The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers

The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers Richard Aldrich Rory Cormac The Black Door explores the evolving relationship between successive British prime ministers and the intelligence agencies, from Asquith’s Secret Service Bureau to Cameron’s National Security Council.Intelligence can do a prime minister’s dirty work. For more than a century, secret wars have been waged directly from Number 10. They have staved off conflict, defeats and British decline through fancy footwork, often deceiving friend and foe alike. Yet as the birth of the modern British secret service in 1909, prime ministers were strangers to the secret world – sometimes with disastrous consequences. During the Second World War, Winston Churchill oversaw a remarkable revolution in the exploitation of intelligence, bringing it into the centre of government. Chruchill’s wartime regime also formed a school of intelligence for future prime ministers, and its secret legacy has endured. Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and David Cameron all became great enthusiasts for spies and special forces. Although Britain’s political leaders have often feigned ignorance about what one prime minister called this ‘strange underworld’, some of the most daring and controversial intelligence operations can be traced straight back to Number 10. (#u2edb29e4-9f5d-578c-8bf9-8979eb3f3d09) Copyright (#u2edb29e4-9f5d-578c-8bf9-8979eb3f3d09) William Collins An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com) First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2016 Copyright © Richard J. Aldrich and Rory Cormac 2016, 2017 Richard J. Aldrich and Rory Cormac assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Cover photograph © Dan Kitwood/Getty Images (door) Cover design by Kate Gaughran The author and publishers are committed to respecting the intellectual property rights of others and have made all reasonable efforts to trace the copyright owners of the images reproduced, and to provide appropriate acknowledgement within this book. In the event that any untraceable copyright owners come forward after the publication of this book, the author and publishers will use all reasonable endeavours to rectify the position accordingly. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. 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Source ISBN: 9780007555475 Ebook Edition © April 2016 ISBN: 9780007555451 Version: 2017-03-29 Dedication (#u2edb29e4-9f5d-578c-8bf9-8979eb3f3d09) To Joanne and Libby (two espionage experts) Contents Cover (#u41d65073-ac65-5969-87dd-5b775cd58dd6) Title Page (#ulink_57e5ffb3-7558-522e-942b-f6e4c5c72cf2) Copyright (#ulink_e2ef62a8-f381-59b6-8705-b3b9ff32e907) Dedication (#ulink_8a461bfc-e6fa-55ae-b6e0-c7e7c3a71b15) Abbreviations and Acronyms (#ulink_e1a35f5e-73b2-503c-abd1-ba6ca786d312) Introduction (#ulink_365230dd-19fe-5f90-b096-4f02fa9a771e) PART ONE: CREATING SECRET SERVICE (#ulink_6caa841f-432f-5a6a-af55-803bc35de2b0) 1 Herbert Asquith, David Lloyd George and Andrew Bonar Law (1908–1923) (#ulink_a3f387f8-e17b-51df-ba42-577438b560b8) 2 Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald (1923–1937) (#ulink_ccf508f2-e17a-5a81-8823-245408fccf46) PART TWO: THE WINDS OF WAR (#ulink_1cdf5370-e44c-54bc-a3e0-696ce0793f1a) 3 Neville Chamberlain (1937–1940) (#ulink_0f78c41d-804f-5e67-8f12-38b004366f58) 4 Winston Churchill (1940–1941) (#ulink_102bc2c2-38df-5088-ab77-8384c1d6ea22) 5 Winston Churchill (1942–1945) (#ulink_7a80ab6e-c454-5279-a2b4-9d6a091af479) PART THREE: THE HOT COLD WAR (#ulink_cad84795-9e42-5d39-8a03-435a9e34bdb3) 6 Clement Attlee (1945–1951) (#ulink_7c5c595b-101e-5f34-8bfa-0b1d3692e056) 7 Winston Churchill (1951–1955) (#litres_trial_promo) 8 Anthony Eden (1955–1957) (#litres_trial_promo) 9 Harold Macmillan (1957–1963) (#litres_trial_promo) 10 Alec Douglas-Home (1963–1964) (#litres_trial_promo) PART FOUR: D?TENTE AND DISSENT (#litres_trial_promo) 11 Harold Wilson (1964–1970) (#litres_trial_promo) 12 Edward Heath (1970–1974) (#litres_trial_promo) 13 Harold Wilson (1974–1976) (#litres_trial_promo) 14 James Callaghan (1976–1979) (#litres_trial_promo) 15 Margaret Thatcher (1979–1990) (#litres_trial_promo) PART FIVE: TURBULENT TIMES (#litres_trial_promo) 16 John Major (1990–1997) (#litres_trial_promo) 17 Tony Blair (1997–2007) (#litres_trial_promo) 18 Gordon Brown (2007–2010) (#litres_trial_promo) 19 David Cameron (2010–2016) (#litres_trial_promo) Conclusion: Prime Ministers and the Future of Intelligence (#litres_trial_promo) Appendix I: Key Officials Since 1909 (#litres_trial_promo) Appendix II: Key Intelligence and Security Machinery (#litres_trial_promo) ‘Eat Before Reading’: A Short Essay on Methodology (#litres_trial_promo) Picture Section (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) Notes (#litres_trial_promo) Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo) Index (#litres_trial_promo) About the Authors (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) Abbreviations and Acronyms (#u2edb29e4-9f5d-578c-8bf9-8979eb3f3d09) ‘C’ – Chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) CCC – Churchill College Cambridge CIA – Central Intelligence Agency [American] CIGS – Chief of the Imperial General Staff CND – Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Comint – Communications intelligence Comsec – Communications security COS – Chiefs of Staff CPGB – Communist Party of Great Britain CSC – Counter Subversion Committee CX – Prefix for a report originating with SIS DCI – Director of Central Intelligence, the head of the CIA DIS – Defence Intelligence Staff DMI – Director of Military Intelligence DNI – Director of Naval Intelligence D-Notice – Defence Notice to the media covering security issues DOPC – Defence and Overseas Policy Committee Elint – Electronic intelligence FBI – Federal Bureau of Investigation [American] FCO – Foreign and Commonwealth Office GC&CS – Government Code and Cypher School GCHQ – Government Communications Headquarters GOC – General Officer Commanding GRU – Soviet Military Intelligence IRD – Information Research Department of the Foreign Office ISC – Intelligence and Security Committee ISI – Inter-Services Intelligence [Pakistan] ISP – Internet Service Provider JAC – Joint Action Committee JIC – Joint Intelligence Committee JTAC – Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre LHCMA – Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives MI5 – Security service MI6 – Secret Intelligence Service (also SIS) MIT – Turkish Intelligence Service MoD – Ministry of Defence NATO – North Atlantic Treaty Organisation NSA – National Security Agency [American] NSC – National Security Council [American] NUM – National Union of Mineworkers OSS – Office of Strategic Services [American] PKI – Indonesian Communist Party PLO – Palestine Liberation Organisation PSIS – Permanent Secretaries’ Committee on the Intelligence Services PUSC – Permanent Under-Secretary’s Committee of the Foreign Office PUSD – Permanent Under-Secretary’s Department PV – Positive vetting RAW – Research and Analysis Wing [Indian] RUC – Royal Ulster Constabulary SAS – Special Air Service SAVAK – Iranian Security Service SBS – Special Boat Service Sigint – Signals intelligence SIS – Secret Intelligence Service (also MI6) SOE – Special Operations Executive TASS – Soviet Press Agency TUC – Trades Union Congress Ultra – British classification for signals intelligence UKUSA – UK–USA signals intelligence agreements 1948 WMD – Weapons of Mass Destruction Introduction (#u2edb29e4-9f5d-578c-8bf9-8979eb3f3d09) This is my own true spy story … Winston Churchill1 (#litres_trial_promo) On Saturday, 6 September 1941, Winston Churchill stood on a pile of bricks outside the newly built Bletchley Park. Here, in the Buckinghamshire countryside, the mysteries of the German Enigma encryption machine were being patiently unravelled. Each day the codebreakers’ product was fed to a prime minister in Downing Street who was beside himself with anticipation. Now, with some emotion, Churchill expressed his profound gratitude and explained to the codebreakers how they had already transformed decision-making at the highest levels, and with it the course of the Second World War. A decade later – and now approaching his eightieth year – Churchill was back in Downing Street. His keen interest in intelligence had not diminished. In 1952, top-secret spy flights took pictures over Moscow at the express instruction of the prime minister. Over Minsk and Lvov, his airborne intelligence emissaries were greeted by a formidable wall of Soviet anti-aircraft fire. Churchill also relished covert action. In 1953, he positively purred with enthusiasm over a joint CIA–MI6 plot that had overthrown the government of Iran. This underlines the way in which intelligence was not just a secret window on the world for Britain’s leaders, but also a discreet means of manipulating it. In 1956 Churchill’s successor, a furious Anthony Eden, neurotic and plagued by ill-health, barked into a telephone that he wanted Egyptian President Nasser destroyed by MI6. Harold Macmillan’s government drew up what he called a ‘formidable’ plan for Syria which involved assassinating several leaders. Alec Douglas-Home added Indonesia’s President Sukarno to the list of foreign leaders that prime ministers wished to see toppled using Britain’s intelligence agencies. However, when Harold Wilson asked for the liquidation of the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, officials responded with horror, and refused to investigate the options. When secret intelligence took extreme risks, it was usually at the direction of Downing Street. Harold Wilson evoked the dark side of intelligence. He was convinced that plotters within MI5, MI6 and especially renegade generals in the Ministry of Defence were out to undermine his government. Notably terrified of the South African secret service, known as ‘BOSS’, he chose to develop close personal relations with the Israeli secret service Mossad instead. Speaking with American officials who were inquiring into illegal activities by the CIA in the wake of Watergate, he agreed with them that the CIA failed to tell British authorities everything it did in London. Yet he remained fascinated by the secret world, and valued the intelligence machinery in Downing Street, engaging in academic debate with his intelligence analysts on points of detail like the Oxford junior research fellow he once was. Intelligence imperilled more than one British prime minister. Within weeks of her arrival at Downing Street, Margaret Thatcher insisted on sitting in with the Joint Intelligence Committee to better understand how intelligence was prepared for those at the top. Only three years later, a major intelligence failure by the same mechanism over the Falkland Islands almost ended her government. John Major found himself confronted by the Arms to Iraq affair, in which ministers had sought to cover up the control of arms export companies by MI5 and MI6. The subsequent inquiry by Lord Scott revealed only part of the murky tale, and brought Major’s government close to defeat in the House of Commons. Tony Blair’s era was defined by vicious public arguments over intelligence. Despite his successful use of secret service during the creation of the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, it was accusations of the misuse of intelligence over Iraq that would leave his reputation in tatters. His bold decision to use intelligence publicly to justify the war on Iraq quickly backfired, and by 2005 the missing WMD fiasco threatened to end his government prematurely. Blair’s administration also left a toxic legacy of allegations about complicity in torture with which Gordon Brown and David Cameron have both struggled. Most recently, the deluge of secrets revealed by NSA contractor Edward Snowden has reshaped relations between David Cameron, Barack Obama and other world leaders including Angela Merkel. In an era when secret services are increasingly kept in check by whistleblowers and their remarkable revelations, British prime ministers live in constant fear of intelligence ‘blowback’. For good or ill, intelligence matters to prime ministers. It may be only one factor shaping their thinking, but it can be critical and very personal, often revealing what their opponents think about them.2 (#litres_trial_promo) Intelligence can provide warning of dangerous future events, and has certainly averted major terrorist attacks on London. It can help to prevent wars, or – once they begin – mean the difference between victory and defeat. Yet it can also be misused to justify preconceived policy desires. The secret world can help to resolve a prime minister’s most difficult dilemmas by providing a hidden hand that shapes events behind the scenes. It can also become a seductive apparent panacea, whereby secret service is employed to carry out a leader’s dirty work, at home and abroad. In its darkest moments, intelligence can consume prime ministers. The relationship has become ever closer. The link between Number 10 and Britain’s intelligence agencies, as intimate as it is secret, lies at the heart of the British establishment. For almost a century, a stream of secret boxes – red for MI6 material and blue for intercepted communications from GCHQ – made their way to 10 Downing Street. Sifted by the cabinet secretary, the best material was placed in a special striped box, nicknamed ‘Old Stripey’, for the early attention of the prime minister. Since the creation of Britain’s intelligence agencies in 1909, the relationship between prime ministers and the secret world has moved from circumspection to centrality. One thing is clear from this story. Intelligence is not about rogue agents operating wildly and freely; nor is it an unaccountable business far removed from the corridors of political power. Many of the most hair-raising intelligence activities and many of the most dangerous covert operations have involved Number 10 directly. Intelligence is part of the beating heart of Britain’s core executive, and has long held a special place behind the famous black door of 10 Downing Street. The use of secret intelligence is one of the dark arts of statecraft. Yet during the early years of the twentieth century, British prime ministers were notably inept practitioners. Relative strangers to the murky world of espionage and clandestine warfare, they treated the subject with either indifference or outright suspicion. When prime ministers did draw on intelligence, they demonstrated remarkable inexperience and na?vety in its use. While Herbert Asquith presided over the creation of the modern British intelligence services in 1909, he had little interest in secret matters other than his mistress. David Lloyd George and Stanley Baldwin enjoyed the first fruits of Britain’s revived wartime codebreaking operations, but squandered them by publicising not only German but also American and Russian intercepts, compromising the source and causing anguish among the denizens of secret service. Ramsay MacDonald, Britain’s first Labour prime minister, distanced himself from the secret services, fearing they may have been out to plot the demise of his government; while Neville Chamberlain arrogantly ignored invaluable secret intelligence provided by brave Germans who personally visited Downing Street at the risk of their own lives. Instead, he preferred to rely on diplomatic reports from those sympathetic to Hitler, which reinforced his own preconceptions. In 1940, Churchill changed all this. Indeed, a Churchillian revolution in intelligence occurred during the middle of the twentieth century. For five years Britain’s fate hung in the balance, and intelligence, especially Ultra material provided by Bletchley Park, often proved the operational advantage. Churchill placed a premium on intelligence chiefs telling truth to power: he believed that craven intelligence officers accounted for some of Sir Douglas Haig’s failings during the First World War. ‘The temptation to tell a Chief in a great position the things he most likes to hear,’ Churchill later observed, ‘is one of the commonest explanations of mistaken policy.’3 (#litres_trial_promo) As prime minister he developed close links with the secret world, especially through Stewart Menzies, chief of MI6, whom he sometimes summoned to his bedside in the middle of the night. The prime minister was obsessed with secret intelligence, and – more importantly – strained every sinew to make sure that the government used it to efficient purpose. Churchill was impulsive, and so constituted a mixed blessing. As David Reynolds argues in his magisterial study, there were reasons why both Baldwin and Chamberlain had kept him out of office. He had imagination, industry, energy and eloquence, but he lacked judgement and wisdom. Lloyd George was of much the same opinion, arguing that in an emergency Churchill’s vision and imagination were essential, and should be used to the full, but at the same time he should be kept under a ‘vigilant eye’.4 (#litres_trial_promo) Churchill’s over-enthusiasm led to friction with the chiefs of staff, who had the onerous duty of vigilance, and indeed to occasional blunders. Yet his determination to harness the power of intelligence transformed not only the centre of government, but also the very nature of British statecraft.5 (#litres_trial_promo) Uniquely, Churchill brought with him vast intelligence experience. In charge of the Admiralty during the First World War, he had seen the work of Britain’s most proficient codebreakers at first hand. In the interwar years he had been deeply interested in intelligence, and repeatedly shaped its development. Once he became prime minister in May 1940, he was finally empowered to change procedure at the top. He demanded raw intelligence fresh from MI6 agents in the field or from Bletchley Park. This annoyed the chiefs of staff, and triggered a revolution in Whitehall’s intelligence assessment machinery – the Joint Intelligence Committee moved centre stage – laying the foundations of the successful body which still operates today. Moreover, the impetuous Churchill loved action. He not only nurtured Number 10’s direct connection with espionage, but also encouraged a new focus on special operations and covert warfare. His personal interest in ‘funnies’ and oddball units – ranging from the Chindits and the Commandos to the Special Operations Executive and most famously the SAS – changed how Britain approached warfare for decades to come.6 (#litres_trial_promo) Churchill’s wartime government was itself a school for secret service. Around him, Britain’s future leaders learned the business of intelligence and its importance to the practice of statecraft. Thereafter, Britain’s next few prime ministers – all veterans of Churchill’s wartime government – understood the value of secret sources and the event-shaping power of intelligence. Trained in the sophisticated integration of intelligence and policy, his successors realised that it formed a crucial instrument for any leader in a perilous period of British decline. Secret service was part of the ‘fancy footwork’ of retreating empire that could potentially turn the tide in colonial bushfire wars, gain an upper hand in manoeuvrings against the Soviets, and even deceive Washington or Brussels.7 (#litres_trial_promo) Churchill constituted an improbable double act with Clement Attlee. Serving as Churchill’s wartime deputy, Attlee took a quiet interest in intelligence from the very first week he entered office, including the sensitive matter of interning Nazi sympathisers.8 (#litres_trial_promo) As early as the autumn of 1940, he was arguing for a single authority to coordinate and improve intelligence.9 (#litres_trial_promo) Later, he led an inquiry into one of darkest episodes of the war, the Gestapo penetration of Britain’s resistance efforts. Despite his public reputation for timidity, Attlee hid an inner toughness. After 1945, he quietly sanctioned numerous covert operations behind the Iron Curtain and across the Middle East. He also recognised the importance of MI5, of positive vetting and of domestic counter-subversion – even at the risk of frustrating his own backbenchers. Most importantly, he completed Churchill’s project, developing new mechanisms that improved Downing Street’s control over secret service. Indeed, by 1951, deliberately seeking to capture corporate memory and learn the lessons of the preceding ten years, Attlee completed the Churchillian revolution, harnessing the power of the hidden hand to state policy and creating a connected British intelligence community for the first time.10 (#litres_trial_promo) Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan had also learned about the growing power of secret service during the war. Eden in particular had endured a series of vexatious confrontations with SOE, which appeared at times to be conducting a parallel foreign policy. In 1942, confronted with yet another improbable episode, he peevishly exclaimed, ‘Am I foreign secretary or am I not?’ Yet once ensconced in Downing Street, both Eden and Macmillan recognised the value of secret service. They also realised that the CIA was quietly being used to expand American influence while bypassing the political, economic and military constraints associated with overt intervention. Accordingly, as well as launching their own covert operations, the prime ministers’ relations with presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy often involved selling cooperation on Anglo–American secret wars against figures like Nasser and Sukarno to the White House.11 (#litres_trial_promo) More recent prime ministers did not, of course, serve under Churchill or Attlee. But all experienced their legacy inside Number 10. Churchill brought the intelligence machine more firmly into Downing Street, while Attlee, as his partner and immediate successor, greatly strengthened the central control of the cabinet secretary over the secret world and began the creation of a refined national security apparatus. Together, they created an intelligence community and made it a familiar part of the working lives of prime ministers for the first time. Thereafter, intelligence became part of the growing ‘presidentialism’ of the British prime minister. While Harold Wilson may have nurtured a curious love–hate relationship with intelligence, Burke Trend, his cabinet secretary, continued Churchill’s drive to connect secret service with the centre. Under Wilson, the involvement of the Cabinet Office with the intelligence services became so great that Trend created a new post of Cabinet Office Intelligence Coordinator to help manage their business. To Wilson’s pleasure, Dick White, who had served as a much-admired director-general of MI5 and then chief of MI6, was the first incumbent. The growing power of premiers, presidents and prime ministers in the twentieth century went hand in hand with secret service. In Britain, this meant the rise of special policy advisers, spin doctors and the increasing tendency of Downing Street to impinge on the territory of cabinet ministers. Typically, Edward Heath created a Central Policy Review Staff under Victor Rothschild, a wartime MI5 officer who also served as a back channel to the secret services. Margaret Thatcher took this further, appointing Percy Cradock to serve simultaneously as her personal foreign policy adviser and also as Chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee. Unhappy with the reluctance of the ‘wets’ in MI5 and the Foreign Office to confront what she saw as Britain’s enemies, Thatcher even created a network of private secret services around Downing Street that paralleled Ronald Reagan’s piratical adventures with the US National Security Council during Iran–Contra. In Whitehall and Washington, secret service now bestowed upon Western leaders their own hidden and deniable foreign policy.12 (#litres_trial_promo) The twenty-first century witnessed the final convergence of intelligence and political leadership. Tony Blair waged wars from Bosnia to Iraq, Sierra Leone to Afghanistan. Doing so required the support of Britain’s secret services. Ironically, his failure to understand intelligence, his determination to exercise personal control and the calamities that followed prompted a further reshaping of the way in which secret service connects with British foreign policy. Gordon Brown and David Cameron formally institutionalised their relationship with the intelligence community, the latter using an American-style National Security Council. For the first time, Cameron met with the three agency chiefs once a week, together with key decision-makers, in an environment that promotes action. Moreover, he announced himself as ‘minister for the intelligence services’.13 (#litres_trial_promo) One of the things that frightens British prime ministers most is the ghost of secret service past. A special security squad of weeders and censors constantly patrols the boundaries of Britain’s official past in the hope of protecting Downing Street from embarrassment. The intention is that intelligence scandals will only emerge slowly and in a controlled fashion, as the result of papers being opened after an embargo of seventy-five or even a hundred years. Eventually, in the National Archives at Kew, amid crumbling paper and crumbling academics, the sensations of yesteryear can be safely examined, since any possible witnesses who might speak out of turn have long passed away. But occasionally, premiers have had to confront skeletons rattling in the secret service cupboard of their immediate predecessor. None was as noisy or as dangerous as the ‘Arms to Iraq’ episode that came within a whisker of ending John Major’s government.14 (#litres_trial_promo) ‘Scandals are the nastiest experiences in politics,’ noted Bernard Donoughue, senior policy adviser to both Wilson and Callaghan. In September 1977, reflecting on the latest press revelations about alleged attempts by the intelligence services to subvert or even overthrow the prime minister, the so-called ‘Wilson plot’, he added that these affairs brought together ‘scared politicians, hysterical and self–righteous civil servants and hypocritical lying journalists’.15 (#litres_trial_promo) Intelligence scandals have long caused sleepless nights in the flat above 10 Downing Street. Almost as soon as he entered office, Attlee was confronted with revelations about the ‘atom spies’, Alan Nunn May and Klaus Fuchs, two wartime scientists employed by the British who had seemingly passed the secrets of the West’s new wonder weapon to Moscow. When Stalin detonated an atomic bomb ahead of the British in August 1949, there were awkward public questions in Parliament, made worse by the mysterious flight of Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess to the Soviet Union in 1951. Security scandals had an alarming habit of appearing out of a clear blue sky, as Anthony Eden discovered just a few years later. In 1956, he clumsily attempted to bat away questions about the mysterious death of the navy frogman ‘Buster’ Crabb, who during a state visit to Britain by the Soviet leadership had embarked on a hazardous secret operation that MI6 had failed to clear properly with the political authorities. The Crabb fiasco triggered a major review of prime ministerial clearance for clandestine operations and new mechanisms for assessing attendant political risk. The 1963 Profumo affair was a defining moment for Downing Street. It not only helped prompt Macmillan to terminate his premiership early, it also heralded a new attitude by the press towards matters of secrecy. Hitherto, the long shadow of the Second World War had ensured a degree of circumspection and security-consciousness by journalists when addressing intelligence matters. But by the 1960s, propelled by a range of scandals around CIA special operations, the press was hungry for stories about espionage. The shooting down of Gary Powers’ U-2 spy plane in May 1960 reverberated personally for Macmillan, collapsing a Cold War summit with Khrushchev that he had worked hard to create. This was followed by the CIA’s disastrous Bay of Pigs escapade, which marred the first months of Kennedy’s presidency and raised questions about his personal judgement. Profumo too had an Anglo–American dimension, with anxious FBI officers arriving in London to probe the delicate question of whether Kennedy had met Christine Keeler. For Macmillan, always keen to project the persona of Edwardian stability, the increasing connections made by the press between premiers, politics and the secret world became deeply disconcerting. It was a wind of change he did not welcome. Harold Wilson had enjoyed tormenting Macmillan over Profumo. As leader of the opposition in 1963, he recognised that this episode was about sex and high society as well as secrets – a gift in terms of media coverage. Entering Downing Street in 1964, he was determined to protect himself against the same fate, and noted that his predecessor, Alec Douglas-Home, had already established a Security Commission to which he could refer malodorous matters when they came before Parliament, giving the prime minister the welcome appearance of actually doing something. For Downing Street, the tactic of creating long-running inquiries into secret matters gradually became a central mechanism for containing toxic security issues. But Wilson also wanted his own ‘security enforcer’, and appointed his paymaster general, George Wigg, to sniff out potential scandals within government. Cabinet ministers and MI5 loathed the freewheeling security inquiries that Wigg made into the most sensitive parts of Whitehall. All this failed to protect Wilson from hideous embarrassment over the interception of telegrams during the ‘D-Notice affair’ in 1967, and then the public flaunting of MI6 secrets by Kim Philby in his waspish memoirs published in 1968. Labour leaders faced a peculiar predicament. They often found themselves publicly defending domestic security services that they privately feared might be seeking to undermine them. Attlee faced the awkward position of being a socialist prime minister at the onset of the Cold War. The Labour Party and MI5 were not, at this point, natural bedfellows, and Attlee had to balance issues of positive vetting with backbench accusations of launching an anti-communist witch-hunt. Attlee was always conscious of the tension between intelligence, security and liberty. He agonised over investigation into the personal backgrounds of Whitehall officials, and introduced it only under the American threat of ceasing nuclear cooperation, passing this into law as almost the last act of his administration. By the 1970s, Labour prime ministers were inspecting MI5 files on their own MPs and wondering what level of risk was involved in appointing them to government. It was now known by Downing Street that some MPs – like John Stonehouse – had actually worked for Eastern bloc intelligence services. Indeed, one of the longest-serving MPs in the House of Commons, Labour’s Bob Edwards, who represented Wolverhampton South-East until 1987, was a fully-paid-up KGB agent. Other MPs had worked closely and enthusiastically with the CIA or Mossad.16 (#litres_trial_promo) Jack Straw, one of the most prominent cabinet ministers of recent years, recalls his initial security vetting when he first joined the government. ‘A man in a mac, with a skin disease which meant he could not shake my hand … came to interview me … for three hours.’ Later the same man came back for another three hours, and in this second interview he suddenly leaned across the desk, looked his subject in the eye and asked, ‘Mr Straw, do you like men?’ This reflected the fact that historically, several people who had spied for the Soviets had been trapped by sexual blackmail. In 1974, when Straw was an adviser at the Department of Health and Social Security, his file was already two inches thick, and from their questions it was clear that MI5 had been collecting material on his family members since he was fifteen. Straw reflected on the scale of the surveillance operation that this implied. But, he recalls, this ‘neither surprised nor shocked me’. He saw it as part of everyday life on the strange planet that was Cold War Britain, where the KGB had to be kept at bay. Years later, when Straw became home secretary, MI5 was nervous that he might wish to see his own file. But he did not request this privilege, taking the view that he had no more right to see this secret material than any other citizen – and he gave the same response to Peter Mandelson, who was characteristically eager to peruse his own MI5 dossier.17 (#litres_trial_promo) In the 1970s, Downing Street also lived in the shadow of Watergate, and was engulfed by growing paranoia about grand political conspiracy. Plots and bugging seemed to be almost normal. In March 1976, during the last days of the Wilson government, Tony Benn, then secretary of state for energy, attended a reception at the American embassy at which he chatted amiably to Cord Meyer, head of the CIA station in London. They reviewed the continuing fallout from Watergate, and Benn offered the opinion that Nixon was in fact quite charming, and that the media had been ‘unfair to him’. Meyer countered that Nixon was a ‘terrible man’, and had done a lot of damage to his service. But Benn took the wider view that given the catalogue of human error that went with the political experience, ‘bugging your opponent wasn’t so bad’.18 (#litres_trial_promo) A year later, James Callaghan and the cabinet secretary were debating whether Benn himself could be trusted to see intercepts and ‘sigint’ material from GCHQ.19 (#litres_trial_promo) Labour prime ministers also worried about plots. Ramsay MacDonald famously feared that MI5 was working against him. During the 1930s, Neville Chamberlain employed a former MI5 officer, Joseph Ball, to spy on both the Labour Party and his own rivals within the Conservative Party, using human agents and telephone taps. The Harold Wilson government rightly feared that a number of secret elements – both domestic and foreign – were seeking to destabilise his regime. For reasons yet unknown, Harold Macmillan had insisted that Downing Street be wired for sound to allow recording of conversations, much in the same style as the Kennedy White House. The extent to which this was used or abused during his time in office and subsequent administrations remains a mystery. The sensitivity of this subject was such that the Cabinet Office insisted that all references to it be cut out of what was otherwise a remarkably candid authorised history of MI5 published in 2009. Harold Wilson was not the only senior figure who feared bugs. In 1973, in the final days of Edward Heath’s Conservative government, William Armstrong, the head of the home civil service, turned up in the Cabinet Office and demanded to speak to the cabinet secretary somewhere that was ‘not bugged’. Ushered into a suitably secure room, he took off his clothes, lay on the floor chain-smoking and talked ‘very wildly’ about the whole system collapsing and ‘the world coming to an end’. The next day he summoned a meeting of all Whitehall permanent secretaries and told them to prepare for ‘Armageddon’. ‘He was babbling incoherently’, and was ‘taken off to hospital for treatment’. He later spent a month recovering at Lord Rothschild’s private villa in Barbados. Although Wilson said almost nothing about the security services in his first volume of memoirs, penning a bizarre chapter of just two and a half pages on the subject, he later said much more to the press. Cabinet Office officials were by turns amused, embarrassed and then dismissive when these stories first appeared. But by 1979, evidence of interference by South African intelligence in London was mounting, and officials gradually came to accept that there was real substance to Wilson’s fears.20 (#litres_trial_promo) Wilson’s public ramblings on intelligence required a new approach by Downing Street. Since the early 1960s, prime ministers had been forced to confront a new era of exposure. Now, a decade later, they had begun to manage their own gentle counter-offensive. Encouraged by the cabinet secretary, Burke Trend, with whom Wilson had enjoyed a good relationship, the intelligence agencies initiated a deliberate policy of emerging from the shadows. The Cabinet Office presided over the writing of the official history of wartime intelligence, and approved the release of the papers of Bletchley Park. This project was expressly about intelligence at the top, and traced the interaction between secrets and high strategy. Throughout the 1970s, British prime ministers were feeling their way towards a more public profile for the security agencies and their own engagement with them, pondering the possibility of public avowal of their existence and activities. Margaret Thatcher hated this. Even as opposition leader in the late 1970s, she had repeatedly attempted to veto any public revelations about intelligence, however carefully controlled. Once she entered Downing Street, she was immediately confronted by the media frenzy surrounding the revelation that Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, was the ‘Fourth Man’. Tasked with explaining the decision not to prosecute him, she went against her instincts and, rather than saying as little as possible, made a detailed statement to the House of Commons. She soon regretted it. Each morsel of detail was picked over, and seemed to draw out further press revelations. Now confirmed in her personal commitment to absolute secrecy, Thatcher’s later years were partially defined by the absurd battle with MI5’s supreme mole-hunter Peter Wright, whose Spycatcher memoir she sought to suppress. Her cabinet secretary endured public humiliation in the Australian courts in a futile attempt to hide what was already in the public domain. By contrast, John Major found himself surrounded by modernisers. Not only were the intelligence chiefs of the 1990s happy to adopt an avowed legal identity, they were also keen to emerge from the shadows. In 1994 the new director-general of MI5, Stella Rimington, gave the BBC Dimbleby Lecture on ‘Security and Democracy’ – despite the intense unease of Home Office officials. MI6 opened an extraordinary new building at Vauxhall Cross, on the south bank of the Thames, that looked like something out of science fiction. Not to be outdone, GCHQ then commissioned its own new headquarters that looked like a flying saucer, and became the first British agency to have a presence on the internet. Yet the press still seemed determined to turn success into scandal. In 1999, when MI6 revealed the treasures of the Mitrokhin archive, compiled by a KGB archivist who had given his secrets to Britain, surely one of the most magnificent intelligence successes of the late Cold War, the press instead focused on the failure to prosecute some of the espionage ‘small fry’ this had revealed. Government spin doctors puzzled over how MI6 had managed to turn a golden story to ashes, and Duncan Wilson of the Cabinet Office agreed that the secret services now needed assistance from Downing Street in managing their public image. Tony Blair exuded confidence in all areas of public affairs, including secret service. When asked about MI6 operations in Moscow he quipped to a waiting band of journalists, ‘We never comment on intelligence matters … except when we want to, obviously.’21 (#litres_trial_promo) Even before 9/11, his public relations team were fascinated by the media operations of MI6 and the interface between openness and secrecy. After the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, secret matters were on the front pages of the newspapers each week during a decade-long ‘War on Terror’. This raised important questions. To what extent should prime ministers place intelligence in the public domain to explain policy? And how should this be done? In two notorious Downing Street dossiers, Tony Blair and his press secretary Alastair Campbell did this badly, and paid a considerable price in terms of trust and public confidence. In the background, senior MI6 officers, some of them modernisers like Richard Dearlove and some old-school types like John Scarlett, argued over issues of public image and the proximity of their own service to Number 10. None of them had any idea how disastrously this episode would explode in their faces. Yet David Cameron retraced Blair’s footsteps. In early 2013, faced with the issue of the use of chemical weapons against its own people by the government of Syria, Cameron released JIC material to the press, going even further than Blair in the public use of intelligence. He realised that prime ministers must balance intelligence’s inherent need for secrecy with their public duties leading the government. If this was an effort to reassert control and confidence, it surely failed. After Blair’s Iraq fiasco, the public were deeply sceptical about intelligence as a justification for pre-emption, and Parliament voted against military action in Syria. Moreover, Downing Street was about to discover that it did not have control over what became public in this realm. Even as it agonised over the release of a two-page letter from Jon Day, the chair of the JIC, to Cameron, an unknown figure called Edward Snowden was preparing to release a deluge of secret material that amounted to thousands of documents. Much of this was British, and each remarkable revelation was more eye-wateringly secret than the last.22 (#litres_trial_promo) Cameron said almost nothing about Snowden. This was because much of the material shone a harsh light on the personal interaction between premiers and espionage. In a world in which diplomacy has become increasingly personal, characterised by G7 summits and mobile-phone calls, spies and statesmen rub shoulders with increasing frequency. For wealthy and powerful states, Snowden’s revelations were a story of hacked emails and rude words. GCHQ was specifically accused of hacking into the Belgian telecoms firm Belgacom, which includes EU institutions as clients. Cameron refused to answer questions about whether he had been able to reassure allies that British intelligence had not been involved in any bugging.23 (#litres_trial_promo) In fact, this was hardly news. Generations of British cabinet ministers have been amazed by the scale of Britain’s surveillance of its European partners.24 (#litres_trial_promo) But what Snowden, and previously Chelsea Manning, also revealed was the jostling of less powerful states, such as Chile and Mexico, which suffered not only stolen briefcases, but also bullying and bribery by the West. This rather raw business of personal espionage has now been exposed, and to the surprise of many, we have realised that James Bond often takes his orders in these delicate matters direct from the prime minister in Downing Street, rather than from ‘M’ in MI6 headquarters. In the summer of 2007, the British embassy in Baghdad received five bloody index fingers through the post. They were claimed to be the body parts of five British citizens who had recently been kidnapped by a pro-Iranian offshoot of Hezbollah in Baghdad. On 29 May that year, Shia militants disguised as policemen had conducted a violent raid on the Iraqi Ministry of Finance. Their main target was Peter Moore, a British consultant who had been installing software designed to prevent fraud surrounding the billions of dollars of aid flowing into the new government’s accounts. Downing Street was determined to secure Moore’s release. SAS and MI6 representatives attended four separate cabinet-level security conferences to plan his rescue with ministers, and as a result special forces conducted more than two dozen house assaults seeking persons involved in the kidnap. Gordon Brown came within minutes of ordering a raid on the kidnappers, but the intelligence on their location was judged to be too thin. Eventually, in December 2009, after 946 days of captivity, Moore was swapped for Qais Khazali, a Shia militant leader, and his brother, who had been seized by the SAS on the streets of Basra at around the same time he was kidnapped. The negotiations were carried out by an MI6 officer operating in Baghdad. The other four Britons, who had served as his security guards, had all been executed the previous year.25 (#litres_trial_promo) The dirtiest diplomacy is talking to terrorists, kidnappers and insurgents. This has to be deniable, since even if governments are willing to admit their part, terrorists frequently are not, and all parties ultimately fear being perceived as ‘weak’. This can place prime ministers in a difficult position, potentially forcing them to mislead the House of Commons. Harold Wilson kept his MI6 back channel with the IRA incredibly secret – many in his own cabinet did not know what was going on. Similarly, Margaret Thatcher publicly insisted that Britain did not talk to terrorists, and yet, as under her predecessors Wilson, Heath and Callaghan, various back channels remained open. In fact, Thatcher was personally involved in some exchanges. She made handwritten comments on one statement sent to the IRA as part of negotiations over the hunger strikers in 1981, and personally amended and approved Britain’s negotiating position.26 (#litres_trial_promo) Her successor, John Major, faced a similar dilemma. Despite stating in the House of Commons that he did not negotiate with terrorists, he had approved precisely that, and his emissaries were secret service officers whom the IRA regarded as ‘untouchable’. But when the secret talks leaked, Major and the IRA descended into a welter of accusation and counter-accusation, with each side publicising its version of the hitherto secret communiqu?s. Bizarrely, even as Thatcher and Major talked to terrorists, they were also their top targets. Both came within inches of being eliminated by the IRA, and one of the darker stories of intelligence, security and 10 Downing Street is the ever greater level of protection required to prevent assassination. Margaret Thatcher, characteristically, had just finished rehearsing a speech with her private secretary, Robin Butler, at ten to three in the morning when a bomb destroyed a large part of the Grand Hotel in Brighton during the 1984 Conservative Party Conference. One minister recalled the security shambles in the immediate aftermath, as injured politicians made their way out of the rubble with barely a policeman in sight. Two IRA gunmen could have ‘got the whole Government as they blearily emerged’, and made their getaway unimpeded. The IRA also purposely eliminated two of Thatcher’s closest advisers, with the assassinations of Airey Neave in 1979 and Ian Gow in 1990, bracketing her arrival and her departure from office.27 (#litres_trial_promo) As a result, Downing Street was turned into a fortress. Large reinforced black gates prevented public access. Harold Wilson had resisted elaborate gates when they were suggested in 1974, but now they arrived, together with armed policemen.28 (#litres_trial_promo) Several levels below Downing Street, technicians were putting the final touches to ‘Project Pindar’, a command bunker deep beneath the Ministry of Defence on Whitehall to which selected denizens of Downing Street could retreat in times of peril, at a cost of ?126.3 million.29 (#litres_trial_promo) By 2005, threats against the life of the prime minister had become an almost daily occurrence. The intelligence warnings of assassination attempts often landed on the desk of David Blunkett, the home secretary, who observed with delightful sangfroid that these plots did not worry him unduly – unless they related to an event at which he was likely to be sitting next to Tony Blair. Towards the end of Blair’s administration, simply moving outside the Whitehall government complex became a problem. Alastair Campbell gazed at the vast prime ministerial convoy of armoured vehicles proofed against nerve gas, the motorcycle outriders stopping the traffic amid a cacophony of wailing sirens, and wondered how many votes were lost every time this baroque parade of vehicles took the prime minister to the airport. The personal threat to the prime minister is at its worst overseas. In October 2001, Blair set off on a trip to Russia, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and finally Egypt. The BBC ignored security guidance and announced the prime minister’s destinations to the world, thereby increasing security concerns. As a result, Blair’s entourage had to be ‘surrounded by outriders with machine guns and tanks carrying anti-aircraft missiles’.30 (#litres_trial_promo) On their return to the UK, Blair’s team told the BBC director of news that Number 10 was ‘exasperated by their continued reporting of his movements’.31 (#litres_trial_promo) Blair remains a high-profile target. In 2014, MI5 planted a listening device in the car of one terrorism suspect and listened in on his conversations for two weeks after searching the vehicle and finding Blair’s home address on a scrap of paper folded inside a Versace glasses case.32 (#litres_trial_promo) MI5 had previously established covert surveillance of Ishaq Kanmi, the self-proclaimed leader of al-Qaeda in Britain. His stated aims included ‘the elimination of political leaders and capitalists Blair and Brown’.33 (#litres_trial_promo) In the twenty-first century, British prime ministers value their intelligence and security services partly because they keep them alive. No less worrying are the threats to visiting heads of state. Each premier on a state visit to Downing Street, whether from Russia, Israel, Sri Lanka or Saudi Arabia, has brought in his wake an exotic trail of would-be assassins. The grim prelude to every visit is the backstairs diplomacy of death. As the leaders make their way around London, they are shadowed by ambulances carrying copious supplies of their blood group. The most vexed discussions concern the intelligence precautions involved in each visit, with every drain and culvert along the routes taken by visiting dignitaries being searched for explosives. Defensive weaponry is an issue, with each American president asking to bring with him an increasingly formidable array of automatic weapons and ground-to-air missiles. George W. Bush was denied permission to bring an SUV containing an M134D mini-gun in an armoured pop-up turret. MI5 routinely regard the US president’s secret service as a more dangerous threat to the British public than potential assassins.34 (#litres_trial_promo) Death has hovered over Downing Street for more than a century. While attacks and plots have become steadily more serious in recent years, enterprising amateurs have always abounded, and earlier prime ministers were more accessible to the public. On 28 August 1939, panic swept through a crowd of protesters immediately outside the door of 10 Downing Street when a London clerk called Laurence Hislam opened a small suitcase and scattered its contents, which resembled the deadly devices beloved of bearded bomb-throwing anarchists. Mayhem ensued, until the crowd realised that the ‘bombs’ were actually large black rubber balls inscribed with the message ‘Peace Conference Now’. Hislam was in fact a pacifist protesting against the mounting international crisis and the spectre of another major war in Europe. The police led him away, and despite his defence that he acted ‘in the cause of peace’, the court sentenced him to six months’ hard labour.35 (#litres_trial_promo) No prime minister illustrates this interface between premiers and personal hazard more than Churchill. Britain’s wartime leader accepted the advice of the Special Operations Executive that assassinating Hitler would be counter-productive, since his strategy was increasingly incompetent and damaging to Germany. However, in 1943 Churchill did approve an assassination attempt against Mussolini, with female agents being dropped into Italy, together with aggressive kill missions against Rommel and other senior German generals. Meanwhile, lesser fascists were earmarked for mere bribery, with an initial ?100,000 personally approved by Churchill and then passed over in a large bag to members of Franco’s circle on a Spanish golf course as an inducement to keep Spain out of the Second World War.36 (#litres_trial_promo) Eden was appalled by the operation, but when more money was required for Franco, Churchill eagerly minuted in red ink: ‘Yes Indeed. WSC.’37 (#litres_trial_promo) Britain’s wartime leader was oddly relaxed about his own personal safety, despite more than a dozen serious attempts on his life. Hitler certainly ordered his multiple secret services to target Churchill, the oddest such operation being a plot to attack Allied leaders at the Tehran Conference in 1943 using a team of Nazi agents transported by camel.38 (#litres_trial_promo) Much of Churchill’s remarkable ability to survive the attempts on his life must be attributed to good fortune and his ever-vigilant bodyguard, Detective Inspector Walter Thompson. Occasionally Churchill insisted on carrying his own revolver, but for the most part brazen and carefree with only a single bodyguard, he travelled over 200,000 miles across Europe, America and the Middle East in the course of the war. No British prime minister will ever do that again, so in many ways Churchill stands at the turning point of security and intelligence in Downing Street, representing both the first of a new wave of premiers who exploited intelligence properly, but also the last of a dying breed. Twenty prime ministers have led Britain since 1909. From Herbert Asquith to Theresa May and from Ramsay MacDonald to Gordon Brown, these premiers have held diverging political views, possessed wildly different leadership styles, and have confronted the full spectrum of problems, threats and crises. This book examines each prime minister in turn. It traces their personal approaches to intelligence and uses each premiership as a vehicle to explore the most pressing national security issues of the day. It reveals that despite the vagaries of personality and politics, intelligence has become increasingly central to all prime ministers. This was not always the case. Back in the first decade of the twentieth century, the secret world was alien to Asquith. Churchill and Attlee addressed this problem together, and forged a quiet revolution. Now, as a result, the prime minister presides personally over an organised intelligence community operating at the heart of Whitehall. This book traces that secret service journey from the periphery to the centre of power. PART ONE CREATING SECRET SERVICE (#u2edb29e4-9f5d-578c-8bf9-8979eb3f3d09) 1 Herbert Asquith, David Lloyd George and Andrew Bonar Law (1908–1923) (#u2edb29e4-9f5d-578c-8bf9-8979eb3f3d09) A rumour spread next day in true war-time fashion that Lord Chetwynd had caught three German spies trying to signal the Zeppelin with lights, and had shot them out of hand. David Lloyd George1 (#litres_trial_promo) The British intelligence system was already immense by the dawn of the twentieth century. The entire British Empire, sprawling across more than half the globe, served as an intelligence machine – a veritable ‘empire of intelligence’.2 (#litres_trial_promo) It depended on information of every kind to project British rule in remote places. Romanticised in the works of Rudyard Kipling, intelligence was about amateur imperial adventurers, revelling in deceit and subterfuge. Unlike today, espionage was conducted informally by local agents, eccentric travellers and scholars. Lawrence of Arabia and the legendary team of British archaeologist-spies at Carchemish, working across the Turkey­–Syria border, typified the way great-power rivalry in the Middle East and Asia mixed with academic debates about how archaeology might change understandings of the Bible. Importantly, scholarly research was not merely a cover for secret service work. Intelligence was considered to be every kind of information, including that obtained by peculiar scholars who spoke many languages, collected eggs, bulbs and butterflies, and mixed ‘comfortably and innocently’ with the local population. Indeed, at the turn of the twentieth century, British officials in Mesopotamia feared an archaeologist-gap and urged the India Office to contact learned societies which could send more scholar-spies to buttress British interests.3 (#litres_trial_promo) India itself, the vast jewel of the empire, depended on spies too. It became an extraordinary ‘empire of information’, allowing just over a thousand British civil servants to superintend close to 280 million people.4 (#litres_trial_promo) An empire of information, in some form, existed at home too. New public health initiatives and social programmes meant the state knew much more about its people than ever before. Meanwhile Irish nationalists and bomb-throwing anarchists from the Continent had forced the Metropolitan Police to develop the world’s first ‘Special Branch’ in 1883. Inevitably perhaps, by the first decade of the twentieth century, Special Branch had broadened its net beyond Fenians and anarchists to collect intelligence on possible foreign spies, anti-colonial agitators, suffragettes, union leaders, pacifists, and even those with radical views on sex.5 (#litres_trial_promo) Nevertheless, these developments were more about keeping authoritarian surveillance at arm’s length from the British public. Mysterious battles with Russian spies in Central Asia were reassuringly remote, while the creation of a small Special Branch of intrepid detectives to counter terrorism was seen as a low-key alternative to the sort of harsh and repressive security legislation preferred in Europe. Accordingly, intelligence remained a matter for distant vice-consuls travelling to Samarkand, or detective sergeants in Whitechapel. It rarely resonated at the centre of British government. More rarely still did a prime minister take a personal interest in espionage. All this began to change over the next decade. Bizarrely, it was literary fashion which drove the transformation of British intelligence, thrusting it towards the heart of government for the first time. A wave of popular Edwardian ‘invasion literature’ forced Herbert Asquith, an otherwise uninterested Liberal prime minister more focused on progressive domestic reforms, to take notice of foreign espionage. Acting only under pressure, Asquith set in train a course which would fundamentally alter the landscape of British intelligence forever. The intelligence revolution may have been forged by Churchill and Attlee, but the first sparks came through the unlikely Asquith. Nonetheless, despite the expansion of espionage during the First World War and greater interest on the part of Asquith’s successor David Lloyd George, it took time and endless trouble before successive prime ministers learned to use intelligence effectively. Fiction paved the long pathway to the creation of a modern British intelligence service. During the nineteenth century, a stream of often sensational crime novels fed a growing public fascination with detection, police work and science. This generated cultural change, gradually eroding anxieties about government surveillance. Created by writers as diverse as Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, fictional detectives gradually became heroic figures to be worshipped, rather than bogeymen associated with distasteful and un-British authoritarianism.6 (#litres_trial_promo) Journalists, who often exchanged information with real policemen, accelerated this transformation, helping to create real-life detectives who enjoyed a similar cult status.7 (#litres_trial_promo) William Melville, who became head of Special Branch, was one example. He famously foiled several anarchist attacks, including the ‘Jubilee plot’ against Queen Victoria in 1887 and another dastardly scheme known as the ‘Walsall plot’, in which anarchists from the West Midlands sought to manufacture a bomb. Many now believe that he created the latter plot himself for mere self-glorification.8 (#litres_trial_promo) Over three hundred spy novels went into print between 1901 and 1914, mostly focused on the ‘German Menace’. This new fiction effectively rebranded itself as a barely concealed form of ‘true crime’ writing, supposedly based on the patriotic leaking of government secrets. In 1903, Erskine Childers published The Riddle of the Sands, which narrated the summer sailing adventures of two young British men along the East Frisian coast who stumble upon a German plot to invade England with a flotilla of barges. Childers claimed to be offering the British people nothing less than a warning of what was to come, and Rudyard Kipling urged the public to support him in taking a firm stand against the ‘shameless Hun’.9 (#litres_trial_promo) The story was improbable – the German admiralty had long written off the possibility of an invasion from East Frisia – but the hapless Royal Navy was forced to investigate the claims regardless.10 (#litres_trial_promo) Members of Parliament from constituencies on the east coast, the closest part of Britain to Germany, bombarded the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Selborne, with difficult questions. In response, he ordered the Naval Intelligence Division to write a detailed report on the invasion plan outlined by Childers. After reconnaissance of the Frisian coast, the report concluded that the lack of railways and roads, together with the shallowness of the water and general lack of facilities, made a secret invasion from there impossible. ‘As a novel it is excellent; as a war plan it is rubbish,’ insisted Lord Louis Battenberg, the director of naval intelligence. To Childers’ barely disguised delight, the Kaiser banned the book in Germany. Childers also claimed that when he next went sailing in the Baltic, German spies dogged his every move.11 (#litres_trial_promo) Spy fiction developed a darker side, shifting its focus closer to home, portraying immigrants and foreign visitors as the hidden hand of subversion. The new trope was Germans as a hidden fifth column already within Britain. Most active of all was a mischievous thriller-writer called William le Queux. He almost single-handedly created a fifth-column panic and then demanded the creation of a domestic security service to combat the undercover ‘German Menace’, with which the day of reckoning would surely come.12 (#litres_trial_promo) Le Queux’s The Invasion of 1910 became the most influential of these books. Published in 1906, it told of German armies over-running the country with the help of spies and saboteurs. Le Queux admitted to a political purpose, explaining his intention to illustrate how poorly British defences would stand up to this sort of sneak attack. He also insisted that the content of his book was factually correct, and had been informed by conversations with ‘the authorities’.13 (#litres_trial_promo) William le Queux posed as an international espionage expert, but was in fact nothing of the sort. Instead, he was a tireless and well-paid pulp-fiction writer who produced five novels a year until his death in 1927.14 (#litres_trial_promo)The Invasion of 1910 sold more than a million copies, and publicists at the Daily Mail, which possessed serialisation rights, sent columns of men marching up Oxford Street dressed in Prussian uniforms, complete with bloodstained gloves, carrying sandwich boards that advertised the book.15 (#litres_trial_promo) An inevitable flood of literary emulators hit the presses as le Queux’s royalties rolled in. Not to be outdone, le Queux responded in 1909 with Spies of the Kaiser, which insisted that no fewer than 5,000 German undercover operatives were at work in Britain. This was a new idea. A whole undercover army, not just a few spies and saboteurs, were apparently biding their time until the Fatherland told them to retrieve their weapons from a series of arms dumps in the British countryside. No less important, the novel also claimed to offer the inside story of intrepid British detectives working with agents to uncover these foreign networks.16 (#litres_trial_promo) The British public were whipped into a frenzy. Politicians who wanted to expand Britain’s relatively small peacetime army jumped on the bandwagon. In 1908 Lord Roberts, Britain’s most distinguished soldier, claimed there were 80,000 trained undercover German soldiers in England ready to assist in the event of an invasion.17 (#litres_trial_promo) Newspapers offered ?10 to members of the public who reported sightings of suspicious activities that they could pass on to le Queux so he could ‘supplement his investigations’. Unsurprisingly, they were inundated with information, and soon it seemed a supposed German saboteur had been spotted in every town in the land,18 (#litres_trial_promo) including some unfortunate Foreign Office clerical staff holidaying on the east coast.19 (#litres_trial_promo) The government was annoyed by the obvious political scheming by advocates of increased arms spending. In 1906, Asquith’s predecessor as prime minister, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, rose to his feet in Parliament to denounce le Queux as a ‘pernicious scaremonger’ whose stories risked provoking an unnecessary war with Germany.20 (#litres_trial_promo) Despite prime ministerial condemnation, several key figures in government worked hand in glove with le Queux. James Edmonds, head of a fledgling military intelligence unit called MO(5), maintained that Berlin had an extensive ring of operatives in Britain. Edmonds had long been nagging a dismissive Richard Haldane, secretary of state for war under both Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith, about the shortcomings of British counter-espionage. He therefore found le Queux’s activities more than welcome.21 (#litres_trial_promo) Indeed, much of the evidence that he presented to his masters came from le Queux, who in turn said that he had received it from concerned members of the public. There had only been five cases of German espionage reported in 1907, but unsurprisingly by 1908 this had risen to forty-eight. Edmonds created a helpful map of agent sightings. Perhaps equally unsurprisingly, this was soon leaked to the press. He also recruited William Melville, the former head of Special Branch, who while a talented agent-runner, had a reputation for embellishing his stories.22 (#litres_trial_promo) By 1909, nefarious German agents were apparently hiding behind almost every bush in Britain. Asquith, however, had other things on his mind. His overwhelming, and rather challenging, priority was to take on and reform the House of Lords, which had consistently blocked his progressive agenda. The time and energy he devoted to this issue only increased further when the Lords famously rejected his government’s budget in 1909. But with the public suffering from spy-fever, the prime minister now had to take note of intelligence matters. As chancellor of the exchequer and in his early months as prime minister, Asquith had already chaired a senior committee to consider the invasion threat in response to pressure from Roberts and le Queux. His report demolished their theories, and showed a surprise attack to be impossible.23 (#litres_trial_promo) Nonetheless, still under immense public pressure, in 1909 Asquith asked the Committee of Imperial Defence to consider the danger of foreign agents operating in the UK. All this accelerated an important cultural change away from the idea that counter-espionage at home was authoritarian and un-British.24 (#litres_trial_promo) Although flawed and bogus intelligence reports shaped its ultimate findings, Asquith swiftly sanctioned the committee’s recommendation to establish a new Secret Service Bureau. This top-secret decision – very few people knew about the bureau’s existence – fundamentally altered the landscape of British intelligence forever. British espionage was nothing new, but its formalisation and growing proximity to Downing Street marked the beginning of a more organised and centralised intelligence system. It was not yet, though, an intelligence community linked to Downing Street, and early prime ministers remained unable or unwilling to engage with the secret world particularly closely. The Secret Service Bureau was comprised of two branches. MO5(g) was the domestic branch, responsible for counter-espionage, and would soon come to be known as ‘MI5’, or the security service. It inherited a number of army counter-intelligence officers, and was led by Captain Vernon Kell, deputy to James Edmonds at MO(5). Kell went on to serve continuously in the role for more than twenty years. Ever present around intelligence matters for nearly half a century, Winston Churchill, as home secretary, oversaw Kell’s appointment. Adding a symmetry to Kell’s long career as spymaster, Churchill, when prime minister, would remove him from office in 1940.25 (#litres_trial_promo) The Secret Service Bureau also had a foreign branch. Initially called MI1c, it soon restyled itself MI6, and was headed by the remarkable figure of Sir Mansfield Cumming, a retired naval officer. Despite losing his leg in a traffic accident in France, Cumming continued to run MI6, speeding down the corridors of Whitehall by planting his wooden leg firmly on a modified child’s scooter. MI5 was a small organisation and MI6 even smaller, but a key change had occurred. Hitherto, individual government departments, especially the India Office, had gathered intelligence locally and conducted espionage for their own purposes. Now Whitehall had an interdepartmental intelligence machine at the centre, delivering a ‘service’ to all government departments and anointed with the cult of specialness.26 (#litres_trial_promo) After 1909, Asquith’s government went further. Harassed by continued public concern about nefarious German activities, it introduced the trappings of a secret state that previous successive governments had resisted for a century. Between 1909 and 1911, Asquith not only created the Secret Service Bureau, but also passed a draconian Official Secrets Act and allowed for much wider mail interception, something a Liberal government had banned as a diabolical infringement of liberties some fifty years before.27 (#litres_trial_promo) The new Official Secrets Act, encouraged by Edmonds of MO(5), also helped the government to crack down on the press.28 (#litres_trial_promo) Asquith, a facilitator rather than a dictatorial prime minister, also set up a new committee under Winston Churchill to consider how Britain would tackle ‘Aliens in Time of War’. With foreigners and exiles at the heart of this scare, the government created a register of aliens living in Britain. By 1913, it would have 11,000 Germans on this list, and had already prepared internment legislation.29 (#litres_trial_promo) Notwithstanding domestic spy-fever, on the eve of the First World War much British intelligence activity lay elsewhere. Intrepid consuls, attach?s and military officers carried out most of the spying on German armament programmes, while MI6 relied on the collection of specialist journals by travellers, or open observations, rather than actual espionage. Despite a lack of coordinated assessment, this material gradually filtered up into the higher reaches of government and influenced Britain’s diplomatic and strategic behaviour.30 (#litres_trial_promo) The most immediate physical threat to Asquith came not from swarms of German spies, but from other quarters, notably the suffragette movement. In September 1909, two women were busy improving their shooting skills at a rifle range at 92 Tottenham Court Road with the rather improbable name of ‘Fairyland’. They intended to assassinate the prime minister, who was a firm opponent of votes for women. The two would-be assassins planned to join a group of suffragettes who had been picketing the gates of Parliament for eight weeks. Asquith passed them frequently, and therefore presented a tempting close-range target. Fortunately for the prime minister, the police received a tip-off. The informant was a Mrs Moore, a member of the Women’s Freedom League, but also a close friend of Asquith’s sister-in-law. She was an advocate of peaceful protest, and spent a great deal of time trying to dissuade her fellow suffragettes from violent acts. Moore produced a letter from one of the two women who had been practising with a revolver.31 (#litres_trial_promo) She refused to name names, but the police made enquiries at the shooting range, whose owner, Henry Morley, told them that two suffragettes had indeed been practising with a Browning automatic pistol. Their alarm was increased by the knowledge that the same range, and the same type of pistol, had been used only months earlier by an assassin who had killed Sir William Curzon-Wylie, aide to the secretary of state for India. Although undercover officers hung about for some days afterwards, neither woman returned. This left Asquith’s government with a dilemma familiar to later administrations dealing with terrorist threats. They knew full well that there would be serious recriminations if they did nothing and the prime minister was assassinated. The police did not remove the protesters from outside Parliament, but increased the number of officers there instead. They did not wish to give prominence to the idea of assassination, fearing that publicity might ‘act on the minds of these half-insane women, and might suggest effectively the commission of the very act which we wish to prevent’. Moreover, the removal of the pickets would be looked on by the women as an act of violence and injustice, and would ‘make them furious and more ready to commit such a crime’. In addition, the government thought that if there was an assassin, it would be easier to stop her if police knew she would be amongst the picketers, rather than walking ‘up and down between the House of Parliament and Downing Street at the hour when the P.M. may be expected to drive down’. Thanks to Mrs Moore, the prime minister remained able to pass in and out of Parliament unscathed.32 (#litres_trial_promo) Recent research shows that the suffragettes included some notably dangerous groups, who fire-bombed churches and later sent a letter-bomb to Lloyd George. Some of the more violent women would go on to become active supporters of the extreme right, including Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts.33 (#litres_trial_promo) Yet, remarkably, Asquith and all his successors through to the Second World War remained largely unprotected. It was an act of assassination that finally triggered the outbreak of war in August 1914. Intelligence now had a more crucial – and real – role to play. The new secret services quickly pounced upon the small German espionage network in London, and rounded up all twenty-two known agents. The authorities had been assiduously following this spy ring, run from a barber shop in London by a naturalised German, since 1911. In an early intelligence success story, close monitoring had prevented the ring from passing useful information on to Berlin. Several hundred people were placed under surveillance. Predictably, the biggest problem was public paranoia. In the first two weeks of the war, the Metropolitan Police were forced to investigate thousands of people, with little to show for it. The newspapers followed this eagerly, and noted with satisfaction that by the end of November 1914 there had been over 100,000 reports of espionage, with 6,000 homes entered and searched. Popular enthusiasm for war, combined with paranoia about spies, forced the Asquith government to look tough. Eleven German spies were shot at the Tower of London, a location chosen for its sinister appearance and reputation. More people were executed there during the First World War than under the Tudors. The amateurish German spies were not difficult to capture. They used lemon juice and peppermint oil instead of ink to render their reports to Berlin invisible, but were often arrested in possession of pen nibs corroded by the acidic lemon juice.34 (#litres_trial_promo) Such tales allowed le Queux to continue to pump out his pulp-fiction spy thrillers. He maintained his phoney reputation as a spymaster to the end, and even now some of his relatives insist that he was assassinated by Russian agents in 1927.35 (#litres_trial_promo) No one was safe from the paranoid public. Not even Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the Scottish architect and designer, who dared to sketch in the Suffolk village of Walberswick, close to the sea; or the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, who sat down with a notebook to write ‘The Lark Ascending’ on cliffs near Margate. Both attracted vigorous police attention. Any Continental connection became a form of contagion. A Polish girl, who was a friend of the Asquith family, was fired from her teaching job simply out of fear that she might be mistaken for a German spy.36 (#litres_trial_promo) The Asquith government stepped up internment, rounding up some 60,000 Germans living in Britain.37 (#litres_trial_promo) Under popular pressure, and perhaps against his better judgement, the prime minister personally emphasised that all non-naturalised adult males ‘should, for their own safety, and that of the community, be segregated and interned, or, if over military age, repatriated’.38 (#litres_trial_promo) The First World War triggered Britain’s tangible intelligence changes. MI5 had only fifteen staff prior to the conflict, but it soon expanded. The Post Office also assumed an intelligence function. It grew into a Censor’s Office that employed over 2,000 officials, each steaming, scanning and resealing some 150 letters per day. Britain now boasted a serious domestic surveillance apparatus.39 (#litres_trial_promo) By the last year of the war, censorship employed 4,871 people, a sizeable engine of surveillance.40 (#litres_trial_promo) In the empire, MI5 worked closely with security agencies in Delhi to thwart German plots to promote revolts amongst imperial subjects. With good intelligence to hand, Asquith’s government allowed the German Foreign Ministry to continue its ludicrously ambitious plans to promote insurrection on the subcontinent, content that they were unlikely to succeed.41 (#litres_trial_promo) Overseas, MI6 remained weak. The majority of important international intelligence instead came from a revival of codebreaking. For at least a decade before 1914, the War Office had plans to recreate a codebreaking centre if a military crisis occurred, and both the army and navy did so independently in August 1914. Although they initially cooperated, differences developed in both personality and approach, rendering any harmony short-lived. Nonetheless, they still managed to break German, French and American codes, alongside a host of other streams of high-level communications. Starting from scratch in 1914, this was an amazing feat. The Admiralty’s famous codebreaking unit, codenamed ‘Room 40’, was the more effective; directed by Reginald ‘Blinker’ Hall, it pioneered many of the scientific methods used by Bletchley Park two decades later.42 (#litres_trial_promo) The First World War may have transformed British intelligence collection, but Asquith still took little interest. The prime minister was in fact deeply uninterested in war, strategy or intelligence, although he found time for bridge, lavish dinner parties and country weekends. He was not lacking in energy or application, but his focus was elsewhere, not least on his mistress Venetia Stanley, more than thirty years his junior. Asquith wrote to her over five hundred times during his period as war leader, sometimes as often as three times a day. The qualities that had made him a good peacetime prime minister were unhelpful in wartime. He was an affable chairman of the board, able to reconcile differences of opinion and find compromises. But he failed to appreciate the value of some of his partners in the wartime Liberal–Conservative coalition, and above all he failed to take hard decisions that were required for the vigorous prosecution of the war. He offered little guidance and support to the military, which was then led by Field Marshal Lord Kitchener.43 (#litres_trial_promo) Intelligence proved important in the context of Ireland. Again, however, Asquith seemed broadly unaware of troubling developments, and instead engaged intermittently with particular incidents. The British had failed to properly penetrate the dissident movement, so human sources inside Ireland were few, and their reports fragmented and contradictory.44 (#litres_trial_promo) Consequently, little warning of the 1916 Easter Rising came through these channels. Room 40 provided more solid intelligence. Decrypted secret German cables from America gave important intelligence on the international activities of Irish nationalists, including details relating to the Rising, during which Berlin assisted the exiled Irish nationalist Roger Casement in fomenting rebellion. Casement’s dealings were not news to the prime minister. Although the flow of intelligence to Downing Street was patchy, Asquith had enjoyed a stream of incriminating material on Casement.45 (#litres_trial_promo) What appeared to be an intelligence bonanza turned out to have come from an untrustworthy source, Casement’s bisexual manservant and lover, who was ‘a liar, a blackmailer and a fantasist’. When Casement found out about his betrayal he publicly (but falsely) alleged a British plot to murder him. Although the incident embarrassed Asquith’s government, it was enough for MI5 to open a file on Casement and unearth more details of his nationalist scheming – and ultimately his German connections.46 (#litres_trial_promo) Room 40 intercepted more than thirty cables dealing with German assistance to Ireland during the first two years of the war.47 (#litres_trial_promo) The codebreakers not only gave full warning of the Easter Rising, but also revealed Germany’s plans to send weapons to Ireland in an attempt to divert British attention from the Western Front, allowing the Royal Navy to intercept a German U-boat carrying Casement to Ireland and the arms shipment to be captured. The signals intelligence, though, was only sent to a small military circle. It seemingly did not reach the politicians, even Asquith.48 (#litres_trial_promo) Nor did it reach the authorities in Dublin. The sorry episode reflects the perennial problem of using signals intelligence: it is difficult to do so without compromising the source, thereby leading to a reluctance to share, even inside Westminster. More intriguingly, there is evidence that the British authorities deliberately allowed the Easter Rising to go ahead in order to justify repression of the Irish dissidents. Under interrogation, Casement offered to publicly call off the rebellion, but this was declined. Instead, he was told that ‘it’s a festering sore’, and it was ‘much better it should come to a head’.49 (#litres_trial_promo) Either way, the Easter Rising failed. Despite the work of Room 40, Asquith experienced the rebellion as ‘a real bolt from the blue’ – albeit one with a ‘comic side’.50 (#litres_trial_promo) His wife Margot confessed in her diary that ‘none of us had any idea what had really happened’.51 (#litres_trial_promo) Upon hearing the news of the Easter Rising, and in the midst of a conscription crisis, the prime minister simply said, ‘Well, that’s something,’ and went to bed. Intelligence seemingly had little impact in Number 10. Such nonchalance belies Asquith’s growing interest in Irish affairs, which had been a key issue in the months prior to war. He subsequently took on the office of Irish secretary himself, and headed off to Dublin to try unsuccessfully to sort things out.52 (#litres_trial_promo) General John Maxwell, appointed by Asquith to force a military solution on a political problem, drew on Special Branch intelligence to persuade the prime minister that the case against every executed rebel leader had been overwhelming.53 (#litres_trial_promo) They included Roger Casement. Partly because signals intelligence had thoroughly convinced the authorities of his treacherous links with Germany, Casement was hanged in Pentonville Prison in August 1916. To counter calls for clemency, the ‘Casement Diaries’, containing what were regarded as shocking descriptions of Casement’s homosexual exploits, were leaked by Blinker Hall to influence the trial. Previously, many Irish nationalists had mistakenly insisted that these diaries were forgeries.54 (#litres_trial_promo) This episode underlines the long history of the selective use of intelligence to influence public opinion. Meanwhile, the seemingly directionless war strategy left the cabinet unimpressed. Discontent also arose over the quality of information reaching them. Asquith had formed an ultimately unpopular coalition government, with Andrew Bonar Law as his Tory partner. In early September 1915, Bonar Law pressed the prime minister to make changes to the leadership of the war effort. He sought the resurrection of a General Staff at the War Office, with the hope that this would result in better strategic advice to cabinet. Nothing was done until 22 September, when Kitchener was conveniently absent. The Tories then took the lead and insisted on a smaller and more active War Council, together with the provision of better intelligence to cabinet by the General Staff. Asquith was finally forced to write to Kitchener, insisting on an improved flow of intelligence to the centre. He appointed General Archibald Murray as the new Chief of the Imperial General Staff, but beyond that none of the suggested reforms were implemented, and Asquith did not follow up on the cabinet’s requests for more intelligence.55 (#litres_trial_promo) The Asquith coalition government disintegrated in late 1916, as a result of its own incompetence and disorder. Lacking personal authority, Asquith had spent much of his time assembling factions and alliances. There was little planning, and astonishingly, letters sent by the prime minister to the King after each meeting formed the only record of cabinet discussions. When Bonar Law joined the coalition in 1915 he had been amazed by the lack of any method or even agenda for cabinet meetings. The failure of the Gallipoli campaign at the start of 1916 accelerated the decline of the Asquith government. Mercifully for the war effort, in June 1916 Lord Kitchener, the aged secretary of state for war, died at sea off the Orkneys in mysterious circumstances, an event that many attributed to a bewildering mixture of German, Irish or Russian saboteurs. He was replaced by the energetic David Lloyd George. At the end of the year, however, both Asquith and Lloyd George resigned in short order, while Bonar Law declined to form a government. Lloyd George became head of a new coalition two days later, establishing a Supreme War Council. Neither Asquith nor Bonar Law was mentally equipped to handle the range of decisions required by modern war. The main challenge for Lloyd George, now and for the rest of the war, was to try to wrest strategic control of the conflict from the military chiefs, a task that he never quite completed.56 (#litres_trial_promo) Asquith had been notably detached from the business of war. He may have presided over the creation of the Secret Service Bureau and the rapid expansion of every kind of intelligence after 1914, but it had interested him very little. By contrast, in December 1916, David Lloyd George became the first prime minister to embrace intelligence, albeit often in an amateurish manner. This was partly to do with his nature, for he was by temperament a man of enormous energy and sudden impulses. But his initial mistakes also reflected the fact that British intelligence lacked a central brain. No system existed for sifting and interpreting intelligence for top policymakers. Despite a quantum leap in the organisation of Downing Street, and the creation of the Cabinet Office in late 1916, intelligence was deliberately left out. As a result, Lloyd George lacked context and made emotional responses to the raw intelligence he received – with unhappy results.57 (#litres_trial_promo) His previous interactions with intelligence had been in the context of the ongoing spy-mania. In May 1915, as minister of munitions, he sought to confront the problem of factory explosions. Such disasters were almost invariably the result of primitive manufacturing processes, running at maximum capacity, which did not privilege safety. Like many others, however, Lloyd George was obsessed with the danger of the German ‘hidden hand’, and blamed saboteurs. His staff were allowed to set up a counter-intelligence unit to ferret out these imaginary enemies. Given the name P.M.S.2, it failed to find any spies, and slowly shifted its attention to trade union activity in the munitions factories.58 (#litres_trial_promo) Lloyd George later admitted that he and some of his friends had deliberately encouraged rumours of saboteurs within the British munitions programme. This included the vast shell-filling factory at Chilwell on the banks of the River Trent in Nottingham, the largest concentration of high explosives anywhere in Britain. In January 1916, a Zeppelin was reported to be hunting up and down the Trent, supposedly hoping to bomb the factory. The next day, rumours circulated that Lloyd George’s friend Lord Chetwynd, who ran the huge complex, had caught three German spies in the act of trying to guide the Zeppelin to its target with hand-held torches and had shot them. Chetwynd exploited the false rumour by asking a labourer to dig three graves on the hillside by night, placing an anonymous black post at the head of each. This, recalled Lloyd George, ‘turned the rumour into unquestioned history’ and discouraged the curious from prying around the factory. Predictably, when it suffered a catastrophic explosion later in the war, it was blamed on yet more spies.59 (#litres_trial_promo) In late 1916, shortly before Lloyd George became prime minister, the Germans asked the American ambassador in Berlin to explain to President Woodrow Wilson that they were ‘anxious to make peace’. But they did not wish to appear weak, so they secretly asked the United States, which was then neutral, to make a ‘spontaneous’ offer of mediation. Unfortunately for Germany, Britain’s Room 40 had decrypted the American message. When Lloyd George read it, he wrongly assumed that it signified collaboration between America and Germany. With the cabinet in disarray, and lacking intelligence-assessment machinery, the impulsive Lloyd George decided to act alone. He warned the American press against interference by Washington, and asserted that the war must be a ‘fight to the finish’. In reality, President Wilson was immersed in an election campaign and had no interest in peace initiatives at this point. Either way, diplomacy was not Lloyd George’s responsibility. When rebuked by the foreign secretary for meddling, he used the decrypts to defend himself. Far worse, he also alluded to secret information when explaining his actions in Parliament. Even as he assumed office in Downing Street in December 1916, more decrypts crossed his desk which he wrongly – and amateurishly – assumed suggested that the Kaiser and Wilson were still working together. This was not an auspicious beginning, and pointed to a wider failure around the assessment of intelligence at the centre of government.60 (#litres_trial_promo) Lloyd George brought his undoubted talents for planning and organisation to the highest level of government. The most important part of this reform was the creation of a professional secretariat by Maurice Hankey, a former Royal Marine officer who became the first cabinet secretary. His background was in intelligence – as a junior officer assigned to HMS Ramillies, the flagship of the Mediterranean Fleet, he had engaged in unofficial reconnaissance. By 1902, he had joined the staff of the Naval Intelligence Department in Whitehall. An outstanding officer who spoke many languages, he was the perfect administrator. In 1909, he had written a report for the Committee of Imperial Defence that proposed a Secret Service Bureau.61 (#litres_trial_promo) Now, in the newly created Cabinet Office, he was joined by Thomas Jones. Once described as ‘a disguised Bolshevik whom Lloyd George had discovered somewhere in a Welsh coal pit’, Jones was nevertheless an equally formidable organiser. It is difficult to capture the chaos that surrounded cabinet affairs before their arrival, and it is no exaggeration to say that they invented modern cabinet government.62 (#litres_trial_promo) Hankey’s reforms were a triumph. They became central to the development of a modern British interdepartmental coordination system, with its labyrinthine sub-committees and orderly minutes focused on Downing Street. Cabinet meetings were no longer rambling conversations amongst twenty-three people, with no agenda. Instead, they became businesslike discussions at which decisions were made and properly recorded. Yet the reforms were a tragedy for secret service. Hankey created a central mechanism for everything except intelligence. Jones, his deputy, recalled that he had been insistent that the new Cabinet Secretariat should not become ‘an Intelligence department’,63 (#litres_trial_promo) and although the design of the war cabinet at first envisaged ‘a comprehensive and regular gathering of intelligence’, this never happened.64 (#litres_trial_promo) The lack of a central clearing house for assessing intelligence had been a constant criticism of government for some time, so while Hankey is celebrated as a moderniser of the government machine, he simultaneously retarded the British intelligence community by twenty years. The idea of a central intelligence machine located alongside Downing Street had to await a further world war, and the arrival of Winston Churchill as premier.65 (#litres_trial_promo) Lloyd George’s personal record as a user of decrypts did not improve during the war. He was often left to deduce the story from individual intercepts, or ‘flimsies’ as they were called, because of the thin paper on which they were recorded, that arrived without context or comment. He was also given little guidance on the need for security. Thus in February 1917, when the American ambassador, Walter Page, visited Downing Street to convey a message from President Wilson, the prime minister could not restrain himself. He boasted that he had already seen Wilson’s message, attributing this to a leak. Page thought it possible that the telegram had been obtained by a ‘British spy service’ from an unreliable American official. In any case, knowing Wilson’s hatred of leaks, he did not inform Washington. Indeed, the president was obsessively secretive, and actually insisted on deciphering his more sensitive telegrams himself, sometimes with the help of his wife. The realisation that Lloyd George was reading his every word would not have endeared London to him.66 (#litres_trial_promo) Surprisingly, even as Lloyd George put their work in peril, British codebreakers delivered the greatest intelligence coup of the First World War. They had intercepted what would soon become famous as the ‘Zimmermann telegram’. In this amazing message, Germany’s foreign minister, Arthur Zimmermann, promised Mexico the reward of three of America’s southern states if she joined the German cause and declared war on her northern neighbour, the US. The message was one of the most secret of the war, and was supposed to have been taken by safe hand on a German submarine. But the vessel broke down before leaving port, forcing Berlin to trust the safety of its ciphers. The Zimmermann telegram is a rare example of a single piece of intelligence changing the course of history. The way in which the British exposed it was elegant, but had nothing to do with Downing Street. Instead, it was a cooperative venture between Room 40 and the Foreign Office – and perhaps for that reason it was not bungled. Lloyd George, doubtless kept abreast given his strong interest in American orientations, was a mere observer. President Woodrow Wilson had won his recent election campaign on the slogan ‘He kept us out of war’. But, provoked by the Zimmermann telegram, alongside Berlin’s aggressive submarine policy, he declared war on Germany in April 1917.67 (#litres_trial_promo) In his memoirs, Lloyd George records his gratitude to the codebreakers of Room 40 and their ‘uncanny efficiency in the unearthing of German secrets’.68 (#litres_trial_promo) By the end of the war everyone seemed to be aware of the British secret service. The famous German philosopher Hannah Arendt, for example, was fascinated by the rise of Britain’s professional spies. She wrote that after the First World War, British secret services ‘began to attract England’s best sons, who preferred serving mysterious forces all over the world to serving the common good of their country’, adding that as a result ‘the stage seemed to be set for all possible horrors’. However, she noted that with the British, unlike the Russians and Germans, ‘a minimum of human rights was always safeguarded’.69 (#litres_trial_promo) Bertolt Brecht wrote that Britain controlled detective fiction and also controlled the world, clearly feeling that these two things were connected in some subterranean way.70 (#litres_trial_promo) Room 40 was created as a wartime emergency. Nevertheless, its product proved too valuable for it to disband once the guns fell silent, and in peacetime Britain continued to read the secret communications of many countries. As the armistice talks opened in France, President Wilson sent his trusted confidant Colonel Edward House to join the negotiations. Lloyd George was able to read everything sent between House and Wilson. Yet strangely he had not been bitten by the intelligence bug, and useful as he found it, was not an enthusiast. Intelligence spending dwindled dramatically after the war, and the prime minister was happy to leave the reorganisation of peacetime intelligence matters to his cabinet colleagues. Accordingly, although Lloyd George established a governmental committee to review secret service in 1919, he did not join it. Instead, Churchill, an avid intelligence enthusiast, was the leading light in this important reordering.71 (#litres_trial_promo) Its most important decision would be to maintain the wartime codebreaking effort and focus all resources in one unit: the Government Code and Cypher School, or GC&CS.72 (#litres_trial_promo) Nonetheless, in February 1920, Lloyd George was required to revisit intelligence matters. He sought to end the festering conflict with the Bolsheviks, viewing Britain’s support for the White Russians as an unhappy extension of the First World War, and therefore a chapter that should now be closed. Although reluctant to offer recognition to the revolutionaries, the prime minister offered Moscow trade agreements as a path to restoring relations. His cabinet colleagues Churchill and Curzon were horrified, not least because of mounting evidence of Bolshevik subversion against the British Empire. Indeed, although there was clear evidence of Soviet funds going directly to the increasingly communist-dominated Labour Research Department during the early 1920s, it was Moscow’s interference in areas such as India that really got the British cabinet excited.73 (#litres_trial_promo) MI6 had been active in this clandestine conflict too, and many military intelligence officers who had been heavily involved in the Russian Civil War were also dismayed.74 (#litres_trial_promo) Once more, Lloyd George had access to his opponents’ decrypts. Not for the last time, a British leader was able to read the derogatory terms in which his opposite numbers discussed him. Lenin denounced the prime minister as a deceiving ‘swine’ and a man without scruples, and urged the Soviet trade delegation in London to repay him with even greater levels of deception. This, of course, was difficult, given that every line of Lenin’s instructions was being decoded by the British. Lloyd George declared himself ‘unruffled by Bolshevik intrigues’, which he considered amateurish and unimportant. He was also prepared to turn a blind eye to the war between Russia and Poland that developed in late 1919. But Moscow was a highly political and divisive issue, and by early 1920, some senior military chiefs had begun to question Lloyd George’s motives. On 15 January General Henry Wilson, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, wrote in his diary: ‘I keep wondering if L.G. is a traitor & a Bolshevist, & I will watch him very carefully.’ Wilson was especially paranoid about Bolshevik plots, and made several similar entries to the same effect over the next few months.75 (#litres_trial_promo) The activities of Soviet negotiators in Britain were inflammatory. In August 1920 Leonid Krasin, a Soviet trade representative, had arrived for talks accompanied by Lev Kamenev, head of the Moscow Communist Party. Decrypts clearly showed that Kamenev was establishing secret contact with the embryonic British Communist Party, and subsidising the far-left newspaper the Daily Herald, using smuggled diamonds. Every move was visible to the codebreakers, and General Wilson was incredulous that Lloyd George had not immediately ejected the trade mission. On 18 August, Wilson confided his worries to Winston Churchill and the director of military intelligence, General Sir William Thwaites. Over the next few days he did the rounds of the security chiefs, including Lord Trenchard, who commanded the RAF, Sir Basil Thompson from the Home Office, and Rear Admiral Hugh ‘Quex’ Sinclair, director of naval intelligence, and received a sympathetic hearing.76 (#litres_trial_promo) On 24 August he noted in his diary: ‘Trenchard with whom I discussed the matter later and to whom I showed … the intercepts thinks like Basil Thompson, that Lloyd George is a traitor.’77 (#litres_trial_promo) On 2 September, with Lloyd George away in Lucerne, his coalition partner Bonar Law summoned a meeting at Downing Street that included Balfour, Churchill and Basil Thompson. Thompson circulated the latest material from the codebreakers. Thomas Jones, the deputy cabinet secretary, recalled that ‘Everyone felt that the last intercept from Lenin where he lays down propaganda as the business of the Russian Delegation put the lid on and that there was nothing for it but to clear them out as quickly as possible.’78 (#litres_trial_promo) Hankey, who had accompanied Lloyd George to Lucerne, argued exactly the opposite. He insisted that Wilson was absurdly alarmist, and that the activities of the Soviets in London were silly and easy to counter. His main worry was that if they ejected the Soviets they would have to publish the decrypts to justify their actions, placing the prime minister in a very difficult position. Britain would then lose its ‘most valuable and trustworthy source of secret information’, as no matter what they did to try to disguise the fact, Moscow would probably realise its communications were being read. He continued: ‘This particular cypher is a very ingenious one which was discovered by great cleverness and hard work. The key of the cypher is changed daily and sometimes as often as three times in one message. Hence if it becomes known that we decoded the messages all the governments of the world will probably discover that no messages are safe.’79 (#litres_trial_promo) Back in London, Lloyd George forced a showdown with his critics. He freely admitted that the Soviets were engaged in ‘perfidy’ and ‘trickery’, but argued that good intelligence could be obtained by keeping the trade mission in place. Although he thought their activities ineffective, he could see that political opinion in cabinet was turning against him, and probably regretted not having taken a closer interest in secret service matters, since the intelligence chiefs had been part of this pressure to act. An opportunity to do so arose in early September, when Kamenev decided to return to Moscow and came to Downing Street to pay his respects. He walked into a diplomatic ambush. Lloyd George met him accompanied by Hankey, Jones and Bonar Law. The prime minister opened with a tirade about ‘gross bad faith’ and interference in British internal affairs, including Soviet attempts to recruit labour leaders and secretly subsidise the Daily Herald. He also accused Kamenev of attempting to turn Poland into a client Soviet state – but did not mention the decrypts. There was obviously a double game going on here, with the prime minister trying to clear himself of suspicions of being overly sympathetic to Bolshevism.80 (#litres_trial_promo) Perhaps for audience effect, he warned Kamenev that if he did not leave Britain he would be deported.81 (#litres_trial_promo) Lloyd George’s hard line resulted in his also being criticised by the left, so he was eventually pushed into publishing eight of the intercepts. He used a rather thin cover story, claiming that they had been provided by a neutral country. Churchill, showing his characteristic impulsiveness and little nuanced appreciation of the value of intelligence, had led the charge demanding publication. Amazingly, blinded by their ideological hatred of Moscow, the intelligence chiefs had agreed. Quex Sinclair, now head of MI6, who had superintended the best wartime codebreakers, insisted that ‘even if the publication of the telegrams was to result in not another message being decoded, then the present situation would fully justify it’. Intelligence officials leaked further decrypts to newspapers three weeks later. Lloyd George fired Basil Thompson shortly afterwards, leading some to suspect that it was he who was responsible for the leak. His departure was a positive move, and ensured that the Foreign Office and MI6 extended full control over foreign intelligence.82 (#litres_trial_promo) The prime minister maintained his policy regardless, and secured an Anglo–Soviet trade agreement in 1921. Although a further surge of Soviet subversive activity was discovered in 1922, Lloyd George was overtaken by political scandal before he could respond, accusations of selling seats in the House of Lords forcing him to resign in October. In the summer his colleagues, led by Bonar Law, had chosen to make more Soviet decrypts public. Moscow predictably changed its cipher system, and an important stream of high-grade intelligence disappeared.83 (#litres_trial_promo) Despite the deliberate and foolish revelations of 1920, 1922 and 1923, GC&CS continued to read much high-level Soviet traffic.84 (#litres_trial_promo) Astoundingly, Soviet incompetence was even greater than that of the British. As early as July 1920, Kamenev and his colleagues had requested a replacement for their ‘Marta’ cipher system, believing it to be insecure. But their superiors resisted this request as requiring too much effort. They not only ignored the revelations in The Times but also strident warnings from senior Red Army commanders that their most secret correspondence in Europe ‘is known word for word to the English, who have organised a network of stations designed particularly for listening to our radio’. By the end of 1920, Georgy Chicherin, the long-serving Soviet foreign minister, seemed to have got the message, and warned his mission in London that very sensitive material should be sent only by courier. But many secret communications continued to be intercepted by GC&CS.85 (#litres_trial_promo) GC&CS therefore remained the star in Britain’s interwar intelligence firmament. Between 1920 and 1924, it issued over 13,000 intercepted signals, approximately 290 a month, including more than half of all French traffic. Yet little of this went to Downing Street. If the prime minister was not regularly in receipt of these gems, where did they go? The answer is to the Foreign Office, which aggressively clawed back control over foreign intelligence from the military following the end of the war. Intercepts informed the negotiation of complex post-war settlements and treaties that followed the First World War, such as those at S?vres and Lausanne, often giving British diplomats the upper hand. One of the most important customers was the foreign secretary, Lord Curzon. By 1922, Curzon also enjoyed power over distribution, deciding what secrets should go to the prime minister or to members of the cabinet. Unfortunately, the decrypts often revealed the fact that Lloyd George was pursuing a separate and secret foreign policy, entirely undeclared to Curzon, and was sometimes backing the Greeks in treaty negotiations against his own foreign secretary. Curzon was an emotional individual, and knowledge of the ‘dirty’ activities of his friends and allies stirred apoplectic outbursts. In 1922, meeting with the French prime minister Raymond Poincar?, Curzon had to be led weeping from the room, and refused to return until Poincar? apologised for his behaviour.86 (#litres_trial_promo) Curzon deliberately kept much intelligence away from Downing Street. Things were made worse by the lack of a system for synthesising intelligence material and presenting it to leaders in a way that would allow it to inform strategy. Instead, attention often focused on single documents. This was typified by the impact of intelligence on talks about the future of Britain’s alliance with Japan during the early 1920s, a decision that would cast a long shadow. Intelligence focused less on Japan’s intentions and capabilities than on plots and nefarious activities: Lloyd George told cabinet that other friendly powers did things that were ‘infinitely worse’ than the Japanese secret service. Curzon argued for a renewal of the alliance, despite the fact that he considered the Japanese ‘insidious and unscrupulous’. Churchill opposed a continued alliance with Tokyo, and to back up his argument showed his cabinet colleagues a secret Japanese map of Gibraltar that had come into the hands of MI5. Intelligence was often about alarms and incidents, and rarely informed national assessments.87 (#litres_trial_promo) Meanwhile, the Irish problem had been rumbling on. The Easter Rising and the First World War were swiftly followed by the Irish War of Independence in 1919. Peace negotiations began in 1921, culminating in the formation of the Irish Free State the following year. This time Lloyd George lacked signals intelligence, but he did draw upon other forms of intelligence to aid the British position. Unfortunately, the material reaching him and his ministers came from military intelligence officers who opposed the truce. Consequently, they offered biased worst-case scenarios in which Sinn F?in and especially the IRA intended to play for time before resuming their offensive, including ‘fantastical reports’ of chemical weapons. Fortunately for the peace process, a more confident outlook emanated from the civilian authorities in Dublin, and the ‘two opposing interpretations of the Irish situation battled it out from July to December 1921’. Lloyd George fell into the optimistic camp, and was determined to reach peace, but the alarmist intelligence came perilously close to collapsing the negotiations altogether. By early December, the prime minister had had enough. He issued a dramatic ultimatum: accept the peace or resume war in three days. This was a gamble. Contradictory and inaccurate intelligence meant that he had no idea whether Sinn F?in would accept – and Britain was in no position to resume war so soon. However, the starkly pessimistic intelligence coming out of Ireland offered enough warning about IRA rearmament to convince Lloyd George to set a strict deadline. The negotiations hung in the balance, and there was ‘palpable relief’ when the Irish signed the deal.88 (#litres_trial_promo) Prime ministers must celebrate when they can; success is often short-lived. In May 1922, Lloyd George was livid when he was shown the new Irish government’s draft constitution, despairing that it represented ‘a complete evasion of the treaty’ he had gambled on securing. Intelligence uncovered numerous plots, some more real than others, against Northern Ireland and the British mainland, in which the Dublin government was complicit. Frustrated, Lloyd George feared that the Irish ‘may have to face re-conquest’. When IRA men assassinated Field Marshal Henry Wilson in London the following month, the government found itself under pressure to wipe out the IRA headquarters in Dublin. A single piece of intelligence wrongly linked the murder to a Dublin conspiracy, and an attack on the IRA headquarters by British troops would have wrecked Britain’s Irish policy ‘at one stroke’. Nevertheless, led by Churchill, the cabinet approved the strike. Once more, Churchill failed to appreciate the nuances of raw intelligence and exhibited his famous impetuousness. All this frustrated the prime minister, but fortunately for Lloyd George and his Ireland policy, the army refused to obey the order.89 (#litres_trial_promo) This marked Lloyd George’s final dealings with the Ireland problem, but Churchill would have to return to it during the Second World War. More ominously, it was merely a taste of the troubles to come for future prime ministers, from Harold Wilson onwards. Bonar Law, who replaced Lloyd George in 1922, was the shortest-serving prime minister of the twentieth century, spending only 211 days in office. He died of a throat tumour shortly afterwards, and was buried in Westminster Abbey near the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. During the funeral, Asquith described him as ‘the unknown prime minister’. Hankey noted in his diary: ‘Poor Bonar never had the nerve for the job of prime minister. The responsibility preyed on his mind and, I feel sure, hastened on his cancer.’ Turning to Bonar Law’s successor, he added, quite correctly, ‘Baldwin has the nerve but scant capacity and I fear will not last long.’ Stanley Baldwin’s first term in office indeed lasted only eight months, and he stepped down in January 1924. Alongside these figures, Lloyd George appeared a political giant, and it was under him that British intelligence took its most adventurous step forward.90 (#litres_trial_promo) A connected British intelligence community was not created in 1909, but it had already begun to centralise and professionalise. Indeed, it has been suggested that Asquith’s government changed the very meaning of the word ‘intelligence’. At the turn of the century, intelligence was something that existed in the far-flung service of empire, and meant information of almost any kind, so long as it impacted upon policy or made colonial rule more efficient. Much of it was supplied by an army of enterprising amateurs serving on ‘special duties’, supplemented by eccentrics who divided their time between collecting rare beetles or tulip bulbs and sketching Turkish fortifications. By 1918, intelligence was about secret work, and incorporated a strong emphasis on counter-intelligence. Most importantly, it had also become increasingly militarised, and had embraced the science of codebreaking. Room 40 had produced astonishing intelligence in just four years, but as yet no one knew how to interpret it or to use it securely.91 (#litres_trial_promo) Lloyd George, perhaps assisted by the wise counsel of Maurice Hankey, had begun to learn his trade. In contrast to his early years as prime minister, by 1920 he knew that context was everything in interpreting decrypts. Accordingly, Lenin’s hot language had not alarmed him. He also came to understand that access to decrypts was acquired with difficulty, and given away easily – a lesson quickly forgotten in Number 10. Therefore, although he eventually discussed codebreaking in his memoirs, he said no more than had already appeared in the public domain, and worked closely with Hankey on the agreed text.92 (#litres_trial_promo) By contrast, his cabinet colleagues performed poorly – even those with more intelligence experience. Lord Curzon, foreign secretary between 1919 and 1924, should have been a master of intelligence, having presided over a sophisticated espionage system in his previous existence as viceroy of India. Yet personal insults from the French, revealed in all their glory by intercepts, literally drove him to tears of rage. Churchill’s performance was even worse, and despite boundless enthusiasm for intelligence he was impulsive in its use. Moreover, when he rushed out his own history of the First World War in 1923, he made many references to British codebreaking capabilities. The Germans were soon avidly reading his account, and it is no coincidence that shortly afterwards they began to take an interest in a new and effective cipher machine called Enigma. In the mid-1920s, however, Germany had not yet resurfaced as a problem. The First World War was over, and a young man named Adolf Hitler had only recently established a nascent Nazi Party. Instead, it was the Russians who attracted the attention of Britain’s secret service. An early cold war of subversion and subterfuge was emerging, in which incoming prime ministers would need to use intelligence subtly and wisely. Inexperienced in handling the secret world and lacking an integrated intelligence assessment community, this may have been asking too much. 2 Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald (1923–1937) (#u2edb29e4-9f5d-578c-8bf9-8979eb3f3d09) How can I avoid the suspicion … that the whole thing is a political plot? Ramsay MacDonald1 (#litres_trial_promo) We were completely misled on that subject Stanley Baldwin2 (#litres_trial_promo) The interwar years were a time of international subterfuge; of clandestine struggles between intelligence agencies only recently created. As Britain and Bolshevik Russia faced off in a global war of subversion and counter-subversion, a fear of communism swept the Whitehall establishment. A smear plot allegedly sought to topple a Labour prime minister, while another prime minister publicly misused intelligence for political expediency. Remarkably, these things happened twice in the space of a decade. The history of secret intelligence and Downing Street has an intriguing habit of repeating itself, and many of the issues that emerged in the interwar years would resurface to confront later prime ministers. Two prime ministers dominated the 1920s and 1930s: Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald. Both entered office as inexperienced and unsophisticated consumers of intelligence. Both faced a steep learning curve. Stanley Baldwin was a hands-off prime minister. A master of delegation, he allowed his ministers maximum freedom – to the extent that he drew charges of complacency and laziness. Baldwin expended most of his energies developing personal relations with MPs, and so spent a great deal of time sitting in Parliament: sometimes on the green benches of the Commons resting his eyes through some dreary debate, at other times slouched in an armchair somewhere soaking up the political atmosphere; but always in conversation. It was a working style that did not please everybody. One exasperated colleague complained, ‘What can you do with a leader who sits in the smoking room reading Strand magazine?’3 (#litres_trial_promo) Beneath the surface, Baldwin was a highly-strung individual. He exhibited a range of nervous habits, from a subtle eye-twitch to compulsively smelling any object that fell into his hands. He was particularly keen on putting books to his nostrils and enjoying a long, loud sniff.4 (#litres_trial_promo) Yet he worked well in a crisis. These are intriguing, almost contradictory, characteristics which bear directly upon a prime minister’s use of intelligence. His proclivity for delegation hints at a lack of interest in detailed intelligence material, while his nervous demeanour suggests an unsuitable constitution for dealing with the periodic crises of the secret world. In fact, Baldwin did draw steadily on intelligence throughout his time in office, although he did so in a blundering and unsophisticated manner which frustrated the intelligence community. He compromised GC&CS’s best intelligence source on the Soviets, publicly accused Air Ministry intelligence reports of misleading him, almost cost an MI6 analyst his job, and fell out with MI5 over surveillance of King Edward VIII. In theory at least, Baldwin should have had an easier ride than Ramsay MacDonald. The illegitimate son of a farm labourer and a housemaid, MacDonald was an outsider. As the first ever Labour prime minister, he was also the first prime minister to hail from a working-class background. He was not part of the establishment; not one of the old boys. MacDonald had never even held a ministerial position before entering Downing Street. There can have been very few prime ministers as inexperienced in the workings of the secret world – or indeed of Whitehall in general – as he. Despite his energy, good looks and personal magnetism, MacDonald was prickly, guarded and introverted. Unlike Baldwin, he had an impressive capacity for hard work. His working day began at seven, and would drag on until the early hours of the following morning. Poor at delegating, he served as his own foreign secretary in his first government throughout 1924. Returning as prime minister for a second time in 1929, MacDonald only appointed someone else, Arthur Henderson, as foreign secretary for political reasons, and sought to keep as much control over foreign policy himself as possible.5 (#litres_trial_promo) One might expect that this would have increased his access to intelligence, and made him a particularly active consumer compared to other prime ministers. But in reality, he generally kept the intelligence community at a distance, and had little intention of ever meeting an MI5 or MI6 officer. At one point, in order to remain detached from the intrigues of the secret world, he even forced a senior MI6 man to stand in an adjoining room, and would only speak to him using the permanent secretary at the Foreign Office as an intermediary.6 (#litres_trial_promo) Yet MacDonald was a Labour hero, the party’s man of destiny. He served as prime minister in 1924, and again between 1929 and 1931. In politics, as in much of British public life, however, heroes exist only to fall. Things inevitably soured for MacDonald in 1931 when he agreed to serve as head of a national coalition government designed to see Britain through the international economic crisis. Deemed a traitor by his erstwhile supporters, he was unceremoniously sacked from the Labour Party which he had done so much to turn into a credible force in British politics. Although he remained prime minister until 1935, the Conservatives, including Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, increasingly dominated the government. Ravaged by insomnia and ill-health, the ageing prime minister ‘slowly faded away’.7 (#litres_trial_promo) A sea voyage was recommended to restore his health, but he died on board an ocean liner in November 1937. By then, many of the European crises that would trouble his successors were already visible. The election of the first ever Labour government raised a whole host of questions about the relationship between Number 10 and the intelligence establishment. King George V wondered what his ‘dear Grandmama’, Queen Victoria, would have made of a Labour government, and the same can be said for the intelligence services. MacDonald had long been on MI5’s radar: the service had actually recommended prosecuting him for delivering seditious speeches during the First World War. Elements within the intelligence elite continued to view MacDonald and his first government with ‘suspicion, alarm and in some cases contempt’. The mistrust was mutual, and Vernon Kell, the long-serving director-general of MI5, knew full well of Labour suspicions towards his service.8 (#litres_trial_promo) The Foreign Office deliberately waited several months before showing any signals intelligence to the new prime minister. When he was finally inducted, MacDonald was probably the only member of his cabinet informed of the activities of GC&CS. The diplomats feared that Labour ministers would be horrified at the idea of intercepts and espionage, and, in Churchill’s words, kept MacDonald ‘in ignorance’. Even once he had gained experience, intelligence officers still kept him ill-informed. In the early 1930s, important reforms meant that MI6 confined itself to operations on foreign territory, while MI5 took over responsibility for countering communist subversion from Scotland Yard. Seeking to ease coordination and reduce overlap, these reforms shaped both organisations for decades to come. Yet it seems that MacDonald was not even told about them.9 (#litres_trial_promo) Similarly, Arthur Ponsonby, his parliamentary under-secretary at the Foreign Office, was refused all access to signals intelligence and MI6 reports, despite directing the government’s Russia policy. Whenever Ponsonby mentioned intelligence, his officials became rigid. Not that Ponsonby particularly minded; he thought intelligence was a ‘dirty’ business.10 (#litres_trial_promo) Few Labour ministers were intelligence enthusiasts. In 1929 Robert Vansittart, the senior official at the Foreign Office, had to defend the Secret Service Vote, from whence came funding for clandestine activity, against the new foreign secretary, Henderson. Britain’s most senior diplomat, Vansittart was an extraordinary polymath and aesthete – during his time as a young diplomatic trainee in Paris he had written a play in French, entitled Les Parias, which was a great success at the Th??tre Moli?re. He went on to produce several volumes of poems f?ted by figures such as T.E. Lawrence. A romantic soul, full of passionate loves and hatreds, he adored intelligence.11 (#litres_trial_promo) ‘Van’, as he was known, bemoaned how Henderson, a tee-totaller, ‘rated Secret Service like hard liquor, because he knew, and wanted to know, nothing of it’. Although this is perhaps unfair, given that even senior Labour ministers were given limited access to it, Vansittart felt frustrated because the government indulged in intelligence ‘all too little’.12 (#litres_trial_promo) MacDonald’s administration took ‘a jaundiced view’ of the orientation of the intelligence establishment as a whole. There was a ‘climate of mutual mistrust’, with MI6 officials wary of discussing anything within earshot of MacDonald’s ministers.13 (#litres_trial_promo) As prime minister, MacDonald did receive a weekly summary of British revolutionary movements written by Special Branch. He was not impressed, thinking the reports suffered from political bias and added little insight. To the anger of Special Branch, he refused to circulate them to cabinet. His attitude towards intelligence did soften over time, especially when dealing with growing problems of industrial unrest, and he came to realise that domestic intelligence provided by MI5, Special Branch and even MI6 could help to determine government responses.14 (#litres_trial_promo) His hard work won respect amongst the Whitehall establishment. The cabinet secretary Maurice Hankey, for example, liked MacDonald ‘very much’, and got on with him ‘like a house on fire’.15 (#litres_trial_promo) MacDonald was no Soviet stooge, and indeed was disliked by the Soviet ambassador in London, who called him fickle and vain. Throughout his premiership, MacDonald remained committed to monitoring Soviet activities just as much as did his Conservative counterparts.16 (#litres_trial_promo) But the notorious ‘Zinoviev letter’ delivered a fatal blow to MacDonald’s burgeoning relationship with the secret world, and cast a dark shadow over relations between Labour ministers and secret service for decades to come.17 (#litres_trial_promo) MacDonald found himself in a precarious position in 1924, perched delicately atop an unstable minority government. The fact that his was the first ever Labour administration made his position even more perilous. He, and his young party, had a lot to lose. Rather like Harold Wilson half a century later, MacDonald had been elected early in the year, but faced another general election in October. MacDonald too found enemies among right-wing sections of the establishment, eager to smear the prime minister and destabilise his nascent Labour government. Days before the election of October 1924, the Daily Mail published a sensational story: ‘Civil War Plot by Socialists: Moscow Order to our Reds’.18 (#litres_trial_promo) The newspaper had somehow obtained a copy of a letter purportedly written by Grigory Zinoviev, head of the Comintern, to the Communist Party of Great Britain. So close to an election, this ‘revelation’ inevitably had damaging implications for MacDonald and his Labour government – which was exactly why the Daily Mail published it so gleefully. Addressed ‘Dear Comrades’, the letter sought to ‘stir up the masses of the British proletariat’ and instigate rebellion. It mentioned ‘agitation-propaganda work’ inside the armed forces, and urged communists to penetrate ‘all the units of the troops’. Perhaps most damaging to MacDonald, it referred to a group inside the Labour Party ‘sympathising’ with closer Anglo–Russian relations.19 (#litres_trial_promo) This implied that the government was soft on Bolshevism – an injurious charge, given the enduring paranoia about Moscow. Although MacDonald had sought to distance Labour from the British communists, as prime minister he had already offered de jure recognition of the Soviet Union and signed two treaties with the new state. Like Lloyd George before him, he hoped simply to improve bilateral trade and bring the Soviet Union into the international community. Unfortunately, his approach ‘seemed nothing less than treachery’ to establishment figures fearful of the relentless march of communism. The popular press were critical too, dubbing one of the treaties ‘Money for Murderers’. To make matters worse, the Labour cabinet had also resisted prosecuting John Campbell, a communist journalist accused of subverting the armed services, on the grounds that he had an excellent war record.20 (#litres_trial_promo) Personally, MacDonald had some reservations about that decision, and rightly worried that ‘more will be heard of this matter’.21 (#litres_trial_promo) Questions over the role of the intelligence community in the notorious Zinoviev affair lingered for almost a century. Did intelligence officers deliberately forge the letter to bring down a democratically elected prime minister? If not, did they at least publicise the letter in order to achieve that end? Was the secret civil service during the 1920s simply anti-Labour? MI6’s official historian, Keith Jeffery, sums up the suspicions nicely: ‘Right-wing elements, with the connivance of allies in the security and intelligence services, deliberately used the letter – and perhaps even manufactured it – to ensure a Labour defeat.’22 (#litres_trial_promo) These questions are crucial. They raise issues of accountability and political legitimacy at the heart of the secret world. The Zinoviev letter was almost certainly a fake. Gill Bennett, the Foreign Office historian with access to MI6 sources, concludes that it was ‘highly unlikely’ to have been written by Zinoviev. Instead it was most likely a forgery produced by someone with links to the international intelligence community and a decent knowledge of Comintern. Bennett adds that the mystery forger was also probably ‘aware that there were interest groups in Britain who would make use of the forgery to further their own cause by damaging the Labour Government and derailing the ratification of the Anglo–Soviet treaties’. It is more than possible that information about the proposed forgery could have reached British intelligence officers looking to aid the Conservatives in the forthcoming election.23 (#litres_trial_promo) White Russians, the exiled supporters of the tsar, were the most likely culprits. Those based in Britain certainly possessed motive, given their vehement opposition to MacDonald’s Anglo–Soviet treaties. They also had the means, including a sophisticated intelligence network and forgery capabilities in Europe. It is likely that the forger was based in Riga – some of the individuals passing intelligence to MI6 in that city were certainly involved with White Russian circles.24 (#litres_trial_promo) One of a team of four key White Russian suspects in the forgery, Alexis Bellegarde, had close links with MI6, and went on to become one of the service’s most successful wartime double agents working against the Nazis.25 (#litres_trial_promo) Others would exaggerate the authenticity of the letter as it was passed upwards – eventually to MacDonald himself.26 (#litres_trial_promo) On 2 October 1924, MI6’s Riga station obtained the letter and despatched an English version to London. A week later, MI6 headquarters sent copies to the Foreign Office with a covering note asserting that ‘the authenticity of the document is undoubted’. It was, they insisted, by Zinoviev. In fact, MI6 conducted no checks on the authenticity of the letter. Nobody inside MI6, for example, had asked how Riga had obtained it; nor did anybody enquire as to whether it was the original or a translation.27 (#litres_trial_promo) The Foreign Office rightly sought ‘corroborative proofs’ before showing the letter to the prime minister. MI6’s Desmond Morton supposedly provided these on 11 October. His report, apparently based on information received from an agent who had infiltrated the Communist Party of Great Britain, stated that the British communists had held a meeting at the start of October to consider a letter received from Zinoviev, thereby validating the Riga letter. Intriguingly, however, the agent’s original written report made no mention of any letter from Moscow at all. Morton claimed that the extra information had been gained after he met the agent on 10 October for further discussion. Morton appears guilty of, at the very least, asking leading questions to generate information to fit the Zinoviev story. At most, he knew the letter was a forgery, but realising the implications for MacDonald, intended it to be treated as genuine. He certainly disliked both the Bolsheviks and the Labour Party.28 (#litres_trial_promo) Morton’s rather weak ‘confirmation’ was good enough for the Foreign Office. The permanent secretary observed: ‘We have now heard definitely on absolutely reliable authority that the Russian letter was discussed at a recent meeting of the central committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain.’29 (#litres_trial_promo) The prime minister was duly informed. Upon first reading the letter on 16 October, MacDonald was suspicious. He ‘did not treat it as a proved document’, and asked that ‘care should be taken to ascertain if it was genuine’. ‘In the storm of an election’, it never crossed his mind that this letter ‘had any part to play in the fight’.30 (#litres_trial_promo) He requested more proof, but his instructions were ignored, and none was sought.31 (#litres_trial_promo) MacDonald was both right and wrong: the letter was of dubious authenticity, but it would play a role in the election. MI6 realised the letter was a fake: Morton privately told MI5 towards the end of November – long after the damage was done – that ‘We are firmly convinced this actual thing is a forgery.’32 (#litres_trial_promo) But he refused to admit this in wider circles. Quex Sinclair, the head of MI6, even wrote a list of reasons, probably drafted by Morton, explaining why the letter was genuine. Each, however, was rather weak. First, Sinclair argued that the source’s reliability strengthened the authenticity, even though MI6 did not know the identity of the ultimate source – an agent’s agent. Second, Sinclair pointed to various ‘corroborative proofs’, but these too were unreliable. Third, MI6 noted that the Soviets had frantically arrested two Comintern officials – a circumstantial point at best. Fourth, Sinclair arrogantly avowed that the possibility of MI6 being taken in by White Russian forgers could be ‘entirely excluded’. This was complacent, to say the least. He then falsely asserted that MI6 knew the identity of all hands through which the letter had passed. Again, this was simply not true, since MI6 did not know the original source. Finally, Sinclair argued that the letter’s contents were consistent with other genuine documents – but this proved nothing. Morton had something to hide. He had long prided himself on being able to spot forgeries, and most likely knew all along that the letter was a forgery.33 (#litres_trial_promo) A leak was probably inevitable, especially once MI5 had circulated the letter widely to senior military personnel. There were also anti-MacDonald factions within MI6, with contacts in the press, who would have been glad to see him fall and who rubbed their hands with glee when the letter arrived in London. Given the overlapping nature of intelligence circles at the time, it is difficult to prove the identity of the culprit.34 (#litres_trial_promo) There were many suspects, all rather devious. Within MI6, suspicion falls on Desmond Morton and Stewart Menzies, a future chief. In fact, Morton later accused Menzies of posting the letter to the Daily Mail. Joseph Ball of MI5 is another candidate. He later went on to work for the Conservatives and, liaising with his former intelligence colleagues, ran a campaign of dirty tricks against the Labour Party, including infiltration, press manipulation and the tapping of phone lines.35 (#litres_trial_promo) Others include Reginald ‘Blinker’ Hall, the naval intelligence chief turned politician, who had lost his Conservative seat in Parliament when MacDonald came to power.36 (#litres_trial_promo) All of these suspects have three things in common: they had served with the intelligence services; they were allied closely with the Conservatives; and they would have firmly believed that they were acting in the national interest by unofficially publicising the letter in an attempt to destabilise MacDonald. Remarkably, by 22 October Conservative Central Office also had a copy of the letter. Whoever leaked it, it certainly found its way ‘to those vested interests who could best make political capital out of it at the government’s expense’.37 (#litres_trial_promo) Meanwhile, similar people, including ‘Blinker’ Hall, were exploiting the Conservative–intelligence nexus to play similar tricks against the nascent Irish Free State. Stanley Baldwin too was not above suspicion, regarding Ireland at least, given that he became an honorary member of a secretive group of former intelligence officers presided over by Vernon Kell and known as the IB Club. The Zinoviev affair can easily be seen as part of a broader campaign by the establishment to undermine opponents.38 (#litres_trial_promo) Ramsay MacDonald was away in the final stages of electoral campaigning when the Daily Mail broke the story. Hoarse and audibly tiring, the last thing he wanted so close to a second election was a scandal which threatened to prematurely end the Labour dream. Although sceptical of the letter’s authenticity, he asked the Foreign Office to draft a protest to the Soviet ambassador. It had to be ‘so well-founded and important that it carried conviction and guilt’.39 (#litres_trial_promo) Unsatisfied by the draft of this response, he substantially rewrote it in a hotel room at Aberavon on 23 October, but ran out of time before having to rush off to another election meeting. He therefore returned the unfinished draft to London without initialling it, indicating that he wanted to see it again before it was sent. Upon hearing that the Daily Mail had a copy of the Zinoviev letter and was about to publish, the Foreign Office sent MacDonald’s unfinished protest off to be printed alongside it. MacDonald was not consulted.40 (#litres_trial_promo) He was therefore naturally ‘dumbfounded to be asked by a pressman attending one of my meetings that evening if I had authorised publication’. Caught off guard, he ‘felt like a man sewn in a sack and thrown into the sea’.41 (#litres_trial_promo) MacDonald considered the matter carefully, and concluded that ‘in my absence, the anti-Russian mentality of Sir Eyre Crowe, the senior official at the Foreign Office was uncontrolled. He was apparently hot. He had no intention of being disloyal, indeed quite the opposite, but his own mind destroyed his discretion and blinded him to the obvious care he should have exercised.’42 (#litres_trial_promo) Although undoubtedly disappointed with Crowe, MacDonald saved the blame for the Daily Mail and the Conservative Party. He ranted in his diary that ‘nothing untoward would have happened had not the Daily Mail and other agencies including Conservative leaders had the letter and were preparing a political bomb from it’.43 (#litres_trial_promo) Rather na?vely, perhaps, he was ‘genuinely dumbfounded’ that the paper had obtained a copy.44 (#litres_trial_promo) On 27 October, MacDonald finally gave a public explanation during an election speech in Cardiff. Feeling bruised and suspicious, he vehemently denied that he had delayed the publication of the Zinoviev letter, slammed the ‘Tory propagandists’ who ‘know nothing’, but loyally defended the Foreign Office and Crowe’s decision to publish his protest. He then attacked the press for obtaining a copy of the letter and seeking to ‘spring it upon us’. He implicated the Conservatives for smearing him and, to laughter from the crowd, alluded to ‘another Guy Fawkes – a new Gunpowder plot’.45 (#litres_trial_promo) The speech failed to deal with the threat posed by the letter. With the election just hours away, the press continued to hound the beleaguered prime minister. The Daily Express and the Daily Mail both saw him at odds with the civil service. The Manchester Guardian joined the chorus, arguing that if the letter was a hoax MacDonald’s department had made an ‘egregious blunder’, but if it was genuine the prime minister could hardly accuse his enemies of fabricating a plot. MacDonald was livid at the ‘scoundrels of the press’, and increasingly saw the whole affair as a personal vendetta.46 (#litres_trial_promo) The election was held on Wednesday, 29 October. Although MacDonald held his constituency, the Conservatives enjoyed a resounding victory, gaining 155 seats. Electoral experts suggest that the Zinoviev letter was not the cause of the Labour defeat, as the Conservatives, in all likelihood, were going to win regardless. But the following day MacDonald returned to London convinced that the letter was a forgery and a plot was afoot. He now sought proof.47 (#litres_trial_promo) One of the first things he did was to visit Eyre Crowe. Instead of finding him at the Foreign Office, Crowe was ill in bed, heartbroken at having published the protest letter without approval. On 31 October MacDonald met with his outgoing cabinet. A long and heated discussion developed, with some calling for an inquiry into the role of the intelligence services in the Zinoviev affair. MacDonald resisted the idea, explaining that Crowe and the Foreign Office had not tried to sabotage the Labour Party. Instead, MacDonald appointed a cabinet committee to examine the authenticity of the now notorious letter. But with little firm evidence, no conclusion was possible. And with that MacDonald resigned and departed for a walking holiday in the West Country.48 (#litres_trial_promo) Stanley Baldwin had been disturbed by the Zinoviev saga. Taking the helm on 4 November 1924, he convened the prime minister’s Secret Service Committee and ordered a review of the whole system, asking for recommendations for ‘greater efficiency’. At the end of 1925, the committee reported to Baldwin that had they been designing the intelligence system from scratch, a single unified department would have been desirable. As it was, however, they advised the prime minister to leave it as it was: imperfect but functioning.49 (#litres_trial_promo) Baldwin cannot have been entirely satisfied. Two years later, he convened the committee again, this time tasking them with an investigation into the state of affairs at Scotland Yard – he feared that Labour might seize on the ‘political work’ of the Yard to argue that a government department was engaging in party politics.50 (#litres_trial_promo) His anxieties about the intersection of ideology and intelligence, fuelled by Zinoviev, were prescient, given that he soon ordered a politically controversial security raid on Soviet premises which backfired spectacularly. The 1926 General Strike increased the obsession of the authorities with Soviet subversion and the hidden hand of Moscow. Baldwin remained calm, but the Beaverbrook and Rothermere press portrayed the strike as an attempted revolution. MI5 and Special Branch intercepted the mail of leftist leaders and sampled public opinion directly by eavesdropping under railway platforms. The resolution of the General Strike in May 1926 was perhaps Baldwin’s most triumphant moment: he was mobbed in the streets and cheered in Parliament. But the security services and the military remained nervous, especially about sedition in the armed forces. In October 1926, at the behest of the excitable home secretary William Joynson-Hicks, a dozen prominent communists were arrested on transparently trumped-up charges.51 (#litres_trial_promo) Britain’s intelligence services now had their collective eyes firmly fixed on the same building in Moorgate. It housed ‘Arcos’, or the All-Russian Co-operative Society, a body which orchestrated Anglo–Soviet trade. The intelligence community rightly perceived Arcos as a front for Soviet propaganda and subversion against Britain. MI5 ridiculed the Soviet description of Arcos – ‘the sole purchasing and selling agency in Great Britain for the Government of the U.S.S.R.’ – as na?ve and childlike: ‘They believe that if they say a thing often enough most people are bound to believe it in the long run.’52 (#litres_trial_promo) To complicate matters, Arcos shared offices with the Soviet Trade Mission, making the line between the two organisations rather blurred. Nonetheless, MI5 had traced the first major Soviet espionage ring to be deployed in Britain back to the offices of Arcos.53 (#litres_trial_promo) MI5, MI6 and Special Branch all watched and waited, trying to build up a bigger picture of an international communist network. In March 1927 a new lead emerged. A human source informed MI6 that a classified British military document had been copied at Arcos. Quex Sinclair promptly passed this information to Vernon Kell, given that, in Sinclair’s words, ‘it concerned an act of espionage against the Armed Forces’, and therefore was not MI6’s responsibility. With Zinoviev a fresh memory, Kell and MI5 prudently spent a few weeks validating the evidence before alerting the director of public prosecutions. It was then felt to be time for action. Kell attempted to see John Anderson, permanent secretary at the Home Office – but Anderson was at a conference and unavailable. Undeterred, Kell instead sought a meeting with the director of Military Operations and Intelligence. Also unavailable, out of London. To complete an unhappy hat-trick, Kell was also knocked back by the Chief of the Imperial General Staff; also away for a couple of days. After mulling over the problem during lunch, lamenting his lack of traction in Whitehall, Kell was ambling back towards the office when he bumped into the secretary of state for war, Laming Worthington-Evans, in the street, and managed to secure an appointment at the House of Commons for 5 p.m. Worthington-Evans kept Kell waiting for fifteen minutes, but having heard the evidence he sent Kell to see the home secretary. At 5.40 p.m., and after a frustrating day, Kell finally found a receptive audience in the fervently anti-communist home secretary. Joynson-Hicks, or ‘Jix’ as he was popularly known, immediately interpreted the evidence as proof of dangerous sedition. Leaving the MI5 boss in his office, he took Kell’s statement straight to the prime minister. Baldwin, who was with his foreign secretary Austen Chamberlain at the time, agreed that Arcos should be raided in order to obtain evidence of a breach of the Official Secrets Act. An animated Jix returned less than thirty minutes later, saying, ‘Raid Arcos. Do you want it in writing?’54 (#litres_trial_promo) Baldwin’s haste surprised Kell. The prime minister was not known for quick decisions or decisive action, but Jix had been pressing him to take a tougher line against the Russians for a while, and had long been angry about Soviet financial support for the miners during the General Strike. Kell’s evidence from Arcos forced Baldwin’s hand.55 (#litres_trial_promo) As with the Zinoviev affair, the fact that this evidence focused on subversion of the armed forces, a serious government concern, made it all the more compelling.56 (#litres_trial_promo) Neither Baldwin nor the foreign secretary, however, was made aware of the full diplomatic implications: that a raid on Arcos would mean a de facto raid on the Soviet Trade Mission.57 (#litres_trial_promo) Remarkably, Sinclair and MI6 were barely informed of the proposed raid, despite the fact that it was Sinclair who had passed the evidence to Kell in the first place. On 12 May, as was often his way, Sinclair, a bon viveur, enjoyed a long lunch somewhere in clubland. He only found out about the raid at three o’clock – just one and a half hours before it commenced. Understandably angry at Kell, he later used the incident as ammunition in his ill-fated attempt to unify the intelligence services into a single organisation.58 (#litres_trial_promo) The raid itself was utterly inept. Ham-fisted policemen brandished guns and ordered employees to empty pockets and handbags, but didn’t seem to know what they were looking for. Nobody was in charge. To make matters worse, a lack of Russian-speakers prevented the police from translating the piles of documents in order to uncover incriminating evidence. Meanwhile, two Arcos employees frantically burned a stack of secret papers in the basement.59 (#litres_trial_promo) Although the prime minister had personally authorised the raid, MI6 were livid. They too had an interest in Arcos, and Baldwin’s foray had ruined their continuing operations against an international espionage ring. Sinclair cursed that it was an ‘irretrievable loss of an unprecedented opportunity’.60 (#litres_trial_promo) The raid had broader ramifications for MI6 operations: it would compromise their espionage efforts in Moscow if the Soviets sought retaliatory action against the British mission there, given that it quietly acted as a letterbox for MI6.61 (#litres_trial_promo) That was not the worst of it. Under pressure from Jix, Churchill and a group of baying backbenchers to take a tough line against Soviet subversion, Baldwin’s government decided to sever diplomatic relations with Moscow. They had hoped to find incriminating evidence in the Arcos raid with which they could publicly justify this move. Unfortunately, none was forthcoming, and opposition MPs taunted the government that the supposed seditious document was ‘merely a figment of the imagination’.62 (#litres_trial_promo) The security services lamented that the documents they had captured ‘do not appear to be of very great value’.63 (#litres_trial_promo) Specifically, there was nothing which proved that the Soviet Diplomatic Mission had been conducting sedition or propaganda.64 (#litres_trial_promo) Panicking, Baldwin drew on top-secret intercepted GC&CS material to prove Soviet guilt. On 24 May, in an unprecedented move, he rose to his feet in the House of Commons and read from signals intelligence intercepts – or, as the cabinet put it delicately, from ‘secret documents of a class which it is not usual to quote’.65 (#litres_trial_promo) The harassed Baldwin falsely presented the Arcos raid as an intelligence success, claiming that ‘both military espionage and subversive activities throughout the British Empire and North and South America were directed and carried out from Soviet House’. Moreover, he added that ‘No effective differentiation of rooms or duties was observed as between the members of the Trade Delegation and the employees of Arcos, and both these organisations have been involved in anti-British espionage and propaganda.’66 (#litres_trial_promo) These two charges were accurate, but could not be adequately backed up by documents found at the scene. Instead, Baldwin began reading the highly classified signals intelligence intercepts. He quoted a startling intercept sent from the Soviet charg? d’affaires to Moscow, stating: ‘I very much doubt the possibility of a raid on our Embassy. I would, however, consider it a very useful measure of precaution to suspend for a time the forwarding by post of documents of friends, “neighbours” and so forth from London to Moscow and vice versa. Telegraph your decision immediately.’ Uproar broke out when the opposition asked how Baldwin had obtained the documents, and only the speaker’s intervention saved the prime minister from having to answer.67 (#litres_trial_promo) Baldwin even published the texts of top-secret telegrams intercepted by GC&CS in a White Paper.68 (#litres_trial_promo) Two days later the House of Commons reconvened to debate the issue. Following the prime minister’s earlier lead, both the foreign secretary and Jix gleefully divulged yet more intercepted material. As Christopher Andrew, MI5’s authorised historian, has observed, the debate ‘developed into an orgy of governmental indiscretion about secret intelligence for which there is no parallel in modern parliamentary history’.69 (#litres_trial_promo) GC&CS, and by extension Baldwin’s cabinet, had long had access to all Russian traffic, including diplomatic and intelligence material. GC&CS also monitored communications between Comintern and the British Communist Party from, for example, an unmarked intercept station located in south London targeting a transmitter based in Wimbledon.70 (#litres_trial_promo) After the Arcos fiasco, however, the Russians realised that their codes had been broken. Predictably, they replaced the system with a better, seemingly impenetrable, encryption scheme, known as the one-time pad.71 (#litres_trial_promo) The one-time pad system, as the name implies, used a new cipher for each message, creating huge problems for the codebreaker. As a result, intelligence dried up. Over the next few years GC&CS had access to few Soviet diplomatic messages, and the only high-grade Soviet traffic available was that of Comintern.72 (#litres_trial_promo) Sinclair, his deputy Stewart Menzies, and Alastair Denniston, the operational head of GC&CS, were all furious about Baldwin’s use of signals intelligence in Parliament. They pointed out the inestimable value of the source, and rightly predicted the detrimental consequences of parliamentary revelation. It was to no avail. Given the Soviet threat, the suspicions about the USSR’s connections to the left wing of the Labour Party, and, most importantly, the political reputations now at stake, intelligence had become temporarily expendable.73 (#litres_trial_promo) Sinclair lamented how decrypts had been read ‘as a measure of desperation to bolster up a case vital to Government’. He bemoaned the lack of coordination within the intelligence services, and once again pressed for all three agencies to be united under one roof.74 (#litres_trial_promo) Denniston also attacked Baldwin for having ‘found it necessary to compromise our work beyond question’.75 (#litres_trial_promo) Baldwin should not shoulder all the blame. As we have seen, in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, intelligence chiefs had grown so alarmed about Soviet subversion that they too had advocated publishing intelligence in order to make the public aware of the scale of the threat. In fact, even Sinclair had changed his tune. Just seven years before, confronted with fears of the Bolshevik Revolution stretching its tentacles into Britain, he had argued that ‘Even if the publication of the telegrams was to result in not another message being decoded, then the present situation would fully justify it.’76 (#litres_trial_promo) Moreover, Baldwin had tried to learn the lessons of the secret past. He consulted cabinet minutes from 1923, when the government had faced a similar issue. Amazingly, they recommended full disclosure: ‘The advantages of basing the published British case on actual extracts from the despatches which had passed between the Soviet government and its agents, outweighed the disadvantages of the possible disclosure of the secret source from which these despatches had been maintained.’77 (#litres_trial_promo) The whole decade of the 1920s proved a learning experience for both the intelligence agencies and the politicians, who still lacked a central intelligence machine to guide them in the use and practice of this important weapon of statecraft. The Arcos story – told and retold – eventually became the symbol of security failure for secret services around the world. New recruits to GC&CS were warned that senior politicians, including the prime minister himself, could be horrendously indiscreet when the political stakes were high. The episode strained the trust between the secret world and Number 10. It demonstrated that intelligence officers needed to be careful about how their product was used.78 (#litres_trial_promo) The lesson would prove crucial during the Second World War regarding the use of Ultra decrypts. Menzies, the wartime head of MI6, never forgot that nobody in government understood the importance of protecting the source as much as the intelligence professionals.79 (#litres_trial_promo) The lessons were not lost on a future prime minister, either. With the Arcos fiasco perhaps in mind, Churchill would personally insist that the circle with whom he shared his Bletchley Park material was limited to only half a dozen of his closest ministers.80 (#litres_trial_promo) Even in the 1970s, when cabinet ministers were being indoctrinated into the arcane mysteries of ‘sigint’, they were visited by a mysterious figure from the Cabinet Office whom they called ‘the Man from UNCLE’. This official, in fact the Cabinet Office Intelligence Adviser, proceeded to recount the story of Baldwin’s blunder – by then politely referred to as a ‘mistake’ – to reinforce the importance of never breathing a word about sigint.81 (#litres_trial_promo) By the summer of 1929, Ramsay MacDonald was back inside Number 10. This time, however, he headed a national coalition government with Stanley Baldwin, who chose to occupy the traditional residence of the chancellor of the exchequer next door at Number 11. He became increasingly influential as MacDonald aged, withered, and became an ever more marginalised figure. Although not prime minister between 1931 and 1935, Baldwin, as lord president of the council, in practice wielded as much power as, if not more than, MacDonald. Churchill referred to him as ‘the virtual prime minister’.82 (#litres_trial_promo) Throughout the 1920s, the intelligence community had focused on Russia, communism, and what can perhaps be seen as a First Cold War, often fought out on the fringes of empire in locations as distant as Hong Kong and Shanghai. By contrast, the cabinet ignored Ireland during the second half of the decade. When MacDonald returned to power, though, attention turned briefly to the rise of the Irish leader, ?amon de Valera, who had been involved in the Easter Rising, had fought in the War of Independence, and had opposed the settlement that created the Irish Free State. Since then he had led the nationalist party Fianna F?il into the D?il, and went on to win the 1932 election. The government sensed trouble, and sought to bring de Valera down. In the absence of effective intelligence-gathering machinery in Ireland, MacDonald was informed by biased, outdated and alarmist intelligence which insisted on portraying de Valera as a violent IRA man rather than a democratic statesman. MacDonald bought this line, and believed de Valera was ‘undoubtedly a complete prisoner to the Irish Republican Army’. This flawed intelligence also confirmed the prejudices of Baldwin, who had increasing sway over MacDonald and was a diehard unionist with bitter contempt for Irish nationalism. Although London was jittery about overreacting to inflammatory intelligence, MacDonald and particularly Baldwin embarked on a campaign of economic sanctions to undermine de Valera. Based on an exaggerated threat of Irish subversion, the strategy was misjudged, and merely allowed de Valera to gain ‘immense political mileage’.83 (#litres_trial_promo) For now, though, Ireland was a red herring. The real threat seemed to be coming from the east rather than the west. Eyes began to turn towards Adolf Hitler and the ominous rise of Nazi Germany. Yet secret intelligence did not inform strategic policy on Germany, or indeed Japan, particularly closely during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Especially in the empire across the Middle East, India and Malaya, intelligence officers remained unduly focused on Bolshevism.84 (#litres_trial_promo) Moreover, partly because Hankey had failed to create a central intelligence ‘brain’ in the Cabinet Office, secret information remained tactical and operational, with little impact on discussions about the next major threat. Instead, policymakers relied on conventional and open sources – or, as in Ireland, biased locals. As Germany, Italy and Japan all began to make noises about revising the international order during the mid-1930s, intelligence on capabilities and industrial capacity became a priority. However, there was still no central machine for using intelligence to assess the strategy or intentions of these new enemies.85 (#litres_trial_promo) Added to this, British impecuniousness and memories of the tragic devastation of the First World War fostered a reluctance in MacDonald and Baldwin to address the issue. MacDonald, perhaps unsurprisingly, remained more focused on economic recovery in the aftermath of the 1929 Wall Street Crash.86 (#litres_trial_promo) Rearmament remains a controversial issue – one breath away from ‘appeasement’. Baldwin was long paraded alongside Ramsay MacDonald and Neville Chamberlain as one of the ‘Guilty Men’ who had failed to deter Hitler. More recently it has become apparent that, in a difficult economic context, he did much to improve Britain’s defences – albeit not enough to provide convincing deterrence.87 (#litres_trial_promo) In March 1934, Baldwin announced that Britain would retain parity in air strength with Germany, hoping that this public commitment would deter Hitler’s aerial ambitions. Later in the year, he announced an expansion of the RAF to keep pace with the German programme. Nevertheless, Baldwin wanted to avoid an all-out arms race, and sought to rearm at a pace the public could accept, rather than at the optimum speed to counter Hitler.88 (#litres_trial_promo) Intelligence was central to these complex rearmament debates. Both MacDonald and Baldwin knew Britain could not afford rapid, large-scale rearmament. Intelligence therefore became crucial in understanding exactly how much rearmament was necessary to counter the Nazi threat, and what kind of weapons were needed. Everyone was obsessed with air power. For the fascists it was symbolic of a modernist future, for others it was the likely harbinger of urban destruction at the very outbreak of war. Downing Street wanted an accurate picture of the current size of the Luftwaffe and the speed of future expansion. This, of course, was rather difficult to achieve in what was increasingly a Nazi police state. New technologies are often developed in secret and misunderstood even by those who develop them. Moreover, Hitler maintained strict control of the German press, and exaggerated Nazi strength. In other countries, especially Japan, ‘horrible deaths awaited those suspected of spying’.89 (#litres_trial_promo) Britain lacked hard intelligence – especially on German intentions. The decline of the codebreakers at GC&CS made matters worse still. In the 1930s the Germans made increasing use of the Enigma encryption machine and electro-mechanical ciphers that generated millions of possible solutions to any secret message, and could not at the time be broken. Progressively through the 1930s, GC&CS lost the ability to read the codes of other important powers, including Russia, Italy and Japan. By the end of the decade the only major power whose traffic they were regularly reading was the United States. Baldwin and MacDonald never enjoyed the insight into German thinking that Churchill was later to gain from Bletchley Park.90 (#litres_trial_promo) Intelligence capability cannot be increased overnight. Successive governments had slashed public spending in an attempt to deal with the aftermath of the First World War and then the Great Depression. As part of this, MacDonald’s national government had imposed deep cuts on army, naval and particularly air intelligence. Strikingly, Robert Vansittart, the permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, later admitted that the head of one section of the intelligence services ‘was so short of funds that at times he was reduced to relatives for assistance’.91 (#litres_trial_promo) Lack of funding proved particularly detrimental given the increasing focus on the size and strength of the German air force, which was one of the great unknowns of the 1930s and which, as a new and frightening form of warfare, needed to be better understood. Interwar developments in air power had dramatically increased British feelings of vulnerability. Baldwin captured the mythical status of air power in his 1932 speech ‘Fear for the Future’ when he insisted ‘the bomber will always get through’.92 (#litres_trial_promo) Air intelligence now fell into a range of mental traps which generated complacency about the pace of Luftwaffe growth. Analysts believed that the Germans sought quality over quantity, and so thought it would take some time before Hitler could build enough planes to constitute a real threat.93 (#litres_trial_promo) Accordingly, intelligence was made to fit into a preconceived model, with the German air force ‘expanding in neat and well-ordered steps from the creation of one air division to the next’.94 (#litres_trial_promo) Even when offered excellent intelligence by France which indicated greater German ambitions, the Air Ministry refused to budge from its fixed mind-set.95 (#litres_trial_promo) The ministry’s dogged underestimation of the Germans is still a puzzle, not least because back in the 1920s it, alongside the Admiralty, deliberately exaggerated the strength of the French air force and the Japanese navy to argue for more resources.96 (#litres_trial_promo) Obsessed with the national stereotype of German efficiency and order, analysts thought the Nazi approach would be slowed by the need to train air crew, create support services and build barracks. According to the Deputy Chief of the Air Staff, ‘a nation so admittedly thorough as Germany will not be content with a mere window-dressing collection of aircraft and pilots’. The Air Ministry happily predicted that the Germans would not be able to match the RAF until 1945.97 (#litres_trial_promo) Meanwhile, at the centre of government a slow revolution was beginning. In 1931 Desmond Morton, an impish MI6 officer, had been allowed to create the Industrial Intelligence Centre. Beginning as a modest clearing house for economic intelligence on arms production capacity, something that no one seemingly wanted to own, it offered accurate assessments based on all source intelligence. More importantly, this unit was also the seed of centralised intelligence analysis that the Cabinet Office and Downing Street so badly needed. Although less sanguine than those of the Air Ministry, Morton’s assessments lacked impact, not least because he himself was unpopular, and did little to ‘promote interdepartmental harmony’.98 (#litres_trial_promo) Detailed and extensive, the reports apparently ‘raised a riot each time’ they were read, since ‘neither Baldwin nor Chamberlain wanted to believe them’, and nor did MacDonald.99 (#litres_trial_promo) Despite the improving intelligence on industrial matters, Baldwin woefully underestimated the speed of German rearmament throughout 1934 and much of 1935.100 (#litres_trial_promo) With Robert Vansittart and the Foreign Office joining the argument, intelligence on the state of the German air force became Whitehall’s hottest potato.101 (#litres_trial_promo) In March 1935, Hitler himself joined the debate, dramatically lifting the veils of secrecy from the Luftwaffe. In doing so, he bewildered British planners by claiming air power parity with the UK. This was bad news for Baldwin. Firstly, Churchill had long argued that Germany would soon overtake Britain if rearmament of the two countries continued at their present rates. Secondly, he had also warned that once Hitler had got the lead, Britain would be unable to catch up.102 (#litres_trial_promo) Thirdly, poor Baldwin had unequivocally promised the House of Commons in November 1934 that ‘it is not the case that Germany is rapidly approaching equality with us’.103 (#litres_trial_promo) Overnight, Hitler’s claims seemed to prove Baldwin wrong and Churchill right. Churchill was not guessing, and had secretly been supplied with the more hawkish intelligence estimates by Morton. Baldwin publicly admitted to intelligence failure, explaining to the House of Commons that his forecast of German air power expansion, given the previous year, was off the mark.104 (#litres_trial_promo) In a dramatic confession, he continued, ‘Where I was wrong was in my estimate of the future. There I was completely wrong.’ He also admitted that there was simply a lack of good intelligence. ‘I tell the House so frankly, because neither I nor any advisers from whom we could get accurate information had any idea of the exact rate at which production was being, could be, and actually was being speeded up in Germany in the six months between November and now.’ He did not stop there. Going beyond lamenting a dearth of facts, he added: ‘We were completely misled on that subject.’ This was a damning judgement of the intelligence assessments, and amounted to an admission that the British secret services had been defeated by a German deception. ‘I will not say we had not rumours,’ the prime minister continued. ‘There was a great deal of hearsay, but we could get no facts’ – aside from those which came from Hitler himself: hardly the most reliable source.105 (#litres_trial_promo) Baldwin was refreshingly unafraid to admit mistakes.106 (#litres_trial_promo) Like so many prime ministers publicly discussing intelligence, however, his performance was ‘dishonest, if politically expedient’.107 (#litres_trial_promo) The Foreign Office and the Industrial Intelligence Centre had offered a less complacent view. By publicly blaming intelligence, Baldwin had put at least one MI6 officer’s job on the line, while Christopher Bullock, the permanent secretary at the Air Ministry, also worried about his future – after all, he had provided Baldwin with the soothing air intelligence estimates. In the end, though, Baldwin used the opportunity to sack Lord Londonderry, the secretary of state for air.108 (#litres_trial_promo) The prime minister had misused the intelligence d?b?cle publicly in the House of Commons for political purposes and to effect ministerial change. It soon became apparent that Hitler had exaggerated his air power parity claims anyway. The failure of British intelligence on the key question of air power actually makes Baldwin look rather better. He deserves more credit for increasing rearmament, given the weak intelligence support he received on this vital matter, and it could be argued that his decisions helped ensure victory in the Battle of Britain in 1940.109 (#litres_trial_promo) Yet, as the historian David Dilks has argued, had intelligence been stronger, and had ‘the British appreciated the magnitude of their peril at an earlier date, had they embarked on an ambitious rearmament programme in 1934 instead of 1936’, Hitler might have been deterred altogether.110 (#litres_trial_promo) Weak British intelligence in the 1930s, and the lack of any central assessment mechanisms, probably contributed to appeasement. Conversely, good intelligence ‘might have been the only means possible to tear the blinkers’ from ministerial eyes.111 (#litres_trial_promo) For both MacDonald and Baldwin, intelligence services became entangled with matters of the heart. A former lover allegedly blackmailed MacDonald with compromising letters during the latter stages of his final premiership in the mid-1930s. Various accounts exist as to what happened next, but some suggest MacDonald used secret service funds to pay her off, or even asked MI6 to swoop in and seize the offending letters. Either way, somehow the blackmailer, one Mrs Forster, was prevented from sending her evidence to the press. MacDonald’s biographer sees some truth in the story, but maintains that it was ‘out of character for MacDonald himself to have authorised – much less ordered – the use of public money for such a purpose. But desperate men do sometimes act out of character.’112 (#litres_trial_promo) For Baldwin, the stakes were higher. In 1936, increasingly frail and looking to retire, he confronted the abdication crisis. King Edward VIII was determined to marry the American Wallis Simpson. Baldwin considered her completely unsuitable, since she had divorced her first husband and was seeking a divorce from her second. The security service also knew of her Nazi sympathies, and for this reason Baldwin and his foreign secretary Anthony Eden had decided that the new King should no longer be supplied with secret documents.113 (#litres_trial_promo) Baldwin staunchly believed that it would be better for the whole government to resign than to allow any such marriage to proceed. Running on phosphorus pills prescribed by his doctor, he was ready for this final challenge, and wondered whether destiny had kept him in office solely for the task. Oddly, this delicate piece of constitutional management was perhaps the prime minister’s most concerted effort as a personal user of intelligence.114 (#litres_trial_promo) Edward VIII became King in January 1936. Baldwin liked the new monarch on a personal level, and met Wallis Simpson in May. By the autumn, having shown the King gossip about the couple’s relationship from American newspapers, Baldwin felt ‘the ice had been broken’. He was comfortable warning the King to be careful and discreet.115 (#litres_trial_promo) Although the affair received front-page coverage in America, remarkably the King persuaded the British press to say nothing. The crisis erupted in November, when Edward summoned the prime minister and declared that he intended to marry Mrs Simpson. Unsurprisingly, he was used to getting his own way, and was immune to appeals to duty from Baldwin.116 (#litres_trial_promo) In addition to creating tension between Buckingham Palace and Number 10, the crisis brought Baldwin into direct conflict with Vernon Kell at MI5. In December 1936, the prime minister demanded that MI5 investigate Mrs Simpson, but Kell declined. Baldwin certainly disliked the American socialite, once stating ‘I have grown to hate that woman.’ He felt she had done more to harm the monarchy ‘in nine months than Victoria and George the Fifth did to repair it in half a century’, and noted approvingly that a friend of the King had referred to her as ‘a hard-bitten bitch’.117 (#litres_trial_promo) It was more than personal, though – Baldwin feared a constitutional crisis of sovereignty. He also felt ‘no other suitable machinery existed’ to conduct such a sensitive operation.118 (#litres_trial_promo) In what was a rare confrontation with a prime minister, Kell disagreed. He argued that the proposed marriage would not threaten the realm, and was consequently no business of MI5’s. The prime minister refused to give up. He pressed Kell further, and the director-general felt compelled to discuss the issue with his deputies. They were seemingly persuaded, and reluctantly agreed to conduct telephone and physical surveillance. MI5 consequently made ‘certain delicate enquiries’. Surveillance of Mrs Simpson’s phone revealed that she had another secret lover, a Ford car dealer in Mayfair. The King was never informed. Special Branch also apparently watched Mrs Simpson, and drew up a file documenting her liaison with the car dealer, whom they described as ‘very charming, very good looking, well bred and an excellent dancer’. Even while the King was considering abdication, Mrs Simpson was seeing her other beau, upon whom she lavished expensive gifts and money.119 (#litres_trial_promo) Baldwin’s government also targeted the King. Horace Wilson, the prime minister’s adviser at Number 10, asked the head of the General Post Office, Thomas Gardiner, to intercept all phone calls between the King’s addresses, including Buckingham Palace, and certain addresses in both Continental Europe and London where Simpson was likely to be staying. Five days before the abdication, the Home Office put the ‘most secret’ request in writing.120 (#litres_trial_promo) ‘Tar’ Robertson, an MI5 officer better remembered for his wartime role in the Double Cross deception operations, claims to have been involved. He apparently entered Green Park at night to access a GPO junction box hidden in the bushes and tap the phone line between the King and his brother, the next in line to the throne, in order to ‘see how the situation was moving’.121 (#litres_trial_promo) Intelligence gathered by such means not only helped Baldwin to deal with the King by providing context, it also enabled him to monitor and control the international press during the crisis. Several unhelpful stories were intercepted by cable monitoring and then squashed by the home secretary.122 (#litres_trial_promo) However, it seems that the process of abdication, Baldwin’s favoured outcome, would have been under way by then in any case. It also seems unlikely that MI5 found anything further against Mrs Simpson through its telephone-interception operation. Nonetheless, Baldwin got his way, although he believed that ‘no more repugnant task has ever been imposed on a prime minister’.123 (#litres_trial_promo) The King abdicated on 10 December 1936. Baldwin’s appearance at the Houses of Parliament that day was greeted by ‘loud cheers’ from the public, and only a small and insignificant ‘little burst of booing’.124 (#litres_trial_promo) The prime minister himself would resign less than six months later, making way for his chancellor of the exchequer, Neville Chamberlain. Between them, MacDonald and Baldwin had faced a wide array of complex secret service issues. These included Soviet subversion, the Ireland problem, the rise of Nazi Germany and the abdication crisis. Inexperienced, driven by political motivations, and for the most part lacking a centralised ‘brain’ to bring intelligence into policymaking, they fared poorly and made costly mistakes. By contrast, Chamberlain’s premiership faced just one overriding issue which intelligence targeted: the Axis between Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Yet few prime ministers, if any, endured a more disastrous relationship with intelligence than he. PART TWO THE WINDS OF WAR (#u2edb29e4-9f5d-578c-8bf9-8979eb3f3d09) 3 Neville Chamberlain (1937–1940) (#u2edb29e4-9f5d-578c-8bf9-8979eb3f3d09) Phew! What a week, the place buzzes with rumours and our own Secret Service continually reports information ‘derived from an absolutely reliable source’ of the most alarming character. I don’t know how many times we have been given the exact date and even hour when the Germans would march into Poland. Neville Chamberlain1 (#litres_trial_promo) It is easy to forget that Britain had not one, but three prime ministers during the Second World War. Neville Chamberlain presided until the invasion of France in May 1940, and Clement Attlee arrived in Downing Street shortly after the general election of July 1945, overseeing crucial end-of-war settlements and the final weeks of the war against Japan. Yet the story of intelligence and the Second World War overwhelmingly remains a mythologised Churchillian romp. Newly released documents show Attlee to have been an improbable action hero, or at least a fan of covert operations, quietly learning the intelligence trade alongside Eden and Macmillan in Churchill’s wartime training school for future occupants of Downing Street. By contrast, Chamberlain remains something of a cipher.2 (#litres_trial_promo) Amongst a mountain of books about Chamberlain and the road to Munich, the interaction between intelligence, appeasement and re-armament is hard to find. Despite significant intelligence disasters in the first six months of the war, Chamberlain’s own impact on intelligence through to May 1940 is almost unknown.3 (#litres_trial_promo) Chamberlain took little interest in British intelligence before 1939. He eschewed it partly because it was weak. MI6 had suffered budget cuts, and was underperforming against Nazi Germany. It had ceased to recruit agents in Mussolini’s Italy, while its representatives in the Far East were a standing joke. Britain’s small band of talented codebreakers had valiantly and successfully filled the intelligence void for much of the interwar period, but during the late 1930s they progressively lost access to the high-level communications of Russia, Italy and finally Japan, while never gaining access to German ciphers. Japanese communications, the last substantial insight into Axis activity, were lost in late 1938 when Tokyo radically improved its communications procedures, probably as a result of its thorough penetration of the British embassy there. But this was not just a failure of spies to collect. Those responsible for assessments at the centre of government concentrated on counting aircraft and tanks, rather than thinking seriously about Hitler’s intentions. During the intense argument over appeasement, intelligence could not speak truth to power simply because it did not know what the truth was. Chamberlain made a bad situation worse by filling this intelligence void with his own arrogance and assumptions. Although hampered by the slow pace of British rearmament, he nevertheless made some real choices among a range of alternative policies, deliberately using his wilful and obstinate personality to prevent a serious debate about these options. He had an overwhelming confidence in his own judgement, and believed that his personal skills in diplomacy would overcome any problems and allow him to make robust agreements with untrustworthy leaders. Worst of all, he punished those who purveyed negative intelligence assessments of Hitler, and with MI5’s connivance used his own private system of surveillance to destabilise his political rivals. Although lacking effective intelligence or a proper assessment machine, Chamberlain did have a range of information sources on Hitler available. He chose to rely on Sir Nevile Henderson, the British ambassador in Berlin, who was close to Herman Goering and believed Hitler’s assurances of good faith concerning his intentions for Czechoslovakia. Robert Vansittart, the able permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, took the opposite view. Understanding that MI6 was struggling, Vansittart had taken pains to develop his own ‘private detective agency’, which delivered surprisingly good, if sporadic, reports from secret contacts inside Germany. Instead of patiently evaluating these competing views, Chamberlain chose to persecute and marginalise Vansittart. In the interwar period very little MI6 material and very few intercepts from GC&CS were circulated to the Treasury, which may help to explain why Chamberlain, despite considerable government experience, was so na?ve about intelligence.4 (#litres_trial_promo) Nevertheless, Chamberlain loved conspiracy. He sent endless secret diplomatic missions behind the backs of his foreign secretaries. He also used his family as emissaries to outwit his own Foreign Office. New and secret documents have recently come to light that show just how far Chamberlain was prepared to go in using the hidden hand against members of his own party, and even his cabinet colleagues. He also manipulated public opinion to artificially create the impression that his views were widely supported. During the ‘Phoney War’ of late 1939 and early 1940, some of the most intricate games of espionage were not focused on Germany, but around Chamberlain’s immediate circle. The greatest intelligence failures are those of the imagination. Chamberlain and his government underestimated Hitler because it was difficult to conceive of someone who was bent on world domination and genocide – doubly so given that the horrors of the First World War were only a decade or so in the past. Yet for those willing to listen, Hitler calmly set out his plans in some detail. In the summer of 1933, for example, John F. Coar, a retired American professor specialising in German literature, reported to the American ambassador in Berlin a conversation he had had with Hitler and his deputy Rudolf Hess: ‘Hitler talked wildly about destroying all Jews, insisting that no other nation had any right to protest and that Germany was showing the world how to rid itself of its greatest curse. He considered himself a sort of Messiah. He would rearm Germany, absorb Austria and finally move the capital to Munich.’ Even hearing these words, no one believed that Hitler meant literally killing millions of people. Many assumed that his talk of ‘destroying all Jews’ meant merely removing them from influential jobs and limiting their economic power.5 (#litres_trial_promo) Although Britain appears to have been deeply divided about intelligence in the late 1930s, there was broad consensus on strategy. Everyone wanted to avoid war, not least because British leaders realised it would expose the nation’s weakness as an imperial power. Faced with threats from both Germany and Japan, and latterly from Italy and Russia, they had agreed to prioritise Germany, quite simply because this enemy was closest to Britain’s shores. Many also agreed with Chamberlain’s grand strategy, which was based on deterrence and diplomacy, not fighting. The prime minister, however, wrongly assumed that the dictator states feared conflict as much as he did. In reality, those around Hitler, Mussolini and Hideki Tojo, the Japanese prime minister at the time of Pearl Harbor, were looking for war. As a former Treasury man, Chamberlain brought an actuarial approach to intelligence that involved counting guns and assessing military capabilities, not political intentions.6 (#litres_trial_promo) British intelligence amplified Chamberlain’s misunderstandings. On the raw size of German forces it was quite accurate, but more importantly, it did not understand Blitzkrieg. Having lost the First World War, Hitler chose a military doctrine emphasising highly mobile conflict. In 1936, he began a second and more rapid phase of rearmament – so rapid that the German armed forces found it hard to spend all the additional money. British intelligence began reassessing the German military’s power, and grew increasingly worried between 1936 and 1938 about growing Nazi capabilities. After 1939, however, the intelligence community became more optimistic about the balance of numbers, and this ‘bean-counting’ approach, which so appealed to Chamberlain, helped to persuade the prime minister to declare war, because he thought Britain was now relatively stronger. In reality, the Wehrmacht’s real capability did not lie in its size but in its new doctrine. Hitler’s audacity and his use of surprise were far more important. Britain’s biggest intelligence problem was codebreaking. It had lost the battle over secret communications, and so lacked deep insight into Hitler’s intentions. Although GC&CS numbered only two hundred staff between the wars, it was still perhaps the world’s biggest codebreaking organisation. Up until 1935 it was also the most effective. But just as Britain confronted the crises of the late thirties, its rivals adopted modern electromechanical cipher machines, and British codebreaking, then still a bespoke handicraft activity rather than an industrial organisation, went into a sharp decline. By 1937, GC&CS had lost access to Russian and Italian diplomatic messages. The following year, the Japanese improved their code systems, shutting Britain out there too. Political communications between the four revisionist powers, Russia, Germany, Italy and Japan, would have been especially revealing regarding enemy intentions. Intercepts would have made Chamberlain’s appeasement strategy hard to sustain, and would also have prevented Mussolini from manipulating the prime minister with such pathetic ease. Axis diplomacy was a sealed box, and it was only opened in 1940, when the Americans began to break high-level Japanese diplomatic ciphers, and generously shared this secret with Britain.7 (#litres_trial_promo) Human spies could not fill the gap. The years of economic crisis in the early 1930s cast a distinct shadow over MI6. Its chief, Quex Sinclair, explained that although his main task was to provide raw intelligence for the services against all potential enemies, the lack of funds meant only partial coverage of secret fascist plans to rearm. Heeding the exhortations of the Foreign Office, Italy was designated ‘friendly’, and there had been no MI6 agents there when Mussolini invaded Abyssinia in 1936. MI6 concentrated on Germany, but there was little work on either her allies or the neutrals in Europe. This meant an underestimation of German total long-term industrial capability.8 (#litres_trial_promo) Britain’s embassy in Berlin was worse still. The ambassador, Nevile Henderson, a close friend of Herman Goering, head of the Luftwaffe, took German reassurances at face value. For their part, the Germans treated Henderson and his staff as idiots. During the Anschluss of 1938, Henderson asked his military attach? to call up German military intelligence and ask what was going on. Senior staff officers there assured him that no unusual troop movements were planned for that day, and everything was calm. The attach? was suspicious, and decided to go on a private reconnaissance expedition out into the countryside. He had only reached the outskirts of Berlin when his car became embroiled in a huge traffic jam caused by a column of 3,000 soldiers, police and SS ‘moving towards Austria in buses, bakers’ vans, pantechnicons and a mass of other miscellaneous vehicles’.9 (#litres_trial_promo) Britain’s weak intelligence was not just about collection. Whitehall lacked a central analytical brain that could assimilate and assess material from all sources. The resulting fragmentation, combined with the focus on capabilities, allowed Chamberlain to manipulate or ignore intelligence. As early as late 1933, Sir Warren Fisher, head of the home civil service, had decided that Germany was the ‘ultimate potential enemy’ against which long-term defence planning had to be directed.10 (#litres_trial_promo) But subsequent efforts to determine Germany’s strength were frustrated by interservice rivalries between army, naval and air intelligence. ‘Bitterness and mistrust’ – especially between the Air Ministry and the Foreign Office – dominated relations. The British intelligence apparatus was not yet a community, but rather a number of factions at odds with each other. In 1936, the first glimmerings of central intelligence appeared with the creation of a Joint Intelligence Committee, or ‘JIC’, but this was then a lowly body, and only served the chiefs of staff. Surprisingly, it did not at this point include representatives from MI5, MI6 or GC&CS.11 (#litres_trial_promo) Intelligence work accelerated after Germany’s occupation of the Rhineland in 1936. All the service ministries boosted their assessment efforts accordingly. Yet there was ‘remarkably little discussion or collaboration between them’. As we have seen, the only effective cross-Whitehall body was Desmond Morton’s Industrial Intelligence Centre, undertaking detailed study into the German war machine. Morton, therefore, might well be credited with the whole idea of central intelligence machinery that would eventually support Downing Street and the Cabinet Office. Even had this existed at the time, Chamberlain was such an incompetent and wilfully blind consumer of intelligence that it would have made little difference. The impact of Morton’s work on Chamberlain was to generate anxiety, then paralysis, and ultimately to accelerate appeasement.12 (#litres_trial_promo) Despite not understanding intelligence, the prime minister spied shamelessly upon his cabinet colleagues. He also appreciated the value of covert propaganda and manipulating the press. Nothing underlines this more clearly than his personal friendship with the mysterious figure of Sir Joseph Ball, an MI5 officer who became Director of the Conservative Research Department in the 1930s, when Chamberlain was party chairman. Ball secretly controlled a weekly journal that engaged in what the leading historian of the Conservative Party has called the ‘venomous anti-semitic character assassination’ of Chamberlain’s enemies.13 (#litres_trial_promo) One of his colleagues recalled that he was ‘steeped in Service tradition, and has as much experience as anyone I know in the seamy side of life and the handling of crooks’.14 (#litres_trial_promo) Ball was so determinedly secret that he destroyed most of his own papers in an attempt to vaporise himself from the historical record. Devoted to Chamberlain, he not only ran spies inside the Labour Party but also spied on the prime minister’s enemies within his own party, especially the anti-appeasers led by Churchill and Eden, even claiming to have had some of their telephones tapped.15 (#litres_trial_promo) Chamberlain also used Ball to conduct a separate overseas policy behind the back of his first foreign secretary, Anthony Eden. Rightly suspecting Mussolini of being a thug and a double-dealer, Eden preferred to look to the United States for support. Chamberlain, however, paid little attention to Washington, believing that he could reach a binding agreement with Hitler and charm Mussolini into alliance. He sought to cultivate Dino Grandi, the Italian ambassador in London, who had previously been Mussolini’s foreign minister. Grandi’s power base came from the most radical and violent Italian fascists; he was also an adept covert operator. Knowing that his masters in Italy had a low regard for the British, he enthusiastically encouraged the secret channel in order to poison relations between Eden and Chamberlain, reportedly meeting Ball in the back of London taxis.16 (#litres_trial_promo) Ball’s many London friends included a Maltese barrister called Adrian Dingli. A lawyer for the Italian embassy, Dingli knew Grandi well, and was also a member of the Carlton Club in St James’s, the oldest and most important of all Conservative clubs. Chamberlain and Ball therefore decided to use Dingli to try to open talks with Italy behind Eden’s back.17 (#litres_trial_promo) In early 1938, they concocted a letter, purporting to be from the Italians, addressed to Eden offering talks, and gave it to Grandi to pass to Eden. Grandi was nervous, and insisted that if the letter were made public he would have no choice but to reveal Chamberlain as the real author ‘in order to protect Italy’s honour’. The scheme went ahead, and when Grandi finally met Chamberlain and Eden on 18 February he greatly enjoyed the open disagreement between them, recalling the ‘two enemies confronting each other like two cocks in fighting posture’.18 (#litres_trial_promo) There was a fearsome row, and further meetings between cabinet colleagues over the weekend could not mend the subsequent crisis. Eden grew annoyed that exchanges with the Italians increasingly came secretly via Ball rather than via the Foreign Office. To Grandi’s impish delight, Eden resigned on 20 February 1938 and was replaced by Lord Halifax.19 (#litres_trial_promo) Chamberlain had been using his sister Ida as a further secret conduit to Mussolini. Visiting Rome in early 1938, she was enthralled by the Duce, who ‘took both my hands and kissed them’. She reported that he was ‘kindly & human’, and only wanted peace. Italian diplomats told her they liked Chamberlain, but nurtured a deep dislike and distrust of Eden. Mischievously, they promised to call off their anti-British propaganda if only London recognised Italy’s conquest of Albania. In further meetings with Mussolini and his foreign minister Galeazzo Ciano, Ida read out long private messages from Chamberlain. After getting rid of Eden, Chamberlain thanked her for her ‘invaluable help’.20 (#litres_trial_promo) The Eden resignation was a potential source of embarrassment. Ball’s influence over the Conservative press, however, helped to limit the damage. The BBC barely mentioned the resignation at all, and Ball assured the prime minister that he had ‘taken certain steps privately’ to manage the story. Amazingly, in the following months Ball watched for counter-attacks on Chamberlain by tapping ‘the telephones of the Eden group’ and of staff working on their journal the Whitehall Newsletter.21 (#litres_trial_promo) Various Conservative groups had their own news-sheets and outlets. Ball secretly took control of one named Truth, and developed it as both a mouthpiece for appeasement and a weapon with which to discredit his opponents outside and inside the party. Chamberlain was well aware of this, happily confiding to his sister that Truth was ‘secretly controlled by Sir J Ball!’22 (#litres_trial_promo) Remarkably, Truth was not only anti-Eden and anti-Churchill, it was also overtly pro-German and pro-Italian. Most striking was its anti-Semitism, attacking mainstream journalists with phrases such as the ‘Jew-infested sink of Fleet Street’. Even after the outbreak of war in 1939 and the formation of the national government, Truth conducted attacks on behalf of Chamberlain against his cabinet colleagues.23 (#litres_trial_promo) Chamberlain’s subsequent visit to Italy was a failure. The Italian secret service had free run of the British embassy in Rome, and used their burglary team, the ‘P Squad’, to gain access to British communications.24 (#litres_trial_promo) They therefore knew what cards the British held. In addition, Chamberlain played his hand badly, and his excessively polite approach seemed craven to the Italians. Ciano rightly concluded that Chamberlain would make almost any concession to avoid war, which underlined the value of a German military alliance. With Hitler’s support, Ciano now felt the Italians ‘could get whatever we want’ from the British.25 (#litres_trial_promo) Chamberlain continued to communicate with Rome via the Dingli ‘secret channel’ until the outbreak of war.26 (#litres_trial_promo) Thereafter, Ball, ever attentive to detail, continued for years to tidy up the evidence of his and Chamberlain’s spectacular failures. Their go-between, Adrian Dingli, died unexpectedly and violently in Malta on 29 May 1945. Two days later, British security agents seized copies of his highly compromising diary.27 (#litres_trial_promo) Fortunately, his wife preserved an extra copy to tell the real tale. Dingli officially died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. But writing to a friend after the war, Ball explained how he had employed a double agent to work on Italian policy. He added casually that this agent became ‘untrustworthy’, and so ‘I arranged for M.I.5 to look after him in the usual way.’28 (#litres_trial_promo) On 14 May 1938, an odd incident underlined Chamberlain’s desire to appease Hitler. The England football team was playing Germany at the Olympic Stadium in Berlin. Hitler missed the match, but Goebbels, Goering, Himmler and Ribbentrop sat amid a crowd of 110,000. Controversially, before kick-off the England captain led his team in giving the Nazi salute during the German national anthem. The instructions for this came direct from the Foreign Office, and were delivered to the players in the dressing room just before the game.29 (#litres_trial_promo) Stanley Matthews, who was a member of the team that day, felt that this was no mere football match, and that the Nazis saw it as a test of the New Order: ‘This day as never before we would be playing for England.’ England won 6–3, with Aston Villa trouncing another German team in Berlin the following day.30 (#litres_trial_promo) The Czechoslovakia crisis dragged on throughout the year. Hitler demanded that the Czechs cede the Sudetenland to Germany, and it fell to a private intelligence network to shake Chamberlain’s complacency. In the 1930s, such networks thronged within Europe’s capitals. The most important was run by Robert Vansittart, who as we have seen understood how intelligence worked inside Whitehall. Having served as private secretary to two prime ministers and a foreign secretary, and being on extremely good terms with Quex Sinclair, Vansittart had more experience in this field than almost anyone else.31 (#litres_trial_promo) Chamberlain, however, removed him as permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office in 1937, on account of his strong anti-German views. The prime minister privately rejoiced that he had managed ‘to push Van out of the F.O.’, adding that this was ‘deathly secret at present’.32 (#litres_trial_promo) Vansittart had forecast doom and destruction almost as soon as Hitler swept to power. He consistently pressed cabinet ministers to encircle and isolate Germany. These warnings reflected thinly disguised prejudice against Germans generally rather than hard intelligence, and Vansittart’s shrill voice often proved his own worst enemy.33 (#litres_trial_promo) His replacement, Alexander Cadogan, considered Vansittart to have a one-track mind, exclaiming: ‘He’s an idiot with an id?e fixe – a very simple one. He’s all fa?ade and nothing else.’ Vansittart may have had a fixed idea, but it was essentially the right idea. Now sidelined as a mere ‘diplomatic adviser’ at the Foreign Office, he nevertheless understood that the key intelligence question was German intentions rather than capabilities.34 (#litres_trial_promo) MI6’s own intelligence capability was badly damaged in the mid-1930s. The key MI6 station in Europe for watching Germany was based in The Hague, and was an indirect casualty of the Nazi persecution of the Jews. MI6 operations there, as in much of Europe, were hidden behind the Passport Control Office, which issued visas. These now became flooded with Jews escaping Germany and seeking permits for Palestine. The MI6 head of station, Major Dalton, took sizeable bribes in return for visas and was then blackmailed by one of the clerks, subsequently committing suicide in 1936. The blackmailer was sacked after an inquiry, and sold his services to the German secret service, which allowed it to uncover Britain’s best human source reporting on the German navy. Inexplicably, Dalton’s MI6 replacement in The Hague took the blackmailer back onto the payroll, along with another German agent. Unsurprisingly, the station was soon flooded with German deception material.35 (#litres_trial_promo) Further disasters followed. On the morning of 17 August 1938, Captain Thomas Kendrick, the MI6 station chief in Vienna, was arrested near Salzburg when he became unacceptably close to German army manoeuvres while driving towards Munich. He was taken to Gestapo headquarters at the Hotel Metropole in Vienna. After being subjected for three days to non-stop harsh interrogation carried out by security teams in eight-hour relays, he was expelled from Germany on grounds of espionage. His staff shut down the station and burned all their papers. Sinclair recalled all the remaining MI6 personnel back to London from Vienna, Berlin and Prague – the key cities in central Europe. If the Germans’ intention had been to blunt Britain’s operational capacity to gather intelligence on military operations against the Czechs, this was a resounding success.36 (#litres_trial_promo) Vansittart’s greatest asset was his ‘private detective agency’, established by his friend Malcolm Graham Christie. Serving as air attach? in Washington in the 1920s, Christie had come to Vansittart’s attention because of his technical and commercial espionage against the Americans. He developed contacts in journalism, government circles and the aircraft industry, and used ‘grey methods’ alongside borderline illegal techniques. Vansittart knew exactly what to do with Christie, and sent him to Berlin as air attach?. Because Christie had a degree in science from a German university and was an experienced pilot, he immediately made friends high up in government and industrial circles. In January 1930, he left government service and became an international businessman, using his German connections. He deliberately socialised with the German political right, and reported back to London. Like Vansittart, Christie loathed the Nazis, but he was skilled in the collection and interpretation of intelligence. He not only used Nazis as sources, but also courted political rebels, and was close to the dissident Nazi leader Otto Strasser, as well as German Catholic circles. The virtue of the Vansittart–Christie network was therefore its broad base, including both Nazis and different types of opposition. True to the tradition of the best spymasters, Christie’s most useful sources remain anonymous, but they included ‘Agent X’ in the German Air Ministry, ‘Agent Y’ in the Catholic Church, and ‘Agent Fish’ who was close to Hitler himself.37 (#litres_trial_promo) Vansittart and his ‘private detective agency’ jubilantly rode the waves of the Czechoslovakia crisis. Hitler’s increasing belligerence served to improve their standing. On 10 August 1938, Halifax, the new foreign secretary, met Christie to hear his reports of another imminent crisis over Czechoslovakia. But the constant reports of Nazi plotting still seemed fantastic, and neither Halifax nor Cadogan knew what to believe. Cadogan later recorded, ‘There’s certainly enough in the Secret Reports to make one’s hair stand on end. But I never quite swallow all these things, and I am presented with a selection.’ Like Chamberlain, they still could not imagine the leader of a major European country undertaking the violent course of action that was now predicted.38 (#litres_trial_promo) Vansittart’s most remarkable achievement occurred on 6 September 1938. A shadowy figure slipped noiselessly through the garden gate of 10 Downing Street to pay a secret visit. This was Theodor Kordt, charg? d’affaires at the German embassy and one of Vansittart’s ‘private detectives’. He met Horace Wilson, head of the civil service and Chamberlain’s most trusted adviser, to warn him that whatever agreements were made on paper, Hitler intended to invade all of Czechoslovakia. Wilson was unimpressed. The next day, Kordt returned to give the same message to Halifax in a private audience. Whether or not Halifax was convinced was immaterial. Chamberlain had increasingly taken personal control of foreign policy together with Wilson. Similar messages from German generals opposed to Hitler had already been dismissed. Instead of listening to Vansittart’s private network, their main alternative source of ‘intelligence’ came from the straight diplomatic reports of the credulous Nevile Henderson.39 (#litres_trial_promo) Henderson had been appointed as ambassador to Berlin in April 1937 because of his uncanny ability to ‘hit it off with dictators’. In the early 1930s, he had formed a close friendship with King Alexander of Yugoslavia. Ironically, it was Vansittart who had identified him as a rising star and promised him a place in the Foreign Office ‘first eleven’. Before Henderson departed for Berlin, Chamberlain sent for him, and after this meeting Henderson became convinced that he was the prime minister’s personal representative rather than a mere diplomat. His positive reporting of Hitler’s assurances underpinned the Munich Agreement that autumn. Early in the morning of 30 September 1938, Hitler, Chamberlain, Mussolini and French prime minister ?douard Daladier agreed to German acquisition of the Sudetenland and postponed the issue of other areas. The Czechs had no choice but to capitulate. Chamberlain returned to a tumultuous welcome, and spoke of ‘peace for our time’.40 (#litres_trial_promo) Halifax now stepped away. He had initially agreed with Chamberlain that Hitler merely sought a racially coherent Germany, had no real ambitions beyond areas of German population, and would not aggravate Britain by using military force. But the increasingly angry arguments within Whitehall over the Czechoslovakia crisis changed his mind. The foreign secretary eventually confronted Chamberlain and told him that although Hitler had not won a conflict, the F?hrer was effectively dictating terms. Chamberlain hated being contradicted. ‘Your complete change of view since I saw you last night,’ he said, ‘is a horrible blow to me.’ Lacking in official and reliable intelligence, the prime minister continued to use his own personal estimation in his attempts to predict Hitler’s intentions. He believed he had established a personal connection with Hitler when the two had met, and so invested strongly in Hitler’s promise that he had no intention of invading all of Czechoslovakia if an arrangement could be made about the Sudeten territories with majority German populations. In September 1938, Chamberlain noted that ‘In spite of the hardness and ruthlessness I thought I saw in his face I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word.’ The prime minister assured his cabinet colleagues that he had secured ‘some degree of personal influence over Herr Hitler’ – but they were increasingly sceptical.41 (#litres_trial_promo) From Christmas 1938 to the invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Vansittart’s circle were on the rise. Their main weapon was intelligence on Hitler’s future intentions. Although Cadogan found Vansittart’s reports from Germany ‘bloodcurdling’, their growing number forced him to conclude that Britain had to assume that Germany was now aggressive. In January 1939, Vansittart was suddenly invited to join the Cabinet Committee on Foreign Policy. He patiently explained to Horace Wilson and Samuel Hoare, two of Chamberlain’s most trusted allies, that his intelligence now indicated that Hitler planned an invasion of the Netherlands. But although he was winning the intelligence argument about the German threat, his prescription was unpalatable and he was never welcomed back into the fold. He recommended an alliance with Russia, something about which even his friends in MI6 were sceptical. Many argued that such an alliance would simply drive Germany into the arms of Japan.42 (#litres_trial_promo) Indeed, there was some evidence of this from GC&CS. On 14 September 1938, it distributed one of its last successful Japanese intercepts, which showed that Tojo had received a proposal from Berlin for precisely this kind of full offensive military alliance.43 (#litres_trial_promo) Throughout the Munich episode, Joseph Ball continued to spy on Chamberlain’s political rivals. Chamberlain even boasted of this in a letter to his sister Ida, gloating that Churchill and the Czech minister in London were ‘totally unaware of my knowledge of … their doings and sayings’.44 (#litres_trial_promo) Most observers suspect that these telephone taps would have been hard to arrange without some assistance from elements within MI5.45 (#litres_trial_promo) Yet the senior officers inside MI5 were vigorously anti-appeasement, and busily informed Cadogan and Halifax of Chamberlain’s private diplomacy with Germany.46 (#litres_trial_promo) Bizarrely, while all of this was going on, Churchill was receiving secret intelligence on rearmament from the former MI6 officer Desmond Morton. Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and then Neville Chamberlain had approved this arrangement in more peaceful times, but Chamberlain had forgotten his own instruction, and was horrified when Morton reminded him that Churchill was on the circulation list for some of the most sensitive intelligence circulating in Downing Street.47 (#litres_trial_promo) At the centre of all this absurd internal political espionage and counter-espionage was the young Harold Macmillan. Although only a backbench MP, he was the key link between the various anti-appeasement factions, including Eden’s ‘Glamour Boys’ and Churchill’s ‘Old Guard’. Their supposedly secret meetings at Conservative MP Ronnie Tree’s house in St Anne’s Gate seem to have been bugged by Ball and his team. Meanwhile, Harold Macmillan, a passionate opponent of Hitler, had taken in forty refugees from the German Sudetenland at his country estate, Birch Grove. In early November 1938, his new Czech guests had joined in the Bonfire Night celebrations, replacing Guy Fawkes with an effigy of Chamberlain. An enthusiastic Macmillan had personally donated his black homburg hat and a rolled umbrella to ensure a perfect likeness of the prime minister.48 (#litres_trial_promo) By Christmas 1938, few in the cabinet shared Chamberlain’s confidence in his ability to divine Hitler’s intentions. MI5 had recruited further sources inside the German embassy in London, including the former military attach?.49 (#litres_trial_promo) The Foreign Office also understood that the majority of the Nazi Party saw Great Britain as ‘Enemy No. 1’, and that a full-scale military confrontation was likely. A blizzard of rumours, often picked up by military attach?s, suggested that Hitler’s generals had been told to plan an attack in the west. Halifax noticed a troubling consistency in the myriad fragmentary intelligence. Chamberlain, by contrast, preferred to believe Henderson’s assurances from the embassy in Berlin that these were all ‘stories and rumours’. The absence of reliable sigint meant there was little decisive material to help.50 (#litres_trial_promo) At one point, MI5 resorted to highlighting Hitler’s personal insults about Chamberlain in order to shock him out of his complacency. Playing on Chamberlain’s vanity, Hitler’s use of the word Arschloch, or ‘arsehole’, to describe the prime minister was underlined. It made a ‘considerable impression’.51 (#litres_trial_promo) At the same time, however, Hitler’s regime was genuinely chaotic, with different groups continually developing plans and cancelling them. German exiles and opposition groups, including elements of the German secret service itself, deliberately invented stories in the hope of inspiring action by London or Paris. There were constant rumours and continual mobilisations, making it very hard to distinguish between ‘signals’ and ‘noise’. All of those earnestly warning about German plans, including MI6, worried about the danger of crying wolf and sowing confusion.52 (#litres_trial_promo) In January 1939, perhaps encouraged by Halifax’s visible defection from the Chamberlain camp, MI6 changed its tune dramatically: ‘Germany is controlled by one man, Herr Hitler,’ it reported, ‘whose will is supreme and who is a blend of fanatic, madman and clear-visioned realist.’ It added: ‘his ambition and self-confidence are unbounded, and he regards Germany’s supremacy in Europe as a step to world supremacy’, and offered the somewhat belated warning that Hitler might well come west in 1939. Of the F?hrer himself, MI6 assessed that he was ‘barely sane, consumed by an intense hatred of this country, and capable both of ordering an immediate aerial attack on any European country and of having his command instantly obeyed’.53 (#litres_trial_promo) The last valuable sigint from GC&CS underpinned this new certainty. At the end of 1938, the German foreign minister, Joachim Ribbentrop, explained to the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, Baron ?shima, that Hitler wanted to transform the Axis from a mere ideological pact against communism into a platform for a joint war on Britain. ?shima immediately telegraphed the news back to Tokyo. These were some of the last Japanese messages that GC&CS read during Chamberlain’s administration before Tokyo improved its cipher security. Diplomats in the Foreign Office panicked when they read this new intelligence on Hitler’s intentions. It suggested that he was planning nothing less than global war.54 (#litres_trial_promo) Remarkably, Chamberlain chose to disregard this definitive sigint, which, taken with the material collected by MI5 in London, pointed only one way: to impending war. The prime minister continued to do so right up until the German attack on Czechoslovakia in March 1939. Although the Foreign Office loathed Chamberlain because of his private diplomacy, diplomats had still held out hopes that he was right about Germany. But with the crushing of the Czechs there could be no doubt. Alexander Cadogan, who had been appointed at Chamberlain’s instigation to replace the violently anti-German Vansittart, conceded that he and the prime minister had been wrong. The story was turning out ‘as Van predicted and as I never believed it would’. Meanwhile, he continued, Nevile Henderson, the prime minister’s single source in Berlin, had been ‘completely bewitched by his German friends’.55 (#litres_trial_promo) British intelligence failures came thick and fast after the German troops marched into Prague in March 1939. On 7 April, Italy invaded Albania, to the general bewilderment of Whitehall and Westminster. Chamberlain, who had sent another craven message to Rome via the ‘secret channel’ using Ball and Dingli only four days previously, was especially shocked. ‘Musso has behaved to me like a sneak and cad,’ he moaned. ‘He has carried through his smash and grab raid with complete cynicism.’56 (#litres_trial_promo) Although MI5 had given a direct warning as the result of its excellent sources in the German embassy in London, Halifax had absurdly then gone to a cabinet meeting two days before the invasion and insisted it was unlikely.57 (#litres_trial_promo) In the subsequent debate in the House of Commons a familiar backbencher rose to speak. Winston Churchill chose the British secret service as his subject, praising it as the ‘finest service of its kind in the world’. The subject was an unusual one for an MP, but Churchill was uncommonly expert on the subject. He attacked the government for failing to use the service’s excellent product properly, insisted that it had received plenty of intelligence about both Czechoslovakia and Albania, and wondered aloud if some sinister ‘hidden hand’ was at work, withholding intelligence from ministers. On balance, however, he thought it more likely that Chamberlain’s obsession with appeasement and striking a peace deal with Germany had blinded him: It seems to me that Ministers run the most tremendous risk if they allow the information collected by the Intelligence Department, and sent to them I am sure in good time, to be sifted and coloured and reduced in consequence and importance, and if they ever get themselves into a mood of attaching importance only to those pieces of information which accord with their earnest and honourable desire that the peace of the world shall remain unbroken. Churchill’s accusation that Chamberlain had ignored good intelligence in his blind search for peace was true, but in reality was only one of several problems. As yet, Britain lacked a central brain to undertake proper analysis of intentions as well as capabilities. Although this machinery was emerging in the JIC even as Churchill spoke, the challenge for intelligence analysts everywhere at this time was to abandon pre-formed notions about the way civilised world leaders generally behaved. Policymakers of every persuasion would be surprised by the political events of the next few months.58 (#litres_trial_promo) On 23 August 1939, Britain was hit by a bombshell. Ribbentrop met Molotov, his Soviet counterpart, in Moscow to sign the Nazi–Soviet pact. This was not only an intelligence failure of the first order, since no one had even begun to contemplate such a possibility, it was also a disaster for British foreign policy. Talks aimed at producing an Anglo–Franco–Soviet alliance were in progress, and a joint British–French military mission was in Moscow for this very purpose even as the Germans and Soviets embraced. The result was abject and public failure. Chamberlain had never been keen on these talks in the first place, confessing in his private diary that he felt ‘a profound distrust of Russia’ and doubted its military capabilities. He believed that Stalin’s objective was to absorb the small states around the edge of the Soviet Union – or, in his words, ‘getting everyone else by the ears’. But he had been forced to pursue a deal, because Halifax and the chiefs of staff now saw containment as the only rational alternative given the bankruptcy of appeasement.59 (#litres_trial_promo) The Nazi–Soviet pact was a classic case of surprise despite many warnings. Chamberlain and his senior colleagues did not believe these because they did not fit in with their preconceived stereotypes and assumptions about the world. But those with inside knowledge of Moscow had warned publicly of precisely this eventuality. Walter Krivitsky, formerly a senior officer in Soviet military intelligence, dramatically predicted the agreement. He had fled the Soviet secret services the previous year, and taken refuge in America. In April 1939, he wrote a remarkable article for the Saturday Evening Post alleging that Stalin had long been contemplating an understanding with Nazi Germany. When Stalin dismissed his foreign minister, Maxim Litvinov, in early May, Krivitsky knew what was coming next, perhaps because Litvinov’s Jewish heritage had served as a potential obstacle in negotiations with Hitler. Krivitsky then predicted the Nazi–Soviet pact. But London was sceptical, and indeed Daniel Lascelles, who superintended relations with Russia at the Foreign Office, dismissed Krivitksy’s prediction as ‘twaddle’.60 (#litres_trial_promo) Oddly, the invasion of Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1939 triggered a surge of British intelligence optimism, even belligerence. Combined with the invasion of Albania, these various shocks resigned Whitehall to the increasing likelihood of war. The JIC perceived Britain’s military chances as improving, especially in terms of air power, and London suddenly offered military support to countries as far afield as Poland, Greece and Turkey. The strategy formed a belated attempt at Vansittart’s Eastern Front plan to encircle Germany, but now without the vital addition of Russia. It was this very effort, with its guarantee to Poland, that would bring Britain and France to declare war in September 1939. During the summer of that year, MI6 predicted, confidently and correctly, that if war broke out it was most likely to begin with a German strike on Poland. Although MI6 did not predict the Nazi–Soviet pact, it did observe that there was some evidence that many in Germany sought better relations with Stalin. By late August 1939, the JIC assessed that it was now a question of when war came, rather than if.61 (#litres_trial_promo) Even at this late hour, Chamberlain still ignored the facts and remained preposterously hopeful. MI6 had reported that Herman Goering wanted to come to London for talks, and Sidney Cotton, an extraordinary airman and pioneer of advanced aerial photography, together with the deputy head of MI6 made intensely secret preparations for a meeting with Chamberlain at Chequers.62 (#litres_trial_promo) Quex Sinclair then brought news of a possible revolt by the German high command. But both of these rumours were probably elaborate Nazi deceptions designed for Chamberlain’s consumption.63 (#litres_trial_promo) A week later, on 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland. At exactly eleven o’clock on 3 September, Britain declared war on Germany. One cabinet minister later reminisced about how Chamberlain said quietly, ‘Right, gentlemen, this means war.’ The rain was pouring down outside, and hardly had he said it than there was a most enormous clap of thunder and the whole Cabinet Room was lit up by a blinding flash of lightning. ‘It was the most deafening thunderclap I’ve ever heard in my life.’64 (#litres_trial_promo) The outbreak of war had an equally startling effect on intelligence. The many secret service and analytical elements in Britain instinctively started to behave like a community. A diplomat began to chair JIC meetings, and the committee now considered political intentions rather than mere capabilities. The new chairman Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, heir to the Duke of Portland, had the advantage of having served in the military before becoming a diplomat in 1918. He was renowned for crossing St James’s Park accompanied by his pet dog Angus, who would spend all day with him in the office, and soon became known as ‘the Intelligence Dog’. Unfortunately, Angus did not last long. Crossing Hyde Park Corner one day he noticed another dog coming up Constitution Hill. Leaping forward and barking, he ran under a taxi, making him one of the few British casualties of the ‘Phoney War’. Dog accidents aside, Cavendish-Bentinck was an excellent chairman, and played a key role in the JIC’s wartime rise.65 (#litres_trial_promo) The only person who appeared not to be shaken by the events of 1939 was Chamberlain. His mental concepts were so fixed that he seemed to see the ‘Phoney War’ as an extension of appeasement. Four weeks into the war, the prime minister told his sister that he thought Hitler would not push beyond Germany’s western borders, and would carry on with a peace offensive. Mysterious emissaries came and went between Britain and Germany throughout the entire year to discuss possible truces, and there is evidence that Chamberlain launched several further secret attempts at backstairs diplomacy shortly after Munich.66 (#litres_trial_promo) Meanwhile, there was no real fighting. ‘I may be quite wrong’, Chamberlain predicted, but ‘however much the Nazis may brag and threaten I don’t believe they feel sufficient confidence to venture on the Great War unless they are forced into it by action on our part’. ‘It is my aim,’ he na?vely continued, ‘to see that that action is not taken.’ Alluding to the national government he had formed at the outbreak of war, containing both Churchill and Eden, Chamberlain believed he had ‘the unanimous consent of my colleagues, including Winston’.67 (#litres_trial_promo) Chamberlain ‘gave his personal approval’ for MI6 to ‘continue discussions with the Germans’. Early in October 1939, two MI6 officers in The Hague, Richard Stevens and Sigmund Payne Best, informed London that they were reasonably confident of persuading two dissident senior German officers, one of whom was General von Rundstedt, to visit Holland. They wanted to talk about overthrowing Hitler and establishing a regime run by the army. Best was intoxicated with excitement, and ‘saw in this a possibility of literally winning the war off his own bat’. This affected his operational judgement, and also that of those around him. They rushed forward impetuously. The person who should have stopped the ill-fated mission was Sir Nevile Bland, the British minister at The Hague. Having previously served as the go-between for MI6 and the Foreign Office, Bland had considerable experience, and a few years later would serve as a strategic reviewer of all of British intelligence. On 7 November, the MI6 officers excitedly reported that ‘a coup would definitely be attempted’. But the German SD, or security service, had in fact used a double agent to lure Best and Stevens into a superbly executed trap. On 9 November, when they went to meet their contact again at Venlo, near the German border, the agent gave the prearranged signal by taking off his hat. A German snatch squad immediately ran forward firing machine guns into the air and took the two MI6 officers prisoner. What became known as the ‘Venlo incident’ compromised many British agents and damaged relations with the Dutch government.68 (#litres_trial_promo) Even ten years later, the intellectually mediocre Stewart Menzies, chief of MI6, still believed that the overtures from the German army via The Hague had been genuine.69 (#litres_trial_promo) The ‘Venlo incident’ is symbolic of a wider credulity at this time. Chamberlain failed to understand that a global war was imminent. It was typical of his overconfidence that the longer the Phoney War went on, the more he disregarded intelligence reports and believed that he was right. In fact the war was widening. The Soviet Union joined Hitler in his invasion of Poland, occupying the east of the country and liberating German soldiers captured by the Poles in the first days of fighting. Two months later, Stalin embarked on his disastrous ‘Winter War’ with Finland. British intelligence saw things more clearly, viewing the conflict as a struggle between the British Empire and a four-headed monster that consisted of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, fascist Italy and militarist Japan. Its answer was to plan secret missions and covert actions against Russia as well as Germany.70 (#litres_trial_promo) While MI6 busily planned special operations, including a team of ‘volunteer’ commandos that they intended to despatch to Finland, Hitler sprung his next surprise: the invasion of Norway. On 3 April 1940, German vessels secretly headed out in advance of the main force, and with shameful Swedish complicity, all of Scandinavia was soon under German control. In a further embarrassment for Chamberlain, a beautiful Russian ballerina turned Nazi spy, Marina Lie, managed to acquire British plans for Norway’s liberation, allowing the Germans to claim another victory.71 (#litres_trial_promo) Again Britain had no warning of the invasion, and even Chamberlain recognised that this was a classic case of intelligence failure. He ordered an investigation. It turned out that the Air Ministry had suspected something was up as a result of reconnaissance flights, and that MI6 had passed on some general hints, but had no specific information about timing. The problem was explained to Chamberlain by Arthur Rucker, his principal private secretary: ‘The position is that we were fully warned of the preparation by the Germans of an Expeditionary Force on a big scale.’ But, he continued, ‘we could not, of course, foretell where that Force would be sent’. Senior officials began to realise that even when good intelligence was collected, it was not being assimilated. The JIC needed to be strengthened further. Discussing the matter with Horace Wilson and cabinet secretary Maurice Hankey, Chamberlain agreed that the JIC should be instructed to maintain ‘a running and connected story based upon such Intelligence material as seems to point to the need for action’.72 (#litres_trial_promo) Norway had sounded a warning that even Chamberlain could not ignore, but although he had now begun to think about substantive intelligence reform, the invasion of France in May 1940 swept his government away.73 (#litres_trial_promo) Neville Chamberlain did not have as much room for manoeuvre as his detractors suggest.74 (#litres_trial_promo) He faced enormous challenges, but his elementary error of ‘mirror-imaging’ his enemies as civilised leaders naturally averse to war made them much worse. So often, premiers disregard intelligence, preferring to believe that the enemy shares their values and thinks like them. Chamberlain was also an intelligence bungler. Not only was he a reluctant consumer of intelligence that did not concur with his world view, he was also a poor manager, and the central machinery did not develop much during his time in Downing Street. His incompetent efforts to use a private secret service to open diplomacy with Rome and Berlin radiated weakness and contributed to an emerging Axis triple threat. At the same time, he marginalised the most experienced intelligence professionals and went shopping for ‘intelligence’ that would confirm his preconceived ideas, fixing on single-source reports from Berlin. Chamberlain was not the only bungler. In the higher echelons of government, few understood intelligence or had any idea how it might organise collectively to meet the challenge of fast-moving Blitzkrieg warfare. Halifax, a deeply intelligent and capable man, was bemused by the contradictory stream of material coming out of Germany, on scraps of paper pinned beneath the collars of secret agents. His senior official, Cadogan, was uncomfortable with the secret world and gladly delegated such matters to Gladwyn Jebb, his private secretary. Jebb recalled how his boss seemed to have ‘the impression that the reports of the SIS which are circulated in the office are obtained by “hired assassins” who are sent out from this country to spy out the land’. The fact that such a na?ve view was entertained at the highest level is revealing.75 (#litres_trial_promo) Hitler was inherently unpredictable. German historians who have immersed themselves in the archives for their entire careers still disagree about whether he was at the outset merely a German nationalist like Bismarck, or whether he always had diabolical plans for world domination. In any case, Hitler loved springing surprises, not least upon his own long-suffering generals. Britain’s codebreakers, so celebrated in the context of the Second World War, simply could not read Hitler’s intentions. Had they been able to decipher even a sliver of top-level German communications in 1939, Chamberlain could not have sustained his arrogant commitment to a personal appeasement policy. But ironically, the weakness of the codebreakers in 1939 became their future strength. Thereafter, a vast influx of young civilians, irreverent students and unorthodox thinkers forced change, powering the intelligence revolution that became Bletchley Park.76 (#litres_trial_promo) With Winston Churchill at the helm, the relationship between intelligence and Downing Street could finally undertake the long-awaited revolution. 4 Winston Churchill (1940–1941) (#u2edb29e4-9f5d-578c-8bf9-8979eb3f3d09) Once I was convinced about the principles of this queer and deadly game, I gave all the necessary orders that very day. Winston Churchill1 (#litres_trial_promo) Winston Churchill was obsessed with intelligence. He arrived in Downing Street in May 1940 with unparalleled experience of the secret world. For almost half a century, he had seen intelligence in action in both peace and war. Churchill was there at the very creation of MI5 and MI6 in 1909. Most importantly, he understood the importance of intelligence – and especially sigint – in wartime operations, as he had been First Lord of the Admiralty from 1911 to 1915, and then secretary of state for war and air in the last year of the First World War. He then became involved in the minutiae of the post-war reorganisation of British intelligence. Later, he immersed himself in the subterranean connections between domestic surveillance, Irish terrorism and communist subversion. Despite this remarkable wealth of government experience in the realm of national security, he remained an outsider. Regarded as a renegade, he had changed political parties twice, and did not hesitate to challenge conventional wisdom. He transferred these impulsive tendencies to the world of intelligence, accelerating the British secret service community as never before. Churchill believed passionately in the transformative power of intelligence, and knew it could play a central role in government policy. An incurable romantic, he loved the craft of espionage and all the paraphernalia of secrecy, and was an enthusiastic advocate of undercover activity for its own sake. More than this, he also believed in conspiracy, covert action and special operations – what we might call the power of the hidden hand. Churchill has been celebrated as one of the great champions of British intelligence, but his impulsiveness and unpredictability often caused exasperation on the part of his intelligence chiefs. The British intelligence community undoubtedly expanded, innovated and became more connected to policy during the Second World War as a result of his boundless enthusiasm, but it also had to protect itself from his meddling and his impulsive desire to control its detail. Most importantly, Churchill’s wartime government served as a school for future prime ministers. Just as he had learned the craft of intelligence in several previous administrations, so his own wartime ministers, including Clement Attlee, Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan, all future denizens of Downing Street, saw intelligence at first hand. Senior figures in their governments such as Ernest Bevin, Hugh Dalton and Duncan Sandys had also been members of Churchill’s wartime government. Unlike previous prime ministers, Churchill taught his pupils that intelligence was of the utmost importance. His entourage were able to see for themselves the transformative power of secret activity at the top. Churchill was ahead of his time in his conception of Downing Street. He anticipated a more presidential style of government, gathering around himself a cluster of special advisers and personal staff able to respond instantly to his sometimes whimsical enquiries. Desmond Morton served as his intelligence adviser and linked Number 10 with MI5, MI6 and GC&CS – as well as the volatile world of special operations. Although this style would later be adopted by Harold Wilson, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, it did not always prove popular with Churchill’s ministers. As foreign secretary, Anthony Eden found Morton’s interventions with Charles de Gaulle and the French resistance especially vexatious, noting in November 1942, ‘I wish Morton at the bottom of the Sea.’2 (#litres_trial_promo) Paradoxically, Churchill’s weakest suit was secrecy, which he applied stringently to everyone except himself. In 1923 he had ‘blown’ the secrets of signals intelligence during the First World War in his account of that conflict, and after the Second World War publishers offered him eye-watering sums to write about that global conflict in which he had played such an important part. Once again he was determined to tell all, including the story of secret service, and initially he fought the efforts of the Cabinet Office to enforce secrecy. Sir Stewart Menzies, the chief of MI6, had to be despatched to bring him to heel. After the war, Morton was debating at length with a friend what constituted the ‘essence of Winston’s life and spirit’. Morton thought ‘freelance newspaper correspondent-adventurer’ was the best possible description. Churchill loved secret service, but he also loved to tell stories. He was not a man naturally inclined to keep secrets for very long.3 (#litres_trial_promo) He was also abrasive. From the moment he entered Downing Street he wanted to see raw intelligence, not just summaries and appreciations. Most of all he wanted to see all the intercepts provided by the codebreakers at Bletchley Park in their original form. Churchill became Britain’s war leader just as the flow of intelligence from Enigma expanded. It would soon become a torrent. Only with great reluctance was he persuaded that he could not see everything. Instead, Menzies personally delivered selections of Ultra to the prime minister in a buff-coloured box.4 (#litres_trial_promo) Churchill was proactive, too. At moments of extreme tension, such as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he would ring Bletchley Park ‘at all hours of the day and night’ to get the latest news.5 (#litres_trial_promo) This allowed him to become a ‘do-it-yourself analyst’ of raw intelligence, and he often leapt to the wrong conclusions. The misreading of Ultra or the selective use of intelligence underpinned some of his more hare-brained schemes. As the war progressed, Alan Brooke, the Chief of the Imperial Staff, found more and more of his energy expended on containing Churchill’s ill-judged enthusiasms. From July 1941 the chiefs of staff were given updates on the latest sigint from Bletchley three or four times a day, to help them deal with the prime minister’s ‘proddings’.6 (#litres_trial_promo) Yet, it was precisely because of these vexing tendencies that Churchill transformed intelligence at the top. Under him, Whitehall developed the first modern system for incorporating intelligence into strategy and operations, not least with the expansion of the Joint Intelligence Committee. The development of the JIC as the central brain of British intelligence was one of the Churchill government’s most important contributions. As we have seen, throughout the interwar period the Foreign Office and the three ministries of the armed services had battled over the control and interpretation of intelligence. This began to be addressed in 1936 with the creation of the JIC, which then worked for the chiefs of staff. But it had remained underpowered and weak. All that changed with the advent of Churchill and his insatiable desire for a daily diet of raw decrypts.7 (#litres_trial_promo) In May 1940, twin disasters catapulted Downing Street into action. The Germans had shocked Europe with their surprise occupation of Norway and the successful invasion of northern France. The lack of warning bothered Churchill, and he ordered the chiefs of staff to rethink how intelligence connected to high-level strategy and operations. As a result, on 17 May, only a few days after Churchill had arrived in Number 10, the JIC was elevated in importance, being given sole authority for producing strategic and operational assessments, alongside a new warning function. Major General Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay, Churchill’s senior staff officer, was ordered to bring JIC intelligence ‘to the notice of the prime minister at any hour of the day or night’.8 (#litres_trial_promo) This was less about creating a good government machine than about personal control. In August 1940, Churchill told Ismay that he was fed up with receiving ‘sifted’ intelligence from the various authorities. He renewed his demand for raw material that he could analyse himself, and insisted that Morton ‘be shown everything’, and should then ‘submit authentic documents to me in their original form’.9 (#litres_trial_promo) A few months later he asked to see a list of all those who were allowed to see this special material from GC&CS. He expressed horror at the ‘vast congregation’, and ordered that it be cut drastically. By November 1940, there were very few recipients of raw Ultra, although many more received the information in a disguised or digested form.10 (#litres_trial_promo) Churchill constantly surprised the chiefs of staff with questions derived from specific Ultra decrypts. His own understanding of them was often at odds with that of the JIC. He used Ultra to underpin his own eccentric approach to strategy, which was romantic, inspirational, loquacious and often fuelled by alcohol. Talking late into the night, he used intelligence and his alarming ability to orate spontaneously at inordinate length to wear down his opponents in the war cabinet. Both Brooke and Alexander Cadogan, the senior official at the Foreign Office, used their diaries to let off steam by recording the vexations that Churchill caused his immediate circle. Cadogan asked how they ever managed to run the war ‘with the PM spending hours of his own and other people’s time simply drivelling, welcoming every red herring so as only to have the pleasure of more irrelevant, redundant talk’.11 (#litres_trial_promo) The reinforced JIC was there to help the chiefs of staff resist Churchill. It expanded to include MI6 (which also had responsibility for the codebreakers of GC&CS), MI5 and the Ministry of Economic Warfare (which oversaw special operations), and more personnel joined the analytical team drafting the assessments. Increasing the amount of assessed intelligence would, it was hoped, prevent the prime minister from engaging in DIY analysis. Yet Churchill was sometimes right in his reading of the decrypts, and was far ahead of the ‘professional analysts’ in spotting one of the most remarkable turning points of the war, Hitler’s stunning decision to launch an attack on Russia on 22 June 1941. Churchill forced Whitehall and Westminster to wake up to the importance of intelligence in modern war. This not only included intercepts, but extended to scientific developments. Indeed, the prime minister backed the creation of entirely new forms of electronic intelligence and the acceleration under R.V. Jones of the ‘Wizard War’, a field that would constitute an entirely new secret world by the 1950s. Most importantly, he understood the strategic importance of special forces and covert action. Britain’s most famous secret armies owed their existence to Churchill’s enthusiasm for wild characters. This included the SAS, the Commandos and the Chindits. Conventionally-minded staff officers detested this sort of unconventional activity. Brigadier Orde Wingate, who led a successful guerrilla revolt against the Italians in East Africa 1940, was actually demoted by his superiors at GHQ Middle East because of his maverick ideas. Churchill rescued him from his military exile and forced the chiefs of staff to take him seriously, allowing him to create the Chindits in Burma, who then inspired a generation of behind-the-lines enthusiasts who believed passionately in what they called the ‘fourth dimension of warfare’. This was not mere romanticism. Churchill understood the importance of unconventional thinking about warfare, and so was the first to connect organisations like SOE and MI6 to national policy. His inner circle learned these dark arts, and began to conceive of a whole new secret way in warfare – which later extended to peacetime. Churchill’s adherents and associates, including some improbable converts like Clement Attlee, his deputy prime minister, ensured that this revolutionary approach to secret statecraft, in which bribery, blackmail and other kinds of subterfuge were used to exercise British power, extended over the next fifty years. Churchill’s most immediate concern was closer to home. He worried that Britain might be overwhelmed by Nazi secret warfare. During late 1939 and early 1940, this fear focused specifically on Ireland as ‘England’s back door’, and anxiety about Irish–German links reached fever pitch. In May 1940, MI6 despatched a veteran Anglo-Irish intelligence officer called Charles Tegart to Dublin to investigate. His fantastic reports would not have been out of place in a William le Queux novel of 1913. He claimed that IRA leaders had allowed 2,000 Nazi agents to be landed by submarine, and that they were already at work preparing hidden aerodromes for a surprise German invasion from the west. Churchill and his new cabinet accepted this at face value and panicked, extending a rather desperate offer of Irish unity to ?amon de Valera, who skilfully played up the fifth-column menace. Secretly, the British military prepared for a pre-emptive invasion of southern Ireland.12 (#litres_trial_promo) Churchill’s long association with both India and Ireland underpinned his views on subversion. During the First World War, Germany had launched elaborate plots conniving with rebels in imperial locations as far apart as Canada, Ireland, India and Singapore. As early as 1937, MI6 warned Robert Vansittart, then still the top official in the Foreign Office, that Germany was advancing similar plans for Ireland in the event of war. All of Britain’s secret services began to turn their attention across the Irish Sea. The IRA, who had been allies of the Soviet Union in the previous decade, sensed an opportunity and began to explore a secret alliance with Hitler. In early 1937, the IRA chief of staff, Tom Barry, visited Germany to discuss opportunities for wartime sabotage. Several other high-level visits followed, and by 1939 even the Irish government were of the opinion that Sean McBride, the IRA’s director of intelligence, was working more eagerly for the Germans than for his own organisation.13 (#litres_trial_promo) During the summer and autumn of 1939, German emissaries visited Dublin, proving their identities by matching a pound note that had been torn in half with one carried by their contacts. In August, the Abwehr, Germany’s overseas secret service, actually informed the IRA that war was coming – ‘probably in one week’. Meanwhile, MI6 had learned, at least in outline, of further meetings between the IRA and the head of the Abwehr, Admiral Canaris. At this point de Valera denied that there was any connection between the IRA and Nazi Germany, but MI6 knew otherwise.14 (#litres_trial_promo) British intelligence overestimated the ‘backdoor’ threat because of an IRA bombing campaign on the mainland. The IRA was a small and divided organisation in the late 1930s and early 1940s, with innumerable splits between those who wanted to do little, those who wanted a guerrilla war against Ulster, and those who wished to bomb the British mainland. In 1939, the faction that advocated bomb attacks on England triumphed. Their plans were somewhat eccentric, and included blocking London’s sewers with two tons of quick-drying cement. Many of their explosives were homemade and most of their attacks failed. Even so, in June 1939 there were seventy-two IRA attacks in England. The worst came two months later, when a bomb exploded in a busy shopping street in Coventry, killing five people and injuring a further fifty-one. In early 1940, two IRA operatives, James McCormick and Peter Barnes, were hanged for their role in the bombing, after much debate in cabinet over their possible reprieve. In another incident, five hundred pounds of explosives were discovered in a raid on a chip shop in Manchester. De Valera refused intelligence cooperation against the bombers.15 (#litres_trial_promo) There were a further fifty IRA attacks in the period up to May 1940. Churchill was particularly exercised, which formed the personal background to the panic about a German fifth column as he arrived in office. It clearly loomed large in the new prime minister’s imagination, and he sought the views of the chief of MI6 on German activity on the west coast of Ireland, asking, ‘Are there any signs of succouring U-boats in Irish creeks or inlets?’ He urged that more be spent on building up a better force of agents in Dublin. Sidney Cotton, an eccentric businessman who cooperated with MI6 and who pioneered aerial reconnaissance, was despatched on a survey of the west coast of Ireland in search of U-boats.16 (#litres_trial_promo) Churchill arrived in Downing Street on 10 May 1940. Five days earlier, Hermann G?rtz of the Abwehr landed by parachute in County Meath. A hardened spy who had been jailed for four years for his espionage activities in Britain in the 1930s, G?rtz’s task was to establish a more permanent liaison with the IRA and develop detailed plans for attacks on Northern Ireland.17 (#litres_trial_promo) The Garda raided one of his safe houses a few weeks later and recovered G?rtz’s uniform, his parachute, documents referring to ‘Plan Kathleen’, and ?20,000 in cash. The Dublin government brought some of those arrested before the courts, and the affair received considerable publicity.18 (#litres_trial_promo) G?rtz managed to evade the authorities for another eighteen months, and after his capture he committed suicide by biting on a glass phial filled with prussic acid.19 (#litres_trial_promo) Guy Liddell, a senior MI5 officer, eventually came to regard the G?rtz case as ‘fairly conclusive proof’ that the Germans were working in close conjunction with the IRA.20 (#litres_trial_promo) In reality, the IRA was small and ineffective in May 1940. It admired Hitler no more than it had admired Stalin in the previous decade. These were merely opportunistic explorations on its part.21 (#litres_trial_promo) But its expansive bombing campaign in England, together with some genuine instances of Nazi agents with secret radios and subventions of cash, gave substance to the largely fictional fifth-column menace. Hermann G?rtz and his associates transferred some ?50,000 to the IRA in this period. This was more than enough to alarm Downing Street. In May 1940, the nascent JIC warned that the IRA could rapidly grow to 30,000 members, and that German aircraft parts and spares had already been smuggled into Ireland. Churchill ordered plans for an invasion of southern Ireland to be drawn up using newly arrived Canadian troops.22 (#litres_trial_promo) By the summer of 1940, the fifth-column menace appeared terrifying. The Netherlands and France had surrendered after only limited resistance. For Churchill, and indeed President Roosevelt, the most plausible explanation for this surprising turn of events was an insidious ‘enemy within’. In reality, Hitler’s thrust into Holland, Belgium and France was informed by excellent signals intelligence derived from the intercepted messages of the French high command, which also revealed British plans.23 (#litres_trial_promo) Nevertheless, in July 1940, with Churchill’s approval, Roosevelt sent William J. Donovan, chief of America’s embryonic intelligence service, to Britain to investigate ‘fifth column methods’. He found a receptive audience. Churchill was now obsessed with the idea that a large fifth column was preparing the ground for a German invasion of Britain. Donovan found hard facts difficult to come by. The British public were infected with what Churchill himself called a ‘spy mania’ – just as they had been in the First World War. German spies were seemingly everywhere. In one odd case, locals assumed a cattle stampede on the island of Eilean Shona off western Scotland was the work of German agents.24 (#litres_trial_promo) The police, the army and the security services were inundated with reports about mysterious foreign men on trains, flashing lights assumed to be signals to the enemy, and above all the menace of carrier pigeons, which were seen as the main means for spies sending secret messages to Germany. An army of British birds of prey was marshalled to bring down the pro-German pigeons on their way back to the Fatherland.25 (#litres_trial_promo) MI5 took the pigeon threat seriously, and even had its own anti-pigeon section under Flight Lieutenant Richard Melville Walker.26 (#litres_trial_promo) The idea of a fifth column captured the popular imagination. One woman, a rare voice of scepticism, recorded the everyday experience: ‘From every part of the country there came the story of the Sister of Mercy with hobnailed boots and tattooed wrists whom somebody’s brother’s sister-in-law had seen in the train.’ Every unusual occurrence was explained by the hidden hand of Nazi agents. Remarkably, the newly formed Ministry of Information dismissed any doubts as further evidence of subterranean activity. Anyone who thought it could not happen in Britain, it insisted, had ‘simply fallen into the trap laid by the fifth column itself’, adding that the top priority of the fifth column was of course ‘to make people think that it does not exist’. In a perfect climate of conspiracy, doubters were themselves part of the vast plot. The police and security agencies were flooded by absurd reports of suspicious Nazi doings.27 (#litres_trial_promo) Churchill had personal reasons for fearing subversion. Pro-German sentiment, often converging with virulent anti-Bolshevism, was rife amongst the British aristocracy. Lord Londonderry, Churchill’s own cousin and the government minister responsible for the RAF in the early 1930s, was notoriously pro-German. Although not a fascist himself, he sought to pursue friendship with the Nazis at any cost, flying to Germany to meet Hitler and Goering, and repeatedly hosting Ribbentrop and ‘a noisy gang of SS men’ in his stately home during 1936.28 (#litres_trial_promo) Evidence of real Nazi spies in important places confronted Churchill within days of his arrival in Downing Street. On 18 May 1940, the Tyler Kent espionage case exploded, shaping the new prime minister’s immediate views on subversion and increasing his fears. Tyler Kent was a lowly cipher clerk at the American embassy in London, but he had close links with the Right Club, a pro-German and anti-Semitic group. He used an intermediary to pass top-secret documents, including summaries of conversations between Churchill and Roosevelt, to the Germans and the Italians. MI5 raided his flat and found 1,929 official documents, as well as Churchill’s cables and a notebook containing the names of people under surveillance by Special Branch and MI5. The haul also included agreements on Anglo–American intelligence cooperation. Kent’s espionage only came to light because MI5 had managed to penetrate the Right Club and the codebreakers at Bletchley Park were now able to read Italian communications.29 (#litres_trial_promo) Churchill and Roosevelt had no way of knowing how far this subterranean network had spread. Both were horrified by the presence of someone with profoundly Nazi beliefs at the centre of the nascent transatlantic relationship. Guy Liddell noted in his diary: ‘It seems that the PM takes a strong view about the internment of all 5th columnists at this moment and has left the Home Secretary in no doubt about his views. What seems to have moved him more than anything was the Tyler KENT case.’30 (#litres_trial_promo) Kent never abandoned his beliefs. After serving his prison sentence and returning to the United States he became the publisher of a newspaper with links to the Ku Klux Klan, and spent his time asserting that President John F. Kennedy was part of a communist conspiracy.31 (#litres_trial_promo) Precisely because of the German offensive in Europe, refugees and ‘enemy aliens’ were now a growing issue at home. Churchill wondered who among them were German or Italian agents. The Chamberlain government had worked hard to avoid mass internment, which had gone badly wrong in the First World War. That said, at least thirty men and women were interned even before Chamberlain declared war.32 (#litres_trial_promo) In 1939 the procedure had been for local tribunals to screen suspects, and less than one in a hundred, mostly Nazi sympathisers, were interned as ‘Category A’ risks. These now amounted to 5,600 people. Around 6,800 received ambiguous ‘Category B’ status, and 64,000 people, mostly fleeing Nazi oppression, were deemed ‘Category C’ and were left at liberty. In the febrile atmosphere of May 1940, Churchill gave the stark order to ‘Collar the lot.’ In practice this meant interning all male aliens and all women in ‘Category B’. The authorities rounded up some 27,000 people, including 4,000 women, most of whom were Jewish refugees. Because this was a panic measure, many went to temporary camps, including the racecourse at Kempton Park, where conditions were appalling. Churchill was so anxious about the fifth-column danger that he thought the detention camps might themselves become launch points for insurrection, possibly reinforced by the arrival of German parachutists. Officials tried to address the problem by deporting some of the internees to Canada and Australia. On 2 July 1940 the liner Arandora Star was torpedoed off the Irish coast with the loss of several hundred lives. Many of the dead were Jewish refugees in ‘Category C’. Churchill’s policy had backfired, and caused a furore in Parliament. Under pressure, the prime minister performed a dramatic U-turn, and by August 1941 only about 1,300 refugees were still interned, mostly on the Isle of Man.33 (#litres_trial_promo) Many of these were dedicated fascists, and on Hitler’s birthday in April 1943 they celebrated by coming together to sing the Nazi Party anthem ‘The Horst Wessel Lied’ in the camp canteen. Importantly, many of those initially interned by Churchill should not have been, while others, often with society connections, escaped detention. One columnist for The Times wondered, if they interned all the pro-Germans in Britain, ‘how many members of … the House of Lords would remain at large?’34 (#litres_trial_promo) MI5 found itself in a mess in 1940. Spending most of their time investigating aliens and refugees, staff soon became overwhelmed by the huge numbers involved. Because home secretaries had been consistently squeamish about issuing warrants for phone tapping, or intercepting the mail of British citizens, MI5 had no clear idea whether there was a connection between German secret service operations, Nazi sympathisers and enemy aliens. Moreover, while it was tied up with the alien problem it had little time to address other important issues.35 (#litres_trial_promo) Having moved from the top floor of Thames House to new wartime headquarters at Wormwood Scrubs Prison, and then decamped to Blenheim Palace to escape the Blitz, MI5 described itself as being in a ‘chaotic’ state.36 (#litres_trial_promo) Unfairly perhaps, this prompted Churchill to sack Vernon Kell, the long-serving MI5 director-general. He moved the control of MI5 from the Home Office to a new Home Security Executive under Lord Swinton, formerly secretary of state for air, and ordered him to ‘find out whether there is a fifth column … and if so eliminate it’. Oddly, Sir Joseph Ball, a Chamberlain henchman and one of Churchill’s detractors, was chosen to run its shadowy Intelligence Committee. Meanwhile, the prime minister’s anxiety about ‘the enemy within’ flitted from aliens to communists and IRA terrorists. But he understood that MI5 badly needed reform. In early 1941, he chose as director-general Sir David Petrie, who had done the same job in India. Petrie restored confidence, and MI5 went from success to success. Although Churchill had overestimated the number of fifth columnists in Britain, his fears were not entirely unwarranted. Real traitors did exist, and MI5 set up a clever ‘false flag’ operation to catch them. Working from the basement of a London antique shop, it attracted more than a hundred would-be pro-Nazi spies into its web with excited talk of invisible ink and secret plots. Assuming they were aiding Berlin, these individuals, including both foreigners and British fascists, unwittingly offered plans of military defences, reports on amphibious tanks and details of experimental jet fighters to undercover MI5 officers. British security officers even acquired a stock of replica Iron Cross medals to award to especially zealous members of the network for their good work and prove that they really were working for Hitler.37 (#litres_trial_promo) Churchill did not only fear subversion; he also saw it as a useful offensive weapon. Indirect warfare, including subversive propaganda and economic sabotage, fascinated him. Accordingly, he conceived of an anti-Nazi fifth column in Europe that would beat the Germans at their own game.38 (#litres_trial_promo) Morton was no less enthusiastic. On 27 June 1940, he told Churchill that anti-sabotage was well in hand under Swinton, but ‘offensive underground activities’ against the Axis were neither centralised nor vigorous. Agreeing with the prime minister, Morton argued that ‘strong underground action … if carefully thought out and coordinated can play an important part in helping to defeat the enemy’. Indeed, Morton now believed that this sort of event-shaping activity was more important than gathering intelligence.39 (#litres_trial_promo) Churchill acted quickly. On 16 July he gave Hugh Dalton, a Labour MP who had long opposed appeasement, responsibility for what he called ‘the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’. This was the new Ministry of Economic Warfare, which encompassed propaganda, economic sabotage and special operations, including what would soon become the Special Operations Executive, or SOE. Having served as under-secretary of state at the Foreign Office in the 1920s, Dalton understood intelligence, and had experience of dealing with GC&CS intercepts. Churchill also thought that Labour politicians were more suited to underground work because it included the promotion of economic sabotage and labour unrest.40 (#litres_trial_promo) Nonetheless, subversion was a hot potato in Whitehall. Prior to Churchill’s arrival, it had been owned by a small department of MI6 under Major Laurence Grand. MI6 was underperforming, and this section was especially weak. Although Grand was flamboyant, gregarious and well-liked, everyone knew he was not up to the task, and he had become a universal figure of fun – Dalton nicknamed him ‘King Bomba’, after Ferdinand II of Sicily, who bombarded his own cities in 1849.41 (#litres_trial_promo) Even Grand’s senior official remarked that to have him in charge of subversion was ‘like arranging an attack on a Panzer division by an actor on a donkey’.42 (#litres_trial_promo) Dalton’s Ministry of Economic Warfare was essential. But Churchill’s passion for forming new organisations caused trouble. MI6, the Foreign Office and the chiefs of staff all hated SOE for cutting across their jurisdictions, and for two years it remained ineffective while Dalton presided over an unholy amount of bureaucratic infighting. Menzies fought doggedly to resist its growth, insisting that SOE’s desire to stir things up imperilled the safety of his own traditional intelligence networks. Conversely, Dalton’s chief of staff complained that MI6 had ‘a “false beard” mentality … especially those who have been in the show for a very long time’. ‘Times have changed,’ he continued, ‘and “secret” activities are now the rule rather than the exception.’ Precisely because secret activities were now everywhere and seemed to touch everything, Whitehall was ablaze with arguments over subversion. The extraordinary interdepartmental warfare over SOE between 1940 and 1942 was a symptom of Churchill’s determination to change how Britain thought about warfare and to fully embrace subterranean techniques. The infighting only decreased in 1942, when Lord Selborne replaced Dalton. Quietly effective and close to Eden, Selborne enabled some of the frictions that SOE had created to subside.43 (#litres_trial_promo) SOE was a widely known secret within Whitehall. By contrast, Bletchley Park was not – with a few exceptions, even the inhabitants of Churchill’s private office knew nothing of Ultra: his various private secretaries who handled the mysterious boxes of intercepts only became aware that they had contained Ultra material in the 1970s. The boxes arrived in Number 10 with a strict notice: ‘Only to be opened by the prime minister.’ The secretaries placed them on the prime minister’s desk, ‘and left [them] for him to re-lock’. The Ultra secret really was ultra-secret – even in Downing Street.44 (#litres_trial_promo) Bletchley Park was only one part of the vast sigint operation presided over by GC&CS. The British codebreaking empire, which numbered some 10,000 people by the end of the war, also intercepted diplomatic traffic (‘flimsies’, also known as ‘BJ’s, or ‘blue jackets’, after the colour of their folders) from dozens of countries. This material was full of political gossip, and Churchill characteristically found it irresistible. His favourite reading included seemingly obscure stuff, such as messages from the Brazilian ambassador in London. The volume was incredible – reaching 13,000 messages in 1941 and increasing dramatically thereafter. It was Morton’s job to sift through this material, selecting those messages that he knew would interest the prime minister.45 (#litres_trial_promo) Stewart Menzies also brought Churchill human agent reports, known as ‘CX’, from MI6. On the whole, though, MI6 and its human intelligence – or ‘humint’ – underperformed, and Menzies found the flow of decrypts from the codebreakers vital in terms of both maintaining his personal standing and defending the reputation of MI6 within Downing Street. In Europe he was also able to piggyback to some degree on the governments-in-exile by trying to restore their agent networks in Europe, but in other regions, including the Far East, MI6’s wartime performance was weak. In August 1940, a teleprinter circuit connected the MI6 headquarters at Broadway Buildings in St James’s with Downing Street, where Group Captain F.W. Winterbotham helped Menzies to select the ‘headlines’ for Churchill.46 (#litres_trial_promo) One MI6 agent, codenamed ‘Knopf’, did provide Menzies and Churchill with valuable intelligence on Hitler’s plans for the Eastern Front and the Mediterranean – including the location of the so-called ‘Wolf’s Lair’, Hitler’s headquarters in eastern Prussia. Knopf and his sub-network provided access to the upper echelons of the Third Reich, informing London that, for example, the F?hrer was ‘determined to capture Stalingrad at all costs’.47 (#litres_trial_promo) For the most part, however, Menzies relied on sigint. Unlike Menzies, Churchill adored science, and depended heavily on his scientific adviser ‘Prof’ Frederick Lindemann. Meeting Churchill almost daily, Lindemann enjoyed more influence than any other civilian adviser. Together they helped to create an entirely new form of scientific spying that would come to be called ‘electronic intelligence’. On 12 June 1940, one of Lindemann’s prot?g?s, a young Oxford scientist working for MI6 called R.V. Jones, was asked by the head of the RAF element that worked with Bletchley Park about a puzzling reference to something called a ‘Knickerbein’, or ‘crooked leg’. No one could understand what it was for. Jones developed a theory that the Germans were using radio beams to guide their bombers. The bizarre theory, unsurprisingly, made its way back to Churchill. Shortly afterwards, a captured German flier gave some details of the system under interrogation: when two radio beams intersected, the bombs were dropped automatically and found their target. On 21 June, Churchill summoned Jones to Downing Street. Ushered into the Cabinet Room, he found himself sitting with the prime minister, his former Oxford tutor Lindemann, and an array of advisers. Jones was only twenty-eight, but was unabashed by the company – he knew the business was simply ‘too serious’. He sensed a lack of comprehension around the table, and decided to tell his tale like a detective story. Churchill, predictably, was captivated, and he described the collective fascination in the room as ‘never surpassed by the tales of Sherlock Holmes’. Without informing the cabinet or the chiefs of staff, he ordered that the existence of the German radio beams be assumed, ‘and for all countermeasures to receive absolute priority’, before adding that the ‘slightest reluctance or deviation … was to be reported to me’. Churchill later recalled that ‘in the limited and … almost occult circle obedience was forthcoming with alacrity, and on the fringes all obstructions could be swept away’.48 (#litres_trial_promo) The prime minister’s response to the inspired deductions of Jones brilliantly captures his effect on intelligence. Impulsive and romantic as he was, his interventions could be critically important, and often inspired immediate action when the machine had become slow. The RAF created an entire special unit called ‘80 Wing’ to jam the German beams with a counter-weapon codenamed ‘Aspirin’. Sometimes this simply bent the beams, causing the Luftwaffe to drop their bombs in the wrong place. In September 1940 the Germans came up with a new system called the ‘X-beam’, and Jones had to create a new jamming system, codenamed ‘Bromide’. Churchill is often associated with the now heavily debunked story that he allowed Coventry to be bombed to save the secret of Ultra. In fact, the reverse is true. He was at the forefront of deploying a new form of intelligence that saved many of Britain’s cities from greater bombardment just before the onset of the Blitz in the autumn of 1940.49 (#litres_trial_promo) A year later, the prime minister visited Bletchley Park. On 6 September 1941, he was escorted into the famous huts, and Alan Turing was asked to tell him about the remarkable mathematical triumphs that had been accomplished there. Being a rather shy character, Turing allowed his colleague Gordon Welchman to take over. Before he could finish, the director, Alastair Denniston, interrupted and moved Churchill on. Welchman later fondly recalled: ‘whereupon Winston, who was enjoying himself, gave me a grand schoolboy wink’. The prime minister moved on to tour the machine room in Hut 7. His bodyguards tried to follow him in, but the sentries shouted ‘Not you!’ so they waited obediently outside. Here Churchill could see intelligence being produced on an industrial scale, with forty-five machine operators in action. He stood on a pile of bricks and gave an impromptu address to some of the codebreakers. ‘You all look very innocent; one would not think you knew anything secret.’ He explained that he called them ‘the geese that lay the golden eggs – and never cackle!’ With deep emotion, he explained how grateful he was for all their work, and how important it was. Privately, he was struck by the informality of the place and its eccentric inhabitants: it reminded him more of a university common room than a military camp. Winding down the window of his car, he said to Denniston, ‘About that recruitment – I know I told you not to leave a stone unturned, but I did not mean you to take me seriously.’ Churchill would have been shocked to know that all was not well at Bletchley Park. Managed by MI6, some of whose officers struggled to understand technology, the codebreaking operations were starved of resources. With Germany’s new Enigma keys coming on stream and a vast amount of fresh material to process, the situation soon reached breaking point, and some of the codebreakers Churchill had met on his visit elected to write to him personally. On 21 October 1941, the anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar, Stuart Milner-Barry, a chess champion turned Bletchley cryptanalyst, was given the unenviable task of conveying their letter to the front door of 10 Downing Street and handing it to a bemused official. The letter thanked Churchill for his visit, and continued: We think, however, that you ought to know that this work is being held up, and in some cases is not being done at all, principally because we cannot get sufficient staff to deal with it. Our reason for writing to you direct is that for months we have done everything that we possibly can through the normal channels, and that we despair of any early improvement without your intervention … it is very difficult to bring home to the authorities finally responsible either the importance of what is done here or the urgent necessity of dealing promptly with our requests. They offered him several alarming examples of bottlenecks and hold-ups. One concerned the decoding of German Army and Air Force Enigma in Hut 6, which was especially close to Churchill’s heart, given his obsession with Rommel and developments in the Western Desert: We are intercepting quite a substantial proportion of wireless traffic in the Middle East which cannot be picked up by our intercepting stations here. This contains among other things a good deal of new ‘Light blue’ intelligence. Owing to shortage of trained typists, however, and the fatigue of our present decoding staff, we cannot get all this traffic decoded. This has been the state of affairs since May. Yet all that we need to put matters right is about twenty trained typists.50 (#litres_trial_promo) Churchill was apoplectic. The result was one of his famous messages headed ‘Action This Day’. He insisted that Bletchley Park’s needs be met in full, and with extreme priority. As a result, throughout 1941 the British were able to read all German air and army intercepts in collaboration with an American liaison group working at Bletchley Park. The Americans had not made headway with Enigma, but had achieved an equivalent triumph against Japanese diplomatic ciphers. Thus, during the summer of 1941 the British were also reading the secrets of Germany’s Japanese allies, including the vital messages of Baron ?shima, the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, to whom Hitler liked to talk at length, and who was regarded as his Japanese confidant.51 (#litres_trial_promo) In October 1941, Churchill and Roosevelt held a top-secret meeting off Newfoundland on board the US Navy ship the USS Augusta to discuss military matters, including America’s then top-secret assistance to the British fight against Germany. On his way to the meeting, Churchill made special arrangements for Ultra to reach him ‘in a weighted case, so that they will sink in the sea if anything happens to the plane’.52 (#litres_trial_promo) A few weeks later, British codebreakers intercepted a communiqu? from the Japanese embassy in London to Tokyo with a remarkably detailed account of the secret meeting. The news stunned Churchill. Even worse, it transpired that one of those who passed the information to the Japanese was not only a highly regarded member of the House of Lords, but a long-time Churchill associate. In 1919 William Forbes-Sempill, a pioneering commander in the Royal Flying Corps whose father had been an aide to King George V, led a mission to Japan – then a British ally – to help it develop naval air power. When Britain terminated the alliance with Japan in the 1920s, Sempill secretly continued assisting Tokyo, providing it with the designs of the latest engines, bombs and aircraft carriers. He also encouraged the development of Japanese naval air power as a national strategy. In 1924, MI5 had begun watching Sempill and intercepting his correspondence, but it hesitated to act because of his status as a war hero at the heart of the British aristocracy. By the mid-1930s, Sempill had become a member of the House of Lords, and joined a number of British pro-Nazi groups. He believed that Britain should have allied with Germany and Japan against Russia and the communists.53 (#litres_trial_promo) Sempill avoided internment because of his status. He would visit Churchill, and then relay the content of their conversations to the Japanese embassy. When the prime minister realised the severity of the leak in October 1941 he ordered: ‘Clear him out while time remains.’ A few days later, Morton wrote: ‘The First Sea Lord … proposes to offer him a post in the North of Scotland. I have suggested to Lord Swinton that MI5 should be informed in due course so they may take any precautions necessary.’ At one point, the attorney general secretly considered prosecuting Sempill. But when the Admiralty confronted him and pressed for his resignation, Churchill interceded and required only that Sempill be ‘moved’. This is a classic case of the prime minister protecting himself. ‘If Sempill had been revealed as a spy, it would have been politically calamitous for Churchill at a low point in the war.’ Even when he was caught calling the Japanese embassy several times in the week following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Sempill still escaped arrest. After the war, he was decorated by both the Japanese and the British. The latter award was widely regarded as an effort to cover up his activities.54 (#litres_trial_promo) Towards the end of March 1941, Churchill read one particular Ultra report ‘with relief and excitement’. It showed a major transfer of German armour from Bucharest in Romania to Cracow in southern Poland. ‘To me,’ he recalled, ‘it illuminated the whole Eastern scene like a lightning flash. The sudden movement … could only mean Hitler’s intention to invade Russia in May.’ The armoured units returned to Bucharest, but this, he correctly surmised, simply meant a delay from May to June because of local trouble in the Balkans caused by an SOE-inspired coup. ‘I sent the momentous news at once to Mr Eden.’55 (#litres_trial_promo) Churchill observed with some satisfaction that it was not until 12 June – only ten days before the attack – that the Joint Intelligence Committee agreed that Hitler had definitely decided to invade Russia. The idea that he would voluntarily begin fighting on a further front when he was already busy in Western Europe and North Africa seemed improbable. The prime minister’s DIY analysis had triumphed on this occasion, and he added jubilantly in his own account: ‘I had not been content with this form of collective wisdom,’ depending instead on Morton’s ‘daily selection of tit-bits, which I always read, thus forming my own opinion, sometimes at much earlier dates’.56 (#litres_trial_promo) Unsurprisingly, Churchill’s account of the Second World War often portrays him in a favourable light. Yet newly opened archives confirm that he indeed predicted the German attack on Russia before almost anyone else. On 26 March, Ultra showed that Hitler had indeed moved a vast force, including two whole army headquarters, from the Balkans to southern Poland. Only a few days later, Churchill informed Stalin of this directly, disguising the source by hinting that the intelligence came from ‘a trusted agent’. Stalin did not believe Churchill, and neither did the Russian chiefs of staff.57 (#litres_trial_promo) Frustrated, Churchill repeatedly pressed Stewart Menzies to send Ultra-based material to Moscow in 1941. However, Menzies worried about both the volume of material going to Stalin and its security. He warned Churchill personally and repeatedly not to let the Russians know about Ultra, and to heavily disguise any intelligence as coming from other sources. Menzies knew from reading Ultra that the Russian ciphers were insecure, and anything Churchill told them might well make its way to Berlin.58 (#litres_trial_promo) Soviet intelligence agents performed brilliantly in early 1941. Secret reports poured in from Germany, Eastern Europe and even Japan, showing in detail Hitler’s massive preparations for invasion. Stalin received more than eighty separate warnings, but ordered his forces to do nothing. The Luftwaffe was permitted to fly reconnaissance missions deep into Soviet territory – some of the aircraft crashed, spilling thousands of feet of film from their underbelly spy cameras. German commando units crossed the Soviet frontier to plan forward routes for the attack. Stalin, however, wanted to signal to Hitler that the Soviet Union was not about to attack Germany, and so avoided mobilisation. He was certain that Hitler would do nothing until he had conquered Britain. This belief was underpinned by an impressive German deception operation that involved two letters to Stalin, directed by Hitler himself. Therefore, Stalin ignored the massive military build-up on his borders, and dismissed every warning of a German attack as disinformation or provocation right up until the morning of 22 June 1941.59 (#litres_trial_promo) Stalin regarded Churchill’s offer of British intelligence on German troop movements as a crude attempt to entrap him in the war in Europe. For years, London and Moscow had each thought the other was on the verge of a deal with Berlin. Most importantly, for Stalin the dramatic flight to Britain in May 1941 by Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, was not the erratic act of an unbalanced individual, but firm proof that British talks with Hitler were well advanced. He was obsessed with the idea of a British deal with Hitler, so much so that in October 1944 he was still asking Churchill why British intelligence had brought Hess to Scotland.60 (#litres_trial_promo) Ironically, Churchill had insisted on Stalin being fully briefed about the arrival of Hess, but this only fed his paranoia.61 (#litres_trial_promo) Churchill passed his warning to Stalin on 9 April, but there were many other efforts to warn the Soviets. In February 1941, Eden told Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador in London, that the Germans were moving troops into Bulgaria, and had taken over the airfields. Churchill was constantly in touch with Eden about what Stalin might be told and how he might receive it.62 (#litres_trial_promo) Similarly, Stafford Cripps, Britain’s ambassador to Moscow, passed on a letter from Churchill in which he wrote, ‘I have at my disposal sufficient information from a reliable agent [a disguised reference to Ultra] that when the Germans considered Yugoslavia caught up in their net, that is, after March 20, they began transferring three of their five tank divisions from Romania to southern Poland.’63 (#litres_trial_promo) Cripps did so reluctantly. He did not know the information was based on Ultra, and underrated its importance, assuming the warning was mere supposition. We now know that Churchill was wise to disguise the source of his intelligence, since German diplomats in Moscow quickly learned the contents of the letter handed over by Cripps.64 (#litres_trial_promo) By early June, Ultra had provided forensic detail about German troop concentrations on the Soviet border. The Foreign Office passed this intelligence to Maisky, and ultimately on to the Soviet foreign minister Molotov. Cadogan gave Maisky a detailed briefing of more information obtained through Ultra on 16 June, but again disguised its source. By then the German attack was only a week away.65 (#litres_trial_promo) Churchill later complained to Lord Beaverbrook about the earlier foot-dragging by Cripps, insisting that ‘if he had obeyed his instructions’ his relationship with Stalin would have been better. But in fact, the message was vague, and only told Stalin what others had already told him many times over.66 (#litres_trial_promo) Churchill did not give up sending Ultra to Stalin. In early 1941 Bletchley Park’s window on ‘the War in the East’ mostly came from Luftwaffe Enigma decrypts. But by the autumn, it was also reading a German Army Enigma key codenamed ‘Vulture’ that carried messages from the German Eastern Front headquarters to particular army groups. This gave wonderful operational information, especially on the drive towards Moscow in October. Churchill sent nine separate warnings to Stalin in the space of a week conveying disguised Ultra information. On the day the Germans launched their October offensive, he ordered a reluctant Menzies to show him ‘the last five messages that had been sent to Moscow’.67 (#litres_trial_promo) He was unaware that John Cairncross, one of the KGB’s top spies in Whitehall, was sitting only yards away in the Cabinet Office during 1941, and was himself about to transfer to Bletchley Park. Predictably, Stalin only believed Bletchley Park material when it was stolen, and not when it was freely given.68 (#litres_trial_promo) Did Churchill have advance warning of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor? More precisely, did he withhold this intelligence from President Roosevelt as part of a plot to draw the United States into the war? This question has been debated endlessly, and historians have firmly concluded that he did not. In fact the British passed several intriguing batches of intelligence about Japanese intentions to the Americans, which they ignored. For example, British intelligence sent a wealthy Yugoslavian playboy named Dusan ‘Dusko’ Popov to New York in 1941. Codenamed ‘Tricycle’ due to his fondness for ‘three in a bed’ sessions, he served as a double agent feeding false reports to the unwitting Germans.69 (#litres_trial_promo) Popov claimed to have warned both the British and the Americans of the impending Japanese attack on Hawaii. Although two senior British intelligence officers, John Masterman and Ewen Montagu, supported him, J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, was unimpressed, and failed to convey any of the information to Roosevelt.70 (#litres_trial_promo) Hoover distrusted British intelligence, and believed that he was fighting not only Axis espionage and subversion, but also the plots of British agents meddling in American domestic politics and trying to manoeuvre the United States into war. He concluded that Tricycle’s intelligence was a forgery created by the British intelligence office in New York.71 (#litres_trial_promo) Within Roosevelt’s supposedly ‘Anglophile’ administration, assistant secretary of state Adolf Berle also harboured extensive suspicions of British intelligence. Churchill’s intelligence relations with Roosevelt were complex. Indeed, Hoover and Berle were partially justified in their suspicions. Although Tricycle’s intelligence was not a British plot, Churchill did authorise a remarkable range of risky schemes in order to draw America into the conflict. He read intercepts of private phone calls between Roosevelt, his secretary of state Cordell Hull, and Joe Kennedy, the US ambassador to London, during which they discussed options ‘if Europe is overrun’ by Nazi Germany. The British also compiled a dossier four inches thick on the isolationist group America First, and then set out to smear it.72 (#litres_trial_promo) British activities involved not only espionage within the United States, but interference in American domestic polity. Churchill and Menzies chose Sir William Stephenson as their special representative in America. Although Stephenson was head of MI6 in the USA, his organisation, British Security Coordination, was more of a department store, representing the myriad secret services, including MI5, SOE and those engaged in propaganda.73 (#litres_trial_promo) The British Security Coordination Office in New York occupied two whole floors of the Rockefeller Center, and employed close to a thousand people. Berle was not exaggerating when he claimed that Stephenson was operating a ‘full size secret police’ inside the United States, and he knew that interventionist organisations such as the Fight for Freedom Committee were closely linked to this undercover British apparatus.74 (#litres_trial_promo) He tried to persuade Roosevelt to ban Stephenson’s agents, who responded by attempting to gather ‘dirt’ on him.75 (#litres_trial_promo) As Roosevelt edged closer to war, Berle correctly concluded that British intelligence was seeking to manipulate US foreign policy by creating ‘false scares’.76 (#litres_trial_promo) Historians now have full accounts of a range of remarkable high-risk British operations, often conducted in connivance with pro-intervention Americans. Churchill authorised a complicated influence operation designed to offer secret support to interventionists and to vilify isolationism. Meanwhile, Britain offered remarkable support to interventionist bodies including the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies and Fight for Freedom. Churchill also authorised secret operations to generate support for the ‘destroyers-for-bases’ deal and lend-lease, in which the Americans agreed to supply Britain and Free France with oil, food and military equipment from 1941. Most remarkably, Britain encouraged a hostile US government probe into the prominent New York congressman Hamilton Fish, the leader of the isolationists on Capitol Hill. Unquestionably, British intelligence forged a so-called ‘secret German map’ that set out a German plan to attack South America. In October 1941, Roosevelt gave this map prominence in a public speech, and the document, actually created in an MI6 forgery laboratory in Canada, was placed on public display.77 (#litres_trial_promo) More than fifty years later, some of the most significant black propaganda operations conducted by British intelligence are still emerging. In 1941, two of the top ten best-selling non-fiction books in the United States were accounts of the Second World War in Europe. One of them was William Shirer’s Berlin Diary, kept by a CBS correspondent who covered Hitler and his regime during 1940.78 (#litres_trial_promo) The other was the diary of a young Dutch boy, Dirk van der Heide, who recorded the experiences of his family under the first days and weeks of German occupation. Owing to their innocent portrayal of the immediacy and trauma of war, children’s diaries are often amongst the most moving testimonies produced by any conflict. Dirk was a ‘twelve-year-old blue-eyed Dutch boy with taffy coloured hair’ who lived in Rotterdam with his mother, father and younger sister, Keetje. When the Germans invaded in 1940, his mother encouraged him to begin a diary and make a family record of their extraordinary experiences. Rotterdam was heavily bombed, and his mother was killed. His father had already departed to fight the invaders, and so their uncle Pieter arranged for the two children to make a dramatic escape to England. Arriving in London only to encounter a renewed German Blitz, they then embarked on a further adventure, evacuated on a ship that makes a hair-raising voyage through minefields and submarine attacks in the North Atlantic to eventual safety in America. Dirk van der Heide’s diary is a fabulous evocation of small people caught up in the vastness of war. It is also a complete fake. Neither Dirk nor any member of his family ever existed. The diary was created for the purposes of anti-Nazi propaganda and published in Britain with the connivance of the publisher Faber & Faber – although this fact was not revealed to its American publisher, Harcourt Brace. It was part of the vast disinformation campaign launched by Churchill and the British secret services.79 (#litres_trial_promo) The real author remains a matter of speculation.80 (#litres_trial_promo) Remarkably, this work of propaganda is so good that it continues to be read and commented upon as if it were real. Tellingly, however, it is one of the few wartime diaries in which the child adopts a pseudonym, and no records or photographs of the family have ever surfaced.81 (#litres_trial_promo) We may never know the full extent to which other plots are waiting to be unearthed. Nicholas Cull, the most important historian of this secret programme, has remarked that the British government seems to have tried to destroy the evidence of its war propaganda in the United States.82 (#litres_trial_promo) British agents even resorted to putting dead rats in the water tanks of American Nazi sympathisers – a less subtle means of manipulating opinion.83 (#litres_trial_promo) Churchill also manipulated intelligence himself in an attempt to play the Americans. In July 1940, Ultra revealed the dismantling of German special equipment that was to be used for an invasion of Britain. Photo-reconnaissance confirmed that invasion barges in France were being towed away. Churchill chose not to share this information with Roosevelt or Harry Hopkins, the president’s special envoy. Instead, he sought to keep the Americans’ sense of threat high enough for them to want to support Britain, but not so high that they thought it a lost cause. In November 1940 he ordered that the amount of intelligence passed on to the US be cut back, and ‘padding should be used to maintain bulk’. Controlling Ultra was vital, and this partly explains why Churchill and Menzies were cagey about cooperation with the Americans on that front. Nevertheless, the first American mission arrived at Bletchley Park in February 1941. In return, the Americans gave the British the power to read Japanese diplomatic communications.84 (#litres_trial_promo) By the end of 1941, the Soviet Union and then the United States had joined what was now a global war impacting on every continent. Increasingly, the international media talked about the ‘Big Three’ (Britain, the USA and the Soviet Union) and how they would shape the future of the world as the war progressed. Churchill, more than anyone, understood that in such a conflict one had to watch one’s allies no less closely than one’s enemies. Deploying the power of intelligence would be even more vital as the war moved towards its climax. 5 Winston Churchill (1942–1945) (#u2edb29e4-9f5d-578c-8bf9-8979eb3f3d09) … the part your naughty deeds in war play, in peace cannot be considered at the present time. Churchill on SOE1 (#litres_trial_promo) Downing Street was now facing a world war. What had begun with minor Italian and Japanese adventures as early as 1936 was now conjoined into a vast global struggle. Britain and the US had declared war on the Japanese; Hitler had declared war on America; and the Soviets had begun a counter-offensive to stem the Nazi march on Moscow. Having been prime minister for nearly two years, Churchill understood the transformative impact of intelligence on strategy and operations on this scale. It would continue to prove vital as the Allies edged towards victory. For Churchill, the Second World War was a struggle not only against Britain’s Axis enemies, but also against its new allies, including Russia and the United States. In 1942, he discovered that some Foreign Office officials had been talking to Moscow about the post-war settlement without his approval. He ‘emitted several vicious screams of rage’.2 (#litres_trial_promo) In particular, he hoped to educate the Americans about what he saw as the problem of growing Soviet power, but he knew this would take time. Pressed to discuss troublesome issues with Roosevelt in 1944, Churchill stalled, and replied, ‘The war will go on for a long time.’3 (#litres_trial_promo) Intelligence and careful timing were part of this delicate game of influence and empire. Nonetheless, Churchill’s detailed control over intelligence declined during the second part of the war. This was an inevitable outcome of the priority he had placed on its expansion. The flow of special intelligence from GC&CS increased massively: by the middle of 1942 Bletchley’s codebreakers produced between 3,000 and 4,000 decrypted German messages a day, as well as Italian and Japanese material. Churchill could not inspect and interpret even a fraction of this material. The torrent of sigint forced the government machine for central assessment to become ever stronger and better-organised. Intelligence was now being produced on an industrial scale, defeating the prime minister’s preference for personal involvement. This was especially evident in his acerbic discussions with his Middle Eastern commanders, whom he constantly goaded to attack the enemy. In early 1942, Bletchley Park’s Hut 8 cracked a medium-grade Italian cipher. This new material showed that Rommel was desperate for supplies. Convinced that Rommel had built his successes on a perilously thin supply of armour and air power, Churchill exhorted his commanders in Cairo to attack. Demonstrating his proclivity towards personal intervention, he summoned Claude Auchinleck, the Middle East commander, back to London and unleashed a classic five-hour haranguing in the Defence Committee. Auchinleck refused to launch an immediate offensive, and demanded more tanks.4 (#litres_trial_promo) By the end of the year, and despite his remaining an avid consumer of the decrypts that passed across his desk, the vast flow of Enigma material to both Downing Street and the commanders in the Western Desert made it increasingly difficult for Churchill to insert himself into such debates.5 (#litres_trial_promo) Churchill had less to do with MI5. His main intervention had been sacking Vernon Kell and appointing David Petrie as its new director after the great ‘spy scare’ of 1940, and MI5 and the chiefs of staff tried to keep it that way. They regarded domestic security as a sensitive area, and feared Churchill’s impetuous meddling. While Stewart Menzies, the chief of SIS, worked hard on his relationship with Churchill, meeting him perhaps over a thousand times during the course of the war, MI5 shied away from personal contact. Petrie, despite being a Churchill appointee, made no attempt to sell the increasingly important triumphs of his organisation ‘at the top’. This only changed because Duff Cooper, who had taken over from Lord Swinton as head of the Home Security Executive, urged it upon him in March 1943. Guy Liddell, a senior officer in MI5, summed up the dilemma: ‘There are obvious advantages in selling ourselves to the PM who at the moment knows nothing about our department. On the other hand, he may, on seeing some particular item, go off the deep end and want to take some action, which will be disastrous to the work in hand.’6 (#litres_trial_promo) For example, ‘When told that a clerk at the Portuguese Embassy in London was spying for both the Germans and the Italians, Churchill scrawled: “Why don’t you just shoot him?”’7 (#litres_trial_promo) Accordingly, internal security issues rarely reached Churchill. Petrie remained reluctant to see the prime minister personally, but considered sending him monthly bulletins with summaries of MI5’s best operations as a compromise.8 (#litres_trial_promo) Churchill loved these bulletins, noting in prime ministerial red ink that they were ‘deeply interesting’.9 (#litres_trial_promo) In the spring of 1944, plans for D-Day finally connected Churchill with MI5 and deception in detail. On Wednesday, 8 March, Menzies joined Churchill, Eden and the chiefs of staff at a special meeting at Downing Street to discuss ‘certain aspects’ of the D-Day preparations that could not be revealed even to the war cabinet. They went backwards and forwards over the deception plans, especially the vast dummy works, supply depots and aerodromes that were being built to misdirect Hitler about the direction of the assault and to persuade him to place his reserves in the wrong location. The conundrum was whether to ban the diplomats of neutral countries based in London from using enciphered messages to report home. The Spanish had passed a great deal of material to the Germans by this means, while the Swedish air attach? had been especially active in spying for the Nazis. Yet Menzies was against a ban. Two years previously, during the invasion of North Africa, the vast volume of conflicting information emanating from Britain through these channels had actually ‘misled the enemy’, and German intelligence officers in Spain had proved delightfully incompetent at sifting ‘true from false information’. Unintentionally, the reports of various spies had also ‘helped us greatly’ in building up aspects of the cover plan and knowing what to stress. Menzies was confident, and rather relishing the deception battle ahead.10 (#litres_trial_promo) As D-Day approached, the prime minister was increasingly obsessed with the plans and the accompanying cover operations. Again, senior MI5 officers were concerned that he might take some rash initiative of his own. But some activities were high-risk, and required Downing Street’s approval. Thus, at ten in the morning on 15 April 1944, Colonel Bevan of the London Controlling Section, the secret unit charged with coordinating deception plans, arrived at 10 Downing Street. Churchill was sitting in his pyjamas smoking a cigar and reading boxes of secret papers. Bevan had come seeking his personal permission to execute one of the most ingenious deception operations of the Second World War: ‘Operation Mincemeat’. The deception planners wished to create a fictitious ‘Major William Martin’ of the Royal Marines, supposedly on the staff of Vice Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, Chief of Combined Operations. They would eventually use the body of a homeless Welshman, Glyndwr Michael, who had died after swallowing rat poison, and which had been purchased from a hospital morgue for ?10. Dressed in the appropriate uniform, and with minute attention to detail, the corpse was to have a briefcase chained to its wrist containing top-secret plans that suggested the main Allied attack would come through the Mediterranean. Churchill was thrilled, and with his enthusiastic blessing ‘Operation Mincemeat’ went ahead.11 (#litres_trial_promo) Two weeks later the body was dropped into the sea on an incoming tide. Spanish officials recovered it and, very properly, handed it over to the British authorities. But first they opened the briefcase, photographed the documents and handed the evidence to German intelligence. The outline plan carried by ‘Major Martin’ pointed to an Allied attack through Greece and the Balkans in an operation codenamed ‘Husky’. The fact that the Germans swallowed the bait was later revealed in Ultra decrypts.12 (#litres_trial_promo) Churchill took great satisfaction in further intercepts showing that Hitler had bought the broader deception plan completely. Sitting with Menzies at Chequers, Churchill gestured in the direction of his cat, ‘Nelson’, who was looking intently out of the window. He remarked that the cat was ‘in touch with the pelicans on the lake’, adding, ‘and they’re communicating our information to the German secret service!’13 (#litres_trial_promo) One of the prime minister’s perpetual arguments with Menzies was about the extent to which Ultra should be exploited, or protected. He cared deeply about its security, but also directly exploited it on occasion. During the battle of El Alamein in October 1942, for example, GC&CS informed Churchill of an intercept reassuring Rommel that a convoy of Italian ships was on its way with fresh ammunition and fuel. Hesitating for only a moment, Churchill ordered an attack on the convoy. Rommel’s deep suspicions about the security of Enigma were only alleviated when the British sent a deliberately insecure message congratulating a group of fictional Italian agents on their information and for their help in sinking the convoy. Ultra later revealed that the Germans had intercepted the signal and set off in hot pursuit of the fictional Italians.14 (#litres_trial_promo) Upon hearing about Axis successes against British communications during 1943, Churchill demanded an immediate inquiry into the security of British ciphers.15 (#litres_trial_promo) As the Allies made their way through Italy and France they rounded up Axis codebreakers, and were shocked to find that many British embassies had been penetrated. Although the Italians had not attacked Britain’s top-grade cipher machine, the Typex, they had broken many other systems. Bletchley Park boffins held prolonged ‘conversations’ with Commander Cianchi, head of the Italian Cryptographic Bureau in Rome, and his staff. Cianchi enthusiastically set out the triumphs of the Italians, especially against British Admiralty communications. The catastrophic Dieppe raid of August 1942 had gone badly because the Germans had been reading Royal Navy messages and had seven days’ warning of this ‘surprise’ attack. Convoy message security had also been weak. The findings of the inquiry did not make for comfortable reading, leaving Churchill at his explosive best. He insisted on the immediate creation of a new body, the Cypher Security Board, to underline the importance he attached to this subject. Soon it had extended its authority over the design, production and operation of all British cipher machines, most of which were made at Bletchley Park’s outstations or at a secret Foreign Office factory at Chester Road in Borehamwood. Ten years later, this had developed into the London Communications Security Agency, a hidden fourth British secret service that worked alongside MI5, MI6 and GCHQ and managed some of the UK’s most sensitive projects.16 (#litres_trial_promo) Churchill was less bothered about his personal security than about ciphers. Yet MI5 learned of more than a dozen attempts on his life during the war. Some of them were bizarre or childish, including an attempt in May 1943 to kill him or members of his entourage using exploding chocolate positioned among the snacks laid out for the war cabinet. This plot was uncovered by Lord (Victor) Rothschild, MI5’s bomb disposal expert. It was not the only such attempt scuppered by Rothschild, and Churchill personally insisted on his decoration.17 (#litres_trial_promo) Germany launched numerous attempts to kill Churchill, many of which were more serious. In late May 1943, Menzies received information from Bletchley Park that it had decoded a most alarming message from a German secret service agent in the Spanish port of Algeciras. The agent had observed the arrival of Churchill and de Gaulle by air, and noted that they had headed eastwards. Churchill was travelling to see General Eisenhower in Algiers to make a passionate case for the invasion of Italy and Sicily. He was joined by Eden, General Montgomery and the chiefs of staff. Menzies rightly feared an attempt to eliminate Churchill on his return. The fact that the secret German watchers were themselves being watched protected Churchill. But events unfolded more quickly than Menzies had expected.18 (#litres_trial_promo) On 1 June, BOAC’s flight 777 took off from Lisbon at 9.35 a.m. and headed towards the Bay of Biscay. Nazi spies were convinced that Churchill was on board. In fact, among the passengers was a man called Alfred Tregar Chenhalls, who unfortunately for himself resembled Churchill, dressed like him and even smoked large cigars. It was clear that the Nazis believed Chenhalls was the prime minister. In fact, he was the business manager of the film star Leslie Howard, who was travelling with him. Three hours after take-off an entire squadron of German warplanes attacked the aircraft. Punctured by shells and bullets, it plummeted into the sea, killing all on board. The attacking aircraft circled the flaming wreckage, and their crew took pictures that were sent to Berlin. Three days later the New York Times reported: ‘It was believed in London that the Nazi raiders had attacked on the outside chance that Winston Churchill might have been among the passengers.’ Churchill too subscribed to the mistaken-identity thesis, and referred to Leslie Howard’s death – which was a severe blow to British morale – as ‘one of the inscrutable workings of fate’. Despite rumours to the contrary, it is overwhelmingly likely that the shooting down of the plane was merely an unfortunate coincidence, and that Chenhalls was not a decoy deliberately sent by Menzies to protect Churchill.19 (#litres_trial_promo) Meanwhile, Churchill’s RAF York aircraft was given an especially strong escort of P-38 fighters to Gibraltar, and then accompanied by a veritable phalanx of Spitfires on the final leg back to England. The prime minister insisted on helping to fly the plane, to the consternation of senior RAF officers.20 (#litres_trial_promo) Even as Churchill landed back in Britain, the Nazis were planning another operation against him. ‘Operation Long Jump’ was one of their most ambitious. The NKVD, the Soviet internal security agency, boasted to the British about having uncovered a plot in which Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin would be simultaneously assassinated during the November 1943 Tehran Conference, at which the principal item on the agenda would be the opening of a second front in Western Europe. The Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence service, had learned of the time and place of the conference, having deciphered the American naval code, and put the operation to assassinate the Allied leaders in the hands of one of its most trusted special force commanders, Otto Skorzeny. Although the British had troops in southern Iran to guarantee the flow of supplies to Russia via the Persian Gulf, the conference was principally the responsibility of the Soviets, who had sent troops into the north of the country in August 1941 to shut down German influence. This was the only time Stalin left Russian-occupied territory during the war, precisely because he was paranoid about assassination attempts. Some have remained sceptical about whether ‘Operation Long Jump’ was a real plot, or merely a Russian propaganda ploy. It did, however, create consternation in London, and Roosevelt was clearly briefed on the episode.21 (#litres_trial_promo) It has since transpired that from 1941 a team of NKVD intelligence officers known as ‘the light cavalry’, on account of the fact that they constantly whizzed around Tehran on bicycles, identified more than four hundred Nazi agents.22 (#litres_trial_promo) Some of their operations were conducted with the assistance of the British, as Churchill had authorised careful but effective cooperation with the NKVD – rather to the distaste of Menzies. Their final success was the arrest of Franz Meyer, a top German agent in Iran, in August 1943. By the time of the conference three months later, German intelligence was thin on the ground, albeit the last German parachute team was not rounded up by the British until early the following year.23 (#litres_trial_promo) Skorzeny later admitted that there had been an assassination plot, but he had thought it hare-brained, and refused any part of it for his commandos.24 (#litres_trial_promo) In 1968, he recalled irritably, ‘My part in the whole damn thing was to turn it down rather bluntly,’ adding that the basis of a successful commando operation was always good intelligence. ‘We had no information.’ The Germans only had two remaining agents in Tehran, and so ‘had nothing to go on’.25 (#litres_trial_promo) The plan was taken up by Walter Schellenberg, the brigadier general in charge of the Waffen SS. Schellenberg sent Germany’s top expert on Iran to prepare secret landing sites and conduct the commandos. This was Major Walter Shultz of the eastern section of the Abwehr, who would travel under the alias of a Swiss businessman. Shultz – whose real name was Ilya Svetlov – was actually a long-term agent of the Soviet secret police who had been infiltrated into Germany in 1928 under an assumed identity. His application for the Nazi Party was signed by none other than Rudolf Hess. Therefore the Soviet secret service commander in Tehran, General Vassili Pankov, was informed of precisely when and where the assassination squad would be arriving. An unmarked German J-52 was shot down by the Soviets as it crossed into Iran. The wreckage, littered with the plane’s load of automatic weapons, mortars and ammunition, continued to explode for some time after it went down.26 (#litres_trial_promo) Gevork Vartanyan, one of the NKVD officers, recalled that the Germans nevertheless dropped a team of assassins by parachute near the city of Qom, eighty miles by road south-west of Tehran: ‘We followed them to Tehran, where the Nazi field station had readied a villa for their stay. They were travelling by camel, and were loaded with weapons.’ All the members of the group were arrested and forced to contact their handlers under Soviet supervision. Vartanyan claimed that in this revised version of the plot, Churchill and Stalin were to be killed, while Roosevelt would be kidnapped. He claimed that the NKVD arrested hundreds of people prior to the conference, and unearthed a German secret service team of six, including radio operators. The Allied leaders were certainly safe by the time of the conference, with some 3,000 NKVD troops saturating the streets.27 (#litres_trial_promo) Soviet claims that Germany launched an elaborate plot sit uncomfortably with the involvement in it of Schellenberg. He was about to take over most of Germany’s foreign intelligence from the Abwehr, and it has recently emerged that in the same year he launched a covert operation codenamed Modellhut, or ‘Model Hat’, which sought to get a message to Churchill from the SS stating that a number of leading Nazis wanted to break with Hitler and negotiate a separate peace with England. The channel of communication was to be the infamous collaborator Coco Chanel, with whom he had a close relationship, and who remained in Paris throughout the war.28 (#litres_trial_promo) His plan was to send her to neutral Madrid to meet the British ambassador and former MI6 officer Sir Samuel Hoare, whom both she and Churchill knew well. Although Chanel was brought to Berlin, the plan failed, and Churchill never received the letter. In any case, MI6 was tired of receiving such missives, and Churchill, scenting eventual victory, was certainly in no mood to negotiate.29 (#litres_trial_promo) If the assassination plot at Tehran had not progressed very far, why did the Soviets make such a fuss about it when Churchill and Roosevelt arrived in Iran? Perhaps it was part of an elaborate Soviet ruse to persuade Roosevelt to move his personal accommodation into the Soviet diplomatic compound, to facilitate bugging. The conference itself, codenamed ‘Eureka’, was held in the Soviet embassy. This gave the Russians the opportunity to bug everything, and transcripts were handed to Stalin personally by Lavrentiy Beria, his intelligence chief, by eight o’clock each morning.30 (#litres_trial_promo) At one point during the conference, Stalin observed Roosevelt passing a handwritten note to Churchill, and was desperate to know what it said. He ordered his NKVD station chief in Tehran, Ivan Ivanovich Agayants, to get hold of a copy. He succeeded, and reported the message to Stalin. It read: ‘Sir, your fly is open.’31 (#litres_trial_promo) Further assassination attempts are still coming to light. Newly declassified MI5 documents reveal that one of the last assassination plans of the war was launched by Zionists in Palestine, where the militant Jewish Stern Gang wanted to end the British mandate and establish the state of Israel. One member, Eliyahu Bet-Zuri, decided in 1944 to send an agent to Britain to assassinate Churchill. MI5 soon became aware that ‘he proposed a plan for assassination of highly placed political personalities, including Mr Churchill, for which purpose emissaries should be sent to London’. The Stern Gang were indeed training their members for assassination attempts, and Bet-Zuri was later executed for the murder of Lord Moyne, the British minister resident in the Middle East, in November 1944. Moyne was a close confidant of Churchill.32 (#litres_trial_promo) Churchill, who was often cavalier about his personal safety, had finally got the message. In December 1944, he visited Athens to have preliminary talks with the various Greek factions, including the prime minister Georgios Papandreou and the Orthodox Archbishop Damaskinos, in what was an emerging civil war between left and right. Some locals worked for the British by day and for ELAS, a militant leftist partisan movement, at night. The women reportedly carried hand grenades in their shopping baskets or under their black dresses. The British delegation drove through areas controlled by the ELAS guerrillas escorted by heavily armed troops, and Churchill opted to sit in an armoured car ‘with a giant 45 Colt revolver on his knees and a look on his face that suggested he would love to fire it’.33 (#litres_trial_promo) Churchill was willing to pay the Germans back for their plots. The military were more cautious. ‘Pug’ Ismay, Churchill’s senior staff officer, warned the prime minister that ‘The Chiefs of Staff were unanimous that, from the strictly military point of view, it was almost an advantage that Hitler should remain in control of German strategy, having regard to the blunders that he has made, but that on the wider point of view, the sooner he was got out of the way the better.’34 (#litres_trial_promo) Nonetheless, in June 1944 Churchill approved a vague plan for Hitler’s assassination by a French sniper. In parallel, SOE had developed detailed plans for the liquidation of Hitler, codenamed ‘Operation Foxley’. Like Ismay, however, Colonel Ronald Thornley, head of SOE’s German Section, warned that Hitler’s direction of the war effort was helpful to the Allies, since he often dismissed the sound advice of his generals. Thornley insisted, ‘his value to us has been equivalent to an almost unlimited number of first-class SOE agents strategically placed inside Germany’. In any case, SOE was aware that both the Russian NKVD and the Polish resistance had studied the possibility of assassinating Hitler and concluded that it would be absurdly difficult.35 (#litres_trial_promo) Churchill loved clandestine activities, sometimes almost regardless of consequence. Unlike his personal support for Bletchley Park, his enthusiasm for SOE and for encouraging resistance has attracted much criticism. John Keegan, one of Britain’s foremost military historians, denounced SOE as ‘a costly and misguided failure’, and the actions of individual agents as ‘irrelevant and pointless acts of bravado’.36 (#litres_trial_promo) Max Hastings, among the most assiduous and persuasive scholars of Britain’s wartime leader, has gone further. He has denounced Churchill’s interventions in this field as resembling those of a ‘terrorist’, adding that his ‘hunger to take the fight to Hitler made him send thousands of heroes to needless death’, and concludes that SOE exerted a malign influence across Europe by arming local factions that were keener to fight each other than to fight the Germans. There is a growing sense that Churchill was emotional, even irrational in indulging his love of immediate action through SOE, while wasting military resources and promoting needless political trouble in Whitehall.37 (#litres_trial_promo) This is not the case. Churchill was remarkably astute in his management of SOE. He had appointed Hugh Dalton as its head in part to keep the Labour partners in his coalition government happy. When it became apparent that Dalton’s main talent lay in annoying other interested parties, Churchill rescued SOE by replacing him in March 1942 with Lord Selborne, a steady and effective Tory ally who had previously been director of cement at the Ministry of Works. The calm Selborne was the opposite of the temperamental Dalton. Over the next two years, whenever SOE fell out with Stewart Menzies, Churchill prevented Desmond Morton, an ally of MI6, from manipulating the ensuing inquiries, and ensured that they were led by intelligent and open-minded people such as John Hanbury-Williams, managing director of Courtaulds. Selborne rewarded Churchill by sending him edited highlights of SOE’s successes, which the prime minister found ‘very impressive’. In the summer of 1943 Churchill waded in to support SOE’s demands for more RAF special duties aircraft in the Balkans, arguing that the uprisings there reinforced the need for strategic deception, and also gave ‘immediate results’.38 (#litres_trial_promo) SOE’s activities in the Balkans are often seen as one of Churchill’s biggest blunders. During 1940 and 1941 all the Balkan countries had come under increasing pressure to collaborate with the Axis. In March 1941, Yugoslavia signed the Tripartite Pact, formalising its alliance with Germany, Italy and Japan. Churchill was furious, and enthusiastically backed an SOE coup d’?tat that deposed the ruler, Prince Paul. He and SOE basked in the momentary glory of apparent success as an anti-Axis regime took over. Hitler responded by invading not only Yugoslavia but also Greece. On 6 April, German, Italian and Hungarian forces poured into both countries. Belgrade surrendered within a week, and SOE’s prot?g? King Peter fled the country. Ten days later, the Wehrmacht marched into Athens. In the short term this looked like a disaster. But Hitler had been forced to delay ‘Operation Barbarossa’, his invasion of Russia, by three months in order to secure his southern flank. This had profound consequences for the Russian campaign, which were visible when the German armies stalled in the snow outside Moscow at the end of the year.39 (#litres_trial_promo) SOE now had a choice of Yugoslavian resistance movements to back. Churchill initially urged it to support the Serbian royalist General Dra?a Mihailovi?. However, by early 1943 his support had shifted to Josip Tito, who led the rival communists. The Yugoslav section of SOE sent intelligence about resistance activities to their colleagues in London and to the Foreign Office. James Klugman, deputy chief of SOE’s Yugoslavia Section and a Cambridge-educated communist, ran down Mihailovi?’s efforts against the Germans and overstated Tito’s. Churchill and much of Whitehall seem to have been misled by Klugman’s trumpeting of Tito’s effectiveness as a resistance leader. Downing Street certainly had an exaggerated view of the contribution of Tito’s partisans, insisting that they were tying down twenty-four crack German divisions. In fact, only eight under-strength German divisions were in Yugoslavia at this time, and the partisans spent much of their effort on factional infighting. Tito even sent a delegation to German headquarters at Sarajevo proposing a truce so they could both concentrate their efforts against the Royalists.40 (#litres_trial_promo) Yet the idea that Churchill was misled by a single middle-ranking SOE officer with Moscow connections is little more than a conspiracy theory. The prime minister had many other sources, including his own special envoy to Tito, the redoubtable Fitzroy Maclean. Churchill chose him personally, writing to Eden: ‘What we want is a daring Ambassador-leader with these hardy and hunted guerrillas.’ Maclean, an adventurer after Churchill’s own heart,41 (#litres_trial_promo) was asked to keep an open mind and to find out, in Churchill’s words, which faction was ‘killing the most Germans’. He parachuted into Yugoslavia in September 1943, and quickly built up a good personal relationship with Tito which persisted for decades. He told Churchill that Tito’s partisans were doing most of the fighting against the Germans. Much of the criticism of Churchill has been made with the benefit of hindsight. Some of it reflects post-war ‘mole-mania’, brought on by revelations about Soviet spies such as Kim Philby. But it is clear that Tito would have prevailed in Yugoslavia with or without SOE assistance. In the end, British intelligence, and Maclean in particular, became important once again when Tito broke with Stalin in 1948 to develop anti-Soviet communism. Mihailovi? and his Chetniks were the advance guard of Serb nationalism – with all that this would entail after 1989. In both the long and the short run, Churchill was right to back SOE and support Tito in 1943.42 (#litres_trial_promo) There was one further source of information for Churchill on Tito. When Maclean parachuted into Yugoslavia with his mission in September 1943, his subordinates were a curious mixture. They included Churchill’s own son Randolph and his friend the novelist Evelyn Waugh. Randolph, a hard-drinking and boisterous officer, had served with the SAS. Admired for his exceptional bravery, he was nevertheless rather tiresome company. Franklin Lindsay, an American who later planned the Bay of Pigs operation and who served with him in Yugoslavia, described him as ‘one of the most aggressively rude men I ever met’. But Maclean valued him for his courage, endurance, and of course his political connections.43 (#litres_trial_promo) Waugh was also a difficult character, and his superior officers were often desperate not to work with him – when his Commando unit sailed for Italy he was given leave to stay behind and complete Brideshead Revisited. In mid-1944, Randolph Churchill told him that he was going out to work for Maclean in Yugoslavia, and asked Waugh to join him. Both were almost killed on arrival when their plane crashed, killing eleven of the twenty on board.44 (#litres_trial_promo) Evelyn Waugh and Randolph Churchill were a comic couple. Both professional drunks, they were bound together because most people found them insufferable. Waugh noted in his diary: ‘Further “tiffs” with Randolph … he is simply a flabby bully who rejoices in blustering and shouting down anyone weaker than himself and starts squealing as soon as he meets anyone as strong.’45 (#litres_trial_promo) But Randolph was fearless, and survived an enemy raid on his camp, fleeing into the mountains without shoes. The prime minister received long and detailed reports direct from his son, fighting with the partisans deep in the heart of the Balkans.46 (#litres_trial_promo) Critics of Churchill’s attempts to promote secret resistance rarely think beyond Europe. Much has been written about SOE in France and the Low Countries, a great deal of it highly critical. But Churchill encouraged SOE to think of itself as a global organisation operating on every continent, resulting in success as far afield as Brazil, Madagascar and Papua New Guinea. Remarkably, almost nothing has been written about its biggest success, which lay in Burma. During the last year of the war, SOE in Burma carried out its most spectacularly successful campaign of the entire conflict. The main focus was a series of operations employing the fiercely loyal Burmese hill tribes, codenamed ‘Nation’ and ‘Character’. Churchill was instrumental in promoting a wide range of special forces activity in Burma, including the Chindits. This force was led by Orde Wingate, one of Britain’s most eccentric wartime leaders. He was so odd that Churchill had to compel his generals to give him a role, but thereafter he achieved remarkable things. Churchill collected eccentrics precisely because they shook things up, and he thought Wingate ‘a man of genius’. At one point the prime minister considered making Wingate overall commander in India, to the absolute horror of the chiefs of staff.47 (#litres_trial_promo) From late 1944, the guerrilla levies recruited from the Burmese hill tribes scented victory. Guerrilla intelligence also multiplied the effect of Allied air attacks. Japanese casualties of ‘Operation Nation’ were estimated at between 3,582 and 4,650, with Allied casualties between sixty-three and eighty-eight.48 (#litres_trial_promo) ‘Operation Character’, conducted in the Karen tribal area, met with even greater success. It consisted of three main groups under Lt. Colonel Tulloch, Lt. Colonel Peacock and Major Turral. By 13 April 1945, Tulloch’s Northern Group commanded a tribal force of 2,000. As the 50,000-strong Japanese 15th Division tried to move south through the Karen areas in a race with the British for the key town of Toungoo, which controlled the strategic road south to Rangoon, it was ambushed.49 (#litres_trial_promo) Extended fighting developed, and continued into July. Remarkably, on 21 July, General Stopford, commander of the British 33rd Corps, conceded that SOE’s locally-raised Karen forces had inflicted more casualties in the previous month than the regular army.50 (#litres_trial_promo) Churchill loved secret service, but even more than that he loved empire. Here, in the hills above the Irrawaddy River, they came together. When Roosevelt and Churchill met off Newfoundland in 1941 they drew up an agreed statement of war aims called the Atlantic Charter. Few people realise that this charter was never signed. To Churchill’s horror it contained clauses offering self-determination to everyone – including Britain’s imperial subjects. He saw the war as a struggle to save the British Empire, and was already thinking about the impact of the post-war settlement on imperial territories. Fearing Roosevelt’s anti-imperialism, he turned the lens of British intelligence on the country’s closest ally, the United States. Churchill was far from merely defensive when it came to imperial territory, believing that the empire needed to become larger if it was to become safer. After Britain’s ignominious defeat at Singapore in 1942, which he called ‘the greatest disaster in our history’, he was determined to restore British rule to Burma and Malaya, and if possible to expand their territory by annexing parts of Thailand. He told Eden that this could be presented to the world as ‘some sort of protectorate’.51 (#litres_trial_promo) But the American Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, engaged in special operations behind enemy lines, thwarted the plan by taking the lead in working with the Thai resistance. In April 1945, it was reporting that Thailand should become an ‘incubator of Americanism’ in the Far East.52 (#litres_trial_promo) Churchill envisaged the Far Eastern war as an exercise in imperial recovery. By contrast, Roosevelt believed that the European empires were a major contributing factor to the outbreak of war. The president was a devout anti-imperialist on ideological grounds, but he also saw the European empires as a barrier to post-war American trade. Some of his secret services were even backing Ho Chi Minh against the French – the future of French Indochina was an issue so divisive that by 1944 Churchill and Roosevelt had refused to discuss it. Instead, they simply spied on each other and sought to subvert each other’s projects.53 (#litres_trial_promo) SOE was the most powerful British secret service in Asia. It was run by Colin Mackenzie, a friend of Lord Linlithgow, the Viceroy of India, and a director of the textile company J&P Coats. In the early twentieth century, this was the world’s third largest company after US Steel and Standard Oil, and it had vast imperial interests. Its main business rivals were American. Similarly, John Keswick, the senior SOE officer in China, was with the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, while MI6’s Asian operation was run by Geoffrey Denham, a director of Anglo-Dutch Plantations. Like Churchill, they were determined to perpetuate the post-war empire. The main focus of Churchill’s paranoia was the Indian independence movement. Churchill’s views on India can seem shocking. His private secretary recorded how ‘The P.M. said the Hindus were a foul race,’ and wished that Bomber Harris could ‘send some of his surplus bombers to destroy them’.54 (#litres_trial_promo) British intelligence followed every move of Indian nationalists, and also discovered covert OSS activity in India. Anglo–American spy rivalry was rife in Delhi. From 1942 onwards, Gandhi’s ‘Quit India’ movement had left the British in the awkward position of trying to fight a war in Asia from a base that was itself effectively occupied territory. India presented a major internal security problem, and the OSS was seen as siding with the subversives. The Americans were not unaware of the ironies. Donald Downes, an OSS officer watching events in Bombay, recalled: ‘I saw the great Gandhi himself come to visit his British dentist in a green Rolls-Royce on which was mounted a sign in five languages saying “boycott British goods”.’55 (#litres_trial_promo) William Stephenson’s British Security Coordination continued its operations in New York, and busily spied on Indian nationalists in the United States. In return, Roosevelt deliberately provoked Churchill by appointing William Phillips, head of OSS London, as his personal representative in India. OSS officers arriving in Delhi were warned that ‘the British are past masters at intrigue and had planted spies in all American agencies to piece together information’.56 (#litres_trial_promo) In fact, the British had gone even further, and from early 1943 were intercepting all mail addressed to American consulates in India.57 (#litres_trial_promo) General Al Wedemeyer, the most senior American officer in India, was told by his staff that the British had tapped his telephone.58 (#litres_trial_promo) Hong Kong lay firmly in the American sphere of military operations. Although occupied by Japan during the war, everyone expected it to be liberated by American and Chinese nationalist forces. Churchill feared that this prize piece of British real estate would be handed to Chiang Kai-shek. He therefore approved the insertion of a British SOE group under John Keswick conveniently close to Hong Kong to watch events there. In April 1942, the head of the Chinese secret service had them expelled. But SOE was greatly helped by the fact that the Chinese nationalists were fighting the Chinese communists, while the OSS were fighting a rival intelligence outfit run by the US Navy. By 1944, SOE had made its way back into China under the cover of a mission to recover and rescue escaping prisoners of war from Hong Kong. It developed a plan to arm and train 30,000 British-paid guerrillas to ensure that a British force played a part in liberating Hong Kong at the end of the war. Also assisting Britain’s return to Hong Kong was a massive SOE black-market currency-smuggling exercise so large that it paid for all of SOE’s operations in every theatre during the Second World War. French Indochina had considerable symbolic value for Roosevelt. In conversations with Stalin he remarked that after a century of French rule, ‘the inhabitants are worse off than before’.59 (#litres_trial_promo) As a result, he tried to prevent French special forces operating in the region under Mountbatten. Unbeknown to the president, Churchill lifted his veto on French secret service operations into Vietnam in late 1944. SOE’s Indochina section had been completely handed over to French control, and essentially became a platform for France’s efforts to restore colonial rule. Colin Mackenzie recalled that the French were a law unto themselves – ‘We let them get on with their own business.’60 (#litres_trial_promo) By 1944, SOE was dropping French colonial governors and policemen by parachute over the Mekong delta. At exactly the same time Roosevelt’s OSS was assisting and arming the Viet Minh. At one point, an OSS medical team seems to have saved Ho Chi Minh’s life.61 (#litres_trial_promo) By 1945, SOE and the OSS were parachuting rival paramilitary teams into Indochina to support opposite sides in a messy conflict. Both were under pressure from their governments to inch ahead in a secret race over restored empire in Asia. In this febrile atmosphere, accidents were bound to happen. Accordingly the British operated a ‘ban on informing the Americans’ about their secret flights, meaning there was a very real danger that they might be mistaken for Japanese aircraft. Just before midnight on 22 January 1945, two RAF Liberator aircraft from No. 358 Special Duties squadron set off to drop operatives into Indochina. They never returned, and soon questions were being asked. Air Vice Marshal Gilbert Harcourt Smith eventually reported: ‘It now seems certain that two of the Liberators missing from No. 358 Squadron on the night of 22/23 were destroyed by American fighters.’ He added, ‘I am convinced that it will be in the best interest of all concerned if we adopt sealed lips on these incidents and drop all idea of any investigation.’62 (#litres_trial_promo) Churchill watched these imperial issues closely. He employed Gerald Wilkinson, an MI6 officer, as his secret contact with General Douglas MacArthur, the American commander in the South-West Pacific. MacArthur loathed Roosevelt, and was a potential Republican candidate for the next US election. When Wilkinson made return trips to England he reported first to Menzies in MI6 headquarters, and then went round to Downing Street to brief Churchill directly.63 (#litres_trial_promo) One key issue was MacArthur’s prospects as a potential presidential candidate. Wilkinson described him as ‘ruthless, vain, unscrupulous and self-conscious’, but ‘a man of real calibre’.64 (#litres_trial_promo) On his visits to London, Wilkinson was often summoned by telephone to brief Churchill in the middle of the night.65 (#litres_trial_promo) His main theme during these midnight conversations was the ‘Wall Street imperialists’ and the danger they presented to British imperial interests in the Far East. Wilkinson visited Alan Brooke, who found him ‘very interesting’,66 (#litres_trial_promo) and also briefed the editor of The Times, the secretary of Imperial Tobacco, the head of Imperial Chemical Industries and the senior staff from Anglo-Iranian Oil.67 (#litres_trial_promo) Late in the war, at the suggestion of Ian Fleming, then a naval intelligence officer, he was posted to Washington, where he continued to monitor the American and Chinese threat to British commercial interests in the Far East. As William Stephenson noted, this work was ‘somewhat outside the charter of British Security Coordination’s activities’.68 (#litres_trial_promo) British covert action in the service of empire was even more remarkable in the Middle East. Recent research in French archives has shown how the British tried to keep the Middle East quiet by means of a vast programme of bribery undertaken by both SOE and MI6.69 (#litres_trial_promo) As the war drew to an end and the future of SOE came under scrutiny, Lord Killearn, the ambassador to Egypt, reflected that its main job in the Middle East had been the bribery of senior political figures, what he called ‘the payment of baksheesh’.70 (#litres_trial_promo) At this point, Lord Selborne, the last head of SOE, wrote a veritable essay to Churchill on how SOE defended his beloved empire: SOE can lend valuable aid to top-hatted administrators by unacknowledgeable methods. Lord Killearn in Egypt and Sir Reader Bullard in Persia have already employed SOE to important effect in nobbling personalities who can make themselves inconvenient to HMG. A ‘loan’ here, a directorship there, pay dividends out of all proportions, and may save battalions … this can be done in conformity with Foreign Office policy, but, it can only be done by those who understand the technique, potentialities, and limitations of subterranean work.71 (#litres_trial_promo) It is only now becoming clear, with the recent discovery of documents which MI6 hoped had long been destroyed, that the wartime Middle East in particular served as a playground for the British secret service, perfecting their techniques of bribery and covert political influence. Many senior figures, including leaders in Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, were on the payroll. The British not only bribed an astonishing number of ministers, officials and newspaper editors across the region, they even forced them to sign receipts to underline that they were on the take.72 (#litres_trial_promo) In 1941, Churchill had viewed William Donovan, the head of OSS, as an ally. But by the end of the war, because of these colonial issues, he saw him as a dangerous enemy trying to subvert the British Empire. In April 1945, when asked about the role of guerrillas and the liberation of Hong Kong, Churchill warned Eden, ‘I incline against another SOE–OSS duel, on ground too favourable for that dirty Donovan.’73 (#litres_trial_promo) Donovan was in much the same mood. He visited London in July 1945 to hold discussions with the large OSS station there, but US intelligence and security officers reported that ‘he did not desire to see “any damn British”’.74 (#litres_trial_promo) Donovan’s vexation in the summer of 1945 may have reflected a sense that he was losing the anti-colonial war against the British in Asia. Russia was on the rise, and Roosevelt, the great evangelist of anti-colonialism, died in April 1945. One of Donovan’s very last missives to the White House as America’s intelligence chief was to insist that the Viet Minh were fundamentally nice people but na?ve, and were being ‘misled’ by ‘agents provocateurs and Communist elements’.75 (#litres_trial_promo) Other OSS officers in Washington disagreed, and were already warning the new president, Harry S. Truman, that the US should be supporting the European colonial empires, not undermining them, as they would be needed to help contain the post-war Soviet Union. British and American intelligence agencies were increasingly talking the language of anti-communism and an emerging Cold War. For Churchill, the Cold War had begun in earnest with the arguments over Poland in early 1944. Dismayed at Stalin’s brutal treatment of the Polish resistance, he told Eden: ‘I fear that very great evil may come upon the world … the Russians are drunk with victory and there is no length they may not go.’ He added that this time, at any rate, ‘we and the Americans will be heavily armed’. Clearly he was already thinking about a military confrontation with Stalin – and perhaps even about nascent nuclear weapons.76 (#litres_trial_promo) Churchill mused that there would soon be nothing ‘between the white snows of Russia and the white cliffs of Dover’.77 (#litres_trial_promo) A year later, within days of Germany’s defeat, the prime minister contemplated the ‘elimination of Russia’. He ordered plans for war with the Soviets to be drawn up, codenamed ‘Operation Unthinkable’. This called for hundreds of thousands of British and American troops, supported by 100,000 rearmed German soldiers, to unleash a surprise attack upon their war-weary eastern ally. Meanwhile the RAF would attack Soviet cities from bases in northern Europe.78 (#litres_trial_promo) The military lacked enthusiasm, not least because Hitler had failed to achieve this objective even with more than a hundred divisions.79 (#litres_trial_promo) Brooke and his fellow chiefs of staff were horrified by Churchill’s idea. The prime minister perhaps felt that nuclear weapons would provide the answer to the question of how to defeat Stalin. Such thoughts and discussions are not ordinarily recorded in formal minutes, but Brooke captured the reality of these intensely secret and private discussions in his diary. Churchill, he recorded, now saw ‘himself as the sole possessor of the bombs and capable of dumping them where he wished, thus all-powerful and capable of dictating to Stalin’.80 (#litres_trial_promo) This was so secret that it was never taken near the main intelligence machine. The JIC, which had not been told about America’s plan to use the atomic bomb on Japan, remarkably undertook very little work on the issue of the Russians after late 1944, precisely because Stalin’s future course was such a hot potato in Whitehall.81 (#litres_trial_promo) Only in January 1946 did it feel able to revisit the explosive issue of Russia.82 (#litres_trial_promo) By this time, Attlee, who became prime minister shortly before the nuclear bombing of Japan, had sought joint action with Russia to stave off an ‘imminent disaster’ in Allied relations. Taking over the helm at the Potsdam Conference of July–August 1945, Attlee wrote, ‘The time is short … I believe that only a bold course can save civilisation.’83 (#litres_trial_promo) Churchill’s impact on intelligence at the beginning of the war had been formidable. At the end of the war it was negligible. He was simply exhausted, and increasingly overwhelmed by the complexity of post-war settlements. Many important questions about the future of British intelligence were now being pondered. They included the possible merger of MI5 and MI6, together with the future of SOE and sabotage. For over a year, Churchill and Eden had also discussed whether it might be a good idea to merge SOE and MI6, in an attempt to end their squabbling. Churchill had decided not, concluding that the ‘warfare’ between the two secret services was ‘a lamentable, but inevitable, feature of our affairs’.84 (#litres_trial_promo) By 1945, senior officials were anxious to keep these discussions away from Churchill, judging him too tired to make sensible decisions. Alexander Cadogan, the senior official at the Foreign Office, agreed with the military that there should be a report on relations between MI5 and MI6. The logical person to do this was the cabinet secretary, but then it would come to the notice of the prime minister, who would ‘have wanted to know all about it’. Guy Liddell discussed this review with Peter Loxley, a young diplomat who helped Cadogan with intelligence matters, and said that ‘In my experience once things of this sort reached cabinet level it was the toss of a coin whether they went right or wrong.’ Loxley entirely agreed, and mentioned ‘off the record’ the bizarre atmosphere in which SOE’s future was being discussed. Churchill received minutes on these subjects at the end of a rather tiring day, and scribbled across them: ‘Let Major Morton look into this and advise. SIS [MI6] I know but who are SOE? I know S. Menzies. He is head of MI5.’85 (#litres_trial_promo) Menzies was, of course, the chief of MI6. By this time, Churchill was in no state to be making important decisions about the future of intelligence. With Churchill fading fast, square-minded individuals and bureaucrats did their level best to kill off SOE. Diplomats and staff officers, people who saw the world from behind a collar-stud, instinctively feared special forces and ‘funnies’ just as much as Churchill loved them. As the war drew to a close, Sir Esler Denning, Britain’s most senior diplomat in the Far East, insisted that some order must now be brought to the sprawling secret empire, adding tersely, ‘Reforms will be much appreciated by all of us who for our sins are in frequent contact with these organisations.’86 (#litres_trial_promo) One senior staff officer lamented that SOE had been created outside the regular military, in a place ‘where imagination was welcomed and allowed to have full play, and where resources were readily obtainable. It is to be hoped that this will never occur again.’87 (#litres_trial_promo) Over the course of the war Churchill had done much to expand and accelerate Britain’s secret state. He had personally driven the creation of most of the nation’s new raiding, sabotage and special operations forces, from SOE to the Commandos to the Chindits. He had boosted Bletchley Park, providing additional resources the instant they were needed. He had encouraged new mechanisms for distributing and integrating Ultra into British decision-making. It was under him that the JIC, the central machine of intelligence, came of age and was relocated close to Downing Street. Above all, he understood the importance of ‘intelligence at the top’, and was the first prime minister to have a special assistant dealing only with intelligence. Impressively, he reined in his impulsive love of immediate action to protect the twin secrets of Ultra and deception. Ironically, Churchill’s last great Second World War battle involved crossing swords with his own security officials. In the interwar period, he had been deeply dependent on writing to stay afloat financially. As David Reynolds has shown, in the 1930s Churchill’s earnings from literary activities brought him about half a million pounds a year at current values. But it was never enough: he was always mortgaging ahead, and employed an army of accountants and legal advisers to help him avoid tax. Even with extraordinary deals for film rights, somehow he was always in deficit. Accordingly, his six-volume history of the Second World War was begun eighteen months after the end of the conflict by a syndicate of ghost writers and assistants, including R.V. Jones. The prime minister’s official salary in 1945 was ?10,000, while this project earned around ?600,000.88 (#litres_trial_promo) Churchill omitted Ultra from his personal account of the war, and touched only lightly on deception and resistance work. But he enjoyed pushing the boundaries, giving detailed accounts of subjects like the ‘Wizard War’ and the passing of intelligence to Stalin. He discussed the Joint Intelligence Committee, something no other prime ministers would do in their memoirs for another half-century. He wanted to include the original texts of telegrams sent to leaders like Stalin, Roosevelt and Truman. This raised the immediate problem of cipher security, for verbatim texts could, in theory at least, compromise much of the other British cipher traffic sent on the same day. Bletchley Park had used just such ‘cribs’ to help break Enigma. Stewart Menzies had dinner with Churchill on the night of 9 June 1948 and explained the problem, trying to ‘tie him down’ to a formal arrangement for changes. Churchill was ‘not impressed’ by his arguments, but eventually caved in.89 (#litres_trial_promo) As prime minister, Churchill had overseen an intelligence revolution. He had recognised the transformative power of intelligence both in support of policy and in shaping events themselves. He brought intelligence to the heart of government in a manner unknown to earlier occupants of Downing Street. However, his impetuosity at times bedevilled his relations with the secret world. He presided over an informal and personal system rife with impulsiveness. It could work well. But it could also lead to recklessness and acrimony. Churchill could therefore only take the revolution so far. To fully harness the power of intelligence, a prime minister needed to be better organised, to inject a sense of order and rationality into what was becoming an intelligence community. Churchill’s revolution required a straight man to form all this new activity into a central machine. Enter Clement Attlee. PART THREE THE HOT COLD WAR (#u2edb29e4-9f5d-578c-8bf9-8979eb3f3d09) 6 Clement Attlee (1945–1951) (#u2edb29e4-9f5d-578c-8bf9-8979eb3f3d09) Are they not possibly for sale? Clement Attlee1 (#litres_trial_promo) Clement Attlee spent his time in office busily scuttling between competing priorities. Labour’s first post-war prime minister is best remembered for successful domestic reform in the face of severe impecuniousness, and for engineering Britain’s miraculous ‘Escape from Empire’ while under pressure from nationalist unrest in India. Crucially, however, Attlee also presided over the early Cold War – a burgeoning conflict that would dominate the second half of the twentieth century. His choices, especially on security, had ramifications for generations to come. Following the Soviet detonation of an atomic bomb in August 1949, the Cold War created increasingly serious responsibilities for the new prime minister. With the advent of the Korean War the following year, all-out confrontation seemed only weeks away. The Cold War placed a high premium on intelligence. Successive prime ministers needed to know the Soviet Union’s capabilities and intentions, including its nuclear arsenals and technological developments – and, crucially, whether it would use them. A great deal was at stake. Intelligence also had a more active, and potentially explosive, role to play. It became crucial in fighting a large-scale underground struggle. With open warfare now too dangerous to contemplate, conflict was forced into a lower key. Subversion, espionage, insurgency and propaganda became the weapons of choice. Clement Attlee was the first prime minister to be forced to adjust to this ‘hot peace’, and to recognise its implications for the active use of intelligence in peacetime. He was well aware of the difficulties. Spoilt by the Ultra material during the war, the new government had to adapt to a lack of high-grade intelligence, since it was not reading many Soviet communications. GCHQ, as GC&CS had become in 1946, could not provide direct insights into the mind of the enemy. Attlee himself privately acknowledged that ‘The difficulties in dealing with Communist activities are far greater than anything which we have had to face before, for the iron curtain is very hard to penetrate.’2 (#litres_trial_promo) Attlee’s premiership was sandwiched between two governments led by Winston Churchill, an enthusiastic – even flamboyant – advocate of secret service. By contrast, Attlee is remembered neither as a natural Cold Warrior nor as an avid consumer of intelligence. He was a modest and sensible man; the last ever prime minister to be challenged to a duel – which he declined, telling the accuser not to be so silly.3 (#litres_trial_promo) Yet, unlike prime ministers who had served during the interwar period, Attlee and his colleagues did not arrive in office ignorant of the workings of the secret world. As an integral part of the wartime coalition he had been aware of MI5 and MI6 long before being elected prime minister.4 (#litres_trial_promo) As Winston Churchill’s deputy prime minister, he had been discussing reform of the secret services as early as 1940, and also experienced the vital contribution made by ‘most secret sources’, especially signals intelligence, first hand.5 (#litres_trial_promo) During the war, Stewart Menzies had picked out Bletchley Park decrypts not only for Churchill, but also for Attlee.6 (#litres_trial_promo) Churchill had asked his deputy to preside personally over some of the most sensitive wartime issues. In December 1943, Attlee had chaired a staff conference that looked at the ‘highly disturbing’ issue of German penetration of SOE in Holland.7 (#litres_trial_promo) And he was not alone. His own deputy prime minister, Herbert Morrison, had been wartime home secretary, while his chancellor of the exchequer, Hugh Dalton, had run SOE. Attlee was therefore quite right to assert that he ‘had had full experience of high and responsible office’, and ‘understood the machinery of government’.8 (#litres_trial_promo) As a consummate committee man, machinery was his strength. Churchill may have boosted Britain’s intelligence community, but it was Attlee who refined the secret structures that ensured its smooth running over the next half-century. Clement Attlee had endeared himself to Churchill personally as Labour’s most vocal enemy of appeasement in the late 1930s. Indeed, it was his refusal to join a coalition government led by Chamberlain that had ushered in Churchill as premier in May 1940. Thereafter, Attlee, together with Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan, completed the Churchillian intelligence revolution. Schooled in the importance of secret service during the long years of conflict with Nazi Germany, the need to integrate intelligence into the core business of government was second nature to them. The amazing achievements of MI5, MI6, SOE and especially Bletchley Park resonated with Britain’s rulers over the next two decades, a period during which 10 Downing Street was consistently run by ministerial figures from Churchill’s wartime coalition. Already well-versed in the clandestine workings of intelligence, as prime minister Attlee oversaw the growth of an intricate secret state prosecuting the Cold War both domestically and overseas.9 (#litres_trial_promo) As Britain faced severe economic decline, intelligence was an area in which it could perhaps still lead the world, while secret service provided opportunities for fancy footwork that dodged imperial retreat.10 (#litres_trial_promo) The new prime minister was no stranger to domestic counter-subversion. Churchill had inducted Attlee into this sensitive area almost as soon as he joined the coalition government in May 1940.11 (#litres_trial_promo) Owing to his intense fear of fifth columnists, Churchill had wished to progress with the internment of enemy aliens, and he instructed Attlee to liaise with MI5 on the matter. Attlee agreed with its senior counter-espionage officer, Guy Liddell, that ‘the liberty of the subject, freedom of speech etc were all very well in peace-time but were no use in fighting the Nazis’.12 (#litres_trial_promo) As prime minister, Attlee continued to value MI5, not least to ‘detect attempts to penetrate our defence organisation’. He also believed that MI5 should be free from political control, separate from government and police machinery.13 (#litres_trial_promo) Yet upon his election in July 1945, he was cautious in his dealings with Britain’s security agencies. They were not natural bedfellows.14 (#litres_trial_promo) Aside from Philby, Burgess and Maclean, senior British intelligence officers were hardly renowned for their love of socialism. According to one barbed remark in Liddell’s diary, the state socialism pursued by Attlee’s government ‘differed little if at all from Communism by evolutionary means’.15 (#litres_trial_promo) Conversely, the Labour Party’s opinions of MI5 were framed by historic antagonism dating back to the Zinoviev affair. More recently, memories of internment, censorship and other infringements of civil liberties perturbed the new Members of Parliament who filled the government benches following Labour’s landslide victory – a victory which took MI5 by surprise. Attlee was being watched carefully by both left and right. During an election broadcast in July 1945, Churchill had rather cruelly suggested that if Labour was elected, his former wartime colleagues would create ‘some form of Gestapo’.16 (#litres_trial_promo) Where would ordinary people be, he asked, ‘once this mighty organism had got them in their grip?’17 (#litres_trial_promo) Attlee feared accusations from the Labour left that he was mounting a witch-hunt if he took obvious measures to keep British communists away from sensitive material.18 (#litres_trial_promo) His understandable caution over domestic security during the early years of his premiership frustrated senior figures in MI5. Within just months of the election, they began moaning about government prevarication.19 (#litres_trial_promo) Towards the end of his first year in office, Attlee expressed strong concerns about MI5’s files on individuals, and demanded that they be kept clean of anything that did not come under the service’s terms of ‘defence of the realm’. In his usual brusque manner, he made it abundantly clear to all concerned that MI5 was not to have the names of anybody on its index cards who was not considered a threat to national security. The issue played heavily on Attlee’s mind over the early summer of 1946. After some weeks he summoned MI5’s director-general to his office to check if the records had indeed been cleared of irrelevant material. Despite the fullest assurances, Attlee remained concerned. Churchill’s pointed comment had clearly stung, and the prime minister ‘was still afraid that the Opposition might accuse him of running a Gestapo’.20 (#litres_trial_promo) Everyone expected the talented Guy Liddell to be next in line for the top job at MI5. When David Petrie retired as director-general in spring 1946, however, Attlee controversially appointed an external candidate. After an impressive career in the police, Percy Sillitoe had hoped for a gentle retirement running a sweetshop in Eastbourne. He clearly did not expect to be catapulted into the murky world of international espionage, but Eastbourne’s loss was Britain’s gain. Sillitoe accepted the position, and the relationship between Downing Street and MI5 swiftly improved.21 (#litres_trial_promo) Attlee and Sillitoe developed an excellent – if unlikely – personal rapport. ‘Little Clem’ was famously a slight man of few words. Loathing small talk and blushing easily, he radiated a shyness which he imparted to his visitors. Even the King privately referred to him as ‘Clam’.22 (#litres_trial_promo) By contrast, Sillitoe was a burly, no-nonsense policeman who had cut his teeth suppressing hooliganism in Sheffield and fighting gangs on the mean streets of Glasgow. Despite physically towering over his new boss, Sillitoe also had a streak of shyness, apparently stemming from his lack of a university education. One therefore wonders how painfully awkward their meetings may have been.23 (#litres_trial_promo) But meet they did – and on the ‘special instructions’ of Attlee himself.24 (#litres_trial_promo) In fact the prime minister met Sillitoe more often than any other prime minister has met the director-general of MI5 before or since – perhaps with the exception of David Cameron.25 (#litres_trial_promo) Sillitoe had ‘trenchant views on the danger of police states and the importance of restrictions on police powers’, and is a rare example of a director-general who inspired greater confidence in Number 10 than he did in his own service.26 (#litres_trial_promo) Understandably, Guy Liddell, then deputy director of MI5, was less impressed. In his invaluable diaries, so secret that they were kept locked in a safe and had their own codename of ‘Wallflowers’, Liddell, perhaps deliberately, consistently misspelled ‘Shillito’s’ name in the weeks following his appointment.27 (#litres_trial_promo) A once considerable man, ‘a great mimic, dancer and teacher of the Irish jig’, Liddell cut a sadder figure after his wife left him during the war. He increasingly found solace only in the cello, and spent his time working or in the clubland company of male friends.28 (#litres_trial_promo) Given that the latter included various traitors and Soviet spies, including the bibulous Guy Burgess, his reputation became somewhat tarnished.29 (#litres_trial_promo) Somebody within MI5 gave the new boss the wrong papers for his first meeting with Attlee, which Sillitoe furiously interpreted as a deliberate attempt to embarrass him. Other MI5 staff deliberately spoke in Latin to ridicule Sillitoe’s lack of intellectual pretension. After retiring from MI5, Sillitoe would work for De Beers investigating diamond smuggling. At their London headquarters he repeatedly briefed Ian Fleming on his adventures, and his exploits went on to inform the best-selling James Bond novel Diamonds are Forever.30 (#litres_trial_promo) Attlee kept MI5 under his personal control. He delegated responsibility neither to the minister of defence nor, as would become customary, to the home secretary. This arrangement also suited MI5. Not only did it keep interfering ministers out of the day-to-day running of its affairs, it also allowed the service to have a ‘very convenient’ right of direct ‘appeal to the P.M.’ if attacked.31 (#litres_trial_promo) Towards the end of Attlee’s premiership, MI5’s privileged position was challenged by Norman Brook, the tall, discreet and ever-unruffled technician of government who as cabinet secretary played an integral part in advising successive prime ministers on intelligence.32 (#litres_trial_promo) At one point Attlee even considered merging the three intelligence and security services under his direct command. He knew that ‘in the past there was a good deal of friction and a tendency for separate empires to grow up’, and was ‘not yet satisfied that we get full value for our expenditure’.33 (#litres_trial_promo) He would later return to this question. The close relationship between the prime minister and his head of domestic intelligence would soon become paramount. The early Cold War was characterised not only by the tightening of the Soviet grip on Eastern Europe, but by fears of communist subversion within Western states. In September 1945, Whitehall linked fear of Soviet espionage with domestic Communism as a result of the defection of a humble Soviet cipher clerk called Igor Gouzenko. Gouzenko, who had been working for Soviet military intelligence in Ottawa, both exposed a Canadian spy ring and revealed that the Soviets had planted agents inside the top-secret Manhattan Project, the wartime programme that produced the first atomic bomb. His defection brought home the dangers of Soviet infiltration to the British, and also the use of local communist parties to recruit agents. It triggered a chain of events which saw Britain’s Alan Nunn May, one of the first atom spies, exposed and arrested; the arrest of the scientist Klaus Fuchs for passing top-secret information on the British nuclear programme to Russia; and the introduction of a controversial new government vetting process.34 (#litres_trial_promo) Intelligence proved a vital factor in spurring Attlee into action.35 (#litres_trial_promo) Drawing on revelations from MI5 and MI6 about the growing underground threat to Britain, the prime minister founded a Committee on Subversive Activities in spring 1947, and went on to personally organise counter-espionage collaboration between the UK and various Commonwealth allies.36 (#litres_trial_promo) Although the new counter-subversion body was initially chaired by A.V. Alexander, the minister of defence, Attlee took personal charge when security matters grew in importance. Subversion was simply too dangerous to be delegated outside Downing Street. Discussing the need for vetting individuals who might have access to classified information, the prime minister’s security advisers came down in favour of a hard line. It was impossible to distinguish between those British communists who would spy for Russia and those who would not. Security arrangements therefore had to be tightened. After prevaricating for a few months, Attlee agreed that Communist Party members should not be allowed to work in such positions. Counting on public support, he decreed that ‘We cannot afford to take risks here.’37 (#litres_trial_promo) A purge of the civil service based on ‘negative vetting’ – a simple check against existing records of communist or fascist affiliation – was accordingly announced to the House of Commons in March 1948.38 (#litres_trial_promo) There was relief when MI5 found a closet fascist lurking in the War Office.39 (#litres_trial_promo) Perversely, Attlee’s purge worried MI5. Despite instinctively wanting it, senior intelligence officers were concerned that their valuable sources on the inside would be fatally compromised if a target was removed for having links to the Communist Party or fascists. Worried that Attlee was not adequately considering this issue, MI5 felt the need to ask Edward Bridges, head of the home civil service, to ‘ram home’ the point to the prime minister.40 (#litres_trial_promo) The impact of Attlee’s purge on MI5’s relations with the rest of Whitehall proved a further sticking point. Other departments did not like being pushed around by what they saw as ‘a bunch of autocrats’ with no authority. MI5 consequently came in for ‘a good deal of abuse’. Attlee had little sympathy, responding to Liddell’s protestations by saying, ‘I doubt whether you would ever get it out of peoples [sic] minds that your Department has overriding powers and is not subject to ministerial control.’ Liddell left feeling that Attlee ‘was his usual self, uncommunicative and unresponsive, but quite pleasant’.41 (#litres_trial_promo) Still haunted by Churchill’s Gestapo accusations, Attlee blew hot and cold on the vetting issue. Fretting that it might be going too far, he set off from Downing Street late one afternoon for cocktails at MI5 headquarters. Talking through the issue over drinks, he was uncharacteristically on ‘extremely good form’, entertaining the spooks by ‘firing questions at everybody and telling stories’.42 (#litres_trial_promo) The accelerating pace of the Cold War carried him along, and in July 1949 he made a particularly bullish public speech slamming the ‘sickening hypocrisy’ of communists accusing him of executing a purge.43 (#litres_trial_promo) What had hardened Attlee’s position? In 1949, he dealt ruthlessly with a major strike by London dock workers, deploying the armed forces and emergency powers. This strike, he claimed, was secretly orchestrated by the British Communist Party, and was intended not only to unhinge the delicate post-war economic recovery, but to overturn social democracy. Because of MI5’s reports, he increasingly saw the Communist Party as doing the Kremlin’s bidding, and deliberately increasing Cold War tensions. The strike came against a broader international backdrop of intensifying acrimony. The previous year, the local Communist Party in Prague had, with backing from Moscow, taken control of Czechoslovakia in a shocking coup which served to highlight the ambitions and dangers of Stalinism. Back in Britain, Attlee was suspicious that this strike coincided exactly with other strikes in the Commonwealth, and saw it as part of a plot by international communism targeted against him. On 11 July 1949, he declared a state of emergency, and at the end of the month sent in 12,792 troops, effectively a declaration of war on the British Communist Party.44 (#litres_trial_promo) ‘We are in a state of affairs quite unlike anything we have previously known in peacetime,’ Attlee said. He agreed with the JIC that Soviet foreign policy aimed to establish communism, directed from Moscow, throughout the world, and that Soviet leaders sought to ‘achieve this by methods short of open war’. Virtually quoting MI5 documents, Attlee stated that ‘the Russian technique in all countries is to infiltrate their sympathisers into key positions in all circles, official and non-official, and by this means to influence policy’. He convened an annual London conference of senior representatives of security services from Commonwealth countries ‘to counter the skilful and extensive infiltration measures which Russia is now carrying on’.45 (#litres_trial_promo) Remarkably, Attlee also encouraged the monitoring of Members of Parliament. He instructed Sillitoe to tell him, and only him, the name of any MP who was ‘a proven member of a subversive organisation’. Going further than later prime ministers, he also ‘expected to be kept informed about signs of subversion amongst ministers’ families’.46 (#litres_trial_promo) This opened a can of worms: what should be done if an MP had a clean bill of health, but their spouse was a communist and thought to be in touch with, say, the Romanian secret service? Once again, Attlee was taking counter-subversion extremely seriously, and making full use of his relationship with Sillitoe. It was he who began the long-standing tradition that after every general election, ‘MI5 informs the incoming prime minister whether there is evidence that anyone nominated for ministerial office is a security risk.’47 (#litres_trial_promo) These sensitive topics were usually reserved for Attlee and Sillitoe alone. However, once or twice when Sillitoe was away, it fell to Liddell to have the conversation with the prime minister. On one such occasion, Liddell entered the Cabinet Room and found the sixty-three-year-old Attlee huddled in his chair and looking exhausted. Liddell asked the prime minister what action he wanted to take regarding Members of Parliament who had close contact with subversive movements. After an uncomfortable pause, Attlee brusquely stated that he, and he alone, should be informed in every case – regardless of the MP’s party affiliation. Another awkward silence followed, with the prime minister straining to avoid eye contact with Liddell. The conversation turned to the activities of British communists in the event of war with Russia. Again Attlee offered little reaction. He was, according to Liddell, ‘an extremely difficult man to talk to’. After a further painful pause Liddell got up to leave, and Attlee ‘bundled out of his chair in a somewhat confused state’.48 (#litres_trial_promo) The outbreak of the Korean War heightened anxiety. Whitehall grew increasingly nervous about communist encroachment into the armed forces, the education system, industrial movements and the scientific community.49 (#litres_trial_promo) In Parliament, Attlee’s front bench was being asked what steps it had taken ‘to ensure that Communist teachers are not employed by local education authorities’.50 (#litres_trial_promo) In early 1951, in the dying days of Attlee’s administration, he agreed to establish a new and extremely secretive body of senior officials whose existence has only very recently become known. Its mission was to ‘focus all available intelligence about Communist activities in the United Kingdom, and to recommend to Ministers what action can be taken to counter such activities’. Demonstrating a more proactive approach, it was also tasked ‘to co-ordinate any anti-Communist activities in this country which may be approved by Ministers’.51 (#litres_trial_promo) Known as the Official Committee on Communism (Home), it led the charge against domestic subversion into the 1960s, and formed another of Attlee’s important legacies in the intelligence and security sphere.52 (#litres_trial_promo) Working closely with MI5, Attlee built the machine of Cold War counter-subversion. He was always painfully conscious of the tension between intelligence, security and liberty, acknowledging that the problem ‘bristle[d] with political difficulties’, and that ‘infiltration can regularly be defended by appeals based on democratic conceptions of freedom’.53 (#litres_trial_promo) Possibly still haunted by the Gestapo fears, he emphasised that ‘we feel it essential to develop effective precautions’ against communist infiltration ‘whilst doing everything possible to maintain democratic liberties’.54 (#litres_trial_promo) He later publicly wrote that the director-general of MI5 ‘has to have a very lively appreciation of the rights of the citizen in a free country’.55 (#litres_trial_promo) Meanwhile, he spurned regular requests from Conservative backbencher Sir Waldron Smithers to establish a House of Commons select committee on ‘un-British activities’, similar to the McCarthyite movement gathering pace in the United States.56 (#litres_trial_promo) Attlee was right to take domestic security and counter-espionage seriously. In addition to the wartime atom bomb spies, Stalin had other eyes at the heart of the British establishment. Now known as the notorious Cambridge Five, they included Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, and a fifth man – thought by many to be John Cairncross, who had worked at Bletchley during the war. Recruited at Cambridge University in the 1930s, they went on to become influential in secret and foreign policy circles, passing secrets to the Soviets throughout the Second World War and into the Cold War. Maclean and Burgess worked for the Foreign Office and MI6 respectively before defecting in 1951. Philby, who became known as ‘the Third Man’, was a high-flier inside MI6, at one point heading its anti-Soviet section before defecting in 1963. Blunt, revealed as the Fourth Man in 1979, had been an MI5 officer during the Second World War, and alongside Philby had helped Maclean and Burgess to escape. ‘Stalin’s Englishmen’, as they have also become known, managed to hide their communist pasts because they came from the right class. This smokescreen worked in Britain, but it held little sway in America. J. Edgar Hoover was amazed at some of their antics. Donald Maclean, for example, who had been in charge of the code room at the British embassy in Washington, ‘broke into the apartment of two American girls’ before being placed under the care of a psychiatrist in London. Dwelling at some length on Guy Burgess’s personal behaviour, Hoover told one of President Truman’s closest advisers that during his time in Washington Burgess had shared a house with Kim Philby, ‘a representative of MI6’, adding that Philby’s first wife Alice ‘was at one time a Communist’. Truman was getting better information on the British moles than Attlee.57 (#litres_trial_promo) It was pressure from the Americans that finally persuaded Attlee to introduce a more proactive and intrusive system of ‘positive vetting’, which went further than merely checking names off against existing files.58 (#litres_trial_promo) Attlee was stunned by the defections of Burgess and Maclean in 1951, and demanded to know why they were never turfed out of the Foreign Office for their debauchery and drunkenness. Understated as ever, he predicted ‘a lot of public criticism’. The Foreign Office responded that Maclean had an outstanding record before a drink-induced breakdown. He was moved to Washington because it was the ‘least heavily loaded’ of all the political departments. By contrast, it informed Attlee that Burgess had indeed been ‘irresponsible, displaying indiscreet behaviour with loose talk about secret organisations’. Attlee never did receive a reasonable answer as to why the Foreign Office did not eject these unsuitable characters earlier,59 (#litres_trial_promo) but he was increasingly concerned about the ‘moral fibre’ in the Foreign Office and its implications for national security.60 (#litres_trial_promo) Issues of vetting were intimately connected to the Klaus Fuchs espionage case, the impact of which on internal security and transatlantic relations was enormous. More importantly, Attlee was not given the full truth about the intelligence failure by MI5 concerning Fuchs. The prime minister consequently defended the service’s performance to Parliament and the public under false pretences. Klaus Fuchs was a brilliant theoretical physicist. Quiet and withdrawn, he wore round spectacles and had an uncanny ability to attract female sympathy. He was also a dedicated communist, and the most important atomic spy of the post-war period. Born in Germany, Fuchs settled within the British university system after fleeing Nazi Germany before the war. Becoming a British citizen and signing the Official Secrets Act in 1942, he worked on the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project in America. He was one of the few scientists with an overview of the whole project, including the perplexing problem of trigger design for detonation of the main device. After the war, he returned to the UK to work at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell. But unbeknownst to the government, Fuchs had long been passing secret information to the Soviets. In America he would drive around in his second-hand blue Buick with a stash of papers on the passenger seat, containing closely guarded secrets about the most devastating weapon ever created. Still he was not caught. In England, he used prearranged signals to meet his Soviet contacts in pubs. To one he offered: ‘I think the best British heavyweight of all time is Bruce Woodcock.’ On cue, the contact replied: ‘Oh no, Tommy Farr is certainly the best.’ Following a ‘complete dog’s breakfast’ of an investigation by MI5 in late 1949, Fuchs finally confessed early the following year.61 (#litres_trial_promo) According to Sillitoe, suspicions about Fuchs first arose in August 1949 as a result of ‘Venona’, a programme by British and American codebreakers to unravel wartime messages sent by the KGB that were proving uniquely vulnerable. The following month, J.C. Robertson, head of counter-espionage at MI5, and Arthur Martin, the MI5 liaison with GCHQ, began working with security officers at Harwell to investigate Fuchs’s background. Jim Skardon, an MI5 interrogator, questioned Fuchs, while MI5 listened in on his phone calls and followed him with teams of ‘watchers’.62 (#litres_trial_promo) As is so often the case, intercept material, this time gathered from Venona, was too sensitive to be openly used in court. Under pressure from the FBI to act, MI5 needed to gather its own physical evidence, ideally based on his contacts with Soviet handlers. Percy Sillitoe grew frustrated. By his own admission, the ‘investigation produced no dividends’. Running out of options and unable to use Venona, he even resorted to asking the senior official at the Ministry of Supply ‘to quietly arrange for Fuchs [sic] departure from Harwell as soon as decently possible’.63 (#litres_trial_promo) Doing so, however, would have raised suspicious eyebrows from Fuchs’s colleagues and friends, since he was Britain’s star nuclear weapons scientist. Sillitoe was furious when he learned how long Fuchs had been operating as a spy for the Soviets. Together with Dick White, a future head of MI5 and then MI6, he had to make the short but uncomfortable journey to Downing Street to break the bad news to the prime minister. White insisted that they had been thorough – four separate investigations had failed to find anything incriminating – but Attlee was unimpressed. The prime minister ‘could only reflect that, if MI5’s four investigations had produced no evidence, it was a reflection upon the investigation not the evidence’.64 (#litres_trial_promo) In early 1950, Sillitoe delivered a brief to Attlee. It was described by the service as ‘merely factual’, but was clearly designed to defend MI5’s actions. A month later, when Sillitoe saw the prime minister again, he found him in ‘fighting form’ and proposing ‘to defend the department’. To aid the prime minister with this defence, Sillitoe left some ‘debating points’ in Number 10 and went away satisfied that he had Attlee’s support, that the prime minister ‘had no intention of allowing an enquiry into the activities of the Security Service’, and was ‘entirely satisfied with the work of the department’.65 (#litres_trial_promo) He had guessed right. Just three days later Attlee stood in front of the House of Commons and stalwartly defended MI5, confidently asserting to the nation that ‘I do not think there is anything that can cast the slightest slur on the Security Services.’66 (#litres_trial_promo) This was the first time a prime minister had discussed intelligence and security at such length in Parliament. There was one snag. Sillitoe later admitted that he had not given Attlee the whole story. The MI5 brief was written in part by Roger Hollis, MI5’s expert in Soviet espionage and the man who had repeatedly cleared Fuchs.67 (#litres_trial_promo) It contained certain strategic inaccuracies and misrepresentations, and these flaws shaped Attlee’s speech to Parliament. Unsurprisingly, it portrayed MI5 as having been proactive and vigilant by conducting numerous checks on Fuchs and unearthing no evidence. Fudging key dates, it tried to pass the buck to other government departments, including the Ministry of Aircraft Production and the Ministry of Supply.68 (#litres_trial_promo) MI5 hoped to weasel out of its central role by insisting to the prime minister that ‘the responsibility of the Security Service is limited to tendering advice’.69 (#litres_trial_promo) Yet the advice tendered was that Fuchs posed only a ‘very slight’ security risk.70 (#litres_trial_promo) MI5’s brief informed Attlee that Fuchs had become ‘a close friend’ of a German while interned in Canada in 1940. Significantly, however, it stopped short of revealing the identity of this German friend. He was Hans Kahle – ‘such a notorious Communist that his name may well have been known to Attlee’.71 (#litres_trial_promo) The significance of this had previously been dismissed by Roger Hollis.72 (#litres_trial_promo) The fact that he strangely ‘over-looked’ the connections between one of Britain’s most damaging post-war spies and one of the decade’s most active communists would later become one of the drivers for lingering suspicions about the loyalties of Hollis himself, with some alleging that he had spied for Moscow. Moreover, the prime minister was informed that until 1949 there was no confirmation of Fuchs’s membership of the German Communist Party. Once again, this was not the full story – Attlee was not told that MI5 had ‘access to the Gestapo records since 1946 but had failed to consult them’.73 (#litres_trial_promo) Sillitoe and his subordinates pointed to everyone except MI5. They went on to blame the police, the constraints of parliamentary democracy, and the importance of using skilled foreigners during the war. These arguments seemingly held weight with the prime minister, who adopted the parliamentary democracy line in his address to the House of Commons. Directly summarising MI5’s suggestions, he told MPs, ‘I am satisfied that, unless we had here the kind of secret police they have in totalitarian countries, and employed their methods, which are reprobated rightly by everyone in this country, there was no means by which we could have found out about this man.’74 (#litres_trial_promo) MI5 also urged Downing Street to counter criticism of its performance in the press, Sillitoe complaining to Attlee, ‘There has been a great deal of uninformed criticism of the Security authorities in relation to the FUCHS case.’ In the circumstances, he felt, the prime minister ‘may consider it advisable that some statement should be made in the House of Commons putting the facts into their proper perspective’. MI5 even went on to suggest exactly what the prime minister should say.75 (#litres_trial_promo) Arguably, MI5 was rather better at public relations than at security. Behind the scenes, it was successfully persuading documentary-makers not to make films about Fuchs.76 (#litres_trial_promo) Influenced by his brief, Attlee did indeed argue that ‘there is a great deal of loose talk in the Press suggesting inefficiency on the part of the security services. I entirely deny that.’ He praised MI5 for acting ‘promptly and effectively as soon as there was any line which they could follow’.77 (#litres_trial_promo) When the Fuchs case broke in late 1949, Attlee knew it could not have come at a worse time for the British.78 (#litres_trial_promo) The test of a Soviet nuclear bomb in August that year had been a defining moment in Anglo–American intelligence collaboration on nuclear weapons – the most sensitive area of post-war spying. Until the Soviet bomb test was detected, the United States and Britain had exchanged a considerable amount of intelligence on the Soviet programme. More important, during the investigations that led to the detection of the Soviet test, American and British officials had co-operated not only in collecting radioactive samples but also in analysing them. As a result, talks on resuming full atomic technical exchange in the area of their own bomb production began in earnest in late September 1949. The discussions went so well that US secretary of state Dean Acheson explained to the British ambassador that ‘it should be possible to get Congress to make the necessary changes’, and the cabinet were told to expect a resumption of full cooperation. At that very moment, the Fuchs case broke. One American diplomat recalled: ‘We were getting very close to really going into bed with the British, with a new agreement. Then the Fuchs affair hit the fan and that was the end of it.’ The case destroyed any British hopes for a resumption of the wartime nuclear partnership, and even Attlee’s artful performance before Parliament could not rescue it.79 (#litres_trial_promo) The Fuchs episode was actually a case of double deception. Although Attlee was not in possession of all the facts when he publicly defended MI5, neither was Percy Sillitoe. Indeed, Sillitoe was highly irritated that he had not been informed at the time when MI5 re-examined the Fuchs case back in 1947. He was angrier still when he learned that he had not given the prime minister the full story. Sillitoe called together his senior staff and asked some tough questions. He was particularly upset that he had not been shown the full file before he briefed Attlee. Guy Liddell believed that had his boss been in possession of all the facts, he ‘would have been extremely apprehensive’ about the prime minister’s response. If an inquiry had been ordered, Sillitoe felt ‘that he would probably have lost his job and the Department would have been split from top to bottom’. Furious, he privately criticised MI5’s performance during the investigation, and argued that his colleagues should have done more. He assured his staff that when he saw the prime minister nothing he imparted was ‘intended to be inaccurate or misleading’. But MI5 officers appear to have concealed the whole truth from their boss in order to escape scrutiny and recrimination.80 (#litres_trial_promo) Klaus Fuchs was a genius who had done much to advance the British nuclear bomb project after Anglo–American atomic cooperation had tapered off at the end of the war. He was so admired by the American defence scientist Edward Teller, known as ‘the father of the H-bomb’, that in April 1946, less than a year after the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Teller had invited Fuchs to a highly secret scientific conference, called to explore the possibility of creating something called a ‘Super’, which was in fact the hydrogen bomb. Within six weeks, Fuchs and an American scientist, John von Neumann, had come up with a new implosion device to ignite the H-bomb, ignition being one of the most technically difficult issues. When interrogated in early 1950 Fuchs ‘laughingly’ claimed that the Soviets might well already be working on the hydrogen bomb, since he had passed all this information to them. Predictably, this information was omitted from Attlee’s MI5 briefings.81 (#litres_trial_promo) In late 1950, Attlee was misled again. The story was becoming depressingly familiar: another nuclear physicist, another Cold War defection. This time it was Bruno Pontecorvo. An Italian-born scientist working at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Pontecorvo disappeared on his way back to Britain from a family holiday in Finland. It seems likely that Philby had tipped off Moscow that the net was closing in on yet another atom spy.82 (#litres_trial_promo) Growing increasingly concerned, Attlee had to endure another uncomfortable briefing with MI5. This time the task fell to Sillitoe’s deputy. Liddell tried to reassure the prime minister that, contrary to inflammatory press reports, Pontecorvo had in fact had very little contact with secret work. In doing so, he was simply parroting the views of Michael Perrin, the director of Whitehall’s Department of Atomic Energy. But Perrin, and perhaps MI5, knew this was not true, and that Pontecorvo’s ongoing access to classified information had earlier caused MI5 to recommend his dismissal.83 (#litres_trial_promo) Sillitoe assured Attlee that detecting Pontecorvo’s actions had been impossible, because MI5 ‘had no magnet to find the needle in the body’. Attlee seemed unconvinced.84 (#litres_trial_promo) In June 1951, Britain’s top nuclear scientists at Harwell and Aldermaston writhed in horror as the US Congress produced a report that threw ‘all the blame for leaks on British security’. American politicians lamented that the British had indeed been responsible for two out of the three known atomic spies and for one very probable spy. The exception among the known spies was Julius Rosenberg in New York, who had just been sentenced to die in the electric chair, along with his wife Ethel. MI5 earnestly hoped that the Americans would unearth a few more ‘dubious cases’ of their own, but conceded that espionage activities by US citizens did not seem to amount to very much: ‘They may well have had some real top-line atomic spies but there is no evidence at all of it.’85 (#litres_trial_promo) Clement Attlee also embraced secret work overseas by MI6. Traditionally, he has been painted as a reluctant Cold Warrior, and certainly in the first two years of his government he needed persuading that Joseph Stalin, his wartime ally, was bent on world domination.86 (#litres_trial_promo) The prime minister tended to resist the hawks in the military, and sided with intelligence assessments that the Soviets would not be in a position to risk a major war until the mid-1950s at the earliest.87 (#litres_trial_promo) He consequently has a reputation for being cautious when it came to covert operations overseas – keeping MI6 on a tight leash. He liked to be kept updated about MI6 activities, and received a weekly report from its chief, Sir Stewart Menzies – something not matched even by his close relationship with Sillitoe. In the post-war world, MI6 was sometimes referred to as Whitehall’s ‘pirates’. But it knew that Attlee was not in any sense a buccaneering figure. In the words of one disgruntled former deputy director of MI6, George Young, Attlee was ‘a sphinx without a riddle’.88 (#litres_trial_promo) But there was more to ‘Little Clem’ than met the eye. He was not averse to using MI6 in covert pursuit of foreign policies abroad, especially when Britain was under severe pressure. In 1946 and 1947 he approved a scheme to kidnap German scientists, technicians and businessmen from the British-controlled zone of Germany. The aim was either to steal business information or to force them to work in Britain in an attempt to boost British industry. Herbert Morrison informed the prime minister: ‘It is most important at this formative stage to start shaping the German economy in the way which will best assist our own economic plans and will run the least risk of it developing into an unnecessarily awkward competitor.’89 (#litres_trial_promo) In 1947 the Soviet press published a grotesque cartoon of a multi-headed beast that was part Ernest Bevin, Attlee’s bullish foreign secretary, and part Churchill. It was the work of a new and aggressive Moscow propaganda department called the ‘Cominform’. In response, Attlee and Bevin persuaded the cabinet to agree to the creation of a secret propaganda unit, the Information Research Department, which worked with MI6 to counter such attacks. Events in Eastern Europe, notably the Prague coup and the Soviet blockade of Berlin between 1948 and 1949, considerably stiffened Attlee’s attitude, making him increasingly convinced about the Soviet threat and the necessity of energetically prosecuting the Cold War.90 (#litres_trial_promo) He gradually became willing for MI6 to play the communists at their own covert game of subversion and political warfare. Soon, however, the Information Research Department became a general covert tool beyond the Cold War, attacking by means of unattributable propaganda anything that was hostile to Britain. In its own words, it was the ‘anti-anti-British’ department.91 (#litres_trial_promo) It was in the colonial sphere that Attlee felt most willing to apply the cosh. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Palestine became one of the worst trouble spots for the prime minister and his colleagues. In October 1946 the Zionist group Irgun bombed the British embassy in Rome, destroying half the building. Six months later, it placed a bomb in the Colonial Office in London, but it failed to detonate. Attlee himself had received death threats from Zionist extremists, and had already authorised the use of firearms against Jewish immigrants trying to escape from camps in Cyprus,92 (#litres_trial_promo) because the accelerating flood of illegal emigration from southern Europe to the British Mandate appeared to be feeding a troublesome insurgency. He now sought more direct action, and authorised a covert war on the emerging state of Israel. Leading from the very top, Attlee asserted that ‘it is essential that we should take all possible steps to stop this traffic at source’. Recognising that any ‘general protests’ would be futile, he insisted that officials come up with ‘practical measures’ to stem the flow.93 (#litres_trial_promo) Implementing Attlee’s directive, senior officials first looked at black propaganda. Devious ideas included clandestinely introducing leaflets into the refugee camps, spreading rumours, and ‘perhaps even setting up secret radio stations’. The plan was to paint such a dire picture of conditions in Palestine, and of the dangerous voyage across the Mediterranean, that potential immigrants would think twice before setting sail. This was soon abandoned as too complex and too slow; Attlee wanted quick results.94 (#litres_trial_promo) An even more secret and controversial operation, however, was under way. In early 1947, a top-secret MI6 team was created to engage in deniable action to slow the flow of illegal immigration. Demonstrating a hangover from SOE activities, these measures included sabotage. Wartime veterans in special operations were quietly plucked from the clubs of Belgravia and despatched to the Mediterranean to launch ‘Operation Embarrass’.95 (#litres_trial_promo) Initially, under the cover story of a ‘yachting trip’, they headed for the ports of France and Italy with limpet mines and timers. Joined by Colonel David Smiley, a former SOE officer who had only just recovered from burns inflicted by an exploding briefcase at the end of the war, they were soon marauding all over the Mediterranean in motor torpedo boats.96 (#litres_trial_promo) Over the summer of 1947 and into early 1948 they attacked five ships in Italian ports, three of which were badly damaged. British-made limpet mines were found on the other two vessels, but Italian security assumed they had been planted by Arabs using stolen British stores. MI6 even considered blowing up the Baltimore steamship President Warfield Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». 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