The Codebreakers: The True Story of the Secret Intelligence Team That Changed the Course of the First World War (34 page)

Indian sappers lay telephone cable during the Mesopotamian campaign of 1917

General Maude would also benefit from more accurate intelligence about his enemy. Inadequate intelligence had dogged Townshend from the start. Although the India Office was the first government department to set up a dedicated cryptographic bureau in 1906, it concentrated on Russian codes – the tsar’s empire was considered to be the most serious threat to the Raj – and did not feel the need to examine German or Turkish ones. Even if it had, any advances made would have been undermined by the lack of material to work with: in the early stages of the war, the Turks rarely used wireless, instead relying on telephone. During 1915, they laid 2,000 km of landlines while possessing only three fixed wireless stations, none of which was in Mesopotamia. This left D Force at the mercy of local agents who were often unreliable and self-serving, and had a tendency to tell the British what they wanted to hear.

Consistently lacking was accurate information on the size and composition of enemy forces. D Force overestimated the number of soldiers it encountered in the initial actions, thus leading to overconfidence, and underestimated them when it came to the critical showdown at Ctesiphon. This dire situation would be rectified thanks to intelligence officers with the necessary talents and intellectual training to successfully penetrate the enemies’ codes, aided by a powerful wireless transmitter/receiver that had been erected in Basra, and by the fact that the Turks had by then established half a dozen wireless stations in Mesopotamia, thereby providing the codebreakers with enough material to work on.

The two codebreakers who helped guide Maude to victory were Gerard Clauson and Reginald Campbell Thompson. Clauson was born in 1891 and educated at Eton, where he displayed a talent for languages. Aged 15, he taught himself Turkish. At Oxford he studied classics and then began an academic career, winning prizes for translations from Sanskrit while conducting research into the Turkic family of languages, picking up Mongolian and Tibetan along the way. During 1915, after a spell on the Gallipoli front, he joined D Force.

Reginald Campbell Thompson was 15 years Clauson’s senior and represented a select breed of intelligence officer: the archaeologist. As a child he collected flints and bits of Persian pottery, and by his teens was translating ancient Assyrian texts from their original cuneiform script. The earliest known system of writing, cuneiform was made up of symbols carved into clay tablets. Developed by the Sumerians, it remained in use for thousands of years, growing in sophistication as it passed through the Babylonian, Assyrian and Hittite civilisations. The art of reconstructing and deciphering cuneiform from archaeological fragments was the perfect training for work as a codebreaker.

After studying Oriental languages at Cambridge, Thompson embarked on nearly 20 years of wandering the Middle East, moving from one excavation project to another, collecting and then recording his finds in a series of books that included trailblazing studies of the magic, demonology and astrology of the Babylonians. Clauson affectionately described him as a ‘curious old bird with a most amazing inverted brain’. Clearly Thompson had an unusual mind. He liked to visit the cinema because ‘he solved many of his hardest problems as he watched pictures floating across the screen’. But he was also a man of action; more Indiana Jones than Nutty Professor. He was a crack rifle shot and an accomplished sailor. He regarded exercise as a ‘moral obligation’. He had little patience with those lacking the physical toughness to endure the rigours of field work in harsh and hostile landscapes, believing a man should be able to withstand ‘heat and cold, hunger and thirst’.

In 1904, on his way to a site in Mesopotamia, he was delayed by ‘a local plague’ and ‘some slight inconvenience caused by a rumour … that an English doctor had been poisoning his patients’. On arrival, he discovered that ‘the texts they had come to recopy were carved on the sheer face of a rock overhanging a precipice’. Thompson, suspended above the ground in a cradle made from packing cases, manoeuvred into place by ropes and pulleys, spent 16 days transcribing and photographing the inscriptions, drawing them with such a steady hand that ‘hardly a tremor can be detected in any stroke or sign’.

In 1914, he was attached to the general staff of D Force, accompanying Townshend on his doomed mission. Thanks to his local knowledge and well-honed survival skills, he was able to escape the encirclement of Kut and join the relief force battling to get to the city.

Once he and Clauson had joined Maude’s expedition, they set to work on the enemy ciphers. Intelligence supplied by them, and by Cairo and MI1(b), detailing the strength of Turkish forces, their position and intentions, meant Maude could organise his push on Baghdad with a clear idea of what lay ahead of him. The difference in outcome could not have been more marked. The advance began in December 1916. Kut was retaken in February 1917. Baghdad was occupied a few weeks later.

While British forces continued to push north, hoping to secure as much of this oil-rich country as possible, Clauson and Thompson settled into their ‘own little room’ in Baghdad. To keep fit, Thompson practised ‘cut and thrust with a sabre on the roof of the mess’. Over a matter of months they solved all the enemy ciphers being used in the Mesopotamian theatre. Their efforts resulted in a steady stream of strategic and tactical information, including Turkish plans for an offensive against Baghdad, allowing Maude to take the necessary precautionary measures.

A letter Clauson wrote to MI1(b) in London provides a sense of their day-to-day existence. It starts with Clauson laid up in bed suffering from a ‘sore belly’ after giving ‘a lifelike imitation of a village pump for three days’. Recovering, he managed to crack ‘another of our local brand of cipher, the 9th of its kind’, though he was concerned about ‘how the Devil I can send you my notes on solving the ruddy thing’ – in the end they went by submarine. He goes on to add that ‘Turkish messages in new keys … rarely present any difficulty’ and that Thompson held ‘the record having downed one with only 113 (letter) groups to work on’.

In November 1917, Clauson was sent to Egypt to act as chief coordinator of codebreaking in the Middle East. While there, he spent time improving and regulating the security of the Yinterim code – based on letter groups – which was used to communicate with his colleagues in MI1(b), Baghdad and Salonika.

Thompson was released from his codebreaking duties in March 1918 and proceeded to take charge of the general supervision of antiquities in Mesopotamia, penning a short history of the country between 4000
BC
and 323
BC
for the benefit of the British soldiers stationed there. At Ur, he dug up the remains of one of the oldest Sumerian cities with the help of Turkish prisoners, shrugging off the hostile intentions of local nomads.

Before the war, Thompson, the archaeologist turned codebreaker, had joined a major excavation of the Hittite royal palace at Carchemish in Syria under the supervision of David Hogarth. Thompson wanted his fiancée to join him on site but Hogarth wouldn’t allow it. Annoyed, Thompson quit and went home to get married. The dig continued without him.

Hogarth was another leading archaeologist who played a major role in the Middle East. Like Thompson, he was an adventurer at heart, and had explored the ancient sites of the Greek islands and Asia Minor, becoming an expert on the connections that linked the civilisations. In 1909 he became keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, overseeing its collection of artefacts. However, he found life as an administrator thoroughly boring. To escape, he organised the Carchemish expedition.

Before leaving, he offered his services to Naval Intelligence. At the time it was normal for academics and explorers dotted around the globe to carry out informal espionage duties. Hogarth was to keep watch on the German engineers engaged in constructing the Berlin—Baghdad railway. In archaeological research, as in so many other things, Germany was Britain’s main rival. Its experts also doubled as spies. The Carchemish dig was visited by the archaeologist Max von Oppenheim who would go on to become the prime mover behind the German-sponsored jihad.

Though 53 at the outbreak of war, Hogarth was keen to do his bit. He joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and, after rejecting an offer to become an agent in Sofia, landed in Cairo just as a new intelligence organisation – the Arab Bureau – was being formed, to act as a ‘centre to which all information on the various questions connected with the Near East will gravitate’.

Back in London, Blinker Hall was one of those lobbying for the right to oversee the Bureau’s activities. He had a close relationship with Colonel Gilbert Clayton, a long-serving colonial soldier who was the director of the Arab Bureau. Unsurprisingly, Hall believed the bureau should be controlled by Naval Intelligence, though as he explained to Clayton in a letter, it would remain fairly independent: ‘this seems to me the only successful plan, as you have people on the spot who are able to assess any information and its proper value’.

In the end, Hall lost out to the Foreign Office. Nevertheless, he kept in touch with Clayton, who agreed to maintain ‘some unofficial channel of communication’. Hogarth, with all his years of experience and accumulated knowledge, was put in charge. As it happened, Hall knew Hogarth well, not only because he was a navy man but also because Hogarth’s father was a close friend of Hall’s father-in-law.

Occupying three rooms at the Savoy Hotel in Cairo, Hogarth and his staff were determined to pursue a ‘forward’ policy in the region, which entailed stirring up the tribes of Arabia against the Turks. The focus of this strategy was Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca, who had been made deliberately vague promises of British support if he chose to throw off the Ottoman yoke, which had tightened ever since a railroad had penetrated deep into his territory. It brought with it Turkish tax collectors, deeply resented by local tribes, and challenged the tribes’ lucrative role in ensuring safe passage for the many thousands of Muslim pilgrims who made the journey to Mecca each year for the haj.

Almost immediately, the British-sponsored Arab uprising was on the brink of collapse. The British had already sunk considerable sums into Hussein’s war chest and appeared to be facing a swift end to their ambitious plans to claim the desert kingdom for themselves in the name of Arab independence.

Direct military assistance was constrained by two factors: the understandable reluctance of the War Office to commit troops; and the prohibitions against non-Muslims entering the Hejaz region, and especially its most holy sites. Yet to do nothing was not an option, not least because failing to help Hussein would give encouragement to his deadly opponent, Ibn Saud, whose clan, fierce acolytes of the Wahhabi sect, a militantly fundamentalist branch of Islam, coveted his territory. What was particularly galling to the Arabists in Cairo and Khartoum was that Ibn Saud was being sponsored by their rivals for influence in the region, the India Office.

Offering a way though this tangled mess was a young archaeologist and protégé of Hogarth who had been kicking his heels as an intelligence officer in Cairo attached to the Geographical Section: T. E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia.

Lawrence’s first great passion was for the medieval history he’d studied at Oxford. Hogarth spotted his talent and became his sponsor, securing him a four-year scholarship after graduation and employing him on the Carchemish excavation. Lawrence spent nearly three years there and found digging ‘tremendous fun’. Hogarth brought him into the Arab Bureau and remained his patron throughout the war as Lawrence made his bid for glory.

Lawrence’s vision offered a neat solution to the problems facing British intervention. Given that the Arab troops, such as they were, were no match for the Turkish army, he argued that they were best suited to guerrilla warfare, a style of fighting that also offered the prospect of amassing booty, a primary motivation for the Bedouins who would form the majority of the strike force Lawrence commanded.

Though Lawrence focused on the destruction and disruption of the Hejaz railway, he had an equally important task: to sever the Turkish telegraph lines between Damascus and Mecca, thereby forcing the enemy to use wireless instead. Messages sent this way could then be intercepted and decoded. Lawrence recalled that ‘one of my cares was to distribute wire cutters over their rear and cut their telegraph daily’. Between March and May 1917 he mounted 15 attacks on the Turkish system; between July and October another 30, using camels to pull down the telegraph poles.

By the time the Egyptian Expeditionary Force was ready to advance into Palestine, with Lawrence’s Arab irregulars acting in support, it could draw on material from more than 40 wireless and DF stations dotted across the Mediterranean. The Turks themselves were operating at least 12, greatly increasing the volume of messages available for decryption.

Despite this impressive infrastructure, its potential was still not being properly used. During the First Battle of Gaza, in March 1917, during which the EEF mounted a frontal assault on well-defended positions, the wireless station established by Gill in Cyprus intercepted a message, decoded in Cairo, which showed the Turks were on the point of buckling under the weight of sustained artillery fire.

This news was transmitted to the commander in the field, General Murray, but ‘he had taken steps to see that no message could reach him, stating he would have no interference from Cairo HQ during the battle’. Having already sustained heavy casualties, and ignorant of the fact that the Turks were on the verge of collapse, he called off the attack, losing the chance of a decisive victory. At the Second Battle of Gaza, in April, the same tactics were repeated, again at high cost to men and materiel, with no advantage gained. Murray was swiftly replaced by General Allenby.

Allenby realised that what was lacking was the element of surprise. If that could be restored, a breakthrough might follow. This could be achieved by deceiving the enemy as to his real intentions. Wireless messaging offered the means to do so – not the only one, but it was the integral component that made the others work.