The Secret Lives of Codebreakers

by Sinclair McKay

  Those men in civvies at Bletchley Park had their chance to fulfill a certain kind of service obligation, chiefly in the form of the Home Guard. For some, this proved to be an onerous distraction. Keith Batey recalls: “I’d be engaged on breaking a cipher or something, and then had to put it down and pretend to go and be a—It was bloody silly, especially in 1944 when there was no danger of invasion. It was organized, we all had to do it, and we all had these stupid uniforms too. It really was fatuous.”

  Conversely, Oliver Lawn found this dash of military experience provided some welcome light relief away from the serious business of cracking ciphers. “We all joined the Home Guard, where we had fun and games. And we went out on to the fields beyond Bletchley and watched to see if any German parachutes came in overnight.

  “Academics in the Home Guard were great fun,” he adds. “You can imagine, Dad’s Army, some of them, the most brilliant, were the most extreme…though one or two had army backgrounds. There was one chap called Michael Bannister, whose father was in the army. Bannister was very much the army type, and he tried to bring in all the army stuff, but without success. So he was the exception. We were very lame.”

  Alan Turing was initially rather taken with the idea of Home Guard duty, as it was an opportunity to learn how to shoot; and his shot, as it turned out, was much more accurate than a lot of people’s. However, Turing’s interest in this activity waned sharply once his shot had been perfected, and around 1942, when after several years of anxiety, the prospect of a Nazi invasion of Britain had receded, he began to absent himself from parades.

  The authorities were irritated by Turing’s apparently casual approach, insisting that since he had signed up for Home Guard duties, he was under military law. Turing calmly pointed out to the furious officers in question that he was no such thing, and that he had stated as much on the form that he had signed. One of the questions on the form was: “Do you understand that by enrolling in the Home Guard, you place yourself liable to military law?” Turing had written his answer: “No.” Naturally, no one had noticed.

  Despite the fact that the women, including the Wrens, at the Park greatly outnumbered the men, there was still the fact that the men were of course very firmly in charge. In the case of the Wrens, there would always be a male officer somewhere. For the civilian women, it was a matter of answering to the heads of huts, be they Gordon Welchman or blond, blue-eyed “knockout” Hugh Alexander.

  In matters of uniform too, there were the views of the ladies to consider. The Honorable Sarah Baring says that the presence of a military man always perked things up a little in the section in which she worked: “There were very few service people, mostly civilian. But there were a few uniforms, which we thought was terribly exciting. If you saw a naval uniform, or an air force uniform, it was lovely. For instance, word would get round that someone from the navy had dropped in. And that was very exciting because it was quite rare.”

  In terms of hierarchy, Sarah Baring gives a vivid account of that very lack of structure—a tale that contrives to combine military, civilian and class sensibilities into one imbroglio. “One morning, I was working as usual in the Index Room when I heard many footsteps outside. The door opened and in walked my godfather. At that time, he was Vice Admiral, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Chief of Combined Operations and naturally privy to Ultra. He was accompanied by a lot of top brass and harassed-looking Bletchley staff.

  “I managed to splutter in my astonishment: ‘Uncle Dickie, what are you doing here?’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I knew you were here and thought I would see how you’re getting on; show me the system of your cross-reference index.’ Pink with embarrassment, I showed him, conscious of the waves of anger behind from the learned codebreakers…

  “I was awfully pleased to see Uncle Dickie and, as the Index was considered fairly lowly work, all of us on watch were thrilled,” she adds. “Doom descended the next morning with a peremptory demand to see Commander Travis forthwith. He asked me how I had dared to ask the Chief of Combined Ops to visit the Index. I assured him, eyes full of tears, that I knew nothing about the visit and that he was my godfather. He believed that I spoke the truth and, bless him, lent me a hankie to blow my nose.”

  For Mimi Gallilee, promoted from messenger girl to clerical duties within the house itself, it was immediately clear that it was the figures in the house who held sway. Her sixteen-year-old self was a little in awe of these men, with their smart secretaries: “I went to work directly under Nigel de Grey’s secretary,” she says. “And she taught me all sorts of little things. Everything from that point of view was more interesting, because it was in codes, or about things that I didn’t understand.”

  Mrs. Gallilee also recalls that for all the apparent lack of military structure, this was still an age in which one did not speak out of turn. Especially not if one was very young: “Sometimes I used to do Mr. de Grey’s bits of typing, and anything that he wanted. Take tea and coffee into him. He was a very silent man. Grim. Forbidding. I was afraid of him. I wouldn’t have dared to put a foot wrong. One was terribly respectful of him.

  “Others, like Harry Hinsley—well, he was one of us. He was lovely and we called him Harry and I believe he was the only boss there that we called by his Christian name. Certainly not Commander Travis or Captain Hastings or the rest of them. Colonel Tiltman was always Colonel Tiltman. We would never have thought to call them by their first names.”

  Mimi Gallilee had authority issues of her own, and they concerned her own immediate boss, Miss Reed. For the senior women in administration had a reputation for ferocity very much more intimidating than the men. Mimi recalls: “Miss Reed used to train me and coach me in the right way to present myself to the world. She said to me once: ‘I must have a talk with your mother some day, she really ought to know about some of these things that you’ve been doing.’ What she meant was the way that I was behaving in the office.

  “And at the end of the day, I’d get home and I’d say to my mother: ‘Please let me leave. I hate her, I hate her!’ Poor Miss Reed. It was only after the war that I realized what a gem she was.”

  18 1942: Grave Setbacks and Internal Strife

  “You mustn’t think that it was all harmony at BP,” says one veteran. “There were some pretty ferocious internal squabbles too.” As 1942 dawned, some of these internal pressures were finally to erupt.

  While it enjoyed the untrammeled and deep admiration of Churchill, the quasi-academic atmosphere of Bletchley Park was not otherwise viewed outside with universal approbation. Particularly, it appears, within certain corners of Whitehall, there was disquiet concerning the way that information was parceled out. And after the difficulties and frustrations of the previous year, with the immensely long struggle to finally break the naval Enigma, the Park was coming under fresh pressure from various directions.

  Thanks to Dilly Knox, Bletchley Park had at the end of 1941 scored another tremendous, almost priceless success in the cracking of the Abwehr code—that is, the codes used by the German military intelligence service. The Abwehr used a subtly different Enigma machine, and the breaking of the Abwehr code was something of a personal triumph for Knox—now so ill with cancer that he was working from home.

  Back at Bletchley, Oliver Strachey was specifically assigned to monitor messages between Abwehr HQ and its agents. And the decrypted messages were to prove to the security services the success of an audacious operation known as the “Double-Cross” system.

  The idea was that captured Abwehr agents should be left in their positions and simply turned by the British—in other words, made to work as “double agents.” That way, not only could all German espionage within Britain be monitored but also the information that these agents sought from the British for their German paymasters would tell MI5 exactly what German Intelligence did and did not know about such things as defences and planned maneuvers.

  There was another terrific advantage: the reports that the German agents made, in code, would be followed
through the Abwehr networks, helping to break the keys for their particular Enigma cipher.

  Such a plan now sounds almost too preposterous to work, and yet it did, handsomely. Captured German agents were given a stark choice: either face a firing squad or obey the orders of an MI5 officer. Once turned, the agents were given information to feed back to their German masters. Most of this was accurate, though inconsequential; some, crucially, was completely false. In other words, these agents were used for strategic deception. As the war went on, one such agent, Wulf Schmidt, known as “Harry Tate,” was so spectacularly successful that not only did the British secret service consider him “a pearl,” the Germans were even more pleased with him and awarded him the Iron Cross.

  As Kim Philby (himself turned down for a job at the Park, as we shall find later) noted in his otherwise not wholly reliable memoirs, the breaking of the Abwehr code also gave Bletchley Park a weird glimpse of “the intimate life of German Intelligence officers”:

  There was the case…of Axel the police dog. He had been posted from Berlin to Algeciras, presumably to guard the Abwehr out-station there from British agents sneaking across the bay from Gibraltar. On the last stage of [the dog’s] journey, Madrid sent a warning telegram to Albert Carbe, alias Cesar, the head of the Abwehr post at Algeciras: “Be careful of Axel. He bites.” Sure enough, a few days later, Algeciras came up with the laconic report: “Cesar is in hospital. Axel bit him.”1

  But the beginning of 1942 was a time of crisis for the British forces. Although it seemed that the campaign to eject the Germans and Italians from North Africa had been going well in the Western Desert—the capture of Benghazi on Christmas Day had proved a national tonic—General Rommel suddenly turned and struck back with force. The British were back almost where they had begun.

  February 1942 brought disaster on another front: the fall of Singapore. General Percival was forced to surrender to the Japanese on February 15, and to lead a staggering 62,000 men into captivity as prisoners of war. Many of these soldiers were subsequently pushed into slave labor in conditions of horrific brutality, facing systematic beatings and beheadings as well as malnutrition, dehydration, and diseases such as beriberi.

  There had been a clutch of cryptographers based in Singapore in the weeks before the surrender, intercepting and decoding messages; among them was Arthur Cooper, brother of Josh. The decoders and Y Service operatives escaped and were evacuated to Colombo in the nick of time. Once again, we see how fragile the Bletchley secret was; if these men had instead been captured and tortured, could they have withstood and refused to say a word?

  In addition to the military setbacks, there was, for Bletchley Park, a disaster that the general public knew nothing of at that time—one that threatened to wipe out a large swathe of the codebreaking operation. For a suspicious Admiral Dönitz, concerned that somehow his codes were being read, decreed that from February 1, 1942, the German U-boat command should bring in an updated version of the naval Enigma machine.

  From that point on, an extra, fourth rotor was fitted to U-boat Enigma machines. The immediate result was a total U-boat code blackout at Bletchley. Suddenly, without warning, the messages the cryptographers received could no longer be decrypted. In turn the Atlantic convoys were rendered horribly vulnerable once more.

  After the great satisfaction of Hut 8’s earlier successes, this was a stomach-punch of disappointment. It also caused a great deal of unrest and unease in Whitehall. One historian has noted that the only thing that ever truly frightened Churchill throughout the course of the war was the prospect of the U-boats gaining the advantage and wiping out the best part of the convoys.

  There was a further complicating factor. After an accident in September 1941, when HMS Clyde was damaged in a collision with U-67, Admiral Dönitz had decided that the submarine codes should be set to a different key from that of the surface naval vessels. As well as decoding “Dolphin,” as the naval Enigma key was known, everyone in Hut 8 now had to turn their attentions to what they termed “Shark,” the submarine key. With the upgraded Enigma machines, “Shark” now had sharper teeth. Once more, Admiralty was faced with the nightmare prospect of all those vital supply ships and their crews effectively sailing without protection.

  It could not have come at a worse possible time: the U-boats were cruising up and down the Atlantic coast of the United States, lying in wait to encircle, or even sail among the convoys; to wait, generally, until night—and then to start firing their torpedoes, so that when one ship went up in bright flame, the others would have to watch. Crews would perish in the stormy waters; vital supplies would be sent to the ocean bed.

  All this coincided almost exactly with the climax of a prolonged power struggle within Bletchley Park itself. For some months, there were voices within the Park, throughout Whitehall, and in other corners of the Intelligence community that the Park needed a new directorate; that it was inefficient, not doing its job properly. The Intelligence branches of the Services were becoming increasingly uneasy about the fact that Bletchley Park was producing so much intelligence autonomously (and possibly doubly uneasy about the fact that Bletchley appeared to have the wholehearted support of Churchill). In other words, it was not only decrypting, but also analyzing the information.

  According to Harry Hinsley’s account, Whitehall was growing restive about what was perceived as the poor organization of the institution: “GC and CS had increased in size fourfold in the first sixteen months of the war. At the beginning of 1941 it was, by Whitehall’s standards, poorly organized. This was partly because the growth in its size and in the complexity of its activities had outstripped the experience of those who administered it.…” Military chiefs also had very little taste for what they saw as “the condition of creative anarchy, within and between the sections, that distinguished GC and CS’s everyday work and brought to the front the best among its unorthodox and “undisciplined” war-time staff…”2

  Churchill himself was made aware of these furious wranglings, which included a suggestion that the director Alistair Denniston got on very badly with the head of MI6, Sir Stewart Menzies. The atmosphere grew fervid. As P. W. Filby recalled it:

  Edward Travis was deputy to Denniston and a crony of [Nigel] de Grey. They had endless talks in the crucial days and although they were held next door, the walls were wooden and since we were almost always working in complete silence, I couldn’t help hearing the conversation sometimes. De Grey’s voice was that of an actor and I knew ages before it happened that they didn’t feel Denniston could cope with the enormous increase demanded of Ultra.…3

  It was true that from the beginning of the war, Denniston had found himself swamped in administrative quicksand. The running of the Park, the efforts to ensure that there were enough personnel when demand from other departments and services was so strong, the constant battle for more machines, even enough building contractors to work on the huts… As Bletchley expanded, its practical needs were growing exponentially. All this quashed any hopes that Denniston once had of contributing further to the Enigma codebreaking himself.

  On February 1, 1942, Denniston was removed as Director of Bletchley Park. He was instead bumped sideways to oversee the Diplomatic and Commercial side of the codebreaking operation, at Berkeley Street, back in London. He never received the knighthood that might otherwise have been automatically his due. But this was not a time in which anyone could afford to be remotely sentimental.

  In his place came deputy Travis—although according to Mimi Gallilee, who was working in the house at the time, Travis maintained the title “Deputy” for a while after these events. Perhaps out of a residual sense of loyalty and propriety?

  A fascinating gloss on this ugly struggle was later offered by one Robert Cecil, who subsequently worked with Denniston in Intelligence at, Berkeley Street. Cecil told Denniston’s son, Robin, that “the huts rose up rapidly at Bletchley; but there were less scrupulous and more ambitious men on hand to skim off much of the credit. Dennist
on left Bletchley and came back to London to escape the backbiting and get on with the job; he disliked the infighting more than he feared the Luftwaffe.”

  Cecil added of Denniston and his time at Berkeley Street: “He always kept his ship on an even keel and his staff, who included a number of brilliant eccentrics, liked and respected him. One of them, whom I remember, had come down from Oxford with a First in Egyptology and had then become an astrologer; when his eccentricities began to affect his colleagues, Denniston just sent him on sick leave and welcomed him back when he was restored.”4

  We are invited to infer from this that Denniston’s reign at Bletchley Park was composed of similarly enlightened touches. And Robin Denniston adds a salty personal view—which must have been shared by his father—of Sir Stewart Menzies: “Menzies was a WWI hero and conducted most of his secret MI6 business at White’s Club in St. James’s and BP’s intellectual feats were simply beyond him. Also, as a manager of difficult and clever men, he [Menzies] was almost useless.”5

  This image of the Intelligence man as club-haunting dilettante was very much part of a generalized impression of the secret services, certainly in the years following the First World War. But in the case of Stewart Menzies, the idea of a cocktail-glugging club dweller was an unfair slur. It seems that he was initially distrusted at Bletchley on being appointed head of MI6 in November 1939; his predecessor, Admiral Sinclair, who had of course bought the house, was much liked. Not least because he was a naval man—the background of Bletchley’s senior personnel echoed back to Room 40, which was a naval concern. Menzies by contrast was an army man. The old service rivalries died hard.