spies

spies. In 1939–45signals intelligence warfare was of far greater importance than it had ever been before and overshadowed human intelligence, the work of spies. Nevertheless, there were subjects that signals intelligence (sigint) could not cover, and that human intelligence (humint) could. Sigint seldom provided evidence of the character of enemy commanders, which might be vital to those making plans to defeat them. Moreover, the yield from sigint was patchy; so was that of the other primary intelligence source, photographic reconnaissance, which hinged on weather conditions; the yield from a properly placed spy might be continuous and full. Sigint did not often cover intentions, except that it could sometimes reveal impending moves; spies might, with a great deal of luck, be in a position to know them. There was still, in fact, much of value that could be done by a well-placed, well-informed spy, provided that he or she could deliver the intelligence gained, in time for it to be acted on (see Popov for a botched example). Menzies, the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, said of one of the war's best spies, Paul Thümmel, ‘A-54 is an agent at whose word armies march.’

Several types of spy need to be distinguished. There were casual sources, as the intelligence services called them, who sometimes provided information on a once-only basis and were not available again (seeOslo report, for example); Coast Watchers, who were carefully trained to recognize and report passing ships, and were valuable and active in areas as far apart as Norway and the Solomon Islands; and the professional agent, most of whom, before the war, had diplomatic cover and ran their own network of sub-agents in the field. Service attachés in embassies and legations were not, technically, spies at all; but were well known to be on the look-out for any military information that came their way. On the other hand, press and commercial attachés, and passport control officers, were sometimes only nominally diplomats, because they were really engaged either in spying themselves or in organizing networks of spies to observe for them. The spy ring centred on the Japanese consulate at Honolulu, which worked to facilitate the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (see below), is one example of spies using diplomatic cover.

But diplomacy was far from being the only source of, or cover for, spies—and was, anyway, of little use once war had actually begun. About a third of the effort of the wartime US intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), was devoted to intelligence-gathering, some of it through spies. SOE was a British sabotage organization, not an intelligence-collecting one, but of course its agents needed to have their own information networks, and sometimes collected valuable nuggets of intelligence; all of which they had to pass over to MI6, and were not allowed to circulate themselves. Counter-espionage organizations such as MI5 were also intimately connected with spying, for they often relied on double agents to penetrate the other side's networks or to plant false information (see XX-committee); first-class spies might look out for double agents, and try to turn them into triple agents.

The dual aspect of the spy's role—the need to transmit intelligence, as well as to acquire it—is often neglected by those who write on the subject, but was of cardinal importance: of such importance that counter-espionage bodies sometimes contented themselves with controlling and observing a spy's communications, not troubling to interrupt the traffic that (if they could read it) would provide valuable information for their own side. It is always a gain to one side to know what questions the other side wants answered.

Another aspect of a spy's work, quite outside his or her control, was the need to analyse reports he or she sent in, to tie them up with whatever else was known about the subject, and to make sure that appropriate action was taken. Military history is littered with tales of vital reports delayed by dunderheads, or overlooked by harassed staff officers: or simply not believed by high commanders. Richard Sorge's warning to his Soviet masters of the German invasion of the USSR (seeBARBAROSSA) is a classic case of the last. (Incidentally, the world's intelligence services all believed that BARBAROSSA would fell the USSR in six or seven weeks: an interesting example of the weakness of expert opinion.)

Spies had to have good cover. Sorge, a German born on Russian soil who became a convert to communism, had excellent cover: he was the correspondent in Tokyo for a number of serious German and Dutch newspapers, and had secured personal letters of introduction to members of the German embassy staff in Tokyo. Cover, to be any good, must have some bearing on reality; indeed the more real it is, the better it will work. Ideal cover was available for ‘Rygor’ Slowikowski who ran Agency Africa while based in Algiers: that of a Polish refugee business man, who had a little capital, and invested it in a porridge factory. He was the only porridge manufacturer in north-west Africa; as such, he could travel widely, and recruit large numbers of business agents—most of whom he also employed as spies, through intermediaries, never revealing to them that they were working to their own managing director until the North African campaign landings (TORCH) in November 1942 had taken the area over for the Allies. The success of TORCH depended largely on Slowikowski's information; though he got no personal benefit from it, as he had passed most of it (for convenience) through OSS channels, and OSS took all the credit.

The spymaster's difficulty was always to find the spy, and then to put him (or her) unobtrusively where he (or she) could make notes, or even take photographs, and afterwards transmit the results to where the spymaster could make use of them. In order to communicate fast, most spies needed access to a radio transceiver (see also radio communications). This might well expose them to being traced, quickly, by direction-finders; and if they were not trained to transmit themselves, gave them the additional peril of needing an extra member of their spy group in the person of the radio operator. Even before the war, Dansey reckoned that the Germans had penetrated most of MI6's spy networks in Europe, through their radio traffic; it was a cast-iron rule of his ‘Z’ networks that they were never to use radio at all.

Alternative methods of communication were usually available. Much time and attention at spy schools went on teaching how to prepare and develop secret ink (at a pinch, semen could be used). As a counter to these inks, censors often criss-crossed suspect pieces of paper with developing chemicals, which would show hidden inks up at once, as would careful use of a magnifying glass. Much ingenuity was also expended on methods of carrying written messages—whether in cipher or in clear—which would not be easy to detect or intercept. The Germans developed a miniature photograph, called a microdot, which reduced a foolscap page to the size of a full stop; this might easily pass a censor unnoticed. It could be enlarged, or read through a microscope. Casual sources in France were encouraged to report radar sites or V-1 sites (see V-weapons) in their area by using carrier pigeons which the RAF dropped in canisters.

The aura of secrecy and subterfuge created by spies also created a feeling, throughout the old officer class (a body which transcended national boundaries) that spying was off-colour, ungentlemanly, unfair; most high commanders, whatever side they were on, mistrusted any information that came to them from spies, because they thought them necessarily an unreliable lot.

It was for this reason that early efforts by the British to hide the source of ULTRA intelligence by telling commanders in the field that it had originated from a well-placed agent (codenamed BONIFACE) resulted in the intelligence being sceptically received. Army commanders in the field were therefore soon let in on its source, which did not stop ULTRA remaining a closely guarded secret in the UK until 1974. Doubtless the secrecy which deliberately surrounded it for so long accounts for the mythical stories of some spies which still flourish in the public's memory. These spies were allowed, by higher authority, to go public because their tales provided satisfactory cover for how such intelligence was really obtained. For example, this is probably the reason for the reputation of Betty Pack (who died under the name of Elizabeth Brousse), whose alleged spy coups in neutral legations in Washington were published in the 1960s (see H. M. Hyde, CYNTHIA: The Spy who changed the Course of the War, London, 1966). The Germans only once came near to discovering that their machine ciphers were being broken (see signals intelligence warfare, 7).

The Soviet Union's greatest wartime intelligence successes were not achieved against its opponents but against its allies. In the opinion of the NKVD, its ablest group of agents were five Cambridge graduates recruited in the mid-1930s; Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, John Cairncross, Donald Maclean, and ‘Kim’ Philby. They were dubbed collectively the ‘Five’ or the ‘London Five’ (since they were controlled from the London NKVD residency). The first to penetrate Whitehall was Maclean, who began a sixteen-year career in the foreign office in 1935. Cairncross also entered the foreign office in 1936, moved to the treasury in 1938, became private secretary to Maurice Hankey in 1940, entered Bletchley Park in 1942, and joined MI6 in 1943. Burgess joined the BBC in 1936, entered the newly created covert action branch of MI6 (section D) in 1938, returned to the BBC in 1940, and entered the foreign office in 1944. Anthony Blunt joined MI5 in 1940. Kim Philby was turned down by Bletchley Park, but succeeded in entering SOE in 1940 before moving a year later to MI6, where he established himself as a high-flyer.

In Washington the NKVD ran two agent networks of government officials headed respectively by Nathan Gregory Silvermaster and Victor Perlo. A number of other agents, the state department official Alger Hiss and the treasury official Harry Dexter White among them, were run individually. OSS contained perhaps a dozen Soviet agents. The NKVD and the GRU (Soviet military intelligence) also both penetrated the atomic bomb research establishments at Los Alamos and at Montreal. In August 1945 the British atomic scientist Alan Nunn May gave the GRU details of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and two samples of uranium.

There was thus an enormous disparity between what the West knew about the USSR and what Moscow knew about its allies. Neither MI6 nor OSS had a single agent worth the name in Moscow. But there was a vast gulf also between the amount of intelligence which Moscow received from London and Washington, and its understanding of the West. The USSR remained constantly suspicious that its allies were considering stabbing it in the back. Philby later admitted that what most interested his wartime controllers was intelligence on the UK's non-existent plans for a separate peace with Nazi Germany and schemes, equally non-existent, to enter the war against the USSR.

The Soviet Union also had the Max Organization, designed to penetrate its own dissident groups (see Soviet exiles). It formed, too—initially using Comintern cover—some useful spy rings that worked against the Nazis. These rings, called the Rote Kapelle (Red Orchestra) by German counter-espionage, were started in several European countries before the war began and were quite widespread—a survivor of the Rote Kapelle's Berlin branch claimed that the branch had as many as 283 members. Some were quite junior clerks in the German armed forces or government offices; that did not prevent them from seeing and copying useful material. The best branch, for the LUCY Ring was working for it, was the Rote Drei in Switzerland.

It is worth emphasis that real spies, quite unlike the spies of melodrama or public myth, are as a rule inoffensive-looking, clerkly types, whose cover is so dense that they never attract a second glance from passers-by or serious attention from security officers. One of the Allies' most valuable spies was a clerk at a large Belgian railway junction, who simply took home with him every night a copy of every document he had typed during the day: these precious lists of war materials in transit were smuggled away to London.

Few spy networks resisted the temptation to recruit many sub-agents, to widen the base from which they could supply data to their distant masters; few sub-agents were given proper training in how to remain obscure, or what not to say when captured; hence many networks' undoing. Both Sorge and Leopold Trepper, who ran the Rote Kapelle in France, fell into enemy hands because sub-agents of theirs were captured and said more than they should have done. Sorge was executed; Trepper survived the war, to undergo a long spell in Siberia as a reward for his services to the USSR. Ideally, a spy's sub-agents can only reach him through cut-outs, so that their arrests do not imperil him; few spies operate in an ideal world.

All sorts of military data were easy for sub-agents to obtain, particularly for those brought up to be observant, as most countrymen and countrywomen were. Any housewife, pushing a pram along a path beside an airfield, could count the aircraft in sight on it, and the number of engines on each; and could spot which were real, and which were dummies (see deception). Any bright lad could count how many guns there were in a horse-drawn battery passing through his village (most German artillery was horse-drawn). Any drinker in a bar could notice the colours on the shoulder-strap edges of the German soldiers who drank there too (white for infantry, red for artillery, and so on). It did not take much training to equip the housewife and the lad with the extra, telling details which would enable them to distinguish one type of aircraft or tank or armoured car from another, or to guess at the calibres of guns. Observant drinkers could learn to look out for formation signs on sleeves as well as arm-of-service colours on shoulder-straps. It was this kind of information that the ‘Noah's Ark’ circuit (see below) passed on with such good effect.

This sort of spying was available, in theory, to both sides. Even in battledress, soldiers in the British Army usually wore arm-of-service colour patches on their sleeves (red for infantry, scarlet and blue for artillery, and so on). Many regiments insisted on bearing some ancient badge, or even the regimental name, visibly on their uniforms. Every division, and many other formations, had a separate badge, worn near the shoulder of every man and on the front and back of every vehicle. A spy at a busy railway station or crossroads, watching which signs moved in which directions, could get some notions of an order of battle together. For this reason alone, it was as well for the Allied cause that all the German spies in the UK were captured and that a number became useful double-agents.

The Abwehr office in Hamburg ran spies (it believed) in the British Isles, in South Africa (see also Ossewa brandwag), and in North and South America, and it also attempted, with the Kondor mission, to establish a network in Egypt. Its spies were also landed in Eire to contact the Irish Republican Army, but were nearly of as little use as those landed in England—and nearly all were equally quickly captured. A few were lodged on the coast of Greenland (see meteorological intelligence) to provide the Luftwaffe with weather reports (as did the German legation in Dublin); it was not in the Allied interest to clean them out entirely, because their messages were so useful for decipher staffs.

Several German spies were sent to the USA (see USA, 6) and a few to Canada; all of them were rounded up, sooner or later, by the security forces, and between them hardly produced any useful intelligence at all—except that a pre-war agent provided the drawings for the Norden bombsight, then the US Army Air Forces' principal secret.

In South America the Abwehr was a little more successful, because it had established agents in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile before the war, who could report (by radio—posts were very slow) on economic affairs. Industrial espionage, now a business commonplace, was attempted by the Nazis, with some degree of success. SOE had an elaborate network of agents in South America, who marked down these and other Axis agents, and stood by to attack them (they never did). To do this at all was a potential infringement of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, and SOE had to go to considerable trouble—through the Office of the Co-ordinator of Inter-American Affairs—to secure a ruling from Roosevelt himself that would quieten the jealous suspicions of Hoover, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (see USA, 6). Extra care was taken to make sure that the FBI was not upset by this potential infringement of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. The Nazi Sicherheitsdienst or SD (see RSHA) also ran spies (see V-man), some of whom, like Déricourt, were double-agents. The SD's most famous coup was in Turkey, where the British ambassador's valet, Elyeza Bazna, provided the German embassy for several months in the winter of 1943–4 with the contents of his master's safe. Exactly what use his information was to the Germans remains doubtful— Ribbentrop and Kaltenbrunner never settled a quarrel about which of them was to lay it before Hitler, who never saw it—and it is possible that the British early detected his treachery, and made use of him (also ineffectively) for purposes of deception.

Bazna, like many wartime spies, was an amateur: professionals were seldom available to either side. Enormous anti-Nazi enthusiasm, almost all of it amateur, undirected, and dangerous to those who felt it, was available in occupied Europe; some of it turned into useful spying. Dansey's links with governments-in-exile in London were often here turned to useful effect; even without such a link, he ran some remarkably useful spies.

One of the largest and best of these amateur spy circuits working to MI6 was nicknamed ‘Noah's Ark’ by the Gestapo, because its agents all had animals or birds for their cover names. Its founder, Georges Loustaunau-Lacau, an eccentric right-wing French officer, was soon arrested; his secretary, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, took over, and established more than 3,000 informants, more than 500 of whom died in German hands. They provided, from all over France, minutely detailed information about German defences and order of battle; some of it already known, to a very limited circle, from ULTRA intelligence, much of it new and of great tactical value. Much of the ‘Noah's Ark’ material, as of other spy networks, was carried out of France by light aircraft of the RAF, which could carry whole suitcases-full of reports too cumbrous to be condensed and sent by wireless: a facility seldom available elsewhere. The reports of amateur spies were of particular value to British intelligence staffs working on German radar and on V-weapon sites. One spy in Belgium, Walther Dewé, had the distinction of running a large and efficient spy network both in the First World War and in the Second; he was killed in a street fight with the SD in 1944.

The Japanese had widespread spy circuits in South-East Asia. There was a spies' training school, run by the army, in the Tokyo suburb of Nakano, which trained men (only men) in techniques of espionage as well as sabotage and subversion. Some of this school's pupils were trained to act as stay-behind parties in areas the Allies reconquered from Japan; one of them, more devoted than intelligent, did not surrender until 1974. Before even the war began, captains and majors in the Japanese Army were happy to take on jobs as mess waiters in the lavish service establishments of the British armed services in the Malay States, and picked up a great deal of gossip from officers' indiscretions, and they were equally active in Burma, the Netherlands East Indies, Hong Kong, and the Philippines. Personnel of the Japanese Army's No. 82 Research Unit, run by Colonel Tsuji Masanobu, surveyed many of the landing beaches Japanese forces were to use in these areas. Only days before the Japanese launched their Malayan campaign, Tsuji himself flew over southern Thailand, northern Malaya, and Singapore, and was able to build up, without any interference, an accurate picture of the defences laid out below him. The Japanese also had an espionage network on the US west coast which had links to New York and Mexico. Until he was forced to return to Japan in May 1941, it was organized by a Japanese naval commander, Yamamoto Hirashi, whose cover was running a chain of ‘comfort houses’ (see alsocomfort women) in Los Angeles.

Japanese intelligence-gathering before Pearl Harbor is probably the best-known example of the Japanese use of spies. When Roosevelt based the US Pacific Fleet at Hawaii in May 1940 the Japanese consulate at Honolulu began sending regular reports on its movements, nearly all of which were conveniently chronicled in the local newspapers. The following March an ex-naval officer, Yoshikawa Takeo, who was a trained intelligence agent, joined the staff of the consul-general, Kita Nagao. Yoshikawa and a team of helpers compiled detailed notes on the fleet's routines and composition and how it was protected, as well as gathering information on military installations such as airfields, the direction of air patrols, and the whereabouts of storage facilities. They discovered the fleet, contrary to the most elementary security precautions, had a regular routine, one of which was that its capital ships (but not its carriers) were nearly always in harbour on a Sunday. All this they managed to ascertain without actually infringing any local security regulations and the information fed back to Tokyo built up as detailed a picture of the target as any attacking force could hope for, Yoshikawa even thoughtfully provided an aerial panoramic picture postcard of the harbour, copies of which accompanied the Japanese pilots to help them to orientate themselves before attacking.

Small wonder that the Japanese, throughout the remainder of the war, were exceptionally spy-conscious. As it happened, this proved to be of great advantage to the Allies because, instead of suspecting their codes had been broken (see ULTRA, 2), the Japanese blamed enemy agents when any particularly disastrous leakage of information occurred. In fact, humint played a minimal role in Allied intelligence-gathering in South-East Asia. However, the Americans did have one spy at work in the Philippines. This was a Nisei (see Japanese-Americans) sergeant called Richard Sakakida who, over time, managed to persuade the Japanese Kempei in Manila that he was a seaman who had jumped ship before the war. While working as a handyman in the Japanese judge advocate general's office in Manila, he used Filipino runners to take his information to the guerrilla bands in Luzon's mountains who then transmitted it to Brisbane.

A concluding example of the value of spies may be given from France. When the Todt Organization set out to build the Atlantic Wall of coastal defences against seaborne attack, it ran the scheme from a headquarters in Caen which was decorated by local French labour, just after work on the wall had begun. A painter, René Duchez, tucked into his blouse a copy of the detailed instructions for building blockhouses—exactly what dimensions of concrete and of reinforcing rods were to be used—and took it away. The Germans noticed a copy was missing. It could not have been the painter, they thought, as the commandant had always been in the room with him. They forgot how busy the commandant had been on the telephone; they shot the electrician instead. Duchez had friends in an intelligence network; the document was in London a few weeks later, and was a godsend to artillery and engineer officers planning how to break through the wall, as they did during the Normandy landings in June 1944 (see OVERLORD).

Christopher Andrew/ and M. R. D. Foot

Bibliography

Andrew, C. , Secret Service (London, 1985), ad fin.
Fourcade, M.- M. , Noah's Ark (London, 1973).
Jones, R. V. , Most Secret War (London, 1978).
—— Reflections on Intelligence (London, 1989)
Kahn, D. , Hitler's Spies (London, 1978).