Gordon Welchman

by Joel Greenberg

  He fell in love with Plum Island, a barrier island off the coast where the Parker River and the Merrimack River flow into the Gulf of Maine. The island was best known as an outstanding birding spot and was a stop-off on the migration paths of numerous species. Bird watchers came from all over the world to photograph and document birds and other forms of wildlife on Plum Island. There was also a lovely sandy beach running around the north side of the island. By August he had found a house which suited him and put in an offer. After some legal problems were resolved, he purchased the house at 167 Water Street for $5,300 with the rear of the property overlooking the Merrimack River and towards Plum Island and the Atlantic. When he moved to Newburyport in June 1971 he didn’t know anyone in the area, but according to friends, was considered to be very eligible. However, he was very much the English gentleman and friends used to tease him about being an old-fashioned one at that. When he was courting his second wife Fannie, his daughter Ros would often accompany them as a chaperone, much to her bemusement. Apparently a lady neighbour, who was a member of a very socially acceptable family, often invited him to her house for parties. At one such event he was at the bottom of the stairs and to his horror, she was removing her knickers. He excused himself and refused further invitations. He even once told his wife not to invite a woman friend around again because she wore eye shadow. However, friends suspected that it was just as likely to be due to her topics of conversation which were not as wide-ranging as the rest of Welchman’s friends. His own definition of a gentleman was ‘someone who would like to but doesn’t’.14

  On 24 July 1971 the second cousin whom he had visited earlier in the year in Pennsylvania came to see him along with her two young sons and her American husband Bill. Teeny Wimer had an English mother and an Austrian father. Her great-grandfather on her mother’s side, Henry Welchman, had been the brother of Gordon Welchman’s grandfather. In 1969 she had ended up in the local hospital in Newburyport as a result of a car accident. On that occasion she was helped by Diana Lucy and they had continued to correspond. On this visit, they were able to meet under pleasanter circumstances and of course, at the same time, bring Welchman together with Diana, who would become a close friend for the rest of his life.

  One of the problems with life in Newburyport was going to be the winter snows and difficulties in parking his car at the back of the house. So, once again, he considered buying a second home in Sarasota where he could spend the winters in the Florida sunshine. However, Teeny had kept in contact with him after her visit and had found him an apartment in Westchester, near her and her family. Welchman was becoming quite close to Teeny. She had lost her father shortly after the end of the war and initially he thought it would be good to bring her into his family and perhaps be the father that she never had.

  Teeny was a very practical and down-to-earth woman and before long events took a different turn. Despite an age difference of thirty years, they had fallen in love. It was hardly surprising that Teeny’s husband was not very happy with the impending break-up of his marriage. In any event, Teeny and her boys moved into Welchman’s house in Newburyport in April 1972. Ever the gentleman, he promptly took a room in a nearby hotel and would not stay the night until they were married. He did not want to damage her reputation! In early May 1972 he flew to England and then on to Paris to visit his youngest daughter Ros, who was living there with her husband. Welchman told her of his wish to marry Teeny and sought advice on how best to broach the subject with the rest of the family in England. After returning to England, he took the opportunity to meet his old BP colleague Sir Leonard (Joe) Hooper, now the Director of GCHQ. He made enquires about when the embargo on discussing his wartime work at BP might be lifted, It appears that he was already considering the possibility of writing something about his time at BP.

  In July 1972 Welchman and Teeny flew to Haiti where they were married. Returning after a brief honeymoon, they soon settled into life in Newburyport. His MITRE work was going well and taking up much of his time. He had completed a fifty-page document on Soviet weapon deployment in Europe before leaving for Haiti.

  MITRE had offered Welchman a consultancy contract which had been ideal for him. MITRE’s Bedford, Massachusetts, headquarters was only fifty miles from Newburyport and he wouldn’t have to make the journey every day. He quickly became involved in various projects concerning technical solutions for weapon systems being used in Vietnam. In early 1972, he was asked to study Soviet capabilities for military operations in and around Europe. From 1972 to 1978, his studies were centred on anticipating what the Soviets, with their Warsaw Pact allies, might try to do in the first few hours of a conventional attack against West Germany. He would then switch to designing suitable tactical communications for possible future battlefields. In this last study he noted that:

  Our military thinking of today shows the same types of doctrinal inhibition and compartmentalization that were so disastrous for the British [in the North Africa campaign in the Second World War].

  In the summer of 1974 Welchman and his wife decided to celebrate their second wedding anniversary in England. It was towards the end of this trip that Welchman came across an article in the 28 July issue of the Sunday Telegraph previewing Winterbotham’s book, The Ultra Secret. This book was the beginning of the gradual release of information about the work of Welchman and his colleagues at BP throughout the war. It would impact significantly on the path that Welchman would take for the rest of his life.

  Chapter 9

  Writing The Hut Six Story

  Welchman had thought very little about the Second World War until he joined MITRE in 1962. That changed once he became ‘involved in studying the information flow needed for co-ordination of ground and air forces in battle’.1 It is likely that he started to think about writing about his wartime activities at that point. In any event, in 1974, spurred on by the Sunday Telegraph articles, Welchman had tried to contact one of his old BP colleagues, Peter Calvocoressi, while in London. Calvocoressi had been head of the Air sub-section of Hut 3 from 1942 to 1945 and worked closely with Welchman in co-ordinating the flow of decrypts from Hut 6 to Hut 3. Failing to make contact directly, Welchman decided to write to him after returning to Newburyport in late August 1974.2 While he found the Winterbotham articles irritating, it did seem to him that their publication might result in others being allowed to talk openly about their experiences and to write their memoirs. He also felt that Calvocoressi might be well placed to provide him with advice on this matter. In his letter he told Calvocoressi about some of his work at MITRE. He made it clear that his primary motivation for writing a book was the deeply held belief that an open discussion of the insight into German communications philosophy that BP acquired during the Second World War could be of real value in advanced planning for NATO.

  Calvocoressi replied several weeks later and by coincidence, had received Welchman’s letter on the very day that he had acquired a proof copy of Winterbotham’s book. He had found it disappointing, believing that after an initial account about how BP learned the details of the Enigma machine, it was no more than ‘a chapter by chapter account of the principal campaigns and battles of the war with Ultra thrown in’. Calvocoressi had already written a book about the Second World War for general consumption and had approached the authorities for permission to refer to Ultra material.3 He had been refused but when he asked the same authorities what they might do if he did, in effect, ‘blow the gaff’, he had been told that they would do nothing because they would look silly in doing so. Nonetheless, he decided to abide by the official ruling, feeling bound by the personal undertaking he had given under the Official Secrets Act. He believed that there was room for the sort of book Welchman suggested but it would probably need to be put together by three or four people. He was well placed to make this judgement as he had been appointed Editor-in-Chief of Penguin books in 1973 and Publisher and Chief Executive the following year. His reservations about being involved himself were due to work commitments a
nd the fact that he did not feel able to write an account of Hut 3 without access to documents, which would probably be refused,

  In reply, Welchman told him that he was keen to ask Stuart Milner-Barry to help in the project because he was the principal Hut 6 liaison with Hut 3 while he was in charge and took charge of Hut 6 when Welchman became Assistant Director for Mechanization. At this stage Welchman believed that a combination of himself, Milner-Barry and a Hut 3 man such as Calvocoressi could cover the essential parts. His own contribution would probably be a simple account of the early days, explaining how a huge operation grew out of the early work of Dilly Knox, supplemented by his own initial studies of call-signs and discriminants. He would probably take his story up to the point when the Americans joined the staff of Hut 6, and the Central Party was merged into the rest of the operation under his supervision.

  Welchman wrote to Winterbotham on 22 January 1975, saying that he had a fascinating story to tell and hoped to do so before long.4 In his reply the following month, Winterbotham said that the real object of writing his own book had been to put pressure on the authorities to release all available documents so that history could be properly written. He believed that Welchman had:

  the most fascinating story of all those who took part and one which everyone is trying hard to find out. I cannot go an inch further than the book. Security here are very nervous at present and have warned me not to go beyond the book, since TV & films are likely to follow, and it is all the cryptographic tricks you got up to in order to give the ‘Bronze Goddesses’ their breakfast that the ferrets are after. Fortunately, I don’t know much about them but Milner-Barry tells me you were the driving force in that field.

  Winterbotham claimed that his British and Commonwealth publishers, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, were very helpful in getting his book published as Sir George Weidenfeld was a close friend of Harold Wilson who had the final world. He also extravagantly claimed that ‘if my own book is any criterion, maybe make you half a million $’s over about 3 years [sic]’.

  While Winterbotham was certainly the first to make the general public both in the UK and the USA aware of BP, others had previously made references to it. The journalist and author Malcolm Muggeridge had been recruited by MI 6 in 1942. In the second volume of his memoirs, published in 1973, a year before Winterbotham’s book was published, Muggeridge mentioned BP on numerous occasions.5 He described ‘cracked cipher material’ as being the staple product of MI 6 which provided the basis of most of its activities. He went on to say that:

  The establishment which produced this precious material was located at Bletchley, in a manor house in which I spent some days familiarising myself with the place, its staff, its output and manner of working. As might be supposed, in view of the business at hand, the staff were a curious mix of mathematicians, dons of various kinds, chess and crossword maestros, an odd musician or two, and numerous wireless telegraphy experts.

  Another example can be found in an episode of the classic 1970s BBC television series, Colditz.6 The series followed the lives of Allied servicemen imprisoned at the supposedly escape-proof Colditz Castle. In Series 2, Episode 3 the prisoners are trying to get a message to British intelligence services. One sends a coded letter to his wife who, being good at crossword puzzles, recognizes it as such and takes it to MI 5. One of the MI 5 officers says to a colleague ‘We could try sending it to Bletchley.’ The programme was broadcast on 21 January 1974, well before Winterbotham’s book appeared. One of the creators of the series had previously drawn on his Second World War RAF experiences to produce, in 1963, a drama about an RAF squadron which ferried agents in and out of occupied Europe. Could it be that he knew about BP and was tempted to drop the name into the script?

  By February 1975, it was becoming clear that, while Welchman could write an interesting book without access to GCHQ documents, Milner-Barry and Calvocoressi would find it difficult to do so. Therefore, at a meeting in Newburyport, Calvocoressi agreed that Welchman’s book could lead up to a second volume, written jointly by the three of them, when, they hoped, records would be available. Calvocoressi believed that a direct approach to GCHQ or NSA would result in a refusal and leave them in an even more difficult position. He also thought that Winterbotham’s idea of going straight to his publishers and letting them fight the battle was naive. He regarded Winterbotham’s story of personal influence with Harold Wilson as nonsense.

  Calvocoressi strongly recommended that at this point Welchman concentrate on getting a major part of the book written. He might avoid some of the technical details by referring to as yet unwritten appendices. The decision about what to do about publication could be left until he had the material ready. Calvocoressi was willing to help and Penguin was definitely interested in the book. Penguin would handle the British edition, and would arrange for an American hardcover edition by some other publisher. He was certain that a number of publishers would be interested, and it would be a great mistake for Welchman to tie himself to any one publisher, even Penguin, at this point. Calvocoressi agreed to talk to Milner-Barry when he returned to the UK. It was important that neither he nor Milner-Barry do anything rash at this stage. Welchman was keen on selling a paper model of an Enigma machine with the book but Calvocoressi thought it would be too difficult to produce. They were both keen, however, to include a picture of an actual message, pictures of Welchman’s original traffic analysis sheets, the ‘female’ sheets, the alphabet squares for the Herivel Tip and the teletype registers. Welchman was pleased that a non-technical person like Calvocoressi, albeit a very intelligent former solicitor, journalist and academic, was so quick at picking up the technical details. Much to his surprise, that even included his great invention, the diagonal board. This gave him some confidence that his story would be both understandable and intriguing to a wide audience.

  Calvocoressi suggested that Welchman contact their old BP colleague Joe Hooper to press the case for access to wartime material which both Calvocoressi and Milner-Barry had previously sought. Hooper now served as Intelligence Co-ordinator in the Cabinet Office, where he acted as a general overseer of the UK intelligence community. Following a meeting with him in early April 1975, Calvocoressi wrote to Hooper, summarizing what he sought as follows:

  Finally, remember that Gordon, Stuart and I are all in our sixties – two of us close to seventy. There are people whom we would wish to talk to, and they are no younger. Some may be ailing, One or two are already dead. Postponement in this case is nearly tantamount to killing the whole project.

  I would therefore urge that what we seek to do be not prohibited by the authorities but blessed – in, dare I say it, the national interest. Clearly there must be limitations but we do seek facilities for embarking now on the planning and writing. And please do not be misled by the word ‘now’. I believe it would take us about two years to write the book from the moment when we can disentangle ourselves from other commitments. The publishing processes take another year. So what we are talking about is publication about the beginning of 1979.

  In their meeting Hooper had told Calvocoressi that in 1974, 2,000 volumes of Air Intelligence files had been deposited in the Public Records Office (PRO).7 He had also said that virtually all Ultra material sent to the Air Ministry was included in the files sent to the PRO.

  One late evening in March 1975, Welchman found himself alone at home, looking after his stepsons while his wife Teeny was away. With both his MITRE work and the book on his mind, he had become very quiet at home, often retreating for long periods to work on the book and letters. He was first and foremost an academic and sometimes everything else became secondary. It was also having an effect on his marriage. As was his habit, he wrote a note to himself:

  As I sit down to write, on this Palm Sunday, March 23rd, 1975, at 10.45 pm, I have a feeling that this book, if it ever gets published, has a good chance of being an unusual one. My wife, who as yet knows little about my wartime activities, is away at a friend’s wedding. It is odd that s
he has German nationality, although her mother was English, in fact my second cousin. I am temporarily in charge of her two sons, who, I hope, are now fast asleep, in spite of the fact that I am listening to music. I had intended to go to bed early, with the idea of doing some writing tomorrow, but the urge is on me tonight.

  I have several motivations for writing. First of all the big opportunity that I had at Bletchley in the early days of the war resulted in the greatest ‘fun’ that I have ever experienced. The Hut 6 organization that I developed had a reputation of being the happiest group in Bletchley, the envy of all other groups, but I really believe that no one in Hut 6 had as much ‘fun’ as I did. It is perhaps rather ironical that many people, like myself, look back on World War II as the most exciting and rewarding period of their life. I certainly do, and at odd times during my busy and varied post-war life I have longed to share my wartime ‘fun’ at least with my family and friends.

  During the war I had the great satisfaction, denied to so many, of doing a really worthwhile job for my country. It had the disadvantage, however, of being a highly secret job. I bore the heavy burden, familiar to people who worked in ‘intelligence’, of trying, in my ordinary life, to distinguish between what I knew about the war from Ultra, and what I had learned from newspapers and radio broadcasts. After the war, to be on the safe side, I did not think or talk or read about the war in Europe and Africa for almost 26 years, in fact until my retirement from the MITRE Corporation.

  When I joined MITRE in 1962, after a varied experience, I soon found myself involved once again with military problems, but in non-European theatres. At that time it was felt that any war in continental Europe would go nuclear at once. However, I did find that my Bletchley experience had a valuable contribution to make in planning for operations in other theatres.