* No relation to Kim Philby
CHAPTER FIVE
Diplomatic Eavesdropping 1922-44
Based on an article published in Intelligence & National Security
I
Diplomatic eavesdropping in 1922 was not a new or recent practice, but the coming of wireless telegraphy (WAT) at the turn of the century gave access, via interception and decryption, to greatly increased volumes of traffic. Much of this would have been worthless, emanating from chancellories without power or influence to affect the course of European affairs. But not all. For the victors in World War I and from the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, British, French, Italian and American codebreaking departments were reinstated or established. The use and abuse of the material thus provided has been tacitly acknowledged but rarely studied. In Britain the history of signals intelligence, known as sigint, has concentrated on the Admiralty codebreaking department in Room 40 OB (Old Building) during 1914-18, and the interwar abuse of Russian cipher insecurity, fuelling the anti-Bolshevik scares of the 1920s and precipitating a Soviet change to a more secure cipher system. 1939 brought not only a new world war but a new dimension of cryptanalysis involving breaking machine-enciphered messages. The Enigma breakthrough and what followed therefrom has been well documented. This chapter is about non-service - that is diplomatic - traffic, much of which was enciphered by systems which predated machine encipherment.
The new source disclosed is the diplomatic component of the files that came to Churchill from MI6 from late 1941 to VJ Day. It is called DIR/C, and in the Public Record Office system it is known as HW1. The value of this material (described by retired government officials as ‘the intercepts’) can now be assessed, because Churchill proved to have been a prime user of diplomatic sigint, and his daily files of intercepts have now been released, though some items are still witheld. Their release is the first and almost only indication that diplomatic eavesdropping – on friends, neutrals and enemies - was a part, and as it turns out a major part, of the British cryptanalytical effort in wartime.
Recent researchers have discovered much about British Sigint efforts of the interwar period. These reveal that as a source of reliable and relevant secret information, human intelligence, or spying, was less useful than the decryption of intercepted messages - Sigint. This applies as much to diplomatic as to wartime sigint. The leading neutral was Turkey. Turkish foreign policy was conducted by no more than three high government officials - the Prime Minister, the Secretary for Foreign Affairs and above all the State President General Ismet Inonu - and these all relied heavily on the reports of Turkish ambassadors to Europe in London, Rome, Berlin, Tokyo, Washington, Stockholm, Kuibyshev/Moscow, Madrid, Lisbon, Berne, Vichy; in South America, Buenos Aires and Santiago; in East Asia, Bangkok. These same reports, encoded and cabled to Ankara where they were reprocessed into their original French, were consistently intercepted and monitored by the British and German foreign office decryption departments. Thus they were available to, and used by, both Hitler and Churchill. It is possible now to construct a hidden dialogue between Churchill and Inonu on whether and how Turkey should join the war.
This would have been impossible without the release of DIR/C, for then there would be no BJs to read and little evidence that they ever existed. Prior to this the very existence of a government department involved in the interception and decryption of foreign diplomatic telegrams has been unacknowledged. In releasing them, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) revealed that neutrals’ signals were being read.
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II
In order to understand the use the FO and other departments made of BJs the prewar methods of interception, decryption, assessment, translation and distribution by GC&CS require some further explanation. The DIR/C (1941-5) files contain a surprisingly high proportion of BJ material, and this calls for comment, since Churchill’s daily intercept reading was hitherto thought to be largely if not completely devoted to Enigma/Ultra – ‘high-grade’ intercepts arising from the North African and Eastern Front campaigns, the war at sea and the Far East. In fact about one quarter of DIR/C is BJ-related. And of this a significant proportion related to or emanated from Ankara’s determined efforts to stay neutral.
Each file contains up to 5 items:
(1) The crucial component is ‘special messages’ - highgrade sigint, Enigma/Ultra. Nothing in the discovery of BJs takes away from the primacy of this material, given its uniqueness and authority as a source. Victories in North Africa and the Mediterranean, victory in the U-Boat war, victory against the Italians and eventually the Germans were all notably advanced by Enigma/Ultra.
(2) ‘Naval Headlines’ from Hut 1 at Bletchley Park (BP),
(3) Intercepts of Abwehr traffic.
(4) Internal correspondence generated by the PM’s queries.
(5) BJs.
(1) The ‘special messages’ so designated by the head of the Secret Intelligence Services, Major-General Sir Stewart Menzies, universally known as ‘C’, have rightly provided the main focus for historical research into the conduct of the war. A fiction that these were not intercepts but reports from well-placed agents survived till 1945 by the use of the codename ‘Boniface’ to describe them. Boniface appears and reappears throughout the series: also ‘source glimpsed’ or ‘source caught sight of a partially burnt message’, etc. - indicated some groups were corrupt.
Notes and comments, separated off from the messages themselves, are often supplied by the sending department at BP, which maintained war maps and backup to ensure the accuracy of the material and its contextual relevance. So places identified are so indicated, and references to people and events that appeared in earlier messages are given. A growing professionalism in the use of service jargon (Hut 3 employed only civilians at this stage) may have been expedited by Churchill who as a former serving officer knew the vocabulary of war and sometimes corrected the messages that came to him. Additionally he annotated them, in the form of exclamation marks, circles on figures of Axis service and even civilian casualties, queries to the Chiefs of Staff, the Foreign Secretary, complaints to ‘C’, some late night doodles: and occasionally a delphic comment. ‘Fear’, he writes on one sheet, ‘it does not prevent, it may even provoke action. But it is there all the same.’
Distribution is indicated by initials, most of them unidentifiable except WO (War Office), ADM (Admiralty) AM (Air Ministry) and BB (Broadway Buildings - where MI6 was located.)
(2) Naval Headlines. These are numbered, presumably from 1, sometime in 1940, to 1479 on 4 June 1945. They itemise the movements of the German and Italian navies and the miniscule Spanish Navy, and include messages from the Spanish Blue Legion of volunteers who served on the Eastern Front. At a later stage this division by origin changed to a division by war zone - Home Waters and the Atlantic; the Mediterranean and Black Sea; and the Far East.
The Italian material came on stream early due to GC&CS’s monitoring of Italian naval and diplomatic traffic which started in 1936 with the Abyssinian crisis and the Spanish Civil War. Thanks to BP breaking the Italian cipher the British severely damaged the Italian Fleet off Cape Matapan on 28 March 1941. Thereafter shipping movements in the Mediterranean were monitored so comprehensively that loss of transport for men and materiel brought an earlier than expected defeat for the Axis in North Africa in 1942.
Naval headlines were only distributed internally, and to ‘Director’ (C). Churchill rarely annotated Naval Headlines; i.e. he circled tonnages of Axis ships sunk.
(3) Abwehr intercepts. These appear due to an early breaking of the Abwehr codes, used by Himmler for orders to his henchmen who reported killings of Jews (until they were ordered not to). At Hut 3 Nigel de Grey, a veteran cryptographer of 1914-18 and the breaker of the German diplomatic cipher which produced the Zimmermann telegram, asked whether reports of this ‘butchery’ had to be continued. However, evidence that reporting continued until December 1942 is suggested by Sir Anthony Eden’s parliamentary r
eference on that day to ‘receiving reliable information of the barbarous and inhuman treatment to which Jews were being subjected’.
(4) Internal correspondence generated by Churchill’s comments and queries, including questions to FSL (First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, later Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham) about whether to close the Straits to Axis shipping, queries to CAS (Chief of Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal) on bombing results, aircraft shot down - Axis and Allied - casualties and damage achieved, comments to CIGS (Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir Alan Brooke) criticising generals, complaints to ‘C’ for not getting the gist of this or that Enigma message to commanders in the field - despite the fact that a sophisticated system of Special Liaison Units (SLUs) had been set up to do just this. Menzies and Churchill regularly discussed cipher insecurity. Churchill used DIR/C on an almost daily basis in his direction of the war effort and foreign policy initiatives centred on non-belligerents until D-Day began in June 1944.
(5) BJs. BJ telegrams did not just drop from heaven to become Churchill’s daily wartime reading. What they were, where they came from, how they evolved from the routines of Room 40 OB in World War I, who got them and what they thought of them, and what was done with them, then and afterwards, all throw light on Churchill’s wartime use of them.
They became part of Whitehall life as early as 1922. Before that, Great War interception and decryption of naval, military and diplomatic messages were handled respectively by Room 40 and MI1b. In 1919 decisions were made to maintain an interception and decryption operation based on two methods. One was cable censorship, whereby diplomatic messages from and to foreign embassies in London were sorted by the Post Office and scrutinized by GC&CS. The other was listening posts maintained by the RAF at sites on the Norfolk Coast.
The British were not alone in identifying the importance of the new Morse-based signals intelligence which became available with the development of Wireless Telegraphy (WT). Similar work was undertaken by most major powers, including Britain, by Germany, France, Russia, Italy and the USSR. The results, for Germany, produced by several large and efficient decryption bureaux, surpassed anything achieved by the other major powers, for it was by exploiting diplomatic eavesdropping that Hitler drove German foreign policy in the mid-1930s. The British targeted the USA, France, Turkey, Germany (without success) the USSR and Japan. Japan proved of particular importance, given her aggressive tendencies in the 1930s and her conservatism over cipher policy. So was Turkey. Between 1919 and 1939 GC&CS obtained knowledge of the cryptographic methods used by all powers except those which had been forced, like Russia, to use One Time Pads or who like Germany had moved to machine encipherment, or those with contiguous European land boundaries who could use landlines to ensure cipher security.
The Abyssinian Crisis and the Spanish Civil War (1935-39) provided sufficient volume of machine-enciphered messages, diplomatic and military, to explore machine encipherment. The Far East yielded valuable intercepts to and from military attachés in Europe. Quantities of Italian naval and military traffic came in as a result of Italian imperialism in Africa and Spain: and diplomatic messages had been read before that. What was produced was valued at the time, and proved invaluable as the basis for greater decryption later on.
From the early months of WW1 the whole operation depended on successful interception. Without interception there could be no intercepts and no clandestine eavesdropping. The British seem to have been alone in adding cable interference as an additional means of reading messages - though telephone tapping became standard practice by other European chancellories in the 1930s, and tapping into landlines used by others has also received a passing mention. The operation of censorship is impossible to track, for lack of any references in the files. But the building of intercept stations in the interwar period in England, Scotland, Iraq and India, was on a substantial scale, whose funding has only recently been identified. GC&CS may have thought it was a Cinderella operation but the backup resources which enabled it to function at all were expensive, elaborate and efficient. Each intercept station had between 16 and 23 men, including cryptanalysts. About 1,400 men worked in these stations, most of which were managed by the RAF, though the Foreign Office maintained its own, run by the Post Office. Additionally by 1925 5 officers and 4 other ranks worked in cryptography in Baghdad while up to 1935 the Royal Navy had formed a separate unit composed of 5 officers. Between 1920 and 1939 the Indian Army’s HQ maintained a cryptanalytical section of 5 officers. So the services probably had 20-30 cryptanalysts between 1925 and 1934 and perhaps 40-50 by the later 1930s. Brigadier John H. Tiltman was their chief, before he was seconded to GC&CS where he served throughout the war. Costs averaged £5,000 per station. By 1939 it cost £15,600 to build a new interception station in Britain. The extent and sophistication of the interception network is demonstrated by a 1942 summary of intercept stations - chief of them at Cheadle, Chicksands, Waddington (RN), Kingsdown and Brora - which lists the countries targeted, the volume of traffic and the callsigns and frequencies.
The work of GC&CS in the interwar period was undertaken by a small group of ‘Senior Assistants’ and a slightly larger group of ‘Junior Assistants’. GC&CS was well equipped to handle the great wartime expansion required by the continuous breaking of Enigma, Shark, the Abwehr machine and hand ciphers, and other medium-grade signals intelligence deployed against diplomatic as well as service traffic before and during the war.
At the end of 1919 GC&CS employed 66 staff. This number went up to 94 in 1924 but of these 65 were support staff, leaving only 29. By 1935 there were 104 on the payroll, of which 67 were support staff. The Abyssinian War produced a temporary need for Italian experts, who were laid off when the emergency receded, but later supplied a firm basis for Bletchley’s outstanding Italian section. A few stayed on anyhow, because other and larger war shadows were looming. In 1939 there were 125, but 88 were support staff, the experts remaining at 35. Of these an impressive roll call - Ernst Fetterlein, John Hitman, Henry Maine, Oliver Strachey, Dilwyn Knox, ‘Josh’ Cooper, Hugh Foss, Thomas Kendrick - testifies to the success of the early recruiting procedures. Qualifications for working at GC&CS included fluency in at least one language other than English. Most were German and French speakers, a few were multi-lingual, in particular Knox. Two (Ernest Hobart-Hampden and Kennedy) were Japanologists: Fetterlein was in earlier years the head cryptologist of the Tsarist foreign service. Linguistic skills not only gave a beginner immediate entrance into intercepts by way of translation, but the skills of a linguist include a facility in guessing meanings from context, word-frequency, letter patterns, the spotting of cipher errors, and the identification of special vocabularies. Ability at mathematics was also highly rated.
Little is said in my father’s account of GC&CS between the wars about training, which tells its own story. On training the Foreign Office early on took the view that ‘the only way a man can learn to be a cryptographer is by devilling for an expert. A training programme would be an impossibility’. The six or so senior assistants were all proven cryptographers with a track-record of achievement and expertise stretching back in some cases to the beginning of wireless interception. Cryptography or crypt-analysis has a history which goes back to ancient Egypt, and in the USA formal cryptanalytical training, including the history of the subject, was promoted energetically by the Head of Army Signals Intelligence, William Friedman. He was a scholar of the subject as well as a leading practitioner. But there is no evidence of similar training for interwar GC&CS recruits; training was mostly ‘on the job’, and this is confirmed in the memoirs of recruits to Bletchley Park between 1940 and 1943. By then the techniques were changing so fast, and the work to be done was so urgent, that formal training may well have been impossible. In the prewar GC&CS the Head and his Deputy and the Senior Assistants had together considerable cryptographic experience behind them, but regarded their job as too hush-hush even to give it a name, much less a pedigree and academi
c respectability. They referred to ‘special work’ as opposed to ‘administrative duties’.
In fact the difference in training methods between Britain and the USA seems to have been one of degree rather than kind. However by 1941 the British were well ahead of the Americans in the application of cryptanalysis for the day to day problems of peace and war.
The age and previous experience of most recruits, until the arrival of Oxbridge graduates in the mid-1930s, would indicate that a career structure within GC&CS would have been impossible anyhow. Within the Civil Service as a whole there was, of course, a clear structure involving promotion after 15 years, change of job description and status, increasing salary and the prospect of a decoration of some sort towards retirement. GC&CS’s staff, both senior and junior, were explicitly bound out of the civil service establishment structure and the pensions which went with it. Yet to achieve what they undoubtedly did required intelligence, dedication, discretion, flair, self-discipline and self-motivation of an uncommonly high order. These qualities did not grow naturally in the culture of the prewar civil service. The dichotomy between what was needed and the lack of incentives, both for recruits and experienced staff, was well known to my father from 1922 to 1944. ‘It must be remembered that beyond a salary and accommodation vote GC&CS had no financial status; it became in fact an adopted child of the Foreign Office with no family rights, and the poor relation of SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) whose peacetime activities left little cash to spare’. While its relation to the Foreign Office is well documented, its closer relation to SIS, whose interwar head Rear-Admiral Hugh Sinclair acquired responsibility not only for GC&CS but also Interception and Direction Finding, remains totally secret. Anecdotal evidence suggests that while the FO hand was a dead one, Sinclair saw to it that GC&CS had the freedom and resources which made possible its expansion and move to Bletchley Park in 1939.
Thirty Secret Years Page 10