Fighting to Lose (49 page)

Hoover died of a heart attack on May 2, 1972. His parting gift to the nation was yielding to whatever damage to his reputation was going to incur because of the Popov questionnaire. It was considerable, mean, and went on for years. He must have given very firm instructions, for the FBI made only token efforts to defend him while holding on to the documents that would have cleared his name. However, the fire lit by Masterman never reached the Oval Office.

Hoover would have been content with that.

The Historical Context

Throughout much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Britain and France were the traditional European rivals, going to war against each other over their lucrative colonies in the Americas and Africa and over which of the two would emerge as the dominate power in Western Europe. The German-speaking people of central Europe, though numerous, remained on the sidelines, for they were broken up among a number of smaller countries, the largest being Prussia in the north and Austria in the south, the former taking in much of what is now Poland and the latter some of what is now the Balkans.

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, and led by an inspired Prussian politician, Otto von Bismarck, these various German-speaking fragments moved together to form two large federations, by 1871 becoming Austria in the south and the new Germany in the north. Germany was the more powerful by virtue of Prussia’s military traditions and because some of the smaller states it absorbed were long-established centres of industry and commerce. Britain and France were suddenly faced with a new and very competent rival in the competition for colonies, world trade, and overseas resources. An armed clash between the British and French empires and upstart Germany became inevitable.

Whatever the immediate causes of the First World War (1914–18), the larger general cause was the perceived need by Britain and France to blunt Germany’s aspirations, both on the Continent and worldwide. It was a war of economic rivalry, pure and simple, and Britain and France achieved their core war aims when the defeated Germany was deprived of its colonies, subjected to reparations that crippled its economy, and saw the territories it occupied with Austria in Eastern Europe returned to the native peoples. An independent Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia were thus created.

All this, combined with an economy deeply wounded by the worldwide Great Depression, made the German people easy prey when a fringe political party in the early 1930s promised to restore the economy and regain some of Germany’s territorial losses. Hitler had much public support when he moved at the end of the decade to annex part of Czechoslovakia and conquer Poland.

The new Germany that emerged after 1871 had been quick to embrace new technology. The American Civil War (1861–64) had demonstrated that railways were a hugely effective way to move large armies, and the rifled musket made the Napoleonic tactic of two lines of stand-up soldiers firing at one another mutual suicide. During the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), the Germans surprised the weary French foot soldiers by arriving for battle by rail, hence well-rested, and by being faster to adapt to the tactics required by the new breech-loading rifles that allowed a man to fire while lying prone.

Forty years later, during the First World War, British and Russian generals demonstrated how little attention they had been paying to these and other advances in weaponry by sending thousands of soldiers directly into the muzzles of German bolt-action rifles and machine guns. They were cut down in swaths, and as the officers were 90 percent derived from the upper classes, this shook the confidence of the people in those they had always assumed to be their betters. In Russia, this led directly to the 1917 Revolution, which saw the execution of the czar, the purging of the aristocracy, and the creation of the first totally socialist state.

To grasp why the new “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” was so successful in persuading some Britons to turn traitor and become communist spies, one must appreciate the impact on men’s minds of the dreadful slaughters that took place during the First World War.

On July 1, 1916, on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the British took 57,000 casualties because the British commander, General Sir Douglas Haig, could think of no better tactics than those of Napoleon’s a century earlier. Men were called upon to walk toward the German lines until close enough to run in with bayonets fixed. Barbed wire and bullets made short work of them — the final figures for the day being 19,240 dead, 35,493 wounded, and 2,737 missing. (By comparison, on June 6, 1944, when the Allies landed in Normandy, the casualties on Omaha Beach were about two thousand; on Utah about 190, and on the British and Canadian beaches a little less than three thousand. Total for the day, about five thousand.) The final British tally for the whole Battle of the Somme, which lasted by piecemeal attacks until November, was about 419,000, with ninety-five thousand dead, all for a gain of about seven miles on a front of sixteen. These same suicide tactics were repeated time and again throughout the war.

Because Britain organized its field formations according to the villages, towns, and regions the soldiers came from, when an attack went in on a particular day, whole communities or entire villages could lose all or most of their young men all at once. The shock and grief was profound, exacerbated when word trickled through official censorship that battlefield progress was being paid for at the rate of thousands of lives to the mile.

Up until 1914, most European countries were monarchies governed by a ruling class made up mainly of people of inherited privilege. Great Britain, Germany, and Russia were all of this type: king, kaiser, and czar ruling through government leaders either chosen by popular election, heredity, or directly by the monarch. In Britain’s case it was a combination of all three: the members of Parliament being elected and the members of the House of Lords and the king’s Privy Council there by right of birth and appointment. All three categories, including most MPs, were derived predominantly from the so-called upper class, identified by ancestry, accent, and private boarding school as a child, usually leading to university or military college. According to Nazi calculations at the time, this group comprised about 1 percent of Britain’s population but occupied about 80 percent of the positions of power and influence.1

The massacres of the First World War, and then the Russian Revolution, caused Britons at every level of society, including some in the upper class, to question the social order they had so long taken for granted. The people had responded to the war cry in 1914 with an outpouring of patriotism. By the end of 1916 it had all gone sour. There was ugly unrest in the factories, then strikes. The execution of Czar Nicholas II and his family in 1918 and the harrying of the Russian aristocrats was an ugly omen of what could happen in England. Then the war ended. Germany, faced with mutiny at home, asked for an end to the fighting. There is no doubt that the “upper class” in Britain breathed a collective sigh of relief. The disillusionment, however, had sunk deep roots.

As good an illustration as any of how sweeping the change of mood was as the First World War came to a close was the fact that the British police, one of the most conservative of institutions, went on strike in 1918 and 1919. Chronic labour unrest became the order of the day, culminating in the General Strike of 1925. The political establishment saw the red hand of the Russian revolutionaries — the Bolsheviks — in it all, and continued to do so through the 1920s and ’30s, and into the first years of the Second World War.

Even though espionage goes back to the ancient Romans and was much practised by the kings and city states of the Renaissance, Britain cruised through most of the nineteenth century without feeling the need for a permanent secret intelligence organization. That changed with the emergence of Germany as a rival. In 1909, the Secret Service Bureau was established.

It was a tiny operation, initially manned by only two officers, fifty-year-old Commander Mansfield Cumming from the navy and thirty-six-year-old Captain Vernon Kell from the army. They soon divided the principal tasks between them: Cumming would look after foreign intelligence-gathering by covert means — spying — and Kell would handle counter-espionage. They had no resources to speak of, little money, and only a handful of staff up to the beginning of the First World War. The whole enterprise might have fizzled except for the remarkable intervention of one man who was later to become Britain’s most famous politician: Winston Churchill.

Churchill was born into Britain’s ruling class in 1874 — an aristocrat of aristocrats — the son of Lord Randolph Churchill, descendent of the dukes of Marlborough. His birthplace was Blenheim Palace, the largest privately owned family home in Britain. He was public-school educated in the usual way for the English nobility (Harrow), and had the usual choices for career: church, state, or military. He chose the military and served for a time in the British army in the Sudan. This got him started as a newspaper war correspondent covering action in the Sudan, India, and in South Africa.

Churchill turned his adventures into books that gained him attention enough to win a seat for the Conservatives in the House of Commons in the election of 1900. Four years later, he switched to the Liberal party and, when it came to power in 1904, he was rewarded with a succession of Cabinet posts. In 1910, when only thirty-six, he became Home Secretary, and in that capacity, in that same year, he gave the Secret Service Bureau sweeping power to covertly open the mails.

It was a major milestone in the history of the secret services in modern times. Hitherto, private letters had been considered inviolate, as were the valises and bags of diplomats entering and leaving a country. It was still an age where gentlemen and nations were expected to stand by their word, and not stoop to low tricks. Churchill injected cynicism into the collection of intelligence, and Germany did not catch on — or catch up — until well into the First World War.

To be sure, it was a simpler time, when most ordinary people of all classes still went to church regularly and assumed that others, including a nation’s potential enemies, did likewise, and subscribed to the same Christian principles, even when at war.

The technological advance that was to have probably the greatest consequence to the nature of war in the twentieth century was the development by 1900 of wireless communication — radio. After the first transatlantic wireless message was successfully received that year, wireless quickly caught on for ship-to-shore contact and as an alternative to undersea telegraph cables. By the First World War, wireless was in general use by navies and by the foreign services of countries wanting to keep in close touch with distant outposts.

In these early years, the most convenient way to transmit messages was by tapping them out in Morse code, the system of dots and dashes representing the letters of the alphabet that occurs by switching an electrical circuit on and off in short and long pulses, specific combinations representing specific letters. An ordinary wall switch, or a flashlight, can be used to send messages in Morse, but for the wireless the on/off switch was the telegraph key, a small spring-loaded device like a paper stapler that could be operated up and down with one finger. The person transmitting was called a telegraph operator.