Looking-Glass War

By John Skow

BODYGUARD OF LIES by ANTHONY CAVE BROWN 947 pages. Harper & Row. $15.95.

This history of World War II shell-and-pea games might have been merely an oversized gathering of spy stories. But there is far more seething below the surface of espionage and counterintelligence. According to British Journalist Anthony Cave Brown, the conflict was a looking-glass war whose cruel and brilliant espionage far outran the fabrications of le Carre and Eric Ambler.

The story of master spies and code cracking was first unraveled last year in Frederick Winterbotham's The Ultra Secret. But Brown has newer intelligence and a stronger moral tone. According to his evidence, Winston Churchill, mindful of the "dull carnage" of World War I, was receptive when the pale geniuses of Oxford and Cambridge proposed "special means"--plans which often resembled the schemes of undergraduates to outwit proctors.

One other factor predisposed England to warfare that depended on cleverness. The Germans had an elaborate code-writing machine called Enigma.

Its ciphers were supposedly uncrackable. But a Polish Jew named Richard Lewinski, who had worked in the Enigma factory before fleeing Germany, succeeded in duplicating the gadget from memory and sold it to the English.

An even more astonishing feat was accomplished by Cambridge Mathematician Alan Turing. Turing was a pure eccentric, a runner who "would on occasion arrive at conferences at the Foreign Office in London having run the 40 miles from Bletchley in old flannels and a vest with an alarm clock tied with binder twine around his waist." Turing was "wild as to hair, clothes and conventions" and given to "long, disturbing silences punctuated by a cackle." But by 1939, confounding all predictions, he had designed an "Ultra" machine that could decode Enigma's messages.

Ultra gave advance warning of the German air raid on Coventry in November 1940. Extraordinary defensive effort could have saved the city, says Brown; evacuation would have rescued its citizens. But Churchill rejected both courses, feeling that they would tip the Germans to Ultra. The raid killed 554 people. Afterward, the Prime Minister was photographed stumping pluckily through the ruins of the great cathedral.

The feints and ruses of special operatives also worked at El Alamein, where Rommel was fooled by planted documents and fake troop movements. Hitler was conned into thinking that Sardinia, not Sicily, would be invaded.

The grandest deception lay in the fog surrounding Dday. Preparations were ponderous, and they aimed clearly at Normandy. But by a brilliant orchestration of fakery, constantly retuned according to the monitoring by Ultra, Hitler was led to believe that invasion was imminent in the Balkans, then in Norway and finally, even after Dday, in the area of Calais. "Special means" had created phantom invasion forces in East Anglia, opposite Calais, complete with phony inflatable tanks that looked real from the air and "complaints" from clergymen about the soldiers' habit of discarding condoms. The nonexistent army even had an illustrious commander, General George Patton, during one of his periods of disgrace.

Malign Side. Churchill informed Stalin: "In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." That bodyguard had a malign side. Coventry was not the only price of victory. It seems at least possible, from Brown's deeply researched account, that resistance fighters and agents were sometimes sacrificed to maintain the credibility of deceptions.

Despite official denials, it also seems possible that to preserve the credibility of a turncoat German agent, he was allowed to report a planned R. A.F. raid on Nuernberg.

More than 700 British airmen were lost, and the surviving flyers were filled with bitter suspicion.

Brown demonstrates convincingly that the intelligence deceptions confused the Germans enough to make the Normandy invasion a success. But in a profoundly ironic way, he suggests, the Allies' intelligence expertise may have lengthened the war. From the beginning, a sizable element among the German General Staff considered Hitler's megalomania to be disastrous. Opposition centered around Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of Abwehr (Counterespionage), whose fellow dissidents called themselves the Schwarze Kapelle, or Black Orchestra. Rommel became a member; so did the maimed Count Klaus von Stauffenberg, whose bomb nearly killed Hitler in 1944. Throughout the war, and increasingly after defeat in North Africa, the Schwarze Kapelle made overtures to the Allies. Secrets were offered; deals for insurrection and surrender clearly were possible.

Two factors, at least, prevented Canaris' group from bringing the war to an early negotiated close. One was the Allies' implacable insistence on Roosevelt's concept of unconditional surrender. The second was Ultra itself. The Schwarze Kapelle was not ignored by the allied intelligence services, but neither does it seem to have been cultivated. The reason, of course, was that with Ultra looking over Hitler's shoulder, the German dissidents were not hugely important. They simply did not have enough information to offer.

John Skow

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