‘Spying on the Reich’ Review: Reading Hitler’s Mind For intelligence agencies in Britain and other European countries, uncovering Nazi plans meant penetrating one man’s intentions. By Stephen Budiansky
Struggling to divine Germany’s intentions in the midst of the Sudeten crisis in 1938, the British ambassador in Berlin, Nevile Henderson, put his finger on the fundamental point that had flummoxed conventional intelligence-gathering efforts against the Nazi government. “It is impossible to know anything for certain,” he reported to London, “in a regime where all depends on the will of a single individual whom one does not see.” The terrifying repressions of a total police state made the most innocuous efforts at penetrating the German regime’s secrets arduous and dangerous; no one seemed to know for certain who Hitler’s chief advisers were; and even those intimates were frequently caught off guard by the führer’s last-minute changes of mind, guided as much by instinct and temperament as any rational calculation. His decision to reoccupy the Rhineland in 1936 was made just two weeks before issuing the order to march. “We needed the secrets of a country,” recalled Czechoslovakia’s spy chief, “where people spoke in whispers.”
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Spying on the Reich: The Cold War Against Hitler
In early 1939, as the world stood on the brink of war, British intelligence officials were deluged by so many contradictory rumors—Hitler was merely bluffing; Hitler would attack the East first; Hitler would begin the war within two weeks in a barrage of bombs and poison gas on London—that Britain’s chief of naval intelligence, Adm. John Godfrey, observed, “Whatever happened, someone could say ‘I told you so.’ ”
R.T. Howard’s “Spying on the Reich” examines prewar intelligence efforts against Germany by Britain, France, Czechoslovakia, Poland and other of Hitler’s victims, and the puzzles it presents will no doubt seem familiar to today’s intelligence officials, who similarly struggle to penetrate the intentions of one-man regimes in Russia and North Korea. Though many of the spy stories Mr. Howard recounts are well known, he perceptively frames them as case studies that illuminate enduring dilemmas in intelligence gathering, intelligence analysis, and the employment of intelligence by governments. As he shows, successful intelligence operations are built as much on imagination, tolerance for ambiguity and a finely honed understanding of bureaucratic warfare as they are on derring-do.
A journalist by training, Mr. Howard is especially good at bringing out the complex, shifting and mutually suspicious relationships that kept the allies who would find themselves fighting Hitler from effectively pooling resources and sharing intelligence. Such conflicts also complicated cooperation among competing intelligence services within individual nations, Britain most notably. Mr. Howard’s decision to write exclusively on the prewar era—and not the war itself—brings the contingency of history front and center. The catastrophe of World War II and the Holocaust makes it easy for a reader today to regard earlier failures to unite and confront Hitler as incomprehensible, or at least tragic, blundering. “Spying on the Reich” makes clear this was business as usual in the tangled affairs of nations trying to balance national interests amid a web of uncertain future possibilities.
The author places the problems of intelligence against a finely wrought tapestry of competing diplomatic challenges. Britain, worried more about Bolshevism than a rearmed Germany, persisted into the 1930s in spending most of its limited intelligence budget targeting the Soviet Union. The French, worried about British undercover skulduggery in its North African colonies as late as the spring of 1938, invested considerable effort monitoring the operations of the “notoriously anti-French” and “very dangerous” British intelligence services. The Poles, who as the historian James Stokesbury observed, hated the Russians more than they feared the Germans, also loathed the Czech government and made no secret of their designs on pieces of Czech territory. The British, meanwhile, distrusted the Czech secret service because of Prague’s growing ties with Moscow. Holland and Denmark, both well positioned to collect intelligence on the Nazi regime, were hesitant to compromise the neutrality that they believed would protect them. Their governments also had complex economic and political ties to Germany. Some German manufacturers of armaments, for instance, had relocated to evade the constraints of the Versailles Treaty; most notably, the Fokker aircraft company set up in Holland.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the intelligence services of the two major western powers were well behind the game in trying to assess the secretly growing military might of Germany. Until 1927, monitoring of Germany’s armaments production and military establishment was in the hands of the Inter-Allied Military Commission, set up by the Versailles Treaty to oversee German disarmament. Its military experts understood armies and weapons but were innocents about deception and intelligence, and they were easily hoodwinked. German factory managers, often tipped off about impending inspections, were adept at concealing evidence of illicit arms production from the commission. On other occasions, inspectors were sent off on wild goose chases by deliberately planted false leads (such as baby carriages that could be assembled into machine guns).
The legendary parsimoniousness of the British did not help their spies, according to Mr. Howard: The undersecretary of the Foreign Office recalled having to work his boss “into his best mood” before presenting the intelligence budget for approval. (He would then invariably “pause, sign, and sigh.”) Into this void some of the best intelligence came from open sources and from military attachés posted to the embassy in Berlin—men whose job, as the historian Wesley Wark notes, was “no less than to acquire intelligence without employing the methods of espionage.” Important intelligence coups came from careful reading of published documents and other publicly available sources. Budgets and economic data were particularly revealing: Prices of commodities like copper, zinc, lead and tin, as well as the stock prices of German firms that imported them, proved an accurate measure of the pace of rearmament; housing shortages in a small town near the Junkers aeroengine plant revealed that the factory had suddenly gone to three shifts, a pace of production far in excess of the demands of civil aviation.
The secrecy of intelligence created its own problems. For one thing, as Mr. Howard observes, it was all too easy for politicians to simply dismiss or cover up information they did not like. Few British politicians in the early 1930s wanted to buck public sentiment against rearmament; far easier to keep under wraps any secret evidence that counseled otherwise. For the same reason, intelligence was extremely vulnerable to political manipulation intended to sway allies or public opinion. The French intelligence service, seeking either to justify larger military budgets or counteract British diplomatic moves to ease the Versailles limits on Germany, regularly exaggerated the state of German rearmament and military preparedness. This, in turn, gave British politicians further excuse to dismiss even credible reports of German violations as the product of Gallic hysteria—a hall-of-mirrors distortion that, in 1934, led the British to scornfully reject a completely accurate French intelligence report of the secret German construction of submarines, an egregious lapse. (The British concluded the boats under construction were minesweepers.)
Mr. Howard makes excellent use of materials from the British and French archives, but for other countries he relies almost entirely on secondary sources; his account of the Czech intelligence service’s efforts against Nazi Germany is drawn exclusively from the 1975 memoir of its former head. He does not cover the Soviet Union at all, a major omission.
His treatment of intelligence derived from intercepted and decoded German signals is the weakest part of the book; there is very little discussion of what was learned from this extremely important and highly reliable source, and he makes a serious hash of trying to explain the workings and cryptanalysis of the German Enigma cipher machine. This is not technical nitpicking: The author’s misunderstandings lead him to grossly undervalue the contribution of the small team of Polish mathematicians who scored all of the key prewar successes in breaking this seemingly impenetrable code. He incorrectly states that the Poles had built a replica of the German Army Enigma in 1933 using as a model a machine briefly detained by Polish customs officers in 1929. But that intercepted model was merely a commercially sold version of the Enigma, and offered no clues to the crucial internal workings of the rewired and highly secret German Army version.
The cryptanalytic breakthrough that allowed the Poles to successfully build their “duplicate” of the secret German version was a stupendous feat of pure mathematical analysis, which exploited an extremely subtle flaw (not an “almost elementary error”) in the machine’s coding patterns. This permitted them to reconstruct its new internal wiring, sight unseen, employing methods from an arcane field of mathematics known as permutation theory.
Likewise, a change in German operating procedures in September 1938 did not render the Polish duplicates worthless, as Mr. Howard insists; on the contrary, they were as indispensable as ever, thanks to two other brilliant innovations the Poles quickly came up with to overcome this new difficulty—punched paper sheets cataloging all 100,000 or so possible initial settings of the machine, and the first electromechanical machines—or “bombes”—to automate the search. As late as January 1939, British codebreakers at Bletchley Park asserted that recovering the Army Enigma’s wiring through mathematical analysis alone was “practically impossible,” and they were astonished when the Poles finally revealed their success at a crash meeting with their British counterparts a month before the outbreak of World War II.
Mr. Howard’s invocation of the Cold War in his subtitle is a stretch, even as a metaphor. The more enduring historical echo of the murky world of uncertainty he skillfully portrays is the one he notes in his introduction, where he observes that “it is hard not to be reminded” of more recent episodes—the 2003 Iraq war most obviously comes to mind—that underscore the pitfalls of intelligence and its vulnerability to manipulation for political ends.
Mr. Budiansky is the author of “Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel” and “Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II,” among other works.
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