ABSTRACT
The anecdotal evidence available from reported statements of twentieth-century decision-makers about the influence of covert intelligence over policy formation suggests a sharp dichotomy between the gullible and the contumaciously dismissive. Many of the latter instances appear to refer most pointedly to agent information as either naive or motivated by personal gain. Hitler provides a classic example of the second school of intuitive thinking, as evidenced from the case of the ‘swindler’ operating inside the Soviet mission in Berlin in 1941. 1 His views on the subject had evidently hardened by 1943, when he was reported as retorting that ‘such people should be shot’ on having the case of another agent working against the Soviet Union brought to his attention. 2 Signals intelligence, on the other hand, could not be so readily discredited, even by former inhabitants of the Central European demi-monde. His foreign minister, Ribbentrop, who can be numbered among the gullible, complained somewhat bitterly to his American interrogators in 1945 that his leader was being briefed, particularly about Anglo-American matters, by sources unavailable to him. 3 If Hitler had thought so little of those who dealt with high-level intelligence, he would scarcely have arranged for the liquidation of Generals von Schleicher and von Bredow in June 1934, whose inside knowledge of the Nazi Party had been so heavily dependent on covert intelligence-gathering for a decade prior to its accession to power. 4
