A Channel 4 SOE mystery
In January and February this year Channel 4 broadcast a history of the war-time Special Operations Executive, SOE, written and presented by the novelist Sebastian Faulks, called Churchill’s Secret Army. It was an interesting series with some excellent first-hand material and footage. But there were two mysteries.
The first, and smaller of the two, concerns the restricted coverage of the programmes. They concentrated on western Europe, especially France and the Netherlands. Little was said about the Far East and nothing on SOE’s efforts in the Middle East and the Mediterranean, even though they were, on the whole, remarkably successful in this theatre.
The second mystery concerns the programme’s treatment of the Prosper network. This was coordinated by Major Frances (sic) Suttill, and during 1942-43 it became one of the most successful resistance organisations in Occupied France. But in 1943 it was betrayed to the Germans, partly through its own carelessness but additionally through the efforts of its courier, Henri Dericourt. The programme revealed that Dericourt was protected by Nick Bodington, a senior SOE officer with responsibility for operations in France. During the war Bodington wrote a report on the Prosper disaster which cleared Dericourt, and after its conclusion he turned up to testify on the Frenchman’s behalf in a treason trial. Dericourt was acquitted and died in 1962 as a result of an air accident in South-East Asia. Faulks, in reporting this tale, suggested that Bodington may have been an MI6 agent before the war (he had been a journalist) and that the connection between him and Dericourt involved more than friendship.
Curiously, Faulks left it there. But much more could have been said. Some years ago the Prosper episode was the subject of a Timewatch documentary (some of the same witnesses appeared in this as were to show up later in Faulks’ effort).(1) As far as I remember this programme argued that Dericourt was indeed an MI6 agent, that his death may have been faked, and that he was instructed to betray the Prosper network by Claude Dansey, the Assistant Chief of MI6.
Why should Dansey have given such a bizarre and terrible mission to Dericourt? Timewatch argued that Dansey hated SOE, regarding it as a nuisance which disrupted the gathering of intelligence from Occupied Europe. If one of SOE’s most important operations could be sabotaged, then the organisation could be taken over by MI6, and attention could be focused on rebuilding secure intelligence networks which had been blown in the first year of the war.
There was more to it than this, however. In 1943 the Anglo-Americans were coming under pressure from the USSR to open up a second front in western Europe. But Churchill was determined not to invade until victory was certain and persuaded Roosevelt to agree with him. He did however concede that something had to be done to help the Soviets. Part of the answer to this was the bombing offensive against Germany. Part lay in a deception called Operation Starkey, hatched, I think, by Dansey, which involved the Prosper network. To this end Churchill ordered SOE to call Suttill back from France in the spring of 1943. The Prime Minister then took the most unusual step of personally meeting Suttill and told him to prepare for an Allied landing in the late summer. Suttill flew back to France, convinced. At this point MI6 used Dericourt to blow the Prosper network in the expectation that its members would talk under torture and would reveal the secret that the second front was about to open. Dansey argued that this would persuade the Germans to divert massive resources west, away from the Soviet Union, which would therefore receive its breathing space at small cost to the Anglo-Americans.(2)
The outcome was like one of those medical operations whose report reads ‘successful but the patient died’. Prosper was rolled up, its members, including Suttill, tortured and shot. Some of the leaders revealed the story of the Allied ‘invasion’ before they died. To back them up the Anglo-Americans assembled an ‘invasion fleet’ on the English east coast and launched 3215 fighter and bomber sorties against ‘invasion targets’.(3) On 17 August the BBC announced ‘the liberation of occupied countries has begun’. But the Germans did not believe any of it. Indeed they actually moved some divisions out of France to the Russian and Italian fronts. So Operation Starkey had been a complete failure (except as far as Dansey, who rejoiced at SOE’s discomfiture, was concerned) and a terrible waste of life.(4) At least 400 members of the resistance went down with Prosper, and the episode injected a dose of poison into Anglo-French diplomatic relations for a generation afterwards.(5)
Why did Faulks avoid this story? It does seem strange that Churchill himself should have been drawn into an MI6 operation, particularly one conducted at the expense of his own ‘secret army’. But Timewatch did produce enough evidence to suggest that there was more to the tragic story of the Prosper network than Faulks seemed prepared to admit. Curiously, the producer of the Timewatch programme, Robert Marshall, appeared in Churchill’s Secret Army. He was either given no chance to develop his thesis or his contribution was severely cut or he has decided to become discreet. This, along with Faulks’ economical presentation of the subject, made for yet another strange twist in a long saga.
Fall-out from the Venona Decrypts
So Harry Dexter White, father of the International Monetary Fund, seems to have been a Soviet agent after all. The Venona decrypts discussed in books by Haynes and Klehr and Weinstein and Vassaliev (reviewed in Lobster 38) apparently confirm longstanding allegations about White and a number of other leading US liberals from the wartime and postwar era. But what is the significance of all this?
As far as White is concerned, many have accepted for years that he had some kind of informal relationship with Soviet or Soviet-front organizations. The case was made fairly persuasively back in the early 1970s by David Rees.(6) Rees’s view, rather like the late Lord Lionel Robbins (who called White ‘a sentimental and highly indiscreet fellow traveller’), is that White kept up his links not because he was a Communist but because he was a New Dealer who believed in (i) union of anti-fascist forces and (ii) US-USSR friendship as the key to postwar world peace and prosperity – his real goals. I suppose he might have been conspiratorial enough to have gone beyond informality. Perhaps he had to if he wanted the links to be kept alive.
We must remember that during the FDR era there was no real inconsistency between supporting the New Deal reforms and taking a friendly line to the Communists. Under Earl Browder the American Communist Party backed the New Deal. Historically, it makes sense for committed New Dealers to have wanted this US version of a Popular Front to continue even when all the signs were pointing in another direction. It was a sentiment which was strengthened by war against the common enemy of the USA and the USSR, Nazi Germany. Here was a country which many believed to be characterised by a malignant and evil form of capitalism in which cartels and big business had too much power. Whether or not industrialists had helped Hitler into office they had become one of the props to his regime. So given that the pacification of Germany was central to international security after the war it was not implausible to argue that expropriating the capitalists, forcibly deindustrialising large swathes of the country, and creating an economy based on agricultural production, were sensible means to this end. Harry Dexter White worked for this policy which was later seen as a Communist plan to create a power vacuum in central Europe opening the continent to Soviet domination. Yet in 1944 you did not have to be a follower of Stalin to believe in the desirability of pastoralising Germany and I am not aware that anyone has ever seriously suggested that Henry Morgenthau, Roosevelt’s Treasury Secretary who gave his name to the plan which suggested precisely this line of action, was a Communist agent.
Another apparently guilty party was Lauchlin Currie, a Keynesian economist, who held the post of Administrative Assistant to the President between 1939 and 1945. Thereafter he worked for the World Bank and was Director of its first country mission, to Columbia in 1949-50. He came under suspicion and decided to stay in Columbia, where he spent the rest of his life (he died in 1993) apart from occasional visiting Professorships in the USA during the 1960s and 1970s. Currie entertained Keynes when the latter was in Washington, and the two were good friends. It is too easy to believe that this was some kind of pretence on Currie’s part. In the circumstances of 1941-45 events backed up the belief that progress was tending to democratic politics and socialist economics, and that Keynesianism showed how these could be synthesised. Currie did have a conspiratorial side to his character, according to J. K. Galbraith, but his plots were designed to infiltrate Keynesians into ‘openings of importance anywhere in the government’.(7)
Of course Keynes worked more closely with White than he did with Currie, although he was probably more friendly with the latter. Did he ever suspect that he was dealing with Soviet agents? Keynes was not unfamiliar with the secret world. He had had contacts with SIS(8) when he was a British delegate at the Paris conference after World War One, and if London had had any doubts they would have probably told him. However I’ve not heard of any evidence to the effect that Keynes believed White and Currie to have been anything other than what they claimed to be – committed New Dealers. In any case I’m not absolutely certain that it would have made much difference to him if he had known or suspected. From a British perspective the alternatives to White and Currie were not at all attractive – as Keynes’s experiences in Washington and Savannah during 1945-46 made very clear.(9)
The record shows that whatever the covert activities of people like White and Currie, their most effective work, in terms of establishing the International Monetary Fund or encouraging the spread of Keynesian economics, was done in pursuit of causes which were inspired by what were in the 1940s mainstream liberal and socialist rather than Communist ideas. We cannot say that they were Stalinists at heart simply because they met Communist agents, since (a) what evidence we have of their beliefs strongly suggests they were not Marxists (not many Marxists are Stalinists but all Stalinists have to be Marxists of some description); and (b) Currie in particular does not seem to passed on especially sensitive material; and (c) in the context of the anti-fascist struggle of the time the enemy was in Berlin not in Moscow. The behaviour of these men should be seen in its proper historical context and the achievements of the New Deal era should not be discredited because some of its proponents did not play the game according to cold war rules which had not even been invented when they were at their most active.
Notes
- All the Kings Men, first broadcast on BBC2, 1 May 1986. The programme was later repeated with some additional information. Subsequently the producer brought out a book: Robert Marshall, All the King’s Men. The Truth Behind SOE’s Greatest Wartime Disaster (London: Collins, 1988). The initial showing of All the King’s Men stimulated a long and intense correspondence in The Listener, the BBC literary periodical. Marshall stuck to his guns and insisted that everything the programme had said was true.
- An abbreviated version of the story can be found in Robert Marshall, ‘Wartime Spies and the Web of Deception’, The Listener, 1 May 1986.
- Anthony Cave Brown, C: The Secret Life of Sir Stewart Menzies, Spymaster to Winston Churchill (New York: Macmillan, 1987), p. 511. Brown covers the story on pp. 498-513, and supports Marshall throughout.
- Anthony Cave Brown, Ibid. Brown suggests that by the time Dericourt started working for SOE he had already built up, with Dansey’s approval, a relationship with the Head of German Counter-Intelligence in France, Hans Boemelberg. By 1943 Dericourt (alleges Brown) was exchanging operational details about SOE for information about the German V weapon plans. See Brown, C: the Secret Life of Sir Stewart Menzies, pp. 500-501, p. 505..
- See Robert Marshall, ‘Wartime Spies and the Web of Deception’.
- Harry Dexter White: a Study in Paradox (London: Macmillan, 1974)
- See J. K. Galbraith, Money: whence it came, where it went (London, 1976), p. 242.
- Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed 1883-1920 (London, 1992), p. 344
- See Scott Newton, ‘J. M. Keynes and the Anglo-American Special Relationship: a reappraisal’, Lobster 36 (1998/9), pp.30-38.