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

by James Wyllie

  Once he and Clauson had joined Maude’s expedition, they set to work on the enemy ciphers. Intelligence supplied by them, and by Cairo and MI1(b), detailing the strength of Turkish forces, their position and intentions, meant Maude could organise his push on Baghdad with a clear idea of what lay ahead of him. The difference in outcome could not have been more marked. The advance began in December 1916. Kut was retaken in February 1917. Baghdad was occupied a few weeks later.

  While British forces continued to push north, hoping to secure as much of this oil-rich country as possible, Clauson and Thompson settled into their ‘own little room’ in Baghdad. To keep fit, Thompson practised ‘cut and thrust with a sabre on the roof of the mess’. Over a matter of months they solved all the enemy ciphers being used in the Mesopotamian theatre. Their efforts resulted in a steady stream of strategic and tactical information, including Turkish plans for an offensive against Baghdad, allowing Maude to take the necessary precautionary measures.

  A letter Clauson wrote to MI1(b) in London provides a sense of their day-to-day existence. It starts with Clauson laid up in bed suffering from a ‘sore belly’ after giving ‘a lifelike imitation of a village pump for three days’. Recovering, he managed to crack ‘another of our local brand of cipher, the 9th of its kind’, though he was concerned about ‘how the Devil I can send you my notes on solving the ruddy thing’ – in the end they went by submarine. He goes on to add that ‘Turkish messages in new keys … rarely present any difficulty’ and that Thompson held ‘the record having downed one with only 113 (letter) groups to work on’.

  In November 1917, Clauson was sent to Egypt to act as chief coordinator of codebreaking in the Middle East. While there, he spent time improving and regulating the security of the Yinterim code – based on letter groups – which was used to communicate with his colleagues in MI1(b), Baghdad and Salonika.

  Thompson was released from his codebreaking duties in March 1918 and proceeded to take charge of the general supervision of antiquities in Mesopotamia, penning a short history of the country between 4000 BC and 323 BC for the benefit of the British soldiers stationed there. At Ur, he dug up the remains of one of the oldest Sumerian cities with the help of Turkish prisoners, shrugging off the hostile intentions of local nomads.

  Before the war, Thompson, the archaeologist turned codebreaker, had joined a major excavation of the Hittite royal palace at Carchemish in Syria under the supervision of David Hogarth. Thompson wanted his fiancée to join him on site but Hogarth wouldn’t allow it. Annoyed, Thompson quit and went home to get married. The dig continued without him.

  Hogarth was another leading archaeologist who played a major role in the Middle East. Like Thompson, he was an adventurer at heart, and had explored the ancient sites of the Greek islands and Asia Minor, becoming an expert on the connections that linked the civilisations. In 1909 he became keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, overseeing its collection of artefacts. However, he found life as an administrator thoroughly boring. To escape, he organised the Carchemish expedition.

  Before leaving, he offered his services to Naval Intelligence. At the time it was normal for academics and explorers dotted around the globe to carry out informal espionage duties. Hogarth was to keep watch on the German engineers engaged in constructing the Berlin—Baghdad railway. In archaeological research, as in so many other things, Germany was Britain’s main rival. Its experts also doubled as spies. The Carchemish dig was visited by the archaeologist Max von Oppenheim who would go on to become the prime mover behind the German-sponsored jihad.

  Though 53 at the outbreak of war, Hogarth was keen to do his bit. He joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and, after rejecting an offer to become an agent in Sofia, landed in Cairo just as a new intelligence organisation – the Arab Bureau – was being formed, to act as a ‘centre to which all information on the various questions connected with the Near East will gravitate’.

  Back in London, Blinker Hall was one of those lobbying for the right to oversee the Bureau’s activities. He had a close relationship with Colonel Gilbert Clayton, a long-serving colonial soldier who was the director of the Arab Bureau. Unsurprisingly, Hall believed the bureau should be controlled by Naval Intelligence, though as he explained to Clayton in a letter, it would remain fairly independent: ‘this seems to me the only successful plan, as you have people on the spot who are able to assess any information and its proper value’.

  In the end, Hall lost out to the Foreign Office. Nevertheless, he kept in touch with Clayton, who agreed to maintain ‘some unofficial channel of communication’. Hogarth, with all his years of experience and accumulated knowledge, was put in charge. As it happened, Hall knew Hogarth well, not only because he was a navy man but also because Hogarth’s father was a close friend of Hall’s father-in-law.

  Occupying three rooms at the Savoy Hotel in Cairo, Hogarth and his staff were determined to pursue a ‘forward’ policy in the region, which entailed stirring up the tribes of Arabia against the Turks. The focus of this strategy was Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca, who had been made deliberately vague promises of British support if he chose to throw off the Ottoman yoke, which had tightened ever since a railroad had penetrated deep into his territory. It brought with it Turkish tax collectors, deeply resented by local tribes, and challenged the tribes’ lucrative role in ensuring safe passage for the many thousands of Muslim pilgrims who made the journey to Mecca each year for the haj.

  Almost immediately, the British-sponsored Arab uprising was on the brink of collapse. The British had already sunk considerable sums into Hussein’s war chest and appeared to be facing a swift end to their ambitious plans to claim the desert kingdom for themselves in the name of Arab independence.

  Direct military assistance was constrained by two factors: the understandable reluctance of the War Office to commit troops; and the prohibitions against non-Muslims entering the Hejaz region, and especially its most holy sites. Yet to do nothing was not an option, not least because failing to help Hussein would give encouragement to his deadly opponent, Ibn Saud, whose clan, fierce acolytes of the Wahhabi sect, a militantly fundamentalist branch of Islam, coveted his territory. What was particularly galling to the Arabists in Cairo and Khartoum was that Ibn Saud was being sponsored by their rivals for influence in the region, the India Office.

  Offering a way though this tangled mess was a young archaeologist and protégé of Hogarth who had been kicking his heels as an intelligence officer in Cairo attached to the Geographical Section: T. E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia.

  Lawrence’s first great passion was for the medieval history he’d studied at Oxford. Hogarth spotted his talent and became his sponsor, securing him a four-year scholarship after graduation and employing him on the Carchemish excavation. Lawrence spent nearly three years there and found digging ‘tremendous fun’. Hogarth brought him into the Arab Bureau and remained his patron throughout the war as Lawrence made his bid for glory.

  Lawrence’s vision offered a neat solution to the problems facing British intervention. Given that the Arab troops, such as they were, were no match for the Turkish army, he argued that they were best suited to guerrilla warfare, a style of fighting that also offered the prospect of amassing booty, a primary motivation for the Bedouins who would form the majority of the strike force Lawrence commanded.

  Though Lawrence focused on the destruction and disruption of the Hejaz railway, he had an equally important task: to sever the Turkish telegraph lines between Damascus and Mecca, thereby forcing the enemy to use wireless instead. Messages sent this way could then be intercepted and decoded. Lawrence recalled that ‘one of my cares was to distribute wire cutters over their rear and cut their telegraph daily’. Between March and May 1917 he mounted 15 attacks on the Turkish system; between July and October another 30, using camels to pull down the telegraph poles.

  By the time the Egyptian Expeditionary Force was ready to advance into Palestine, with Lawrence’s Arab irregulars acting in
support, it could draw on material from more than 40 wireless and DF stations dotted across the Mediterranean. The Turks themselves were operating at least 12, greatly increasing the volume of messages available for decryption.

  Despite this impressive infrastructure, its potential was still not being properly used. During the First Battle of Gaza, in March 1917, during which the EEF mounted a frontal assault on well-defended positions, the wireless station established by Gill in Cyprus intercepted a message, decoded in Cairo, which showed the Turks were on the point of buckling under the weight of sustained artillery fire.

  This news was transmitted to the commander in the field, General Murray, but ‘he had taken steps to see that no message could reach him, stating he would have no interference from Cairo HQ during the battle’. Having already sustained heavy casualties, and ignorant of the fact that the Turks were on the verge of collapse, he called off the attack, losing the chance of a decisive victory. At the Second Battle of Gaza, in April, the same tactics were repeated, again at high cost to men and materiel, with no advantage gained. Murray was swiftly replaced by General Allenby.

  Allenby realised that what was lacking was the element of surprise. If that could be restored, a breakthrough might follow. This could be achieved by deceiving the enemy as to his real intentions. Wireless messaging offered the means to do so – not the only one, but it was the integral component that made the others work.

  From decodes, Allenby knew the exact location, size, composition and tactical intent of the enemy. Armed with this knowledge, he could then decide where he wanted the Turks to think he was going to attack, and where he was actually going to. He wanted to strike inland towards Beersheba, and hoped to convince the Turks that his offensive would be directed at Gaza.

  Based on the assumption that the enemy was also intercepting and decoding British communications – according to the German general Limon von Sanders, ‘we often deciphered their wireless messages in spite of their frequent changes of cipher key’ – disinformation could be spread. False messages were broadcast on a daily basis. To make sure they could be read, the British deliberately leaked the key to solving them by announcing it en clair. Whether or not the Turks had fallen for these measures could be established through their wireless chatter.

  The most daring, yet simple, act of deception involved a British officer riding into an area where Turkish patrols were known to loiter with intent. Having spotted him, they opened fire and he escaped, ‘accidentally’ leaving his knapsack behind. In it were maps and papers laced with misleading information, plus some helpful notes on the British cipher being used to transmit the fake wireless messages. The Turks were delighted with their find, as army orders revealed: ‘one of our NCO patrols … came back with some very important maps and documents … no doubt as important and valuable to the enemy as they are to us’.

  Allenby launched his offensive in the autumn of 1917. Expecting the attack elsewhere, the Turks at Beersheba were taken completely unawares and were quickly overrun. With air superiority bolstered by the fact that MI1(b) had cracked the wireless code used by German aircraft, the EEF advance pushed remorselessly ahead.

  Having excelled as a codebreaker on the Western Front, the journalist Ferdinand Tuohy was now roaming the Middle East as an ambassador for wireless intelligence. He recalled how the order for a Turkish assault ‘was sent out by cipher by wireless from Jerusalem … we deciphered the first message … and were able to act … before the enemy commander knew himself what was expected of him’. Soon afterwards, Jerusalem was in British hands; the last desperate wireless message from its Turkish defenders said it all: ‘the enemy is in front of us only half an hour from here … fighting has been going on day and night … this is our last resistance. Adieu Jerusalem.’

  As Allenby pushed towards Syria, he resorted again to deception: this time he pretended that he was going to strike inland, while his main thrust was actually directed along the coast. The Battle of Megiddo effectively ended Turkish resistance. With more troops, artillery and aircraft than his predecessor, and with Lawrence’s Arabs protecting his flanks, Allenby had considerable advantages. The Turkish army was weakened by disease, malnutrition, mass desertion and the loss of its best units to a futile assault on the Caucasus. Nevertheless, victory was assured by Allenby’s astute handling of the material analysed by the codebreakers in London, Cairo and Baghdad, all supplied by the wireless masts built by Eric Gill.

  Chapter 19

  CRISIS

  During 1917, the war of attrition reached the home fronts. All the belligerents were suffering from shortages of food and other basic commodities. Raw materials were scarce. Rationing became the order of the day. The cost of financing the conflict was ruinous for all concerned; inflation was rampant, national debts astronomical. Strike action, labour agitation and anti-war feeling were on the increase. Those in power realised that victory or defeat would depend on who could best withstand the strain. Russia was the first to crack: it was hunger that drove the citizens of Petrograd and Moscow onto the streets to topple the tsarist regime in March 1917.

  For many socialists and liberals in England who had instinctively despised the autocratic system in Russia, felt distinctly uncomfortable about any form of alliance with it, and hoped that a more democratic, progressive government might take its place, the fall of the Romanov dynasty was a cause for celebration. Oliver Strachey and his friend Leonard Woolf, husband of Virginia, honoured the revolution by opening the 1917 Club in Soho as a meeting place for sympathetic intellectuals and politicos. Ramsay MacDonald, Labour Party leader and future prime minister, was a founding member.

  Not everyone was so enthusiastic about the Russian Revolution. The Allied leaders were justifiably concerned that it would lead to Russia’s exit from the war, which would present the Germans with the chance to switch their forces from the Eastern Front to the West, thereby giving them numerical superiority. As it was, the aptly named provisional government, dependent as it was on British and French money to stay afloat and ward off the economic crisis afflicting Russia, stayed in the war and gambled its credibility on a new offensive against the Germans in July. It began promisingly but quickly unravelled as the Russian army disintegrated from within.

  By now, many of the rank-and-file, inspired by the example of their comrades in the major cities, had joined self-governing soldiers’ committees (soviets), and either rejected, changed or simply ignored orders, while officers were sacked, beaten up and sometimes hanged. At the same time, many thousands of the peasant conscripts who formed the bulk of the army melted away as they downed their weapons and drifted back to their villages, eager to take part in the spontaneous confiscation of the lands and estates of the nobility. To all intents and purposes, the Russian army had ceased to exist as a fighting force.

  Prior to the chaotic events of 1917, neither Room 40 nor MI1(b) had endeavoured to break Russian codes. Malcolm Hay observed that ‘no attempt was made to read Russian cables before the Revolution. These cables, enormous in number, and encoded by a complicated system, would have required special staff.’ Meanwhile, over at Room 40, relations with their Russian counterparts had been extremely good, partly due to the debt of gratitude Room 40 owed the Russians for their decision to hand over the German naval code books they retrieved from the sinking Magdeburg early in the war. Blinker Hall and his staff liaised with Russian naval staff in Moscow, helped them with the cipher keys used by the German fleet in the Baltic, and supplied information about its movements, whereabouts and intentions: ‘every step in their preparations, every movement of the squadrons was known at once … whence the information was loyally forwarded to the Russians’. Notoriously secretive and reluctant to entertain visitors, Room 40 even opened its doors to Commander Przyleneki, a representative from Russian naval intelligence.

  But, over the summer of 1917, with the German army advancing ever deeper into Russia and food shortages mounting, the country became chronically unstable; the Provisional Govern
ment’s hold on power, tenuous at best, simply evaporated. Into the vaccum stepped Lenin and his Bolsheviks. Supported by the all important workers and soldiers’ Soviets that were effectively running the big cities, Lenin seized power in November and immediately declared his desire to come to terms with the Germans.

  Fearing for the safety of his Russian colleagues and the sensitive material he had shared with them, Hall’s immediate reaction was to cable them on 4 October: ‘in view of the present situation, I earnestly beg you to burn all documents and papers concerned with our mutual work. Should situation improve I can replace everything and will keep you advised.’

  But the situation didn’t improve. As Lenin strengthened his grip, British policy entered a black hole of confusion and uncertainty, not helped by the swift emergence of the Bolsheviks’ own deadly efficient secret service, the Cheka. MI6 tried to get agents, including the writers Somerset Maugham and Arthur Ransome, close to the leadership, and cooked up ever more ambitious and frankly ludicrous schemes to derail the Bolshevik juggernaut, but with little effect.

  The one positive development was the arrival in London of Ernst Fetterlin, Russia’s leading cryptographer, during July 1918. Born in 1873 in St Petersburg, Fetterlin studied languages at university and joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1896. Over time he became the tsar’s top codebreaker, penetrating German, Austrian and British codes. With a price on his head and Russia descending into a brutal, pitiless civil war, Fetterlin, accompanied by his Swedish wife, managed to evade the Cheka and escape the country on a Swedish ship.

  Totally broke, with no possessions except the clothes on his back and a large ruby ring, a present from the tsar for his services that he was considering selling, Fetterlin was welcomed with open arms by Room 40. He made an instant impact, bringing his knowledge of Austrian codes, an area so far neglected by Room 40, and displaying the kind of talent that led a colleague to remark that ‘on book ciphers and anything where insight was vital he was quite the best. He was a fine linguist and he would usually get an answer no matter the language.’ As for the Bolsheviks, they were slow to develop their own codes: when they did, Fetterlin was ready for them.