The Bletchley Park Codebreakers (4 page)

The Indian signals intelligence operation, which was regarded as part of Sinclair’s overall organization, took any Russian traffic it could, including the communications of the OGPU, forerunner of the KGB. It achieved ‘very considerable cryptographic success’, according to one military official. A Wireless Experimental Station was opened at Abbottabad on the North West Frontier with a further intercept site at Quetta. Meanwhile, the site in Constantinople was withdrawn to Sarafand, near Jaffa, in Palestine, as No. 1 section of 2 Wireless Company, with Baghdad forming No. 2 section. Like the Indian operation, Sarafand had its own cryptographers, producing intelligence for the British Middle East Command. It also sent raw Russian traffic back to London where it was passed on to GC&CS, considerably increasing the amount of Russian traffic available to Fetterlein and his assistants.

The increased amount of traffic coincided with yet another change in the Soviet ciphers, leading to calls for more Russian experts. One of those recruited as a result was J. E. S. ‘Josh’ Cooper, who was
to become another leading light at Bletchley Park. He heard of the openings at GC&CS through a friend, the novelist Charles Morgan.

Cooper already knew Fetterlein, having been introduced to him by one of the teaching staff at King’s College.

Despite Cooper’s problems with the cipher he was put to work on, the amount of Soviet messages continued to increase with the opening of a new Royal Navy intercept site at Flowerdown, near Winchester, an army site at Chatham, and an RAF site at Waddington, in Lincolnshire. Sinclair moved both the code-breakers and his MI6 staff to a new joint headquarters at 54 Broadway, close to Whitehall, in 1925. He also added to the intercept facilities by co-opting the resources of a small Metropolitan Police intercept operation, which was run by Harold Kenworthy, an employee of Marconi who was on
indefinite loan to the police. It operated out of the attic at Scotland Yard, employing a number of ex-naval telegraphists to intercept illicit radio stations.

The Metropolitan Police unit had first shown its capabilities during the 1926 General Strike. Although the strike broke out largely for socioeconomic reasons, the BJs had shown the Soviet Government keen to provoke industrial action to the extent of subsidizing the striking miners to the tune of £2 million. It was scarcely surprising therefore that when, on the first day of the General Strike, the Metropolitan Police operators intercepted an unusual wireless transmission using apparently false callsigns and emanating from somewhere in London, there were suspicions of Russian foul play. Kenworthy informed the assistant commissioner in charge of the Special Branch who in turn contacted Admiral Sinclair. The MI6 Chief sent over the GC&CS radio expert Leslie Lambert, better known as the BBC ‘wireless personality’ A. J. Alan, and together they constructed a miniature direction-finding device small enough to fit into a Gladstone bag, Kenworthy recalled.

The illicit radio transmitter may not have been run by the Russians, but the General Strike and Moscow’s attempts to inspire revolution in China and to take control of Afghanistan – and thereby threaten India – increased the general feeling within the Conservative-led establishment that the Bolsheviks were determined to subvert Britain and its Empire.

Government ministers were also influenced by MI5 and Special Branch reports of Soviet espionage centred on ‘the firm’, a cover name for the All-Russian Co-operative Society (ARCOS) based in Moorgate,
ostensibly set up to facilitate trade between Britain and Russia. None were anywhere near as successful as the later Cambridge spy ring, but their attempts to obtain military and naval intelligence outraged those like the intensely anti-Bolshevik Home Secretary Sir William Joynson-Hicks, who put pressure on the then Foreign Secretary Sir Austen Chamberlain to back action against Russia. Throughout 1926, Chamberlain continued to defend his policy of pragmatic dealing with Moscow rather than lose the new trade links. But by 19 January 1927, he accepted that there was a need ‘to review in Cabinet our relations with Russia’, asking the President of the Board of Trade what Britain’s ‘actual trade interests’ amounted to, and for some sense of ‘the sentiment of traders’ about them. Five days later, he drafted a protest note to the Russians. He suspected that it would not satisfy Joynson-Hicks, or the other hardliners like Winston Churchill, now Chancellor of the Exchequer, and he was right. But it was the start of a process that would soon lead to a complete diplomatic break with Moscow.

What exactly made Chamberlain accept the need for action is still unclear. But some time during 1926, the codebreakers had received a new source of telegrams. MI6 had already managed to acquire the Bolshevik cables passing through the Tehran post office, of crucial interest with regard to Russian threats to Afghanistan. Now it supplied the Soviet telegrams sent via Peking, allowing the codebreakers to break complete substitution tables for the first time and producing a rich harvest of intelligence for the cabinet hardliners. The addition of Alfred Dillwyn ‘Dilly’ Knox to Fetterlein’s team may well have contributed to this success. Dilly’s early promise at Eton – he beat John Maynard Keynes to take first place in the scholarship for King’s College, Cambridge – had been confirmed by his work in Room 40, where he and Nigel de Grey broke the Zimmermann Telegram in January 1917. Six days before Chamberlain’s letter to the President of the Board of Trade, Knox’s work had given him an unexplained reason to celebrate. He bought himself a new Burberry overcoat and ordered dinner at an expensive restaurant. ‘These expenses might pass as unremarkable,’ his niece Penelope Fitzgerald recorded in
The Knox Brothers
. ‘But with Dilly they could only mean celebration and it is at least possible that the Government had agreed, in his own phrase, to “get something from the post office”.’

Whatever the celebration was about, the messages obtained from the Peking post office were to have a devastating effect on Anglo-Soviet relations. Over the ensuing weeks, further examples of Soviet
espionage were detected and on 12 May, the police raided the ARCOS headquarters. The Russians had been warned of the impending raid and, despite three days of searching by the police, nothing of significance was discovered.

In order to justify the decision to break with Moscow, the Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin resorted to reading out the text of some of the deciphered Peking telegrams in Parliament. He was followed two days later by Chamberlain who, reminding MPs that there had been a recent anti-British demonstration outside the British embassy in Washington, read an extract from a message sent a month earlier by Moscow to its representatives abroad. Clearly taken from a deciphered intercept, it said: ‘It is absolutely essential to organize in the shortest possible space of time meetings against England and to demonstrate where possible in front of British embassies and legations.’ Chamberlain followed this extract from one of the decrypts with a succession of other examples. Although these were at least paraphrased rather than quoted verbatim, the Russians had got the message. Where they had previously been slow to change their cipher systems, they now adopted the one-time pad system (OTP), which if used properly was impossible to break.

The codebreakers were horrified. There was a brief period during which the old ciphers continued to be used in more remote places like Central Asia. But very soon the decipherable diplomatic messages dried up. ‘HMG found it necessary to compromise our work beyond any question,’ recalled Denniston. ‘From that time, the Soviet Government introduced OTP for their diplomatic and commercial traffic to all capitals where they had diplomatic representatives.’

Josh Cooper, speaking with the benefit of hindsight, after misuse of the system had led to at least two other one-time pad systems being broken, said that it might have been possible to break the Soviet diplomatic system if only there had been enough codebreakers to allow ‘long shots’.

Although the Russian diplomatic material had dried up, the Soviet Union provided GC&CS with a second interwar success via the communications of the Comintern, the organization set up in 1919 to promote communism and revolution around the world. It controlled all of the various communist parties, each of which formed a so-called ‘Section’ of the Comintern and was bound to follow its direction. They were also required to set up parallel ‘illegal’, or more accurately underground, organizations that would be controlled by the Comintern in order to prepare for a general strike and armed insurrection that it was hoped would precede fresh revolutions. An additional role of these ‘illegal’ organizations was to carry out espionage.

The first sign of illicit transmissions linking the Communist Party of Great Britain to Moscow came in early 1930, when the various intercept units began picking up a large number of unauthorized radio transmissions between London and Moscow. ‘Peacetime GC&CS did have one experience of successful work on clandestine traffic,’ Denniston recalled. ‘This, unlike the diplomatic, necessitated close co-operation between interception, T/A [Traffic Analysis] and cryptography before the final results were made available only to a small select intelligence section of SIS.’ The operation, codenamed Mask, was run by Tiltman, who had returned from India in 1929 with a great deal of experience in Soviet wireless and cipher practice. ‘The analysis of this traffic was studied closely and from it emerged a world-wide network of clandestine stations controlled by a station near Moscow,’ Denniston recalled. ‘It turned out to be the Comintern network.’ The attack on the Comintern ciphers ‘met with complete success’, he said.

The ‘small, select’ MI6 section to which the decrypted material was sent was the two-man counter-espionage department known as Section V (five). It was led by Major Valentine Vivian, a former Indian police officer. The material was also discussed with B Branch of MI5, which at the time was responsible for Soviet subversion and espionage. J. C. ‘Jack’ Curry, who was in charge of MI5 operations against subversion for part of the 1930s, recalled that the messages dealt with a variety of subjects. ‘The London/Moscow transmissions were part of a large network with a number of stations in different parts of the world and the material dealt with a variety of the affairs of the Comintern and its sections in different countries. Those from Moscow included directions and instructions regarding the line to be
taken in propaganda and in party policy generally. They gave, among other things, details regarding subsidies to be paid by Moscow, a large part being allocated to the
Daily Worker
.’

Many of the messages were obscure and difficult to understand without an appreciation of the context and the cover names of those to whom they referred. Curry said. ‘Major Vivian was, however, able to extract useful intelligence from a number of messages and, in particular, obtained a certain picture of some of the details of Comintern finance and its measures for subsidising its Sections in other countries. Information about the names of couriers and active Communists, including certain British crypto-communists, was obtained from this source.’

The information culled from the Comintern decrypts appears to have allowed MI6 to recruit a number of agents inside the Comintern in France, Holland and Scandinavia. But the best source it had within the Comintern was a ‘walk-in’, a spy who offered his services to MI6. Johann Heinrich de Graf (Jonny X), was a German communist who was recruited by Soviet Army intelligence, the GRU. He walked into the MI6 station in Berlin to volunteer his services and was run by its head, Frank Foley, who was to become far better known for his work in helping Jews to escape from Nazi Germany. Jonny X had been involved in the organization of the Comintern ‘illegal’ network in Britain and was able to provide vital information not only on the workings of the Comintern but also on its attempts to subvert the governments of Britain, China and Brazil.