The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers. Richard Aldrich
it was almost an advantage that Hitler should remain in control of German strategy, having regard to the blunders that he has made, but that on the wider point of view, the sooner he was got out of the way the better.’34 Nonetheless, in June 1944 Churchill approved a vague plan for Hitler’s assassination by a French sniper. In parallel, SOE had developed detailed plans for the liquidation of Hitler, codenamed ‘Operation Foxley’. Like Ismay, however, Colonel Ronald Thornley, head of SOE’s German Section, warned that Hitler’s direction of the war effort was helpful to the Allies, since he often dismissed the sound advice of his generals. Thornley insisted, ‘his value to us has been equivalent to an almost unlimited number of first-class SOE agents strategically placed inside Germany’. In any case, SOE was aware that both the Russian NKVD and the Polish resistance had studied the possibility of assassinating Hitler and concluded that it would be absurdly difficult.35
Churchill loved clandestine activities, sometimes almost regardless of consequence. Unlike his personal support for Bletchley Park, his enthusiasm for SOE and for encouraging resistance has attracted much criticism. John Keegan, one of Britain’s foremost military historians, denounced SOE as ‘a costly and misguided failure’, and the actions of individual agents as ‘irrelevant and pointless acts of bravado’.36 Max Hastings, among the most assiduous and persuasive scholars of Britain’s wartime leader, has gone further. He has denounced Churchill’s interventions in this field as resembling those of a ‘terrorist’, adding that his ‘hunger to take the fight to Hitler made him send thousands of heroes to needless death’, and concludes that SOE exerted a malign influence across Europe by arming local factions that were keener to fight each other than to fight the Germans. There is a growing sense that Churchill was emotional, even irrational in indulging his love of immediate action through SOE, while wasting military resources and promoting needless political trouble in Whitehall.37
This is not the case. Churchill was remarkably astute in his management of SOE. He had appointed Hugh Dalton as its head in part to keep the Labour partners in his coalition government happy. When it became apparent that Dalton’s main talent lay in annoying other interested parties, Churchill rescued SOE by replacing him in March 1942 with Lord Selborne, a steady and effective Tory ally who had previously been director of cement at the Ministry of Works. The calm Selborne was the opposite of the temperamental Dalton. Over the next two years, whenever SOE fell out with Stewart Menzies, Churchill prevented Desmond Morton, an ally of MI6, from manipulating the ensuing inquiries, and ensured that they were led by intelligent and open-minded people such as John Hanbury-Williams, managing director of Courtaulds. Selborne rewarded Churchill by sending him edited highlights of SOE’s successes, which the prime minister found ‘very impressive’. In the summer of 1943 Churchill waded in to support SOE’s demands for more RAF special duties aircraft in the Balkans, arguing that the uprisings there reinforced the need for strategic deception, and also gave ‘immediate results’.38
SOE’s activities in the Balkans are often seen as one of Churchill’s biggest blunders. During 1940 and 1941 all the Balkan countries had come under increasing pressure to collaborate with the Axis. In March 1941, Yugoslavia signed the Tripartite Pact, formalising its alliance with Germany, Italy and Japan. Churchill was furious, and enthusiastically backed an SOE coup d’état that deposed the ruler, Prince Paul. He and SOE basked in the momentary glory of apparent success as an anti-Axis regime took over. Hitler responded by invading not only Yugoslavia but also Greece. On 6 April, German, Italian and Hungarian forces poured into both countries. Belgrade surrendered within a week, and SOE’s protégé King Peter fled the country. Ten days later, the Wehrmacht marched into Athens. In the short term this looked like a disaster. But Hitler had been forced to delay ‘Operation Barbarossa’, his invasion of Russia, by three months in order to secure his southern flank. This had profound consequences for the Russian campaign, which were visible when the German armies stalled in the snow outside Moscow at the end of the year.39
SOE now had a choice of Yugoslavian resistance movements to back. Churchill initially urged it to support the Serbian royalist General Draža Mihailović. However, by early 1943 his support had shifted to Josip Tito, who led the rival communists. The Yugoslav section of SOE sent intelligence about resistance activities to their colleagues in London and to the Foreign Office. James Klugman, deputy chief of SOE’s Yugoslavia Section and a Cambridge-educated communist, ran down Mihailović’s efforts against the Germans and overstated Tito’s.
Churchill and much of Whitehall seem to have been misled by Klugman’s trumpeting of Tito’s effectiveness as a resistance leader. Downing Street certainly had an exaggerated view of the contribution of Tito’s partisans, insisting that they were tying down twenty-four crack German divisions. In fact, only eight under-strength German divisions were in Yugoslavia at this time, and the partisans spent much of their effort on factional infighting. Tito even sent a delegation to German headquarters at Sarajevo proposing a truce so they could both concentrate their efforts against the Royalists.40
Yet the idea that Churchill was misled by a single middle-ranking SOE officer with Moscow connections is little more than a conspiracy theory. The prime minister had many other sources, including his own special envoy to Tito, the redoubtable Fitzroy Maclean. Churchill chose him personally, writing to Eden: ‘What we want is a daring Ambassador-leader with these hardy and hunted guerrillas.’ Maclean, an adventurer after Churchill’s own heart,41 was asked to keep an open mind and to find out, in Churchill’s words, which faction was ‘killing the most Germans’. He parachuted into Yugoslavia in September 1943, and quickly built up a good personal relationship with Tito which persisted for decades. He told Churchill that Tito’s partisans were doing most of the fighting against the Germans.
Much of the criticism of Churchill has been made with the benefit of hindsight. Some of it reflects post-war ‘mole-mania’, brought on by revelations about Soviet spies such as Kim Philby. But it is clear that Tito would have prevailed in Yugoslavia with or without SOE assistance. In the end, British intelligence, and Maclean in particular, became important once again when Tito broke with Stalin in 1948 to develop anti-Soviet communism. Mihailović and his Chetniks were the advance guard of Serb nationalism – with all that this would entail after 1989. In both the long and the short run, Churchill was right to back SOE and support Tito in 1943.42
There was one further source of information for Churchill on Tito. When Maclean parachuted into Yugoslavia with his mission in September 1943, his subordinates were a curious mixture. They included Churchill’s own son Randolph and his friend the novelist Evelyn Waugh. Randolph, a hard-drinking and boisterous officer, had served with the SAS. Admired for his exceptional bravery, he was nevertheless rather tiresome company. Franklin Lindsay, an American who later planned the Bay of Pigs operation and who served with him in Yugoslavia, described him as ‘one of the most aggressively rude men I ever met’. But Maclean valued him for his courage, endurance, and of course his political connections.43
Waugh was also a difficult character, and his superior officers were often desperate not to work with him – when his Commando unit sailed for Italy he was given leave to stay behind and complete Brideshead Revisited. In mid-1944, Randolph Churchill told him that he was going out to work for Maclean in Yugoslavia, and asked Waugh to join him. Both were almost killed on arrival when their plane crashed, killing eleven of the twenty on board.44 Evelyn Waugh and Randolph Churchill were a comic couple. Both professional drunks, they were bound together because most people found them insufferable. Waugh noted in his diary: ‘Further “tiffs” with Randolph … he is simply a flabby bully who rejoices in blustering and shouting down anyone weaker than himself and starts squealing as soon as he meets anyone as strong.’45 But Randolph was fearless,