The Secret Lives of Codebreakers

by Sinclair McKay

  From the moment one left the Park and embarked upon a train journey, one was under an infinitely intensified version of the phrase: “Careless talk costs lives.” But for some, there seemed to be little in the form of stern lectures or admonitions. Nor were there any restrictions on leave, or where that leave might be spent. It was understood from the start by the Park’s administrative authorities that after the exhausting focus of the work, after all the concentration and the unremitting shift system, these young people would need their breaks simply to maintain their sanity.

  But for the others, it was all a matter of self-discipline. A prevailing sense of anxiety that Germany might after all win the war helped enormously. One veteran recalls how she hated to drink even the smallest amount off duty, because she was terrified that if she got drunk, she would blurt out confidential information that could be overheard by anyone. Another veteran developed a fear that she might talk in her sleep.

  Sheila Lawn recalls her own regular journeys home to the far north of Scotland, and how, as soon as she walked through the gates of Bletchley Park to the railway station, she was under her own jurisdiction. She also recalls what for many of us would be a trying journey, even now.

  “Of course, the trains were more reliable then,” she says smiling. “We used to get a week’s holiday four times a year. They paid your fare, third class, which for me was a great matter because I went up to Inverness to see my parents to have a nice few days there. You’d go down to the station, you’d try to make it a suitable shift, you’d walk down with your case to the station, and usually the trains were absolutely crowded in that area, and so often I was shoveled in with a great lot of Forces chaps, and hopefully find a seat, though sometimes it was a case of sitting on your case in the corridor.

  “And then sometimes the trains would be rerouted. Whether it was because of difficulties on the line because of bombing, I do not know…so sometimes, you would be pretty late in getting up to Inverness. But they got there. In those days, once you got to the lowlands of Scotland, they changed the engines, they put a double engine on, to draw you up over the Highlands.

  “I always used to be a bit dirty with the flakes from the engine. They would fly into the carriage through the window. So first thing on getting home, I used to have a shower, or a bath, I can’t remember which, and mother would have a hot drink for me, and she always asked me what I wanted for lunch, so I’d tell her, and it would be all ready for me. This would be luxury.”

  And luxury, indeed, with no one asking her anything about the nature of the work that she was engaged upon down in Buckinghamshire.

  The Honorable Sarah Baring—that cheery habitué of Claridge’s and other smart London spots—remembers the strategies she would employ to bat off unwelcome queries about what she was doing so far outside the capital, and why she was spending so much time doing it: “When you were on leave, people would say to me: ‘What are you doing?’ It was difficult. I used to say: ‘Oh, nothing much, frightfully boring job.’ ‘Oh. Well, what is it?’ they’d say. And I’d say: ‘I’m a typist, would you believe it?’ I would then add: ‘I could tell you more if you want…’ Then they would back away and say: ‘Oh, no thank you, we don’t want to hear about typing.’

  “And that was it. Quite easy after that. You could see them thinking: ‘Don’t ask Sarah what she does, she’s so boring about it.’ If you’re boring enough, they stop asking you.”

  Even at home, in the bosom of one’s family, Sarah Baring says that somehow it became second nature not to pry: “My family didn’t ask me. My father just used to say—my mother had died, unfortunately: “You all right, darling?” And I would say: “Yes, Poppa, I’m fine, don’t worry.” My brother was fighting in Anzio at the time—he wouldn’t have talked either. The information somehow becomes so precious. It’s the lives of your comrades, isn’t it.”

  There were lapses of discretion, however. Some came about for the most touching and innocent and human of reasons. Take this incident, reported by a J. B. Perrott to Bletchley Park’s administrator, Nigel de Grey. Perrott, in Signals, had this formal complaint to make, still to be found in the archives today:

  On 18 Feb 1943, I met [Wren] Gwen Knight at a Harpenden Gramophone Society recital. Afterwards, on Harpenden station, she stated that she knew what work was being done by this unit, and mentioned types of discriminant, such as “shark,” “cockroach,” “chaffinch,” as well as the expression “BP”… I ascertained that she was in some way connected with deciphering…to the best of my knowledge, Wren Knight is satisfactory on security grounds—her parents would seem to have no knowledge of the nature of her work, she is ostensibly training as a “writer.” I consider that the unnecessary remarks made on February 18th were solely to impress me.3

  Wise Nigel de Grey was inclined to take this view of the matter too. He wrote back to a Colonel Wallace with these remarks:

  I have personally interviewed the Wren in question and I do not think she will transgress again. I gave her the name of the officer who reported her and I think that alone may cause the friendship to cool off a bit. She made the fatal mistake of thinking that anyone connected with our services was entitled to the same information as she has herself…

  It is always extremely useful to me to know where people have gone wrong.4

  Sometimes, worryingly, it seemed that word had seeped out even wider than Wrens and Signals men. There was this anxious report to de Grey from a Mr. Fletcher of Block D:

  Mr. Chicks, one of the British Tabulating Machine employees, engaged upon the final assembly of the bombes, was recently at home in Chelmsford where his father is a works manager. His father told him he’d met a man, an Air Ministry inspector, who, on hearing that his son worked at BTM Letchworth, said: “Oh, I know what they do there. They make decoding machines.” Chicks neither confirmed nor denied this to his father but told him it would be as well if he didn’t talk about it.

  This case presented de Grey with a little difficulty, as he revealed in his reply: “The matter is one which I think will have to be followed up, though Travis wishes me particularly to emphasize the delicacy of allowing even MI5 into the bombe secret.…”5

  A little later on, and a small number of American officers also apparently found it difficult not to hint at what they were doing. One Lieutenant Skalak seemed alarmingly garrulous when among British officers or at dances with Wrens. Indeed, such was the fright he caused that Bletchley Park prevailed upon the FBI to investigate his background thoroughly. Skalak’s loyalty was beyond doubt. He had simply been behaving rather overenthusiastically. This also seemed true of a young Letchworth machine operator who had been dropping hints in social situations about the importance of his work. “He seems a decent young fellow,” wrote one colonel after a full investigation. “All the same, a little salutary fear won’t do him any harm.”6

  One Park veteran recalled the day when one of the lower-scale administrative staff was apprehended: “I remember John Harrington, because he disappeared. When I went into the Accounts Office, I had the shock of my life. There were two burly MI5 men either side of him. He was such a clever man and I had asked Miss Molesworth why someone so clever was doing this sort of job. But he seemed to know a lot about everything, so I told Miss Molesworth and that’s how he was picked up—he was a spy.”

  But in general, it appears that if indiscretion was suspected, action was swift and low-key. One gets the sense that the Bletchley method of securing silence was mostly a visit from an Intelligence operative to put the frighteners on the offender. “The trouble about taking any drastic action,” wrote Colonel Vivian to Nigel de Grey, “is that it is often likely to draw attention rather than to conceal.”

  Despite the intense seriousness and constant tension surrounding all questions of security, isolated cases were in their own odd way slightly amusing. There were accidental indiscretions in the most startling places: in school and parish magazines. Occasionally, famous Old Boys or parish notables would be writt
en up, together with the news that they were working at Bletchley Park.

  And the case of one billetor near Bletchley, a Reverend Harry L. Clothier, was brought to the attention of Nigel de Grey. The reason? Unlike most other people in Bletchley, he was constantly trying to catch his younger billetees out for information about what they were up to. At first sight, this looked rather sinister, but it became clear that the reverend gentleman thought he was playing some sort of game. “As a host, Reverend Clothier is very kind,” wrote Colonel Vivian to de Grey. “I think the time has now come when he will have to be officially warned to keep his mouth shut. In fact I think he wants a thorough frightening…he is not a bad man, but a foolish one.”

  Intriguingly, MI5 became concerned about the possibility of hypnosis being used to extract information about Bletchley’s activities. This was specifically because of one officer who had suffered a nervous breakdown. The officer’s doctor, based on the Isle of Man, came under Intelligence scrutiny when it became apparent that he was using hypnotism as a means of helping the officer to recovery. There was no evidence of anything more sinister than that. But the very idea of this sort of treatment was regarded by some within MI5 as black magic, and the notion of its potential use in espionage undeniably grabs the imagination.

  In the directorate, there was a constant concern about the inherent danger of drunkenness. There were flurries of disquiet if, for instance, people were heard to be speaking too loudly at smart drinks parties about subjects which they should not know that much about. Another source of anxiety was what they termed “superior persons”—for example, senior university dons who felt that the stringent confidentiality “didn’t apply to them.” Added to this, personal letters were scrutinized and censored as a matter of course. Wrote one Intelligence officer: “I enclose six letters which I think require looking into.”

  There were also discussions about the potential trouble that could be caused by marriage. Nigel de Grey stated that the “best plan is to warn young women. Very specially against talking to her future husband on the subject of her work.”7 This precaution proved, across the decades, to be phenomenally successful. Wives said nothing to husbands, and it worked the other way around too. Meanwhile, vulnerable young Wrens were to be warned against “confidence tricksters”—plausible-seeming American soldiers, for instance—who would dupe them into talking with such lines as “I know all about your show.”

  In 1942, a striking communiqué was sent around to all GC&CS employees, appealing to their sense of personal, rather than institutional, responsibility. It read:

  Secrecy. This may seem a simple matter. It should be. But repeated experience has proved that it is not, even for the cleverest of us; even for the least important. Month after month instances have occurred where workers at BP have been heard casually saying things outside BP that are dangerous. It is not enough to know that you must not hint at these things outside. It must be uppermost in your mind every hour that you talk to outsiders.

  Even the most trivial-seeming things matter. The enemy does not get his intelligence by great scoops, but from a whisper here, a tiny detail there…

  It went on in a manner calculated to bring a blush to the cheeks:

  There is nothing to be gained by chatter but the satisfaction of idle vanity, or idle curiosity: there is everything to be lost—the very existence of our work here, the lives of others, even the War itself.

  Some of these breaches were rather sad. Particularly poignant was the incident in which a shopgirl in Knightsbridge sparked a security alert at Bletchley Park when a couple of Wrens went into the shop, bought some clothes, and gave the address for them to be sent on to. The shopgirl, seeing their address, immediately became very chatty about Bletchley and asked the Wrens if they were working on bombes.

  The reason the shopgirl knew so much about it was that she herself had worked at Bletchley, and in an extremely rare case had been discharged owing to “ill health and incompatibility.” After this incident, she was “duly cautioned” by MI5.8

  In his account, Peter Calvocoressi was fascinating on that crucial point of secrecy: that, in the vast majority of cases, once a recruit was in on the purpose of Bletchley Park, there would be no way for them to back out and go elsewhere.

  The Ultra community at BP saw itself as—perhaps was—an elite within an elite. Many of the things which made it successful made it also intense: the narrow catchment area, the smallness…of its cryptographic and intelligence sections, the edgy pressures of relentless work around the clock, the sense of responsibility and achievement, and the fact that there was no escape.

  The rule, dictated by security, was: once in, never out. And this rule was rarely broken. There was a board or committee to which an inmate of BP might address a plea for a posting elsewhere. An application to this board would be followed by an interview and, almost invariably, the rejection of the plea.

  A girl who had broken her heart and wanted to get away to give it a chance to mend might find sympathy, but she would not get release. The only transients on the Ultra side were officers who came to BP to be indoctrinated and trained before going to Intelligence staffs in the field where they would handle Ultra material.9

  Against this careful security, however, there were always fears among the administrative hierarchy. They were perfectly justified, it would seem. For instance, some now suggest that an unidentified spy, with the codename of “Baron,” operated within the Park in the early years of the war—a spy, crucially, feeding information not to the Germans but to Britain’s Russian allies. One name put forward is Leo Long, who worked in the War Office. In May 1941, he leaked a raw decrypt from Bletchley Park concerning the Germans’ forthcoming Barbarossa campaign against Russia.

  Conversely, those who chose to help Russia on their own account were more alarmingly slapdash about the methods that they employed.

  22 Bletchley and the Russians

  Accidental babbling and careless drunken boasts were one threat to security, but the Park was also vulnerable to more calculating figures. And a more full-time and notorious spy at Bletchley Park, it emerged in the late 1990s, was John Cairncross—known to some, in tabloid terms, as “the Fifth Man.”

  Bletchley had already experienced an extraordinary near miss. In 1940, a Times correspondent called Kim Philby—later to become notorious as “the Third Man”—was kicking his heels, looking for war work. In his 1968 memoir, My Silent War, written five years after his defection to the Soviet Union, Philby recalled:

  I had one promising interview, arranged by a mutual friend, with Frank Birch (before and after the war, a don at King’s College, Cambridge), a leading light in the Government Code and Cypher School, a cryptanalytical establishment which cracked enemy (and friendly) codes. He finally turned me down, on the infuriating ground that he could not offer me enough money to make it worth my while.1

  We now see how much credit Frank Birch deserves for this decision, regardless of the reasons for it. Philby, along with Guy Burgess, Donald MacLean, and Anthony Blunt, was of course one of the so-called “Cambridge Spies,” who had been engaged in passing information to the Russians since the 1930s. There is little question that, had he been hired, Philby would have tried to pass Bletchley decrypts to his Soviet controllers. As it happened, Philby was taken on by MI6. But the Bletchley authorities very wisely limited knowledge of its activities, to the extent that even a number of SIS operatives had no clear knowledge of what was being achieved there.

  John Cairncross, meanwhile, had been at Cambridge, studying Modern Languages at Trinity College having gained a scholarship after attending Glasgow University. An intelligent, spiky man, a bit of a loner, he came to know Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt. According to one account, he very much disliked them.

  Blunt was interested in sounding Cairncross out in terms of doing some work for the Russians, but the antipathy between Cairncross and Blunt was too strong. But then Cairncross met the Marxist James Klugman. It was Klugman who persuaded hi
m—by rather underhand means, according to Cairncross himself—to provide help for the Soviet cause.

  Cairncross joined the Foreign Office in 1936. Around that time, Klugman arranged to meet him in Regent’s Park in London, seemingly for purely social reasons. But as soon as Cairncross arrived at the rendezvous, he wrote in a memoir, a round, moon-faced man appeared from behind a tree and introduced himself as “Otto.” He was KGB. Klugman made his excuses and left “Otto” and Cairncross to it. “Otto” wanted Cairncross to work for the Russians.

  In his memoir, Cairncross professed to have been acting out of a burning zeal to see Nazism defeated; the best means for this to be achieved was by cooperation with Soviet Russia. But in this account, he also suggests extra motivations, including blackmail (fear of losing his Foreign Office position) and money (the need to live at a smarter address and not in a dowdy west London suburb). The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 made his life distinctly uncomfortable.

  During the war, Cairncross became private secretary to Lord Hankey, who had a general supervisory role over the intelligence services. In this capacity, between 1940 and 1942, Cairncross would have had direct access to the decrypts coming from Bletchley Park. After a brief spell of army training, Cairncross came to Bletchley itself in 1942, as a captain, and joined Hut 3. A Bletchley Park cryptographer called Henry Dryden recalled Cairncross in a postscript he wrote of an account of his own time at the Park:

  John Cairncross and I went up to Trinity College, Cambridge in October 1934, he as a Major Scholar and I as an Exhibitioner in Modern Languages. Whilst we were not close friends, I saw something of him at lectures and supervisions, and once at a cocktail party for the Trinity Cell of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which I had just joined.