Chapter One

CHAPTER ONE

The Mystery in the Soul of State

They were playing cards or cleaning equipment in the hut that served as a barrack room when the sergeant came in and pinned a notice on the door. The officer cadets crowded round. But it was only a list of the names of those who had admitted they spoke foreign languages. They were ordered to report to the orderly room to show how well they knew them.

`What do they ask one?' I said to Peter Webber, who had been a contemporary of mine at King's, Cambridge and had studied modern languages.

`Oh, the same old phrases. In French "Tell him to wait until I come".'

`I see, the subjunctive.'

`In German you might get "I was at the meeting when the speaker was speaking", or possibly "I ought to have done it". This is the fourth time I've been tested since I joined the Field Security Police, and they never vary.'

Never was cynicism more accurate. At the interview next morning I was asked to translate every one of those phrases. `But your German is much better than you said it was,' said my examiner.

Two months later at the end of the course in December 1940 the cadets again gathered round the door. Which regiment had they been posted to? I had hopes of being commissioned in the Rifle Brigade. To my dismay I found against my name something called the Intelligence Corps. Hardly anyone had heard of it -- which was not strange, since it had been formed only that month.

`I'm told it has quite a nice cap badge,' said a school friend, John da Silva -- who was in fact to spend his life in Intelligence. I thought that a frivolous observation.

It was now nearly Christmas, and the new officers were all sent on leave over the holiday before they joined their units. One day just before the New Year I was lunching with my father at our club where he introduced me to a member called Carl Sherrington. He was the son of a famous Cambridge physiologist who had won the Nobel Prize with E.D. Adrian, and made a living as a railway economist. He knew the capacity -- that is to say how many trains a day could be run -- of every railway line in Europe and America. Hearing that I was expecting to be posted to the depot of the Intelligence Corps, he said, `But Kenneth Strong is itching to get his hands on people like you.'

Two days later I got a letter telling me to report to a Captain Sanderson at the War Office. He wore the ribbons of a veteran of the 1914-18 war and, characteristic of those days, had a moustache. He looked like a friendly, alert terrier. In a corner of the room sat a young officer peering into an epidiascope examining air photographs.

`I understand you know about railways,' said Sanderson, and looked somewhat disconcerted when I said I didn't. `Well, then, your father does.' I recollected that at some time before 1914 my father had been associated with the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway. `Ah, that must have been it,' said Sanderson, relieved that he now had a cast-iron case for getting me transferred to his department. `Can you read German? Tell me what this means,' he said, thrusting into my hands a long report. At this point his phone rang, and while he answered it I was able to get the gist of the article.

`It's to do with transport in Europe,' I began.

`Excellent,' he said, without troubling me further. `I am hoping you will hear from us soon.' Next week I found myself back in that room, having been ordered to fill a post in MI14. I was twenty-four years old.

The reason Captain Sanderson was so ready to recruit me was simple. MI14 was the German department in the Military Intelligence Division of the War Office. It was still a tiny unit, and even when I left two years later it numbered no more than twenty officers. The staff had hardly the time to wade through the torrent of paper that fell over their desks. For they were expected to advise the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) what Hitler would do next. The Military Intelligence Directorate contained such well-known departments as MI5 (Security) and MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service); and certain other sections specialised in obtaining information from a specific source -- one, for example, interrogated prisoners of war and, having bugged their rooms, listened to their talk. But there was one department which nearly all the others served. That was MI3. It concerned itself with operational intelligence: it collected and interpreted all information from whatever source about the military forces and intentions of other countries -- 3a dealt with Iraq, Iran and the Near East; 3b with Italy; 3c with the Soviet Union.

The German section had once been part of MI3, but it was now so important that it had broken away to become MI14. In MI14 one unit led by the second in command assessed German strategy and intentions. Another worked on what could be discovered about the operations of the German secret services, the Abwehr, Gestapo and Sicherheitsdienst. (Its head was a theatrical character, Brian Melland, and he was aided by Leo Long, an efficient young officer who was to be shamed years later when he was identified as one of the Cambridge spies. Long was a pupil of Anthony Blunt: self-confident, masterful and dismissive of fools.) Another section, vital for Bomber Command, identified the whereabouts and strength of the German anti-aircraft or Flak regiments. It was led by a former England cricket captain, G.O. `Gubby' Allen. Crucial to the enterprise was the German Order of Battle section, which tried to estimate the number and character of the German divisions, and identify their commanders. Where were these divisions, and were they stationary or moving? The section I joined tried to answer the second of these questions.

After the spit and polish of my officer cadet training, the atmosphere of MI14 was anything but regimental. This was not surprising. It contained only three regular officers, and the only thing that was regimental about its chief, Lieutenant-Colonel Kenneth Strong, was his tartan trews. He looked like a beaver -- an eager beaver bursting out of his uniform, with dark hair, a fine forehead, clever, shifty eyes and so chinless that he came to be known as the hangman's dilemma. Strong had been assistant military attache in Berlin before the war, spoke German well and knew several of his contemporaries and elders on the German General Staff. His reports from Berlin were so impressive that they were one of the factors, it was said, that persuaded Chamberlain to introduce conscription.(1) Strong won his reputation as an intelligence officer when he predicted the Germans would attack through the Ardennes in 1940. The French -- our senior ally militarily and in intelligence work -- scouted this bizarre idea.(2) Yet before the war, so Strong recalled, the senior officer present at the end of any lecture he gave would warn the audience against being over-influenced by his words on the strength of the German army; and he was forbidden at the Imperial Defence College to suggest that the German air force might give close support to their troops in the field.(3)

Strong's task was enormous. He had to build an organisation almost from scratch and shoulder a multitude of tasks, such as teaching the Military Operations departments what kind of army they were facing and how it would fight. He was tireless in explaining how the German General Staff was drilled in the tactic of the Schwerpunkt, or sudden concentration of armour and infantry to punch a hole in the enemy's line and exploit the breakthrough. He knew how efficient the German army was: `You need three British battalions to equal one German. When will people learn this?' he used to say. But now his most pressing problem was to gauge how likely Hitler was to invade England. The unit in MI14 which I joined was there to put the evidence before him.

Captain Sanderson, the head of the unit, collated this evidence. But the crucial figure in the room was the man of my own age whom I had seen studying air photographs when I was first interviewed. This was Peter Earle, one of only three regular officers in the British Army who at the beginning of the war knew how to interpret air photographs; it was he who assessed the most crucial evidence by counting the fluctuating number of barges and other craft assembled in the Channel ports. If Strong made one think of a beaver, Earle had the air of a greyhound. He was lean and sensitive, with delicate hands and a quizzical expression. He was one of those Etonians who appear to be indolent but in fact develop curious talents and interests. Like Strong he was not a stereotyped regular officer. He disliked horses -- `nasty, unpredictable animals' -- but knew a lot about fast cars. However squalid our conditions became (we were soon moved underground) his own corner of the room somehow conveyed the calm of a country house. If some vulgarian patronised or oiled to him, his expression never changed; only his nostrils quivered. He was highly strung yet imperturbable -- a quality much needed when later he became military assistant to the formidable and alarming Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Alan Brooke. He was later to tell me that my predecessor was a devious, bone-idle and bad-tempered officer whom Strong had sacked by the well-used method of getting him appointed at a higher rank to a department in Military Operations, whence he departed by being again promoted to the rank of major in some other long-suffering organisation.

My prime task was to collate the evidence we got on the movement of German troops. What kind of evidence could we hope to get?

*****

Military intelligence, so goes the well-worn joke, is a contradiction in terms. In fact it resembles a fountain, the jets of evidence spurting from different pipes. Air photographs; prisoner of war interrogations; captured documents; the reports of our own, and the gossip of foreign, diplomats; the observations of businessmen and industrialists travelling abroad, and the stories filed by foreign correspondents whose sources of information could be more reliable than those of our own diplomats. We studied newspapers, broadcasts and dozens of specialised periodicals that, unknown to their editors, rendered up secrets. Two organisations produced the most intriguing material. The first was MI6, whose spymasters recruited agents in Europe and elsewhere. The second was the by now famous, but then deadly secret, Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, where the radio messages sent between units of the German armed forces were decyphered.

Someone has to put all this information together and make sense of it if he can. It is not an academic exercise, although academic skills and techniques come in handy. The War Cabinet, the Chiefs of Staff and the Joint Planning Staff wanted quick answers to the questions they asked. What would be Hitler's next move? How strong would the German forces be were we to land in Sardinia -- and how quickly could they be reinforced? To answer such questions a staff had to be set up in each of the service ministries to estimate how many divisions, air squadrons, U-boats and capital ships the enemy possessed; where they were located and employed tactically; how many divisions were armoured, motorised or horsedrawn, and which squadrons were fighters, medium or heavy bombers. Almost anything that told us about the enemy's army was grist to the mill. And when -- as was often the case -- one source said one thing and another the opposite, we had to judge which was the more reliable.

Other ministries in Whitehall were expected to help the War Office, the Admiralty and the Air Ministry in their work: the Foreign Office injected political intelligence, the newly created Ministry of Economic Warfare (MEW) informed them about enemy production of weapons and identified bottlenecks or weaknesses in his economy. So a handful of officers and officials, each a spider, sat at the centre of their web and as each fly or item of intelligence got caught on a strand, they scuttled down to inspect and devour it, hoping that one day a fat bumblebee of information would land on the web and reveal what the other insects were about.

At the beginning of the war the British secret service stood higher in the imagination of foreigners than in Whitehall. The prestige of spies had waned. The masterful agent, who purloins the draft of a secret naval treaty from the private residence of a senior civil servant in the Admiralty, existed only in the imagination of the authors of thrillers. Foreigners took at face value the yarns of dozens of writers from Kipling and Buchan to Dornford Yates in which lean, bronzed British officers, often in disguise, outwitted the other side in the `game': the Great Game. `The only game in the world worth playing,' in Jim Maitland's words.(4) So much so that any event which thwarted their own plans was apt to be attributed to the British secret service. The reality was, alas, somewhat different. Sir Stewart Menzies, the legendary `C', had no second-in-command to organise his office, with the result that he worked late hours and had had no leave for two years. The heads of the espionage and counter-espionage sections hated each other and were not on speaking terms. None of the staff of MI6 was a university graduate. Hugh Trevor-Roper left a memorable account of the power struggles in MI6 during the war(5) and of the egregious characters who worked there; Graham Greene wrote of futile days in East Africa spent controlling agents whom he knew to be unreliable and corrupt and who provided worthless information. The tales of John le Carre told of a world of mirrors in which no one could be certain on which side agents were operating. These gifted writers turned MI6 into a black comedy. From the days when Sir Mansfield Cumming (the original `C') set it up in 1909 its leaders rejoiced in sobriquets like Dummy Oliver, Blinker Hall, Biffy Dunderdale, Lousy Payne, Buster Milmo, Pay Sykes, Tar Robertson, Barmy Russel and Quex Sinclair (not to be confused with his successor but one, Sinbad Sinclair).(*)

Between the wars MI6's tiny staff was mainly engaged in identifying Soviet attempts to cause mutinies in the armed forces and to capture the leadership of the left and the trade unions. That famous clubland hero Bulldog Drummond was portrayed by Sapper as the leader of the Black Gang, a set of ex-army officers clandestinely kidnapping Soviet agents as they were infiltrated into Britain under the direction of the greatest of all villains, Carl Peterson. Intellectuals, horrified by Sapper's vision of life, denounced the gang as a bunch of fascists, but in fact they were pursuing a quarry that existed in real life. Christopher Andrew, the doyen of scholars of the intelligence community, concluded that the Zinoviev letter was not a forgery, even though the action of MI5 in briefing Admiral Blinker Hall to leak the letter to the Daily Mail was inexcusable.(+)(6)

The zeal of the intelligence services in such anti-Soviet activities was their undoing. Lloyd George sacked the head of Special Branch, Baldwin treated them with disdain (though his eminence grise J.C.C. Davidson employed retired MI5 officers to infiltrate Labour Party headquarters), and Chamberlain distrusted the former head of the Foreign Office, Sir Robert Vansittart's claims that an opposition existed in Germany waiting to overthrow Hitler on a sign from Britain. When members of this opposition came to London to meet Chamberlain, he said they reminded him of Jacobites in the reign of William III.

Intelligence is not the road to promotion in the armed services. Before 1914 only that outrageous Admiral Lord Charles Beresford understood its value to the navy, and got the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, to establish the Naval Intelligence Department in 1886. (In revenge the Admiralty cut the salaries of those who served in it.) As a result the Admiralty's record in the First World War was miserable, misreading intercepts and misleading Jellicoe and Beatty in action in the North Sea. The Commander in Chief of the army, Queen Victoria's cousin the Duke of Cambridge, Buller in the Boer War, and Haig and Henry Wilson in the First World War thought intelligence unnecessary. General French nearly lost the war in August 1914 by refusing to believe reports of the great enveloping movement by Kluck on the right wing of the German armies.

Nor was Whitehall much better prepared in 1939. The War Office and the Air Ministry had no technological sections. The War Office was informed that 1400 medium German tanks were in service: in fact only 300 existed. It was part of Hitler's propaganda to exaggerate the size of the German air force, and the Air Ministry fell for his boast that aircraft production would soar from 700 to 1500 a month: in fact in December 1940 only 780 aircraft were produced. This vast air force was intended, so it was put about, to flatten British cities as the Germans had destroyed Guernica, whereas in fact many of the aircraft were Stukas intended to give close air support to the army. Naval intelligence was much more accurate. Hitler began the war with fifty-seven U-boats, and the navy's estimate was only nine more.(7)

The estimates of Germany's economy were again wide of the mark. It was thought to be near collapse through overstrain. Goering's exhortation `Guns before butter' was taken at face value, and the German people were pictured as having tightened their belts so far that they could hardly tighten them further in order to re-arm. Only a Hungarian refugee don at Balliol, Thomas Balogh, questioned these conclusions: in an article in the Economic Journal in September 1938 he argued that the sacrifice made by the German civilian population was much less than was imagined.(8)

The organisation of intelligence was not much better. Intelligence reports are misleading unless they are analysed and interpreted. Yet even when they have been analysed, intelligence is still a mine of controversy unless there is a single body to resolve the different interpretations which each ministry will put forward. In 1936 Sir Maurice Hankey set up the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) to give such a unified view, but the Planning Staff ignored it, and the Directors of Intelligence and the three armed services sent only their deputies to its meetings. Not until February 1940 were the Directors of Military, Naval and Air Intelligence all at the same meeting.(9) Each was briefed by his own staff, and each thought his own view of the situation was the most sagacious, so they did not bother to summon meetings of the JIC or ask it to provide an appreciation. The Foreign Office for long refused to share its political intelligence with the armed forces: indeed, it did not distinguish intelligence from the advice it gave to the Cabinet on foreign affairs. To diplomats intelligence and advice were a seamless garment.

The JIC was also burdened with too many responsibilities.(10) It dealt with plans to deceive the enemy, with internal security, with propaganda, with the treatment of prisoners of war, and with topographical intelligence. It jibbed only when it was proposed that it should mastermind the running of double agents. Too many summaries circulated, and a body on future operations duplicated its work. Much of its time was spent in struggling with the administration of intelligence, and it had no secretariat. Until the fall of France the JIC met the Chiefs of Staff only once, and it was never invited to join the Planning Staff in the War Cabinet Office.(11)

As war drew near, MI6's sources of information began to dry up. When Hitler marched into Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938 the SIS network of agents in Vienna and Prague unravelled. Until 1937 our military attaches in Berlin had been able to glean considerable information about German military organisations and equipment: after that year their old haunts and contacts were sealed off. The British network in Holland was penetrated by the Abwehr in 1935, and there was no advance warning of the Nazi-Soviet pact. There were indeed warnings from MI6 and the Foreign Office of the German invasion of Norway in April 1940, but earlier that month the War Office had brushed them aside. Paul Thummel, an old-guard member of the Nazi Party and a captain in the Abwehr, was MI6's most prized agent in the Czech network, but he could give no warning of the German attack through the Ardennes though a woman in the Polish underground did. Whether it was this that alerted Strong I do not know, but it did not convince the French. By mid-1940 the military operations branch in the War Office did not believe what the intelligence sections told them, and hardly ever bothered to meet them.

Nevertheless, hope for the intelligence community was on the horizon. Even before war was declared some of the First World War veterans of Blinker Hall's Room 40 in the Admiralty began to recruit for the Government Code and Cypher School which had recently moved to Bletchley Park. Two classics dons were asked to select likely colleagues. Professor F.E. Adcock at Cambridge was diligent, Professor Last at Oxford was not, with the result that many of the earliest members came from Cambridge. Adcock was a fellow of King's, where I had been an undergraduate. He lured so many of the dons I knew best there -- for instance the devotee of Horace, Patrick Wilkinson, and my own director of studies in history, Christopher Morris -- that it did not require much imagination to guess what was going on. The staff was recruited by unabashed nepotism. Nigel de Grey and Dilly Knox of Room 40 days did not hesitate to recruit their sons; Evelyn Sinclair was the sister of `Quex' Sinclair, a former chief of the Secret Intelligence Service. The dons were told to say that they were engaged on research into the civil air defence of London. It is certainly true that had security depended on the normal apparatus of passes and sentries, the secret would have not been kept long. One member of the staff who left his pass at home wrote on the temporary pass he was given the name `Heinrich Himmler' and was admitted without demur.

Sir Stewart Menzies, the chief (`C') of MI6, under whom Bletchley nominally operated, once said that the best guarantee of security was to employ kinsmen of those known personally. Today such faith in the integrity of the old boy network may be met with sneers and the mention of Burgess and Blunt; indeed the `fifth man', John Cairncross, did for a short time penetrate the organisation. Yet the secrecy of the work at Bletchley was preserved because the staff, realising how important it was not to gossip, were fanatically loyal to the institution. No one knew the whole story. Few knew, or had time to know, what the others were working on; and the various processes were so complicated that an individual had only `tunnel vision' of the work on which he was personally engaged. At their peak the staff numbered 9000, but for thirty-five years none breathed a word to the media until F.W. Winterbotham wrote his book The Ultra Secret in 1974. Bletchley's success depended on one word: security. The work of the dazzling mathematicians and cryptographers would have gone for nothing had the Germans discovered that we had broken the secret of the Enigma machine.

The material which the cryptographers at Bletchley dissected was gathered by hundreds of men and women at listening posts scattered throughout the country. They worked in six-hour shifts listening to German radio operators sending messages by wireless telegraphy. It was slogging, unrewarding work to record a lot of unintelligible letters in morse. They came to recognise the individual operators by their quirks and idiosyncrasies in transmitting messages, by the frequencies they used and by their call signs. They could tell who sent an unsigned message from the style of the operators chatting to each other. Sometimes they could sense something fishy: in June 1941 the call signs of two construction companies, known to be in Holland, were transmitted from Poland, yet copious transmissions were still coming from Holland, and very few from Poland. The deduction was clear. The construction companies had moved to Poland and the transmissions from Holland were being faked.(12)

The unintelligible messages logged by our radio operators were sent to Bletchley where the cryptographers in Huts 6 and 8 got to work on them. The cryptographers had spotted the weaknesses in the Enigma machine, and the carelessness of those who operated it. They searched for cribs -- some repetition, such as a weather report transmitted in much the same words at the same time of day week in, week out. With these and other devices they put together what they called a menu and fed this into the `bombes' -- electro-mechanical engines, the brain-child of a fellow of King's, Alan Turing. Turing and Gordon Welchman built on the work of the Poles and the French, and Turing was to invent the first automatic electronic digital computer that could store programmes.(13)

The bombes determined the wheel settings of the Enigma machines. When the German navy in February 1942 added a fourth wheel to the machines installed in U-boats, the bombes could not perform, and it was not until December 1942 that the cryptanalysts broke the new Enigma settings. Meanwhile the sinkings by U-boats of Allied convoys soared. This reverse in the Battle of the Atlantic was to have a profound effect on Allied strategy.

The bombes were dispersed over the countryside and serviced by a flotilla of 2000 Wrens. Year after year, with little chance of promotion, they worked, whey-faced, for four weeks of eight-hour shifts followed by four days' leave, getting electric shocks from the bombes and living in hideous conditions. Some collapsed, others had nightmares of breaking security, but they kept going by knowing that what they were doing was vital, in the way that most war work was not.

When the bombes had done their work and found the solution through permutation to the key on the Enigma machine which had been chosen for that day's transmission, what emerged were puzzling messages in German telegraphese. These were sent to Hut 3. If Bletchley had a centre it was there, where the second echelon of the staff got to work. Inevitably the books on Ultra concentrate on the triumphs of the cryptographers in Huts 6 and 8, but Ralph Bennett is right to point out that Hut 3 made the decrypts intelligible.(14) Linguists translated and emended the messages, and intelligence officers made sense of them. Some of the best linguists were schoolmasters accustomed to give top marks only to those boys who presented meticulously accurate translations. The intelligence officers were often dons who elucidated obscurities, abbreviations and map references. If a text was corrupt, they had to make sense of it. The duty officers in Hut 3, who worked an eight-hour shift, then had to paraphrase the Enigma translations into Ultra, so that if the Germans broke our own cypher they would not identify it as an Enigma message.(15) Only then did WAAFs teleprint the messages to the War Office, Admiralty and Air Ministry; and from to army group and army commanders in the field.

Among the first Enigma settings to be broken were those used by the German air force; and many of the messages that were decrypted came from `Flivos', air force liaison officers attached to armoured divisions. What Flivos reported was of intense interest to MI14. In the first year of the war, however, the security surrounding Ultra sometimes defeated those whom it was meant to help. To explain how these German messages had been received, Bletchley invented a ubiquitous, highly-placed agent with the code name of `Boniface', and displayed singular ingenuity in producing convincing situations in which this source might have got hold of the message that was passed to us in MI14: `Source was able to look over the shoulder of GOC of X Fliegerkorps and read . . .' Once bad weather made an Enigma message almost unintelligible since several groups of numbers in the original signal had not been picked up, but the staff at Bletchley excelled themselves: `Source was able to retrieve from a waste paper basket a badly charred document . . .' When such messages were first received the intelligence staffs gave no more credence to them than they would have to the utterances of a chuckle-headed spy. The navy, on the other hand, insisted on the original messages being sent to the Admiralty, but the intelligence staff there were as sceptical as the army about Ultra, and the muddles between the Home Fleet and the Admiralty remind one of the calamities of the Battle of Jutland, when the outnumbered German fleet inflicted heavy casualties on the Royal Navy. Struggles for turf were also inevitable. When Rommel landed in North Africa in February 1941, Bletchley Park (under the nominal supervision of Stewart Menzies) cut red tape, and Hut 3 communicated direct to Wavell's headquarters in Cairo. Sure enough in the winter of 1941-42 the War Office and Air Ministry tried to assert their control at a time when the battles between Eighth Army and the Afrika Korps were fierce and fluctuating. In the end MI6 won out, and the intellectuals were surprised to find a businessman, E.M. Jones, appointed as head of Hut 3, and even more surprised to find that his sagacity in reorganising duties relieved them of chores and gave them more time to do their own work.(16) Similarly, in Whitehall intelligence staffs became more professional and came to recognise how valuable Ultra could be as the numbers of messages they received multiplied. During 1943 the decrypts rose from 30,000 to 90,000, and in the last five months of the war over 45,000 went to the Western and Italian fronts. By that time 9000 people were employed at Bletchley Park. Long before then, `Source Boniface' had faded away.(*)

Ultra was only one of the Bletchley products. Some staff worked on V cyphers, others extracted information about German troop movements from railway cyphers, which revealed consignment numbers -- tedious hack-work, but ultimately rewarding. Dilly Knox broke hand cyphers, which the Abwehr used. These were invaluable to Melland and Long in MI14(d). Patrick Wilkinson worked on the book code of the Italian navy, an old-fashioned cypher that was far harder to break than machine cyphers. Late in the war Bletchley built the first true electronic computer, Colossus, that enabled the British at last to read messages sent by the German High Command, the OKW, to theatre commanders.

Bletchley was a community where age, sex, rank and appearance were irrelevant. The atmosphere was like a senior common room in one of the less stuffy Oxford or Cambridge colleges. Only those with sensitivity to the life of the intellect, like Hugh Alexander or Commander Travis, could succeed in the art of managing the menagerie of talent. There was only one criterion: could you do the job you were assigned? Women were treated as the equals of men -- except, typical of Treasury rules, as regards pay: they were sometimes enrolled as linguists rather than cryptographers in order to get them equal pay. Many of them worked in dull routine jobs, like compiling the Index -- a vast compendium of cross-references so that any message or unit or event could be traced in an instant. They could hold their own if challenged. Jean Howard, one of three women in the liaison section, was not to be cowed when a group of generals came to inspect the war map of the Russian border in early June 1941 and ridiculed the number of pins representing the massed German divisions: surely there were too many? They were taken aback when she replied that her training as an opera singer ill-equipped her to invent an order of battle.

The fact that so many at Bletchley knew each other had advantages. Patrick Wilkinson judged that the friendship between the two chess-players Hugh Alexander and Stuart Milner-Barry, or between Gordon Welchman and John Jeffries, prevented rivalry between sections that might have been at each other's throats because they were competitors. The young and obscure chalked up successes. Donald Michie, a classics specialist without mathematical training, straight from Rugby School, made a mark as an analyst and later became a professor of machine intelligence at Edinburgh. Mavis Batey decyphered the Italian Fleet signal that told Admiral Cunningham what he needed to know to win the Battle of Matapan. Peter Calvocoressi, whose sole virtue seemed to be that he could read upside down, and who was rated by the War Office as `no good not even for intelligence',(17) was another success, along with his friend Jim Rose, the future literary editor of the Observer and chairman of Penguin Books. F.L. (Peter) Lucas, another King's don, wrote analyses of campaigns that were full of hints and hypotheses: they jogged the mind out of its rut.

Even more remarkable was Harry Hinsley, who had a sixth sense for deducing from the traffic and decrypts if something was up. In the spring of 1940 he tried to get the Admiralty to understand the significance of some decrypts that revealed that heavy ships were leaving the Baltic. He was ignored -- until the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious was sunk off Narvik. From then on Hinsley, still an undergraduate, with an astonishing shock of hair and a cheeky grin, was persona grata at Scapa Flow and at the Admiralty.

Nearly everyone wore civilian clothes: some, Turing among them, were scruffy. The story circulated that when Churchill visited Bletchley in 1941 he met Turing and, turning to Alistair Denniston, said: `I told you to leave no stone unturned in recruiting the best people, but I did not expect you to take me literally.'

One man transformed the standing of intelligence in Whitehall and throughout the armed services. That was Winston Churchill. From his experience at the Admiralty in the First World War Churchill was almost alone among politicians in understanding the value of intelligence. A cardinal rule of intelligence is never to allow officers, however exalted their rank, to see messages sent by top-grade sources before they have been interpreted by the intelligence staff. The CIGS never saw Ultra himself. Nor did Montgomery. Churchill, however, insisted that he be shown all Ultra messages of interest. Stewart Menzies, who had virtually nothing to do with the running of Bletchley, realised that his prestige and power as head of MI6 rested on serving up what the Prime Minister called the golden eggs, and he saw that he got them with his breakfast. As a result Churchill sometimes startled his Chiefs of Staff -- not yet briefed by their Directors of Intelligence -- by referring to some piece of news they had not heard.

Churchill paid several visits to Bletchley, one of which was to have a sequel. In November 1941, maddened by the inability of the administration at Bletchley to persuade Whitehall to exempt some young experts there from military service and to allow them to recruit twenty women clerks and some typists, Turing, Welchman, Alexander and Stuart Barry wrote a long personal letter to Churchill explaining their needs and why, for lack of them, the decrypting of Enigma, vital in the Battle of the Atlantic against the U-boats, was being delayed. Churchill immediately dictated a minute to General Ismay in the War Cabinet Offices: `Make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this has been done.'(18)

Churchill recognised that the problem was not so much the collection of information as the way to use it. Within a week of taking office as Prime Minister and Minister of Defence, he ordered the Chiefs of Staff to draw up a new directive for the JIC in which they were bidden to `take the initiative in preparing at any hour of the day or night, as a matter of urgency papers on any particular development'.(19) The JIC soon found their conclusions subjected to scrutiny by Churchill's personal staff. On 5 July 1940 `The Prof' Lindemann, later Lord Cherwell, correctly challenged the Air Ministry estimate, endorsed by the JIC, that the German air force could deliver 4800 bombs a day. The tone of the Prime Minister's directive showed he wanted instant action. Like Ezekiel, Churchill breathed life into the dry bones of the JIC. Early in 1939 the War Office had proposed that the chairman of the JIC should be the Foreign Office representative, the ostensible reason being that a neutral civilian would see fair play between the three armed services. The less charitable view of this decision was that the War Office was determined not to allow the Admiralty to take the chair. No wonder: Admiral Godfrey was the one Director full of ideas. His biographer, however, admits that he was not a man to conceal his contempt for less gifted colleagues, in particular the charming courtier and Guardsman, General Beaumont-Nesbit. But the War Office had not reckoned with the young man whom the Foreign Office appointed, William Cavendish-Bentinck. As the youngest of the JIC members, and a civilian, it took Cavendish-Bentinck time and patience to galvanise his colleagues, and only when Churchill spoke could he at last set up a secretariat under an elusive, secretive barrister, Denis Capel Dunn, and impose some sort of discipline upon them.

*****

Such was the situation when I joined MI14. When I look back on those days and the years that followed, I see not only the remarkable stream of information that came from Ultra and many other sources. I also see the influences -- some beneficent, some malign -- that affected the interpretation of the evidence. I see the inevitable distortions and the immense efforts made by the operational intelligence staffs to produce a coherent explanation of the evidence that would convince army commanders, Supreme Headquarters, the Chiefs of Staff, the Prime Minister and the President of the United States. The Joint Intelligence Committee embodied an ideal: that each ministry would lay on the table its interpretation of the evidence, and after discussion a unanimous report would be signed which the Planners and the Chiefs of Staff could use. The ideal was frustrated. The War Office and the Air Ministry were both in the grip of what might be called an ideology -- a theory of how the war could be won. The ideology was not constant: it fluctuated according to the fortunes of war. Indeed, within each ministry different interpretations were held, and the director of intelligence would be canvassed by one or other faction. Dejection in defeat affected the appreciation which Auchinleck and his staff made when the Eighth Army was driven back by Rommel to El Alamein. They looked over their shoulder and saw the German army advancing into the Caucasus, so they drew up plans to evacuate the Nile Delta and send troops a thousand miles to the north to protect the oil in Iraq and Iran. Per contra, the euphoria of victory in Normandy blinded Montgomery and his staff: they neglected the evidence from Ultra that the Germans were determined to hold on to the Scheldt estuary and stop Antwerp operating as a port.(20) I was to learn time and again that those of us who served in operational intelligence and tried to make sense of the information got it wrong. Had I been years older I might have felt as Shakespeare's Henry IV did:

O God! that one might read the book of fate, And see the revolution of the times Make mountains level, and the continent -- Weary of solid firmness -- melt itself Into the sea... O! if this were seen, The happiest youth, viewing his progress through, What perils past, what crosses to ensue, Would shut the book, and sit him down and die.

But this happy youth had no intention of doing so. On that Christmas of 1940, like everyone else, I was full of boundless, unreasonable optimism.

FNT[(*) In the period between Victorian times, when men called even their closest friends by their surnames, and the present day, when not to know someone's first name makes it almost impossible to address him without appearing supercilious or pompous, nicknames like Stubby, Toby and Tubby were used as a gesture towards informality, particularly in the Army and Navy.]FNT FNT[(+) The letter, apparently signed by Soviet Politburo member Grigori Zinoviev, urged the British Communist Party to foment revolution. The publicity it attracted contributed to the defeat of Ramsay MacDonald's Lawyer government at the 1924 General Election.]FNT FNT[(*) It was part of intelligence jargon to refer to an agent as `Source'. Colonel Strong's personal assistant, Lieutenant Cooley, who could be relied on to know what was cooking, was always referred to in MI14 as `a well-placed Chinese source'.]FNT (*) In the period between Victorian times, when men called even their closest friends by their surnames, and the present day, when not to know someone's first name makes it almost impossible to address him without appearing supercilious or pompous, nicknames like Stubby, Toby and Tubby were used as a gesture towards informality, particularly in the Army and Navy.]FNT FNT[(+) The letter, apparently signed by Soviet Politburo member Grigori Zinoviev, urged the British Communist Party to foment revolution. The publicity it attracted contributed to the defeat of Ramsay MacDonald's Lawyer government at the 1924 General Election.]FNT FNT[(*) It was part of intelligence jargon to refer to an agent as `Source'. Colonel Strong's personal assistant, Lieutenant Cooley, who could be relied on to know what was cooking, was always referred to in MI14 as `a well-placed Chinese source'.

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Changing Enemies

9780801484902

0801484901

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