The Secret Listeners

by Sinclair McKay

  Although in a wider sense, events in Greece and on Crete were unlikely to boost British morale, they did at least pleasingly demonstrate that the Y Service was effective and accurate. Edgar Harrison was not quite alone in providing signals intelligence; there was another small mobile unit as well. Meanwhile, at the highest level, information from decrypts in April concerning the forthcoming German invasion of Greece had been passed to General Freyburg, commander of the Allied forces on Crete, but – as was common in that relatively early stage of the conflict – Freyburg was not told the true provenance of this miraculous stream of intelligence. The secret of Ultra was hidden even from the generals. Instead, Freyburg was informed that this information was coming from a brilliantly well-placed spy in Athens. And so, as the Axis powers advanced through the country, the small Y unit and Bletchley Park were able to keep in contact, and thus to pass back and forth decrypted messages of great value concerning the enemy’s latest positions. Were it not for this stream of information, the retreat from Greece and Crete could have been dramatically more disastrous.

  As it was, the Crete operation led to terrible losses, particularly of naval defences – to say nothing of the horrors perpetrated upon the civilian population by the invading Nazis. The atrocities committed in Crete are the source of continuing echoes of hostility even today. But the effectiveness of mobile Y intelligence had been emphatically demonstrated. It has even been suggested that a little later on, while out in the Western Desert, General Freyburg asked casually whether that ‘brilliant spy’ who had worked so well in Athens was still operating.

  7 A World Wide Web of Intelligence

  One of the bleakest, coldest, most northerly of the British Y stations was sited just outside Murmansk, on the north-western tip of Russia; a seaport in the Arctic Circle that stood not far from the borders of Norway and Finland, and which could boast a harbour that was free of ice. The station was established in 1941 in order to give aid to the Arctic convoys sailing through those freezing, treacherous waters, pursued by the U-boat wolf packs and by German battleships.

  In the wake of Operation Barbarossa – the German invasion of Russia – and with it the violent end of the Molotov/Ribbentrop pact (the always fragile non-aggression treaty between Germany and Russia that had also contained clauses concerning the appropriation and carving up of eastern Europe), the port of Murmansk was also a means by which the Allied convoys could deliver urgently needed goods to the Russians. In this sense, the Y station suited the Soviet purpose, at least for a time. But the Russians had an extra use for it too; according to the official Bletchley Park history, it gave them valuable information about German naval transmissions. Intriguingly, also according to the official history, the paranoid Russians at one point demanded that the station be closed down, for fear that the British were spying on them; but when this was done, the Russians found that they missed the intelligence that the station generated. Soon afterwards, normal service was resumed.

  Shipboard wireless telegraphist Ron Charters was sailing on HMS Bellona with the Russian convoys near the Arctic Circle at the time when the Allies were attempting to give careful support to the nervy Soviets. Charters soon became familiar both with the harshness of that region of the world, and the danger that lurked in the icy waters of the Arctic. ‘I well recall my almost stunned realisation when receiving my first U-Boat . . . message,’ he wrote. ‘There was little time to identify [it] and at the same time take a bearing on the signal.’ He had no idea how he succeeded on this first encounter but it did, he said, teach him to be fully alert. However, he was having to perform such feats of focus in appalling weather. ‘We were not allowed to sling hammocks while at sea and it was a case of using an inflated life-belt and sleeping fully dressed on any part of the deck that was free,’ he recalled.

  In the midst of such conditions, the young sailors on the frozen ships did what they could to keep spirits high. On one occasion, when two ships were berthed at a Russian port in the darkness of midwinter, the rival crews set up a football match in a square that was ‘covered with ice and snow’. ‘With no available changing facilities, I, with 21 other “braves”, changed into our football strip in the open,’ said Mr Charters. The Russian locals looked on ‘more with amazement than admiration’.1

  But the Y station at Murmansk was not perceived as the most attractive posting. One veteran wrote bitterly of his sojourn there: ‘Mosquito-ridden north Russia is as inhospitable as its communist inhabitants.’

  A few months later, the British made great efforts to tackle the simmering distrust that clearly existed in Anglo-Soviet relations, to the extent of sending a senior military commander out to Moscow to talk directly with his Russian Y Service counterparts. There were delicate diplomatic issues: not least of which was the importance of not letting the Russians know that the British had succeeded in cracking the Enigma codes. On top of this was the barbed issue of Russian security; it was all very well the British sharing some of their valuable Y intelligence, but how could they be sure that the Soviets would not accidentally leak such intelligence to their enemies? This was later to become a diplomatic matter requiring almost superhuman skills of negotiation.

  Secret listeners were also quietly active in neutral countries, picking up transmissions from enemy spies. The nature of such missions – often given not to highly trained British secret agents, but simply to young men with a firm grasp of radio expertise – was filled with intrigue and risk, and proved an invaluable means for these men to grow up very fast. One such man picked out very early for such duties was Morse and short-wave radio expert Bill Miller, who was designated a Section VIII operator.

  Having completed three months’ military training on the south coast, Miller was approached quietly by his superiors and asked if he would be willing to put himself forward for special duties ‘involving overseas service’. As if this were not thrilling enough, he was then given the old cloak-and-dagger injunction not to tell any of his friends in the regiment what he had been offered. He was also told that he was to be posted to a place in Buckinghamshire called Bletchley Park.

  It was here that the James Bond-esque life began in earnest, and the way Miller related it exudes a sort of quiet, carefree pride. Like Edgar Harrison before him, Miller was fully briefed by Brigadier Gambier-Parry. His mission, he was told, was to ‘proceed to San Sebastian in Spain near the French frontier.’

  There, his cover story would be that he was joining the staff of the vice-consulate. Miller’s real business, however, was to set up a wireless out-station and transmit reports back to Britain on a daily basis. It went without saying that this had to be a top secret operation. German operatives transmitting from neutral territory would be slightly more lax about short-range material, and might not even bother enciphering it. For this reason, it was vital that they should not suspect that anyone in the locality was listening in on them. Furthermore, the neutral countries were extremely reluctant to allow the gathering of any form of covert intelligence on their soil; neutrality was a tricky balancing act, and the pressures upon them were great. To be caught could create serious repercussions, and cause substantial damage to related secret operations.

  So, before travelling out to San Sebastian, the young and relatively inexperienced Bill Miller was sent for a short but intense course of advanced cryptography training ‘with a couple of nice young ladies’, as he put it, from MI6 HQ in Broadway Buildings, St James’s Park. This gave him a grounding in both encoding and deciphering.

  One such code he had to learn with extreme care was his personal one. It was based on one of the brand new paperback books from Penguin, Poet’s Pub by Eric Linklater, and involved ‘the [book] page number and a line number to choose a couple of words or a phrase from which a grid was formed’. Miller also had to familiarise himself in painstaking detail with German officers and units, their military equipment, their tanks and guns and vehicles. In other words, he was required to take on board a very great deal in a short space of time.r />
  At last, in early 1941, came the flight to Lisbon, and the start of his adventures. He departed from Bristol; and the world in which he landed was a far cry from everything that he had known. In Portugal there ‘was no blackout, no war, and the shops were full of fruit that had not been seen at home for a long time’, wrote his friend Geoffrey Pidgeon. ‘He could not get over the brilliant lighting everywhere, the streets, the shops, the crowds of people sitting in cafes and restaurants . . . A man from the Embassy took him out to dinner at a restaurant one night. During the meal, he muttered: “Take a discreet look at those chaps over there . . . they’re from the German embassy.”’2

  This was just the start of it. Miller was then required to establish himself in Spain, which was quite a different prospect from Portugal. In the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, the ruling dictatorship of General Franco might prove amenable to the Germans at any point, so it was vital for Britain to know of any Nazi manoeuvres in the vicinity. The naval fleet around Gibraltar would have to be given sufficient notice to set sail in the event of German troops crossing into Spanish territory; British diplomatic interests, too, would need advance wireless warning in order to be able to burn their secret papers before the enemy arrived.

  Young Miller found himself posted, with a minimal cover story, to the British consulate in Bilbao, the staff of which clearly had no wish for him to be there. The Spanish authorities had recently set down extremely stringent rules to do with forbidden wireless interception and transmission; it seemed to the consulate staff that it was altogether too obvious what Miller was, and what he would be doing.

  Miller was counselled not merely to keep himself to himself, but also to avoid the attentions of young women; this was a matter of deep practicality. Of all the catches a female counter-intelligence spy might make, a wireless operator was among those of the highest value. Like all secret agents, Miller was also advised not to frequent the same bars or cafés repeatedly; it was important that he should not be noticed, or attract attention. And so this very young Englishman, operating almost independently, set up his equipment in a small back room, and began the long vigils listening in on German signals.

  Young radio experts were also needed to transport vital equipment to strategic locations in Europe in order to help with the struggle against the Germans. These men would need an unusual blend of talents: both the raw bravery of the Special Operations Executive and the technical knowhow of a back-room scientist. One such man, a talented young wireless buff known to his friends as ‘Spuggy’ – real name Arthur Newton – had, after his recruitment in the 1930s by Richard Gambier-Parry, been instrumental in devising wireless equipment that could be hidden and buried in strategic locations in the event of a Nazi invasion of Britain. His love and feel for the technology made him an invaluable innovator and by 1940, he was working for the Auxiliary Intelligence Organisation under Captain Peter Fleming (the brother of Ian).

  Spuggy had also designed a mobile two-way station that could be used in a Dodge car. In the early weeks of 1941, he was required for a rather more hazardous mission: carrying valuable, up-to-the-minute radio equipment to Belgrade, Yugoslavia. This meant somehow crossing a continent dominated by the Nazis and Italians. The route, of necessity, would be circuitous. Quite how circuitous no one could have predicted.

  Newton’s journey involved sailing from Greenock, Scotland, and for reasons of evasive action, heading towards the North Pole. This part of the voyage was not only, as he wrote to his wife, ‘B****** cold!’ but also fraught with menace from the patrolling, invisible U-boats. Eventually the ship was able to set a more southerly course. Some weeks later, with its engines failing, the vessel reached the harbour of Freetown on the coast of west Africa; from there, Spuggy, still caring for his precious radio cargo like a mother hen with chicks, was obliged to load everything on to a rickety plane that was to sweep his party across the Belgian Congo. An encounter with a tornado forced the pilot to ditch the plane miles off course – the emergency landing clipping the tops off trees – and Spuggy and his equipment found themselves in a wilderness near Stanleyville where they were taken in by missionaries.

  This accident-prone journey across Africa finally came to its conclusion in Cairo, as a rather crusty Spuggy, always on the lookout for somewhere to get a proper wash, made preparations to sail to Athens on a boat filled with New Zealand soldiers. Some days later, in April 1941, Spuggy was established in Athens (passing ships, as it were, with his fellow Y Service operative Edgar Harrison, though of course Spuggy’s mission was onwards to Yugoslavia): at that time, Spuggy wrote home to his wife to inform her of his excruciatingly slow progress to Belgrade. The letter gives a vivid flavour of the near-anarchic atmosphere of Mediterranean Europe as the Nazi shadow grew longer:

  The days after Yugoslavia told Germany to go to hell, imprisoned the Government, turned out Prince Paul and started mobilising, I had to go to Belgrade. Had stacks of baggage too! Caught a train Monday 4.30 a.m. and arrived in Salonika at 2 a.m. the following day. Went to hotel – had two hours sleep – then up again to catch another train for the Greek/Yugoslav frontier. Got across border and changed for Belgrade.

  Arrived . . . 4.30 p.m. Wednesday after a nightmare journey. Train was packed with troops with women and children crying in the corridors. There was no food.

  I delivered all the bags (with the valuable radio equipment) but was told to get out fast and to take the midnight train out from Belgrade to Greece. It turned out to be the last train. Crossed the Greek frontier at Salonika before Jerry invaded Greece.

  As it happened, Spuggy’s timing was acute; with the Germans advancing, Athens was in a state of near collapse. It was vital that he get out. But how? As an air raid started, he hurried down to the docks, thinking he might be able to hop on to a destroyer that was scheduled to be there. The ship in question did not materialise and time was running ever shorter. Spuggy managed to find a place on a refugee boat that was sailing for Alexandria, his fellow passengers terrified children and women.

  ‘Had loads of bags and equipment and had to load this myself,’ he wrote to his wife, ‘which meant heaving out a derrick, tying all my boxes on to the end of the guy and then running up the ship and working the winch.’ All of this very much against the clock. ‘After sweating and struggling for half an hour in the boiling sun, I was a mess.’3

  Ever preoccupied with hygiene, Spuggy ‘managed to scrounge a wash’ from the ship’s engineer. Then it became apparent to him just how terrible the conditions on board were for the petrified evacuees: on a boat designed to carry six passengers, there were now 200 people with ‘no food’, ‘limited water’ and – at best – sparse lavatorial arrangements. Thankfully for Spuggy, there was the solace of some smuggled spirits; and he found himself a corner under a lifeboat cover. The boat was strafed by German fighter pilots, who dive-bombed and fired machine guns at the open deck; miraculously, there were no casualties.

  The ordeal at sea went on for three days and three nights; when Spuggy and his shipmates arrived safe in port at Alexandria, he was able to return to Cairo and deliver the diplomatic bags and equipment that he had picked up in Belgrade. One might think he would be grateful for this deliverance, and for the relative peace of Egypt. But he confided to his wife as soon as he got there that he was ‘fed up to the teeth’ with it.

  But what impresses now is the idea of a young man from Durham moving through this war-ravaged world with such apparent insouciance; his genius clearly lay not merely in the art of radio communication, but also personal communication. This ability to extemporise – while remaining completely imperturbable – was shared by some of his other radio-minded colleagues.

  For Harold Everett at Beaumanor, a young corporal with 110 Wireless Intelligence Section, the prospect of Egypt loomed somewhat unexpectedly. ‘Six of us were being sent to Cairo from our highly secret and closely guarded intelligence school in the Midlands,’ he wrote. Not only that: for reasons of security and discretion, they were bei
ng sent via warship, rather than the more basic troop carrier. The six men clambered aboard HMS Shropshire at Glasgow; they were to find the interregnum at sea both extraordinary and a little like a dream.

  For these young men and women, such voyages marked transitional moments in their lives. Because the nature of the work they were to do was cerebral rather than physical – and because there was not much they could do throughout the course of the long journeys but relax – they had time to reflect, while at the same time their eyes were opened to the wider, more colourful world beyond Great Britain.

  Everett described moments of comedy:

  When we reached a specified latitude, the order was issued to don tropical kit. We soldiers emerged in the sartorial splendour provided by the War Office. We caused quite a stir as I imagine that the uniforms were left over from the Battle of Omdurman. Long, narrow, tight fitting jackets with high collars and real drain-pipe trousers for evening wear and some enormous long baggy shorts for daytime. These shorts [were] known as Bombay Bloomers.

  Such voyages were, nevertheless, naturally jagged with jeopardy. There was alarm on board HMS Shropshire when it appeared that the biggest and most feared German battleship, the Tirpitz, was bearing down upon the convoy. In the end, it turned out to have been a misread signal (highlighting in a small way the need for complete accuracy). But Everett also noted that in an enclosed community like a warship, rumours were rife, and spread like lightning. The ship sailed to Sierra Leone, where one RAF passenger suddenly, and without warning, became manic with a clasp knife; the man had to be overpowered, sedated, and taken to hospital in Freetown.