The Spies of Winter

by Sinclair McKay

  The year 1949 also saw the Allies allowing West Germany to govern itself, ending the post-war period of occupation. British and American military bases would remain on West German soil, but the country itself would finally be going to the polls to elect its first post-war chancellor. That man was Konrad Adenauer. The government that he headed up was – thanks both to American aid and also a certain native work ethic on the part of the West Germans – almost preposterously successful, and indeed he stayed as chancellor for the next 17 years. Adenauer’s government was not based in Berlin, but Bonn. There was some suggestion that even if his country had not been split, Adenauer actually had little time for the regions of the east – the sundering suited him perfectly well. Indeed, it also suited a number of politicians in other countries. Some, like the British prime minister-to-be Harold Macmillan, took the view that for reunification of Germany to remain far off was very much for the best: it would stop the Germans ever being tempted into resuming old territorial ambitions.

  Since the Berlin Blockade of 1948, tensions in that city, deep within the Soviet zone of occupation, had been heightening. But this was still some time before the vast concrete structure of the Berlin Wall went up. Here, West and East continued to co-exist – just – without any flare-ups of violence. (In the years before the Wall’s construction in 1961, it is estimated that some three million East Germans crossed over to the Western sector, and from there defected to Western Europe; many of these were doctors, lawyers and other trained professionals. Conversely, a rather small number of artists, writers and intellectuals made the journey to East Berlin, preferring to live in what they regarded as more ideologically pure austerity.)

  This was the world that was being transmitted back to Eastcote and analysed. The men and women of GCHQ, charged with monitoring all incarnations of Communism, were now charting the Eastern bloc’s response to the super-charging of the West German economy, with all the temptations that prosperity presented for so many citizens of the East. George C Marshall had wanted the Russians to participate – and benefit from – the American money that was pumping in to the continent. Stalin, though, had refused. And now the landscape was beginning to assume its new shape: while West Germany disconcertingly sprang to rebuilt life in next to no time, a grey pall of poverty continued to hang over Poland, Czechoslovakia and others. There are two types of warfare: military and economic. As the West pulled sharply away from the Soviet bloc, so the pressure on the Kremlin started to rise. People living under Stalinist rule began to understand what it was that they were being denied.

  Those citizens of Czechoslovakia, of Hungary, of Romania, were now required to live according to Stalin’s blueprint. In agriculture, for instance, any last traces of a peasant class were swept away; the collectivisation of private land began, and the poorer agricultural labourers were swept up into five-year plans. Meanwhile, there was also extensive industrialisation; under the ruler of steel (the meaning of Stalin’s adopted name), this was very much to be an age of steel. But, as Tony Judt has observed, even though the populations of Western Europe largely ignored what was happening in the East, there were vast numbers of people in the Eastern countries who had looked west towards cities like Vienna in search of culture and art. The culture of Soviet Russia was in many ways an alien imposition. This is not the sort of intelligence that is generally picked up by cryptanalysis; but the Eastcote codebreakers would nonetheless have been deeply aware of the rich life of cities such as Prague and Bucharest, and they must have wondered what sort of a story this new and sudden – even sullen – silence told.

  But GCHQ’s curiosity had its budgetary limits too. Even if the organisation was once more expanding, to absorb those with the cultural as well as mathematical expertise to analyse the cryptology of its targeted nations, the financial arrangements dealt with by Commander Travis, Captain Hastings and Nigel de Grey at Eastcote were a matter of great delicacy and care.

  Even the most everyday costs of GCHQ costs were a matter for haggling and scrimping. One memo, from Harold Fletcher (an old Bletchley hand) to the Foreign Office ran: ‘We shall find it necessary to send out each week a certain amount of laundry in the shape of roller towels. In the past, the cost of such laundry has been borne by “Special Funds” but as you know, these no longer exist. We have approached the Ministry of Works on this matter in the hope that they would accept liability, but they have informed us that this is a departmental commitment. I shall be grateful, therefore, if you will let me know whether the Foreign Office will be prepared to meet the accounts, which we estimate will be in the neighbourhood of £2 each week.’6

  As much as their American counterparts in Arlington Hall may have protested that their work was being underfunded, it seems very unlikely that they would have been reduced to roller-towel bathos.

  Moreover, there are moments now in recently released papers that afford a fascinating – if not faintly comical – glimpse into a pre-technological world of security arrangements. One such memo concerned the containers in which hyper-sensitive material would be conveyed to the necessary superiors in Whitehall, without the possibility of espionage. ‘The blue despatch boxes at present being used for delivery of our material to you are to be withdrawn, and will be replaced by boxes with a different type of lock,’ wrote the unnamed ‘Head of 3 Department’ in 1949. ‘The new key is enclosed herewith; on receipt of your acknowledgement, the new boxes will be brought into use. Would you return your old key to us in a new box and send back any of our old boxes which may still be in your possession.’

  ‘The new boxes’, the memo concluded, ‘can be easily recognised by the name “GCHQ” stamped on the lid.’ There is something highly evocative too about the furniture of the letter, from the address given as ‘Room 3/2911, Lime Grove, Eastcote, Ruislip’, to the telephone number in case of queries: ‘PINNER 7500, Ext. 43.’7

  The very business of keys raised other security issues, this time the subject of an internal memo. ‘It is important that, in order to avoid the compromise of GCHQ, keys and the consequent danger to confidential documents, the following directions should be carefully followed… The person to whom a key is issued is personally responsible for looking after it and ensuring that it can never be lost or copied… If in abnormal circumstances it is essential that a key should be taken away from the office, it should be carried securely attached to the holder’s person. To take an impression of a key on plasticine or soap is the work of a few moments only. The opportunity for this must never be afforded by leaving keys lying about eg on the dressing table.’8

  The dressing table! What wonderfully demure enemy agents they must have been worried about. Key etiquette required that in order to request a key, one had to make representations to the Establishment Officer in Room 3 at Eastcote; if the key was to be passed to another, then the transaction had to go through this office, and the key in question would remain the full responsibility of the previous holder until this exchange was properly acknowledged.

  There was another very serious point. ‘GCHQ keys may not be taken out of the United Kingdom,’ the memo continued. ‘On any occasion on which the holder of the key proceeds abroad, the key should be returned to GCHQ for safe custody unless it is needed by a successor.’ And what about those keys that had been taken around Britain to one or more of Eastcote’s listening out-stations? They ‘should be returned by Registered Post in sealed envelopes’.9 Again, there is now something unutterably charming about spies having complete trust in the Royal Mail to deliver top-secret keys without fear of theft.

  Some secret business could only ever be conducted face to face, and in the early weeks of 1949, Sir Edward Travis, accompanied by his assistant Commander Clive Loehnis, set off on a globe-circling tour to meet up with Australian signals intelligence superiors, and also their counterparts in the United States. A memo to a British diplomat outlined – in the era just before jet travel – what an undertaking this would be. After Australia, the memo ran, they ‘are returning to the UK v
ia the USA… they will leave Honolulu on Saturday 26th March on flight number BP444 due at San Francisco on March 27th… They will need dollars and hotel accommodation for three nights. They will be travelling to Philadelphia on Weds 30th March by the UP (Union Pacific) overland train route… it would be kind if you could book them onward drawing room accommodation on this train.’10

  Despite the considerable setback of the Soviet encryption changes, Travis’s codebreaking department had found its confident stride; quite independently of MI6, he and his lieutenants were quietly ensuring that they were covering as much of the earth as they could. The blank spaces on the vast intelligence maps were slowly but steadily being filled in: GCHQ’s bank of knowledge of military and scientific developments was growing. Certainly, the saga of the Cambridge Spies was due to cause huge trauma to other corners of Britain’s security operation, but the codebreakers – voyaging across the Atlantic and journeying across Europe – seemed quite secure about their own personnel, and about the aims of their organisation.

  They were, as ever, ahead of their time. The White House and the leaders of the Western European nations saw – in the aftermath of the Berlin Blockade and the Soviet coup in Czechoslovakia– the advantage in becoming closer militarily. In the earliest days of NATO, a supreme headquarters was set up in a pleasant suburb of Paris near Versailles. The first Supreme Allied Commander Europe was General Dwight Eisenhower.

  This development could hardly go unanswered by the Soviet Union; soon afterwards, it gathered together the Baltic and Eastern European states under its thrall into the Warsaw Pact, a military pact to counter NATO. But during this period, the spread of Communism was hardly confined to the east of Europe. The cryptanalysts were struggling – with limited resources and personnel specialising in the Far East – to hear and analyse some of the curious noises which were now coming from the other side of the world.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Dominoes

  High above the blue rippling waters of Hong Kong, the humid breeze whispering through the hills, the secret listeners in Batty’s Belvedere (as the out-station was called) had been chronicling a fresh war. After the surrender of Japan, civil war had broken out in China between the nationalist forces, led by Chiang Kai-shek, and the Communists, led by Mao Zedong. Signals intelligence (or ‘sigint’) – if good – is occasionally a means of gazing straight into the hearts of leaders. The sigint in this region was not good; efforts were made, but with the West so closely focused on every twitch in Eastern Europe, there were other regions where even the greatest expertise could not make that much headway.

  The conflict in China was complicated by the weight of more powerful countries pressing in on it. The Soviet Union was occupying the lands of Manchuria, to the north; the Americans, under President Truman, were giving their overt backing to Chiang Kai-shek’s forces – they did not want to see the Communists grabbing this region. The British were in a position to closely observe; curiously, this was to be one of those points where they and the Americans fell out rather sharply.

  Mao Zedong prevailed in 1949: the People’s Republic of China was founded. The Americans simply refused to acknowledge Mao’s ascension. Stalin wanted the kind of relationship whereby Mao adhered closely to Soviet thinking and desires. The British were – by contrast – a little subtler (or more serpentine, whichever way one might look at it) in their dealings with this new regime. Partly this was to do with trade between China and the United Kingdom, which was strong; and partly, perhaps, because of the unlovely history shared between the two nations. In this new post-colonial age, the British wanted to put diplomatic relations with previously oppressed and exploited peoples on a more elegant and civilised footing.

  There was also the matter of the British colony of Hong Kong. This eruption of Communism – with the threat of expansionism that accompanied it – suddenly made Hong Kong – a tiny area surrounded by ideological foes – acutely vulnerable. So it was that foreign secretary Ernest Bevin informed the Americans that the government intended to give proper recognition to this new Chinese government. His argument to secretary of state Dean Acheson was this would be a way of making sure that China did not swaddle itself completely in Russia’s embrace. Acheson was extremely doubtful that it would achieve any such thing.

  And when Britain did publicly announce its recognition of Mao, it turned out that Acheson was right: the People’s Republic of China was magisterially dismissive of Britain’s overtures. Ambassadors and diplomats were broadly ignored. Mao Zedong, initially, apparently only had time for the Russians. Again, while this was partly ideology, it is difficult not also to imagine that a driven moderniser like Mao (so driven, indeed, that his modernisations were to lead to famines that claimed the lives of some 30 million people) would have studied the history of Britain’s opium trading with China in the 19th century very closely. The humiliations heaped upon China by the British at the height of Victoria’s reign still resonate now; Mao must have felt that weight of history even more acutely.

  The idea of the British having any long-term influence in the region became even more fantastical the following year: with the encouragement of Mao, the neighbouring territory of North Korea (a Communist regime run by Kim Il-Sung) launched an attack against the (American-backed) south of the country. It would prove to have astoundingly bloody consequences, for Koreans, Chinese, American and British troops alike.

  The lightning assault across the region demarcated by the 38th parallel had been utterly unforeseen. There had been no prior intelligence: no indications of unusual troop movements, no brilliant cypher-breaks of crucial messages between military leaders. Neither the Americans nor the British, for all their extensive listening facilities, had picked up any warning. In fairness to Commander Travis and GCHQ, they could not be expected to gaze into a crystal ball over every last square mile on earth. And given that the Joint Intelligence Committee had directed the cryptanalysts to focus on the Soviet Union, it was clearly taking some time to build up an equal level of expertise in the Far East.

  That said, the British and the Americans had not been completely oblivious to the dangers inherent in the region. In 1948, a CIA report observed that: ‘Eventual armed conflict between the North and South Korean governments appears probable… in the light of such recent events as Soviet withdrawal from North Korea, intensified improvements of North Korean roads leading south, People’s Army troop movements to areas nearer the 38th parallel, and from Manchuria to North Korea, and combined manoeuvres.’1 Yet equally, this was not the only area in the world on a potential razor’s edge. And there were still substantial US forces in Tokyo, occupying Japan after its apocalyptic defeat; the military there was dismissive of any North Korean threat, not least because they knew how heavily armed the South Koreans were. If anything, the Communists in the north appeared rather more vulnerable than the regime in the south.

  Added to this, the messages given out by America had been rather easier for the Chinese and North Koreans to read: Dean Acheson had announced in 1950 that Korea lay outside America’s ‘ring of interests’. Kim Il-Sung saw an opportunity to seize the entire country; according to former Joint Intelligence Committee grandee Sir Percy Cradock, he received gentle though reserved encouragement from Stalin, along the lines that if the adventure backfired, Russia would immediately step back, and Kim Il-Sung would have to rely on China for help.

  According to Sir Percy Cradock, the British in 1949 knew that their American allies had better intelligence on Korea; and indeed a small team from the Joint Intelligence Committee, on a visit to Washington DC that year, had asked to be included in on what they knew. But the Americans refused: a punishment for the British recognising Mao Zedong’s government. In the years to come, there would be further outbreaks of American petulance in the face of what they regarded as British stubbornness; fractures in an otherwise remarkably easy-going intelligence relationship. In this instance, no-one benefited, as the intelligence had either not been heeded or lacked urgen
cy. North Korea launched its attack and the US and British were each as surprised as the other.

  This moment in 1950 was – for some American military – the point at which they were braced for the worst. Russia now had the capability to destroy whole cities in sun-bright blasts; the question according to some was whether North Korea’s headlong attack over the 38th parallel was a means of diverting attention away from some larger plot? A Stalinist plot for Russia to lunge deep into Western Europe?

  The notion that Communism could be a form of contagion – the ‘domino theory’ of one country after another falling – was still a little distance off (President Eisenhower cited ‘the domino effect’ in a speech in 1954 when talking of the convulsions in Indo-China). In 1950, President Truman and those around him in the Oval Office had now formulated a view that Stalin was effectively in control of every Communist state on earth; that nothing could be done by North Korea without his bidding. There were many in the military, too, who were convinced that Stalin was the great overlord, planning each move with scientific precision.

  In the meantime, the British interceptors of GCHQ had been reporting back to the Joint Intelligence Committee, and the JIC issued this rather more measured judgement: ‘We believe North Korean aggression was originally launched not with the primary object of diverting American attention from Europe, or as a prelude to provocative action against our weak spots of the European or Middle East periphery, but as a limited operation within the ambit of an intensified drive to expel western influence from the whole of the Far East and South East Asia.’2

  Yet the fever was spreading elsewhere. In the week of the invasion, a fervidly anti-Communist ‘Congress For Cultural Freedom’ was being held in West Berlin, within slingshot distance of the East Germans. The event was financed by the CIA. This ‘Congress’ put out a statement. ‘Indifference or neutrality in the face of such a challenge amounts to a betrayal of mankind and the abdication of the free mind,’ it ran. And at the same time secretary of state Dean Acheson outlined the entire purpose of US opposition to the Soviet Union. ‘All the problems of the United States are related to the problem of preserving its existence as the kind of country which we know and love.’