Fighting to Lose

To Cathy:

Wife and editor-in-chief

1. Note to the Reader
   
2. Introduction
   
3. Prologue: Corrupt? Inefficient? Stupid?
   
4. Chapter 1: A Spymaster’s Incredible Story
   
5. Chapter 2: Hitler’s Enemy Within
   
6. Chapter 3: That “Stupid Little Man”
   
7. Chapter 4: A Little Too Easy, Perhaps?
   
8. Chapter 5: The Abwehr Spreads Its Net
   
9. Chapter 6: Canaris Betrays the Cause
   
10. Chapter 7: E-186: The Spy Inside
    
11. Chapter 8: Names to the Flames
    
12. Chapter 9: Birmingham is Burning
    
13. Chapter 10:
    CELERY
    Hits the Jackpot
    
14. Chapter 11: Menzies Wants to Know
    
15. Chapter 12: Red Sun Rising
    
16. Chapter 13: Whither the Questionnaire?
    
17. Chapter 14: Calm Before Sunday
    
18. Chapter 15: Tora! Tora! Tora!
    
19. Chapter 16: Postscript, Pearl Harbor
    
20. Chapter 17: The Last Hours Revisited
    
21. Chapter 18: Ultimate Secrets
    
22. Chapter 19: Epilogue: A Rogue Octogenarian
    
23. Appendix: The Historical Context
    
24. Notes
    
25. Select Bibliography
    
26. About the Author
    

Human nature does not change much over time, but politics and technology do. Books dealing with specific periods in the past often crash for the general reader if the context in which events took place is unfamiliar, or if the terminology is outdated and strange. Before beginning, the reader might like to glance through “Appendix: The Historical Context.”

In his book
Chief of Intelligence
(1951), British journalist Ian Colvin wrote that he was having lunch with a senior official in one of the ministries a few years after the Second World War and in conversation asked him how he thought British intelligence had done. The man replied with some emphasis: “Well, our intelligence was not badly equipped. As you know, we had Admiral Canaris, and that was a considerable thing.”

Colvin did not know. The civil servant had made the mistake of assuming that because Colvin had been in Berlin before the war, and had sent back valuable information on the activities of those opposed to Hitler, he had been an agent of British intelligence himself. He had not been.

The official left it at that, but the incident set Colvin on a quest. He knew from his own experiences that Admiral Canaris, the wartime head of the Abwehr, the German intelligence service, had worked against Hitler. But a British agent?

“As I walked away from lunch that day it seemed that this must be the best-kept secret of the war.” From then on, however, it was a brick wall with the exception of one veteran of the War Office who said: “Ah, yes, he helped us all he could.” He said no more.

Colvin had no access to secret documents, especially those of the Foreign Office and War Office, much less those of MI5 and MI6 — Britain’s Security Service and Secret Intelligence Service respectively — but some of the officers close to Canaris had survived the war and he went to Germany and talked with them. Each had his own fragment of the Canaris story, and Colvin pieced together their memories. Apparently, Canaris did tip the British off to Hitler’s moves against Czechoslovakia in 1938, and did foil his attempt to bring Spain into the war in 1940. He also forewarned the British of Operation Barbarossa, the 1941 invasion of Russia, and had been party to two attempts to kill Hitler.

It may have been a little too much to describe Canaris as a “British agent,” Colvin concluded, but from what he was told, “his omissions in the intelligence field helped the Allies to achieve surprise and brought their certain victory mercifully closer.”1 He also found that Canaris was a passive player in the conspiracies against Hitler, rather than a principal actor.

Colvin had to rely on hearsay. Thus, the debate has gone back and forth over the ensuing decades, between those writers who portrayed Canaris as an unsung hero of the German opposition against the Nazis and those — mainly British — who have presented him as the ineffectual chief of a corrupt and inefficient secret service. By the end of the 1970s, the latter view had won out.

Documents released in Britain and the United States since the 1990s, however, combined with captured German records that have been available all along, show Canaris to have been a central figure in the German army conspiracies against Hitler and, even more remarkable, that the Abwehr under his direction had decisively intervened on the side of Germany’s enemies in some of the major events of the war, most notably the 1941 Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the 1944 Battle of Normandy.

This is much more than Colvin, or most of the contemporaries of Canaris, could ever have dreamed of.

The newly opened MI5 files are very incomplete. They have been extensively censored and “weeded,” both officially and apparently surreptitiously — the damage being so enormous that the British security and intelligence services themselves may have lost sight of much of their wartime past. It can be recovered at least partially, however, by matching the newly released material to corresponding intelligence documents held abroad, and the surviving records of the Abwehr.

The situation is better in the United States, the relevant archives being those of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Office for Strategic Services (OSS) — the wartime forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The number of available files is enormous, for the Americans spared no expense in trying to determine how the German secret services, both army and Nazi, conducted operations. Many of the FBI/OSS files complement those of the British, and what is apparently missing on one side of the Atlantic can sometimes be found on the other.

What are consistently absent, because withheld by both, are the records that directly link the respective secret services with the wartime president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the wartime British prime minister, Winston Churchill. There are no minutes of meetings or correspondence at hand between Roosevelt and William Donovan, or Churchill and Stewart Menzies, even though the OSS and MI6 chiefs reported almost daily. The Second World War can never be reasonably understood, however, without considering the effect secret intelligence had on the decisions of the four top protagonists: Churchill, Roosevelt, Hitler, and Stalin.

This book specifically addresses that challenge for the period 1939–1941. It has often meant weighing incomplete evidence and inferring conclusions rather than settling only for proof. It has also meant assuming at the outset that the secret services — British, American, and German — sometimes manipulated their own records.

The following, then, is a fresh perspective on the Second World War.

Corrupt? Inefficient? Stupid?

The FBI did not like the idea, but what could it do? Supreme meant supreme, and if the intelligence chief of the supreme commander of the Allied armies poised to invade Europe decided that the British should get first crack at interrogating captured German spies and spymasters, then that was that.

“With the understanding that G-2 [an army term for military intelligence chief] has agreed that the British shall have priority on all captured prisoners and records,” the internal FBI memo lamented, “it will be seen that the British will be in a position to give the Americans only such intelligence data as they wish us to have.”

It was early in January 1944. The Second World War was in its fifth year. Although the armies of Nazi Germany still occupied much of Europe, they were about to be crushed between the mainly American military machine gathering in the south of England and the Soviet colossus in the east. Barring a miracle of German secret-weapon technology, the end of the war seemed imminent.

“From our experiences in South America and … the Ostrich source, we have seen the continual reluctance and refusal of the British to furnish us all pertinent information which we should normally have,” continued the note to FBI heads of departments. “The British would be in a position to squeeze us out from the intelligence field in the Western Hemisphere; and if they are co-operating along those lines with G-2, it may result in the FBI being squeezed out of the intelligence field in the United States.…”

Two years of working together against a common enemy had created an abyss of distrust between the FBI and the British secret services, MI5 and MI6.

The Anglo-American Allies were just then in the final stages of preparation for the cross-Channel invasion of German-occupied France. SHAEF, or Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force — the command organization led by the American general (and later president) Dwight D. Eisenhower — was charged with leading the American, Canadian, and British armies being assembled in England; and if the landings were successful, the Allies expected to capture plenty of prisoners, including those from the German secret services. In anticipation of this, SHAEF G-2, British brigadier-general Kenneth Strong, had asked the FBI to supply a list of individuals the combat forces should be on the lookout for. Unfortunately, from the FBI’s point of view, Strong had also agreed that such prisoners should be offered for interrogation first to the British.