Max Hastings - The Secret War - Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939–1945

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2015

Copyright © Max Hastings 2015

The author asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library

Cover photographs © Topham/Picturepoint (figure, body); Sovfoto/Getty Images (figure, head)

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Source ISBN: 9780007503742

Ebook Edition © September 2015 ISBN: 9780008133023

Version: 2016-02-23

For

WILLIAM and AMELIE

the next generation

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

1 Before the Deluge

1 SEEKERS AFTER TRUTH

2 THE BRITISH: GENTLEMEN AND PLAYERS

3 THE RUSSIANS: TEMPLES OF ESPIONAGE

2 The Storm Breaks

1 THE ‘FICTION FLOOD’

2 SHADOWING CANARIS

3 Miracles Take a Little Longer: Bletchley

1 ‘TIPS’ AND ‘CILLIS’

2 FLIRTING WITH AMERICA

4 The Dogs that Barked

1 ‘LUCY’S’ PEOPLE

2 SORGE’S WARNINGS

3 THE ORCHESTRA PLAYS

4 THE DEAF MAN IN THE KREMLIN

5 Divine Winds

1 MRS FERGUSON’S TEA SET

2 THE JAPANESE

3 THE MAN WHO WON MIDWAY

6 Muddling and Groping: The Russians at War

1 CENTRE MOBILISES

2 THE END OF SORGE

3 THE SECOND SOURCE

4 GOUREVITCH TAKES A TRAIN

7 Britain’s Secret War Machine

1 THE SHARP END

2 THE BRAIN

3 AT SEA

8 ‘Mars’: The Bloodiest Deception

1 GEHLEN

2 AGENT ‘MAX’

9 The Orchestra’s Last Concert

10 Guerrilla

1 RESISTERS AND RAIDERS

2 SOE

11 Hoover’s G-Men, Donovan’s Wild Men

1 ADVENTURERS

2 IVORY TOWERS

3 ALLEN DULLES: TALKING TO GERMANS

12 Russia’s Partisans: Terrorising Both Sides

13 Islands in the Storm

1 THE ABWEHR’S IRISH JIG

2 NO MAN’S LAND

14 A Little Help from Their Friends

1 ‘IT STINKS, BUT SOMEBODY HAS TO DO IT’

2 AMERICAN TRAITORS

15 The Knowledge Factories

1 AGENTS

2 THE JEWEL OF SOURCES

3 PRODUCTION LINES

4 INFERNAL MACHINES

16 ‘Blunderhead’: The English Patient

17 Eclipse of the Abwehr

1 HITLER’S BLETCHLEYS

2 ‘CICERO’

3 THE FANTASISTS

4 THE ‘GOOD’ NAZI

18 Battlefields

1 WIELDING THE ULTRA WAND

2 SUICIDE SPIES

3 TARNISHED TRIUMPH

19 Black Widows, Few White Knights

1 FIGHTING JAPAN

2 FIGHTING EACH OTHER

3 THE ENEMY: GROPING IN THE DARK

20 ‘Enormoz’

21 Decoding Victory

Picture Section

Acknowledgements

Notes and Sources

Bibliography

Index

Also by Max Hastings

About the Publisher

This is a book about some of the most fascinating people who participated in the Second World War. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, civilians had vastly diverse experiences, forged by fire, geography, economics and ideology. Those who killed each other were the most conspicuous, but in many ways the least interesting: outcomes were also profoundly influenced by a host of men and women who never fired a shot. While even in Russia months could elapse between big battles, all the participants waged an unceasing secret war – a struggle for knowledge of the enemy to empower their armies, navies and air forces, through espionage and codebreaking. Lt. Gen. Albert Praun, the Wehrmacht’s last signals chief, wrote afterwards of the latter: ‘All aspects of this modern “cold war of the air waves” were carried on constantly even when the guns were silent.’ The Allies also launched guerrilla and terrorist campaigns wherever in Axis-occupied territories they had means to do so: covert operations assumed an unprecedented importance.

This book does not aspire to be a comprehensive narrative, which would fill countless volumes. It is instead a study of both sides’ secret war machines and some of the characters who influenced them. It is unlikely that any more game-changing revelations will be forthcoming, save possibly from Soviet archives currently locked by Vladimir Putin. The Japanese destroyed most of their intelligence files in 1945, and what survives remains inaccessible in Tokyo, but veterans provided significant post-war testimony – a decade ago, I interviewed some of them myself.

Most books about wartime intelligence focus on the doings of a chosen nation. I have instead attempted to explore it in a global context. Some episodes in my narrative are bound to be familiar to specialists, but a new perspective seems possible by placing them on a broad canvas. Though spies and codebreakers have generated a vast literature, readers may be as astonished by some of the tales in this book as I have been on discovering them for myself. I have written extensively about the Russians, because their doings are much less familiar to Western readers than are those of Britain’s Bletchley Park, America’s Arlington Hall and Op-20-G. I have omitted many legends, and made no attempt to retell the most familiar tales of Resistance in Western Europe, nor of the Abwehr’s agents in Britain and America, who were swiftly imprisoned or ‘turned’ for the famous Double Cross system. By contrast, though the facts of Richard Sorge’s and ‘Cicero’s’ *doings have been known for many decades, their significance deserves a rethink.

The achievements of some secret warriors were as breathtaking as the blunders of others. As I recount here, the British several times allowed sensitive material to be captured which could have been fatal to the Ultra secret. Meanwhile, spy writers dwell obsessively on the treachery of Britain’s Cambridge Five, but relatively few recognise what we might call the Washington and Berkeley five hundred – a small army of American leftists who served as informants for Soviet intelligence. The egregious Senator Joseph McCarthy stigmatised many individuals unjustly, but he was not wrong in charging that between the 1930s and 1950s the US government and the nation’s greatest institutions and corporations harboured an astonishing number of employees whose first loyalty was not to their own flag. True, between 1941 and 1945 the Russians were supposedly allies of Britain and the United States, but Stalin viewed this relationship with unremitting cynicism – as a merely temporary association, for the narrow purpose of destroying the Nazis, with nations that remained the Soviet Union’s historic foes and rivals.

Many books about wartime intelligence focus on what spies or codebreakers found out.