The Secret Listeners

by Sinclair McKay

  That was about the extent of union success, though, as Mr Barnes recalls, ‘I don’t think the union cut much ice there. I don’t think [the base’s officer in charge] Commander Ellingworth had any regard for unions. It was the Civil Service Radio Operators Association we belonged to. I think on the whole we must have been rather wasting our money.’

  The very idea that unions would have been allowed to operate within such a vital establishment at a time of war now seems extraordinary, regardless of how much or how little they achieved. But such safety valves were necessary, for the pressure of the work was liable to produce outbreaks of tension, here as at Chicksands. According to Chris Barnes, though, Commander Ellingworth, was a unifying figure in the old-fashioned way. ‘He was very autocratic. People were a bit scared of him. And it didn’t do to argue with him. Whether you were civilian or in the services, it didn’t make much difference. But I don’t remember myself being involved in rows or tensions. I think people got edgy at night. At three in the morning, you can have a row with anyone, can’t you?’

  In the coastal listening stations, the coyly styled ‘Home Defence Units’, the operators – once they had gained the experience – were becoming adept at recognising and understanding the jargon used by German pilots. The knowledge was crucial because certain pilots were quite loose-tongued and conversational, and were thus apt to give away details of forthcoming raids. In this way, the RAF could anticipate some of the Luftwaffe’s moves.

  The men and women operating from RAF Kingsdown, meanwhile, were perfecting a novel type of dirty trick that not only demonstrated mastery over German signals, but also threw that knowledge right back at the Luftwaffe. It was a tactic known poetically as ‘Ghost Voices’. The idea was that expert linguists could tune into pilots’ frequencies and pass themselves off as German Flight Command, as Wrens and WAAFs stood by making notes of the pilots’ responses. By doing so, the linguists could give the pilots fake co-ordinates, false targets, send them on fuel-sapping wild goose chases, lose them over the Channel, fool them into believing that the land beneath them was Belgium and not Sussex . . .

  ‘Specially selected men and women began annoying voice interference on the 3–6 [Luftwaffe] megacycle range,’ recalled Kingsdown operative Peggy West. ‘Pseudo controllers . . . gave false fog warnings to get aircraft to land, read poetry, or relayed Hitler’s speeches to disrupt and frustrate, and gave direct, contrary orders to cause confusion.’

  The tricks sometimes led to moments of hilarity. ‘A German controller was trying to direct his aircraft to Kassel,’ remembered Peggy West. ‘Kingsdown’s “ghost” was trying to stop them and told them not to take any notice of the Englander who was trying to confuse them. After an exchange or two, the German became pretty agitated, lost his temper, and swore. Our “ghost” replied, “The Englander is now swearing” and was met by an infuriated shriek from Germany: “It’s not the blank Englander who is swearing, it’s blankety-blank me”!’

  And the presence of women on the airwaves also led both to some ingenious double bluffing, and also – even in situations of high tension – to even greater heights of amusement. ‘When a 101 Squadron Lancaster with an ABC Special [a jamming transmitter] was shot down over Berlin, the Luftwaffe assumed Kingsdown’s “Corona” voice interference came from that ABC equipment,’ said Peggy West. ‘They reasoned, correctly, that the RAF would not allow women to fly operationally over Germany and switched to women ground controllers. Since we had anticipated that, we did the same. One of our girls got into a similar battle of wills, the only difference being that both women ended up laughing with each other and had to shut down. We all enjoyed the incident very much – but did wonder what happened to the lass over there!’

  In broader terms, the trick’s effectiveness could not last for ever. Having become wise to it, Luftwaffe flight command issued new ‘friend or foe’ codes that the pilots would employ before receiving further instructions. It is a terrific example, though, of just how proactive and game a number of the Y Service operatives were, and how skilled with language. As the conflict progressed, their skills and their tricks – for a few personnel, extending deep into the realm of espionage – were to develop dramatically.

  6 Heat, Sand and Ashes

  According to society figure Robin Stuart French, Cairo in 1940 was ‘A filthy, Frenchy, modern town – an ancient, elegant, primitive city.’ For British newcomers, it could be disorientating. Quite apart from the obvious sights, it was a clamouring cacophony of ‘horse-drawn vehicles, trams hung about with people, army trucks’, where an attempt to get anywhere was a struggle. The Musqi was a maze of poverty-riddled streets in which upper-class women came to browse and buy among innumerable shops, piled high with silks and rugs and perfumes, while metal-workers hammered out jewellery. It is difficult to imagine a sharper contrast between this intensity and colour and noise and the muted provincial greyness of Bletchley in Buckinghamshire.

  For Bletchley codebreaker Henry Dryden, dispatched to help with the successful new interception service in Egypt, the journey itself was something of an induction into this extraordinary new life. His first voyage, sailing out from Glasgow, met with disaster: ‘The fire alarm sounded, followed a quarter later by “abandon ship stations”,’ he wrote. ‘The fire, caused by the bursting of an oil-pipe under the boilers, got out of control . . . The following Sunday, I got back to [Bletchley Park], soaked in sea-water and oil, to be greeted by John Tiltman with: “Hullo old boy, haven’t you gone yet?”’1 The lightness of Mr Dryden’s tone distracts the attention from the fact that any voyage during this period – when the waters of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean were being ruthlessly patrolled by the U-boat wolf packs – was a profoundly unsettling business.

  One rather disquieting aspect of life in Cairo was the seemingly porous nature of secrecy. ‘Security is almost non-existent,’ wrote Hermione, Countess of Ranfurly, herself working in the office of the Special Operations Executive there and later branching into what she vaguely described as ‘cipher work’ in Jerusalem. ‘If you give our address to a Cairo taxi driver, more often than not he’ll say “oh, you want to go to secret office”.’

  The Countess was there under extremely unusual circumstances; after her husband was posted to the Middle East, she set off in pursuit of him, defying every rule and regulation in the way that only the smarter, better-connected, wealthier women could. Her extraordinary adventures took her all over the continent of Africa. Seeing her chance to come to Egypt, she somehow, against all the odds, secured herself a position in order to replenish her fast-diminishing funds.

  ‘It was exciting flying in over the pyramids,’ she wrote of her arrival by flying boat. ‘We landed elegantly on the Nile and little boats came out to meet us. Captain Mountain came ashore with us and told Customs and Immigration officials that I was a special passenger and must be helped in every way possible . . .’2 From here, on the last of her money, she managed to find the address of some friends of her husband living outside the city. In terror that she would be arrested and turned back, she presented herself at the door of distinguished expat Pat Hore-Ruthven; he and his wife, and their guests, were extremely amused.

  In the years to follow, the indefatigable Countess’s duties were punctuated by some extremely colourful adventures; for it hardly needs to be added that she was socially connected with all of the leading players in the region at that time, from General Wavell – the man in charge of Middle East command – downwards. She also stands now as an emblem of the determination of women to get involved in the war effort; the experiences that she and WAAF Aileen Clayton had are sometimes startling, in the sense that our distant view of women’s role in the war is that they were kept very firmly away from jeopardy. Clayton’s introduction to Egypt seemed similarly exciting:

  We flew south to Lagos, where those of us who were urgently needed in the Middle East were told we would be flying overland via Kano, Maiduguri, Fort Lamy, El Geneina and El Fasher to Khartoum, while th
e others went on by flying boat via the longer Congo route. Half an hour out from Lagos our Lockheed Lodestar developed engine trouble and our pilot, Captain Bowes-Lyon, a cousin of the Queen, had to return to make an undignified landing in a mangrove swamp on the edge of the airfield. We finally reached Khartoum a few days later, where I had the awe-inspiring honour of being asked to dine with the Governor at the splendid Government House.

  The following day, we joined a flying boat coming up from South Africa, and after a brief stop for lunch at Wadi Halfa, few on to Egypt, skimming down just as dusk was falling on the Nile at Rod-el-Farag, where I was met by Rowley Scott-Farnie and Kenneth Jowers, the Commanding Officer of the Y set-up at Suez Road, Heliopolis. It had been a fascinating ten days’ journey.3

  One slightly reluctant Cairo ‘cipherine’, to use her deliberately vague term, was Barbara Skelton, later to marry writer Cyril Connolly. In London, she had been keen to avoid being propelled into the Wrens, hoping instead for what she grandly termed ‘a proper job’. But a continual inability to be punctual led to those ‘proper jobs’ – secretarial positions – disappearing from beneath her. As very few other girls did at that time, however, she found herself in the Café Royal in Piccadilly one evening, and bumped into an old acquaintance of hers – Donald Maclean, at that time a young diplomat, whose name would become rather better known in the 1950s as one of the Cambridge spies. ‘He suggested I offer my services as a cipher clerk to the Foreign Office and said he would be my sponsor,’ she wrote drily.

  The result was an intensive three-month training course deep in Whitehall. Then, she recalled, she was offered a choice about her destination: Guatemala, Sweden or Egypt. So Egypt it was.

  As well as the usual hazards of travelling in convoy – all such journeys across the oceans had been made in convoy since the start of the conflict – she found that the voyage presented other unexpected complications, such as the sexual jealousy of the purser who, vying for her favours with a young Frenchman, wooed her with ‘French tart scent’ and ‘vanishing cream’. The conflict between the two men grew so intense that, one night, they both came to blows, the Frenchman fell overboard, and Skelton had to raise the alarm to have the man rescued. Later, the same Frenchman was himself driven into a passion of sexual jealousy, and he banged Skelton’s head against an engine and threw two of her combs into the sea.

  Initial impressions of Cairo were not appealing. It was, she wrote, ‘oppressive, dusty and colourless’. Her arrival at the Embassy was no more cheering:

  The embassy was grey and deserted. The cipher room was on the ground floor with steel bars across the windows . . . Lipsticky cups of half-drunk tea were scattered about among used carbons, despatch books, partly chewed slabs of chocolate and countless cigarette ends. Then I was put into another taxi and driven to the Continental Hotel where another cipherine showed me to my room.4

  It was clear that whatever magic the city was to hold for Skelton, it would not be found anywhere near her work. She was greeted at the office by a wispy red-haired youth in an Eton tie, and entered the office to find herself posted with a ‘phenomenally fat ex-naval commander who sat surrounded by tiny dish-cloths used to mop the sweat from his eyes. Each day, fresh mops were brought to work in a satchel containing pencils, pens, and an India rubber attached to a string. We worked on shifts and got picked up and taken to work in a kind of cattle truck.’

  At the Heliopolis station, to which Skelton had been posted, it was also clear that the conditions would be trying, for the volume of work was growing ever greater. ‘The intercept station . . . was largely engaged in covering high-grade networks,’ wrote Henry Dryden, ‘the Enigma messages carried on them being relayed by radio or cable to Bletchley Park for processing.’ Equally, messages were relayed to Services Headquarters in Cairo. ‘Because of their sensitivity, the messages were shielded from the eyes of the cipher officers by being encoded in a simple substitution before encipherment and dispatch from the United Kingdom.’

  Heliopolis, after its early successes of 1940, was to come further into its own in 1941. In January, the British mounted an attack against the Italian forces occupying Eritrea, Somaliland and Ethiopia. The precise date for the British assault had been selected because the Heliopolis interceptors had been listening to Italian plans for movement back from Sudan. And as the British forces closed inexorably on the Italian army in Ethiopia, the Italians were virtually helpless: the Cairo listeners and cryptographers picked up every single order, plan and communication between the Italian military leaders. Just a few days later, the British and Australians entered Tobruk and 25,000 Italian troops were taken prisoner.

  Then there was the triumph of General O’Connor, commander of the Western Desert Force; his attack not merely drove the Italian army back but also crippled a good part of it. The figures were stark: some 20,000 Italians were killed or wounded in the pincer movement, and about 130,000 were taken prisoner. But this victory ‘could hardly have been achieved without the excellent and copious intelligence information that was available to General Wavell’, states the official Bletchley Park history. ‘This came primarily from decrypts of . . . Italian cyphers at BP and at the Central Bureau Middle East in Cairo. The brave dash across the desert would have been foolhardy in the extreme had it not been known from the many intercepts that no significant enemy forces stood in its way.’

  But the war in the desert had only just begun. In the early months of 1941, Britain was receiving stark intelligence that the Germans were massing military forces in Romania. Since the immediate strategic threat these forces posed was to Greece, in one sense the British were now concerned with coming to the aid of an ally. But there was another consideration too; that any German conquest of Greece would bring Hitler’s armies uncomfortably close to the British strongholds of Palestine and Egypt, as well as to the strategically vital Suez Canal.

  So, in March, around 60,000 British troops were ferried from Egypt to Greece in preparation for such an assault. The consequence of this, however, was that when Rommel and his Afrika Korps – who had arrived in Tripoli in February – started to push east, there were fewer British forces available to mount an effective defence. By April, the British were forced to withdraw from Benghazi; Rommel and his troops marched into the vacated city. Nor was the British withdrawal especially dignified, as mobile Y Service veteran G.A. Harries, who was in the thick of the scramble, later recalled: ‘Things got pretty desperate as we were chased out of Libya . . . We made a night-time stop . . . just over the border with Egypt. We were well south in the desert all this time.’

  And indeed, Harries and his comrades were having to maintain the highest levels of concentration to home in on the enemy’s signals; from their range and frequency, the Y section was able to tell just how close the Germans were getting. ‘We moved again, finally leaguering at about midnight,’ he continued. ‘We went to sleep with our boots on that night. We had only been asleep a short time when we were awakened by engines being started up and found ourselves brightly illuminated by flares. There was only one word for what happened and that was panic.’

  According to Harries, everyone took off at great speed, including his wireless intercept car (such specially modified cars, crammed with equipment, were widely deployed). He and his comrades made it back behind the Alamein line, but in the general confusion, Harries was then informed that he was to be posted back into the desert with another operator. Orders were orders. They drove off, with a mass of interception equipment, in a ‘battered 3-ton truck with badly broken springs’, their instructions to link up with another wireless unit that was still operational in the desert.

  Harries recalled the extraordinary sight that confronted him and his comrades; as they drove westwards along the coastal road, theirs was the only vehicle headed in that direction. Passing them eastwards in an endless convoy was, as Harries put it, the Eighth Army in full retreat and ‘heading towards Alexandria’. He recalled that there were occasional isolated groups standing by the
side of the road, without any form of transport and desperately thumbing lifts. Harries and his comrades presumably did not drive very far west.

  The German army’s push towards Egypt continued, its pursuit of the British seemingly ineluctable. Alison Trelfa recalls from reading his accounts that her father, Kenneth Maynard, was sent out to Cairo at around this time. Called upon to widen his experience after his adventures – and Steve McQueen-style escape from Nazi forces – in France in 1940, he was sent to Heliopolis in May 1941. His daughter now says: ‘In a magazine printed for the old boys of his school during the war, my grandfather wrote about my father: “In May, 1941 he was specially selected to go out to Cairo to help to organise a unit there, and he has been there ever since.” Whether he was specially selected and whether he was helping to organise anything, or whether it was just a proud father speaking I don’t know.

  ‘Where my father stayed whilst in Cairo I am not sure, but I do know that the officers were allowed to use the swimming pool at the Mena House Hotel. This is a lovely looking hotel which is still existence today. I know that he disliked Cairo as a place and always said that after spending time there in the war he didn’t ever want to go abroad again. I do remember clearly what he used to say about it, but it’s probably not for sharing!

  ‘I got the impression that he was quite bored for a lot of the time that he was in Egypt and there was a lot of sitting around – presumably when not on duty. He was very modest though and not the sort of person who would glorify or exaggerate things. I have a huge number of his books, mainly history books which he read when he was out there. He was certainly never allowed anywhere near the front line. He used to carry a piece of paper stating “This officer is not allowed within x miles of the front line (on land) and considerably further than this when in the air.”