Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by John Keegan
Illustrations
Maps
Dedication
Title Page
Introduction
1. Knowledge of the Enemy
2. Chasing Napoleon
3. Local Knowledge: Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley
4. Wireless Intelligence
5. Crete: Foreknowledge No Help
6. Midway: the Complete Intelligence Victory?
7. Intelligence, One Factor Among Many: the Battle of the Atlantic
8. Human Intelligence and Secret Weapons
Epilogue: Military Intelligence Since 1945
Conclusion: The Value of Military Intelligence
Picture Section
References
Acknowledgements
Select Bibliography
Index
Copyright
John Keegan is the Defence Editor of the Daily Telegraph and Britain’s foremost military historian. The Reith Lecturer in 1998, he is the author of many bestselling books including The Face of Battle, The Mask of Command, Six Armies in Normandy, Battle at Sea, The Second World War, A History of Warfare (awarded the Duff Cooper Prize), Warpaths, The Battle for History, The First World War and, most recently, The Iraq War.
For many years John Keegan was the Senior Lecturer in Military History at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and he has been a Fellow of Princeton University and Delmas Distinguished Professor of History at Vassar. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He received the OBE in the Gulf War honours list, and was knighted in the Millennium honours list in 1999.
The Face of Battle
The Nature of War
(with Joseph Darracott)
World Armies
Who’s Who in Military History
(with Andrew Wheatcroft)
Six Armies in Normandy
Soldiers
(with Richard Holmes)
The Mask of Command
The Price of Admiralty
The Second World War
A History of Warfare
Warpaths
The Battle for History
War and Our World: The Reith Lectures 1998
The First World War
The First World War (Illustrated Edition)
Churchill: A Life
The Iraq War
I have tried to steer clear of the intelligence world all my working life. For good reason: as a young lecturer in military history at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst I was told that any contact with intelligence organisations, those of other countries especially but also our own, would attract official disapproval (I should have answered, but did not, that I possessed no shred of information that could have been of the slightest interest to any sensible intelligence officer). Later, as Defence Correspondent, then Defence Editor of The Daily Telegraph, I decided that entanglement with intelligence organisations was unwise, having, by that stage of my life, concluded, through reading, conversation and a little personal observation, that anyone who mingled in the intelligence world, in the belief that he could make use of contacts thus made, would more probably be made use of, to his disadvantage. I continue to believe that to be the case.
Nevertheless, and probably inevitably, given my career first in the Ministry of Defence, then as a newspaperman and continuously as a military historian, I have come to know over the years more inhabitants of the intelligence world than I would have deliberately set out to meet. Some of my Sandhurst pupils became intelligence officers; one died, heroically, at the hands of the Irish Republican Army. Some of my Sandhurst colleagues served in Special Forces, which are on intimate terms with the intelligence organisations and often act as their executive arm. Academic life, improbably as it may seem, sometimes brought me into touch with the intelligence services, though, it should be explained, with their analytic rather than operational branches. Fleet Street – where the offices of The Daily Telegraph were still located when I joined in 1986 – had then, and still has, its own informal relations with the intelligence services; at the outset the newspaper encouraged me to get to know what were called ‘the contacts’.
The first to whom I was sent was also the most important, the then chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, which oversees the work of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and the Security Service (MI5), dealing respectively in foreign and domestic intelligence. It was arranged that I should meet him in one of London’s grand gentlemen’s clubs. I was not told how I should recognise him. I remembered, however, from the novels of John le Carré – someone with whom Fleet Street would also bring me into touch – that a good agent always sits in the corner of the room from which he can see the entrance and has access to two separate exits. On arriving, I spotted the chairman instantly.
I later met the head of MI6 and, much later still, the then head of MI5, (Dame) Stella Rimington; I have no hesitation in mentioning her name since, to the outrage of some of her colleagues, she insisted in retirement on publishing her memoirs. I met her in the company of my then editor and great friend, Max Hastings, who had invited me to join them for dinner, perhaps to assure her that the occasion was purely social and not an attempt on his part to extract information. In the event I had a strong feeling of playing gooseberry; I certainly took little part in the conversation. A few days later an outraged Max cornered me in the office. ‘Do you know what a friend has just told me? The morning after our dinner with Stella she posted the gist of what we discussed on the Whitehall e-mail. Can you credit it?’ My memories of civil service thought-processes came to the fore. ‘All too easily,’ I said, ‘she was getting her retaliation in first. Government servants are terrified of accusations of treating with the enemy.’
I found the American intelligence services altogether more human. At an academic conference I bumped into a genial character who knew my work as a military historian and asked what aspect of it I enjoyed most. ‘Order of battle analysis,’ I replied unhesitatingly; the order of battle is the list of units involved in an operation, often surprisingly difficult to establish. ‘Really,’ he said. A little while later I got a message from him to say that he was responsible for training American government servants to whom order of battle was a matter of great importance. Could I come to Washington to give a lecture on the subject?
Washington turned out to be Langley, Virginia and the government servants in question trainee analysts of the Central Intelligence Agency; analysts process the information which is assembled by the Agency’s other branch, its field officers. My first lecture was a success. Invited to give it a second time, I found myself delivered to CIA headquarters and put into the hands of an escorting officer. I was impressed by the Agency’s attention to detail. ‘You’ll need a pass’, my escorting officer said and put before me a sheet of paper for signature. It contained more personal information about myself than I could have readily assembled. ‘We’re going to see the Director,’ he said, ‘but not yet. Let’s have a cup of coffee’. He took me round the corner. The husband and wife running the coffee stall were blind.
‘Now we’re going to the Director’s office.’ He set off confidently, first one floor, than another. I sensed a loss of confidence. After a bit he stopped to question a passer-by. ‘Wrong floor,’ he said, with a touch of embarrassment. Eventually arrived – all doors looked identical and had minuscule nameplates below eye level – we entered an anteroom full of muscular young men with bulges near their armpits. ‘The Director is expecting you,’ one said.
I entered the adjoining room. A very large man, who I subsequently learned was William Casey, Director of Central Intelligence, indicated a seat and began to speak. I had by this stage formed the impression, by intuition alone, that the CIA wished to communicate with The Daily Telegraph; the trouble was I could not discern quite what. I shuffled my chair nearer Mr Casey’s desk. He continued to speak, unintelligibly. I shuffled nearer. Eventually it dawned on me that the Director was not talking about current intelligence affairs but military history; he was a reader of my books and wanted to discuss technique, as he wrote himself. It was still difficult to understand what he was saying.
Eventually, and clearly as a sign that time was up, he rose from his desk, extracted a book from a shelf, wrote in it and said goodbye. The book turned out to be Where and How the War Was Fought, a surprisingly gripping account of the War of the Revolution related in terms of its geography; the warm inscription stated that my books had been of use to him in composing his. Slightly bemused, I returned to the corridor. My escorting officer was there and so were several other senior CIA agents. ‘What did he say?’ was their collective question. ‘I couldn’t really understand’, I answered. There was a collective burst of laughter. I had said the right thing. I later learned that the Director was known as ‘Mumbles’ and described as ‘the only man in government who doesn’t need a secure telephone.’
The last encounter with the intelligence world I shall mention was more complex and perhaps more sinister, though I would mislead if I implied that it was really dangerous. During the nineteen-eighties I formed a connection with the American magazine the Atlantic Monthly, then the highest-paying publication in the world. For the Atlantic I went to the Lebanon, during the Civil War, and later to the North-West Frontier, during the Russian war in Afghanistan. My reason for accepting its commissions was simple. I had four children at expensive schools and the sums it paid, $10,000 an article, went far to meet the costs of tuition. My last Atlantic commission was to report on the security situation in South Africa, just before the collapse of apartheid.
The arrangements were made by the magazine, which had contacts in South Africa. I was grateful for its intervention because I was still on the Staff of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and, though I would be absent during the Academy vacation, was well aware that I should not be visiting a country not then a member of the Commonwealth for a foreign magazine without official permission, which I had not secured or indeed requested. I was told I would be met on arrival. When I landed at Jan Smuts airport I found myself the only passenger whose suitcase was missing. I reported the loss and, with my guide, went on to Pretoria. During the next week, in which I bought clothes to replace those missing, I visited the Voortrekker Monument, the headquarters of the 1st Light Horse and the South African Ministry of Defence, where I was briefed by a Commodore in the South African Navy. I also went to lunch in the Pretoria Club with the retired head of South African military intelligence, General du Toit. Over lunch he enquired casually, ‘Are you still at Sandhurst?’ I felt a twinge; I thought I was travelling as a freelance journalist. He clearly had other thoughts. The disappearance of my suitcase suddenly seemed significant.
The suitcase eventually reappeared, at Johannesburg Central Police Station, the day before my departure. In the weeks following, I forgot about the oddity of the episode. Then, a month or two later, I got a telephone call from someone at the Ministry of Defence. Could we meet for lunch? Perhaps I didn’t listen very carefully. Anyhow, I jumped to the conclusion that the caller belonged to the Defence Intelligence Agency, an open and indeed very helpful body which I telephoned frequently for information when writing about wars in obscure parts of the world. We arranged to meet.
The young man from the ministry was impressive, well-dressed, well-mannered, well-spoken, what my generation would call smooth. After preliminaries, I said how pleased I was to meet a representative of the Defence Intelligence Agency, which was such a helpful source. A slight flicker passed across his brow. It was clear that there was a misunderstanding. ‘I’m not from the Defence Intelligence Agency’, he said. Without specifying which, he indicated that he came from another agency. I realised at once that he was an officer of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). I wondered what on earth he wanted with me. He shortly made that clear.
With remarkable frankness, he told me that he knew me from the past, having been at Sandhurst, felt he could trust me and had read my Atlantic Monthly article about South Africa. South Africa was his beat. He went there frequently. Alarmed, I blurted out the question, ‘Do they know about you?’ Imperturbably he answered, ‘They know some of my names. I hope they don’t know them all because that would mean twenty years.’ While I digested that he went on, ‘I found your account of your interviews in South Africa very interesting. Do you think you could go back again and ask more questions? I would tell you what to ask. Everything paid, of course.’
I was struck dumb and remained dumb for some time. Eventually lunch came to an end. His parting words were, ‘Do you think you will have to mention this conversation to your editor?’ Words returned. ‘You bet I do’, I said. Max, when I got back to the office, erupted. ‘John, don’t touch it with a bargepole. You haven’t even been to spy school. They’d eat you for breakfast.’ I had already come to the same conclusion.
This terminated my one and only encounter with the inner secret world. I have not a single regret that intimacy ended there. I know with certainty that I lack any of the qualities, courage and self-confidence foremost, to serve it usefully. On the other hand, I am grateful for having met some of those who do. I do not wish to mention names. I would say, however, that among those to whom I have been introduced during my on-off encounter with the world of espionage is one of the most celebrated traitors of the twentieth century. He served the West, at great danger to himself, and is a fascinating and charming human being. About him, however, I share the feelings of my wife, in whom burns the true fire of British patriotism. ‘I like him,’ she said, after our only meeting, ‘but I can’t suppress the knowledge that he betrayed his country. I would die rather than be a traitor.’
So to her, my beloved Susanne, I make my first acknowledgement. I also wish to acknowledge the help and support of our children and children-in-law, Lucy and Brooks Newmark, Tom and Pepi, Matthew and Rose, and to thank them for the entry into our lives of their wonderful children, Benjamin, Sam, Max, Lily, Zachary and Walter. I particularly want to thank Lindsey Wood, my indispensable assistant, for her help, and my publishers, Anthony Whittome, Simon Master, Ash Green and Will Sulkin, my brilliant picture researcher, Anne–Marie Ehrlich and the master mapmaker Reginald Piggott. Geography is the key to military history.
Without breaking confidences, I would also like to thank Alan Judd, John Scarlett, Sams Smith, George Allen, William Casey, Bill Gates, Percy Cradock, Anthony Duff, Jeremy Phipps and John Wilsey. Among my colleagues at The Daily Telegraph I would like to thank Charles Moore, Michael Smith and Kate Baden.
Finally, let me thank my literary agent, Anthony Sheil. He set out in life, as a rich young man, to make a fortune betting on the horses. He retired from that undertaking to backing authors, of whom I have been gratefully one. About horses he remarked, memorably, ‘You can never know enough.’ It might be the motto of this book.
Sources for the case-studies which form the substance of this book will be found in the chapter notes. This bibliography includes some of the more general works on intelligence which the author has found of particular value and in which he has confidence. It does not include many books often cited in bibliographies of ‘intelligence’ which are too often sensationalist or mere compendia of intelligence gossip or speculation. It excludes most biographies and autobiographies of intelligence agents or their controllers which are rarely reliable.
Beesly, Patrick, Very Special Intelligence. The Story of the Admiralty’s Operational Intelligence Centre 1939–45, London, 1977
The author worked in the OIC during the Second World War and this scholarly and reliable book conveys a valuable picture of its methods and achievements. It does not cover operations in the Mediterranean or Pacific.
Bennett, Ralph, Ultra in the West. The Normandy Campaign, 1944–5, London, 1979; Ultra and Mediterranean Strategy, London, 1989
The author, a young Cambridge history graduate, worked at Bletchley in Hut 3, which interpreted deciphered German army and air force intercepts, from February 1941 until the end of the war. He sets out to demonstrate in detail how the intercepts influenced the conduct of operations, a daunting task in which he largely succeeds. His book is one of the most original and valuable on ‘the Ultra secret’. After the war he returned to Cambridge where he eventually became President of Magdalene College.
Boyle, Andrew, The Climate of Treason. Five Who Spied For Russia, London, 1979
A professional writer rather than historian, Boyle deserves attention because of his exceptional ability to portray individual character and social atmosphere. His portraits of the ‘Cambridge spies’, Burgess, Maclean and Philby particularly, are highly convincing, as is his evocation of the ethos of their public and private lives. Though now a little dated, and inaccurate in places, The Climate of Treason is indispensable to anyone seeking to understand the attraction of Soviet Communism to the university-educated in Britain before and after the Second World War.
Calvocoressi, Peter, Top Secret Ultra, London, 1980
Calvocoressi, a member of the long-established Greek community in Britain, educated at Eton and Oxford, spent 1940–45 as a Royal Air Force officer at Bletchley. His memoir is especially valuable for the picture it provides of how Bletchley worked day-to-day.
Chapman, Guy, The Dreyfus Trials, New York, 1972
A meticulous study, by a professional historian, of the most notorious intelligence scandal of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The long-drawn-out investigation of a suspected traitor remains an object lesson in how not to conduct counter-espionage proceedings. Professor Chapman was an historian of France rather than of the intelligence world but his work is of great value to intelligence organisations everywhere.
Clark, Ronald, The Man Who Broke Purple. The Life of the World’s Greatest Cryptologist Colonel William F. Friedman, London, 1977
Friedman has been called by David Kahn, himself the leading historian of intelligence, ‘the world’s greatest cryptologist’. Certainly his achievement in breaking the Japanese machine cipher, called Purple by the Americans, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, was one of the greatest cryptanalytic feats of all time. Friedman suffered a severe nervous breakdown in the aftermath but recovered sufficiently to become chief technical consultant to the National Security Agency, the principal code and cipher service of the United States.
Clayton, Aileen, The Enemy Is Listening, London, 1980
Clayton, a Women’s Auxiliary Air Force officer, worked during the Second World War in the Middle Eastern Y Service, the organisation that intercepted and interpreted ‘low level’ transmissions on the battlefield. Y is a neglected subject, despite its great importance, and her book is one of the few studies of it.
Cruickshank, Charles, SOE in the Far East, Oxford, 1983; SOE in Scandinavia, Oxford, 1986
Special Operations Executive (SOE) was the subversive organisation set up by Winston Churchill in July 1940 to ‘set Europe ablaze’. Branches were later formed in Scandinavia and the Far East, their work being described by the author in these semi-official histories.
Davidson, Basil, Special Operations Europe. Scenes From the Anti-Nazi War, London, 1980
Davidson served as an officer in SOE both in its Mediterranean headquarters in Cairo and in the field in Hungary, Italy and Yugoslavia. He had strong left-wing views and was instrumental in transferring support from the royalist Četniks in German-occupied Yugoslavia to Tito’s Communist partisans. His account illuminates how easily the fostering of short-term ‘subversion’ leads to the fomentation of civil war and atrocity, with deplorable long-term results.
Deakin, F. W., The Embattled Mountain, London, 1971
Deakin, later Sir William and Warden of St Antony’s College Oxford, was a liaison officer for SOE with Tito’s partisans. His celebrated book is both a wonderful adventure story, in the T. E. Lawrence tradition, and a chilling account of Communist ruthlessness in widening internal conflict for post-war political advantage.
Deakin, F. W. and Storry, Richard, The Case of Richard Sorge, New York, 1966
Richard Storry, a Fellow of St Antony’s during Deakin’s wardenship, was an historian of Japan and wartime Japanese-language intelligence officer in the Far East. Their study of the most important Soviet spy to operate inside any Axis country during the Second World War brilliantly illuminates the limited usefulness even of the best placed agent.
Foot, M. R. D., SOE in France. An Account of the Work of British Special Operations Executive in France, 1940–44, London, 1966
The official history of Special Operations Executive in France, by an academic historian who served as a Secret Intelligence Service officer during the Second World War. It provides an extremely detailed account of the operations of all SOE networks in France and of their political affiliations, which were complex. Despite its scholarly objectivity, it reaches conclusions which exaggerate the military contribution made by the French resistance to Anglo-American victory in France in 1944.
Garlinski, Josef, Intercept, London, 1979
Garlinski is understandably concerned to set on record the pioneering achievement of his fellow Poles in breaking into Enigma traffic before the outbreak of the Second World War and of how their work contributed to the success of Bletchley.
Giskes, Herman, London Calling North Pole, London, 1953
Giskes was the German counter-espionage officer responsible for capturing and ‘turning’ Dutch agents of Special Operations Executive parachuted into the German-occupied Netherlands during 1940–3. In a highly successful counter-espionage campaign, the Germans captured almost all agents as they arrived and persuaded them to transmit back to Britain at German direction. The ‘England game’, as the Germans called it, severely strained Dutch-British relations during the war and for some years afterwards. The episode has now been fully investigated and recounted by M. R. D. Foot in SOE in the Netherlands, London, 2002.
Handel, Michael, (ed), Leaders and Intelligence, London, 1989.
Handel, a professor at the US Army War College, is a productive writer and editor, whose chief subject is operational intelligence. When not the principal author, he can be counted upon to assemble contributions from leading intelligence writers, such as Professor Christopher Andrew of Cambridge. All his compilations, including War, Strategy and Intelligence, London, 1989 and Intelligence and Military Operations, London, 1990, contain valuable material, bearing both upon the past and the present.
Hinsley, F. H. with E. E. Thomas, C. F. G. Ransom and R. C. Knight, British Intelligence in the Second World War. Its Influence on Strategy and Operations, London, Volume 1, 1979, Volume 2, 1981, Volume 3, Part 1, 1984, Volume 3, Part 2, 1988, Volume 4 1990.
Hinsley’s five volumes, the official history of British intelligence in the Second World War, are the most important single publication on the subject of their subtitle: how intelligence effects decision-making in wartime. Hinsley appears to cover almost every topic in his remit, including how Enigma was broken, how Ultra worked, how British intelligence successes and failures are to be judged in comparison with those of her enemies, and how intelligence affected the outcome of the war as a whole. His work has been criticised as ‘by a committee for a committee’; but that is unfair. It is an achievement of the greatest value and interest.
Howard, Michael, British Intelligence in the Second World War, Volume 5, Strategic Deception, London, 1990
The last volume of Hinsley’s great work, by Britain’s leading military historian of the twentieth century, is a fascinating account of British efforts to deceive the enemy, with mixed results but some success against Germany’s secret weapons campaign.
Hinsley, F. H. and Thripp, Alan, (eds), Codebreakers. The Inside Story of Bletchley Park, Oxford, 1993
A fascinating collection of thirty-one essays by B. P. initiates, on such varied subjects as how the watch system worked and the building of the famous huts. An essential companion to Hinsley’s official history.
James, William, The Eyes of the Navy. A Biographical Study of Admiral Sir Reginald Hall, London, 1955.
Admiral Hall, known as ‘Blinker’ in the Royal Navy because of a nervous facial tic, was the founder of the immensely successful intelligence organisation known as OB 40 (Old Building Room 40), by which the Admiralty achieved complete intelligence dominance over its German equivalent during the First World War. Its achievements were later compromised by boastful disclosure of its successes, particularly in cryptanalysis, in the interwar years.
Jones, R. V., The Wizard War. British Scientific Intelligence 1939–45, London, 1978
Jones, a young scientific civil servant, came to enjoy the favour of Winston Churchill during the Battle of Britain and afterwards because of his discovery of how the Luftwaffe used radio beams to guide its bombers to British targets. The ‘man who broke the beams’ thereafter rose ever higher in the service, eventually outfacing Lord Cherwell in the dispute over the V-weapons threat in 1944. His account of scientific intelligence is one of the war’s most valuable personal stories, though it fails to disclose why he fell into obscurity after 1945.
Kahn, David, The Codebreakers. The Story of Secret Writing, revised edition, New York, 1996
Kahn’s book is a veritable encyclopaedia of cryptanalysis, superior to any other publication in the field. The original edition was published before the disclosure of the Enigma secret; the revised edition repairs the deficiency. Its great length (1181 pages) and density will deter the casual reader but it repays the effort to persist.
Kahn, David, Hitler’s Spies. German Military Intelligence in World War II, New York, 1978
The title is a misnomer. The book is a study of how the German military intelligence organisation worked in the field and is a rare example of an effort, by an expert, to relate intelligence inputs to operational outcomes.
Lewin, Ronald, Ultra Goes to War, London, 1978
Lewin’s book, published four years after Winterbotham’s The Ultra Secret (1974), which first disclosed the Bletchley secret, was an attempt to correct its more serious mistakes and to set the Ultra achievement in a wider context. It remains a valuable account of the Bletchley story.
McLachlan, Donald, Room 39. A Study in Naval Intelligence, London, 1968
Although published before the disclosure of the Ultra secret, and so able to refer to Bletchley only as ‘Station X’, this has been described as ‘one of the best books on intelligence ever written’. It is an account of the workings of the Naval Intelligence Division, by one of its officers, during the Second World War.
Masterman, J. C., The Double-Cross System in the Second World War, London, 1972
Masterman, an Oxford don who became Provost of Worcester College after the war, chaired the Double-Cross (XX) Committee during its course, a body dedicated to manipulating information so as to mislead the enemy. Its most important work was in deluding the Germans about the success of their secret weapons campaign during 1944–5.
Powers, Thomas, The Man Who Kept the Secrets. Richard Helms and the CIA, New York, 1979
A biography of the Director of Central Intelligence, 1966–72, under Presidents Johnson and Nixon, by a Pulitzer Prize winner, which is also a history of the CIA from its earliest years. Cool in tone and objective in approach, it provides a wealth of information about not only intelligence procedures and operations but also about the influence of intelligence on policy and decision-making.
Sweet-Escott, Bickham, Baker Street Irregular, London, 1965
Sweet-Escott, like Peter Calvocoressi, a graduate of Balliol College, Oxford, held a large number of staff positions in SOE and describes its methods and many of its personalities crisply and convincingly.
Trevor-Roper, Hugh, The Philby Affair. Espionage, Treason and Secret Services, London, 1968
Trevor-Roper, later Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge and ennobled as Lord Dacre, knew Philby well and, though himself only a junior intelligence officer, provides a subtle and penetrative portrait of his ex-colleague. The book also includes an essay on Admiral Canaris, head of the German Abwehr during the Second World War.
Tuchman, Barbara, The Zimmermann Telegram, New York, 1958
This short book made the reputation of the famous American historian. Her account of how the British Admiralty deciphered the Germans’ diplomatic traffic in 1917, so revealing their efforts to persuade Mexico to attack the United States and thus bringing about America’s entry into the First World War on the Allied side, is a masterpiece of intelligence history. Incomplete in part, it nevertheless stands the test of time.
Welchman, Gordon, The Hut Six Story, London, 1982
Welchman was in 1939 a mathematics don at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, one of the many recruited to join Bletchley Park at the outbreak of war. He proved highly successful at attacking Enigma and was instrumental in reorganising Bletchley to meet the challenge of all-out war. His book, besides being wholly authoritative, also provides the most comprehensible account of how Enigma worked and how Bletchley progressively broke it. Indispensable.
Winterbotham, F. W, The Ultra Secret, London, 1974
Winterbotham, a regular air force officer who had served with the Secret Intelligence Service, was posted to the air section of Bletchley during the war. He apparently got permission to publish this book, the first in English to disclose the Ultra Secret (though it had previously been hinted at by Trevor-Roper), because the government feared the secret was about to be broken by the Poles. Largely written from memory, The Ultra Secret contains many errors both of fact and interpretation.
Wohlstetter, R., Pearl Harbor, Warning and Decision, Stanford, 1962
Roberta Wohlstetter’s examination of how Japan succeeded in mounting its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 is meticulous and exhaustive. Her book is widely admired by intelligence experts and, although it is not without its critics, it remains the most valuable study of the preliminaries to the outbreak of the Pacific War.
This book sets out to answer a simple question: how useful is intelligence in war? The volume of literature on the subject suggests that it is very important indeed. Shelves groan under the weight of books on the German Enigma machine, on the British code and cipher school at Bletchley Park that attacked Enigma, on the American unlocking of the Japanese ciphers, on the parallel deception operations which sought to delude the enemy, on the agents who risked their lives to help make deception work or to seek to discover the enemy’s secrets from within. The literature of fact is exceeded in bulk by that of fiction. The spy story became, in the twentieth century, one of the most popular of literary forms and its masters, from John Buchan to John le Carré, grew rich and famous by their writing.
The climate created by the masters of spy fiction deeply affected popular attitudes to intelligence work. The sheer fascination of the techniques unveiled, in the use of cryptic writing, dead letter boxes, agent running, the ‘turning’ of agents to become ‘doubles’, surveillance, interception and a dozen other practices of the secret world, had the effect of representing technique as an end in itself. The ‘spy’ achieved the status of hero, or sometimes anti-hero, a mysterious and glamorous figure who was made to seem significant because of what he was rather than what he did.
It is notable that very few even of the most celebrated spy stories actually establish a connection between the spy’s activities and the purpose for which he presumably risks his life in the field. In Greenmantle, for example, John Buchan’s wonderful romance of intelligence work in Turkey during the First World War, it becomes impossible for the reader to discern at the end what exactly Sandy, as Greenmantle, has done: has he frustrated a Muslim jihad against Britain and her allies or, contrarily, has he himself become a Muslim prophet? In The Riddle of the Sands, the first serious novel of intelligence to appear and still one of the best, Erskine Childers subtly suggests how the Germans may mount an invasion of Britain’s east coast through the secret channels around the Friesian Islands, but the dénouement of his tale does not demonstrate that his two patriotic yachtsmen actually cause the Admiralty to take appropriate precautions. In Kipling’s marvellous Kim, ostensibly an unforgettable panorama of Indian life on the road but essentially a spy story, his hero does, unwittingly, help to frustrate a rising in one of the princely states but the climax results in nothing more than his making fools of some Russian spies on the Himalayan border. In almost none of John le Carré’s brilliantly convincing constructions of spy and counter-spy life does he show an objective outcome for what his characters do. They are fighting the Cold War; but, after all their intricate delusions and deceptions, the Cold War goes on.
The author might rightly say that he was representing reality; the Cold War thankfully did not have an outcome, certainly none in military terms, and it was the function of the intelligence services on both sides to see that it should not. They were playing a game, and the point was to keep the game going, not to win. No one would disagree with that or ought to complain, in the absence of a tangible result, that intelligence is a vacuous activity.
The intelligence services of all states originated, nonetheless, in the efforts to avert an enemy’s achieving a military advantage but to achieve military advantage in return. In peacetime intelligence services may merely tick over. In war they are supposed to bring victory. How effective are they? How do they – or how do they fail to – do it?
The novelists of intelligence have disseminated an enormous amount of information about intelligence techniques. Some of it is accurate, some is misleading. Few of them, however, even such writers who are as personally experienced in intelligence work as John le Carré, have set out in full the essential components and sequence of effective intelligence operations. That is understandable. Much intelligence practice is mundane and bureaucratic, unamenable to treatment in readable form. Even the most mundane, however, is essential if intelligence is to be useful. There are five fundamental stages.
This book is a collection of case studies, beginning in the age of sail, when the supreme intelligence difficulty was to acquire information of value at any lapse of time which made it useful, and ending in the modern age, when intelligence of all sorts abounds but its volume threatens to overwhelm the power of the human mind to evaluate its worth. Its theme is that intelligence in war, however good, does not point out unerringly the path to victory. Victory is an elusive prize, bought with blood rather than brains. Intelligence is the handmaiden not the mistress of the warrior.
The second illustrated page of Home Popham’s Telegraphic Signals or Marine Vocabulary, 1803
The Battle of Aboukir, 1799 (The Art Archive/Bibliothèque des Arts Décoratifs Paris/Dagli Orti)
Captain Thomas Troubridge (Mary Evans Picture Library)
Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson (The Art Archive/Musée du Chateau de Versailles/Dagli Orti)
General Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson (The Art Archive/National Archives Washington DC/The Art Archive)
Union generals of the Civil War (Peter Newark’s American Pictures)
George Everest during the Great Trigonometrical Survey, 1800–41 (© The British Library)
Union supply column, Shenandoah Valley, 1862 (The Fenton History Center, New York)
General George McClellan (The Art Archive/National Archives Washington DC/The Art Archive)
SS Great Eastern (Mary Evans Picture Library)
Admiral Graf von Spee (Robert Hunt Library)
Australian sailors bringing German prisoners to HMAS Sydney, 1914 (The Art Archive/Imperial War Museum/The Art Archive)
Rear Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock (Robert Hunt Library)
Kent, Inflexible, Glasgow and Invincible leaving Port Stanley, 1914 (Robert Hunt Library)
Survivors of SMS Gneisenau being collected by boats from Inflexible, 1914 (Robert Hunt Library)
Admiral Wilhelm Canaris (Robert Hunt Library)
An Enigma operator aboard a U-boat (The Art Archive/E.C.P.A., Ivry, France/The Art Archive)
An Enigma machine team, Army Group Centre, Russia, 1941 (Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz)
German paratroopers, Crete, 1941 (Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz)
General Bernard Freyberg VC (Robert Hunt Library)
General Kurt Student (Ullstein Bild)
USS Lexington’s crew abandoning ship (Robert Hunt Library)
Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto (The Art Archive/US Naval Historical Center/The Art Archive)
Admiral Chester Nimitz (The Art Archive/Library of Congress/The Art Archive)
Captain Joseph Rochefort (The Art Archive/US Naval Historical Center/The Art Archive)
Kaga circling under attack, Midway, 1942 (Robert Hunt Library)
USS Yorktown sinking (Robert Hunt Library)
Admiral Karl Dönitz with Grand Admiral Raeder (The Art Archive/E.C.P.A., Ivry, France/The Art Archive)
USS Greer on convoy escort in heavy Atlantic weather (The Art Archive/National Archives Washington/The Art Archive)
US Coast Guard Cutter Spencer firing a depth charge (The Art Archive/Library of Congress/The Art Archive)
Admiral Ernest J. King (The Art Archive/National Archives Washington/The Art Archive)
A convoy conference at Derby House, Liverpool (The Art Archive/Imperial War Museum/The Art Archive)
Captain F. J. ‘Johnny’ Walker (The Art Archive/Imperial War Museum/The Art Archive)
V–2 rocket at Peenemünde (Ullstein Bild)
V–1 flying bomb, France, 1944 (Ullstein Bild)
A V–1 about to impact near Drury Lane, London, 1944 (The Art Archive/Imperial War Museum/The Art Archive)
General Walter Dornberger with Dr Todt (Ullstein Bild)
Wernher von Braun (© Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis)
SAS troopers after the helicopter crash on South Georgia, Falklands, 1982 (The Defence Picture Library)
Argentinian Pucara ground-attack aircraft destroyed by the SAS (The Defence Picture Library)
British anti-tank missile team, Second Gulf War, 2003 (The Defence Picture Library)
Nelson in the Mediterranean, 1798
The Shenandoah Valley, 1862
Von Spee in the Pacific and Atlantic, 1914
The Eastern Mediterranean, 1941
Midway, the Pacific Theatre, 1942
Battle of the Atlantic, 1939–43
V–1, V–2 Offensives, 1943–44
The Falkland Islands, 1982