The Great Game
In March 1915 a group of German army officers and diplomats left Constantinople (Istanbul) disguised as a travelling circus, their secret mission to incite a jihad or holy war against the British in Persia (today’s Iran). Persia was of great importance to the British; it was there that the Anglo-Persian Oil Company had the concession to drill for oil. And demand for oil was rapidly growing to fuel both the Royal Navy and the burgeoning mass of motor vehicles and aircraft powered by the internal combustion engine.
One of the German group was a former vice consul from the Persian Gulf, Wilhelm Wassmuss, later nicknamed ‘Wassmuss of Persia’ after Lawrence of Arabia.1 Wassmuss, like Lawrence, loved the desert, its people and their customs. He was committed to raising the local tribes against Britain and seems to have left the main group as they headed into Persia and travelled inland with a small raiding party to blow up the Anglo-Persian oil pipeline where it crossed the mountains of Abadan, in the sort of guerrilla raid that would have appealed to Lawrence. The story then becomes confused. Either Wassmuss was captured by a Persian khan who planned to hand him over to the British, or he was surrounded by a British patrol while still in camp. Whatever the truth, he managed to flee at the last minute at night, wearing only his pyjamas and leaving behind all his baggage. The small British force, frustrated that their prey had escaped, collected up his bags, which were eventually taken back to London and stashed away in the basement of the India Office.
When ‘Blinker’ Hall at the Admiralty heard about the incident he became curious and sent a representative from Room 40 to search the German diplomat’s bags. There, wrapped in the vice consul’s long woollen underpants, was a code book. On examination back in Room 40 it was found to contain the secret codes used by the German diplomatic service for sending messages from Berlin to Madrid and Constantinople. Most significantly, it was via Madrid that the Germans sent all messages to their diplomats in north, south and central America. Hall had sniffed out another remarkable find. From the code book found in the vice consul’s long Johns, the British could now read cables sent between Berlin and the Germans’ diplomatic mission in the United States.2
It might seem strange today that the arm of government that was now presented with the prize of reading German diplomatic messages to America was the Admiralty. But in those days the Foreign Office would never have entertained the idea of intercepting the diplomatic mail of neutral governments. That sort of thing just was not what gentlemen did. In the years before the First World War, a proper system for the collection of intelligence had been established with the formation, in 1909, of the Secret Service Bureau, partly with the encouragement of Winston Churchill while he was still Home Secretary. This had two parts, one to handle domestic and imperial intelligence in what became known as Military Intelligence 5 (or MI5). The second dealt with foreign intelligence matters and became known as the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6. But the establishment of a state intelligence service did not bring with it a great revolution in intelligence gathering. Neither MI5 nor the SIS had any capability for code breaking and both were run on a shoestring before the war. In 1914, MI5 only had a staff of fifteen, including the office caretaker, and the SIS was similarly tiny.3
It needed someone like Hall, a complete outsider to the diplomatic and security establishment, to realise that, in wartime, code breaking could be a valuable source of potential intelligence. And of course, as the Royal Navy had interests in every corner of the globe, what the Germans were up to in far-flung places could be justified as being of immense potential interest to the Admiralty. Moreover, the only other cryptanalyst department in government was at the War Office, whose small group of code breakers were only concerned with intelligence of military significance. So despite the existence of a nascent security apparatus, the initiative in intercepting diplomatic messages was taken by ‘Blinker’ Hall at the Admiralty.
Already, the Admiralty had picked up several signals that were not of purely naval interest and had stored them away in a cupboard. Now they were in possession of the new code book, it was time to get them out again and have a look at what was going on. Hall thought they might contain useful information about the political and economic affairs of Germany.
To interpret this intelligence, Hall needed to recruit a new set of individuals. He formed another department to focus entirely on reading the diplomatic mails and responsible to him alone, not to Ewing as Director of Intelligence. Initially, it operated down the corridor in Room 45, but it was still generically known as part of Room 40. To head the new group Hall chose George Young, a man in his early forties with just the right international experience for the task. Educated at universities in France, Germany and Russia, Young had an excellent grounding in diplomacy, having served as an attaché in Washington, Athens, Constantinople and Madrid and as a more senior diplomat in Belgrade and Lisbon. He was in many ways typical of the new breed of pre-war professional diplomat, suave, sophisticated and mysterious – but one who was prepared to resort to any means to get one up on his enemy.
Hall and Young, probably with some advice from Ewing who was very well connected in the academic world, went on to recruit a remarkable team from the universities. Dilwyn ‘Dilly’ Knox had been educated at Eton and was a classics don at Kings College, Cambridge. He was to prove the most brilliant and intuitive crypt-analyst in Room 40. Frank Birch was another old Etonian and a history Fellow at Kings, Cambridge. His strength was in interpreting the intelligence from the decrypts. From London University there was Prof. L.A. Willoughby, a German specialist, while from Oxford came L.G. Wickham-Legg, a Fellow of New College, and Philip Baker-Wilbrahim, a Fellow of All. Souls. Not all the new recruits were from the universities. There was George Prothero, editor of a political review; Thomas Inskip, a barrister and later Lord Chancellor; and Captain Loch, a former international correspondent of the Daily Telegraph. Several wounded naval officers were recruited to supply additional manual help, like the one-legged Lieutenant Haggard, and Lionel Fraser and Edward Molyneux, who later went on to become a famous dress designer. Then there was the Rev. William Montgomery from Westminster Presbyterian College, Cambridge, a specialist on the writings of St Augustine; and Nigel de Grey, another old Etonian who had failed his entrance exam to the Diplomatic Service because, although fluent in French and German, he had not reached the required standard in Italian. So he had joined the Royal Naval Voluntary Reserve as a volunteer while working full time for the London publishers, William Heinemann. Later in the war. Montgomery and de Grey would play a major role in the biggest intelligence coup of all.
Breaking yet another Admiralty tradition, Hall began to recruit women – much to the horror of the established senior naval staff. There being no ‘old girls’ network’, Hall decided that all female recruits must, first, be totally secure and reliable. In practice, this meant that many of them were the daughters, sisters or wives of respected naval officers or other pillars of the establishment. Next, they must either be good linguists – and indeed there were many able female language specialists coming out of the universities of Britain, even if at this stage they were not able to take degrees in many of the older universities – or they should be able to type. The team of formidable women who now arrived to do their bit included Mrs Denniston, the wife of the code breaker who already worked in Room 40; Miss Henderson, the daughter of Admiral Wilfred Henderson; Joan Harvey, the daughter of the Secretary of the Bank of England; and Miss Robertson, the headmistress of Christ’s Hospital for Girls and a brilliant linguist. Chief of the secretarial staff that supported Room 40 was a rather masculine woman nicknamed ‘Big Ben’ who smoked cigars. She was in fact Lady Hambro, the wife of a city banker.4 It seems there was only one lasting affair during the war between these young men and women, when ‘Dilly’ Knox fell in love with and later married his secretary, Miss Olive Roddam.
Many of these men and women were recruited because someone already in Room 40 introduced them to Hall when a vacanc
y came up. This was the way such recruitment was done, as a personal recommendation usually guaranteed the reliability of the recruit.
The list of individuals now at work in the Admiralty is in many ways strikingly similar to the disparate but brilliant group that more than twenty years later were recruited to Bletchley Park. And, as in the following generation, this group worked well together and clearly sparked each other off. But it was a sign of Hall’s great skill that he was able to recruit so many variously talented civilians to an organisation, such as the Admiralty, that tended only to value the sort of familiar service that it recognised in its own. It was another illustration of how many remarkable men, and in this case women, from a range of backgrounds, academic and otherwise, came to do their bit in the laboratory of war. Hall himself later wrote, ‘It must have been the most heterogeneous staff that ever came together. Men and women of every profession and class joined us. We had few precedents to follow and worked to make our own rules as we went along. We had our successes, but we also had our ignominious failures. And … we had our comic opera moments, when it was difficult to realise that we were in the midst of war.’5
One of the subjects of deepest political dispute in the United Kingdom before the war was Ireland. At the time, the entire island of Ireland formed part of the Union with Britain, but since Gladstone’s day there had been talk of Home Rule, and this was the great political ambition of the majority, Catholic nationalist population. But the minority, Protestant unionist population of Ulster refused to be part of what they predicted would be a Catholic state and demanded to remain within the United Kingdom, where their privileges would be preserved. And, in the spring of 1914, the Irish Question had threatened civil war. The country had drifted into two armed camps as tens of thousands of Irish Volunteers drilled openly in the south, and 100,000 men joined the Ulster Volunteer Force under Sir Edward Carson in the north. In April 1914,20,000 German rifles were smuggled into the north of Ireland to equip the Ulster Volunteers. In the south, Sinn Fein, literally ‘Ourselves alone’, was a political movement that went further than many nationalists wanted and called for an independent, free Irish republic. The declaration of war in August 1914 brought a temporary cessation to the threat of civil strife, and Irishmen of both hues rushed to join the British Army. But it did not mark any sort of resolution to the deep-seated divisions within Ireland itself.
The British government now feared that a nationalist uprising in Ireland would open up Britain to an attack by Germany through the back door. It was not surprising that the Irish nationalists, using the principle that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’, should turn to Germany for support, and indeed the German embassy in the United States was happy to encourage Irish-American hardline republicans. In late 1914, Hall picked up information that Sir Roger Casement, an ex-member of the British consular service and a keen Irish nationalist, had left New York and reached Germany. There Hall followed his progress as he appeared to try to form an Irish Legion from among the Irish prisoners of war. Next came information that he was about to land in a German ship equipped with arms supplied by Berlin, in a remote spot in south-west Ireland from where he would launch a Sinn Fein uprising against British rule.
Hall and Assistant Commissioner Sir Basil Thomson from Scotland Yard’s Special Branch now conceived of an extraordinary ploy to test out the support for Sinn Fein in the west of Ireland. Chartering a grand 500-ton steam yacht by the name of the Sayonara, Hall made plans for it to appear to belong to an American who was loud and sympathetic to the Sinn Fein cause. He installed a supposed German-American owner, a skipper and a full crew who were to sail along the remote bays and inlets of the south and west of Ireland to observe where support for Sinn Fein was strongest and try to find where Casement was intending to land. When he came ashore they were to overpower him and any Germans accompanying him, and arrest him as a traitor.
Hall assembled a remarkable cast of characters for the venture. Lieutenant Simon, who had served under him in the Queen Mary, jumped at the opportunity of playing the part of the American skipper; as well as being a fine seaman, one of his great accomplishments was his ability to imitate a variety of American accents. Major Wilfred Howell was cast as the German-American owner of the yacht who was to display strong sympathies for the German cause. He had been educated in Austria and spoke German like a native, but was a British citizen who had served in various imperial forces in which he had won a DSO. A crew of fifty naval ratings were supplied from Portsmouth. They had to dispense with their Royal Navy uniforms, dress as American sailors, chew gum and generally behave in a way that would make observers think they were American. A radio set was hidden in the ship along with a stash of arms that would be pulled out to arrest Casement if he landed as expected.
A variety of adventures befell the Sayonara and its fake crew over the weeks of its travels around the south-west coast of Ireland. They were nearly arrested when pulled in by Admiral Sir Charles Coke, who was in command of the Irish coast. When Coke learned the real reason for the yacht’s presence he agreed to play along. He invited a group of naval officers to lunch with the ‘owner’ and the ‘skipper’, and the British officers were outraged when the ‘Americans’ told them that Germany would win the war and had a far more impressive navy than the British.
At one point of their mission HMS Cornwallis, a British patrol vessel, intercepted the Sayonara. The captain interrogated the ‘owner’ and the ‘skipper’ and immediately grew suspicious. Reporting back to the Admiralty that the owner spoke mostly German and only broken English, he thought the yacht must be on some sort of spying mission and requested permission to detain the vessel and its crew. Hall intercepted the communications and sent back instructions that the Americans were to be allowed to carry on with their business. The captain of the Cornwallis was furious, and Hall was very amused when his private letters were later intercepted and he was found to have described the Admiralty as being full of ‘silly old gentlemen’.
At another point in the Sayonara’s journey, Lord Sligo, a local Anglo-Irish landowner, rushed to London in person to demand a private meeting with Hall. Claiming that the Sayonara was undoubtedly up to no good and was clearly in the pay of Germany, he reported to Hall that he had seen with his own eyes the crew planting mines in Westport harbour. The actors on the Sayonara performed brilliantly during the comic opera of their adventure along the Irish coast, but in Berlin the Casement landing was postponed, so Hall had to recall them and return the yacht to its owner.6 And in reality it is highly unlikely that the adventures of the Sayonara produced any intelligence of real value about the strength of Sinn Fein support in south-west Ireland.
Thanks to the newly discovered diplomatic code books, Hall was however able to follow the correspondence between Count Bernstorff, the German ambassador in Washington, and Berlin. He read reports that Sinn Fein had plans for an armed rising in Ireland but he could see that the German General Staff was wary about the strength of Sinn Fein support for Casement in the west. There were many months of delays but in April 1916, Room 40 deciphered a message in which the ambassador said that an armed uprising was planned for Easter Sunday, and requested the shipment of up to 50,000 rifles to support the rising. In the exchanges that followed, Room 40 discovered that a gun-running vessel called the Libau was to be sent from Germany, disguised as a Norwegian merchant ship and carrying 20,000 captured Russian Mauser rifles, ten machine guns and a million rounds of ammunition. Sir Roger Casement was to go to Ireland separately in a U-boat and to land at Tralee Bay in County Kerry. With all this detail, the Admiralty had no difficulty in apprehending the gun-running ship off the Irish coast. As it was being escorted in to Queenstown (now Cobh) the German crew scuttled the ship and surrendered as prisoners of war. The following day, Casement was arrested within hours of setting foot on Irish soil.
A delayed armed rising did take place in Ireland on Easter Monday, 23 April 1916. After Padraig Pearse, its romantic poet-leader, read out a proclamation declarin
g the existence of the Republic of Ireland, 150 revolutionaries occupied the General Post Office in O’Connell Street in Dublin. The British response was swift and decisive. Martial law was declared, troops were rushed in and HMS Helga shelled the city with high explosive shells from Dublin Bay. After six days the rising was crushed and much of the centre of the city was left in ruins. Most of the leaders were arrested and executed. Only Eamon de Valera, who claimed American citizenship, was pardoned. Moderate Irish nationalists were outraged by what was seen as British barbarity. Although few Irish men and women had been sympathetic to Sinn Fein at the beginning of the rising, many were converted to republicanism in its aftermath. The focal point of Irish politics shifted for ever as a consequence of Britain’s response to the Easter Rising.
Sir Roger Casement was tried and found guilty of treason, despite claiming in his defence that he had realised the rising could not succeed and had come to try to stop it rather than foment it. His trial became something of a cause célèbre: America put pressure on the British government to commute his death sentence, while several significant figures, including George Bernard Shaw and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, came out on his side. Using a set of diaries seized from Casement, Hall then seems to have engaged in one of his most unsavoury ‘dirty tricks’ campaigns. The so-called ‘Black Diaries’, in which Casement described in some detail scenes of gay sex, revealed him to be apparently a promiscuous homosexual with a penchant for young men. This caused outrage in the more innocent atmosphere of the time, and Hall realised that if Casement’s supporters knew of the content of the diaries they would abandon their demands for leniency. It seems that Hall and Commissioner Thomson leaked extracts from the diaries to the British and American press and to some MPs.7 So discredited was Casement that it put an abrupt end to the campaign to save him. He was hanged at Pentonville Prison for high treason on 3 August.
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