Against this backdrop – the British fast fading in grandeur, the unstoppable rise of American power – the news that the British had in principle cracked the American coding system did not result – as Eastcote had hoped – in a renewed sense of joint purpose. If anything, it made the Americans shrink back a little. Added to this was a sense that American research into encryption was now pulling ahead of the resource-starved British. Although in American terms, the US codebreakers were themselves operating on slender budgets, they were still a galaxy away from the threadbare operation at Eastcote. Those laboratories in New York and deep in the Virginia countryside were producing a whole new race of computers. For this, they had scant need of expertise from London. They were sharpening their focus upon a Soviet Union that had already blockaded Berlin, and mounted a Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, and which was embedding itself yet further from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The Americans, meanwhile, were establishing a very strong presence in more northern areas, listening to every Morse dot in the airwaves above Finland and the borderlands of the Soviet Union.
What the US did need from Britain though – and very strongly – was manpower and ingenuity when it came to keeping tabs not only on those hazardous fringes of Europe (the material that Eastcote gathered from East Germany, for instance, was passed on to grateful counterparts in Arlington Hall), but also on the more inaccessible regions of the earth. Conscripted British youngsters in National Service were being sent to remote territories where British rule, far from ending smoothly, was resulting in a gruesome long-drawn-out mess. The Malayan Emergency, which started in 1948, was an illustration, among many other things, of the limitations that the Eastcote codebreakers were now slamming up against.
Malaya, like so many other lines on the world atlas, had been a construct, drawn up in the 19th century in order to best exploit the area’s vast economic potential. The British had moved in and established control over local sultanates; in this region of vast rainforests were huge deposits of tin. The land was also rich in rubber. As the mercantile 19th century brought a revolution in industry, so the resources of Malaya were harvested and sold at fantastic profits. The local people, it was felt, were too proud to work on rubber plantations; and so to fulfil the vast economic demand, great numbers of Chinese immigrant workers were imported. The idea, according to Neal Ascherson, who served out there as a young soldier, was that these Chinese incomers would return to their own territories once demand dropped off and their work was done. But they did not.
By the 1940s, Malaya had a sizeable Chinese minority population; but the native Malays had no intention of giving them the same constitutional rights as everyone else. And when Attlee’s government set about after the war working out how best to pull back from the region – while avoiding jeopardising Britain’s still hugely lucrative supplies of tin and rubber, which were doing much to keep the Treasury afloat in those times of financial hardship – it became grindingly obvious that the result could instead be bloody civil war and revolution.
Facing the Malay sultanates was a new grouping, largely composed of Chinese people. In its first incarnation, it was the MCP, the Malayan Communist Party. Following some dirty dealings involving a high-ranking double agent called Lai Tek, this party was banned. Many young men and women who had been members fled the cities and towns to begin new lives of resistance in the teeming, sweating jungles, and in the savage hilly landscape where, only several years beforehand, Chinese and British had fought side by side against the Japanese.
The Communists were now the Malayan People’s Liberation Army. They began a campaign of guerrilla warfare that, at first, the British were confident of dealing with. Yet it soon became clear that an enemy that could disappear at will into the dense emerald labyrinth of the forest would not be one against which conventional military forces would be much use. So began the MPLA campaign: their targets were plantation owners, wealthy British and Malays alike. Young inexperienced soldiers such as Neal Ascherson were sent on patrols into ‘ant-swatting’ jungles of infernal heat.
And then there were the wireless interceptors, like the young novelist-to-be Alan Sillitoe. ‘The four-engined Lincoln bombers of 97 Squadron flew to Malaya from the UK and began pounding suspected bandit hideouts in the jungle,’ he wrote in his autobiography. ‘All twelve would take off from Singapore Island and head north-west, their wireless operators competing to be first in getting a bearing. As each string of Morse came hammering on the air, I noted his call-sign and told him to wait and when they were in the correct queuing order I would go down the list until all were dealt with. Every bearing was sharp and therefore accurate though it was hard to think that their bombs hit much in the kind of jungle I knew about.’1 Some weeks before the Emergency began, Sillitoe and some wireless interceptor friends had indeed mounted an expedition deep into the forest, a holiday of sorts, the aim being to climb a local mountain. After days of laboured progress – of hacking back plant life, and stumbling, and climbing with the green canopy above all but blocking out the sky – they had at last climbed so high that they could look out over a vista that seemed to have come from Arthur Conan Doyle’s story The Lost World: a land of forest and paddy field, unconquerably remote. Such was the exhaustion occasioned by this expedition – not just the labour of moving through such terrain, but also the impossibility of sleeping out in this alien wilderness, alive with running water and the croaks and cries of animals and insects – that Sillitoe had a near out-of-body experience, switching, as he said, from the jungle in front of him to his family front parlour back in Nottingham, the two alternating as fluidly as a dream.
If straightforward war was not possible in this sort of terrain – even efforts to cut supplies to the MPLA were consistently thwarted by a guerrilla resistance that simply knew the land and its secrets so much better – then any prospect of useable signals intelligence seemed also a forlorn hope. Young men like Sillitoe were expert at seeing that their own side’s communications got through; less accessible were the coded communications of different cells of the MPLA.
Yet the signals effort was key to the struggle, as indeed was the clever dissemination of propaganda throughout the country. In 1948, the Colonial Office sent this memo to the joint intelligence operations in Malaya: ‘It has been decided that the criminal elements engaged in acts of violence in Malaya should be referred to as “bandits”. On no account should the term “insurgents”, which might suggest a genuine popular uprising, be used.’ As historian Philip Deery pointed out rather acutely, the terminology used on the airwaves was also a means of making sure that the insurance cover on Malayan plantations was not invalidated; banditry came under the heading of ‘riot and civil emergency’ which the owners were insured against. A full-on colonial war was not covered.
But this policy had an unforeseen knock-on effect, as it rapidly became obvious to everyone from military commanders to wireless operators that the MPLA were not merely ‘bandits’ but highly organised, well-equipped, well-trained and lethally effective. Added to this, Britain would at least need the moral support of the United States if it was to declare to the rest of the world that it was justified in trying to fight the uprising. These ‘bandits’ also had to be portrayed somehow as viciously motivated tools of a rapacious Communist empire seeking to topple freedom and liberty.
‘It seems to us very dangerous’, stated a British intelligence memo at the time, ‘to pretend that the troubles in Malaya are not caused by Communism but only by a kind of local banditry. As we saw in the case of Greece, where the Greek government were for long anxious to describe the Communists only as bandits, international public opinion in the United States… is inclined to take the line that when wholesale military operations are required to suppress mere internal unrest, it is in some way due to bad government. This is especially so in a colony; and instead of receiving sympathy and support from American public opinion in our praiseworthy struggle to combat the well-known international Communist menace, we shall be merely regarded as a bad c
olonial power coping with rebellions.’2
The chief reason signals intelligence could only go so far – and the Malayan Emergency continued for 12 years until 1960 – was that the insurgents themselves at first only had rather limited access to radio equipment that could stand up to being hauled through wet warm jungle. There were, according to Leon Comber, some radio sets that, ironically, had been an unintended gift from the British: leftovers from the war, when British special forces had tried to equip the anti-Japanese guerrillas deep in the lush forests. But these heavy-duty wireless transmitting sets required a lot of maintenance amid conditions such as violent rainstorms; and to move them, together with their generators, was awkward and time-consuming and required a lot of manpower.
Elsewhere, there were more congenial spots for young expert wireless operators to find themselves tracking enemy codes. One such was Christopher Barnes: a gifted and intelligent veteran of Beaumanor Hall and the rather more austere Forest Moor station. In 1948, he had managed to swap the biting winds of Yorkshire for the politically lively – yet atmospherically congenial – British base at Cyprus, which was soon to become a kind of Clapham Junction of signals intelligence in the sensitive Mediterranean region.
‘Those… who found themselves in Cyprus will be left with a host of memories, pleasant as well as unpleasant,’ Barnes wrote mid-way through 1948. ‘Memories of the long days of sunshine and great heat, of bathing in the royal blue Mediterranean, of the ancient churches of Famagusta, of Bill Hayward arguing with all-comers into the small hours of the morning. Of Bellapais Abbey and the ruined castle of St Hilarion in the summits of the purple Kyrenian mountains, of “Curly” Hendley after the demob party… the colourful peasants with their mules and donkeys, the old ships from the fishing ports, mountain sheep and armies of goats… Of the gothic cathedrals of Famagusta and Nicosia now used as mosques, the countless little windmills that watered the plain… the camp cat eating the night duty fish ration… little cafes, black coffee, wines and the inevitable egg and chips… oranges and many other fruits, though mainly oranges, the Turkish bazaars and oriental pageantry of many parts of Nicosia… night duties, fatigues, blanco-ing and loud-mouthed sergeant majors.’3
Barnes was being commendably discreet (this short memoir was published in Beaumanor’s staff magazine); he certainly gave no hint about the frenetic amount of work that was being done at the intercept station on Cyprus. From Israel declaring its statehood, to picking up volumes of encrypted traffic from Iraq and Egypt, day and night shifts were intensive, with the wireless interceptors expected to work at peak levels of concentration and accuracy. Certainly at that stage in the Middle East, access to the kind of encypherment technology fast being developed by the Americans and Soviets was very rare; in most cases, the communications that Barnes and his colleagues were picking up would have been using the sort of wartime code-making machines that Bletchley had turned into a sort of factory-line process for cracking. A little later, Cyprus would become even more important; especially to the Americans, who came to understand what an amazingly vital foothold it was in the region. But in the late 1940s, these close Allies were still dancing around one another a little. No-one could doubt the commitment of Clement Attlee’s government in seeing Communism as an existential threat to be fought in all territories. But just how close would the Americans allow the British to get?
The question, in 1948, took on a wider dimension too, one involving the ever-closer cryptological union of the British Dominions. Canada, Australia and New Zealand each had their own formidable teams of cypher-crackers; the teleprinter lines to Melbourne during the war against the Japanese had been particularly hot. However, by 1948, there were a couple of serious security scares that made the Americans look askance at their friends.
Thanks to the ongoing horror that was the saga of the Venona decrypts – those tiny hermetically sealed teams of US and British codebreakers were still working at them to unveil the names of Soviet agents infiltrated everywhere – leaks in the Australian codebreaking department had been found. Now, Commander Travis at Eastcote had already made moves to ensure that the Australian cypher operation was closely watched over, inserting his own man, Teddy Poulden, as head of Signals Intelligence in Melbourne. Poulden’s previous post had been as deputy to Bruce Keith at the Far East Combined Bureau in Colombo.
The Canadians, too, had had moments of huffiness when out from Eastcote came codebreaking veteran Geoffrey Evans to be deputy head of their signals intelligence operations. This was balanced with prickly offence caused by their American neighbours. Canada, given its vast territory, and its own proximity to the borders of the Soviet Union, expected that the Americans might have been a little more generous in the matter of sharing out encrypted intelligence. But the Americans held back, and there was a whiff of imperial snobbery there that outdid any insult that the British codebreakers could have offered. The Americans, for a while in the late 1940s, wanted Canada to be only marginally in the loop – to be given intelligence and leads on a strictly need-to-know basis.
There was a reason for this other than simple disdain, according to Richard Aldrich: in the view of the US codebreakers, the Canadians appeared to be relatively lax about their own coding security. The proximity with Russia went both ways. Just as the Canadians would be straining every sinew to listen to the Kremlin, so the Soviets would eagerly be rifling through Canadian traffic to pick out the fruit not just of Ottawa’s diplomacy but also of American and British communications.
Even so, it now also seems quite remarkable that the allies were willing to share quite as much as they eventually did; for in the realm of cryptography – as everyone at Bletchley learned – the overriding, ever-present anxiety was that as few people should know the secret as possible. At Bletchley, this had extended to not even allowing many operatives of other secret departments to know. So for America, Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand to come closer together – even with strict boundaries being set on the type and nature and volume of intelligence shared between them – was quite remarkable, and also a formidable counterblast to what had clearly been terrifically effective Soviet infiltration at all layers of the secret service.
By 1948, after several incredibly confidential convocations between these allied nations, a much more comprehensive agreement was reached. It was still known as the UKUSA alliance and it is still very firmly out of sight of anyone but accredited personnel. According to the political analyst and historian Peter Hennessey, that agreement became the foundation for many decades of intelligence work against the Soviet bloc, an alliance that spanned the planet. Yet even with the might of all those combined intellects, there were still gaps and weaknesses. In the still fast-shifting landscape, from Europe to the depths of China, new forces were stirring. The codebreakers of Eastcote and Arlington Hall were fast and brilliant; but they were not psychic. Convulsions in the Far East would show how easily blind-sided they still were.
Yet next to this was a sense that, even as its strutting imperial power declined, Britain’s codebreaking creativity was still world-beating, with as much of the old eccentricity and swashbuckling individualism as before. Of the men and women who typified the operation at Eastcote, Hugh Foss (sent to America to help there and described as a ‘Lend-Lease Jesus’), Hugh Alexander (who seemed determined that his top-level secret work should not interfere too heavily with a fascinating and authoritative chess career) and Joan Clarke (persuaded after the war not to return to her mathematical studies at Newnham Collage, but to continue and help to construct GCHQ) were key. Their stories in the late 1940s open a window into how the nascent GCHQ was being formed out of very fine and recognisable British traditions.
Chapter Fourteen
Highland Reels and Drawing-Room Comedy
Of all the many wonderful figures that somehow made their way into this shadowed, esoteric world, Hugh Foss might be said to have had the most colourful background. He had been a codebreaker since the 1920s; born in Kobe, Japan, to an
Anglican minister father, Foss had been educated at Marlborough school and Cambridge. After he graduated from Cambridge, he was recruited to work for the Government Code and Cypher School; his formative years in Japan would prove a particular advantage over the years and decades to come.
Yet Foss was marked out not merely because of his dazzling intellect and good humour; he also led a life that might have fitted nicely into one of novelist EF Benson’s social comedies. When we refer to espionage figures leading double lives, the expectation is usually of a dark and ironic dichotomy. Foss was the reverse: his parallel life involved an all-consuming passion for the pastime of Scottish country dancing. It was completely pervasive; and by the time he got to Eastcote, helping to construct this fresh approach to a world of signals intelligence, it had almost become an alternative career. It also had the most extraordinary effect upon his personality.
Hugh Foss was married to Alison; she was a little on the short side, whereas he was a looming sentinel of a figure at six foot five inches (1.95 metres). He had russet hair and a straggly beard. In the early 1930s, as Foss was making careful studies of the complexities of Japanese encryption techniques, Alison had a novel idea for an evening out: she took her husband along to a private house in Chelsea, west London, which was playing host to an evening of Highland reels. It is difficult to know how Alison Foss must have responded to his almost instantaneous obsession. That evening, he had declared himself enchanted; but he found the instructions for each dance seriously lacking in the sort of detail he thought they required. In the following few days, Foss had acquired himself a scholarly book on the history and techniques of traditional Highland reels. This was a world he had to enter.
So it began: cypher-cracking by day, in the rather shabby offices of the Government Code and Cypher School in Queen’s Gate, Kensington; seeking out reels come the evenings. This fascination was to continue upon the outbreak of war, and after the move to Bletchley Park. Obviously, the defeat of the Axis powers was the daily priority – but given the crushing pressure this was putting upon some of the youngest new recruits, how best was the experienced Foss to help them relax and let off steam?
The Spies of Winter Page 24
