The Spies of Winter

by Sinclair McKay

  This had an unexpected repercussion for his brother back at Eastcote, though. Ernest Eytan was highly thought of – his work during the Battle of the Atlantic had been admired – and it had seemed natural that he should carry on doing what he was so good at. But his brother’s growing stature within Israel proved troublesome to a few in authority; it was suggested that Ernest might even pose a security risk. Now possibly there was a case to be made before the establishment of Israel that the family link might be construed as awkward. Afterwards, though, and it is difficult not to recoil at a tang of straightforward anti-Semitism in the implied suggestion that the ties between the Jewish brothers were far stronger than any sense of national loyalty or indeed the strictures of the Official Secrets Act. On top of this, it took the relevant authorities a long time to reach a final decision. It was only in 1952 that Ernest Eytan, ensconced quite happily at Eastcote, was moved. Another – rather less intense or secretive – civil service berth awaited at the Inland Revenue.

  Other Jewish codebreakers forged beguilingly varied lives. The brilliant Rolf Noskwith carried on for a bit at GCHQ Eastcote but he left in 1946 to attend to the family business. His father had been very successful with a lingerie firm and Noskwith wanted to ensure that Charnos, as it was called, kept thriving. A rather longer stint was put in by Squadron Leader Nakdimon Shabetai Doniach. Within those grim, plain grey pre-fabricated buildings at Eastcote, his innate elegance with languages made him a natural tutor to other codebreakers. According to historian Martin Sugarman, he ‘was in charge of teaching Russian and overseeing the teaching of Chinese to Foreign Office officials’.3 Even more vitally, at Eastcote, Doniach continued the technical expertise of the cryptanalysis operation; in an evolutionary step forward from Bletchley’s exhaustive card index system, he oversaw the creation of a complete technical Soviet dictionary. Any terms that came up – military, mechanical, avionic – would be logged, registered and monitored closely, the repetitions helping terrifically in cracking future codes and also sizing up military potential in different regions.

  There were other notably brilliant Jewish codebreakers who found a sort of lifetime vocation in cryptology. Indeed, there were several American recruits who, after the Park wound up, returned to the US and continued with codebreaking efforts, working in close union with their UK counterparts for many years afterwards. Among them were Arthur Levenson, Captain Abraham Sinkov and Major Solomon Kullback. Sinkov was a mathematician, born in Philadelphia and educated in New York, who had been recruited into William Friedman’s US cryptography efforts the year before the war broke out. Months before Pearl Harbor, Sinkov was among the small, incredibly secret party who travelled across the Atlantic via battleship to visit Bletchley Park, and to share German and Japanese codebreaking secrets and techniques.

  He was later posted around the world, pulling off dizzying feats in cracking Japanese codes at astonishing speed. On his return to the US, Sinkov became closely involved in the growing computerisation of the field; and he became a pillar of what was later to become the National Security Agency – GCHQ’s transatlantic cousin. As is traditional, Sinkov’s family had no idea what it was that he actually did, either in the war or afterwards. His son said that whenever Sinkov was asked, he would reply ‘I am a mathematician.’ On the occasion of his 90th birthday, President Clinton sent him a letter thanking him for all the work he had done on so much vital cryptography. That must have rather let the cat out of the bag; but then, who better to finally reveal Sinkov’s true achievement than the President himself?

  An even more ebullient Jewish figure in Britain during the war and afterwards back in the US, where he continued the signals intelligence work in partnership with GCHQ, was Solomon Kullback. He was a Brooklyn boy, educated in New York. Like Sinkov, his talents had been spotted early on by William Friedman. Enrolled in cryptography courses, the men were encouraged by Friedman to continue their more straightforward education by attending night classes and working extremely hard Kullback, like Sinkov, attained his doctorate in mathematics. He and Sinkov then progressed further in the code game. Before the war, code-generating machine manufacturers would try to persuade the US government into buying up their systems. Kullback was one of the men appointed to test these machines and their breakability. He invariably did break their codes, and the machines in question were not taken up. ‘We solved them for our own amazement and amusement,’ Kullback later said.4 As a result, according to the NSA, he and Sinkov did a great deal between them to ensure that US codes were as watertight as possible, at about the time when they were starting to get a serious lever into the Japanese codes.

  In 1942, Major Kullback (the military ranking came with the codebreaking) made the voyage across the Atlantic to join the cryptology revolution; throwing himself into the hut system at Bletchley, the beguiling atmosphere of ‘near anarchy’ and the concomitant startling brilliance of its successes against Enigma. He was embedded deep in Bletchley’s secrets, having also been made privy to the diplomatic codebreaking operation – spanning the globe – that was operating from Berkeley Street and which from 1942 was headed up by Commander Alastair Denniston. As well as focusing specifically on diplomatic cyphers, the operatives at the Berkeley Street premises in central London had also set about decrypting commercial communications from around the world.

  Major Kullback formed an admiration for his British counterparts. ‘I found the British most helpful and co-operative,’ he later said. ‘They were completely frank, open and above board with me and kept no detail of their operation, procedures, techniques or results from me.’6 After the war, and firmly back in the US, Kullback became the chief scientist of the National Security Agency, staying with the codebreakers and liaising with the British until the 1960s before moving into academia at George Washington University. Colleagues recalled with fondness how Dr Kullback would respond to codebreaking triumphs with the exclamation: ‘We dood it!’ This was a catch-phrase used by Hollywood comic entertainer Red Skelton. It may have sounded more beguiling coming from the master cryptographer.

  One other brilliant British codebreaker, who might have stayed on, instead followed Walter Eytan in his determination to help forge a new nation. Michael Cohen had left the Eastcote codebreaking operation by 1948; it was then that he started coding messages for the Jewish Agency Offices in London to be sent across to Jerusalem. Thereafter, with the state of Israel newly declared, he set sail for the port of Haifa. It was there that Cohen helped set up the ‘British kibbutz’ in the Upper Gallilee region. There followed years of intensive agriculture; and in cultural terms, the start of a period in which the British political left as a whole looked across at this burgeoning Israeli life of communal farms, with communal dining and family facilities, and sighed for what looked like the establishment of a form of utopia.

  As a result, Cohen left the codebreaking far behind him and, when later pressed to recall any details of that life (by the 1980s, numerous books were being published and the secret was out), he simply smiled and mentioned the two beautiful Wrens that he had worked with.

  It was not always perfectly easy to be Jewish in Britain during the middle years of the century, and there were codebreaking veterans who recalled minor outbreaks of anti-Semitism; cries from military men about the requirement for everyone to go ‘kosher’; and sly suggestions that Whitehall did not want to see too many Jewish people getting into positions of high authority within the codebreaking establishment. Frankly, it would be surprising if there had not been any such tensions: British society as a whole was scarcely free of prejudice – this was an era in which certain golf clubs would not admit members with Jewish-sounding names. But on the whole, the memories were positive – and this indeed was to prove crucial to the future. One such man who could reminisce very fondly over his codebreaking days was Arthur Levenson.

  Levenson, like Solomon Kullback, was a Brooklyn boy, and also like Kullback, almost preternaturally intelligent. Indeed, it was Kullback who gave him his introduct
ion to the world of cryptography just before the outbreak of war. After training – both in codes and in the military life – Levenson was shipped out to Bletchley Park alongside figures such as Bill Bundy. In conversation years later, Levenson was very wry and witty about the world that he found there.

  ‘We were treated like, oh, marvellous,’ he said. ‘I mean Americans were very few and we were supposedly integrated but we were treated as something special. They were very nice to us. The Director would invite us out, give us pink gin.’5

  After the war Levenson stayed on a little longer, working, as he said, ‘on a few problems’ – one of which, as we have seen, was plunging into the darkness of Germany to salvage Tunny machines and to question German cryptographers. Following these extraordinary experiences, he returned to the US, and after several years in Army Intelligence, became one of the key figures in the National Security Agency. The continued harmonious relationship between the Americans and the British reached a sort of good-humoured apogee in Levenson; and the Lewis Carroll-like eccentricity of many of the key British codebreakers – and their enthusiasm for fighting their way out of thickets of mathematics and language – also found an echo in Levenson’s huge love for the works of James Joyce.

  Indeed, his love for Joyce is a superb glimpse into the aesthetic tastes of codebreakers: novels such as Ulysses and Finnegans Wake were written, in part, as gleefully encoded texts, the meanings hidden deep within. Ulysses is more straightforward, though abounding in puns, reversals and indeed the recurring mystery of the postcard (coded) message ‘U.P: up’. Finnegans Wake was Joyce’s deliberate exercise in cryptology: the language constantly dissolves and reforms, entire paragraphs resemble cryptic crossword clues. Above it all is the sense of the author devising this enigma, an explicit, witty and mischievous tease for even the most intellectual of readers. Levenson – who in later years was assigned some of the knottiest cryptographic problems by the National Security Agency – must have adored wrestling with the novel that is composed of the swirling dreams of one man, penetrating the poetry and half rhymes and the baffling absurdist knockabout comedy routines to fish out its true themes of sex and death and the oppressive nature of history.

  One of Joyce’s great preoccupations, threaded through Ulysses, was that of a nation strangled and oppressed by colonialism and seeking to find its own voice and language; to recover a true sense of nationhood. Similarly, some of the Jewish codebreakers had an almost spiritual passion about the need for Israel to come into being as a ‘kingdom’; throwing off both the British and the Arabs. As with other Zionists, there were the pragmatists and moderates who sought some way – as Winston Churchill had suggested – to partition the land so that it could be shared among Arab and Jew alike. Then there were others who burned with a holier zeal; these believed that political violence was justified to establish the state. What sort of state it would be was merely window-dressing, fine detail. As a result, when the British effectively threw in the towel in 1947 and announced that within a year, the territory would be left under the watchful eye of the United Nations, events turned ugly.

  The codebreakers and secret listeners based in Sarafand were among the many British personnel who were going to have to pack up sensitive equipment and incredibly confidential paperwork amid an atmosphere of escalating anarchy. The Irgun guerrilla group was attacking British soldiers and Arab Palestinians; the Arabs were attacking Jews; and the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were beginning to crackle with gunfire. But there was a sense among some British soldiers that it was very important to hold back in terms of fire: a moral imperative that Jews should not be attacked after all the unimaginable horrors visited upon them in Europe. This was also a point when the world had little sympathy for the British position. There were still haunted, emaciated Jewish refugees living in European Displaced Person camps. How could they be denied the safety and security that everyone else took for granted?

  Signals officer Peter Davies, based in Sarafand, recalled the atmosphere as the time came for him and his intercept colleagues to try and ship their entire operation out. Some were headed for Cairo; other bits of equipment were to be shipped back to Britain; yet further items were to be consigned to the flames. In terms of interceptors and codebreakers, some of the operation in Jerusalem and Sarafand was being moved over to an ever expanding base on Cyprus.

  Startlingly, the copper wire used in their wiring systems became sought-after treasure: in the aftermath of war, there was a worldwide shortage. And so the signals officers found themselves racing against Bedouin raiders to get to remote desert installations to clear them out. Added to this, British withdrawal was fraught with the possibility of random death; soldiers climbing to the top of telephone poles became tempting targets for snipers.

  In May 1948, the British mandate in Palestine came to an end. But it might be noted that there are those in today’s Israeli equivalent of GCHQ – the world-beating Unit 8200 – who, even in the midst of technology scarcely conceivable to many, cheerfully reflect one of the key approaches to cyphers set down back in Britain, at Bletchley and GCHQ: that of the work being carried out in an atmosphere fizzing with free-wheeling free-thinking. One former Unit 8200 officer recently told the Financial Times that operatives are expected to be argumentative, to question everything and at times to disobey their senior officers. ‘In intelligence, you can’t only work by rules,’ he said. ‘You need to be open-minded. We teach them [new recruits] how to work out of the box.’7 Edward Travis and Nigel de Grey would have nodded vigorously at this.

  By 1948, the British still had a foothold in Egypt, with operations continuing at Heliopolis, and still assiduously monitoring Russian communications. But that foothold was growing shakier by the week; Egyptian nationalists were growing angrier about the idea of foreign soldiers patrolling their streets.

  A great deal was being asked of the codebreakers at Eastcote. The startling and rapid dissolution of the British Empire – the extinguishing of its power in Asia and key regions of the Middle East – punched a hole in the gathering of intercepted communications. A sudden Soviet switch in encryption techniques was going to present the cryptologists with another crisis, on the face of it insurmountable. Yet at this crucial moment in the late 1940s – when Britain’s influence was melting, and the influence of America growing – their work carried on as feverishly as ever. And while political relations between Britain and the US became rather scratchier, the codebreakers themselves not only continued their unusually harmonious arrangements, but also were by now allowing others into this warm embrace too. Eastcote and Arlington Hall were forming, with Canada, Australia and New Zealand, a codebreaking superpower: a global team of some of the most towering intellects, pitting themselves against the savage complexities of Soviet secrecy.

  And in the midst of this kaleidoscope of inter-continental change, one senior Eastcote codebreaker was set the task of plotting out the future of GCHQ; what could the codebreakers learn from their own history, and most particularly from their own mistakes, that would make them a more formidable force in the difficult years to come?

  Chapter Twelve

  ‘The Signs and Portents Will Not Be Lacking’

  The village of Iver, in Buckinghamshire – about 20 miles (30 kilometres) from central London and about five miles (eight kilometres) from the Eastcote HQ of the codebreakers – had the faintest tang of show-business about it. The wealthy hamlet was very close to the Pinewood film studio which, despite the pinched nature of the times, was producing dozens of dramas and comedies, often with imported Hollywood stars. Home-grown stars such as Sidney James and Roger Moore were to acquire properties there. In the late 1940s, the neighbours of Nigel de Grey must have wondered if he had missed his vocation, and whether he should be working at Pinewood too.

  As far as they knew, this unassuming man was a civil servant of some sort by day. But he was also a hugely enthusiastic amateur actor who threw himself into a variety of different amateur productions. De Grey ha
d been a member of the Old Stagers, and the rather upmarket ‘Windsor Strollers’ too. Surely this quiet chap in his early sixties should have been working for producer Michael Balcon or director Basil Dearden?

  The pleasing incongruity of Nigel de Grey’s story is that, of course, every day in that period he was right at the heart of the Cold War, fighting to break into Soviet cable traffic, as military and intelligence experts all around declared that the next world war was about to begin. De Grey had a kind of unnatural calm that was also extremely apparent when – at the behest of Eastcote’s director Commander Travis in 1948 – he put together a top-secret document looking towards the future of the codebreakers, laying the foundations of the new GCHQ by examining their recent history. The organisation was about to expand in numbers once more. So, learning from both successes and failures at Bletchley, how were the codebreakers going to continue to adapt to this new world of daily atomic jeopardy? How were they going to keep one step ahead?

  ‘Dear Eric,’ begins a neatly handwritten note at the top of this (now) de-classified document. De Grey was addressing this thesis to his colleague Group Captain Eric Jones (who was later to succeed Travis as the head of GCHQ). ‘A point I meant to make somewhere in the notes I sent you did not I think find a place after all.’1 This prefacing point was to do with the numbers of men needed for Y Service units dotted around the world. These brilliant radio experts were attached to army, navy and Royal Air Force and their staffing levels were dictated by the needs of those services. De Grey’s point was that the Y Service personnel should in fact match the enemy’s numbers – if the enemy had multitudes of trained wireless operators sending out illimitable signals, then similar numbers were needed on the British side to counter them.