The Spies of Winter

by Sinclair McKay

But then, several years later in the mid-1950s, Britain’s attempt to seize the Suez Canal back from Egypt’s Colonel Nasser, resulting in the country being roundly humiliated on the world stage, led to a turning-point further east. The Ceylonese authorities – infuriated by what they had seen as a contemptible imperial manoeuvre, and doubly furious that British naval ships had refuelled in Colombo – announced that they no longer wanted the British in their territory. Britain tried in vain to protest. The post-colonial slide seemed inexorable.

  Elsewhere in the region, that process was rapid and abrupt; particularly so in Burma, where so many had fought such horrific battles in the humid jungles against the Japanese. It had been a war of filthy, terrifying forest skirmishes, of monsoons, vampire-like insects and suffocating heat, of untidy gunshots and bayonets thrust deep into guts. For the secret listeners of the Y Service, tracking and monitoring every last Japanese transmission, the territory brought all kinds of technical difficulties. Dennis Underwood recalled how, as a young Y Service operative in 1945, Burma was a prospect of ‘constant damp, always sweaty, plagued with prickly heat, message pads sticking to hands and wrists etc’. Then there were the tropical storms – many secret interceptors had hearing problems in later life. ‘The lightning would blow the fuses in the antennae feeds so that we lost our stations,’ recalled Underwood. ‘Better than having the sets burned out though.’7 The facilities proved a little more reliable (and better protected from the pervasive moisture) in the post-war years.

  Strikingly enough, one codebreaker – Jean Valentine, the Wren who had been posted to HMS Anderson to work on Japanese codes – had in the interim returned to England with Clive Rooke, her husband-to-be; they married, lived in a London pock-marked by bomb-sites – and decided to move back east once more, to live in Burma’s capital Rangoon. Clive Rooke had flown with the RAF; and now, as a commercial pilot with BOAC, the couple could transfer to this new territory and enjoy, in comparison to the general population, quite spectacular luxury (certainly when compared to the soot and the cold of London). Jean and Clive lived in a house with servants, which was handy for when it came to dealing with some of the local wildlife. ‘I remember going into my bedroom one evening and between the bathroom and the dressing room, there was a snake coiled up,’ recalled Jean. ‘So I yelled for the boy [a servant] to come and deal with it – which he did – and then when I went off to bed, I found the snake’s mate coiled up in the dressing room.’

  But Burma was wildly volatile: there was the simmering genesis of a civil war between the (largely) coastal- and lowland-dwelling Burmese and the Karens, communities who lived in the hillier territories and who were often Anglophile – to the extent that it was said that they received help from former British officers when it came to planning insurrection. Developments in India had led a charismatic young Burmese soldier called Aung San to take up the cause of independence with Britain, and he did so in the full expectation that he would be able to take full control from that point onwards. According to some, the British had done an unusually bad job of governing Burma; indeed, the authorities had, through neglect and ineptness, contributed greatly to poverty and crime. Unlike India, the civil service was ramshackle, there was little in the way of public transport and even though food was plentiful, its distribution was frequently ropey.

  Nonetheless, it was convenient for the British to try and maintain some kind of a toehold, and the Burmese and the Foreign Office were able to negotiate an understanding. After the signing of an independence agreement, Aung San’s newly elected government would enjoy the protection of the British military for three more years. In return, of course, the British would have continued use of air bases and related stations. But this post-colonial agreement soon turned to bloodshed: in 1947, during a meeting of Parliament, Aung San and six of his cabinet colleagues were assassinated. The man behind the mass murder was swiftly identified as Aung San’s chief political rival U Saw, who had a few years previously met with Winston Churchill to discuss Burma’s future. The British authorities, in their last few weeks of colonial rule, put U Saw on trial. He was found guilty and sentenced to hang. It later emerged that U Saw and his political allies were being supplied with arms by renegade British officers, who were also giving weaponry to members of the Karen community.

  But Burma, despite its border with China, was not quite so crucial to British interests as the territory of Malaya and Singapore, both recently wrested back from the Japanese. Indeed, Malaya was particularly important to Britain not just in defence terms, but also economically. Unlike India and Pakistan, this region, which was rich in rubber as well as other materials and minerals, still contributed hefty sums of money to the UK Treasury.

  And the new-found independence of India and Pakistan was also to bring a fresh and unexpected difficulty to British security: both nations, utterly hostile to one another, were asking Britain to provide protection in various forms. It was an almost impossibly knotty dilemma for the Foreign and Colonial Office. To persuade India to stay within the Commonwealth – and thus at least spare a hole being punched in Britain’s economy – it would be necessary to apply a great deal of charm and generosity and practical aid: specifically, of a military nature. Yet at the same time, Pakistan – with its hyper-sensitive borders, and its extreme proximity to the Soviet sphere of influence – needed to be kept happy, too. Supplying help and expertise to both sides, without the other knowing, would not be an ideal solution.

  For Edward Travis and Nigel de Grey back at Eastcote, all these were matters of the highest seriousness, and they also in part illustrated the growing importance of their particular espionage speciality. One could fill Pakistan – from its mesmerising cities to its remotest rural communities – with secret agents on the ground, but there would still only be a limited amount of useful intelligence that they would be able to report back. Intercept stations, on the other hand, would enable the codebreakers to listen to Stalinist Russia’s every heartbeat, across the vast plains and wastes with their industrial centres, particularly in the sensitive region from Siberia to Kazakhstan. Just as the West was beginning to become increasingly aware of its dependence on Middle Eastern oilfields, so too the Soviet Union would want to open up fresh lines of fuel to facilitate its modernisation. The job of what was still the London Signals Intelligence Centre was to listen out for the first indications of any incursion or infiltration, first into Pakistan, and then into the oilfields to the south and west of it. The process of decolonisation would have had an inevitable untidiness whatever happened: how does one dismantle a century of institutions overnight? But India and Pakistan were in what the Foreign Office termed the ‘north tier’ – countries adjoining Stalin’s empire whose integrity was now under constant threat.

  Travis and de Grey also had an additional pressure: a growing conviction among British and American military figures that the Third World War was a matter of months away. There were many who thought that it would happen no matter what: there were cracks and fissures, geopolitical fault lines stretching right the way around the globe. One of the agonies for the personnel at Eastcote at that time was that – by comparison – the Second World War itself had been simple. There had been a central problem to solve – either in the form of Enigma, Tunny, the Japanese JN-25 – and though the intellectual gymnastics required were awesome, the results were immediately effective. Here, in this suburb at the end of the Piccadilly Line, receiving bundles of transmissions from agitated, angry regions far across the world, the codebreakers were looking not so much at a Cold War as a kind of Ghost War. This was not like tracking the movements of U-Boats, or eavesdropping on Panzer divisions. This was trying to keep tabs on a mighty empire, that of Stalin’s Russia, without ever being entirely certain what the intentions of that empire were.

  This was a world of new regimes and new governments, many of which were far from being stable. And between 1947 and 1948, they also faced something of an unexpected internal development, to do with the culmination of an ancien
t Middle Eastern conflict.

  Chapter Eleven

  Exodus

  It has been pointed out that one of the dark ironies of the codebreaking effort during the Second World War was that if the Germans had recruited their country’s finest Jewish minds – as opposed to murdering them – then their cryptological departments would have been rather more successful. Certainly, Bletchley Park had been boosted by a great range of hugely talented Jewish recruits; many stayed on after the war to help found the new GCHQ. And many of those who left still maintained contact with the world of cryptology. But that is not to say that the experience of the Jewish codebreakers was universally comfortable. For some, the post-war landscape was to bring unexpected complications.

  Yet the ethos of this new GCHQ – as well as its approach to the most intransigent problems – would much later find a powerful echo in Israel’s extraordinarily effective modern equivalent: the intelligence department called Unit 8200. Indeed, some of the key philosophical lessons of the British codebreaking operation are still very much in place in Israel.

  Among the first Jewish recruits to have been drawn to the codebreaking effort in 1939 had been Miriam Rothschild, a brilliant biologist, sister of Jacob and a member of the famous banking family. There was Professor Max Newman, the Cambridge mathematician who had been a tutor to the young Alan Turing. Among the Wrens was Ruth Bourne who, after having sat an intelligence test, guessed very quickly what line of work she was going to be ushered into. ‘I had read enough spy novels,’ she said. She added that for her, the urgency of helping the war effort had an extra dimension: the prospect of the Nazis invading Britain literally gave her nightmares.

  Among the young undergraduates lured in from university were Walter Eytan and his brother Ernest. They had changed their name from Ettinghausen; and they had the distinction of being the only German-born men to work at Bletchley Park.

  ‘The security clearance must have been singularly perceptive,’ Walter Eytan wrote, ‘since such antecedents might so easily have disqualified us for BP, and in the United States certainly would have done. I suppose the responsible officer, knowing or discovering that we were Jews, must have concluded, correctly, that we had an extra interest in fighting Hitler, and therefore might be even more ardent than the others at our BP work.’1

  The nature of the war work was such that Eytan’s dramatic post-war destiny was formed in that crucible. ‘I may be the only one’, he wrote, ‘who will recall a peculiarly poignant moment when in late 1943 or early 1944 we intercepted a signal from a small German commissioned vessel in the Aegean, reporting that it was transporting Jews, I think from Rhodes or Kos, en route for Piraeus ‘zur Endlösung’ (‘for the final solution’). I had never seen or heard this expression before, but instinctively I knew what it must mean, and I have never forgotten that moment. I did not remark on it particularly to the others who were on duty at the time,’ continued Eytan, ‘perhaps not even to my brother – and of course never referred to it outside of BP, but it left its mark – down to the present day.’2

  At Bletchley, Walter and Ernest had formed a Zionist society, and held many meetings and discussions over dinners and drinks. The overarching theme was, of course, the necessity of forming an Israeli state after the war: how it was to be achieved, how the mass immigration could be managed. Strikingly, these discussions – and the passions fomented – were to affect the careers of both brothers in profound ways.

  With the war over, the Eytans elected to stay on with the codebreaking operation. With the move to Eastcote, Ernest became what was termed an ‘intelligence librarian’. This was, in part, the crucial role of building up a codebreakers’ library, to help pinpoint certain technical recurring terms emerging from decrypts. These could be anything from abstruse military details to the richer corners of cultural life. Meanwhile, his brother Walter Eytan’s own life was very shortly to take a turn for the more dramatic.

  In 1946 – as the wider world absorbed the horror of what had happened in Europe, and the abject conditions that the survivors were living in – Walter Eytan left GCHQ and took himself to Palestine. There was a state to be founded and he was determined to be in there at the very beginning of it.

  In wider terms, the increasing tension and outbreaks of violence in Palestine created a fascinating fault line for the codebreakers and interceptors both in Britain – which of course still had the mandate over the territory – and in America too. Ever since the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the British government had been committed in principle to the establishment of a homeland for Jewish people. Yet in the intervening years, it had struggled – with the help of the military and the RAF – to try to keep the peace in the territory between warring Jews and Arabs. Sometimes the British methods – implemented against both sides – were both clumsy and casually brutal: for instance, the aerial bombing of settlements using increasingly sophisticated aviation and firepower. The result was that the British were ardently hated. Come the end of the war and it was clear that to a great many Jewish people, there was simply no time to be lost. Millions had been foully slaughtered; the Nazis had aimed to murder every single Jew. Now, in this new era of Soviet control of Eastern Europe, the world was scarcely any safer.

  Yet the British were equally determined to try and halt the Jewish exodus that was fast gathering pace, the fishing boats setting sail across the Mediterranean from French ports, heading for the Palestinian port of Haifa. What the government wanted above all else was stability – not least for its own interests. The Chiefs of Staff had stated that ‘it was essential to the security of the British Commonwealth to maintain our position in the Middle East in peace and to defend it in war’. There was paranoia about Soviet infiltration across the region through agents in Egypt’s capital Cairo; and others lurking in Jerusalem. On top of this, Britain was fast running out of money. The foreign secretary Ernest Bevin had suggested moving military and air force operations from Cairo to Mombasa – air technology had greatly improved, it was argued, so there was scarcely any more need to maintain a costly army in Egypt. The idea was abandoned, not least because it was at the same time becoming increasingly apparent how bountiful the oil-fields of nearby Saudi Arabia would prove; the Middle East was becoming indispensable to the economies of Europe and America.

  And this was another reason why the British started behaving so viciously towards Jewish refugees: it was in part the diplomatic need to keep the ever more powerful Arabs on side. And so, as the refugee boats approached the coast of Palestine, British naval vessels headed them off, and took all those on board prisoner. These unfortunate refugees were then conveyed as previously mentioned, to a prison camp on Cyprus. The symmetry with the concentration camps was hideous; but to the British government, it was a problem seemingly without an answer. Before the war had ended, Attlee’s Labour Party had largely been committed to the idea of mass Jewish immigration of around 100,000 people and the creation of a Jewish state. Now, all was in confused flux. There were some Jews calling for a shared ‘motherland’ for two Semitic peoples – Jews and Arabs alike. There were even some Arab scholars who were calling for a Jewish state, though one in which Arabs had full rights. But all this was against a decades-long backdrop of violence between the Arabs and Jews. And with British intransigence, it was a group of Jewish terrorists who were to step that violence up.

  The Irgun group was responsible for the 1946 atrocity of the blowing up of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, in which 91 people – Arab and Jewish and British – were killed. The British army stationed in Palestine went after Irgun and three of the group’s operatives were executed. Their comrades had little doubt what to do next. Two British sergeants were kidnapped by Irgun – and were themselves hanged. The atmosphere in Palestine, for Arabs, Jews and ordinary British soldiers, was razor-edged.

  America, and President Truman, were not helping. Truman had demanded that Palestine be opened up to hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees. This led to a rare explosion of exasperation f
rom Clement Attlee, who pointed out, in a pained fashion, that America would have no responsibility for then trying to keep the peace between Arabs and the increased numbers of Jews. The foreign secretary Ernest Bevin went rather further, insisting that Truman had only made this declaration because he did not want thousands of Jewish refugees turning up in New York.

  In the midst of all this violence and hatred – the Zionist Stern gang terrorising Arabs, Arabs murdering Jews – arrived Walter Eytan. After all those years decoding German messages of horror, and after the evenings of Zionist discussion with Joe Gillis and others, he could at last see where his destiny lay. Indeed, of all the Jewish codebreakers at Bletchley, Eytan’s subsequent career was the most spectacular.

  On arrival in Palestine, he joined what was in essence the Israeli government-in-waiting, called the Jewish Agency. Among Eytan’s intellectual gifts was a dazzling flair for languages; and it was not long before he was becoming indispensable on the diplomatic front. He secured a position working for future Israeli premier Golda Meir and – as the British began their helpless and angry withdrawal – he started working with UN commissioners on issues such as the peaceful dividing up of Jerusalem. And indeed, as soon as the state of Israel came into official being in May 1948, Eytan became director general of the newly formed Foreign Ministry.

  And in this role, he was not only furiously energetic, but also witty and inclined to understand that there could be no simple answers. For instance, at a time when many of his colleagues held little but the darkest contempt for Arabs, he himself was in favour of Israelis and Arabs meeting halfway in terms of economic co-operation to help build up the entire region. He went on to engage Egyptian diplomats in talks; these were doomed ultimately to failure but again, Eytan was open to the wider world, with a healthy respect for his counterparts. He took this engaging, open skill around the world, seeking to establish diplomatic ties and full recognition for Israel everywhere from Burma to Iran. While Israel’s first premier David Ben-Gurion was implacable about the need to demonstrate strength at all times, Eytan was there to prove that the new state of Israel had a lively, functioning intelligence. Indeed, Israel swiftly developed a lively, functioning codebreaking unit, too, doubtless with the help of a few top tips from its expert foreign minister.