In 1974, the first book in English about the breaking of Enigma appeared, F. W. Winterbotham’s The Ultra Secret. As a Royal Air Force officer during the war, Winterbotham had been in charge of the secret Special Liaison Units that conveyed intelligence from Bletchley Park to commanders in the field. He knew virtually nothing about how Bletchley Park worked, and gave a picture of a far quicker, more complete success in breaking Enigma than happened in reality. Among other errors, he described Britain as supplying the United States with the solution to the “Japanese counterpart” of Enigma, thereby erasing the American breakthroughs against Purple and the Japanese naval systems.22
Winterbotham worked from memory, since he was allowed no access to wartime papers. Still, he received permission to publish. Winterbotham averred that his British publisher had made use of his personal friendship with Prime Minister Harold Wilson.23 The real push may have been the publication two years before, in France, of the memoirs of Gustave Bertrand, the French intelligence officer who’d worked with the Poles before the war and who brought Alastair Denniston and Dilly Knox to Warsaw in 1939. Even earlier, a Polish colonel had discovered a wartime report in his country’s archives and written a book on the work of Rejewski. Winterbotham’s book shrank the Polish and French role and returned the glory to Britain.24
Gordon Welchman saw a review of The Ultra Secret during a visit home to Britain and began thinking of writing his own account of how Enigma had been broken. Welchman had left GCHQ after the war and moved to the United States three years later. By the time his book, The Hut 6 Story, appeared in 1982, he was a semiretired consultant for a defense research and development firm. He assumed that as a US citizen, he was no longer subject to the British Official Secrets Act, and besides, Winterbotham had already told the world about Britain’s intelligence victory.
So it was a shock when three US government agents came to his house and told him that he had revealed information that was classified in the United States. A late-1940s agreement with Britain and a federal legal clause based on it made British codebreaking secrets into American secrets as well. He was at risk of being sentenced to ten years in prison and a $10,000 fine. A letter followed from the National Security Agency, heir to America’s World War II codebreaking agencies, warning Welchman not to reveal anything more about Enigma or methods used “to successfully exploit code or cipher systems.” The difference between earlier tell-alls and Welchman’s was that they’d merely described the military value of the intelligence. Welchman had explained how the unbreakable cipher was broken.
Welchman was never prosecuted. He did endure more harassment from American and British authorities, including FBI interviews and agents sitting in unmarked cars outside his house, before his death in 1985 from pancreatic cancer.25 It was a strange form of appreciation for the man who had transformed codebreaking from a craft into an assembly line, an industry that changed the shape of the war.
THE REASON THAT Welchman’s book upset his heirs at the NSA and GCHQ, historian Nigel West argued, was that Welchman had stressed that in theory Enigma was “impregnable if it had been used properly.” German mistakes and failure to follow simple security rules had created the openings Bletchley Park exploited. His book, therefore, was not just about how an archaic cipher from before the computer age was cracked. It was a warning to contemporary enemies to tighten security.26 If they took note, their encryption could become unbreakable.
Yet Welchman was partly mistaken, and so were the agencies frightened by his book.
Welchman’s error was in underestimating what Rejewski had achieved before the war. Welchman found it “hard to believe” that in 1938 Rejewski had figured out the wiring of the new Enigma wheels added by the Germans. But Rejewski had done so. A problem had appeared unsolvable to brilliant minds. Another brilliant mind turned it sideways, looked at it differently, and found a solution. The cipher was theoretically unbreakable, until it wasn’t.
More than that, Welchman made his own early breakthroughs, sitting alone in an empty classroom at the edge of Bletchley Park, when a flash of light in his mind showed him that German security measures were actually back doors into Enigma.
The other mistake was in thinking that the rules could ever be followed perfectly. The cipher had to be used by people, often tired and under pressure. This is what John Herivel had realized the night he fell asleep in front of the fireplace and imagined an Enigma clerk woken at midnight to send a message in a hurry. The more complicated the procedures, the more certain it was that people would take shortcuts. Decades after Turing midwifed the age of computers, people would be asked to protect supposedly perfect encryption by using long, random passwords and changing them regularly. Some would write the passwords on pieces of paper and leave them on their desks.
The flaw in the machine was its human inventor who forgot that human beings would not behave like machines.
THE PERSECUTION OF Gordon Welchman was useless. The secret was out. More and more books appeared. In Poland, Rejewski had been belatedly recognized as a national hero and awarded two military decorations.27 In Britain veterans of Bletchley Park began to enjoy acclaim—those who’d managed to stay alive long enough, those unlike Storey who could believe it was proper to talk about what they’d done. In 2013, Alan Turing received a posthumous royal pardon.28 The ruined grounds of Bletchley Park were restored and turned into a museum where recorded ghostly voices spoke in empty rooms of the huts.
THE OLD MAN’S living room in Jerusalem was half-lit, as if it were a space between memory and reality. The man was Haim Gouri, one of Israel’s most famous poets. He was ninety-one years old. He had been nineteen in the summer of 1942 when his team from the Palmah was sent to scout the road to Megiddo in anticipation of Rommel’s advance.
He told me about watching the endless line of trucks carrying Australian soldiers toward El Alamein, about the truck that stopped, about the huge, happy men who climbed out and drank beer and talked to the Jews who were preparing to fight as partisans after the Nazi conquest. “Wait for the news,” an Australian told them, and then the Australians rode onward to the battle that stopped Rommel.
“When I think of it,” the old poet said, “where could I find them to say thank you?
“You owe your life to nameless people, and you don’t know where to find them.”29
Acknowledgments
WRITING THIS BOOK has been a wonderful intellectual journey, and has required many thousands of miles of actual travel. Both were made more productive and far more enjoyable by the extraordinary generosity of many people.
At the outset, Gerhard Weinberg drew on his unparalleled knowledge of World War II to suggest sources to consult and issues to consider. Benny Morris was a superb guide to archives and background material. Rob Rozett mapped out scholarly debates on German strategy and the Holocaust.
Gill Bennet, Christopher Andrew, Richard Aldrich, Calder Walton, and Stephen Budiansky shared their knowledge of intelligence history. I am especially grateful to David Alvarez, who was always willing to answer questions and point out new directions, and to Rebecca Ann Ratcliff, who shared not only her time and expertise, but also her archival notes.
I am incredibly appreciative of the openheartedness of people who have spent their lives studying closed, secret agencies. Searching for one document mentioned in a footnote, I cold-called Brian Sullivan. He responded by meeting me, advising me over many months, sharing his stacks of documents and writing on Italian intelligence history, and connecting me with more scholars. Ciro Paoletti gave me an in-depth and insightful tour of Fascist-era Rome and the secret locations of intelligence agencies. John Gooch and MacGregor Knox shared Italian intelligence documents that changed my understanding of this story. Maria Gabriella Pasqualini met with me in Rome, provided an in-depth explanation of Italian secret services, and shared with me crucial documents that she discovered and that give the clearest picture of Manfredi Talamo and his Sezione Prelevamento.
Ralph Erskine was alw
ays ready to share his expertise on Bletchley Park and to help with archival documents. Christos Triantafyllopoulos was a constant source of insight and material on codebreaking. Andreas Biermann happily provided access to documents he’d found in his research on Operation Crusader.
I was most fortunate to meet Patrick Bernhard at a small conference at Hebrew University. His presentation there, our conversation and correspondence, and his writings demonstrated over and over how false the myth of a “war without hate” in North Africa was.
Yoram Meital and Israel Gershoni gave me wonderful guidance on the politics of Egypt. Seth Anziska, Eugene Rogan, Walter Armbrust, Avi Shlaim, and Hazem Kandil were open with their time and Middle East expertise and added to my range of sources. Joshua Teitelbaum, as always, had the source I needed on Saudi Arabia.
Kuno Gross, Michael Rolke, and Andrés Zboray eagerly shared information from their exhaustive research on Laszlo Almasy.
For finding arcane archival and published material on American conservative politics in the postwar years, Rick Perlstein came through yet again.
Yacov Haggiag-Liluf shared with me his extensive files on Libyan Jewry during World War II, and Maurice Roumani provided me with additional avenues for research. Matti Friedman added to my sources on the Palmah. Louise Fischer gave me source material on Jewish politics in Palestine in 1942. Sarah Guthartz shared her historical expertise on wartime fashions.
Given the sometimes arcane filing system for World War II military records at the US National Archives at College Park, Maryland, I am particularly grateful for the guidance provided by archivist emeritus Tim Mulligan. Robert Hanyok gave me excellent suggestions based on his many years of research in those records, shared documents from his own files, and uncovered more in the archive in answer to my queries. I am truly indebted to them.
I HAD THE pleasure of working with several excellent research assistants. Sam Miner searched through captured German documents for me at College Park, translated other material from German, and shared his knowledge of German military history. Giulia Sbaffi and Annalisa Bernardi sifted through and translated Italian materials.
My son Yehonatan Gorenberg handled Arabic press reports. My daughter Shir-Raz Gorenberg lent a hand with a last-minute visit to a Jerusalem archive, and applied her artist’s expertise to analyzing photographs. My daughter Yasmin Gorenberg applied her professional eye in helping to analyze Margaret Storey’s reports and the deciphered messages on which they were based in order to understand Storey’s reasoning.
ORIGINAL DOCUMENTS FROM the time of the events are the foundation of this book. Most came from archives. Some of the most important papers, though, came from the children and grandchildren of key figures in the story.
One of the most rewarding moments in my research was finding and making contact with Amy Lear, granddaughter of Bonner Fellers. In her attic were manila envelopes, patiently waiting for a historian, full of his documents. I am truly grateful for her permission to draw from these papers and from the much larger collection of Fellers’s personal papers at the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University.
One of the published sources for this book is To War with Whitaker, the wartime diary of Countess Hermione Ranfurly, a remarkable observer and writer. However, some fragments of her writing were not included in the published version. I am most grateful to her daughter, Lady Caroline Simmonds, for inviting me to her home, enabling me to go through the manuscript fragments, and allowing me to quote from them.
Another long search brought me to the home of Lottie Milvain, daughter of Russell Dudley-Smith. Waiting for me on her table were cardboard folders filled with his writing and notes, virtually all from before he joined the Government Code and Cypher School. I am indebted to her for the opportunity to see this material, and for the additional family lore she shared in conversation with me, providing me with a window into the personality of a man whom I otherwise knew only from official documents. Through her, I was also able to contact John Tiltman’s daughter, Tempe Denzer, in Hawaii and to learn more about both Tiltman and Dudley-Smith.
Margaret Storey did not leave personal papers. But at the Cheltenham Local History Society, Kath Boothman responded to my request and ran an ad in the society newsletter seeking people who knew her, and Joyce Cummings found records including Storey’s last will and testament, allowing me to identify her heirs. I am indebted to both of them and to Dorelle Downes, Pauline Flemons, Nicholas Fenn Wiggin, Nikki Swinhoe, and James Hodsdon, who shared what they knew about Storey and enabled me to fill in the picture of this remarkable and forgotten woman.
I am also grateful to Jeffrey Maunsell, who has allowed me to draw from the memoir of his father, SIME chief Raymond Maunsell, and to Tori Rosen, who shared with me her father’s flight log on the trans-Africa air ferry route.
THE RICHEST ARCHIVAL source for this book was the UK National Archive in Kew. I lost track of all the remarkably friendly and helpful staffers who made my months of work there more pleasant. I am grateful to all of them and to the equally friendly staff at the Imperial War Museums archival departments.
I’m indebted to Guy Revell at the Bletchley Park archive; to Debbie Usher at the Middle East Centre Archive at St. Antony’s College, Oxford; to Lianne Smith at the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King’s College, London; and to Julia Schmidt at the Churchill Archives Centre at Churchill College, Cambridge.
At the National Cryptologic Museum Library at Fort Meade, Maryland, Rene Stein went far beyond the call of duty to render assistance to me. Her retirement is a loss for research on intelligence history. I’m grateful to the staff of the Hoover Institution Archives, especially to Lisa Miller, who located many megabytes of newly declassified papers for me, and to the staff of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, especially William Baehr, who helped make sense of the format of War Department cables and their telltale time stamps. At the US National Archives at College Park, Bill Cunliffe added information on the War Department cables, and Eric Van Slander spent much time guiding me through the filing system.
I would also like to thank Zvi Bernhardt at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Yuval Ron at Yad Tabenkin in Ramat Efal, Tamar Fuks at Yad Ben Zvi in Jerusalem, and Pnina Yeruchami at the Palmach Museum in Tel Aviv for their assistance.
THE MANY PUBLISHED works that I consulted are listed in the bibliography. But I must make special note of several that were truly essential. Gerhard Weinberg’s magisterial A World at Arms provided the most integrated overview of World War II, the development of Hitler’s strategy, and the central place of his war against the Jews in that strategy. Of the countless works on El Alamein, Niall Barr’s Pendulum of War: The Three Battles of El Alamein gave the most precise and detailed account and incisive analysis.
Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers’s groundbreaking article “‘Elimination of the Jewish National Home in Palestine’: The Einsatzkommando of the Panzer Army Africa, 1942,” their book Nazi Palestine, and Cüppers’s subsequent biography of the Einsatzkommando’s commander, Walther Rauff—In deutschen Diensten: Vom Naziverbrecher zum BND-Spion, lay out what the consequences of an Axis victory at El Alamein would have been for the Jews of the Middle East.
FOR SOME PARTS of this book, the document I needed to read was the landscape. Yigal Greiver at the Haifa Historical Society gave me a tour of the World War II fortifications on Mt. Carmel. Hilary Olsin-Windecker of the US State Department connected me to the US embassy in Cairo, where Thomas Goldberger found information on the location of American diplomatic offices during the war, and to the US embassy in Rome, where Stephen Labensky and Carmela Cirami arranged for me to tour the majestic embassy compound. Amr Yosef at the Egyptian embassy in Tel Aviv was most helpful with arrangements for my visit to Egypt. My guide there, Mounir Mahmoud, was remarkably friendly, knowledgeable, and ready to assist in finding the landmarks on my idiosyncratic list. I am grateful to all of them.
MY RESEARCH REQUIRED long stays in London. I am grateful t
o Norm Guthartz and Lindsey Taylor-Guthartz, who treated me not as a guest but as a regularly returning member of their family, and to Julian Gilbey and Deborah Lee, who opened their home to me. Likewise, I am grateful to Dan and Rochel Rabinowitz, who welcomed me into their family each time I returned to the National Archives in Maryland.
The generosity of the Knapp Family Foundation and a collaboration of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies have made it possible for me to spend spring semesters at the university. The funding and the resources of a great university have been essential to the writing of this book. I’m grateful to them and to the talented students in my seminar on writing history at the School of Journalism, from whom I constantly learned.
It was a pleasure to work with cartographer and historian Mike Bechtold, who created the map for this book.
I am extremely thankful to my editor at PublicAffairs, Ben Adams, for his support and encouragement throughout this project, and to my wonderful agent, Lisa Bankoff, who is always there when I need her and who makes everything happen.
THE MOST IMPORTANT part of every journey is coming home. I am grateful for the help and encouragement of my children. Most of all, I am grateful beyond words to my wife, Myra Noveck, for her love and constant support, for lifting my spirits, and for her advice and wisdom in helping with each step in putting together this story.
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YASMIN GORENBERG
GERSHOM GORENBERG is a historian and journalist who has been covering Middle Eastern affairs for over thirty-five years. He is the author of three critically acclaimed books, The Unmaking of Israel, The Accidental Empire, and The End of Days, and coauthor of Shalom, Friend: The Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin, winner of the National Jewish Book Award. A columnist for the Washington Post, Gorenberg has also written for the New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, New York Review of Books, New Republic, and Foreign Policy, and in Hebrew for Haaretz. He has been a visiting professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where he led a workshop on writing history. He lives in Jerusalem.
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