The Pitfalls of Intelligence History

It has often been said that the intelligence services of the major powers present observers with a “wilderness of mirrors”. That is demonstrated, yet again, in Paul Monk’s otherwise intelligent and carefully drawn article “Christopher Andrew and the Strange Case of Roger Hollis” (Quadrant, April 2010).

First an admission. Christopher Andrew is an old personal and academic friend of mine and is well able to respond himself, if he wishes. Furthermore, I have not yet read his Defence of the Realm and can therefore not comment directly on it. But a few words on the background of matters that exercise Monk may be in order.

First of all, no one can understand the intelligence affairs or personalities of the Second World War or the immediate postwar period without sketching the impact of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and, more particularly, the events of the Spanish Civil War. We are nowadays encouraged to see the contest between communism and anticommunism as mere shadow-boxing, and anticommunism as largely manufactured hysteria about “reds under beds”. The simple facts are, of course, that Leninism pronounced itself to be at war with the entire bourgeois system, and that it, and its Comintern machine, aimed to promote revolution everywhere. There can be no serious question about the fact that the very powerful French and Italian and many other communist parties were, until well after 1945, under the direction, even to some extent control, of Moscow.

It is also the case that during the Second World War the German authorities saw themselves, among other things, as the defenders of the West against “Bolshevism”. Whether that claim is now regarded as preposterous is irrelevant. The German armies in the East were an essentially multi-national force, and included Rumanian, Hungarian, Italian, Croat and other allied units. The Waffen SS, in particular, included Dutch, Scandinavian, French and other non-German divisions. A Spanish “Blue Division” served against the Russians; and when the Soviets captured the 250,000 or so Germans in their victory at Stalingrad in early 1943, some 50,000 of them turned out to be Russians in German uniforms. In the final days of the war, as the Russians closed on the centre of Berlin, some of its fiercest remaining defenders were remnants of the French “Charlemagne” SS Division, who knew they were going to die anyway but still saw themselves as defenders of Western civilisation against Bolshevism.

These fundamental hostilities were pre-figured in the Spanish Civil War, whose Europe-wide influence is often overlooked. The Republican side was supported by, among other things, “International Brigades” of volunteers from all parts of the Western world but, as time went by, was increasingly dominated if not run by Stalin. The eventually victorious side headed by General Franco was closely linked to the “fascist” states of Italy and Germany, who supplied troops and weapons, and enjoyed widespread sympathy among anticommunist groups everywhere.

It is hardly surprising that in such a climate some influential groups in Britain should sympathise with Germany and Italy—neither the Kristallnacht in Germany, nor the Munich agreement, nor the Jewish Holocaust had yet happened—or that, per contra, not a few idealistic young men should have concluded that joining the Communist Party, or otherwise helping Russia, was going to be the only effective way of opposing the fascist advance. Among these young men were, of course, the “Cambridge Five” to whom Monk rightly refers, and many others, including George Orwell.

Moreover, after June 1941 Russia was an ally, and one who, until the very end of the war, was doing all the fighting against the vast bulk of German forces. It is not in the least surprising that helping “Uncle Joe” (Stalin) and the Russians became hugely popular across Britain. Or that the line between treason and effective help to Britain’s fighting ally should become blurred. It was not until late 1945, or maybe 1946, that the lines of the “Cold War” began to be drawn. Not until Winston Churchill’s great speech at Fulton, Missouri, in which (with President Truman’s consent) he used that famous phrase about the “Iron Curtain” coming down across Europe, was the issue so starkly presented in public. But that only came on March 5, 1946.

None of this is to challenge Monk’s detailed discussion of what might have been the identity of some particular “mole” or who might (or might not) have met whom back in the 1920s and 1930s. But it is that background against which we should see the recruitment and other policies of the British intelligence services and their nascent American colleagues. Not to mention the pro-Soviet sympathies of some of the stellar figures in the British cultural and intellectual world that began well before 1939 and continued until well after the war. As is well known, they included George Bernard Shaw, the historian Christopher Hill who became Master of Balliol, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

There are some other curiosities in Monk’s discussion. Perhaps the most curious is the following. Monk accuses Andrew, no doubt rightly, of skating lightly over a number of important issues, especially since Andrew had access to virtually all of MI5’s files. But as most of Cambridge and half of literary London well know, Andrew, his agent and his publisher had to fight for something like two years to get security clearances for the material they did eventually manage to publish. For all I know Christopher might find it difficult to respond to Monk even now, given the secrecy provisions by which he continues to be bound. His book may be the official history but it is not, and cannot possibly be, the whole unvarnished story.

Another oddity comes in Monk’s accusation that Christopher accepts much too readily some obviously suspicious lacunae in the stories of certain participants. It is a little like Sherlock Holmes’s point that the curious thing about the dog was that it didn’t bark. But we know some things. We know that British intelligence was quite remarkably subtle and successful in deceiving the Germans during the Second World War. We also know, from John Masterman’s 1972 book The Double Cross System, that the British managed to locate and turn around all German agents in Britain during the war and used them to deceive their German masters.

Monk mentions nothing like that in the case of Soviet spying. But is it really so unlikely that the British (or after the war, the Americans) managed to “turn” some Soviet officials and agents who cannot, even now, be mentioned? We got to know about Penkovsky, but only long after the Soviets unmasked and shot him. We know about defectors, especially the ones who brought documents, like Mitrokhin, whom Christopher Andrew has written about. But might there not be others?

Let us indulge in a little pure speculation. Monk makes a good deal of a Soviet GRU (military intelligence) agent named “Sonia” who, he says, on September 4, 1943, radioed from Oxford the text of the Anglo-American agreement on collaborating to produce an atomic weapon, which included a provision that neither would communicate information about it to any third party without joint consent. Monk stresses the secrecy surrounding that agreement and quotes General Leslie Groves (head of the Manhattan Project to produce the bomb) as writing in his memoirs that “For several years after the war the existence of the agreement was not known either to the American Congress or to the British Parliament.” The information, incidentally, reached Moscow almost simultaneously with the Anglo-American invasion of Italy.

But the existence of nuclear research and preparation was no secret in the small international community of nuclear physicists. As early as 1942–43 the British staged operations against Norwegian “heavy water” facilities to deprive the Germans of material for their suspected nuclear plans. So what if, in later 1943, the objectives of the Anglo-Americans had been twofold: to make sure that the Russians heard about the nuclear agreement from a source that Stalin would trust and not suspect of Western disinformation but to keep it away from parliaments and congresses that would leak all over the place and cause political trouble at home? In Britain, for instance, someone might have argued that the agreement, under which British nuclear personnel and know-how were transferred to the USA, was a “sell-out”.

Not only that, but Monk tells us that on October 15, 1943, the GRU obtained “details of the early plans for Operation Overlord”, the cross-Channel invasion of Europe, being planned for 1944, including detailed maps and plans. That, too, was of course material very secretly held in London and Washington.

But why would the Western allies want to be able to convey to Stalin, entirely deniably, information denied to their own parliaments? That year, 1943, was one of the more interesting years of the Second World War in Europe. In January–February the Soviets won their victory at Stalingrad. In July they won the greatest tank battle in the history of the world, at Kursk, when the Germans failed to get enough of their new Panther and Tiger tanks to the front in time. At the same time, we know that Stalin became increasingly furious and alarmed about the continued failure of the British and Americans to cross the Channel and relieve German pressure on the Russians. Always given to paranoia, he thought once again—as he had done in 1938–39—that the allies might well betray him by letting the Germans and Russians exhaust one another and then coming in to collect the political winnings in Europe.

It is no surprise, therefore, that in mid-1943 he began some subtle, totally confidential and deniable soundings through Sweden, and possibly elsewhere like Switzerland, about any possibilities of a separate Soviet-German peace agreement. Just what he intended is less clear. If the Russian front had fallen silent, on almost any terms, Hitler would have been left in virtually unassailable command of the whole of Europe, with all its industries and resources. No Anglo-American cross-Channel attack would have been feasible and Stalin could have expected, some years later, a fresh attack from a revived and rearmed German-dominated Europe. On the other hand, in 1943 the mere threat of such an agreement, however faint, would certainly have put a burr under British and American saddles. If the British and Americans did find out—and I for one do not know whether they did—it would have been hugely in the Western interest to give Stalin between September and October just the kind of credible information that the GRU obtained from sources that even Stalin could trust. In any event, ideas about a separate Soviet-German peace faded.

Nor can it be any great surprise that Stalin had agents in Britain and America (and in Germany and Japan) and that some of them came to be treated by the Soviet services as highly trustworthy. Richard Sorge in Tokyo—the man who, by telling Moscow that Japan was not about to attack the Soviet Union, made it possible for Stalin to transfer enough troops from Siberia to Moscow to stop and reverse the German attack on the city in 1941—is an obvious case in point. But would it be a great surprise if there had been Soviet agents in Britain who had been “turned”, as had German agents before and after them, and maintained in comfort? Would it even be a huge surprise if there had been British officials, perhaps quite senior ones, who worked for the Soviets in important and believable ways, no doubt giving away some very valuable information or protecting known Soviet agents, but in the process acquiring altogether more important material, including knowledge of Soviet networks, methods and systems of the utmost value to London—all the while surrounding that with the proverbial “bodyguard of lies”?

Monk concludes by making two other points that may deserve comment. The first is his deep suspicion about London’s urging that the dominions refrain from undertaking their own studies of the Soviet intelligence service, since that would be “redundant”. But quite apart from the quaint picture of separate dominion intelligence services falling over each other trying to find out the same thing, can anyone doubt that London had altogether greater and better resources for any such investigation, not to mention justifiable fears about Canberra’s then quite inadequate security systems?

The final point concerns the suppression, apparently at the request of the Keating government in 1992, of those portions of the Mitrokhin archive that dealt with Australia. Monk thinks that is simply a pointless piece of self-protection by the Australian Labor Party and ASIO. Perhaps. But surely that is difficult to judge unless we know what the suppressed files actually contain and, especially, what they might reveal about still-current persons, systems and practices?

It is admittedly one of the perennial fascinations of trying to write about intelligence matters that however hard one works, however many libraries and files one sifts, there is always something maybe just out of reach that could change the entire picture. It was so with John Masterman’s XX revelations in 1972. It was even more so with the vastly important story of “Ultra”, the decryption of German wartime radio messages that allowed the British to read German strategic and even tactical plans. Maybe no less important turned out to be the story of the American interception and decryption of Japanese Navy radio signals that allowed the US Navy to catch the Japanese carrier feet heading for Midway in June 1942. That, arguably, decided the entire campaign in the Pacific. Monk and I—and Christopher Andrew—can all be confident that at some point in the future the entirely unexpected will strike again. Which is why studying “intelligence” is such fun.

Harry G. Gelber’s most recent book is The Dragon and the Foreign Devils: China and the World, 1100 BC to the Present.