My Silent War: The Autobiography of a Spy (13 page)

The head of B Division was Guy Liddell.
^*
“I was born in an Irish fog,” he once told me, “and sometimes I think I have never emerged from it.” No self-depreciation could have been more ludicrous. It is true that he did have a deceptively ruminative manner. He would murmur his thoughts aloud, as if groping his way towards the facts of a case, his face creased in a comfortable, innocent smile. But behind the façade of laziness, his subtle and reflective mind played over a storehouse of photographic memories. He was an ideal senior officer for a young man to learn from, always ready to put aside his work to listen and worry at a new problem.

Yet Liddell’s career ended in disappointment. The head of MI5 during the war was Sir David Petrie, an Indian policeman of great authority and charm. When he retired, B Division would have voted to a man for Liddell to succeed him—and he had many supporters elsewhere. Instead, the government appointed Sir Percy Sillitoe,
^†
another policeman, British this time, with less authority and less charm than Petrie. Liddell’s personal disappointment was obvious, yet it was more than personal. He, like most of the MI5 professionals, maintained that MI5 was an intelligence organization, not a police outfit. The techniques for combating espionage were different from those adapted to crime. Since spies are backed by the great technical resources of governments, while criminals are not, there is clearly much to be said for that view. The government, however, took the view that the appointment of a senior policeman, trained in Whitehall procedures, would be safer. Liddell was awarded the doubtful dignity of Deputy Director, and he would have been inhuman if he had felt no resentment. I am sure
that spies, had they but known it, would have rejoiced at Liddell’s discomfiture. One did.

Liddell’s chief assistant in B Division was Dick White. Originally a schoolmaster, he had joined MI5 between the wars. He was a nice and modest character, who would have been the first to admit that he lacked outstanding qualities. His most obvious fault was a tendency to agree with the last person he spoke to. With his usual good sense, he was content to delegate a lot of work to his subordinates, and to exercise his gifts for chairmanship with a view to keeping harmony in the division. He was one of the few officers in MI5 who, until the bitter end, maintained a reasonable personal relationship with Cowgill. His capacity for avoiding departmental fights paid off in the outcome. When Liddell became Deputy Director, White was promoted to the top of B Division. But there was more to come. In due course, White was wafted across the park to become Chief of SIS. Luckily, Dansey died before seeing a counter-espionage expert lording it, however courteously, over Broadway. If he hadn’t, it would have killed him anyway.

I cultivated MI5 assiduously and, before the end of the war, I could claim many personal friends in St. James’s Street. It was in every way necessary for someone to soften the collision between Cowgill and our opposite numbers; and as few others were willing to take the lead, I took it upon myself. Quite apart from immediate considerations, various long-term prospects were forming in my mind, for the materialization of which MI5 support would be helpful. I formed the habit of slipping my friends information off the record—that is to say, without Cowgill’s knowledge. The rewards of such unorthodoxy were often generous.

A major battle developed in 1943, in which I found myself ranged discreetly on the side of MI5 against Cowgill. The issue was the location of Section V. We had been housed in St. Albans partly because of overcrowding in Broadway, partly because of the desirability of keeping the archives out of range of German bombers. When Woodfield moved his records to St. Albans, Cowgill moved
too. His overt reason for doing so was that “a counter-espionage organization must be near its records.” His real reason was that it enabled him to build up his little empire with a minimum of disturbance, free from the taint of “politics.” The long lull in the bombing, however, had robbed these arguments of their cogency. There was plenty of office space available in London, and no obvious reason for not using it.

MI5 meanwhile had maintained their pressure for closer co-operation with ourselves. They laboured the virtues of “propinquity,” a word that began to appear frequently in Petrie’s correspondence on the subject with Menzies. It was indeed quite clear that, despite the telephone, co-operation would be more effective if the distance between us was less. This was precisely what Cowgill did not want, and for the same reasons that MI5 wanted it. He foresaw himself and his staff, back in London, dissipating their effort in “politics,” at the mercy of the manoeuvres of Liddell and Co. Above all, he saw control slipping from his fingers. For my part, I was wholly in favour of the return to London. Closer contact with MI5, Broadway and other government departments, in my view, could only assist in promoting an overall grasp of intelligence work. That, as far as I was concerned, was all that mattered.

Characteristically, Cowgill overestimated his hold on the situation. He announced in St. Albans that he would take a free vote on the subject, giving all his staff a chance of pronouncing for or against London. He was even unwise enough to let outsiders know what he had done, so that the result of the vote could not have been suppressed. I assumed that a free vote entitled me to a little lobbying, and I got busy accordingly, not neglecting the secretarial staff, many of whom had begun to tire of the cloistered life in billets. The result of the vote dumbfounded Cowgill. More than two-thirds of our staff chose London—the vote, in itself, had no validity, but it did much to weaken Cowgill’s determination. Within a few weeks, we were installed in offices in Ryder Street. We were two minutes from MI5 and fifteen from Broadway. If we came to work early, we
could look down from our windows and see Quaglino’s offloading its horrible garbage from the night before. We were just in time for the “little Blitz.”

I must now go back a few months and write of an event that was to have a profound effect on all subsequent development of British intelligence work. I refer to the arrival of the Americans. Before the war, the United States lacked a regular foreign intelligence service. The Federal Bureau of Investigation was responsible for internal security only. Secret information from other countries was obtained to a limited extent from extra-curricular activity of service attachés and diplomats attached to United States embassies, who were less inhibited than the representatives of countries which had regular secret services to do the dirty work. It is now well known from published material how, in 1940, British Security Co-ordination, under William Stephenson,
^*
was set up in New York. Its main ostensible function was to assist in protecting the security of American supplies destined for Britain; it was supposed that the large element of German origin in the United States would indulge in widespread sabotage. This supposition was not borne out. But Stephenson, who was a friend of Churchill’s and wielded more real political power than any other British intelligence officer, soon found other outlets for his ample energies. One was interference with supplies destined for the Axis and with neutral shipping in which they were carried. It is probable that BSC committed more acts of sabotage than the whole German-born colony in the United States. But another outlet for Stephenson was the one towards which he devoted his best efforts: persuading the Americans that it was high time that they created an intelligence service of their own.

Stephenson, like many others, saw that the creation of such a service was, in the long run, inevitable. Short-term considerations suggested that it would be better for the British to get in on the ground floor and, by offering all possible help in the early stages, to earn the right to receive in return the intelligence that might
be expected to flow from deployment of the greater resources of the United States. There was also the immediate chance of getting information through United States embassies in countries where Britain was no longer represented, such as Vichy France, the Balkans and even Germany. A true top-level operator, Stephenson was not used to footling around at the lower levels. His achievement was to stimulate the interest of Roosevelt himself, and to make quite sure that the President knew that Stephenson and his backers, among whom were SOE and MI5 as well as SIS, had a lot to offer. Thus when the Office of Strategic Services was born with General Donovan
^*
at its head, the closest co-operation with the British was already assumed at the highest level. Whether the wartime exchange of British experience for American resources really paid off is a matter open to argument. What is beyond doubt is that the decision in favour of co-operation doomed the British services, in the long run, to junior status. That junior status has been sobering fact for many years. All SIS could do was sit back helplessly when the CIA committed the United States Administration to folly with Ngo Dinh Diem or to ridicule in the Bay of Pigs.

Stephenson’s activity in the United States was regarded sourly enough by J. Edgar Hoover. The implication that the FBI was not capable of dealing with sabotage on American soil was wounding to a man of his raging vanity. He was incensed when Stephenson’s strong boys beat up or intoxicated the crews of ships loading Axis supplies. But the real reason for his suspicious resentment, which he never lost, was that Stephenson was playing politics in his own yard, and playing them pretty well. He foresaw that the creation of OSS would involve him in endless jurisdictional disputes. The new office would compete with the FBI for Federal funds. It would destroy his monopoly of the investigative field. The creation and survival of the new organization was the only serious defeat suffered by Hoover in his political career—and his career had been all
politics. He never forgave Stephenson for the part he played as midwife and nurse to OSS.

These high decisions gradually seeped downwards and reached St. Albans. Our first visitor from the United States was a certain Kimball, of the FBI, who arrived shortly after Pearl Harbor. He talked with machine-gun speed, accusing the Navy, the Army, the State Department and the White House of having ignored FBI warnings of imminent Japanese attack. The real purpose of his visit, apart from the sales-cackle, was to announce that Hoover had decided to appoint a liaison officer in London, in the shape of a Legal Attaché of the United States Embassy, to co-operate with MI5 and SIS. After Kimball’s departure, Cowgill spoke of him in derogatory terms, saying that “Hoover evidently intended to bypass Stephenson.” With more reason than usual, Cowgill regarded Hoover as another of the evil men who used intelligence as a stepladder for political advancement, whose overtures should be treated with suspicion if not resisted outright. My loyalty to Cowgill was strained when the first Legal Attaché made his appearance. He was Arthur Thurston, a thoroughly competent operator with whom it was a pleasure to work. I had every reason to cultivate him, and he happily reciprocated the bootlegged intelligence I passed him. He was too perceptive to stay long with Hoover, preferring the political jungle of Indiana.

OSS were not far behind. After preliminary high-level talks with Donovan, Bruce, and others, we had assigned to us a small liaison party. Its head was Normal (Holmes) Pearson, a poet of Yale. He was hail-fellow-well-met, and have you heard the latest one about the girl in the train? He was terribly funny about his organization, Oh So Sexy. It was a notably bewildered group, and they lost no opportunity of telling us that they had come to school. I must have been slow to grasp the facts of inter-departmental life, as I was innocently surprised by the confidence bestowed on them by Cowgill. He gave them the freedom of our files, including the intercepted wireless traffic—which was still being doled out grudgingly to the FBI in heavily disguised form. It was difficult to see why a
professional organization like the FBI should be denied intelligence which was given in profusion to the service once described by Pearson himself as “a bunch of amateur bums.”

In due course, the answer became clear enough. It was quite true that Hoover had wanted “to bypass Stephenson.” He did not like BSC and wanted to clip its wings. One way of achieving that end was to shift the weight of the liaison to London. In addition, he naturally wished to get close to MI5. Like the FBI’s security division, MI5 was purely a counter-espionage organization. It had its worries about SIS, just as Hoover had his worries about OSS. Above all, in Hoover’s eyes, its writ ran only in British territory, and its interests therefore could not clash with those of the FBI, whose jurisdiction was confined to the Western hemisphere. In short, Hoover’s aim was two-fold: to move the centre of co-operation away from the United States to Britain, and to get as close as possible to MI5.

All this was highly distasteful to Cowgill. He would have liked to gather all exchange of counter-espionage information with the Americans into his own hands. Having failed in this, he wanted to restrict exchanges between the FBI and MI5 to a minimum. The ostensible reason for his attitude was fear that MI5 might pass to the FBI information derived from SIS without due regard for the security of SIS sources. I have never heard any evidence that such transactions occurred. But the line of argument had a certain plausibility, and in the stress of war a plausible argument is often good enough. Plausible or not, the argument was quite hollow, as Cowgill’s liberality towards OSS showed clearly enough. Information too delicate for MI5 and the FBI should certainly have been withheld from Pearson’s “bunch of bums.” Yet it was not. The truth was that Cowgill saw in OSS a potentially pliable instrument which might be used to bolster his position against both MI5 and the FBI. His strength was that, however much Hoover might rave, no one in Britain could challenge his links with OSS on realistic grounds. Such a challenge would have meant MI5, for example, associating itself with Pearson’s dictum on OSS. Inter-departmental good manners barred such crudities.