The Spies of Winter

by Sinclair McKay

  But it was not, it seems, a smile of triumph; Gardner later said that his own view of the treacherous agents exposed was that they at least believed in what they were doing, as opposed to being out-and-out mercenaries. There was almost a sense of a parallel between his preternatural skill and their own in carrying out their work. So much so that the eventual exposure of the agents seemed to cause Gardner some curious anguish. He saw his work as having a strange abstract purity, a freestanding cryptological puzzle, and there was something jarring about the agents exposed by his work then facing the prospect of prison or indeed the death sentence as a result of it.

  Despite all the painstaking secrecy, word inevitably spread among tiny numbers of people in the intelligence community. Over in Britain, Commander Travis, Captain Hastings and Nigel de Grey were immediately informed. Even they took something of a back seat, though. One of the main liaisons between London and Washington over Venona was Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Marr-Johnson, who had served so effectively out in India. After Sir Stewart Menzies, head of MI6, had had the preliminary discussions with his American counterparts about the sharing of intelligence, Marr-Johnson was based within the British Embassy in Washington DC to ensure that this incredibly secret transatlantic codebreaking operation went smoothly.

  A little later, the transatlantic partnership would be quietly formalised. And the echoes of that alliance are still very much with us today. But for now, this window into the heart of the NKVD was unknown territory. Oddly enough, in the closing months of the war, and the months that followed, separate units of British and American signals experts had been burrowing further into the decryption operations of vanquished Germany; they wanted to know how far the Germans had got into breaking Soviet codes, and indeed what of this intelligence might be salvaged for the new era to come. They succeeded, for instance, in breaking into one particular Soviet teleprinter system with the aid of secretly acquired German know-how.

  The close relationship between American and British codebreakers – one of pure mutual respect forged throughout the war – continued unbroken and indeed in some respects strengthened. The Venona triumph was not merely a matter of duplicated code-books; they had just been the incredibly narrow entry point. Meredith Gardner and his colleagues had painstakingly extrapolated from these – through mathematical and linguistic progressions involving working out Russian keys for certain English words – a wider net of Soviet encryption. They were able through pure mathematics to overcome systems of double encryption – for in most respects, the Soviets were usually extremely cautious. In Eastcote, these new leads were grabbed and worked upon by Brigadier John Tiltman and the elegant chess champion Hugh Alexander.

  Meanwhile, it was not only the double agent Donald Maclean who picked up the inkling that his Soviet activities were in danger of being uncovered. His fellow Cambridge Spy Guy Burgess also managed, in his role within MI6, to catch some prickling sense of the intelligence coming over, with its references to spies with codenames like ‘Homer’. ‘Homer’ was Maclean. Knowing that the searchlights were drawing ever closer, that the decrypts were offering clues about locations and movements which would help to pinpoint the identities of the double agents, the volcanically unstable Burgess was first forced to live in suspense, and then to make his choice: to face denouncement and prosecution as a traitor, or to defect to the land that he had worked for? A few years later, in 1951, as the suspicions around the two agents reached a crescendo, they made their escape, via the Black Sea, to the Soviet Union. For Donald Maclean, it was a form of deliverance; for the flamboyant Burgess, it was a descent into grey purgatory.

  The exposure of just two double agents – with the certain knowledge that there must be more – was to deliver a terrific shock to the British intelligence services. For the Americans, though, there was another figure, who had sought refuge in Britain in the inter-war years and had grown to great scientific eminence, whose betrayal, as we shall see, was even graver.

  The theft of atomic secrets from the Manhattan Project would give the coming Cold War its real edge of frost. But in 1946, the Russians were still some distance away from being able to test any atomic weapons. In terms of territorial conquest, they may not have had any need for them. Across the flattened continent of Europe, millions of freezing, hungry people in despairing queues for food and fuel in cities and towns that were barely working were pointing to quite another possibility: that so many countries lost in darkness would turn to the apparent certainties of Stalin’s Communism.

  From the Kremlin’s point of view, the genuine popular enthusiasm for Communism in countries such as Italy and France demonstrated that a political takeover could simply mean winning over hearts and minds: much less costly and indeed much more stable than a coup involving tanks and firepower.

  Europe’s ragged edges were in 1946 still struggling to find definition after the implosion of empires that came in the aftermath of the First World War. The Balkan states had a long, ugly history of bitter strife; there was also the ferocious civil war that had begun in Greece. Britain had held on to the island of Cyprus but that, too, was about to undergo bloody upheaval. Further north, Hungary, Romania and Ukraine, which had fought furious, confused wars, were still bloodied and disorientated. President Joseph Tito’s Yugoslavia seemed a curious outpost of near- stability and indeed independence; that in itself would prove to be a source of fury to Stalin. Here was the epochal moment when the continent would be defined from above. Just as in the aftermath of the First World War, when the victorious powers re-drew the maps of influence, so Stalin wanted – needed – to bring as many of these states as possible under his unyielding influence.

  Yet at Eastcote, there was also careful monitoring of the airwaves slightly closer to home. In political terms, France was in a state of tumult, and for a while it was looking as though the Communists there were gaining a huge amount of popular traction. More than this, the British codebreakers were detecting and reading quite a bit of secret traffic between Paris and Moscow. The rationale behind such secret diplomatic overtures was not purely one of socialist fervour; it was also to do with elements in the government of post-war France wanting to ensure no resurrection of Nazism. From their point of view, even an occupied Germany was not to be trusted; these French diplomats felt the Soviets might be trusted to give protection. This was several years before the creation of NATO – the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. There was also a huge amount of traffic emanating from French embassies deep within Eastern Europe. In that quiet London suburb, responsibility for eavesdropping on such communications and encryptions went to the volcanic and unpredictable genius Josh Cooper. The idea of this French–Soviet dialogue now seems arrestingly incongruous. Yet France was afflicted with a form of traumatic national schizophrenia, based on the violating nature of Nazi occupation, combined with that widespread yet unspoken knowledge of countless vile betrayals; and this against a backdrop of almost medieval economic catastrophe. In 1946, deep in the French countryside, farmers were starting to hoard food, and in the French cities, the shortages were starting to sharpen the distress and anger that otherwise could not quite find expression. It was not just London watching this turbulence with anxiety; in Washington, the French were being monitored very closely indeed.

  It was the American diplomat George Kennan who had written so influentially about the neurosis of the Soviet leadership – that essential insecurity, the endless watchfulness against attack. Given the horrors visited upon the USSR by the Nazis, Stalin’s lack of trust was in some ways quite understandable. The Soviets had made it quite clear that in the aftermath of the war they wanted to grab back territories which they felt the Axis powers had stolen from them: Poland, parts of Ukraine, the Baltic states. Stalin also sought ultimate control over Czechoslovakia and slabs of eastern Germany too. His thinking was two-fold: the more land that any potential future German army would have to cross before it came within sight of the Russian border, the better. Also, intriguingly, Czechoslovakia a
nd eastern Germany had deposits of uranium. Stalin was soon to acquire the secret of the bomb. It would no longer be held in the ‘sacred trust’, as President Truman had once put it, of the US.

  Western governments, if distrustful, were not about to lift a finger to stop the Russians grabbing Eastern Europe. They could not have done so even if they had wanted to: America might have the atomic bomb – but it was not going to use it in Europe. As to land armies, the effort to bring tired troops home from around the world was still ongoing. Armed forces were being cut back, and not only on the Western side: the Soviet military, too, had its numbers dramatically cut. No-one could afford that many soldiers.

  As Tony Judt wrote: ‘Youthful enthusiasm for a Communist future was widespread among middle-class intellectuals, in East and West alike. And it was accompanied by a distinctive complex of inferiority towards the proletariat, the blue-collar working class. In the immediate post-war years, skilled manual workers were at a premium – a marked contrast with the Depression years still fresh in collective memory. There was coal to be mined; roads, railways, buildings, power lines to be rebuilt or replaced; tools to be manufactured and then applied to the manufacture of other goods. For all these jobs there was a shortage of trained labour… One consequence of this was the universal exaltation of industrial work and workers… Left-leaning, educated middle-class men and women embarrassed by their social origin could assuage their discomfort by abandoning themselves to Communism.’4

  From Britain to Italy, writers, journalists, artists and playwrights were perfectly open in their Communist sympathies. Indeed, there was an abundance of sympathy, too, for all that the Russian people had suffered under that Nazi assault. This was also the age of nationalisation: formerly private business enterprises were being taken under state control. In Britain, these changes were to come in the late 1940s, with the government taking over health provision, the railways, coal-mining, electricity and gas, among other industries. In France, the process went even further. In other words, there was a conscious political effort to de-fang capitalism; a belief that only state control would make business work in a more equitable fashion for the masses.

  And at the centre of this destabilising maelstrom was Germany, a country divided into chunks by the victorious powers and occupied while they all tried to determine its destiny. The Soviets had the east, and in the middle of their zone sat the capital Berlin; the city was itself carved into different quarters for the occupying powers. Germany had been flattened from all directions as the Allies had sought to bring the Nazis to their knees; from entire cities seared and melted in mighty firestorms, to the ruthless cruelty and rapacity of the Soviet army, it was startling that there was any nation left at all. In the midst of this, the British army had begun a programme of attempted ‘de-Nazification’, taking Germans to view concentration camps, forcing them to gaze on the gas chambers. The Soviets and the French looked at the German people and imagined that the violence could very easily begin all over again. The French wanted vast reparations, partly as a means of keeping Germany permanently on its knees. But the Americans and the British took a more pragmatic view. Under the surface, too, the intelligence agencies and Britain’s codebreakers were taking a particularly practical approach to the possibilities that this new landscape was opening up.

  From Britain’s point of view, the proximity of the Soviets was seen as putting deliberate pressure on the West. A diplomat called Christopher Warner said they ‘have decided upon an aggressive policy, based upon militant Communism and Russian chauvinism. They have launched an offensive against social democracy and against this country… the Soviet Government makes co-ordinated use of military, economic, propaganda and political weapons, and also of the Communist ‘religion’. It is submitted, therefore, that we must at once organise and co-ordinate our defences against all these, and that we should not stop short of a defensive-offensive policy.’5

  Part of the success of that policy was successfully following and analysing the secret communications emanating from eastern Germany, and indeed throughout Eastern Europe. In those post-war years, while few may have been anticipating gun battles and tanks deployed once more, there was still the question of hearts and minds. As the perceptive diplomat George Kennan had written of the power-sharing arrangements in occupied Germany, ‘the idea of Germany run jointly with the Russians is a chimera… we have no choice but to lead our (US and UK) section of Germany… to a form of independence so prosperous, so secure, so superior, that the East cannot threaten it… Better a dismembered Germany in which the West, at least, can act as a buffer to the forces of totalitarianism than a united Germany which again brings those forces to the North Sea.’6 Bolshevism was understood by the Foreign Office – and by the more senior codebreakers – as essentially an internationalist movement. Borders were an irrelevance, nation-states meaningless. In some ways, Communism was viewed as a cult; and it was in that period that the codebreakers of Eastcote found that their requests for a larger budget to widen the scale of their operations was granted.

  This was more than a significant gesture; it meant that in the eyes of the government, the codebreakers had justified their status as an independent intelligence-gathering department. From this point, Edward Travis, Nigel de Grey and Edward Hastings would sharpen their efforts to recruit the brightest young minds, while also keeping a very close tab on developments in research departments in the new science of computing. The future was theirs to seize.

  Chapter 7

  ‘This Was when the Penny Dropped’

  The pin-striped commuters – many still with bowler hats – who walked along avenues of plane trees to the underground station at Eastcote must have occasionally allowed themselves to wonder about all the smartly dressed men and women who were making the reverse commute and getting off the trains there first thing in the morning. But the old habits of war persisted; everyone knew that curiosity would only get them so far, and so the big secret estate, hidden at the end of a perfectly ordinary row of suburban houses on Lime Grove, was hardly even a subject for local gossip.

  Codebreakers – some eager to avoid spending an entire evening in their lodging houses – repaired to the pub at the end of their day’s work, and they shared the saloon bar with the commuters who had returned home from their City jobs, and were enjoying a snifter before dinner. They would have known each other by sight, and greeted each other too. But no questions would have been asked. People simply didn’t then.

  On top of this, wrote local historian Susan Toms, ‘because of the nature of the work, staff were cautioned about mixing too much with local people, so most socialising was done with work colleagues.’1 Two pubs in particular were greatly favoured: ‘The Black Horse’ and ‘The Case Is Altered’.

  It is now extraordinary to recall that the existence of MI5 and MI6 was never officially acknowledged in newspapers or on the television until many years after the war; but at least everyone knew broadly that there was a secret service, whether anyone referred to it or not. The existence of GCHQ was buried deeper yet in the shadows; most members of the public would never have thought that work on codes would have had its own separate department. The term ‘GCHQ’ was first made public in 1976 by journalist Duncan Campbell in what was then the very left-leaning London magazine Time Out. Before then: absolute silence. The Eastcote establishment was getting steadily more populous from 1946 onwards, yet not even the most gimlet-eyed Soviet spy could have guessed at the function of these ordinary-looking men and women.

  Nor was the Eastcote site bristling with vast cloud-scratching radio aerials that might have betrayed its purpose; the signals that were being intercepted in locations all over the world were relayed on to other sites, such as Chicksands and Beaumanor, before chattering over the teleprinters of Eastcote. Still operational elsewhere was the special unit buried within Hanslope Park, Northamptonshire: the Diplomatic Wireless Service. To this site intercepted messages and communications were passed on from British embassies and out
-stations around the world.

  But the Eastcote operation had a sporting and social dimension, too, that was rather more open to the wider world. And by way of contrast to the determinedly drab and anonymous blocks and huts of Lime Grove, the codebreakers and interceptors could go and enjoy this rich recreational life at a nearby property that far outstripped Bletchley Park in terms of elegance and grandeur. Swakeleys House, near Ickenham, still stands today: a magnificent piece of 17th-century architecture at which Samuel Pepys is said to have dined. Now it sits close to the busy M40 motorway; back in 1947, it was a rather quieter proposition, disturbed only by the military flights going in and out of the nearby RAF Northolt air base. Swakeleys House, now Grade I listed, with extraordinary panelling and oak staircases, was soon to provide working and living space for a party of Americans; but it was here that the Eastcote operatives came for much-needed relaxation.

  First, there was the club formed for GCHQ’s rugby enthusiasts. As Eastcote veteran Geoff Hardy wrote on the occasion of the club’s 50th anniversary: ‘The club was formed, as the Foreign Office Rugby Football Club, in 1947 when Government Communications Headquarters was based at Eastcote… The idea to form the club was the brainchild of Geoff Hardy and Hooky Walker while sitting in the bar overlooking the grounds of Swakeleys House in Ickenham, the home of the Foreign Office Sports Association. Swakeleys was a large mansion set in some 20 acres (80 hectares) which also had space for about ten residents. Both Geoff and Hooky were among those residents and although Geoff was playing for Wasps and Hooky for Pinner, they decided that life would be much easier if a club could be formed to play rugby in their own backyard.