The genteel St. Ermin’s Hotel, tucked away from London’s bustle on a quiet side street in Westminster, seemed an unlikely spot for the hatching of plots to incite violence and revolution. A Victorian redbrick dowager of a building, St. Ermin’s was known for its tree-lined courtyard and a spectacular soaring lobby featuring a rococo plaster ceiling and curved balcony. There, at the turn of the century, guests could enjoy afternoon tea while listening to the soothing strains of a small string orchestra.
Forty years later, as France fell and Hitler prepared to hurl his Luftwaffe thunderbolts at Britain, a handful of government officials gathered in a room on the fourth floor of St. Ermin’s to try to figure out a way to fight back. Clearly, the British could not return to the Continent anytime soon: their army was too meager, their arms almost nonexistent, and the ally they coveted—the rich and powerful United States—showed no signs of wanting to join the conflict. In the desperate summer of 1940, Britain’s skimpy offensive arsenal contained just two weapons: the Royal Navy’s blockade of Germany, begun in 1939, and a nascent bombing effort against the Reich by the RAF. The plotters at St. Ermin’s added a third: a campaign to undermine the enemy from inside the occupied countries of Europe.
Thus was born a new top secret government agency, the innocuously named Special Operations Executive, which took over three floors of St. Ermin’s in a matter of weeks. SOE’s assignment was to foment sabotage, subversion, and resistance in captive Europe, a goal that its creators hoped would disrupt and eventually help destroy the German war machine. Winston Churchill, an enthusiastic champion of the idea, dubbed the SOE “the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” and instructed its first chief to “set Europe ablaze.”
Before it could attempt to do so, however, SOE had to deal with the unpleasant reality that, aside from Churchill and a few other leading political figures, virtually no one in high British government circles wanted it to exist, much less succeed. That was particularly true of the top men in Britain’s vaunted Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), who loathed the thought of a new clandestine government agency independent of their control, especially one whose goals and methods were so fundamentally in conflict with those of their own.
MI6, which was responsible for collecting military, economic, and political intelligence from countries outside the British Empire, prided itself on its secrecy and discretion; the idea of a sister agency drawing unwelcome attention to itself (and to MI6 operations) through sabotage and other public acts of violence was anathema. The intelligence historian Nigel West aptly summed up the key difference between the two organizations in his description of how each would react if one of its operatives witnessed enemy troops crossing a bridge: an MI6 spy would observe the troops and estimate their number while an SOE agent would blow up the bridge to prevent the enemy from getting across.
As SOE officials would soon discover, MI6 was a dangerous foe to have. Globally renowned, it enjoyed a sterling reputation as an all-seeing, all-knowing spy organization. Churchill considered the British intelligence service “the finest in the world.” So, interestingly, did Hitler and other Nazi higher-ups, including SS head Heinrich Himmler and Himmler’s murderous deputy Reinhard Heydrich, known as “the blond beast,” who used MI6 as a model when he created the SS’s fearsome intelligence and security operations: the SD and Gestapo. Heydrich even signed some of his letters and memos with the letter “C,” the initial used by MI6 chiefs in their official correspondence.
Yet for all his admiration of the British intelligence service, Heydrich, like his Nazi colleagues, actually had very little substantive knowledge of how it worked. His romantic views of its omniscience and omnipotence came from reading the prewar British spy novels that filled the Gestapo’s reference library. And as it turned out, all those awestruck notions were as fanciful as the fiction on which they were based.
FROM THE LATE NINETEENTH century on, British novelists found that one of the surest routes to fame and fortune was to write about the fictitious exploits of British secret agents in continental Europe. When the spy novel genre began in the 1890s, the enemy was usually French, but as German military power exploded in the early twentieth century, he became almost exclusively German. The heroes, however, remained remarkably the same.
With few exceptions, they were well-born English gentlemen who belonged to the best London clubs, rode to hounds, and were connoisseurs of gourmet food and vintage wines. Yet all those paragons were willing to forsake their good life for a time to spy for their country in the face of great danger and appalling odds. The protagonist of Robert Erskine Childers’s wildly popular novel The Riddle of the Sands, written in 1902, was typical: he was, according to Childers, “a young man of condition and fashion, who knows the right people, belongs to the right clubs, and has a safe, possibly a brilliant future in the Foreign Office.”
For decades, the adventures of these amateur patrician spies not only attracted millions of readers from around the world but also inspired a generation of young Englishmen to follow in their footsteps. An SOE agent noted after the war that “practically every [SOE] officer I met at home and abroad was, like me, imagining himself as Richard Hannay or Sandy Arbuthnot,” two British agents who were the fictional creations of John Buchan, whose famed adventure novels included The Thirty-nine Steps.
Reflecting Britons’ instinctive distrust of foreigners, the enemy agents in those books tended to be stereotypes as well—unshaven, badly dressed, shifty, and duplicitous. The novels’ overall moral seemed to be that getting involved with foreign countries and individuals was a dangerous undertaking and that Britain—“the supreme country in the world,” as one fictional British agent described his homeland—should do its best to stay well clear of them.
Given the xenophobia of British spy novels, it’s a wonder that foreigners like Himmler and Heydrich were so taken with them. Heydrich, whose addiction began during a post–World War I stint in the German navy, was convinced that the success of the British Empire was due to the brilliance of MI6 and that every upstanding Englishman was “ready to aid the Secret Intelligence Service, regarding it as his obvious duty….The SS has adopted as its idea this English view of intelligence work as a matter for gentlemen.” In an attempt to emulate the British, he focused on recruiting for his own operations young, well-educated Germans from good families.
Even Hitler joined in the chorus of praise for MI6. Speaking to Nazi intelligence officials early in the war, the Führer remarked that “the British Secret Service has a great tradition. Germany possesses nothing comparable to it. Therefore, each [German] success means the building up of such a tradition and requires even greater determination….The cunning and perfidy of the British Secret Service is known to the world.”
Such Nazi paeans, however, could not have been further from the truth. Starved of government funds after World War I, MI6 in the late 1930s was underfinanced, understaffed, and woefully short of both talent and technology. In 1935, two years after Hitler came to power in Germany, the then-current “C”—Admiral Hugh Sinclair—despairingly remarked that his agency’s entire annual budget equaled the cost of maintaining one British destroyer for a year. Although Sinclair borrowed money from wealthy relatives to keep MI6 afloat, it was never enough; at the time of the Munich Conference in 1938, he could not afford to buy wireless transmission sets for the few agents he had in Europe to let them communicate directly with London.
MI6 did indeed tend to recruit well-born young men as its intelligence officers; preferring “breeding over intellect,” it shied away from those who had attended college, seeking instead “minds untainted by the solvent force of a university education.” Many of its operatives in the interwar period were former military officers with substantial private incomes. The early education of “these metropolitan young gentlemen…had been expensive rather than profound,” observed Hugh Trevor-Roper, the noted historian, who, after a stint as an Oxford don, worked for MI6 during World War II. “[They] didn’t have much use for ideas.” They were, he added, “by and large pretty stupid—and some of them very stupid.”
In one area, however, the real intelligence officers had much in common with their fictional counterparts: both groups operated with an air of casual, gentlemanly amateurism. When a new MI6 operative named Leslie Nicholson asked in 1930 about the kind of training he would receive, he was told that “there was no need for expert knowledge.” When Nicholson persisted in seeking “tips on how to be a spy,” the MI6 station chief in Vienna responded, “You’ll just have to work it out for yourself. I think everyone has his own methods, and I can’t think of anything I can tell you.”
As it happened, Stewart Menzies, who was named “C” in 1939 and who ran MI6 throughout the war, had never himself experienced what it was like to be a secret agent, trained or otherwise. The grandson of an enormously wealthy whiskey baron from Scotland, Menzies had attended Eton, then joined the British Army’s prestigious Life Guards Regiment, many of whose officers were aristocrats. During the Great War, he fought with distinction in France and was awarded a Distinguished Service Order and Military Cross. After being gassed, he signed up with army intelligence, and when the war ended, he shifted to MI6 headquarters in London, where he remained for the rest of his career.
A charter member of the clubby, upper-class “old-boy network” that had dominated British society for generations, Menzies, like many if not most of his contemporaries, was conservative in his social and political attitudes and wary of foreigners. He once said that “only people with foreign names commit treason,” obviously unaware that someone with the very English name of Kim Philby, who was without question one of the “old boys,” was committing treason within Menzies’s own agency.
Tall and slender, with thinning blond hair, the fifty-year-old Menzies belonged to the Beaufort Hunt, the select fox-hunting group sponsored by the Duke of Beaufort, and White’s, the most exclusive men’s club in London, where no bottle of nonvintage wine was ever served and no woman was ever allowed to enter. It was in White’s bar that he did much of his recruiting for MI6, focusing mostly on young men from families in his own cloistered milieu.
An amiable social butterfly, Menzies was generally regarded as an intelligence lightweight by senior MI6 officers, who noted his lack of practical experience in the field and his propensity for procrastination. “He was not a very strong man, and not a very intelligent one,” recalled Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, wartime chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, a Cabinet-level group that oversaw all of Britain’s intelligence operations.
The person who really ran MI6, in the opinion of many, was Menzies’s deputy, Claude Dansey, a shadowy figure well versed in stealth and deceit, who was, as the writer Ben Macintyre put it, “a most unpleasant man and a most experienced spy.” An anomaly in MI6’s upper-crust world, Dansey had not gone to Eton or served in one of the army’s posh regiments. Instead, he had spent much of his early career as a military intelligence officer in Africa, where he had run spy networks that gathered information on and helped put down rebellious native groups. During World War I, Dansey had worked for British intelligence in London, where his myriad duties included rounding up suspect aliens and engaging in counterespionage in Britain and western Europe.
Short, balding, and bespectacled, Dansey had a luxuriant white mustache and, in Ben Macintyre’s words, the sharp, penetrating “eyes of a hyperactive ferret.” He was witty, spiteful, and widely disliked. “Everyone was scared of him,” said the journalist and author Malcolm Muggeridge, who, like Hugh Trevor-Roper, worked for MI6 during the war. “He was the only real professional there. The others at the top were all second-rate men with second-rate minds.” Trevor-Roper was far more jaundiced in his view of Dansey, describing him as “an utter shit; corrupt, incompetent, but with a certain low cunning.”
As dissimilar as they were, Menzies and Dansey shared at least one common trait: an obsessive devotion to clandestine behavior that bemused Muggeridge, Trevor-Roper, and the other young outsiders brought into MI6’s inner sanctum during the war. According to Muggeridge, MI6’s motto seemed to be that “nothing should ever be done simply if there are devious ways of doing it.” Like small boys playing secret agent, the agency’s old hands often used code names when they were not needed, communicated in code when writing innocuous messages, and left those messages in out-of-the-way places such as a potting shed rather than posting them in an ordinary mailbox.
Muggeridge realized he had been infected with that same obsession for secrecy when he found himself tiptoeing past Menzies’s hushed offices on the fourth floor of MI6 headquarters at 54 Broadway, just off Parliament Square. “Secrecy,” Muggeridge recalled, “is as essential to Intelligence as vestments and incense to a Mass…and must at all costs be maintained, quite irrespective of whether or not it serves any purpose.”
While the use of pointless code names and other forms of clandestinity struck newcomers like Muggeridge as richly comic, MI6’s fixation with secrecy served an important purpose for those in its upper reaches, one that had nothing to do with protecting the safety and security of Britain. Its usefulness was far more personal: it helped shield those in power from the scrutiny of Parliament, the British public, and the rest of the government. The novelist John le Carré, who worked briefly for MI6 shortly after World War II, noted how devoted the agency had been to “the conspiracies of self-protection, of using the skirts of official secrecy in order to protect incompetence, of gross class privilege, of amazing credulity.”
In the years immediately preceding the war, MI6, as it happened, had a considerable amount of incompetence to protect.
ON A DARK, DREARY November day in 1939, a car pulled up to the Backus Café in the small Dutch town of Venlo, just across the Meuse River from Germany. Two middle-aged Englishmen—sporting trim gray mustaches, monocles, and bowlers—got out. They were MI6 officers, come to Venlo on a top secret mission that, if successful, might well lead to the overthrow of Hitler and the end of the two-month-old war.
Ever since the Führer had come to power, the neutral Netherlands, situated as it was next to Nazi Germany, had served as one of the main spy centers of Europe, playing reluctant host to countless intelligence agents from all over the globe. Like most of their foreign counterparts, the two mustachioed MI6 officers—Sigismund Payne Best and Richard Stevens—were based at The Hague, which British intelligence used as its unofficial European headquarters.
For such an important post, MI6 had been astonishingly inept in its selection of station chiefs, who operated there under the flimsy cover of passport control officers. In 1936, station chief H. E. Dalton had killed himself after the revelation that he had embezzled fees paid by Jewish refugees for British visas. Then came the discovery that two Dutch operatives working for Dalton’s successor had been recruited as double agents by the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence agency.
Realizing that one of its most important bases in Europe had been penetrated by the Germans, MI6 chose not to take the logical step of closing down the office and starting over. Instead it created a second, unofficial intelligence service throughout Europe that would exist alongside the old operation but have no connection with it. Known as the Z Organization, it was run by Claude Dansey, who chose as its agents a varied collection of amateurs: businessmen, industrialists, journalists, politicians, and other British subjects who either lived in Europe or were frequent travelers there.
The man Dansey picked for The Hague was Sigismund Best, the owner of a Dutch pharmaceutical and chemical company, who passed on to Dansey mostly worthless items of intelligence. At the same time, he claimed significant amounts of money as expenses for the thirteen agents he alleged he was running, nine of whom turned out to be fictitious.
When war broke out in September 1939, Best was ordered by London to join forces with Richard Stevens, MI6’s latest station chief in The Hague, thereby destroying the whole point of having an alternative intelligence operation. A newcomer to the agency, Stevens, who had earlier served in the British Army in India, was as unimpressive in his job as Best had been in his. Before going to The Hague, Stevens had “never been a spy, much less a spymaster,” he later acknowledged. “I was totally lacking in experience and felt I was altogether the wrong sort of man for such work.” When he told MI6 higher-ups of his fears, they assured him that The Hague was largely an administrative post—a gross misstatement, as Stevens would find out a few months later when he and Best were thrown into a situation for which neither was remotely prepared.
In October 1939, the month after Germany invaded Poland, Neville Chamberlain quietly let it be known that the British government would consider making peace with Germany if Hitler were deposed. At the same time, Stevens and Best received word that a dissident military faction in the Reich was plotting to get rid of Hitler and open peace negotiations with Britain. After several clandestine sessions with men reportedly from this rebel group, the MI6 officers, with the backing of Chamberlain and the Foreign Office, agreed to a November 9 meeting at the Backus Café in Venlo to meet the German general leading the resistance.
But when Stevens and Best entered the café, they discovered to their shock that there was no general and that the officers with whom they’d met were in fact SS intelligence agents; one of them was Walter Schellenberg, Reinhard Heydrich’s deputy and another longtime British spy novel addict and MI6 fan. After shooting to death a young Dutch military intelligence agent who had accompanied the British operatives, Schellenberg and his colleagues bundled Stevens and Best into a car and sped over the border into Germany.
The intelligence officers’ abduction, one of the most embarrassing episodes in MI6 history, became an even greater disaster thanks to their behavior after the kidnapping. Ignoring London’s directive that captured agents should reveal only the names and addresses of their cover businesses or other jobs, Stevens and Best, without being subjected to physical torture, collaborated fully with the Germans. Stevens was caught with a complete list of Dutch agents in his pocket; he also apparently handed over the names of all MI6 station chiefs in western and central Europe, along with the identities of their foreign operatives. In addition, he and Best provided extensive information about MI6’s hierarchy in London, including the names of department heads and the location of their offices in the Broadway headquarters.
As a result of the Venlo disaster, the MI6 network in western Europe was in ruins by the time of the 1940 German blitzkrieg. Yet despite this fiasco, Menzies and Dansey managed to retain their jobs, thanks in large part to the providential arrival in London of the exile European governments and their intelligence services.
In exchange for providing financial, communications, and transportation support to the secret services of Czechoslovakia, Norway, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and de Gaulle’s Free French, MI6 gained control of most of their operations. The foreign services, in turn, provided virtually all of the wartime intelligence the British received about German activities in occupied Europe.
Though hardly a genius as spymaster, Menzies was brilliant at protecting and promoting himself and his agency in the often brutal infighting in Whitehall. One of his major weapons in that bureaucratic war was never to reveal MI6’s sources to anyone, not even Churchill. In that way, he and Dansey could claim sole credit for any successes that came their way.
As it happened, the European intelligence agencies with which MI6 was now aligned scored many coups. Yet almost nobody outside MI6 knew it. An exception was David Bruce, head of the London branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the United States’ newly formed espionage and sabotage agency. Bruce, who arrived in London in 1942, noted in his diary that MI6’s intelligence capabilities were “lamentably weak. Most of the reports they send us are duplicates of those already received by us from European secret intelligence services.”
The first foreign intelligence group to arrive in London was the Czechs’. Just before Hitler occupied all of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, František Moravec, the head of that country’s highly respected spy agency, and ten of his top officers, along with dozens of boxes of files, escaped to Britain. Moravec’s arrival was a particular windfall because he brought with him the reports of one of the top Allied intelligence sources of World War II, a disaffected German Abwehr officer named Paul Thümmel. Code-named A54, Thümmel, the chief of the Abwehr station in Prague, provided the Czechs—and indirectly the British—with remarkably accurate information about German military plans for more than two years. Thanks to Thümmel, for example, MI6 learned beforehand of German plans to invade France through the Ardennes in 1940 and to conquer Yugoslavia and Greece in the spring of 1941. (The Ardennes intelligence coup—and Britain’s and France’s failure to do anything about it—prove that, however good intelligence might be, it is of little or no use unless action is taken as a result.) In the fall of 1940, Thümmel also reported that Hitler had abandoned his plans, at least temporarily, for Operation Sea Lion, the proposed invasion of Britain.
The Norwegian intelligence service, meanwhile, passed on to MI6 reports from hundreds of coast watchers in Norway, who monitored the movements of German submarines and warships. In 1941, one of them informed London that he’d spotted four German warships in a fjord in central Norway—information that led to the sinking of the battleship Bismarck and the crippling of the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen. Hundreds more ordinary Norwegians reported on fortifications, airfields, camps, and German troop movements.
In the early years of the war, however, France was MI6’s main focus. As the occupied country closest to Britain, it was Hitler’s springboard—the country from which the Luftwaffe bombed British cities and the German navy dispatched submarines to sink British merchant shipping. It would also serve as the launching point for any invasion of Britain. As a result, intelligence about the movements and disposition there of German troops, ships, submarines, barges, and aircraft was of vital importance to the British government.
To gather such information, MI6 was able to draw on a cornucopia of sources. One was de Gaulle’s fledgling intelligence service, headed by André Dewavrin, a young army officer and former professor at Saint-Cyr, France’s foremost military academy, who agreed to dispatch secret agents to France under British control. The first to be sent was Gilbert Renault, a French film producer who was working on a movie about Christopher Columbus when France fell. He escaped to London and joined de Gaulle’s Free French; six weeks later, he landed secretly on the coast of Brittany to begin what turned out to be a phenomenally successful two-year stint as a spy.
Renault’s first job was to collect and send back to Britain detailed, up-to-date maps of France. (As with Norway, the only maps the British had of France in the 1940 campaign were those they’d collected from travel agencies.) Once he had done that, Renault, although a complete novice at intelligence, put together a far-flung spy network, called the Confrérie de Notre Dame, that eventually covered much of occupied France and Belgium. The information it provided led to such military successes as the 1942 British commando raids on the northwest French ports of Bruneval and Saint-Nazaire.
When Renault, whose code name was Colonel Rémy, finally left France in June 1942, he took with him copies of plans for Germany’s defense installations on the Normandy coast, stolen by one of his agents. Those blueprints later proved to be an invaluable resource for the British and American planners of the D-Day invasion.
While Renault and other Free French agents were vital assets for MI6, so, too, were a number of Frenchmen who at one time or another had been allied with Pétain’s Vichy government. Some of MI6’s closest wartime links in France were with the prewar French intelligence services, many of whose members worked for Vichy. Soon after France’s capitulation to Germany, a group of anti-German officers in the French army formed an underground intelligence organization called Organisation de Résistance de l’Armée (ORA) that accepted Pétain as French head of state but conspired to end the German occupation of France.
Indeed, among the most important Allied spy rings in France was one organized by Georges Loustaunau-Lacau, a colonel who had earlier served as Pétain’s top military aide. When the colonel was arrested by the Vichy police, his former secretary—a petite, elegant thirty-year-old mother of two named Marie-Madeleine Fourcade—became the leader of the network, called Alliance, which included hundreds of men demobilized from the French army, navy, and air force. At its height, Fourcade’s operation (known as Noah’s Ark by the Gestapo because its members used animal code names) was active throughout all of France and numbered more than three thousand agents, some five hundred of whom were arrested, tortured, and executed by the Germans over the course of the war. Fourcade herself was arrested twice but escaped both times, once by stripping naked and forcing her slender body through the bars of a Gestapo jail cell.
Marie-Madeleine Fourcade
Sure that the British would never accept the idea of a woman as head of a major intelligence network, Fourcade kept her identity secret until the end of 1941, when she was smuggled into neutral Spain in a diplomatic bag for a meeting with her MI6 handler. She needn’t have worried about how the meeting would go. Her handler was bedazzled by her “Nefertiti-like beauty and charm,” and although the irascible Claude Dansey grumbled that “letting women run anything was against his principles,” he couldn’t argue with Fourcade’s accomplishments. MI6 continued to supply money, wireless sets, and other equipment to her Alliance network, which repaid that largesse with a flood of top-level intelligence, including information about German coastal fortifications and German troop movements prior to D-Day.
As good as the French were, however, it was the Poles who provided the lion’s share of British—and Allied—intelligence during the war. In 2005, the British government acknowledged that nearly 50 percent of the secret information obtained by the Allies from wartime Europe had come from Polish sources. “The Poles had the best special services in Europe,” said Douglas Dodds-Parker, a British intelligence official who worked with them during the war. Actually, the Poles were even better than that, according to the deputy chief of American military intelligence, who argued in 1942 that “they have the best intelligence in the world. Its value for us is beyond compare.”
The Poles were longtime masters of covert activity, having been occupied and partitioned for more than a century by three powerful neighbors: Russia, Germany, and Austro-Hungary. “With generations of clandestine action behind them,” Dodds-Parker noted, “they had educated the rest of us.”
From the day Poland regained its status as a sovereign country in 1918, it had given top priority to spying and code breaking, specifically aimed at its two chief historic enemies, Germany and Russia. In the words of a former chief of Polish intelligence, “If you live trapped between the two wheels of a grindstone, you have to learn how to keep from being crushed.” In 1939, Polish leaders were unable to prevent that from happening, but before escaping to the West, they did leave in place sophisticated intelligence and resistance networks.
From a large town house in the fashionable west London neighborhood of Knightsbridge, Polish intelligence officials maintained close radio contact with a widespread network of agents inside Poland, who provided a flood of information, including statistics about industrial production and the deployment of German military and naval forces. In return, the British gave the Poles, along with the Czechs, a high degree of autonomy. Unlike the other exile intelligence services in London, the two eastern European countries were allowed to operate their own training establishments, codes, ciphers, and radio networks without MI6 control, with the proviso that they pass on all intelligence relevant to the Allied war effort.
Years after the war, the Polish historian Jan Ciechanowski estimated that as many as 16,000 Poles—most of them members of the Home Army, the country’s highly organized resistance movement—were involved in the gathering of military and economic information inside Poland. “No place in Poland, where there was anything of great significance, could be kept from the prying eyes of Home Army intelligence,” Ciechanowski said. In fact, the Home Army’s network was even more far-flung than that, with contacts throughout Austria and Germany, including outposts in Cologne, Bremen, and Berlin. Much of the information from the Reich came from Poles who had been forced to work in German factories as slave laborers.
The Poles’ extraordinary talent for spying won admiration, albeit grudging, from German intelligence officials as well. After two days of poring over captured Polish intelligence documents in 1939, Walter Schellenberg wrote in his diary that “the amount of information, especially concerning Germany’s production of armaments, is quite astonishing.” Later, he dourly noted, “One always has to be prepared for unpleasant surprises with the Poles.”
Besides its spies in Poland, Austria, and Germany, Polish intelligence boasted agents in Scandinavia, the Baltic States, Switzerland, Italy, Belgium, the Balkans, and North Africa. Among its most successful operatives was Halina Szymańska, whose husband had been the Polish military attaché in prewar Berlin. While there, the couple had become friends with Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the Abwehr. One of the most enigmatic figures of the war, Canaris, who had grown increasingly disenchanted with Hitler, was playing a double game: while counterintelligence operatives in his agency ruthlessly tracked down Allied spies and saboteurs, he encouraged other Abwehr colleagues to pass on intelligence to MI6. After Poland’s defeat, Canaris arranged for Szymańska’s escape to Switzerland, where he put her in touch with Hans Bernd Gisevius, who was in charge of Abwehr operations there. For more than two years, Szymańska acted as a conduit between Gisevius, Polish intelligence, and MI6, providing information about high-level Nazi decision making, including German plans to invade Russia in 1941.
In France, too, the Poles organized and ran several important intelligence networks. The seeds of the French operations were planted by several Polish officers who remained behind in the unoccupied zone after Allied forces were evacuated from France in June 1940. Their first network, called F-1, established an escape route for marooned Polish and other Allied troops that led from Toulouse, in southwest France, to Britain. But F-1’s major effort was to gather intelligence about German aircraft, weapons, and troop movements. Its organizers recruited dozens of additional agents, many of whom came from the large communities of Polish immigrants scattered throughout France. A sizable number of these émigrés were industrial workers, able to provide detailed reports about the output and location of factories producing armaments and other items of interest to the Allies.
By early 1941, the original Polish network had split into several new cells. The most important of these operated out of a rented room in the heart of occupied Paris. It was organized and run by an intense, adventurous Polish air force officer named Roman Garby-Czerniawski, one of F-1’s original organizers. A fighter pilot before the war, the French-speaking Garby-Czerniawski had been recruited by Polish military intelligence in late 1939. He was, said a colleague, “a man who lives and thinks spying.”
Garby-Czerniawski’s goal in establishing himself in Paris was to provide London with as detailed a picture as possible of German forces and installations in occupied France. He christened his operation the Interallié network, declaring that “the boss will be a Pole, the agents mostly French, and all working for the Allies.” Hundreds of full- and part-time operatives gathered information for him, among them railway workers, fishermen, policemen, and housewives.
The agents’ reports were sent to various “cutouts” in Paris—a restroom attendant at the iconic La Pallette restaurant, a teacher at a Berlitz language school, and a concierge at an apartment building, among others—who then passed them on to Garby-Czerniawski. After collating and typing the reports (some of them up to four hundred pages long and containing maps and diagrams), he gave them to a Polish courier, who boarded a train to Bordeaux, in unoccupied France, and secreted them in a hiding place in the first-class restroom. Once the train reached Bordeaux, another Polish operative would retrieve the reports, which were then relayed to London. Eventually Garby-Czerniawski’s network acquired several wireless sets and was able to transmit directly to London, providing such a huge volume of information that those on the other end were hard pressed to keep up with it.
Stewart Menzies and MI6, meanwhile, happily took credit for the rich mother lode of information they were receiving from Polish and other European spies. But all that intelligence, highly valuable as it was, paled in comparison with what one historian called “the most important intelligence triumph of this or any other war.” Just before the Battle of Britain began, British cryptographers at Bletchley Park, the country’s code-breaking center, succeeded in cracking the Luftwaffe version of Germany’s fiendishly complex Enigma cipher. Ultra—the name given to the information obtained from Enigma—proved critical in winning the Battle of the Atlantic and the campaigns in North Africa and Normandy, as well as the Allied victory as a whole.
“It was thanks to Ultra that we won the war,” Winston Churchill told King George VI. Actually, according to the noted intelligence historian Christopher Andrew, Churchill was overstating it a bit. “Intelligence did not decide the outcome of the war,” Andrew observed. “The Red Army and the U.S. did. But the successes of Allied intelligence undoubtedly shortened it—and saved millions of lives.”
What almost no one, including Churchill, knew was that Britain’s code-breaking success had been due in large part to the French and, above all, to the Poles. The Ultra operation “would never have gotten off the ground if we had not learned from the Poles, in the nick of time, the details both of the…Enigma machine and of the operating procedures that were in use,” wrote Gordon Welchman, one of Ultra’s top cryptographers.
THE STORY OF THIS top secret Allied collaboration began in July 1939, when the leading code breakers of Britain and France were invited by Polish military intelligence to a meeting at a camouflaged, heavily guarded concrete bunker in a forest near Warsaw. Once inside this newly built transmitting station and cipher center, they were shown a small black device resembling a typewriter, with keys that rotated a cluster of three-inch wheels—an exact replica of Germany’s astonishingly sophisticated Enigma machine. With it, unbeknownst to the British and French, the Poles had been reading much of Germany’s military and political communications for more than six years—a feat that, in the Germans’ estimation, should have taken 900 million years to accomplish.
The visitors responded to the Poles’ disclosure with stunned silence. Alfred Dillwyn “Dilly” Knox, an eccentric former classics scholar from Cambridge and Britain’s top cryptographer, was particularly upset. The son of an Anglican bishop, the tall, bespectacled Knox was, in the words of a colleague, “a bit of a character, to put it mildly.” He combined a keen intellect with an absentmindedness so extreme that he forgot to invite two of his three brothers, one of whom was the Catholic theologian Ronald Knox, to his wedding. Among his closest friends were John Maynard Keynes and other prominent members of the Bloomsbury Group, including Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster, and Leonard Woolf.
Knox’s early training in deciphering ancient Egyptian papyrus fragments had been instrumental in his emergence as a matchless code breaker, beginning in World War I, when he had cracked the cipher used by the German naval commander in chief. For more than a year, he and his colleagues in Britain’s underfunded code-breaking agency, called the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), had been studying Germany’s latest cipher system, Enigma, but had gotten nowhere in their attempts to decipher it. He found it impossible to believe that the Poles had beaten them to it.
According to Alastair Denniston, who headed GC&CS and was also at the session in Poland, Knox sat in “stony silence” as he and the other British and French participants were briefed on the Poles’ success. “It was only when we got back into a car to drive away that he suddenly let himself go and, assuming that no one understood any English, raged and raved that they were lying to us,” Denniston said. “The whole thing was a fraud, he kept on repeating—they never worked it out—they pinched [the machine] years ago…they must have bought it or pinched it.”
The temperamental Knox apparently didn’t know—or had forgotten—that Poland had given top priority to intelligence gathering and code breaking since regaining its independence. After World War II, another leading British cryptographer acknowledged that he and some of his fellow code breakers had been “very slow to admit that the Poles might have anything to teach us.”
Marian Rejewski
Dilly Knox, however, was not among them. The day after his outburst, he calmed down considerably when he met Marian Rejewski, the thirty-three-year-old mathematician who had been the first to crack Enigma, and the two colleagues who worked with him. The three young Poles explained the intricacies of the machine and their novel technique for breaking ciphers, called mechanical combination theory, to Knox, who, in Rejewski’s words, “grasped everything very quickly, almost as quick as lightning.”
Denniston had once remarked about Knox, “He can’t stand it when someone else knows more than him.” But the British code breaker made an exception when it came to Rejewski. An assistant to Knox later recalled that “Marian and Dilly struck up a bond right away—a true meeting of the minds.”
Knox, Denniston reported, soon “became his own bright self and won the hearts and admiration” of the Poles. Even though alcohol was banned at the Polish cipher center, a few bottles of beer were found, and everyone drank to the Polish triumph. When he left the center that day, Knox chanted, “Nous marchons ensemble” (“We are traveling together”). On his return to Britain, he sent Rejewski and his colleagues a thank-you note in Polish: “Serdeznie dzie¸juje¸ za współprace¸ i cierpliw os´c´” (“My sincere thanks for your cooperation and patience”). Accompanying the note were three silk scarves depicting a horse winning The Derby—Knox’s graceful acknowledgment that the Poles had come in first in the Enigma race.
Yet that exploit did not belong solely to the Poles. If it hadn’t been for the efforts of a short, stout French military intelligence officer named Gustave Bertrand, they might never have solved Enigma’s complexities. In 1933, Bertrand, the head of French radio intelligence, had approached his Polish counterparts with an intriguing story and offer. He told them he had paid a substantial amount of money to an official in the German military cipher department for top secret documents relating to Enigma, including instructions for operating the machine and four diagrams of its construction.
Bertrand’s superiors in France had had no interest in the documents, declaring that even with them, Enigma could not be broken. He next approached MI6, which also dismissed the idea. When he contacted the Poles, however, they accepted the material, according to Bertrand, as if it had been “manna in the desert.”
The documents were turned over to three new recruits in the Polish cipher bureau, all in their twenties. The standout of the three was Rejewski, a twenty-eight-year-old mathematical genius who had just returned from a year of graduate study at Germany’s University of Göttingen, an international mecca for mathematicians.
Armed with the documents, Rejewski and his colleagues built their own Enigma machine, as well as what they called a “bomba,” an electromechanical device that allowed them to scan all the possible permutations of the Enigma code at high speeds. (The “bomba” was named after a popular Polish ice cream dessert that the mathematicians were eating when they came up with the idea.)
By early 1938, the Poles were able to decrypt about three-quarters of the Enigma intercepts. The Germans, however, began adding even more complexity to their machine, introducing two new rotors and making significant changes in their methods of enciphering. Hampered by a lack of money and other resources and realizing that war was drawing near, the Poles decided to share what they had accomplished with the British and French. Not long after the visit of Dilly Knox and the others to the forest outside Warsaw and only days before Germany invaded Poland, the Poles sent replicas of Enigma to Britain and France, along with detailed information on how to use it.
Knox and his team went immediately to work on the “Polish treasure trove,” as he called it. In the past, the GC&CS had recruited academics from various disciplines for cryptography work, but, like Poland, it had begun to focus on mathematicians, notably including Gordon Welchman and Alan Turing. After thoroughly examining the design and details of Enigma and the Polish “bomba,” the shy, absent-minded Turing took what he had learned and built a far more powerful and accurate decoding machine, which he called “the bombe.”
In May 1940, just days after Churchill came to power, Bletchley Park code breakers used the bombe to begin cracking the Luftwaffe’s version of Enigma; months later, they did the same to the Enigma codes of the German navy and army. The information gleaned from these decrypts was “of almost unbelievably high quality,” the British historian M.R.D. Foot wrote. “Operation instructions from Hitler…to his supreme commanders were now and again read by his enemies even before they had been gotten into the hands of their addressees.”
Since MI6 oversaw Bletchley Park, Stewart Menzies had the daily pleasure of presenting Churchill with an old buff-colored leather box containing the latest priceless information gleaned from Enigma—a box to which Churchill had the only key. For both men, it was a high point of their day. “As ‘C’ quickly saw, he would never have to fear criticism or cuts in his budget as long as he could drop in on the prime minister at breakfast time with some tasty item of Intelligence,” Malcolm Muggeridge noted. About Menzies, Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, remarked, “He would not have held the job for more than a year if it had not been for Bletchley.”
And if it hadn’t been for a quirk of fate, the young Polish cryptographers whose early work had led to Ultra might well have been working at Bletchley Park alongside Knox, Turing, and the others to produce what Churchill called “golden eggs” of intelligence.
After the fall of Poland, Marian Rejewski had escaped to Romania with his two colleagues, leaving his wife and two young children behind in Warsaw. In the Romanian capital of Bucharest, the three Poles contacted the British embassy, only to be told by a harried diplomat that staffers there were too busy at the moment to deal with them. The mathematicians then went to the French embassy, where they were warmly welcomed and, within a day or two, given travel documents to travel to France.
When Dilly Knox and Alastair Denniston learned of the Poles’ escape, they asked the French to send them on to Bletchley Park. “The experience of these men may shorten our task by months,” Denniston told the French. His request, however, was rejected by Gustave Bertrand, as was a proposal by the Poles to invite British cryptographers to Paris. Bertrand, who was fiercely anti-German, didn’t much like the British, either. He was particularly irritated that they had, as he put it, “profited gratuitously from a Franco-Polish friendship of eight years’ duration [that was] sustained by mutual trust.” Even though the Poles would have much preferred to work at Bletchley Park, Bertrand was determined to keep them in his own country.
Until the fall of France, the Polish cryptographers worked with him and his code-breaking team at the French military’s radio intelligence and deciphering center, housed in a handsome château about twenty-five miles northeast of Paris. Despite Bertrand’s frostiness toward the British, his operation cooperated closely with Bletchley Park, daily exchanging decrypts as well as other information and ideas.
When the Germans marched into Paris, Bertrand evacuated his code breakers—not to a safe location outside France but, in an audacious and breathtakingly risky move, to the south of the country, where they set up shop again at a secluded château in the countryside of Provence. This was now an underground operation: Pétain and the higher-ups in his collaborationist regime knew nothing about it.
For the next sixteen months, Bertrand’s team was faced with the daily threat of detection; although Provence was in unoccupied France, the Vichy government allowed German agents, in the guise of armistice commissioners, to move about freely in its territory. The code breakers were given a certain amount of protection by anti-German intelligence officials at Vichy, who tipped Bertrand off about German agents or overzealous Vichy police officers who might be roaming around in the area. Nonetheless, the team remained on constant alert, watching for vans or cars with circular aerials on their roofs—a telltale sign of radio-direction-finding equipment inside.
The cryptographers rarely left the château, whose ground-floor windows were barred and kept shut, making working conditions distinctly unpleasant in the hot, sultry summer of 1940. As a further precaution, three cars were ready, day and night, to whisk the team and their equipment away in case of a sudden German or Vichy police raid. Yet for all their difficulties, the French and Polish code breakers never lost contact with Bletchley Park, providing the British with a constant stream of decrypts about the movements, locations, and equipment of the Reich’s air, ground, and naval forces in France and other occupied countries.
Throughout the war, the British and their allies were never free from the worry that the Germans would realize that their Enigma ciphers were being read. But despite repeated indications that the British had advance knowledge of many of their military plans, Reich officials refused to acknowledge that their vaunted machine could possibly have yielded its secrets. Ironically, they preferred to believe that agents of the all-powerful MI6 had somehow obtained information about German plans and tactics on their own and passed them on to Churchill and his government.