The Spies of Winter

by Sinclair McKay

  The intelligence alliance was a source of great satisfaction to the Americans. General Charles Cabell, in charge of US Air Force Intelligence (and therefore at the heart of all planning to do with nuclear strike capability) wrote in 1948: ‘At the present time, there is complete interchange of communications intelligence information between the cognizant United States and British agencies. It is not believed that the present arrangements… could be improved.’8

  This was not just a new world of interception; it was also very much about the developing technology of signals intelligence gathering, and electronic methods of cracking cyphers. Gordon Welchman, at that time in London working for the John Lewis Partnership, was gnawingly aware of developments in computer technology. Compared to Britain’s efforts – at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, and Professor Newman’s department at Manchester University – the Americans were clearly striding ahead. Welchman had kept in touch with some American friends he had made in Bletchley days. It was clear to him that his future lay out there. And even though he had left cryptography behind, it was quite clear that someone with his experience would still be a terrific asset to the United States when it came to technology and questions of national security.

  And at Eastcote (or the London Signals Intelligence Centre as it was still being called), Welchman’s old boss Commander Travis was more than happy for him to be farmed out to the US in this way. Since Welchman had been one of the architects of Travis’s new realm in Eastcote, it would have been surprising if this was not so: there was pride (and perhaps an element of healthy competitiveness with the Americans) in sending them such a fine example of British brainpower. However, for an Englishman to be admitted into the most secret spheres of the US state was quite a prospect and, as revealed by Welchman’s biographer Joel Greenberg, Commander Travis provided his old colleague with an unofficial letter of reference. For while Welchman was known within codebreaking circles, he was about to enter quite a different part of America’s labyrinthine defence community.

  ‘Dear Welchman,’ Travis’s letter read, ‘I have recently been reviewing the wartime work of this organisation with particular reference to the contribution of individual members of the organisation and I should like to place on record my appreciation of the important and outstanding part you played. Your quick mastering of a number of different aspects of the work of which you had no previous experience was most noticeable and your inventiveness and ability in the field of applied mathematics and electronics provided a notable contribution to the success of the organisation.

  ‘From 1943 to the end of the war,’ Commander Travis continued, ‘your services as an Assistant Director gave you an opportunity to display your organising and administrative ability of which you took full advantage. I hope your wartime experience will be of real value to you in Civil (sic) life in which I wish you every success.’9 While Welchman’s reputation preceded him, Travis’s warm words were themselves a code to do with reliability and discretion, ideal for procuring transatlantic security clearance. The Welchman family set sail in 1948, and Welchman, with that full and very privileged clearance, went to work for an organisation called MITRE.

  The British and US trade in codebreakers brought romance to Eastcote. The brilliant cryptographer Joan Malone, while coping with colds, hay-fever and the delicate mores of English suburbia, got to know her colleague and fellow American Captain Harold Callaghan rather better. Love blossomed among those grey one-storey huts; marriage followed swiftly thereafter.

  Incidentally, the Americans seemed as forward-looking in their attitude towards the female aptitude for cryptology as Bletchley’s late Dilly Knox, who had always favoured working with women. Back across the Atlantic, at the Arlington Hall cryptography section, more US women were starting to dazzle at this time, including Gene Grabeel. Originally a schoolteacher who grew bored with that work and yearned for something a little more challenging, Grabeel loved her codebreaking life so intensely that she worked with the National Security Agency for a further three decades until the mid-1970s.

  Then there was Wilma Zimmerman Davis, a true pioneer in the field. She graduated in mathematics, and, in common with a number of other female US cryptologists, started out as a teacher. But then Davis took US Navy correspondence courses that focused on cryptography. She found that she had a flair; and others had spotted this aptitude too. In the late 1930s, aged 26, she was recruited into the secret realm in Washington DC by the codebreaking pioneer William Friedman. Just months into her new role, Davis was widowed; and she later said that her colleagues at this time became part of an extended family, such was their support. ‘I was a very lucky person that I happened to be there when I lost my husband,’ Davis said. ‘These people gathered around like family and it made life really worth living and going on.’10

  She gained terrific experience working first on Italian codes and then on the Japanese Purple system, and even for a little time with Chinese codes. Her expertise was such that she was drafted on to the super-exclusive Venona team. Like so many others, Wilma Davis made a couple of efforts during her later career to leave cryptography behind; but she was always lured back to the work. Indeed, she didn’t actually retire until 1973.

  There was also Genevieve Grotjan, the woman now credited by the National Security Agency as having made the first breaks into the Japanese Purple codes. She, too, was drafted on to Venona, and once again provided the agency with an extraordinary means of levering into the codes (though exactly what is still unspecified for security reasons to this day). ‘Miss Grotjan’s brilliant findings in two instances enabled exploitation of communications that provided invaluable intelligence information to policymakers,’ states the agency’s ‘Cryptologic Hall of Honor’ baldly. ‘This information was used by the most senior government officials for decisions in World War Two and the Cold War.’11 Grotjan later married Hyman Feinstein and went off into academia to be a Professor of Mathematics at George Mason university.

  ‘No two independent powers have ever exchanged as many secrets as Britain and America during and since the Second World War,’ observed historian Christopher Andrew.12 What made these exchanges even more extraordinary was the fact that they were so hermetically sealed: outside the respective codebreaking departments, not even a handful of people knew. The average MI5 and MI6 operatives were not privy to the secret.

  Deep in the background, the Venona operation carried on. As well as the British traitors, that enormous tranche of Soviet codes had also ripped away the disguises of American double agents Alger Hiss and Harold Dexter White. Hiss had been a US State Department official. Curiously, his public denouncement as a spy actually came not from the codebreakers but from editor and former Communist Party member Whittaker Chambers who beat them to it at a Senate hearing; when Chambers repeated the accusation of espionage against Hiss on national radio, Hiss sued. But the tactic eventually doubled back on him and he was found guilty of perjury. The point was that even though there were levels of ambiguity and doubt to the Hiss case, it nonetheless seems certain that he was identified in the Venona decrypts. The case of Harold Dexter White was more unsettling: a very senior US Treasury official, Dexter White was among those involved in pulling together the Bretton Woods agreement that put the world’s economies back onto a more stable footing after the war. Again, he was publicly denounced as a spy; more quietly, he was there in that tranche of decrypts. Harold Dexter White never stood trial – but equally, his premature death in 1948, aged 55, meant that he could never deny the successive accusations. There are a few today who maintain that Dexter White’s contacts with Soviet Russia were more innocent than the decrypts appear to suggest.

  The Venona messages contained other vital information as well as cover-names; in particular, they opened a significant window into the tactics and methods of the Soviet NKVD, fore-runners of the KGB, by which agents would receive specific instructions to do with conveying their own intelligence (such as how to get rolls of film to their controlle
rs) or indeed simply meeting up – the types of places and times favoured by controllers to meet their agents. They revealed terminology used by the NKVD that these days sounds like pure B-movie spy material: if an agent was to be ‘de-activated’ for instance, the cover term was ‘put on ice’ or ‘put in cold storage’.

  But given the tension of the times, this went far beyond simple spy-versus-spy stuff; it is no exaggeration to say that the passing to Moscow of America’s nuclear secrets was one of those acts upon which the world of future generations pivoted. Those Manhattan Project secrets – smuggled out of Los Alamos by the scientist Klaus Fuchs, with help from Julius and Ethel Rosenberg – were to give Stalin the key to true power that he needed.

  The story of Klaus Fuchs seems, with the distance of time, many times more extraordinary than the treachery of the Cambridge Spies. Whereas Burgess, Philby, Maclean, Blunt and Cairncross were dealing very often in material involving other spies, Fuchs was handling secret knowledge that would change the tides of power throughout the entire world. Described by one former colleague as a thin-lipped man who never laughed, one might now argue that Fuchs had had little to laugh about. Born in Rüsselheim, Germany, in 1911, he was inspired when young to join the Communist Party. As the thugs of Hitler’s Nazi party became increasingly prominent and confident, Fuchs was targeted, on one occasion being thrown into a river. By 1933, with Hitler now triumphant in the Reichstag, and the Nazis radically transforming Germany’s society and its constitution, he knew that it was time to flee.

  First, Fuchs went to Paris; then he came across to England. A gifted physicist, he went to study at Bristol under Nevill Mott; it was there that he gained a doctorate. Later, he moved to Edinburgh University to study under Max Born. These were extraordinary years in the realms of physics; the possibilities suggested by quantum theory were being explored. As art had modernism and futurism, so physics also came to point to a radically different kind of world.

  Then, with the outbreak of war, came the official British crackdown on foreign-born nationals – most notably German citizens. Doctor Fuchs was interned along with many fellow countrymen, first on the Isle of Man, and then across the Atlantic in Canada. But the Canadian exile lasted little more than six months in the latter part of 1940; in 1941, Dr Fuchs was permitted to return to Britain.

  His story from this point shows the inevitable shortcomings of both signals intelligence and human intelligence. The talented Fuchs was recruited by Rudolf Peierls to work on what sounded a perfectly ordinary war project: ‘Tube Alloys’. It was very far from being ordinary. This was the cover-name for Britain’s effort to develop the atomic bomb. Fuchs, having signed the Official Secrets Act, was also given British nationality; no sounder precautions were felt to be necessary.

  It was a serious mistake on the part of the British. Indeed, as soon as he had been drafted into Tube Alloys in 1941, Fuchs had determined that the Soviet Union should share in this awful new power. His decision came at around the point that the Germans had consigned the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union to the flames and launched their invasion of Russia. It is possible to see the anguished idealism that would lead a young Communist to seek to do anything to help the bloc that he considered to hold the prospects for a brighter, cleaner future.

  And so it was that Fuchs had made early contact with the Soviets in London, and established regular meetings where he passed everything on. Around this time, John Cairncross, who was working at Bletchley, was also meeting up on a regular basis on the outskirts of London with Soviet agents. It seems quite surprising that Fuchs was not being monitored; what came next was more startling still.

  By 1943, Fuchs and Rudolf Peierls were invited by the Americans to join forces. The scientists set sail for the US, working first in New York and then at Los Alamos deep in New Mexico, on what was being termed the Manhattan Project.

  Dr Fuchs was to become more than just a valued colleague: presiding genius Robert Oppenheimer had frequent close and detailed conversations with him. And here we might see some of Fuchs’s native courage, no matter where one stands on his actions. For he contrived to start getting secrets out of the most secure site on earth. Here was a man working not merely with equations on a blackboard, but next to the physical reality of the bomb itself. Obviously, security in and out of the Los Alamos site was extraordinarily tight, but Fuchs had no need to smuggle reams of documents. He had a diamond-sharp mind.

  And so it was, after all those detailed discussions and debates with Oppenheimer, that Fuchs would then leave the base, travel to another small, obscure town in New Mexico, and there meet with his Soviet contact. The contact would make notes; Fuchs had the fine detail memorised – unimaginably fine, ranging from the critical mass of fissile material to the complex inner workings of the bomb structure. He simply felt it his duty: this was the technology that was going to decide the future of the world, and there was no way that the Soviet Union could be allowed to fall behind in the arms race.

  His treachery would eventually be uncovered; but his unmasking would come only after the entire world had stopped in shock when Stalin detonated the Soviet bomb.

  In the meantime, Fuchs returned to England after the war, welcomed closer than ever into an appreciative scientific community. Indeed, he was made head of the Theoretical Physics Division at the brand new Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell. Fuchs also sat on many advisory committees, and he continually advised the need for ever tighter security around Britain’s own burgeoning nuclear projects.

  In the end, it was the Venona codebreakers who revealed his activities; old messages would eventually be unscrambled that made references to Los Alamos. Given the limited numbers of people who had that sort of high-level access, his identity was finally pinpointed and GCHQ helped ensure, in circumstances of the greatest secrecy, that this intelligence was passed to MI5. They would also uncover a startling postscript to the Fuchs story.

  In espionage terms, the grab for the bomb was not the only Soviet gambit uncovered by the Venona programme. There was huge Soviet appetite for learning via espionage about the nascent field of jet-engine technology, for instance; or in the advances made in the area of rocket science. The Soviets were desperate to know more about the development of jet aircraft, and the new capabilities that such materiel might bring. The atomic secret was one thing; but to acquire as well the means to deliver such doomsday weapons, in a matter of minutes, either from screamingly fast planes, or by missiles that could fly across countries… That would instantly change the landscape of power.

  But incredibly, the Venona secret itself was also compromised, in circumstances that were almost blackly comic. For among the very few who were invited in on the intelligence that these Soviet codes had been cracked were in fact two undercover Soviet agents. In the US, that agent was Elizabeth Bentley. For the British, it was the Cambridge Spy Kim Philby.

  London and the south-east of England formed an extremely important axis: the Venona decrypts also revealed that there was a female agent working in the area of Oxford, who was key in passing on signals from Klaus Fuchs without her secret radio equipment being detected. In the messages, she was referred to as SONIA (and later acquired the nickname ‘Red Sonia’). This was Ursula Beurton, who had managed to evade the attentions of the Radio Security Service by concealing a large transmitter within a stone garden wall.

  This was not abstract paranoia, or a deliberate demonising of the Eastern Bloc. Rather, there was real anxiety. Venona exposed the most frightening vulnerability – first, as to the extent to which the Soviets had captured the hearts and minds of so many key British and American operatives; and second, the way that this capture had enabled the Soviets to acquire the gift of nuclear firepower. In Britain, even some regarded as being far to the left looked with misgivings across the Channel, into the darkness of that smouldering, smashed-up continent. They could hear the approach of the Soviet tanks from the east. Daily, they would read reports about Soviet progr
ess in countries such as Hungary and Romania: the machinations by which elected politicians were gradually being replaced with Soviet sympathisers, making it easier for the Kremlin to absorb fresh territory without even firing a shot. And it was in Germany that all these anxieties would reach an early pitch, in the 1948 crisis that marked the start of open, formal hostilities in the Cold War. The secret listeners feeding messages back to the London Signals Intelligence Centre at Eastcote were intercepting communications that could decide the fate of Europe for an age to come.

  Chapter Nine

  The Torn City

  The black-and-white photographs of ruined Germany are almost over-familiar now: the hollowed-out wrecks of churches, of offices, of railway stations. Such images are less familiar in full-colour. There is something quite extraordinary about seeing a photograph of a young woman in a white skirt walk along a street containing only the jagged shells of buildings, while above her, the summer sky glows with richest blue. If the Third World War was to have broken out at the end of the 1940s, then this land would have been one of the most likely sparking points. The British, Americans, French and Soviets each had their own sectors of Germany to govern and more particularly, to guard. But the Western powers had the added tension created by Stalin’s desire to see Germany swallowed whole and subsumed into the Soviet Union.

  This was the situation that the men and women at the London Signals Intelligence Centre or GCHQ were monitoring with particular care. They had been watching closely as so many of the smaller Eastern European states fell into Stalin’s close grip. They had also been observing the situation in Germany as the process of ‘de-Nazifying’ the population unfolded. There were also the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi leadership. As historian Tony Judt observed, one crucial factor threatened to undermine the sense that these trials were truly just, and that was the presence among the judging authorities of Soviets. The behaviour of the Soviet army on its rampage through to Berlin was hardly a secret; but their atrocities went unremarked. As the diplomat George Kennan said: ‘The only implication this procedure could convey was, after all, that such crimes were justifiable and forgivable when committed by the leaders of one government, under one set of circumstances, but unjustifiable and unforgivable, and to be punished by death, when committed by another government under another set of circumstances.’1