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Chevalier D’Eon | A cross-dressing 18th-century CELEBRITY spy?
As a celebrity, spy, diplomat and fencing champion, the Chevalier D’Eon had many extraordinary adventures and took on many identities over the course of their long life
As a celebrity, spy, diplomat and fencing champion, the Chevalier D’Eon had many extraordinary adventures and took on many identities over the course of their long life. But there was one aspect of their story that fascinated the Georgian public more than any other – the question of whether the Chevalier was a man, or a woman. In this episode of History’s Greatest Scandals, Professor Hannah Greig and Ellie Cawthorne share not just one scandal, but a string of them, as they chart the Chevalier’s swashbuckling escapades. Watch the full episode, or listen ad-free at the link below: View Green Video on the source website
Oliver Cromwell’s postal spies: intercepting letters and codebreaking in the General Post Office
Oliver Cromwell was England's Lord Protector, but his enemies were out there and plotting through clandestine or coded letters. Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman tell the story of the intelligence-gathering unit Cromwell created, the first in England, which deployed an array of cunning tricks to intercept and decode enemy communications
A month before the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, the Government Code and Cypher School moved into Bletchley Park, a stately home and estate in Buckinghamshire. There, it established a centre dedicated to intercepting and decoding enemy communications, playing a pivotal role in the Allied victory over Nazi Germany. But this was not the first time an operation dedicated to the interception and decoding of messages had been set up in England. Indeed, in 1655 – nearly three centuries earlier – a smaller, but remarkably similar operation had been established on the orders of England’s Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell. It was christened the General Post Office. Early intelligence gathering Until the 1640s, intelligence gathering in the British Isles was a matter of individual spies reporting to their own spy chiefs – men such as Sir Francis Walsingham, the Earl of Essex, and William Cecil and his son Robert. As rivals competing for the favour of their monarch, cooperation was not their first instinct. Operations tended to be limited to the infiltration of groups that might harbour potential enemies, but also the occasional interception of letters exchanged between known or suspected conspirators. And that was often a tricky task. Before any agent could attempt to read a message contained within a letter – which might be protected through ciphers, codes or invisible inks – they had to open it, preferably without damaging it. Long before the invention of gummed envelopes, letters were as intricate as origami birds. The paper on which the message was written was folded into its own letter-packet. Security devices included wax seals and ‘locks’ – pieces of paper threaded through the letter-packet that would rip upon opening, betraying the fact that the letter had been compromised. Great skill was required to deal with these anti-tamper devices; that might mean mending the damage caused by opening a letter or, when that was impossible, counterfeiting all or part of it. Breaking through the wax seal The first security measure encountered was typically the seal – a blob of molten wax into which a design was pressed, simultaneously identifying the sender and preventing the letter from being easily opened. Such seals could be removed invisibly if treated with care. In the second century AD, the writer Lucian recommended using a hot needle to prise off a wax seal. By the 16th century, though, the pliable beeswax-and-turpentine mixture used for seals in Lucian’s time had been replaced by a more secure wax. This brittle substance, prone to shattering, contained hardening substances such as gum arabic – obtained from the sap of acacia trees – or shellac, a resinous substance secreted by a species of Asian bug. The 16th-century Italian polymath Girolamo Cardano suggested warming the wax before using a horse-tail hair to slice under the seal and detach it in one piece. This was, of course, a very delicate operation, and Cardano recommended that less dexterous operators counterfeit the seal instead. To do so, a new seal might be created from scratch, copying the original design and casting a facsimile in brass. This took time and no little skill, though, and would be done only for suspects responsible for high levels of correspondence. For seals newly or only occasionally encountered, a fragile plaster-like cast could be used to directly mould a new wax seal. This process required a sample of the seal that was clear enough to be duplicated. In 1596, counter-espionage agent Arthur Gregory complained to Robert Cecil that “among so many seals… there is no choice of one perfect print”. Gregory would be best able to copy a ‘bare-seal’, formed by pressing a seal-stamp into molten wax on the outside of the letter-packet. The other type, a ‘covered’ or ‘papered’ seal – created by dripping molten wax between the two pieces of paper to be joined – was next to impossible to counterfeit. A counterfeiter’s craft – and curse Once a suitable seal had been identified, a cast could be made – which also required quite some preparation and skill. In his 1558 book of secrets, Magiae Naturalis (Natural Magick), polymath Giambattista della Porta suggested that, before attempting to make a cast, the counterfeiter should first “compass the seal about with wax, that the matter [the casting material] run not about”. This would prevent it from staining the surrounding paper, revealing the counterfeiter’s work. He also advised that the original seal be “anointed with oil” to prevent the casting material from sticking to it. The cast, once made, carried a negative image of the seal, which could then be used to cast a new seal from wax. When time was of the essence, a counterfeiter’s choice of casting material was all-important. Nothing was so likely to put the wind up conspirators as a letter taking 12 days to reach its recipients when it ought to have been there in four. Excessive delay in delivery of a letter was a tell-tale indicator of possible interception. To avoid such revealing delays, Arthur Gregory aimed to formulate a casting compound that dried at speed and to a metallic hardness – with unfortunate consequences. In February 1586, while working to perfect his ‘sealing metal’, he wrote to Walsingham: “I prepared a singular piece of the usual metal to show the same to your Lordship, but a sudden swelling in one of my eyes did prevent me.” A decade later, he connected his activities with recent afflictions: “With the making of metal this last night I have gotten an unsteadiness in my hand which will not leave me for a few days.” Though it’s impossible to be sure – Gregory failed to leave behind a recipe book for posterity – it seems likely that the formula he worked to perfect was inspired by della Porta, who used toxic ingredients such as ceruse (white lead), verdigris (copper carbonate) and quicksilver (mercury), any one of which might have caused Gregory’s symptoms. The General Post Office opens for business As well as counterfeiting seals, intelligence agents like Gregory also sought to master the imitation of handwriting and particular letterlocking styles, translation, cryptanalysis and myriad other tasks. During the time of Walsingham and the Cecils, intelligence operatives worked on an ad-hoc basis – and often alone. Their efforts sometimes delivered tangible results – for example, foiling the Babington Plot of 1586, a scheme to assassinate Elizabeth I and put Mary, Queen of Scots on the throne. Read more | Alternate history: what if the Babington Plot to assassinate Elizabeth I had succeeded? But the lack of a centralised and resourced surveillance system could allow conspiracies to blossom unchecked. After the execution of Charles I in 1649, the nature of intelligence gathering changed. Oliver Cromwell, ruling as Lord Protector from 1653, was aware that the British Isles was shot through with supporters of Charles Stuart, son of the executed king. So he created a system of surveillance with the aim of controlling the primary method of communicating information over distance: the letter. In 1655, Cromwell installed his secretary of state and head of intelligence, John Thurloe, as postmaster general of a new institution, the General Post Office. His reasoning became clear in 1657, when An Act for Setling the Postage of England, Scotland and Ireland stated that the founding of “one general Post Office” would allow the Commonwealth to “discover and prevent many dangerous, and wicked designs… the intelligence whereof cannot well be communicated, but by letter”. Cromwell’s Post Office, then, was created not only to deliver letters but to intercept them. Precursor to the Post Office The idea of using a postal monopoly for the comprehensive surveillance of communication was nothing new. In the 1630s, Alexandrine, Countess of Taxis, was described as “a troublesome busy Woeman, [who] will open letters, [and] hath counterfait seales of publicque Ministers”. Alexandrine’s family held the monopoly on postal services throughout the Holy Roman Empire – in other words, most of western Europe. Between 1628 and 1646, while she minded the family business until her young son came of age, she developed a system by which letters were methodically opened and inspected for valuable information before being resealed and sent on their way, their recipients (generally) none the wiser. The information was then sold to the highest bidder. Alexandrine’s operatives worked in a back room of what we would now call a post office. Similarly secreted offices known as cabinets noir (‘black chambers’) later popped up in Paris and Vienna. The interception of letters was not uncontroversial. When Stuart diplomat and art broker Balthazar Gerbier realised that someone in Alexandrine’s office was opening and reading his letters, he complained of the “violation of his sacred letter-packets”. And in 1642, Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland and Charles I’s secretary of state, argued that the opening of private mail was “a violation of the law of nature that no qualification by office could justify a single person in the trespass”. Inside the Black Chamber For Cromwell, however, the needs of the state justified riding roughshod over private delicacy. His postmaster general, John Thurloe, set up his Black Chamber in the ‘Queen’s Closet’ of the palace of Whitehall, London. In this room, decorated with gold leaf, his men processed all of the official mail sent into and out of the capital, as well as that between England and the continent. The Black Chamber aimed to provide continuous surveillance, and employed several operatives on what was effectively a production line that sought to systematically interrogate suspect letters. The work was conceptually simple but in practice complex, demanding and time-consuming. Read more | The dark truth about Oliver Cromwell The volume of post was too large for everything to be opened, so operatives concentrated efforts on letters for which addressees, recipients, handwriting or seals were already on their watch list. Once identified, these were opened and read, and any suspect contents copied, translated, deciphered or decoded. They were then resealed and sent on to their recipients to avoid spooking any conspirators before enough evidence had been gathered to catch them all. How to elude prying eyes in the Black Chamber Many of the intercepted missives were protected by clever alphabet and word-substitution systems If you needed to send a secret message in a letter that might well be intercepted and read by others, how might you protect that message? One way was by using ciphers or codes. At its simplest, a cipher is a system in which the individual letters are replaced by other letters, numerals or symbols, producing what is known as a substitution alphabet: ‘a’ might, for instance, be written as /, ‘b’ as 7, and so on. Such ciphers are relatively easy to crack using frequency analysis – that is, by counting characters. Because ‘e’ is the most frequently used letter in English, for example, whichever letter, numeral or symbol appears most often in the cipher text is very likely to represent this vowel. Simple substitution ciphers quickly reveal their secrets when interrogated using frequency analysis and a little pattern recognition. Several techniques could be employed to make cracking substitution ciphers more difficult and, most importantly, more time-consuming. But another approach was also used: codes. In a code, each word is replaced by a letter, numeral or symbol. A list of these, known as a ‘nomenclator’, might include names, titles, objects, syllables and common words. So King might be represented by 1, Queen = 2, Paris = 12, ship = 25, therefore = 42. Sender and recipient would work from the same plan, known as a ‘key’, which would contain one or more substitution alphabets, and a nomenclator with anything from 10 to 1,000 entries. These nomenclators were created to frustrate cryptanalytical techniques such as frequency analysis. This sparked a neverending battle for supremacy between cryptographers and cryptanalysts. The best ciphers and codes were easy to decrypt if you had the cipher key, but very difficult to crack if you did not. Getting the balance right could be tricky. While imprisoned in Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight in 1648, Charles I bemoaned the problems created by overdoing things. “Ther is so much in Cypher from K: [aka Lady d’Aubigny] that I doe not thinke fitt to stay this Packet upon the decyphering of them,” he wrote, “because it will cost more then a dayes worke.” By the time of the Restoration, Thurloe had, understandably, made his exit, but the Black Chamber itself remained as part of the fabric of government. By then, its operatives were virtually civil servants. The regime may have changed, but two of the more skilled employees, Isaac Dorislaus and Samuel Morland, remained in office to serve the new monarch, Charles II. (This is perhaps all the more surprising when you consider that Dorislaus’s father had been listed as one of the regicides, accused of involvement in the sentencing and execution of Charles I, and had been murdered by royalists in May 1649.) Lost secrets of Charles II's counter-espionage Morland, a natural entrepreneur in the ‘dangerous trade’, was more than happy to boast of his own victories – presumably safe in the knowledge that they were unlikely to be contradicted – especially when lobbying for cash from the restored king. He claimed that he had saved Charles’s life through the “dexterous opening and Sealing up of one letter Sealed carefully with a Wafer”, and that “by this Art of opening letters & Seals, and copying out dispatches in a moments time &c. were very great services done to King Charles 2”. Morland was something of a polymath. A keen inventor, he not-so-quietly took over the role of early modern Q earlier filled by Arthur Gregory. In 1664, he was granted an audience with Charles II, during which he demonstrated a series of “models in little of several engines and utensils” he had designed to help automate the counterfeiting skills on which the Black Chamber relied. Finding it impossible to distinguish counterfeits from the original letters, the king ordered that Morland’s methods be put into practice. Like Bletchley Park, the 17th-century Black Chamber drew together an array of talented counter-espionage experts and supported them with cutting-edge technologies. Unlike Bletchley, however, neither the Black Chamber nor any of its devices survived to be investigated further. When writing his memoirs in 1689, Morland recounted how another of his innovations, a machine that could copy entire documents in mere minutes, was used “at the General Post Office until at the Fire of London the apparatus was destroyed and was not set up again”. Perhaps it’s apt that this covert unit, and the tools it used to such effect in counterespionage, effectively vanished – virtually without trace. Nadine Akkerman is professor of early modern literature and culture at Leiden University. Pete Langman is a writer and academic. They are the authors of Spycraft: Tricks and Tools of the Dangerous Trade from Elizabeth I to the Restoration (Yale University Press, 2024)
Oleg Gordievsky: the double agent who changed the course of the Cold War
As BBC Two’s documentary series Secrets & Spies: A Nuclear Game tracks the spies operating behind the scenes in the Reagan era, Jonathan Wright takes a closer look at the remarkable dual life of the double agent that changed global policy, and lived to defect and tell his secret-filled tale
In the early 1980s, Oleg Gordievsky was arguably the most important spy in the world. This was not primarily because of his work for what was ostensibly his employer, the KGB, but because he was a double agent for MI6. For over a decade, he leaked Russian secrets that would inform international policy in both London and Washington. His is an extraordinary story, now outlined in a documentary series on BBC Two, Secrets & Spies: A Nuclear Game, which looks at how espionage shaped the end of the Cold War. More than that, it may well have helped save the world from Armageddon at a time when the USSR and the United States possessed, respectively, 33,000 and 22,000 nuclear warheads. Who is Oleg Gordievsky and why does he matter? Now in his 80s and living, it’s said, somewhere in the south of England, Gordievsky was a career KGB spy who rose to become bureau chief in London in the early 1980s. Yet by then, he was also committed to passing information to British secret intelligence, fuelled by a disillusionment in the system he was serving. “I hated the communist system, I wanted to fight against it,” he says in an archive recording, which features in the new documentary. While we now know the Cold War was winding down, that’s not how it would have felt to those living through that time, with aggressive rhetoric coming from both sides and when it seemed that one misstep might have led to nuclear calamity. Gordievsky’s insights proved to be invaluable to the British and their US allies as they tried to manage relations with the Soviet bloc. How did Gordievsky come to occupy such an important position? To take the long view, espionage was a family business. Born in Moscow in 1938, Gordievsky was the son of an agent in the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, or NKVD, the Soviet secret police and the forerunner of the KGB. His older brother would also serve in the KGB. Read more | Stanislav Petrov: the Soviet who saved the world A talented student with a knack for languages, Gordievsky studied at the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations. On graduating, he joined the foreign service and was posted to East Berlin as a diplomatic trainee in 1961, in time to see the wall go up. The division of Berlin was a decisive moment in the Cold War, and remained a potent symbol for nearly three decades; for Gordievsky, it was one of the causes for his turn against communism. Still, he joined the KGB less than a year later. What persuaded Gordievsky to become a double agent? In 1966, Gordievsky was posted to Copenhagen for his first tour of duty in Western Europe. “There was so much beauty, such lively music, such excellent schools, such openness and cheeriness among ordinary people, that I could only look back on the vast, sterile concentration camp of the Soviet Union as a form of hell,” he later wrote about his experiences. He looked on as the Soviets crushed the Prague Spring, an attempt to reform and liberalise the political system in Czechoslovakia, in August 1968. His aversion to communism grew, especially after he returned home to work in Moscow. In 1972, Gordievsky was posted to Denmark again, this time with a willingness to cooperate with the West. Recruited by MI6 officer Richard Bromhead, he began working for the British following – according to the author Ben Macintyre, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast – “a long, complicated dance”. On the podcast | The spy who changed the Cold War Macintyre, who was discussing his 2018 book on Gordievsky, The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War, explained that while Gordievsky wasn’t a senior KGB figure, he was nevertheless “a huge catch”. How did Gordievsky come to be posted in London? He worked to make this happen. Having been recalled to Moscow in 1978, he was briefly in the KGB doghouse after having an affair and getting divorced; the kind of personal life complications frowned upon in Soviet secret circles. While in Moscow, though, he learnt English, partly at the behest of MI6, and mastered the language within just six months. It’s odd, says Macintyre, that his spy masters weren’t suspicious of their Scandinavian expert taking such an interest in the UK, but in 1982 Gordievsky succeeded in his efforts to be sent to London. In the meantime, the British remained patient. Realising the dangers of Gordievsky sharing secrets while in Moscow, they limited their actions to setting up a system by which he could send a message if needed. Otherwise, he was left alone. What happened after Gordievsky was posted to London? Helped by MI6, who made life difficult for his direct superiors, Gordievsky rose to become the USSR’s chief spy in London. In that role, he not only passed on secrets, but helped the UK and, indirectly, the US understand the Soviet perspective on the Cold War tensions. In the early 1980s, the Russian leader Yuri Andropov (who was premier from 1982-84) grew increasingly worried about a pre-emptive strike from the West. Andropov’s paranoia – and that is not too strong a word – reached a peak in November 1983 when NATO conducted its annual Able Archer military exercises. As a result of the information coming from Gordievsky, US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher decided to rein in their “evil empire” rhetoric. According to Macintyre, “it’s one of those [rare] occasions when the information from a single agent actually begins to have an effect on global policy.” Read more | Able Archer 83: the Nato war-game that nearly spelled nuclear disaster When Mikhail Gorbachev visited the UK in late 1984 and met Thatcher, the future Soviet premier received briefing documents from the KGB in London. Gordievsky became, unbeknown to the USSR, a kind of secret middleman, paving the way for Thatcher’s famous remark: “I like Mr Gorbachev, we can do business together.” How did Gordievsky get caught out? Being discovered was a constant danger for Gordievsky. This explains why, despite Western leaders acting on his insights and leaks, the British never shared his identity, even with the Americans. The fewer people who knew who he was, the less chance of his identity being revealed. Nevertheless, the CIA set to work on discovering the name of a figure they dubbed ‘Tickle’. It would, says Macintyre, have got more and more embarrassing to brief the president and, if asked where the intelligence came from, “being forced to reply, ‘It comes from the Brits and we trust it.’ That’s not a good look.” Unfortunately, the CIA worked out Gordievsky’s identity during the course of unmasking one of their own, Aldrich Ames. An embittered KGB expert in financial trouble, Ames had taken money from the Russians, and over the course of his relationship with the Soviets he gave up the names of multiple double agents. This included Gordievsky. Ames is now serving a life sentence with no hope of parole. Read more | The secrets and lies of Cold War spies How did Gordievsky survive his identity being discovered? In 1985, Gordievsky was called back to Moscow. “I felt instinctively that my time was running out,” he later said. And yet he went anyway. Following an initial interrogation that included being given a ‘truth serum’, he was set free, however. Why? Macintyre’s explanation is that the KGB would have hoped to catch Gordievsky in the act of contacting his handlers, which would be a humiliation for the British. They may have also blithely, but not unreasonably, assumed he could never escape the USSR anyway. Instead, there would have been a military trial, followed swiftly by an execution. Instead, in a stunning act of espionage craft worthy of a John le Carré novel, Gordievsky did manage to get out of the USSR, via Finland, from right under KGB surveillance. Operation Pimlico, as his escape plan was codenamed, was triggered by Gordievsky standing by a bakery holding a Safeway bag, which the British knew to be a signal that he needed to be extracted. A few days later, employing his considerable craft to evade pursuit, Gordievsky made his way to a remote, mosquito-infested meeting place. There, the British, themselves harried by the KGB en route, picked him up and bundled him into the boot of a car prior to crossing the border. Even then, all might have been lost but for the quick-thinking wife of diplomat Raymond Asquith, Viscount Asquith and MI6 station commander in Moscow at the time. By changing their baby’s dirty nappy on the boot, she successfully threw border officials and sniffer dogs off the scent – by now quite unpleasant after being on the run – of Gordievsky. Against the odds, Gordievsky escaped the USSR, the irate KGB, and the communist system he had grown to hate, and embarked on a new life in the West. All episodes of Secrets & Spies: A Nuclear Game are available now on BBC iPlayer, and include rarely heard archive interviews with Oleg Gordievsky
Noor Inayat Khan: the daring life of the British WW2 ‘spy princess’
The first female wireless operator to be sent behind enemy lines during the Second World War, Noor Inayat Khan's tale is one of courage and tragedy. Rhiannon Davies explores her story
Who was Noor Inayat Khan? Noor Inayat Khan made history as the first female wireless operator to be sent behind enemy lines in France during the Second World War. Working for Britain’s clandestine Special Operations Executive (SOE), she was sent to Paris in the summer of 1943 to support the Parisian resistance network, Prosper. However, the Gestapo had already infiltrated Prosper, and not long after Noor’s arrival the network collapsed. Despite London urging her to return home, Khan remained in enemy territory, determined to keep communicating with Britain – but the Gestapo were closing in. The Nazis finally captured her in October 1943, and managed to impersonate her to trick SOE into sending further waves of agents into their traps. After her arrest, Noor was imprisoned for almost a year in increasingly squalid conditions, until she was sent to Dachau concentration camp in September 1944 and executed. Was Noor Inayat Khan a princess? Khan was born on 1 January 1914 in Moscow, and was descended from Indian royalty. Her father – a Sufi teacher called Hazrat Inayat Khan – was related to Tipu Sultan, the famed 17th-century ruler of Mysore in southern India. Khan’s mother, Ora Ray Baker (who changed her name to Amina Begum after marriage), was an American poet. “Khan had a pretty idyllic childhood,” says historian Kate Vigurs, who was speaking to us about Noor Inayat Khan for our Life of the Week podcast series. “She had a very loving family, and was surrounded by philosophy, music and religious teachings”. During Khan’s formative years the family lived in London, but then they relocated to France in 1920. “I believe things were a little difficult to Khan at first, because she and her family only spoke English, but she was a very intelligent child and quickly picked up the language,” says Vigurs. However, Khan’s idyllic childhood was fractured in 1927 when her father tragically died. “A few months after his death, she went to visit the family home in India – this is the only time we’re aware of that she travelled there – and she became very taken with the place.” Khan also sought solace in writing. She was a talented author, first penning poems and later publishing children’s stories. But when the Second World War broke out, her life was upturned once again. Noor Inayat Khan and pacifism When France fell to the Nazis in 1940, Khan and her family decided to flee to Britain. But as war engulfed Europe, Khan was desperate to help those suffering, and she and her sister started training as Red Cross nurses. According to Vigurs, this decision was typical of Khan: “She always wanted to help people. She always wanted to do the best that she could.” However, rather than continue with her nursing, Khan changed course and followed her brother into the armed forces. He initially wanted to enlist in the RAF, but poor eyesight meant he could not, so he joined the navy Khan signed up with the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force instead and trained as a wireless operator, learning to quickly send and receive messages in Morse code. This new direction deeper into warfare was directly at odds with Khan’s deeply held principles of pacifism. “She was a pacifist, having been brought up in a very peaceful and caring environment,” says Vigurs. “There must have been some conflict in her head about what she was going to do during the war, to be able to contribute.” Vigurs reasons: “Being a wireless operator wasn’t an active role – she wasn’t bearing arms, and was instead acting in a support capacity. Perhaps she felt like she wanted to contribute in a way that was a little more practical .” How did Noor Inayat Khan become a secret agent? Khan’s skill as a wireless operator eventually brought her to the attention of SOE. This intelligence organisation was founded in 1940, and existed to “assist and coordinate local clandestine activity against the occupying Nazis”. To help support resistance groups across Europe and beyond, the SOE needed to recruit men and women with a range of skills, from wireless operators to weapons experts. Khan was recruited after just one interview, and then began her training so she would be able to survive while on assignment. As well as honing her Morse code skills, she was also taught how to handle weapons, survival skills and security measures for keeping codes secret. Read more | Your 60-second guide to Bletchley Park But some of Khan’s tutors – and even her fellow students – worried that she wasn’t up to the job. Vigurs explains: “Her training reports were extremely poor. They described her as ‘dreamy’ and said she’s ‘not overburdened with brains’” – assessments that the head of SOE France, Maurice Buckmaster, vehemently disagreed with. “But it was even worse than that. Some of her fellow trainees wrote a letter to Buckmaster saying that they didn’t think she was suitable for work in the field. Her wireless skills were superb, but her personality and the lack of security demonstrated on the training course were a real cause for concern.” Despite these objections, Khan remained committed to being an SOE agent – and the Parisian SOE networks desperately needed a wireless operator of her calibre to help them. Against the advice of some instructors and trainee agents, she was sent into the field in the summer of 1943. Was Noor Inayat Khan a WW2 spy? On the night of 16 June 1943, Noor boarded a Lysander (a small landing aircraft) heading for France. In the early hours of the morning she arrived in the Loire Valley and made her way to Paris, clasping a suitcase with her wireless set hidden inside, and with a cover identity as a nurse that would hopefully save her from the Nazis. She started working for the Prosper network almost immediately. Her job was to communicate with SOE back in Britain, to coordinate the arrival of agents and weaponry to aid the Resistance. “A lot of people refer to these wireless operators as spies,” says Vigurs. “They weren’t strictly intelligence gatherers, although they did dabble, so I prefer to use the term ‘secret agent’.” Khan’s job was an incredibly dangerous one. “Being a wireless operator was the most dangerous job for any SOE agent,” Vigurs explains. “To start with, the wireless sets were hidden inside suitcases, so you would be literally carrying the tools of your trade that would give you away in an instant. “Operators were given a life expectancy of six weeks, and a survival rate of 50-50.” How did Noor Inayat Khan get caught? Shortly after Khan arrived in Paris, the Prosper network began to collapse. The Gestapo had managed to infiltrate the group, and “once one arrest happened, it was like a house of cards”. Although Prosper had essentially disbanded, with its agents either arrested or in hiding, Khan was determined to stay and help. “She maintained wireless contact, and this was the most important thing”, says Vigurs. It is noted that she was the sole wireless contact out of Paris at this incredibly important time. “She’s held up for her bravery, for staying in Paris when nobody else was there.” The Gestapo were desperate to catch her. Khan managed to evade them throughout the summer, though there were several near misses. For instance, Vigurs shares that “she dyed her hair blonde, which sent goosebumps down everybody’s spine as it made her really recognisable.” Although Khan quickly dyed it brown again to be less conspicuous, Vigurs says one error in this period proved insurmountable: “The most critical thing she did was keep a record of all her messages. She kept them in code, and she kept them in clear [as the decoded messages were known]. She used to carry them in her bag, and when her friend urged her to stop, she left them on the kitchen table instead – she never got rid of those messages. She should have burnt them.” More from us HistoryExtra members can explore this topic further with exclusive content from our archives Money, love and revenge: the motivations of spies through history Why did the Germans never convince the Japanese to start a serious invasion of the Soviet Union during the Second World War? Our dangerous devotion to the Second World War Alternate history: what if Alan Turing and Bletchley Park had not cracked the Enigma code? Not a HistoryExtra member? Explore our latest membership offers Was Noor Inayat Khan betrayed? On 13 October 1943, the Gestapo finally caught up with her. Vigurs believes that Khan was betrayed by a Frenchwoman, who was worried that a man she had feelings for was interested in Khan. “There were 100,000 francs on Noor’s head, and she was betrayed for just 10,000. So, whoever betrayed her really wanted to get rid of her. “I want to caveat this about her arrest,” says Vigurs. “It's something I've been giving a lot of thought to recently. She was betrayed. She wasn't caught because of lack of security. “Now would she have been caught later? Would something else have happened? Obviously, it's not something we can answer, but I think people are very quick to say it was her lack of security that got her into the position she was in, but it was betrayal that caused her arrest at the end of the day.” However, her lack of security did prove crucial. On the day of her arrest, it wasn’t only Khan that the Gestapo captured – they also seized her collection of notebooks, containing both her coded and clear messages. What happened after Noor Inayat Khan’s arrest? After her arrest, Noor Inayat Khan was taken to 84 Avenue Foch, the Gestapo’s headquarters in Paris. Using her wits, she managed to escape almost immediately, shimmying out of a bathroom window and flying across the rooftops. However, she was swiftly recaptured and brought in for interrogation. “We often think of 84 Avenue Foch as a torture house, where the most horrific things were carried out, says Vigurs. On the podcast | Professor Christopher Andrew explores the history of intelligence and espionage from ancient times until the present day “But they didn't need to do this to Khan – although her interrogations were still brutal – because they had everything they needed. They had her notebooks with the codes, and they'd already caught the rest of the Prosper circuit.” With Khan’s notebooks, the Gestapo were able to impersonate her over the radio and communicate with SOE themselves. It’s estimated that they lured 167 agents to Paris with this technique, with many being arrested and executed. What were Noor Inayat Khan’s last words? After a second failed escape attempt, Khan’s treatment in captivity declined dramatically. “Her treatment changed overnight. She was put into manacles and registered as a ‘dangerous prisoner’, and was sent to Pforzheim prison, where she was kept in dreadful conditions. She was wearing a basic sack cloth, and couldn’t raise her hands to her own mouth to feed herself.” After spending almost a year at Pforzheim, Khan and a small group of other female prisoners were transferred to Dachau concentration camp to be executed. According to Vigurs, it seems Khan was viciously assaulted by prison guards upon her arrival: “When she was taken out to be shot on the morning of 13 September 1944, she was a bloody mess. She had been absolutely brutalised.” “She was taken out to a mound behind the crematorium, which was where prisoners were shot at Dachau. She was killed with a single shot to the back of the neck, and her final word was ‘Liberte’.” She was just 30 years old. Life of the Week: Noor Inayat Khan Member exclusive | Explore the lives of some of history’s most intriguing figures. In this episode, historian Kate Vigurs shares the daring story of Noor Inayat Khan. Listen to the episode now
Chevalièr d’Éon: the tale of an 18th-century gender non-conforming spy
What happens when a spy becomes the subject of other people’s investigations? Nige Tassell delves into the life of the Chevalier d’Éon – the French master of disguise who defied conventional notions of gender
After decades of speculation, gossip and even gambling on the matter, in 1810 it was an elderly Londoner called Mrs Cole who finally discovered the truth. For the previous 14 years, this widow had shared an apartment with a French spinster, the Chevalière d’Éon. During the last few of those years, the chevalière – the female equivalent of a chevalier, or knight – was largely bedbound. Both women were in their early eighties; both also lived in poverty and suffered poor health. Now, on 21 May 1810, at the age of 81, the Frenchwoman was dead. Unsurprisingly, it was Mrs Cole who found the body. Mourning the passing of her friend and flatmate, she solemnly began to prepare the corpse to receive visitors, aiming to provide some dignity in death. As she changed the deceased’s clothes, Mrs Cole made a startling revelation: the chevalière was very much in possession of male genitalia. The French flatmate had told a convincing tale: that they had been born female but – due to social restrictions of the time – had been raised as a boy. As an adult, they had fought as a soldier, and had been free to revert to ‘her’ biological sex only after retiring from public life. Now it appeared that the opposite had been true. This was the final twist in an action-packed life. Mrs Cole sought a second opinion – a dozen opinions, actually, including those of surgeons and professors of anatomy who visited the property. Yes, her friend had narrow, feminine hips and an unobtrusive Adam’s apple, but all of these experts came to the same conclusion: that the chevalière had actually been a chevalier all along. Who was the Chevalièr d’Éon? Charles-Genèvieve-Louis-Auguste-André-Timothée d’Éon de Beaumont had been born in 1728 in the small Burgundy town of Tonnerre. His was a noble family, albeit a comparatively poor one. After a childhood of little note, he followed his attorney father into legal training, graduating in both civil law and canon law in Paris before taking on positions within the civil service. By the age of 30, he had risen sufficiently through the ranks to become a royal censor for history and literature. By then, though, d’Éon had already embarked on the first of his double lives, having been recruited into Le Secret du Roi (The King’s Secret), an undercover network of spies that, under the direct command of Louis XV, operated without the knowledge of the ministries of the French government. These spies often worked directly against government policy – at least, whenever opposing the official line worked in the king’s favour. An early mission for d’Éon – albeit one that may have been, at the very least, exaggerated when he recounted it in his memoirs, as the episode was never documented elsewhere – involved travelling to Russia to elicit the support of the Empress Elizabeth. Support was sought for the placing of Louis XV’s cousin, the Prince of Conti, onto the Polish throne. The empress was known for refusing to meet with French ambassadors so, in order to infiltrate the imperial court as well as evade the attention of the British who only permitted women and children across the Russian border, d’Éon took advantage of his comparatively androgynous looks to disguise himself as a fictitious French noblewoman, Lia de Beaumont. The ruse was successful, with his female persona apparently gaining the trust of the empress and allegedly serving as one of her maids of honour. At the same time, under his biological sex, d’Éon was employed as secretary to the French embassy in St Petersburg. Dispatched to London Returning to France in the autumn of 1760, d’Éon was appointed as a dragoon captain the following spring, seeing service for a portion of the remaining two years of the Seven Years’ War. Having been wounded in battle, he was removed from the frontline and dispatched to London where his legal training would be put to good use: he was charged with helping to draft the peace treaty that would bring the war to a close. For his service in creating the conditions that would bring peace to Europe, d’Éon was awarded the Order of Saint Louis in 1763. The honour was the French equivalent of a knighthood and he could now use the title Chevalier d’Éon. The new chevalier remained in London, becoming the embassy’s chargé d’affaires before a promotion to the position of minister-plenipotentiary. Such appointments offered great opportunities to bolster his usefulness to Louis XV by supplying significant intelligence to the king. One example of this was overseeing covert surveys of the British coastline in preparation for Louis’s misconceived plan of invading Britain, a scheme that only a small number of the king’s very closest associates were aware of. The privileges that came with being interim ambassador didn’t last. Within three months, a permanent ambassador, the Comte de Guerchy, was appointed and d’Éon’s role reduced to that of secretary. He didn’t take this demotion lightly. Having been instructed to return to Paris for his protestations (and fearing the Bastille to be his destination once back on home ground), he resisted orders, instead writing directly to the king to accuse Guerchy of attempting to poison him at an ambassadorial dinner. The French government’s request to have him deported fell on deaf British ears. D’Éon retaliated to the French government’s threats by publishing a swathe of secret correspondence from missions as part of Le Secret du Roi, causing Paris to retreat somewhat from its aggressive actions towards the chevalier. They now realised he was a politically dangerous man. D’Éon was a sharp thinker and, by not publishing the correspondence concerning Louis XV’s secret and undeniably controversial invasion plans, he knew the king could not lend his support to the government’s attempts to discipline d’Éon. After Guerchy sued d’Éon for libel, the chevalier went into hiding in London where he became something of a folk hero to the British public who enjoyed the French government being undermined by one of their own. He remained a spy in Britain where, with the invasion correspondence as his personal insurance policy, he continued to receive a handsome annuity from Louis XV. Salacious rumours In London, the chevalier’s androgynous looks meant that rumours abounded about his sex, with many observers holding the opinion that d’Éon was actually a woman masquerading as a man. Indeed, such was the fervour over the chevalier’s biology that a betting pool was even launched on the very matter on no less an institution than the London Stock Exchange. No pay-outs were forthcoming though as d’Éon refused to be medically examined to provide a definitive answer. One school of thought would later suggest that the chevalier declined to settle the argument because, to help pay off mounting debts from an extravagant lifestyle, he was in receipt of payments from betting houses keen to keep the book open. The mystery surrounding the chevalier remained, although one French nobleman viewed the interminable chatter about d’Éon’s sex as sufficient confirmation in itself that the chevalier was actually a chevalière. “All the world says it,” he announced. “Final incontestable proof!” In 1774, Louis XV died – and with him went Le Secret du Roi. No longer operating along these secret channels, and concerned about a possible loss of that annuity underwritten by the late king, d’Éon sought to end his exile in London and return to France. An agreement was drawn up: the chevalier could return to his homeland, and he could retain his pension, if he surrendered all the correspondence involving Le Secret du Roi. But d’Éon insisted on another condition. Claiming to have been born female, the chevalier requested that the French authorities and the new king Louis XVI officially recognise this. D’Éon’s story involved being raised as a boy because his father could only receive an inheritance from his wife’s family if he fathered a son. The new king agreed to d’Éon’s request, although insisted that the chevalier must always present as a woman. Louis XVI even provided d’Éon with a clothing budget. The deal was known as ‘The Transaction’. In his book Monsieur d’Éon is a Woman, d’Éon’s biographer Gary Kates describes the journey back to France as one seen to be loaded with symbolism. “It marked as well his maiden voyage across the gender boundary, a barrier much better defended and more impenetrable than any national border. As far as the world knew, d’Éon was returning both to his original country and to his original sex.” Not everyone was convinced by these claims of being born female. In November 1777, the newly retitled Chevalière d’Éon was – after four hours of preparation – presented at court at Versailles, with one female observer announcing: “She had nothing of our sex but the petticoats and the curls which suited her horribly.” When France began to assist the anti-British rebels in the American Revolutionary War, d’Éon requested to join the cause, but was rebuffed by the French government. Further requests ended in arrest and being held in a dungeon for three weeks, before being sent back to Tonnerre, to which d’Éon was confined. Here, a collection of – possibly amplified and embellished – memoirs was embarked upon. Eventually, in 1785, small-town life proved too stifling and the chevalière successfully petitioned to be allowed to return to London. These weren’t to be happy years. The French Revolution had put paid to the pension previously authorised by successive kings and d’Éon fell on hard times. Family-owned land and property in Burgundy was also being seized by the revolutionary government, forcing d’Éon to sell personal possessions to make ends meet. Giving fencing displays was one source of modest income, but some time was nonetheless spent in a debtors’ prison. A couple of years after release, d’Éon was paralysed by a fall and was largely confined to bed for those final years. It was a sad, rather tragic end to a life spent colourfully both in the uniform of a dragoon captain on the frontline of war and dressed to the nines for the collective gaze of the Versailles set. Ever the secret-keeping spy, d’Éon had kept the personal mystery intact right up to death. But then, with the body still warm, Mrs Cole made her discovery. Why did the Chevalier d’Éon present as a woman? There were likely a multitude of reasons behind the spy’s identity switch… In 1777, the Chevalier d’Éon returned to France from exile in London but only on the condition that the claim of being born female was recognised by the French government and crown, despite it eventually being revealed not to be true. In his book Monsieur d’Éon is a Woman, d’Éon’s biographer Gary Kates offers several reasons for the double life. “D’Éon’s switch was not a compulsion but an intellectual decision that he made between 1766 and 1776 after careful thought and reading,” says Kates, suggesting that d’Éon chose to present as a woman “because he deeply admired the moral character of women and wanted to live as one.” Also, despite his military combat, d’Éon was ill at ease with hypermasculine ideals. Informed by the Enlightenment thinkers, he was “heavily influenced by early modern feminist writing that called into question patriarchal gender roles”. Kates argues that d’Éon’s declining influence on public life may have been a contributing factor, too. “The ‘cause’ of d’Éon’s transformation was his alienation from French political life. His career as a diplomat and spy having reached a dead end, he searched for a way to win back his honour and regenerate his own soul.” This article first appeared in the August 2023 issue of BBC History Revealed
The Dreyfus Affair: how France was divided over a miscarriage of justice
In 1894, a French artillery officer named Alfred Dreyfus was found guilty of treason after it was revealed he passed military secrets to Germany. Except, he was innocent; the victim of anti-Semitism. Danny Bird explores the years-long scandal that erupted and the fight to clear Dreyfus's name
On 22 December 1894, after a four-day trial at the Cherche-Midi prison in Paris, seven judges unanimously convicted Alfred Dreyfus, an artillery officer, of collusion with a foreign power. Born in Mulhouse, Alsace, Dreyfus was a patriotic and independently wealthy soldier of Jewish heritage. He was sentenced to the harshest penalty under French law: permanent exile in a walled fortification. The discovery, three months earlier, of a ripped-up, handwritten note – the bordereau – in a wastebasket by a French intelligence agent operating inside the German Embassy, had shocked the nation. Ever since Germany’s annexation of France’s easternmost regions, Alsace and Lorraine, in 1871, there had been deep mistrust between Paris and Berlin. The note, addressed to the German military attaché, served to validate this paranoia. Its contents divulged information on changes to French artillery regulations, the outcome of a weapons test, and plans to conquer Madagascar. Suspicion pointed to a spy on France’s general staff, with Dreyfus soon identified as the culprit. His upbringing in a part of France long exposed to Germanic influences, as well as his Jewish ancestry, singled him out as an anomaly in a military culture rife with anti-Semitism and hungry to avenge the defeat of 1871. Exile and conspiracy Two weeks after his conviction, on 5 January 1895, Dreyfus was subjected to a humiliating “degradation” on the courtyard of the École Militaire. His sword was snapped across the knee of a towering warrant officer, and his epaulettes and stripes were unceremoniously torn from his uniform. Baying crowds screamed “Judas!” and “Death to the Jews!”, but Dreyfus remained stoic throughout the ordeal, exclaiming: “Innocent! Innocent! Vive la France! Long live the Army!” before being marched off. That April, he arrived on Devil’s Island, a former leper colony off French Guiana, to begin his sentence. There, he endured appalling mistreatment. Imprisoned within a purpose-built stone hut measuring a mere 4 x 4 metres, Dreyfus was fed rotting pork, manacled to his bed at night, and had his view of the sea obstructed by a palisade. Guards were ordered not to interact with him, and his ability to speak languished. Read more | The Fashoda Incident: what if France went to war with Britain in 1898? Back in France, events were taking a surprising turn. Graphology had been used to convict Dreyfus, with alleged “experts” confirming a match between his handwriting with that on the bordereau. However, in July 1896, Lieutenant Colonel Georges Picquart, the army’s new intelligence chief, discovered that the handwriting was not Dreyfus’s at all. Rather, it belonged to a disgruntled officer, Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy – whose hand was known to Picquart from a letter intercepted that spring. Suddenly, however, his investigation was killed in its tracks and Picquart redeployed to French Tunisia. Always certain of his innocence, Dreyfus’s wife, Lucie, and brother, Mathieu, waged a tireless campaign to clear his name. In 1897, Esterhazy’s banker notified Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, vice-president of the French Senate, upon recognising his client’s handwriting on one of Mathieu’s public facsimiles of the bordereau. The politician, already aware of Esterhazy’s treachery, lodged a complaint with the minister of war and a court-martial ensued. Esterhazy was acquitted in January 1898 and fled across the English Channel, while anti-Semitic riots erupted in several French cities. A national crisis By now, the imbroglio was being referred to as the “Dreyfus affair”. Days after Esterhazy’s acquittal, Émile Zola published an open letter, “J’Accuse...!”, on the front page of L’Aurore (The Dawn). In it, the famed novelist denounced the army’s top brass for conspiring to scapegoat Dreyfus to protect Esterhazy. Zola also warned that the anti-Semitism fuelling the affair would “destroy the freedom-loving France of the Rights of Man” if not confronted. Later that year, Hubert-Joseph Henry, a lieutenant colonel, was found to have doctored evidence to further incriminate Dreyfus. Under arrest, Henry slashed his throat with a razorblade and became an instant martyr for the anti-Dreyfusards. Édouard Drumont’s newspaper, La Libre Parole (Free Speech), launched a petition to raise funds for a monument, inviting messages from contributors. These were full of dark, anti-Semitic fantasies, with many calling for a general extermination. Did you know? The noun “intellectual” was wielded as a term of abuse by the anti-Dreyfusards against their adversaries. Nevertheless, Alfred Dreyfus’s defenders wore it as a badge of honour, popularising the most common meaning of the term today. Finally, in 1899, a retrial took place in Rennes, France. It was an open secret that nationalists were plotting a coup should Dreyfus be acquitted. With the threat of civil war looming, he was reconvicted, but on a reduced sentence of 10 years’ imprisonment due to “extenuating circumstances” – unheard of for a charge of treason. It would take another seven years before he was fully exonerated, reinstated to the army and appointed to the Legion of Honour. He fought for France in World War I and died in 1935, aged 75. In September 1995, the French Army finally admitted that Dreyfus had been the victim of a military conspiracy. This article was first published in the Christmas 2022 issue of BBC History Revealed
Professor Michael Goodman answers key questions about the decades-long rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union
What was the Cold War and why do we refer to it as such? To put it simply, the Cold War was a political, ideological and economic conflict that broke out in the years after the Second World War and lasted up until 1991. The two main protagonists were the United States and the Soviet Union, along with their respective allies (the western and eastern blocs). Of course, it was much more complex than that. Read more | The CIA’s most unlikely Cold War weapon? A secret smuggling operation that terrified Soviet censors As to the name: a war will turn ‘hot’ when it involves open fighting, whereas a ‘cold war’ is a battle of ideology. The Cold War of the second half of the 20th century did, in various instances, become a physical conflict as there were lots of wars by proxy, such as in Korea and Vietnam. But fundamentally it remained peaceful and certainly was not what the two world wars had been. What were the ideologies of the two opposing sides? The United States, and its chief ally Britain, were capitalist and democratic countries, while the Soviet Union was a communist state – the first significant communist country to come out of the First World War. The Soviet ideal was an internal system for making life more equitable and level, but more broadly there was a belief that if communism was to succeed then the Russians would have to export that mentality to other countries around the world. So, in the interwar years – particularly after Joseph Stalin came to power – the idea of a global communist revolution took hold. This was strongly opposed by the west, but the two sides would become allies in the Second World War. In the aftermath of the war, Soviet expansion took on a renewed vigour and became more overt: not just in a political-ideological way, but increasingly in a military way, too. The east and west became embroiled in a battle for ideas, for people, for land and for territory. And later, this battle would become characterised by the threat of nuclear war. Read more | Did the Soviet Union win the war? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/08/GettyImages-1035607912-098f873.jpg" width="3806" height="5510" alt="An American propaganda poster, dated c1920, offers an alarming depiction of life under communist rule" title="An American propaganda poster, dated c1920, offers an alarming depiction of life under communist rule. Long before the Cold War, the US sought to halt the spread of the ideology. (Photo by Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)" /> Was the Cold War inevitable after the Second World War? The answer to this question is more complex than a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’. On one level, there were substantial differences in the aftermath of the Second World War that had not existed at any previous time in history. Take Germany: the four great powers who had won split the country into four zones, with the capitalist nations (the United States, Britain and France) combining their zones into what became West Germany. The Soviets took East Germany. So, in one country, there was a stark division in politics, ideology, economy and allegiances. The hope that these two sides of Germany could live perfectly harmoniously was, at best, naive. Why and how was the Berlin Wall built? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/08/GettyImages-542359919-8124f85.jpg" width="2035" height="2675" alt="The construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 physically prevented East German citizens from entering the area of the city under western rule" title="The construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 physically prevented East German citizens from entering the area of the city under western rule. (Photo by Hilde/ullstein bild via Getty Images)" /> But one issue that pervaded the Cold War was trying to understand what was going on: the perception versus reality. One of the main difficulties that the west faced after the war was knowing what the Russians were up to. Read more | Stanislav Petrov: the Soviet who saved the world Stalin and the Kremlin were fearful of a German invasion; a common fear for the Russians as they had been invaded numerous times in the preceding centuries. American, British and other western diplomats began focusing on the question ‘Is Stalin trying to expand the communist revolution outward, to make states to the west of the Soviet Union communist?’ Or was his intention, as others believed, to create a buffer zone between Germany in the centre of Europe and the Soviet Union? Events from 1947 onwards made the Russians show their hand, and that’s when the Cold War became a more crystallised conflict. Listen| Historian Sean McMeekin discusses his revisionist history of WW2, which places Josef Stalin at the centre of the conflict. He shows how the Soviet dictator outmanoeuvred both enemies and allies to secure his own ends How long after the start of the Cold War did the public know it was happening? Between the end of the war in 1945 and 1947, not much happened. Countries were preoccupied with their own economies and with other forms of rebuilding after years of destruction. The big change came in 1947. First, there was the Truman Doctrine, launched by US president Harry Truman in reaction to what he perceived as a communist threat to Greece and Turkey. This was essentially a promise that the US would come to the rescue of any country who was fighting political oppression. It didn’t name the Soviet Union directly, but it was a clear statement of intent: “We, the US, will support anyone standing up to the Russians.” The Truman Doctrine was followed a few months later by the Marshall Plan, named after the then-US secretary of state George Marshall, which promised enormous amounts of economic aid to these countries. What you had with both of these was a political commitment to defend Europe (and other countries more broadly) against the Soviets. This was followed two years later with the creation of Nato. So, by the late 1940s, the public was certainly aware that there was a growing antagonism between the US and the Soviet Union, if not a conflict. How and why was Nato established? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/08/GettyImages104416960-22e2215.jpg" width="2612" height="3508" alt="Greek dockers unload sacks of American flour provided as part of the Marshall Plan" title="Greek dockers unload sacks of American flour provided as part of the Marshall Plan. The US scheme was designed to help Europe recover from the economic damage of the Second World War –although there was a crucial ulterior motive. (Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)" /> How close did the Cold War get to becoming ‘hot’? Arguably, the prospect of a nuclear war was actually less close than people appreciated, and feared, at the time. But a fundamental concern during the Cold War was misperception: if one side got it wrong in their judgment of what the other was up to, it had the potential to lead to a severe miscalculation that would result in a direct war – a nuclear war, at that. The closest that they came was the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. This was a reasonably short-lived episode where the Russians secretly transported a huge number of nuclear missiles to Cuba, an island around 90 miles off the coast of Florida. Cuba was a communist country led by Fidel Castro, a great friend of the Soviet Union. After American intelligence spotted the missile sites on the island, a tense 13-day standoff followed. There were calls for an invasion, and, famously, Curtis LeMay, head of Strategic Air Command (one of the US’s nuclear arms) – a characteristic, cigar-chomping Air Force man – just said, “Let’s bomb them!” Fortunately, saner heads prevailed. Under President John F Kennedy, there was instead a blockade, which stopped more Russian ships getting in, and clandestine negotiations. Eventually, an agreement was reached whereby the missiles would be dismantled and removed. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/08/GettyImages-159788523-76a228a.jpg" width="4800" height="3632" alt="The US destroyer USS Barry (bottom) and a Navy plane escort the Soviet freighter Anosov (top) away after the conclusion of the Cuban Missile Crisis" title="The US destroyer USS Barry (bottom) and a Navy plane escort the Soviet freighter Anosov (top) away after the conclusion of the Cuban Missile Crisis. (Photo by Underwood Archives/Getty Images)" /> The Cuban Missile Crisis was regarded at the time as the moment the world stepped back from the brink, and is still remembered as such to this day. How did the US resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis? It is with the benefit of hindsight that there is a greater understanding of the stand-off between Kennedy and the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev. The latter was notorious for using bluff as a main method of dealing with people, so he was unlikely to back down publicly in October 1962, despite the scale of the American anger at having missiles so close to their mainland. There was a great sense that this could all-too easily lead to an escalation of the Cold War. Yet the tense situation was diffused with help from a Soviet spy: a colonel in military intelligence named Oleg Penkovsky, who passed information to the Americans and British about the missiles and the Soviet nuclear programme. Thanks to this, the Americans knew that Khrushchev’s policy was based on bluffing, and that the best way of dealing with a bully like that was to stand up to him. That’s what Kennedy did, and Khrushchev backed down. In return, the Americans secretly agreed to remove their missiles in Turkey, the presence of which had partly prompted the Russians to send missiles to Cuba in the first place, in a sort of quid pro quo. One intriguing detail, which didn’t come out until the 1990s, was that in addition to the missiles that the Americans had known about on Cuba – had tracked and watched being dismantled – the Russians had actually managed to get some tactical nuclear weapons onto Cuba. These were never spotted by the Americans. Alternate history: what if the Cuban Missile Crisis had escalated? How close to nuclear war did the Cuban Missile Crisis get? Listen | Michael Goodman tells you everything you need to know about the Cold War What was the significance of espionage in the Cold War? Policymakers in both the east and west continuously supported and financed their intelligence communities throughout the Cold War; clearly it was felt there was a great need for the information they provided and the misinformation they spread to the other side. There were a number of episodes that were a direct consequence of the information gained through espionage. For example, technical intelligence acquired by the Russians – such as blueprints during the Second World War from a variety of different scientists – influenced the way they built their atomic bomb. Then there was the intelligence passed on to the British by Russian double-agent Oleg Gordievsky. In particular, he was good at sharing information about the mentality of the Kremlin. In the early 1980s, Leonid Brezhnev, leader of the Soviet Union from 1964 until his death in 1982, was by then an old man and hugely paranoid. He heard US president Ronald Reagan’s speeches calling Russia “the evil empire” and became convinced that the west was going to launch a nuclear strike. Gordievsky’s intelligence prompted the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, to tone down her rhetoric about the Russians and also to convince Reagan – with whom she had developed an extremely close relationship – to change his speeches. So, this is a key example of where you can almost draw a direct line between espionage information and a change in policy. Listen | Bestselling historical author Ben Macintyre talks to us about his book, The Spy and the Traitor, which tells the remarkable story of a KGB double agent who risked his life to help the west during the Cold War How did the way in which wars were fought change in the second half of the 20th century? One of the biggest innovations of the Second World War was the construction of the atomic bomb. Fundamentally, it arose out of a fear that the Germans would be the first to develop this technology. The atomic bomb was one of the biggest secrets of the war – the science behind it and the fact it was being constructed on such a massive scale – and the dropping of bombs on Japan was a real watershed moment. It changed warfare. Atomic bomb history Was the US justified in dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War? Hiroshima: the race to the atomic bomb How have nuclear weapons shaped global politics? 10 key moments in the post-war atomic world The mystery of the missing H-bomb paper In pictures: the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki So, as the antagonism between the east and west grew during the postwar period, one of the key questions for the Americans and their allies was: when will the Russians get the atomic bomb and how will that change warfare? It was assumed from the outset that any future war would be a nuclear war. Who ‘won’ the Cold War? The easy answer is: the west won. The Cold War ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union; the Soviets’ political-ideological system imploded, as did all the countries that were allied with them – they became independent and shed their Soviet allegiances. Of course, there’s a much more complex answer to the question, but I think on a basic level, as an ideological political conflict, you can say the Soviet system lost. Did the Cold War ever really end? Michael Goodman is professor of intelligence and international affairs and head of the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. He has published widely in the field of intelligence history and scientific intelligence
They engaged in thrilling adventures in a shadowy world. But who were the spies who operated during the Cold War and what were they up to? Professor Michael Goodman steps into a realm of suspicion and sedition to explore why some people turned traitor
Cold War Moscow was a place like no other. The eyes and ears of the Soviet secret police, the KGB, were everywhere; the only place that was really safe, one political prisoner would later write, was in your dreams. It was a place where life and death existed side by side, as did opportunity and imprisonment. To betray the state was to risk everything, yet on one cold and snowy evening in February 1978 that was precisely the choice one individual made. As Gus Hathaway drove from the US Embassy to his residence he stopped for petrol. He was coming out of the petrol station when there was a tap on his car window. A Russian. Hathaway was one of the original breed of the CIA, recruited at the start of the Cold War, part of a cadre who spent their careers hidden in the shadows fighting cat-and-mouse battles with their Russian counterparts. Hathaway had been appointed as CIA Moscow station chief at a crucial time in the espionage confrontation between East and West: the CIA had lost a number of significant agents, and those back in Washington had decreed that no new agents were to be recruited until the losses could be explained. Read more | Spying in WW2: how wartime espionage was just as dramatic as fiction But Hathaway knew better than to reject an overt gesture from the ‘main enemy’. This was neither the first nor the last approach the Russian made, but eventually he was able to make contact and Hathaway secured support to recruit him. The result was more than Hathaway could have hoped for. The Russian, Adolf Tolkachev, was a disgruntled engineer and over the next seven years he provided document after document, sharing a wealth of intelligence and saving the US defence establishment so much money that he earned the nickname the ‘Billion Dollar Spy’. From his first interactions with the CIA, Tolkachev would have been made aware of the dangers he faced. He had to be tightly controlled by the CIA with his information very carefully concealed so that only select individuals knew anything about him. But even this was not enough. At some point in 1985, the KGB learnt of his identity, almost certainly via CIA officers secretly working for the Russians, and Tolkachev was arrested, interrogated and executed. Recruitment process Tolkachev’s experiences and fate were not unique. The Cold War espionage game had begun before World War II came to an end, and although spy technology evolved over the decades, the core elements rarely changed. There were two broad types of human spies: those with an incentive to spy, and those who made the calculated decision themselves to spy and volunteered their services. Finding such people in a position of access – to documents and people – was tremendously difficult, and it took huge efforts over years to recruit them. Encouraging someone to work for an opposing intelligence agency usually involved a certain level of psychological manipulation. What could be used as an incentive or, in the case of some of those recruited by the KGB, what form of blackmail might be employed? Some writers use the acronym MICE to explain these incentives: people spy for Money, Ideology, Coercion or Ego. For Tolkachev, the driving factor was ideology, but for the CIA officer who likely betrayed him, Aldrich ‘Rick’ Ames, the impetus was entirely financial. Read more | Money, love and revenge: the motivations of spies through history Ames was probably the most destructive Soviet spy or ‘mole’ hidden in the CIA. He spent more than three decades in the agency, the vast majority in the Directorate of Operations with a focus on the Soviet Union. For various reasons, Ames got into debt and grew desperate until he could not find a way out. Then, suddenly in the mid-1980s, he had a brainwave: he would sell secrets of limited utility to the Russians. In April 1985, Ames arranged to meet a KGB officer based in the US. When the latter failed to show, Ames brazenly walked to the Soviet Embassy, demanded to speak to the KGB officer in charge and deposited a letter asking for $50,000 in exchange for the identities of several supposed Soviet spies. (He later alleged that he suspected they were plants anyway – that is, not real spies, but agents intentionally dangled by the Russians to confuse the CIA.) Unsurprisingly, not only were the Russians keen, but they wanted more and Ames, increasingly, was happy to provide it. Ames’ espionage career finally ended in 1994 when he was arrested: his extravagant lifestyle had finally given him away. In exchange for the millions of dollars that he had received, Ames had provided scores of names, a number of whom were subsequently executed. In contrast to these sorry individuals, Ames was convicted and imprisoned, where he remains to this day. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2010/10/GettyImages_51503136-f3e7606.jpg" width="600" height="413" alt="Aldrich Ames, a CIA agent turned Soviet spy, pictured at a federal courthouse in Virginia, in 1994" title="Aldrich Ames, a CIA agent turned Soviet spy, pictured at a federal courthouse in Virginia, in 1994. Ames was "probably the most destructive Soviet spy or ‘mole’ hidden in the CIA", says Miles Goodman (Photo by LUKE FRAZZA/AFP via Getty Images)" /> Ideologies at war What caused the likes of Ames and Tolkachev to turn against their own nations? The Cold War was, above all, an ideological battle, one that in many ways began in 1917 with the Bolsheviks and the October Revolution. Once Lenin and his followers had taken power, they set about transforming Russia into the Soviet Union, a vast communist monolith with two primary focuses: maintaining a strict communist ideology and discipline, and exporting their ideology globally with the ultimate goal of inspiring a worldwide revolution. The natural enemy of communism was capitalism, so it was perhaps inevitable that the two main protagonists of these beliefs – communist Russia and capitalist America - would lock horns. Read more | Has Russia always played by its own rules? Yet whilst the theoretical origins of the Cold War can be traced to 1917, in practice it was not until the end of World War II that these differences emerged in tangible fashion. Until then, the US and Soviet Union had been bound together in a ‘marriage of convenience’, conceived to take on greater foes – Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan. As the war wound down and the Axis powers looked defeat in the face, questions emerged about who might be the next big enemy. For both the US and Soviet Union, there was a sense of inevitability that they might become rivals, and by 1947 – less than two years after the last shots of World War II had been fired – the Cold War had become a reality through the Truman Doctrine, a foreign policy declaration by US President Harry Truman that committed the US to fighting Soviet expansion in Europe and beyond. Did you know? In the aftermath of World War II, the US spy agencies are estimated to have enlisted around 1,000 former Nazis or Nazi collaborators to act as spies and informants during the Cold War. Lines had been drawn in the sand, and for the next 40-plus years the superpowers were engaged in a political, military and, above all, intelligence conflict. Neither trusted the other, and each undertook colossal efforts to extend their own influence, sometimes directly and often through puppet governments and proxy battles. In 1949, the year of the first Soviet nuclear test, the atomic arms race began, with both nations spending vast amounts on improving and enlarging nuclear stockpiles, possessed by the notion of trying to one-up the other. It was against this backdrop – of trying to ascertain each other’s nuclear, military, diplomatic and economic plans while protecting their own – that spies became some of the most valuable assets in play. The rules of spying The decision to betray secrets was (and is) rarely an easy or quick one, and once started it was difficult to go back to a normal life, ever. Living with the worry and anxiety of exposure never left individuals. In the West, it could mean imprisonment or, in the case of some like the Rosenbergs, the electric chair; in the East, it invariably meant a bullet to the back of the head. Trying to find out what your adversary is going to do before they do it; trying to understand what is happening around the globe; and trying to be in a position to influence and exert your national objectives are the ultimate goals of an intelligence organisation. This was a game of deception and paranoia, with dedicated counterintelligence staff trying to look out for both recruiters and those recruited. At its heart was a battle for information, to know what the other side was up to. While this activity might appear to be morally, ethically or legally questionable, the intelligence agencies did adhere to certain ‘rules’. For example, what do you do when an enemy spy falls into your hands? Executing an agent that has betrayed your own side might be an idea, but that did not mean you acted in such a callous manner towards your opponents. Soviet and American intelligence officials did not attack their counterparts. Stealing information was fair game, but physical violence was rare. These rules were unwritten and ungoverned, but important nonetheless and number one amongst them was a certain sense of respect and etiquette. If an American was caught spying in the Soviet Union, the routine was to declare them ‘persona non grata’ (person not appreciated) and send them back to the US. This was a practice mirrored around the world – the biggest expulsion by Britain was in 1971 when the UK kicked out 105 Russian officials. This mutual respect not only extended to the individuals and organisations themselves, but in the ‘gentlemanly’ exchange of captured agents, many of which took place on Glienicke Bridge in Germany, which connects West Berlin and Potsdam. This was the perfect location for a spy exchange, literally spanning the Cold War divide. In the days of the Soviet Union, one side terminated in the Western bloc, one in the Eastern, so crossing over was both physically and metaphorically significant. On the podcast | The Berlin Wall: everything you need to know Keeping the war cold The biggest question is whether the lives, billions spent, and huge amount of time and effort made a difference. To put it another way, did spies stop the Cold War from boiling over into physical conflict? The closest we might get to an answer may be Major-General Dmitri Polyakov, a man whose actions – according to former CIA director James Woolsey – “didn’t just help [the West] win the Cold War, it kept the Cold War from becoming hot.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2010/10/soviet-poster-44fec37.jpg" width="600" height="413" alt="This Soviet propaganda poster from 1948 is warning to the US not to meddle with atomic weapons; with spies confined to the shadows, propaganda was the Cold War's public weapon" title="soWith spies confined to the shadows, propaganda was the Cold War's public weapon; this Soviet poster from 1948 is warning to the US not to meddle with atomic weapons (Photo by Universal History Archive/ Universal Images Group via Getty Images)iet poster" /> Polyakov was a general in the Soviet military intelligence agency, GRU, codenamed Top Hat by the FBI, who became an agent in 1961. His trove of intelligence included the names of US military officers spying for the Soviets, missile specs and tangible evidence of a rift emerging between the Soviets and China, the latter prompting US President Richard Nixon to re-establish diplomatic relations with China in the early 1970s. But in the mid-1980s, Top Hat fell silent. It would not be until 1990 that the communist state paper Pravda reported that Polyakov had been executed two years earlier. At first, it was thought that he had been betrayed by Ames, every bit as prolific a mole as Polyakov himself, but in 2001 the FBI unmasked one of its operatives, Robert Hanssen, as another Soviet mole. Read more | Who was Sir Anthony Blunt and the Cambridge Five? It is one thing to look at individuals, operations and events to judge the role played by spies, but completely different to look at it across the evolution of the Cold War and throughout the world. At times the role of intelligence was absolutely crucial; at others it made no difference. What can be said is that leaders relied on their intelligence agencies: budgets rarely shrank, agencies rarely disappeared, and intelligence chiefs were rarely out of the leaders’ offices. As the world became more complex, the ability to gather information became ever more indispensable. Who were the super spies on both sides of the Cold War? Information was a vital weapon in the Cold War, and these men and women – whether motivated by ideological beliefs or money – were on the front line Igor Gouzenko Russian spying for Canada Fate: Survived the Cold War Gouzenko was a cipher clerk at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa. He became disillusioned with the Soviet system and the fact that his family was being recalled back to Moscow. A few days after the end of World War II, he offered his services to Canadian intelligence and would subsequently defect to the West. His most important information was on the continued Soviet efforts to penetrate the American and British nuclear weapons programme. Daphne Park British spy in Moscow and elsewhere Fate: Survived the Cold War Park worked in British intelligence during World War II, going on to join MI6 in 1948. She spent her whole career there, serving overseas in a number of different embassies, including those in Moscow and Hanoi, Vietnam, acting as a diplomat. Earning the nickname, the ‘Queen of Spies’, her remarkable espionage career was all the more important as she was the first female ‘controller’ – one of the top directors – in MI6, at a time when gender imbalance was strong within the organisation. Following her retirement, Park was made a baroness. Oleg Penkovsky Russian spying for the UK and the US Fate: Quietly executed after a public trial Penkovsky was a colonel in the Soviet military intelligence organisation, the GRU. He became upset at not being promoted – feeling that he should be a general – so offered his services to the West. Quite uniquely, he was jointly ‘run’ by both MI6 and the CIA. His espionage career only lasted a few years before he was caught and executed, but in that time he played a pivotal role in the way that US President John F Kennedy dealt with the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, providing reams of data on the technical aspects of the missiles that had been placed on Cuba, as well as describing how the Soviet Premier, Nikita Khrushchev, based his aggression on bluff. Oleg Gordievsky Russian spying for the UK Fate: Fled into hiding Gordievsky was probably Britain’s most important spy. Recruited by MI6 in the mid-1970s when stationed in Denmark, he was a patriotic Russian who despised the Soviet system. He became KGB resident (top officer) at the London embassy and provided masses of intelligence on Britons spying for the Soviets, as well as on increasing paranoia in the Kremlin about a nuclear attack. In 1985, he was summoned to Moscow, where he was drugged and interrogated. He was rescued in dramatic fashion two months later, hidden in the boot of a specially modified car and smuggled to Finland. The Rosenbergs Americans spying for the Soviet Union Fate: Executed by electric chair Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were an American husband-and-wife team involved in passing on information regarding the Manhattan Project, the codename given to the construction of the atomic bomb during World War II. They oversaw an espionage network that included Ethel’s brother and their main source was Klaus Fuchs, the German-born British scientist who handed over large amounts of scientific and technical intelligence on the atom bomb to the Russians. Quite how important the Rosenbergs themselves were in this network is a matter of debate, particularly Ethel. They were identified following a joint Anglo-American codebreaking effort into Soviet transmissions, were arrested and convicted in the early 1950s. They were both executed by electric chair on the same day. Robert Hanssen American spying for the Soviet Union Fate: Imprisoned for life Hanssen decided to offer his services to Soviet intelligence just a few years after joining the FBI. He was motivated entirely by financial gain – he would end up being paid millions of US dollars by the Russians – and passed across thousands upon thousands of pages of highly classified documents. Included in these was not only information on military and technical subjects, but details of Russians who had volunteered to work for the US. Hanssen faithfully passed these all to his Soviet handlers without regard to what might happen to them. Even the fall of communism did little to quell his activities and he continued to work for the post-Soviet Russian intelligence agencies. He was finally caught in 2001 and by pleading guilty managed to avoid the death penalty. He’s currently in prison in the US without the possibility of parole. The Cambridge Five Britons spying for the Soviet Union Fate: All unmasked, none prosecuted The quintet of (clockwise from top left) Anthony Blunt, Donald Maclean, John Cairncross, Kim Philby and Guy Burgess were devastatingly effective. All recruited by Soviet intelligence while at the University of Cambridge in the 1930s, they ideologically believed in the communist cause. Each went on to a successful career in government: taken together they had access to intelligence secrets, the atomic bomb, diplomatic affairs and propaganda efforts. Maclean and Burgess defected to Moscow in the early 1950s, Cairncross was only publicly unmasked in retirement, Blunt was discovered but remained out of prison, and Philby escaped to Russia. Philby was probably the most destructive, having served in the late 1940s as the MI6 liaison officer to the CIA. Michael Goodman is Professor of Intelligence and International Affairs, Head of the Department of War Studies and Dean of Research Impact, King's College London This article first appeared in the April 2020 issue of BBC History Revealed
Operation Mincemeat: how a corpse duped Hitler
As the Allies plotted to invade Sicily in 1943, two British intelligence officers concocted an elaborate deception operation involving a corpse, a submarine, and a briefcase stuffed with documents. What followed would alter the course of WW2 – and save thousands of lives. Jonny Wilkes reveals how the events unfolded
Adolf Clauss and Karl-Erich Kühlenthal could not believe the stroke of luck that had come their way. After a nervy few days of back and forth with the Spanish authorities, the agents – members of Germany’s military intelligence service, the Abwehr – had got their hands on a piece of information that could change the course of WW2: a top-secret letter between two British generals. It had been discovered, on 30 April 1943, among the possessions of a dead Royal Marine floating off the coast; the victim of a plane crash who must have been in the water for some time until a local fisherman spotted his remains. The letter hinted at the planned Allied invasion of Greece and Sardinia in the next few months. With this, the Germans could halt the enemy’s attempts to get a foothold in Europe before it got going. The Abwehr put a copy of the letter on Hitler’s desk, and he quickly ordered infantry and panzer divisions, fighter squadrons, artillery and torpedo boats to defend Greece, Sardinia and the Balkans. Now, the invasion was doomed to fail – all thanks to the chance find of a dead British officer. Meanwhile in London, in a dim, smoky and cramped basement room of the Admiralty, the men and women of Section 17M banged the tables and jumped up and down in celebration when they heard of the Germans’ preparations. And put in front of Winston Churchill was a telegram: “Mincemeat swallowed rod, line and sinker.” What was Operation Mincemeat? Adolf Hitler had been duped. The body was not Captain (Acting Major) William Martin of the Royal Marines, but a homeless man called Glyndwr Michael; the personal papers, keys, cigarettes, stamps, theatre tickets and loving mementoes from a fiancée in his pockets had been fabricated and planted; the fisherman found the body exactly where the British carefully planned it to be so that the Germans would know about it; and the top-secret letter was a hoax. The whole thing was a brilliant, elaborate and macabre deception – codenamed Operation Mincemeat – to hoodwink the Germans from the real target of the invasion, Sicily. By late 1942, success in the North African campaign had allowed the Allies to turn the attentions to the “soft underbelly” of German-held Europe. Sicily was the obvious launch point, since control of the island meant control of shipping in the Mediterranean. But that was the problem: it was too obvious. “Everyone but a bloody fool would know that it’s Sicily,” said Churchill. That did not stop the Allies wanting to take Sicily, though, as a stepping stone to Italy. So they needed to pull off a spectacular act of misdirection to convince the Germans that they intended to go for Greece instead. To that end, the deception plan Operation Barclay set up a non-existent army, faked manoeuvres, and carried out real sabotages on infrastructure to divert the Axis powers and confirm Hitler’s paranoia that the biggest threat to Europe would surely come from the Balkans. On the podcast | James Holland tells the story of the dramatic Allied assault on the island of Sicily in the Second World War Mincemeat would be the most ambitious, and successful, scheme of the lot. The genesis of the idea went back to the early days of the war with the 1939 ‘Trout Memo’, so named as the document compared deception of the enemy to fly-fishing for trout. Although issued by Britain’s director of naval intelligence, John Godfrey, the true author may well have been his assistant, Ian Fleming. Certainly, the dozens of ways to fool the enemy listed in the memo would have not looked out of place in one of Fleming’s later James Bond novels. Around halfway down, the 28th idea had the enigmatic title “A suggestion (not a very nice one)”. That suggestion: “A corpse dressed as an airman, with despatches in his pockets, could be dropped on the coast, supposedly from a parachute that had failed. I understand there is no difficulty in obtaining corpses at the Naval Hospital, but, of course, it would have to be a fresh one.” Read more | Ian Fleming: the intelligence insider behind James Bond Nothing may have ever come of this, but to deceive the Axis about Sicily required the upmost limits of what Churchill dubbed “corkscrew thinking” – imaginative problem solving beyond the linear approach – and Number 28 was resurrected in 1943. The corkscrew thinkers responsible were Charles Cholmondeley and Ewen Montagu, both experienced with double agents, counter-espionage, counter-intelligence and misinformation with their work for the secret XX Committee. Cholmondeley (pronounced ‘Chumley’) was the bespectacled, moustachioed, adventure-seeking eccentric of the pair, seconded from the Royal Air Force having never flown. The pipe-smoking Montagu had been an eminent barrister before the war before signing up with naval intelligence. They led a team, Section 17M, in a basement room underneath the Admiralty, where around a dozen people squeezed into a space fit for six, the air thick with smoke and its fluorescent lighting making everyone look blue. Who were William Martin and Glyndwr Michael in Operation Mincemeat? From Room 13, the first issue that Cholmondeley and Montagu had to solve for Mincemeat was acquiring the right body. It could not have injuries that contradicted the story of a plane crash, and there had to be no chance of family showing up asking questions. They consulted the pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury and secured the services of London coroner Bentley Purchase, who came across the ideal cadaver in January 1943. Read more | Think James Bond's pure fantasy? His creator's real WW2 missions were more outrageous than you'd believe A jobless and homeless Welshman named Glyndwr Michael ended his life, aged 34, by ingesting rat poison during that cold winter. Found in a warehouse near King’s Cross and taken to Purchase, his death report described him as a “lunatic”. To Montagu, he was nothing more than “a bit of a ne’er-do-well… the only worthwhile thing that he ever did he did after his death”. In fact, so unimportant was the man Michael used to be, that if not for a chance discovery by an amateur historian in the 1990s, the identity of the Mincemeat body may have remained a mystery. Operation Mincemeat trailer and release date The wartime crime caper based on Ben Macintyre's novel of the same name releases in cinemas on Friday 15 April in the UK View oEmbed on the source website With Michael kept in a mortuary refrigerator, Cholmondeley and Montagu got to work on the details they were certain would make the hoax more believable to the Germans. They gave their fake officer an exhaustive identity and backstory, beginning with the name William Martin, a common surname in the Royal Marines, and the rank of Captain (Acting Major), which they deemed high enough to carry top-secret documents, but not so important that the enemy would know him. Photographing the corpse for the ID card proved ineffective as well as morbid, so they had to scout for someone who looked like Michael and eventually discovered a striking resemblance in MI5’s Ronnie Reed. Then came the ‘pocket litter’: everyday items anyone would have on them. In Martin’s case, this meant keys, stamps, cigarettes, matches, a St Christopher’s medallion, theatre ticket stubs, a receipt for a new shirt, a letter from his father, and even an overdraft notice from Lloyd’s Bank. These had to be written in special ink so as not to run while in the water. Read more | Spying on the king: when MI5 targeted Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson A masterstroke was to invent a fiancée for Martin. So included in his effects was a photo of ‘Pam’ – actually an MI5 clerk, Jean Leslie – a receipt for an engagement ring, and a couple of beautifully poignant love letters to “Bill darling”. “That lovely golden day we spent together – oh! I know it has been said before, but if only time could sometimes stand still just for a minute – But that line of thought is too pointless. Pull your socks up Pam and don’t be a silly little fool,” one read. “Don’t please let them send you off into the blue the horrible way they do nowadays – now that we’ve found each other out of the whole world, I don’t think I could bear it.” Cholmondeley and Montagu clearly enjoyed creating this character to fool the Nazis. They got ‘Martin’s’ underwear, for example, from the wardrobe of recently deceased historian and politician Herbert Fisher. Cholmondeley wore the uniform to give it wear and tear, while Montagu, truly living the role, had a strange romance with Jean Leslie pretending to be Bill and calling her Pam. This worried his wife enough that she rushed back from the United States. By mid-April, with the invasion of Sicily nearing, it was time to get Mincemeat underway. Cholmondeley and Montagu prepared the body and loaded it into a container filled with dry ice for the journey to Scotland (driven by a pre-war motor racing champion, no less) where the submarine HMS Seraph was waiting. It took 10 days and two enemy bombings to reach the drop-off point, all the while the crew unaware of the purpose of their mission. Once the officers lowered Martin into the water, the engines revved so that the wash would push it towards the Spanish shore. Early on 30 April, a sardine fisherman came across the supposedly drowned British officer near Huelva. Assumed to be a casualty of war, the local authorities ordered an autopsy, which risked giving away the con were it not for the British vice-consul, working with the Mincemeat team, suggesting the pathologists go for an early lunch. The Spanish then buried Martin with full military honours. What secrets were on the body? The dead man had been found with a black briefcase chained to his trench coat, inside which was a letter marked “Personal and Most Secret”. This was the lynchpin of Mincemeat; a communication from Lieutenant General Sir Archibald Nye, vice-chief of the Imperial General Staff – who did actually write it for Cholmondeley and Montagu to ensure complete authenticity – to General Sir Harold Alexander, commander of the 18th Army Group in North Africa. Among the rambling paragraphs about the Guards Brigade and US service medals, Nye referred to the imminent invasion, Operation Husky. “We have had recent information that the Boche [the Germans] have been reinforcing and strengthening their defences in Greece and Crete, and CIGS [Chief of the Imperial General Staff] felt that our forces for the assault were insufficient,” it read. “It was agreed by the Chiefs of Staff that the 5th Division should be reinforced by one Brigade Group for the assault on the beach south of Cape Araxos and that a similar reinforcement should be made for the 56th Division at Kalamata.” Nye even mentioned Sicily as having been dismissed as a potential location for the invasion. Instead it would be used for Operation Brimstone, a double-bluff to fool the Germans: “We stand a very good chance of making him [the Boche] think we will go for Sicily – it is an obvious objective and one about which he must be nervous.” Read more | All you need to know about Hitler's planned invasion of Britain, Operation Sealion German agents quickly heard about the dead British officer with top-secret documents. While Spain was neutral, the government cooperated with the Nazis and so Cholmondeley and Montagu knew the letter would reach the Abwehr. That had been why they selected the Huelva area, where the tides were sure to carry Martin to one well-connected agent in particular, Adolf Clauss. Then when they sent a telegram, intending it to be intercepted, apparently showing the British making concerted efforts to get the briefcase back unopened, Clauss knew he had something important. “Secret papers probably in black briefcase, earliest possible information required, it should be recovered at once, care should be taken that it does not get into undesirable hands,” it read. Of course, the letter was meant to get to undesirable hands. Cholmondeley and Montagu had planted an eyelash in the envelope so they would know it had been opened when the Spanish inevitably returned the briefcase. Did Operation Mincemeat work? For some reason, though, the Spanish refused to hand anything over to the Germans. It needed the intervention of the most senior Abwehr agent in the country, Karl-Erich Kühlenthal, to get the letter finally opened and photographed after more than a week. Before long, back in Britain, decryptions of German High Command messages at Bletchley Park proved the contents of the letter had made it to Hitler’s desk. Read more | Enigma before Bletchley: the German spies who betrayed Hitler to steal codes It was still an anxious wait in Room 13 to find out whether Hitler had been fooled, but when the news started arriving it was everything Cholmondeley and Montagu had hoped. An entire panzer division redeployed from France to Greece, troop numbers swelled in the Balkans, and aircraft, artillery and torpedo boats were actually transferred from Sicily to defend against the invasion. Hitler had been so convinced by the “discovered British order” that even when the real Operation Husky on Sicily began on 10 July, he thought it to be a feint from the real target. Within 38 days, the Allied forces had captured the island with far fewer casualties and ship losses than projected. Italy followed, resulting in the downfall of Benito Mussolini’s regime, and Hitler had to cancel an offensive against the Soviets in order to move troops to fight on this new front in Europe. The course of the war had been changed, but not in the way the Germans thought when they read that letter found on the body of, as Montagu titled his account of Operation Mincemeat, “the man who never was”. This content first appeared in the January 2022 issue of BBC History Revealed
Brian Hochman reveals how wiretapping has been part of American life for centuries, used by criminals and law enforcement alike
Wiretapping has a chequered past in the United States, from civil war soldiers who were seen as heroes for tapping enemy wires to the political scandals that rocked the 20th-century establishment. Brian Hochman, the author of The Listeners: A History of Wiretapping in the United States tells Rhiannon Davies about the history of electronic eavesdropping. Brian Hochman is the author of The Listeners: A History of Wiretapping in the United States (Harvard University Press, 2022) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones