The Measure of Security

“Force and fraud,” wrote Thomas M Hobbes in 1651, “are in war the two cardinal virtues.” If fraud be accepted as including those measures of deception taken by Security to keep the details of plans and resources from the knowledge of an enemy, then it must be conceded that the philosopher has aptly singled out the two elements which—with varying percipience— have been recognized as amongst the first of war’s categorical absolutes.

In a military sense, security is called into being as a defense against espionage; while espionage—almost as old as warfare itself—- can be regarded as constituting the positive, or forward, element of security.

As early as the sixth century B.C. the civil and military emissaries of Theodora, the courtesan-empress of mighty Byzantium, swarmed all over south-eastern Europe and the Levant; and scant success attended such elementary security measures as were put in train to counter their activities.

The Roman Emperor Constantine (A.D. 272-337) employed some hundreds of agents, ostensibly to laud his Imperial edicts and victories. Their less advertised function, however, was the maintenance of internal security; and in its pursuit they were not above the secret denunciation of anyone who dared to raise his voice in criticism of the regime. Neither did they shrink from acting as agents provocateur should the occasion seem to recommend it.¹ In effect, the record of their sinister technique furnished the pattern for the innumerable propaganda-cum-security organizations to be evolved by succeeding generations, with such additions and refinements as sharpened ingenuity might suggest.

In a purely military sense, the ancient Greeks set a remarkably high standard of security in the care they exercised in preserving the secret formula upon which the manufacture of the much-dreaded Greek fire was based. Invented by Callinicus of Heliopolis about A.D. 673, its ingredients included sulphur, pitch, dissolved nitre, petroleum, and certain other ingredients, the nature of which is as unknown today as at the time of the combustible’s first employment. And it was just those other, undetectable ingredients which made all the difference between the veritable Greek fire which, projected through a tube, shrivelled human flesh and ship’s timbers with equal facility, and the pallid imitation of the genuine article compounded by the artillators of the West. The secrecy with which the precise constitution of the formula was preserved implies a security system such as has rarely been paralleled in the history of war.

No attempt was made to conceal from Alaric the Goth the poverty and emasculation of Imperial Rome’s resources for defense; and the proud Capital of the World fell through lack of the strength to keep it inviolate, and want of those security measures that might have helped to disguise its pitiful weakness.

From the chaos and darkness which followed on the fall of Rome’s fabulous empire there gradually emerged a new concept of warfare, less barbaric but, in a sense, less realistic. Conflict found itself hedged about by all sorts of chivalric prohibitions and taboos; and it became the lofty aim of the fighting man, in Lecky’s words, “to unite all the force and fire of the ancient warrior with something of the tenderness and humility of the Christian Saint.” Naturally enough, the ideal was not always realized; rapine had its accompaniment of ruthlessness, and there were relapses into savagery which only too faithfully re-enacted the bestial exterminatory orgies of Attila the Hun.

But in the main the less ruthless conception of war prevailed; and with its acceptance the need for guile and deception, with their corollary of counterbluff, or security, fell into a temporary decline. Everything was conducted in a manner almost naively open and straightforward. The field commander made little or no attempt to veil his resources; if they were not of so inconsiderable a nature as to council flight, if in any way they approached parity with that of an opponent, the tendency was to “put everything in the shopwindow,” and cheerfully fall to hand- strokes without more ado.

Security throughout the Crusades, for instance, was virtually non-existent. The Saracens were so intimately acquainted with all that went on amongst the garrison of besieged Kerek that when one of Reynaud de Chatillon’s knights wedded the betrothed who had followed him out from France, the infidel leader, Saladin, offered to suspend bombardment of the stronghold for three days and nights, by way of affording the happy pair an uninterrupted honeymoon. Chivalry could scarcely go further towards ensuring security in a hymeneal rather than a military sense of the term!

This halcyon condition of affairs was, of course, far too good to last. Someone lacking the necessary force was driven to try and eke it out with fraud and with that the necessity again arose to organize some sort of countermove in the way of security.

This revitalized element of warfare undoubtedly played its part during England’s retention of the cross-Channel outpost of Calais. Throughout its alien occupation the French regarded this formidable point d’appui as a particularly galling thorn in the flesh; and all attempts to regain it by assault having failed, fraud was called in to try and effect what force had failed to achieve. This was during the reign of Edward III, when the command in Calais was in the hands of the Italian mercenary, Amerigo de Pavia; to whom Geoffrey de Chargny, the French Captain of St. Omer, discreetly intimated that 20,000 gold crowns awaited the man prepared to betray the citadel and admit a Gallic force within the fortifications. Like most mercenaries, de Pavia fought for what he could get out of it; but he was not the sort of recreant to line his pockets through treachery. Pretending to accede to the suggestion, and drawing “a little bit on account,” he went on to inform his royal master of the agreement and requested instructions.

The opportunity to set a trap for the French was far too good to be missed; but to ensure that it proved effective it was essential that the Calais garrison should be powerfully reinforced. But the English ports swarmed with explorateurs—as the contemporary spy was termed with tasteful ambiguity—and were the French to learn that de Pavia was to be strengthened, they would be unlikely to pursue their plan. Security as to the movement of reinforcements was, therefore, a prime necessity. So Edward was at considerable pains to muster a fleet of fishing boats at several points along the coast, with instructions to rendezvous at a given point off-shore, where their destination would be revealed to them and the troops they had embarked. Before setting out the King and his followers, as an additional precaution, slipped “sea-gowns” of rough falding over their glittering battle- harness, crowning the disguise with fishermen’s leather caps.

Slipping into Calais haven in ones and twos, the little fleet only disgorged its human cargo after night’s shadows had come down to obscure all movement.

At the given hour the agreed postern was duly opened—after the wily Amerigo had pouched the last installment of his bribe!— and the swarm of incoming French found themselves confronted with the cream of the English Chivalry. Their utter demoralization no less than their subsequent discomfiture, testified with sufficient eloquence to the admirable security which had contributed so signally to their downfall.

A similar infiltration of fighting-men as, apparently, harmless civilians was a device, it will be recalled, practiced by the Germans to very useful purpose at the time of their surprise attack on Norway in the April of 1940.

The employment of mercenary armies on a large scale, followed by the inauguration of standing national forces among many other things, established warfare on a far more realistic footing than in the days of Chivalry. The mercenary, making a good thing out of pay and booty, was all in favour of living to fight—and profitably pillage—another day. Equally, the fixed hope of the conscripts who formed the bulk of the respective national armies was to survive the perils of the battle-fields, so that they might return to plough their own.

In these changed circumstances deception, guile, and duplicity strove their utmost to baffle the opponent; while security bent all its energies to the guardianship of the Commander’s intentions and all the details of the resources upon which he relied to carry them into execution. Not for nothing had Niccolo Machiavellilaidit down that “Those enterprises are best which can be concealed up to the moment of their fulfillment.”

There were still Field Commanders of note who held by Capablanca’s robust belief that “A master does not win by traps, he wins by force”; but they were in a dwindling minority. The new concept of conflict regarded deception—leading to surprise—as an integral part of war’s prosecution. It also demanded a close-webbed security organization to act as deception’s vigilant guardian— truth kept inviolate by a bodyguard of lies.

But the technique of security is not to be perfected in a day; while only in rare instances has the degree of effectiveness achieved by rival military organizations in this particular reached anything like parity. Perhaps at no time was this more strikingly demonstrated than in the days prior to the launching of Philip of Spain’s attempt to submerge Elizabethan England. Drake and Howard of Effingham were fully aware of the strength and composition of the Armada gathering in the havens of Corunna, Vigo, and Cadiz, as they were informed, down to the last drummer boy, as to the number of invasion troops the Duke of Parma had been able to concentrate in the Spanish Netherlands.

It was a different story, however, with such security organization as the Spaniards had succeeded in evolving. There were plenty of sympathizers in England to forward intelligence; even something suspiciously like a “Spanish Party” in the Cabinet itself. But there was no one to warn Admiral Cruz that the squadron commanded by Drake could outsail and—more    particularly—outgun anything that the Spanish shipyards could put into the water. Yet the writing had been on the wall for all with the wit to read, with Drake’s magnificently insolent and highly successful attempt to “singe the King of Spain’s beard,” in April, 1587. Discarding 21 of the 25 ships at his disposal, all unheralded the Devon captain sailed into Cadiz harbour, where the Spanish vessels lay at their anchorage in scores. Holding his fire until he could wreak the maximum execution, Drake poured in his broadsides from tier upon tier of ordnance, of whose overwhelming power no word can possibly have reached the Spaniards’ ears. Under the hail of metal the enemy galleys, unable to return shot for shot or to ram—since their row-benches were a mash of shattered bodies—drifted helplessly to and fro, a sitting target; and the “history of the world was altered in an hour: the era of galley warfare was ended” as Sir Geoffrey Callender has written in his The Naval Side of British History. So far as the Spaniards were concerned, the era of security can scarcely be said to have begun.

Security measures are much more difficult to operate efficiently when the belligerents speak the same language. Proof of this was abundant during the civil strife between England’s Charles I and the Parliamentary forces under Fairfax and Cromwell, throughout the American War of Independence, and again when America was riven by its Civil War.

With a common tongue in use throughout the area of conflict and no infallible means of ascertaining in which direction individual sympathies may lie, the task of security is complicated at every turn. In the War of Independence, for example, although the popular cause commanded the greater support, there were not wanting loyalist elements whose one desire was to help towards a victory for British arms. On balance, however, the security measures operated by Washington’s Intelligence Officer, Captain Benjamin Tallmadge, were considerably more effective than those organized by the British. There was no leakage to spoil Washington’s surprise crossing of the Delaware to rout the Hessians at Trenton. At Whitemarsh the Commander-in-Chief was in receipt of a constant stream of messages as to the activities and intentions of the British troops in Philadelphia. Nor was there any lack of vigilance when Major John Andre sought to make his way back to his own lines after the momentous meeting with Benedict Arnold at Smith’s House. John Paulding and his companions, Isaac Van Wart and David Williams, may have started out with no other purpose than to head off redcoat cattle-rustlers from New York. But their eyes were alert for “bad people on the road”; and in their opinion the smooth-spoken stranger in the blue surtout and knee boots undoubtedly came into that category. Neither were they to be bluffed or cajoled out of their suspicions. The outcome was an arrest which reflected the greatest credit on the indoctrination in security to which these simple militiamen had obviously been submitted. That security, prior to Andre’s capture, had entertained no doubts as to the dependability of Arnold himself can readily be understood in the light of the renegade’s earlier record. For this was of a brilliance which would have made distrust nothing less than an unthinkable form of treachery.

So far as naval matters were concerned, British security undoubtedly left a good deal to be desired. D’Estaing, with a large fleet bearing 4,000 French auxiliaries, had put in to Delaware Bay unhindered. This can be attributed to the fact that the warning frigate by which intelligence of the imminent arrival of this formidable armament should have been conveyed to the Admiral commanding in North American waters, had elected to run for England; whence the news could not be forwarded in time to be of any practical service. Again, in 1780, when Cornwallis’s off-shore squadron did its gallant but unsuccessful best to cripple the armada bearing Rochambeau and 5,000 Gallic reinforcements, no effort was made to inform Admiral Arbuthnot of the outcome of the encounter; so there was no opposing force to greet the Frenchmen when they arrived off Rhode Island. It followed that Clinton, in New York, although fully informed by his security services of the exhausted and mutinous state into which Washington’s army had temporarily sunk, was in no case to turn the situation to advantage.

If security is not as long-ranged as it is long-termed, its practitioners are apt to make the unpleasant discovery that they have been living in a fool’s paradise.

Over more recent times three elements have added enormously to the difficulties with which security has to contend—increasing literacy, the incidence and increase in number of newspapers, and the progressive amplification of the means of inter-global communication. There were few letter writers and fewer newsprints in the days of Cromwell, Blake, Turenne, Marlborough, Frederick the Great, Vernon, Washington, Rodney, or Ferdinand of Brunswick; while the occasional diarist was—fortunately—apt to preserve his records for publication in the after-years.²

It was a very different story by the time of the war between France and Britain and her allies; the first shots in which were exchanged in 1793 and the last expended on the field of Waterloo in 1815. Newspapers were not only flourishing but, as fiercely partisan sheets, remarkably outspoken in their comments. Moreover, eccentricities of orthography and grammar did nothing to inhibit the flow of correspondence from officers serving in the Iberian Peninsula or at sea. And many of these epistles found their way into the public press, to the acute embarrassment of the military authorities and the infinite satisfaction of the enemy intelligence.

At one period the scandal of these “writing Officers,” as Wellington testily described them, became so grave that the Duke sharply reminded Government, “It may be very right to give the British public this information, but if they choose to have it, they ought to know the price they pay for it, and the advantage it gives the enemy in all their operations.” The Commander-in-Chief was in no way exaggerating; for the newspapers had published a whole series of letters from the front which, pieced together, had afforded Masséna a graphic and detailed picture of his opponent’s dispositions, with the number of troops in his command, and the likely strength of his immediate reinforcements. As Napoleon’s own letters have revealed, both the Emperor and his Marshals consistently relied on the English newspapers to keep them supplied with a steady stream of up-to-date and authentic information.

Nor can the security section of Wellington’s generally admirable intelligence service be justly held responsible for a state of affairs they could only deplore without any particular hope of remedying. The principles of censorship of correspondence had not yet been so much as adumbrated, and appeals for restraint were hopelessly undermined when it was discovered that two of the chief offenders were the Cavalry Brigadier, Ballard Long, and the Army’s own Quartermaster-General, Colonel Willoughby Gordon.

A very different state of affairs prevailed on the “other side of the fence.” Wielding absolute power, Napoleon was determined that there should be no lowering of public morale through the indiscreet revelation of anything calculated to deflate it. Equally, he was resolved that military security should play a full part in guarding his secrets from his enemies. He had little enough to fear. The facilities afforded the services for forwarding private mail were negligible; while of such letters as did achieve transit by far the larger proportion underwent careful scrutiny in the Black Bureau. In addition, the ramifications of Fouche’s security police extended into every branch of the Service; one of his principal agents being the beautiful and alluring Ida de Saint Elms, who first came into prominence as the mistress of General Jean Victor Moreau. In due course—and probably under instruction—she was pleased to transfer herself, and her less endearing activities, to the protection of fiery, redheaded Marshal Ney, an individual of such incalculable impetuosity as to attract the attention of any security service.

So far as newspapers were concerned, at the head of a controlled press was the official Moniteur, and surely its unvarying tale of stupendous victories would have been utterly incredible to any people less intoxicated with vainglory than the French. However, as its rival sheets dutifully echoed the brazen mendacity with which it reported as Napoleonic triumphs even such sanguinary setbacks as Eylau, there was no disturbing note to challenge those innumerable bulletins which always trumpeted with l'eloquence de la victoire. Since the little Corsican never doubted his ultimate success, like other dictators before and since, he felt under no obligation to assay the degree of shock and disillusionment that lay in wait on defeat, when the plain, unvarnished truth would stand revealed. Disenchantment, when it did come, was shattering; because the politico- military security measures, whose primary purpose is to bolster up untruth, dig a pit for themselves in which they are ultimately engulfed. The authoritarian’s precept, “Keep them from knowing until it no longer matters,” is the merest sophistry. Integrity always matters.

Throughout the whole of the struggle with Napoleon, French privateers were a perpetual vexation to the British naval authorities; and at one period a device was put into practice which, with better security, would have earned even richer dividends. Craft such as the sloop Doris and the 74-gun Plantagenet were diguised as harmless-looking merchantmen—much as the Q ships took on a pacific guise in the war of 1914-18—and sent out to “trail their coats” in the western approaches of the English Channel. Challenged by a gloating privateer, down would go the false deck-hamper, the loaded guns would be run out, and a strong body of Marines would add their musketry to the tempest of fire beating into the flabbergasted Frenchman. It was a ruse, however, whose continued success depended upon every challenger being either captured or destroyed. Should but one survive to “blow the gaff,” then obviously the jig was up. And in due course one ambushed sea-rover did contrive to disengage and stagger into port. Had Security insisted on a frigate lurking in the offing to cut off any lame duck that managed to survive the inital onslaught and show a clean pair of heels, then there would have been no reason why the stratagem should ever have been penetrated. As it was, the British found themselves hoist with their own petard when the Sans Souci emerged from St. Malo to pursue precisely similar tactics to those originated by the Doris and Plantagenet.

With the steady increase in the number of newspapers, the demand arose for objective, first-hand news direct from the theater of war; and security was confronted with an entirely novel and ticklish problem in the shape of a war-correspondent.³

At the outset, with communication by courier the only means of transmitting news, the war-correspondent’s indiscretions occasioned only minor embarrassment. For although security was endowed with no control over his pen, the time-lag between the composition of his dispatch and its appearance in the press coveniently out-dated his revelations before they stood a chance of coming under the scrutiny of the enemy.

For all that, William Howard Russell, representing The Times in the Crimea, in his zeal to try and remedy the scandalous conditions under which the British troops had been called upon to fight, inadvertently gave away so much invaluable information that Prince Gortchacoff, the Muscovite Commander-in-Chief, cynically described him as “the best spy in the Russian service.”

The menace of indiscreet reporting was greatly intensified when the electric telegraph arrived to eliminate the time-lag which had hitherto operated to render incautious revelations relatively innocuous.⁴ Reports of interest to Intelligence, appearing in neutral or even enemy news-sheets, could be telegraphed to their respective governments by those agents of the respective belligerents who were in a position to obtain immediate access to them. And security was entirely without means of inhibiting or even hindering their transmission. In the American Civil War, for example, Sherman’s “march to the sea” was inspired by information gleaned from Confederate newspapers; while intelligence gathered from the same source enabled Grant to arrange for vital supplies to be at the West Pointer’s disposal by the time he reached the coast. The grape-vine was another means of passing on information which the security organizations of both belligerents found consistently bafffing.

In the Franco-Prussian War the German High Command was deeply indebted to the enemy’s newspapers for information of the very highest importance. In the July of 1870 they furnished the watchful Moltke with full details of the composition and deployment of the Gallic forces disposed along the frontier. Again, in August, when virtually all touch with the French had been lost, it was from the columns of the Gallic public prints that the German General Staff learned of MacMahon’s concentration at Chalons, his retreat on Rheims, and his subsequent advance toward the Meuse. As a result, within a week of the issue of the order changing the direction of the German armies’ advance, Napoleon III had capitulated at Sedan.

With such potent examples of laxity to quicken apprehension, security’s demand that, in the interest of military operations, both newspapers and private correspondence should be put under a reasonable degree of restraint was not one that could lightly be disregarded. It followed that a limited control over press reports and personal letters was imposed for the first time during the Boer War in South Africa, in 1899-1902. But it was not until the outbreak of hostilities in World War I in 1914 that security succeeded in clamping a censorship on all “news and views” that was well nigh watertight. The Germans got wind of the landing of the first four British Infantry Divisions, with their attendant Cavalry Division, very little earlier than the folk at home were informed of it. Thereafter, all that was vouchsafed to an expectant world—from the British side—were the sparse and cryptic dispatches of the official “Eye-witness.” If they failed to satisfy a public avid for news, from a security angle they were the quintessence of discretion; and from their spare paragraphs the German Grosser Generalstab learned absolutely nothing.

Such a beatific state of affairs—from a strictly military point of view—could scarcely be expected to continue; and in due course a hand-picked group of war-correspondents was permitted to proceed to the front. Good sense, combined with a little tactful guidance from the security organization, contrived to set a pattern for the future and to ensure, in the meantime, that the reading public was not denied such war news as could be revealed without “giving aid and comfort to the enemy.”

One of security’s abiding bugbears is the incredulity with which its warnings are too often received. In pre-1914 days, for example, the Administration had been cautioned that German chemists were hard at work experimenting with the possibilities of lethal gas. Yet its appearance in the field on that hectic morning of April 22, 1915, undoubtedly caught the authorities by surprise. The birth and development of the tank, on the other hand, scored an even greater success for the British security organization; very largely because the device aroused little interest outside the tiny circle of devotees sworn to nurse it to perfection. Moreover, the deliberately uninspiring “cover-name” with which it was dubbed helped to discourage the circulation of dangerous rumor and inspired speculation, which could so easily have accompanied the development of the project. Conversely, the measure of the Germans’ horrified amazement at its entirely unheralded appearance is reflected in the jawbreaking name with which they christened it—schutzengrabemernichtigungsautomobil!

Where naval activities were concerned, the importance of checking German forays in the Channel was only a little less urgent than the need to counter the submarine menace. To this dual end the raid on the port of Zeebrugge was planned for St. George’s day, 1918. Every possible security precaution was taken to keep the impending venture secret, including the dispersal of the vessels assigned to it and the segregation, incommunicado, of their crews, up to the very last minute. There can be little doubt that these elaborate measures went far towards ensuring the element of surprise by which the whole enterprise was distinguished.⁵

Where very large concentrations of ships or bodies of troops are concerned, it is unlikely in the extreme that strategical surprise can be achieved, although tactical surprise always remains a possibility. But Ludendorff attained neither in his bold gamble of an offensive in March, 1918. So cannily had Allied Intelligence—the active element of security—done its work that not only was the sector where the first attack might be anticipated accurately foretold, but the actual hour at which it might be expected. With this knowledge in its possession, Gough’s Vth Army should have stopped Ludendorff’s last throw a good deal further east than Villers Bretonneux—and would have, given the necessary troops. But these the politicians had pettishly withheld; a fact which, when the consequences of their folly became apparent, security was peremptorily called upon to obscure—by suppressio veri if not by actual suggestio falsi.

The outbreak of World War II hostilities in 1939 found the security services of all the belligerents in possession of a vast body of lore inherited from the 1914-18 conflict, and a technique quickened by the years of tension which had preceded the actual clash of arms. But the expansion of the various organizations to meet the needs of an ever- expanding war had, initially, the inevitable effect of gravely lowering the standard of security achieved. When the Free-French enterprise to Dakar was in train, for example, there was not a hotel bar in London’s West End that was not buzzing with the most senselessly revealing chatter. Excited Gaul- lists babbled openly of the objective and the composition of the forces to be employed; and so comprehensive was the flow of intelligence which came into the Germans’ possession that they experienced no difficulty in frustrating an enterprise so frivolously betrayed by indiscretion as to have defeated itself even before it set out.

The German security organization scored an early and facile triumph over Dakar; but their successful work in Holland reflected far more credit on their ingenuity and resource and brought them infinitely richer reward. For by pin-pointing a secret radio link with the Dutch Government-in exile, and substituting one of their own men for the captured operator, they were able to play back successfully enough to acquaint themselves with all the Allies’ plans for the dropping of agents, saboteurs, and supplies; and thereafter to circumvent them without arousing their victims to the slightest suspicion of the fraud. The deception continued undetected for the best part of a twelve- month, with heavy loss in agents and material and also in the aircraft that flew them in.

Even more extensive use of this snare might have been made but for the distrustful rivalry existing between the innumerable Reich security organizations, all working exclusively within their own orbit, without inter-departmental liaison or any system for the regular interchange of information—at best never more than grudgingly disclosed. This narrow jealousy was particularly in evidence in the uneasy relationship prevailing between the respective military and political security services. As Hitler’s interpreter, Dr. Paul Schmidt, has recorded, “In April and again in August, 1942, I went to France to interrogate Canadian prisoners of war, who had been taken at St. Nazaire. . . . The military authorities were reluctant to let Foreign Office officials have access to their prisoners, and we were forbidden to put any questions to them on military matters.”

“You shan’t come and play in my yard” makes a poor theme-song for any security organization.

There is, of course, a tendency—not peculiar to the Germans-—for the members of security services to find their possession of inside knowledge a trifle heady and prone to encourage a particularly pestilential form of folie de grandeur. Indeed, the fringes of such organizations abound in melodramatic autothaumaturgists—self-mystery-makers who perceive dark stratagems and involuted complots in matters susceptible to the simplest and most everyday explanations. The only sure cure for so inflamed and unbalanced a cloak-and-dagger mentality is a little cooling-off spell on the bridge of a destroyer or in an isolated fox-hole.

To piece together the intricate mosaic of intelligence on which security is based calls for great thoroughness and unremitting application; characteristics with which the Germans are endowed to an unusual degree. But certain finer, subtler shades of these estimable qualities were singularly absent on one occasion of more than average importance. Nowadays most people are acquainted with the story of the dead courier —‘Major William Martin, R.M.’—washed ashore on the coast of Spain in April, 1943. In his pockets was a most convincing assortment of intimate letters, theatre ticket counterfoils, bills, Cabaret Club membership card, and other personal miscellanea. But his official pouch contained letters from the Vice-Chief of the General Staff and Lord Louis Mountbatten which clearly indicated that the Allied effort against “the soft underbelly of Europe” was likely to exclude Sicily in favor of simultaneous attacks on the Peloponnese and against Sardinia.⁶

In due course this strange treasure-trove was subjected to intensive scrutiny by agents of the German security services; who eventually agreed to accept the evidence that had come into their hands at its face value. The one thing they had omitted to do, however, was to submit the body of the drowned courier to proper medical examination. For a post mortem would have revealed the fact that, with no water in the lungs, ‘Major Martin’ must have been dead before his cadaver had been put in the sea; a fiat contradiction of all the other available evidence which would inevitably have aroused suspicion that the whole affair was a deliberate plant. Yet serving with the German intelligence in Spain at the time was the Abwehr Officer, Major Fritz Baumann,⁷ an expert pathologist, whose special work had been the examination of victims of air accidents and drownings, for the purpose of ascertaining the actual cause of death.

German security was equally deluded as to which sector of the Channel coast the Supreme Commander had chosen for the Allied landing. The fact that such an operation was impending was, of course, without hope of disguise. But so cannily was the cover plan put into operation that almost up to the last Field Marshall Rundstedt was firmly under the belief that the main assault would be hurled in by the shortest route—and by ten entirely phantom divisions!—against the Pas de Calais.

In the outcome, first-class security—in all its ramifications⁸—helped very materially toward ensuring a tactical surprise without parallel in military history.

Security does not go out of business with the Cease Fire; it merely undergoes a certain shrinkage and retires a little further into obscurity.

In the natural order of things such vital installations as the atomic proving grounds at Las Vegas and Woomera, the Offult Air Force Base at Omaha, research laboratories, naval and military centers, and the like, demand especial measures of security for their guardianship; while as a matter of ordinary precaution a sharp eye has to be kept on developments in the resources of other lands, whether neutral or definitely hostile. While international tension remains as it is, such safeguards cannot be relaxed.

But the same plea cannot be urged to extenuate the non-suspension of those measures of political security in which the population had been prepared temporarily to acquiesce as an aid in the prosecution of the recent fight for freedom. Special circumstances impose their own peculiar conditions, and when a country is locked in a life and death struggle with a powerful enemy it will, pro tem, cheerfully surrender many of the freedoms which, in the long run, it is actually in arms to preserve. Freedom of movement, freedom of employment, freedom of speech and criticism—all these, like the enjoyment of everyday amenities, have for the nonce to be curtailed or totally foregone. Such emergency interdictions, however, should be abandoned at the earliest possible moment after the cessation of hostilities.

Unhappily, a tendency has emerged— and one by no means confined to the undisguisedly totalitarian countries—to carry forward this type of shackling emergency legislation into the succeeding years of peace; the purpose being to make use of such sanctions as a means of consolidating the authority of the contemporary political party in power, or even of that sinister variety of imperium in imperio—a caucus of extremists within the party itself. In either case, having fastened their grip on the community, and being—like the octopus—remarkably loath to relax it, resort is made to such devices as Orders in Council, Presidential decree, on the décret-loi, by which ordinary constitutional safeguards can speciously be sidestepped.

In the outcome, and before it well realizes what has happened to it, a nation will find itself being dragooned by measures claiming to be essential and patriotic, but which, in cold fact, are nothing less than an embodied threat to the liberty of the subject. In an atmosphere less judicial than hysterical, there are loyalty checks, interrogatories seeking to establish guilt by association, and even organized attempts at character assassination; a whole gallimaufry of intimidation, supported by the suborned moguls of a venal partisan press and a horde of aspirants for the knout-wielding role of political commissar.

It is a modus operandi which—as the fall of Czechoslovakia grimly demonstrated— embodies a deadly combination of threat and smear. It is obviously Communistic in origin—even when ostensibly fighting Communism—and its loathsome technique has found far too wide acceptance even among what, with bitter irony, are termed “the freedom-loving democracies.” There is, indeed, a plethora of second-rate little puffball Goebbels fulminating up and down the world; and far more amateur but viciously active internal security services in operation than are required to keep such democracies’ health in the first order of perfection.

By and large, the effort to stifle liberty of speech, in the form of healthy constructive criticism, constitutes the most sinister of all the manifestations of this evil litany of suppression. Not that precedents are wanting, even in the United States. That was the malign purpose of the Alien and Sedition Acts, passed by the Congress of 1798; Acts by the terms of which any alien whose words or deeds the President deemed dangerous to the peace and safety of the country could be deported without trial; Acts which made it a criminal offense for anyone to indulge in criticism of the Government or even of local administrations.

Possibly President Adams and his advisers, in framing these obnoxious measures, had been inspired by memories of the methods employed by England’s infamous Star Chamber. For this extra-juridical junta could pass sentence and award punishment virtually as caprice—or personal venom— might dictate. Possibly Washington’s distinguished successor was influenced by recollections of those lettres-de-cachet by which so many awkward stones were removed from their path by the autocratic French monarchy.⁹

If so, then all honor to Virginia and Kentucky, whose vigourous protest that such tyrannical provisions flagrantly contravened the Constitution, was followed by their call to the other States to consider the measures as null and void . . . and the Administration had to think again.

But although it has been dealt many a shrewd knock, oppression is ever ready to enter the fight to prostrate liberty. Following the coup d’état of December, 1852, for example, Louis Napoleon inaugurated “elaborate measures of police; while trade unions were dissolved, and publicity was controlled by an ingenious press law under which newspaper offenses were tried without the embarrassment of reporters or a jury” as Philip Guedalla has written in The Second Empire. Bismarck’s handling of the opposition in the Reichstag was equally high-handed; while the Tsarist Ochrana was every whit as ruthless and oppressive as the present-day representatives of the Kremlin’s network of security services.

Even in more recent times we have seen many of the lesser but vexatiously cramping restrictions introduced in the 1914-18 war period perpetuated and made part of the Common Law of the land. Moreover, the British emergency regulations of the 1939- 45 war years are renewed annually in the Supplies and Services (Transitional Powers) Act; and no matter with what restraint Parliament, generally, exercises the powers embodied in this legislation, the blunt fact remains that it can put the screw on at any time it pleases, and without any sort of reference to the electorate.

In other lands, the suppression of newspapers critical of the regime, Dreyfus-like witch hunts for disloyal elements in the Services and public administration, the blanketing of critical discussion by Service personnel —however eminent or experienced—of matters of the very utmost importance to the development of the Fighting Forces¹⁰—all these demonstrations of the relentless power- hunger by which a little clique of politicians and newspaper tycoons has been infected, lend almost literal truth to Mark Twain’s bitter quip; “None but the dead have free speech; none but the dead are allowed to speak the truth.”

This simply will not do; and the plea that the Administration dare not reveal the truth because the opposition would make unscrupulous use of it brazenly begs the question. For the only inference to be drawn from that sort of submission—wherever it be made— is that the country is not being run on sound party lines, but on those of an unrelenting vendetta.

A respect-worthy democracy—by which is meant a democracy it is unprofitable to lie to at election times—is entitled to hear both sides of any question, and freely pronounce its opinion pro and con. The alternative is swift degeneration into that state of suspended (mental) animation characteristic of the bovine, servile populations behind the Iron Curtain.

It was Walt Whitman who persistently inveighed against “the never-ending audacity of elected persons.” Their effrontery and their contempt for those who put them into office—and could as easily tear them down from it—is based largely on the fact that men, lulled by the soothing syrup of political propaganda, are ceasing to be aware of the liberties they are in grave danger of losing.

But it cannot be too emphatically stated that if you accept rule by decree or any other form of improvised, substitute legislation, you buy a tyranny. A free people can only be governed by laws in which they themselves assent; laws which not only are good but are seen to be good. Such laws, faithfully observed, provide all that is necessary in the way of internal security. At the same time they furnish a full measure of protection for the individual citizen against any machinations tricked out in the specious disguise of security measures, that seek to threaten the personal liberty which is his birthright.

It should not be for the freedom-loving democracies to be forced to reinterpret Shakespeare’s “Security is mortal’s chiefest enemy” as a threat to all they hold most dear.