May 12, 2013

Finest Hour 149, Winter 2010-11

Page 12

Churchill and Intelligence – Adventures in Shadowland, 1909-1953

Churchill valued secret intelligence more than any other politician of his century. Without him, the modern intelligence community might never have developed as it did.

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By David Stafford

Dr. Stafford, of Victoria, B.C., was for many years project director at Edinburgh University’s Centre for the Study of the Two World Wars and Leverhulme Emeritus Professor in the University’s School of History, Classics and Archaeology. A preeminent intelligence scholar, his books include Camp X: Canada’s School for Secret Agents, 1941-1945 (1986); The Silent Game: The Real World of Imaginary Spies (1988); Spy Wars: Espionage and Canada, with J.L. Granatstein (1990); Churchill and Secret Service (1998, reviewed FH 96); and Roosevelt and Churchill: Men of Secrets (2000, reviewed FH 110). His latest book is Endgame, 1945: The Missing Final Chapter of World War II (2007, reviewed FH 139).  This article is excerpted from his paper, “Churchill and the Secret Wars,” 13th International Churchill Conference, Ashdown Park, East Sussex, England, October 1996.

In early 1995, after a week’s intensive work in the Churchill Archives at Cambridge, researching my book Churchill and Secret Service, I opened yet another file of documents. I had reached that dangerous stage, rarely admitted by historians, of secretly hoping it would contain nothing that demanded more tedious note-taking.

It was marked “Private correspondence, 1949.” This was promising for my unworthy hopes. After his triumphs in the Second World War, everyone wrote to Churchill, a great deal of it inconsequential. With luck I might finish this file quickly.

Speeding through a bizarre miscellany of invitations to lectures, garden fetes, school prize-givings, even the blessing of babies, I came upon a telegram from Spain. It was addressed to Churchill at his London home at 28 Hyde Park Gate. There were only four lines. This is what it said:

Message recieved very late as was travelling apologies stopnumbers including minor parts and attachments in both cases are now two hundred and thirty six theirs and one hundred and thirteen ours.

What did it signify? Crates of sherry consumed by Spanish and British Cabinet members? Comparative advantages of rival cigar-rolling devices? My eye was suddenly caught by the name of the sender: Alan Hillgarth.

I instantly knew that I had stumbled on some unknown episode in Churchill’s adventures with the secret world. I recognised Hillgarth’s name from my book about the top secret agency Churchill created in 1940 to “set Europe ablaze” with the fires of sabotage and subversion, the Special Operations Executive (SOE).

Hillgarth was just the sort of maverick adventurer to whom Churchill was magnetically drawn. Wounded as a 16-year-old Royal Navy midshipman at the Dardanelles, he had, he hinted, smuggled guns during the 1920s Riff rebellion—when tribal insurgents in Spanish Morocco dealt Spain one of the most severe reverses ever sustained by a European colonising power at the hands of natives. Later Hillgarth went broke sinking a gold mine in Bolivia, and wrote a rollicking cloak and dagger novel of adventure and intrigue which even caught the eye of Graham Greene.

The Spanish Civil War found him as British Vice-Consul in Majorca. By 1940 he was in Madrid for that anxious period when Churchill feared that neutral Spain under General Franco might join forces with Hitler. Nominally the British naval attaché, in reality Hillgarth helped supervise Britain’s secret intelligence, sabotage, and subversion operations in Spain.

Churchill, who had met Hillgarth in Majorca in the 1930s, regarded him with particular trust, interviewing him personally in London and circulating his reports to the War Cabinet. He also employed him on at least one particularly sensitive mission. In September 1941, Hillgarth visited Chequers to discuss ways of keeping Spain out of the war. As a result Churchill stage-managed the unblocking of $10 million secreted in a Swiss Bank account in New York. Shortly afterwards the “Knights of Saint-George,” otherwise known as British gold sovereigns, were riding to war, lining the pockets of Spanish generals willing to argue the neutrality case with General Franco. Hillgarth, like Churchill, had had “a good war.” Ian Fleming, a close friend, called him “a useful petard and a valuable war winner.”

But what was Hillgarth doing sending a telegram to Churchill in 1949?

In fact, the telegram’s mysterious figures referred to the number of intelligence officers, British and Soviet, in Moscow and London respectively. During this period, the Cold War in Europe was becoming glacial. In 1945 Igor Gouzenko, a junior cypher clerk, had walked out of the Soviet mission in Ottawa a month after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, carrying beneath his coat documents that exposed a massive Soviet intelligence offensive against the West. Six months later Churchill had delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri. In 1948 Prague fell to the Communists and the Russians imposed their blockade of Berlin. Churchill, in opposition since 1945, was anxious to expose Soviet and Communist misdemeanours and called for vigilance against Moscow’s spies and Fifth Columns around the globe.

In 1949 Hillgarth was retired and living in Ireland. But he travelled, and kept valuable contacts with old intelligence and military friends in London. Even while out of office, Churchill relied on private information to keep him informed…right up to October 1951, when WSC returned to Downing Street.

Throughout his life Churchill relished the hands-on contact with agents normally reserved to case officers. The Second World War—as my book demonstrated—is littered with examples of Churchill listening spellbound to the exploits of heroic young agents returned from behind enemy lines. Hillgarth was part of a long tradition.

Sir Martin Gilbert’s official biography has revealed in detail how in the 1930s, a voice crying in the wilderness against the threat of Hitler, Churchill turned Chartwell into a massive private intelligence centre. His best known informant was Desmond Morton, an officer in the Special Intelligence Service and head of the Industrial Intelligence Centre. Morton became the Prime Minister’s official adviser on intelligence during the Second World War. Yet his name never once appears in the Chartwell visitors book. Indeed it seems extraordinary that while still in opposition, Churchill could calmly invite an SIS officer to Chartwell to chat about intimate secrets of state over lunch.

Only within the last two decades or so has it become possible for scholars to write intelligence history. And as the shadows have lifted, we can see with increasing clarity that Churchill enjoyed lifelong contacts with the secret world that go back well before the First World War. It is clear that he valued secret intelligence more than any other British politician of this century. Without Churchill, the modern intelligence community might never have taken the shape it did.

World War I

Let us briefly go back to the decade when Europe was approaching the fateful guns of August 1914. Behind the arms race raged bitter intelligence battles. Each Great Power spied on its rivals and protected its secrets. Late as usual, Britain joined this continental game in 1909, when the Committee of Imperial Defence approved the creation of a Secret Service Bureau. By the outbreak of war it consisted of the two branches that still exist today: MI5 for counter-espionage and MI6—otherwise known as the Secret Intelligence Service or SIS—for foreign intelligence. Not surprisingly, both MI5 and MI6 focussed on naval affairs. The former sent spy-catchers to sniff out German spies nosing around naval installations in Britain. The latter sent agents to uncover the Kaiser’s naval plans. Both, being new and untried, had difficulty in gaining the ears of ministers. Churchill was the outstanding exception.

It was natural that as First Lord of the Admiralty from 1911 to 1915 he should be interested, as he hints in The World Crisis. What he carefully concealed was the provenance, the intensity, and the significance of his influence on the infant secret service. Richard Burdon Haldane, Secretary of State for War in the pre-war Liberal Government, chaired the 1909 committee that recommended its creation. The Director of Military Intelligence was a fellow Scot, Lieutenant-Colonel John Spencer Ewart, a veteran of Omdurman. In November 1909, just weeks after the Secret Service Bureau began its work, Haldane asked Ewart to go and talk to the young man concerned—the President of the Board of Trade, Winston Churchill.

The meeting took place on 15 November 1909 in Churchill’s private office, the bronze bust of Napoleon that he carried with him from ministry to ministry carefully positioned on the desk between them. It sparked a lifelong love affair between Churchill and the Secret Service. He was deeply alarmed by what he had witnessed in Germany. Intrigued by Ewart’s mission, within weeks Churchill had sent him a sixty-page memorandum packed with Board of Trade data about German commerce.

From then on, Churchill saw the Secret Service as vital to national security. As Home Secretary, he eagerly promoted MI5 demands for greater surveillance powers: its legendary registry of spies and potential subversives—what has been described as “the most important and controversial weapon in the British counter-intelligence armoury.” It was Churchill who first authorised the clandestine interception of private mail by general warrants; and who conceived the legislative sleight of hand by which the drastic third Official Secrets Act was slipped through Parliament in 1911.

In 1994 Stella Rimington, then Director-General of MI5, visited Edinburgh. I was able to engineer a few words with her. “Ah yes, Churchill,” she said briskly when I told her of my book. “He opened all the doors when my predecessor made his first nationwide tour in 1911.”

As Europe slid towards war Churchill kept in constant touch with the man she meant: Sir Vernon Kell, the first director of MI5. By the end of July 1914 he was living round the clock in his office, surrounded by telephones. It was on one of these that, late on August 3rd, Churchill rang and ordered him to take the preemptive action the two had long been planning. The next day, as war officially began, suspected German spies on Vernon Kell’s secret list were arrested in a nationwide swoop by the Special Branch.

Kell is not the only important intelligence player of this period in Churchill’s life. Sir Alfred Ewing, Director of Naval Education, yet another Scot, was a short, thick-set man with keen blue eyes and ill-kempt shaggy eyebrows. His first wife was a great-great grandniece of George Washington. On the day war began, he turned up in Churchill’s office with Admiral Sir Henry Oliver, the Director of Naval Intelligence, also a Scot—a taciturn figure of such silent discretion that he was known throughout the Navy as “Dummy” Oliver. They wanted to intercept German navy radio signals.

Churchill immediately agreed and put Ewing in charge. By November, hidden deep within the Admiralty, a code breaking agency known as Room 40 had begun its work. Three years later its greatest coup came with the decyphering of the Zimmerman telegram that so memorably helped bring the United States into the war.

Room 40 was the progenitor of World War II’s Bletchley Park and of Britain’s present-day Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), that great vacuum cleaner in the sky that works in tandem with the American National Security Agency and other allies to sweep up signals intelligence from around the globe.

Churchill was fascinated by Room 40’s work. He personally wrote out in longhand its founding charter and spent many an hour watching the codebreakers at their work. He captured the thrill in The World Crisis:

…in Whitehall only the clock ticks and quiet men enter with quick steps laying slips of pencilled paper before other men equally silent who draw lines and scribble calculations and point with the finger or make brief subdued comments. Telegram succeeds telegram…as they are picked up and decoded…and out of these a picture always flickering and changing rises in the mind and imagination…

Thus the statesman who so valued his secret intercepts in the Second World War that he described them as his “golden eggs” was the very person who in 1914 had made it all possible.

Britain’s SIGINT agency, along with MI5 and MI6, is the third of Britain’s intelligence services. Like them, its history is firmly imprinted with the Churchill stamp. It shows that when he kept his assignment with destiny in 1940, he was already a veteran of intelligence wars—and I’m passing over, of course, those personal encounters with the “Great Game” he’d experienced as soldier-journalist on the North-West frontier of India, in the Sudan, in Cuba, and in South Africa, all of which had made him an ardent enthusiast of the shadow war.

Intelligence is power: the better, the more effective. Churchill, politician that he was, instinctively knew it. It gave him a weapon of multiple uses. He could deploy it against the enemy, as he did so brilliantly in both World Wars, but it also helped in struggles with friends and allies. One reason he liked “Ultra” was that it put him on an equal footing with his Chiefs of Staff and gave him a weapon to wield against reluctant or recalcitrant Generals. But it was also a powerful tool in dealings with allies as well.

Roosevelt and Pearl Harbor

On Sunday evening, 7 December 1941, Churchill was dining at Chequers with the American ambassador, John G. Winant, and Averell Harriman, Roosevelt’s special envoy to Moscow. Shortly after nine o’clock he switched on his wireless, and barely caught an item announcing a Japanese attack on the Americans. Within minutes he was talking to Franklin Roosevelt on the transatlantic line. The President told him of the assault on Pearl Harbor and his intention to seek a Congressional declaration of war on Japan.

At first stunned by the momentous news, Churchill finally grasped its import. Anticipating Germany’s declaration of war on the United States, he concluded that Hitler’s fate was sealed and the war was won. “I went to bed,” he recalled, “and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.”

But did he also dream contentedly of a conspiracy come to fruition? Claims quickly surfaced in the United States that Roosevelt had deliberately withheld intelligence of the coming attack in order to silence the isolationists and bring the United States into the war.

More recently, voices have suggested that the real Pearl Harbor intelligence conspirator was not Roosevelt but Churchill. According to this claim, Churchill’s astonished reaction at Chequers was nothing but a carefully constructed charade that masked the secret of advanced intelligence about Pearl Harbor that he deliberately concealed in order to lure Roosevelt into war. This, argued two authors in 1991, one a former wartime codebreaker in the Far East, was the true “betrayal at Pearl Harbor.”

Central to this startling conspiracy theory is the claim that prior to the Japanese strike on Hawaii, British and American codebreakers had broken not only Magic, the Japanese diplomatic cypher, but also the Japanese Navy’s operational cypher, JN-25. The American decrypts had not been sent to the White House, according to the conspiracy theorists, but the British ones did reach Churchill and fore-warned him of the attack. In short, this theory not only places Churchill at the heart of an intelligence conspiracy. It simultaneously turns Roosevelt into an ignorant dupe.

But the theory is fatally flawed. The reason is not that Churchill was incapable of manipulating intelligence to maximise the chances of American participation. He had already done so in 1940-41, withholding Ultra intelligence revealing German postponement of its invasion plans to keep up pressure on Roosevelt. There are two more cogent reasons. First, the betrayal theory flies in the face of Churchill’s own patent desire to win American help. Why would he deliberately have connived at the destruction of the U.S. Pacific Fleet? One reason he desired American entry was to protect British Far East interests. It would have made far more sense, had he possessed advanced intelligence, to have passed it on to the White House. He would thus have saved the U.S. fleet and earned Roosevelt’s gratitude in a war that would in any case still have occurred.

In fact—the heart of the matter—Churchill did not have advance intelligence about Pearl Harbor. The authors’ contention about JN-25 is simply wrong. It is true that British Far East codebreakers had broken the cypher before Pearl Harbor, perhaps as early as 1939. But what the conspiracy theorists omit to note is that JN-25 was superseded by an improved system, JN-25B, in December 1940, and then again in 1941 by two more successive changes, JN-25B7 and JN-25B8. These new cyphers for all practical purposes were unreadable and unproductive of intelligence. Moreover, the Japanese maintained an extremely high level of security. “The Day of Infamy” was not just an American intelligence failure. It was also a brilliant Japanese intelligence success.

Of course, the specific claims about JN-25 must be distinguished from the more general point that British and American intelligence had long been predicting a Japanese attack, somewhere. The Magic (diplomatic) intercepts unambiguously revealed by late November that Tokyo had opted for war. But the consensus in London and Washington was that Japan’s most likely target was the Philippines and South-East Asia.

Churchill knew a Japanese attack was coming. Every day personal files of intercepts were sent him from Bletchley Park. They were released to the public only in 1993. They reveal that on 6 December, Churchill read a telegram from the Japanese Foreign Minister in Tokyo to his ambassador in London, instructing him to destroy all except certain key codes and burn codes and secret documents. But neither this nor any other intercept he read in the forty-eight hours before Pearl Harbor contained any hint of the actual target.

Indeed, he was still desperately seeking it up to the last minute. We know this because Malcolm Kennedy, a First World War veteran and Japanese linguist, was one of those on high alert at Bletchley Park. Against all the rules, he kept a diary that still survives. On December 5th he had been on 24-hour duty. The next day, he noted that Churchill “is all over himself at the moment for latest information and indications re Japan’s intentions and rings up at all hours of the day and night, except for the 4 hours in each 24 (2 to 6pm) when he sleeps.” On December 7th, when Kennedy, like Churchill, heard the news of Japan’s attack on the wireless, he recorded his “complete surprise.” If Kennedy, working at Bletchley Park, did not know in advance of Pearl Harbor, how would Churchill?

Of course there is no doubting Pearl Harbor’s global significance. So far as Churchill and intelligence is concerned, it highlights yet another extraordinary part of the story. American entry into the war paved the way for the greatest intelligence alliance in history—an integrated and coordinated system that saw British, American, Canadian, Australian, and other allied codebreakers working side by side to defeat the Germans, Italians, Japanese, and then, during the Cold War, the Soviet Empire.

Again Churchill was architect and master builder. Pearl Harbor sent him rushing to Washington. Here, in a midnight tête-à-tête with Roosevelt at the White House, he confessed that British codebreakers had been reading State Department cyphers, but that since Pearl Harbor he had ordered the work to stop.

The experience suggested, he told the President, that the two allies should henceforth cooperate closely on guarding their own cypher security. Having gone this far, he briefed Roosevelt about British successes against the German Enigma cypher key. But nothing was put on paper.

What is clear is that over the following twelve months he bulldozed aside the constraints and inhibitions of intelligence professionals on his side of the Atlantic. When General Dwight D. Eisenhower arrived in Britain later that year as commander-in-chief of “Torch,” the Allied landings in North Africa, it was Churchill who personally revealed to him and his chief of staff, Major-General Walter Bedell Smith, the secrets of Ultra. Which brings me to the final episode in this all-too-brief account.

Bedell Smith became a postwar Director of the Central Intelligence Agency; he was the immediate predecessor to the legendary Allen Dulles of the 1950s. These were the happy times. The CIA, in thrall to covert operations, toppled regimes and disposed of leaders around the world. Churchill, too, had a romantic attachment to action behind enemy lines. It appealed to his courage, and for one so bellicose in spirit who’d experienced the brutal reality of war, cloak and dagger promised relatively painless results. Neither had he shrunk from assassination when the time and target was right. Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler’s dreaded SS henchman, died at the hands of SOE agents in Prague in May 1942. And the killing, on Christmas Eve 1942, of Admiral François Darlan, Vichy’s man in North Africa, at the hands of a Frenchman trained by SOE, was remarkably convenient. The BBC announced on its Christmas Day bulletin: “A Very Happy Christmas to you all. Last night, in Algiers, Admiral Darlan was assassinated.” That morning Churchill sat in bed looking “like a benevolent old cherub.”

Last Act: Mossadeq and Iran

In 1953, even as Churchill wrestled with the massive stroke that two years later forced him from office, he joined with the CIA in his last great exploit of the secret war.

Three other principal actors starred in the drama. The first was Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq, the 70-year-old prime minister of oil-rich Iran. “A wily, theatrical, tragicomic figure,” he was also a passionate nationalist. His principal target was the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, 51 percent owned by the British Government and owner of the then largest oil refinery in the world, at Abadan on the Persian Gulf—a complex as big as Salt Lake City, employing close to 40,000 workers. It was Britain’s single largest overseas asset. In 1951 Mossadeq nationalised this hated symbol of British imperialism and expelled its British technicians. The next year he kicked out all British diplomats. By 1953, London and Washington wanted to get rid of him. No one disliked him more than Churchill. As First Lord of the Admiralty WSC had played a leading role in negotiating the Anglo-Iranian oil deal in the first place. In private he mocked Mossadeq as “Mussy Duck.”

The second actor was the head of the SIS in Iran, the Honourable “Monty” Woodhouse, later Tory MP for Oxford. But he was more than that. In the Second World War he’d been one of those brave young warriors fighting behind enemy lines—in his case Greece, close to his and Churchill’s heart. In 1942 he’d helped blow up the Gorgopotamos Viaduct carrying vital German supplies to North Africa. In 1944 he, too, had received a summons to Chequers, where Churchill had taken a shine to him.

Something else had happened while Woodhouse was in England. Lunching with Anthony Eden, a fellow guest was an attractive war widow named Davina Lytton. She was the daughter of the young woman who fifty years before had stunningly captured Churchill’s heart in India, Pamela Plowden. Romance again flourished, and Davina and Monty were soon married. “Our man in Teheran” had a personal link with Churchill.

The final actor was also well known to Churchill and had a name resonant in the United States. Kermit Roosevelt was a grandson to Theodore and cousin to Franklin. He and Churchill had met at the White House Christmas party in December 1941, and since then he’d risen high in the CIA. Now he was its field commander in Iran.

The SIS and CIA concocted a joint plan to topple Mossadeq in a coup. In July 1953 Kermit Roosevelt secretly entered Iran and, in several clandestine nighttime encounters with the Shah worthy of any thriller, persuaded him to cooperate. In London, Woodhouse had several meetings with Churchill. When a hesitant Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, fell sick, Churchill took over and gave the green light to the plot. In August, Teheran was convulsed in carefully-prepared rent-a-crowd riots and Mossadeq was duly deposed.

A week later a triumphant Kermit Roosevelt arrived at Heathrow Airport en route for Washington. SIS top brass gave him a splendid lunch at the Connaught Hotel before his final appointment of the day: Ten Downing Street. Characteristically defying his medical advisers, Churchill had soldiered on since his stroke in June. Events in Teheran had gripped his imagination. Learning that Roosevelt was in London, he demanded a personal account.

At precisely 4 o’clock, Roosevelt rang the doorbell and was ushered in by a military aide. Downstairs, in a reception room converted into a bedroom, he found the Prime Minister, lying in bed propped up by pillows. Churchill grunted a greeting, and Roosevelt sat down beside him. The two men began with small talk and exchanged reminiscences about the White House Christmas Party. Then Roosevelt launched on his tale, presenting the dramatic highlights in considerable detail. Churchill frequently interrupted with questions and from time to time would doze off for a few moments, only to awake and grill the American on a point of detail. For a full two hours the two men talked.

When Roosevelt had completed his account, Churchill grinned and shifted himself up on his pillows. “Young man,” he said, “if I had been but a few years younger, I would have loved nothing better than to have served under your command in this great venture!”

With this telling vignette I must take my leave of Churchill. A warrior to the end, he’d exploited intelligence in all its guises as no other politician before him—and certainly more effectively than either of his wartime allies, Josef Stalin and Franklin Roosevelt. He left an indelible mark on British intelligence, which served him well both in peace and war during his fifty year political career. The Anglo-American intelligence alliance that endures to this day owes more than history acknowledges to his fervent support.

The quest to understand the protean figure of Winston Churchill grows, not diminishes, with the passage of time. As we peel away the layers of historical varnish, the portrait becomes ever richer and more complex. His adventures in the secret world of intelligence make him an even more intriguing figure than we thought.