Intelligence in War: The Value--And Limitations--Of What the Military Can Learn About the Enemy by John Keegan Read Free Book Online

Germany’s intention to invade and had even identified the correct date, 22 June. Stalin had received other warnings, including one from Churchill, but chose to ignore them, as he ignored that of Sorge. The idea of war was too uncomfortable; Stalin preferred to believe that he could buy Germany off by fulfilling delivery of strategic materials, including oil. As to the assurance that Japan would not invade Siberia, the evidence is that Stalin had moved a large portion of the Soviet garrison out of Siberia before the attack of 22 June and that Sorge’s warning, even if heeded, was not the critical strategic intelligence it seemed to be. 14
    Other celebrated human intelligence organisations of the Second World War, the “Red Orchestra” in Germany and the “Lucy Ring” in Switzerland, also lack credibility as media of real-time intelligence, though for different reasons. Sorge is almost unique among identified operators in the world of humint by reason of his undoubted access to information of high quality and his ability to forward it speedily to base. The Red Orchestra, a coterie of left-inclined Germans of superior social standing, was a dilettante organisation led by a Luftwaffe officer with a double-barrelled name, who seems to have been animated by the excitement of misbehaviour. They transmitted little of importance to Moscow, betrayed themselves by lack of elementary security precautions and were rapidly rolled up by the Gestapo. The information supplied by the Lucy Ring—in reality an individual called Rudolf Roessler—to Moscow from Switzerland during the war seems to have been derived largely from his study of the German press. The rest was fed to him by the Swiss, who maintained contacts with the German Abwehr. The Swiss feared that a German victory would lead to the incorporation of their country into a greater Reich; the Abwehr was adept at playing a double, if impenetrable, game. Roessler may have belonged to that colourful gang of fantasists who enriched themselves, at the expense of the secret service budgets of many countries, throughout the Second World War. 15 In any case, he lacked a radio link to Moscow.
    The ability to communicate, quickly and securely, is at the heart of real-time intelligence practice. It is rarely enjoyed by the agent, that man of mystery who figures so centrally in the fictional literature of espionage. Real agents are at their most vulnerable when they attempt—by dead letter box, microdot insertions in seemingly innocent correspondence, meetings with couriers, most of all by radio transmitter—to reach their spymasters. The biographies of real agents are ultimately almost always a story of betrayal by communication failure. A high proportion of the Special Operation Executive (SOE) agents in France during the Second World War were discovered by German radio counter-intelligence; the same was true of those operating in Belgium while, as has become well known, at one stage all agents dropped into Holland were collected on site by German manipulators of the SOE radio network. Even when counter-intelligence is deplorably lax, as in the notorious “Missing Diplomats” case, the certainty of Donald Maclean’s guilt was finally established, even if retrospectively, by his habit of leaving Washington to meet his Soviet controller in New York twice a week. 16
    It is the intrinsic difficulty of communication, even, indeed above all, for the agent with “access,” which limits his—or occasionally her—usefulness in real time. By contrast, the enemy’s own encrypted communications, if they can quickly be broken, will, of their nature, provide intelligence of high quality in real time.
    The history of “how, what, where, when” in military intelligence is therefore largely one of signal intelligence. Not exclusively; human intelligence has played its part, and so, latterly, have photographic and surveillance intelligence. In principle, however, it is the unsuspected