 30,000 square
miles, behind enemy lines? Bologna only? Where is the evidence – beyond the
June message quoted by Origo? What did the SOE officers say? (I have not yet
read Joe Maioli’s Mission Accomplished: SOE in Italy 1943-45, although
its title suggests success, not failure.)
‘The partisan movement
in northern Italy was largely destroyed’.
This was not true, as
numerous memoirs and histories indicate. Admittedly, activity sharply decreased
after September, because of the Nazi attacks, and the reduction in supplies. It
thus suffered in the short term, but the movement became highly active again in
the spring of 1945. On what did Howard base his conclusion? And why did he not
mention that it was the Communist Togliatti who had been as much responsible
for any weakening in the autumn of 1944? Or that Italian neo-fascists had been
determinedly hunting down partisans all year?
‘It was still believed . . .’
Why the passive voice? Who? When? Why? Of course the communists in Bologna would say that.
‘ . . .deliberately
planned to weaken the communist movement’.
Richard Lamb wrote that
Field Marshal Harding, Alexander’s Chief of Staff, had told him that the
controversial Proclama Alexander, interpreted by some Italian historians
as an anti-communist move, had been designed to protect the partisans. But that
proclamation was made in November, and it encouraged partisans to
suspend hostilities. In any case, weakening the communist movement was not a dishonourable
goal, considering what was happening elsewhere in Europe.
‘. . . much as the Soviets
had encouraged the people of Warsaw to rise and then sat by while the Germans
exterminated them’.
Did the Bologna
communists really make this analogy, condemning the actions of communists in
Poland as if they were akin to the actions of the Allies? Expressing sympathy
for the class enemies of the Polish Home Army would have been heresy. Why could
Howard not refute it at the time, or point out the contradictions in this
passage?
‘ . . .was there really nothing that we could have done to help?’
Aren’t you the one supposed to be answering the questions, Professor, not asking them?
‘. . . huge cumbrous
armies with their vast supply-lines’
Why had Howard forgotten
about the depletion of resources in Italy, the decision to hold ground, and
what he wrote about in Strategic Deception? Did he really think that
Alexander would have been able to ignore Eisenhower’s directives? And why
’cumbrous’ – unwieldy? inflexible?
‘Someone must have known
what was going on’.
Indeed. And shouldn’t it have been Howard’s
responsibility to find out?
‘Ever since then I have
been sparing of criticism of the Soviet armies’
Where? In print? In
conversations? What has one got to do with the other? Why should an implicit
criticism of the Allied Command be converted into sympathy for Stalin?
The irony is that the
Allied Command, perhaps guided by the Political Warfare Executive, did
probably woefully mismanage expectations, and encourage attacks on German
troops that resulted in the murder of innocent civilians. But Howard does not
make this case. Those events happened primarily in the June through August
period, while Howard bases his argument on a September proclamation. He was
very quick to accept the Bologna communists’ claim that the alleged
‘destruction’ of the partisans was all the Allies’ fault, when the partisans
themselves, northern Italian fascists, the SS troops, Togliatti, and even the
Pope, held some responsibility. If Howard had other evidence, he should have
presented it.
Why was Howard not aware
of the Monte Sole massacre at the time? Why did he not perform research before
walking into the meeting in Bologna? What did the communists there tell him
that convinced him that they had been hard done by? Did they blame the British
for the SS reprisals? Why was he taken in by the relentless propagandizing of
the Communists? Why did he not explain what he thought the parallels were
between Alexander’s actions and those of Rokossovsky? The episode offered an
intriguing opportunity to investigate Allied strategy in Italy and Poland in
the approach to D-Day and afterwards, but Howard fumbled it, and an enormous
amount is thus missing from his casual observations. He could have illustrated
how the attempts by the Western Allies to protect the incursions into Europe
had unintended consequences, and shown the result of the competition between
western intelligence and Togliatti for the allegiance of the Italian partisans.
Instead the illustrious historian never did his homework. He obfuscated rather
than illuminated, indulging in vague speculation, shaky chronology, ineffectual
hand-wringing, and unsupported conclusions.
Perhaps a pertinent
epitaph is what Howard himself wrote, in his volume of Strategic Deception,
about the campaign in India (p 221): “The real problem which
confronted the British deception staff in India, however, was that created by
its own side; the continuing uncertainty as to what Allied strategic intentions
really were. In default of any actual plans the best that the deceivers could
do as one of them ruefully put it, was to ensure that the enemy remained as
confused as they were themselves.” He had an excellent opportunity to inspect
the Italian campaign as a case study for the same phenomenon, but for some
reason avoided it.
This has been a fascinating
and educational, though ultimately sterile, exercise for me. It certainly did not
help me understand why Howard is held in such regard as a historian. ‘Why are
eminent figures allowed to get away with such feeble analysis?’, I asked
myself. Is it because they are distinguished, and an aura of authority has
descended upon them? Or am I completely out to lunch? No doubt I should read
more of Howard’s works. But ars longa, vita brevis . . .
Sources:
War
in Italy 1943-1945, A Brutal Story by Richard Lamb
Russia
at War1941-1945 by Nicholas Werth
Barbarossa
by
Alan Clark
The
Second World War by Antony Beevor
War
in Val D’Orcia by Iris Origo
Captain
Professor by Michael Howard
The
House in the Mountains by Caroline Moorehead
World War II Partisan
Warfare in Italy by Pier Paola Battistelli & Piero Crociani
The Pursuit of Italy by David Gilmour
Between Giants by Prit Buttar
Winston Churchill: Road
to Victory 1941-1945 by Martin Gilbert
Rising ’47 by Norman Davies
No Simple Victory by Norman Davies
The Oxford Companion to
World War II edited by Ian Dear and M. R. E. Foot
The Oxford Illustrated
History of World War II edited by Paul Overy
British Intelligence in the Second World War, Volume 5, Strategic Deception by Michael Howard
I
am experimenting here by posting a fascinating piece by an Internet colleague,
Denis Lenihan. I have long been looking for a forum in which discussions on
outstanding intelligence conundrums could take place. My idea of an ‘Officially
Unreliable’ conference never took off, and I have not found any other medium
where serious, non-polemic, debates on such subjects could be undertaken. I am
not certain that WordPress is the optimum home for such discussions, as I have
to assume the role of editor, moderator, and host, but I want to try it out.
Denis (whom I have never met) is a dedicated analyst of intelligence matters. He describes himself as follows: “Denis Lenihan was born in New Zealand and has degrees from the University of New Zealand and the University of Sydney. Having spent his working life in Australia as a civil servant, he now lives in London. He also writes about spies on the websites kiwispies.com and academia.edu .”
I am delighted that Denis has taken the trouble to respond in depth to my piece on Sonia and the Quebec Agreement. (Readers may want to refresh their memory of it first.) I have prepared a reply to Denis, which I have sent him at the same time that this bulletin is being posted. In that way, I can deliver an unvarnished response, uninfluenced by any comments posted here, and readers who want to make any observations will likewise not be swayed by any of my pontifications. I plan to post my response here after a week or so, and Denis will of course have an opportunity to address any of my arguments.
You can respond in several ways. You can leave a short post at the
end of this piece. I have to approve such postings before they are released,
so, if I do not know who you are, and the message is questionable, I may not
‘Approve it’. An email address attached will allow me to contact you, if
necessary. It is also possible that some messages may be trapped by the ‘Stop
Spammers’ filter. Since I installed this feature last summer, I have apparently
had 1,189,918 messages blocked. If you suspect I may have overlooked your
message, please contact me by email at antonypercy@aol.com. (Since many readers are accustomed to my schedule of monthly
postings, they may well overlook the arrival of this Special Bulletin.)
Alternatively, you may wish to send me an email with a longer
message. Again, I may want to check you out if I have not heard of you before,
but, after I have done that, if you want your posting to appear anonymously, I
am happy to oblige. I hope to receive some comments, but, if none arrive, Denis
and I can simply air our exchange. (And he has more to come.)
A colleague has informed me that Maik Hamburger, Sonia’s
first-born, but last-surviving child, translator and Shakespearean scholar,
died in Berlin on January 16.
SONIA
AND THE QUEBEC AGREEMENT by ANTONY PERCY
(coldspur.com) : A COMMENT
Antony
Percy begins by noting the claim made by Pincher in the (first) 2009 edition of
Treachery that the GRU spy Sonia (aka Ursula Beurton, nee Hamburger, born
Kuczynski) transmitted to Moscow ‘the details of the Quebec Agreement’ 16 days
after it had been signed on 24 August 1943. Percy concludes his introductory
paragraph with the words:
‘This article shows that the contradictions and anomalies in the accounts of the leakage of this secret leave the published claims about Sonia’s activity open to a great deal of scepticism.’
Having
done his analysis, Percy concludes his article by saying that ‘a proper
resolution of this affair can therefore only come from the following steps’; and
he goes on to list five, ranging from verifying the existence and authenticity
of a real document in the GRU archive dated September 1943 concerning the
Quebec Agreement, to investigating whether the intelligence might have been
gained elsewhere.
These
five steps resemble counsels of perfection. It is a nice question whether if
they were applied to other questions which arise in espionage/intelligence
activity we would be able to reach any certainty or indeed to make any progress
at all. Certainty may be beyond us at the moment so far as Sonia and the Quebec
Agreement are concerned, but that does not prevent us from harvesting and
studying the scraps of information which we have and developing one or more
hypotheses from them. These can be
extended or modified as more information emerges. The hypothesis advanced here
is that on this occasion Pincher was right about Hollis being Sonia’s source
for her information about the Quebec Agreement.
A
useful starting point is a close examination of the allegations about what is
contained in the GRU archive in Moscow, of which there are four, in the
following date order: by Bochkarev and Kolpakidi in 2002 in a book about Sonia
(described as Ruth Werner) called Superfrau iz GRU (Superfrau in the
GRU); by Bance (aka Dan) in a 2003 book Ultimate Deception; in the
2012 (final) edition of Treachery, in which Pincher quotes the Russian
historian Dr Svetlana Chervonnaya; and in a 2016 journal article by William A
Tyrer, which again quotes Chervonnaya but with one crucial addition to
Pincher’s report.
Bochkarev
is described by Pincher, without sources quoted, at 598 as ‘a former GRU
officer’, and Kolpakidi as someone ‘who had been given some, but strictly
limited, access to secret GRU records’. A Google search shows that Kolpakidi is
the author of a number of books on the GRU. Pincher has the duo at 187 simply
stating that ‘on 4 September, Sonia reported data on the results of the
conference’. Pincher adds ‘suggesting that she sent all that she had learnt
from her source’, which is clearly a non sequitur.
Bance
is variously referred to by Pincher as a researcher with Moscow intelligence
sources (53), having access to KGB and other USSR archival documents (202 and
207), obtaining information from former KGB officers (344-5, 386, 425, 431 and
630) and with access to GRU sources also (208 and 459). On the other hand, Percy warns that
Bance/Dan’s work ‘is a curious melange of fact and fiction that needs to be
parsed very carefully’. What category the following fell into is not
disclosed. Percy quotes Bance/Dan’s
‘critical sentences about Sonia and the scientists’ thus:
‘General Groves, the newly installed head of the Manhattan Engineering District, the US codename for their atomic bomb project, agreed to the British request that a number of its scientists should work in America. Lord Cherwell, Wallace Akers and Michael Perrin, his deputy, met to decide what names to put forward to Groves, who reserved the right of refusal. Advised by two of his scientists, Mark Oliphant and James Chadwick, a list was finally agreed . . . Word quickly spread in the scientific community as to who was on the list. Fuchs provided the names to Ruth [=Sonia], who then transmitted them to a grateful Moscow on September 4.’
As
Percy notes, there was no mention of the Quebec agreement itself. This may be the reason why this extract is
not, so far as I can see, quoted by Pincher. In any event he thought that
Hollis rather than Fuchs was responsible for providing the scientists’ names.
Chervonnaya
is quoted by Pincher at 19 as ‘having discovered a Soviet document confirming
that Sonia had sent the information about the Quebec Agreement on 4 September
1943 and that, after translation into Russian, it was taken straight to
Stalin’.
Finally,
Tyrer’s article in the International Journal of Intelligence and
Counterintelligence in 2016 (Vol 29, no 4) quotes ‘a Russian military
writer Vladimir Lota, with access to
some of the GRU files, which are off limits to other researchers’ thus:
‘On 4 September 1943, U Kuzcynski [Sonia] reported to the Centre information on the outcomes of the conference in Quebec. She had also learned that English scientists Pierls, Chadwick, Simon and Olifant had departed for Washington. U Kuzcynski had received this information from Klaus Fuchs…’ ‘
Tyrer
gives the reference to Lota’s article, published in 2010, in a footnote and
then adds: ‘Courtesy of Dr Svetlana Chervonnaya’.
So
there is agreement from the supposed GRU sources that information (unspecified)
was sent by Sonia on 4 September about the Quebec Agreement. Note however that
the claim about the names of the scientists who had gone to the US being sent
on the same day is made only by Bance/Dan, but without mention of the
Conference. Bance/Dan may thus have been confused. One gets the impression that the GRU
gradually disclosed more and more about Sonia’s message: initially in Bochkarev
and Kolpakidi, only ‘data on the results of the conference’; then information
just about the agreement; and then – finally in Lota – information on both the
outcomes of the conference and the scientists, and again with Fuchs as a
source.
The
great anomaly in the material is that Chervonnaya was evidently aware in 2010
or shortly thereafter that Fuchs had been named by Lota as Sonia’s informant
(at least so far as the names of the scientists were concerned), but she
evidently failed to tell Pincher. He recorded in the 2012 edition of Treachery
at 629-30 that he was ‘indebted’ to Chervonnaya for many reasons, one being
that she provided information about ‘extracts from the continuing works of
Vladimir Lota, who appears to be the only person granted any access to GRU
records’ (but see his descriptions of Bochkarev and Kolpakidi above). This
seems inexplicable.
Percy
suggests that, in the Lota extract quoted above, the force of ‘also’ and ‘this
information’ concerns only the departure of the scientists and not the
Agreement, and I think this is right – although some confirmation about the
accuracy of the translation would be helpful.
He goes on to suggest that Fuchs was indeed the source of the
information about the scientists and that he passed this information on to
Sonia in mid-August. This too seems right: why would Sonia wait until September
4 to pass this on to Moscow? Quoting GRU
archives, Pincher has Fuchs meeting Sonia in mid-August and not again until
November, so this fits with the suggestion that the information about the
scientists was sent in mid-August, shortly after she received it.
There
is another argument against Fuchs being the source of the leak about the
Agreement, and that is that nobody on the Soviet side has ever given him the
credit for it. Both Fuchs and Sonia eventually admitted their roles in getting
and transmitting atomic secrets. If Fuchs had been responsible for the leak
about the Agreement, why not go beyond merely admitting it and boast about it,
especially Sonia?
Percy
proposes a number of other candidates as the source of the leak about the
Agreement and while they have some plausibility they all suffer from the same
defect: there is no or no apparent Oxford connection. Unless the GRU is running
and has run some disinformation campaign, the material about the Quebec
conference was sent by Sonia from Oxford. This argues overwhelmingly for an
Oxford connection for the source. London candidates would surely have used the
more secure services of Colonel Simon Kremer, a GRU officer at the Soviet
Embassy, as others did. Hollis was based in Oxford at the relevant time.
The
list of alternative candidates proposed by Percy might need to be expanded in
the light of admission made by Churchill in the House of Commons on 13 April
1954, when the subject of the Quebec Agreement came up. A Google search of the
Agreement shows that he said that
‘My telegram [from the context, about the Agreement] was addressed to the Deputy Prime Minister and the War Cabinet, but it may well be that, owing to the great respect with which the words “Tube Alloys” were treated, it slipped out at some point or other.’
Having
been the Deputy Prime Minister in 1943, Attlee came to Churchill’s aid:
‘May I ask the Prime Minister, was it not a fact that it was thought best to keep knowledge of this matter in the hands of a very few people and that the War Cabinet was informed that there had been talks and agreements with the United States Government on this matter, but that they were not, as a matter of fact, informed of the details at all, or what the agreement was, but simply that some agreement had been come to, and the matter rested there? ‘
Churchill
did not disagree. So members of the War Cabinet, who might have inferred from
what little they were told what the agreement was about, need to be added to
the list of possible sources – if they have an Oxford connection. Churchill
plunged on in the exchange in the House of Commons, getting deeper into the
mire, so that Attlee was moved to ask plaintively:
‘Would not the right hon. Gentleman think, on reflection, that it would have been better not to have referred to the matter, but to have left it where it was?’
Another
gap in the Percy analysis is the role of Michael Perrin, whose role as
described by Pincher is dismissed thus:
‘Pincher made some imaginative jumps in promoting the thesis that Hollis would have gained access to the information [about the Agreement] through his colleague at Tube Alloys, Roger [sic] Perrin.’[Thank you, Denis. I meant Michael. I have corrected my text. Coldspur.]
Perrin
gets no fewer than 32 mentions under his name in the index to Treachery,
and Pincher establishes a strong personal and professional relationship between
Perrin and Hollis. Both were sons of bishops, both had been at Oxford, they
were the same age and Perrin had a country cottage at Henley, conveniently
close to Oxford. He was originally an industrial scientist at Imperial Chemical
Industries (ICI), and became an assistant to the ICI Director of Research,
Wallace Akers; both became involved in a project to build an atomic bomb, known
in the
UK by the cover name of Tube Alloys. On Pincher’s account at 131, ‘Perrin had
overall responsibility inside Tube Alloys for security and intelligence, being
cleared for access at all levels’; and his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography says that he ‘was made secretary to the main Tube Alloys
committees’. He and Hollis seem to have
become first involved professionally in 1941, when they cleared Fuchs for access
to secret information in Tube Alloys. They went on to clear other scientists,
some of whom were also spies, in a partnership which on Pincher’s account
lasted at least until 1951. Hollis became ‘the natural liaison man with Tube
Alloys’ and ‘was to become recognised as MI5’s atomic expert’, being appointed
in 1945 as consultant and adviser to the Official Committee on Atomic Energy
(Perrin was a member) which reported directly to the Prime Minister. (Treachery
203, 341).
On
Pincher’s account at 186-7, Perrin was ‘a most important figure in the talks
leading to the Quebec Agreement’; and he was also heavily involved in the preliminary
negotiations with US representatives in London. Although Pincher gets muddled
about the chronology, I think he is right to suggest that Perrin would have
kept Hollis informed of progress with the Agreement, as more scientists – who
needed vetting by MI5 – were to be sent to the US after it had been signed.
There is also the highly relevant point, made by Pincher at 203, that Hollis
had form for being pushy when it came to demanding information to which
strictly speaking he was not entitled. Pincher recounts at 405 what the GCHQ
officer Teddy Poulden told him about Hollis’ behaviour after the Petrov
defection. Hollis repeatedly pressed for details which Poulden declined to
provide, as Hollis had no need to know. Hollis then went to Poulden’s superior
‘who upheld the decision and congratulated Poulden’. Thus had it been
necessary, Hollis might well have heavied Perrin about the Quebec
Agreement. There are no imaginative
jumps here, only reasonable inferences.
The
other factor pointing to Hollis comes from Percy’s own writings on Sonia’s
Radio, a ninepart epic (plus envoi) also on coldspur.com, during which (at Part
VII) the author felt compelled to issue health warnings to his readers. At
heading 4 in the envoi -‘Exploiting the National Archives: “Traffic Analysis”’ –
Percy makes the very useful observation that while the focus on fresh material
in the Archives has been on drilling down, a more arduous but rewarding
approach is ‘scouring the archives horizontally’ so that one may find
links among disparate cases. What follows is an attempt to adopt this approach
with Hollis to detect patterns of behaviour. It looks at his other activities
as they bear on atomic spies and on Sonia during the war, when the Soviet priority
was discovering what the West was up to with atomic research so that it could
develop its own bomb, as of course it did; thus putting into perspective the
Quebec Agreement.
1.
Atomic Spies
Fuchs
May 1941: Cleared by Hollis for secret work for the first time (Treachery, 130)
August 1941: MI5 received information that Fuchs ‘was well-known in Communist circles’; this was passed on by MI5 with the observation by Hollis that ‘while it was impossible to assess the risk of leakage of information, any leakage would be more likely to lead to Russia rather than to Germany’ (132)
October 1941: An officer on
Hollis’ staff suggests that the Ministry of Atomic Production be warned of
Fuchs’ communist connections; no action taken (136)
June 1942: MI5 told the
Home Office that it had no security objection to Fuchs becoming a British citizen
(159)
Late 1942: MI5 learned that while in
Canada Fuchs had become a close friend of Hans Kahle, who was well known to
MI5, having been noted by it in 1939 as ‘said to be running the [Russian]
espionage system in this country’; rated by Hollis as ‘not significant’ (160)
Late
1943: Cleared by Hollis for secret work for the second time (191); reservations
not mentioned
January 1944: Cleared by Hollis for secret
work for the third time (192)
February
1946: Fuchs’ name discovered by Royal Canadian Mounted Police in the diary of
Israel Halperin, a communist who had befriended Fuchs; information passed to
Hollis, but not conveyed to MI5 in London (231-2)
Late
1946: Fuchs appointed to Harwell Atomic Energy Research Establishment: member
of Hollis’ staff suggested that Fuchs should be re-examined; Hollis decided
‘Present action should be confined to warning [Harwell] about the background of
Fuchs’; cleared for the fourth time (263)
October-November
1946: two MI5 officers express the view that Fuchs may have been a Soviet agent;
Hollis notes ‘I, myself, can see nothing on this file which persuades me that
Fuchs is in any way likely to be engaged in espionage or that he is anything
more than anti-Nazi’; cleared for the fifth time (264)
Early
1947: Hollis was over-ruled and Fuchs investigated for three months; there was
no suspicious behaviour and the investigation ceased; shortly thereafter, as
turned out later, Fuchs resumed his spying activities, one inference being that
he had been warned of the investigation (265)
November
1947: after a review involving Hollis, decision made to notify the Supply
Ministry if it approached MI5 that ‘We consider that the records indicate only
that Fuchs held anti-Nazi views and associated with Germans of similar views
and we think the security risk is very slight’; cleared for the sixth time
(266)
1950:
Fuchs arrested and charged; false statements supplied by MI5 made to court by
the Attorney-General; ‘can be little doubt that Hollis had been involved’ in
preparing the statements (chapter 42)
False
statements made by MI5 to the Prime Minister, who repeated them in the
Parliament; ‘can be little doubt that Hollis, as a prime source, was involved…’
(chapter 43); see also Percy Misdefending the Realm, chapter 9;
June
1950: Hollis attends a conference in Washington with US and Canadian officials to
discuss security standards; Fuchs case discussed and Hollis’ performance
described by Pincher as ‘a virtuoso display of brass nerve, cool dissimulation
and power of persuasion without a whisper of apology’, but he failed to
convince the FBI (chapter 47)
It
is only fair to note that in Misdefending the Realm, chapter 9, Percy
argued that Hollis was too junior to have made many of these decisions alone
and that his superiors must also have been involved. Perhaps; but a copy of
letter composed and signed by Hollis on the Beurtons’ MI5 file (KV6/41) displays
his authority as far back as 1944. It is written to the US Embassy in response
to an inquiry about the activities and identity of Rudolf Albert Hamburger’s
wife and two children, then residing in the UK. (Hamburger had been Sonia’s
first husband, and he had recently been arrested for spying.) While Hollis said
that Sonia’s brother Jurgen ‘was a Communist of some importance’ and her four
sisters ‘have all come to notice in a Communist connection’; she herself
‘appears to devote her time to her children and domestic affairs. She has not
come to notice in any political connection, nor is there anything to show that
she has maintained contact with her first husband. There is no doubt that she
herself has some Communist sympathies…’
the
same pattern was repeated with other atomic spies such as Engelbert Broda (94,
187, 305, 344, 613, 626), who got little attention from Percy.
2.
Sonia
1942:
MI5 interrogated a veteran communist, Oliver Green, who confessed to working
for the GRU and ‘disclosed that several agents in Britain were transmitting
directly to Moscow by radio…’; he added that ‘he had been told that the Moscow
Centre had a spy inside MI5’; no action was taken on either allegation (Treachery
178-181)
January
1943: as the result of a request made by MI5 London (H Shillito) via the MI5
officer in Reading, the Oxford City Police made some local inquiries about the
Beurtons at George St Summertown Oxford, where they were then residing. In
forwarding the police report to MI5 London, the MI5 officer in Reading noted that
‘the most interesting point appears to be their possession of a large wireless
set, and you may think this is worthy of further inquiry’; no further action
was taken, and there is no indication of the reason for the inaction; Shillito
worked in Hollis’ section; Hollis’ initials appear on the file as late as 1947;
the Beurtons’ MI5 file KV6/41
1944:
Hollis wrote his notorious letter to the US Embassy – see above.
‘For
most of the war’ (Treachery 141) messages of Soviet interest intercepted
by the Radio Security Service (RSS) were sent initially to an MI5 officer and an
MI6 officer; Kenneth Morton Evans, who worked for the RSS and then MI5, told
Pincher that the full details were given to Hollis in MI5 and Philby in MI6 and
there was ‘no great enthusiasm over them’; James Johnston of the RSS told
Pincher that ‘he and his colleagues had intercepted messages from an illegal
transmitter in the Oxford area, which he later believed to be Sonia’s, and had
submitted them to MI6 or MI5…they were returned with the reference NFA (No
Further Action) or NFU (No Further Use)’ the decisions being made by Hollis and
Philby; ‘…[Sonia’s] station continued to work, off and on…It must be a mystery
as to why she was not arrested’.
In
July 1947 MI5 obtained a warrant to intercept the telephone of Sonia’s sister,
Barbara Taylor and her husband Duncan, who were ‘suspected of receiving
communications from agents of a Foreign Power’. A postal and cable check was
also instituted, and some physical surveillance undertaken. The original number intercepted turned out to
be incorrect, but the second number – at the Lawn Rd flats in Hampstead, where
Barbara’s father lived – was correct. (It may be that Barbara and her husband
moved in with her father after her mother died). The first part of the MI5 file
on the Taylors (KV2/2935) records summaries of telephone calls made and
received over the next three months, all the checks being removed in
mid-September after the interview with Sonia mentioned below. One striking feature of the summaries is the
apparent total absence of any compromising telephone calls, while another is
the lack of contact among some of the family members. Despite it being the
father’s telephone, he rarely used it. There are no calls to or from Sonia in
Oxford. By coincidence, the girls’ father was visiting Sonia in Oxford in
September when she and her husband were interviewed by Skardon and another MI5
officer, Serpell. Tellingly, he made no
contact with Barbara in London by telephone after the interview occurred. On his return to London late on September
15th he got Barbara to ring her sister Bridget and ask her to come and see him
the following day.
All
this suggests that the family were aware that Barbara’s telephone was ‘off,’ as
the expression has it – that is, they knew it was being intercepted.
On
Pincher’s account at 277-8, the letters etc of Sonia and Bridget were also
intercepted at this time, as was Bridget’s telephone (but not Sonia’s). Pincher
read all the intercepted information but it ‘yielded nothing whatever of
intelligence value’. Funny, that.
All
this put together shows that Hollis:
–
through his connection with Perrin, was well-placed to know the details of the
Quebec Agreement;
–
was in Oxford at the relevant time;
–
via horizontal analysis, was contemporaneously engaged in other activities
protecting atomic spies and protecting Sonia and other members of the Kuczynski
family.
In
the present state of knowledge, Hollis is the prime suspect for Sonia’s source
of information about the Quebec Agreement.
Obiter
dicta
There
is a remarkable entry on ‘Tube Alloys directorate’ in the Oxford Dictionary
of National Biography: it mentions the contributions of Klaus Fuchs and
Alan Nunn May but omits the fact that both were spies.
In
discussing Tyrer’s suggestion that the GRU was waiting for the death of Hollis’
widow before naming him, Percy says that ‘I have not been able to track the
birth or death of Edith Valentine Hollis, nee Hammond..’, Hollis’ second
wife. A Google search shows that the
University of Oxford Gazette of 27 September 2018 recorded the death on
5 July 2018 of Edith Valentine Hollis (née Hammond), aged 98, in the St Hilda’s
College obituary list. This clears one obstacle so to speak to naming Hollis
(if he be Elli); another, his son and only child by his first wife, died in
2013; but the son had children and it may be that the GRU reluctance to name
names extends to Hollis’ grandchildren.
Percy
writes that ‘One of the objections to the claim that Roger Hollis was ELLI has
been the fact that Soviet intelligence experts have reportedly expressed
bewilderment at the proposition, and no evidence has appeared in Russian
archives equating Hollis’s name with that cryptonym.’ Of the ‘Soviet intelligence experts’, how
many have been GRU people, Hollis having been claimed to be GRU rather than
KGB?
Denis
Lenihan
London
January 2020
Coldspur’s Response to Denis
I
thank you for this comprehensive commentary. I have learned much. I shall
address your points in the sequence you presented them.
Despite
what I would describe as our shared inquisitive devotion to discovering the
truth behind some perplexing intelligence conundrums, I believe we might have a
slightly different approach on methodology. Your commentary leads up to the
conclusion ‘Hollis is the prime suspect for Sonia’s source of information about
the Quebec Agreement’. Yet I would counter that we have no reliable evidence
that Sonia ever provided details of the Quebec Agreement to Moscow, whether by
direct transmission (as Pincher claims), or by any other medium (such as via
the Soviet Embassy in London). And the claims that are made are riddled with
inconsistencies.
You
suggest that the absence of any documentary evidence should not obstruct our
search, questioning whether, in such circumstances, ‘we would be able to reach
any certainty or indeed make any progress at all’. But I would rejoin that it
does not constitute ‘progress’ to build further hypotheses on such a shaky
foundation, however compelling the circumstantial evidence – which itself is
constructed on known friendships and alliances, with no unambiguous evidence.
For there exists no external phenomenon indicating Stalin’s awareness of secret
agreements made at the Quebec Conference beyond what he was told by Churchill
and Roosevelt. The event is not like, say, the acknowledged distribution of
Ultra secrets through the Rote Drei in Switzerland, or the long
concealed Burgess-Berlin mission to Moscow in 1940.
To
recap the official major communications between the war leaders in those months
in 1943:
August
7: Churchill delivers a telegram to Clark Kerr, informing Stalin of the
‘Quadrant’ conference, which Clark Kerr passes on to Stalin the next day.
August
8: Stalin writes to Roosevelt, apologizing that his time at ‘the front’ (an
habitual excuse) has prevented his replying to Roosevelt’s invitation to hold a
Summit.
August
9: Stalin replies to Churchill, with similar excuses, expressing his desire to
delay the Summit meeting.
August
18: Churchill and Roosevelt write a joint message to Stalin, saying they expect
to be in conference for about ten days, and stress the importance of a Summit
meeting soon.
August
22: Stalin writes to Roosevelt and Churchill, expressing irritation over the
armistice negotiations with the Italians.
August
24: Churchill and Roosevelt are taken aback by Stalin’s sharp tone.
August
24: Stalin sends a more conciliatory message.
August
25: Churchill and Roosevelt send Stalin a summary of the Quebec conference,
outlining the various European initiatives (but obviously excluding anything
about atomic weaponry, ‘the Quebec Agreement’).
September
2: Churchill and Roosevelt send Stalin a preview of events in Italy.
September
4: Roosevelt writes to Stalin, endorsing idea of politico-military discussions
at State Department level.
September
5: Churchill writes to Stalin, stating he wants to restrict discussions to
military matters.
September
8: Stalin writes to Roosevelt, saying he would prefer the military-political
Commission to be held in Moscow.
September
9: Churchill and Roosevelt write to Stalin, informing him that Eisenhower has
accepted the unconditional surrender of Italy.
September
12: Stalin writes to Churchill and Roosevelt, looking forward to the meeting of
the Commission on October 4.
What
is remarkable about this is that Stalin appears to have offered no opinions on
the ‘open’ aspects of the Quebec conference, either of approval or disapproval,
being more concerned about the situation in Italy. Yet the suggestion is made
that he received details of FDR’s and WSC’s other plans, as the GRU archive
cited by Pincher (p 17) claims to indicate. As I have stated before, however, the
statement in the archive that ‘there was no word about the fact that they had
made an additional secret agreement about the use of nuclear weapons’ does not
make sense. It must have been added as some commentary or report later.
Pincher
then goes on to say that Stalin was in a ‘prickly, suspicious mood’ when he met
Churchill and Roosevelt in Tehran on November 28. Apart from suggesting that
Stalin learned about the Agreement from Sonia, Pincher also suggests that the
dictator may have been upset about the delay of the invasion until the spring
of 1944 (probably leaked by MacGibbon). Stalin, however, knew in June 1943
about the delay of the Second Front until spring 1944, since he complained about
it in a message to Roosevelt on June 11. Stalin’s annoyance may have been
provoked by information on the Quebec Agreement that he received recently from
another source. We simply do not know. Pincher is not a reliable source, and he
sometimes piles on his arguments unnecessarily.
What
this points to is that no exterior behaviour of Stalin can be attributed to the
fact that he learned of the Quebec Agreement from Sonia in early September. All
we have are the claims of various GRU/KGB officers or hangers-on, all with
privileged but restricted access to secret records, who make assertions about
Sonia’s revelations, while none of them can reproduce a document that confirms
the event, its timing, its origin, or its precise contents.
I
think your analysis of the anomalies in Pincher’s account of the contributions
from Chervonnaya and Lota is very sound. I might wonder whether your statement:
“Unless the GRU is running and has run some disinformation campaign, . . .” was
made with tongue in cheek, as I can hardly imagine the GRU (or KGB) doing
anything else – just like MI5, in fact. That is what secret intelligence
services do. Your additional evidence about the 1954 exchange between Attlee
and Churchill is extremely useful, and I am very grateful to you for your
coverage of Michael Perrin. I admit to having taken the Hollis-Perrin
connection a bit too casually, and I think the 32 mentions in Treachery
which you cite are worthy of deeper analysis. If there were any stronger
evidence that Hollis was ELLI (or a mole with another cryptonym), the Perrin
link would be absolutely vital.
I
recall that Perrin, who was deputy to Lord Portal when the latter was appointed
Controller of Production (Atomic Energy) at the Ministry of Supply, was the
individual to whom Fuchs made his full confession, an experience that
distressed Perrin. And Perrin also came strongly to Peierls’s defence later in
1950 (see Frank Close’s Trinity, p 395) after the FBI and MI5 had begin
to cast doubts on Peierls’s loyalties. Early in 1951, Peierls had the ominous
conversation with Portal, followed up by the letter to him that I discussed on coldspur
a couple of months back, where Peierls admitted his connection with the
assassin Leonid Kannegiesser. Shortly after this, both Lord Portal and Michael
Perrin left their posts. I wonder whether those events had anything to do with
the Peierls ‘confession’? Perrin must have been devastated, and he did not die
until 1988, so must have witnessed the attacks on Hollis. Another trail to pursue.
Your
‘horizontal analysis’ of Hollis is also very welcome, although I would prefer
that it be based on the original National Archives records rather than
Pincher’s unsourced references to them! I have been through your citations, and
checked them against my Chronology, and believe that they are all sound,
although one must point out those occasions where Hollis took a more positive
line in trying to counteract Soviet espionage or subversion. Pincher does not
dwell on these. Again, a topic for further study, especially when it comes to
the matter of whether his arguments were countered or condoned by other MI5
officers.
I
am glad you drew attention to Engelbert Broda, as well. I had not spent much
time on him, but I have recently read Paul Broda’s Scientist Spies, and
it is evident that he was one of the key contributors to Soviet Russia’s access
to atomic secrets. I have now acquired the Kew files on him and his wife.
When
it comes to surveilling Sonia and Green, as you now, I am of the opinion that
senior officers in MI5 and SIS were complicit in a scheme to allow the spies to
carry on their undercover work, and that Hollis was thus not a lone wolf trying
to protect Sonia. And yes, I did notice the obituary of Hollis’s widow last
year. If the GRU were sensitive enough to want to spare their agents’ widows, that
time has now passed. As you point out, Roger Hollis’s son, Adrian, died in
2013.
You
echo Pincher’s account that Morton Evans of RSS informed him that ‘messages of
Soviet interest’ were passed on by him to Hollis and Philby. But this cannot be
true. Morton Evans could not have detected that undeciphered messages were in
Russian, or from a Soviet spy. His procedures did not involve sending such
messages to Hollis or Philby, who would have had no idea what to do with them.
He may well have invoked Liddell and Robertson to determine, if the locations
had been triangulated by direction-finding apparatus, whether the transmissions
originated from Double-Cross agents. If the location could not be pinpointed
accurately, he would have sent out mobile direction-finding teams, but an
officer from MI5 B1 section would have had to accompany them.
Your
fascinating observations on the September 1947 telephone intercepts of Sonia’s
sister Barbara, where you draw attention to the fact that the Kuczynski family
appeared to be aware that their telephone calls may have been listened to, made
me go back to Sonia’s Radio, Chapter 6. I relate there Sonia’s own story
that Alexander Foote warned her that she was in danger by contacting Ullman,
the Austrian who had introduced them, and was now living in London. Of course,
the GRU might have insisted that she present that anecdote in Sonyas Rapport,
to conceal the real source of the leak in MI5 . . .
Having
returned to my original text of Sonia and the Quebec Agreement, I also
wanted to add a few comments. I may have given the impression that the Nazi spy
JOSEFINE (representing the attachés in the Swedish Embassy) had passed on to
her masters the details of the Quebec Agreement. As David Kahn indicates, in Hitler’s
Spies, the information passed on was the basic military stuff – still very useful to the Germans, and
evidence that many lips were talking too loosely.
And
MI5 was given the same information – though six days later than when JOSEFINE
passed it on. Liddell had, however, known about a ‘Quebec decision’ as early as
August 27. He later records that he (and others) were briefed on the outcome of
the Quebec Conference by (Gilbert) Lennox, on September 7. Lennox is a figure
who crops up regularly in Liddell’s Diaries, although Nigel West declines to
provide any details for him (apart from listing him as ‘Operations’), and
sometimes confuses him with Gordon-Lennox. We owe it to Christopher Andrew who,
while omitting to provide an entry in the Index for Lennox, informs us (on p
235 of Defence of the Realm) that Lennox was MI5’s liaison officer with
military intelligence, and had joined the service at the outbreak of war, on
the recommendation of Jane Archer and Dick White. Why Lennox should be the
first recipient of the news, rather than Petrie, is not clear, although the
emphasis on military (rather than political) matters would point to his
involvement. Liddell understandably says nothing about the Quebec Agreement,
and there may later have been another more restricted chain of communication
via Petrie to him and others officers (such as Hollis), given the requirements
to vet the list of scientists who would shortly be selected.
Yet
I remain unconvinced that Perrin would have received a copy of the approved Agreement
that early. Graham Farmelow, in Churchill’s Bomb, writes that Lord
Cherwell did not see it until mid-September, and then complained about the
terms. It would have been quite reckless, and unnecessary, for Perrin to tell
Hollis anything before the first informal meeting of the Combined Policy
Committee (September 8), before Churchill had returned (September 19) and
before the UK scientists (led by Chadwick) returned to London (late September)
to lay the proposals before Sir John Anderson’s council. There may, however,
have been a leak before the parties left for Canada, since the draft of
the agreement was prepared by Sir John Anderson and Churchill while Stimson and
Bush were in London, and Perrin contributed to the proceedings by having
private talks with Stimson at the time (Gowing, pp 167-168). Did Perrin perhaps
inform Hollis of what was then being called the ‘Tube Alloys Agreement’ before
Churchill and his party left for Canada, and then one of them took the
imaginative step of calling it the ‘Quebec Agreement’? Or did Peierls give a
hint to Fuchs when he received the call (see below)? Until we see the precise
text of the supposed message passed on to Stalin, this is all very speculative.
One
vital aspect of all this that does not appear to have been covered: why did
Pincher not inyerview Perrin, and ask him about the Quebec Agreement? I can
find no indication in Treachery of any correspondence or meeting between
the two, which is utterly incredible. And yet, on page 130, Pincher writes that
the American biographer of Fuchs, Robert Williams, had a meeting with Perrin on
November 12 1985, and immediately afterwards ‘lunched with me at the Randolph
Hotel in Oxford and told me about it [the clearing of Fuchs’s file by Hollis
and Perrin]’. In Klaus Fuchs, Atom Spy, Williams refers to
correspondence from Perrin of May 10 and August 14, 1984, and the interview
with him on November 12. Why could Pincher not be there himself? Why did he
need an American intermediary to communicate with Perrin? Why was Perrin willing
to speak to Williams, but not apparently to Pincher? Did Pincher perhaps suppress
any contact, as it did not help his cause?
Lastly,
I want to inspect a number of Pincher’s claims in his chapters in Treachery
about the Quebec Agreement (1 and 23), in light of our recent discussions.
(Some of this analysis has already appeared in my coldspur segment.)
Chapter
1:
P
16: “Churchill therefore kept the Quebec Agreement and its details secret to
himself, a few trusted aides, and the chiefs of staff of the British Armed
Forces. . . . Several documents now in
the British National Archives testify to the extraordinary extent of the
measures taken to prevent any unauthorized persons having any knowledge of its
details.” I do not know to which
papers Pincher refers. He lists only three files on the Quebec Agreement in his
list of Archival Sources, FO 800/540 (a copy of the Agreement), FO 115/4527
(from 1951), and PREM 8/1104 (from 1949). It is unlikely, anyway, that a
procedure to keep something secret would itself be registered. And for Perrin
to act in contravention of such a procedure would therefore be highly
irregular. (I should add that the text of the Agreement itself still refers to
‘the Tube Alloys Project’. I don’t know when it was first called ‘the Quebec
Agreement’.)
Pp
16-17: “Yet the Russian archives have now shown that on Saturday, 4,
September – only 16 days after the signing – Sonia, sitting in Oxford, supplied
the Red Army intelligence Centre with an account of all the essential aspects
of the Quebec Agreement, along with ancillary details, sending them directly to
Moscow by radio.” There is no evidence of this. There were no ‘ancillary’
details outside the text of the Agreement itself.
P
17: “The GRU archives record: ‘On 19 August 1943, in a secret personal
message to Marshal Stalin, Roosevelt reported about their agreed plans for the
surrender of Italy and other matters but there was no word about the fact that
they had also made an additional secret agreement about the use of nuclear
weapons.’” This commentary, if it does indeed exist, is an historical
observation, made later, and not an original archival entry.
P
17: “What Stalin regarded as his allies’ perfidy inevitably affected his
attitude when, on 28 November, he met Churchill and Roosevelt in Tehran to
discuss both the war and the postwar situation.” This is pure speculation.
Stalin would have had a chance to react earlier; there were many other reasons
for him to express annoyance; alternatively, he may have heard about the Quebec
Agreement from other sources in October or November.
P
18: “In 2006, the release of the private papers of Vyacheslav Molotov,
Stalin’s most trusted deputy, revealed that, on 15 October 1943, another
British spy had supplied details of the early plans for Operation Overlord, the
Anglo-American assault on Normandy. . . . They included the estimate that the
‘second front’, which should reduce pressure on the German forces, was unlikely
to be attempted before the spring of 1944. Small wonder that Stalin was
’prickly and suspicious’ at Tehran.” Stalin knew about the timing of
Overlord in June 1943, as The Kremlin Letters show.
P
18: “Whether Sonia appreciated the scale of her achievements is unknown
because she never mentioned it to anyone and, probably on Soviet orders,
withheld it from her memoirs.” Why?
P
18: “Her [Sonia’s] Quebec coup was extraordinaryfor another reason:
she was so heavily pregnant that she gave birth only four days later.” Indeed.
Pp
18-19: “The GRU archives show that Sonia also included the fact that some
senior Americans, both military and scientific, had reservations about any
atomic partnership with Britain. So, she had clearly been given a summary of
all the atomic aspects of the Quebec Agreement, which had been circulated in
secrecy in some British government department and abstracted by some high-level
traitor.” This is pure speculation. It is highly unlikely that any such
analysis would have been attached to the Agreement. The Agreement was
exclusively about the Tube Alloys project, and hence there were no non-atomic
aspects to it. The implication here, moreover, is that Perrin was a ‘high-level
traitor’.
P
19: “In July 2011, the Moscow-based historian Dr Svetlana Chervonnaya
reported having discovered a Soviet document confirming that Sonia had sent the
information about the Quebec Agreement on 4 September 1943 and that, after
translation into Russian, it was taken straight to Stalin.” We have no
evidence of this serendipitous discovery.
P
19: “It seems certain that the information was delivered to her in
documentary form rather than verbally [sic: ‘orally’], because on 4
September she also transmitted a complete list of the 15 British scientists who
had already been selected to move to America.” This is nonsense. The
scientists were not selected until two months later. If any such document is
produced, it must undeniably be a forgery.
P
19: “When her coup was made public in 2002, in a GRU-sponsored book, Lota’s The
GRU and the Atomic Bomb, the GRU’s Colonel General Alexander Pavlov, who
vouched for its authenticity in a foreword, was at pains to point out that ‘the
time has not yet arrived when still unsuspected or unproven wartime sources can
safely be named.’.” I have not seen this book, but would mistrust any
‘GRU-sponsored’ publication, just as I would mistrust any ‘MI5-sponsored
publication’, such as Alan Moorehead’s Traitors, or Alexander Foote’s Handbook
for Spies. And, if the evidence existed, why did Chervonnaya have to
stumble upon it? Since Sonia had already been named, and her (GRU-sponsored)
memoir published, why was there reticence in naming names? And the ‘source’ who
‘abstracted the document’ must have been (according to Pincher) not Hollis, but
Perrin.
Chapter
23:
P
185: “The culprit could not have been Klaus Fuchs. He knew about the British
determination to send scientists, including himself, to America, if concord
could be reached, but he would not have had access to such a particularly
secret political document at Birmingham University.” This is a red herring:
in his enthusiasm to indict Hollis, Pincher misses the point. Fuchs could not
have passed on details of the Quebec Agreement, but, as Tyrer suggests, citing
Lota via Chervonnaya, Fuchs had met Sonia and passed on details of the
departure of Chadwick, Peierls, Simon and Oliphant for Washington. This is
quite plausible to me. Tyrer muddies the waters by indicating that Sonia also
learned from Fuchs the outcomes of the conference in Quebec. As you point out,
Chervonnaya inexplicably omitted to tell Pincher about this. You do state,
however, that ‘there is agreement from the supposed GRU sources that
information (unspecified) was sent by Sonia on 4 September about the Quebec
Agreement’, but that is not strictly true. Tyrer’s passage does not mention
‘the Quebec Agreement’, only ‘outcomes from the conference’.
P
185: “Further, the GRU archives show that after seeing Fuchs in mid-August
Sonia did not meet him again until November.” So what do these archives
have to say to us about the mid-August meeting? If Fuchs did indeed meet Sonia
in mid-August, why would she wait until her childbirth was imminent to inform
her bosses of his message about Chadwick and co.?
P
185: “Nor could the traitor have been any of the minor agents Sonia claimed
to have recruited. He had to be a spy with exceptional high-level and rapid
access to top-secret political information and who could safely visit Oxford
and deposit a document near Sonia’s house.” But this does not describe
Hollis’s role and access. He would have been totally reliant on Perrin.
P
185: “The GRU had no known spy in the Foreign Office at that time anyway . .
.” Unknown – by whom?
P
185 “ . . .according to Gouzenko,
information from ELLI was so highly prized that it went straight to Stalin, as
the Quebec information certainly did.”
I have not been able to verify this claim yet, though it may well be
true.
P
186 “Elli was in MI5, where the director general, Sir David Petrie, would
have received a copy of the Quebec Agreement because of his responsibility for
its security. . . . . who then decided which divisional heads needed to receive
it.” Well, maybe. If it were that sensitive, it would have been much more
likely that information was passed down orally. There was nothing in the
Agreement, moreover, that addressed security aspects, such as vetting of
scientists. That all came later.
P
186: “Because of his close connection with Michael Perrin when clearing
scientists like Fuchs to work on it, he had known about the project for more
than two years. He was also one of the few people who knew the names of all the
scientists chosen to move to America, because he had been involved in clearing
them for work on the bomb there.” The first part may well be true. But
Pincher does not claim he had exclusive knowledge, and the record backs that up.
The Fuchs archive (KV 2/1245-1) shows that Michael Serpell and Milicent Bagot
were shocked when the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research
contacted MI5 on November 17 to determine whether it had any objections to
Fuchs’s departure. (Bagot was outraged.)
Major Garrett of D2, the security liaison officer with the DSIR, is involved,
and states that “FUCHS’ name was not on the original list of workers going to
the U.S., sent me by D.S.I.R., but I imagine his name was added at the last
minute.” (This may suggest a plot to get Fuchs in under the radar, since
Peierls had recommended him back in August.) Hollis does not seem to have been
involved, and his F Division was not even the first to hear about DSIR
requests. The documents were flying around everywhere: Otto Frisch had to be
granted naturalization papers in two days.
P
187: “Clearly, Perrin knew the nature of the Quebec Agreement in advance. He
also knew that the agreement had been signed because he had been given the
‘all-clear’ to dispatch the first batch of scientists He is also likely to have
confided in Hollis to explain the reasons for the haste.” The first
sentence is partially true, although the fact that something called ‘The Quebec
Agreement’ might be signed, or even the understanding of what issues Roosevelt
and Churchill would agree on, is not. The second is ridiculous, as the experts
arrived in Quebec just before the signing, and they were not ‘the first batch
of scientists’. It is extremely unlikely that Hollis would have had to be
informed of their departure: they were all British citizens.
P
187: “The text of Superfrau states: ‘On 4 September, Sonia reported
data on results of the conference.’” Note that this says nothing about the
Quebec Agreement.
P
187: “On 4 September, Sonia also transmitted a list of the atomic scientists
chosen to work in America. Where did she get it? The fact that the first batch
of scientists had all been cleared in advance is shownby the haste with
which they arrived in America. Hollis was involved with their clearance.”
This is nonsense. The four who left in August had all been to the USA before.
They were citizens of the UK (including Peierls), and did not need any clearance.
Their visit was temporary. As Gowing reports, Wallace Akers, confident that an
agreement would be signed, on August 10 cabled to London, with Anderson’s
approval, that Chadwick, Simon, Oliphant and Peierls should leave immediately,
for purposes of imparting information. Yet Peierls would have had an
opportunity to pass on to Fuchs the reason for his journey.
P
188: “Early September was also the time when Hollis and Perrin were actively
engaged together as a matter of urgency in going through the motions of vetting
more of the scientists for despatch to America.” Again, this is pure
fantasy. No names had yet been submitted. Where does Pincher get this
information from? (But was Pincher suggesting that Perrin was a
co-conspirator?)
P
188: “As the leak was of such massive proportions, the supplier of the
information is also likely to have been someone who could be confident that
neither Sonia nor her transmissions were under surveillance. That factor
reduces the candidates to a small number, of whom Hollis was certainly one, as
the evidence of the reliable officer Kenneth Morton Evans has confirmed.”
We have discussed this off-line. Morton Evans was by no means a reliable
witness, and fed some absurd stories about RSS passing the transcripts of
encrypted wireless messages to Hollis and Philby. Something to be investigated
and analysed separately.
P
188: “Sonia’s receipt of super-secret information of such consequence
supports the contention that the GRU had posted her to Oxford specifically to service
a source who had high-level access and operated in that area.” It is true
that the decision to send Sonia to the UK occurred in the same month that most
of MI5 was posted to Blenheim (October 1940), but Sonia did not know where in
England she should go until she arrived in Lisbon. Milicent Bagot reported,
however, that Sonia’s father, who was lecturing in the city, took up temporary
residence in Oxford on December 13, 1940. An area for further investigation!
What this boils down to, for me, is that Pincher was a fantasist, and a highly unreliable chronicler. That may be attributable to his obsession over Hollis, but he may also have been fed false information that would bolster the case against Hollis, as a diversionary tactic. None of this is to deny that Hollis showed a pattern of highly irregular behavior, but it may have been due to incompetence rather than malignance. And he was not alone in MI5 in his (selective) indulgence towards Communism.
Tony Percy, January 2020
Response by Denis Lenihan, February 20, 2020
It was not necessary for Perrin, much less Hollis, to have received a copy of the Quebec Agreement at an early stage. As you say when commenting on Pincher p 185, ‘If it were that sensitive, it would have been much more likely that information was passed down orally’. Further, Perrin at least would have known what was being proposed, and in all likelihood would in the first instance have been told of the outcome orally (as an aside, like you, I deplore ‘verbally’ being used in this context); so that he could go ahead with making arrangements – which would have extended beyond arranging for scientists’ travel. The ‘Quebec decision’ that Liddell learned about on August 27 from Lennox presumably came by the same means?
You ask whether Perrin informed Hollis of what was then being called the ‘Tube Alloys Agreement’ before Churchill and his party left for Canada? I suspect the answer is yes, and nothing wrong with that from Perrin’s point of view, since after it was signed he needed Hollis to get cracking on clearing the next batch of scientists (and he may have been pushed by Hollis to let him know the outcome). Somebody at some early point, if the GRU is to be believed, told Sonia – after it was signed.
Also on the Quebec Agreement, you say that ‘Tyrer’s passage does not mention ‘the Quebec Agreement’, only ‘outcomes from the conference’; true, but Lota referred specifically to ‘the conference in Quebec’. If these are not references to the Quebec Agreement, as it came to be called, then to what do they refer?
Under Pincher p 187 you say that ‘It is extremely unlikely that Hollis would have had to be informed of their [the first batch of scientists] departure: they were all British citizens’. While I can’t lay my hand immediately on any evidence, I’d be surprised if British-born scientists were not also checked (or supposed to be checked) if they were going to the US for this sort of work. (Oliphant was Australian-born but in those days – until 1949 – would have had a British passport). As you point out, however, the four had all been to the US previously, so there would have been no need for any additional check on this occasion if they had been checked previously. Nunn May went to Canada, where the word of the mother country in those days would have been sufficient. Clearly Pincher got his two lots of scientists muddled, however.
You’re right about it being incredible that Pincher did not interview Perrin. He may have tried and Perrin refused. Perrin may have been willing to talk to Williams about Fuchs, but not to Pincher about Hollis. Another straw in the wind? We really do need that Pincher archive in Kings College.
You ask: ‘If Fuchs did indeed meet Sonia in mid-August, why would she wait until her childbirth was imminent to inform her bosses of his message about Chadwick and co.?’ The answer to this might be as you suggest in Sonia’s Radio that Sonia sent two separate messages: one about the scientists (perhaps in mid-August after meeting Fuchs) and another in early September having received a message from Hollis/Elli/Whoever about the conference outcome.
I note that you do not address what I think is one of my strongest points: the message about the conference went from Sonia in Oxford, not from the Embassy in London, thus pointing to an Oxford source – and a high-level one at that, not many people being in the know about Quebec.
While many of your comments about particular passages of Pincher in Treachery are right, it is with respect a bit over the top to describe him as ‘a fantasist and a highly unreliable chronicler’. He was a superb reporter with a genius for getting people to talk to him. More often than not he was right during his career; otherwise he would not have flourished in the way that he did. He may have got it wrong or got out of his depth here and there in Treachery but some of this may as you say be down to being fed false information. Like an historian, a reporter is only as good as his sources.
February 2020
Contribution by Richard Learie, February 26
Richard is another electronic colleague, living in Brussels, whom I have regrettably not yet met. He is an eager and well-read student of the tribulations of MI5, and of the efforts to unmask ELLI, and I think it is safe to describe him as a coldspur enthusiast. Here follows his contribution, for which I heartily thank him.
Brussels
17 February 2020
Dear
Tony
I offer my comments to your intriguing proposal after
reading Denis Lenihan’s post. I read your comments in reply but that hasn’t
changed my views which remain in summary:
I believe Hollis was ELLI
It is likely he passed
the Quebec Agreement directly to Sonia
I’m not sure if most of my comments are within your
scope because Sonia and the Quebec Agreement is but one of many strands to the
“Who was Elli?” debate. I will start with the general debate and then add my
small contribution to the detailed matter at hand.
The ELLI Debate
I have written to you before on the ELLI debate and I
still consider that the weight of evidence on Hollis (despite it all being
circumstantial) means that it was probably him. Clearly we know that ELLI
existed so to debunk Chapman Pincher entirely is problematic for 2 reasons: if
it wasn’t Hollis then who was it? – there cannot be too many
possibilities/candidates!! And debunking Pincher is a long and arduous task
since Treachery is over 600 pages of the case for the prosecution containing
his many so called “anomalies” (50 or so from memory).
If I may say, Tony, that here we have a classic
difference in styles. It is clear to me that, as stated in the Introduction to
your book, you are a serious researcher, analyst, writer and historian who uses
a very scientific methodology to ensure that your output is always of a high
quality. In my opinion your book and website prove that this Introduction is no
bluff and the detail in your work is prodigious and well thought-through. In
contrast, Pincher was a journalist who did not always quote his sources and “Treachery”
is a kind of character assassination rather than a piece of work “keeping all
options open”. However, Pincher certainly found a lot of circumstantial
evidence pointing to Hollis, although I admit that in Treachery he always seems
to be trying to use evidence to prove Hollis’ guilt. That is consistent with
what journalists do to provoke interest in their stories.
Nevertheless, I see the ELLI debate as a bit like
solving a murder. We know the crime has been committed and we need to
investigate the prime suspects. Graham Mitchell was also investigated within MI5
by his own junior officers but they quickly realised that Hollis was a much
better fit and his background was ideal and similar in many respects to the
Cambridge 5. There were not many candidates to investigate at all because ELLI
obviously had high level access to material. Hollis’ background and
inaction/incompetence would be well explained if he were ELLI. I am
particularly persuaded by the University drop-out in Shanghai element to his
background where he admitted to meeting Agnes Smedley who knew Richard Sorge
and Sonia. It seems obvious that there would have been attempts to recruit him.
He had left wing views and was at a low point in his life. Also on his return
to UK he applied for jobs at the Times and the Intelligence Services – classic
GRU/KGB advice!!
So I personally (for what its worth as solely an avid
reader) remain in the “Hollis was ELLI” camp. As I read a lot of the espionage
material from this period, I am continuously frustrated by authors who claim
that the spy in MI5 story is a conspiracy theory. Clearly it is not and it’s the
greatest intelligence mystery out there. Let’s hope there is a breakthrough one
day.
I have not noticed that you have nailed your colours
to the mast either way. Denis Lenihan’s papers on Paddy Costello presents
another “anomaly”. I hope that this is “the straw that breaks the camel’s back”
for you personally.
Sonia and the Quebec
Agreement
Coming back to the matter at hand. I will follow the
Sonia/Quebec Agreement issue with great interest.
If it was Fuchs who supplied the Agreement to Sonia,
then it was under Hollis’ nose because both Fuchs and Sonia were on his radar.
That would be consistent with Hollis’ inaction/incompetence strategy as an
agent of influence that was to become so damaging to UK/US relations.
It could have been Hollis himself of course because he
was in the Oxford area. Also Hollis appears to have had an excuse for visiting
the area where Sonia lived because I seem to remember reading she was renting a
Laski property.
Hollis was clearly a very cautious man in his MI5
career. I believe this character trait served him well and explains why he got
away with it for so long.
Tony, you have contributed enormously to the debate
with your epic series of posts about Radio Security matters and the Sonia
mystery. I really look forward to any progress you make with the theory that
MI5 aided Sonia’s arrival in the UK in order to keep an eye on her and use her
for mis-information and to trap Russian spies in the UK. Have any other writers
written to provide support? Your theory makes sense but it seems that it was spectacularly
bungled? The interesting part would be then “was that due to incompetence or
was it due to the work of ELLI (or both)”? Whichever it was a massive cover up
has been carried out ever since. I believe part of this cover up was the
Skardon/Serpell visit to Sonia in Oxfordshire. MI5 seemed to fear that their
bungling could be exposed and clumsily tried to practice some damage limitation.
Frank Close (and others) seem to think they were outwitted by Sonia. But they
had so few cards to play and so little to gain at that stage except to limit
further damage on UK/US relations. I don’t think they even wanted to outwit or
trap her. Certainly by that stage there was no way MI5 could ever let her be
prosecuted.
Finally, if Hollis was Elli (and also if Elli is
revealed to be someone else) then clearly the espionage history of this period
needs to be reassessed from top to bottom. But at least it would resolve a few
mysteries whilst leaving MI5 to sort out the exposure of their biggest ever
cover up.
Good luck with this experiment, Tony.
Best
regards
Richard LEARIE
Response to Denis and Richard by Tony, February 26
Thank you, gentlemen! I wonder
whether your eagerness to seal the case on ELLI means that you have been a bit
too forgiving of the evidence . . .
The questions that Denis
poses about aspects of the ‘Quebec Agreement’ prompt me to suggest something else.
First, we must remember that there were two parts to the decisions that were
made at Quebec. There were the decisions about opening the so-called ‘Second
Front’ in 1944, which were secret, but widely dispersed among military and
government departments. (It was on those decisions that Liddell was briefed by
Lennox: Liddell does not refer to any ‘Quebec Agreement’.) And then there was
the highly confidential Tube Alloys Agreement, which concerned sharing of
skills and technology in the realm of atomic weaponry and energy, between the
USA and the UK (and Canada), which was so secret that neither Roosevelt’s nor
Churchill’s cabinet ever knew about it.
Thus, whenever a writer
refers to the ‘Quebec Agreement’, one needs to ascertain to which part of the
overall decisions he or she is referring (such as when Tyrer talks about
‘outcomes from the conference’). I should like someone to point out when the
phrase ‘Quebec Agreement’ first came into existence, and whether it was then
used to replace the term ‘Tube Alloys Agreement’. It appears as the header in
the transcript at Appendix 4 of Margaret Gowing’s history, but, on p 171, she
writes that Anderson handed to Churchill and Roosevelt the ‘Tube Alloys
Agreement’ for signature, and then she simply slips into calling it the ‘Quebec
Agreement’. When Roosevelt and Churchill signed an aide-mémoire at Hyde Park on
August 18, 1944, confirming the ‘utmost secrecy’ of the project, it contained
no mention of a ‘Quebec Agreement’, but continued to refer to ‘Tube Alloys’.
Furthermore, the official US Army copy of the Tube Alloys agreement (see https://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/q003.asp ) introduces the
Articles as ‘The Quebec Conference – Agreement Relating to Atomic Energy’. The
document was created from a photocopy of the British original.
It thus seems to me
that, because of the ambiguities, and the need for compartmentalization, it
would have been highly unlikely for any of those in the know at the time to
have referred to the overall conclusions, or the separate Tube Alloys
Agreement, as the ‘Quebec Agreement’. When Lota refers to ‘the conference in
Quebec’, he may accurately not be referring to what has become to be known as
the ‘Quebec Agreement’. When you claim, Richard, that Hollis passed ‘the Quebec
Agreement’ directly to Sonia, I think you need to explain what document you believe
that was, and why a highly secret subset of all the written outcomes was identified
that way. Any claim for the existence of a ‘copy’ of a comprehensive ‘Quebec
Agreement’ must be treated very sceptically, as no document containing all the
decisions signed in Quebec exists (so far as I know). And any archival material
in Moscow that actually referred to the combination ‘Quebec Agreement’ in
September 1943 would reflect some tantalising ingenuity.
I repeat my assertion
that, even if Perrin had divulged to Hollis the terms of the upcoming Tube
Alloys Agreement, it would have been very premature to refer to it as the
‘Quebec Agreement’ before the participants had even congregated there.
Moreover, it makes no sense to talk about ‘the next batch of scientists’. The
four whom Akers had shipped out before the Conference were not ‘the first
batch’: Vannevar Bush told Akers that his move was premature, and that the role
of any British scientists on the project would have to await the meeting of the
Combined Policy Committee. There was no time for any further check on the four,
even if it had somehow been required. As I think we all agree, the four had
already visited the United States in their scientific capacity. It was weeks
before the other scientists were chosen. Hollis never had to ‘get cracking’,
and was not even in the picture, as I showed in my last response.
The reason I did not
address what Denis describes as ‘one of my [his] strongest points’, namely the
claim that, since the message about the conference went ‘from Sonia in Oxford’,
it thus pointed to an Oxford source, is that I have still to see any solid
evidence that a message from Sonia about the conference was received in Moscow.
Offering the inescapable conclusion that ‘Pincher got his two lots of
scientists muddled’ does not bolster the case.
I concede that my
characterization of Pincher as a ‘fantasist’ was a little extreme. But it was
intended to be provocative. Since he embellishes what could be a very
workmanlike argument with so many absurdities, his worth as a reliable witness
diminishes. Denis says he had ‘a genius for getting people to talk to him’, but
Pincher may never have imagined that he was being used as a conduit for any
number of damaging stories about Hollis that may have been designed to distract
attention from another suspect, or simply to muddy the waters while other
groups maintained his innocence.
As Richard indicates, I
cannot yet come off the fence on ELLI. I agree that Pincher has presented an
enormous amount of circumstantial evidence that could point to Hollis’s guilt,
but in a Scottish court the verdict would be ‘not proven’. The apparent failure
of Pincher to engage with Perrin is, to me, a vitally important example of ‘a
dog that did not bark in the night-time’. If a clincher for Hollis’s being ELLI
exists, it is definitely not the anecdote about Sonia and the Quebec Agreement.
P.S. I notice that the
Wikipedia entry for the Agreement still boasts Tyrer’s claim that Fuchs
supplied Sonia with the details. Does anybody know who the author is? Should he
or she be introduced to this discussion?
[An imagined conversation between Stewart Menzies, SIS Chief, and Richard Gambier-Parry, head of Section VIII, the Communications Unit in SIS, in early March 1941. Both attended Eton College, although Gambier-Parry was there for only one ‘half’ (i.e. ‘term’): Menzies is four years older than Gambier-Parry. Menzies replaced Admiral Sinclair as chief of SIS in November 1939, on the latter’s death. Sinclair had recruited Gambier-Parry from industry in April 1938. At this stage of the war, Menzies and Gambier-Parry were both Colonels.]
Stewart MenziesRichard Gambier-Parry
SM: Hallo, Richard. Take a pew.
RG-P: Thank you, sir.
SM: I expect you are wondering why I called you in.
RG-P: Mine not to reason why, sir. Hope I’m not in trouble.
SM: Dammit, man. Of course not. Some news to impart.
RG-P: Good news, I trust.
SM: Fact is, our man has gone over to the enemy.
RG-P: The enemy, sir? Who?
SM: [chuckles] Our Regional Controller in the Middle East.
Petrie. He’s agreed to become D-G of MI5.
RG-P: Very droll, sir! But that wasn’t a surprise, was it?
SM: Well, Swinton always wanted him. Petrie went through the
motions of performing a study of ‘5’ first, but there was no doubt he would
take the job.
RG-P: I see. So how does that affect us, sir?
SM: First of all, it will make it a lot easier for us to work with
MI5. No longer that clown Harker pretending to be in charge . . .
RG-P: Indeed. But I suppose Swinton and the Security Executive are
still in place?
SM: For a while, yes. But there are other implications, Richard. [pauses]
How is Section VIII coming along?
RG-P: Fairly well, sir. We had a tough few months in 1940 learning
about the struggles of working behind enemy lines, but our training efforts are
starting to pay off, and our ciphers are more secure. Moving the research and
manufacturing show from Barnes to Whaddon has worked well, and it is humming
along. As you know, the first Special Signals Units are already distributing
Ultra.
SM: Yes, that seems to have developed well. Swinton signed off on
Section VIII’s readiness a few weeks ago. [pauses] How would you like to
take over the RSS?
RG-P: What? The whole shooting-match?
SM: Indeed. ‘Lock, stock and barrel’, as Petrie put it. The War
Office wants to rid itself of it, and MI5 feels it doesn’t have the skills or
attention span to handle it. Swinton and Petrie want us to take it over.
RG-P: Dare I say that this has always been part of your plan, sir?
Fits in well with GC&CS?
SG: Pretty shrewd, old boy! I must say I have been greasing the
wheels behind the scenes . . . Couldn’t
appear to push things too hard, though.
RG-P: Indeed, sir. I quite understand.
SG: But back to organisation. Petrie has a very high opinion of
your outfit.
RG-P: Very gratifying, sir. But forgive me: isn’t RSS’s charter to
intercept illicit wireless on the mainland, sir? Not our territory at all?
SM: You’re right, but the latest reports indicate that the German
threat is practically non-existent. We’ve mopped up all the agents Hitler has
sent in, whether by parachute or boat. The beacon threat has turned out to be a
chimera, as the Jerries were using guidance from transmitters in Germany for
their bombers, and our boffins have worked out how to crack it. The really
interesting business is picking up Abwehr transmissions on the Continent.
Therefore right up our street.
RG-P: I see. That changes things.
SM: And it would mean a much closer liaison with Bletchley.
Denniston and his crew at GC&CS will of course decrypt all the messages we
pick up. Dansey’s very much in favour of the move – which always helps.
RG-P: Yes, we always want Uncle Claude on our side. I had wondered
what he had been doing after his organisation in Europe was mopped up . . .
SM: You can never be sure with Colonel Z! He’s got some shindig underway
looking into clandestine Russian traffic. He’s just arranged to have a Soviet
wireless operator from Switzerland arrive here, and wants to keep an eye on
her. He’ll be happy to have RSS close by on the ranch.
RG-P: Fascinating, sir. Should I speak to him about it?
SM: Yes, go ahead. I know he’ll agree that the move makes a lot of
sense. Learning what the enemy is up to is a natural complement to designing
our own systems.
RG-P: Agreed, sir . . . But
isn’t RSS in a bit of a mess? All those Voluntary Interceptors, and all that
work farmed out to the Post Office? And didn’t MI8 want MI5 to take it over?
SM: Yes, they did. So did Military Intelligence. But once Simpson
left, MI5 lost any drive it had.
RG-P: Ah, Simpson. The ‘Beacon’ man. I spoke to him about the
problem back in ‘39.
SM: Yes, he went overboard a bit on the beacons and criticized the
GPO a bit too forcefully. He wanted to smother the country with interceptors,
and set up a completely new organisation with MI5 at the helm. MI5 had enough
problems, and wouldn’t buy it. Simpson gave up in frustration, and went out
East.
RG-P: So what does Military Intelligence think?
SM: As you probably know, Davidson took over in December, so he’s
still learning.
RG-P: Of course! I do recall that now. But what happened to
Beaumont-Nesbitt? He’s a friend of yours, is he not?
SM: Yes, we were in Impey’s together. Good man, but a bit of a . .
.what? . . . a boulevardier, you might
say. I worked with him on the Wireless Telegraphy Committee a year ago. He
seemed to get on fine with Godfrey then, but maybe Godfrey saw us as ganging up
on him.
RG-P: Godfrey wanted your job originally, didn’t he?
SM: Indeed he did. And, as the top Navy man, he had Winston’s
backing. I managed to ward him off. But later things turned sour.
RG-P: So what happened?
SM: Unfortunately, old B-N made a hash of an invasion forecast
back in September, and the balloon went up. Put the whole country on alert for
no reason. Godfrey pounced, and he and Cavendish-Bentinck used Freddie’s guts
for garters. The PM was not happy. Freddie had to go.
RG-P: Well, that’s a shame. And what about Davidson?
SM: Between you and me, Richard, Davidson’s not the sharpest knife
in the drawer. I don’t think he understands this wireless business very well.
RG-P: I see. What did he say?
SM: Not a lot. He was initially very sceptical about the transfer.
Didn’t think we had the skills, but wasn’t specific. He’s probably still
seething about Venlo.
RG-P: Is Venlo still a problem, sir?
SM: Always will be, Richard. Always will be. But it damaged Dansey
more than me. Partly why I am here, I suppose. And it makes Bletchley – and RSS
– that more important.
RG-P: Access to the PM?
SM: Precisely. Ever since he set up those blasted cowboys in SOE,
it has become more important. They’ll go barging in on their sabotage missions,
raising Cain, and make our job of intelligence-gathering more difficult. I see
Winston daily now, which helps.
RG-P: I see. And Gubbins is starting to make demands on our
wireless crew. Should I slow him down a bit?
SM: I didn’t hear you say that, Richard . . .
RG-P: Very good, sir. But I interrupted you.
SM: Where was I?
RG-P: With Davidson, sir.
SM: Yes, of course. He did come up with a number of better
questions about the proposed set-up a few weeks ago, so maybe he’s learning. He’s
probably been listening to Butler in MI8. And I think he’s come around. Swinton
has been working on him, and I don’t think he wants to upset the apple-cart.
But you should try to make an ally of him. I don’t trust him completely.
RG-P: Very well, sir. I wouldn’t want the Indians shooting arrows
at me all the time. And, apart from Petrie, is MI5 fully behind the move?
SM: Very much so. Liddell is all for it. They still have this BBC
chappie Frost making a nuisance of himself. His appointment as head of the
Interception Committee went to his head, I think. I gather he has upset a few
people, and even Swinton – who brought him in in the first place – is getting fed up with him.
RG-P: I think I can handle Frost. I knew him at the BBC. I agree:
he needs to be brought down a peg or two. But he has enough enemies in ‘5’ now,
doesn’t he?
SM: So I understand. Wants to build his own empire: Liddell and
co. will take care of him. Your main challenges will be elsewhere.
RG-P: Agreed. The RSS staff will need some close attention.
SM: Yes, it will entail a bit of a clean-up. Augean stables, and
all that, don’t you know. That is why I am asking you to take it over . . .
RG-P: Well, I’ve got a lot on my plate, sir, but I am flattered.
How could I say ‘No’?
SM: That’s the spirit, man! I knew I could rely on you.
RG-P: I may need to bring in some fresh blood . . .
SM: Of course! We’ll need our best chaps to beat the Hun at the
bally radio game. And you’ll need to speak to Cowgill. The W Board has just set
up a new committee to handle the double-agents, run by a fellow named
Masterman. One of those deuced eggheads that ‘5’ likes to hire, I regret. But
there it is. Cowgill is our man on the committee.
RG-P: Very good, sir. What about the current RSS management?
SM: Good question. Those fellows Worlledge and Gill are a bit
dubious. Worlledge is something of a loose cannon, and I hear the two of them
have been arguing against an SIS takeover.
RG-P: Yes, I had a chat with Worlledge a few weeks ago. He asked
some damn fool questions. But I didn’t take them too seriously, as I didn’t
think we were in the running.
SM: Well, he was obviously testing you out. Quite frankly, he
doesn’t believe that you, er, we . . .
have the relevant expertise. Not sure I understand it all, but I have
confidence in you, Richard.
RG-P: Very pleased to hear it, sir. Anyway, I think Worlledge’s
reputation is shot after that shambles over the Gill-Roper decryptions.
SM: Oh, you mean when Gill and Trevor-Roper started treading on the
cipher-wallahs’ turf at Bletchley with the Abwehr messages?
RG-P: Not just that, which was more a matter for Denniston.
Worlledge then blabbed about the show to the whole world and his wife,
including the GPO.
SM: Yes, of course. Cowgill blew a fuse over it, I recall.
RG-P: Worlledge clearly doesn’t understand the need for secrecy. I
can’t see Felix putting up with him in SIS.
SM: You are probably right, Richard. He’d be a liability. But what
about Gill?
RG-P: Can’t really work him out, sir. He definitely knows his
onions, but he doesn’t seem to take us all very seriously. Bit flippant, you
might say.
SM: H’mmm. Doesn’t sound good. We’ll need proper discipline in the
unit. But if you have problems, Cowgill will help you out. Felix used to work
for Petrie in India, y’know. Now that he has taken over from Vivian as head of
Section V, Felix is also our point man on dealing with ‘5’. He won’t stand any
nonsense.
RG-P: Will do, sir.
SP: What about young Trevor-Roper? Will he be a problem, too?
G-P: I don’t think so. He got a carpeting from Denniston after the
deciphering business with Gill, and I think he’s learned his lesson.
SP: Cowgill told me he wanted him court-martialled . . .
G-P: . . . but I intervened
to stop it. He’s a chum of sorts. Rides with us at the Whaddon. Or rather falls
with us!
SP: Ho! Ho! A huntin’ man, eh? One of us!
G-P: He’s mustard keen, but a bit short-sighted. We have to pick
him out of ditches now and then. I think I can deal with him.
SP: Excellent! But you and Cowgill should set up a meeting with
Frost, White and Liddell fairly soon. Make sure Butler is involved. They will
want to know what you are going to do with the VIs. They have been losing good
people to other Y services.
RG-P: Very good, sir. (pauses) I think Worlledge and Gill
will have to go.
SP: Up to you, Richard. Do you have anyone in mind to lead the
section?
RG-P: H’mmm. I think I have the chap we need. My Number Two,
Maltby. He was at the School as well, and he has been in the sparks game ever
since then. He’s a good scout. Utterly loyal.
SP: Maltby, eh? Wasn’t there some problem with the army?
RG-P: Yes, his pater’s syndicate at Lloyd’s collapsed, and he had
to resign his commission. But he bounced back. I got to know him again after he
helped the Navy with some transmission problems.
SP: And what about that business in Latvia? Didn’t we send him out
there?
RG-P: Yes, he reviewed operations in Riga in the summer of ‘39.
And it’s true we never received any intelligible messages from them. But I
don’t think it was Maltby’s fault. Nicholson and Benton didn’t understand the
ciphers.
SP: I see. So what is he doing now?
RG-P: He’s running the Foreign Office radio station at Hanslope
Park. I know I shall be able to count on him to do the job. He also rides with
the Whaddon.
SM: Capital! Have a chat with him, Richard, and let me know. All
hush-hush, of course, until we make the announcement in a week or two.
RG-P: Aye-aye, sir. Is that all?
SM: That’s it for now. We’ll discuss details later. Floreat
Etona, what, what?
RG-P: Floreat Etona, sir.
Edward Maltby
“Maltby, who seemed to have started his military career as a colonel – one has to begin somewhere – was also an Etonian, but from a less assured background, and he clearly modelled himself, externally at least, on his patron. But he was at best the poor man’s Gambier, larger and louder than his master, whose boots he licked with obsequious relish. Of intelligence matters he understood nothing. ‘Scholars’, he would say, ‘are two a penny: it’s the man of vision who counts’; and that great red face would swivel round, like an illuminated Chinese lantern, beaming with self-satisfaction. But he enjoyed his status and perquisites of his accidental promotion, and obeyed his orders punctually, explaining that any dissenter would be (in his own favourite phrase) ‘shat on from a great height’. I am afraid that the new ‘Controller RSS’ was regarded, in the intelligence world, as something of a joke – a joke in dubious taste. But he was so happily constituted that he was unaware of this.” (Hugh Trevor-Roper, quoted by Edward Harrison in The Secret World, p 6)
“Peter Reid considers Gambier-Parry, Maltby & Frost as
bluffers, and to some extent charlatans.” (from Guy Liddell’s diary entry for
June 9, 1943)
* * * * * *
In preparation for this month’s segment, I was organizing my notes on the Radio Security Service over the holiday in California, when I discovered that a history of the RSS, entitled Radio Wars, had recently been published by Fonthill Media Limited, the author being one David Abrutat. I thus immediately ordered it via amazon, as it seemed to me that it must be an indispensable part of my library. I looked forward to reading it when I returned to North Carolina on January 2.
For some years, I have
been making the case on coldspur that a serious history of this much
under- and mis-represented unit needed to be written, and hoped that my
contributions – especially in the saga of ‘The Undetected Radios’ – might
provide useful fodder for such an enterprise. Indeed, a highly respected
academic even suggested, a few weeks ago, that I undertake such a task. This
gentleman, now retired, is the unofficial representative of a group of wireless
enthusiasts, ex-Voluntary Interceptors, and champions of the RSS mission who have
been very active in keeping the flame alive. He was presumably impressed enough
with my research to write: “The old stagers of the RSS over here would be delighted
if you were to write a history of the RSS.”
I told him that I was
flattered, but did not think that I was the right candidate for the task. My
understanding of radio matters is rudimentary, I have no desire to go again
through the painful process of trying to get a book published, and, to perform
the job properly, I would have to travel to several libraries and research
institutions in the United Kingdom, a prospect that does not excite me at my
age. Yet, unbeknownst to my colleague (but apparently not to some of the ‘old
stagers’, since Abrutat interviewed many of them), a project to deliver such a
history was obviously complete at that time. My initial reaction was one of
enthusiasm about the prospect of reading a proper story of RSS, and possibly communicating
with the author.
The book arrived on
January 4, and I took a quick look at it. I was then amazed to read, in the
brief bio on the inside flap, the following text: “David Abrutat is a former
Royal Marine commando, RAF officer, and zoologist: he is currently a lecturer
in international relations and security studies in the Department of Economics
at the University of Buckingham. He has long had a passionate interest in
military history.” How was it possible that an academic at the institution
where I had completed my doctorate was utterly unknown to me, and how was it
that we had never been introduced to each other, given our shared interests,
his research agenda, and the record of my investigations on coldspur?
What was more, the book
came with a very positive endorsement from Sir Iain Lobban, Director of GCHQ
from 2008-2014. He referred, moreover, to the author as ‘Dr Abrutat’, and
finished his Foreword by writing: ‘I commend Radio War to all
students of the strategic, operational, and tactical difference that
intelligence can make in conflict and what passes for peacetime’. My interest
heightened, I flipped through the book quickly, but then decided I needed to
know more about the author.
His Wikipedia entry is
inactive, or incomplete. I then discovered his personal website, at https://www.abrutat.com/. This confirmed his
biography, but added the factoid that he also held the post of’ ‘Associate
Fellow’ at Buckingham University. So I then sought out the Buckingham
University website, but was puzzled to find that he was not listed among the
faculty staff. Was the information perhaps out of date? I noticed that in 2018 Abrutat
had delivered a seminar at Prebend House (the location where I had delivered my
seminar on Isaiah Berlin), but I could not find any confirmation that he was a
permanent member of the faculty. I thus posted a friendly message under the
‘Contact’ tab on his website, explained my background and interests, introduced
him to coldspur, and indicated how much I looked forward to
collaborating with him.
While I was waiting for
his response, I reached out to Professor Anthony Glees, as well as to Professor
Julian Richards, who now leads the Security and Intelligence practice (BUCSIS) after
the retirement of Glees (my doctoral supervisor) last summer. Indeed, Professor
Glees’s initial reaction was that Abrutat must have been signed up after
his retirement, as he knew nothing of the engagement. I very gently pointed out
to Richards the anomalies in the record, and stated how keen I was to know more
about the doctor whose research interests so closely overlapped with mine. I
also contacted my academic friend, whose ‘RSS’ colleagues appeared to have
contributed much of the personal reminiscences that are featured in Abrutat’s
book.
What happened next was
rather shocking. Professor Richards admitted that Abrutat has been recruited as
an occasional lecturer, but was not a member of the faculty. He insisted that
Abrutat’s bona fides were solid, however, encouraging me to contact
Abrutat himself to learn more about his qualifications, including the nature of
his doctorate. After an initial warm response, Abrutat declined to respond
further when I asked him about his background. Yet he did indicate that he had
been appointed ‘Departmental Historian’ at GCHQ, a fact that was confirmed to
me by another contact, who said that Arbutat was replacing Tony Comer in that
role. An inquiry at GCHQ, however, drew a highly secure blank.
Thus I had been left out
in the cold. But the information gained was puzzling. How was it that Abrutat
had been engaged as some kind of contract lecturer without Professor Glees
being in the know? And why would Abrutat claim now that he was a member of the
faculty when he had indicated to me that his lecturing days were in the past?
Why would the University not challenge Abrutat’s claims, and request that he
correct the impression he had been leaving on his website and in his book that
he was a qualified member of the faculty? And why would he give the impression
that he had a doctorate in a relevant subject?
A few days later, I was
just about to send a further message to Richards, when I received another email
from Abrutat, in which he said that he had indeed been involved in some ad
hoc engagements as a lecture at Buckingham, but had insisted on secrecy and
anonymity because he was working for British Intelligence at the time. Now,
such an explanation might just be plausible, except that, if Richard was hired
in 2018, after his guest seminar at Prebend House in March, he was at exactly
the same period publicising his relationship with the University to the world
beyond. His website page declaring the affiliation was written in 2018, as it
refers to a coming book publication date in May 2109, and one can find several
pages on the Web, where, in 2018 and 2019, Abrutat promotes another book of his
(Vanguard, about D-Day), exploiting his claimed position on the faculty
of Buckingham University. So much for obscurity and anonymity! Moreover, the
blurb for Radio Wars describes his current role as a lecturer ‘in
the Department of Economics’ at Buckingham, even though Abrutat implied to me
that even the informal contract was all in the past.
I thus replied to
Abrutat, pointing out these anomalies, and suggesting that he and Professor
Richards (who had taken five days to work out this explanation) might care to
think again. Having heard nothing in reply, on January 13 I compiled a long
email for Richards, expressing my dismay and puzzlement, informing him of my
intentions to take the matter up the line, and inviting him thereby to consult
with his superiors to forestall any other approach, and thus giving him the
opportunity to take corrective action. My final observation to Richards ran as
follows: “It occurs to me that what we might have here is what the business
terms a ‘Reverse Fuchs-Pontecorvo’. When the scientists at AERE Harwell were
suspected of spying for the Soviet Union, MI5 endeavoured, out of concern for
adverse publicity, and in the belief that the miscreants might perform less
harm there, to have them transferred to Liverpool University. The University of
Buckingham might want to disencumber itself from Abrutat by facilitating his
installation at GCHQ.”
After more than a week,
I had heard nothing, so on January 21 I wrote to the Dean of the Humanities
School, Professor Nicholas Rees, explaining the problem, and attaching the letter
I had sent to Richards. A few days later, I received a very gracious response
from Professor Rees, who assured me he would look into the problem.
On January 29, I
received the following message from David Watson, the Solicitor and Compliance
Manager at Buckingham:
“Dear Dr Percy
I refer to your email to Professor
Rees of 21st January, which has been referred to me for response. I advise that
Dr Abrutat, who has recently been appointed the official historian at GCHQ, is
an Honorary Associate Fellow of the University of Buckingham (“the University”)
and he does occasionally lecture at the University. The University intends for
this relationship to continue and does not consider Dr Abrutat to have made any
representations regarding his relationship with the University that would be
harmful to the University’s reputation. In the circumstances, the University
does not intend to take this matter any further.
As an alumni [sic!] of the
University, as well as having been a student in the BUCSIS Centre, we would
like to maintain close contacts and good relations with you. As in all matters
academic, there are some matters of academic judgement involved, and is
important to respect the views of those with whom we might not always
agree.
I note your comment to the effect
that you will “have to change your tactics” if the University does not act upon
your concerns. Whilst it is not clear what you mean by this, I trust that
you do not propose to engage in any activities, which might be considered
defamatory to the University and would request that you refrain from making any
statements that go beyond the realm of reasonable academic discourse and which
could potentially damage the University’s reputation (this includes ad hominem
attacks on the University’s academic staff and/or associates).
I trust that the University’s
position has now been made clear and advise that the University does not
propose to enter into any further communications with yourself on this matter.
Yours sincerely
David Watson”
I leave it at that. I
have presented most of the facts, though not all.
Lastly, I have now read
Abrutat’s Radio War. I decided that I needed to see what the author had
to say, and the method he used to tell his story, before concluding my
investigation of his relationship with Buckingham University. The experience
was not good: it is a mess. I have, however, not addressed the book thoroughly,
or taken notes – yet. I wanted to keep this segment exclusively dependent on my
own research, and I shall defer a proper analysis of Abrutat’s contribution to
the story of RSS for another time.
* * * * * *
This segment of ‘The Mystery of the Undetected Radios’ is something of an aberration, designed to amplify statements and conclusions I made some time ago. It has been provoked by my access to a large number of National Archives files, non-digitised, and thus not acquirable on-line. This inspection was enabled by the efforts of my researcher Dr. Kevin Jones, photographing the documents at Kew, and sending them to me. I wish I had discovered Dr. Jones, and been able to us these files, earlier in the cycle, as this analysis would have found a better home in earlier chapters, especially Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 of the saga, and it should probably be integrated properly later. Readers may want to refresh their memories of my earlier research by returning to those segments, or reading the amalgamated story at ‘The Undetected Radios’. There will be some repetition of material, since I believe it contributes to greater clarity in the narrative that follows. It covers events up to the end of 1943.
The following is a list
of the files that I relied on extensively for my previous research: WO/208/5096-5098,
HW 34/18, HW 43/6, CAB 301/77, ADM 223/793, and FO 1093/484
For
this segment, I have exploited the following files: DSIR 36/2220, FO 1093/308, FO
1093/145, FO 1093/484, HO 255/987, HW 34/18, HW 34/19, HW 34/30, HW 40/190, HW
62/21/17, KV 3/7, KV 3/96, KV 3/97, KV
4/27, KV 4/33, KV 4/61, KV 4/62, KV 4/97, KV 4/98, KV 4/213, KV 4/214, MEPO
2/3558, WO 208/5095, WO 208/5099, WO 208/5101, WO 208/5102, and WO 208/5105.
This
list is not complete. In my spreadsheet that identifies hundreds of files
relevant to my broader inquiries, I have recorded several concerning RSS and
wireless interception that my researcher/photographer in London has not yet
captured. At the same time, Abrutat lists in his Bibliography many of the files
that I have inspected, as well as a few that I did not know about, or had
considered irrelevant. I have added them to my spreadsheet, and shall
investigate those that relate to my period. (I have spent little time studying
RSS’s story after the D-Day invasion, and have steered clear of its activities
overseas.) On the other hand, I note several files used by me that have
apparently escaped Abrutat’s attention. Thus some further process of synthesis
will at some future stage be desirable.
One
of the files (FO 1093/308) I received only at the end of January, just in time
for me to include a brief analysis. This file, in turn, leads to a whole new
series, the transactions of the Wireless Telegraphy Board (the DEFE 59 series),
which should provide a thorough explanation of how the organisational decisions
made on Wireless Telegraphy (‘Y’ services) in early 1940 affected wartime
policy. That will have to wait for a later analysis.
I
should also mention that E. D.R. Harrison’s article, British Radio Security
and Intelligence, 1939-43, published in the English Historical Review,
Vol. CXXIV No 506 (2009) continues to serve as a generally excellent guide to
the conflicts between MI5 and SIS, although it concentrates primarily on the
control over ISOS material, and does not (in my opinion) do justice to the
larger issue of Signals Security that caused rifts between MI5 and RSS. I note,
however, that Harrison lists some important files (e.g. HW 19/331) that I have
not yet inspected.
I
have organized the material into seven sections: ‘Tensions Between MI5 and RSS,
Part 1’ (1940-41); ‘Tensions Between MI5 and RSS, Part 2’(1942-43); ‘The Year
of Signals Security’; ‘Mobile
Direction-Finding’; ‘The Management of RSS’; ‘The Double-Cross Operation’, and
‘Conclusions’.
Tensions between MI5 & RSS, Part
1 (1940-41)
The overall impression given by various histories is that the transfer of control of RSS from MI8 to SIS in the spring of 1941 all occurred very smoothly. This tradition was echoed in the Diaries of Guy Liddell, who was initially very enthusiastic about the change of responsibility, since he knew that the Security Service was hopelessly overburdened with the challenges of sorting out possible illegal aliens and ‘Fifth Columnists’ at a time when the fear of invasion was very real. MI5 was deficient in management skills and structure, and Liddell initially had great confidence in the capabilities of Gambier-Parry and his organisation. It is true that, as the war progressed, Liddell voiced doubts as to whether SIS’s Section VIII was performing its job properly, but his complaints were generally very muted.
An early indication of MI5’s exclusion
from the debates can be observed in the early wartime deliberations (January
and February, 1940) of the Wireless Telegraphy Board, chaired by Commander
Denniston of GC&CS (visible at FO 1093/308). Maurice Hankey, Minister
without Portfolio in Chamberlain’s Cabinet, called together a task force
consisting of the Directors of Intelligence of the three armed forces, namely
Rear-Admiral Godfrey (Admiralty), Major-General Beaumont-Nesbitt (War Office),
and Group-Captain Blandy (acting, for Air Ministry), Colonel Stewart Menzies,
the SIS chief, and the Zelig-like young Foreign Office civil servant, Gladwyn
Jebb. The group recommended a full-time chairman for a task that had changed in
nature since war broke out, what with such issues of beacons, domestic illicit
wireless use, and German broadcasting complicating the agenda. Yet what was
remarkable was that the Group seemed to be unaware that Y services were being
undertaken outside the armed forces. Moreover, there was no room for MI5 in
this discussion, even though Lt.-Colonel Simpson was carrying on an energetic
campaign to set up a unified force to handle the challenge of beacons and
illicit domestic transmissions. Amazingly, the Board appeared to be completely
unaware of what was going on inside MI5, or the negotiations it was having with
MI8.
MI5 was in danger of losing its
ability to influence policy. A year later the transfer of RSS took place,
despite the fact that influential figures had challenged SIS’s overall
competence. Major-General Francis Davidson, who had replaced Beaumont-Nesbitt
as Director of Military Intelligence in December 1940, in February 1941 first
questioned Swinton’s authority to make the decision to place RSS under Section
VIII. (Beaumont-Nesbitt, who held the position for only eighteen months, was probably
removed because he was notoriously wrong about a predicted German invasion, in
a paper written on September 7, 1940. Noel Annan indicated that Admiral Godfrey
did not rate ‘less gifted colleagues’ such as him highly, and in Changing
Enemies Annan witheringly described
him as ‘the charming courtier and guardsman’.) Davidson apparently knew more
about MI5’s needs than did his predecessor, and, as WO 288/5095 shows, he
subsequently expressed major concerns about SIS’s ability to understand and manage
the interception of signals, and to deal with the Post Office. He regretted
that Petrie had apparently not yet spoken to Worlledge, or to Butler in MI8.
(Handwritten notes on the letters suggest that Davidson was getting tutored by
Butler.) Davidson’s preference echoed Simpson’s ‘unified control,’ but he was
perhaps revealing his naivety and novelty in the job when he stated that MI5
(‘our original suggestion’) was the home he preferred for RSS, being unaware of
MI5’s deep reluctance to take it on. He nevertheless accepted Swinton’s
decision.
Colonel Butler had been particularly
scathing about Gambier-Parry’s understanding of wireless interception issues.
Before the decision was made, he stated (WO 208/5105) that Gambier-Parry had ‘little
or no experience of this type of work’, and on March 23 reported Gambier-Parry as
saying that, if RSS were under his control in the event of an invasion, he could
not be held responsible for the detection of illicit wireless within the Army
Zone, and had suggested a new organisation under GHQ Home Forces. “Colonel
Gambier-Parry refers to operational agents and static agents but I do not know
how one can differentiate between the two when heard on a wireless set,” wrote
Butler. Both Butler and Worlledge thought that Petrie did not have full
knowledge of the facts – a justifiable complaint, it would seem.
Worlledge
had written a very sternly worded memorandum on February 14, 1941, where he
stated: “It is not clear to me that anything would be gained by the transfer of
R.S.S. ‘lock, stock, and barrel’ to any other branch unless that branch is in a
position to re-organize R.S.S. completely on a proper military basis. In my
opinion, R.S.S. should be organized as one unit, preferably a purely military
unit though I would not exclude the possibility of a mixed military and
civilian unit.” He was chafing more at the frustrations of dealing with the
Post Office rather than the reliance on a crew of civilian interceptors, and
his concerns were far more with the threat of soldiers in uniform invading the
country, bearing illicit radio transmitters, than with the possibility of
German agents roaming around the country. His voice articulated the broader
issue of Signals Security that would rear its head again when the circumstances
of war had changed.
And in April, 1941 (after the
decision on the transfer was made, but before the formal announcement) when the
threat of invasion was still looming, Butler had to take the bull by the horns,
and inform the General Staff that RSS was incapable of providing the mechanisms
for locating possible illicit wireless agents operating in the area of active
operations, and that military staff should take on that responsibility, using
some RSS equipment. Butler showed a good insight into the problem: “Apart
from actual interception, the above involves a number of minor commitments such
as the control of some wireless stations erected by our Allies in this country,
monitoring of stations in foreign Legations in London, checking numerous
reports of suspected transmissions and advising the Wireless Board and G.P.O on
the control of the sale of radio components.” Fortunately, the threat of
invasion was now receding, and Operation Barbarossa on June 22 confirmed it.
The problem of ‘embedded’ agents was deferred, and the General Staff relaxed.
A valuable perspective on the
challenges of the time was provided by one R. L. Hughes. In 1946, Hughes, then of
MI5’s B4 section, submitted a history of the unit he had previously occupied,
B3B, which had been a section in Malcom Frost’s group (see KV 4/27), and had
played a large role in the exchanges of the time. What was B3B, and what was
its mission? The exact structure of B3 between the years 1941 (after Frost’s W
division was dissolved, and B3 created), and 1943 (when Frost left MI5, in
January, according to Curry, in December according to Liddell!) is elusive, but
Curry’s confusing organisation chart for April 1943, and his slightly
contradictory text (p 259), still show Frost in charge of B3A (Censorship
Issues, R. E. Bird), B3D (Liaison with Censorship, A. Grogan), B3B (Illicit
Wireless Interception: Liaison with RSS, R. L. Hughes), B3C (Lights and
Pigeons, Flight-Lieutenant R. M. Walker) and B3E (Signals Security, Lt. Colonel
Sclater).
The confusion arises because Curry
added elsewhere that Frost had taken on ‘Signals Security’ himself, and B3E was
created only when Frost departed ‘in January 1943’. The creation and role of
B3E needs to be defined clearly. B3E does not appear in the April 1943
organisation chart which Curry represented, and Frost did not depart
until the end of November 1943. As for Sclater, the Signals Security expert, Colonel
Worlledge had appointed him several years
before as his ‘adjutant’ (according to Nigel West) at MI8c, and he thus may
have been a victim of the ‘purge’ after Gambier-Parry took over. But a valid
conclusion might be that Frost was unaware of how Sclater was being brought
into MI5 to replace him, and saw his presence as a threat, even though Signals
Security was nominally under his control. That Sclater would effectively
replace Frost was surely Liddell’s intention, as Signals Security once again
became a major focus of MI5’s attention.
Thus Hughes was right in the middle
of what was going on, liaising with RSS, and he adds some useful vignettes to
the tensions of 1940 and 1941, echoing what Lt.-Colonel Simpson had articulated
about the importance of Signals Security. For example: “Colonel
Simpson reported on the 15th September, 1939 on the condition of
affairs at that time. He considered it quite unsatisfactory and suggested that
the assistance of Colonel xxxxxxxxx should be sought. It is interesting to note
that he stressed the importance of Signals Security and recommended that there
should be a monitoring service studying our own Service transmissions. He also
stressed the importance of the closest possible collaboration between the
Intelligence Organisation, M.I.5. and the technical organisation, R.S.S. He
drew a diagram which pictured a wireless technical organisation in close
liaison with the Services, G.C.& C.S., M.I.5., R.S.S. (then known as
M.I.1.g.) and, through Section VIII, with M.I.6. M.I.5.was to provide the link
with police and G.P.O. It may be noted that during the latter part of the war
the organisation approximated to this, as Section V of M.I.6. established a
branch working with R.S.S. under the name of the Radio Intelligence Section
(R.I.S.) . . .”
Why the name of the Colonel had to be redacted is not clear. As I have written before, it was probably Gambier-Parry himself, as the names of all SIS personnel were discreetly obscured in the records, and Curry in a memorandum indicated that Simpson had indicated that the Colonel was in MI6 (SIS). Gambier-Parry was not known for his shrewd understanding of signals matters, however, and at this stage Simpson would more probably have been invoking support from his true military colleagues. In any case, it is salutary that Simpson was so early drawing attention to the failings of security procedures within the armed forces, as this would be an issue of major concern later in the war, in which Frost would take a keen interest. Simpson’s message of ‘Unified Control’ is clear, and Hughes states that this issue caused a breakdown in negotiations between MI5 (then represented by Simpson) and RSS/MI8c. He goes on, moreover, to describe how Malcolm Frost had responded to Walter Gill’s memorandum describing the functions of RSS by making a bid to manage the whole operation. This was a somewhat audacious move, as Frost had been recruited from the BBC to investigate foreign broadcasts, and he had nothing like the stature or reputation of Simpson.
Malcolm Frost is one of the most
interesting characters in this saga, as his role has been vastly underrepresented.
He may be one of those public servants whose contributions were sometimes diminished
by jealousy, or personal dislike – perhaps like Felix Cowgill in SIS, or Jasper
Harker of MI5 – and whose reputations have suffered because they were not
invited to tell their side of the story. He was certainly a favourite of Lord
Swinton for a while, as Swinton appointed him from the BBC, where he had been
Director of Overseas Intelligence, to chair the important Home Defence Security Intelligence
Committee, which included
wireless interception. This promotion apparently went to his head a bit, and
his ambitions and manœuverings quickly got under the skin of Liddell – and
eventually Swinton himself. Yet, even though Swinton was recorded as saying, at
the end of 1940, that Frost’s days at MI5 were numbered, Frost was a survivor,
and proved to be an important thorn in the flesh of Gambier-Parry and RSS for
the next couple of years. He seemed to be a quick learner, an analytical
thinker, and a painstaking recorder of conversations, an operation that may
have been designed to cover himself should his enemies turn against him more
volubly. And indeed he had many enemies, probably because he behaved so
antagonistically when trying to work through differences of opinion with
anyone.
Ironically, however, the primary
challenge to RSS’s governance in mid-1940 had come from the Post Office. What
might have pushed Simpson over the edge was the GPO’s insistence that it had a
charter to provide personnel and materials to MI8c, granted by the War Office,
and approved by the Cabinet. When it was challenged on the quality of such, and
on its sluggish bureaucracy, however, its representative dug his heels in, and
reminded MI8c and MI5 that it was exclusively responsible for the detection of
illicit wireless transmitters and would pursue that mission on its own terms.
That charter was a legacy of peacetime operations, when it needed to track down
pirate operators who might have been interfering with critical factory
operations, or public broadcasting. Yet it was an argument doomed to failure.
Yet the GPO was not the only fly in
the ointment. As the military threat increased, and Swinton soured on MI5’s
capabilities, competent critics sighed over the apparent muddle. Before the SIS
takeover, RSS had set up regional officers at exactly the same time (June 1940)
that MI5 had established its own Regional Security Liaison Officers (RSLOs),
leading to conflicts in searches and reporting. Both the military and the
police were confused as to who exactly was in charge. And while the
responsibility was more clearly defined with the transfer to SIS, several
observers expressed their doubts about Gambier-Parry’s understanding of the
true problem. As I have showed, the Director of Military Intelligence,
Major-General Francis Davidson, newly appointed to the post, expressed his
strong concerns to Swinton in January 1941, before the official decision was
announced. Swinton tried to assuage him, but he was still expressing doubts in
May 1941.
At the same time, Worlledge, having had
a meeting with Gambier-Parry, also thought that the future new owner of the
unit did not understand the technical issues well. Likewise, Colonel Butler of
MI8c concluded that Gambier-Parry had ‘little or no experience’, and pointed
out that Gambier-Parry had told him that he did not think that RSS would be
responsible for any detection of illicit wireless in the event of an invasion –
an appalling misjudgment. (At this stage of the war, there was a deathly fear
of the possibility of German wireless agents working on English soil, assisting
the invaders, with their traffic inextricably entwined with military
communications.) But Butler was not to last long: he was feuding with Gordon Welchman
of GC&CS at the time, and was let go in June 1941, perhaps another victim
of Gambier-Parry’s purge.
What is fascinating is that Frost,
despite his being logically discarded by his sponsor, Lord Swinton, in December
1940, evolved to be the main agent pestering Gambier-Parry over his inadequate
machinery for tracking illicit transmitters in the UK – the core mission of
RSS. KV 4/97 and KV 4/98 show how, after the year of acquaintanceship in 1941, when
committees were setup, and procedures defined, the distrust began to establish
itself in 1942. Liddell had already clashed with Gambier-Parry in May 1941 over
possible undetected transmissions, Gambier-Parry holding on to the Gillean line
that they would have to be two-way, and using this argument to deny that any
could exist. (He was probably politically correct, but technically wrong, but
at that stage of the war, a German invasion had not been excluded from
consideration.) Trevor-Roper, performing brilliant work in developing schemata
of the Abwehr’s operations, but now forced to work formally under Cowgill, was
by now chafing at his boss’s obsession about control, as Cowgill was unwilling
to distribute Trevor-Roper’s notes to MI5 or even to GC&CS, and a series of
meetings attempted to resolve the impasse.
Then, on November 19, Frost made a very
puzzling comment to Liddell, informing him that ‘Gambier-Parry & Maltby
deprecated his departure to the B.B.C.’ It would appear from this item that
Frost was at this stage on the way out, and it might partly explain why Curry
(who had moved on to a position as Petrie’s aide in October 1941) later wrote
in his ‘History’ that Frost left MI5 in January of 1943, which was admittedly
over a year later, but still a long time before Frost’s eventual departure. This
show of remorse was certainly one of crocodile tears from Gambier-Parry and
Maltby, and maybe Frost, under attack on all sides, was making a plea to
Liddell that his talents were still needed. By this time, Liddell, who was
beginning to get frustrated by illicit wireless transmissions (mostly from
foreign embassies), may have concluded that, while he continued to complain to
Vivian at SIS of the problem, he needed a dedicated pair of hands working below
decks, and, with Frost having had his ambitious wings clipped, the BBC-man
gained a stay of execution. Indeed, Liddell did later plan to liquidate Frost’s
division: on February 9, 1943, however, he wrote that that move had been
shelved, and Frost was not to leave until the end of November of that year.
Liddell was probably already looking for a replacement.
Tensions between MI5 & RSS, Part
2 (1942-43)
Thus, despite the efforts to move him out,
Frost survived, and 1942 was his most significant year in MI5. KV 4/97 shows a
fascinating account of his perpetual tussles with Gambier-Parry and Maltby. In
December 1941 and January 1942 he harangued Maltby over the problems and
responsibilities of the mobile units, and argued with Morton Evans over
transferring receivers to them. He asked questions about the distribution and
equipment of personnel and equipment, which caused Morton Evans to rebuke him
for being nosy. He became involved with the abortive exercise to exchange
details of codes and frequencies with Soviet intelligence, and asked Maltby to
disclose SIS secrets. Gambier-Parry had to lecture him that everything was
under control. He wrote a detailed report on the state-of-the-art of
interception, again suggesting that RSS did not really understand it. On
September 20, he submitted a report to Liddell that criticised the clumsiness
of current mobile detection devices, and his text indicates that at this stage
MI5 was performing some experimental work of its own. A meeting was set up with
Liddell and Maltby just over a week later, and soon afterwards Maltby was
forced to admit that current coverage in the UK was inadequate. Frost pointed
out problems with Elmes, one of Maltby’s sidekicks, and had to inform Liddell
that the minutes of one RSS meeting needed to be corrected to include the
mission of identifying illicit wireless in the British Isles – the perpetual
blind spot of Gambier-Parry’s team.
All this resulted in a spirited defence by
Major Morton Evans, who submitted a carefully argued paper on March 3, 1942
about the conflicts between the demands of watching and recording the
undeniably real traffic of the enemy, and the need to uncover any wireless agents
on the mainland (the ‘General Search’ function), concluding that a necessary
balance was maintained that could not ensure both goals were perfectly met. He
introduced the challenge of domestic illicit interception by writing: “By
working at full pressure it is only possible to take about one hundred
effective bearings a day, which means that only a very small percentage of the
signals heard can be D/F’d, since the number of transmissions taking place
throughout the day is in the order of tens of thousands. It therefore becomes
necessary to narrow the field of those signals which are to be put up for
bearings, and this means that the signal has to be heard more than once before
it can be established that it is unidentified and therefore suspicious. The D/F
stations are therefore employed largely by taking bearings on signals which
have been marked down for special investigation, and when this is not a full
time job the remainder of their time is spent on taking bearings of all
suspicious signals which may be put up at random.”
This is a highly important report which shows
the stresses that were placed on the Discrimination Unit that passed out
instructions to the VIs, and how ineffective the Mobile Units would have been
if they had to wait for multiple suspected transmissions, and then organize
themselves to drive maybe hundreds of miles in the hope of catching the pirate
transmitting again from the same location. It is also presents a provocative
introduction to the claims made by Chapman Pincher about what Morton Evans told
him about the traffic suspected as being generated by Sonia, and what Morton
Evans was supposed to have done with it. As I shall show in a later piece,
Morton Evans’s career makes Pincher’s testimony look highly dubious.
All this pestering by Frost, however, must have
caused immense irritation to Gambier-Parry, Maltby and Cowgill, and may well
have contributed to SIS’s suggestion (made through Vivian) that the RSS
Committee be abolished. At a meeting on December 2, all except Maltby and
Cowgill voted that the committee should not be discontinued, however, and
a useful compromise, whereby the committee was split into two, a high-level and
a low-level group, was eventually worked out. But, by now, the planning
emphasis was much more on signals protection and detection of ‘stay-behind’
agents on the Continent when the inevitable Allied invasion of Europe took
place, and Frost’s attention to domestic mobile units was beginning to sound
wearisome.
In 1943, Frost took up the cudgels again, as KV
4/98 shows. A note by Frost to Liddell, dated January 27, 1943, indicates that
Frost has now immersed himself into the techniques of broader signals security,
and violently disagrees with Vivian and Gambier-Parry. Frost wrote: “He
[Vivian] appears to presume that Gambier-Parry and S.C.U.3 are responsible for
all functions which can be included under the heading ‘Radio Security’. This is
false. Radio security involves not only the technical interception of suspected
enemy signals, which is the function of R.S.S., but the planning of our own and
Allied radio security measures and the investigation of illicit wireless
activities from an intelligence angle. Parry frequently implies that he is
responsible for all these activities. In fact, many bodies other than R.S.S.
and the Security Service are engaged on radio security work under one heading
or another, including the British Joint Communications Board, the Wireless
Telegraphy Board, the Censorship, and the Signals Department of the Three
Services.” Thus Gambier-Parry was
accused of two crimes: ineffectiveness in illicit wireless detection, a
function he denied having, and misunderstanding the scope of Signals Security,
a responsibility he thought he owned.
Frost
goes on to mention Gambier-Parry’s excuse that he needs more funding: Frost
asserts that Gambier-Parry has plenty of money for his own pet projects. Two
weeks later, Frost is making demands to be on the high-level committee, and that
Gambier-Parry should be removed – a bold initiative, indeed. This echoes the
statement that Liddell had made to Petrie in December 1942, that ‘the plumbers
(i.e. Gambier-Parry and Maltby) were directing intelligence, rather than the
other way around’. Yet there was a further problem: while Vivian may have been
declaring Gambier-Parry’s overall responsibility, Gambier-Parry was becoming a
reluctant warrior on the broader issue of civil and military signals security.
Gambier-Parry’s chief interest was in technology, in apparatus and codes, and
some of the more complex and political aspects of radio security eluded him.
By now Frost was being
eased out. Vivian’s proposal to Liddell on participants on the low-level
committee excludes Frost, with Dick White and Hubert Hart suggested as members instead.
Liddell and Vivian argue, about Frost and the Chairmanship, as well. Even
Petrie agrees that MI5’s radio interests are not being adequately represented.
The record here goes silent after that, but an extraordinary report in KV 4/33 (‘Report
on the Operations of B3E in Connection with Signals Security & Wireless
Transmission during the War 1939-1945’), written in May/June 1945 (i.e. as
Overlord was under way) suggests that MI5 thereafter effectively took control
of signals security through the efforts of Lt.-Colonel Sclater, a probable
reject from Maltby’s unit at Hanslope, who at some stage led the Signals
Security Unit within MI5.
The Year of Signals
Security
A close reading of Liddell’s Diaries gives a better insight into the machinations of this period than does anything that I have discovered at Kew. 1943 was the Year of Signals Security, and the matter had several dimensions. The overall consideration was that, as the project to invade Europe (‘Overlord’) developed, the security of wireless communications would have to become a lot tighter in order to prevent the Nazis learning of the Allies’ battle plans. The unknown quantity of dealing with possible ‘leave-behind’ Abwehr wireless agents in France would require RSS to turn its attention to direction-finding across the Channel. Moreover, there were military, civil, and diplomatic aspects. While the Navy and the Air Force had adopted solid procedures for keeping their traffic secret, the Army was notoriously lax, as the General Staff had learned from decrypted ULTRA messages. * Much government use of wireless was also sloppy, with the Railways particularly negligent. When troops started to move, details about train schedules and volumes of personnel could have caused dangerous exposures. Governments-in-exile, and allied administrations, were now starting to use wireless more intensively. The JIC welcomed the intelligence that was gained by intercepting such exchanges, but if RSS and GC&CS could understand these dialogues, why should not the Germans, also?
[* The frequently made claim
that naval ciphers were secure has been undermined by recent analysis. See, for
example, Christian Jennings’s The Third Reich is Listening]
These issues came up at the meetings of the high-level Radio Security Committee. Yet, as Liddell reported in March 1943, Gambier-Parry was very unwilling to take the lead. He refused to take responsibility for signals security (suggesting, perhaps, that he had now taken Frost’s lesson to heart), and used delaying tactics, which provoked Frost and Liddell. Liddell believed that the JIC and the Chiefs of Staff should be alerted to both the exposures caused by lax wireless discipline and Gambier-Parry’s reluctance to do anything. As Liddell recorded on April 12: “G-P has replied to the D.G. on the question of Signals Security. His letter is not particularly satisfactory and we propose to raise the matter on the Radio Security Committee. Parry is evidently afraid that it may fall to the lot of R.S.S. to look after Signals Security. He is therefore reluctant to have it brought to the notice of the Chiefs of Staff that the Germans are acquiring a considerable knowledge about the disposition of our units in this country and elsewhere through signals leakages.” What is perplexing, however, is that Liddell does not refer in his Diaries to the April 1943 report put out by Sclater [see below], which presumably must have been issued before Sclater was officially hired to MI5.
Another trigger for action (May 31) was the
discovery that agent GARBO had been given a new cipher, and that he had been
given instructions to use the British Army’s procedure (callsigns, sequences) in
transmitting messages. While this news was encouraging in the confidence that
the Abwehr still held in GARBO, it was alarming on two counts. It indicated
that the Germans were successfully interpreting army traffic, and it indicated
that it would be a safe procedure as RSS had not been able to distinguish real
army messages from fake ones. (Astute readers may recall that agent SONIA
received similar instructions: the Soviets probably learned about it from
Blunt.) This was of urgent concern to MI5, since, if RSS could not discriminate
such messages, unknown Abwehr agents (i.e. some not under control of the XX
Operation) might also be transmitting undetected. Even before this, the Chiefs
of Staff realised that special measures need to be taken. In classic Whitehall
fashion, they appointed a committee, the Intelligence Board, to look into the
question. But in this case, they selected a very canny individual to chair the
committee – one Peter Reid, who was a close friend (and maybe even a relative)
of Guy Liddell.
On June 9, Liddell had a long chat with Reid,
and informed him of the details of Garbo’s new cipher. Reid was
characteristically blunt: “Reid considers G-P, Maltby & Frost as bluffers,
and to some extent charlatans”, wrote Liddell. Reid thought that the Army
ciphers and operations had to be fixed first: fortunately the Army staff now
recognised the problem. A couple of weeks later, Reid was telling Liddell that
MI5 should ‘logically control RSS’. He thought Frost was not up to the mark,
technically inadequate, and probably recommended at this stage an outsider for
Liddell to bring in, which might explain the eventual recruitment of Sclater.
Reid’s committee also inspected RSS’s operation itself: Frost told Liddell that
Reid might be looking into the communications of SIS and SOE, which had been
Gambier-Parry’s exclusive bailiwick, and of which the head of Section VIII was
particularly proprietary. Reid is much of a mystery: where he came from, and
what his expertise was, are not clear. It is difficult to determine whether he
is offering strong opinions based on deep knowledge of the subject, or
energetic fresh views deriving from relative ignorance. (He was not the P.R.
Reid who escaped from Colditz, and wrote of his exploits.) On August 20,
Liddell recorded that Reid was ‘almost violent about the stupidity in handling
intercept material’.
While Gambier-Parry was becoming increasingly
under siege, Frost also appeared to have received the message that a career
move was imminent. He told Liddell on August 7 that he was investigating a job
with the Wireless Board. He was unhappy with his salary, and said ‘he should
give another organisation the benefit of his services’, an observation that
defines well his pomposity and high level of self-regard. Soon after this, one
finds the first references to Sclater in Liddell’s Diaries. Yet Sclater is
talking to Liddell ‘in the strictest confidence’ on August 26, which suggests
that his appointment has not yet been regularized. It suggests that Sclater was
frustrated with working at RSS (as any man of his calibre reporting to Maltby
must surely have been): similarly, one can never see him accepting a job under
Frost, to endure the same insufferable management style.
A few paragraphs in Sclater’s post-war History
of the unit, submitted to Curry, gives a hint of how Sclater’s influence
started. He claims that MI5’s initiative, in raising questions about possible
leaks from civilian authorities, such as the Police and Railway Lines, resulted
in the collection of ‘all possible details from other departments thought to be
using radio communications’. MI5 then requisitioned the services of some RSS
mobile units to monitor them. But the outcome was not good. “The results of
monitoring some Police and Railway communications indicated a deplorable lack
of security knowledge and some examples were included in a report which
eventually reached the Inter-Department W/T Security Committee.” MI5 then
succeeded in expanding the scope of the committee to include civilian use, the
Committee having its name changed to ‘W/T Security’. This new Committee then
issued the report that appeared on April 28, under Sclater’s name. Thus it is
probably safe to assume that Sclater was at this time on secondment, since he
did not appear in Curry’s organisation chart of April 1943, and would hardly
have been nominated to criticize RSS from within the unit. Frost, however,
should be credited with keeping the matter alive, even if he did not show mastery
over the subject, or display tact when pursuing his investigations. (Harrison
states that Sclater was not officially recruited by MI5 until January 1944.)
Liddell here records some shocking details of
Sclater’s conclusions about RSS: “He told me in the strictest confidence that
they had 3 M.U.s [mobile units] which had been carrying out exercises under
McIntosh. He does not however think that the latter is a suitable person to
conduct a search. He also told me that RSS in d.f.ing [direction-finding] an
alleged beacon near Lincoln had given an area of several hundred square miles
in which the search would have to be made. Their methods in d.f.ing continental
stations were improving but they reckon on an error of 1% per hundred miles.
This would mean a transmitter could only be located within an area of some 400
sq. miles. He also told me confidentially that he believed RSS were attempting
to d.f. certain stations in France which only came up for testing periodically
since they are believed to be those which will be left behind in time of
invasion. RSS have said nothing to us about this officially. All this of course
will have to come out when we get down to I.B. [Intelligence Board] planning.”
This exchange shows the high degree of
confidence that Sclater had in Liddell and MI5 assuming the responsibility for
Signals Security, but also his disillusion with Gambier-Parry. (A few weeks
later, Gambier-Parry was to suggest that mobile units should not be taken
across the Channel until the RSS had detected an illicit transmitter. A rather
feeble interpretation of ‘mobility’ . . . Gambier-Parry
certainly did not understand the problem of mobile illicit wireless use.) Yet
Sclater’s willingness to criticize the RSS’s direction-finding capabilities
implicitly suggests that the acknowledged expert on direction-finding, Major
Keen, who also reported to Maltby, was not being used properly. Did Keen
perhaps have something to do with Sclater’s move away from RSS?
Sclater’s arrival must have boosted Liddell’s
knowledge – and confidence. An entry in his diary from September 10 is worth
citing in full. The first significant observation is that he records that
Vivian appeared not to be aware of RSS’s mission in detecting illicit wireless
from the UK, thus providing solid reinforcement of the signals that
Gambier-Parry had been issuing. In the only chapters of substance covering RSS
(that I have found, before Abrutat), namely in Nigel West’s Sigint Secrets,
suggests that RSS’s straying into counteroffensive operations at the expense of
defensive moves was a result of Guy Liddell’s success, and that he himself
initiated it (p 154). Since West mistakenly informs us that RSS was in fact created
by MI5, and given the identity of MI8c ‘as a security precaution’, one has to
remain sceptical of the author’s conclusions, while understanding how he might
have contributed to the confusion about RSS
Newly emboldened, Liddell then wrote: “The
other question to be decided is the security of the communications of allied
Govts. This can be divided into three parts: allied forces, allied diplomatic
and allied secret service. Vivian takes up a rather non possumus
attitude on this question by saying that monitoring of the services of allied
forces can easily be evaded by the transfer of the traffic to diplomatic
channels. If this possibility exists, and obviously it does, we should monitor
the diplomatic channels. All we are really asking is a clear statement of the
facts. The services are supposed to be responsible for the security of the
signals of allied services. What in fact are they doing about it? The Secret
Service communications of allied Govts’ are supposed to be the responsibility
of SIS. Have they the cyphers? Do they know the contents of the messages? If the
cyphers are insecure what steps have been taken to warn the governments
concerned? Do SIS ever take it upon themselves to refuse to send certain
communications? If so is it open to government concerned to have them sent
either through military or diplomatic channels? Our sole locus standi in
this matter is that when a leak occurs we may well be looking all over the
country for a body whereas in fact the information is going out over the air.”
He followed up with a trenchant analysis of the R.S.C. committee meeting on September 14,
encouraging the RSS to deal with the Reid committee directly.
Realising that Frost was not a good ambassador
for MI5, Liddell at this point tried to harness his involvement with the Reid Committee until his
new position was confirmed. “It was agreed at that meeting that RSS should
monitor the civil establishments as and when they were able and turn in the
results to the Reid Committee on which are represented Min. of Supply, MAP,
GPO, Railways, and Police. All these bodies are on occasions co-opted to the
Reid Committee. The reason why I did not press this matter at the meeting at
Kinnaird House was that I did not want to build Frost up in a new job where he
would again be at logger-heads with everybody. Had he not been there I should
have pressed hard for our taking over the educational side and urged that RSS
as our technical tool should monitor from time to time and turn in the products
to us”, he recorded on November 12. The next day, Reid told Liddell that Frost
had accepted a job with the BBC in connection with broadcasting from the Second
Front. Frost’s swansong was to try to ‘liquidate’ the whole Barnet operation,
and told his staff, before he left, of that drastic action. But, after his
departure, Sclater was able to take on his role in B3E officially, and consider
more humane ways of dealing with the problems at RSS. By then, with Frost gone,
Maltby was sending out conciliatory signals to Sclater and Liddell about
wanting to cooperate.
The
relevant files on B3E (KV 4/33) can thus now be interpreted in context. The unit was stationed close to RSS’s Barnet
headquarters, an outpost of MI5 in RSS territory, and Sclater maintained close
contacts with parties involved with wireless, including the GPO Radio Branch,
the Telecommunications Dept., responsible for Licenses, the Inspector of
Wireless Telegraphy (Coast Stations), the Wireless Telegraphy Board, as well as
the RSIC, the low-level RSS committee. Sclater’s main point was that the
lessons of listening to the Abwehr, with their lack of discipline to names,
identities, repeated messages, en clair transmissions, etc. were not
being applied to British military or civilian communications in 1942. He
pointed out that MI5 also had no official knowledge of all the many organisations
that were using transmitters legally, which must have inhibited the effectiveness
of any interception programme, whoever owned it. He identified appalling lapses
of security, especially in the Police and Railways. The outcome was the report
published on April 28, 1943, which made some urgent recommendations. Yet it
must be recalled that B3E was apparently not established until after Frost left
in December 1943, so Sclater’s account is not strictly accurate in its
self-representation as an MI5 document.
This report therefore (with some allowances,
perhaps, for the author’s vainglory) makes the claim that MI5 effectively took
over control of RSS, ‘rooting out undisciplined use’, especially in the Home
Guard. RSS was given strict instructions on how to deploy resources to cover
Civil or Service traffic ‘as shall appear to the Security Service desirable’.
MI5 was now represented on all bodies to do with radio interception, and
exerted an influence on the JIC and SHAEF. MI5 co-authored with the Home Office
instructions to all civil units, which were copied to the RSS. This file contains
a fascinating array of other information, including examples of flagrant
breaches of security, and it demands further attention. Signals Security had
come full circle from Simpson to Sclater in five years. The ascent of Sclater
marked the demise of Frost. Can it all be trusted? I don’t know. You will not
find any reference to ‘Sclater’ or B3E’ in Christopher Andrew’s Defence of
the Realm, but that fact will perhaps not surprise anybody.
Mobile Direction-Finding
The course of mobile direction-finding
(and, implicitly, location-finding) during the war was not smooth. It was
partly one of technology (miniaturizing the equipment to a degree that vans, or
even pedestrians, could pick up signals reliably), and partly one of resources
and logistics (to what extent was the dedication of personnel to the task
justifiable when the threat seemed to diminish). Thus the years 1941-1943 can
be seen in the following terms: a year of sustained concern about the threat of
an invasion (1941); a year of relative quiet, and thus reflection, on the
mainland, while the outcome of the war generally looked dire (1942); and a year
of earnest preparation for the Allied invasion of Europe, when security of
radio traffic, and the threat of illicit broadcasts, again rose in importance
(1943).
The GPO had begun serious
experiments as early as 1935, as is shown in DSIR 36/2220. The fact that a
problem of ‘illicit radio transmissions’ in rural districts was considered a
threat at this stage, even before Hitler had occupied the Rhineland, is
breathtaking. Hampshire was chosen as the locality, and the exercise led to
some dramatic conclusions. Negotiating country roads, and relying primarily on
1” scale maps (since cars had no built-in compasses) required much visual indication,
and constant changing of direction to take fresh bearings. It was estimated
that forty minutes of transmitting-time were required for any successful
pursuit. Market-day interfered with the activity, and night operations required
stationary observations at main road crossings, ‘as these are the most easily
identifiable landmarks’. This was, for 1935, a remarkably imaginative exploit
by the Post Office, and showed some important lessons to be built on.
By 1938, the War Office and the GPO,
assuming war was imminent, were bringing the role of mobile operations to the
forefront. Colonel Ellsdale of the Royal Engineer and Signals Board submitted a
very detailed report (WO 208/5102, pp 68-74) of the perceived threat from
agents operating in Britain, even ascribing to them a degree of mobility that
was far beyond capabilities at the time. In March 1939, the War Office agreed
to a considerable investment in Illicit Wireless Interception, including
significant investment in mobile stations (see HW 62/21/17). Yet the focus by
November 1939 had very quickly switched to beacon-finding, in the erroneous
belief that Nazi sympathisers or German agents in Britain would be using such
signals to help direct bombers to their targets. Thus the GPO’s annual
expenditure in detection was planned to rise from £27,058
in 1939 to £343, 437 in 1940, and capital expenditures to increase from £13,425
to £211,325. A rapid-response squad was envisaged, with up to one hundred vans
operating, and identifying the target in a period of between thirty and ninety
minutes.
Fortunately,
this investment was quickly shelved, as interrogations of prisoners-of-war
indicated that there were no beacons operating from British territory. The
direction of flights was maintained by tail bearings in Germany. Despite the
generic concern about illicit transmissions, and MI5’s lack of knowledge of
what licit transmissions were occurring, Beaumont-Nesbitt, the Director
of Military Intelligence, called for a slowdown because of the costs. The GPO
continued to make investments, but drew criticism from other quarters because
of its inefficiencies and bureaucracy. By October 14, 1939, a meeting revealed that the GP had 200
mobile units in operation, but Simpson complained that the staff operating them
were not competent. It was this background which prompted
Colonel Simpson’s energetic response, but, since he was the individual most
closely associated with the Beacon Scare, his voice was not always attended to
seriously enough. In all probability, the units were disbanded, the staff was
moved elsewhere, and the equipment was put in storage.
After
the transfer of RSS to SIS in May 1941, MI5 actually started cooperating with
the GPO on the creation of its own mobile units. In a history of B3B written by
a Captain Swann (and introduced by R. L. Hughes of B3B – see KV 4/27), can be
found the following statement: “Two mobile D/F and interception units were
designed and constructed in co-operation with the G.P.O. Radio Branch, for use
in special investigations outside the scope of the R.S.S. units. [What this
means is not clear.] These cars were provided with comprehensive monitoring
and recording facilities, and proved very useful in connection with the special
monitoring assignments involved in the campaign to improve the Signals Security
of the country’s internal services.” A
laboratory and workshop were set up, using contents of a private laboratory
placed at the section’s disposal by one of the MI5 officers. The author said
that it was cost-effective, supplemented by GPO apparatus. Hughes comments that
this enterprise was a mistake, as it competed with RSS, and earned their
enmity. (RSS obviously learned about it.) But ‘it filled the gap that RSS
declined to stop’. Units and laboratories were supplied and equipped by the GPO:
they were not handed over to RSS until March 1944. Thus another revealing
detail about how RSS was seen to be unresponsive to MI5’s needs has come to
light.
I
shall consider Maltby’s approach to the problems of the mobile units later,
when I analyse the minutes of his meetings. Malcolm Frost, meanwhile, was
making constant representations to Liddell about the failings of the operation,
and how it was having a deleterious affect on RSS-MI5 relationships (see KV
4/97). He reported on October 18, 1942, on a meeting with Gambier-Parry, which
resulted in a commitment to provide greater local detection capabilities, but
still using equipment and research facilities from the GPO. A few days later,
Maltby, Elmes and Frost discussed moving MU bases from Leatherhead and
Darlington to Bristol and Newcastle respectively. This was the period (as I
discussed above), where Maltby was reluctantly admitting that little had been
done with the units since RSS took them over from the GPO in the summer of
1941. The record is important, since it shows that Frost was capable of making
some very insightful comments about the state-of-the-art of wireless
interception. On September 8, 1942, he submitted a long report to Guy Liddell
on the implications of signals security in the event of an allied invasion.
Moreover,
policy in the area of follow-up remained confusing. Frost was also energetic in
ensuring that local police forces did not act prematurely when illicit
transmissions were detected – presumably to safeguard the sanctioned traffic of
the double-agents around the country, and to ensure they were not arrested and
unmasked. Regulations that MI5 had to be consulted in all cases had been set up
on August 9, 1941, but they were not being obeyed faithfully. HO 255/987
describes some of the incidents where Frost had to remind the authorities of
the law. “The Home Office has instructed Police that they may not enter houses
of people suspected of possession of illicit wireless transmitters, without
prior reference to MI5.” The exception was the case of suspected mobile
illicit transmitters, since all double agents were stationary. Though even this
policy had its bizarre aspects, as another memorandum notes: “An Individual
apparatus is not enough for impounding; there have to be sufficient components
to form a complete transmitter.” And Frost sometimes received his rewards. One
notorious case (the Kuhn incident, wherein an employee of the Ministry of
Supply was discovered using a radio illegally in Caldy, Cheshire) resulted in
Frost’s receiving an obsequious letter of apology by a Post Office official.
Lastly,
a section of the report on B3E gives a glimpse of how MI5 was at some stage
strengthened by the arrival of personnel from RSS. In a report titled ‘Liaison
with R.S.S. Mobile Units’, the author confirms that MI5 was deploying a
parallel organisation. “For this purpose,’ the report runs, ‘in addition to the
main D/F stations belonging to R.S.S., there was a Mobile Unit Organisation
with 4 bases, namely Barnet, Bristol, Gateshead and Belfast. At each base were
station cars fitted with direction-finding apparatus for the search after the
fixed D/F Stations had defined the approximate area in which it was thought the
agent’s transmitter was situated. It was the duty of B.3.E. to co-operate with
R.S.S. Mobile Unit Section at all times and, if necessary, supply an officer to
accompany the units on any operation which might take place in the U.K.” Such
cases came two ways: through RSS interception, and from MI5 evidence. The MI5
officers on whom liaison duty evolved were all ex-RSS employees.
This
is a strange account, for, if B3E was indeed not established until January 1944
(as Harrison asserts), the threat of detection of domestic illicit wireless
agents (the ‘purpose’ referred to above) was at that time negligible. Is this
another example of grandstanding, in this instance by Sclater? By now, the
primary and consuming focus was to on the challenges of mobile units in Europe,
on ‘the Second Front’, as Liddell and all irritatingly continued to call it,
echoing Stalin’s propaganda. Illegal transmissions would continue to be an
irritant, as HW 34/18 displays, but they would occur when the war was virtually
over, and then won, such as in foreign embassies. One entry from December 20,
1945 even states that ‘Much useful information was passed on to Discrimination
as a result of further transmissions from the Soviet Embassy, only 100 yards
from Colonel Sclater’s home, from where the MU detachment worked.’ The fact
that those who are entrusted with the task of writing the history may distort
it to their own benefit is once again a possibility.
The
Management of RSS
Was Maltby unfairly maligned by Trevor-Roper? The historian’s experiences in dealing with the Controller of the RSS are, it appears, a rare impression. Trevor-Roper’s waspish comments about members of the military whom he encountered during the war may not be entirely fair: he accused Gambier-Parry of ‘maintaining a fleet of Packards’ at Whaddon , without indicating that it had been acquired in order to provide mobile units equipped with wireless to accompany the major command headquarters of the Army with capabilities for Ultra intelligence to be distributed. It is true that the seventy or so 1940 Packard Coupes included three that Gambier-Parry reserved for himself, Maltby and Lord Sandhurst, as Geoffrey Pidgeon’s Secret Wireless War informs us. When the first models were shipped out to North Africa, they were however found to be unsuitable for off-road use, and in 1943 the equipment was installed in existing army vehicles instead. This perhaps echoed the unfortunate experiences of wireless equipment that could not survive parachute jumps.
An equipped RSS Packard in Alexandria
Yet Pidgeon’s fascinating compendium does provide some other hints to Maltby’s character and prowess. He was apparently not the sharpest technical officer, and relied largely on Bob Hornby: the episode of his travelling to Latvia to coach embassy staff (cited by Nigel West in GCHQ) is confirmed by Philip J. Davies, in MI6 and the Machinery of Spying, but does not reflect well on his technical competence. Davies states that Maltby made a ‘cameo appearance’ in the memoir by Leslie Nicholson, the Passport Control Officer (cover for SIS) in Riga, which was confirmed by Kenneth Benton, Nicholson’s deputy. Pidgeon describes how the ace technician, Arthur ‘Spuggy’ Newton, made several trips to Europe before and during the war to install two-way wireless links. Between 1938 and the end of 1941 he was constantly travelling, and one of these assignments involved Nuremberg, Prague, Warsaw, Tallinn, Helsinki and Stockholm. It is probable that Riga was another capital he visited, although one John Darwin was also involved. Maltby may have toured Europe after Newton, checking on the field networks. Pat Hawker recorded how Maltby was more ‘in his element’ showing VIPS around the premises at Whaddon, and Pidgeon claims that Arkley (the headquarters of RSS), ‘although nominally under Maltby, was actually run on a daily basis by Kenneth Morton-Evans’, his deputy.
Maltby
was generally not popular. At one stage there were three candidates in the
running for the position as Gambier-Parry’s second-in-command, Maltby, Micky
Jourdain, and John Darwin. On June 6, 1939, Darwin wrote that he took Maltby
out to lunch, writing: “I think we will get on well together but if I am to be
Gambier’s second-in-command, it is going to be a trifle difficult.” Pidgeon
states that harmony between all three deputies did not last. Squabbling between Gambier-Parry’s wife and
Mrs. Jourdain broke out openly, with the result that Jourdain had to be
transferred. Darwin was in fact mortally
ill, and had to leave the unit in January 1940, so Maltby rose by default to
his post as Gambier-Parry’s deputy.
After
Maltby’s appointment as chief of RSS, Lord Sandhurst, who had been responsible
for assembling the troupe of Voluntary Interceptors, indicated he disapproved
of Maltby’s appointment as Controller of RSS. Pat Hawker, one of the VIs, wrote
the following: “‘Sandy’ was no longer in a position directly to influence RSS
policy; indeed both he and particularly his wife had little affection for
[Colonel] Ted Maltby who had been made Controller, RSS by Gambier-Parry. Unlike
most of the original Section VIII senior personnel, Maltby had not come from Philco
(GB) but had been chief salesman to a leading London hi-fi and recording firm
well used to ingratiating himself with his customers and superiors.” It is
perhaps surprising how the wives were integral to the career prospects of such
officers, and there may be some disdain for commerce behind these opinions, but
the indications are that Maltby was better at public relations than he was in
intelligence matters or leadership.
He
left a remarkable legacy, however. The National Archives file at HW 34/30 offers
a record of all Maltby’s staff meetings from 1941 to 1944. The first noteworthy
aspect of this is that the minutes exist – that a highly secret unit would
perform the bureaucratic task of recording discussions and decisions made. The
second is the manner in which Maltby went about it. He was clearly a lover of
protocol, and believed that his primary job was recording decisions made in
order to improve communications, and the understanding of responsibilities by
his staff. Moreover, each meeting is numbered, so the record can be seen to be
complete. (No meetings were held in 1944 until after D-Day, which is a solid
signal that security was tightened up everywhere.)
The
first meeting of the Senior Officers’ Conference was held on September 29,
1941, and sessions were held each Tuesday in Maltby’s office at Barnet. The
initial intent was to hold meetings weekly: this apparently turned out to be
excessive, and the frequency diminished, with intervals of up to several weeks,
on occasion, but each meeting was still numbered sequentially. Maltby’s
obsession with recording every detail shows an organizing mind, but also
betrays that he really did not distinguish between the highly important and the
trivial: thus the ordering of gumboots for the mobile unit personnel in Thurso,
Scotland, the construction of womens’ lavatories, the ordering of photocopying
equipment, and the precise renaming of Trevor-Roper’s unit as 3/V/w/ are given
exactly the same prominence as the major problem of trying to make the Post Office
deliver the secure lines required for communication between Hanslope and
Whaddon. Maltby is not one who can make things happen behind the scenes: he
likes to delegate, but does not intervene when tasks cannot be accomplished on
time, which probably frustrated many of his team. Lord Sandhurst, for instance,
was an active participant for the first few months, but left to take up a
senior post elsewhere in SIS by the end of 1941.
The authorised historian
(whoever that will be) will do proper justice to these minutes, and maybe they
will be transcribed and published one day. I here simply extract and analyse a
few items that touch the question of the detection of illicit wireless in the
United Kingdom, and shed light on Maltby’s management style. One sees glimpses
of the recognition that a more disciplined approach to classifying suspicious
traffic was needed. Hence a meeting of November 9, 1941 focuses on the matter
of General Search, ‘to ensure that any new and unidentified signal shall be
heard and reported’. The VI, ‘having found a new transmission he should
continue to watch it whenever heard, until his initial report has been returned
with instructions.’ ‘Normally signals such as (i) a known R.S.S. Service. (ii)
Army, Navy and Airforce traffic of all nations. (iii) known commercial
stations. (iv) transmissions previously reported but identified as unwanted by
R.S.S. are not suspicious. But the V.I. should bear in mind that an illicit
signal might be an imitation of (i) or (iii).’ The effort is considered
tedious, but very important. Yet the issue is left dangling, and it was
behaviour like that which must have frustrated Frost and Liddell in MI5. (This
analysis was picked up by Morton Evans in the report mentioned earlier.)
What puzzles me is that a complete register of known approved and official transmitters of wireless messages, with their schedules, callsigns, frequencies, patterns, etc., was not compiled at the outset. (This was a problem that Sclater had identified, noting in his report that at the beginning of the war, ‘MI5 had no official knowledge of many organisations using transmitters: Experimental Stations of the Ministry of Supply, Ministry of Aircraft Production, Police, Fire Brigade, Railways, in addition to all the G.P.O. and Cable and Wireless Stations.’ Sclater estimated a thousand transmitters in operation, excluding the supply ministries and the services.) A forceful leader would have overcome the security objections that would no doubt have been raised, and accomplished such a project, thus making it much easier to detect signals that were not covered by the register. And if an earlier motion had been made in demanding the improvement of Army Signals Security, the troublesome matter of alien transmissions imitating Army procedures could have been forestalled. Indolence in that area led to the departure of Sclater to work on the problem for the Intelligence Board, and then MI5.
Another example involves
Major Keen, the acknowledged worldwide expert on direction-finding. At a meeting on October 7, 1942 (Number 26),
under the line item ‘VHF – DF Equipment’, it is recorded: “Major Keen reported
that he had been in touch with Marconis regarding the delivery of this
equipment, and had found that the holdup was not due to non-availability of
vibrator units but to the fact that Marconis were prone to concentrate on the
orders of those who badgered them most.” The Controller (always identified as
such) responded in less than helpful terms: “The Controller suggested that
Major Keen should apply pressure to expedite delivery and that, if necessary,
he would himself call and see Admiral Grant. It was decided that he would not
do this until Major Keen had made further efforts to expedite delivery.” Major
Keen was not suited to such work, and it was inefficient to make further
demands on him in this role: the matter should have been sorted out at the
Gambier-Parry level.
The file is replete with
such gems. My conclusion is that Trevor-Roper was probably justified in
describing Maltby as he did. He was unsuitable in the post, and resembled an
Evelyn Waugh figure from Men at Arms, promoted above his due by the
fortunes of war, and the fact that Gambier-Parry seemingly found his company
congenial. Moreover, I can find no reference to Major Sclater, Worlledge’s
adjutant. The minutes of the first few meetings include the ‘Deputy Controller’
as one of the attendees, and since most of them were Majors, one might expect
Sclater to have been on the team in that function. Yet the indication is that Lt.-Colonel
Lacey filled that role, as his name appears in the minutes, but he is not
identified separately as attending. (In 1942, Major Morton Evans would become
Deputy Controller: after the war, he joined MI5, and would work in B Division,
as his name appears as ‘B2B’ in the Foote archive. At some stage, in 1950 or
later, he was appointed Security Adviser to the Atomic Energy Authority at
Harwell, since Nigel West states that, when Liddell retired, he replaced Morton
Evans in that role.) As former adjutant, Sclater may have been listed as ‘C/
i/c Administration’, with access to the minutes, but not invited to the
conference. Further investigations may show us the facts, but, in any case, one
cannot see Sclater lasting long under Maltby’s leadership. Worlledge had
resigned, or been forced to move out, in the summer of 1941, and maybe Sclater
soon followed him.
The Double-Cross Operation
A few important activities have come
to light in a perusal of KV 3/96 and 3/97, HW 40/90, KV 4/213 and KV 3/27.
A decryption of Abwehr traffic from
August 13, 1940, made on September 20, indicated that General Feldmarschall
Milch had reported that thirty spies were then in training to be sent to the
United Kingdom. Soon afterwards, Vivian of SIS informed Dick White (assistant
director of B Division) that the Germans claimed to have efficient agents in
many British harbour towns who were supplying information on shipping
movements. This advice may have alarmed White, but it was probably unreliable.
Vivian was able to provide much more useful information in December, when an
agent in Budapest telegraphed that the Germans were planning to insert several
Sudetenland Germans into the country under the guise of being Czech refugees.
This confirmed the German policy of not sending German nationals as part of the
LENA spies, as their cover stories would not hold up so well, and the Nazis may
have judged non-German natives might well escape the direst prosecution of
‘working for the enemy’.
Another item shows that DMI Davidson
was learning – slowly.
KV 4/213 provides great insights into
MI5’s thoughts as to how the double agents should be most effectively used, and
indicates that after the threat of invasion had passed, and plans for using
them for deception proposes to support OVERLORD were not yet relevant, there
was much discussion as how they might be sued for propaganda purposes. (It was
not until July 1942 that operational plans were advanced enough for the
double-agents to be considered suitable for deception purposes.) After one
meeting in mid-February, 1941, when Masterman had been educating members of
government about the project, he added a fascinating observation to his
memorandum to his boss: “D.M.I. asked me after the meeting whether R.S.S.
picked up the messages of our agents. He made the point that, if they did not,
it was an alarming criticism of their efficiency and utility. If, however, they
did, it was equally alarming, because our messages would then be known to a
large number of people, including many of the voluntary interceptors.”
Davidson was groping towards an
important truth. As Masterman pointed out to him (although the record shows
that Masterman himself was not really familiar with the details, since he
admitted that he was not sure how often RSS picked up their messages). ‘it
would be difficult for the voluntary interceptors to decode the messages.’ In
fact it would have been impossible, owing to skills and time pressures, but,
the major point was that, if RSS could pick them up, then certainly German
Intelligence Services would have been able to. That was the perpetual dilemma
that MI5 had to deal with throughout the war.
Lastly, KV 4/27, outlining the
achievements of B3B, contains some rich accounts both of Illicit Wireless
activity investigated by MI5 from 1939-1945, as well as the duties that the
unit assumed in liaising with B1A in controlling double agents, based on interceptions
reported from RSS. The former report is worthy of deeper analysis another time,
but the author reported that about 2,400 incidents were investigated during the
course of the war, and some were of B1A double-agents whose activity had raised
suspicions by housewives, window-cleaners, etc. R. L. Hughes, B4 in August
1946, included the following paragraphs, when describing how he kept RSS
informed of what B1A’s agents were doing: “B.3.B maintained records of no less
than 14 agents who came into this category. The work involved reporting back to
B.1.A.the results of R.S.S. monitoring of any suspicious stations noted and was
undoubtedly of value to both parties. Full details of these cases concerned
will be found in the B.1.A. records referring to ZIGZAG, TATE,
ROVER, SNIPER, BRUTUS, FATHER, MUTT & JEFF, SPRINGBOK, TRICYCLE, DRAGONFLY,
MORIBUND, GARBO, IMMORTAL and MOONBEAM.” Rather mournfully, he added: “The
B.3.B. papers concerning these activities have been destroyed.” The list is
fascinating, as little is known about ROVER or MOONBEAM (apparently based in
Canada), and I have not come across IMMORTAL or MORIBUND before.
Conclusions
In January, 1946, Sir Samuel
Findlater Stewart wrote a report on the achievements of RSS, with
recommendations for its future disposition (see FO 1093/484). His DNB
entry states that, during the war he had been ‘chairman of the Home Defence
Executive and chief civil staff officer (designate) to the commander-in-chief,
Home Forces. He was also appointed chairman of the Anglo-American co-ordinating
committee set up to deal with the logistic problems of the establishment of the
United States forces in Britain, and ‘played a significant part during this
period in dealing with the problems of security’. Findlater Stewart also had to
approve the information to be passed on by the double agents of the XX
Operation. He was thus in all ways in an excellent position to assess the
mission and contribution of RSS. I shall return to Findlater Stewart’s report
in my final chapter, and merely highlight a few of his observations here.
The report is drafted with typical
civil servant vagueness, with heavy use of the passive voice. The author does,
however, indicate that it had originally (when?) been intended (by whom?) that
the RSS should report to Menzies’s Communications Section, because of the
natural affinity between the latter’s establishment of secret radio
communications, and the RSS’s need to detect them, but that Swinton wanted to
wait until Section VIII had matured. Findlater Stewart then went on to write: “The
new system attempted a much greater precision. It started from the proposition
that the basis of an efficient service must be as complete an identification of
all the traffic capable of being received in this country. When this had been
done the task of identifying illicit transmission would be simplified, because
almost automatically the suspect station would be thrown up as one which did
not fit into the pattern of licit transmissions the Service had drawn.”
This is, to me, an astonishing misrepresentation
of the problem and the response. Apart from crediting too much to the level of
systematization achieved, the emphasis on reception in the UK, rather
than transmission from it, betrays a lack of understanding of the
challenge. To assert that all traffic from around the world that was
perceptible by monitoring stations in the UK could be catalogued, and sorted
into licit and illicit transmissions is ridiculous: the volume was constantly
changing, and the notions of ‘licit’ and ‘illicit’ have no meaning on
international airwaves. Moreover, many of the UK’s interception (Y) stations
were overseas. What might have been possible was the creation of a register of
all licit transmitting stations in the UK, so that apparently unapproved
stations – once it could be shown that they were operating from UK soil,
which almost exclusively required detection of the groundwave – could be
investigated. Maybe that was what Findlater Stewart meant, but on this occasion
‘his sound practical judgment of men and things; his capacity to delegate; his
economy of the written word’ (DNB) let him down. And even if we grant
him license for the occasional muddling of his thoughts, he greatly overstated
the discipline of any such system. What he hinted at would have made obvious
sense, and it may have been what he was told at Security Executive meetings,
but it definitely did not happen that way.
Thus, as the story so far covers events
up until the end of 1943, I would make the following conclusions:
Military Intelligence wanted to cast off RSS (MI8c), because of a)
the problems of managing civilian staff, b) the struggles in dealing with the
General Post Office, and c) the responsibility of a mission for civilian
protection. Yet it neglected its responsibility of wireless security in the
military. Worlledge and Sclater were champions of the latter, but lost out.
Worlledge’s pressing for MI5 after Simpson left, however, was foolish. If Military
Intelligence couldn’t solve the GPO supply problem, why did it think MI5 or SIS
could do so?
Y (interception) services were surpassingly scattered, among the
GPO, RSS (professional stations as well as Voluntary Interceptors), the Army,
Navy and Air Force, Marconi’s Wireless Telegraph Company, and even GCHQ itself.
This was probably not an efficient method of organizing the collection of
potentially harmful messages and valuable enemy traffic. Simpson’s energies
within MI5 and the efforts of the high-level Y investigation in 1940 appeared
to proceed in parallel, without any cross-fertilisation. The new Y Committee,
set up in 1941, was not an effective force. The VIs were allowed to drift into
concentrating more on Abwehr signals, and the domestic threat was not
approached in a disciplined fashion. Gambier-Parry’s and Vivian’s repeated
denials of responsibility for interception are very provocative in their
disingenuousness. (Even such an accomplished historian as David Kenyon has been
swept into this misconception: in his 2019 book, Bletchley Park and D-Day,
he describes RSS as ‘a body tasked with the interception of
Abwehr wireless traffic’.)
RSS was weakly led, but it did not receive much direction – not from Maltby, not from Gambier-Parry (whose
preferences were more in design of equipment), not from Menzies (who, according
to JIC chairman Cavendish-Bentinck, would not have survived for more than a
year had it not been for GC&CS), not from the JIC, not from the General
Staff, and certainly not from the Foreign Office or the Home Office. Findlater
Stewart of the Security Executive was confused, as was Davidson, the Director
of Military Intelligence.
Gambier-Parry’s
Section VIII did some things very well (the secure
distribution of ULTRA), but others not so well (manufacturing of equipment for
SIS and SOE agents, and providing mobile units to accompany the army).
Signals Security did not appear to be the responsibility of
Section VIII or RSS, but it took an ex-RSS adjutant, working independently for
the Intelligence Board, and then for MI5, to get matters straightened out. A
History of Signals Security needs to be written: not just RSS (but other Y),
not just GC&CS, not just SIS (where Jeffery fails). It would analyse MI5,
SIS, including RSS & GC&CS, the armed forces, the GPO, the BBC, the
JIC, the General Staff and Military Intelligence, the Foreign Office and
Governments-in-exile.
The practice of domestic
illicit wireless was never tackled properly, especially when it came to a
disciplined approach of tracking it down. What mobile units were supposed to
achieve was never defined, and they remained a gesture of competence,
frequently inventive, but too sparse and too remote to be a rapid task-force.
Fortunately, they were never really required.
MI5 was caught in a Morton’s Fork over its double agents, but got
away with it. It desperately did not want them to be casually discovered, and
the whole secret to come out in public. It wanted RSS to be able to detect
their transmissions, even when they were masked as official military signals,
as it was important that MI5 became aware of any unknown German agents who had
infiltrated the country’s defences, and were transmitting back to Germany. Yet,
if RSS did indeed pick up and discern these transmissions, it meant that the
Germans might in turn be expected to wonder why its agents were so remarkably
able to broadcast for so long undetected.
There was a tendency, once the war was won, to praise every
section enthusiastically. The RSS VIs did well, and so did GCHQ, but SIS and
Section VIII had a very mixed track-record, and the Double Cross operation was
exaggeratedly praised. A remarkable number of persons and officers were
unsuited to their jobs, and, despite the coolness with which the authorised
histories describe events, the conventional array of jealousies, feuds,
ambitions, rivalries and even blunders exerted a large influence on
proceedings.
The last chapter of the saga will describe the events of the first six months of 1944, when the FORTITUDE deception campaign led to the successful invasion of Normandy.
This month’s Commonplace entries can be found here.
One of the most stressful days of my life occurred at the end of July 1980. I had been spending the previous few months commuting between the UK and the USA, courtesy of Freddy Laker, spending three weeks in Connecticut before a break of a week at home in Coulsdon with Sylvia and the infant James, and then flying back to the USA for another sojourn. For some months, we had been trying to sell the house, while I looked for a place to live in Norwalk, CT., and began to learn about US customs, banking practices, documentary requirements for applying for a mortgage, etc. etc.. Meanwhile, I started implementing the changes to the Technical Services division of the software company I was working for, believing that some new methods in the procedures for testing and improving the product with field enhancements, as well as in the communications with the worldwide offices and distributors, were necessary. Sylvia successfully sold the house. I had to arrange for our possessions to be transported and stored, and decide when and how we should eventually leave the UK. On the last decision, Sylvia and I decided that using the QEII for the relocation would be a sound choice, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, perhaps, and one that would be less stressful for the three of us. We thought we would stay in the USA for a few years before returning home.
And then, three days
before we were due to sail, I discovered that our visas had still not come
through. I had been told by my boss (the CEO of the company) that an attorney
who specialised in such matters would apply for an L-1 visa (a training visa,
of limited duration), and that it would later be upgraded to a resident alien’s
visa. I had met the attorney, and given him all the details, and he had
promised me that I would be able to pick it up at the American Embassy in
London. But when I went there, the officials knew nothing about it. Some
frantic phone-calls across the Atlantic followed, and I was eventually able to
pick up the visas the day before we left Southampton. Such was the panic that I
cannot recall how we travelled from home to Southampton, or how we packed for
the week’s cruise with a ten-month old son, but we made it. The cruise itself
turned out to have its own nightmares, as my wallet was stolen (probably by a professional
pickpocket who funded his trips by such activities), and I spent the last three
days on the ship desperately looking for it, since it contained my driving
licence (necessary for applying for a US driver’s license), as well as a few
other vital items. It was not a comfortable start to our new life.
Fortunately, we still had our passports and visas intact. We were picked up in New York, and I was able to show Sylvia her new house (which, of course, she had never seen before). If she had any qualms, she was very diplomatic in suppressing them. We settled in: the neighbours were kind. They were Jews originally from Galicia, Bill and Lorraine Landesberg. I recall that Bill named ‘Lemberg’ as his place of birth – what is now known as Lvov, in Ukraine. (Incidentally, I recall a school colleague named Roy Lemberger. I conclude now that his forefathers must have moved from Lemberg some generations before in order for his ancestor to be given the name ‘the man from Lemberg’.) I suspect that the Landesbergs found us a bit exotic, even quaint.
I recall also that my
boss had encouraged me to rent, not buy (‘Interest rates will come down in a
couple of years’), but I had thought that he was probably trying to cut down on
relocation expenses. That conclusion was solidified by another incident. During
the summer, he had succeeded in selling his outfit to a local timesharing
company (‘timesharing’ being what was not called ‘cloud computing’ at the
time). I obtained a copy of the parent company’s Personnel Policies, and
discovered that it offered a more generous overseas relocation allowance, and
presented my findings to my boss. He was taken by surprise, and somewhat
crestfallen, as he knew nothing of the policy, and the expenses had to come out
of his budget.
In any case, this windfall
helped with the acquisition of new appliances, required because of the voltage
change. I must have applied for a re-issue of my UK licence, and soon we
acquired two cars. We chose General Motors models, a decision that my
colleagues at work also found quaint, as they were buying German or Swedish
automobiles, and stated that no-one would buy an American car those days.
Gradually, we found a pace and rhythm to life, a reliable baby-sitter, and the
changes I had made at the company seemed to have been received well –
especially by the support personnel I had left behind in Europe. My parents
were coming out to visit us that Christmas.
Indeed, I was next
recommended (by my predecessor) to host and speak at the key product Users’
Group being held that autumn/fall. I later learned that relationships between
the company management and the Users’ Group were very strained, because of
failed promises and indifferent support, and I was thus a useful replacement to
address the group – a fresh face, with a British accent, an expert in the
product, with no corporate baggage. I thus quite eagerly accepted the
assignment, prepared my speeches, and set out for Toronto, where the meeting
was being held. It all went very well: the group seemed to appreciate the
changes I was making, and I was able to offer several tips on how to diagnose
the system expertly, and improve its performance.
Thus I made my way back
through Toronto airport with some glow and feeling of success. Until I
approached the US customs post, after check-in. There I was told that I was not
going to be allowed to re-enter the United States, as I was in possession of an
L-1 visa, and as such, had committed an offence in leaving the country, and
could not be re-admitted. (My visa had not been checked on leaving the US, or
on entry to Canada, where my British passport would have been adequate.) I was
marched off to a small room to await my fate. Again, the experience must have
been so traumatic that I don’t recall the details, but I believe that I
pleaded, and used my selling skills, to the effect that it had all been a
harmless mistake, and Canada was really part of the North-American-GB alliance,
and it wouldn’t happen again, and it was not my fault, but that of my employer,
and I had a young family awaiting me, so please let me through. The outcome was
that a sympathetic officer eventually let me off with an admonishment, but I
could not help but conclude that a tougher individual might not have been so
indulgent. What was the alternative? To have put me in a hotel, awaiting a
judicial inquiry? This could not have been the first time such a mistake
occurred, but maybe they didn’t want to deal with the paperwork. And I looked
and sounded harmless, I suppose.
I eventually acquired the much cherished ‘Green Card’, which gave me permanent resident status, and the ability to change jobs. (That became important soon afterwards, but that is another story.) This was an arduous process, with more interviews, forms to fill out, travelling to remote offices to wait in line before being interrogated by grumpy immigration officials. Many years later, we repeated the process when we applied for citizenship. It was something we should have done before James reached eighteen, as he had to go through the process as well on reaching that age. One reason for the delay was that, for a period in the 1990s, adopting US citizenship meant a careful rejection of any other allegiance, and we were not yet prepared to abandon out UK nationality. At the end of the decade, however, we were allowed to retain both, so long as we declared our primary allegiance to the USA. (Julia was born here, so is a true American citizen, as she constantly reminds us.) More questions, visits to Hartford, CT., citizenship tests on the US constitution and history, and then the final ceremony. I noticed a change: when I returned from a visit abroad, and went through the ‘US Citizens’ line, the customs official would look at my passport, smile and say ‘Welcome Home’.
Illegal Immigration
All this serves as a
lengthy introduction to my main theme: what is it about ‘illegal immigration’
that the Democratic Party does not understand? I know that I am not alone in
thinking, as someone who has been through the whole process of gaining
citizenship, that such a firm endorsement of an illegal act is subversive of
the notion of law, and the judicial process itself. When, at one of the early
Democratic Presidential Candidate debates held on television, all the speakers
called not only for ‘open borders’ but also for providing free healthcare to
all illegal immigrants and asylum-seekers, I was aghast. Did they really think
that was a vote-winner, or were they all simply parading their compassionate
consciences on their sleeves, hoping to pick up the ‘progressive’ or the
‘Hispanic’ vote? For many congresspersons seem to believe that all ‘Hispanics’
must be in favour of allowing unrestricted entry to their brethren and sisterhood
attempting to come here from ‘Latin’ America. (Let us put aside for now the
whole nonsense of what ‘Hispanic’ or ‘Latino’ means, in relation to those
inhabitants of Mexico and South America who speak Quechua, Aymara, Nahuatl,
Zapotec, German, Portuguese, etc. etc.) Many ‘Hispanic’ citizens who are here
legally likewise resent the entitlements that others from south of the border
claim, suggesting that it is somehow their ‘right’ to cross the border
illegally, and set up home somewhere in the USA. There should either be a
firmer effort to enforce the law, as it is, or to change it.
Moreover, the problem is
by no means exclusively one of illegal immigration. It concerns authorized visitors
with temporary visas who outstay their welcome. Almost half of the undocumented
immigrants in the USA entered the country with a visa, passed inspection at the
airport (probably), and then remained. According to figures compiled by the
Center for Migration Studies, ‘of the roughly 3.5. million undocumented
immigrants who entered the country between 2010 and 2017, 65% arrived with full
permission stamped in their passports.’ The government departments responsible
can apparently not identify or track such persons. I read this week that an
estimated 1.5 million illegal immigrants reside in Britain.
The problem of mass
migration, of refugees, of asylum-seekers affects most of the world, in an
environment where asylum was conceived as a process affecting the occasional
dissident or victim of persecution, not thousands trying to escape from poverty
or gang violence. But we do not hear of throngs of people trying to enter
Russia, China, or Venezuela. It is always the liberal democracies. Yet even the
most open and generous societies are feeling the strain, as the struggles of EU
countries trying to seal their borders shows. It is not a question of being
‘Pro’ or ‘Anti’ immigration, but more a recognition that the process of
assimilation has to be more gradual. A country has to take control of its own
immigration policy.
I was reminded that this cannot be made an issue of morality, instead of political pragmatism, when I recently read the obituary of the Japanese Sadako Ogata, the first woman to lead the U.N. Refugee Agency. She was quoted as saying: “I am not saying Japan should accept all of them [people escaping from Syria]. But if Japan doesn’t open a door for people with particular reasons and needs, it’s against human rights.” The statement contained the essence of the dilemma: Ogata recognised presumably inalienable human ‘rights’ to move from one country to another, but then immediately qualified it by suggesting that only ‘particular reasons and needs’ could justify their acceptance. And who is to decide, therefore, which reasons and needs are legitimate? Not an Open Borders policy, but some form of judicial investigation, presumably.
. . . and Healthcare
The Democratic candidates then compounded their confusion by their demonstration of ‘compassion’ for claiming that they would allow such illegal immigrants free access to healthcare. Now here is another controversial example of the clash between ‘rights’ and pragmatism. Heaven knows, the healthcare ‘system’ in this country is defective and ‘broken’, but then I suspect that it is in any other country where, alternatively, medical treatment is largely controlled by the state. I read last week that Britain’s National Health Service has 100,000 vacancies, and that 4.4 million persons are now on waiting lists. (We have the antithesis of the problem over here. While a patient needing a knee-replacement has to wait six months or more in the UK, when I was referred to a knee specialist a few months ago, within ten minutes, without even calling for an MRI, the doctor recommended, because of arthritis showing up on X-Rays, that I needed a knee-replacement, and, before you could say ‘Denis Compton’, he would probably have fitted me in for the operation the following week if I had pursued it. His prosperity relies on his doing as many operations as possible. I am successfully undertaking more conservative treatments. Moreover, the American insurance system is littered with incidents where insurance companies pay absurd sums for processes that never happened.) France, I read, is having similar problems as the UK: is Finland the current model for how welfare and enterprise coexist successively? Maybe we should all migrate to Finland.
‘Medicare for all’. Apart from the fact that such a program is estimated by its champions to cost about $30 trillion over the next ten years, where will all the doctors and medical practitioners come from to satisfy the new demands? Will they be raided from ‘developing’ nations, who would surely ill afford the loss? Again, this matter is often represented as an ‘entitlement’ issue, one of ‘basic human rights’. Consider what the UN says. Article 25 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that ‘Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services.’ Well, one can regret the obviously sexist language here – what about ‘every person and his or her wife or husband, and members of their blended or rainbow family, including members of the LGBQT community’ – but let that pass. It also did not state that subscribing nations should appoint a Minister for Loneliness. This was 1948, after all.
Reflect also on what the Declaration does not
say: “Every individual should
have access to healthcare, including the ability to gain, in a matter of four weeks,
an appointment with a reputable gastro-enterologist whose practice is within
twenty miles of where he or she lives.” “Every individual has the right to be
treated by a qualified shaman who can recite the appropriate incantations over
the invalid for an affordable fee.” “Every individual has the right to decline
approved immunization processes for their children out of religious
conviction.” I do not make these points as a frivolous interjection, but again
to point out how the provision of healthcare in any country has to be based on
pragmatics and economics, and will often clash with religious opposition and
superstitions.
It is bewildering how
many of the electorate in the USA appear to have swallowed the financial
projections of Senators Warren and Sanders for their expansive plans. To
suggest that such money can be raised by taxing what are mostly illiquid
assets, and that such government programs could presumably be permanently
funded by the continuance of such policies, is economic madness. Some
commentators have pointed out that wealthy individuals would find ways of
avoiding such confiscation, yet I have noticed very little analysis of the
effect on asset prices themselves in a continued forced sale. The value of many
assets cannot be determined until they are sold; they would have to be sold in
order to raise cash for tax purposes; if they are to be sold, there have to be
cash-owning buyers available; if a buyers’ market evolves, asset values will
decline. (One renowned economist suggested that the government could accept
stocks and shares, for instance, and then sell them on the open market . . .
. !) The unintended consequences in the areas of business investment and
pension values would be extraordinary. Yet the Democratic extremists are now
claiming that such a transfer of wealth will provoke economic growth, quickly
forgetting the lessons of a hundred years of socialism, and also, incidentally,
undermining what some of them declare concerning the deceleration of climate
change.
In summary, we are
approaching an election year with a Democratic Party desperate to oust Donald
Trump, but in disarray. The candidates for Presidential nominee are a
combination of the hopelessly idealistic, the superannuated and confused, and
the economically illiterate. I believe that those who stress the principles of
Open Borders and a revolutionary Medicare for All program seriously misjudge
the mood and inclinations of what I suppose has to be called ‘Middle America’.
But now Michael Bloomberg has stepped into the ring. As [identity alert]
‘an Independent of libertarian convictions with no particular axe to grind’, I
have found it practically impossible to vote for either a Republican or a
Democratic Presidential candidate since being granted the vote, but here comes
someone of proven leadership quality, a pragmatist (for the most part), and one
who has changed his political affiliations – just like Winston Churchill. In a
recent interview, he described himself as ‘a social liberal, fiscal moderate,
who is basically nonpartisan’. I could vote for him. But Michael – you will be
78 next February! Another old fogey, like Biden and Sanders! Why didn’t you
stand four years ago?
The Kremlin Letters
‘The Kremlin Letters’
I started this bulletin by referring to experiences from thirty-nine years ago, and conclude by describing events thirty-nine years before that, in 1941. This month I started reading The Kremlin Letters, subtitled Stalin’s Wartime Correspondence with Churchill and Roosevelt, edited by David Reynolds and Vladimir Pechatnov, which was published last year. It is proving to be an engrossing compilation, since it exploits some previously undisclosed Russian archives. The Acknowledgements inform readers that ‘a carefully researched Russian text was revised and rewritten for an Anglophone audience’. The core material is therefore what historians prefer to base their interpretations on – original source documents, the authenticity and accuracy of which can probably not be denied. A blurb by Gabriel Gorodetsky on the cover, moreover, makes the challenging assertion that the book ‘rewrites the history of the war as we knew it.’ ‘We’? I wondered to whom he was referring in that evasive and vaguely identified group.
Did it live up to the challenge?
A crucial part of the editing process is providing context and background to the
subjects covered in the letters. After reading only one chapter, I started to
have my doubts about the accuracy of the whole process. David Reynolds is a
very accomplished historian: I very much enjoyed his In Command of History,
which analysed Winston Churchill’s questionable process of writing history as
well as making it. I must confess to finding some of Reynolds’s judgments in The
Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth Century a little dubious, as
he seemed (for example) to understate what I saw as many of Stalin’s crimes.
What caught my attention
was a reference to the Diaries of Ivan Maisky, the Soviet Ambassador in
London for much of WWII. I have previously explained that I think Maisky’s
Diaries are unreliable as a record of what actually transpired in his conversations
with Churchill and Eden, in particular, and regretted the fact that certain
historians (such as Andrew Roberts) have grabbed on to the very same Gabriel
Gorodetsky’s edition of the Diaries (2015) as a vital new resource in
interpreting the evolution of Anglo-Soviet relations. (see https://coldspur.com/guy-liddell-a-re-assessment/) Now David Reynolds
appears to have joined the throng. Is this another mutual admiration society?
The controversy (as I
see it) starts with Stalin’s initial letter to Churchill, dated July 18, 1941,
a few weeks after Barbarossa (the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany),
following Churchill’s two messages of support communicated via Ambassador
Cripps. Stalin’s message included the following paragraph:
“It is easy to imagine
that the position of the German forces would have been many times more
favourable had the Soviet troops had to face the attack of the German forces
not in the region of Kishinev, Lwow, Brest, Kaunas and Viborg, but in the
region of Odessa, Kamenets Podolski, Minsk and the environs of Leningrad”. He
cleverly indicated the change of borders without referring to the now embarrassing
phenomenon of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. (Stalin then went on to request,
absurdly and impertinently, that Great Britain establish ‘fronts’ against
Germany in northern France and the Arctic.)
What is this geographical lesson about? Reynolds introduces the letter by writing: “And he sought to justify the USSR’s westward expansion in 1939 under the Nazi-Soviet Pact as a life-saver in 1941, because it had given the Red Army more space within which to contain Hitler’s ‘sudden attack’.” My reaction, however, was that, while Stalin wanted to move very quickly on justifying the borders defined by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, his military analysis for Churchill’s benefit was poppycock. For what had been a strong defensive border built up during the 1930s, known as the Stalin Line, had effectively been dismantled, and was being replaced by the Molotov Line, which existed as a result of aggressive tactics, namely the shared carve-up of Poland and the Baltic States by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. (See diagrams below. In all the historical atlases I possess, I have not been able to find a single map that shows the Stalin and Molotov Lines, and the intervening territory, clearly, and have thus taken a chart from Read’s and Fisher’s Deadly Embrace, which does not include the border with Finland, extended it, and added the locations Stalin listed.)
The Stalin LineThe Molotov LineThe Area Between the Stalin Line and the Molotov Line
I was confident, from my reading of the histories, that the Soviet Union’s annexation of the limitrophe states (as Hitler himself referred to them) had weakened the country’s ability to defend itself. After all, if the ‘buffer’ states’ that Stalin had invaded (under the guise of the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact) had been allowed to remain relatively undisturbed, Hitler’s invasion of them on the way to Russia in the spring of 1941 would have warned the Soviet Union that Hitler was encroaching on the Soviet Union’s ‘sphere of influence’ and that its traditional, internationally recognised border would soon be under attack. ‘More space’ was not a benefit, in other words. Thus the analysis of this period must address how seriously Stalin believed that forcing the buffer states to come under the control of the Soviet army would impede a possible invasion (which Stalin expressly still feared) rather than facilitate it. Reynolds does not enter this debate.
Ambassador Maisky
delivered this message from Stalin to Churchill at Chequers. Reynolds then
echoes from Maisky’s diary the fact that Churchill was very pleased at
receiving this ‘personal message’, and then goes on to cite Maisky’s impression
of Churchill’s reaction to the border claims. “Churchill also expressed
diplomatic approval of Stalin’s defence of shifting Soviet borders west in
1939-40: ‘Quite right! I’ve always understood and sought to justify the policy
of “limited expansion” which Stalin has pursued in the last two years’.”
Now, my first reaction
was that Churchill, as a military historian and as a politician, could surely
not have expressed such opinions. I seemed to recall that he had been highly
critical of both the Nazi invasion of Poland as well as the Soviet Union’s
cruel takeover of the Baltic States, where it had terrorized and executed
thousands, as well as its disastrous war against Finland in the winter of 1940.
(Lithuania was initially assigned to Germany, according to the Pact, but was
later transferred to the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence.) Churchill must also
have known that dismantling a strong defensive wall, and trying to establish a
new one, under pressure, in countries where Stalin had menaced and antagonised
the local citizenry, would have been a disastrous mistake as preparation for
the onslaught that Hitler had long before advertised in Mein Kampf. Did
he really make that statement to Maisky? Had these assertions of Maisky’s been
confirmed from other sources?
Then I turned the page
to read Churchill’s response to Stalin, dated July 20. Here was the evidence in
black and white: “I fully realise the military advantage you have gained by
forcing the enemy to deploy and engage on forward Western fronts, thus
exhausting the force of his initial effort.” This was astonishing! What was
Churchill thinking? Either I was completely wrong in my recollection of how
historians had interpreted the events of Barbarossa, or Churchill had been woefully
ignorant of what was going on, and insensitive to the implications of his
message, or the British Prime Minister had been tactfully concealing his real
beliefs about the annexations in an attempt to curry favour with Generalissimo
Stalin. Which was it? In any case, he was shamelessly and gratuitously expressing
to Stalin approval of the brutal invasion of the territory of sovereign states,
the cause he had gone to war over. Churchill’s message consisted of an
unnecessary and cynical response to Stalin’s gambit, which must have caused many
recriminations in negotiations later on. As for ‘exhausting the force of his
initial effort’, Churchill was clutching at Stalin’s straws. Where was the
evidence?
I decided to look up evidence
from sources in my private library to start with. First, Maisky’s Diaries.
Indeed, the details are there. Maisky indicates that he translated (and typed
up) the message himself, and that, since he told Anthony Eden that it dealt
with ‘military-strategic issues’, the Foreign Secretary did not request that he
be in attendance when it was read. Maisky adds that ‘the prime minister started
reading the communiqué ‘slowly, attentively, now and then consulting a
geographical map that was close at hand’. (Those placenames would certainly
have not been intimately familiar.) Maisky singles out, rather implausibly,
Churchill’s reaction to the ‘expansion’ policy. When Churchill had finished
reading the message, however, Maisky asked him what he thought of it, and
Churchill ‘replied that first he had to consult HQ’. One thus wonders whether
he would have given anything away so enthusiastically in mid-stream, and why he
would have concentrated on the geographical details when the substance of the
message related to more critical matters.
What other records of
this visit exist? I turned to John Colville’s Fringes of Power: 10 Downing
Street Diaries,1939-1955. Colville records the meeting, albeit briefly. “At
tea-time the Soviet Ambassador arrived, bringing a telegram for the P.M. from
Stalin who asks for diversions in various places by English forces. It is hard
for the Russians to understand how unprepared we still are to take the
offensive. I was present while the P.M. explained the whole situation very
clearly to poor, uninformed Maisky.”
Maisky records Churchill’s protestations about the futility of trying to
invade mainland Europe without admitting his own miserable ignorance: Colville
makes no reference to the exchange over the Baltic States.
Did Churchill or Eden
make any relevant observation at this time? I have only my notes from Eden’s The
Reckoning, which refer to Maisky’s demands for the Second Front, but
indicate nothing about the Baltic States at this time. (The matter would
surface ominously later in the year, when joint ‘war aims’ were discussed.). I
own only the abridgment of Churchill’s war memoirs, which contains no
description of the meeting with Maisky. And what about the biographies? The
Last Lion, by William Manchester and Paul Reid, while spending several paragraphs
on Stalin’s demands for a second front, makes no mention of the telegram and
the Maisky meeting, or the contentious issue of Soviet borders. Roy Jenkins’s Churchill
is of little use: ‘Maisky’ appears only once in the Index, and there are no
entries for ‘Barbarossa’ or ‘Baltic States’. I shall have to make a visit to
the UNCW Library in the New Year, in order to check the details.
Next, the military
aspects of the case. Roger Moorhouse, in The Devil’s Alliance, provides
a recent, in-depth assessment. “Since
the mid-1920s, the USSR had been constructing a network of defenses along its
western border: the ukreplinnye raiony,
or ‘fortified areas,’ known colloquially as the ‘Stalin Line.’ However, with
the addition of the territories gained in collaboration with the Germans in
1939 and 1940, those incomplete defenses now lay some three hundred or so
kilometers east of the new Soviet frontier. Consequently, in the summer of
1940, a new network of defenses was begun further west, snaking through the
newly gained territories from Telŝiai in Lithuania, via eastern Poland, to the
mouth of the Danube in Bessarabia. It would later be unofficially named the
‘Molotov Line’.” These were the two boundaries to which Stalin referred,
obliquely, in his telegram.
Moorhouse explains how
the Soviets were overwhelmed in the first days of the invasion, partly because
of Stalin’s insistence that his forces do nothing to ‘provoke’ Hitler, but also
because his airfields and troops were massively exposed. “After two days, the
capital of the Lithuanian Soviet Republic, Vilnius, fell to the Germans; a week
after that, the Latvian capital, Riga, the Byelorussian capital, Minsk, and the
western Ukrainian city of L’vov (the former Polish Lwów) had also fallen. By
that time, some German units had already advanced over 250 miles from their
starting position. Already, almost all the lands gained under the pact had been
lost.” The Red Air Force had been annihilated on the ground, with thousands of
aircraft destroyed because they sat in airfield in rows, unprotected and
unguarded. “Facing the full force of the blitzkrieg, the Red Army was in
disarray, with surviving troops often fleeing eastward alongside columns of
similarly leaderless refugees. In some cases, officers attempting to stem the panic
and restore order were shot by their own troops.”
This account is echoed
by Antony Beevor, in The Second World War: “The
Red Army had been caught almost completely unprepared. In the months before the
invasion, the Soviet leader had forced it to advance from the Stalin Line
inside the old frontier and establish a forward defence along the
Molotov-Ribbentrop border. Not enough had been done to prepare the new
positions, despite Zhukhov’s energetic attempts. Less than half of the
strongpoints had any heavy weapons. Artillery regiments lacked their tractors,
which had been sent to help with the harvest. And Soviet aviation was caught on
the ground, its aircraft lined up in rows, presenting easy targets for the
Luftwaffe’s pre-emptive strikes on sixty-six airfields. Some 1,800 fighters and
bombers were said to have been destroyed on the first day of the attack, the
majority on the ground. The Luftwaffe lost just thirty-five aircraft.” Michael
Burleigh, in his outstanding Moral Combat, reinforces the notion of
Soviet disarray: “On 22 June three million troops, 3,350 tanks, 71.146
artillery pieces and 2,713 aircraft unleashed a storm of destruction on an
opponent whose defences were in total disarray, and whose forces were deployed
far forward in line with a doctrinaire belief in immediate counter-attack.”
Yet I struggled to find detailed
analysis of the effect of the moved defensive line in accounts of the battles.
Christer Bergstrom’s Operation Barbarossa 1941: Hitler Against Stalin,
offers a detailed account of the makeup of the opposing forces, and the
outcomes of the initial dogfights and assaults, but no analysis on the effect
on communications and supply lines that the extended frontier caused.
Certainly, owing to persecutions of local populations, the Soviet armies and
airforce were operating under hostile local conditions, but it is difficult to
judge how inferior the Soviet Union’s response was because of the quality of
the outposts defending the frontier, as opposed to, say, the fact that the military’s
officers had been largely executed during the Great Purge. The Soviet airfields
were massively exposed because German reconnaissance planes were allowed to
penetrate deep into the newly-gained territory to take photographs – something
they surely would not have been permitted to perform beyond the traditional
boundaries. On the other hand, I have found no evidence that the Soviet
Union was better able to defend itself in Operation Barbarossa because of the
movement of its western border, as Stalin claimed in his telegram.
I have also started to
inspect biographies of Stalin. Dmitri Volkogonov’s Stalin: Triumph and
Tragedy (1998, English translation 1991) is quick to list several causes
for the disaster of Barbarossa: Stalin’s hubris in wanting to restore the old
imperial borders too quickly, the lack of attention to defensive strategies, the
fact that, in January 1941, General Zhukov recommended unsuccessfully that the
‘unfavourable system of fortified districts’ be moved back 100 kilometres from
the new border, the overall zeal in meeting production quotas resulting in too
many defective aircraft, and high crash rates, and their poor protection on
exposed airfields. But while criticising Stalin, Volkogonov appears the
inveterate Communist, claiming equivocally that
‘while the moral aspect of the annexation of the Baltic states was
distinctly negative, the act itself was a positive [sic!] one’, that
‘the overwhelming majority of the Baltic population were favourable to their
countries’ incorporation into the Soviet Union in August 1940’, and even that
‘the decision to take over Western Ukraine and Byelorussia . . . was broadly in accord with the desire
of the local working class population’. These statements are highly
controversial, and further study is called for. Meanwhile, Marshall Zhukov in
his Memoirs (1969) offers a mostly propagandist account of the
tribulations of 1941, but does provide the scandalous information that German
saboteurs had cut the telegraph cables in all of the Western Frontier
Districts, and that most units had no radio back-up facilities.
How did Churchill’s attitudes
over the Baltic States evolve over time? Anthony Read’s and David Fisher’s Deadly
Embrace contains an indication of Churchill’s early opinions cited from the
latter’s Gathering Storm: “The British people . . . have a right, in conjunction with the
French Republic, to call upon Poland not to place obstacles in the way of a
common cause. Not only must the full co-operation of Russia be accepted, but
the three Baltic States, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, must also be brought
into the association . . There is no means of maintaining an eastern
front against Nazi aggression without the active aid of Russia. Russian
interests are deeply concerned in preventing Herr Hitler’s designs on Eastern
Europe.” Yet that was said in April 1939, well before the pact was signed.
Churchill at that time was surely not considering that the Baltic States had to
be occupied by the Soviet Union in order to provide a bulwark against
the Germans. In any case, the States (and Poland) were more in fear of the
Bolsheviks than they were of the Nazis.
I turned to Robert
Rhodes James’s edition of his speeches, Churchill Speaks 1897-1963, and
was rather astonished by what I found. On October 1, 1939, after war had been
declared, and after the dismemberment of Poland, Churchill referred to
‘Russia’s’ interests without referring to the fate of the Baltic States. “What
is the second event of this first month? It is, of course, the assertion of the
power of Russia. Russia has pursued a cold policy of self-interest. We could
have wished that the Russian armies should be standing on their present line as
the friends and allies of Poland instead of as invaders. But that the Russian
armies should stand on the line was clearly necessary for the safety of Russia
against the Nazi menace.” A highly inflammatory and cynical opinion expressed
by the future Prime Minister, who quickly turned his attention to the Balkans
in his ‘riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’ oration.
A few months later,
Churchill picked up his analysis with commentary on the Finnish war, where the
Soviet invasion (part of the exercise to create a buffer zone between Leningrad
and hostile forces) had provoked a robust reaction in Britain, and even calls
to send troops to help the Finns. Again, Churchill evinced more rhetoric than
substance. “Only Finland – superb, nay sublime – in the jaws of peril – Finland
shows what fine men can do. The service rendered by Finland to mankind is
magnificent. They have exposed, for all to see, the military incapacity of the
Red Army and of the Red Air Force. Many illusions about Soviet Russia have been
dispelled in these fierce weeks of fighting in the Arctic Circle. Everyone can
see how Communism rots the soul of a nation: how it makes it abject and hungry
in peace, and proves it base and abominable in war. We cannot tell what the
fate of Finland may be, but no more mournful spectacle could be presented to
what is left to civilized mankind than this splendid Northern race should be at
last worn down and reduced to servitude by the dull brutish force of
overwhelming numbers.” Well, it surely did not take the invasion of Finland to
show how a nation subjugated by Communism could be ruined, as the famines of
the Ukraine and Stalin’s Gulag had showed.
On March 30, 1940,
Churchill was again critical of the two totalitarian states. “What a frightful
fate has overtaken Poland! Here was a community of nearly thirty-five millions
of people, with all the organization of a modern government, and all the traditions
of an ancient state, which in a few weeks was dashed out of civilized existence
to become an incoherent multitude of tortured and starving men, women and
children, ground beneath the heel of two rival forms of withering and blasting
tyranny.” Indeed, sir. Yet Churchill could be remarkably selective in
identifying the places suffering under extremist cruelty: Britain was at war
with Germany, not with the Soviet Union, and he would come to soften his
criticism of Stalin’s variety of tyranny.
For the year after his
appointment as Prime Minister, Churchill was concentrated primarily on the war
in western Europe, and the threats of invasion, and his speeches reflect those
concerns. All that time, however, he was welcoming the time when the Soviet
Union would be forced to join the Allies. In February, 1941, he reminded his
audience that Hitler was already at the Black Sea, and that he ‘might tear
great provinces out of Russia.’ In April, he said that the war ‘may spread
eastward to Turkey and Russia’, and that ‘the Huns may lay their hands for a
time upon the granaries of the Ukraine and the oil-wells of the Caucasus.” By
this time he was warning Stalin of the coming German invasion, advice that the dictator
chose to ignore.
When the invasion
occurred, Churchill immediately declared his support for the Soviet Union. This
was the occasion (June 22, 1941) when he professed that ‘no one has been a more
consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the past twenty-five years’.
But then he dipped into his most sentimental and cloying prose: “I see the
Russian soldiers standing on the threshold of their native land, guarding the
fields which their fathers have tilled from time immemorial. [Actually, not.
Millions of peasants had been killed and persecuted by Stalin, whether by
famine or deportation. Their fields had been disastrously collectivised.] I
see them guarding their homes where mothers and wives pray – ah yes, for there
are times when all pray – for the safety of their loved ones, the return of
their bread-winner, of their champion, of their protector. I see the ten
thousand villages of Russia, where the means of existence was wrung so hardly
from the soil, but where there are still primordial human joys, where maidens
laugh and children play.”
This is all romantic tosh,
of course. Stalin had so monstrously oppressed his own citizens and those in
the countries he invaded that the Nazis, from Estonia to Ukraine, were initially
welcomed as liberators by thousands who had seen family members shot or
incarcerated, simply because they were bourgeois or ‘rich peasants’, who had
seen their churches destroyed and their faith oppressed, and who had
experienced their independent livelihood being crushed. As Christopher Bellamy
writes, in the Oxford Companion to Military History. “The next biggest
contribution [to Soviet victory] was made by Hitler, who failed to recognize
the importance of the fact that his armies were initially greeted as liberators
in Belorussia and the Ukraine.” Some maidens did indeed start laughing when the
Germans arrived, as Georgio Geddes’s extraordinary account of Ukraine in 1941
to 1943, Nichivó: Life, Love and Death on the Russian Front, informs us.
Moorhouse and others
have written of the dreadful purges and deportations that took place after the
Soviets invaded the Baltic States, and the portion of Poland awarded to it
through the Pact. From The Devils’ Alliance, again: “In the former Polish eastern regions, annexed
by Stalin in 1939, at least 40,000 prisoners – Poles, Ukrainians, Byelorusians,
and Jews – were confined in overcrowded NKVD prisons by June 1941. As
elsewhere, some were released or evacuated, but around half would not survive.
The worst massacres were in L’vov, where around 3,500 prisoners were killed
across three prison sites, and at Lutsk (the former Polish Ĺuck), where 2,000
were murdered. But almost every NKVD prison or outpost saw a similar action –
from Sambor (600 killed) to Czortkov (Czortków) (890), from Tarnopol (574) to
Dubno (550).” Moorhouse continues: “Latvia had scarcely any history of
anti-Semitism prior to the trauma of 1939 to 1941; it had even been a
destination for some Jews fleeing the Third Reich, including Russian-born
scholar Simon Dubnow. Yet, in 1941 and beyond, it became the scene – like its
Baltic neighbors – of some of the most hideous atrocities, in which local
units, such as the infamous Arajs Kommando, played a significant role. It seems
that the Soviet occupation – with its informers, collaborators, denunciators,
and persecutions – had so poisoned already fragile community relations that,
even without Nazi encouragement, some sort of bloody reckoning became
inevitable.”
These facts were all revealed with the benefit
of hindsight, and access to archives. I need to inspect diplomatic and
intelligence reports to determine exactly how much Churchill knew of these
atrocities at the time. After all, the deportation and execution of thousands
of Polish ‘class enemies’ was concealed from Western eyes, and the Katyn
massacre of April-May 1940 remained a secret until April 1943, to the extent
that Stalin claimed that the Germans were responsible. By then, his British and
American allies were too craven to challenge him, even though they knew the
truth. Yet Churchill’s previous comments showed he was under no illusions about
Soviet persecution of even nominal opposition. If ‘communism rots the soul of a
nation’, it presumably rotted the Baltic States, too.
I started this exercise
in the belief that I would be uncovering further mendacity by Maisky, and soon reached
the stage where I was astonished at Churchill’s obsequious response to Stalin.
Stalin laid a trap for Churchill, and he walked right into it. One cannot
ascribe his appeasement of Stalin solely to his desire to encourage the Soviet
leader to continue the fight against Hitler, and his need to rally the British
public behind a regime that he had condemned for so long. Churchill acted meanly,
impulsively, and independently. In his recent biography of Churchill, Andrew
Roberts writes: “Churchill announced this full-scale
alliance with Soviet Russia after minimal consultation with his colleagues.
Even Eden had precious little input into the decision. Nor had he consulted the
Russians themselves. Over dinner at Chequers that evening Eden and Cranborne
argued from the Tory point of view that the alliance ‘should be confined to the
pure military aspect, as politically Russia was as bad as Germany and half the
country would object to being associated with her too closely’. Yet Churchill’s
view ‘was that Russia was now at war; innocent peasants were being slaughtered;
and that we should forget about Soviet systems or the Comintern and extend our
hand to fellow human beings in distress’. Colville recalled that this argument
‘was extremely vehement’.” He does not mention whether anyone brought up the
fact that Stalin himself was responsible for the deaths of millions of peasants
in his own homeland.
Throughout,
Churchill showed as much disdain for the fate of the Baltic States as
Chamberlain had done over the rape of Czechoslovakia. I believe that it is a
topic that cries out for re-assessment. Churchill certainly did not know the
extent of the disaster in the Soviet Union’s defences in July 1941, but,
knowing so little, he did not need to go overboard in agreeing with Stalin’s
claims. We thus have to face the possibilities: either a) Churchill knew all
along about the cruelty of Soviet oppression in the areas between the Stalin
Line and the Molotov Line, and chose to suppress them in his desire to rally
Stalin to the cause of fighting Hitler, or b) he had managed to remain ignorant
of what persecutions were occurring in these buffer states, sandwiched between
the infernal machines of Nazism and Bolshevism. And, whichever explanation is
correct, he omitted to explain why he, a military man, believed that the Soviet
Union had managed to contain better the onslaught of the Nazi war machine by choosing
to defend remote boundaries created in a campaign of aggression.
It
is hard to accept the second thesis. The famous cartoon by Low, published in Punch
in September 1939, where Hitler and Stalin rendezvous over dead bodies, with
Hitler saying ‘The scum of the earth, I believe?’, and Stalin responding ‘The
bloody assassin of the workers, I presume?’, reflected well the mood and
knowledge of the times. In the USA, Sumner Welles was much more hard-nosed
about the menace represented by the Soviets. As the excellent Moorhouse again
writes: “Nonetheless, in British government circles the
idea of de facto recognition of the annexations was soon floated as a
possible sop to bring Stalin onside. The American reaction was more principled.
Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles issued a formal statement – the Welles
Declaration – condemning Soviet Aggression and refusing to recognize the
legitimacy of Soviet control in the region, citing ‘the rule of reason, of
justice and of law,’ without which, he said, ‘civilization itself cannot be
preserved.’ In private he was even more forthright, and when the Soviet
ambassador, Konstantin Oumansky, opined that the United States should applaud
Soviet action in the Baltic, as it meant that the Baltic peoples could enjoy
‘the blessings of liberal and social government,’ his response was withering.
‘The US government,’ Welles explained, ‘sees no difference in principle between
the Russian domination of the Baltic peoples and the occupation by Germany of
other small European nations.’”
David Low’s Cartoon on the Nazi-Soviet Pact
The research will continue. I believe an opportunity for re-interpretation has been missed, contrary to Gorodetsky’s bubbly endorsement. (And I have read only one chapter of The Kremlin Letters so far. What fresh questions will it provoke?) Can any reader out there point me to a book that carefully dissects the implications of the defence against Barbarossa from the Molotov line, and maybe a study of virtual history that imagines what would have happened had Stalin been able to restrain himself from moving his defensive line westwards? Did Basil Liddell Hart ever write about it? In the meantime, I echo what I wrote about the Appeasement of Stalin a few months ago (see coldspurappeasement), except that I admit that I may have been too generous to Churchill in that piece. What was really going on in his mind, apart from the sentimentality, and the desire to capture some moving sentences in his oratory? It seems to me that Hitler inveigled Stalin into exposing his armies where they would be more vulnerable to his attack, that Stalin hoodwinked Churchill into making a calamitous and unnecessary compliment to Stalin’s generalship, and that Churchill let down the Baltic States by mismanaging Stalin’s expectations.
The last point to be made is to draw parallels with these times. The question of borders is all very poignant in view of current geopolitics. NATO was designed to provide concerted defence against westward extensions of the Soviet Empire. When communism died, NATO’s mission became questionable. Then Putin annexed the Crimea, supported separatists in eastern Ukraine, and this month forged a tight embrace with Belarus. Largely because of the reoccupation by the Soviet Empire after World War II, both Estonia and Latvia have 25% Russian ethnicity. Could Putin, in his desire to ‘make Russia great again’, possibly have designs on Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania?
I wish all coldspur readers the compliments of the season. I leave for two weeks in Los Altos, CA on December 17.
When
I first started planning this bulletin, I had imagined that Sylvia, Julia and I
would be leaving North Carolina for California for a couple of weeks over
Thanksgiving, departing on November 18, and that I would thus not be able to
publish any intensive research this month. We then learned that our son’s new house,
being built in Los Altos, would not be occupiable until late November, so we
had to postpone our visit until mid-December. The tragic fires in the state
have imposed additional stresses on Pacific Gas and Electric, which has
accordingly been tardy in installing the power-lines for the house (which
involved digging a trench under the road). PG&E may not be the best managed
utility in the country, but others’ suffering has been unimaginable, and we
must all be patient.
Nevertheless,
I decided that I needed a break from the more intensive and exhausting work
that a segment like the study of the House of Peierls demanded, and I am using
this opportunity to bring readers up-to-date on a number of research projects.
The
BBC and Christopher Andrew
One
of my most intense recent frustrations has to do with the behaviour of the BBC,
specifically the editors of the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, and what I have
called the ‘grandstanding’ of Sir Christopher Andrew, who is wheeled out by the
corporation when it wants to add gravitas to some segment on
intelligence. The matter in question concerns an intelligence officer, Eric
Roberts, who was informed in 1947 by Guy Liddell of suspicions about a senior
MI6 officer’s being a Soviet mole, but was then apparently strongly discouraged
from saying anything further in 1949, when he (Roberts) returned from an
assignment in Vienna. The easiest way for me to explain the saga here is to
reproduce part of the text that I sent to Sarah Sands, the current editor of Today.
(She was not Editor when the segment in question was aired, but I would claim
that she holds a professional responsibility on behalf of her predecessors.)
“The
story was issued by Sanchia Berg on July 14, 2015, and the related Magazine
entry can be seen at https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33414358
. It concerns a letter that Eric Roberts, an MI5 field agent, wrote to Harry
Lee, an old friend, in the late 1960s. Sir Christopher Andrew is quoted as
commenting: ‘It’s the most
extraordinary intelligence document I’ve ever seen. It’s 14 pages long – it
will keep conspiracy theorists going for another 14 years. It’s a mixture of
fact and fiction and the other thought I have is to be desperately sorry for
the individual who wrote it.’
Now, I suspect that you will agree that, in
order for the ‘conspiracy theorists’ (itself an odd, and disparaging, term for
the authorised historian of MI5 to use) to be kept busy, the letter would have
to become publicly available for inspection. A research colleague of mine
approached Ms. Berg, asking about the letter’s availability. Her reply was evasive, maintaining that, as far as she knew, the
family had not published the letter in full, and suggesting we consult ‘Agent
Jack’, by Robert Hutton, for possible further extracts. Hutton does indeed
quote from Roberts’s letter, but provides no clue as to its whereabouts, and
our attempts to contact him on the matter have remained unanswered.
We thus next contacted Professor Andrew himself, and were astonished to receive his reply, by email, part of which ran as follows: “Sorry, I don’t have a clear recollection of this document.” Given the significance that he imparted to the document only four years ago, it seems inexplicable to me that Sir Christopher could have so easily forgotten about it. And, in view of the fact that he is regarded as the doyen of intelligence historians, I believe those of us who toil without such publicity deserve greater consideration than he offers us by what I can only describe as irresponsible behaviour. I know of other prominent researchers in this field who resent Sir Christopher’s constant criticism of anyone whose research into intelligence penetration contradicts his often erroneous conclusions. [I note now that Professor Andrew has not been knighted. coldspur, February 2, 2021]
I wonder, therefore, whether it is timely for you to enter the
ring, to contact Sir Christopher about his high-handed behaviour, to ask him to
offer the world an explanation, to re-consider using him for such promotional
purposes in the future, and perhaps to engage other academics and historians
who would provide a more insightful opinion on intelligence matters. Most
important of all, however, I should like you and Ms. Berg to provide to the
public the letter so vigorously advertised by your programme.”
I
sent this letter, both by email and by airmail, on October 9. I never received any
acknowledgment, let alone a reply. On October 28, I accordingly sent a letter
to both Mohit Bakaya, Controller of Radio 4, and Bob Shennan, Director of BBC
Radio, requesting them to intervene and give me a response. Four weeks later, I
have heard nothing. Between them, three BBC’s executives trousering annually well
over half a million pounds of license fee money from the public cannot organise
themselves even to send out an acknowledgment of a letter from a member of the
public. True, I am not a license-payer, but BBC promotes its brand strongly overseas,
and I am a UK tax-payer. (The BBC website knows where I live from my TCP/IP
address, and thus prevents me from viewing recent videos from the cricket
coverage, yet it does send me annoying pop-up windows inviting me to participate
in a survey. I thus feel entitled to offer the institution my opinions.)
It
seems to me that, if Sir Christopher Andrew is too senile to provide continuity
and enlightenment in these matters, his contract with the BBC should be
terminated. And if he has been muzzled by MI5 because of its discomfort over
the revelations, he should disqualify himself from any further involvement
since he can no longer provide objective analysis. So what do I do next? Invoke
the Curse of Gnome, and appeal to Private Eye? Organise a demonstration
in Trafalgar Square? Chain myself to the railings at Broadcasting House? Engage
the support of Greta Thunberg?
On
November 26th, I decided to try to call Mr Shennan in person. First,
I inspected the ‘Contact’ button on the BBC website, but the last thing the BBC
wants members of the public to do is actually ‘contact’ any of its precious
executives, so you will find no telephone numbers there. ‘Contact’ in BBC-speak
means reading the institution’s ‘how to’ guides. By pressing the ‘Complaints’
tab, however, I did find a number to call, in Darlington, with the disturbing
rubric ‘charged as geographic numbers’ (I do not know what that means), so I
decided to call the main switchboard at Broadcasting House, and asked to be put
through to Mr. Brennan. After the operator took down my particulars, so that I
could be introduced appropriately to Mr. Brennan’s PA, I was soon talking to
that lady. After I explained my mission, she told me that Mr. Brennan has since
been promoted. I had noticed that he is now a member of the Executive Board,
but wondered, since my letter had also gone to Sarah Sands and Mohit Bakaya, why
none of the three could have responded. A positive signal, however – the PA
remembered my letter, and had in fact sent it to ‘Audience Services’. I
expressed my alarm that, without some person with authority taking
responsibility for tracking its progress, my letter might disappear in another
Reithian or Birtian labyrinth, and reminded the good woman that, since the BBC
had my email address, it did not have to rely on the slow transatlantic postal
traffic (a factor she had brought up as a reason for the tardiness in response)
to keep me informed of progress. She committed to be that pointperson: we shall
see.
Agent
Jack
Meanwhile,
Robert Hutton’s book about Eric Roberts, Agent Jack, was published this
month in the USA, and I received my copy forty years to the day after Anthony
Blunt’s pardon was disclosed. (Forty Years On – what a great title for a
play!) I immediately turned to the pages where the exchanges between Guy
Liddell and Roberts are recorded, and reproduce their contents as follows.
Before Roberts left for Austria in 1947 (no specific date offered), on
secondment to MI6 (SIS), Liddell ‘hinted that he suspected MI6 might have been
penetrated by the Soviets’. On his return in 1949 (‘after just over year’,
which suggests a late 1947 departure), dispirited from a fruitless mission
trying to inveigle Soviet intelligence to approach him, Roberts talked to
Liddell again, looking for career advice. But Liddell ‘changed the subject’,
and wanted to know whether Roberts suspected that MI5 had itself been
infiltrated by a traitor. He followed up by asking Roberts how he thought MI5 might
have been penetrated.
The
conversation prompted Roberts to reflect on the time he had confided to Dick
Brooman-White, another officer in MI5, that he suspected two MI5 men might be
working for the Abwehr. (Infuriatingly, the encounter is undated: all that
Hutton writes is ‘not long after he began working for Rothschild’, which
suggests early 1941.) One of the men was in Maxwell Knight’s department, and
the other was ‘a man with access to some of MI5’s greatest secrets’. At the
time, Brooman-White ridiculed his suspicions, saying (with unconscious irony):
“You will be suspecting Victor Rothschild next!” According to Andrew Boyle,
Brooman-White, who died in 1964, went to his grave firmly believing in Philby’s
innocence, so he was perhaps not the best judge of character. Apparently,
Roberts did not share this anecdote with Liddell in 1949, but when he suggested
to him that the ‘perfect spy’ would ‘be a member of one or two of the most
exclusive clubs’, and thus have an unimpeachable reputation, Liddell went very
silent, and the conversation came to a close. The two men never spoke again.
(Can
traitors be detected by their habits? In an article on John le Carré in the Times
Literary Supplement of November 8, the writer of spy fiction Mick Herron
recalls that his father, when watching the first scene of Tinker Tailor
Soldier Spy on television in 1979 immediately identified Bill Haydon (as
played by Ian Richardson) as the traitor because he entered the room carrying a
cup of tea, on which he had balanced a saucer, to prevent spillage. “That’s a
strange way of carrying his tea”, said Herron pêre. “I bet he’s the
traitor.” P.S. I have never read any of Mick Herron’s books. Mark Amory’s
enthusiasm for him in the Spectator’s Books of the Year segment suggests
that I should.)
Years
later, in 1968, when Roberts had retired to an island off Vancouver, he was
visited by Barry Russell Jones of MI5, who presented him with a sealed envelope
that contained the name of a man who had confessed to being as Soviet spy four
years earlier, ‘in return for a guarantee of anonymity and immunity from
prosecution’. The name was, of course, Anthony Blunt, the same person whom
Roberts had identified to Brooman-White. As Hutton observes: “He now believed
he had got the country for whom the man was spying wrong, but not the identity
of the agent.” Blunt had been recruited as Liddell’s personal assistant.
Thus
it must have been all too poignant for Liddell in 1949. As attentive readers of
Misdefending the Realm will recall, Liddell was very aware of Soviet
penetration of MI5, since Blunt – alongside Leo Long – had been discovered
stealing secrets during the war, and had been let go with a slap on the wrist
and a spot of gardening-leave. And, early in 1949, MI5 was deep in the inquiry
into the leakages from the British Embassy, prompted by the VENONA traffic,
that would lead to the unmasking of Donald Maclean. Moreover, it was clear that
MI5 had been building a file on Kim Philby, whose possible guilt had been
strengthened by the mysterious Volkov incident in 1945, and the increase in
radio traffic between London and Moscow immediately after Volkov’s attempt to
flee to the West. It was all starting to unravel for Liddell. Moreover, it
sounds as if MI5 and SIS had performed a deal whereby SIS would stay silent
about Blunt if MI5 kept quiet about Philby.
Yet
we still do not have the transcripts of the letters that so excited Christopher
Andrew. Material to keep the conspiracy theorists active for years? So far just
old-fashioned clues, traditional digging at the coalface, and confirmation of
cover-ups. In other words, routine business in the world of intelligence.
At
the end of the month, I completed my reading of Agent Jack. Robert
Hutton has written a very engaging and accessible account, in the style of Ben
Macintyre, of a story that needs to be told. But I wonder whether he has missed
the larger point. The ‘Fifth Column’ that MI5 encouraged was a fantasy of
Victor Rothschild and Guy Liddell, sustained by a blatant provocation exercise.
It was dominated by some veritable fruitcakes, and it did contain some
potentially dangerous Nazi enthusiasts, including some German nationals who
never should have been allowed to work on sensitive weapons programmes where
they were able to purloin or copy important material. But neither the Abwehr
nor the Wehrmacht ever knew of their existence, and no information passed on to
Roberts ever reached Nazi hands. The artificial group was never a true ‘Fifth
Column’.
Moreover,
the project sheds searching light on the characters and motivation of Liddell
and Rothschild. Liddell is again shown to be a man of straw, who allowed
matters to drift because he did not want to face the implications of the entrapment:
at some stage, MI5 would have to recommend that that the offenders be arrested.
But a highly skeptical Home Office would demand that an open trial be carried
out, whereupon both the identity of Roberts and the nature of the illegal
provocation exercise would come to light. Thus Liddell and Rothschild ignored
the obvious, and tried to continue the program even after the war was over as a
default from taking any decision at all. Petrie, White and Hollis were all
critical of the operation, and wanted it closed down, and the perpetrators
prosecuted. But Liddell waffled, and Rothschild temporised, not considering the
possible outcomes of a highly controversial provocation game. After the war,
Rothschild omitted any mention of the operation in his in-house history of the
department.
Rothschild’s
motivations must be carefully scrutinised, however. Here was the leader of
MI5’s anti-sabotage group (B1c) taking control of what was effectively a
counter-espionage project, one that should strictly have been managed by Roger
Hollis’s F Division. Moreover, Rothschild maintained separate, highly detailed
files of all the several hundred persons who were part of Roberts’s ‘Fifth
Column’ organisation. Hutton refers to the accusations made against Rothschild
as a Soviet agent – something Rothschild strenuously denied in the Thatcher era,
even misguidedly asking the Prime Minister to provide Sabine Lee-esque ‘proof’
that he had not been a spy – and also points out that fact that Rothschild’s
crony, Anthony Blunt, turned out to be a dangerous Soviet agent. Yet Hutton
never considers investigating whether Rothschild’s motives might have been to
distract attention from the Soviet subversive threat, and prepare for his
putative Moscow controllers a list of possibly dangerous opponents who would
need to be eliminated.
In
addition, Hutton, in his focus on the years of the ‘Fifth Column’
investigation, leaves unattended the hare that he scares out of Roberts’s
experiences in Vienna, and who might have architected the utter failure of
Roberts’s mission. Vienna was in 1947 and 1948 a very dangerous place, and to
think that a bank-clerk with a gift for enticement in his own country could
somehow star as a potential plant with Soviet intelligence was an exercise in
self-delusion. Why would SIS have plucked Roberts from obscurity, and on what
pretext would they have had him resident in Vienna? Sanchia Berg reported, citing
Roberts’s letter, that he was ‘posing as a disaffected British civil servant
and passing low-grade harmless information, to a Communist named Jellinek’, and
that he, Roberts, then declined to meet a ‘star agent’ maintained by the SIS
station chief, George Kennedy Young. Young revealed to Roberts a few weeks
later that his ‘star agent’ turned out to be a Soviet spy, and Roberts credited
Liddell’s advice for his evasion of the encounter.
Moreover,
if Liddell confided to Roberts that he thought SIS had been penetrated, why on
earth would he have encouraged Roberts to be recruited by SIS for a mission the
security of which was highly questionable? And why would Roberts have accepted
such an assignment in the knowledge that his recruiters contained a mole? It
also seems bizarre that Barry Russell Jones would travel all the way to
Vancouver to discuss Blunt’s pardon with Roberts. Was that, in itself, not a
great security risk, especially if MI5 suspected that Roberts himself was a
Soviet agent, as Roberts hinted at in his letter? What else had Roberts done to
warrant such attention? Lastly, Young’s replacement in 1950 as station chief in
Vienna was one Andrew King, who concealed his communist past from his superiors.
Nigel West wrote, in The Friends (p 73), that
Philby in 1946 ‘could not have had any illusions about keeping his Party
membership concealed, for Andrew King, one of his contemporaries at Cambridge
and another rising star in SIS, had attended Party meetings with him at
Cambridge.’ Since Philby was stationed in Turkey in 1947, was it perhaps
King whom Liddell was warning Roberts about?
There
is a lot more to be told here, and I am analyzing it with one of my most supportive
and dedicated coldspur colleagues – someone who understands well the
mechanics of ‘dangling’ operations.
The
House of Peierls
I
have received some very positive reactions to last month’s segment on Rudolf
Peierls. I was hoping for some challenges, as well, as I believed my piece
might arouse some controversy. I had alerted Frank Close and Sabine Lee shortly
before it appeared, but heard nothing from either of them. True, I had given up
on Ms. Lee (Professor of Modern History and Head of School in History and
Cultures at Birmingham University), as it was clear from her last message to me
that she was clueless about the process of historical analysis and the
establishment of ‘proofs’, but I expected some response from Professor Close.
After all, he had been tutored by Peierls, was – and remains – an admirer, is
in touch with Peierls family members, and had urgently encouraged me to drop my
investigation into Peierls’s libel action. I had occasion to contact Close in
the middle of the month with some questions about Bruno Pontecorvo, and asked
him, in an aside, whether he had had a chance to read my article.
I
was a bit dumbfounded by his response. He said he had ‘skimmed’ it. ‘Skimmed’,
eh? That was all. Now, as some of my readers point out to me, my pieces are not
easily read superficially. They call for either intense concentration, or icy
disdain. Is it not extraordinary that an academic in Frank Close’s shoes, with
his biographies of Pontecorvo and Fuchs published, and given Peierls’s close
involvement in the affairs of both these men and of Alan Nunn May, would not
show more intellectual interest in a piece that tries to evolve our
understanding of what was going on in the parallel worlds of British and Soviet
physics, and the intelligence subterfuges behind them – especially since Close
has so stoutly defended Peierls’s innocence in the whole endeavor? In a way, I
am not surprised. I have learned that persons – especially academics – who have
found themselves on a lofty pedestal, but who harbour secret fears that they do
not really deserve such recognition, frequently display such behaviour. Remarkably,
Close and I continue to have cordial email exchanges about other matters of
intelligence; yet any discussion of Peierls appears to be off limits. I refuse
to consider myself insulted [are you sure? Ed.], and shall continue as
if nothing were awry.
I
learned from my days as a Gartner Group analyst that companies did not really
care much when you got their story or strategy wrong, as in that case they
complacently believed that they had hoodwinked you, and what they were up to
remained a secret. What really upset them was the realisation that you had
worked out the truth. I suspect I may have stumbled on a more accurate account
of Peierls’s career, and that Close has been stunned into silence. Moreover,
there is an amusing side to this process of ‘skimming’. The point I was asking
Close about concerned an FBI document on Pontecorvo from December 1949: he
replied that he was not aware of any such document. I pointed out the pages in Half
Life where he had discussed it, and I believe he was a little humbled. We
shall see what evolves: I should be very interested if any of the Peierls
controversy comes up during the Skimmer’s forthcoming book-signing tour for Trinity.
I am sure my spies on the ground will keep me informed.
I
shall be returning to Peierls’s activities, concentrating on his time in the
UK, and his associations with other scientists, especially with Max Born and
Klaus Fuchs, in a future coldspur bulletin. As dedicated readers will
recall, I analysed the efforts of Peierls and Born to secure Fuchs’s return to
the UK from detention in Canada in Misdefending the Realm (pp 216-223),
and it would probably be appropriate for me to reproduce that section on coldspur,
as a segue to my next piece on Peierls. At the time of writing that segment of
my book, I was using notes that I had taken from the Peierls-Born
correspondence at the Bodleian. Sadly, I shall not now have access to that
resource, or Peierls’s numerous other letters. Sabine Lee’s two volumes of the
Peierls Letters (very expensive, poorly edited, and selected very much
with a bias towards highly technical scientific exchanges) will be of little
use, I fear. Christopher Laucht has written some interesting passages about
Peierls’s correspondences in Elemental Germans, but my study will have
to rely mostly on other sources until I can return to Oxford some time. I plan
for the next chapter to appear on coldspur in February or March of next
year.
RSS
and the Undetected Radios
I
had started gathering my research for the last episode of ‘The Undetected
Radios’ when I came across (thanks to the photographic skills of my
London-based researcher, Dr. Kevin Jones) some obscure files at the National
Archives that covered aspects of the history of the Radio Security Service, as
well as others that contained various interrogations of German intelligence
officers after the war. While these files did nothing to contradict my main
conclusions so far (that the tensions between MI5 and SIS over the RSS were
more highly strung than portrayed, that both the RSS and the
Abwehr/Funküberwachung greatly misrepresented the strength of their
interception and direction-finding capabilities after the war, that agents were
in many cases poorly trained and ill- prepared for infiltration into Europe,
and were much more frequently discovered by local betrayal than through
interception and location-finding, that SOE’s and SIS’ wireless equipment was
often defective, that RSS’s general surveillance of illicit transmissions was
very lax, and the state of Britain’s mobile-direction finding service feeble, and
that the Double-Cross organisation acted very naively in managing its agents’
wireless communications), these archives certainly revealed some valuable new detail
on some of the personalities and committees involved. I have thus decided to
allocate one more chapter summarizing these findings before I cover the final
six months of wireless activity up until D-Day. My current plan is to write
this additional report in January of next year.
Maclean
and Boyle
Regrettably,
there is little to report on the Boyle-Gallienne connection (see https://coldspur.com/two-cambridge-spies-dutch-connections-1/
and https://coldspur.com/the-importance-of-chronology-with-special-reference-to-liddell-philby/ .
National Archive files including Gallienne’s reports from Estonia are not
revealing, and do not show any links between Soviet Intelligence, Krivitsky,
and the ‘Imperial Council’ spy. My following up the rather feeble leads in the
Boyle archive led me to an unresolved question about Liddell’s role in leaking
information to writers such as Boyle, and an expressed intent to explore the
Springhall archive in depth, a project not yet started. So this matter has had
to be placed on the back-burner for a while.
Project
‘Hegira’ and the Double-Agents
I
have recently been studying some of the lesser-known files at The National
Archives. One of these, KV 4/211, was titled ‘Functions and Disposal of Special
Agents in Event of Invasion of UK’. Well, that ‘Disposal’ was somewhat
alarming, but I learned a fair amount about Project Hegira, which was
designed at the beginning of 1941 as a procedure for ensuring that double agents,
and other potentially dangerous individuals, would not be allowed to escape and
inform the invaders of what MI5 had been up to. The file contains few sparkling
revelations, although Hegira was a project that has not received the
attention it deserves. You will find no mention of it in Christopher Andrew’s
authorised History of MI5, nor in Nigel West’s unauthorised account of the story
of the Security Service’s development.
One
might have thought that MI5 had more important fish to fry than the safety or
security exposures of having double agents ‘fall into the hands of the enemy’,
as the introductory letter describes the problem, but, in early 1941, when
there were only three named agents, it appeared to be a manageable problem. The
fact that the project seemed unworkable was highlighted later by Cyril Mills in
a long memorandum of March 25, 1943, when he wrote about the stretch on
resources to handle all the agents, especially since Billy Luke had now left
B1A. He recommended instead that all agents should be taken to Colonel
Stevens’s Camp020 for incarceration, or to its back-up location in the country.
But by then, the threat of invasion had receded.
Yet
the file betrays some secrets. For those analysts still keen to portray MI5 as
some kind of secret police organisation, it may come as a shock to learn that
‘Tar’ Robertson had to apply to the Special Branch to borrow five pairs of
handcuffs (as well as pistols, and ammunition) to be used in the event of
invasion. These had to be signed for, and duly returned, at the end of 1943,
when the threat of an invasion had disappeared. All the letters and receipts
are here to be inspected. It is difficult to think of the civil security
service of any other country being forced to go through such bureaucratic
procedures, and to document it all for posterity, providing evidence that all
legal processes were being followed.
The
plan was to secrete double agents and other dubious personages in Colwyn Bay,
in North Wales, and hotels were identified for their accommodation. I suppose
that such locations would have been the last place where the dastardly Nazis
would have looked for their ‘Fifth Column’, but perhaps the agents would by
then have suffered so much under their strict Methodist landladies that they
would have been willing to talk to anyone. (I hasten to add that, despite my
experiences with the University of Aberystwyth, I have nothing against what
must be called ‘the Welsh Methodist Landlady community’.) But what is highly
interesting is the identification of such agents in the memoranda and letters,
as the latter reveal important facts about the existence of such persons at
different times. Thus, in January 1941, the emphasis is on TATE, SNOW and
STORK. Two months later, GANDER and SUMMER are listed. Soon after, reflecting
capture of other agents, MUTT and JEFF are added, and, as the year goes on, we
see the names of BALLOON and others.
I
was familiar with most of these names, even such as VICTOIRE, who was a Frenchwoman
of dubious character who had ‘escaped’ to Britain after betraying the
Interallié network. She was not an exclusive MI5 ‘double agent’, as her fate –
and expense of upkeep – was shared between MI5, SOE and SIS. (I have just
finished David Tremain’s epic and encyclopaedic, but ultimately indigestible, Double
Agent Victoire: Mathilde Carré and the Interallié Network, which describes
a wilderness of subterfuge and double-dealing in French, Polish and British
agent networks in France in 1941 and 1942, so I was well-armed.) But other names
were puzzling.
Agent
STORK, for instance. I could not recall ever reading about a double agent with
the cryptonym STORK. Neither West, nor Andrew, nor even Ben Macintyre lists
this person in their books. Yet here he was in KV 4/211, described as a
Norwegian agent, accompanied by a wife and son, who would need to be evacuated
to the fjords of North Wales. I found his name in one place, in Guy Liddell’s
Diaries, and Nigel West, in his published version of the same, provides an
extract for February 17, 1941, which notes that STORK, ’who has refused to go
into his house at Hendon as his wife is going to have a baby’. (Was that the
reason for the choice of cryptonym?) But West lists STORK as an MI5 ‘agent’, as
if he were a hired hand to spy on domestic institutions like the Communist
Party. I have found no record of the real name of STORK, or when and how he landed
in the United Kingdom. And his name quickly disappears from the roster. It is
all very odd.
Two
others of special interest are Reisen (GANDER) and Caroli (SUMMER). Reisen
(listed as ‘Riesen’) is mentioned in March 1941, but in all other accounts his
name fades away – except for here, where Cyril Mills refers to him in his
letter of March 1942! Nigel West just records that Reisen was no longer used
after the end of 1940, as he had a transmitter only. Moreover, he was probably
not a committed anti-Nazi, and thus potentially dangerous, but the revelation
here is astonishing, since the implication is that he has not had to be
interned since the time that he was de-activated. SUMMER disappears after March
1941, however, as if he no longer had need to be specially ‘disposed of’ in the
event of invasion. Studious readers of coldspur will recall that a far
more ominous explanation of SUMMER’s disappearance from the scene has been
posited: that he was extrajudicially hanged in prison after his attempt to
escape and kill his guard in the process. If that did indeed happen in March
1941 (as some authors have suggested), it would explain why his name was no
longer mentioned when the list of agents to be transported to the provinces
increased in 1941 and into 1942.
By
1943, the whole operation (now affectionately referred to as ‘Mills’ Circus’,
after the member of the Bertram Mills Circus family who worked for MI5 and
Robertson, Cyril Mills), was called off. The handcuffs could then be safely
returned to a grateful Special Branch.
The
ODNB
Following
my pointed remarks about the inferior quality of Nigel West’s entry on Guy
Liddell in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, I wrote to my
contact at the ODNB, pointing her to my coldspur article. She promised
that its editors would look into the topic, and get back to me. In what has
become a sadly predictable phenomenon, I never heard back. So I thought I
should check out the latest versions of the biographies of intelligence
officers, physicists and spies, and accordingly spent a couple of hours recently
at the University of North Carolina Library in Wilmington, using the on-line
access provided, to verify whether any changes had been made.
Sadly,
nothing has changed. Liddell’s entry was last updated on May 24, 2008. And I
was struck by how unimpressive and incomplete many of the entries were. Dick
White (head of MI5 and SIS) was responsible for the entries on Roger Hollis
(who succeeded White as head of MI5) and John Sinclair (whom White succeeded as
head of SIS). An unimaginative choice. There is no mention of Philby, or how
Sinclair protected him, in the latter entry. The entry for Klaus Fuchs is by
one Mary Flowers, who coyly refers to a ‘relationship’ at Harwell, but does not
identify Erna Skinner. The biographies of Max Born, Nevill Mott, Herbert Fröhlich
and Joseph Rotblat are all very bland, and omit any controversial aspects.
What
struck me most, however, was that the ODNB carries no entry for Bruno
Pontecorvo, the famous Italian-born physicist who defected in 1950, and has
been suspected by some of spying for the Soviet Union (a fact which Roy
Medvedev confirmed in Let History Judge). Now, the reason for this
cannot be nationality: after all, the ODNB finds room for Pyotr Kapitza, the
Soviet physicist who spent many years in Cambridge in the 1930s, and even was elected
a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1929, but never became a British citizen.
Pontecorvo took up British citizenship in 1948, and other proven spies (such as
Fuchs) have been awarded entries. I again wrote to my contact at the ODNB,
asking for an explanation over this extraordinary omission, but answer came
there none.
No
doubt the ODNB is struggling with its business model, and finding it difficult
to attract thorough and objective writers who know their stuff, and to create a
mechanism for updating entries in the light of new research findings. It is all
rather sad, but the ODNB is turning out to be little better than Wikipedia –
and in some cases inferior. I often have reason to dip into the volumes of the Dictionary
of National Biography on my shelf, and am rewarded by the unfailingly
fascinating, thorough and elegant (though frequently overdiscreet) accounts of
lives – in a recent trawl in the 1961-70 edition, for instance, Cockcroft,
Forster, and Eliot – to be found there. The ODNB has sacrificed quality for
volume.
Methodology
“The
art of writing history is the art of understanding men and events more
profoundly than they were understood when they lived and happened.” (Michael
Oakeshott)
“The great challenge facing the storyteller and
the historian alike is to get inside people’s heads, to stand where they stood
and see the world as they saw it, to make some informed estimate of their
motives and intentions – and this is precisely where recorded and recordable
history cannot reach.” (Michael Frayn, in Postscript to Copenhagen)
One of my most loyal supporters has urged me to publish the chapter on methodology from my thesis. When my editor and I considered how the thesis should be adapted for publication as a book, we agreed that the introductory chapter, which contained some historical background as well as a detailed exposition of my methodology, should be trimmed back. Some of the material was omitted, a brief Preface on methodology was added, while another section was incorporated into Chapter 8 of Misdefending the Realm. I have now thus posted the complete content of the original chapter on coldspur, and it can be found here.
Other Projects
In the longer term, I
have a number of other projects that I want to pursue.
The Apostates: One important topic that I believe has not been addressed
comprehensively is that of members of the CPGB (Communist Party of Great
Britain) who renounced their membership – or were banned from the party. I am
thinking predominantly of such as Frederick Copeman and Humphrey Slater. Did
they rebel against Stalinism, but remain communists? Or did some perform a
complete volte-face, and suddenly become crusty conservatives? Some became
informers – but was the apostasy sometimes a ruse engineered by the Party? And
were they in danger? Were their occasionally premature and unusual deaths not
accidental? (I think of the fate of Juliet Poyntz and others in America, thrown
from high buildings . . . )
Incidentally, I was reminded of the parallels in the USA when I started reading The Millionaire Was a Soviet Mole: The Twisted Life of David Karr, by the estimable Harvey Klehr. A couple of weeks ago, I had noticed a letter in the New York Times Book Review from one Jonathan Brent, who described himself as ‘the visiting Alger Hiss professor of history at Bard College’. I found it hard to believe that a chair would be named after the notorious Soviet spy, but it is true. It was as if a Kim Philby chair in Moral Philosophy had been established at Trinity College, Cambridge. And then I noticed a blurb on the back cover of Klehr’s book from the same Jonathan Brent, here introduced as ‘YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and author of Inside the Stalin Archives’. No mention of the Alger Hiss professorship. Quite understandable, but rather coy, Professor Klehr (Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritus of Politics and History at Emory University), but how very odd! For Klehr, along with John Earl Haynes, wrote VENONA: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, the book that confirmed Hiss’s guilt despite the protestations of the Left. Perhaps Mellon and Hiss are designed to cancel each other out, but shouldn’t Klehr have perhaps been more open about Brent’s credentials, and how he liked to describe himself? It would have been an amusing flourish.
2. Chapman Pincher: I have for some time intended to perform a thorough analysis of Chapman Pincher’s Treachery, and the claims he makes about Roger Hollis. Sadly, Pincher’s thesis was fuelled very much by ‘insider’ information, often anonymous, and mostly unverifiable, and some of his claims are openly ridiculous. Others may be confirmed or refuted by more reliable evidence.
3. Alexander Foote & Canada: The enigma of Alexander (Alan) Foote remains, an earthy uneducated countryman who rose to become not only an expert wireless operator (true) but also a skillful negotiator of international banks (highly unlikely). I intend to return to the two different editions of his ghost-written memoir Handbook for Spies, and the extensive archives from Kew, to check out his career – and also those of the mysterious Sedlacek and Roessler. Foote showed a deep interest in the processes of the Canadian Royal Commission into the Gouzenko affair, primarily because of the interrogation of his banking contact there, and the Dallin archive may show up some fresh intelligence. My correspondent via coldspur Greg McNulty has performed some diligent delving into Foote, and I look forward to collaborating with him further on these matters.
4. Pontecorvo and Liverpool University: The case-histories of Herbert Skinner, Klaus Fuchs and Bruno Pontecorvo indicate that Liverpool University was sometimes unwittingly involved in a strange game of academic musical chairs, where positions were to be opened up for the putting out of distressed spies to grass. The integration of archival material from Kew and Churchill College suggests that MI5 learned of Pontecorvo’s communism a few months before it let it be recorded for posterity in Pontecorvo’s files. Once Fuchs was arrested, the prospect of having to park him at Liverpool disappeared, but similar plans to deal with Pontecorvo had antedated even Fuchs’s arrest. All this is complicated by a running feud between John Cockcroft (of AERE Harwell) and James Chadwick (whose chair at Liverpool Skinner filled in a very puzzling sequence of events) over Harwell’s intrusions on the turf of British universities, and its being granted generous capital expenditures. Chadwick was reluctant to leave Liverpool, his staff did not want him to leave, he had good relations with his boss . . . and yet he left. Who pushed him, how, and why? One little-known irony of the whole fiasco is that, while Fuchs and Pontecorvo, as potentially dangerous communists, were going to be dumped on to a provincial university where it was assumed that they could do no harm, Nunn May, who was convicted of espionage, was blacklisted by all British universities on his release from prison. A very English arrangement.
5. MI5 & Gouzenko: Another aspect of the Gouzenko case that puzzles me is the way that SIS succeeded in hi-jacking the inquiry away from MI5. Canada was MI5’s territory, and, while posts were sometimes shared between the two services (the MI5 representative happened to be returning to the UK when the story broke), there was no reason for SIS to intercept the communications that came to the Foreign Office in that September of 1945, with the result that Philby heard of it before Liddell and White. This is not a major item of research, more a loose end that needs to be tidied up. Yet Roger Hollis’s subsequent interrogation of Gouzenko is also problematic.
6. Isaiah Berlin in Lisbon: I had left readers in suspense when describing the surely coincidental presence of Isaiah Berlin in Lisbon, in January 1941, at the same time that Sonia was attempting to get her visa papers for the final leg of her journey to Britain. Berlin was characteristically evasive about his movements before and during his stay in Portugal, and the account of his activities on behalf of the Jewish Agency needs to be inspected more closely. I doubt whether any further documentary evidence will turn up, but Henry Hardy has already discovered that contemporary guest records for the period that Berlin stayed at the hotel have gone missing . . .
7. The Law, ter Braak and Caroli: I believe that the British authorities got themselves into a fearful tangle when they enabled the passing of the Treachery Act in 1940, in an attempt to be able to exploit newer legislation that would address the challenge of prosecuting enemy agents infiltrated into the United Kingdom, without having the embarrassment of a public trial, and the possible security exposure concerning the Double-Cross system. Giselle Jakobs, in her study of her grandfather (executed as one of those spies) The Spy in the Tower, has very capably analysed the unsatisfactory attempt to resolve the dilemma, but my study of archival material suggests to me that the topic is worthy of deeper inspection. This casualness about precision in legal verbiage extended into the Official Secrets Act, and the prosecution and conviction of Nunn May and Klaus Fuchs. I have not looked closely into the literature yet, but I believe justice has not yet been done to the legitimacy of the forces applied to some of these ‘traitors’. I notice that an article on the Treachery Act was published in the Modern Law Review of January 1941 by D. Seaborne Davies. I have ‘skimmed’ this short piece, and shall study it carefully at some later date.
8. The Oxford Ring: I am again not very hopeful, but I believe some tighter analysis of the group of Communists that comprised the counterpart to the Cambridge Spies and the latter’s cohorts is required. Guy Burgess was a link between the two, but MI5’s investigation into the Ring was abandoned when supposed members of it started committing suicide. Nigel West has identified Arthur Wynn as its leader, and archival material is starting to surface that may shed more light on his activities, and his links with other such subversives.
That should keep me busy for a while. And then there are always books coming out that generate fresh controversy. I expect Ben Macintyre’s book on Sonia, planned for publication early next year, will be one such volume . . . Lastly, I realised that I have not updated my examples of the Hyperbolic Contrast for a couple of years, so the latest entries can be seen here. The newest Commonplace entries appear here. And my December bulletin will be published on or around December 16.
(Sir Rudolf Peierls was a German-born British scientist whose memorandum, co-authored with Otto Frisch in early 1940, helped convince the British authorities that an atomic bomb was a possibility. He later earned some notoriety by recruiting Klaus Fuchs to what was called the ‘Tube Alloys’ project. Fuchs then proceeded to betray secrets about the development of nuclear weaponry to his Soviet controllers, both in the UK and the USA. He was identified by decrypted Soviet Embassy traffic in 1949, persuaded to confess, and in early 1950 was convicted of offences against the Official Secrets Act.)
‘The British Connection’
One of the rarest books in my
library must be a volume titled The British Connection, by Richard
Deacon, which appeared in 1979. It looks to be a harmless publication,
subtitled Russia’s Manipulation of British Individuals and Institutions
– a subject obviously close to my research interests. I recall buying it via
abebooks a few years ago, from Bradford Libraries, Archives and Information
Services. A stamp indicates that it was ‘withdrawn’ at some stage, but the fact
that it had been issued its Dewey categorization number, 327.120947, suggests
that it may have rested on the library shelves for a while. A small square of paper
stuck to the inside of the back cover includes the numbers 817 563 779 5, and
the letters W/D handwritten underneath. Perhaps an enterprising young librarian
decided to place it in the archive, and later, when all memory of the
surrounding events had passed, the authorities decided to sell off surplus
stock.
For all copies of The
British Connection were supposed to have been withdrawn and pulped. The
publishers, Hamish Hamilton, under threat from a lawsuit by Sir Rudolf Peierls,
submitted to the claim that a libel had been written against the physicist’s
good name. As Peierls himself wrote of Deacon’s book, in his 1985 memoir Bird
of Passage (pp 324-325):
“It contained many unsubstantiated allegations against
well-known people, including, for example, a completely unfounded slur on Lise
Meitner, the well-known nuclear physicist. But nearly all the individuals
mentioned were no longer alive, since in English law there is no libel against
dead people. But for some reason the author thought I was dead, too, and made
some extremely damning and quite unjustified statements about me.
Because of this I was able to take legal action very early, and a writ was served on the publishers and the author a few days after publication. The matter was settled out of court very promptly; the distribution of the book was stopped at once, so that the few copies that were sold are now collector’s items. I received a ‘substantial sum’ by way of damages. The speed of action was impressive: the settlement was announced in the High Court just thirteen days after I first consulted my solicitors. The publishers could have reissued the book in amended form, but they decided to abandon it.”
A
few copies must have escaped, however, which makes one wonder how rigorous the
process was. The Spectator even managed to commission the journalist
Andrew Boyle (the author of The Climate of Treason) to review it. In its
issue of July 21, 1979, in a piece titled Unnamed Names,
(http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/21st-july-1979/19/unnamed-names ), Boyle drew attention
to the book’s ‘unsightly scar tissues of transplanting and overhasty cutting’.
He expressed doubts about Deacon’s allegations concerning Pigou, Tomàs Harris and Clark Kerr, but overlooked the Peierls
references. The British Connection is still available at several
second-hand booksellers, and also at prominent libraries, so Peierls may have
been misled about the severity of the censors’ role.
I
cited this whole incident in Misdefending the Realm (pp 206-207), but
believe now that I identified the wrong passage as the offensive slur. I
concentrated on Deacon’s statement that ‘Peierls was one of the first to be
suspected’ (after the acknowledgment by the British government that there had
been leakages by scientists to the Russians), and pointed out that it was an
undeniable fact that Peierls had come under suspicion, as the voluminous records
on Peierls at the National Archives prove. Yet, after I sent scans of the
relevant pages to Frank Close, the biographer of Bruno Pontecorvo and Klaus
Fuchs (who had not been able to read the book), we realized, when I discussed
the text with him, that another passage was probably much more sensitive. (Three
years ago, Close shared some thoughts with me about the passage, but asked me
not to promulgate them. These comments thus represent my own reactions.)
I shall not quote Deacon’s statements verbatim – which might be construed as repeating a libel, even though the victim is dead. He implied that a source of intelligence on the atom spies in the late 1940s was Alexander Foote, whom regular readers of this website will recognize as an important figure in the saga of ‘Sonia’s Radio’. Foote had been trained as a wireless operator by Sonia, and had worked in Switzerland as an illicit transmitter during the war until his incarceration in 1943. After the war, he had been summoned to the Soviet Union, a directive he bravely accepted, where the KGB/GRU grilled him. Convinced of his loyalty, however, Moscow then despatched him on a mission to South America. Foote ‘defected’ to the British in Berlin in July 1947. He was interrogated, and then brought back to Britain. (See Sonia’s Radio: Part VI)
The
essence of Deacon’s information was a ‘hitherto unpublished’ statement made by
Foote, who had been extremely upset by the perceived lack of interest in what
he had to say to his interviewers (or interrogators) from MI5 after his
experiences in Moscow. Foote claimed he was obstructed in his attempts to warn
the Home Secretary of the fact that MI5 had been negligent in its surveillance
of Ursula (Sonia) and her husband, Len Beurton, despite repeated approaches
through private letters and interviews to members of Parliament. The most provocative
claim that Deacon listed was that Foote had been fully aware, by the late
1940s, that the important figures in Zabotin’s network in the USA and Canada
were Nunn May and Fuchs, and that Foote also believed that Peierls had also
played a role in this network, although not such a risky one as Fuchs or May. Had
Foote picked up this intelligence in Moscow? In any case, this was probably the
accusation that provoked Peierls to invoke his solicitors.
One needs to be a bit careful with Foote. He no doubt had a grudge with the way he had been treated by MI6 (who, I believe, had been his employers), and probably expected to be treated as a hero on his return, rather than with the evident suspicion that he faced, mainly from MI5 officers who were not aware of his MI6 connections. He was also probably by then under a death-sentence from Moscow, which must have disturbed his equilibrium. Yet his personal loyalties were not as clear-cut as he made out. One of Deacon’s key statements is that ‘Foote himself was convinced that the vital information he gave the British authorities concerning the Beurtons, then living in Oxford, was passed back to the couple through someone in MI5 so that they were able to escape to East Germany before action was taken.’ We now know that MI5 had kept a watch of some sorts on the Beurtons, and evidently knew what they were up to – but chose to do nothing – and that Sonia and Len made their escape to East Germany immediately they heard of Fuchs’s arrest. No ‘action’ was ever intended, as MI5 knew what the Beurtons were up to when Foote broke the news to them. And, presumably out of affection for his instructor in Switzerland, Foote himself had vicariously sent a warning message to Sonia.
I
carefully stated in Misdefending the Realm that I believed that Peierls
was never engaged in direct espionage himself, but that he was probably an
‘agent of influence’ who, for whatever reasons, abetted Fuchs in his efforts to
steal atomic secrets. I have identified multiple patterns of activity and
testimony that contribute to this opinion, not least of which is the fact that
a file exists at The National Archives (or, more correctly, in some government
office, presumably the Home Office) that is titled ‘Espionage Activities by Individuals:
Rudolf Peierls and Klaus Fuchs’, and is identified as HO 523/3. The record has
been retained by the Government Department in question: I have made a Freedom
of Information Request, but am not hopeful that it will be declassified because
of my beseechings. What intrigues me is that the title does not say ‘Suspected
Espionage . . .’ or ‘Investigation into Claims of Espionage . . .’, but simply
‘Espionage Activities’. If Deacon’s claims can still be considered erroneous,
is it not strange that the British authorities would publicize the fact that
they have retained a file that explicitly makes the same claim that he did?
Other
documentary evidence that cries out for a re-assessment of Peierls’s role
consists of the following: his own memoir, which elides over, or misrepresents,
some very important events in his life; the large files at The National Archive
that are publicly available, which point out many contradictions in his and his
wife’s stories; the FBI files on Peierls and his wife that point out
contradictions in their stories; the memoirs and biographies of other
scientists, which highlight some anomalies, especially in Peierls’ awareness of
Fuchs’s early communist activities, and whether he ignored them; accounts from
the former Soviet Union, which point out a distressing way in which western
scientists were manipulated and threatened; facts concerning Peierls’ courting
of, marriage to, and escape with, his wife, who was born in Leningrad; and the
details of Peierls’ highly controversial visits to the Soviet Union, including
one at the peak of the Great Terror, in 1937, that he attempted to conceal at
the time. It is the last two aspects on which I focus in this coldspur article.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Moisei Uritsky
On August 30, 1918, Moisei Uritsky, the head of the Petrograd branch of the Russian secret police, the Cheka, was murdered by a young Socialist-Revolutionary. The next day (according to some accounts, a couple of weeks later, according to others, confusion over which may be attributable to hesitation over adopting the New Style calendar), another Socialist-Revolutionary, Fanya Kaplan, fired at Lenin himself, seriously wounding him, but not mortally. She was very short-sighted, and may have struggled to line up her target. These two events provoked Lenin to activate what has been called the ‘Red Terror’ – a frightful orgy of executions of thousands who could be considered enemies of the Bolsheviks. Robert Service, in his History of Twentieth-Century Russia, wrote: “According to official records, 12,733 prisoners were killed by the Cheka in 1918-19; but other estimates put the figure as high as 300,000.”
Some histories suggest that Lenin had been preparing for a fierce campaign of elimination of groups hostile to the Revolution for a while beforehand, and that he might even have set up the assassination of Uritsky as a justification for extreme measures. (Uritsky had been a Menshevik before joining the Bolsheviks, so he might have been considered expendable.) Uritsky had, however, gained a reputation for extreme cruelty, and enjoying the task of murdering aristocrats and members of the bourgeoisie. The man who killed him, with only one of eighteen shots finding his target, was a military cadet named Leonid Kannegiesser, a sensitive bisexual poet. Kannegiesser had been embittered and enraged when Uritsky killed his boyfriend in the Army, Victor Pereltsweig, that summer. Robert Payne, in his biography of Lenin, stated that Kannegiesser had also been revolted by the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and the fact that so many of the Bolsheviks were Jewish. Kannegiesser was cool enough to have spoken to Uritsky on the telephone the day he killed him, and to have played chess with his father an hour before the deed.
Leonid Kannegiesser
The Kannegiesser household had
been a popular venue for artists and poets to meet. In his study Marina
Tsvetaeva, The Woman, Her World, and Her Poetry, Simon Karlinsky writes:
“The Kannegiser [sic: many variant spellings exist] home was a major
artistic and literary center of the northern capital. Numerous writers of the
Russian emigration were to remember it in their memoirs. Tsvetaeva saw a great
deal of the Kannegiser family during that visit and became especially friendly
with the elder son, Sergei. But she also got to meet the younger son, Leonid, a
budding poet and a close friend of the celebrated peasant poet Sergei Esenin.
(Tsvetaeva strongly intimates in ‘An Otherworldly Evening’ that Esenin and
Kannegiser were lovers at the time of her visit, a supposition supported by a
close reading of their respective poems of the summer of 1916.)”
After the attack, Kannegiesser
escaped by bicycle to the English Club. Some reports say that he was a British
spy, and Bruce Lockhart, in his Memoirs of a British Agent, recounts
how, immediately after the attacks, he and Captain Hicks were arrested and
taken to the Lubianka under suspicion of being accomplices. In any case,
Kannegiesser was quickly arrested when he reappeared from the Club in a
longcoat, a weak disguise. After torture, he was executed in October 1918. Yet
his guilt and ignominy spread further, both among his artistic circle and his
immediate family. In her record of the time Memories: From Moscow to the
Black Sea, Teffi (the pseudonym of Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya), the author wrote
that Kannegiesser contacted her a few days before the assassination, hinting
that he was being followed, and that he did not want his pursuers to be able to
track him to Teffi’s apartment. The poet Marina Tsvetsaeva explained in her Earthly
Signs that Kannegiesser had been a childhood friend, and when she mentions
it on a mission to barter goods for grain soon after Uritsky’s death, a
Communist severely reproaches her. Nadezhda Mandelstam, in Hope Against Hope,
relates how her husband Osip had met Kannegiesser, shortly before the deed, in
Boris Pronin’s Stray Dog, which was a cabaret/club where all the leading
poets of the day got together to recite. These associations surely tainted the
police-record of Kannegiesser’s friends.
Reprisals were swift. Ivan
Bunin, in Cursed Days, wrote that ‘a thousand absolutely innocent
people’ were killed in retaliation for the murder of Uritsky. Kannegiesser’s
telephone book was found on him, with nearly five hundred names in it, with the
result that many of his relatives and friends, and other people in the list,
were immediately arrested. Mark Aldanov, who also knew Kannegiesser well, and
published an account of the event from Paris in the 1920s, wrote that a
thousand persons were killed in two days in early September. Kannegiesser’s
father was taken in the same day of the murder: his aunt’s second husband (Isai
Mandelstam, a distant relation of the famous poet, Osip) the following day. His
parents (Ioachim and Rosa, née Saker) were interrogated for months before being
released in December, and they would be persecuted for years. Kannegiesser’s
older brother, Sergey, had committed suicide in 1917, but the no doubt
distraught couple was allowed to leave the country in 1924 with their sole
remaining child Elisaveta (who would later die in Auschwitz). Isai Mandelstam
was exiled and persecuted for decades. He was lucky, I suppose, not to have
been shot, unlike Osip, who died on his way to the camps, in 1938.
Iochaim Kannegiesser, an
engineer, was the son of Samuil Kannegiesser, a medical doctor, and Rosalia
Mandelstam, who lived in St. Petersburg. To show how tightly bound the families
of Kannegiesser and Mandelstam were (interleaving with the Levins and Bloks,
also), Rosalia’s brother Benedikt, who married one Zhanetta Gurevich, had three
offspring, one of whom, Elena, married Rosalia’s son, Alexander – from her
second marriage to Avram Blok – while
another was the same Isai mentioned earlier. [See the family tree below for
clarification.] Moreover, Samuil and Rosalia had another son, Nikolai, who
became a famous gynaecologist. He married Maria (another Levin), and had two
daughters. But the genealogical record shows that Nikolai had another daughter,
Olga, whose mother was apparently named ‘Kennegiesser’ (another variant).
Whether from a previous marriage, or a child born out of wedlock, is not clear.
Nikolai died from septicaemia in 1909, and his widow then married Isai
Mandelstam, the very same individual mentioned above. Isai was an electrical
engineer, but he had a flair for languages, and engaged in translations of
western classics for much of his life.
Nikolai’s premature death, at the age of 43, meant that his first daughter, Eugenia, was not yet two when he died, while his second daughter, Nina was born posthumously. Eugenia became a physics student at the University of Leningrad (as St. Petersburg, next Petrograd, had now been named), and was an exact contemporary of the future Nobelist Lev Landau. The two of them joined up with other young physicists, George Gamow, Dmitri Ivanenko, and, later on, Matvei Bronstein, in a group known as the ‘Jazz Band’. Bronstein was killed in the purges of 1938; Landau was arrested the same year and freed only on the intervention of the influential and courageous physicist Pyotr Kapitza; Ivanenko was arrested in 1935, but survived until 1994. In 1930, from August 19th to the 24th, the All-Union Congress of Physicists was held in Odessa. It was attended by Eugenia Kannegiesser, Gamow and Landau, as well as by several foreign guests. Amongst these was Rudolf Peierls, attending as an assistant to the Austrian theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who was introduced to Eugenia. They fell in love, were married in Leningrad the following year, and after some bureaucratic hassles and delays, were allowed to emigrate at the end of 1931.
The Kannegiesser-Mandelstam Family Tree
* * * * * * * * * * *
You could have searched in vain for published details of Rudolf Peierls’s connection with the assassin of Moishe Uritsky, and the revenge harboured by Lenin and Stalin against the kin of murderers of the Bolshevik vanguard. Both his Wikipedia entry and his citation in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biograph, simply refer to his encounter with Genia, and their subsequent marriage. In his memoir Bird of Passage, written as late as 1985, Peierls merely ascribes his invitation to Odessa, even though he was not at that time a scientist of renown, to Yakov Frenkel, a prominent member of the Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute in Leningrad. (Abram Ioffe was also at the conference in Odessa.) Peierls describes how he met Genia (‘a recent physics graduate’) on the beach at Lusanovka, but does not mention George Gamow in this context, even though a photograph from the Segré archive shows him, Gamow and Ioffe talking together in Odessa. Gamow and Genia had been close friends for a while, as the photograph below, taken from Gamow’s autobiography, shows.
George Gamow, Eugenia Kannegiesser & Lev Landau (from Gamow’s ‘My World Line’
(The very perceptive follower of these events might have noticed, in an article by Sabine Lee in the Winter 2002 issue of Intelligence and National Security titled The spy that never was, an observation that Peierls ‘had enough reasons for hating their [the Soviets’] system like poison’, with a clarification relegated to a footnote that ran as follows: “His wife’s family had been persecuted by the Stalinist regime, because one of her cousins had been an outspoken counter-revolutionary who had assassinated the then head of the Russian secret policy [sic], Uritzky.” The author, who did not delve deeply into the matter, and was clearly echoing what Peierls himself wrote, used as her source the letter to Viscount Portal found in the Peierls Private Papers held at the Bodleian: the MI5 files on Genia and Rudolf were not declassified until 2004. I shall return to Lee’s article later.)
Thus the account of the
couple’s courtship, and trials in managing to gain a visa for Genia, must be
viewed with some scepticism. Later, Peierls wrote of a time in 1934: “It was in their [the
Shapiros’] house that we awaited a telephone call from Leningrad that brought
us some disturbing news. Genia’s parents and her sister, Nina, had been exiled from
the city to a small town some distance east of Moscow. One did not have to ask
for a reason for this order; exile or arrest were then hazards that struck
people at random, like lightning or disease. One tended to speculate about what
factors might have contributed to this result, but this would never be known.”
This can now be seen as disingenuousness of a high order – and it was before
the assassination of Kirov, which did provoke more reprisals. Frank Close, in commenting on Genia’s reaction to
Fuchs’s arrest in Trinity, states simply: “In Russia, members of Genia’s
family had been incarcerated on the whims of the authorities.” There was random
terror in Stalin’s Russia, but Stalin’s organs carried out more carefully
targeted campaigns. Peierls undoubtedly knew the reasons.
I had found only one clue
indicating that Peierls ever admitted that a dark cloud hung over his
relationship with the Soviet government. It is to be found in one of the files
on Peierls at the National Archives, namely KV 2/1662. After accusations had
been made against Peierls in early 1951 because of his association with two academics
at Birmingham University, known to be communists (referred to as ‘Prof. P’ –
certainly Roy Pascal, and ‘Dr. B.’ – possibly
the economist Alexander Baykov, but more probably Gerry Brown, a former
Communist Party member in America, whom Peierls, shortly after Fuchs’s
sentencing, had invited to a post at Birmingham University), in April 1951 Peierls
had a conversation with Viscount Portal about the relationships. Portal had
been chief of the Air Staff during World War II, and was Controller of
Production (Atomic Energy) at the Ministry of Supply from 1946 to 1951. In a
letter he sent to Portal after their conversation (the same one identified by
Sabine Lee), Peierls tried to defend himself against the accusations, suggesting
his associations were harmless or short-lived, and then presented the following
tentative declaration:
“On the other
hand, is it known that my wife is the cousin of Kannegiesser, a
counter-revolutionary who assassinated Uritsky, who was then head of the
Russian secret police? With the same, very rare surname, she was never allowed
to forget this connection. It is known that her family was banished from Leningrad
in 1935, partly because of this connection, and partly no doubt because of her
marriage to a foreigner. They have not dared communicate with her for several
years, and we do not know whether they are still alive.”
Peierls misstates Uritsky’s
level of responsibility, but this paragraph is highly important. The scientist
used this strange admission to shed doubt about the credibility and
intelligence of his accusers, yet dug a pit of his own in so doing. The
statement is to me remarkable, for the following reasons:
His
feigned ignorance as to whether the authorities [presumably] knew about Genia’s
connection with Leonid. If he had not volunteered the information at any time,
why would he expect them to know? And yet, if he seriously considered that it
was the responsibility of intelligence organisations to uncover such facts, why
was he not surprised that he had not been challenged by the association, given
all that had recently happened?
The
claim that Genia was ‘never allowed to forget this connection’. Given that
Peierls’ stance was that he and his wife were in complete ignorance of the
persecution of her family members, what agency or person was constantly
reminding her of the connection? True, she and Rudolf made a return visit to
Leningrad in 1934, where she would have learned from her sister and her mother
what was happening, but in 1937, at the height of the terror, Peierls went to
Moscow alone. Was Genia in touch with members of the Soviet Embassy, and were
those the persons who continued to threaten her, and presumably kept her
informed on the fate of her relatives?
The
deliberate vagueness of ‘it is known that her family was banished from
Leningrad in 1935’. Known by whom? Peierls claimed that, during his oppressive
visit to a physics conference in Moscow in 1937, he managed to engineer a
meeting with Genia’s sister Nina, who would have updated him on Stalin’s
persecution. (Indeed, Stalin probably arranged for this meeting himself, as it
would have been fatal for Nina otherwise, Peierls at that time being considered
a German spy. I shall discuss this unlikely sequence of events later.) But who
else would have known about this state of affairs, unless Peierls himself chose
to tell them?
When
Peierls came to write his memoir, over thirty years later, he chose to overlook
this particular exchange as he told his life-story, no doubt believing that the
unfortunate episode and its aftermath were safely buried by then. Perhaps he
thought the letter to Viscount Portal would never come to light.
We have no exact record of how
Portal responded, but the outcome was favourable for Peierls. (The story of revenge
executed on family members of defectors and enemies should have been known to
MI5: Walter Krivitsky’s three brothers-in-law were killed after he and his
second wife Tonia escaped to Canada, and he published his articles denouncing
Stalin.) By March 1954, F3 in MI5 was
able to confirm the Uritsky story, but also concluded that there was no doubt
as to Peierls’s loyalty. Rudolf Peierls was knighted in 1968, and a succession
of honours and medals followed. He died in 1995. In 2004, the building housing
the sub-department of Theoretical Physics at Oxford University was named the Rudolf
Peierls Centre.
I had essentially finished the
research that appears above by October 1 of this year. That day the book Love
and Physics landed on my doorstep. Subtitled The Peierlses, it was
published earlier this year, and is the work of a professional Russian-speaking
theoretical physicist, Mikhail Shifman, now a professor at the University of
Minnesota. (From information in Shifman’s book, I have been able to extend the
details on the family tree I created, which is richer than the one Shifman
offers, but not so extended. Otherwise, the research is my own.) Love and
Physics is a valuable addition to the Peierls lore, since it combines letters
written between Rudolf and Genia (extracted from Sabine Lee’s compilation of
the correspondence), items from Rudolf’s diaries, reminiscences from such as
Genia’s sister, Landau’s students, and the Peierlses’ friends, as well as
archival material from both Russian, American and English sources (including
the complete text of the notable letter to Viscount Portal quoted earlier.)
Remarkably, it also contains the text of letters sent by Genia’s mother and
stepfather, exiled to Ufa, from 1936, and a photograph of a postcard sent by
Genia on November 25, 1936 to them. This correspondence presumably ended with
the onset of the Great Terror, but the Soviet censors were surely familiar with
its contents.
Yet Shifman singularly fails
to interpret the material synthetically. The volume is essentially a scrapbook
– a very rich scrapbook, but still a scrapbook. (I learned towards the end of
this month that Love and Physics has been withdrawn by its publisher,
because of copyright infringements. So now I own another rarity.) The various
escapes (of the Peierlses, of Gamow, even of Landau) are ascribed to miraculous
intervention. Shifman sees no anomalies in the fact of Peierls’s being invited
to a conference in Moscow during the Great Terror at the same time that Isai
Mandelstam was being interrogated in jail about Peierls’s activities as a spy.
He seems completely unaware of the work of Pavel Sudoplatov, who boasted of
engaging scientists in the West to provide secret information under the threat
of their relatives being harmed. He criticises Peierls for being ‘naïve’ in
helping carry out the Soviet Union’s message of ‘Peace’ over nuclear weapons
after the war, but delves no further. The Uritsky episode is described in
detail, but he makes no linkage between Genia’s plight, or the conflict in
Peierls’s own testimony about the connection. The volume has been put together
with the intent of gaining ‘re-assurance’ from various witnesses and
participants that Peierls’s role was entirely honourable.
Shifman does refer, however,
to one significant event in the saga. On May 29, 1999 the weekly magazine the Spectator
carried an article by Nicholas Farrell which picked up the necessarily
abandoned claim by Richard Deacon that Peierls had been a spy. Commentators
have assumed that Farrell gained his information from the historian of
intelligence Nigel West, who had recently published his book on the VENONA
project. On the assumption that the identities behind the cryptonyms FOGEL/PERS
and TINA were Rudolf and Genia Peierls, the author took advantage of the fact
that Peierls was now dead to try to breathe fresh life into the theory that the
couple had been working for the Soviets. It should be remembered that Nigel
West had been a researcher for Richard Deacon as a young man, and Deacon’s
stifled accusations probably still resonated strongly with West. Unfortunately,
the identification was a mistake (and in Misdefending the Realm, I
unfortunately echoed the Farrell/West hypothesis). The Spectator article
was carelessly prepared, and overemotionally presented. Later research showed
that TINA was Melita Norwood, PERS was Russell McNutt, and MLAD was Theodore
Hall.
In 2002, Professor Sabine Lee,
now Professor of Modern History at the University of Birmingham, the
institution at which Peierls spent most of his academic life, published the
article referred to earlier, The spy who never was. It stated as its
objective the investigation of the claims that Peierls and his wife had spied
for the Soviet Union. (Lee made an acknowledgment of thanks to the British
Academy for supporting the research on which the article was based: why the
British Academy felt it had to get involved with such an endeavour is not clear
to me, since the piece appears only to exploit information available at the
Peierls Archive at the Bodleian Library, and on the MI5 files on Peierls and
Fuchs accessible online from the National Archives. Lee’s Acknowledgments in
her editions of Peierls’s Letters credit both the British Academy and
the Royal Society for funding the project, which is a phenomenon worthy of
analysis some other time.) Lee painstakingly took her readers through Peierls’s
career and his relationship with Fuchs, and, concentrating on the erroneous
assumption concerning VENONA, treated these items as the only significant evidence
for the prosecution. Yet she omitted to analyse all the other incriminating
evidence: hers was a whitewash job that showed that she failed to understand
the complexity and subterfuge of the agencies of Soviet intelligence, and the
strains that many western scientists were put under. Lee correctly dismantled
the Farrell/West allegations, but failed to address the core of the matter.
Thus a triad of academics has
lined itself up to protect Peierls’s reputation: Frank Close, the author of Trinity,
who was taught by Peierls at Oxford University; Sabine Lee, who is the lead
historian at Peierls’ primary seat of learning, the University of Birmingham,
and has edited a comprehensive set of the Peierlses’ letters, as well as a
biographical sketch of Peierls (which appears in Shifman’s book); and Mikhail
Shifman, whose thesis adviser at the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental
Physics in Moscow was Professor Boris Ioffe, who worked under Kurchatov when
Fuchs was supplying purloined information to the Institute. (Ioffe may have
been a distant relation of the first director of the Ioffe Physical-Technical
Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Abram Ioffe, who chaired the
notorious 1937 conference in Moscow attended by Peierls.) Shifman comes to no
outright conclusion on Peierls, but he is very respectful of Lee’s expertise
and research, and admits to looking for ‘reassurance’ about Peierls’s loyalty
from both Lee and the Peierlses’ offspring. Lee admits to having been much
inspired by Peierls’s former protégé, the communist Gerald Brown: her edition
of the Peierls-Bethe Letters is dedicated to him. None of these three
writers appears to be familiar with the memoirs of Pavel Sudoplatov, Special
Tasks, which outlined the strategies of issuing personal threats adopted by
Soviet Intelligence to aid the country’s atomic weapons research.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
I wrote about Sudoplatov’s statement in a posting of three years ago: ‘Mann Overboard’. It is worth reproducing the extract in full again here. Pavel Sudoplatov was deputy director of Foreign Intelligence of the NKVD from 1939 until 1942, and in July 1941 was appointed director of the Administration of Special Tasks. ‘Special Tasks’ involved both assassination abroad (Sudoplatov had personally killed Konovalets in Rotterdam in 1938, and had supervised the assassination of Trotsky in 1940, so he was well qualified for the job), and stealing of secrets to assist the Soviet atomic bomb project. Sudoplatov wrote:
“There was one respected scientist we targeted with
both personal threats and appeals to his antifascism, George Gamow, a
Russian-born physicist who defected to the United States in 1933 when he was
permitted to leave the Soviet Union to attend an international meeting of
physicists in Brussels, played an important role in helping us to obtain
American atomic bomb secrets. Academician Ioffe spotted Gamow because of his
connections with Niels Bohr and the American physicists. We assigned Sam
Semyonov and Elizabeth Zarubina to enlist his cooperation. With a letter from
Academician Ioffe, Elizabeth approached Gamow through his wife, Rho, who was
also a physicist. She and her husband were vulnerable because of their concern
for relatives in the Soviet Union. Gamow taught physics at George Washington
University in Washington, D.C., and instituted the annual Washington Conference
on theoretical Physics, which brought together the best physicists to discuss
the latest developments at small meetings.
We were able to take advantage of
the network of colleagues that Gamow had established. Using implied threats
against Gamow’s relatives in Russia, Elizabeth Zarubina pressured him into
cooperating with us. In exchange for safety and material support for his
relatives, Gamow provided the names of left-wing scientists who might be
recruited to supply secret information.” (Special Tasks, p 192;
published 1994)
Sudoplatov’s account has been challenged: he did get names of some spies wrong, for instance, but most of it has been confirmed by other sources. (Sudoplatov’s disclosures provoked wrath from some diehard KGB officers.) He does not specifically identify the Peierlses as targets, but Genia’s intimate friend Gamow had almost certainly been recruited in the Soviet Union: the comic-opera story of his plans to escape the country, followed by an absurd plea made to Molotov, can be inspected in my piece ‘Mann Overboard’. The prolonged delay of six months after the Peierls marriage before Genia’s exit visa was approved indicates that the decision was made only after very careful planning, with sign-off occurring at the highest level. In a testimony provided to Shifman by the scientist Freeman Dyson, the latter wrote of Genia’s ‘long experience of living in fear of the Soviet police’, which indicates that she and Rudolf confided to their closest friends how they were being threatened.
Genia and Rudolf Peierls
Yet
even the somewhat starry-eyed Shifman shows a realistic assessment of the
horrors of 1937, when he describes the intensification of the Great Terror in
July of that year, and directly echoes Sudoplatov’s claims:
“Working on
my previous book, Physics in a Mad World, I looked through a notable number
of files from the archive of the German and Austrian sections of the Comintern.
This archive is now kept in the Russian State Archive of Social and Political
History (RGASPI) in the public domain. I was amazed by the number of German and
Austrian communists who were agents of the Comintern in Western Europe and
carried out the order of Stalin with an iron fist. In many dossiers there is a
note ‘performed special assignments’. ‘Special assignments’ is a euphemism that
could mean anything: from espionage to discrediting opponents among Russian
emigres, from eliminating disobedient agents, to assassinating defectors from
the ‘socialist paradise,’ Trotskyists (and Trotsky himself), and other
‘undesirable elements’.”
“In 1934-36, many of the Comintern agents fled or were
recalled to Moscow, and almost all disappeared in 1937-38: they were either
sent to Gulag, or were executed immediately after their arrest by the NKVD.” (Love
and Physics, p 265). There were other emotions than Love involved with
Physics, for sure.
Thus Rudolf Peierls’s
extraordinary trip to Moscow in the autumn of 1937 has to be analysed very
closely. What was he thinking, walking into the lions’ den, still a German
citizen who knew that the Germany Embassy would not come to his aid if anything
untoward happened, at a time when Stalin was persecuting Germans scientists,
especially those of Jewish origin? I start with Peierls’s account of the
enterprise:
“In the summer of 1937 I was invited to a nuclear physics conference in Moscow, and Genia planned to come with me. But we were warned that her presence might prove an embarrassment to her friends and relatives, so she did not go. I went by myself, stopping for a week in Copenhagen. I then went . . . to Leningrad, where I met Genia’s sister, Nina, who had by then been allowed to return to Leningrad. Landau was very worried by the state of affairs, a fact he mentioned only when we were walking in a park, and were secure from being overheard. Nevertheless, the scientific discussions at the conference itself were normal and fruitful.” (Bird of Passage, pp 129-130)
A
dissertation could probably be written on this paragraph alone, given the
numerous items that are left unsaid. Now that historians can pick up so much
more background to the events in the Soviet Union and Copenhagen at the time,
multiple questions have to be posed as to the accuracy of Peierls’s statement,
from the circumstances of his departure to the question of whether, given the
flimsiness of his account of it, he even attended the conference. I organize
these questions around the following five subjects: 1) Arrangements for travel;
2) Logistics of the conferences; 3) The political climate in the Soviet Union;
4) Proceedings in Moscow; and 5) The meeting with Nina.
Arrangements
for Travel
Remarkably,
Sabine Lee completely overlooks the 1937 Moscow visit in her biographical
sketch. This oversight is doubly strange because Peierls assumed his new
position as Professor of Mathematical Physics at Birmingham University in
October 1937. (He was offered the chair, in the spring of 1937, by Professor
Mark Oliphant, who himself did not take up his chair of physics at Birmingham
until the same month.) The Conference in Moscow took place from September 20th
to the 26th. I suspect no record of the exchange between the
organisers of the conference and the Peierlses exists (if indeed it was
conducted by mail), but the event conveniently fell between the end of Rudolf’s
period at the Mond Laboratory, where his position had been financed by the
availability of funds released by the unexpected detention of Pyotr Kapitza in
the Soviet Union, and the assumption of his new post.
So
who warned Rudolf and Genia that Genia’s presence might prove ‘an
embarrassment’ to her friends and relatives? That gesture showed an unusual
amount of sensitivity and compassion on the behalf of the Soviet authorities.
Given, however, that Genia’s parents were at that time in disgrace, exiled in
Ufa, it seems unlikely that they would have been discomfited further by the
presence of Genia in Moscow, unless, of course, the physicist’s wife made some
sort of public protest – a highly unlikely happening. It would appear to me
that Genia would have been mortally afraid of returning to the Soviet Union at
this time, and might even have attempted to persuade her husband from going,
had she not been aware that his summoning was a vital part of any arrangement
made to protect her family from the direst outcome.
As
will be shown, Rudolf combined his excursion with a visit to Copenhagen, which
contains its own contradictions. Moreover, Rudolf was clearly aware that a
visit to Moscow at this time might provoke some difficult questions from his
British hosts. He must have gained a Soviet visa (his German passport had been
renewed in Liverpool in 1934, for a period of five years), because an alert
customs official at Harwich noticed the Soviet stamps in his passport – but not
until Peierls returned from a holiday, ‘spending his Easter vacation’ in
Copenhagen, in April 1938. As part of the report on his arrival at Harwich
declares: “During the examination of his passport it was noticed that it
contained a Soviet visa and Russian control-stamps for 1937, but the alien,
when questioned, beyond confirming that he had visited the U.S.S.R. last year,
did not appear to be willing to give any reason for his visit to that country,
and, in view of his substantial position as a professor, Peierls was not
further questioned on the subject.” (TNA, KV 2/1658/2, serial 1A)
Why
Peierls should have to behave so furtively about a legitimate conference in
Moscow is not clear. Had he perhaps concealed the whole adventure from his new
supervisor, Professor Oliphant? One would have thought that the timing of the
conference was excellent cover for whatever other business he had to attend to
in the Soviet Union, about which he was clearly diffident to talk. If he had
given a straight answer, perhaps no report would have been filed, and no one
would have been any the wiser. Instead, MI5 opened a file on him, one that
eventually ran to eight bulky folders.
One
other aspect that has not been analysed properly is the financing of Rudolf’s
and Genia’s travel in the 1930s. It was not as if they were flush with money,
yet they flitted around Europe and the Soviet Union with seeming ease. Shifman informs us (via Sabine Lee) that
Rudolf’s father, Heinrich ‘provided some financial support to the young family,
through wire transfers first to Switzerland and then to England, within the
limits imposed by the Nazi government of Germany’, but Henrich was very
cautious. He had not approved of Rudolf’s marriage in the first place, and he
regarded their ventures to the Soviet Union as risky and hazardous. It was
unlikely that, under these circumstances, he underwrote their extensive voyages,
many of which were not even traced at the time.
For
example, Sabine Lee’s edition of the Peierlses’ Letters (Volume 1)
proves that Rudolf and Genia engaged in a lengthy and enigmatic visit to the
Soviet Union in 1932 (completely ignored in Bird of Passage, which is an
astonishing lapse), when Rudolf had already expressed how difficult it would be
for the married couple to survive in Zürich on his meager salary after their marriage. For some reason, in the
spring of 1932, Rudolf went to Moscow without Genia, and there applied for a
visa for his wife to join him. It took so long that he had to leave the Soviet
Union before Genia gained her visa, after which she was able to travel to Leningrad
to stay there several weeks without him. (In the interview with Weiner [see
below], he deceptively stated that he ‘came back earlier than my wife, who
was staying longer’.) It sounds very much as if the granting of Genia’s visa
was conditional on some effort or commitment by Rudolf. (Professor Lee offers
no commentary at all on this highly controversial visit.) MI5 slipped up
massively in not pursuing aggressively Kim Philby’s source of funding when he
was sent as a journalist to Spain in early 1937. It probably should have been more
pertinacious in ‘following the money’ when it came to the Peierlses’ travel
arrangements. Yet the Security Service probably knew nothing about these
journeys at the time: Rudolf and Genia were not yet resident in the United
Kingdom.
Conference
Logistics
Elsewhere,
Peierls has given some vague descriptions of the movements of that summer, so
threadbare that one might be justified in wondering whether he did in fact
attend it. We owe it, however, to Paul Josephson, in his book Physics and
Politics in Revolutionary Russia (1991) to confirm that Peierls did
actually attend the conference. “The
second all-union conference on the atomic nucleus, held in Moscow late in
September 1937, drew over 120 Soviet scholars, and several physicists from
abroad including Wolfgang Pauli, Rudolph Peierls, a longtime associate of L.D.
Landau, and Fritz Houtermans”, he wrote. Josephson cites official Russian records in
his footnotes to this passage in Chapter 6, so this account can presumably be
trusted. Yet Josephson does not mention Bohr, whose presence would certainly
have been sought in normal circumstances, given his prominence and reputation. Izvestia
sent him telegrams in November 1937, seeking his opinions on Landau’s
discoveries, which indicates the level of regard in which he was held in
Moscow. Bohr had spent some time in the Soviet Union in the summer of 1937,
however, lecturing, and meeting Kapitza, so he presumably did not need to
return so soon.
Peierls indicates very clearly that he spent a week in Copenhagen first, before advancing through Stockholm and Leningrad. Presumably that week must have taken place in the first half of September. But what was the purpose, and whom did he meet? It is very odd that he does not mention an important Scientific Conference reportedly organised by Niels Bohr, of which a very famous photograph exists, with Peierls sitting among many luminaries in the second row [see below]. Shifman reproduces this photograph, with the caption “The famous A auditorium of the NBI: Photograph by Nordisk Pressefoto, Niels Bohr Institute, courtesy of the AIP Emilio Segré Visual Archive, Fermi Film Collection, and Niels Bohr Archive, Copenhagen.” It all sounds very authentic – but the occasion is undated. (This image, with attendees named in manuscript, can be found, but it has a question mark after ‘1937’.) In her commentary to the Letters, Sabine Lee indicates that Genia accompanied Rudolf to a conference in Copenhagen at the beginning of September – a fact that appears to be confirmed by a reference in a letter to Rudolf from his father – after which Rudolf proceeded to Moscow alone, but no details are given. And in that case, why did Rudolf write that he ‘went by myself, stopping for a week in Copenhagen’? Was a meeting in Copenhagen a cover for a visit to Moscow?
Scientists in Copenhagen (1937?)
Searching for details of the Niels Bohr conference on the web is a mostly fruitless task: the photograph is the most regularly cited item. One rare specific reference to a Bohr conference that autumn comes from N. L. Krementsov, who, in his International Science Between the Wars: The Case for Genetics, writes: “Just a few weeks earlier, in mid-November [1937], he [Otto Mohr] had spent several days with Muller in Copenhagen (at a conference organized by Niels Bohr) . . . ” But mid-November does not work with Peierls’s calendar. Another famous photograph shows Niels Bohr chatting with Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen some time in 1937, yet again it is sadly undated. (Bohr’s Collected Works confirm that a meeting of the Copenhagen Academy was held on November 19: it states that the photograph was taken at Fredericksborg Castle.) The scene looks as if it were a conference, at some kind of open-air cocktail party: most of the attendees are wearing overcoats. But I find it extraordinary that, if so many famous scientists were assembled at such a critical time, there would not be some more tangible and reliable record of the proceedings.
Niels Bohr & Werner Heisenberg
Peierls added to the confusion by explaining, in Nuclear Physics 1919-1952, a work he edited, that Bohr was on a lecture tour of Japan in the early summer of 1937, and in June gave an address on nuclear physics in Moscow during his return home. In October 1937 he apparently spoke at the Congrès de Paris, but Ruth Moore, one of Bohr’s biographers, informs us that ‘in late September, not long after the Bohrs had returned to Copenhagen, Bohr went to Bologna, to attend the centenary [sic] celebration for Galvani.’ Abraham Pais, however, records that the Bohrs returned home as early as June 25: Moore’s ‘not long’ has to be interpreted vaguely. Further research indicates that the actual bicentennial of Galvani’s birth occurred on September 9, but the event was celebrated between October 17th and the 20th . Moore continues by stating that Bohr was expecting to see Ernest Rutherford in Bologna, but there learned that Rutherford had died after a fall from a tree. (The dates now mesh.) Bohr thus rushed to England for the funeral service shortly after Rutherford’s death on October 19. No mention is made of a conference in Copenhagen amid all these activities.
Thus the facts about the Copenhagen conference, and Bohr’s activities in September, are very elusive and contradictory. No Bohr archival record or biographical work appears to refer to an early September conference: Volume 9 of Bohr’s Complete Works, edited by Peierls himself, contains an entry in its Index for ‘Copenhagen Conferences’, but for years 1932, 1933, 1934, 1936, 1947 and 1952 only. An early trawl through biographies of scientists appearing in the ‘1937’ photograph shows no reference to such an event. (The search will continue.) As I mentioned before, in his memoir, Peierls specifically indicates that he spent a week in Copenhagen before Moscow, in discussions with Bohr, but makes no reference to any conference. In the Letters, however, hints are planted at the holding of such an event, Peierls’s father echoing his son’s description of the coming function. In her own account, Genia travelled to Copenhagen, but then went home. Yet Peierls later wrote that he travelled to Copenhagen alone. In the Letters, Peierls and Hans Bethe discussed Bethe’s visit to Europe that summer, and they planned a ten-day motoring tour in Paris in early September, as Bethe was due to sail back to the United States in the third week of September. The September conference is like a refined version of Schrödinger’s Cat, where the box emblazoned with the photograph of the gathered scientists can be opened, but nothing is to be found inside.
Thus the only recognised conference
in Copenhagen that autumn occurred much later, and was noted by Peierls when he
edited Volume 9 of Bohr’s Complete Works. He wrote that Bohr delivered a
paper back in his hometown in November: “Of a paper read to the Copenhagen
Academy on 19 November 1937, only an abstract is published . . .” So was that the occasion when the
photograph was taken? If so, how did Peierls manage to attend it? Did he return
to Copenhagen in November, fresh in his new post? If so, why did he not
describe it? It is all very puzzling: I have written to Professor Sabine Lee to
ascertain whether she can shed any light on the matter. In her initial
response, she offered to help, but evidently completely missed the point of my
questions: she had evidently not inspected coldspur. I followed up with
more detailed questions about Peierls’s puzzling movements, and even offered to
send her the current draft of this piece, so that she could enjoy a sneak
preview.
Professor Lee eventually
responded, on October 24. She failed to address my questions, however, simply writing:
“As far as I can see, all the issues relating to the Peierlses and
security have comprehensively been addressed in many thorough and serious
explorations which, in my view, have proved beyond reasonable doubt that there
is no question about the integrity of the couple.” I must surely have overlooked some
important works. I found this attitude astonishing in its lack of intellectual
curiosity, and for its untenable suggestion of ‘proof’, but also thought it a not
unusual reaction for an academic with a territory and position to protect. Having
appointed herself as the editor of Peierls’s Letters, Lee has shown a
disappointing lack of energy in providing useful exegesis: if she encounters an
event that can be confirmed by Bird of Passage, she refers us to such a text;
if a phenomenon is ignored by Peierls, she likewise ignores it. And she appears
to have little understanding of the world of intelligence.
The Political Climate in the
Soviet Union
Summer 1937 was a dangerous
time in Moscow – especially for Germans. Three major show trials had recently
taken place. In August 1936, the prominent Party leaders Grigory Zinoviev and
Lev Kamenev were among a group of sixteen who had been found guilty of plots
against Stalin, and executed. In January 1937, Karl Radek and others were
accused of plotting with Nikolai Bukharin against Stalin, Radek delaying his
own demise by implicating Bukharin and Marshal Tukahchevsky. Nearly all were
executed immediately. In late May, Tukhachevsky was forced to sign a confession
that he was a German agent in league with Bukharin in a bid to seize power. He
was tried and found guilty on June 11, and executed a few hours later. (Bukharin
was executed the following March.) At this stage, Stalin was executing anyone –
including his Comintern agents recalled from overseas – who could have been
tainted by exposure to Western influences.
Shifman refers to the dangers
that German scientists faced at this time. He reports how Hans Hellmann
(1903-1938) emigrated to the Soviet Union after being dismissed from the
University of Hanover on December 24, 1933. In Moscow, he assumed leadership of
the Karpov Institute’s Theoretical Group. On March 9, 1938, however, he was
arrested on the charge of spying for Germany, and was sentenced and executed on
May 28, 1938. Fritz Noether (1884-1941) was a mathematician who likewise
emigrated to the Soviet Union, where he was appointed professor at the
University of Tomsk. He was arrested in November 1937, and on October 23, 1938,
found guilty of sabotage and spying for Germany. He was sentenced to
twenty-five years of Gulag, but executed on September 11, 1941.
Fritz Houtermans, who was
described erroneously as a visitor from abroad, attending the conference with
Peierls, was a German Communist who had worked for EMI in England – near
Cambridge, where Peierls worked – before emigrating to the Soviet Union in
1935. Houtermans’ biographer states that Houtermans was arrested
by the NKVD in December 1937. He was tortured
and confessed to being a Trotskyist plotter and Gestapo spy (as his charge
sheet, reproduced in Mikhail Shifman’s Physics in a Mad World, described),
out of fear from threats against his wife, Charlotte. They had married in
Tbilisi in August 1930 (or 1931), and Peierls and Pauli had attended the
ceremony. However, Charlotte had already escaped from the Soviet Union to
Denmark, after which she went to England and finally the USA. On May 2, 1940 Houtermans was extradited to Germany
and arrested by the Gestapo at the Soviet-Polish border. Owing to the
intervention of another scientist, he was released to work on German nuclear
research, and survived until 1974.
According to Herbert
Fröhlich’s biographer, G. J. Hyland, another member of the ‘Jazz Band’, Dmitri
Ivanenko, had been arrested on February 27, 1935, in the wake of the Kirov
assassination. (Kirov was head of the Party organisation in Leningrad, and was
assassinated on December 1, 1934. Some accounts suggest that Stalin had himself
arranged the murder.) Shifman reports
that Ivanenko and Landau had quarrelled in 1928, and Ivanenko had moved to
Kharkov, but writes, however, that Ivanenko was not arrested until March 4,
1936. Whichever date is accurate, Ivanenko had then been exiled to a labour
camp in Karaganda, but Vladimir Fock – another physics student whom Genia Kannegiesser/Peierls
mentioned in a poem and in letters to Rudolf – managed to engineer an
extraordinary intercession with Fröhlich before the latter escaped from the
Soviet Union. Fröhlich was then able to gain further pressure from Pauli and Paul
Dirac, and Ivanenko‘s sentence was commuted to exile in Tomsk.
Most poignant of all was the
fate of Matvei Bronstein, another of the ‘Jazz Band’ alongside Landau, Gamow
and Genia Peierls. He was arrested on the night of August 6, 1937, when aged
thirty. According to the archives, his captors demanded that he hand over his
arms and poisons, to which Bronstein responded with a laugh. He was sentenced
and executed, on the same day, in a Leningrad prison in February the following
year. It is not surprising that Lev Landau spoke to Peierls in tones of terror
when they met the month after Bronstein’s arrest. Landau, a future Nobelist,
was himself arrested on April 27, 1938, for comparing Stalinism to Nazism.
A report in Ukrainian Week
from June 2019 (Landau worked in Kharkov) reinforces the fact that Landau and
his circle had been under pressure for a while. It reports: “Already in 1936, the NKVD had begun to build a case against ‘a
group of counterrevolutionary physicists at UPTI led by Professor Landau.’ The
police interrogated Lev Rosenkevich, who was then the head of the radioactive
measurement lab at the Institute. During this interrogation, Rosenkevich
supposedly confessed that back in 1930 Landau’s ‘counterrevolutionary group’
had already been active at UPTI, and included Shubnikov and the head of the
x-ray laboratory, Vadim Gorsky. The NKVD acted swiftly and in November 1937,
Shubnikov, Gorsky, Rosenkevich and nuclear physicist Valentin Fomin were shot.”
Thus we have further evidence of the horrors that Landau must have confided to
Peierls in their furtive meetings of September 1937.
Another study might draw some interesting comparisons between those Germans persecuted in the Soviet Union and those like Charlotte Houtermans who were able to engineer a miraculous flight from the terror. Herbert Fröhlich was another who reputedly managed to ‘escape’. Fröhlich had been invited to work at the Ioffe Physical-Technical Institute in Leningrad by Yakov Frenkel, the same scientist who had invited Peierls to the Odessa Conference in 1930, and he thus left the University of Freiburg in 1933 for his new life. He in fact sought employment in the United Kingdom first, but failing to be awarded any funding, accepted Frenkel’s offer, waited six months to pick up a visa in Paris, and arrived in the Soviet Union only in the late summer of 1934. Thereafter, Frohlich’s account becomes increasingly dubious, however.
Herbert Froehlich
Fröhlich blamed his disillusionment on the assassination of Kirov in December 1934, and the ‘Great Terror’ that followed. Yet that was a premature assessment: the Great Terror is not generally recognized as starting until 1936, and foreign scientists were not persecuted at that time. Fröhlich, through another miraculous series of events that almost matched George Gamow’s picaresque adventures (see ‘Mann Overboard’), including a fortuitous exit visa planted in his passport, and his ability to buy a sleeper ticket on a train to Vienna with rubles without the NKVD’s noticing, managed to escape to Austria in May 1935. (Fröhlich’s ODNB entry states that he was ‘expelled’ from the Soviet Union. If Moscow wanted to punish him, it would surely have handed him over to Germany.)
What is also significant, as
Christopher Laucht informs us in Elemental Germans, using part of the
Peierls correspondence not published by Sabine Lee, is that Peierls was
also involved in helping Fröhlich’s egress. With whom he communicated, and what
exactly he achieved, are not clear, but any lengthy exchange with the Soviet
authorities does not match with the more frenzied activity by which Fröhlich
described the events. In any case, the community of German leftist émigré
scientists in England no doubt took notice of his adventures. In England, Fröhlich
took a position under Nevill Mott in Bristol, alongside Klaus Fuchs, and
eventually became Professor of Theoretical Physics at Liverpool University. Even
more astonishing is the fact that Fröhlich, despite all his tribulations with
his Soviet hosts, apparently seriously considered an invitation by Frenkel to return
to Russia soon afterwards. Even his biographer was moved to note: “Why he
should ever have entertained this course of action is not at all clear, given
his earlier experience there, and the fact that Stalin was still conducting his
Great Purge.” The naivety of émigré Germans scientists was matched only by the
clumsiness of the NKVD.
Thus Peierls’s decision to
visit Moscow in the late summer of 1937 seems incredibly rash, unless he had
some kind of relationship with the Soviet authorities. He was not yet a citizen
of the United Kingdom, while his wife was in England with two children: he
owned a German passport. It would be unlikely that the Germans would come to
his rescue should he encounter any difficulties. He must have gained a clear
understanding of the horrific goings-on in the Soviet Union. He admitted that
Landau furtively explained to him the general oppressions of the Terror, but
did not explain how Landau and his associates themselves were being persecuted
at that time. A subtle point that has been overlooked,
moreover, is this: if Landau was under intense investigation at the time, why
did the authorities allow him to travel from Kharkov to Moscow for the
conference, to meet a ‘Gestapo spy’? The NKVD surely intended him to speak to
Peierls, and reinforce the fear that he should hold for the Soviet secret
police. He might well have impressed upon his friend that, unless Peierls
continued to co-operate, his (Landau’s) life would be in danger. Otherwise, exactly
what the benefits of attending such a conference would have been were extremely
murky, as the following section makes clear.
Conference Proceedings
For someone who recalled so
many events so crisply, Peierls was remarkably vague about Moscow in 1937. In
an interview conducted by Charles Weiner of the University of Seattle in 1969,
Peierls said: “I don’t remember much in detail about the conference. It was a
time when work on cyclotrons in Russia had started. People were reporting on
the progress. I don’t think they had a working cyclotron yet . . . “, adding
later: “There was a conference in Moscow and when already the chance of
foreigners to go there was already deteriorating, when the mass arrest had
started. This was heading for Stalinism.” Apart from the outrageous misrepresentation
about the nature of Stalinism, and how long Stalin’s murderous policies had
already been in evidence, Peierls here completely finesses the point of why he
had gone to Moscow. Given the poisonous atmosphere of the mid-1930s, might he
perhaps have verified how useful such a gathering would be before agreeing to
attend? And would he not have been required to submit a report on the
proceedings his return? Yet he struggled to recall what the conference was
about: “I think it was nuclear physics”. He recalls Bohr’s having been in
Moscow in the summer, but mistakenly described George Gamow as being present
that September, and had to be corrected by Weiner (who appears to be confused
about the ‘conference’ at which Borg spoke in June, and the September event).
Weiner was overall a very incisive interrogator, and had done his homework, but
he missed an opportunity here.
The atmosphere in Moscow in
1937 must surely have been memorable, apart from what appears to have been a very
meaty set of presentations. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists provides
the following details about the agenda: “Twenty-three of the 28 papers were by
Soviet authors, and they covered five main problems: the penetration of matter
by fast electrons and gamma rays; cosmic rays; beta decay; the interaction of
the nucleus with neutrons; and the theory of nuclear structure. There were also
discussions of high-voltage apparatuses used for penetrating the nucleus.” The
chairman of the conference was Abram Ioffe, who also chaired the conference in
Odessa in 1930. He must have had special significance for Peierls, since his
daughter, Valentina, was one of the ‘Jazz Band’ group of which Genia, Landau
and Gamow were members. In view of Ioffe’s position, one might wonder whether
information about the not totally reliable group filtered back to Ioffe
himself. Landau was arrested soon after the conference, and I have already
described what happened to Ivanenko and Bronstein.
A report on Ioffe’s address to
the conference (from the Bulletin of Atomic Sciences) is worth quoting
in full:
“Ioffe’s
opening speech at the second conference reflected the forces at work under
Stalin in the late 1930s and indicated that the field of physics was not immune
to the political currents of the day. He spoke about the tremendous
achievements of Soviet science, which under socialism was devoid of the slavery
and exploitation of capitalist science. He described how advances in nuclear
physics served to verify the validity of dialectical materialism. Ioffe praised
the emergence of proletarian scientists who replaced the old intelligentsia and
highlighted the great strides made since 1933: the creation of a large network
of physics research institutes, and the fact that in four years the number of
nuclear physicists in the Soviet Union had quadrupled to more than one hundred.
On a more
somber note. Ioffe acknowledged the failure of Soviet physicists as yet to
achieve ‘any kind of practical applications’. And while the Academy of Sciences
Presidium, in the protocol issued at the end of the conference, touted the
achievements of Soviet nuclear physics as outlined by Ioffe, it also drew
attention to the failure to begin construction of a new, powerful cyclotron.”
Peierls obviously found this
unremarkable, not noting the irony of the fact that Soviet scientists were
being persecuted and murdered, while ‘capitalist science’ was reportedly
riddled with ‘slavery and exploitation’. Nor did he comment on the final communiqué
issued by the attendees to the person who inspired the whole affair. According
to the archive, “On September 1937 at the Second All-Union Conference on
nuclear physics in Moscow, the participants addressed Comrade Stalin with these
passionate words of admiration: ‘The successful development of Soviet physics
occurs against the background of a general decline of science in capitalist
countries, where science is falsified and is placed at the service of greater
exploitation of man by man. . . Vile agents of fascism, Trotsky-Bukharinist
spies and saboteurs . . . . do not stop short of any abomination to
undermine the power of our country . . .
Enemies penetrated among physicists, carrying out espionage and sabotage
assignment sin our research institutes .
. . Along with all the working people of our socialist motherland, Soviet
physicists more closely unite around the Communist party and Soviet government,
around our great leader Comrade Stalin .
. .’”
Either Peierls did not hang
around to hear this nonsense, or listened, and concluded it was not worth
recording for posterity when he returned to the United Kingdom. I repeat his
only technical conclusion: “Nevertheless, the scientific discussions at the
conference itself were normal and fruitful”, as if it had been just another
conference, like one in Brussels, or Bath, perhaps. Why did this experience not
solidify his resolve against the dark forces of Communism?On the other hand, his colleague David Shoenberg at
the Mond Laboratory, with whom he worked on a paper on magnetic curves in
superconductors in 1936, returned from Moscow in late September 1938, and told
everyone about Landau’s arrest and incarceration. Shifman rather oddly suggests
that Fuchs should have spoken to Shoenberg to learn the truth of Stalin’s
oppression: but his mentor Peierls would have been just as capable, and much
more conveniently placed.
Peierls,
unlike Kapitsa, never petitioned Soviet authorities (except in a plea to
Khrushchev for the emigration of Genia’s sister, Nina), never expressed or
published any criticism of the murder and imprisonment of Soviet physicists
under Stalin, including many eminent physicists and colleagues he had met at
conferences in the Soviet Union. Nor did he support Soviet physicists who were
active in the dissident movement, notably Yuri Orlov or Andrei Sakharov. His
most fervent defense was for identified Soviet agents, such as Fuchs, and for suspected
Soviet agents, such as Oppenheimer, and in his tortuous appeal on behalf of the
convicted spy Nunn May.
The Meeting with Nina
The likelihood of Peierls’s
being able to set up a safe meeting with his sister-in-law, Nina, in Leningrad
at that time must have been extremely slim. Again, Peierls is terse about the
occasion. From Bird of Passage: “I then went . . . to Leningrad, where I met Genia’s sister,
Nina, who had by then been allowed to return to Leningrad. From there I went to
Moscow.” No description of how he had managed to locate her, or what they
discussed. Yet it would have been exceedingly dangerous for Nina to make
contact with any foreigner. As Timothy Snyder has written in Stalin and
Europe: Imitation and Domination, 1928-1953: “Well aware of the threat of
total espionage from abroad, Stalin had by the 1930s created a system of ‘total
counterespionage’ in the Soviet Union: ubiquitous surveillance and terror.
Every contact with foreigners was watched. Every visitor to foreign consulates
was investigated. Every immigrant was suspected as a possible foreign agent.”
Nina
had been allowed to return from exile, of course. In March, 1935, she and her
parents had been exiled to Ufa for five years, but, at the end of April, 1936,
she had been allowed to return to Leningrad. Nina described this fortuitous
event in these terms: “The
slogan ‘Children are not answerable for their parents’ which Stalin suddenly
produced at the start of 1936 immediately granted freedom to all young people
who had been exiled from Leningrad as ‘members of the family’, and I was one of
these. At the end of April I returned to Leningrad.” This fact is confirmed by
a letter that her parents were able to send to Genia on May 9, 1936, when her
mother writes that she knows only that Nina has gone to Leningrad. (The truth
that Nina’s parents were as innocent as she was is irrelevant in this picture.)
For some reason, however, Nina makes no mention of any meeting with Peierls in
her memoir about her step-father, which was published posthumously in 1991. And
maybe they did not meet in in Leningrad: Shifman writes elsewhere (p 13) that
Nina, after her exile to Kazakhstan ‘returned to Leningrad after Stalin’s
death’. Someone has the facts wrong.
What is more likely is that
the whole encounter had been engineered by Stalin, to communicate to Peierls
that his wife’s relatives were suffering, but that their situation could be eased
by Peierls’s continued contribution to the Soviet acquisition of western atomic
research. After all, it was no use threatening persons with the uncertain fate
of their relatives unless you were able to confirm to your victim that they were
still alive, but in permanent danger, and that others like them had been
exterminated. And Isai’s fate would remain on a roller-coaster. Nina herself
describes how autumn 1937 saw the start of arrests among people exiled from
Leningrad, and that Isai was arrested in March 1938, and spent eight months in
an overcrowded prison cell in Ufa. She remarks, about Isai: “He was
interrogated twice: a repeat interrogation about the murder of Uritsky which
had happened 20 years before, and on the ‘spying activities’ of Rudolf Peierls,
who by that time already a physicist of world renown.” He was not physically
assaulted, but subject to all manner of threats, as well as ‘screaming and foul
language’.
We thus see the duplicity of
the NKVD’s operation. On the one hand, it threatened an innocent man purely
because of a distant (and non-blood) relationship with a known assassin, and sought
to acquire knowledge from him of a German scientist’s supposed espionage simply
because he (Isai) and his wife had been visited in 1934 by his step-daughter
and husband, showing off their baby daughter. At the same time, they allowed
this German spy to enter the country, unchallenged and unarrested, and permitted
him to conduct a clandestine encounter with the prisoner’s other step-daughter,
who had recently been released early from a term of exile, and converse with a
suspected rebel (Landau), who was under close investigation. The contrast
between the fate of other Germans, and Peierls’s relatively serene sojourn, and
his ability to meet Nina unharassed, could not be more stark or provocative.
As a final twist in this saga of distorted memories and deliberate disinformation, I present the enigma of the text of a letter sent by Nina to Genia in May 1936, just before she returned to Leningrad, where she commented on the photographs of the Peierlses’ daughter. “Thank you for the pictures of Gaby”, she wrote. “We also received the Berlin pictures. Gaby there is a bit worse seen, but your Shweiger [father-in-law] is amazingly clear-cut; he has the face of an actor and resembles Isai. . . . Rudi looks best of all from the viewpoint of expressiveness.” Did Nina get the date or location wrong? Peierls never mentioned in Bird of Passage a visit to see his father in Germany after his own escape in 1933. He indicates that the next time he saw his father (and his step-mother, Else, his own mother having died in 1921) was in 1939, when they were allowed to emigrate, and stopped off in the UK on their way to the USA. Yet that is also untrue, as the letters from his father and his step-mother indicate very clearly that they visited Rudolf and Genia in England in June 1936, i.e. after Nina’s letter was sent. Heinrich Peierls also refers to meeting Genia and Gaby early in 1934, in Hamburg, so Nina could not have been referring to photographs taken on that occasion.
What was Peierls doing back in
Germany in 1935 or 1936, and why would he conceal the fact in his memoir? His
published Letters also show that he and Genia made a visit to the Soviet
Union in 1936, which again he ignores in his autobiography. In a letter to L.
I. Volodarskaya of 27 September, 1989 (printed in Volume 2 of Lee’s edition of
his correspondence), he tells his addressee that he and Genia visited the
Soviet Union ‘a few more times in the early thirties’. Yet he completely overlooks these events in
his memoir. In a letter to H. Montgomery-Hyde of March 35, 1981, in Captain
Renault style, he rebuked the author over his book The Atom Bomb Spies,
writing; “I must say I am quite shocked by many inaccuracies and the general
careless attitude to the facts which it reveals.” But Peierls is no better. How
can one trust anything he says?
* * * * * * * * * * *
According to all accounts by
friends and colleagues Rudolf Peierls was a decent man, an integrated, pipe-smoking,
crossword-solving English gentleman, feted, honoured and respected. Even if the
meeting with his future wife had been arranged, theirs was clearly a love-match,
and Rudolf was an attentive husband and a doting father. He was a brilliant
scientist, and an excellent teacher who inspired hundreds of students. As the
awards tumbled over him in the last couple of decades of his life, he surely
basked in the reputation he had gained among scientists world-wide, and with the
British intellectual elite.
Yet the great secret must have
haunted him – to the degree that he could never even hint at it in his
autobiography. Apart from his confession to Viscount Portal, he could never
admit to the world that his wife’s kinship with a mortal enemy of the Bolshevik
regime had placed intolerable burdens on them both. For there is surely another
narrative that has to be pieced together: the flight from Germany; the
fortuitous acceptance of a post at Cambridge using funds released by Kapitza’s
forced detention in the Soviet Union; the unexpected invitation by Frenkel to
attend a conference in Odessa; the introduction to Genia by another manipulated
deceiver, George Gamow; the struggle to gain a visa for Genia, and then their
miraculous departure to the West; their unexplained and unreported return visit
to Moscow in 1932, when Peierls laboured to gain a re-entry visa for Genia; the
assistance given to Fröhlich to ‘escape’ from the Soviet Union in 1934; the unlikely
direct correspondence with exiled ‘criminals’ in 1936; the concealed visit to
the Soviet Union in 1936; the unnecessary and dangerous attendance at the
conference in Moscow in 1937, and the problematic private encounter with Landau;
the perilous meeting with Nina in Leningrad that same year; the evasive
explanation for that visit given to immigration officers in 1938; the adoption
of British citizenship to allow him to work on the MAUD project; the timely
awareness that Klaus Fuchs would be a useful asset on the project, and the
promotion of his employment; his nurturing of Fuchs despite the knowledge of
his Communist past; Peierls’s continued friendships with open Communists such
as Roy Pascal; his recruitment of Gerry Brown, an open subversive communist
from the USA, to a post at Birmingham soon after Fuchs’s conviction; and his
contribution to the Manhattan project followed by his immediate support of
peace movements that were instruments of Stalin’s aggressive objectives.
It is very difficult for those
of us who have never suffered under a totalitarian regime such as Hitler’s or
Stalin’s to judge the actions of those who were subject to the kind of threats
that the Peierlses, Gamow, and others underwent. The date on which Genia and
Rudolf sold their souls to the Devil will probably never be verifiable, but
when it happened, they must have quickly realised that they were being sucked
into a vortex that was inescapable. And yet . . . Need Rudolf have been quite so diligent and
dedicated in fulfilling Stalin’s wishes? Was he in fact specifically instructed
to recruit Klaus Fuchs? Since his authority was at that stage minimal, could he
have not found a way to exclude him from the project without damaging his own
credibility, and thus possibly causing harm to Genia’s relatives? Did he and
Genia not conclude that Stalin’s cruelty was capricious and random, in any
case? Did he have to take so naively such an active role to promote the Atomic
Scientists’ Association, since it had enough steam and authority to communicate
its message without him?
I believe the April 1951
letter to Lord Portal is a vital part of the puzzle. Peierls must have been
disturbed enough by his recent conversation with Portal to conclude that some
kind of statement was appropriate. Suspicions and accusations were coming from
the Americans, as well as from British sources (such as the rather dubious Kenneth
de Courcy). It was the only place where he lifted the veil enough to admit that
the Kannegiesser association might have been a factor. My theory would be that,
soon after this, some kind of agreement (like that with Anthony Blunt) was
forged between Peierls, MI5 and other authorities: Peierls probably admitted to
a minor degree of carelessness with Fuchs, or sympathy for the Soviets in time
of war, and was essentially forgiven. (‘Quite understand, old man . . .’;
‘Utter devils, those Russkies, eh?’; ‘What your poor wife must have been
through . . .’; ‘At least that Fuchs fellow is behind
bars . . .’) The Russians had the bomb,
so it was all (heavy) water under the bridge. Stalin died in 1953: maybe
Peierls breathed a sigh of relief. Genia’s mother died in 1953, her step-father
in 1954. Alexander Foote, a potential threat, died in 1956. Nina was the only
surviving close relative, and Peierls made appeals to Khrushchev for her to be
allowed to leave the Soviet Union.
Thus when the rumours were
aroused again in 1979, with the publication of Deacon’s book, Peierls, now Sir
Rudolf Peierls, with the Establishment behind him, bearing a reputation for covering up embarrassing
secrets about espionage and counter-espionage, was emboldened to deny
everything, rightly thinking that there was not enough evidence around to
disprove his contentions. The secrets of VENONA had not yet been publicised:
there was no Internet. MI5 or the Home Office probably had a quiet word with
the publisher, who did not put up a fight, not even bothering to re-issue
Deacon’s book with the offending passages removed. In 1985, Peierls published
his heavily sanitised memoir, which conveniently omitted several facts,
distorted others, and elided over the more troublesome parts of his career and
life. Even then, with Nina having died in Oxford in 1982, he could not bring
himself to tell the full story. Neither Uritsky, nor Nikolai Kannegiesser, nor
Stalin appears in the book.
If there is one experience
that convinces me of Peierls’s harbouring of more dangerous affiliations to the
forces of Communism, it is the 1937 Conference in Moscow. How could a liberal
democrat, albeit with leftist leanings, as he described himself, possibly not
conclude, after what he saw and heard in Moscow that dreadful summer, with the
arrests and executions of the innocent
in their hundreds, that a Stalinist regime based on Communism was the
most inhuman and destructive agency that could in those days be imagined?
Peierls was surely not a Denis Pritt or a Leon Feuchtwanger, who reported
enthusiastically about the justice of the show trials, but his silence places
him in the same league as those rogues. Would not such a lover of liberty and
pluralism have immediately reported on his experiences, informed his
fellow-scientists (such as Fröhlich and Mott) of the true nature of the system
they admired, and carefully re-assessed where his own allegiances lay? And
would he not have been wary of any open communist, such as Fuchs, and at least
striven to convince such persons of the folly of their convictions? Sabine
Lee has written that ‘Rudolf Peierls never shied away from expressing his views
in public’, but if that is so, he should be castigated as a humbug and a shameless
apologist for Stalin.
Peierls in England: that will
be the subject of the second (and maybe final) chapter of my analysis of The
Mysterious Affair at Peierls. And now that Professor Lee has declared that
their project is complete, I wonder whether the Royal Society and the British
Academy would consider funding my more searching and inquisitive investigation
into Rudolf Peierls?
The New York Times chose to present the following as its leading letter in the Book Review dated August 4, 2019:
“In
her review of Tim Bouverie’s ‘Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and
the Road to War’ (July 20), Lynne Olson gives a number of reasons for what
happened at the Munich conference, among them Chamberlain’s ignorance of
foreign policy. However, she omits an underlying motive for that sordid
episode, namely anti-Communism.
Throughout
the 1930s, Conservative political opinion in Britain mostly saw Nazi Germany as
a buffer against Marxism. Such views played as much of a role in ‘appeasement’
as did Chamberlain’s limitations and naivete. That anticommunism was a key
component of European fascism, alas, is a truth that has been long forgotten.”
(Gene
H. Bell-Villada, Williamstown, Mass.: August 2, 2019)
What
is the message the letter-writer is trying to leave us? It was not immediately
clear (to me), and the text thus needs to be parsed carefully. ‘Alas’: that
suggests regret, regret that some unnamed persons have forgotten that
‘anticommunism was a key component of European fascism’. Well, that may not be
correct, in two senses. It may not be correct that the ‘truth’ has been
forgotten (by whom?), but it is also possible that the ‘truth’ itself is
debatable. Hitler’s brand of fascism, according to most accounts, singled out
the communists as the prime threat to his ambitions for nationalist vigour, and
he persecuted them immediately he gained power in 1933. On the other hand,
Mussolini’s brand of European fascism evolved from socialist roots. One might
conclude, however, from the way Stalin propagandized antifascism in the 1930s,
that antifascism was a more vibrant component of communism than the other way around.
After all, countless deluded intellectuals ran to his banner in the belief that
only communism could resist fascism. That all changed, of course, in August
1939, when Stalin decided to change the rules.
Bell-Villada’s
contention is thus not without its sceptics. I read in this September’s History
Today that Brendan Simms has just published a book, Hitler: Only the
World Was Enough, in which he claims that Hitler has been misunderstood as
a ‘far-right’ anti-communist. The reviewer Nigel Jones wrote that “Simms argues
forcefully that his primary motivation was fear that Germany would be crushed
by the Anglo-Saxon capitalism epitomised by the US and the British Empire.” (Please
check it out, Mr. Bell-Villada.) Moreover, many years ago, A. J. P. Taylor
remarked that Hitler’s anti-communism was soon dampened after his assumption of
power, being replaced by antisemitism. Perhaps the mutual loathing disappeared when
Hitler and Stalin realised that they had more in common with each other than
their ideologies superficially suggested: despite his rallying-calls to
anti-fascists, Stalin was a secret admirer of Hitler’s tactics for increasing
power. Or, more probably, Hitler’s anti-communism weakened because all the
active communists in Germany had either been murdered, or had fled the country.
Quite simply, Hitler and Stalin both wanted to obliterate everyone who
disagreed with them, or did not declare loyalty to them, or simply who did not
fit in their perverse sociological tribes.
Yet
the author seems to be suggesting two further ideas. The first is the subtle
insinuation that ‘anti-communism’ is the nadir of political depravity, and
that, by expressing opposition to communism, Chamberlain and his team were
essentially fascists themselves, and had more in common with Hitler than the
history-books have shown. Apart from the illogical and careless temporal
connection that Bell-Villada makes between the 1930s and Chamberlain
(Chamberlain did not become Prime Minister until May 1937), the assertion is
absurd. While there were certainly many fascist sympathisers in government
during the late 1930s, the Conservative Party was defending a pluralist liberal
democracy against the pressures of the two totalitarian adversaries. It was a
flawed democracy, no doubt, with too much of an aristocratic influence,
unsuitable delusions about the Empire, and an inherent disregard for equality
of opportunity, but it was as good as any of the time, and capable of
evolution. It was worth defending. The expression of both anti-fascist and
anti-communist sentiments was a healthy and necessary part of the political
stance.
The
second suggestion is that the failure of British political opinion to
sympathise with communism, and thus form a speedy alliance with Stalin, was one
of the main reasons why Hitler was allowed to pursue his imperial ambitions
unchecked. I believe the writer here discloses a colossal naivety about the
Soviet Union in the 1930s. It was a vast prison-camp, where Stalin had been
responsible for the deaths of millions of his own citizens in the name of Leninism-Marxism
and the Communist Experiment. The historian Richard Evans, in his recent
Gresham’s College Provost lecture, pointed out that the German middle classes,
before Hitler established his one-party state in July 1933, were ‘terrified of
communism, whose supporters had put 100 deputies into the Reichstag in November
1932’. They were therefore much more familiar than their British equivalents
were with what had happened to the bourgeoise in Russia. Fear of communism was
clearly not a specifically fascist characteristic, even in Germany.
It
would thus have been absurd for Great Britain and France to pretend that they
had goals in common with Stalin for the setting up of some stable political
order in Europe at a time even before the horrors of Hitler’s own programmes of
mass murder had been initiated, and it would have been impossible to sell such
ideas to the British electorate, or even to the nation’s allies in eastern
Europe. As one historian. Larry Fuchser, has written: “To Chamberlain, reaching
agreement with the dictators [Hitler and Mussolini] was a supremely important
goal in its own right, and he did not need the additional ideological factor of
Germany as a bulwark against communism to convince him that such agreements
would be worthwhile.” Chamberlain’s policy was desperately naïve – to satisfy
any demand of Hitler’s in order to avert war. But Hitler’s hatred of communism
had nothing to do with it.
A common theme in historical writing, however, is that, if Britain had adopted serious talks with the Soviet Union, Germany might have been encircled and intimidated, and the Third Reich quashed before war broke out. Indeed, some Russian and Western historians even today lament the failure of the Western powers to have sent a serious negotiating team to Moscow in the summer of 1939: this is a prominent theme of Bouverie’s. Yet Chamberlain rightly detested Stalin and Communism, and found it impossible to consider personal parleys with the Soviet leader. And when the Soviet Union wanted a guarantee from Poland to provide a path for its army to pass through in the event of hostilities, it did not approach Poland for permission, but requested Britain and France to intervene! The fact was that Poland’s government feared Stalin more than it feared Hitler, and would have nothing to do with any accommodation with the Communists. Had Britain come to some agreement with the Soviet Union, would it have had to connive at Stalin’s occupation of the Baltic States and Poland? Such a pact would have meant the replacement of the appeasement of Hitler by a similar grovelling position towards Stalin. As George Orwell later wrote: “. . . all the appeasers, e.g. Professor E. H. Carr, have switched their allegiance from Hitler to Stalin.” (London Letter to Partisan Review, April 17, 1944)
Molotov Signing the Pact (with Ribbentrop over his shoulder)
In
any case, what happened next blows a hole in Mr. Bell-Villada’s thesis. In
August 1939 the determined anti-fascists and the resolute anti-communists got
together to sign a non-aggression pact, and the Soviet Union started providing
matériel to help Hitler wage his war against the West, including, of course,
the Battle of Britain. The conflict joined was now a battle against
imperialism, not fascism. Alas, the truth that Molotov and Ribbentrop came together
to sign a pact that immediately turned the remnants of a Popular Front into a
Highly Unpopular Devils’ Alliance has long been forgotten by many eager
armchair observers.
So
what was the Times Book Editor thinking? I suspect he (or she) didn’t
really take it all in: the apparent message rang a bell in his head that
Communism would have defeated Fascism, and that war would have been averted,
and Europe would have been a better place for it if only the West had reached
out to Stalin. The vague regret about the implosion of communism that imbues
the Times editors must have overtaken him. That is a common opinion of
the American Leftist intelligentsia. After all, this is the newspaper that
instructs its journalists to report the catastrophe of Nicolás Maduro’s dictatorship
in Venezuela as his ‘mismanagement of the economy’, carefully avoiding the
‘S-word’ of ‘socialism’ (which might turn out to embarrass Bernie Sanders), as
if the moustachioed Marxist caudillo were merely an incompetent version
of John Major.
And
it does not appear that Mr. Bell-Villada has even read the book. He is allowed
to assume that Lynne Olson’s review offers a comprehensive summary of
Bouverie’s account. The nature of Mr. Bell-Villada’s credentials for offering
an opinion on this matter is not clear, however: he offers a suitable
Massachusetts address, but his Wikipedia entry describes him as ‘an American literary critic, novelist,
translator and memoirist, with strong interests in Latin American Writing, Modernism, and magic Realism’. Bell-Villada (the entry goes on to say)
has been a professor at the private liberal arts Williams College since 1975.
No apparent degree in modern history is evident in his curriculum vitae,
although he does hold a mysterious doctorate from Harvard.
Analysis
It happened that I had read both Lynne Olson’s
review and Bouverie’s book. Bell-Villada is correct about Olson: the Soviet
Union and Communism get nary a mention in her review. Yet Bouverie is hardly
expansive in his coverage either. He repeatedly refers to Chamberlain’s
‘distrust’ of the Russians, but discusses the antipathy for Bolshevism in
mainly impersonal terms: “ . . . the western Powers needed to reach an
understanding with Soviet Russia, a nation widely distrusted and against which
Nazi Germany had originally been conceived as a bulwark.” (p 334). (Note the
evasive passive voice.) Yet, on the following page, Bouverie undermines the
nature of what such an ‘understanding’ might have taken, referring to events as
late as April 1939: “The Foreign Policy Committee could see no advantages in an
alliance with Russia – on the contrary, such a move was likely to perturb
allies in eastern Europe – and, although Chamberlain had assured the Labour
leadership that he had ‘no ideological objection to an agreement with Russia,’
he admitted privately to being deeply suspicious of her.”
‘No ideological objection’? ‘Suspicious?’, when
the state that Lenin founded was pursuing the extermination of capitalists like
him? This shows another gutless aspect of Chamberlain, who believed that
dictators could be transformed to behave like English gentlemen. Was he more
suspicious of Stalin than he was of Hitler? In that case, why not respond more
robustly? Neville Chamberlain was not known for his intellectual stature, but
that sounds more like a move to ‘appease’, or reconcile with, his Parliamentary
opposition rather than the reflection of any political principles. Nevertheless,
if Chamberlain had been prepared to discard Czechoslovakia because of ‘a quarrel in a far-away country between people of
whom we know nothing’, he would have been unlikely to want to establish an
association with the even more mysterious and inscrutable Russians, and explain
it to his electorate. If he had found it difficult to find a common level of
discourse with Hitler, and had been betrayed by him, it would have been an even
worse struggle with Stalin. Chamberlain was out of his depth. If he and Stalin
had abandoned parleys, and resorted to an arm-wrestling match, I would have
instantly put my money on the Gremlin from the Kremlin rather than on the
Birmingham Bruiser.
Unfortunately, Bouverie
offers only a very superficial analysis of Britain’s relationship with the
Soviet Union, in an Epilogue titled ‘Guilty Men’. But he gives a hint to where his unsubstantiated opinion resides, in a
paragraph that might put some air behind Bell-Villada’s sails (p 415): “The
failure to perceive the true character of the Nazi regime and Adolf Hitler
stands as the single greatest failure of British policy makers during this
period, since it was from this that all subsequent failure – the failure to
rearm sufficiently, the failure to build alliances (not least with the Soviet
Union), the failure to project British power, and the failure to educate public
opinion – stemmed. For defenders of appeasement, this is an exercise in
ahistoricism. It was not until after Hitler tore up the Munich Agreement and
marched into Prague, they argue, that he demonstrated his mendacity, while the
full horrors of the Nazi regime only became apparent after the end of the war.”
Yet
Bouverie does not substantiate this claim. Does he think that Chamberlain
‘failed to perceive the true nature of the Soviet regime’, as well? He
does not say. Bouverie cites three paragraphs from Sir Warren Fisher’s ‘damning
survey’ of British foreign policy, delivered in 1948, but Fisher omitted the
Soviet Union in his castigation of the failure of ‘the British Empire, the
United States and France’ to face the facts in unison. Earlier, Bouverie explained
that the Chiefs of Staff had made an about-turn about the role of the Soviet
Union when Molotov replaced Litvinov as Foreign Minister, and feared a
rapprochement between the Germans and the Soviets, and that such arguments
swayed Halifax and most of the Cabinet into responding to Soviet overtures. Yet
this was probably too late, and largely a bluff. In a well-written book on
Chamberlain, Neville Chamberlain and Appeasement by Larry Williams
Fuchser (a 1982 volume strangely missing from Bouverie’s bibliography), the
author shows his opinion of how unimportant negotiations with the Soviet Union
were. He spends only two brief sentences on the topic. Fuchser indicates that
it was the pliable Halifax, at the bidding of Cadogan and the Foreign Office,
who pushed for this approach, but then enigmatically adds: “Chamberlain was
forced into these negotiations quite against his will, and it is clear that in
this respect at least, he had lost control over British foreign policy.”
This
does not make complete sense, however, as the remainder of Fuchser’s thesis is
that Chamberlain maintained tight control over a sycophantic inner Cabinet, a
compliant Foreign Policy Committee, and a loyal party apparatus. Thus we have
to return to Chamberlain’s sudden lack of resolve: if he was not able to stand
up to his Labour opposition, the Foreign Office, and his Chiefs of Staff, what
hope did he have of standing up to Hitler or Stalin? Why did he simply not veto
any attempt to reach out to the Soviets? It was not as if Halifax was going to
resign in a flash of pique (as if that mattered), as Eden had done. It is true
that Chamberlain felt handicapped by the French, because of her agreements with
the Poles and the Soviet Union, but he was overall prepared to reject the
French implorations. Fuchser and Bouverie both point out that Alexander
Cadogan, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, wrote in his
diary that Chamberlain ‘would rather resign than sign alliance with Soviet’. ‘Appeasement’ is sometimes domestic
political compromise – and not always a necessary act.
Thus it would have been better to have sent no mission at all rather than the underpowered and underauthorised Slow Boat to Leningrad that resulted, and which failed to impress Voroshilov and company. That misguided venture encourages Bouverie, however, to make his dubious conclusion: “Unlike his successor, he [Chamberlain] treated the United States with frigid disdain, while his failure to secure a deal with the Soviet Union stands out as among the greatest blunders in that calamitous decade.” But it wasn’t ‘failure’: Chamberlain was never serious. And what kind of a deal with the unscrupulous Stalin would have made sense? The independence of the Baltic States was a major bone of contention. And what would happen if Stalin had still invaded Finland, for instance? Again, Bouverie does not explain.
A J P Taylor
One
of the historians with whom I am familiar is A. J. P. Taylor. Taylor studied this
period in his much-cited 1961 work, The Origins of the Second World War.
This is a book that needs to be used cautiously, however, since Taylor
notoriously came up with some bizarre and controversial judgments. For example,
he presented some equivocal and provocative opinions, such as: “The blame for
war can be put on Hitler’s Nihilism instead of on the faults and failures of
European statesmen – faults and failures which their public shared. Human
blunders, however, usually do more to shape history than human wickedness.”
Such vague attributions of guilt and responsibility are highly dubious and
unconvincing. In addition, Taylor could be infuriating when he made lofty
generalisations about ‘the British’ and their assumed intentions, when in the
next sentence he would analyse the differences of opinion that existed in
various politicians and diplomats, and which thus contributed to indecision.
(Taylor deployed too much use of the passive voice for my liking.)
Yet
Taylor could provide trenchant and pithy insights as well, worthy of essay-type
‘Discussions’. “Both sides wanted
agreement, but not the same agreement. The British wanted a moral demonstration
which would enable them to reach a settlement with Hitler on more favourable
terms. The Russians wanted a precise military alliance for mutual assistance,
which would either deter Hitler, or secure his defeat”, he wrote, in the
relevant Chapter Ten of Origins. And his conclusion to this chapter ran
as follows: “Alliances are worth while when they put into words a real
community of interests; otherwise they lead only to confusion and disaster, as
the French alliances did. It was inconceivable, in the circumstances of 1939,
that the British should commit themselves, irretrievably and decisively, in
favour of Soviet Russia as against Germany; and equally inconceivable that the
Russians should commit themselves to defence of the status quo.” That
judgment is sound and clear, notably so, given Taylor’s own communist
sympathies.
Later,
in 1965, in English History 1914-1945, Taylor gave a more guarded explanation
of what happened. He suggested that the Soviet Union made demands for
reciprocity in its approaches to France and Germany, and that Chamberlain
dithered, not only because of distaste of communism, but owing to the pressure
of public opinion, and the appeals of such as Lloyd George – a now familiar
refrain. In addition, Taylor raised the important spectre of the Soviet Union’s
invading Poland and the Baltic States under the mantle of an agreement with the
democracies, which would have been a bitter pill for Chamberlain to have
swallowed and explained to his constituents. Taylor significantly repeated his
earlier conclusion that the Soviet Union was as unenthusiastic about an
alliance with the United Kingdom and France as the latter were themselves.
How
has historical research advanced in the past fifty years? The theme of a missed
opportunity has been picked up since by many other historians, some of whom
have had access to Russian archives. For instance, in 1999, Michael Jabara
Carley wrote 1939: The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of World War
II (a work apparently uninspected by Bouverie) and in 2018 followed up with
a paper in International History Review titled Fiasco: The
Anglo-Franco-Soviet Agreement That Never Was, and the Unpublished British White
Paper, 1939-1940, The latter explores these events in great depth, and
points to rifts between France and Britain in the response to the Soviet
approach, and describes a White Paper on the failed negotiations that was suppressed
by Chamberlain.
Unfortunately,
Carley’s work is representative of the fashionable academic left (including, no
doubt, Mr. Bell-Villada), emphasizing the themes of ‘co-operation’ with the
Soviet Union, attributing the distaste for communism to Britain’s ‘elites’, and
ignoring the fact of how unreliable a signer to an agreement Stalin would have
been. Chamberlain and other
conservatives are classified as ‘hard-core Sovietophobes’, as if their distaste
were a dire medical condition rather than a serious and justified ideological opposition.
Carley supposes the existence of Soviet ‘views’ towards Britain and France, as
if the country had vigorous parliamentary debates, a free press, and public
opinion polls. He appears to think that Soviet military ‘assistance’ to
adjoining countries from the Black Sea to the Baltic would have been welcomed,
and somehow beneficial. He reports that the Soviet Union had one hundred
divisions to deploy, while Britain and France had only two, but treats
seriously Stalin’s suggestion that he did not want be ‘left in the lurch to face
Nazi Germany alone’. Carley is far more trusting of Stalin’s objectives in a
military alliance than he is of Chamberlain’s justified scepticism about it.
Stalin’s replacement of Litvinov (a Jew) by Molotov at the end of April is
attributed to British ‘stalling’ to Stalin’s offer of a couple of weeks before
rather than interpreted as a signal that Stalin meant at that point to do
business with the Germans (as has been pointed out by other historians). He
says nothing about Stalin’s access to Britain’s diplomatic thinking by virtue
of spies in the Foreign Office (notably John Herbert King). In summary, according
to Carley, the signing of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was all Chamberlain’s
fault.
If this is the current state of research on the crisis of the late 1930s, it is highly regrettable. The controversy over the missed opportunity would have been a highly profitable avenue for a contemporary historian to pursue, perhaps investigating the counterfactual history that would have evolved if a Soviet-Franco-British alliance had had any teeth. Would they have had to declare war on Germany in September 1939? And, since the retrospective judgment of the Soviet Union is that it signed the pact in order to gain time and rebuild its armed forces, would it really have wanted to engage Germany on foreign soil in 1939? Threatening joint hostilities would surely have not deterred Hitler, or brought Europe to peace. Hitler would not have abandoned his plans for Lebensraum. What would the Poles have done if the Red Army invaded its territory? How would a land assault on Germany by French and British forces have fared? Would Hitler have had to conduct a war on two fronts, or would he have been able to reverse his strategy, fighting the Soviet Union first before invading France and Belgium? Life would still have been made intolerable for millions of innocent civilians from Finland to Bessarabia, and Hitler would certainly not have stayed his hand over Dunkirk when he had the chance to eliminate the British Expeditionary Force. (I expect some military historian has already explored such scenarios.)
Tim Bouverie
In
summary, Appeasement is a very readable, and imaginatively composed,
book. The author is a fresh-faced young journalist who was educated at my alma
mater, Christ Church, Oxford, gaining a degree in history. He has exploited
a rich range of sources –
works of history, both familiar and obscure, private and public archives,
memoirs, articles and dissertations (though almost exclusively written in
English) to write a fascinating account of a still controversial period in the
nation’s history. Yet debates continue about responsibilities and blame for
what was a very complex challenge in allowing Hitler to advance his plans as he
did, and I do not think Bouverie sheds any fresh light on the matter, and does
not provide support for his conclusions. Despite the extraordinary parade of
puffs from distinguished historians on the back-cover (Kershaw, Frankopan, Moorehead,
Hastings, Macmillan, Beevor and Fraser), I do not regard Appeasement as
a major work of history bringing innovative research to the table. But it prompts
me to inspect now one or two aspects in more detail.
Lewis
Namier
As an example, I quote again from Bouverie’s Epilogue, where he cites several leading figures (e.g. Boothby, Churchill, Warren Fisher) who apparently held the opinion that, with greater diplomatic skills, war could have been averted (p 410). Among these he lists the historian Lewis Namier, who (he says) believed that ‘at several junctures it could have been stopped without excessive effort or sacrifice’. Well, this sounded to me a point at which a book should begin, not end. I knew of Namier (mainly through my study of Isaiah Berlin), but had not read any of his books. This statement came from Diplomatic Preludes: I thought it might address several questions on my mind, so I obtained the volume from the local university library.
Lewis Namier
The
Introduction and Outline of Namier’s book contains the following passage
(which I recorded in my August Commonplace file): “The issue of a crisis depends not so much on its magnitude
as on the courage and resolution with which it is met. The second German bid
for world dominion found Europe weak and divided. At several junctures it could
have been stopped without excessive effort or sacrifice, but was not: a failure
of European statesmanship. Behind the German drive were passionate forces,
sustained by obsessionist, sadistic hatreds and by a cruel ideology; to these
the Germans, whom defeat had deprived of their routine of life, showed even
more than their usual receptivity, while the rest of Europe had neither the
faith, nor the will, nor even sufficient repugnance, to offer timely, effective
resistance. Some imitated Hitler and hyena-like followed in his track; some
tolerated him, hoping that his advance would reach its term – by saturation,
exhaustion, the resistance of others, or the mere chapter of accidents – before
it attained them; and some, while beholding his handiwork, would praise him
of having ‘restored the self-respect of
the Germans’. Janissaries and appeasers aided Hitler’s work: a failure of
European morality.”
And that’s it. There was nothing else in the
book to back it up – just
these windy, abstract statements about ‘European statesmanship’ and ‘European
morality’. (I do not know what is meant by those entities. History is made by
individual agents contributing to events.) I found the rest of the book, which
describes only the events of 1938 and 1939, practically unreadable, and utterly
useless in illustrating the claims that Namier made in his Introduction. So why
would Bouverie choose to extract such a vague and unsupported assertion to
bolster the rather thin conclusion to his book? Exploring this idea might have
led to something valuable.
Maybe Namier wrote about appeasement in more
depth elsewhere. (Bouverie lists In the Margin of History as a primary
source, but I have not been able to inspect it.). So I dug around. In his essay
on Namier, published in Personal Impressions, Isaiah Berlin gives a
glimpse of how his friend really thought:
“He spoke bitterly about the policy of appeasement. He felt that their sense of reality and their empiricism had evidently deserted the ruling classes in England: not to understand that Hitler meant everything he said – that Mein Kampf was to be taken literally, that Hitler had a plan for a war of conquest – was self-deception worthy of German or Jews. The Cecils were ‘all right’; they understood reality, they stood for what was most characteristic of England. So was Winston Churchill. The men who opposed Zionism were the same as those who were against Churchill and the policy of national resistance – Geoffrey Dawson, the editor of the Times, Chamberlain, Halifax, Toynbee, the officials of the Foreign Office, Archbishop Lang, the bulk of the Conservative Party, most trade unionists. The Cecils, Churchill, true aristocracy, pride, respect for human dignity, traditional virtues, resistance, Zionism, personal grandeur, no-nonsense realism, these were fused into one amalgam in his mind. Pro-Germans and pro-Arabs were one gang.”
This was progress, at least, the recognition
that in a pluralist society, many different standpoints contribute to eventual
policy-making, rather than ascribing causation to the abstraction of ‘European
morality’. Namier identified some of these agents. Yet I found it too
stereotyped: ‘the ruling classes’ – who are they? Why should a hesitation about
the merits of Zionism automatically be assumed to indicate a sympathy for
Hitler? Surely opinions were more complex than this? Indeed, Berlin mentions
that Namier used to harangue ‘pen-pushers of the Foreign Office’ and ‘the
hypocritical idiots of the Colonial Office’ at his club, the Athenaeum, and do
more harm than good by his supplications. And did Namier really understand the
various aspects of what ‘appeasement’ meant?
Interestingly, elsewhere in this essay, Berlin
draws attention to Namier’s failings as a historian. “He believed that objective truth could be discovered, and that he
had found a method of doing so in history; that this method consisted in a sort
of pointillisme, ‘the microscopic method’, the splitting up of
social facts into details of individual lives – atomic entities, the careers of
which could be precisely verified; and that these atoms could then be
integrated into greater wholes. This was the nearest to scientific method that
was attainable in history, and he would adhere to it at whatever cost, in spite
of all criticism, until and unless he became convinced by internal criteria of
its inadequacy, because it had failed to produce results verified by research.”
Berlin then concludes that Namier then integrated his atomic facts ‘with a
marvellous power of imaginative generalisation’, lacking the skills of a
narrative historian.
Is ‘imaginative generalisation’ a feature to be admired in
historians? Maybe not so much these days, Sir Isaiah. (Berlin was rather good
at that stuff himself, as was Taylor.) As another example of Namier’s
shortcomings, in his memoir Bird of Passage, Rudolf Peierls reinforced
the impression that Namier gave of theatrical vagueness when he wrote: “He was very fond of saying ‘we’. And you had
to be very alert in following the course of the conversation to know whether at
the given point this meant the University of Manchester, All Souls College,
Oxford, the Jews, the Foreign Office, or Poland.” Such ways of thinking do not
lead to historical precision. I do not believe Namier is a productive and reliable
source. But very shrewd on Peierls’ part.
An Alternative Approach
My first exposure, therefore, to one of Bouverie’s influences was not positive. Moreover, I think Bouverie overlooks the fact that ‘appeasement’ (like ‘remembrance’, which can mean both ‘recalling from experience’ and ‘commemoration’) carried two clear meanings in the 1930s – ‘pacification’, and later ‘conciliation’. (This is a point that David Dilks made: “The word in its normal meaning connotes the pacific settlement of disputes; in the meaning usually applied to the period of Neville Chamberlain’s premiership, it has come to indicate something sinister, the granting from fear or cowardice of unwarranted concessions in order to buy temporary peace at someone else’s expense.”) The ambivalence is shown in the fact that the book, titled Appeasing Hitler in the UK (which does not do justice to the policy as pursued), was re-titled Appeasement in the USA (when it is not a study of appeasement in general), with an odd subtitle (Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill and the Road to War) that suggests that Churchill was party to the process. Thus the fact that much of Baldwin’s and Chamberlain’s policy, spurred by their deep desire to avert a repeat of the WWI carnage, was motivated by an honourable desire to bring a stable peace to Europe, and only later sharply criticised as a shabby propitiation of Hitler’s and Mussolini’s demands, is overlooked by Bouverie.
Chamberlain and Hitler
I have read only a handful of the book in
Bouverie’s Bibliography, but, if I were striving for a methodological approach
to the challenge of defining when the policy of appeasement might have taken a
different course (Namier’s ‘junctures’), I would need to bring some structure
to the environment, along two axes. The first would offer a time-line, listing
the critical events by which Hitler’s growing belligerent moves became more
obvious and threatening. The second would attempt to profile the varieties of
opinion that existed in influencers and policy-makers in Britain’s pluralist
society. Indeed, from studying materials such as Bouverie’s, one can track how
the opinions of individual factions did evolve in the light of events on the
Continent. (Some
historian may have already analysed the period under such a structure, and I
apologise if I have overlooked such a study.)
I would start with Hitler’s accession to power
in 1933 – a grab, but performed with some democratic authority. At that stage,
observers should have sat up to take the Austrian more seriously. Here follow
what I would classify as the main events that western politicians should have
addressed and analysed:
The Publication of Mein Kampf: Hitler’s book was published in Germany in 1925 and 1926, but did not appear in English until 1933, in a heavily abridged version. As Bouverie relates, the Ambassador to Germany, Sir Horace Rumbold, immediately after Hitler’s accession, warned the Foreign Office of the threats inherent in Mein Kampf, but he was largely ignored. Indeed, many politicians did not even read the English version until too late (see ‘Who read Mein Kampf?’)
German Rearmament (1): Brigadier Temperley, who had attended the Geneva Disarmament Conference in 1932, pointed out in 1933 that Germany’s development of over a hundred fighter airplanes was in contravention of the Treaty of Versailles.
Withdrawal from the League of Nations: Germany withdrew in October 1933, in protest against its members’ refusal to allow the country to achieve military parity.
The Night of the Long Knives: In June-July 1934, Hitler showed his ruthlessness by purging Ernst Röhm’s Sturmabteilung, seeing it as threat to his own power
The Murder of Dollfuß: Having banned the Austrian Nazi party, Dollfuss, the Chancellor Austria was assassinated in July 1934 by Nazi agents.
German Rearmament (2): On March 16, 1935, Hitler openly announced that Germany would build an airforce, and begin conscription, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles.
Anglo-German Naval Agreement: This agreement was signed on June 18, 1935, and set out to regulate the size of Hitler’s Kriegsmarine in relation to the Royal Navy.
Italian Invasion of Ethiopia: On October 3, 1935, Hitler’s fascist ally Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, showing his imperial ambitions. The inability of the League of Nations to respond emphasised its hollowness.
German Reoccupation of the Rhineland: In violation of the Treaties of Versailles and Locarno, Hitler’s forces remilitiarised the Rhineland on March 7, 1936, including a considerable swath of land on the right bank.
Fortification of the Western Wall: Soon after the militarisation of the Rhineland, Hitler started a project to fortify the old Siegfried Line.
Aid to Franco in Spanish Civil War: Immediately the war started, in July 1936, Hitler sent in troops, aircraft and material to aid the Nationalist effort.
Hitler’s Assumption of Control of Army: With the sacking of Field Marshal von Blomberg and General von Fritsch in January 1938, Hitler made himself Supreme Commander of the Army.
The Anschluß: On March 12, 1938, Austria was annexed into Germany, a process forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles.
The Expropriation of the Sudetenland: In October 1938, the Sudetenland (a primarily German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia that had once been part of Austria) was assigned to Germany.
The Munich Pact: On September 30, 1938, Chamberlain and Daladier signed the pact with Hitler, effectively handing over Czechoslovakia to the Germans.
Kristallnacht: On November 9-10, 1938, The Germans oppressed Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues, killing about a hundred Jews throughout Germany.
The Invasion of Czechoslovakia: The Germans invaded Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939.
The Nazi-Soviet Pact: Molotov and Ribbentrop signed a pact of non-aggression on August 23, 1939.
Invasion of Poland: The Nazis invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, thus triggering a declaration of war by Britain.
Extermination of Jews: On December 16, 1939, The Times made its first report on the mass execution of Jews, in Lublin.
Next,
the profiles of political figures. One must remember that the United Kingdom,
in trying to forge policy, had to consider the opinions of the leaders of its
Dominions, as well as those of its allies in Europe. In addition, Roosevelt
started to poke in his oar at the beginning of 1938. I shall restrict myself here to the spectrum
of opinion within Britain itself. I
would classify it as follows, with examples of the main adherents:
Complete agreement with Nazi policies (Mosley; Londonderry)
Sympathy for fascism, but essentially patriotic (Dawson)
Universal Christian pacifism (Lansbury)
Pious abdication of leadership (Baldwin)
Labour distaste for Nazi policies, but essentially pacifist
(Attlee)
Liberal admiration for Hitler’s reconstruction of Germany, but
opportunistic and hypocritical over the Soviet Union (Lloyd George)
Labour distaste for totalitarianism, and stressing rearmament
(Bevin)
Tory disdain for Hitlerism, sympathy to German grievances, but
confident it can be stopped via good will (Chamberlain)
Vague impressionable Tory piety (Halifax)
Realistic abhorrence of Hitlerism (and Communism), and urging
re-armament (Churchill)
Distaste for Hitlerism, and unwilling to negotiate with dictators
(Eden)
Belief in Communism as only valid anti-fascist force (Pollitt)
This segmentation is
necessarily simplistic, but serves to show how fragmented political opinion
was. (I hope it carries enough ‘imaginative generalisation’ to satisfy
Berlinian requirements. It may attribute a depth of political thinking to such
flabby figures as Halifax and Eden that they perhaps do not merit.) Moreover, opinions
evolved. Attlee became more militaristic after the Sudetenland episode; Lord
Londonderry, a diehard fascist supporter, was revolted by Kristallnacht;
Chamberlain had to swallow his previous idealistic notions after the Munich
agreement was shown to be empty; Lloyd George suddenly switched his
affiliations to Moscow after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and made personal
remonstrations to Chamberlain about an agreement with the Soviet Union, as did
Churchill, supported by Vansittart; all but Halifax and the diehard corps of
the Conservative Party rallied to Chamberlain after war was declared; several
prominent Communists (such as Goronwy Rees) abandoned the Party when the
Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was signed; Mosley was interned, but renounced support
for Hitler when he understood the nature of Hitler’s aggression; Churchill
remarkably overlooked his hatred of Communism when Germany invaded the Soviet
Union. What should also be remembered, however, is that before the war
Chamberlain used his authority to apply great pressure on the media to support
his policy of trying to contain Hitler, which helped to stifle any oppositionist
communications to the mases.
Nevertheless, one can
accept that, at a certain stage, opinion might have consolidated around a
strategy of deterrence of Hitler, of sending him a message that continued
infractions of international treaties would not be tolerated, of showing a
degree of force before the dictator had been able to assemble any comparable
military strength of his own, of pointing out to the German people that a
resurgence of imperial aggression across Europe would not be tolerated. For
Hitler was a bully: and bullies will continue to flex their muscles until they
meet resistance. Indeed, they will interpret a failure to resist as a sign of
weakness, and an encouragement of the policies that brought them to where they
are.
I would select the remilitarisation
of the Rhineland as the critical event that should have turned the tables.
Hitler had been given enough benefit of the doubt by then, and the seriousness
of his aggressive ambitions was clear. This was a territorial push, the first
implementation of his objectives for Lebensraum. Yet Hitler’s military
strength was poor: he had not yet built a competent and extensive army. The
French forces were larger and stronger. Hitler did not yet have access to the
munitions factories of Czechoslovakia. And when the French army moved, Hitler
blinked. Repulsing this German incursion would not necessarily have meant war. Yet
nothing happened. The entry of Hitler’s troops into the Rhineland, and the
failure of France and Britain to take action, removed the last obstacle to the
defence of the west. The Treaty of Locarno in 1925 had committed Britain,
France (and Italy) to guaranteeing the Franco-German border against ‘flagrant
violations’. It is difficult to imagine what could constitute a more flagrant
violation than this move of Hitler’s. William Shirer was one journalist who at
the time recognized the pivotal chance that had been allowed to escape.
As Bouverie explains,
the Rhineland exploit had not come as a surprise. The instincts of the newly
appointed Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, were to honour the Locarno Treaty
arrangements, and come to France’s aid if she requested help. But he dithered,
despite hawkish views from such as Vansittart in the Foreign Office, and spoke
against any action by France against Germany. As Bouverie writes: “Despite
stating in a memorandum to the Cabinet on March 8 – the day after the invasion
– that Hitler could no longer be trusted to abide by treaties even when they
had been freely entered into, he nevertheless, and contradictorily, argued that
the Government should use this opportunity ‘as far-reaching and enduring a
settlement as possible whilst Herr Hitler is still in the mood to do so.” (p
87)
Moreover, the public had
not been prepared. Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace
was still an influential book, arguing that the cost of reparations on the
German people was too punitive, and they could not be expected to provide such
wealth in an effective state of slavery. His book was misunderstood, and
criticised at the time. The problem was that politicians such as Chamberlain
and Baldwin were not imaginative enough to recognize that, while the scale of reparations
may have been a mistake, it did not mean that Germany should be allowed to
break other treaty-defined obligations, rearm itself as an aggressive power,
and make incursions into the territories of its neighbours. Such subtleties
were thus lost on the British public: Bouverie records that the Dean of
Chichester believed that ‘the ordinary man almost breathed a sigh of relief
when he heard that Hitler had entered the Zone.’ Hitler gained further
confirmation of the pusillanimity of the British and French.
The crux of the matter
is that Chamberlain has come to be defined by Appeasement, as Eden was by Suez,
and Cameron will be by the Referendum. The man they called the ‘Coroner’ has
borne the brunt of the failed policy. In his tenure as Prime Minster,
Chamberlain tried to impose his will by creating a Cabinet dominated by
sycophants, and undermined those who stood up to him, such as Duff Cooper and
Eden. But at least he had a policy, however misguided it was, unlike Baldwin.
In a recent Literary Review article, Professor Cornwall observed that
Chamberlain ‘believed that a European war should be avoided because Sudeten
German grievances were basically credible’. That may have been so, but the
damage had been done long before. Again, it must be remembered that Chamberlain
did not become Prime Minister until May 1937. The failures went back many
years.
Thus an innovative and
scholarly approach might investigate whether and why Chamberlain was able to
exert such an influence on foreign policy when he held only the office of
Chancellor of the Exchequer. For example, did his control of the purse-strings
allow him to hinder or help the cause for re-armament? A recent book by Lord
Lexden, Redressing the Balance, tries to restore Chamberlain’s
reputation by inspecting the many reforms that he helped implement before the
dire days of Munich for which he is remembered, and even claims that his
delaying tactics actually helped prepare the British Empire for the inevitable
conflict. A fresh inspection of Chamberlain’s influence before he became
Prime Minister, and of his timidity over the Soviet Union in the face of the
War and Foreign Office pressure in the summer of 1939 might have provided a
dramatic new addition to the historical record.
Dealing with Stalin
‘Judgment in Moscow’
Moreover, Britain would have had to deal with Stalin eventually. I have recently been reading Vladimir Bukovsky’s penetrating study of the Politburo’s manipulation of western opinion, Judgment in Moscow, which explores how the intellectual dupes of the western democracies were taken in by the siren songs of ‘co-operation’, ‘peace’ and ‘détente’, all designed to be implemented on the Kremlin’s terms. Written over twenty years ago, it has only just been published in English. It is an absolutely indispensable volume to be read by anybody who wants to understand the sham of ‘perestroika’ and ‘glasnost’, and the fraudulent behaviour of Gorbachev, leading to the resurgence of kleptocratic communists in the control of Russia. My only regret about this work is that its detailed analysis picks up only around 1970, whereas the propaganda campaign went back to the Second World War. In any case, Bukovsky writes: “Ironically, the architects of Ostpolitik are being touted as heroes and are claiming that the downfall of communism in the East was a product of their ‘delicate’ games with Moscow. This is shameless beyond belief. According to such criteria. Neville Chamberlain could have declared himself the victor in 1945, as peace with Germany was finally reached.”
Vladimir Bukovsky
Of course, poor Chamberlain died in November 1940 of stomach cancer, so did not live to see that irony played out. Yet the analogy is clear – a clear case of post hoc non propter hoc. Bukovsky explains how the shameful policy of détente needlessly prolonged the lives of the communist regimes, and echoed the decades-long practice of the West’s attempts to come to grips with its adversary by taking its implorations for ‘peace’ seriously.
Stalin and Churchill
I have written before
about the futility of trying to build a culture of ‘co-operation’ with an
agency whose objectives are in fact to help the tide of history in trying to
destroy you. (See https://coldspur.com/krivitsky-churchill-and-the-cold-war/) Yet immediately the
Soviet Union became an ally in the war against Germany, Britain (and then the
United States) had to deal with Stalin’s untrustworthiness, duplicity, and
propagandizing, and her representatives seemed incapable of countering the
Generalissimo’s demands for fear of upsetting him, performing damage to the war
effort, and even possibly pushing him back into Hitler’s arms. (Such
negotiations did in fact happen later, through Switzerland and Sweden, but they
were initiated by the Nazis through third parties when they had effectively seen
the writing on the wall.)
Stalin was ungracious
about Churchill’s offer of material aid (which the nation could not afford) after
Barbarossa, and immediately (July 1941) started making demands for a ‘Second
Front’, ignoring the fact that the British Empire was engaged on several fronts
already. Beaverbrook and Harriman made lavish promises to Stalin in person, in
October 1941. Despite informing Churchill in September that the Soviet Union
was ‘on the point of collapse’, Stalin arrogantly insisted on a statement of
‘war aims’ in November, to which Churchill meekly offered ‘co-operation’. Stalin
threatened Ambassador Clark Kerr that he might seek peace with the Germans if
the Allies did not help him more. He asked for (and received) legitimisation of
the Soviet Union’s extended borders in the Baltics. He made incessant and
offensively-worded demands for the highly dangerous convoy system to be
resumed. He ferociously placed the guilt for the Katyn massacre on to the
Germans: Churchill knew that was a lie, but did nothing. Stalin was insincere
about the exchange of intelligence, demanding much, but revealing little. He
undermined the Polish government-in-exile, and captured their representatives
in Warsaw. To Churchill he expressed ‘shock’ on hearing of the Warsaw uprising,
and his forces stood by. He used his spies in the governments of the United
Kingdom and the United States to undermine his allies’ negotiating tactics over
the future of the central states of Europe shortly to be ‘liberated’ by the
Soviets. He was ruthless over the return of prisoners-of-war to the Soviet
Union. And the Iron Curtain fell.
Indeed, on July 18,
1943, Anthony Cavendish-Bentinck, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence
Committee, warned that the appeasement of Stalin closely resembled the previous
attitude to Hitler. But by then, it was again too late. British influence was
diminished by then, with the resources of the United States influencing the
outcome of the war. The vain, ingenuous and sickly Roosevelt was calling the
shots, sometimes influenced by his mischievous wife. He undermined Churchill,
believing that he alone knew how to manage Stalin. Shortly before he died in
April 1945, Roosevelt acknowledged that Stalin had betrayed all his Yalta
promises, and that he was not a man he could do business with any longer.
Yet I believe that
Churchill must be held largely responsible. When Barbarossa occurred in June
1941, he immediately sent a message of support to Stalin, without consulting
his Chiefs of Staff. That was fine as a gesture, indicating the shared campaign
against Naziism – which Churchill rightly rated as a direr threat than
Communism at the time. But I wonder, if he had visited the Kremlin soon after,
whether a speech along the following lines might have set expectations a little
straighter without damaging the war effort:
“Marshall Stalin: You
may recall that, on June 22, when ‘the monster of wickedness’ invaded your
country, I stated to the House of Commons that ‘the Nazi regime is
indistinguishable from the worst features of Communism’, and I declared that I,
as the most consistent opponent of Communism for twenty-five years, would unsay
no word that I have spoken about it. Yet I then reached out to the long-suffering
Russian people, and offered them ‘any technical or economic assistance which is
in our power’.
Let me now explain further. We have watched your experiment with
communism with the gravest dismay. We are highly suspicious of its cruel
ideology, and its determination to eradicate the freedoms of western democracy
that we treasure. We have seen how you have murdered your opponents, and
condemned millions to starvation in your fruitless quest to eliminate any
private endeavours in agriculture. You have established a prison-camp of
monstrous dimensions in which to incarcerate those who oppose your regime. We
have observed your purges and show-trials with amazement and disgust, as
apparently loyal members of your political and military administrations have
been condemned to death on the flimsiest of pretexts. We know that you have
infiltrated spies into our offices of government, intent on stealing secrets of
state in order to abet your political cause. We were astonished that, having
chastised the organs of German Fascism, you then made a partnership with the
Devil himself, and then provided war matériel that has helped Hitler wage his
aerial assault on Britain, causing thousands of lives to be lost. We were
shocked by your invasion of innocent Finland, and your enslavement of the
Baltic States, where you have again murdered anyone who might be considered an
opponent of your proletarian dictatorship. We repeatedly warned you of Hitler’s
plans to turn his aggressive impulses away from Western Europe to the Soviet
Union, but you ignored our advice, or treated it as provocation.
Yet, for all this, as Hitler moves his armies across your borders,
we again offer you our moral support, and the few military supplies that we can
spare. Jointly, and with the hoped-for involvement of the United States ere
long, we will force Hitler and his minions into defeat and submission. Yet our
determination to resist the forces of communist tyranny will not fade away
after the deed is done, and we hope that your involvement with us will help
persuade you that your version of socialism is an insult to our common humanity.”
Would that have been over the top, and have been interrupted before Churchill was able to finish? Quite possibly. (Would the interpreter have had the guts to complete the translation?) But Stalin preferred tough talk from military officers to the appeasing noises he received from milquetoast Foreign Office men, and he might have been impressed. At some stage, of course, Churchill would have had to convince Roosevelt of the correctness of his opinions, but at least he would have made the most of his opportunity to tell Stalin what he really thought. Instead, Stalin started to make demands, and intimidate his allies. It is a failing of many democratic political leaders overendowed with vanity that they believe they can ‘do business’ with despots (Chamberlain with Hitler, Roosevelt and Churchill with Stalin, Thatcher with Gorbachev, Trump with Kim). Yet they forget that, while they themselves have to be re-elected, the tyrants endure. And as Vladimir Bukovsky said to Margaret Thatcher: “The difficulty of ‘doing business’ with communists is that they have the disgusting habit of lying while looking you in the face.”
Almost two years ago, I contacted the particle physicist Professor Frank Close by email. I had just read his biography of the Soviet atom spy, Bruno Pontecorvo, titled ‘Half Life’, and had some questions about Rudolf Peierls. Peierls had been the mentor of the atom spy Klaus Fuchs, and, in ‘Misdefending the Realm’, I had suggested that Peierls, while not a spy himself, had probably abetted Fuchs in his endeavours, and that the conventionally described career of his wife, Genia, whom he had married in the Soviet Union, was highly questionable. Close had worked under Peierls, and I believed he might have some insights.
What followed was a very
thorough, productive, and detailed exchange, lasting several months. Close and
I shared a similar doggedness in working through the archives, and were
similarly puzzled by the conflicting stories thrown up by the records, and by
the memoirs of the participants. Close was researching a book on Fuchs: he was
not familiar with my book (which devotes two chapters to Fuchs), so I
introduced it to him. I think we both learned from each other, although we had
different methods for interpreting the evidence.
Our communications
suddenly stopped – outwardly because of Close’s deadlines, but in fact, as I
learn now, for reasons that I am not at liberty to divulge. Thus I looked
forward to the arrival of his book on Fuchs, ‘Trinity’, with great expectations.
When it came out this summer, I sent a message to Close, congratulating him on
the event of publication, but he did not respond. I started reading the book
with enthusiasm, but, as I progressed, I began to experience disappointment, as
the letter below explains. I felt that Close had stepped away from engaging
with some of the remaining problematic aspects of Fuchs’s espionage, aspects
that I and others (e.g. Mike Rossiter) had explored.
I thus compiled the
following message for Close. He responded quickly, and we have since commented
creatively on many of the points that I brought up. He is, however, very busy
because of the success of his book (lucky man!), and said he could not respond
fully for a month or more. I thus let him know about my intention to publish my
message on Coldspur, and invited him to offer a placeholder response if he
wanted to. I am not sure what the best forum for pursuing these ideas is:
Coldspur is all I know. (Any other medium simply takes too long, and has too
many hurdles.) At some stage I want to publicise Close’s responses to my
questions, and summarise our dialogue, but I shall not post verbatim his
messages to me without his permission.
For some reason, Close
appears to want to discourage any further discussion on Peierls. I believe the
message he wants to leave is what he wrote to me: ‘You perceive some deep
mystery or conspiracy and will not take yes for an answer. That is your affair
not mine.’ While I hold a very high regard for Close’s dedication and skills, and
believe we continue to enjoy a very cordial relationship, I find that an odd
response for any historian/biographer who presumably should retain a natural
curiosity about his area of interest. In this business, no issue is completely
settled. Moreover, I do not see my mission as having to convince Close of
anything. I plan to return to the Mysterious Affair at Peierls in a future
edition of Coldspur. Meanwhile, here is the unexpurgated text of my message.
(We patiently await the arrival of Dorian. We are sitting it out, hoping that it will not leave us without power as long as Florence did last year.)
I
have just read your epic ‘Trinity’. It is an astonishing work, showing very
patient and broad research into archival material, well-written, and unique
because of the expert knowledge of atomic science that you bring to the table.
I congratulate you on it.
I
was obviously delighted about the credit that you gave to our electronic
discussions, for including ‘Misdefending the Realm’ in your Bibliography, and
for the three (as far as I could see) references to my book in your Endnotes. Thank
you very much.
In
the spirit of historical curiosity, however, I have to add that I was
disappointed in some of your interpretations, and alarmed by some of your
conclusions. I should have liked to see perhaps less detail on (say) the
overheard conversations of Fuchs, the Skinners and the Peierls, and more
analysis of what it all meant. It led me to ponder on how you would describe
your methodology. I recall that you
wrote to me once that, as a physicist accustomed to the scientific method, you
were very reliant on documentary evidence, and reluctant to hypothesize. (“Being trained as a research physicist and not a historian
has mixed blessings. It makes me focus obsessively on facts and only give a
judgment when the conclusion is beyond doubt. In physics I can do that; in
history I prefer to assemble everything I can find first hand and then leave it
to the reader to decide what to do with it.” : November 6, 2017)
Have you changed your opinion since then about what your role as
scientist/biographer should be? What is your methodology for determining which
‘facts’ are reliable, and which are not? How do you deal with uncertainties?
Are the books listed in your Bibliography to be considered utterly dependable? Do
you believe that all other biographers of Fuchs would agree with you on the
dependability of the documentary evidence? In any case, I do not think you
should be surprised if one of your readers takes up the gauntlet of ‘deciding
what to do with it’, or if, having presented conclusions yourself that you
consider ‘beyond doubt’, you might be challenged by readers who do not share
your degree of confidence. The contradictions and paradoxes of evidence in this
sphere do not go away simply by being ignored.
I
would aver that the archives of the world of ‘intelligence’ are inevitably
deceptive, and sometimes deceitful, that ‘facts’ are frequently highly dubious,
and that historians have to develop theories of what actually happened from
incomplete or conflicting information. If one abandons interpretation to the
reader, one ends up being just a chronicler – and maybe a selective one at that
– and allowing all manner of theories to flourish. Moreover, in ‘Misdefending
the Realm,’ I presented evidence on several subjects that I think is critical
to understanding the Fuchs case (e.g. on Rudolf and Genia Peierls, on Radomysler,
on Moorehead) that you appear to have overlooked or forgotten. I wonder why
that is? My conclusion would be that the ‘definitive’ story about Fuchs (and
his mentor Peierls, who is so vital to the analysis), still remains to be
written.
So
what should be the forum for developing these discussions? I noticed that, on
page 458, you write: “Although somewhat peripheral to our primary purpose. I
record this in the hope that subsequent investigations might shed light on this
episode [Jane Sissmore/Archer’s return to MI5], and Jane Sissmore’s career in
general”, indicating a curiosity to extend the research process. I clearly
share your interest in Jane, as well as your desire for the exchange of ideas.
But I have been frustrated in my attempts to find a mechanism for such explorations
to be shared (see my account at ‘Confessions of a Conspiracy Theorist’ at https://coldspur.com/confessions-of-a-conspiracy-theorist/ ),
and I do not believe that the Royal Historical Society will come to our rescue.
I have thus continued to try to bring www.coldspur.com to a broader audience,
and am gratified to receive comments on the subjects I raise from readers
(professional and amateur historians, intelligence officers, journalists,
enthusiasts) around the world.
In that spirit of continuous discovery, I therefore present a number of topics which I believe are still controversial, and do not appears to have been settled by your study. There is no particular order to these, but I do analyse what I consider the most important first.
The Overall Judgment on Fuchs: I am clearly not competent to express opinions on the matters of Fuchs’s technical expertise. I admit, however, that I was a little puzzled over the paradox that ‘the Most Dangerous Spy in History’, who knew more about the conception and construction of the atom bomb ‘than anyone in the UK’ was really only outstanding in solving mathematical equations. And how did his contribution rank alongside that of Melita Norwood, whom recent evidence indicates was very highly regarded by the KGB? I notice there is no mention of Norwood in your book. I was confused as to how you wanted to define his legacy.
You rightly highlight his
‘treachery’ in the subtitle of ‘Trinity’, but then, on page 418, you refer to the testimony of Lorna
Arnold (who, you state, inspired you to perform your research into Fuchs) as
follows: “She insisted that he [Fuchs] had not been understood, and that he was
an honourable man who stuck by his principles; people might disagree violently
with those principles, but there are many who shared them, and to decree what
is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ is a profound question of moral philosophy where the line
of neutrality itself moves with the era. For Lorna, Fuchs was man who had yet
to receive a fair trial. I hope to have contributed to that.” Were you aware
that Lorna Arnold, who was not a physicist, contributed greatly to Margaret
Gowing’s Britain and Atomic Energy, which relied for much of the
coverage of Fuchs on Alan Moorehead’s mendacious work of public relations
commissioned by MI5, The Traitors, instead of inspecting source
materials? See ‘Officially Unreliable’ at https://coldspur.com/officially-unreliable/ .
Do Arnold’s close association with Peierls and his political aims, and her
controversial statements about loyalty and morality, perhaps make her not an
entirely objective muse?
While a case could be made that Fuchs’s legal trial was fixed, and the procedures sadly broken, the fact that you seem to want to present evidence in his defence rather counters the notion of the ‘treachery’ of ‘this most dangerous spy in History’ that your title embraces. A further clue might be what you record, without commentary, on page 321: “The answer [to Peierls], which the detective overheard, was that he felt ‘knowledge of atomic research should not be the private property of any one country, but, instead, shared with the world for the benefit of mankind.’” I am not sure what ‘principles’ drive that admission. Fuchs did not share his knowledge of atomic research with the world: he gave it to the Soviet Union, whose mission was to destroy the western liberal world in what it saw as the inevitable clash between capitalism and communism (as Lenin and his adherents erroneously characterized the conflict.) Fuchs, who betrayed his adopted country, and broke the Official Secrets Act, an honourable man? I do not think so.
2. The Timing of Fuchs’s Espionage: I was a little surprised to read, in Jay Elwes’s review of ‘Trinity’ in The Spectator, that ‘Close suggests that he [Fuchs] offered his services to Moscow even while it was still aligned with Nazi Germany’, as my reaction was that you remained equivocal on this point. Moreover, that was a claim that I had first made in ‘Misdefending the Realm’, one which you rejected in our correspondence (“You write as if it’s established that Fuchs was active during the Soviet-Nazi pact, which is tantalisingly possible as I mentioned in my first email but I have not been able to establish that”: November 11, 2017). I cannot find anything stronger in your text than: “This is, however, an example of Fuchs crafty setting of false trails, as he was in fact spying by the summer of 1941, and possibly even earlier. The date is of more than scholastic concern, for if he began to spy soon after he joined Peierls that would have been in the period when the Soviet Union still had a non-aggression pact with Germany, and was by implication an enemy of the United Kingdom.” (page 63) On page 287, however, you do offer a Note: “It seems that Fuchs was deliberately hiding his 1941 espionage, probably because his initial contacts were made dangerously near to the time when the USSR was allied to Germany – up until June 1941.” I am not sure what ‘dangerously near’ implies, because the issue is surely binary: he either passed on information before Barbarossa on June 22, 1941, or he did not. The fact that Fuchs continually lied about the dates, changing his testimony from ‘1942’ to ‘late 1941’, when the VENONA transcripts prove he was already active by August, and had met with Jürgen Kuczynski (whom he had known earlier) soon after he was recruited by Peierls in April, suggested to me that he passed on to fellow-Communists all he knew about his assignment as soon as possible. As we both agree, it was in the interests of everybody (British, Soviets, Fuchs) to pretend that the betrayal did not happen while the Soviet Union was sharing its pact with Germany. Since there is no ‘proof’, and no unquestionable ‘fact’ for you to rely on, I imagine you would abstain from any judgment, which rather undermines Elwes’s observation. Have you protested it?
3. The Role of Rudolf Peierls: I believe that Peierls, as Fuchs’s mentor and recruiter, is very central to the story. I was thus astonished at the almost hagiographical treatment that you gave him. You make him out to be a victim of the ‘communist witch-hunt’ until 1954 (page 399), and then skate over the Deacon lawsuit, which we discussed at length a couple of years ago. Yet, as ‘Misdefending the Realm’ explains, there is so much more to the Peierls story. I wrote to you then: “I believe there are simply too many incriminating actions or words to conclude that Peierls was innocent of abetting the Soviets. Like most agents of influence, he was very careful not to leave any obvious trails behind (such as purloined documents, or meetings with intermediaries), but a whole list of incidents and anecdotes indicate his guilt.
1)
Pressure on him and Genia from OGPU. There was no way a Soviet citizen would be
allowed to leave the country, especially marrying a foreigner, without
his/her committing to espionage. This was not really blackmail, but threatening
the safety of family members unless the person obeyed instructions.
2)
Relationship with Gamow. I take it you have read my piece on Wilfred Mann,
and Genia’s relationship with him, and Gamow’s deviousness [at https://coldspur.com/mann-overboard/ ].
3)
Peierls’ lies over his return visit to the Soviet Union.
4)
Peierls’ deceptive correspondence with Born.
5)
Peierls’ pretence that the idea of Fuchs working for him came only when Fuchs
had returned from internment, when he had worked with Born to get him released.
6)
Genia’s response when Fuchs was arrested.
7)
Peierls’ relationship with Kapitsa and the chair at Cambridge.
8) Peierls’
exaggerated response to Deacon (but I may be wrong on this).”
These were just the primary examples. I wonder, have you read Nigel West’s ‘Mortal Crimes’, which develops this theme? I notice it is not in your Bibliography. You also did not refer to the intriguing MI5 file on the service’s suspicions of espionage surrounding Fuchs and Peierls, which was suddenly withdrawn. You informed me that you looked into the Deacon lawsuit in some detail, but omit any analysis in the book: you do not mention Alexander Foote, and what Deacon claimed Foote told him. I shall say no more about this now, but I think the whole question of Peierls’ possible knowledge of what Fuchs was up to deserves some very detailed analysis.
4. The Role of Genia Peierls: Genia is even more controversial, I believe. I recall that you were sceptical about my claims that the OGPU would have applied pressure to any Soviet citizen allowed to marry a foreigner and escape to the West. That is nevertheless the undeniable fact about how they operated. Yet your account oddly chooses to finesse the whole question of Genia’s marriage, and her background in the Soviet Union. On page 318, when describing Genia’s reaction to Fuchs’s arrest, you write, again without comment: “In Russia, members of Genia’s family had been incarcerated on the whims of the authorities (see chapter 1). News of Fuchs’ arrest renewed nightmares, which now made her afraid that the same might be possible in Britain.” And later you cite the extraordinary statement of Freeman Dyson (page 415) – perhaps not an objective observer: “For Genia with her long experience of living in fear of the Soviet police, the key to survival was to have friends that one could trust, and the unforgivable sin was betrayal of that trust”.
But Genia did not have a long experience of ‘living in fear of the Soviet police’! She married Rudolf at the age of 22, having lived a protected life as a physicist assistant to the Nobelist Lev Landau, and occasionally frolicking on the knee of George Gamow, another scientist who made a miraculous escape from Soviet Russia. It is true that she may have been put in a very invidious position, with threats concerning her extended family made if she did not meet OGPU’s demands, but misrepresenting her experience, and not giving ‘credit’ to the known and widely repeated practices of Stalin’s intelligence organs, does not perform justice to her story. And her supposed suggestion that Britain’s authorities were about to engage upon ‘whimsical incarcerations’ in the manner of the KGB is simply ridiculous. Was it not the civility of life in the UK that eventually impressed Fuchs? What could Genia have intended with those absurd comments?
And then there is her highly suspicious reaction to the news of Fuchs’s arrest on charges of espionage. If an innocent person, unaware of a friend’s possible treachery, had heard of such an event, my belief would be that that person might exclaim: “How can that be true?” Yet Genia’s first response, as you report on page 318, was: “Good God in Heaven. Who could have done this?”, as if her stupefaction was over who could possibly have shopped Fuchs, not whether he was guilty or not. Her comments to her husband afterwards (that a similar fate might overcome him), and their careful conversations in Russian, suggest an awkwardness that indicates another explanation. In this light, Fuchs’s regretful musings in prison over the betrayal of their friendship could take on another whole meaning. The FBI file on Genia Peierls shows a committed communist: I believe this is another dimension to the story that needs to be studied in more detail.
5. Fuchs’s Confessions to Communism: In a Note on p 41, you write: “The myth that Fuchs announced his communism at the Aliens’ Tribunal in 1941 appears to have been a creation of the writer Rebecca West in 1950 with no basis in fact. Contrary to a widely held misconception, there is no evidence that Fuchs ever admitted to membership or support of the Communist Party, at least in any publicly available document.” I believe this statement is contestable, but, on the other hand, it may not perhaps matter much. For example, as you write on page 284: “Picking up from his tête-à-tête with Arnold, Fuchs talked [to Skardon] about his work for the Communist underground in Germany, and his fight against the Nazis . . .” In addition, the FBI report on the Second Confession (issued October 10, 2014 by the Los Alamos Laboratory) cites that ‘Fuchs stated that he joined the Communist Party of Germany while he was attending the University of Kiel.’ Furthermore, “Fuchs said that he was considered to be a member of this section of the German Communist Party, and probably had filled out a biography concerning himself and furnished it to officials of the German Communist Party sometime after his arrival in England, because of the fear of the Party that they might be infiltrated by Nazis. Fuchs also said that he was aware that Jürgen Kuczynski was regarded as the head of the underground section of the German Communist Party during this period. Thus there is no doubt that he did not deny his communist beliefs.” Maybe Fuchs made no admission before his arrest, but that is not what you claimed.
What is perhaps more surprising, and worthy of inspection, is why, given his understanding of the value of proper espionage tradecraft (which his contact Harry Gold was not aware of), Fuchs did not conceal his associations with communists and ‘anti-fascist’ activity during his time in Bristol and Birmingham, as this should surely have drawn the attention of the authorities. Max Born and others were clearly aware of it. But that question leads into the whole discussion of how woolly MI5 was at the time over communist subversion, and the belief it held that dangerous activity would originate only from persons who were actually members of the Communist Party. Fuchs’s leftist persuasions never got in the way of his recruitment to Tube Alloys, and official policy even drifted into that netherworld where he was regarded as a loyal servant because he was a communist.
6. The FBI and McCarthyism: I was disappointed that you fell into the habit of inseparably linking ‘McCarthyist’ with ‘witch-hunts’ in your text, a tired trope of the left. However one may regret the extent that Senator McCarthy pushed his agenda, and disapprove of his personal habits, the fact is that it was the House of Representatives’ Committee on Unamerican Activities that took up the cause, a cause that the State Department tried to stymie. Moreover, while there never was such an entity as ‘witches’, there was a group of communist infiltrators in US government who were loyal to Joseph Stalin. That the hunt was justified is hardly deniable now, especially since the VENONA transcripts have identified many of the traitors for us. (For more analysis, please see https://coldspur.com/soviet-espionage-transatlantic-connections/ )
I was also shocked at the parallels that you implied between the FBI and the NKVD/OGPU/KGB. On page 212 you write: “The Cold War provided a perfect backdrop, even while Hoover’s spying on American citizens was often indistinguishable from the totalitarian regimes he despised.” Really? The Soviet Secret Police exercised a terror on citizens, with powers of immediate arrest without cause, followed by secret shooting, or staged trials followed by ‘judicial’ execution or despatch to the Gulag. Stalin had millions of his own citizens murdered – and was ready to murder his own atomic scientists if the Soviet bomb project failed. How on earth were the actions of Hoover’s FBI ‘indistinguishable’ from those of the Soviet Secret Police? I find your comparison very unfortunate.
7. Herbert and Erna Skinner: This couple remains somewhat of a mystery to me. Is there more to be told about Herbert’s activities? He was ‘of the left’: did he have similar political beliefs as Blackett and Bernal, for example? I was in communication with a distinguished alumnus of Liverpool University last year who told me that the official historian of the University knew nothing about the shenanigans at Harwell: he (the alumnus) was in disbelief when I told him that Fuchs and Erna had been having an affair. And Herbert’s death in Geneva at the comparatively young age of 60 – has that ever been investigated? Rossiter also tells us that Skinner informed Fuchs that someone in MI6 had told him about the Soviet atomic research taking place in Odessa. How was it that Skinner was informed of this? Was this an official briefing – or a leak? Was he alone in receiving this information, and, if so, why? Do you have any opinions?
Another aspect that intrigues me is Fuchs’s revelations to the FBI about the Skinners. In the FBI report that I referenced earlier, this remark about Fuchs, concerning his stay in New York in 1947, appears: “He recalled 111th Street in view of the fact that he remembered that Mrs. H. W. B. Skinner was residing in an apartment on that street.” Later, when Fuchs describes meeting Dr. Cohen, he introduces a seemingly irrelevant detail about a lost hat. “Fuchs said that he left his hat in the restaurant and later requested Cohen pick up the hat and return it to the home of Mrs. [?] Skinner, West 111th Street, in New York City. Fuchs said that this incident did not have anything to do with his espionage activities.” Erna Skinner was presumably in New York, staying with her father-in-law, since Herbert accompanied Klaus to Washington. (Rossiter states that it was here that Fuchs became more acquainted with Herbert and Erna.) Was the fact that Fuchs identified Erna Skinner as the contact not extraordinary? And, in any case, why would Fuchs gratuitously introduce their names to the FBI at a time when the organisation was strenuously looking for leads on further spies? Would anyone really trust what Fuchs said was connected to his spying activities? It is all very strange. Have you considered this anecdote?
8. Halperin’s Diary: In an endnote to page 376, you refer to my claims about the possible concealment of the evidence from Halperin’s diary, in which the appearance of Fuchs’s name led the FBI to him. Note 14: “MI5 records imply that they first learned of these documents only on 4 October 1949, TNA KV 2/1247, s. 230c. In his critique of MI5, Antony Percy, Misdefending the Realm . . . suggested on page 255 that early references to Halperin were removed from Fuchs’ file and ‘the record edited to make it appear that the FBI had only recently (October 1949] informed MI5 of the discoveries in Halperin’s diary,’ He offers no direct evidence to support this.”
The
evidence I used was the letter from Geoffrey Patterson, the MI5 representative
in Washington, to Arthur Martin of MI5. I wrote: “The British Embassy letter,
dated October 4, 1949, is from a G. T. D. Patterson, addressed to A. S. Martin,
Esq., and begins: “With reference to previous correspondence about FUCHS and
HEINEMAN I have just received from the FBI some further information about their
activities in this country. Much of it you already know, but some is new and I
think you will agree of considerable interest.”[i]
The next paragraph has been redacted: the letter then starts describing
(repeating?) the evidence of Halperin’s address book when he was arrested in
February 1946, and it later cites the captured German document compiled in
1941. Paragraph 18, which appears after Patterson’s suggestion that Fuchs and
his father are “key GPU and NKVD agents” has also been redacted. The inference
is clear: the majority of the information had been given to MI5 some time
before. This evidence is conclusive that Archer, Robertson and Serpell were
basing their claim on the revelations from Washington in 1946 – intelligence
that White and Hollis did not want to accept as valid.”
In
our correspondence, I also wrote the following: “In
Amy Knight’s ‘How The Cold War Began’, she says that the RCMP told the FBI that
they had made the Halperin evidence available to the British. She offers the
following reference for the paragraph: NARA, S.3437. Fuchs Case,
882012-359-383. I performed a search on this, but came up with nothing.”
Now this may not meet the requirements of the strictest scientific investigation, but I continue to assert that Patterson’s reference to ‘previous correspondence’ which is not to be found on file is extremely provocative, and should not be dismissed lightly.’
9. MI5 Suspicions of Sonia/Sonya: On page 421, you refer to the fact that MI5 apparently overlooked Sonia as a candidate for espionage. “Sonya – interviewed by Skardon and Serpell in 1947, overlooked by everyone in 1950, and only identified after she had escaped to East Germany.” On page 57, you state that ‘this manoeuvre’ (her acquisition of a passport) was ‘noticed by MI5’. What is your explanation for the inactivity of the Security Service, given the circumstances?
As I believe I have fairly
convincingly shown in my on-line articles titled ‘Sonia’s Radio’ (see https://coldspur.com/sonias-radio/
), senior officers in both MI5 and MI6 were very aware of Sonia’s activity,
facilitating her bigamous marriage in Switzerland, her application for a
British passport, and her eventual return to the United Kingdom, where they
probably kept an eye on her, hoping to surveille her wireless transmissions.
Yet lower-level officers were not confided in, and eventually left hanging.
Michael Serpell and Hugh Shillito were two officers who doggedly tracked such
malfeasants as Sonia and her husband, the Soviet spy Oliver Green, and Fuchs
himself. For example, on November 13, 1946, Serpell demanded that the Fuchs
case be followed up, and he was the officer who interrogated Alexander Foote in
July 1947, before the interview with Sonia. Shillito, in November 1942, had
recommended that the Beurtons be prosecuted, and in 1943 he was responsible for
the Green case, and wanted him prosecuted. Yet their efforts were quashed –
even, I suspect, to the chagrin of David Petrie himself, to whom Serpell was
close. I believe this was an internal tension that should not be overlooked.
In addition, I should mention that in two places (pages 57 and 382), you describe Sonia as ‘head of the GRU network’, or ‘GRU station chief”. That is not true. As you accurately state on page 92, she was the leading GRU ‘illegal’ in the country.
10. The Gouzenko Case: On page 376, you remark, in connection with the follow-up to Gouzenko’s disclosures, and Peter Dwyer’s declining to take the Halperin information from the FBI: “ . . . nor, if the FBI account is correct, does it explain why MI6 had failed to act. Whatever the reasons, MI5 was unaware of these aspects of Fuchs’ history.” Yet I believe that there lies another fascinating anomaly in this story. The Gouzenko affair took place on Canadian soil, which was the province of MI5, not MI6. Dwyer was the MI6 representative in Washington, but he took over the case on behalf on MI5 because Cyril Mills, the MI5 Security Liaison Officer for the Service (who had been GARBO’s handler before Tomàs Harris in WWII) was on his way back to the UK – temporarily, according to one account by Nigel West, permanently because of demobilization, as the same author wrote elsewhere. Yet, when Dwyer’s report was sent in to the Foreign Office, it was routed, on September 9, 1945, not to Liddell and Sillitoe in MI5, but to Menzies, the head of MI6, who gave it to Philby to look at. As his Diaries inform us, Liddell learned of the matter from Philby on September 11. Astonishingly, Liddell does not express any protest to Philby that the matter was not the latter’s responsibility, and most written accounts echo the account that Philby was able to manipulate the whole event by not having Jane Archer sent over to investigate, but the pliable Roger Hollis (who did of course work for MI5.) On whose authority was Dwyer acting, if he did indeed decline the FBI’s help, and why was MI5 so timid in this exchange? Why did MI5 have no representative of its own in Washington between August 1945 and February 1948 (when Thistlethwaite arrived)? It is all very puzzling.
11. ‘TAR’ Robertson’s Role: On page 173, when describing Fuchs’s unexpected and (by MI5) unknown return to the United Kingdom in October 1946, you state that Robertson was head of Soviet Counter-Espionage, at B4. I do not think that is true. Christopher Andrew’s authorised history of MI5 is of no use on post-war organisation, but Nigel West, in his account of MI5, states that Robertson was so disgusted with the appointment of Sillitoe (official on May 1) that he immediately resigned. That is clearly not true, as the memoranda signed by Robertson prove. But he was surely not in charge of Soviet counter-espionage, in which he had no expertise. In his biography of Robertson, ‘Gentleman Spymaster’, Geffrey Elliott informs us that, when Dick White returned from Europe to take over B Division, Robertson was put in charge of ‘Production and Coordination of Aids to Investigation, etc.’. In October 1947, it seems that Sillitoe gave him the responsibility for tackling ‘Russian and Russian Satellite Espionage’. Robertson fell out with Sillitoe, however, and in 1948 was given a menial post, as B3, with some responsibility for liaising with Overseas Stations. Robertson retired on August 31, 1948.
12. Philby as Double-Agent: I have spent some considerable time trying to classify properly the notions of spies and double-agents (see ‘Double-Crossing the Soviets’ at https://coldspur.com/double-crossing-the-soviets/ ). I do not expect my terminology to gain widespread adoption (although no one has yet challenged me on it), but I do believe my claim that a person with inimical convictions who signs up for his or her national intelligence service with an intent to betray that service, and the national interest, to a foreign power is not a ‘double-agent’. He is a traitor. A double-agent is an enemy agent who has been arrested and ‘turned’ – either ideologically or through some kind of threat, or via a mechanism of controlling his or her communications apparatus. In several places, you refer to Philby as a ‘notorious double-agent’ (e.g. page 78), and on page 247 you even describe him as ‘the notorious double-traitor’. I do not know what that last term means, but I would continue to suggest that it is inaccurate to call Philby a ‘double-agent’.
13. Liddell’s Marriage and Career: I thought you might be interested to read what I have uncovered about Guy Liddell’s fortunes, inspectable at ‘Guy Liddell: A Reassessment’ (https://coldspur.com/guy-liddell-a-re-assessment/) . Thus what you write about the departure of his wife, Calypso, and the subsequent lawsuit, should be updated.
14. Enemy Status: Maybe I share with you some confusion about how British politicians and lawmakers consider how Britain’s ‘enemies’ should be defined. In the quotation I used earlier, you wrote (page 63): “The date is of more than scholastic concern, for if he began to spy soon after he joined Peierls that would have been in the period when the Soviet Union still had a non-aggression pact with Germany, and was by implication an enemy of the United Kingdom.” And on a Note to page 338, you write: “Russia was at no stage an enemy of the United Kingdom during Fuchs’ Birmingham period but had become so by 1950. Fuchs’ espionage at Harwell, which was on the charge sheet, is consistent with Perrin’s description. [‘potential enemy’]”
Is this not critical to the legal case against Fuchs? If the Soviet Union was ’by implication’ an enemy of the United Kingdom by virtue of its non-aggression pact with Germany, would that have affected the treachery charge? As Fuchs was not yet a citizen, what did that mean? (MI5 had problems during the war because of the inability of current laws to address ‘treachery’ by foreign agents, not part of a military organisation, who had entered Britain illegally, and thus had no predefined loyalty to the country.) But was Russia (the Soviet Union) truly an ‘enemy’ in 1950? War had not been declared (apart from the Cold War, I suppose!), but what validity did ‘potential enemy’ on the charge sheet have? Was giving secrets to any foreign power – which was essentially what the McMahon Act defined – merely enough?
15. US & UK Espionage: I was intrigued by what you wrote on page 315: “Fuchs was a ’very eminent scientist in his own right’, Souers pointed out, and might have information about the state of British atomic science.’” That suggests that the USA, having recently banned any sharing of atomic research with even its allies, was still interested in staying up-to-date with what its former partner was doing. The corollary of that, of course, is the claim, made by Mike Rossiter and others, that Fuchs was actually spying on the USA on Britain’s behalf. Rossiter writes in his book, ‘The Spy Who Changed the World’, that the documents concerning the latter had been suspiciously removed from the National Archives after he had previously successfully inspected them. If it had been true, I would be surprised that Fuchs did not bring that up with his defence lawyer. Is this something you looked at?
16. Photograph of Sonia: I noticed that the photograph you used came from your ‘personal collection’. May I ask where you acquired this? I scanned the same photograph from my copy of the English version of Sonia’s memoir, and posted it on my website, where it is searchable by Google. Indeed, the editors of two separate biographies of Richard Sorge approached me asking where I had found it, as they wanted to use it in their authors’ books. I have not checked them out yet, but the publisher of Sonia’s memoir came up a blank, and I recommended approaching Sonia’s son.
Thank
you for reading this far. I hope you will agree that stepping into what
Christopher Andrew calls the ‘Secret World’ involves a lot of murkiness, where
matters are not black and white. Most months I write about various unresolved
aspects of espionage, counter-espionage and intelligence on my website, and
open myself up to questions, criticisms and challenges all the time. I welcome
it, as it is an inevitable part of the task of trying to establish the truth.
Thus I hope you will accept what I have written in the same spirit.
Virginia Hall of SOE & OSS operating, with Edmond Lebrat pedalling a generator, in July 1944 (by Jeff Bass)
The
previous chapter of this story concluded by describing the state of events in
the autumn of 1942. It had been a difficult year for the Allies, but the tide
of the war had begun to turn in their favour. The five-month battle of Stalingrad,
which represented the Soviet Union’s critical effort to repel the Wehrmacht, began
in October, and the USA’s arsenal was beginning to have an effect in the rest
of the world. Nazi Germany accordingly intensified its efforts to eliminate
subversive threats, and by this time had rounded up the sections of the Red
Orchestra operating on German soil, executing many of its members in December.
The Allied landings in North Africa (November) prompted Germany to occupy Vichy
France, which removed a safer base of operations for espionage and sabotage
work originating in Britain. Meanwhile, Churchill had ended his opposition to the
Overlord invasion plan in a deal over sharing of atomic research and
technology with the USA. Colonel Bevan had thus been appointed to reinvigorate
the important London Controlling Section, responsible for strategic military
deception, in August 1942, and serious plans for the invasion of Europe were
underway. Yet Bevan had a large amount of preparatory work to do, and
circulated his draft deception plan for the broader theatre of war, Bodyguard,
only at the beginning of October 1943. It was approved later that month, with
refinements still being made in December. All domestic intelligence agencies would
be affected by the objectives for the segment describing the European landings,
named Fortitude.
This
(penultimate?) chapter takes the story of wireless interception up to the end
of 1943, and again concentrates on the territories occupied by the Nazis in
Central Western Europe – the Low Countries and France, with a diversion into
Switzerland, as well as the domestic scene in Great Britain. Roosevelt had founded
the OSS (the Office of Strategic Services, roughly equivalent to MI6 and SOE) in
June 1942, and thus Britain’s dominant role in European resistance began to
fade. The rather haphazard approach to sabotage that had characterized SOE’s
work up till then began to evolve into a more considered strategy to support
the invasion. It was placed under closer military control in March 1943. The
uncertain role of Britain’s Double-Cross agents received a much sharper focus
in preparations for a campaign of disinformation to deceive the Germans about
the location of the landings. The RSS started to concentrate more on the
challenge of locating ‘stay-behind’ agents in Europe than on the detection of
illicit domestic transmissions in the United Kingdom. Yet issues of post-war
administrations began to surface and introduce new tensions: as the Red Army
began to move West, Churchill and Eden started to have misgivings about the
nature of some nationalist movements, SOE’s associations with communists, and
Stalin’s intentions. Moreover, Roosevelt’s OSS was much more critical of
Britain’s ‘imperialism’ than it was of Stalin’s ‘communist democracy’, which
also affected the climate with the various governments-in-exile in London.
The Reality of German
Direction- and Location-Finding
Whereas the missions of
the various German interception services had previously been focused on the
illogical basis of the political motivations of the offenders, in 1943 a split
based on geography was initiated. The WNV/FU assumed control for Northern
France, Belgium and South Holland, the Balkans, Italy, and part of the Eastern
Front, while the Orpo (Ordnungspolizei) was given responsibility for
Southern France, the rest of Holland, Norway, Germany and the rest of the
Eastern Front. This may have led to differences in operational policy, and
equipment used: little intelligence-sharing went on, however, because of
political rivalries. In the previous chapter I had suggested that the scope and
effectiveness of the German direction- and location-finding machine had been
exaggerated by the Gestapo as a method of deterrence, and that, in reality,
infiltrated wireless operators were betrayed more by shoddy practices and
informers. I now examine this phenomenon in more detail.
A popular reference work
on espionage (Dobson and Payne, 1997) describes the operation as follows:
“German
direction-finding operations in France were centered on Gestapo headquarters in
the Avenue Foch in Paris. Relays of 30 clerks monitoring up to 300 cathode-ray
tubes kept up a continuous watch on every conceivable frequency between 10
kilocycles and 30 megacycles. When a new set opened up it showed at once as a luminous
spot on one of the tubes. Alerted by telephone, large goniometric stations at
Brest, Augsburg and Nuremburg started to take cross-bearings. Within 15 minutes
they were able to establish a triangle with sides about 16 km (10 miles) across
into which detector vans from a mobile regional base could be moved to pinpoint
more precisely the area of transmission.
Typically, a mobile
regional base would be equipped with two front-wheel-drive Citroen 11ight vans,
each crewed by four civilians carrying machine guns, and two four-seater
Mercedes-Benz convertibles with fake French licence plates. If the transmission
had ended the vehicles would move to the intersection points of the triangle
and wait in the hope that the unknown station would acknowledge a reply to its
message. An acknowledgment of a mere three to four seconds would allow an
experienced team to reduce the sides of the triangle to no more than 800 m (0.5
mile). If the transmission were longer, the operator would almost immediately
be compromised.”
I see several problems
with this account. First of all, it contains no dates, no sense of gradual
establishment. I have not discovered any images of the CRT equipment claimed to
be deployed. If a transmitting set were to be detected without high-powered
interception stations working in harness first, it would have to be via
ground-wave, which would be restricted to a distance of about ten miles. That
limitation would not justify the huge expense required in the centre of Paris,
since most illicit transmissions occurred in the provinces. In any case, the
assumed illicit signals would have to be discriminated from all the other
police, military and industrial activity going on at the same time. The number
of personnel, vehicles and equipment to cover the whole of France would be
astronomically high, and, especially at this advanced stage of the war, Germany
did not have an available competent and dedicated labour force to deploy
successfully in such a project. How many ‘mobile regional bases’ were there? It
would have been a colossal waste of resources to deploy this infrastructure on
the assumption that occasional illicit transmissions could be promptly
identified and eliminated.
This dubious reference attempts to shed light on the process by means of an imaginative diagram:
German Direction-Finding
The text for this entry is echoed almost verbatim in Jean-Louis Perquin’s The Clandestine Radio Operators (2011), a work that boasts a serious bibliography and set of sources. Here a few additional details are supplied by the author. The German unit is identified as the Kurzwellenüberwachung [Short-Wave Observation], or KWU, with a codename for the operation of DONAR. (I cannot find any other reference to a such-named unit – a true hapax legomenon?) “A total of one hundred and six men, seven mobile goniometers mounted either on trucks or on one of the service’s 35 cars was made available”. The author adds that protection was provided by the French Sureté Nationale. Yet the mechanisms are vague. “A control station equipped with over 300 (ultra-modern) receivers continuously monitored over thirty thousand frequencies . . .” The principle behind the scheme was that any unregistered frequency used was ‘highly likely to signal a covert radio-operator’. Then a telephone message was immediately sent to the three direction-finding centres in Brest, Augsburg and Nuremberg, which would quickly be able to determine an equilateral triangle of 20 kilometre sides in which the operator was transmitting. Thereafter, the trucks were sent in to the tip of the triangle, sometimes supported by a team of pedestrian monitors using sensitive magnetometers on their wrists. In that way, they would quickly identify the building where the transmission was occurring, and arrest the agent before he or she committed suicide.
The operation was
claimed to be very efficient. “This was
the procedure used in 1943. If the clandestine transmitter was located in the
same city as a mobile goniometer base, the location of the transmitter could be
identified within a 200-metres radius in less than a quarter of an hour.”
Further: “As an example, the German DF could be within sight of a transmitter
half an hour after it sent its very first signal. It is likely that, by the
spring of 1944, the Germans were using a fully automated, car-mounted DF system
using a cathodic screen monitor.” The official historian of SOE, M. R. D. Foot,
may be the originator of this particular histoire, writing, in 1984: “The Germans, like the British, kept a constant
watch on every wireless wavelength, and it took only twenty or thirty minutes
for a team of their armed direction-finders to get within a few yards of an
operator who was fool enough to remain on the air so long. Relays of thirty
clerks with cathode-ray tubes in the Gestapo’s headquarters in the Avenue Foch
in Paris, for example, kept up a continuous watch on every conceivable
frequency. When a new set opened up, it was bound to show up on a tube; the
frequency could be read off at once. In a couple of minutes, alerted by
telephone, direction-finders at Brest, Augsburg and Nuremberg were starting to
take cross-bearings; within a quarter of an hour, detector vans would be
closing in on the triangle a few miles across that the cross-bearings had
indicated.”
It seems as if these
accounts were also received by the RSS, which at the end of the war compiled a
report on the Funkabwehr (available at HW 34/2 at the National Archives). The writer lists the claims made by captured
German officers, and ‘various sources’, illustrating them with such dramatic
detail as: “Within a period of two minutes each new suspect signal was observed
and reported by line to a large scale system of D/F networks which could obtain
bearings with an error of less than half a degree and so plot the position of
any station to an area within a radius variously estimated at from 4 to ten
kilometres. This process required a further seven minutes, after which five
further minutes were necessary to bring a very strong mobile unit organisation
into action and for them to proceed by short-range D/F and shifting to locate
the transmitter.” The report then casts serious doubts on the reliability of
these statements, which appear to be the work of German propaganda, sent out by
various media, in an attempt to discourage Allied wireless use.
The RSS report includes
some details about mobile unit operations: that the 1942 Operation Donar in the
Unoccupied Zone was largely ineffective, as few French-speaking persons took
part, and it was very obvious; that a single mobile unit roamed around Southern
France in 1943, ‘principally Marseilles and Lyons, until it settled in Lyons’
(which does not suggest dense coverage); that the communications between
interception and the D/F stations in the OKW were poor, certainly not as good
as the Orpo’s; that effectiveness was hindered by personnel transfer; that
local and atmospheric conditions greatly hindered accurate readings; that many
cases were recorded where the mobile units were totally unable to locate the
groundwave. In certain cases, mostly in urban areas, a very focused operation
could produce results, especially when the famous ‘guertel’ snifter (the Gürtel
Kleinpeiler für Bodenwelle) was introduced in 1943, but, overall,
location-finding was a very haphazard affair, and nothing like the streamlined
operation that the authorities liked to represent.
There is no reliable evidence of the number or names of clandestine operators who were caught by this method. It should be concluded that there must be a large amount of propagandizing in this scenario, with no reliable source provided. As previous incidents have shown, there is no dependable way of identifying the physical source of a ‘new’ message stream over the ether unless something is known about the data sent – the callsign, for instance, which may have been revealed through torture or collaboration. Only when triangulation occurs could the rough proximity of the transmission zone be determined. And the operator would have to continue transmitting for an inordinate amount of time for the detectors still be able to sense him or her when they eventually turned up in their vans. Moreover, part of agent practice was to employ ‘watchers’ who would look out for the tell-tale features of the DF vehicles, and agents were taught to stay on the air for only a few minutes at a time before signing off and moving location.
Inside a Gestapo DF Truck
The whole process is
belied by some of the autobiographical accounts that were published after the
war. Jacques Doneux’s They Arrived By Moonlight is considered one of the
most reliable descriptions of the life of a clandestine radio operator – this
time in Belgium. He explains how he managed to evade the direction-finding
vans, by transmitting at different times of the day, by varying the location,
by staying on the air for no more than half an hour, and by using a protection
team to warn him of approaching vans. Significantly, one of the statements he
makes runs as follows (p 105): “We went to a place called La Hulpe
which was a short way out of Brussels and fairly safe from direction-finding;
this meant that we could have a good long sked with little fear of
interruption.” This suggests that urban detection capabilities were based on
ground-waves, and that the mechanisms for intercepting and trapping illicit
broadcasters were much less sophisticated than has frequently been claimed. (I
return to Doneux when discussing SOE later in this piece.) Another technique used with
some success by the territorial guardians, however, was the deployment of
radio-detecting planes. Doneux reports that ‘a Fieseler-Storch, flying low, often
appeared about ten minutes after an operator had started to transmit’. This
very visible and obvious mechanism clearly encouraged radio operators to be
brief. The RSS Report on the Funkabwehr claims, however, that the
Fiesler-Storch was equipped to operate where mobile units could not go, namely
the Russian Front and the Balkans.
Perquin presents a more down-to-earth analysis at the end of his article, where he breaks down the record of SOE’s F Section. “For ten arrested radio operators, at least five fell victims to carelessness of breaches of basic security rules; another two arrest [sic] could have been avoided had the transmissions not been sent from cities where German DF teams had regional branches. Many radio operators like other members of resistance networks were compromised because of careless talk, gossip, indiscretion, police investigations or sheer bad luck in the form of a routine police check. On the other end, the fact that ten radio operators were captured should not hide the extraordinary usefulness and effectiveness of the remaining ninety if one is to mention only F section. ‘Kleber’, belonging to the French intelligence branch and not to the SOE, never had a single incident when it used its eight transmitters to send signals to Algiers from the immediate vicinity of Pau (SW France). By 1944, the average duration of a transmission was less than three minutes per frequency.”
In
summary, the existence of location-finding teams is not in doubt, but they were
certainly far fewer in number than claimed by some expansive reports. They may
have picked up some random operators. Yet, rather than a comprehensive mechanism
for picking up previously unknown operators, it is much more likely that the
system was deployed to try to mop up remaining members of a network whose
predecessors had already been betrayed by some source or behaviour, when the
general neighbourhood in which they were working was already known. Promoting
the mythology of a powerful and ruthless machine may however have acted as a
useful deterrent for the Nazi security organs, and ascribing failure to it may
have served to absolve leaders and remote directors of resistance groups of
lapses in security procedures.
The Red Orchestra
A more reliable model
for how the Gestapo worked is provided by the successful efforts to close down
the section of the Red Orchestra that operated out of neutral Switzerland. As I
explained in the previous episode, the units of the Red Orchestra in Germany and
France had been largely mopped up by the end of 1942, primarily because of
atrociously lax inattention to security procedures by the Communist agents.
(The executions at Plötzensee carried on until December 1943.)
Developing an accurate
account of the operation of the ‘Rote Drei’ (as the main three wireless
operators in Switzerland, Foote, Radó and Bölli, were known) is notoriously
difficult. The memoirs of Foote – which were ghosted – as well as those of
Radó, are highly unreliable, and the source of much of the strategic
intelligence, probably gained from Ultra decrypts, is still hotly contested. The
authoritative-sounding analysis emanating from the CIA is also riddled with
disinformation. For a refresher on the background, I refer readers to ‘Sonia’s Radio’,
especially https://coldspur.com/sonias-radio-part-vii/.
German Intelligence had
been intercepting the messages of the Soviet agents in Switzerland since
November 1941, but apparently no headway had been made on decrypting them. Then,
as the German network was being closed down, the volume of messages from across
the border increased. According to V. E. Tarrant, in The Red Orchestra: “During
the latter half of 1942 the German long-range radio monitoring stations in
Dresden and Prague reported heavy radio traffic from three short-wave
transmitters operating in neutral Switzerland. Through cross-bearings two were
tracked to Geneva, close to the Franco-Swiss border, and the third to Lausanne
on the northern shore of Lake Geneva.”
In January 1943, with
the German network rounded up and executed, attention thus switched to group in
Switzerland, and the pressure mounted for making sense of the transmissions,
and determining how vital and accurate they were. OKW/Chi (Chiffrier Abteilung)
was charged, on February 23, with attacking the messages, and, perhaps surprisingly,
made swift progress, an achievement which suggest, perhaps, that some work had
been undertaken in a more dilatory fashion before then. Tarrant again: “When
the intercepts of these transmissions were sent to the radio traffic analysts
in the Funkabwehr offices on the
Matthaïkirchplatz they concluded that the cipher employed by the Swiss
operators was of an identical format to the one-time pad that had been used by
the Grand Chef’s [Trepper’s] pianists.” Tarrant suggests
that the agent ‘Kent’, who was in the custody of the Gestapo, helped in the
deciphering process. In any case, the CIA reported that Chi had gathered all the
extant traffic by the end of March, and in a few days had discovered the main
principle of the encryption technique. By April 22, sixteen messages had been
broken.
The first reaction by
German Intelligence was to conclude that the information was of the highest
quality, and continued dissemination could seriously damage the war effort. Yet
the organs found it very difficult to identify a Berlin-based source
responsible for the information, or the medium by which the information could
have been passing. (I shall not re-explain here the claim that ‘Lucy’, the
enigmatic Rudolf Rössler, was in fact receiving his intelligence from the
United Kingdom, itself deriving form Ultra decrypts.) Instead, they resolved to
track down the suspects in Switzerland. Their location-finding techniques could
identify the cities from which the transmissions were being made, but
Switzerland was of course neutral territory.
Radó’s network took a
fairly relaxed attitude towards security. The Swiss Government was reasonably
tolerant of foreign intelligence activity, so long as it was not directed
against Switzerland itself. The unit considered itself free from the
observations and threats of the Gestapo, and was under enough pressure from
Moscow Centre, in the latter’s persistent requests for identifying sources, and
the torrents of questions that they presented to Radó and his team. Thus the
Germans had to use a combination of traditional espionage and political
pressure to help them track and close down the dangerous wireless trio.
In 1941 (or, according
to some accounts, 1942), Walter Schellenberg had been appointed by Himmler to
head Section VI, the RSHA’s foreign intelligence branch. Indeed, he had already
had clandestine meetings with the Swiss intelligence chief, Roger Masson, in
the summer and autumn of 1942, after Masson had heard rumours that the Germans
were planning an invasion of the country. Yet Schellenberg’s intentions in
setting up the meeting may have been to persuade Masson to cooperate in
prosecuting the Rote Drei. Max Hastings, in The Secret War,
informs us that Schellenberg told Masson then that Berlin had already decrypted
two of the ring’s messages, and was seeking help. The threat of invasion, which
was always a real threat to the Swiss, because of its German-speaking
population, and Hitler’s designs on the ‘Südmark’, was a not-so-gentle
incentive for Masson to ‘help with the RSHA’s inquiries’. The two met again,
early in 1943. It appears that Germany had made serious demands that
Switzerland maintain its neutrality, under threat of invasion, and Masson did
indeed crumble, and deploy his native counter-intelligence experts to mop up the
illicit wireless network.
The Gestapo had also
tried inserting agents to subvert and betray the network, but these were mostly
clumsy efforts that Alexander Foote was able to deflect. The mopping-up
operation did not take long, however. In September 1943, the Swiss Bundespolizei
(BUPO) began the operation to silence the transmitters. They used the
traditional goniometric techniques to locate the equipment more accurately,
starting with Geneva. Since the agents were not accustomed to moving premises,
or having to restrict the length of their transmissions (Foote recorded being
on the air for hours owing to the volume of work), there was no rush. Tarrant
even reports that ‘it took a few weeks for Lt. Treyer’s direction-finder vans
to pin-point the actual locations . . . ‘. That luxury would not have been
available in the pressure-cooked environment of Belgium or France. The BUFO
also used the famous method of turning off the power to houses individually in
order to notice when transmission stopped. And the frailties of war-time
romance took their effect, as well. Margrit Bölli, one of the wireless
operators, took a lover, Peters, who was in fact a German agent and stole her
cipher key. She ignored instructions, and moved to his apartment, where BUFO agents
tracked her. The Hamels were arrested on the night of October 13/14, and just
about a month after that Foote himself was arrested.
Radó escaped into
hiding, and some abortive attempts to resuscitate the network were made, but
they fell short – primarily because of funding. Ironically, BUFO tried to carry
on a ‘Funkspiel’ (along the lines of what the Germans performed in the
Netherlands) with the Soviets. Foote had owned a powerful wireless set, capable
of reaching Moscow, obviously, but also the Americas, and Treyer, in possession
of Radó’s code, initiated messages in German on Foote’s set, using that code.
Yet, as David Dallin inform us in Soviet Espionage, ‘Foote’s previous
messages, always in English, had usually been transmitted in his own code’.
(The Soviets deployed techniques for alerting Moscow Centre of code-switches to
be deployed in a following suite of messages.) The Soviets saw through the ruse
very quickly.
Because of the
sympathetic role that the spies had been playing in support of Switzerland’s
resistance to Nazism, they were all treated relatively well. Yet an important
source of intelligence was closed down. By then the Battle of Kursk (to the
success of which the Lucy Ring had substantially contributed) was over, the
Wehrmacht had been mortally damaged, and the war was as good as won. From the
standpoint of illicit wireless interception, however, the story has multiple lessons.
It reinforces the fact that remote direction-finding, across hundreds of miles,
could be an effective tool in locating transmissions at the city-level. It
shows that suborned and tortured agents, with knowledge of callsigns,
schedules, ciphers and codes, could provide a much quicker breakthrough to
decryption than laborious ‘blind’ brainwork. It stresses the importance of
solid tradecraft and security techniques for agents to avoid successfully those
in pursuit of them (although, in a small country like Switzerland, where their
activities were suspected anyway, it would have been impossible for the Rote
Drei to have held out for long). It emphasizes the role that simple
security techniques could play in avoiding the successful ‘turning’ of networks.
One other consequence of the operation was that Moscow stopped relying so much
on the illicit transmissions of mainly ‘illegal’ agents, and switched its focus
on using couriers and equipment in the Soviet Embassies to manage the traffic
that their spies were still accumulating.
Exploits of SOE &
SIS
I have earlier drawn
attention to the renowned actions taken by General Gubbins in tightening up SOE
security in 1943, and how they need to be questioned. Not only were these
initiatives very late, the claims about their success are not really borne out
by the evidence. Much has been written about the careful psychological
screening of potential SOE agents, and their wireless operators, and even more
has been written about their lengthy training in all manner of tradecraft as a
foreign agent, from practice at parachute-jumping to secure methods of wireless
transmission. Yet the experiences in France and the Low Countries, as recounted
by M. R. D. Foot, tell of a parade of broken backs, legs and ankles resulting
from clumsy parachute landings, of wireless sets that broke on impact, were
lost, or simply did not work. It seems quite extraordinary that so much would
be invested in preparatory training, only to be wasted in the minutes following
the dropping of the parachutists. (Several of these highly trained wireless
operators were killed in plane crashes.) SOE did not have the luxury of a rich labour
pool from which to select the most suitable candidates, and the pressures on it
to deliver were immense. Yet, despite the attention given to training, it was
clearly deficient in many areas.
Moreover, procedures
regarding wireless security were still inconsistently applied. Foot again: “It did not take long [sic] for Gubbins, as head
of operations, to spot what was wrong, or for the signals training school at
Thame Park to start to impress on operators – as Beaulieu explained to
organisers – that mortal danger lay in trying to send long messages by
wireless.” Yet the order that no transmission was to last more than five
minutes did not go out until the winter of 1943-44. In September 1943 (when
Gubbins replaced Hambro as head of SOE), more flexible and unpredictable ‘skeds’
(transmission schedules – a critical part of the software, since they had to
take into consideration such factors as atmospheric disturbance) were
introduced: irregular hours and switching of frequencies made detection more
difficult.
What became necessary
was a keen sense of how active the organs were in a particular area. Foot
relates how, in May 1943, an agent named Beckers was able to stay at his set
‘for two hours without any trouble, and only once heard of a D/F
car in the neighbourhood’. Another, Léon Bar, was quickly arrested after
starting to address a backlog of messages, and tried to shoot his way out of
trouble. He was tortured, and then killed, but it is not clear whether
direction-finding or betrayal caused his demise. Wendelen escaped surveillance
because he had an informer in the Vichy police, who warned him of all
direction-finding efforts in the Indre département. Yolande Beekman successfully
transmitted from same spot at the same hour on the same three days of the week
for months on end during 1943 and 1944. It is somewhat shocking to read, however,
that, in the summer of 1943, Wendelen returned to England, and had to make some
fundamental suggestions for better tradecraft, such as water-proofing the
containers, and requiring at least one look-out man during every schedule. Why
did it take so long to learn and apply these lessons?
Yet
some of the practices were not repeatable. Scheyven never transmitted from the
same house twice, and remained undetected. Goffin learned from predecessors:
“He kept his sets buried in large boxes in gardens; kept codes and crystals
hidden in a different address; never carried his set himself. His case can
stand for an example of how sensible SOE agents were able to benefit from the
more foolish mistakes of others.” Agents on the run, with no variety of safe
houses to choose from, could not afford such luxuries, and local residents
became increasingly petrified at being found out by the Gestapo harbouring an
illicit wireless operator. They knew the penalty. The operational pressures
were imperfectly understood by the controllers in London.
Jacques
Doneux’s memoir seems to be a more reliable guide to the psychological stress.
He provocatively wrote that the locals, who had been working on subversive work
much longer than any agent, were frequently dismissive of strict security
procedures, preferring to rely on their own wits, and sense for danger. Doneux
was certainly aware of detector vans, but always used a squad of look-out men,
and paid solid attention to location and transmission-times. He was one who
considered that Nazi claims of radio-detection efficiency were inflated (viz.
his comment about moving to La Hulpe), but it did not take much for the
transmission to be interrupted, and the carefully prepared sked ruined. Extra
controls deployed by the Gestapo made walking around with a wireless
transmitter even more perilous, so mobility caused fresh challenges.
Lastly must be considered the advances in equipment, especially when SOE set up its own workshop in 1942 on being freed from dependence upon SIS. One of its first breakthroughs was the S-Phone, which was designed to be worn on an agent’s chest, whereby he could make contact with an allied aircraft by voice, up to a distance of thirty miles, and to a height of 10,000 feet. This technology had the advantage of using UHF, and was not detectable by conventional D/F techniques owing to the highly focused antenna, and the low power consumption. The S-Phone was used primarily to guide arriving planes on drop areas or landing-sites, but was also used to convey brief instructions and information between the two parties. Articles published elsewhere indicate that the S-Phone had been deployed as early as 1941, which suggests that SOE was very early in its lifetime carrying on secret research while nominally still under the control of SIS. William Mackenzie’s Secret History states, however, that ‘one of the very early uses of the S-Phone’ occurred only on July 22, 1943, when Lieutenant-Colonel Starr had been deprived of any regular wireless contact since November 1942, and had up till then had to rely on couriers through Switzerland and Spain. In any case, Gambier-Parry of Section VIII got to hear about the development.
The SOE’s S-Phone
Certainly,
by 1943, smaller transmitters were being used for regular short-wave
communication. Doneux refers to his carrying round his set under his overcoat.
Foot describes the first innovations by F. W. Nicholls as follows: a Mark II in action by October 1942, 20lb in
weight, which sent at 5 watts on 3-9 mc/s. Its successor, the B2 (technically,
the 3 Mark II) was even more popular: it required 30 watts, and needed only two
valves. It could transit between 3 and 16 mc/s, and could also receive. “None
of the SOE’s sets suffered from a tiresome disadvantage of the paraset, which
when switched to receive would upset any other wireless set in use for a
hundred yards around: a severe brake on action in built-up areas where
civilians were still allowed their own receiving sets.” The B2 weighed 32 lb.,
which sounds a bit bulky to be slipped under an overcoat, however. It was for
longer ranges. Doneux may have been using the Mark III, which weighed only five
and a half pounds, and fitted with its accessories into a tiny suitcase. Its
5-watt output could reach up to 500 miles.
In Western Europe, electric current was usually
available, which meant that generating capabilities were seldom required.
Matters were much tougher in other areas, such as Yugoslavia and Albania.
During the same period, authors such as Deakin record the treks involved in
lugging 48-lb transmitters and chargers driven by bicycle-type pedalling
mechanisms across mountainous country. (A famous example with the OSS in France
can be seen in the painting of Virginia Hall that I selected as the
frontispiece to this article.) Mules were required to carry such a load, and in
one memorable passage Deakin describes such a mule toppling into a crevasse,
taking the equipment with him. For purposes nearer to home, successful miniaturization
was slow to take hold: later in the war, when the Jedburgh teams were set up, a
new small ‘Jedset’ was developed, but its fragility and size meant that it was
frequently broken on landing. Not enough attention had been paid to insulating
it from hard contact with the ground.
The
SIS appeared to have greater success in 1943, although its mission of
intelligence-gathering was subject to consistent interference from the sabotage
objectives of SOE. With the invasion plans starting to be made, the demands
made on SIS branches for information about German defences, installations, and troop
movements, and research on potential landing-sites for the invasion, and the
like, became more intense – and more immediate. Couriers were slow, which
switched pressure to wireless communications.
The
volume of information that was successfully passed back to London suggests that
dozens, or even hundreds, of wireless operators managed to evade surveillance,
and send their reports successfully across the airwaves. Keith Jeffery, in his
authorised history of SIS, praises ‘Section VIII’s outstanding achievement in
developing and refining radio transmitters and receivers’, which ‘made an
indispensable contribution’. The author adds, however, that ‘at the sharp end
it was up to individual men and women to operate the equipment in often very
hazardous circumstances’. As an example, he cites the experiences of ‘Magpie’
in March 1943, who, pursuing loyally the strategy of trying to keep mobile, had
to walk nine miles to his next safe house, during which journey the handle of
the set broke twice, as it was not strong enough. Perhaps not such an
outstanding job of design, after all. The answer was – more sets, a requirement
to which Kenneth Cohen in London complied.
In
Belgium, at the end of 1942, SIS also experimented with specialised
ground-to-air communications, which allowed agents to communicate directly (and
without the lengthy process of Morse codification) using the so-called ‘Ascension’
sets developed by Gambier-Parry’s team. (These were presumably similar to the
technologies used by SOE. Indeed, an article in Cloak and Dagger suggest
that the sets were an enhancement of the SOE invention: see https://www.docdroid.net/MEaQLK7/cloak-and-daggerair-enthusiast-2007-07-08-130.pdf ) Jeffery writes that
‘the Ascension sets were used with some success in Belgium and elsewhere,
but the system was not very useful for long messages which still had to be
smuggled out by courier across long and precarious land routes’. That statement implies that long
messages could not be trusted to conventional short-wave radio connections,
because of the requirement to be on air for hours at a time, and the real or
imagined threat of radio-detection techniques. Jeffery suggests soon afterwards
that a lag of three or four months was occurring between information-gathering
and receipt, and that the results were therefore valueless. By May 1943 even
the courier supply lines had broken down.
Whether that problem was restricted to Belgium is not clear
(remember the ‘elsewhere’). Certainly in France the networks were overall much
more productive, despite a new set of challenges. A continual danger of a
network’s having been suborned existed, but this threat was complemented by the
onset of ideological disagreements between the various resistance groups, who,
as the day of liberation became more real, each promoted their own view on what
the political shape of the country should be after the war. For a while, the
Gestapo appeared to use propaganda rather than competent feet on the ground,
and anecdotal evidence suggests that the organisation was having trouble
providing enough sharp and well-trained officers and men to control the noisy
underworld. It frequently resorted to denouncers to make up for its
deficiencies.
Yet, by the end of 1943, Madame Fourcade’s ‘Alliance’ organisation
was almost completely destroyed – not by super-efficient surveillance
techniques, but by Nazi infiltration of the groups. As Jeffery reports: “ . . . by the late autumn of 1943 most of the
Alliance groups in north-west France and the Rhone valley had ceased to
function”. Overall, communications out of France were considered to be
inadequate, and the main channel for passing information was with a French
diplomat in Madrid. Jeffery rather puzzlingly states that this person (named ‘Alibi’)
‘managed to establish wireless communications with networks in France’. This is
one of the many enigmatic, vague and incomplete observations in the authorised
history: no date is given, and the statement poses many questions. How were
skeds set up? How many staff were on hand to receive messages, at what hours?
And what did they do with them? Moreover, if a link could be made between
networks in France and Madrid, how was it that the sources could not
communicate with London directly?
The Evolution of the RSS
“James Johnston recalled in letters to me that he and his
colleagues had intercepted messages from an illegal transmitter in the Oxford
area, which he later believed to be Sonia’s, and had submitted them to MI6 or
MI5. ‘Our logs recorded her traffic, but they were returned with the reference
NFA [No Further Action] or NFU [No Further Use].’ According to Morton Evans, it
was Hollis and Philby who decided that the logs should be returned to the RSS
marked ‘NFA’ or ‘NFU”. This meant that the RSS was not required to send out its
mobile detector vans. No such action was ever taken against Sonia during the
whole duration of her illegal transmissions. ‘Her station continued to work,
off and on,’ Johnston recalled. ‘It must be a mystery as to why she was not
arrested.’’ (from Chapman Pincher’s Treachery,
p 141)
This now famous passage by Chapman Pincher is extremely
controversial, suggesting that the identity of Sonia was known to the
authorities who monitored and instructed the interception plans of the squad of
Voluntary Interceptors who scanned the airwaves. In this latest manifestation,
it even identifies the senior RSS officer making the claim to Pincher, Kenneth
Morton Evans, who, in a letter to Pincher, reportedly stated that gave ‘full
details to Hollis in MI5 and Philby in MI6’, and implied that those two
intelligence officers were unable to decrypt the messages.
That latter assertion is absurd, as neither Philby nor Hollis, had
they indeed been passed the original texts, would have possessed the skills or
authority to start trying to decrypt them. Yet it is the suggestion that the
order to send out the mobile vans was withheld that is even more provocative.
Earlier, Pincher had written: ‘The RSS had responsibility for locating any
illicit transmitters. Detector vans with direction-finding equipment could be
sent in the area to track down the precise position of a transmitter with
police on hand to arrest the culprit. As a former operator James Johnston told
me, ‘Our direction-finding equipment was so refined that we were able to locate
any wayward transmitter’.”
Thus the objective observer, perhaps now familiar with the urgent
security rules impressed upon SOE agents in Europe, has to accept the following
scenario: Possibly illicit Soviet signals are detected emanating from the area
of Oxford in the UK, perhaps identifiable by their callsigns. These are sent to
the RSS discrimination unit, which studies them, and passes them to officers in
MI5 and MI6. After these gentlemen get around to inspecting them (and perhaps
attempting to decode them), it is their responsibility to say whether or not
the transmitter should be located. If so, the vans are sent into action
(perhaps a few days later), in the hope that the transmitter will still be obligingly
cooperating by transmitting from the same place.
It is not the purpose of this analysis to determine whether the
RSS was negligent over Sonia. This reader is convinced that she was left in
place so that her transmissions could be surveilled. (Remember, on January 23,
1943, the Oxford police had visited Sonia’s residence, and reported to MI5 the
discovery of a wireless set on the premises.) What needs to be established is
how reliable is the testimony (if it truly exists) of Kenneth Morton Evans, a
senior and capable wireless professional. From 1941 to 1945 he was the officer
in charge at Arkley, the RSS facility that gathered and processed all the
messages received by the Voluntary Interceptors. (In 1951, as an MI5 officer,
he wrote a letter to the Guardian claiming that The National Association
for Civil Liberties was a Communist front: see https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/jan/06/humanrights.world ) How was it that Morton Evans expected an illicit agent to hang
around in the same location for several days? Was his understanding of the
readiness and efficacy of the mobile vans accurate? Or was he also a party to
the cover-up over surveillance of Sonia, contributing to the convenient story
that Hollis had successfully protected her? And how did his account overall undermine
the pretence that Nazi agents were able to work undetected in England for
years?
The facts about the mobile detection apparatus are elusive. I have started to examine some of the historical records at the National Archives. [But not all: I am still waiting to receive photographs of many critical files, such as the WO 208/5099-5102 series. This section may thus require a later update. This analysis is based on WO/208/5096-5098, HW 34/18, HW 43/6, CAB 301//77, ADM 223/793 and FO 1093/484.]
Soon after the outbreak of war, Colonel Burke of MI8c (the
forerunner of RSS) listed the equipment then in service, and made requests for
expansion. His deposition ran as follows:
Direction
Finding Stations 6 + 4
Listening
Stations 4 + 2
Mobile Vans 10 + 14
G.P.O.
Detection Vans 88 (up to 200
available)
Amateur
Listening Posts 27
Local D.F.
systems for regional centres 1 + 16
Transmitters
for beacons 0 + 20
He added that ‘only one
of the mobile vans is now fully equipped’, but that ‘the remaining vans should
be ready in two to three weeks’. It is not clear what the distinction is
between ‘mobile vans’ and ‘G,P.O. detection vans’. It could not be solely one
of ownership: an earlier memorandum noted that the GPO provided the six fixed
and ten mobile stations. It may have been one of designed function: a paper
written in January 1941 records that ‘mobile vans (which were normally used to
assist listeners in the detection and suppression of radio interference from
industrial and domestic equipment) had been lent by PO to deal with the problem
of detecting illicit radio beacons.’ Meanwhile the notion of ‘beacons’ (devices
to assist arriving bombers to find their targets) had evolved to one of illicit
transmissions. The Post Office was seen by military men as an unreliable, slow
and bureaucratic organisation, unsuitable for holding responsibility for such
critical tasks.
The
official SIGINT history reinforces a rather casual approach to the use of
mobile units: “Fixed interception stations would search the ether . . . In the event of signals being intercepted,
they would pass to the direction-finding stations the callsign, wavelength and
text of the message. Supplementing this would be the widespread corps of
voluntary interceptors whose function it would be to listen to the amateurs
working in their area, observe their habits and report anything unusual. Mobile
units were to perform the function of determining the exact location of the
illicit transmitter. After the fixed D/F stations had located the general area
of the transmitter, the mobile direction-finding units would proceed there,
await further signals, obtain more accurate bearings and so narrow down the
area of search.” And it indicates that, when the transmitter was located, the
responsibility for what happened next would be MI5’s: the service might want to
monitor it rather than close it down. (In that case, why sending out mobile
vans, which might frighten the transgressor, and cause him to stop
broadcasting, is not explained.)
But what happened to the expansion programme? It probably never
occurred. As I have described before, by 1940 the interception mission of RSS
was almost focused on overseas traffic. The History suggests a somewhat
desultory approach could have been taken to what was then considered a non-problem.
At some stage, a Mobile Units Group, under Major Elmes,
centred in Barnet, controlled also the bases in Gateshead, Bristol and
Gilnakirk, the establishment of which I described in the previous chapter.
Fixed stations would then locate a general area of about 400 square miles. A report
would be given to MI5, and the Mobile Unit organisation set in motion. At least
three mobile vans were posted on the perimeter of this area, in contact with the
Police Station in neighbourhood, a headquarters to which an MI5 officer would
be attached. When the transmitter was heard, simultaneous bearings were taken
by the Mobile Units and reported to HQ, where they were plotted on a map. The units
then moved closer, and took fresh bearings ‘until definite action was possible
on the part of the MI5 officer present’. But MI5 had no powers of arrest, and
it is not clear what judgments the MI5 officer would be able to make on the
spot in the event that a transmitter was caught red-handed. The narrative
sounds like a good deal of wish-fulfilment, and post facto puffery for
the historians.
Mobile
vans definitely did exist, as Guy Liddell makes occasional reference to them in
his Diaries. Yet, in 1943, as RSS started to consider the security needs for
the invasion of Europe, it encountered fresh challenges. The History
again informs us: “‘During this period RSS had accepted a further extension of
its commitments without, however, affecting the vital features of its
programme. This was the monitoring, by mobile units, of certain classes of
signal made by our own stations, to prevent the inadvertent passage of
information likely, if intercepted, to be of use to the enemy. the possibility
of such leakage had been recognized and dealt with in the early days of the war
by the cancellation of amateur transmitting licences and the impounding of
transmitters, and the vetting of MI5 of firms requiring licenses for
experimental or testing purposes. With GPO collaboration such action was easy
to take, since licences were granted by that body. As the GPO did not
necessarily license other Government departments however, it was found that
there was a number of organisations using radio transmitters of which the Security
Service had no official knowledge, as for example, experimental establishments
of the Ministry of Supply, the Ministry of Aircraft Production, the Railways,
the GPO stations themselves and Cable and Wireless stations. In addition the
Police and the Fire Service possessed their own transmitters.” The organisation
was under stress, and memoranda attest to the fact that its original mandate
was being ignored.
A
budgetary memorandum from 1941 indicated that capital expenditures for two
Intercept Stations, at £25,000, and for Vehicles & Equipment, at £3,500,
were requested. Annual Expenditures for P.O. Agency Services (D/F & Mobile
Unit [sic!]) were estimated at £78,000. Yet, after some disturbing gaps
in the record, the Estimates for RSS in the Budget Year of April 1942 to March
1943 include very little on mobile units, with Special Apparatus given as
£10,000, and expenses of Mobile Unit Operations a mere £8000. This is not the
high-powered, swift-moving organisation reportedly described to Chapman Pincher
by Andrew Johnston and Kenneth Morton Evans, but a service apparently being
rapidly wound down. (Were radio-detection vans perhaps later requisitioned and
repurposed as transmitting vehicles to roam around issuing bogus signals
of a phantom army? And an intriguing minute from D. I. Wilson of B1A in MI5,
dated February 24, 1943, recommends that, if phantom armies were to be created,
bogus wireless traffic needed to be realized as well, to support the false
information to be passed on by the agents. Was Wilson perhaps the originator of
one of the more spectacularly successful aspects of the whole OVERLORD
operation?) Other memoranda written at this time indicate that the resources of
RSS, including the reconstruction and repositioning of receiving stations at
Hanslope, Cornwall and Forfarshire, and the installation of rhombic aerials, were
being increasingly focused on mainland European needs.
Meanwhile RSS struggled
to resolve its political problems in 1943, caused mostly by the over-secretive
Cowgill, the highly-opinionated Trevor-Roper, the arrogant Gambier-Parry, and
the manipulative Malcolm Frost. Frost left MI5 in November 1943 to return to
the BBC, and some of the organisational issues were addressed by splitting the
RSS committee into two, one for high-level policy, and the other for detailed
intelligence. Guy Liddell continued to be frustrated that Gambier-Parry was not
performing his mission regarding illicit wireless interception. In his diary on
February 18, he recorded that RSS was not doing its job, as two German agents
had been detected. One might interpret this discovery as a sign that RSS had
indeed been doing its job, but maybe the agents – whoever they were, and whose
existence was an alarming fact since T.A. Robertson had already reported that
all agents had been mopped up – were not detected through electronic means. The
same month he recorded that one Jean Jefferson had left the CPGB to operate a radio
as an illegal, but she is not heard of again. On March 11, Liddell noted that
Gambier-Parry had refused to accept responsibility for signals security. On
April 1, he wrote that Frost had informed him that the Post Office had ‘bumped
into’ an unknown 75-watt transmitter in Bloomsbury. It may have been SOE’s, but
it all went to show (as indicated earlier in this piece) that a large amount of
authorised radio transmission was carrying on of which MI5 had not been
informed. And on June 3, not yet licit transmissions were detected coming from
the Soviet Embassy.
The problem certainly
got worse, with multiple foreign embassies now starting to transmit from the
privacy of their premises, and the British government unwilling to intervene
because of possible reciprocal moves. A major meeting occurred on September 10,
1943, at which (as Liddell noted) Colonel Valentine Vivian seemed ‘unaware of RSS’s charter for detecting illicit
wireless communications from UK’. Liddell went on to write: “As regards the
diplomatic communications of the allies there appears to be no real
supervision. It was felt that to monitor and break these communications would
impose too great a task on GC & CS, who were already overburdened with
operational work. It was agreed that we should have a permanent representative
on the Reid Committee, that we should continue to look after the security of
non-service bodies, but that the results of the monitoring of the
communications of non-service Govt. Depts. should be sent by RSS to the Reid
Committee and not to ourselves.” Gambier-Parry’s apparent disdain for
interception is shown in a record of October 13, where the head of Section VIII
is shown to be a lone voice, thinking that ‘mobile units should not be taken across
the Channel until RSS have detected an illicit transmitter’. The issues of
quick mobility and transmission habits were obviously lost on him. (I have
written more about this matter, and especially the illicit broadcasts of the
Soviet spy Oliver Green, at https://coldspur.com/sonias-radio-part-viii/) .
Several reports written at the end of the war, in the summer of 1945 (inspectable at HW 34/18), suggest that deploying mobile units to track down illicit transmitters was a laborious and often futile exercise. (Of course, operations may have been scaled back by then, as the obvious threat had diminished, but the experiences are still informative.) In March 1945, a team of four mobile units were sent to Cheshire, and after several days managed to apprehend a GPO employee, a Volunteer Interceptor in Warrington. Another case in Birmingham was abandoned after five days. When unidentified transmissions were found to be emanating from the area of Kinross in Scotland, a troop of mobile vans was ordered from Barnet (about 400 miles away – hardly a rapid-response force) to investigate. The vans eventually discovered a Polish Military Signals Training Unit, which had conveniently and innocently continued with its traffic. Repeated interception of signals in London led back several times to the Soviet Embassy, where a ‘prototype model of a wide band DAG-1 D/F receiver’, which could track rapid changes in wavelengths used, was successfully utilised. Such cases confirm that RSS worked under a serious lack of intelligence about potential transmitters, and it had no mechanisms for adding to the portfolio of sources of radio-waves listed above. Why was no register, with geographical co-ordinates, maintained? Moreover, the mobile force the RSS deployed was scattered so broadly as to be almost completely ineffective for trapping careful illicit operators.
The Ellipse in Kinross (from HW 34/18)
One last aspect of the interception
wars is that MI5 had a respectful admiration for the Germans, believing that
they were as efficient as RSS was in intercepting and interpreting traffic
emanating from domestic control stations. In his diary entry for May 23, 1942,
Guy Liddell describes how the Nazis were able to concentrate on Whaddon Hall
(the nerve-centre for SIS, which was also handling SOE traffic, at the time),
and quickly pick up the changes in frequency adopted by the British when they
were communicating with agents in Europe. He concluded by writing: “It seems
that the Germans have made a very close study of the form of Whaddon operators
and can recognize them very easily. Their Direction-Finding apparatus is
considered to be extremely good and accurate. They must think ours is very bad
in view of the fact that TATE and company have got away with it for so long.”
Indeed. Yet Liddell and his troops did not appear to conclude that that
observation represented a considerable exposure, or that the Germans might have
expected them to address this loophole as the plans for the invasion of Europe
solidified.
There is no doubt more
to be told of this period, but the evidence already points to a strong contrast
in perceptions about illicit wireless transmission in mainland Europe and Great
Britain in this period. In Nazi-occupied Europe, the organs of security moved
aggressively and cruelly to eliminate any dangerous wireless traffic, although
admittedly with propaganda about mechanized forces that clearly did not exist,
with agents feverishly trying to escape capture by keeping transmissions short
and moving around to other safe houses. In Britain, the problem was not seen to
exist, but if it did, agents were able to move around unmolested in what should
have been an openly hostile climate, with no safe places to withdraw to, or
believed to sit at their same stations waiting conveniently for the mobile vans
to turn up in a few days at the appointed time, when they would start
transmitting again – and then the vans and the nervous MI5 officer might do
nothing at all. Yet that is not what the RSS officers said after the war. The
judgment of Hinsley and Simkins, on page 181 of Volume 4 of the History of
British Intelligence in the Second world War (“In all its activities the
RSS achieved a high and continuingly increasing degree of efficiency”) merits
some re-inspection. The mission from Barnet to Kinross particularly epitomizes
the poor use of intelligence and resources.
The Double-Cross System
After the invasion of
Britain was called off by Hitler towards the end of 1940 (but kept alive for
propaganda purposes until well into 1941), the role of the captured and turned
wireless spies as an instrument for influencing Nazi policies was debated at
length. All through 1941, and the beginning of 1942, officers of MI5 had
discussed among themselves, and sometimes with outsiders, such as those in
Military Intelligence proper, what the role of the information passed on to the
Abwehr should be. Should it be veiled propaganda? Should it overstate or
understate Britain’s military capabilities? Dick White recommended to his boss,
Guy Liddell, in April 1942 that the Committee managing double agents should
change ‘from that of a body of censors to that of a body of planners’, adding
that ‘the difference is that we are now asking questions of the Germans while
previously we were answering questions from them’. Yet it needed a lead. It was not until July
1942, after John Bevan had replaced Oliver Stanley as head of the London
Controlling Section, that operational plans were able to take on more solidity.
The XX Committee, under Masterman’s chairmanship, and MI5’s B1A could start to
think about serious deception strategies. (Volume 4 of the authorized History,
by Hinsley and Simkins, covers this period very well. KV 4/213 at the National
Archives is useful. Ben Macintyre’s breezy but uneven Double Cross is
also generally recommended as a contemporary study of the project.)
Meanwhile, the Committee
had to convince the Abwehr that its remaining agents were safe, and ready for
action, but not over-exuberantly so. After all, the Abwehr was supposed to be
in control. Long discussions took place over the necessity of passing facts on
via the agents, in order to maintain credibility, but also allowing for
occasional mistakes. Yet one critical aspect of the whole double-cross
operation was the extent that the undeniable primary contributors to the
successful deception project (BRUTUS, TREASURE, GARBO and TRICYCLE) were mostly
very late arrivals to the scene. What is even more important to state,
moreover, is that none of these was a classical ‘double agent’. They were all
Allied sympathisers who had inveigled themselves into the Nazi apparatus under
the pretence of wanting to help the Axis cause, but who then betrayed their
recruiters by disclosing their true allegiance when they arrived in Britain (or
spoke to British officials in Lisbon.) Admittedly, they might have been lying
(and agent ZIGZAG fell into this highly complex netherworld), but MI5
strenuously tried to verify stories. TATE was the only true double agent, who
had been turned after he had been captured, convinced of the necessity of his
role as a tool of British intelligence, mostly out of the fear for his life,
but who then gradually came to appreciate the benefits of his democratic host
country. As I explained in the last chapter, TATE’s value as a contributor to the
deception over FORTITUDE was diminished because the necessity for him to find a
modus vivendi and occupation to survive in Britain forced him to be a
more reclusive and less mobile observer of invasion preparations.
For a short while in April,
1942, moreover, the Double-Cross Committee had considered the implications of
running double-agents overseas, and taking over the transmitters that SIS
maintained at Whaddon Hall. This was because the SOE agent VICTOIRE, Mathilde
Carré, who claimed she had escaped from her German captors, had convinced her
interrogators that she was genuine. Masterman and Marriott in B14 thus started
to plan how messages could be sent back to members of the Interalliée as a
method for deception, since MI5 and SIS knew that the agents had been turned by
the Germans, but the Germans were assumed not to know this. The task presented
fresh challenges as to how lies and truth should be managed without detriment
to the real war effort. Before this task became reality, however, VICTOIRE was
unmasked by one of the officers she had betrayed, agent BRUTUS (see below), and
she was incarcerated for the remainder of the war.
In any case the official
accounts need to be treated carefully. John Masterman’s Double Cross System
contains an Appendix that claims that there were at least 120 double agents
managed by the XX System, and it lists thirty-nine of ‘the more interesting
cases that were operated from this country’. Yet this list includes such
dubious characters as SNOW (who was dropped as early as March 1941 since he was
probably a triple agent), the enigmatic GANDER (who may never have been turned,
and disappeared mysteriously from the scene in November 1940), and the turncoat
SUMMER (who tried to escape in January 1941, and whose fate remains
controversial). It also includes such figures as BALLOON, who was recruited by
TRICYCLE, which hardly puts him in the class of ‘double agent’: the term
sometimes used in the authorised history by Hinsley et al., ‘double-cross
agent’, is more suitable. (Masterman omits to mention a figure named BRISTLE, the
cryptonym appearing in KV 4/214 at the National Archives, an oversight that suggests
there may be a yet undiscovered tier of ‘less interesting’ agents whose names
MI5 would prefer to forget.) As Hinsley and Simkins more accurately represent
the state of the game in late 1943: “The newly acquired double agents [sic!]
off-set the loss of Zigzag, Rainbow, Father, Dragonfly,
Balloon and Mutt and Jeff, whose operations were now
closed down or suspended.”
This account necessarily
focuses on agents who successfully contributed to deception through wireless
communications, which was a complex issue in its own right. Because of MI5’s
desire to have information passed quickly to the Abwehr, agents who had
hitherto used secret ink or microphotography requested wireless apparatus from
their controllers. Indeed, GARBO exploited a delayed, but highly accurate,
message about TORCH landings, which conveniently arrived after the event, to
encourage a move to wireless usage. This may have prompted the Germans to
accelerate the use of wireless communications with GARBO. That would, of
course, allow the British to get disinformation in the hands of their adversaries
in a much more timely fashion, but it would also eliminate the convenience of
delivering highly accurate information with a built-in delay, thus increasing the
risk of injurious retaliatory action. The adoption of radio did necessitate the
delivery of codes, however, which was mightily useful for GC&CS in
extending the range of intercepted signals that could be decrypted.
So how did these vital agents fare in the use of radio? The final 1942 entry in the files of TATE [Wulf Schmidt] at Kew expresses confidence that the enemy trusts him, and that his story about transmitting early in the morning, before the farm hands go to work, has been accepted. Yet 1943 appeared not to be so successful, and his handlers voiced concern about his viability. (It was impossible to verify what the Abwehr thought of him, as messages from Hamburg to Berlin were sent by land-line.) During the period March-September he received only fourteen messages from the enemy, most of them very routine, as if it could not expect much valuable information from an agent fully engaged in agricultural work. An added complication arose because of the repatriation of a Nazi in November 1943. It was feared that this officer might have picked up rumours inside the camp where he was being held to the effect that MUTT, JEFF, SUMMER and TATE were all under control of the British. That encouraged MI5 to put TATE on ice for a while. A report in early January 1944 also lamented the fact that he had only one transmitting frequency (4603 kcs), which made communication as far as Hamburg difficult outside daylight hours. TATE thus made a request to have a small portable apparatus workable off the mains, and the minor role he was able to play in OVERLORD will be described in the next episode.
Agent BRUTUS
BRUTUS [Roman Czerniawski], a former Polish fighter Pilot, experienced a comparatively short career as a double-cross agent. After the Germans arrested him in late 1941 in France, where he had built up an intelligence network, he manufactured a deal whereby he traded the safety of his family for a role spying in Britain. Before he left Paris, he was given quartzes to take with him for the purpose of building a transmitter with the help of his Polish friends, although BRUTUS asserted that it would be difficult finding a wireless operator. After an ‘escape’ via the Pyrenees, he arrived in England on October 2, 1942. Certain necessary checks with Poles in exile complicated his adoption, but he was approved, and established contact in December 1942, with an apparatus constructed for him by MI5. (The archive does not indicate how he suddenly acquired operating skills.) He was then instructed to build his own radio set in early January 1943. Masterman was cautious, telling Bevan he wanted to run BRUTUS giving information, not as a deception medium.
The year 1943 turned out to be problematic, as BRUTUS stumbled into hot water with the other Poles over the Katyn massacre, and his overexuberant politicking. (The Germans had discovered the site of the massacres in April, but the Soviets had denied any responsibility, thus causing a rift in Allied circles. On April 25, the Soviet Union broke off relations with the Polish government-in-exile.) Moreover, there was a security problem, as the Poles had access to BRUTUS’s codes (and thus might learn about the deception plan for OVERLORD). Harmer also reported to Robertson on May 6 that White and Liddell were concerned lest the Russians intercept and decode the BRUTUS traffic and use it ‘as a basis for their allegations that the Polish Government are maintaining contact with the Germans’. Reed assured Harmer that the range for BRUTUS’s transmitter was only 400 miles, so there was no danger of interception, but the episode showed the tangled politics that were starting to affect counter-espionage exercises. BRUTUS successfully reported on the arrest of CARELESS in May 1943, and Ultra decrypts showed that his reports were being taken seriously. However, BRUTUS’s arrest in the fracas over Katyn caused an awkward interruption. MI5 found him a notional ‘operator’ (purportedly in Reading, actually working in Richmond, thus apparently breaking the rules observed in other cases to protect against German direction-finding) so that he would not have to operate the wireless himself. Intercepts indicated that he was not fully trusted, and by the end of the year, Harmer was suggesting that he be used solely as a courier. On the last day of the year, however, BRUTUS informed his handlers that he needed a new transmitter.
Agent TREASURE
The career of TREASURE [Lily Sergueiev], a journalist of Russian extraction, was very short, and she was not even activated as a wireless agent until January 1944. Yet her association with German Intelligence went back as far as 1937, when she had declined to work for a contact in Berlin, one Felix Dassel. After the fall of France, when in Paris, she had recontacted Dassel, and agreed to work for the Abwehr. She had been introduced to her handler, Emile Kliemann, in June 1941, and soon started receiving training on operating wireless equipment. This was somewhat unusual, as the Abwehr seemed keener at this time to have their agents use couriers, secret writing and microdots. By February 1942, she had started practicing, transmitting and receiving on a proper set, but for reasons primarily to do with Kliemann’s rather erratic behavior and complicated love life, the practice was neglected. Indeed, as late as May 18, she was taught how to use invisible ink, and it was not until July 17, 1943 that she appeared at the British consular office in Madrid declaring that she intended to travel to England to spy, but wanted to switch her allegiance.
After researching her background, MI5 concluded that her intentions were genuine. But she still had to wait for the distracted Kliemann to get organised, and it was not until a few months later (her MI5 handler, Mary Scherer, said November 11; Ben Macintyre states October 7) that she was able to fly from Gibraltar to Bristol. Kliemann had promised her that she would be given a wireless set to be disguised as a phonograph, but he let her down, unable to procure one for her, instead promising that she would be passed one after she arrived in Britain. She boarded the plane without it – also without her beloved dog, an incident that would later cause deep rifts between her and those in MI5 she trusted. Her activity as a spy was then further delayed owing to her becoming seriously ill in December, and being hospitalised. Thus it was not until January 11, 1944 that MI5 started conceiving plans for putting TREASURE in possession of a wireless set. She was able to write to Kliemann informing him that she had now bought an American Halicrafter radio (actually supplied by MI5), even though possession of an unlicensed wireless transmitter was still a civil offence.
Agent TRICYCLE
For most of his career TRICYCLE [Dusko Popov] was not a wireless agent, and he never used such equipment himself. He had managed to convince the Germans as of his bona fides, while remaining free to travel because of his import/export business, but had declared himself to the British back in 1940. Yet he had been sent by the German to the USA in October 1942, and spent most of 1943 in what turned out to be a fruitless (and expensive) sojourn. Even before his spell in the USA, the British had deciphered messages that indicated that the Germans had suspicions about him, but TRICYCLE bravely walked back into the lions’ den in Lisbon, and managed to brazen out his interrogators, who were anxious to believe that they still had a valuable resource under their control. On September 14, 1943, TRICYCLE flew back to Britain, carrying with him various espionage material and money, and also a wireless transmitter. So who was to operate it?
TRICYCLE had ingeniously convinced the Abwehr of a scheme to infiltrate supposed Yugoslavian Nazi sympathisers into Britain, disguised as refugees. Through his brother, Ivo Popov, TRICYCLE arranged for a naval officer called Frano de Bona to be recruited by the Abwehr and trained as a wireless operator. TRICYCLE returned to Lisbon and Madrid in his role as a Yugoslav diplomatic courier in November 1943, and there negotiated de Bona’s [FREAK’s] passage via Gibraltar to London, where he would operate TRICYCLE’s equipment. On December 8, Guy Liddell recorded his fear that the whole TRICYCLE set-up might collapse at any moment, but later that month FREAK started his work as a wireless operator. He would transmit regularly (his location not apparently revealed) for five months until being necessarily closed down because of a scare.
Agent GARBO
The most famous of the double-cross agents, and the one who contributed most to the deception exercise of FORTITUDE, was the Spaniard Juan García Pujol (GARBO). Again, his career went back a long way, and it was not until late in the war that his ‘network’ was supported by wireless transmission. He had originally presented himself to the British Embassy in Madrid in January 1941, but was turned away. Inventing information for the Abwehr, his reports were picked up by SIS, and he was eventually interviewed again in November 1941. He was smuggled out of Lisbon to Gibraltar, and hence to London, where he arrived on April 24, 1942. After interrogation, GARBO was transferred to the control of B1A in MI5. Over the next few years he would craft hundreds of letters written in secret ink, which mysteriously managed to reach the Germans in Spain and Portugal. As Ben Macintyre writes: “The information they theoretically supplied was written up in secret ink and dispatched inside innocuous letters that the Germans believed were either brought by courier or sent by airmail to various cover addresses in neutral Spain and Portugal. In fact they were transported in MI6’s diplomatic bags.”
Yet this was not going
to be a swift enough medium for the purposes of FORTITUDE. In August 1942,
GARBO had in principle gained permission to use wireless. The Abwehr had
encouraged GARBO to make his ‘notional’ agents use secret ink to communicate
directly, which would have made the control and distribution of disinformation
very difficult. Thus GARBO, having fortuitously ‘discovered’ a radio technician
employed on the outskirts of London who was a friend of his ‘Agent No 4’,
suggested that wireless should now be attempted for communications. When GARBO
reported, in November 1942, on convoy departures for the TORCH landings, and
the information arrived too late for the Germans to act upon it, it was a
timely signal for them to adopt a newer technology, and they wrote to him on
November 26 more warmly accepting his recommendation. In the words of Hinsley
and Simkins: “To begin with a
large volume of material continued to pass by air mail and courier. From the
end of August [1943], however, almost all his [GARBO’s] messages were sent on his radio link. This followed
from the need, in support of Allied deception plans, to force the Germans’
correspondence with him on to the air and receive it with greater speed, and
also from the fact that, to give verisimilitude to his network by indicating to
the Germans that MI5 was aware of its existence but could not track it down,
steps were being taken to show them that its air mail letters were being
intercepted.”
The first transmission was
scheduled to take place on March 6, 1943, and Guy Liddell reported that GARBO
did in fact establish radio contact with Madrid on March 12, with the MI5
operator resident at 55 Elliot Road, Hendon. The provision of a new cipher by
the Abwehr was highly valuable: Liddell further commented, on June 5, that
GC&CS regarded the results of interception as ‘outstanding’. Yet wireless
procedures were outstandingly undisciplined. Despite instructions to their new
operator to keep messages as short as possible (‘No
transmission should exceed fifty groups for safety sake’), and warnings about direction-finders, even
referring to the use of aeroplanes (which was a technique the Abwehr was
domestically familiar with), GARBO’s operator was shown to be on the air for
two hours at a time in June 1943, owing to the prolix and flowery reports that
he and Tomás Harris, his minder, compiled. By the end of August, nearly all
GARBO’s messages were sent by the wireless link, and after one or two hiccups
due to the Abwehr’s concerns about British censorship of the mails, and
possible exposure of the wireless-led network, communications flourished for
the remainder of the year.
As an interesting sidenote on the efficiency of
RSS, Hinsley and Simkins report that the service was able to detect GARBO’s
station. It was clearly closely involved with tracking the transmissions of the
agents. What had happened was that GARBO had been given a transmitting plan
that required the station to adopt military procedures for callsigns and
introductions, with the result that the signals would be confused with a
swelter of other military traffic, making connection with Madrid difficult for
a while. “ . . . in fact GARBO’s
transmissions were temporarily lost by the operators who had been intercepting
them for the RSS from places as far apart as Scotland, Gibraltar and Canada. .
. “, the historians wrote. “It was a tribute to the efficiency of the RSS’s
intercept network that after a few weeks it again reported Garbo’s transmitter
as a suspect station.”
Conclusion
As the preparatory period for the long-awaited invasion of Europe started, a strange, asymmetrical confrontation of wireless intelligence had developed. From the German side, the notion of a powerful direction- and location-finding apparatus had been created in response to a pervasive and potentially dangerous threat. Yet it was hard to implement. Its menace was used more as a deterrent than an enforcement mechanism, the security organs struggling with the practical limitations of such techniques, and having to rely more on informers and infiltration to subvert and destroy the enemy’s networks. In Britain, a similar powerful detection capability kept a close ear on the airwaves. The authorities, however, confident that no genuine hostile agents were operating on native soil, owing to the RSS’s interception, and GC&CS’s decryption, of Abwehr traffic, maintained a surprisingly casual stance towards illicit transmissions and their origin. Both German and British Intelligence were justified in thinking that the capabilities of their foe were at least as advanced as their own. After the war, the British boasted of their capabilities in a manner similar to that of the Germans. Yet MI5, in managing its Double-Cross System, was woefully careless in supervising the transmission schedules of its agents, and the Abwehr deluded itself in thinking that its agents could survive undetected in a small, hostile island.
