Burn After Reading (16 page)

Lies may be dead and damned, and rumor may be what Shakespeare called it, nothing but long-tongued, babbling gossip, but in times of war, lies are powerful weapons in the arsenals of secret services. All secret services have special branches whose wartime job is to concoct lies and to spread useful rumors.

On a summer day in 1940, a young man of twenty-eight, working at humdrum intelligence jobs in the War Office in London, was called to the office of “Paddy” Beaumont-Nesbitt. The young man was John Baker White, a junior major in MI. He was ordered to conduct psychological warfare, not against the Germans in general, but specifically against the German Army.

Baker White was sent to lovely St. Margaret's Bay near Dover to see for himself what Britain had in tangible weapons. The Sea Lion scare was at its height and what Baker White found made his heart sink. The beach was defended by a rifle company with two Bren guns and an old Vickers machine gun. Their supporting artillery consisted of a few ancient French 75mm guns, with only ten rounds of ammunition for each gun. Behind that thin line there was nothing else for twenty miles. “We're damn thin on the ground,” an officer told him; Baker White thought it was a masterly understatement.

And yet Major White found something interesting. Running along the beach were pipes with holes punched into them at regular intervals. There were fuel tanks and pumps behind the pipeline, feeding a mixture of gasoline, fuel oil and creosote into the pipes. The contraption operated like a garden sprinkler; it spewed flames along the beach and down to the water line. “In operation,” Baker White remarked, “they were a
frightening spectacle, with clouds of thick, blinding black smoke through which shot great jets of red flame.”

On the drive back to London, he could not get that flaming spectacle out of his mind. Suddenly he had a vision. He saw flames extending beyond the water line, setting the Channel itself on fire. “Setting the sea on fire,” he repeated again and again all the way home to London. How about spreading a rumor that Britain was, indeed, as Tennyson had put it, a looming bastion fringed with fire?

Baker White consulted experts and they assured him that an operation like this would be extremely difficult and prohibitively expensive, but was feasible. Armed with this expert opinion, he worked up a memo and submitted it to the committee that was to pass on all such concoctions. Back came the committee's okay, with the remark: “No objection, but we think it a pretty poor effort.”

The rumor now floated out of Baker White's hands and was planted by other organs of the British secret service in the usual spots: in the lobby of the Grand Hotel in Stockholm, the bars of the Avenida in Lisbon and the Ritz in Madrid, in Cairo and New York, Istanbul and Buenos Aires, wherever the Germans had their listening posts.

There was not much more that Baker White and his associate rumor-spreaders could do, except to sit back and wait for the playback. For a while nothing happened. Then, abruptly, the first faint echo was heard. A German pilot, shot down in Kent, mentioned during his interrogation at the Cockfoster “cage” something about Britain's “burning sea defenses.” A few days later, another
Luftwaffe
prisoner spoke of them again. After that came the deluge. Promoted and stimulated by elaborate instruments of political warfare, the rumor was sweeping the world.

Two fortuitous events gave the rumor the plausibility and impetus it still needed to be devastatingly effective. An R.A.F. flight of bombers, on a routine mission against a concentration of German invasion barges, caught a battalion of
Landsers
at
an exercise near Calais. A rain of incendiaries was showered on them and the men of the battalion were severely burned. The brand new French underground was already spreading the rumor. Now they could point to the
Landsers
in hospitals in France and Belgium as “evidence.”

At about the same time, forty-odd German soldiers arrived in England. They were corpses washed up along the coast. They were members of another invasion battalion engaged in embarkation practice. A few of the barges had put out to sea, strayed into foul weather and sunk. The coming of these German bodies was quickly linked to the floating tall tale.

“This was,” Churchill wrote, “the source of a widespread rumour that the Germans had attempted an invasion and had suffered very heavy losses either by drowning or by being burnt in patches of sea covered with flaming oil. We took no steps to contradict these tales, which spread freely through the occupied countries in a wildly exaggerated form, and gave much encouragement to the oppressed populations.”

In France, as soon as a German soldier would enter a café, at least a few young men or women would usually get up and ostentatiously warm their hands at the stove. In Belgium and Holland, people would stop Germans politely on the streets, ask them for lights and then hold the flame of the match or lighter suggestively under the German's nose.

To the German High Command, this was no longer a joking matter, especially when the
Abwehr
received foolproof confirmation from its agents in England. Needless to say, it was again British Intelligence which supplied the corroboration.

To at least some of the German generals, like Halder, the rumor was a godsend because they could use it as an argument against the whole maneuver. Even those who had thought it practicable now stopped thinking so, seeing the whole venture in a new light, the light of those imaginary flames. Sea Lion's D-Day was again postponed, pending tests.

Several tests were made, two of them on an elaborate scale. One was conducted at Fécamp in Normandy, the other on a
secluded lake near Friedland in East Prussia. The experts had orders to make their tests as realistic as possible and they took the instructions literally. They covered prototype barges with asbestos sheets, filled them with soldiers, then poured oil on the water, ignited it and steered the barges into the pools of burning oil. All on board were burnt to death.

Far from alleviating the rumor, these tests merely added to its plausibility. The experts reported to Hitler that the British could create a wall of fire, completely impenetrable, by pouring oil on the waters of the Channel from specially-constructed fuel planes and by igniting it with incendiary bombs.

The test at Fecamp was still another proof. A few of the dreadfully charred bodies from the test barge drifted out to sea and were washed up along the French coast. The burned bodies provided the final convincing proof.

How decisive the rumor was on the course of Sea Lion is difficult to say, but those who were close to Hitler during those days believe the rumor unnerved him.

At any rate, Sea Lion was postponed from September to October and then indefinitely. Hitler no longer bawled out General Halder when the Chief of Staff told him on December 5 that he considered the execution of the enterprise no longer possible. On January 9, 1941, Hitler ordered his High Command to suspend all preparation for an invasion of England, but to continue to go through the motions as a feint to keep the British jumpy. He was fooling only himself.

But even without Sea Lion, Britain was under savage attack. She was pounded from the air by Goering's enormous
Luftwaffe,
which had begun the Battle of Britain on August 12. On the night of August 24–25, the first bombs fell on central London. Hitler proclaimed in a broadcast, during which his voice broke with hysteria: “The hour will come when one of us two will break, and it will not be National Socialist Germany.” Late in the afternoon of September 7, the all-out Battle of London was joined. It was ushered in with a statement by Goering that it will continue “day and night until the R.A.F. has destroyed
itself in vain attempts to stop us, and until the people's will to resist is broken.”

But Goering, who should have known better, was whistling in the dark. In spite of his stupendous intelligence service, he did not know what the British had and how they were taking it. He looked to Canaris'
Abwehr
and to his own chief of intelligence, Colonel Joseph (Beppo) Schmid, for the knowledge he needed so badly, but all he got from them was double talk they had picked up from the British carillon.

In their ignorance, his generals bickered and made contradictory arrangements for the big battle. Early in September, Hans Sperrle insisted that the R.A.F. still had a thousand fighter planes left. Albrecht Kesselring said they had next to nothing. Beppo Schmid set the “absolute maximum figure” at three hundred and fifty Hurricanes and Spitfires. They were all wrong. In actual fact, the British had six hundred and fifty fighter planes.

Throughout the Battle of Britain, the Germans were fatally handicapped by such faulty intelligence. “It was a battle of chance and force against science and skill,” wrote Chester Wilmot. “There was no shortage of courage on the German part, though their pilots lacked the zest of the British, but their confidence was undermined by the knowledge that in comparison with their opponents they were blind, deaf and dumb.”

The British flooded the Germans with contradictory information, now claiming that things were going badly and morale would break momentarily, then insisting damage was slight and morale was better than ever.

These “blossoms” were scattered throughout the world. A British agent in Washington leaked information to General Boetticher, the German Military Attaché, that London was on the verge of collapse, traffic at a standstill, famine widespread and epidemics rampant. The German Minister in Lisbon reported exactly the opposite, claiming he had received his information from a prominent Portuguese banker who had just returned from London—in fact, another British agent. The German
Military Attaché in Sofia then confirmed Boetticher's information, while his colleague in Rio de Janeiro corroborated the Lisbon envoy's statements.

German intelligence tried to tap the intelligence services of the neutrals. The British anticipated this and enlisted the aid of their diplomatic friends. The Duke of Alba, Spanish Ambassador at the Court of St. James's, played the game as did the Swedish Minister, sending hopelessly contradictory reports to their respective Foreign Ministries whence they expected the Germans to procure them.

The British received additional help from an unexpected source. The Hungarian Military Attaché in London was an ardent Nazi sympathizer and one of the very few dependable sources the Germans still had in England. He opened his own clandestine radio system in the attic of his house on Grosvenor Place, signaling to the Hungarian General Staff first-rate intelligence. A German agent in Budapest funneled the information on to Berlin.

But the Hungarian Military Attaché in Stockholm was as close to the British as was his London colleague to the Nazis. The Stockholm attaché tipped off the British to the illicit radio; the British seized it and continued to operate it.

So much was at stake and so little was known, that on September 17, at the height of the battle, Goering flew to England in person, to survey from the air what his agents failed to report from the ground. He found out precious little.

But Goering thought he had another ace to play. For some months in the late spring of 1940, a funny German word kept cropping up in radio intercepts and captured documents. To British ears it sounded like the bark of a Katzenjammer kid, though in German it connoted a polite ritual. The word was
Knickebein
which is the German for “curtsey,” the colloquial application of “weak-legged” or “weak-kneed.” It was assumed that
Knickebein
had something to do with electronic beams that guided German planes to British targets. These were radio beacons which the Germans had erected in various parts of the
Continent. Using directional radio, the
Luftwaffe's
pilots could obtain the desired fixes by the angles from which any two of these transmissions came.

In due course, the British countered these beacons with a system of electronic interference they named “meacons.” The “meacon” picked up the German signal, amplified it and returned it from a different angle. The results were gratifying. The “meacon” helped to lead the Germans astray. Once a
Luftwaffe
bomber, homing on the doctored British beam, came down in what its pilot confidently thought was France. He had the surprise of his life when he was told he had just landed in Devonshire.

The British did not expect this to last forever and they decided that
Knickebein
must have been the cover name for a network of secret agents the Germans had planted in England to neutralize the “meacon.” Agents of the net, it was thought, were to plant in the various English cities secret beacons on which the Germans could home. The entire British counter-espionage organization was mobilized, and a frantic hunt began for those suspected German spies and their secret beacons. None could be found.

What, then,
was
this
Knickebein
? The question was answered by the forces of what Churchill called “the Wizard War.” “This was a secret war,” he wrote, “whose battles were lost or won unknown to the public, and only with difficulty comprehended, even now, by those outside the small high scientific circles concerned. No such warfare had ever been waged by mortal men. The terms in which it could be recorded or talked about were unintelligible to ordinary folk. Yet if we had not mastered its profound meaning and used its mysteries, even while we saw them only in the glimpse, all the efforts, all the prowess of the fighting airmen, all the bravery and sacrifices of the people, would have been in vain.”

Churchill had prepared for the “Wizard War” in advance. He assigned Professor Frederick Lindemann of Oxford as his scientific adviser and organized, under him, two groups of
scientists: one to promote and stimulate war-essential scientific research at home; the other, to find out as much as possible about similar developments abroad, especially in Germany.