The Spies of Winter

by Sinclair McKay

  ‘When he and Bronstein were playing in different games,’ continued Crankshaw, ‘they got on famously together. For both have the same high-spirited attitude to life and chess – though Bronstein is subdued, Alexander ebullient; both the same mathematical genius – though Alexander seems to have the greater intuition, Bronstein the more god-like view of serried regiments of permutations; both, above all, the same sense of humour. The respect of each other for each other is immense.’

  There was a parallel: just as physicists swiftly forgot any sense of national differences or ideology when they met, so too there was a brotherhood of chess players. The suggestion of friendship between Alexander and Bronstein, even if it only existed strictly within the confines of this seaside-town variety theatre, is intriguing, for it also shines a light into Alexander’s relationship with his own superiors at GCHQ and ultimately within the Foreign Office. The ban on travel behind the Iron Curtain was perfectly natural and understandable; but Alexander’s taking several days of leave to play his ideological opponents on the south coast did not appear to cause any flutter. His presence in Hastings, indeed, must surely have been officially sanctioned. Hugh Alexander’s colleagues will have relished the multiple levels of intrigue that could be pulled off within the confines of an out-of-season music hall.

  (Just three years later, Ian Fleming’s Bond thriller From Russia With Love was published. Early scenes involve a Soviet chessmaster called Kronsteen – perhaps a little wink at Bronstein? – urgently being called away from the table by undercover KGB men, to immerse himself in the sinister geopolitical chess-piece strategies of his icy superiors. But Kronsteen delays abandoning the game for a few minutes until he can make his triumphant move – an act of disobedience that he explains to his murderously angry SMERSH boss as protecting his espionage cover; for if he had rushed off, would observers not have thought it odd that a Grandmaster would leave the board for anything? Given that Fleming, in naval intelligence throughout the war, was one of the few to be wholly familiar with the Bletchley codebreaking operation, and the prolific use of chess players, was this passage his unsubtle declaration that he knew all about the Soviet system too?)

  And indeed there was an extraordinary double victory for the British at those tables. Hugh Alexander got the better of David Bronstein on that bitter grey January day; incredibly, in the same tournament, he also brought Alexander Tolush crashing down. The defeat of two Soviet Grandmasters was unprecedented. The habitually amused Alexander caught the attention of a press that otherwise did not concern itself too greatly with the esoteric world of chess. His admiring former Bletchley colleague Stuart Milner-Barry (who had moved away from codebreaking into the senior civil service) later wrote of his old friend: ‘He defeated Bronstein in their individual encounter in a marathon Queen and Pawn ending which went on for over 100 moves; and slaughtered the other Soviet grandmaster Tolush in no time with the black pieces… In spite of his congenital state of untidiness… he was a surprisingly well-organised person. If he had not been he could not have kept under control all the things that he did.’4

  The Hastings tournament had been a ferocious embarrassment for the Soviets; so much so that when one of the Russian team, Alatortsev, came to write it up for the Soviet newspaper Evening Moscow, he neglected to mention the results at all, preferring instead to claim that he ‘had received many letters from all over Britain wishing… success. The senders expressed the hope that the visit of the Soviet chess players would strengthen the friendship between peoples.’5 Alatortsev also found a moment to observe sourly that the British working poor could only ‘gaze in awe’ at department store windows and that ‘it was always somewhat cold in the hotels’ and the chess players ‘were always putting shillings in the gas meter’.6 In other words, amusingly bitter misdirection.

  And in the meantime, those in Whitehall who knew of Hugh Alexander’s true provenance could afford to feel – at a time of national insecurity – a sense that the old country still had the sharpest minds. Indeed, Alexander went on to juggle his unthinkably stressful codebreaking day-job with chess-related work: as a result of that 1954 triumph, he went on to write columns for The Sunday Times and The Spectator.

  Chess was also key to the emerging generation of computational thinking. Part of Alan Turing’s vision of a thinking, conscious machine – thinking that had evolved at Bletchley Park and now at Manchester University – was of a computer that could play the game. Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, Turing had been writing philosophically about the very nature of human intelligence itself: how it came to be formed, and the ways in which machine intelligence might differ sharply. He and Shaun Wylie – the mathematician who was soon to return to the codebreaking fold of GCHQ – had corresponded on their early attempts to write programs that would enable computers to play chess. They were able to get as far as the computer ‘thinking’ one move ahead, which by itself was rather an achievement. But how long would it be before a computer could take on a Grandmaster and win? Alan Turing was interested in the idea of chess being, as it were, a hermetically sealed activity: there was simply the board, the pieces, and the potential moves that could be made. No machine would have to interact with an opponent any further than that. The game itself was not, for him, the important point. The quality of chess that interested him was that it showed how a nimble, lithe, sinuous human mind worked.

  Programming a machine to play chess – even in those earliest days – was for Turing a bit of a chore, because in principle, any device could run through pre-programmed possibilities, like his Bletchley Park bombe machines. What he wanted to see was a machine that could take in a chess board and then surprise its opponent. The corollaries between chess and cryptanalysis were also inescapable. Codes, like the chess board, were something that could be approached without having to interact with anything other than the encoded text. At Bletchley, machines – properly programmed – had been able to decypher coded text at speeds no army of humans could dream of. If it were possible to tell a computer to produce wholly random letters and numbers in order to create a new cypher, could a machine on the opposing side counter it effectively? Could a machine deal with random surprises?

  Hugh Alexander had, in 1952, contributed a short essay to a book that Turing and others had written about computers playing games (it was not only chess; there was also much speculation on whether a mechanical device could convincingly and successfully play poker). Alexander was keeping a very keen eye on the developments in the computing department at the University of Manchester.

  The experience of Bletchley Park had shown Alexander and all those other veteran codebreakers that it was folly to rely completely on technology; Hitler and the Nazis had done so, and unwittingly revealed their most secret thoughts and orders by doing so. The Germans had not understood technological vulnerability. But in Manchester, Alan Turing and his mentor Professor Max Newman had been pushing towards computers that had both practical and philosophical possibilities. There is something about the crystalline purity of the codebreaker’s reasoning: closing everything else off into order to focus like a laser on summoning the truth from a chaos of random letters. That purity – that unsullied, unbroken concentration – was the sort of consciousness that could also be the advantage of a thinking machine.

  By 1954, Alan Turing was cast out into the wintery wilderness, his relationship with the codebreakers now firmly shut off. After his trial and conviction in 1952, friends and colleagues had certainly gathered around; but with the revocation of his prized security clearance, he was now excluded from the most fascinating problems of cryptology and defence. That curious establishment witch-hunt of homosexuals in the early 1950s was only a part of it; there were also suggestions that in security circles, senior figures in America as well as Britain regarded Alan Turing as worryingly unpredictable. Why did he take those (for the time, rather unusual) holidays in Norway and Greece? In the 1950s, these were destinations far from the usual tourist maps, and too close to the Eas
tern bloc for those security operatives not to take anxious notice. No-one ever seemed to question Turing’s essential loyalty to his own nation, but at the same time he was regarded as disorganised, eccentric and stubborn. The fear was clearly not that he would defect to the Russians, or deliberately hand them intelligence, but more that Turing was an innocent compared to the more ruthless KGB operatives and he could be duped, blackmailed, or by some other means purely accidentally hand the Soviets some crucial sense of how far Britain’s cryptanalytical forces had developed.

  To those who worked with Turing in Manchester in the days and weeks before his dreadful death, there seemed little change in his essentially shy, dishevelled temperament. Apart from his stammer and his slightly gauche, eye-contact-avoiding manner, he was popular with neighbours and academic friends, too. He had struck up a friendship with a psychoanalyst called Franz Greenbaum, and Greenbaum’s young daughters remembered having talks with Turing about games such as solitaire. On one occasion, Turing joined the Greenbaum family on a day trip to Blackpool. Recalled daughter Barbara: ‘We found a fortune-teller’s tent and Alan said he’d like to go in so we waited around for him to come back.

  ‘And this sunny, cheerful visage had shrunk into a pale, shaking… face. Something had happened. We don’t know what the fortune-teller had said but he obviously was deeply unhappy.’7

  Others recall that the reason his death was such a shock was that there had been nothing unusual in his manner or behaviour beforehand. Turing was found dead in bed one morning by his housekeeper; by his side was a half-eaten apple. The apple was found to have been contaminated with cyanide, which had come from the laboratory at the back of his house. The inquest found that, among other symptoms of ‘violence’, Turing’s jaws had been working furiously. The policeman who was summoned to the house reported on the white froth around Turing’s mouth. The coroner found that it could only have been suicide: a man of Turing’s learning could not have failed to have known what the effect of such contamination would be.

  It was also noted at the inquest that there were no unusual worries or pressures bearing on him at that moment in June 1954; indeed, he had just received an invitation from the Royal Society in London, of which he was a Fellow, to attend a special talk. The implication was that a scientist of Turing’s standing was still clasped deep within the bosom of the establishment. In the newspaper, no mention was made of his conviction for gross indecency two years beforehand.

  The world of the codebreakers remained a close one; and a few days later, in the pages of The Manchester Guardian, a hugely affectionate tribute to Turing was contributed by one who signed himself simply ‘MHAN’ – the initials, in fact, of Professor Max Newman. He wrote: ‘Mathematics and science have lost a great original thinker… Turing took a particular delight in problems that enabled him to combine mathematical theory with experiments that he could carry out, in whole or in part, with his own hands… His comical yet brilliantly set analogies with which he explained his ideas made him a delightful companion.’ Newman paid tribute to the dazzling nature of Turing’s thinking about computing – stretching the very idea of what a machine actually was and what it could be made to do – and how he had, in his final months, started taking an avid interest in the ‘chemical theory of the growth of living things… In this work, he found the fullest scope for his mathematical powers; his great flair for machine computing and his power of tearing his way into a subject new to him – in this case, a chemistry of living tissues.’8

  A charming obituary in The Times, on 11 June 1954, also omitted any mention of Turing’s conviction. It made a teasing reference, too, to the nature of his work between 1939 and 1945. ‘The war interrupted Turing’s mathematical career for the six critical years between the ages of 27 and 33,’ was all it would say, before giving a punchily condensed summary of Turing’s philosophy, the mathematical problems too intractable to be solved by machinery, and the differences and similarities between human and computer brains. ‘Few who have known him personally can doubt that, with his deep insight into the principles of mathematics and of natural science, and his brilliant originality, he would, but for these accidents, have made much greater discoveries.’9

  It was only Turing’s mother who did not believe the verdict of suicide. Instead, she thought it had been an accident; in previous years, she had always warned her untidy son about the dangers of dealing with hazardous chemicals and absent-mindedly licking his fingers. She believed that he had taken the apple into his back-room laboratory, and there it had become poisoned with the fatal dust. Another theory has it that this is precisely what Turing had wanted his mother to believe; knowing that she would be destroyed by the idea that he had taken his own life, this alternative seemed kinder. There are of course all sorts of other theories to this day; one or two former Bletchley Park veterans openly wondered why it was, if Turing was so hell-bent on self-destruction, that he had gone out and bought himself some new socks just days beforehand? But that way lies a disorientating hall of mirrors of conspiracy theories. The point was that Britain had first cast out one of its pre-eminent cryptanalytical intellects, and now that intellect was lost forever.

  And such minds were needed quite urgently. The intensity of a chess tournament, with all its intellectual grandstanding is one thing; but in 1954, there were increasing numbers of senior figures within the military establishments of both the US and the USSR who believed that nuclear confrontation was inevitable. Deep in the Pacific, near the Marshall Islands at Bikini Atoll, the world had been permitted to witness the latest and most terrible development in apocalyptic weaponry. The first hydrogen bomb, developed by the Americans, was detonated; it was believed to be one thousand times more powerful than the atomic bombs used on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945. Here in the Pacific, an island was quite simply vaporised, and the mushroom cloud that rose poisonously into the sky eventually spread out over 100 miles (160 kilometres). Everywhere beneath was showered with radioactivity. A Japanese fishing boat called Lucky Dragon had been within 80 miles (130 kilometres) of the epicentre of the explosion; the crew immediately came down with radiation sickness. The explosion had been larger than the US military and scientific establishment had expected; this was a weapon which changed the philosophy of war.

  The prospect of global doomsday had now become nightmarishly easy to imagine. These were weapons that could not only wipe out entire populations but render regions of the earth uninhabitable for generations to come. The hydrogen bomb could only bring one conceivable response from the Soviets, and that was for their scientists to seek to create their own version. At what point must the scientists on either side have advised that the use of such devastating technology could very easily wipe out much of the planet’s population? It was in 1954 that American civilians in public buildings and schools began to carry out elaborate drills on taking shelter and building up supplies in the event of such a war breaking out.

  In Britain, the move of GCHQ from Eastcote to the former agricultural land on the outskirts of Cheltenham was – in part – a precaution against the day that London had nuclear death rained down upon it; in the event of such a cataclysm, the nation’s security and communications would not be compromised. By 1954, the move – which had brought a faintly comical array of bureaucratic headaches and not a little ill-will among Cheltenham business leaders – was almost complete. The distance of some 100 miles (160 kilometres) from London would possibly have brought only limited advantage in the event of an atomic missile attack. But the new premises at Cheltenham offered both day-to-day operational security and tight-knit unity. While a few personnel were to remain at the primitive blocks of Eastcote – GCHQ could not quite be moved out in its entirety – the vast bulk was now being settled into purpose-built accommodation where staff and complex machinery had enough room to attend to ever-expanding duties.

  There had been some job-swapping going on: personnel in varying grades who had been reluctant to move from London exchanged their jobs with c
ivil servants from the Ministry of War, among others, who were happy to move out. The outskirts of Cheltenham saw a flowering of government-funded house-building (at the start of a general golden age for government housing provision). All these civil servants needed proper homes; they could not be expected to endure – as the early Eastcote GCHQ codebreakers did – the rather infantilising business of renting pokey digs with landladies. And so, over the space of several years, hundreds of new houses and flats were built on the outskirts of the town, and the general upsurge of economic activity was broadly welcomed within Cheltenham. There were a few dissenting voices, for as GCHQ also began recruiting in the town for new staff of all grades, local businessmen realised that the brightest and the best of their potential workforce was being lured away by the prospect of work that seemed not only more exciting but also more secure.

  And the issue of housing seemed initially fraught. For, while all these smart new dwellings, all these closes and cul-de-sacs and avenues, were being built for the ‘Foreign Office’ (the cover of GCHQ was that it was quite simply a branch of the FO), Cheltenham still had over a thousand people on its council-home waiting list. As in London, the end of the war had brought huge accommodation difficulties for many. In Cheltenham, there was sizzling local resentment that new houses were being handed straight over to outsiders.

  Worse yet: some of the completed new houses, on the smart new residential estates, were empty for a long time after the last bricks had been laid; so if there was a delay in people coming down to the town, opponents said, why could the residences not be allocated to local people in need instead, with the ‘Foreign Office’ staff being catered for closer to their arrival date? It was left to figures such as GCHQ’s Edward Hastings to explain to the town council that such an idea – though understandable – was not practical; that a surge in numbers was expected imminently.