War of Shadows by Gershom Gorenberg

Author:Gershom Gorenberg [Gorenberg, Gershom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

“ACCORDING TO A report from a good source,” the German message said, the British Seventh Armored Brigade in Egypt was “apparently being reconstituted,” meaning that for the moment it was out of action. The radiogram was sent to Rommel’s headquarters, and intercepted by a British operator, on the morning of May 2.

Another message to Rommel, later that day, gave an “unconfirmed, general picture” of the location of troops who’d shipped out from Britain since December. At the end, if the reader was paying close attention, came two items with more solid confirmation. “According to a report from a good source,” the British Tenth Armored Brigade in the Middle East was “presumably not in fighting condition,” and Lieutenant General W. H. E. Gott was the new commander of the Thirtieth Armored Corps.46

The volume of Ultra intelligence from Hut 3 to Auchinleck’s headquarters was rising. If anyone at the Grey Pillars complex in Cairo’s Garden City noticed that the material from “a good source” was more accurate than the usual German reports on the location and condition of British units, there’s no known evidence that word got back to Bletchley Park. The report, or the Hut 3 translation of it, did mistakenly identify William Gott’s new command: it was the Thirteenth Corps, not the Thirtieth.47

A week passed. On May 9, Rommel’s intelligence officer received a long radio message that began with two-month-old information: “A good source reports on March 2, 1942: Axis air force recently suffered from fuel shortage. The Germans have nine battalions [of] infantry… Rommel needs a further month’s rest.” The information appeared drawn from at least one detailed British intelligence document from Cairo.

The same message to Rommel said that the “good source” had reported on April 4 that the British had put down “continuous minefields” from the Libyan coast to Bir Hakeim, in the desert thirty miles southeast of Tobruk, and that British positions were “in part blasted out of the rock.” Following that came the map coordinates of a series of British units and battle headquarters in Libya.48

The German message came in the Chaffinch II key, with which Hut 6 still struggled. It took two days to decode. On the third day, a paraphrase was encoded on Britain’s own TypeX cipher machine and sent to Cairo. Strangely, despite the provocative questions the message raised, Stewart Menzies did not put it in one of the thin packets of Ultra material and decoded diplomatic cables that he delivered at least once a day to Winston Churchill. Judging from his behavior on later occasions, the most likely reason was that the MI6 chief understood that the Germans’ good source represented a problem, and he preferred presenting problems to the prime minister along with their solutions.49

The message did, however, go immediately to the Naval Section in Hut 4, where Margaret Storey and Russell Dudley-Smith dissected Enigma messages looking for Axis espionage. It went in a file that—later, at least—was labeled “Bluebird.” For the moment, all they could do was wait for more bluebirds to land, perhaps bearing evidence of where they had come from.

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