Intelligence in War: The Value--And Limitations--Of What the Military Can Learn About the Enemy (53 page)

The V-weapons programme has interest from another intelligence aspect—the unusual preponderance of human intelligence in influencing opinion on the other side. Human intelligence played almost no part in determining the conditions under which most of the campaigns which form case studies in this book were fought. Its importance, though paramount in the Nile campaign, when Nelson was acting as his own intelligence officer, and crucial to Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley, was negligible during the U-boat war and quite insignificant during the campaigns of Crete and Midway. Paradoxically, in the high-technology struggle between German secret weapon scientists and their blinkered Allied opponents, human intelligence was of critical importance. The unattributable Oslo Report gave the first clue; eavesdropping, if that was what it was, by the unnamed “chemical engineer” later provided the trigger to Allied action. Thereafter, though photographic intelligence, imagery as it would now be called, supplied the earliest confirming substance, agent reports from foreign workers at Peenemünde and observations by the Polish underground provided the direct evidence that the V-weapons were actually airborne. Without those reports, and the evidence supplied by Swedish neutrals, including the sea captain with his watch, London would have lacked the picture—fairly clear as it eventually became—of what the hazily defined menace of flying bomb and supersonic rocket ultimately threatened. The intelligence attack on the V-weapons kept alive the importance, elsewhere so greatly discredited, of humint.

Humint, though the term was then unknown, also supplied the means, directly and indirectly, by which Jackson so successfully conducted his campaign against superior odds in the Shenandoah Valley in 1862. That campaign, in any large-scale military perspective, hovers uncertainly between the old and the new. In contemporaneous terms, Jackson belonged to the future, the future of the electric telegraph and the railway alongside which it usually ran. Practically, neither telegraph nor railway played anything but a tangential part in Jackson’s manoeuvring. Although he eventually withdrew his Valley army to Richmond by railway, he scarcely used it to manoeuvre during his campaign of bewitchment and bewilderment; his employment of the telegraph, as a means of communication within the Valley and from it to higher command elsewhere, was intermittent. Jackson in the Valley behaved as a trusted Napoleonic subordinate might have done, superior though he was in talent to his Confederate seniors; he made his own appreciations, asked for no orders, and based his decisions on his own intelligence assessments, founded on close and local observations.

Like a pre-telegraphic and pre-railway commander, Jackson was most concerned to understand the geography of the theatre in which he was operating and to use it to his advantage. A man with an intuitive sense of ground himself—in that respect he resembled that other taciturn, relentless, hard-fighting general of the war, Ulysses S. Grant—he was greatly served by his mapmaker, Jedediah Hotchkiss, a gifted, if self-taught cartographer. In the modern world, where images of every sort abound, it is difficult to visualise the difficulties of travellers and voyagers of an earlier time, when often the only picture available of the route forward was held in the head of a fellow-traveller who had gone that way before or of a local unaccustomed to explanation. Since America east of the Appalachian chain had been settled, or at least explored and travelled, for 200 years before the Civil War’s outbreak, it may seem extraordinary that much of its terrain was unmapped and indeed unknown to strangers. Such was, nevertheless, the case. Though there were turnpike roads in the Shenandoah Valley, and railroads that ran into it, the Union armies lacked maps of its topography, which was unknown in detail to their officers. Jackson, a West Virginian by upbringing, knew the outlines of the topography, but he took trouble to master the details by requesting Hotchkiss to survey the theatre and make him a military map of its most important features, particularly waterways, bridges and passes through the high ground. It was Hotchkiss’ map that gave him his advantage. Jackson’s succession of small, local victories, which frustrated the manoeuvres of his opponents, superior in numbers as they always were, was not the outcome of chance or recklessness but of careful calculation. He was his own intelligence officer, as Nelson had been during the Nile campaign, with the difference that, though similarly confined within a narrow zone of operations, his role as a fugitive, not a pursuer, was to mislead, confuse and avoid a decisive confrontation, rather than bring his enemy to a battle of annihilation.

All the cases studied in this book concern military intelligence in the strict sense: how the use of intelligence brought the enemy to battle on terms favourable to the intelligence victor (the Nile, the naval battle of the Falklands, Midway, the U-boat war) or spared the intelligence victor battle on unfavourable terms (the Valley); or else how the successful practice of intelligence nevertheless failed to avert an unfavourable outcome (Crete, the V-weapon campaign). Its purpose is to demonstrate that intelligence, however good, is not necessarily the means to victory; that, ultimately, it is force, not fraud or forethought, that counts. That is not the currently fashionable view. Intelligence superiority, we are constantly told, is the key to success in war, particularly the war against terrorism. It is indisputably the case that to make war without the guidance intelligence can give is to strike in the dark, to blunder about, launching blows that do not connect with the target or miss the target altogether. All that is true; without intelligence, armies and navies, as was so often the case in the age before electricity, will simply not find each other, at least not in the short term. When and if they do, the better informed force will probably fight on the more advantageous terms. Yet, having admitted the significance of the pre-vision intelligence provides, it still has to be recognised that opposed enemies, if they really seek battle, will succeed in finding each other and that, when they do, intelligence factors will rarely determine the outcome. Intelligence may be usually necessary but is not a sufficient condition of victory.

The reasons for the current overestimation of the importance of intelligence in warfare are twofold: the first is the common confusion of espionage and counter-espionage with operational intelligence proper; the second is the intermingling of operational intelligence with, and contamination by, subversion, the attempt to win military advantage by covert means.

Operational intelligence and espionage work in different time-frames. Espionage, usually but not necessarily a state activity, is a continuous process, of very great antiquity; so is its counterpart, counter-espionage. States seem to have always sought to know the secrets of each other’s policy, particularly foreign but also mercantile and military policy, and to deny such secrets in return. The apparatus of espionage is common knowledge: the employment of spies, the suborning of foreign nationals in positions of confidence, the use of codes and ciphers and the maintenance of decryption and intercept services. Operational intelligence, by contrast, is specifically an activity of wartime and, at high tempo, is limited to comparatively brief periods of hostilities. The rhythm of the intelligence attack on the German V-weapons programme illustrates that: most lethargic at the outset, when the evidence was scanty and diffuse, growing intense as it became incontrovertible, then slowing again when the British, after their capture of the V-1 launch sites in northern France, wrongly persuaded themselves that the danger had been brought under control.

The intermittent pattern of operational intelligence activity is explained in part by the positions military intelligence officers occupy in the hierarchy of an army or navy. They are always subordinate to the operations staff and rarely make full careers in intelligence; indeed, most seek transfer to the operations branch, in the all too understandable hope of becoming masters rather than servants. It is difficult enough, in any case, to make a reputation as a staff officer in any branch, but while there are a number of celebrated operations officers and chiefs of staff—Berthier to Napoleon, Jodl to Hitler, Alan Brooke to Churchill—there are almost no famous intelligence officers. The best known of the Second World War, E. T. Williams, Montgomery’s chief of intelligence in the Eighth Army in the desert and then in Normandy, was an Oxford don who had gone to war as a troop leader in the King’s Dragoon Guards. The best known of the First World War, Sir Alfred Ewing, founder of Room 40, was a former Cambridge don who, as a civilian, became Director of Naval Education. Williams, still a young man, returned to his Oxford college after the war.
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Espionage and counter-espionage by contrast are, or have become in the modern world, the arena of full-time professionals. The CIA and the SIS (MI6) are organs of state and, as they evolved over time, have grown into formidable bureaucracies; the former KGB of the Soviet Union was, in at least one of its aspects, effectively a parallel government, charged to maintain the internal stability of the Soviet system as well as spy on foreign enemies and defeat foreign espionage. In all those organisations, it has been possible, indeed usual, to enter as a carefully selected recruit, to be trained, usually in a particular speciality, and to make a lifelong career. Since the career was full-time, the agencies’ operatives naturally found or made activities to occupy their day-to-day working lives; and as, in practice, serious threats to state security are as intermittent as major military threats to national survival in wartime, the intelligence agencies bulked out their work by spying on each other. Indeed, if asked what spies do, the safest answer is that spies spy on spies. The parallel eavesdropping agencies—the British Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ, descendant of Bletchley) and the American National Security Agency (NSA)—are party to serious secrets, which they pluck from the ether by interception and decrypt. At their most successful, they are able to tell their own governments the most secret business of others. They guard what they know jealously, even, paradoxically, from their companion intelligence agencies. No rivalries are more intense than those between intelligence services working, by different means, on the same side.

The disdain evinced by the “hard” agencies—NSA, GCHQ—for the “soft”—CIA, SIS—is nowhere better illustrated than by the now endlessly retold story of the Cambridge spies of the early Cold War. Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross and their hangers-on were elegant young men of good family, educated at expensive schools and leading colleges, who had been seduced by the warped logic of Marxism to become Soviet agents before they joined the British Foreign Office or intelligence services. All eventually, after 1945, fell under suspicion, and three, Maclean, Burgess and later Philby, defected to the Soviet Union amid noisy media sensation. They caused great harm to their parent services and to Anglo-American trust, which took many years to restore. Indeed, for a long time the Americans took the view that the British intelligence services were fundamentally flawed, even corrupt; it was not until, much later, the Americans themselves suffered a succession of serious breaches of security inside the CIA and the military intelligence services, admittedly committed by agents who were motivated by greed rather than ideology, that relations returned to an even keel.

Yet, viewed in retrospect, the damage done by at least two of the Cambridge spies, Burgess and Philby, was superficial rather than substantial. Guy Burgess, a flamboyant homosexual and dedicated alcoholic, never rose high in the Foreign Office hierarchy. Though his background was entirely conventional—his father was a regular naval officer, and he had himself, until ill health intervened, trained as a naval cadet at Dartmouth—his personality and behaviour were not. He was an exhibitionist, a poseur, a professional rebel. Though a brilliant pupil at Eton, he wasted his time at Cambridge and had difficulty thereafter finding a job. A temporary position at the BBC led in the lax war years to a job in the Foreign Office information department; charm, reinforced by his determination to succeed in his chosen vocation as an undercover Soviet agent, then won him promotion to the post of personal assistant to the Minister of State. It did not last. His irresponsible urge to outrage the conventionally minded led to his transfer to a specialist information branch, then to the Far Eastern Department, where he continued to make a bad impression, and eventually to the British embassy in Washington. His position there was humiliatingly junior. The wonder is nevertheless that, after years of bad behaviour, the Foreign Office was still prepared to keep him on. The explanation, easily grasped by anyone who lived then, incomprehensible today, is that Burgess was protected by the indulgence felt by the well-behaved for the professional naughty boy. Their forgiveness of his excesses excused, in a sense, their own unrelenting propriety; their unwillingness to condemn absolved them of pomposity.

It is doubtful, in any case, if Burgess was ever privy to secrets that could damage his own country. The same might be said of his protégé, Kim Philby. Philby, a truly dedicated Communist convert, began life after Cambridge as a journalist but transferred at the outbreak of war, with the help of Burgess, to the subversive Special Operations Executive. Thence he migrated to the Secret Intelligence Service, which then operated under the cloak of the Foreign Office. As an intelligence officer he undoubtedly betrayed to the Russians a great deal of information about British counter-espionage and subversion and was responsible for the deaths of numbers of anti-Soviet agents, particularly Albanians and Ukrainians whom the British and Americans infiltrated behind the Iron Curtain in the early 1950s. Philby did not, however, have access to war plans or nuclear intelligence. His was a classic example of a spy spying on spies, and the atmosphere of his world is perfectly caught in the novels of John le Carré, which almost exclusively concern the operations of espionage services against each other.