clothes in a Madrid street – conducted a massive cover operation in the North African desert before the October 1942 Battle of El Alamein. Historians have celebrated Clarke’s ingenuity in creating fictional forces which caused Rommel to deploy significant strength well south of the focal point of Montgomery’s assault. However, such guile did not spare Eighth Army from the fortnight of hard fighting that proved necessary to break through the Afrika Korps. The Germans argued that Clarke’s activities changed nothing in the end, because they had time to redeploy northwards before the decisive British assault. In Burma Col. Peter Fleming, brother of the creator of James Bond, went to elaborate and hazardous lengths to leave a haversack full of deceptive ‘secret papers’ in a wrecked jeep where the enemy were bound to find it, but the Japanese took no notice of this haul when they got it. From 1942 onwards, British intelligence achieved an almost complete understanding of Germany’s air defences and the electronic technologies they employed, but Allied bomber forces continued to suffer punitive casualties, especially before US long-range fighters wrecked the Luftwaffe in the air in the spring of 1944.
Whatever the contribution of British tactical deceptions in North Africa, Allied deceivers had two important and almost indisputable strategic successes. In 1943–44, Operation ‘Zeppelin’ created a fictitious British army in Egypt which induced Hitler to maintain large forces in Yugoslavia and Greece to repel an Allied Balkan landing. It was this imaginary threat, not Tito’s guerrillas, that caused twenty-two Axis divisions to kick their heels in the south-east until after D-Day. The second achievement was, of course, that of Operation ‘Fortitude’ before and after the assault on Normandy. It bears emphasis that neither could have exercised such influence had not the Allies possessed sufficient hard power, together with command of the sea, to make it credible that they might land armies almost anywhere.
Some Russian deceptions dwarf those of the British and Americans. The story of agent ‘Max’, and the vast operation launched as a diversion from the Stalingrad offensive, at a cost of 70,000 Russian lives, is one of the most astonishing of the war, and almost unknown to Western readers. In 1943–44, other Soviet ruses prompted the Germans repeatedly to concentrate their forces in the wrong places in advance of onslaughts by the Red Army. Air superiority was an essential prerequisite, in the East as in the West: the ambitious deceptions of the later war years were possible only because the Germans could not carry out photographic reconnaissance to disprove the ‘legends’ they were sold across the airwaves and through false documents.
The Western Allies were much less successful in gathering humint than sigint.* Neither the British nor the Americans acquired a single highly placed source around the German, Japanese or Italian governments or high commands, until in 1943 OSS’s Allen Dulles began to receive some good Berlin gossip. The Western Allies achieved nothing like the Russians’ penetration of London, Washington, Berlin and Tokyo, the last through their agent Richard Sorge, working in the German embassy. The US got into the business of overseas espionage only after Pearl Harbor, and focused more effort on sabotage and codebreaking than on placing spies, as distinct from paramilitary groups, in enemy territory. OSS’s Research and Analysis Department in Washington was more impressive than its flamboyant but unfocused field operations. Moreover, I believe that Western Allied sponsorship of guerrilla war did more to promote the post-war self-respect of occupied nations than to hasten the destruction of Nazism. Russia’s partisan operations were conducted on a far more ambitious scale than the SOE/OSS campaigns, and propaganda boosted their achievements both at the time and in the post-war era. However, Soviet documents now available, of which my Russian researcher Dr Lyuba Vinogradovna has made extensive use, indicate that we should view the achievements of the Eastern guerrilla campaign, at least until 1943, with considerable scepticism.
As in all my books, I seek below to establish the ‘big picture’ framework, and to weave into this human stories of the spies, codebreakers and intelligence chiefs who served their respective masters – Turing at Bletchley and Nimitz’s cryptanalysts in the Pacific, the Soviet ‘Red Orchestra’ of agents in Germany, Reinhard Gehlen of OKH, William Donovan of OSS and many more exotic characters. The foremost reason the Western Allies did intelligence best was that they brilliantly exploited civilians, to whom both the US and British governments granted discretion, influence and – where necessary – military rank, as their opponents did not. When the first volume of the British official history of wartime intelligence was published thirty years ago, I suggested to its principal author Professor Harry Hinsley, a Bletchley veteran, that it seemed to show that the amateurs contributed more than did career secret service professionals. Hinsley replied somewhat impatiently, ‘Of course they did. You wouldn’t want to suppose, would you, that in peacetime the best brains of our society wasted their lives in intelligence?’
I have always thought this an important point, echoed in the writings of another academic, Hugh Trevor-Roper, who served in both MI5 and MI6, and whose personal achievement makes him seem one of the more remarkable British intelligence officers of the war. In peacetime, most secret services fulfilled their functions adequately, or at least did little harm, while staffed by people of moderate abilities. Once a struggle for national survival began, however, intelligence had to become part of the guiding brain of the war effort. Clashes on the battlefield could be fought by men of relatively limited gifts, the virtues of the sports field – physical fitness, courage, grit, a little initiative and common sense. But intelligence services suddenly needed brilliance. It sounds banal to say that they had to recruit intelligent people, but – as more than a few twentieth-century sages noted – in many countries this principle was honoured mostly in the breach.
A few words about the arrangement of this book: while my approach is broadly chronological, to avoid leaping too confusingly between traitors in Washington, Soviet spies in Switzerland and the mathematicians of Bletchley Park, the narrative persists with some themes beyond their time sequence. I have drawn heavily on the most authoritative published works in this field, those of Stephen Budiansky, David Kahn and Christopher Andrew notable among them, but I have also exploited archives in Britain, Germany and the US, together with much previously untranslated Russian material. I have made no attempt to discuss the mathematics of codebreaking, which has been done by writers much more numerate than myself.
It is often said that Ian Fleming’s thrillers bear no relationship to the real world of espionage. However, when reading contemporary Soviet reports and recorded conversations, together with the memoirs of Moscow’s wartime intelligence officers, I am struck by how uncannily they mirror the mad, monstrous, imagined dialogue of such people in Fleming’s From Russia With Love. And some of the plots planned and executed by the NKVD and the GRU were no less fantastic than his.
All historical narratives are necessarily tentative and speculative, but they become far more so when spies are involved. In chronicling battles, one can reliably record how many ships were sunk, aircraft shot down, men killed, how much ground was won or lost. But intelligence generates a vast, unreliable literature, some of it produced by protagonists for their own glorification or justification. One immensely popular account of Allied intelligence, Bodyguard of Lies, published in 1975, is largely a work of fiction. Sir William Stephenson, the Canadian who ran the British wartime intelligence coordination organisation in New York, performed a valuable liaison function, but was never much of a spymaster. This did not prevent him from assisting in the creation of a wildly fanciful 1976 biography of himself, A Man Called Intrepid, though there is no evidence that anybody ever called him anything of the sort. Most accounts of wartime SOE agents, particularly women and especially in France, contain large doses of romantic twaddle. Moscow’s mendacity is undiminished by time: the KGB’s official intelligence history, published as recently as 1997, asserts that the British Foreign Office is still concealing documentation about its secret negotiations with ‘fascist’ Germany, and indeed its collusion with Hitler.
Allied codebreaking operations against Germany, Italy and Japan exercised far more influence than did any spy. It is impossible to quantify their impact, however, and it is baffling that Harry Hinsley, the official historian, asserted that Ultra probably shortened the war by three years.
