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high-level German communications at will. In the aftermath of the war, hubris—a repetitive influence on secret communication—led the British to believe their own book codes impenetrable, while the Germans during the 1930s both broke the British book codes, an intrinsically insecure means of secret writing, and adopted a machine cipher system, Enigma, which would resist the attack of its enemies’ cryptanalysts—Polish, French and British—until well into the course of the Second World War. The Polish success in breaking Enigma before 1939 was negated before the outbreak of war by German variation of their machine encryption.
    There are other means of acquiring intelligence in real time besides seeing and hearing, notably through the indirect sight provided by photographic intelligence and, today, satellite surveillance; human intelligence—humint, or spying—can, in certain circumstances, also convey critically urgent information. Both, however, are prone to delay and defect. Images, however acquired, need interpretation; they are often ambiguous and can cause experts to disagree. Thus, for example, photographic evidence brought back to Britain from the German pilotless weapons development station at Peenemünde during 1943 did show both the V-2 rocket and the V-1 flying bomb. The weapons went unrecognised for some time, however, in the first case because the interpretation officers did not recognise the rocket in its upright, launching position, in the second because the image of the V-1 was so small—less than two millimetres across—that it was missed. Yet the pilotless weapon photographic evidence was comparatively clear and was supported by other intelligence which told the interpreters what it was that they should be seeking to identify. They knew they were looking for “rockets” and miniature aircraft; even so they failed to recognise the evidence before their own eyes. How much more difficult is image interpretation when the interpreters do not know exactly what the evidence will resemble when they see it: the hideouts of al-Qaeda terrorists, the bunkers of illegal Iraqi weapon development centres. The intelligence of imagery is frustratingly rich—many needles but in a vast haystack.
    Human intelligence may suffer from different limitations: including, first, practical difficulty in communicating with base at effective speed; and, second, inability to convince base of the importance of the information sent. The world of human intelligence is so wrapped about with myth that any clear judgement about its usefulness is difficult to establish. It does seem, that, for example, the Israeli foreign intelligence service was running an “agent in place” at a high level in Egypt before that country’s attack on Israel in 1973. Because the Egyptian government dithered over the decision to attack, the agent sent a succession of self-cancelling reports, with the result that, when the attack came, the Israeli army had gone off high alert. True or not, the story leaves unresolved the question of how the agent was able to communicate in real time. The case of Richard Sorge was entirely different; he was both highly placed and well equipped to communicate by clandestine radio. His difficulty—of which he was unaware—was to secure a hearing. Sorge, a committed Communist and long-term Comintern agent, had established himself before the Second World War in Tokyo as the respected correspondent of a German newspaper. As a German native and citizen thought to be entirely patriotic, he became intimate with the staff of the German embassy, passed on information about Japanese affairs the diplomats found useful and eventually began to assist the ambassador in drafting his reports to Berlin. As a result, he was able to send the assurance to Moscow, during the terrible summer of 1941, that Japan did not intend to assist its German ally by attacking the Soviet Union through Siberia. He had earlier sent convincing warning of