Fighting to Lose (43 page)

At the beginning of October, Sorge reported that Japanese-American talks were in their final stages, and if the Americans refused to lift the various embargos imposed by Roosevelt, Japan would attack British and American possessions in the western Pacific. By now, Stalin was listening. He began moving some of his troops in the east to the Russian front, but the stakes were too high for him to act too boldly. The spectacular collapse of Japanese-American talks in November was still to come.

At this crucial moment, Sorge was arrested. He had fallen in love with one of Japan’s most beautiful geishas, and it was his undoing. The hard-nosed spy had taken it in the heart, and even the Japanese who set up the sting were sorry. The curtains were drawn on Stalin’s primary window on Tokyo. Stalin, however, had an alternative source.

Approximately a year earlier, Anthony Blunt — son of a parson, related to royalty, distinguished art critic, Cambridge graduate, and Soviet mole — joined MI5. After first serving as a kind of personal secretary to MI5’s counter-espionage chief, Guy Liddell, he was given responsibility for a sub-department concerned with tracking the activities in England of the diplomats of neutral nations. This entailed recruiting spies in their embassies, stealing the contents of their wastebaskets, and secretly opening diplomatic bags before they left the country. This latter practice was a First World War trick, and MI6 had been doing it since then. However, when it was described by Herbert Yardley in his book
Secret Service in America
, published in London in 1940 for all to see, MI6 lost interest. It made no objection when MI5, at Blunt’s urging, offered to take it over.21

According to Blunt’s own autobiographical report to the Soviets, he oversaw an operation that involved having agents persuade diplomatic couriers to hand their bags over to port security officials who would put them into a safe while they awaited departure. When they were travelling by air, their flights would be deliberately delayed so that the bags would be turned over for safekeeping. Blunt’s people would then be given access to the bags, open and photograph their contents, and then have them carefully resealed so that the couriers would be none the wiser.22

Given that all this was first described in Yardley’s book
The American Black Chamber
(1931), which went through many printings, including in French and Japanese, before being reissued in 1940, and given that Walter Nicolai covered the same ground in
The German Secret Service
(1924), reprinted in French as
Forces secrets
(1932), it is doubtful that many of the couriers fell for it. The Soviets, on the other hand, had a very great reason to want Blunt to be secretly opening their diplomatic bags. He could freely put into them whatever he wanted, enabling the ever-suspicious Stalin to see for himself what Blunt stole.

On August 14, the same day that Ellis was showing the Pearl Harbor questionnaire to the FBI in New York, Liddell proposed to Petrie that Blunt be nominated to go down to the Government Code & Cipher School periodically to take notes on the most recent BJs — those Japanese diplomatic decrypts of such importance that they were earmarked for Churchill’s eyes.23 Thanks to the generosity of the Americans, with their gift the preceding February of a PURPLE machine and the keys to the PA and J codes, this involved a cornucopia of Japanese consular traffic of the most sensitive and significant sort, intercepted in Britain, Canada, Australia, and Singapore.24

It made Stalin a silent third party to the countdown to December 7. Blunt was able to send him, through the Moscow-bound diplomatic pouch, actual copies of the same decrypts of Japanese messages then being read by Churchill. The Soviet leader could also follow Japan’s hopeless negotiations with the United States, its growing desperation caused by American-imposed shortages in food, fuel, and raw materials, and its hardening resolve to fight. This was the intelligence he needed if he was to release troops in Siberia for the struggle against the Germans in western Russia. Convinced, he began the transfers in October, and by the end of November, ten new divisions, plus a thousand tanks and a thousand aircraft, were deployed before Moscow.25

Of the messages supplied by Blunt, the most critical was that released by the GC&CS on November 25. It was a Tokyo advisory of November 19 to all diplomatic posts abroad that should Japan’s access to commercial cable and radio-telegraph services be subject to interruption because Japan was breaking diplomatic relations, the specific “enemy countries” involved would be identified by open-code phrases in the weather reports of Japan’s international broadcast-radio service: For Russia, “north wind cloudy”; for Britain, “west wind clear”; for the United States, “east wind rain.”26

This would have indicated to Stalin that as of the date the message was sent, Japan was still considering the possibility of attacking the Soviet Union. The Japanese had a large army in China, so Siberia was not safe. Stalin could not afford to attack the Germans before Moscow until it was.

Meanwhile, the temperature dropped and snow swept across the plains of the Ukraine. The Russian winter had arrived early and it was to be one of the most severe in living memory. Hitler urged his generals to press on — the spires of the Kremlin were almost within sight — but the fresh troops from the Soviet east now barred the way. On November 27, the German offensive, begun six months earlier with such confidence, stalled, halted. Moscow was a mere thirty-two kilometres farther on.

Next came BJ/35, read by Churchill and, thanks to Blunt, read by Stalin. Available on December 2, it was sent by Prime Minister Tojo to Japan’s ambassador in Berlin asking him to tell Hitler that an “armed collision” leading to a state of war with Britain and the United States was to be expected soon, but Japan intended “to refrain from deliberately taking positive action in the North.”27 North wind cloudy was no longer in the forecast.

On December 5, as the Japanese bombers were being readied on their aircraft carriers, the Soviets launched a major attack on the German lines before Moscow. The Germans reeled from the blow. After the huge Russian losses of the preceding months, the attack was totally unexpected. The fighting became desperate — for the Germans.

It was the beginning of the end for Hitler.

18

September 1939–December 1941

In Berlin, in his office on the Tirpitzuferstrasse, Admiral Canaris had a Japanese woodblock print of a warrior hanging on the wall, a gift from the Japanese ambassador. Canaris had spent six months in Japan as a young man, and must have been impressed by the speed at which this colourful but formal people had advanced militarily. As Abwehr chief, he had seen to it that top-quality officers were sent to Japan as military attachés. For Germany, the benefit of being able to keep abreast of Japan’s accomplishments in air and naval developments made this commitment well worth it.

The evidence is ample that Canaris had a direct hand in the Pearl Harbor questionnaire delivered by Dusko Popov that ultimately triggered America’s entry into the Second World War.

First, all other considerations aside, the fact that both questionnaires — Dusko Popov’s about the Americans and Juan Pujol Garcia’s about the British — involved collecting military intelligence for another country meant that they would have required Canaris’s approval. It is in the nature of nations that co-operation of that kind with a foreign power is a matter of high policy, requiring consultation with the top leaders concerned, and at least a briefing note to the head of government. There is just no chance that KO Portugal and KO Spain would have sent the two agents on their missions without clearance from a higher authority in Berlin. That meant Canaris.

Further:

• On July 24, the U.S. Navy decrypted a Japanese diplomatic message from “a high authority in Japan” that indicated the Japanese were about to seize British and Dutch colonial possessions in the Far East;
  
• Admiral Canaris would have seen this message because the German armed forces cipher bureau, OKW/CHI, was then decrypting and reading Japanese diplomatic messages in the same J-19 and PA ciphers as the Americans and British;2
  
• Also on July 24, Churchill spoke openly with Roosevelt about their upcoming shipboard rendezvous over their transatlantic scrambler radio-telephone link. The conversation was picked up and unscrambled by the Nazi radio-telephone intercept service;3
  
• About a week later, MI5’s double agent RAINBOW announced he had received a cover letter from his German controller with microdots attached, the first MI5 had seen. An MI5 internal report a year later indicated that RAINBOW, Charles Eibner, had been an agent “planted” on the Security Service by the Germans;
  
• Within days, Dusko Popov, a.k.a. TRICYCLE, showed his MI6 controller in Lisbon the questionnaire about Pearl Harbor on microdots he said the Germans had given him.
  

Popov had been scheduled to leave Lisbon for the United States at the end of July but his departure was delayed and his original mission of going on to Egypt was dropped. Place-name errors in his questionnaire suggest it was prepared in haste, and in Lisbon, not Berlin. However, the entire mission was unnecessary because Japan had its own intelligence service and there were thousands of naturalized Japanese living in Hawaii. In addition, the Abwehr also had at least one long-established spy, Otto Kühn, already there.

The evidence is compelling. On learning that Churchill and Roosevelt were about to meet face to face, Canaris rushed to provide Churchill with the means to argue that Japan was contemplating military action against the United States. He could not have predicted where the two leaders would go from there.

Or could he?

To begin with, there is no argument that German intelligence scored a massive direct hit against British intelligence in 1940 when Arthur Owens turned over details of the coastal radar stations Britain had secretly built. It was decisive information, and Britain could have lost the war had the Luftwaffe properly followed up. Indeed, up until his last cross-Channel trip in April 1940 to see his German controller, Owens was an entirely successful triple agent.

Then came his unmasking by Sam McCarthy during their aborted North Sea rendezvous with Ast Hamburg’s Major Ritter. Instead of arresting him for espionage, a few weeks later Captain Robertson sent him again to meet Ritter, this time in Portugal, and this time hopefully really acting for the British. He came bearing the reports of Agent E-186, which, among a number of bomb-target suggestions, included giving away the locations of Fighter Command and Bomber Command. Theoretically, all the Luftwaffe needed to do was smother Stanmore and High Wycombe with high explosive and Britain’s air defences would have been reduced to confusion and chaos.

That did not happen. Ritter did send in the E-186 reports, but for some reason that remains obscure, they were not acted upon.

Major Ritter’s original intention in 1939 appears to have been to use Owens as a straight spy, who would report by wireless once the war started. But Owens had other ideas, probably because spying for the enemy in wartime Britain was a capital crime. By turning himself in immediately, he minimized the period that he could be accused of working for the enemy and stood a chance of being taken on as a double agent. Getting his wife to denounce him beforehand was probably part of the scheme.