Fighting to Lose (48 page)

It was true. The suspicions generated by the Registry fire in 1940 had coalesced once more around Guy Liddell, this time over his possible role in the escape of Burgess and Maclean, to which were added new accusations that Blunt and Liddell had been covert communist fellow-travellers. In the 1950s it was enough to block Liddell’s chances of reaching the top in MI5, but in 1964 White received positive confirmation that Blunt and Burgess had been co-conspirators. By then, being dead, Liddell did not matter, but Blunt did. He was art adviser to Her Majesty and a respected veteran of MI5. To avoid the disastrous publicity that would result by arresting him, it was decided — with government approval — to confront him, but to offer to keep his treachery secret in exchange for his detailed confession.6

So the answer to Masterman was still
no
, but there was no explaining the real reasons. The Oxford don is not to be admired for the action he then took. He leaked his report to Ladislas Farago, an American author of a number of well-researched books on the Second World War.7 He was then in the process of writing a comprehensive history of the German secret intelligence service and apparently contacted Masterman in the course of his work.

Farago was to give Masterman considerable credit for his accomplishments. Farago’s
The Game of Foxes
(1972) goes on at some length about the messages sent to the Germans by MI5’s first double agent, Arthur Owens, in the late summer of 1940. These described the effects of German bombing: “Wimbledon hit … hundreds of houses, railway station and factories destroyed at Morton-Malden … private dwellings damaged at Kenley … Biggin Hill hit … Air Ministry moving soon to Harrogate.” And so on. And then:

On the 19th, he began to transmit a series of reports recommending targets for the raiders. The first directed them to a munitions plant and aircraft factory at Seighton….

None of these messages was, of course, written by Owens. He had no part in the collection of the information they contained. All of them were concocted in MI5 where the Double-Cross organization was beginning to gain its stride under the management of John Cecil Masterman, now a major “specially employed.” But if the British themselves produced JOHNNY’s reports, what was to be gained by giving the enemy such detailed, pinpointed intelligence about his handiwork?

This was the first attempt — feeble as yet — to gain a measure of control over the Luftwaffe’s selection of targets by manipulating the damage reports beamed to the Germans by double agents…. It was to become highly effective and was used broadly with a degree of ruthlessness under Mr. Churchill’s personal supervision.8

Ruthlessness
may not be too strong a word if applied to deliberately drawing German bombers onto factory targets embedded in densely packed residential areas.

Farago clearly indicates that he was getting his information from Masterman’s
The Double-Cross System
, before it was published, spending several more paragraphs lauding the XX Committee’s “cruel responsibility” of having to carry the “burden” of giving the Germans true information so that there would be no suspicion of fakery when the double agents SNOW and SUMMER sent messages designed to steer the bombers onto targets of British selection, including Coventry. Masterman could not have bragged about it better, except that he never did. There were only two mild allusions to directing German bombers in the book version of
The Double-Cross System
when it came out in 1972. Evidently, much more was in Masterman’s manuscript when Farago saw it, but was deleted before it went to print.9

There had been a deal, and here is how we know.

In his preface in
The Double Cross System
, Masterman wrote that the book was the report on the double-cross work performed by the British, a report he was asked to write at war’s end by MI5 director-general David Petrie, which is consistent with the after-action reports that were asked of all section heads. He said that he started it early in July 1945, and completed it in mid-August. This is a half-truth. All but the first page of Chapter 2 and half of Chapter 3, plus bits and pieces here and there, have been lifted word for word from a lengthy essay in the MI5 “SNOW” files entitled “SNOW, BISCUIT, CHARLIE, CELERY, SUMMER.” The last page of this nine-page case summary of some six thousand–plus words is missing, so the author is unknown, but the first page is date-stamped 23 April 1946. Its document number — 1803a — also positions it in the file in that month and year.10

Obviously, Masterman did not write this paper. He only joined MI5 in the last two months of the 1939–40 period it covers, and if he had been called back after leaving the service to do the very considerable research needed to write it, he would have surely said so. The most likely author was Major John Gwyer of B1B (Analysis). He is everywhere to be found in the MI5 files, for it was his job to look at as much as he could, see how it connected, and write reports. The two documents in the file on either side of Doc. 1803a are from him. He could only be as accurate as the available information, however, for this particular summary overlooks the trip Owens made to Lisbon in June 1940, and accepts Robertson’s incorrect conclusion that it was Ritter that McCarthy saw in Lisbon that July. Otherwise, it largely reflects events as they are to be derived from the pertinent documents that remain in the “SNOW” files.11

Clearly, a deal had been struck. It was probably handled by White. In exchange for dropping the bomb-target material, Masterman appears to have been offered a document that more comprehensively tells the story of the 1939–40 double agents, giving him the basis of a book even more attractive to publishers. Masterman agreed, for he certainly would not have got Doc. 1803a otherwise. The question remains: When did this occur?

One must try to puzzle things out from the available hard evidence.

There seems to be no certainty that Farago had access to the “SNOW files” as he claimed. In the first place, it is unlikely anyone then in MI5 would have allowed it, given that he was an uncontrollable foreigner and already a well-known popular writer on wartime espionage. Second, there appears to be nothing about SNOW in
Game of Foxes
that he could not have got from the Abwehr files he discovered or from contact with Masterman.

His description of the other 1939–40 double agents can be traced back to previously published sources, especially Lord Jowitt’s
Some Were Spies
, and to his interview with Owens’s wartime German controller, Nikolaus Ritter. His research had led him to the captured German records section of the National Archives in Washington, where he stumbled (as did this writer) upon microfilmed documents pertaining to the agents Ast Hamburg had been running in Britain. The Hamburg-to-Berlin message of September 18, 1939, conveying A-3504’s report on radar probably convinced him that this A-3504 was a genuine German spy operating in England. By finding and interviewing Ritter in 1969–70, Farago learned his identity — Arthur Owens.12

Advance copies of
The Game of Foxes
were released sometime in 1971, and a tentative publishing date of January 14, 1972, was set. These releases mark at least one sure moment when the British authorities learned what was in Farago’s book,13 and they would have been appalled. Not only was there the stuff about controlling German bombing, but by revealing that the secret of radar had been sprung before the Battle of Britain, Farago showed that MI5 had been decisively duped by the Abwehr from the outset. There must have been an instant scramble to get someone to Washington to see what records he had found.

It would have been a rueful awakening. The Abwehr files Farago accessed were from Nebenstelle Bremen, and had been captured by the British army when it entered that city in 1945. They included twenty-two folders containing hundreds of original messages from spies operating in Britain. When eventually they were delivered to London, they vanished into some secret cellar, never again to be seen. However, before being sent away, they had been loaned to the U.S. naval base at Bremen to be sifted through for anything of American interest. The navy microfilmed the lot.14

Farago’s disclosures about Owens reporting on radar and giving bomb-target information at the behest of MI5 suddenly got infinitely worse. The evidence was in the archives in Washington. It all could be proven.

How White responded can only be guessed at. If the deletions and additions proposed for Masterman’s manuscript had not already gone forward, they certainly did so now. Masterman was to claim in his autobiography that he had nothing to do with these revisions — did not even know what they were — but did admit he had lined up Yale University Press as publisher. Masterman’s revised
The Double-Cross System
came out within weeks of Farago’s
The Game of Foxes
, both without endnotes, unusual for Farago in that his earlier books had been heavily documented.15 So far so good. The two books would compete with one another and the scholarly community in Britain could be counted upon to rally around one of their own. Masterman’s book was devoid even of a bibliography, whereas Farago’s went on for eight pages and included the pre-1939 espionage classics of Colonel Walter Nicolai, Henry Landau, and Sir Basil Thomson. Masterman credited only his own ideas, fresh-minted like gold sovereigns entirely from his experiences on the XX Committee. The wonder of it is, with the exception of the sporadic pooh-poohing from the likes of maverick Oxford historian A.P. Taylor and veteran counter-intelligence officer David Mure,
The Double-Cross System
came to be swallowed whole. Farago’s book was essentially forgotten; Masterman’s became celebrated.

Colonel Nicolai, Germany’s spymaster of the First World War, wrote in
The German Secret Service
(1924) that a country at war must first and foremost win the battles for public opinion at home. Britain was at war16 — the Cold War — and the battles now were about winning or losing world opinion. White was dealing with a rogue octogenarian determined to betray his oath of secrecy for a few rays of sunlight. It is hard not to be sympathetic with how he decided to handle it. The idea of class struggle promoted by the Comintern (Communist International) in the 1920s and ’30s still cast its shadow over British workers and students in the 1960s. After Kim Philby’s defection, further damage to Britain’s image at home and abroad was to be avoided at all costs. Taking advantage of an old man’s vainglory17 by allowing him to publish what was essentially an untrue story was a reasonable tactic under the circumstances.

There was unexpected collateral damage.

When
The Double-Cross System
hit the bookstores, it was found to contain the story of Popov’s Pearl Harbor questionnaire. The XX Committee had had little to do with it, but Masterman put it in anyway, along with the veiled accusation that the U.S. government of 1941 had failed to act on a clear warning that the Pacific Fleet was in danger. This played directly into suspicions that had been running for years in and out of Congress that President Roosevelt had sacrificed the Pacific Fleet in order to get into Churchill’s war with Germany. This was an especially sensitive issue in the late 1960s, because the United States was in the process of losing the most unpopular war in its history — Vietnam. And it was another president’s war.18

The Tet Offensive of 1968, when the North Vietnamese attacked the Americans in Hue, was a defeat for them, but a bigger loss for the United States. Support at home for the war collapsed. There were anti-war marches across the land. Draft-dodgers fleeing to Canada became heroes. The “military-industrial complex,” the CIA, and the U.S. Armed Forces were vilified by young Americans in their teens and twenties facing compulsory military service. Vietnam had begun as a police action under President John F. Kennedy, but had escalated into a full-scale war involving all the armed services under his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. It was never formally declared by Congress; it was a White House war.

One can never know how it would have affected the nation if it had been confirmed then that Roosevelt had read Popov’s questionnaire, and had allowed the attack on Pearl Harbor to go ahead anyway. The American authorities who knew it was true were not taking any chances. With files bulging with documents that proved Popov’s questionnaire did make it to the proper decision-makers, the FBI sat on them and took the blame. J. Edgar Hoover was still head of the Bureau, so the decision was his.

Again, it looks like mischief by Masterman. Because of its importance, White would surely have read the revised version of
The Double-Cross System
before it was cleared for publication. It is hard to believe he would have allowed the two pages about the questionnaire and its printing if he had seen them. But the manuscript was being published in the United States, so Masterman could well have added a few last-minute pages of text. Farago’s previous book,
The Broken Seal
, had been about Pearl Harbor, but he had not come up with an item so delicious. Given what we now know of his character, Masterman may have put it in his own book just to show Farago a thing or two.