by Alastair Denniston- Code-breaking From Room 40 to Berkeley Street
On 28 September 1941, AGD received a letter from Frank Birch denouncing Malcolm Saunders, the nominal head of Hut 3 as ‘interfering, intriguing, creating and magnifying difficulties and misunderstandings, causing friction, undermining confidence and incidentally, making proper liaison impossible’.97 Inter-Service rivalries had surfaced in Hut 3 between the senior liaison officer with the Air Ministry, Robert Humphreys, backed by C.R. Curtis, head of the military section and Saunders. Humphreys had lobbied effectively for BP in Whitehall but as a poor team player, he had caused great dissention in both Hut 3 and Whitehall. Nigel de Grey described the situation as ‘an imbroglio of conflicting jealousies, intrigue and differing opinions’. In AGD’s absence due to illness in April 1941, Travis issued the following orders:
No. 1 of the watch will be in general charge and, working in collaboration with the Air and Military Watch officers, will report agreed renderings of such messages as are considered necessary. In case of disagreement as to rendering or the necessity to report, the Service Officer’s version or decision is to be taken and the matter referred to Commander Saunders for the Head of GC&CS. The circulation both at home and abroad and the form in which reports are sent abroad will be decided by the Army and the Officers for their respective services.98
In October, the two senior intelligence officers, Humphreys and Curtis, demanded that the whole staff of Hut 3 should be subordinated to them for operational duties and to the GC&CS ‘administrator’ for ‘purely administrative’ purposes. In this they were supported by MI6 and AI1(e). They had exceeded their mandate and were in effect replicating the higher-level struggle for control of Sigint. On 7 November, a new conduct of work was issued which handed control to a triumvirate consisting of Saunders, Humphreys and Curtis. The intelligence officers were to be
responsible to their Ministries for the Intelligence reported to their respective Ministries or Commands, resulting from the work of the GC&CS staff, … for all Intelligence Reports and summaries issued from Hut 3, whether the reports have actually been compiled by an Intelligence Officer or by the staff of GC&CS and for any comment that may be added to the text or signals … Decisions as to priority of the work of the watch rest with the Intelligence officers of the watch … All emended material is to be passed directly to the Intelligence officer of the watch, who alone who will decide its disposal.99
This new arrangement didn’t satisfy anyone involved and led to a breakdown in discipline. On 1 December, MI8 issued an inaccurate document on German Army and Air Force cooperation based on Enigma decrypts and traffic analysis without the knowledge of any part of GC&CS, contravening all rules of security. According to de Grey ‘It was evident that the whole situation was getting out of hand and that GC&CS was unable apparently to control it.’100 Eventually, Eric Jones, a RAF officer, was brought in to assess the situation. His report, dated 2 February 1942 and classified Most Secret provides a fascinating and objective commentary on the state of GC&CS at the end of 1941:
The difficulties of the organisation of Hut 3 are manifold in cause, but the key lies particularly in the background and structure of the G.C. & C.S. The material which Hut 3 amends, edits and distributes, has first to be subjected to several stages before being finally broken. All the processes which the material undergoes at the War Station demand the application of great intellectual power with the result that there is as high a concentration of brain as has ever been achieved anywhere. That fact alone makes administration a delicate matter, for such people tend to be unworldly: their task is fascinating, and they will continue until forcibly discouraged. They do not worry consciously about accommodation or facilities, and hence have tended to concentrate upon the immediate execution of the work than to provide for its more efficient execution in the future. Another strange factor works the same way. Luck enters into the whole process, and so cryptographers are apt to be superstitious to the extent of believing that if they make grandiose preparation for future output, nemesis will cut off the source as return for their presumption. Indeed it would have taken a very courageous man to have decided, say two years ago, to build a large organisation for coping with such a chance, albeit voluminous, flow of information. Hence G.C. & C.S. has lived a hand-to-mouth existence, always short of accommodation, nearly always overlooked (because cryptographers prefer to be overlooked) and always in the background is the fickle nature of the material. In addition, the general administration of accommodation, billeting, and general amenities, has become most incompetent, and would have not been suffered by more worldly personnel. The work is most exacting, demanding all patience and tenacity, and is being carried out against a background of inconvenience and irritation; it would therefore be amazing if tempers remained even.
The foregoing considerations apply to one aspect of the nature of the work, namely, its intellectual difficulty. There are two other aspects, the need for security and for an acute form of team spirit, which jointly mitigate against smooth running. For success, the work depends upon a chain, from the people who do W/I, through the crib constructors, and the breakers, to the amenders and editors. The chain carries on, in fact, through the Service Intelligence Sections, both at War Station and at the Ministries, to the Operational Staffs who finally use the information. Such a chain is, of course, not peculiar to MSS101 nor even to less elaborate cryptography, but is characteristic of all Intelligence. The chain principle is, however, much more strongly developed in the case of MSS than in any other form of Intelligence. An inevitable feature of the chain is that each stage is regarded as the representative of the source to all stages on the user side, and as the representative of the user to all stages nearer the source. For efficiency, it is essential that each stage realizes this dual responsibility, for example, A.D.I (Science) represents the user of beam information to Hut 3, and the source to D. of S.
A further feature of the chain is that each stage will tend to regard its immediate neighbours as unnecessary middlemen. Hut 6 at one time looked upon Hut 3 in this light, but that feeling has now largely disappeared. The real work has to remain vitally secret, but at some point in the chain the information has to emerge as ‘MSS’. The officer at this point must be a relatively public figure, and will be regarded by the Service Intelligence as (at minimum) the representative of the source. It is this officer who gains the glamour, and who in particular – if he is not scrupulously faithful – will come to be regarded as a profiteering middleman by all the others who have treated the material at an earlier stage. It would be the acme of unfairness for this officer to make capital from his privileged position: the achievements for those who remain secret should make any fairminded man feel very humble.
Jones then went on to make the following recommendations:
Apart from drastic reorganisation, which would be so dangerous that I would not care to advise upon it, there remains the possibility of cleaning up the present organisation, and MSS is sufficiently unique – even in cryptography – to justify ad hoc measures. The first thing is a change in the administration of working, billeting and general welfare facilities, so that no further time and energy be fretted away over irritation irrelevant to the work. Second, there should be confirmation or otherwise of the editing functions of Hut 3, and if possible the Admiralty should be induced to stabilise the arrangement by providing a competent Naval section in Hut 3. The Army Section ought to be strengthened by a change of Head: the present one is a charmingly naïve plagiarist who puts to the War Office as his own, interpretations borrowed from others: this can only end in trouble, for people will suspect him of capitalisation. In addition, his refusal to allow the letter ‘G.L.’ to appear in MSS reports, on the ground that they are secret, is characteristic. The Air Section, and indeed all the sections, needs a Head who is scrupulously honest, for the reasons I have given above. I consider it desirable that he should understand the principles of MSS cryptography and (essential) the academic mind, for then he will meet the worker as an equal – and through his appreciation –
be less inclined to make personal capital out of the work. In addition, he must understand thoroughly the requirements of his Service. It is of less importance that he should be an expert linguist; this we have found from experience, that a good technical man working alongside a good linguist can nearly always bridge all the gaps. The Heads of the Service sections would fulfil the functions of Service editors; besides their direct editing, they would have to know what their readers wanted and hence what their reports, i.e. Hut 6 and the Y organisation, should cover. Above them, for the purpose of administration should be an Editor-in-Chief, who would exercise a supervisory control over general Hut policy. The Watch would be responsible to him, and the Service representatives on the Watch should be regarded as expert advisers to the No. 1, instead of Overseers. I believe that if the Services were to give a little in the matter of their rights, they would find an adequate return. Regarding the choice of an Editor-in-Chief, as the man who started it has obviously the most interest in the Hut’s welfare, and it has yet to be shown that the present Head has been either prejudiced or incompetent, there is a good case for his remaining in office. The Research Section of Hut 3 needs expansion; this is already contemplated, but is held up through a shortage of people.
The outcome of Jones’s report was the removal of Saunders from Hut 3, along with Humphreys and Curtis. They were initially replaced by a management triumvirate of the three senior officers in the Hut, but Jones was confirmed as overall head in July 1942. The ‘Hut 3 affair’ also brought further scrutiny of AGD’s management of GC&CS at BP.
By September 1941, Sigint resources were stretched. According to DMI: ‘Sigint is vital but at the present moment it suffers from two grave disadvantages: (a) lack of equipment; (b) lack of effective operational control.’102 There were serious deficiencies in all three main branches of Sigint and subsequently, Navy and Air Sections had found and trained their own staff for low-grade cryptanalysis. While the Army had no low-grade material to work on, their training section ISSIS provided recruits to all Services. DMI complained that Typex facilities were insufficient ‘to deal with even the present volume of traffic being sent home from abroad, with the result that much of this traffic is not seen by the cryptographers, much less broken’.103 On 23 December 1941, at a Chiefs of Staff Committee meeting with the Directors of Intelligence, the Committee ‘invited the Y Board to examine as a matter of urgency the organisation of Y Services generally and to submit proposals for the additional accommodation, equipment and staff that would now be required in the Y organisation and for the consequential increases in staff in the intelligence Directorates’.104
The Foreign Office stated that a 35 per cent increase had already been approved by the Treasury for GC&CS. This provided an increase in Temporary Senior Administrative Officers, Junior Administrative Officers, first, second and third grade Temporary Clerks, tabulating staff and typists. The Y Board set out a number of principles and recommendations to the Chiefs of Staff which were very significant for AGD’s organisation.105 In particular, the work of cryptanalysts would now be treated as a reserved occupation without question. Furthermore, there would be no prohibition against recruiting young men until the personnel requirements were met and absolute priority was to be given to demands for requisitioning premises in the neighbourhood of GC&CS.
In late October 1941, following a visit to BP by the Prime Minister the previous month, Welchman and some of his colleagues were becoming frustrated by the failure by senior BP management to deal quickly with urgent requests for vital equipment and personnel. Welchman drafted a letter106 to the Prime Minister and signed it along with Turing and their two deputies, Stuart Milner-Barry and Hugh Alexander:
Secret and Confidential
Prime Minister only, Hut 6 and Hut 8, 21st October 1941
Dear Prime Minister,
Some weeks ago you paid us the honour of a visit, and we believe that you regard our work as important. You will have seen that, thanks largely to the energy and foresight of Commander Travis, we have been well supplied with the ‘bombes’ for the breaking of the German Enigma codes. We think, however, that you ought to know that this work is being held up, and in some cases is not being done at all, principally because we cannot get sufficient staff to deal with it. Our reason for writing to you direct is that for months we have done everything that we possibly can through the normal channels, and that we despair of any early improvement without your intervention. No doubt in the long run these particular requirements will be met, but meanwhile still more precious months will have been wasted, and as our needs are continually expanding we see little hope of ever being adequately staffed.
We realise that there is a tremendous demand for labour of all kinds and that its allocation is a matter of priorities. The trouble to our mind is that as we are a very small section with numerically trivial requirements it is very difficult to bring home to the authorities finally responsible either the importance of what is done here or the urgent necessity of dealing promptly with our requests. At the same time we find it hard to believe that it is really impossible to produce quickly the additional staff that we need, even if this meant interfering with the normal machinery of allocations.
We do not wish to burden you with a detailed list of our difficulties, but the following are the bottlenecks which are causing us the most acute anxiety.
Breaking of naval enigma (Hut 8)
Owing to shortage of staff and the overworking of his present team the Hollerith section here under Mr Freeborn has had to stop working night shifts. The effect of this is that the finding of the naval keys is being delayed at least twelve hours every day. In order to enable him to start night shifts again Freeborn needs immediately about twenty more untrained Grade III women clerks. To put himself in a really adequate position to deal with any likely demands he will want a good many more.
A further serious danger now threatening us is that some of the skilled male staff, both with the British Tabulating Company at Letchworth and in Freeborn’s section here, who have so far been exempt from military service, are now liable to be called up.
Military and Air Force enigma (Hut 6)
We are intercepting quite a substantial proportion of wireless traffic in the Middle East which cannot be picked up by our intercepting stations here. This contains among other things a good deal of new ‘Light Blue’ intelligence. Owing to shortage of trained typists, however, and the fatigue of our present decoding staff, we cannot get all this traffic decoded. This has been the state of affairs since May. Yet all that we need to put matters right is about twenty trained typists.
Bombe testing, Hut 6 and Hut 8
In July we were promised that the testing of the ‘stories’ produced by the bombes would be taken over by the WRNS in the bombe hut and that sufficient WRNS would be provided for this purpose. It is now late in October and nothing has been done. We do not wish to stress this so strongly as the two preceding points, because it has not actually delayed us in delivering the goods. It has, however, meant that staff in Huts 6 and 8 who are needed for other jobs have had to do the testing themselves. We cannot help feeling that with a Service matter of this kind it should have been possible to detail a body of WRNS for this purpose, if sufficiently urgent instructions had been sent to the right quarters.
Apart altogether from staff matters, there are a number of other directions in which it seems to us that we have met with unnecessary impediments. It would take too long to set these out in full, and we realise that some of the matters involved are controversial. The cumulative effect, however, has been to drive us to the conviction that the importance of the work is not being impressed with sufficient force upon those outside authorities with whom we have to deal.
We have written this letter entirely on our own initiative. We do not know who or what is responsible for our difficulties, and most emphatically we do not want to be taken as criticising Commander Travis who has all along done his utmost to help us in every possible way. But if we
are to do our job as well as it could and should be done it is absolutely vital that our wants, small as they are, should be promptly attended to. We have felt that we should be failing in our duty if we did not draw your attention to the facts and to the effects which they are having and must continue to have on our work, unless immediate action is taken.
We are, Sir, Your obedient servants,
A.M. Turing
W.G. Welchman
C.H.O’D. Alexander
P.S. Milner-Barry
Milner-Barry was tasked with delivering the letter in person and upon arriving at No. 10 Downing Street, handed it to one of Churchill’s staff. Remarkably, the Prime Minister read the letter and put an ‘Action This Day’ stamp on it with a handwritten note to his chief military assistant General Ismay, saying: ‘Make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this has been done.’ Milner-Barry would later recall AGD’s reaction to the letter: ‘I by chance met Commander Denniston in the corridors some days later, and he made some rather wry remark about our unorthodox behaviour; but he was much too nice a man to bear malice.’107
Shortly afterwards, Menzies appeared at BP and according to Milner-Barry ‘was very cross’. He personally rebuked Welchman for violating the chain of command and then met with AGD. It was not long, however, before the situation at BP started to improve. Staff requirements at BP were indeed given ‘extreme priority’ and on 18 November 1941, Menzies reported to Churchill that ‘every possible measure was being taken’. While all of the new arrangements were not yet in place, BP’s needs were being ‘very rapidly met’.108 However, in January 1942, when the spate of argument and recrimination was damaging efficiency and threatening a breakdown of discipline, ‘C’, in his capacity as Director of GC&CS, appointed an independent investigator, a former DDMI, to report not only on the dispute about the handling of the product of Air Force and Army Enigma and on the administrative control of GC&CS, but also on the functioning of GC&CS’s Naval and Air Sections.109
