Fighting to Lose (47 page)

I nodded my understanding. Menzies was contemplating a dialogue with Canaris or those close to him with a view to ousting Hitler.30

Popov’s anecdote, with his conclusion that a dialogue was being sought with Canaris, was published in 1974 when there was no serious suggestion anywhere that Britain had asked for the Abwehr’s help in mid-war.

Indeed, Dicketts identifying himself as being on a mission for the British secret service explains why he was not, to use Masterman’s words in
The Double-Cross System
, “painfully executed by the Germans in Germany.” Instead, on that first trip to Germany he met with Dr. Schacht, a long-time opponent of the regime, and with the “Baron,” Canaris’s mentor and closest confidant, and returned safely to England with word that “secret peace talks” were possible. Menzies, remembering the many warnings about Hitler received from the Abwehr and German civilian officials before the war, would have taken this to mean that despite Hitler’s successes Canaris and others around him were still hoping to overthrow the Nazis.31

Menzies sent Dicketts back to Portugal in May, and he went on to Germany a second time, without MI5 being told of it (then or after). Presumably, he brought with him the British response, though what this was is unknown. It probably touched on the fact that Britain could not hope to carry on alone much longer. If the United States did not soon take up the cause, Britain would have no choice but come to terms with Hitler.

That may have been too awful to contemplate for Churchill, but it was infinitely worse for Canaris and others in the German army opposed to the Nazis. Hitler had just brutally attacked and conquered Yugoslavia. Russia was next. If Britain pulled out of the war, the Nazis would never be budged from power, whether Hitler was dead or alive.

Who apart from Ritter was at this second meeting is unknown, but it may have included Canaris. From March to August, the messages pertaining to his movements that were being intercepted and read by MI6 (but not by MI5) show him to have been skipping from one Abwehr office to another in southeastern Europe in connection with the invasion and occupation of Yugoslavia. The messages for late May and the month of June, however, are missing from the collection, suggesting that they were either sent in a more secure cipher or MI6 has withheld them.32 Either way, the targeted secrecy indicates Canaris was involved in something of great importance during that period.

We know what that was. During his travels, he took time to visit Madame Szymanska in Berne. He had saved her from the Russians in Poland and had set her up in Switzerland, where she opened up contact with the MI6 office in Geneva. After the war, she told how in conversation he had casually mentioned that Hitler was about to invade Russia. This information she had in turn passed to her MI6 contacts.33

What happened seems clear. Britain had sent out a distress call. Canaris had replied through Dicketts and Madame Szymanska with a comforting reply, “Hold on. Help is coming.” The reprieve was Operation
Barbarossa
, Hitler’s ill-advised invasion of the Soviet Union.

Scarcely three weeks later, on July 15, a Spaniard who could not speak English turned up at the British embassy in Lisbon with a spy’s questionnaire indicating that Japan was planning to attack British possessions in the Far East. A few weeks later, Popov was given a similar questionnaire suggesting that Hawaii and the U.S. Pacific Fleet were threatened.

As noted at the beginning, Popov’s questionnaire shows signs of having been put together quickly, not in Berlin, but in Lisbon, at KO Portugal. It was a rush job, composed within days of the German intercept services learning that Roosevelt and Churchill were about to meet by ship in the Atlantic.

One must also note that Canaris would have had on his desk decrypts of the SS messages dealing with the exterminations in Russia. They would have been small in number compared to those on the same subject he was getting from the Abwehr field commandos attached to the armies. It must have made sickening reading. Since he had seen to it that the SS messages were in simple ciphers, he could be reasonably certain that Churchill was reading them, too.

Now one must flash back to the beginning of this sequence of events, to the end of January 1941, just before Dicketts set off for Lisbon and then Germany the first time. An informal talk took place between Churchill, a few of those closest to him, and Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt’s principal civilian adviser. Hopkins had come over to England to see how bad things were and to sound out Churchill as to Britain’s chances of survival. The real bread and butter of war planning occurred at such meetings, where records were not kept. In this case, one of Churchill’s junior secretaries was present. He noted the pith of their conversation in his diary.

They sat after dinner in a circle in the Great Hall at Chequers, with only Churchill standing, leaning on the fireplace mantel. The prime minister declaimed at some length about the need for the United States to get into the war against Germany, while acknowledging there was little appetite for it in the U.S. Congress. Hopkins then had this to say about helping Britain:

The important element in the situation was the boldness of the President, who would lead opinion and not follow it, who was convinced that if England lost, America, too, would be encircled and beaten. He would use his powers if necessary; he would not scruple to interpret existing laws in the furtherance of his aim…. He did not want war … but he would not shrink from war.34

Hopkins added that if America were to come in, “the incident would be with Japan.”

The question then is: Did this somehow get back to Canaris? Did Menzies, on Churchill’s order, send Dicketts to Germany in February to sound out the Abwehr chief, and then again in May to deliver the vital intelligence: “Japan, then Germany!”? We will never know.

Canaris was famous, among those who knew him, for his creative solutions to intractable problems. So was Churchill. Menzies of MI6 was not short of imagination either. Maybe, just maybe, Popov’s Pearl Harbor questionnaire was an idea born of the three of them.

In any case, giving the president of the United States the excuse and the means to get into a fight with Japan saved Britain and, as a bonus, saved Russia. On December 7, 1941, when Japanese planes dived on the battleships of the Pacific Fleet, the war for the Allies was as good as won.

19

A Rogue Octogenarian

They had mostly died off by 1969, those members of the Wireless Board who knew of the Pearl Harbor questionnaire and of Churchill’s attempt to influence the German bombing of England. One of the first to go was Guy Liddell, dead of a heart attack in 1958. Stewart Menzies died in 1968 and with him those MI6 secrets that he never shared. Commodore Boyle was gone, too, and with him his private knowledge of what really had gone on between MI5 and MI6. Left were the younger men who attended those meetings of 1941, meetings that were so secret that the participants were not given the minutes: Ewen Montagu, the recording secretary, and “TAR” Robertson of B1A, both in their late fifties. It was not going to be long before the secrets of the Wireless Board would be secret forever.

Enter John Cecil Masterman, former chairman of the XX Committee. At the time seventy-eight, he could look back over a long but colourless career as an Oxford academic and see that his finest hours were during wartime, when, so he thought, he had carried England’s counter-intelligence banner against Hitler’s Huns. He decided it was time to tell the world. He proposed to publish the report he submitted at the end of the war.

Reaction from the government was swift and firm:
No!
He was not to seek a publisher. He was still under the Official Secrets Act.
No, no, no.

Masterman, however, was not prepared to take no for an answer.

The primary objector was Dick White,1 retired after a postwar career that had included stints as director of both MI5 and MI6, but serving now as a special advisor to the government on intelligence. He had joined MI5 in the late 1930s, served as deputy to Guy Liddell of B Division, and in late 1940 was instrumental in the recruitment of Masterman.

Masterman was given the XX Committee chairmanship at the outset, while White went on to other duties in B-division, none of which required him to attend the meetings of the Wireless Board and the XX Committee, or to be told the details of Dusko Popov’s Pearl Harbor questionnaire.

White knew, however, that the “double-cross system” had been a flop. If there was not a postwar internal paper somewhere in the secret service archives saying so, his wartime predecessor as MI6 chief, Stewart Menzies, would have passed along the basic message verbally: MI5 had been inept, amateurish, and definitely penetrated by the Germans and the Soviets. White might have reddened when told how silly it was to have thought that the Abwehr was genuinely using First World War ciphers; that it would allow its spies to communicate with one another; that it did not know how to equip them properly; and so on. On the other hand, perhaps he had known. The wartime documents in which he features indicate a well-travelled, well-informed person with a keen mind.

Masterman was the opposite. In his fifties in the 1940s, he was the quintessential Oxford/Cambridge don. A bachelor, he lived with his mother or in rooms at his club or the university, sealed like a sardine from the rest of the world. He taught modern history, where the choice of courses did not come closer than the 1880s on the theory that present-day events could not be profitably studied until at least a half-century had elapsed. Cricket and all-male dinner parties, where obscure ideas were brandished like rapiers, were his chief recreations, and like many of his type of that era, he had written a detective novel. Otherwise, his contribution to learning was like a mist on the Thames.

He had been brought into MI5 in late 1940 without any background whatsoever in the art of espionage, with little previous interest in contemporary affairs, and with little direct experience with people outside his class.2 He had ignored warnings that war was imminent while at the University of Freiburg in 1914, and spent the next four years in spartan but comfortable internment at Camp Ruhleben outside Berlin. The life there, amidst other male prisoners of culture and privilege, was not unlike his normal life at Oxford.

In his autobiography, he comes across as a thoroughly artificial person — vain, pleasure-seeking, and self-indulgent. The type was much satirized in the plays and novels of the 1920s and ’30s. It is possible that he had been chosen to head the XX Committee for these very qualities; he was not the sort to ever dream that MI6 and the Abwehr might secretly be co-operating.

There is no fool like an old fool
, White may have thought as he turned down Masterman’s request. He knew his claims in his 1945 report on MI5’s double agents were hollow in terms of the “achievements” that Masterman put such stock in. These primarily were the deception operations through 1942 and 1943 that dangled false threats of cross-Channel attacks before the Germans, culminating in using double agents to try to deceive them as to the time and place of the June 6, 1944, Allied invasion of Normandy. White had much reason to doubt the success of any of this.3

More delicate were the descriptions in Masterman’s “B1A Sectional Report” dealing with luring the Luftwaffe onto residential areas of London and onto the cities of the Midlands. His original report has vanished from MI5’s archives, but there is good evidence it covered this topic. MI5’s in-house history of the war, John Curry’s
The Security Service
, confers on the XX Committee major though undeserved credit (see Chapter 3) for getting the permissions necessary to have MI5’s double agents send the Germans daily weather reports and true information, “diverting their bombers to other cities or places.”4 As this had been ongoing, Masterman undoubtedly went into some detail.

The British public knew nothing of any of this and the threatened disclosure could not have come at a worse time. In the late 1960s, left-wing militancy in Britain was on the march in the unions and universities, and there was widespread hostility against the political Establishment, fuelled by the example set by the student protests in the United States against the war in Vietnam. A homegrown example of workers being sacrificed would have been greedily seized upon.5

There was also the very human concern that twenty-five years was not a long time for those who had lost their homes and loved ones. No matter how well it could be argued that directing the bombers onto residential areas of London and onto other cities had been necessary, many would still feel a keen sense of betrayal to learn that their own leaders were partially the cause of their personal tragedies.

Masterman persisted, later claiming he was motivated by the desire to use the story of MI5’s wartime double-cross triumphs to help restore public confidence in the British secret services, wounded by the recent defection to the Soviet Union of Kim Philby, a senior officer with MI6. This had come on top of the defections of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in 1951. White and Whitehall could hardly try to dampen Masterman’s tell-all zeal by admitting that MI5 itself had provided ample soil for traitors to grow in.