Krueger's Men by Lawrence Malkin Read Free Book Online Page B

defected five years later. These tactics can be traced to the ancient world, when the Greek city-states forged enemy silver coins in base metals. They persist today in the rogue nation North Korea, which has been printing bogus American hundred-dollar bills since the 1970s on a press purchased from a Swiss company.
    Churchill himself received a polite put-down from Simon in less than a fortnight. Addressing his Admiralty colleague in his own hand on October 4, 1939, the nation’s chief financial officer informed “My dear Winston” that the Treasury had carefully examined his idea, “and I am bound to say that, on balance, I think the Noes have it.”
    John Simon was an intelligent but indecisive lawyer who sometimes made marginal comments on his official papers in Latin verse. (When Churchill succeeded Chamberlain, Simon was kicked upstairs to be lord chancellor, the head of the judiciary.) Simon enclosed a closely argued memorandum based on the thinking of Ralph Hawtrey, the Treasury’s chief economist. First of all, Hawtrey warned, dropping counterfeit reichsmarks would discredit Britain politically in the eyes of neutral nations. On a practical level, the memo continued, “the difficulty with forged currency always is to introduce it into circulation.” Further, in a totalitarian society anyone trying to spend such a windfall would come under immediate suspicion, so most of the notes would be turned in, and the operation would therefore offer little hope of debasing the enemy’s currency. If the Germans nevertheless decided to retaliate by dropping counterfeit pounds, “we could then cry quits, except the discredit would apply to us.” The Treasury mandarins played their own version of three-dimensional chess with the idea for half a year, but Hawtrey seems to have made the decisive move in a memo to his Treasury colleague David Waley in April 1940: “It strikes me that this is a game at which two can play, and we’re probably not the best at it.”
    Churchill’s suggestion had not been the only one. Bright ideas had begun streaming into Whitehall as soon as war was declared on September 3, 1939. The first to reach the Treasury was prompted by news of leaflet raids over Germany. On September 6, Robert Chapman, a retired colonel, wrote his MP from his home in rural Sunderland with a proposal to scatter large amounts of counterfeit marks in low denominations “to cause consternation and help to get the [German] people into a state of unsettlement and fear.” He conceded that the Germans might retaliate but remained confident that it would be far more difficult for the Germans to duplicate the high-quality paper of British banknotes. Chapman’s letter landed on Waley’s desk, and he circulated it in the department. One Treasury man, quivering with such outrage that his signature is deemed illegible by the official archivist, commented, “War may be war, but I should have thought we should not indulge in this sort of business.” The following day, a noncommittal reply was dispatched to Colonel Chapman assuring him that “all suggestions from any quarter are always welcome.” Across the Treasury’s file copy in a neat hand, another official harrumphed: “Ingenious but not British.”
    Indeed. In Brussels, a friend of the British ambassador coyly signing his letter “A Belgian ‘neutral,’” urged his British friends to wage the war against Hitler “with imagination.” He proposed an airborne mechanism, complete with automatic timer, to scatter packets of counterfeit reichsmarks at one-mile intervals. Not surprisingly, Britain’s Ministry of Economic Warfare weighed in with its own proposal, and so did the chief of the secret service, Stewart Menzies, an elderly and not particularly competent superspy whose network was riddled with Soviet agents. For more than a year, other complex schemes to undermine German currency arrived from patriotic worthies in the best neighborhoods of London and retired