The Spies of Winter

The GCHQ codebreakers who fought the Cold War

Sinclair McKay

• Publisher: Aurum
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781781316184
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Following on from the enormous success of his bestseller, The Secret Life of Bletchley Park, renowned author Sinclair McKay uncovers the story of what happened after the end of the Second World War.

Once victory was declared, many of the individuals who had achieved the seemingly impossible at Bletchley Park by cracking the impenetrable Enigma codes and giving the Allies an invaluable insight directly into the Nazi war machine, moved on to GCHQ. This was the British government's new facility established to fight a different, but no less formidable foe – Stalin and the KGB.

Fascinating and insightful revelations from deep within the archives of this secret organisation reveal the story of the tumultuous early years of GCHQ as it navigated its way through an era of double agents, deception and betrayals. From the defection of the Cambridge Five and the treachery of the atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs, to the collapse of the British Empire, the ascension of Chairman Mao and the emergence of the US as a superpower, McKay deftly explores the impact these events had on the fledgling organisation.

During the years of the Cold War the men and women of GCHQ penetrated Soviet encryptions and gathered crucial intelligence from all over the world. The Spies of Winter tells the story of the codebreakers themselves and how they used new technology to expand the horizons of cryptography in order to defend the nation and maintain the fragile peace in a world now under the shadow of nuclear holocaust.

Chapter One

If War Should Come Again

The music echoing out of the house on that warm spring evening, across the large green lawn and the lake, was not unusual. This Victorian mansion and the wooden huts dotted on the grass around it had echoed with everything from opera to Highland dance tunes in recent years. The young people who had been putting in round-the-clock shifts at this country property had an unusual susceptibility to melodic compositions of all kinds. They were keenly aware of the intricate structures of music. Very often, it was an invaluable pressure valve, helping to relieve the sometimes suffocating pressure that they were all under. But now, on that May evening, the soft strains of the gramophone from within the house, combined with the ripples of conversation and laughter outside, spoke of quite a different atmosphere.

It was 1945, and the war in Europe was over; but here, on this unremarkable English country estate, among the huddles of young people drinking glasses of beer and gin on the grass, looking out at the perpetually furious geese on the lake, there was also an understanding that their work could not simply end.

An entirely new world was being shaped, even in the space of those few hours and days when the Germans finally capitulated. There were teams of brilliant men and women, pioneers all, who understood very well how vital their efforts had become. From a slightly hit-and-miss operation back in 1939 to a sleek, super-efficient decryption production line which by 1945 unlocked thousands upon thousands of secret enemy communications daily, the work of Bletchley Park had played an enormous role in victory. Winston Churchill had been particularly grateful for his daily boxes of intelligence provided by these glittering intellects.

A few months before the end of the war, a triumvirate of young codebreakers had been asked to give their thoughts on facing up to new kinds of conflict. These men – senior cryptologist Gordon Welchman, Edward Crankshaw, and a 26-year-old Harry Hinsley – immediately saw where the threats of the future would come from; and they were astringent in prescribing what Bletchley Park as an institution would have to become in order to face them.

‘This organisation should cover all types of intelligence about foreign countries, including scientific, commercial and economic matters as well as diplomatic activity; for in the handling of both foreign and domestic affairs, it is important for the Government to have the best possible knowledge of developments and intentions in other countries,’ declared their top-secret jointly written memo.

‘The Services, also, in order to be fully prepared, must have all possible knowledge about the developments of methods of war that are being carried out by potential enemies.

‘Further, the organisation must be so planned that, if war should come again, the Services will have the best possible operational intelligence from the start. The applications of intelligence to civil problems may well prove to be of greater value than they could ever have been before, because it appears that the handling of foreign affairs is going to be exceedingly difficult after this war. The value of a good intelligence organisation to the Services may well be critical, because the steady development of methods of war will tend to make the first blow of an aggressor more and more devastating, giving less time for an unprepared country to develop its war potential.’¹

The most senior figures at Bletchley were among the very few, before August 1945, who knew how such a ‘first blow’ might be landed: they were part of a tiny elite who had knowledge of the development of atomic weaponry at Los Alamos, New Mexico. They were aware that the United States had developed the capacity to drop atom bombs. They also knew that it would not be long before other, less friendly, powers, would develop their own equivalents. Looking back now, we tend to see the end of the war as being a neat line: one day there was fighting, the next peace. That is not at all how it seemed to many people then. If anything, there was a pervasive fear that worse was to come.

For those senior figures who worked in the Bletchley Park Directorate, overseeing the continual stream of top-secret and invaluable coded signals intelligence flowing in from every region on the earth, there was a terrifying awareness of the fragility of peace. The Park’s director, Commander Edward Travis, was thoroughly human, though, and Bletchley Park – which at that point had many thousands of people working in and around the estate and at out-stations too – found its own way of marking 8 May 1945. The Park’s administrative officer Captain Bradshaw sent out a memo to all codebreakers setting out arrangements to celebrate the great day. It was to start with appropriate solemnity; the music and laughter came later.

‘On VE Day at 0915 hours, there will be a brief Thanksgiving service, on the lawns, in front of the main building,’ the memo read. This referred to the area directly in front of the distinctive Victorian house. It was to be ‘conducted by the Rev JL Milne, Rector of St Mary’s Church, Old Bletchley’. The Reverend would have been acutely aware throughout the war of these multitudes of young men and women, many not in uniform, passing in and out of the big estate, and living and socialising in the town and surrounding villages. But the Reverend Milne, even on VE Day, would not have had the slightest idea what they were actually working on. The secret remained tightly kept, even among respected Bletchley locals.

‘In accordance with Government policy,’ Captain Bradshaw’s memo continued, ‘all staff except the minimum necessary for operational work… will be granted a paid holiday on VE Day and the day following… in anticipation of congestion on the public transport services (road and rail), staff are advised in their own interests not to attempt long-distance journeys.’²

The note of caution filtered down to all sections and departments. Women’s Royal Navy recruit Betty Flavell recalled: ‘The chief officer gave us all a pep talk. I think she thought we were all going to lose our honour, because of everyone feeling free and throwing caution to the wind. Celebrating, drinking.’³

According to codebreaker Major Neil Webster, there had indeed been quite a gaudy night. ‘Bletchley Park put on a terrific VE party,’ he wrote in his memoir, ‘a fancy dress ball with oceans to drink, a top band, our own cabaret, special décor, soft lights and all the trimmings.’⁴ The ‘top band’ was most likely formed of Bletchley personnel; figures such as Eric de Carteret, who was to stay on, had a genius for music. Added to this was a wide range of acting and writing talent (among the codebreakers was Angus Wilson, the soon-to-be-feted novelist); the Bletchley Park players were so accomplished that they had taken their productions around the county, and raised a great deal of money for military charities. The fancy dress for their VE Day party would have been an extension of their limitlessly inventive costume departments; and the night, for many, would have been an acknowledgment, possibly a melancholy one, that this extraordinary and intense life that they had known was almost over.

The authorities need not have worried about excess: after so many years of ferocious self-discipline, it was hardly likely that a full-scale bacchanalia would break out. In any case, victory in Europe was overshadowed by the knowledge that conflict in the Far East was still raging on. There is a photograph of a large group of Bletchley codebreakers, men and women, a few in uniform, all smiling and raising glasses. There were some who had ignored the dire warnings about the crowded railways, and hoofed it to London on the express in order to be able to catch the night of celebration there.

Everyone gave thought, though, to their colleagues across the world: the dedicated codebreakers stationed in Ceylon; in India; in the scorching sun of Heliopolis, Egypt; in the turbulent political atmosphere of Mandate Palestine. In Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), young women such as Jean Valentine, then 19, were still working deep into eerie tropical nights, burrowing into Japanese encrypted intercepts. In India, young men such as the Oxford undergraduate Alan Stripp – like so many, his university education interrupted before it got going – were still decyphering Japanese communications in sweltering huts, while coping with extraordinary heat and with ceiling fans so slow that birds would sit on them and be rotated gently.

Back at Bletchley, obviously there were warm words too. Some of these words came from a man that very few of the codebreakers, Women’s Royal Navy (Wrens) or Auxiliary Territorial Service women would ever have seen, or even been aware of. On VE Day itself, a letter from Sir Stewart Menzies was circulated. It was signed from the ‘Director General’. Sir Stewart was the head of MI6 at that time, which oversaw the work of Bletchley Park. MI6 was never publicly acknowledged or referred to. The vast majority of those working in all departments at Bletchley would have had no indication that they came under the aegis of the Secret Service. The place was so efficiently compartmentalised that most had no idea even what happened in other huts and blocks.

‘On this ever memorable day,’ Sir Stewart wrote, ‘I desire that all those who are doing duty in this Organisation [sic] should be made aware of my unbounded admiration at the way in which they have carried out their allotted tasks. Such have been the difficulties, such has been the endeavour, and such have been the constant triumphs that one senses that words of gratitude from one individual are perhaps out of place. The personal knowledge of the contribution made towards winning the war is surely the real measure of the thanks which so rightly belong to one and all in a great and inspired organisation which I have the privilege to direct. This is your finest hour.’⁵

The achievements had indeed been extraordinary: from the 1939 Enigma code-cracking inspiration provided by three pioneering Polish mathematicians to Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman’s development of the revolutionary ‘bombe’ machines which partially automated the decyphering of German codes; from the first cracking of the daily Luftwaffe codes to eventual triumph against the almost unthinkable complexities of the German naval Enigma; from the development of an extraordinary proto-computer that opened the door of the future to the decoding of encrypted messages from the desk of Hitler himself. The work of Bletchley Park had – as many distinguished figures were later to aver – shortened the war by two years, if not by three.

By the summer of 1945, some of the leading intellects who had shaped these codebreaking triumphs had been pulled elsewhere. In the case of Alastair Denniston, the original wartime director of the institute and the man who had assembled this quirky array of minds, his time at Bletchley had ended unhappily in 1942, when he was bumped sideways into a role in diplomatic cryptographic intelligence, heading up a much smaller department back in London.

The man whose name is now synonymous with Bletchley’s success – the mathematician Alan Turing – had himself been rather more gently removed. First, he was transferred from his position as the head of Hut 8, where he and his team had been fighting desperately to crack the apparently insoluble naval Enigmas. Rather than have him anywhere near administration, which was clearly a misuse of his almost preternatural intellect, Turing was first set to working on more advanced code and technological problems (helping Professor Max Newman and the engineer Dr Tommy Flowers to bring the Colossus, the world’s first proto-computer, into being). Then, in 1942, he was sent across to the States, to join the top-secret research work at the Bell Laboratories. Turing’s gift, as one colleague put it, was that he was capable of thinking thoughts that others would not even have thought it was possible to have. Towards the end of the war, after Turing had returned to England, he was diverted to another highly secret research establishment: Hanslope Park, just a few miles north of Bletchley, in Northamptonshire.

But back at Bletchley itself, the senior figures who worked on the first floor of the main house represented a certain sort of continuity. These codebreaking veterans were now to be the architects of the computer-age future, staying firmly in place to ensure that the organisation was ready for the new world. Their experience was beyond value. Brigadier John Tiltman, born in 1894, had joined the Government Code and Cypher School (as the operation was then known) in 1920, in the wake of the First World War. He was sent out to India for a few years, where his job involved more codebreaking duties. As the sophistication of encryption grew, so too did his ideas for unravelling it. This was still largely the pre-Enigma machine era; the Germans bought up this electric encryption technology for use in the navy in 1926, and extended it to the rest of the military thereafter. Others were still relying on less sophisticated – though still fearsomely complex – means of scrambling communications.

And this is where Tiltman’s astonishing skill came into play. Rather than rely on machinery and technology, he had an almost intuitive approach to cracking codes, a blend of mathematical, linguistic and philosophical brilliance. Returning to London and working at the Government Code and Cypher School throughout the 1920s and the 1930s, his chief focus became the agents and diplomats of the Stalin-era Soviet Union. He uncovered a quite remarkable volume of intelligence, particularly involving links between Soviet agents and organisations in Britain. Tiltman’s approach to codebreaking was, in part, immersive: he would plunge into unfamiliar languages and dialects, absorbing them completely, and in so doing pick up an instinctive feeling for the thoughts of others and the patterns of their communications. Tiltman had the most extraordinary facility for language, and later, at Bletchley, he swiftly mastered Japanese, and was responsible for running the intensive schools in the nearby town of Bedford that threw young undergraduate recruits into the esoteric mysteries of Japan’s encryption system.

In the early days of Bletchley Park, Tiltman had specialised in military codes, and in 1941 broke specific German army and railway Enigma cyphers that revealed the imminent Nazi threat to Russia. But despite his senior military rank, Brigadier Tiltman was the opposite of a uniformed martinet; indeed, he was often amused to see younger Bletchley recruits, fresh from university, working in uniform instead of perfectly acceptable civilian clothes. ‘Why are you wearing those damned silly boots?’ he asked of one uniformed codebreaker. His office in the directorate – in the house that had once belonged to the Leon family – was in what had been the family nursery. It was still decorated with Peter Rabbit wallpaper.

Working alongside him in the Bletchley Park directorate was another formidable codebreaking veteran: Nigel de Grey. Born in 1886, de Grey was an Old Etonian with quite a nuanced background. As a boy, he had shown a real gift for languages, but decided against going to university. He had aimed for the diplomatic service instead, but despite his linguistic skills, failed the exam. As a result of this, he moved into the rather more raffish, bohemian world of publishing, joining the firm Heinemann prior to the outbreak of the First World War. At the start of that conflict, Nigel De Grey served as an observer with the Balloon Corps (an unenviably vulnerable position, even by the standards of that most harrowing of conflicts), but by 1915 was drafted into naval intelligence.

This was the start of an extraordinary career; indeed, the colourful de Grey might now be said to have been at the very epicentre of some of the century’s most pivotal moments. He began working alongside other codebreakers in the Whitehall forerunner of Bletchley Park, a department called Room 40. It was here that he met Alastair Denniston and Alfred Dillwyn (‘Dilly’) Knox, with whom he was to work so closely over the next several decades. And it was here, in 1917, that he decrypted, among countless other documents, one very particular German diplomatic message. From the German foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann, it was a telegram that had been sent across to Mexico, via the Atlantic underwater cable, to the German Ambassador there. It concerned the stepping up of submarine warfare in the Atlantic. In the telegram, Zimmermann told the ambassador that he was to approach the Mexican government with an offer of an alliance against the Americans. The reward for Mexico would be the acquisition of the southern states of Texas and Arizona.

Though the provenance of the intelligence was suitably disguised (it would not do for the Germans to see that their codes had been broken – still less would it do for the Americans and everyone else to see that the British had tapped the transatlantic cable), the news was released. As well as the resulting uproar, de Grey’s decrypt had the effect of bringing America into the First World War, which in turn helped ensure Germany’s defeat.

Yet even after this dizzying triumph, de Grey did not stay on with the Government Code and Cypher School at the end of the war; instead, he went to Piccadilly to head an art concern called The Medici Society. Its purpose, in part, was to provide prints of Old Masters to various smart figures. One such, in the inter-war years, was Winston Churchill; the Churchill archives contain correspondence between the two men discussing various art works. Home was a house in the Buckinghamshire village of Iver, close to where Pinewood Studios now stands. De Grey had married in 1910, and he and his wife had three children. This also meant that despite a privileged background, he very much needed to work. De Grey was an aesthetic soul; occasionally he was given to wearing a cloak. Because of his smart family connections, he would often spend his weekends at vast country estates, shooting. He was a keen painter himself, and was also an enthusiast amateur actor, appearing with a group calling itself the ‘Windsor Strollers’.

Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, The Medici Society ran into financial turbulence, and de Grey’s position looked precarious. After a gap of nearly 20 years, he was welcomed back into the embrace of the Government Code and Cypher School (though on a rather modest salary). Dilly Knox had been making terrific headway with different versions of the Enigma encryption machine; soon de Grey was on top of this, as well as other encryption methods. In 1941, he was one of the first people to comprehend the scale of what the Germans had planned for the Jews; breaking codes coming out of Eastern Europe, he saw and understood the meaning of orders for villages to be razed, and communications involving the logistics of mass transportation on the railways.

If Brigadier Tiltman represented the best of the military mind – ideal for analysing the territorial intentions of the Soviet empire – Nigel de Grey exemplified the value of the artistically refined codebreaker, versed not in mathematics, but in language and culture. His languid fluency would prove to be a great advantage in the late 1940s and early 1950s when dealing with the more stubborn corners of Whitehall. And the man who was their commander – Edward Travis – brought his own formidable codebreaking expertise to what, by the middle of the war, had become a dizzyingly efficient intelligence factory, unravelling thousands upon thousands of messages, from all theatres of war, every single day.

Commander Edward Travis was a bulky figure, born in 1888 in the marshy south-east-London suburb of Plumstead. He joined the navy at the age of 18 and sailed on HMS Iron Duke. His aptitude for code work was spotted early on when he decrypted some of Admiral Jellicoe’s messages to prove that the system being used was weak. By 1916, he was working full-time on naval cyphers, devising as well as decoding; and he did a great deal of work alongside the French and Italians. When the war ended, he elected to stay on full-time with the fast-developing Government Code and Cypher School. Alastair Denniston became the director and by 1925, Travis was his deputy – a state of affairs that would last until 1942. It was said of Travis – five foot seven (1.7 metres), inclining to the portly – that his gruff, brusque manner gained him few friendships, though he commanded loyalty. In fact, though, many who were to work at Bletchley and GCHQ regarded him with enormous affection.

He also caught the admiring attention of senior figures within intelligence and Whitehall. Whereas Alast...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Prologue: The Masters of the Game
• 1. If War Should Come Again
• 2. Storm Warnings
• 3. ‘The Merest Indication of Corpses’
• 4. Mission into Darkness
• 5. The Remaining Jewels
• 6. Decoding the Soviet Heart
• 7. ‘This Was when the Penny Dropped’
• 8. They Gathered around like Family
• 9. The Torn City
• 10. A Continent on Fire
• 11. Exodus
• 12. ‘The Signs and Portents Will Not Be Lacking’
• 13. The Emerald Labyrinth
• 14. Highland Reels and Drawing-Room Comedy
• 15. Don’t Even Breathe
• 16. Invasion of the Ferrets
• 17. Dominoes
• 18. The Cat’s Cradle
• 19. ‘Berserk with Fanatical Nationalism’
• 20. The Loss of a National Asset
• 21. The Tunnel and the Traitor
• 22. The Great Game
• Photo Section
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright