Chapter Six
Decoding the Soviet Heart
Any semblance of trust had been utterly destroyed. Nations looked at former enemies and allies alike – and could not fathom their intentions. There was no sense of security to be found anywhere. It was, in many ways, the ideal time to be a double agent in Europe: relatively easy in all that confusion and agitation to feign loyalty to one country while secretly working to promote a revolutionary ideology that did not recognise borders. There were men and women, long-time spies, embedded deep in the United Kingdom and America. The British codebreakers, together with their US counterparts, were soon to discover just how horrifyingly porous their security services had been.
Consider the world in which the shadowy double agents were operating. This was at a moment, in the late 1940s, when the expectation – the dread – of a Third World War was universal. Although armies were demobilised and arsenals spent, there was never for a moment any let-up in international tension, nor in cross-border hatreds, nor indeed in individual anxieties and neuroses. The loathing the Poles had for the Jews – who had been in Poland for 600 years – had in no way diminished, despite all the unimaginable horrors visited upon them; then there was the jagged suspicion and hostility that lay between many Poles and Ukrainians after a war filled with full-throated Nazi and Communist collaborations and atrocities. There was also the bitter hatred among Central Europeans – Czechs, Hungarians, Romanians – for the German civilians who had found themselves helpless in territories that they had imagined conquered. Throughout the Balkans, meanwhile, the old tectonic fault lines of hatred gaped ever wider. Everywhere throughout the continent were millions of hideously vulnerable Displaced Persons, as they came to be known.
The most extraordinarily vulnerable of these were the Jews who had somehow survived the camps and the nightmarish death marches. After a period of partial recovery from the privations of the camps, under the horrified eyes of American soldiers, some of these former prisoners tried returning to their old villages in Poland and settlements deeper in Eastern Europe; what they found was stark inhumanity. Their houses were now occupied, without any shame, by villagers who had simply moved in as the Jews had been forcibly transported out. Those villagers had their possessions; they even wore their winter clothes and the jewellery that they had thought hidden. The emaciated Jewish people who had returned to claim what was theirs were furiously denounced, threatened, pushed away. In a few cases, they were quite simply murdered.
The Jews of Poland, of Latvia, Lithuania, Galicia, Romania, Hungary, all those forested lands, now had to adjust to a world that had been completely torn down around them. Even in a time of so-called peace, their former neighbours had passed far beyond any sense of legality, let alone decency. Return was quite simply impossible. There were parts of Poland and the Baltic states where they would never be safe.
The world that the codebreakers was listening to with anxious focus was a continent swarming with acutely helpless humanity, one in which the mass slaughter could so very easily begin again. And it was a continent which had the weight of Stalin’s Russia bearing down upon it. The Soviets were eager to harvest political advantage from these flashpoints of distress. Its double agents wanted to further the Soviet cause by any means. There were a few who genuinely believed that it would make the world better.
For, as the commentator Neal Ascherson wrote, there was a time when the word ‘Europe’ was associated with darkness. The war had exposed something more than mindless slaughter: it had revealed one of the continent’s supposedly highest cultures, Germany, to be a machine for determined, deliberate, pre-meditated mass murder. Yet the silence after the war echoed throughout the world; everyone knew what had happened in the Nazi death camps – yet very few spoke specifically of the Jews. No-one wanted to look this slaughter directly in the eye. When the Allies liberated those camps in the forests of eastern Europe – deep in the territory expropriated by the Nazis, so that the mass killings took place far from the eyes and ears of those in the heart of Germany – it might have been imagined by some that they had brought relief. Yet how could they have done? Entire families, millions of them, wiped out: for those very few who survived, what conceivable relief could there be?
At Eastcote, the listeners and the codebreakers were not merely monitoring traffic for the sake of some spy-versus-spy game: this was about checking the pulse of a sick, traumatised continent that could – at any moment – go into convulsions, and so fall deeper into the tight grip of Soviets claiming to bring stability. It has been observed that one of the intriguing philosophical conundrums for Europe in times of peace is how a continent without any discernible eastern border thinks of itself. Stalin’s Russia was doing its utmost to define that border; the Americans would soon be doing the same. But with Central Europe seething with so many people who were homeless and stateless – people who apparently belonged nowhere – the potential for renewed conflict was never more than a hair’s breadth away.
The agency dealing with this multitude of misery was the newly created United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, which in turn had taken over from large contingents of the American army that had worked ferociously to set up hundreds of camps for refugees. There were some Jews who were still reluctant to move too far from the concentration camps in which they had been held. As communities very slowly came back to life – courtships and marriages among the young – so there were some people who wanted to keep a hold of some familiarity, no matter how dreadful.
They were not the only Displaced Persons. For some time before the end of the war, the British authorities had known how the Czech government planned to deal with the Germans within its borders. After the war, Czech president Edouard Beneš declared that ‘we have decided to eliminate the German problem in our republic once and for all’. Until 1947, that elimination was carried out systematically. All property owned by Germans was placed under state control. Then those Germans, some three million or so, had their Czech citizenship revoked. They were stateless. Then they were expelled – forced back to Germany. There was nothing orderly about the process. It is reckoned that some 267,000 Germans died.
This was just Czechoslovakia. As Neal Ascherson wrote: ‘Some 12 million ethnic Germans fled or were driven out of east and central Europe… This gigantic act of ethnic cleansing, as we would now call it, was euphemised as “population transfer”.’1 Such a transfer on a vast scale was effected from Poland and the lands of East Prussia, country labourers and old aristocrats alike fleeing through the winter ice from the advancing Soviet forces. Stalin had declared as part of his own war settlement that these lands would be returned to the Slavs. In the aftermath of the Holocaust – where millions of people were forcibly transported to their deliberate pre-meditated slaughter – this was not remotely on the same scale. But the essential point was this: in the midst of the violence meted out to the German families heading back west (and how oddly this foreshadowed the apocalyptic violence that came with 1947’s partition of India, when millions were killed throughout a similar ‘population transfer’), the West had to try, however it could, to ensure that repercussions would not sow the seeds for further conflict.
The codebreakers at Eastcote were intensely alive to the advances of the Soviet Union in this time; having carefully monitored the Communists throughout the inter-war years, men such as Edward Travis knew that Soviet ambitions were not merely territorial but in a sense psychological too. There were some who believed that, given just the smallest chance, the Soviets would conquer of all Western Europe, including Britain, right up to the Atlantic shore itself.
And this was not baseless Cold War paranoia either; rather, a series of quite extraordinary decrypts made by the British and the Americans of Soviet coded messages was unveiling an utterly chilling reality: that Soviet sympathisers and agents had infiltrated themselves right into the very heart of the US and UK intelligence services. Indeed, the codebreakers were about to draw back a veil on espiona
ge on an unprecedented and terrible scale.
The decrypting operation – known only to the tightest and most select circle of American and British codebreakers – was eventually called Venona. What had started as pulling at a metaphorical loose thread of encrypted Soviet messages had suddenly unravelled into a series of appalling revelations. The story of the Venona Project now reads in many ways as the most perfect symbol of an era; it is a story about a secret so grave that, at first, not even national leaders could be let in on it. The President of the USA and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom were initially kept carefully out of the loop. In a blackly comical sense, Venona was almost too secret for anyone to act upon – for fear that their enemies would see that their codes had been broken. Most of all, though, it is the story of the subterranean struggle to shape the future destiny of the continent. Venona might be counted as one of the most dazzling moments of the early USA/UK decryption alliance, even if – by the late 1940s – it was accompanied by a sense of horror and impotence on the part of the codebreakers.
It was often decorously said, as previously mentioned, that throughout the war, Bletchley operatives were not reading Soviet traffic, because after 1941, the Soviets were allies. This might be the case, but Soviet messages were certainly being read elsewhere: Arlington Hall, the American equivalent of Bletchley Park, in Virginia. The reason was a most serendipitous discovery made in 1943 by Lieutenant Richard Hallock.
Whereas the Germans had favoured electric encryption techniques with machines like Enigma, the Soviets very often used a much more cumbersome system, known as ‘one-time pads’. Yet these pads, with numbered tear-off sheets, were in principle much more secure than any machine cypher. The system involved identical pairs of pads or booklets, each page filled with randomly generated numbers. The message to be encrypted would be paired with a page of the pad – both agents, for instance, might agree on ‘page 4’. The message would be encyphered according to the key on that page. But because only those operatives were using that key – and because after they used it they destroyed the page – it would be completely impossible for anyone else to break into that code. With no key to go on, and with no other copies of that particular encypherment procedure, there was no way to get a lever into it (unlike the Enigma which had a couple of crucial mathematical vulnerabilities).
The drawback in this fail-safe system was that the pads took a lot of time and effort to produce. Those random numbers had to be generated (not so easy as it sounds: there was a suggestion that teams of Soviet women were employed to sit in rows and shout out numbers off the top of their heads – but even this method could never be truly random; there would always be unconscious links). On top of this, those pairs of identical pads had to be printed and distributed; even the paper used had to be of a very specific quality to make it especially easy to burn or destroy. And in the midst of the German assault on Russia from 1941 onwards, it has been suggested that the Soviet authorities – buckling under the weight of Nazi aggression – were struggling, and the resources for the pads and agents were beginning to run out. Whatever the case was, the Soviets made the most atrocious error: they accidentally re-printed 25,000 pages of randomly generated numbers. That meant that the pads were no longer unique.
Moreover, these pads were being used by the Soviet diplomatic service. In February 1943, Hallock and the codebreakers at Arlington Hall – working on intercepted messages had been passed on by the US Signals Intelligence Service – realised that they were looking at a potential treasure trove. Like Josh Cooper and Nigel de Grey, the prevailing attitude among US codebreakers towards the Soviets as wartime allies was that they would cease to be allies very quickly; and so anything that could be done to get a crowbar into their communications would be a shrewd investment for the future. So, in America, a very small, very tight-knit team began work.
It would become apparent that the US codebreakers had happened upon some appalling intelligence; not merely relating to Soviet infiltration of secret departments, but also the extent to which the Soviets had managed to spy on the American atomic bomb project. In other words, out of one encryption mistake, out of one batch of duplicate code pads, were to come revelations that were absolutely key to the balance of power in Europe.
One of the American codebreakers was a young Gregory Peck lookalike called Meredith Gardner; by 1944, Gardner was breaking into the fearsomely complex NKVD (Soviet secret service) codes. Gardner was in some ways the perfect US mirror of the academically inclined British codebreakers. Born in 1912 and raised in Texas, he was an almost absurdly gifted linguist. He could read Spanish, Lithuanian, Russian, Sanskrit and German. When America entered the war in 1941, Gardner, by then a lecturer at the University of Akron, was recruited the following year to work as a cryptologist at Arlington Hall (and, some years later, he, like so many of his fellow American codebreakers, crossed the Atlantic for a spell at GCHQ in Cheltenham).
Gardner’s brilliance with German was one thing; he was also swift to master Japanese. Soon, he was making a detailed study of Chinese. But in 1946, the Venona Project was pushed his way; and the deeper he became immersed in it, the more it began to dominate his every working hour. Peter Wright, the MI6 operative who wrote the controversial book Spycatcher in the 1980s, said of Gardner: ‘He was a quiet, scholarly man, entirely unaware of the awe in which he was held by the other cryptanalysts.’2 Gardner himself talked of his ‘magpie attitude to facts, the habit of storing things away that did not seem to have any connection at all’.3 Like many of his British counterparts, he also had a flair for extraordinarily difficult crosswords.
Yet here was a man who would prove to be partly instrumental in setting the terms of the fast-freezing Cold War. In 1946, Gardner (according to Peter Wright), using old Soviet codebooks that had been retrieved from Finland, unlocked some decrypts which contained hair-raising information. These secret Soviet messages, intended to be passed to senior NKVD agents back in Moscow, had referred to the Manhattan Project – the intensely secret testing of the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, New Mexico. That was the first horrifying glimpse that the balance of world power was shifting. Gardner’s decrypts went on to reveal more, including the codenames given to Soviet double-agents, from which, with a lengthy process of cross-referencing, their real identities could be guessed at. There was, for instance, American spy-ring leader Julius Rosenberg (codename LIBERAL). Hideously, for the British, there were also mentions – still disguised by means of codenames, but nonetheless there – of the MI6 double agents Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby. It took some time to narrow down the clues offered by the content of the messages passed to Moscow; but their eventual unmasking would be inevitable.
This dreadful intelligence was passed upwards – though intriguingly, not quite so far upwards as the Oval Office or Number 10 Downing Street. At first, a decision was clearly made to shield the president and the prime minister from the news. Even by the hermetic standards of the codebreakers, this was all kept extraordinarily secret; barely a handful of Americans and only the tiniest smattering of British cryptologists were allowed in on the Venona revelation. Other agencies were shut out: the FBI was given no indication; MI5 and MI6 were – apart from a couple of senior figures – equally locked out. Because of course, at the very first inklings that Gardner and his small dedicated team were uncovering unexpectedly vast secrets, the next terrific anxiety was this: how to make absolutely certain that the Soviets did not realise that their encryptions had been peeled open. Having exposed the fizzing stick of dynamite, what were the codebreakers then to do with it?
According to intelligence historian John Earl Haynes, the exquisite difficulty for the hierarchy in Arlington Hall was that these diplomatic cables also revealed that back in the early 1940s, the Soviets had made a deliberate concerted push to infiltrate agents into all corners of the American military, together with its industry and indeed its intelligence services. The Venona cables constituted only a tiny percentage of the bulk of Soviet com
munications; therefore it would be reasonable to extrapolate from this the assumption that the numbers of unrevealed Soviet agents still working within American society were huge.
The paranoia was not misplaced. It transpired that – rather like the Cambridge Spies – there were highly placed Soviet sympathisers everywhere throughout American intelligence and security. According to Haynes, despite the intense secrecy around Venona, a sense or a whisper of what was unfolding somehow got through to the British double agent Donald Maclean, who was then working with the British Embassy in Washington. It took years for the full consequences of the Venona revelation to ripple through the intelligence services; at first, agents could not be identified by their code-names alone. One can decypher all the messages in the world, but when faced with agent code-words such as ‘Fakir’, ‘Dodger’ and ‘Grandmother’, analysts were completely in the dark. Was ‘Grandmother’ in the Admiralty? Might ‘Fakir’ be attached to top-secret nuclear work?
But Venona was not simply a short-term project: as we will see, the American and British codebreakers would join forces to form a top-secret team-within-a-team to work full-time on this vast harvest of cables, these thousands of messages. And the more they worked on them, the more references and clues to the traitor agents would be thrown up.
It is a measure of the purity of the codebreakers’ calling that Meredith Gardner always appeared to consider his work not so much in practical terms as a sort of work of art. He and his dedicated team were squaring up to an intellectual, mathematical and linguistic challenge that had its own inherent beauty and elegance; delving into hidden structures to bring the truth out into the open. His closest working partner was the FBI agent Robert J Lamphere, whose role was not to break codes but to chase down the spies exposed by the decrypts. Lamphere later paid tribute to Gardner, recalling how out of bundles of encryptions, he would somehow extract order out of fractal chaos and that success came with a small smile.
The Spies of Winter Page 11