From then on Turkey was a prime target for the diplomatic cryptographers of both Germany and Britain, and the study of her ambassadorial reports became part of Churchill’s daily workload. The continued neutrality of the Turks from the end of 1941 to the beginning of 1945 is a theme of several of the chapters that follow. Their success in staying out of the war, despite the threats and blandishments of von Papen in Ankara and of Churchill and the FO in London, which resulted in the Adana Conference of January 1943 is, of course, already familiar to war historians of the eastern Mediterranean region. Nothing in the new secret diplomatic intercepts substantially alters the Turkish wartime scene as already recorded, but some new light is shed on how Churchill himself conducted British foreign policy towards Turkey in those years.
At the beginning of this chapter, two questions were asked: one was, how important was the work of GCCS on Turkish messages between May 1940 and October 1941 and 1939 to the FO? The answer is that the expansion of GCCS from its mainly diplomatic work to its decryption of service traffic was of overriding importance to Churchill and the COS in 1940, so BJs figured less prominently than Enigma during this period, and their use by the FO cannot be realistically assessed from current data.
This chapter has provided a provisional answer to a further question about the quality and quantity of Turkey-sourced BJs in 1941: the evidence is to be found in Hinsley’s history of secret intelligence. Though Churchill’s mission to save the world from German expansionism benefited greatly from the work of Bletchley Park in the early years of the war, reliable information on Turkey from Turkish sources did not elevate Turkish participation in the war in Churchill’s mind: he had other and greater problems to deal with. It should be added that these answers must remain speculative, given the non-availability of BJs before September 1941.
In the next two years, Churchill’s concern with Turkey can be scanned in conjunction with his reading of diplomatic intercepts in a way which suggests the intercepts underpinned as well as infused his playing of the Turkey hand.
This chapter has sought to establish the context in which Churchill was able to use DIR from 1941 till VE-Day. The next two chapters are devoted to a study of Churchill’s use of Turkish diplomatic messages in his eastern Mediterranean policy between 1941 and 1943.
CHAPTER FOUR
Turkish Neutrality:Liability or Asset?
Churchill loved the decrypts . . . as one who had been fascinated by cryptanalytic intelligence from 1914 onwards and who regarded it as of the utmost importance. Churchill alone enjoyed this overall view of intelligence. At this stage there was no integration of the material except in his head. It was a state of affairs that did not appeal to the military departments or the Foreign Office . . . especially when the PM was liable to spring on them . . . stuff they had not read or known.
Andrew Hodges in Alan Turing: The Enigma of Intelligence
Churchill and Turkey 1941–43
This chapter charts the developing relationship between Churchill and the Turkish leadership in the months before the Adana Conference. Germany was predominant in the eastern Mediterranean until the spring of 1942, but in the months before January 1943 the balance of power had swung towards the Allies, who had been victorious in North Africa, displaced the Italian dictator, while the Russians had achieved a massive victory at Stalingrad. It shows the extent to which Turkey, as a leading neutral, observed the signs of a possible separate peace – between Italy and Britain at one point, and between Russia and Germany all through the period till 6 June 1944. Linked to the possibility of a separate peace were the questions whether, when and where a second front would be launched. Speculation on this among the neutrals continued throughout the North African campaign, the invasion of Sicily and the Italian campaign. This was important because gauging neutral sensibilities gave Churchill, and other readers of BJs, an unrivalled entry into the mindset of those countries, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Sweden, Brazil, Chile, the Vatican, Vichy France and above all Turkey. These neutrals collectively had the power to alter the course of the war. That was why they were important. Turkey was the most important, so questions affecting Turkey’s continuing policy of neutrality led Churchill and Eden in London, and Hitler in Berlin, to realise that Turkey could decide which way the war would go.
Churchill’s own strategic objectives were materially affected by his daily reading of DIR/C. His only long-term strategic objective was to defeat the enemy, so his intercept reading resulted in strong and often otherwise inexplicable hunches. The much discussed Balkan offensive launched from Turkish territory across the Bosphorus to Greece and up the Danube to attack the German heartland recurred annually between 1942 and 1944, though it was never more than a figment of his imaginative way of looking at possibilities, fuelled by Balkan information from BJs. It was quite beyond the competence of the Anglo-American commanders to bring such a project into the realms of the possible. Churchill was a great extemporiser – and in late 1941 he could only react to what the enemy was doing, or might be planning to do next. The Turkish march was one theme on which he extemporised with many variations. First, as has been shown, he asked the CIGS, Sir John Dill, to send Gen James Marshall-Cornwall to Ankara on a one-man military mission to get Turkey onto the Allied side in late 1940 and early 1941. Marshall-Cornwall made two trips to Ankara. He did his best but he knew his job was impossible. On 19 February 1941 Field Marshal Lord Wavell, the C-in-C, told him ‘the policy of our government is to build up a Balkan front’.1 It was for this reason that Churchill then sent Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden twice to Turkey in 1941 to bully or lure the Turks in. The results were negative. Between Eden’s second visit and Churchill’s own arrival on Turkish soil in January 1943 the war developed in other theatres, but from May 1942 onwards Churchill set his sights on his personal intervention into Turkish foreign policy, partly as the start of a great Balkan second front to aid the Russians at Stalingrad, but more because he badly needed the comfort of the formidable Turkish army at his side, and his study of the diplomatic messages told him the time was ripe.
In Washington the leadership disliked pressurising Turkey, while in Whitehall Turkey remained the province of the Southern Department of the FO, instinctively opposed to anything as rash as Churchill’s Turkish initiative. For over two decades it had been responsible for developing British friendship and trade with Turkey, it was proud of this not very difficult achievement and defended its right to look after the Turkish agenda. The War Cabinet, following Eden, took the same view as the Southern Department, while after 1942 the COS had their minds on the western Mediterranean and never looked favourably on a Balkan initiative from the east. In this they echoed the views of the Americans, who only saw trouble in stirring up Turkey and opening a Balkan front. Sir John Dill, now in Washington, who had sent Marshall-Cornwall to Ankara in 1940, tried to explain the problem of the American leadership to Churchill in early 1944:
Can I suggest without offence that you look [at Turkey] from the US Chiefs of Staff point of view, with their vast responsibilities in this great democracy, which are much more direct and more publicly recognised than in our country, and then do as you would be done by.2
What no one identified was Churchill’s determination to do everything possible to postpone ‘Overlord’ until the Allies were capable of delivering it. This was the only credible second front. It was this instinct rather than any long-term plan of attack on the European heartland from Bulgaria that drove Churchill into the welcoming if hesitant arms of the Turkish oligarchs at Adana in January 1943. Churchill himself must have realised that, from the moment Hitler re-armed the substantial Bulgarian army with the latest German weaponry in 1941, this option did not exist; if so he kept his own counsel.
The view from Ankara in 1941 was rather different. Turkey was beset on all sides. To the east a joint Russo-British invasion of Persia from the north and south respectively had cut off both oil and Arab friends in the area. To the north-west, Bulgaria and Romania had been
reduced to satellite status by Germany, compelled to supply half a million men for the Eastern Front, fully equipped and politically neutered. To the north the Germans reigned supreme over the rich arable plains of the Ukraine now basking in autumn sunshine and with a record wheat harvest to be transported back to Germany. To the south British reverses in the North African deserts had left Egypt twitching helplessly while to the west Italy was still in aggressive mode.
This was the situation when DIR/C came on stream and Churchill was able to give his full attention to Turkey. The diplomatic decrypts which follow reveal that the Southern Department knew well that the Turks would reject all attempts to bring them into the war unless one or other combatant invaded their territory. They knew there existed some differences of emphasis on this point among the leadership in Ankara. They also knew how both neutral and Axis diplomats appraised Turkish foreign policy, because they read the reports of foreign ambassadors, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Iberian, South American and Balkan, conveying to their home governments the Turkish attitude to the belligerents, while they could also study the occasional updates circulated by the Turkish foreign ministry to their embassies abroad. To Ankara came reports from Turkish ambassadors in the same capitals reporting secret conversations with others on the international diplomatic network. Many of these reports read by the Southern Department referred to the possibility of a Balkan front, and some, even at this early stage, glanced at the dreaded possibility of separate peacemaking, first between the western Allies and Italy, next between Germany and the Soviet Union. A separate peace would leave at least one major combatant on both sides with sufficient strength and energy to continue and extend the world war, perhaps drawing in the neutrals. The Southern Department also read of the fear, particularly in Spain and Portugal, of the possible Bolshevisation of Europe if Soviet successes were to be fully exploited. The FO knew from other sources that Stalin had no interest in the Comintern or in Trotskyism, but memories of the International Brigade in Spain five years earlier were still strong enough to keep this dire threat alive. The neutrals hoped for some sort of balance of power in Europe. As first Italy and then Germany declined as a power in the Mediterranean, these fears were transferred, first to the ‘Anglo-Saxons’, and then, irretrievably, to the Soviets.
The Anglo-Turkish Conference at Adana in southern Turkey took place on 31 January 1943 and is the subject of Chapter Six. It came as the climax of Churchill’s efforts to get Turkey into the war on the Allied side. This and the next chapter set out to trace the origins of the idea of a direct approach to the Turks, using the DIR/C files. By connecting the diplomatic and Enigma intercepts of the period with the events leading up to the conference itself, it concludes that Churchill’s minute study of the intercepts, and the decisions and events which followed, failed to alter the course of events. But this conclusion does not imply that the intercepts did not provide important and timely information on which action plans were drawn up and discussed. They were valuable to and valued by British foreign policy makers. Of these, Churchill saw both service and diplomatic traffic; the FO saw diplomatic traffic only; the COS saw Enigma but not diplomatic; and the rest of the War Cabinet saw arbitrary selections of both sources on a ‘need to know’ basis. Churchill found more cause for believing Turkey could be seduced into the war than anyone else. Though the Southern Department ‘handled’ Turkey, a passive or reactive view was taken there of Churchill’s attempts to ‘get her in’, partly because it had no remit to instigate such a policy, and ‘getting her in’ would have entailed handing her over to Combined Allied Headquarters, Middle East, in Cairo. It was also very conscious of the danger of arousing Russian suspicions of a postwar Turco-British deal involving the Straits, and knew from the intercepts that Turkey remained fearful of a sudden Luftwaffe assault on Istanbul as late as autumn 1943.
Thus the Southern Department wanted to keep Turkey neutral, while the COS, largely under the growing influence of the Americans, were against any Balkan front or offensive action in the eastern Mediterranean which would divert Allied forces from Italy and western Europe, and probably alarm the Soviet Union. For the rest of the War Cabinet Turkish involvement was relatively unimportant. So Churchill concluded that he could and should make Turkish participation in the war on the Allied side a high personal priority.
Can his reading of diplomatic intercepts be seen to have direct influence on that policy? Or were there occasions when his determination to get Turkey into the war made him blind to what he read in the DIR/Cs? The message coming from the intercepts was unequivocal about Turkey, so no recipient of BJs would have been in any doubt that Churchill had an impossible job on his hands. Conversely it is quite possible that both Eden at the FO and the COS might have ignored evidence from the DIR/Cs which suggested that Turkey might be persuaded to enter the war because they had decided that her assistance was not worth the price. The Southern Department, the COS and the War Cabinet had differing views on the advantage of a change in Turkish neutrality, and these governed the attitudes, recommendations and actions of the department, but none shared Churchill’s conviction that his personal intervention would change the Turkish mindset. So the Prime Minister went to Turkey without Eden, though with Alexander Cadogan, his permanent under-secretary. Despite the apparent failure of the Adana Conference, Churchill remained determined to create, if not a Balkan front, then certainly a lot of trouble for the enemy, by risking an attack on the Italian-held Dodecanese later in 1943. The disastrous though short-lived results of this campaign are the subject of a later chapter.
Diplomatic interception, decryption, translation, evaluation and distribution had continued through the 1938 war scare, when ‘Station X’ was set up in August at Bletchley simulating war conditions, to the establishment of Bletchley Park as a going concern by September 1939. This part of GCCS’s workload was not part of the main cryptographic thrust which the arrival of the Enigma machine in Britain in September 1939 and the consequential breaking of the Luftwaffe high-grade ciphers generated. ‘Dedip’ was derived from both interception and cable scrutiny, and continued to be supplied to the FO and other Whitehall departments, alongside Enigma/Ultra. How this joint/parallel operation was managed does not emerge from the disclosed files in the PRO, but it must have been an uneasy marriage, brought to the point of separation (though never divorce) by the decision to hive off diplomatic and commercial traffic to Blitz-torn London from Bletchley in February 1942. From Berkeley Street the FO and Ministry of Economic Warfare (MEW or ‘Mousetrap’) continued to receive an uninterrupted flow of Dedip as part of its task to monitor the economic blockade. In Whitehall the usefulness of the diplomatic and commercial intercepts grew to a climax in 1943, when the interception and distribution of commercial messages was hived off from GCCS’s diplomatic work in Berkeley Street and set up in nearby Aldford House, Park Lane, where careful monitoring of Spanish exports of wolfram, tungsten and manganese to Germany gave the Ministry of Economic Warfare all the information it needed to maintain the economic blockade. The FO rather than the MEW (which started the war as a department of the FO) looked after Turkish supply of chromite and other minerals to Britain, the USA and Germany, as part of its responsibility for Turkey. It failed to stop the supply to the Germans until 1944 by which time they had all they needed anyway. Through the British ambassador in Ankara the Southern Department sought to influence Turkey away from Germany by vague threats the ambassador found very difficult to make convincing, substituting a sort of offended withdrawal of interest which in the end may have played some part in President I·nönü’s revised anti-German policy in early 1944. But this is doubtful. I·nönü on his home territory was never greatly influenced by anyone else’s ambassador.
To conclude, a provisional answer to the question what actions were taken by which organs of British government on the conclusions they were drawing from a reading of Turkish diplomatic telegrams: the War Cabinet took instant and effective action to prevent any possibility of Churchill
being murdered on his way back from Adana in February 1943 by Algerian extremists. This is recounted in Chapter Six. The War Office kept a military mission going in Ankara, extended runways on western Turkish airfields, and trained Turkish soldiers in the new weaponry and Turkish pilots in Britain alongside those of countries allied to Britain. The Air Ministry contributed by training Turkish pilots alongside those of several European allies, and keeping in touch with the Turkish military establishment in Ankara.
The results in the short term were modest. Churchill’s visit to Turkey in January 1943 produced nothing tangible. The Southern Department admitted, to itself but to no one else, that its Turkish policy had failed, withdrew the ambassador, largely for security reasons, and may have consistently underestimated Turkish usefulness as a full ally. This would have been less due to reading BJs and perhaps more due to an inherent philhellenism (most FO officials were former classical scholars) which may have made them anti-Turk. The culture of the pre-war FO was conditioned by the pursuits of classical scholarship. Pierson Dixon was, in this respect, primus inter pares (first among equals). But when Greece was overrun by the Germans in 1940, and Italy firmly in the Axis camp, this love of Greece and Rome had little outlet. Classical archaeology in Asia Minor was still in its infancy, and understanding within the Southern Department of what Atatürk had achieved for Turkey between the wars was limited. Despite Loraine, FO views on modern Turkey were still conditioned by her Ottoman past and Islamic culture. The War Office, and the visiting generals, admirals and air marshals failed to make much impact on the Turkish military mindset.
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