The Codebreakers: The True Story of the Secret Intelligence Team That Changed the Course of the First World War

by James Wyllie

  At MI1(b), Hay inherited three members of staff, including an unemployed 40-year-old aesthete, Oliver Strachey, who would become one of the key figures in Britain’s codebreaking apparatus. A man of abundant gifts, Strachey lacked the motivation to capitalise on them until he became a codebreaker in 1914 and found his true calling.

  A confirmed atheist, he enjoyed life and viewed it as a game not to be taken too seriously. A friend of his daughter described him as ‘gregarious, amused, amusing, highly intelligent, and interested in everything’. His subversive nature is best captured by an anecdote concerning his time as a juror on what appeared to be an open-and-shut case. A well-known robber was being tried for loitering with intent outside a house with a crowbar down the inside of his trouser leg. With the rest of the jury ready to rubber-stamp a guilty verdict, Strachey, out of ‘sheer devilry’, thought it would be amusing to see if he could change their minds ‘by force of logical argument’. Though it took some doing, he persuaded them that the thief was not guilty. Back in court, when the foreman delivered their shock decision, ‘the judge’s mouth fell open – but he wasn’t nearly as surprised as the prisoner’.

  Strachey’s non-conformist character owed a lot to his mother, Lady Jane Strachey. A modern woman – she smoked and played billiards – with a passion for literature, liberal politics and feminist causes, she passed on her love of words to her children and encouraged them to let their imaginations run riot. Oliver’s younger brother Lytton found literary fame as the author of Eminent Victorians (1918); his sister Dorothy translated the writings of her friend André Gide into English; while another brother, James, would do the same for the works of Sigmund Freud.

  Oliver Strachey, leading codebreaker, lost in thought

  Educated at Summerfield and Eton, where he excelled at languages, mathematics and music – the piano was his first and most enduring love – Strachey managed to get himself expelled from Balliol College, Oxford, after just two terms. Rumours that he’d had a homosexual affair were dismissed as absurd by all who knew him: he was enthusiastically heterosexual. Having failed to make the grade as a concert pianist in Vienna, he was packed off to the Raj, where he worked as a traffic superintendent on the East India Railway. Thoroughly bored, he met and married a Swiss-German beauty, a relationship that soon ended in acrimonious divorce.

  Back in England, Strachey mixed effortlessly with the Bloomsbury Set, that decadent anti-establishment group who left a major imprint on twentieth-century culture. The writers Virginia and Leonard Woolf and the artists Duncan Grant, Roger Fry and Vanessa Bell would become lifelong friends. Fancy-dress parties were a regular fixture: at one, Strachey was the Harlequin; at another he came as the ballet dancer Nijinsky, dressed all in red. During long weekends in the country, he would spend hours debating ethics with the moral philosopher G. E. Moore, performing music, and playing marathon games of chess and bridge, two of his favourite pastimes.

  Around this time, he met the genius codebreaker Dilly Knox, who was then deciphering ancient Greek poetry. Lytton Strachey, Oliver’s brother, was a contemporary of Dilly’s at Cambridge and developed a huge crush on him, which was not reciprocated. Oliver would bump into Dilly at Bloomsbury gatherings, and over the course of their long codebreaking careers they became firm friends.

  In 1911, Strachey married Ray Costelloe. Known for her unflattering dress sense – her grandmother observed that ‘Ray sniffs at the idea of trying to make her look graceful … a hopeless task … but she has consented to give up those awful knickers for the summer’ – she was distinctly unfeminine and loved sport and fast cars. She read mathematics at Newnham College, Cambridge, and after graduating met Pippa Strachey, who was deeply committed to the women’s movement and worked for the Central Society for Women’s Suffrage. Ray joined and threw herself into organisational duties and campaigning. She would play a pivotal role in mobilising Britain’s women during the war.

  After honeymooning in India, the newly-weds returned to London in early 1912. They moved into a tiny flat and lived off an allowance from Ray’s stepfather. The opportunity for Strachey to join MI1(b) came through a family friend at the War Office, who was ‘looking for someone with an ingenious head for puzzles and acrostics to decipher code and piece together scraps of wireless messages’. A meeting was arranged and he was hired on the spot. With his agile brain, his knowledge of languages, mathematics and music, his skill at games and puzzles, coupled with his love of detective novels that tested his ability to find clues and solve the mystery, he fitted in perfectly.

  When Malcolm Hay arrived at MI1(b) in late summer 1915, work on Western Front material had slowed to a trickle: the Germans had for the time being stopped using wireless and were sending their messages via trench telephone. Instead, Strachey and his two compatriots were attempting ‘the reconstruction of the American diplomatic code books’. Without economic and financial support from America the Allies could not continue fighting. Knowing the intimate details of US policy could make all the difference between winning and losing. Hay immediately set about examining communications between James Gerard, the US ambassador in Berlin, and his government in Washington. According to Alice Ivy Hay, his second wife, Malcolm detected their meaning over the course of one night.

  Without a steady stream of wireless intercepts to work with, Hay next turned his attention to the voluminous telegraph traffic passing through London. He discovered that copies of all foreign telegrams were kept by the cable censor, Lord Arthur Browne, who was a member of the War Office staff. It was thus possible to obtain copies of all the diplomatic cables which passed through London.

  Up to this point, the idea that the confidential communications of neutral and friendly powers constituted fair game was anathema to the British establishment. Such behaviour was considered ungentlemanly, not worthy of an Englishman. Collecting them was one thing, reading them quite a different matter. Hay, however, was not bothered by etiquette. There was a war to win. He quickly realised the potential value of the enormous mass of encoded messages from all over the world which were accumulating in War Office cupboards. He met with Browne, who agreed to have all diplomatic cable traffic handed over to MI1(b).

  Hay was also determined to rejuvenate MI1(b)’s relationship with Room 40. During the early months of the war, as both organisations were finding their feet, they worked in relative harmony. Alastair Denniston, one of Room 40’s first recruits, remembered how work on the ciphers continued in the Admiralty and the War Office by day, while the night watch worked in the War Office. However, this cordial esprit de corps soon broke down, as the long-held rivalry between the Admiralty and the War Office reasserted itself. As a result, ‘a definite breach’ occurred, and from then on the two sets of codebreakers worked in isolation.

  Hay immediately recognised the need for them to cooperate and informally approached Blinker Hall. Never one to let institutional loyalty interfere with beating the Germans, Hall was happy to oblige, especially as Room 40 had also begun to deal with the Germans’ diplomatic communications, thanks to a bizarre chain of events in the Middle East.

  Chapter 5

  SPIES IN AMERICA

  When the Ottoman Empire entered the war in 1914, it brought with it hundreds of thousands of Muslims, the holiest sites in Islam and the supreme leader of the faith, the Sultan-Caliph Mehmed Rashad V. The Germans sensed an opportunity to destabilise the British Empire by appealing to its millions of Muslim subjects in India, North Africa and the Far East and rallying them to their standard.

  A major step in that direction was taken when the Sultan-Caliph declared a jihad against the British in November 1914. An intensive propaganda campaign was launched by German agents, underground networks were established in Egypt, and a small, dedicated team was dispatched to foment uprisings in Persia (Iran), notionally independent but jointly controlled by Britain and Russia, and Afghanistan.

  One of these insurrectionists was Wilhelm Wassmuss. The nearest German equivalent to Lawrence of Arabia, Wa
ssmuss was a career diplomat, fluent in Persian and Arabic, who adopted the lifestyle of the desert tribes. An advocate of guerrilla warfare, he was single-handedly responsible for leading the British a merry dance in southern Persia: stirring up locals, capturing several towns, blowing up oil pipelines and taking hostages. An irritant rather than a major threat, Wassmuss inadvertently gifted Room 40 the code books that would ultimately transform Allied fortunes.

  By the spring of 1915, the British were hot on his heels, but Wassmuss always managed to keep one step ahead, twice escaping the somewhat lacklustre efforts of local pro-British officials to hold him prisoner. At this point, history and myth collide. According to one account of events, when Wassmuss eluded his captors he left behind a chest containing secret papers, amongst them two versions of the German diplomatic code book, numbered 89734 and 3512. The British seized the trunk and it made its way to the India Office in London (Persia was under the jurisdiction of the Raj). Alternatively, the British, annoyed that Wassmuss had got away, arrested the German consul in the Persian Gulf for collaborating with him. During a search of the consul’s office safe they came across the code books. Not appreciating their potential value, they sent them back to London.

  By chance, Blinker Hall bumped into a young naval officer who told him about the Wassmuss affair. He wasted no time getting the books out of storage. Alistair Denniston remembered how one day in April Hall ‘produced a fresh line of goods – a treasure trove in Persia’.

  Hall immediately formed a diplomatic section that was independent from the rest of Room 40, giving him sole control of its activities. He headhunted George Young, a very experienced Foreign Office official who’d worked in Washington, Athens and Constantinople, and was based in Lisbon at the outbreak of war, and placed him in charge. To make up the rest of the team, he pinched Nigel de Grey and the Reverend Montgomery from Room 40, and brought in Benjamin Faudel-Phillips, a City man.

  The diplomatic code books yielded crucial intelligence concerning communications between Berlin and the German embassy in Madrid, which was acting as a clearing house for messages to their spies in America, where an extensive sabotage operation was being planned: before the code book was discovered, 170 German messages had passed via neutral cables to Count Johann von Bernstorff, the larger-than-life German ambassador in America.

  However, because of the risks of having their ambassador oversee a covert war on US turf, the Germans provided von Bernstorff with plausible deniability in the form of like-minded associates. The German embassy had an executive staff of four, who would in effect become the general command of the German war effort in North America, and have at their disposal an army of lethal patriots and rogues who saw the US financing and supply of the Allied war effort as a legitimate reason to wage war on America.

  Heinrich Albert, the German commercial attaché in the USA and sabotage ‘money man’

  The first was Germany’s commercial attaché in the US, Privy Councillor Dr Heinrich Albert, a 40-year-old lawyer. Albert was paymaster for the German diplomatic corps in the US – and the eventual paymaster to Germany’s espionage and sabotage, holding a massive joint account with Ambassador von Bernstorff at Chase National Bank. He was popular with his American banking colleagues, and conveyed an air of discreet competence despite the vicious duelling scars that creased his face. From his office deep in New York’s financial community, at the Hamburg America Building in Lower Manhattan, Heinrich exerted great influence with New York bankers as a man of prudence and principle. Yet in truth his wartime activities for the Fatherland characterised him, in a later Senate investigation, as ‘the Machiavelli of the whole thing … the mildest mannered man that ever scuttled a ship or cut a throat’.

  The German military attaché in the US was also an aristocrat, Captain Franz von Papen. The eldest son of a wealthy, noble and Catholic landowning family in Westphalia, the 35-year-old von Papen was an officer of an Uhlan cavalry regiment, and had recently finished a stint as a military attendant to the Imperial Palace when he was dispatched as attaché to the United States and Mexico in 1913. Tall, powerfully built and with a sculpted, strong-jawed face that gave him an air of both vigour and sneering arrogance, he, like von Bernstorff, had married money. His wife’s fortune, as the daughter of an Alsatian pottery manufacturer, gave von Papen social standing in Washington DC, which he used to pursue other women for reasons personal and political, though he was more often than not to be found in his redoubt at 60 Wall Street in the heart of New York’s financial district, which became known as the Bureau of the Military Attaché – or more nakedly, the War Intelligence Centre.

  Franz von Papen, Germany’s military attaché in the USA

  Rounding out the quartet was Germany’s naval attaché, Captain Karl Boy-Ed, who had joined the navy at the age of 19 and seen action around the world. He witnessed the brutal American invasion of the Philippines in 1898, and was a secret agent for the Kaiser’s brother shortly before the Boxer War in China, where his mission was to measure the strength of the Chinese navy. Boy-Ed’s origins were more exotically bohemian than those of his von-prefixed colleagues in Germany’s American war office. He was born in the important (and intellectually vibrant) German seaport of Lubbock, on the Baltic coast, where his father was a merchant of Turkish ancestry, and his progressive, intellectual mother was a journalist and novelist who nurtured the career of Thomas Mann, a frequent guest in the Boy-Ed household.

  Tall and built like a rugby prop, Boy-Ed was worldly, well read and funny, with a compelling combination of charm and diligence that made him popular among the Washington crowd when he took up his diplomatic post in 1913. When war came in 1914, he too set up his office in New York City, at 11 Broadway, close to the New York Customs House. And like von Papen, he was within easy walking distance of Heinrich Albert’s counting house.

  New York City was the perfect North American front line for the Germans’ secret war. With a population of 5.3 million people, it was the largest city in the world. Better still, many of the 12 million immigrants who had landed on Ellis Island between 1900 and 1915 stayed where they’d arrived. About one million residents of New York City were foreign born, largely Irish and German, with no love lost for England.

  And the city itself was a marvel of modernity. At 7.30 p.m. on 24 June 1913, President Woodrow Wilson pressed an electric switch in the White House, and on the corner of Broadway and Park Row in Manhattan, 200 miles up the road, the 80,000 lights of the new 60-storey Woolworth Building blazed out to ships 40 miles out to sea that the world’s largest skyscraper was open for business in a city whose new epicenter – Times Square – called itself the crossroads of the world. Ezra Pound, the American poet then living in London, visited the city and was moved to remark, ‘No urban nights are like nights there. I have looked down across the city from high windows. It is then that the great buildings lose reality and take on magical powers. Squares and squares of flame set and cut into the ether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled the stars down to our will.’ With 500 miles of shoreline, the city’s five boroughs were connected to each other and the rest of the country by ferry, tunnel and bridges spanning a harbour that was the busiest in the world, funnelling goods into the American heartland and out to the world beyond.

  Von Papen’s first instinct, however, was to look further afield and attack Canada, which, as a self-governing dominion of Great Britain, had gone to war along with Britain and was now a vital source of soldiers and supplies for the war in Europe, sending 30,000 soldiers to England in October 1914 – 5,000 more than London had rather extravagantly hoped for in such a short time. Canada’s military training centre at Valcartier, Quebec, 500 miles north of New York City, was within easy striking distance, but for the German saboteurs in the USA, the entire country, as a key part of the British Empire’s war machine, was a target.

  The Canadian attack plan had come to von Papen via a German soldier of fortune named Holst von der Goltz, who had attained the rank of major while serving w
ith Pancho Villa’s revolutionary army in Mexico. The baby-faced von der Goltz was really Franz Wachendorf, born in Koblenz in 1884, who already boasted a shadowy career in intelligence, having stolen a document from a Mexican finance minister he had chloroformed in Paris. The purloined document revealed a top-secret agreement between Japan and Mexico, which von der Goltz then leaked to the US in February 1911, who responded by sending their fleet to the Gulf of Mexico, and 20,000 troops – two-thirds of the US army at the time – to the Mexican border.

  The following year von der Goltz was in Mexico too, fighting the revolution. That adventure ended once Germany was at war. He heeded the call for all German soldiers and reservists located outside Europe to muster in the United States, and headed to New York to pay a call on Franz von Papen.

  On 22 August 1914, von der Goltz appeared at 11 Broadway, and in a little room in the Imperial German consulate he and von Papen hatched a plan to strike at Britain through its dominion of Canada. Von Papen produced a letter he had received from a German who worked on a farm in Oregon suggesting that the Germans should attack Canada’s Great Lakes cities with machine guns mounted on motorboats. The two men agreed that the plan was good, but that it could also be a trap, and so von Papen, with the same kind of shrewd thoroughness that would later see him rise to vice chancellor of Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler, had the letter-writer investigated.

  In the meantime, the duo hatched a scheme to use German reservists in the United States to invade British Columbia via Washington State, with support from German warships in the Pacific. That plan was rejected too, partly because of the lack of artillery backup, but mainly because Ambassador von Bernstorff thought it the kind of ‘wild-cat scheme’ that would inflame Germanophobia and ultimately fail.