The Golden Egg
SOME interest has been aroused by one of the diplomatic telegrams reprinted in the latest volume (No. IX, Series D) of Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918-1945, which was published by the Stationery Office last week. The telegram (franked Most Urgent and Top Secret, and prefaced by the words 'For the personal attention of the Foreign Minister'), was dispatched from Rome by the German Am- bassador there (Mackensen) on May 23, 1940. It discloses a major breach of security in either Washington or London; for it contains a substantially accurate summary of the long message, routed through the United States Embassy in London, in which Roosevelt replied to Sir Winston Churchill's first re- quest—transmitted on May 15—for forty or fifty old destroyers.
Mackensen's telegram began : 'I am reliably informed by an unimpeachable source that on the 16th of this month the American Ambassador in London received telegraphic instruc- tions from Roosevelt to deliver a message of reply to Churchill.' It ended : 'I am sending the documentary evidence for this report by the next reliable opportunity.' By ill luck the docu- mentary evidence has not, according to the American editors of this volume, survived.
* When a diplomat quotes an 'unimpeachable source' he is normally referring to cryptographic intelligence and has had access to the text, or anyhow to the gist, of a message in a secret cypher which his informants have broken. In the event—a fairly unlikely one—of his being given or procuring a copy of the original text of the deciphered message, he will send it home either by safe hand or in a specially secure cypheri it may be of inestimable value, as a crib, to his own Government's cryptographers. He will at all times take the most stringent precautions to ensure that the source of his intelligence is not compromised—to avoid, in simpler language, killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Mackensen's telegram contained a golden egg, and it was Packaged in a way which is perfectly compatible with a crypto- graphic coup by the Italians. But there are certain indications— including minor inconsistencies between his summary of Roosevelt's message and that given by Sir Winston Churchill in Their Finest Hour—that his documentary evidence was not a straightforward transcript of an intercepted telegram, but something rather different.
Italy was not a belligerent on May 23; she did not declare war until June 10, by which date it appeared that all was almost over bar the shouting. Despite the facade of Axis solidarity, despite the peak reached by German prestige during the Wehrmacht's headlong advance through the Low Countries into France (which began on May 10), nobody in Rome was Under any obligation to give Mackensen the extremely valuable Intelligence which he passed to Berlin on the 23rd. Somebody did, however, do this, and it reached him, not only from an unimpeachable source, but through a 'reliable' informant. The inference is that he probably had it from the Italian Foreign Ministry.
During the month which followed Mackensen's scoop the Italians, despicably shivering on the brink of war and at last— even more despicably—taking the plunge, had every reason to try to impress the Germans with their utility as allies. If they had in fact broken the Roosevelt-Churchill cypher, it is scarcely conceivable that Mackensen, after being allowed access to one message, would not have been .shown subsequent traffic. But his frequent communications to Berlin between May 24 and June 22 (which is as far as. Volume IX takes us) include no further references to the 'unimpeachable source' or to any in- formation which might have come from it. It looks, therefore, as if Mackensen's telegram was not based on cryptographic intelligence, and as if his Roman goose expired after laying, between May 16 and 23, a single golden egg.
In the latter half of that month the United Kingdom was suffering acutely from spy fever. Most of the measures taken against a largely hypothetical Fifth Column were—as we now know—unnecessary and some were unbecoming. But two arrests made on May 18 were open to criticism on neither ground. On that day Tyler Kent, a twenty-nine-year-old cypher clerk in the American Embassy, and Anna Wolkoff, the thirty- eight-year-old daughter of a Tsarist admiral, were taken into custody; they were later tried in camera at the Old Bailey and sentenced respectively to seven and ten years' imprisonment. It seems in retrospect possible that the German Ambassador was indebted to them for his singleton egg.
Kent had begun, while stationed in Moscow in the Thirties, to keep copies of the more interesting messages which he was given to encode or decode. During this period he formed an admiration for the achievements of Nazi Germany. When posted to London in October, 1939, he continued this highly irregular practice and accumulated in his flat in Gloucester Place a considerable hoard of American diplomatic corre- spondence. It included, from January, 1940, on, copies of the telegrams exchanged between. Roosevelt and the Former Naval Person.
It was proved at her trial that Anna Wolkoff, who had the run of Kent's collection of documents, had had some of them photographed, and although the prints were found, the nega- tives were not. Anna Wolkoff was a henchwoman of Captain Ramsay, the then Member of Parliament for Peebles and Mid- lothian, a dedicated anti-Semite who was interned soon after she was imprisoned; and she had also a close connection with a member of the Italian Military Attaché's staff, into whose letter-box she was at least once seen to slip an envelope.
* * * Anyone with the slightest knowledge of how things go on in the sort of demi monde which may have provided Mackensen with his remarkable coup will realise how greatly one possible solution of a minor mystery is over-simplified by what I have written. But it is a possible solution. Roosevelt did send, on or about May 16, the message which Mackensen summarised in a telegram from Rome a week later. It was probably decoded by Kent. If so, it was almost certainly available to Anna Wolkoff on the eve of their simultaneous arrest on May 18. If she did pass its contents on to the Italian Military Attaché, a week is just about the time it would have taken to reach—together with documentary evidence of its authenticity—the German Em- bassy in Rome. And it does seem odd that an unimpeachable source, having produced one report whose accuracy and im- portance can still startle its readers after sixteen years, should have gone forthwith out of business.
* * * There must be two or three, or perhaps half a dozen, people still alive who can throw a much less speculative light than 1 have upon this curious episode. If any one of them happens to read this page, perhaps he or she will send me the true story?
STRIX
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