Burn After Reading (13 page)

At the same time, Colonel Dudley Clarke, an officer of the General Staff, thought of guerrilla warfare and remembered the Boer Commandos. He jotted down his ideas on a single sheet of paper, which eventually reached Churchill's eyes and obtained immediate approval. Clarke and a staff were installed in a private house in Grosvenor Crescent, where, in civilian clothes, they posed as the board of trustees of a mythical charity.

There was much about the effort that was grimly hilarious. Churchill had proposed that each of the twenty thousand “Leopards” be equipped with a Tommy gun, and it turned out that there were exactly forty Tommy guns available in the whole of Britain. Only half a dozen boats could be found to
ferry the raiders across the Channel, and in two of those the engines failed. When it was decided that the Commandos should blacken their faces in night action, no black greasepaint could be found in the entire military establishment. It had to be bought from a Wardour Street stage costumer.

It was hardly surprising that their first raid, near Le Tou-quet, was no great shakes. In the words of the official historian of the Commandos, “It had accomplished little and yet, at the same time, much. The military information brought back had no very great value, but the raid had a most heartening effect upon the people of England.”

A later raid was far more successful. Radar was becoming a vital weapon in the battle for air supremacy, and the Germans had established a major station at Bruneval on the French coast between Fecamp and Le Havre. A resident British agent discovered its existence and a team of specialists was sent to recon-noiter and make sure of its importance. On the basis of their report, a team of one hundred and twenty Commandos was dropped from the air on the night of February 7, 1942, while thirty-two others were landed from the sea in support. They succeeded in dismantling and taking away the important parts of the apparatus intact and in blowing up what they left behind. The equipment they brought back revealed to England some of Germany's most jealously-guarded electronic secrets.

In due course, however, the intelligence function of the Commandos was largely superseded by its military activities and so its detailed history, fascinating though it is, would be out of place here. The intelligence work fell largely to another brand new organization created in the Ministry of Economic Warfare, the Special Operations Executive, or S.O.E., for short.

The S.O.E. developed from a brief note Churchill had sent to General Ismay on June 24, 1940, after France's total collapse. “It seems most important,” he wrote, “to establish now before the trap closes an organization for enabling French officers and soldiers, as well as important technicians, who wish to fight, to make their way to various ports. A sort of ‘underground railway'
as in the olden days of slavery should be established and a Scarlet Pimpernel organization set up. I have no doubt there will be a steady flow of determined men, and we need all we can get for the defense of the French colonies.” The Prime Minister could afford to propose such unorthodox ideas to the hidebound military Tories of the War Office, but when lesser lights came forward with similar suggestions, they were frowned upon and even punished.

How dangerous it was to voice such ideas was shown by the fate of a lieutenant colonel of the First Royal Dragoons, named A. D. Wintle. At the time of Dunkirk, he hit upon the idea of dropping in at French airfields to recruit airmen for continued resistance to the Nazis. His idea scandalized his senior officer. It came to a bitter quarrel, the end of which found Colonel Wintle in the Tower of London on charges of insubordination and threatening a senior officer. He was later acquitted, but, in the light of his experience, few of his contemporaries dared to annoy Colonel Blimp with original ideas.

But where Wintle was put in his place, Churchill prevailed. The War Office added a special operations division to Military Intelligence and, beyond that, on a far broader and more unorthodox scale, S.O.E. was created. Major General Sir Colin McVean Gubbins, who headed it, described its purpose in a lecture on January 28, 1948, at the Royal United Service Institution :

“The shock of initial German success was profound, particularly in the occupied territories of Western Europe. France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark and Norway lay as if stunned; only the Poles, toughened by centuries of oppression, were spiritually uncrushed. Yet in all these countries there were hundreds of thousands of individuals who refused to accept defeat and who prayed for the means to continue the struggle.

“The British Commonwealth was on the defensive and it was clear that it would be years before invasion would be possible; what could, however, be done in the meantime was to attack the enemy by unorthodox methods: attack his war
potential wherever it was exposed and at least create some running sores to drain his strength and to disperse his forces. This would give the maximum of assistance to the forces of liberation when invasion of the Continent finally did take place. To undertake this task, an organization, Special Operations Executive, was created.”

According to General Gubbins, this was the plan: “To encourage and enable the peoples of the occupied countries to harass the German war effort at every possible point, by sabotage, subversion, go-slow practices,
coup de main
raids, etc., and at the same time to build up secret forces therein, organized, armed, and trained to take their part only when the final assault began. …”

Churchill's (or, for that matter, Colonel Wintle's) original idea was subsequently broadened. On July 23, Churchill wrote to the Secretary for War: “It is, of course, urgent and indispensable that every effort should be made to obtain secretly the best possible information about the German forces in the various areas overrun, and to establish intimate contacts with local people, and to plant agents. This, I hope, is being done on the largest scale, as opportunity serves, by the new organization [S.O.E.] under M.E.W. [Ministry of Economic Warfare].”

Called affectionately the “Old Firm” by its habitués, S.O.E. was housed in two buildings on Baker Street—the brass in Michael House, and the rank and file in Norgeby House, close to Sherlock Holmes' fictitious dwelling. To passersby, the agency was the “Inter-Service Research Bureau”, or at least that was what the sign said on the door of Norgeby House. Other sections of S.O.E. were scattered throughout London, behind screens of similar secrecy; one occupied premises from which a famous circus had just been gently evicted.

By the whimsical placing of S.O.E. under the Ministry of Economic Warfare, its supreme chief became a man one would never have normally associated with the melodramatic pursuits of espionage and sabotage. He was the Right Honorable Hugh Dalton, son of a prominent clergyman, Eton-bred barrister and
an economist with a doctorate from King's College. He was the Labor Party's outstanding budgetary expert, former Chancellor of the Exchequer. Dalton condescended to the management of S.O.E. with a certain professorial aloofness and the righteous indignation of a canon who has wandered by chance into a house of ill-repute. Someone in S.O.E. once said that Dalton reminded him of one of those large dinner gongs which stand on wooden legs in old country houses. “When you beat it with a stick padded with chamois leather,” the quipster remarked, “it gives out a deep, booming sound. That's Dr. Dalton—but there's no dinner at the end of it.”

But Dalton's mental and physical vigor impressed even the most intellectual and athletic members of this organization, which was composed in equal measure of brain and brawn. “I found him,” Bruce Lockhart remarked, “very receptive to new ideas, decisive and quick in action, and a tiger for work. We christened him Dr. Dynamo, and he deserved the compliment.”

Aside from S.O.E., Dalton supervised another alphabetic combination, the P.W.E., the initials standing for Political Warfare Executive. It was headed eventually by Bruce Lockhart and was to do in the propaganda sphere what S.O.E. was to achieve in espionage and sabotage, to harass the enemy at home and abroad. Its purpose was to attack people's minds and move them to controlled action.

It was P.W.E. that produced the outstanding propaganda appeal of the war: the V-symbol with all its ingenious sideshows, the Morse beat, the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the V-signs scribbled on enemy walls and Churchill's enthusiastic participation through the display of the sign on all opportune occasions.

The campaign was thought up by Victor de Laveleye and Douglas Ritchie, assistant to the director of B.B.C.'s European Services, who became well known during the war by his
nom de radio,
Colonel Britton. One night in the winter of 1940, de Laveleye, a former member of the Belgian Government, found
an intriguing item in an R.A.F. intelligence summary. It reported that Belgian patriots were defying the German Field Security Police (a branch of
Abwehr
III) by writing the three letters “R.A.F.” on the walls and shutters of their houses. De Laveleye got the idea to substitute the letter “V” for the three letters “R.A.F.”, partly because it was more meaningful with its connotation of victory or
victoire,
and partly because it entailed reduced risk, because it could be written more swiftly.

De Laveleye was then in charge of the B.B.C. broadcasts in French to Belgium and mentioned his idea in passing on one of his broadcasts. He thought no more about it until he heard that the “V” was cropping up in increasing numbers on Belgian walls.

At about the same time, and quite independently of de Laveleye's historic brainwave, Ritchie also thought of a symbol that could, through its powerful visual appeal, inspire and encourage the subjugated Europeans. Eventually, as John Baker White put it, Ritchie's and de Laveleye's suggestions came to be fused in the phenomenal “V” campaign. Haphazard though the original idea was, the campaign was executed with the utmost efficiency, and before long the symbol swept occupied Europe.

By 1942, the activities of the Old Firm leveled off, and Dalton was replaced by the noble lord in whose charge the S.O.E. remained for the rest of the war: Major the Earl of Selborne. At the time of his appointment as Minister of Economic Warfare, he was fifty-five years old, and a cement manufacturer by profession.

Both Dalton and Selborne were, in the final analysis, only nominal heads of S.O.E. Its actual chief was a seasoned and flexible young officer of the British Army's General Staff, the legendary Colin Gubbins, then forty-four. He is the forgotten man of the secret war, the least known chief of wartime secret service (and that largely by his own choice). As soon as the war ended and he collected a string of decorations (including the Legion of Merit from the United States), the newly created knight, Sir Colin Gubbins, retired from the Army. He went into
seclusion on the Isle of Harris, where he found the peace and tranquility he needed after “the long years of dreadful night”, as he put it.

Gubbins directed a fantastic clandestine war that was, in his own words, “a day-to-day battle with the Gestapo, the Quislings and the Japanese secret police, one long continuous struggle, with torture and unbelievable suffering and death waiting around every corner at every moment.”

No problem equal to his faced any other commander of the late war. He had no precedents, no experience on which to build; the Second World War was the first in history in which organized resistance in occupied territories was mounted on this scale, and was directed and supplied from outside. His task was vastly complicated by the multi-national character of his composite force and by the conflicting interests, ideas and aspirations of the émigré governments with which he had to work in close cooperation.

S.O.E. experienced both misery and grandeur, scored amazing victories and suffered heartbreaking defeats. After all, S.O.E. had to cope with the pitfalls and risks of a hazardous coalition war waged by rank amateurs against seasoned and ruthless professionals. It was by sheer necessity composed of a miscellany of modern buccaneers.

Ian Colvin, a foreign correspondent whose conscientious coverage of German dissidence took him deep into the bowels of the secret war, remarked that virtually the only survivors of S.O.E. were officers who held wartime jobs in London. It is true that the life expectancy of S.O.E. agents was distressingly brief. In one of his books, Peter Churchill listed some seventy fellow agents, of whom only twenty escaped capture or death. “Hundreds of men like me were sent to the occupied countries,” he wrote. “Some were captured on the very fields where their parachutes landed; some lasted for weeks; some for months; some were captured on the eve of victory, whilst a few were lucky enough to survive the entire war.”

The high mortality rate of these agents reflected not only
the occupational hazards, but also some of the inner shortcomings of S.O.E. As Colvin pointed out, many of its operations were gallant but ill-founded.

Most of S.O.E.'s history is still suppressed by the application of the Official Secrets Act; the chances are that the whole of its story will never be told. A few of the narratives whose publication was authorized depict the Old Firm as a house occasionally divided against itself, rampant with jealousies, chaos and ignorance, its dissensions and bickerings endangering the men and women whose survival depended on the organizers at home. Jean Overton Fuller's story of “Madeleine,” a pathetic young woman of the Resistance, abounds in complaints and reproaches, accusing S.O.E. of criminal blunders. Some of these mistakes were so monumental and sustained, so costly in the lives they claimed, that critics of S.O.E. averred there was more than just stupidity, disorganization, jealousy and carelessness behind them. “But corroboration or denial of these facts,” Colvin wrote, “even the investigation by Inter-Allied Commissions of Enquiry, of the possibilities of gross carelessness or treason had, in such instances, been frustrated by an order to burn the documentary records of Special Operations Executive after the war.”