He also caught the admiring attention of senior figures within intelligence and Whitehall. Whereas Alastair Denniston, in assembling and constructing the codebreaking teams at Bletchley Park, encouraged anarchic-seeming lateral thinking and wild abstraction, Travis was the man who kept it all very firmly rooted, and who ensured that even the airiest mathematical theorising led to concrete, well-organised results.
At a time when codebreaking representatives of all the services – the army, the RAF, the Royal Navy – were competing furiously for valuable time on Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman’s bombe machines (which could check through thousands upon thousands of potential code combinations at speeds that no human could match), it was Travis who put an end to the shrill bickering, and found a way to turn Bletchley Park from a cottage industry into a vast, slick, efficient factory. It was also thanks to Travis that in the latter years of the war, machinery and personnel materialised in ever greater numbers.
And it was in recognition of this organisational genius that Alastair Denniston was told to move aside. In a mark of Travis’s own loyalty, he refused for a couple of years to take the title of ‘Director’, sticking firmly to ‘Deputy’. Only in March 1944 did he relent. By VE Day, and the night of those fancy dress celebrations at Bletchley Park, Travis was not some distant authority figure but a man who kept closely involved with all the departments and personnel; there is some suggestion, in fact, that the lavish VE Day party was funded entirely by Travis from his own pocket.
Travis, Tiltman and de Grey were to be the cornerstones of continuity as a new, more shadowy war loomed in 1945. They would have known, throughout 1944 and 1945, that they would have to find ways to ensure that cryptography stayed ahead of vast technological leaps. But another senior Bletchley figure, who might very reasonably have been expected to stay on, had been thinking for some time of quite different enterprises. Gordon Welchman, a bullish young academic plucked from Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge, was in many ways Bletchley’s great logistical genius: as well as devising brilliant innovations, such as an addition to the bombe machines that greatly increased their calculating speed and efficacy, he was an expert in ensuring that all lines of communication between huts and machines flowed like mercury.
Welchman was an innovator who had been able to demonstrate to his superiors (and indeed on one occasion to a visiting Winston Churchill) how brilliant new technology could be melded with organisation to produce a lightning-fast stream of intelligence. It was his view – and that of Travis too – that the possibilities of this new world, hovering just at the edge of the inception of the computer, were the real future of intelligence. The cloak-and-dagger antics of MI6 were, by contrast, starting to look slightly antiquated, a fit subject for entertainment in Hitchcock films, but out of step with a fast-changing landscape.
Given all this responsibility, one might almost have expected Gordon Welchman to be officially compelled to stay – a man who simply knew too much to be allowed to go anywhere else. Yet at the end of the war, he could see setbacks to a career in cryptography. Welchman was married with three children and his ambitions, though not quite in focus, were rather larger than a place in such an organisation as the Government Code and Cypher school would allow.
Welchman, like Turing, had been sent over to America for a time in 1943, and the experience for him was an extremely happy one, from the VIP dinners on board Queen Mary on the voyage over, to the open, friendly (and by implication, breezily classless) community of cryptanalysts in Washington DC and New York. And perhaps it was this that was to set the course of Welchman’s days. He had caught the sniff of opportunity, the idea that he might be able to vault much further than what was, in essence, a modest wage packet with the civil service. So in 1945, as the Bletchley operation started to wind down, Welchman was anxious to get out. Equally, he looked back at Cambridge, at his old academic role, and realised that a return to that life would be terribly stifling and claustrophobic after all the days and months of nerve-fizzing adrenalin that he had been through. Where could a restless young man go to make some money?
At first – with a few words in the right ears from elegant fellow-codebreaker Hugh Alexander – Welchman headed into the slightly unlikely sphere of corporate life. Before the war, Hugh Alexander had worked in a senior position for the John Lewis Partnership which then, as now, ran department stores. With his recommendation, Welchman would move into the same position, commuting to central London every morning from the village of Cookham in Berkshire. Yet very quickly it would become apparent that the contrast between this and the life that he had led bordered on the bathetic. As we will see, even the codebreakers who left actually never really did so; Welchman and many others eventually reconnected with this much more satisfying secret world. How could the secret world ever let them go?
For the women, there were other, stronger, social pressures. Young female codebreakers such as Mavis Batey and Sheila Lawn, there right up until the end, had met their future husbands at Bletchley; and while Keith Batey and Oliver Lawn, young postgraduates, set their sights on the civil service, their wives would be expected to make homes. A young mother was emphatically not welcome in the workplace; she had children to look after and a house to keep. The cruelty of this was that Bletchley itself had opened up a hitherto unimaginable range of possibilities for women; at the age of 20, Mavis Batey had cracked the Italian Enigma code that resulted in British triumph at the Battle of Cape Matapan. Sheila Lawn found the most influential use for her significant linguistic skills. But in that summer of May 1945, there was one young woman who knew that she would be staying on. Joan Clarke – the only female codebreaker in Hut 8 – was a formidable mathematician. And even though she had started out at Bletchley performing largely clerical duties, her talents had quickly been recognised.
For a time, Joan Clarke had been engaged to Alan Turing. They had been on holiday together. She was very much in love; and on some level, he was too. But Turing was honest with her: he explained how he had ‘homosexual inclinations’. Such things were not as well understood in that era, and she felt that it didn’t matter. However, after a few months, Turing called the engagement off. It is a testament to them both that they remained very close friends until his tragic death in 1954.
But Joan Clarke, 23 years old when she had been recruited by Gordon Welchman for Bletchley in 1940, had proved one of the mainstays of Hut 8 following Turing’s replacement by Hugh Alexander, and then the subsequent merger with a party of American codebreakers. She had proved herself to be sinuously dextrous with Bayesian Probability Theory – a mathematical set of cartwheels that resulted in the fantastically complex codebreaking method known as Banburismus, and which greatly increased the speed of the work on the bombes. More than this: she had been notably calm in the vortex of tension of the Battle of the Atlantic, when the new four rotor Naval Enigmas would not yield, Britain’s shipping was being sent to the bottom of the ice-cold ocean in terrifying volumes, and the nation’s lifelines were being inexorably severed. The political pressure on Hut 8 throughout those months of 1942 would have been enough to drive anyone to nervous collapse. Joan Clarke and her Hut 8 colleagues knew that the only thing to do was to push on.
And now, in 1945, she was working alongside American naval cypher experts – her own field of expertise was the Shark and Dolphin keys, used by German submarines. After VE Day, naturally, her office would be very much quieter. But even by then, even with all the secrecy surrounding the work that she and her colleagues had done, the satisfaction must have been immense. On VE night, as Travis’s fancy dress party spilled out of the house into the crisp May evening air, Joan Clarke surely experienced a helium buoyancy, the sense that the aching responsibility had lifted. But like so many of her fellow codebreakers, she would have found that the work itself had bred a sort of compulsion: intense intellectual duels that had instant, concrete impact on events around the world. At this point, she was unmarried, and had no dependents. Unlike so many other women, th
ere was nothing to stop her continuing to lead this extraordinary life. For this, her superiors would prove to be intensely grateful.
The unfathomable stress of breaking into the enemy’s every communication was one thing; being right at the heart of the secret war effort was another. The pressures that came with this unspoken knowledge were invisible. There was also a delicate element of diplomacy involved, for the British were – unprecedentedly – sharing both full intelligence and decrypting techniques with their allies, the Americans. While the military side of the Special Relationship was rather more fraught and ill-tempered than anything ‘special’, the codebreakers worked in unusual harmony. Unlike among the Allied military, there was a huge amount of mutual intellectual respect on both sides. A contingent of American codebreakers had come over to Bletchley, just as Alan Turing had been sent over to the States. And Travis was the man who kept this partnership on smooth rails, negotiating with some skill the few aspects of codebreaking work that both sides were keeping back from one another.
But the truth was that not much diplomacy was needed: the American personnel at Bletchley, some of whom worked for a unit called ‘Sixta’, had been utterly beguiled by what they had found there. Captain William Bundy was one young American cryptologist – an extremely nimble one, solving a Hut 6 coding difficulty in record time – who fell head over heels in love, not merely with the place but with the ethos, that curious blend of military and civilian. Bletchley had an apparent lack of iron hierarchy – but there was a concomitant ferocious self-discipline and self-reliance. Even though he later rose to be a defence adviser to President John F Kennedy in the White House of the early 1960s, Bundy always looked back at Bletchley as a career high-point.
The Americans were by and large the first to leave Bletchley Park after VE Day; beforehand, General Spaatz of the US Army paid a visit to the site to make a general speech to all – British and American alike – thanking them for the amazing work that they had done, and for the invaluable contribution that they had made to the victory.
This close relationship worked the other way around as well: for example, by 1943, the work of Hut 8 in burrowing into German naval codes was in part taken over by the American naval codebreaking department. The head of Hut 8, Hugh Alexander – born in 1909 and pulled into Bletchley in 1940 – focused, in turn, on the Japanese Coral cypher. There was none of the bitter competitiveness or jealousies to be found elsewhere in the military. Instead, the knotty intellectual challenges of ever-evolving encryptions seemed to provide their own satisfaction. As Travis’s VE Day party got underway, Hugh Alexander was on the other side of the world, installed for a couple of months at the codebreaking establishment in Colombo, Ceylon.
During the summer of 1945, there was much about the Far East codebreaking effort that was a little routine, but still very necessary. After his brilliant work applying some of Alan Turing’s most labyrinthine mathematical theories, Hugh Alexander might have thought that this tropical office with its bamboo roof and its nightly incursions from giant winged insects was the conclusion of his cryptological career. Indeed, for a very short while, it was. But the end of the war did not diminish Alexander’s appetite for the constant stimulation of coding challenges. His future lay in those cyphers.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 brought the world to a shocked stop. At Bletchley, among the personnel who were now left, it brought a sense, not of relief that the war was over, but of nauseous unease about the sort of world that might emerge from the ruins. The summer of 1945 had seen a certain amount of winding down – the young aristocratic ladies decanted back to London, the undergraduates prepared to resume interrupted academic careers. Indeed, the sparser staffing arrangements had already caused some tension: even more rigid shift patterns made it difficult for codebreakers to arrange things such as dental appointments.
There were outbreaks of unalloyed happiness, sometimes from Wrens who had come to detest the bombe machines, which required a great deal of tending (they frequently came shuddering to unintended halts, and wires had to be teased with tweezers, often in the small hours of the morning). Now the monsters were to be dissected. ‘I remember having to dismantle the bombes bit by bit, wire by wire, screw by screw,’ recalled one Wren. ‘We sat at tables with screwdrivers, taking out all the wire contact brushes. It had been a sin to drop a drum [the machines had rows of rotating drums] but now we were allowed to roll one down the floor of the hut. Whoopee!’
The social life was winding up too; as well as the theatrical troupe, the classical music societies and the film appreciation societies, which met in the main house, came to an end. Now one very particular task remained for the occupants of all the myriad huts and blocks: getting rid of every particle of classified intelligence. That which had not been spirited upwards into the Directorate, and thence to Whitehall, had to be destroyed. Slips of paper with five-letter groupings – indeed, every last little bit of paperwork – were to be carefully gathered up and burned in bonfires. Most of the machinery on site was to be destroyed too: the secrecy was still vital in a shifting, uncertain world. As we will see later, some vital instruments, such as the world’s first proto-computers, were to survive, but the silence surrounding that survival was so complete that their heartbroken creator had no idea.
The cleansing of the Bletchley Park estate was not perfect, as a very recent discovery has made quite plain. In 2015, workers performing restoration work at the old Hut 6 for the Bletchley Park museum were startled when a wodge of scrumpled paperwork fell from the ceiling. Upon closer examination, it turned out to be a great mass of decrypts. How and why had they been pushed into the hut’s ceiling cavity? The answer was hilariously simple: during those wartime winters, the huts were cruelly cold. The wind and freezing draughts crept in from all angles. The discarded decrypts had been used as a primitive form of insulation.
Commander Travis and his colleagues had known for some time that, once the war was over, the work of Bletchley Park would be moving back to London, or at least its suburbs. While the numbers of personnel were to be reduced to a fraction of their wartime height, the operation still needed a substantial (and secret) base from which to operate. The ideal candidate had already been in use since 1943 as an outstation, largely for the vast bombe code-checking machines tended to by armies of Wrens. The new site was fiercely utilitarian and in the winter months rather depressing. Unlike Bletchley, there was not the sociable focus of an architecturally striking grand house. The site was at Eastcote in Middlesex, near the north-western end of the Piccadilly line, and some 15 miles (24 kilometres) from central London.
A return to the Government Code and Cypher School’s pre-war HQ at St James’s Park, round the corner from Westminster, was no longer practicable. In the course of the previous six years, signals intelligence – that is, intelligence captured over the airwaves, or through intercepts, as opposed to the intelligence gathered on the ground by agents – had evolved to the most striking degree. Thanks to Turing, Welchman, Newman, Flowers and many others, bulky new technology was indispensable for unlocking encryptions. Added to that, a base was needed which also had room for a properly sized radio operation. Bletchley itself was not to be wholly abandoned by the Government Code and Cypher School; the codebreakers didn’t make the move until 1946 and even then some traces were left behind in the form of a training establishment. It was still used, right up until the 1980s. But the more compact post-war operation needed to be closer to London, as opposed to in the middle of the countryside.
There was another pressing question to be addressed by Commander Travis, and it was one that had been indirectly posed by Sir Stewart Menzies, head of MI6, and his proprietorial letter of congratulation to all Bletchley staff. With the end of the conflict, who was now to be in charge of codes and signals intelligence? Was Travis’s team destined to become an offshoot of MI6 (and answerable purely to Sir Stewart)?
There was a strong case to be made that Bletchley’s core team sho
uld form its own department, not as a branch of MI6, but as a fully fledged organisation in its own right, answering only to the Foreign Office and to the prime minister. Obviously, the codebreakers and the secret service could hardly be completely divorced; the nature of clandestine intelligence gathering meant that overlap would be inevitable. But Commander Travis could see the shape of the future, and the scale of the work that his new team was going to have to do.
It is always officially said that during the war, once Britain and the Soviet Union had become allies against the Germans, the British stopped intercepting and decoding Russian messages. Indeed, Bletchley Park obliged further, giving Stalin the (carefully edited) fruits of their German decrypts, so that the Russian army could find the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of the Wehrmacht. But the British codebreakers had – before the war broke out – been most assiduous in their blanket monitoring of Russian encrypted communications. It seems not merely decent but also rather reckless of them to have simply stopped, especially in the later stages of the war, when Stalin’s ambitions for Eastern Europe became ever clearer.
Also unprecedented had been the warm intelligence partnership between British and American codebreakers; even more unusually, it was to continue. Never before had two nations forged such a tight alliance over the sharing of top-secret material. And in this respect, once again, the British were a little ahead of their Allies. For thanks to the Y-Service – the British wireless interceptors who grabbed all messages from the airwaves and with pinpoint accuracy relayed them back to Bletchley Park – the codebreakers had operatives in every region on the earth. From Mombasa to Murmansk, Cyprus to Hong Kong, these listening posts were beyond value. America’s codebreakers (many of whom were based in Arlington Hall, a former girls’ school a little to the west of Washington DC) were greedy for the sheer volume of raw intelligence that these worldwide outposts were continuing to scoop up.
The Spies of Winter Page 3