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Man Called Intrepid:
The Incredible WWII Narrative Of The Hero
Whose Spy Network And Secret Diplomacy
Changed The Course Of History;
by William Stevenson.
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Some books are difficult to review, because every bit is precious, and one cannot possibly quote everything! Moreover, one battles the absolute admiration for the protagonist or more than one, questioning if one is being even, and knowing it is impossible not to admire such towering figures. This book and it's subject is one such, and it's startling to realise that not only the fictional figure of James bond was based on this very real living person with very real achievements but also far superior ones. The author Ian Fleming and his brother were not only contemporaries of Bill Stephenson but his colleagues, and knew him well.
Bill Stephenson, like many other towering persona of the time, spanned the era that had the two world wars and much else of tremendous importance and consequence for humanity and civilisation. He's one of those that helped save it.
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Pont Of Departure: A Foreword
Bill Stephenson, like many other towering persona of the time, spanned the era that had the two world wars and much else of tremendous importance and consequence for humanity and civilisation. He's one of those that helped save it.
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Pont Of Departure: A Foreword
By
INTREPID.
"President Franklin Delano Roosevelt supported a secret war against tyranny for two years when the United States was formally at peace. Then, attacked without warning, the United States replaced the staid costume of diplomacy for the combat fatigues of war. The enemy—Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy, and their puppets—was at last out in the open. But the secret war continued.
"For cogent reasons, the fundamental facts of that hidden activity have never been fully revealed. The complete facts have been known to few; some have not been committed to any documents; the written records have been totally inaccessible; and for thirty-five years they were under the rigid restraints of Britain’s Official Secret Act. Even now, a few matters must remain undisclosed for reasons that, of course, will not be obvious. But in terms of history—what really happened and why— nothing significant need now be concealed.
"In 1940, supplied all but daily with evidence that Hitler’s scheme of world domination by terror, deceit, and conquest was undeniably underway, Roosevelt recognized that the defeat of embattled Britain would be prologue to an ultimate attack upon the United States. Intelligence was given to him by me or through me as Winston Churchill’s secret envoy and as chief of British Security Coordination. BSC, the innocuous-sounding organization with headquarters in New York, was, in fact, the hub for all branches of British intelligence. Roosevelt was acutely aware that America, psychologically isolated since World War I and relying wistfully upon geographical insularity, was woefully unprepared to meet or counter the onslaught of newly developed military, propaganda, and espionage techniques. He desperately needed time to alert his nation and to arm it without plummeting into war. Churchill was in far more desperate need of arms and supplies to grant severely battered Britain even a modest hope of resistance and a slim chance of survival. Only a leader who could extend his vision of national self-interest to the belief that a union of free people was the real defense against totalitarian aggressors would wager on Britain at such unattractive odds. Roosevelt was such a rare gambler."
"In the most personal sense, I consider this account a tribute to the gallant women and men of many nations who volunteered to fight in unconventional ways. They assumed frightful risks, had no protection or privilege of uniform, carried the responsibility of countless lives in the solitary missions they accepted on trust, and often were forced to make lonely decisions that could mean merciless death to their families and countrymen. Many of these agents and resistance fighters lie in unmarked or unknown graves. Relatively few have gained recognition beyond mention in confidential archives. Most of those who survived returned to peaceful pursuits, unable to receive honors or rewards. Those who are named in this narrative are but a few of the vast hidden army to whom the free world owes a debt that cannot be repaid."
"Prophetic as he was, Churchill did not foresee the awesome extremes to which these follies would extend: diplomacy negotiated within a balance of nuclear terror; resistance tactics translated into guidelines for fanatics and terrorists; intelligence agencies evolving technologically to a level where they could threaten the very principles of the nations they were created to defend. One way or another, such dragon’s teeth were sown in the secret activities of World War II. Questions of utmost gravity emerged: Were crucial events being maneuvered by elite secret power groups? Were self-aggrandizing careerists cynically displacing principle among those entrusted with the stewardship of intelligence? What had happened over three decades to an altruistic force that had played so pivotal a role in saving a free world from annihilation or slavery? In the name of sanity, the past now had to be seen clearly. The time had come to open the books."
"We are rightly repelled by secrecy; it is a potential threat to democratic principle and free government. Yet we would delude ourselves if we should forget that secrecy was for a time virtually our only defense. It served not only to achieve victory, but also to save lives in that perilous pursuit.
"The weapons of secrecy have no place in an ideal world. But we live in a world of undeclared hostilities in which such weapons are constantly used against us and could, unless countered, leave us unprepared again, this time for an onslaught of magnitude that staggers the imagination. And while it may seem unnecessary to stress so obvious a point, the weapons of secrecy are rendered ineffective if we remove the secrecy. One of the conditions of democracy is freedom of information. It would be infinitely preferable to know exactly how our intelligence agencies function, and why, and where. But this information, once made public, disarms us."
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I. IN TIME OF PEACE.
I. IN TIME OF PEACE.
One has to love the beginning.
"A brash young man named Winston Churchill was on the North American lecture circuit at the turn of the century, retelling the story of guerrillas in South Africa and his own escape from one of their “camps of concentration.” His audiences were disappointingly small. Nobody could have foreseen that Churchill was describing some of the grimmer features of future conflict: unconventional warfare, political terrorism, and concentration camps.
"In January 1901 he left the United States for Canada. On the twenty-second he reached Winnipeg, and found it draped in black. Queen Victoria was dead. The British Empire had crossed a watershed. Churchill wrote home to his American mother in England that “this city far away among the snows . . . began to hand its head.”
"A five-year-old boy in the crowds mourning the death of the distant monarch was Billy Stephenson. His father had been killed in South Africa, and the news had reached him a few days earlier, on his birthday. Shivering on the snow-banked sidewalks on the day of Churchill’s arrival in Winnipeg, he thought his dead father must have been a great hero to deserve such attention.
"Stephenson’s boyhood could not have been more different from that of the two partners he would have at a later critical moment in history: Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He had more in common with his future comrade in secret warfare William J. Donovan, then living on the United States side of the frontier."
There you have four of the six major players of allies - two on public stage and two in shadows - set out. Perhaps the Russian pair would be Molotov along with his boss, although Molotov wasn't as unknown a name to public as Donovan and Bill Stephenson.
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The two future partners met in WWI.
"The British decision to go to war against Germany in 1914 brought volunteers from the United States and Canada, attracted often by the promise of adventure. Stephenson was sent straight to the trenches with the Royal Canadian Engineers. Before his nineteenth birthday, he was commissioned in the field. Men fell in such numbers that he was advanced to captain within the year. He suffered the trauma of a poison-gas attack and saw men die in convulsion or lose sight and mind. For twenty months he knew the misery of the foot soldier. Then, crippled in another gas attack, he was sent back to England as “disabled for life.”"
"In the third summer of the war, William Donovan was completing a survey of the conflict for the Rockefeller-sponsored American War Relief Commission in the hope of limiting the carnage. Donovan was thirty-three, a successful New York lawyer, and a shrewd investigator. He was appalled by what he found. Great armies embraced and heaved and pulled without shifting ground, locked in lingering death."
"“One of the ‘veterans’ from this nightmare was this twenty-year-old Canadian,” Donovan said later in notes for a biographer.1 “I felt an old man, wickedly well-fed, against this skinny kid. But when he started to talk, I paid attention. I had asked a couple of routine questions. His answers were concise and perceptive. At our first meeting, in 1916, we discovered a shared background that overcame the gulf between those already fighting the war and us Americans, still out of it. I’d been a member of Canadian rowing teams near my home in Buffalo. Each week at the Crystal Rowing Club in Ontario, I’d argued with Canadians about the American Republic’s rejection of monarchy and Canada’s device for keeping a British king without taking orders from London."
"“He combined compassion and shrewdness in assessing German military and psychological weakness. He said Germany must lose in the end because she was fighting for bad reasons. He seemed terribly young to be a captain until he reeled off his observations. He didn’t see the war as an accident of history complicated by lunacy at the top. He was certainly not in love with war. He said someone had to fight this evil. He refused to dismiss as propaganda the reports of German atrocities. He wanted to get back to the front. The doctors said his lungs would never stand up to more fighting in the trenches.
"“So he decided to fly. He wangled a transfer to the Royal Flying Corps. They didn’t ask questions. Men were getting killed faster than recruits came in. He fudged his medical history and nobody looked too close. After five hours’ instruction, he was a fully-fledged combat pilot. It was an indication of how desperately the Allies needed pilots.”"
He analysed and made a report.
"By 1917, Blinker Hall had won respect even among his critics by intercepting and deciphering a telegram that he believed would bring America into the war: the Zimmerman Telegram, dispatched from Berlin to the Imperial German Minister in Mexico. No single crypt-analysis, it would be said for years to come, had such enormous consequences. Hall’s code breakers held history in their hands, and the memory of it would sustain the Admiral through discouraging times. Stephenson’s cool appraisal of enemy aviation, in a period when combat in the sky was regarded as chivalrous jousting between young daredevils, pleased Hall."
" ... He thought the Germans had vulnerabilities in character that should be exploited. Decoys could be used to lure pilots into dogfights far from their own lines so that they would be distracted by the fear of running out of fuel. This was not the game according to the rules of chivalry, thought Hall, who was no great sport himself when it came to war."
Stephenson was shot down and taken prisoner when he flew to rescue a lone French flyer attacked by several Germans. He escaped after a few attempts and reported on prisoner camps.
"Stephenson did not share the easygoing attitude of the sportsmen fliers who romanticized aerial warfare. ... Technology had advanced under the pressure of war, but Stephenson was afraid that in a long period of truce the Allies would fall behind and find themselves ill-prepared to confront a more militarily advanced enemy."
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"Hall did not think the end of the fighting meant an end to danger. Modern weapons and new methods of mass communication produced new possibilities for tyrants. His warnings, like those of others, were swept away in the postwar wave of revulsion to war and disenchantment with military leaders."
"In New York, the crowds turned out to cheer the 69th Regiment as it paraded down Fifth Avenue, with Colonel William Donovan marching on foot at the head of his men. His regiment had earned the title “The Fighting Irish,” and their chief was as famous as “Wild Bill.” ... At the end of the day, in the empty silence of Camp Mills, where the regiment had been quartered before going to war, he wept. “I can’t forget the men we left behind,” he told his brother, Father Vincent Donovan."
"The game of politics demanded the dismantling of the war machine. The public wanted it so. Military budgets were slashed. Aviation in England was returned to private enterprise. Test pilots were out of jobs. Stephenson was put through Oxford and the forerunner of Cranwell Aeronautical College, where he concentrated on Admiral Hall’s favorite subject, radio communications. Stephenson went back to Canada with a private vision of a new world in which science would bring order and peace."
"Admiral Hall sent word that Stephenson should return to London in the early 1920s. Hall had retired into the shadows. The British intelligence community had been drastically reduced, and Hall tried to keep it alive through groups of civilians in politics, international affairs, and scientific development. He regarded Stephenson as “a brilliant mathematician who, like the American pioneers, can see no limit to his horizons . . . a most rare combination of the man of action and of imagination.” Believing that the interception of enemy communications and cryptanalysis were the foundation of good modern intelligence. Hall built up contacts in industry, commerce, and the universities, where he could tap resources of intellect. The modern science of cryptology had grown from humble beginnings: the invention of telegraphy. Stephenson had demonstrated an inventive genius of his own in the field. Now he learned that while he had been fighting in France, other battles had been conducted by scholars who had applied academic discipline and logic to break down German codes and who could pinpoint the exact disposition of U-boats and Zeppelins by snatching orders out of the ether. Others analyzed general radio traffic to gain an insight into enemy thinking: a craft in itself, so that those who became skilled in “traffic analysis” were regarded by Hall as far too valuable to be lost in the postwar defense cuts. There was not yet a profession called “cryptanalysis,” and those who were good at solving coded mysteries were found in departments of classical history, mathematics, and even dead languages. These formed a tiny unpaid nucleus. Around them, Hall gathered likely young fellows who could make it in the commercial world."
"“There wasn’t a lot of money available in those days,” Stephenson said later. “What counted was encouragement and being able to find enthusiastic co-workers. Whatever lessons the war taught me about personal survival were overshadowed by a conviction that our society had to defend itself against sudden attack or we’d have another world war. H. G. Wells became a good friend and adviser. The public knew him as a historian and prophet in fiction. Few knew about his passionate belief that in the science-fiction wars to come, our first line of defense would be information, rapidly conveyed. We’d both learned to distrust an elite class that claimed the privilege of leadership in good times and then, having led the people into calamity, let them fight their own way out.”"
"Stephenson wrote papers on what he called “Tele-vision,” the method of transmitting moving pictures by radio waves. Why not make it a practical reality? He worked on mathematical equations to prove pictures could be transmitted as easily as sound."
"Stephenson was now drawn into a circle of scientists gathered by Winston Churchill, through his personal force of character, around the person of Professor Frederick Lindemann, later Lord Cherwell, but always “the Prof” to Churchill and Stephenson. It was the Prof who began sounding the alarm about German militarism and its revival in an atmosphere of pseudo-scientific racism. Germany was also leaping forward in science and military technology. Stephenson’s own ideas were stimulated by the revolutionary theory that gravitation bends light, propounded by Albert Einstein, who had been part of resurgent Germany’s intellectual establishment. The Prof and a secret British defense committee kept in touch with the physicist, and also encouraged research in Britain on splitting the atom. The problem was always one of funds. There was popular hostility to government-financed research and development of arms. Men like Churchill were political outcasts for warning that preparation was the only guarantee against another “unnecessary war.”"
"His secret defense committee ... One of its concealed accomplishments in the 1920s was the development of Larynx, a “catapult-bomb”—in effect, a guided missile that foreshadowed the rockets Hitler aimed later at London. Whatever was done, however, depended upon the interplay of industrial scientists. They attracted refugee scientists from Germany; and the best were given moral support by Churchill’s followers."
Stephenson brought the genius Charles Proteous Steinmetz to work in his labs, giving him freedom unlike the stifling he was going through.
"Their first encounter was described by writer Roald Dahl “Even Steiny could never stretch this man to his full mental capacity. He just accommodated every new idea, digested everything, and created out of what he absorbed.”"
"Another refugee scientist, Chaim Weizmann, entered Stephenson’s circle. This tall, princely figure first appeared on the English scene in 1903. He had left his home in the Jewish Pale near Pinsk to study chemistry in Europe. He was drawn to London for reasons shared with many Jewish scientists, which he summarized in a letter to his fiancée: “If we are to get help from any quarter, it will be England which, I don’t doubt, will help us in Palestine. . . . This [London] is the hub of the world and really, you sense the breathing of a giant.” In 1916, Weizmann had perfected a new process for making acetone, which eased a critical explosives shortage. This brought him in touch with Churchill and other English statesmen. They encouraged his dreams of a Jewish dominion in which Jewish creative energies would combine with British improvisation. By the 1920s he had become president of the Zionist Organization and was known as “the uncrowned king of the Jews.”"
Bill Donovan had been in 1919 sent to Siberia to assess white Russians and returned to Europe on a mission funded by Rockefeller Foundation.
"His carefully documented notes on Germany dwelt upon the dangerous mood of self-pity induced by the notion that German leaders had never actually surrendered and were therefore still unbeaten."
This conflicted with America public opinion summarised by William Wisemann at end of his term in Washington in British intelligence.
"“We should be wary.” Wiseman had written to London, “of the American inclination to thrust responsibility for the war upon the Kaiser and what is termed the Military Party. Americans believe the rest of Germany has been an unwilling tool in the hands of military masters. If Germany was to repudiate the Kaiser and become a Republic, there would be an enormous reaction in America in her favour and she might be received again very much like the Prodigal Son.”
"Donovan noted the popularity of the German military caste, its determination to rearm, and the opportunities offered to fanatics promising to lead the people out of the economic chaos they were suffering. His reporting methods were described as “anticipating in an uncanny way the functions of a future American intelligence agency” by his biographer, Corey Ford. Donovan had also anticipated Churchill, who was soon saying publicly what Donovan reported privately to a few concerned Americans. “My mind is obsessed with the terrible Germany we saw and felt in action during the years 1914 to 1918,” said Churchill. “I see Germany again possessed of all her martial power while we, the Allies, who so narrowly survived, gape in idleness and bewilderment.”"
Meanwhile Hitler was set scot free by German courts.
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"In that same year of 1924, Stephenson received from Cipher Machines, at 2 Steglitserstrasse, Berlin, the offer of a “secret writing mechanism to frustrate inquisitive competitors.” This was Enigma, harmless enough in its commercial form. It resembled a clumsy great typewriter."
"It seemed to Stephenson that Enigma could be electrified and remodeled into a compact machine. Unknown to him, this is what German intelligence thought, too. By the time Hitler had strong-armed his way to power, a different, and highly secret, Enigma would lie at the heart of Nazi cipher systems."
"Stephenson’s firsthand reports of what was really happening in Germany now stirred Churchill. With the Prof to lean upon, the seemingly old man made a little-known journey. It took him into the nooks and crannies of Germany, from which he returned alarmed and angry. This near-forgotten German tour would later explain Churchill’s ruthless pursuit of Hitler’s destruction and the Prof’s mobilization of air power to destroy the nation that spawned Nazism. They had glimpsed, in 1933, the possibility of a German atomic bomb and a dictatorship mad enough to use it.
"There was a bonfire of books at Berlin University that same year. Stephenson watched students fling into the flames the works of Freud, Mann, H. G. Wells, Proust, and Einstein."
"In the burning of the books, Stephenson saw the forging of a weapon hard to define: thought control. He was asked by Churchill to seek out more facts and figures on secret German arms, details that would shatter British and American complacency. Thought-control defied such analysis, though H. G. Wells had tried. Hitler had invented the Big Lie, said Wells. “It will be believed if repeated enough.” The Big Lie spread like a gas that poisoned the minds of foreign observers as well as Germans disposed to trust one man’s claim to infallibility.
"“The Big Lie takes many forms. It can win bloodless victories for Germany if our leaders are soft-headed. Hitler means to conquer the world,” Stephenson wrote privately to Churchill. “But he will not attack his next victim until he has undermined him first, and digested the previous victim. Europe is rotten with indecision, and corrupted by hopes of making separate deals with the Nazis. Germany’s final enemies are in North America. Hitler will try first to sap our courage by winning friends there.”"
"Nazi intrigues led to the rediscovery of Enigma. The cipher machine had been modernized and put into limited German service, its presence noted by American engineers of the International Telephone and Telegraph Company. ITT was becoming involved in German arms manufacture, after talks with Hitler in 1933. The founder of ITT, Colonel Sosthenes Behn, set up German subsidiaries to take advantage of Nazi promises that foreign investors would get preferential treatment and the guarantee of huge global markets later.
"A report on these advantageous terms was sent to Stephenson. One of his companies made equipment for ITT’s British subsidiary. He found an opportunity to talk with ITT engineers, who were now in an unusual position to examine the German communications systems. They commented on the large amount of coded traffic. It seemed to result from Hitler’s use of a coding machine for Nazi party business.
"ITT’s German interests were handled by Dr. Gerhard Alois Westrick. The German banker Kurt von Schroeder joined the directors of ITT subsidiaries. Both men caught Stephenson’s attention—and would hold it for other reasons for a long time. Schroeder was on his way to becoming Gestapo treasurer and a general in the SS security service. Westrick was a partner of Heinrich Albert, a German propagandist in the United States, and would become an adversary when Stephenson tried to break up Nazi cartels in the Western Hemisphere. Sometimes it was wiser to leave these partnerships alone. In ITT’s case, whatever benefit was obtained by the Nazis from American expertise had to be balanced against intelligence gathered by its technicians. The irony was that in those days this intelligence roused more interest in Enigma among Stephenson’s colleagues in London than it could in Washington."
People worried about Germany getting ready for war had to be cautious about getting labelled 'warmongers'.
"There was no financial inducement for Stephenson to chase ghosts like Enigma or to pry into Nazi secrets. Yet everything he touched not only turned to gold, but also involved technical developments that would transform warfare. He was building planes at a time when no British government would put money into military aircraft. His fellow flight-commander from 73 Squadron A. H. Orlebar won the coveted aeronautical trophy, the Schneider Cup, in the plane that sired the Spitfire. The designer, Reginald Mitchell, was dying; Stephenson encouraged him sufficiently that he fought pain and despair to complete the graceful fighter in time to defend Britain against invasion. The inventor of the jet, Frank Whittle, remembered his relief at discovering Stephenson, after the Royal Air Force had rejected his revolutionary concept of flight without propellers. Fortunately, such developments could be financed by Stephenson’s Electric and General Industrial Trust. Stephenson listened to Whittle’s proposals, sat silent for several minutes, then put his finger on the problem with characteristic brevity.
"“He said we’d need a new alloy for the high-speed turbine blades,” Whittle recalled. “Then he found it.”
"There were cautionary voices who had a more subtle influence on Stephenson: George Bernard Shaw, George Orwell, and foreign correspondents whose horror stories from Germany were often suppressed by their own publishers. Stephenson had lost his dearest friend, Steinmetz, who died suddenly but whose voice persisted in a period of confusion. On visits to Germany, Stephenson “felt Steiny at my elbow, setting me straight. Everything I did was tangling with the knowledge that we were going to have to fight Hitler and his perversion of Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest.”
"The fight against Hitler finally began at home. In Britain and North America, small movements resisted further compromise with Hitler."
But Churchill was ignored.
"These were what he called the “Wilderness Years.” He was branded a warmonger for writing that “when Hitler began, Germany lay prostrate at the feet of the Allies—Hitler may yet see the day when what is left of Europe will be prostrate at the feet of the Germans.”"
"It was an offense even to utter the initials of any department of intelligence, let alone complain to the press. The problem was partly solved by an unobtrusive figure moving between the Directorate of Military Intelligence and these civilian-professional groups meeting in their clubs and company board rooms. He was Desmond Morton, a modest major who would eventually organize an Allied Committee of Resistance to rally civilians against Hitler inside Nazi territories. Major Morton’s experience in organizing resistance within Britain in the mid-1930s offered lessons for the future."
Their support came from the king with funding supposedly for protection of national interests.
"Meanwhile, it allowed Morton to shuttle between groups like Focus, Electra, and the XYZ Committee; informal gatherings of men who had respectable reasons for traveling abroad, including adventurers and explorers like Ian and Peter Fleming. (Fleming had just walked across Tibet from China to India and was speculating on methods of “strategic deception” if war with Germany broke out again.)"
Stephenson became centre of intelligence coordination between U.S. and England, forbidden in U.S. and therefore only possible in talks, but helped by both sides being involved with Canada.
"In London, his friends tore up his past. In Germany, he gently interrogated Hitler’s men with little more than a smile and cocked eyebrow.
"“At one conference,” he reported, “a description was given of ‘blitzkrieg.’ Dive bombers and tanks would spearhead each offensive, followed by troops in fast carriers. The Nazi war machine would rely on lightning victories, in turn dependent on the swift redirection of mechanized units by means of radio. It follows that blitzkrieg can succeed only by transmission of top-secret orders through the ether in unbreakable codes.”
"German chieftains talked so frankly because they took professional pride in their efficiency. Some hoped to overawe any potential opposition. Others used the sly justification that Germany was destined to destroy the ultimate and universal enemy: Bolshevik Russia.
"Did Nazi Germany plan to invade Russia, then? The answer was yes, according to Albert Kesselring. The man destined to direct the bombing of London told Stephenson how German armored divisions would strike into Russia. “The secret will be speed . . . speed . . . speed!” Kesselring thumped the table to emphasize each word. “Fast as lightning! Blitzkrieg! Lightning war.”"
"To Churchill, Stephenson reported that the weak link in the German armor would be communications. “If we can read their signals, we can anticipate their actions.”
"Stephenson was launched on a search for the modernized Enigma cipher machine, without knowing it."
"Hall did not think the end of the fighting meant an end to danger. Modern weapons and new methods of mass communication produced new possibilities for tyrants. His warnings, like those of others, were swept away in the postwar wave of revulsion to war and disenchantment with military leaders."
"In New York, the crowds turned out to cheer the 69th Regiment as it paraded down Fifth Avenue, with Colonel William Donovan marching on foot at the head of his men. His regiment had earned the title “The Fighting Irish,” and their chief was as famous as “Wild Bill.” ... At the end of the day, in the empty silence of Camp Mills, where the regiment had been quartered before going to war, he wept. “I can’t forget the men we left behind,” he told his brother, Father Vincent Donovan."
"The game of politics demanded the dismantling of the war machine. The public wanted it so. Military budgets were slashed. Aviation in England was returned to private enterprise. Test pilots were out of jobs. Stephenson was put through Oxford and the forerunner of Cranwell Aeronautical College, where he concentrated on Admiral Hall’s favorite subject, radio communications. Stephenson went back to Canada with a private vision of a new world in which science would bring order and peace."
"Admiral Hall sent word that Stephenson should return to London in the early 1920s. Hall had retired into the shadows. The British intelligence community had been drastically reduced, and Hall tried to keep it alive through groups of civilians in politics, international affairs, and scientific development. He regarded Stephenson as “a brilliant mathematician who, like the American pioneers, can see no limit to his horizons . . . a most rare combination of the man of action and of imagination.” Believing that the interception of enemy communications and cryptanalysis were the foundation of good modern intelligence. Hall built up contacts in industry, commerce, and the universities, where he could tap resources of intellect. The modern science of cryptology had grown from humble beginnings: the invention of telegraphy. Stephenson had demonstrated an inventive genius of his own in the field. Now he learned that while he had been fighting in France, other battles had been conducted by scholars who had applied academic discipline and logic to break down German codes and who could pinpoint the exact disposition of U-boats and Zeppelins by snatching orders out of the ether. Others analyzed general radio traffic to gain an insight into enemy thinking: a craft in itself, so that those who became skilled in “traffic analysis” were regarded by Hall as far too valuable to be lost in the postwar defense cuts. There was not yet a profession called “cryptanalysis,” and those who were good at solving coded mysteries were found in departments of classical history, mathematics, and even dead languages. These formed a tiny unpaid nucleus. Around them, Hall gathered likely young fellows who could make it in the commercial world."
"“There wasn’t a lot of money available in those days,” Stephenson said later. “What counted was encouragement and being able to find enthusiastic co-workers. Whatever lessons the war taught me about personal survival were overshadowed by a conviction that our society had to defend itself against sudden attack or we’d have another world war. H. G. Wells became a good friend and adviser. The public knew him as a historian and prophet in fiction. Few knew about his passionate belief that in the science-fiction wars to come, our first line of defense would be information, rapidly conveyed. We’d both learned to distrust an elite class that claimed the privilege of leadership in good times and then, having led the people into calamity, let them fight their own way out.”"
"Stephenson wrote papers on what he called “Tele-vision,” the method of transmitting moving pictures by radio waves. Why not make it a practical reality? He worked on mathematical equations to prove pictures could be transmitted as easily as sound."
"Stephenson was now drawn into a circle of scientists gathered by Winston Churchill, through his personal force of character, around the person of Professor Frederick Lindemann, later Lord Cherwell, but always “the Prof” to Churchill and Stephenson. It was the Prof who began sounding the alarm about German militarism and its revival in an atmosphere of pseudo-scientific racism. Germany was also leaping forward in science and military technology. Stephenson’s own ideas were stimulated by the revolutionary theory that gravitation bends light, propounded by Albert Einstein, who had been part of resurgent Germany’s intellectual establishment. The Prof and a secret British defense committee kept in touch with the physicist, and also encouraged research in Britain on splitting the atom. The problem was always one of funds. There was popular hostility to government-financed research and development of arms. Men like Churchill were political outcasts for warning that preparation was the only guarantee against another “unnecessary war.”"
"His secret defense committee ... One of its concealed accomplishments in the 1920s was the development of Larynx, a “catapult-bomb”—in effect, a guided missile that foreshadowed the rockets Hitler aimed later at London. Whatever was done, however, depended upon the interplay of industrial scientists. They attracted refugee scientists from Germany; and the best were given moral support by Churchill’s followers."
Stephenson brought the genius Charles Proteous Steinmetz to work in his labs, giving him freedom unlike the stifling he was going through.
"Their first encounter was described by writer Roald Dahl “Even Steiny could never stretch this man to his full mental capacity. He just accommodated every new idea, digested everything, and created out of what he absorbed.”"
"Another refugee scientist, Chaim Weizmann, entered Stephenson’s circle. This tall, princely figure first appeared on the English scene in 1903. He had left his home in the Jewish Pale near Pinsk to study chemistry in Europe. He was drawn to London for reasons shared with many Jewish scientists, which he summarized in a letter to his fiancée: “If we are to get help from any quarter, it will be England which, I don’t doubt, will help us in Palestine. . . . This [London] is the hub of the world and really, you sense the breathing of a giant.” In 1916, Weizmann had perfected a new process for making acetone, which eased a critical explosives shortage. This brought him in touch with Churchill and other English statesmen. They encouraged his dreams of a Jewish dominion in which Jewish creative energies would combine with British improvisation. By the 1920s he had become president of the Zionist Organization and was known as “the uncrowned king of the Jews.”"
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Bill Donovan had been in 1919 sent to Siberia to assess white Russians and returned to Europe on a mission funded by Rockefeller Foundation.
"His carefully documented notes on Germany dwelt upon the dangerous mood of self-pity induced by the notion that German leaders had never actually surrendered and were therefore still unbeaten."
This conflicted with America public opinion summarised by William Wisemann at end of his term in Washington in British intelligence.
"“We should be wary.” Wiseman had written to London, “of the American inclination to thrust responsibility for the war upon the Kaiser and what is termed the Military Party. Americans believe the rest of Germany has been an unwilling tool in the hands of military masters. If Germany was to repudiate the Kaiser and become a Republic, there would be an enormous reaction in America in her favour and she might be received again very much like the Prodigal Son.”
"Donovan noted the popularity of the German military caste, its determination to rearm, and the opportunities offered to fanatics promising to lead the people out of the economic chaos they were suffering. His reporting methods were described as “anticipating in an uncanny way the functions of a future American intelligence agency” by his biographer, Corey Ford. Donovan had also anticipated Churchill, who was soon saying publicly what Donovan reported privately to a few concerned Americans. “My mind is obsessed with the terrible Germany we saw and felt in action during the years 1914 to 1918,” said Churchill. “I see Germany again possessed of all her martial power while we, the Allies, who so narrowly survived, gape in idleness and bewilderment.”"
Meanwhile Hitler was set scot free by German courts.
................................................................................................
"In that same year of 1924, Stephenson received from Cipher Machines, at 2 Steglitserstrasse, Berlin, the offer of a “secret writing mechanism to frustrate inquisitive competitors.” This was Enigma, harmless enough in its commercial form. It resembled a clumsy great typewriter."
"It seemed to Stephenson that Enigma could be electrified and remodeled into a compact machine. Unknown to him, this is what German intelligence thought, too. By the time Hitler had strong-armed his way to power, a different, and highly secret, Enigma would lie at the heart of Nazi cipher systems."
"Stephenson’s firsthand reports of what was really happening in Germany now stirred Churchill. With the Prof to lean upon, the seemingly old man made a little-known journey. It took him into the nooks and crannies of Germany, from which he returned alarmed and angry. This near-forgotten German tour would later explain Churchill’s ruthless pursuit of Hitler’s destruction and the Prof’s mobilization of air power to destroy the nation that spawned Nazism. They had glimpsed, in 1933, the possibility of a German atomic bomb and a dictatorship mad enough to use it.
"There was a bonfire of books at Berlin University that same year. Stephenson watched students fling into the flames the works of Freud, Mann, H. G. Wells, Proust, and Einstein."
"In the burning of the books, Stephenson saw the forging of a weapon hard to define: thought control. He was asked by Churchill to seek out more facts and figures on secret German arms, details that would shatter British and American complacency. Thought-control defied such analysis, though H. G. Wells had tried. Hitler had invented the Big Lie, said Wells. “It will be believed if repeated enough.” The Big Lie spread like a gas that poisoned the minds of foreign observers as well as Germans disposed to trust one man’s claim to infallibility.
"“The Big Lie takes many forms. It can win bloodless victories for Germany if our leaders are soft-headed. Hitler means to conquer the world,” Stephenson wrote privately to Churchill. “But he will not attack his next victim until he has undermined him first, and digested the previous victim. Europe is rotten with indecision, and corrupted by hopes of making separate deals with the Nazis. Germany’s final enemies are in North America. Hitler will try first to sap our courage by winning friends there.”"
"Nazi intrigues led to the rediscovery of Enigma. The cipher machine had been modernized and put into limited German service, its presence noted by American engineers of the International Telephone and Telegraph Company. ITT was becoming involved in German arms manufacture, after talks with Hitler in 1933. The founder of ITT, Colonel Sosthenes Behn, set up German subsidiaries to take advantage of Nazi promises that foreign investors would get preferential treatment and the guarantee of huge global markets later.
"A report on these advantageous terms was sent to Stephenson. One of his companies made equipment for ITT’s British subsidiary. He found an opportunity to talk with ITT engineers, who were now in an unusual position to examine the German communications systems. They commented on the large amount of coded traffic. It seemed to result from Hitler’s use of a coding machine for Nazi party business.
"ITT’s German interests were handled by Dr. Gerhard Alois Westrick. The German banker Kurt von Schroeder joined the directors of ITT subsidiaries. Both men caught Stephenson’s attention—and would hold it for other reasons for a long time. Schroeder was on his way to becoming Gestapo treasurer and a general in the SS security service. Westrick was a partner of Heinrich Albert, a German propagandist in the United States, and would become an adversary when Stephenson tried to break up Nazi cartels in the Western Hemisphere. Sometimes it was wiser to leave these partnerships alone. In ITT’s case, whatever benefit was obtained by the Nazis from American expertise had to be balanced against intelligence gathered by its technicians. The irony was that in those days this intelligence roused more interest in Enigma among Stephenson’s colleagues in London than it could in Washington."
People worried about Germany getting ready for war had to be cautious about getting labelled 'warmongers'.
"There was no financial inducement for Stephenson to chase ghosts like Enigma or to pry into Nazi secrets. Yet everything he touched not only turned to gold, but also involved technical developments that would transform warfare. He was building planes at a time when no British government would put money into military aircraft. His fellow flight-commander from 73 Squadron A. H. Orlebar won the coveted aeronautical trophy, the Schneider Cup, in the plane that sired the Spitfire. The designer, Reginald Mitchell, was dying; Stephenson encouraged him sufficiently that he fought pain and despair to complete the graceful fighter in time to defend Britain against invasion. The inventor of the jet, Frank Whittle, remembered his relief at discovering Stephenson, after the Royal Air Force had rejected his revolutionary concept of flight without propellers. Fortunately, such developments could be financed by Stephenson’s Electric and General Industrial Trust. Stephenson listened to Whittle’s proposals, sat silent for several minutes, then put his finger on the problem with characteristic brevity.
"“He said we’d need a new alloy for the high-speed turbine blades,” Whittle recalled. “Then he found it.”
"There were cautionary voices who had a more subtle influence on Stephenson: George Bernard Shaw, George Orwell, and foreign correspondents whose horror stories from Germany were often suppressed by their own publishers. Stephenson had lost his dearest friend, Steinmetz, who died suddenly but whose voice persisted in a period of confusion. On visits to Germany, Stephenson “felt Steiny at my elbow, setting me straight. Everything I did was tangling with the knowledge that we were going to have to fight Hitler and his perversion of Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest.”
................................................................................................
But Churchill was ignored.
"These were what he called the “Wilderness Years.” He was branded a warmonger for writing that “when Hitler began, Germany lay prostrate at the feet of the Allies—Hitler may yet see the day when what is left of Europe will be prostrate at the feet of the Germans.”"
"It was an offense even to utter the initials of any department of intelligence, let alone complain to the press. The problem was partly solved by an unobtrusive figure moving between the Directorate of Military Intelligence and these civilian-professional groups meeting in their clubs and company board rooms. He was Desmond Morton, a modest major who would eventually organize an Allied Committee of Resistance to rally civilians against Hitler inside Nazi territories. Major Morton’s experience in organizing resistance within Britain in the mid-1930s offered lessons for the future."
Their support came from the king with funding supposedly for protection of national interests.
"Meanwhile, it allowed Morton to shuttle between groups like Focus, Electra, and the XYZ Committee; informal gatherings of men who had respectable reasons for traveling abroad, including adventurers and explorers like Ian and Peter Fleming. (Fleming had just walked across Tibet from China to India and was speculating on methods of “strategic deception” if war with Germany broke out again.)"
Stephenson became centre of intelligence coordination between U.S. and England, forbidden in U.S. and therefore only possible in talks, but helped by both sides being involved with Canada.
"In London, his friends tore up his past. In Germany, he gently interrogated Hitler’s men with little more than a smile and cocked eyebrow.
"“At one conference,” he reported, “a description was given of ‘blitzkrieg.’ Dive bombers and tanks would spearhead each offensive, followed by troops in fast carriers. The Nazi war machine would rely on lightning victories, in turn dependent on the swift redirection of mechanized units by means of radio. It follows that blitzkrieg can succeed only by transmission of top-secret orders through the ether in unbreakable codes.”
"German chieftains talked so frankly because they took professional pride in their efficiency. Some hoped to overawe any potential opposition. Others used the sly justification that Germany was destined to destroy the ultimate and universal enemy: Bolshevik Russia.
"Did Nazi Germany plan to invade Russia, then? The answer was yes, according to Albert Kesselring. The man destined to direct the bombing of London told Stephenson how German armored divisions would strike into Russia. “The secret will be speed . . . speed . . . speed!” Kesselring thumped the table to emphasize each word. “Fast as lightning! Blitzkrieg! Lightning war.”"
"To Churchill, Stephenson reported that the weak link in the German armor would be communications. “If we can read their signals, we can anticipate their actions.”
"Stephenson was launched on a search for the modernized Enigma cipher machine, without knowing it."
................................................................................................
"Whenever he flew from Berlin to London, Stephenson was angrily aware that the official German airline carried pilots and navigators of the shadow Nazi Air Force who were familiarizing themselves with their future target. In London, Parliament droned on, oblivious to the treachery being prepared in the skies above, intent only upon pacifying Hitler. ... The bomber crews had official German support and scarcely bothered to hide their preparations. Not only did Churchill’s ministry run counter to official British policy, but also Churchill was himself a political leper.
"Support had to come from outside. Where better, Stephenson argued, than the United States? The U.S. Navy had established a Mid-Pacific Strategic Direction-Finding Net, whose purpose was to locate Japanese units by tracking their radio transmissions. It would net coded Japanese traffic that then could be added to what was acquired by British monitors in India and Asia. The Japanese were making increasing use of their own versions of Enigma, and the Americans were at work on the Japanese machine-produced ciphers."
"Churchill had courage but no visible power. In the White House there was a man possessed of the courage so conspicuously absent in Westminster. That man was Franklin Delano Roosevelt."
"Donovan bore the same relationship to FDR that Stephenson bore to Churchill. There was mutual respect and trust. Donovan, knowing war, hated it. His investigation of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia had been followed by discreet visits to Hitler. At home, Donovan enforced antitrust legislation for the Justice Department in such a way that the big corporations respected his fair play as well as his incorruptibility. He knew, in consequence, a great deal about the corporate structure of international firms controlled or influenced by the Nazis. It was inevitable that Stephenson would renew their brief World War I acquaintanceship. Donovan was the logical American to discuss how Nazi intelligence proposed to use dummy U.S. subsidiaries. Donovan was also a friend of the director of U.S. Naval Intelligence, Rear Admiral Walter S. Anderson, and Stephenson was the protégé of a British admiral, Blinker Hall."
"Donovan agreed that dictatorship was made vulnerable by dependence on secrecy. “The soft area in a totalitarian state is the security system,” he said. “So much has to be kept secret that machinery to process information is cumbersome. A dictator is apt to think he functions in a totally secure environment and he gets careless.” Nazi Germany was forging a military machine that relied on secret communications, the weak link in Hitler’s armor."
"It was understood without anything being spelled out that Big Bill was the President’s personal agent.”
"The two Bills saw the world in similar terms. Neither took pleasure in military affairs. Donovan never saw himself as a military hero, though General Douglas MacArthur was to describe him as “the most determined, resourceful and gallant soldier I have ever known in my life.” Donovan replied that “I know too much about war to glory in it. But wars are made by politicians who neglect to prepare for it.”"
"In 1937, Stephenson learned through his contacts in the German communications industry that Enigma was serving the Nazi party’s own secret intelligence. It had come under the control of a few men with all the powers of spying, police interrogation, and execution. One of these men was Reinhard Tristam Eugen Heydrich.
"“The most sophisticated apparatus for conveying top-secret orders was at the service of Nazi propaganda and terror,” Stephenson noted. “The power of a totalitarian regime rested on propaganda and terror. Heydrich had made a study of the Russian OGPU, the Soviet secret security service. He then engineered the Red Army purges carried out by Stalin. The Russian dictator believed his own armed forces were infiltrated by German agents as a consequence of a secret treaty by which the two countries helped each other rearm.2 Secrecy bred suspicion, which bred more secrecy, until the Soviet Union was so paranoid it became vulnerable to every hint of conspiracy. Late in 1936, Heydrich had thirty-two documents forged to play on Stalin’s sick suspicions and make him decapitate his own armed forces. The Nazi forgeries were incredibly successful. More than half the Russian officer corps, some 35,000 experienced men, were executed or banished.3 The Soviet Chief of Staff, Marshal Tukhachevsky, was depicted as having been in regular correspondence with German military commanders. All the letters were Nazi forgeries. But Stalin took them as proof that even Tukhachevsky was spying for Germany. It was a most devastating and clever end to the Russo-German military agreement, and it left the Soviet Union in absolutely no condition to fight a major war with Hitler.”
"Heydrich, the architect of this triumph in Nazi deceptive operations, was Stephenson’s opponent in the developing battle of wits. He was tall, blond, clear-eyed, and handsome. He played down his part-Jewish origins, and was driven by a personal and unlimited vindictiveness that had nothing to do with Nazi ideology. “His cold eyes glinted with pleasure when he gave directions for a Jewish family of shopkeepers, discovered by the Gestapo in a minor infringement of the law, to be murdered by whipping and strangulation,” reported one of Heydrich’s own intelligence rivals, Walter Schellenburg. “His schizophrenic hatred of his Jewish ancestry led to monstrous actions against Judaism in general. ... Simply to win advancement, he married the daughter of a secret sponsor of Germany’s rearmament and close friend of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris.”"
"Although Heydrich had been kicked out of the German Navy for “dishonorable conduct” when a youngster, Canaris continued to groom him for a career in intelligence.
"Stephenson awoke with a jolt to the full significance of this Nazi spy whose usefulness to Hitler had seemed to be mainly in cheating Allied watchdogs enforcing the Treaty of Versailles. Later, when the Allied Control Commission prepared to inspect German factories to see if Germany adhered to the treaty’s arms limitations, it was Heydrich who warned the managers. If the Commission arrived at Krupp’s, in Essen, it was to see household articles come off the assembly line instead of the guns and ammunition of a few hours earlier.
"These deceptions were spotted by Stephenson because he could look into the records as a bona fide businessman representing, among other things, new industries created by discoveries in synthetic materials, prefabricated construction methods, and propulsion technology. As owner of the Pressed Steel Company in Britain, he negotiated with German United Steel and thus found that this conglomerate made howitzers as well as hairpins. He saw where tanks were hidden among the blueprints for tractors. Submarines were now constructed in prefabricated sections in Finland, Holland, and Spain, where the separate bits would not be recognized.
"Heydrich was identified with the authors of such schemes, and with that typical Nazi weapon the Stuka dive bomber, which struck terror when it fell upon its victims. The Stuka’s scream was intended to destroy morale already undermined by bombs. Typically, the plane combined propaganda and terror. One required the other. The Stuka was unthinkable, and those who might have resisted Hitler preferred not to think about it. Stephenson’s reports failed to budge British leaders who wished to believe that the Stuka factories were making lawn mowers.
"What Stephenson saw was reinforced by what he was told by Germans like Fritz Thyssen. The German steel king poured a fortune into Nazi party coffers, and then in 1938 lost control of Hitler. Hoping to separate the Führer from the Nazi movement, Thyssen sought sympathy abroad and unwittingly betrayed crucial information, including a clue to the greatest secret of all. Hundreds of new, portable versions of a cipher machine were being built to Heydrich’s specifications in a factory near Berlin. This proved to be the new Enigma, for carrying the top-secret signals that would guide the massive Nazi war machine. It would be the nervous system of Germany’s blitzkrieg."
"Whenever he flew from Berlin to London, Stephenson was angrily aware that the official German airline carried pilots and navigators of the shadow Nazi Air Force who were familiarizing themselves with their future target. In London, Parliament droned on, oblivious to the treachery being prepared in the skies above, intent only upon pacifying Hitler. ... The bomber crews had official German support and scarcely bothered to hide their preparations. Not only did Churchill’s ministry run counter to official British policy, but also Churchill was himself a political leper.
"Support had to come from outside. Where better, Stephenson argued, than the United States? The U.S. Navy had established a Mid-Pacific Strategic Direction-Finding Net, whose purpose was to locate Japanese units by tracking their radio transmissions. It would net coded Japanese traffic that then could be added to what was acquired by British monitors in India and Asia. The Japanese were making increasing use of their own versions of Enigma, and the Americans were at work on the Japanese machine-produced ciphers."
"Churchill had courage but no visible power. In the White House there was a man possessed of the courage so conspicuously absent in Westminster. That man was Franklin Delano Roosevelt."
"Donovan bore the same relationship to FDR that Stephenson bore to Churchill. There was mutual respect and trust. Donovan, knowing war, hated it. His investigation of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia had been followed by discreet visits to Hitler. At home, Donovan enforced antitrust legislation for the Justice Department in such a way that the big corporations respected his fair play as well as his incorruptibility. He knew, in consequence, a great deal about the corporate structure of international firms controlled or influenced by the Nazis. It was inevitable that Stephenson would renew their brief World War I acquaintanceship. Donovan was the logical American to discuss how Nazi intelligence proposed to use dummy U.S. subsidiaries. Donovan was also a friend of the director of U.S. Naval Intelligence, Rear Admiral Walter S. Anderson, and Stephenson was the protégé of a British admiral, Blinker Hall."
"Donovan agreed that dictatorship was made vulnerable by dependence on secrecy. “The soft area in a totalitarian state is the security system,” he said. “So much has to be kept secret that machinery to process information is cumbersome. A dictator is apt to think he functions in a totally secure environment and he gets careless.” Nazi Germany was forging a military machine that relied on secret communications, the weak link in Hitler’s armor."
"It was understood without anything being spelled out that Big Bill was the President’s personal agent.”
"The two Bills saw the world in similar terms. Neither took pleasure in military affairs. Donovan never saw himself as a military hero, though General Douglas MacArthur was to describe him as “the most determined, resourceful and gallant soldier I have ever known in my life.” Donovan replied that “I know too much about war to glory in it. But wars are made by politicians who neglect to prepare for it.”"
"In 1937, Stephenson learned through his contacts in the German communications industry that Enigma was serving the Nazi party’s own secret intelligence. It had come under the control of a few men with all the powers of spying, police interrogation, and execution. One of these men was Reinhard Tristam Eugen Heydrich.
"“The most sophisticated apparatus for conveying top-secret orders was at the service of Nazi propaganda and terror,” Stephenson noted. “The power of a totalitarian regime rested on propaganda and terror. Heydrich had made a study of the Russian OGPU, the Soviet secret security service. He then engineered the Red Army purges carried out by Stalin. The Russian dictator believed his own armed forces were infiltrated by German agents as a consequence of a secret treaty by which the two countries helped each other rearm.2 Secrecy bred suspicion, which bred more secrecy, until the Soviet Union was so paranoid it became vulnerable to every hint of conspiracy. Late in 1936, Heydrich had thirty-two documents forged to play on Stalin’s sick suspicions and make him decapitate his own armed forces. The Nazi forgeries were incredibly successful. More than half the Russian officer corps, some 35,000 experienced men, were executed or banished.3 The Soviet Chief of Staff, Marshal Tukhachevsky, was depicted as having been in regular correspondence with German military commanders. All the letters were Nazi forgeries. But Stalin took them as proof that even Tukhachevsky was spying for Germany. It was a most devastating and clever end to the Russo-German military agreement, and it left the Soviet Union in absolutely no condition to fight a major war with Hitler.”
"Heydrich, the architect of this triumph in Nazi deceptive operations, was Stephenson’s opponent in the developing battle of wits. He was tall, blond, clear-eyed, and handsome. He played down his part-Jewish origins, and was driven by a personal and unlimited vindictiveness that had nothing to do with Nazi ideology. “His cold eyes glinted with pleasure when he gave directions for a Jewish family of shopkeepers, discovered by the Gestapo in a minor infringement of the law, to be murdered by whipping and strangulation,” reported one of Heydrich’s own intelligence rivals, Walter Schellenburg. “His schizophrenic hatred of his Jewish ancestry led to monstrous actions against Judaism in general. ... Simply to win advancement, he married the daughter of a secret sponsor of Germany’s rearmament and close friend of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris.”"
"Although Heydrich had been kicked out of the German Navy for “dishonorable conduct” when a youngster, Canaris continued to groom him for a career in intelligence.
"Stephenson awoke with a jolt to the full significance of this Nazi spy whose usefulness to Hitler had seemed to be mainly in cheating Allied watchdogs enforcing the Treaty of Versailles. Later, when the Allied Control Commission prepared to inspect German factories to see if Germany adhered to the treaty’s arms limitations, it was Heydrich who warned the managers. If the Commission arrived at Krupp’s, in Essen, it was to see household articles come off the assembly line instead of the guns and ammunition of a few hours earlier.
"These deceptions were spotted by Stephenson because he could look into the records as a bona fide businessman representing, among other things, new industries created by discoveries in synthetic materials, prefabricated construction methods, and propulsion technology. As owner of the Pressed Steel Company in Britain, he negotiated with German United Steel and thus found that this conglomerate made howitzers as well as hairpins. He saw where tanks were hidden among the blueprints for tractors. Submarines were now constructed in prefabricated sections in Finland, Holland, and Spain, where the separate bits would not be recognized.
"Heydrich was identified with the authors of such schemes, and with that typical Nazi weapon the Stuka dive bomber, which struck terror when it fell upon its victims. The Stuka’s scream was intended to destroy morale already undermined by bombs. Typically, the plane combined propaganda and terror. One required the other. The Stuka was unthinkable, and those who might have resisted Hitler preferred not to think about it. Stephenson’s reports failed to budge British leaders who wished to believe that the Stuka factories were making lawn mowers.
"What Stephenson saw was reinforced by what he was told by Germans like Fritz Thyssen. The German steel king poured a fortune into Nazi party coffers, and then in 1938 lost control of Hitler. Hoping to separate the Führer from the Nazi movement, Thyssen sought sympathy abroad and unwittingly betrayed crucial information, including a clue to the greatest secret of all. Hundreds of new, portable versions of a cipher machine were being built to Heydrich’s specifications in a factory near Berlin. This proved to be the new Enigma, for carrying the top-secret signals that would guide the massive Nazi war machine. It would be the nervous system of Germany’s blitzkrieg."
................................................................................................
"In April 1939, Roosevelt appealed to Hitler and Mussolini to give a ten-year guarantee of nonaggression to thirty-one nations. Hitler replied in a sarcastic speech to the Reichstag: “Mr. Roosevelt! I fully understand that the vastness of your country and the immense wealth of your nation allow you to feel responsible for the history of the whole world. I, sir, am placed in a much more modest and smaller sphere. I have re-established the historic unity of German living space and, Mr. Roosevelt, I have endeavored to attain all this without spilling blood.” It was a speech described by Hitler’s biographer Joachim Fest as “a moral declaration of war.”
"“It was all Roosevelt needed to settle in his own mind the morality of supporting those who resisted fascism,” said Stephenson later. “He had made his gesture and Hitler had ranted and raved in derision. After this, the President was one of us.”"
" ... Hitler was set upon a monstrous course that seemed sure to bring disaster. Yet many in the United States, struggling with the Depression and disenchanted with the quarrels of Europe, saw only the economic success of Nazi Germany and not its evil roots.
"“Germany must have markets for her goods or die,” wrote an American military attaché in Berlin. “And Germany will not die.” He found it understandable that this dynamic new Germany should demand more space. Hitler’s interpretation of living space, Lebensraum, was less innocent than might appear to foreign admirers. His real intentions emerged in a four-hour harangue to his military chiefs and the ministers of war and foreign affairs. This was reported, apparently verbatim, by an official German archivist, Colonel Friedrich Hossbach.
"Hitler talked about the “solid racial nucleus” of German Aryans, who must breed selectively and prosper on resources now held by “inferior tribes.” The German Empire was “a spatially coherent” concept of a world governed by Nazi supermen. There would be a series of lightning military campaigns. Each expansion of German dominions would create a new need for still more expansion. The British Empire was 450 million people “governed by 45 million who will have to be removed.” The final obstacle would be the United States, led by “the Jew-loving Roosevelt.”
"This program was condensed to 50,000 words in the summary from Hossbach, who was also Hitler’s military adjutant. It reached Stephenson through Germans horrified by the network of intelligence agencies directed by Heydrich, allegedly created for the security of the state but in practice employed against those who might oppose Hitler.
"The report reached Churchill and Roosevelt about a month after Hitler’s briefing, which took place on November 5, 1937. The sources had to be protected, and neither Churchill nor the President could risk betraying their knowledge. Instead, Roosevelt quietly arranged for the transfer from Prague to Berlin of Sam Edison Woods, a forty-five-year-old Texas engineer-turned-diplomat. Woods had the talents of Stephenson: wide knowledge of industrial techniques and finance, an ability to listen, a sympathetic understanding of people in many walks of life, and devotion to the old virtues. Woods had been commercial attaché for three years in Czechoslovakia before moving to Berlin to serve in the same capacity. He reported directly to the President on such undiplomatic and noncommercial matters as German progress in atomic science and submarine warfare.
"Woods confirmed that Heydrich was a major customer for the new Enigma coding machines, mass-produced on the Czech border near Poland. Several factories by 1938 were assembling parts of what was dubbed the “Heydrich-Enigma.” The British, through their Polish Secret Service contacts, nurtured by a Scot named Gubbins, located a Polish engineer working at the Czech border site who was willing to try to reconstruct a cipher machine from memory. He was brought to Paris, where some of the world’s best cryptographers worked for French intelligence. Two of Stephenson’s men examined the mock-up of the Heydrich-Enigma. They returned with the startling news that it resembled a machine registered in Washington under U.S. Patent 1,657,411. However, it was based on the original Enigma built fourteen years before. The Pole had recalled parts common to all models. He knew none of the specifics that might help the cipher experts. There was only one solution: steal a production model."
"In April 1939, Roosevelt appealed to Hitler and Mussolini to give a ten-year guarantee of nonaggression to thirty-one nations. Hitler replied in a sarcastic speech to the Reichstag: “Mr. Roosevelt! I fully understand that the vastness of your country and the immense wealth of your nation allow you to feel responsible for the history of the whole world. I, sir, am placed in a much more modest and smaller sphere. I have re-established the historic unity of German living space and, Mr. Roosevelt, I have endeavored to attain all this without spilling blood.” It was a speech described by Hitler’s biographer Joachim Fest as “a moral declaration of war.”
"“It was all Roosevelt needed to settle in his own mind the morality of supporting those who resisted fascism,” said Stephenson later. “He had made his gesture and Hitler had ranted and raved in derision. After this, the President was one of us.”"
................................................................................................
" ... Hitler was set upon a monstrous course that seemed sure to bring disaster. Yet many in the United States, struggling with the Depression and disenchanted with the quarrels of Europe, saw only the economic success of Nazi Germany and not its evil roots.
"“Germany must have markets for her goods or die,” wrote an American military attaché in Berlin. “And Germany will not die.” He found it understandable that this dynamic new Germany should demand more space. Hitler’s interpretation of living space, Lebensraum, was less innocent than might appear to foreign admirers. His real intentions emerged in a four-hour harangue to his military chiefs and the ministers of war and foreign affairs. This was reported, apparently verbatim, by an official German archivist, Colonel Friedrich Hossbach.
"Hitler talked about the “solid racial nucleus” of German Aryans, who must breed selectively and prosper on resources now held by “inferior tribes.” The German Empire was “a spatially coherent” concept of a world governed by Nazi supermen. There would be a series of lightning military campaigns. Each expansion of German dominions would create a new need for still more expansion. The British Empire was 450 million people “governed by 45 million who will have to be removed.” The final obstacle would be the United States, led by “the Jew-loving Roosevelt.”
"This program was condensed to 50,000 words in the summary from Hossbach, who was also Hitler’s military adjutant. It reached Stephenson through Germans horrified by the network of intelligence agencies directed by Heydrich, allegedly created for the security of the state but in practice employed against those who might oppose Hitler.
"The report reached Churchill and Roosevelt about a month after Hitler’s briefing, which took place on November 5, 1937. The sources had to be protected, and neither Churchill nor the President could risk betraying their knowledge. Instead, Roosevelt quietly arranged for the transfer from Prague to Berlin of Sam Edison Woods, a forty-five-year-old Texas engineer-turned-diplomat. Woods had the talents of Stephenson: wide knowledge of industrial techniques and finance, an ability to listen, a sympathetic understanding of people in many walks of life, and devotion to the old virtues. Woods had been commercial attaché for three years in Czechoslovakia before moving to Berlin to serve in the same capacity. He reported directly to the President on such undiplomatic and noncommercial matters as German progress in atomic science and submarine warfare.
"Woods confirmed that Heydrich was a major customer for the new Enigma coding machines, mass-produced on the Czech border near Poland. Several factories by 1938 were assembling parts of what was dubbed the “Heydrich-Enigma.” The British, through their Polish Secret Service contacts, nurtured by a Scot named Gubbins, located a Polish engineer working at the Czech border site who was willing to try to reconstruct a cipher machine from memory. He was brought to Paris, where some of the world’s best cryptographers worked for French intelligence. Two of Stephenson’s men examined the mock-up of the Heydrich-Enigma. They returned with the startling news that it resembled a machine registered in Washington under U.S. Patent 1,657,411. However, it was based on the original Enigma built fourteen years before. The Pole had recalled parts common to all models. He knew none of the specifics that might help the cipher experts. There was only one solution: steal a production model."
................................................................................................
" ... It was known that Heydrich had paved the road for Hitler’s entry into Austria and Czechoslovakia, and Heydrich was reported to be preparing even more elaborate deceptions to justify a German invasion of Poland.
"This was the time of general betrayal. Hitler and Stalin were feeling their way toward a pact, though sworn fundamentally to destroy each other. There had been hints of this pact in the diplomatic traffic that the British were already intercepting through the cryptographers of the Government Code and Cipher School, known irreverently as the Golf, Cheese and Chess Society, quartered at that time near Victoria Station in London. Gubbins warned the Polish Secret Service that their country was to be crushed between these two dictatorships. Then Hitler would bring his frontiers right up to those of the Soviet Union, the mortal enemy he planned to liquidate."
"“The Second World War began with wirelessed intelligence,” said Stephenson later. “Heydrich was the evil genius. It was a significant fact that the Nazi blitz was launched by coded orders, based on deceit we could not expose, directed by Heydrich. His orders were carried on the new Enigmas. Had we been able to recover those orders, our political leaders might have understood the depth of Nazi wickedness.
"“It was made to appear that Polish troops attacked a German radio station early that morning of September 1, 1939. German forces thereupon fired on Polish-occupied points in the Free City of Danzig in ‘selfdefense.’ . . .
"“The so-called Polish aggressors were inmates from German concentration camps, taken by Heydrich and dressed in Polish uniforms, then given fatal injections. A few survived to tell the story. They knew they were doomed when they were told to get into foreign uniforms—it’s hard to dress a corpse. They were trucked to the frontier and injected with lethal Skophedal. Then they were spread out and riddled with bullets.
"“The code name given these men was CANNED GOODS. That was Heydrich’s touch. Until he died, he boasted that he started the Second World War.”
"Heydrich’s ruse worked. The New York Times reported that regular Polish Army troops took part in an attack on German positions and that this was the signal for a general offensive by Polish forces. The lie confused the British—bound by treaty to help Poland if she was attacked first—long enough to make intervention too late. The role of Heydrich and his weapons of deceit, terror, and lying propaganda was to give German armed forces time to consolidate the positions they gained in sudden movements of surprise."
Churchill was dining out.
"The Duke of Westminster had been celebrating with Nazi-minded friends. The two parties collided. The Duke was rich, anti-Semitic, and an admirer of the powerful—and of Hitler. The Duke came yapping at the old man he regarded as the pariah of a twilight society, calling Churchill a Jew-lover who had conspired against Germany and now saw the consequences.
"Churchill stood with head sunk until the drunken tirade ended. The Duke swept off. Churchill leaned on the arm of his daughter Mary. “This country is like a family,” he muttered, quoting George Orwell, “with the wrong members in control.”
"Even as he spoke, other members of that confused family were working on the prize from Poland—a captured Heydrich-Enigma—in a clay field at the very heart of England."
" ... It was known that Heydrich had paved the road for Hitler’s entry into Austria and Czechoslovakia, and Heydrich was reported to be preparing even more elaborate deceptions to justify a German invasion of Poland.
"This was the time of general betrayal. Hitler and Stalin were feeling their way toward a pact, though sworn fundamentally to destroy each other. There had been hints of this pact in the diplomatic traffic that the British were already intercepting through the cryptographers of the Government Code and Cipher School, known irreverently as the Golf, Cheese and Chess Society, quartered at that time near Victoria Station in London. Gubbins warned the Polish Secret Service that their country was to be crushed between these two dictatorships. Then Hitler would bring his frontiers right up to those of the Soviet Union, the mortal enemy he planned to liquidate."
"“The Second World War began with wirelessed intelligence,” said Stephenson later. “Heydrich was the evil genius. It was a significant fact that the Nazi blitz was launched by coded orders, based on deceit we could not expose, directed by Heydrich. His orders were carried on the new Enigmas. Had we been able to recover those orders, our political leaders might have understood the depth of Nazi wickedness.
"“It was made to appear that Polish troops attacked a German radio station early that morning of September 1, 1939. German forces thereupon fired on Polish-occupied points in the Free City of Danzig in ‘selfdefense.’ . . .
"“The so-called Polish aggressors were inmates from German concentration camps, taken by Heydrich and dressed in Polish uniforms, then given fatal injections. A few survived to tell the story. They knew they were doomed when they were told to get into foreign uniforms—it’s hard to dress a corpse. They were trucked to the frontier and injected with lethal Skophedal. Then they were spread out and riddled with bullets.
"“The code name given these men was CANNED GOODS. That was Heydrich’s touch. Until he died, he boasted that he started the Second World War.”
"Heydrich’s ruse worked. The New York Times reported that regular Polish Army troops took part in an attack on German positions and that this was the signal for a general offensive by Polish forces. The lie confused the British—bound by treaty to help Poland if she was attacked first—long enough to make intervention too late. The role of Heydrich and his weapons of deceit, terror, and lying propaganda was to give German armed forces time to consolidate the positions they gained in sudden movements of surprise."
Churchill was dining out.
"The Duke of Westminster had been celebrating with Nazi-minded friends. The two parties collided. The Duke was rich, anti-Semitic, and an admirer of the powerful—and of Hitler. The Duke came yapping at the old man he regarded as the pariah of a twilight society, calling Churchill a Jew-lover who had conspired against Germany and now saw the consequences.
"Churchill stood with head sunk until the drunken tirade ended. The Duke swept off. Churchill leaned on the arm of his daughter Mary. “This country is like a family,” he muttered, quoting George Orwell, “with the wrong members in control.”
"Even as he spoke, other members of that confused family were working on the prize from Poland—a captured Heydrich-Enigma—in a clay field at the very heart of England."
................................................................................................
"Stephenson, using his knowledge of electronic transmission and cipher machines, provided more specifications and tracked down a German SS unit in the Danzig area where Poland’s Secret Service could hope to recover cipher books. The new Enigmas were being delivered to frontier units, and in early 1939 a military truck containing one was ambushed. Polish agents staged an accident in which fire destroyed the evidence. German investigators assumed that some charred bits of coils, springs, and rotors were the remains of the real Enigma. Ironically, the box that contained the battery model had been deliberately made of wood to facilitate destruction if the operator faced capture. Thus it was made easier for the hijackers to fake loss by fire.
"The real Enigma, taken to Warsaw, was somewhat larger than an old-fashioned portable Underwood typewriter. During Colin Gubbins’s mission to Warsaw early in 1939, it had been placed in one of those large leather bags then in general use among world travelers—a bulky affair with brass locks and reassuring leather straps to hold it together, and plastered with worn hotel and steamship stickers. This impressive bag was left beside the piles of luggage in the foyer of Warsaw’s old Bristol Hotel, a watering hole favored by crusty colonels and their ladies. Among the Bristol’s patrons was Alastair Denniston, who was then in his fifties. He had flown there with a steamship bag identical to the one now holding the stolen Enigma. The bags were casually shuffled, and Denniston left at once with his prize, exchanged for some dirty shirts and some weighty but otherwise dispensable books.
"It was a week before Germany attacked Poland, and Denniston’s prize was the greatest gift any nation could give another. The Polish Secret Service had helped capture it and work out some of the Nazi methods of using it. The gesture of passing this knowledge and the machine to the British was that of a warrior flinging his sword to an ally before he fell. It more than compensated Britain for signing the Anglo-Polish Treaty three days later, on August 25, committing Britain to make war on Germany if she invaded Poland: a promise regarded as foolish, ill-timed, and impractical by postwar historians."
"So strong was Gubbins’s sense of obligation and comradeship that he was already leading a thirty-man team straight back into Poland—“a journey carried out in the face of considerable diplomatic difficulties,” a fellow intelligence officer, Carton de Wiart, wrote later. In fact, the British Foreign Office, in its self-righteous disapproval of espionage, refused to help. Gubbins and the team were trapped inside Poland after the invasion. The incident was one indication of British official attitudes. To avoid any more bureaucratic lunacies, the Heydrich-Enigma was smuggled up to the Duke’s estate. Close by was Bletchley Park, once a Roman encampment, later granted to Bishop Geoffrey by William the Conqueror after the Battle of Hastings. The mansion on this historic piece of land dated back a mere sixty years. It was a red-brick Victorian monstrosity, but it was also just about the last place anyone would expect to find the keys to Hitler’s day-by-day decisions and the enemy’s inner secrets.
"Hidden in the rolling farmland all about were webs of radio aerials, already spread to net the faint murmurings of distant transmitters. At the center of each web were groups of experienced ships’ radio operators to supplement the few C. employed. Stephenson, who had never forgotten his schoolboy exchanges with the Morse operators on Great Lakes freighters, regarded seagoing radiomen as among the world’s best. They were accustomed to discomfort and to working in close quarters alone. They could hang onto the faint signals of a moving station surrounded by the clutter of other transmissions drifting across the wave bands. At sea, they had to recognize quickly the “fist” of the particular operator they might seek, detecting subtle characteristics in the way he worked his key that amounted to an individual signature. They had a sense for danger, important when later their transmissions guided the secret armies in Nazi Europe. Between the wars, thousands of such ships’ operators were kept on a special reserve list in anticipation of a conflict fought in darkness. Admiral Hall had long ago worked out his plans to mobilize these men without alarming the enemy."
"There was a brief panic when the Nazis betrayed knowledge that something unusual might be happening. In a propaganda broadcast, the British traitor known as Lord Haw-Haw, William Joyce, followed his familiar opening—”Germany calling”—with a description of the small town. The British responded by spreading stories that the BBC was erecting some local broadcasting aerials. More to be feared than Nazi detection was the mentality of government leaders in London who stoutly refused to bomb Germany while the Nazi Air Force was engaged in Poland. In vain, Gubbins and his “agricultural mission” tried to convince London from their position inside the shattered country that Poles were being deliberately terrorized, their children and churches singled out for attack. Chamberlain’s men were hypnotized by vague hints of peace and compromises from Berlin. Then silence fell over Poland. Gubbins’s team and the Polish Secret Service were out of touch, lost in conquered Nazi territory, bringing home to Bletchley the urgent need to build an underground network of communications in Europe as well as to intercept the enemy’s signals."
................................................................................................
"“In some mysterious way, Hitler was expected by French and British leaders to wear himself out on the plains of Poland. Neville Chamberlain did everything not to antagonize the enemy,” remembered Stephenson. “President Roosevelt was afraid Chamberlain might negotiate peace. There was not much the President could do to support those resisting both Chamberlain and Hitler. American public opinion was the target of Nazi propaganda guns, no less than Warsaw had been the target of Nazi bombs. And American opinion was against us.”
"“In some mysterious way, Hitler was expected by French and British leaders to wear himself out on the plains of Poland. Neville Chamberlain did everything not to antagonize the enemy,” remembered Stephenson. “President Roosevelt was afraid Chamberlain might negotiate peace. There was not much the President could do to support those resisting both Chamberlain and Hitler. American public opinion was the target of Nazi propaganda guns, no less than Warsaw had been the target of Nazi bombs. And American opinion was against us.”
"So Roosevelt wrote an astonishing invitation to Churchill to bare his breast in private and confidential communications. A correspondence began on September 11, 1939, unique between the chief of state of a neutral power and an unrecognized foreign leader. The President acknowledged that although Churchill might be without power in Parliament, as First Lord of the Admiralty he was directing the secret warriors. The replies, during the next 150 days, called “the Phony War,” were signed “Naval Person” and went to POTUS, the President of the United States.
"The period was known as the Phony War because the Anglo-French alliance seemed to dodge any real engagement with the enemy, while behind the scenes there were disturbing signs of peace negotiations with Hitler. Those who believed that the enemy used these peace overtures to gain time were forced to behave like conspirators in preparing for the inevitable German onslaught. If the President wanted to join these secret warriors, it would help if they gave him ammunition to fight Nazi and isolationist influences in the United States. Here was another reason for Bletchley to get results. If the British needed advance notice of Hitler’s military moves, Roosevelt also needed inside information to convince his doubting service chiefs of Germany’s ambitions and Britain’s worthiness as an ally."
"Arguments about the wisdom of risking Stephenson shuttled back and forth between Churchill and other secret-warfare chiefs. Then, in October 1939, Colin Gubbins made good his escape from conquered Poland. He had slipped into Rumania and from there traveled through the Balkans to the Mideast. He brought with him the nucleus of a Polish secret army. Otherwise, he had nothing but bad news."
"The news from Poland was that a secret additional protocol to the Stalin-Hitler pact had assigned spheres of influence splitting the world between them.
"“Now we learned there was a distinct possibility of the physicists joining forces under the swastika and the hammer-and-sickle to split the atom, too.
"“This was not a wild nightmare. Until Stalin’s purge of the Red Army, Russia and Germany worked closely on new weapons. A few months before Germany and Russia carved Poland between them, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin bombarded the uranium atom and split it—nuclear fission! The Russians were concentrating their energies on the same task. If they could make a pact with the Nazis and then denounce us in Britain as warmongers, we had to face the danger that they could complete the turnaround in science, too.”
"Stephenson pointed out that atomic research required heavy water, a sinister and eerie term for that peculiar substance with the doubled hydrogen nucleus that was a neutron slower in uranium fission. The source of heavy water for German experiments was Norway.
"“Deny it to the Germans and we stop that line of progress,” he told Churchill.
"“And then—?”
"“One of the greatest atomic scientists is within Hitler’s grasp. Niels Bohr has split the uranium atom with a release of energy a million times more powerful than the same quantity of high explosive. He did it in his Copenhagen laboratory.”
"Churchill nodded. “If we know this, so do the Russians.”
"“Exactly. It’s a tossup if Hitler or Stalin takes over Scandinavia.”"
"“Bill knew, too, that in this same month—October 1939—his colleague Alexander Sachs, the New York financier and mathematician, had got to President Roosevelt with a letter from Albert Einstein and other atomic scientists warning that the dictators could build the new bombs. Roosevelt had taken action and informed Churchill."
"At the end of November, Russia invaded Finland. This put the adjoining territories of Norway and Sweden in double jeopardy. Hitler might have another secret protocol with Stalin. Or he might move first in anticipation of the Soviet Red Armies. Either way, Scandinavia was in grave danger."
"STRIKE OX was named after Oxeloesund, an ice-free port about sixty miles southwest of Stockholm. The supplies for Nazi Germany were tons of Swedish iron ore, which, if interrupted, would leave Hitler with only enough stockpiled to keep the Ruhr steel industry going for another nine months. This was a seemingly valid argument for sabotaging the port’s loading ramps and cranes; Nazi intelligence, if this idea was let slip, would believe it. But when Churchill spoke of stopping certain vital supplies, he and a very small circle of scientists knew that heavy water also traveled this route from Norway to Germany and might reach Russia, too. Only 150 miles across the Baltic Sea from Oxeloesund were the Baltic states of Estonia and Latvia, recently absorbed by the Soviet Union. To the northeast, Red Armies battled the Finns."
" ... Then Swedish counterespionage picked up reports that Stephenson was on a sabotage mission. Walter Lindquist, its chief, filed a report that duly reached German agents: this forty-three-year-old Canadian industrialist had plans to destroy the port installations owned by his old friend Axel Axelson Johnson, a major stockholder in iron-ore mines and owner of the railroad from the mines to the port of Oxeloesund, whose docks and loading equipment also belonged to him. It seemed hardly likely to them that Johnson, however sympathetic to Britain, would help blow up his own properties."
"Then the secondary cover story for STRIKE OX spread along the intelligence grapevines. As a decoy, it proved so successful that to this day it persists in espionage tales, embellished with stories of how a British secret agent assigned to guard Stephenson accidentally fired his revolver in the hotel room, and how some explosives were stored under the British Legation.
"This was pure deception. The melodrama reached its intended climax. Sweden’s King Gustav V was frightened into urging King George VI of England to “halt this madness.” ... Halifax, hoping that peace could be negotiated if Britain did nothing to further annoy Hitler, thundered that STRIKE OX was “an unprecedented violation of international law.”"
"King George kept quiet. This misleadingly modest man, who had stepped so hesitantly into the shoes of his brother, erstwhile King Edward VIII, was an active participant in Britain’s clandestine warfare. He was in confidential correspondence with that other Scandinavian monarch, made of sterner stuff, King Christian X, of Denmark. Christian was the royal patron of Niels Bohr, who refused to move to exile in England, although he had acquired much of his knowledge of nuclear physics there.
"The sabotage mission being conspicuously canceled, Stephenson was left in peace. He had legitimate reasons to visit his Swedish associates and friends of Greta Garbo. As a member of the Stephenson-Churchill group, she provided introductions and carried messages. When Stephenson called on her royal admirers, he was quietly arranging escape routes—especially for Professor Bohr, unaware of the threat hanging over Copenhagen, three months away from Nazi occupation."
................................................................................................
"While German scientists, hard on the heels of German invasion troops, moved into the Norsk heavy-water plant, their colleagues surrounded the nuclear-fission laboratories in Copenhagen and restricted the movements of Niels Bohr. Bohr, only days earlier, had been put in touch , with the new British intelligence network in Sweden.
"Stephenson reported in London on what had been accomplished and warned that Britain would be foolish to rely on Germany exhausting herself in a struggle with Russia. The Russians had learned from their misadventures in Finland that they were far from ready for a major war. The theme found its way into a column by George Orwell, writing in the New English Weekly: “The plan laid down in Mein Kampf was to smash Russia first, with the implied intention of smashing England afterwards. Now, as it has turned out. England has to be dealt with first, because Russia was the more easily bribed [by the Russo-German pact]. . . . Russia’s turn will come when England is out of the picture.”"
................................................................................................
"If Bletchley’s possibilities were to be fully exploited, American help must be obtained, in both brains and technology. That meant a direct approach to President Roosevelt, whom Churchill trusted. Thus the Prime Minister of Great Britain, so long as he was appeasement-minded Neville Chamberlain, was not taken into the confidence of the various intelligence groups, consisting now mostly of gifted amateurs, who were known in general as “the Baker Street Irregulars,” after the amateurs who aided Sherlock Holmes. Like the methods of the great detective, their approach was unorthodox. They were reticent with their own Prime Minister, but agreed to confide in the President of the United States.
"If Bletchley’s possibilities were to be fully exploited, American help must be obtained, in both brains and technology. That meant a direct approach to President Roosevelt, whom Churchill trusted. Thus the Prime Minister of Great Britain, so long as he was appeasement-minded Neville Chamberlain, was not taken into the confidence of the various intelligence groups, consisting now mostly of gifted amateurs, who were known in general as “the Baker Street Irregulars,” after the amateurs who aided Sherlock Holmes. Like the methods of the great detective, their approach was unorthodox. They were reticent with their own Prime Minister, but agreed to confide in the President of the United States.
"“We put the fate of Britain in Roosevelt’s hands when we made that decision,” said Stephenson later."
................................................................................................
"George VI recorded his talks with the President in notes that, read today, seem even more significant than when they were shown to Stephenson. The notes were carried in a dispatch box that never left the King’s side throughout the war. They were later deposited in the Royal Archives. He summarized their talks on June 12, 1939, a good two months before war broke out in Europe: “The President . . . was very frank. . . . He gave me all the information in these notes either in answer to my questions, or he volunteered it. . . .”
"King George then described FDR’s “ideas in case of War.” The President would lead U.S. public opinion by defining the economic price Americans would have to pay if Hitler conquered Europe. FDR then gave the King precise details on U.S. plans to defend its coasts. “He showed me his naval patrols in greater detail about which he is terribly keen,” the King noted. “If he saw a U boat he would sink her at once & wait for the consequences.”
"“If London was bombed U.S. would come in.”
"The King set such store by these statements from the President that British intelligence chiefs were advised to go on the assumption that Roosevelt was “part of the family.” Would the President have behaved differently if George VI had not made that brief visit to the White House? George was an exceedingly mild and self-effacing individual, but Roosevelt glimpsed a quality of pride and obstinacy that expressed the character of the islanders. It had surfaced briefly in the simple presentation of the British case that the King made to the U.S. Ambassador, Joseph P. Kennedy, a few days after Britain declared war on Germany. Kennedy, on September 9, 1939, had warned the King that England would bankrupt herself in this new war, and should get out while she still could. Three days later, George penned a letter to Kennedy that was remarkably frank. In it, the King wrote: “England, my country . . . is part of Europe. . . . We stand on the threshold of we know not what. Misery & suffering of War we know. But what of the future? The British mind is made up. I leave it at that.”"
................................................................................................
"Randolph Churchill, son of Winston, destined for parachuting on special-intelligence operations, wrote later: “We had reached the point of bugging potential traitors and enemies. Joe Kennedy, the American ambassador, came under electronic surveillance.”
"Randolph Churchill, son of Winston, destined for parachuting on special-intelligence operations, wrote later: “We had reached the point of bugging potential traitors and enemies. Joe Kennedy, the American ambassador, came under electronic surveillance.”
"At Scotland Yard there were ugly reports that confidential material was leaking from the U.S. Embassy. Yet Kennedy was popular among the Prime Minister’s cronies. The evidence of something wrong came from intercepted diplomatic messages, and it was too early to take action."
"It was this shared outrage and apprehension that put Colin Gubbins in line to run the Baker Street Irregulars. He was with Stephenson at a dinner given by exiled Polish statesmen in London. Also present was the man who would answer in Parliament for the actions of the still unofficial Ministry of Economic Warfare, Hugh Dalton. He represented a left-wing Labour party faction that rebelled against appeasement. “I suddenly realized that here were the men to lead the Irregulars,” Dalton recalled later. “Gubbins, at that dinner, described his chagrin in Poland where the people seeing him said ‘Thank God for the British!’ when they should have been damning us. He told how the British Treasury squabbled about who would pay for transport to get 120 Hawker Hurricane fighters to the Polish Air Force. . . . Then Stephenson said it was time we learned to fight with the gloves off, the knee in the groin, the stab in the dark. Well, I knew him as a great amateur sportsman. Not an unkind bone in his body. And I thought: If these chaps want dirty tricks, things are in a bad way.”
"The training of Irregulars and future officers of secret armies was removed from direct War Office control."
" ... Despite all his efforts to provide eyewitness proof of Nazi terrorism in Poland, the hope had lingered in some circles that a deal could be made with Hitler’s powerful henchman Hermann Göring, whose Air Force had carried out the systematic terror raids against Poland’s helpless civilians. Gubbins had watched those raids. While still trapped in Poland, he had dispatched one of his men through the lines with evidence of German atrocities. The courier, Captain “Tommy” Davies, was refused help by the British Legation in Latvia when he reached there. Davies found a boat to take him to Sweden. When his own Legation heard of his plans, it even telegraphed ahead to warn the British Embassy in Stockholm against protecting this “spy” and antagonizing the Swedes. The message was sent in clear language, endangering Davies, who had quickly realized that he was an inconvenient eyewitness to the Nazi brutality that Chamberlain’s group would rather not know about.
"Even with these bitter memories, the Baker Street Irregulars dared not push too hard. As planners of secret warfare, they vowed “to do those things which assisted in the execution of His Majesty’s Government policy but which could not be acknowledged,” as their Oath of Secrecy had it. The emphasis was on loyalty to the King, obedience to the Crown. Since Gubbins’s return from Poland, a new German Governor-General had started to eliminate all “unnecessary” Poles, and to reduce the rest to slavery. During this first winter, Polish intellectuals, aristocrats, officers, priests, and Jews were being murdered. Yet, in the face of proof that Hitler was studiously acting out the wild dreams of Mein Kampf, Chamberlain continued to hope for the best."
"The visits were not misunderstood by Churchill’s rebels. They knew the truth about the Swedish “businessman.” They knew his job was to gull British leaders until their hesitancy turned them into easy prey. The fact was that Dahlerus was in the power of the Nazi Air Minister, Göring, because his wife owned large estates inside the Third Reich which could be confiscated by a stroke of the pen. Göring had so far taken care that Mrs. Dahlerus retained her valuable properties in return for her husband’s cooperation. During his “peace missions,” Dahlerus carried the plea from the King of Sweden to the King of England to “stop Stephenson” from sabotaging Swedish supplies to Germany.
"Such peacemongers exercised more influence than was recognized at the time. It was a well-kept secret throughout the war that Prime Minister Chamberlain considered that there was a possibility of replacing Hitler with Göring. “This was to be achieved by relaxing British pressure on Germany,” Stephenson recalled later. “Of course, Hitler and Göring were working together in this maneuver. They played on the weak-minded and simpletons, using intermediaries like Dahlerus to persuade us that if we were soft on Germany, there was a good chance that Nazism would be soft on us.
"“Chamberlain really thought Göring might take over Germany in a transitional government. The longer he played with this idea, the longer Britain avoided a direct confrontation. That suited Hitler.
"“But the peacemongers served another purpose by waking up a few hardheaded leaders in Britain and America to the realities of a war like none other. It was a war of treachery, with weapons of lies and deceit. The final and biggest battlefield was to be America. If Hitler could keep it ‘neutral on his side,’ using the Dahlerus-style strategy, he could conquer the world.”"
................................................................................................
"Meanwhile, other Bletchleyites mapped the new German distribution of forces. Two mighty air armadas, Luftflotte II and Luftflotte III, with 3,000 warplanes, were shifting to bases in an arc westward. German armored units, paratroop and infantry groups drew up in positions from which to strike across the rest of free Europe on the way to the English Channel."
" ... It was cold comfort to be forewarned of Hitler’s next offensives. Even if British and French commanders had believed some educated guesses from Bletchley, they were not equipped physically or mentally to move quickly to block Hitler. The lack of preparation under sick and ineffective leaders was described by George Orwell in England Your England:
"After 1934 it was known that Germany was rearming. After 1936 everyone with eyes in his head knew that war was coming. After Munich it was merely a question of how soon the war would begin. In September 1939 war broke out. Eight months later it was discovered that, so far as equipment went, the British army was barely beyond the standard of 1918. We saw our soldiers fighting their way desperately to the coast, with one aeroplane against three, with rifles against tanks, with bayonets against tommy-guns. There were not even enough revolvers to supply all the officers. After a year of war the regular army was still short of 300,000 tin hats. There had even, previously, been a shortage of uniforms—this in one of the greatest woollen-goods producing countries in the world!"
"Kennedy had just revisited the United States on a vacation that the British Foreign Office thought might be in preparation for a campaign to win the presidency from Roosevelt. The platform on which Kennedy would fight, the British suspected, would include a policy of staying out of the war. Kennedy had used his visit to tell his fellow Americans, in public statements, that Hitler would win the war against the British and that the conflict involved no moral issues. He was back now in London, conscious of British disapproval and a new instruction from the Foreign Office to all government departments warning them to confide nothing to the American Ambassador. This reversed the previous policy of giving senior Embassy staff confidential information in an effort to show good faith.
"On the day Stephenson left for his secret rendezvous with the President, Scotland Yard took the first reluctant step in an investigation into pro-Nazi activities by someone in the United States Embassy in London."
Stephenson met FDR in White House after flying northern route via Labrador, within twenty-four hours of leaving London in military aircraft.
"The British government had examined the claim that the fission of uranium atoms had been achieved in Berlin by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann. German interest in Norway’s heavy-water supplies was proof that Nazi funds must be supporting research into all the possible approaches to the control of a nuclear chain reaction. And in March 1940, the so-called Frisch-Peierls paper informed British defense chiefs that it was possible to construct an atomic bomb using the isotope U-235."
They discussed guerrilla warfare.
"In that moment of inspiration, Stephenson hit upon a description of British strategy that Churchill would later use in reminding Americans that supplies were the key to that strategy. “If we do not starve first . . . we shall get back into Europe.”
"Roosevelt grasped the point at once on that day in early spring of 1940. The supplies, at that date, were required by British intelligence irregulars who were not yet sure who their leader would be, but who took their lead from Churchill."
FDR had Stephenson meet J. Edgar Hoover, who required measures before he'd cooperate; Stephenson got sanction by FDR.
"On Monday, May 20, 1940, Special Branch detectives took the grave decision to enter the Gloucester Place apartment of a twenty-eight-year-old diplomat of the U.S. Embassy, a cipher clerk named Tyler Gatewood Kent. Copies of 1,500 pieces of correspondence labeled “top secret” and cabled between Whitehall and the White House were recovered. They included the coded messages between Naval Person and POTUS, the gist of which had been in Hitler’s hands within days of transmission. When confronted, Kent claimed he wanted to thwart President Roosevelt’s “secret and unconstitutional plot with Churchill to sneak the United States into the war.”"
................................................................................................
"The misgivings about Kennedy could not be conveyed safely to Prime Minister Chamberlain, who was impressed by reports of German invincibility. The Ambassador had even brought Charles Lindbergh to London with frightening stories of Germany’s overwhelming superiority in air power. Chamberlain listened. The Czech Minister in London, Jan Masaryk, recorded that Kennedy assured him there was no question of his country being “cut up or sold out,” just before German tanks moved into the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. The New York Post reported that Kennedy was identified with “the Germanophile clique” and sprinkled his conversations with anti-Roosevelt, defeatist, and pro-fascist comments. The Post reprinted an article by the London writer Claud Cockburn: “Kennedy goes so far as to insinuate that the democratic policy of the United States is a Jewish production.”"
Kennedy aligned with pro German elements, predicted German victory and seemed to be without opposition in British government, even encouraging Chamberlain to give in at Munich.
"“But in May 1940, Hitler forced the struggle between Churchill’s men and the appeasers into the open,” Stephenson noted later. “The Nazis launched sudden and savage attacks on Belgium and the Netherlands, making an end run around the French, who were still gazing placidly across the Rhine from the Maginot Line. The bulk of British fighting strength was in danger of being trapped in continental Europe. The support of the people for Churchill rose in a great swell of anger.”
"The nation turned to Churchill. He was the rebel whose political ambitions were curiously restrained. His wife, when asked before the war if he might become prime minister, had said: “Only if some great disaster were to sweep the country and no one could wish for that.”
"Stephenson continued: “It was the socialists who sensed disaster and put him in. The Labour Party Executive was prepared to join a coalition government, the traditional response to danger, but only if Churchill led it."
"Some old-guard civil servants whispered that Dalton would run a “Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.” They feared it would become a monster with concealed and unaccountable funds, dangerous and unorthodox weapons, and freedom to cause political mayhem abroad, even to the extent of political assassination. That, of course, was what Churchill anticipated, but he felt confident that he could curb any wilder impulses. Ministry headquarters in Berkeley Square quietly sucked in poets and professors, sportsmen and journalists, and others not already equipped with cloak and dagger. One recruit was Eric Maschwitz, who composed the wartime song “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.” Those who really occupied Berkeley Square adopted the song as their theme."
................................................................................................
"That certain night, the night we met
There was magic abroad in the air
There were angels dining at the Ritz
And a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square
I maybe right, I maybe wrong
But I'm perfectly willing to swear
That when you turned and smiled at me
A nightingale sang in Berkeley Square
The moon that lingered over London town
Poor puzzled moon, he wore a frown
How could he know we two were so in love
The whole darn world seemed upside down
The streets uptown were paved with stars
It was such a romantic affair
And as we kissed and said goodnight
A nightingale sang in Berkeley Square!"
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"Churchill became prime minister on May 10, 1940, a few days before Hitter’s armies swept to the English Channel in a series of blitzkriegs. “At long last,” Churchill was to write later, “I could act with full authority in all directions.” One of his first orders was to bring together the work of separate agencies concerned with the U.S. Embassy leaks. The gravity of the case could be judged by the priority given to it during this time of greatest danger. On the day the police came for Tyler Gatewood Kent, the American cipher clerk, British naval officers met in deep galleries carved into the cliffs of Dover and peered doubtfully across the English Channel. Could a fleet of sailing craft and rusty coasters be scraped together to rescue the British Expeditionary Force encircled by German armored forces in Flanders? In the War Office, a Military Intelligence tape machine rapped out a message that seemed to reflect the incoherence of events:
"HOTLERS TROOPS OVERRUN LUXEMBOURG. . . . HOTLER PROCLAIMS FALL OF BELGIUM AND HOLLAND. HOTLER SAYS HE WILL CRUSH BRITAIN.
"There was a pause and then the machine stuttered again.
"CORRECTION. FOR HOTLER READ HITLER AND THE MEANING WILL BECOME APPARENT."
The connections were found in a chain from the Duke of Westminster to Anna Wilkoff, daughter of a White Russian admiral, who ran a tea room frequented by the Duke, to Tyler Kent.
"There was no further doubt about the origin of the leak, which was the U.S. code clerk and not Ambassador Kennedy.
"There was no further doubt about the origin of the leak, which was the U.S. code clerk and not Ambassador Kennedy.
"The Ambassador then had to disown his own man. Standing in the Kennedy house near Kensington Palace on the evening of the raid on Kent’s apartment, he agreed to Lord Halifax’s proposal that Kent should be dismissed from the U.S. Foreign Service so that British authorities could take legal action. Kennedy telephoned President Roosevelt that night to report “our most secret code has become useless. Just when France is collapsing, the United States has to suspend its confidential communications with diplomatic missions throughout the world.” He added that if the United States had been at war, he would have recommended that Kent be shot as a traitor.
"The trial of Tyler Kent and Anna Wolkoff was conducted in secrecy. They were sentenced to prison terms on charges of communicating confidential documents that might help the enemy. The case was hushed up because of its many implications, not the least being that Kent justified his actions on patriotic grounds and felt that it was Roosevelt who was guilty of treason. Kent was a well-educated young man, a career diplomat with an unusual amount of experience abroad. No matter how angrily Kennedy condemned him now, many Americans shared his isolationist feelings."
"Even while Churchill was moving into the post of prime minister, Halifax was anticipating the consequences of a French collapse. He commended a peace proposal “that will get us better terms now than we might get in three months’ time.” Mussolini had offered to negotiate a settlement with the Nazis without affecting Britain’s independence, provided Fascist Italy could have the island of Malta and free play in the Mediterranean. If Britain would display a reasonable attitude and allow Germany and Italy to share the Middle East and Africa, peace could be secured.
"Halifax and Chamberlain tried repeatedly to have this proposal endorsed by the British War Cabinet. “Had they collaborated, it would not have been long before our anti-Nazi activities became anti-British,” said Stephenson."
" ... Ambassador Kennedy had been cleared of any responsibility for the leak, but his testimony before a closed hearing of the House and Senate committees on Military Affairs put him in the same category as Halifax. That testimony was given shortly before Stephenson’s first flying visit to Washington. In it, Kennedy was emphatic that Nazi Germany could not be beaten. He had recorded his view that Churchill was scheming and unscrupulous and “willing to blow up the American Embassy and say it was the Germans, if that would get the Americans in.”"
"To the Baker Street Irregulars, Churchill issued the orders to prepare for guerrilla operations. A body was to be created “to coordinate all action by way of subversion and sabotage,—To Set Europe Ablaze.”
"Official action was delayed two months while Stephenson explained the proposal to President Roosevelt, for a blazing Europe might include an occupied Britain whose guerrillas would take direction from New York.
"What seemed in April an academic question was now a probability. Stephenson had not exaggerated when he told the President that it would take Hitler little time to subjugate his unprepared neighbors, and the forces of freedom a long time to liberate them. “The Führer is not just a lunatic,” Stephenson had said. “He’s an evil genius. The weapons in his armory are like nothing in history. His propaganda is sophisticated. His control of the people is technologically clever. He has torn up the military textbooks and written his own. His strategy is to spread terror, fear, and mutual suspicion.
"“There will be a period of occupation when we shall have to keep up the morale of those who are not taken to the death and slave camps, and build up an intelligence system so that we can identify the enemy’s weak points. We’ll have to fall back upon human resources and trust that these are superior to machines.”"
"Stephenson flew with Churchill on one of the five grueling journeys made by the new Prime Minister, pitchforked in his mid-sixties into the role of war lord while his armies tried to escape from the enemy’s trap. Every available vessel capable of crossing the English Channel formed an almost continuous stream between Dover and the bombed beaches of Dunkirk. In Paris, Reynaud knew nothing of the evacuation."
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II. FIGHT ON.
II. FIGHT ON.
"Stephenson flew with Churchill on one of the five grueling journeys made by the new Prime Minister, pitchforked in his mid-sixties into the role of war lord while his armies tried to escape from the enemy’s trap. Every available vessel capable of crossing the English Channel formed an almost continuous stream between Dover and the bombed beaches of Dunkirk. In Paris, Reynaud knew nothing of the evacuation."
Churchill invited him for dinner, and spoke aside after.
"“Winston started by pointing a finger directly at me. ‘You know what you must do. We have discussed it so fully from all angles, there is a complete fusion of minds. You are appointed my personal representative. You will be backed by all the resources at my command.”’
"Stephenson was being given extraordinary independence and power. He was to direct His Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Services and a great deal more. He was to move against the enemy wherever and whenever he saw fit, to take action through covert diplomacy or clandestine agencies without seeking prior approval from the War Cabinet. He would be protected only to the degree that the purpose of his movements would be known to very few."
"Hitler was preparing to transform Berlin into the colossal capital of the world. “He has a good chance of conquering the world,” said Churchill. “All he needs is that a small island capitulate. Tell the President that!”"
" ... The Baker Street Club was the handiest jargon. BSC became dignified as British Security Coordination only when it was obliged later to register with the U.S. State Department. It sounded harmless.
"It sounds anything but harmless today. BSC rigged its headquarters in New York in haste. The invasion of Britain seemed imminent. Stephenson’s mandate, when it was finally defined, ran to hundreds of pages, covering activities that ranged from operations against Americans helping Britain’s enemies, to policing U.S. ports, to supervising the overthrow of a pro-Nazi government. BSC conducted guerrilla warfare from secret headquarters in the privileged sanctuary of neutral U.S. soil. ... "
"The real explanation is that the Bletchley code breakers, by a combination of familiarity with German military thinking, ULTRA’s still incomplete retrieval of orders, and analysis of other German signals, were able to guess German intentions and even to predict some German operations prior to the fall of France. Thus, during most of May, Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay was mobilizing 848 captains among fishermen, yachtsman, merchant seamen, and Royal Navy officers for DYNAMO. Ramsay ensured that every ship, no matter how small, would get stores, fuel, provisions, and charts to cross the twenty-four miles from Dover to Dunkirk, to which the British expeditionary forces were told to withdraw. The rest was up to each captain.
"DYNAMO surprised the Germans because it seemed impossible that the British could improvise such an evacuation in the midst of a blitzkrieg."
"On June 4, when German forces finally bore down in great numbers upon the dwindling Dunkirk perimeter, Hitler realized that he had been outwitted on the battlefield and misled politically. He thereupon ordered the destruction of the Royal Air Force as a prelude to the invasion of Britain. His party comrade Hermann Göring judged that his Luftwaffe would take four days to knock Britain’s Fighter Command out of the air.
"There was a pause in the German onslaught after Dunkirk. Historians may write that it occurred because Hitler still hoped to negotiate a settlement with Britain. President Roosevelt knew better, because he was getting, through the FBI, from Bletchley, a regular summary of what German military formations were actually doing. Troops were being concentrated in ports from Norway to France, air divisions were moved to bases that brought all England within bombing range. The long lists of German personnel postings alone confirmed that Hitler meant what he was saying in private, but overheard, directions to his commanders: Britain is to be occupied."
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"“The manoeuvre which brings an ally into the field is as serviceable as that which wins a great battle,” Churchill had written in his autobiographical account of World War I. As prime minister in the second, he added that the man to bring in the Americans must be fearless. He paused. “Dauntless?” He searched for the right word while Stephenson waited. “You must be—intrepid!”
"Churchill felt strongly about code names. They should be neither flamboyant nor trivial. ... BSC records were kept under the label INTREPID from the day Stephenson arrived back in New York posing as a passport control officer. This humble title was acceptable to the FBI, knowing it to be a traditional cover for British intelligence chiefs abroad.
"The new passport control officer’s immediate concerns included getting American help in developing the one weapon with which the British hoped to save themselves and, perhaps, civilization: communications. ULTRA was part of that weapon. To lead from defensive to offensive use of that weapon, enemy orders must be intercepted and analyzed swiftly, and orders to guerrilla units must be transmitted swiftly, all with absolute secrecy. Churchill acknowledged in June 1940 that most of this fighting would be conducted by guerrillas, special agents, revolutionaries, and saboteurs. Their operations would have to be orchestrated by radio. Wireless communication was the new factor in warfare that not only enabled the Germans to conduct blitzkriegs, but also could be used against the Germans to coordinate irregular actions. “The completely defensive habit of mind which has ruined the French must not be allowed to ruin all our initiative,” Churchill wrote in a confidential memo. “How wonderful it would be if the Germans could be made to wonder where they were going to be struck next, instead of forcing us to try to wall in the Island and roof it over!”"
"Stephenson plunged straight into the wireless war when he got back to New York on June 21, 1940, the day after Churchill told a secret session of Parliament that the fall of France was the prelude to invasion: “Steady continuous bombing, probably rising to great intensity must be the regular condition of our life. It will be a test of our nerve against theirs.” In case German bombing should destroy the secret devices being perfected in Britain, copies were dispatched to New York. They included new methods of radio-location; in return for them, the Americans were asked to cooperate in Stephenson’s effort to provide Bletchley with information on U-boats derived from U.S. radio-detection stations."
"But this was only a beginning. Before Americans played their secret role in guerrilla operations and before the battles of Britain and the Atlantic, Stephenson found himself grappling with the enemy inside the United States. It was a dirty underside to the war, unexpected, and subsequently underestimated by those who chronicled the drama unfolding across the English Channel. It was the first of many guerrilla skirmishes fought on American soil. Defeat for the British here would have spelled defeat for Britain.
"The Wednesday after Stephenson returned, the Nazi military victories in Europe were celebrated in a private suite at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Manhattan. The host was an agent of SS intelligence chief Reinhard Heydrich. The guests were prominent Americans, millionaires and industrialists who were being urged to “cut off supplies to Britain.”
"This advice came from Dr. Gerhard Alois Westrick, a German intelligence agent masquerading as a German trade official. Westrick served several Nazi masters, but his ultimate chief was Heydrich. He threw the Waldorf Astoria party in his capacity, he said, of an international business lawyer. “Britain will be polished off in three months,” he advised his guests. “Then the prospects for American trade with the New German Empire will be beyond your wildest dreams.” Stephenson knew Westrick as the Nazi representative who had done business years earlier with Colonel Sosthenes Behn, the American chief executive of international Telephone and Telegraph, who had been involved in producing weapons for the Germans and counter-weapons for the British. Behn attended Westrick’s party, along with other American contacts with large financial interests in Germany and territories now falling under the Nazi shadow. James D. Mooney, chief of overseas operations for General Motors, was expected to pressure Roosevelt into suspending help for Britain so that the Germans would allow GM to continue business in Europe. Edsel Ford and his millionaire friend from Pennsylvania, Ralph Beaver Strassburger, had large financial investments in Germany and property in France they wished to protect from Göring’s greedy treasure-hunting eyes. Executives from other U.S. corporations were supposedly susceptible to the argument that Nazi Germany had virtually won the war. This did not seem an unlikely proposition on the day of Westrick’s celebration party: June 26, 1940. It was the day the War Cabinet in London received intelligence that the German invasion would be preceded by heavy bombing and use of “a new weapon.” This was also the day that the British Ambassador in Washington, Lord Lothian, reported, “in a distressing telegram,” a wave of pessimism in the United States that might affect the President’s attempts to provide help, because it seemed most Americans regarded the defeat of Britain as inevitable. It was the day German troops prepared for the successful invasion of two of the British Channel Isles, Jersey and Guernsey, ... "
"One prominent figure at the German victory celebration was Torkild Rieber, of Texaco, whose tankers eluded the British blockade. The company had already been warned, at Roosevelt’s instigation, about violations of the Neutrality Law. But Rieber had set up an elaborate scheme for shipping oil and petroleum products through neutral ports in South America. With the Germans now preparing to turn the English Channel into what Churchill thought would become “a river of blood,” other industrialists were eager to learn from Texaco how to do more business with Hitler."
"To keep the White House in secure and continuous contact with Whitehall, a confidential agent of Roosevelt’s own choosing would have to be taken into the secret heart of Britain and given the freedom to measure morale and scrutinize the new and aggressive leadership. Many Americans would object to a presidential “spy” who might short-circuit diplomatic and political channels. Many in Britain would object to disclosing to a neutral the secrets that were their only defense.
"“The right man will have to combine integrity and discretion, compassion and resolve,” Stephenson wrote in a personal memo. “He will be going from a wealthy and self-indulgent society to one of austerity and the immediate prospect of annihilation, and he will need a great capacity to tolerate the short-tempered brusqueness of exhausted men at war.”
"Stephenson’s choice was already made. William Joseph Donovan had a law office at 2 Wall Street, handy to the Passport Control Office. ... "
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" ... Stephenson assembled a formidable number of documents that proved beyond doubt that Germany was committed to the most gruesome policies of mass murder and enslavement. Orders issued as far back as 1933 laid down the basis on which human beings were to be graded in accordance with Hitler’s theories of racial purity. German “educational” films showed how doctors should select infants by measuring them against charts for the correct color of hair and eyes, the proper length and shape of nose and skull, and why it was important to discard children of inferior quality. ... Carefully selected Germans were to mate and produce purebred infants. In conquered territories, a system had been devised for picking out the few children deemed worthy of “Germanization.” The rest were to be given limited educations—enough to make them useful laborers—or left to die. Nazi proposals for populating the globe with German supermen were not matters of conjecture. Stephenson produced the written orders, the propaganda films, the textbooks and bureaucratic forms by which the world was to be purified with Teutonic thoroughness, because he believed this gave the Nazis their drive; this was their ambition, this was their aim. Everything else—military campaigns, battles won or lost—was secondary to the great overriding impulse to purge the human race of “impure blood.”
" ... Stephenson assembled a formidable number of documents that proved beyond doubt that Germany was committed to the most gruesome policies of mass murder and enslavement. Orders issued as far back as 1933 laid down the basis on which human beings were to be graded in accordance with Hitler’s theories of racial purity. German “educational” films showed how doctors should select infants by measuring them against charts for the correct color of hair and eyes, the proper length and shape of nose and skull, and why it was important to discard children of inferior quality. ... Carefully selected Germans were to mate and produce purebred infants. In conquered territories, a system had been devised for picking out the few children deemed worthy of “Germanization.” The rest were to be given limited educations—enough to make them useful laborers—or left to die. Nazi proposals for populating the globe with German supermen were not matters of conjecture. Stephenson produced the written orders, the propaganda films, the textbooks and bureaucratic forms by which the world was to be purified with Teutonic thoroughness, because he believed this gave the Nazis their drive; this was their ambition, this was their aim. Everything else—military campaigns, battles won or lost—was secondary to the great overriding impulse to purge the human race of “impure blood.”
"This explained his relentlessness. He feared this German fanaticism. He feared where it might lead if the Nazis should develop new weapons."
"From Britain, Stephenson had brought “the first memorandum in any country which foretold with scientific conviction the practical possibility of a bomb and the horrors it would bring.”4 These fateful notes raised the specter of a German empire using the immense resources of Europe to build an atomic bomb. Only a totalitarian state, it was thought, could mobilize the huge industrial capacity, labor, and raw materials necessary to produce “the ultimate weapon.” The memorandum was the product of years of British scientific research and espionage. All information on the matter should be restricted to the smallest possible circle, Stephenson had said. “If Germany conquers Britain, the way is clear for development of this weapon with which Hitler can blackmail the rest of the world. The Fuehrer has under his control the doyen of nuclear physicists, Niels Bohr, in Occupied Denmark. While Hitler remains preoccupied with military adventures, he may overlook this opportunity. Give him respite,” Stephenson concluded, “and he will make this new weapon of horror.”"
"A signal from INTREPID reached C in London on July 15, 1940:
"COLONEL WILLIAM J DONOVAN PERSONALLY REPRESENTING PRESIDENT LEFT YESTERDAY BY CLIPPER. . . . UNITED STATES EMBASSY NOT REPEAT NOT BEING INFORMED. . . ."
"Donovan reached London by way of Lisbon in the role of a bluff American businessman. Within hours he was talking with the King, who handed him the latest ULTRA recovery from the Enigma-enciphered directive issued the previous day, Tuesday, July 16, by Hitler: “Since England, in spite of her hopeless military situation, shows no sign of being ready to come to an understanding, I have decided to prepare a landing operation against England . . . to eliminate England as a base for the prosecution of the war against Germany.” The British intelligence report concluded that the main enemy sea-borne assault would be aimed at suitable beaches on the east and south coasts, while paratroops might be dropped on the scale of 15,000 in a single day in areas like East Anglia and Kent. But Hitler was demanding first that “the English Air Force must be so reduced morally and physically that it is unable to deliver any significant attack against the German crossing.”
"The first stage of the Battle of Britain was being fought overhead. The King joked about Buckingham Palace providing a conspicuous target. One bomb did miss the King and Queen by a few hundred feet. It became apparent to Donovan that these monarchs had no plans to run away."
"The supreme trial had begun on July 10, which, unknown to the victims at the time, marked the opening of the Battle of Britain. The defending forces consisted of Hurricane and Spitfire single-engine fighters, which the Germans hoped to wear down in daily air battles. The main German assault on British Fighter Command was scheduled for August 10, according to Bletchley analysts. Hitler set the date of invasion for September 15 and called it OPERATION SEALION."
" ... Donovan talked to the Irregulars about underground warfare. He met Colin Gubbins, whom he knew as the author of the study written two years before based on the argument that “the coming war with Germany will have to be fought by irregular or guerilla forces.” Gubbins was now in charge of training saboteurs, agents, and the leaders of secret armies. His Irregulars worked behind a façade of commercial offices between Westminster and Soho. Some of their recruits were drawn from 20,000 Poles who had escaped from France, the Dutch, Free French, Norwegians, and Belgians who had slipped across the narrow seas to continue the struggle against Nazism. Their instructors had been on secret missions to Russia and China. They had studied guerrilla warfare from the Boer War in South Africa to the Civil War in Spain, and Mao Tse-tung’s Long March from Shanghai to Yennan."
"On the weekend following Donovan’s arrival, Hitler’s “final peace offer” was broadcast to Britain: “I consider myself in a position to make this appeal since I am not the vanquished seeking favors, but the victor speaking in the name of reason.”"
"Within the hour, an insulting reply hit Berlin. It was delivered, without the British government even being consulted, by a newspaperman. Hitler’s grandiose offer of peace was not even discussed by Churchill’s War Cabinet, which had dispersed for the unshakable ritual of a weekend in the country. The vulgar nose-thumbing reply was left to Sefton Delmer, of Lord Beaverbrook’s London Daily Express, who ran a center of propaganda dirty tricks at the Duke of Bedford’s Wobum Abbey, ten miles east of Bletchley Park. When Delmer sat before a microphone that night of Friday, July 19, he had no authority—and neither had the British Broadcasting Corporation—to respond to Hitler’s speech. In idiomatic German he spoke directly to the Führer: “Let me tell you what we here in Britain think of this appeal to what you are pleased to call our reason and commonsense. Herr Fuehrer and Reichskanzler, we hurl it right back at you. Right back into your evil-smelling teeth.”
"Nobody at the BBC questioned the sentiment. The final insult to Hitler was that the British government had not even troubled to discuss his peace offer. All Hitler could do was mutter back the threat of “an exceptionally daring undertaking”; meaning invasion."
"The Germans had no radar at this time and were puzzled by a growing British discrimination between feints and real attacks. There was another explanation for this skill. ULTRA was beginning to develop confidence in its ability to read and interpret orders to the German Air Force. This information was not vital to RAF victory, but together with radar it demonstrated that mechanized barbarism could be outwitted.
"“I’ve always believed in the superiority of mind over matter,” Watson-Watt told Donovan. “But, by God, we suffered from some witless leaders before the war. Stephenson and private enterprise helped me in the 1920s. Bill understood what I was doing because it was close to his own work with the rudiments of television. By the 1930s, he was able to get me secret support. If I’d relied on the British government, there’d have been no radar and no Spitfires.”"
"Two weeks after arriving in Britain, Donovan wrote a note to Stephenson:
"The defenders share a total of 786 field guns, 167 anti-tank guns, and 259 inadequate tanks, enough for two divisions against the forty German divisions waiting across the Channel. There are just over a thousand pilots left in the RAF, shredded by meat-grinding air attacks. The Royal Navy looks like a fleet of old bath tubs riddled with holes. The loss of destroyers in evacuating the troops from Dunkirk leaves the navy in no shape to stop an invasion. I have seen the Orders Concerning the Organization and Function of the Military Government of England instructing the German gauleiters on the liquidation of all intellectuals and all Jews. This is to be done under the direction of the former dean of political science at Berlin University, Dr. Franz Six. All other Englishmen between 17 and 45 are to be deported to Germany as slaves. The SS is to select mates from among its finest men to impregnate Englishwomen and breed a new race."
"The two British islands of Guernsey and Jersey were now occupied. Hitler had English soil under his boots for the first time since he was a poor student in Liverpool before World War I. Few knew about Hitler’s sojourn in the largest shipping center in the British Empire. He celebrated the capture of the Channel Islands on his fifty-second birthday, more than a quarter-century after his first glimpse of this maritime power. From these islands, Hitler intended to dispatch SS officers charged with the task of establishing liquidation centers in London, Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester, and Edinburgh. Special arrangements were specified in the Military Government Orders for Liverpool, where the selection of victims was to be especially harsh. Hitler, clearly, had not forgotten Liverpool."
"Yet Churchill directed the Irregulars to “Set Europe Ablaze.” ... The Ministry of Agriculture distributed pamphlets on wartime vegetable-growing, in which were concealed tips on blowing up invaders tramping through the fields of Hereford and Hertfordshire.
"Each hamlet had its own guerrilla detachment and tunnels so well concealed that some villagers remained unaware of them thirty years later. Donovan was taken into the secret by that extraordinary product of another age, Colonel Eric Dailey, ... "
" ... Later, Bailey moved to New York to work for Stephenson as a King’s Messenger, carrying BSC’s confidential papers around the world. “He sighed for the simpler days,” Donovan would recall. “Rolling tennis balls down drainpipes, waiting to stick a German with a pitchfork, struck him as healthier than being stuffed into the gun turret of a bomber to be ferried back and forth.”"
" ... On the last day of July, a secret session of the House of Commons was warned by Churchill that a dreadful month lay ahead: “Hitler may try to bomb and gas the country before landing. Italy and Japan will snarl and snap like jackals.”
"The very next day, another powerful nation bared its teeth. The Soviet Union accused Britain of prolonging the war by spurning Hitler’s peace offers. This attack from Foreign Minister Molotov, opening the seventh session of the USSR’s Supreme Council, meant more than Russian moral support for Germany. It carried a message for all members of the Communist parties in Britain and America. Wherever Communists manipulated the workers—loading ships in U.S. ports for the dangerous supply runs to Britain, in American factories beginning to produce weapons, even in Britain’s own vital industries—there would be strikes and go-slow campaigns and a betrayal of men dying at sea and in the air."
"Despite Donovan’s discretion, Kennedy soon learned of the presence in his bailiwick of the President’s special agent. “Kennedy was furious at the intrusion and did his best to sabotage the mission,” said a British Foreign Office historian, Nicholas Bethell, after the files were opened for the first time thirty-three years later. “Even the British diplomatic world knew nothing about Donovan when he arrived.” Kennedy tried to limit Donovan’s contacts, not knowing what powerful patrons stood behind him, by making it appear that Donovan was writing articles for U.S. publications—an ingenious move, because stringent British censorship would place Donovan at a disadvantage. Foreign journalists were regarded as a potential source of security leaks.
"Lord Halifax, then still Foreign Secretary, wrote: “The U.S. Ambassador is somewhat embarrassed by [Donovan’s] presence here and regards him as a newspaperman employed by Colonel Knox for his own newspaper [the Chicago Daily News]. It would seem therefore out of the question to treat him as a high official of the U.S. Government.”"
Donovan met Joan Bright in The Hole under the Whitehall where Churchill and others worked. He saw their work, system, and was astounded.
" ... One card was labeled B/SOE/1: Formation Of Special Operations Executive. This referred to the red file labeled INTREPID and a red-bordered card calling for “a reign of terror conducted by specially trained agents and fortified by espionage and intelligence so that the lives of German troops in Occupied Europe be made an intense torment.”
"All this in a shoe box, thought Donovan. Was it reality? ... "
"Reality was a wooden signpost outside War Lord Churchill’s conference room. Four cards could be put into a slot: COLD, SUNNY, FINE, WINDY. For the men and women who worked in The Hole, rain was an academic question when they were sometimes there for weeks on end without ever coming up. ... "
"Now, on the Thursday that Russia joined in kicking an apparently fallen Britain, the Führer issued Directive No. 17: “Establish the necessary conditions for the final conquest of England.” The German Air Force was to overpower the RAF before the invasion. “I reserve to myself,” Hitler added, “the right to decide on terror tactics. . . .”
"None of this seemed to strike terror among Donovan’s new friends. Instead, they showed him a device to turn the landing beaches into blazing infernos. The secrecy surrounding the weapon was such that many historians have since thought the whole thing was a British deception. Donovan’s biographer, Corey Ford, wrote of “ingenious British propaganda devices, including the carefully planted rumor that a system of underwater pipelines could turn every beach and cove into a sea of flaming oil.” The system did exist and led to Pluto, the Pipe Line under the Ocean, which would eventually carry oil from Britain to Allied forces storming Hitler’s Fortress Europe. But it was first conceived as a deterrent.
"“Stephenson proposed a Petroleum Warfare Department and flame-throwing weapons,” Donovan was told. “PWD laid perforated pipelines out to sea and along the coast. The whole system could be ignited when the Germans landed. Churchill loved the scheme because he was convinced Hitler had a superstitious dread of fire.”"
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"Stephenson believes FDR made the decision to run because Churchill was resolved to fight on."
"Stephenson believes FDR made the decision to run because Churchill was resolved to fight on."
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Quoting from the work, by copy and pasting, ends here, due to restrictions by publishers.
Quoting from the work, by copy and pasting, ends here, due to restrictions by publishers.
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"Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."
Churchill's famous speeches:-
"I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this Government: 'I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.' We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival."
Speech in the House of Commons, after taking office as Prime Minister (13 May 1940).
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"We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old."
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""Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us now. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'"
Speech by Churchill in the House of Commons, June 18, 1940 "War Situation".
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"Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."
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"Hitler cannot stand opposition. Our hopes rest upon inciting him to lunatic actions. He must see the insults offered his supermen by barefoot peasants. It will be good for our morale too, knowing we are defeated but still string back."
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President John F. Kennedy made Churchill honorary U.S. citizen for his leadership "in the dark days and darker nights when Britain stood alone - and most men save Englishmen despaired of England's life."
President John F. Kennedy made Churchill honorary U.S. citizen for his leadership "in the dark days and darker nights when Britain stood alone - and most men save Englishmen despaired of England's life."
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FDR sent Wendell Wilkie to London, with a message for Churchill, verses by Longfellow :-
"Sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on they fate!"
FDR wanted to reassure and encourage Britain, but he dare not expose himself to political attacks that would destroy his plans.
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"The Germans wanted Americans to focus on Japan to give Hitler time to finish his initial schedule of world conquest, and to make sure that when Japan did advance, it was limited to South-East Asia," Stephenson noted later.
"The Germans wanted Americans to focus on Japan to give Hitler time to finish his initial schedule of world conquest, and to make sure that when Japan did advance, it was limited to South-East Asia," Stephenson noted later.
FDR answered Stephenson about entering war to say he'd learned from Wilson in WWI, and wanted American nation to enter the war united, when they entered publicly.
According to Kim Philby, Hoover wasn't pleased about the new rival organisation, to be led by Donovan, taking shape with coordination of BSC, and never forgave Stephenson for the role he played in its creation. But that was Soviet propaganda version. Even after they were allies, Soviet efforts to sow discord between FBI and British continued.
This author prefers to err towards right and give credit to the likes of J. Edgar Hoover, unlike most others on the subject.
Problems of communication rose; Hoover suspected, and informed Stephenson so, that communist sympathisers amongst intelligence men were sabotaging his communications with Stephenson. Stephenson communicated with C., British intelligence chief, who was old school and couldn't imagine colleagues without honour.
................................................................................................
"Stephenson flew at least once a moth to London to unscramble problems. Again he needed Hoover's goodwill, because the traffic in agents and couriers could have been so easily interrupted by FBI hair-splitting."
So, the author does manage to admit, albeit indicated rather in veiled manner, that, unlike the pairings of the two leaders, or that of the two Bills - Bill Stephenson and Bill Donovan - the Hoover cooperation wasn't a seamless one.
................................................................................................
Stephenson needed another centre for his group and Bermuda was chosen. Later Ian Fleming, part of the operation, showed his James Bond in Bermuda.
"For their successful prosecution of several espionage cases in 1940 and 1941 FBI owed BSC."
................................................................................................
"The British Navy kept its own experts at Bermuda and Bletchley, because it was felt that significant items in the enemy traffic might escape the notice of landlubbers."
"The British Navy kept its own experts at Bermuda and Bletchley, because it was felt that significant items in the enemy traffic might escape the notice of landlubbers."
" ... Art treasures stolen by nazis in France and shipped through neutral ports to be sold in New York for Hitler's war machine were confiscated. ... " (In Bermuda). In one case, the captain of Excalibur of American Export Lines refused to open a sealed strongroom containing valuable paintings; the British burned it open like safecrackers, confiscated the paintings and stored them in the vault of Bank of Bermuda until they could be restored to the original Paris owner, who was surprised to get all of the 270 impressionist works back.
................................................................................................
Camp X gave BSC its punch. This facility with closely guarded acres of Canadian farmland surrounded by cold lake waters was a contrast to Bermuda. This was training ground for agents preparing for action against Nazi forces. Here they prepared for action against Heydrich whose designs against U.S. were caught by agents at Bermuda. Ian Fleming was among those who trained there.
................................................................................................
Lester B. Pearson was one of the agents. His memoir 'Mike' "reveal a good rumoured tolerance of the sillier aspects of espionage."
Noel Coward was one of the intelligence agents. His very fame was his camouflage, and he went on lecture tours around the world ridiculing intelligence work. That worked.
"All that technical expertise isn't worth a damn if you don't get the best out of people, though. Winston did understand that - and so did Roosevelt. I'd have done anything for Roosevelt. As for Bill Stephenson, if he was against you, there wasn't a chance for you - but if he was for you, Little Bill was for you until the last shot!"
Lester B. Pearson was one of the agents. His memoir 'Mike' "reveal a good rumoured tolerance of the sillier aspects of espionage."
Noel Coward was one of the intelligence agents. His very fame was his camouflage, and he went on lecture tours around the world ridiculing intelligence work. That worked.
"All that technical expertise isn't worth a damn if you don't get the best out of people, though. Winston did understand that - and so did Roosevelt. I'd have done anything for Roosevelt. As for Bill Stephenson, if he was against you, there wasn't a chance for you - but if he was for you, Little Bill was for you until the last shot!"
Noel Coward was one of hundreds of agents of Bill Stephenson with access to influential people in neutral countries, who were used by Bill for getting information and collect opinions, plant rumours and so on.
""The wars of people will be more terrible than those of kings" Winston Churchill had warned the House of Commons in 1901. His premonition was to come true forty years later."
................................................................................................
"The full recovery of Hitler's directive on barbarossa, issued on December 18, 1940, could not be disclosed to the Russians or the threatened countries of East Europe." Because giving away ULTRA wasn't an option.
So there was an elaborate charade whereby big Bill travelled supposedly incognito but was caught out by American press while little Bill travelled along and went unnoticed, from U.S. to London and onwards to Mediterranean. Churchill wanted to delay Hitler's intended invasion of Russia, planned for May, so it'd fail. This is where Yugoslavia partisans of Tito, then yet unknown, were key.
"As it turned out, Donovan's interaction succeeded. Hitler was forced to postpone the attack until the very anniversary of Napoleon's own catastrophic invasion - to the very day and hour - an ill omen that nobody, least of all Hitler, should have ignored."
Donovan spoke on nationwide broadcast on March 25, 1941 after his return to Washington, speaking of courage of those resisting nazis in east Europe. This threw Hitler into a fit, which was known to cause blunders when it wasn't merely calculated for stage effect.
"The speech reached Hitler and, as intended, sent him into a dangerous and, this time uncalculated rage. A week later, on April 6th, on Orthodox Good Friday, German bombers began to raze Belgrade."
"The resistance of Yugoslavia, unexpected by The Germans, diverted Nazi forces and prolonged their advance through Greece."
""Churchill's decision to reinforce Greece was not the romantic gamble of an amateur" Stephenson said later." Although British lost equipment and could only save fewer than 50,000 out of 62,000 strong British force after resistance in Greece collapsed, it was necessary to stand by an ally.
Meanwhile German forces were stuck in a guerrilla warfare quagmire in Yugoslavia for remaining years of war.
"Stephenson was bringing into operation a fake astrologer to help irritate Hitler even more."
................................................................................................
Next chapter, however, deals, not with the astrologer bit, but with a group of young women agents, familiar if one has read "Spymistress: The Life of Vera Atkins, the Greatest Female Secret Agent of World War II" by William Stevenson.
Next chapter, however, deals, not with the astrologer bit, but with a group of young women agents, familiar if one has read "Spymistress: The Life of Vera Atkins, the Greatest Female Secret Agent of World War II" by William Stevenson.
................................................................................................
Next part, IMPEACHABLE OFFENSES, begins with hunting down Bismarck, which had been part of the force ordered to destroy British ships in Atlantic. This is very well covered in various works related to battle of the Atlantic, including Atlantic Nightmare: The longest military campaign in World War II (by Richard Freeman).
................................................................................................
III. IMPEACHABLE OFFENSES.
III. IMPEACHABLE OFFENSES.
Next part, IMPEACHABLE OFFENSES, begins with hunting down Bismarck, which had been part of the force ordered to destroy British ships in Atlantic. This is very well covered in various works related to battle of the Atlantic, including Atlantic Nightmare: The longest military campaign in World War II (by Richard Freeman).
"Traffic analysis became an important job of coordination for BSC ... ".
Public and state opposition about U.S. helping British was circumvented by Canadian private owners purchasing U.S. vessels, their own having been requisitioned by Canadian navy.
"The INTREPID organisation had discovered German plans for using two French islands off the coast of Canada and seizing bases in Gulf of St. Lawrence. ... before the war's end, Canadian navy had become third largest in the world. ... "
................................................................................................
"No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years. I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding. ...
"I see the Russian soldiers standing on the
"threshold of their native land,
"guarding the fields which
"their fathers have tilled from time immemorial.
"I see them guarding their homes where mothers
"and wives pray—
"ah, yes, for there are times when all pray—
"for the safety of their loved ones, for the return of
"the bread-winner, of their champion, of their
"protector.
"I see the ten thousand villages of Russia
"where the means of existence is wrung
"so hardly from the soil, but
"where there are still primordial human joys,
"where maidens laugh and children play.
"I see advancing on all this hidden onslaught
"the nazi war machine with its clanking,
"heel clicking, dandified Prussian officers, its
"crafty expert agents fresh from cowing and
"tying down a dozen countries.
"I see also the dulled, drilled, docile, brutish
"masses of Hun soldiery plodding on like a
"swarm of crawling locusts. ....
"Behind all this glare, behind all this storm, I
"see that small group of villainous men who plan,
"organise and launch this cataract of horrors upon
"mankind."
Radio broadcast (22 June 1941) on the day Germany invaded the Soviet Union.
................................................................................................
Bletchley identified every one of 200 BARBAROSSA generals, their 115 German divisions, 18 Finnish, 14 Italian, apart from others - Slovak, Rumanian, Hungarian, Spanish - while Stalin refused to believe the invasion for several days. "The name of Moscow will vanish forever" Hitler informed his generals (and thereby Bletchley), and that his intended and planned conquest of Russia was was to take twenty weeks. British and American military advisers forecast that it will be done before winter. Stephenson disagreed and assured FDR that the Yugoslavia adventure of Hitler's had bought Russia the necessary time.
In U.S., all communist publications suddenly turned pro British and pro-Roosevelt, after having protested against any of it for years. Bill Donovan was now coordinator of intelligence for FDR.
................................................................................................
TRICYCLE, a double agent under British control who was a Yugoslav patriot named Dusko Popov, arrived at Stephenson's office in N.Y., having had information from Germans about Japanese intentions months before Pearl Harbour, but Hoover refused to believe any of it. Japanese had studied British success at Taranto where conditions were similar to Pearl Harbour. But he was ignored by Hoover despite the questionnaire from his German masters that had very specific questions regarding Pearl Harbour.
TRICYCLE, a double agent under British control who was a Yugoslav patriot named Dusko Popov, arrived at Stephenson's office in N.Y., having had information from Germans about Japanese intentions months before Pearl Harbour, but Hoover refused to believe any of it. Japanese had studied British success at Taranto where conditions were similar to Pearl Harbour. But he was ignored by Hoover despite the questionnaire from his German masters that had very specific questions regarding Pearl Harbour.
FDR and Churchill met August 9, 1941, off Newfoundland on navy ships of their countries. They set up the Atlantic Charter that went into fundamental basics of UN philosophy.
Next part deals with Stephenson pursuing exposure of hidden German ownership and otherwise financial tie-ups with seemingly legitimate corporations in U.S., and Hoover delighted about taking over hounding them with publicity being not only no problem but essential. This included Standard Oil, which Rockefeller helped about, ITT, and several other corporations that were seemingly owned by Swiss or Scandinavian corporations but were in reality German.
"The Vichy French ran their own Gestapo and intelligence services from the embassy in Washington, demonstrating how the nazis were most effective in disguise." The French offshore islands were used to refuel enemy submarines roaming the Atlantic in search of unarmed merchant ships. In December 1941 Vichy French planning to use islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon were blackmailing a technician to tap cables from U.S. running through the offshore islands. These islands, in French jurisdiction, inside the Gulf of St. Lawrence, were being planned for spying on navy close at Halifax.
................................................................................................
................................................................................................
IV. CRY HAVOC.
IV. CRY HAVOC.
Next part deals with Stephenson pursuing exposure of hidden German ownership and otherwise financial tie-ups with seemingly legitimate corporations in U.S., and Hoover delighted about taking over hounding them with publicity being not only no problem but essential. This included Standard Oil, which Rockefeller helped about, ITT, and several other corporations that were seemingly owned by Swiss or Scandinavian corporations but were in reality German.
"Stephenson became expert in unexpected areas like smuggling of diamonds, through which Germany could beat the economic blockade."
The subversives included not only corporates entangled with nazis but also labour leaders like John L. Lewis and oilmen such as William Rhodes Davis. And some senators and congressmen, such as senator Wheeler, who helped nazis by distributing propaganda via misuse of their own franking privilege. Senator Wheeler was accused in Senate, and forced to admit that America First had bought a million of his franked envelopes.
"A month later, in June 1941, all German consulates and agencies were closed by executive order. BSC ended a period during which 1,173,000 copies of Axis propaganda had been mailed at the expense of American taxpayer through twenty-four members of congress.
"John L. Lewis was in difficulty that same June of 1941 as the result of Hitler's invasion of Russia. Suddenly American communists were in favour of war. Lewis himself was never a communist. He pandered to communist sympathisers for sake of political expediency."
William Rhodes Davis, whose entanglement with nazis included not only dealings but helping them with confidential information provided by his British highly placed contacts, and worse, helping them not only with fuel supplies but also in acquiring ability to strike at U.S. coast and oceangoing vessels, died suddenly at the age of fifty-two. Cause of death was given as "sudden seizure of heart", and further inquiries were discouraged by FBI at BSC's request.
................................................................................................
Wheeler attacked Roosevelt, questioning a map Roosevelt had spoken about, one giving map of the new world order, obtained from a German consulate in South America that showed German intentions of conquest and of imposing their order thereafter. Wheeler attacked Roosevelt by using a confidential War Department report named Victory Program that favoured Germany, and passed this on to Chicago Tribune, which printed it. Fact was that Victory Program was a plant, and German high command celebrated its exposure in press, shortly before Pearl Harbour.
British worry was that U.S. might not declare war against Germany even if Japanese attack brought U.S. into war. But Hitler, due to the Wheeler leaking to Tribune and it's publication of Victory Program, declared war against U.S. on December 11, 1941, and shocked nazi diplomats. Under U.S. constitution, only congress could declare war, and Roosevelt was helped due to Hitler declaring it instead.
Also, Victory Program seemed to set date of allied invasion of Europe at June 1, 1943, which was intended to divert Nazi forces onto several fronts, and especially towards maintaining large forces along the Western Wall, so as to reduce pressure at Russian front.
Churchill travelled swiftly to Washington after Hitler declaring war against U.S., and in fact had Britain declare war on Japan immediately after Pearl Harbour, much before Hitler made his announcement.
................................................................................................
................................................................................................
V. AN ORIGINAL AND SINISTER TOUCH.
................................................................................................
V. AN ORIGINAL AND SINISTER TOUCH.
"The Vichy French ran their own Gestapo and intelligence services from the embassy in Washington, demonstrating how the nazis were most effective in disguise." The French offshore islands were used to refuel enemy submarines roaming the Atlantic in search of unarmed merchant ships. In December 1941 Vichy French planning to use islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon were blackmailing a technician to tap cables from U.S. running through the offshore islands. These islands, in French jurisdiction, inside the Gulf of St. Lawrence, were being planned for spying on navy close at Halifax.
Majority of the islanders were Free French and followers of De Gaulle. They got up a small invasion fleet ten days after Pearl Harbour and they occupied the islands on Xmas day.
Pierre Laval was using his daughter, wife of a diplomat in Washington, as a courier to Washington. She could claim diplomatic immunity. But her papers had old French credentials and were checked in Bermuda. Laval's plans for France joining Germany in exchange for wealth of French colonies were exposed. This included enormous reserves of gold stored in Martinique apart from French joining Germany in war against Britain.
"Distinguished French intellectuals argued the German case convincingly and confusingly."
It didn't help, likely, that the attitudes of Europe have been all accepted in U.S. melting pot as an attitude salad bowl - another look at a few popular or otherwise works of literature, films or tv would show those unfamiliar with the U.S. caste system, which is very real albeit not so titled.
So English heritage is standard respectable and Dutch more so, but French is the exotic royalty above others, and this subconscious attitude prevalent in U.S. must have helped the German use of Vichy French. Example, Andre Maurois "arrived in autumn of 1940 and lived in Ritz Towers lavishly" after having visited U.K. and sworn undying devotion to the Queen, and proceeded to speak about U.S. help to Britain being merely much needed weapons being thrown away to fall into German control when they won, while U.S. fell short on Pacific front. He was called a deserter by De Gaulle and decided to continue living in U.S..
Stephenson hoped his record wasn't forgotten. Well, our European colleagues in Boston mentioned him, especially the German ones. They made him seem an intellectual, and a must for intellectual readers. But they also opposed death penalty flatly, including for paedophile serial killers, and thought it should be replaced with education.
................................................................................................
The author next speaks of CYNTHIA. Her description, until he mentions her British diplomat husband and her physical characteristics, is very evocative of Laurel, the third and final wife of Lanny Budd, in the World's End series of Upton Sinclair. He might have mixed his last wife with CYNTHIA, since Laurel embodies Baltimore propriety but spies as and when required and taught by Lanny, albeit her - Laurel's - exploits don't quite match those of CYNTHIA despite much innovative effort by the author of Lanny Budd - being involved in acquiring Enigma for British being awesome at any level. CYNTHIA was key in fact to cracking Enigma, Bletchley park establishment, ULTRA and Colossus, but knew nothing of any of it, having delivered her part.
Her subsequent story seems copied by Upton Sinclair to that of Rosemary in her postmarital dealings with Lanny, but only in a small part, up to her going to South America with her husband, and Rosemary didn't spy.
CYNTHIA was brought to Washington, after being very useful in South America, and she got Italian cipher code for him in Washington.
"Details of the Italian embassy's direction of pro-nazi subversive activities in U.S. ports she gave to FBI."
She had an unidentified visitor whom she understood to be Bill Stephenson but neither mentioned that; he wanted her to get all Vichy French communications for them, which she understood meant for London and Churchill.
About this point on and looking back to her South America record as mentioned here, one is reminded of Ingrid Bergman in Notorious.
"Kahn's The Codebreakers is indispensable to serious students of cryptology" INTREPID wrote in 1975."
CYNTHIA's personal notes, which became part of BSC papers, are partly quoted by the author, and show a very intelligent, erudite person with understanding of complexities of political, personal and more.
Churchill, having implored to Marshall Petain to not hand over the French fleet to nazis, and lost, had said to Bill Stephenson "we are faced with total French collapse. The total collapse of civilisation is inevitable unless we put up a successful defense of these islands."
CYNTHIA writes "but that defense could be undermined by appeasement. This was what he wanted to make Americans understand. The Vichy French could destroy us all by encouraging the peace-chasers - what Churchill called the damned benighted bishops and Quakers, capitalists and communists, cowards and cranks, peers and plain dyspeptics ..."
How very relevant still today, after decades, around the globe!
Captain Brousse, working for the Vichy ambassador and now paramour of CYNTHIA, told her about nazi use of Martinique. A loyal Frenchman swam the ocean from Martinique to St. Lucia to give details of French gold in Martinique. Stephenson reconsidered taking control of Martinique.
Here the author brings in Louis de Wohl, "The famous Hungarian astrologer" built up by Stephenson.
................................................................................................
Vincent Astor was appointed special liaison officer by Roosevelt; his family had part ownership in St. Regis hotel where Stephenson had rendezvous with Einstein whose connection then was kept veiled - although Upton Sinclair writes about it, Lanny Budd is coached by him at Princeton, and the rendezvous at St. Regis is not mentioned. Nancy Astor meanwhile was a prominent member of the appeaser set in Britain, named Cliveden Set.
Vincent Astor was appointed special liaison officer by Roosevelt; his family had part ownership in St. Regis hotel where Stephenson had rendezvous with Einstein whose connection then was kept veiled - although Upton Sinclair writes about it, Lanny Budd is coached by him at Princeton, and the rendezvous at St. Regis is not mentioned. Nancy Astor meanwhile was a prominent member of the appeaser set in Britain, named Cliveden Set.
Vichy intrigues were given publicity widely in U.S. after Stephenson had conferred with Churchill and evidence was shared with FDR, who advised publicity. Vichy ambassador called it de Gaullist-Jewish-FBI-British intrigue.
................................................................................................
Next in this part is about BSC's execution of Heydrich and explanation thereof, which is a succinct summary of holocaust and Heydrich's role therein.
"It's impossible to deny that Hitler's actual liquidation policies were known to have started even while western and Russian leaders appeased him." - Stephenson.
................................................................................................
The astrologer Louis de Wohl, "The famous Hungarian astrologer" built up by Stephenson, is finally explained in in the chapter dealing with the psychological build up leading up to assassination of Heydrich - he was merely there for effect, without a shred of reality to pronouments in his name, made - and publicised around the globe, through parts controlled by British, via seemingly diverse ethnic prophecy pronounces - by BSC, with no attempt at a semblance of providing any real base.
The astrologer Louis de Wohl, "The famous Hungarian astrologer" built up by Stephenson, is finally explained in in the chapter dealing with the psychological build up leading up to assassination of Heydrich - he was merely there for effect, without a shred of reality to pronouments in his name, made - and publicised around the globe, through parts controlled by British, via seemingly diverse ethnic prophecy pronounces - by BSC, with no attempt at a semblance of providing any real base.
For example, prior to the assassination, Wohl is supposed to have said that - was publicised as having said that - Neptune was passing through Hitler's house of death. But Neptune was then in Virgo neighbourhood, Hitler is known to have been born with Libra ascendant, and his house of death is occupied by Taurus, which Neptune hasn't yet come anywhere near, and it won't until a few decades later.
Similarly another man then prophesied about rise of a red planet in Eastern horizon. Mars rises on eastern horizon every day, as does every other stellar body, each at a time depending on the said body's current place in sky and the point on earth one refers to the horizon of; no new red planets were discovered after Pluto which isn't red, and was decades before then.
If they'd made the slightest effort, they could have found real astrologers easily enough, and as it is they risked being exposed by Hitler's astrologers. Not about the prophesies, which are interpretations of astronomical data, but about the very data they mentioned, which was false.
It's one thing spreading false propaganda about India as per Macaulay policy of demoralizing and breaking India from within. Which is still being battled. It's quite another lying about astronomical facts, second only to mathematical.
................................................................................................
The next chapter begins with arrival of Allen Dulles in midst of BSC at Rockefeller Centre, and his moving to Switzerland. One has to wonder if Stephenson realised about the man what one reads about him through various subsequent exposes on subjects of Nazi escape routes, their being helped by him, and Jim Garrison on him as quoted in JFK.
Sure enough, the chapter does go into problems encountered by BSC, and not just due to various obvious differences.
................................................................................................
" ... Passive resistance might work for Gandhi against the British. It would never work for French peasants against the Gestapo. ... " Stephenson on secret warfare within fortress Europe.
" ... Passive resistance might work for Gandhi against the British. It would never work for French peasants against the Gestapo. ... " Stephenson on secret warfare within fortress Europe.
................................................................................................
Author writes next about OPERATION JUBILEE, termed " ... Great Deception" later by Mountbatten, was described by Churchill to say that it must not be taken as failure despite grim casualty figures. Germans were to be led to think that it was a botched attempt and failure of a ragtag invasion. Real purpose, finding out how good was German radar, apart from leading them to think allies intended to invade in the future along that route, from Newhaven to land at Dieppe.
One of the German political refugees discussed, with U.S. intelligence, a military revolt against Hitler. Attempt at entering Europe to contact military was risky by almost any route. One possibility was landing on coast somewhere, under cover of a raid at night.
The Dieppe raid, OPERATION JUBILEE was prelude to TORCH, invasion of North Africa by allies. When Churchill met FDR in Washington, Rommel was sweeping through to Tobruk and it was inexplicable until it was discovered that U.S. ambassador at Cairo had been transmitting to Washington in code broken by Germans. So Churchill got the advantage and got U.S. to agree to TORCH.
U.S. and Russia were both pushing Britain for invasion immediately in 1942 across the channel, and the only way to demonstrate to them was OPERATION JUBILEE, apart from other reasons - radar, French resistance imprisoned by Gestapo, preparing for the actual invasion, .... .
"Almost all of the survivors thought of the Dieppe raid as a failure. The hard decision had been made that they could not be told otherwise - but it had been a tremendous, if extravagant, success."
Part of the description of the raid is very reminiscent of Where Eagles Dare.
"A battery of Bangalore torpedo carriers crept across open ground to the Hess Battery perimeter wire and waited for the air strike, which should come within seconds, delivered by Hawker Hurricanes screaming flat over the waters from England."
They attacked after the air strike.
"Only for of the 112 Germans in the big guns' crews were left alive."
The radar raid was successful, as was release of the French resistance from Gestapo prison, and insertion of anti-nazi agents.
"It was essential, however, that Germans think JUBILEE had failed. This myth was so scrupulously preserved that even Mountbatten - who had at least defended the raid as a dummy run and the Great Deception - was unaware of all the secret operations it covered. ... The men who had carried out the secret missions all vanished, unrewarded, into anonymity."
" ... JUBILEE proved the need for overwhelming bomber and fire support. ... "
" ... secret armies of Europe were not yet ready. ..."
"JUBILEE ... convinced the Germans that the full scale invasion could not be conducted over open beaches ... MULBERRIES were developed ... so JUBILEE became the Great Deception."
................................................................................................
VI. THE END OF THE BEGINNING.
................................................................................................
VI. THE END OF THE BEGINNING.
Stephenson sent a note to Donovan:-
"To thine own self be true,
And then it must follow, as the night does the day,
Thou cast not then be false to any man."
It dealt with the troubles British had with young and energetic Americans arrived fresh in U.K. teaching the British intelligence about how to go about their business.
................................................................................................
Even as they set out to TORCH, Philby persuaded his superiors that OSS would send blundering or ambitious guys that'd make trouble; Stephenson was enraged about his relationship with Donovan being sabotaged, consequently. Hoover requested files regarding Russia that were sidetracked or mislaid by Philby.
General Clark arriving in a submarine off the coast of Africa near Algiers, and in a rubber dingy at the beach where in a villa there was a meeting with Bob Murphy, the U.S. ambassador, and the French general, is described by Upton Sinclair in his 11 volume World's End series, complete with the lad arriving to warn about local police, the guests diving in the cellar, the hosts playing poker as the police arrived, and so on.
"Two U.S. vice-consuls smuggled out of Casablanca a French marine pilot ... "
Hereby Casablanca, suitably romanticised for viewers, with most of them of those times quite aware of general unmentioned background.
A clandestine network of radio stations was strung across North Africa. Local tribal chiefs were roped in to do partisan work.
"Fishermen located U-boat hideouts."
Clark gave more value to field intelligence.
"Later, General Clark declared that ULTRA became the vital intelligence weapon once its value was understood. The problem persisted of when to risk losing a battle to protect the secret."
A week after Dieppe, General Eisenhower arrived in London, in charge of allied forces, and planned details of TORCH. Nearly a million men to arrive simultaneously at different points of North Africa, from U.S. and from U.K., wasn't easy to arrange. British had high stakes too.
"Churchill called it "a formidable moment in Anglo-American-soviet affairs"."
He had trouble keeping up with demands for ships and equipment in two opposite directions.
"The trouble was that TORCH was running behind schedule."
They landed on November 8, 1942. British had meanwhile had victory in East fighting West from Cairo, 8th army having done it without help, and advancing on Tunisia. There were arguments ahead.
"But it could never be denied that American losses in TORCH were light because at el Alamein the British had finally destroyed "nine-tenths of the enemy tanks, and three-quarters of their guns"."
............................................................................................
Problems of communication rose; Hoover suspected, and informed Stephenson so, that communist sympathisers amongst intelligence men were sabotaging his communications with Stephenson. Stephenson communicated with C., British intelligence chief, who was old school and couldn't imagine colleagues without honour.
"After the Japanese surrender, Hoover had discussed his own confusions with Stephenson. He sensed something wrong, could not put a finger on it, and for a time withheld cooperation. This gave way to his feeling that INTREPID's expulsion might be precisely what the Soviet Union sought. Stalin did not want strong and independent revolutionary armies that would challenge his authority in postwar Europe. Thus he would be accused by Tito of depriving the Yugoslav secret armies of help, even though they held down a significant part of the German army and relieved pressure on Russia."
"The baker street amateurs bore the load and the Kim Philbys burrowed away unnoticed."
German rockets finally began to strike, but the enemy could only calculate time of arrival, not place; they were fed misinformation through double agents so they kept correcting it towards East and away from London.
................................................................................................
I. G. Farben had, Stephenson noticed, invested heavily in the heavy water plant, Norsk Hydro, in Norway. Before Germany went in, French quietly informed the CEO of the plant about their own requirements due to interest of Dr Frederick Joliot-Curie. Germans found the supply had vanished.
Another visitor at Norsk Hydro was Niels Bohr. On his way back he talked with King Haakon. Bohr believed in Gandhi's nonviolent resistance until Copenhagen was hit by German bombers as he returned.
" ... Irregulars were not in a position to demand aircrafts and equipment to knock out the heavy water plant in Norway and rescue Niels Bohr from Denmark."
Niels Bohr in nazi occupied Denmark still discussed nuclear fission openly. British warned him through underground channels which resulted in his hiding and mislabeling files to foil nazis.
"In London, a good many people held their breath."
Meanwhile Sam Woods kept his contacts after moving from Berlin as U.S. consul-general to Zurich. Chaim Weizmann met German physicists through him, and later spoke to Stephenson in Manhattan, strolling through the Central Park.
................................................................................................
Odd Starheim and Sofie Rorvig story ought to be told in a film, as one of the thrilling little episodes with a happy outcome. For that matter, this book ought to be made into a film.
One has to wonder if TRUDI mentioned here lent the name for the second wife of Lanny Budd in the World's End series by Upton Sinclair. Other than their being active anti nazi agents, there's nothing common in their stories, but writers might choose immortalising someone by name only, and keep the story covert because it was. The real TRUDI was involved in bringing out Niels Bohr.
Norwegians, recruited from Canada and from amongst refugees in Britain from Norway, managed to finally sabotage the heavy water supply en route to Germany.
Niels Bohr escaped to Sweden after King Christian had been surrounded but managed to get a message through to him, and rounding up of jews had begun. Yet he hadn't faced realityuntil he talked in Sweden with Princess Ingeborg. He then accepted the offer of rescue by British, and flew in the wooden plane that had just brought TRUDI. His son Aage, familiar with his work, was brought out later. Niels Bohr was talked to by Churchill to persuade him down from his peace stand; he'd known nothing about what was going on in Europe outside his lab, yet Peenemünde was only 120 miles away and Britain had been struck by rockets.
TRUDI was a cousin of the British king, and captured by Gestapo, died in custody.
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Bohr's heavy water cyclotron was still in Copenhagen, and he was aware that if the charges went off, nazis would become aware of its importance. Finally the secret armies were instructed that the charges shouldn't be set off.
But they had to decide to conduct a raid on Gestapo headquarters when Danish partisans were caught, and were being interrogated. The raid had to fly low over sea and in city streets, and the school next door was affected when one of the planes crashed into it. After the war, parents of the dead children assured them that their mission had been necessary.
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EPILOGUE: A VIEW FROM ANOTHER ISLAND.
"No man is an island, entire of itself ... "
"No man is an island, entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were:
any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind,
and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee."
" ... and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee."
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Stephenson was knighted with recommendation to his king by Churchill, with a personal, unusual inscription - "This one is dear to my heart". President Harry Truman awarded Stephenson the first non American to receive the highest U.S. award, the Presidential Medal of Merit, wrote - "Some day the story must be told."
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Most of the story related to Stephenson's work, ULTRA, the secret armies, et al, is still untold. For several decades it was due to secrecy regarding wartime and enemy; rest is about it being huge, with enormous numbers of resistance fighters. Partly the concern was use of the methods by hostile powers.
Stephenson and Donovan wrote together to FDR six months after D-Day regarding continuation of the special partnership. But those opposed to OSS and BSC leaked to Chicago Tribune. FDR planned to address the concern they'd expressed after the furore generated by the leak died down, but he passed away much too soon with much unfinished. A month later, BSC was asked to leave U.S..
Stephenson retired to Bermuda afterwards, having drawn no salary through the war. He was aware of continued danger to democracies from totalitarian systems exploiting the very freedom and rights they sought to destroy once they took over.
Montgomery Hyde wrote "The Quiet Canadian " in Room 3603.
Ian Fleming created James Bond.
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November 22, 2019 -
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November 22, 2019 -
January 18, 2020 -
March 07, 2020 -
May 25, 2020 -
October 22, 2020 - November , 2020.
ISBN 978-1-59921-170-1
The Lyons Press Guilford,
Connecticut
An imprint of
Globe Pequot Press
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