The Codebreakers: The True Story of the Secret Intelligence Team That Changed the Course of the First World War

by James Wyllie

  Wiseman had joined the army in 1914 and served with the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, seeing bloody action on the Western Front. He was at the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915 – at which the Germans first shocked the Allies and the world with their use of chlorine gas – and was temporarily blinded. While recuperating back in London he had a chance encounter with ‘C’– aka Mansfield Smith-Cumming – who had served in the Royal Navy with Wiseman’s father. And so, in that effectively improvisational way that coloured so much of intelligence recruitment during the war, Wiseman ended up an officer in what would eventually become MI6, assigned to expand the brand to American shores.

  The British were already represented in the USA by Captain Guy Gaunt, who acted as Hall’s man on the ground. This brash and snobbish Australian, who revelled in his role as swaggering spy (and who was known by both Germany and the US to have extracurricular espionage duties), was not happy to receive the competition, which was how he viewed these two arrivals from England who showed up at his New York office. In the end, Wiseman would more than compete; he would quietly take over Gaunt’s role in the US.

  Wiseman and Mansfield would eventually return to London before the end of 1915, with Mansfield deployed to a counter-intelligence assignment in the eastern Mediterranean. Blinker Hall and ‘C’ decided that Wiseman would go back to America, and supplied him with the services of another wounded veteran, Norman Thwaites. British by birth, Thwaites had been educated in Germany and could speak the language fluently. He’d first gone to New York at the beginning of the century, working as a journalist for the New York World, and making many useful contacts in the city, the most powerful of whom was his proprietor, Joseph Pulitzer. However, when the war began, he abandoned his burgeoning career and joined up. His period of service as a cavalry officer was brief: in November 1914 he was severely wounded in the First Battle of Ypres which saw more than 200,000 total casualties over two months of fighting this new kind of industrialised war.

  After recuperating from a bullet that ricocheted off a trench and through his throat and chin, Thwaites sailed into New York Harbor on New Year’s Day 1916, and quickly renewed acquaintance with friends who had grown influential in his absence. His former newsroom colleague Frank Cobb was now the go-to foreign affairs man at the New York World; Frank Polk was now counsellor to Secretary of State Robert Lansing, effectively making him Lansing’s lieutenant and the man whose office was responsible for intelligence; his pal Tom Tunney was now head of the NYPD Bomb and Neutrality Squad, chasing down German saboteurs; and his friend Charlie Dillingham, a promoter on Broadway, would end up as second-in-command of the US army’s military intelligence bureau in New York in 1917.

  Wiseman followed Thwaites to New York later in January, and the duo set up shop in the British consulate at 44 Whitehall Street, in Lower Manhattan, overlooking the harbour – and just across the street from the offices of the Hamburg America Line. They had recruits sent to them from England, and they brilliantly used the resources at hand, establishing a network that included characters as diverse as occultist and provocateur Aleister Crowley, the ‘Beast of the Apocalypse’, and the Russian-born Shlomo Rosenblum, aka Sidney Reilly, the self-styled ‘ace of spies’, as well as Germans, Irish, Americans, Indians, Canadians, Mexicans and eastern Europeans. Wiseman even succeeded in stealing away from Guy Gaunt the powerful network of agents run by Czech-American spymaster Emanuel Voska.

  The pair enjoyed the pleasures of New York, but never let an opportunity pass to gain the upper hand on the Germans. While dining at the Long Island home of Oscar Lewisohn, heir to a copper fortune and a social season mainstay in both England and the US, Thwaites was entertained by pictures of a recent trip that Lewisohn had taken to the Adirondack Mountains. He noticed that one of the photos in the album featured none other than Count Johann von Bernstorff, the German ambassador, with two comely young women, both in swimming costumes and neither of them the count’s wife.

  Thwaites managed to sneak the photo out of the mansion, have a copy made and return it to the album. His stealth attack came to light when he (with Wiseman’s hearty consent) released the photo to the press, causing substantial ridicule to von Bernstorff, and great pleasure to his enemies.

  In March 1916, Wiseman and Thwaites welcomed 47-year-old Robert Nathan to the fold, the third member of the trinity that would help to wage Britain’s war on the North American front so effectively. Nathan had served in the Indian Civil Service, and had notably been the police commissioner in Dhaka, successfully suppressing anti-British and armed Bengali revolutionaries. He began to work for British intelligence against Indian opposition groups in 1914, and after returning to England served on the Western Front as an interpreter for Indian troops, the perfect cover for an intelligence agent looking to overhear Indian plots against the state. His brief in New York was still to pursue Indian sedition.

  ‘C’ and Blinker Hall now had in place three agents to fight their intelligence war in North America: to investigate suspects about whom the home office needed information; to keep track of the Irish Nationalist movement in the United States; and to probe the murky and dangerous world of ‘Hindu sedition’. Nevertheless, despite the trio’s presence, the departed von Papen and Boy-Ed had created an extensive network in America, and had left a large and committed force of German agents behind. Germany was fighting a war on three fronts, and their biggest attack on America was soon to come.

  Chapter 8

  DEATH FROM THE SKIES

  In early 1915, Kaiser Wilhelm, a man better known for his bellicose rhetoric than his humanitarianism, was on the horns of an ethical dilemma. Should he bow to the urgings of his military and allow the Zeppelin fleet free rein to attack Britain regardless of the civilian casualties that would inevitably follow? Or should he exercise restraint? A bombing campaign, whatever its material successes, could easily backfire in the court of international public opinion, putting Germany beyond the pale in the eyes of neutral states, particularly America.

  As the pressure on him mounted, the Kaiser equivocated: on 9 January he gave permission for raids on Britain but not London; on 12 February he admitted the London Docks to the list; on 5 April he extended it to include the East End but warned his commanders not to hit residential areas or the royal palaces – after all, members of his family lived there. Then, on 20 July, he agreed to unrestricted bombing. At last the advocates of the Zeppelin had the green light to pursue their vision.

  The airship was named after the man who had created it, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, a member of the Engineering Corps who was so impressed by the observation balloons he’d witnessed first hand during the American Civil War that he decided to design his own version. With a rigid framework 420 feet long and 38 feet wide, 4,000 cubic feet of hydrogen to keep it afloat and two 16 h.p. motors to run it, the first model, LZ1, was test-flown in 1900.

  Both the army and the navy seized on this new weapon, each developing their own version with rival manufacturers – the army ships were designated S-class, the navy L-class. By 1914, there were 11 Zeppelins, armed with crude incendiary bombs and explosives, with more coming off the production line and teams of technicians working to create ever bigger, faster and more durable models.

  The first foray was mounted by Zeppelins L3 and L4 on 19 January 1915. Eleven incendiary bombs were randomly dropped on the seaside town of Great Yarmouth: one hit a church, killing two people, including a 72-year-old spinster; a shoemaker was killed in his shop; and one bomb hit a house where a young girl was playing the piano: ‘the force of the explosion lifted her completely from the piano stool and planted her a distance away’. Thankfully, she survived with only minor cuts and bruises. Meanwhile, 16 bombs fell on nearby Hunstanton, leaving two dead.

  For the British people, the experience of seeing these immense ships appearing in the sky above them must have felt like that moment in sci-fi movies when the alien spaceship first emerges from the clouds. Though H. G. Wells had anticipated their arrival in
his visionary The War in the Air (1908), nothing could have prepared the average citizen for the reality of death on their doorsteps. One civilian remembered how his ‘old pal’ reacted to seeing them: ‘he was half scared out of his wits. He was breathing heavy’ and thought they resembled ‘big silver cigars’.

  After a break while the Kaiser vacillated, raids resumed mid April. There were five more in the next four weeks, causing six fatalities as Zeppelins hit targets in East Anglia and the south-east. Then, on the night of 31 May/1 June, with the Kaiser’s blessing, the first assault on London occurred. Flying in from north of the city, a lone Zeppelin hit Stoke Newington before passing over Shoreditch, Hoxton, Spitalfields and Commercial Road, swinging out again via Leytonstone, having delivered 91 incendiaries and 28 explosives, setting 41 fires and killing seven people. The first Blitz had well and truly begun.

  From 1909 onwards, British attachés in Germany acting as spies for naval intelligence were reporting back on the progress of this new weapon. Two of them were treated to a test flight, and were suitably impressed by the Zeppelin’s speed and manoeuvrability. In their opinion, the German authorities were contemplating using Zeppelins to drop explosives on ships, towns and dockyards.

  They continued informing London about this aerial threat right up to the outbreak of war. However, it was only then, after Antwerp had been hit by Zeppelins in the first few weeks of the war, that the military woke up to the danger and began hasty preparations for home defence. As Churchill put it, Britain was ‘quite powerless to prevent an attack’. Alarmed, he intervened to get things moving, thereby ensuring that the Admiralty would take charge of any counter-measures, overriding the bitter objections of the War Office, who felt that their air arm, the Royal Flying Corps (RFC), should bear the burden.

  A motley collection of 68 guns was assembled in London, along with 53 searchlights, all manned by the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. On 1 October 1915, blackouts were introduced. By mid 1915, 60 planes, mostly from the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS), armed with rifles and hand-held bombs, were operating in the London-Sheerness-Dover triangle, with 20 allocated to the capital.

  As time went on, the resources dedicated to this defensive infrastructure increased steadily – by the end of 1916, 17,000 servicemen were watching the skies, adding to the dangers facing the Zeppelins. A veteran German captain compared the searchlights to ‘loathsome rigid snakes that have eyes’, holding their victims in ‘electric chains’. Once illuminated, bombardment followed: ‘Hell’s orchestra breaks loose … sirens howl, mortars bellow, cannons thunder.’

  It takes a particular kind of person to be able to sit thousands of feet in the air in a gigantic balloon filled with highly inflammable gas that other people are doing their best to ignite. Each Zeppelin carried between 16 and 23 crew – all volunteers – who had undergone six months of intensive training. They were part of the heroic elite of the German armed forces, ranked next to fighter aces and the submarine crews. Successful commanders were household names.

  Travelling at such high altitudes, they had to endure bitter temperatures: ‘even in midsummer our thermometers recorded 25–30 degrees below zero as soon as we were 5,000 metres up’. One officer recalled a particularly raw journey: ‘it was so cold that our sandwiches had frozen in our pockets and our eyebrows had turned white with frost’. Bad weather caused constant navigational difficulties. Numerous raids were abandoned after ships completely lost their bearings.

  To keep on course, they relied on communications from their meteorological and direction-finding stations. According to one veteran commander, this made the wireless operator, perched alone in his narrow cabin that was erected just in front of the engine, the key member of his crew: ‘our fate depended on him keeping a cool head’.

  Operators sent their first messages as the Zeppelins departed their bases. MI1(b), which was monitoring this traffic alongside Room 40, observed that ‘the practice prior to a raid was for the flagship at Wilhelmshaven to hold a sort of wireless roll-call’. A signal was ‘sent to the airship squadron and … acknowledged by each airship in turn’. Once en route, they relied on DF stations at Tondern, List, Nordholz and Bruges to get their bearings and negotiate the journey, especially when the ship was above the clouds or in a fog; and then, as they reached the English coast, to guide them in. This caused wireless pile-ups as each raider simultaneously tried to get confirmation of its position: ‘every ship is sparking away wildly … determined to get its own information at all costs’.

  All this activity was a gift to Britain’s string of coastal DF stations. After the war, the art of establishing the position of a Zeppelin from its signals was discussed by H. J. Round, the theoretical and practical brains behind DF technology. When three or more stations were in action, one would act as a censor, plotting the bearings coming in from the others until they all intersected at one point. Only then was the information deemed reliable.

  The Germans knew that their signals were vulnerable, ‘for every electrical discharge called the enemy’s attention to the fact that airships were approaching’. What they didn’t realise was that their messages were being intercepted and decoded. The Zeppelins relied on the HVB code book, the same one used by the merchant navy and the submarine fleet that had been in the hands of Room 40 from early in the war. As a result, decoding their communications was relatively straightforward. It helped that the airships stuck to their call signs, making them easy to identify. Though they changed their cipher key daily, this rarely troubled the experienced Room 40 codebreakers on duty during ‘Zeppelin nights’.

  Hugh Cleland Hoy, who was part of Hall’s staff for most of the war, remembered the feeling of anticipation as the codebreakers waited for an attack to come. They were ‘continually expectant of some intercepted message from the East Coast listening stations that might give a clue to the intention of the air raiders. On January 19th, an enemy wireless communication reached them which when decoded signified that the first effort was to be made … I still recall the breathless sensation with which I learned … that Yarmouth had been raided.’

  The aftermath of a Zeppelin attack on Bartholomew Close, London, 1915

  On 14 June, Hoy wrote that ‘decoded messages showed that L10 had left her shed at Nordholz at the same time as SL3, but there was no certainty as to her destination’. They were heading for Hull and other targets in the north-east. August was relatively quiet; then, over successive nights in early September, the capital got the worst of it: 40 dead, more than 100 injured, as both the East End and central London were blasted. A bus was flattened near Bloomsbury, while at Holborn a 660-tonne bomb created an eight-foot-deep hole in the ground.

  The raids were getting bigger. According to Hoy, shortly after 5 p.m. on 13 October, Room 40 decoded a wireless message which showed a serious raid was pending. Half a dozen Zeppelins were involved and once again London was the primary target. Casualties were high: Hoy called it ‘a fearful night’ during which 71 people were killed and over 120 so badly hurt that ‘probably few of them will survive to tell the tale’.

  By early 1916, the Zeppelins were travelling even further afield. Room 40 decoded wireless intercepts that served as a warning of a serious attack on Liverpool. Due to bad weather, they didn’t make it that far but still managed to offload 376 bombs, mostly incendiaries, on Manchester, Scunthorpe, Hull, and Walsall in Norfolk, where a stunned witness described the terrifying moment a tram full of passengers was hit: ‘the blast broke its windows. A piece of glass struck the Mayoress who was riding in the tram and she died from her injuries.’

  Throughout this onslaught the army had continued to grapple with the navy for control of home defence until a compromise was eventually reached on 10 February 1916. The Admiralty was to focus on the Zeppelins while they were over the sea, the army while they were over the UK. Room 40’s intelligence remained vital, as it alerted the seaplanes of the RNAS, giving them the chance to hunt down the Zeppelins before they reached the mainland.

 
Hoy described how ‘we learned from the German wireless that another raid was to take place. This was decoded so quickly that by 3 p.m. we were able to inform the Eastern Naval Command that there were 12 airships over the North Sea.’ The RNAS sprang into action: ‘our seaplanes … were at once ordered out from Harwich … L13 reported by wireless at about 10 o’clock that she was hit.’

  Meanwhile, at the War Office, Malcolm Hay already had four officers on wireless duties. In March, they left MI1(b) and formed MI1(e) to deal exclusively with the Zeppelin menace. Two of them collated the messages that were received by the special aerial on the roof of the building within 60 seconds of transmission, while the other two attacked the daily cipher key. The unit was connected by direct line to the WO telegraph section. It forwarded the data by pneumatic tube to Room 417, the main control centre. From there the information was called through to GHQ Home Forces. One squadron leader described the scene. A large map was laid out on a table. Sitting round it were ‘a number of operators … receiving information on telephone handsets as it came in’ and plotting it on the map, making it ‘possible for the GOC to see the position of the raid at a moment’s glance’.

  With the DF stations and the codebreakers leading the way, the British had at their disposal a formidable intelligence-gathering system that produced a clear picture of the scale and timing of each raid. However, all this information was worthless unless the air force could actually destroy the enemy. Due to inadequate firepower, it couldn’t. The planes simply didn’t have ammunition powerful enough to penetrate the monster’s skin. They were further handicapped by lack of altitude. Unable to operate higher than 13,000 feet, they were no match for Zeppelins that were still comfortable at 18,000 feet. Speed was an issue as well. The airships could climb 1,000 feet a minute; British aircraft took ten times as long to cover the same distance.