Read The Secrets of Station X Online
Authors: Michael Smith
The Secrets of Station X (2 page)
The inevitable had happened. There seemed no longer any need to study the communications of a naval and military nature. The Navy and Army of Germany had disappeared, never were they supposed to rise again. To show the extent of the change, in the early days of 1920, the strongest section of the GC&CS was the United States section, to which Knox and Strachey and a number of lesser lights were attached.
Perhaps understandably, the Admiralty saw little reason to fund the collection of diplomatic intelligence, and Britain's codebreakers were soon placed once more in the hands of the Foreign Office. When Admiral Sinclair was made head of MI6 in 1923, he also took over control of GC&CS, Denniston said. âIt became in fact an adopted child of the Foreign Office with no family rights and the poor relation of MI6 where peacetime activities left little cash to spare.'
The codebreakers were recruited, as with their MI6 colleagues, from a limited circle of people within the
establishment
. Joshua âJosh' Cooper, who would become a leading member of Bletchley Park and subsequently its Cold War successor GCHQ, recalled being recruited as a âJunior Assistant' in October 1925 when he was twenty-four.
Like many other recruits, I had heard of the job through a
personal introduction â advertisement of posts was at that time unthinkable. In my case introduction came through the family of the novelist Charles Morgan, whose father Sir Charles Morgan of the Southern Railway was an old friend and chief of my father. I was one year down from University of London King's College with a first in Russian and had found nothing better to do than teach at a preparatory school at Margate. My father was bewailing this at tea with the Morgans one day, and one of Charles's sisters remarked that she had a friend called Sybil Pugh who worked at a place in Queens Gate where Russian linguists were actually wanted. So in due course I took an entrance exam which included a number of puzzles, such as filling in missing words in a mutilated newspaper article and simple mathematical problems calling for nothing more than arithmetic and a little ingenuity. I wasted a lot of time on these, thinking there must be some catch and rechecking my work and so did not finish the paper. Nevertheless I got top marks. There was also an interview board where I found Denniston, whom I had already met, and for the first time met âC' (Admiral Sinclair) the Director of GC&CS. I do not think this exam was ever repeated but selection continued on a fairly haphazard basis right up to the [Second World] War.
Cooper was set to work on Russian cyphers alongside Ernst Fetterlein, who had been codebreaker to the Tsar, where one of his main jobs was solving British codes, a role that was now reversed. âFetterlein was a devotee of his art,' one of his former colleagues in the Russian
Cabinet Noir
recalled.
I was told that once, when he was sent to London with dispatches, he sat morosely through breakfast until suddenly a complete change took place. He beamed, began to laugh and jest, and when one of the embassy officials asked him what the matter was, confessed that he had been worried by an indecypherable word which occurred in one of the English telegrams he had
decyphered. Someone had in conversation mentioned the name of a small English castle to which the King had gone to shoot and this was the word in the telegrams which had bothered him.
Fetterlein, who was by then fifty-two, had a large ruby ring given to him by Tsar Nicholas in gratitude for his achievements, which included breaking a German Navy message which enabled the Russian Navy to sink a number of German ships in the Baltic in 1914. This was helpful to Fetterlein's future employers. The Russians recovered a naval codebook from the light cruiser the
Magdeburg
, which they passed on to the British.
Fetterlein fled Russia during the Bolshevik takeover in November 1917, later telling William Filby, one of his new British colleagues, that he and his wife narrowly evaded a search of the ship by trigger-happy Bolsheviks. âAs the top
cryptographer
in Russia he held the rank of admiral,' said Filby. âHis stories of the day the revolution occurred, when workmen stripped him of many decorations and bullets narrowly missed him, were exciting. It is said that the French and the British organisation were anxious to get him and Fetterlein simply sat there and said: “Well gentlemen, who will pay me the most?”'
The British evidently offered the most money. Fetterlein was recruited by Room 40 in June 1918, working on Bolshevik, Georgian and Austrian codes, Filby said.
Fetty, as we addressed him, would arrive precisely at 9.30 and read his
Times
until ten when he would adjust a pair of
thicklensed
glasses and look to us expecting work to be given to him. He was a brilliant cryptographer. On book cypher and anything where insight was vital he was quite the best. He was a fine linguist and he would usually get an answer no matter the language.
Josh Cooper already knew Fetterlein, having been introduced to him by one of the teaching staff at King's College.
His experience and reputation were both great, and I was fortunate to find myself assigned to work with him on Soviet diplomatic, which at that time consisted of book cyphers, mostly one part, re-cyphered with a 1,000-group additive key. He took very little notice of me and left it to an Army officer who had been attached to GC&CS, to explain the problem. Traffic was scanty and it was hard to get adequate depth. It took me some time to realise that almost every group had two meanings. After about six weeks' work, during which I rubbed holes in the paper with endless corrections, at last I read my first message which was from Moscow to the Soviet
representative
in Washington and was concerned with repudiation of debts by American states. Later we got much better material from Tehran, where traffic was a great deal heavier and was obtained from the Persian post office by MI6. Hitherto it had been exploited locally by an Army officer resident in Tehran, but now the work was transferred to GC&CS. Later still we got even more voluminous material obtained in the same way from the post office in Peking, and were able to solve for the first time whole additive tables.
Despite Cooper's problems with the cypher he was put to work on, the amount of Soviet messages continued to increase with the opening of a new Royal Navy intercept site at Flowerdown, near Winchester, an Army site at Chatham and an RAF site at Waddington, in Lincolnshire.
The Russian messages disclosed a concerted attempt to provoke a Bolshevik revolution in Britain in 1920 and repeated attempts to subvert British society throughout the 1920s and 1930s, but this success was a double-edged sword. First in 1920 and then again in 1923 and 1927, the British government used Russian messages broken by the codebreakers as evidence of the communist threat to Britain, leading to changes in Soviet cypher systems that by the late 1920s had all but ended the codebreakers' success against Russia's diplomatic cyphers. After
the government's 1927 admission that GC&CS was reading Moscow's secret messages, the Russians began using the
one-time
-pad system which, when used properly, was unbreakable.
The codebreakers had little in the way of formal training, Cooper recalled.
The structure of the office was pretty hopeless. It had begun as six Senior Assistants and eighteen Junior Assistants but by the time I joined it was, I think, one Senior Assistant with a responsibility allowance (Denniston), twelve Senior Assistants and twelve Junior Assistants. Supporting staff consisted of a few misemployed typists, some women on MI6 books and, I believe, a few women employed as âJAA' (Junior Assistant's Assistant). For it was the Treasury's understanding that Senior Assistants broke new cyphers and Junior Assistants decyphered and translated the texts. Recruitment by personal introduction had produced some very well-connected officers, especially among the seniors. At best they were fine scholar linguists, at worst some of them were, frankly, âpassengers'.
Very little interest was shown in naval or military messages in the immediate wake of the First World War and
responsibility
for assessing the value of these was left largely to naval and military intelligence. But in 1924, GC&CS set up a small Naval Section under William âNobby' Clarke, a veteran of Room 40 and then forty-one years old. It obtained its intercepts from the Scarborough station; from the new Royal Navy site at Flowerdown, which had replaced Pembroke; and from
operators
on board Royal Navy ships who intercepted foreign naval messages in their spare time. The Army still had its intercept site at Fort Bridgewoods, Chatham and in 1930 a military
codebreaking
section was formed at GC&CS under the command of Captain John Tiltman. The RAF had set up its own intercept station at Waddington, Lincolnshire, in 1927, but it was not until 1936 that an Air codebreaking section was created in GC&CS
with Cooper in charge. Two years later, the RAF intercept site moved from Waddington to Woodhead Hall at Cheadle, in Staffordshire. There were also a number of intercept stations at various sites overseas at the end of the First World War,
including
Malta, Sarafand in Palestine, Baghdad, and Abbottabad on the North-West Frontier. A Royal Navy intercept station was set up in Hong Kong in 1934 as the threat from Japan became more evident. The messages provided by this network and the international cable companies were augmented by diplomatic and clandestine messages intercepted by a small Metropolitan Police wireless unit based initially in the attic at Scotland Yard and from the mid-1930s in the grounds of the Metropolitan Police Nursing Home at Denmark Hill, south London. The unit, which was controlled by Harold Kenworthy, a Marconi wireless expert, was co-opted by Sinclair to provide GC&CS with both intercepts and technical advice.
By now, Sinclair had moved both the codebreakers and his MI6 staff to a new joint headquarters at 54 Broadway, close to Whitehall and the centre of power. The resurgence of Germany under Adolf Hitler and the Nazis had led to a realisation that war was inevitable and determined efforts were being made to try to break the German cyphers. Cooper recalled that the British codebreakers had almost totally ignored them since the end of the First World War assuming they must be unbreakable:
Another grave fault in the old GC&CS was the tradition, which I found firmly established when I joined, that German cyphers were invincible. Considering what Room 40 had achieved in 1914â18 it seems extraordinary that anyone should believe this, but it was generally assumed that no civilised nation that had once been through the traumatic experience of having its cyphers read would ever allow it to happen again, and that after the wide publicity given to Room 40's results, together with unfortunate leakages to the Germans during the Peace Conference it would be waste
of time to work on German high-grade systems. The result was that for twenty years one man was employed to read the German diplomatic low-grade code traffic which was of no intelligence value whatever.
Germany had indeed learned its lesson from the publication of the Zimmermann Telegram and, during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, its delegation used the one-time-pad system, blocking British attempts to read its communications with Berlin. It also began looking at the possibility of using cyphers generated by a machine. The publicity given to the success of the British codebreakers during the First World War led a number of nations to adopt machine cyphers, which were seen as more difficult to break. The most famous of these was the Enigma machine. The first British contact with the machine came in 1921, when it was still in development. It was shown to the British military attaché in Berlin, in the hope of
persuading
the British armed forces to use it.
The German Navy introduced the Enigma machine cypher in 1926 and for a brief period it remained a possibility that both the British and the German armed forces might use it. In 1927, Commander Edward Travis, a member of GC&CS who
oversaw
the construction and security of British codes and cyphers, asked Hugh Foss, a specialist in machine cyphers, to test the commercially available machine.
The Enigma machine resembled a small typewriter encased in a wooden box. It had a typewriter-style keyboard, set out in the continental QWERTZU manner, which differed slightly from the standard British/American QWERTY keyboard. Above the keyboard, on top of the box, was a lampboard with a series of lights, one for each letter of the alphabet. The operator typed each letter of the plain-text message into the machine. The action of depressing the key sent an electrical current through the machine, which lit up the encyphered letter on the lampboard.
The encypherment mechanism consisted of three or four teethed wheels or rotors which were inserted into the machine. The wheels had twenty-six different electrical contacts on each side, one electrical contact for every letter of the alphabet. Each electrical contact was connected to one of the contacts on the other side of the wheel by internal wiring. The order of these contacts and their wiring was different for each of the three wheels, which could be set at twenty-six different starting
positions
with any one of the twenty-six contacts at the top. They could also be placed in different orders within the machine to add further difficulties for anyone trying to break the cypher.
The action of depressing each key turned the first wheel one position. When that wheel had moved a set number of times, the second wheel moved round one position, and when the second wheel had turned a set number of times, the third wheel moved round one position. The point at which the next wheel moved was known as âthe turnover'.
The Enigma machine had two crucial features which Foss realised would help anyone trying to break it. A letter could not be encyphered as itself (so if the operator pressed âT', for
example
, the only letter that would not light up on the lampboard was âT' itself), and the machine was reciprocal, i.e. if âP' was encyphered as âT', with the machine set at the same position, âT' would be encyphered as âP'.