The Spies of Winter

by Sinclair McKay

  In any case, the mere fact that the youthful working classes were taking to the streets to protest, not merely about unreasonable work quotas or even living standards, but about the very nature of Communist rule itself, was a fascinating sign of possible inherent weakness in the Eastern bloc. The street demonstrations that had spread all over the German Democratic Republic were also finding faint echoes – in different ways – from Czechoslovakia to Romania. From discontent over factory policy to the continued forced collectivisation of agriculture – which forced many farmers in Eastern Europe off their own property and into alien (and ineffective) new production methods – the warning tokens of dissent could be heard, and indeed picked up, by the listeners in Britain, who assiduously passed intelligence on to the Americans. If there had not been so many Soviet troops on the streets of East Germany, there might have been greater temptation on the part of the West to give the rebellious young some covert assistance. Equally, those rebellious young might very well have finished the job themselves without any outside interference.

  But the Soviet response – given that no-one in the Kremlin now had Stalin to look to for fearful guidance – was pragmatic. Across the Eastern bloc, Soviet demands for more produce and more food to be sent to Russia were scaled down; coupled with this was a lessening of the blunt use of police terror against dissidents; and political prisoners already locked up received (in a few cases) pardons, and were able to return to their homes. For if the urban young could not be kept on-side, then the regime would not be remotely sustainable.

  The continuing intransigence of Soviet cypher systems meant that the codebreakers and their intelligence cousins would have to develop new means of eavesdropping; ingenious tunnels notwithstanding, there was still much room for technical and scientific innovation. The Dollis Hill research department continued its work (while it also went about devising the aforementioned ERNIE system of selecting numbers of Premium Bond draws). But with Winston Churchill returned to Downing Street, it was also quite clear that it was time to pull together some of the more formidable wartime talents to give a sense of unity to all espionage work. So it was that one of the greatest unsung minds of the time was lured back to Whitehall to cast an eye over what might be done for GCHQ to harvest as much Soviet information as they could.

  Reginald Victor Jones was now a Professor; this still (relatively) young 40-something scientist had, after a piercingly brilliant war, been offered a post teaching physics at the University of Aberdeen. None of his young students would have been aware that this angular figure had been behind the triumph of misdirecting Luftwaffe bombers, or sabotaging the aim of the later V-1 rockets. For these triumphs, Jones had been awarded the CBE.

  And now he was lured back to London by an admiring Churchill (in fact, during the war, Churchill had frequently been irritated by Jones, as the young man had stubbornly argued with the prime minister over operational matters; but Churchill had come to see that Jones was usually right). Now the professor was to be made Chief of Scientific Intelligence. This would carry across all departments and services: from the War Office, to the armed forces, to the intelligence departments, and particularly to the men and women of GCHQ.

  Codes were only a part of it; what could a new generation of ingenious bugging technology achieve? If one were to focus some sort of super-microphone at the embassy of an Eastern European country, how many of the ambassador’s conversations and calls might one pick up? Professor Jones also took a shrewd interest in GCHQ’s move from Eastcote to Cheltenham, which was gradually underway (speed being rendered impractical by the need to establish incredibly complex, expensive and confidential machinery as well as personnel – they could scarcely have allowed GCHQ a month off to move everyone down from London in one go).

  Professor Jones recalled that he had discussed the Cheltenham site with GCHQ operative and racing enthusiast Claude Daubney. He and Jones jokingly discussed the notion of scientifically setting up a means of cracking the bookmakers – just theory of course, nothing practical. By 1953, GCHQ was blossoming in terms of the numbers of fresh personnel and also in new computational expertise. The rise of Communist China, the Korean War, the tectonic uncertainty over the Soviet Union’s intentions and aggression in the aftermath of Stalin, all meant that this still relatively new service was given a huge injection of investment.

  It is worth remembering how much admiration Churchill had had for the codebreakers of Bletchley Park. The entire business of cyphers had mesmerised him. This was clearly the case now, too. As the new queen came to the throne, the extraordinary level of activity down in this Gloucestershire country town intensified. There was another development that mirrored the war: just as Bletchley Park had seen a dedicated group of brilliant Americans moving into its huts by means of liaison in the later years of the war, so 1953 saw an even closer conjoining of the two nation’s cryptanalytical skills. With the earlier Venona decrypts, the joint British-American team had been very small, and attached to that task only. This new melding of experts served a rather wider clientele. The American team would be there in Cheltenham to receive any codes or messages from GCHQ’s innumerable listening stations around the world: codes that immediately pertained to US interests. And so from Cheltenham, these Americans in turn could relay the vital intelligence back to the CIA, or to Washington.

  Perhaps now such an arrangement might seem a little like the more powerful Americans leaning on their British allies quite heavily for assistance, whether the British liked it or not; but it is important also to recall that the senior figures of GCHQ had been among the architects of that brilliantly successful wartime transatlantic partnership. Commander Loehnis was among the former Bletchley men who, in 1953, had gone to Washington for talks about how this new Cold War relationship might be strengthened. For the politicians and military leaders, there might well have been mutual suspicion and even dislike; but the codebreakers were in another realm: they talked to each other with relaxed good humour and also a keen sense of their skills and abilities. In the years to come, this terrific harmony would come to be tested, quite violently; but in 1953, as the codebreaking institute put down its roots among the straight lines and clinical architecture of 1950s office new-builds, there was a sense of real purpose.

  Josh Cooper – the brilliant codebreaking veteran whose career had started with the Government Code and Cypher School in the mid-1920s – had then been among the first to smell the danger of Bolshevism. Now, here he was in Cheltenham, at the age of 52, his multiple eccentricities undimmed (he would suddenly resume conversations that others thought had ended days beforehand), but his towering experience and ingenuity was a beacon to the younger adepts. Although one of his chief talents was for linguistics as opposed to pure mathematics, Cooper had been among those who evangelised the new era of the computer; he had seen the potential some distance off. He was now heading up GCHQ’s research department, delving deeply into such matters. This was precisely the sort of unfazed talent that the Americans had such open admiration for: the minds that could seemingly be turned to any sort of discipline, while maintaining a laser focus on the reason that they were turning these dazzling cartwheels. The lives of some of Cooper’s contemporary colleagues were, at this crucial point in the 1950s, to take some dizzying turns. But the institution that they had founded was beginning a whole new phase of life.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The Great Game

  This new intelligence service had selected a most unlikely setting for its moment of symbolic triumph. On the seafront at Hastings, Sussex, just facing the pier, stood a theatre built in the Spanish colonial style – white, with large windows and an elegant green-tiled roof. In the summer months, hundreds of visitors would visit the White Rock Pavilion for shows starring comedians such as Arthur Askey and the Fols de Rols variety performers. In the frozen January of 1954, with no holidaymakers in sight, the entertainment was a trifle more cerebral. Inside the Pavilion, there was a sort of feverish excitement. This was the annual
Hastings Chess Congress, an international tournament that had been held since 1895. This year, the tournament held layers of significance that the general public – chess fans and idle onlookers alike – could never have guessed. The British and the Soviet teams were matching wits and playing hard for victory, watched closely by heavyweight Russian NKVD agents (travelling as observers of the chess team) and British codebreakers alike.

  At the table was a renowned young Soviet Grandmaster: David Bronstein. The challenge of matching his labyrinthine intellect was not to be taken lightly. And yet this was exactly what his British opponent Hugh Alexander appeared to be doing. Here was one of GCHQ’s greatest and most valuable cryptographic minds – who had spent the last few years deeply immersed in the exquisite complexities of Soviet codes – sitting just two feet away across the board from this Russian titan, and playing with an extraordinary detached amusement. The outcome of this contest would have terrific resonance. Bronstein was not the only Russian chess genius there by the shore of Hastings; also present was an older Grandmaster, Alexander Tolush, a native of Leningrad (still St Petersburg when he was born). There was a thrill of electricity running through the gaudy surrounds of the White Rock Pavilion, be-suited spectators looking on at duellists hunched over carved pieces.

  And as if to prove that the world of codebreakers was almost absurdly tightly-knit, even one of the official onlookers had GCHQ connections. ‘The Russians were expected to steal the show,’ exclaimed a report in The Observer by Edward Crankshaw, the newspaper’s correspondent. Crankshaw had, in 1944, been part of the Bletchley Park team of young turks, along with Harry Hinsley and Gordon Welchman, who had been asked to write a confidential paper on the future shape of GCHQ. Something of a literary critic in his earlier life, Crankshaw had also been in military intelligence during the war and posted to Moscow. During that time, he had been part of the tortuous process of conveying intelligence from Bletchley Park code decrypts across to senior Kremlin figures without their guessing that Hugh Alexander and his colleagues had broken all the most important Nazi cyphers.

  Now here he was, preparing to rub salt in Soviet wounds. By 1954, Edward Crankshaw was – quite appropriately and pleasingly – regarded as an expert on Russian affairs, and he worked full-time for The Observer. He was acutely aware of the real contest being played out before him in the White Rock Pavilion. The sly way he wrote it up was brilliantly calculated to cause Kremlin operatives to boil with rage and frustration:

  ‘It is just twenty years since representatives of the greatest chess-playing country appeared at the Hastings Congress, “Crankshaw’s report began.” Any Russian would have been an event. But the two who came are spellbinders… For the first week, they did steal the show, not, as it turned out, by wiping the floor with their opponents but by their admirable bearing, and their unfailing and often highly adventurous sportsmanship, which was in keeping with the spirit of this remarkable congress. It was the happiest display of international amity and this aspect of the Russian invasion should not be forgotten in the excitement of seeing an Englishman suddenly come forward to steal the show for himself.’1

  Strictly speaking, Conel Hugh O’Donel Alexander was Irish; but there was no ambiguity – to the very few who knew – about who he was representing here and why. ‘The hero, of course, was Hugh Alexander,’ continued Crankshaw, ‘the forty-four-year-old Cambridge mathematician and ex-champion of England, young and gay for his years, and an amateur of amateurs. His battle with Bronstein was an epic of genius, nerve and wit – all concealed beneath a surface of unbroken elegance. It will be remembered for ever by those who watched it… an achievement of the highest order – on the part of Alexander for obvious reasons, on the part of Bronstein for the smiling gallantry with which he fought on for hour after hour and day after day, steadily losing from the moment that he saw that his own spirited attack had gone astray.’2

  The undercover Soviet agents looking on within the White Rock Pavilion, did they know precisely who this ‘amateur of amateurs’ Hugh Alexander was? From the British point of view, there would have been that part-pleasurable frisson of uncertainty. On the one hand, blanket secrecy around Bletchley and GCHQ would have bestowed anonymity; yet after the wide and horrifying betrayals by Burgess, Philby and Maclean of so many within British intelligence, who could be entirely certain what the Soviets knew and did not know? And if these Soviet agents – the KGB was formed that year – did not know, they must have stared at Hugh Alexander and wondered why this apparently effortless chess genius was never seen at matches played in the Eastern bloc. After all, the new era of aeroplane travel put Moscow and Helsinki firmly within practical travelling distance for tournaments – indeed, the same went for most cities behind the Iron Curtain. But even if Alexander had wanted to (and actually, even this most blithely adventurous codebreaker would have balked at the idea), he would never have received permission. He was party to the deepest national secrets; the risks were simply far too great. What if some accident were to befall him? Or something much worse? Hugh Alexander’s extensive codebreaking knowledge – particularly the knowledge of how far the Soviet cypher systems had been penetrated – was beyond value and could not be subjected to the hazard of an Eastern European adventure.

  The Soviet agents, meanwhile, were in Hastings to keep a very close eye on their own Grandmasters. This was routine with international chess tournaments all the way through to the 1970s: blazing intellects chaperoned by heavy KGB muscle. One might speculate that players such as Bronstein and Tolush had themselves been drawn in to the unfathomable complexities of codebreaking, and that they too had secrets that could never be spoken. In fact, the reason they were watched so closely was to act as a deterrent to defection. Although this was still some years away from the Berlin Wall sundering East and West – with anyone attempting to escape to the West being cut down by gunfire – any earlier attempt to get out of the Soviet system still presented its own dangers.

  Crankshaw exulted in the incongruity of the battle taking place before him. ‘The basement hall of the White Rock Pavilion did not look like an arena for the display of high-thinking and higher chivalry,’ he wrote. ‘It looked more like the scene of a village whist drive. At trestle tables, covered with green baize, fifty pairs sat in rows, all organised in sections of ten players. Only the chessboards and the double stop-clocks for each pair indicated that twice fifty intellects were stretched to the limit.

  ‘There was incessant movement, but no loud talking. Wandering between the lines of tables, competitors waiting for their next moves murmured confidences, glanced curiously at other people’s games…’ They and the spectators were focused on Bronstein and Alexander. ‘Bronstein was all attractiveness and quiet charm, small, neat, in a double-breasted blue suit and a rather startling tie of flaming red and blue,’ continued Crankshaw. ‘He has the self-containment of a great musician. Pale, with a forehead that is fine and ample rather than immense, with horn-rimmed spectacles, the gentlest and most diffident manner, a delightful smile and an air of extreme sensibility, he offered for most of the time a spectacle of perfectly controlled relaxation, like a cat on the hearth… Only under extreme pressure, as in his duel with Alexander, did he show the slightest sense of strain. Then his features became a little drawn and his mouth a little tight.’3

  There was more at play here than simple national pride: under Stalin – and the pervasive paranoia that he succeeded in introducing to every level and every moment of Soviet life – there had been a fear of being seen as inferior to the West. Stalin was now dead, but the dread remained. Senior Kremlin figures, none more so than Nikita Khrushchev, who was eventually to take over, were neurotic about how they were perceived by the West; that while the Russians may have had overwhelming troop numbers and weaponry, they were falling behind technologically and strategically. It was vital for the chess players – and by extension the Soviet authorities – to be able to demonstrate that the reverse was true: that Communism was fostering intellects th
at could out-think any attempted Western encroachment on what they regarded as their territory. The metaphorical game was now being played out on every continent: East and West manoeuvring to get all their lethal pieces in place, from the far east to the soon-to-be-former colonies in Africa.

  And as much as Hugh Alexander was steeped in a world so secret that not even many MI5 or MI6 operatives would have guessed his provenance, he must have settled his clear blue gaze on the Soviets who faced him across those chessboards and wondered if they too spent their working lives decoding and analysing the most intimate enemy secrets (if Bronstein and Tolush were cryptologists, there is as yet little indication, but given the disproportionately large numbers of chess players at GCHQ, Alexander would have been mad not to suspect). As much as his opponents were under pressure from their political masters, Alexander would certainly have been acutely conscious of his own obligation to perform dazzlingly, and show the Kremlin in turn that Britain had lost none of its guile and intelligence.

  Equally, though, Hugh Alexander also had the most brilliant capacity that any codebreaker could have: the ability to draw back, to shake off the hugest pressure, the most dreadful tension, and to gleefully enjoy the mental assault course before him. This capacity had preserved sanity for many codebreakers. ‘Alexander is on wires,’ wrote Crankshaw of his contest with Bronstein. ‘His whole body moves with his mind. His face lights up with delight at a successful thought. He laughs against himself when a move goes wrong for him. He strides about through the crowd with an air of a man seeing visions – dashing back sometimes to the board to see if his vision was right after all. When it is his turn to move, he positively plunges back to the board, pouncing on it, and then going off into a visible agony of concentration. He has to share every irony, every success, every setback, with his opponent.