Tales of Brave Ulysses (Timeline 10/27/62)

by James Philip

  The Home Secretary had asked if he could take notes; the Foreign Secretary had gravely shaken his head.

  ‘Only if you drink poison first, old man.’

  Aged thirty-three William Gordon ‘Bill’ Welchman, the Marlborough schooled Trinity College mathematician had been Dean of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge in 1939. Alan Mathison Turing was twenty-seven in 1939, an old boy of Sherbourne College who had at the tender age of twenty-two been elected a fellow of King’s College Cambridge for his proof of the Central Limit Theorem. Thirty-two year old Stuart Milner-Barry had become a city stockbroker after winning Firsts in Classics and Moral Sciences at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1923 he had won the first British Boys’ Chess Championship and from 1932 onwards he had represented England at chess. The fourth Wicked Uncle was Irish-born Conel Hugh O’Donel Alexander, aged thirty in 1939, who like his friend Stuart Milner-Barry, was a former Trinity College man and an international class chess player. Before the war he had taught mathematics at Winchester College.

  ‘Bill Welchman ran Hut Six,’ Tom Harding-Grayson had explained. ‘Hut Six was in the business of attacking the German Army’s Enigma and Traffic Analysis.’

  ‘What exactly is traffic analysis?’ Roy Jenkins had asked plaintively.

  ‘The only plain language parts of any given Enigma message were the FROM and the TO components. These were meaningless codes of themselves but once Bill Welchman and his people had worked out, for example that CA85X was the Third Kampfgruppe of Fliegerkorps One in France, Bill’s people owned 3KG/FCI forever. By the time of the Dunkirk fiasco Hut Six had deduced the complete – and I do mean complete – German order of battle in the West. So, before we had broken a single Enigma message, Bill Welchman was able to pick up the phone and tell the powers that be not to worry about fighting the Battle of France because we had already lost it. Fortunately, that was just in the nick of time for the Navy could start pulling what was left of the British Expeditionary Force off the beaches of Dunkirk.’

  Traffic Analysis told one where and what one’s enemy was ‘physically’ doing; where his forces were deployed, his state of readiness and consequently where one’s own defences were the most vulnerable. Without having this ‘complete picture’ of the enemy’s strength and dispositions it did not matter if one could, or could not read his coded radio transmissions.

  Military intelligence, all intelligence in fact, is about context.

  Facts tell you nothing in the absence of context; a common journalist, academic and political misunderstanding!

  ‘Alan Turing ran Hut Eight. Hut Eight’s job was to crack the U-boat Enigma. SHARK. He was a remarkable fellow, after the war he was on the short list for the British Team at the London Olympics for the marathon, one of the top five or six long-distance runners in the country even though he would have been in his mid-thirties by then. Turing was the man who invented an electro-magnetic machine, ‘a computer’ to speed up the code-breaking process. He was the master logician who had sat down and worked out, in his own head, how such a machine would work, built it, eventually got it to work and won the Battle of the Atlantic. Albeit, with a little bit of help from the Royal Navy. We had had some early success reading SHARK in 1941 and 1942 but then the bloody Germans started using an extra ‘rotor’ on the naval version of the Enigma machine and breaking SHARK became exponentially more problematic. It was Bill Welchman, who by 1943 was in charge of mechanisation at Bletchley Park, as well as being the poor chump who was responsible for liaising with the Americans, who designed a modification to Turing’s code-breaking machine – his bombe – that speeded things up so that we could start reading SHARK again. Bill Welchman and Alan Turing became the ‘big men’ at Bletchley later in the war; with Milner-Barry and Hugh Alexander respectively taking over the running of Hut Six and Eight from about 1943 onwards.’

  The Home Secretary had had a mouthful of questions; but Tom Harding-Grayson was in a hurry to return to the Prime Minister’s rooms in Corpus Christi College.

  Roy Jenkins had tried to keep things succinct.

  ‘Who actually ran Bletchley Park during the Second War?’

  ‘The War Office.’

  ‘What about GCHQ now? Its remit seems to overlap several departments...’

  ‘Under the War Emergency Acts GCHQ is a Defence Ministry problem. But,’ Tom Harding-Grayson had qualified, ‘rebuilding the defence-intelligence community which GCHQ formerly served has thus far been a piecemeal affair.’

  ‘What happened to The Wicked Uncles?’

  ‘Turing was driven to suicide in 1954. The local police in Manchester persecuted him because he was a known homosexual and basically, nobody in authority who knew the truth about his wartime service raised a finger to help him. The whole affair was a disgrace. My Minister forbade me to go to his funeral. Bad show all round.’

  ‘Oh, what about the others?’

  ‘Bletchley Park was dismantled after the war. A pale shadow of the wartime Government Code and Cipher School was set up at Eastcote in Middlesex in 1946 but GCHQ in Cheltenham wasn’t established until the early 1950s. Stuart Milner-Barry joined the Treasury in 1946 I think. He was an Under-secretary by the time of the October War. He went missing the night of the war. Bill Welchman got so fed up with the penny-pinching of the Atlee Government that he moved to the United States in 1948. The last I heard he had become an American citizen and he was a top man in the National Security Agency in Virginia.’

  ‘And Hugh Alexander...’ Roy Jenkins’s voice had trailed away as the penny dropped. The last of the four Wicked Uncles who had done so much to win Hitler’s war was currently incarcerated at Her Majesty’s pleasure in Gloucester. Courtesy of those idiots at MI5!

  He fixed the Director General of MI5 in his sights.

  “It has come to my attention that officers under your command have wilfully subverted the transmission of a lawful communication from senior government officers to the Prime Minister,” the Home Secretary remarked icily to Sir Roger Hollis, the tired, irritated Director General of the Security Service, “in the name of national security.”

  “What of it, Home Secretary?”

  “And,” Roy Jenkins continued, “employed the powers vested in my person by the War Emergency Act (1962), to detain indefinitely without charge four highly qualified men engaged on work of vital national importance.”

  “Oh, the Cheltenham four...”

  “Yes, the Cheltenham Four!”

  “So that’s what this is all about!”

  Although the Home Secretary had discounted the whispering campaign against Hollis, on a night like this when the man seemed almost totally indifferent to the evidence that his officers were more interested in covering up deficiencies in the operation of an institution that was key to the defence of the realm, than they were in the actual defence of the realm, that he wondered for the first time is there might be an element of truth in the rumours that Hollis was the ‘sixth man’ after the three acknowledged Cambridge traitors Burgess, MacLean and Philby, and their publicly unacknowledged co-conspirators John Cairncross and Anthony Blunt.

  “I have ordered their immediate unconditional release from prison, Sir Roger. Moreover, I have passed their letter and the relevant MI5 case file to the Prime Minister’s Private Office. Further, I have asked to be present if and when the Prime Minister calls you before her to account for your personal conduct, and that of the officers under you command in this disgraceful business.”

  Sir Roger Hollis rose to his feet.

  He said nothing because he had nothing further to say to the man he worked for. MI5, acting on solid intelligence received from the Secret Intelligence Service in the last forty-eight hours had rounded up over a hundred suspected former Soviet, Red Dawn and other violently inclined malcontents, including several probable IRA men caught red-handed with bomb making equipment and industrial grade plastic explosives. It was MI5’s greatest coup since the October War; over the next few days his interrogators would uncover exactly how
many networks had been disrupted and rolled up. The operation was still ongoing. He would have given the Home Secretary forewarning of the operation if he had trusted him, or any of his senior officials but he had decided not to risk the security of the operation by ‘unnecessary disclosures’ to a ‘bunch of amateurs’.

  The Home Secretary could go to Hell!

  Nothing suited him better than to deal directly with the Prime Minister.

  He looked forward to ‘explaining himself to that lady’ whenever she summoned him.

  Chapter 19

  01:02 Hours (GMT)

  Saturday 4th April 1964

  Corpus Christi College, Oxford, England

  Lady Patricia Harding-Grayson had made her way across Oxford as the first news of the scale of the disaster in the Mediterranean had reached her. Leaving her charges, the Prime Minister’s eleven year old twins, Mark and Carol, in the care of friends and a large detachment of Royal Marine bodyguards, she had hurried to be with her younger friend at Corpus Christi College.

  “Margaret is in a dreadful state!” Her husband explained, taking his wife by the arm and leading her into an alcove in the corridor leading to the Prime Minister’s room. “Willie’s being and absolute brick and Walter Brenckmann is doing his best to get hold of every available scrap of information but...”

  Lady Patricia – a lifelong socialist with genteel libertarian leanings she hated the ‘Lady’ appellation, a by-product of her husband’s advancement to Foreign Secretary after the murder of his predecessor, Lord Hume, at Balmoral in November – had divorced her husband in the fifties and remarried him the instant she discovered that he too had survived the night of the October War. Before the war her unabashed left-wing political affiliations and sympathies and her successful career as a novelist had once been embarrassing encumbrances to her spouse, whose once brilliant career had been in freefall during the Macmillan years leading up to October 1962. All of which was well behind them both. These days they were a team, intimates and confidantes within Margaret Thatcher’s inner circle.

  Willie was forty-five year old William Stephen Ian Whitelaw, the Member of Parliament for Penrith and the Border and since January the imperturbable Secretary of State for Defence in the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom.

  Walter Brenckmann was Captain Walter Brenckmann, United States Navy (Retired), the American Ambassador to the newly re-located court of Blenheim Palace. Walter Brenckmann was that rare thing; a man whose voice was listened to and respected on both sides of the North Atlantic. A veteran of the Battle of the Atlantic in Hitler’s War and the commander of a Fletcher class fleet destroyer during the Korean conflict, after the October War he had been plucked from the obscurity of his Boston law practice and sent to England as a naval liaison officer. Back in November and December he had been a lone voice warning of the dangerous dissonances developing between the World’s last two remaining nuclear superpowers. Within the higher echelons of the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom he was regarded very nearly as an ex-officio insider, much in the way Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Ambassador to London, John Gilbert Winant, had become between 1941 and 1945. Like Winant, Walter Brenckmann had no political ties to the Kennedy Administration and had quickly become a trusted honest broker between his chief, Secretary of State J. William Fulbright and the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom.

  However, inside the Prime Minister’s rooms at that moment Walter Brenckmann wanted to tear his hair out.

  No matter how hard he tried to communicate with the people around him nobody really got it. The malicious rumour that the British had secretly unilaterally appointed Admiral Sir David Luce, the First Sea Lord as the new Supreme Commander of all Anglo-American Forces in the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations – allegedly imperiously over-riding the Kennedy Administration’s recommendation of an American officer not to the liking of the British Ministry of Defence – had stirred up a vitriolic firestorm of outrage and recrimination in Philadelphia. It was only a matter of time before a long and vociferous phalanx of isolationist America First members of the House of Representatives began to fan the flames of that firestorm.

  “Walter,” Margaret Thatcher decided, testily signalling that in her opinion there were more important things on the agenda. “Walter, thank you for your concern and for your advice but I am sure this whole thing is a storm in a tea cup. The Ministry of Information is in the process of issuing a firm rebuttal of the stories which have apparently emerged overnight in New York and Philadelphia. What we need to be worrying about presently is the situation of Malta.”

  Outside the Prime Minister’s room Tom Harding-Grayson had also put the workings of the American newspaper rumour mill to one side in favour of other, seemingly more pressing imperatives.

  The latest news from Malta could hardly be worse.

  The Foreign Secretary had forced himself to move past his initial disbelief, shock and despondency upon hearing the news from the Mediterranean; it was always a mistake to become so preoccupied with the travails of the present that one neglected to look to the future. No matter that there had been an unexpected seismic shift in the geopolitical realities of the region; it was his job as Foreign Secretary to provide his Prime Minister with realistic policy options in the new, radically altered situation. But not right now. Right now the problem was wholly in the hands of the military men because it was obvious that what had just happened in Malta was – the October War excepted – the most disastrous day for British arms since the fall of Singapore in 1942. It was precious little comfort to reflect that but for the heroism and sacrifice of the Royal Navy and the fortuitous belated intervention of the USS Iowa and her consorts, things might have been even worse. Around lunchtime the previous day he had been in a funk about Argentina invading a few small islands eight thousand miles away; islands of minimal strategic importance to and of no material political significance to the UAUK. Since then he had been blaming himself for being completely surprised by the events in the Mediterranean. In the fullness of time the inevitable inquests would ineluctably prove beyond any reasonable doubt that had he and many others in government, the intelligence community and the military had not been ‘on the ball’ because whatever the circumstances, Malta should not have been left so criminally undefended.

  “Nobody will say what’s actually going on?” Pat Harding-Grayson put to her husband in a conspiratorial whisper.

  “That’s because the commander of the US Navy squadron that was supposed to be ‘guarding’ the Maltese Archipelago decided to rendezvous with the larger American force approaching Malta,” the Foreign Secretary hissed, “without first informing Admiral Christopher when the aforementioned larger American force was due to arrive in the Central Mediterranean. On the basis of existing intelligence it seems that the C-in-C decided to not to turn the sudden departure of Admiral Detweiller’s four big modern guided missile destroyers into a diplomatic incident. Consequently, when the smelly stuff hit the fan around mid-day yesterday all he had to hand was an under-gunned frigate, HMS Yarmouth, and HMS Talavera, a 1945-war vintage destroyer only recently out of dockyard hands. Apparently, both ships captains were ordered by Admiral Christopher to quote ‘get out to sea’ but in the event took it upon themselves to directly engage a hugely superior enemy fleet. In so doing they cut short the enemy bombardment of Malta and contrived to so badly damage two large enemy warships that they were sitting ducks by the time the Yanks belatedly came to the rescue.”

  It was like something straight out of the pages of Boys’ Own!

  Pat Harding-Grayson realised that she had missed something very important.

  “What happened to the RAF while all this was happening?”

  “All available strike aircraft had previously been sent to attack a suspected invasion convoy. Early indications are that this air strike, backed up by a later attack by an American nuclear submarine largely destroyed this enemy force.”

  “Oh. So we’ve beaten off the invasion?”
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br />   “Yes, but at a very high cost. Some reports say that as many as two thousand Soviet paratroopers were dropped on key installations across the archipelago and that isolated fighting is still going on.”

  Pat scowled at her husband.

  “There have been very heavy casualties, particularly amongst the civilian population,” he responded, unable to get past his customary reticence even though he made a point of not keeping secrets from his wife. “Especially, in Mdina. It is feared that Sir Julian Christopher is among the dead.”

  This struck Pat Harding-Grayson like a slap in the face.

  “God! No!”

  While a lot of people at the heart of government suspected that Margaret Thatcher and the famous ‘Fighting Admiral’ were more than just ‘friends’; the number of people who actually knew of their betrothal could be counted on the fingers of one hand; Sir Julian’s prospective best man, Captain Nicholas Davey, currently off Cyprus in command of the 23rd Support Flotilla, Pat herself, and the couple themselves. A formal announcement had been tentatively planned once Operation Grantham, the massive amphibious assault to expel the Red Dawn horde from the island of Cyprus had come to a successful conclusion but the couple had not planned to marry until Sir Julian’s tenure in command at Malta concluded sometime in the next eighteen months.

  The great Anglo-American fleet currently gathered in the Eastern Mediterranean poised to fall upon Cyprus would have swatted aside the enemy force that had bombarded Malta; but it had been a thousand miles away and the big guns of two – Red Dawn or Soviet, it mattered not – warships had, virtually unopposed, systematically rained death on the single most strategically important bastion of what remained of the British Empire. In comparison with what had just happened and was continuing to happen across the Maltese Archipelago, the humiliation of Anthony Eden’s Administration over the Suez Debacle in 1956 was as nothing.