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Book: 'The Secret War' by Max Hastings


'The Secret War' by Max Hastings, William Collins, £30


John Le Carre once observed that many spies he encountered had a whiff of personal failure and a certain dodgyness about them. Max Hastings's study of espionage and code breaking is packed with anecdotes supporting Le Carre's cruel assessment. Some of the eccentric or incompetent characters he profiles are less James Bond and more Mr Bean. Yet, he also draws our attention to the unsung heroes of code-breaking; mainly non-conformist types whose bosses took the credit.

Hastings, who writes beautifully, points out that in many cases a careful perusal of the daily media in a given nation would have netted more and better quality intelligence than some spies produced by nefarious means. The CIA's failure to foresee the Iranian Revolution and the collapse of communism, despite vast amounts of evidence freely available, indicates this is still the case.

Yet, the real shock is the inability of governments to analyse and use the intelligence brought to them by some remarkably brave people who paid the ultimate price for their daring exploits. In the case of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, both were so convinced of their racial superiority that they refused to believe anyone could break their encryption methods, or develop more sophisticated weapons systems.

A common feature among the Allies and the Axis nations' top brass was to take seriously only the intelligence that bolstered their preconceptions. In the case of the Soviet Union and Japan, spies risked their careers (or even their necks, in the case of the USSR) if they presented intelligence contradicting prevailing assumptions. Hence Stalin ignored the tidal wave of human intelligence and signals interception warnings that Hitler would break the Molotov-Von Ribbentrop Pact and invade the USSR. Ever paranoid, he preferred gossip about internal plots aimed at unseating him. Consequently the superb Soviet spy effort in the run up to, and during, the Second World War, was wasted on the ever-suspicious Master of the Kremlin.

The Americans also failed to treat seriously the signals intercepts pointing to the imminent bombing of Pearl Harbor. No one acted on an intercept in September 1941 from Tokyo asking its Hawaii consulate for the precise locations of US battleships in Pearl Harbor. They also ignored an order from Tokyo requiring all foreign missions to destroy their codes and ciphers on December 3rd. This was followed four days later by the "day of infamy."

Hastings provides us with excellent portraits of the tweedy academics at Bletchley Park and elsewhere, cracking codes, while being regarded with suspicion by a surrounding community who thought they were wasting their time, having an easy war, believing they must be "conchies" if they weren't in uniform. The world now rightly celebrates Alan Turing, but he was by no means the only genius working flat out for years, providing crucial information that saved untold Allied lives. After the war, most of them slipped back into Civi Street, never mentioning their extraordinary contribution to the war effort.

Many of the points Hastings makes still apply today. Some of us urge our governments to use their soft power with regimes that abuse their own citizens' rights, rather than waiting for a full blown conflict that requires either military engagement or diplomatic denial of the facts (Rwanda, Darfur, Bosnia, etc.). "Rather than a failure of intelligence what mattered was the democracies' failure of will," Hastings concludes. Sadly, that could be said of many human rights catastrophes across the globe in the Twenty First Century. We know what is going on, but our politicians prefer to avert their eyes, and then feign alarm when whole regions melt down. Once again, the failure to learn from history.

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