The secret side of World War II

Sir Max Hastings takes exception with the oft-stated theory that Allied code-breaking shortened World War II by two or more years. The spy trade, intelligence gathering and clandestine operations shifted suddenly and dramatically between 1939 and 1945, thanks largely to the radio and the enhanced ability to broadcast information, but little of that mattered when the bullets were flying.

“Knowing the enemy’s hand did not diminish its strength,” Hastings told hundreds gathered in New Orleans Thursday for the International Conference on WWII Espionage Symposium. “Perhaps one-thousandth of 1 percent of secret-source material changed battlefield outcomes. Intelligence has always influenced wars, but until the 20th century, commanders could discover their enemies’ motions only through spies and direct observation. Counting men, ships and guns.”

The radio reduced the need for direct infiltration or observation to gain wartime intelligence. It also bred the need to summon into service mathematicians and puzzle solvers in places like Bletchley Park and Arlington Hall where British and American code breakers and signal interceptors eventually and painstakingly discovered how to decipher Germany’s Enigma and Lorenz communications systems. “Intelligence services suddenly needed brilliance,” Hastings said. “And the United States and Britain recruited some of the finest academic talent in their respective nations.”

The code-breaking and intelligence edge ultimately went to the Allies, said Hastings, author of “The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas, 1939-1945,” but the emerging world of espionage was far from maturity.

“The task of many intelligence officers is to promote treachery, which helps to explain why the trade attracts seriously weird people,” Hastings said. “Spymasters were often unsure which side their agents were really on.”

The uncertainty of espionage and intelligence gathering perplexed commanders on both sides of World War II, Hastings explained. That did not stop them from investing heavily in it. “Secret service became the war’s growth industry. Such huge resources were lavished upon gathering information. The United States alone spent half a billion dollars – serious money in those days – on signals intelligence. Of course, most of this was wasted.”

Spies might be counter spies. Messages were sent and intelligence advanced meant solely to divert enemy focus from one location to another, as was the case when the Soviet Union sent the Red Army to fight well-informed Germans in Operation Mars, losing some 77,000 soldiers in the conflict, possibly as a counter-intelligence diversion from the more successful Operation Uranus, Hastings told the crowd.

Soviet leader Josef Stalin, he said, was often less interested in intelligence about enemy strength and movements than he was about possible conspiracies against him. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was criticized for dismissing military intelligence that was not in his favor. Nazi military authorities ultimately were told to “stop submitting intelligence reports that might upset the Fuhrer.”

It was a time when secret intelligence was difficult to trust, Hastings told the group in his keynote address, the General Raymond E. Mason, Jr., Distinguished Lecture on World War II. Even the best of information from Arlington Hall and Bletchley Park “made it difficult to sift the good from the bad. People expressed caution even about Bletchley Park’s output, saying the enemy can put out deception messages in a code they knew we had, just as easily as we could.”

The spy trade and the code-breaking operations of World War II have filled multitudes of novels, movies, television shows and documentaries in part because unique individuals fulfilled those clandestine and dangerous roles, often paying with their lives for the risks they undertook.

“We must never forget that in every aspect of the global conflict, the stakes were life and death,” Hastings said. “Hundreds of thousands of people of many nationalities risked their lives, and often indeed were sacrificed in the loneliness of dawn before a firing squad to gather intelligence for an advanced guerrilla campaign. No 21st century take on the personalities, events, successes and failures of those dead should diminish our respect – maybe reverence – for the memory of those who paid the price for waging secret war.”

World War II espionage, he added, “connects the war years with the post-war years.”

In the Cold War that followed World War II, and even today, the power of knowing the enemy’s plans and delivering messages that may or may not be accurate remain strategically important. “Scrutiny of communications has become the foremost western weapon in combatting state enemies both with our frontiers and abroad,” Hastings said. “Civil libertarians wring their hands in dismay about what they call a snooper state. What they are unable to recognize is the old nuclear historical delineations between a state of peace and a state of war are defunct, probably forever.”

He said the case of Edward Snowden, the former CIA employee and computer contractor charged in 2013 with violating the Espionage Act for leaking secrets about U.S. global surveillance programs, is an illustration of a changing world of secret intelligence. “Edward Snowden inhabits the universe in which all definitions of conflict, and also of patriotism, are no longer universally recognized. Tactics, loyalties, struggles between nations have changed, are changing and will continue to change. Secret war, as it was practiced by the nations who fought in the 1939 to 1945 struggle, is likely to be future hybrid war.”

The International Conference on WWII is streamed live online at www.ww2conference.com and will be aired on CSPAN. It continues Friday and Saturday in New Orleans.

Thursday’s Espionage Symposium also featured presentations from authors Peter Duffy (“Double Agent: The First Hero of World War II and How the FBI Outwitted and Destroyed a Nazi Spy Ring”); Alex Kershaw (“Avenue of Spies: A True Story of Terror, Espionage and One American Family’s Heroic Resistance in Nazi Occupied Paris”); and Howard Blum (“The Last Goodnight: A WWII Story of Espionage, Adventure and Betrayal”). Wrapping up the symposium Thursday was a conversation onstage with retired Maj. Gen. John Singlaub, a World War II Army infantry officer who served with the Office of Strategic Services and led Chinese guerrillas against Japan in 1943.

Secret warfare may have been in its infancy during World War II, and thus fraught with uncertainties that could be deadly, but, said Kershaw, “We had do anything we could to win that war. The consequences of not doing so are too horrific to consider.”