And where should they all put themselves? Again, de Grey reached to the past for inspiration as he sought to outline the new sort of institution that would be needed. In 1939, he said of the move to Bletchley from St James’s Park, ‘central space was always lacking from the first mobilisation of 137 people in accommodation for 80. Building was always therefore against time.’ The blocks that were built, he said, at least constituted ‘an asset’ to the government, in the way that the ‘wooden hutments’ did not (although one wonders what the shade of de Grey would make of Bletchley Park’s exquisite restoration of said ‘wooden hutments’ for today’s modern museum – an English Heritage ‘asset’, no less). ‘It was a definite advantage’, wrote de Grey, ‘that we had on the staff a man who had had long experience in public works [actually water and drainage]’. This allowed him to override civil servants from the Ministry of War who in many cases were ‘amateurs’. This man, said de Grey, now dead, had left behind a legacy: ‘He left on his death complete plans for an underground building to house GC and CS in war-time.’
Even at the first stirrings of nuclear neurosis, many government departments were starting to think in subterranean terms. In the event of war, it was starting to be believed, everything on the surface would simply disappear in a scorching instant flash. There had been suggestions for underground housing of codebreakers before; prior to the move to Bletchley, one idea was to put the cypher experts in quarters and offices beneath the St James’s Park HQ of MI6. Hitler’s bombing, many assumed, would start the very minute war was declared, and the Luftwaffe attack would almost immediately leave the entire city shattered and in flames. But the underground notion was abandoned; delicate brainwork – and fissile personalities – meant that the chances of any startling innovations emerging from such close quarters was low.
But it was clear that Eastcote, on the outer fringes of London, could not be a permanent home. For some of the codebreakers, it was maddening to be stuck in suburbia: they wanted the neon and the rush of town. Others hankered for rural peace. It would not be too long before an inspirational compromise was suggested.
And what then of the larger number of recruits who would be needed to be drawn in at speed once Britain went to war with Stalin? Indeed, even without conflict, the spreading global reach of the Cold War mean that the codebreaking was poised to expand further. De Grey was concerned about human happiness (and its knock-on effects in the workplace); having seen the low morale of many women who worked in those cypher factories, he wondered how things might be improved for their successors.
‘It should not be forgotten that new entry will be entirely unfamiliar with Civil Service rules, regulations etc,’ he observed. ‘They are accustomed to payment on the knocker and unaccustomed to mistakes in deductions of income tax and subsequent recovery. They do not understand Civil Service jargon and circumlocution. They want to know exactly where they stand and actively resent delays in getting answers. Nothing saps new entry’s morale quicker than dilatoriness in dealing with their troubles.
‘A very large number, especially girls, have no other resource than their weekly pay,’ he added, a nod to the independent means of the smarter young women and an acknowledgement of the new generation of young working women coming through. At Bletchley, he said, ‘a very large number were badly treated – chiefly by blunders – and redress took months to obtain. Establishment can do a very great deal to make life tolerable to new entry, by clear explanation of conditions and prompt and accurate attention to hard cases.’9
Any feminist cheering that this might have evoked would, however, have been choked by his next point. He said of some new entrants that ‘they may appear and may be stupid but they need all the more to have humane handling.’ This unfortunate phrasing made many of the Typex operators sound like cattle. De Grey’s progressiveness only went so far. Of these badly treated Bletchley women, he said, ‘hardship cases were by no means confined to the lower decks’.
So much for the human factor; but the codebreakers were running a global operation in a world shifting dizzyingly fast. The ambitions of Nigel de Grey were evidently shared by his colleagues in the directorate, but could they ever hope to achieve them? They would have been all too aware how overshadowed they were by their one-time parent service MI6; and even more piercingly aware of the battles ahead to compete for ever shrinking sums of cash.
As we have seen, the Eastcote establishment had already been writhing under a number of financial frustrations, even down to the vexed question of whether the Middlesex setting entitled the staff to a few shillings extra of London weighting in their wages. But on a broader canvas, the impotence that de Grey – and doubtless many like-minded colleagues felt – was palpable. America was effervescent with innovation, a future filled with reel-to-reel tapes and flashing lights; there was little doubt that the lumbering Soviet empire was fast catching up. And here was Britain – the greatest and most creative of all codebreaking innovators – gradually suffocating in the grey sludge of austerity debt and Whitehall inertia as, across the world, vast chunks of empire snapped off, bringing a diminishment that was very hard to adjust to.
That said, there were still ‘overseas centres’, and the question of how they should be used in the forthcoming Third World War was also addressed. De Grey was anxious for clarity (a contrast to the opening months of the Second World War, when various separate departments appeared to be gainsaying one another). This new-look GCHQ would have very well-defined lines of communication with the military. Also, it was not just a matter of sending through thousands of decrypted messages; there had to be clarity in terms of who did the filtering of the military intelligence. De Grey’s preference was clearly that this should also stay within the realm of GCHQ. The whole set-up was cleaner that way.
And what about the Dominions, which were, at the time that de Grey was writing, being pulled into the unprecedentedly wide embrace of the UK/USA agreement? How things had changed! Canada, noted de Grey, had had a rather mixed codebreaking war. It was ‘part service, part civil, very active in interception but small and inexperienced in processing’. What about ebullient Australia? Quite apart from the fact that it was just about to suffer its own Soviet double-agent drama, it too had had an up-and-down war. ‘From the American standpoint,’ observed de Grey, ‘it had no intelligence reporting function, merely the production and circulation of decrypts.’ That said, the Australian authorities were proud of their signals intelligence operation, which was so active in the field units of the Australian army and air force.
Then there was the Indian elephant in the room: at the time that de Grey was writing, the Indian Congress had achieved independence, and Jinnah had his Pakistan. The weight of British signals and codebreaking work was based on that golf course just outside Colombo. Nigel de Grey harked back drily to the days when the Experimental Wireless Centre at Delhi had generated dramatic amounts of ‘acrimony’. This was partly a conflict of seniority – who got to control the flow of intelligence through Delhi and Colombo. It was, de Grey said, a ‘persistence of the traditions of the bad old days’, by which he meant that the military was inclined to sideline Bletchley Park’s overall centralised dominance. Added to this, the man in charge at Delhi, Lieutenant Col Marr-Johnson, had a notably corrosive manner. Codebreaker Alan Stripp, while not naming him, observed that ‘too often administration relied on authority rather than professionalism’. Of course, none of this was the fault of the Indian codebreakers, or those based in Ceylon; they had, said de Grey, done a splendid job against the specific complexities of Japanese codebreaking. What concerned him was that lack of centralised control; this new age would change all that. No matter how congenial the idea of anarchy may have been to the thought processes of cryptologists, the organisation behind them had to be strong and rigid and in complete charge at all times.
De Grey could not pronounce on the future role of the Commonwealth: the whole thing was ‘in flux’. But when it came to allies, he said, ‘all the eviden
ce points one way… There cannot be a successful partial liaison – all or nothing.’ And the codebreaking centres, wherever they might be, had to resist the excessive demands of military brass-hats. All had been well ‘save for financial starvation’ in the 1930s, wrote de Grey. But then, with the war, the senior military hierarchy started to take a sharper interest in codes and in building up their own Y Services with ever expanding numbers of their own officers taking control (or trying to take control) of cryptanalysis. This, to de Grey, was an intolerable invasion. It ‘diminished the scope’ of the codebreakers. Moreover, each service ‘was a law unto itself’. Intelligence got duplicated – and this carried the danger of reflecting endlessly in a mad hall of mirrors.
Worse, Bletchley Park had been ‘none too clear on its principles and rather took the line of limiting its responsibilities’. In other words, it had offered itself as a batman or valet to the military, rather than maintaining the strict integrity of its own independence. That would have to change. ‘While it is obviously necessary to set a limitation on the responsibilities of any organisation…’ wrote de Grey, ‘GCHQ should not hesitate to pursue any course that may lead to better signals intelligence and better use of it, whatever the theoretical objections. Had GC and CS halted in its stride every time objections were made, there would have been no Naval Section, no intelligence work in Hut 3, no combination of sources in the BMP and no task control from Hut 6 or Hut 3 or Naval Section… On the other hand,’ he added, ‘GC and CS was a laggard in… military field code work and many other respects. It deserved a good deal of what it got.’
The magnificent conclusion de Grey was steering towards would have delighted his colleagues. ‘All this points towards clear thinking and plain speaking with GCHQ customers,’ he wrote. ‘It points too towards the lesson that the peace time organisation should be the skeleton of the war organisation – “the image of war without its guilt” [de Grey was quoting Robert Surtees on the subject, strikingly, of hunting]… so that on mobilisation it is a well-running machine. If that is done and GCHQ avoid the great mistake of GC and CS which was to create at the very first emergency an anomalous complex in its internal system entirely contrary to its planned and accepted organisation, friction and dangerous complications should be avoided.’
But perhaps the most startling aspect of this blueprint for the future was that it was being drawn up by a civilian with seemingly no consultation with any member of the armed forces that it would be dealing with, its ‘customers’. The codebreakers may have transformed Bletchley from a cottage industry into a worldwide factory; but the men running GCHQ seemed as defiantly quirky and eccentric as their forebears. In America, the mighty army and navy had contributed cryptanalysts such as Telford Taylor and Bill Bundy and the meshing of military and civilian personnel carried with it a feeling of determined military discipline; this sense – of an advanced and complex establishment deeply and inextricably intertwined with the military – continued and deepened after the war. With the nascent GCHQ, there was a faintly maverick flavour: not in any political sense (the codebreakers if they could be characterised at all in such terms were profoundly conservative) but rather that they did not welcome intrusion into their territory. Brigadier John Tiltman and Lieutenant Colonel Marr-Johnson were among the few to continue with their military careers. In contrast were figures such as the bearded sandal-wearing Highland-dancing expert Hugh Foss and the chess champion (and regular chess correspondent) Hugh Alexander. There was a sense of continuity with Bletchley – and with the First World War Room 40 operation – that verged on the defiant. Cloak-wearing Nigel de Grey – by day analysing the terrifying lurches in geopolitics that threatened Europe with further bloodshed and by evening appearing on stage in amateur productions with the Windsor Strollers – seemed somehow to symbolise this unashamed left-fieldedness.
Two key developments from Russia – viewed with horror by the British and Americans – combined with a torrid period for MI6 – would also come to mark the British establishment’s understanding of just how vital the new GCHQ would be.
Chapter Thirteen
The Emerald Labyrinth
During the winter months – and the British winters of the late 1940s were particularly unforgiving – Forest Moor could be shrivellingly bleak. Based a few miles outside the prosperous Yorkshire town of Harrogate, in a landscape that the Brontë sisters would have thrilled to, was a vast aerial farm: a metal forest of tall antennae covering many acres which, since the end of the war, had been picking up huge numbers of transmissions from the Soviet Union. The intelligence harvested at Forest Moor was shared, automatically, with the Americans. The base stood as a symbol of the remarkable relationship. In terms of working conditions, gradual improvements had been made since wartime days, when Wrens remembered the very specific discomforts of working shifts in rickety structures buffeted by blade-sharp winter winds.
As with all other radio establishments, those who worked there did so under conditions of direst secrecy. It was a base that the Americans found particularly helpful, covering as it did so much of East Germany and Eastern Europe. But it was also the very easiness of that alliance between the US and the UK that led Commander Travis and Nigel de Grey to propose an even snugger proposition to their Washington counterparts: a joint code-generating system.
Effective though Typex had been for the British, this essentially Enigma-like machine was pretty much obsolete by the late 1940s. It was not just a matter of technology: the fact was that it was also looking increasingly vulnerable to enemy codebreakers. The system could be cracked. But money was desperately short; how could a new system of code-generating be brought in without crippling the entire nascent GCHQ operation?
According to Richard Aldrich, the British codebreakers, in making their pitch to their richer American colleagues, picked a curious means of doing so. They chose to reveal dramatically to their allies that the US needed to update its own system – because the British codebreakers had levered their way into it, analysing the workings of the Sigaba system. In essence, the directorate at Eastcote let the Americans know that they had been blithely – and secretly – burrowing into their most closely guarded cryptological machinery. This was not to say that they had been actually reading their messages (though of course one way to tell that one had really understood encoding machinery would be to unravel its efforts). Such a thing would have been considered an outrage – even though each side must have assumed that enemies and friends alike were always worth eavesdropping on.
The British point was to tell the Americans that a new, joint code-generating system – an Inter-Allied mechanism, used interchangeably, and with complete trust – would be fantastically convenient, cost-effective and diplomatically attractive to all concerned. There was one setback: the Americans reacted to this British revelation of the penetration their Sigaba system with complete horror. As personally close as many of the codebreakers were, the idea that the British had had the potential capacity to read their secret traffic went quite beyond the boundaries of rudeness. It opened up new vistas of neurosis, especially in the face of the ongoing Venona Soviet decrypts, which were unmasking British and American Soviet double agents alike.
There was a slight dash of spicy hypocrisy in that reaction too, of course, for the Americans had been quite blithe about poking around in British diplomatic communications as sent via the Typex system; it had not taken Washington codebreakers long to master the principles of that encoding technology. But the essential fear about security remained perfectly valid. Even by 1948, there were still bumps and spats between London and Washington. One such had come with the British behaviour over the Palestine Mandate. Some in the US establishment took a bleak view of British treatment of Jewish refugees attempting to make landfall in Palestine. Equally, though, there were staff at Eastcote – and throughout Whitehall – who were mistrustful of handing Middle Eastern decrypts over to the Americans.
This was the dawn of the Central Intelligence Agency in t
he US, and there were those in Whitehall who suspected – without any particular evidence – that this new organisation contained ‘Zionist sympathisers’. There was also a jumpy conviction that sensitive decrypts had already been leaked, thus aiding the more ferocious Zionists in and around Jerusalem. But, according to Professor Aldrich, Whitehall was unaware that American codebreakers had in fact been picking up signals from Zionist groups in the region, to do with the supply of arms – and then failing to pass such news over to their British allies.
These outbreaks of friction between friends were perfectly understandable though: such an intelligence-sharing arrangement was still very new territory, just a matter of six or seven years old. It was reasonable for both sides to expect a few boundaries. Britain’s wider interests in the Middle East at that time were going to be crucial to its future prosperity. In the absence of empire, and with the country’s need for oil growing, it was already teetering along a very high tightrope. On top of this was the sure awareness that America had somehow, and invisibly, become by far and away the dominating partner in this alliance. And America’s own global interests were seldom going to be to the advantage of Britain’s material wealth.
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