Exposing Winston Churchill

Real History is quite simple man who makes the history to the man who writes the history to the book you have here Anthony Eden next to him a document that he's written you may see that there are three lines cross out in that documenten and he's written in the margin the words too secret to record and next to him is an author with the document and finally the book that The author has written so real history is what goes straight from the history history that's in the archives to the book as I write on the

back of the book with no academic Prejudice with no political input it's real history it's history as it really happened it's interesting incidentally this Antony Eden document I mentioned it on on the last occasion I was here anony Eden writes in the margin of that document the words too secret to record He crosses out those two lines two two or three lines in Black Ink and red ink so that if you go to the archives and hold the document up against the light you still can't read what was originally typed there by him recording a

conversation he had on December the 8th 1942 with General Charles de go and with two other French generals and with a high Mandarin of the British foreign office sir Alexander Kagan it incidentally refers to their Plan to assassinate a foreign head of state Admiral Daran it's unimportant for the purpose of this morning's topic but but is is an example of how real history can be found in the archives if you dig deep enough if you look in the cabinet British cabinet version of that document those lines have vanished entirely they're not even there they've been

crossed out but if you look in Anthony Eden's papers you find the original TI script draft with The lines crossed out and the words written next to them in his own reading hand writing two secret to record AE Anthony Eden it's rather amusing when you come across documents like that I remember around about the same time I as I was signing the contract with this book in 1972 and I was doing the research on the adol Hitler book I came across a document in the German foreign office archives again foreign office Diplomats the Diplomat has

written a record and from this record we know that Adolf Hitler had a meeting early in July 1940 with two go lighters two provincial Nazi Governors gaer bner and G Burl who were in charge of the westernmost German provinces which were in fact the newly annexed or re recovered French regions of Alas and lorine and meeting with these two top Nazi gitters in private Adolf Hitler drew a sketch map of the future German Frontier where it would be after the war was over after the peace treaty and there was a pretty generous enlargement of German

territory at France's expense Germany recovered all the old German territories like AAS line and quite a few other territories besides and was a pretty sensitive document and arol Hitler ordered at the end of this conference with these westernmost gitters he said as there's not to be any paper record Made of what I've said today and you wonder how I know that it's because the Diplomat who was present went back to Berlin and typed memorandum on the conversation ending with the words the fur ordered that no record is to be taken to the conversation isn't that

nice and here you have Anthony Eden doing the same thing saying too secret to record and we that's how we know it happened and in Eden's private Diaries Are in the University of Birmingham where I have read them all through from beginning to end and I must say it's a rather sad Voyage when you read somebody's private diers particularly when he's dead you read when he was a nobody you read when he is a somebody you read when he's failing and fading away and you suffer all his triumphs and trials and tribulations it is a

very sad I didn't know the Anthony Eden Personal family story very well I I remember in 1940 I think it was reading in the diary about how he went to Eaton College to visit his son Nicholas who was at Eaton College which is England's Premier school or one of England's two or three Premier schools and Anthony Eden actually wrote in this about how distressing it was for him to stand outside The Chapel at eeden college and see all the pupil streaming out with large numbers of dirty unkempt And slovenly Jewish children as well that goes

into his private Di and of course he never published it and not in any of the published versions of his Memoirs either them all their private feelings and then two years later Nicholas this son of whom they're so proud goes and joins the roal Air Force then when you're reading the 1944 diary suddenly you get message from the Far East that his son Nicholas is missing the plane has gone down somewhere in the Mountains of Burma and there's still some hope that they may find the wreckage and the sun may be alive and for the

next few weeks while you're reading through the diary you share his hopes that the sun may be may be found it's really very distressing to read somebody's private diary and then eventually the word comes that the wreckage has been done so these are the joys of writing Real History if you do the work and You're prepared to read the the handwriting read into somebody's handwriting which starts as being elgible but eventually becomes very easy then you can gather all the secrets and all the Mysteries and as I researched the life of Winston Churchill who wrote

no diary I suppose he was too busy to write a diary either you're a diary writing person or you're not Gobles was a diary writing person Eden was a diary writing Person but Churchill wasn't I managed to buy or rather rent many many years ago Churchill's desk Diaries He had a staff who would put on his desk each month a large new uh calendar pad a large card about twoot Square which all the days of the month were printed in and then they would be Inked into these squares by himself or by his staff all

his appointments for that particular week and the person who had them was his Bodyguard Commander Thompson Commander Thompson died I don't know how The Bodyguard got them but his Gods son offered them for sale at Salis he wanted a half million pound for them which they were probably worth for the autograph value and their historic value and eventually sou took them off The Auction Block because the church family protested that they were stolen property so the son offered them to me I said I'm not going to buy them because I Know what's going to happen

with my kind of luck one year later the family comes along and takes them off me and I don't get any refunds so anyway I didn't have that kind of money but I rented them I mean you can rent stolen property I rented the stolen property from the Sun for a year and I made very very good microfilm records of them I've just recently in fact this is the advance of Technology put them all on CD ROM so anybody can have these desk diers who Wants them it's part of my contribution and from these desk

diers you can see what's happening from the annotations you can get a picture of what's happening it's not so much the documents that matter sometimes as the little scribbles on them and only recently within the last EUR to the British government has released the records of the British codebreaking agency to which I referred in my talk yesterday there was a sheet of Intercepts you may remember of the SS messages from the Eastern Front the codebreaking agency was at Bletchley Park with the innocuous title the government code and Cipher School government code and cyer school after

the war it became known as gchq Government Communications Headquarters so secret that nobody was allowed even to use the initials gchq the whole British codebreaking effort was so secet That they didn't even refer to the ultra secret the documents were stamped with the word Ultra nobody was allowed to use use the word enigma in postwar histories historians weren't allowed to refer to the British codebreaking effort The Joint Chiefs of Staff in the United States and the British Chiefs of Staff forming together the combined Chiefs of Staff which continued to rule for a year or two

after World War II ordained that No official historians were to be allowed to be told of the Allied codebreaking effort because it was so secret and if you wonder what the logic behind that was surely the war was over and even the official government historians should have been allowed at least to know about it and to write about it in the directive of the combined Chiefs of Staff which I quot in the introduction to this church of biography you see the combined Chiefs of Staff said if it was ever announced that we had had such

an enormous insight into the German secret internal messages if this was made known then this would give birth to a new stab in the back legend for the Germans and the word would get around that they had been unfairly defeated which of course in a way they were you can't really fight a war when both your hands are tied behind your back and your enem is looking over your shoulder effectively with with a a Mirror poised above your head so he can read all all your cards and if that had become known then the Magnificent

quality of the British and American victories would have been tarnished and diminished and so the decision was taken this fact is never going to be released or made known and it was kept secret until 1974 when gradually the outter secret came out but even then the secret marched on in the British archives they raided Church's Own files the British secret bearers they raided Church's own files and weeded them of every document that referred to alra they didn't say we found 68 documents with Alro reference in the Church of the files they said we found 68

code word documents 68 code word documents they weren't even allowed to mention the word Altra in their own internal memoranda it was as secret as that which is an indication of how the Secret was kept Bletchley Park and the government Cod and cyer school is that I have found evidence within the last two years that this was the British terminal of a secret transatlantic link between Churchill and Roosevelt Churchill and Roosevelt conducted an open correspondence with each other which is in the public libraries now a multivolume series of The church Rosevelt correspondence has been published

even in the early years after the war publishing that series was a major diplomatic effort because each government had to consult the other about whether they were going to be permitted to quote this telegram or that and eventually most of the telegrams were released and finally all of the telegrams were released and if you read the publication by Warren F Kimble who Is a professor at ratus University you have the impression that that is it there is no more to be found and you can imagine with what astonishment I therefore came across scattered through the

thousands of files of the bretley park documents which in the British public record office under the designation the class HW it's class HW for those of you who are historians you go there you look in file Hw1 and you find all sorts of messages from a man called C to Winston Churchill and in your packets those of you who arrived early will have found in your yellow welcoming packages this document this is just one sample which causes us to raise our eyebrows as historians we have a few more copies here I've got one more copy

and a few more on the back back and I'm quite happy to print out more copies later or those of you who've acquired The book will find that I've actually reproduced this document in the appendix at the back you'll see this is the document signed c c always used Blue Note Paper in England it's known as basilon Bond paper my name is Bond basilon Bond here we have C signing it C was in fact s Stuart is m n z i or m n z i s the head of the British secret service he's writing

a letter to Churchill saying prime minister I enclose a copy of a telegram I enclose a copy of a telegram which has been received through my channels addressed to you from the president now we know who the president was I attached the relevant BJs as well as Berlin press directive of 18th of January this is 1944 BJs I can explain are a an anagram we're not quite sure what Of it may originally have been British Japanese British intercepts of Japanese messages some people say well ACC refers to the Blue Jackets which the documents came the

blue folders I've seen them referred to in the private diary of the Deputy Chief of the British general staff is the black jumbos and they were also referred to quite free freely in conversation as the black jumbos The BJs with the intercepts not necessarily intercepts of Japanese messages they were de message in this case I think it was a Spanish telegram that had been intercepted by the British Cod Breakers and jie deciphered but what is significant here of course is that this is a letter my channels through British secret service channels s channels it's being

delivered to Churchill by the head of a secret service and it's coming through Secret Service channels and has never been published it's one of us hearers and Churchill has written across the document in his typical reading s ofs Foreign Affairs Secretary of State for foreign affairs pray comment on this if you can WSC 20th of January 1944 it all went with lightening speed you see it's all same day I'm not quite sure where the link was at the American end I think The American end terminal was effectively Sir William Stevenson the head of the British

secret service in the United States you may know of him as the man called Intrepid that was the title of a book written by another William Stevenson an extraordinary coincidence an author with the same name but different spelling who wrote the biography of Sir William Stevenson the Canadian based in New York he had a d0 code number from the British Secret service he was the head of the British secret service in the United States a close friend to Winston Churchill a close Confidant he ran the Secret Service in this country he carried out the sabotage

and the assassinations as dictated from London the messages went from Stevenson to Ste to to se to MZ to Churchill and they went from Roosevelt to Stevenson and that was the channel That Was used I think in the United States they used the FBI wiress transmitting station on Chesapeake Bay I went once to interview the man who was the in charge of the American end of that he lived outside a town called mlan which has some kind of connection I understand with the Secret Service in this country and I visited this gentleman about 20 years

ago and the conversation lasted only 35 seconds on His doorstep and I told him what I was there for he said I'm afraid I can't talk to you and shut the door so he knew more than he was prepared to talk about the Americans gradually learned of this secret Communication channel between Churchill and Roosevelt and this may surprise that I put it like that Roosevelt was communicating with Churchill and his own diplomatic service the state department didn't Le was going on we know this was the case because the Under secretary of state in the United

States a man called Adolf Burley b r l e writes a very full Diary daily diary which is in the the Roosevelt archives and he describes paying a visit to Lord Halifax who was the British Ambassador in Washington early in 1942 to start to to ask him about rumors that there was a flood of top secret code messages going through the FBI link to England and coming back through the same channels of which the state department were not Aware and the me the record written by Burley in his private diary says I took this up

with Sir William Stevenson effectively I'm I'm I'm paraphrasing this I had to be careful because in the court in London I was accused of distorting documents when I quoted them like this from memory it's a document I read 20 years ago so paraphrasing Bley writes in his diary I took this out with Sir William Stevenson and Stevenson implied that it reflects a series of top secret messages between the president and the Prime Minister whereupon Bley went to see Lord Halifax to ask him about about it and Lord Halifax said that he had questioned Stevenson about

it and Stevenson denied it but berley writes in his diary as I left him I could see there was something of a sneer on Lord Hal hax's face and I think there's been some tall lying going on around here which is a nice way of Putting it I quoted the actual passage in in in the Church biography so these two great Statesmen were communicating with each other through the back door and only allowing foreign office in England and the state department in the United States to know about these communications and what was in them whatever

they the the president and the Prime Minister saw to be fit I'd like to know what is in the rest of that Communications exchange and I've Written the British government about it and I asked them to search their archives and we had a conference in the British archives to public record office on very similar subject six weeks ago which I attended and there was the head of The Bletchley Park archive system there as one of the lecturers and that was a question I put her I said is there still in your secret Archives of Bley

Park a Churchill Roosevelt and she said she wasn't aware Of one and I drew her attention to another document like this from the same file which actually had at the top written in handwriting the word PM file PM's file prime minister's file indicating that there was a special file kept at Bletchley Park for this secret channel of Correspondence we don't know what's in the channel correspondence I put in the appendix to this book a number of examples which are scattered through These thousands of hw1 files which clearly indicate that it was matters of a top

secret nature when a message was intercepted from Hitler to the German High command using the teleprinter code machine Network known as the kahim shriber the Germans called it the gim shriber the secret writer the secret teleprinter the British Cod has called it fish and they then assigned to each of the different kinds of code within that group various Kinds of fish names like tny and sturgeon and so on I don't think there was a jewfish among them but so they may have been I don't know if that out in this country I understand that the

Anti-Defamation leag is protesting about this Association shark would probably be there was actually there was actually a code called I know it's unfortunate Virginia Beach and Florida and all that time there was actually a code a code Code named shark and the kahim shriber revealed in October 1943 that Hitler had changed his strategy in Northern Italy and was reassigning certain lines of Defense to the to kesslering who was in charge of the defense of Northern Italy and there's a top secret correspondence between Churchill and Roosevelt about that which went through this secret link of vital

importance if you're writing the history of that period but we don't Know exactly what was said because it's only reflected in the covering letters like this and the fact that that such telegrams went and were responded to we're not entirely sure what they were and of course somewhere in the United States there must be the corresponding mirror image of the correspondence probably not in the H High Park Library of President Roosevelt is probably in the NSA or at Arlington hall or one of the other centers of Archival um depositories of the intelligence system in this

country this it what makes writing history such fun we're looking constantly for something which we suspect is there and you get a clue that it's there and then it's your duty to dig deeper and of course if you're a conformist historian sitting in your book lined cave plucking the books off the shelves you're never going to find that kind of thing because the lines have been Scratched out and they don't exist because you can't dig deeper in a bookline library you've got to go into the archives and start looking at the obstru files you've got

to spend three or four days trolling through hundreds and hundreds of files and finding nothing at all and you may be a bit sleepy that afternoon you may have been moving it up the night before and you flip over a page and you missed the important pencil note at the top of the Page which tells you yes there was a file called the PMS file but it's it's and you've got to have a a long a long stamina you got to have it's a long- winded research I can tell you I have a file in

the bottom of one of my filing cabinets in London which is called the transatlantic telephone traffic between Churchill and the president which is the other arm of my talk this morning 1939 the phone rang in Churchill's apartment in Mor mansions in London not far from Parliament he had a seedy little kind of oneup apartment in and that this Mansion block and a Victorian block I went and visited once his apartment was up for sale and I could have exchanged it for mine and I thought that would be really ironic if I could go and live

in church old apartment and the phone rang in that apartment around about October the 3rd the war had been running for a month and Churchill was Navy minister in England he was the first Lord of the admiralty as he's known he wasn't the prime minister of that time and it was the president of the United States phoning him now this alone is an unusual fact because etiquette dictates that presidents as heads of state or presidents even as first ministers can't telephone a minister in a foreign administration it would have to go Through the prime minister

the forign administration would then pass it on but no the phone rang in Churchill's department and it was the president himself and Churchill was dining that evening with a couple of Admirals and he excused himself and went into the next room and took the call and he came back looking very satisfied and a correspondence started at that time between Churchill as a minister for and Roosevelt as Prime as president of the United States I say started but it may well be resumed because of course the fact that the first letters between the two in October

1939 doesn't mean to say there was no other channel of communication they used I suspect that one channel they used was Felix Frankfurt the eminent Justice of the Supreme Court in this country their references to that in frankfur as private diary in the Library Of Congress which indicat that he was carrying conveying messages between the two men of that time Churchill desperately wanted to bring the United States into the war rather than make making some kind of unsatisfactory peace with Adolf Hitler and he had started communicating through these backdoor channels in a totally unconstitutional Manner

and reprehensible manner one would think behind the back of Neville Chamberlain His own prime minister with a foreign head of state simultaneously his son was taking up conversations with the Soviet government Through The Ambassador in London Ian mey we now know I know that from the Moscow archives their records in the Moscow Archives of M's telegrams reporting these conversations interestingly of course in 1940 and greatly to the embarrassment of Winston Churchill it turned out that the code clerk in the American Embassy in London about whom Mr Mark Weber may want to tell us something in

the discussion period was making secret furtive copies of this correspondence that went on between Churchill and Roosevelt through the American Embassy he was so incensed by the fact that a British Minister was trying to drag his concern of the United States that gateward Kent thought it his patriotic Duty Tyler Kent thought it was his patriotic duty to make copies of these telegrams only about a dozen or so of which we know in that period of the first months of 1940 between the two men and eventually in May 1940 Tyler Kent was arrested by the British

secret service by MI5 and at the request of the American government instead of being repatriated to the United States to be put on trial as a as a as a traitor because he was Intending to turn these documents over to the Germans to announce to humiliate and embarrass the British the Americans requested that Tyler Ken should be put on trial in Britain and he was stripped of his diplomatic immunity so that he could be put on trial in the famous Old Bailey and locked away nobody would hear about him so the whole Tyler Kent story

was kept Under Wraps until the end of the war when he was sent back to the United States and of course by that time the whole picture had changed what is interesting about the Tyler Kent story is that it mirrored the fact that there was a secret channel of communication at that time between Churchill and Roosevelt which where where they were using at that time State Department channels and US Navy Department channels to conduct correspondence in May 1940 on May the 10th Churchill became prime minister and The picture but Churchill had this conspiratorial furtive element

about him if I can put it like that throughout the war throughout my volume one and volume two you will see that he repeatedly sends out a commander to to do a job he sends an admiral to Norway he sends a general to D sends a general out to the Western desert in North Africa and he then at the same time as he sends this man out to do the job he says here's a Secret code you can use to communicate the directly with me bypassing the war office bypassing the admiralty was typical Churchill that

he would always set up this back door so that these commanders could communicate directly with him and give him direct information that he could issue direct orders to them to Lord G he sends a telegram at the time of Dunkirk saying you are to advance to the coast I mean history would say you are To retreat to the beaches but no you are to advance to the coast and you are not to inform your allies to the left and write what you are doing which is the most shameful act in an in a coalition war

that you pull your own Army the British army out of the the expeditionary Force British expeditionary Force you pull it out of the line in France because the Germans are pouring force and you don't tell the unfortunate belgians and French that You're doing this you leave them just hanging in midair because you're going to get to safety if you possibly can and that shameful telegram is in the French files not in the British files it's been taken out of the British files but I found it in the files of the French Prime Minister Paul Reno

in France I visited his widow at that time in the 1970s still alive one armed Widow with her one remaining arm I persuaded her to sign an authorization for me to See her husband's papers and there was this shameful Telegram in the French papers in the PO Reno papers this telegram that church WIll sent using his private line of communication to Lord G who was the general in charge and he did the same with Admiral cork at the time of the Norwegian expedition in April 1940 which ended with the Fiasco which ironically left Churchill in

charge as prime minister because the Fiasco in Norway Resulted in a dearle which caused the overthrow the downfall of the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his place was taken regrettably I would say by Winston Churchill and he did the same in North Africa when he established a private line of communication with Claud orle the British commander-in-chief in North Africa until the summer of 1942 and the war office was repeatedly distressed to find that Churchill was Communicating directly behind its back with this Commander in the field now I'm not going to pass judgment on whe whether

it's a good or a bad du line of communication through official channels and through unofficial channels his subordinates like General Brooke the command the the chief of the Imperial general staff were such weak characters that they didn't really protest effectively enough they should have said either Winston you you sever That link or I resign because it's completely impossible for me to run the general staff if you're going to go behind my back repeatedly and issue orders to the commanders and- Chief and uh undermine what I'm what I'm doing so it was in church was nature

to establish these private links now what about that telephone conversation in October 1939 how did it come well there was a radio telephone link at the same time as there was a Transatlantic cable the transatlantic telephone cable was in its infancy it didn't carry of World War II it was decided to cut the cable to make it impossible for the enemy to tap into the telephone cable so ironically all traffic by R by telephone went thereafter by radio telephone through a Scrambler system it was scrambled the Scrambler system had been made by a German firm

effectively that designed it patent was a patent of The Seaman Corporation and it's no surprise therefore when we learn that the radio telephone link across the Atlantic had been unscrambled by the Germans and they were listening into every telephone conversation that they could intercept after they had invaded the low countries Holland and Belgium and France they set up near the hag a listening post the listening post was in a direct line of sight so to speak between the American end at Washington London and the ha so they were catching the back traffic the radio traffic

they could listen in very clearly to all the radio traffic going across the the Atlantic and within no time at all they were recording hundreds upon thousands of these conversations that went across the the Atlantic by radio telephone i' say straight way that this very unsatisfactory State of Affairs from our point of view lasted until the End of 1943 four years at least how do we know this in the private papers of Hinrich himler the chief of the SS you will find the transcripts of the conversations you won't find them in the British archives you

won't find them in the American archives but you find them in the archives of the SS scattered around these intercepts of Churchill's telephone Conversations isn't that extraordinary the extraordinary thing is that they had intercepted thousands of these conversations and only a few of them survived in the German archives none in the British archives and none in the American archives so now you can understand why I've got that very faded and battered file slot in the bottom of my filing cabinet in London for over 30 years into which I've been Putting sedulously every page of paper

I can find referring to these intercepts because there in lies the Tale in my view ignore the Warren Kimble beautifully printed volumes of Churchill Rosevelt correspondence that's not where you will find the real history ignore the Church of archives in Cambridge ignore the public record office because they're not going to help us on this you've got to try and find The transcripts of those conversations between those men because that's where the history was decided between these two look at the private diary not of Adolf Burley not of Henry Stimson or somebody like that look in

other private Diaries look in the diary of the secretary of agriculture Claude F wickard nobody I was sitting one day in the Rosevelt library in Hy Park and sitting opposite me was Slinger Arthur Slinger himself the grand Guru the historian on President Roosevelt and we recognized each other instantly I would like to say anyway he knew of my words he said hey I've read your book at let's War grateful and we went and had lunch together and I said what do you make of that conversation November 1941 the church that Roosevelt had with his cabinet

there was no Roosevelt cabinet but there was a kind of a kitchen cabinet where where church WIll where Roosevelt called in all his ministers and unlike the British cabinet which kept detailed meticulous records which are sanitized of the cabinet meetings there are no records of the American cabinet meetings no official record was kept no minute was taken which makes it difficult to write history were it not for the people who sat around the table chewing their fingernails biting their pencils and writing private Diaries afterwards Claude Wickard and Stans I said what do you mean the

wickard diary and I said you haven't read the wickard diary then it's up there in the shelves here in the library the original handwritten Diary of Claude wiard the Secretary of Agri what encourages me when I find that even a great historian a truly great historian Leger it hasn't occurred to him to read the diary of the SEC secretary of agriculture because you think agriculture doesn't really play Much of a part in the war does it it does of course you can't fight a war without a good harvest look at 19 39 look at 1938

the Munich treaty so what do we find in the wiard diary he's writing a record of every Friday cabinet meeting that Resident President Roosevelt holds and on I think November the 4th or thereabouts 1941 a month before Pearl Harbor Roosevelt says I had a conversation a day or two ago with Churchill with the Prime Minister He wants us to go ahead with a preemptive strike against Japan I'm saying again I am recalling this from memory just in case there's any lawyers here making records who are going to have me up in court a month from

now or a year from now saying that's not exactly what he said you'll find the exact quotation in my volume I quoted this particular passage Roosevelt says I was talking it over with Churchill a day or two ago and he wants us to deliver a Preemptive strike against Japan and suddenly it makes sense when you look at the maps of the operations staff of George Marshall where they've got concentric Rings centered on the Philippines and they sent the B7 bombers out there and the Rings designed to show whether they can reach Tokyo yet with the

B7 bombers they sent out to the Philippines and then you understand what the planning is going on because these two men are up to something so why did They get in this mess with Japan you look a bit further back and you find that there's a record in the papers of Harry Hopkins of a telephone conversation between Hopkins and Roosevelt from Checker's Churchill's home at the end of July I think it's July the 25th 26th 1941 in the middle of the night church WIll telephones the president and Hopkins comes comes in and joins him and

the the two of them telephone the President and they're talking about the need to issue sanctions against Japan those of you who are familiar with the story of the run out to Pearl Harbor know that the sanctions against Japan were what triggered the Japanese decision to go ahead with the attack because they were effectively going to run out of world three months from now the important question is who took the decision not just to issue General sanctions against Japan the the delivery of War materials purchase of silk and so on but to add an oil

embargo the oil embargo against Japan that was pronounced and I think July the 26 1941 was what brought about Pearl Harbor originally Roosevelt told his cabinet that no way would he go along with an oil embargo because he knew that would mean War that when the sanctions are pronounced on July the 26 they include the oil Embargo and my own Theory presumption which I have not the slightest shred of evidence apart from circumstantial is that it was agreed between the two men in that telephone conversation in the middle of the night that you've got to

add oil to it Churchill was reassuring chur Roosevelt go ahead put in the oil embargo because believe me the Japanese are not going to make war when push comes to sh church will believe throughout 1941 that Japanese weren't Serious with their threat but we don't know because we don't have the transcripts the conversations were definitely recorded at the British end because one of the British sensors a woman still alive recorded her reminiscences on on the BBC Radio about a year ago and uh she she recalls very deeply very clearly Winston Churchill making the telephone calls

to Rose she doesn't recall very much about what they Actually talked about which is a good thing because we would have got a bower Riz version she recalls the external details that churchold didn't like being interrupted and reminded of the censorship warnings they went allowed to talk about strategic plans they had to use code words they had to use e euphemisms they weren't allowed to identify themselves you'll find there's one hilarious telephone call that Anthony Eden makes in this book my Second volume Anthony Eden telephones Winston Churchill on May the 21st 1943 I'm sorry Churchill

telephones Anthony Eden Churchill is in Washington visiting Washington in May the 21st 1943 and Roosevelt has read him the riot act over General deal who's becoming increasingly obstreperous more communist aligned more hostile to the Allied cause causing increasing difficulties and Roosevelt is dropping broad hints that it is time to terminate General deol With extreme prejudice to use modern modern language and Churchill telephones Anthony Eden who's running the show back in London church or telephones Anton Eden and the two of them use code names for each other and they use code everybody else and Churchill tells

Anthony Eden that um the president here has caused him immense problems over jonar Jo everybody understood who Joon AR was that was that was Charles the go and the president has insisted that Immediate steps should be taken to get rid of him and the conversation goes on like this and the line the we know that this conversation took place because it was intercepted by the American Navy and transcribed you wonder why the American Navy had anything to do with this will you answer is that the American censorship Bureau that was set up at the time

of Pearl Harbor divided these censorship jobs into various fields and this interception of telegraphic and Telephone Communications abroad and overseas was the job capability and under Mann the censorship Bureau was set up and Captain Fen sent a telegram to the state department that night with the transcript of the conversation between between these two Englishmen which has been intercepted and halfway down the transcript it says at this point the conversation was interrupted and we are able to identify who the speakers were Because when traffic was resumed the London and came on and said hello hello is

that you Winston so so forget about the the need for secrecy Churchill on one occasion telephoned the White House when he was in Florida and said I'm going to be coming back from Florida to Washington on Tuesday I can't tell you the means are I'll be using for security reasons but it'll be a cho cho so he wasn't all that security Conscious and this is an important thing to remember because in October 1943 the Americans were fully aware from codebreaking that the Germans were listening into the radio trans radio telephone line across the Atlantic and

of course this gets gets very difficult because you can't reveal how you know these things so George Marshall sends an angry message to Harry Hopkins in the White House saying somebody's got to have a word with both The president and Ros and and Churchill about their loose talk on the transatlantic radio telephone in his conversation this morning of which we've seen a transcript Churchill has been extremely Frank about the coming strategic planning and operations and he's beginning and it's going to endanger lives that's what it's all about there's quite a f of Correspondence between roselt

and and Marshall and the White House on this Issue of Churchill's loose talk on the transatlantic telephone and the infuriating thing is we know from the British end and from the American end that transcripts were made of these conversations at the American end as I say the US Navy Department made the conver the transcripts on behalf of the office of censorship the Bureau of censorship you ask where the records of the office of censorship are and the Answer is in the National Archives under under seal in perpetuity president Kuman at the end of World War

II issued an executive order that the records were to be kept sealed in perpetuity no one was to be allowed to see the actual transcripts or the letters that were intercepted there was a corresponding office at the English end the department of postal and Telegraph censorship telegraphic Censorship under sir Edwin Herbert who actually advised The Americans on how to run such an operation at that time the Americans could advise from us we effectively set up the CIA for you we send over the British secret service and we set up first of all the OSS we

provided the lead the initial officers for the OS and eventually the Americans took it over after we set set the operation up the same with the Bureau of censorship We told you how to open letters without letting it be seen that they've been opened how to intercept radio traffic and so on at the British end the records show quite clearly that transcripts were also made the director state that the person who initiates the conversation is to have a transcript made so somebody sat down there writing a lonand record of every and these transcripts have Vanished

and they're going to be worth looking for I have had a 35e search for them both at the American end and at the English end looking for the transcripts of the telephone conversations between Roosevelt and the prime minister in England because that is where we're going to find out the real hidden history of World War II how these two men steered things and guided public opinion and took the decisions while still leaving their General staffs in The bed belief that they were the ones who called the shots they didn't and that that's what this talk

has been about thank you very [Applause] much now we can have a discussion about that and you can ask questions and I'm sure some of you have have questions to ask you will find that I've dealt very extensively with both topics in the two appendices at the back of this volume one appendix on the subject of the radio Telephone link across the Atlantic with all the records and another appendix on the subject of this secret Channel between Roosevelt and Churchill using the the Secret Service link but through messages yes the Bona secret message say you

didn't mention anything about the Soviet Union archives yes that those because they supposedly well we we we had very Extensive discussion about venona the I I give a brief overview of what venona was um early on in the war and throughout the War the British and American code Breakers and radio intercept Services built up a very intercepted messages that were passing between the capitals London and Washington and Moscow going to the KGB very evidently radio traffic concerning Espionage Activities and I'm not sure where the word Bona comes from I think this was one of the

code words that was assigned by the NSA or the pre or the wartime equivalent of the NSA to this traffic it was very very difficult to decode for the reason that it was encoded using what were called onetime pads a onetime pad with a sheet of paper with with random letters and numbers on it which was used to pick out the Equivalent when you're writing a code message and as long as each sheet of paper you use was absolutely different from any other sheet of paper in the universe then that was totally undecipherable but of

course there's no such thing as a sheet of paper with random numbers across it that is totally different from any other sheet of paper with random numbers in the universe eventually there will become evidence systematic similarities in the pages Particularly if they're all printed by one printer or something like that and if you're lazy and if you're running short of onetime pads is eventually you will otherwise you're going to need a stacks and sacks of 30,000 she's just the right one brief message to someone something like that so lazy cryptographers would go back to a

used one time pad and reuse it indicating to the Moscow end I'm reusing pad number so and so so and so I'm putting it in Simple terms as I understand it and as soon as they do that a little of light comes through for the code Breakers and they can begin looking at the similar is between the patterns to decode the message in front of them they don't get all of it they may only get three letters in a whole message they may get two words they may but eventually the more times that particular error

is repeated if they have enough men working on it and you Can begin to understand the mind-breaking task this was for the code Breakers sitting there month after month getting absolutely nowhere at all looking at meaningless jumbles of letters but some then gradually little chins of light began to come through and they would illuminate one message after another and they built up a huge file of all the intercepted messages the anona messages and they would crawl backwards and forwards through this file of Messages playing them off against each new page of the One Time Pad

that had been accidentally reused by the Cod by the the uh the cipher officer until they built up more and more of the contents of his message and the whole B has now been released by the NSA in this country and you can see there I think there something like a 100 messages all together that they've managed to make sense of some of them they made sense of all of them some of they made sense of None of them some of them they've only got the sender and the recipient most of them use code names

for the people they're talking about but you can work out who it is because the code names are sometimes very transparent I'm repeating to you what I've learned at this Pro public record office session in England about six weeks ago on the Bona case um it doesn't really concern what I've been Talking about here though that is the the end of that particular story it's a fascinating subject the codebreaking messages are the ones that are most important in my view I tried to explain this to the high court in London that when you're looking message

I I asked one witness or or another Donald wat Professor wat I said when you're looking at the quality of documents in front of you how would you rank them for reliability as a historical Source uh if would I be right in saying the right at the bottom of that table you would put eyewitness evidence and right at the top of that table you would put codebreaking intercepts because codebreaking intercepts they have no reason to be spurious or euphemistic because the man who's writing it believes it's written in a secure code that nobody can read

except the authorized recipient and somewhere between you've got prison of War reports And captured documents and things like that captured document of course may always be deliberately planted on you but a code breaking message isn't necessarily is is is less likely to be applied I said is is less likely to be a plant because there suspicions that the Japanese knew that we were reading their so-called purple code we knew that we I mean we knew that they knew we we knew it if I can put it like that because we intercepted German messages in which

the Germans told the Japanese that they had understood in Washington that the Americans were reading the purple code so there after that point which is May 1941 you've got to look at every purple message with a little bit of a suspicion saying well although we appear to have prct to this message about Honolulu the man in Honolulu being being given orders to provide a an exact grid chart of the layout of the battleships and Battleship row and Pearl Harbor is this something The Japanese want us to know that they they've ordered it's a it's a

it becomes quite complicated once you know the enemy knows that you know so to speak but I think that the Japanese forgot that we knew about Pearl Harbor it's as simple as that that's we're off your venona track but as I say venona has nothing to do with Churchill or Ros yes would it be correct to presume that the Germans knew of Japanese plans to Bomb Pearl Harbor and if they did once the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor it's my understanding that Germany was under no treaty obligation to declare war but rather exercised a discretion I

could be wrong on that but my final the final part of my question is why then did Hitler exercise his discretion to declare war on the United States three totally separate questions right starting with the last one Hitler decided to attack the Soviet to attack The United States quite simply because the United States was already at war with Germany Admiral Raider the commander-in-chief of the German Navy repeatedly came to Hitler and said the the the US Navy has been given orders to shoot on site our submarines are operating at extreme disadvantage in the North Atlantic

repeatedly we getting us warships under the SES under our Periscope sites we could torpedo were were hamstrung by the orders you've Issued which prevent us from doing that even though these are obviously warships engaged in offensive actions against us please make a formal declaration of war which enables us to do what we there were're there for because otherwise we're losing the war in the Atlantic without even being able to fight it so Hitler was just regularizing a status quo that that the that the the war in the Atlantic already existed what Hitler didn't anticipate when

he declared war On on the United States he thought it was a cheap declaration to make because the United States was going to have its hands tied fighting Japan he didn't expect the United States to take the unexpected step of declaring Germany first that we will deal with Germany first and then turn around and settle the Japanese problem which was in fact a strategic miscalculation of War losing proportions because if you think about it Japan Couldn't have won the war without the unit without Germany being in still in the war and the moment Germany was

out of the war Japan's fate was sealed uh so it was quite obvious that the ja that the Americans would have to deal with Germany first nless public opinion and sentiment over Pearl Harbor grabbed the American lion by its tail and swung it around to face across the Pacific this brings back the question of um whether the Germans knew about Pearl haror in advance they didn't know about the intention to attack Pearl Harbor there had been serious hints brought by the Japanese Ambassador Oshima General um Hiroshi Oshima Who is the very capable Japanese Ambassador in

Berlin over the previous few days he had said things like you must understand he' said this to ribon Trop the German home minist you must understand that we need some kind of word from you about what your steps will be things may happen Sooner than you can imagine um Japanese being an ambiguous language that kind of sentence could be translated several ways but the meaning was quite clear that that if you hesitate he who hesitates is lost we are about to do something and this is the time you to to run your colors out the

M as well um I know from Hitler's own personal staff who described it to me that when the word of pearl Hara came Hitler was completely stunned he'd never anticipated this it had come at a very low point in his own fortunes on December the 2nd or 3rd the the Soviets had began a counter offense of the German Army in the East was in a desperate position its tanks weren't starting in the extreme cold the guns weren't firing the explosives were fizzing the German Army was all but lost it was in Retreat and abandoning his

heavy equipment and Hitler was in a very Sorry pass when the word came that night his press Chief dietr the man who's at the back of the big color poster which I had it back there um and you'll see him on the photographs in some of my books his press Chief Dietrich came in with the first news agency report of the attack on the on the Japanese Fleet in Pearl Harbor and thet was overwhelmed with with delight and his foreign minister liaison officer a man called Walter hael H w l who wrote a private diary

which his widow gave to me to use typically I said I said to the Widow why is it you cannot give this to Hill gr or any of the other established historians she said Mr Irving they never asked me for it they they they sit in their book lined caves these conformist historians and don't bother to ask and in this handwritten diary Walter hav wrote down Hitler's words that night he says now we can't possibly lose this war we have an Ally now who hasn't been defeated in a thousand years then he went thought of

it and then he said of course we've got another Ally meaning the Italians who constantly been defeated however they've always ended up on the right side of course that was prophetic words and I used to say when I went around the World lecturing in the old days when I could go around the world lecturing I used to say um I think it was Napoleon Who once said the Italians had never managed to end up on the same side that they started the war on except for one occasion in histry when they changed sides twice and

there was one Italian family who got up and walked out in indignation from when I said that everybody else thought it was very draw you had a middle question which I forgotten but yes that's what so Thank [Music] you it's fair to say that the British secret service had far surpassed the uh the German equipent the abor and would you attribute that to uh caneris being a double agent it seems to me that most of the German codes were being read by the British and very little of the British and American traffic had been penetrated

by the Germans that's not that's not entirely true [Music] um that again as a multifaceted question the British secret service was very good we had expended a huge sum of money on the British secret service and we had a complete faith in it George Marshall at the equivalent period at the beginning of the World War II the the chief of staff of the United States forces he had very little faith in codebreaking with the result that the at that time with the result that the outbreak of War we Had thousands of code Breakers working in

secret encampments we had as I said yesterday 3,000 code Breakers working on the German police codes alone which you might may find was a very unrewarding field of research except that the German police were scattered across the entire Nazi Empire and whenever there was an air raid on Hamburg or Castle or or Hanover their telephone lines down would use the radio teleprinter to send code messages reporting the damage Reporting public morale reporting all the problems which factories have been destroyed and so on which bomber Harris in England was had on his so the police codes

were very well worth following in England and we did that you think you asked a question where are we better than canaris is abair well I I I knew W I knew the Widow of canaris I corresponded and visited her once when I was on the hunt for the Canaris diis canaris r diar which exists somewhere I think they're buried and someone's forgotten where they are husband's papers I don't know in my view was incompetent I don't know how he kept his job or got his job probably through favoritism I know that he was very

close to to field Marshal kitle the chief of the German High command who protected him and was deeply shocked and felt betrayed when it turned out that canaris had been harboring Treacherous thoughts uh canaris was finally hanged on April 8 1945 in fenberg concentration camp and um because by that time the Gusto who had had raided his files had found the Diaries and established that he had been plotting to overthrow Hitler and that he had been har harboring these treacherous thoughts it has always attracted the attention of historians of a certain vent the question whether

canaris was Hand in glove with the British I don't think he was I would have been inclined years ago to say being a by Nature conspiracy theorist probably he was but but having worked now so extensively in the archives that have been released I've not found the slightest trace of it neither first order nor second order nor third order evidence not no reference in private di nobody hinting at our man at the top level and Hitler headquarters Nothing that you would expect to find were that the case I think the canaris damaged the Nazi cause

by his bungling and by the fact that he was so easily duped by our extremely clever um deception tactics I'll give you one example of how we duped him and this is the case of the famous man who never was he's dealt with in this book Church War volume two we took a corpse of a gardener a Welsh Gardener who had Tried to kill himself or succeeded in killing himself finally by swallowing weed killer of a certain kind which left very few traces on the body and we promoted that corpse of this Welshman to a

marine officer dressed him in Marine uniform kept him beautifully preserved for a couple of months and then floated him out of a torpedo tube in a submarine uh off the coast of Spain chained round his neck a cers valys containing Top Secret Letters from London to mount baton and Eisenhower and others revealing accidentally the location of the coming in next operation in the Mediterranean not against sic oh no that's the grand decoy operation that we hope the American the the Germans are going to fall for we're going to be invading Greece at the other end

of the Mediterranean but it was all done beautifully um heavy-handed British humor I hope you're going to bring back a few cans of sardines ho ho Sardinia This kind of thing if if if and um the the whole operation I've read the whole file through now it's just been released in England the M never was the whole file was there with the way that the the body was prepared the way that everything that was put into his pockets was prepared the dance hall tickets the phony existence it was created for him the letters from A

bank manager asking about this4 7 Shillings and 6 overdraft when was going to be Returned and his efforts to to deal with the overdraft because he wanted to buy a ring for the for the fiance that he had just met at the dance hall and sure there was the the dance hall ticket in the other pant's pocket beautifully prepared the way that this man's phony identity was created because they knew that the that the gusta would check up in England through its agents to find out if there was such a dance forall and was there

A evidence contained in these letters was of such strategic importance that the gustafa would undoubtedly go to enormous links to check it up so the body was floated ashore it landed off cadis Spanish Secret Service got hold of it he got got hold of the case British Naval atachi in in Madrid who in in in Madrid had been tipped off to keep an eye open for word of a marine corpse being found and brought ashore he reported to London Duly three or 4 days later yes a body has been found and we've been contacted by

the Amer by the Spanish admiralty with word that this body has been found apparently it crashed in a Catalina there was a a Catalina SE plane uh rubber boat dingy found floating not far away from the body that to had been pushed out through the torpedo tube with the submarine to to create the image and then of course the anxious wait will the Japan will the the the Spanish do the Decent thing and turn over the body untouched or will they open that case eventually the case was handed back I mean very obligingly the the

CER had the key to the case in his other pocket the case was handed back by the Spanish authorities to the British Naval Itachi in Madrid and they opened it and there were all the letters still inside and they were still sealed so the question was had the Japanese got hold of the documents Inside and resealed them by magic or not and 5 days later Churchill is in Washington this is May the 21st 1943 the day of that telephone intercept and he gets a message sent by pouch across from sea one of these blue letters

it's operation mince meat was the name of the of the actual operation and it with the message said very briefly operation mince meat the enemy has swallowed the Fate because the code Breakers in Britain had intercepted messages going down the fish channel the kahim Sha from Berlin down to the outposts in Greece and in Sardinia warning that the British were going to be invading and that certain secret documents had fallen into the hands of the German Advair but there's a rider to this who believed these documents well if you read the GBL diary you see

Gobles says to Admiral canaris I Don't believe these documents may be genuine there may be a plant and Admiral canaris says there's not the slightest question of that we've gone into this most subtly it turned out that Gustavo did carry our checks in London and they did find out that the dance world would help a dance that night so everything about that body was absolutely kosher if you can put it like that be so tasteless hey if you can't be tasteless here where can you be Tasteless and it came up at Hitler's conference headquarters a

few days later canaris says to Hitler we have this tgraphics canara says to Hitler we have received um an extraordinary welcome piece of Vital Information that's come from the body of a of a British query that's been watched a Shore revealing that the the target of the operation isn't Sicily but somewhere else and we pick all the necessary preparations and the Stenographic record shows Hitler just registering this fact taking note of it but I spoke with this sonographer who was at that conference ludig creger now ludig Ker who after the war resumed his duty as

a conference phographer and became eventually very highly paid verbatim stenographer of the German bundar the German Parliament he lived in Bon I visited him and he still had all his old Shand Diaries and everything in the first world war he had Been actually the private Secretary of the head of the German secret service then the famous Colonel Nikolai once again the German archist the German historians had paid not the slightest attention to this man Lord VI Creer but he sat for two days dictating to take for me his reminiscences lud ker said I remember so

clearly that day when canaris told the fura about the find the corpse the CER and I remember that as Hitler I was Longing to say to Hitler to to the chief but this may be a plant this this smells very fishy the whole thing stinks and but of course as a stenography could no no way could he interrupt the conference and say this to the Supreme head of the the third right and then he said I remember that as he was leaving the conference room Hitler turned around and he said chisan by the way Mr

Christian this is the chief of staff of the German Air Force at that time by the way Colonel Christian I think this thing stinks I think I think it's I think it's a plant so Hitler with his very sound Instinct although all the signs is intense effort by the British secret service to create the phon identity of the man the cours and everything else something in the back of Hitler's mind he disregarded this thing that had been given him on a plate he thought himself no the obvious next step Is Sicily surely not the far

end not s has got to be Sicily this is this is this is dumb but the German Armed Forces took it the other way it was put them on a plate and they they they aband and thought about husky as it was called the British operation The Landing in Sicily in July 1943 and they were taken totally by surprise just like Normandy 1944 Hitler said The Invasion is going to be in Normandy or breast that that that Peninsula and the German High command said oh no it's going to be coming through C through the N

Straits of calal and although Hitler ordered the seventh Army in Normandy had to get all the reinforcements and had to be the one that was ready for the Invasion the German High command knew better and quietly disregarded his instructions and reinforced the Cal area very interesting when you look at Hitler's own personal involvement which I know by because I spoke to his staff and and I've read all the telegrams at that level I think that's all we have time for on this particular subject ladies and gentlemen have a break now Professor Martin is here to

talk to us after the break on this highly interesting subject of the slave trade and its Origins 10 15 minute break thank you very much indeed