Intelligence in War: The Value--And Limitations--Of What the Military Can Learn About the Enemy (57 page)

41. D. Irving,
The Virus House,
London, 1967, passim.

EPILOGUE: MILITARY INTELLIGENCE SINCE 1945

1. N. West,
The Secret War for the Falklands,
London, 1997, pp. 20, 37–38.

2. A. Finlan, “British Special Forces and the Falklands Conflict,” in
Defence and Security Analysis,
December 2002, pp. 319, 332.

3. West, p. 144.

4. Ibid., pp. 145–47.

5. Finlan, p. 826.

6. M. Hastings and S. Jenkins,
The Battle for the Falklands,
London, 1983, p. 316.

CONCLUSION: THE VALUE OF MILITARY INTELLIGENCE

1. The Ultra secret was first revealed, in a book of that title written by F. W. Winterbotham, in 1974. Winterbotham, a regular air force officer, had been head of the air section of MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS) and moved to Bletchley in 1939. The reason he was given permission to publish the book—which contains serious inaccuracies—is that there were official British fears of the story coming out anyhow; articles were appearing in Poland, which initiated the attack on Enigma before 1939, describing the Polish success; it was suspected that disclosures about Bletchley would shortly follow.

2. Reinhard Gehlen achieved fame as head of Foreign Armies East, branch 12 of the German General Staff, which collected intelligence about the Red Army. Since Hitler, however, disliked inconvenient facts, and Gehlen failed to insist on his accepting them, he cannot be reckoned a great intelligence officer, though he was a very efficient one. After 1945 the “Gehlen organisation” was adopted by the Americans as a source of Cold War intelligence. It later evolved into West Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the
Bundersnachrichtendienst.

Bacler d’Albe achieved fame as intelligence officer to Napoleon, but Bonaparte, like Wellington, usually acted as his own intelligence officer. He travelled with a compact filing-cabinet of essential information, cleverly constructed to display a summary of the contents on the doors of each of its compartments. For Gehlen, see D. Kahn,
Hitler’s Spies,
New York, 1978.

3. See A. Boyle,
The Climate of Treason, Five Who Spied for Russia,
London, 1979. Now somewhat outdated factually, it continues to provide the best description of the university traitors’ disposition.

4. See J. Lunt,
Imperial Sunset, Frontier Soldiering in the 20th Century,
London, 1981, for such exotic forces as the Iraq Levies, the Hadrami Bedouin Legion and the Somaliland Scouts. Histories of the Indian army are many but an interesting modern one is by General S. Menezes,
Fidelity and Honour,
New Delhi 1993. General Menezes served in the Indian Army both before and after independence.

5. See A. Clayton,
France, Soldiers and Africa,
London, 1988.

6. See M. Binney,
The Women Who Lived for Danger,
London, 2002.

7. See J. Horne and A. Kramer,
German Atrocities 1914,
New Haven and London, 2001, Appendix 1.

8. See R., Kipling,
The Complete Stalky & Co,
London, 1929. “ ‘The surprises will begin when there is a really big row on . . . Just imagine Stalky let loose on the south side of Europe with a sufficiency of Sikhs and a reasonable prospect of loot.’ “ Stalky was modelled on Kipling’s schoolfellow Dunsterville, who as a First World War general led a sensational intervention into the Caucasus. See Horne and Kramer, Appendix 1.

9. D. Kahn,
Seizing the Enigma,
London, 1991, p. 91.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sources for the case studies which form the substance of this book will be found in the chapter notes. This bibliography includes some of the more general works on intelligence which the author has found of particular value and in which he has confidence. It does not include many books often cited in bibliographies of “intelligence” which are too often sensationalist or mere compendia of intelligence gossip or speculation. It excludes most biographies and autobiographies of intelligence agents or their controllers, which are rarely reliable.

Beesly, Patrick.
Very Special Intelligence: The Story of the Admiralty’s Operational Intelligence Centre 1939–45.
London, 1977. The author worked in the OIC during the Second World War and this scholarly and reliable book conveys a valuable picture of its methods and achievements. It does not cover operations in the Mediterranean or Pacific.

Bennett, Ralph.
Ultra in the West: The Normandy Campaign, 1944–5.
London, 1979; and
Ultra and Mediterranean Strategy.
London, 1989. The author, a young Cambridge history graduate, worked at Bletchley in Hut 3, which interpreted deciphered German army and air force intercepts, from February 1941 until the end of the war. He sets out to demonstrate in detail how the intercepts influenced the conduct of operations, a daunting task in which he largely succeeds. His book is one of the most original and valuable on “the Ultra secret.” After the war he returned to Cambridge where he eventually became President of Magdalene College.

Boyle, Andrew.
The Climate of Treason: Five Who Spied For Russia.
London, 1979. A professional writer rather than historian, Boyle deserves attention because of his exceptional ability to portray individual character and social atmosphere. His portrait of the “Cambridge spies,” Burgess, McClean and Philby particularly, are highly convincing, as is his evocation of the ethos of their public and private lives. Though now a little dated, and inaccurate in places,
The Climate of Treason
is indispensable to anyone seeking to understand the attraction of Soviet Communism to the university-educated in Britain before and after the Second World War.

Calvocoressi, Peter.
Top Secret Ultra.
London, 1980. Calvocoressi, a member of the long-established Greek community in Britain, educated at Eton and Oxford, spent 1940–45 as a Royal Air Force officer at Bletchley. His memoir is especially valuable for the picture it provides of how Bletchley worked day-to-day.

Chapman, Guy.
The Dreyfus Trials.
New York, 1972. A meticulous study, by a professional historian, of the most notorious intelligence scandal of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The long drawn-out investigation of a suspected traitor remains an object lesson in how not to conduct counter-espionage proceedings. Professor Chapman was a historian of France rather than of the intelligence world but his work is of great value to intelligence organisations everywhere.

Clark, Ronald.
The Man Who Broke Purple: The Life of the World’s Greatest Cryptologist Colonel William F. Friedman.
London, 1977. Friedman has been called by David Kahn, himself the leading historian of intelligence, “the world’s greatest cryptologist.” Certainly his achievement in breaking the Japanese machine cipher, called PURPLE by the Americans, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, was one of the greatest cryptanalytic feats of all time. Friedman suffered a severe nervous breakdown in the aftermath but recovered sufficiently to become chief technical consultant to the National Security Agency, the principal code and cipher service of the United States.

Clayton, Aileen.
The Enemy Is Listening.
London, 1980. Clayton, a Women’s Auxiliary Air Force officer, worked during the Second World War in the Middle Eastern Y Service, the organisation that intercepted and interpreted “low level” transmissions on the battlefield. Y is a neglected subject, despite its great importance, and her book is one of the few studies of it.

Cruickshank, Charles.
SOE in the Far East.
Oxford, 1983; and
SOE in Scandinavia.
Oxford, 1986. Special Operations Executive (SOE) was the subversive organisation set up by Winston Churchill in July 1940 to “set Europe ablaze.” Branches were later formed in Scandinavia and the Far East, their work being described by the author in these semi-official histories.

Davidson, Basil.
Special Operations Europe: Scenes From the Anti-Nazi War.
London, 1980. Davidson served as an officer in the SOE both in its Mediterranean headquarters in Cairo and in the field in Hungary, Italy and Yugoslavia. He had strong left-wing views and was instrumental in transferring support from the royalist Cetniks in German-occupied Yugoslavia to Tito’s Communist partisans. His account illuminates how easily the fostering of short-term “subversion” leads to the fomentation of civil war and atrocity, with deplorable long-term results.

Deakin, F. W.
The Embattled Mountain.
London, 1971. Deakin, later Sir William, and Warden of St. Antony’s College Oxford, was a liaison officer for the SOE with Tito’s partisans. His celebrated book is both a wonderful adventure story, in the T. E. Lawrence tradition, and a chilling account of Communist ruthlessness in widening internal conflict for post-war political advantage.

Deakin, F. W. and Richard Storry.
The Case of Richard Sorge.
New York, 1966. Richard Storry, a Fellow of St. Antony’s during Deakin’s wardenship, was a historian of Japan and a wartime Japanese-language intelligence officer in the Far East. Their study of the most important Soviet spy to operate inside any Axis country during the Second World War brilliantly illuminates the limited usefulness even of the best placed agent.

Foot, M. R. D.
SOE in France: An Account of the Work of British Special Operations Executive in France, 1940
–
44.
London, 1966. The official history of the Special Operations Executive in France, by an academic historian who served as a Secret Intelligence Service officer during the Second World War. It provides an extremely detailed account of the operations of all the SOE networks in France and of their political affiliations, which were complex. Despite its scholarly objectivity, it reaches conclusions which exaggerate the military contribution made by the French resistance to Anglo-American victory in France in 1944.

Garlinski, Josef.
Intercept.
London, 1979. Garlinski is understandably concerned to set on record the pioneering achievement of his fellow Poles in breaking into Enigma traffic before the outbreak of the Second World War and of how their work contributed to the success of Bletchley.

Giskes, Herman.
London Calling North Pole.
London, 1953. Giskes was the German counter-espionage officer responsible for capturing and “turning” Dutch agents of the Special Operations Executive parachuted into the German-occupied Netherlands during 1940–43. In a highly successful counter-espionage campaign, the Germans captured almost all agents as they arrived and persuaded them to transmit back to Britain at German direction. The “England game,” as the Germans called it, severely strained Dutch-British relations during the war and for some years afterwards. The episode has now been fully investigated and recounted by M. R. D. Foot in
SOE in the Netherlands,
London, 2002.

Handel, Michael, ed.
Leaders and Intelligence.
London, 1989. Handel, a professor at the U. S. Army War College, is a productive writer and editor, whose chief subject is operational intelligence. When not the principal author, he can be counted upon to assemble contributions from leading intelligence writers, such as Professor Christopher Andrew of Cambridge. All his compilations, including
War, Strategy and Intelligence,
London, 1989, and
Intelligence and Military Operations,
London, 1990, contain valuable material, bearing both upon the past and the present.

Hinsley, F. H., with E. E. Thomas, C. F. G. Ransom and R. C. Knight.
British Intelligence in the Second World War: Its Influence on Strategy and Operations,
Vol. 1, 1979; Vol. 2, 1981; Vol. 3, Part 1, 1984; Vol. 3, Part 2, 1988; Vol. 4. London, 1990. Hinsley’s five volumes, the official history of British intelligence in the Second World War, are the most important single publication on the subject of their subtitle: how intelligence effects decision-making in wartime. Hinsley appears to cover almost every topic in his remit, including how Enigma was broken, how Ultra worked, how British intelligence successes and failures are to be judged in comparison with those of her enemies, and how intelligence affected the outcome of the war as a whole. His work has been criticised as “by a committee for a committee”; but that is unfair. It is an achievement of the greatest value and interest.