Fighting to Lose (30 page)

Menzies gave the code name BONIFACE to his private offerings to Churchill, the term generally covering the intercepted wireless traffic of the enemy deciphered by the Government Code & Cipher School. In 1941, the choicest decrypts were offered first and foremost to the prime minister, and then passed on to the army, navy, and RAF as appropriate. The American equivalent was MAGIC, the code name for deciphered Japanese diplomatic traffic that was broken as a shared task of the U.S. Army’s Signals Intelligence Service (SIS) and the U.S. Navy’s Combat Communications Section (Op-20-G), both agencies headquartered in Washington, D.C. MAGIC decrypts had an exclusive clientele: the president, the secretaries of state, war, and navy, the army and navy chiefs, and senior service heads and field commanders.

Both BONIFACE and MAGIC covered two superb cryptological accomplishments: the breaking of the Enigma machine ciphers of the German air force (Luftwaffe) by the British and the breaking of the Purple machine cipher of the Japanese by the Americans. The terms also covered decrypts of hand-enciphered messages and codes — Abwehr, German police, and SS wireless traffic with the British; and, with the Americans, the LA, J, PA, and similar diplomatic codes and ciphers of the Japanese. It was the importance of a message, not just the type of encipherment, that determined whether it made the MAGIC or BONIFACE folders.10

Menzies’s daily submissions to Churchill could also come from his other sources, including anything MI5’s double agents picked up while under MI6’s jurisdiction because travelling abroad. If especially valuable, Menzies could withhold such items from MI5 until seen by Churchill. This explains how it happened that when Walter Dicketts was tipped off to the impending German invasion of Russia in June, Churchill got that news first, and everyone else, including MI5, a day or so later. This also appears to have occurred with Popov and the questionnaire about Pearl Harbor.11

Before leaving for the United States, Popov secretly met with Ralph Jarvis, his MI6(V) contact in Lisbon, and showed him his microdots plus typed copies of the questions that were on them in both English and German. MI6(V) in London was notified — that is to say, Felix Cowgill — and the reply came back that he should carry on with his mission and give the information to the Americans when he got to New York. Popov left on August 10.12

The paper copies of the questionnaire were flown to London immediately, arriving by August 7 at the latest. As the questions indicated German collaboration with Japan at the highest level, the English-language version would have been brought to Menzies’s attention immediately, and he would have promptly sent it on to Churchill.13 What makes this simple deduction of great significance is that Churchill was then on the high seas, aboard the battleship
Prince of Wales
, on his way to meet personally with President Roosevelt.14

It was a secret rendezvous, urgently arranged. On July 15, or a day or so after, a twenty-nine-year-old Spaniard had called at the British embassy in Lisbon claiming to be a spy for the Germans who wanted to change sides. His name was Juan Pujol Garcia (later GARBO), and as proof of his mission he produced several “miniature” photographs containing a list of questions the Germans wanted him to try to get answered:

• Does England expect aggression from Japan against British or Dutch possessions in the Far East in the course of 1941?
  
• What is to be the final objective of such aggression, Hong Kong, Singapore, India, the Dutch East Indies, or Australia?
  
• What possibilities are considered to defend Hong Kong?
  
• In what direction is an attack expected in case of war with Japan? Against Singapore, Siam, or the Dutch East Indies?
  
• How does England expect to resist Japanese aggression? What help is expected from the U.S.A. in case of war with Japan?
  
• Is England in the condition to dispose of and make available naval forces and arms for use in the Far East?15
  

The implication was grave. It looked like the Germans had been asked by the Japanese to gauge Britain’s attitude toward the possibility of Japan attacking British and Dutch colonies in the Far East, rather than going after the Soviets.

It appeared to confirm earlier intelligence. On May 22, a MAGIC decrypt had provided Roosevelt with “proof positive” that Japan was planning the conquest of Southeast Asia and the southwest Pacific. Then, on July 24, another decrypt revealed that Japan had ordered its merchant shipping to withdraw from the Indian Ocean and the southwest Pacific. Such action is a classic prelude to armed conflict on the high seas. The Japanese also had recently obtained permission from Vichy France to set up air bases in French Indochina, giving them control of the sky over Malaya and Singapore. Evidently, Japan was poised to attack Britain in the Far East. Churchill and Roosevelt talked on the transatlantic scrambler telephone that very evening and agreed they had to meet face-to-face.16

They had something else on their minds that needed urgent discussion, as well. British scientists had just concluded that a super-bomb based on the heavy element uranium was theoretically possible. This was ominous news, as German scientists had led the world in nuclear physics before the war.17

Two weeks later, the White House pretended to the Washington press that Roosevelt was leaving on a yachting holiday, but once over the horizon he boarded the battle cruiser USS
Augusta
to sail for Argentia, the newly constructed U.S. Navy air base overlooking Placentia Bay, Newfoundland. There, on August 9, the two ships and the two leaders met, accompanied by some of their most senior army, navy, and air force chiefs.

Over seventy years later, most contemporary documents that could describe the content of their talks remain under lock and key. Records of their discussions and many of those involving their military staffs, all of which must exist, have never been released. Even Roosevelt’s personal account of the meeting has been scissored in half, his description of his four days with Churchill left behind in the vault at the Roosevelt Library.18 By design, surely, rather than accident, the meeting is known to historians mainly by the press release at its conclusion announcing that the two leaders were resolved that their two countries would respect the right of peoples of all nations to self-determination. This became known as the Atlantic Charter.

More important to Churchill, they also publicly pledged that they were jointly committed to “the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny.” This last statement was a stunning victory for the British. It went far beyond anything Roosevelt had so far said about the Nazi regime, and it flew in the face of the virulent anti-war opposition in Congress. Churchill must have done something fairly dramatic to achieve such a result.19

The prime minister, so it appears, had played two trump cards. First, wireless messages recently deciphered by the Government Code & Cipher School indicated that the Nazis in Russia were systematically killing innocent civilians by the thousands.20 Second, he was able to produce a spy questionnaire that showed the Germans were gathering intelligence on the defences of Pearl Harbor, obviously for the Japanese.

Churchill, it should be explained, never allowed himself to be cut off from his daily cocktail of secret intelligence. Before he left on the sea voyage, arrangements were made for him to continue to receive the day’s most important German armed forces “telegrams” and “BJs” — “British Japanese” diplomatic decrypts — as selected by Major Morton, Churchill’s personal assistant. BONIFACE was dealt with by Menzies, and the hottest items after Churchill sailed on August 4 must have been the decrypts detailing Nazi atrocities in Russia and the novelty of a double agent being given a whole series of microscopic photographs containing questions about the defences of Hawaii. Copies of the decrypts and a copy of the questionnaire would certainly have been among the deliveries of secret papers air-dropped to the
Prince of Wales
every day by weighted bag.21

Menzies, of course, could have had the contents of the decrypts and Popov’s questionnaire radioed to the
Prince of Wales
, but hard copies with German fingerprints all over them, so to speak, would have been more desirable for the show-and-tell to follow.

Churchill had a flair for the dramatic and, given that no official record has ever been released of these talks with Roosevelt, one can only imagine how he might have made his presentation.

The two leaders normally conferred in the wardroom of the
Augusta
. Churchill would have asked that the room be cleared because he had something of utmost importance to share with the president. Because what he had to say pertained to cryptographic intelligence and to the security of the United States, it is probable that the chiefs of the army and the navy, General George C. Marshall and Admiral Harold R. Stark respectively, would have been asked to remain. It is unlikely there was anyone else present, not even a secretary to take down the conversation.

Churchill would have begun by saying that for some time now the British had been intercepting and decrypting the enciphered wireless messages of German police and SS special forces, which, up to the German attack on Russia in June, had been of small value. Starting in mid-July, however, these messages revealed that the Nazis were carrying out mass executions in the east. As proof, he would have been able to show a July 18 decrypt reporting the execution of 1,153 Jewish “plunderers” in Belorussia, and two others, of August 4, from the SS cavalry brigade reporting the liquidation of some 3,274 partisans and
“judische Bolshevisten”
and another
“90 Bolshevisten und Juden”
shot. Since British claims of German atrocities in Belgium during the First World War had been afterward found to have been pure propaganda, Churchill would have made sure he had on hand the actual decrypts to convince his listeners.22

The impact of this information on Roosevelt would have been considerable. The Nazis had certainly demonstrated that they would resort to murder to achieve their political ends, but this was vastly worse. Hitler had said in his book,
Mein Kampf
, that the Germans needed
lebensraum
— “living space” — in the east. Here was proof that he intended to get it, not just by conquest, but by exterminating unwanted elements of the population. To make his point, Churchill probably used rhetoric similar to what he used in an international radio broadcast he gave when back in Britain two weeks later:

As his armies advance, whole districts are being exterminated. Scores of thousands — literally scores of thousands — of executions in cold blood are being perpetrated by German police troops upon the Russian patriots who defend their native soil. Since the Mongol invasions of Europe in the sixteenth century there has never been methodical, merciless butchery on such a scale, or approaching such a scale…. We are in the presence of a crime without a name.23

By this time the tally in the decrypts was well over ten thousand.

Roosevelt would have been especially sensitive to Churchill’s report on the killings. Images of the Japanese army’s massacre of thousands of Chinese civilians during the “Rape of Nanking” would have still been vivid in his mind. During his previous term, he had repeatedly warned of a growing danger from Japan and was vindicated when the Japanese seized the Chinese capital in late 1937 and went on a six-week killing spree before the eyes, and cameras, of the resident European community. The photographs and reports were horrific. He would have pictured similar scenes enacted in Russia.24

Of all the American presidents, Roosevelt must be rated as one of the most compassionate. He had introduced an array of socialist reforms in the early 1930s in his New Deal program to rescue Americans from the effects of the Great Depression. These included the pioneering Social Security Act, which introduced unemployment and old age benefits for the first time, but his concern for his fellow human beings was not isolationist. In his State of the Union address for 1941, he had passionately expounded to Congress his belief that all mankind was entitled to four basic freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. This is the kind of person who six months later was receiving Churchill’s news of Nazi atrocities.

As Roosevelt listened, the prospect of Nazi murderers getting hold of a weapon of unimaginable power may also have figured in his thoughts. Since 1939, after he received a warning letter from the renowned physicist Albert Einstein, Roosevelt had been actively supporting American research aimed at determining whether a super-bomb based on nuclear fission was possible. British scientists now said they believed it was. Even though the prospect was still only theoretical, both leaders must have shuddered at the thought of Hitler getting his hands on such a weapon.25

The reason for the meeting, however, was Japan. Undersecretary of State Sumner Wells left one of the few eyewitness accounts of their discussions, a session in which the central theme was the certainty that the Japanese intended soon to seize Britain’s Far East possessions. Churchill vigorously sought some guarantee from Roosevelt that this would prompt U.S. intervention. At another session, when neither Wells nor perhaps anyone else was present, Roosevelt probably reminded him that neither Congress nor America at large could be expected to back a declaration of war against Japan to save Britain’s empire. It would have been then, perhaps, that Churchill produced a carbon copy of the English-language portion of Popov’s Pearl Harbor questionnaire — the German section having been retained in London. It would have been on “onion-skin,” a very thin, semi-transparent type of paper used for multiple carbon copies in the days of the typewriter.26 One can picture it hanging limp, tissue-like, in Roosevelt’s hands. Churchill would have watched as he read, the president’s expression fading from polite interest to grim realization as he absorbed what it was that the Germans wanted.

HAWAII