The Bletchley Park Codebreakers (50 page)

It might be tempting to suggest that part of the reason for this weak internal structure was a carry-over from MI6. This would be a substantial misreading of the situation as the two organizations had only a minimum of interaction, the main links being via ‘C’, who oversaw both, and the MI6 circulating sections which tasked the operational sides of both services. The main factor driving the matrix of dual-control sections that took shape as GC&CS was the individual departmental contributions of staff and resources to the service, and the desire of those departments to make use of its product. However, the internal processes were further complicated by the fact that the MI6 circulating sections also acted as conduits for consumer requirements to GC&CS during the interwar years.

If the demand for intelligence is a crucial input to intelligence service structure in the British model, the lack of demand can be equally telling. Although the War Office, Admiralty and Air Force all contributed to the make-up of GC&CS, this did not make it a highly valued or well-endowed organization. Throughout the interwar period, it suffered the same financial stringency as the other intelligence services and the armed forces under ‘the Ten Year Rule’ – the assumption that there would be no major war for at least a decade. The result was an acute lack of receivers for intercepting foreign traffic, and therefore a dearth of traffic to study in order to achieve any significant breaks. This problem was intensified by the fact that most continental armed forces adopted relatively fixed, stationary deployments during the inter-war period, and so secure communications moved mainly to landlines leaving relatively trivial and generally unencoded traffic to go by radio.

During mid-1940, Air Intelligence did attach a small traffic analysis team to Bletchley Park’s Air Section. This was considerably enhanced
when the War Office intercept organization MI8 attached all its traffic analysts to Bletchley as well. Denniston originally resisted this, insisting that GC&CS should remain concerned strictly with cryptanalysis (although he would later insist on a consolidation of all Sigint work in the Middle East theatre). Apart from any issue of the advantages or disadvantages of consolidating Sigint at Bletchley, one factor almost certainly in Denniston’s mind was the increasingly crowded circumstances at Bletchley Park. There was, however, external pressure for an amalgamation of Sigint. The Director of Military Intelligence wrote to his fellow service directors of intelligence lamenting the lack of co-ordination between traffic analysis and cryptanalysis, and the overall direction of Sigint. He demanded an investigation of the body responsible for the overall handling of intercept work, the Y Committee, and even suggested subordinating it to the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC).

The Y Committee’s parent body, the Y Board, was reconvened from February to March 1941 and was composed of ‘C’ and the service directors of intelligence. It examined all interception or Y work including both communicative and non-communicative (e.g. radar and navigation beacons) emissions, and even the study and recognition of individual Morse operators. The Y Board concluded, with regard to GC&CS, that the technical characteristics of cryptanalysis precluded any increasingly direct service branch intervention in its internal operation than already was the case (through the GC&CS service sections and MI6 circulating sections). By the same token, however, it did endorse the closer integration of traffic analysis and cryptanalysis, and in due course traffic analysis proved a very valuable auxiliary method to the production of Ultra. The Y Board in turn was to be responsible for co-ordinating the two sides of the process on behalf of the Chiefs of Staff, and was supposed to meet every six to eight weeks. The service intelligence directorates were each to attach an intelligence officer to a Y sub-committee concerned strictly with interception, and likewise to a cryptanalysis sub-committee intended to be ‘run in parallel’ with the Y sub-committee. The chairs of the two sub-committees were in turn appointed as members to the Y Board. In the event, the obvious duplication between the two sub-committees eventually led to the cryptanalysis sub-committee petering out as its duties were subsumed by an additional Enigma sub-committee created in March 1941.

In an attempt to address the concerns of his consumers in Whitehall about their access to, and control of, cryptanalytical product, Denniston set up an additional section within GC&CS called the Interservice Distribution and Reference Section. This section would also include representatives from the service branches to help ensure that their interests were duly considered in the circulation of GC&CS product. Despite these attempts to incorporate consumer demand into the day-to-day operation of the service, the Admiralty in turn remained relatively dissatisfied. In an effort to increase the forcefulness of their representation at Bletchley, they attached an assistant director of naval intelligence to GC&CS. In practice, however, he was actually based at the Admiralty’s Operational Intelligence Centre (OIC), albeit making regular visits to Bletchley, and received daily reports from the navy section by telephone.

One can see, therefore, that GC&CS was very much an assortment of semi-independent sections with divided loyalties and subject to lines of dual control between GC&CS and their departments of origin. The organizational politics of intelligence management were very similar in both GC&CS and MI6. Where the two organizations differed most dramatically was in their relative success as the war developed. While MI6 lost most of its continental assets during the fall of Europe in 1939–40 and spent much of the war trying to regain lost ground, GC&CS developed a chain of successes, central of which was the successful penetration of the Axis high-grade codes and ciphers, now famous as Ultra. Hence, the difficulties of MI6 arose from the unenviable combination of escalating demand and dwindling supply. On the other hand, while GC&CS found itself in possession of a rich vein of raw intelligence (plus or minus occasional ebbs and flows as the fortunes of cryptanalytical war came and went), it was confronted by severe overload of already strained facilities combined with growing demand that actually seemed to outpace even the richest outpouring of the intelligence product. As a result, GC&CS quadrupled in size between late 1939 and early 1941 when it reached a staff of 900. With continued success, its size continued to expand to 1,500 in 1942.

At the outbreak of war, GC&CS had been composed of a combination of Foreign Office and Service Branch professionals coupled to an assortment of ageing but productive Room 40 alumni of First World War vintage. In the new population there was an exotic assortment of civilians, amongst which the official history counts
‘professors, lecturers and undergraduates, chess-masters, experts from the principal museums, barristers and antiquarian booksellers’. The result was a struggle to keep up with the flood of new faces and personalities, and to keep some semblance of orderly process. As the official history notes, ‘At the beginning of 1941 it was by Whitehall standards poorly organized … new sections had to be improvised into existence in response to the needs and opportunities thrown up since the outbreak of war.’ The result was ‘a loose collection of groups rather than … a single tidy organization’, words which almost exactly parallel Vivian’s description of MI6 in the same period. The situation was intensified by the fact that senior officers still retained the pre-war practice of performing both cryptanalytical as well as administrative tasks. An additional source of friction was the fact that the new and relatively ‘undisciplined’ wartime staff were less familiar with the traditional departmental and ministry control over intelligence analysis, and were prone to stray into areas of interpretation and assessment consumers viewed as their own domain.

By early 1942, GC&CS found itself all but overcome by its own internal management problems, partly driven by a new and unmanageable size, partly by a progressive erosion of traditional institutional and administrative boundaries, and partly by escalating efforts of the Service customers to keep a hand in the day-to-day operation of the organization. GC&CS reached a crisis point in the autumn of 1941, forcing Menzies to appoint a Joint Committee of Control drawn from both MI6 and GC&CS. However, like so many of Menzies’ administrative initiatives, the committee proved unequal to the task, and – despite the obvious dangers of going over the heads of their superiors – four leading cryptanalysts were forced to appeal directly to Churchill. Despite this drastic action, matters remained unresolved until January 1942.

It is worth keeping in mind that this kind of difficulty as a result of too rapid success was not wholly unique to GC&CS. During the same period, and also partly as a result of GC&CS successes, in this case against
Abwehr
ciphers, MI5 experienced a similar overload crisis. With the successful penetration of the German espionage effort against the UK that took the shape of the now-famous Double Cross programme, MI5’s operational side, B Division, found itself a vast and tottering mass of
ad hoc
groups and sections, trying to cope with the volume of work brought on by Double Cross. It also experienced
management bottlenecks where staff and procedures were not equipped to handle the volume of materials generated by both counter-espionage Sigint, double-agent operations, and a flood of reports from around the British Isles of suspected spies and saboteurs. Where MI5 differed from GC&CS, however, was that it was designed primarily as an investigation service and not as an intelligence producer. MI5 did not have a brace of powerful Cabinet-level customers demanding their respective pounds of flesh, and was not composed of a staff subject to the divided loyalties of dual control between the service and its consumers. The demands of Bletchley Park’s consumers intensified its difficulties with overload well beyond that experienced by the Security Service. What MI5 needed was a strong central hand of control, which it eventually received in the form of Sir David Petrie as Director-General. No such solution was available to a GC&CS which existed to serve many masters rather than one. Although the service intelligence branches increasingly ceded direct control of GC&CS to the organization itself and to ‘C’ prior to 1941, debates over the circulation of what amounted to an embarrassment of Ultra wealth set matters back considerably.

One of the peculiarities of intelligence supply and demand in wartime is the absence or even reversal of the law of diminishing marginal utility. Under this old standard of economic theory, a thirsty man derives more utility from his first mouthful of water than from his last, by which time he is sated and drinking ceases to be a source of pleasure. The additional utility of each additional swallow diminishes until there is no more utility to be had. On the whole, this theory holds quite nicely for most products, from food to household computers to television comedy. In the case of intelligence, and especially in wartime, the process is almost reversed, as each intelligence report of the calibre of Ultra creates an increased appetite for more of the same, with no real upper limit in sight. One cannot really imagine the Admiralty’s OIC turning around to Bletchley Park and saying ‘that’s all the Ultra we need thank you, we’ve had quite enough now’. The result was that as supply increased, demand increased rather than decreased, and the armed forces’ desire for a direct hand in the running of things that had been on hold for a time increased likewise.

As far as the internal workings of GC&CS were concerned, this was particularly apparent with the army and air sections, the Admiralty having made something of a ‘separate peace’ with Bletchley Park
through its appointment of an OIC-based Assistant Director of Naval Intelligence. The army and air sections were subject to a particularly keen sense of divided loyalty between GC&CS and their own services. This was demonstrated most clearly in October 1941, when the Director of Military Intelligence and his RAF counterpart demanded what the official history described as ‘total operational control of the staff engaged in translating and elucidating the decrypts, and selecting from them those which should be passed to Whitehall and operational theatres’. To complicate matters, this demand was supported by the military and RAF circulating sections (Sections IV and II respectively) at MI6. The irony of this development was that the Sigint service branch officers themselves fell to quarrelling like thieves over the division of the spoils, and this intervention too ended in deadlock.

As internal solutions to GC&CS’s internal problems were not forthcoming, Menzies was forced to initiate an independent inquiry by a former deputy director of military intelligence. In February 1942, Menzies implemented the inquiry’s recommendations. The Joint Committee of Control was disbanded, and the civil and military sides of GC&CS were drawn apart into two distinct directorates under ‘C’. The sub-division of GC&CS largely resolved the span of control problems which had come with frantic expansion, and relieved some of the crowding problems at Bletchley Park as the civil and diplomatic sections of GC&CS were rehoused in quarters in Berkeley Street, London. The service sections came under a new post of Deputy Director (Services), filled by Commander Edward Travis, who subsequently received replacements for the civilian administrative staff that had been drawn from MI6 and who relocated to Berkeley Street under Denniston – moved sideways but effectively demoted, to become Deputy Director (Civil). This solution was not, however, without its costs. In creating two Directorates under ‘C’, the post of a single operational head of GC&CS had to be abolished.

Civilians who remained with the service directorate at Bletchley Park were given formal authority over armed service personnel working under them. Finally, differences over the control of Ultra were to be settled by the appointment of a head of section responsible for distribution and answerable directly and only to Travis.

GC&CS continued to grow rapidly, with continued managerial difficulty resulting, albeit not on the scale of the 1941 crisis. By summer 1943, the staff had increased to 5,052 (from 2,095 the
previous summer). In June 1944 they numbered 7,723, of whom 3,371 were civilians and 4,352 service persons. Numbers peaked in January 1945 at 8,995. The solution to these management difficulties can only have served to intensify the friction felt over the 1942 reorganization. Menzies redesignated himself Director-General and promoted Travis as overall Director of GC&CS while Denniston continued to languish in the hierarchy as Deputy Director (C). These arrangements prevailed until the end of the Second World War.