The Spies of Winter

by Sinclair McKay

  And so it was, in the late 1940s, that Swanborough turned his focus back to the Soviets. The main listening station at Cheadle was on the Staffordshire moors, under wide open skies. Now the local countryside around there is awash with millionaire footballers; for the secret listeners in the rather quieter 1940s, entertainment would have come at local hops rather than neon nightclubs.

  Overall this was a world in which interceptors – who had spent the war reporting for duty in civilian clothes – now found themselves at the other end of the conflict in uniform, and tracking the signals which arose from an entirely new kind of international tension.

  But they were not alone. The relationship between the British and the American codebreaking and interception operatives was more than simply warm. On a personal level, there was often great delight taken in the friendships forged throughout those years. And as much as the young British codebreakers loved being introduced to an America that they had only previously seen and dreamed about on cinema screens, the Americans who came over to Britain to help with the work at Eastcote and other sights also found their own preconceptions sometimes hilariously confirmed. The land of the tea-drinkers – damp, cold, drafty and drab – was not without its own perverse attractions. And for both sides, there was also a measure of comfort; a sense of rightness and indeed stability when facing a world that was still dangerously poised on the edge of a larger conflict.

  Chapter Eight

  They Gathered around like Family

  By the late 1940s, it was a relationship that had become unprecedentedly intimate; and it was striking to consider that this closeness had been sparked in circumstances that were almost picturesque, if not downright romantic: that snowy January midnight in 1941 when four senior US cryptologists had arrived, in the thick darkness of the blackout, at the front door of Bletchley Park. These Americans had brought with them a technological marvel: the machine they had constructed to combat the Japanese cypher system. Bletchley’s director Alastair Denniston offered his guests sherry in the quiet book-lined study that was his office. Given that at the time America was still pretty much one year away from joining the war, this initial meeting of minds was truly remarkable; doubly so given the inevitable rivalry between the two nations. After the war, there had been some in Washington DC who wanted to see this continuing romance between the two nation’s codebreakers cooled down. Yet – even aside from the triumph of Venona – the relationship continued to be irresistibly fruitful.

  For instance, in 1946, the British and Americans had started working together on cracking Soviet traffic under the name ‘Operation Bourbon’, later renamed ‘Rattan’. This success was followed by an operation named ‘Caviar’, in which inroads were made against a Soviet teleprinter system.

  After this came what was called the ‘Poet’ operation. The Soviet armed forces’ machine cyphers were broken by a team at Eastcote, and the system of doing so was christened ‘Coleridge’. According to intelligence historian Michael Smith, the equipment being used by the Russians in this instance bore a useful similarity to the ‘Hagelin’ electric encryption machines used by the Swedes. This was one of the moments when the American liaison officers working in London looked at the British – or more specifically, in this case, at Hugh Alexander, who had headed up the ‘Coleridge’ assault – and understood the depth of brilliance that they were working with. According to a communication sent back to Washington in the spring of 1947, Alexander’s ‘Coleridge’ codebreak – which opened a window into a world of Soviet administration, which in turn yielded invaluable intelligence about military numbers and priorities – was ‘the most important, high-level system from which current intelligence may be produced and is so in fact regarded here’.1

  One of the Americans working at Eastcote who joined in with the Poet operation – branching off into another decryption project, ‘Longfellow’ – was a wonderfully engaging mathematician whose name is now venerated by UFO conspiracy theorists the world over. Howard H Campaigne – who had worked under Professor Max Newman and who was, later in his career in America, to do so much to push computer technology along – wrote a paper in the late 1960s which came to light several years ago. Or, at least, a fragment of the paper surfaced. It was about coded messages from a most unusual source. ‘Recently a series of radio messages was heard coming from outer space,’ Campaigne wrote in an enjoyably deadpan – even mischievous – introduction. The fragment of his paper does not indicate whether these messages are set as a hypothetical test by himself or not, but the way he frames the effort to decode the messages, broken into fragments, suggests a sly attention-grabbing way into a mathematical riddle as opposed to an extraordinary revelation that will alter the course of human history.

  In conversation with a National Security Agency colleague in the 1980s, Campaigne was happy to muse on the rather more terrestrial concerns that he had faced in his cryptography. He was quite candid about how US codebreakers had identified the need to break into Soviet cyphers some distance before the end of the war. ‘President Roosevelt had said that we were not at war with Russia and we wouldn’t study their codes. But there were people down the line who thought that was very unwise.’

  But the study of Soviet messages was kept extremely low-key, for understandable reasons. ‘It was extremely modest,’ Campaigne said. ‘We did a little intercept. We had great difficulty covering up for our intercept stations. And practically all we had was a few samples of traffic.’

  On top of this – and despite the unprecedentedly close relationship between the US and UK codebreakers – he also confessed that there had been some sneaky spying upon the affairs of their British friends. ‘Well, we looked a little at some of their things,’ Campaigne noted. ‘It really wasn’t an intelligence effort. It was more a cryptographic monitoring… the British were using an encyphered code for the convoy thing and we were convinced that the Germans were reading it. And we told them that and it was hard to persuade them that it was true.

  ‘We also got hold of a British machine,’ he continued. Professor Campaigne was referring to the Typex encyphering machine which in some ways mirrored the workings of the German Enigma. ‘And of course we took it apart and examined it with great interest… we did do some analysis of the British cypher machine without telling them. Looking for weaknesses and we didn’t uncover anything. It was a pretty secure device really.’2

  In drizzly 1940s Eastcote, American fascination – and sometimes bewilderment – at British life continued. According to security expert Gordon Corera, one especially beguiling detail concerned official struggles with ramblers. Around Eastcote – and other listening stations buried rather deeper in England’s sylvan glades – there was a criss-crossing network of ancient footpaths and rights of way dating back centuries. Under the new Labour government, which viewed the rights of ordinary man as trumping those of the landed aristocracy, there were a great number of walkers who were starting to assert their rights to use them, no matter how close these footpaths may have been to secret establishments. There was nothing in America to quite match the ferocious determination of the ramblers and their expertise on the right to march along certain by-ways; by contrast, in the US, such people would be warned off forbidden land with guns.

  Some footpaths in the most extraordinarily sensitive areas remained open, including one, dating all the way back to 1565, that ran between two blocks of the Eastcote establishment. Obviously there was security fencing and walls but nevertheless, the proximity to the secret work was startling. Incidentally, things are just as free and easy now for walkers: the site of so-called GCHQ Bude in Cornwall, featuring an array of satellite dishes, has the South West Coast Path running alongside it, the equivalent of a walkers’ motorway. Meanwhile, the giant golf-ball surveillance structures at Fylingdales in Yorkshire are of themselves something of a tourist attraction for ramblers. Obviously one cannot wander around the site itself, but about ten years ago the Ministry of Defence opened up tracts of the North York Moors sur
rounding the installation that had, for some decades, been forbidden territory to the public. In any event, many codebreakers and secret listeners were themselves keen walkers: Christopher Barnes at Beaumanor Hall in Northamptonshire relished the countryside all around; Alan Turing made a habit of running through the countryside around Hanslope Park. As it happens, that particular park is very much barred to walkers now; a most unusual defeat for the rambling community. Walking groups post complaining blogs about having to circumnavigate the estate, but there are some areas that are still deemed too clandestine to risk it.

  In cultural terms, what was slightly more difficult for the Americans coming to 1940s monochrome Britain was the greatly reduced standard of living. For US cryptographers such as Joan Malone, who had been brought over to work alongside veteran British cryptographer William Bodsworth, this new world of fish paste, of processed ham, of scarce to non-existent luxury items, must have been quite an ordeal after the unthinking plenty of Virginia. This was a landscape not merely of austerity, but of rationing even more ferocious than that seen during the war. Added to this was the spectacularly biting winter of 1947: the snow came down relentlessly, never clearing. Rather unkindly, Joan Malone was given the nickname ‘Sneezy’. The unconditioned air in the Eastcote blocks, together with the unpleasantly chilly weather, left her a martyr to her nose. The summer months were not much better: leafy Eastcote, with all its surrounding parks, made her hay-fever a nightmare.

  Added to this particular discomfort were the wider privations: the continual shortages of coal and fuel, combined with the coupons needed to buy any kind of new clothing. This was a time when women were forced to make themselves garments out of old blankets. Joan Malone, together with her small accompanying team of American codebreakers, had come from a burgeoning consumerist paradise, where orange juice and fresh coffee were expected, to a somnolent London suburb where such things had never been known; a suburb where everything was shut all day Sunday, and on Wednesday afternoons too. The proximity of the West End would only have been a partial consolation, since the city was still a soot-smirched parade of British Restaurants and frowsy pubs.

  The pairing of Joan Malone – a formidably skilled analyst and linguist – with British codebreaker Bodsworth, himself a polyglot, in some ways symbolised the entire US–UK relationship. Here was an old-school male academic, a product of the traditional English education system, sparking with a woman who in some ways represented a future of equality, and certainly a future of growing American dominance.

  A key figure in forging a strong post-war partnership with these bright Americans was Group Captain Eric Jones. At the start of his codebreaking career, Jones had attracted the attention of those from backgrounds far more genteel than his own. His intellectual trajectory, when he had been recruited from Air Ministry intelligence to Bletchley Park in 1942, was strikingly different to that of the off-the-wall academics roaming the premises. Although fiercely bright, Jones was not a university man. Indeed, he had left school at the age of 15. He joined his family’s textile firm and then left that by the age of 18, in order to start up his own business independently. A terrific success he made of it too; and it was only the urgency of war that made him hand it over to associates, aged just 33. He might not have been an Oxbridge classicist – Jones attended the King’s School in Macclesfield – but his wider experience clearly set him up fantastically well for the extraordinary life that he was to lead. At Bletchley, he had been placed in temporary charge of Hut 3 and Luftwaffe decrypts; and this, in turn, led to permanent leadership. Commander Travis had been immediately impressed not merely with Jones’s intelligence, but also by the way that he could bring a semblance of order to all the jostling, wild intellects working in that hut; an easy knack for leadership based on a charisma that many were to pay tribute to across the years.

  Jones also had a gift for organising intelligence: in 1945, he had been sent to Washington DC to act as the representative of British Signals Intelligence. As in Britain, his straightforward and easy manner won him good friends – crucial to the quite extraordinary level of trust that evolved between America and Britain. Jones had both laser-beam intelligence and also a manner that was found universally pleasing. Chess champion Stuart Milner-Barry wrote of him: ‘Jones was not a scholar or an academic; I suppose he must have had some knowledge of German but primarily he was a businessman coming from… Lancashire. He was a genuinely modest man who regarded himself as having little to contribute compared with the boffins with whom he was surrounded; in fact he was a first-rate administrator who was liked and trusted by everyone.’3

  Codebreaker William Millward also paid tribute to Jones’s awesome powers of diplomacy: ‘He had the qualities of principle, strength of character, and a firm grasp of essentials which enabled him to settle most of the tiresome intrigues and controversies.’4 Ralph Bennett described him as ‘firm but understanding’ meaning that everyone could concentrate on their work ‘undisturbed by internal conflict’.5

  Jones’s goal in Washington was to work on cementing an intelligence liaison – and it was in large part through his efforts that America and Britain came to seal their secret codebreaking alliance, an arrangement that still holds firm today. Before then, he had worked with the US codebreaker Telford Taylor who remembered him with great fondness: ‘Group Captain Eric Jones was personally impressive and, at first, all business, but eventually became a friend whom I greatly admired.’6

  A photographic portrait of Sir Eric Jones taken in 1957 – by which time he had been director of GCHQ for some years – now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. It shows a handsome, amused figure, slightly loud of suit but neat of hair. Sir Eric was valued on both sides of the Atlantic for his directness. Given his success in the field of commerce, it would not have been unreasonable to have expected him, after the war, to return to the profitable business that he had founded. But in 1946, he told an American colleague that he was keen ‘to stay in the racket’.7

  Initially, that top-secret UK–USA agreement excluded Britain’s dominions such as Canada, New Zealand, Australia. They were not even to be privy to the fact that there was such an agreement. And they were not considered for intelligence-sharing because there was concern over how tight security could be over such wide dissemination. But by 1946, following a two-week conference, all that was to change. It was seen as perverse to lock out such formidable intelligence harvesters.

  These wrangles aside, this secret alliance opened up vast prospects. Meetings took place in London in 1946, in a smart square just to the north of Marble Arch. Among those sitting in was Sir Stewart Menzies, the head of MI6; and for the Americans, Joseph Wenger. According to Richard Aldrich, when the fine print of negotiations ran into obstacles, it was Menzies who prescribed the age-old British technique for solving such difficulties: he took the American delegation to his St James’s club, White’s, and treated them to a wine-filled lunch. Talks got going again in a more relaxed frame. And then, afterwards, came the signing of the actual agreement: this was carried out, on the British side, by Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Marr-Johnson and on the American by General Hoyt Vandenburg.

  Only recently did GCHQ finally acknowledge officially that any such alliance was formed; it was a state secret for over 60 years. There were some good reasons for this: apart from anything else, the blending and sharing of such expertise rendered it an astoundingly powerful force, whereas it was very much in the interests of both Britain and America throughout the entire course of the Cold War that the Soviets should underestimate their abilities and reach.

  After the 1946 agreement, the Americans and the British and the dominions between them were listening in on every last square mile of earth. And in strategic terms, the Americans at this stage were leaning heavily on the British; thanks to the UK–USA alliance, they would have regular, secure access to the streams of intelligence being produced by listening stations from Colombo to Hong Kong to Cyprus to Sarafand. In the Indian operation, various listening ou
t-stations were pulling in signals many miles to the north, monitoring all Soviet activity near the borders of Asia with microscopic closeness. Equally, any Soviet transmissions in the Black Sea or the Caspian Sea was being picked up by the British in the Mediterranean.

  In archival terms, vast amounts are still being withheld in the UK; in America, slightly more has become available. There are, for instance, very warm letters from US senior codebreaker William F Friedman to Group Captain Eric Jones which the authorities have now placed in the public domain. The correspondence shows an ease and a lightness and a strong sense of mutual respect; there is none of the usually salty efforts on both sides to establish a tone of superiority. Particularly fruitful during this period were the regular bundles of intelligence briefings to do with Russian military movements and build-ups that were passed across the Atlantic. For while there had been some problems with decyphering Soviet military and intelligence codes – and there were far worse problems to come – there was also, by way of consolation, the great innovation of Bletchley Park’s Gordon Welchman: the forensic examination of traffic analysis. That analytical beam was now turned on all corners of the Soviet empire.

  For on a day-to-day basis, soldiers had to communicate with soldiers, units with units. And in listening bases across the world, the young British men working the intercepting radios were fast becoming experts in being able to tell individual Soviet radio operators; each operator had their own unique ‘fist’, as distinctive as a walk or a voice. And it wasn’t only the individual techniques for sending Morse messages, it was also the way that these Russian radio operators would communicate with each other outside the official messages being sent. Traffic analysis also yielded up huge amounts of geographical information; by means of direction finding, one could monitor from where messages were being sent, whether certain units were on the move, and where to.