The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers. Richard Aldrich
experiences. Rotterdam was heavily bombed, and his mother was killed. His father had already departed to fight the invaders, and so their uncle Pieter arranged for the two children to make a dramatic escape to England. Arriving in London only to encounter a renewed German Blitz, they then embarked on a further adventure, evacuated on a ship that makes a hair-raising voyage through minefields and submarine attacks in the North Atlantic to eventual safety in America.
Dirk van der Heide’s diary is a fabulous evocation of small people caught up in the vastness of war. It is also a complete fake. Neither Dirk nor any member of his family ever existed. The diary was created for the purposes of anti-Nazi propaganda and published in Britain with the connivance of the publisher Faber & Faber – although this fact was not revealed to its American publisher, Harcourt Brace. It was part of the vast disinformation campaign launched by Churchill and the British secret services.79 The real author remains a matter of speculation.80 Remarkably, this work of propaganda is so good that it continues to be read and commented upon as if it were real. Tellingly, however, it is one of the few wartime diaries in which the child adopts a pseudonym, and no records or photographs of the family have ever surfaced.81 We may never know the full extent to which other plots are waiting to be unearthed. Nicholas Cull, the most important historian of this secret programme, has remarked that the British government seems to have tried to destroy the evidence of its war propaganda in the United States.82 British agents even resorted to putting dead rats in the water tanks of American Nazi sympathisers – a less subtle means of manipulating opinion.83
Churchill also manipulated intelligence himself in an attempt to play the Americans. In July 1940, Ultra revealed the dismantling of German special equipment that was to be used for an invasion of Britain. Photo-reconnaissance confirmed that invasion barges in France were being towed away. Churchill chose not to share this information with Roosevelt or Harry Hopkins, the president’s special envoy. Instead, he sought to keep the Americans’ sense of threat high enough for them to want to support Britain, but not so high that they thought it a lost cause. In November 1940 he ordered that the amount of intelligence passed on to the US be cut back, and ‘padding should be used to maintain bulk’. Controlling Ultra was vital, and this partly explains why Churchill and Menzies were cagey about cooperation with the Americans on that front. Nevertheless, the first American mission arrived at Bletchley Park in February 1941. In return, the Americans gave the British the power to read Japanese diplomatic communications.84
By the end of 1941, the Soviet Union and then the United States had joined what was now a global war impacting on every continent. Increasingly, the international media talked about the ‘Big Three’ (Britain, the USA and the Soviet Union) and how they would shape the future of the world as the war progressed. Churchill, more than anyone, understood that in such a conflict one had to watch one’s allies no less closely than one’s enemies. Deploying the power of intelligence would be even more vital as the war moved towards its climax.
5
… the part your naughty deeds in war play, in peace cannot be considered at the present time.
Churchill on SOE1
Downing Street was now facing a world war. What had begun with minor Italian and Japanese adventures as early as 1936 was now conjoined into a vast global struggle. Britain and the US had declared war on the Japanese; Hitler had declared war on America; and the Soviets had begun a counter-offensive to stem the Nazi march on Moscow. Having been prime minister for nearly two years, Churchill understood the transformative impact of intelligence on strategy and operations on this scale. It would continue to prove vital as the Allies edged towards victory.
For Churchill, the Second World War was a struggle not only against Britain’s Axis enemies, but also against its new allies, including Russia and the United States. In 1942, he discovered that some Foreign Office officials had been talking to Moscow about the post-war settlement without his approval. He ‘emitted several vicious screams of rage’.2 In particular, he hoped to educate the Americans about what he saw as the problem of growing Soviet power, but he knew this would take time. Pressed to discuss troublesome issues with Roosevelt in 1944, Churchill stalled, and replied, ‘The war will go on for a long time.’3 Intelligence and careful timing were part of this delicate game of influence and empire.
Nonetheless, Churchill’s detailed control over intelligence declined during the second part of the war. This was an inevitable outcome of the priority he had placed on its expansion. The flow of special intelligence from GC&CS increased massively: by the middle of 1942 Bletchley’s codebreakers produced between 3,000 and 4,000 decrypted German messages a day, as well as Italian and Japanese material. Churchill could not inspect and interpret even a fraction of this material. The torrent of sigint forced the government machine for central assessment to become ever stronger and better-organised. Intelligence was now being produced on an industrial scale, defeating the prime minister’s preference for personal involvement.
This was especially evident in his acerbic discussions with his Middle Eastern commanders, whom he constantly goaded to attack the enemy. In early 1942, Bletchley Park’s Hut 8 cracked a medium-grade Italian cipher. This new material showed that Rommel was desperate for supplies. Convinced that Rommel had built his successes on a perilously thin supply of armour and air power, Churchill exhorted his commanders in Cairo to attack. Demonstrating his proclivity towards personal intervention, he summoned Claude Auchinleck, the Middle East commander, back to London and unleashed a classic five-hour haranguing in the Defence Committee. Auchinleck refused to launch an immediate offensive, and demanded more tanks.4 By the end of the year, and despite his remaining an avid consumer of the decrypts that passed across his desk, the vast flow of Enigma material to both Downing Street and the commanders in the Western Desert made it increasingly difficult for Churchill to insert himself into such debates.5
Churchill had less to do with MI5. His main intervention had been sacking Vernon Kell and appointing David Petrie as its new director after the great ‘spy scare’ of 1940, and MI5 and the chiefs of staff tried to keep it that way. They regarded domestic security as a sensitive area, and feared Churchill’s impetuous meddling. While Stewart Menzies, the chief of SIS, worked hard on his relationship with Churchill, meeting him perhaps over a thousand times during the course of the war, MI5 shied away from personal contact. Petrie, despite being a Churchill appointee, made no attempt to sell the increasingly important triumphs of his organisation ‘at the top’. This only changed because Duff Cooper, who had taken over from Lord Swinton as head of the Home Security Executive, urged it upon him in March 1943.
Guy Liddell, a senior officer in MI5, summed up the dilemma: ‘There are obvious advantages in selling ourselves to the PM who at the moment knows nothing about our department. On the other hand, he may, on seeing some particular item, go off the deep end and want to take some action, which will be disastrous to the work in hand.’6 For example, ‘When told that a clerk at the Portuguese Embassy in London was spying for both the Germans and the Italians, Churchill scrawled: “Why don’t you just shoot him?”’7 Accordingly, internal security issues rarely reached Churchill. Petrie remained reluctant to see the prime minister personally, but considered sending him monthly bulletins with summaries of MI5’s best operations as a compromise.8 Churchill loved these bulletins, noting in prime ministerial red ink that they were ‘deeply interesting’.