The world longed for peace, and thus good relations with the nascent, etiolated Turkish state became the cornerstone of the Balkan policies of all the western great powers – of none more so than Britain. Additionally Turkey’s foreign minister, Ismet I·nönü – later to lead the Turkish nation through the Second World War and beyond – proved to be a formidably successful negotiator at the Lausanne Conference of 1923. While Lord Curzon was perceived to be the ablest tactician of the great power statesmen present, it was I·nönü who won for his country significant modifications to Versailles, including parts of western Thrace which made the Straits in effect a broad river through Turkish territory, much to the chagrin of generations of Russian and Bulgarian diplomats.
Chanak in 1922 and Montreux in 1936 were significant moments in the development of Turkish foreign policy in the interwar period. British attitudes to Turkey were affected by two factors which bound Turco-British relations together for the next twenty years. One was the presence of Winston Churchill back in government after serving in a sort of honourable disgrace as a battalion commander on the Western Front. Churchill was passionately in favour of the Chanak provocation in 1922, pressing information derived from Turkish diplomatic intercepts on his colleagues to show which way the wind was blowing. The second, arising from the first, was Britain’s access to Turkish military and diplomatic ciphers continuously from 1916 to 1945. These informed Churchill how he could have taken advantage of the shortage of Turkish ammunition and the willingness of the Turkish banks to accept bribes to intervene: thus informed, he could have averted the Dardanelles fiasco. Seven years later he read the intercepts which spelt out the chances of the success of the Chanak provocation and, twenty years after that, he plotted each step in Turkey’s plans to stay neutral in 1941–43. Thus the relationship between Churchill, Turkey and diplomatic intercepts can be traced over twenty-nine years, which helps explain why playing the ‘Turkey hand’ was so important to him in the Second World War.
Some account of Turkey’s economic and political developments will serve to bridge the interwar years. The crises and conferences which brought modern Turkey into being created an essentially non-viable state, lacking the infrastructure and resources of other Middle Eastern countries, settling uneasily for a centralised one-party state on Portuguese lines but with a commitment to some form of eventual social democracy which was slow to come and over which the Turkish leadership procrastinated, often with good reason.
Turkey’s strategic position at the eastern end of the Mediterranean and the southern shore of the Black Sea meant that it was a target of constant surveillance by Whitehall, but in fact the country was split, not geographically but ethnically and culturally, into two quite distinct groupings. Turkish discrimination against Armenian, Azerbaijani, Kurdish and Greek minorities obscured the fact that many Turks shared more in common with populations between the Caucasus and the Caspian than with their Balkan neighbours. The huge Anatolian hinterland was comparatively undeveloped, and schools, roads and amenities generally were scarce. The economy was fragile, illiteracy extensive and taxation yielded insufficient revenue to support not only a large standing army but by 1939 a massive call-up of reservists and a state of emergency. Foreign trade was hard to come by without credit, or barter, or state intervention. Here was a third world country in which a million peasant farmer producers had become consumers through the call-up, as Prime Minister Saraçoğlu explained in the Turkish National Assembly in July 1941.3 A wealth tax, introduced as a consequence, caused widespread alarm, particularly among the non-Muslim minorities in the west of the country, against whom it was targeted and who involuntarily contributed 85 per cent of the additional revenue raised. After a good harvest the peasantry regularly worked on the roads for additional subsistence, and thus gradually opened Anatolia up to the internal combustion engine.
Looking east and south, to Mecca and Arabia and central Asia rather than to Europe, the 18 million population had no wish to fight the Germans, the Russians or anyone else, except perhaps the Bulgarians. Only Muslims could bear arms and many of the minorities suffered discrimination. Dissent was discouraged and the press followed the government line with only mild differences of emphasis depending on whether the proprietor or editor inclined to national socialism or democratic capitalism. All alike were afraid of Russia, until Mussolini’s interventions in Africa, Spain and Albania made Italy Turkey’s chief problem.
I·nönü knew that his army was equipped to fight and win on Turkish soil and elsewhere in Asia but not against the Wehrmacht (German army) with its new weapons and frightening new ways of carrying out Blitzkrieg (lightning war). On Atatürk’s death in 1938 I·nönü had been appointed his successor in the presidency. He concentrated his attention on foreign policy, to maintain his predecessor’s priorities, holding Turkey’s new borders inviolate, keeping her hard-won rights in the Straits, buying only from nations that bought from them, making wary non-aggression noises to her equally fragile neighbours – Romania, Greece and Bulgaria – ignoring the Arab world and the Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe, and maintaining friendship, albeit on their terms, with the great powers, particularly Britain. And he based the policy on the reports of his ambassadors which were invariably delivered straight to him.
At the start of hostilities in September 1939 Turkey’s major enemy was Italy, whose advance into Albania two months previously was seen as further evidence of Mussolini’s neo-imperialist policy, already condemned by the League of Nations, though later condoned. It was clear to the Turks that Mussolini’s ambitions were by no means fully realised, and his occupation of the Dodecanese islands might prove to be the prelude to sharp fighting in the eastern Mediterranean. But elsewhere I·nönü followed Atatürk in seeking to ensure the balance of power in Europe was maintained. So Germany’s ambitions in eastern Europe, already realised in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland, loomed menacingly, although German diplomats then and thereafter, on Hitler’s orders, treated Turkey with politeness and care. The British approach by way of reciprocal guarantee in April 1939 came as the climax of several years of diplomatic activity designed to keep Turkey sweet. The formalities were completed by the Franco-Turco-British Pact which guaranteed Turkey’s borders from any threat in the west – but the FO files reveal that almost no one understood what the pact really entailed, and in particular what would happen if a belligerent country attempted to sail its ships through the Straits. And it was never put to the test. French influence, hitherto dominant,4 was severely eroded by the unmoving nature of the French position which failed to maintain her mission civilisatrice in the Middle East, and was effectively eliminated when France surrendered to the Germans in June 1940.
Thus preserving Turkish neutrality required all I·nönü’s concentration and formidable negotiating powers. Conflicting concerns swirled round the politicians in Ankara, and historical and ancestral memories skewed the negotiating processes. Fear of Russia was compounded by the widespread fear of international Bolshevisation – which by 1938 threatened to bring parts of northern Spain into the Russian orbit – with a growing awareness of what Stalin’s purges were doing to the officer class there. With France immobile and Italy flexing its muscles, with Germany enticing her into trading dependency and Britain unable to deliver what she promised, Turkey also had potential problems on her eastern borders where in Persia and Afghanistan unstable regimes, tribal loyalties and oil complicated international relations. Many Turks – sometimes I·nönü himself – hankered for a recrudescence of panturanism – the re-establishment of the wider frontiers and spheres of influence of the declining years of the Ottoman Empire – and longed at least to fight the Bulgarians, their erstwhile vassals. Control of the Straits was maintained only through the terms of the Montreux Convention which were widely resented by the other Black Sea littoral powers.
Such was the geopolitical reality for Turkey in 1939. This was the situation Churchill manipulated constantly, though in the end unavailingly. He was kept info
rmed of Turkish military thinking by Adm Howard Kelly whom he sent to Ankara where he struck up a friendship with Marshal Kakmak.5 Kelly’s manuscript diary entries covering these years are at the National Maritime Museum. The Turks, he reported, admired German efficiency. He went on unauthorised walks near strategic installations and was constantly being arrested. In 1940 he noted that it was evident that Turkey had no intention of going to war except for the protection of her own interests, but Churchill disregarded his view. Despite his knowledge of Ottoman history and the wounds left by the Dardanelles venture, Churchill’s wish to get Turkey into the war was not based on geopolitical reality but on a mixture of hope and desperation. In 1940 when France fell he had no one else in Europe to turn to, and when a year later Russia joined the Allies, and America six months after that, neither partner went along with his Turkish ploy, though such was his influence until mid-1944 that the other two sometimes pretended to do so.
He went about bringing Turkey into the war by proposing a platonic marriage, based on mutual convenience. He ignored Turkey’s fear that the success of any great power would threaten the balance of power in Europe and her own territorial sovereignty. By 1940 Germany was almost at Turkey’s doorstep, Russia was a less than friendly neighbour to the north, whose plight in 1941 raised the spectre of a plea for help against the German invader. Russia’s later successes displaced Italy and Germany as the major threat, as the prospect rose of Germany being rolled back by a newly victorious Soviet Union, still suspected of promoting Bolshevism internationally. And when British successes in the Mediterranean seemed likely to throw the Axis out of the region, Turkey grew to fear yet another imperial superpower would displace Italy as a potential aggressor. Thus Germany, Russia, Britain, Italy (and France until mid-1940) had all constituted a direct challenge to Turkish independence.
In 1941 all Churchill had to go on was the Turco-Franco-British guarantee of mutual assistance of 1939, effectively nullified in 1940 by the collapse of France. But he had something else which only Hitler, Ribbentrop and a handful of FO officials in London and Berlin shared: he had intimate access to the formulation of Turkish foreign policy through the secret diplomatic intercepts from Turkish ambassadors abroad to Ankara. These told him in great detail when to press his platonic marriage suit and when to quench his ardour; when President I·nönü might be ready to receive him, and under what conditions and with what agenda and with what outcome; what Axis pressures were exerted on Ankara and how they were received; how the Turks reacted to German successes in 1940 and 1941, and the Russian successes thereafter; their suspicions of American intentions, their fears of the Bolshevisation of Europe, shared by the Iberian countries, their scepticism of his own good faith – would the British, could the British, deliver what they were promising: both success in fighting the Germans and sophisticated new weaponry for the Turks to defend themselves against the Bulgarians.
He had little help from his colleagues. Anthony Eden, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, did not like the Turks and was not liked by them. Harold Macmillan was assigned political responsibility for most Mediterranean littoral countries, but specifically bound out of Turkey.6 The British generals were too assertive, the admirals only marginally less so. Turkey should be handled by London, Churchill ruled. And London meant Churchill, and only Churchill had the diplomatic intercepts.
As for the other Allies, neither America nor Russia shared his enthusiasm for Turkey – but for different reasons. To the Americans Turkey looked like a part of a plot to set up a second front as far away as possible from the British or imperial homelands, in the Balkans, an area they regarded as an exclusively European can of worms. In November 1940 the Russians had urged on their Axis partners a carve-up of the world: Molotov wanted Russian expansion at the expense of Turkey and proposed that Moscow and Berlin should impose these claims by force. But a year later the Russians, fighting for their lives, had no time for or interest in the Turks. They could not understand why the British continued to court them after Adana and though they agreed it was important they join the Allies in 1943 they cooled to this project, as indeed to Turkey, when they saw the diplomatic game the Turks were playing so successfully.
So Churchill had his platonic marriage of convenience, a stick and carrot method of proposing it (if you don’t you’ll be invaded by someone, probably Russia, perhaps Bulgaria; if you do you’ll get the best new weaponry and maybe the Dodecanese) and his Turkish diplomatic intercepts. Given such a poor hand he may be thought to have played it with panache and skill and an endearing lack of self-importance. All present at Adana thought so. The conference itself took place amid scenes of amazing friendship and conviviality. But the British could not or would not deliver as promised, while the Turks were reluctant to accept and make use of what did arrive, for fear of provoking the Germans. A stalemate developed thereafter and a year of diplomatic gerrymandering began, until President I·nönü quite unexpectedly removed his reputedly pro-German foreign minister, Numan Menemencioğlu, stopped sending chromite to Germany, forbade passage of German naval vessels through the Straits and ultimately, with one week to go, entered the war. By that time the fighting was almost over. Despite the malingering and some consequential ill-tempered remarks, Churchill persisted in his attachment to his idea of Turkey and was personally instrumental in bringing her into the United Nations in late 1945.
If Churchill thus failed basically to secure a useful ally in the Turks, it was because there was nothing in it for them. The Turkish leadership called his bluff, very politely, and the German bluff (perhaps the more honest of the two). They also called the Russian bluff when in 1945 Molotov proposed a revision of the terms of the Montreux Convention.
The Turkish ambassadors, attachés, diplomats and foreign ministry officials kept their president au courant with the progress of the war, mainly by means of the diplomatic reports, which were systematically intercepted, decrypted and read assiduously in Whitehall and the Wilhelmstrasse – and by none more assiduously than Churchill himself, as we shall see. These Turkish officials were all remarkably and genuinely united behind I·nönü in working for continued Turkish neutrality at almost any cost. They all refused to think seriously about becoming a belligerent unless and until Turkish sovereignty had been infringed. It never was.
Churchill’s Secret Source
Two factors can now be seen to tie Turkey umbilically to Whitehall in the interwar period. One was Churchill at the Dardanelles and at Chanak; the other was the secret signals intelligence that the British obtained, unknown to the Turks, which gave them easy access to the reports from European capitals on which the Turks themselves, and I·nönü in particular, relied in shaping foreign policy.7 This form of intelligence had always been highly regarded by Churchill and some account of his early use and appreciation of it now follows.
Churchill’s direct involvement with the product of the cryptographers did not start in 1940 when he became prime minister or even in the latter days of peace when Maj Morton kept him au courant with what the intercepts were saying to the government.8 It started in 1915 when he was First Lord of the Admiralty and Room 40 OB was born. He himself wrote the rules and procedures whereby naval decrypts – wireless messages and telegrams – should be processed. He decided who should see them, apart from himself, and more significantly who should not.9 He dealt with Room 40 through successive DNIs – first Sir Alfred Ewing, then Adm Sir Reginald ‘Blinker’ Hall. His relationship with Hall was not easy because they were both mavericks. It was Hall10 who without cabinet authorisation fixed the price on receipt of which the Turks would withdraw from the Dardanelles. His negotiation was aborted by Churchill who was too preoccupied with his own agenda, and looked Hall’s gift-horse in the mouth. Hall’s use of signals intelligence in the First World War went on to include the spectacular success of the disclosure of the Zimmermann telegram11 – bringing the USA into the war – a feat Churchill may have envied as well as admired, and for lack of a similar intercept in the Second
World War he had to wait many anxious months before the United States was forced into the war by Japan and Germany.
So diplomatic intercepts, or blue jackets or ‘BJ telegrams’ were familiar to Churchill over nearly thirty years in and out of government. What they were, where they came from, how they evolved from the routines of those manning Room 40 Old Buildings in the First World War, who read them and what they thought of them – and what was done with them, at the time and afterward – all throw light on their use in the Second World War.12
Diplomatic as well as naval intercepts were decrypted by Room 40 in the First World War and became part of foreign policy making in 1919 when decisions were made to maintain an intercepting and decrypting facility based on cable censorship and the identification of appropriate diplomatic traffic. Similar work continued in Germany, the USA and the USSR. The British specifically targeted traffic to and from the USA, France, the Soviet Union and Japan.13 Italy, Spain and Turkey followed later.
The fledgling Government Code and Cipher School (GCCS) eavesdropped on all major countries except Germany, which adopted supposedly unbreakable machine encipherment, and the Soviet Union, which used the labour-intensive but secure ciphering technique known as the One Time Pad (OTP) after British politicians had revealed that they were reading her secret messages.14 Japanese and Turkish diplomatic traffic proved to be of particular interest and importance. The lack of naval and military traffic was an inevitable consequence of peace. Targeting Japan proved clever or lucky or both, for the penetration of Japanese diplomatic and naval signals yielded vital wartime information on the state of Germany to the Americans and Russians as well as the British. The importance of this will emerge in the pages that follow.15 Turkey’s diplomatic messages were targeted by Cable & Wireless in Constantinople, and were also read in Berlin and probably Moscow.16 The Spanish Civil War released valuable Italian naval material including Enigma intercepts which enabled GCCS to study machine encipherment. Access to the German naval traffic was limited to traffic analysis (TA) until June 1940, but the analysis of the volume and direction of enemy traffic developed new cryptographic skills based on wireless telegraphy, which eventually provided most tactical signals intelligence. During the Second World War service traffic was obviously the main priority, and has subsequently dominated the literature of secret intelligence. But in the 1920s there was no military or naval traffic, only diplomatic telegrams. The Spanish Civil War yielded a bonanza of Italian military and naval traffic, all successfully read by GCCS, and the Abyssinian war of 1935–36 produced readable Italian material both military and diplomatic.
Churchill's Secret War Page 3
