The Spies of Winter

by Sinclair McKay

  The Americans wanted to point out it was a two-way process: that their British friends would be allowed in on their own codebreaking results. In July 1945, Commander Travis wrote to his opposite number, Captain Wenger of the OP-20-G US codebreaking arm, to acknowledge this happy continuity. ‘Many thanks for your offer to continue direct cross-Atlantic communications,’ he said. ‘Fully appreciate difficulties created by economy drive, as I am experiencing them myself. Suggest that negotiations now proceeding with you may lead us both to conclude that good Atlantic channels are essential for close collaboration on future problems that may arise. Shall therefore keep subject under review…’6

  Britain had its own concerns too, from the impending independence of the subcontinent of India from British rule to the feverish tensions in Palestine and the increasing pressure to honour the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which promised British support for the creation of a homeland there for the Jewish people. The need for signals intelligence did not diminish.

  In those last few weeks of Bletchley Park, a local newspaper reporter wrote sadly that the Park’s theatrical troupe was disbanding, and that its talents would be dispersed far and wide. Neither he nor any of their audiences had any idea what it was that these gifted amateur actors had been doing as their day job. It is natural now to imagine with hindsight that this was symbolic of the change that was coming to the codebreakers – that frenetic yet eccentric world being replaced by something far chillier, much more professional, and far less amenable to whimsy or the sort of Bohemian behaviour that Bletchley recruits had displayed. And yet this is not so: while the site of Eastcote itself was drab, the ethos of Bletchley Park was to be transplanted; there were still battalions of bright young women and owlish young men. And they were to be joined – as symbolically befits the new age of Clement Attlee’s Labour government which came to power in 1945 – by a swarm of fresh new recruits from all sorts of social backgrounds, united by intellectual dexterity, the ease of youth and indeed a love of music – though this time, the musical form was jazz.

  And it would not be long before the talents and capabilities of these younger codebreakers were to be tested: in some key regions of the earth, peace was little more than an illusion.

  Chapter Two

  Storm Warnings

  For those working amid the sand and the flies in the piercing heat, or indeed for those thousands of miles away again intercepting messages in wet warm emerald forests, mesmerised at night by the flickering glow of fireflies, it must have seemed for a time in 1945 that the British Empire would carry on much as before. The war was won and, superficially, the old order had not itself been called into question. Empire was a matter of administration and bureaucracy, or so it must have seemed to many. What could be more natural than Britain’s holding on to its bases in Egypt and Palestine, in Ceylon and India, and in Cyprus and Hong Kong?

  Winston Churchill was gone, unsentimentally voted out before the war had even ended. His Labour deputy, Clement Attlee, was now prime minister. Ernest Bevin was his pugnacious foreign secretary. Britain was financially shattered: it had been driven practically to bankruptcy by the pressures of war production from 1940. Yet the economy alone was not Attlee’s main spur when he considered Britain’s position in this ruined, traumatised world. He was already thinking in terms of Britain voluntarily surrendering its imperial influence to a new technocratic council of nations (what would shortly become the United Nations).

  But for the moment, the British codebreakers were at the absolute centre of influence. They were faster than many to understand that the Soviet Union under Stalin would be seeking to expand its own interests ruthlessly, not just through Eastern Europe, but into Asia as well. The codebreakers saw too that the Soviets would have a keen interest in the Balkan states, all the way down to Greece and the Mediterranean; and that the rich oil fields of Saudi Arabia and Iraq would be a new crucible of tension. The Combined Code and Cypher School in Heliopolis, just outside Cairo, Egypt, had proved more than invaluable throughout the Desert War against the German forces led by General Erwin Rommel, sometimes knowing more about his supply lines than he did. Now, although the focus of its work had shifted, it remained vital.

  Because most aspects of the Second World War are now so intensely familiar to us, it is slightly startling to look instead at those immediate post-war weeks and months; to imagine how the peoples of Europe and Russia, of China and Japan could function amid such utter devastation. It is sometimes assumed or imagined, for example, that the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps was an occasion of tearful joy; in fact, on the part of both the liberators and the prisoners, it was anything but. There was horror on the part of the liberators, a sort of paralysed trauma from the prisoners. Those Jews who survived – who had seen their entire families murdered in the most appalling circumstances – what were they to do now? For some, the immediate and macabre-seeming answer was simply to stay put in the camps: the world outside was not to be trusted to any degree. At least now, within the fences of these obscene compounds, there was a bizarre measure of security among familiar faces. Beyond the gates were the people who had consigned them to this hell in the first place. There were some Jews who started to think of making the return to their old towns and villages deep in Eastern Europe; as we will see later, these journeys were not to end well. Forget any semblance of delicate justice: what were these people to do, where and how were they to live?

  And although some might be tempted to see a satisfying symmetry, the same was quickly being asked of 20 million displaced German citizens: as Nazi rule ended in Czechoslovakia and in many parts of Eastern Europe, so the local populations in those countries immediately turned to look at the German speakers who had been sent to live among them. Those Germans, too, were soon to understand the pitilessness of persecution.

  This, then, in 1945, was the Europe that the codebreakers were listening to. Germany itself was bloody, broken and mute. Once busy city streets had been crushed into grey dust; entire urban skylines had been obliterated. Women quite beyond number had been raped by invading Soviet soldiers, and these countless individual traumas were to resonate. Food was in desperately short supply; rations in Germany were down at one point to a few slices of bread, a herring and some jam to last a week. In many senses, the continent of Europe had been thrown back to the Dark Ages, fractured by war and threatened with famine.

  Berlin, the German capital, was carved up into four sectors, run by the victorious Allies: the British, Americans, French and, of course, Russians. There was a solid practical reason for Bletchley Park’s wartime triumphs to remain completely secret, and that was that some of the codebreaking technology that they had pierced during the war was still very much in use. The Bletchley secret had also been assiduously kept from the Russians; although intelligence from decrypts had been carefully filtered through to Stalin, its exact provenance had always been disguised. This secrecy was later to pay off: for instance, some years later, as East Germany (or the ‘German Democratic Republic’) went behind the shadow of the Berlin Wall, officials sometimes still used Enigma machines.

  The months before the end of the war had brought other developments that foreshadowed the secret cypher conflicts to come. Of particular significance in late 1944 was the discovery, in Finland, of a partially burned Soviet code-book, the vital key into a wide range of Russian communications. The Finnish cryptographers had made some use of it, feeling their way into the Russian codes, but they passed it on in turn to the Americans. The US cryptographers at Arlington Hall were quick to get to work. The Americans had as much of a knack for recruiting from unexpected quarters as the British. A key cryptographer assigned to this vitally important task was a woman called Gene Grabeel, ‘a Virginia schoolteacher,’ who, according to NSA history, ‘began the effort to read the Soviet diplomatic messages’.1

  What she started snowballed into one of the most shattering revelations of treachery, for amid the thousands of Soviet messages that Grabeel and a very sm
all (and hyper-secret) team of American and British codebreakers were to set to work on were communications that would uncover double agents working at the very heart of the Washington and Whitehall atomic establishments. As a result, that partially burned code-book found in Finland – together with more Russian encryption material discovered in May 1945 in Saxony and Schleswig, Germany – was to become a vital part of a mosaic of intelligence finds.

  The Government Code and Cypher School successfully fought for its independence. It has been suggested that the wartime achievements of Edward Travis and his team had been rather appropriated by Sir Stewart Menzies and MI6; that Menzies wanted to see his own department garlanded with lavish praise; that if it had not been for Bletchley, MI6 would have emerged with very little credit from the conflict. But now the codebreakers were a service in their own right, under the auspices of the Foreign Office – because, despite the ruins and the human devastation and the financial chaos, it was also perfectly clear in this new world that the fast-evolving technologies of signals intelligence would be on a par with what was called ‘humint’ (or human intelligence), involving secret agents on the ground.

  There was another incentive for a greater concentration on code-work: it was a great deal more economical than the expensive business of running spies and double agents. Also, unlike the skittish agents (just exactly how skittish, the security services were to discover to their terrible cost in subsequent years), codebreaking work was reliable: there was no treachery.

  The cabinet and Whitehall knew that Britain’s imperial status would be changing; that India would soon be making the transition to independence. But as an empire within an empire, Commander Edward Travis’s global network of listening stations was, at this point in history, pretty much unparalleled, and indeed more powerful than any other on earth. No other nation, not even America, had an equivalent scope.

  Naturally, America was keenly aware of this fact. The codebreakers at Arlington Hall had maintained extremely good relations with their British counterparts. Even though the Americans had been focused on their struggles against Japan, they had been squick to see what the British were seeing; that if there was to be further war in the years ahead – when, perhaps, economies had recovered sufficiently – then it would most likely be against Stalin’s Soviet Union.

  As well as enjoying a sense of fellowship with director Edward Travis, Captain Wenger of the US Navy codebreakers had formed a firm friendship with Bletchley’s Frank Birch, a longstanding senior veteran who blended his brilliant codebreaking career (stretching back to the First World War) with an equally lively (and incongruous) curriculum of professional acting on stage, screen and early television.

  ‘Dear Birch,’ wrote Captain Wenger on 7 September 1945, ‘I trust you will forgive me for not having written sooner but we have been in a mad whirl here ever since peace broke out. As with you, we are in the midst of demobilisation and post-war planning and are struggling to find solutions to complex problems while many of the basic policies are still undecided or unknown to us.’ (In other words, it was all very well the codebreaking partners having ears all over the world, but they also required those in charge to indicate what their priorities should be.) ‘My object in writing at this time is simply to express my great appreciation of the great relations we have enjoyed throughout the war. Your unfailing spirit of co-operation and helpfulness was in no small way responsible for the fine teamwork that prevailed throughout our operations.

  ‘It seems to me,’ Wenger continued, ‘that the joint efforts of the two organisations can always be looked upon as a model of combined action. I trust,’ he added, ‘that this will find you in the best of health… Please convey my best wishes to Mrs Birch and to all of my good friends at Bletchley Park.’2

  Wenger had supposed that Frank Birch was now going to take a break from this intense life. He was wrong. For the post-war codebreakers in 1945, there was to be a foretaste of the continuous nerve-stretching crises to come. It centred on a small and rather obscure region of western Asia: Azerbaijan, then part of the north of Iran.

  The chief protagonists in this tussle were the British and the Russians. This was the first time since their wartime alliance that the two powers had found themselves in active dispute. The skirmish was to serve almost as an orchestral prelude – a tight, local outbreak of hostility that encapsulated the fears, neuroses and misunderstandings of the conflict to come.

  The importance of this region was little to do with its extraordinary history. It had more to do with the gulping appetites of the motor age, and the mineral wealth of the land. In the latter years of the war, the Allies had kept a very tight grip on Iran, which had originally declared its neutrality in the conflict; the area had been absolutely key, first for transporting supplies to the Russians after Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union, and also for its flow of oil. For their part in this wartime control of the country, the Soviets occupied the north-west of Iran.

  Naturally the Soviets showed no signs of wanting to move out again after the war, and when Azerbaijan declared its independence from Iran – with the backing of Stalin – Britain and America felt their interests to be imperilled. The British interest was particularly acute: it more or less owned the oil that was pumping out of Iran’s wells and it had every intention of holding on to this advantage. So at this point, the British needed to delve deep into the minds of Iran’s rulers: where did they secretly stand? Would they use this crisis as a trigger for rising up and ejecting the deeply resented British colonial presence?

  And so it was in late 1945 that the Bletchley Park codebreaker Alan Stripp, a bright young man who had been cracking Japanese cyphers in Colombo, found himself being sent on a new mission to listen in to Iran and to break its codes. In order to do this, he was to be posted to the extensive ‘Wireless Experimental Depot’ in Abbottabad, in India’s North-West Frontier province, around 100 miles (160 kilometres) from Afghanistan (Abbottabad was to claim greater geopolitical fame in 2011 when it was revealed to be the refuge of the al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, assassinated by an American squadron). Signals from Iran and Russia poured into this station.

  Though the journey across the continent, largely by rackety railway in sweltering weather, was arduous, Stripp relished the new challenge, which combined codebreaking with a more old-fashioned kind of approach. Cryptology, for all its terrific satisfactions, was a desk job. The posting to this remote station – with all of its historical resonances dating from the 19th-century ‘Great Game’ (ie the military manoeuvring) in the region between Britain and Russia – spoke more of high adventure. ‘My job… was to study Farsi, the main language of Iran and Afghanistan, and much closer to the languages of north-west Europe than many found in between,’ Stripp wrote. ‘It is a beautiful and flexible language with a strikingly simple structure and a fine literature.’3 According to Stripp, this top-secret cryptological listening station in the wild and beautiful foothills of the frontier had been established before the war – indeed, it might have even been there since the First World War. The unit that Stripp found was small, and was presided over by a Colonel Harcourt who had read Persian at Oxford.

  Stripp insisted that even though the station had been reading Afghan and Iranian encoded messages for years, they had ‘certainly’ stopped working on the Soviet messages that they would surely also have been overhearing. Now that the war was over, this was changing fast. ‘Abbottabad was concerned with finding out what it could about Iran’s real intentions,’ wrote Stripp. ‘The traffic we studied, therefore, was not military but diplomatic, with a single code system covering every aspect of diplomatic and consular activity from summaries by overseas press attachés of local newspaper reports on Iran, at the brighter end, to routine requests for permission to issue a visa at the more tedious extreme.

  ‘This may sound pedestrian,’ he added, ‘but after the Japanese grind, it was a welcome distraction; moreover, the atmosphere of the small unit was very appealing.’4 These were the deep
twilight days of Empire in the region; Stripp was in a world of manservants and ‘native bearers’ that was soon to disappear. But the dispute with Russia – the Soviets continuing to arm the rebels in the north of Iran in their struggle with Tehran – was a dress rehearsal for the tense stand-offs to come. Out there among the rich foothills of India, Alan Stripp was at the heart of the first Cold War skirmish.

  But in early 1946, the truth was also that Russia was still weak and wounded; it needed time to convalesce. Even though Iran was starting to bubble with resentment not only about Soviet interventions, but also about British and American military occupation, the Kremlin felt that it had to stand down. As they did so, Stalin’s men attempted to wrest an oil concession from the Iranian authorities. But as soon as the Soviet forces had pulled back, the Iranian government tore this agreement up. Moscow was not quite able at this stage to retaliate. This relative weakness only served to exacerbate the neurotic paranoia and aggression within the Kremlin: the proof they needed of Britain and American perfidy.

  And it was Alan Stripp and his colleagues who were in place, instantly intercepting, decrypting and analysing Russian movements. This was a test case for the new incarnation of the codebreakers: their ability to garner invaluable intelligence from every corner of the earth, no matter how remote. (Incidentally, these events of 1945 and 1946 also had repercussions that can be felt to this day – many parts of the modern Iranian establishment still nurse poisonous resentment of the British interference in their affairs, to say nothing of the sequestering of their oil, which continued with even greater establishment cynicism throughout the 1950s.)