The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers. Richard Aldrich
The codebreakers not only gave full warning of the Easter Rising, but also revealed Germany’s plans to send weapons to Ireland in an attempt to divert British attention from the Western Front, allowing the Royal Navy to intercept a German U-boat carrying Casement to Ireland and the arms shipment to be captured. The signals intelligence, though, was only sent to a small military circle. It seemingly did not reach the politicians, even Asquith.48 Nor did it reach the authorities in Dublin. The sorry episode reflects the perennial problem of using signals intelligence: it is difficult to do so without compromising the source, thereby leading to a reluctance to share, even inside Westminster. More intriguingly, there is evidence that the British authorities deliberately allowed the Easter Rising to go ahead in order to justify repression of the Irish dissidents. Under interrogation, Casement offered to publicly call off the rebellion, but this was declined. Instead, he was told that ‘it’s a festering sore’, and it was ‘much better it should come to a head’.49 Either way, the Easter Rising failed.
Despite the work of Room 40, Asquith experienced the rebellion as ‘a real bolt from the blue’ – albeit one with a ‘comic side’.50 His wife Margot confessed in her diary that ‘none of us had any idea what had really happened’.51 Upon hearing the news of the Easter Rising, and in the midst of a conscription crisis, the prime minister simply said, ‘Well, that’s something,’ and went to bed. Intelligence seemingly had little impact in Number 10. Such nonchalance belies Asquith’s growing interest in Irish affairs, which had been a key issue in the months prior to war. He subsequently took on the office of Irish secretary himself, and headed off to Dublin to try unsuccessfully to sort things out.52 General John Maxwell, appointed by Asquith to force a military solution on a political problem, drew on Special Branch intelligence to persuade the prime minister that the case against every executed rebel leader had been overwhelming.53
They included Roger Casement. Partly because signals intelligence had thoroughly convinced the authorities of his treacherous links with Germany, Casement was hanged in Pentonville Prison in August 1916. To counter calls for clemency, the ‘Casement Diaries’, containing what were regarded as shocking descriptions of Casement’s homosexual exploits, were leaked by Blinker Hall to influence the trial. Previously, many Irish nationalists had mistakenly insisted that these diaries were forgeries.54 This episode underlines the long history of the selective use of intelligence to influence public opinion.
Meanwhile, the seemingly directionless war strategy left the cabinet unimpressed. Discontent also arose over the quality of information reaching them. Asquith had formed an ultimately unpopular coalition government, with Andrew Bonar Law as his Tory partner. In early September 1915, Bonar Law pressed the prime minister to make changes to the leadership of the war effort. He sought the resurrection of a General Staff at the War Office, with the hope that this would result in better strategic advice to cabinet. Nothing was done until 22 September, when Kitchener was conveniently absent. The Tories then took the lead and insisted on a smaller and more active War Council, together with the provision of better intelligence to cabinet by the General Staff. Asquith was finally forced to write to Kitchener, insisting on an improved flow of intelligence to the centre. He appointed General Archibald Murray as the new Chief of the Imperial General Staff, but beyond that none of the suggested reforms were implemented, and Asquith did not follow up on the cabinet’s requests for more intelligence.55
The Asquith coalition government disintegrated in late 1916, as a result of its own incompetence and disorder. Lacking personal authority, Asquith had spent much of his time assembling factions and alliances. There was little planning, and astonishingly, letters sent by the prime minister to the King after each meeting formed the only record of cabinet discussions. When Bonar Law joined the coalition in 1915 he had been amazed by the lack of any method or even agenda for cabinet meetings. The failure of the Gallipoli campaign at the start of 1916 accelerated the decline of the Asquith government. Mercifully for the war effort, in June 1916 Lord Kitchener, the aged secretary of state for war, died at sea off the Orkneys in mysterious circumstances, an event that many attributed to a bewildering mixture of German, Irish or Russian saboteurs. He was replaced by the energetic David Lloyd George. At the end of the year, however, both Asquith and Lloyd George resigned in short order, while Bonar Law declined to form a government. Lloyd George became head of a new coalition two days later, establishing a Supreme War Council. Neither Asquith nor Bonar Law was mentally equipped to handle the range of decisions required by modern war. The main challenge for Lloyd George, now and for the rest of the war, was to try to wrest strategic control of the conflict from the military chiefs, a task that he never quite completed.56
Asquith had been notably detached from the business of war. He may have presided over the creation of the Secret Service Bureau and the rapid expansion of every kind of intelligence after 1914, but it had interested him very little. By contrast, in December 1916, David Lloyd George became the first prime minister to embrace intelligence, albeit often in an amateurish manner. This was partly to do with his nature, for he was by temperament a man of enormous energy and sudden impulses. But his initial mistakes also reflected the fact that British intelligence lacked a central brain. No system existed for sifting and interpreting intelligence for top policymakers. Despite a quantum leap in the organisation of Downing Street, and the creation of the Cabinet Office in late 1916, intelligence was deliberately left out. As a result, Lloyd George lacked context and made emotional responses to the raw intelligence he received – with unhappy results.57
His previous interactions with intelligence had been in the context of the ongoing spy-mania. In May 1915, as minister of munitions, he sought to confront the problem of factory explosions. Such disasters were almost invariably the result of primitive manufacturing processes, running at maximum capacity, which did not privilege safety. Like many others, however, Lloyd George was obsessed with the danger of the German ‘hidden hand’, and blamed saboteurs. His staff were allowed to set up a counter-intelligence unit to ferret out these imaginary enemies. Given the name P.M.S.2, it failed to find any spies, and slowly shifted its attention to trade union activity in the munitions factories.58
Lloyd George later admitted that he and some of his friends had deliberately encouraged rumours of saboteurs within the British munitions programme. This included the vast shell-filling factory at Chilwell on the banks of the River Trent in Nottingham, the largest concentration of high explosives anywhere in Britain. In January 1916, a Zeppelin was reported to be hunting up and down the Trent, supposedly hoping to bomb the factory. The next day, rumours circulated that Lloyd George’s friend Lord Chetwynd, who ran the huge complex, had caught three German spies in the act of trying to guide the Zeppelin to its target with hand-held torches and had shot them. Chetwynd exploited the false rumour by asking a labourer to dig three graves on the hillside by night, placing an anonymous black post at the head of each. This, recalled Lloyd George, ‘turned the rumour into unquestioned history’ and discouraged the curious from prying around the factory. Predictably, when it suffered a catastrophic explosion later in the war, it was blamed on yet more spies.59
In late 1916, shortly before Lloyd George became prime minister, the Germans asked the American ambassador in Berlin to explain to President Woodrow Wilson that they were ‘anxious to make peace’. But they did not wish to appear weak, so they secretly asked the United States, which was then neutral, to make a ‘spontaneous’ offer of mediation. Unfortunately for Germany, Britain’s Room 40 had decrypted the American message. When Lloyd George read it, he wrongly assumed that it signified collaboration between America and Germany. With the cabinet in disarray, and lacking intelligence-assessment machinery, the impulsive Lloyd George decided to act alone. He warned the American press against interference by Washington, and asserted that the war must be a ‘fight to the finish’.