In August 1979, one other former colleague proved to have a memory almost the equal of Welchman’s. In a long detailed letter, John Monroe was able to provide a remarkable amount of information about the multiplicity and handling of Enigma keys, life and work in the Hut 6 watch, and mechanical adaptations to the Enigma machine which the Germans had introduced in the last year of the war.11 Monroe had arrived at BP around the same time as Fletcher. A qualified lawyer, he had been recruited by Milner-Barry from the Army and interviewed by Welchman and John Tiltman. He went on to serve as a head of watch and a member of the research section in Hut 6 until the end of the war.
In early February 1979 Welchman told Calvocoressi that Cushman had secured a contract for him with McGraw-Hill and that one with Penguin was on the way. His work in MITRE had also taken a direction that would make the book more interesting and help with obtaining approval from Admiral Farnhill. Twelve years earlier, he had been one of the pioneers in the development of a revolutionary concept of battlefield communications that had evolved into JTIDS. The British forces were buying this system for their Nimrod aircraft. Welchman had a good rapport with the assistant director at the Ministry of Defence who was responsible for the procurement. He also happened to be a Second World War veteran who had served in North Africa with Major General Richard O’Connor. In the spring of 1978, Welchman had shown a draft of his book to some of the key players in the JTIDS project and they had agreed that it could aid their planning for the 1980s and 1990s. He thought this would help convince Farnhill that his book should be published and that further investigations be undertaken, based on the experience of Hut 6 and Hut 3 activities.
Welchman had carefully avoided approaching former colleagues for input until he had approval but at this point he decided to ask some of them for help in non-sensitive areas. He had already written to Fletcher, Wallace, Monroe and Milner-Barry for anecdotes about individuals and life generally in and around BP. Fletcher and Monroe had provided him with much more than that. He asked Calvocoressi for suitable photographs and any other relevant information. Calvocoressi was planning his own short book, devoted to the recruitment and organization of BP as well as its practical impact on the fortunes of war. Documents were becoming available at the PRO but many eager authors were swarming around them. Calvocoressi duly published his book, Top Secret Ultra in 1980. Most historians regard it as a valuable addition to the literature about BP, but he avoided any mention of Welchman or other BP colleagues.
With McGraw-Hill pressing him for a new draft and MITRE work also keeping him busy, Welchman managed finally to get what he felt was close to an acceptable draft of the book ready by the end of 1979. However, it would take almost a further year and continual editorial revisions until a final draft of The Hut Six Story was in the hands of McGraw-Hill and Penguin.
All in all, 1980 was not a good year for Welchman. He worked up until September on two further revisions of the last part of his book dealing with military communication problems of the day and the relevance of his BP experience to them. But, at seventy-four years of age, the work was starting to tire him. In addition to his own heath worries, Teeny was very ill and depressed. Eventually she was diagnosed with anaemia and a course of iron tablets helped considerably.
With a final draft of his book safely with the publisher and Teeny’s son Tom off to university, the Welchmans departed for a holiday in Europe. They were temporarily free from parental duties as Tom’s older brother Michael had departed for university five years earlier. They travelled to the village of Aschau in the province of Chiemgau in Germany where Teeny had been born. They rented an apartment in the old family home and enjoyed the beautiful surroundings and walked every day. Teeny’s old ‘housemother’ from the school she went to in a nearby village was still a good friend and almost a second mother to her. She took them on several trips by car to even more beautiful walking country. After three relaxing weeks they arrived in England. They visited an aging relative of Welchman’s in Chippenham and spent two days in London before returning to Newburyport.
When they arrived home it seemed that they had put all of their troubles behind them. However, the family finances were in bad shape. Welchman was already planning another trip to England, this time to take Teeny to Cornwall, but his MITRE contract would end in September and would not be renewed until the end of the year and he still had not received the advance on royalties that he had been promised by McGraw-Hill. He had finally decided to slow down. It was the MITRE work that was tiring and he was worried that his ability to do worthwhile work was bound to deteriorate. Then, in early 1981 in quick succession, a property that he had inherited from his Aunt Lilian was sold, his new MITRE contract, which ran up to September was going well, and McGraw-Hill finally came through with an advance and assigned an editor to his book.
He now hoped that he could bow out of MITRE at the end of his current contract and live off the royalties from his book. Perhaps the large sums mentioned to him by Winterbotham in 1975 were at the back of his mind. So he started to plan his next trip to England with Teeny from 27 April. They would visit London, Wallace Houston in Brighton, an elderly relative in Chippenham and then relax at a hotel in Watergate Bay near Newquay. Teeny had to be back in Newburyport on 26 May, but Welchman hoped to stay on to visit his old college in Cambridge, an old friend at Quex Park and perhaps other relatives.
In late November 1981, Cushman was able to inform Welchman that the bound book date for the American edition was 1 February 1982 at the latest. Penguin also proposed to print 2,000 copies at the same time as McGraw-Hill. Welchman’s UK agent, John McLaughlin, was also happy with the final proof of the book and was holding off offering serial rights until copies of the American edition had been sent to key people in the UK. Welchman was keen to send copies to William Bundy, his former BP colleague and now a distinguished figure in American politics, and to the eminent historian David Kahn. Other people on his list to receive advance autographed copies included Harold Fletcher, John Monroe, Jack Good, Ronald Lewin, Peter Calvocoressi, Harry Hinsley, Brian Johnson, Jean Stengers, Stuart Milner-Barry and Brian Randell. All of these had provided input to the book in one form or another.
While working on his book, Welchman had been delighted to renew his wartime friendship with William Bundy who had commanded the small American detachment at BP for the last twenty-one months of the war. As Bundy had gone on to become a very significant figure in American political life as foreign affairs advisor to two presidents, Welchman was worried about compromising him in any way. He therefore decided not to name him personally in The Hut Six Story. Despite his hugely successful career after the war, Bundy, according to his daughter Carol, had always regarded his work at BP as the greatest achievement of his career. By the early 1980s, his wife had had to put up with his passion for the recent flood of books on what had been done by intelligence agencies during the war, on both sides of the Atlantic. He was finally able to document this passion in a fascinating paper which he presented to the Annual Meeting of the Friends of Princeton Library on 1 November 1981.12
The Hut Six Story went on public sale in the USA during the second week in February 1982. As the book was of interest to a wide audience, it was reviewed in the US by journals dealing with computing, cryptography, military history and planning as well as both national and local newspapers. The Annals of the History of Computing published a favourable review in their October issue13 even though they had found that several people would not review the book, fearing ‘their Bletchley sources might dry up’. In Cryptologia’s April issue Louis Kruh had given the book a favourable review and much to Welchman’s delight said, ‘Both parts of Welchman’s book are fascinating but it is not inconceivable that the second part with its disturbing implication for the future may have a longer lasting effect.’14 A less than favourable review of both Welchman’s book and Hinsley’s first two volumes of British Intelligence in the Second World War was written for the US Strategic Institute in Washington in th
e autumn of 1982 but a more favourable review appeared in a US Army newspaper in February 1983. There was also a very favourable review by R. T. Crowley for the Smithsonian in May 1982 and in William Bundy’s publication Foreign Affairs, An American Quarterly Review. The book was very well received by the local Newburyport paper and an autograph party was held at a local bookshop on 17 April 1982.
In his review, Kruh had found it strange that Welchman had either ignored or found untrustworthy, Josef Garlinski’s The Enigma War, even though Welchman listed it in his bibliography. Welchman had known nothing about the pre-war work of Rejewski and his associates until Jean Stengers sent him his article ‘La Guerre des Messages Codes’, which was published in L’Histoire.15 Welchman had received it in the summer of 1981 just as the text of his book was being frozen, but he had tried to slip something in about it. Then McGraw-Hill decided to shut down their General Books division and sack his editor Bruce Lee at short notice. The final text had to be settled in a few days, when he had just become aware of the Garlinski book, but had not read it. He realized that it was important, and included it in his bibliography, but did not have time to say anything about it in the text. After the book was published, Lisicki had written to him in August, and they had a brief exchange of letters. By that time he had also seen the Rejewski papers. Already thinking about post-publication projects, Welchman suggested to David Kahn that he write a paper for the January 1982 edition of Cryptologia called ‘From Polish Bomba to British Bombe’. Kahn was delighted with the suggestion as that issue was going to be dedicated to the Enigma machine. At last Welchman felt that he could tell the true story of what happened in the Cryptologia paper. Unfortunately, he would be prevented from doing so.
The book was published by Allen Lane in the UK in the middle of May 1982 and received favourable reviews from Ronald Lewin in The Times and Edward Crankshaw in the Observer. In his eloquent and insightful review, published on 11 November, Lewin said:
A reasonably informed reader will be able to follow, at one level of the narration, how speculative intuition and an organized logical attack battened on German procedural errors to achieve a breakthrough. The instructed cryptanalyst, at home amid abstractions which baffle me, is fed by Welchman with tables, diagrams and pointilliste arrays of figures which he will doubtless absorb with the ease of an accountant conning a balance sheet. But in sum, as the elder Mill said after first skimming Das Kapital overnight, ‘I see what the man is at.’
The first winter of the war was evidently Welchman’s ‘prime time’, and he conveys the sense of urgency, supreme concentration and ultimate success with a passionate brio. When the Blitzkrieg of May 1940 opened, the Germans radically altered their Enigma arrangements. It is clear, now, that unless the most original of the Bletchley intelligentsia had not been working throughout that winter to the limits of their mental capacity (as others had worked on radar) we should have staggered far behind, in this fascinating aspect of the wizard war.
Harold Fletcher, who was still in touch with top officials at GCHQ, said that while they were sorry that the book had been published, they thought it was a jolly good one. Shortly after the book was published, however, he ‘had a reminder from the office to be careful with any approaches which may be made to me by the press or other media’.
Pat Bayly wrote to Welchman after he had read the book several times and made a number of interesting comments. One of his wartime roles had been to take care of purchases of a top secret nature for several groups who did not want some of their requirements to go through the British Purchasing Mission. Typical requirements were for items such as adjustable incendiary devices or quartz crystals of specified frequencies to be used in secret agents’ radios on enemy soil. Welchman’s book had solved one puzzle for him: ‘You finally cleared up a minor mystery for me. We purchased for shipment to England scores of coloured pencils. I never knew why.’ Welchman of course had introduced colours to identify different keys for the Registration Room in Hut 6 and coloured pencils were used for this purpose. When the British supply ran out, he had to appeal to America for more.
Bayly also offered some insight into Welchman’s remarkable discovery of the diagonal board:
Your description of the finding of the ‘Diagonal Board’ as an ‘inexperienced recruit from Cambridge’. Your work on Algebraic Geometry which I am sure included modern graph theory was almost exactly the training needed for your monumental discovery, in retrospect one of the most important discoveries of the war.
So, with his book having been received well both by the cryptologic community and general readers, Welchman was looking forward to pressing on with his research at MITRE and to begin the process of drawing out, from the Hut 6 experience, valuable lessons for battlefield communications of the 1980s. Unfortunately, the official reviews from GCHQ and the NSA were not quite so enthusiastic.
Chapter 10
Persecution and Putting the Record Straight
Over seven years had passed since Welchman first learned about Winterbotham’s The Ultra Secret and seriously considered writing his own account of events at BP. It had been nine years since he had met with the Director of GCHQ and received assurances that within a few years he would be able to disclose all aspects of his experience, technical as well as personal. When his friends and former colleagues Stuart Milner-Barry and Peter Calvocoressi decided not to author a book jointly with him, he made the decision to go it alone.
By 1980, a number of books had been published which described aspects of the BP operation. However, they had either been written by insiders who had restricted themselves to talking about how Ultra intelligence had been used, or by historians who were dependent, in most cases, on second-hand accounts. The first volume of the authorized history of intelligence activity in the Second World War by Harry Hinsley appeared in 1979 but contained little technical detail and an inaccurate account of the Polish contribution. Several books by Polish and French authors were already in print and described in detail the workings of the Enigma machine.1 Also revealed in these was how the Poles had gone about breaking it and technologies they had invented to assist them. A British academic, Professor Brian Randell of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, had managed to get GCHQ to release some details of Colossus, the world’s first electronic computer, which had been designed and built to assist BP’s attack on the strategic communication networks used by the German high command. Randell presented his findings in 1976, but his interest was in the evolution of computing, not cryptographic applications at BP.2 Therefore, when The Hut Six Story was published in 1982, it was the first book to describe accurately not only how Ultra intelligence had been produced at BP, but also some of the technologies that had been invented to help with the work.
In August 1974, Welchman’s former BP colleagues Harold Fletcher and Bob Amys had arranged for him to speak to George Goodall, a senior member of GCHQ. Goodall had responded to specific points in a letter the following month and summarized GCHQ’s position as follows:
Policy with regard to the release of wartime records and the publication of memoirs has been under review for some time and the Winterbotham book has been a stimulus towards this. But the official policy line has not changed yet. It is likely that there will be some relaxation, but that this will apply to the existence of our material and use made of it, not the means by which it was obtained; and I think you can take it for certain that the B.P. records themselves will not be released to the Public Records Office.
Since you do not seem to be in any hurry as regards reminiscences, I hope that you will be content to wait and see what new policy emerges: I will happily undertake to inform you of this. I expect that ex-members of the ‘producing’ agencies will be advised to clear any plans and publications with Admiral Farnhill, the Secretary of the ‘D Notice’ Committee.
Regrettably, Goodall failed to honour his undertaking to keep Welchman informed about developments.
Goodall had seemed, though. to be very positive about Welc
hman’s use of his knowledge of German battlefield communications in his consultancy work for the USAF. Welchman wrote to Goodall again on 15 October 1974, explaining more precisely what he had in mind for his proposed memoir:
I would like to write a simple account of how a vast co-ordinated effort grew from very small beginnings. I would like to concentrate in the early days and would end at the period during which the American group under Bill Bundy joined my Hut 6 staff, the Central Party was brought fully into the picture under my management, and Milner-Barry took charge of Hut 6 on my appointment as Assistant Director for Mechanization.
Welchman understood the dilemma of former colleagues who lived in the UK and were still bound by the Official Secrets Act that they had signed when joining BP. Many, like Welchman, had conditioned themselves to avoid all conversations about their work both during and after the war. In a similar vein, visitors to BP today frequently ask why local people in Bletchley did not suspect what was going on there. This must have been a concern of Denniston, because, in 1941, he asked BP’s Security Officer, James Bellinger, to look into the matter. His report did not raise major security concerns but did suggest that the task had its rewards: ‘During the course of my investigation I have visited nearly every hotel, public house and club in Bletchley and the surrounding districts.’3
Even though Welchman corresponded extensively with former colleagues while he was writing the book, he made a point of only soliciting anecdotal material from them. He also sought assistance with people’s names and when they had first arrived at BP. When a few colleagues did volunteer more technical information, he was careful not to attribute it directly to them. As an American citizen, Welchman believed that he could not be prosecuted if his book was published in the USA. Peter Hilton was a former colleague at BP who had also moved to North America and believed that if he chose to write anything, he would be protected as he lived abroad. As he wrote in 1985
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