The Spies of Winter

by Sinclair McKay

  And despite the fact that the new establishment was facing up to the prospect of a grim and profoundly uncertain world, there were soon to be yelps of indignation over other outbreaks of perceived short-changing. ‘Rates of Pay,’ began one incendiary communication. ‘It is pointed out, particularly for the guidance of junior staff, that as Eastcote is a “provincial” area, the rates of pay will be on the same scale as those of Bletchley Park.’5 But as a few people were to point out – Mimi Gallilee included – working in and living near Eastcote very much involved London prices. There were rows to do with relocation and re-accommodation; even in 1946, London was not cheap. Indeed, the scale of the bombing over the last few years had put a strain on the housing market. ‘A billeting office is being established,’ declared a November 1945 Eastcote memo. The idea was partly to circumvent the kind of disputes that tended to result in triplicated letters of complaint. Originally – as Mimi Gallilee recalled – there had been a rather stark option of staying in a hostel near Notting Hill Gate. Then that was discontinued; there was an idea that another hostel, nearer Eastcote, might be established. But as the memo stated, this was not intended as a ‘permanent base of residence’.

  Others turning up for duty at Eastcote were similarly dismayed at what they found. According to Professor Richard Aldrich, in ‘June 1946, William Bodsworth, a British codebreaker, returned from a period in America to the cold and rain of an English summer to take over GCHQ’s Soviet section. He found his first sight of Eastcote ‘frankly shattering’. Expecting a ‘nice old country house’, instead he found it to be ‘more cheerless than any of the temporary buildings I have seen in this racket either here or abroad’.6

  William Bodsworth had a good excuse for his gloom: the year previously he and a small number of other codebreakers had been posted to Washington DC as a liaison team; quite apart from the thrill of being right at the centre of pan-global intelligence operations, there was also the great abundance of fresh food, coffee, even the fruit juices that were quite unknown in Britain. Even tomato juice from a tin was then regarded by the British as impossibly sophisticated. To huge numbers of young people in Britain throughout the war, America symbolised the future; this younger generation danced to swing and yearned for the perceived classless style and cool of their transatlantic cousins. Imagine, then, William Bodsworth sailing back to sad, rain-swept, bitterly cold England, and taking up his new work behind the barbed wire of what looked like a Soviet-style correction camp.

  Yet curiously, as 1946 progressed, this most secret site – or at least a disused part at its northern extreme edge, separate from the codebreakers, an area which had once housed some army personnel – proved mightily attractive to others. The gaping holes left all over London where once there had been homes had created a terrible shortfall which, despite the government’s best efforts with pre-fabricated bungalows, had not been solved. There were thousands of families desperate for somewhere decent to live. And so – aided in part by former soldiers who knew the sites well – there began a London squatters’ movement which focused on what had been bustling military and air bases. The vast acreage at Eastcote became one such target. Prospective squatters and their families noted the group of now disused military buildings, a little distance away from the barbed-wire enclosed blocks of the cryptographers. Indeed, just weeks before the squatters moved in, there had been a question raised in the House of Commons to the housing minister about what might be done with some of the spare huts in the compound. The squatters soon provided an answer.

  Today, such an incursion would meet with a very shrill response from politicians and journalists. In 1946, the reaction was more measured. Possibly because the first man to move in to the squat was himself a former officer.

  Especially interested in this phenomenon were those running Mass Observation, the vast social research project which aimed to catalogue the everyday life of British people. ‘The squatters are half middle and half artisan class,’ the MO man reported. ‘One man is a master builder, another a school master and another a factory worker. All are ex-servicemen. Two of them have cars. And some could afford to buy a house but have been unable to do so. They live the typical suburban middle class life as far as they are able. There is no sign of any violent political enthusiasm among any of them.’7 Mass Observation noted that the Eastcote incursion was started by a former pilot officer, living with his family in rented rooms nearby, who noticed that the officers’ mess on the site was disused, and would make rather more suitable accommodation. Word then spread among friends, and more families came to join them on the site. The electricity meter was kept fed, and the officers concerned raised rent money, should anyone ever actually ask for any. No-one did.

  And unlike those instances in grander Kensington, where in 1946 squatters took over unoccupied private property, the police were notably relaxed about this incursion too. As for the codebreakers, their part of the camp was firmly and hermetically sealed, those rolls of barbed wire remaining in place. Nonetheless, it is a striking image – it is very difficult now to imagine unauthorised personnel being allowed to set up camp anywhere near GCHQ’s current base in Cheltenham.

  Yet this is not to say that Clement Attlee’s government was perfectly relaxed: these middle-class squatters, however subliminally, were tweaking the tail of authority. They clearly could not be permitted to stay where they were. Cunningly, the matter became one not for the security services, but the Ministry of Health; in other words, were former military sites suitably safe places to bring up young children? The Ministry of Health thought not. Moreover, even though the sites concerned happened to be empty at that point, that did not mean that the government regarded them as spare. These buildings might soon be needed, it was argued, for refugees from other countries, or Polish airmen who had no desire to return to their ravaged country.

  So while this was going on in one corner of Eastcote, in the other, work of the most clandestine degree was being undertaken. Although most of the bombe machines had been dismantled – there were bombes at Eastcote dedicated to chewing through codes from each region of the earth – a number were retained, and continued working in the immediate post-war period. Indeed, it has been observed that they (and their human operators) worked ever more efficiently. On top of this was the arrival at Eastcote of the machines that were to shape the future.

  Captain Gil Hayward had – as a very young man – been part of the Dollis Hill General Post Office research team. Throughout the war, he served with the Intelligence Corps in Egypt. He returned in 1944, came to Bletchley and very quickly became proficient not merely with the revolutionary Colossus machine but also the Tunny. This was the astounding British re-engineering – almost a re-imagining – of the German Lorenz SZ42 cyphering machine. It was instrumental in cracking messages that had come from the desk of Hitler himself. Come 1946, and the final clearance of the Bletchley site, Captain Hayward was part of the highly delicate operation to remove two Colossus machines to the Eastcote site. Accompanying them were two of the Tunny machines.

  Also involved in this move was a very young engineer called John Cane. He understood at the time that the technology was still perfectly crucial and indeed still so revolutionary that very few could have guessed at the advances. He remembered recently, however, that the Eastcote site was not perhaps as purely secure as it could have been.

  ‘One of the blocks we installed this marvellous top secret equipment in had a three foot wide hole in the wall,’ he said. ‘And the [local] children used to climb through that hole and pinch our tools.’ Yet John Cane understood very well the importance of that post-war role. ‘The way I looked at it was that we’d done a job, enjoyed ourselves doing it and been quite safe. No-one was dropping bombs on us or anything like that.’8

  The site at Eastcote was large enough to allow the space for such technological marvels; but was there the feeling that Commander Edward Travis and the dapper Nigel de Grey would have preferred to have been located at a rather smarter ad
dress near Westminster, a walk away from the War Office and the Cabinet? Before the war as mentioned, the Government Code and Cypher School had occupied premises in St James’s Park; by contrast, this pleasant but very faintly boring suburb must have seemed – just in the obvious terms of status – rather a comedown. MI5 and MI6 would never have been based so far away from where the key decisions were being made: surely such a distance left Travis, de Grey and all their colleagues rather out of the loop?

  Yet it worked the other way around too. There was in those first few post-war months a continuing tension about who should assume ultimate authority over the work of the codebreakers. MI6 still clearly felt that the department fell under their purview. Travis disagreed: his codebreakers and his worldwide network of secret listeners had to have operational independence to be effective. The department should not be subordinate to MI6 but, rather, should function as its equal. Quite apart from anything else, the new era of computers was changing the very nature of intelligence. There was an entire world to monitor. Any insistence from MI6 that it should in some way perform all analysis on GCHQ’s intelligence – acting in essence as a filter before such intelligence was relayed upwards towards the War Office and the prime minister – might cloud or even distort the meanings of millions of messages.

  ‘In the brave new world,’ one hand-written Eastcote memo of the time ran, ‘we have got to be prepared to follow trouble around the globe – vultures ready to take wing at the merest indication of corpses.’9

  So, as the vultures settled in, in early 1946, some of the senior Eastcote personnel found themselves places to live nearby; there were even quainter spots not too far off, such as the village of Chalfont St Giles.

  And after a few weeks spent working with the John Lewis Partnership (in that time of austerity, it is difficult to imagine that these department stores had much vim or colour), Hugh Alexander, the champion chess player and former architect of Hut 8’s great cryptological triumphs, returned to the codebreaking fold. In those anonymous single-storey offices (by some accounts at least bright, nicely carpeted, and with plenty of sunlight pouring through the windows of the long corridors or ‘spurs’), he, together with Frank Birch, Eric Jones, Joan Clarke, Arthur Bonsall and a range of other piercing Bletchley intellects, settled in to survey the new world before them. Within walking distance, housewives hung their washing out, husbands mowed their lawns, and the trains of the Metropolitan Line carried wholly unsuspecting locals to their rather less dramatic jobs in town. The incongruity could not have been more English.

  Yet there was another consideration: next to the vast sums that the Americans were pumping into their intelligence structures, the former Bletchley personnel must now have been finding that their own funding was becoming more of a struggle in a country which was to all intents and purposes bankrupt. How could the codebreakers – listening to the creaking strains and stresses of nations around the world, and the thunderous rumbles of looming conflicts – impress upon the new Labour government the fact that the world was now, in some ways, even more dangerous than before, and needed lightning intellects to respond to lightning strikes?

  Chapter Four

  Mission into Darkness

  Even the most squalid governments have secrets worth grabbing; and after the war, there was a scramble to salvage such treasure from the ruins of Nazi rule. Most famously, there was breathless urgency among the Americans to take control of, and to master, the German advances in rocket technology. For GCHQ and the post-war codebreakers, there were also prizes to be found amid the ugliness and dumb brutalisation. To secure them, and bring them back to Britain, would require experts more used to confining themselves to laboratories.

  Nor were these men the world’s most obviously qualified secret agents. One such was Alan Turing. At the time, he had been seconded to a hugely secretive research establishment called Hanslope Park, in Northamptonshire. This institute – centred on a handsome white stuccoed 19th-century house, surrounded with Nissen huts, and all within carefully fenced-off and frequently patrolled parkland – was an offshoot of the main codebreakers’ operation. It was set up by the ebullient Brigadier Gambier ‘Pop’ Parry, under the umbrella of the Radio Security Service. Hanslope Park was on the face of it quite a straightforward military establishment and part of its remit was to explore and push the boundaries of interception technology. But there was also much work being done on new technological means to devise encryption methods.

  The work was very much tilted towards the coming age of the computer – the age that Turing himself had done so much to pitch the world towards. Here, in these secure Northamptonshire laboratories, were vast electronic machines, the size of wardrobes, linked with labyrinths of wire and cable. The air was thick with the smell of oil and the heat off thermionic valves. Turing – not in uniform, unlike so many around him – was working on projects such as the ‘Delilah’, an intended means of scrambling and encyphering voice transmissions so that, say, Churchill might be able to talk to Roosevelt on a line that would sound – to interceptors – like the anonymous hiss of white noise. The reason for the name ‘Delilah’ was that it was named after the Biblical figure – the ‘deceiver of men’.

  At Hanslope, there was none of the day-to-day intense pressure of Bletchley. Turing was able to work in calm (and rather congenial) surroundings, with his young assistants Robin Gandy and Don Bayley.

  The Delilah device had some competition, for the Post Office Research Laboratories at Dollis Hill in north-west London were working at the same problem: that of encoding the human voice. The presiding genius of Dollis Hill, Dr Tommy Flowers – a supremely gifted engineer and also not an obvious choice of secret agent – had hailed from one of the poorer districts of London’s East End. As a young man, he had struggled and worked intensely hard to put himself through night school to pursue his passion for engineering; this is perhaps why some of the Cambridge-educated codebreakers had sometimes treated his ideas with scepticism and occasionally open disdain. Dr Flowers vaulted above such snobbery, and he achieved stewardship at Dollis Hill at a time when telephone technology was starting to evolve dizzyingly fast.

  Flowers and Turing had met often throughout the war years, and came to admire one another. Flowers had a genius for giving solid structure to the most abstruse of mathematical theories; a genius that Turing lacked. In 1944, Flowers’s code-smashing Colossus had proved enormously successful and more were built. As the war in Europe ended, the East End engineer and the public-school mathematician found themselves called upon to make an unexpected journey together.

  In the summer of 1945, both Flowers and Turing were quietly summoned from their respective establishments to travel to Paris; there, with several other British colleagues, they met with a small team of American scientists. Their onward mission – handled in part by codebreaking veteran Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Marr-Johnson – was one of the most intense secrecy. From the relative lightness of Paris, they then travelled far into the dark ruins of Germany. There was a strong perception of risk: English voices moving through some of the obscurer corners of a traumatised, nerve-shattered population, sometimes deep in the country and far from the safety of the occupied cities, may have been regarded as a provocation to desperate vanquished communities. Not everyone in those remote rural populations would have been willing to welcome such figures. But Turing and Flowers formed part of what were to become known as TICOM expeditions. These were to prove beyond value.

  TICOM was the Targeted Intelligence Committee, a joint effort between the Americans and the British to send experts into the depths of former Nazi territory to acquire any scientific or technological secrets that the retreating forces had not wilfully destroyed. Different teams were sent to Peenemünde, to Innsbruck, to Heidelberg, to salvage what they could of Nazi missile technology, as well as advances in such areas as liquid oxygen, infra-red instruments and anti-radar equipment.

  Turing and Flowers had their own specific mission: to examine how far the
Nazis had got in terms of computerised cryptology. The areas that their team started off with – Frankfurt, Bayreuth – were under American control and there was a great deal of nerve-grating bureaucracy as the scientists had continually to prove who they were. But in that uncertain landscape – there was a prevalent and perfectly understandable fear that many German young men would not relinquish their Nazi loyalty – Turing, Flowers and the Americans travelled far up into the mountains, to a secret radio research establishment, and they made their sleeping quarters in an old hospital. The abandonment of these establishments high up in the wild hills must have lent them a slightly eerie and unsettling feel.

  Turing and Flowers were, throughout, implacably silent with their colleagues about all the work that they had done, all the triumphs that they had enjoyed back at Bletchley Park. They also said nothing to those Germans that they met.

  Flowers and Turing had the opportunity to meet a German cryptographer who, despite defeat, was intensely proud of the technology that he had worked with. They listened with quiet respect as he gave them a demonstration of the machine that had produced the Tunny code. It was perfectly unbreakable, the German scientist averred. He pointed to the countless millions of different combinations and permutations, the limitless complexities of its codes. Turing responded – with discretion and politeness – with a raised eyebrow and an exclamation of surprise. Neither he nor Flowers were about to tell the scientist that his unbreakable codes had in fact been shattered, and on a spectacular scale.

  Elsewhere in Germany, another Allied codebreaker – an American mathematical prodigy who had been brought over to England for the war and who was to later help construct the US codebreaking efforts throughout the Cold War – was engaged in an even hairier mission. Arthur Levenson was seconded to another TICOM unit, set up to grab as much cryptological machinery and expertise out of Germany and Austria as they could. He was face to face with Nazi soldier prisoners and indeed Nazi civilians who might turn on American soldiers without any warning.