Churchill's Wizards

by Nicholas Rankin

  Sinclair had been ‘C’ since 1923, but he did not just control the spies who gathered human intelligence (HUMINT). He was also the director of the Government Code and Cipher School (GC&CS), which dealt in the signals intelligence (SIGINT) that became so vital to victory in WW2. Sinclair himself had formed the School in 1919, when he was still the director of Naval Intelligence, by combining the remnants of Room 40 at the Admiralty with the War Office’s equivalent. The school – its name was a camouflage; it taught nothing – was under the nominal control of the Foreign Office, and stingily paid for out of the Foreign Office vote. GC&CS continued wartime signals intelligence in peacetime by intercepting and interpreting the cable and wireless communications of both hostile and friendly powers. Much material was received under the 1920 Official Secrets Act that Sinclair had helped to frame, whereby all cable companies operating in Britain were legally obliged to hand over copies of all telegrams sent or received within ten days. There was also a chain of radio intercept or ‘Y’ stations in key points at home and abroad. During the 1920s, when Bolshevik subversion was seen as the great threat, GC&CS, under its deputy director Alastair Denniston, had decrypted all the codes and ciphers of Soviet Russia. Unfortunately, British politicians in Stanley Baldwin’s government in 1927 could not resist publicly boasting about this covertly acquired information. The Soviets then began sending their diplomatic and commercial wireless traffic using ‘one time pads’, which were impenetrable. This disastrous loss of intelligence taught a hard lesson about secrecy which was not forgotten in WW2: never let your enemy know what you know, or how you know it.

  Denniston was a little Scot who had husbanded the section through lean times. There were only sixty-six staff in 1919; in 1935, there were still no more than 104 on the payroll. Two years later, Admiral Sinclair told Denniston to start earmarking and recruiting more ‘men of the professor type’ from universities who would be ready to start cryptanalysis when war broke out. In that eventuality, the GC&CS would move fifty miles from Broadway Buildings in London to a large ugly mansion that SIS had purchased in 1938 in Buckinghamshire, a house called Bletchley Park. Among the 12,000 men and women who eventually worked at what was known as ‘Station X’ were eccentric geniuses, including an untidy young Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, called Alan M. Turing, often described as the founder of modern computer science. His work led to the building of the world’s first programmable digital computer, Colossus, which helped break German top-secret codes and produced the top grade of special intelligence known as ULTRA.

  When the German Navy appeared in the Mediterranean in 1936, giving military support to General Franco’s insurgent forces during the Spanish Civil War, they were signalling in cryptograms that the British could not read, communicating through Enigma electromechanical enciphering machines that looked like a typewriter in a wooden box, complicated by variable plugs and rotor wheels. In 1937, GC&CS were analysing the traffic, without understanding the messages, of the German air, army and police forces who were also using Enigma ciphers. As war approached in 1939, the Polish cipher bureau contacted its British and French counterparts and asked them to visit. On 24 July 1939, a month before Clare Hollingworth made the same journey, Alastair Denniston, with two GC&CS colleagues, Alfred Knox and Humphrey Sandwith, flew from Hendon to Warsaw. The next day they were driven to Pyry, a village in woods south of Warsaw, and shown into a room with lumpy objects on a table covered by a sheet. Their Polish hosts then uncovered their pièces de résistance: three Enigma machines that they had built themselves, with the rotors correctly wired in the German way. The French and the British were given one each for further technical research, to be shipped via Paris.

  The British Enigma machine reached Victoria Station on the ‘Golden Arrow’ boat-train late on 16 August 1939, in a large diplomatic bag, camouflaged by the mountainous luggage of the singer Sacha Guitry and his wife. It was met on the platform by Sinclair’s deputy, Colonel Stewart Menzies, wearing black tie for an evening engagement, with the Légion d’honneur rosette in his buttonhole. Three months later, a fortnight after Sinclair’s death, Menzies was anointed ‘C’, given the secret ivory emblem of his office by King George VI, and became the keeper of the golden eggs of ULTRA.

  SIGINT saved SIS from the disasters of their HUMINT. On 9 November 1939, two SIS agents were captured at Venlo on the German–Dutch border. Major Richard Stevens, a passport control officer, and Captain Sigismund Payne Best, a monocled cove working for the ‘Z’ network, had believed they were going to recruit an anti-Nazi dissident, a ‘good German’ high up in the Luftwaffe who was leading the resistance to Hitler. In fact the whole thing was a deception operation by German counter-espionage, Reichssicherheitshauptamt IVE, an elaborate sting to roll up all the British intelligence networks in Holland. Among the thugs who captured them was the same Alfred Naujocks who had led the fake raid on Gleiwitz radio station by the Polish border at the very start of the war. For this new trick, Hitler personally gave Naujocks the Iron Cross. Under interrogation, Stevens and Best told everything. Much of their information about the British secret services went into a Gestapo publication called Informations-heft GroßBrittanien, prepared by SS Major General Walter Schellenberg as the invasion handbook for the Nazi forces who would assault, occupy and purge the United Kingdom of Great Britain after Göring’s air force dominated the skies.

  In the summer of 1939, Arthur Watts, the president of the Radio Society of Great Britain, was approached by the War Office to find amateur radio enthusiasts prepared to listen for clandestine enemy morse code signals on short wavebands. Thousands of ‘radio hams’ became part-time V. I. s or Voluntary Interceptors, organised by groups and sectors into the Radio Security Service (RSS), one of the nine wartime secret services. They found no spies transmitting in England, but they did pick up weak Morse signals from Europe that came in coded groups. They turned out to be wireless messages directed to German secret service agents abroad. In its new headquarters at Arkley View, North Barnet, the RSS – which included Oxford dons like Hugh Trevor-Roper, Stuart Hampshire and Gilbert Ryle – collated and classified the intercept logs, before passing the messages on to Bletchley Park for deciphering. This ability to read German intelligence messages was crucial to later deception operations and to the ‘Double Cross’ system.

  The connection between double agents and radio began before the war, with a character code-named snow, who in real life was a Welsh electrical engineer called Arthur Owens. Owens first contacted the Abwehr, the Wehrmacht intelligence service, in Germany in 1936, and they later gave him a wireless transmitter set. Owens thus became one of only six known German spies in Britain. But he also reported what he had done to the British authorities. At the outbreak of war Arthur Owens ended up in Wandsworth Prison in the custody of the Security Service, the British secret service which does counter-espionage and is also known as MI5. Owens pleaded with Major T. A. ‘Tar’ Robertson of ‘B’ Division, MI5, to be allowed to radio supervised messages back to Hamburg. This began in September 1939, but snow at first sent mainly weather reports.

  Later, snow was allowed to travel to Belgium with his new radical Welsh Nationalist colleague ‘G. W.’ (a retired police inspector called Gwilym Williams) to meet his Abwehr controller, Major Nikolaus Ritter. From this expedition, MI5 learned the whereabouts of three more spies, what military and naval matters the Germans were interested in, their sabotage techniques and plans, and their secret communications via postage stamps and microdots. Most important of all, the RSS’s monitoring of snow’s German wireless control station led in April 1940 to the first breaking of the Abwehr codes. The decrypts of Abwehr signals that circulated among the secret services became known as Illicit (or Intelligence) Series Oliver Strachey (ISOS), after the section head at Bletchley Park, brother of Lytton Strachey, who had been breaking codes, including Japanese ones, since WW1.

  Reading German intelligence signals enabled MI5 to arrest twenty of the twenty-one German spies who arrived in Britai
n by parachute, small boat, seaplane and U-boat between September and November 1940. (The twenty-first ran out of food and money and shot himself in despair in an air-raid shelter in Cambridge.) Twelve of the spies were interned for the duration of the war, five were executed and three became ‘double agents’ for Tar Robertson and his section, B1A. This meant they would continue to work for, and be paid by, the Germans, but all their reports and movements were carefully controlled by the British. Some volunteered to do this, others ‘were volunteered’ by the prospect of a grim alternative. Thanks to the breakthroughs from snow, the British Security Service controlled all German spies in Britain during WW2, knowing exactly who they all were and when and where new ones arrived. Moreover, by supplying all the information the spies communicated to Germany, Britain gained many opportunities for deceiving the enemy.*

  After a row between MI6 and MI5 about who had jurisdiction and control over these channels, a coordinating committee evolved to make sure that credibility was maintained and wires did not get crossed. The initial W or Wireless Board, chaired by Admiral John Godfrey, brought together the heads of all the intelligence services. Later this task was devolved to a lower level organisation. Named officially the Twenty Committee and known colloquially as the Twenty Club, it was really the ‘Double Cross Committee’, since the Roman numeral for 20 is XX. The Double Cross Committee first met at Wormwood Scrubs prison on 2 January 1941 and then every Wednesday for the next four years and four months that the war in Europe lasted.

  Naval Intelligence’s usual representative on the XX Committee was a Jewish barrister, Lieutenant Commander Ewen Montagu, RNVR, the son-in-law of Solomon J. Solomon. The day before the first XX meeting, Montagu had been seen, in uniform, drinking and chatting about yachts with a smooth-looking man in the American bar of London’s Savoy hotel. This was a Yugoslav called Dusko Popov who, after twelve days in England being questioned and checked out by MI5 and MI6, was on the eve of flying back on the first of many regular trips to Lisbon to meet his Abwehr controller, who went under the name Ludovico von Karsthoff. In the Savoy bar, Montagu gave Popov a friendly letter that he could show as proof of their acquaintance. Every detail of what they talked about would be passed on, because Dusko Popov was starting his career as one of the most successful double agents of the war, code-named tricycle by the British, and ivan by the Germans. He fed false information to the Germans and brought back true intelligence on German rocketry and strategy.

  Both German and British scientists had been working with invisible electromagnetic radio waves. British boffins, led by Robert Watson Watt, had been developing ‘radiolocation’ since 1935, bouncing radio pulses back and using the blips to locate the range, height and bearing of approaching enemy aircraft. When the Home Chain of Radio Direction Finding aerials was linked to the RAF Ground Control Interception system, it helped win the Battle of Britain in 1940. Radar (RAdio Direction And Ranging) equipment fitted in RAF aircraft helped defeat the night blitz in 1941, and when installed in Royal Navy ships detected faraway enemy vessels and aided the laying of accurate gunfire at distance. Short-wave radar in ships and planes proved devastating against U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943.

  German research centred on transmitting beams that aided bomber navigation, and using intersecting beams to indicate a bombing target. From scraps of intelligence – captured German pilots talking, a photographed aerial array, equipment on a crashed German aeroplane – the young scientist R. V. Jones worked out what the Germans were doing, told Churchill’s Cabinet about it, and sent up a plane over Derby (where the vital Rolls-Royce aero-engine works were a key Lufwaffe target) to discover that the narrow directional beam was where two thicker radio beams, one of dots, the other of dashes, overlapped. Radio countermeasures could then be set in force, the Knickebein of beam bombing bent, the X-Gerät of precision bombing annulled. The British radio guidance system, known as ‘Gee’, was developed in 1942 to guide fleets of British bombers to the Ruhr. After commandos were sent to capture parts of a German Würzburg radar at Bruneval in France in 1942, R. V. Jones and Joan Curran devised a way of ‘spoofing’ German radar with a smokescreen of deceptive reflective material dropped from aeroplanes. These strips of paper and aluminium foil, now called ‘chaff’, were code-named ‘Window’ in WW2.

  * This holds equally true for the Germans too. From the spring of 1942 to the autumn of 1943 Oberleutnant H. J. Giskes of the local German Abwehrstelle controlled all the SOE agents dropped into occupied Holland, as he let London know, quite openly, on April Fool’s Day 1944. The whole excruciating story of how the British were hoodwinked is told in Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker’s Story 1941–1945 by Leo Marks, and in SOE in the Low Countries by M. R. D. Foot.

  15

  Hiding the Silver

  The population of Great Britain had been alarmed, among other things, by the sci-fi film written by H. G. Wells, Things to Come, in which fleets of bombers devastated an English Everytown. For them, rearmament meant building more fighter aircraft and anti-aircraft guns, and civil defence meant air-raid precautions, concealment and camouflage. Winston Churchill, however, thought that public anxiety about aerial bombing was roused both by pacifists eager to promote their anti-war cause, and by Air Ministry officials exaggerating out of self-importance.

  On 30 March 1939, the same day the government pledged 8 per cent of its £25 million Civil Defence budget to ‘obscuration of glare, and camouflage’, The Times had run a long and authoritative article on the subject. ‘Camouflage: Nature’s Hints to Man’ stated: ‘In view of the revolutionary methods of modern aerial warfare, concealment has now assumed a new and most vital function.’ The author of the piece, anonymously credited as ‘a Scientific Correspondent’, was the zoologist Dr Hugh Cott of Cambridge University, then completing his masterly study Adaptive Coloration in Animals, which Methuen published in 1940. Cott gave a biologist’s overview of counter-shading and ‘dazzle’, disruptive patterns contradicting structural features, and, pointing out some errors in modern military camouflage, made a plea for more science to be applied to the art, which was ‘still in its infancy – a child suffering from arrested development’.

  Cott’s piece prompted a slew of letters to The Times throughout April 1939. Camouflage was no longer secret, and the sort of people who write to newspapers had lots of points to make about its usefulness or its earlier history. A. J. Insall wrote from the Imperial War Museum, mentioning ‘armoured snipers’ posts made to represent natural tree trunks’ and other ‘excellent examples’ of camouflage from the sniping schools of WW1. But the debate re-aroused old rivalries. Norman Wilkinson wrote to defend the culture of dazzle painting, saying that its purpose was not ‘diminishing visibility’ as Cott alleged, and pointing out that 5,000 wartime vessels had been successfully painted. Professor Sir John Graham Kerr then wrote from the Athenaeum to point out that camouflage was biological, not cultural, and that he had been the first to lay out the distractive functions of ‘dazzle’ in a memorandum of September 1914. What the Government needed now, he said, was ‘a special Department, presided over by someone possessing high scientific qualifications’ (not a million miles from himself, perhaps), to guide the camouflage activities of civilians and military on land, at sea and in the air. This spurred Wilkinson on to state that ship disguise was not biological camouflage, and tartly to remind ‘Mr Graham Kerr’ that when the Royal Commission of Awards to Inventors had thrashed out the history of ‘dazzle’, Wilkinson was the only one to receive an award. (This was a twenty-year-old battle: Wilkinson and Kerr’s first print spat had been in Nature in 1919.) In May 1939, Graham Kerr also popped up in Parliament to ask the Secretary of State for Air whether he was using the biological principles of camouflage to diminish the conspicuousness of aircraft hangars, and once again in The Times where he reminded readers that a recent picture of a panda’s ‘patchwork of violent contrasts’ constituted the kind of ‘dazzle’ that was potentially useful in war camouflage.

 
The British military was already thinking about this. In December 1937, a Camouflage Research Establishment (CRE) had been set up at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough. Its director was Lieutenant Colonel Francis Wyatt, formerly of the Royal Engineers, the man who had taken command of Wimereux ‘Special Works Park’ in 1916. The man who appointed Wyatt, Reginald Stradling, had also been with the RE in WW1, when he won the MC and two mentions in dispatches. Stradling was a civil engineer with a doctorate in building materials, and an expert on steel structures. He became head of ARP research inside Sir John Anderson’s Department of Civilian Defence, looking particularly at how to protect from bomb damage. From April 1939, when the Ministry of Supply that Churchill had been pleading for was finally established, the CRE helped with technical advice on camouflaging ‘Military Establishments, Fixed Permanent Defences, Royal Ordnance Factories (excluding agency factories run by civil firms) [and] Ministry of Supply Establishments’. The Royal Engineer Board’s ‘E’ Committee was also concerned with camouflage, and developed steel wool (now used for scouring) as a useful material to attach to rolls of wire netting. Steel wool could be painted, and did not rot or burn.