The Spies of Winter

by Sinclair McKay

  But there was another fault line too: money. ‘Mixture of service and civilian produces gross inequalities of pay,’ observed de Grey. ‘Parliament always agitates for the services to be properly paid, indeed highly paid. No-one agitates for civilians.’ (Except perhaps trades unions, one would have been tempted to tell him.) He continued of the Bletchley Park experience: ‘While most civilians accepted their position equably, there were monstrous cases where men were doing the same (not similar) work and some getting nearly double the others. Such violent inequity tends to sap enthusiasm at times. Service officers in the Government Code and Cypher School were not in danger and some got staff pay… Decisions will have to be reached therefore on numbers duties and types of service officers… which the services propose to attach 1) on mobilisation; 2) subsequently.’

  There was a note on the fresh difficulties that new technology would bring. For instance, de Grey observed, at Bletchley Park upon the outbreak of war, recruits preferred ‘preliminary training courses’ as opposed to learning at top speed on the job. The declaration of war had made that a practical impossibility for many; but de Grey noted, in the future, ‘a more highly developed organisation’ might be able to cover that gap. What was important in the wider context was to avoid some of what de Grey perceived as the deficiencies in the wartime service. This applied especially to the Y Service interceptors out in the field. ‘Many British and American Y units were sent overseas with expeditionary forces, untrained and useless,’ he wrote. ‘A bad operator is rather worse than useless eg RAF unit sent to Singapore, units sent with Torch to north Africa.’ Incidentally, it seems eyebrow-raising – even in the context of a ‘top-secret Ultra’ document circulated only among his close colleagues – that de Grey was willing to blame the 1942 fall of Singapore, and its capture by the Japanese, on hapless Y Service secret listeners; the intelligence failure was most assuredly rather larger than that…

  Nigel de Grey’s point was that the skill of the Y Service operatives was specific and had to be nurtured; the army imagined that gathering intelligence in this way could be done by any old operator. It could not. De Grey’s answer was that such operatives should be spotted early, recruited early and trained early, and that their unique speed and talent and sharpness should be recognised accordingly. On top of this, when it came to recruitment of codebreakers in the future, the new GCHQ should have the authority to pick out the best candidates and exempt them from military conscription. ‘Great importance attaches to GCHQ being a party to if not the sole constituent of selection boards,’ observed de Grey.

  ‘If as has been said [signals intelligence] dances to the enemy’s tune and the saying is true, it is provident to guess the enemy’s programme before the band begins to play,’ he continued.7

  And so to the gleaming technological innovations: what would the regenerated codebreaking department need, how many and how much? ‘High speed calculators – not much is here relevant,’ wrote de Grey. ‘It is no use thinking small on this subject. Preparation for, experimental work on and production of the first 6 bombes cost roughly £100,000. The large “Fish” calculator [that is, Tommy Flowers’s innovative Colossus machine] embodied 2400 valves of a type reckoned practically unprocurable. Experience’, de Grey added, ‘was that each new problem tended to require modification of existing machines or the devising of new ones. When a factory is geared up for large-scale production, any redesigning or modification throws the whole organisation out of step.’

  ‘Government Code and Cypher School had three main sources of supply: a) British Tabulating Machine Co, bombes and some subsidiary machines; b) GPO engineering research at Dollis Hill. Recourse when BTM was fully occupied was had to the Government’s Telecommunications Research Engineering establishment. The first device which they made far exceeded their powers of production and had to be farmed out to Mawdsleys for manufacture. It was far too long (18 months approx.) a process before it came to perfection. On the other hand, their work on Fish and a Japanese machine were most useful. But clearly, Government Research Departments, unless they embrace production (as at Dollis Hill whose work consisted in the main of assembly of standard parts and only a small amount of engineering) are not of more than limited use.’

  Again, there might have been a personal bias against state-run concerns that led de Grey here to underplay the rather magical contribution that Dr Tommy Flowers and his GPO team at Dollis Hill had made; regardless of the amount of time needed to perfect these revolutionary machines – admittedly not an ideal factor in war – the fact was that they had moved cryptology into an entirely new dimension of possibility.

  So where would this magical machinery come from, if not from the stolid and lumbering government departments? Like so many of his colleagues, Nigel de Grey got a flash of enthusiasm in his eyes when he looked across the Atlantic towards the work being done in America. ‘Very great assistance was afforded by both Navy and War departments in America,’ wrote de Grey. ‘The Navy contribution was outstanding in research on electro-mechanical devices. Their resources of manufacture were of course larger than ours.’ They still were, too – as we shall see, former Bletchley codebreaker Gordon Welchman was now over on the east coast, helping to usher in more of these electronic leaps.

  And decoding brought with it a number of equally important subsidiary tasks – many to do with the secure transmission of the intelligence. Nigel de Grey was wondering how many copiers – ie early photocopiers provided by the company Roneo – would be required in a time of heightened international tension? There were other required items that would later become mainstays of the entire spy-fiction genre: microfilm cameras and microfilm readers. In the late 1940s, such things were just about available, but the special pleading in view of the cost was presumably very loud.

  And unlike the slick ease with which James Bond and Avenger Emma Peel swiped, snapped and read their microdot documents, de Grey was less than impressed with the huge amounts of behind-the-scenes labour that the technology required. ‘Dealing with microfilm,’ he wrote, ‘which as a method of conveying large quantities of documents about the world should have been ideal, saving the burden on cables and air bags, proved particularly tiresome. It was easy to make 35mm and 16 mm film. But to enlarge them upon receipt was beyond the resources of most centres. 35mm was possible though lengthy and expensive. Only two automatic plants for enlarging and printing 16mm existed, one in London, one in America, both belonging to Kodak. They were both in demand for air-mail letters for the troops and were very expensive to operate, let alone possible risks to security. Recourse’, he added, ‘was had to film projectors and a copying staff which, although the work was of the dullest, achieved a fair output, but it was obviously a one-horse method. Staff of six girls.’

  De Grey mused that the demand for photography and copying was so large that Bletchley had to install its own specialised department; and presumably would have to do so again at Eastcote – or indeed, wherever the codebreaking was carried out. ‘It is obvious that considerable development of a photographic copying department should form the subject of study and the organisation be kept informed of the latest apparatus and its suitability. Apparatus should be earmarked and supplies assured.’ Incidentally, it is rather sweet to consider that this super-secret proposal was essentially about a photocopying department. The world turns with unforgiving speed.

  It is also worth bearing in mind – when we all have the books and monographs of the world’s libraries digitised at our fingertips in our homes – that the codebreakers in the late 1940s were scrabbling around trying to procure for themselves reference books and atlases. Expensive, detailed reference works were rare; facts could not be verified, as they can now, within the blink of an eye. ‘No large scale maps or charts existed in Government Code and Cypher School on mobilisation,’ wrote de Grey, eyebrows raised. ‘Hut 3 had none until the Battle of Norway. There were no existing channels for obtaining them.’

  Indeed, given the highly esoteric nature of th
e codebreakers’ work – the need to grasp every last syllable of the enemy’s communications on subjects from local politics to topography – the omission was startling. ‘The only reference books were chiefly concerned with diplomatic activities eg Statesman’s Year Book, Almanack de Gotha etc,’ continued De Grey. ‘A few dictionaries – largely private property – practically no atlases. No technical literature whatever concerning the enemy armed forces save British blue books. No address books, telephone books, railway guides, tourist guides, motor maps. No vocabularies, no modern technical dictionaries, or standard works.

  ‘While the official publications on enemy forces were well informed on the aspect of standard weapon equipment, endurances, speeds and such like, they were not informative on organisation, structure or subordinate formations. It cannot be too strongly emphasised’, said de Grey, ‘that the need for such guidance was a paramount requirement in the early stages for the existing staff and later for instruction of new entry.’ And so for the new-look GCHQ? ‘It is suggested that unofficial handbooks or guides to the potential enemy forces, with emphasis on organisation, should be compiled on a loose leaf principle and constantly revised by GCHQ,’ stated de Grey. ‘Into them could be embodied official statistics etc where regarded as germane. Every effort fair and foul’, he added, with underlining, ‘should be made to acquire foreign service handbooks and manuals of instruction for the sake of information, idiom and technical equivalents. In this respect, GCHQ has quite different requirements from the Ministries. Compilations of this nature would save much time on the arrival of reinforcements.’

  Funnily enough, the Bletchley Park database – which at that time was a vast number of cards, handwritten and cross-referenced, bearing information on enemy technical terms, and weapon jargon – had been maintained and added to by a platoon of highly dedicated debutantes, whose boredom thresholds had been stretched beyond imagination by the tedious nature of their work: every decyphered German message had been filleted for concrete terms – propellers, engine parts – and names, too, of as many officers and subordinates as could be contained on shelves in one big room. As Alan Turing and Professor Max Newman continued to struggle with the possibility of endowing a machine with a memory, information and knowledge was still a matter of physical hard copy.

  It was highly unlikely, in the event of nuclear war, that Britain’s high-society debutante army might be raised again: many of them, such as the Honourable Sarah Baring, were married off and settled on grand estates. On top of this, there had been a shift in the global axis since the outbreak of war in 1939. By the late 1940s, it was no longer an automatic truism that aristocratic girls were ideal recruits because their social class meant that they were more disposed to loyally keeping secrets. The new GCHQ was clearly not going to be established on a base of cosy social connections.

  Added to this was a new nervousness following the unwelcome revelations of the Venona decrypts; the hermetically sealed departments of dedicated codebreakers – American and British – were still unlocking the secrets of these messages, and still in the process of identifying those who had betrayed Allied secrets to the Soviets. But it was painfully clear that the Comintern (the body that united Communist parties internationally) had succeeded beyond perhaps even its own wildest dreams in infiltrating the most extraordinarily guarded US and UK areas. For GCHQ, recruitment in a new age of lethal atomic science would have to be even more circumspect than it had been before, and the threats and warnings given to those embarking on a career of cypher-cracking would need to be even more dire than those issued to personnel at Bletchley Park.

  Added to this was the insight in de Grey’s monograph that – certainly at the time – signals intelligence could not quite operate at complete effectiveness without an accompanying element of human intelligence. The nature of the information de Grey required to have at his fingertips was traditionally the type obtained by human agency: from the humble tourist guides, to the more sensitive and detailed lists of personnel and senior commanders, and the innovative weaponry that they were to deploy. But de Grey – perhaps as a result of his wartime experiences – seemed to have limited patience with the idea of the codebreakers having extensive dealings with either MI5 or MI6.

  ‘It was a mistake to interpose SIS [MI6] between the ministries, service or civil, and the Government Code and Cypher School,’ observed de Grey. ‘There was no point in it, save possibly some obscure and long forgotten loose thinking about security… In the Japanese war of course, the India Office was a vitally interested customer but Government Code and Cypher School relations were never clarified quite satisfactorily owing chiefly to the long-standing interposition of SIS, difficult by then to set aside.’8

  This was about more than a simple inter-service rivalry; more than a sense of clever codebreakers viewing MI6 agents – back then largely recruited, like the early days of Bletchley, through the smarter social echelons and Pall Mall clubs – as faintly incompetent. De Grey – and with him the codebreaking establishment – had clearly learnt the lesson from the war that prized intelligence should not be scattered about; that only the absolute bare minimum of people should be receiving such briefings, and certainly without any of the intelligence being filtered by agents from quite another discipline. ‘Experience of the war was always that direct reporting to the user was the cleanest and safest method,’ said de Grey, ‘for both sides knew exactly where they stood, could discuss problems direct, and Government Code and Cypher School could control security of use.’

  But there was an unexpected security risk that de Grey mused upon, and in so doing, he threw a most intriguing light on the future relationship of the codebreakers with the wider government and the Westminster establishment. It was all to do with delicate matters of money. He noted that when it came to extremely expensive bombe machine production back in the early 1940s, the cost was covered first of all by MI6, and then, thereafter, by the Admiralty. It was ‘non-audited’, meaning that Bletchley did not have to make special representations to politicians or civil servants.

  ‘Another very useful arrangement was the “pool” fund of the GPO, established to cover service requirements,’ wrote de Grey. ‘Out of all this the work of the GPO Dollis Hill establishment for Government Code and Cypher School was financed and no special Treasury sanction was necessary. This relieved GC and CS of considerable labour and the necessity to violate security to obtain the required money.’

  In other words: such financial secrecy was good for the defence of the realm; the fewer interfering and carping Whitehall types who knew what the codebreakers needed to raise money for, the better. This was perfectly sensible in a jumpy age, but there was also a hint of passive aggression too. De Grey knew very well – from British liaisons and from the sparky American codebreakers stationed at Eastcote who were puzzling their way through that mountain of Venona Russian encryptions – that the US was pulling away fast in technological terms, awash with money from a grateful and uninquisitive Congress.

  ‘In dealing with secret equipment,’ de Grey wrote for the benefit of his director Edward Travis, but also his business-minded colleague Eric Jones, ‘it is all important to have open doors to finance and not to have to go through the hierarchy pleading and explaining the necessity… A preliminary study of this whole subject is necessary and agreement with the Treasury as to what liberty of action GCHQ should be granted in time of war.’ But the sentiment from de Grey could not have been clearer: in time of war, GCHQ should be given what it wanted with absolutely no questions asked; for the questions themselves would throw up concerns about national security.

  He illustrated the point with some facts from Bletchley concerning the British equivalent of Enigma, the Typex machines. They ‘were almost always in short supply’, de Grey noted. ‘Many important plans for communications were bunkered by shortage of these machines and the people to work them. Their gravest disadvantage was that they produced only a single tape copy. More time and staff were wasted in GC an
d CS duplicating by typewriter and duplicating machines than any other single thing and since an enormous proportion of the total traffic handled… when the Far Eastern war was in full swing passed through the Typex machine the lack of i) a page print and ii) any mechanical duplication was a really serious feature.’

  The consequence was that backlogs developed; with all the thousands, and then millions, of messages pouring in from every theatre of war, and with the need for British units in the field to receive that intelligence, the system would come close to logjam. The result, de Grey said, was that they had to resort to ‘factory methods’ to get the work done.

  ‘This was done chiefly by keeping careful records of output per watch, per machine and per girl,’ said de Grey. ‘This showed up weaknesses, peak hours etc and enabled the manager to adjust numbers and skill per watch, additional training for slow workers and additional servicing of machines… Properly constructed chairs were found to minimise fatigue and increase output – but were seldom available.’ The time-and-motion techniques at last allowed Bletchley and its outstations to work out the optimum number of ‘girls’ needed to work the optimum number of machines. Some women appeared to have a natural knack for the work; others did not. It was not a precise science. In the various huts and blocks, other methods were tried to improve ‘productivity’ including the playing of ‘music while you work’. This did not improve speed; and de Grey noted that generally among Typex operators, morale was often low. With any new war – and the many emergencies that it could bring – such issues were far from being personnel trivialities; this was the very heart of intelligence and it needed to be working at peak condition.