The Secret Lives of Codebreakers

by Sinclair McKay

  The American contingent at Bletchley Park clearly found life in the Buckinghamshire countryside congenial and stimulating in a variety of ways. Consider this account from an American soldier, collected by Marion Hill. He spoke wistfully of the lively social life he and his compatriots enjoyed among the Wrens:

  “We were 100 American men, at least half of whom worked side by side with the natives, many of them female. In the community at large, there was a shortage of men, many of the local lads being away in the service. Consequently, Americans were always invited to dances. At least half of us were married, but there is little evidence we forgot it. A few of the single men did marry British girls.”8

  Similarly, some of the women who worked at the Park had starryeyed (and curiously innocent) recollections of these American dreamboats. One said: “We used to go to dances with the American airmen…because they had beautiful food and ice cream.” Another, equally artless, had this to say: “Bill, a captain in the American signals, drove a jeep. I was looking at it with great envy—I’d never ridden in a jeep.”

  Obviously, there was going to be the odd moment when the two cultures gazed upon one another with mutual incomprehension. There was the matter, for instance, of culinary tastes. One American serviceman at Bletchley noted that one could always do swaps in the canteen: “The Britons were always hungry for protein and it was a delight to see the English girls attack my kipper with vigor while I ate my toast.” Conversely, Lord (then plain Asa) Briggs found himself saucer-eyed at the prospect of American food—and indeed American further education. At Bletchley Park, he recalled, “I first heard of tomato juice, American bacon, American coffee, and, not least for me, American universities.”9

  And an American officer after the war summarized what he considered the great charms of Bletchley Park: “If you had to be in the army, it was nice to be in a place where you wouldn’t be shot at. If you had to have a desk job, it was satisfying to have one you believed was extremely important to the war effort as well as offering a heavy mental challenge. We could be smug in the knowledge that we had been in an important place at a crucial time.”

  In 1944, it was Gordon Welchman’s turn to travel to the States, and his account of the voyage illustrates the frustrations and satisfactions that this secret life at Bletchley brought to a proud man:

  I went to America on the Queen Mary in February 1944 and found myself sitting at the captain’s table with several well-known people, including a minister in the British cabinet, the head of the National Physical Laboratory, and film producer Alexander Korda.

  During the voyage it became apparent that the cabinet minister resented the presence at the captain’s table of this Gordon Welchman, who didn’t seem to be doing anything important. However, when we reached New York, and the passengers were awaiting instructions, we heard a broadcast announcement: “Will Mr. Alexander Korda and Mr. Gordon Welchman please disembark?” I happened to be standing near the cabinet minister and saw the look of amazement on his face!10

  Welchman does not record the pleasure that he doubtless felt upon seeing this expression.

  He was in the United States as an invitee of Sir William Stephenson, a senior Intelligence man who, at the behest of Churchill, had set up a shadow “British Secret Service” in the United States, in the event that the Germans invaded and overran Britain. But the focus of Welchman’s admiration was on America and its people. He so enjoyed all he saw and experienced there that in 1948, he emigrated for good. This was his account of his first encounter with his US counterparts:

  The Americans, I found, are particularly good at putting people at their ease by preliminary talk about this and that before serious matters come up for discussion. When I first arrived in Washington, before I was allowed to make contact with the cryptanalysts, I had to be introduced to some of the top brass, whose approval was needed.

  No doubt they would have made things easy for me by a period of general conversation, but in my case no such ice-breaking was necessary. I had only just arrived from England, where our wartime diet was simple, and was suffering from my first exposure to American food. As soon as we reached the building, I had to ask: “Where is it?”…when I finally arrived [to meet the dignitaries], everyone was grinning and there was no ice to be broken.

  In other words, even as the two countries’ senior military personnel found themselves in continual dispute, among the codebreakers there was an unusual camaraderie, warmth, and mutual respect. For America, the relationship was vital—Britain had made so many of the giant, and sometimes devious, intellectual leaps that made such an operation possible. Conversely, much in the way that America was helping Britain out with military resources, it was also proving invaluable in terms of supplying Bletchley.

  What then, from 1941 onward, of Britain’s other allies? When it came to the existence of Bletchley Park, the French turned out on many occasions to be the source of tremendous anxiety in Whitehall.

  It was of course alongside Gustave Bertrand, with his “Scarlet Pimpernel” pinches, that—before the start of the war—Alistair Denniston and Dilly Knox had been fed information by the Poles. After the Germans invaded France in the spring of 1940, the Polish mathematicians, having already left Poland, now had to be evacuated again. They pitched up in England, though they were felt to be too much of a security risk to allow near Bletchley Park. If this seems unjust, it has to be balanced against a thoroughly practical sense of paranoia. And as it happened, Marian Rejewski and his fellow mathematicians were allowed to set up a separate unit in Middlesex analyzing Russian intercepts. Meanwhile, the gallant General Bertrand remained in France, under the Vichy government.

  This in turn caused the administration at Bletchley Park great anxiety: for what if the Germans were to find Bertrand and his French cryptography experts and force them to reveal Enigma secrets? As it happened, by some extraordinary oversight, they never did. But there was an incident concerning General de Gaulle’s Free French forces. In 1943, General Henri Giraud announced to a crowd that he had seen an intercepted message from a senior ranking German. This in turn was reported in London in The Times. An incandescent Churchill demanded an immediate investigation at Bletchley Park. The administration could not find any message or decrypt that matched the one that General Giraud claimed to have seen. Once again, it was a claim that appeared to set off no alarm bells within German Intelligence; nevertheless, Bletchley Park ensured that the Free French were never passed any identifiable decrypts.

  *

  Another dramatic naval battle in 1943 was to hammer home both the Park’s tremendous power and its peculiar vulnerability. In September of that year, Ultra decrypts were revealing, in close detail, the movements of the powerful German battleship Scharnhorst. This vast vessel, responsible for the sinkings of many Allied merchant ships, had become a near obsessive target for the British navy. It was based in Altenfjord, Norway. And by Christmas 1943, thanks to Enigma decrypts, enough was known of the ship’s movements and intentions for the navy to strike.

  After an extraordinary chase through the black northern waters involving many warships—Sheffield, Norfolk, Belfast, Duke of York—while the Scharnhorst took repeated evasive action, changing course desperately, it was finally run down. Duke of York scored a palpable hit, and shortly, torpedoes from the other ships were searing through its hull. Thanks to the continuous stream of communications being decrypted at Bletchley—and instantly passed on to the Admiralty—the mighty Scharnhorst sank beneath the waves on December 26, 1943.

  In the spring of the following year came a renewed Allied attack on the last of the great German marauders, Tirpitz, after other attempts had ended in failure. The ship was harbored, once again, at Altenfjord. Guided by Enigma decrypts concerning the time it intended to set sail, an Allied bomber raid was unleashed one dawn in March. While extensive damage was done—and a great many sailors were killed—it wasn’t quite enough. And this, it seemed, was also a very near miss for Bletchley.

  “It w
as as well,” noted John Winton, “that the Germans remained absolutely confident that the Enigma was inviolate. Even the least suspicious…might just have wondered why, after Tirpitz had been so many months under repair, a powerful and clearly well-briefed and-trained force of enemy aircraft should just happen to arrive overhead, not only on the day but at the hour, even at the very minute, when Tirpitz was putting out to sea.”11

  Nevertheless, information from Enigma decrypts meant that Tirpitz was dogged as closely as if she had been bugged. Her final battle came a few months later, once more off the coast of Norway. This time she sank, taking over 1,000 of her sailors with her.

  But the secret of Bletchley could so easily have been deduced by the Germans. Indeed, it still remains a matter of some wonder that it was not; maneuvers and battles of this sort would always carry that inevitable risk. But the authorities at Bletchley—with thousands now working at the Park—faced an equally pressing and constant anxiety. Regardless of the Official Secrets Act, and the need for utter secrecy being impressed hard upon all those who came into contact with the place, what could the Park do in the event that the secret was accidentally blurted out? Or worse, deliberately revealed by means of espionage?

  21 1943: The Hazards of Careless Talk

  In Robert Harris’s best-selling 1995 novel Enigma, the core of the story concerns a spy at work at Bletchley. The tension mounts inexorably because the consequences are so utterly unimaginable. For if the Germans gain one whisper or one inkling that the British have cracked their encoding system, then they will make that system infinitely more complex—and with that, they will be almost impossible to defeat. It is one of those rare thrillers where the publisher might say with some justification that the fate of the world depends upon the novel’s heroes.

  Some Bletchley veterans are fans of the novel; they admire the way that Harris skillfully evoked life at the Park while adding a thriller element. But that very element, they say, while entertaining, is in fact extremely implausible. Secrecy and security, according to some, was woven into the texture of life at Bletchley to an extent that it became almost pathological. Some veterans were to recall that security at the Park was heavy and unremitting. There are stories of women who worked there who refused even to have medical operations carried out for fear of blurting indiscretions out under anaesthetic. There was a story concerning a lady academic at Cambridge attending parties in London, getting drunk and boasting about her work…and she was never heard of again. Intriguingly, there were other slips—accidental, unintentional—that were to demonstrate just how vulnerable the Park was to careless talk.

  When western Europe shockingly fell to the Germans with such speed in 1940, the popular belief in Britain that the country would suffer a similar fate had been extremely strong. As Mimi Gallilee recalls, everything possible was done to confuse potential invaders: “Everyone had to stay quiet about everything then—for instance, all railway station names were removed from platforms.

  “And all directions were deliberately muddled—so that if we were invaded, or if there were people who shouldn’t be in this country—they couldn’t find their way easily by signposts.”

  But this was not just a matter of marauding soldiers or cunning foreign spies, it was a matter of the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, any one of whom might be plotting away with secret wireless sets. It was around this point that the notion of the “fifth columnist”—the outwardly normal citizen secretly working with the enemy to undermine society—seized the national imagination. German propagandists played upon this anxiety in broadcasts to Britain, in which they would, for instance, announce that the church clock in Banstead, Surrey, was running five minutes slow. How, people wondered, could they acquire such information unless such places were crawling with fifth columnists? But the Germans might not have had to work all that hard to create conditions of paranoia. In every city and every town, any transgressive or unusual behavior was noted and reported.

  What Bletchley Park veterans tend not to refer to now are the episodes when the Park was itself caught up in espionage dramas—not merely the cunning British transmissions of false information and black propaganda from the riding stables of nearby Woburn Abbey (by means of a fake German radio station called Gustav Siegfried Eins, which specialized in smears about Nazi officials), but murkier episodes that across the years have provoked allegation and counter-allegation. As we shall see, there were instances where careless talk was talked—by Wrens, by lieutenants, by mechanically minded know-it-alls—and on these occasions, the Bletchley authorities were swiftly on the case. There was no shortage of voluntary surveillance in Britain at that time.

  But while the necessity of keeping the secret was obviously vital above all else, it seems that the Park hierarchy was largely remarkably trusting of its young recruits. For the ordinary young men and women, the very notion of espionage or indeed of spies moving among them rarely even occurred.

  Teenage runaround Mimi Gallilee—just fourteen when she was taken on as a messenger in this top secret establishment—recalls her induction very well. “There was the Official Secrets Act to sign. There wasn’t a lecture—I can’t even remember if they said ‘This is the Official Secrets Act.’ I didn’t know what kind of a place I was going to work in. I didn’t know what my mother did there. And there was no reason for me to have ever asked. I just know that I had signed the Act. And of course we were told that we mustn’t breathe a word to anybody of where we were working.”

  The nature of her job meant that she could at least attach names to certain huts, which is a good deal more than any of the cryptographers or linguists could do. But, she says, this was a period in which all natural curiosity was numbed. “You just accepted everything you saw and you didn’t ask. If there was a need to know, you were told. Because of the job, I used to walk around all day. The Park used to get deliveries of messages, communications—a minimum of four deliveries a day each, which I then had to make to the huts.

  “And that entailed knowing where everything and everybody was—including who was in charge of the huts—but you weren’t allowed to roam around the house.

  “And some huts you weren’t allowed to go into at all. For instance, there was Hut 11—where you had to ring the bell outside. Then one of the Wrens or someone—who were locked in—opened up and you just handed across the doorway what you were carrying.”

  The odd technological glitch could result in alarms being triggered. In May 1943, H. Fletcher of Hut 6 sent this warning memo to his superiors: “I think it should be seriously considered whether the fitting of scramblers is necessary. A Wren, using a public call box in Newport Pagnell, and conversing with her mother in a trunk call, was able to overhear a menu being telephoned to [the Bletchley Park outstation at] Gayhurst. Her mother also heard this conversation and remarked on its curious nature.”1

  What seems rather striking now to the Honorable Sarah Baring is the fact that she cannot remember what the penalty would have been for any slip of the tongue. “The people I worked with in Hut 4, we could talk between each other,” she says. “We were doing the same thing. I’d be translating, another friend would be doing something else. So we could talk. But only within your hut. You never talked outside your hut.

  “But the awful thing was they couldn’t give you the sack. Because you knew too much. So God knows what they would have done if anyone did talk. And nobody ever did.”

  Oliver Lawn recalls: “There was certainly absolute secrecy in that sense, that you didn’t talk about your work to anyone outside your section. Some people have criticized that, saying that it was unnecessarily blinkered. We should have been able to be a little freer in knowing what was going on. It would have helped our work.”

  Even though recruits might maintain secrecy within the establishment, however, the question arises: how could Bletchley Park security be expected to police those who were on leave? When these codebreakers and linguists and clerks went home for time off, what did they tell t
heir families, their friends, their neighbors, their local communities, about the nature of the work they were doing?

  This was a particularly germane issue for the young men, for it would be natural for many people to think of them: “Why is he not in uniform?” Gordon Welchman recalled in his memoir that the issue became a source of acute discomfort for some:

  Some of the young men who were sent to Hut 6 because of their brains found themselves trapped there by the demands of security. They longed for active service in the air force, the navy, or the army, but they knew too much about our success with the Enigma for their capture by the enemy to be risked.

  They were doing an exhausting job, and it was obviously helping the war effort, but many of them longed to play an active part in the fighting. There was, too, the inevitable feeling that not being at the front was somehow dishonorable; one young man received a scathing letter from his old headmaster accusing him of being a disgrace to his school.2

  Conversely, some of the codebreakers appeared to live in communities that either valued discretion, or had a sense of what it was that the homecoming lad was really doing. This seemed to be the case for Keith Batey whenever he got leave: “As to going home, and lack of uniform: no one found it odd. People knew that everything was pretty strict. This business about call-up, reserved occupations and what you were doing. Everyone was directed to what they were doing. No question about that. And no one asked me what I was doing.

  “Though there was my brother…he wasn’t in Bletchley,” Mr. Batey continues. “He was younger than I and was still at Oxford in the middle of the war. Then he went to the RAE, then after the war he became a parson. Many years later—quite recently in fact—he said to me: ‘It was pretty obvious what you were doing. There were you—a mathematician—and Mavis speaking German. There was never a doubt.’ So you can see that lots of people put two and two together and sometimes got the right answer.”