The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers. Richard Aldrich
only fed his paranoia.61
Churchill passed his warning to Stalin on 9 April, but there were many other efforts to warn the Soviets. In February 1941, Eden told Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador in London, that the Germans were moving troops into Bulgaria, and had taken over the airfields. Churchill was constantly in touch with Eden about what Stalin might be told and how he might receive it.62 Similarly, Stafford Cripps, Britain’s ambassador to Moscow, passed on a letter from Churchill in which he wrote, ‘I have at my disposal sufficient information from a reliable agent [a disguised reference to Ultra] that when the Germans considered Yugoslavia caught up in their net, that is, after March 20, they began transferring three of their five tank divisions from Romania to southern Poland.’63 Cripps did so reluctantly. He did not know the information was based on Ultra, and underrated its importance, assuming the warning was mere supposition. We now know that Churchill was wise to disguise the source of his intelligence, since German diplomats in Moscow quickly learned the contents of the letter handed over by Cripps.64
By early June, Ultra had provided forensic detail about German troop concentrations on the Soviet border. The Foreign Office passed this intelligence to Maisky, and ultimately on to the Soviet foreign minister Molotov. Cadogan gave Maisky a detailed briefing of more information obtained through Ultra on 16 June, but again disguised its source. By then the German attack was only a week away.65 Churchill later complained to Lord Beaverbrook about the earlier foot-dragging by Cripps, insisting that ‘if he had obeyed his instructions’ his relationship with Stalin would have been better. But in fact, the message was vague, and only told Stalin what others had already told him many times over.66
Churchill did not give up sending Ultra to Stalin. In early 1941 Bletchley Park’s window on ‘the War in the East’ mostly came from Luftwaffe Enigma decrypts. But by the autumn, it was also reading a German Army Enigma key codenamed ‘Vulture’ that carried messages from the German Eastern Front headquarters to particular army groups. This gave wonderful operational information, especially on the drive towards Moscow in October. Churchill sent nine separate warnings to Stalin in the space of a week conveying disguised Ultra information. On the day the Germans launched their October offensive, he ordered a reluctant Menzies to show him ‘the last five messages that had been sent to Moscow’.67 He was unaware that John Cairncross, one of the KGB’s top spies in Whitehall, was sitting only yards away in the Cabinet Office during 1941, and was himself about to transfer to Bletchley Park. Predictably, Stalin only believed Bletchley Park material when it was stolen, and not when it was freely given.68
Did Churchill have advance warning of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor? More precisely, did he withhold this intelligence from President Roosevelt as part of a plot to draw the United States into the war? This question has been debated endlessly, and historians have firmly concluded that he did not. In fact the British passed several intriguing batches of intelligence about Japanese intentions to the Americans, which they ignored. For example, British intelligence sent a wealthy Yugoslavian playboy named Dusan ‘Dusko’ Popov to New York in 1941. Codenamed ‘Tricycle’ due to his fondness for ‘three in a bed’ sessions, he served as a double agent feeding false reports to the unwitting Germans.69 Popov claimed to have warned both the British and the Americans of the impending Japanese attack on Hawaii. Although two senior British intelligence officers, John Masterman and Ewen Montagu, supported him, J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, was unimpressed, and failed to convey any of the information to Roosevelt.70 Hoover distrusted British intelligence, and believed that he was fighting not only Axis espionage and subversion, but also the plots of British agents meddling in American domestic politics and trying to manoeuvre the United States into war. He concluded that Tricycle’s intelligence was a forgery created by the British intelligence office in New York.71 Within Roosevelt’s supposedly ‘Anglophile’ administration, assistant secretary of state Adolf Berle also harboured extensive suspicions of British intelligence.
Churchill’s intelligence relations with Roosevelt were complex. Indeed, Hoover and Berle were partially justified in their suspicions. Although Tricycle’s intelligence was not a British plot, Churchill did authorise a remarkable range of risky schemes in order to draw America into the conflict. He read intercepts of private phone calls between Roosevelt, his secretary of state Cordell Hull, and Joe Kennedy, the US ambassador to London, during which they discussed options ‘if Europe is overrun’ by Nazi Germany. The British also compiled a dossier four inches thick on the isolationist group America First, and then set out to smear it.72
British activities involved not only espionage within the United States, but interference in American domestic polity. Churchill and Menzies chose Sir William Stephenson as their special representative in America. Although Stephenson was head of MI6 in the USA, his organisation, British Security Coordination, was more of a department store, representing the myriad secret services, including MI5, SOE and those engaged in propaganda.73 The British Security Coordination Office in New York occupied two whole floors of the Rockefeller Center, and employed close to a thousand people. Berle was not exaggerating when he claimed that Stephenson was operating a ‘full size secret police’ inside the United States, and he knew that interventionist organisations such as the Fight for Freedom Committee were closely linked to this undercover British apparatus.74 He tried to persuade Roosevelt to ban Stephenson’s agents, who responded by attempting to gather ‘dirt’ on him.75
As Roosevelt edged closer to war, Berle correctly concluded that British intelligence was seeking to manipulate US foreign policy by creating ‘false scares’.76 Historians now have full accounts of a range of remarkable high-risk British operations, often conducted in connivance with pro-intervention Americans. Churchill authorised a complicated influence operation designed to offer secret support to interventionists and to vilify isolationism. Meanwhile, Britain offered remarkable support to interventionist bodies including the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies and Fight for Freedom. Churchill also authorised secret operations to generate support for the ‘destroyers-for-bases’ deal and lend-lease, in which the Americans agreed to supply Britain and Free France with oil, food and military equipment from 1941. Most remarkably, Britain encouraged a hostile US government probe into the prominent New York congressman Hamilton Fish, the leader of the isolationists on Capitol Hill. Unquestionably, British intelligence forged a so-called ‘secret German map’ that set out a German plan to attack South America. In October 1941, Roosevelt gave this map prominence in a public speech, and the document, actually created in an MI6 forgery laboratory in Canada, was placed on public display.77
More than fifty years later, some of the most significant black propaganda operations conducted by British intelligence are still emerging. In 1941, two of the top ten best-selling non-fiction books in the United States were accounts of the Second World War in Europe. One of them was William Shirer’s Berlin Diary, kept by a CBS correspondent who covered Hitler and his regime during 1940.78 The other was the diary of a young Dutch boy, Dirk van der Heide, who recorded the experiences of his family under the first days and weeks of German occupation. Owing to their innocent portrayal of the immediacy and trauma of war, children’s diaries are often amongst the most moving testimonies produced by any conflict.
Dirk was a ‘twelve-year-old blue-eyed Dutch boy with taffy coloured hair’ who lived in Rotterdam with his mother, father and younger sister, Keetje. When the Germans invaded in 1940, his mother