The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers. Richard Aldrich
refugees from the German Sudetenland at his country estate, Birch Grove. In early November 1938, his new Czech guests had joined in the Bonfire Night celebrations, replacing Guy Fawkes with an effigy of Chamberlain. An enthusiastic Macmillan had personally donated his black homburg hat and a rolled umbrella to ensure a perfect likeness of the prime minister.48
By Christmas 1938, few in the cabinet shared Chamberlain’s confidence in his ability to divine Hitler’s intentions. MI5 had recruited further sources inside the German embassy in London, including the former military attaché.49 The Foreign Office also understood that the majority of the Nazi Party saw Great Britain as ‘Enemy No. 1’, and that a full-scale military confrontation was likely. A blizzard of rumours, often picked up by military attachés, suggested that Hitler’s generals had been told to plan an attack in the west. Halifax noticed a troubling consistency in the myriad fragmentary intelligence. Chamberlain, by contrast, preferred to believe Henderson’s assurances from the embassy in Berlin that these were all ‘stories and rumours’. The absence of reliable sigint meant there was little decisive material to help.50 At one point, MI5 resorted to highlighting Hitler’s personal insults about Chamberlain in order to shock him out of his complacency. Playing on Chamberlain’s vanity, Hitler’s use of the word Arschloch, or ‘arsehole’, to describe the prime minister was underlined. It made a ‘considerable impression’.51 At the same time, however, Hitler’s regime was genuinely chaotic, with different groups continually developing plans and cancelling them. German exiles and opposition groups, including elements of the German secret service itself, deliberately invented stories in the hope of inspiring action by London or Paris. There were constant rumours and continual mobilisations, making it very hard to distinguish between ‘signals’ and ‘noise’. All of those earnestly warning about German plans, including MI6, worried about the danger of crying wolf and sowing confusion.52
In January 1939, perhaps encouraged by Halifax’s visible defection from the Chamberlain camp, MI6 changed its tune dramatically: ‘Germany is controlled by one man, Herr Hitler,’ it reported, ‘whose will is supreme and who is a blend of fanatic, madman and clear-visioned realist.’ It added: ‘his ambition and self-confidence are unbounded, and he regards Germany’s supremacy in Europe as a step to world supremacy’, and offered the somewhat belated warning that Hitler might well come west in 1939. Of the Führer himself, MI6 assessed that he was ‘barely sane, consumed by an intense hatred of this country, and capable both of ordering an immediate aerial attack on any European country and of having his command instantly obeyed’.53
The last valuable sigint from GC&CS underpinned this new certainty. At the end of 1938, the German foreign minister, Joachim Ribbentrop, explained to the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, Baron Ōshima, that Hitler wanted to transform the Axis from a mere ideological pact against communism into a platform for a joint war on Britain. Ōshima immediately telegraphed the news back to Tokyo. These were some of the last Japanese messages that GC&CS read during Chamberlain’s administration before Tokyo improved its cipher security. Diplomats in the Foreign Office panicked when they read this new intelligence on Hitler’s intentions. It suggested that he was planning nothing less than global war.54
Remarkably, Chamberlain chose to disregard this definitive sigint, which, taken with the material collected by MI5 in London, pointed only one way: to impending war. The prime minister continued to do so right up until the German attack on Czechoslovakia in March 1939. Although the Foreign Office loathed Chamberlain because of his private diplomacy, diplomats had still held out hopes that he was right about Germany. But with the crushing of the Czechs there could be no doubt. Alexander Cadogan, who had been appointed at Chamberlain’s instigation to replace the violently anti-German Vansittart, conceded that he and the prime minister had been wrong. The story was turning out ‘as Van predicted and as I never believed it would’. Meanwhile, he continued, Nevile Henderson, the prime minister’s single source in Berlin, had been ‘completely bewitched by his German friends’.55
British intelligence failures came thick and fast after the German troops marched into Prague in March 1939. On 7 April, Italy invaded Albania, to the general bewilderment of Whitehall and Westminster. Chamberlain, who had sent another craven message to Rome via the ‘secret channel’ using Ball and Dingli only four days previously, was especially shocked. ‘Musso has behaved to me like a sneak and cad,’ he moaned. ‘He has carried through his smash and grab raid with complete cynicism.’56 Although MI5 had given a direct warning as the result of its excellent sources in the German embassy in London, Halifax had absurdly then gone to a cabinet meeting two days before the invasion and insisted it was unlikely.57
In the subsequent debate in the House of Commons a familiar backbencher rose to speak. Winston Churchill chose the British secret service as his subject, praising it as the ‘finest service of its kind in the world’. The subject was an unusual one for an MP, but Churchill was uncommonly expert on the subject. He attacked the government for failing to use the service’s excellent product properly, insisted that it had received plenty of intelligence about both Czechoslovakia and Albania, and wondered aloud if some sinister ‘hidden hand’ was at work, withholding intelligence from ministers. On balance, however, he thought it more likely that Chamberlain’s obsession with appeasement and striking a peace deal with Germany had blinded him:
It seems to me that Ministers run the most tremendous risk if they allow the information collected by the Intelligence Department, and sent to them I am sure in good time, to be sifted and coloured and reduced in consequence and importance, and if they ever get themselves into a mood of attaching importance only to those pieces of information which accord with their earnest and honourable desire that the peace of the world shall remain unbroken.
Churchill’s accusation that Chamberlain had ignored good intelligence in his blind search for peace was true, but in reality was only one of several problems. As yet, Britain lacked a central brain to undertake proper analysis of intentions as well as capabilities. Although this machinery was emerging in the JIC even as Churchill spoke, the challenge for intelligence analysts everywhere at this time was to abandon pre-formed notions about the way civilised world leaders generally behaved. Policymakers of every persuasion would be surprised by the political events of the next few months.58
On 23 August 1939, Britain was hit by a bombshell. Ribbentrop met Molotov, his Soviet counterpart, in Moscow to sign the Nazi–Soviet pact. This was not only an intelligence failure of the first order, since no one had even begun to contemplate such a possibility, it was also a disaster for British foreign policy. Talks aimed at producing an Anglo–Franco–Soviet alliance were in progress, and a joint British–French military mission was in Moscow for this very purpose even as the Germans and Soviets embraced. The result was abject and public failure. Chamberlain had never been keen on these talks in the first place, confessing in his private diary that he felt ‘a profound distrust of Russia’ and doubted its military capabilities. He believed that Stalin’s objective was to absorb the small states around the edge of the Soviet Union – or, in his words, ‘getting everyone else by the ears’. But he had been forced to pursue a deal, because Halifax and the chiefs of staff now saw containment as the only rational alternative given the bankruptcy of appeasement.59
The Nazi–Soviet pact was a classic case of surprise despite many warnings. Chamberlain and his senior colleagues did not believe these because they did not fit in with their preconceived stereotypes and assumptions about the world. But those with inside knowledge of Moscow had warned publicly of precisely this eventuality. Walter Krivitsky, formerly a senior officer in Soviet military intelligence, dramatically predicted the agreement. He had fled the Soviet secret services the previous year, and