muddled political views. A monarchist and a conservative, Franco’s Spain was his spiritual home; he travelled there as often as he could, not merely to visit the large Madrid Abwehr HQ at Calle Claudio Coello 151, but also to commune with like-minded Spanish politicians and grandees. The Abwehr’s ship-watching service in Spain, the Unternehmen Bodden, monitoring Allied movements through the Straits of Gibraltar with the aid of advanced infra-red technology, and reporting them to the Kriegsmarine and the Luftwaffe’s Air Fleet 1 in Italy, formed the most impressive element in the organisation’s overseas operations.
Yet if Canaris bears much responsibility for the shortcomings of Germany’s ‘big picture’ intelligence, he could never have run an honest operation under the dead hand of Hitler, any more than Moscow Centre could do so in the shadow of Stalin. Reports on the condition and prospects of the enemy were permitted to reach conclusions only within parameters acceptable to the Führer. This crippling constraint was symbolised by Hitler’s annotation on an important intelligence report about Russian agricultural conditions: ‘This cannot be.’ Kurt Zeitzler, chief of the army general staff, wrote on 23 October 1942, the eve of Stalingrad: ‘The Russians no longer have any reserves worth mentioning and are not capable of launching large-scale offensives.’ Himmler in 1944 declared without embarrassment that his first requirement from Germany’s intelligence services was not truth, but loyalty to the Führer. This was an important statement, the most vivid expression of the huge weakness of the Abwehr and the RSHA throughout the Second World War.
Historian Michael Handel has written: ‘Leaders in a democratic system are generally more inclined to consider a wide variety of options than those who have always functioned within authoritarian or totalitarian political systems. In authoritarian countries, where the climb to the top is an unrelenting struggle for power, habits of cooperation and openness are usually less developed … Tolerance for ideas that deviate from the “party line” … are seen as personal criticism.’ These features of almost all dictatorships crippled German intelligence activities beyond the battlefield, and sometimes also within it. Himmler’s deputy Reinhard Heydrich, for instance, was far more interested in using the RSHA as a weapon against the Nazi empire’s internal enemies than as a means of securing information about its foreign foes. Hitler never wished to use intelligence as a planning or policy-making tool. He recognised its utility only at a tactical level: the Nazis were strikingly incurious about Abroad.
Yet the fact that the Abwehr was an unsuccessful intelligence-gathering organisation did not mean that Hitler’s armed forces were blind on the battlefield: their access to tactical intelligence was generally good. In the first half of the war Germany’s wireless interceptors and codebreakers enjoyed successes which would today seem impressive, were they not measured against those of the British and Americans. The Wehrmacht had excellent voice-monitoring units, which in every theatre of war provided important information. ‘The Y Service was the best source of intelligence,’ said Hans-Otto Behrendt, one of Rommel’s staff in North Africa. In August 1941, aided by an Italian employee, two agents of the Sezione Prelevamento – the ‘extraction section’ of Italian intelligence – opened the safe of the military attaché’s office at the US embassy in Rome. They removed his codebook – Military Intelligence Code No. 11 – and photographed it. This enabled the Axis to read substantial traffic through the ensuing ten months, and proved a seriously significant intelligence break. In 1942 it had especially grievous consequences for Eighth Army in the desert, since the US military attaché in Cairo, Col. Bonner Fellers, reported in detail to Washington on British plans and intentions. A German intelligence officer paid generous tribute to ‘this incomparable source of authentic and reliable information, which … contributed so decisively during the first half of 1942 to our victories in North Africa’.
At sea, some of the Royal Navy’s ciphers were found aboard the British submarine Seal, captured off the German coast on 5 May 1940, owing to an extraordinary and culpable failure by the minelayer’s officers to destroy its confidential papers. The Kriegsmarine was able to read much of the Royal Navy’s North Sea traffic until August 1940, and some warship communications until September 1941. Throughout the first half of the war, the Kriegsmarine’s B-Dienst read the Royal Navy’s convoy codes, with grievous consequences for Allied shipping losses. Even where signals could not be decrypted, radio-traffic analysis enabled Axis intelligence staffs to judge enemy deployments remarkably effectively, at least until the second half of the war, when Allied commanders became more astute and security-conscious. Patrolling, air reconnaissance and PoW interrogations all provided streams of useful data to German operational commanders, as did open-source information – enemy newspaper and broadcast monitoring.
In the first phase of the war until 1942, while the Wehrmacht was triumphant on battlefields across Europe, these sources sufficed to tell its commanders all that they felt they needed to know about the world, and about their enemies. Victories masked the abject humint failures of the Abwehr. As long as Germany was winning, why should anyone make trouble about imperfections in the war machine? It was only when Hitler’s armies started losing that hard questions began to be asked about the Reich’s abysmal political and strategic intelligence. Hitler himself was, of course, much to blame, but Canaris exercised operational responsibility. The admiral fell from grace, though it was by then far too late – probably impossible, for reasons institutionalised in the Nazi system – to repair his corrupt and ineffective espionage organisation.
While anxious not to be a bad man, Canaris lacked the courage to be a good one. Far from being a substantial historical figure, he was a small one, grappling with dilemmas and difficulties far beyond his capabilities. Trevor-Roper professed to see a close resemblance between the admiral and Menzies, his British counterpart. Both men were conservative, honourable – and weak. By a trifling coincidence, Canaris had a mistress in Vienna whose sister was married to Menzies’ brother. Trevor-Roper came to regard the Abwehr as ‘a mirror image of [MI6], with many of the same weaknesses and absurdities … I recognised, across the intervening fog of war, old friends of Broadway and Whaddon Hall transmuted into German uniform in the Tirpitz Ufer or at Wannsee.’ The admiral did little to merit his eventual fate at the hands of Hitler’s executioners: he frequently talked treason, but did nothing to further it. Far from becoming a martyr to the cause of a ‘good Germany’, he was merely an incompetent servant of an evil one.
3
Miracles Take a Little Longer: Bletchley
1 ‘TIPS’ AND ‘CILLIS’
In the winter of 1939, MI6 came under scrutiny and fierce criticism within Whitehall, intensified by the Venlo fiasco. Stewart Menzies, knowing the precariousness of his position as ‘C’, compiled a twenty-six-page document defending his service, in which he risked playing one card which might – and did – save his bacon. He promised his masters that the country was ‘about to reap the fruits’ of MI6’s liaison with Allied secret services in a fashion ‘which should be of inestimable benefits to the Air Ministry within a few weeks, and probably to the Admiralty within a month or two’. The significance of this vaguely expressed claim was that Menzies believed that Bletchley Park, with the help of the French and Poles, was close to cracking some German ciphers. Such successes could go far indeed towards compensating for MI6’s humint failure. His expectations would remain unfulfilled for much of the year that followed. Few even within the intelligence community dared to hope that Britain could emulate, far less surpass, the 1914–18 triumphs of Room 40. Admiral Godfrey, head of naval intelligence, wrote to Menzies on 18 November, saying that ‘whether or not Cryptanalysis will ever again give us the knowledge we had of German movements in the late war’, MI6 should exert itself to plant agents in enemy ports to report shipping movements. Godfrey did not seem to expect much from the codebreakers.
In peacetime, few nations commit their finest brains to national security. Brilliant people seldom choose careers in intelligence – or, for that matter, in the armed forces. A struggle for national survival
