The Secret Listeners

by Sinclair McKay

  There were wheels within wheels in the security services as well. Richard Gambier-Parry was detailed to run Section VIII – as distinct from MI8 – an MI6 offshoot that unusually had some independence from day-to-day Foreign Office interference. His role was partly to strengthen overseas wireless and intelligence links.

  But there had to be proper headquarters for these wireless interception operations too. Just as the codebreaking activities of GC&CS were moved out of London from St James’s Park to the Buckinghamshire town of Bletchley, so the Foreign Office settled upon two handsome properties – certainly much more handsome than Bletchley Park itself – just a few miles away. The first was Hanslope Park; the second a requisitioned country house – a rather fine Regency structure – called Whaddon Hall. The latter estate could very easily be made secure; and it had a range of outbuildings that could be adapted for all sorts of purposes. It was at Whaddon Hall that the security services built their first secret dedicated transmitter of the war, for the purposes of MI6 communications.

  Not only that: in the stables to the side of the building was a secret factory which manufactured special wireless sets for the use of secret agents. Head of MI6 Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair took the precaution of ensuring that the work of Whaddon Hall, dedicated as it was to communications within Intelligence, was kept free of interference from the Foreign Office. The transmitters of Whaddon Hall were, in effect, his own private fiefdom.

  These two grand country properties, Whaddon and Hanslope Park – with the addition of Beaumanor Hall – would serve as the nerve centres of the wireless interception operations that were to come. Indeed, later on, as Hanslope gathered in transmissions from around the world, it became something of an attraction for the higher echelons of Allied command, according to Geoffrey Pidgeon: ‘Hanslope was considered important enough for Lord Gort, General Alexander, Field Marshal Montgomery and General Eisenhower to pay it a visit . . . Never had there been such a large gathering of amateur wireless operators whose sole purpose was to eavesdrop on enemy wireless intelligence.’ Like Bletchley Park, the work of the Y Service was hidden far from general view. Even from its early days, it also shared Bletchley Park’s spirit of inventiveness and innovation.

  3 The Human Computors

  Just before war was declared, an anxious belief took hold among the staff of Bletchley Park that there might actually be a dramatic drop-off in radio traffic for them to intercept. This would – they imagined – be caused by the radio silence they presumed the Germans would impose. Such a thing had happened in the latter stages of the Great War, although the reason had not so much been security as the increasing prevalence of telephone landlines. Nonetheless, there was worry that if such a silence were to recur, it would cause immediate damage to codebreaking and intelligence opportunities.

  And indeed, in August 1939, there was an ominous decrease in radio traffic in the days leading up to the German assault on Poland. However, once the attack was under way, it was found that volumes of signals rose dramatically once more. In fact, GC&CS found that there were more German signals than ever before.

  But in those early, uncertain weeks of conflict, the security services were seemingly caught out rather badly, both by the enemy and by their own disorganisation. There was the notorious Venlo incident of 1939 when two senior SIS officers – in the process, so they thought, of trying to help disaffected German commanders stage a coup – were lured into a trap in Holland, and spirited over the border into Germany. Not only were the two men – with all that hideously valuable knowledge – now in the power of the Nazis, they had also been captured with some state-of-the-art radio equipment, the technology of which could also conceivably be useful. The British agents were imprisoned for the duration of the war.

  It was apparent even before Britain declared war that the Y Service would have to be expanded dramatically. In military terms, as they stood at the start of the conflict, the main intercept station, manned by the Royal Signals, was at the old naval base in Chatham, Kent, on the Thames Estuary. This station picked up army signals. There were two big naval Y stations: one near Winchester and another up in Scarborough, on the Yorkshire coast. The main RAF Y station, meanwhile, was in Staffordshire, located on the moorland between Leek and Cheadle.

  Even before the war, ‘[it] was quite clear that the Luftwaffe was the strongest and most menacing of all foreign air forces,’ recalled Bletchley’s Air Section head Josh Cooper in his diaries. Finding a way of listening to bomber and fighter pilots’ communications would be crucial. But when RAF Cheadle began operations, it was all actually reasonably straightforward, remembered veteran Peter Gray Lucas in an essay. ‘A Warrant Officer was in charge of the intercept operators’ room . . . The operator wrote down everything he heard, including the procedural exchanges. Any formal message was passed into the teleprinter room and sent formally but without undue haste to Bletchley, where it was decoded, translated, edited and sent by teleprinter to the Air Ministry in London.’1

  There was, though, according to Bletchley veteran and former director of GCHQ Sir Arthur Bonsall, one immediate setback: a shortage of operators fluent in German. So, in the first few weeks of the war at Bletchley Park, as the classicist academics and keen young undergraduates trawled from the universities began to materialise, such messages from the Luftwaffe were handled in a special hut by four people given the Wellsian designation of ‘computors’ – specifically spelt with an ‘o’, to signify that they were akin to those who worked on mathematical tables. On the face of it, this was not the most glamorous designation, especially for a Cambridge professor of classics. Perhaps even less glamorously, it was soon decided that the ‘computors’ should be sent from Bletchley to RAF Cheadle, thus doing away with the intermediate teleprinting stage.

  There, wrote Peter Gray Lucas, ‘they sat at a large table in the middle of the air-intercept room. The operators sat at their receivers ranged around the walls and handed their intercepts to the computors. The messages were immediately decoded, translated, and shown to the Warrant Officer in charge of the room, who passed them to the Commands as he saw fit.’

  Living up to the chilly, Dalek-like efficiency of the term ‘computors’, this small team quickly became extraordinarily successful. Even though all signals were sent on to Bletchley Park, the computors became so familiar with the patterns and rhythms of the messages coming in from over the blackness of the North Sea that during any night, they could themselves quietly decode enormous amounts of material.

  Arthur Bonsall, then very young, was sent to oversee their work in the initial stages. This involved a comic dispute as to his exact status: civilian or military? The authorities decided that for form’s sake, he ought to be in the RAF. ‘I spent a morning in the airship shed being catalogued and weighed and measured,’ recalled Sir Arthur, ‘and [I was] issued with a knife and fork and spoon. Before I had finished my lunch, I was told there had been a change of policy . . .’ And so he had to ‘retrace his route’ and hand back the cutlery. For the duration, he was to all intents and purposes a civilian.

  The human computors at RAF Cheadle slipped into their routine with remarkable ease. In the very early stages of the war, Luftwaffe pilots were lax about using the special codes and codewords provided; but even when they did so, the computors were swift to unravel them. Too swift, it seemed, to be believed by higher authorities. Sir Arthur Bonsall recalled an occasion when RAF Cheadle reported that German bombers were on course for the Forth Bridge in Scotland. Despite the clarity of the report, Fighter Command chose to ignore it. As a result, it was ‘surprised’ when the attack actually did take place. It is possible that Fighter Command simply did not believe the provenance of the information.

  It is intriguing that the Cheadle computors were able to press on happily with decoding at a time when the Bletchley authorities were sharply tightening their grip on security; not only were the codes the business of Bletchley Park and Bletchley Park alone, but anyone outside found to be successfully decryptin
g would be severely dealt with (Hugh Trevor-Roper’s nerve in cracking codes, as we have seen, earned him the lasting enmity of the Bletchley authorities). Later yet, there would be fresh and furious debate concerning the various out-stations abroad – from the Middle East to Asia – and the amount of material it was deemed proper for them to process and decode ‘in-house’ without endangering the great Bletchley secret.

  Somehow, though, RAF Cheadle was the happy exception to these outbreaks of paranoia and jealousy. Just so long as the Luftwaffe signals were sent to Bletchley, as well as being decrypted in Staffordshire, all proceeded smoothly, and the computors enjoyed a degree of autonomy that few others were to be granted.

  Also vital – especially in those early, sweaty days of the war when the fear of German invasion was at its height – was the work of RAF Kingsdown in Kent. As Sir Arthur Bonsall has noted, at a time when radar technology was in its infancy, RAF Kingsdown provided the closest that the British could get to real-time reports of the positions of enemy pilots: their take-off times, the courses they were flying, the heights at which they flew.

  Bonsall added that ‘Kingsdown and the other Home Defence Units came into their own during the Battle of Britain.’ The Home Defence Units he referred to were the many listening stations – ranging from small to minuscule – which were swiftly established around Britain’s coastline, from Cornwall to Scotland. In the spring of 1940, the military authorities were still constructing this vast, complex operation. Sometimes there was a sense of ingenious extemporisation.

  And of almost equal importance were the tiny ad hoc RAF stations – sometimes based in caravans, or in honeysuckled clifftop cottages – on the south coast. For it was of course the south coast that would witness so much of the action: the German fighter pilots zooming in across the Channel, the RAF pilots braced to meet the assault. In the early days of the conflict, these tiny stations could also gauge the immediate urgency of messages; although fighter pilots were supposed to communicate in code, the heat and terror of conflict meant that frequently, the listeners along the coast heard their voices; tense, terrified young Germans talking – or more often, shouting – in plain German. There was almost a form of perverse intimacy in the relationship; the young women listening in to what were frequently either moments of crisis or occasions of exhausted triumph.

  RAF Kingsdown operative Peggy West recalled that the station lay in what was termed ‘Bomb Alley’. Otherwise, though, it was a happy base, presided over by ‘Miss Conan Doyle, the daughter of Sir Arthur’; ‘Wing Commander Budge’, described by West as ‘a wireless wizard’, was their ‘respected and dedicated commanding officer’. Even at the very start of the war, they picked up some nifty tricks:

  Initially the radios used were rather awkward boxes whose coil changes [tuning components that could be changed in order to receive different frequencies] were needed at the most inappropriate times . . . But when small compact radio sets began to arrive from crashed German aircraft, or via clandestine routes, you can imagine we found those German sets were ideal for us too. These covered the whole spectrum of frequencies used by the Luftwaffe by rotation of one comfortable dial with precise tuning capabilities.2

  Elsewhere, in the earliest stages of the war, Gordon Welchman – senior cryptographer and Bletchley Park’s great organisational genius – had forged close links with the staff at the Chatham naval base. They would ensure that communications received were bundled up and sent at top speed by motorcycle courier, even on icy, wet winter nights, to Bletchley Park, where round-the-clock shifts could immediately start decoding and analysing them.

  Motorcycle couriers were not the only means of transmitting information but quite often, in those early days, they were the most reliable. Also in place was a system of teleprinters; but in 1939, there were neither enough telephone lines nor enough teleprinter operators to make the technology work effectively. At Bletchley Park, a small number of WAAF operatives, referred to affectionately as ‘Tele-princesses’, were based within the main house; by the time the technology became more reliable and the machines were used around the country and around the world, they numbered around forty in total.

  Elsewhere, the Radio Security Service was settling comfortably into Arkley View in Barnet. Here, according to Pat Hawker, were to be found ‘analysis, intelligence, direction finding control and various administrative departments’. Rather like Bletchley Park, huts were built in the grounds, the better to accommodate equipment such as teleprinter terminals. Dispatch riders were always at hand to take intercepted messages directly, and at top speed, to Bletchley Park.

  It was understood – even in the generally unprepared atmosphere of 1939 – that a great many wireless intercept operatives were going to be required. The work could not be left to clutches of individuals hunched by radio sets for hours on end. Having said that, the story of recruitment to the Y Service shows that the net, though cast carefully, was also cast wide. The selectors were not merely going to rely on military personnel at secluded coastal bases. Just as the authorities at Bletchley Park had sought out mathematicians, chess champions and crossword lovers, so the Radio Security Service was fixing upon Britain’s ever-growing numbers of wireless enthusiasts, many of them quite young.

  Radio was – and possibly still is – a fundamentally male hobby. And part of Arkley’s remit was to take in not merely intercepts taken down by professionals, but those also picked up by a small but substantial army of gifted amateurs. These amateurs were known as Voluntary Interceptors.

  One such operative – or VI – was teenager Ray Fautley, who had been utterly fascinated with the science of radio since his earliest years, showing a precocious talent in constructing his own receivers. And though this enthusiasm was to lead him into years of extremely hard work, it is clear that he would not have begrudged one moment of it.

  Seventeen-year-old Ray was still living at home with his parents in Mitcham, south London. Since the age of fourteen, he had worked for radio firms, including Marconi, with a zeal that his employers must have found extremely heartening. In 1939, he was co-opted into becoming a listener. Not from any secret premises, but from his parents’ front parlour. There, a radio set was installed inside a bureau, where it could be hidden from sight when Ray was not using it.

  ‘I was with the civilian Y Service, you could say,’ he explains. Though Mr Fautley was not to know it until a great many years later, the frequencies allocated to the Voluntary Interceptors to tune into were those used by the Abwehr, the German secret service. His instructions were to tune in on bands ‘from 7 to 7.5 megacycles per second, or megahertz, as it is now. But what I listened to: they gave me no clue whatsoever. All they said was, write down any Morse signals you hear and send them in to us.’ And that is what he did: Mr Fautley would tune into the frequencies within the bands given and, simultaneously translating from Morse (a precious high-speed skill that he shared with all other Y Service operatives), would scrupulously note down, upon specially provided stationery, the letters that he had decoded. So how was this young lad drawn into such specialised war work?

  ‘This chap at Marconi’s was the bloke who had put my name forward for the work. And he knew about it when the vetting man came to my house.’ The visitor who materialised on his doorstep one afternoon proved to be the archetypal hush-hush Man from Whitehall – much to the consternation of Fautley’s parents, who were not allowed to know what was going on. ‘There was this chap in a bowler, with an umbrella, he was doing background on me,’ says Mr Fautley with a chuckle. ‘Asking me where my parents were born, where my grandparents were born. I told him exactly where they were born. They were all Brits. The furthest away was born on the Isle of Wight. Most were from London. I myself was born in Camberwell.’

  As can easily be imagined, while this serious, confidential talk was going on, Ray Fautley’s parents were in the other room, bewildered and anxious about the mysterious visit. ‘When this Voluntary Interception gentleman, with his bowler hat and umbre
lla, was leaving, I said to him: would you please say just a few words to my parents?’ Young Fautley of course was not allowed to do so himself – the vow of secrecy was imposed with immediate effect. ‘I said, “They’ll think I’ve done something awful and that I’m going to be taken away and locked up . . . I don’t know what they’ll think.”

  ‘The man said, “All right.” And within my hearing, he said to my parents: “Your son will be doing work of very great national importance to this country.” I thought, what on earth . . . I’m no secret agent . . . what on earth could I be doing that was so important?’

  The background to this thrilling opportunity is a sharp snapshot of a long-lost world of engineering skill and knowhow. For even as the war broke out, young Fautley, who had built his own radio receiver at the age of twelve, had moved from Marconi and was a junior with another big radio firm of the day.

  ‘I got a job with the Mallard Radio Valve Company in Mitcham Works,’ he says. ‘The little laboratory I worked in was on an island in the middle of the River Wandle. You had to approach on a footbridge. I joined the firm in December 1939. The senior engineers took to me, because I was like a sponge. The stuff I learned from those senior engineers in about the year that I was there – well, I don’t think there’s a single piece of equipment I’ve seen from that time on that I couldn’t use.’