Churchill's Secret War
Page 5
For readers of diplomatic decrypts, the early months of 1942 saw Rommel driving the British relentlessly eastwards in North Africa and a new enemy, Japan, striking south as the Germans had done in Europe so that Malaya, Burma and Indo-China were soon part of the East Asian Co-Prosperity Region. The Japanese were dominant in the Indian Ocean, talking of invading Australia and/or India, and of linking up with their Axis partners somewhere near the Persian Gulf. The world war had become a reality and few doubted who would be the victor, for Allied shipping losses in January–June 1942 were insupportable. The Germans had intercepted and read British codes and ciphers and knew the whereabouts of all convoys of importance while it took the British a further year to crack the German naval code.26 While the Turkish leadership was not to know the full extent of Allied defeat, it knew from its ambassador that Churchill was in a deep and understandable depression. On 12 February 1942 the British surrendered at Singapore, and Sir Alexander Cadogan in the FO noted ‘it was the blackest day of the war’.27
In Ankara Sukru Saraçoğlu had just become prime minister and shortly afterwards Numan Menemencioğlu was appointed foreign minister. March saw Turkish diplomats abroad reporting armistice approaches between Germany and Russia with sometimes Turkey, sometimes Sweden, sometimes the Iberian nations named as would-be mediators. I·nönü proclaimed Turkish neutrality. Diplomatic intercepts yielded signs in March and April that Germany would attack Turkey as part of her spring offensive, while in Berlin Japanese ambassador Hiroshi Oshima confidently predicted global German victory. May saw further evidence of possible peace negotiations between Russia and Germany. The Spanish thought the Allies had decided to occupy Turkey. Molotov, visiting in Washington, called for a second front in the west in 1942. In June a delegation of Turkish arms dealers were treated by Hitler to a lecture in international history and to his assurances of undying friendship between the two countries. In June Tobruk fell to Rommel with the loss to Britain of face and booty. The intercepts were full of it.
While the Turkish leadership was slowly adjusting to the prospect of German omnipotence and the inevitability of a Russian request to revise the terms of the Montreux Convention, Churchill was still hankering after Turkey. From the intercepts he could observe others failing to handle Turkey effectively. The Turks resented the arrogance of British soldiers, Eden failed to impress his counterparts in Ankara and Hugessen wrote long reports but failed to make headway against the Turkish diplomats resolved to stay neutral. The Germans had decided to leave Turkey in a state of benevolent neutrality monitored by their ambassador, Franz von Papen, and the Russians had other matters on their minds. The Turks suspected that the British neither could nor would keep their promises about the supply of equipment for the army. The Turkey hand was being played, in fact, rather ineptly; Churchill’s concern with Turkey, testified to by his doctor, his colleagues, and himself in his account of these traumatic months of the war, was so intense that he would play the hand himself. And at the end of January 1943 he did.
It was not until the end of 1942 that the tide of war turned – El Alamein on 4 November and Stalingrad on 23 November. Meanwhile American successes in the Pacific were followed by Allied landings at Casablanca and Oran. BJs of the period buzzed with these events. A new belligerent, the United States, was as worrying to Ankara as the new Soviet successes in the south, bringing Soviet claims as a Black Sea littoral nation back into the minds of the Turkish leadership. Pressures on Turkey to join (or not to join) the Axis or the Allies continued till October when Soviet successes in the Caucasus and in the north eased German pressure on Turkey. By the end of the month the neutral Portuguese diplomats reflected that Germany, who had lost the First World War through exhaustion was now likely to lose the second in the same way.28
This was the background to Churchill’s Turkish visit in January 1943, the hidden trick in the Turkey hand. We have seen that his interest in Turkey was out of all proportion to Turkey’s likely usefulness on the Allied side in a combined operation. The Foreign Secretary joined the Chiefs of Staff and the rest of the War Cabinet in attempting, and failing, to head off Churchill’s Turkish trip en route from the Casablanca Conference in January 1943. But despite what followed, or failed to follow, from that extraordinary encounter in the railway carriages parked in the wasteland in the slush and snow of the Mediterranean winter, Churchill’s instinct seemed vindicated, and Turkey’s views of the comparative merits of friendship with the Allies or the Axis were never the same again.
Post-Adana there was much martial activity in Turkey but the course of the war in the eastern Mediterranean remained static until the resignation of Mussolini in June 1943. This caused a flurry of Turkish ambassadorial reports to and from Ankara. Would the Allies achieve a quick victory? Would Italy make a separate peace? Would Japan insist on a reassertion of the Tripartite Pact? Would Germany invade the Dodecanese and arrive on Turkey’s doorstep with one eye on the pipelines of Persia of which only Turkey now stood in the way? All the Balkans were as shocked by Italy’s collapse in 1943 as by the fall of France in 1940. In fact it presaged an early Allied victory which never quite came off. For the Allies it proved a false dawn, as their conquest of Italy dragged on and the Germans retook the Dodecanese.
The war took on a different aspect in Ankara after January 1943. Protestations of friendship were followed by two British military missions, to bring Turkey into the war by providing equipment and training. It was not an easy agenda and it was not successfully carried out. Britain failed to provide what was needed. Direct American involvement ensued. Whether for this reason or as part of a complex strategy to maintain her neutrality, Turkey’s demands escalated. Reconditioned Hurricanes were rejected for new Spitfires which had been promised. Guns urgently needed elsewhere could be ill spared to a country which perhaps could not use them and might never need them. Churchill himself goaded his reluctant Chiefs of Staff partly to save his own credibility, but his own powers were less than total and all he could offer the Turks when begging in America was his moral support. The second front in the west had to be postponed again, not once but twice. Stalin’s ill-concealed fury found outlets in threats of patching up peace between the Soviet Union and a battered Germany – something regarded with equal dread by the Turks and the British. It was not until 6 June 1944 that the second front finally became a reality, and Turkish neutrality at that point ceased to be interesting or relevant to final victory.
CHAPTER TWO
Churchill’s Diplomatic Intercepts
All the years I have been in office since it [Room 40] began in the autumn of 1914 I have read every one of these flimsies and attach more importance to them . . . than to any other source of knowledge at the disposal of the state.
Winston Churchill to Austen Chamberlain, November 1924 (in Chamberlain’s papers at Birmingham University library)
Any analysis of Churchill’s use of diplomatic intercepts must start by an attempt to answer the question of how those intercepts came to be in the possession of the British government in the first place. The first section of this chapter tackles a cognate question: who produced them, and how?
Diplomatic eavesdropping in Britain in 1922 was not a new or recent practice, but the coming of wireless telegraphy (W/T) at the turn of the century gave access, via interception and decryption, to greatly increased volumes of traffic. Much of this would have been worthless, emanating from chancelleries without power or influence to affect the course of European affairs. But not all. For the victors in the First World War and from the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, British, French, Italian and American code-breaking departments were reinstated or established.1 In Britain the history of signals intelligence, or sigint, has concentrated on the Admiralty code-breaking department in Room 40 OB (Old Buildings) from 1914 to 1918, and the interwar abuse of Soviet cipher insecurity, fuelling the anti-Bolshevik scares of the 1920s and precipitating a Soviet change to a more secure cipher system. The year 1939 brought not only a new world war bu
t a new dimension of cryptanalysis involving breaking machine-enciphered messages. The Enigma breakthrough and what followed therefrom has been well documented. This chapter traces recent research into non-service – i.e. diplomatic – traffic, some of which was enciphered by systems which predated machine encipherment. The period covered includes the interwar years.
The nature of prewar intercepts can be identified by the diplomatic component of the files that came to Churchill from MI6 from late 1941 to VJ-Day. It was called DIR/C, and in the Public Record Office system it is known as HW1. This material (still described by retired government officials as the ‘intercepts’) can now be assessed, because Churchill was not only a prime user of diplomatic sigint but a compulsive hoarder of any and all papers that came his way, and it is his daily files of intercepts that have been released. They provide the first, and almost only, indication that diplomatic eavesdropping, on friends, neutrals and enemies, was an important part of the British cryptanalytical war effort. Churchill’s use of it, particularly in 1943, and particularly the Turkish messages, is the main theme.
Extrapolating backwards it is possible to discern some of the prewar work, undertaken under the auspices of the FO by the SIS, which had to be done to make possible the wartime achievements of Bletchley Park. Unlike the war period, now extensively documented and researched, the evidence for the prewar period remains scanty and the literature somewhat specialised. While most war historians are familiar with the work of Bletchley Park, in particular the breaking on a continuous basis of the German machine cipher Enigma and the distribution of the resulting decrypts in a process called Ultra, few scholars so far have more than anecdotal evidence for the history, the people and the evolving processes within the British secret establishment which enabled Enigma to be read and Ultra to function from 1940 onwards. What and who made this achievement possible in the years before 1939? The claim made here is that a small group of non-established civil servants lodged in the FO and working on diplomatic intercepts from 1917 (and on naval and military messages since 1914) rose to the occasion in 1941 to provide the British war leadership with invaluable information on the state of the enemy. If that is proved true, it will answer an important question about Churchill’s contribution to Allied victory.2
The Classical Cryptographers
The main sources for what follows consist of two documents, one handwritten until typed in 1994, covering the First World War, the other the interwar period, both deposited in the Churchill Archives in Cambridge.3 By linking the names which appear in both documents, and the cryptographic processes described in them, it becomes possible to sketch the progress of British cryptography from 1915 to 1939 from a primary source, part of which has not hitherto been referred to in print.4 The First World War document, which bears no signature, was written by Cdr Alastair Denniston to answer an enquiry put to him by Adm Sir William (‘Bubbles’) James, who wished to include a chapter on Room 40 in his autobiography, which was eventually published as The Skies Were Always Blue. The second, also written by Denniston in 1944, also unsigned, was to rebut an assumption made by the then head of GCCS, Gp Capt Eric Jones, that GCCS had failed to prepare effectually for the cryptographic needs of the Second World War.
Cryptography lies at the heart of secret signals intelligence. It is a misleading word, though used by ‘the classical cryptographers’ of Britain’s codebreaking operation,5 because it implies only the creation and security of codes and ciphers, whereas the key part of the job, carried out by all the major European powers since the establishment of W/T, was the reading of the secret diplomatic ciphers of other nations. And reading them (i.e. successfully and continuously solving them) was only part of an operation which started with interception and the channelling of raw, authentic, relevant Morse messages to a central decryption unit, manned by ‘specialists’ (i.e. cryptographers), and concluded with translation, assessment and distribution in suitable form to the appropriate clients. Each part of the total process was essential for the production of useful signals intelligence. Yet all these aspects were embraced in the one word cryptography. This extended meaning will be used here. Efficient interception and intelligent assessment both proved as important as decryption in the total cryptographic process whereby wireless intelligence on the activities of foreign nationals was made available to named departments and individuals within the British government who could use the information in foreign policy reports and recommendations.
This chapter charts the work done on diplomatic cipher messages between the wars by the classical cryptographers which brought both Ultra and medium-grade diplomatic intercepts from 1941 till VE-Day. The interwar activities of these cryptographers, learning from their own experience and mistakes, despite their exiguous resources, made possible the successful handling of the exponential increase in traffic occasioned by the breaking of the Luftwaffe Enigma cipher (using hand methods) in January 1940, which in turn played a key part in turning probable British defeat in 1940 into Allied victory in 1945.
It was a group drawn from different backgrounds – academia, the aristocracy, business, the stage, teachers, servicemen, university graduates and GPO trainees. All were linguists and most were proficient in mathematics.6 All practised critical analysis. Some had worked on naval and diplomatic intercepts in the First World War. Other key figures joined when GCCS was set up in 1919. A Russian refugee joined in 1925. Only two women, one the wife of the Director of Naval Intelligence, Adm Godfrey and the other the sister of ‘C’ (Adm Sinclair), were specialists, showing the closed circle of initiates. Two had made the Zimmermann telegram readable in 1916. It was their common perception of the interlocking requirements of the service, enabling them to deliver relevant messages on time to the right people, which may justify the use of the word ‘group’ in describing the informal, collegial approach to their clandestine work from Room 40 in 1914 to Bletchley in 1942, work which played an understated part in turning defeat into victory.
This section has introduced the cryptographers who made Churchill’s reading of diplomatic intercepts possible. But he was no stranger to the interception of German naval signals, as the next section makes clear.
Churchill’s Intercepts: the First World War
At the beginning of the First World War German wireless signals were being easily intercepted but no one knew what to do with them. Under Sir Alfred Ewing and Adm Reginald ‘Blinker’ Hall7 the founder-members of the group helped to solve that problem. Whether Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, was a help or a hindrance is a moot point, but his understanding of the importance of signals intelligence in the Second World War, which no one now doubts, can now be matched with his enthusiasm for the naval intercepts of Room 40 from 1914 onwards.8 For it was he who as First Lord of the Admiralty directed, on 29 November 1914, that a particular naval officer9 selected by the Admiralty to monitor the German messages that were pouring in, was:
to study the telegrams with a view to finding out the general scheme of the enemy, and tracing how far the reports of the telegrams have in the past been verified as recorded facts . . . The telegrams when intercepted will go direct and exclusively to COS.10
Churchill had immediately spotted the political value of these golden eggs, and the need to protect the goose that laid them, though his rules of procedure had to be drastically changed. Characteristically, he steered them past the new Director of Naval Intelligence, Hall, and would not leave the procedures to the people doing the work.11 The arrangements he made in 1914 for handling naval intercepts bear a strong resemblance to the orders he gave out for getting Ultra to him in 1941.
Very early in 1915 Churchill, together with Adm ‘Jackie’ Fisher, the First Sea Lord, made a disastrous decision with consequences which affected British standing in the Near East for a generation. Never one to enjoy sharing knowledge that brings power with anyone, and particularly not with one, like ‘Blinker’ Hall, as enterprising and ambitious as himself, he received from Hall information w
hich would have averted the Dardanelles campaign fiasco. Hall had despatched two emissaries to persuade or bribe the Turks to break with Germany and allow the Royal Navy a free passage through the Dardanelles.12 Negotiations were protracted and not helped by the alternative agenda of the FO, but on 13 March Hall read an intercept:
From Nauen to Constantinople.
12.3.15. Most Secret. For Admiral Usedom. HM the Kaiser has received the report and telegram relating to the Dardanelles. Everything conceivable is being done to arrange the supply of ammunition. For political reasons it is necessary to maintain a confident tone in Turkey. The Kaiser requests you to use your influence in this direction. The sending of a German or Austrian submarine is being seriously considered. By command of All Highest. v Müller.13
Hall took the intercept to Churchill who said, ‘that means they [the Turks] have come to the end of their ammunition’. Hall then updated Churchill on his private initiative to buy off the Turks. His emissaries were Griffin Ender and Edwin Whittal. They met a Turkish emissary at Dedeagatch on 15 March 1915. Hall informed Hankey of these negotiations on 4 March. Much later (on 7 October 1937), he sent his account of the episode to Capt (then Sir Herbert) Richmond, adding:
I had no cabinet authority for the money then. Because of the Turkish shortage of ammunition and the inability of the Germans to make good the shortage for at least a week, victory to them seemed inevitable.14