Burn After Reading (6 page)

The result of this was disastrous. The Foreign Office was forced to dismantle the Political Intelligence Department, to let its best men go, and to get along as best it could. By 1938, the budget of the Service had been increased to more than four hundred and fifty thousand pounds. But most of it had to be spent on combating foreign agents swarming all over the British Isles and the empire. It was not until the Czechoslovak crisis that the Foreign Office suddenly decided to revive the Political Intelligence Department (called P.I.D. or, colloquially, “Pids”) and appointed a brilliant career diplomatist, Rex Leeper, as its chief. This department did not go into actual operation until September 10, 1939, a week after the outbreak of the war. Leeper set it up at Woburn, the estate of the Duke of Bedford—an intelligence service, as Bruce Lockhart remarked, fifty miles from the center of intelligence.

The revival of “Pids” compounded the anarchy, for now the Secret Service complex became even more complex. For one thing Leeper, despite his qualifications, did not become chief of
the Secret Service. In fact, his own department was hardly secret at all. The actual chief of the labyrinthian service was hidden somewhere deep under cover and conveniently so, because he had nothing to be proud of or to shout about.

Anarchy and confusion were not confined to London; if possible, they were even worse in the field.

It is the practice of secret services to cover sensitive areas with networks of operatives prepared long in advance; some of these networks are never used. They are supposed to provide assurance that in critical situations they can supply whatever intelligence is needed.

What with its curtailed appropriations and its world-wide commitments, the British maintained the barest skeleton network; even so, both the Foreign Office and the War Office's Directorate of Intelligence had their own operatives in Germany. These were full-time, indoctrinated, trained espionage agents in the exact sense of the term, working on a preconceived plan and on a long-range basis, quite independent of
ad hoc
informants and volunteer helpers.

Their presence was evident; from time to time Reinhard Heydrich's SD and other organs of German counter-espionage managed to catch British spies red-handed. In 1938–1939, they executed twenty-three common, garden-variety spies, all of them German nationals. Among them were several rather minor agents in British employ, working as train-watchers or as local observers of airports, barracks, railroad junctions and the like.

These men and women were managed by either the service attaches at the Embassy in Berlin, or by the British consuls scattered across the Reich, but chiefly by the so-called Continental Secret Service. It was never thought advisable to maintain the headquarters of the Continental Secret Service in the country which was the major target of espionage. The practice was rather to establish this central office under some plausible cover in a nearby friendly country that was expected to remain neutral.

Until midsummer of 1938, the chief Continental base was
in Vienna. It operated behind the front of the British Passport Office, traditionally a
dependence
of the Secret Service. The Passport Officer was Captain Thomas Kendrick, one of the foremost career officers of the British Secret Service.

Kendrick's position became untenable when, in March, 1938, the Germans annexed Austria, occupied Vienna and instituted a manhunt for spies. It did not take them long to get around to Kendrick who was arrested on charges of espionage. The Foreign Office went through the usual motions of protestation, but all it really wanted was to get Kendrick out of jail and back to London. On August 22, he was expelled. Though he was not any the worse for the experience, his network, of course, collapsed.

After that, the center of British espionage activities against Germany shifted to Copenhagen, but, in November, 1938, this shift also suffered a serious setback. The Danes, disturbed by the increased espionage activities of foreigners on their soil, started an elaborate spy hunt and one Waldemar Poetzsch was caught in the net. At that time all espionage agents were
ipso facto
presumed to be in German service, but Poetzsch's interrogation developed the startling fact that he was working for the British. The Danes were most reluctant to interfere with the operations of a British agent, but, since his arrest had been publicized, they had to salt him away. His trial was held
in camera
, but the Germans managed to procure Poetzsch's confession, and thus learned a lot about the management and the operations of the Continental Secret Service.

Additional damaging information reached the Germans from another Danish source, the police, which had a special department for counter-espionage. Section III-F of German military intelligence managed to infiltrate this department and enlist the confidential assistant of the chief of police. From this source, the Germans obtained exact information about the activities of the Continental Secret Service, not only in Denmark, but in all of Scandinavia.

After the Poetzsch debacle, Continental Secret Service
shifted its headquarters to The Hague. This office was headed by a “lifer,” a professional spymaster named Henry Richard Stevens. He was a major in the British Army who had been trained for espionage in the “Black Castle.” He managed a sizable organization that operated in more or less independent sections. There were political and economic branches, a counter-espionage department and military and naval sections, each under a chief who had considerable autonomy. The Military Section was under an apparently retired officer of the British Army, Captain Payton Sigmund Best, who had first come to Holland in World War I.

Best operated a network of agents inside Germany. They supplied him with whatever
military
information they could lay their hands on. His chief liaison with this net was an excitable little “refugee” who called himself Dr. Franz and who supplied authentic intelligence about the rapid development of the
Luftwaffe.
Best confined his interest to espionage proper and, until the outbreak of the shooting war, kept aloof from operatives in the field.

The Holland field office attained an importance second to none. Its excellent prewar performance was largely due to the efficiency of the intelligence department of the Netherlands Army under General van Oorshot, with which the British worked, and to the competence of a single man, the Dutch Military Attaché in Berlin. He was a soft-voiced, pleasant-mannered, self-effacing colonel of the Netherlands army named Jan G. Sas, an outstanding figure in this twilight world of espionage.

Sas had many good friends within the
Wehrmacht
and was on especially intimate terms with Colonel Hans Oster, chief of staff of the German Military Intelligence, a determined and energetic anti-Nazi within the
Abwehr
. Oster was by nature rather suspicious, but about Sas he had no qualms. He talked to him even more freely than to his fellow conspirators. The two colonels would meet in Oster's house in Zehlendorf, usually after dark, for nominally social visits. During those calls Oster supplied Colonel Sas with all the intelligence to which he had
access and part of this material eventually found its way to London.

Britain had still another field office in Berne, Switzerland, but it did not come into its own until after the invasion of Holland in 1940.

The contribution this checkered field service could make was somewhat hampered by the aging of the dormant network. Much of it had been in existence for years, if not decades, and its members had become lazy and stale. Another deficiency was inherent in the quality of the very men who were supposed to manage the various rings.

Britain was unfortunate in having in Berlin an ambassador to whom espionage was repugnant (likely to interfere with his policy of appeasement) and whose preconceived notions precluded the proper evaluation of even the most reliable information if it ran counter to the grain. This was Sir Nevile Henderson, a rather stiff career diplomatist, befuddled by the intricacies and chicanery of the unorthodox Nazi diplomacy. Actual espionage was not in his domain. It was managed in part by the anonymous delegate of the Secret Service and in part by the service attachés, but they nevertheless came under the spell of this pathetic envoy.

Thus on February 15, 1939, exactly one month before the German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, Group Captain J. L. Vachell, the British Air Attaché in Berlin, reported to London: “I feel that it is unlikely that Germany will undertake any military operation for the next two, or possibly three, months.” And on February 28, when the German troops were already at their battle stations for action against Czechoslovakia, Colonel [later General Sir] Frank Mason-Macfarlane, the military attaché, answered queries with the following double talk out of which no intelligence estimator at home could make head or tail:

“The German army is passing through a phase of its evolution in which very much that would normally be abnormal is in point of fact normal…. The great difficulty—even to skilled
observers—is to decide when ‘normal abnormality' merges into something more significant. Up to date [fifteen days before the march on Prague] I have no reliable information whatever to indicate that mobilization in any form has commenced, but I cannot say more than that.”

With so-called “information” of this kind coming in, it is hardly surprising that the evaluation work of the bumbling Blimps back in London was worse than useless.

On August 15, German preparations were practically complete and a tentative date—August 26—had been chosen for the commencement of hostilities against Poland.

And yet, on this same day, in a confidential dispatch to the British Minister in Warsaw, Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax still ventured the opinion: “I have the impression that Herr Hitler is still undecided, and anxious to avoid war and to hold his hand if he can do so without losing face.”

At the dawn of war, Colonel Piekenbrock had given to the
Wehrmacht
the vast store of
military intelligence
it needed; yet, even in the face of such abundance, Hitler's knowledge of his foes was incomplete—in fact, fatally deficient. The glittering, pampered and flamboyant German secret service combine also had its Achilles' heel. It was totally inadequate in the vital sphere of political intelligence.

This function was claimed primarily by the Foreign Ministry, but it was also usurped by Heydrich's organization and by two quasi-official agencies: Foreign Minister Ribbentrop's private bureau (the notorious
Buero Ribbentrop
) and by the Foreign Affairs Bureau (
Aussenpolitisches Amt),
a quasi-diplomatic arm of the Nazi party, headed, in a whimsical manner, by Alfred Rosenberg, the Party's mystic theoretician and frustrated diplomatist.

These agencies vied with one another in a mad scramble for diplomatic information. In their efforts to establish separate networks of their own, and in their competitive greed, they got into each other's hair. The result was that Hitler received an enormous amount of political intelligence whose quality was not matched by its quantity.

From the very outset of the Nazi regime,
political
intelligence had been endowed and encouraged. How the network was built and cultivated in England was described in a candid report to the Fuehrer by Rosenberg: “Efforts,” he wrote, “to find persons in England who were favorably inclined toward the
German cause date back to 1929. Our English agent, R., in Berlin, arranged my first trip to London as early as 1931. There a number of contacts were made that worked out well in a practical fashion in bringing about an Anglo-German understanding.”

If Rosenberg's account is true (and it presumably is, since British prosecutors at the Nuremberg War Crimes trial allowed it as evidence), it is clear that his organization was successful in creating an unprecedented British network of sincere friends, misguided dupes and mercenary spies. “Most important of all,” Rosenberg wrote, “was Group Captain W., a member of the Air General Staff, a firm believer that Germany and England should stand together in the defense against the Bolshevik danger. As we succeeded in spreading this opinion, we expanded our circle within the Air General Staff. The Royal Aero Club became a centre of Anglo-German co-operation. In 1934, Group Captain W. came to Germany and was received by the Fuehrer.”

Rosenberg's network also included a secretary of Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald; a consultant of the War Office named Captain McCaw (one of Lord Kitchener's aides) ; the aide-de-camp of the Duke of Connaught; a certain Archibald Boyle, whom Rosenberg described as “an adviser to the Air Ministry”; and “a great number of other contacts” among British politicians, officers and Members of Parliament. His influence extended even into the Royal Family. On at least one occasion, Rosenberg was received in clandestine audience by the Duke of Kent, who volunteered to present Germany's case sympathetically to his brother, the King.

The sympathy and concrete co-operation of so many prominent Britons blinded dilettante diplomats like Ribbentrop and Rosenberg to the realities of the situation. They believed these Britons were plotters like themselves, figures in a vast conspiracy, the members of which preferred
Mein Kampf
to the Magna Carta. Some of these Britons were fools or dupes, to be sure, but they were not traitors.

After the occupation of Czechoslovakia, men and women who had championed Hitler's cause suffered the horrible hangover of the morning after, with the bitter taste of Hitler's perjury in their mouths. Overnight, the Nazis lost virtually all of their celebrated English friends, yet somehow this did not become apparent to Ribbentrop or Rosenberg.