xxii•INTRODUCTION
greater transparency, the declassification of official papers, and the re-
laxation of the rules of total confidentiality have allowed the public to
learn more about the influence of the men known by the initials ‘‘C,’’
‘‘K,’’ and ‘‘M.’’ Far from turning out to have been faceless, colorless
bureaucrats, some of these characters prove to have been larger than
life, with the first ‘‘C’’ being a one-legged admiral whose naval career
had been curtailed by seasickness, ‘‘K’’ an asthmatic infantry officer
who had been theDaily Telegraph’s war correspondent during the
Boxer Rebellion, and ‘‘M,’’ hardly 007’s ruthless chief, later the pre-
senter of a children’s nature program on the BBC.
Certainly stranger than any fiction, the true stories of these remark-
able spymasters have yet to be disclosed in any detail. Nevertheless,
their impact on events, albeit behind the scenes, is hard to exaggerate.
For example, most historians agree that World War II was shortened by
at least two years through the skilful exploitation of the signals intelli-
gence derived from the Anglo-American cryptographic operation con-
ducted at Bletchley Park, which successfully solved many of the Axis
machine ciphers, including those generated on the Enigma. In addition,
the cryptanalysts broke dozens of other codes and read the German For-
eign Ministry’s traffic and that of Japanese military attache ́s across the
world. The scale of the effort, amounting to 25,000 codebreakers, lin-
guists, and intercept operators, was matched only by what they accom-
plished in the military and diplomatic fields.
Interception of Axis future plans, current dispositions, fuel and am-
munition stocks, availability of reserves, and even the complete enemy
order of battle was but one part of the total picture that encompassed
wholesale deception by the manipulation of controlled double agents,
as well as the dissemination of false rumors, bogus wireless signals,
and fake newspaper reports and the preparation of imaginary armies to
mislead the enemy’s aerial reconnaissance. The intelligence techniques
developed by the British helped save tens of thousands of lives, per-
suaded the enemy units launching rockets that their weapons were over-
shooting London, convinced Hitler that the D-Day landings would take
place in the Pas-de-Calais, and bottled up several German divisions in
Norway until the end of hostilities, where they surrendered with
scarcely a shot being fired. Intelligence and deception played key roles
in winning the Battle of the Atlantic against the U-boats, pushing the
Afrika Korps from the Libyan Desert, and destroying Nazi panzers at
Kursk in the biggest tank battle of all time.