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On 26th August one of the [German] operators from Army Group, South Ukraine…suddenly broke into violent remarks about Hitler, using the peculiarly foul language in which the Germans delight. The operator at Supreme Army Command tried to shut him up in equally filthy language. This interchange lasted for about ten minutes…

The incident is only noteworthy as a possible indication of the way things are going.

Nigel de Grey, Deputy Director at Bletchley Park, to Sir Stewart Menzies, 14 September 1944¹

By the autumn of 1944 the Second World War was ending and the Cold War had, to all intents and purposes, already begun. In the east, the German Army was collapsing fast, and by September Soviet forces were at the borders of Prussia. A month later, American forces had entered Germany from the west, capturing the ancient town of Aachen. While much bitter fighting lay ahead, the minds of officials in London, Washington and Moscow were increasingly focused on the post-war settlement. Wartime relations with Russia had never been easy. Stalin’s intense and unwavering suspicion was underlined by the fact that, throughout the war, he had refused to leave Soviet-controlled territory to meet Churchill and Roosevelt. Harsh Soviet behaviour in newly occupied areas like Poland already pointed to post-war confrontation and rivalry, and all eyes were on the advance into Germany.

Britain and the United States were gearing up for piratical raids on the headquarters and laboratories of a collapsing Third Reich, and Axis sigint material was the treasure that was most actively sought. A joint Anglo-American planning group began consulting with Bletchley Park about what material it wished to scoop from an occupied Germany. By early 1945, Intelligence Assault Units were moving into Germany alongside the fighting elements of Allied formations, looking for all kinds of top-secret German experimental weapons. Bletchley Park despatched its own Target Intelligence Committee teams, known as ‘TICOM teams’, made up of a mixture of British and American personnel, to seek out cryptographic equipment and sigint personnel from Germany. The whole TICOM programme was run on what Commander Edward Travis called ‘an entirely inter-allied’ basis.²

Suddenly, boffins in glasses and cardigans found themselves turned into amateur commandos. Whisked away to a quarry near Bletchley, those selected for this task were given a short course in the use of sub-machine guns and hand grenades. They began on the Thompson sub-machine gun, but soon found the lighter Sten gun to be an easier weapon to handle. None of them performed well, but nevertheless they were soon on their way to Hitler’s ‘Alpine Lair’ at Berchtesgaden. Major Edward Rushworth, one of the senior British officers from Hut Three, led a TICOM team of a dozen officers, accompanied by Selmer Norland, an American stationed at Bletchley Park. They arrived at the major German headquarters at Augsburg on 8 May, VE-Day. Augsburg had been home to the famous German ‘Fish’, or Geheimschreiber, the encyphered teleprinter which Bletchley had eventually defeated with the mighty ‘Colossus’ computer. Sadly, all these beautiful machines, lovingly manufactured by Lorenz, had been smashed and the cypher wheels had gone. The dejected team surveyed the debris. However, a day later their spirits rebounded when they gleefully recovered a single intact late-model ‘Fish’ from a town on the Austrian border.³

On 12 May 1945 they reached Hitler’s Alpine retreat. The Führer’s accommodation had been heavily bombed, but a hundred feet below ground was a maze of bunkers and tunnels to explore, including an emergency power station and a complete telephone exchange. No more cypher machines seemed to be in evidence, and the mission was tailing off when, as a last task, Rushworth set off for nearby Rosenheim on the Austrian border, to question a cryptographer who had been working for the German High Command (OKW). While they were there, a group of other German prisoners sent a message asking to speak to the ‘proper people’. This team had served in the OKW headquarters sigint units and now revealed that, terrified of the rapid Soviet advance, they had buried their equipment under the pavement in front of their headquarters. Called ‘OKW-Chi’, they had successfully broken what was referred to as ‘Russian Fish’. This was an encrypted Soviet military teleprinter that achieved an early version of packet switching, breaking each message into nine different parts and routing it along separate channels, before reassembling it. The Germans had already worked out that their code-breaking triumph would have post-war value, and hoped to sell themselves on as a complete team.⁴

They were not disappointed. By 23 May they had been encouraged to unearth and set up their equipment, allowing them to resume decrypting Soviet command traffic. The Bletchley team were in awe of this vast technical display, which was eventually packaged up again in over a hundred boxes and chests. The eight tons of equipment and the complete German staff were loaded onto five lorries, which then wound their way slowly through a devastated Germany towards Bletchley. They arrived on 6 June 1945, and the equipment was set up and tested at the nearby radio station of Wavendon Manor.⁵ The German team was later employed intercepting Soviet encyphered teleprinter traffic which the British code-named ‘Caviar’, and although the messages were mostly about administration rather than policy or strategy, they provided rare insights into the daily activities of Soviet armed forces in post-war Europe.⁶ More treasures followed, and ultimately a further five tons of documents pertaining to Soviet codes and cyphers would arrive. In mid-June, Edward Travis asked Russell Dudley-Smith, a senior Bletchley Park officer, to try to establish some priority in exploiting the mountain of material now pouring in, but little did they know that they would still be working on this material in 1951.⁷ One-of-a-kind equipment stayed in Britain, while any duplicates were shipped to America.⁸

Yet another important haul was brought in by Colonel Paul Neff, an American who headed TICOM Team 6. This group included William Bundy, later US Assistant Secretary of State under President Lyndon B. Johnson, and Geoffrey Stevens from Bletchley Park. In April 1945 they pushed into southern Germany at Magdeburg, near Leipzig, and took control of a castle at Burgscheidungen which had recently been the headquarters of a code-breaking unit of the German Foreign Ministry called the Balkanabteilung, whose tasks had largely focused on Soviet and Balkan traffic. The fourteen staff and their documents were flown to Britain and taken to Bletchley Park. Burgscheidungen was in an area that would later be designated as part of the Soviet Zone, so Neff destroyed all traces of the German code-breakers’ presence before departing.⁹

The British caught Generalmajor Klemme, the Senior Commander of Radio Intelligence for the Luftwaffe, at the Husum-Milstedt intercept station on 19 May 1945. At first he was taken to Neumuenster Prison, but from there he was brought to Britain, and worked with the Allies on sigint in Germany until 10 March 1948, when he was considered to have been drained of all he knew about Soviet communications. On 1 May 1945, Major Oeljeschaeger and Major Beulmann from the Berlin Cryptographic Centre, which had been based in a stable block of the Marstall-Neues Palais at Potsdam, had fled in the direction of Hitler’s complex at Berchtesgaden. A few days later, with the Allies closing in, they stopped at Viehoff to burn all the records of Branch 3, and they fell into Allied hands on 22 May near Munich. On 5 July they were flown to Britain and placed in a special camp. They were surprised to be welcomed by their Branch Chief, Lt Colonel Friedrich, who had been captured before them. By June 1945 the British and Americans had scooped up most of the senior Luftwaffe sigint officers whose traffic they had listened to assiduously for much of the war.¹⁰

The TICOM teams were competing with the Soviets, who were also swooping on German cryptographic assets. To their surprise, Bletchley Park discovered that the Soviets had taken over some German Enigma-based communications nets and Fish teleprinters, and had begun using them for their own purposes. However, initial hopes of a post-war dividend from the breaking of these machines were quickly dashed. Roy Jenkins, who was then working at Bletchley Park, recalls this odd interlude in May 1945:

When the Russians got to Berlin they took over the Fish machines in the War Ministry, somewhat changed the settings, and proceeded to use them for sending signals traffic to Belgrade and other capitals in their new empire. We continued to do the intercepts and played around with trying to break the messages. We never succeeded. I think it was a combination of the new settings being more secure (which raises the question of how much the Russians had found out about our previous success) and the edge of tension having gone off our effort.

Elsewhere, Allied recovery teams regularly overran German sigint operations that were still chattering away, producing decrypts of mid-level Soviet Army Group traffic.¹¹

The timing of raids on German sigint centres was a precarious matter. If they were captured too early there was a risk that this would cut off a flow of valuable material that Bletchley was intercepting, or else would alert the Germans to the fact that the British knew more about their cyphers than was desirable. London was especially anxious to avoid freelance raiding activities that might be counter-productive. As early as May 1944 the London Signals Intelligence Board, the supreme governing board which met monthly to set overall British sigint policy, learned that some independently-minded British intelligence officers in the Middle East were planning to use the Special Operations Executive to raid enemy signals intelligence centres in the Balkans. Sir Stewart Menzies, who chaired the board, warned them sternly that operations against such centres were ‘highly undesirable’, and that action should ‘on no account be undertaken’ without prior personal authority from him.’¹²

Bletchley’s corporate takeover of the Axis sigint effort was not limited to Germany. There were even greater TICOM dividends in occupied Italy.¹³ Many countries competed for the services of the talented Italian cryptanalysts. After the Italian surrender in 1943, some eighty Italian code-breakers under Major Barbieri continued to work for the Germans at a station near Brescia in northern Italy. At the end of the war in Europe they were at last interrogated in Rome, and proved to have a large quantity of material, including photocopies of the codebooks of Turkey, Romania, Ecuador and Bolivia. They had also reconstructed some of the codebooks from France, Switzerland and the Vatican, and had smaller amounts of British and American traffic. During the spring of 1945 Barbieri’s unit had been concentrating on French diplomatic traffic, ‘a large number being messages to Paris either from Bonnet [French Ambassador] in New York or from Catroux [French Ambassador] in Moscow’. This traffic offered insights into subjects as diverse as Soviet-Yugoslav relations, Soviet policy in Germany, French economic negotiations with the United States and French plans for exploiting the Saar coal mines in Germany.¹⁴

With British encouragement, this precocious Italian unit worked on into the post-war period, without deviating from its French target. The diplomatic unit at Berkeley Street was already doing extensive work on Britain’s European allies, regarding them as either insecure or untrustworthy, or both. Much of this suspicion stemmed from a sense of indignation at their behaviour in 1940. In November 1944, Churchill wrote to Eden: ‘The Belgians are extremely weak, and their behaviour before the war was shocking. The Dutch were entirely selfish and fought only when attacked, and then for a few hours…’ General de Gaulle’s Free French government in exile, as other historians have shown, came in for especially close attention from the code-breakers during the war, and this continued into 1946.

During the important diplomatic conferences that marked the end of the war, Jimmy Byrnes, the new American Secretary of State, was apparently more eager to see decrypted French material than anything else, concerned that Paris was likely to be working with Moscow.¹⁵ French traffic from Moscow was of great interest to London because the former French Air Minister, Pierre Cot, had indeed begun a special diplomatic mission to Moscow to examine the possibility of cooperating against Germany in post-war Europe.¹⁶

French traffic provided the British and Americans with a fabulous window on the diplomacy of Western Europe.¹⁷ Indeed, in mid-1946 half the US Army code-breakers’ end product was based on intercepting French communications.¹⁸ Alarmingly, the French still seemed keen to develop a close relationship with Stalin.¹⁹ The traffic from French Embassies in Eastern Europe proved especially interesting. Typically, an intercept from the French Embassy in Tirana gave detailed information on the balance of power in the Albanian Cabinet and the waning power of the pro-Moscow elements, and intercepted French intelligence traffic sometimes offered information about the KGB.²⁰ With the work on Soviet codes still gaining momentum, the chatter of other countries that were talking to Moscow provided insights into their thinking. On 13 August 1945, Edward Travis sent Joseph Wenger, the senior American naval code-breaker, a long missive about cooperation on post-war French and Dutch systems, and explained British plans ‘to increase the effort here, especially on French’, adding that British plans to focus on Paris ‘are going into effect at an early date’. French, Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American traffic was soon consolidated into a single group under Josh Cooper.²¹

Major Barbieri was proud of the work of his Italian code-breakers against the French, but he pressed for more staff. So many of the best cryptographers, he complained, had been captured by the French in North Africa, adding, ‘the French are now employing them in their own service!’ Nevertheless, the British concluded that the Italians were ‘doing remarkably well with the limited reserves at their disposal’.²² By mid-1946 they were giving them new tasks, including Soviet traffic which came from military cypher machines at division level code-named ‘Taper’. British liaison officers with the Italians were working closely with code-breakers in Britain on the identification of new Taper groups. Senior Italian sigint officers knew that Taper traffic ‘which had been taken with so much depth and continuity for the past month’ was Soviet in origin, but many of their underlings were in a state of blissful ignorance about what they were collecting and who the ultimate customer was.²³

The efforts of TICOM were not exclusively directed towards raiding priceless sigint secrets from the Germans, the Italians and the Japanese. They were also concerned with protecting Britain’s own secret communications. Until late 1943, Bletchley Park regarded weak security as a problem restricted to Britain’s allies. But the ability to read German messages had revealed a number of unexpected security nightmares for the Allies. Ultra had shown Britain’s code-breakers that the Germans could read many of the codes of the Allies, such as those of the Soviets and the Free French. In Asia, terrible cypher security and serious human agent penetration ensured that Chinese codes were effectively an open book to the Japanese, even though Tokyo’s code-breakers were mediocre. Accordingly, keeping Britain’s secrets safe meant keeping them away from many of her allies, whose communications were being read by friend and foe alike.²⁴

By the autumn of 1943 the security situation looked much worse. The Italians had now capitulated, and captured Italian code-breakers revealed their successes against British codes. Captain Edmund Wilson, who helped to look after cypher security at Bletchley Park, held prolonged ‘conversations’ with Commander Cianchi, head of the Italian Cryptographic Bureau in Rome, and his staff during late 1943. Wilson explained that he could hardly call them ‘interrogations’, since Cianchi had given all of Italy’s secret information so happily and freely. Wilson said that ‘very valuable information’ on the breaking of British naval cyphers had been obtained, and that Britain was ‘extremely fortunate’ to have the cooperation of its former opponents. He pressed his colleagues to be ‘very careful indeed in the use they made of the information’ from these sources.²⁵

The TICOM raids into Germany later confirmed that British naval cypher security had been especially weak. B-Dienst, the German naval sigint service, had been reading British naval codes and cyphers easily at the start of the war. In early 1940 this had allowed it to read British plans for the Narvik raid in Norway, contributing to Germany’s success in repulsing that action. In 1942, the Dieppe raid had also been given away to the enemy before it took place due to poor cypher security. Incredibly, the Germans had been given a full five days to prepare for this ‘surprise attack’. Allied troops – mostly Canadians – paid for this dearly in the slaughter that followed. B-Dienst achieved the height of its success against Atlantic convoy traffic in 1943, allowing alterations of convoy routes to be radioed to U-boat commanders within a few hours.²⁶

The autumn of 1943 saw a long-overdue inquiry into the security of British cyphers, carried out by Brigadier Chitty, who began by visiting Bletchley Park. His findings did not make for comfortable reading. ‘It is true,’ he reported, ‘that of the fourteen sections working at B.P. [Bletchley Park] one is named Security of Allied Communications. From a total staff of some six thousand, however, the part-time services of only one man (Dudley-Smith) plus two or three girls, are spared to equip this section.’ At a higher level there was a supervising body called the Cypher Security Committee, supposedly chaired by Sir Stewart Menzies, but this had not attracted Menzies’ interest. Moreover, it lacked the power to compel Whitehall departments to change any practices that they thought lax. Chitty had done a spot check of twelve departments around Whitehall, and found that few were taking cypher security seriously. Britain needed a decent operational security section at Bletchley Park, and a proper supervisory board with teeth.²⁷

No cypher system, Chitty warned, was unbreakable. Britain’s most sensitive material was sent by one-time pads, which were, in his opinion, ‘unassailable’ if used correctly. Yet he reminded his superiors that Bletchley was making a ‘most successful daily attack’ on the one-time pads of other countries, ‘which reach us in a steady stream by Photography, Theft, and the sifting of Embassy waste-paper baskets’. The majority of London government traffic went by Typex machine, the British equivalent of Enigma. This was much better than Enigma, but Chitty asserted that its security had never really been tested. Again, much depended on the diligence of the operators:

One of the most instructive lessons I learnt from the [Government Code and Cypher] School was the fact that the Hagelin machine used by several nations including the Americans, affords in practice a widely different degree of security in different hands. Whereas this machine, as used by the Swedes and the Finns, has so far been virtually unbreakable, in the hands of the Italians who are normally very good cryptographers, we have for a long time been able to read it with ease. This was entirely due to the increasing idleness of the Italian operators and their persistent disregard of the numerous security rules which have been laid down for them.

For routine traffic the Foreign Office used more elderly hand cyphers, and the services made use of field cyphers in their lower formations. Quite rightly, these were thought to be even less secure.²⁸

By March 1944, no less a figure than Winston Churchill himself was calling for a shake-up. A new supervisory outfit was created, called the Cypher Policy Board. Although Menzies was in the chair, Edward Travis from GC&CS, together with the Secretary of the War Cabinet and a representative of the Chiefs of Staff were also there to keep a stern eye on him. This top-level representation underlined a deep anxiety about cypher security. A new Deputy Director of GC&CS, known as the Communications Security Adviser, was also to be appointed, who would serve as the Secretary of the Cypher Policy Board. In reality, this person, Captain Edmund Wilson, was the new broom.²⁹ After the war, Wilson was replaced by Commander T.R.W. Burton-Miller, who operated from a new headquarters at 10 Chesterfield Street W1, conveniently close to both MI5 and SIS.³⁰ Soon they had extended their authority over the design and production of all British cypher machines, with Gordon Welchman their chief technical adviser.³¹

During 1944, Bletchley Park offered an impressive technical solution to worries about cypher security. It fielded a new and rather superior cypher machine called ‘Rockex I’ that produced what was effectively automated one-time pad traffic. Instead of using tiresome tear-off sheets from a one-time pad that had to be processed by hand, it used code tape, which carried the same information. This was initially used for messages between Bletchley Park and its sigint collaborators in Washington and Ottawa, together with the SIS wartime office in New York. A new version called ‘Rockex II’ was already being developed by the British. The machine was originally intended for the Special Communications Units that disseminated Ultra to Allied commanders in the field, but after the war it became a mainstream British cypher machine, and was still being used by smaller embassies in the 1970s.³²

The super-secret Rockex cypher machine also had another purpose. From 1944, it provided extra security for the communications network of Britain’s SIS agents around the world. With assistance from Bletchley Park, wartime SIS had been able to develop an effective long-range wireless network to support its overseas stations and agents in the field. Known as SIS Section VIII, this was run by Brigadier Richard Gambier-Parry from two country houses not far from Bletchley, at Whaddon Hall and Hanslope Park. These locations not only provided a wireless network for SIS, they also built covert radio sets hidden in suitcases used by British agents and fitted out vehicles for the Special Liaison Units that supplied sigint to overseas commands such as Montgomery’s Eighth Army. In addition, Hanslope Park had provided a base for a unit called the Radio Security Service, under Ted Maltby, that had used mobile detection vans to track the radio transmissions of enemy agents hiding in wartime Britain. SIS was a small organisation with small volumes of radio traffic, and up until 1944 it had been comfortable sending its traffic by slow but highly secure one-time pads. The Rockex machine allowed it to take a leap forward.³³

By 1944, SIS’s Section VIII had expanded considerably and was taking on new customers. With its new Rockex machines, it was carrying some traffic for Bletchley Park, typically from Canada, together with secret messages for the Special Operations Executive which conducted sabotage. The Foreign Office was now looking at this efficient radio network with growing interest, and at the end of the war SIS Section VIII was simply coopted to form the backbone of a new Foreign Office communications system called the Diplomatic Wireless Service. Gambier-Parry became the first Foreign Office Director of Communications. As early as 1943 some embassies, such as that in Cairo, had been switching over to ‘experimental use of official wireless’ by making use of local SIS facilities.³⁴ Although diplomatic wireless was technically banned by international diplomatic convention, in practice cable communications had frequently been disrupted during the war, and wireless had crept into widespread use as an alternative.³⁵

The gradual development of the Diplomatic Wireless Service at Hanslope Park during 1944 and 1945 was another critical building block in the creation of the modern British sigint community. Alongside the military sigint collection stations in locations such as Ceylon, the Diplomatic Wireless Service, or ‘DWS’, doubled as a secret monitoring service working from within British Embassies and High Commissions. The first permanent undercover sigint station was set up at Ankara in 1943. DWS staff numbered close to a thousand, and about half its time was devoted to secret collection on behalf of the British code-breakers. Over the years it produced important results from locations as far afield as Moscow and Luanda because of its ability to collect short-range transmissions.

In August 1945 the Second World War finally drew to a close. Winston Churchill was of the view that Bletchley Park was the deciding factor in the defeat of the Fascist powers: in 1945 he apparently told King George VI that Ultra had effectively won the war.³⁶ Robert Harris, author of the novel Enigma (1995), rightly points out that most of the major combatants had military forces that were superior to those of Britain, not least in their weapons technology. Bletchley Park was the one place where we enjoyed a crucial world lead.³⁷ Harry Hinsley, a junior figure at Bletchley Park, but later the official historian who produced a magisterial study of intelligence during the Second World War, has famously asserted that Ultra shortened the war by several years, saving countless lives on all sides. Without Ultra, he states, ‘Overlord would have had to be delayed until 1946’.³⁸ Andreas Hillgruber, the distinguished German historian of Hitler’s strategy agrees, adding that as a result the Soviets might well have advanced much further west.³⁹

Yet others, including the British historian Paul Kennedy, have argued that the Second World War was largely a battle of material production, and that once America and Russia were both pitted against the Axis, their industrial might made the outcome only a matter of time – epitomised by the use of the atomic bomb in August 1945. In reality, the debate about the overall value of Bletchley Park has a troubling ‘What if?’ quality. Inevitably, we are encouraged to ponder the alternative universe of ‘no Ultra’. Ralph Bennett, like Harry Hinsley a Bletchley Park veteran turned historian, has expressed impatience with such counter-factual speculations, regarding them as a parlour game. He has argued that the absence of Ultra would have forced the faster development of other forms of intelligence, such as aerial reconnaissance.⁴⁰ Peter Calvocoressi, another distinguished historian who spent the war at Bletchley Park, has dismissed Hinsley’s assertions as ‘silly’.⁴¹

Some propositions can however be advanced with confidence. Ultra and other kinds of sigint contributed hugely to the outcome of the Battle of Britain. The breaking of naval Enigma changed the course of the Battle of the Atlantic, allowing the Admiralty to direct convoys away from concentrations of U-boats and bringing the level of ship losses down to a bearable, although still frightening, level. This in turn allowed a breathing space for more successful anti-submarine warfare techniques to be developed which would finally turn the tide in the battle against the U-boat in 1943. Ultra also contributed greatly to the British naval victories at the Battle of Cape Matapan (March 1941) and the Battle of North Cape (December 1943). Parallel code-breaking work by the Americans in the Pacific allowed the dramatic interception of the aircraft carrying the brilliant Admiral Yamamoto, architect of Pearl Harbor, which sounded the death knell for Japanese naval forces in the Pacific. It is impossible to understand the war at sea without comprehending the contribution of Ultra in the west and the breaking of a range of Japanese cypher systems in the east. Appropriately, it fell to a naval officer, Commander Edward Travis, to pilot Bletchley Park as it sailed forward into the post-war era.

Even in the spring of 1945, final victory in Europe had loomed like the end of an interminable school year – with the distant summer holidays already beckoning. Bletchley Park, with its nearby dormitories and improvised tennis courts, had looked rather like a vast boarding school waiting for the end of term. Post-war worries were not troubling many of the brilliant minds there. Instead, for the most part they were yearning for an end to war and a return to peacetime activities. The majority of Bletchley’s wartime residents were exhausted from years of gruelling hard work. The intellectual pressure had been enormous, and some had suffered nervous breakdowns: Jean Thompson, a Wren who worked at one of the outstations, recalls that they routinely referred to Bletchley Park as the ‘Nut House’.⁴² Most code-breakers greeted the end of the war with relief, returning to their former activities in ivy-covered colleges, libraries and museums. However, a minority had been bitten by the intelligence bug. They understood the fundamental importance of what they had been doing for the future of international affairs, and would stay on.

Those who remained at Bletchley Park were also thinking of ‘escape’ – but in a different sense. For them, the end of the war did not so much offer an opportunity of personal freedom, but more the possibility of liberation for the GC&CS. Their remarkable achievements over the last five years suggested that GC&CS might cease to exist under the cloying direction of Britain’s traditional overseas secret service, SIS, where the senior staff were often failed cavalry officers recruited in White’s or Boodle’s. Instead, GC&CS might hope to become an intelligence agency in its own right, perhaps one of a new and different kind. Indeed, its rising status was already signalled by a gradual change in everyday usage from terms like ‘GC&CS’ and ‘BP’ to the rather grander cover name of ‘Government Communications Headquarters’, or ‘GCHQ’, which had been in intermittent use since early 1940.⁴³

Bletchley Park had already taken some important strides towards becoming a fully-fledged intelligence service. Peter Calvocoressi, one of its distinguished wartime denizens, recalls that in its pre-war incarnation the Government Code and Cypher School was exactly what its name implied, ‘and no more’. It made up codes for use by the British government, and broke the codes of other nations. But at Bletchley Park, and especially under Gordon Welchman in Hut Six, code-breaking was gradually married to an intelligence process to provide a sophisticated system for sigint exploitation. No less importantly, Bletchley also designed a means for the secure and rapid distribution of sigint to essential customers, even in distant theatres such as South-East Asia. The sheer pressure of wartime exigency forced rapid and logical developments that might otherwise have taken decades.⁴⁴

Another massive achievement was that Bletchley Park and its diplomatic equivalent at Berkeley Street in London were properly ‘integrated’, mixing up staff from the three armed services and civilians. This was immediately obvious to any visitor from the curious blend of uniform and civilian dress, often in exotic combinations. Occasionally a visiting Admiral or General would fulminate to see members of his service dressed in colourful pullovers, and demand that they return to full uniform. However, the top brass on day trips from Whitehall were little more than a temporary nuisance. During the 1940s a sigint service which mixed up civilians and personnel from the armed services was quite remarkable. It would take the Americans until the early 1950s to achieve an integrated organisation that mirrored Bletchley. In Nazi Germany as Calvocoressi recalls, the situation had been even worse, for there ‘six or seven different cryptographic establishments fought each other almost as venomously as they fought the enemy’.⁴⁵

In the social anthropology of intelligence, sigint was emerging as the dominant tribe. ‘The Ultra community at BP saw itself as – perhaps was – an elite within an elite,’ recalled one code-breaker. Material gathered by other kinds of intelligence agencies was merely ‘Top Secret’, but sigint material was compartmentalised as ‘Top Secret-Ultra’. The ability to impose draconian security on its product would be a hallmark of a fully-fledged sigint organisation, and dominated its relations with its friends and allies in the code-breaking world. This security obsession also extended to people. The security rule at Bletchley Park was ‘Once in, never out.’ In other words, once people had worked in sigint, there was a reluctance to allow them to move to other areas of war work, and they were effectively ‘captive’ for the duration of the war.

Dominance was partly about size. By the end of the war, over ten thousand people were labouring under Bletchley’s direction. The expanded bombe effort alone led to the creation of five further outstations as far away as Stanmore and Eastcote on the outskirts of London. Working alongside GC&CS were the listening units of the armed forces, known as the Y services. Although these fed high-grade material to Bletchley Park, they also worked on low-grade material for their own purposes. Often considered ‘poor relations’, they derived their intelligence either from listening in to low-level tactical communications that were not encrypted, including clear voice traffic, or by simply analysing the flow of traffic. Analysing the patterns of radio traffic, including volume and direction, even without breaking the codes, could reveal a great deal of information about the enemy, and GC&CS worked closely with the armed services to develop what were known as the ‘Y stations’. Bill Millward, who continued to serve long after the war, recalls that Bletchley Park’s relationship to the Y services was to become ‘a sort of university of signals intelligence, developing techniques which all might share’.⁴⁶ The Y services had been largely responsible for deducing the enemy ‘order of battle’, the structure, strength and location of the units of the German armed forces. The Navy ran intercept sites at Scarborough and Winchester. The Army ran a site at Fort Bridgelands near Chatham, and later opened a station at Beaumanor Hall near Loughborough in Leicestershire. The RAF were located at Cheadle in Cheshire, and developed a large new site at Chicksands near Baldock in Bedfordshire. Many of these locations would continue as sigint sites after August 1945.⁴⁷ All of them were symptomatic of an industrial revolution in secret intelligence: both Bletchley Park and the outstations operated like factories, with three gruelling shifts each day.

At a deeper level, there had also been a social revolution in British intelligence. Brilliant individuals who only a year before had been members of international chess teams or wrestling with obscure mathematical problems in Cambridge colleges, were now focused on intelligence. Remorselessly logical, they could see that Bletchley Park was the intelligence machine of the future. Moreover, they were outsiders, with no sense of bureaucratic anxiety and no fear of the ‘Establishment’. They fearlessly articulated what to them was self-evident. GC&CS, once a small school of code-breakers working in the service of SIS, had now vastly outgrown its parent organisation. Gladwyn Jebb, one of a number of rising British diplomats who were temporarily attached to intelligence duties during the war, noticed this dramatic change. The organisations like Bletchley Park had been forced to recruit widely from industry and the universities to fill their ranks, so they had forward-looking staff who brought with them modern organisational techniques.⁴⁸ Jebb complained that SIS had ‘too much of what I would call the “false beard” mentality…more especially amongst those who have been in the show for a very long time’. The world had moved on, he argued: ‘The idea of a deeply mysterious “Master Spy”, sitting in some unknown office and directing an army of anonymous agents, is as outdated as it is romantic.’⁴⁹

The Americans had also opened the eyes of GC&CS to what was technologically possible. Although hobbled by the bitter Army–Navy divide, Washington nevertheless threw vast scientific resources at sigint. On their visits across the Atlantic, a core of determined individuals from Bletchley were able to glimpse what the future might hold. In 1944 a small group of talented British code-breakers began the long-range planning that would turn wartime Bletchley Park – with its chess players and crossword puzzlers – into Britain’s premier post-war secret service, with a strong sense of identity, a large budget and predatory designs on other agencies. Three key figures were instrumental in this: Gordon Welchman, the man behind Bletchley Park’s intelligence processing centre; Harry Hinsley, who would serve as the ‘sherpa’ for the Anglo–American–Commonwealth sigint summits after 1945; and Edward Crankshaw, who had handled wartime sigint discussions with the Soviets. Hugh Foss joined them on his return from a posting in Washington.⁵⁰

On 15 September 1944, only weeks after the liberation of Paris, this planning group began to consider GC&CS’s post-war future. It was led by Gordon Welchman, who was Assistant Director for Mechanisation, and had also been responsible for Hut Six, where Enigma was broken. Some of the exciting ideas the group advanced for the future of GC&CS grew largely out of the Hut Six experience. It called for a more centralised ‘Foreign Intelligence Office’ as part of a coherent national intelligence organisation, and for a comprehensive body dealing with all forms of sigint, together with a modern signals security organisation with the latest communications engineering. This, the group believed, could become a truly modern ‘Intelligence Centre’ governing all types of interception activities.⁵¹

Welchman’s group was tough-minded. There were, it argued, few people in GC&CS with real ability in general planning and strategic coordination. They observed, ‘it would be difficult to count as many as a dozen’. This talent should not be wasted on the final year of the war against Japan. Instead, as soon as the war in Europe was over, ‘as many as possible of the few potential planners should be set to work in the direction of our three immediate objectives, instead of devoting more of their time to Japanese problems’. GC&CS should not lose touch with developments in the field of Japanese sigint problems, since there were interesting things to learn in this sphere. However, it should merely extract technical benefits from the Japanese War, rather than expend resources upon it. British commanders in Burma, like Field Marshal Bill Slim, realised that they were now a low priority for the intelligence services, and complained bitterly about it.⁵²

GC&CS realised that speed was of the essence. It was ‘imperative to make an approach to the present Prime Minister at the earliest possible moment’. Any successor to Churchill, it reasoned, however sympathetic, could not have a real appreciation of ‘the fruits of intelligence in this war’, or Churchill’s keen appreciation of the importance of tight security. In Churchill it had a heavyweight advocate, and it feared a return to the pre-war situation of under-recognition of what sigint could achieve; even now, the true scale of its wartime output was known to only a very few in high places. Moreover, the really talented sigint planners were newcomers, and would soon be recalled to their pre-war occupations unless some positive action was taken to retain them. Quite simply, this came down to cash. GC&CS had to have the status to secure ‘a sufficiently liberal supply of money to enable it to attract men of first rate ability’, particularly engineers and electronics experts. It was also aware that it would have to give equal weight to all types of intelligence about foreign countries, ‘including scientific, commercial and economic matters’. This was a tacit reference to the targeting of friendly states.⁵³

In January 1945, the torch of post-war planning passed to William F. Clarke. Clarke, who had served continuously in code-breaking from 1916, warned that the ‘enormous power wielded by the Treasury’ might soon be brought to bear on GC&CS. As had happened in 1919, work on military cyphers might cease in favour of concentration on diplomatic material only. This, he insisted, could be ‘disastrous’, because the resulting damage to ongoing cryptographic research might mean that in the event of a sudden future conflict, enemy military traffic would prove inaccessible. Even more problematic was the challenge of building up the prestige of GC&CS. Its very secrecy was its worst enemy, ensuring that many in elevated government circles did not know its true value. There was also the ‘potential danger’ of a Labour government coming to power, since the interwar Labour government had found many aspects of the secret state to be repellent.

Clarke also paused to consider the emerging United Nations. Allowing himself some momentary Utopian thoughts, he observed that if the new organisation took the step of abolishing all code and cypher communications, this action ‘would contribute more to a permanent peace than any other’. However, he conceded that this ‘is probably the counsel of perfection’, and was highly improbable. Instead, he predicted that energetic code-making and code-breaking would persist into the post-war world. On the matter of who would control the British code-breakers, he felt that in the past neither the Admiralty nor the Foreign Office had been satisfactory. The current system of control by SIS also brought with it ‘certain disadvantages’. Clarke vigorously asserted that GC&CS should break free, not only of SIS but also of the Foreign Office. Instead it should be a separate organisation under either the Chiefs of Staff or the Cabinet Office, and should be regarded as a wholly separate third secret service.⁵⁴

As late as October 1944, some senior figures at Bletchley were still arguing for re-absorption by SIS. John Tiltman, the Soviet specialist, argued that the code-breakers should be ‘closely fused with S.I.S. under the Director General [Sir Stewart Menzies] as the one and only Intelligence producing service’.⁵⁵ However, the stock of Menzies was continuing to fall among senior figures in Whitehall. In January 1945, the Chairman of the JIC, Victor Cavendish Bentinck, concocted his own influential vision of ‘the intelligence machine’. He suggested that GC&CS should remain under the overall direction of ‘C’, but at the same time it would be a separate organisation and ‘not a part of SIS’. It would boast its own budget alongside the other secret services as part of the Secret Vote, Britain’s quaintly titled intelligence budget.⁵⁶ It was thus Commander Edward Travis, not Menzies, who determined the final shape of GC&CS shortly after VJ-Day. Although peace had arrived, Travis’s mind was already focused on possible future conflict with the Soviets. Recalling the earliest days of the last war, he observed, ‘When information was most urgently required, very little was forthcoming.’ The next war was likely to be of shorter duration, with little time for mobilisation. In such a conflict the British would have to fight with what they had. It was essential that continuity be maintained, and that rapid expansion was possible on the eve of war.

Exactly when the post-war term ‘GCHQ’ came into common usage is a matter of dispute. It was first used as a cover name to confuse workmen dropping off furniture at the Bletchley Park site as early as the end of 1939.⁵⁷ By 1946, although technically still merely a cover name, it was used more and more widely to denote Britain’s code-breakers. Travis decided that the new post-war GCHQ would be divided into five groups run by his key subordinates.⁵⁸ To cover its multifarious tasks, he hoped to have a thousand civilians plus a hundred military staff at a new sigint centre located somewhere near to the policy-makers in London. By contrast, the outlying Y stations would be manned by about five thousand additional personnel, of whom only a few would be civilians. GCHQ’s own core staff fell rapidly from an end-of-war strength of 8,902 to a projected 1,010 for 1946.⁵⁹ Despite the dramatic drop in numbers, Travis concluded that the post-war deal he had struck with the Treasury was ‘on the whole most satisfactory’. For him it was about quality rather than quantity. A few days before Christmas 1945 he explained: ‘The war proved beyond doubt that the more difficult aspects of our work call for staff of the highest calibre, the successes by the Professors and Dons among our temporary staff, especially perhaps the high grade mathematicians, put that beyond doubt.’ He wanted suitable conditions with which to attract these sorts of people, although he knew this would be difficult.⁶⁰ Captain Edmund Wilson, Travis’s Principal Establishment Officer, echoed this view, arguing that of the 260 officers to be kept on in their post-war establishment, some two hundred of them must have not only initiative but also ‘first class brains’.⁶¹

Where would GCHQ’s new centre be? What it craved was a site in central London, next to the policy-makers, but even with the post-war demobilisation of many government departments, nothing suitable could be found. The solution was what John Betjeman would immortalise as ‘Metroland’. GCHQ moved to the outer fringes of north-west London, close to Harrow and Pinner. The precise location was Eastcote, which had been used as a wartime outstation of Bletchley Park. It was also close to Dollis Hill, where the laboratories of the Post Office Research Department had built the remarkable ‘Colossus’ computer. Together with Stanmore, Eastcote was one of two large out-stations built in 1943 to accommodate the ever-expanding number of bombes that were being used to cope with the flood of Enigma traffic. However, while it provided reasonable single-storey buildings that were superior to the huts of Bletchley, the overall site was regarded as cramped and unattractive. In June 1946, William Bodsworth, a British code-breaker, returned from a period in America to the cold and rain of an English summer to take over GCHQ’s Soviet section. He found his first sight of Eastcote ‘frankly shattering’. Expecting ‘a nice old country house’, instead he found it to be ‘more cheerless than any of the temporary buildings I have seen in this racket either here or abroad’.⁶²

Those who were leaving Bletchley for good and returning to civilian occupations were given the security warning of their lives. Edward Travis issued a ‘Special Order’ to everyone in GCHQ. He began by thanking them all for their admirable achievements and the substantial contribution they had made to the winning of the war. He then moved quickly on to the matter of maintaining secrecy, even after the end of hostilities. ‘At some future time we may be called upon again to use the same methods. It is therefore as vital as ever not to relax from the high standards of security that we have hitherto maintained. The temptation to “own up” to our friends and families as to what our war work has been is a very real and natural one. It must be resisted absolutely.’⁶³ However, in the Far East, the secret of ‘Magic’, the breaking of Japanese diplomatic codes, was already out. When Bruce Keith, commander of the vast British sigint station located at HMS Anderson in Ceylon, tried to outline Travis’s tight security measures, some of his subordinates openly laughed at him and observed that ‘the Americans had spilled the beans in the paper the other day’.⁶⁴

The move from Bletchley to Eastcote was undertaken during early 1946 in four main parties. The first was the priority group, and included the Soviet and East European Division; the last arrived in April 1946.⁶⁵ Staff turning up in leafy Pinner in search of lodgings were allowed to refer to their place of work as ‘GCHQ’, but they were told firmly that any reference to ‘signals intelligence’ was forbidden.⁶⁶ Between 1945 and 1948 the term ‘GCHQ’ was used interchangeably with both ‘London Signals Intelligence Centre’ and ‘Station X’.⁶⁷

Bletchley Park was now an empty shell in the Bedfordshire countryside. Barbara Abernethy, who had worked as Denniston’s personal assistant, recalls: ‘We just closed down the huts, put all the files away and sent them down to Eastcote. I was the last person left at Bletchley Park. I locked the gate and took the key down to Eastcote. That was it.’⁶⁸ Much of the machinery was broken up, including examples of the mighty ‘Colossus’ computational machine. However, Professor Max Newman, who had been central to its development, managed to secure two ‘Colossus’ machines for his new computing department at Manchester University. These were transported by the Ministry of War Transport at the price of thirty-four shillings a ton. Newman offered to send a junior university lecturer down ‘to sit on the van’ to make sure that the precious machines were not damaged in transit.⁶⁹ In fact, this was not quite the end of Bletchley Park’s active life in sigint, since GCHQ continued to use it for training courses as late as the 1960s.

The intention behind GCHQ’s post-war move to London was to service the centres of power in British government. Accordingly, in the autumn of 1945 Travis took the opportunity to look at how the sigint product – the ‘blue jackets’ or ‘BJs’– circulated around Whitehall. The Foreign Office was a big customer, receiving three sets of BJs daily. One set stayed with Ernest Bevin, the new Foreign Secretary and his war-weary Permanent Under-Secretary, Cadogan, ‘for their immediate information’. Another went to the Services Liaison Department, which worked closely with the JIC. The third went to the main departments. Virtually everyone in the operational core of the Foreign Office habitually saw BJs, but they were always kept separate from other documents in special boxes which were locked up overnight.⁷⁰

In MI5, the ritual of sigint security was closely observed. Distribution was presided over by the redoubtable ‘Mrs Arbuthnot’, who recorded everything meticulously in her log. Security of BJs seems to have been at its most lax inside SIS, where batches of them circulated around sections for as long as six weeks before being returned. Nor were they properly logged. GCHQ noted that, quite uniquely, inside SIS BJs were never treated as requiring special security measures, and indeed in some cases had ‘found their way into the General Office for filing’. This broke the cardinal rule that sigint was never to mix with ordinary paperwork.⁷¹

The first major international crisis of the Cold War era was not long in coming. In June 1948, the Soviets decided to block road and railway access to the western sectors of Berlin, which were controlled by the British, the French and the Americans. The Berlin Blockade was defeated by a massive airlift of some four thousand tons of supplies a day. Hidden amongst the innumerable supply flights heading to Berlin were anonymous but highly secret aircraft collecting sigint for GCHQ, which provided some of the best intelligence during the crisis. Even before the crisis ended in May 1949, GCHQ had already been working hard on the ‘Russian problem’ for almost five years. The early onset of the Cold War had not only provided GCHQ with new targets, but had helped to perpetuate the wartime alliance between British code-breakers and their counterparts in allied countries. This, as we shall see, was fundamental to the postwar success of GCHQ.