Alan Judd

We are familiar with the myths and realities of French resistance and German occupation, but less so with the story of Belgian resistance. It was highly creditable, spanning both world wars, and has long deserved to be better known. This book should help ensure that it is. The title refers to the legend of the White Lady – la Dame Blanche – whose appearance was said to herald the downfall of the Hohenzollerns, the Kaiser’s dynasty. The name was adopted by a network of 1,084 Belgians who spied for MI6 against the country’s German occupiers during the first world war. According to MI6’s authorised history, this ‘became the most successful single British human intelligence operation’ of that war.

More than half a century ago Palestinian terrorists stormed the 1972 Munich Olympics, murdering two of the Israeli team and taking another nine hostage. The West German authorities, ill-equipped to deal with such incidents, agreed to fly the terrorists and their hostages to Egypt. Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, offered to mount a rescue operation. The Germans launched their own, resulting in the deaths of a police officer, four of the seven terrorists and all the hostages.    One consequence was the Israeli government’s Operation Wrath of God, a programme to assassinate any leaders or planners associated with the massacre.

Plutarch says that Julius Caesar dined with friends the day before he was assassinated. When conversation turned to considering the best way to die, Caesar looked up from the papers he was signing (being in company never stopped him working) and said, without hesitation: ‘Unexpectedly.’ Thanks partly to Shakespeare, Caesar’s has a claim to be one of the two or three best known historical assassinations. Another, plausibly argued here by Simon Ball as one of the most consequential, was that of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, precipitating the first world war. Without it, the past century might have been unrecognisably different.

Vasili Mitrokhin was a KGB colonel smuggled out of Russia by MI6 in the early 1990s with a treasure trove of notes from the KGB’s archive. The resulting 3,500 CI reports (CI meaning counter-intelligence – information about hostile spies) identified 1,000 KGB agents around the world and were shared with 36 countries. The CIA rated it ‘the biggest CI bonanza of the post-war period’, while the FBI described as ‘the most detailed and extensive pool of CI ever received’. The story behind it was as remarkable as the haul itself. Gordon Corera’s fluent narrative draws on many sources, including the magisterial two-volume Mitrokhin Archive compiled by the historian Christopher Andrew and Mitrokhin himself.

MI6’s historical archive suffered disastrous weeding on grounds of space from the 1920s onwards. One of many mysteries was the identity of a 1930s/40s agent referred to cryptically in surviving papers as ‘C’s German source’ (C being the chief of MI6). Now, as a result of indefatigable research, Tim Willasey-Wilsey has established who the man was who almost uniquely reported on the thinking of Hitler’s pre-war inner circle. In the course of this the author may also have resolved the origin of the notorious Zinoviev Letter, believed by many in the Labour party to have lost them the 1924 general election.   William Sylvester de Ropp, a baron usually known as Bill de Ropp, was a Lithuanian Balt, born in 1886.

You need only mild interest in the second world war to be aware of the Arctic convoys of 1941-45, escorted by the Royal Navy through savage weather and unimaginable cold to deliver supplies to Russia. Their purpose was to keep Russia in the war; the conditions were such that storms could last nine days, blowing ships hundreds of miles apart and playing havoc with communications. That’s not to mention enemy action by submarine, air attack and large surface raiders such as the Tirpitz and Scharnhorst. Some 4.5 million tons of aid were delivered at the expense of 119 ships and 2,763 lives lost.  Was it worth it? Opinion at the time was divided.

‘Biffy’ Dunderdale (1899-1991) was a legend in his own lifetime within MI6. Born in Odessa to an Austrian countess and a British trader representing Vickers, his cosmopolitan upbringing endowed him with English, Russian, German, Turkish, French and Polish. His real first name was Wilfred, Biffy being acquired through youthful handiness with his fists. Biffy played an important role in smuggling the Polish copy of the Enigma cipher machine to London Education and family connections made him intimate with prominent Levantine trading families such as the Whittalls, Keuns and La Fontaines. Members of each served with him in MI6 and two into modern times.

In September 1978 Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian émigré writer, waited at a bus stop on Waterloo Bridge on his way to work at the BBC World Service. Feeling a sting in his right thigh, he looked round to see the man behind him picking up his apparently fallen umbrella. The man apologised in a foreign accent and hastily crossed the road where he hailed a taxi. Markov felt feverish that night, was admitted to hospital and within four days was dead. ‘The bastards poisoned me,’ he told doctors, as they struggled to identify what was wrong with him. ‘The bastards poisoned me,’ Markov told doctors, as they struggled to identify what was wrong with him What was wrong was ricin, a poison with no antidote.

Those of us who have never endured occupation can find it difficult to judge the behaviour of some who have. The lines between survival, passive cooperation and active collaboration are not always clear. Following the second world war, the myths of resistance, especially in France, were deliberately inflated in order to hide the humiliation and deep wounds occasioned by collaboration, which was far more widespread. Understandably sometimes; you may take risks for yourself, but when it’s your family who may be butchered, decisions are harder. It’s not only the unoccupied who find judgments difficult. As Ian Buruma demonstrates in his informed and perceptive commentary, it can be equally difficult for those who were there.

In February 1941 four US officers were landed from a British warship at Sheerness, bundled into vehicles and driven to Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, a large redbrick house amid wartime huts. They were greeted at midnight by the head of Bletchley with sherry, whisky being in short supply. They carried with them a secret device called the Purple Machine, which deciphered previously impregnable Japanese communications. In return, they were given full details of Bletchley’s breaking of the German Enigma cipher. Yet it would be another ten months before the US entered the war.

If MI5 had a Cold War file on you – paper in those happy days – it didn’t mean they thought you were a spy. Nor even that you were especially interesting. Files were a means of storing and retrieving information. They could be general subject files or personal files (PFs) relating to individuals. Some PF holders were secretly investigated, but many were merely monitored – i.e. information about them was collated until it was clear there was no need for further investigation. Following their seizure of power in Russia in 1917, the avowed mission of the Soviet government was to foment worldwide revolution in order to impose communism. MI5 was tasked with investigating, monitoring and – within the law – preventing subversion.

This very readable account of relations between the British intelligence services and the Crown does more than it says on the tin. Although subtitled ‘Spying and the Crown, from Victoria to Diana’, it quite properly begins with Queen Elizabeth I and the intelligence network masterminded by Francis Walsingham, whom MI6 regard as their historical progenitor. It also quite properly makes the point that ‘spies and royal statecraft were episodic and opportunistic partners’. Unlike other major powers, Britain had no permanent intelligence services until 1909. There weren’t even any permanent military intelligence organisations until the late 19th century.

In carefree days which now seem so distant we used occasionally to take the Newhaven-Dieppe ferry. Docking after a long lunch, I would try to imagine the port during the infamous Dieppe Raid of August 1942. It is so clearly a natural defensive position that I could never work out how they expected to take it or, more importantly, why. This book sets out to answer both questions and, thanks to the release of previously classified wartime files, largely succeeds. It also throws new light on Ian Fleming, who was there. Dieppe in those days was intensively fortified by the Germans, flanked by heavy guns on the cliffs. Just about every inch of the docks was covered by concealed machine guns and cannon, including a captured French tank.

Between 1923 and 1931 the publisher Routledge produced ‘Today and Tomorrow’, a series of 110 short books by intellectual luminaries of the time who were asked to imagine the future 50 to 100 years hence. The writers included Bertrand Russell, his wife Dora, J.B.S. Haldane, C.E.M. Joad, Sylvia Pankhurst, Robert Graves, Winifred Holtby, Basil Liddell Hart and Vera Brittain. The titles ranged between Science and the Future, An Anatomy of Clothes, The Conquest of Cancer, Women and Knowledge, The Future of War, The Future of the Jews, The Future of Humour, The World, the Flesh and the Devil, The Problem of Race and The Price of Justice. Those announced but never published included The Future of Sex by Rebecca West and The Future of Traffic in Women by H. Wilson Harris.

It is sometimes said that intelligence failures are often failures of assessment rather than collection. This is especially so when the intelligence is unwelcome or unfashionable. MI6’s first report of prewar Germany’s secret U-boat building programme was withdrawn from circulation at the request of the Foreign Office, reluctant to alarm Whitehall’s appeasers. Action Likely in Pacific exemplifies that tendency in spades.

These two refreshingly concise books address the same question from different angles: how should we deal with Russia? Mark Galeotti focuses on Vladimir Putin himself, his background, aims, tactics and strategy (if any).  Andrew Monaghan takes a wider approach, analysing Russia’s strengths and weaknesses, its self-image, its perceptions and misperceptions of us, ditto ours of it. Both argue that relations between Russia and the West suffer because we are sometimes prisoners of our own preconceptions. Monaghan describes what he calls the two-part security dilemma, a problem firstly of interpretation and secondly of response.

Awareness of German opposition to Hitler is usually limited to Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg’s attempt to blow up the wretched man on 20 July 1944. Hitler was at a briefing in his Wolf’s Lair, a secret forested redoubt, when Stauffenberg entered the room with his briefcase bomb (containing British plastic explosive), placing it beneath the table where Hitler was due to sit. Stauffenberg withdrew, pleading an urgent call, but the unsuspecting subordinate who took his place moved the briefcase further under the table and away from Hitler. Standing and smoking by his car, Stauffenberg — a one-armed, eye-patched veteran of the North African and Russian campaigns — watched as the wooden briefing hut erupted with a flash and roar.