Intelligence in War: The Value--And Limitations--Of What the Military Can Learn About the Enemy (41 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

Human Intelligence and Secret Weapons

T
HE SECRET AGENT
dominates popular conceptions of the intelligence world, how it works and what it yields. The image of the agent is strongly imprinted on the imagination of anyone who in childhood played the war game
l’Attaque
—a sinister civilian figure parting the grasses to spy on brightly uniformed soldiers honourably and conspicuously engaged in combat—and that image has been reinforced for over a century by the work of successful fiction writers. Joseph Conrad made the agent an enemy of society, Conan Doyle, in “The Bruce-Partington Plans,” a venal creature working for money; but most writers in English represented the agent as romantic and patriotic: Kipling’s Kim a servant of empire in the Great Game, John Buchan’s Richard Hannay bursting with Britishness in pursuit of his country’s enemies, Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond to whom all foreigners were objects of suspicion. Later writers, John le Carré foremost, refined the image, admitting the dubiety of the agent’s role and introducing the idea of the double agent, all too understandably in view of what the public then knew of treason among Britain’s university-educated class.

The idea nevertheless persisted that “intelligence” was principally the “product”—a term popularised by le Carré—of spying. The idea survived the disclosure of the Enigma secret, which revealed that the most valuable intelligence produced by the British intelligence services during the Second World War was derived from the interception and decryption of enciphered enemy signals. That was equally true of British intelligence successes during the First World War and of the American intelligence effort in 1942–45. British and American fiction readers were by then too enamoured of the idea of the “agent in place,” however, to alter their view of the essential nature of the craft. The spy, not the eavesdropper, was established in the popular imagination as the principal source of knowledge of the enemy and his evil intentions.

The popular imagination entirely overlooked the limitations within which real agents laboured. The danger of betrayal was recognised, and that of identification by enemy counter-espionage. What was discounted was the much more oppressive burden of practicality: how to discover anything worth knowing; how, even more critically, to communicate such knowledge to the home base. Memoirs by agents of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), Britain’s subversive organisation inside German-occupied Europe in 1940–45, and of OSS, the contemporary American Office of Strategic Services, reveal a picture quite at variance with that of the glamour and romance depicted by writers of fiction. SOE and OSS operatives dealt in tiny scraps of information, often of apparently trivial importance—gossip picked up in cafés, numbers of freight cars seen crossing a bridge, shoulder straps of soldiers glimpsed changing station. Such scraps, when collated, had to be recorded in comprehensible form and then sent by radio transmitter, whose operators always knew that they risked being overheard by enemy interceptors with location devices and so of being intercepted and arrested in mid-transmission.

There was little that was romantic about spying in Hitler’s Europe. The business was furtive, nail-biting and burdened by the suspicion of betrayal. Many agents were betrayed. The German counter-espionage service was extremely efficient at identifying networks, breaking their members and inducing those arrested to inform against their fellow conspirators. Women proved better than men at keeping out of German clutches, because of their superior ability to remain inconspicuous and to deflect difficult questions. Many women nevertheless fell victim to the Gestapo. Men in the networks were arrested in large numbers. Their fate, that of women and men alike, was despatch to Hitler’s camps.

GERMAN SECRET WEAPONS

There were gaps, nevertheless, in the Gestapo system, particularly in its ability to protect the German secret weapons programme. Because the testing of Germany’s pilotless weapons, later to be known to the British as the V-1 and V-2, necessitated test flights over areas populated by non-Germans in the Baltic and Poland, and because Germany’s acute shortage of labour forced the organisers of the secret weapons programme to employ non-German labour in work, particularly construction work, at the secret weapon sites, information leaked out. Over time, eyewitness reports, transmitted through networks run particularly by Poles, would yield considerable amounts of information about German secret weapon development. It was not, however, information for which the British were particularly looking at the outset. Under threat of invasion after June 1940 and heavy air attack after September, they were more concerned about the dangers of the here and now rather than those that might lie in the future.

As early as February 1939, however, seven months before the outbreak of war, the Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence, chaired by the distinguished scientist Sir Henry Tizard, had decided to form an intelligence section and a young physicist, Dr. R. V. Jones, had been appointed to lead it. He was first directed to collect information about bacterial and chemical weapons, then believed to be a serious menace. In October his attention was diverted elsewhere, if only briefly. A report was received of an experimental station, located on the Baltic coast between Danzig and Königsberg in East Prussia, where the Germans were testing a “rocket shell” carrying 320 pounds of Ekracite explosive over ranges up to 300 miles.
¹
The source lay in gossip and might therefore have been discounted, along with much other rumour about fantasy devices. On 4 November, however, another report arrived on Dr. Jones’ desk, sent by the British naval attaché in Oslo, the capital of Norway.

About 2,000 words in length, “the Oslo Report,” as it became known, was not rumour but a detailed communication, obviously written by a practising scientist, describing nine weapons or weapon systems under development in Germany. Some were conventional—a new bomber, an aircraft carrier—some were not; the report also identified sites at which the new weapons were being tested. Among the unconventional weapons mentioned were a remote-controlled anti-ship glider bomb, a pilotless aircraft, “remote-controlled shells” propelled by rocket, acoustic torpedoes and an anti-aircraft proximity fuse. One of the two test sites named was at Peenemünde on the Baltic coast.
²

The origin of the Oslo Report was mysterious and remained so for many years. Recently, however, it has been suggested—the suggestion has not been universally accepted—that the author was a German scientist, Hans Friederich Meyer, director of research at the great German electrical company Siemens.
³
Meyer, who opposed Hitler’s racial policies, had a British friend, Cobden Turner, of the British General Electric Company. Much troubled by the treatment of a half-Jewish child whose mother he knew, Meyer told Turner of the case and Turner, equally troubled, managed to obtain a visa for the girl to leave Germany for England from the head of the MI6 station at the British embassy in Berlin, Frank Foley, just before war broke out. Foley was then posted to Oslo but Turner induced Meyer, as a token of gratitude for the grant of the visa, to write what we now know as the Oslo Report. Meyer typed it up on a visit to Oslo on official business on 1–2 November 1939 and it reached R.V. Jones, without attribution, two days later.

Though Jones was astounded by the Oslo Report—he described it later as “the most amazing statement I have ever seen”—it was allowed, because it was unsubstantiated and not amplified, to lie on the file. British intelligence had other matters on its mind during 1940–42; in the scientific field particularly German advances in aerial radio navigation, radar, tank technology and underwater warfare.

Jones was nevertheless right to recognise that the Oslo Report was pregnant with warning. In one form or another, however vague, it gave advance notice of at least four weapons that were to do the Allies great harm before the war was out: in ascending order of importance, the anti-ship glider bomb (the HS293), the acoustic torpedo (
Zaunkönig
), the rocket-propelled shell, eventually to be realised as the A-4 projectile—V-2 to the British and father to all ballistic missiles—and the FZG-76, or flying-bomb, father of the modern cruise missile. While the Oslo Report slept on a British shelf in 1940–42, German scientists were busy bringing to production stage the weapons of which it warned.

British—and then American—efforts spurred them on. Had RAF Bomber Command, joined in the strategic bombing offensive by the American Eighth Air Force during 1942, not succeeded in that year in breaking through the Reich’s air defences and beginning the destruction of Germany’s major cities, it is possible that Hitler would not have chosen to allocate the resources necessary to make “weapons of reprisal,” as he came to call them, the agents of destruction of the cities of his enemies, particularly London but also Antwerp in Belgium, that they became in 1944–45. Allied bombing not only wrought terrible devastation on German homes and factories, and on Germany’s cultural heritage, and terrible disruption as well as termination of ordinary Germans’ everyday lives; it also directly attacked Hitler’s and his Nazi party’s claim to be the protectors of the German people. While bombs rained down on Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne and his state’s other centres of population, unanswered after the defeat of the Luftwaffe as a means of attack against Britain in 1941, Hitler began to burn with the urge to pay back. Göring’s conventional bombers had failed him. During 1943 he turned to the promise of unconventional weapons to repay the hurt.

The British scientific intelligence service’s attention was first drawn back to German secret weapons at the end of 1942, when a report reached London, from a Danish chemical engineer, of a conversation overheard in a Berlin restaurant about a rocket fired from Swinemünde—not far from the Oslo Report’s Peenemünde—which was said to carry five tons of explosives over 130 miles. In February 1943 a second report, from another source, gave different capabilities to the rocket but specified that it was launched from Peenemünde.
⁴

Germany has little sea coast. West of the Danish peninsula, its seaboard runs inside the Friesian islands, forming a region that provided Erskine Childers with the setting for the first serious novel of espionage,
The Riddle of the Sands
, written just before the First World War and warning the British of the Kaiser’s hostile intentions against their coasts. East of the Danish peninsula, inside the Baltic, lie Germany’s historic mercantile ports but also the summer holiday places of its leisured class—small fishing villages amid fir-lined dunes and white beaches. It was the holiday connection that brought Germany’s secret weapons programme to the Baltic. The family of Wernher von Braun, the leading young rocket designer, had spent summers there, and when a testing site was being sought, his mother suggested that remote and sparsely populated spot.
⁵
Work began on the site in 1936, and by 1943, when the British began to take an increasingly close interest, the establishment had grown considerably. It consisted of two locations, Peenemünde West, under the control of the Luftwaffe, where the flying bombs were under development; and Peenemünde East, the army base where the V-2 rocket, known to the Germans as the A-4, was tested. An airfield had been built, a camp for the labour force—largely non-German—laboratories, workshops, a plant for producing liquid oxygen, an essential ingredient of the V-2’s fuel which was in short supply, and a housing estate for the scientific staff.

Peter Wegener, a young scientist who had been recalled from an anti-aircraft unit on the Eastern Front to work at Peenemünde, has left a revealing picture of life there. In some ways it mirrored that of Bletchley Park. The rocket scientists were young, highly educated, often from the upper middle class. Wegener was a boarding-school product from a professional family. Von Braun was from a similar background, as was, notably, Albert Speer, who, in 1943, had risen from the position of Hitler’s personal architect to be Reich armaments minister and so directly responsible for V-1 and V-2 production. Von Braun and Speer were handsome and charming young men of wide interests and considerable social assurance. Wegener was formed in the same mould. After three years in the army, only latterly as an officer, he found the transfer to the university-like surroundings of Peenemünde, among people of his own sort, men and women with doctoral degrees and civilised manners, a delightful liberation. “I never heard a harsh word: everyone helped everyone else, and good humour reigned”; little attention was paid to rank; “in fact, it was a pleasure to work in this place.”
⁶
The description might apply to Bletchley. There was this difference. At Bletchley, despite the common-room atmosphere, the in-jokes, the amateur dramatics and the undercurrent of romance, the strictest rules of security applied. No one ever spoke about his or her work outside the immediate workplace; instant removal was the penalty. At Peenemünde, by contrast, “need to know” was not a principle. “Practically all discussions in larger groups—in the mess hall and other public places—concerned technical problems. Everybody spoke freely of his work; internal security simply did not exist.
Fachsimplen,
or shop talk, squeezed out all other discussions.”