On Forest Moor in Yorkshire, as the shrewd winds scoured the rough grass and the firs, the radio operators continued to pick up all Soviet traffic; but there was nothing that could be plucked from the encoded chaos. In Germany itself, along the jumpy border that now separated two wholly alien blocs, radio operators could no longer listen in on chatty exchanges with their opposite numbers; instead, all had become impenetrable.
Yet there was one rather innovative figure who had, that same year, taken a slightly less orthodox approach to intercepting messages, and listening in on discussions. Indeed, the principle on which his idea rested would provide, over the next few years, some of the more divertingly bizarre and sometimes blackly comical stories of signals intelligence, and its growing dominance in the spy game. The man’s name was Peter Lunn, and he was based in the Austrian capital of Vienna.
Even by the standards of the time, Lunn had lived quite a life. He was an Old Etonian champion skier, who had pioneered ski racing and had written books on the subject. His grandfather had founded a travel agency that today is perhaps better known in its modern merged form as Lunn Poly. The outbreak of war saw him pulled into the orbit of MI6, and stationed in Malta (a source of distress to him owing to a total lack of any possibility of skiing). Then came the aftermath of war. Lunn was dispatched as station chief to the city of Vienna which, like Berlin, had been split by the victors into different sectors. Of course, there are now a number of ready-made images conjured by the 1949 Carol Reed thriller The Third Man; a sinister city of shadows and silhouettes. Curiously, just one year before that, Lunn’s Vienna was holding out possibilities of espionage that were very much more bizarre.
The Western Allies, from 1945 onwards, had not only been trying to stabilise the conquered Austria and its abject, freezing and hungry population; they had also been trying to root out Nazis. Austria’s 1938 Anschluss with Germany meant that it, too, would essentially have to be completely re-invented as a nation. Austria suffered hideous repercussions for its role in the war: much as in Berlin, the invading Red Army had embarked upon a campaign of rape, with many thousands of Viennese women attacked. In the traumatised weeks and months of peace, this was the crime that the city lived with silently.
In strategic terms, the Soviets, while also concerned with warding off anarchy, had ideas of their own: the first, ensuring that local elections went well for Communist candidates; and also appropriating oil and materials for infrastructure for transportation back to the Soviet Union. Politically, the city of Vienna had always leaned towards socialism; it was out in the small Alpine towns and villages in the Austrian countryside that the People’s Party – conservative and deeply Catholic – held sway. But the Austrians had to be terrifically careful. Their country bordered on Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia, all client states of Stalin. Even though the Western Allies shared their occupancy of Austria with the Soviets, that crackling tension, the sense that Austria too could be swallowed whole by the Kremlin, was uncomfortably pervasive. Indeed, in 1948, the visionary US Director of Policy Planning George Kennan had started mapping out contingencies for what should happen if the Red Army attempted a total takeover. What would Allied troops on the ground be able to do about a concerted surge from the Red Army?
So what had started out as a wariness between the two neighbouring blocs soon froze into something more hostile. The tensions rose against a backdrop not only of grand city ruins – once proud recital halls and opera houses shattered, fragmented, exquisite architecture flattened and erased – but of thinly dressed Viennese citizens subsisting on tiny rations of bread, peas and root vegetables. In the year after the war, the average intake for a Viennese citizen was 800 calories a day; by contrast, today, even people on the most radical diets are taking in double that. On top of this was a chronic shortage of heating. There were many who would set out on foot to leave the city boundaries, walk into the nearby forests, chop wood, and then walk all the way back to their homes in the city, piles of fuel tied to their backs. Added to this was a thriving black market; Graham Greene’s chilling Harry Lime was the fictional emblem of a much more widespread phenomenon.
By 1948, the Soviet grip on lower Austria had tightened, but the Austrians were chafing under Stalinist methods and ideology; the occupying forces were costing them, not only in terms of appropriation, but also in terms of being unable to kick-start new trade and industry. Vienna itself had recovered a little of its old Habsburg sophistication: that year saw the concert halls boast distinguished visiting artists such as Yehudi Menuhin and Leonard Bernstein. But at the heart of Vienna was something rather darker, as Alexander Kendrick, a correspondent for the US journal New Republic put it in the summer of 1948: ‘Vienna is less an international capital, in the old sense of the phrase, than an advance base for propaganda, espionage and intrigue. Intelligence agents, detectives and informers for all four occupying powers; displaced persons of a dozen nationalities; black marketeers; spivs, prostitutes, money-changers and night-club-bar girls form a large demi-monde… By the time minor incidents filter through successive layers of intrigue, they become events of international importance.’3
And amid those tensions – including occasional outbreaks of drunken violence between American and Russian soldiers, fighting over women – the British espionage contingent, Peter Lunn among them, was setting to work on an ambitious idea that would come to brilliant, clandestine, fruition a few months later in 1950. The basic idea was simplicity itself: tunnelling. Lunn came to realise that various Soviet telephone cables actually ran under streets in the British- and French-controlled zones of the city. The technology of phone-tapping had been pursued enthusiastically by British pioneers decades beforehand – pretty much as soon as the first undersea telephone cables had been laid. The British government had made quiet arrangements with specialised engineers to avail itself of what was effectively a world-spanning telephone-monitoring campaign. The work itself was farmed out to the ‘Y’ Service and the results were collated back in England. In this case, Peter Lunn first of all wanted to be sure that it was possible to carry out secret surveillance and that the mechanics could be installed in rather more awkward conditions, and kept properly hidden. Peter Taylor, one of Dr Tommy Flowers’s colleagues from the Dollis Hill Post Office Research station was summoned to Vienna.
Along with Eastcote, and various sub-branches of MI6, the Dollis Hill station had continued, after the war, to pursue all sorts of Cold War research activity: means not only by which to eavesdrop, but also to ensure that the British protected themselves from hostile listeners. Taylor looked at the possibilities of the Soviet telephone line that ran from the embassy and eventually all the way out to a Soviet airfield just outside the city. He concluded that it would indeed be possible to listen in from here.
Intriguingly, Peter Lunn felt it better not to inform the Foreign Office of what he was doing; he had little doubt – and he was right – that he would have been told to desist instantly, for fear of causing a diplomatic calamity at a time when relations were already quite fraught enough. But he did have allies within the Joint Intelligence Committee who had very quietly given their (unofficial) approval. On top of this, Britain’s ambassador in the city, Harold Caccia, was kept informed, and his approval was wholehearted. He later said that he could not have lived with himself if the Soviets had invaded; this was his covert contribution. His fears of Soviet intentions were hardly ideological abstractions: the close, cobbled back-streets of Vienna were swarming with hostile Soviet agents. Every single part of the city was under constant surveillance. So how exactly could Peter Lunn establish a nest of secret listeners – first through tunnelling, then setting them up with an underground base from which to listen in to all communications – without enemy agents spotting unusual activity?
Again, somehow without letting the Foreign Office know, Lunn enlisted a small number of Royal Engineers. According to security expert Gordon Corera, there were appalling moments of tension before the army party with the s
pecialised recording equipment even arrived. Lunn and his colleagues waited for them at the designated railway station; but there was no sign of them. It turned out that the men – and the top-secret equipment – had mistakenly disembarked at another Vienna station deep within the Russian zone of the city. If they were caught, there would be little doubt what the equipment was for. The men rang through to the British office and the duty officer kept it explosively short and to the point: ‘Don’t move, don’t look at anyone, don’t talk to anyone. In the meantime don’t even breathe and we will be out within half an hour.’4
The men and their equipment were safely retrieved. Peter Lunn had found cover for his planned tunnel: it would be located beneath a jeweller’s shop. The Royal Engineers who constructed the tunnel, just a few feet beneath the surface of the street (Harry Lime, pursued through the sewers, would perhaps have run parallel to it at some point), were not only working under conditions of gravest secrecy; those involved were shortly afterwards sent for new duties in the Far East. Then came the special teams of interceptors. Like those at Beaumanor, or Forest Moor, or Batty’s Belvedere in Hong Kong, they were generally very young. In shifts, they would sit in a cavern beneath the jeweller’s shop, and listened in to what would soon become a very rich bounty of intelligence.
In that humid tunnel, lit with yellowing light-bulbs, the young men picked up calls and communications not merely between Vienna-based Soviets, but conversations stretching out throughout the Balkans and the Soviet Union; there was much about troop movements and dispositions. Incidentally, as Gordon Corera points out, one of these young secret listeners was Rodric Braithwaite; although distrusted by his senior officer because of his taste for left-leaning journal The New Statesman, Braithwaite was a rather brilliant recruit, and later went on to enjoy an incredibly fruitful career, including (the quiet irony) a spell as British ambassador in Moscow, and chairmanship of the Joint Intelligence Committee.
In a curious way, all this lurking about in secret tunnels was symbolic of a conflict that had in part been started by another Moscow ambassador: George Kennan who, a couple of years before, had written that anonymous article, swiftly dubbed ‘The Long Telegram’, which had detailed Soviet aggression and paranoia and which had advocated a policy of containment. He followed this up with a lengthy analytical essay, also published anonymously in the journal Foreign Affairs under the byline ‘X’ (diplomats were not expected to give voice to such views). By 1948, this need for containment seemed perfectly illustrated in Vienna. To the Western Allies – and in particular, to the more hawkish military commanders among them – it looked as though the Russians were set on dominating as much as they possibly could; that Communism was a cult, or even a form of plague, that could conceivably infect any nation. By 1948, America was already viewing itself as a form of world policeman: wherever it looked as though Communism might take root, the Americans had to counter it, fully armed if need be. This policy, advocated by President Truman, came to be known as ‘The Truman Doctrine’, and had solidified during the Greek Civil War. In that instance the Western Allies had given backing to those who opposed the Communists. Now, any country in the world that appeared to be turning red would have to be ‘contained’. And in Vienna, where Soviets and American soldiers sometimes walked the same streets, hair-trigger tension and mutual incomprehension was woven into the fabric of the city.
But this kind of international mutual aggression came swiftly to be regretted by Kennan. It did not have to be like this. While he continued to abominate Stalin, he also came to be a fierce critic of increasing American militarism. Kennan hated the idea of some kind of security state. Unwittingly, he had led the intellectual charge towards a wholly bipolar world, with both Americans and Soviets now seeking to impose themselves on far-distant lands, both believing that the other was set on total conquest. The struggle in Vienna was a sneak preview; as the Cold War frost sharpened over the years, the death-lock struggle between superpowers was to extend to every continent.
The British security services needed no encouragement; it might have been MI6 on this occasion which was gaining intelligence from tapped cables, but the operatives at Eastcote, side by side with their US colleagues, were wholly committed. (Strangely enough, some of the language that is used today by intelligence officers in Cheltenham carries an echo of that original Government Code and Cypher School ethos: escorting the author and journalist Ben McIntyre on a special guided tour of these otherwise extraordinarily secret premises recently, some figures explained to him that the work of GCHQ was about protecting Britain from ‘baddies’. The core of the establishment – ever since it was Room 40 in the Admiralty during the First World War – has been love for country, heightened by the knowledge that the country is under constant threat from irredeemably wicked enemies.)
So much material was generated by means of Peter Lunn’s Vienna tunnel that back in London, an entirely separate Y Service station was established within an office at Carlton Gardens, just off Pall Mall. From here, reams of transcripts were analysed extensively by a dedicated intelligence team. Interestingly, this intelligence stream seemed to fall outside the remit of Eastcote and Edward Travis’s team (although, strictly speaking, all signals intelligence should have been referred back to them). Instead, there seems to have been a shade of MI6 competitiveness, together with a flourish of triumphalism. Although this was early days for the nascent, independent GCHQ, it did present a challenge to its original parent, the Secret Intelligence Service. First, the codebreakers had enjoyed a near-impeccable war, and their handling of the new, neurotic climate had also been deft. But by the late 1940s, MI6 was not in so happy a position.
It was not just the (admittedly vast) issue of the Cambridge Spies: the service itself, with its insouciant clubland approach, may have been looking dangerously and anachronistically class-bound, particularly during the years of Attlee’s government. If it had been dazzlingly and demonstrably effective over the past few years, then perhaps that scent of aristocratic languor and decadence might not have mattered so much. But now the codebreakers appeared to be pointing to a new technocratic era with rather more impressive results.
There will always be inter-departmental scuffles and fights; indeed, the James Bond film Spectre focuses in part upon an attempted takeover of 007’s traditionalist department by the cyber-security branch – which is of course the modern-day equivalent of Eastcote or GCHQ. And Peter Lunn’s brilliant Vienna tunnel was a much-need coup for MI6 prior to the all-time low of the revelation of deep-level penetration by the Soviets. The Vienna tunnel remained operational for several years, until two unfortunate events saw it come to an end. First, the Soviets simply upgraded and moved their cables. Second, there was an unexpected outbreak of subsidence, which saw a Vienna bus get jammed in a pothole and then subsequently sink into the cavern beneath.
But it was to inspire another tunnel in another divided city; and a few years later, when the even more ambitious Berlin tunnel had been excavated, MI6, rather like that Vienna bus, was to sink deep into a frightful cavern of its own making. Nonetheless, the principle had proved effective, and it was also a pointer for the technicians at Eastcote and at Dollis Hill. Dr Tommy Flowers had not only inaugurated the age of the computer, but was also a wizard at developing the engineering possibilities of electronics. Tapping a cable was one thing; how long would it be before there could be devices capable of listening in to conversations some distance off? And would bugging devices soon be able to be miniaturised practically to the point of invisibility? Such questions were shortly to acquire a greater urgency.
Chapter Sixteen
Invasion of the Ferrets
Ever since the Victorian pioneers of military ballooning took to the skies over the deserts of Sudan in the 19th century, establishing a god-like all-seeing omniscience over rebels below, the dream of being able to observe and hear every move the enemy made, every conversation about battle plans, had been refreshed by new technological developments. During the Sec
ond World War, the arts of aviation and photography were melded into a spectacular secret enterprise that revolutionised reconnaissance missions: now it was possible not only to capture aerial views of enemy installations, but also to photograph them in such a way as to render three-dimensional images, from which so much more could be gleaned. From the point of view of Bletchley Park, the aural equivalent of this was the Y Service, faithfully and brilliantly eavesdropping on all enemy chatter, from the Luftwaffe pilots in the air to the commanders in the scorpion-infested deserts.
And now the innovations at Hanslope Park and the research laboratory at Dollis Hill were beginning to offer even more ambitious possibilities for GCHQ, which was placing itself very much at the forefront of this jet-age espionage. For Commander Travis and his cypher-breaking team at Eastcote, the mastery of signals intelligence was soon to be matched by a growing proficiency in what came to be termed electronic intelligence. It was here that the codebreakers really began to prefigure the wildest creations of Ian Fleming’s boffin Q.
The dignified real-life version of Q was the brilliant government scientist Dr RV Jones; he was the wizard who divined in the early stages of the Second World War that German bombers were being guided to their targets by specially transmitted radio-wave ‘beams’ that intersected over the position where the bombs were to be dropped. Dr Jones invented a way to ‘bend’ these beams; he might not have been able to stop the onslaught of the Blitz but, nonetheless, a great many potential Luftwaffe targets were missed. And importantly, Dr Jones’s deep study of this kind of guidance technology was helpful when it came to the bombing raids made by the British. Alongside this was a fast-growing ability to ‘read’ radar – that is, to monitor the enemy’s radar and divine intentions from the nature of the waves. When the war began, radar was still so new as to be regarded by some as a form of black magic; very swiftly, though, planes fitted with radios and antennae came to be essential in fast-moving espionage operations.
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