Lastly, the Far East made its first important appearance on the international espionage scene in the shape of the Japanese intelligence service, which in the ensuing years became a highly efficient and dangerous presence in the intelligence world.
The period between the two world wars saw a proliferation of intelligence services and a growing complexity in their internal structure. The targets had become increasingly technical and the world a much more complicated place. For the new dictatorships, Germany, Italy, Japan and the U.S.S.R., the intelligence service became the major instrument abroad in probing and preparing for foreign expansion. At the same time the free countries, especially England, had to take on new and enormous responsibilities in intelligence work in the face of the threat of the dictatorships. The silent warfare between the intelligence services of both sides in World War II supplies many of the examples and case histories to which I shall refer later on. On the Allied side, in opposition to the common enemy, there was collaboration between intelligence services that is without parallel in history and which had a most welcome outcome.
During the war days when I was with OSS, I had the privilege of working with the British service and developed close personal and service relationships which remained intact after the war.
In Switzerland I made contact with a group of French officers who had maintained the tradition of the French Deuxième Bureau and who helped to build up the intelligence service of General de Gaulle and the Free French. Toward the end of the way, cooperation was established with a branch of the Italian secret service that adhered to King Victor Emmanuel when non-Fascist Italy joined the Allied cause. I also was working with the underground anti-Nazi group in the German Abwehr , the professional military intelligence service of the German Army. A group within the Abwehr secretly plotted against Hitler. The head of the Abwehr , the very extraordinary Admiral Canaris, was liquidated by Hitler when, following the failure of the attempt on Hitler’s life in 1944, records establishing Canaris’ cooperation with the plotters were discovered.
This wartime cooperation contributed, I believe, toward creating among the intelligence services of the Free World a measure of unity of purpose, and after the war a free Western Germany has made a substantial intelligence contribution. All this has helped us to counter the massive attacks which the intelligence and security services of the Communist bloc countries are making against us today.
2
The Evolution of American Intelligence
In United States history, until after World War II, there was little official government intelligence activity except in time of combat. With the restoration of peace, intelligence organizations which the stress of battle had called forth were each time sharply reduced, and the fund of knowledge and the lessons learned from bitter experience were lost and forgotten. In each of our crises, up to Pearl Harbor, workers in intelligence have had to start in all over again.
Intelligence, especially in our earlier history, was conducted on a fairly informal basis, with only the loosest kind of organization, and there is for the historian as well as the student of intelligence a dearth of coherent official records. Operations were often run out of a general’s hat or a diplomat’s pocket, so to speak. This guaranteed at the time a certain security sometimes lacking in later days when reports are filed in septuplicate or mimeographed and distributed to numerous officials often not directly concerned with the intelligence process. But it makes things rather difficult for the historian. At General Washington’s headquarters Alexander Hamilton was one of the few entrusted with “developing” and reading the messages received in secret inks and codes, and no copies were made. Washington, who keenly appreciated the need for