The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers. Richard Aldrich
just as the flow of intelligence from Enigma expanded. It would soon become a torrent. Only with great reluctance was he persuaded that he could not see everything. Instead, Menzies personally delivered selections of Ultra to the prime minister in a buff-coloured box.4 Churchill was proactive, too. At moments of extreme tension, such as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he would ring Bletchley Park ‘at all hours of the day and night’ to get the latest news.5 This allowed him to become a ‘do-it-yourself analyst’ of raw intelligence, and he often leapt to the wrong conclusions. The misreading of Ultra or the selective use of intelligence underpinned some of his more hare-brained schemes. As the war progressed, Alan Brooke, the Chief of the Imperial Staff, found more and more of his energy expended on containing Churchill’s ill-judged enthusiasms. From July 1941 the chiefs of staff were given updates on the latest sigint from Bletchley three or four times a day, to help them deal with the prime minister’s ‘proddings’.6
Yet, it was precisely because of these vexing tendencies that Churchill transformed intelligence at the top. Under him, Whitehall developed the first modern system for incorporating intelligence into strategy and operations, not least with the expansion of the Joint Intelligence Committee. The development of the JIC as the central brain of British intelligence was one of the Churchill government’s most important contributions. As we have seen, throughout the interwar period the Foreign Office and the three ministries of the armed services had battled over the control and interpretation of intelligence. This began to be addressed in 1936 with the creation of the JIC, which then worked for the chiefs of staff. But it had remained underpowered and weak. All that changed with the advent of Churchill and his insatiable desire for a daily diet of raw decrypts.7
In May 1940, twin disasters catapulted Downing Street into action. The Germans had shocked Europe with their surprise occupation of Norway and the successful invasion of northern France. The lack of warning bothered Churchill, and he ordered the chiefs of staff to rethink how intelligence connected to high-level strategy and operations. As a result, on 17 May, only a few days after Churchill had arrived in Number 10, the JIC was elevated in importance, being given sole authority for producing strategic and operational assessments, alongside a new warning function. Major General Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay, Churchill’s senior staff officer, was ordered to bring JIC intelligence ‘to the notice of the prime minister at any hour of the day or night’.8
This was less about creating a good government machine than about personal control. In August 1940, Churchill told Ismay that he was fed up with receiving ‘sifted’ intelligence from the various authorities. He renewed his demand for raw material that he could analyse himself, and insisted that Morton ‘be shown everything’, and should then ‘submit authentic documents to me in their original form’.9 A few months later he asked to see a list of all those who were allowed to see this special material from GC&CS. He expressed horror at the ‘vast congregation’, and ordered that it be cut drastically. By November 1940, there were very few recipients of raw Ultra, although many more received the information in a disguised or digested form.10
Churchill constantly surprised the chiefs of staff with questions derived from specific Ultra decrypts. His own understanding of them was often at odds with that of the JIC. He used Ultra to underpin his own eccentric approach to strategy, which was romantic, inspirational, loquacious and often fuelled by alcohol. Talking late into the night, he used intelligence and his alarming ability to orate spontaneously at inordinate length to wear down his opponents in the war cabinet. Both Brooke and Alexander Cadogan, the senior official at the Foreign Office, used their diaries to let off steam by recording the vexations that Churchill caused his immediate circle. Cadogan asked how they ever managed to run the war ‘with the PM spending hours of his own and other people’s time simply drivelling, welcoming every red herring so as only to have the pleasure of more irrelevant, redundant talk’.11
The reinforced JIC was there to help the chiefs of staff resist Churchill. It expanded to include MI6 (which also had responsibility for the codebreakers of GC&CS), MI5 and the Ministry of Economic Warfare (which oversaw special operations), and more personnel joined the analytical team drafting the assessments. Increasing the amount of assessed intelligence would, it was hoped, prevent the prime minister from engaging in DIY analysis. Yet Churchill was sometimes right in his reading of the decrypts, and was far ahead of the ‘professional analysts’ in spotting one of the most remarkable turning points of the war, Hitler’s stunning decision to launch an attack on Russia on 22 June 1941.
Churchill forced Whitehall and Westminster to wake up to the importance of intelligence in modern war. This not only included intercepts, but extended to scientific developments. Indeed, the prime minister backed the creation of entirely new forms of electronic intelligence and the acceleration under R.V. Jones of the ‘Wizard War’, a field that would constitute an entirely new secret world by the 1950s. Most importantly, he understood the strategic importance of special forces and covert action. Britain’s most famous secret armies owed their existence to Churchill’s enthusiasm for wild characters. This included the SAS, the Commandos and the Chindits. Conventionally-minded staff officers detested this sort of unconventional activity. Brigadier Orde Wingate, who led a successful guerrilla revolt against the Italians in East Africa 1940, was actually demoted by his superiors at GHQ Middle East because of his maverick ideas. Churchill rescued him from his military exile and forced the chiefs of staff to take him seriously, allowing him to create the Chindits in Burma, who then inspired a generation of behind-the-lines enthusiasts who believed passionately in what they called the ‘fourth dimension of warfare’.
This was not mere romanticism. Churchill understood the importance of unconventional thinking about warfare, and so was the first to connect organisations like SOE and MI6 to national policy. His inner circle learned these dark arts, and began to conceive of a whole new secret way in warfare – which later extended to peacetime. Churchill’s adherents and associates, including some improbable converts like Clement Attlee, his deputy prime minister, ensured that this revolutionary approach to secret statecraft, in which bribery, blackmail and other kinds of subterfuge were used to exercise British power, extended over the next fifty years.
Churchill’s most immediate concern was closer to home. He worried that Britain might be overwhelmed by Nazi secret warfare. During late 1939 and early 1940, this fear focused specifically on Ireland as ‘England’s back door’, and anxiety about Irish–German links reached fever pitch. In May 1940, MI6 despatched a veteran Anglo-Irish intelligence officer called Charles Tegart to Dublin to investigate. His fantastic reports would not have been out of place in a William le Queux novel of 1913. He claimed that IRA leaders had allowed 2,000 Nazi agents to be landed by submarine, and that they were already at work preparing hidden aerodromes for a surprise German invasion from the west. Churchill and his new cabinet accepted this at face value and panicked, extending a rather desperate offer of Irish unity to Éamon de Valera, who skilfully played up the fifth-column menace. Secretly, the British military prepared for a pre-emptive invasion of southern Ireland.12
Churchill’s long association with both India and Ireland underpinned his views on subversion. During the First World War, Germany had launched elaborate plots conniving with rebels in imperial locations as far apart as Canada, Ireland, India and Singapore. As early as 1937, MI6 warned Robert Vansittart, then still the top official in the Foreign Office, that Germany was advancing similar plans for Ireland in the event of war. All of Britain’s secret services began to turn their attention across the Irish Sea. The IRA, who had been allies of the Soviet Union in the previous decade, sensed an opportunity and began to explore a secret alliance with Hitler. In early 1937, the IRA chief of staff, Tom Barry, visited Germany to discuss opportunities for wartime sabotage. Several other high-level visits followed, and by 1939 even the Irish government were of the opinion that Sean McBride, the IRA’s director of intelligence, was working more eagerly