Perhaps the most startling of Frank Birch’s forays into the world of showbusiness – while he continued his top-secret work within the world of cryptography – was a role in the 1953 film comedy Will Any Gentleman…? in which he starred alongside George Cole and Sid James. It is almost impossible to imagine, by means of comparison, any of Birch’s heavyweight American codebreaking counterparts making appearances in Abbott and Costello films. Birch, who was married to the Hon Vera Benedicta, also contrived to live in some theatrical splendour in the swish Montpelier Walk in Knightsbridge, London. He was one of the great examples of codebreakers having unexpectedly rich hinterlands.
More importantly, Birch was also a great example of how the esoteric world of codebreaking had a particular lure of its own; that even those who left to embark upon the most wildly divergent projects could never quite resist the chance to return. It was that combination of addictive intellectual rigour and the satisfaction of being privy to the gravest of all national secrets.
On this level, indeed, the lives of the cryptographers were many times more satisfying than those of agents for MI5 and MI6. In the case of the latter, work was often grindingly humdrum, and lacking any real intellectual or even moral challenge. The point about codebreaking, however, was that one always knew that one was making the most direct and concrete kind of difference. On top of this, the codebreakers of GCHQ were wielding global clout at a time when Britain’s power as a whole was starting to recede sharply. Increasingly, the codebreakers would find themselves being pushed to the front line of the nation’s defences.
Chapter Five
The Remaining Jewels
The photographs of the Yalta Conference – the seated figures of Stalin, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill – looked, even by 1946, like a memento of a vanished age. There was the idea of an American president seated smiling, quite relaxed, with the Soviet dictator, whom he trusted and respected, even as that dictator demanded vast reparations from Germany. Also hinted at in the composition of this image was the suggestion that the United Kingdom was the absolute equal of these two vast powers. The following Potsdam Conference had taken place in the early summer of 1945, and halfway through it, Winston Churchill was abruptly replaced: he had lost the General Election and it was his successor, Clement Attlee, who slid into that chair. Meanwhile, Franklin Roosevelt had died in the spring of 1945 and Harry S Truman, who had been his vice president, acceded to the White House.
By 1946, any idea of warmth between the US and the Soviet Union was the shadow of a memory. Naturally, there has never been any such thing as a perfectly stable world; yet in Britain, the codebreakers now had to be alert to a range of new threats. These were not just military. Britain’s stature was fast dissolving like thawing snow; the empire starting to crack, colonial power stuttering. The country faced the loss not only of imperial revenue, but also valuable military and naval bases. The GCHQ codebreakers would have to work ever more nimbly to pinpoint in advance the secret intentions of hostile powers – wherever in the world they might be. Added to this was the prospect of a vast swathe of continental Europe living under an immovable Communist dictatorship. More insidious than the menace of Soviet armies was the idea – believed by some – that a young generation from Calais to Athens could become revolutionaries with no coercion at all. There were millions of children growing up who had known nothing but totalitarianism. What sort of world might they demand?
There might have been a few politicians in Washington DC who advocated continuing a friendly stance towards Stalin, but the clashing ideologies would soon make that inconceivable. The Communists were convinced that capitalism bore within it the seeds of its own destruction, and that the American way of life – soulless consumerism propped up by exploitation of the workers, as they saw it – would eventually fold in on itself. Likewise, Americans were convinced that the oppressive tyranny of Communism, not to mention the mad cycle of purges and political imprisonments, would eventually be shaken off by people yearning for liberty.
In the febrile months that followed Potsdam, the Americans had returned to their old position, that of viewing the Soviets with hostile suspicion; Stalin for his part mirrored these sentiments towards the US. But this new phase was more sharply defined by the now former prime minister Winston Churchill, and also by an American diplomat from Milwaukee. Churchill, having been invited over to America, delivered a speech in 1946 in Fulton, Missouri, in which he famously declared: ‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.’ Perhaps mindful of the sensibilities not merely of former allies, but also of the many British who felt sympathy for the Russians, Churchill said: ‘From what I have seen of our Russian friends and allies during the War, I am convinced there is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect for than weakness, especially military weakness. For that reason, the old doctrine of a balance of power is unsound… I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war. What they desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their powers and doctrines.’
Churchill was speaking of cementing the Anglo-American alliance, of continuing that high level of liaison between all services. Again, there was a very faint element of bathos there: the idea that somehow, the British would not finish up being junior partners to the greatest military force that had ever been assembled in history. But there was at least the shared ideological commitment.
It was the American diplomat George F Kennan who, having been posted to Moscow, in 1946 wrote what was called ‘The Long Telegram’; this essay set out some highly influential views on the rules of engagement between these new and vast superpowers. Whereas Churchill had looked at the new fault-line of power in military terms, Kennan brought an element of psychoanalysis, focusing on Stalin’s neurosis and ‘traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity.’ The plan of the Kremlin, Kennan wrote in 1946, was to undermine the West: to promote and encourage dissent and disunity, to turn Western workers against capitalism. Kennan proposed the idea of containment: that the way for the West to deal with this growing power was to throw up blocks and obstacles to any possibility of socialist advancement across borders, and to fence off any gaps there may be in Europe or Asia or the Middle East that Soviet allies might take advantage of. In 1945 and 1946, there were already the cases of northern Iran (where codebreaker Alan Stripp had been operating); plus, in the Mediterranean, the knife-edge political situation of Greece. The British, in that particular case, were forced to pull out and to end their financial support for anti-Communist forces there. Greece was plunged into fresh internal conflict between Communist and right-wing factions, having already been ravaged and ruined at the hands of the Nazis. From the point of view of Downing Street and the White House, it would take very little for Stalin to begin to exert influence in that corner of the world, which in turn would make the rest of the Mediterranean – including already Communist-inclined countries such as Italy – intensely vulnerable to further advance.
Could there have been a chance that the Cold War, as it came to be known, might have been averted? Might there have been the chance that Americans and Russians could still have continued smiling side by side at press conferences? Even if the White House and the Kremlin had both been filled with cooing doves, it seems profoundly unlikely: the very principle of the atomic bomb made America so manifestly more powerful than any other nation that the Soviets – whoever had been leading them – would have behaved with nervy suspicion. And from the US side, the oppressive Soviet system of government – the killings, the disappearances, the utter refusal to acknowledge in any way the indescribable horror of the 1930s, when Stalin’s rule combined terror and famine and the death of millions – meant that its containment was about limiting the advance of evil.
British political sophisticates may have regarded such a view as impossibly Manichaean, and that the suffering of Russians was a part of the larger proces
s of bringing a truly just society into being. For a very long time, a large number of figures on Britain’s intellectual left were inclined to find explanations excusing the nature of Stalin’s rule.
Among the codebreakers at Eastcote, however, there was a sense of conviction that had come through simply listening. Among the older members of the team, there had been for a long time a sharp sense of the deadly potential of Bolshevism. Joshua (‘Josh’) Cooper, one of the organisation’s more notable and loveable eccentrics, had been pitting his wits against Soviet intelligence since the 1920s. His outward dotty manner – sudden exclamations of random words, falling under tables while interrogating German prisoners, throwing teacups into lakes – masked quite a serious ideological commitment to his work. At the end of the war, in the transition between Bletchley Park and Eastcote, it was Cooper who was arguing that this new phase of codebreaking work would require much greater funding to match any advances that the Soviets might make in computing and electronic encryption.
In a time when the British population was being rationed more severely than it was throughout the war, and when the nation’s debts were making the administration of empire impossible, the codebreakers were going to have to extemporise. Yet thanks to the careful groundwork of Gordon Welchman and Edward Travis during the war, the legacy of Bletchley Park carried one invaluable element that, for a time, made its work as effective as any being done by the Americans; and that was the sprawling web of Y service wireless intercept stations. Many of these were first established around the time of the First World War and the early inter-war years by Britain’s security services to secure an advantage in a new age of rapidly developing radio technology. They lay in or near regions that were seen as being vulnerable to Soviet influence.
The fear was not just that of Soviet rapacity, but also of the complete and utter collapse of an obliterated Europe. Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson addressed the US Senate in 1945 and told them: ‘In liberated Europe, you find that the railway systems have ceased to operate, that power systems have ceased to operate; the financial systems are destroyed. Ownership of property is in terrific confusion. Management of property is in confusion.’ Any sense of a structured working, functioning life ‘had come to a complete and total standstill’. Things seemed only to get worse through the long and lethal winter of 1946–47.
So at Eastcote, Commander Travis and Nigel de Grey had almost pre-empted the Americans in their unwavering focus on Soviet signals traffic. In Britain, the listening station at Forest Moor, just outside Harrogate, which had bustled with hundreds of Wrens throughout the war, was now switched full-time to monitoring the Soviet airwaves. Meanwhile, right the way around the world, in those listening stations in Ceylon and Singapore, the codebreakers were doing the same thing. It was not simply a question of hawkish cryptographers squaring up to an implacable Soviet enemy; in a sense, these units, and also the residual military listening units based in Europe, dotted around Italy and Austria and Germany, were listening to the faltering heartbeat of a continent.
Commander Travis and his colleague Captain Hastings were also assiduous at ensuring that their Commonwealth associates were keeping very much in step with this new world; this had meant to an extent that Travis had trodden on the toes of his Australian codebreaking counterparts – or subordinates as he would have seen it – insisting that their cypher activities be headed up by an Englishman. But there were hundreds, thousands of skilled personnel not only in Australia, but across Canada too; and Canada, of course, shares a northerly maritime border with the Soviet Union.
According to Richard Aldrich, any mismatch in wealth and investment between the British and the Americans was addressed quite simply. What the British lacked in computers, they gained in terms of scale of world-spanning coverage. And then of course, there were hundreds of young men who had a lightning flair for radio technology. The parts of the world these young people were based in were fissile. But the intelligence that they were then able to send back – intelligence shared with the Americans – was invaluable.
One of those bases – the Combined Bureau Middle East, based in Heliopolis, just outside Cairo, Egypt was still operating a comprehensive service, though the numbers working there were starting to decrease. There was a note of imperial grandeur about the intelligence-gathering setting, the glass and ironwork of the old museum HQ, a relic of unabashed Victorian cultural grandstanding amid the sands.
All of the radio intelligence gathered at Heliopolis had been relayed back to Whaddon Hall, Buckinghamshire. The immediate situation would have suggested that it was very much in Britain and America’s interests to keep the operation going in Egypt: a strategic spot from which to listen in to signals from southern Russia and the Balkan countries which were already within the Soviet sphere. But night was falling on the old British Empire, and on its old imperial ways of doing things.
Having tolerated Britain’s involvement in its affairs even after 1922 and the declaration of what turned out to be semi-independence, the Cairo authorities, having gained complete independence in 1936, made it quite plain that they now wanted the British to withdraw. The Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 had stipulated that 10,000 British troops could be stationed within Egypt’s borders; the war had taken that number up to about 200,000. And afterwards, demobilisation was slow. There were still over 100,000 troops stationed within the country’s Canal Zone. In other words, there were still populous British bases, and they were extremely unpopular with a rising generation of Egyptian nationalists. Whitehall had no wish to cause any unnecessary rancour; there was, apart from anything else, the need to think of keeping the Middle East calm and stable in order to safeguard oil supplies.
And Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee was quite content with the idea of pulling out completely; to him, imperialism was an anachronism. In addition, this was an age of air power, and of the atomic bomb. Old strategic concerns such as keeping Mediterranean routes open to the navy, and safeguarding the Suez Canal, were in Attlee’s view hopelessly outmoded. Senior military personnel from all three services argued bitterly with the prime minister about the principle of withdrawal. Chief of the Imperial General Staff Bernard Montgomery was particularly acerbic, as was former Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean, and former First Sea Lord Andrew Cunningham. But this was the flow of history; it was obvious to all in Whitehall, for instance, that India would very shortly be breaking free from British rule.
The core of the conflict between Whitehall and the military was to do with anxiety about the Soviet Union’s sensing a vacuum in the Middle East and filling it. There was also the question of Britain’s self-defence. No bomber at that stage could have flown all the way from Britain to populated Russia and back again – the British needed RAF bases and runways and facilities in the Middle East, from which they would if necessary be able to strike at Soviet industrial facilities in the Urals.
And above all, there was the painful matter of national prestige. It seemed to matter less to Attlee, with his visions of world authorities acting as world policemen. To his punchy foreign secretary Ernest Bevin, though, it was vital that Britain should not be infected with what he termed ‘pessimism’. And that meant – apart from many other things – maintaining a presence in the Middle East, because who else was there to do it? There was no guarantee, now the war was over, that America would not withdraw from the world stage and wrap itself once more in the blanket of isolationism. This was a moment when Britain was facing the Soviet Union and taking on the idea that if there were to be hostilities, there might not necessarily be all the help from America that was needed.
But Britain was also, to all intents and purposes, bankrupt. There was precious little money even for modest outbreaks of imperialism. And in the splendour of the sun at Heliopolis, the codebreakers and the secret listeners – some civilian – was now thinning out in terms of numbers, their base at the Flora and Fauna museum beginning to echo. In some senses, it was quite a life to give up. While for the m
ilitary, the role of wireless interceptor could often be miserable (postings in the desert, with all the attendant sand and scorpions and thunderstorms so heavy that headphones would crackle and hearing would be permanently damaged), for the civilians, it was quite a different thing. Aside from the work at Heliopolis, life for many was a whirl of a defiantly old-fashioned kind of decadence: smart bars, dream-like nights on terraces, the gossip and intrigue of well-heeled expat society. Aileen Clayton, a WAAF, wrote that she stayed at ‘Shepheard’s Hotel, which in those days before the great post-war revolution, was sheer Edwardian opulence. There seemed to be myriads of Egyptian and Sudanese suffragis flip-flopping around the hotel in their heel-less slippers, clad in white galabiyahs, and red cummerbunds and fezes.’
‘The food,’ she added (and this would have been particularly true of severely rationed post-war Britain), ‘after the deprivations of England, was good and plentiful.’ There were ‘plentifully stocked shops and gay night clubs’.1 Egypt was still a monarchy, under the rule of King Farouk. But in the days after the war, his colourfully decadent era too was coming to the point of dissolution: the final days of an era of aristocrats dining at Cairo restaurants such as the Auberge des Pyramides, the king amusing himself by throwing coloured pom-poms around the other diners. Even for codebreakers without any of these gilded social connections, life had been a daze of scent and colour and sun.
Now some of this skilled mix of radio interceptors and cypher experts were to be relocated: some to the British base in Sarafand, Palestine; and more to the large base on Cyprus. Both were absolutely key positions to be in. Cyprus enabled the codebreakers to intercept a great deal of Russian traffic at the point when the Soviets were casting a long shadow over Greece. In Palestine, the British faced quite a different challenge: that of furious and desperate Zionism.
The Spies of Winter Page 9