To the reports of British military, air and naval attachés in most European capitals could be added the results of monitoring foreign press and broadcasts, covering much of the same ground as the BJs. The value of BJs was their pristine quality. Without any mediating factor beyond GCCS’s decision that they were worth circulating, they conveyed what Britain’s friends and enemies, well-wishers and ill-wishers, thought about the coming hostilities. In the main, judging from wartime diplomatic intercepts, they would have been ambassadorial reports on conditions, events and comment on the countries for which they were responsible. But interception was a limited option since most European countries safeguarded their cipher security by using landlines for their communications. The Germans invested heavily in machine encipherment. Targeting Japan, Italy and Turkey so effectively produced important information, in the case of Turkey through cable scrutiny at the Constantinople headquarters of Cable & Wireless, in which the British government was a major shareholder, thus empowering itself to read Turkish traffic on a ‘complete coverage’ basis. After the Montreux Conference of 1936, Turkey became a prime target, from which the FO learned many patterns of decision making in Ankara, and the nature of Turkish diplomatic priorities, particularly in relation to Italy, France, Germany and Britain.40
GCCS’s Interwar Achievements
Against a background of recently released files which reveal strong criticism in 1945 of the prewar GCCS’s pessimistic attitude towards the breaking of German machine codes, it may now be appropriate to summarise the four major interwar achievements of GCCS.41 The first was the deep penetration of the diplomatic codes of Turkey, Italy, Russia, Japan, Iberia and the USA. The Turkish traffic already referred to, obtained in full, with minimum delay and without any ‘corrupt groups’ thanks to Cable & Wireless’s efficient service, deserves singling out. A file in the House of Lords’ library contains copies of the actual Turkey-sourced BJs on which Churchill, Curzon and Lloyd George relied in attempting to thwart Turkish aggression at Smyrna in October 1922.42 These intercepts were translated from the French by the fledgling GCCS in Melbury Road, Kensington. In all essentials they are identical to later BJs which were sent to named individuals in government from then on continuously until 1945. According to the Lloyd George files, copies of the intercepts went routinely to a printed distribution list which included the directors of service intelligence, senior ministers including Lloyd George, Curzon and Churchill, and Sir Basil Thompson (head of security at the Home Office). All through the Chanak crisis of October 1922 the diplomatic messages from the Turkish ambassador in Paris to Constantinople were the required reading of the policy makers.43 Thus BJs were, even at this early stage, at the heart of British foreign policy.
The second achievement was the coverage of the total process of sigint from interception to distribution without which any one aspect was unable to fulfil its function. It is this second achievement which this chapter seeks to underline, because without a worked out functional system, acceptable to all, available to the Enigma specialists at Bletchley in 1939, the results of their achievement – usable high grade sigint or Ultra – might have been unavailable to the British armed forces by mid-1941.44
By September 1938 GCCS was on a war footing and under Sinclair had completed a successful dummy run, simulating war conditions, at a time when the appeasers still thought they had bought peace in their time. At the FO the diplomatic intercepts GCCS distributed round Whitehall told a different story, requiring a different policy, promoted by the Deputy Permanent Under-Secretary, Sir Orme Sargent, who acquired such a reputation as an anti-appeaser that he was nicknamed ‘Moley’ by his colleagues, after the character in The Wind in the Willows who could not let his friends off with easy answers. Sir Alexander Cadogan and most other ranking mandarins with access to the intercepts were of the same mind. Relations between GCCS and the FO can only be guessed at because no files survive, all intercept material was burnt immediately after reading and all references to GCCS and its product required modification to ‘special’ or ‘reliable sources’ before appearing in governmental minutes. Despite this reticence there must be a strong thread joining the diplomatic intercepts and the now famous FO opposition to Chamberlain’s policy towards Hitler. This is the third of GCCS’s interwar achievements.45
GCCS may have had its own political stance towards the German menace. Its members rallied round Vansittart whose views on the German menace they preferred to Cadogan and Eden, whom in turn they preferred to Halifax. Reading intercepts with this background would have produced a more radically anti-appeasement view even than that of the FO. Also discernible in the sparse literature is a significant difference in the group’s attitude towards its clients.46 Among the service ministries the Air Ministry, the newest and most flexible in its mindset, was judged the best customer. The Admiralty still had its own intelligence assessment department, using raw data from GCCS, while the War Office only realised the importance of sigint in the field during the fighting in North Africa in 1942. These attitudes are important because they formed the basis of the assessment of what should be circulated and to whom. Knowing your customers’ character as well as his needs was part of GCCS’s expertise. This, in turn, was a function of GCCS’s autonomy, which had become such an accepted feature of the Whitehall landscape that it extended right through the Second World War. GCCS had won for itself the power to decide what its customers should read and hence influence policy. Without having established this degree of authority over all aspects of the total sigint operation in the years between the Spanish Civil War and the outbreak of hostilities on 3 September 1939, GCCS could not have developed its wartime role with so little delay. That is the fourth achievement of British cryptography before 1939.
The interwar period culminated for GCCS in two visits paid to mainland Europe in 1939 by GCCS’s head – the first to Paris in January and the second to Poland in late August. Denniston, Knox and Menzies himself travelled by ferry and train across France and Germany to Poland. At Pryr, near Warsaw, the British and French parties learned that the Poles could read Enigma (though not currently) and would give two Enigma machines to France and Britain, knowing their chances of survival were slight. An Enigma machine was brought from Warsaw to Paris, thence via London to Bletchley, where a new generation of British cryptographers soon achieved amazing results on an almost daily basis, culminating in the breaking of the Luftwaffe cipher in January 1940.47
These four achievements together with the successful reading of the diplomatic ciphers of many countries and the recruiting campaigns of 1937–39 made possible the activities of Bletchley Park in 1939, which became by June 1940 vital to Churchill’s conduct of the British war effort. Enigma was then, after many agonising difficulties had been overcome, integrated into GCCS’s existing but enhanced structures and practices, while Ultra was a natural development of the interwar distribution system.
The process was immensely demanding and there were casualties. But there was no alternative. In 1940 and 1941 Britain did indeed stand alone. Her armies had been outclassed in Norway, France and Libya, while the Royal Navy had failed to protect convoys carrying vital war matériel. If the RAF had not defeated the Luftwaffe over British air space in September 1940, Hitler would have launched Operation ‘Sealion’ and Britain might well have been occupied like Denmark, like Hungary, like Romania. A British government-in-exile would have been established in Canada. A gauleiter from Berlin might have installed himself at Whitehall or Buckingham Palace. With access to British war factories, radar and the still formidable navy, Germany could have contemplated the unbelievable and become – what some Germans already felt themselves to be – masters of the western world. It is neither rhetorical nor sentimental to assert of Churchill that he was the saviour of the nation.48 How he did it has been endlessly discussed. But the part played by Bletchley Park and the geese that ‘laid the golden eggs and did not cackle’ can be illuminated by tracing both eggs and geese to their point of origin, first in
the Admiralty, then in the FO in the twenty years before war was declared.
Churchill’s wartime achievement might have been significantly diminished had not British cryptographers served him and the country so effectively from his days as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1914, through the Turkish crisis of the early 1920s, the Russian, Spanish and Italian crises of the 1920s and 1930s, through the period of Hitler’s European supremacy, to the breaking of Enigma and the creation and daily working of Ultra all through the war, until 8 May 1945, when the Germans surrendered unconditionally to the Allies.
CHAPTER THREE
Before the Deluge: 1940–41
If the British knew in detail about us everything we know about them [from interception] it could have very grave consequences.
Goebbels, 28 April 1942
Meanwhile she [Germany] is waging a war of nerves with Turkey in the hope that no military action will be necessary.
WO 190/893/22832
The previous chapter has shown the government fully aware of the importance both of diplomatic intercepts and, since the Abyssinian crisis, of the breaking of the Italian naval machine ciphers with its consequential provision of full and immediate information on Italian ship movements in the Mediterranean. This breakthrough was of more immediate use to the service ministries, and in fact became the basis of Enigma and Ultra which developed at Bletchley Park from late 1939. It is upon the implications of the former that this chapter now concentrates. It is divided into two parts, the first reconstructing Churchill’s and the FO’s view of eastern Mediterranean affairs, and the second attempting to show the results of DIR/C becoming available to Churchill from September 1941.
The Foreign Office and Turkey
Anglo-Turkish relations were a high priority for the FO throughout the 1930s and were developed by Sir Percy Loraine, the British ambassador who preceded the ill-fated Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen in Ankara. At war with each other in 1914–18, seriously at odds during the Chanak crisis of 1922, both parties realised that there were many advantages in Turco-British friendship. For Britain Turkey would provide a hedge protecting the imperial trade route, Persian oil and a defence against either German or Russian incursions into Egypt; for Turkey, Britain was still unquestionably a superpower, still with a great navy and a great empire.
The FO knew little about the actual economy and government of Turkey outside the main cities and embassy staff rarely ventured into the interior. The few who did reported back on the primitive state of the roads, railways, towns, villages, schools and peasantry. Illiteracy was almost universal, despite Atatürk’s social engineering. Only Muslims could bear arms or become magistrates. Democracy was more a matter of good intentions than of actual implementation of policy, which suited both the government and the people. There was never any significant opposition either to Atatürk’s reforms or I·nönü’s more directly dictatorial rule. None of this seems to have affected the traditional FO view that ‘Johnny Turk’ could be relied on in emergencies, and so in the spring of 1939 a guarantee was offered, similar to those already made to Poland and Romania.
In Ankara the chief government ministers had to balance the advantages of unconditional friendship with Britain against a number of complex and contradictory possibilities: a multilateral alliance with France, whose mission civilisatrice had made Turkish society francophone as well as Francophile; with Italy, a powerful and uncertain Mediterranean power under Mussolini; with Russia, feared in its new Bolshevik clothing as well as for its czarist ambitions in the ancient Near East, which had only been discarded momentarily by Lenin in the early 1920s – and with Germany, Turkey’s ally of the First World War and now becoming the main force in Europe. There were good but different reasons for staying on friendly terms with all the great powers.
However, Halifax and Chamberlain delayed their approach to Turkey until it was almost too late, and reactions in Ankara to British diplomatic activity in Europe throughout the early months of 1939 grew sceptical. Hitler’s Germany was disliked for its arrogance and both feared and admired for the overnight success of its Czech invasion of March 1939. In Britain the Southern Department of the FO continued to assume that Turkish friendship was on open offer, to be taken up as and when required – a dangerous assumption for which the British embassy in Ankara should have taken some blame.1
At the FO, first under Eden then Halifax then Eden again, two departments were studying Turkish foreign policy. One was the Southern Department, the other was GCCS. The latter regarded Turkish diplomatic messages as of prime importance because in 1919 and 1922 Turkish and British government leaders read Turkish diplomatic telegrams and based their policy upon what they read. These messages were extracted by GCCS from the full cover of Turkish diplomatic telegrams intercepted by the government-owned Cable & Wireless. These were delivered complete and at speed to GCCS and may only have needed translation from French and assessment by them before distribution.2 Thus they formed a significant part of the total BJ traffic distributed which might have been out of proportion to their actual importance.
The FO files suggest that Eden inherited this Turkish policy without Churchill’s enthusiasm, presumably because his concern over Italy dominated Mediterranean policy. Later he showed little finesse in his dealings with the Turks. After the Italian adventures in Africa and Albania he realised that a benevolently neutral Turkey had become a strategic necessity, but as Minister for War there was little he could do to expedite the Anglo-Franco-Turkish Pact of 1939.3 The FO’s policy towards Turkey in the run-up to the start of hostilities in 1939 can thus be seen to have been a somewhat haphazard product of a close study of what Turkish diplomats were saying to each other and a hazy conviction, often overlooked when more important countries flexed their muscles, that a friendly Turkey was a useful protection for the imperial trade-routes to the Far East.
Churchill had a more romantic attitude to Turkey while out of office. He had long been interested in the country as an ally in any future world war, remaining as ignorant until 1945 of the true nature of the country’s economy and willingness to fight outside its own borders as the FO. Moreover he had been a consistent advocate of the use of diplomatic signals intelligence in its raw, authentic form, as the best means of assessing the intentions of the major powers. Through his friendship with Maj Desmond Morton who had regular access to BJs, he would have been nearly as well informed of Turkish attitudes towards friendship with Britain as the Southern Department itself. By 1940 these two strands in Churchill’s thinking – the importance of Turkey and the significance of their diplomatic intercepts – came together. His reading Turkish diplomatic intercepts, several a week before the war, would probably have influenced his Mediterranean view as soon as he became prime minister in May 1940. There was, as has been shown, a twofold reason why Turkish BJs were of particular significance: one was that Cable & Wireless supplied them in full cover, so a complete picture of Turkish international diplomacy was available to the FO on a daily basis. The other was that the Turkish leadership used them as the basis of its foreign policy.
Turkey was governed by a small clique of French-speaking statesmen and diplomats; ambassadors in the main European capitals regularly reported to Angora (as the FO still called the new Turkish capital), and their reports had become the chief source of intelligence for foreign policy decisions. These reports, and the responses of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, illuminated patterns of decision making in Ankara, the nature of Turkish strategy and its diplomatic relations with other countries, especially the USSR and Britain.4 Churchill’s developing view of the importance of a wartime alliance with Turkey can thus be seen as a somewhat bizarre scheme of an out-of-office politician, while the FO, with daily access to Turkish diplomatic messages, may have underestimated the importance of Turkey. Both shared the regular supply of Turkish intercepts, which made them unusually well-informed of the reactions of an important neutral to the dire results of deep German penetration across Europe in the immediately follo
wing months, but their interpretation may have been different. The consequences of German success, however, were so dangerous to Britain, whose survival was seriously in doubt, that Turkish attitudes became of secondary importance to Churchill’s expressed strategy, which was to get through the next three months, as is made clear in the section that follows.
The Phoney War
The nine months of the ‘Phoney War’ constitute a black hole in Turco-British relations. The FO files are sparse, Germany was about to spread its claws all over Europe. The French were keener than the British during this period on aggressive forays in the Near East, to reduce Germany’s war effectiveness by bombing the Baku oilfields, as recommended by Adm Darlan and Gen Weygand on 22 February 1940.5 France also wanted to make a pact with Turkey similar to the Turco-British Guarantee but the Turks would only agree if Britain was party to this also. Thus the Turco-British-French Pact was agreed, on the basis of which Dr Carl Clodius (the German trade negotiator) later tried to persuade the Turks to let Germany have the chrome otherwise due to go to France, by then a defeated nation.
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