Fighting to Lose (45 page)

In fairness, bringing the horrors of war directly to the people was not done without feeling. On September 17, in his underground bunker, Churchill was given an ULTRA intercept that indicated unequivocally that the Luftwaffe had given up trying to defeat the RAF and that the threatened cross-Channel invasion was off. Relief and a sense of jubilation pervaded the group gathered around the prime minister. The Germans would continue to bomb, but the main danger had passed. As one who was there remembered:

There was a very broad smile on Churchill’s face as he lit up his massive cigar and suggested we should all take a little fresh air. An air raid was going on at the time but Churchill insisted on going outside the concrete screen at the door. I shall ever remember him in his boiler suit, cigar in his mouth, looking across the park at the now blazing buildings beyond, all the Chiefs of Staff and Menzies and myself behind him. His hands holding his long walking stick, he turned to us and growled, “We will get them for this.”14

Churchill’s vehemence surely derived from the dreadful decision-making position he had put himself in. He was an elected politician and knew full well that many would never understand him inviting German attacks on Britain as a favour to the French, and then putting bricks and stone, palaces and cathedrals, over people’s homes. Farago, writing thirty years later in
The Game of Foxes
, could not resist using the pejorative
expendable
to describe the working-class areas of London that inevitably took the brunt of the bombing. Others, especially in the context of socialist Britain during the 1960s and ’70s, would have been more severe.

The fact was the choices had to be made or the war was lost. Once the Luftwaffe began bombing London in earnest, it became evident that, despite the city’s vast size, it could not handle it all on its own. The city had to be given a respite. Luring the Luftwaffe onto the big cities of the Midlands and onto Bristol and Liverpool was the way to go. Churchill had decided others should share the pain.

Undoubtedly, Clement Atlee, Morrison, and the other MPs in the War Cabinet were glad the responsibility fell to the prime minister. Creating a committee, the Wireless Board, outside the normal reporting channels that took responsibility for giving the Germans information “which might have the consequence of diverting their bombers to other cities and places”15 was probably quite all right by them. Churchill had taken the added precaution of setting up Sir Findlater Stewart to take the blame should it ever be found out that the government was complicit in the bombing of Coventry, Birmingham, Manchester, and the rest. That might have been all right, too.

The XX Committee was just further cover. Usually presented as a kind of operational subcommittee to the Wireless Board, in fact it had no executive powers. It debated possible action, but could not issue orders. Its service members were junior intelligence officers who were to keep no records and share as little as possible with their bosses. Its chairman — Masterman — was a fifty-year-old Oxford teacher of pre-twentieth-century history with no military or secret service experience, and too erudite apparently to read the open literature on espionage. He had been in MI5 less than two months before being given the XX Committee job. In the context of what was going on, it is impossible not to wonder whether he had been chosen precisely for his stunning lack of qualifications.

Meanwhile, there was Robertson. He ran his double agents through the fall and spring of 1940–41 without benefit of the expertise or knowledge of the army or navy “Y” services, MI6 (VIII), or the Government Code & Cipher School. Scotland Yard had no role. Cowgill of MI6(V) looked on from afar. Liddell left it to him. Because the messages had first to be enciphered, the telegraph operators sending for SNOW and later for TATE did not necessarily know what information they contained.16 It was perfect; Boyle could go straight to Robertson. Given the prime minister’s penchant for keeping his thumb directly on key military matters, he may even have been behind some of the double agent messages himself.

How else does one account for SNOW’s message that told the Germans there were no Spitfires in Egypt? If it drew away some of the deadly FW-190s from the sky above London, it evened the odds a bit in the fight for life between the RAF and the Luftwaffe. Only Churchill, or a real spy, could have been behind that one.

Churchill, Boyle, Robertson — it was a perfect setup because it bypassed everyone else, including the chiefs of staff. It was totally secure because it needed to involve only three people. However, in answering directly to Churchill in an arrangement that circumvented the responsible ministers, it did require that Boyle and Robertson be absolutely reliable and absolutely discreet. Boyle could be depended upon because he was a long-time member of the pre-war intelligence Establishment. Robertson’s credentials for Churchill’s trust are not so obvious, but trusted he was.

Since Churchill did not become prime minister until May 1940, and Boyle had been supplying Robertson with air intelligence for his wireless agents for some seven months before, the idea of luring enemy bombers away from strategic targets must have been conceived much earlier, probably before the war.

Menzies’s predecessor at MI6, Admiral Hugh Sinclair, had recognized as far back as 1930 that air power was likely to be decisive in the next war and, together with Boyle who was then on the intelligence staff of the Air Ministry, recruited and sent to Germany Fred Winterbotham, a thirty-three-year-old former First World War fighter pilot. It was a happy choice. Winterbotham, who had flown with the famous ace Billy Bishop, could talk the language of the skies and easily made a good impression on the Nazis. He was soon running in high political and military circles, supposedly as a junior member of the British air staff. He collected much valuable intelligence on German rearmament and advances in aircraft technology.

It seems Sinclair, finding the government of Stanley Baldwin indifferent to Winterbotham’s reports, passed the information to Churchill, then sitting as a backbench MP. He could feel comfortable doing so because Churchill had been a great user of secret intelligence during the First World War and, as a former cabinet minister, was a member of the Privy Council of England. This entitled him to hear state secrets. Churchill turned this information into questions in Parliament, becoming remembered in the 1930s, thanks to Sinclair, as the Cassandra of the upcoming conflict.

The Nazis hoped that what Winterbotham learned would convince Britain that Hitler’s plans for Europe were to her advantage. On his first trip to Germany in 1934, Winterbotham was given an audience with the Führer himself, who spoke passionately of the need to defeat communism and of his intention to conquer Russia. This was followed a few days later by Winterbotham having lunch with General Walter Reichenau, who described how an attack on the Soviet Union would be conducted. All of this was given to Winterbotham, evidently on Hitler’s order, on the assumption that rational minds in the British government would counsel non-interference.17

Winterbotham’s subsequent report went to Menzies, Boyle, the Foreign Office, Baldwin, and presumably to Churchill. The effect was the opposite of what Hitler wanted. It convinced Baldwin that another war with Germany was probable and that Britain had better look to its air defences. In 1935, the veteran Conservative MP Philip Cunliffe-Lister was named to the House of Lords — which put him beyond reach of questions in the House of Commons — and became Lord Swinton, the new secretary of state for Air. Britain then embarked on a secret program of air rearmament that included the go-ahead to develop the promising Spitfire fighter design and for “the construction of great shadow factories in the Midlands.”18 The organization of Fighter Command and the development of coastal radar coverage followed. Boyle was an insider to all of this.

When Boyle received the request from Robertson in the first month of the war for permission to send the Germans weather observations, he must have taken the matter up with whoever was still in the loop of Britain’s secret air defence preparations. The strategy subsequently adopted by MI5 of feeding its double agents true information to pave the way for false information later was an echo of how, before the war, the Air Ministry under Lord Swinton had pretended a free exchange of visits and technology with the Luftwaffe while hiding its most novel advances.19 Hitler was taken in, for he forbade espionage against Britain in 1935, sticking to the ban until 1938.

Indeed, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that Owens was planted on MI5 by MI6 to establish a means of delivering deceptive messages to the Luftwaffe when the bombers started coming. The available evidence fits such a scenario, but, if true, the scheme backfired spectacularly. Owens also delivered hot intelligence to the Germans on his trips across the Channel. It should be noted, too, that Swinton, having left the Air Ministry in 1938, resurfaced in July 1940 when Churchill appointed him chairman of the Security Executive. This put him in overall charge of MI5, and the chaos that ensued when he undertook to reorganize the service during the first months of the Blitz makes it fair to wonder whether the confusion was intentional. It certainly helped hide what was going on between Boyle and Robertson.

One way or another, by the late summer of 1940, Owens was still only one double agent with only one transmitter. If German bombing was to be significantly influenced when the Luftwaffe turned from airfields to urban industry and infrastructure, more wireless double agents reporting the weather were going to be needed. The Luftwaffe was still sticking to the 1938 League of Nations resolution that only allowed the bombing of military targets in built-up areas if they were identifiable. The extra distance to the Midlands and Britain’s western ports increased the risk. Churchill could not hope to draw the Luftwaffe off London to other distant cities without it having up-to-date data on local weather conditions, especially visibility. The German bomb aimers were supposed to be able to see what they were doing.

Major Ritter, by extraordinary coincidence, rose to the occasion when he dispatched the
Lena
spies, whose capture was so certain.

The question is: Did the Abwehr somehow know beforehand that Ritter would be playing perfectly into Churchill’s strategy. It cannot be answered. Theoretically, Canaris could guess that the British would want to take the pressure off London, but in the end, it was Hitler’s decision to expand the bombing campaign. Canaris’s proper response would have been to try to provide more and better weather information to the Luftwaffe. It would save airmen’s lives.

Experience with Arthur Owens had shown that MI5 was willing to allow a wireless double agent to send the weather. It was just a matter of providing the British with more such agents. The pre-mission wireless chat and poorly forged identity papers ensured that those Ritter did send would be caught. Some were bound to have their transmitters played back under control. Caroli and Schmidt, SUMMER and TATE, were used in just this way, with the bonus that in addition to the weather, they also sent bomb-damage reports. MI5 understood them to be pre-invasion spies in an operation code-named Unternehmen
Lena
. On the other side of the Channel, Ritter had a different name for it: Unternehmen
Isar
.20

One might argue that the intelligence triumvirate of Churchill, Menzies, and Boyle could more easily have dealt up front with MI5, but the bottom line was, those in the organization could not be trusted. MI6 could fairly guess that MI5 had been penetrated by the Germans and the Soviets if it considered the Registry fire in September 1940 and the episode involving William Rolph and the secret list of right-wingers he provided to Owens.

The Rolph incident was the trap door for Vernon Kell, MI5’s chief since the First World War. Churchill and Menzies would have been familiar with PMS2, the shadowy organization set up by Kell during the First World War to disrupt the Labour Movement. They were insiders themselves of that political era, and would have been aware of PMS2’s persistence underground since then, and of its links to right-wing extremists in the upper classes. It would have been possible, then, that Rolph’s list included the Nazi-leaning Edward VIII, forced to abdicate in 1936 and banished to the Bahamas with his American paramour, Wallis Simpson. Rolph had been a key player in the early days of PMS2, and the fact that MI5 was still using him, and that he had been caught trying to sell names to the Nazis, was surely reason enough to consider MI5 compromised. Churchill was correct to fire Kell and to send in Lord Swinton to clean house.