Our new president’s rumored Kremlin ties are panicking our espionage partners
For three-quarters of a century it’s ranked among the world’s most important secrets. The American-led global spy alliance, born in the early years of the Second World War, is beyond question the most effective partnership in espionage history. Now, it’s all starting to come unraveled.
This remarkable hush-hush story began in the summer of 1940, in the dark days after the fall of France to the Wehrmacht, when Britain stood alone against Hitler, who occupied most of Europe. With his ally Stalin, the Nazis and Soviets had divided much of the continent between them, and it seemed only a matter of time before Britain gave in—as several ministers in Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s cabinet were counseling, so bleak did London’s odds appear.
Britain’s secret ace in the hole, known to only a privileged few, was her ability to crack German codes, above all the Nazi Enigma machine, which gave London deep insights into the enemy camp. The Poles were the first to break into Enigma, and shortly before their country fell to Hitler and Stalin in September 1939, Polish intelligence shared their secret knowledge with Britain. There, codebreakers made quick progress against Enigma, a top-secret program they termed ULTRA. But they needed help.
That’s where American code-breakers came in. In the bleak summer of 1940, in a desperate effort to stave off British collapse, which would leave all Europe under the Nazi-Bolshevik yoke, President Franklin D. Roosevelt began assisting London with money, supplies—and weapons.
Read the rest at The Observer ….
The XX Committee 