The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers. Richard Aldrich
and insisted that if the letter were made public he would have no choice but to reveal Chamberlain as the real author ‘in order to protect Italy’s honour’. The scheme went ahead, and when Grandi finally met Chamberlain and Eden on 18 February he greatly enjoyed the open disagreement between them, recalling the ‘two enemies confronting each other like two cocks in fighting posture’.18 There was a fearsome row, and further meetings between cabinet colleagues over the weekend could not mend the subsequent crisis. Eden grew annoyed that exchanges with the Italians increasingly came secretly via Ball rather than via the Foreign Office. To Grandi’s impish delight, Eden resigned on 20 February 1938 and was replaced by Lord Halifax.19
Chamberlain had been using his sister Ida as a further secret conduit to Mussolini. Visiting Rome in early 1938, she was enthralled by the Duce, who ‘took both my hands and kissed them’. She reported that he was ‘kindly & human’, and only wanted peace. Italian diplomats told her they liked Chamberlain, but nurtured a deep dislike and distrust of Eden. Mischievously, they promised to call off their anti-British propaganda if only London recognised Italy’s conquest of Albania. In further meetings with Mussolini and his foreign minister Galeazzo Ciano, Ida read out long private messages from Chamberlain. After getting rid of Eden, Chamberlain thanked her for her ‘invaluable help’.20
The Eden resignation was a potential source of embarrassment. Ball’s influence over the Conservative press, however, helped to limit the damage. The BBC barely mentioned the resignation at all, and Ball assured the prime minister that he had ‘taken certain steps privately’ to manage the story. Amazingly, in the following months Ball watched for counter-attacks on Chamberlain by tapping ‘the telephones of the Eden group’ and of staff working on their journal the Whitehall Newsletter.21 Various Conservative groups had their own news-sheets and outlets. Ball secretly took control of one named Truth, and developed it as both a mouthpiece for appeasement and a weapon with which to discredit his opponents outside and inside the party. Chamberlain was well aware of this, happily confiding to his sister that Truth was ‘secretly controlled by Sir J Ball!’22 Remarkably, Truth was not only anti-Eden and anti-Churchill, it was also overtly pro-German and pro-Italian. Most striking was its anti-Semitism, attacking mainstream journalists with phrases such as the ‘Jew-infested sink of Fleet Street’. Even after the outbreak of war in 1939 and the formation of the national government, Truth conducted attacks on behalf of Chamberlain against his cabinet colleagues.23
Chamberlain’s subsequent visit to Italy was a failure. The Italian secret service had free run of the British embassy in Rome, and used their burglary team, the ‘P Squad’, to gain access to British communications.24 They therefore knew what cards the British held. In addition, Chamberlain played his hand badly, and his excessively polite approach seemed craven to the Italians. Ciano rightly concluded that Chamberlain would make almost any concession to avoid war, which underlined the value of a German military alliance. With Hitler’s support, Ciano now felt the Italians ‘could get whatever we want’ from the British.25 Chamberlain continued to communicate with Rome via the Dingli ‘secret channel’ until the outbreak of war.26 Thereafter, Ball, ever attentive to detail, continued for years to tidy up the evidence of his and Chamberlain’s spectacular failures. Their go-between, Adrian Dingli, died unexpectedly and violently in Malta on 29 May 1945. Two days later, British security agents seized copies of his highly compromising diary.27 Fortunately, his wife preserved an extra copy to tell the real tale. Dingli officially died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. But writing to a friend after the war, Ball explained how he had employed a double agent to work on Italian policy. He added casually that this agent became ‘untrustworthy’, and so ‘I arranged for M.I.5 to look after him in the usual way.’28
On 14 May 1938, an odd incident underlined Chamberlain’s desire to appease Hitler. The England football team was playing Germany at the Olympic Stadium in Berlin. Hitler missed the match, but Goebbels, Goering, Himmler and Ribbentrop sat amid a crowd of 110,000. Controversially, before kick-off the England captain led his team in giving the Nazi salute during the German national anthem. The instructions for this came direct from the Foreign Office, and were delivered to the players in the dressing room just before the game.29 Stanley Matthews, who was a member of the team that day, felt that this was no mere football match, and that the Nazis saw it as a test of the New Order: ‘This day as never before we would be playing for England.’ England won 6–3, with Aston Villa trouncing another German team in Berlin the following day.30
The Czechoslovakia crisis dragged on throughout the year. Hitler demanded that the Czechs cede the Sudetenland to Germany, and it fell to a private intelligence network to shake Chamberlain’s complacency. In the 1930s, such networks thronged within Europe’s capitals. The most important was run by Robert Vansittart, who as we have seen understood how intelligence worked inside Whitehall. Having served as private secretary to two prime ministers and a foreign secretary, and being on extremely good terms with Quex Sinclair, Vansittart had more experience in this field than almost anyone else.31 Chamberlain, however, removed him as permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office in 1937, on account of his strong anti-German views. The prime minister privately rejoiced that he had managed ‘to push Van out of the F.O.’, adding that this was ‘deathly secret at present’.32
Vansittart had forecast doom and destruction almost as soon as Hitler swept to power. He consistently pressed cabinet ministers to encircle and isolate Germany. These warnings reflected thinly disguised prejudice against Germans generally rather than hard intelligence, and Vansittart’s shrill voice often proved his own worst enemy.33 His replacement, Alexander Cadogan, considered Vansittart to have a one-track mind, exclaiming: ‘He’s an idiot with an idée fixe – a very simple one. He’s all façade and nothing else.’ Vansittart may have had a fixed idea, but it was essentially the right idea. Now sidelined as a mere ‘diplomatic adviser’ at the Foreign Office, he nevertheless understood that the key intelligence question was German intentions rather than capabilities.34
MI6’s own intelligence capability was badly damaged in the mid-1930s. The key MI6 station in Europe for watching Germany was based in The Hague, and was an indirect casualty of the Nazi persecution of the Jews. MI6 operations there, as in much of Europe, were hidden behind the Passport Control Office, which issued visas. These now became flooded with Jews escaping Germany and seeking permits for Palestine. The MI6 head of station, Major Dalton, took sizeable bribes in return for visas and was then blackmailed by one of the clerks, subsequently committing suicide in 1936. The blackmailer was sacked after an inquiry, and sold his services to the German secret service, which allowed it to uncover Britain’s best human source reporting on the German navy. Inexplicably, Dalton’s MI6 replacement in The Hague took the blackmailer back onto the payroll, along with another German agent. Unsurprisingly, the station was soon flooded with German deception material.35
Further disasters followed. On the morning of 17 August 1938, Captain Thomas Kendrick, the MI6 station chief in Vienna, was arrested near Salzburg when he became unacceptably close to German army manoeuvres while driving towards Munich. He was taken to Gestapo headquarters at the Hotel Metropole in Vienna. After being subjected for three days to non-stop harsh interrogation carried out by security teams in eight-hour relays, he was expelled from Germany on grounds of espionage. His staff shut down the station and burned all their papers. Sinclair recalled all the