by Alastair Denniston- Code-breaking From Room 40 to Berkeley Street
It was not until 1961 that senior intelligence officials such as Menzies had to acknowledge the bitter truth of Philby’s treachery. Philby defected to the Soviet Union in 1963, and several years later was living in Moscow and writing his memoirs. Clearly, the publication of such a book could damage the reputations of both Menzies and his service during the war. At the same time, the Sunday Times began a major examination of the Philby affair and assigned to it an experienced team of reporters, Bruce Page, David Leitch and Phillip Knightly. Their subsequent articles caused quite a stir and were subsequently published in 1968 by Andre Deutsch in the UK and Doubleday in the US.7 The book described the ‘British tradition of cryptographic skill’ and provided some detail of the activities of Room 40 and GC&CS at BP. It named AGD as a veteran of the former and the head of the latter organisation.
The Foreign Office tried to stop Kim Philby from publishing his memoir, My Secret War. No publisher wanted to take it on but Robin, a director of Hodder & Stoughton at the time, according to the Sunday Telegraph, ‘felt so strongly that the book ought to be published that he took the unusual step of offering to act as London agent for the book in his private capacity and on a no-commission basis’. He gave no reason for his support for the book, which could damage the reputation of ‘C’ and SIS. According to Menzies’ biographer, Anthony Cave Brown, ‘Robin Denniston believed that it was “C” who had been incompetent, not his father. He became a determined enemy of Stewart Menzies by ramming through the publication of Frederick Winterbotham’s memoir The Ultra Secret despite the threats of the British Government. And it was Robin Denniston who found Philby’s book a home at MacGibbon and Kee, a small but respected London publisher.’
It does seem that Menzies supported Philby far too long, having mistakenly reached the conclusion that he was innocent. MI5 informed him of their suspicions of Philby after interviewing him for the first time on 12 June 1951. Despite this, Menzies took Philby to dinner at the Travellers’ Club on 1 April 1952 and asked him ‘whether he wished for any advance of the bonus that was given to him at the time of his resignation’.8 Philby eventually confessed to being a Soviet spy on 13 January 1963 and on the 24th he was smuggled out of England by his Soviet handlers on the Russian freighter Dolmatova. All of this would have been known to Robin and Philby’s book was duly published in 1968. According to Robin’s daughter Candy: ‘I think Dad was keen to see the truth be revealed and hence his choice of a publishing career. Getting the Philby Memoirs was for him a coup because it was telling the truth about what he (Philby) had done.’ Robin’s son Nick believes that his father wanted the true story of AGD’s wartime activities to be told but at the same time was not averse to ‘putting right a few wrongs’.
A year before Winterbotham’s book, generally considered to be the first authorised account of GC&CS’s activities at BP, was published, another book appeared. Philby: the Long Road to Moscow by Patrick Seale and Maureen McConville included a fifteen-page chapter titled The Golf Club and Chess Society. This was apparently a jokey name coined by early recruits to GC&CS in the late 1930s. The chapter summarised the whole story of British Sigint, starting with the creation of Room 40 and ending with William Friedman’s letter to ‘Y’ Denniston on learning of AGD’s death. It also included personal details about the Denniston family, from AGD and Dorothy’s daily assault on The Times crossword puzzle to ‘Y’ and Robin playing rounders in the grounds of BP. Both ‘Y’ and Robin were thanked by the authors in the Acknowledgements.
Given his character and strong religious beliefs,9 it seems unlikely that Robin Denniston saw Menzies, as Cave Brown claimed, as an enemy. While he did show great animosity towards GCHQ near the end of his life, it is more likely that he was trying to set the record straight and establish his father’s true legacy. His support for Gordon Welchman’s book The Hut Six Story, the first to provide technical details of GC&CS’s work, was another example of this. He subsequently arranged for the publication of Welchman’s paper From Polish Bomba to British Bombe, which gave the true history of the Polish contribution to the breaking of the Enigma system. In a 1992 paper, Robin described the process which led to the publication of the Philby, Winterbotham and Welchman memoirs.10
According to Robin, Philby’s memoir was dismissed as a ‘plant’ by the British authorities, with the sole intention of creating division between the British and American secret services. Robin had never met Philby, but his parents had been on good terms with him and his sister ‘Y’ had, for a time, worked at MI6 headquarters in Ryder Street as a secretary for Philby and others. Robin had read the complete typescript in the offices of Percy Knowles, an American literary agent. It appeared to Robin to be a genuine account of key events in Philby’s career as a Soviet spy. He was completely convinced when he read Philby’s casual description of the move of the diplomatic and commercial Sigint traffic work from BP to its new headquarters in Berkeley Street. Over twenty years after Philby wrote his memoir, the activities and existence of Berkeley Street had not been officially acknowledged!
Rather cryptically, Robin responded to Cave Brown’s comments on his part in the publication of Philby’s book in a footnote:
He believes that its chances of publication would have been slender, given the Foreign Office’s campaign to prevent the book ever appearing, and attributes my own efforts on its behalf to a family dislike of Menzies, who, some may think, emerges rather badly from Philby’s pages. I, on the contrary, think he gets surprisingly kind treatment. It is true that my father never got on so well with Menzies as with his predecessor, ‘the admiral’, Hugh Sinclair, who was warmly admired by all his staff. Yet my father and Menzies remained in regular touch until the former’s retirement.
Robin began the process of planning his father’s biography, and in April 1982, met with Rear Admiral W.N. Ash, Secretary of the Defence, Press and Broadcasting Committee. Aware of the sensitivities within the intelligence community about such a book, he had put forward a more modest proposal. He suggested that he would collect information on a privileged basis and prepare a draft biography, not for publication but for submission to the appropriate authority. He would only begin discussions with Lord Weidenfeld about publication when the authorities gave him approval to do so. By July, Admiral Ash confirmed that he had put the proposal ‘into the machine’ but was still unable to let Robin have ‘a reaction’ to it.
Robin pressed on with his research and began by trying to contact the very few survivors of Room 40. He spoke to Patrick Beesley, who had just published an account of Room 40. Beesley told him that the only surviving member of Room 40 that he had found was W.H. Bruford. He also thought it would be difficult for Robin to find anything new about AGD’s work in WW1 or that ‘there would be sufficient fresh information to produce a book about your father’s working life’. One Berkeley Street veteran was more than happy to provide Robin with everything he could remember. Percy Filby had arrived at BP on 8 September 1940 and was assigned to Tiltman. He eventually ended up at Berkeley Street as head of the German section. He wrote to Robin on 15 April 1981 and gave him details about AGD’s removal and his strong views about those who had ‘plotted’ against him.11
While British post-war reports about the Berkeley Street operation were still classified, as they are to this day,12 he was able to acquire a copy of the McCormack Report (see Appendix 11) which provided an American description of the operation. He also obtained all of the war and post-war correspondence between AGD and William Friedman. He continued to accumulate a considerable amount of information about his father’s life, but a coherent structure for the book was still not in place.
In 2006, Robin was introduced by his daughter to the publisher Jerry Johns. Jerry agreed to work with him to put the book together. By this time Robin was nearly 80 and not in the best of health. Jerry recalls being ‘summoned’ to Robin’s house in Malvern where he lived alone, surrounded by piles of books, papers and other documents in somewhat chaotic circumstances, and he would be handed som
e material to work on. Robin continued to struggle with the book but eventually, in 2007, Polperro Press published Thirty Secret Years, A.G. Denniston’s work in signals intelligence 1914-1944.
On 4 October 2012, Iain Lobban, the Director of GCHQ, gave a speech at the University of Leeds called ‘GCHQ and Turing’s Legacy’. It was one of a number of events held to commemorate the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing. In his speech, Lobban publically acknowledged AGD’s role in the creation of GCHQ. He began by noting AGD’s recruitment of mathematicians:
It was this information which crystallised a crucial insight by Alastair Denniston, the Director of the Code and Cypher School, and a veteran of cryptanalysis in the First World War: he had already worked out that the forthcoming war and the profusion of mechanical encryption devices needed a new sort of cryptanalyst to complement the existing staff. He decided to look out wartime colleagues who had returned in 1919 and 1920 to the Universities (well, to Oxford and Cambridge) and asked them to identify what he described as ‘men of the professor type’, academics engaged in mathematical research who could be persuaded to turn their hands to cryptanalysis. In the first list of names drawn up in response to his request we can see the hint of what was to come: Alan Turing, Gordon Welchman and Max Newman.
He went on to say that:
One of the reasons for the success of Bletchley Park, and something that I and Alastair Denniston’s other successors have striven to maintain in GCHQ, is the organisation’s ability to make space to allow individuals to flourish, both in isolation, and within teams. I will be talking more about the importance of recognising and making space for the unique and different contribution that each person makes, but part of that recognition can often involve a leap of faith by the manager.
He concluded his remarks by drawing a clear line from AGD’s pioneering work to his own:
Let me conclude, though, by looking at Denniston, the Director in 1938 who saw Turing and accepted him as a new type of cryptanalyst for a new era. Obviously my job, like his, is to make sure that all of the wonderfully talented people we have retain their focus on the task set out for GCHQ by the government. But what drives me, what will make me feel that I have in a small way achieved a little of what he did, comes from focusing not just on the outputs and achievements of GCHQ, but on fostering, protecting and developing a culture which prizes passion and dedication, in which today’s and tomorrow’s Turings can achieve as much as the genius, the man Alan Turing, did.
In the end, the last word is probably best left, not to politicians and administrators, but to those who actually produced the signals intelligence which so dramatically affected two world wars. Writing in his personal memoir, the Head of the Air Section at BP, Josh Cooper, said of AGD:
He understood the wider problem of Sigint better than he was credited for. When he made me head of the Air Section he gave me a charge which I never forgot that I was to use cryptanalysis as one of the tools for obtaining intelligence by interception. But later when I asked for additional staff to build up an intelligence card index he became agitated and warned me earnestly not to ‘confuse cryptography with intelligence’, and said that the intelligence departments in Whitehall would object to this kind of thing.13
The two dominant figures in British and American signals intelligence of the twentieth century, John Tiltman and William Friedman, remained close friends with AGD for the rest of his life. In a letter to Robin, Tiltman said: ‘I had a great respect for your father … and remember him as a very good director and personal friend. I think I can claim that together with Josh Cooper I was about his [AGD’s] best supporter in a job which was by no means easy and I have always considered that he was quite unnecessarily roughly treated when Travis took over in 1942.’
Friedman, in his poignant letter of condolence to ‘Y’ Denniston, perhaps best summed up AGD’s career: ‘That so few of them should know exactly what he did towards achievement of victory in World War I and II is the sad part of the untold story of his life and of his great contribution to that victory.’
Appendix 1
Charter Document for Room 40
Churchill College CLKE1&2
Appendix 2
GC&CS Staff, November 1919
1 Individual regarded by the Admiralty as liable to transfer to the Admiralty control in wartime.
2 Royal Naval College at Osborne in the Isle of Wight.
3 Graded as Senior Assistant but as Deputy Head, received an extra £100 per annum.
4 d – died in service; r – retired/resigned.
5 Fetterlein retired in 1938 but rejoined GC&CS on the outbreak of war.
6 Post dispensed with 1923/24
Appendix 3
Code Text of the Zimmermann Telegram
Edward Bell’s copy of the decode made at the American Embassy (US National Archives, Foreign Affairs Branch, State Department Decimal File 862.202 1 2/81 ½). English translation by Barbara Tuchman.
The following has Bernstorff’s slight alterations at the beginning and is the same as the text obtained by Hall in Mexico City and which he gave to Ambassador Page.
130 (number of telegram) –
13042 (Code identification number) –
13042 Auswärtiges Amt Foreign Office
8501 telegraphiert telegraphs
115 Januar 16 January 16
3528 colon (:) colon (:)
416 number 1 no. 1
17214 ganz geheim strictly secret
6491 selbst yourself
11310 zu to
18147 entziffern decipher
18222 stop(.) stop(.)
21560 Wir We
10247 beabsichtigen intend
11518 am from the
23677 ersten first
13605 Februar February
3494 un- un-
14963 eingeschränkt restricted
98092 U-boot U-boat
5905 Krieg war
11311 zu to
10392 beginnen begin
10371 stop(.) stop(.)
0302 Es wird It will
21290 versucht attempted
5161 warden be
39695 Vereinigten Staaten United States
23571 trotzdem nevertheless
17504 neutral neutral
11269 zu to
18276 erhalten keep
18101 stop(.) stop(.)
0217 Für den Fall In the event
0228 dass dies that this
17694 nicht not
4473 gelingen succeed
22284 sollte should
22200 comma(,) comma(,)
19452 schlagen offer
21589 wir we
67893 Mexico Mexico
5569 auf on
13918 folgender following
8958 Grundlage terms
12137 Bündnis alliance
1333 vor (prefix of verb vorschlagen – to offer
4725 stop(.) stop(.)
4458 Gemeinsam Together
5905 Krieg war
17166 führen make
13851 stop(.) stop(.)
4458 Gemeinsam Together
5905 Krieg war
17166 führen make
13851 stop(.) stop(.)
4458 Gemeinsam Together
17149 Freidenschluss peace
14471 stop(.) stop(.)
6706 Reichlich Generous
13850 finanzielle financial
12224 unterstützung support
6929 und and
14991 einverständnis understanding
7382 Unserer Seits our part
15857 dass that
67893 Mexico Mexico
14218 in in
36477 Texas Texas
5870 comma(,) comma(,)
17553 New New
67893 Mexico Mexico
5870 comma(,) comma(,)
5454 AR AR
16102 IZ IZ
15217 ON ON
22801 A A
17138 frühen former
21001 verloren lost
17388 Gebiet territory
7446 zurück back
23638 erobern conquer
18222 stop(.) stop(.)
6719 Regelung Settlement
14331 im in the
15021 Einzelnen details
23845 Euer Hochwohlgeboren Your Excellency
3156 überlassen To be left
23552 stop(.) stop(.)
22096 Sie You
21604 woollen will
4797 vorstehendes of the foregoing
9497 dem the
22464 Präsident President
20855 streng in strictest
4377 geheim secrecy
23610 eröffnen inform
18140 comma (,) comma (,)
22260 sobald as soon as
5905 Kriegs war’s
13347 Ausbruch outbreak
20420 mit with
39689 Vereinigten Staaten United States
13732 fest certain
20667 steht is
6929 und and
5275 Anregung suggestion
18507 hinzufügen add
52262 Japan Japan
1340 von by
22049 sich himself
13339 aus from
11265 zu to
22295 sofortig immediately
10439 beitretung join
14814 einladen invite
4178 (setze infinitiv mit zu – i.e., einzuladen) (form the infinitive – i.e., to invite)
6992 und and
8784 gleichzeitig at the same time
7632 zwischen between
7357 uns us
6926 und and
52262 Japan Japan
11267 zu to
21100 vermitteln mediate
21272 stop(.) stop(.)
9346 Bitte Please
9559 den the
22464 Präsident President
15874 darauf of this