A World at Arms (107 page)

The United States built somewhat larger battleships in the
Iowa
class, but these were the direct follow–onto the
North Carolina
class. The victory of the Allies at sea was, however, attained by the building of vast numbers of ships rather than any major new types. Naturally there were all sorts of technical improvements, but, except for some of the special ships built for amphibious warfare, the sailors of 1939 would have had no difficulty recognizing the warships of 1945.

Another area where the war at first saw little change from prior practice was that of agents and spies. German agents and spies were of considerable effectiveness in France, Holland, and Belgium, but had little success in the United States or the Soviet Union.
¹⁹
Those in Great Britain were all captured and shot, jailed, or turned into double–agents controlled by a special organization established for that purpose.
²⁰

The best known German penetration of Allied diplomacy, the recruitment in the fall of 1943 of the valet of the British ambassador in Turkey, generally known under the code–name “Cicero” given it by the Germans because of the eloquence of the documents he purloined, still awaits a serious–as opposed to sensationalist-investigation. As so often, the highest level information on Allied plans thus obtained by the Germans was either not believed or not particularly useful to them.
²¹

British espionage and agent operations in Germany, Italy, and Japan remain shrouded in security restrictions but appear not to have been nearly as extensive as the contemporary imagination–especially of the Germans–supposed. Most successful activities appear to have taken place in German and Japanese-occupied areas where some support from local sympathizers could be expected. Such operations were, however, often disastrous. Sometimes the Germans penetrated the networks established by the British and then lured agents and members of the resistance to their death, simultaneously collecting great quantities of supplies dropped by the British, the most notorious case occurring in the Netherlands in 1942–43.
²²
At other times, rivalry between the older intelligence agencies, MI5 and MI6, on the one hand and the new SOE on the other, led to disaster which was then used by the former to discredit the latter.
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Some valuable information came to the British from German individuals opposed to the government of the Third Reich; the most famous of these, the “Oslo document,” listed the major new weapons being developed by the Germans but was for a long time considered too implausible to believe, a fate often accorded to top–level leaks in wartime.
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The United States was apparently about as unsuccessful in penetrating Germany as Great Britain was,
²⁵
but did better in occupied Western and Southeast Europe through contacts with underground resistance forces. The OSS at least from March to June 1942 obtained copies of correspondence between Vichy and the French embassy in Washington.
²⁶
There was a massive intelligence research effort in Washington.
²⁷
The United States also gained important insights into developments inside the German government from individuals opposed to the Nazi regime. Some of those associated with the July 20 plot provided such insights; especially important were the German Foreign Ministry materials turned over from October 1943 by Fritz Kolbe.
²⁸

Polish intelligence, which had made the decisive contribution to the breaking of German machine codes before the war, a subject discussed later in this chapter, continued to supply both Britain and the United States with valuable information not only from German-occupied Poland but from all over Europe and North Africa. The British, for example, received key details about and pieces of German secret weapons, and the Americans were provided German order-of-battle and other significant reports. As American War Department G-2 (Intelligence) commented on two such documents in a long series: “This is an excellent report...” and “This type of information is extremely valuable.”
²⁹

There is, in addition, good reason to believe that from time to time the Western Allies received intelligence of importance to them from sympathetic individuals in the military and diplomatic services of several neutrals, Sweden in particular. At times, furthermore, representatives of German satellites unburdened themselves to Allied officials in neutral capitals.
³⁰

The Italians and the Japanese had espionage networks that were, on the whole, more effective in the pre-war period than during hostilities.
³¹
Vastly more widespread, and very active during the war, was the Soviet espionage network, or rather, the networks directed separately by the Secret Police and by the Red Army. Much of their activity remains to be illuminated, and much has been distorted by sensational accounts. Some things can, however, be stated with considerable confidence. There was extensive Soviet espionage in Germany, much of it continuing from before the war. A most important Soviet source was either indirectly Rudolf von Scheliha or Gerhard Kegel, of the German embassy in Warsaw; Scheliha was arrested in October 1942.
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Amajor Soviet network generally referred to as the “Rote Kapelle” or Red Orchestra had a high-level recruit in the intelligence section of the German air force, Harro Schulze-Boysen, whose arrest in August 1942 further reduced the already low esteem in which air force intelligence was held
in Berlin.
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The literature on the Rote Kapelle is extensive, but it suggests that little was gained from it by the Soviet Union.
³⁴

The Soviet government clearly received information of much greater importance from the spy ring headed by Richard Sorge in Tokyo, though in this case also truth and fiction have been very much confused.
³⁵
Sorge certainly provided the government in Moscow with a clear picture of Japanese general policy in the years before the Japanese expanded their war against China into the Pacific War in 1941, and he also had considerable access to information originating in the German embassy in Tokyo. Whether his activities and those of his associates compromised Japanese or German codes is not known. A less well–known figure was Ivar Lissner, a key German agent in Manchuria, who collected information on the Soviet Union from there, was accused in 1943 by the Japanese of being a Soviet double-agent, but may well have been so accused merely to enable the Japanese to rid Manchuria of a German who was too well–informed in their eyes.
³⁶

Soviet espionage in Great Britain also continued, and probably increased, during the war years. This activity, doubtless aided by the British ending work on Soviet codes during wartime, was to attain enormous notoriety in the post-war years. The subject of a vast literature, that espionage has been examined primarily from the perspective of its impact on the Cold War.
³⁷
Beyond demonstrating the tenuous character of the alliance against Germany and the willingness of numerous individuals in Britain to betray their country to the Soviet Union, even when that state was aligned with a Nazi Germany poised to invade the United Kingdom, this espionage activity appears to me to have been significant for two types of information provided Moscow during World War II. In the first place, it would have made certain that the Soviet government knew of British code-breaking successes against Germany; so that the real source of the special information provided them by the British and discussed subsequently in this chapter would have been known, in spite of the attempts at camouflage designed to protect that knowledge for fear of the Germans finding out.
³⁸
Secondly, the extensive information about the British-American effort to develop atomic bombs provided by Klaus Fuchs and others gave the Russians, who were working on such weapons themselves, both a sense of the progress being made by the Western powers and assistance for their own project. Whether, in addition, the Soviet moles in the British government also made it possible for the Russians to read British codes is not known at this time, but, even if given, such information would hardly have been very useful
during
as opposed to
after
the war.

Soviet espionage was similarly active in the United States. Here too
such activity was mainly a continuation of pre-war operations. As the United States government learned, espionage was very much directed toward the atomic bomb project but appears to have been less successful, even if as extensive, as in Britain. The American success in reading Japanese codes appears, however, to have remained secret from the Soviet Union; it is difficult to imagine such Soviet leaders as Molotov speaking to Japanese diplomats the way they did had they known that the Americans would read the reports of the Japanese.

Given this background, it should not be surprising that cooperation in intelligence matters, like cooperation in other fields between the Western Powers and the Soviet Union, was on a minimal leve1.
³⁹
There were some exchanges of information, but most of the traffic was one way: the British and Americans provided material about some of their own technical developments and captured German material to the Russians with little being given in return.
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At Churchill’s repeated insistence, information derived from the breaking of German codes was regularly transmitted to the Soviet government through a specially assigned representative attached to the British embassy, Major Edward Crankshaw.
⁴¹
From their own spies in England, especially Kim Philby, the Soviets knew the source of the information provided by Crankshaw; but the British fear that careless use of such information by the Russians or German reading of Soviet codes would compromise the source, which had led them to disguise the latter, was never realized. In spite of repeated requests, however, the Soviet government was rarely prepared to reciprocate by providing products of its own extensive intelligence against the Axis. There is no sign that the massive Russian interrogations of German prisoners of war, capture of German weapons and documents, or other information gathered on the Eastern Front was transmitted on any substantial scale to the other powers fighting Germany.

While there was a very extensive degree of cooperation in both intelligence and technical matters between the Americans and the British, beginning before the United States was drawn into the war, the exchanges between Germany and Japan, though considerable, were clearly less.
⁴²
In most fields, the Germans appear to have been more forthcoming than the Japanese. It should be added that both at times displayed a singular carelessness in their selection of readily penetrated cover names: the Germans by using “Barbarossa” for the invasion of Russia and “Aida” for the offensive toward Suez,
⁴³
the Japanese by using operation MI and operation MO for the attacks on Midway and Port Moresby respectively.

Whatever effects espionage and agents may have had on the war, these were of minor importance compared to those resulting from signals
intelligence. The need for rapid communication with tanks and formations on the ground, planes in the air, headquarters at a distance, ships at sea, and, in return, the requirement for reports, put a premium on communication systems. Where possible, these were handled by all belligerents through cables or couriers precisely to preclude the dangers of interception which always accompany radio messages. Sometimes, however, there was no way to avoid radio communication: with ships at sea and planes in the air, to places where cables were not available, and in the rush of battle when there was often no alternative to radio. One of the important but rarely noted by–products of strategic bombing in the last part of World War II in both Europe and the Pacific was that the destruction of the means of communication, first in Germany and later in Japan, reached a level where a large volume of messages which would otherwise have been transmitted by wire, mail, or courier was instead entrusted to the radio, with the resulting exposure to interception by the Allies.

Interception by all belligerents involved the establishment of extensive systems of stations for listening in on, recording, and conveying to central locations whatever messages could be gathered in by usually large numbers of increasingly well–trained listeners. These listeners, whose organization was referred to as the “Y-Service” by the Western Allies, played a central role in all radio intelligence efforts.
⁴⁴
The intercepted messages could then be utilized for signals intelligence, which consists basically of three types.
⁴⁵

In the first place, the interception of a radio message by two or more listening posts could, if accurately plotted, provide the location of the sending station, what is generally referred to as locator intelligence. Obviously of central importance in the war at sea, it also played a significant role in the locating of headquarters and agents, as well as their movement. It was the development of a seaborne radio locator system, HF/DF, nicknamed “Huff-Duff,” which was a key contributor to Allied victory in the Battle of the Atlantic because it enabled the escort ships to locate and attack, or at least force below the surface, German submarines signalling while on the surface.

The second form of signals intelligence is traffic analysis. Careful attention to the pattern of radio traffic, in which trained listeners soon learned to recognize the hand of each of the enemy operators they were monitoring, provided very important information on enemy dispositions, shifts, reorganizations and, as a frequent result, intentions.
⁴⁶
It should be noted that neither locator nor traffic analysis required any ability to
decypher
whatever messages the enemy had entrusted to the air; what
was needed was an elaborate monitoring system and exceedingly conscientious and able listeners and analysts. Both types of intelligence had existed in World War I but both, like the third form–decypherment-were developed dramatically in World War II.