More temptation; the British succumbed. Dunderdale met with Bertrand – who had got himself across not-very-neutral Spain by train — in Lisbon in March 1941. He returned to Cadix with a portable transmitter for communicating with London and a spring in his step. X-Y-Z had been reborn.
• • •
When Julius Caesar described Gaul as partitioned into three, he had a somewhat different picture in mind to that of France in 1941. To begin with, his partition lines were not in the same place as the demarcation line between the Zone Libre and the Zone Occupée. And another thing: in Caesar’s day, the third part of France was already part of the Roman Empire, and not part of France at all. In 1941, however, the Vichy government continued to rule the French Empire, whose main asset was in North Africa. The third area of focus for the nascent Polish intelligence network was going to be the third part of France and Ekspozytura 300 would provide the foundations for Ekspozytura AFR.
The fake French at the Château des Fouzes signed up to the new dispositions on 7 March 1941.27 Maksymilian Ciężki would run signals intelligence for Ekspozytura AFR, the African show. Every two months a contingent of five Polish intelligence workers would come out to him for a tour, one dedicated to Russian material, one to German and two for sorting and distribution. Henri Braquenié, the one credible French cryptanalyst, would also be in Algiers, assigned to German traffic. They did not yet know it, but the Algerian outpost was going to carry out a crucial role in the gathering of intelligence for the Allies in one of the most critical campaigns of World War Two.
Major Słowikowski, cover-name Rygor, set up shop in Algiers shortly after Maksimilian Ciężki. Słowikowski arranged his first meeting with Ciężki in textbook spy school fashion. A dinner invitation was slid under the door of room no. 16 in the Hotel Arago. Ciężki arrived on time; indeed, from his perspective, Słowikowski was overdue. Messages from London had been backing up: there were demands for details of anti-aircraft defences; shipments of war materials to Germany; the Algerian railway network and more. Słowikowski pumped Ciężki for news of his old friend Langer: he used to be in radio intelligence, what’s he up to now? There were no secrets worth finding in radio today, surely? Ciężki swiftly disabused his colleague. Since the time of the Russo-Polish War, signals and code-breaking had been the backbone of Polish intelligence. And they still were:
Mathew [Ciężki] mentioned a case where a German radio message to their resident agent in Egypt was deciphered, ordering him to poison all the fresh water supplies in Alexandria with typhoid. London was immediately informed … [The telegrams] helped to arrest the German agent who could have dealt an enormous blow to the Allied forces in the Middle East.28
On deciphering the clutch of telegrams which Ciężki had brought, Słowikowski realised he had his work cut out. The next day Ciężki was back with more telegrams and more the day after. Now Polish HQ wanted maps and town plans for the North African ports; telephone directories; descriptions of ships requisitioned by the Vichy government; you name it. There was no other intelligence network in French North Africa, yet the Allies seemed to expect him to create one instantly out of hot, spice-scented air. For a magician like Gustave Bertrand, this, or at least the illusion of it, might have been possible. Słowikowski had to use more conventional means and, meanwhile, he had to keep his head down.
Thus it came to pass that a merchant of Polish extraction, going by the name of Dr Skowroński, became the co-owner of a barley meal factory, doling out porridge. As the rationing imposed by the Vichy régime was extended to French North Africa, the production of staple foods was a credible cover for Słowikowski, especially as his role was as capital-providing partner and he needed no technical knowledge about grains and gruel. It gave him an excuse for mingling among the upper échelons of the colonials, an opportunity for getting insight into the morale and inclinations of a divided country. Nobody need know that the so-called Dr Skowroński, settling in with his sultry-eyed wife Sophie and son George, was in fact a major in the Polish Army and the Chief of Allied Intelligence Services in French North Africa.
• • •
From the British perspective, it did not seem that there was much to learn from French military strategy in World War Two, unless you took the cynical view that there were several ‘how not to’ lessons. Nevertheless, the British had decided to follow one chapter from the French textbook to the very letter.
On 7 January 1941, a group of junior officers arrived at Bletchley Park. Two were from the army and two from the navy. Their mission was educational. They were there to find out whatever the code-breakers were willing to tell them. It was not that unusual for army and navy officers to visit the Park, to be blinded with a bit of science and in return to give back a hoorah speech and tell the chaps to keep up the good work. Nor was it unusual for new experts to arrive at Bletchley. The staff was growing, with over 500 people on the site now that GC&CS was proving its worth. Nevertheless, this quartet was out of the ordinary. They had strange accents and foreign uniforms. They were bemused to be offered sherry by Alastair Denniston, for that was not the usual tipple of their home country. The visitors were American.29
America was not at war and, despite Roosevelt’s election success in November 1940, it would take an earth-shattering event going to the heart of American security to bring them into another European conflict. So the French strategy, which the British had embraced, was to begin with the sharing of information. A thin cord, but one that could be drawn on to pull in much more weighty ones. Just as the French had done in 1937–38, the British laid as bait their most vital secrets with the intention that once the Americans were hooked they would then be reeled in to a closer and wider military cooperation, beginning with supply and convoy protection in the Atlantic. The Americans were eager; the bait was gobbled.
Although the British had succeeded in obtaining an intelligence mission from the US, they were still wary of how much to reveal. The four visitors were shown more about organisation and unsolved problems than they were about the inner workings of Bombes and cryptological methods. But people who have made breakthroughs want to show off their achievements and such international opportunities are rare in the secret services. As with the initial X-Y-Z meetings, the important thing was that people who spoke the same language of cryptology were meeting each other and forming a mutual respect. The wheels were turning, X-Y-Z was evolving. The alliance against Enigma might, in time, add the next letter on. It was becoming X-Y-Z-A.
By early 1941, Alan Turing had become head of Hut 8, one of the unattractive temporary buildings which had been nailed together across the Park. Hut 8 was where the code-breakers were attacking Naval Enigma. Naval Enigma was a much tougher proposition than Army or Air Force Enigma and at the same time more critical for the British, who were fighting on alone. More difficult, because the German Navy did not use the three-letter indicator system for the start positions of rotors, let alone make the mistake of repeating the encipherment of it. Instead, they used a completely separate set of tables – in essence, a code book – common to ship and shore, which guided the cipher clerks as to how the Enigma was set up. If Bletchley Park had the code book, decryption methods being deployed against Army and Air Force Enigma would work; or, if they had plenty of deciphered messages from which to construct cribs, they could use Army and Air Force methods to reconstruct the code book. It was all very frustrating and only limited progress was being made on this critical problem. And it was critical, possibly the most critical of the war, because U-boats were attacking convoys at will, sinking merchant ships and stifling the country’s oxygen supply.30
Another secret had to be shared, as another relationship was being forged at Bletchley Park. Working with Alan Turing on the Naval Enigma problem was a female code-breaker. Women were rare recruits to Bletchley and Knox had snapped up most of the promising young women to work with him in his ‘research’ section. There, using pencil and paper methods, they had notable success against versions of the Enig
ma machine with no plugboard. Gordon Welchman, however, had recruited one of his Cambridge students, Joan Clarke, to join Alan Turing’s team. Bletchley Park didn’t have code-breaker grades for women, so she had to be graded as a linguist, even though she spoke only English and Mathematics. But Joan was remarkably clever and she could relate to Alan Turing. Probably for the first time in his life, Alan Turing had found a woman he could talk to, and while they puzzled over the statistical approach he had adopted from Jerzy Różycki’s clock method to find a way round the code book problem, Alan and Joan grew close. In the spring of 1941, Alan Turing popped the question. It was awkwardly done, but she said ‘yes’, she would become Alan’s wife. There was muted jubilation in Hut 8: the two were obviously good for each other.
Except for the secret. In 1941, gay men could not afford to make much of their sexuality, for ‘gross indecency’ between men was a criminal offence and periodically the police would start a wave of prosecutions. Nobody at Bletchley knew about Alan Turing’s secret, but in all honesty he could not fail to tell Joan. The day after his proposal, he made a clean breast of it. Perhaps it would be a mariage blanc? World War Two was creating some very strange relationships, but this one was not destined to last. The engagement was, after a short while, called off.
• • •
Girls were also thin on the ground at the Château des Fouzes. Opportunities for anything much more exciting than code-breaking were few. There were country walks in the nearby fields and vineyards, opportunities to go drinking in Uzès and occasional exeats on bicycles to the Roman antiquities. The code-breakers wore navy blue overalls and clogs supplied for free by the French. The shops in Uzès didn’t have much to sell and the Poles didn’t have much money, so they made do. As at the Château de Vignolles, dining was segregated by nation, and conditions were decidedly more cramped than they had been at the former centre for Gustave Bertrand’s operations.31
One bright spot was that Bertrand had installed in the environs of the château a man called David as cook, as well his trusty chauffeur Maurice, who would use the car to get wine, brandy and other essentials for the team. As at the Château de Vignolles, the demand for booze was high. Sometimes it was quite fun. In the winter of 1941–42 there was the unusual event of a snowfall in Provence, allowing the code-breakers to see if they could climb a snow-laden palm tree. There was football. There were bullfights at Nîmes. And there were curious oversize terracotta jars in the grounds, which were tested to see if they would conceal a whole code-breaker. On one occasion, one of the Poles, having been admitted to Maurice’s sanctum, had himself photographed standing prisoner-like behind the iron security bars of the basement windows. Bertrand did not see the funny side of that.
Also within the sanctum lived Maurice’s daughter Monique with her pet rabbit. Kazimierz Gaca (the young officer who had buried the Enigma machines near Włodzimierz during the flight from Warsaw) may not have recognised it as a blessing when he suffered a ruptured appendix and had to be operated on. Nor that he had to convalesce without the benefit of antibiotics. Yet there was a positive to the situation. Monique may have been young but she was a sympathetic nurse, closer in age to Kazimierz than he was to most of the other code-breakers, and she was fun to have around. Monique was also small enough to fit into a terracotta jar without any difficulty and she soon found Kazimierz more interesting than the rabbit.
The Poles were also expected to do some code-breaking. To start with, Bertrand put the Poles on to the Swiss commercial and military ciphers. Nothing of the remotest interest emerged from the commercial material, but the military cipher had been done on an Enigma-like machine, which Marian Rejewski and his colleagues found fairly straightforward to reverse-engineer. It was on this device that the Swiss had enciphered their weather secrets, which Bertrand was dangling before the British. Edward Fokczyński, co-founder of the AVA factory, made a model of the machine out of cardboard, which Bertrand took with him to Lisbon to present to Biffy Dunderdale. It must have been an interesting handover: a fold-up cardboard mock-up of a Swiss enciphering machine and some old weather forecasts, for a powerful radio transceiver. Bertrand knew how to strike a bargain.
The Swiss material was probably a distraction. The actual enemies were Russia and Nazi Germany and German ciphers were what the Polish team focused on, now they could actually receive a good variety of signals. These included machine ciphers used by the Luftwaffe and hand ciphers used by the German police. Another cipher, cracked by Antoni Palluth, was being used by the Abwehr and its agents. In 1941, the code-breakers of Uzès read 4,158 German messages. ‘The contents of the messages were interesting,’ wrote Marian Rejewski:
their senders were German agents who, passing themselves off as ordinary tourists, observed the movements of ships in French and Algerian ports … This sort of activity in the unoccupied zone, in the light of the ceasefire agreement, was apparently illegal, and … the French police, tipped off by us in advance, organised a dragnet and caught them.32
The German activities in the Zone Libre were in contravention of the armistice. Equally illegal, technically, were the radio transmissions of Ekspozytura 300, since they were done with the blessing of the French. The radio-relay statistics were given by Langer in his annual report to Headquarters for the year 1941: 813 messages sent to Polish HQ, all relating to Ekspozytura AFR in Algiers; 666 sent to Algiers; 30 sent to Ekspozytura F and 361 sent to various Ekspozytura F agents. Over 1,100 of these, that is two thirds, were not known to Bertrand. Not just the content, but even the fact of the messages being sent. On top of this were over 2,000 messages exchanged with MI6.33 The British concern about who were the ultimate masters of the operation was answered in this way. The Poles may have been housed and financed by the Vichy government, but they were able to operate with a large degree of independence.
• • •
For Henryk Zygalski and the small team who had gone to Algiers with Ciężki, the move to North Africa was a release. Zygalski, aka Henri Sergant, had not been happy with the arrangements at Cadix and only days after signing his (false) name to the orders naming him as a member of the first African party, he had petitioned General Kleeberg to be released from the strictures of covert intelligence and allowed to join a combat regiment. Whether Kleeberg replied is not recorded, but joining intelligence is a one-way journey. Those entrusted with the Enigma secret could not, ever, be permitted to go into combat zones where they could be captured and interrogated. Despite his misgivings and despite the memories of his unpleasant illness there in June, for Zygalski the tour of duty in Algiers was liberating. Free from the controls of Bertrand, the Poles could let their hair down. Soon there were girls, Ewa and Włada, with whom there were outings, beaches and parties. And, just before the end of the two-month tour, there was Simone …34 The romance of another Henri, the fake Henri Materon, aka Henryk Paszkowski, brought him the epithet ‘Casanova’ for his exploits, which was rather unfair as his liaison culminated in marriage to his girl, Janina.
Their French colleague, Henri Braquenié, found the antics of the team quite startling:
The only annoying thing about the Poles was how they drew attention to themselves abroad. When they went to the restaurant, they ordered extraordinary dishes. They were always doing things which drew attention to themselves. Not only in the restaurant … For example, when at the beginning in Algeria we had this villa in the south of Algiers which was called ‘Kouba’, we took the tram which we nicknamed ‘the cipher’ … at the end of the line, you took a bus which took us up to ‘Kouba’, and so, as they always talked in Polish or Spanish, on one occasion the conductor asked me ‘Who are those blokes?’ Turning away discreetly, I replied, ‘Be quiet, that’s the Italian Armistice Commission.’35
More serious was the Polish radio traffic going from Africa to London, which was re-enciphered at PC Cadix, and added to by messages Ekspozytura 300 was sending to London on its own account. This growing volume of beeps in the airwaves was becoming a matter of sec
urity. To encrypt their own material the Poles were using a machine of their own invention, the so-called Lacida or LCD, standing for its inventors Langer, Ciężki and Danilewicz (or sometimes LCP for Langer, Ciężki and Palluth). Like Enigma, the Lacida used a system of rotors to encrypt a message. One day in the summer, Marian Rejewski asked if he could see an encrypted report, and he and Henryk Zygalski had a go to see if they could break the cipher. It took them two hours. The reaction was predictable: Langer was by turns furious, outraged and alarmed, yet unwilling to shoot the messengers. All communications with London had to cease. Improvements in cipher security were ordered. With a bit of effort, Langer was calmed down. After all, his machine-breaking cryptanalysts were the best in the world, far better than anyone the Germans could pit against Lacida.
For his part, Bertrand knew nothing of Mieczysław Słowikowski and his operation or all these extra messages.36 Nothing was quite what it seemed. The only thing that seemed real was that everyone was deceiving somebody else. Gustave Bertrand thought that his teams of Poles in PC Cadix and their outpost in Algeria were working for him. Maksymilian Ciężki was ostensibly working for Bertrand, though in fact he was working for Polish military intelligence, and the details needed to be kept from Bertrand. Słowikowski was under cover, keeping away from the Vichy officials, because he was working for the Poles, not the French. But Colonel Gano’s new intelligence centre in London was, more or less, under the control of Dunderdale and it was fairly clear to Słowikowski that he was, indirectly, working for MI6.
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