Intelligence in War: The Value--And Limitations--Of What the Military Can Learn About the Enemy (54 page)

Donald Maclean was a different and more serious traitor. As a promising young diplomat in the Washington embassy in 1945, he was appointed joint secretary of the Anglo-American committee on nuclear development (Combined Policy Committee) and also acquired a pass which gave him unsupervised access to the headquarters of the Atomic Energy Commission. What information he thus gained remains a matter of speculation. It was probably of less value than that supplied to Moscow by the nuclear scientists Alan Nunn May, a British citizen, and Claus Fuchs, a naturalised Briton of German origin, both committed Communists, though of much humbler social origin than the Cambridge spies. They enjoyed the advantage, however, of actually working within the nuclear laboratories at Los Alamos, where the first atomic bomb was developed, and were undoubtedly the source of the information which allowed Stalin to learn of the atomic secret before Hiroshima. Maclean, who had no scientific training, was not guilty of that betrayal. Because of the seniority of his position, however, he was undoubtedly responsible for poisoning Anglo-American trust during the early Cold War, poison that lingered for years afterwards.

The peculiar “climate” of the Cambridge spies’ treason, a word chosen by the most perceptive analyst of the episode, Andrew Boyle, goes far to explain the persistent popular interest in it.
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Not only were Burgess, Maclean and Philby privileged citizens of the society they betrayed, products of good family and its most distinguished schools and colleges; they also belonged to the social elite, knowing those who counted and at ease in the company of the fashionable and powerful. All nevertheless insisted in behaving in disreputable fashion, all three by drinking ostentatiously to excess, all three by publicly violating the sexual norms of the day: not only was Burgess a promiscuous homosexual when homosexual behaviour was still a criminal offence; Maclean, too, a married man, regularly succumbed to his homosexual impulses, while Philby, though strenuously heterosexual, treated women with cavalier selfishness. He abandoned his second wife, pregnant with their fifth child, to a lonely death by drink and drugs; he stole his third wife from a journalistic colleague after his dismissal from the secret service; he next stole Maclean’s wife during their Moscow exile and finally married a Russian far younger than himself when the ex-Mrs. Maclean saw him in his true light. The Cambridge spies were not only traitors; they were also, in different but closely similar ways, monsters of egotism. No wonder that they remained for so long objects of fascination to the prurient.

Since the substance of espionage is duplicity, it should not be thought surprising that its three most notorious practitioners of modern times—they had subordinates, they also had imitators, some Soviet, some American, but none so blatantly complacent—were such unpleasant people. Treason is an intrinsically repulsive activity, so much so that it is difficult not to despise even those who, during the Nazi era and the Cold War, betrayed their countries out of devotion to universally admired ideals, such as respect for truth or democratic freedom. Because the efficient spy lies to protect himself, and evades exposure in order to advance his work, his behaviour is the opposite of what is conventionally regarded as heroic. The hero is a fighter who bares his breast to the blows of the enemy. The spy shrinks from the fight and thinks his work best done when he attracts no attention at all.

Hence a paradox. The British—and it is a peculiarly British approach to the secret world, though one also espoused by the Americans—devised during the nineteenth century a philosophy of secret warfare in which duplicity but also the heroic ethic were combined. Because Britain has always been demographically weak but strategically strong, a country of moderate population enjoying a commanding position athwart the world’s most important maritime trade routes, it has naturally sought to maximise its power by mobilising what today would be called special and subversive forces in the flanks of its enemies. The practice perhaps began during the Peninsular War of 1808–14, when the British army in Portugal and Spain raised and trained locals to serve in irregular regiments under British officers; the Royal Lusitanian (Portuguese) Legion was such a body. The British also directly subsidised not only the Spanish army, such of it as survived after the political collapse of 1808, but also the bands of guerrillas which took the field in its place after the French occupation. The guerrillas never threatened to end the occupation or overturn French rule, but at the cost of dreadful suffering to the Spanish people, they succeeded in making Spain almost impossible to administer.

In India, meanwhile, the British applied a reverse technique in order to overcome disorder and restore central government. Acting nominally in support of the effete and effectively defunct Moghul emperors, they made extensive use of irregulars to put down the bands of pillagers who ransacked Moghul territory and to defeat the armies of overmighty Moghul subjects who had set up as provincial rulers in their own right. Typically, at the end of a successful campaign of pacification, they incorporated the defeated warriors into their own forces. By the mid-nineteenth century, the British were running two military establishments in India: a regular army of their own, recruited from Indians but organised on European lines, and, attached to it, a kaleidoscopic collection of irregulars, wearing local dress, observing local customs of discipline and commanded by small handfuls of British officers who had almost gone native: Shah Shujah’s Contingent, the Hyderabad Contingent, the Punjab Irregular Force.

When in 1857 the Indian regulars rose in mutiny against British rule, their revolt was put down largely by mobilising the irregulars against them; and when the Indian Mutiny was over, the old regular army was almost completely replaced by the irregular forces that had rescued the Indian empire from dissolution. It retained a minimum of British officers—in 1911, the year of the Delhi Durbar, which marked ceremonially the high point of the power of the Raj, they numbered only 3,000—and they, for the most part, wore a version of native dress, spoke Indian languages and prided themselves on their immersion in the customs and culture of their soldiers.

What went for India went eventually for the rest of the British empire, which came largely to be garrisoned by their own inhabitants under the sketchiest of British control. The King’s African Rifles, the Royal West African Frontier Force, the Somaliland Canal Corps, the Sudan Defence Force were native armies commanded by Britons who exerted power not by force but by imitating native habits of authority.
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The French achieved something of the same effect in their African empire, through their organisation of the
goums
of the Moroccan mountains and the camel-riding
méharistes
of the Sahara, units even more indigenous in character than their British equivalents.
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The French, however, never embraced the idea of imperial self-policing as comprehensively as the British did. It became a peculiarly British idea that an empire could be sustained upon the personal bond established between a local warrior and the young white officer-sportsman who had learnt his language and adopted his costume.

There was a great deal to the idea. The bonds established were very strong and were to survive the most severe tests. The British, however, took the idea too far. They convinced themselves that what worked to maintain imperial authority and even to extend imperial boundaries would work also in war against fellow Europeans. So enthralled did the late Victorians become by the ideals of empire that they persuaded themselves of the overriding appeal of those ideals to the empire’s subjects. No individual was more seduced by the universality of the imperial idea than Winston Churchill. It came to him, curiously, in South Africa, during the Boer War: an attack on, and in part a rebellion by, white Afrikaners against British imperialism.

Churchill, who participated in the Boer War as both a journalist and a soldier, conceived a profound admiration for the Boer spirit. The Boers’ dedication to their fight to retain the independence of their tiny republics, and their refusal to submit even when they had been objectively defeated by superior force, led him to two conclusions. The first was that, by the exercise of magnanimity, the Boers could be transformed from bitter enemies to close friends; such proved personally to be the case, for Jan Smuts, the outstanding Boer guerrilla leader, became after his people’s surrender the pro-British leader of post-war South Africa and Churchill’s warm political colleague. The second conclusion, which was to have less benign consequences, was that the practice of guerrilla warfare, by people of free spirit, could wear down a superior power, fetter its freedom of action, distort its strategy, and eventually force it to make great political concessions not strictly won by purely military means. This belief seems eventually to have acquired universal value in Churchill’s world vision. He did not place it in context, calculating the likely reaction of a less or more ruthless enemy confronted by guerrilla action. He seems to have invested the guerrilla idea with autonomous value and come to believe that the guerrilla warrior, by the covert nature of his actions and the support he would enjoy from patriot civilians, ensured his success. Such beliefs, though founded on the Boer example, may have been reinforced by his experience of the Irish Troubles of 1918–21 and his acquaintance with another successful guerrilla leader he came to admire, Michael Collins. At any rate, by the time he became British Prime Minister in 1940, at a supreme crisis in national life, he had been involved in two large-scale guerrilla wars, one concluded successfully only with the greatest difficulty, the other undoubtedly lost, and might therefore be forgiven for holding the view that guerrilla operations were a fruitful means of undermining an offshore enemy.

“Set Europe ablaze.” That was Churchill’s instruction to Hugh Dalton, Minister of Economic Warfare in his 1940 government, uttered on 24 July. It was to lead to the creation of a network of subversive organisations which would penetrate the whole of Nazi-occupied Europe west of the Soviet Union, as well as the Japanese-occupied territories in the Far East. The Special Operations Executive (SOE) was the principal body; its chief task was to insert parties of agents, usually by parachute, into occupied territory, to make contact with the local resistance organisations, if they existed, to arrange for the delivery of weapons and supplies and to carry out espionage and sabotage. All were equipped with radio to maintain contact with base. In the smaller countries—Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway—where conditions were not suitable for guerrilla activity, the parties mainly attempted to set up reporting services (disastrously in Holland, where they were penetrated by the Germans early on and their radios used to entrap arriving agents as they landed). In France SOE organised country-wide networks of reporting agents but also trained and armed resistance bands which proliferated after the introduction of forced labour in August 1942. The French resistance, which was comparatively slow to emerge, divided from the start along ideological lines; SOE officers in the field had to play a delicate political game, since within the country itself, the Communists sought to create a secret army of their own, principally loyal to Moscow, while, outside, de Gaulle in London strove to unify the resistance and include it within his forces of Free France. In Greece and the Balkans, where there was a long tradition of local resistance to former Turkish rule, guerrilla bands formed soon after the German occupation of April to May 1941. There too, they also divided ideologically, with results disastrous for the populations. In Yugoslavia the royalist Cetniks were the group with which the SOE first made contact; their leader, Draza Mihailovic, believed, however, that his correct strategy was to build up his strength until circumstances would permit the
ustanka,
a general rising against the occupiers. His Communist opponents, the Partisans, under Josef Tito, preferred to create country-wide war, with the object of politicising the population and securing a position of power that would ensure the creation of a Communist government in the wake of the occupiers’ defeat or departure. On the grounds that Tito was fighting the enemy, while the Cetniks were not, the SOE, whose Balkan directorate was heavily penetrated by British Communists, transferred its support to the Partisans in April 1943. In Greece, the SOE never gave its backing to the Communists, since Winston Churchill prudently thought it essential to keep Greece out of Stalin’s orbit; nevertheless, by the ruthlessness of their internal operations, they succeeded in making themselves the dominant resistance group by 1943, and some of the arms supplied by the SOE inevitably found their way to them.

The result in Greece was civil war, which persisted long after liberation in 1944 and was not finally suppressed until 1948. Civil war was also the outcome of the Cetnik–Partisan conflict in Yugoslavia. Both conflicts led to widespread loss of civilian life, amplified by the occupiers’ reprisals, which often fell on the innocent. Yugoslavia lost a higher proportion of its population than any other combatant country in the Second World War, the majority the victims of internecine violence; the Greeks also suffered heavily.

At the time, and for years afterwards, the guerrilla campaigns conducted under the auspices of the SOE within occupied Europe were celebrated as significant ingredients of the anti-Nazi war effort. The story of the SOE contributed heavily to the myth of “intelligence” as some mysterious means of war-winning, cheaper than battle and somehow more deadly, that captured the popular imagination during the early years of peace. The SOE’s leading operatives—the organisers of the major networks in occupied France, the most prominent of the liaison officers dropped into the mountains of Yugoslavia and Greece—were celebrated as Second World War equivalents of Lawrence of Arabia, as glamorous as he and even more effective.