The Codebreakers: The True Story of the Secret Intelligence Team That Changed the Course of the First World War (40 page)

On awakening, she resumes her search for the White Rabbit, encountering a series of characters along the way, until pandemonium greets the arrival of a new cipher. Alice then precedes to the Directional Room, occupied by a forlorn Humpty Dumpty, ‘not the creature I was – not since rationing came in’, who has been conferring with Beatty and Jellicoe about how to sink the German fleet. Passing on, she arrives at a dark cul-de-sac, and a door bearing the sign ‘Mixed Bathing’. Here she meets none other than ‘Dilly the Dodo … the queerest bird she had ever seen … so long and so lean’, with a face ‘like a pang of hunger’.

Dilly the Dodo proceeds to recite his mantra, ‘Greek or Latin, Latin or Greek’, and shows her ‘a sheet of very dirty paper on which a spider with inky feet appeared to have been crawling’. After getting into a dispute with his secretary about the location of his glasses and a missing ham sandwich, he leads Alice to the aeroplane experts, who are surrounded by ‘an orchestra of typewriters’.

Suddenly the Mad Hatter appears, loaded down with an enormous tin of tobacco, and promptly demands tea. During the ensuing chaos, during which the Mad Hatter falls into a gigantic mug, Dilly the Dodo jumps up and declares that he ‘must go to Room 40 and find fault with things’.

Alice pursues him but he slips away from her and she becomes embroiled in a confusing discussion with Little Man (Denniston), about codes, decodes, bi-grams and monograms. Before she can make any sense of it, he and his companions are snoring away.

Their slumbers are interrupted by the arrival of an imposing figure wearing a coat covered with little flags: it’s Blinker Hall. The White Rabbit summons the courage to approach the DNI and offers him ‘a piece of paper on which a lot of letters were written backwards and a lot of numbers upside down’.

Hall then demands to know where Captain James is: the Dormouse replies using classic Carrollian logic: ‘his hours are 10 to 7 and 7 to 10’. Bemused, Hall asks for clarification. The Dormouse happily obliges: ‘he’s nearly always here at ten minutes to seven in the evening, and sometimes at seven minutes to ten in the morning’.

Before Hall can press him further, a dramatic announcement is made, ‘It’s demobilisation’, sending the creatures into a demented panic that quickly turns into a singalong, a series of rousing verses in rhyming couplets that bring the show to a close.

As many of the codebreakers contemplated a return to civilian life, their chief, Blinker Hall, was keen to represent the Admiralty at the forthcoming peace conference at Versailles, eager to flex his muscles on a grand stage. However, his maverick style and willingness to bend the rules to breaking point ruled him out of contention for such a delicate mission. Instead, his continued poor health – the same persistent chest problems that had ended his career at sea – gave those who resented his success the excuse they needed to push him into retirement. In early 1919, Hall was replaced as head of naval intelligence by Captain Hugh Sinclair. The tributes that poured in from those who had worked with him did little to soften the blow.

Meanwhile, over at MI1(b), peace brought with it fresh challenges. As Malcolm Hay’s team had already succeeded in breaking the diplomatic codes of so many countries, both friend and foe, it was ideally placed to eavesdrop on the secret chatter of the participants at the Versailles negotiations. To cope with the mass of material coming in, Hay’s staff increased to over a hundred. Unfortunately, the effect of this unprecedented operation will never be known. No documentary evidence has survived: Britain’s relationship with its Allies would have been in tatters if the truth had come out.

When Malcolm Hay took over at MI1(b), he did so only because he was guaranteed complete autonomy; the last thing he wanted was the mandarins at the War Office sticking their noses in. During the war he managed to keep outsiders at bay, but by the spring of 1919 he was fighting a losing battle. The new head of military intelligence, Sir William Thwaites, had ‘no previous experience of Intelligence work and no obvious qualifications for the position’. Hay thought he was totally unsuitable for the job.

To add insult to injury, Thwaites decided that MI1(b) would no longer exist in splendid isolation: it was time the army took charge. Hay described how one afternoon, Thwaites invaded MI1(b)’s premises at Cork Street: ‘he made no appointment, and we had no warning of his intended visit. I returned to my office … and found my room full of staff officers.’

Rather than quit, Hay decided to bite his lip. Aware that the creation of a new codebreaking organisation, the Government Code & Cypher School (GC&CS), was under discussion, he hung on in the hope that he might be chosen to run it. The Secret Service Committee, featuring representatives from the Admiralty, War Office, Foreign Office and the Treasury, agreed that Room 40 and MI1(b) should be amalgamated to form GC&CS but was divided over who should be in charge. The perennial rivalry between the Admiralty and the War Office once again reared its ugly head.

The argument turned on the relative achievements of the two sections. The Admiralty pointed out that the War Office only ‘dealt with cables which are far more accurate than wireless’. In MI1(b)’s favour was the fact that, unlike Room 40, it had not been gifted any copies of German code books: it had reconstructed over a dozen of them without, as Hay later observed, ‘outside assistance’.

To add fuel to the fire, the Admiralty insisted that it would ‘only consent to pool our staff with that of the War Office on condition that Commander A. Denniston is placed in charge of the new department’. To counter this audacious move, the WO put forward Malcolm Hay as their candidate for the job. On 5 August 1919, the two men were interviewed by the committee. Hay hurt his case by refusing to work under Denniston under any circumstances, while Denniston said he was happy to serve under someone else if that was what the committee wanted.

Hay’s bullish attitude cost him dear; Denniston was appointed head of GC&CS. But Hay was not alone in his poor opinion of Denniston. Even some of Denniston’s Room 40 compatriots had severe doubts about his administrative skills and capacity to lead; according to William Clarke, ‘many of the most capable … flatly declined to serve under Denniston’, while one of them thought he was only ‘fit to manage a small sweet shop in the East End’.

Nevertheless, Denniston remained in charge of GC&CS for over 20 years. Disappointed, Hay did not hang around. He retired on 21 August and was given a fond farewell and an engraved two-handled silver cup by his remaining staff. His last request was to have all the documents accumulated during his tenure destroyed. What evidence we have of MI1(b)’s activities comes from the material it shared with Room 40. The rest of it went up in smoke.

When Blinker Hall gave his farewell speech to his naval intelligence colleagues, he ended it with a warning: ‘We have now to face a far, far more ruthless foe, a foe which is hydra-headed, and whose evil power will spread over the whole world, and that foe is Russia.’

Hall’s fears about the spread of communism were shared not only by the rest of the intelligence community, but by most of the British establishment. Hall’s response to this foe was to go into politics. For the Secret Service Committee, the question was how best to meet this threat. Should MI6 and MI5 be kept going as they were, or should a new, integrated espionage organisation take their place?

Basil Thomson, head of Special Branch and one of Hall’s key allies, had his own ambitions in that direction: he wanted to control all Britain’s intelligence agencies. His bid for power was fully supported by Hall; as Thomson noted in his diary (18 October 1918), ‘I saw Captain Hall about secret service on a peace footing. I found him in full sympathy with my scheme for a civilian head with four departments under him, naval, military, foreign and home.’

Though his scheme failed to get off the ground, and both MI5 and MI6 survived intact – Mansfield Smith-Cumming, ‘C’, stayed on at MI6 until his death in June 1923 – Thomson was put in charge of a new outfit, the Directorate of Intelligence, formed in the spring of 1919. Its brief was to monitor and prevent subversive activities within the UK.

Thomson saw the directorate as a springboard: through it he hoped to achieve his original goal. However, over the years he had made some powerful enemies, who found his habit of hogging the limelight deeply distasteful. In 1921, they moved against him and presented their complaints to Lloyd George, who was still prime minister. Thomson was summarily sacked. Outraged, his loyal friend Blinker Hall, by now a Conservative MP, raised the matter in Parliament. During the course of an impassioned speech, Hall defended Thomson’s reputation – ‘there is no man who has been a better friend to England than Sir Basil Thomson’ – and convinced 41 Tory MPs to vote against the government. It was not enough. Thomson was cast into the wilderness. Undeterred, he immediately wrote a book,
Queer People
(1922), about the foreign spies he’d dealt with during the war.

In December 1925, Thomson hit rock bottom. One evening in Hyde Park, two police constables caught him sitting next to a prostitute, Miss Thelma de Lava. According to the policemen, Thomson was in the process of ‘fondling’ her when they arrived. He was arrested and charged with committing an act in violation of public decency. When he reached the police station, he gave the custody officer a false name.

Desperate, he begged the police to drop the case, but to no avail. In court, he argued that he had been waiting to meet a communist party informer when Miss de Lava approached him. Not wanting to compromise his secret rendezvous, he said, he paid her a few shillings to get her to leave quietly; he denied kissing her and claimed to be adjusting his clothing when the police nabbed him. The ever-faithful Hall appeared for the defence as a character witness. The judge was not fooled: Thomson was found guilty and fined £5.

This sordid incident ended any ambitions Thomson had of being invited back into the fold. Instead, he turned his hand to crime fiction. His first effort,
Mr Pepper Investigates
(1925), featured ‘the world’s greatest detective, just over from America’, and was followed by a series of half a dozen novels, each one a bafflingly complex murder mystery. Thomson then wrote his autobiography,
The Scene Changes
(1937). He died two years later. Naturally, Hall was there to mourn the loss of a man with whom he’d done so much to stop German agents causing havoc on both sides of the Atlantic.

As the dust settled on their wartime endeavours, Blinker Hall and Malcolm Hay contemplated putting their experiences down on paper. Hall went about it with his customary zeal, determined that the end product should reach as many people as possible. In 1932, on the advice of a literary agent, he hired a novelist to help co-write the book, secured a UK and US publisher, and sold serialisation rights to papers on both sides of the Atlantic.

With half a dozen chapters drafted, Hall ran into the brick wall that was the Admiralty. Having got wind of the book, it sent him a stern warning that it would ‘object to any mention … of the real names of persons and places in connection with real intelligence work and also any reference to the employment of agents in a neutral country’. On 4 August 1933, the Admiralty added intercepted messages and codebreaking to its list of no-go areas, leaving Hall with almost nothing to write about. He had no choice but to admit defeat. Thankfully, the unedited chapters were preserved and now reside with his other personal papers in the Churchill Archive, Cambridge.

Malcolm Hay did not even get this far down the road to publication. Having drafted a short introductory essay on MI1(b), he abandoned the project altogether, not wishing to violate the solemn commitment he’d made when he signed the Official Secrets Act. He even considered destroying the few notes he’d made, but luckily for posterity held on to them: they include much of what we know about the clandestine work of MI1(b).

This aborted attempt at an autobiography was not Hay’s first literary effort, or his last. His first book was an account of his time as a soldier,
Wounded and Taken Prisoner
, published anonymously (1916). This was followed by a series of scholarly books on the history of Catholicism in England; one of them featured an appendix on ‘Cryptology in the 17th Century’, in which he cracked a previously unbroken cipher that had been used in a letter from a pro-Catholic conspirator to his masters in Rome.

During the Second World War, Hay was based at his Scottish estate and nearly became a victim of a Luftwaffe bombing raid: a stray projectile exploded so close by that a glass of water he was holding shattered in his hand and ‘the windows and shutters were blown out of his room’.

Ever mindful of his own time as a POW, he got involved with the Prisoners of War Appeal, run by the Red Cross, raising funds and helping the families of bereaved servicemen. Then, as the war drew to a close, he began to consider his next book project. Profoundly shocked and horrified by the Holocaust, and furious at how such a monumental injustice could have been perpetrated so easily, he turned his ire on the Catholic Church. He felt that ‘the Pope, who could have spoken as the representative of millions of Christians, was silent; silent all the time’, with the result that ‘Hitler took for granted that such failure to protest meant, if not approval, at least indifference’.

What began as an examination of the Vatican’s passivity during the Nazi era grew into a study of its long history of anti-Semitism. The finished manuscript,
The Foot of Pride
, was so controversial that no English publisher would touch it. It did, however, win favour in America and came out there in 1950.

Its release was greeted with a flood of comment and debate, and attracted the support of prominent members of the Jewish community, including the legendary physicist Albert Einstein, himself a victim of Nazi persecution. Einstein wrote a heartfelt letter to Hay in which he praised him for tackling such a divisive topic: ‘there are few historians of standing willing to work on such an unpopular subject as this. May I congratulate you and express to you my sincere gratitude for what you have done.’