X, Y & Z

by Dermot Turing

  Airfields were being bombed to prevent the French Air Force fighting back against the invaders. The Luftwaffe signals were prolific. April had been a large increase on March, but May saw a complete explosion of material, with dozens of pages of detail, so much so that air intelligence in London had no time any more to make supercilious remarks on the usefulness of this bit of information or that. And the Germans, baring their plans to the Allies, were wide open to retaliation.

  If only the high command would actually use what they were being told. Gustave Bertrand and Gwido Langer watched the war unfold before their unhappy eyes. Langer’s notes on the intercepts recorded:28

  21 May. Key [Enigma settings] determined same day. Message received at 23h00. Message reveals intention of German forces to advance in direction Calais-Boulogne. [The trap, to cut off British and French units from retreat into France, was sprung the same day.]

  25 May. Key determined same day. Message received at 22h00. Full order of battle of General Hoth’s motorised corps listed. [General Hoth was commanding the right flank of the invading army, the wing that was the ‘sickle-cut’ which had sliced off the British Expeditionary Force.]

  28 May. Key determined 29 May. Message received at 17h10. Locations of French aircraft factories specified (as well as destroyed factories).

  30 May. Key determined 31 May. Message received at 01h10. German 77th Squadron requests orders from 8th Air Corps, being unaware of the operation codenamed PAULA. Message received at 01h50. 8th Air Corps responds PAULA means Paris.

  31 May. Key determined same day. Message received at 10h45. Full operational details for Operation PAULA: groups involved, height to fly at, target to be pinpointed by incendiary 10 minutes ahead of main attack, inward and outward routes to be followed. [On 3 June the aerial destruction of France’s remaining air force in the Paris region began. Only eighty French planes were scrambled in defence.]

  Despite the successes of the joint X-Y-Z operation, Bertrand, whose views were echoed by many of his colleagues, was in despair. The General Staffs of both the French and British forces were quite unable to accept what they were being told. To protect the secret source, intelligence reports derived from code-breaking were dressed up as reports of a highly placed agent called Boniface, thereby consigning them to the same category of unreliability as the other contradictory and variable human intelligence which was already too hard to evaluate.29 Bertrand said he had been feeding ‘confiseries aux cochons’ [sweets to swine].30

  The march of the Wehrmacht could not be stopped. The British Expeditionary Force was gone. The security situation was desperate. MI6 wrote to Alastair Denniston on 6 June 1940 that, ‘with the evacuation of the B.E.F. the enemy has obtained possession of all information on Military cyphers and cypher methods’ and that ‘information vital to our work … may be becoming available to the enemy’.31

  It was even more perilous for those on the ground. On 14 May 1940, while the world began to collapse around the hopeless French defences, Lieutenant Colonel John Tiltman was at the French General Headquarters. His mission was not an easy one, to withdraw his team of British code and cipher experts from the joint enterprise before the risk of capture became too acute. It was the diplomatic mission of a rat in a sinking ship. Bertrand came to the rescue. ‘We value your party very much; we’d like to keep them, but you’d better get out while you can,’ he said. Bertrand’s next remark widened Tiltman’s eyes to the size of saucers. ‘Please tell your chiefs in London that none of your secrets will get into enemy hands.’32 How could Bertrand make such a promise? There were possibly a hundred French officers who knew about the Enigma secret. If any of them were captured, if the Germans stopped using Enigma, the fledgling operation at Bletchley Park could be stifled before it had really begun.

  PC Bruno was vacated on Monday 10 June 1940. The teleprinter link to London was disconnected.

  On 21 June 1940, Bertrand took his British liaison officer Pinky MacFarlan in his car to Cazeaux, where the last RAF plane was leaving France.33 A free France was a thing of the past. By 23 June the defence of France was finished. Word had been passed to the Germans that the French would treat for an armistice. Adolf Hitler selected a location of maximum humiliation for the terms to be signed: a railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne. In that same carriage the defeated German Imperial generals had signed another armistice document on 11 November 1918. The humiliation of France was complete. The only positive aspect to the disaster was that the war in France brought an end to the investigations of Lieutenant Colonel Sadowski. The invisible men of Équipe Z had survived the bombardment from their own side, but their future was looking bleak. Gwido Langer told Bertrand that Poland was still fighting, notwithstanding the armistice, and he was going off to find his commanders.34 Only Langer had no idea where they were and he had no transport.

  For Bertrand, for the Poles of PC Bruno, the war was over, and the successes with bombas, cyclometers, and Zygalski’s sheets had been a brief, fading spark in the dark cryptological sky which was now going to blanket the whole of Europe. The liaison of X, Y and Z was surely finished.

  • • •

  In moments of darkness, James Bond should come on to the scene. Lieutenant Ian Fleming, RNVR, spent the war reporting to the Director of Naval Intelligence and in that capacity found enough real-life inspiration to create his famous novels in his second career. One of his most colourful contacts was Commander Wilfred Dunderdale, also RNVR, who is one of the many contenders to have been Fleming’s model for the suave, martini-swilling international agent of the books.

  Dunderdale had a CV which came straight from a Fleming story. He was born in Odessa and grew up speaking Russian as well as English. He was 19 when the Russian Revolution began and found himself caught up in the civil war as temporary honorary sub-lieutenant in the Royal Navy, acting as interpreter and liaison officer with the White Russian naval commanders in the Black Sea. He was also a formidable boxer, on which account he was nicknamed ‘Biffy’ by colleagues. No doubt deploying his pugilistic skills, he is said to have thwarted a Bolshevik attempt to murder the Tsarist officers (and himself) on the ship he was assigned to and came back from this venture with an MBE (‘Dunderdale remain Interpreter to [Senior Naval Officer]. Promote and decorate.’) As he moved up in the world, he found himself at Yekaterinburg investigating the murder of the Imperial family and then at Constantinople in the employ of MI6. Another job as interpreter was to assist a White Russian general in a private railway carriage liaison with his mistress. As neither spoke the other’s language, Biffy stood outside and interpreted, presumably until the point at which words became unnecessary for the proceedings.

  The British Establishment continued to make use of Biffy’s services as intermediary in similar sensitive situations: ‘he always maintained that his first job for MI6 was to pay off, with gold sovereigns, all the foreign members of the sultan’s harem and to repatriate them through the good offices of the Royal Navy.’ Liaison involved more traditional forms of intelligence as well and Dunderdale was commended by the Admiralty for his reports on minefields, defences around Odessa, shipping, and so forth. By 1926, possibly because Paris had become a hotbed of White Russian intrigue, but certainly because he spoke excellent French, Biffy was posted there and began his long mission of liaison with the French secret intelligence services. By 1937, he was Head of Station and it is in this context we have met him before, meeting with Rivet and escorting the Polish replica Enigma machine across to London in 1939.35

  Still under the cover-name Dolinoff, Dunderdale was busy in June 1940, trying to salvage something from the wreck of Allied intelligence in France. On 17 June 1940, contact was established with Bertrand, who from this date on is referred to in the British sources as ‘Bertie’. Bertie was busy too. The situation in France was changing hourly. Now it was Biffy’s job to see what could be done about Bertie and his fugitive code-breakers.

  23.6.40 to Bertrand. You and the officers of your staff as well as you
r Polish colleagues will be very welcome to come to us: apply to Lieutenant FLEMING or to WHINNIE at Bayonne and embark there.

  25.6.40 to Bertrand. Please reply to my telegrams concerning your plans and those of your friends.

  25.6.40 from Bertrand. Current plan is to continue to work under similar conditions.

  How could this possibly be, given that the Germans were going to occupy the entire northern half of the country and the Atlantic coast and the new government being installed in the south was likely to be firmly under the German heel?

  26.6.40 from Bertrand. For Dolinoff, in response to telegram No. 1: heartfelt thanks for your invitation; as to our Polish friends they were evacuated by plane before your telegram was received; so it is no longer possible to send them to you; as to the officers of the service, the command is opposed to all movement at the moment.

  26.6.40 to Bertrand. Your telegram No. 4 of the 26th. My superior counts on you for the security of our work. Your telegram 2465. From what place do you expect to continue working. Denniston.

  28.6.40 from Bertrand. For Dolinof. Are obliged to cease radio transmission by reason of Armistice conditions. We ask you to keep listening in each day in the same way as we hope to recommence soon clandestinely. You can count on me for security your work. Regards. Bertrand.36

  In the midst of the chaos, on 19 June 1940, Henri Navarre had gone to Bordeaux – to where the French government had decamped – and ran into Rex. Navarre was in no doubt about what was good for Rex and good for France. Rex should be put as far away from the enemy as possible. Fortunately, Rex was the passport king. He had been thrown out of Spain for irregularities involving passports in 1920 and this experience had not in the least discouraged him from an energetic trade in false documents ever since.37 So this occasion was not going to be a challenge. Navarre told Rex to report to the British – not at Bordeaux itself, as that was swamped with people seeking passage – but at Saint Jean de Luz further down the coast. Saint Jean de Luz was not much better, as thousands of displaced Polish soldiers were trying to get to Britain to regroup. The baronial Rex, accompanied by his wife, demanded a better place for her to wait, rather than for her to be jostled in the middle of the crowd of soldiers. The stressed British embarkation officer yelled at Rex. His attempt to queue-barge while waving some possibly-official-looking French order wasn’t going to cut any English mustard. Rex stormed off saying, ‘I would rather die here in France than live in England and be subjected to your insults.’38

  A few days later, Rex was back in the unwilling hands of his controllers from the Deuxième Bureau, controllers who included Bertrand. In his suitcase Rex had confidential papers, codes from various countries, blank Dutch, Swedish and Danish passports, identity cards … the whole gamut of counterfeiting and espionage. The bundle even contained German cipher bureau papers. Bertrand and his colleagues were horrified. Paris had fallen. If the Germans should search Rex’s place in Paris … If the Germans should find more than fake passports … It didn’t bear thinking about.

  It might be all up for Rex; it certainly seemed to be all up for France. Like Poland, the country had been ripped in two by the invading power. A mirror, crack’d from side to side. The secret of X-Y-Z and that they had made great strides against Enigma was in the greatest danger. The Polish code-breakers had disappeared again. But Gustave Bertrand was working on a plan.

  France 1940–42.

  * See Appendix for a more detailed explanation

  8

  INTO THREE PARTS

  Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres.

  [The totality of Gaul is split into three parts.]

  Julius Caesar,

  Commentariorum de Bello Gallico

  While the body of France was being torn in half, and the immense French Army stood by powerless to prevent it, the future seemed clear enough to the Director of the Government Code & Cypher School. Once the rape of France was complete, Hitler would turn his guns on Britain. Plans were put in place for an emergency evacuation of Bletchley Park. Some documents would be taken for off-site storage in the vaults of Lloyds Bank in Merthyr Tydfil in Wales.1 Others would have to be destroyed. Still others would go to Canada. Small sections of personnel would be dispersed and keep working in clandestine conditions.

  Mercifully, the Director’s staff were largely unaware of these fatalistic plans. In fact, the changed war conditions meant that the code-breakers were achieving results which had been unthinkable a year before. With the entry of Italy into the war on 10 June 1940, there was an opportunity for revival of Knox’s manual Enigma code-breaking team. The Italians used the old-style Enigma machine without a plugboard, which was similar to that broken by Knox during the Spanish Civil War. In Hut 6, a temporary edifice put up to house code-breakers for whom there was no space in the pre-war buildings, the Luftwaffe’s ‘Red’ Enigma key was broken on 22 May 1940. This was a massive breakthrough, not least because on 1 May, as foreseen, the Germans had abandoned the double encipherment of the indicator, thus rendering obsolete the Zygalski sheets method for finding the daily keys. ‘Red’ was broken despite this change. The code-breakers were using a new method.2

  Enigma operators were air force men and soldiers and they were bored by signals work. When they were told that they had to choose three letters at random for a message’s start position and a further three letters to send out the enciphered start position, they soon ran out of ideas. For some time, Bletchley Park had spotted that they were apt to use easily guessable combinations, like HIT and LER (if you are patriotic), or ISA and BEL (if you are romantic), or SQE and ISS (if you are just fed up, for which no explanation is suggested, except that Q was often an abbreviation of CH). Bletchley Park called these errors ‘Cillis’, while the Scarlet Pimpernels referred to the technique of testing for non-random start letters as the ‘Method Kx’.3 In the spring of 1940, the new technique was derived from another glimpse into the operator’s mind. It was named ‘Herivelismus’ after its inventor, another young code-breaker from Cambridge called John Herivel. Herivel imagined the bored Enigma operator would not have a great deal of patience for randomising the positions of the rotors in his machine, so would lazily move the wheels a place or two in one direction or another from where they already were. So, given that you knew from the preamble where the rotors were for the three letters in the ground setting, it was a fair guess that the rotors’ position for the indicator was not more than a few places away from that. These insights enabled the Bletchley team working in Hut 6 to find the daily key for ‘Red’ almost continuously for the remainder of the war.

  Furthermore, the machine group was working on the Bombe, which had been delivered in March. It was having some success with naval Enigma messages, but the problem of too many false positives had limited its usefulness. Then, during the summer, one of the early recruits to Bletchley, a mathematician called Gordon Welchman, had a brilliant insight. It was a simple idea and based on simple logic. If the plugboard of the Enigma machine has a cable which plugs A to B, then that cable also plugs B to A. That logic could be translated into a simple adjustment to the Bombe machine, to ensure that the A wire in the B cable was electrically connected to the B wire in the A cable, and so on through all possible letter combinations. Gordon Welchman drew a diagram to show his idea to the incredulous Turing, with little diagonal lines to show the connections he proposed.

  Welchman’s addition was called a ‘diagonal board’. When built, it was neither a board nor diagonal, but a skein of wires at the end of the cabling behind the machine. No matter, it did the job. By increasing the number of connections, Welchman had achieved two huge improvements to the performance of the Bombe. Not only did it stop less often – increasing the likelihood that a feasible start position it had found was the real one – but also it enabled more flexibility in designing ‘menus’ (the Bletchley jargon for wiring diagrams for the cables connecting up the reproduction Enigma rotors revolving on the front of the machine). In August 1940, the modified Bombe
came into operation. It was called Agnus Dei, or Aggie for short, because it was going to take away the sins of the world, and with a bit of luck, grant peace.

  After the fall of France, the Germans turned their attention to Britain. In early July, the code-breakers learned from decrypted messages that the Luftwaffe was planning to destroy the Royal Air Force completely in preparation for an invasion. Just like in France. For the next few months, the country would be subjected to attack from the air: bombings of airfields and aircraft factories; incendiaries dropped on civilian targets; dogfights and terror.

  • • •

  Colonel Louis Rivet noted in his war diary that he had, under the terms of the armistice, given orders for the official dissolution of Bertrand’s department on 21 June 1940 and, two days later, the departure of the Polish code-breakers to Africa. On 25 June he reported that Pétain had addressed the French people. His diary entry concluded, ‘Mourning of France … a day of infinite sadness’.

  The previous day, a plane landed at Oran in Algeria and a small group of rather unmilitary personnel clambered out after an uncomfortable flight. This was only one day after the British telegram inviting the Polish code-breakers to Britain. The code-breakers themselves, bundled out of metropolitan France, may not have known that Bertrand (keeping tight control over his assets) had ‘not received’ the message until after the Poles had safely gone – ‘safely’ in the sense that he could continue to deploy them in his own personal war effort. Langer had his suspicions about Bertrand’s statement. The evacuation of the Poles had been done in a hurry, with Bertrand claiming that he was fearful they would be discovered and that he was unable to contact Langer’s Polish superiors.4