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

by James Wyllie

  More was to come. During February 1918, Thoroton, acting on Room 40 decodes, tipped off the local chief of police at Cartagena and U-35 was caught with 12 cases of anthrax and glanders concealed in lumps of sugar. The fact that this horrific cargo was travelling under orders from the German embassy presented Hall with an opportunity to embarrass the German ambassador, who was already smarting from the dismissal of Krohn.

  To perform this delicate mission, Hall employed his personal secretary, Lord Herschell. As lord-in-waiting to both Edward VII and George V, Herschell was extremely well connected and was friends with the Spanish monarch, King Alfonso XIII. He presented the damning evidence to the King, and, shocked by this blatant abuse of diplomatic privilege, Alfonso politely told the German ambassador that he was no longer welcome in Spain.

  Support for Germany was wearing thin in Spain. Between April 1917 and April 1918, in a desperate effort to disrupt trade with the Allies, U-boats sank 40 Spanish merchant ships and killed 100 sailors. For the same reason, German agents promoted labour unrest, strikes and industrial sabotage. By 1918, they were conspiring with anarchist groups as well as recruiting informers and crooked cops, including the head of Barcelona’s political police. These murky dealings culminated in the assassination of José Barret, a major player in the Catalan metallurgy industry, whose factories supplied the French with shells. The investigation into this brutal murder implicated government officials and local dignitaries. Shocked into action, politicians passed an espionage bill to crack down on German spies.

  As the war drew to a close, Hall’s agents were paid the highest possible compliment by the Spanish government: it begged him not to withdraw them because, according to Edward Bell, Hall’s confidant at the US embassy in London, they were ‘a far more reliable source of information … than their own police and civil authorities’.

  King Constantine, the Greek monarch, was pro-Germany. The prime minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, who’d been elected in June 1915, was pro-Allies. The potential for conflict between them increased when Bulgaria entered the war in October 1915 and helped the Germans and Austrians crush Serbian resistance. The Allies, bogged down at Gallipoli and fearing that the strategic balance in the Balkans was going against them, asked Venizelos if the surviving remnants of the Serbian army could seek refuge in the Greek territory of Salonika.

  Venizelos agreed to their request, but when news of the deal came out, his government collapsed and he was forced to resign. A new administration, supported by the King and preaching benevolent neutrality, rejected the Salonika plan. Ignoring their wishes, and with Venizelos still agitating on their behalf, the Allies went ahead anyway and began landing a force of 75,000 British and 75,000 French troops at Salonika.

  Given the uncertainty surrounding Greek policy, it was imperative that MI1(b) tackle their diplomatic codes; Malcolm Hay remembered that ‘in 1916 information about what was going on in Greece was badly wanted’. MI1(b) had access to ‘very long messages which were passing in great numbers between King Constantine … and Berlin’, but there was a major stumbling block. Hay had no means of knowing in what language the messages were written.

  His right-hand man, John Fraser, was given the job of solving the riddle. A lecturer in Latin at Aberdeen University and later Professor of Celtic at Oxford, Fraser mastered 21 languages by the end of the war and was instrumental in cracking the codes of 11 different countries.

  After several weeks of intense study Fraser concluded that the text must not be in Greek, but in French. This was the breakthrough they were looking for. Fraser immediately telegrammed Hay, who was out of the office for a few days, the simple message ‘Pillars of Hercules have fallen’. After that, progress was swift. Fraser applied his discovery to a number of different code books, some in Greek, some in French, and, with Room 40’s cooperation, set about reconstructing them.

  By the end of the year, MI1(b) had the inside track on the deteriorating political situation in Greece. Venizelos continued to press for a clear commitment to the Allies. The King resisted as long as he could before being forced to abdicate in June 1917. Venizelos began to mobilise the army so it could lend support to the Allies at Salonika.

  At the time, there were around 680,000 troops, British, Italian, French and Russian, rotting away on what had been dubbed the Macedonian Front. Two dismal and short-lived attacks were launched against the Bulgarians in the summer of 1916 and the spring of 1917; otherwise a dispiriting stalemate was the order of the day, only broken in the last few months of 1918 when the Allies went on the offensive and the Bulgarian army broke and ran, leaving its government no choice but to seek peace.

  Malcolm Hay’s conviction that MI1(b) should play a much greater role than it had under his predecessor led inexorably to an expansion of his team and larger premises to accommodate them. While he lived alone at 20 Gloucester Place, Hay’s staff moved to a large building in Cork Street in the heart of the West End. The core codebreaking team grew from three to eleven: by the end of the war there were 20, plus 60 clerical and secretarial staff, almost all women. They had their work cut out, as Hay recalled: ‘thousands of telegrams filled up the cupboards at Cork Street. Although my staff had increased it was impossible to read everything.’

  Like Blinker Hall, Hay recruited mostly from academia: there was a medieval historian, a classicist, a lecturer in palaeography, an Egyptologist, an Arabist, an expert on Celtic languages, a philologist, the curator of the Ashmolean Musuem in Oxford, a mountaineer, and an ex-consul formerly based in Tokyo.

  The security and privacy of MI1(b)’s operations was jealously guarded. To distract and detain unwanted visitors from neutral countries, a dummy room was maintained at the War Office. The entrance to Cork Street itself was guarded by ‘a trusty warrant officer of prizefighter physique’; if anyone got past him, Hay had a colleague available to act as a decoy by giving ‘the impression of a typical British idiot’. A letter to the police, regarding ‘the nuisance caused by the large number of itinerant musicians’ who congregated on the streets outside, politely demanded that the constabulary prohibit ‘street noise in the immediate vicinity’.

  The codebreakers at Cork Street focused mainly on diplomatic traffic. Unlike Room 40, which had been gifted copies of the relevant German code books early in the war, the decipherers at MI1(b) had to start from scratch. Hay noted that ‘before decoding the messages, we had to reconstruct the code books’; many of them were non-alphabetical, adding to their complexity, while ‘some embassies used to encipher their codes’. However, as he proudly stated, ‘all these difficulties were overcome, Cork Street was never defeated’. By 1918, his team had broken the diplomatic codes used by the USA, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Italy, the Vatican, Holland, Greece, Romania and Japan.

  One of MI1(b)’s most significant achievements was cracking the ‘Für GOD’ system used by the German General Staff to encode messages sent three times a week to their secret agents in North Africa and the Middle East via the all-powerful Nauen transmitter. As the messages carried no signature, no address and no call sign, each normally a standard point of entry for the codebreakers, they had already defied Room 40’s experts. The system was eventually solved by Captain Brooke-Hunt, one of Hay’s key staff, who discovered that it contained 22 mixed alphabets and 30 random cipher keys of 11–18 letters, generating a dizzying array of variables and alternative letter combinations, making it extremely difficult to discover any repetitions or recurring patterns. The intelligence gained from this breakthrough was shared with Room 40, and Hall used it to stop German gun-running to rebels in French Morocco.

  This was one of the few examples of the burgeoning cooperation between MI1(b) and Room 40 that we have on record. Unfortunately very little else remains to illuminate their relationship. Hay and Blinker Hall had a private telephone line installed and spoke at least once a day. Sadly, neither left any record of their conversations. A few documents in the archives feature requests by
Room 40 for material from MI1(b) about South American codes, the exchange of notes and code books relating to Spain, and some American material.

  One such communiqué from Room 40 to MI1(b) concerned Oliver Strachey, who was by then overseeing its Middle Eastern work: ‘touching on the Turkish question, I wonder if Strachey would like to see some intercepts of a year ago when Constantinople and Berlin were only joined by WT. As there is now an expert in this language something might in time be made of them which would throw light on subsequent events.’

  This kind of exchange of material and ideas between Room 40 and MI1(b) reflected the informal camaraderie that developed over the course of the war, driven by a healthy sense of competition. It was in stark contrast to other sections of the intelligence community, which were beset by suspicion and barely concealed hostility. How much the diplomatic work carried out by Malcolm Hay’s team dovetailed with Hall’s efforts to manipulate the foreign policy of neutral countries and counter German efforts to do the same, we will never know. That said, the very fact that Hall and Hay brushed aside the mutual loathing that characterised the relationship between the Admiralty and the War Office demonstrated that their commitment to defeating the enemy took precedence over departmental politics.

  Chapter 11

  THE IRISH WAR

  January 1916 was deceptively warm and dry in London, as if spring were coming early to assuage the bloody wounds of war. The British had just finished evacuating troops from the disaster of Gallipoli, after suffering close to 115,000 killed or wounded. On the Western Front, where the war was now entrenched into its second winter, the Germans and the French were about to begin the Battle of Verdun, the longest single battle of the war and one that would claim more than 700,000 combatants by the time it was finished – with no victor – in December 1916.

  Blinker Hall was under no illusion that the war was going to get any easier, despite US President Woodrow Wilson dispatching his unofficial Secretary of State Colonel Edward House to Europe in early January to work out an Anglo-American strategy for peace. Though House spoke with French and German leaders about ending the war, he spent most of his time in London telling the British that the Germans would relaunch unrestricted submarine warfare, suspended in November 1915, and that this would bring the Americans into the conflict. But when?

  And then there was the Irish question. In 1912, the Third Home Rule Bill for Ireland – violently opposed as ‘Rome Rule’ by the Ulster Unionists – had riled supporters and opponents on both sides of the Irish Sea. The bill’s eventual success – it would receive royal assent in 1914 – led to sectarian violence and the simmering threat of civil war. But the Irishman who was most on the mind of Blinker Hall at the beginning of 1916 was in Germany, with a bold plan to open another front on which to further bleed the depleted British military. And he was a revolutionary from within the British establishment, which made him that much more dangerous.

  Roger Casement, an elegant 50-year-old bachelor, had come to the United States in the summer of 1914 as a knighted servant of the British Crown who had won his title for his work in the British consular service in the Congo, and then in Brazil. Casement had done more than bid for the interests of the state in his 18 years in the Foreign Office. He had been a bold emissary of justice, investigating – and publicising – with zeal the crimes committed against rubber plantation workers by their corporate and government exploiters, especially the genocidal rule of Belgium’s King Leopold II in the Congo, and the slavery and torture inflicted by the Peruvian Amazon Company on the Putomayo Indians in South America.

  Casement had been born into a life of seeming Anglo-Irish comfort in Sandycove, just outside Dublin, in 1864. His father, the son of a bankrupt Belfast shipping merchant, was a captain in the 3rd Dragoon Guards of the British army, and a Protestant. His mother, a Dubliner, had her son secretly baptised as a Catholic when he was three years old. By the time he was 13, Casement was an orphan, and was taken in by an uncle, who raised him as a Protestant and sent him to boarding school.

  The tall, handsome Casement cut a striking figure when he ventured into the Congo, as caught by the eye of Jessie Conrad, the wife of his friend, novelist Joseph Conrad: ‘He was a very handsome man with a thick, dark beard and piercing, restless eyes. His personality impressed me greatly. It was about the time when he was interested in bringing to light certain atrocities which were taking place in the Belgian Congo.’

  And indeed he did. In 1911, Casement named the perpetrators, many of whom were charged and convicted, and detailed their crimes in his report to Britain’s Parliament on human rights abuses in the rubber industry, an account framed by the crimes he had seen in the Congo and reported on in 1904. His work won him a knighthood, and international celebrity as a humanitarian crusader. Yet despite his success in the Foreign Office, he was disillusioned by the sins of empire, and especially those he now saw committed by the British in his home country. He had become increasingly politicised by the vigorous and violent opposition that Protestant Ulster Unionists successfully demonstrated against Irish Home Rule in 1912, a form of Irish self-government still overseen by Britain, which the UK proposed as a solution to the Irish Question. Casement realised that he was on the other side – the side of total Irish liberation.

  Delving into Irish history and studying the Irish language, he left the Foreign Office in 1913 and helped to found the Irish Volunteers, a republican organisation whose mission was to help usher in self-rule in Ireland. That same year, he visited Connemara, in the west of Ireland, whose poverty shocked him even more than the misery he had witnessed in his consular work in Africa and South America.

  The following year, with both sides having formed paramilitary organisations, Casement was in charge of a committee to buy arms for the Irish Volunteers. With a budget of £1,500 to buy 1,500 rifles – in contrast to the funds available to the Protestant Ulster Volunteer Force, which purchased 35,000 guns and three million rounds of ammunition – Casement shipped arms to the Irish Volunteers on the yacht of novelist and Republican sympathiser Erskine Childers, who would serve with distinction in the Royal Navy during the war.

  In the summer of 1914, Casement travelled to the United States at the invitation of John Devoy, the 72-year-old patriarch of Irish nationalism in the US. Devoy had been exiled there in 1871 as one of the ‘Cuba Five’, Irish revolutionaries who were released from British prison on the condition they did not return to England until their original sentences had expired. He had been sentenced to 15 years for treason in trying to organise an uprising of Fenian soldiers he had met while serving in the uniform of the British army. It was this idea that fuelled Casement’s war against the English.

  In a display of Irish republican enthusiasm that annoyed the British, Devoy had been welcomed to the United States at the very seat of national government: the House of Representatives. Irish nationalism was a strong force in American political life, buoyed by the promise of Home Rule that had first been mooted by the British more than half a century before the 1914 war began in Europe. After such a warm embrace in the new world, Devoy had no interest in returning to the old, save for his politics. He became a journalist for the New York Herald, and eventually, leader of the Clan na Gael, which was the American branch of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Under Devoy’s direction, Clan na Gael had risen to become the most powerful Irish republican organisation in the USA, and it gave Casement a mighty platform from which to advance his cause of Irish nationalism with money and men. And then the war gave him an even bigger one.

  In September 1914, Casement attracted the attention of his government, in a way that would ultimately become fatal, when he wrote an open letter to the Irish people from New York. In it he urged all Irishmen to refuse to fight against Germany, and declared himself a founding member of the Irish Volunteers. The British Foreign Office suspended his pension, and MI5 opened a file on him.

  For the British, hoping to convince the United States – by whatever means necessary – to
enter the war on the side of the Allies, the Irish Question was especially sensitive. The Great Famine had ravaged Ireland in the mid nineteenth century, killing a million people and speeding another million to distant shores, many of them staying in the place where they’d arrived in the United States: New York City. The large, and largely urban Irish population wielded considerable influence in President Woodrow Wilson’s Democratic Party, where they favoured peace because it was good for the American economy – and the Irish working man. The British knew that some of the Irish in America saw the war as a chance for Ireland to free itself from Britain once and for all. It was a dangerous game, and Blinker Hall was keeping a close watch on Irish republican traffic, including Roger Casement in New York. And Hall had some powerful local help.

  Sir Roger Casement and John Devoy

  While in New York, Casement was lodged at the home of John Quinn, a second-generation Irish-American lawyer who, in addition to being influential in the art world as a collector and patron, was also deeply involved in the world of Irish politics. The dapper 44-year-old Quinn was an energetic supporter of Irish Home Rule, and would help write an Irish Home Rule Convention in 1917. In 1914, however, he was also working on behalf of the Allied cause, feeding intelligence to the British consulate at 44 Whitehall Street. Back in London, Blinker Hall learned everything that Casement was plotting in America.

  On 10 August, the swaggering, impassioned Casement met with Germany’s opportunistic military attaché Franz von Papen at the German Club in New York, along with the German ambassador Count von Bernstorff, Quinn, Devoy and others. Casement’s war plan for Ireland so inspired von Papen that he sent a memo to Germany introducing Casement as the ‘leader of all the Irish in America’. Two weeks later, Casement wrote to Kaiser Wilhelm himself, outlining the rich possibilities that the war presented to Irish freedom from English rule: ‘Thousands of Irishmen are prepared to do their part to aid the German cause for they recognise that it is their own.’ In his letter, Casement argued that of the 150,000 British soldiers taken prisoner by the Germans, 35–40,000 were Irish, and they should be separated and organised into a separate Irish brigade, ready to land in Ireland and fight the English.