Not until my retirement from MITRE, at 65, was I asked to pay serious attention to the problems of the continental European theatre, and to the lessons that could be drawn from the experience of World War II. As I studied the NATO/Warsaw Pact confrontation, it became more and more obvious that the true story of what happened at Bletchley would be of immense value, not only to the military planning of the NATO alliance, but also to the general public in each NATO country.
Another facet of the Bletchley story that has been in my mind all these years is the fact that we drafted a lot of young men into the game. Many of them pleaded to be allowed to take an active part in the war, for instance as RAF pilots. But their knowledge of what was happening at Bletchley made this impossible. I have been haunted by one particular young man who was recruited for Bletchley because of his ability, and was doing a magnificent job. He received a vile letter from his former headmaster, implying that he was a disgrace to his school!
In my work for MITRE, both as an employee from 1962 to 1971, and as a consultant, I have become more and more aware both of the major problems that face NATO in the area of battlefield communication, and also of the value to forward planning by the lessons that are implied by the Hut 6 story.
In early April, Welchman received a letter from Robin Denniston of Thomson Publications. Formerly at Weidenfeld and Nicolson, Denniston had been responsible for publishing The Ultra Secret and Winterbotham had shown him Welchman’s letter. Denniston’s father Alastair had been the Head of GC&CS, from its inception in 1919 until 1942.8 Denniston junior was keen to meet to discuss the possibilities of his acquiring publishing rights for Welchman’s book about Hut 6. He went so far as to say that he would ‘bring a contract with me so that, all being well, we can proceed to practicalities’. While Welchman, following Calvocoressi’s advice, had no intention of tying himself up with a publisher at this stage, he was keen to meet Denniston and hear what he had to say about BP.
Welchman was confident that he could, if necessary, tell his part of the story without access to records and what he might not be able to remember about what he regarded as the brilliantly conceived German signals organization, he could get from unclassified sources. He told Calvocoressi in a letter that:
In my part of the story I intend to bring out very clearly that our success in Hut 6 was by no means a purely cryptographic success. It depended on developing a key understanding of the purposes of the German command communications system, its methods of operation, and its weaknesses. Without this, our cryptographic methodology would have accomplished very little.
He also had a further incentive to tell the story of Hut 6, not shared by Calvocoressi, Milner-Barry or most of his other BP colleagues. After the war, he had taken part in the early development of digital computers, and been involved in several other technological fields. After joining MITRE in 1962, the principal focus of his work had been the proper application of new technology to communications for command and control on a future battlefield. However, a study of information-handling requirements on a battlefield called for a pretty broad understanding of military problems. This he had been trying to provide in a form suitable for participants in military communication studies. After his retirement in 1972, he had been asked to continue to work for MITRE as a consultant. Research on military history and military thinking had already become a major hobby and he soon found himself developing and presenting background information needed for studies related to the Warsaw Pact/NATO confrontation in Europe. This had brought him right back, after thirty-five years, to the unique characteristics of the German military communications of the Second World War. Part of his current work was for a new educational activity called ‘The MITRE Institute’, which was beginning to offer courses in systems engineering in the field of communications. An underlying purpose of these courses was to bring out all the important considerations that should be taken into account in the design of a battlefield communication system for use by future NATO commanders in Western Europe. He and his MITRE colleagues had been using military history as a guide. They had found plenty of historical evidence that the early German success in the Second World War owed a great deal to the design and implementation of battlefield communication capabilities that were well suited to, and as revolutionary as, the strategy of Blitzkrieg. It now seemed to be highly probable that the association of new technology with the best features of the German communications of the Second World War would lead to another revolution in communication capabilities that would be ideal for NATO. Consequently Welchman now believed that an open discussion of the insight into German communications philosophy that had been acquired during the Second World War could be of real value in advanced planning for NATO. Furthermore, after the Winterbotham publication, it was hard to see why highly relevant historical information on the subject of German battlefield communications in the Second World War should not be developed and made available to planners.
From late May 1975 there was a lull in his MITRE commitments which would allow him to work on the book over the next two to three months. By the beginning of June, the first three chapters – ‘The Cottage and Schoolhouse, Summer 1939’; ‘Birth of Hut 6’; and ‘The Early Days of Hut 6’ – were completed in draft form. Several weeks later, he had a draft of two more chapters covering the golden days of the machine room and the proliferation of Enigma keys. His final three chapters would cover related activities, working for Travis and life at Bletchley Park. He also proposed to produce four technical appendices covering the Jeffreys apparatus, the Turing bombe, the spider bombe and manual methods. At this stage, Calvocoressi advised against telling both the Hut 6 story and the moral for today in one book. He felt that they were two very different things and likely to appeal to different audiences. He had also been given a copy of Anthony Cave Brown’s A Bodyguard of Lies which he thought Welchman should see.
Welchman had now met Robin Denniston and had a three-hour chat. He believed that Denniston had good reason to feel that his father was badly treated: ‘It was utterly disgusting – far, far worse than the way I was treated, which was bad enough.’
By the end of July, he was pressing Calvocoressi on whether he was seriously interested in writing a Hut 3/Hut 6 book in collaboration with Milner-Barry. By early August, Calvocoressi admitted that he was not making any progress. He was still interested in writing the sort of book that they had talked about but had got nowhere in his attempts to get hold of material which he regarded as essential. He felt that he had a dual interest as friend and prospective publisher and, in the latter context, warned Welchman off doing business with Denniston. As a publisher, he now wanted to publish the book throughout the world in both hardcover and paperback. He did, however, advise Welchman that Penguin might not be the best publisher for him in the USA.
In the end, Calvocoressi informed Welchman on 6 August 1975 that:
It becomes clearer and clearer as you forge ahead that you are outdistancing anything that Stuart or myself can do, and this really means that the separate publication of your book is more likely than a joint publication with us.
On 10 August Welchman sent Calvocoressi an unedited preliminary draft of The Hut Six Story along with notes for revision and further thoughts about the book. By November, Milner-Barry had also ruled himself out until after his planned retirement in 1977. He had joined the Treasury in 1945 and, apart from a stint in the Ministry of Health in 1958–60, he remained there until 1966, when he had reached the normal retirement age for the civil service. He had been persuaded to carry on as a ceremonial officer administering the honours system and he was planning to continue with this work until 1977. Therefore, as a working civil servant he was too busy to write a history of Hut 6 after he took over from Welchman. He of course would also have been seriously compromised in being involved in a venture which was likely to be frowned upon by senior government officials. So, on 20 November, he wrote to Welchman saying that:
It seems to me perfectly clear that for the reason
s given above, there is really no contribution that I can offer until circumstances change. That being so, I can only withdraw to the side-lines for the present, while taking the keenest interest in the further developments and wishing you and Peter the best of all possible luck.
Welchman was very disappointed as Milner-Barry was a highly valued friend, but had not produced anything since they had first started talking about a book. As Calvocoressi had observed: ‘He is not nowadays a fast mover, I suspect.’ Welchman was also concerned by Milner-Barry’s suggestion that he tell GCHQ about the book. He did not want to antagonize the intelligence community and felt that what should be presented to them was a complete version of the book, not a preliminary draft. Calvocoressi was confident that Milner-Barry would not do anything which was against their wishes.
By now, Welchman had received from Penguin in New York a copy of A Bodyguard of Lies. He felt that it contributed to the story of codebreaking more generally than books such as David Kahn’s The Codebreakers. However, he felt that both books were too long and in many places, unreliable. What was needed was a more concise book that would tie up and authenticate the whole story of the cryptological struggle that lay behind the Second World War. By December, Calvocoressi had been to New York on business and shown some of Welchman’s manuscript to a senior Viking editor. Penguin had recently bought Viking, a distinguished New York publisher, and Calvocoressi wanted to acquire both paperback and hardcover rights in all markets.
At the end of January 1976, Calvocoressi attended a discussion dinner at the Savile Club in London. Around eighty people were present and the guest speaker was Colonel Tadeusz Lisicki. Lisicki had been in charge of a Polish unit based in Britain in 1942–45 which was working for BP. Two of the three young Polish mathematicians who had initially unlocked the secrets of the Enigma machine in Poland in the 1930s, Marian Rejewski and Henryk Zygalski, joined his unit in 1943. The third, Jerzy Różycki, had gone down with his ship while crossing the Mediterranean from Algeria to France in 1942. The unit had its own ‘Y’ Service section, cryptanalysts and radio links with Poland, France and many other countries. It also had a direct teleprinter link to BP. In his presentation, Lisicki described the Polish bomba as being similar to the BP Robinson and Colossus machines, in that all were computers with memory, capable of making rapid calculations. He also claimed that the Poles had solved all of the main problems by 1938/39. The discussions at the 1976 dinner threw up some odd views which prompted Calvocoressi to write again to Hooper, urging him once more to permit a well-informed and responsible account of what did happen. In his letter of 2 February 1976 to Hooper, who had not even acknowledged his previous letter, Calvocoressi argued that there is a:
sinister interpretation of history and it can be rectified only by a convincingly truthful and authoritative account of what really happened – in other words by a book, such as I have argued for before, written by an independent writer (not an official historian) with access to the right materials.
Calvocoressi had decided to seek an opinion about Welchman’s manuscript at Penguin. Jim Cochrane was the editor-in-chief and had considerable experience and acumen. He was bound to come to the book from a completely different perspective than Calvocoressi and, while he had read the Winterbotham book, he knew nothing else whatever about the story that Welchman wanted to tell. He had been told not to pull any punches and that his comments would be fed directly back to Welchman, not something that a publisher would normally do. Cochrane’s view was that they had a marvellous story on their hands and that Welchman was clearly the right person to tell it. He felt that the book was a potential winner but not in its current form. He believed that a professional collaborator was needed who could ask the right questions and pace the narrative, introducing the right amount of anecdote and personality and handling the problems of technical explanation. If the collaborator were a ‘name’ they might just have a best-seller. The name Cochrane had in mind was the author Len Deighton. Welchman welcomed Cochrane’s comments, although he believed that he had most of them in hand. He was working on a redraft and wanted to postpone discussion about a ‘big name’ collaborator until Cochrane had read that.
Progress on the book had been quite slow during the last five months of 1975. Welchman’s wife Teeny had been very busy at work and they had entertained a succession of visitors from Europe. He was also trying to reestablish his consultancy role at MITRE. By February 1976 the situation at home had improved, with Teeny in a less exacting job, no visitors and Welchman fairly well settled in a new consulting job for MITRE.
He had two major changes in mind. The first was a new chapter tentatively called ‘The Enigma Story in its Historical Perspective’. A major part of this would be based on his analysis of three books, Kahn’s The Codebreakers, Cave Brown’s Bodyguard of Lies and William Stevenson’s A Man Called Intrepid. The last book had particularly intrigued him because, as Assistant Director for Mechanization at BP, he had come into contact with Bill Stephenson’s New York based operation. He hoped to produce a concise but provocative discussion of the importance of Huts 8, 6 and 3, in the general conduct of the Second World War. His second change would involve drawing on his many years of working on computers, communications, military command capabilities and military science in general to project his broad discussion of the Second World War events into the present and future. He seemed to have forgotten that this was exactly what Calvocoressi had advised against, the previous May!
Cochrane visited Welchman in Newburyport in late April 1976 and they got on well. By the following month, Welchman had produced a number of diagrams that he felt were needed to explain the theory of the bombe and in particular the diagonal board, cribs and menus. He tried the diagrams out on colleagues at MITRE and they seemed to find them fascinating and understandable.
During the first half of June, Welchman was completing a paper for MITRE titled ‘Military Value of Communications Capabilities’. An earlier paper, ‘Survival of the Simplest – Ability to Adapt’, had been issued in April. He felt that the success of these two papers was of indirect importance to the book because it would help him get more consulting work and MITRE staff support for work on the book. From recent discussions at MITRE, it seemed likely that he would be given new consulting work by October if not sooner.
On 29 June, Welchman received a letter from Calvocoressi with the surprising news that he was leaving Penguin immediately. He also enclosed a recent exchange of letters with Hooper. Several years earlier, Welchman had spoken to Hooper about the future release of classified material and the discussion had been friendly and positive. His recent response to Calvocoressi was impersonal and formal, however:
You will recall that when we met in April last year and discussed the official position about access to records, I confirmed that an Official History was being compiled by a team of historians, parts 1 and 2 of which are being edited by Harry Hinsley.
The supporting records, except those of the Service Departments which have already been deposited in the Public Records Office, are at present being used by the historians in their research. There is still quite a long way to go and I cannot say how much longer it will take to meet the requirements of the historians up to completion of the Official work. Nor can I be sure that further records may then become publicly available.
Therefore I must say that unless you are able to find the material you require among that which has already been deposited in the Public Records Office, we are not in a position to help you further.
In effect, Hooper was saying that as long as official historians were at work, only general material already deposited in the Public Records Office was available to others. In disgust, Calvocoressi wrote a letter to the Sunday Times on 28 June 1976 which was duly published. He concluded it with words born out of both frustration and passion:
My plea is not to throw secrecy to the winds. There was a case for continuing secrecy for many years after the war. But what had to be kept secret was the singl
e simple fact that we could crack Enigma cyphers. That fact was published to the world by Group Captain Winterbotham, since when secrecy has done no more than ensure that history is being written wrong and that British Intelligence continues to be regarded as a tale of muddle and treason (Philby etc.) instead of as an unparalleled and most exciting success.
Calvocoressi wrote again to Hooper and also to the Prime Minister! In his reply, dated 8 July 1976 Hooper gave one more interesting and official perspective on the whole issue of the release of material:
You will, I am sure, appreciate that it would be impossible for the Government to allow selective private access to the WW II intelligence records. There would be uproar if some were allowed it and others not. You, and all other interested private writers of the history of intelligence and its use in the war, must be on equal footing, and this means waiting until the relevant records can be put in the PRO. I am hopeful that this will now not be too long.
So Welchman, Calvocoressi and Milner-Barry would have to wait in line along with any writers, whatever their credibility as historical authors, to tell the insider’s story of Bletchley Park.
With Calvocoressi’s departure from Penguin, Welchman would now be dealing with Cochrane on the publishing side, which he was happy with, and he had also decided to take Calvocoressi’s advice and work through an agent. He was keen to speak to someone suitable as soon as possible because he had been approached by the BBC to take part in a programme which was to be part of a series called The Secret War.9 The New York agent that Calvocoressi had in mind was John Cushman and, as he was holidaying in the UK, Cochrane said he would speak to him about the book. He would be returning to New York on 16 August and Cochrane suggested that Welchman contact him directly. Cochrane also advised him to complete his revised draft before approaching Cushman. Welchman had this in hand and the manuscript was being typed on a new word processor system at MITRE, making future revisions much easier. He hoped to let Cushman have a complete version by mid-September.
Gordon Welchman Page 20