by Max Hastings
In peacetime, few nations commit their finest brains to national security. Brilliant people seldom choose careers in intelligence – or, for that matter, in the armed forces. A struggle for national survival alone makes it possible for a government to mobilise genius, or people possessing something close to it, in the interests of the war effort. The British, and latterly the Americans, did this more effectively than any other participants in World War II. A remarkable proportion of their nations’ brightest and best sooner or later found themselves performing tasks worthy of their talents – in higher army staff posts alongside the likes of Enoch Powell, John Freeman, Toby Aldington; in scientific or technical research; and especially in intelligence, which absorbed thousands of outstanding intellects from many walks of life. The outbreak of war enabled the German section of British military intelligence, for instance, to recruit such writers and academics as Noel Annan, Eric Birley and Alan Pryce-Jones. Annan, a Cambridge don who had only a passable acquaintance with German and French, observed wonderingly: ‘Within a week I was piecing together the reports of agents in the Balkans and the early stutterings of Ultra.’
Donald McLachlan, a journalist who served under Godfrey at the Admiralty, afterwards argued that all wartime intelligence departments should be run by civilians in uniform, because they are unburdened by the lifetime prejudices of career soldiers, sailors and airmen: ‘It is the lawyer, the scholar, the traveller, the banker, even the journalist who shows the ability to resist where the career men tend to bend. Career officers and politicians have a strong interest in cooking raw intelligence to make their masters’ favourite dishes.’ MI6 remained until 1945 under the leadership of its old hands, but most of Britain’s secret war machine passed into the hands of able civilians in uniform who – after an interval of months or in some cases years while they were trained and their skills recognised – progressively improved the quality of intelligence analysis. The Admiralty’s Submarine Tracking Room was directed by Rodger Winn, a barrister and future judge. Gen. Sir Bernard Montgomery’s chief of intelligence from Alamein to Luneburg Heath was the Oxford don Edgar ‘Bill’ Williams, latterly a brigadier. Reg Jones made himself a legend in scientific intelligence.
These men, and a few hundred others throughout the armed forces, spent much of the war exploiting and assessing information derived overwhelmingly from interception and decryption of the enemy’s wireless traffic. Bill Williams, who served in the Mediterranean until 1943 and in Europe thereafter, stated in an important 1945 report: ‘It must be made quite clear that Ultra and Ultra only put intelligence on the map.’ Until decrypts began to become available in bulk in 1942, ‘Intelligence was the Cinderella of the staff … Information about the enemy was frequently treated as interesting rather than valuable [though] of course this attitude varied according to the commander.’
Scepticism was often merited, because much material was downright specious. The 1940 war diary of the army’s Middle East intelligence section in Cairo included comically frivolous snippets: ‘All Hungarian cabaret artistes have been ordered to leave the country by the end of May.’ Data about the Italian army was scanty, so that on 9 August the section recorded: ‘The present location and organisation of Libyan troops in Eastern Cyrenaica is obscure.’ A despondent staff officer added a week later: ‘There has been no further reliable information of fresh [Italian] ground units or formations arriving in Libya from overseas.’ On 27 September, the British high command’s weekly intelligence summary included a paragraph on domestic conditions in Germany: ‘A neutral traveller to the Leipsic fair, whose personal observations are believed reliable, reports that relations between the [Nazi] Party and the Army are not good.’ Three months later, the head of MI6’s Political Section wrung his hands: ‘It is piteous to find ourselves in this state of ignorance’ about both Germany’s internal condition and economy.
Only when Allied warlords were empowered to read the messages being exchanged between enemy generals in the field and their higher headquarters was scepticism about the value of ‘intelligence’ replaced by increasingly fervent belief. Ultra forced commanders-in-chief, not to mention the prime minister, to treat senior intelligence officers with a respect they had seldom received in the pre-Bletchley universe. Brigadier Ian Jacob of the war cabinet secretariat said: ‘My impression is that once the Ultra business got well-established, Churchill didn’t look at anything else.’ Eisenhower’s intelligence chief Kenneth Strong wrote in 1943, in a memorandum on training staff officers: ‘We no longer depend on agents and cloak-and-dagger sources for our information. Modern methods have completely transformed intelligence.’
He meant codebreaking, of course, and in Britain the fountainhead of such activity was the Government Code & Cypher School at Bletchley. In the months following the outbreak of war, GC&CS expanded dramatically with the arrival of a stream of academics, many of them earmarked by its recruiters before the war. Though some were seconded from the armed forces, it was understood that there was no need to train the universities’ contingent to march, blanco webbing, and name the parts of a rifle. They remained their sallow, tweedy, pipe-smoking young selves when housed in lodgings around the dreary suburban town, and enlisted on the government payroll without uniform or ceremony. Twenty-year-old mathematician Keith Batey found his landlady demanding an assurance from his employer that he was not a despised ‘conchy’ – conscientious objector – before he joined the growing body of academics working on a task of supreme importance to their country, fulfilment of which might do something to assuage its shocking vulnerability. What was the task? Bletchley’s little band, 169 strong in 1939 including support staff, understood only that the nation’s enemies communicated in a multitude of codes and ciphers, vulnerable to interception. If even a portion of these combinations of numbers and letters could be rendered intelligible, information might be gained of priceless value to the war effort.
Nobody knew, in the beginning, whether a given message hijacked from the airwaves might be an order from Hitler for his armies to march on Warsaw, or a request from a Luftwaffe airfield in eastern Germany for a delivery of filing cabinets. Ahead of the codebreakers lay a mammoth menu of requirements which could only be addressed as mobilisation sluggishly made available ears, brains and hands to monitor the enemy’s frequencies around the clock, log some of his vast output of messages, fix the locations and possible identities of the senders – diplomatic, police, military, naval or air force. Then came the much greater challenge, of discovering what the messages meant.
All radio communications involved a trade-off between speed and security. At the simplest level, battlefield direction by land, sea and air required some voice linkage. This enabled the instantaneous passage of orders and information, at the cost of being overheard by anybody else who cared to tune to a given frequency. Crude security could be introduced by using coded callsigns in place of names and suchlike – during the Battle of Britain fighter controllers added 5,000 feet to indicated altitudes, to confuse eavesdroppers. But voice messaging was inherently insecure: sensitive information should never be passed verbally, though it often was.
Most military messages were instead wirelessed by Morse key. Low-level material could be rapidly encrypted under battlefield conditions by relatively unsophisticated personnel using so-called hand- or field-ciphers, usually involving groups of two or three letters or numbers – the Kriegsmarine employed twenty-seven variants. More sensitive traffic, issuing from higher echelons, was translated by machine-generated or manual ciphers, usually involving combinations of four or five letters or numbers. The British thought justifiably highly of the security of their Type-X machines, though they never had enough of them.* The Americans rightly trusted their Sigaba, a fifteen-rotor system.
For substantial periods between 1939 and 1943 the Germans broke some Allied codes, including those of the US State Department and military attachés, along with the traffic of several exile governments, notably the Poles and Free French. They sometimes also
accessed messages of all three British services, including the RAF’s four-character cipher, and later had successes in attacking products of the US Army’s M-209 field-ciphering machine. It deserves emphasis that Allied code-security weaknesses, and enemy achievements in exploiting them, gave the Germans much more operational assistance than some Western historians acknowledge, especially in the Battle of the Atlantic. However, higher British, American and Russian communications defied enemy scrutiny: Nazi eavesdropping on transatlantic telephone conversations between Churchill and Roosevelt told Berlin little of value. Modern claims that the Germans broke into Russian higher ciphers deserve to be treated with caution: certainly from 1942 onwards, there is no evidence that Hitler’s generals profited from any such insights; if they had, they would have been less often deluded by Soviet deceptions.
Most German senior officers – though by no means all their cryptographers – were confident that Enigma ciphering machines, which scrambled messages by means of shifting rotors and a plugboard, and rendered them comprehensible only by a matching machine with identical settings, were immune to the attention of any enemy, and indeed to the workings of the human brain. It is unsurprising that in 1939 they discounted the possibility that electro-mechanical technology might dramatically accelerate exposure of the Enigma’s secrets, because it did not then exist. It is extraordinary, however, that such serene confidence persisted through six years that followed, even following the discovery that the Poles had broken some pre-war Enigma traffic, and several warnings from their own experts. Amazing hubris was expressed by the Wehrmacht’s last signals chief, Lt. Gen. Albert Praun, who preened himself before his Allied captors after the war ended: ‘The achievements of German communications intelligence … may speak in favour of the German type of intelligence organisation.’ His organisation, he said, ‘gave German commanders a hitherto unattained degree of [signal] security’.
The British breaking of the Enigma, then subsequently and separately of German teleprinter traffic, was a progressive, incremental operation which attained maturity only between 1943 and 1945, and was never uninterrupted or comprehensive: even at peaks, only about half of all intercepts were read, many of them too late to provide practical assistance ‘at the sharp end’. What was done at Bletchley Park was indeed miraculous, but the codebreakers were never able to walk on all of the water, all of the time.
The 1939–40 Phoney War conferred few benefits on Britain, but it granted GC&CS precious time to bolster its strength and refine its methods. Without mechanical aids Bletchley’s brainstormers made modest and delayed breaches in a small number of enemy ciphers. The Germans employed acronyms and codenames which took weeks or months for their enemies to interpret. The importance of what happened at Bletchley in the first two years of war was not that it enabled Britain’s generals to avert or arrest a disastrous run of defeats, which it certainly did not, but that it lit a candle of hope about what the codebreakers and their embryo technology might accomplish in the future. It enabled the directors of the war effort to lay upon the board a few scattered pieces of a vast jigsaw, which would be filled only during the Allies’ years of victory.
Bletchley Park – Station X, Box 111 c/o The Foreign Office – was a notably ugly Victorian pile of bastard architectural origins surrounded by fifty-five acres of trees and grassland, located fifty miles from London. It was purchased in 1938 to house GC&CS at a safe distance from German bombs by Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, then head of MI6; as legend has it, he used £7,500 out of his own pocket, but more plausibly he paid with secret funds under his control. Whatever MI6’s humint weaknesses, the service’s chiefs, especially Sinclair, deserve full credit for backing the establishment of Bletchley at a time when resources were desperately constrained. Work began at once on laying direct phone and teleprinter lines to London, and in the following year MI6’s skeleton team of cryptanalysts moved from Broadway to the Park, where they came under the orders of Alastair Denniston. One of his colleagues from the old Admiralty days, Dillwyn Knox, an expert on ancient Egyptian papyri, became an early Bletchley stalwart. The most prominent of the younger recruits were Gordon Welchman of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, Hugh Alexander, Stuart Milner-Barry, John Jeffreys – and Alan Turing.
This last, the twenty-seven-year-old son of an Indian civil servant and the product of an austere and emotionally arid childhood, had just returned from a stint at Princeton clutching one of his own creations, a so-called electric multiplier machine mounted on a breadboard. His headmaster at Sherborne had once written: ‘If he is to stay at a public school, he must aim at becoming educated. If he is to be solely a Scientific Specialist, then he is wasting his time.’ In the headmaster’s terms, Turing had indeed been ‘wasting his time’: he had evolved into a shy, narrow, obsessive. Noel Annan wrote: ‘I liked his sly, secret humour … His inner life was more real to him than actuality. He disliked authority wherever he was … [and] enjoyed games and treasure hunts and silliness … Turing was the purest type of homosexual, longing for affection and love that lasted.’ More even than by his sexuality and his often childlike immaturity, however, his tragedy was to be afflicted by the exquisitely painful loneliness of genius.
Other drafts of young academics followed, variously codebreakers and linguists, together with the first of what became successive waves of young women, who would play a vital role in the operations of ‘BP’. The first two of these were daughters of golfing partners of Denniston, reflecting the importance of personal connections in Bletchley’s recruitment process in the early days, before industrialisation became inescapable. Indeed, the whole wartime intelligence machine emphasised the cosiness of the upper reaches of British life. Oxford University Press was entrusted with responsibility for printing vast quantities of codes, maps and reports, because of its pre-war experience producing examination papers under secure conditions. The Admiralty’s liaison with OUP was handled by Margaret Godfrey, wife of the director of naval intelligence. The Royal Navy’s Topographical Photographic Library was housed in the basement of the nearby Bodleian Library, which eventually dispatched 300,000 images a month to operational areas. The World War I intelligence veteran Admiral Sir William ‘Blinker’ Hall introduced Godfrey, his modern successor, to the City of London banking giants Montagu Norman, Olaf Hambro and the Rothschilds, who helped to identify suitable recruits for the NID.
Candidates being scrutinised for Bletchley were often asked: ‘Do you have religious scruples about reading other people’s correspondence?’ Twenty-year-old Harry Hinsley was interviewed at St John’s College, Cambridge by Alastair Denniston and Col. John Tiltman, the senior codebreaker. They said: ‘You’ve travelled a bit, we understand. You’ve done quite well in your Tripos. What do you think of government service? Would you rather have that than be conscripted?’ Hinsley would indeed, and joined the Naval Section located in Bletchley’s Hut 4. Through the icy winter of 1939–40, such men and women wrestled with Enigma traffic. Working conditions were dismal, with staff muffled in overcoats and mittens. The first break into a Luftwaffe Enigma key – designated ‘Green’ – is thought to have been made on 25 October 1939. In December, by unaided intellectual effort Alan Turing is believed to have broken five days’ worth of old naval messages. By the end of March, the French – or rather, the Poles working at France’s Station Bruno – had broken twenty days’ worth of old signals and BP about thirty, all Luftwaffe traffic.
Turing was much more importantly engaged. He compiled a 150-page treatise on Enigma, studded with schoolboyish blots, deletions and illegibilities. While most codebreakers addressed each other by first names or nicknames, heedless of age and status, almost everyone knew Turing as ‘Prof’ rather than as Alan. When his Enigma study was circulated later in 1940, it became known as ‘the Prof’s book’. He also set about fulfilling his concept for a ‘bombe’, a primitive but revolutionary electro-mechanical device for exploring multiple mathematical combinations. This borrowed its name, though not its design, from the Polish �
�bomby’, and would be capable of examining the 17,576 possible wheel deployments for a three-rotor Enigma in about twenty minutes: the order for the first machine was placed in October 1939, and the prototype became operational six months later. Meanwhile, outside in the park, workmen sawed and hammered at an ever-widening array of low wooden buildings which housed the growing staff. Eventually, only administrators worked in the main building, where the telephone switchboard was established in the ballroom. In the huts, signals were shifted from one section to another on a small trolley pushed along a makeshift wooden tunnel.
Hut 8 attacked German naval traffic, which was then passed to Hut 4 for translation and processing. Hut 3 performed the same function for Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe traffic decrypted by Hut 6. The former would eventually play a pivotal role in Allied wartime intelligence, but in its early incarnation it had a staff of just four. Frank Lucas, who was one of them, wrote: ‘On a snowy January morning of 1940, in a small bleak wooden room with nothing but a table and three chairs, the first bundle of Enigma decodes appeared. [We] had no idea what they were about to disclose.’ A few score yards away, Hut 6 run by Gordon Welchman wrestled with army-Luftwaffe ‘Red’ key traffic, which was the first to be broken in bulk.
From the outset, pains were taken to disguise from all but the most senior operational commanders the fact that information was being gained from codebreaking. This gave an unintended boost to the prestige of MI6, and to that of Stewart Menzies in particular. When Reg Jones gave a disguised report based on an Ultra decrypt to the RAF’s director of signals, Air Commodore Nutting, the airman professed astonished admiration for the courage of the presumed spies who had provided the information, saying, ‘By Jove, you’ve got some brave chaps working for you!’ The ever-growing scale of the enemy traffic to be trawled was intimidating. It is a measure of the expansion of communications as a branch of warfare that by August 1943, 305,000 personnel among the Luftwaffe’s total strength of 2.3 million were employed on signals duties – transmitting, receiving or processing – and the same was true on both sides of the war, and of all armed forces.