This being so, British Intelligence had to accommodate itself to American security rules, just as did atomic research. Accordingly, the case of Alan Turing was one that also had to be seen through American eyes. Regardless of any post-1945 developments, he had been the top-level liaison between the two countries in 1943, and admitted into secret American establishments. Besides knowing so many technical details, he was a person ‘on top of intelligence problems’. He knew how the systems worked as a whole – the people, the places, the methods, the equipment. Had the headline been ‘ATOMIC SCIENTIST FOUND DEAD’, the questions would have been immediate and public. In Alan Turing’s case, the questions were not obvious, but precisely because the field of his expertise was even more closely guarded than that of nuclear weapons. And it was the Ultra secret that Churchill personally cared about, the adventures of the secret service being useful largely as cover stories. Alan Turing had stood at the very centre of the Anglo-American alliance. His very existence was a glaring embarrassment, and one which put the British government in the position of being answerable for his behaviour. As John Turing had found as a small boy, this was no easy responsibility. Not only the quiet trial at Knutsford, but also his visits to countries bordering on the eastern bloc were subjects that in contemporary American eyes, were they to come to American notice,58 would be tantamount to an international incident. These were exceedingly deep waters.
Fundamentally it was not his homosexuality that presented a difficulty to the mind of security, but the lack of control, the element of the unknown. The coroner said that ‘with a man of his type’ – a man of the Professor type! – no one could tell what his mental processes would do next. That iconoclastic ‘originality’ had been acceptable in the brief period of ‘creative anarchy’, which had even stomached the arrogance and will-power required to solve the unsolvable Enigma, and force the implications upon an unwilling system. But by 1954 a very different mentality prevailed. At Alan’s last Christmas visit to Guildford he had left behind some papers; calming his mother’s anxiety about them he betrayed his impatience with post-war Newspeak:59
The note on [the] M of S* document about secrecy etc. is all eyewash really. The document is ‘unclassified’ (an idiotic word of American origin meaning ‘not in the least secret’. It arises by documents being ‘classified’ according to their degrees of secrecy, hence secret documents get to be called ‘classified’, and hence, worst of all ‘unclassified’ does not mean ‘not as yet assigned to any category’ but ‘not secret’).
He belonged to an age of implicit trust and class-based discretion, at a time when trust and discretion were being mechanised and classified. In the climate of 1954 it was almost irrelevant that he had no time for the Soviet Union, for all were under suspicion until ‘cleared’, and everything that was not the purest White, could be considered potentially Red.
With the loss of strategic independence, and the end of imperial confidence, Alan Turing’s country had changed. His old housemaster had declared him ‘essentially loyal’, and in rather the same way an assumed ‘essential loyalty’ had satisfied the recruiters of the new men. It probably never occurred to them that a well-connected English person could take an abstract, foreign idea seriously enough for it to make any difference. Fifteen years later, events had proved otherwise. If the 1940s had made the idea of ‘intelligence’ into something very concrete and definite, the 1950s forced the concept of ‘loyalty’ to an equal explicitness. And the Cambridge which had supplied the intelligence was an unknown quantity in respect of loyalty. This was a time at which Patrick Blackett, once the trusted adviser of an independent Royal Navy, was being pointed out among Manchester University staff as ‘the fellow traveller’.
Alan Turing, by comparison, was the entirely apolitical person. But he came from the dissenting King’s background; he had supported the ‘very good’ Anti-War demonstration in November 1933. He had never moved in the sophisticated circles of Burgess and Maclean, and had not been elected an Apostle, but connections could easily be found by anyone who chose to look for them. At a time of guilt by association – when there was nothing but association to go on – he was guilty. They had made some incredible mistakes, and how could they be sure Alan Turing was not yet another, given his instructions by the Red Queen twenty years before? What would constitute a proof? It was Wittgenstein’s awkward question, applied to real life. Burgess and Maclean had been absurd and clumsy players of the imitation game – but were there others more skilful, yet to be found out? Even if such gross suspicions had been entirely ruled out, the fact was that by combining and concentrating the two great unthinkables, cryptanalysis and homosexuality, mysteries of ‘stinks’ and ‘filth’ respectively, he had rendered himself a demon, arousing the most primordial insecurities. And it was at a time when British securities had evaporated. The old social discipline offered no defence against nuclear war, but neither did scientific methods offer better than plans for revenge and suicide. Torn between a subservient trust and a resentful anxiety regarding American machinations, to which British power had been surrendered, a panic over spies and homosexuals provided Great Britain with a suitable diversion.
The tide in the affairs of men had turned in 1943, and by the summer of 1954 had obliterated the patterns drawn in the Second World War. Stalin had gone, but this had made no difference to the system of threat and counter-threat, apparently beyond the control of individuals. A Soviet hydrogen bomb had been tested in August 1953, presenting the possibility of devastation greater than the most pessimistic prognostications of 1939, and of a scale far outweighing that offered by the British bomb tested in October 1952. But it was the American test on 1 March 1954, the 14-megaton blast catching the crew of the Lucky Dragon, that suddenly jolted public consciousness. On 5 April, in a rare Commons ‘defence’ debate, Churchill saw fit to reveal the terms of the 1943 Quebec agreement between Britain and the United States, on which the Americans had reneged, and said:
No words of mine are needed to emphasise the deadly situation in which the whole world lies … the H-bomb carries us into domains which have never confronted practical human thought and have been confined to the realms of phantasy and imagination.
What was fantasy and what was reality? There was American pressure on the British to join in a military intervention in Vietnam, after the French defeat on 7 May at Dien Bien Phu. Churchill’s refusal brought about talk of a ‘British betrayal’, and strains to the quid pro quo of the Special Relationship. Fears of a new Asian war were not unfounded; on 26 May an American admiral spoke of a ‘campaign for complete victory’ in Vietnam, including the use of nuclear weapons. A general described using atomic bombs to ‘create a belt of scorched earth across the avenues of Communism to block the Asiatic hordes’. Dulles now said that he was ‘very hopeful’ that the British government would ‘change their attitude’.
June 1954 was a period of particular uncertainty, with the Geneva talks on Vietnam being compared with those of Munich. Now it was the turn of American city populations to practise taking cover in air-raid shelters, while in Britain there was a revival of the Home Guard – recruitment was in progress at Wilmslow during the last week of May. The tension was as great in Europe as in Asia, with West German rearmament being the inflammatory issue. The rules had changed, and the past had changed its meaning. Not only the silver bars had been lost for good; other bridges had been destroyed, and new ones built in solid concrete. Now it was the turn of the U-boat men to be called back, while the hunt for spies and traitors was occupying their erstwhile enemies. It was on 2 June that the newspapers revealed that ‘new man’ at Princeton to be loyal but a ‘security risk’. Robert Oppenheimer, guilty of wrong ideas and associations, was someone that no one could be certain about. And there was another special feature of the newspapers that Whitsun weekend. Faded, stilted, almost embarrassed tributes were being paid to the men who had landed on the beaches of Normandy, exactly ten years before.
Alan Turing was not an isla
nd, but a stray eddy in a sea of troubles. The coroner referred to the ‘balance of his mind’ and to him becoming ‘unstable’. It was an image not remote from his own morphogenetic model of the moment of crisis. As the political temperature rose, his equilibrium would become more and more unstable. The smallest event could have been the trigger. One particular issue would have concentrated his demand for freedom on the one hand, and the implications of past promises on the other. Could he have gone abroad again in the summer of 1954 – when no one knew what might happen next, and in the midst of an official panic over homosexuality? The Foreign Office had been issuing stern memoranda on Soviet entrapment during the past year,60 in parallel with an extension of ‘positive vetting’ on 31 March 1954, and fortified by the disclosures of the Russian defector Petrov. Meanwhile the Montagu trials had shown that fond British beliefs in velvet-glove government were not always to be sustained. There was always the possibility of another case being brought against Alan, manufactured out of an affair long in the past. This was one aspect of the wave of prosecutions now taking place, and one which threatened to drag down friends – even on the merest suspicions and flimsiest allegations. Even the newspapers, if he could bear to read them, could have told him this. He was in a corner. He had always been prepared to confine his fight to his own personal space – the space that others chose to allow him. But by now he was left no space at all.
E. M. Forster,61 outdoing the King’s heresy with grand bravura, had written in 1938 that if he were faced with the choice between betraying his country and betraying his friends, he hoped he would have the courage to betray his country. He would always put the personal above the political. But for Alan Turing, unlike Forster, or Wittgenstein, or G. H. Hardy, it was more than a theoretical question. For him not only had the personal become the political, but the political was the personal. He had chosen and promised for himself in working for the government. The choice for him therefore was that between betraying one part of himself and betraying another part. And however much he wavered between these alternatives, there was a solid logic to the mind of security, one that could not be expected to take an interest in notions of freedom and development. He had no rights to such things, as he would have had to admit. He might have outwitted the Home Guard, but when it came to questions that mattered, there was no doubt that he had placed himself under military law. There was a war on; there was always a war on now.
Churchill had promised blood, toil, tears and sweat – and this was one promise which the politicians had kept. Half a million of Alan Turing’s compatriots had been sacrificed ten years before, without much choice in their fate; to have the luxury of choice in matters of integrity and freedom was itself a great privilege. Only the ‘heads in the sand’ assumptions of 1938 had allowed him into such a position in the first place, and his position in 1941 was one for which many would have given all they had. Ultimately he could not have complained. The implications had proliferated, and arrived at a remorseless contradiction. It was his own invention, and it killed the goose that laid the golden eggs.
No one remotely mindful of such considerations could have wanted to make a fuss; and neither in any case could he speak of such things – that was the very point. Only in obscure clues and jokes could they emerge. In March 1954 he sent to Robin four last postcards. They were headed ‘Messages from the Unseen World’, an allusion to Eddington’s 1929 book Science and the Unseen World. Robin kept only the last three, here shown.*
The old Empire was giving way to the institutions of Oceania. None of Alan Turing’s friends saw this as a background that might be relevant to his death, nor saw him as playing the role of Casabianca after all. Not for about fifteen years would the various elements involved become mentionable at all, and even then no one could begin to put them together. There was no hushing-up operation in 1954 – it was not necessary, for no one thought anything nor asked any questions. The Wicked Witch of the West was caused no embarrassment, for the friends of Dorothy had nothing to go on. Few people on 7 June 1944, seeing the cycling civilian boffin, could have imagined a connection with the news of the great invasion: they did not need to know, nor want to know. Ten years later to the day, the links were literally unthinkable, and the death came as an individual hurt and loss, without suggesting any wider significance. Jung said:62
Modern man protects himself against seeing his own split state by a system of compartments. Certain areas of outer life and of his own behaviour are kept, as it were, in separate drawers and are never confronted with one another.
Modern men had to protect themselves particularly carefully when they were confronted by Alan Turing, and they kept the compartments completely separate. So perhaps too did Alan Turing, when confronting his own situation.
Behind the singleminded Shavian figure that he cut, especially after the war, acting out in public a set of ideas with relentless intensity, and going to the stake like a modern Saint Joan, there had always been a more uncertain, contradictory person. Doubting Castle and Giant Despair had been his favourite passages in The Pilgrim’s Progress as a small boy, and his part in the progress of mankind had been in keeping with them – the delectable mountains being few and far between. In particular there lay the uncertainty of all his relationships with institutions, neither fitting in, nor presenting a serious challenge. In this respect he shared something with many people deeply attracted to pure mathematics and science – never sure whether to regard social institutions as Erewhonian absurdities or as plain facts of life. Making a game out of anything, like G. H. Hardy (and like Lewis Carroll), he reflected the fact that mathematics could serve as protection from the world for one who was not so much blind to worldly affairs as only too sensitive to their horror. His offhand, self-effacing humour also shared something with the response of so many gay men to an impossible social situation: in some ways directing a bold, satirical defiance at society – yet ultimately resigned to it.
For Alan Turing these elements were aggravated by the fact that he never quite fitted into the roles of mathematician, scientist, philosopher or engineer – nor into the tail-end of the Bloomsbury set, nor indeed into any kind of set, even the Wrong Set. It was often a case of Laughter in the Next Room for Alan Turing, for people never knew whether to include him or not. Robin Gandy wrote63 very soon after his death of how ‘Because his main interests were in things and ideas rather than in people, he was often alone. But he craved for affection and companionship – too strongly, perhaps, to make the first stages of friendship easy for him …’ And he was more alone than anyone could ever see.
A self-taught existentialist, one who had probably never heard of Sartre, he had tried to find his own road to freedom. As life became more complicated it became less clear where this should lead him. But why should it have been clear? This was the twentieth century, in which the pure artist felt called upon to become involved, and which was enough to make any sensitive person acutely nervous. He had done everything he could to restrict his involvement to the simplest sphere, as he had also tried to keep true to himself, but simplicity and honesty had not protected him from the consequences of that involvement: far from it.
The British university world was as well insulated from the twentieth century as anyone could hope for; and so often it saw his eccentricities, not his vision, offered vague tributes to cleverness, not serious criticism of his ideas, and remembered the bicycle stories rather than the great events. But although nothing if not an intellectual, Alan Turing never truly belonged to the confines of the academic world. Lyn Newman, who had the advantage of seeing that world at close quarters but from outside, articulated64 more clearly than anyone else this lack of an easy identity; she saw him as ‘a very strange man, one who never fitted in anywhere quite successfully. His scattered efforts to appear at home in the upper-middle class circles into which he was born stand out as particularly unsuccessful. He did adopt a few conventions, apparently at random, but he discarded the majority of their ways and ideas without he
sitation or apology. Unfortunately the ways of the academic world which might have proved his refuge, puzzled and bored him …’ There was an ambivalence in his attitude to what was, despite all its concomitant deprivation, a privileged upbringing: he jettisoned most of the paraphernalia of his class but in inner self-confidence and moral responsibility remained the son of Empire. There was a similar ambiguity in his status as an intellectual, not only in his disdain for the more trivial functions of academic life, but in the mixture of pride and negligence with which he regarded his own achievements.
There was another uncertainty in his attitude to the privilege of being a man in a male-dominated world. In most ways he took it entirely for granted. It was a weak point of King’s liberalism that it rested upon wealth accumulated for the benefit of men alone, and he would have not been the person to question it. In conversation with Robin, who took a progressive line on the question of equal pay (the only issue, in this period, which kept feminism alive), Alan said simply that it would be unfair if women were off work having babies. Nor did he doubt that women would run round him clearing up the mess, and seeing to matters that he chose not to bother about himself. In conversation with Don Bayley at Hanslope he mentioned how he had been engaged, that he had realised it ‘would not work’ because of his homosexuality, but also remarked that if he were ever to marry, it would be to someone non-mathematical, who would look after his domestic needs – a conventional attitude much closer to his family’s, and untrue to the way in which his friendship with Joan Clarke had developed. There was an unresolved contradiction here, at least at that stage of his life. He disliked the talking-down and triviality expected of men in ‘mixed company’ – and, no doubt, too, the pressure on him to display an erotic interest he did not feel – and largely avoided such social obligations. Yet when these constraints did not apply – especially, perhaps, with Lyn Newman, but to some extent with his own mother – he showed a mind more open to the other sex than that of many men to whom the word ‘women’ was a synonym for sexual possessions or distractions. Nor did he ever do more for male supremacy than to share in its institutions. He never sought to justify his homosexuality in terms of preferring the superior male, for instance, and when set against the speech and writing of what everyone called the age of the common man, his comments were remarkably free of the stream of hostility, implicit or explicit, that most men felt entirely free to direct at the encroachments or pretensions of women. Alan certainly spoke of ‘girls’ doing the menial work, and by implication cast them in the role of ‘slaves’ at Bletchley; yet this was simply the way things were, and if anything he was just a little more conscious of the inequity than were others who took it entirely for granted. He did nothing to change it, but then he had never sought to change the world, only to interpret it.
Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game Page 80
