My father’s account of GC&CS between the wars deserves a chapter to itself.
CHAPTER SIX
The Government Code and Cypher School Between the Wars
This was the seminal report by my father, published in the first issue of Intelligence & National Security on which many historians of signals intelligence have relied He wrote it shortly after his retirement and my mother typed it on her ancient typewriter.
I
In paragraph 10 of ‘Post-War Intelligence’, a memorandum by Group-Captain Jones, occurs the remark in large type:
It would indeed be a tragic and retrograde step for intelligence as a whole, and therefore – this is not putting it too high – for the future of the country, if GC&CS were to sink back into its pre-war position.
I think I am right in taking these words not as a general scathing criticism of the pre-war activities of GC&CS but as a warm tribute to the efficiency of the wartime development in GC&CS of its new function of ‘Intelligence’ at the source, a tribute with which, I am sure, none of the service departments will quarrel.
But in justice to the late Admiral and to the members of the peace reorganization of GC&CS who, for 20 years fulfilled their allotted task and reached 1939 with a solid foundation on which to build, I propose to state quite briefly for the information of those now about to build a new GC&CS:
A The origin and purpose of the 1919 GC&CS;
B Its establishment under Treasury control;
C Its development.
Files and records sent to safety in 1940 are not available to me, therefore I write from memory and cannot claim complete accuracy in dates and numbers. But the main facts can be substantiated by the evidence of others who took part during those 20 years.
II
A [THE ORIGIN AND PURPOSE OF THE 1919 GC&CS]
1. During the 1914-18 war cryptography was practised in two sections:
(a) 40 OB, principally German naval, latterly a certain amount of diplomatic enemy and neutral, only using material obtained by interception of W/T by stations under Admiralty control, and
(b) MI 1B, principally German military and (currently) some neutral and later even Allied diplomatic, the raw material for the latter being obtained from Cable Censorship under War Office control. Only from 1917 was there any exchange between (a) and (b) and then principally of results.
2. Early in 1919 the Cabinet decided that the results obtained by these two sections justified the formation of a permanent section to keep alive the study of this work which had such an important effect on the prosecution of the war, both naval and military.
3. Admiral Sinclair (then DNI) was given the task of forming a section from the remnants of 40 OB and MI IB, to be established under the civil administration in the Admiralty. Negotiations between Admiralty, War Office and Treasury continued through spring and summer of 1919 and in November or December the new organisation was set up in Watergate House (staff details under B).
4. The present [1944] Ambassador to Peru (Courtenay Forbes), then in the Communications Department of the Foreign Office, invented the title Government Code and Cypher School.
5. The public function was ‘to advise as to the security of codes and cyphers used by all Government departments and to assist in their provision’.
6. The secret directive was ‘to study the methods of cypher communications used by foreign powers’.
7. Nothing in this constitution indicated how raw material was to be obtained. But DNI, being in charge, was able to retain a small party, both in the Admiralty and War Office, drawn from their rapidly diminishing war time intercepting stations. Pressure from DNI and others procured the inclusion in the New Official Secrets Act of a clause instructing all cable companies operating in UK to hand over for scrutiny copies of all cable traffic passing over their systems within 10 days of despatch or receipt.
8. Nothing in the constitution indicated that it was desirable that successful results of the study should be made available to government departments who might be interested, though in actual practice there was a circulation of ‘unprocessed’ decodes from the day of our birth, which has continued until today without interruption.
9. In 1921 the Geddes axe fell on us and we moved to Queen’s Gate where we were more comfortable but rather remote from other departments. But we were nearer Melbury Road, and when the Admiral took over in 1923 he, as our founder, at once took steps to bring the two organisations into closer touch; this process culminated in 1925, when both moved to the third and fourth floors of Broadway Buildings.
10. About 1922 after two or three years’ work and circulation in which results showed that there was no service traffic ever worth circulating, the late Lord Curzon, then Foreign Secretary, claimed that GC&CS was doing work solely for the Foreign Office and should therefore be transferred from the Admiralty to the Chief Clerk’s Department of the Foreign Office for administrative purposes. The Admiralty, at that time in process of cutting down, willingly assented and thenceforward GC&CS estimates appeared in the Foreign Office vote.
11. 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 the SIS, whose peacetime activities left little cash to spare.
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III
B [ESTABLISHMENT OF GC&CS UNDER TREASURY CONTROL]
1. GC&CS began with a sanctioned establishment of 25 pensionable officers as follows:
1 head
6 senior assistants
18 junior assistants
A clerical staff (unpensionable) was also sanctioned, amounting to approximately:
6 typists
12 clerks (for code construction)
10 traffic sorters and slipreaders
2. The pay of the senior staff was based on that of the Administrative Class in the Civil Service, that is:
senior assistants = principals
junior assistants = assistant principals
In due course members of our staff were considered to be eligible for membership of the Association of First Division Civil Servants as are the senior staff in the museums, but there has never been any question of precise equality of pay.
3. On the other hand, when we had to recruit new staff through the Civil Service Commission our candidates did not have to sit for the Administrative Class examination but were selected on interview and record by the Committee of the Commission in which GC&CS was represented.
4. The original selection in 1919 for all classes was made from volunteers who had served in the Admiralty or War Office. Where the needs of the work required special qualifications such as Japanese (Mr Hobart-Hampden) or a highly experienced but already elderly man (Mr Fetterlein) who could not be made pensionable, they were granted equal pay with the others and blocked posts in the establishment. The Chief Clerk had difficulty more than once in explaining to the PAC why two very senior ex-Foreign Office officials were now graded as junior assistants of the GC&CS.
5. In 1925 when we first recruited young staff direct from the university, the establishment was increased to 10 seniors and 20 juniors. But promotion was slow. Naturally there was little or no difference in the work of good juniors and seniors. Therefore during the early 1930s the proportion was altered to 15 seniors and 15 juniors.
6. But promotion was still too slow, principally because no seniors died nor were superannuated. Therefore in 1937 the Treasury agreed to promotion of junior to senior after 10 years’ service and the scales were slightly altered and fixed at:
junior assistants £250 - 25 - £500
senior assistants £700 - 30 - £1,000
chief assistants £1,000 - £1,100
while the head and deputy head were given the position and pay of assistant secretaries.
7. The above paragraphs (B, 1-6) have concerned the civil staff established under the Foreign Office. It might be fitting now briefly to account for the contr
ibution made by the Services (Admiralty, War Office and [later] Air Ministry).
8. Their main effort was in the interception of foreign government W/T messages, a subject outside the scope of this paper. But the Admiralty and the War Office did make some staff contribution to the GC&CS until the time when the War Office and Air Ministry did maintain their own section within the framework of GC&CS.
9. From 1923 onwards the Admiralty evinced special interest in the Japanese diplomatic and naval attaché traffic and always provided one officer (Japanese interpreter) to work in the section. When a small party in the Far East was being formed, a system of rotation arose. Ultimately when in 1934 Admiralty started a bureau in Hongkong, sufficient officers had been trained to man it and Paymaster-Captain Shaw (then retired) was taken on the Foreign Office Establishment to act as the first head of the bureau. Further Admiralty assistance in the matter of staff is described in part C.
But the Admiralty, unlike the other two services, never maintained their own section in GC&CS.
10. The War Office, at the time of the Armistice, had in addition to MI IB, certain small sections overseas of which the one in Constantinople continued to function after 1918 until its staff were transferred (about 1922) to form the original nucleus of the War Office station at Sarafand which still exists today as an intercepting and crypto-graphic unit dealing almost entirely with local problems. A close liaison between GC&CS and Sarafand has always been a satisfactory feature. During the twenties the War Office did send military officers to GC&CS for some training before proceeding abroad. Among others, Captain Tiltman, spent some months in 1920 at Watergate House on his way to the Middle East. But it was not until the early troublous thirties that Captain Tiltman, having returned from a long tour of duty in India, rejoined us, and before long started, himself as a civilian under the War Office, the Military Section to which were attached an increasing number of military officers. Their activities will be described more fully in [part] C.
11. For at least 15 years of our life the Air Ministry, while considerably interested in some of our results, contented themselves with the provision of valuable intercepting facilities. But about 1936 their Intelligence authorities felt the need of a technical expert of their own. They therefore set up the RAF Section within the framework of GC&CS and Mr J.E.S. Cooper was transferred from the Foreign Office to the Air Ministry civil establishment. The early development of this section will also be dealt with more fully in [part] C.
12. During 1937 the Admiral, convinced of the inevitability of war, gave instructions for the earmarking of the right type of recruit to reinforce GC&CS immediately on the outbreak of war.
Through the Chief Clerk’s Department we obtained Treasury sanction for 56 seniors, men or women, with the right background and training (salary £600 a year) and 30 girls with a graduate’s knowledge of at least two of the languages required (£3 a week).
To obtain such men and women I got in touch with all the universities. It was naturally at that time impossible to give details of the work, nor was it always advisable to insist too much in these circles on the imminence of war.
At certain universities, however, there were men now in senior positions who had worked in our ranks during 1914-18. These men knew the type required. Thus it fell out that our most successful recruiting occurred from these universities. During 1937 and 1938 we were able to arrange a series of courses to which we invited our recruits to give them even a dim idea of what would be required of them. This enabled our recruits to know the type of man and mind best fitted and they in turn could and did earmark, if only mentally, further suitable candidates. These men joined up in September 1939.
Thus very early in the war GC&CS had collected a large body of suitable men and women quite apart from recruitment of service personnel by the two service sections, of which the Military was now on an entirely military footing.
13. With regard to the clerical and typing staff which grew gradually during those years, involving us in prolonged discussions with the Treasury, the Tomlin Civil Service Commission of 1929 widened the basis of establishment, consequently we did obtain sanction for the establishment of two higher clerical, some six to ten clerical officers, about a dozen clerical assistants and half a dozen typists.
By this means we were able to retain with prospects of pension some of those girls and women who had proved their value to us in both our functions.
* * *
IV
TOP SECRET
C [DEVELOPMENT 1919-1939]
1. In A.5 I stated that the ostensible function of GC&CS was ‘to advise as to the security of codes and cyphers used by all government departments and to assist in their provision’.
This duty was carried out exclusively by Travis who came to us fresh from this type of work in the Admiralty, together with a clerical party whom he had trained. He alone is in a position to tell the story of its development.
Suffice it to say that each of the big departments nominated officers in the Communications Branch to act in liaison with us. The Admiralty alone appointed an officer to work in GC&CS (later increased to two officers). Out of this has now grown the section known as CSA with far wider responsibility and power.
2. The secret side of GC&CS had as its task ‘to study communications of foreign governments’.
The development of this work I propose to outline under the headings Diplomatic, Clandestine, Services and Commercial in the order of their appearance as vital issues during the period 1919-1939.
3. Diplomatic
As stated in A, 1 and 2, some diplomatic work was undertaken in both sections during the 1914-18 war. But it must be emphasised that this work was from a cryptographer’s standpoint most elementary. Of the countries then tackled and read, only the German Foreign Office was using ‘hat’ books and reciphering methods: all the others read had an alphabetical basis. Sir George Young invented a method of reading German hat books (for which he received a monetary reward) which included an elaborate card index manned by some ten graduate women. Within a year of the start of GC&CS, the solution of a hat book was the task of one good linguist working on the method used by Mr Fetterlein for many years in this work in Russia. I myself, working with Young, also received a monetary reward for solving the first additive key we had ever seen as used by the Germans. When I say that this key varied from 7-13 digits, I must consider myself lucky to have been rewarded for a job which nowadays any young cryptographer would take in his stride.
Fetterlein’s previous training enabled us to read the fairly complex Austrian keys and rebuild their hatted books.
It might perhaps be noted here that I took a small Admiralty party over to Paris, in April 1919, to work with the French on the German material passing during the Peace Conference. We remained until the signing of the Peace of Versailles and I have always thought that our visit was useless though pleasant. Although Germany was a beaten nation, nothing appeared in the terms of Armistice concerning their diplomatic cyphers. Consequently their mission came to Paris provided with entirely new books and methods. We obtained all the traffic between Paris and Berlin but failed to produce anything of any value. How could we? Germany knew well we had read her diplomatic traffic for the last three years (e.g. Zimmerman Letter), and no one prevented Germany from replacing her compromised codes by the safest methods she could devise. I believe that at that time Germany made use of OTP for the first time. I am certain she used the method ultimately solved in 1942 and then only thanks to an amazing scrap of physical compromise. In any case there was no GC&CS at that date and such was the lack of co-ordination that the party in Paris never saw results obtained in London of American and Japanese work, while French and Italian had then never been attempted.
All other powers which were read in wartime, including American, Japanese, Greek, Spanish and Scandinavian, were using alphabetical books. Norwegian was alphabetical; the first Danish and Swedish solved were hatted but some ‘cribs’ were available.
Thus it came about that in 1919 only those who had worked on the enemy countries, who were driven to recyphering processes, had had any real experience in cryptography. The majority of the party were linguists. Ultimately the reconstruction of code books used and the translation and emendation of the resultant texts was our productive function. Fetterlein, Strachey and Knox were our original key men while Turner had the role of master-linguist with Hobart-Hampden in charge of Japanese.
The first effort of the early years was devoted to breaking into the hitherto untouched material from various governments.
a. The Americans celebrated the advent of peace by introducing a new hatted diplomatic code recyphered with tables changing quarterly. The solution of the first of these tables was a year’s work and thereafter the American Section had to be expanded for the increased task of breaking the tables and reconstructing the code. Good progress was made, and the section was able to be of some assistance during the Washington Naval Conference in 1922.
b. The second really big task was to make a concentrated attack on French diplomatic cyphers, which had received no attention during the war.
A large number of hatted books of 10,000 groups were used and with the constant practice of reconstruction of such books they never presented any difficulty. Given sufficient traffic, legibility appeared within a month of birth.
Many recyphered books also appeared and after the initial struggle to obtain the general system, the constant change of tables presented little difficulty. Only about 1935 did the French introduce any system which defied solution. This was a development of the bigrammatic substitution and it was felt that even this would not be insoluble if only there were enough traffic. The Quai d’Orsay is conservative and we never observed anything of the OTP type.
Thirty Secret Years Page 11