The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939 45

Its chief, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, who was regarded for decades after the war as an important personality and even as a hero of the Resistance to Hitler, was in reality a temporiser who lacked both the moral courage to challenge the Nazis whom he despised, and the skills to run an effective secret service in their interests.

The first man to grasp this was not a German, but a young English historian with a disdain for mankind in general, and professional secret service officers in particular. The manner in which Hugh Trevor-Roper became not the nemesis of Canaris, but instead his shadow, is one of the more remarkable stories of the secret war.

The brilliant, testy, supremely arrogant Oxford don who, while not homosexual, professed a deep dislike of women, had just written his first book, a study of Archbishop Laud which he often reread during the war years: “I am forever discovering yet more exquisite beauties, lurking unsuspected among yet profounder truths.”

He spent the years between 1940 and 1945 monitoring the wireless traffic of the Abwehr, first for MI5 then for MI6. Trevor-Roper lived and breathed Canaris and his organisation, except on days when he went foxhunting. In growing degree, and comprehensively from 1943 onwards, the English academic learnt more about Germany’s intelligence services than any man in the Nazi high command knew.

In December 1939 Hugh Trevor-Roper, then 25, was summoned from Merton College to work alongside Walter Gill, a lecturer in electricity who had achieved celebrity as college bursar by installing lighting in Merton’s quadrangles. During the First World War “Gilly” had served in an army wireless section in Egypt, where he ran an aerial up the Great Pyramid. He listed his recreations in Who’s Who as riding, wireless research and “rebuking sin”.

Now he and Trevor-Roper formed the nucleus of the Radio Security Service (RSS), a branch of MI5 initially quartered in the cells at Wormwood Scrubs. Day after day, post office operators, previously employed to catch unlicensed private wireless transmissions, scoured the airwaves for signals from enemy agents transmitting from Britain, whom it would then be the role of the Merton pair to scotch.

Gill and Trevor-Roper found themselves frustrated by the emptiness of the ether, or rather by the absence of such traffic as they sought. They were failing, so it seemed. Only slowly did they come to understand that this was not because their own eavesdroppers were incompetent, but because no German spies were signalling home.

Finding their original function redundant, on their own initiative the two dons widened their researches: they began to gather intercepts from stations in Europe that used known Abwehr callsigns. One evening, in the flat they shared in the west London suburb of Ealing, over tea and biscuits they cracked an Abwehr hand-cipher — a lower encryption system used by Canaris’s bases for communications with out-stations and agents lacking Enigma machines. Trevor-Roper, a fluent German linguist, started to read its messages.

When this came to the notice of Alastair Denniston, chief of Bletchley Park, he was not amused. Gill and Trevor-Roper, stubborn and mischievous men both, persisted nonetheless; they were soon reading much of the Abwehr’s traffic with its out-stations. To the dons’ glee, even when Bletchley established its own cell to monitor the same Canaris links, it was RSS which broke the next four hand-ciphers.

MI6 eventually made a successful takeover bid for RSS, which was logical, given its suzerainty over signals intelligence. Trevor-Roper found himself working with one of the secret service’s more exotic figures, Colonel Richard Gambier-Parry. The colonel was one of many luminaries of “secret shows” who was able to exploit to his own advantage their freedom from accountability to a service hierarchy.

Gambier-Parry established MI6’s communications centre at Whaddon Hall in Buckinghamshire, which he also made his personal residence. A keen horseman, he took over the prewar owner’s pack of hounds and placed the huntsmen on MI6’s payroll; on one notable occasion, the hounds in hot pursuit streamed through the security gate of Bletchley Park. Gambier-Parry lived like a medieval baron.

Trevor-Roper, who knew him as a fellow-foxhunter, marvelled: “In the world of neurotic policemen and timid placemen who rule the secret service, he moves like Falstaff, or some figure from Balzac, if not Rabelais.” It should be added that for the rest of the war Gambier-Parry ran MI6’s communications with energy and flair.

While MI6 chiefs believed that their enemies’ intelligence officers were wizards of guile, from an early stage Trevor-Roper became convinced of the Germans’ institutional incompetence. As for the Abwehr’s chief, he said, far from being a master spy, Canaris was a lost little man drifting on the tides of fate.

Admiral Wilhelm Canaris came from a family of Rhineland industrialists. After service as a U-boat officer in the First World War he became engaged in right-wing politics, while playing a role in rebuilding the German navy. During the early years of Hitler’s rule he ingratiated himself enthusiastically and successfully with the foremost Nazis. In 1935, aged 48, he was appointed chief of Germany’s intelligence service.

The admiral’s early years of office saw a dramatic expansion of his empire; he achieved a reputation for administrative efficiency and diplomatic skills, both in his handling of the Nazi hierarchy and in dealing with prominent foreigners. Until at least 1942, the service’s prestige stood high both inside Germany and abroad.

Canaris was instinctively secretive, even before he became a spymaster, and more so thereafter. Within the rambling warren of offices in a row of converted mansions on Berlin’s Tirpitzufer, where the Abwehr had its headquarters until it was bombed out in 1943, he seemed to glide almost invisibly from one room to another. So he did too on his frequent travels to other countries, especially Spain: a signed portrait of Franco, its dictator, adorned his office wall.

He seldom wore uniform — an oddity in Nazi society, which was obsessed with fancy dress. He was elaborately courteous, not least to subordinates, and something of a hypochondriac who took too many pills. He relaxed by riding regularly and playing a smart game of tennis. His passion for animals was much remarked: he was followed around Abwehr headquarters by two dachshunds, to which he talked constantly. One of them once fell ill while Canaris was visiting Italy, and he telephoned at length to Berlin to discuss its condition. His Italian companions assumed that he was speaking in code about great issues of state.

The Abwehr quickly became Canaris’s personal fiefdom. The agents his officers dispatched to gather information abroad were almost all unfit for the role. It is odd that Berlin never attempted to recruit spies to dispatch to Britain who might have passed for gentlemen.

Even in 1940, the accent and manners of the upper class remained a passport to social acceptance in Churchill’s embattled island. The writer Cyril Connolly wrote an angry letter to the New Statesman complaining that when he himself was detained as a possible spy, he was immediately released when it was discovered that he had been educated at Eton.

The experience of the Cambridge Spies, deemed beyond suspicion as members of the upper-middle class, suggests that if the Abwehr had dispatched to Britain a few Nazis with passable table manners and some skill as flycasters or grouse-shooters, they would have been asked to all the best houses.

As it was, however, German secret operations abroad deployed immense labour for negligible results. The Hungarian air force officer Count László Almásy, for instance, crossed 2,000 miles of North African desert to deliver two agents to Egypt in May 1942, a remarkable achievement, and Almásy later inspired the novel and film The English Patient, though its version of this enthusiastic Nazi was fanciful. His passengers, however, did nothing on arrival to justify their epic journey.

Nearer home, it became increasingly clear to the British monitoring the Abwehr’s wirelessed reports that its network of overseas stations and informants produced almost nothing that was both new and true.

For several decades after the war, Canaris was treated as a major figure of the era. The foremost element in the Canaris mythology was a claim that he had been a secret crusader against Hitler, who had given active assistance to the Allied cause.

It is now plain that such claims were unfounded. Until 1938 Canaris was an ardent supporter of the Nazis, and for years thereafter Hitler frequently used him as a personal emissary abroad. The admiral worked amicably with Reinhard Heydrich. The two families socialised: Frau Canaris and the executive planner of the Holocaust sometimes played the violin together.

From 1939 onwards, the admiral became increasingly gloomy and nervous — colleagues noted him drinking heavily. Trevor-Roper regarded it as an absurd delusion that Canaris was the directing brain of “the other Germany”. The Abwehr’s chief, in his view, was a man of limited gifts, who confined his anti-Nazi activities to making his organisation a haven for officers who shared his rising distaste for Hitler and his supporters.

Yet if Canaris bears much responsibility for the shortcomings of Germany’s “big picture” intelligence, he could never have run an honest operation under the dead hand of Hitler, any more than Moscow Centre could do so in the shadow of Stalin.

Reports on the condition and prospects of the enemy were permitted to reach conclusions only within parameters acceptable to the Führer. This crippling constraint was symbolised by Hitler’s annotation on an important intelligence report about Russian agricultural conditions: “This cannot be.”

Hitler never wished to use intelligence as a planning or policy-making tool. The Nazis were strikingly incurious about Abroad. It was only when Hitler’s armies started losing that hard questions began to be asked about the Reich’s abysmal political and strategic intelligence. Canaris fell from grace, though it was by then far too late — probably impossible — to repair his corrupt and ineffective espionage organisation.

©Max Hastings 2015 Extracted from The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939-45, to be published by William Collins on September 10 at £30

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