Burn After Reading (5 page)

From time to time, the Germans tried to infiltrate the Bromberg network by exploiting one or another of Zychon's weaknesses, and once in a while they seemed to be on the verge of success. But just when the arrangements appeared concluded, Zychon would disappoint them. This caustic jester was no fool. He was a king of spies.

It, therefore, caused a profound sensation within the
Abwehr
when Subsection East reported to topside in Berlin that vague feelers had come from the Zychon organization that held out the promise of a real break. At first it appeared that Major Zychon himself was putting out the feelers, but when contact was established with the would-be traitor, he turned out to be Zychon's second in command, Captain Kasimir Tolodzietzki.

He offered a plausible explanation for his defection : hatred of his capricious boss. Tolodzietzki was Zychon's whipping boy
and scapegoat. The major made life miserable for his hapless aide and gradually built up in him a blind rancor. Tolodzietzki may not have intended to harm Poland, but merely to hurt Zychon. His plot was simple. He would slip some intelligence to the
Abwehr
in order to get Zychon into hot water. He so arranged his treachery as to make it appear that the major was the real culprit. Then he wrote poison-pen letters to Warsaw hinting that Zychon was involved in sordid deals with the Germans. His zeal finally became so great that he put the Germans on their guard. The
Abwehr
suspected that Tolodzietzki was merely a plant through whom Zychon was trying to smuggle misleading information into the
Abwehr's
files.

Just as the Germans were set to drop Tolodzietzki altogether, the Poles stepped in and proved that the German suspicions were without foundation. His aide's defection had not escaped Zychon. Tolodzietzki was placed under surveillance and his treacherous activities were discovered. He was arrested and hanged. The Poles made the mistake of publicizing the hanging. The execution opened the Germans' eyes. The reports they had refused to regard as genuine were now vindicated, dusted off, and, in due course, made their contribution to the German triumph over Poland.

Another major source of information for the Germans was an officer of the Polish army whose identity is still clouded in secrecy. He managed to escape Tolodzietzki's fate, and the Germans, in their gratitude, still refuse to identify him. This man also volunteered his services to the
Abwehr
and offered to enlist a number of Polish officers to act as spies. He, too, was received with a great deal of suspicion and at first his offer was rejected. After the Tolodzietzki affair, however, the Germans realized their mistake and tried frantically to re-establish contact with the volunteer. What with the mills of espionage grinding rather slowly, they needed more than two years to regain contact, which was finally made at a most crucial time—on the eve of the Second World War.

After that, everything worked smoothly. The agent delivered
to the
Abwehr
a number of Polish officers stationed at key posts and from them, bit by bit, the Germans acquired the entire Polish mobilization order and deployment plan.

Thus Canaris' organization delivered to Hitler all he needed to know about France and Poland. His Eastern flank was protected by the Nazi-Soviet pact. There was only one more thing he wanted—the neutrality of Britain.

In stark contrast to the sprawling secret services of Hitler, the democratic countries either had no intelligence services worthy of the name or maintained severely constricted, hibernating organizations. The French and British services were in the latter category. They subsisted largely on shoestring appropriations and coasted on past prestige with the inevitable consequences. To put it bluntly, both the French and British secret services were just plain bad, totally inadequate to the challenge and demands of those fateful years.

In France, which had produced Joseph Fouché, one of history's most nefarious spymasters, intelligence was a traditional instrument of power, but it was practiced as an art rather than an exact science. In line with the chaotic organization of the French government and the jealousy-ridden, predatory bureaucracy of its permanent officials, intelligence was decentralized and compartmentalized. Each service kept aloof from the others and actually frowned upon liaison or cooperation for fear that concord might compromise autonomy.

In 1939, France had a galaxy of truly brilliant ambassadors stationed at the key capitals. Men like André François-Poncet and Robert Coulondre, successive ambassadors in Berlin during these stormy days, were fully capable of procuring their own information and evaluating it in their reports to the Quai d'Orsay, but they had no control over what was done with their reports back home. In the French table of organization, intelligence
per se was regarded as the responsibility of the armed forces; accordingly, the major intelligence services were lodged deep within the military establishment.

On the eve of the Second World War, France had four major intelligence services, but no agency to co-ordinate or synchronize them. The army had two, the Second and Fifth Sections of the General Staff; the former engaged in general intelligence and strategic evaluation; the latter, in espionage and counter-espionage. The navy had its parallel intelligence division. The Air Ministry had a somewhat smaller intelligence section, probably the best of the lot, because, being the youngest, it was not yet encumbered by traditional impediments.

By virtue of its age, influence and adeptness at arrogating power to itself, the army's
Bureau de Renseignement
—the Second Bureau—came to occupy a central position in this intelligence labyrinth. It was a cloistered, professorial organization whose distance from the realities of the day was somehow symbolized by its location. It was housed at La Ferète-sous-Jouarre, well away from the hustle and bustle of Paris and also physically separated from the Fifth Section.

Despite its gray pre-eminence, Army Intelligence suffered from various fatal handicaps. For one thing, it was headed by officers of relatively low rank. In 1939, its chief was Gauche, a colonel. Head of the Second Bureau was Baril, a major. Gauche and Baril happened to be men of marked personality and profound intelligence, but their influence did not reach far, even within their own organizations. They were constantly stymied by brother officers who sat closer to the commanding generals, and who were remarkably uninfluenced by hard information when arriving at their own judgments.

Gauché, for example, made several valiant efforts to funnel information about the Polish campaign up to General Gamelin, commander-in-chief of the army. He hoped it would induce the general to alter his outmoded, stolid strategy. He got as far as Colonel Préaud, a friend of Gamelin and head of the
commander's Operations Bureau. Préaud found himself in disagreement with Gauché's conclusions and refused to forward even the intelligence on which they were based.

The generals themselves were inclined to disregard or dismiss the conclusions of their intelligence officers. When General Weygand was presented with a report on mechanized warfare that proposed a revamping of the French military machine, he scribbled on the margin of the document (which, incidentally, was prepared by Charles de Gaulle) : “What you have written has deeply interested me, but I do not agree.” That was the end of the matter.

Similarly, the Second Bureau differed from the senior French observers in its facts and evaluations of the lessons of the Polish campaign. But so great was General Gamelin's distance from intelligence that he did not find time even to leaf through the Polish
dossier
of the Second Bureau.

The Second Bureau was burdened by a number of officers forced down its throat because they happened to be friends or protégés of generals. Military attachés were so chosen and the Bureau had to depend on them for most of its intelligence. During the years immediately preceding the Second World War, Colonel Didelet—a man, who, like his aide and his predecessor, could not speak German—was French military attaché at the crucial Berlin post. Didelet received the appointment because he was one of Weygand's protégés. In Berlin he lived in a fool's paradise. The reports he sent to Vincennes read like fairy tales today. He failed to find out the actual strength, the doctrine, tactics and over-all purpose of the German armored divisions, the very divisions soon to be assigned the dominant role in vanquishing France.

And the
Deuxième Bureau
was frozen stiff in its own tradition. Despite men like Gauchér and Baril at the top, the organization was antiquated and inefficient. Its blunders ranged from minor tactical faux pas to major strategic errors. On the General Staff map put out by the cartographic branch, the
German city of Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) was placed inside Belgium. The main Hamburg-Berlin railway line was marked as a branch, capable of carrying only light traffic. The periodic
Intelligence Summaries
contained fundamental errors of fact and judgment, which in several instances had serious consequences. The historian Marc Block, who served as an intelligence officer during World War II, maintains that the gross errors in the
Intelligence Summaries
were, in part, responsible for the disastrous defeat of France in 1940.

“It should be the business of Intelligence,” Block wrote in his melancholy post-mortem, “to anticipate … needs, and to provide the required facts even before they are demanded. It should circulate to each, all the relevant information as soon as it is available. But instead of this being done, Intelligence scarcely ever moved outside the narrow limits prescribed for it by a tradition that knew nothing of the needs of mechanical warfare.”

In France, it may truly be said, the intelligence service both mirrored the confusion of France and contributed handsomely to deepening that confusion.

England was only a little better off.

To the outsider the British secret service is a vague, almost chimerical organization. The government steadfastly refused either to confirm or deny its very existence, to blame it publicly for its blunders or to claim credit for its successes. The very motto of the Secret Service is: “Never explain, never apologize.” All attacks upon the Secret Service are mutely absorbed and no charge, however preposterous or damaging, is ever dignified with an answer or denial.

The ironclad secrecy in which Britain wrapped its Secret Service was part prudence and part whimsy; to a large extent, the latter. It was a romantic masquerade that appealed to Britons, a grandiose pageantry of espionage that in 1939, on the eve of another world war, was anachronistic, even childish.

Growing exasperation with this confidential strong arm of
His Majesty's Government induced members of Parliament to breach the sacrosanct tradition and openly discuss the apparent decay of the Secret Service.

In the House of Commons, Geoffrey Mander bemoaned “the frequent appalling ignorance of the British Government on the subject of what is going on abroad.” Mr. Lees-Smith demanded that the Secret Service be removed from the aegis of the Foreign Office because its traditions and methods were “not suited for dealing with the particular methods which have to be adopted with a regime of the Nazi type.”

Most outspoken and eloquent, as usual, was the Cassandra of those days, Winston S. Churchill, who voiced the most direct criticism of the Secret Service. On April 13, 1939, in the wake of Hitler's occupation of Czechoslovakia, he said: “After twenty-five years' experience in peace and war, I believe the British Intelligence Service to be the finest of its kind in the world. Yet we have seen, both in the case of the subjugation of Bohemia and on the occasion of the invasion of Albania, that Ministers of the Crown had apparently no inkling, or at any rate, no conviction, of what was coming.”

The stagnation of the Secret Service was evident both at home and in the field. It was most glaring within the Foreign Office and suffered from all the shortcomings of British diplomacy of that period. Members of the Secret Service adopted the hoary Victorian mannerisms of British diplomats and their penchant for both decorum and intrigue. Political intelligence became a tool abused by department heads, the middle-layer of permanent officials. Anarchy was rampant and the traditional secrecy cloaked, not only confidential transactions, but the anarchy as well.

In time of war, Britain reaches out and enlists the very best brains of the Commonwealth in the secret service. Great writers such as Maugham and Mackenzie; outstanding scholars like Ewing, Hogarth and Lawrence; brilliant politicians of the stature of Wilson and Cox were brought into the service to serve as intelligence specialists in areas they knew best.

But in the lazy and leisurely days of peace, British intelligence falls back on the “corps,” a handful of lifetime professionals. Some of these men prove excellent technicians, well trained, in the legendary “Black Castle” which allegedly houses the Imperial General Staff's college of spies, but usually they are men with little savvy or imagination. They go by the textbook. They incline to think, along with Falstaff: “Pray that our armies join not in a hot day; for, by the Lord, I take but two shirts out with me, and I mean not to sweat extraordinarily.”

Then there was the question of money. In emergencies Britain can be lavish, but in time of peace she is often unusually miserly.

On the eve of the First World War, His Majesty's Secret Service received the niggardly appropriation of some forty-seven thousand pounds, as compared with the seventy thousand pounds which Cromwell allocated to John Thurloe two centuries earlier, when the purchasing power of the pound was enormously greater.