The Codebreakers: The True Story of the Secret Intelligence Team That Changed the Course of the First World War (16 page)

Hall’s meddling nearly blew up in his face. After a few weeks, a troublesome MP who was already under scrutiny discovered his mail was being interfered with. Outraged, he complained to Reginald McKenna, the Home Secretary, who demanded to see Hall, warning him that the sentence for tampering with His Majesty’s mail was two years in prison.

With his career hanging by a thread, Hall was sent to Asquith, the prime minister, at 10 Downing Street. Though by the end of the war he had met a great number of politicians and ‘seen to some extent how their minds worked’, it was his first visit to this august address and he felt distinctly nervous: ‘once inside this rather shabby old house I could not rid myself of the idea that I was only witnessing some strange kind of stage play. Things had suddenly become unreal.’ Luckily for him, Asquith was in favour and endorsed his actions. By the end of the war, 4,801 staff, mostly women, were engaged in steaming open hundreds of letters a day.

Hall not only interfered on the domestic front, he was equally willing to take the iniative over international diplomacy. In early 1915, he put into motion an audacious plan to bribe the Turks to sue for peace. The Ottomans’ entry into the war, November 1914, was half-hearted at first, reflecting deep splits in the government over the right course to take. With British warships gathering in the Adriatic, reports were coming in of the uncertainty and fear gripping the population in Constantinople (Istanbul), and Hall spied a chance to exploit these tensions.

He contacted a British civil engineer working for a firm of contractors, who was ‘on friendly terms with many of the most influential Turks’. Hall’s contact agreed to try and get in touch with Talaat Bey, the Minister of the Interior, who was known to have doubts about the war. In his memoirs, Hall stated that on 5 March 1915, ‘the price offered for the complete surrender of the Dardanelles with the removal of all mines was £500,000’.

While Hall rolled the dice, Churchill was also prepared to gamble that the Turks would fold if enough pressure was applied. During February 1915, Churchill bullied and cajoled his colleagues into agreeing to try and send ships through the heavily defended Dardanelles and on to Constantinople; once there, the threat of the city being bombarded by their guns might prove sufficient to force the Turks to capitulate. However, the straits were guarded by fortifications armed with heavy artillery and mobile gunnery with enough firepower to prevent easy access and stall the operation.

Then Room 40 received and decoded two messages that referred to the fact that the Turkish defences, which had so far prevented British ships from getting through, were very low on ammunition and it would take several weeks before more would arrive. Could this be the chance the British were waiting for? Realising that this information might be a game-changer, Hall visited Churchill and Lord Fisher, the Admiralty’s most senior naval figure, and told them the news. Both of them were galvanised by what they heard; the navy might now be able to enter the Dardanelles without sustaining heavy losses. According to Hall, Fisher exclaimed, ‘By God … I’ll go through tomorrow,’ while Churchill ‘seized hold of the telegram and read it through again’ with great enthusiasm.

Sensing that this was a decisive moment, Hall decided to tell them about the bribe, or as he put it, ‘the large sum of money I had personally guaranteed’. An astonished Churchill asked how much, and Hall replied, ‘Three million pounds … with power to go to four million if necessary.’ Churchill demanded to know who had authorised this offer; Hall responded, ‘I did.’ Alarmed, Churchill probed further: what about the Cabinet? Did it know? Unruffled, Hall replied, ‘No, it does not. But if we were to get peace … I imagine they’d be glad enough to pay.’

Before Churchill could fire off another question, Fisher, still processing the fact that the enemy was running short of ammunition, declared, ‘No, no, I tell you, I’m going through tomorrow, or as soon as can be completed,’ then turned to Hall: ‘Cable at once to stop all negotiations … We’re going through.’

Hall bowed to his superiors and took the bribe off the table. The navy renewed its doomed assault on the straits, frustrated as much by the dense network of minefields as by the Turkish guns. After repeated attempts the operation was abandoned and the fateful decision made to conduct an amphibious landing at Gallipoli. The troops involved quickly became mired in trench warfare every bit as harrowing as on the Western Front, with the added discomforts of blistering heat and disease. As the scale of the disaster became sickeningly apparent, both Churchill’s and Fisher’s jobs were on the line.

The careers of these two colossi had been intertwined for years. Churchill admired Fisher’s dynamism and innovation, while Fisher found Churchill ‘Napoleonic in audacity, Cromwellian in thoroughness’, and considered him ‘a staunch friend’. Nevertheless, the cracks were beginning to show. After the war, and with his characteristic literary flair, Churchill compared Fisher to ‘a great castle that has contended with time’. Hall, more prosaically, agreed that Fisher was ‘a tired man. The strain under which he worked would have been terrific … He might still on occasion show the old flashes of brilliance, but, beneath the surface, all was far from being well … at any moment, we felt, the breaking point would come.’

At the same time, Hall was acutely aware that Churchill ‘had the defects of his great qualities. He was essentially a “one man show”. It was not in his nature to allow anybody else to be the executive authority.’ He recalled an incident where they were debating an issue from diametrically opposed points of view: ‘it was long after midnight and I was dreadfully tired, but nothing seemed to tire the First Lord. He continued to talk and I distinctly recall the odd feeling that although it would be wholly against my will, I should in a very short space of time be agreeing with everything he said.’ Battered into submission, feeling his own sense of self diminishing rapidly, Hall admitted defeat: ‘I can’t argue with you; I’ve not had the training.’

Admiral Jackie Fisher, 1914

Not surprisingly, both Churchill and Fisher had their enemies. Working in harmony, they could deflect the critics and backbiters, but once serious differences over the Dardanelles campaign surfaced, they became vulnerable. In a fit of pique, Fisher offered his resignation. Churchill, knowing that this could spell doom for him as well, immediately wrote to Fisher on 15 May: ‘if you go at this bad moment … thereby let loose upon me the spite and malice of those who are your enemies even more so than mine’. Fisher was unmoved; he reminded Churchill that he had been ‘dead set against the Dardanelles operation from the beginning’ and reaffirmed his decision to ‘GO’.

At this critical juncture, Hall was asked to act as assassin by Sir Frederick Hamilton, Second Sea Lord. Senior figures within the Admiralty felt the time had come for both Fisher and Churchill to step down: the Dardanelles campaign had been Churchill’s baby, which he’d pushed through despite serious concerns about its value. Now, as the hard-pressed British were having to commit more and more resources to landings at Gallipoli that had only become necessary because of the failure of the navy to do its bit, Churchill had nowhere to hide. Given that the ageing and autocratic Fisher had returned to the top job because Churchill had insisted on his appointment, it was inevitable that he would be ousted as well.

The problem was how to remove them without causing a backlash within the service and accusations that they were being sacked because of who they were rather than what they’d done. Hamilton needed to find someone of sufficient authority and unquestionable integrity to set the wheels in motion. Hall was an obvious choice. Nobody would accuse him, as Hamilton deftly put it, of acting through ‘motives of self-interest’. As Hall was no longer on active service, commanding a ship, he had nothing to gain from a change of command. Hamilton approached Hall and asked him ‘to take such steps as will make it impossible for Lord Fisher to ever return to the Admiralty. I consider him a real danger.’

Hall reluctantly accepted this ‘most unpleasant job’. But to whom should he present the poisoned chalice? Showing the tactical awareness that served him so well in the corridors of power, he decided to put the case before Lord Reading, the Lord Chief Justice, as Asquith, the prime minister, who would ultimately be responsible for the decision, ‘relied at this time on his advice’.

The two heavyweights met at Lord Herschell’s flat. According to Hall, ‘at 3.30 Lord Reading was shown in, and I at once put all my cards on the table. I told him I knew I was putting my entire future in his hands, but hoped to make him understand I was acting solely in the public interest … I said bluntly that in my opinion Lord Fisher was in no fit state to continue at his post.’ Hall spoke for ten minutes: ‘when I had finished he cross-examined me for nearly half an hour … question, indeed, followed question, some purely technical but others so fashioned as to make sure of my motive’.

Reading asked if it should be Fisher or Churchill who should go. Hall did not hesitate and replied, ‘both … you can’t keep a First Lord who will appear to have driven out of office a man like Lord Fisher. The navy would never forgive him.’ Satisfied, Reading passed judgement: ‘if you had answered my questions differently I would have broken you. But I am now satisfied that your view of what is required is correct and I will see the PM at once.’

In a matter of days both Fisher and Churchill were gone. Though Churchill refused to hold a grudge against Hall as the man who helped pull the trigger, Fisher was not so forgiving. In a letter dated 27 January 1917, he referred to Hall as ‘that blinking rogue’. Later that year he accused Hall of being ‘the champion liar of the British navy’ and demanded he be replaced, because ‘the NID should be thinking about our enemy’s plans and what he is up to, and not hunting spies and interviewing journalists as its prime occupation’.

Though Fisher’s accusations were motivated by personal animosity, there was some truth to them. Hall
was
in constant contact with the press. The print media played an aggressive role during the war, particularly the Northcliffe press, which was masterminded by the newspaper baron Lord Northcliffe and included
The Times
and the
Daily Mail
, Britain’s best-selling tabloid. Sharp with their criticisms and ruthless in pursuing those who they felt were undermining the country’s war effort, the barons of Fleet Street wielded their power mercilessly.

Hugh Cleland Hoy, who served in close proximity to Hall for most of the war, described the ‘working agreement … made between the Chief Censor and Admiral Hall early in the war in regard to the issue of news to the most important papers, who from the beginning included many Americans’. To deal with journalists, ‘Hall evolved a system of entertaining them to tea once a week, when he would give a general resumé of the week’s achievements. Admittedly, he did this with discretion, not to say bluff, at which he was a past master.’

At the same time, Hall was not above manipulating the press for his own ends. He realised he could exploit the fact that ‘most foreign countries have the highest respect for our leading newspapers and believe what they read in them’. Given this, ‘an intelligence officer can have fairly free scope’, though he was careful not to compromise the reputation of the quality papers: ‘whatever information you ask them to publish must be well within the bounds of reason’. He recognised, however, that ‘with the penny press one need not be so careful. They are quite accustomed to eating their words and digesting the result.’

During the autumn of 1916, Hall hit on a way of taking the pressure off the exhausted British troops on the Somme. He decided to float the idea that an invasion of northern Belgium was being prepared, thereby drawing German forces away from the front line. The first step in this ruse was to send wireless messages to ‘various stations’ indicating that an invasion fleet would depart from Harwich, Dover and the Thames.

He then persuaded his closest ally in the press, Thomas Marlowe, editor of the
Daily Mail
, to insert ‘a wily paragraph’ in the paper that would support the invasion story. This was not straightforward: Marlowe couldn’t simply print it in a regular UK edition, as it would be removed immediately by censors and never see the light of day. Instead, on 12 September, he had 24 copies of a special issue of the paper shipped to Holland for the benefit of German spies there. Most had the relevant paragraph blacked out to convince its German readers that it was a genuine edition that had already been scrutinised by the censors, leading them to assume that the few copies that still carried the offending article had somehow slipped through the net.

The paragraph in question was by a special correspondent and bore the headline ‘EAST COAST READY. GREAT MILITARY PREPARATIONS’. It dropped heavy hints about ‘very large forces concentrated near the East Coast’. In fact the preparations were on such a scale that they were unlikely to be for mere defence. The article worked a treat and the Germans did exactly what was expected of them: a mass of troops was moved to defend the Belgian coastline.