INTELLIGENCE IN WAR

INTELLIGENCE IN WAR

Knowledge of the Enemy

From Napoleon to Al-Qaeda.

By John Keegan.

Illustrated. 387 pp. New York:

Alfred A. Knopf. $30.

Reviewed  By Joseph E. Persico

 

THE literature of espionage flows on with unabating popularity and

durability. Yet in the first sentence of his latest work, the military

historian John Keegan, author of such instant classics as ''The Face of

Battle'' and ''The Mask of Command,'' poses this question: ''How useful

is intelligence in war?'' By the end we will have Keegan's unequivocal

answer, one likely to jar the conventional wisdom.

Though ''Intelligence in War'' carries the subtitle ''Knowledge of the

Enemy From Napoleon to Al-Qaeda,'' Keegan has written not a history,

but several case histories, measuring the contribution that intelligence

made to victory. He is put off by the romantic notion generated by

espionage fact and fiction that spies somehow win battles, even wars, by

ruses, pilfered secrets and cracked codes. His own conclusion, hammered

home again and again, is that ''decision in war is always the result of a

fight, and in combat willpower always counts for more than

foreknowledge. Let those who disagree show otherwise.''

While spying is as ancient as the pharaohs, Keegan dates the beginnings

of ''real time'' intelligence, that is, information obtained in sufficient

time to be used, to the invention of radio. He illustrates the limitations

of intelligence before then in the chapter entitled ''Chasing Napoleon,''

his case history of Admiral Nelson's 1798 zigzag hunt across the

Mediterranean in search of the French fleet. Surprisingly, even in that

era, information could fly -- from the Admiralty in London to the English

coast in two minutes, via a chain of semaphore stations. But once the

fleet put out to sea, communication vanished over the horizon.

Consequently, while the Admiralty had intelligence from several sources

that the French fleet was headed for Egypt to obstruct Britain's trade

routes to India, no way existed to get this information into Nelson's

hands in time for him to act on it. That the French fleet was finally

destroyed at Alexandria after a 73-day chase had more to do with

Nelson's deductive genius, Keegan says, than with the stale intelligence

that was arriving from London. By World War I, however, the

development of radio, as Keegan puts it, ''altered for ever the nature of

war at sea,'' and on land as well. Which leads to his root question: can

intelligence win rather than merely abet victories?

Keegan takes a hard look at the role of intelligence in the Battle of the

Atlantic during World War II, beginning with an observation from Prime

Minister Winston Churchill that ''the only thing that really frightened

me during the war was the U-boat peril.'' Was Churchill's concern

justified? In the conventional telling, Allied intelligence, particularly code

breakers, located German U-boat wolf packs, which Allied ships and

planes then sank. This, it is said, saved Britain from strangulation. But

Keegan is quite ready to sacrifice the heroic legend to the duller truth.

Yes, the Allies did defeat the German U-boat fleet in the Atlantic. And

yes, intelligence did play an instrumental role. But, he points out, even in

1943, the year of the biggest convoy battles, 9,097 Allied ships made it

safely across the ocean, while only 139 were lost. He concludes that

''the Battle of the Atlantic could have been won without the assistance

of the code breakers.''

In 1941, the Germans planned a surprise parachute assault to capture

the island of Crete in the Mediterranean. Because British cryptanalysts

had broken the enemy's Enigma code, defenders of the island had a

virtual X-ray of the pending attack. Yet though nearly twice as numerous

as their attackers, the British lost Crete. Why? Despite this ''open and

shut intelligence example,'' the British commander made independent

and fatal misjudgments.

Even the storied resistance fighters in occupied Europe working with

Allied secret agents to harass the Nazis are not spared Keegan's

relentless rationality. Granting the extraordinary courage of these men

and women -- courage that nourished hope and revived the honor of

conquered peoples -- their efforts provoked such brutal retaliation by

the Germans, Keegan concludes, that they ''brought nothing but

suffering'' to the resisters and their innocent compatriots. As for the

military value of the resistance, it ''harmed the German occupiers

scarcely at all.''

Secrets and Surprises
By Joseph E. Persico
Published: Sunday, November 9, 2003
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What part does intelligence play in the war against terrorism? Keegan is

not sanguine. Conventionally, war pits enemy nations and enemy armies

against each other. But Al Qaeda presents no visible nation or enemy.

Rather, Keegan suggests that Al Qaeda is diffuse, ''a coalition of

like-minded but separate groups.'' The United States, even with its

ocean buffers, proved vulnerable on 9/11; and Europe, with its porous

borders, he believes, ''defies containment.'' Keegan argues that the

technical intelligence wizardry that was employed during the cold war is

ineffectual against today's terrorists. It is back to low tech, he says,

operations analogous to police undercover agents worming their ways into

the confidence of a criminal gang. But the greater challenge ''to the

West's intelligence services,'' he concludes, ''is to find a way into the

fundamentalist mind and to overcome it from within.'' True, no doubt,

but a tall order.

Keegan has a deeper purpose than simply to spin spy stories -- yet his

case histories offer enough revelations and drama to satisfy any

espionage buff. It comes as a bit of a jolt, for example, to learn that

though American cryptanalysts were breaking the Japanese diplomatic

code before Pearl Harbor, many messages that might have given

Washington some foreknowledge of the attack were not broken until

September 1945, after the war ended, because the government lacked

the staff to deal with the volume of information coming in.

Keegan also settles the classic intelligence mystery of the origin of the

Oslo Report, the windfall that dropped onto the desk of the chief of

British scientific intelligence early in World War II; it revealed that

Nazi Germany was embarked on a secret weapons program some five

years before the V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets began falling on

London. Where this priceless intelligence came from remained shrouded

in mystery for some 60 years. Keegan presents a plausible solution

involving a closet anti-Nazi German scientist, a part-Jewish child and an

escape to England engineered by British Intelligence agents. We learn

further how the British persuaded captured German spies to turn double

agent (or be shot) and then had them broadcast to their Nazi masters

false locations as to where the V weapons were falling. This

disinformation led the enemy to shift its accurate aim from central

London to the open countryside, thus saving possibly thousands of

Britons.

Keegan describes how a simple brainstorm provided a breakthrough in

solving the presumably insoluble German Enigma code. Breaking the code

was largely a triumph of esoteric mathematics; yet one intuitive

cryptanalyst had a hunch that lazy German encoders would probably take

certain shortcuts when setting up their machines. Indeed they did, and

British code breakers had a back door into deciphering the

undecipherable.

Keegan is always a pleasure to read for his wit, insight and style. One

academic couldn't keep his mouth shut about a secret operation he was

involved in; Keegan calls his loquacity ''a notorious failing of clever men

leading unimportant lives.'' Nelson's inability to communicate with the

Admiralty in real time may not have been a disadvantage; ''Though he

made his own mistakes,'' Keegan notes, Nelson ''was spared the

misjudgments of others.'' He describes men trapped aboard a sinking

U-boat with horrific economy: ''a screaming mass of humanity, fighting

for egress against the inrush of water, all comradeship lost, every man

for himself, imbued by blind and selfish panic.''

In this latest work, Keegan has not set out to debunk intelligence.

Rather he has sought to place the clandestine underbelly of war in

perspective, to wrest it from the popular imagination as some sort of

entertaining shortcut to victory. In the end, as he puts it, ''It is force,

not fraud or forethought, that counts.'' Whatever its truth, the roots

of this conviction are not hard to divine. Keegan came to military history

well before he came to military intelligence, and he understands all too

well the barbarous physical reality of war as contrasted to the largely

cerebral battlefields of intelligence warriors. To John Keegan, warfare

has always been far more blood and guts than cloak and dagger.