GCHQ

by Richard Aldrich

  During the important diplomatic conferences that marked the end of the war, Jimmy Byrnes, the new American Secretary of State, was apparently more eager to see decrypted French material than anything else, concerned that Paris was likely to be working with Moscow.15 French traffic from Moscow was of great interest to London because the former French Air Minister, Pierre Cot, had indeed begun a special diplomatic mission to Moscow to examine the possibility of cooperating against Germany in post-war Europe.16

  French traffic provided the British and Americans with a fabulous window on the diplomacy of Western Europe.17 Indeed, in mid-1946 half the US Army code-breakers’ end product was based on intercepting French communications.18 Alarmingly, the French still seemed keen to develop a close relationship with Stalin.19 The traffic from French Embassies in Eastern Europe proved especially interesting. Typically, an intercept from the French Embassy in Tirana gave detailed information on the balance of power in the Albanian Cabinet and the waning power of the pro-Moscow elements, and intercepted French intelligence traffic sometimes offered information about the KGB.20 With the work on Soviet codes still gaining momentum, the chatter of other countries that were talking to Moscow provided insights into their thinking. On 13 August 1945, Edward Travis sent Joseph Wenger, the senior American naval code-breaker, a long missive about cooperation on post-war French and Dutch systems, and explained British plans ‘to increase the effort here, especially on French’, adding that British plans to focus on Paris ‘are going into effect at an early date’. French, Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American traffic was soon consolidated into a single group under Josh Cooper.21

  Major Barbieri was proud of the work of his Italian code-breakers against the French, but he pressed for more staff. So many of the best cryptographers, he complained, had been captured by the French in North Africa, adding, ‘the French are now employing them in their own service!’ Nevertheless, the British concluded that the Italians were ‘doing remarkably well with the limited reserves at their disposal’.22 By mid-1946 they were giving them new tasks, including Soviet traffic which came from military cypher machines at division level code-named ‘Taper’. British liaison officers with the Italians were working closely with code-breakers in Britain on the identification of new Taper groups. Senior Italian sigint officers knew that Taper traffic ‘which had been taken with so much depth and continuity for the past month’ was Soviet in origin, but many of their underlings were in a state of blissful ignorance about what they were collecting and who the ultimate customer was.23

  The efforts of TICOM were not exclusively directed towards raiding priceless sigint secrets from the Germans, the Italians and the Japanese. They were also concerned with protecting Britain’s own secret communications. Until late 1943, Bletchley Park regarded weak security as a problem restricted to Britain’s allies. But the ability to read German messages had revealed a number of unexpected security nightmares for the Allies. Ultra had shown Britain’s code-breakers that the Germans could read many of the codes of the Allies, such as those of the Soviets and the Free French. In Asia, terrible cypher security and serious human agent penetration ensured that Chinese codes were effectively an open book to the Japanese, even though Tokyo’s code-breakers were mediocre. Accordingly, keeping Britain’s secrets safe meant keeping them away from many of her allies, whose communications were being read by friend and foe alike.24

  By the autumn of 1943 the security situation looked much worse. The Italians had now capitulated, and captured Italian code-breakers revealed their successes against British codes. Captain Edmund Wilson, who helped to look after cypher security at Bletchley Park, held prolonged ‘conversations’ with Commander Cianchi, head of the Italian Cryptographic Bureau in Rome, and his staff during late 1943. Wilson explained that he could hardly call them ‘interrogations’, since Cianchi had given all of Italy’s secret information so happily and freely. Wilson said that ‘very valuable information’ on the breaking of British naval cyphers had been obtained, and that Britain was ‘extremely fortunate’ to have the cooperation of its former opponents. He pressed his colleagues to be ‘very careful indeed in the use they made of the information’ from these sources.25

  The TICOM raids into Germany later confirmed that British naval cypher security had been especially weak. B-Dienst, the German naval sigint service, had been reading British naval codes and cyphers easily at the start of the war. In early 1940 this had allowed it to read British plans for the Narvik raid in Norway, contributing to Germany’s success in repulsing that action. In 1942, the Dieppe raid had also been given away to the enemy before it took place due to poor cypher security. Incredibly, the Germans had been given a full five days to prepare for this ‘surprise attack’. Allied troops – mostly Canadians – paid for this dearly in the slaughter that followed. B-Dienst achieved the height of its success against Atlantic convoy traffic in 1943, allowing alterations of convoy routes to be radioed to U-boat commanders within a few hours.26

  The autumn of 1943 saw a long-overdue inquiry into the security of British cyphers, carried out by Brigadier Chitty, who began by visiting Bletchley Park. His findings did not make for comfortable reading. ‘It is true,’ he reported, ‘that of the fourteen sections working at B.P. [Bletchley Park] one is named Security of Allied Communications. From a total staff of some six thousand, however, the part-time services of only one man (Dudley-Smith) plus two or three girls, are spared to equip this section.’ At a higher level there was a supervising body called the Cypher Security Committee, supposedly chaired by Sir Stewart Menzies, but this had not attracted Menzies’ interest. Moreover, it lacked the power to compel Whitehall departments to change any practices that they thought lax. Chitty had done a spot check of twelve departments around Whitehall, and found that few were taking cypher security seriously. Britain needed a decent operational security section at Bletchley Park, and a proper supervisory board with teeth.27

  No cypher system, Chitty warned, was unbreakable. Britain’s most sensitive material was sent by one-time pads, which were, in his opinion, ‘unassailable’ if used correctly. Yet he reminded his superiors that Bletchley was making a ‘most successful daily attack’ on the one-time pads of other countries, ‘which reach us in a steady stream by Photography, Theft, and the sifting of Embassy waste-paper baskets’. The majority of London government traffic went by Typex machine, the British equivalent of Enigma. This was much better than Enigma, but Chitty asserted that its security had never really been tested. Again, much depended on the diligence of the operators:

  One of the most instructive lessons I learnt from the [Government Code and Cypher] School was the fact that the Hagelin machine used by several nations including the Americans, affords in practice a widely different degree of security in different hands. Whereas this machine, as used by the Swedes and the Finns, has so far been virtually unbreakable, in the hands of the Italians who are normally very good cryptographers, we have for a long time been able to read it with ease. This was entirely due to the increasing idleness of the Italian operators and their persistent disregard of the numerous security rules which have been laid down for them.

  For routine traffic the Foreign Office used more elderly hand cyphers, and the services made use of field cyphers in their lower formations. Quite rightly, these were thought to be even less secure.28

  By March 1944, no less a figure than Winston Churchill himself was calling for a shake-up. A new supervisory outfit was created, called the Cypher Policy Board. Although Menzies was in the chair, Edward Travis from GC&CS, together with the Secretary of the War Cabinet and a representative of the Chiefs of Staff were also there to keep a stern eye on him. This top-level representation underlined a deep anxiety about cypher security. A new Deputy Director of GC&CS, known as the Communications Security Adviser, was also to be appointed, who would serve as the Secretary of the Cypher Policy Board. In reality, this person, Captain Edmund Wilson, was the new broom.29 After the war, Wilson was replaced by Commander T.R.W
. Burton-Miller, who operated from a new headquarters at 10 Chesterfield Street W1, conveniently close to both MI5 and SIS.30 Soon they had extended their authority over the design and production of all British cypher machines, with Gordon Welchman their chief technical adviser.31

  During 1944, Bletchley Park offered an impressive technical solution to worries about cypher security. It fielded a new and rather superior cypher machine called ‘Rockex I’ that produced what was effectively automated one-time pad traffic. Instead of using tiresome tear-off sheets from a one-time pad that had to be processed by hand, it used code tape, which carried the same information. This was initially used for messages between Bletchley Park and its sigint collaborators in Washington and Ottawa, together with the SIS wartime office in New York. A new version called ‘Rockex II’ was already being developed by the British. The machine was originally intended for the Special Communications Units that disseminated Ultra to Allied commanders in the field, but after the war it became a mainstream British cypher machine, and was still being used by smaller embassies in the 1970s.32

  The super-secret Rockex cypher machine also had another purpose. From 1944, it provided extra security for the communications network of Britain’s SIS agents around the world. With assistance from Bletchley Park, wartime SIS had been able to develop an effective long-range wireless network to support its overseas stations and agents in the field. Known as SIS Section VIII, this was run by Brigadier Richard Gambier-Parry from two country houses not far from Bletchley, at Whaddon Hall and Hanslope Park. These locations not only provided a wireless network for SIS, they also built covert radio sets hidden in suitcases used by British agents and fitted out vehicles for the Special Liaison Units that supplied sigint to overseas commands such as Montgomery’s Eighth Army. In addition, Hanslope Park had provided a base for a unit called the Radio Security Service, under Ted Maltby, that had used mobile detection vans to track the radio transmissions of enemy agents hiding in wartime Britain. SIS was a small organisation with small volumes of radio traffic, and up until 1944 it had been comfortable sending its traffic by slow but highly secure one-time pads. The Rockex machine allowed it to take a leap forward.33

  By 1944, SIS’s Section VIII had expanded considerably and was taking on new customers. With its new Rockex machines, it was carrying some traffic for Bletchley Park, typically from Canada, together with secret messages for the Special Operations Executive which conducted sabotage. The Foreign Office was now looking at this efficient radio network with growing interest, and at the end of the war SIS Section VIII was simply coopted to form the backbone of a new Foreign Office communications system called the Diplomatic Wireless Service. Gambier-Parry became the first Foreign Office Director of Communications. As early as 1943 some embassies, such as that in Cairo, had been switching over to ‘experimental use of official wireless’ by making use of local SIS facilities.34 Although diplomatic wireless was technically banned by international diplomatic convention, in practice cable communications had frequently been disrupted during the war, and wireless had crept into widespread use as an alternative.35

  The gradual development of the Diplomatic Wireless Service at Hanslope Park during 1944 and 1945 was another critical building block in the creation of the modern British sigint community. Alongside the military sigint collection stations in locations such as Ceylon, the Diplomatic Wireless Service, or ‘DWS’, doubled as a secret monitoring service working from within British Embassies and High Commissions. The first permanent undercover sigint station was set up at Ankara in 1943. DWS staff numbered close to a thousand, and about half its time was devoted to secret collection on behalf of the British code-breakers. Over the years it produced important results from locations as far afield as Moscow and Luanda because of its ability to collect short-range transmissions.

  In August 1945 the Second World War finally drew to a close. Winston Churchill was of the view that Bletchley Park was the deciding factor in the defeat of the Fascist powers: in 1945 he apparently told King George VI that Ultra had effectively won the war.36 Robert Harris, author of the novel Enigma (1995), rightly points out that most of the major combatants had military forces that were superior to those of Britain, not least in their weapons technology. Bletchley Park was the one place where we enjoyed a crucial world lead.37 Harry Hinsley, a junior figure at Bletchley Park, but later the official historian who produced a magisterial study of intelligence during the Second World War, has famously asserted that Ultra shortened the war by several years, saving countless lives on all sides. Without Ultra, he states, ‘Overlord would have had to be delayed until 1946’.38 Andreas Hillgruber, the distinguished German historian of Hitler’s strategy agrees, adding that as a result the Soviets might well have advanced much further west.39

  Yet others, including the British historian Paul Kennedy, have argued that the Second World War was largely a battle of material production, and that once America and Russia were both pitted against the Axis, their industrial might made the outcome only a matter of time – epitomised by the use of the atomic bomb in August 1945. In reality, the debate about the overall value of Bletchley Park has a troubling ‘What if?’ quality. Inevitably, we are encouraged to ponder the alternative universe of ‘no Ultra’. Ralph Bennett, like Harry Hinsley a Bletchley Park veteran turned historian, has expressed impatience with such counter-factual speculations, regarding them as a parlour game. He has argued that the absence of Ultra would have forced the faster development of other forms of intelligence, such as aerial reconnaissance.40 Peter Calvocoressi, another distinguished historian who spent the war at Bletchley Park, has dismissed Hinsley’s assertions as ‘silly’.41

  Some propositions can however be advanced with confidence. Ultra and other kinds of sigint contributed hugely to the outcome of the Battle of Britain. The breaking of naval Enigma changed the course of the Battle of the Atlantic, allowing the Admiralty to direct convoys away from concentrations of U-boats and bringing the level of ship losses down to a bearable, although still frightening, level. This in turn allowed a breathing space for more successful anti-submarine warfare techniques to be developed which would finally turn the tide in the battle against the U-boat in 1943. Ultra also contributed greatly to the British naval victories at the Battle of Cape Matapan (March 1941) and the Battle of North Cape (December 1943). Parallel code-breaking work by the Americans in the Pacific allowed the dramatic interception of the aircraft carrying the brilliant Admiral Yamamoto, architect of Pearl Harbor, which sounded the death knell for Japanese naval forces in the Pacific. It is impossible to understand the war at sea without comprehending the contribution of Ultra in the west and the breaking of a range of Japanese cypher systems in the east. Appropriately, it fell to a naval officer, Commander Edward Travis, to pilot Bletchley Park as it sailed forward into the post-war era.

  Even in the spring of 1945, final victory in Europe had loomed like the end of an interminable school year – with the distant summer holidays already beckoning. Bletchley Park, with its nearby dormitories and improvised tennis courts, had looked rather like a vast boarding school waiting for the end of term. Post-war worries were not troubling many of the brilliant minds there. Instead, for the most part they were yearning for an end to war and a return to peacetime activities. The majority of Bletchley’s wartime residents were exhausted from years of gruelling hard work. The intellectual pressure had been enormous, and some had suffered nervous breakdowns: Jean Thompson, a Wren who worked at one of the outstations, recalls that they routinely referred to Bletchley Park as the ‘Nut House’.42 Most code-breakers greeted the end of the war with relief, returning to their former activities in ivy-covered colleges, libraries and museums. However, a minority had been bitten by the intelligence bug. They understood the fundamental importance of what they had been doing for the future of international affairs, and would stay on.

  Those who remained at Bletchley Park were also thinking of ‘escape’ – but in a different sense. For them, the end of the war
did not so much offer an opportunity of personal freedom, but more the possibility of liberation for the GC&CS. Their remarkable achievements over the last five years suggested that GC&CS might cease to exist under the cloying direction of Britain’s traditional overseas secret service, SIS, where the senior staff were often failed cavalry officers recruited in White’s or Boodle’s. Instead, GC&CS might hope to become an intelligence agency in its own right, perhaps one of a new and different kind. Indeed, its rising status was already signalled by a gradual change in everyday usage from terms like ‘GC&CS’ and ‘BP’ to the rather grander cover name of ‘Government Communications Headquarters’, or ‘GCHQ’, which had been in intermittent use since early 1940.43

  Bletchley Park had already taken some important strides towards becoming a fully-fledged intelligence service. Peter Calvocoressi, one of its distinguished wartime denizens, recalls that in its pre-war incarnation the Government Code and Cypher School was exactly what its name implied, ‘and no more’. It made up codes for use by the British government, and broke the codes of other nations. But at Bletchley Park, and especially under Gordon Welchman in Hut Six, code-breaking was gradually married to an intelligence process to provide a sophisticated system for sigint exploitation. No less importantly, Bletchley also designed a means for the secure and rapid distribution of sigint to essential customers, even in distant theatres such as South-East Asia. The sheer pressure of wartime exigency forced rapid and logical developments that might otherwise have taken decades.44