Ever since I started exploring the KV 6/41 file at the National Archives in greater depth, and published my findings in a special bulletin at the end of April (see here), Professor Glees and I have been pondering over its implications. We quickly agreed that the letter sent by Victor Farrell to Len Beurton in March 1943 was conclusive proof that MI6 was using Len and his wife, Ursula (agent SONIA), as some kind of asset, and this finding sealed the somewhat speculative story I had outlined in ‘Sonia’s Radio’. Professor Glees was able to use his contacts at the Mail on Sunday to excite their interest, and the story that appears today is the result.
We are very pleased with the outcome. Of course, there are items which we might have expressed differently ourselves (and Professor Glees and I still enjoy differences of opinion on how some of the evidence should be interpreted), but we agree that a compelling account of the story of treachery and self-delusion has been laid out. We think it has shed dramatic light on an intelligence puzzle that has foiled the experts for decades.
The story is unavoidably very complex, and in compressing into a single article an international series of events involving multiple intelligence agencies, it is inevitable that some oversimplifications occur. The details of World War II, and the fact that the Soviet Union was an ally of Nazi Germany during the Battle of Britain, may not be familiar to many readers. A new generation will not be aware, necessarily, of who Klaus Fuchs was, and why secrets of atomic weaponry were so critical in the years following the war. Thus some of the nuances of politics in the 1940s have had to be skated over, as have some of the details of the career, movements, and activities of Ursula and Len Beurton.
Those readers who want to pursue in more depth the story of SONIA’s career, her activities in Switzerland, her arranged marriage, and her escape to the United Kingdom, are encouraged to read the full story of ‘Sonia’s Radio’, viewable here. And if any reader wishes to send a serious question about the Mail on Sunday piece, or anything that I have written about on coldspur, he or she is encouraged to post a comment after this bulletin, or to send me an email at antonypercy@aol.com. I shall post questions and responses here.
Lastly, look out for a fresh report at this website, an analysis of the description by Peter Wright (‘Spycatcher’) of the wireless messages that convinced him both of Sonia’s activity, and of Roger Hollis’s culpability, on Tuesday, July 1.
Update No. 1 (June 28)
Last night I received my first item of feedback, from a US resident. It ran as follows: “Utter nonsense. Sorry to hear that you bought into a ridiculous idea. Embarrassing for you that it has been published.”
My reactions are many. First of all, I know this correspondent (whom I shall call ‘Horace’) to be a smart fellow, who has contributed originally to intelligence research. But I also know him as a notorious skimmer of my work (like Frank Close, perhaps). After my Round-up last month, Horace wrote to me, enclosing a link to Ben Macintyre’s website, and the reference to the book on Sonia, at which I had to point out to him that I had already cited it in the same report, and pointed out a gross error. And, since, this Mail on Sunday feature is a highly logical extension of all that I have been writing in the saga of ‘Sonia’s Radio’ and since, Horace must have failed to follow the plot. He has occasionally stated that he does not agree with my conclusions, but has never provided a shred of evidence to challenge them. Moreover, Horace must be temperamentally unsuited to this business: so many mysteries exist that it is absurd to dismiss a serious attempt to explain them as ‘nonsense’. Alternatively, Horace must have a theory of his own to explain the multitude of accommodations that MI6 and MI5 made for Sonia – one he has never articulated.
I am far from ’embarrassed’. This feature is excellent publicity for coldspur. As for ‘buying into a ridiculous idea’, I find that amusing. No one ‘sold’ it to Professor Glees and me. We developed it.
Horace is not Ben Macintyre, by the way. I asked Horace whether I could quote his comments on coldspur. He never replied.
Update No. 2 (June 29)
I
have now received many responses to the Mail on Sunday piece, for which
I thank everyone. They were, with one exception already reported on, overall very
positive, but I understand that the appearance of the information in this
format did confuse some of you.
Let me recap first. Back in early May, I had been trying to find a media outlet for my latest conclusions about Sonia, in order to forerun the arrival of Ben Macintyre’s book on the Soviet spy. Having failed with the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, I was encouraged by Professor Glees to work with him on approaching the Mail on Sunday, where he had a solid contact. I jumped at the opportunity, but also had some concerns, as I was not sure how I would remain in control of the project. Things went fairly well, a story was put together (based on my material on coldspur, largely by Professor Glees, who was more familiar with the house style), and we in fact expected the story to be placed on May 31.
Then
matters became difficult. For four successive weeks, the decision to publish
was deferred, since apparently more pressing stories demanded priority. This
was an extremely frustrating time for me, as I was obviously embargoed from
writing any more on the subject that might weaken the freshness of the Mail
on Sunday feature. We had no contract, but our contact implored us to be
patient. I was about to pull the plug on the whole project, and either start with
a new media outlet (which could have caused a repeat of the whole drawn-out business)
or simply reverse to my own publishing model, where I can issue what I want,
when I want, in my own voice, and without any editors looming over me, but
where the readership and the publicity are indisputably small. I wanted very
much a) a story in the national media about Sonia, and b) publicity for coldspur,
so that I could continue my writings with the confidence that they were gaining
more attention.
We
thus extended our offer for one more week, and the Mail on Sunday came
through. Unfortunately, it did not refer to coldspur (at least not in
the on-line version), which I believed had been part of the agreement. That is a
great disappointment to me, but I imagine those readers really interested will
track coldspur down. Has it drawn Ben Macintyre out of the undergrowth?
Not yet, it seems, but that will probably take a little longer. I must believe
that ‘his attention will be drawn’ by experts, agents, editors, and colleagues
at the Times to the Mail on Sunday story, and he may start to
regret not having responded to my overtures a couple of years ago. I am predictably
very keen on learning what his particular angle on Sonia (how Chapman Pincher spelled
her) or Sonya (Macintyre’s choice, and the form in her translated memoir) will
be.
As
for the story itself, some of you were confused, for which I apologise. You
found the narrative unconvincing, and looked for more substance – such as that
which you normally find on coldspur. Some asked whether I agreed with
all the statements ascribed to Professor Glees! I should mention that all the
quotations offered to the paper were presented as joint submissions, but in
their intensity, and maybe for space reasons, the journalists attributed nearly
all to the Professor, and I was left with only a single, somewhat fractured
one. Never mind. I am very grateful to Professor Glees for the academic and
professional authority he brought to the project, and the proof of the pudding
will remain in my researches on coldspur.
Thus I acknowledge that a slightly less ‘melodramatic’ version of the analysis would be useful – nay, essential – to many of my readers. You have submitted questions that demand scholarly and cool answers. Nevertheless, rather than address them during the month one by one here, I have decided to devote next month’s bulletin (to be published July 31) to an exposition of the full case of the MI6/MI5 collusion regarding Sonia, list all the evidence that led the Professor and me to our conclusions, and also describe the conundrums and unanswered questions that remain.
In the meantime, keep those comments coming, and do not forget to look out for new analysis on Peter Wright and Spycatcher tomorrow.
Update No. 3 (July 7)
The dust has settled a bit. I have received some further very positive feedback. Unfortunately the Google News feature that Professor Glees uses, which provides alerts on activities of his like the publication of this article, appears to have been de-activated. Many of his contacts may therefore not have noticed the feature. The editors at the Mail on Sunday are similarly perplexed. It looks as if some undefinable body, upset by the revelations, has the power to interfere with such mechanisms. How can that be?
Professor Glees and I have both been in cordial contact with Ben Macintyre. He claimed, in his message to Professor Glees, that his book would obviously be making references to coldspur. I await the arrival of his book (which he promised to send me via the US publisher) with great eagerness, so that I may verify that assertion. He apologised to me for the fact that my 2018 message to him via his publisher had gone astray, and told me that he had corrected the errors on his websites. Yet, as I look at them again today, they all appear to be unchanged.
Meanwhile, I have started working on a fuller and less hectic version of the Sonia/MI6 story for publication here on July 31. I also sent an email to the GCHQ Press Office, alerting it to my post on Spycatcher and HASP, and providing the link, on July 1. I have yet to receive any acknowledgment. I am sure my report has been the cause of much merriment in Cheltenham.
I
was intending to publish this month the final chapter in the series The
Mystery of the Undetected Radios, but was inhibited from doing so by the
closure of the National Archives at Kew. I had performed 90% of the research,
but needed to inspect one critical file to complete my story. Since my doughty
researcher, Dr. Kevin Jones, will not be able to photograph it until we get the
‘All Clear’, the story will have to remain on hold. Instead, I use this month’s
bulletin to sum up progress on a number of other projects.
Contents:
Sonia and Len Beurton
Ben Macintyre
Prodding Comrade Stalin
The
National Archives and Freedom of Information
Professor Frank Close at the
Bodleian
The BBC and Professor
Andrew
Nigel West’s new publications,
and a look at ELLI
The Survival of Gösta Caroli
Dave Springhall and the GRU
‘Superspy Daughter in Holiday-camp
Tycoon Romance Drama!’ (exclusive)
China and the Rhineland Moment
Sonia
and Len Beurton
I published the recent bulletin, The Letter from Geneva, because I believed it was important to get this story out before Ben MacIntyre’s book on Sonia appears. The fact that Len Beurton, Sonia’s bigamous husband, had acted as an agent-cum-informant for SIS in Switzerland seemed to me to be of immense importance for Sonia’s story, and the way that she was treated in the United Kingdom. Sonia herself wrote in her memoir that, when Skardon and Serpell came to interview her in 1947, they treated Len as if he were opposed to communism, rather than being an agent for it, abetting his wife as a recognized but possibly reformed spy or courier for Moscow, and the contents of the letter helped to explain why.
I
wanted to have my conclusions published in a respectable medium, so as to have
a more serious stake placed in the ground. I could not afford to wait for the
more obscure journals on intelligence matters (and then perhaps get a
rejection), and instead considered that the London Review of Books might
be suitable. The editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers, could conceivably have a personal
interest in the story (she is an Eitingon, and has written about her grandfather’s
cousin Leon, who managed the project to kill Trotsky). The LRB
frequently runs long articles on off-beat subjects (in fact, it runs so many earnest
leftish political pieces that one sometimes forgets what its mission is
supposed to be), and it could presumably turn round my piece quickly. I thus
sent my bulletin, as an exclusive, to Ms. Wilmers, with a covering letter
explaining the appeal it could have to her readers, the opportunity for a
scoop, and describing how I would re-work my article to make it a suitable
contribution for her periodical.
After
a week, I had heard nothing – not even an acknowledgment. (Coldspur 0 : The
Establishment 1) So I made a similar approach to the Times Literary
Supplement, with obviously different wording in the cover letter. The
Editor, Stig Abell (who had, after all, commissioned a review of Misdefending
the Realm a couple of years ago), responded very promptly, and informed me
he was passing my piece to a sub-editor to review. A couple of days later, I
received a very polite and appreciative email from the sub-editor, who offered
me his regrets that he did not think it was suitable for the periodical. That
was it. I thus decided to self-publish, on coldspur. (Coldspur 1 : The
Establishment 1)
I have since been in contact with a few experts on this aspect of Sonia’s and Len’s case, and have discussed the puzzling circumstances of the letter, why Farrell chose that method of communication, and how he must have expected its passage to be intercepted. Why did he choose private mail instead of the diplomatic bag? Would the diplomatic bag have taken the same route as airmail, and would the German have opened that, too? Why did he not send an encrypted message over cable (although the consulate had probably run out of one-time pads by then), or wireless to SIS in London? Presumably because he did not want Head Office to see it: yet this method was just as risky. And what kind of relationship did he possibly think he could nurture with Len in those circumstances? No convincing explanation has yet appeared.
Ben
Macintyre
Meanwhile,
what about Ben Macintyre’s forthcoming book on Sonia, Agent Sonya,
subtitled variously as Moscow’s Most Daring Wartime Spy, or as Lover,
Mother, Soldier, Spy? The publisher indicates that it is ‘expected on
September 15, 2020’, yet Mr. Macintyre himself seems to be lagging a bit. His
US website (to which I was directed at http://benmacintyre.com/US/
) shouts at us in the following terms: ‘The Spy and the Traitor Arriving
September 2018’, but even his UK website needs some refreshment, as it informs
us that the paperback edition of his book on Gordievsky will be published on
May 30, 2019 (http://benmacintyre.com/about-the-author/
), and lists events in 2019 where the author will be signing copies of the same
book. Wake up, Benny boy! This is 2020.
So,
back to the publisher of Agent Sonya, where we can find information at https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/612487/agent-sonya-by-ben-macintyre/
. The promotional material includes the following passage: “In 1942, in a quiet village in the
leafy English Cotswolds, a thin, elegant woman lived in a small cottage with
her three children and her husband, who worked as a machinist nearby. Ursula
Burton was friendly but reserved, and spoke English with a slight foreign
accent.” This is all rather disturbing, however. Sonia’s husband, Len, returned
from Switzerland only in July 1942, and they lived in Kidlington for a short
time before moving to Summertown, in Oxford. Her third child, Peter, was not
born until 1943. Len did not work as a machinist at that time, since he was unemployed
until called up by the R.A.F. in November 1943. And their name was not ‘Burton’
but ‘Beurton’. Still, ‘thin’ and ‘elegant’ might, with a little imagination, conceivably
be accurate, and she surely spoke English with a foreign accent. Not a
promising start, however.
So what is ailing our intrepid journalist? I
hope things improve from here onwards. I shall place my advance order, and
await the book’s arrival, as expectantly as the publisher itself. In fact, I
heard from my sources earlier this month that Macintyre has started ‘tweeting’
about his new book. Meanwhile, I believe I have taken the necessary initiative
by posting my analysis first. (Coldspur 2 : The Establishment 1)
Prodding Comrade Stalin
Neo-Keynesian Stalin?
It continues to dismay me how Stalin’s pernicious influence casts a depressing and inaccurate shadow over the history of the twentieth century. We can now read how President Putin attempts to resuscitate the days of the Great Patriotic War, emphasising Stalin’s role as a leader, and minimising events such as the Nazi-Soviet pact or the massacres of the Katyn Forest. At the end of last month, the New York Times carried a story that described how the Russian authorities have tried to discredit an amateur historian who discovered mass graves of Stalin’s victims in Sandarmokh in Karelia, near the White Sea. The State Military society is arguing that ‘thousands of people buried at Sandarmokh are not all Stalin’s victims but also include Soviet soldiers executed by the Finnish Army during World War II’, which is palpable nonsense.
Thus my disgust was intense when I read an
article by one Lionel Barber in the Spectator of April 4. It included
the following passage:
“Covid-19 is indeed the Great Leveller.
Conventional wisdoms have been shattered. But crises offer opportunities. Wise
heads should be planning ahead. FDR, Churchill, and, yes, Stalin lifted their
sights in 1942-43 as the war against Nazi Germany began to turn. Prodded by
gifted public servants like Keynes and others, these leaders thought about the
future of Europe, the balance of power and the institutions of the post-war
world.”
The idea that Stalin could have been ‘prodded’
by ‘gifted public servants’ is a topic to which perhaps only Michael Wharton (Peter
Simple of the Daily Telegraph) could have done justice. I can alternatively
imagine a canvas by Repin, perhaps, where the wise Stalin strokes his chin as
he listens to a deputation from the Ministry of Economic Affairs, as if saying:
‘You make a strong point there, Alexey Dimitrovich. Maybe world revolution is
no longer necessary. I shall change my plans immediately.’ I was propelled into
sending a letter to the Editor of the magazine, which ran (in part) as follows:
“I wonder whether the Stalin Mr. Barber refers
to is the same Joseph Stalin who incarcerated and killed millions of his own
people, and then, after the war, enslaved eastern Europe, killing many of its
democratic leaders and thousands of those who defied him, as he prepared for
the inevitable collision with the ‘capitalist’ west? I doubt whether the despot
Stalin was ‘prodded’ by anyone, except possibly by a distorted reading of Marx
and Lenin, and certainly not by ‘gifted public servants’, whether they were
Keynesian or not. The ‘future of Europe’, especially that of Poland, was a
topic that, after Yalta, caused a sharp rift between the Allies, and led to the
Cold War. Where did Mr. Barber learn his history?”
The Editor did not see fit to publish my
letter. I do not know what is the saddest episode of this exercise: 1) The fact
that Lionel Barber, who was Editor of the FinancialTimes from
2005 until January of this year, and is thus presumably an educated person,
could be so desperately wrong about the character and objectives of Stalin; 2)
The fact that the Editor of the Spectator was not stopped in his tracks
when he read this passage, and did not require Mr. Barber to modify it; 3) The
fact that no other Spectator reader apparently noticed the distortion,
or bothered to write to the Editor about it; or 4) The fact that the Editor,
having read my letter, determined that the solecism was so trivial that no
attention needed to be drawn to it. (Coldspur 2 : The Establishment 2)
To remind myself of the piercing insights of
Michael Wharton, I turned to my treasured copy of The Stretchford
Chronicles: 25 Years of Peter Simple, and quickly alighted on the following
text, from 1968:
Poor
old has-beens
“The Soviet Government,” said a Times leader
writer the other day, “has become hopelessly outdated and out of touch with
contemporary movements at home and abroad.”
So the Soviet Government is hopelessly
outdated, is it? It has just imposed its will on the Czechs and Slovaks by
force. And this is supposed to be hopelessly outdated in an age which, thanks
to perverted science (a highly contemporary movement if there ever was one),
has seen and will see force repeatedly and successfully applied on a scale
undreamed of by the conquerors of the past.
So force is outdated. Treachery is outdated.
War is outdated. Pain is out dated. Death is outdated. Evil itself is not only
outdated but out of touch with contemporary movements at home and abroad.
That a writer, presumably intelligent,
certainly literate and possibly able to influence the opinions of others, can
believe these things is positively terrifying. If the Russian Communist
leaders, as we are told day in day out, are now cowering in the Kremlin in a
state of extreme terror here is some little comfort for them.
When Soviet tanks are on the Channel Coast, shall
we still be telling ourselves that the Soviet Government is outdated and out of
touch? As we are herded into camps for political re-education or worse, shall
we still go on saying to each other, with a superior smile: ‘This is really too
ridiculously outdated for words. I mean, it’s quite pathetically out of touch
with contemporary movements at home and abroad.’?”
There was as much chance of Brezhnev and his
cronies paying heed to ‘contemporary movements at home and abroad’ in 1968 as
there was of Stalin being prodded ‘by gifted public servants’ in 1946. Pfui!
As a final commentary on this calamity, a few weeks ago I read Norman Naimark’s Stalin and the Fate of Europe, published last year, which explained how duplicitous Stalin was in his dealings with western political entities, and how he restrained European communist parties until the Soviet Union successfully tested the bomb in August 1949. One of the books cited by Naimark was Grigory Tokaev’s Stalin Means War, published in 1951. I acquired a copy, and read how, in 1947, Colonel Tokaev had been commissioned by Stalin to acquire German aeronautical secrets, by any means necessary, including the kidnapping of scientists, to enable the Soviet Union to construct planes that could swiftly carry atomic bombs to New York. Thus would Stalin’s plans for world revolution be enforced.
‘Stalin Means War’
I do not think this book is a hoax. Tokaev
managed to escape, with his wife and young daughter, to the United Kingdom at
the end of 1947, where he had a distinguished academic career, and managed to
avoid Moscow’s assassins. He died in 2003, in Cheam, in leafy Surrey, just a
few miles from where I was born and grew up. I wish I had had the honour of
shaking his hand. His book provides undeniable evidence that Stalin was not
listening to gifted civil servants, and musing about the peaceful organisation
of the world’s institutions. He wanted war.
The National Archives and Freedom of
Information
In my recent piece on Rudolf Peierls (The Mysterious Affair . . . Part 2) I drew attention to the increasing trend for archival material that had previously been released to be withdrawn and ‘retained’. Further inspection, prompted by a deeper search by Dr. Kevin Jones, reveals that an enormous amount of material is no longer available, especially in the ‘AB’ (records of the Atomic Energy Authority) category. I have counted 43 files alone in AB 1, 2, 3, & 4, mainly on Rudolf Peierls, including his correspondence, as well as multiple reports on Pontecorvo, and including Fuchs’s interview by Perrin. For instance, if you look up AB 1/572, you will find a tantalising introduction to the papers of Professor Peierls, described as ‘Correspondence with Akers, Arms, Blackman [Honor?], Blok, Bosanquet [Reginald?], Brown . . .’, from the period 1940-1947: yet the rubric informs us that ‘This record is closed while access is under review’.
I suspect some of these files may never have
been made available, but it is hard to tell unless one has been keeping a very
close watch on things. For example, the file on Perrin’s interviews with Fuchs (AB
1/695) has been well mined by other researchers, and the fact that the
statement ‘Opening Date: 16 July 2001’ appears below the standard message would
suggest that this file has indeed been withdrawn after a period of
availability. But does the lack of any such date indicate that the file was
never released, or is the absence merely the inconsistent application of
policy? Several months ago, I referred to another provocative file, HO 532/3
(‘Espionage activities by individuals: Klaus Fuchs and Rudolf Peierls’),which
has a different status of ‘Closed or Retained Document: Open Description’,
where the rubric reads ‘This record is retained by a government department’,
and has never been sent to the National Archives. It puzzles me somewhat as to
why the Home Office would even acknowledge the existence of such a
controversial file, as an open description without delivery just encourages
speculation, but I suppose that is how bureaucracy works, sometimes.
Dr. Jones (who has made it his speciality to
find his way among prominent archives) offered me his personal interpretation,
which may be very useful for other researchers. He wrote to me as follows:
“Where a file is stated to be ‘closed while access is under review’, but has ‘Open Document’ in the ‘Closure status’ field (e.g. AB 1/572), then the file has always been available, until its ‘disappearance’.
Similarly, as with AB 1/695, if there is a specific ‘Record opening date’ the previously retained file was made available from that date, again until its ‘disappearance’.
With the likes of HO 532/3, where it is stated ‘Retained by Department under Section 3.’”, the file has indeed never been available.
Many of these ‘Retained’ files do reveal the file’s title (the ‘Open Description’) to tantalise the researcher, but many such files are listed in the catalogue with no title/description.
Where a specific government department is named in a retained file entry (e.g. FO, MOD, etc.), it is obliged to process a FoI request, though don’t expect a quick response, especially if they are composing various forms of waffle to justify not releasing the file! When the ‘government department’ is not named (as with HO 532/3), there is good chance it is retained by MI5/MI6, both of which are exempt from the FoI Act (well, certainly the latter, which also holds the retained SOE files; not 100% sure about MI5). In any instance, click the ‘Contact Us’ button and the TNA’s FoI team will inform you of the good/bad news.”
Occasionally, therefore, the researcher is
invited to submit an FoI (Freedom of Information) request, as an attempt to
challenge the status of the censored file. I performed this over the above
Espionage file, on the grounds that no conceivable reason could be justified
for withholding it now that the subjects (and their offspring) are all dead,
but received just an acknowledgment. My colleague Denis Lenihan had approached
GCHQ concerning the HASP file (referred to by Nigel West and Peter Wright), which
was claimed to contain transcripts of Soviet wireless messages intercepted in
Sweden during WW II. Denis requested its release, as no conceivable aspect of
British security could be damaged through its publication, but his request was
rejected by the GCHQ Press Office (as if it were simply a matter of PR).
Denis then brought my attention to another
statutory body whither appeals could be sent – the Investigatory Powers
Tribunal. I had just read an article in the Historical Journal of March
2014, by Christopher J. Murphy and Daniel W. B. Lomas (‘Return to Neverland?
Freedom of Information and the History of British Intelligence’), which very
quickly explained that ‘the intelligence and security services fall outside its
provisions, in marked contrast to the comparable legislation in the United
States . . .’ I thus wondered why we
bothered, and under what circumstances any of the security services (MI5, SIS,
GCHQ) would feel they should have to even consider such requests. But, after
all, Kew does advertise the facility: is it an exercise in futility?
Denis wrote to me as follows: “While they’re right about the FOI legislation, the security
agencies react in odd but sometimes helpful ways. I remember Pincher saying
somewhere that the Romer Report (re the Houghton/Molody/Kroger case) was
obtained from MI5 by someone who applied under FOI. I once sought a document
from MI5 and got the classic Sir Humphrey response: ‘while MI5 is not subject
to the FOI Act, it has been decided to treat your application under that Act.
It has been unsuccessful’.” That was rich – so generous! Then Denis went on to
say that the authors of the article appeared not to be aware of the
Investigatory Powers Tribunal, to which he had turned with the HASP material.
(On his recommendation, I made a companion request, referring to the fact that
a reference to HASP was evident on some of the RSS records, and that it was
thus in the public interest to make the material available. I have since
conducted some deep research into the HASP phenomenon: I shall report in full
in next month’s coldspur.)
I followed up Denis’s valuable lead to Chapman Pincher’s Dangerous
to Know. Pincher’s account of the application, and its rejection, can be
seen in the chapter ‘The Elli Riddle’, on pages 318 and 319. An official of the
Intelligence and Security Committee suggested that Pincher complain to the
Tribunal about MI5’s lack of action on a ‘missing’ report on Gouzenko made by
Roger Hollis. The Tribunal had been set up in 2000, under the Human Rights Act,
to consider complaints about the public authorities, but Pincher had,
surprisingly, never heard of it. It took notice of Pincher’s request (would it
have paid heed to submissions by those of lesser standing, without a platform
in the media?), and required MI5 to respond on the status of the Hollis report.
MI5 sent two items of correspondence to Pincher, stating that ‘despite an extensive search of the Service’s archives ‘it had to conclude that no record of the important interview was ever made’. And that appeared to be the end of the affair – until William Tyrer, through an astonishing display of terrier-like determination, managed to extract a copy from MI5, having first discovered a reference to a vital telegram in the Cleveland Cram archive. Tyrer wrote up his conclusions in 2016, in an article in The International Journal of Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence (see https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08850607.2016.1177404), and Denis Lenihan has analysed Tyrer’s findings in Roger Redux: Why the Roger Hollis Case Won’t Go Away.
As the Tribunal’s website (https://www.ipt-uk.com/ ) explains, the Investigatory Powers Act of 2016 did strengthen
provisions for the public to make appeals, but it is not clear to me that the
withholding of files really fits into what the IPT declares its mission, namely
‘a right of redress for anyone who believes they have been a victim of unlawful
action by a public authority using covert investigative techniques’. That
sounds more like heavy-handed surveillance techniques, or officers and agents
masquerading as person they were not in order to infiltrate possibly dissident groups.
And the organisation has a very bureaucratic and legalistic methodology, as the
recent decision on an MI5 case shows (see: https://www.ipt-uk.com/judgments.asp, and note that the Tribunal cannot spell ‘Between’). It is
difficult to see how the body could sensibly process a slew of failed FoI
requests. And what about the Home Office, retaining aged documents? That
doesn’t come under the grouping of security services.
Yet all of this fails to grapple with the main question: why has
the Government suddenly become so defensive and concerned about records dealing
with matters of atomic power and energy, most of them over seventy years old,
and many of which have already been dissected in serious books? In the articles
to which I provided links beforehand, Michael Holzman and Robert Booth say it
all. The lack of a proper explanation is astounding, and the blunderbuss
approach just draws even more attention to the fact that the civil service is
out of control. Did Peierls’s letters to Blok and others betray some secrets
that would be dangerous for the country’s foes to get hold of? I cannot imagine
it. Maybe all will be revealed soon, but the furtive and uncommunicative way in
which these files are being withheld just induces more distrust of the
authorities, and their condescending attitude to the public. (Coldspur 2 : The
Establishment 3)
Professor Frank Close at the Bodleian
Professor Frank Close
My status as Friend of the Bodleian entitles me to attend events staged by that institution, and a couple of months ago I received the following invitation: “Our first video by Professor Frank Close, available exclusively to the Friends, can be viewed here. In this talk, ‘Trinity: Klaus Fuchs and the Bodleian Library’, Professor Close uses the Bodleian’s collections to describe an extraordinary tale of Communist spies and atomic bombs.” I viewed the presentation on YouTube, but I don’t believe that it is available solely through subscription, as the above link appears to function properly.
It does not appear that Klaus Fuchs
ever visited the Bodleian Library, but Professor Close uses Bodleian resources,
such as the correspondence of Rudolf Peierls, and the photographic collection
of Tony Skyrme, another Trinity College, Cambridge man, and contributor to the
Manhattan Project (see https://archives.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/repositories/2/resources/3424 ) to weave a fascinating story about Fuchs. Skyrme
accompanied Fuchs and the Peierls family on a ski-ing holiday in Switzerland in
1947, and produced a riveting set of photographs of that adventure, some of
which Close reproduces in Trinity, his biography of Fuchs. Close also
makes some fascinating linkages between the dates that Fuchs claimed vacation
days from his work at Birmingham, and the timings of wireless messages to
Moscow reporting on the communication of his latest secrets. He does, however,
avoid any possible hint of controversy over Peierls’s career, ignoring what I
have written about him, even though his final message was a very pertinent one
about the relationship between Fuchs and those who ‘adopted’ him, and how he
eventually betrayed them.
Since I have read Close’s book, and
am familiar with the overall story, the pace of his presentation was a little
slow for me. Yet I could see that Close is a very gifted lecturer, and must
have truly energized his students when he was a working physics don. I
accordingly sent an email congratulating him on his performance, at the same
time asking a question about the source of some of his data. I never received a
reply. Apparently I have fallen out of favour with the learned professor, who
was so eager to communicate with me a few years ago. (Coldspur 2: The
Establishment 4)
The BBC and Professor Andrew
Readers may recall my last
Round-up, in November 2019, where I left with the optimistic projection that,
having been able to speak to Mr Brennan’s Personal Assistant, and hearing from
her that she would commit to follow up on my letter, I might be able to make
some progress on my complaint about Professor Andrew’s high-handed, even
contemptuous, behaviour towards the listeners to the ‘Today’ show. (This
concerns a letter written by Eric Roberts to a friend which Andrew categorized
as ‘the most extraordinary intelligence document’ that he had ever seen, but of
which he later claimed to have no memory.)
Well, I heard nothing. So, early in
January, I tried to call the lady at Broadcasting House. (I had to explain who
I was to get past the switchboard.) And there was no reply. I thus tried asking
the switchboard operator if he could give me her email address, telling him,
quite truthfully, that I was following up a previous conversation with her.
And, believe it or not, in what was probably a gross breach of institutional
policy, he gave it to me. I was thus able to write to her, as follows:
Dear Xxxxxxxx,
You may recall that we spoke several weeks ago about my
correspondence with the BBC, specifically with Bob Shennan. You were familiar
with my letter, and told me that it had been passed to Audience Services. You
also said that you would personally ensure that I received follow-up.
Well, I have heard nothing since, and felt it was time to
make contact again. Could you please explain to me what is happening, and why I
have not yet received a reply to my letters?
Thank you.
Sincerely, Tony Percy.
Six days later, I received the following reply:
Good evening Mr Percy,
I am very sorry I have just
picked up this email, which was sitting in my Junk inbox. I will
again try and find out where your original correspondence is and why it hasn’t
been responded to, I know you offered to resend me a copy, may I please take
you up on this.
Apologies again for the non
response and I will come back to you as soon as I can.
Regards,
Xxxxxxxx
EA to Group Managing Director.
‘Be patient now . . .’
I thus responded:
Thanks for your reply, Xxxxxxxx.
The reason I was not
able to send you the letters beforehand was that I never received any email
from you giving me your address! Only when the kind switchboard operator
offered it to me when I called last week (explaining that I had spoken to you
before: otherwise he probably would not have handed it out), was I able to
contact you.
Anyway, here are the two
letters we discussed. I would really appreciate your tracking down whoever is
tasked with giving me a response. You will notice that it is now over three
months since my original letter . . .
Best wishes, Tony.
I didn’t hear from Xxxxxxx
again, but on January 21st, I received the following message:
Dear Antony Percy,
Reference CAS-5759257-M8M4X9
Thank you for your letters and we apologise for the time it has taken to
respond.
I have discussed your request with Sanchia Berg whose report you refer to on
the Today Programme. While we appreciate your frustration, the decision whether
or not to release the document rests with the family and not with the BBC.
Sanchia has confirmed that this was a private family document which Eric
Roberts’ family shared with her and later with Rob Hutton. The family did not
want to publish it in full but agreed to certain extracts being made public. It
was only with their consent that she shared it with Christopher Andrew. I
understand Sanchia did suggest that you look at Rob Hutton’s book, as he’d
published more of the letter than Sanchia had made available in her reports.
Nor is it the case that Sanchia was being evasive. Rather she was respecting
the family’s wishes.
I am afraid too that we can’t really comment on what Christopher Andrew has
said. He obviously views an awful lot of documents, so it’s not that surprising
he cannot remember in detail a long document he read four years ago. He is not
the only historian the BBC talks to about MI5 – but he is their official
historian, so it’s logical that we should go to him fairly frequently.
I have asked Sanchia to contact the family on your behalf and will let you know
if she is successful. However, we would make it clear there is no guarantee
they will be back in touch. I am sorry I am not able to give you any further
help and once again I apologise for the time it has taken to respond to your
concerns.
Thank you for
your reply. It was worth waiting for.
I appreciate
your asking Sanchia to approach the family on my behalf. Since the family
approved her showing the document to Christopher Andrew and Rob Hutton, I
assume that they were comfortable with greater publicity. (Rob Hutton did not
reply to my inquiry.) I await the outcome with great interest.
But I must
admit that I do not find your distancing the BBC from Andrew acceptable. After
all, it is on the BBC website that his comments still appear (see https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33414358). Do you not accept some responsibility for this highly provocative
opinion, and do you not agree that it would be appropriate for the BBC to
contact him, remind him of what he said, point out the information on the
website, and request a clarification from him, instead of members of the public
(like me) having to chase around for months trying to gain an explanation from
the corporation? Why does Andrew’s role as MI5’s ‘official historian’ allow him
to use the BBC to promote himself and to provoke public interest, but then to
evade his professional responsibilities by concealing facts concerning MI5?
Sincerely,
Tony Percy.
But that was
it. I heard no more. The BBC is in such
disarray, and the ‘Today’ editors have now moved on. I am not going to gain
anything else. For a moment, I thought I might score a goal, but I suppose it
is a draw of some sorts. (Coldspur 2 – The Establishment 4)
Nigel West’s
New Publications
As I was
flicking through one of the book catalogues that I receive through the mail, I
noticed two startling entries, one advertising a new edition of Nigel West’s
MI5 (originally published in 1981), the other his MI6 (1983),
published by Frontline. Now this was exciting news, as I needed to learn what
the “Experts’ Expert” (Observer, 1989) was now writing about the two
intelligence services after an interval of over thirty years. I was half-minded
to order them immediately at the discounted prices of $37.95 and $26.95, but
thought I should check them out on-line first. Thus Casemate Publishers can be
seen to promote the books, at https://www.casematepublishers.com/mi5-british-security-service-operations-1909-1945.html#.XrLLhSN_OUk , and the overview for MI5 includes the following: “In this new and revised edition, Nigel West
details the organizational charts which show the structure of the wartime
security apparatus, in what is regarded as the most accurate and informative
account ever written of MI5 before and during the Second World War.”
This was encouraging, and I thought I might get
a glimpse of the new Contents by gaining a Google Snippet view, before
committing myself. Yet the text, as displayed by that feature, indicated that
the Contents of the book had not changed, and the number of pages had not
increased. Was that perhaps merely a procedural mistake, where Google had not
replaced the former text? I decide that the only way to find out was to ask the
author himself. Now, I have not been in touch with Nigel for a few years. I
have since tweaked his nose a bit on coldspur, especially over his
superficial yet contradictory treatment of Guy Liddell, and I wondered whether
he would reply. Maybe he had not seen what I had written, but, if he had, he
might not want to communicate with me.
Anyway, I sent a very polite message to him, in
which I explained how excited I was at the prospect of reading his new
versions, and the very next morning he replied very warmly, and included the
following revelation: “The four wartime titles
recently republished (MI5; MI6; The Secret War: The Story of SOE and The
Secret Wireless War: GCHQ 1900 -1986) are simply corrected new editions of
the four books previously published.”
Is this not shocking, even a gross misrepresentation of goods
sold? Apart from the fact that, if I were a historian with a chance to revise
an earlier book in these circumstances, I would take the opportunity to refresh
it with all the research uncovered in the meantime, such as a host of files
from the National Archives, and Christopher Andrew’s authorised history, I
would be very careful in arranging how the book was presented to the public.
But not just one! Four titles? I think this is highly irregular, and I hereby
warn anyone who was thinking of acquiring any of these four volumes that the
information they get will be very outdated, and that I doubt that all the
multiple errors in them have all been addressed. (Coldspur 3 : The
Establishment 4)
Meanwhile, I have been scouring other Nigel West books. His
latest, Churchill’s Spy Files: MI5’s Top Secret Wartime Reports (2018),
exploits the KV 4/83 file at Kew (although the reader is pushed to find the
source, since it does not appear until a footnote to the very last sentence of
the book). Beginning in April 1943, Director-General Petrie of MI5 sent a
regular summary report, delivered to Churchill and for his eyes only (the copy
was taken by the emissary), outlining the activities and achievements of MI5.
It seems that West produces the reports in full, although I cannot yet verify
that, as the files have not been digitized, and he adds some very useful (as
well as some very dense and impenetrable) commentary gained from study of the relevant
MI5 files at Kew, such as on the Double-Cross System, and on MI5’s major
success against Soviet espionage in World War 2, the successful prosecution of
Dave Springhall.
Yet it is another weird West concoction, akin to his recent book on Liddell (see https://coldspur.com/guy-liddell-a-re-assessment/ ), on which my colleague Denis Lenihan has recently posted an invigorating article (see https://www.academia.edu/43150722/Another_Look_At_Nigel_West_s_Cold_War_Spymaster_The_Legacy_of_Guy_Liddell_Deputy_Director_of_MI5 ). The author’s sense of chronology is wayward, he copies out sheaves of material from the archives, the relevance of which is not always clear, and he overwhelms the reader with a host of names and schemes that lack any proper exegesis. Moreover, the Index is cluttered, and highly inaccurate. I saw my friend General von Falkenhausen with a single entry, but then discovered that he ranges over several pages. Indeed, West describes, through rather fragmentarily, the SIS scheme to invoke Falkenhausen in 1942-43, which is very relevant to my discoveries about Len Beurton. I immediately downloaded from Kew the relevant files on the very provocative HAMLET, taking advantage of the current free offer. I shall return to comment on this volume when I have completed my reading of it.
West does highlight the role of Anthony Blunt in editing the
reports for Churchill, which brings me back, inevitably I suppose, to ELLI, the
spy within MI5 (or SIS) called out by the defector Gouzenko in 1945. I have
studiously avoided making any statement on ELLI in my reports so far, but Denis
Lenihan has been writing some provocative pieces, and I must catch up with him
eventually. I had happened to notice, in Chapman Pincher’s Treachery
(2012 edition, p 78), that the author quoted the file KV 3/417 as confirming
that ELLI was a spy working for the GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence) in
London in 1940. He gave the source as the GRU defector, Ismail Akhmedov, whose
work In and Out of Stalin’s GRU, I had quoted in Misdefending the
Realm. So I went back to that file, resident on my PC, and found the
reference, in paragraph 104. The writer indeed states that Akhmedov was indeed
the source, but that the defector claimed that ELLI was a woman! Why did
Pincher not include that in his account – was that not rather dumb? And how
come nobody else has referred to this anomaly? Professor Glees has pointed out
to me that no male given a cryptonym by Soviet Intelligence ever received a
female name. Apart from Roessler (LUCY, after Lucerne, which is a special case)
and DORA (an anagram of Alexander RADÓ), I think he is overall correct,
although I have to add the somewhat ambiguous IRIS, who was Leo Aptekar, a
‘chauffeur’, Sonia’s handler at the Soviet Embassy.
I have thus started a fresh project on digging out the various sources on ELLI. First of all, I re-read Molehunt, Nigel West’s account of the hunt for Soviet spies in MI5. This is a very confusing world, what with Pincher staking his reputation and career on Hollis’s culpability, based on what Peter Wright told him, John Costello pointing the finger at Guy Liddell (before succumbing to a mysterious and untimely death himself), Nigel West, using the substance of Arthur Martin’s convictions behind the scenes, making the case that Graham Mitchell was the offender, and Christopher Andrew pooh-poohing the lot of them as a crew of conspiracy theorists while allowing himself to be swayed by Gordievsky’s assertion that ELLI was, improbably, Leo Long. West’s book is very appealingly written, but his approach to chronology is utterly haphazard, he is very arch in concealing his whole involvement in the process, and he makes so many unverifiable assertions that one has to be very careful not to be caught up in the sweep of his narrative. For instance, he identifies the failure of British double-agent manoeuvres with Soviet spies as a major item of evidence for stating that MI5 had been infiltrated. But he never explores this, or explains what these projects were. Apart from the attempt to manipulate Sonia (and Len) I know of no documented case of such activity, and, as I have repeatedly written, such projects are doomed to fail as, in order to be successful, they rely both on discipline by a very small and secure team as well as exclusive control of the double agent’s communications.
Ismail Akhmedov
I also went back to Akhmedov, to re-acquaint myself with how he
described his lengthy interviews with Philby in Ankara in 1948. His conclusion
was that, even though a stenographer was present, and he suspected the
safe-house had been bugged, Philby reported only a small amount of the material
that he passed on, which certainly included a description of the GRU’s set-up
in London. (He does not mention ELLI here.) But he also wrote that he knew this
because of his contacts with American intelligence afterwards. “Many years later I learned that Philby had
submitted only a small part of the reams of material obtained from me to the
British and American intelligence services”. That indicated to me that a fuller record
exists somewhere, and that Akhmedov was shown Philby’s report. Akhmedov also said
that, a year later (in 1949) he was thoroughly debriefed by the FBI, CIA and
Pentagon officials in Istanbul. So I assumed that CIA records
were a good place to look.
And, indeed, the CIA archives display quite a lot of information
that Akhmedov supplied them about GRU techniques and organisation, but in
secondary reports. (I have not yet found transcripts of the original
interviews.) Moreover, literature produced more recently points to a critical
role that Akhmedov played in unmasking Philby. One account (Tales from
Langley by Peter Kross) even states that Akhmedov informed the CIA in 1949
that Philby was a Soviet spy (how Akhmedov discovered that is not clear, since
he obviously did not know that for a fact in 1948, although he claimed he partly
saw through Philby’s charade at the time), and that Philby was presented with
Akhmedov’s testimony when he was recalled from Washington immediately after the
Burgess-Maclean escapade. Unfortunately, Kross provides no reference for this
assertion, but Akhmedov’s informing the CIA at that stage would be an
astonishing revelation: it would put Philby’s presence in Washington under a
harsh new light, frame White’s ‘devilish plot’ in a dramatic new context, and
even explain why Eric Roberts was faced with an astonishing new reality when he
spoke to Liddell in 1949. Is that what Andrew was hinting at? I am going to
claim an early goal, before VAR gets in. (Coldspur 4 : The Establishment 4)
Another anomaly I have noticed is the famed reference to ELLI
(actually ‘ELLY’) in the Vassiliev papers. (These were transcripts of files created
by Alexander Vassiliev from the KGB archives, containing information on the GRU
as well, and available on the Internet at https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/collection/86/vassiliev-notebooks .) Chapman Pincher presented the assertion that Gouzenko had
betrayed the existence of ELLI in British intelligence as appearing in a report
from Merkulov to Stalin in November 1945, and William Tyrer has echoed
Pincher’s claim in his article about ELLI.
Yet the published archive states no such thing. The comment that “Gouzenko
reported on the GRU source in British intel. ‘ELLY’” is not in the selected
highlights of Merkulov’s report, but appears as an introduction in a separate
pair of parentheses, looking as if it had been added by Vassiliev as editorial commentary,
after the statement that informs us that what follows is a summarization
of what Philby has given them. If it is intended to also reflect the
information received from ‘S’ [STANLEY = Philby] that immediately precedes it,
it is worth noting that Philby’s report likewise includes nothing about ELLI.
Pincher
cites the comment as coming from Merkulov’s report, but uses the on-line
version as his source. He is wrong. Tyrer reproduces the whole introduction in
his article, but removes the parentheses. He is careless. Of course, it is very
possible that Merkulov did write to Stalin about Gouzenko and ELLI, and
that needs to be verified. Merkulov was, however, in the NKVD/KGB, not the GRU,
and it seems implausible that he would want to lay any bad news concerning the
GRU on Stalin’s plate. I cannot quickly see any other reference to the GRU in
Merkulov’s communications, and Allen Weinstein and Vassiliev himself, in The
Haunted Wood, suggest (note, p 105) that any reference to the GRU by
Merkulov was an attempt to pass off some of the responsibility for Elizabeth
Bentley’s defection to the GRU, who recruited her originally in 1936, and for
whom she worked until 1938, when she was transferred to the NKVD.
Thus
one might ask: if Vassiliev thought that the reference to ELLI was important
enough to be highlighted, why did he not publish the original text that
contained it? (I have checked the original Russian manuscript on the Wilson
Center website: the texts are the same. Yet some pages are missing in all
versions: original scan of manuscript, Russian transcription, and English
translation). We should recall, also, that Vassiliev was not transcribing the
texts surreptitiously: he had been given permission from the Association of
Retired Intelligence Officers (KGB alumni) to inspect them, was well-briefed in
western intelligence interests, and under no pressure. So I decided to try to
ask him what the import of his commentary was. I know he is hiding somewhere in
England (maybe holed up with Oleg Gordievsky in an especially leafy part of foliate
Surrey), so on May 18 I sent a message to his publisher to inquire whether they
could pass on a question to him. I was brushed off with a message saying I
should look on Vassiliev’s social media, or write a letter to the publisher. I
doubt whether Vassiliev is seeking any attention, or wanting to give clues to
his whereabouts, so I shall take the latter course.
There is no doubt ELLI existed. But ELLI was almost certainly a
woman, and the information on her is so sparse that she was probably a minor
player, and was not an informant for long. Thus the quest for identifying ELLI
has to be separated from the generic search for traitors within MI5. If there
was evidence of leakage on certain projects, MI5 should have investigated it,
traced it back to those officers who were privy to the information, and then
tried to discern how they might have passed it to a member of Soviet
intelligence. Instead, they listened to the emotional appeals of Angleton and
Golitsyn, and started examining (and sometime interrogating) Mitchell, Hollis,
Liddell, Hanley, even White.
In Spycatcher, Peter Wright tried to list the strongest
reasons for suspecting a major source of treachery within MI5, narrowing his
search for ELLI to Hollis and Mitchell.
I noticed that, after the Gouzenko revelations broke out, he even
consulted Akhmedov to discuss the arrival of ‘ELLI’s telegrams’ [sic] in
Moscow. But the two of them apparently did not discuss ELLI’s gender! It is all
very mystifying. And if there was an endemic failure to protect against
communist subversion (as L’Affaire Sonia shows), it makes even less
sense to pretend that the rather dim Roger Hollis had the power and influence
to stop all his smarter colleagues from performing their jobs properly. Every
time I go back to Pincher, I am stunned by the ham-handed way he overstates his
case against Hollis. Any decent defence-lawyer would submerge his case within
minutes. Nevertheless, I am not yet ready to claim the winning goal.
The Survival of Gösta Caroli
Gosta Caroli
When I wrote about Jan Willem ter Braak, the German agent who apparently escaped undetected for several months in Cambridge in the winter of 1940-1941 (see https://coldspur.com/the-mystery-of-the-undetected-radios-part-3/ and https://coldspur.com/two-cambridge-spies-dutch-connections-2/ ), I referred to the claim that Nicholas Mosley had made about another agent parachuted in, Gösta Caroli, in his book The Druid. Mosley reported that Caroli had in fact been hanged in Birmingham prison, contrary to Nigel West’s reports that he had been repatriated to Sweden after the war.
Now, if that were true, it would have been an alarming course of
events, with the Security Service arranging an extra-judicial killing, given
that there was no account of a trial, even in camera, to be found. The
biography of Caroli’s colleague Wolf Schmidt (TATE) was written by two Swedes, and
mentioned Caroli, but it apparently gave no details about his incarceration and
subsequent return to Sweden. So I left the issue hanging.
Now I can report that the intrepid Giselle Jakobs (the
grand-daughter of Josef Jakobs, who was indeed executed as a spy) has tracked
down the biography of Caroli, written by the same two authors, in Swedish,
which they self-published in 2015. She has arranged for enough portions of it
translated to prove that Caroli, while his health had been damaged by the fall
on his landing in England, did recuperate enough to live for thirty more years.
It includes a photograph of Caroli after his marriage. Giselle’s extraordinary
account of his life, and of her admirable efforts to present the information
for posterity, can be found at https://www.josefjakobs.info/2020/04/the-apres-espionage-career-of-gosta.html and at http://www.josefjakobs.info/.
While this is good news, removing one black mark against the
occasionally dubious application of the law by the British authorities when
under stress in 1940 and 1941, it does not materially change anything of my
suggestion that the death of ter Braak was not a suicide. I expect this matter
to be resuscitated before long. My on-line colleague Jan-Willem van den Braak
(actually no relation, as Ter Braak’s real name was Fukken) has written a
biography of Ter Braak, in Dutch. It is now being translated into English for
publication next year, and Mr. van den Braak has invited me to offer an Afterword
to present my research and theories.
Dave Springhall and the GRU
In April last year, I was investigating hints provided by Andrew
Boyle about the possible recruitment of Kim Philby by the Communist Douglas
(‘Dave’) Springhall, and wrote as follows:
“Springhall is
problematical. On my desktop computer, I have twenty-seven bulky PDFs from his
files at the National Archives, which I have not yet inspected properly. They
provide a fairly exhaustive account of his movements, but Special Branch did
not appear to track him having a meeting with members of the Soviet Embassy in
1933. (Springhall did make a request to visit Cambridge in March of that year,
however.) I suppose it is possible that Liddell had an interview with the
communist activist at the time of his conviction in 1943, but it is improbable
that a record of such a conversation has lain undiscovered. Somewhere in that
archive (according to Springhall’s Wikipedia entry) is a suggestion that
Springhall was working for the GRU from 1932 onwards, but locating that record
is a task that will have to wait – unless any alert reader is already familiar
with the whole of KV 2/2063-2065 & KV 2/1594-1598 . . .”
Douglas (‘Dave’) Springhall
Well, I have at last had enough time on my hands to go through the whole of that archive, and take notes. The evidence of a strong connection between ‘Springy’ (the comrades referred to each other thus, with Len Beurton responding to his MI5 interviewers about ‘Footie’ – Alexander Foote – as if they were members of the England cricket team) and Soviet military intelligence is thin. It derives from an SIS report concerning a translation of a Russian request for information on Indian Army capabilities from the Intelligence Directorate of the Staff R.K.K.A. to the Military Attaché in Berlin, in which Springhall’s name is brought up (KV 2/1594-2, p 40, August 20, 1931).
Yet
Springhall was very much a naval/military figure. Even though he missed the
Invergordon Mutiny (he was occupied in Moscow at the time), he was a regular
commentator on military affairs. He was head of anti-military propaganda in
England, he gave eulogistic descriptions of life in the Red Army, and busied
himself with secret work at Woolwich Arsenal. And his eventual arrest, in 1943,
for extracting secrets on radar defensive measures (WINDOW) from Olive Sheehan,
was obviously for trying to transfer facts to Soviet military experts. MI5
never determined, however, who his courier was, despite the close watch that
was kept on him. I noticed in his MI5 that Nigel West suggested that
Gorsky of the KGB was his contact at the Soviet Embassy, but in the same
author’s recent Churchill’s Spy Files, he indicates that it was a GRU
officer, and that the courier was someone called Peppin. (Somewhere in the
Springhall archive, I got the impression that the courier might have been
Andrew Rothstein.) So I wrote to West about it, and he confirmed that it must
have been a GRU contact, but he could no more about the courier.
This
is a vast archive: I wouldn’t be surprised if someone is writing a book about Springhall
at the moment. West’s book provides a good introduction, but there is so much
more to be explored, and I shall certainly return to the archive when I come to
write about Slater and Wintringham. I shall thus say little more here, but
merely make a few important observations on three aspects: 1) The role of
Anthony Blunt (as introduced above); 2) The immensity of the surveillance of
Springhall; and 3) Springhall’s trial.
One
of the remarkable features of the monthly reports to Churchill on MI5’s
activities, starting in March 1943, was that Guy Liddell, to whom the task was
delegated by Petrie, in turn brought in Anthony Blunt to perform much of the
editorial work. Thus here was additional proof that most of the service’s
‘secrets’ were being passed on to Moscow before you could say ‘Andrew
Rothstein’. Thus one has to interpret the prosecution and sentencing of
Springhall (conducted in camera) in a completely new light. The CPGB (the head
office of which, in King Street, had been bugged comprehensively by Special
Branch) was shocked and disgusted at the fact that Comrade Springhall had been
involved in espionage, and thus was guilty of bringing the Communist Party into
disrepute. Moscow was, of course ‘appalled’, and denied anything untoward had
taken place.
Yet,
if Moscow had known what was going on throughout the Springhall investigation
because of Blunt, they would not have been surprised at the outcome. They would
have to make the necessary melodramatic denials, but were perhaps not
completely unhappy that all the attention was being paid on an expendable,
somewhat irresponsible, open member of the Communist Party, while their
unmasked agents were gathering information on the atomic bomb. In that way, MI5
would continue to imagine that the Party was the major source for subversive
activity (with Ray Milne in MI6, and Desmond Uren in SOE being minor casualties
dragged in by Springhall), and their moles in the intelligence services would
be able to carry on unhindered. ‘Springy’ was not sprung.
The
second noteworthy aspect is the sheer volume of material that was collected
about Springhall, hundreds and hundreds of pages of notes on his career in the
Navy, his visits to the Soviet Union, his published articles in the Daily
Worker, his girl-friends, his associates and friends, his meetings at
Communist Party headquarters, his speeches exhorting revolution at rallies –
and of course on his espionage, his arrest, his trial, his sentencing, his time
in prison, and his release before dying in Moscow of cancer in 1953. MI5 and
Special Branch must have an expended an enormous amount of time trailing and
surveilling him, yet the service was mostly powerless in doing anything at all – until Springhall so
clumsily tried to extract the secrets from the communist flatmate of a loyal
citizen, Norah Bond, who shared what she overheard with her RAF boyfriend,
Wing-Commander Norman Blackie.
In a way, I suppose,
Springhall’s being caught red-handed justified all the effort, and it enabled
MI5 to move the traitor Ray Milne quietly out of SIS, and Raymond Uren out of
SOE. Yet so much other surveillance was going on that one has to conclude that
it was all rather wasted energy. ‘Keeping an eye’ on suspicious characters
became a literal watchword, in the vain hope that such an activity would lead
to larger networks of subversive ne’er-do-wells. But what next? So long as the
Communist Party was a licit institution, its members could make calls for
revolution, even during wartime, without any fear of prosecution, and the Home
Office seemed far too timid as to how the factories might be adversely affected
if too energetic moves were made against the comrades of our gallant ally, the
Russians. Meanwhile, most government institutions were infected with Communist
moles, agents of influence, and fellow-travellers who separated themselves from
links with the Communist Party itself.
Lastly, the Trial
itself. Files KV 2/1598-2 & -3 from Kew contain a full record of ‘Rex v
Douglas Frank Springhall, at the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey, 20th
July Sessions, 1943’, before Mr Justice Oliver. It represents a transcript of
the shorthand notes of George Walpole & Co. (Shorthand Writers to the
Court). The Solicitor-General, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, K.C. and Mr L. A. Byrne
appeared on behalf of the Prosecution, with Mr J. F. F. Platts-Mills appearing
on behalf of the Defence. I think it is an extraordinary document.
From the first lines of
the transcript, where the portentous Justice Oliver rather patronisingly puts
the Rumpolean Maxwell-Fyfe in his place, and the Solicitor-General
deferentially responds ‘If your Lordship pleases’, we can see a classical
court-room drama take place. Oliver then treats Platts-Mills in the same
peremptory manner, and, when the prosecuting council start their questioning of
Olive Sheehan (who had passed on to Springhall secrets about ‘WINDOW’), Oliver interrupts
them freely, as I am sure he was entitled to. He rebukes Platts-Mills, rather
pettily, for referring to the Air Ministry as Sheehan’s ‘employers’: “Now, Mr
Platts-Mills, this court has not become a theatre of politics.” Platts-Mills has to adapt to his Lordship’s pleasure.
I shall comment no more
now than to remark how different this court was from those administered by
Roland Freisler or Andrey Vyshinsky. Yes, it was in camera, but this was
not a show-trial where the defendants knew they were already guilty and were
facing inevitable execution. Britain was at war, and had caught a spy declaring
allegiance to a foreign power, stealing secrets that could have seriously
harmed the war effort if they had passed into the wrong hands, and calling for
revolution, but Springhall received a fair trial. It concludes with Springhall
making a rather eloquent but disingenuous speech about wanting ‘to arouse the
country behind the government headed by Mr Winston Churchill’. The jury took fifteen
minutes to consider the evidence before returning a verdict of ‘Guilty’ on
almost all counts, and Springhall was sentenced to seven years’ penal
servitude. A very British trial.
‘Superspy Daughter in Holiday-camp Tycoon Romance Drama!’
(“I wanted to marry him”, confesses distraught schoolgirl)
‘I am the Daughter’
A while back, I acquired a slim volume titled ‘Die Tochter bin ich’ (‘I am the Daughter’), by one Janina Blankenfeld. It was published in Berlin in 1985, and is a brief memoir by a schoolteacher who was the daughter of someone who will be familiar to all readers of this website – Ursula née Kuczynski, aka SONIA. Janina was actually Sonia’s daughter by her lover, Johannes Patra (cryptonym ERNST), conceived in China, born in Warsaw in 1936, and spending much of her childhood years in Switzerland and England. Janina did not learn who her real father was until 1955, when Sonia’s first husband, Rolf, returned to Berlin, and Sonia felt she ought to break the news to her. I bought the book because I thought it might shed some light on Sonia’s movements in the UK, and even explain how Janina was able to attend an expensive boarding-school in Epping.
Unfortunately, it gives little away, sheltering under her mother’s
memoir, published a few years beforehand. Janina gives the impression that
money was very tight, and she says nothing about the private school. For a
while, the idea of a holiday was impossible, but Janina wrote that, six months
after her grandmother’s death (which occurred in June 1947), Sonia found an
inexpensive room on the Welsh coast, in Criccieth, which was a revelation for
Janina, as she enjoyed the coastline and the ruined castles. (Criccieth is a
bit too close to the University of Aberystwyth, to my liking.) But “Das schönste Erlebnis für mich war unser
Bummel durch Butlins Holiday Camp.” (‘The best
experience for me was our stroll through Butlin’s Holiday Camp’.) She revelled
in the string of bungalows, and the loudspeakers playing all day, and the
dances and merry-go-rounds in the evenings. “Der Glanzpunkt war die Wahl der schönsten
Urlauberin. Schöne Beine and ein hübsches Gesicht – mehr war nicht
gefragt.“ (“The climax
was the election of the most beautiful holidaymaker. Fine legs and a pretty
face – nothing more was asked for.”)
I am not sure what the Ernst Thälmann Pioneer Organisation leaders
would have thought of all this frivolity, with no time spent on propaganda
lessons and correct ideological thinking, and far too much attention paid to
superficial bourgeois pastimes like beauty contests, but Janina’s memoir
managed to get through the censors. And it all made a strong impression on the
twelve-year-old girl. “Seit
diesem Besuch hatte ich neue Träume – ich wollte so gern Herrn Butlin heiraten,
ganz reich sein and jedes Jahr meinen Urlaub in solch einem Feriencamp
verbringen. ” (Ever since this visit I had fresh dreams
– I wanted to marry Mr Butlin so much, to become quite rich, and to spend my
holiday every year in such a Holiday Camp.”) Instead, eighteen months later,
she had to leave for good her idyllic life in the Cotswolds and Wales,
exchanging it for Walter Ulbricht’s holiday-camp of East Germany.
China and the Rhineland Moment
I have been thinking recently of China’s gradual expansion, and reactions to threats to its growing power (e.g. concerning Taiwan, the South China Sea, the Uighurs, industrial espionage, Hong Kong), and reminded myself that, if the first response to a bully is to refrain from challenging him, and biffing him on the nose, he will continue in the knowledge that his adversaries are really too cowardly, afraid of ‘provoking’ him more, and that he can thus continue unimpeded with his aggressive moves. I thought of the piece I wrote on Appeasement a few months ago, and how I judged that Hitler’s invasion of the Rhineland in 1936 was the incident marking the opportunity for the dictator to have been stopped.
Then, on May 30, Bret Stevens wrote an Op-Ed piece in the New
York Times titled ‘China and the Rhineland Moment’ (at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/29/opinion/china-hong-kong.html, inside the paywall). His piece started off as follows: “Great struggles between great powers tend to
have a tipping point. It’s the moment when the irreconcilability of differences
becomes obvious to nearly everyone. In 1911 Germany sparked an international crisis
when it sent a gunboat into the Moroccan port of Agadir and, as Winston
Churchill wrote in his history of the First World War, ‘all the alarm bells
throughout Europe began immediately to quiver.’ In 1936 Germany provoked
another crisis when it marched troops into the Rhineland, in flagrant breach of
its treaty obligations. In 1946, the Soviet Union made it obvious it had no
intention of honoring democratic principles in Central Europe, and Churchill
was left to warn that ‘an iron curtain has descended across the Continent’.” After making some recommendations as to what
the USA and Great Britain should do, Stevens concluded: “If all this and more
were announced now, it might persuade Beijing to pull back from the brink. In
the meantime, think of this as our Rhineland moment with China — and remember
what happened the last time the free world looked aggression in the eye, and
blinked.”
This month’s Commonplace entries can be seen here.
[In Part 1 of this segment, I analysed the way in which Rudolf Peierls tried to frame his life and career. He almost managed to conceal a murky connection with the Soviet authorities, but a study of archives, letters and memoirs strongly suggested a hold that Moscow exerted over him and his wife. In Part 2, I investigate how the network of physicists in Britain in the 1930s helped to enable Peierls’s close friend and protégé Klaus Fuchs to thrive, and explore how Peierls tried to explain away Fuchs’s ability to spy under his watch.]
Rudolf Peierls
When those UK public servants who aided or abetted the espionage of Klaus Fuchs were judged, whether they were in academia, government, or intelligence, the investigation essentially boiled down to four questions: 1) Were they incompetent? (‘I never knew he was a Communist’); 2) Were they negligent? (‘I knew he was a Communist, but didn’t think it mattered’); 3) Were they timid? (‘I knew he was a Communist, and was concerned, but didn’t want to rock the boat’); or 4) Were they culpable? (‘I knew he was a Communist, and that is why I recruited/approved him’). The actions of each were highly dependent upon roles and timing: supporting a communist scientist in the 1930s would have been almost de rigueur in physicist circles; in 1941 the Ministry of Aircraft Production was so desperate to beat Hitler that it admitted it had no qualms about recruiting a communist; after Gouzenko’s defection in 1945, and Nunn May’s sentencing, any communist links began to be treated as dangerous; in 1951 Sillitoe and White of MI5 lied to Prime Minster Attlee about Fuchs’s communism in order to save the institution’s skin. In comparison, in 1944 the OSS recruited Jürgen Kuczynski (Sonia’s brother, who introduced Fuchs to a member of Soviet military intelligence) because he was a communist. But the post mortems of the Cold War suggested that warning signals should have been made at every stage of the spy’s advancement to positions where he had access to highly confidential information.
Moreover, Fuchs is often presented in contrasting styles. On the one hand appears the superb master of tradecraft, who effortlessly insinuated himself into Britain’s academic elite, convinced the authorities of his skills and commitment, took up UK nationality, and then, with his keen knowledge of counter-surveillance techniques was able to pass on atomic secrets to his handler, Sonia, and later, in 1949, to give away no clues when he was being watched, being betrayed solely because of the VENONA decrypts, and the tenacity of those who followed the leads. On the other hand we see the clumsy communist, who made no effort to conceal his true affiliations, escaped undetected only because of the incompetence of MI5, but carelessly provided possible clues by visiting his sister in Boston, and contacting a known Communist (Johanna Klopstech) on his return to the UK in 1946. Moreover, he drank ‘like a fish’, according to Genia Peierls. When questioned, he was foolish enough to confess to espionage when anyone else would have brazened it out, with the result that his Soviet spymasters were disgusted with him.
Would
it not have made more sense for Fuchs to soften his communist stance, thus
avoiding a complete volte-face and loss of credibility with his leftist peers
in England, but suggesting he was more of a vague theoretician than a firm
believer in the Stalinist paradise? In this respect the relationship to Fuchs
of Rudolph Peierls, as his mentor and recruiter, is especially poignant. In
this article, I examine what is known about Peierls’s and other scientists’ awareness
of Fuchs’s true political commitment, and how Peierls danced around the issue
in the years after Fuchs’s prison sentencing, and later, when Fuchs was
released, and left the UK for the German Democratic Republic. I expand my
analysis by using the statements and testimony of other scientists who dealt
with the pair.
I
wrote about Peierls in Misdefending the Realm, and it might be useful to
re-present here a few sections from my book that focused on my assessment of
Peierls’s role in recruiting Fuchs to the Tube Alloys project, from Chapter 8:
Peierls’s
account of what happened next is deceptive. In his autobiography he claimed
that, several months after Fuchs’s release, when thinking about technical help
he himself needed in the spring of 1941, he thought of Fuchs. “I knew and liked
his papers, and I had met him”, he wrote, dismissing the relationship as fairly
remote. Yet he had never written about Fuchs beforehand, and he does not
describe the circumstances in which he had met him. His autobiographical
contribution is undermined, however, by what he had told MI5. When he was
interviewed by Commander Burt in February, 1950, shortly before Fuchs’s trial,
he said that he had first met Fuchs “in about 1934, probably at some scientific
conference”, but also stated that “he did not know him very well until Born
recommended him”. Fuchs was later to confirm that he had met Peierls at a
scientific conference “immediately before the war”. An MI5 report of November
23, 1949, states that “Peierls had met Fuchs at a Physics Conference in
Bristol, when Peierls had first suggested that Fuchs should work under him at
Birmingham”. That occasion was clearly before the war: Peierls and Fuchs had
achieved more than merely discuss issues of joint interest, and Peierls clearly
misrepresented the closeness of their relationship when speaking to Burt.
Without explaining how he had learned that Fuchs had been released from internment, and had returned to Edinburgh, Peierls stated that he wrote to Fuchs asking him whether he wanted to work with him, even before he (Peierls) had gained permission to do so. He next asked for official clearance, but was instructed “to tell him as little as possible”. “In due course he [Fuchs] got a full clearance, and he started work in May 1941.” One might conclude that the impression Peierls wanted to give is that it was a fortuitous accident that Fuchs’s availability, and his own need, coincided: he conveniently forgot the previous job offer. Moreover, the “and” in Peierls’s account is troublesome, suggesting a sequence of events that did not in fact happen that way. Fuchs had not received ‘full clearance’ by that time: in another item of correspondence, Peierls admitted that he had to wait. The process was to drag on for several months, and some MI5 personnel were later to express horror that the relevant government ministries had proceeded so carelessly in advancing Fuchs’s career without concluding the formal checks. For example, in June 1940, Peierls had taken Fuchs with him to Cambridge to meet the Austrian expert in heavy water, Dr. Hans Halban, who was a member of the exclusive five-man Tube Alloys Technical Committee: Fuchs’s training was assuredly not being held back.
Moreover,
Peierls’s account does not correspond with other records. It is clear from his
file at the National Archives that Fuchs was recommended for release from
internment in Canada as early as October 14, 1940 (i.e. shortly after the
meeting of the Maud Technical Sub-Committee), and that the termination of his
internment (to return to Edinburgh) was officially approved a few weeks later.
This followed an inquiry by the Royal Society as early as July 1940, since an
MI5 memorandum states that “the Royal Society included Fuchs on list of
scientists they wanted urgently released soon after Fuchs sailed on Ettrick on
July 3, 1940.” An ‘exceptional case’ was made on October 17, and the Home
Office gave Fuchs’s name to the High Commissioner for Canada. These requests
would later appear very provocative, as a defined role for Fuchs appeared to
have been described very early in the cycle. Yet, after his arrival in
Liverpool in January 1941, the Immigration Officer specified very clearly to
the Superintendent of the Register of Aliens that Fuchs would not be able to
“engage in any kind of employment without the consent of the Ministry of
Labour”.
It
would at first glance be quite reasonable to suppose that Peierls had initiated
this action, especially given the curious testimony of Fuchs’s supervisor at
Edinburgh, Max Born. In a letter dated May 29, 1940, Born had written (to whom
is not clear) that, despite Fuchs’s being “in the small top group of
theoretical physicists in this country”, he and the others should not be freed
from internment. Furthermore, Born wrote that “there are strict regulations
that prohibit any liberated internees to return to the ‘protected area’ where
they live”. “Even if they would be released they could not join my department
again”, he added. Either this was a deliberate deception by Born, to provide a
cover-story, or he had a quick change of heart, or he was sincere, but was
overruled, the British government wishing to maintain the fiction that
everything happened later than supposed. The third alternative can probably be
discounted, as Born soon after began writing to influential persons, trying to
gain Fuchs’s release, immediately after his arrest, and himself vigorously
tried to find Fuchs remunerative employment as soon as he learned about Fuchs’s
release from internment. In any case, the earlier statement represented an
unnecessarily severe judgment, made just over two weeks after Fuchs’s
interrogation and arrest, and its only purpose can have been to smooth the path
of Fuchs’s employment elsewhere after his eventual release. [pp 217-218]
And:
In fact, correspondence between Peierls and the pacifist-minded Born suggests that the two collaborated to find Fuchs employment very soon after his release from internment was approved. It appears the two scientists knew each other well. In the summer of 1936, Born (whose position at Cambridge had come to an end) had received an invitation from Kapitza to work for him in Moscow. The fact that Kapitza appeared then to be an unreformed Stalinist, writing in his letter of invitation: “Now, Born, is the time to make your decision whether you will be on the right or the wrong side in the coming political struggle”, did not deter Born. He considered it so seriously that he started taking Russian lessons from Peierls’s wife, Eugenia, but instead assumed the chair of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh University in October 1936. Laucht’s study of Frisch and Peierls refers to letters exchanged between Peierls and Born in November, 1940, where they explored opportunities for placing Fuchs successfully. This correspondence continued during the spring of 1941, with Peierls expressing extreme dedication towards bringing Fuchs into his camp. “Although it looked initially as if Fuchs would not make the move to the University of Birmingham, Peierls remained tireless in his effort to find a job for the talented physicist at his university. In the end, he succeeded and offered Fuchs a temporary position,” wrote Laucht. Thus Peierls’s version of the recruitment process can be interpreted as another self-serving memoir attempting to distance the author from a traitor. All this was known by MI5: they had gained Home Office Warrants to read the correspondence.
Max
Born, moreover, was far from innocent in helping Fuchs on his mission. In his
two items of autobiography, he relentlessly reminds his readers that he had no
competence in nuclear physics, a convenient pretence for his attitude of
non-participation and pacifism. Yet in his later, more comprehensive volume he
related the episode of a visit to Cambridge in the summer of 1939, where he met
the nuclear physicist Leo Szilard, and how, on his return, he shared with Fuchs
Szilard’s conviction that an atom bomb could be made. He was then unequivocal
that Fuchs knew that the nature of the work he would have to be engaged in was
nuclear weapons research, with the goal of defeating Hitler, as he claimed he
tried to talk Fuchs out of it. Just as Peierls did in his own memoir, Born
concealed the fact of the correspondence between the two exiled scientists at the
end of 1940, supporting the lie that it was Peierls’s sudden request for Fuchs
in May of 1941 that occasioned the latter’s transfer from Edinburgh to
Birmingham. [pp 220-21]
What
new material can shed further light on this story? In some ways, the sources
have become sparser. In recent years, previously available files concerning
atomic weapons and energy research, including vital files on Klaus Fuchs, have
been ‘retained’ by UK government departments for unspecified reasons. (see, for
example:
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/research-brought-halt-national-archives/ and
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/23/british-nuclear-archive-files-withdrawn-without-explanation ) Very recently, some of the files on
Sonia’s family have been inexplicably withdrawn (’closed while access is under
review’). In his 1997 biography of Professor Chadwick (the head of the British
mission to assist in the Manhattan Project), Andrew Brown wrote: “Some of the wartime
letters between Chadwick and Peierls that have never been released in England
were available at the National Archives, but possibly as a result of the Gulf
War, they were recently recensored by the US authorities” – an
extraordinary admission of foreign interference. The Cleveland Cram archive of
CIA material at Georgetown University has been withdrawn, at the CIA’s request
(see: https://theintercept.com/2016/04/25/how-the-cia-writes-history/).
Sabine Lee’s publication of the Letters of Rudolf Peierls has usefully extracted
a number of communications between the scientist and his colleagues and
contacts, but the emphasis is very much on technical matters, most of the letters
appear in the original German, and the volume is very expensive.
On
the other hand, a careful examination of the archival material of fringe
figures (such as the enigmatic Herbert Skinner), and the articles, book
reviews, memoirs and biographies of scientists who engaged with Peierls and
Fuchs in the 1930s, 40s and 50s can reveal a host of subsidiary detail that
helps to shed light on the process by which Fuchs was allowed to be adopted by
Peierls, and approved for work on Tube Alloys.
The
Physicists
The Physics Department at Bristol
The saga started at the University of Bristol, where a fascinating group of future luminaries was assembled in the 1930s. Klaus Fuchs arrived there, in October 1933, and was introduced to Professor Nevill Mott by Ronald Gunn, who was a director of Imperial Tobacco, was described by many as a Quaker, but was also a strong communist sympathiser. Gunn had visited the Soviet Union in 1932, had met Fuchs in Paris in 1933, and had sponsored his move to Bristol. The university admissions board accepted Fuchs as a doctoral student of Mott, who held the Melville Wills Chair of Theoretical Physics. Mott and Gunn were both alumni of Clifton College, as, indeed, was Roger Hollis, the controversial future chief of MI5. Mott had taken up his new position only in the autumn of 1933, at the young age of twenty-six, and one of his new colleagues was Herbert Skinner, to whom he was indebted for helping focus his research. Professor Tyndall’s history of the Physics Department also credits Skinner with endorsing the selection of Mott.
Skinner was later to become Fuchs’s boss at AERE Harwell, where Fuchs was to conduct an affair with Skinner’s ‘Austrian-born’ wife, Erna, described as ’glamorous’ in one memoir. Skinner had been appointed a Henry Herbert Will Research Fellow at Bristol in 1927, and was given a more permanent position as Lecturer in Spectroscopy in June 1931, which he held until 1946. In October 1934, Rudolph Peierls’s long-time friend, colleague and correspondent Hans Bethe arrived, but he stayed only four months before leaving for the United States to take up a chair at Cornell University. Soon after that, however, Herbert Fröhlich was added to the faculty. (I wrote about his miraculous escape from the Soviet Union in Part 1 of this analysis.) Fröhlich was appointed Lecturer in 1944, and Reader in 1946. He stayed until 1948, when he was appointed as Professor of Theoretical Physics at Liverpool University. Ronald Gurney was another Soviet sympathiser, a member of the local Communist Party, working as a George Wills research associate from 1933 to 1939, and contributing, alongside Fröhlich, to Mott’s research on semiconductors and crystals. (Ironically, Fuchs would later tell the FBI that Gurney was ‘a security risk’ because he and his wife had at Bristol both been members of the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR.) Alan Nunn May, the other famed ‘atom spy’ was one of those scientists from King’s College, London, evacuated to Bristol at the start of the war.
Other
German-speaking physicists were recruited, and were later, like Fuchs, to
undergo internment during the ‘fifth column’ scare of 1940. Christopher Laucht
writes, in Elemental Germans: “Other German-speaking émigré physicists
who were interned included Walter Kohn and Hans Kronberger, as well as eight
members of the physics department at Bristol University: Walter Heitler and his
brother Hans, Herbert Fröhlich, Kurt Hoselitz, Phillip Gross and Heinz London,
and two of their students Robert Arno Sack and G. Eichholz.” (p 27) Yet it is primarily
the exposures of Mott, Born, Skinner, Gurney and Fröhlich to Klaus Fuchs,
supplemented by the careers of two other important figures, Rotblat and
Plazcek, that concern me here.
Nevill
Mott
Nevill Mott
Nevill Mott was ambivalent in his assessment of Fuchs. Mott was some kind of fellow-traveller himself: in his memoir, A Life in Science, he describes how in 1934 he enthusiastically paid a visit to the Soviet Union, ostensibly to attend a conference celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Mendeleyev. The scientist who invited him, Yakov Frenkel, was the same person who had invited Peierls to Odessa in 1931. Mott had the good (or bad) fortune to be accompanied on the Soviet boat by Sidney Webb. He recorded part of his experiences as follows: “To me, from England at the height of the depression, Russia appeared as a country without unemployment. At any rate, I wanted to believe in it. It was after the ‘dekulakization’ but before Stalin’s purges. ‘What about the Kulaks?’, I asked a Russian physicist. ‘Well, we had to get rid of the half million rich peasants in the interests of the masses, but now that this has been done there will be nothing more like it, and the future is rosy.’ I believed him.”
Mott
could be described as the perfect embodiment of Lenin’s ‘useful idiot’.
Admittedly, far greater persons posed the same question. Winston Churchill also
asked Stalin about the kulaks, in 1942, although it was a foolish impulse, as
the Prime Minister must have known full well by then what the nature and scale
of the massacres, deportations and enforced famine had been, and, if he was not
prepared to challenge the Soviet dictator on the matter, his question would
turn out to be a political victory for Stalin. Mott was naive enough to admit
his gullibility, at least: Peierls remained silent after his more tortured
visit.
Yet
Mott was a little evasive about Fuchs. In a memoir Bristol Physics in the
1930s, he wrote that Fuchs’s ‘views, as we all knew, were very left wing,
and at the time of the Spanish Civil War, the rise of Hitler and Mussolini’s
invasion of Abyssinia, so were those of many of the young physicists’. In A
Life in Science, however, Mott’s awkwardness shines through. First he
introduces Fuchs as ‘a political refugee, with communist sympathies’, not
explaining how he knew that. He next writes that Fuchs was ‘was shy and
reserved and I do not remember discussing politics with him’. But then he
relates the famous incident of the meeting of the local branch of the Society
for Cultural Relations with the Soviet Union, which he and Fuchs – and maybe
others – attended. The description ironically does not comment on those aspects
of ‘cultural relations’ that Mott judged worthy of nurturing.
“In
Bristol in the 1930s, we had a branch of the Society for
Cultural Relations with the Soviet Union. It met from time to time in a
studio in Park Street, which disappeared in 1940 in the first big raid on
Bristol, (during which I remember walking home from a meeting, with
incendiaries falling in the street). We used to dramatize translations of the
Soviet treason trials, but which Stalin appears to have got rid of most of his
possible rivals. They were accused of sabotage in the interests of the Germans.
But my most vivid recollection is of Fuchs in the role of Vishinsky, the
prosecutor, accusing the defendents [sic] with a cold venom that I would
never have suspected from so quiet and unassuming a young man.” The mystery is
a) why Fuchs would go out of his way to express his political sympathies, and
b) why Bristol academia would not consider his behaviour outrageous.
Eventually,
Fuchs moved on – to Edinburgh University, under Professor Max Born. The record
here is again ambiguous. Mott described the action as follows: “After four
years I arranged for him to go to the former leader of the Göttingen theorists,
Max Born, by then Professor in Edinburgh. Born, in his autobiography, writes
that I wanted to get rid of him because he was a communist, but that was not
so; we had many refugees in Bristol and needed to think about permanent posts
for some of them, and we hadn’t the resources to provide for all.”
Max
Born
Max Born
Max Born had escaped from Nazi Germany in 1933, and after taking a position at St. John’s College, Cambridge, was in 1936 appointed to the Tait chair of natural philosophy at Edinburgh University. In an essay in his My Life and Views, Born wrote: “Next, Klaus Fuchs, a highly gifted man who never concealed the fact that he was a communist; after the outbreak of the war and a short internment as an enemy alien, he joined the British team investigating nuclear fission. I think he became a spy not from ulterior motives but from honest conviction.” Apart from the disingenuous claim that ‘ulterior motives’ and ‘honest conviction’ are opposite motivators in the field of espionage, Born makes it quite clear that he knew about Fuchs’s loyalties, writing in My Life about recently arrived scientists at Edinburgh: “One of the first of these was Klaus Fuchs, later so well known through the spy affair in which he was involved,’ as if The Spy Who Changed the World (Michael Rossiter’s clumsy title for his first-class biography, flawed only by its lack of specific references) had been a bit-player in some distasteful society scandal.
This controversy
was intensified, however, when the first biography of Fuchs, by Norman Moss,
titled Klaus Fuchs: The Man Who Stole the Atom Bomb, was reviewed by M.
F. Perutz in the 25 June, 1987 issue of the London Review of Books.
Fuchs had taught Perutz the principles of theoretical physics when both were
interned in Canada in the summer of 1940. In his review, Perutz referred to the
claim made by Prime Minister Attlee in the House of Commons that there had been
no evidence that Fuchs had ever been a Communist, and commented: “When I mentioned this to a veteran physicist
friend of mine recently, he interjected: ‘But Fuchs and I were in the same
Communist cell when we were students at Bristol.’ Max Born, Fuchs’s former
chief at Edinburgh, wrote about Fuchs: ‘He never concealed that he was a
convinced communist. During the Russo-Finnish war everyone’s sympathies in our
department were with the Finns, while Fuchs was passionately pro-Russian.’ On
the other hand, Peierls had no idea that Fuchs was a Communist.”
Norman Moss explained more, in a response
published by the LRB: “In his autobiography My Life, Max Born, who took on Fuchs as a young
researcher, said Sir Nevill Mott told him he sent him away from Bristol
University because ‘he spread Communist propaganda among the undergraduates.’
But there is a footnote containing a comment by Sir Nevill to the effect that
Born must have misunderstood something he said, because he does not remember
his doing any such thing. “In fact, none of Fuchs’s close friends knew he had
been an active Communist in Germany. Fuchs did once defend Russia’s attack on
Finland in 1939 in an argument with Born, as Professor Perutz says in his
review and as I said in my book.”
While this sheds light on the Born-Mott
misunderstanding, the final sentences would seem to be a non sequitur.
It is worth examining Born’s text more closely. In fact he admitted surprise at
the written reasons Mott gave for passing Fuchs on to him, which stressed
Mott’s desire to learn more about Born’s ‘special methods’. Born felt that Mott
understood such methods very well, and could have thus passed them on to Fuchs
himself. The message that Mott later denied was delivered orally at a meeting
in London. According to Born: “I enjoyed working with Fuchs so much that I
wondered why Mott had sent him away. This was explained when I encountered Mott
at a meeting in London. He asked me how I was getting on with Fuchs, and when I
answered ‘splendidly’, and praised his talent, Mott said ‘What a pity I had to
get rid of him. He spread communist propaganda among the undergraduates’. Mott
told me that he had arranged for his own contribution to the general refugee
fund to be directed to Fuchs, a generous gesture which possibly also showed how
much he was afraid of communist propaganda.”
Does that last statement indicate that Mott
was trying to buy Fuchs off? What did it mean that Mott (or Bristol) could not
afford to pay Fuchs, but could cover his expenses at Edinburgh? It does not
appear to make much sense. In any case, Mott apparently had a chance to review
Born’s script before publication, as he was allowed to comment, in the footnote
cited by Moss, as follows: “I must have made a remark which Born misunderstood
or took more seriously than I intended. I do not remember believing that Fuchs
spread communist propaganda among the students, and at a time when Hitler was
the enemy I could not have worried unduly if he had. What happened was this. In
Bristol we had research funds from the generous gifts of the Wills family, and
with these and help from the Academic Assistance Council we built up a very
strong group of physicists who had left Germany in 1933. Some we wished to
keep; but established positions then as now were few and far between and for
others we helped as we could to find jobs elsewhere. This is how we acted about
Fuchs.”
A strong measure of truth may have
accompanied that last claim, but how come Born could not have been apprised of
it from the outset? Why did Mott beat about the bush? And why did he so
carelessly misrepresent Nazi Germany’s status as of 1937, when Fuchs moved to
Edinburgh? At that time, Hitler may have been a grossly unpleasant threat to
leftist scientists like Mott, but he was no more ‘the enemy’ than Stalin was.
It was a typically disingenuous footnote by Mott.
Many witnesses seem to be behaving
economically with the truth here, including, of course, Clement Attlee, who had
been lied to outrageously by Percy Sillitoe, the head of MI5. Yet the most
startling item of evidence is the statement by Perutz’s ‘veteran physicist
friend’, who talks about membership of communist cells as casually as a British
diplomat might refer to his house at Marlborough or Wellington. Who was this
friend? And why would Perutz treat his friend’s confession so lightly?
Herbert Fröhlich
Herbert Froehlich
The friend cannot have been Skinner, as Skinner had died while attending a conference in Geneva in 1960. Ronald Gurney had been a member of the CPGB, but he had left for the United States, where he died in 1953. If we are looking for a prominent physicist, of suspected communist affiliation, present at Bristol between 1934 and 1937, still alive in 1987, and a probable friend of Max Perutz, it would be Herbert Fröhlich. And the communist cell may not have been a unit of the Communist Party of Great Britain: it was much more likely to have been the German branch (the KPD). Fuchs regarded himself still as a member of the KPD when in the United Kingdom, and he had made contact with Jürgen Kuczynski, Sonia’s brother, who had arrived in London in 1933, and re-energised the KPD through the front of the Free German League of Culture. Jürgen became head of the KPD in Britain, and was in contact with the GRU representative in London, Simon Kremer.
You will not find a reference to Fröhlich in
the biographies of Fuchs by Moss, Edwards, Rossiter or Close. Christopher
Laucht, in Elemental Germans, records the contribution to the Maud Committee
that Fröhlich made with Walter Heitner, in the field of spontaneous fission in
uranium. Yet he glides smoothly over Fröhlich’s time in the Soviet Union,
remarking solely that he experienced problems in getting his visa renewed.
Laucht does note, however, that Fröhlich also lodged with the Peierlses, and
that Peierls managed to gain funding for Fröhlich from the Academic Assistance
Council.
G.J. Hyland’s biography of Fröhlich (A
Physicist Ahead of His Time, published in 2015) provides the details on
Frohlich’s experiences in the Soviet Union, whither he had also been invited by
the ever-present Frenkel. Yet Hyland is comparatively bland on the physicist’s
career after that, providing a text that is very much directed at the specialist.
He does not mention any Maud work, although he does record that Fröhlich, after
being released from internment in September 1940, returned to Bristol, but was
prohibited from working on nuclear fission – an intriguing contrast to how
Fuchs was sought out and approved. During the remainder of the war, Fröhlich
‘was occupied in part-time research for the Ministry of Supply, working
initially on an image converter instrument for use on tanks to extend night
vision’. Fröhlich was not naturalised until August 1946, but was then offered
the position of Head of the Theoretical Physics Division at Harwell. “He
declined this offer, however, not wanting to be involved with any work that
might further nuclear warfare,” writes Hyland, adding: “Klaus Fuchs was
appointed in his place!”
(I welcome any other suggestions as to who
Perutz’s communist friend might have been.)
Herbert Skinner
Herbert Skinner
The most mysterious figure in this whole farrago is Herbert Skinner, since he owned an unmatched intimacy and longevity in his relationship with Klaus Fuchs, but his career is the least well documented of all. While his presence at Bristol University in the 1930s has been clearly described, his period in the war years has been sparsely addressed. His biographical memoir as a Fellow of the Royal Society indicates that, from 1939, he performed very valuable work on the detection of submarines by microwave radar, and after experiments in the Shetlands pursued the deployment of the technology at the Telecommunication Research Establishment at Malvern. (Ironically, this type of work was so secret, and so critical to the defence of the nation, that Skinner’s German-born colleagues were prohibited from working on it.) Skinner was then recruited, in 1943, to work as Oliphant’s deputy in California. Mike Rossiter simply notes that Skinner had contributed to the Manhattan Project at Berkeley ‘on electromagnetic separation with Lawrence’, and Frank Close similarly – but not strictly correctly – writes that ‘Herbert Skinner had also spent the war in the Berkeley team, which had studied separation of isotopes and investigated the physics of plutonium’. Skinner merits only one mention in Volume 1, 1939-1945) of Margaret Gowing’s history of Britain and Atomic Energy, when she refers to a Harwell planning meeting he attended in Washington in November 1944. Skinner does not appear in Graham Farmelow’s Churchill’s Bomb.
Skinner came to life again on his appointment
at Harwell after the war as head of the General Physics Department. He was also
John Cockcroft’s deputy, and in the first half of 1946 selected staff and
guided the construction, while Cockcroft was still in Canada. Fuchs was one of
those appointments, arriving at Harwell in June 1946. Before the sordid
business in the late forties, however, when Fuchs conducted his affair with Erna
Skinner, a liaison closely surveilled by MI5 and Special Branch, Skinner appeared
with Fuchs in a very strange episode in New York. I introduced this event in my
Letter to Frank Close, but it merits deeper coverage here.
The two of them had travelled to Washington
in November 1947, in order to attend a declassification conference (November
14-16) where the implications of the McMahon Act on release of information on
atomic weaponry and energy were to be discussed. Evidence supplied in 1950 to
the FBI is so bizarre that I decided to transcribe here the main section of the
report. (I do not believe it has been reproduced anywhere before this. See https://vault.fbi.gov/rosenberg-case/klaus-fuchs/klaus-fuchs-part-05-of/view .) On
February 4, 1950, Dr. Samuel Goudsmit * informed the FBI that Dr. Karl Cohen,
who was head of the Theoretical Physics Division, and thus Fuchs’s counterpart
in the Atomic Energy Program, had described to him how Fuchs, after meeting
Cohen at a restaurant, had later called his counterpart, asking him to pick up
a hat he had left at the restaurant and return it to the person from whom he
had borrowed it on West 111th Street.
[* Goudsmit had been the head of the Alsos
project, which set out to determine how close the Nazis were getting to the
creation of an atomic bomb. After the war, he appears to have been a regular
contributor to the FBI, the CIA and SIS. His name comes up as an informant in
the Pontecorvo archive.]
The FBI interviewed Cohen on February 9,
1950. He described his encounters with
Fuchs at Columbia University and in Los Alamos, and then went on to explain
that he had no further meeting with Fuchs until the declassification conference.
His testimony is presented as follows:
“Cohen was told by Dr. Willard Libby of the
Atomic Energy Commission that he should discuss with Fuchs the declassification
of a certain document and make his recommendations to the conference. Cohen
received a phone call from a woman who explained that she was a good friend of
Fuchs, that Fuchs was staying either at the Henry Hudson Hotel or Park Central
Hotel, and that Fuchs wanted to see Cohen. Thereafter Cohen called Fuchs and
invited him to his home, which invitation Fuchs declined. He and Fuchs,
however, had dinner at a restaurant of Cohen’s choosing, during which time they
discussed the declassification of the document, Cohen recommending that it be
declassified and Fuchs opposing. Cohen stated that some time after leaving the
restaurant, Fuchs realized he had left a hat in the restaurant, which had
belonged to the person with whom he had been staying. He asked Cohen to pick it
up and return it since he, Fuchs, was leaving town. Cohen said that he regarded
this request out of line, but agreed to call the people and tell them where
they could obtain the hat. He did this, but the woman declined to retrieve the
hat and consequently, a few days later, Cohen obtained it and returned it. It
was Cohen’s recollection that Fuchs’ contact was a Dr. Cooper or Dr. Skinner,
attached to the British Delegation that was in the United States for the
Declassification Conference and who was staying with his wife and her father on
West 111th Street. He said that when he returned the hat he met the
scientist’s wife and her father. He described the wife as being typically
English, but stated that her father was of European extraction and spoke with
an accent. He said that on the bell to the apartment house there was the name
Cooper or Skinner, as well as the name of the father-in-law. He commented that
he would have forgotten this incident had it not been for the recent publicity
on Fuchs.” The FBI later confirmed that the names on the bell of 536 West 111th
Street appeared as Skinner, Hoffman and Kirsch, and that the apartment was
owned by Mrs. Skinner ‘who is presently living in Connecticut’. The report
added that ‘she had rented out this apartment to various roomers for the past
six years’.
What is one to make of this extraordinary
tale? Why was there such a performance around a simple hat? Was there any
significance in Erna’s accompanying her husband to New York at that time? What
was the role of her father, named Wurmbrand? (Her father was Moishe Michael
Wurmbrand, who was born in Sadhora, a suburb of Czernowitz, in 1883 and died in
New York in 1952. The claim that Erna was ‘Austrian’, as represented at the
National Archives, may have been a convenient fiction, but Bukovina was
governed by the Austrian Empire until 1918, after which it lay under Romanian
rule until 1940. Skinner’s Wikipedia entry gives her maiden name as
‘Abrahamson’.) Why did Fuchs have to borrow a hat, and why could the Skinners
not have picked it up themselves?
A former intelligence officer tells me that
he regards the whole episode as an example of complex tradecraft, but, given
Cohen’s sure innocence (else he would not have alerted the authorities), it
seems a very clumsy effort by Fuchs that risked exposing contacts to the FBI. As
I pointed out earlier, when speaking to the FBI, Fuchs identified the property
as belonging to Mrs. Skinner, overlooking her husband’s presence. (I believe I
misjudged the knowledge of the FBI about Cohen, and his role, in my earlier
piece. And the FBI surely was aware of the joint mission of Fuchs and Skinner,
although the report, rather dimly, states that ‘it would appear probable that
Mrs. Skinner is the wife of Dr. W. H. B. Skinner . . . who was one of the
members attending the Declassification Conference . . .’) Perhaps Cohen was used, as an
unwitting and innocent accomplice, to send a message about a completed project
from the restaurant to the Skinners – or Erna’s father. Fuchs may have left a
message at the restaurant chosen by Cohen, but wanted confirmation of its
receipt to be delivered to Erna and her father by an unimpeachable medium. In
any case, the incident shows that all the biographers of Fuchs have failed to
exploit the considerable information about him in the FBI Vault.
How much did Herbert Skinner himself know
what was going on? Why would he not have mentioned this incident to MI5 himself,
given the suspicions he later claimed to have had about Fuchs? And why would
the FBI not have made some connection? I have found no evidence of it in the
obvious places. The FBI’s Robert Lamphere came to London with Hugh Clegg in May
1950, after Fuchs’s conviction, to interview the spy, and extracted from him
the photographic recognition of his contact Harry Gold. Lamphere reports that
Clegg, who was not familiar with the case, brought a copy of the whole Fuchs
file with him, and read it on the plane. But Lamphere does not even mention
Skinner in his book, The FBI-KGB Wars.
Skinner comes across as a very complex
character. Rudolf Peierls has this to say about him, in Bird of Passage:
“His [Cockcroft’s] second-in-command was
Herbert Skinner, a well-known experimental physicist, whom we had known since
the thirties. He was more forceful in conversation than Cockcroft; he tended to
hold strong opinions, often more conservative than those of most physicists,
and was never reluctant to make them known. His lively personal contacts with
the staff at Harwell made up for Cockcroft’s detachment.” Cockcroft presented
him as somewhat self-important, with a tendency to regard himself and his
family as specially entitled. Others have described the Skinners’ boisterous
parties at Harwell, which were less inhibited than those of the
Cockcrofts. Close describes him as
follows: “A lean man with tousled hair, he and his wife Erna
shared a bohemian outlook. She had grown up in Berlin between the wars. Both
were socialists, like many of the scientists who had worked on the atomic bomb
programme, but they also had a cosmopolitan circle of friends in London, all of
which interested MI5.”
‘Bohemian’
and ‘cosmopolitan’ – dangerous epithets in the world of security. Yet how are
the contrary ideas of ‘conservative’ and ‘socialist’ explained? Was Skinner a
dissembler, working perhaps for some other organisation himself, and playing
Philbyesque roles of communist one day, fascist sympathiser the next? Rossiter
describes the two occasions, in December 1947 and February 1949, where Skinner
confided to Fuchs that he had seen two separate reports from MI6 that indicated
that German nuclear scientists had been detected working on a Soviet nuclear
bomb at Sukhumi on the Black Sea coast, immediately putting Fuchs on his guard.
Why and how would MI6 (SIS) have introduced such reports to a socialist like Skinner?
Why would they not have gone to Cockcroft, and why did Skinner think it was
suitable to show them to Fuchs, given the suspicions he admittedly harboured
about him? Is there another narrative, with Skinner involved as some secret
channel by SIS, to be uncovered here? So many questions, still.
It
is true that MI5 did maintain a file on Herbert and Erna (see KV 2/2080, 2/2081
& 2/2082 at The National Archives). Yet it was not opened until the end of
1949, when the Fuchs affair was brewing, and MI5 noticed that Erna was
associating ‘with a proven Soviet spy’ as well as ‘with persons who are
potential spies’. (It was not unknown for MI5 to maintain files on MI6
operatives about whom they were not told anything.) Input from the FBI would
have been very appropriate at that time, and it was careless of MI5 not to have
recalled the 1947 visit to New York. It would also have been odd if Robert
Lamphere did not mention the incident while he was in England. (Maybe he did,
of course, but nothing was recorded.) One would think that any possible link that had an aspect of
subterfuge should have been followed up. That was what ‘intelligence-sharing’
was about.
In
any case, MI5 had by then demanded that Commander Henry Arnold, the Security
Officer at Harwell, warn Skinner about such undesirable contacts. The Skinners
admitted that they had communist friends, and MI5 considered that it would be
safer to move Skinner to Liverpool, thus indicating that MI5’s discomfort over
him anteceded Cohen’s revelations. (I shall investigate the whole story about the
role of Liverpool University as a rest-home for distressed spies, and how MI5
misrepresented the project to Prime Minister Attlee, in a future article.)
On
June 28, 1950, William Skardon interviewed Skinner at Liverpool, and elicited
an extraordinary statement from him: “Dr. Skinner was somewhat critical of
M.I.5 for having allowed Fuchs, a known Communist, to be employed on the
development of Atomic Energy, saying that when they first met the man at
Bristol in the 1930’s he was clearly a Communist and a particularly arrogant
young pup. He was very surprised to find Fuchs at Harwell when he arrived there
to take up his post in 1946.” One might ask what Skinner had done about this,
in the fraught post-war world of 1946, with the Cold War under way, and Nunn
May having been sentenced a few months before. Skinner was surely responsible
for making the key appointments at Harwell. Skardon did in fact ask him, as his
report shows: “Of course I asked Skinner whether he had done anything about
this, pointing out that we were not psychic and relied upon the loyalty and
integrity of senior officers to disclose their objections to the employment of
junior members of the staff. He accepted this rebuff.”
Skinner
echoed this opinion in a review of Alan Moorehead’s Traitors in The
Atomic Scientists’ News : “We should not take on another Pontecorvo, who had
never lived in England, or another Fuchs, whom we knew to have been a communist
in Germany and who all through the 8 years of his stay in Britain until his
employment on the project, had continually consorted with extreme left-wing
groups without any attempt to disguise the fact.” This was a remarkably naïve position for
Skinner to take, given his prominence in atomic affairs, and his leading role
at Harwell. More alarming, perhaps, was a Liverpool police report from May 10,
1951, sent to Sir Percy Sillitoe, the head of MI5, that the Chief Constable had
received information, from ‘a hitherto most reliable and trustworthy source’,
that the Skinners were attending Communist Party meetings. Were they working under
cover?
Skinner
died in 1960, at the relatively young age of fifty-nine, at a conference in Geneva.
Was there anything suspicious about his death? None appears to have been
raised. But he was a very paradoxical character, and I do not believe the last
word has been uttered on exactly what his role in atomic espionage – either
abetting it, or trying to prevent it – had been.
Joseph
Rotblat
Joseph Rotblat
Joseph Rotblat never served on the faculty at Bristol, but his career is so interwoven with that of Peierls and the other émigré scientists that he merits a section here. His life was scarred by an unspeakable tragedy, but he came under suspicion by the FBI when he was posted to Los Alamos.
Rotblat
was born in 1908 in Poland. He left Warsaw for Great Britain in 1939,
travelling to Liverpool to learn more about the cyclotron being constructed
there under James Chadwick’s direction. Chadwick soon awarded Rotblat a
fellowship, which now meant that he could afford to bring Ewa, his wife, to the
U.K. With the prospect of war looming, he returned to Poland in order to pick
up Ewa. She was ill with appendicitis, however, so he reluctantly returned
without her. Strenuous efforts to bring her out after the outbreak of war
failed. She was killed at Belzec concentration camp, although Rotblat was not
to learn this for several years.
Rotblat
worked on the Tube Alloys project, although he had never became naturalised. He
was nevertheless still allowed to join the Manhattan project at Los Alamos in January
1944, after a waiver had been granted. Committed to the project out of fear
that the Germans would acquire the atomic bomb, Rotblat asked to be released
when it seemed that the Germans would fail: he reputedly heard from General
Groves that the Soviets were now the potential enemy, and his pro-Soviet
sympathies rebelled at this prospect.
By
this time he had come under suspicion. When he told Chadwick of his desire to
return to the UK, Chadwick contacted General Groves, who showed him the contents
of the FBI file on him, now available on-line. Exactly what happened cannot be
determined from the file, as so many retractions and denials concerning its
content occurred later. But Rotblat’s name was later found in Fuchs’s address
book, which led to renewed investigations. Rotblat had met in the course of his
year at Los Alamos a lady friend from England, in love with Rotblat, who at
first indicated to the FBI that Rotblat had had communist sympathies, and
wanted to train with the RAF so that he could parachute into Soviet-occupied
Poland. That would have been unthinkable, given what he knew. The lady later
retracted some of her testimony, and Rotblat apparently managed to convince the
authorities that the accusations were baseless.
One
final twist on the story is that Rotblat, leaving Los Alamos on Christmas Eve 1944
on a train to Washington and New York, packed a large box with all his personal
records in it. After staying with Chadwick in Washington, he discovered in New
York that the box was missing. Yet Martin Underwood, in an article for Science
and Engineering Ethics in 2013 (‘Joseph Rotblat, the Bomb, and Anomalies
for his Archive’) points out that highly confidential papers concerning
critical developments at Los Alamos turned up in Rotblat’s archive at Churchill
College in Cambridge, showing that Rotblat probably did engage in important
work (despite his claim that he was bored and underutilised), and that thus not
all his papers were in that mysterious lost box.
Rotblat
was a complex character, and his work for the Pugwash Conference led him to a
Nobel Prize. He worked closely with Peierls, who had been instrumental in
setting up the Soviet-friendly British Association of Atomic Scientists in the
early postwar years. Moreover, he was one of those scientists involved in the
musical chairs at Liverpool. In 1946 he took up British citizenship, and was
appointed acting director of nuclear physics at Liverpool. After Chadwick moved
on to become Master of Gonville and Caius College at Cambridge in 1949, and
Skinner was appointed his replacement, Rotblat, against Chadwick’s stern
advice, left Liverpool to become Professor of Physics at St Bartholomew’s
Hospital in London. By then he had learned that Ewa was dead. He was made a
Fellow of the Royal Society at the age of eighty-seven, in 1995.
George
Placzek
George Plazcek
George Placzek deserves a mention because he was a close collaborator with Peierls. As a resident scientist in Kharkov, working with Landau, he also attended the fateful 1937 conference in Moscow [but see below: the evidence is contradictory]. Yet he is distinctive mainly because he retained a fiercely critical opinion of the Stalinist oppression of scientists, and was outspoken about it when he returned to the West. Placzek was born in 1902 in Moravia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and after working in Prague and Vienna, joined Lev Landau’s circle in Kharkov in 1937. There he witnessed some of the persecutions of scientists by Stalin, such as Houtermans, Ruhemann, Weisskopf, and Landau himself. Blessed with a sardonic wit, and a sense of humour, Placzek got himself into trouble. (As a fascinating but irrelevant sidenote in this whole saga of intelligence, Plazcek was to marry Els, the first wife of Hans Halban, the Austrian physicist: Isaiah Berlin married Halban’s second wife. For details, please read Isaiah in Love. Placzek was also involved in performing a security check on Pontecorvo at the time the latter was recruited, on Halban’s recommendation, in Montreal: correspondence from British Security Coordination in Washington was sent to him in March 1943.)
In
the book he edited about the travails of scientists in the Soviet Union, Physics
in a Mad World, Mikhail Shifman relates an anecdote about Placzek where his
subject, having been offered a permanent chair in Kharkov, named five
conditions that would have to be fulfilled for him to accept it. The last was
that ‘the Khozyain must go’, with a scarcely veiled reference to the Boss,
Stalin himself. While most of the small gathering that heard his playful speech
were amused, the incident was reported by Ruhemann’s wife, Barbara, to the
local Communist Party chief. It thus got back to Stalin, who immediately dubbed
him as a Trotskyist. Plazcek managed to get away, unlike some of his colleagues,
but he was a marked man.
The difference was that, when Placzek returned to the West, he ruthlessly warned his colleague of the dangers of Stalinism, unlike, for example, Ruhemann, who immediately joined the Communist Party, or Peierls, who maintained an undignified silence. As Shifman writes in Love and Physics: “In England, Fuchs could have discussed the situation with David Shoenberg, professor at the Mond Laboratory at Cambridge, who spent a year in Moscow (from September 1937 to September 1938) and had witnessed the arrest of Landau and hundreds of other innocent scientists and the onset of the Great Terror. Also, he could have spoken with George Placzek, who returned from Kharkov in early 1937; before his departure for the US in 1938 he stayed some time in Copenhagen, London, and Paris to explain the consequences of the communist ideology to the left-leaning colleagues he was in contact with.”
What
is especially poignant is the fact that Placzek made several appeals to Peierls
to intervene in the cases of incarcerated scientists in the Soviet Union. On September 4, 1938, he wrote to him from Pasadena: “Zunächst
möchte ich Sie fragen, was mich der seelige Bucharin fragte, als ich ihn einmal
sozusagen im Namen der internationalen Wissenschaft bat, sich dafür
einzusetzen, dass Landau ab und zu ins Ausland gelassen werde, nämlich: Ist Ihre
Demarche offiziell, offiziös, oder inoffiziell?” (My translation: “I
would next like to ask you the question that the late Bukharin asked me, when
once, in the name of international science I begged him to stand up for
Landau’s being allowed to travel abroad occasionally, namely: Is your
initiative official, semi-official, or unofficial?” In his biography of Plazcek,
Shifman translates the passage as follows: “First of all, may I ask you, as
blessed Bukharin asked me (when once I, so to say, personally represented
international science and solicited for Landau, trying to convince Bukharin
that they should now and then let him travel abroad), namely: is your démarche
official, officious, or unofficial?”) And, with a little more desperation, from Paris on
October 17, 1938: “Ich höre dass der Schönberg jetzt in Cambridge sein soll,
wissen Sie etwas authentisches über Dau???” (“I hear that Shoenberg
is supposed to be in Cambridge by now, do you know anything authoritative about
Landau???”)
Peierls’s
response from Birmingham on October 22 was lapidary and vague. “Shoenberg habe ich gesprochen. Ueber Dau hatte er nicht
mehr zu berichten, als wir schon wussten (oder jedenfalls befürcheteten). In
dieselbe Gruppe gehören auch Rumer und Hellman. Hier in England läuft der
Zehden herum, der via Berlin hierher vorgedrungen ist, aber seine russische
Frau mit Kind in M. zurücklassen musste, und seit Monaten nicht mehr mit ihr
korrespondiert. Es ist eine schöne Welt.” (In Shifman’s
translation, from his biography of Placzek: “I spoke to Shoenberg. On Landau, he
had nothing more to report than we already knew (or feared). Rumer and Hellman
belong to the same group. [Walter] Zehden is running around here in England; he
got here via Berlin, but had to leave his Russian wife and child in M[oscow],
and hasn’t corresponded with her for months. What a world we live in.” Indeed,
Sir Rudolf. [Shifman notes that Hellman, a German-born quantum scientist, had
worked at the Karpov Institute in Moscow, was arrested on charges of espionage
in March 1938, and shot in May 1938.] Later in the same letter, Peierls says:
“I’d rather not write about the political situation. It’s just too annoying. [‘ . . .man ärgert sich doch zu sehr.’]”
That was an
understatement, but a revealing one. Hitler’s persecutions and Stalin’s purges
– a very tiresome business.
Plazcek
also worked at Los Alamos on the Manhattan project. Later, in 1947, he tried to
inject a dose of reality into the attempts to gain agreement with the Soviets
over mutual inspection of installations working on nuclear weaponry, pouring
cold water on the statement, expressed by Gromyko, that foreign inspectors
would be allowed to pry around on Soviet territory. It appears he trusted
Peierls to the end. And what was his end? He met a premature death in a hotel
in Zürich in 1955, at the comparatively young age of fifty. His biographers Gottwald
and Shifman ascribe his death to suicide, but was the long arm of Soviet
intelligence behind his demise? Did they recall his heretical comments from
1937, and were waiting to pounce? Like Skinner, an unexplained death, far from
home, in a Swiss hotel.
Rudolf
Peierls
Rudolf Peierls
It thus seems inconceivable that Peierls could have not been aware of Fuchs’s communist allegiance. He worked with him closely, Fuchs lodged with him, they were friends. Frank Close describes Fuchs as ‘like a son’ to Peierls. So how did Peierls explain the situation? I analyse a few of his statements:
“I
can believe now that he may have had so much self control as to deceive all
those who believed to be his friends. I asked him whether he really believed in
the superiority of the Soviet system. His reply was, ‘You must remember what I
went through under the Nazis’. I said I quite understood this but I was
surprised he still believed in all this at the time we were in America.” (from
letter to Commander Burt, received February 6, 1950)
“If
one takes these statements as genuine, and it is very hard to believe anything else,
he has lived all these years hiding his real allegiance, yet at the same time
acquiring a genuine and almost passionate interest for his job and building up
personal relationships and friendships which were kept quite separate from his
secret contacts. One can believe that a man should hold political views of such
strong, almost religious, conviction that he should let them override all other
considerations, but it is incredible that, at the same time, a man who had
never thought for himself and was always ready to go to enormous lengths in the
interest of others, should allow himself to become so attached to the people
and to allow other people to become so attached to him without seeing what he
was doing for them.” (from letter to Niels Bohr, February 14, 1950)
“I
knew he had left Germany because of his opposition to the Nazis and I respected
him for this. I knew of his connection with left-wing student organizations in
Germany since at that time the communist controlled organizations were the only
ones putting up any active opposition . . .
During
all these years we saw much of him. Shy and retiring at first he made many
friends and in many conversations politics was, of course, a frequent topic.
His views seemed perhaps a little to the left of ours, but he seemed to share
the attitude to Communism – and to any kind of dictatorship – of most of his
friends. I remember an occasion when he talked to a young man who was in
sympathy with communism and in the argument Fuchs was very scornful of the other’s
dogmatic views.
When
I heard of his arrest I regarded it as quite incredible that anyone should have
hidden his real beliefs so well. Looking back it seems that at first he shared
in the life of his colleagues and pretended to share their views and attitude
only in order to hide his own convictions. But gradually he must have come to
believe what was at first only pretence. There must have been a time when he
shared one attitude with his colleagues and friends and another with the agents
to whom he then still transmitted information, and when he was himself in doubt
which of the two was conviction and which was pretence. I do not want to enter
into speculations about the state of his mind during all this time. Some have
described it as a superb piece of acting, but either way it was certainly quite
exceptional.
In
the case of Fuchs, they would have had to probe very deeply to disclose his
continued adherence to the communist cause and that would have required a depth
of human insight that is very hard to achieve.” (from memorandum ‘The Lesson of
the Fuchs Case’, March 1950)
“The main point was Fuchs had then, although he
had changed his mind and allegedly or at least claimed not to be pro-Communist
anymore, he still out of a sense of chivalry was refusing to name his contacts
and so on, and they thought this was foolish and they expected I would think it
foolish too, and they wanted me to urge him to do that – which I tried. I don’t know whether this
was a success. Anyway, in the course of this conversation, Commander Burt of
Scotland Yard, asked me what sort of man Fuchs had appeared to be and whether
we realized what his views were. I said, ‘No, he didn’t say much on political
things, but he gave the impression of agreeing with everybody else, being
perhaps a little to the left of most of us but not drastically.’ Of course, I knew
that as a young man he had been mixed up with a Communist student organization
in Germany, but that was understandable and this was very common with young
people.” (from interview with Charles Weiner, 1969)
“But I needed regular help – someone with whom
I would be able to discuss the theoretical technicalities. I looked around for
a suitable person, and thought of Klaus Fuchs. He was a German, who as a
student had been politically active as a member of a socialist student group
(which was essentially communist) and had to flee for his life from the Nazis.
He came to England, where he worked with Neville Mott in Bristol, completed his
Ph. D., and did some excellent work in the electron theory of metals and other
aspects of the theory of solids. I knew and liked his papers, and had met him.
He also asked me whether Fuchs’s pro-communist
views had been evident. ‘No’, I said, ‘he never talked much about his political
views, but gave the impression he shared our general views. I knew, of course,
that he had been strongly left-wing as a student, but that is very common with
young people.
I formed the impression that his conversion
from communism was genuine. His communist friends in Germany must have
instilled in him a rather unfavourable picture of Britain, which life in
Bristol and Edinburgh, where he perhaps still associated with left-wing
friends, did not dispel.
Perhaps the process of understanding took so
long because in our intellectual circles we are curiously shy about saying what
we believe. Our style is not to use any words with capital letters. We don’t
mind talking about what is wrong and what we want to fight, but we find it much
harder to talk about moral principles and about what is right. Our behavior
follows quite firm rules, but somehow we feel it is bad taste to spell them
out, and they have to be discovered by observing how we act.” (from Bird of
Passage, 1985)
It is instructive to examine the probable
evolution of Peierls’s thoughts.
At the time of A) he knows that he is under
suspicion as well (telephone taps have revealed Genia’s fears). He deems it
appropriate to show some initiative with Commander Burt of Special Branch,
knowing that the policeman will probably not be familiar with the background of
Nazi and Soviet oppression of opposition elements. Peierls no doubt believes
that Fuchs’s blatant demonstrations of pro-Soviet views may be forever
concealed, so he confidently ascribes Fuchs’s deception of his friends to
superlative self-control, thus absolving Peierls (who after all, is a very
bright man) of any responsibility for not seeing through his subterfuge. In
expressing sympathy for what Fuchs went through Peierls conveniently overlooks
what his wife’s family, and the physicists who were murdered by Stalin, underwent,
which dwarfed the actual sufferings of Klaus Fuchs.
A little later, in B), he is more reflective.
Fuchs’s confession of January 27 made a claim that the spy was subject to a
‘controlling schizophrenia’ which allowed his life to be strictly
compartmentalized. This is Fuchs’s excuse for letting down his friends. So
Peierls can jump on this self-assessment to his own advantage, while at the
same time expressing some sympathy for Fuchs’s commitment and earnestness. Yet
the suggestion, to a fellow ‘peace-loving’ scientist, Bohr, that Fuchs
possessed some kind of saintly altruism and selflessness is disturbing and
irresponsible. It is not surprising that Peierls apparently did not share this
confidence with anyone else.
A few weeks later, a more measured statement is
required, in C). As an astute political watcher, Peierls has to show a greater
awareness of the facts of life, and a slippery equivalence of ‘left-wing’ and
‘communist’ is even admitted. He has to admit that he and Fuchs talked
politics: after all, the Peierls household saw such lodgers as Bethe, Fröhlich, Frisch, G. E. Brown, even the recently
deceased Freeman Dyson, as well as Fuchs, so it would have been difficult to
steer the conversation away from politics. Now he indulges in some very fine
distinctions: Fuchs’s views are ‘a little left’ from those of the Peierlses,
but, in an unlikely aside, Peierls indicates that Fuchs was ‘very scornful’ of
a dogmatic communist. In this, he directly contradicts Born’s evidence. Significantly,
the episode is undated: in the thirties, through the Spanish Civil War, right
up until the Nazi-Soviet pact, it would have been very appropriate in
intellectual circles for enthusiasm for Communism as the ‘bulwark against
Fascism’ to be expressed.
So what were Fuchs’s ‘real beliefs’ that he hid
so well from Peierls? A loyalty to Stalin instead of an honest commitment to
principles of the Bolshevik revolution? This reflection allows Peierls to make
an artificial distinction between ‘his colleagues and friends’ and ‘the agents
to whom he still transmitted information’, when Peierls must have known that
there would not have been much time for idle political chit-chat during the
encounters when Fuchs passed on his secrets, and was aware that he still
mingled with communist sympathisers, and
had promoted his views unrestrainedly, such as at Bristol and Edinburgh
universities, and in the internment camp in Canada. Thus he creates a cover for
himself, suggesting that the authorities would have had to be very tenacious to
detect Fuchs’s adherence to the communist cause when a relatively simple
investigation would have revealed his political cause.
By the time of D), the crisis has blown
over. The complete text of the interview
shows that Weiner was a very persistent interrogator, but he was not
well-prepared on the Fuchs case. Peierls can dispose of Fuchs’s communism as a
student entanglement, and represents the state of being ‘strongly left-wing’ as
an affectation of young people, predominantly, calmly overlooking the fact
that, in the 1930s, it was almost a required disposition of the intellectually
‘progressive’ academic body. In contrast to his statement of almost twenty
years before (when politics was a ‘frequent topic of conversation’) Peierls now
minimizes the time he and Fuchs talked politics, since Fuchs ‘didn’t say much
on political things’. Moreover, he can diminish Fuchs’s involvement with the
communist organisation in Germany, describing Fuchs’s role as being ‘mixed up’
with it, as if he were a respectable youth who had, ‘fallen in with the wrong
crowd’, and become a delinquent, as one occasionally reads in the words of
regretful parents. Yet such persons are part of the crowd, and are thus
responsible.
This strain continues in Peierls’s
autobiography in E), written sixteen years later. Moreover, Peierls can now
afford to be cavalier with the chronology. His comment about looking around for
‘a suitable person’ overlooks the fact that Fuchs had been identified for early
deportation from Canada in the summer of 1940, that Peierls and Born had
discussed his recruitment, and that Fuchs knew, as early as January 1941, when
he first met Simon Kremer, that he would have access to important information
on nuclear physics. On the other hand, it is true that Peierls met Fuchs at
Bristol, and collaborated with him. A letter from Nevill Mott to Peierls, dated
December 4, 1936, invites Peierls to add his name to a paper produced primarily
by Fuchs. Peierls declines.
And Peierls reinforces the illusion of
political discussions, let alone articulation of extreme views. He echoes the
notion that strong left-wing views are primarily the province of young people,
and gives the impression that the young firebrand had mellowed, and shared the opinions
of Peierls’s circle – ‘our general
views’. But again, he provides no date, and Peierls had gained a reputation for
encouraging and harbouring communists at Birmingham University. He continues
the lazy distinction between ‘left-wing’ and ‘communist’, but then indulges in
some very complacent pipe-dreaming. Peierls is by now part of the
establishment, the academic elite: he is an English gentleman. Thus he
romantically starts to refer to ‘our intellectual circles’ – the senior common-room at New College, Oxford,
in the 1970s, presumably – as if it were
indistinguishable from the 1930s hothouses of Bristol, Cambridge, or
Birmingham. That delicate English sensitivity in refraining from hard
ideologies now provides cover for his group’s not quickly winkling out Fuchs’s
traitorous impulses. Peierls is now safe.
Thus Peierls, in the multiple roles of his
public, private and secret lives, experienced all four of the traits I listed
above. He had to present to the outside world the notion that he was not aware
that Fuchs was a Communist. He had to convince the authorities selecting the
Tube Alloys team that any suspicions of Fuchs’s ultra left-wing views did not
present a danger, or reason for disqualification. He had to recoil from any
exposure of Fuchs’s activities because of the threats that the Soviet regime
made on Genia’s family. He had to conceal his own very real preferences for
recruiting communist sympathisers to his team.
Peierls’s Naturalization
The last, highly important item, in the case
against Peierls is his failure to tell the truth in his application for British
citizenship. I pointed out, in Chapter 1 of this report, how a 1989 letter of
his, to L. I. Volodarskaya, admitted that he had travelled to the Soviet Union
several times in the 1930s. These visits had probably been concealed by dint of
their being inserted into extended journeys to Copenhagen, to see Bohr and
Placzek. In his statement (undated, viewable at KV 2/1658-1, but certainly
accompanying his May 17, 1938 application for naturalisation), Peierls records the
visits he made abroad between 1933 and 1938. The list includes a ‘holiday trip
to the Caucases’ [sic] in 1934, and attendance at a Conference on
Nuclear Physics in Moscow in 1937. He had much to hide.
It is worthwhile trying to define the sequence
of events that led to his naturalization. For some reason, in Bird of
Passage, Peierls does not describe the application. He writes of it only:
“Our position improved further, quiet unexpectedly, when in February 1940 my
naturalisation papers came through.” Yet in a letter to Professor Appleton,
dated September 13, 1939 (written thus by a German subject after the outbreak
of war), he explains that he first made his application in May 1938. We should
recall that that date was immediately after his return from a holiday in
Copenhagen, where an observant customs officer noticed the 1937 Soviet stamp in
his German passport, and Peierls had been very evasive over the reason for his
visit. He had got away with it, but perhaps that was an alarm call. Maybe
Moscow had told him to acquire UK citizenship. Peierls never explained why or
when he made the decision.
One might imagine that the idea of reprisals
governed the timing. While Genia’s family was evidently undergoing threats in
the Soviet Union, Rudolf’s father, Heinrich, and second wife, Else, were still
resident in Nazi Germany in 1938. A too precipitous rejection of German
citizenship might have caused repercussions for Heinrich and Else. Yet,
according to Sabine Lee, Rudolf’s father and step-mother did not get permission
to leave Germany, and be admitted to the UK, until early 1939. Peierls wrote
that his father had been reluctant to leave Germany, because of his age,
health, and lack of other languages, but that ‘in 1938, he finally decided to
leave’. It does not seem as if it was as simple as that, but Heinrich and Else
were able to join Heinrich’s brother, Siegfried, in New York in 1940.
The processing of the application took an
inordinately long time. Peierls clearly believed that he would have to record
the 1937 visit in his outline of foreign travel, and thus more boldly described
the conference in Moscow about which he had been so sheepish a month before. He
would have had, at some stage, to submit his German passport (which was to
expire on May 17, 1939) to the UK authorities, but that apparently did not
happen for some while, as the record from the Letters indicates he paid at
least two more visits to Copenhagen that year. Peierls himself twice states, in
his memoir, that he paid ‘several visits to Copenhagen’ in 1938). Yet, if his
own admission elsewhere is correct about other undocumented visits to the
Soviet Union in the 1930s, they must have been undertaken with a forged Soviet
passport in order to leave and return to Copenhagen. (One wonders, also,
whether an alien in the process of applying for citizenship would have been
allowed to leave the country at all.)
The archive is very sketchy about what happened
next, and some of the few documents that have survived have been redacted. One
letter of December 8, 1938, reporting to the Chief Constable of Cambridge, lays
out the positive outcome of an inquiry into Peierls’s credentials. Page 2 of a
chronology laying out the processing of the request appears, and runs as
follows (enigmatically, Page 1 is missing):
19.12.38 Confirms residence at Stockport
13.5.39 Positive interviews with Peierls’s
referees
31.8.39 Application from Peierls for permit to
join in A. R. P. (Air Raid Precaution) work
10.10.39 Peierls and wife exempted from
internment
21.2.40 Fee of £9 paid for Certification of Naturalization
23.3.40 Oath of Allegiance received from
Peierls
2.4.40 Naturalization granted
On July 18, 1939, Peierls wrote to the German
Embassy, asking whether he could renounce his German citizenship before his
naturalization papers came through, but received a dampening reply that he
could only do that if he submitted birth certificates, which were, of course, already
in the hands of the British authorities. And then, a remarkable revelation
appears: on August 31, Peierls wrote to the Home Office, with some obvious –
but subdued – frustration, trying to determine where his application stood.
(This is presumably what the item above refers to.) “I am therefore writing now
to ask whether there is any way of obtaining a statement to the effect that my
application for naturalization is being considered, or some other statement
which might make it possible for me to enroll [in any ARP service]”, he wrote.
Was it really possible that, after fifteen months, Peierls had received no
acknowledgment that his application was even being considered? Peierls does not
record these events, either.
Perhaps the only conclusions that can be drawn
from this saga is that there existed a strong reluctance to naturalize German
scientists until war was imminent, or even under way. Yet a period between May
1938 and the outbreak of war in September 1939 for sitting on an application,
with neither a rejection nor an approval, seems very odd. Were there some
witnesses who made objections, aware perhaps of his connections and sympathies
– even of his unadmitted travel to the Soviet Union? After all, someone decided
to place the customs officer’s report on file –
a highly selective but broad hint from the authorities to us
researchers, perhaps. Peierls again is very coy: he does not comment on the
long period of waiting, or even suggest to Appleton that the delay is
unreasonable. He must have been anxious not to appear peevish or querulous, as
any more detailed inquiry might have upset the applecart. As it was, his collaboration
with Frisch, and Appleton’s important role as Secretary of the Department of
Scientific and Industrial Research, and awareness of what he and Frisch were
doing, saved him.
In their book A Matter of Intelligence, MI5
and the Surveillance of anti-Nazi Refugees 1933-1950, Charmian Brinson and
Richard Dove sum up the episode as follows: “Peierls’ perceived importance in
British atomic research can be measured by his successful application for
British naturalisation. His work was considered so valuable to the war effort
that he was granted British citizenship as early as [sic!] March 1940: a
rare distinction, since naturalisation had been formally suspended for the
duration of the war and was permitted only in exceptional circumstances.” Given
what we know now (but which Peierls himself did not reveal), we might ask
instead: ‘What took them so long?’
Conclusions
What was it that drew so many scientists to the
communist cause? Winston Churchill spoke of the Nazis’ use of ‘perverted
science’ in his ‘Finest Hour’ speech, but at that time the observation could
more appropriately have been directed at Joseph Stalin. It was as if the slogan
‘the communist experiment’, in which millions of human beings were treated like
laboratory rats in the quest to build Soviet man took on a respectability that
merited the endorsement of the western scientific world. Yet an initiative to
exploit their naivety was surely undertaken.
If I were an avid conspiracy theorist, I would
be tempted to point out some alarming coincidences in the events that led to
Fuchs’s betrayal of his naturalised allegiance, and his passing on of atomic
secrets to the Soviets. I would refer to Ronald Gunn’s predecessor visit to the
Soviet Union in 1932, and his sponsorship of Fuchs’s establishment in the UK. I
would allude to the fact that Yakov Frenkel invited Peierls, Mott and Fröhlich to the conference in Odessa in 1934. I
would point out that some unusual circumstances allowed all three to be
installed in influential academic positions that they might otherwise not have
achieved. Peierls was able to use the funding released by Kapitza’s forced
detention in the Soviet Union to gain his position at the Cavendish Laboratory.
Mott was appointed professor, at a very young age, for a position for which he
had to receive technical guidance from Skinner at Bristol, because of the
influence of his schoolfriend, Ronald Gunn, and the encouragement of Skinner himself.
Peierls helped locate funding for Fröhlich to work under Mott after Fröhlich’s extraordinary escape from the Soviet
Union. And then Gunn introduced Fuchs to Mott, who protected him, and then
arranged his transfer to Edinburgh, again using special funding.
Rudolf Peierls was thus caught up in this
maelstrom. True, he made some personal questionable decisions (as well as some
good ones), but he was also inveigled into a conspiracy not of his direct
choosing. This resulted, I believe, in his living a lie, and I know that he
wrote a very dishonest memoir. I suspect the internal pressure on him may have
been even greater than that on Fuchs, who, despite some superficial softening
in his exposure to a liberal democracy, remained a hardened communist. Yet
Peierls’s career, for all its achievement, was essentially dishonourable.
I received several notes of appreciation after
I published Part 1 of this report on Peierls. I did not receive – even
confidentially – any complaints over, or criticisms of, my conclusions about
the probable explanation for the strange behavior of Rudolf and Genia. That may
have been, of course, because no one who might challenge my thesis actually
read the piece. Or it might mean that they read it, but did not want to draw
any undesirable attention to it. (I suspect that Frank Close and Sabine Lee have
read it, and even introduced it to the Peierls offspring. But maybe not.) My
intention has not been to single Peierls out, and malign him, for the sake of
rabble-rousing, and I have expressed a measure of sympathy for his probable
plight. My goal, however, has been to stir up the complacent and lazy official
and authorised historians, and the fawning biographers, and the custodians of
MI5’s official memory. I want to encourage them to reach beyond the obvious, and
question the very misleading memoirs, autobiographies and testimonies to their
biographers made by such as Peierls, Berlin, White, Jebb, Philby, Foote,
Sillitoe, Wright, etc. etc., instead of treating them as reliable archival
material. I want them to amend their incomplete and erroneous accounts of how
the realm was let down by a very shoddy security and counter-espionage system,
and that continuing to try to conceal the facts performs a gross disservice to
the historiography of British Intelligence. But not just that – to the history
of the United Kingdom itself.
When I posted Denis’s commentary recently, I said that there was more to come. Thus I now present some further analysis by him, focussed primarily on Len Beurton’s presence in Kidlington, and the efforts by MI5 officer Hugh Shillito to track him down. I have not yet studied the Kew file on Sonia’s sister Sabine Loeffler, which Lenihan mentions, so I shall delay my response until I have done that. Again, readers are encouraged to offer their views on the matter.
Aspects of Sonia
Antony Percy’s ‘Sonia’s Radio’ at coldspur.com is a tour de force, beginning and ending with Sonia’s activities in Oxford, but in between encompassing such apparently diverse but in fact related matters as the bureaucracy dealing (or not) with wireless interception in the UK during World War II, written accounts of that subject, how Sonia and her husband got to the UK and ‘the claim that British authorities [MI6/SIS] had no involvement in exploiting the Soviet spyring in Switzerland to pass disguised ULTRA traffic to Stalin’s government’.
His conclusion, expressed as an hypothesis, is that MI6 were involved in exploiting the Soviet spy-ring in Switzerland via that strange man Alexander Foote; that MI6 also ‘helped to engineer Sonia’s transfer to the UK, where SIS could extend its infiltration in, and surveillance of, communist espionage rings’; that ‘Senior Officers of MI5 had to be brought into the loop, since Sonia was operating on UK territory’; that ‘Sonia – with the help of Blunt’s revelations, and her bosses’ guidance ̶ had exploited this confusion, and hoodwinked both intelligence services. Her radio was found, and, in the belief of the security services that, with the help of RSS and the GPO, they had identified the sole danger, they no doubt eavesdropped on her transmissions’; and that her husband Len had another radio at a separate address at Kidlington in Oxford, and it was from there that the radio messages were really sent.
There are several difficulties with this hypothesis. I am not qualified to discuss the exploitation or otherwise of the Soviet spy-ring in Switzerland, but it may be worth observing that if there was such exploitation, it is a matter of wonder that the bragging rights have not thus far been exercised by official sources. Percy identifies a number of hints and glances in an extraordinary range of publications, as well as a number of denials of such exploitation, at least some of which he shows to be without much foundation. In total they do not carry conviction that such exploitation occurred.
Unfortunately the hypothesis really comes unstuck at the very last hurdle: Sonia and Len’s living arrangements in Oxford. Percy and Pincher both praise the MI5 officer Hugh Shillito for his work with the Beurtons. On their accounts he did good work on the case of the GRU spy Oliver Green, but the record shows that so far as investigating the Beurtons was concerned, he was rather dim.
Len’s Addresses
Working from Sonia and Len Beurton’s MI5 file (KV6/41), Percy notes that in November 1942 Shillito asked that mail going to 134 Oxford Rd Kidlingon be intercepted, as Len had gone to live there alone (there being no mention of Sonia). Percy takes this to be accurate, as he does memoranda in 1943 from Shillito to others which repeat this address. Percy suggests that ‘One possible explanation is that Sonia’s residencies were all arranged by the authorities, and that Beurton was ‘encouraged’ to stay in Kidlington after his arrival in order to keep the attention off Sonia’. Further, he asks: ‘Was Kidlington an area for secret meetings, and was Beurton acting as a courier for an unidentified third party, perhaps? Or perhaps he operated a radio there, and the device at Summertown was a ruse to distract the authorities?’
A close examination of the file shows that there is no evidence that Len ever lived at Kidlington on his own.
The file shows that when Len landed at Poole Airport on 29 July 1942 he gave his address in the UK as 134 Oxford Road, Kidlington. On Pincher’s account at Treachery 138, Sonia and the children had moved there in the previous April from The Rectory, Glympton, near Woodstock. Judging from the file, one of Beurtons’ case officers at that time was D I Vesey, who with an unidentified MI6 officer interviewed Len on 18 September 1942. Vesey recorded that ‘on the whole Beurton made a good impression.’ The arrangements for the interview had been made via the Oxford police, who had been provided with the Kidlington address.
There had however been a very interesting development in the meantime. Early in August Sonia had written to one of her sisters in London, Mrs Sabine Loeffler. MI5 had a file on her and her husband Francis (KV2/2927) and in fact were intercepting their mail as well as their telephone. Sonia’s letter showed a return address of Avenue Cottage, Summertown, Oxford and referred to both her and Len coming to London the following month. There is no record of the letter on the Loefflers’ file, as it was placed on the Beurtons’ file. Another MI5 officer, shown only by his initials JBM, promptly put a two-week return of correspondence check on that address. (This required the Post Office to record all mail going to that address, the postmarks, and the sender where recorded; the next step was a Home Office Warrant enabling items of mail to be opened). Pincher has Sonia and Len moving to Summertown ‘in the autumn of 1942’.
The return over the period 19 August to 3 September showed that no fewer than 26 items of mail were received for both the Beurtons at that address. One addressed to Mrs Hamburger (Sonia’s name from her previous marriage, still used by the child of that marriage) had been redirected from Kidlington. Some had apparently been sent from Kidlington and others from Oxford or London, sent by Len or Sonia or in one case by Sonia’s father. Given the volume and origins of the mail, it might have been a reasonable step to upgrade the check to a warrant, but JBM simply wrote on the return P A (put away).
While other mail checks – of both kinds – were put on the Beurtons later, they showed no such volume or origins of mail; in fact they received hardly any mail. Pincher would have noted at this point, had he been aware of this conjunction, that Hollis was absent from work ill from March to September 1942; and he would have drawn the inference that because of that absence the Beurtons were unaware that their mail was being intercepted in August-September, but they were aware at the other times. It is a point worth contemplating.
At least the exercise established that both Beurtons were living at Summertown, or so it seemed; but this escaped the notice of Shillito. When he took over the file again in November, he asked the Post Office whether the Kidlington address had a telephone, as he was interested in Beurton ‘who has gone to live there’. (There is no reply to this query on the file). Shillito may have been misled by the previous paper on the file, a letter from the British Vice-Consul in Lisbon to Beurton at the Kidlington address which had been intercepted and opened by the Post Office. Shortly thereafter Shillito obtained a Home Office Warrant for Beurton at the Kidlington address.
Nearly three weeks later, Shillito asked that the police make further inquiries about Beurton, noting that the Warrant had (unsurprisingly) been ‘unremunerative’, by which he presumably meant unproductive. This having been the case, it might have been prudent to check that Beurton was in fact living at the Kidlington address.
In January 1943 the Oxford City Police reported that ‘the Beurtons’ were living at George St Summertown and that they had interviewed two neighbours, Mrs Laski and Mrs Best. The information obtained suggested that the Beurtons had lived there for some time and there was no indication that Len did not live there in the normal way. On 6 July 1943, Shillito wrote to a colleague in MI6 saying among other things that ‘since their return to this country the Beurtons have been living together at Oxford…’ The following month however he wrote to a colleague in MI5 and said that Len ‘lives at 134 Oxford Rd Kidlington’, while in the same month he received a letter from the War Office giving Len’s address at Summertown. The penny appeared to have dropped at last with Shillito as he wrote to the Post Office saying that ‘Beurton has now moved’ and asking that the Home Office Warrant be changed accordingly.
Shillito was notified in December that Len had been called up by the RAF and had the Home Office Warrant at Summertown suspended. Inexplicably he then had another issued, applying both to Kidlington and to the RAF Station at Cardington where Len was based, explaining that it was ‘desired to cover both his home and service address’, despite official letters on the file all showing that Len lived at Summertown.
A year later, in December 1944, the Post Office wrote to Shillito about the check on Len, noting that it had been suspended in February last ‘as there seemed to be some doubt as to Beurton’s address’. Shillito cancelled the check, and thereafter had nothing to do with the case.
Tellingly, except in two cases (the Lisbon letter noted above, and a letter from Geneva, both writers evidently having used an address given to them some time previously, when it was accurate), there is no record on the file of any mail addressed to Len at Kidlington having been intercepted.
In summary, the totally confused or essentially dim Shillito:
– late in 1942 obtained a warrant for Len at the Kidlington address, notwithstanding that the file showed that he was living at Summertown;
– in August 1943 told a colleague that Len lived at Kidlington, despite having had a further report showing that he was living at Summertown;
– in December 1943 caused a warrant to be issued covering Len’s ‘home address’ at Kidlington, despite having received further official correspondence showing his address as being Summertown.
In the absence of others, the more mundane hypothesis that Sonia was able to conduct her business through a combination of MI5’s corruption and incompetence, as proposed by Pincher, survives.
The HASP Material
Drawing on Nigel West’s description in the Historical Dictionary of Signals Intelligence, Percy writes of this material that it ‘derived from partially successful attempts by the [Swedish signals interception organisation] FRA to decipher the Soviet Embassy’s traffic between Stockholm and Moscow in the period December 1940 to April 1946’, and that ‘Nigel West reports that 390 such messages were passed by the FRA to GCHQ in 1959’. He adds that some of the messages according to Wright in Spycatcher were from the GRU resident Simon Kremer to Moscow describing his meetings with Sonia.
Percy assumes that this is Venona material and says that ‘There is no reason why Sonia should appear in Stockholm-based cables, or why Kremer’s messages should have been routed there’. He adds that Wright does not divulge what is in the messages and that he can find no reference to Sonia in the Venona transcripts, other than the one mentioned above.
There may be some confusion here. In Spycatcher (375), Wright describes part of the HASP material as ‘not genuine Venona’ and which was broken using a 1930s book of trade statistics. While the GRU traffic was similar to that already broken ‘…there was one series of messages which was invaluable. The messages were sent from the GRU resident [in London] Simon Kremer to Moscow Centre, and described his meetings with the GRU spy runner Sonia, alias Ruth Kuzchinski.’ The messages showed ‘that Sonia had indeed been sent to the Oxford area by Russian Intelligence, and that during 1941 she was already running a string of agents. The traffic even contained the details of the payments she was making to these agents, as well as the times and durations of her own broadcasts’.
Wright records that he spent much time and effort over the next four years, without success, ‘searching for new VENONA and Sonia’s transmissions’.
Has anybody ever asked GCHQ for this material?
‘The String of Agents’
Are there any clues about agents other than Fuchs and perhaps Elli being run by Sonia, especially after the end of the war? If Hollis was Elli, MI5 were by then back in London and his Oxford connection was no more. One clue is the well-referenced entry on Sonia on Wikipedia where this appears: ‘In addition to the (retrospectively) high-profile spies Fuchs and Norwood, Sonya was the GRU handler for (among others) an officer of the British Royal Air Force and a British specialist in submarine radar. She was also able to pass to her Soviet employers information from her brother, her father, and other exiled Germans in England. It was, indeed, her brother Jürgen Kuczynski, an internationally respected economist, who originally recruited Klaus Fuchs to spy for the Soviets at the end of 1942.[5]’
The reference [5] is Thomas Karny (11 May 2007). “”Sonja” – Stalins beste Spionin”. Wiener Zeitung (online). It is beyond my linguistic or technical abilities to retrieve this item, although it is not clear if it extends beyond Jurgen.
The Wikipedia piece also says about Sonia (without references): ‘In Oxfordshire, together with Erich Henschke, she worked on infiltrating German Communist exiles into the US Intelligence Agency. By Autumn 1944 she and Henschke had succeeded in penetrating UK activities of the US Intelligence Service (OSS). The Americans were at this time preparing an effort called “Operation Hammer” for parachuting UK-based German exiles into Germany. Ursula Beurton was able to ensure that a substantial number of the parachuted OSS agents would be reliable communists, able and willing to make inside intelligence from the “Third Reich” available not merely to the US military in Washington, but also to Moscow.’
This gets support from the following CIA piece on-line: Gould, Jonathan S., “The OSS and the London ‘Free Germans'”, Stud. Intel. V46:1-11-29 (2002) PDF [1.0MB*]
Sonia’s Radio
Percy writes in the introduction to chapter 9: ‘[Len] and Sonia are watched, and in January 1943 an illicit radio transmitter is discovered in their rented accommodation’.
They were hardly being watched. The police called at the request of MI5, which happened twice in the period 1941-5. What was discovered in their rented accommodation in January 1943 appears to have been a radio receiver – a wireless – which could hardly have been illicit. One of Percy’s options for it elsewhere in his piece is that it was used only for reception (could it have been used for anything else?). Further, it was hardly ‘discovered’. It had been seen by a least one neighbour. The police who visited he house did not think it unusual enough to remark on it in their report, although the MI5 man to whom the report was sent did comment on it.
For what it’s worth, my memory of the 1940s in New Zealand is that wirelesses were often so large as to be items of furniture, and that aerials strung up on poles were often necessary for good reception. Sonia might easily have passed off the wireless and aerial as being needed for good reception from London or even Switzerland.
Obiter dicta
Percy records that ‘Nigel West has written to me the following: “I have two explanations for SONIA’s traffic. Firstly, it was probably very low power, and was only intended to communicate with the embassy in London, and not Russia. Secondly, the Abwehr taught GARBO how to emulate authentic British Army radio traffic. These signals were ignored by RSS. It may be that the GRU adopted the same tactics.”
The first explanation is contradicted by the sole Venona message mentioning Sonia – no 2943 of 31 July 1941 – which shows that she had tried and failed to make contact with Moscow via the radio on the four nights 26-29 July; by the GRU records which show that she notified Moscow on 4 September 1943 of the Quebec Agreement; and by the HASP material, which on Wright’s account (Spycatcher 375) showed in messages from the Soviet Embassy in London to Moscow ‘the times and durations of her [Sonia’s] own radio broadcasts’. As to the second, the information given to Pincher by the former RSS officer James Johnston confirms that Sonia’s transmissions were detected, but the reports were ignored. (Treachery 141, 260)
Other parts of the message concerning Sonia are not without interest. It shows her salary for seven months as being £406, so £59 a month; her husband £195; (?) from abroad £116; expenditure on radio and microdots £105; and expenditure on an item not identified £55, giving a total of £877. Assuming this is all expenditure for seven months, in 2020 terms the equivalent of £877 is £44,600, or say £75,600 for 12 months, just for one agent; so spying in 1941 was quite an expensive business.
Denis Lenihan, London, January 2020
* * * * * * * * *
Response by coldspur
The
HASP Material
Thank
you for this clarification, Denis. I
should have kept the distinction between VENONA and HASP material clear. As you
point out, part of this misconception is encouraged by Wright’s misleading
characterization of HASP as ‘not genuine VENONA’. Moreover, his text (see p
186) appears to attribute to HASP lessons learned about J. B. S. Haldane
(INTELLIGENTSIA) and Owen [sic: actually ‘Ivor’] Montagu (NOBILITY) that
can be detected from VENONA transcripts, as Nigel West’s book confirms.
And
I agree with you that the intelligence claimed for these messages is
tantalising. Why have they not been revealed by GCHQ? I wonder whether it has
anything to do with what Wright himself says about ‘the Sonia connection’ (p
375):
“The
Sonia connection had been dismissed throughout the 1960s as too tenuous to be
relied upon. MI5 tended to believe the story that she came to Britain to escape
Nazism and the war, and that she did not become active for Russian intelligence
until Klaus Fuchs volunteered his services in 1944 [sic!]. In particular GCHQ
denied vehemently that Sonia could ever have been broadcasting her only radio
messages from her home near Oxford during the period between 1941 and 1943.”
I
wonder whether you agree with me that this is pure hokum. What is behind that
passive voice of ‘had been dismissed’? ‘Tended to believe’ suggests contrary opinions
were voiced – and suppressed? And why would Wright get the chronology so wrong?
After all, he, like Alexander Foote, believed that Sonia had been tipped off by
an insider within MI5, and told Lord Trend that he believed that Hollis was
ELLI. The whole point of ‘Sonia’s Radio’, and my subsequent research, is to
show that MI5 and SIS colluded desperately to keep Sonia from being
investigated properly. Of course GCHQ would ‘vehemently deny’ that she could
have operated under their noses! Was Wright simply being loyal to MI5 here, and
contributing to the project to blame everything on Hollis? (Answers on a
postcard, please.)
‘The
String of Agents’
I
would be surprised to be able to verify that Sonia was running a ‘string of
agents’ by 1941. (I likewise have been unable to locate the Wiener Zeitung
article.) Sonia’s memoir is very vague about dates, and of course cannot be
relied upon too much, but she was very occupied in 1941 in finding
accommodation, meeting with her brother and Hans Kahle, and with ‘Sergei’ from
the Embassy. “After I had succeeded in making some military contacts . . .”,
she writes (p 243), with no explanation as to how or where or when the
acquaintances were made, but it would have been foolhardy to have offered such
persons money. On page 249, she describes how, in 1942, before Len came to
England ‘I had taken up an important contact with an RAF officer whose wife and
child had been evacuated to Oxford’ (James), and she eventually persuaded him,
with Moscow Centre’s approval, to ‘cooperate’. James provided details of
aircraft construction, but refused to take any money from the organisation. On
page 250, she introduces ‘Tom’, a fitter in a car plant, who was recruited as a
back-up wireless operator. He refused to take any money, either. In the English
version of the book, she mentions Klaus Fuchs as coming into her life only at
the end of 1942. I don’t know where ‘the specialist in submarine radar’ comes
from.
Have
I answered the point about her brother Jürgen, Henschke and the OSS adequately?
On page 260 of ‘Sonya’s Report’, she writes in some detail about the Strategic
Bombing Survey, and confirms that Jürgen contacted her about it, so that she
could ‘consult Centre’. After that, she took over from Jürgen, who had
introduced Joe Gould, responsible for recruiting German emigrants for the
espionage missions in Germany, to Erich Henschke. She thus worked with Henschke
to identify ‘anti-fascists’ who could help. She says she never met Joe Gould. So
the activity was hardly ‘penetration’, or ‘infiltration’: their help had been
sought out. At least, that’s what Sonia writes. I don’t think the CIA article
you identify contradicts that story, even though it fails to mention Sonia’s
contribution.
Sonia’s
Radio
Thank
you. Yes, it is more accurate to say that the first discovery was made after a
request from Hugh Shillito. I don’t recall where I implied that Sonia’s radio
might have been only a receiver – which was characteristic of the apparatus of
most of the ‘Lena’ spies – as Sonia would have been powerless without a
transmitter, and knew how to construct one. I am not technically adept enough to
know about the vagaries of wireless reception in wartime New Zealand (did the
sheep interfere?), but I suspect outsize aerials would have been very
conspicuous (and unnecessary) in wartime Oxfordshire. And why would anyone need
to listen into broadcasts from Switzerland? Admittedly, Sonia gained permission
from Mrs Laski to erect an aerial from Sonia’s roof to one of Mrs Laski’s
stables, and wrote that ‘the aerial looked rather like a normal one for any
radio receiver’.
Yet
she acknowledged that, since amateur radio transmissions were forbidden, ‘we
had to count on my transmitter being discovered at some point’, which is why
she trained Tom. (How Tom was going to access secret material when Sonia had
been arrested is not made clear.) I continue to maintain that it was extremely
flamboyant for Sonia to parade her unusual aerial so boldly, and it should have
merited attention. This was a woman who was known to derive from a Communist
family and background, and was suspected by many junior officers in MI5.
Moreover, the Oliver Green case was active in MI5’s portfolio, and had gained
the urgent attention of Director-General Petrie! Why no action?
I
don’t claim that Sonia transmitted exclusively by the methods Nigel West
outlined: that came later. Certainly, she tried to communicate by conventional
means in July 1941, as VENONA confirms. On page 243 of ‘Sonya’s Report’, she
declares that she made some contact with the Soviet Union, and then Sergei gave
her a miniature transmitter, ‘about eight by six inches’, which contained a new
transmitter. She thereupon dismantled her old transmitter, ‘which was six times
the size, and hid the parts for emergency use’. The event is undated. But the
story suggests that it was late in 1941, before Len returned.
As
for the GRU records for the Quebec Agreement, the HASP material, and James Johnston’s
evidence to Pincher, I have to be very distrustful of all three, as none can be
inspected! (Although I am sure that the RSS ignored Sonia’s transmissions.)
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
[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.”
