The Spies of Winter

by Sinclair McKay

  Stripp was blithe, however. In his station set amid a stunning landscape of mountains and wildflowers, there was much in the job to be relished. He was so at ease with the Farsi language that he regarded the actual codebreaking as a crossword-style relaxation. And he could see history unfolding before his eyes in Abbottabad and northwards: how local politics in the region was to take on global consequences. ‘The fly in the Afghan ointment was the Faqir of Ipi,’ Stripp later wrote. ‘A celebrated old rogue who, with his forebears, had long played a tune which many tribesmen in the whole Hindu Kush area were happy to dance to. He was again becoming restive and the Pathans were getting excited. A lot of this was simply letting off steam: the rugged local tradition expressed joy at fairs, festivals and weddings, or grief at funerals, by firing rifles into the air. Sometimes things got out of hand, and kidnapping, arson, murder and attacks on local forts (on both sides of the border) led to the risk that any clumsy action by the civil or military administration could produce a dangerous flare-up.’ The town of Abbottabad was no less restive. ‘With the end of the war, the “Quit India” campaign was gaining strength and there were many points on which Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs could not agree.’ Given the subsequent partitioning of India and Pakistan in 1947 – with the resulting carnage and vast death toll – there was an element of macabre understatement in this.

  Yet Stripp also wanted to pay tribute to the ferociously hard-working ‘Indian wireless operators’ attached to the station who were utterly committed to their interception duties ‘at a time when their loyalty to the British might well have been in question, for any appeal to their patriotism would have been diluted by the ending of the war.’5 They were also rather brilliant cricket players.

  In 1946, it was time for the Wireless Experimental Depot team to pack up – and each of the men was offered the chance to apply for a full-time job with the codebreaking HQ. Some did and were accepted; but Stripp felt that this would be his chance to return to academia.

  His story, though, throws light on a wide web of British interception and codebreaking that had been carefully constructed over a period of decades; indeed, as soon as the very first telephone cables were being laid under oceans in the earlier years of the century, and across continents, the British had been pioneers in making arrangements to have those cables tapped and monitored. By the mid-1920s, the Government Code and Cypher School had made a secret deal with the communications company Cable and Wireless which was laying down the connections: even back then, few were the cables that ran across borders which were not being actively monitored.

  Meanwhile, a far-sighted Commander Edward Travis, preparing for his organisation’s move to Eastcote, had decided to take stock not only of British intercept stations, but also of the set-ups in the Commonwealth and the Dominions, interception bases ranging from New Zealand to Canada. He set off on an epic journey around the world.

  Travis’s grand tour started at the station in Heliopolis, based in the old Flora and Fauna museum with its elaborate glass and steel architecture; then he progressed to Mombasa, where the codebreakers were ensconced in a rather ornate old school house overlooking the Indian Ocean. Travis then travelled across that ocean to inspect the rather more extensive cypher base at HMS Anderson in Colombo, Ceylon. And from there it was onwards to the Antipodes. Australia had a formidable interception and decryption setup and there was a lot of cross-traffic and co-operation between stations in Melbourne, Canberra and HMS Anderson. Commander Travis wanted to be sure that in the post-war landscape, the British operation retained its essential superiority; that there would be no worrying outbreaks of independence in the passing upwards of intelligence. On top of this, there had been concerns about the occasional instance of leaking in Canberra. It was vital that no-one knew of code systems that had been broken. According to security expert Professor Richard Aldrich, the Australians were actually quite happy to swallow the British arrangement, for it equally gave them access to all the latest developments in British signals intelligence.

  The grand tour did not end there. Travis and his party then journeyed on to Hawaii, which again was the hub of a complex listening operation, this one obviously run by the Americans; and thence onwards to Washington DC. Canada was key to this codebreaking alliance too. It was recognised in Ottawa that Canada’s own codebreaking efforts could give the country some independent heft in the alliance of intelligence communities. But as with Australia, so with Canada: Britain was for some time to remain very much the senior partner. As a worldwide operation, the scale was quite breathtaking. And because of Empire and Commonwealth and Dominions, the British briefly had what the Americans did not have: the ability to listen to any nation in any corner of the earth.

  The manpower and machinery to cope with the interceptions being received from all over the planet did not all converge at Bletchley Park: it would have been a physical impossibility and the teleprinters would most likely have melted. Instead, there were numerous out-stations, filled with the young men and women of the ‘Y’ services (the ‘Y’ was short for ‘wireless’). These operatives, high-speed Morse experts all, would receive both encrypted and decrypted messages sent on from Y Service colleagues around the world. The domestic out-stations were spread across the Home Counties of England, which took in all the raw intelligence and then fed it on to Bletchley; and in the new post-war world, they continued to do so. The staff, though, had gone through a bit of reconfiguration, and the intelligence now went to the new headquarters at Eastcote.

  Naval signals were intercepted in Hampshire at HMS Flowerdown – a pleasingly bucolic name for what was in fact a rather utilitarian establishment just outside Winchester, noted among Wrens not only for the pressure and demands of the work, but also for a certain amount of knicker-theft. Flowerdown was also unusually progressive: throughout the war, this had been one of the few places where uniformed sailors and Wrens had worked side by side. Consequently, it had also been a simmering hotbed of romance.

  In the aftermath of war, HMS Flowerdown was also where many young male Morse interceptors – who had been based everywhere from the remotest, bluest isles of the Indian Ocean to the wild shores of East Africa – now came back to address new challenges. These were young men with sharp, agile brains and reflexes, enabling them to take down accurately 30 coded words per minute. One such operator, barely 19 when he got back to Hampshire from the Cocos Isles, remembered how striking it was that the sole focus of their efforts was now Russian messages; as ever, the young Y Service operatives were never told why. Equally, they were still very strictly working under the Official Secrets Act: no-one was to know that they were listening in to all the Soviet communications that they could.

  Other branches of the services had their own arrangements. The Royal Air Force, for instance, also employed secret listeners. Their intercepted encrypted signals were routed through to Chicksands Priory, in Bedfordshire, a rather more aesthetically pleasing prospect than HMS Flowerdown, with its pre-fab Nissen huts; parts of Chicksands Priory dated back to the 15th century. This antiquity was counterbalanced by an arrestingly futuristic spectacle nearby of a Stonehenge of radio masts – vast concentric circles laid out in an array across the land. Chicksands was later to stand as the perfect symbol of the close relationship between the British and the Americans, as an American team of interceptors in essence took the site over in 1950. But the great – and sometimes comical – point of continuity, from the point of view of the Bedfordshire locals, was the secrecy. Throughout the war, everyone knew better than to ask questions; after the war, inquisitiveness increased. Any local people asking whether it was true that Chicksands was some kind of spying headquarters were told matter-of-factly that it was not: it was simply an ordinary RAF establishment. But everyone could see with their own eyes that rather beautiful array of aerials.

  Chicksands had played an honourable part in the codebreakers’ secret war with Germany; originally based at RAF Cheadle, in Cheshire, there were men and women there who were
faster than their counterparts at Bletchley Park. Before the advent of the computer age, in fact, these young people came to be known as ‘the human computors’ (sic). Among their number was a bright young man called Arthur Bonsall who some decades later – in the 1980s – would rise to become the Director of GCHQ. As well as getting early crowbars into Luftwaffe Enigma codes and pilots’ messages, the team at Chicksands were, in 1941, at the centre of the operation to sink the German battleship Bismarck. It was their intercepts of Luftwaffe communications – some of which involved an anxious Luftwaffe officer who had a relative serving on board the Bismarck – that, once decoded, gave clues as to the elusive co-ordinates of the much-feared vessel. Once this intelligence had been passed through Bletchley Park, the British were able to act: first, by sending RAF planes flying over the Bismarck as if by chance, to give the impression that the ship had been spotted from the air; nothing could be allowed to hint that in fact the Bismarck’s messages had been read and decyphered.

  There was the occasional outbreak of friction between Bletchley and the out-station ‘human computors’. Because of security, the codebreakers at Bletchley hated it when codes were broken unbidden, and off site; and this was the case with young Arthur Bonsall’s team (as indeed it was elsewhere with another department, the Radio Security Service, and one of its brilliant young operatives, Hugh Trevor-Roper).

  The Chicksands operation, together with those spectacular mast arrays (and occasional concerts from American band leader Glenn Miller, attended by hundreds of adoring WAAFs [members of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force], further proof of fruitful Anglo-American accord), made the interception work even slicker and faster. The main building at RAF Chicksands had once been a priory belonging to the Gilbertine order, and it was said to be suitably haunted. The chief spectre was that of a nun. The story went that she had become pregnant and had been walled up alive for her sins; her lover was beheaded.

  By August 1945, Germany’s defeat had been followed by that of Japan. VJ night saw a number of Chicksands personnel off duty at last; in that warm summer darkness, WAAFs gathered around the nearby YWCA for a huge bonfire and celebratory drinks. But as with the other corners of the codebreaking enterprise, the work went on. And in the new post-war chill, RAF Chicksands had been designated as ‘European Signals Centre’. For the next five years, the personnel left on base would be focusing on the signals coming out of Central Europe.

  Wars do not just suddenly stop, like a heavy rainstorm followed by sunshine. Treaties may be signed, but the violent aftershocks are felt by everyone for an extraordinary amount of time afterwards. How were the Allies to deal with the German people? How were they to be, as the phrase came to be used, ‘de-Nazified’? How was the country to be run? Who would feed the population and try to ensure that they did not begin the whole murderous cycle all over again?

  Agonising questions branched out from that: the survivors of the concentration camps – what was to become of them? Added to this was the terrifying and all-embracing oppression that came with Soviet rule, which itself always teetered on the edge of state-approved anti-Semitism (and indeed, by the 1950s, openly tipped over into it). The continent was swarming with displaced persons (or DPs). There were, for example, a great many Polish men who had fought with the Allies, but who had no intention of returning to their own country, now under the domination of their implacable Russian enemies and their Polish Communist collaborators. Many of those who did return would be subjected in the months to come to grotesque trials for having fought alongside capitalists and imperialists, regardless of whether they were Allies or not. The Poles knew that to return would be to face either face instant violent death or the protracted living-death of the Gulag. But where could they go?

  And over all these individual and mass traumas flew the spectres of disease and starvation. The shadow that had fallen over 20th-century Europe disfigured many thousands times more lives than any previous conflict. For the Western Allies, the overwhelming question was: how could a semblance of civilisation be restored so swiftly after the savagery of the war? And what sort of government would Germany have? Could it in fact be trusted to govern itself? And the nation was clearly bankrupt, so how could it be expected to pay out reparations to compensate those it had so implacably conquered and destroyed?

  Decrypted messages – signals intelligence – were to be absolutely at the centre of these efforts to try and keep the continent stable. The British may no longer have been monitoring armies, but they had to stay sharp and alert and pinpoint-accurate, to ensure that the continent did not slide into an even deeper abyss. They needed first warning of trouble or violence from a hundred different quarters; and most secretly, they needed to understand precisely the thinking of the governments of so many different nations, and in particular, those in the east. They needed – through monitoring and decyphering the airwaves – to judge and anticipate the actions of others; this applied to everyone, from the Jews in Palestine to the separatists in India.

  Most particularly, it applied to Stalin’s Soviet Russia. Commander Travis’s codebreakers were light years away from the British public in their views of Stalin’s regime. The cryptographers had a long-standing, deep-rooted distrust and loathing of the Bolsheviks; the general public had, throughout the war, developed a much more favourable view. Throughout the war, ‘Uncle Joe Stalin’ had become hugely popular, especially in more working-class areas. Maisky, the Russian ambassador to Britain, recalled how warmly he was received in visits to the East End of London. He also reported on how images of Stalin, when flashed up in cinema newsreels, always drew cheers. With no public knowledge of the true nature of Stalin’s rule (famines and the deaths of millions were shrugged off as dark rumour), Soviet Russia and Communism looked to many like the image of the future. Codebreaking veterans, long-standing foes of the Soviet regime, must have listened to such sentiments in grim silence.

  Of course, it was not only the codebreakers who had a more realistic view of Stalin. But even though it was believed in Whitehall that Russia would clearly be the enemy in a future conflict, not everyone believed that the Soviets would be in any immediate position to fight a conventional war. There was physical and economic exhaustion. The losses and the traumas inflicted by the Nazis would require a lengthy period of recovery. But there was another fear, of a more insidious form of invasion. The anxiety was that the Soviets would not actually have to pick up a weapon; that all they had to do was to infiltrate Soviet sympathisers into the political classes and the trades unions of France, Italy and other countries such as Czechoslovakia. They would work to convert the countries from within to the religion of Communism. In the moral disorientation of the war’s aftermath, there would be a great many who would succumb. There was evidence that huge numbers already had.

  Given the rumbling, violent weeks and months after the war, it is easy to imagine both the dread of Communism spreading and also, for many on the ground, its overwhelmingly seductive desirability. For a younger generation of Europeans, the world and all its promise had been torn down around them, and the fascists had done more than anyone to destroy it. This, it seemed to many, was the end result of capitalism. It was a system that had made a continent collapse in on itself. Therefore, surely the only chance for a proper new start, a society where men stood a chance of being equal, lay with the purity of the Soviet system?

  So the listeners at Chicksands and other locations were not merely focusing on the Russians, but also on the sort of political noise coming out of regions such as provincial France; codebreakers were alert to any traffic, any communication, passing between Paris and Moscow.

  The army also had its own band of dedicated wireless listeners. The signals intelligence that they picked up was sent on for analysis not too far away from Chicksands: it went to Beaumanor in Leicestershire (the main house of which again outdid Bletchley Park in terms of its pleasing aspects). All three of these establishments – Bletchley, Chicksands, Beaumanor – had lively, youthful atmosph
eres; the operatives at Beaumanor took this a stage further with their own quarterly magazine, devoted to gossip, jokes and satire, which continued well after the war, up until 1950. After August 1945, the numbers of people based in and around this fine 19th-century house naturally thinned, but there were some young men – there as civilian operators – who now found themselves facing National Service. That is, they were to do the same job – the high-intensity interception of Morse code messages from every continent – but they were to do so in uniform, and with sergeant majors bawling at them.

  Close by the elegant Beaumanor Hall was the equally pleasing 19th-century property Garats Hay, which not only hosted wireless interception work, but was also a training camp for a great many young people; despite the secrecy of the work, there are photographs from the 1940s and 1950s of young smiling men, either in huts or in the grounds. And equally, there are many fond recollections of the pub in the local village of Woodhouse Eaves. These youngsters – drawn from all sorts of backgrounds, but quite often linked by a fanatical and almost obsessional love for radio – underwent extraordinarily intensive Morse training. One poet, simply calling himself ‘Wireless Operator’, contributed this verse to an in-house magazine:

  ‘Livid pulses striking free/In beatings of the rhythmic Morse

  Up to the stratosphere, over the sea/Away from the tall and virile source…

  Hands outstretched, a million masts receive/Electrical sensations, ethereal words,

  Faster than the gods perceive,/ Smoother than the birds.’6