Ike's Spies (2 page)

Through cocktails, through dinner, through the brandy, coffee, and more brandy, on into the early hours of the morning, Ike listened enthralled as the P.M. briefed him on the secret war. He explained radar, its shortcomings and its promise, how it was being used in the Battle of Britain, what the British hoped it could do in the future. Churchill fairly glowed as he described the Battle of the Beams. German night-bombers were finding their targets over blacked-out London by flying along radio beams sent by transmitters located on the French coast. Crossbeams, sent from another spot on the coast, intersected the beam over the target, letting the German bombers know the precise moment to drop their bombs. A
young British scientist, R. V. Jones, had figured out how the system worked, which gave the British an opportunity to jam the signals, or misdirect the Germans, or mislead them into dropping their bombs over open countryside.
¹

With a chuckle, Churchill described some of the wilder ideas British scientists had produced, such as suspending time bombs by parachute in the path of approaching German bomber formations, or the search for “death rays” for both humans and engines. An idea Churchill liked and intended to follow up was to take masses of seaweed, mix them with huge quantities of dry ice, and thereby create an unsinkable aircraft carrier that could be towed up and down the coast of Europe.

Ike was never tempted to laugh, however absurd some ideas seemed, because he knew that it was this same Churchill who had, in 1914, found private funds to support the research for and development of a new weapon of war that all the generals laughed at. That weapon became the tank, and in 1917 Ike had been one of the first officers of the U. S. Army to recognize its potential. He took command of the “Tank Corps” and trained it at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. In late 1918, within a week of his receiving orders to take his unit to France to enter the battle, the armistice came. Ike had therefore never held a combat command, but his appreciation of the tank—and his respect for Churchill for his key role in its creation—remained undiminished.

Churchill told Ike of some of the fears his scientists had with respect to what the Germans were developing in the way of new weapons. The German Navy was making rapid progress with its diesel submarines, while the Luftwaffe was thought to be experimenting with some sort of jet-propelled aircraft. Rocket research was also going forward. It was thought that the Germans might have an operational pilotless aircraft, or even a true rocket, within a year or two. Another innovation was a bomb with eyes—the Germans were experimenting with a ballistic bomb which would be steered from the launching aircraft on the receipt of pictures “televised” back by the bomb.

More cheerful news was that German atomic research seemed to be misdirected. Churchill and Roosevelt, meanwhile, had agreed to pool their resources, and British physicists—along with some of the best European physicists, who had fled Hitler's Europe to work
at their specialties—were now participating fully in the Manhattan Project in America.

As for spies, Churchill was pleased to report that the British had managed to maintain contact with the Polish and French secret services through
MI
-6 of the British Secret Service, headed by Brigadier Stewart Menzies. The Special Operations Executive (
SOE
), a branch of Menzies' Secret Service, was establishing contacts with the French underground forces. Best of all, Menzies believed that the British had managed to identify and then either execute or “turn” every German spy in the United Kingdom, which if true meant that the British Secret Service controlled every piece of information the Germans received from their spies. There was rich potential in such a situation.

(Churchill would not have been quite so pleased with
MI
-6 if he had known that the Germans had done the same to his
MI
-6 agents in Holland. The British had parachuted sabotage agents into that country, but the Germans had caught the first one and forced him to send back suitable messages to London. The Germans then knew where subsequent agents were to be dropped, as
MI
-6 sent radio messages to their agents to be ready for them. The Nazis captured every one of them, at the same time sending messages back to London that led
MI
-6 to believe that the agents were at large and operating a successful campaign.
²
)

Finally, triumphantly, Churchill turned to what he called
ULTRA
. Before explaining the term, however, he rather dramatically made Ike swear that he would never expose himself to capture during the remainder of the war, which meant explicitly that he was never to go into a war zone or fly over one. Everyone who knew about
ULTRA
had to make that promise, Churchill explained, because this was the most valuable secret of the war, and the Germans had their own ways of making captured men talk.

ULTRA
, Churchill then declared, was the term the British used for their systematic breaking of the German code. By itself, difficult though the feat may have been (and was, in fact), breaking an enemy's code was not a decisive factor, primarily because the enemy changed his code at regular intervals, and when he did, the code breakers had to start all over at point zero. But in this case, a delighted Churchill declared, the Germans believed they had an absolutely safe encoding machine, which was called Enigma. It
consisted of two machines somewhat like electric typewriters, which were attached to three rotating drums, which in turn were interconnected by an intricate set of electric wires. An operator would type a plain text on one typewriter; the drums would rotate according to a predetermined setting, and the other typewriter would rap out the encoded message, which was then sent over the airwaves. At the receiving end, all the operator needed to do was put the machine on the proper setting, feed in the encoded message, and take out the plain text.

The Germans believed the system to be foolproof because even if the enemy had an Enigma machine, it would do him no good without the settings. The possible variations were numbered in the tens of thousands and a code breaker would go crazy before cracking even one of them. Enigma could produce an almost infinite number of cipher alphabets merely by changing the keying procedure.

But the British
had
broken the system, and the Germans did not know it, which gave the British a major asset in the Battle of Britain and the Battle of the Atlantic. The way in which the British had earned this asset was in itself a fascinating story, involving spies, double-agents, traitors, and the cream of British universities.
³

The French and the Poles had both made contributions to
ULTRA
. A Polish Jew who had worked on an Enigma machine in Berlin managed to contact
MI
-6; the British arranged to get him from Warsaw to London to direct the building of a duplicate. The French had obtained earlier, commercial models of the Enigma machine, which they made available to
MI
-6. With these examples before them, the British proceeded to construct a strange contraption, eight feet by eight feet, called “the Bomb,” which was installed at Hut Three, a Nissen hut under the trees at a wretched estate named Bletchley Park. The Bomb, as described by its chief engineer, Harold Keen, was not a computer, and “there was no other machine like it. It was unique, built especially for this purpose. Neither was it a complex tabulating machine, which was sometimes used in cryptanalysis. What it did was to match the electrical circuits of Enigma. Its secret was in the internal wiring of Enigma's rotors, which ‘the Bomb' sought to imitate.”
⁴

Bletchley Park, or
BP
as it inevitably came to be called, soon had an overflow of British intelligentsia. Nissen huts covered the grounds. They were staffed by German-language experts, military
technicians, and code breakers, with a heavy emphasis on mathematicians, which meant a high number of eccentrics and “absentminded” professors.

“There was an amazing spirit at the place,” Alfred Friendly, who was there, later wrote. “Morale was high because everyone knew the fantastically successful results of our daily-and-nightly endeavours. It was one place in the military where there was no sense of futility, or useless work or of nonsense. Had he served there, Heller would have had no material for
Catch 22
.”
⁵
William Filby, a Britisher who served through the war at
BP
, later scoffed at the idea of a vacation or even a short leave. “You couldn't wait to get back in the morning to see what had happened overnight,” he said in an interview. “It was like your baby—you never wanted to leave it.”
⁶
At
BP
, in brief, there was a tremendous feeling of excitement and contribution. Churchill conveyed some of that feeling to Eisenhower in his description of the place and its work.

Breaking the Enigma secrets open had been a brilliant team effort, but there were problems. The codes needed to be broken on a continuous basis, as the Germans were consistently changing the key. The new settings had to be found before each new code could be mastered. As the war went along the thousands of men and women working at
BP
got better at it, but in the early years they were baffled more often than not.
ULTRA
was not an important factor in the August-September 1940 Battle of Britain; even by October,
BP
, after straining every resource of human intelligence and endurance, could break only one message in three in time to act on the information. With the decoded messages, as R. V. Jones pointed out, “I was able to tell the Duty Air Commodore at Fighter Command the exact place of the German bomber attack, the time of the first bomb to within ten minutes or so, the expected ground speed of the bombers, their line of approach to within 100 yards, and their height to within two to three hundred metres. Could any air defence system ask for more?”

And yet, the bombers still got through. Jones complained that “reading the Enigma signals was just like reading tomorrow's paper today.” As an extreme example, he recorded that the British knew of the German invasion plans for the island of Crete at least three weeks in advance, and still could not stop the enemy. In part this was because of British military weakness, in part because they dared
make only the most limited use of their
ULTRA
-derived information.
⁷

Ronald Lewin, author of
Ultra Goes to War
, the first detailed examination of the use of
ULTRA
in the campaigns of World War II, writes, “It was impossible to risk disclosing its intelligence to those in actual contact with the enemy, or liable to capture for other reasons, even though the knowledge might improve their chance of success or survival.”
⁸
So it was at Crete.

An inability to take advantage of the information, or an inability to use it for fear of revealing its source, put definite limits on what
ULTRA
could contribute. Another limitation was distribution, getting the right information to the right man at the right time, and without tipping their hand. Only the very highest-ranking officers in the British service knew about
ULTRA
. It was the best-kept secret of the war, a secret that lasted for almost a full generation after the Nazi surrender.

Then, in 1974, Group Captain F. W. Winterbotham revealed
The Ultra Secret
in a book by that name.
^*
Winterbotham was the officer who brought the
ULTRA
intercepts directly to Churchill, who delighted in reading Hitler's messages. Because Winterbotham was so close to the Prime Minister throughout the war, his memoirs were filled with inside stories that made an exciting tale even more appealing.

In the mid-1970s
The Ultra Secret
came as a surprise to the public, as well as to most World War II scholars. Its immediate reception was one of puzzlement by the public, anger by the scholars (they would have to rewrite their books). Why, the public wondered, if the Allies listened in on everything the Germans said to each other over the radio, did it take so long to win the war? And why was the victory so costly?

Churchill's initial reactions to
ULTRA
were similar. In 1941 and throughout 1942, for example, he kept reading Rommel's messages from Africa, messages in which Rommel complained that his gasoline had not arrived, nor his spare parts, nor his reinforcements, nor his new tanks, nor his communications equipment. Because Churchill knew that Rommel was short on everything, he could not understand why his Middle East commanders hesitated to attack,
and one by one he sacked them. Thanks to
ULTRA
, Churchill knew what the generals knew, and it made the generals furious and apprehensive because it invited criticism by Churchill, who was always at his happiest when he was dressing down a general.

But although Churchill called
ULTRA
an oracle (which it was when it worked) and the key to victory (which it could be if the right lock were found), it could provide only intelligence, not a strategy or the power to enforce one. General Bernard Law Montgomery pointed out to Churchill time and time again the obvious fact that knowing about Rommel's supply shortages did not solve the British supply problems.

The Germans never caught on to the
ULTRA
operation, however. They used Enigma to the last day of the war. So the question persists: Why did the Allies not win sooner, at less cost? An American football analogy may help the perspective here. Suppose you were coaching against a National Football League team, and your intelligence system was so good that you knew not only the height, weight, speed, and characteristics of every opponent (all gathered from open sources, mainly films) but you also knew every one of your opponent's plays. Even better, suppose you managed to hook up a radio transmitter in the quarterback's helmet, while each of your players had receivers in their helmets. Your information about the enemy's strength and intentions would then be perfect, as would your system of getting that information into the right hands in time to act on it.