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Anthony Tucker-Jones, "The Secret War: Spies, Lies and the Art of Deception in World War II" (Sirius, 2025)
01:41:47
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- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
B
Hello. Welcome to the New Books Network. I am your host, Stephen Sikevich. My next guest is Anthony Tucker Jones, and we will be discussing his book, the Secret Spies, Lies, and the Art of Deception in World War II, published by Sirius in 2025. Anthony Tucker Jones, a former intelligence officer, is an author, commentator, and writer who specializes in military history. He has written more than 50 books, as well as several hundred features online and in print. Anthony Tucker Jones, welcome once again back to the New Books Network.
- [01:42]
C
Hi, Stephen. Thank you very much for having me back.
- [01:45]
B
Yes, I think this is our fourth or fifth interview we've had on the podcast.
- [01:50]
C
Yeah, I kind of lost track of my school head.
- [01:54]
B
So have I. But you're. You're always welcome to come back onto the podcast, but as you know from probably previous interviews, we always like to begin by asking you, tell us a little bit about yourself and what's the backstory behind this book.
- [02:12]
C
Well, as I'm sure people have seen us together before, I'm an English military historian. I've had, at last count, about 70 books published. So quite an embarrassing number. So I'm quite prolific. I'm fascinated by all elements of military history, but sort of in recent years, I've kind of focused on the Second World War, largely because that's what Publishers, certainly in the uk, tend to like, in terms of my latest book that we're going to discuss in a minute, which is the, you know, the secret war. The background to that really is I've always been fascinated by what goes on behind the lines. So for most military historians, the focus tends to be the war on land, air and sea, which we would consider the front line. So Battle of the Atlantic or the naval war in the Pacific, or fighting on the land in North Africa or Europe, or the strategic bomber campaign against Germany and Japan. So those kind of the spearhead end of things, if you like. But there's actually, around the globe, there's been a war going on, very complex things going on, principally, of course, on the intelligence front. So there's this constant intelligence gathering and counterintelligence going on. But you've also got. So famously, everyone's pretty much familiar, I think, with Bletchley park and cracking the Enigma codes. So there's the sort of sigging war going on. There's also the sort of spy war going on. There's also a deception and disinformation war going on. And then actually on the ground behind the lines, of course, there's guerrilla and partisan conflicts going on, of which are really widespread. I mean, before I started writing this book, I don't think I'd realized how much guerrilla warfare and resistance activity was going on around the world. So typically, certainly in Europe, we tend to think of. If you say resistance, you tend to think of France or guerrilla warfare, you'll think of the Balkans. But actually, in the Far east, there was a lot of resistance, Japanese as well. So there's these sort of widespread guerrilla wars going on. And then at the same time, to confuse matters, you've got various nationalist organizations who side with the Germans or the Japanese, so you end up having civil wars going on as well inside the occupying territories. So my aim with the book was sort of just to try and give the reader a general introduction and a snapshot to the complexities of what I've called the secret war. Because it's kind of an element that. That people aren't, on the whole, that familiar with.
- [04:50]
B
Yeah. Now, what kind of. What kind of sources were you able to consult for this book?
- [04:56]
C
Well, as you can imagine, because it's pretty broad brush, the focus tended to be on things like spy memoirs, histories of Bletchley Polk, that sort of thing. So it is pretty. Pretty broad, you know, broad brush in terms of source material.
- [05:11]
B
Now, I think we might have had this discussion at the end of one of our previous interviews. But could World War II be considered almost like a golden age of espionage? Because often the Cold War gets the most attention, and for obvious reasons, but a lot of that from the Cold War, and a lot of the participants in the Cold War, they got their early experiences during World War II. Ian Fleming, of course, the author of the James Bond novels, he was an intelligence officer, I believe, in naval intelligence during World War II. And speaking of James Bond, that's probably the close. World War II is probably the closest you're going to get to like what you see in the Bond novels and the Bond films in actual reality. Would you agree with this assessment?
- [05:57]
C
I think you're right. The. A lot of intelligence disciplines that we know today solidified, if you like, during the Second World War. A lot of the elements were already there. You know, things like SIGINT intelligence really had been developed during the First World War. So it was sort of beginning to become a discipline, if you like, by the 1920s. Obviously, spies have always been around, but in terms of signals, I mean, again, a lot of the elements that we would consider today as, you know, sigint, human, all those different disciplines, they kind of come of age, I guess, in the Second World War. But I do sort of caution that we need to be careful because we tend to have this rosy view of, you know, the espionage War during the Second World War, and indeed Special Forces during the Second World War, because an awful lot that could go wrong did go wrong, you know, particularly in terms of things like, you know, during the Cold War, you'd sort of take development spy networks for granted. But certainly during the Second World War, the Allies had to learn the hard way how you did that. So, for example, in France, occupied France in the early days, a lot of the networks were literally networks. So they were made up of friends and family. And of course, you can imagine what would happen if a member of the network is nabbed by the Gestapo and tortured. The entire network is rolled up. So things like operating on a cell level where you'll have three or four people that know each other, but no other part of the organization and that safeguards it. So things like that were developed during the Second World War by trial and error, pretty much. I say France in particular, the opening stages of the German occupation, the Allies were quite successful in gathering information and what have you. They were not so successful in protecting the networks. A lot of them were rolled up by the Germans quite successfully. And indeed, the Germans on the whole, during the Second World War were very good at counterintelligence. So counterespionage, they weren't so good at espionage itself. In fact, I mean, I'm sure we'll come on to this, but something like the double cross, where we turned their agents, we were very good at shutting down their attempts to spy on us. In contrast, the Germans, the Abwehr, and particularly the Gestapo, they were pretty good at rounding up enemy agents and indeed turning them, which is what happened famously in the Netherlands. The SOE had set up this very comprehensive Dutch network which the Germans had unmasked fairly quickly and of course then used it for their own purposes to feed false intelligence back to the uk. I mean, I say that's why the book is called Spies Lies in the Art Deception, because there's a lot of, you know, that's where counterintelligence and counter and espionage comes in. Because of course, what you're using those disciplines, if you like, you're using them actually to misinform your opponent. So quite often they would think they were gathering valuable intelligence, but actually, of course, it's pointing them the wrong direction. And that's deliberate. And again, I'm sure we'll come on to this in a bit, but say those sorts of things are very, very important for major Allied operations during the Second World War, particularly in terms of something like the invasion of Sicily or the invasion of Normandy. By that point, the Allies really have got the art of deception off to fine art. They've really become very good at deceiving the Axis as to what their true intentions are.
- [09:25]
B
Now, I know this is a little bit of a broad question, but as much as possible, what overall role did espionage play the Second World War? Like, what role did it play in relation to the military aspects of the conflict?
- [09:42]
C
It's quite difficult to quantify it, really. I mean, I say that in the book and when I, you know, I mean everything, and I mean, you know, in terms of the guerrilla war, the espionage war, the scientific war, all the elements that contributed to secret war, it's difficult to gauge its overall effect because of its very nature. The irony is, what it did do quite often was it aggravated the creation of police states. As we know that the Axis countries were totalitarian regimes which were pretty much police states. But of course, once they became ever more conscious of the presence of Allied agents in their midst, they clamped down even more. And of course, when you do that, that makes particularly occupied territories, it makes the populations more restive and then actually become self defeating. We particularly see that in terms of things the partisan and the guerrilla wars is that the more the Axis forces tried to clamp down on those rebellions, the worse that they made the situation. But in terms of something like Bletchley Park, I mean, it said cracking of the Enigma and Lorenz code actually probably reduced the war by up to two years. So can you imagine if the end of the Second World war had been 1947? So they. A lot of the results are quite intangible because it's difficult to quantify what they did. But the important thing is all those elements actually help contribute towards an Allied victory. Going back to my original point, our focus tends to be it's the fighting on the ground, the air or on the sea, because that's where we can see victories or defeats. But the intelligence war and the secret wars actually feeding into that all the time, particularly with Bletchley. And of course, Bletchley gets all the credit, which is unfair because America had its own decrypting service. The Australians played their role as well. So there were lots of other organizations. The Germans did it as well, actually. I mean, they eavesdropped, so did the Italians, so did the Japanese. But the outcome of what they were doing did not have quite such a fundamental impact on the war as, I think, Bletchley park, which is the, you know, the. The British cipher school, cipher and signal school.
- [11:57]
B
Now, we could just get into some of the. What were the major intelligence agencies on the Allied side? Let's start with the British, of course. They kind of get a lot of the attention since they did a lot of the work during the early part of the war.
- [12:11]
C
Well, obviously at home in the UK, we've got the famous ones. So you've got MI5, which is the security service, which job was counterintelligence, so domestic security within. Within the British Isles. You've then got MI6, Special Intelligence Service, which is the overseas element of Britain's intelligence effort. So their job was to collect information on foreign powers. Obviously, you've got the signals and cipher school, Bletchley park as well. They're contributing to Britain's eavesdropping effort. And again, we can discuss this in more detail, but the scope and scale of their work is much more vast than people tend to realize. It was global in its efforts. And then, of course, again, famously for Britain, we have the establishment of the Special Operations Executive, so soe, which sort of becomes the sort of clandestine British overseas war effort, if you like. And that's set up to help foster, eroding the access war effort within the occupied Territories, you know, its principal role is to try and ensure Nazi Germany doesn't benefit from, you know, captured her factories within the occupied zone. It's designed to help foster rebellion so, you know, support things like the French Resistance and the resistance and the other European occupied countries and also foster rebellion again in the Balkans. So, you know, famously in Yugoslavia and Greece, where the Germans and the Italians ended up with pretty much full scale war on their hands behind the lines. In America, obviously, you know, you've got the domestic, so FBI, your version of MI5 if you like, and then you've got set up. Oh God, what's called oss, you know, which is created again to support American intelligence operations abroad and is pretty much the American version of the soe. And of course the, with the British armed forces and with the American armed forces, because they've all got their own intelligence bodies as well. And certainly in the uk, the sort of overarching organization was something called the jic. So the Joint Intelligence Committee, which operated in Whitehall and that was designed to sit above all the intelligence agencies and coordinate their efforts. And I think that's certainly one of the edges that the Allies have, and particularly Britain in the early part of the war is it does do a fairly good job of coordinating all these various bodies and ensuring that they're playing to the same hymn sheet, if you like. And the Germans, you know, they have a plethora of organizations, but the coordination of them is pretty bad, largely because they operate on a divide and rule basis, because it's easier to keep them apart because then there's no one in the ascendancy all the time. And it's the same with the Japanese, actually, and the Italians, that there's a sort of. There's not really a central body. They have lots of different organizations for intelligence, counterintelligence and for signals intelligence, but the coordination of them is quite poor. And I think that's certainly. And then obviously once America's in the war, you've got the Joint Chiefs of Staff. So of course they then sit over the Allied intelligence gathering operations to try and ensure that all that's dovetailed, if you like, that it's working together. Because one of the problems you have historically, of course, is you have turf wars in that the Navy don't want to give up their intelligence collecting activities, nor do the army, nor do the air forces. So it's quite important to get everyone together and make sure it's coordinated. I mean, I think famously in terms of a famous intelligence failure, of course, Pearl harbor is right up there, you know, because it's not that America did not receive the warning signs. It's just the fact that the intelligence community was not joined up enough to make sure the, you know, the warnings reached, you know, Pacific Fleet cnc, Admiral Kimmel. He just didn't receive it. And that wasn't deliberate. It was just the fact, the way, you know, certainly in the Pacific, all intelligence, encrypted intelligence had to be sent back to the States to be deciphered. Of course, that then took time to decipher it and then had to be sent back to Hawaii. All that took time. And quite often it wasn't disseminated amongst the relevant commands. So you can see how coordination of intelligence effort is very, very important, because otherwise it just leads to chaos and in certain instances, of course, really bad intelligence failures. Or you can have examples where intelligence failures are deliberate. And again, we can come on to this. But something like Operation Barbarossa. Stalin knew full well that Hitler was going to attack him, but that did not fit his narrative, so he avoided it. He was getting intelligence from us, he was getting intelligence from his own services, from the NKVD and the gru. So they're the Soviet bodies, intelligence bodies. He was getting warnings from those, but he chose to ignore them. So in that instance, it wasn't the fact he didn't get the intelligence, it just didn't fit his narrative that Hitler actually was carrying out a bluff against Britain and Churchill to try and get Churchill to lure his guard, because the bulk of the Wehrmacht were moving east, actually. Well, they weren't going to attack. Well, this is what he told Stalin. Obviously, they weren't going to attack the Soviet Union. They were just trying to lull Britain into a full sense of security, which, of course is not true, but Stalin chose to believe that and then chose to ignore perfectly good and sound intelligence of what was about to happen.
- [17:50]
B
Yes, and Soviet intelligence networks were very extensive during this time because you had the nkvd, you had the gru, which was the military intelligence, and then later on, you had smersh, which was counterintelligence. And it literally meant death to spies in Russian.
- [18:08]
C
Again, the Soviets obviously have got a plethora of organizations. Those are the ones you just mentioned, are the three key ones. And in many ways, particularly the NKVD, of course, that's if you like, actually GRU's sort of doing overseas stuff. NKVD is really designed for counterintelligence internally and also, of course, stamping out any opposition from the populations within the Soviet Union. So it's a domestic security apparatus, but actually the NKVD also carried out overseas operations. And then, like Smush now, which is famously Death to Spies, again, was designed for counterintelligence. And these organizations, again, were not terribly well joined up because, of course, particularly in the Soviet Union, all the heads of those various organizations were always vying for power. And Stalin's ear, although, of course, quite often being in charge of those organizations could be a death sentence, because, famously, when the Second World War broke out, General Golikov, who was in charge of the GRU and again had really good intelligence about what Hitler was about. I think I'm going from memory here. But he was something like the sixth person in recent years to be appointed head of the gru. So those sorts of jobs could be real poison chalices. The irony with Golikov is he ended up agreeing with Stalin rather than convincing Stalin of the threat. He knew that it was best to tell the boss. You know, Stalin was known to tell the boss what he wanted to hear, which, of course, when it came to people like Marshal Timoshenko, who was in charge of the army, and, you know, General Zhukov, who's chief of staff, again, they knew that invasion was imminent along with Golikov. But Stalin's going, no, don't believe it. It's a bluff. And to make matters worse, Stalin despised despised spies. You know, he thought that they were traitors. Didn't matter which side you were on, he just thought they were the lowest of the low. So, again, didn't really want to trust information coming from spies. And that's one of the big failures that Churchill had, was that Bletchley park had deciphered German intentions about Operation Barbarossa. So Churchill warned Stalin and said, look, we've got intelligence that an attack is imminent, but obviously didn't want to tip off Stalin that Britain was reading German ciphers, that he'd cracked Enigma. He didn't want the Soviets to know that. So when Stalin wanted to know where that intelligence had come from, of course Churchill told him he gave the worst possible excuse. Churchill told Stalin that they had come from a British spy network, which, again, of course, did not engender Stalin's confidence in the veracity and the information. You can understand why after the Soviet. Sorry, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the Wehrmacht gets the very doors of Moscow, you can understand why Stalin locked himself in his office in the Kremlin and almost had a nervous breakdown because the truth had been staring him in the face and he simply did not want to accept it. The other reason, of course, he locked himself away at the Kremlin was that he seriously feared there'd be a coup. You know, that he'd allow the Soviet Union to be brought to his knees. The Red army and other members of his inner court, they would replace him. You know, it was time for new leadership. So for a while, he sweated on top lines, fearing that there'd be a knock on his office door and the AKVD would turn up and arrest him and, you know, he would be replaced. But as we know, that wasn't the case. But, yes, you can see the challenges, though, that wartime leaders had when it came to assessing the veracity of intelligence. And also, of course, you know, you were referencing Nicole Wars. Both you and I will know source protection is paramount. In fact, that source protection comes over and above quite often disseminating the intelligence, because you don't want to compromise the fact that you've got a spy network. You don't want to compromise the fact that you've cracked Japanese novel codes or that you've cracked Japanese, the purple code, the diplomatic one. You don't want to give that away. Because the minute, the minute the enemy is aware that you have, you know, you've breached their security, they will change the nature of their codes. I mean, the Germans famously did that with the Enigma machines. They kept changing the number of rotors, which, particularly the Battle of the Atlantic, caused the Allies unending problems because every time they changed the ciphers, the wheels on the machine, the Allies would then be back to scratch and would have to crack that, that, that new version of Enigma. So you can see why source protection is, is paramount. But at the same time, of course, you then have a credibility gap. Do people believe what they're being told? In the famous case of Stalin, who just didn't want to believe it, yes.
- [23:06]
B
There is one famous story, I know, where he was presented with intelligence about the German invasion and he literally wrote over the report, like, tell your source to go F his mother.
- [23:19]
C
Yeah, because again, he usually felt spies were doing it for money and therefore they wanted to sell you something sexy, if you like, something really important, something earth shattering, so it would make it up. And I think his mindset was that he believed that. Now, I think as the war progressed, he suddenly realized actually the value of intelligence. And that, of course, becomes paramount for Red army operations when it comes to Kursk or Stalingrad. Intelligence then becomes really, really important. But of course, we need to remember that Stalin and the rest of the court, or the Red Czar, they lived in this atmosphere of paranoia all the time because no one felt safe because it was a police state. So of course that thereby undermined their confidence in anything that they were being told at any one time. So it wasn't a healthy state of affairs to be, to be in. I mean, I think that's why the Western Allies probably did better when it came to their, you know, their intelligence gathering and the deception operations. A, they were joined up, but also they had greater faith in what they were doing.
- [24:23]
B
Now moving over to the Axis side, we did talk a little bit about the Germans, how they had several different intelligence, and probably the two big ones was the Abwehr, which was the military or the normal military intelligence. But then there was also the SD under Heydrich, which was kind of the Nazi party SS intelligence network. And then subordinated to the SS was the Gestapo, which primarily was about counterintelligence, I believe, because that was the secret police in Nazi Germany.
- [24:55]
A
Correct.
- [24:57]
C
Again, you know, the Germans had a, they had a, a plethora of SIGINT gambling organizations. So the army had one, the air force and the navy, but they were not joined up. That was the disaster for the Germans is that they didn't pull their eavesdropping capabilities into one area. They were kind of all did separate things. There were about a dozen or so German organizations that collected SIGINT and telephone and postal intelligence, but they were not joined up. And then likewise, you're right, the Abwehr, which was the intelligence for the Wehrmacht, so the armed forces, so the intelligence body that sat at the top of the pile, if you like, then had rivalry with things like the Gestapo, because as you say, they did counterintelligence. So they operated within the occupied territories. Their job was to root out sedition and enemy spies, to stop dissent under Nazi rule and also to track down Nazi spies. So they had that job. And then you also have a plethora of other SS organizations that are doing, doing it at the same time. And again, that's, you know, a bit like the Soviet Union. It's a reflection of the fact that Nazi Germany is a police state which by the beginning of the Second World War had pretty much got control of, you know, obviously in Germany's case, the German population down to a fine art. You know, state control was really good. So what they did was they then rolled that out into the occupied territories. And in fact, the Japanese operated in pretty much the same way. You know, Japan, again, pretty much a, you know, the military is pretty much ruling it in the name of The Emperor. So again, Japan pretty much a police state. And in their instance, of course, they got famously the Kampetai, the Japanese secret police. I mean again, Japan had a whole host of different organizations. You know, the army, the navy, they all had them. The national police force had gone through all these groups, but again, Kampotai is the sort of main one. And as Japan expanded its empire into mainland Asia, obviously behind it came all those intelligence organizations and those police and those counterintelligence organizations to try and damn down any opposition where the Japanese were in control.
- [27:21]
B
And kind of a irony getting back to the Germans is that the Abwehr was run by Admiral Canaris, who later became involved with the resistance against Hitler. But then also even the Gestapo was run by Heinrich Muller, who was not a Nazi. In fact, he was an early opponent of the Nazis. But Reinhard Heydrich, who ran the sd, he kind of saw him as a very competent policeman, so he kept him on board. But he also said, well, you better do your job because we do know what you said about us in the early days. So you either do your job or, you know, your bad things will happen.
- [27:59]
C
You're right. I mean, Canaris, very strange character in that he ran a very, very effective amvir. But you're right at the same time had no faith or loyalty to Hitler and of course famously leaked intelligence to the Allies via Switzerland. So he was kind of playing a double edged game. I mean, it's a shame that Canaris and indeed Muller were not more active in their opposition to Hitler because they might have actually got rid of him. You know, obviously famously you have the bomb, the 20 July bomb pot. But there were at least half a dozen attempts to kill Hitler. But most of those emanated from within the ranks of the German army and in fact, most famously Army Group center operating on the Eastern Front in the Soviet Union. A lot of the plotters had served there at one point or another, you know, they would rotate back to Germany. So a lot bulk of the plotters actually came from within the army rather than the intelligence services, which would have been better, you know, better placed to oppose, to oppose Hitler because it's the same with the general generals. It fell. Gebel, who was in charge of German armed forces communication security, was a vehement anti Nazi. So again actually was working for the Soviet Union. So here's the man that sits on top of the armed forces communications and I think famously was responsible for introducing Enigma. He's also feeding intelligence to the Soviet network in Switzerland on German intentions. So you know, he doesn't matter how you look at it, is a complete traitor and is working for the downfall of Hitler, even if that means the defeat of Soviet Germany. And of course, his contribution becomes quite important in terms of leaking intelligence on the German buildup on the Eastern Front for Kursk, you know, the battle of Kursk, the Germans Operation citadel in 743. He plays his part in helping Stan Tallinn prepare to fend off and indeed defeat Citadel when the time comes.
- [30:15]
B
Would it be fair to say.
- [30:16]
C
Sorry to interrupt. I was just going to say. So you can see how complicated the secret war is because you've actually got people actually betraying their own nation states to further their own what they feel is the right political goal. So within Germany you do have people working fundamentally to undermine the success of the German armed forces. At the same time, you've got all these vicious security organizations who are operating to ensure that doesn't happen by winking out foreign spies and traitors.
- [30:46]
B
Yeah, I was about to say probably compared to. If we compare the Soviets with the Germans at this time, would be fair to say Stalin probably had a little bit more control over his intelligence networks where not even one of the heads were traitors. But yet Hitler, he had Canaris and then he also had the other fellow you just mentioned who was the head of Army Communications Intelligence. He's a Soviet spy, but it seems like Stalin, he kind of had a little bit more of a, of a tight grip on his intelligence.
- [31:16]
C
And also he, he again, you know, despite his dislike for spies and agents, actually had, you know, this thing called the Germans called it this, the Red Orchestra, which was the Soviet spy network across Europe. And then you also have famously the Silver Master Group, which was in America. So Stalin is spying on the access forces. He's also spying on the Western Allies because again, famously, he's got a network in the UK. The Soviets had at least 18 agents operating in Britain during the war, which includes the Cambridge Five. So you've got Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, John Carncross, and of course they are working in the heart of intelligence because respectively, they're MI5, MI6 and in Bletchley park, because again, Carncross, who's a sort of die hard left winger Communist, worked at Bletchley park and leaked decrypts from Bletchley park to his Soviet handler in London, which again helped tip off Stalin when it came to Stalingrad. I mean, one of the things I always found strange with Khancross is how British security was not aware of what he was doing. There is a line of thought that actually maybe the authorities turned a blind eye because he was literally walking out of Bletchley park with decrypts stuffed in his trousers. I mean, he smuggled out documents, you know, he didn't really. I don't think he had a camera, so he couldn't really photograph a lot of it. So he literally smuggled out documents. And it does make you wonder actually whether that. That was a deliberate way of trying to get intelligence to Stalin without Churchill sort of officially doing it, if that makes sense, you know, that it was sort almost a backdoor way of providing him with intelligence. But either way, what it shows is that the Soviets not only were spying on the Axis, but they were also spying on Britain and America at the same time. Because, of course, Stalin wanted to know what Britain and America's intentions were with regard to opening the second front. Stalin was particularly interested in, of course, an American military production capabilities because he wanted to know what America was, you know, could build and would send his way. So there was a lot of industrial and espionage going on in the States, you know, to try and try and form Soviet Union and then likewise, you know, Britain, Britain, to our shame, and I'm sure America did about, you know, Britain was conducting intelligence operations on American soil during the Second World War because it was concerned about America's views on things like Indian nationalism. You know, so Britain, Iran, intelligence operations against Indian nationalists on American soil because a, they were worried about Indian contact with the U.S. government and any official support it might get in the States. And then likewise in India, of course, there's, there's, you know, there was tension between the OSS and the British authorities because it was all right all the time the USS was, you know, helping coordinate operations against the Japanese. What the British authorities didn't want was the OSS liaising with Indian nationalists, which might cause the Raj and British colonial rule problems further down the line. Now, as we know, actually, Britain did have a major problem in India in the summer of 1942 because Gandhi declared quit India. And for a time from a month or so, there was widespread rebellion across India, which of course was at a time when the Allies could ill afford to be worrying about that, when the Japanese were pressing through Burma almost at the gates of India. So you could see why, again, you've got the sort of. The colonial powers are worrying about the impact of the war, you've got America worrying about the impact at the end of war, because obviously Roosevelt famously was not keen on colonialism and didn't want to prop up the British or French empires at the end of the war. So you've got all these, all these tensions going on behind the scenes as well, which again of course is clouding, if you like, the intelligence operations against the enemy, which should actually be the priority.
- [35:28]
B
Not to mention they were all concerned about how Stalin was going to proceed after the war. What was he going to do with his sphere of influence in Europe? I know Churchill was especially very concerned about that.
- [35:41]
C
I mean, obviously the Allies were very, very keen to know what Stalin was doing in terms of, of supporting East European Communist parties, because of course his plan was that once he occupied Eastern Europe, they would end up in government, which of course is famously what happened in Poland once the Red army had liberated Warsaw. And you'll know about this better than I do, once he'd liberated Warsaw, he was going to put the Polish Communist Party in power in Warsaw where they were win an election. And that was going to happen across Eastern Europe. So again, you're right, Britain and America and probably to a lesser extent France were very keen on getting a handle on what the Soviet Union's long term strategic goals were, because that obviously was going to affect peacetime Europe.
- [36:30]
B
Now you did mention this briefly earlier, but if we had to compare the intelligence capabilities of the Allies and the Axis, you kind of mentioned, the Allies were really good at espionage, foreign espionage, the Axis, Texas, and particularly the Germans, they were really good at counter intelligence. Is there anything more you would like to say about this, about how the different sides, what their capabilities were at the time? And I know this is a broad topic.
- [36:57]
C
Yeah, well, I think probably, you know, and I'm generalizing here, but I think the problem that most of the totalitarian states had was they were good at keeping control on a, on a population. They were not quite so good at penetrating enemy territory, if that makes sense. So as I said earlier, because the Axis essentially were police states and the Italians did this as well, obviously in Albania and Libya and Ethiopia, because they were essentially police states. They would roll out that form of totalitarian control into the occupied territories and were pretty good at it. What they were not quite so good at was penetrating Allied soil with agents. The irony is, again, I'm generalizing here. The irony is the Soviet Union was probably more successful penetrating the Western Allies than the Axis forces were because they ended up with networks across Europe, networks in the UK and networks in America. So they were pretty good actually at a global level of spying, whereas the Germans, Italians and Japanese were less so. And certainly in terms of Italy. Well, their empire was fairly diddy because obviously they had Libya, Italian Somaliland and Ethiopia. So their scale of control was not so big, nor was their need to collect intelligence. I mean, obviously for the Italians, their key concern was British naval capabilities in the Mediterranean, because that's where the main rivalry was, obviously between the Italian fleet, which was pretty good. You know, by the outbreak of the Sycamore War. The Italians had a good fleet, but they obviously wanted to know about British naval capabilities, particularly in terms, of course, Italians didn't have any carriers, which was a major drawback for them, nor did they have radar, which was a major drawback for them, which meant that they were pretty much a daylight water navy, because they couldn't, they couldn't operate in the dark. So they immediately had, you know, problems in terms of facing down the Royal Navy. So for them, intelligence gathering was very important. For Japan, again, Japan's same. It was quite good at rolling out, you know, brutal police states within all the territories that it occupied. You know, so Malaya, Singapore, Indochina, you know, Duchess Indies, so Indonesia, Korea, Manchuria, all those places are occupied. It was quite good at establishing police control, but it wasn't quite so good at gathering intelligence because again, famously, the Soviets had, of course, what's his name, Richard Sorgarin, you know, who they had in Japan, who was monitoring Japanese attitudes towards the Soviet Union. Because, of course, Stalin was very concerned that he would end up with a two front war on his hands, particularly once Germany invaded the Soviet Union. And the Soviet Union had already fought a very brief border war at the end of the 1930s. So because Stalin was really keen to be able to withdraw or redeploy Red army divisions that were in Siberia, you know, that were monitoring the border with China and Japan, because obviously Japan was in Manchuria, that created a puppet state there. So Stalin was keen to redeploy those divisions, but he knew he couldn't if there was a danger that the Japanese would attack the Soviet Union again. So Richard Salk was instrumental in trying to sound out Japanese intentions in the early 1940s. And that was crucial for Stalin because he needed to know what Japanese intentions were. And famously, the Japanese had what they called the strike south option or the strike north option. Obviously, the strike north was to strike from Manchuria against the Soviet Union again, or the strike south was to attack the colonial powers. So America, Britain and the Netherlands, the Dutch attack the Philippines in the French, in Indochina and Malaya and Burma and all the rest of it. So they had that option. And once they were in Indochina. And America started clamping down on oil exports to Japan, which Japan desperately needed. And particularly once the Dutch had joined in on that, the Japanese very quickly decided that actually Southeast Asia would be a better war option than going north. So they opted for the go south option and of course famously saved Stalin from fighting a two truck war. But before December 1941, when the Japanese turned south, of course Stalin didn't know and he desperately needed divisions to help defend Moscow, which of course became the case once Pearl Harbors happened. General Zhukov trying to hold Moscow is rapidly reinforced by a large number of divisions from Siberia, who, fortunately for Stalin, were, you know, used to harsh winters out in Siberia, were used to winter combat. You know, they'd been trained, they had cold weather clothing, all that sort of stuff. And they arrived in the nick of time to help save, save Moscow.
- [42:20]
B
Now, on average, who would be recruited into these intelligence agencies on both sides? We'll start with the Allies and then we can get into the Axis. I know this is a broad topic, so try to generalize or on as.
- [42:32]
C
Best on the whole, I mean, across the board, to be frank, they were a bunch of oddballs. You know, you had people do it for a million and one reasons. You know, we mentioned earlier that Stan despised spies because he thought they all did it for the money or some did it for the money, some did it for patriotic reasons, some did it for ideological reasons. If you were a communist, then you would do things that you felt would help the Soviet Union. Some would do it for a sense of adventure, just like the thrill of it. And that was quite often the case with lots of British people that involved or involved with soe, famously, particularly the sas, famously. They were full of mavericks. And the intelligence community, particularly the espionage part of the community, they were very similar. They were full of mavericks. There were people who didn't like walls. They didn't, you know, they could think out of the box. They didn't like the establishment, they didn't like government. They were kind of people who were laws unto themselves, which of course that kind of work, Special forces operations and indeed intelligence and counterintelligence work is. They're ideal for in Civi street, probably most of them are a complete nightmare and end up as political agitators or criminals because again, they ended up with a lot of criminals. Eddie Chapman famously, you know, was a German spy and was turned for the double cross. Well, he was a safecracker, you know, so you had all these people and some people did it to save their necks. You Know, if you're arrested, maybe a way for you not going to prison or concentration camp is to offer your services to become a double or in some cases, of course, triple agents. So there was, we kind of have, I think we sort of have this general view of agents as being sort of some, some sort of, of patriotic superhero because the dangers involved were absolutely enormous. I mean, basically if caught, it's a death sentence, but you're going to be tortured to within an inch of your life before they kill you. You know, so it's really, really dangerous work and you're on your own. So, you know, despite what Hollywood might have, you think no one's coming to the rescue. So if you're compromised in court, that's the end of it. So say it really attracted a very broad brush range of individuals who did it for a whole host of different reasons.
- [44:53]
B
I remember one scholar even said about spies during the Cold War, it's almost like he had to be a real true sociopath to really pull some of the, some of this intelligence work off. Because you would betray people you would know and all that and sometimes you would just do it for like either money or something. Very much so.
- [45:14]
C
Again, famously, you know, in Britain you had the Cambridge Five and they were all die hard communists, you know, so it wasn't until sort of the Cold War that of course that they were unmasked and deemed to be traitors. But at the time they felt the Allies were not doing enough to help the Soviet Union, so took matters into their own hands. So very clearly in their cases, because they were, you know, Cambridge fired because they'd all been to Cambridge University, so very, very intelligent and well educated individuals. So they did what they did for ideological reasons and they took matters into their own hands because they just thought, initially Churchill and then later Roosevelt, they just thought, well, they're not doing enough to help the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union's doing all the heavy lifting because it's no secret that the bulk of the Wehrmacht was engaged on the Eastern front. So they just felt, well, we are in positions of, you know, being able to obtain intelligence that we can pass on to the Soviets. So we're going to do it, which is what they did it. So as, as I say, they did that for, you know, for the communist cause. It wasn't, it wasn't for money or any other reason that they, they truly believed what they were doing was the right thing to do.
- [46:24]
B
Now who were some of the big British spies during the war? I know this is a broad topic but is there any particular stories you'd like to, you know, mention in more detail?
- [46:37]
C
No, I mean, I've got top of my head. Not really. I say certainly in Britain, of course, what we tended to do was recruit your nationality folks. So we quite often have someone that had an English dad, maybe a French mother because they would be fluent French speakers, would know their way around France and if they'd holiday there or they had a second home there, so they could pass themselves off and quite well. Or you quite often have Anglo Frenchmen who'd fled France after the defeat and they would come to the UK and if they were good, bilingual and very convincing in whatever their cover story was, they would be sent back. I say the problem we had in the early days is that the networks were not sealed, which meant once they were compromised, the entire network was rolled up. So in the early days there was running agents. In France in particular, it went bad quite rapidly for a while until we sort of fine tuned how the process should work. And again, you know, the British ones did it for a variety of reasons. Obviously if you're a French emigre and you're in France, you want to do you do your bit from other France or say a lot of them were dual nationality, so wanted to help fault, you know, the country of their mother or their father. The problem with those is of course that sometimes, particularly if they had German ancestry in the family, there was always that concern actually that they could be a double agent and therefore actually would compromise whatever they were being sent to do. I mean, that was always the danger of recruiting any agents is that you didn't really know, you know, I mean a lot. They were all screened, but certainly if their antecedents was not straight, you know, you're born in England, Scotland and Wales and therefore it's, you're fairly confident that they're not a security risk. There was always that risk that actually whoever you recruited could turn out to be a dual edged sword.
- [48:33]
B
Then also there was the famous, the Czech. The Czechoslovakian government in exile organized Operation Anthropoid, which assassinated Reinhard Heydrich, who was the head of the sd. And that kind of code probably caused a lot of disruption in German intelligence. And did the British intelligence know much about that operation or was that kind of kept secret from them?
- [48:57]
C
I'm not terribly knowledgeable on that. On that particular operation. I think we, I think we were, I think we're in the know, but I'm not sure. I mean, again that that's the problem with those sorts of operations. Is lots of the governments in exile took matters into their own hands, you know, so a similar headache for us was Charles de Gaulle and the Free French. Well, de Gaulle set up his own intelligence bureau to collect, you know, intelligence against the Axis. But what that also involved was Frenchmen spying on Frenchmen on British soil because Vichy maintained an embassy and a cons and consulates in Britain because they were technically the free part of France. So of course de Gaulle spied on them. So for MI5, we had a real headache of, you've got Frenchmen smiling on Frenchmen on British soil, which is not really something that you want going on. Particularly, of course, because the Vichy authorities then might complain to London that this is going on and we shouldn't be allowing it. Now, you could argue that Vichy's position was slightly opaque anyway, because it's effectively a puppet state to the Nazis. But, you know, legally and technically, it's. It's supposed to be neutral because it's the rump state, that state, the part that Germany hasn't. Hasn't occupied. So again, you've got that recruiting. I mean, recruiting French agents was a. Was a complete headache because France's political allegiances were all over the place. I mean, you had, you know, a whole range of different political colors. So obviously the French Communists were keen on doing anything that would help the Soviet Union. You had the Vichy government that didn't want to do anything that would antagonize the Germans. You've got the colonial authorities in North Africa and Indochina paying lip service to Vichy as the official French government, but not really happening. So places like, famously, Casablanca in Morocco and Algiers, you've got a lot of intelligence gathering going on there because the nature of the regimes are sort of, you know, they're not pro Axis, but they're not pro allied. So there's sort of this strange neutral zone, you know, that's a real headache for everyone involved, quite frankly. You know, it'd be much easier if the French empire had declared for the Allies and receded from that point. But of course they didn't. Again and again, famously, you know, Syria and Lebanon fought the French Empire. French colonial mandates from the, the end of the Second World War, you've got Lebanon and Syria sitting in the Middle east. Again, sort of not Nazi, but not pro allied. And with those areas, because you ended up with the Allies with Britain conducting military operations against Libya and Syria, because the authorities there started to turn a blind eye to the Luftwaffe operating from their airfields in support of Iraq, where the Iraqis had decided to rebel against British authority. So, again, you've got this. All these, you know, wars within war, effectively. France, I think, sort of fell into a state of, you know, civil war, really, in that nobody quite knew where their loyalties lay. Which meant in terms of espionage, you had people spying for lots and lots of different reasons, looking for different outcomes.
- [52:15]
B
And that, of course, gave us. And that, of course, gave us the famous film Casablanca in 1942, which is very much about this and about the Vichy and Free French kind of. Kind of vying for each other, and also all these different spy networks. And the Germans are coming in and telling the Vichy, well, you got to clamp down on these spies or, you know, bad things will happen. And there's that famous scene of he's shutting down the. The casino. He's like, yeah, I'm just shocked to see gambling here and then he gets his. His winnings.
- [52:45]
C
Yeah, I mean, I think the. Because the Germans were very clever. Because when I first started studying the Second World War, I could never understand why they didn't occupy the whole of metropolitan France. France was defeated. It was in a state of disarray. They could have pushed down to the Mediterranean and that would have been the end of it. But, of course, what they very cleverly did was it meant they could hold down France with limited numbers of units because they only needed to occupy the northern half of France. And then, under the. The terms of the armistice with France and Germany, Vichy France. So the unoccupied southern zone was only allowed to maintain an armed force of 100,000. So about a corps. So in military terms, that's not an army or an army group, it's fairly weak. And they weren't allowed any heavy equipment. Essentially, they were allowed 100,000 troops for internal security purposes. So they didn't need to occupy southern France. But it then meant. Meant for the government in Vichy, there was always that threat of Germany invading southern France, which meant they had to toe the line with what the Germans wanted, which at the same time meant they had to ensure that the French colonies towed the line as well. So it made for this very, very, very confusing situation, which it played nicely into German hands. As we know, it's not until, what, late 43 that the Germans finally move into the rest of France purely in response to Operation Torch. When the Allies land in French Algeria and Morocco, Hitler then occupies the rest of France, obviously, with a view to securing the naval base at Toulon. And the French fleet. I mean, finally, the French actually scuttled their fleet, but we would have been grateful if they'd done it in 1940, not in 1943. So, again, you've got this war within a war where France is neither an ally nor an enemy. I mean, it was a very, very strange situation. And on top of which, it's worth remembering someone like Charles de Gaulle, although we called him General in France, he was a brigadier general. Well, the equivalent to that in the British military is a brigadier. So he wasn't even a general. So he was not very senior. He'd been a minister in the French government before the collapse, and he'd commanded a French armored division. So he carried no weight politically or military with the rest of France, because, again, you kind of think, well, if I was a Frenchman, I would have rallied to de Gaulle, and he would have ended up with this huge army in exile in Britain with the Free French, and he would have had this massive army behind him. But, of course, no, Very few Frenchmen actually recognized his authority. That was the tragedy of Dunkirk. We saved 300,000 men, and about 100,000 were Frenchmen. Or the minuteless minute they got to Dover, they then headed to Southampton, Portsmouth, to sail back to France, you know, because why wouldn't you? You're a Frenchman. You want to carry on the fight. But ironically, in the long term, they would have been better off staying in the uk, Joining de Gaulle. We could have trained them and equipped them, ready to go back to France, but they ended up going back to France just at the point that France was surrendering, and they then either end up in exile in the unoccupied zone in the south, or interned. They're not allowed. And of course, a lot of the senior French generals were imprisoned. So again, it adds to that sort of confusion. Again, Britain and America trying to work out what French intentions were. It was just impossible.
- [56:08]
B
Now, we did talk about Bledgeley park, and code breaking was very important, especially the breaking of the Enigma code. Is there anything more you would like to say about that aspect of the intelligence war?
- [56:22]
C
I mean, I mentioned earlier that Bletchley park was fundamental, I think, in the Allied war effort. And it wasn't until the 1970s that anyone knew anything about what it had done. You know, it had been so secret. You know, obviously, the American cipher intersection organizations and what the Australians did, they all played a part.
- [56:39]
B
But.
- [56:40]
C
And also, Bletchley Park's kind of got all the credit. Of course, there was liaison between Bletchley park and sister American organizations and sharing of information and, you know, Enigma machines and that sort of thing. But Bletchley park, as I mentioned when we first started, was absolutely enormous. So it had something like eight out stations in the UK and then eight abroad. So it had listening stations overseas as well. They had this thing called the Y service and they were sent overseas. So you had stations in Hong Kong, Singapore, Mombasa and Cairo. So there's this chain of listening stations around the world that was picking up, you know, intelligent signals, traffic all the time, which was then fed back to the UK for, you know, particularly if it was encrypted, sent back to the UK for decryption. So it was this really big organization. And by good fortune, Bletchley park itself had been bought in 1938. So the signal and cipher school actually was elsewhere before then. And it had been bought by the head of MI6 as an outstation because it was far enough from London. And the feeling was if war broke out, the Luftwaffe would struggle to find it and it would be a secure place. And the idea was MI6 were going to move all their records there out of London, you know, because again, they would be safer than, you know, heaven forbid, do the Germans invade, then any vital documentation needs to be taken out of London because we don't want it falling into German hands. But actually the Cypher School ended up being moved there and of course then pretty much took over Bletchley park and it became the center for handling encrypted, not just German. That's the other thing is, I think we mistakenly think that it just dealt with German codes, but it didn't. It dealt with Italian and Japanese ones as well. So you've got this hub. And of course what it did was it advised the Allies at crucial moments in the war. So it helped Stanning with Stalingrad, but also it helped Monti with Lalamain, it helped the Allies in Normandy. And on the American side of things, of course, decryption of Japanese codes helped the American fleet at Midway, you know, because they knew that the Japanese fleet had divided in two and the Northern arm was a bluff. So you can see how that sort of information was very important. You know, Montgomery had very good intelligence on Rommel's order of battle prior to El Alamein, courtesy of Bletchley. And it also had good intelligence on his dispositions, which then helped Monty with his Operation Bertram, which is this huge deception operation designed to convince Rommel that when Montgomery attacked, he would attack in exactly the place that he wasn't going to. You know, so they created all these fake ammo dumps Camps, you know, a fake tank park with hundreds of tanks in a fake pipeline which was run south. You know, so, of course, the Luftwaffe are flying over the sappers, busy laying this pipeline, which was actually empty tin cans, which at night they would remove, fill it in to look like the pipe had been done and then put them down again, you know, so they, they created this huge, long pipeline which convinced, of course, Rommel that Monty was shipping oil and petrol south, ready for a strike south, not a strike in the north. So, you know, you can see how the deception plans and the intelligence intercepts all helped shape the battlefield again. In an Example for America courses following the D Day landings, Hitler insisted that there was a counterattack at Mortown to try and cut off Patton and his U.S. 3rd Army. Well, Patton knew that attack was coming because Bletchley park had warned him. And of course, Patton knew how weak the German army was, and he knew that that counterattack actually did not constitute a threat. Now, actually, if you're sat in the Allied command, you're thinking, oh, God, Patton's going to be cut off. If they get through there and reach the sea and cut off the base of the Coton Peninsula. Patton's on his own to the south, and, yeah, but their Panzer divisions are exhausted. They've had to pull them out of line. They're not going to have any air cover, which means the Allies will pound them the minute they move. Patton knew all that. So everyone's going. Well, Patton doesn't seem too worried because his armored divisions are still high, tailing it off into Brittany. But of course, actually had, I can't remember what they were called. Oh, signals liaison. So Bletchley park, courtesy of a chap called Group Captain Winterbotham, he come up with the idea that Bletchley park should have liaison officers embedded with senior commanders. So they had these signals liaison units. And of course, Patton had one of those, so he was well informed. Again, that's a bit of a fallacy of Patton. We always thought, oh, Patton was a real risk taker, wasn't he? You know, real seat of the pants, General. And you go, yeah, that's essentially true of them. But he quite often knew that the dice was sacked in his favor because he had good intelligence. Actually, he wasn't taking quite the risks we thought he was. Which, of course in hindsight makes him an even better general, actually, you know, because he wasn't. He wasn't risking defeat because on the, on the whole, he tended to know what he was doing was backed up by what the intelligence was telling him.
- [62:08]
B
Now, the lead up to D Day there was a major deception operation, including putting Patton in charge of this phantom army to try to deceive the Germans as to where the Allied invasion of France was going to be. They wanted to deceive them away from Normandy and more towards, I believe, the Port of Calais. And could you tell us a little bit about those operations? Because that's one of the most famous deception operations.
- [62:34]
C
Sure. For D Day they had this thing called Operation Bodyguard, which was overarching name, code name, that covered a whole series of deception operations designed to convince the Germans that the Allies were not going to land in Normandy. And they created this thing called fusag. So first US army group put under the commander pattern. And obviously we've been discussing the merits of eavesdropping, so collecting enemy signals intelligence. But it also worked the other way. What we did was we would broadcast fake signals. So in the case of fusag, it really, it consisted of Patton and a headquarters staff and then a whole bunch of trucks driving around the countryside issuing fake orders to fake units. And of course, the German eavesdroppers were picking up these signals going, my God, Patton has this higher army group in East Anglia and Kent, so in southeast England, poised to cross at the closest point on the Dover Strait, so across from Britain to the Pas de Calais, it's the shortest point. And logic would go, well, the hours will land there because it's nearest to the Somme, and once they're over the Somme, it puts them nearest to getting to the Ruhr, which of course is Germany's industrial heartland. So all that made sense. The other thing was at the same time as fusag, and of course Patton is there, so why wouldn't you believe it wasn't really an army group? So Patton is actually wandering around. What they also did was they ensured that a number of German generals were handed over in an exchange. And they ensured one of them, I think General Kramer or Kramer, they ensured one of them was driven through the fake preparations so there would be dummy tanks and landing craft and like I say, the signals trucks. And they drove him past bits of it that looked quite real to help convince him that when he got back to Germany, he could tell his debriefers that actually he'd seen fusag's preparation. So again, that all added, added to the illusion. And then at the same time in Scotland, they created another army. I think it's 4th Army, British 4th army under General Thorne, who had commanded the army corps earmarked to defend the south of East England in the event of an invasion by the Germans. So, of course, the Germans were aware that General Thorne is in the north, in command of a new army, which led them to believe that he was going to be part of an operation against Norway, that there would be an operation across the North Sea and land in Norway. So, of course, that forced the Germans to keep a large number of divisions in Norway because they feared invasion there, that there'd be a northern assault. And likewise, thanks to Fusag and all that bogus signals traffic that was coming out of it, it convinced the Germans that Patton was there, poised to cross to the Pas de Calais. So they would keep all their infantry, they would keep all their armor east of the Seine where it would be ready to counterattack should Patton come off, should land. And that although the Germans realized that Operation Overlord was going to take place in Normandy, they pretty much sussed that was going to be the main attack point. For months after the landings, the Germans still remain convinced. Weeks after the landings, the Germans remained convinced, that that actually was a feint, that it wasn't the main Allied effort, that the idea of Normandy was to draw all their troops to Normandy and then another attack force would cross the Channel and would strike across northwest Europe. So that deception operation, say you've got Operation Fortitude South, Operation Fortitude north, you've got bodyguard, you've got all these various other ones, worked absolutely brilliantly in deceiving the Germans into believing the Allies strategic intentions were something that they were not.
- [66:24]
B
Now, we did briefly mention the role of partisans and resistance movements, the role they played during the Second World War. Now, there's also, most famously the French Resistance, but then there was also the partisans in the Balkans, Yugoslavia, and then there was also the partisans on the Eastern Front. Is there anything you want to say about this issue of, like, what role, what intelligence roles they played? Now, I know the French Resistance, they did sabotage operations right before D day to try to help the Allies so the Germans couldn't reinforce their forces at the beaches.
- [67:01]
C
Yeah, I mean, I think it's worth pointing out the difference between resistance and partisans. Resistance takes lots of shapes, but basically it is at a level where it's not a coherent armed resistance, if you like. So it acts as sabotage, blowing up railways, maybe oil dumps, those sorts of things, blocking roads, maybe blowing up the odd bridge is designed to be a nuisance, to impede the enemy's ability to control an area and to move disseminating propaganda, all that sort of sort of stuff. Gathering intelligence. But it, but it, but it keeps things at a certain level, whereas partisans are actually in open warfare. And of course a lot of the difference between the two is quite often geography. So in France, the resistance went over to open warfare in the spring of 44, just before D Day. And they timed it just wrong because it meant they were on their own and the Germans crushed them. It was the vecors rising. It did not go well for them, but they thought that they were going from resistance over to the next phase, which would be guerrilla warfare and then they would link up with the Allies. Now that didn't work. Whereas places, and on the whole in France, the geography for large scale partisan warfare was not really suitable. And also of course, the German garrison was quite significant, particularly by 44. Whereas in the Balkans and in the Soviet Union or the Western Soviet Union, the geography helped greatly because the Balkans are very mountainous. So Greece and Yugoslavia, the resistance could take to the mountains. From there they could conduct guerrilla warfare. And indeed in Yugoslavia, by the end of the war, Tito, the communist leader in charge of the communist guerrillas there, by the end of the war, his guerrillas really were pretty much a conventional army. I mean, they had artillery and lorries and tanks and everything. So they had switched over, they had gone from partisan warfare to conventional warfare by the end of the. And then likewise in the Soviet Union, sort of in the central region you've got a huge area called the Pripet Marshes. And also a lot of the western Soviet Union at the time was forested. So you've got the marshes and the forests which were good sanctuaries for partisan warfare because they would just, you know, they would sally forth, attack railways and all the rest of it, make life a misery for the Germans and then retreat back in. And in both the case of Bugistar of Yaran in the the Soviet Union, the Germans had to tie up huge numbers of security forces trying to keep a lid on things, because the German supply lines from Germany to the Eastern front, to the very front were enormous. You're talking thousands of miles and hundreds of miles behind the front line. And in the end, Hitler got so fed up with it, he put rear area security operations into the hands of the ss. Himmler was put in charge. So the immediate frontline area, the Wehmr, were responsible for security and countering Axis sabotage and partisans. But beyond that, the situation was so bad that Hitler put Himmler in charge basically with scorched earth instructions that he was burned down every village and kill every villager that he came across, which is Pretty much what they did. But in both those areas, of course, again, the geography helped intelligence gathering, because they could issue out of the mountains, collect intelligence on German units, or from the forests or the swamps, collect intelligence and then go back to sanctuaries. Eventually, certainly in the Soviet Union, once the Red army began to advance, the partisans were absorbed back into the Red Army. Stalin didn't want a separate militia outside the Red Army. So as the Red army advanced, any partisan organization behind it, it were basically recruited into the Red Army. So it put a stop to resistance organizations. I mean, famously in France, de Gaulle did exactly the same thing with the French Resistance, which became known as the Free Forces in the interior. The ffi. Once, after D Day, in Operation Dragoon in the south of France, de Gaulle very rapidly issued orders that the French Resistance were to be absorbed into the French army army, primarily because he didn't want militias running around. But also, in the case of France, the main actors within the French Resistance were communist. So he didn't want a large communist militia in metropolitan France. It was better to make sure they were routed into the French army under French discipline and in uniform, where it would keep them out of harm's way. The expansion of the French army was enormous after Dragoon. In fact, they couldn't cope with the number of recruits. But it was a clever way of ensuring that large numbers of armed communists were not swanning about France being fettered as heroes because they'd been resistors and all the rest of it. So it's interesting how in the case of the Soviet Union, France, the resistance organizations were absorbed into the national armed forces, whereas in Yugoslavia, the partisans became the national armed forces of Yugoslavia.
- [72:18]
B
Now, there was also Jewish resistance to the Nazis, most famously in the Warsaw ghetto uprising of 43. Is there anything you would like to say about that?
- [72:29]
C
Yes. I mean, I think when it comes to the, you know, the horrors of the Final Solution of the Holocaust, people tend to think that the Jews went to their doom peacefully, but that was not always the case. You know, there was resistance. What tended to happen was the Jewish authorities tended to. To cooperate with the Nazis because they thought if they didn't, things would go even worse for them. Whereas actually, of course, by doing that, they acted as lambs of the slaughter. But there are a number of Jewish resistance organizations that did not agree with the Jewish elders that that was the right thing to do and felt it was better to go down fighting, which is what they did in a number of instances and in certain indicates of, well, the Warsaw Ghetto, the Jewish Inhabitants there are slowly being siphoned off to be exterminated. And it got to the point where part of the population just went, it's better to fight than die, so that you end up with the ghetto rising there. But unfortunately, of course, it was timed in such a way that it was much too early. And although the Polish Home army tried to help them, they were not at a stage where they were ready to go into armed rebellion against the German armed forces. The ghetto risings in 43, and of course, famously, the Warsaw rising doesn't happen until August 44, so they were not in a position to help them. But, yes, the Jewish ghetto rose up and for a brief time was a major security headache for the Nazis. But of course, as we know, they had ghettos across Europe. Really, they were just another form of concentration camp where Jews were gathered prior to them being murdered.
- [74:08]
B
Now, there was also the German resistance, especially in the German military, that opposed the Nazi regime. And they made several attempts to assassinate Hitler and overthrow the regime, the most famous one being operation Valkyrie in July 1944.
- [74:26]
C
I mean, there was a level amongst the population, there was a level of passive resistance. And I think, and certainly in senior levels, I think, as we've just discussed, a lot of people felt they didn't agree with Hitler or the Nazi party, but of course, most of them had taken an oath to Germany, and the German government so fell on a bound to honor that oath and wouldn't act beyond it. And again, as we discussed earlier, most of the resistance to Hitler came from within the German army. And of course, that was to have ramifications in the later part of the war because Hitler increasingly relied on the Waffen ss, the Armed S, which was this sort of parallel army that Himmler had set up. Never as big as the German army, but it ended up almost 40 divisions strong, over 300,000 men, which some might argue is a ridiculous diversion of resources that should have gone to the German army. But, yes, you had. Famously, there were a number of bomb plots. The key one, obviously, on the 20th of July 1944, which only just failed. But after that, of course, Hitler conducts this major purge of anyone suspected of being involved in the plot and anyone that's anti Nazi. So the German resistance was purged quite badly. But prior to that, they had done a number of other attempts. There'd been an attempt to kill him on an airplane, but the bomb hadn't gone off. There'd been an attempt to kill him in a car, and that hadn't succeeded. There was another attempt to kill him in Berlin. So he was at the Berlin Zoo and he was visiting, I think it was outside the zoo somewhere. He was visiting a collection of Soviet military equipment. You know, the Germans ship back all this stuff they captured in the Soviet Union. And Hitler was invited to a viewing of all this. And Colonel Gerd Stoff, who was the man to do the job, had a bomb with him which was set on a timer. But the problem was Churchill Freudian sipping hipp. Hitler went round the exhibition so quick, he finished before the bomb was ready and Gersdorff had to deactivate it. So to be fair to the German resistance, it wasn't for the want of trying it. You know, in many ways Hitler was, you know, had the luck of the devil, quite frankly, because he could have been killed quite often, but for one reason or other, it just never came up.
- [76:49]
B
Now, you mentioned this mostly came from the military and not the intelligence. I think the Oster Plot would have been the closest that the intelligence agencies tried to overthrow Hitler. Is that correct? If that's in 38 where they were opposed to the annexation of Sudan land.
- [77:06]
C
Yes, probably. I mean, I think it's for a lot of Germans, I think they're a bit like Churchill, is that they saw the warning signs when he began to nibble away at Europe Europe. And whilst I think a lot of Germans subscribed to the idea of restoring German national pride, I don't think all of them felt the need to take areas that were populated by Germans but were within other areas. Now, I think arguably the militarization of the Rhineland in 36, you can kind of go, well, that is part of Germany. It had been demilitarized as part of the Versailles Treaty. You get Hitler's logic, because he wants to move Germany's air defenses west of the Rhine, which will serve to protect the Rhineland cities, but also push Germany's air defenses west, therefore creating greater depth for the Ruhr, which is just to the north. It will protect the industrial region. So you understand his logic. But of course, actually what Hitler did with that was, was it really was a test pad that, you know, Britain and France did not react. And I think he took that as a benchmark for what he was to do subsequently. So, yeah, you know, you've referenced the Sudetenland. Well, that's part of Czechoslovakia. The Rhineland you get, but Sudetenland is in Czechoslovakia, so he didn't really have any right to that. But he browbeat the Czechs into handing it over. Of course, he then orchestrates a crisis between the Slovak and the Czech halves of Czechoslovakia, who have a historic dislike for each other anyway, which means Slovakia invites Hitler in to protect them. The Czech Republic then, or Czech part, then becomes Bohemia and Moravia. So he very cleverly starts nibbling off. And I think members were in the German military and in particularly within the intelligence community, who probably had a better window of what was going on, began to realise what Hitler's plan was because obviously he didn't share it with anyone beyond his inner circle. So the rest of Germany were not really aware of what was going on. But the fact that he was putting them on the path to another world war by doing this, which as we referenced earlier, culminates with his occupational of Western Poland.
- [79:30]
B
Now, one effect of the July bomb plop was that Admiral Canaris, he got arrested and then his activities of resisting Hitler were uncovered and then the sd, I believe they took over the Abwehr, is that correct?
- [79:46]
C
I mean, there had been a long rivalry between Himmler and Canaris, and Himmler had coveted the Abwehr for a long time. Mainly because I think Himmler felt, you know, a, he liked empire build, but also he felt those roles should, should come under his control because, you know, he already was doing intelligence gathering and counterintelligence, you know, through the sd, the ss, the Gestapo and the various branches of the police. Because it's worth remembering again, there were numerous different departments from the police. So you had, you know, you had criminal police, the sipo. So there were lots of different branches of the police and they were all doing a lot of what the ABIR were doing anyway. And also, I think, I don't know whether he was on to Canaris or not, but I suspect he also felt the Abir's loyalty to Nazi Germany would be firmly sealed if it was under the control of the, the Reich's main office, you know, which was him, the sort of headquarters office which was in charge of this, this wide range of different Nazi Party organizations.
- [80:55]
B
Well, what do you think is the legacy of World War II espionage? And we did discuss this a little bit about the impact it had on the, the Cold War, but is there any more thoughts you'd like to add on that question? Maybe what is even the legacy today of World War II era espionage?
- [81:14]
C
As I said earlier, I think it solidified our understanding of, of different intelligence gathering disciplines. So human, you know, human intelligence, SIGINT intelligence and all the others that come, come with it. And I think the legacy for the Cold War, of course meant the security apparatus were in place that had been used against the Axis would then be used against the Soviet Union. So the groundwork for certainly the espionage side of the Cold War had already been, been, had been laid if you like. Same on the Soviet side obviously because they had this footprint across Europe and of course we'll be able to make use of communist parties across Western Europe as well to help them with what they were doing. So I think you've got that sort of, I say, if you like, the groundwork was already laid in terms of how we were, the two blocks were going to spy on each other and what they would use and also subversion of course, because both sides would mount subversive propaganda operations against each other. So the Soviet Union would help fund student organizations in Western Europe, it would help ferment political unrest, anything that undermined Western European governments. And at the same time, of course Western allies were trying to get a handle on what the Soviets were doing in Eastern Europe, what its long term plans were, whether it was ever going to withdraw or not. Obviously we know that wasn't the case because it culminates in the creation of the Warsaw Pact in 1955. And in terms of eavesdropping, of course that becomes really important during the Cold War because both sides become paranoid about knowing the other science intentions. So you know, for us, you know, it may morphed into Bletchley part morphs into GC8Q Cheltenham. You know, everyone now spends a huge amount of money collecting these days. It's, you know, Internet, it's hacking, it's cyber warfare, you know, it's the modern versions of Bletchley park if you like, you know, telephone communications, mobile phone communications, all those sorts of things trying to build a picture of war. Enemy states are doing what they're planning. So it kind of in many ways the secret war during the Second World War I think acted as a blueprint for what's come since.
- [83:49]
B
This has been a very fascinating discussion and we could probably talk all day about different aspects about the intelligence, even different countries and all that. But do you have any final thoughts, anything you might want to add to our discussion that we didn't get to.
- [84:04]
C
No, I mean the only thing I would add with the secret war is it's very broad brush. I mean, you know, I, I like to think I've packed a lot of information in a fairly small book, you know, because I'd say it, you know, it covers all the aspects we've done. So you know, it looks at spies, it looks at the eavesdropping war Art, misdirection. I've called it the camouflage war. So, you know, we've touched on deception operations, partisans, guerrillas, opposition within the Axis, and then the scientific war. I mean, we've not really had time to delve into that because that's pretty much a whole nother thing. But, you know, the scientific war in terms of gathering intelligence against Hitler's V weapons, in terms of the battle of the Atlantic with sonar, battle of the beams with the Luftwaffe using radio beams to guide their bombers, all that sort of thing. So there's a lot packed in there. But as I say, the scope and breadth of the secret war, I think, is a lot bigger than people. People realize they tend to view all those things as compartmentized to think, whereas actually it was all part of one huge war effort behind the front lines.
- [85:07]
B
That, and also it's usually seen as just a precursor to the Cold War, but it actually has its own complexity unto itself. Is that correct?
- [85:16]
C
So I think so. And I think the more that the work of Bletchley Park Park's been recognized, the more people have a better appreciation for the contribution that spies made, you know, that signals, intercepts made all those elements. I think people actually realize, whilst it might not have been decisive, it certainly helped tilt the war effort into the Allies favor. And let's face it, any commander needs whatever advantage that he can get. One of the points I make in the book is that quite often commanders were ticked off what the enemy was going to do, but the admiral or the general still had to fight that battle and win it. It. So it wasn't, you know, just because you. Just because you've been told that the Italian fleet, you know, are going to be off Matapan, that doesn't mean that the battle's going to go your way. So it kind of, you know, you know, what the Allied intention, what Allied the Axis intention would be, but you still had to get victory on the battlefield. Same with El Alamein. You know, Monty benefited from a huge amount of intelligence and a really good deception operation, but ultimately he still had to fight Rommel and win the battle. So it kind of. It helps, but quite how decisive it is, it's open to debate.
- [86:31]
B
That reminds me of a story I heard during the early stages of Barbarossa where the Germans took this one village and then the commander actually found in the headquarters of the Soviet commander, you know, a copy of his own plan. He still won the battle, but the Soviets had advance warning of what his plan was for the battle was. So again, that kind of Proves the point that you can have that intelligence, but whether or not you're going to win the battle is still in question.
- [86:59]
C
So, I mean, again, perhaps Kursk is a, you know, a point. Point of moot there in that Stalin had very good intelligence on what the Germans were planning to do. But the Soviet plan for countering Citadel was very ambitious. It could have gone wrong in the cold light of day, in hindsight, you kind of think, well, the Germans walked into a trap and it was perfectly executed, and then they lost. But actually, the sheer scope of what the Red army planned, there were a lot of moving parts that could have gone wrong. Say, although they knew what the Germans were going to do, they knew the German order of battle, they were well informed, they still had to execute a successful battle on the ground. It's likewise with Stalingrad. They conducted quite a good deception operation into making the Germans feel that the Soviet counteroffensive would take place further north, whereas actually they were striking in the south, but they still had to cut their way through Hungarian, Italian and German armies. So, again, there was a lot that could have gone wrong. I mean, that tends to be the danger of a historian. You go, well, when you look at all the pieces and all the facts, it was a foregone conclusion. And you have to go, well, actually, it could have gone completely wrong. Again, another example of that is Battle of the Atlantic, because the Germans kept changing their codes. You know, one minute the U boats would have the upper hand, next minute the Allies would, and then it would flip back to the U boats. You know, it was very, very touch and go for a long time. Despite all the benefits of the, you know, the naval intelligence that Bletchley park was collecting.
- [88:35]
B
Well, as you may know, we always like to end our interviews by asking our guests, what are you working on now? And you're almost always working on something. I know I am.
- [88:45]
C
I'm currently writing a book called Nazi Hunters. So sort of World War II theme, and it's looking at the. The fate of lots of Nazis at the end of the end of the Second World War. So it's looking at what happened to those over and beyond Nuremberg and the other trials. So a reasonable number of senior Nazis were put on trial, but thousands upon thousands were not. And so I'm kind of examining how some of them are hidden plain sight, how some of them are given a get out of jail card because of what they had to offer. So, famously, with some of the Operation Paperclip, where all the German scientists were shipped to America to work on them on the rocket programs. Although they had blood on their hands because the weapons they designed and were everything built were built by slave labor, and that slave labor came from the concentration camps. So he's kind of trying to give a view of how they slip through the cracks. Likewise, we were touching on Jewish resistance at the end of the war. The Jewish Brigade, formed by the British army in Palestine, which was fighting in Italy, took matters into its own hands, and they formed this sort of secret organization called nakam, or Revenge, which were basically hit squads that traveled around targeting Nazi officers after the war ended and assassinating them. And there were various organizations like that. And of course, again, a lot of Latin America which were pro Nazi during the Second World War. But obviously with a. A very large northern neighbor, with a very powerful armed forces, they towed the line. And indeed, some of them did. Brazil joined the hard war effort, but places like Brazil, Chile and Argentina became havens for fleeing Nazis. So it looks at the fate of some of those and how they got there. Mossad was fairly late to the game for obvious reasons, because the creation of Israel, they were preoccupied by immediate problems rather than the fate of Nazi Germans. But it's kind of, again, it's sort of an overview of what was done post Nuremberg to try and bring Nazi war criminals to trial. So I'm writing that at the moment. And then I've got another book on Churchill, which is in the proof stage. So it's a rather nice pictorial history of Churchill with, you know, over 300 images, which is quite nice. And that's in the finishing stages. That will be out. Should be out next year somewhere.
- [91:21]
B
Oh, it's very good.
- [91:23]
C
Yeah. Yeah. So keeping busy is this. Is this should have been the easy answer.
- [91:29]
B
Yeah. Now, getting back to the Nazi hunters. I know one example that's also kind of relevant to this book was Reinhard Galen, who headed military, German military intelligence against the Soviet Union on the Eastern Front. Even though he was kind of involved in war crimes, I believe the. It was the United States that actually recruited him because he had vital intelligence on the Soviet Union. So they kind of struck this deal. It's like, okay, well, look, we won't try you for war crimes, but you give us all the information you have on the Soviet Union that will help us in the Cold War.
- [92:05]
C
Yes, you're right. Galen famously was in charge of intelligence gathering on the Eastern Front and assessing the Red Army's capabilities. And he very cleverly, at the end of the war, gathered all his files and his staff and basically surrendered himself and said, look, I can be of great use to you. Of course, he ended up eventually head of intelligence at bnd. But of course, in the immediate aftermath, the Sycamore War, Germany both occupied and both west occupied and east occupied were not allowed armed forces. Part of the end of the war was that Germany was to be demilitarized. But certainly in the case of Galen, he basically ran this sort of clandestine intelligence operation on behalf of America because he was able to run agents into East Germany and spy on the Soviets. Again, that's one example of a senior senior German officer being given a get out of jail card, even though he had blood on his hands. And also a lot of senior German army officers and to a lesser extent SS ones, was sort of rounded up with a view to fielding a couple of German divisions in the event of an emergency. So there was this sort of contingency planning during the Cold War, particularly during the sort of 50s and the early 60s before the Bundeswehr was formed, you know, before West Germany was formally recognized as an independent state and allowed to have its own armed forces and obviously join NATO. Before then, while it was still demilitarized, there were plans afoot that, you know, senior officers would be secretly tasked to form several German divisions because, you know, the Allies would need. The Western Allies would need manpower in the event of the Soviet Union attacking West Germany. So again, both intelligence and in terms of creating a shadow army, a blind eye was turned to criminal activity, war crime activity, because increasingly, Germans were of value to the escalated Cold War. And that was part of the problem, is that not only did a lot escape abroad, but they were kind of allowed to hide out in plain sight. I deal with a husband and wife couple in the book, and she was. I think she's French and her husband was German. And they made their life's work making life for West German politicians a misery because they usually had Nazi party connections and they quite rightly felt that they should not be involved in politics. You know, post World War II, that they were tainted by their association of being Nazis. You know, famous, famous example, that is Kurt Valdheim, who's the, you know, the Austrian chancellor who was accused of being involved in war crimes. You know, the. Lots of Germans ended up in senior political positions that on closer scrutiny, they should not have. They should not have had, you know, because I famously. She slapped one of the early German chancellors on the face, you know, at a party political rally, to make the point, you know, to draw attention to his past, that he shouldn't be allowed to achieve high office in light of, you know, his role during the Second World War. And there was a lot of that. I mean, it was. I suppose it was a case of expediency, you know, with a lot of.
- [95:31]
B
Them.
- [95:33]
C
The ones that were executed, I mean, their crimes were so heinous you couldn't ignore them. But there were a lot where, you know, on the surface it looked okay, but with deeper investigation, it did show that they had blood on their hands.
- [95:45]
B
Yes. And then in the case of East Germany, they created their own secret police, the Stasi, which some have remarked even makes the Gestapo look like amateurs in comparison.
- [95:56]
C
And I'm. And I'm sure amongst the stars ranks, there were former Gestapo officers. I mean, you know, again, the Soviets would have done exactly the same thing. They would have recruited people that were very good at doing unpleasant things. So I suspect the Stasi included, again, they would have had Gestapo and SD members because they were good at unmasking traitors, they were good at running police states, which, of course is what East Germany became. So people that should have actually faced trial were given a new lease of life because of the skill sets they had. I mean, that was the case with a lot of them that fled to Latin America. They tended to help set up intelligence or secret police organizations within their host countries because they were experts on interrogation techniques, they were experts on running covert surveillance, they were experts on running secret police organizations. And unfortunately, the likes of Brazil and Argentina and Chile, which were quite often dictatorships, wanted those skill sets and therefore were prepared to give, you know, former Nazis were very serious war crimes laid at their feet, sanctuary. And more than extradite them, you know, quite often West Germany would ask for them, and particularly when it came to Argentina, until Peron was deposed, you know, all requests for their extradition was ignored.
- [97:19]
B
Well, Anthony Tucker Jones, when you finish some of those other works, maybe we can have you back on the. The podcast.
- [97:25]
C
Yeah, no, that would be good. Well, I have got. I don't know if you've seen it. I've got a book out at the moment. It came out on 9th of October, called Rindland. So that's my current one. Yeah.
- [97:35]
B
We could possibly have you on again for that book as well.
- [97:38]
C
Yeah, that would be good. I mean, that looks at the German defensive battles of the Rhine. 44, 45. I can wave a copy up. There we go. That's literally just come out.
- [97:53]
B
Yeah, definitely. We could. You're always welcome to come back on.
- [97:56]
C
It's always.
- [97:57]
B
We always seem to be able to bounce ideas back and forth for the period of time that we're given.
- [98:04]
C
Yeah, well, yeah, also hopefully we. Well, I was going to say hopefully we might have some more cheery subjects, but obviously having just discussed Nazi hunters, that's not terribly cheery. And then been having discussing the final Solution, that's not very cheery, eh?
- [98:17]
B
Well, you know, history is what it is, I guess.
- [98:20]
C
Well, yeah, you're right. You know, you can't whitewash history. I mean, that, that's in fact, you know, one of the roles of being a historian is to, is to remind people of what's happened in the vain hope that we don't repeat the same mistakes. I don't know about you, but the older you get, you realize each generation has to learn from its own mistakes, not the one before it. But there you go.
- [98:40]
B
Indeed. Anthony Tucker Jones, thank you for joining us yet again on the New Books Network.
- [98:45]
C
Thank you very much.
- [98:47]
B
Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network Work. I am your host, Stephen Sikevich. Until next time.