The Secrets of Station X

by Michael Smith

  Many of our recruits are men of considerable distinction and it is definitely felt that in the allocation of accommodation such facts should be taken into account. It appears to me improper to invite such as these to try to do work requiring a high degree of concentration in overcrowded rooms. There is a real spirit of discontent growing among my colleagues. I have congratulated them on the good work that is being done under trying conditions and the natural reply is ‘improve our conditions and you will get more results’. The Naval Section is now grossly overcrowded and we have to remember that we have added to our staff volunteers of very considerable standing and the research work they will undertake is of extreme national importance and one which calls for some degree of comfort in their surroundings in order to get the best out of them. It seems that there is not room to house MI6 and GC&CS in Bletchley Park efficiently. The only alternative therefore is to separate. It therefore remains to examine whether alternative accommodation can be found for some or all sections of MI6.

  MI6 sections began to move out; the GC&CS Commercial and Diplomatic Sections had already moved into the neighbouring Elmer’s School and a programme of construction of temporary wooden huts began. Soon the various sections began to move out of the mansion into the newly constructed buildings, adopting the name of the hut they were in as their section title, in part for security reasons. The first to move was the Naval Section, which moved into Hut 4, next to the mansion, in November 1939.

  The accommodation remained primitive and as late summer turned first into autumn and then into winter, the codebreakers found the heating to be woefully inadequate. ‘It was dreadful,” said Barbara Abernethy. ‘We had an electric stove which didn’t work and a very poor heating system. We all froze. We had to wear coats and mittens.’ It was even colder in the huts, which were bleak after the comfort of the house. Bare concrete floors disguised with a coating of red tile paint, windows with blackout curtains, wooden trestle tables, light bulbs with no shades and inefficient electric heaters, or worse, cast iron coke stoves with metal chimneys going up through the asbestos roof or inefficient paraffin heaters. ‘They were awful,’ said Phoebe Senyard.

  When the wind was high, long flames would be blown out into the room frightening anyone nearby. Alternatively, the fire would go out and smoke would come billowing forth filling the room with a thick fog. It was a familiar sight to find Mr Green on his hands and knees wearing thick motor gloves endeavouring to light a recalcitrant fire, whilst the shivering occupant would be dressed in a thick overcoat, scarf and gloves endeavouring to cope with his work, with all the windows open to let out the smoke.

  But it was wartime and across Britain there was very much a spirit of make-do and live for the day. Funding for all that was required to take place at Bletchley was low and there had been no real breakthrough into the German Enigma cypher but morale remained remarkably high. ‘Christmas was now drawing near and the question of leave arose,’ said Phoebe Senyard.

  It was impossible for all to be away together so we arranged among ourselves who should stay. Jocelyn and I drew lots and I lost and resigned myself to a miserable Christmas, the first one for some years that I had spent away from home. When the day arrived I found there were more people at BP than I had thought there would be. For the travel ban which had been imposed had prevented quite a number from going home. Mr Birch invited me to a small celebration and I arrived afterwards in the dining room for lunch feeling quite happy and being rather late to find the hall decorated magnificently with everyone sitting down wearing the peculiar paper hats one gets from Christmas crackers and blowing whistles which shot out a terrific length of paper. Every seat was occupied with the exception of one seat round the corner but there I sat quite happily with a wonderful lunch in front of me. All the Christmases which I spent in Bletchley were extremely good, everyone going all out to make everyone else enjoy themselves.

  CHAPTER 3

  EARLY BEGINNINGS VERY SMALL BEER–FULL OF FOREIGN BODIES

  When German forces crossed the border into Poland, Rejewski and his fellow codebreakers were forced to flee to Bucharest. Hoping to join Knox and resume their work breaking Enigma, they went first to the British embassy where the ambassador told them he could do nothing to help them until he had spoken to London. Sadly for the British, the staff at the French embassy were far better briefed on the importance of the Polish codebreakers and arranged for them to leave for Paris immediately. Attempts by Knox, Denniston and Menzies to bring them to Bletchley Park failed and they were incorporated into the French intercept site – the Poste de Commandement Bruno, based in the beautiful Château de Vignolles, in Gretz-Armainvilliers, on the north bank of the Marne, twenty-five miles south-east of Paris. British codebreakers were posted to the château, with one of them, Henry Dryden, recalling his time at what the British called the ‘Mission Richard’ for reasons quite separate from the codebreaking he carried out. ‘My enduring memories of the two months I spent there have no military connotations,’ Dryden said. ‘Never before or since have I seen such a remarkable display of roses, nor heard so many nightingales singing against each other, nor eaten so much Brie in so short a time.’

  Turing had spent his time since arriving in the Cottage working on Naval Enigma, which Knox had put to one side since it was a more difficult problem than German Army and Luftwaffe Enigma. He had also been busy devising a machine, called the Bombe, after the Bomby, although it was a more complex piece of equipment than its Polish namesake. This would test the encyphered messages against commonly used streams of text – known to the codebreakers as cribs – to narrow down the possibilities for the keys, settings and wheel orders of the Enigma machines. Turing enjoyed a good degree of progress on both. Menzies agreed funding of £100,000 for the construction of the first Bombes and the British Tabulating Machinery company (BTM) was commissioned to build it, with the work supervised by the BTM research director Harold ‘Doc’ Keen. Then in December 1939, Turing managed to work out the indicator systems for five days of pre-war Naval Enigma traffic. But neither the Poles in France nor the British could manage to break a wartime Enigma message. Dennis Babbage, one of the young mathematicians who had joined the small party in the cottage, recalled that attacks were made on numerous days’ traffic. ‘One after the other they went down and a general gloom descended.’

  This period was not entirely wasted because the codebreakers discovered one feature of the way in which the ordinary signals operators set up the machine. The operators were using pronounceable sequences of letters for the three-letter message settings on the machine, these were usually the first three letters of a word, or their girlfriends’ names, sometimes even the first three letters of obscenities. They became known as Cillies because one of the first that was spotted was CIL, an abbreviated form of the German girl’s name Cilli. ‘Just occasionally you would get a chap who was rather fond of the same letters,’ said Susan Wenham, who was twenty-eight and one of the young female codebreakers recruited from Newnham College, Cambridge. ‘It might be for some personal reason. Perhaps one chap might use his girlfriend’s initials for the setting of the wheels or his own initials. Something like that, you know, silly little things. They weren’t supposed to do it but they did.’ Searching for Cillies became something of an art, said Mavis Lever, another of the young female codebreakers, who also worked on four-wheeled Enigmas. ‘One was thinking all the time about the psychology of what it was like in the middle of the fighting when you were supposed to be encoding a message for your general and you had to put three or four letters in these little windows and in the heat of the battle you would put up your girlfriend’s name or dirty four-letter German words. I am the world’s expert on dirty German four-letter words!’

  But no actual cyphers were being broken and the pressure got to Knox, who had just been appointed Chief Assistant, effectively the chief cryptographer. He threatened to resign, an approach he was prone to take when he felt the battle to break the cyphers was not being pursued wit
h sufficient vigour by those in charge. At the Pyry conference, he and Denniston had promised to send the Poles more of the Zygalski sheets, which they had been unable to procure. These had been produced, but never sent. In a letter to Denniston, Knox insisted that the Zygalski sheets must be taken to the Poles in France immediately. ‘My personal feelings on the matter are so strong that unless they leave by Wednesday night I shall tender my resignation,’ he said. ‘I do not want to go to Paris but if you cannot secure another messenger I’m actually at the moment completely idle.’

  In fact, Turing was sent to Mission Richard with the Zygalski sheets and a brief to find out why the codebreakers were unable to get into the wartime cyphers. The Zygalski sheets allowed Rejewski to make the first break into the German wartime Enigma: a German Army message in what the codebreakers dubbed the Green cypher for the 28 October 1939. Turing’s visit also uncovered the reasons for the British codebreakers’ failure to break any wartime Enigma. The information the Poles had given them was inadvertently wrong, providing the incorrect turnover points for two of the wheels. Shortly after Turing’s arrival back in the UK, Knox used the corrected information to break the Green Army Enigma settings for 28 October and, within days, an Enigma key known as the Red was broken for 6 and 17 January 1940. (The first Enigma cyphers to be worked on by GC&CS were given the names of colours because progress was listed on boards using coloured crayons, the green and red crayons simply being the first that came to hand.)

  Despite Knox’s undoubted brilliance as a codebreaker, there were those who felt that something more intensive along the lines of a codebreaking production line would be required once the Phoney War came to an end and British troops became involved in the fighting.

  ‘One decision had been taken just prior to the first success,’ noted Nigel de Grey, who took charge of intelligence production.

  Among the younger men engaged on the Enigma problem, Commander Travis had found not only the knowledge required to grapple with the Bombe theory but men with an active sense of urgency. He felt that the atmosphere of research work tended to cloud the practical attack, the ‘chuck and chance it’ spirit that might hook the fish while the more experienced fisherman still considered the colour of his fly. Both were necessary but one should be tried not independently of, but separately from, the other. The decision to make this change was taken at a meeting held on 5 December 1939 and it was further determined to move the exploitation party into a new wooden hut erected in the garden of Bletchley Park, named Hut 6. This they occupied in January and as Hut 6 they were ever after known.

  Commander Edward Travis, Denniston’s deputy, had been the government’s main adviser on what type of codes and cyphers to use before the war, a secondary role of GC&CS. Short, stout and bald, with small round spectacles, ‘Jumbo’ Travis was fifty-one years old and an able and forceful administrator who did not feel himself bound by the traditions of the veteran codebreakers. He put one of the impressive new younger men identified by de Grey in charge of Hut 6. Gordon Welchman, a studious, pipe-smoking man in his early thirties with dark hair and a moustache, who was far more dynamic than his academic appearance suggested, had already begun recruiting his own people to man the section. Stuart Milner-Barry, the 33-year-old Chess Correspondent of The Times and a fellow student of Welchman’s at Trinity College, Cambridge, was one of the first to join Hut 6, as Welchman’s deputy. When the war broke out he had been in Argentina playing chess for Britain, along with his friends 30-year-old Hugh Alexander and 28-year-old Harry Golombek. They too soon joined, as did the 31-year-old Scottish chess champion J. M. ‘Max’ Aitken; 30-year-old Dennis Babbage, from Magdalene College, Cambridge and Howard Smith, also thirty and like Welchman a Fellow of Sidney Sussex. (Smith would later serve as British Ambassador to the Soviet Union and then as head of MI5.) Continuity with Knox’s efforts was provided by John Jeffreys. Knox continued to carry out research into various problems in the Cottage while Hut 6 prepared to carry out what was hoped to be the day-to-day breaking of Enigma. It is important to realise that at this stage no one was sure whether the success would continue. Indeed, there were concerns that it might not last at all, that the Germans were bound eventually to realise that Enigma was not secure, de Grey recalled.

  There were, in January 1940, no means within GC&CS of assessing the value of Hut 6’s achievement in terms of intelligence. The material available from the Poles was fragmentary or rather, perhaps, spasmodic. It was long out of date. But, since the Germans had not made a change on 1 January, and the methods of attack were proving themselves, it seemed that at least GC&CS might look to have a run for its money, especially when the Bombe could be brought into action. The achievement, it was true, hung by a hair, for it was really mostly lack of good cypher discipline that so far had made the Enigma vulnerable and the Germans were regarded as masters of disciplinary regulations and slaves of the iron rule. It was clear that steps must be taken to put the decyphered material into English and in some measure order it for expert examination. If the pearl were indeed of great price, cryptanalytically a triumph achieved after years of investigation, a potential source of first-rate intelligence both on the German Army and on their Air Force and a good omen for the attack upon the German Naval machine, then it must be guarded as none other.

  The break into the Enigma cypher led to strict security being imposed on the work going on at Bletchley Park. Menzies issued orders giving GC&CS the covername ‘Government Communications Headquarters’ – the name by which it is still known to this day – adding that ‘this should be sufficient explanation for the curious to account for the presence of personnel from so many different government departments.’ Hut 6 and Dilly Knox’s Enigma Research Section became ‘barred zones’ for anyone who was not working there.

  The potential intelligence haul from Bletchley Park’s ‘Most Secret Source’ was immense. But de Grey was right. It hung by a very slim thread. The British had managed to penetrate the Enigma cyphers only because the Germans had been careless and did not adhere strictly to their signals instructions. If they found out and strengthened or even changed their cypher systems, all the codebreakers’ efforts would be wasted. There were already strict regulations in place preventing staff from talking about their work, but these were now reinforced to the point that most of the people at Bletchley who were not working on Enigma, or a related issue – the vast bulk of the people working there – were not even aware that it had been broken. ‘We knew nothing about Enigma at all until long after the war,’ said Julie Lydekker, one of the clerks in Cooper’s Air Section. ‘It was a very strange set-up. We were very much in water-tight compartments because of the security so one really only knew one’s own sections.’

  The lack of understanding in the services and in Whitehall of the extent of what was going on at Bletchley led them to send people who while fluent in German were never going to match up to the very tight vetting procedures, Josh Cooper recalled.

  The German-speaking ladies that Air Ministry sent down to Bletchley pretty obviously failed to meet these requirements. There was for example the elderly and very imposing typist-secretary whom the Section immediately nicknamed ‘Queen Mary’, and a younger and rather promising recruit who made her position impossible scandalising her Bletchley billetors by saying to all and sundry that the only friends she had ever had were Germans. This seems to have been true; she had had a troubled and unhappy life at home in England, but had found kindness and sympathy when she went to Germany. It was a pity that she had to go, for she had evident aptitude for the work.

  When Gwen Davies was sent to Bletchley Park, as an 18-year-old member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), she was told she was being posted to nearby RAF Chicksands. ‘When I arrived at Chicksands I was taken into the administration office where there was a driver waiting and he said with perfect seriousness: “Do we blindfold her or do we use the covered van?” and ultimately they used the covered van, I was shut into the back of a blacked out van and taken t
o Bletchley.’

  She was dumped with her luggage outside the gates of the park and told by a young guard that she couldn’t come in because she didn’t have a pass. ‘I was by this time hungry, thirsty and very, very annoyed. “Look,” I said, “I don’t know where I am, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.” “Come to the right place then,” said the guard, “most of ’em here look as if they didn’t know where they was and God knows what them doing”. An elderly guard told him to leave me alone, and said that I was to go to the hut at the left of the gates. “Somebody will come and see to you,” he said, “and if you want to know where you are, you’re at Bletchley Park.” “And if you want to know what that is,” added the younger guard, sniggering, “it’s the biggest lunatic asylum in Britain.”’

  Davies was given a security lecture and told never to reveal, even to her close family, what she did at Bletchley.

  I had to sign the Official Secrets Act and I was told that I must never ever say to anyone where I was working, except to say Box 101, Bletchley, and that I must never ever tell anyone about any of the work I was doing. You never talked even to your own watch about your traffic, about what you were doing. So you talked about personalities. That was the great thing. Gossip at Bletchley was absolutely wonderful, apocryphal stories about everybody flew everywhere; personalities were safe to talk about.

  Similarly, those in Hut 6 knew nothing of what went on elsewhere in the Park. ‘It was a very curious organisation,’ said Susan Wenham, one of the Hut 6 codebreakers.