The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers. Richard Aldrich
rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">122 However, it seems that the process of abdication, Baldwin’s favoured outcome, would have been under way by then in any case. It also seems unlikely that MI5 found anything further against Mrs Simpson through its telephone-interception operation. Nonetheless, Baldwin got his way, although he believed that ‘no more repugnant task has ever been imposed on a prime minister’.123 The King abdicated on 10 December 1936. Baldwin’s appearance at the Houses of Parliament that day was greeted by ‘loud cheers’ from the public, and only a small and insignificant ‘little burst of booing’.124 The prime minister himself would resign less than six months later, making way for his chancellor of the exchequer, Neville Chamberlain.
Between them, MacDonald and Baldwin had faced a wide array of complex secret service issues. These included Soviet subversion, the Ireland problem, the rise of Nazi Germany and the abdication crisis. Inexperienced, driven by political motivations, and for the most part lacking a centralised ‘brain’ to bring intelligence into policymaking, they fared poorly and made costly mistakes. By contrast, Chamberlain’s premiership faced just one overriding issue which intelligence targeted: the Axis between Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Yet few prime ministers, if any, endured a more disastrous relationship with intelligence than he.
PART TWO
3
Neville Chamberlain (1937–1940)
Phew! What a week, the place buzzes with rumours and our own Secret Service continually reports information ‘derived from an absolutely reliable source’ of the most alarming character. I don’t know how many times we have been given the exact date and even hour when the Germans would march into Poland.
Neville Chamberlain1
It is easy to forget that Britain had not one, but three prime ministers during the Second World War. Neville Chamberlain presided until the invasion of France in May 1940, and Clement Attlee arrived in Downing Street shortly after the general election of July 1945, overseeing crucial end-of-war settlements and the final weeks of the war against Japan. Yet the story of intelligence and the Second World War overwhelmingly remains a mythologised Churchillian romp. Newly released documents show Attlee to have been an improbable action hero, or at least a fan of covert operations, quietly learning the intelligence trade alongside Eden and Macmillan in Churchill’s wartime training school for future occupants of Downing Street. By contrast, Chamberlain remains something of a cipher.2 Amongst a mountain of books about Chamberlain and the road to Munich, the interaction between intelligence, appeasement and re-armament is hard to find. Despite significant intelligence disasters in the first six months of the war, Chamberlain’s own impact on intelligence through to May 1940 is almost unknown.3
Chamberlain took little interest in British intelligence before 1939. He eschewed it partly because it was weak. MI6 had suffered budget cuts, and was underperforming against Nazi Germany. It had ceased to recruit agents in Mussolini’s Italy, while its representatives in the Far East were a standing joke. Britain’s small band of talented codebreakers had valiantly and successfully filled the intelligence void for much of the interwar period, but during the late 1930s they progressively lost access to the high-level communications of Russia, Italy and finally Japan, while never gaining access to German ciphers. Japanese communications, the last substantial insight into Axis activity, were lost in late 1938 when Tokyo radically improved its communications procedures, probably as a result of its thorough penetration of the British embassy there. But this was not just a failure of spies to collect. Those responsible for assessments at the centre of government concentrated on counting aircraft and tanks, rather than thinking seriously about Hitler’s intentions. During the intense argument over appeasement, intelligence could not speak truth to power simply because it did not know what the truth was.
Chamberlain made a bad situation worse by filling this intelligence void with his own arrogance and assumptions. Although hampered by the slow pace of British rearmament, he nevertheless made some real choices among a range of alternative policies, deliberately using his wilful and obstinate personality to prevent a serious debate about these options. He had an overwhelming confidence in his own judgement, and believed that his personal skills in diplomacy would overcome any problems and allow him to make robust agreements with untrustworthy leaders. Worst of all, he punished those who purveyed negative intelligence assessments of Hitler, and with MI5’s connivance used his own private system of surveillance to destabilise his political rivals.
Although lacking effective intelligence or a proper assessment machine, Chamberlain did have a range of information sources on Hitler available. He chose to rely on Sir Nevile Henderson, the British ambassador in Berlin, who was close to Herman Goering and believed Hitler’s assurances of good faith concerning his intentions for Czechoslovakia. Robert Vansittart, the able permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, took the opposite view. Understanding that MI6 was struggling, Vansittart had taken pains to develop his own ‘private detective agency’, which delivered surprisingly good, if sporadic, reports from secret contacts inside Germany. Instead of patiently evaluating these competing views, Chamberlain chose to persecute and marginalise Vansittart. In the interwar period very little MI6 material and very few intercepts from GC&CS were circulated to the Treasury, which may help to explain why Chamberlain, despite considerable government experience, was so naïve about intelligence.4
Nevertheless, Chamberlain loved conspiracy. He sent endless secret diplomatic missions behind the backs of his foreign secretaries. He also used his family as emissaries to outwit his own Foreign Office. New and secret documents have recently come to light that show just how far Chamberlain was prepared to go in using the hidden hand against members of his own party, and even his cabinet colleagues. He also manipulated public opinion to artificially create the impression that his views were widely supported. During the ‘Phoney War’ of late 1939 and early 1940, some of the most intricate games of espionage were not focused on Germany, but around Chamberlain’s immediate circle.
The greatest intelligence failures are those of the imagination. Chamberlain and his government underestimated Hitler because it was difficult to conceive of someone who was bent on world domination and genocide – doubly so given that the horrors of the First World War were only a decade or so in the past. Yet for those willing to listen, Hitler calmly set out his plans in some detail. In the summer of 1933, for example, John F. Coar, a retired American professor specialising in German literature, reported to the American ambassador in Berlin a conversation he had had with Hitler and his deputy Rudolf Hess: ‘Hitler talked wildly about destroying all Jews, insisting that no other nation had any right to protest and that Germany was showing the world how to rid itself of its greatest curse. He considered himself a sort of Messiah. He would rearm Germany, absorb Austria and finally move the capital to Munich.’
Even hearing these words, no one believed that Hitler meant literally killing millions of people. Many assumed that his talk of ‘destroying all Jews’ meant merely removing them from influential jobs and limiting their economic power.5
Although Britain appears to have been deeply divided about intelligence in the late 1930s, there was broad consensus on strategy. Everyone wanted to avoid war, not least because British leaders realised it would expose the nation’s weakness as an imperial power. Faced with threats from both Germany and Japan, and latterly from Italy and Russia, they had agreed to prioritise Germany, quite simply because this enemy was closest to Britain’s shores. Many also agreed with Chamberlain’s grand strategy, which was based on deterrence and diplomacy, not fighting. The prime minister, however, wrongly assumed that the dictator states feared conflict as much