The late 1940s and early 1950s had brought many new town communities to Britain; just outside Bletchley Park, for instance, was the fresh modern development of Milton Keynes. Cheltenham involved a slightly more delicate operation to ensure that the most high-security personnel would mesh with ease into what had been a conservative and staid community.
The logistics of the move were exquisitely tortuous too: the incredibly secret cryptanalytical machinery being transferred from Eastcote to the new building at Benhall (at Bletchley, such moves were achieved via army trucks; but the key thing was that the transfer should not draw any sort of attention and look utterly unremarkable. Who knew what agents could be there spying on the route?). There was not one moment, one split second, where Britain could be left without the round-the-clock attention of the listeners and the codebreakers; not one fraction of a moment when the guard was lowered or weakened in any way. But this also meant that in the period between 1952 and 1954, there were some codebreakers who had to face a reverse commute. In a few cases, those with families were either still waiting for suitable Cheltenham housing, or were still making domestic arrangements concerning moving the family. Those people worked at Cheltenham throughout the week and then got on the train at Cheltenham Spa to catch the express back to Paddington.
But the codebreakers – in their impenetrable guise as ordinary Foreign Office civil servants – also brought a brilliant infusion of life to the old country town. It was not long before the GCHQ cricketers were taking on other local teams, and also throwing themselves in to inter-county championships. Naturally, the town’s chess society also received the most almighty and unexpected boost. Codebreakers were not merely cerebral; the town’s tennis and football clubs received a similar injection of new blood and new life. Like Bletchley Park, many of the new recruits (GCHQ tried to reel in as many people from the surrounding area as they could) were youthful and lively. They brought a love for jazz and literature. The highbrow nature of these attractive newcomers also had an invigorating effect upon the town’s cultural efforts (indeed, one glance at today’s mighty Cheltenham Book Festival, held every year in October, makes one wonder how much of its growth was down to the literary appetites of the codebreakers on the edge of town).
There was nothing new about geopolitical uncertainty and neurosis; there had never been a moment of history that had not been darkened by the threat of war. But the conditions in the mid-1950s were something entirely new because now, the war would be both total and sickeningly fast. Rather than years spent patiently re-arming – and then further time spent training battalions of soldiers – the new threat was one of bombs that could bring more destruction than even an entire army, and all in a matter of minutes. This was the moment – serendipitously – that GCHQ fully flowered into its new incarnation. The codebreakers were still delving deep into the heart of the enemy’s intentions, still unscrambling their most deviously encrypted messages. But now, Sir Eric Jones, with his lieutenants and his fresh GCHQ team of some 2,000 people, were also employing the most fantastic technology to listen to the most obscure corners of the earth, detecting the faintest tremors that could lead to a geopolitical earthquake. The organisation was not staffed with clairvoyants, and they did not use crystal balls; so accusing them in hindsight of having missed some key developments rather overlooks the point that no system on earth can anticipate the intentions of every single regime, every single ruler, every single otherwise anonymous military figure who has been plotting his coup in secrecy.
But from this point, what they could do – as a dedicated and new intelligence service – was provide what they saw as pure, unadulterated, crystal-clean intelligence to Whitehall; there was none of the mess or unpredictability of human intelligence, just the forensic surveillance and analysis provided by brains that occasionally seemed in uncanny synchronisation with their machinery. All those Bletchley Park codebreakers – Joan Clarke, Nigel de Grey, Hugh Foss, Hugh Alexander, Frank Birch, Jack Good and so many others – had now built an institution ready to go further than ever to make sure that even the most fearsome enemy encryptions could be read instantly.
And so it was from that curiously incongruous collection of plain 1950s office buildings in pretty Cheltenham that GCHQ addressed itself to the future. Most of their work in that period is still wrapped up in complete secrecy. But we know what they would have been listening to, and the communications they would have been addressing. For Britain, there were the post-imperial traumas yet to come: the shame of Suez, the ugliness of the retreat from Kenya, the separation from the African colonies. Mixed in with those would be further shocks to the wider intelligence services; the revelation of yet more traitors and double agents. And all this against a lurid panorama of American and Russian hostility, from the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1961 to the near hysteria of the space race. Nigel de Grey and Edward Travis had, in the aftermath of war, been concerned about building an intercept/decryption operation that could be instantly put on red alert at the first signs of the next worldwide conflict. Thanks to them, this reincarnation of Bletchley Park, nestling amid Gloucestershire’s green hills, was now poised on red alert permanently; and the coming era of satellite technology was only to add further dimensions to their reach. It is to be hoped that soon, a little more of their historic work will be laid out in the public domain to enrich our understanding of the various levels of the Cold War.
But for the moment, today, the individual codebreakers working so deep in those GCHQ shadows, still firmly rooted in Cheltenham, are the direct and spiritual heirs of those free-wheeling, occasionally madly hilarious masterminds; today’s unsung, highly secret achievements are a straightforward tribute to the visions and intellects of those astounding pioneers.
© National Collection of Aerial Photography(Published through Google Earth)
In 1946, the codebreakers moved from Bletchley Park to Eastcote, a base in north-west London – John Betjeman’s ‘Metro-land’. Despite the pleasant leafy surroundings, William Bodsworth described the Spartan new HQ, seen from above, as ‘shattering’.
© Bletchley Park Trust
Bletchley’s suave Hut 8 veteran Hugh Alexander (much swooned over by female codebreakers) was a crucial figure in the new, regenerated GCHQ – but he continued to pursue his parallel brilliant career in chess.
© Charles Fenno Jacobs/Getty Images
The 1948 Berlin Blockade – Soviet troops ruthlessly starving the city of food and essentials, and Allied airlifts being sent in – proved a tense Cold War test for the codebreakers, and the secret listeners posted throughout Germany.
© Popperfoto/Getty Images
With post-war Germany in ruins – even the grandeur of the Reichstag was destroyed – the codebreakers were in a race to seize advanced Nazi cryptography technology, and also to establish secret bases to intercept and crack Soviet traffic.
© School of Computer Science, University of Manchester
A gleaming new age of computers and codes: Bletchley veteran Professor Max Newman became a post-war computing pioneer at Manchester University, and maintained close links with GCHQ as the Cold War froze deeper.
Crown Copyright, reproduced by permission Director GCHQ
One of the twentieth century’s most pivotal codebreakers, Nigel de Grey, who had decrypted the First World War’s crucial Zimmermann Telegram, bringing the US into that war, was a key post-war architect of the new GCHQ. He had a deeply sardonic wit and an acidic impatience with military brass hats and trades unions alike.
© Martin Sharman [Flickr: Kalense Kid, https://flic.kr/p/9jy8An]
As the British Empire began its speedy and sometimes bloody disintegration, far-flung codebreaking bases such as HMS Anderson in Colombo, Ceylon, lost none of their vital strategic importance, and their secret work went on.
© National Army Museum, London
Post-war National Service pulled radio-mad young men into the realm of secret wireless interception; many were sent out to countries such as Malaya, dee
p in jungles, monitoring burgeoning unrest and revolt.
Crown Copyright
Wireless interceptors were posted all over the Far East, and many revelled in the amazing new worlds that opened up. Novelist-to-be Alan Sillitoe recalled eerie tropical night shifts with inexplicable snatches of classical music coming through the ether.
© National Portrait Gallery, London
Sir Edward Travis, the much-admired – if sometimes bellowing – director of both Bletchley Park and its new post-war incarnation. He ensured that the newly regenerated GCHQ won proper respect from Whitehall and rival secret agencies.
© Kings College Archives, Cambridge
Frank Birch (second from left), another brilliant Bletchley veteran, who went on to help forge the momentous Cold War codebreaking alliance between Britain and the US. This secret life didn’t hinder his love for acting; he appeared in many early television dramas at that time.
© GCHQ
The fierce demands of monitoring the Soviets meant an increase in numbers – and a move for the codebreakers out of Metro-land. There was a site at Cheltenham that had been partly developed for the military during the War which seemed the perfect choice.
© GCHQ
When the codebreakers considered the move from London, other towns – including Oxford and Cambridge – were considered. Cheltenham was rumoured to be a popular choice because of its race-course.
© Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=688136
A new world of ingenious US/UK surveillance innovation was encapsulated by the American submarine USS and its on-board technology; but pursuit of Soviet vessels was hazardous and in the 1950s there was a hideous fiery tragedy at sea.
Courtesy of the National Security Agency
The Americans produced some dazzling codebreakers, many of whom came over to work with GCHQ. One such individual was Meredith Gardner, an intensely modest genius, who was partly responsible – by breaking into key Soviet codes – for unmasking the Cambridge Spies.
© Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, HABS VA, 7-ARL,12A--8
America’s answer to Bletchley Park: Arlington Hall in Virginia, not far from Washington DC. It was here, in this crucible of codebreaking, that the activities of atomic spies at Los Alamos and other double agents were uncovered.
© Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, HABS VA, 7-ARL,12--1
The men and women of Arlington Hall and GCHQ worked together incredibly closely; like the UK codebreakers, Arlington Hall’s experts were drawn from all over, such as schoolteacher Gene Grabeel and Brooklyn prodigy Solomon Kullback. The relationship between the US and UK was – in this instance – genuinely special.
© AP/Press Association Images
The Berlin tunnel – a terrific ruse to tap into Soviet communications – had an equally ingenious forerunner in Vienna, when young wireless interceptors such as diplomat-to-be Sir Rodric Braithwaite entered secret passages through false shop fronts.
© Gnter Bratke/DPA/PA Images
Unfortunately, thanks to traitor George Blake, the Soviets knew all about the Berlin surveillance tunnel; they staged a serendipitous ‘discovery’ of the British interception equipment in 1956 in order not to give away their double agent.
Notes
All documents prefaced by ‘National Archives’ are held at the United Kingdom National Archives at Kew.
Chapter One
1. National Archives HW3/169
2. National Archives HW14/151
3. Betty Flavell, interviewed for the Bletchley Park Trust: www.bletchleypark.org.uk
4. Neil Webster, quoted in Cribs for Victory: The Untold Story of Bletchley Park’s Secret Room (Polperro Press, 2011)
5. National Archives HW62/16
6. National Archives HW62/16
Chapter Two
1. Gene Grabeel, featured in National Security Agency archive features – www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic-heritage
2. National Archives HW8/36
3. Alan Stripp, in an essay contributed to Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park (Oxford University Press, 1993)
4. As above
5. As above
6. The poem reproduced in the in-house Beaumanor magazine, The Woygian Winter 1948
7. Gwendoline Gibbs – her essays can be found at http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/resources/filer.rhtm/655471/gibbs+g.pdf
8. As above
9. National Archives HW62/16
Chapter Three
1. National Archives FO366/2221
2. National Archives HW14/164
3. National Archives HW64/68
4. National Archives HW14/164
5. National Archives HW64/68
6. As quoted in GCHQ – The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency by Richard Aldrich (Harper Collins, 2010)
7. Mass Observation diaries; available for consultation by appointment in file 48/1/A at Sussex University or the British Library
8. John Cane, as quoted on the BBC News website, www.bbc.co.uk/news in February 2014
9. National Archives HW14/164
Chapter Four
1. Arthur Levenson’s interview can be found in the National Security Agency online archive at www.nsa.gov/news-features/declassified-documents/oral-history-interviews/index.shtml. Levenson’s interview is NSA-OH-40-80
2. As above
3. As quoted in Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges (Burnett/Hutchinson 1983)
Chapter Five
1. Aileen Clayton, writing in The Enemy Is Listening (Hutchinson, 1980)
2. This correspondence can be found on the National Security Agency online archive. Visit www.nsa.gov/news-features/declassified-documents/friedman-documents/assets/files/correspondence/FOLDER_365/41733539077277.pdf
3. Alan Sillitoe, Life Without Armour (HarperCollins, 1995)
4. As above
5. The Woygian, Beaumanor magazine, Winter 1946 number
6. Veterans share their memories online at http://gwulo.com/RAF-Battys-Belvedere-Hong-Kong
Chapter Six
1. Neal Ascherson, writing in the London Review of Books, 20 December 2012
2. Spycatcher by Peter Wright (Viking, 1987)
3. Meredith Gardner, as featured in the National Security Agency archives. Visit www.nsa.gov/news-features/declassified-documents/crypto-almanac-50th/assets/files/POLYGLOT.pdf
4. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt (Heinemann, 2005)
5. As quoted in The Cambridge History of the Cold War Volume 1 (Cambridge University Press, 2010)
6. As quoted in The Cambridge History of the Cold War Volume 1
Chapter Seven
1. Quoted from Enigma and the Eastcote Connection by Susan Toms. The essay can be read at www.ruislip.co.uk/eastcotemod/enigma.htm
2. Geoff Hardy, as quoted on the Cheltenham Civil Service RFC website www.pitchero.com/clubs/cheltenhamcivilservice/a/club-history-8718.html
3. Chris Barnes, writing for The Woygian, Beaumanor in-house magazine
4. As above
5. Kenneth Carling, writing at the website http://www.garatshay.org.uk/about_us/beaumanor.html
6. As above
7. As above
8. As above
Chapter Eight
1. For a splendid appreciation of Alexander from Stuart Milner Barry, go to: https://www.nsa.gov/news-features/declassified-documents/cryptologic-spectrum/assets/files/cono_hugh.pdf
2. As quoted in The Secret Sentry: The Untold Story of the National Security Agency by Matthew M Aid (Bloomsbury, 2009)
3. Stuart Milner Barry, writing in Codebreakers – The Inside Story of Bletchley Park (Oxford University Press, 1993)
4. William Millward, writing in Codebreakers, as above
5. Ralph Bennett, writing in Codebreakers, as above
6. Telford Taylor, writing in Codebreakers, as above
7. As quoted in GCHQ – The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intel
ligence Agency by Richard J Aldrich (HarperCollins, 2010)
8. As quoted in GCHQ – The Uncensored Story by Richard J Aldrich
9. As quoted in Gordon Welchman: Bletchley Park’s Architect of Ultra Intelligence by Joel Greenberg (Frontline Books, 2015)
10. For the National Security Agency’s appreciation of Wilma Zimmerman Davis, go to www.nsa.gov/news-features/declassified-documents/crypto-almanac-50th/assets/files/Wilma_Z._Davis.pdf
11. Genevieve Grotjan, as featured in the National Security Agency online archives, as above
12. As quoted in The Defence of the Realm – the Authorized History of MI5 by Christopher Andrew (Penguin, 2009)
Chapter Nine
1. George Kennan, as quoted in Post-War: A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt
2. ES Turner, writing in the London Review of Books, 29 September 1988
3. Reflections on Intelligence by RV Jones (William Heinemann, 1989)
Chapter Ten
1. Norman Logan, writing online at 14threunion.blogspot.com/2011/05/royal-signals-hands-over-to-corps-of.html
2. Alan Stripp, writing in Codebreakers
3. As recalled for www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar
4. As above
5. As above
6. As above
7. Dennis Underwood, writing at http://www.burmastar.org.uk/stories/dennis-underwood-war-office-y-group/
The Spies of Winter Page 38
