The Germans, as it happened, had been a trifle slower to set up an organisation of wireless interception, and only caught up when High Command instructed military radio bases to monitor all signals coming from Russia. The idea was that they might be able to jam such signals in case they also found themselves fighting on the eastern front.
According to veteran interceptor Bill Baker: ‘By 1916, all three armed services were depending heavily upon wireless. Paratroops were first employed in 1916 when Belgian soldiers, who in civilian life had been marine wireless officers, were asked to volunteer for special duties. After parachute instruction and a period of training by Marconi’s, these men were dropped into enemy territory with small sets manufactured by the company strapped to their backs, their task being to transmit intelligence from behind the German lines.’ And according to another veteran wireless expert, Pat Hawker, the famous female agent ‘Mata Hari . . . was convicted largely on the basis of intercepted wireless messages between Spain and Germany.’
Not long after Armistice Day in 1918, some of these secrets began leaking out. In a 1921 book by two journalists – Hector Bywater and H.C. Ferraby – called Strange Intelligence: Memoirs of Naval Secret Service, was a chapter entitled ‘The Men Who Heard The U-Boats Talk’. The authors boldly declared that the ‘sources of information were many and varied. The most valuable of all were the wireless directional stations around our coast.’
That there were such stations would have come as a surprise to few. Yet there is a perpetual feeling in intelligence circles that such tactical posts should never be discussed, for fear of giving an inadvertent advantage to the enemy. Intriguingly, though, in this instance Bywater and Ferraby’s book was given the tacit backing of Admiral Hall, the naval commander behind many of the innovations. He wrote in a foreword that the disclosures ‘can now do no harm either to the public service or individuals’.
After the war, Room 40 evolved into the Government Code and Cypher School; and the focus of wireless interception – under its head Alastair Denniston – changed to new subjects for surveillance, such as the fledgling Soviet Union. During the 1920s, British Intelligence made the threat of the spread of Bolshevism a priority. Indeed, it was at this time that the operatives of GC&CS became wary of handing over their information to politicians, largely because blundering politicians were liable to make loud public speeches in the Commons containing intelligence which could only have been gleaned from sensitive sources. As a result of such blunders, the Soviets, now alerted to British interception techniques, switched to the use of unbreakable ‘one-time pads’ – that is, paper pads featuring encrypted letters and digits in groups of five, with tear-off sheets, meaning they could be used once, then destroyed.
In 1928 came the formation of a new body, the Y Committee: the idea behind this was to try and bring some co-ordination to the various intercepting operations across the Army, Navy and Air Force. Room 40 personnel under Alastair Denniston were joined by figures from the services, such as Major John Tiltman of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. Tiltman’s name now lives on in cryptography lore; one of the figures later to achieve so much at Bletchley Park, he was not only a brilliant codebreaker but also inspirational to others.
Around the world, as radio technology spread and improved, with ever more delicate aerial and valve designs, there was a rise in the number of signals deemed urgent enough to listen in on. The Navy, for instance, developed expertise in eavesdropping on Japanese signals; this obviously required specialised, highly trained operatives to navigate the special difficulties of Japanese Morse. The War Office in the meantime had an interception base in Palestine which would listen in on Arab and French signals.
During this period, amateur interest in wireless technology continued to grow. One such enthusiast, a young man called Richard Gambier-Parry, who had attended Eton College, was by 1920 a licensed amateur radio operator. Indeed, anyone wishing to pursue wireless hobbies had to be similarly licensed and for a small but extremely dedicated number of people, getting a licence was a priority.
But Gambier-Parry’s enthusiasm was on another level entirely, and it was to have a profound impact upon the course of his life. In 1926, he became press officer for the BBC (and in a modern age where the Corporation now has around 200 such officers, how extraordinary to think back to an era when only one was required). Five years after that, he joined the British offices of American firm Philco, which specialised in the manufacture of radios, becoming general sales manager for the United Kingdom. This unglamorous sounding occupation (though utterly enthralling to Gambier-Parry) was actually a formative prelude to a remarkable war.
Also key to his career – and it is in no way a slight on his abilities to point this out – was the matter of his social position. As well as his grand education, his family owned lands in Oxfordshire; in the socially rigid 1930s, this meant that at some point he was certain to meet smart, well-connected intelligence officers. And indeed, Gambier-Parry used to go fox-hunting with a senior intelligence official called Stewart Menzies, who was later to become head of MI6. It was as a result of this connection – combined with his undoubted flair and expertise with wireless technology – that towards the end of that decade, at around the time of the Munich crisis, Gambier-Parry was invited by Menzies to join a new communications section of the security services. Like a great many of his fellow Old Etonians, Gambier-Parry had a relaxed, charming and confident manner – universal attributes that nevertheless carried perhaps a little extra weight in that era.
Thanks to his contacts from his Philco years, as well as his general enthusiasm, Gambier-Parry was able to begin headhunting some of the liveliest minds in the wireless world. ‘Richard Gambier-Parry took the top layer of Philco,’ says Geoffrey Pidgeon, himself later to work for Brigadier Gambier-Parry, and who developed a level of admiration and affection for him that is still evident in his voice whenever he talks of his old boss. ‘Philco was at that time the world’s biggest radio manufacturer, and the biggest in England – he’d taken the top tranche of their top men.
‘Lots of top businessmen were recruited from elsewhere as well. Because they had worldwide connections. They knew a lot of information.’
The first idea was for his organisation to strengthen its clandestine links with agents in neutral countries, as well as to forge new bonds with governments in exile. Even more crucially, by the months leading up to the war, the organisation was responsible for ensuring that traffic intended for Bletchley – either by dispatch rider or radio – got through smoothly, as well as looking after the so-called Black Broadcasts (brilliant propaganda tricks, beamed through to the radios of ordinary Germans, with the aim of disorientating and destabilising their listeners).
It is often noted of the institution of Bletchley Park that a sort of inspired amateurism was at work there. Recruits to the cause were not professional cryptanalysts; rather, they were brilliant minds in specific fields such as mathematics, who could bring lateral reasoning to bear on the problems before them. Similarly, the early days of wireless interception had a pleasingly ad hoc, informal flavour.
In the 1920s, interception was mostly carried out in an anonymous corner of the Passport Office in St James’s Park. There was also, according to Geoffrey Pidgeon, a small station operating out of a riverside office in Barnes, south-west London. This location might not have been entirely random; there was a Marconi factory close by and, as Pidgeon points out, there were clear links between Marconi and MI6 in the years leading up to the Second World War.
Yet another secret listening post was located in the south London suburb of Denmark Hill. Here, within a large police station, listeners would covertly tune in to embassy wireless traffic. According to Pidgeon, this unit enjoyed a minor triumph in the inter-war years when it intercepted the communications of a ‘subversive’ Russian organisation operating out of leafy Wimbledon.
By the mid 1930s, there were prototype out-stations dotted around the world, keeping sharp ears out
for Britain’s imperial interests. One such station, in Beijing (then Peking), was operated by Edgar Harrison under the aegis of the Foreign Office. The intercept station itself was based in the city’s British legation. Young Harrison listened to Chinese communications at the time of the 1936 abdication crisis, and was fascinated by the widespread disapproval expressed towards Wallis Simpson. The station broadly handled diplomatic traffic, but it had a hidden, interior function too: that of closely monitoring Japanese wireless communications.
Added to this network was the establishment of a station in the British colony of Hong Kong. Elsewhere, another prototype out-station had been set up in Spain in the mid-1930s to keep close track of the conflict in the Spanish Civil War.
And the subject was a matter of growing interest among all the services. In 1934, Sir Charles Blount – Director of Air Intelligence at the Air Ministry – established a unit, operating out of an RAF base in Lincolnshire, to intercept radio traffic. This swiftly became so successful that not long afterwards, a strikingly eccentric young academic was drafted in from Oxford to work full-time on its intelligence gathering. This was Josh Cooper, then thirty-three years old; and before he attracted admiration at Bletchley Park both for his awesome abilities and his distractingly unnerving mannerisms, he was swept deep into the bosom of the Air Ministry.
For the purposes of the coming conflict, an American radio set known as the HRO (the initials were said to stand for ‘Helluva Rush On’) was identified as being the most suitable; it could pick up both Morse and human voice transmissions with ease and, with a certain dextrous rearrangement of components, had a very broad range. Initially about 1000 were ordered in. As the war progressed, these numbers would rise to some 10,000.
Meanwhile, down in Woldingham in Surrey stood an innocuous looking suburban bungalow with the curious name ‘Funny Neuk’. Among the names on the electoral register for the property was one Hugh Sinclair – otherwise Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, head of MI6. This suburban structure, placed conveniently close to the North Downs and situated at a good height, served as the base for wireless transmissions.
A little more surreal – and perhaps foreshadowing the offbeat, eccentric feel of the 1960s television show The Avengers – was an intercept station set up deep within the tough prison of Wormwood Scrubs, west London, in the months before the war began. It was given the designation of the Radio Security Service (and because it was in essence an offshoot of MI5, it was also known as MI8). The purpose of the station was to intercept and track down transmissions from enemy agents working from within Britain. In one section of these unusual headquarters, the prisoners were moved out (to secure accommodation in the countryside), and intelligence figures such as Hugh Trevor-Roper (later Lord Dacre) moved in.
Trevor-Roper had been hauled out of a comfortable life as a young don in Oxford. Very poor eyesight meant that he would not be called up for regular army duties. Swiftly he was recruited by Walter Gill, the Bursar of Merton College. Major Gill was an intensely pragmatic enthusiast who, during the First World War, had worked in the fledgling field of wireless interception; when based in Egypt, it was said that he had had transmitters fitted on top of the Great Pyramid. Now, working deep in their incongruous prison wing, Gill and Trevor-Roper dedicated themselves to the business of detecting enemy radio waves directed towards agents in Britain; or indeed, radio waves emanating from those agents’ sets.
The idea was based on an early anxiety about bomber raids; the authorities were concerned that enemy agents might be able to set up radio beams in such a way that the fighter pilots could home in on them as targets. In fact, in conceptual terms, this was not a hundred miles away from what later evolved as ‘beam bombing’, where pilots would use radio beams to triangulate the location of their targets.
HM Prison Wormwood Scrubs is – and was – a formidable and lowering structure, and one might easily imagine that the aesthetically sensitive Trevor-Roper would have baulked at having to work in such a place. His office was based on the first floor, near an iron walkway that clanged with every footstep. But why were he and his colleagues there at all? The reason was that this was a secure location in which captured spies could be dealt with in conditions of reasonable discretion.
Also working among the drab green tiles of Wormwood Scrubs were a number of smart debutantes, engaged in secretarial work in the echoing cells and corridors. Did Trevor-Roper shudder at the gloom? Not as such. In fact, far worse in his eyes was the area just outside: streets and streets of soot-blackened ‘council houses’, the drab and uniform avenues of East Acton. Nor was he especially thrilled to find himself living in rented accommodation in the nearby suburb of Ealing.
These quibbles aside, Trevor-Roper and Major Walter Gill proved to be brilliantly effective at their radio interception work; for, having accumulated a great number of German messages transmitted on certain frequencies, the two men took them home to the flat in Ealing and began decoding them. Gill had expertise in cryptography, Trevor-Roper a working knowledge of the German language. Just a few months into the war, they had stolen something of a march on the assembled cryptographers at Bletchley Park: after a great deal of analysis and effort, the codes began to unravel before their eyes.
As it happened, these codes were the ones being used by the Abwehr, the German secret service. Trevor-Roper felt that this was quite a coup. His superiors, however, were furious. Not only was it considered a grave and foolhardy security breach; there were also the layers of regulations and complication of hierarchies, along with the ever-present sense of resentment between different branches of the security services. The ‘breach’ was considered so serious that Trevor-Roper received a visit at Wormwood Scrubs from Alastair Denniston, now the director of Bletchley Park, and one of his long-standing senior cryptographers, Oliver Strachey (the brother of Lytton). The two men were emphatically not there to congratulate the myopic young Oxford don. And subsequently, it was Strachey who inherited the role of cracking the Abwehr codes harvested by Trevor-Roper.
Nor was his sojourn at Wormwood Scrubs to last long. The Radio Security Service – which was swiftly to prove so successful, with a growing team of volunteers based all over the United Kingdom and eagerly sending in their monitored logs of German radio signals – needed room and space to breathe, and so new and more salubrious premises were found on the northern tip of London in Barnet; the team moved from gloomy Wormwood Scrubs to a roomy and attractive nineteenth-century property called Arkley View.
Back in the late 1930s, along with various other senior intelligence figures, Richard Gambier-Parry was well aware of the urgency of his work. There was little question that the Germans’ communications systems would be tightly run and technologically advanced. It was also the case that although Britain was wealthy and powerful throughout the world, its security arrangements were meagre. Few embassies were equipped with the most modern, easily used radio technology, and so the business of communications had – in some regions – a flavour of the nineteenth century about it, much reliant on ink and paper.
So, as Gambier-Parry recruited, he knew that he had to pull in the lithest and most agile minds in order to ensure that wireless security efforts were successful.
By 1937, even before Hitler’s Anschluss with Austria and demands upon Czechoslovakia, the Y Committee realised – in the face of demands from the Treasury that it should instead make economies – that it would need yet more bases. The drums of war could be heard all over Europe; nevertheless, the Committee’s plans unfurled at no great speed. Further academic appointments were made; established naval bases such as those at Chatham on the Kent shoreline and Flowerdown near Winchester, in Hampshire, were customised for listening purposes.
In the archives can be found a slightly pained account of the early wartime days of HMS Flowerdown (sited on land but nonetheless referred to in all the naval terms familiar at sea), written by an anonymous senior chronicler:
Equipment available was, to say the least, in very short
supply. Four steel masts, 120 feet high, erected at the corners of a 260 foot square were available for aerial construction . . . The position in regards to spare parts . . . was critical. On many occasions, spares from civilian receivers were brought in to use as replacements, Maintenance, as such, was practically non-existent, comprising merely the repair of sets which had broken down . . . the compiling of records in the early days of the war was seriously handicapped by the shortage of staff.
The place would change quite dramatically as the conflict gathered pace in the early 1940s; HMS Flowerdown was to become a teeming hub of Y Service activity, with a crew of high-spirited young Wrens and sailors. Veteran Marjorie Gerken recalls the surprisingly egalitarian atmosphere that gradually evolved there; how Wrens and sailors would sit side by side, radio sets before them, their work monitored each shift, day and night, by two figures sitting on a central dais. The receivers, by now shipped in from America, were sleeker, with ultra-smooth dials and a smart black metal finish, and the atmosphere of the establishment – from the hyper-serious focus on the work, to the unstoppably exuberant nature of the dances, plays, shows and sports matches that the young people of Flowerdown participated in – were to make it one of the most efficient and certainly happiest of bases.
But the initial shortages of equipment encountered by Flowerdown just before the outbreak of war were by no means unique. In that curious, thundery atmosphere of 1939, when everyone knew – yet no public figure said aloud – that war was inevitable, the scramble to prepare was universal. In 1939, several other listening bases were added, including one in Hertfordshire and two in the wilds of Scotland. These were all to be staffed by the Foreign Office.
Meanwhile, the Navy, with its separate interest in wireless and signals, had been busy elsewhere. Small wireless interception bases were established across the world: from Wellington in New Zealand, to Singapore, to Malta, to Canada. They were now fast acquiring the latest high-frequency technology – radios that could transmit and receive signals refracted in the heavens high above, in the ionosphere, and bounced back down in far distant lands. These high-frequency waves were ideal for long-distance radio transmissions. What more natural use of Britain’s many colonies and territories than to enlist them for the purposes of national security? Indeed, this particular advantage, this ability to set up bases on almost every continent, was an intelligence asset that was to last well into the 1950s and the Cold War.
The Secret Listeners Page 3