The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers. Richard Aldrich
than the west. Eyes began to turn towards Adolf Hitler and the ominous rise of Nazi Germany. Yet secret intelligence did not inform strategic policy on Germany, or indeed Japan, particularly closely during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Especially in the empire across the Middle East, India and Malaya, intelligence officers remained unduly focused on Bolshevism.84 Moreover, partly because Hankey had failed to create a central intelligence ‘brain’ in the Cabinet Office, secret information remained tactical and operational, with little impact on discussions about the next major threat. Instead, policymakers relied on conventional and open sources – or, as in Ireland, biased locals. As Germany, Italy and Japan all began to make noises about revising the international order during the mid-1930s, intelligence on capabilities and industrial capacity became a priority. However, there was still no central machine for using intelligence to assess the strategy or intentions of these new enemies.85 Added to this, British impecuniousness and memories of the tragic devastation of the First World War fostered a reluctance in MacDonald and Baldwin to address the issue. MacDonald, perhaps unsurprisingly, remained more focused on economic recovery in the aftermath of the 1929 Wall Street Crash.86
Rearmament remains a controversial issue – one breath away from ‘appeasement’. Baldwin was long paraded alongside Ramsay MacDonald and Neville Chamberlain as one of the ‘Guilty Men’ who had failed to deter Hitler. More recently it has become apparent that, in a difficult economic context, he did much to improve Britain’s defences – albeit not enough to provide convincing deterrence.87 In March 1934, Baldwin announced that Britain would retain parity in air strength with Germany, hoping that this public commitment would deter Hitler’s aerial ambitions. Later in the year, he announced an expansion of the RAF to keep pace with the German programme. Nevertheless, Baldwin wanted to avoid an all-out arms race, and sought to rearm at a pace the public could accept, rather than at the optimum speed to counter Hitler.88
Intelligence was central to these complex rearmament debates. Both MacDonald and Baldwin knew Britain could not afford rapid, large-scale rearmament. Intelligence therefore became crucial in understanding exactly how much rearmament was necessary to counter the Nazi threat, and what kind of weapons were needed. Everyone was obsessed with air power. For the fascists it was symbolic of a modernist future, for others it was the likely harbinger of urban destruction at the very outbreak of war. Downing Street wanted an accurate picture of the current size of the Luftwaffe and the speed of future expansion. This, of course, was rather difficult to achieve in what was increasingly a Nazi police state. New technologies are often developed in secret and misunderstood even by those who develop them. Moreover, Hitler maintained strict control of the German press, and exaggerated Nazi strength. In other countries, especially Japan, ‘horrible deaths awaited those suspected of spying’.89
Britain lacked hard intelligence – especially on German intentions. The decline of the codebreakers at GC&CS made matters worse still. In the 1930s the Germans made increasing use of the Enigma encryption machine and electro-mechanical ciphers that generated millions of possible solutions to any secret message, and could not at the time be broken. Progressively through the 1930s, GC&CS lost the ability to read the codes of other important powers, including Russia, Italy and Japan. By the end of the decade the only major power whose traffic they were regularly reading was the United States. Baldwin and MacDonald never enjoyed the insight into German thinking that Churchill was later to gain from Bletchley Park.90
Intelligence capability cannot be increased overnight. Successive governments had slashed public spending in an attempt to deal with the aftermath of the First World War and then the Great Depression. As part of this, MacDonald’s national government had imposed deep cuts on army, naval and particularly air intelligence. Strikingly, Robert Vansittart, the permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, later admitted that the head of one section of the intelligence services ‘was so short of funds that at times he was reduced to relatives for assistance’.91 Lack of funding proved particularly detrimental given the increasing focus on the size and strength of the German air force, which was one of the great unknowns of the 1930s and which, as a new and frightening form of warfare, needed to be better understood. Interwar developments in air power had dramatically increased British feelings of vulnerability. Baldwin captured the mythical status of air power in his 1932 speech ‘Fear for the Future’ when he insisted ‘the bomber will always get through’.92
Air intelligence now fell into a range of mental traps which generated complacency about the pace of Luftwaffe growth. Analysts believed that the Germans sought quality over quantity, and so thought it would take some time before Hitler could build enough planes to constitute a real threat.93 Accordingly, intelligence was made to fit into a preconceived model, with the German air force ‘expanding in neat and well-ordered steps from the creation of one air division to the next’.94 Even when offered excellent intelligence by France which indicated greater German ambitions, the Air Ministry refused to budge from its fixed mind-set.95 The ministry’s dogged underestimation of the Germans is still a puzzle, not least because back in the 1920s it, alongside the Admiralty, deliberately exaggerated the strength of the French air force and the Japanese navy to argue for more resources.96 Obsessed with the national stereotype of German efficiency and order, analysts thought the Nazi approach would be slowed by the need to train air crew, create support services and build barracks. According to the Deputy Chief of the Air Staff, ‘a nation so admittedly thorough as Germany will not be content with a mere window-dressing collection of aircraft and pilots’. The Air Ministry happily predicted that the Germans would not be able to match the RAF until 1945.97
Meanwhile, at the centre of government a slow revolution was beginning. In 1931 Desmond Morton, an impish MI6 officer, had been allowed to create the Industrial Intelligence Centre. Beginning as a modest clearing house for economic intelligence on arms production capacity, something that no one seemingly wanted to own, it offered accurate assessments based on all source intelligence. More importantly, this unit was also the seed of centralised intelligence analysis that the Cabinet Office and Downing Street so badly needed. Although less sanguine than those of the Air Ministry, Morton’s assessments lacked impact, not least because he himself was unpopular, and did little to ‘promote interdepartmental harmony’.98 Detailed and extensive, the reports apparently ‘raised a riot each time’ they were read, since ‘neither Baldwin nor Chamberlain wanted to believe them’, and nor did MacDonald.99 Despite the improving intelligence on industrial matters, Baldwin woefully underestimated the speed of German rearmament throughout 1934 and much of 1935.100 With Robert Vansittart and the Foreign Office joining the argument, intelligence on the state of the German air force became Whitehall’s hottest potato.101
In March 1935, Hitler himself joined the debate, dramatically lifting the veils of secrecy from the Luftwaffe. In doing so, he bewildered British planners by claiming air power parity with the UK. This was bad news for Baldwin. Firstly, Churchill had long argued that Germany would soon overtake Britain if rearmament of the two countries continued at their present rates. Secondly, he had also warned that once Hitler had got the lead, Britain would be unable to catch up.102 Thirdly, poor Baldwin had unequivocally promised the House of Commons in November 1934 that ‘it is not the case that Germany is rapidly approaching equality with us’.103 Overnight, Hitler’s claims seemed to prove Baldwin wrong and Churchill