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CHAPTER 4  DECEIT AND DIRTY TRICKS

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ROOM 40

From 1914 onward, British cryptography was centered around a group of gifted civilians

operating in high secrecy from cramped offices in London. Known as “Room 40,” they provided

a stream of reliable intelligence to the Royal Navy, and helped to change the course of the war in

1917 by decoding the Zimmerman letter that brought the US into the conflict (see pages 74–75).

The day after declaring war on Germany on August 5, 1914, Britain sent out ships

to cut its new enemy’s undersea telegraph cables. This left Germany highly reliant

on radio communications, which could easily be tracked by British listening posts.

The messages were secured by codes, which needed to be broken. This led to the

formation later that year of a dedicated codebreaking team, based in a set of

interlocking offices called “Room 40” in the British Admiralty in London.

SOLVING PUZZLES

The British military had largely dispensed with codebreakers since the Crimean

War sixty years earlier, meaning that they had to start from scratch in 1914. This

gave them the chance to select gifted individuals from the civilian world. At its

peak, Room 40 employed 800 wireless operators and ninety codebreakers, led by

the idiosyncratic Captain Reginald “Blinker” Hall, nicknamed after his pronounced

facial twitch. Hall collected some of the most inventive puzzle solvers from a wide

variety of fields, including scientists, lawyers, schoolteachers, and professors.

Room 40’s first task was to break German naval codes. In this, they were helped

by a stroke of good fortune when British naval intelligence acquired three German

naval codebooks. They supplemented this information with coded German maps

Above: Reginald “Blinker” Hall

Below: A German U-boat