The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers. Richard Aldrich
minister at the time of Pearl Harbor, were looking for war. As a former Treasury man, Chamberlain brought an actuarial approach to intelligence that involved counting guns and assessing military capabilities, not political intentions.6
British intelligence amplified Chamberlain’s misunderstandings. On the raw size of German forces it was quite accurate, but more importantly, it did not understand Blitzkrieg. Having lost the First World War, Hitler chose a military doctrine emphasising highly mobile conflict. In 1936, he began a second and more rapid phase of rearmament – so rapid that the German armed forces found it hard to spend all the additional money. British intelligence began reassessing the German military’s power, and grew increasingly worried between 1936 and 1938 about growing Nazi capabilities. After 1939, however, the intelligence community became more optimistic about the balance of numbers, and this ‘bean-counting’ approach, which so appealed to Chamberlain, helped to persuade the prime minister to declare war, because he thought Britain was now relatively stronger. In reality, the Wehrmacht’s real capability did not lie in its size but in its new doctrine. Hitler’s audacity and his use of surprise were far more important.
Britain’s biggest intelligence problem was codebreaking. It had lost the battle over secret communications, and so lacked deep insight into Hitler’s intentions. Although GC&CS numbered only two hundred staff between the wars, it was still perhaps the world’s biggest codebreaking organisation. Up until 1935 it was also the most effective. But just as Britain confronted the crises of the late thirties, its rivals adopted modern electromechanical cipher machines, and British codebreaking, then still a bespoke handicraft activity rather than an industrial organisation, went into a sharp decline. By 1937, GC&CS had lost access to Russian and Italian diplomatic messages. The following year, the Japanese improved their code systems, shutting Britain out there too. Political communications between the four revisionist powers, Russia, Germany, Italy and Japan, would have been especially revealing regarding enemy intentions. Intercepts would have made Chamberlain’s appeasement strategy hard to sustain, and would also have prevented Mussolini from manipulating the prime minister with such pathetic ease. Axis diplomacy was a sealed box, and it was only opened in 1940, when the Americans began to break high-level Japanese diplomatic ciphers, and generously shared this secret with Britain.7
Human spies could not fill the gap. The years of economic crisis in the early 1930s cast a distinct shadow over MI6. Its chief, Quex Sinclair, explained that although his main task was to provide raw intelligence for the services against all potential enemies, the lack of funds meant only partial coverage of secret fascist plans to rearm. Heeding the exhortations of the Foreign Office, Italy was designated ‘friendly’, and there had been no MI6 agents there when Mussolini invaded Abyssinia in 1936. MI6 concentrated on Germany, but there was little work on either her allies or the neutrals in Europe. This meant an underestimation of German total long-term industrial capability.8
Britain’s embassy in Berlin was worse still. The ambassador, Nevile Henderson, a close friend of Herman Goering, head of the Luftwaffe, took German reassurances at face value. For their part, the Germans treated Henderson and his staff as idiots. During the Anschluss of 1938, Henderson asked his military attaché to call up German military intelligence and ask what was going on. Senior staff officers there assured him that no unusual troop movements were planned for that day, and everything was calm. The attaché was suspicious, and decided to go on a private reconnaissance expedition out into the countryside. He had only reached the outskirts of Berlin when his car became embroiled in a huge traffic jam caused by a column of 3,000 soldiers, police and SS ‘moving towards Austria in buses, bakers’ vans, pantechnicons and a mass of other miscellaneous vehicles’.9
Britain’s weak intelligence was not just about collection. Whitehall lacked a central analytical brain that could assimilate and assess material from all sources. The resulting fragmentation, combined with the focus on capabilities, allowed Chamberlain to manipulate or ignore intelligence. As early as late 1933, Sir Warren Fisher, head of the home civil service, had decided that Germany was the ‘ultimate potential enemy’ against which long-term defence planning had to be directed.10 But subsequent efforts to determine Germany’s strength were frustrated by interservice rivalries between army, naval and air intelligence. ‘Bitterness and mistrust’ – especially between the Air Ministry and the Foreign Office – dominated relations. The British intelligence apparatus was not yet a community, but rather a number of factions at odds with each other. In 1936, the first glimmerings of central intelligence appeared with the creation of a Joint Intelligence Committee, or ‘JIC’, but this was then a lowly body, and only served the chiefs of staff. Surprisingly, it did not at this point include representatives from MI5, MI6 or GC&CS.11
Intelligence work accelerated after Germany’s occupation of the Rhineland in 1936. All the service ministries boosted their assessment efforts accordingly. Yet there was ‘remarkably little discussion or collaboration between them’. As we have seen, the only effective cross-Whitehall body was Desmond Morton’s Industrial Intelligence Centre, undertaking detailed study into the German war machine. Morton, therefore, might well be credited with the whole idea of central intelligence machinery that would eventually support Downing Street and the Cabinet Office. Even had this existed at the time, Chamberlain was such an incompetent and wilfully blind consumer of intelligence that it would have made little difference. The impact of Morton’s work on Chamberlain was to generate anxiety, then paralysis, and ultimately to accelerate appeasement.12
Despite not understanding intelligence, the prime minister spied shamelessly upon his cabinet colleagues. He also appreciated the value of covert propaganda and manipulating the press. Nothing underlines this more clearly than his personal friendship with the mysterious figure of Sir Joseph Ball, an MI5 officer who became Director of the Conservative Research Department in the 1930s, when Chamberlain was party chairman. Ball secretly controlled a weekly journal that engaged in what the leading historian of the Conservative Party has called the ‘venomous anti-semitic character assassination’ of Chamberlain’s enemies.13 One of his colleagues recalled that he was ‘steeped in Service tradition, and has as much experience as anyone I know in the seamy side of life and the handling of crooks’.14 Ball was so determinedly secret that he destroyed most of his own papers in an attempt to vaporise himself from the historical record. Devoted to Chamberlain, he not only ran spies inside the Labour Party but also spied on the prime minister’s enemies within his own party, especially the anti-appeasers led by Churchill and Eden, even claiming to have had some of their telephones tapped.15
Chamberlain also used Ball to conduct a separate overseas policy behind the back of his first foreign secretary, Anthony Eden. Rightly suspecting Mussolini of being a thug and a double-dealer, Eden preferred to look to the United States for support. Chamberlain, however, paid little attention to Washington, believing that he could reach a binding agreement with Hitler and charm Mussolini into alliance. He sought to cultivate Dino Grandi, the Italian ambassador in London, who had previously been Mussolini’s foreign minister. Grandi’s power base came from the most radical and violent Italian fascists; he was also an adept covert operator. Knowing that his masters in Italy had a low regard for the British, he enthusiastically encouraged the secret channel in order to poison relations between Eden and Chamberlain, reportedly meeting Ball in the back of London taxis.16
Ball’s many London friends included a Maltese barrister called Adrian Dingli. A lawyer for the Italian embassy, Dingli knew Grandi well, and was also a member of the Carlton Club in St James’s, the oldest and most important of all Conservative clubs. Chamberlain and Ball therefore decided to use Dingli to try to open talks with Italy behind Eden’s back.17 In early 1938, they concocted a letter, purporting to