The Spies of Winter

by Sinclair McKay

  The Balfour Declaration of 1917 promised the Jewish people a homeland. Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour had written to Baron Rothschild and by extension to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. ‘His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,’ wrote Balfour, ‘and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights or political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.’

  In 1941, with that homeland still a distant prospect, Bletchley Park codebreaker Oliver Strachey made his way into a very particular set of Enigma decrypts: the railway timetables and deportation communications that laid bare the escalating horror of the Holocaust in eastern Europe. These were the decrypts that made plain the need for that homeland. In the aftershock of war, though, the Palestinian question was, for the Foreign Office, one part of a complex interlocking structure of empire; a territory mandated since 1922, presided over by the British, and which the British were now having increasing difficulty keeping any kind of lid on.

  There was a radio relay station in Sarafand, not far from Tel Aviv, that had been established in the 1920s. It had grown in size and numbers of personnel throughout the 1930s and was a key station throughout the war, sitting amid the bustle of a wider army encampment. Situated in the very heart of the Middle East, it was clear that its importance had not diminished in any way. But from 1945 onwards, life for the British in Palestine was going to prove explosive. As well as attempting to defuse the rising fury between Arabs and Jews – the Palestinian Grand Mufti had visited Hitler and made no secret of his support for the persecution of the Jews – the soldiers had to face hostility directed at them from all sides. And a younger Jewish generation – traumatised by a mass atrocity that the entire world had witnessed, and yet somehow did not want to talk about – was making ready to fight.

  Then there were the thousands of Holocaust survivors in Europe who desperately wanted to leave that dark continent and make for the sanctuary of a Jewish homeland. The chief obstacles to their doing so were to be the British, as we will see later. There were many Jewish codebreakers back in England who had made incalculable contributions to the wartime cypher triumphs, and who were now looking on with some interest as the British authorities began to wriggle. In 1945, in Jerusalem, there was a graffito that appeared on a wall. It read: ‘British go home.’ Underneath, a British soldier had added: ‘If only we f****** well could.’ It was the codebreaking operatives in Sarafand who were picking up increasing amounts of traffic from Zionist groups; the local difficulties standing alongside the broader aims of divining Soviet intentions. Indeed, there was the further complication for the British that Stalin’s Soviet Union was apparently in wholehearted support of the right of the Jewish people to establish the state of Israel. This was in the brief period before the Kremlin returned to its older anti-Semitic attitudes.

  For British codebreakers, there were more exotic and yet more tranquil corners to which they could find themselves being posted. One such was the port of Kilindini, Mombasa, on the East African coast. From a converted school – a rather wonderfully ornate structure of pink stone – overlooking the crashing waves, operatives such as Hugh Denham replicated the non-military Bletchley approach, working in civilian clothes and thus avoiding parades and other ‘time-wasting’ activities. From this base, and with their receivers picking up signals from far across the ocean, the team had made brilliant inroads into the Japanese codes in the teeth of technical difficulties involving the clarity of radio reception. They had originally gone there following a Japanese bombing attack on the base of HMS Anderson in Colombo, Ceylon. And in the immediate post-war period, Clement Attlee was to wonder if Mombasa might make an altogether more suitable base for a range of British forces than either Egypt or Palestine or Iraq.

  In the meantime, HMS Anderson – perched on the other side of the Indian Ocean – was still very much in business after the Japanese capitulation in September 1945 in South-East Asia. It was here that those last languid days of the imperial life were played out before disbelieving young British people, fresh from modest backgrounds in England, whose eyes were opened to a world of colour and natural luxuriance that they had thought could never have existed outside of books. The base itself – single-storey huts, roofs woven of palm, tall radio transmitters looming up – was perfectly utilitarian; the life outside was anything but. Wren Jean Valentine, who had been breaking Japanese codes and who now had to wait a while for demobilisation after the war, was drawn deeply in: the smart restaurants, the elegant night-clubs and, away in the hills, the tea plantations, a world where all one had to do was press a small button under a table, and a servant would materialise.

  And after the war, the social and cultural life of the base itself went on with some fervour. There was a string ensemble, a swing band and a thriving theatrical society. In terms of technology, this was less an age of Morse and more a time of advancing teleprinter developments. Laurence Roberts recalled one small setback: the cabling required for the machinery was too great a temptation for a few of the local population to resist. It was regularly stolen. But this in itself, he remembered, had the partial result of ushering in further advances in terms of early microwave transmissions. He, too, recalled that the great relief of such a posting was the terrific diversion of Colombo itself, which offered a great deal of entertainment to men and women alike.

  There was also, quite naturally, romance, and it was thanks to her posting here – right the way around the world from her native Perth in Scotland, which she had left as an 18-year-old girl – that Jean Valentine was to meet pilot Clive Rooke. They married (though not without some initial resistance from Jean’s father back in Perth, who later grudgingly relented and gave his permission when it was pointed out to him that he had allowed his only daughter to set sail through U-Boat-infested waters, and also face the unquantifiable dangers of an Asian posting). Obviously they – and countless other young people like them, men and women alike – had shown conspicuous bravery in doing their duty; but the war had had another side effect for people like Jean and Clive. It had opened up a far wider world to them than perhaps they would otherwise have seen.

  For Jean, the codebreaking work was running down fast, but she could not be demobilised because the ships sailing home were filled with exhausted (and traumatised) soldiers being brought back from the Far East. As it was, she and Clive Rooke, upon marrying, decided to stay in that part of the world. She recalls vividly being in Burma on the day in 1947 that India gained its independence.

  India was a particular intelligence asset that Bletchley’s successors could ill afford to do without, regardless of the subcontinent’s coming independence. Indeed, in the aftermath of the war, the Indian authorities and representatives of various British services executed careful little dances of diplomacy around one another. A key figure in wartime signals intelligence in India had been Colonel Patrick Marr-Johnson, who was now back in the West as part of the team working to fine-tune and formalise the unprecedented intelligence alliance between Britain and the United States. The dance of diplomacy went a few steps further: the National Security Agency has released some fascinating correspondence between Colonel Marr-Johnson and senior US cryptologist William Friedman in Washington, from 1943, after Colonel Marr-Johnson had paid a visit. In one letter, Marr-Johnson reflects on the British position in India and how others might see it. ‘I wonder whether your daughter is still pondering deeply the question of the fate of India?’ he asks Friedman. ‘And whether I managed to persuade her that the British were not quite such evil ogres as she thought?’2

  The listening stations in India were now absolutely key for monitoring Soviet activity, particularly in regions close to Afghanistan and the North-West Frontier (it is interesting to note how geopolitical fault lines appear
to be every bit as enduring as the geological variety).

  Appointed to Eastcote in late 1945 as Commander Travis’s second deputy, Captain Edward Hastings was the man in charge of dealings with India and his intelligence counterparts there. The imminent removal of all British soldiers and police from the subcontinent was one thing, but he was the man trying to ensure that unobtrusive listening stations might form part of what might be termed a diplomatic legacy.

  And there was something about the very business of interception that was appealing to a certain sort of intelligent, sparky though not necessarily academically trained young man. Conscription continued in the form of National Service; in order to be able to bring tired troops home from their ordeals in the east, it was necessary to train up more young men back home, many of whom had just finished school and were looking at the prospect of apprenticeships. The science of radio made many of these young men angle themselves towards wireless operator roles. As in the war itself, the job of Direction Finding, interception, and incredibly swift Morse code transcription appealed to many sharp and nimble working-class lads.

  Perhaps the most famous of the immediate post-war wireless operators was a young man from Nottingham who had been doing piece-work in a bicycle factory and was destined, late in the 1950s, to become one of the defining novelists of his generation. Alan Sillitoe realised that he had a knack for Morse, even though the training course that he was sent on was gruelling and so pressurised that it made one candidate succumb to a fit during a test.

  Sillitoe knew that he and a few of his fellow recruits for RAF Signals were going to be shipped overseas; but the destination was a secret. He was expecting to sail out from Liverpool, but instead these boys first found themselves packed off to Southampton, in the midst of an utterly miserable, fuel-rationed British winter, bitingly wet and grey. The world that was to come was almost hallucinatory in its contrast. Within weeks, Sillitoe was in warm, hazy air, gazing from the deck of the ship over at Bedouins walking with camels on the banks of the Nile; he watched as ‘the mountains of Sinai turned purple in the afternoon light’ and he found a startling recall for all the Old Testament stories that he had been taught as a child. Across the Indian Ocean, he enjoyed a dazed stop-off in Colombo which, as Sillitoe observed, took the black-and-white photographs in books his grandparents had shown him and turned them into colour.

  HMS Anderson was not his destination; they sailed on further. And so it was that Sillitoe, then just 18 years old, found himself among the rubber trees deep in Malaya. He adapted quickly to this new life of earphones, interference and calculations of ionosphere bounces, set against an eerie nocturnal backdrop of all-night shifts in a simple hut in the middle of a restless jungle. He and his colleagues were constantly on the lookout for snakes, which could nest anywhere in their camp. The job itself, those lonely moonlit shifts, sometimes took on a hauntingly surreal tone when, in between communications between passing aeroplanes and messages intercepted from wider shores, there were sometimes bursts of music out of nowhere: classical pieces that would seem to fill the silence and the darkness.

  ‘The music of the spheres came into my headphones,’ he wrote, ‘and I communicated in Morse with Rangoon and Singapore, chatted to Saigon using my bits of French, and even for half an hour after dawn made contact with such faraway places as Karachi, Hong Kong and Bangkok. Every transmitter, even if of the same make, had a different tone and, no need of call signs, one soon learned to know them and the moment of their tune-forking into the ears.’3

  This was a brotherhood of wireless operators and the work was intensely focused at all hours; absolute accuracy was of course of the essence, as the communications would then be passed on to Eastcote for analysis. Yet, as Sillitoe noted, even despite the hours and those uncanny nights when all sorts of noises could be heard outside the listening station in the trees, there was also Tiger beer, the music from wind-up gramophones, and the serious pleasure of walking along the warm shore and watching the local fishermen haul in some bizarre-looking catches. Had it not been for National Service, this is a world that Sillitoe might never have expected to see; as it was, it clearly had an impact other than artistic, as in subsequent years he and his wife moved from Britain to Mediterranean shores.

  And a little later, Sillitoe’s experience was tested to the limit as another fragment of Britain’s empire began to break off painfully, and he found himself in the middle of what is still termed the ‘Malayan Emergency’. But there was something about the philosophy of his work, hunched over earphones, that remained consistent. Years later, he said: ‘It’s therapy. I like to eavesdrop, though you’re meant to shred everything you take down. Once Morse has been implanted in your brain at the age of 16 or 17, it never leaves you.’4 That was the experience of many others, though the conditions in stations in Malaya and Singapore could often be extremely uncomfortable due to asphyxiating heat and indeed the vast, terrible thunderstorms at night that – if one was wearing headphones and transcribing – would crackle agonisingly like a lightning bolt through the brain.

  Others wore the burden of travel lightly as well; there were some who had spent their war years working at Beaumanor Hall and RAF Chicksands and whose expertise was now needed out in the wider world. The winter 1946 number of The Woygian magazine, for interceptors past and present, contained exciting news from the Middle East. ‘Bill Hayward wrote from Cairo on December 9th where he – together with Pete James, Derek Basnett, Ron Blease, Bern Norwood and ‘Tubby’ Fagg – was hoping to go on to Cyprus but afraid it might be the Holy Land. Also in Cairo with another draft, similarly bound, are Sgt Tyler, ‘Doodlebug’ Tomlinson and NL Smith. Bill sends greetings… and adds that he thinks Egypt “sphinx”.’5

  Of all the signals intelligence jewels that Britain possessed, the one with perhaps greater value than all the rest was a station that also proved remarkably resistant to the tide of empires; indeed, this particular territory only ceased to be British in 1997. The station was Hong Kong and the range of traffic that flowed through, was analysed and sent on was, even from 1945, quite formidable. Even before Mao Zedong wrestled his way to power in 1949 and established the People’s Republic of China, the listening base at Hong Kong was of exquisite importance not only to the British, but the Americans too.

  Indeed, for years the colony had been the most crucial vantage point, eavesdropping on Chinese, Japanese and also Soviet Russian traffic. This scrutiny had been interrupted by the war: having ravaged great swathes of China, the Japanese forces besieged Hong Kong in December 1941, then overran and occupied it. The British codebreakers had moved out some way in advance, having anticipated such an attack; it was always vital that their secrets should stay firmly as far from the hands of the enemy as possible. Unfortunately, in this instance in 1941, the Hong Kong codebreakers had withdrawn to Singapore, and despite the finest cypher work, no analysts predicted the assault on Singapore that was to come in February 1942. As it was, the codebreakers made it out once more, and this time ended up at Colombo in Ceylon, and then further out at Mombasa.

  Back in Hong Kong, the Japanese stayed in the territory until their war ended with the atomic blasts. So in 1945 there was as swift restoration as possible not just of everyday life and commerce, but also of intelligence gathering. Hong Kong was one of the great crossroads, teeming with agents of all sorts, as well as equally smooth-operating figures moving in the (perhaps even shadier) world of high finance. There was one signals intelligence station in a small hilly outcrop referred to for some reason as ‘Batty’s Belvedere’. It was highly popular with some of the military and civilian operatives thanks to a nearby tiny secluded bay, hemmed in on two sides by towering cliffs. When not on duty, there were terrific opportunities for swimming and sunbathing in rich blue waters. During the Japanese occupation, the station had continued in use, but of course in the service of the Japanese forces. Come the winter of 1945, and something of its old life had been restored. ‘It was a rough journey in an RAF truck to get to the
summit,’ recalled one veteran signals-man years later, ‘but at 4am, when our shift began, the view of the surroundings was incredible, especially on a misty morning.’6 And in time, the infrastructure around the Belvedere was to improve rather dramatically as well.

  Unlike those listening stations in the Middle East, operating under a cloud of increasing uncertainty, there was something – as one operative remarked – curiously tranquil about a small outstation like the Belvedere, or the nearby listening station RAF Little Sai Wan. In those immediate post-war years, as China sought to recover, there was still a reasonably open frontier with Hong Kong; in that period, many middle-class Chinese families moved across there. In the years that followed, with the massive social upheaval of the Communist revolution, that trickle of migration was to become a torrent, and Hong Kong would end up with shanty towns on its hillsides, people living in the most desperate poverty.

  The listening posts around Hong Kong naturally called for experts in Chinese linguistics; in the 1940s, the operation was a little austere, involving recruits working in pre-fabricated huts, and looking, as one signals veteran recalled, rather like battery hens. They were happy battery hens, though. And as the Americans in the 1940s became increasingly concerned about the build-up of Communist influence in the region, the listeners of Batty’s Belvedere were to find themselves in one of the most secret hot spots on earth.

  Meanwhile, though, the codebreakers at Eastcote were listening to the signals emanating from the unhappier corners of Europe, grimly logging the signs that the hunger and the hatred were bringing the prospect of a Third World War very much closer. On top of this, they were about to decrypt a cache of messages which would reveal, horrifyingly, the extent to which British and American security services had been infiltrated by Stalin’s agents.