The Secret Listeners

by Sinclair McKay

  At roughly the same time, security considerations of quite a different order of magnitude were arising – with the Russians. In September 1942, Major Edward Crankshaw was in Moscow, reporting back to the Y Committee. By this stage, the Soviets were already deep in the unimaginably bloody struggle with the Germans that would claim the lives of countless civilians and lay waste much of eastern Europe. Acutely aware of the difficulties in dealing with Stalin and his brutalised, terrorised underlings, Crankshaw was in the Russian capital to try and reach an agreement about the sharing of certain intercept information. ‘Y service evidently wanted to co-operate owing to value of our offerings and initial meeting went well,’ he wrote in a communication marked ‘Most Secret’, adding tartly: ‘This was followed by comatose dry-up. I was not even given chance to hand over material badly needed by Red Army.’6

  Even now, the extent to which the alliance between the British and the Soviets in the war allowed the Russians in on vital secrets is ambiguous. Certainly there was no intention that Stalin should be vouchsafed the greatest secret of all – the continuing decoding triumphs of Bletchley Park. None the less, Churchill was swift to understand the value of passing on choice Ultra decrypts, with their true source suitably obscured. In the case of wireless interception, the field was more open, in the sense that the Russians and the British each knew that the other was doing their best to listen in and could in certain cases help each other out with particular intercepted signals or messages. But – perhaps based on a justifiable suspicion that the British were monitoring the Soviets as well as the Nazis – there was clearly an initial sense either of reluctance or distrust on the Soviet side. Major Crankshaw, together with senior military figures in the Moscow mission, had clearly had to push hard for a deal to be made.

  ‘Impression is that [Soviet] Y people were warned off by higher authority,’ wrote Crankshaw of the delicate negotiations for the sharing of Y information. As a result, British higher authorities were themselves invoked, and wrote strong notes to Russian military figures concerning discourtesy and a failure to fulfil promises. This seemed to cause the Soviets to shift a little. Crankshaw wrote:

  This meeting highly successful. [Senior officer] Tulbovitch less nervous and more confident than ever before and obviously relieved to have comprehensive directive behind him at last. Through him Soviet High Command formally reaffirmed their intention to play square with us and agreed to my proposals. My reproaches were met with unprecedented apologies . . . My main request was for access to senior ‘Y’ officer to discuss policy matters.

  Even then, it was an exhausting process. But one which opens an intriguing window on the levels of co-operation – and more vitally, perhaps, of mutual trust – attained. ‘My telegrams will have conveyed the general atmosphere here . . .’ wrote Major Crankshaw just a few days later from the British Military Mission in Moscow, ‘in spite of the keenness of the [Soviet] Y people to get hold of my material, the first three weeks were one sustained crisis. This crisis has now resolved itself, and we have started work.’

  In a curious mirroring of the relationship with the US, it seemed that the intercept teams got on better than their superiors; Crankshaw related how the Soviet Y team were making efforts to outmanoeuvre the official liaison department that oversaw all operations. ‘It will not be the fault of Y if after a month or two we don’t have a good routine running,’ he wrote. ‘I have handed over Col Tiltman’s Japanese material, and this is being digested. It has been agreed in principle to give me the traffic I have asked for and very soon I hope to have a special meeting about this.’

  In return for this valuable information, the Russians were handing over German identifications, and other vital ways into German radio signals. And there was more. ‘Cryptography, as expected, is a delicate subject,’ ran the memo, ‘but I also hope for progress here. I think they may ask for someone like . . . [Bletchley codebreaker Henry] Dryden to come out and visit their cryptographers for a few weeks.’ It was clearly possible to do this without letting on about the cracking of Enigma; there were other coding systems in use in the field, such as Double Playfair, a manual encryption system using square grids, which the British and the Soviets could quite safely discuss. A few days later, and the two teams appeared to be co-operating with much greater ease and fluidity.

  ‘I have so far given Red Army Col Tiltman’s material, the Bird Book, the Fag System, D/F safety service, ground station call signs and some oddments. The Russians are now setting the pace . . .’ Again, in return, the British were benefiting by means of more German material captured by the Russians, ‘the low-down on Russian cryptographic situation’ and ‘full details of Army network and traffic in front of Armies, with serials, frequencies, identifications etc, present and future’. A little later, an even more significant concession was made: Russian naval officers came to Britain to see the workings of several Y establishments, and all the technology of interception – though one site they were not allowed anywhere near was Bletchley Park. According to the official history, the British also proved to the Russians that the Soviet cipher systems were hopelessly insecure, and that the Russians could not expect to receive any more helpful messages from Bletchley until this security had been tightened up. For if the Russians were to blunder while handling information from Britain, German intelligence would correctly deduce that the British had broken their code systems, with potentially catastrophic results.

  All of which makes for very striking reading now. Just three years after that memo was sent, the British listeners were focusing their clandestine attentions on the very Soviets into whose infrastructure they had been permitted to look. Nevertheless, as allies, it was thanks to the work of the Bletchley codebreakers that – to give one striking example – the Russians were supplied with vital information about German tanks, which enabled them to win the 1943 Battle of Kursk; and in turn, it was the Y Service that ensured that such information was expedited.

  Quite apart from the sensitivity of international relations, there was continuing ill will within British cryptography circles, tension and jealousy between the different departments of intelligence. There was a particular distrust and dislike among some for the operatives of MI6. In 1942, Captain Trevor-Roper, now working for the Radio Analysis Bureau at Arkley View, and having great success with Abwehr codes and communications, confessed to his diary his opinions of ‘the Secret Service’ – a ‘colony of coots in an unventilated backwater of bureaucracy’, a ‘bunch of dependent bumsuckers held together by neglect, like a cluster of bats in an unswept barn’, ‘high-priests of effete religion’, mandarins with ‘Chinese ideograms’ and ‘green ink’ and ‘Palace eunuchs in the Great Within’.

  On another occasion, and without explanation, he wrote: ‘I am sick of them, sick to death of them, that nest of timid and corrupt incompetents . . . I would rather grill in the desert with unambitious idealists who have something to sacrifice . . . than sit here in the shade and watch the endless, meaningless, purposeless ritual of these Roman augurs.’7

  In contrast to Trevor-Roper’s citric views about the workings and personnel of MI5 and MI6, there was a sense of smooth, assured expertise about the Y Service; an expertise acknowledged by admiring Americans. It has been suggested that around the Special Relationship, there was nevertheless a continual element of unease to do with security, and that as few American top brass were apprised of the Bletchley triumphs as possible. This, some say, is why the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s efforts during the war were directed by Washington more towards South America than Europe; pressure to have FBI work deflected elsewhere came from the British, who were anxious about sensitive information being given to the FBI, a young organisation with plenty of potential for leaks. And so it was that, despite the atmosphere of co-operation between US signals personal and the Y Service, many American commanders and operatives could only shake their heads with admiration at the quality of intelligence that the British were obtaining, without having the faintest idea ab
out its provenance.

  9 Wilder Shores and Secret Missions

  The war in the Far East and the Indian Ocean created its own specialised demands upon Bletchley Park; not least of which was the need for some young recruits to be given swift, intense courses in rudimentary Japanese. Moreover, the codebreaking and interception stations in Asia were, in the 1940s, a truly vast distance away from home; this was a consideration that was certainly to skitter through the minds of some of the younger people sent out there.

  The other aspect of life during those years – taken for granted then, but increasingly alien now – was the fact that these out-stations were located in countries that were still part of the British Empire, even if that empire was nearing the edge of disintegration: India, Ceylon . . . And so it was that those who sailed out to these parts, like those posted to Egypt, had their eyes opened to a way of life that no one would see again.

  In 1942, Hugh Denham, a nineteen-year-old undergraduate from Jesus College, Cambridge, received his summons to Bletchley Park. Within a few short weeks, his horizon was to be widened considerably. The station at Kilindini in Kenya let the Bletchley authorities know that they wanted three new operatives. Denham, together with fellow youngsters Jon Cohen and Wynn Davies, had been trained to work on Japanese codes. Now they were transferred on to the payroll of the Foreign Office. Denham got a letter from Permanent Under-Secretary Sir Alexander Cadogan, summoning the young man to see him at Downing Street, and thence the ostentatious splendour of the Foreign Office – rather in the manner of one of William le Queux’s fictional Edwardian heroes. Denham’s orders were that he and his colleagues were to be posted with all speed – and travelling across Africa for seven weeks – to their new home in Mombasa.

  That home – in common with other Bletchley naval out-stations – was referred to in seafaring terms: in this case, as HMS Alidina. It was, Denham recalled, based in a ‘requisitioned Indian school’ (which is where its name came from) on a ‘rocky northern shore’. In architectural terms, it was stunningly ornate; not merely redolent of the grand nineteenth-century colonial era, but fantastically decorated on the exterior with intricate rococo touches.

  Manning the base were two senior Japanese translators who were naval men, alongside several career diplomats who had previously been interned by the Japanese. On top of this was a contingent of about thirty specially trained Wrens. ‘The “front line” of the unit was the wireless operators, who intercepted the enemy messages,’ wrote Denham.1 Highly meticulous and scrupulous these operators were too; at the end of each working day, as Denham recalled, they would go out to the back of the building and carefully monitor the burning of all the top secret waste paper that had been produced.

  There was a tropical echo of the cerebral atmosphere of Bletchley. Denham and his colleagues made full use of the large and airy former school rooms; they pushed big laboratory tables together and used them to lay out their complex decryption spreadsheets. In the meantime, as Denham noted, the Wrens ‘did a superb job. They were young, usually well educated, away from home probably for the first time, living under tight discipline on low pay in austere accommodation and engaged in routine work of an opaque nature. They did it all accurately, conscientiously and cheerfully.’ And though the hours were uniformly long – seven-day weeks were quite common, with the occasional half-day off – there were extraordinary bonuses. One such was that some members of staff were permitted a little extra free time to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, ‘just over the border in Tanganyika’. Today’s celebrity charity ordeal was yesterday’s ideal recreational pick-me-up.

  A year earlier, intercept stations had been expanding throughout India. Captain Frank Dickinson of the Royal Signals – a physicist by training – was posted to Delhi, and to a station in the south of that city:

  It was a former private school situated on the top of a rocky hill with excellent buildings but a very poor site for radio reception. It was a fully integrated Intelligence station incorporating radio intercept and indentification, codebreaking . . . and comprehensive communications. On arrival at the ‘Hill of Happiness’, one walked up to an open gateway to a large, bare quadrangle, surrounded by solid-looking buildings . . . Many of the officers were volunteers who had been living in India or further east – as civil servants or in business – and . . . they wore the most extraordinary jumble of uniforms and badges.

  After some unhappy experiences with a martinet officer called Pyster, who once threatened some of the operatives with a court-martial simply for taking time out to perform in a male voice choir for All India Radio, Dickinson requested a transfer, and soon found himself travelling across the country to Abbottabad, in the Khyber province of northern India (the city is now part of Pakistan). This involved gruelling train journeys, and frightening river crossings made by dilapidated ferry in remote regions. But life at the Abbottabad intercept station was lively and a great deal more colourful than anything he would have found back in England.

  At Christmas, we despatched signalmen Howden and Russell (a couple of cockney wideboys) and signalman Joseph (their Madrassi equivalent) to the nearby Naga village where they successfully bargained for a pig. This was successfully dispatched and dismembered by Waters, who had almost completed his apprenticeship to the trade in his father’s butcher’s shop and provided a superb Christmas dinner for the entire section.

  Another course of the dinner involved ‘a pound and a half of rice on a banana leaf, surrounded by ten heaps of various curries and dahls, every one calculated to make steam come out of our ears’.2

  There were moments of high comedy too; while British soldiers were on the move through the Kabaw valley, it was necessary, in their absence, for the interceptors to double up and carry out guard duties for the camp, which was set up in a teak forest and surrounded with a barbed wire fence. It was all apparently too much for an operator nicknamed Tug:

  Guard duties had placed a lot of strain on operators and ‘I corps’ but produced one humorous incident when an elephant . . . walked into a booby trap (a hand grenade on a piece of string between two trees) and set up an awful screaming dance crashing through the trees. The noise was quickly increased when ‘Tug’ leaped out of bed and dashed around the camp in his pyjama trousers yelling: ‘Man the defences!’ The scene returns to me whenever I see Corporal Jones on ‘Dad’s Army’.

  Section VIII operative Bill Miller – who had been dealing with ciphers and radio work covertly out of Spain in the early years of the war – found in 1942 that he had to leave, and quite hurriedly. The Spanish government had registered that large numbers of ambiguous figures were working in embassies. And so the authorities caught up with Miller; when he asked permission to extend his stay in the country, that permission was abruptly denied. This might not have been too heavy a blow. Although Spain was neutral, Miller had sharply noted the pro-German propaganda everywhere, from the faintly gloating coverage of the Dunkirk withdrawal that played in the cinemas a couple of years back to the latest headlines in the local newspapers.

  During a brief stopover in Lisbon, Miller was informed by his superiors of his next posting: this was to be Tangier, in the international zone of Morocco. Despite the place’s neutrality, General Franco had sent Spanish troops in. Even with this Spanish presence, the city remained genuinely international in feel and – more importantly – was to become one of the world’s leading nerve centres of espionage. Our images of the region in this era have been coloured immortally by the film Casablanca; there are those who would affirm that the film was not so very far from the truth. Tangier was a city swarming with spies, and electric with intrigue.

  Immediately upon arriving, Miller reported to the grand British consulate, and to the Consulate-General Colonel Ellis, who also happened to be SIS head for the region. Miller was given a cover: he was to become press attaché to the consulate. His real role, however, was to work directly to MI6 as a cipher operator, dealing with encoded traffic between embassies while ensuring the security of Brit
ish encrypted communications. According to Geoffrey Pidgeon, the city had the faintly disorientating quality of a looking-glass world; the enemies – British, Italians, Germans – sat in their legations not far apart, each pretending that their own business was wholly above board. Miller told Pidgeon that there was something especially jarring about walking through the Tangier streets and suddenly seeing the swastika fluttering in the warm breeze; the flag hung from the German legation, which was close to the main marketplace.

  It was not too long, says Geoffrey Pidgeon, before Miller’s wireless duties expanded to taking on board other forms of espionage. He was required, for instance, to maintain contact with a wireless operator in Casablanca who was monitoring a strategically important French battleship – keeping constant tabs on its position in Casablanca harbour, watching for signs that its fifteen guns were being made ready to engage in combat. Intriguingly, the battleship’s position changed whenever it was not being observed, surely a sign that there was covert activity afoot. The looking-glass element was to the fore again: the watchers and the watched, perfectly aware of one another, playing their pre-assigned roles while at times neatly reversing them. This was a city in which German and British intelligence operatives would sit at adjacent tables, failing to acknowledge one another but at the same time piercingly aware of each other’s presence.

  Another of Miller’s roles was to train secret agents in the use of transmitters small enough to be carried in suitcases. There were agents from all backgrounds, including a French Moroccan and a Spaniard. He was also quietly involved in what Pidgeon refers to as ‘boat operations’: nocturnal manoeuvres at sea, intended to transport secret equipment – and, on some occasions, refugees – between Tangier and the British fastness of Gibraltar. The vessel used was an ordinary fishing boat; perfect cover although vulnerable, especially in stormy weather. It says something for the sturdiness of British wireless receivers that when one such article was accidentally pitched over the side of the boat during a storm – and, miraculously, retrieved swiftly afterwards – the equipment had only to dry out before working perfectly again.