Intelligence and Determination
France in the 1930s was slouching toward fecklessness. Its angry neighbor to the east built from strength to strength, while France frittered its time and built useless tunnels in Alsace. That story's well-known. More surprising, though, is the brilliant effectiveness of the French secret service -- the Deuxième Bureau -- during this period. They had the Nazi government wired up like a Christmas tree. The result was "a record of accuracy rarely equaled in the history of modern intelligence," according to Benjamin F. Martin ["France in 1938," p.74]
The French even had access to German cryptology. "Yet, far from spurring the French to act, the intelligence reports of a powerful and increasingly dangerous German military were used instead to justify passivity." No wonder, as Martin writes, the Deuxième Bureau and its agents came "to despise the national leaders who exploited their work." Having the most perfect intelligence-gathering in the world means nothing without the statesman's vision to project it into the future and the political will to act on it.
When Germany secretly violated the arms limitation terms of the Versailles treaty during the early 1920s, when its military experimented with coordinated dive-bomber and tank spearhead attacks eventually called "Blitzkrieg," when Hitler began his massive rearmament, when the decisions were made to reoccupy the Rhineland and to effect Anschluss, the Deuxième Bureau provided early and ample warning. And of German efforts to penetrate France, it was equally on the mark: Paul Paillole, who commanded the counterespionage division recalled forcefully: "There were no German spies. We knew them all!"
The French even had access to German cryptology. "Yet, far from spurring the French to act, the intelligence reports of a powerful and increasingly dangerous German military were used instead to justify passivity." No wonder, as Martin writes, the Deuxième Bureau and its agents came "to despise the national leaders who exploited their work." Having the most perfect intelligence-gathering in the world means nothing without the statesman's vision to project it into the future and the political will to act on it.
