Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game

by Andrew Hodges

  True to its modern approach, grounded in management and the social sciences, the Senate report of 1950 had avoided these potent and persistent archetypes, and had concentrated upon the more reassuring picture of gay men as feeble, helpless victims of blackmail. It was according to this rationale that, after 1950, employees identified as homosexuals were ejected from American government departments.† Scientific language had not, however, entirely exorcised the older ideas, and the fear, amounting to panic, that now surrounded the subject could better be explained by the notion of a invisible cancer in society, transforming an obedient population into unknown, uncontrollable, un-American quantities, than by purely rational appraisals of possible compromise through blackmail.

  Unlike the American Senate, the British legislature was not expected to interfere so openly with the practice of government. But the same pressures of the modern world were at work, and there was an event which had goaded the British government into taking parallel steps. It was on 25 May 1951 that the two Foreign Office officials Burgess and Maclean disappeared, and then on 10 June the Sunday Dispatch had drawn attention to the disappearance, dropping a strong hint that it was time to follow the American policy of ‘weeding out both sexual and political perverts’.

  British ‘security’ had come under scrutiny the previous year, with the Fuchs case being heard. But Fuchs was a German refugee, and the atomic bomb project had been highly irregular, resting largely upon the work of exiles who in 1940 could not be trusted with anything that seemed likely to be important. The difference was that Burgess and Maclean were from the upper middle class and Cambridge, the nurseries of British administration. Previously it might have been assumed that the public-school training would guarantee those subtly distinguished loyalties to house and school, and during the war the British government had saved itself the laborious and expensive surveillance of personnel that had been required in the less trusting United States. But now, bafflingly, the public-school code had been broken, and something new had to be done. The form taken by the new procedures was not, however, entirely the result of the Red Queen’s flight. It was an aspect of the managerial revolution, overtaking the legacy of more aristocratic government, and also a reflection of the American alliance.

  The Sunday Pictorial series in 1952 had included the comment that:

  In Diplomatic or Civil Service circles perversion is regarded as a special danger, for there is always the accompanying complication of possible blackmail. It is this blackmail danger which makes the perverts such a problem to the police.

  They also stated that homosexuality was ‘most prevalent among the Intellectuals’. These remarks in the press parallelled the action of the government, which in 1952 introduced the ‘positive vetting’ of those holding posts, or who were candidates for posts, involving important state information.* Until then, government employees had only been ‘negatively vetted’ by the Security Service, simply by checking in their records of those with ‘subversive beliefs’ and stamping ‘Nothing Known Against’ on applications. The point of ‘positive vetting’ was that it was to be a49 ‘searching investigation into a person’s background and character’. This, in particular, included ‘serious character weaknesses of a kind that might make a person unreliable or subject to blackmail. Thus any evidence that the person being investigated had or was reasonably suspected of having homosexual tendencies would automatically have raised a presumption that he was unfit to occupy a Positive Vetting post.’

  In practice, it would require elaborate and expensive surveillance to establish whether or not a person was homosexual. It was not enough to look for ‘pansies’, since (in the words of the American report) there were ‘no outward characteristics or physical traits’ that were ‘positive as identifying marks of sex perversion’. Traditional British reserve and a presumption of heterosexuality made it difficult to detect homosexuals who made contacts through friends and private gatherings alone. But one who had been found out was in a very different position, concentrating the fear and suspicion that more logically would have diffused over many.

  Alan Turing had not only been found out, but had been found behaving with what to the official mind, or indeed to the mind of anyone alive to the demands of national security, would appear a horrifying indiscretion. His brain, filled with knowledge of the British cryptographic and cryptanalytic work of not ten years before, had been allowed to mingle with the street life of Oxford Road – and who knew where else? Besides the wartime work, the consultation since 1948 would have given him knowledge at least of special problems, and meanwhile the very idea of computer methods, when only a handful of computers existed in the world, was at the frontier of knowledge.* Whether or not directly relevant to Soviet interests, it was knowledge not only secret, but whose very existence was a secret. He had done the unthinkable. A member of the Inner Party, he had compromised himself with the proles. And he had done it in a way that Orwell himself would have dismissed in one word as ‘perversion’, while Aldous Huxley regarded the demand for sexual freedom as a concomitant of growing dictatorship. He was a law unto himself.

  It could well be argued – and perhaps he argued it himself – that his conduct had shown precisely that he was not liable to blackmail. For he had gone to the police, and taken the consequences, at even the hint of a petty threat, one that had nothing to do with secrets. He had also told all the details, silly or shocking as they might be, and shown that he did not flinch from the ‘friends, associates, or the public at large’ knowing them. But such arguments would only accentuate an impression of indiscretion. They would render him the more outrageously anti-social, the more appallingly unpredictable.

  He was not a frequenter of the few furtive English ‘restaurants, night clubs and bars’. But to the mind of security, his holidays abroad were a nightmare. Inasmuch as Britain was a free country, and he a free citizen, he was entitled to make them. But he enjoyed no right to have young Norwegians come to visit him, and whatever the details of the mysterious ‘Kjell crisis’ of March 1953, a matter of which the local CID knew nothing, it certainly had the effect that Kjell returned to Norway without Alan seeing him. Alan’s allusions to Robin about immigration officials suspecting ‘blinds’ and ‘heretics’ and plots to import sexual satisfactions were perhaps the furthest he could go in hinting at what ‘for sheer incident rivalled the Arnold story,’ without disclosing the reason why he would have been the object of special attention, to protect him from himself.

  In these circumstances, his holiday in summer 1953 had been an act of defiance, one which might well have led to interrogations at the Ministry of Love of a kind more difficult to cope with than high-table quips about sonnets. How could they know he had not been compromised all the time? How could they know he had not gone mad? How could they know anything at all about his associations? How could they be certain of anything? The essence of Alan Turing’s claim to life and liberty lay in his scrupulous adherence to a personal promise. But such a gentleman’s agreement depended upon a tremendous degree of trust, a commodity which by 1953 was in short supply. Nor indeed was even Alan Turing quite perfect. Once he had talked a little too much to Neville, mentioning that the Poles had made a tremendous contribution to his wartime work. And then, in the year that passed before his death, the rules were changing yet again, and not in the direction of gentlemanliness. The game was becoming much rougher.

  When in 1952 the subject of homosexuality had first become public, the Sunday Pictorial had explained that this was because ‘as a start’ it was necessary ‘to turn the searchlight of publicity upon these abnormalities, to end the conspiracy of silence….’ The newspaper had conceded that a ‘final solution of the problem’ would be ‘more difficult’. But progress towards a solution was accelerated in 1953. The feature of the period between June 1953 and June 1954 was that this was when government action took a far more dramatic and open form. It was considered time for a repeat of the Wilde trials which had so successfully deterred dissidence for
fifty years.

  An opportunity was found on the August bank holiday of 1953, when Lord Montagu of Beaulieu reported a theft to the police. Montagu then found that he and a friend were charged with an ‘indecent attack’ on two boy scouts who were acting as guides at his motor museum. This charge, denied absolutely and depending entirely upon the boys’ statements, led to a case enjoying an immense and quite unprecedented publicity. It made a remarkable contrast with the Turing case, in which a matter of comparative substance and a sensational statement went unreported except at the parish pump, and when even there one character witness, Hugh Alexander, had gone unmentioned. But one difference was that this case was presented from the beginning as a show trial, not just of an individual but of a national ‘moral decline’.

  The Montagu trial ended in December 1953 without a conviction. But the Crown did not admit defeat, and on 9 January 1954 Montagu was arrested again, this time charged with an ‘offence’ dating from 1952. Two others were charged with him, one being Peter Wildeblood, diplomatic correspondent of the Daily Mail. Besides this hint of state affairs being at risk, the prosecution also involved a number of RAF servicemen, and so aroused fears that Britain’s military pride and joy was endangered by the tide of ‘filth’. The two trials also enjoyed accoutrements of telephone tapping, searches without warrant, free pardons for turning Queen’s Evidence to the ‘accomplices’, a forgery on the part of the Crown – and a general overriding of legalities that suggested a threat to state security itself was involved. Indeed the Special Branch, the political arm of the police, played a role. The renewed publicity provoked complaints in Parliament that it was a ‘danger to public morale’. But the government had clearly decided upon an increased public consciousness of male homosexuality, and the old silence was gone for good. The Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, had summoned magistrates to explain his policy and spoke50 of a ‘drive against male vice’. It was claimed by judges and reported dutifully by newspapers that the country had suddenly seen an outbreak of homosexual crime. But it was an outbreak of official anxiety which was manifested in the sharp increase in the number of prosecutions.

  Besides the Conservative complaints in Parliament about the open reporting of the Montagu case, there were also more modern-minded questions regarding the operation of the law. These had nothing to do with notions of rights or freedoms; the plea of the new men was for homosexuals to be treated by science rather than be punished by imprisonment.*

  On 26 October 1953 the young Labour MP, Desmond Donnelly, asked the Home Secretary to bring homosexuality into the scope of a current Royal Commission on the law relating to mental disorders. This plea was followed on 26 November by the independent-minded Conservative MP, Sir Robert Boothby, asking for a new Royal Commission to examine51 ‘the treatment of … homosexuals … in the light of modern scientific knowledge …’ Another MP suggested ‘establishing a hospital for these unhappy people, where they can receive suitable discipline and treatment.’ But Maxwell-Fyfe replied that the prisons were ‘alive to this problem and doing their utmost to treat these people according to the most up-to-date views and knowledge.’ For even prison, or ‘prison treatment’ as he called it, was scientific now.

  On 28 April 1954, the Commons briefly debated the state of the 1885 law, and the Lords followed on 19 May. Much of the Lords’ debate revolved around the nineteenth-century concept of the homosexual personality: that of52 ‘a certain school of so-called scientists whose dangerous doctrine has done more, and does more, harm to the youth of the country and many others than anything else; that is to say, the doctrine that we are not ourselves responsible and that, to a certain extent, these things are irresistible.’ The bishop of Southwell joined in an attack on the ‘behaviourist plea’. Another Lord referred to ‘other countries in the past, who were once great, but became decadent through corrosive and corrupting immorality.’ But science had its defenders. Lord Chorley interrupted these adieux to Empire with the assertion that ‘It is really much more a medical question than a criminal question.’ Lord Brabazon, the pioneer of flight, also struck a medical note: ‘There are the hunchback, the blind and the dumb; but of all the dreadful abnormalities surely abnormal sexual instincts must be one of the worst.’*

  Important as these observations were, the problems of government called for a more pragmatic, less philosophical approach to the problem of human free will. On 29 April, the House of Commons debated the Atomic Energy Bill, and turned to an opposition amendment which would have set up an appeals system for employees of the new Atomic Energy Authority dismissed as ‘security risks’. Opposing this policy, Sir David Eccles for the government pointed to cases for which such appeals would be inappropriate, pre-eminently those of55

  moral turpitude. What, in short, that includes is that if a man is a homosexual he is much more easily blackmailed, owing to the law being what it is at present, than almost anyone else. There are cases in which the price which the blackmailer exacts is not money but secrets….

  But this, he wished to say, was not a matter for discussion.

  these sorts of cases … are not cases about which the public is anxious. The public is anxious, I think rightly, about … political associations.

  If the public was not anxious, one Labour MP was:

  MR BESWICK: Apart from the general contention, the Minister has just made a statement which is serious. Is he saying that a homosexual is automatically now considered to be a security risk? That is what he said. I should like him to confirm it, because it is a serious thing to say that in this country we now consider all these people to be security risks, and so ought to be discharged.

  SIR DAVID ECCLES: I should like to take advice on that, but my impression is that the answer is ‘Yes’. It certainly is in America. It is the result of the law as it is now.

  So the new rule was inadvertently revealed. At the end of the debate, presumably on being briefed by his department, Eccles said:

  I may have made a mistake in conveying to the House – though I do not think I did – that all homosexuals are necessarily suspect risks. If I conveyed that, I am sorry.

  But he had given the game away. And it was a game of ‘hands across the sea’. The field of atomic energy was covered particularly rigorously by ‘positive vetting’, so that anyone with even occasional access to atomic-energy information had to be screened in advance. The reason for this was outside the hands of the British government; it was ‘a requirement of the agreement between the United Kingdom and the United States for the exchange of atomic energy information’.

  The American authorities were understandably suspicious of the ability of the British to put their own house in order, and were bound to make stipulations when it came to sharing their secrets. It was one of the charges against Fuchs that he had ‘imperilled the good relations between this country and the great American republic with which His Majesty is aligned’. Burgess and Maclean had compromised American secrets. This was a subject of paramount, desperate sensitivity.

  Eccles’s more carefully worded statement reflected the tradition of a more discreet state machine, never eager to make public its dispensations. But changes were being made, to accommodate the demands of the alliance. While the Montagu trials, which enjoyed large headlines in the American press, suggested that neither Lords nor Old Etonians would be spared in the purge, more significant problems would have been faced behind closed doors.*

  The public emphasis was placed upon the secrets of atomic physics. But all the time, there existed that other area of secrecy, which did not even officially exist. This, a fortiori, would have been subject to the same considerations, for it, too, was intimately linked with the arrangements of the Special Relationship. An American arriving at the CIA office in London in 1952 would discover57 that ‘the wartime partnership was still paying off handsomely.’

  The British, recognising the importance of keeping the United States actively engaged in an effort to contain Soviet disruptive thrusts, were extraordinar
ily open and cooperative with Americans in intelligence matters. They provided not only most of their highest-level joint intelligence estimates but also supplied the station chief in London with most of their clandestine intelligence MI6 reports.

  As during the war, such intelligence was not confined to that derived from spying. There was Sigint:

  Some of the material thus exchanged with liaison services was from intercepted electronic signal messages. Eventually most of this material was worked into the reporting system of the National Security Agency, the consolidated cryptanalysis and signals intelligence facility set up in 1950 …

  If the CIA represented an American imitation of the British secret service, the existence of the far more secret NSA simply reflected the rather later victory of the arguments for centralisation which in Britain had prevailed after the First World War. The Americans had learnt from British experience, and it was in London, ‘the hub of the closest intelligence exchange in all history’, that this particular American official perceived ‘what vast benefits our allies provided in the way of good intelligence. Without them, the alliance system itself could not function effectively.’ The exchange was formalised ‘by roughly dividing the world between them and exchanging the materials recorded’. The British had taught the lesson learned at Bletchley, that

  there is no way to be on top of intelligence problems unless you collect much more extensively than any cost-accounting approach would justify and then rely on the wisdom and experience of analysts to sift out the small percentage of vital information that needs to be passed to the top of the government.

  The CIA’s espionage was ‘supplemented greatly’ by these contributions, and correspondingly

  In Great Britain these extensive liaison arrangements were supplemented by equally crucial exchanges in the counter-espionage and counter-intelligence field – also important in liaisons with other allies with good internal security services.