The Spies of Winter

by Sinclair McKay

  ‘No attempt was made prior to the war to estimate what the probable scale of enemy communications would be,’ wrote de Grey, adding that the resulting inadequacy of transmitters and personnel was an example of a ‘hidebound’ Whitehall. De Grey was thinking about the structure of this new GCHQ; and his friendly note to Eric Jones was about how to give it the investment it needed in the face of what must have seemed inevitable Whitehall cheese-paring. Although codebreaking was in some ways a much cheaper source of intelligence than having agents on the ground, the advent of the computer age meant that it would have to spend significant sums on innovative hardware. It also needed to fund the essential scientific research into new technological means of cracking codes and eavesdropping on the enemy. How were they to match the brilliant success rate of Bletchley?

  ‘Seventy-five percent of the justification for the existence of GCHQ in peace time is that it should be ready on or before the outbreak of hostilities,’ wrote de Grey. ‘It is obvious therefore that its mobilization plan must conform to the national or international military plan. It must assume, however problematical the situation may appear, that it will be successful, as it was in 1914–1918 and 1939–1945. Moreover, it is probably fair to say that its value in both wars was greater for strategical purposes rather than tactical – which does not imply any lack of “operational” importance. All the weight of the evidence goes to show that concentration of effort on the technical production side was the more successful policy.’2

  This new age was at once nuclear and electronic; in the space of a heartbeat in the summer of 1945, there had been a dimensional change in the rules of engagement. De Grey knew that for the codebreakers to enjoy fresh victories, they, too, would have to embrace and get some way ahead of the computer era (as indeed their colleagues across the Atlantic were busy doing). But that did not necessarily mean a budget nightmare for the Ministry of War, setting up vast computerised codebreaking departments in stations across the world. De Grey and his fellow codebreakers were adamant that such things were more effectively handled when centralised.

  ‘There is not, provided communications are adequate, the necessity to set up large technical processing organisations at overseas commands for strategical codes and cyphers,’ he wrote. ‘There was considerable confusion of thought over this in the Navy,’ de Grey added. ‘What Commanders in Chief really wanted was a concentration of all the intelligence relevant to their command for their own staff to assess, what they thought they wanted and demanded was that the technical processes also should be carried out at their Fleet base.’ It might have worked for local issues, de Grey conceded, but even then only as long as all intelligence – no matter how seemingly unimportant – was sent back to the main codebreaking centre. The point was that the codebreakers’ strength lay in the fact they remained at the centre of the web.

  ‘Where more than one country is involved, the clear cut division of responsibilities and the closest integration of staff at all possible points in the common task were the two outstanding lessons of the American alliance,’ de Grey wrote. He forbore to add at that point that this particular alliance with the Americans was still going very strong. ‘This ensures the complete sharing of all technical knowledge and intelligence, avoids misunderstandings and determines who controls what.’

  The other issue of course was the relative independence of the codebreakers; at Bletchley Park they had answered to MI6 and the Foreign Office. After the war, and following the split from MI6, this independence increased their determination to point out that they knew best ‘who controls what’.

  The next war would be radioactive. Nigel de Grey, thinking as he wrote in that somnolent leafy west-London suburb of where the codebreakers would be best located when the sirens started crying out once more, posed the question: ‘First of all then, it has to be determined whether GCHQ should on mobilisation: 1) Stay put; 2) Move in the UK and if it do so, should it move to a) the heart of a populous city; b) a suburban area; c) a country area; d) below ground – eg the bottom of a coal mine or a clay pit.’

  Drastic though the bottom of a coal mine sounded, even that might not have been sufficiently far from harm’s way in the event of an atomic attack. So de Grey also thought further afield. (Incidentally, his reference here to ‘GCHQ’ was part of increasingly common usage by the late 1940s; though many were still referring to the London Signals Intelligence Centre, those at Eastcote were now more frequently using the GCHQ acronym.) If they were to move abroad, Nigel de Grey wrote, should it be ‘to a) British territory, Canada, Australia, South Africa etc; b) Mandated territory – north Africa etc; c) Allied territory – America, Benelux etc, bearing in mind the proposed seat of the conduct of the war as a whole, or of any specific theatre of war. It is assumed that the main conduct of the war must necessarily be sited in conformity with the expected risk of disruption of communications (not merely telecommunications of course).’

  De Grey was drily understating the prospect of nuclear Armageddon; but he added with more mordant wit that if international tensions were moving inexorably in that direction, ‘the signs and portents will not be lacking’.

  The most important thing was to avoid improvisation; any moves made hastily in a crisis could imperil the entire operation. ‘On a lower level,’ de Grey wrote, ‘there is always a fatal tendency to regard any important cryptanalytical success as a special case requiring special measures to handle it. Success’, he added rather magnificently, ‘is the common form of GCHQ, it is to be expected, there should in a well organised establishment be no special cases or mistrust of a well-tried, well-seasoned staff.’ His suggestion here was that ‘dummy runs’ should never be overlooked. That way, de Grey wrote, things ‘should be all right on the night’.

  And what about recruitment? Where were the new generation of codebreakers to come from? De Grey, it will be recalled, was an Old Etonian who had been recruited from the business world, at a time – before and during the First World War – when many codebreakers were either naval men or classicists drawn from Oxford and Cambridge. De Grey noted that very clearly at Bletchley, the idea of recruiting from Oxbridge – and pursuing gifted mathematicians – had been perfectly effective. So how should they now proceed at Eastcote and how many should they take on?

  ‘It is for decision’, de Grey wrote, ‘whether GCHQ will use one or more of the following channels for raising staff: 1) Direct contact with Universities, secondary schools etc. In general, this method produced not only the original 60 high grade people [for Bletchley Park before the war] but also considerable numbers afterwards. As national recruiting became more methodical,’ he continued, referring to Bletchley, ‘this system tended to clash with the proper authorities. There were also diminishing returns as men and women joined the Services. Government Code and Cypher School [the pre-war term for GCHQ] had no Establishment and these people were automatically taken on to Foreign Office books – the first 50 without “friction to the Treasury”.’ Could such an informal recruiting system be tolerated by the bean counters of late-1940s Whitehall?

  And what of the less glamorous, less intellectual vacancies that the new organisation would demand? Again, de Grey thought warmly back to the war: ‘For lower grade labour,’ he wrote, ‘especially girls, large numbers were raised through the Foreign Office, in contact with the Ministry of Labour, who directed the more intelligent types for interview by the Foreign Office (Miss Moore).’ This, incidentally, is a throwback to an old Bletchley Park memo, equally breathtakingly sexist as it seems now, in which then director Commander Denniston complained about some of the ‘girls’ being sent his way; he wanted fewer of the ‘cook and messenger’ type, he said.3 Added to this, many ‘girls’ – including the absurdly glamorous debutantes such as Osla Benning – were recruited directly through smart social connections. In the new post-war world, with its radical Labour government, such an idea may have had a little less appeal.

  There were other roles too to think about – the ‘lowest grade�
��, which might have included maintenance engineers and drivers. De Grey noted a little sourly that at Bletchley, some such workers came from local recruitment but that on the whole, the town and surrounding area had proved ‘mainly unproductive’. Wherever the codebreakers found themselves moving to in the event of a Third World War, it would have to be somewhere with streams of potential (and competent) manual and low-grade-clerical workers quite close by.

  There were other skills to think of too, and de Grey analysed the men and women – linguists, traffic analysts – who had served in the huts and blocks, trying to pinpoint the factors that made them a success. ‘GC and CS did initially very well in securing a high grade team of young dons etc,’ he wrote. However, he added, ‘few women reached the highest levels.’ De Grey did not speculate on why that might have been the case; but his colleague Joan Clarke, attached to this new organisation having proved so brilliant at Bletchley, might have had her own views on the subject. Of course, it was much more than simple old-fashioned sexism; in cultural terms, there was at the time an overpoweringly strong bias in education in steering girls towards the humanities, and away from science and mathematics. Even if girls demonstrated high aptitudes in these fields, the cultural expectations of them – added to the social expectation that when they married and had children, all work outside the home would cease – meant that very few broke through. (Joan Clarke stands out today as much as Margaret Hilda Roberts, the young chemist from Grantham who studied at Oxford and later of course became Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.)

  And had Alfred Dillwyn (‘Dilly’) Knox – a brilliant classicist codebreaker central to the cryptographic effort in the First and Second World Wars – still been alive, he might have had rather a different view on the contributions of women. At Bletchley Park, Knox seemed overwhelmingly to prefer working with them. One of his most dazzling young colleagues was Mavis Lever, just 19 when recruited. After the war, she had married fellow codebreaker Keith Batey (both sadly died not too long ago), and had left the cypher game, first to raise a family and then to return to academia. Her background, crucially, was in linguistics rather than mathematics. Now, in the late 1940s, Nigel de Grey, in setting out the template for the new GCHQ, was giving thought to the kind of ways such experts could be best utilised in the future.

  ‘Linguists: the pure linguist without other qualifications was not of great use,’ wrote de Grey. ‘Recorded opinion favoured 1) sound grammatical knowledge; 2) current idiom; 3) power to apply knowledge as a basis for guess work. Honours degree in Modern Languages not necessarily a sufficient linguistic qualification,’ he added. ‘Some additional test recommended.’4

  He also explored the talents required by those working specifically on traffic analysis; here, it was more a question of ‘deductive faculty’ and a lithe intelligence, as opposed to any specialised gift. ‘In all of the above,’ de Grey wrote of the dons, the linguists and the analysts, ‘accuracy, quickness of work and some degree of puzzle-mindedness considered necessary.’

  ‘From the general point of view,’ he went on, ‘speaking “managerially”, there was [at Bletchley] a lack of men sufficiently experienced to take charge of sections where problems such as the handling of large volumes of paper arose… There was also a lack of commercially trained leaders eg women who had run typing pools in banks and insurance companies, accustomed to organising output up to a given rate per day, or men who had been sub-managers with a team working under them. The bank clerks, while excellently methodical, did not entirely fill the bill. No emphasis was laid in recruiting upon obtaining this type. Time was wasted by “talented amateurs”. Very many of the tasks were of a plain “factory” type.’

  This fascinating view of codebreaking being an industrial activity, which first germinated with Gordon Welchman, was now finding its full voice in Nigel de Grey. At the time he wrote this, with the numbers of people working at Eastcote still a fraction of the crowds who had teemed around Bletchley Park, he was clearly planning for a future with a purpose-built environment, as opposed to a collection of slightly drab long pre-fabricated blocks abutting an American air force station outpost. For the expanding field of signals intelligence to be truly effective, it had to be able to operate in the way that Bletchley Park operated. And that also meant with the full backing of Downing Street.

  Incidentally, de Grey was not completely sexist; having witnessed some of the miracles performed at Bletchley Park, he envisaged a key role for many women in this proposed establishment. ‘It was astonishing what young women could be trained to do,’ wrote de Grey. ‘EG Fish and bombe Wrens, Typex operators, in an incredibly short time with wonderful accuracy, although quite untrained to use their hands or apply their minds to such work.’5

  So: these bright young women, unused in normal circumstances to applying their minds, and these bright young men, some potentially to be hauled straight out of their Sixth Forms: were these the most suitable people for the new codebreaking establishment to be going after? Funnily enough, although there was the sharpness, suppleness and adaptability of young brains to consider, de Grey also had experience of the potential setbacks of focusing mainly on youthful recruits. ‘Age,’ declared de Grey. ‘Recorded opinion lays emphasis upon youth because it is more trainable, more prepared to accept direction, better able to stand the strain, more flexible in mind – all obvious considerations.’ But, he continued, there were less obvious considerations too. ‘There are facts to be set against this: 1) Experience has a value and was none too prevalent [at Bletchley]; 2) cases of mental breakdown occurred equally between young and middle-aged; 3) both men and women are often tougher in middle age than in youth; 4) flexibility is not always so valuable as judgement.’

  The mention of mental breakdowns was important: at Bletchley Park, a few such cases had been seen. Part of it was the huge pressure of the work; but another factor was the very nature of the work itself, that combination of dizzying intellectual pirouettes combined with often cruelly dull and laborious checking and re-checking. Modern electronic encypherment techniques reduced language to a vortex of anarchy; just a few years previously, one of the Polish mathematicians who had first cracked the German Enigma had stated that where there is arbitrariness, there is always – somewhere – a certain regularity. But the new computer age made such regularities almost invisible, generating cyphers with many thousands of millions of potential combinations. Angus Wilson (who in the 1950s became one of Britain’s most prominent and acclaimed novelists) had been a codebreaker at Bletchley Park; and there, his mind had buckled. The authorities had offered him a spell of recuperation in a special government institution. He turned it down, on the grounds that he was better off sticking with the madhouse he knew. The codebreaking mind was a distinctive thing – leaping laterally, able to hold the vastest abstract ideas. But clearly it was also prone to fragility. The coming of computerised cyphers was not going to ease that sort of pressure; especially if those codebreakers found themselves staring into the abyss of a Third World War.

  And what of the Y Service – the brilliantly nimble men and women who had listened deep into the ionosphere, tracking crackling signals in deserts and jungles and on lonely mountains? Nigel de Grey noted that during the war, this had been one arm of the codebreaking process that had been slow to get going; part of the reason was the complexity of the job that required interceptors to translate Morse at the brain-burning rate of 30 words per minute. So it was difficult enough to find and recruit sufficient operators from among the young army, navy and air force conscripts. Here, the recruitment of women to work in establishments such as Beaumanor and Forest Moor eased a lot of the pressure. But – as de Grey noted with a dash of vinegar – when it came to civilians, there were fresh problems presented, one of which, in his view, was their tendency to belong to trades unions.

  ‘Trade union regulations were restrictive,’ he wrote, ‘and all GPO [General Post Office] and ex-GPO operators were unionists and stations manned by them were never 100% eff
icient: mixing of ex-GPO operators with War Office civilians led to trouble and ex-GPO men were segregated into a separate station. Union never forwent their restrictive practices.’6

  There were Y service operatives who would have snorted with indignation at that assertion (and de Grey never made it clear which of the Y Stations had to be segregated). Certainly, there had been some flashes of ill-will at Beaumanor in Leicestershire. This was not so much down to the operators wanting to establish ‘restrictive practices’ as to simply improve the conditions in which they were working. Union representatives had protested to the station’s Commander Ellingworth about the bitterly uncomfortable huts in which the radio equipment was housed; the impossibility of concentration in the winter when the huts were so cold; and the near suffocation of the summer months, combined with the thick, un-air-conditioned fug of tobacco smoke. Nonetheless, codebreakers of Nigel de Grey’s generation (he had been born in the final years of Victoria’s reign) clearly had little time for what they obviously regarded as domestic Bolshevism. (And funnily enough, the relationship between GCHQ and union activity was a sore spot that would flare again in the years to come, most notably in 1982 when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher attempted to have unions shut out of the institution.)

  And in the event of this new conflict, would the codebreakers be civilian or military? Bletchley Park had always operated in a kind of twilight zone. Wrens, ATS women and WAAFs were all required to wear their uniforms on duty, and were explicitly under service rules and discipline; yet they were working alongside men who – even when conscripted – had the choice of wearing the uniform or not. Many did so only for the purposes of obtaining free rail passes on their days off to London. In the Bletchley directorate, Colonel Tiltman consistently wore his uniform (always involving rather natty tartan trews), but joked with younger male recruits who insisted on wearing theirs. But behind these sartorial dilemmas had been a more philosophical problem: for instance, were codebreakers who were then sent off to stations like Heliopolis outside Cairo or the Far East Combined Bureau in Colombo under the sole command of their military superiors? What sort of weight would orders from Bletchley Park have? Indeed, in Egypt, this very fault line of authority had caused some venomous disputes: codebreakers accused by military colleagues of making Bletchley Park their priority, and not instantly sharing intelligence before Bletchley Park could analyse it.