The Spies of Winter

by Sinclair McKay

  Oddly enough, one chess expert who knew rather more about Hugh Alexander’s secret career than most was Harry Golombek. In 1945, Golombek took up the job of full-time chess correspondent for The Times, following competitions in which Alexander took part. But he had also had the opportunity to play Alexander at Bletchley Park, for he had been there as well. Indeed, when Alexander had taken on the responsibility of Hut 8 leadership, Golombek had found the chance for some games of chess with Alexander’s colleague Alan Turing. And as with the game, so with the Park: champions deliberately sought out and recruited; the codes approached with the same lithe mental agility – and considered abstractedness – as the most knotted chess moves.

  As a chess player, Alexander’s advice to others was: never let up on the aggression. What lay before them was not simply a mental conundrum. It was a duel, and the opponent had to be fought, hard. ‘Play for direct attack on the king,’ he wrote. ‘…When you are a stronger player and have had more experience you can begin position play, which is very much more difficult, and you will then find that the combinative powers developed by an attacking style will be of the greatest service to you… you will be following the example of all the leading masters of this or any other period… All the world masters… whatever their ultimate style, started as brilliant attacking players.’10

  Nor was there much patience for the idea of gentlemanly scruples. Any weakness in the opponent should be ruthlessly exploited – even if the weakest players complain ‘that such tactics are unsporting’. It is easy to see the jump across to acquired code-books and cypher keys, or mistakenly twice-used one-time pads. Alexander’s aggression on the chess board was not without humour; it was after all a game. But from this starting point of conflict came some more abiding principles. ‘One of the dangers – even for very gifted players – of going over too early to the more positional styles of play is that you get afraid to attack and try to win with a complete avoidance of risk,’ he wrote. ‘I cannot emphasize too strongly that this is an aim that it is impossible to achieve and that a habit of cowardice is as fatal in chess as in everything else.’11

  He also analysed the toll that the game could exact on even its most brilliant players. ‘Tournament chess is a very great strain,’ he wrote in the 1970s, a little after he finally retired from GCHQ (resisting all pleas for him to stay on). ‘To some extent the professional’s technique eases it – in so many situations he knows at once the type of plan to adopt… [but] it is hard work mentally, nervously and physically to overcome such opposition.’12 Once again, it is easy to envisage the corollary: the cypher analyst, working deep into the silent night, looping and stretching his or her mind round the fractal chaos of coded messages, under immense pressure to burrow deep into the labyrinth in order to outwit the opposing side. ‘Intensive preparation – study of one’s opponents,’ he continued, ‘… is important; one must be physically fit or one will tire and blunder… However, there are compensations. Chess is a creative activity and there is the same satisfaction in playing a fine game as an artist or scientist gets from his work.’ Alexander’s next thought was freighted with unspoken irony. ‘Moreover,’ he wrote, ‘unlike an artist, the chess player who plays fine chess gets instant recognition.’13 No such recognition for the artists of Eastcote.

  But in this passage, also written in the 1970s, with all those years of experience in Soviet opponents and Soviet cyphers, Alexander wrote of the chess world: ‘Underlying the inevitable personal feuds and jealousies, there is a feeling of community in the chess world that cuts across barriers of nationality, age and class; one only has to attend an Olympiad to feel this – the often sordid disputes and incidents that mar these are nevertheless something “in the family”.’ World interest in the game was rising at that point; and this was in no small part down to the impact of Soviet players such as Boris Spassky. Was there any chance, with the rise of technology, that the contest would finally be played out? No, said Alexander. The game is ‘still not fully explored’ and ‘will continue to fascinate and infuriate its players for many years to come’.14

  Alexander also displayed a flourish of admiration for the way that the Soviets had, over the last few decades, developed their ideas on the way that the game should be played. ‘With the victory of Botvinnik in the 1948 World Championship pentangular tournament,’ he wrote, ‘the period of Soviet dominance of world chess began, not to be broken until 1972 when [Bobby] Fischer wrested the championship from Russian hands. In addition to its playing success, the Soviet school has made substantial contributions to the theory of the game.’

  Unlike their Russian predecessors back at the beginning of the century, said Alexander, the Soviet school took new psychological and tactical approaches. ‘One could afford… to accept weaknesses if one got sufficient tactical chances,’ he observed of their technique. The Soviet school ‘has resulted in a great revitalisation of the game, play being now more varied and interesting than ever before’.15

  It was impossible that there was not a deeper, wrier note in these remarks, for even upon retirement, Alexander was still being coaxed back into the equally ancient game of cryptology, not merely by his hugely admiring colleagues at GCHQ, but also by a substantial number of fans across the Atlantic in what was by then the National Security Agency.

  Curiously enough, despite the awesome intellect that allowed him to take on the world’s most serious chess players, and also the world’s most serious cryptologists, Hugh Alexander was apparently not at all attuned to the new age of electro-mechanical dazzle. ‘He regarded even driving a car as being technically beyond his reach,’ as one former Bletchley colleague, Hugh Denham, remarked warmly in a tribute paper circulated within the National Security Agency. Alexander also ‘never learnt to program’. But, added Denham, ‘he understood clearly enough what computers can do for cryptanalysis and was the loudest propagandist at GCHQ for huge increases in our computer power.’16

  Indeed, the new institution was to see the return in 1948 of one of Alexander’s old chess-playing comrades: Irving John (Jack) Good, who had, since the war, been at Manchester University with Professor Max Newman working on developments in computer science. Although his precise role at Eastcote (and then Cheltenham) is still yet to be disclosed, it is not too difficult to speculate on the sort of areas Good might have specialised in.

  Even though Hugh Alexander had tried returning to the John Lewis Partnership in 1945, it was not just the lack of excitement when compared to the clandestine thrill of cryptology: it was also having to work in an office where one was expected to wear black coat and striped trousers, like a bank manager of the time. Hugh Alexander was cut from rather more dashing cloth. And the essential point about him and colleagues such as Joan Clarke and Hugh Foss is that all of them would have presented faintly incongruous figures in the excessively drab and conformist cultural landscape of 1940s Britain. None of them would have been especially easy to place anywhere without their immediately standing out and perhaps also going against the institutional grain.

  It has often been said of Bletchley Park that it required a certain kind of brain – not just in terms of IQ but also a certain personality and approach – to be a happy and successful codebreaker. The same must certainly be true of the institution that came afterwards. Unlike Bletchley though, these men and women did not have to prove themselves from scratch; they were building upon triumph, and in that sense commanded respect from America. But their Russian opponents were also building on a different sort of success; that of infiltration. And as well as the espionage disasters involving American atomic secrets, and the undermining of Britain’s secret services, there was a shattering blow to come in terms of cryptology too. As never before, the men and women at Eastcote were going to need all their quirky good humour and energy.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Don’t Even Breathe

  This wide empty world of dusty pink soil and pale green grassland, quiet save for riffling winds and the sharp cries of wheeling bird
s, had hardly been touched by the 20th century; impossibly distant horizons rising in dark hills looked exactly as they had done to those merchants of silk and spice travelling in caravans from China to the Mediterranean in centuries past. Yet one day in the summer of 1949, an outrage was committed on the silent land; a roar deeper than hearing, a flash brighter than could be seen, the wide open sky now occluded by a fast-unfurling cloud of darkness.

  The mystification that day among the British and Americans when Western spy planes detected nuclear activity from Kazakhstan in the east of the Soviet Union was profound. Before the oracle of Venona had started to reveal the trafficking of atomic secrets, the predictions of the intelligence agencies had been that Stalin would, inevitably, obtain his own bomb; but not for several more years yet. How, the authorities asked, had the Soviets been able to develop their own weapon – code-named First Lightning – so fast? Nor could the Western powers have known that this Soviet weapon had been built on the back of slave labour from the prison camps; uranium and other materials mined in barbaric circumstances, with many workers dying from radiation sickness. The detection of the test was also accompanied by instant geopolitical unease: now that the Soviet leader had the bomb, what would stop him using it to achieve further territorial ambitions?

  The truth of the matter was that it took the codebreakers slightly too long to unveil the treachery of the atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs. The postscript to his story seems somehow even more extraordinary than his original treachery. As we have seen, Fuchs had turned up in the ongoing Venona decrypts (under the codenames ‘Charles’ and ‘Rest’); there had been encrypted signals sent from the US to Moscow, detailing atomic secrets – information that had been supplied by Fuchs. Yet he was still above suspicion. By the time that mushroom cloud rose over the cold sands of Kazakhstan, Dr Fuchs was installed in a position of some responsibility at Harwell, Britain’s top-secret nuclear research facility in Oxfordshire. It was only now that there were enough matches from decrypts to confirm that he was the man. In 1950, after the tip-off from the codebreakers, he was investigated by MI5, then arrested and put on trial. He was sentenced to 14 years in prison.

  Incidentally, it is interesting to compare that sentence to the one handed down to British double agent George Blake in 1966 – of 42 years. There is absolutely no question that Fuchs’s actions had the greater resonance, consequences that reverberated over four decades. Eventually, upon release, Fuchs emigrated from his adopted country to East Germany, where he remained until his death. The limitations for the intelligence services involved what we might call ‘real time’: the atomic traitor was uncovered, but only with a significant time-lag. By the time the Pandora’s Box of Venona had been opened, the secrets were already across the Iron Curtain. Although the fact of Fuchs’s employment at the heart of Britain’s nuclear establishment does make one wonder what else he might have passed across had he not been caught.

  The codebreakers and the listeners could intercept the signals; but anticipating where these signals might come from was quite another matter. A further fascinating afterword to the Klaus Fuchs atomic treachery story came decades later in the late 1990s when an apparently nremarkable old lady living in the south London area of Bexleyheath was revealed to have also passed great numbers of atomic secrets to the Soviets and the NKVD. Melita Norwood had grown up on the south coast; she and her family moved to London in the mid-1930s and by that time, she had seen much of the poverty and the hunger wrought by the Depression. She joined the Communist Party in 1936. In today’s climate – where the listeners in Cheltenham carefully monitor those who pose security risks – it seems perfectly unthinkable that such a person would pass the vetting that would be required for working in a firm that would supply crucial data for the atomic programme.

  Even before the outbreak of the Second World War, the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association was not quite as dry as its name suggested. Melita Norwood joined the firm in 1932; it covered all elements of metallurgy research. This included armaments as well as industry – aspects of which would be hugely useful to the desperately modernising Soviet Union. Not long after the war began, the firm struck a regular partnership with the similarly innocuous sounding Tube Alloys. In other words, it was helping with the atomic bomb research. In 1937, Norwood had volunteered her services to the Communists as a spy: she was given the codename ‘Hola’. Very quickly, she was spying in the most traditional way: waiting until the office was clear, then opening her boss’s safe, removing all the documents, photographing them with a special camera provided by her Soviet handler, then handing over the negatives.

  It started with work that had straightforward military applications: metal research for guns and tanks. When she began photographing sensitive documents to do with research into the properties of uranium, she was handing over gold dust to her Soviet controller. In a curious way, her story as much as Fuchs’s illustrates the impossible challenge for signals intelligence: the spies who by and large don’t send any signals. Extraordinarily, Norwood finally came to be security vetted in 1945 (a shade too late): she passed the vetting with ease, despite her colourful political affiliations. The result was that she carried on working at the Non-Ferrous Metals firm, and continued, well into the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, to pass a range of material to her Soviet handlers. On her retirement in the early 1970s, the Soviets even arranged for her to receive a modest pension from Moscow. She remained utterly in the shadows until the 1990s, when a defecting Soviet agent handed over boxes of archive material from the KGB and the exploits of ‘Hola’ were laid bare.

  ‘I did not want money,’ the grandmother told reporters. ‘It was not that side I was interested in. I wanted Russia to be on an equal footing with the West. I never considered myself to be a spy, but it is for others to judge.’1 There were calls to prosecute her; but really, with the Cold War itself now history, what would have been the point?

  In a sense, these stories – if only they had been known – would have underscored Commander Edward Travis’s anxiety to expand his signals intelligence operation back to the scale seen during the war. The Soviet Union, through guile and extensive infiltration, was gaining both power and influence. The detonation of its own atomic bomb in the wastes of Kazakhstan was the signal that the Cold War was now not only very much more serious, but also that the Soviet Union’s new global reach would seriously imperil Western interests everywhere from the sands of Syria to the green jungles of what was then Indo-China. Agents such as Fuchs and Norwood had evaded the attentions of MI5; but by devoting more time and manpower to careful monitoring and decrypting of as much Soviet traffic as possible, here was a chance to divine Soviet intentions, and instantly.

  Yet treachery brought another hammer-blow, both to Americans and British, but more particularly to the codebreakers. This time the agent was in America. A Russian-born émigré to the US, William Weisband had served as part of an army codebreaking unit in the desert in 1942. So proficient was he with cypher work that come 1944, he was posted back to Virginia, and Arlington Hall. Here he worked on Soviet traffic. According to Richard Aldrich, he had friendly discussions with resident codebreaking genius Meredith Gardner. This was a catastrophe. Weisband had been a fully-fledged Soviet agent since 1934.

  And here before him – even though the team assigned to the work was very tight and secure – was the sheer weight and volume of the Venona project. These one-time-pad messages were unveiling Russian spies by the dozen: code names revealed, activities disclosed. Weisband went in to work every day acutely aware that his own identity and his own codename ‘Zhora’ would also be somewhere in that mass of secret communications. According to Aldrich, Gardner actually recalled at one point Weisband scanning a list of names that the Venona decrypts had most recently thrown up. It is fascinating to imagine how this popular, charming, chuckling figure maintained his outward geniality while every moment of every day knowing that his treachery was about to be exposed. Certainly his nerve-gnawing anxiety was fin
ally conveyed to his Soviet controllers, and thence to Moscow: ‘For one year,’ ran an NKVD report, summing up Weisband’s intelligence, ‘a large amount of very valuable documentary material concerning the work of the Americans on decyphering Soviet cyphers, intercepting and analysing open-radio correspondence of Soviet Institutions was reached… On the basis of Weisband material, our state security organs carried out a number of defensive measures, resulting in the reduced efficiency of the American decyphering service. This has led to a considerable current reduction in the amount of decyphering and analysis by the Americans.’2

  What had happened was this: in October 1948, partly as a result of the funk caused by the idea of Venona, the Soviets carried out a gigantic, far-reaching overhaul of every one of their encrypted operations. Not just rather more careful use of one-time pads, but much worse. For the first time, messages between various arms of the Soviet army, navy, air-force, even the police – all of which had provided huge amounts of material to British interceptors – were thoroughly encrypted. Even the most trivial message – which before the operators would simply transmit as was – was now converted into a vortex of code. Added to this was the implosion of the so-called ‘Poets’ codes that the British and Americans had been reading ever since their forays through shattered, defeated Germany, picking up fresh codebreaking tips along the way. All Soviet systems were changed, overnight, on 29 October 1948.

  It was akin to the shattering blow dealt to Bletchley’s Hut 8 in 1942. The timing in the case of the Soviets was also frightful: even before they had exploded that first atomic bomb, there was rising paranoia in the West about what Stalin might be planning not just for Europe, but other regions. There were some who – in their neurosis – argued that it was time to allow Germany to re-arm, in order to defend the Rhine against a Red Army that would not stop marching until it reached the North Sea.