The Bletchley Park Codebreakers (49 page)

The Germans had designed a cipher machine,
Schlüsselgerät
39 (cipher machine 39 – SG 39), in 1939 to replace Enigma, but it never went into mass production. The SG 39 was an outstanding machine, embodying a rewirable reflector, four variable notch rotors, three mechanical drive wheels, and an entry plugboard. The Allies could not have broken it. The Germans developed a variable-notch rotor
(Lückenfüllerwalze)
for Enigma as an interim measure, pending the introduction of the SG 39. Plans were made in December 1943 to bring one such rotor into service with
Heer
Enigmas ‘within a reasonable time', since replacing all the existing rotors would have been a huge logistical task. Although it was a very simple device, the new rotor would almost certainly have foiled the bombes, by making it impossible to know when the middle and right-hand rotors advanced.

OKW/Chi's
Oberinspektor
Fritz Menzer, who was a thorn in the flesh of the ISK Section
(Abwehr
machine ciphers) at Bletchley, developed a Hagelin-type machine, the
Schlüsselgerät
41 (cipher machine 41 – SG 41). About 11,000 machines were ordered by the
Heer
and
Luftwaffe
, but few were produced. When it was brought into service with the
Abwehr
in late 1944, GC&CS solved a few messages using it by aligning them in depth, but could not reconstruct the machine itself.

However, UKD had posed the greatest potential threat to Ultra. A postwar United States Army study concluded that:

The Allies were very fortunate indeed that Ultra from Enigma did not dry up long before the end of the war, especially since, with better management, the
Wehrmacht
could have greatly increased Enigma's security without undue difficulty.

21

FROM AMATEURS TO PROFESSIONALS: GC&CS AND INSTITUTION-BUILDING IN SIGNALS IN TELLIGENCE

PHILIP H. J. DAVIES

It is difficult to really understand an organization like GC&CS outside of its contemporary institutional context of Britain’s wartime intelligence community, and its longer term historical context as a phase in the evolution of today’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). To appreciate how GC&CS evolved, why it evolved the way it did, and what that evolution means, it is valuable to compare GC&CS and its sister intelligence and security services, the Secret Intelligence Service (now better known as MI6), and the Security Service (MI5).

Although GCHQ, as a Sigint organization, collects information from a fundamentally different class of sources from MI6 (which concentrates on human agents and local technical operations, usually in conjunction with GCHQ), MI5 has to handle both communications
as well as human intelligence domestically (again in concert with GCHQ). However, like MI6, GCHQ is essentially a service provider to consumers in the overt government and as a result is subject to very similar structural and political pressures. By contrast, MI5, which is supposed to be as independent from political interference as possible under both the 1952 Maxwell-Fyffe Directive (which charged it with ‘the Defence of the Realm’) and the 1989 and 1996 Security Service Acts, does not really serve a brace of intelligence ‘consumers’ in quite the same way. As a result, GCHQ, like MI6, evolved very much on the basis of consumer demand for a particular kind of intelligence. The pressures of that demand shaped its early loose and informal structure as the interwar GC&CS, and also proved central to the pressures and crises during its most productive years, churning out Ultra during the Second World War. It was out of that period of pressure and transformation that much of what constitutes the modern GCHQ took shape.

Compared with both MI6 and GCHQ, MI5 developed throughout its history as a fairly coherent, hierarchical bureaucracy. In part, one might trace the tighter organizational practice at the Security Service back to the earliest days of Mansfield Cumming and Vernon Kell, founding fathers of the foreign and domestic sides of the Secret Service Bureau. Those two sides would eventually split apart to become MI6 and MI5. Even from the earliest days, Kell, the War Office official, displayed a greater flair for organizational design than the ageing and retired naval commander Cumming. However, such an early influence need not prove pervasive and lasting, and it is fairly easy to show that, regardless of flair, MI6 was as subject to the range of pressures within Whitehall that prevented it from adopting a conventional hierarchy.

The strongest single pressure on MI6 was consumer demand. The most important thing to understand about consumer demand in terms of Britain’s intelligence machinery is that intelligence in the broad sense, that is, any and all information relevant to policy formation and execution, is a departmental concern, and not an agency one. Intelligence, at least in the sense of special or secret intelligence, is essentially one more of a variety of information sources which the overt government can employ in its ordinary course of work. According to Reginald Hibbert, a government official, around 50 per cent of the information used by the Foreign Office is ‘drawn from overt published sources’. A further 10 to 20 per cent is ‘privileged
material which is not strictly speaking classified’ or information which is ‘classifiable as confidential’ and is ‘a product of normal diplomatic activity’, while of the remainder only around 10 per cent comes from secret sources. Traditionally, the various forms of covert intelligence collection were set up as required more or less independently by the various departments. Hence, during the Napoleonic Wars military intelligence networks were set up, but dismantled after the conflict, just as the Indian Government employed the players of the Great Game on an
ad hoc
basis. Even the long-standing Secret Department of the Post Office had been shut down in 1840. It was not until after the Boer War that there was any effort to set up a permanent secret service, and even that was a very limited undertaking. When the first really permanent secret service was set up in 1909, it was primarily because of concerns expressed by the Admiralty and War Office before the Haldane Committee ‘into the question of foreign espionage’ that they lacked information about German ports and dockyards, and the ability to deal securely with potential agents.

The importance of customer demand is well illustrated by the fact that, in 1917, Cumming was forced to reorganize his headquarters from a geographical structure to one based on the functional relevance to his consumer departments. Under the so-called Macdonogh Scheme, the MI6 HQ was then divided into sections that provided military intelligence for the War Office, economic intelligence for the Ministry of Blockade and political intelligence for the Foreign Office and so forth. This reform, imposed on Cumming by his Whitehall masters, meant two main things. In the first place, it demonstrated that he was not really master in his own home. What the customers in Whitehall and Downing Street wanted would prevail over any internal process. It also flattened the MI6 headquarters structure so that it acted mainly as a distributor of information to those consumers where the first responsibility of the collating sections was to their customers rather than Cumming or his successors as Chief or ‘C’. This dynamic of consumer demand was intensified after the First World War by the decision in 1921 to give MI6 exclusive responsibility for collecting intelligence for all three services and a number of government departments. As a quid pro quo for MI6’s monopoly, the principal ‘consumers’ attached sections of their own intelligence branches to MI6 HQ to act as collators, as conduits of requirements (or ‘tasking’) issued to MI6 by their home departments, and as circulators of
intelligence reports from MI6 to their departments. These sections were dubbed Circulating Sections.

The doctrine of ‘dual control’ (as it would later become known in MI6), originally embodied in the Circulating Sections, meant that senior headquarters officers owed only part loyalty to ‘C’, and the rest to the War Office, Admiralty or wherever they had come from. This created a precedent of loose and horizontal organization which carried over into the addition of other sections for internal ciphers and radio communications, escape and evasion and so forth. This made the service desperately difficult to manage, especially when the Second World War broke out and staff numbers and additional specialist sections began to multiply. As a consequence, one-time Deputy Chief Valentine Vivian eventually described the service as a loosely affiliated group of ‘independent sections … known as the SIS’. This weak structure made the service almost impossible to oversee and direct by the middle of the war, and successive attempts at reform eventually led to a postwar scheme in which the service was centrally divided between a ‘Production side’, which collected information on a geographical basis, and a ‘Requirements side’, which collated and disseminated it and received consumer requirements, on a functional basis.

By comparison, MI5 has always existed with a certain degree of detachment from the rest of the British machinery of government. Production and dissemination of raw intelligence to consumers in Whitehall and Downing Street were never its main function. Moreover, during its interwar and early wartime years, MI5 was very much without a specific governmental master or ministerial sponsor. Indeed, the Security Service’s main consumer is, and has always been, the service itself. As a result, it has never been subject to the same kind of tangential forces that pulled MI6 into a wide, flat, ‘organic’ structure. On the contrary, the problems experienced by MI5 have generally had to do with excessively rigid bureaucracy rather than overly loose organization. However, MI5 would experience problems of rapid growth and unanticipated success during the Second World War, much as GC&CS did, the crucial difference in their experiences being the fact that the latter’s position in the machinery of government was (and in its modern form as GCH Q is) more akin to that of MI6 than MI5.

Like MI6, the key force in the evolution of GC&CS was consumer demand, and the desire of consumers to ensure access to the service’s product. Its origins lay in an attempt to regularize the cryptanalytic
machinery which had developed during the war, chiefly in the form of the Admiralty’s highly successful ‘Room 40’ staff, and the less dramatic efforts of the War Office cryptanalysis section MI1b. Just as early human intelligence had been run on a departmental,
ad hoc
basis, so wartime codebreaking had been chiefly a departmental concern. This was so much the case that considerable rivalry and hostility existed between the Admiralty and War Office codebreaking teams, undermining the potential advantages to be had from pooling their efforts. Regardless of the risks to security from weakening compartmentalization by co-operating, codebreaking is a field with very real economies of scale where different groups working on different problems can generate results useful to each other as well as to themselves. This was certainly the experience of the First World War, and it was because of this that GC&CS was established on an inter-departmental basis in 1919. That being said, in the first instance, GC&CS came under the authority of the Foreign Office, and under ‘C’ when Admiral Sir Hugh ‘Quex’ Sinclair took over that post after the death of the MI6 founder Mansfield Cumming. The original GC&CS consisted of its director, six senior assistants, drawn from the best cryptanalysts of Room 40 and MI1b, eighteen junior assistants and a clerical staff of twenty-eight.

GC&CS was housed with MI6 at 54 Broadway, near Whitehall, where they were known collectively and euphemistically as the Government Communications Bureau (GCB). The original organization was very loosely and informally organized, partly a carry-over of the organizational culture of Room 40 and partly a consequence of its relatively small size. Formal management structure took a back-seat to getting the job done, so much so that one historian has summarized the experience of the interwar GC&CS as a combination of ‘technical success and organizational confusion’.

The resulting organization, however, like MI6, was to become profoundly shaped by the role and interests of its consumers as it developed. Rather than being confined to its original single, central cryptanalysis staff under its interwar chief, Alastair Denniston, its original postwar staff was added to in the form of service branch cryptanalytical sections and a Foreign Office-oriented civilian side, which were attached on terms of dual control similar to the circulating sections of MI6. Almost as soon as GC&CS was set up, the service branches began to complain that service cryptanalytical interests and
needs were not being properly addressed. A Naval Section was formed in 1924, an Army Section in 1930, and an Air Section in 1936. In 1938, a commercial section was set up to provide intelligence to the Industrial Intelligence Centre (IIC) at the Department of Overseas Trade. From 1937, the ‘civil side’ included a GPO-manned system of stations intercepting Axis diplomatic traffic for Foreign Office consumption, although GC&CS had had access to pretty much any telegram traffic required from Britain’s commercial cable companies throughout the interwar period. Once war broke out, there was even a meteorological section attacking enciphered German weather reports.