The Secret Listeners

by Sinclair McKay

  ‘He was a member of the Radio Society of Great Britain and as such he was extremely proficient at Morse code. He also spoke fluent French and a smattering of other languages. In 1938 the Air Ministry approached the Radio Society of Great Britain to help form a civilian wireless reserve. My father was sent to France in November 1939 and although his service record says that this was as part of the Advanced Air Striking Force I know that he was working in a listening station at this time.

  ‘He was at this time intercepting messages and trying to decrypt those which had been encoded. He served there until the fall of France in May 1940. He used to tell me that he escaped from France on the back of a motorbike, driven by a colleague from the listening station.

  ‘They drove to Dunkirk and were unable to escape so they managed to get to St Nazaire where they got on the last boat,’ adds Mrs Trelfa. ‘I don’t know what happened on the boat but apparently he was terrified. He asked my mother never to ask him about it so she never did. It wasn’t until after his death that she told me this part of the story, and how scared he had been.’ A few weeks afterwards, Maynard would be posted abroad again, this time to a more exotic, even luxurious environment.

  One region of the world about which the British seemed to have done a lot of forward thinking was the Far East. Even in the early months of 1939, the Far East Combined Bureau – which dealt with all cryptographic and wireless matters in the region – was preparing to move out of Hong Kong to the more strategically sensitive region of Singapore. Just a matter of days before the conflict began, the move was completed, although such an upheaval could not come without teething problems. The immediate difficulty was recruiting the extra personnel that would be needed on that side of the world.

  The Bureau’s Captain F. Wylie recalled that the difficulties involved ‘the effect of having to expand during a crisis, train staff and keep abreast of current work – all with a transplanted organisation’. On top of this, he added, there were unexpected physical side-effects suffered by some of the older officers who sailed there from more temperate climates. Mainly because of the ferocious and exhausting heat, ‘Retired naval officers so far sent out are not able to stand up to watch-keeping and energetic duties.’

  Nonetheless, the successfully transplanted Bureau was joined, in the early days of 1940, by a Special Liaison Unit (SLU) from Bletchley Park. The notion of these units sprang from the nimble brain of Captain Frederick Winterbotham, an MI6 man based at Bletchley who today is equally well known for the fact that he wrote the pioneering book on Ultra (as the top secret intelligence harvested from the Park’s codebreaking triumphs was designated). The idea was that Bletchley operatives – quite often officers and sergeants – were specially trained to deal with, and decrypt, much material generated by the Y Service.

  ‘The officers and men of the Special Liaison Units . . . had to learn to study a long silence,’ wrote Ronald Lewin. ‘In war, this was essential: they carried Ultra in their hands.’ He went on to observe how swiftly this branch of intelligence had been deployed. ‘In 1940 . . . SLUs were established at the headquarters of Gort’s British Expeditionary Force in France . . . to pass on such Ultra as might be available from Bletchley and Vignolles.’7

  Care was taken that officers were never too senior, for such figures would have attracted attention and speculation. The idea of SLUs was that no one should really know that they were there. As Captain Winterbotham wrote, the Special Liaison Units were to play a crucial role in the Bletchley intelligence operation:

  The SLU officer was responsible for personally delivering the Ultra message to the commander or to a member of his staff designated to receive it. All messages were to be recovered by the SLU officer as soon as they were read and understood. They were then destroyed. No Ultra recipient was allowed to transmit or repeat an Ultra signal. Any action taken by a commander on the information given by Ultra was to be by way of an operation order or command or instruction which in no way referred to the Ultra signal or could lead the enemy to believe that his signals were being read . . . No recipient of Ultra could voluntarily place himself in a position where he could be captured by the enemy.8

  The role of the Singapore Special Liaison Unit was to closely monitor the movements of the Japanese military. Again, showing some forethought, the Government Code and Cypher School had been working hard on the intricacies of Japanese cryptography; Colonel John Tiltman and senior codebreaker Hugh Foss had been swift to immerse themselves in the challenge, and to impart to others what they found. Of course, as the Singapore station was to find later in the war, forethought is not the same as a crystal ball; but despite subsequent shortcomings in intelligence, it was remarkable that such a bureau was operated so speedily and efficiently. According to historian Peter Elphick, Cable and Wireless was prevailed upon to helpfully tap cables; and very soon, there appeared a platoon of about thirty Wrens, specially trained in certain Japanese uses of Morse.

  They could also monitor significant German movements; such as when the pocket battleship Graf Spee sailed from the Atlantic into the area of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. The HF/DF (high-frequency direction finding) receivers – nicknamed Huff-Duff – were extremely powerful. But hearing the messages was one thing. Correctly interpreting them was quite another.

  In the Middle East, the secret listeners were equally swift off the mark. Early in 1940, it had been decided to broaden the listening operation in order to allow decrypts to be relayed directly to officers in the field; to this end, codebreaker Freddie Jacob had been sent to Cairo to open a station that became known as the Combined Bureau Middle East. Jacob helped to set up base in the pleasingly incongruous setting of what had been the Flora and Fauna Museum at Heliopolis, not far from Cairo. Second Lieutenant Donald Shirreff had the job of supervising the erection of the complicated masts nearby, which was carried out by roughly 100 Egyptian workmen.

  The mobile arm of the Y Service was soon picking up recruits from a variety of sources. One man selected to work out there was Alison Trelfa’s father Kenneth Maynard; after his adventures in France, he was called upon to widen his experience in Cairo.

  ‘By July 1940, Bletchley Park was making progress in reading the new high-grade Army and air-force cyphers and by August, a steady stream of decrypts was reaching Cairo,’ states the official Bletchley history. ‘BP increased the number of cryptanalysts in Cairo to ensure that as much of the traffic as possible would be read locally.’ There had been an encouraging start to the work there too. ‘The British had been expecting the Italian attack from Libya into Egypt on 13th September 1940, although the decrypts did not give the actual date. The arrival of Italian air reinforcements in Albania had been revealed by decrypts and so their attack on Greece on 28th October was no surprise.’

  The official history is if anything a shade too modest. In that September incursion, Italian troops occupied a strip of coastline, posing an immediate threat both to Alexandria and to the security of the Suez Canal. In the days and weeks following, the work of the codebreakers and the Y Services was an early triumph; they broke into almost all the ciphers used by Italian military formations. The British commanders on the ground were soon apprised of crucial strengths and weaknesses, and were able to exploit them.

  By December, the British counter-assault upon Italian forces was launched. In the midst of this, a British field army Y section continued to provide a torrent of successful decrypts from Italian codes, prompting a senior Bletchley Park figure, Nigel de Grey, to describe this as ‘a perfect, if rather miniature example of the cryptographer’s war’.

  It also happened to be a perfect, if rather miniature example of the tensions that existed between the various services and their cryptography operations. After these initial successes, a memo sent out from the Admiralty stated: ‘Major Jacob, who is head of Military cryptographers in Cairo and has had twenty years experience in Government Code and Cipher School, should be appointed as head of Bureau . . . he should be authorised to communicate dir
ect with head Government code and cipher school on technical matters connected with cryptography.’

  For reasons of security, there was a maze of bureaucracy around the work of Bletchley; if you did not absolutely have to know, then you wouldn’t. In this sense, Major Jacob (despite all his years of experience) was honoured. The historian and codebreaking veteran Ralph Bennett was witness to the delicate cat’s cradle of responsibility, and how Bletchley Park assumed its own role:

  Hut 3 [of Bletchley Park] was suddenly empowered to signal useful intelligence direct to Wavell in Cairo. This was an unprecedented step. Not foreseeing what they were letting escape from their control, it is to be presumed, the War Office and the Air Ministry allowed a Secret Service organisation, hitherto staffed mainly by civilians, to handle operational intelligence. Who was to judge what the Army and Air Force in Egypt might find useful, and who was to compose the signals? Small parties from the two services, closely linked to the War Office and the Air Ministry by telephone, were already attached to the translation watch and so the work naturally fell to them.

  Or, more precisely, to Bennett himself:

  A new member of the military section, a young Cambridge don with four months in an Officer Cadet Training Unit as my sole remotely military experience, my German acquired during a year’s study of medieval history at Munich University – I was ill-qualified for the task which thus unexpectedly came my way . . . we (and the other Air and Military Advisers) were now to be the channel along which passed the intelligence which was to transform the basis of all operational planning.9

  A little further down the line, however, and even in the midst of the desert war there would be a series of spats among those involved in the work of Heliopolis.

  Captain Hugh Skillen was among those who worked in the field – that is, among the soldiers in the desert – in specially dedicated units. ‘In the field with the “Y” sections . . . [it] was a male society of four or five score individuals, thrown together for long periods of two to three years,’ he wrote. Moreover, familiar comforts and diversions supplied to other troops were denied to these wireless men for much of the time. ‘There was no ENSA and no entertainment at all for them, for security reasons and because more often than not . . . they were isolated from other military formations on a high piece of ground in order to obtain good reception conditions.’

  Out in the field, their duties involved an odd mix of claustrophobia and agoraphobia: situated in an empty landscape, yet cooped up in the backs of specially adapted vehicles, mostly vans – close, cluttered spaces where two or three wireless operators would work at their HRO receivers, headphones clamped on, desks and chairs jammed next to one another. Accommodation for their off-duty hours was scarcely more comfortable: equally cluttered tents.

  These spartan souls, added Captain Skillen, had to be resourceful in keeping their morale up. ‘Without a book, newspaper or radio they made their own entertainment, finding kindred souls and minds . . . their society becoming an extension of the common room they had vacated . . . with long debates on philosophy and history, religion and art.’10 All this was in the face of the jeopardy that they had to face – from the ‘bomber and the minefield’ to ‘the scorpion in the tent’. No theatre of war is ever comfortable, but the more cerebral Y Service recruits, some drawn from the cool echoing cloisters of academe to the desert war, had to face an unusually alien and harsh environment.

  Back amid the noise and the bustle of the city alleys and marketplaces, though, the young people sent out to Egypt at the behest of Bletchley – ‘extra cryptographic staff will be made available and sent to Cairo as soon as possible’ stated a confidential Admiralty memo in 1940 – were also, without knowing it, witnessing the final days of a world that would never be seen again. For these overwhelmingly young recruits, some of whom had never left Britain before, this was the Middle East in all of its rich, dazzling wonder. From the glimpses of the Pyramids in the distance to the hiss of water spray on embassy lawns, from the lazy fat grey flies that had continually to be swatted to the pervasive smell of offal and urine, this in some ways was a meeting place for peoples of the world; and in others, a world of its own.

  The Cairo operation also demonstrated the skill and flexibility of Y Service operatives. ‘The lesson had been learned the hard way in Belgium and France . . .’ wrote Hugh Skillen, ‘to have efficient and speedy means of transmitting the intelligence to the military commanders and to send back enciphered Enigma to Bletchley Park by means of SLUs . . . using Type-X machines, similar to Enigma machines but more secure.’ Staff were also willing to swap roles between cipher operations when required. Indeed, the entire Heliopolis operation was planned, down to the ‘Natives’ who would be required to perform other tasks: as a memo from the time suggested, there would be a need for ‘2 cooks, 2 waiters, 1 labourer and 1 messenger’.11

  In Britain, meanwhile, the Army had established its chief listening base at Beaumanor Hall in Leicestershire, while the RAF set up its equivalent just a few miles away at Chicksands in Bedfordshire. The main Chicksands building was a handsome Gilbertine priory, founded in 1147 and rumoured to be haunted by countless nuns. It also boasted some fourteenth-century stained glass (which was removed in 1940, to be on the safe side). But the RAF establishment ran into difficulties almost from the start. ‘In July 1940,’ states a memo in the archives, ‘a detachment of about 30 airmen under a flight lieutenant was sent to Chicksands Priory to set up an intercept station . . . At that time, the building was occupied by the Navy under the command of Rear Admiral Millar, and a little later the Army were to send in a detachment and make it an all-services station.’

  The result of this, some time later, was apparently a great deal of tension and perhaps even hysteria, especially among the Wrens who were to be posted there. Before that, though, there were other causes of ill will, as another early memo stated:

  I have the honour to submit that the question of the organisation of Chicksands Priory should receive attention. At present, this station is shared by the three services. A Paymaster Captain is in command and the staff in the station consists of Naval ratings and Admiralty civilian personnel . . . members of the WRNS, the ATS and the WAAF . . . it is situated in a country district with only small villages in which it is difficult to find billets. At present the billets are extremely over-crowded and 12 of the RAF personnel are sleeping two in a bed, a state of affairs which cannot be continued.12

  Quite apart from the reluctant bedfellows, the building had to be customised in such a way as not to attract the attention of German bombers. Even so, the complexity of the equipment meant that the place could not help but look rather striking. ‘As all of the work had to be carried on in the upper rooms of the Priory,’ wrote the careful and anonymous historian, ‘masts were erected all round the building and from insulated triatic stays dozens of straight wire aerials of 70 to 100ft in length, conveyed to the upper windows, until the whole must have looked like a large spider web.’ Later, there was the addition of a vast – and in its way, aesthetically pleasing – arrangement of masts not far off in the shape of a vast circle.

  Elsewhere, on the Yorkshire coast at Scarborough, the naval listening station established long before the war was tuning into shipping signals in the North Sea and beyond. In the weeks after the war ended, its commander wrote for government record purposes a history of the work done there. ‘I think it safe to say that before histories were written, there were “Y” services in existence,’ he noted wrily. ‘I have mentioned the above mainly to indicate that . . . we did appreciate the value of “Y” at sea . . . Training of personnel for those duties was started and built up at Scarborough . . . where approximately 2,500 ratings were trained, including Canadian, American and Polish ratings.’

  In keeping with many other wartime establishments, Scarborough had got off to a rather shaky start: back in 1934, in terms of equipment and technology, it was all looking extremely shabby. ‘I found on arrival that “Y” was a “Cinderell
a”, the wireless transmission and electrical equipment could only be classed as “junk” and my operators were of the opinion that the material read was destined for the waste paper basket.’ His job was to persuade them that their role was absolutely key; as he added drily:

  Hitler’s accession to power in Germany at this time, [followed by] the Japanese seizure of Manchuria, Mussolini’s Abyssinian conquest and the Spanish Civil War indicated the ‘Y’ was of value.

  I doubt if I can find words to appreciate the work and zeal put into this job by the original crew of 25, who took my word that their time was not being wasted and upon their experience and knowledge, a ‘Y’ personnel ashore and afloat, whose number ran into thousands, was built.13

  But by the time the war was under way, Scarborough fast picked up a reputation, especially among Wrens, as an attractive posting. Y Service veteran Ray Pelan wrote of the establishment:

  A mixture of ratings, Wrens and ACSWs made up the watch – about 60 or 70 . . . The main receiving room . . . was virtually underground in that it was a large rectangular brick and concrete building with a secondary blast wall. The whole thing was sunk halfway below ground level and covered by a mound of grassed earth . . . Constantly ready in the watchroom were two ratings with small attache case-sized boxes, whose task was to seize any urgent (and presumably exploitable) signals and literally run with them . . . to the teleprinters building where Wrens were ready and waiting to signal them to various British and American authorities.14

  For the young women who found themselves posted here, there was at the very least the distraction of the beautiful coastline and countryside (to say nothing of an occasionally rumbustious nightlife – in a period in which young people seemed disproportionately keen on dancing, Scarborough offered a great many opportunities for lively hops). The work, though, could be appallingly tedious. WAAF Ursula Smith, a Y Service Special Operator, expressed her deep frustrations in wry verse: