Alastair Denniston

Throughout 1941, administrative matters continued to occupy much of AGD’s time. At the first meeting of the JCC on 6 April, Captain Ridley stated that GC&CS had asked for £500 for two full-size hard tennis courts on existing grass courts.92 On 12 April, the JCC considered and approved a proposal from AGD to build a cafeteria to feed 1,000 at one sitting.93 On 7 June, AGD was reporting to the JCC that:

Owing to the course of events in the Mediterranean we have been asked to combine the German and Italian Naval Sections. Need has also arisen for a combined German-Italian Research Intelligence party. Birch to take charge of the Section and Clarke Research Intelligence. It will not be possible to amalgamate fully or to the best advantage until the new premises are ready.94

Accommodation issues continued to be a pressing concern and on 4 October, AGD commented at a meeting of the JCC:

Priority must be given to the accommodation of the staff at Elmers and Wavendon within the perimeter. Nothing can happen until the new large huts (Naval and Military) are complete. Progress on these appears to be very slow. Elmers School are at present roughly 120 strong and Wavendon 60. These will therefore occupy at least Huts 10 and 5, leaving 4 and 9 vacant. When the Dining Room is completed two large rooms in the house will be available and suitable for offices. Is it possible that the Recreation Hut could be linked up with Hut 9 and that this joint building might be used for various amenities such as an enlarged coffee room which could be used as the general common room, a Senior common room, quiet rooms, etc?95

Interestingly, Travis, who has always been characterised as the ‘hard man’ at BP, responded to the suggestion that the rooms in the Mansion should be used for offices as follows: ‘This has never been the view up to now and, although conversation on the subject has been desultory and indecisive, it has been generally hoped and assumed that those large and commodious rooms, which are not really suitable for offices, will be used for the social amenities of our community.’96

On 28 September 1941, AGD received a letter from Frank Birch denouncing Malcolm Saunders, the nominal head of Hut 3 as ‘interfering, intriguing, creating and magnifying difficulties and misunderstandings, causing friction, undermining confidence and incidentally, making proper liaison impossible’.97 Inter-Service rivalries had surfaced in Hut 3 between the senior liaison officer with the Air Ministry, Robert Humphreys, backed by C.R. Curtis, head of the military section and Saunders. Humphreys had lobbied effectively for BP in Whitehall but as a poor team player, he had caused great dissention in both Hut 3 and Whitehall. Nigel de Grey described the situation as ‘an imbroglio of conflicting jealousies, intrigue and differing opinions’. In AGD’s absence due to illness in April 1941, Travis issued the following orders:

No. 1 of the watch will be in general charge and, working in collaboration with the Air and Military Watch officers, will report agreed renderings of such messages as are considered necessary. In case of disagreement as to rendering or the necessity to report, the Service Officer’s version or decision is to be taken and the matter referred to Commander Saunders for the Head of GC&CS. The circulation both at home and abroad and the form in which reports are sent abroad will be decided by the Army and the Officers for their respective services.98

In October, the two senior intelligence officers, Humphreys and Curtis, demanded that the whole staff of Hut 3 should be subordinated to them for operational duties and to the GC&CS ‘administrator’ for ‘purely administrative’ purposes. In this they were supported by MI6 and AI1(e). They had exceeded their mandate and were in effect replicating the higher-level struggle for control of Sigint. On 7 November, a new conduct of work was issued which handed control to a triumvirate consisting of Saunders, Humphreys and Curtis. The intelligence officers were to be

responsible to their Ministries for the Intelligence reported to their respective Ministries or Commands, resulting from the work of the GC&CS staff, … for all Intelligence Reports and summaries issued from Hut 3, whether the reports have actually been compiled by an Intelligence Officer or by the staff of GC&CS and for any comment that may be added to the text or signals … Decisions as to priority of the work of the watch rest with the Intelligence officers of the watch … All emended material is to be passed directly to the Intelligence officer of the watch, who alone who will decide its disposal.99

This new arrangement didn’t satisfy anyone involved and led to a breakdown in discipline. On 1 December, MI8 issued an inaccurate document on German Army and Air Force cooperation based on Enigma decrypts and traffic analysis without the knowledge of any part of GC&CS, contravening all rules of security. According to de Grey ‘It was evident that the whole situation was getting out of hand and that GC&CS was unable apparently to control it.’100 Eventually, Eric Jones, a RAF officer, was brought in to assess the situation. His report, dated 2 February 1942 and classified Most Secret provides a fascinating and objective commentary on the state of GC&CS at the end of 1941:

The difficulties of the organisation of Hut 3 are manifold in cause, but the key lies particularly in the background and structure of the G.C. & C.S. The material which Hut 3 amends, edits and distributes, has first to be subjected to several stages before being finally broken. All the processes which the material undergoes at the War Station demand the application of great intellectual power with the result that there is as high a concentration of brain as has ever been achieved anywhere. That fact alone makes administration a delicate matter, for such people tend to be unworldly: their task is fascinating, and they will continue until forcibly discouraged. They do not worry consciously about accommodation or facilities, and hence have tended to concentrate upon the immediate execution of the work than to provide for its more efficient execution in the future. Another strange factor works the same way. Luck enters into the whole process, and so cryptographers are apt to be superstitious to the extent of believing that if they make grandiose preparation for future output, nemesis will cut off the source as return for their presumption. Indeed it would have taken a very courageous man to have decided, say two years ago, to build a large organisation for coping with such a chance, albeit voluminous, flow of information. Hence G.C. & C.S. has lived a hand-to-mouth existence, always short of accommodation, nearly always overlooked (because cryptographers prefer to be overlooked) and always in the background is the fickle nature of the material. In addition, the general administration of accommodation, billeting, and general amenities, has become most incompetent, and would have not been suffered by more worldly personnel. The work is most exacting, demanding all patience and tenacity, and is being carried out against a background of inconvenience and irritation; it would therefore be amazing if tempers remained even.

The foregoing considerations apply to one aspect of the nature of the work, namely, its intellectual difficulty. There are two other aspects, the need for security and for an acute form of team spirit, which jointly mitigate against smooth running. For success, the work depends upon a chain, from the people who do W/I, through the crib constructors, and the breakers, to the amenders and editors. The chain carries on, in fact, through the Service Intelligence Sections, both at War Station and at the Ministries, to the Operational Staffs who finally use the information. Such a chain is, of course, not peculiar to MSS 101 nor even to less elaborate cryptography, but is characteristic of all Intelligence. The chain principle is, however, much more strongly developed in the case of MSS than in any other form of Intelligence. An inevitable feature of the chain is that each stage is regarded as the representative of the source to all stages on the user side, and as the representative of the user to all stages nearer the source. For efficiency, it is essential that each stage realizes this dual responsibility, for example, A.D.I (Science) represents the user of beam information to Hut 3, and the source to D. of S.

A further feature of the chain is that each stage will tend to regard its immediate neighbours as unnecessary middlemen. Hut 6 at one time looked upon Hut 3 in this light, but that feeling has now largely disappeared. The real work has to remain vitally secret, but at some point in the chain the information has to emerge as ‘MSS’. The officer at this point must be a relatively public figure, and will be regarded by the Service Intelligence as (at minimum) the representative of the source. It is this officer who gains the glamour, and who in particular – if he is not scrupulously faithful – will come to be regarded as a profiteering middleman by all the others who have treated the material at an earlier stage. It would be the acme of unfairness for this officer to make capital from his privileged position: the achievements for those who remain secret should make any fairminded man feel very humble.

Apart from drastic reorganisation, which would be so dangerous that I would not care to advise upon it, there remains the possibility of cleaning up the present organisation, and MSS is sufficiently unique – even in cryptography – to justify ad hoc measures. The first thing is a change in the administration of working, billeting and general welfare facilities, so that no further time and energy be fretted away over irritation irrelevant to the work. Second, there should be confirmation or otherwise of the editing functions of Hut 3, and if possible the Admiralty should be induced to stabilise the arrangement by providing a competent Naval section in Hut 3. The Army Section ought to be strengthened by a change of Head: the present one is a charmingly naïve plagiarist who puts to the War Office as his own, interpretations borrowed from others: this can only end in trouble, for people will suspect him of capitalisation. In addition, his refusal to allow the letter ‘G.L.’ to appear in MSS reports, on the ground that they are secret, is characteristic. The Air Section, and indeed all the sections, needs a Head who is scrupulously honest, for the reasons I have given above. I consider it desirable that he should understand the principles of MSS cryptography and (essential) the academic mind, for then he will meet the worker as an equal – and through his appreciation – be less inclined to make personal capital out of the work. In addition, he must understand thoroughly the requirements of his Service. It is of less importance that he should be an expert linguist; this we have found from experience, that a good technical man working alongside a good linguist can nearly always bridge all the gaps. The Heads of the Service sections would fulfil the functions of Service editors; besides their direct editing, they would have to know what their readers wanted and hence what their reports, i.e. Hut 6 and the Y organisation, should cover. Above them, for the purpose of administration should be an Editor-in-Chief, who would exercise a supervisory control over general Hut policy. The Watch would be responsible to him, and the Service representatives on the Watch should be regarded as expert advisers to the No. 1, instead of Overseers. I believe that if the Services were to give a little in the matter of their rights, they would find an adequate return. Regarding the choice of an Editor-in-Chief, as the man who started it has obviously the most interest in the Hut’s welfare, and it has yet to be shown that the present Head has been either prejudiced or incompetent, there is a good case for his remaining in office. The Research Section of Hut 3 needs expansion; this is already contemplated, but is held up through a shortage of people.

By September 1941, Sigint resources were stretched. According to DMI: ‘Sigint is vital but at the present moment it suffers from two grave disadvantages: (a) lack of equipment; (b) lack of effective operational control.’102 There were serious deficiencies in all three main branches of Sigint and subsequently, Navy and Air Sections had found and trained their own staff for low-grade cryptanalysis. While the Army had no low-grade material to work on, their training section ISSIS provided recruits to all Services. DMI complained that Typex facilities were insufficient ‘to deal with even the present volume of traffic being sent home from abroad, with the result that much of this traffic is not seen by the cryptographers, much less broken’.103 On 23 December 1941, at a Chiefs of Staff Committee meeting with the Directors of Intelligence, the Committee ‘invited the Y Board to examine as a matter of urgency the organisation of Y Services generally and to submit proposals for the additional accommodation, equipment and staff that would now be required in the Y organisation and for the consequential increases in staff in the intelligence Directorates’.104

The Foreign Office stated that a 35 per cent increase had already been approved by the Treasury for GC&CS. This provided an increase in Temporary Senior Administrative Officers, Junior Administrative Officers, first, second and third grade Temporary Clerks, tabulating staff and typists. The Y Board set out a number of principles and recommendations to the Chiefs of Staff which were very significant for AGD’s organisation.105 In particular, the work of cryptanalysts would now be treated as a reserved occupation without question. Furthermore, there would be no prohibition against recruiting young men until the personnel requirements were met and absolute priority was to be given to demands for requisitioning premises in the neighbourhood of GC&CS.

In late October 1941, following a visit to BP by the Prime Minister the previous month, Welchman and some of his colleagues were becoming frustrated by the failure by senior BP management to deal quickly with urgent requests for vital equipment and personnel. Welchman drafted a letter106 to the Prime Minister and signed it along with Turing and their two deputies, Stuart Milner-Barry and Hugh Alexander:

Secret and Confidential

Prime Minister only, Hut 6 and Hut 8, 21st October 1941

Dear Prime Minister,

Some weeks ago you paid us the honour of a visit, and we believe that you regard our work as important. You will have seen that, thanks largely to the energy and foresight of Commander Travis, we have been well supplied with the ‘bombes’ for the breaking of the German Enigma codes. We think, however, that you ought to know that this work is being held up, and in some cases is not being done at all, principally because we cannot get sufficient staff to deal with it. Our reason for writing to you direct is that for months we have done everything that we possibly can through the normal channels, and that we despair of any early improvement without your intervention. No doubt in the long run these particular requirements will be met, but meanwhile still more precious months will have been wasted, and as our needs are continually expanding we see little hope of ever being adequately staffed.

We realise that there is a tremendous demand for labour of all kinds and that its allocation is a matter of priorities. The trouble to our mind is that as we are a very small section with numerically trivial requirements it is very difficult to bring home to the authorities finally responsible either the importance of what is done here or the urgent necessity of dealing promptly with our requests. At the same time we find it hard to believe that it is really impossible to produce quickly the additional staff that we need, even if this meant interfering with the normal machinery of allocations.

We do not wish to burden you with a detailed list of our difficulties, but the following are the bottlenecks which are causing us the most acute anxiety.

Breaking of naval enigma (Hut 8)

Owing to shortage of staff and the overworking of his present team the Hollerith section here under Mr Freeborn has had to stop working night shifts. The effect of this is that the finding of the naval keys is being delayed at least twelve hours every day. In order to enable him to start night shifts again Freeborn needs immediately about twenty more untrained Grade III women clerks. To put himself in a really adequate position to deal with any likely demands he will want a good many more.

A further serious danger now threatening us is that some of the skilled male staff, both with the British Tabulating Company at Letchworth and in Freeborn’s section here, who have so far been exempt from military service, are now liable to be called up.

Military and Air Force enigma (Hut 6)

We are intercepting quite a substantial proportion of wireless traffic in the Middle East which cannot be picked up by our intercepting stations here. This contains among other things a good deal of new ‘Light Blue’ intelligence. Owing to shortage of trained typists, however, and the fatigue of our present decoding staff, we cannot get all this traffic decoded. This has been the state of affairs since May. Yet all that we need to put matters right is about twenty trained typists.

Bombe testing, Hut 6 and Hut 8

In July we were promised that the testing of the ‘stories’ produced by the bombes would be taken over by the WRNS in the bombe hut and that sufficient WRNS would be provided for this purpose. It is now late in October and nothing has been done. We do not wish to stress this so strongly as the two preceding points, because it has not actually delayed us in delivering the goods. It has, however, meant that staff in Huts 6 and 8 who are needed for other jobs have had to do the testing themselves. We cannot help feeling that with a Service matter of this kind it should have been possible to detail a body of WRNS for this purpose, if sufficiently urgent instructions had been sent to the right quarters.

Apart altogether from staff matters, there are a number of other directions in which it seems to us that we have met with unnecessary impediments. It would take too long to set these out in full, and we realise that some of the matters involved are controversial. The cumulative effect, however, has been to drive us to the conviction that the importance of the work is not being impressed with sufficient force upon those outside authorities with whom we have to deal.

We have written this letter entirely on our own initiative. We do not know who or what is responsible for our difficulties, and most emphatically we do not want to be taken as criticising Commander Travis who has all along done his utmost to help us in every possible way. But if we are to do our job as well as it could and should be done it is absolutely vital that our wants, small as they are, should be promptly attended to. We have felt that we should be failing in our duty if we did not draw your attention to the facts and to the effects which they are having and must continue to have on our work, unless immediate action is taken.

We are, Sir, Your obedient servants,

A.M. Turing

W.G. Welchman

C.H.O’D. Alexander

P.S. Milner-Barry

Shortly afterwards, Menzies appeared at BP and according to Milner-Barry ‘was very cross’. He personally rebuked Welchman for violating the chain of command and then met with AGD. It was not long, however, before the situation at BP started to improve. Staff requirements at BP were indeed given ‘extreme priority’ and on 18 November 1941, Menzies reported to Churchill that ‘every possible measure was being taken’. While all of the new arrangements were not yet in place, BP’s needs were being ‘very rapidly met’.108 However, in January 1942, when the spate of argument and recrimination was damaging efficiency and threatening a breakdown of discipline, ‘C’, in his capacity as Director of GC&CS, appointed an independent investigator, a former DDMI, to report not only on the dispute about the handling of the product of Air Force and Army Enigma and on the administrative control of GC&CS, but also on the functioning of GC&CS’s Naval and Air Sections.109

By the end of 1941, the Diplomatic Section at BP, which AGD directly controlled, had grown to eighty staff which included sixty cryptanalysts (twenty-nine Senior and Junior Assistants, including temporaries and thirty-one Linguists or Clerical Assistants), and the remainder typists and other ancillary staff. The main country sections were Italian, Japanese, Near Eastern, Chinese, Balkan, Portuguese and a French Section enhanced by eight staff to work on Vichy government ciphers. In all, they worked on the traffic of twenty-six countries, received around 100,000 telegrams, read 70,000 and translated and circulated 8,495.110 At least an additional fifty staff were required but working space was not available. So there was little change to the Diplomatic Country Sections apart from a small increase to the Italian and French Sections, bringing the establishment up to 100. Early in the year liaison was established with US Diplomatic Agencies and later a joint effort began to break and exploit German diplomatic traffic.

The America Army Security Agency (ASA) had more staff working on Italian diplomatic traffic, but GC&CS had more experience and knowledge, so it could provide them with codes more fully recovered than theirs along with information about enciphering tables. The Americans in due course provided help in recovering keys and had at their disposal more machine tabulating equipment. Regular exchanges of traffic registers, wanted material and code recoveries were in force by the beginning of 1942 and continued until the end of the war.

After the Americans had provided GC&CS with at least one replica ‘Purple’ machine in February 1941, there was joint collaboration in recovering the current settings of the machine. This work required both a specialised team of cryptanalysts and a greater number of linguist/translators. Once Japan entered the war, many former consular and diplomatic officials returned to Britain and were drafted in to help with the task.

My Dear Mr. President,

One night when we talked late, you spoke of the importance of our cipher people getting into close touch with yours. I shall be very ready to put any expert you care to nominate in touch with my technicians. Ciphers for our two Navies have been and are continually a matter for frank discussion between our two Services. But diplomatic and military ciphers are of equal importance, and we appear to know nothing officially of your versions of these. Some time ago, however, our experts claimed to have discovered the system and constructed some tables used by your Diplomatic Corps. From the moment when we became allies, I gave instructions that this work should cease. However, danger of our enemies having achieved a measure of success cannot, I am advised, be dismissed. I shall be grateful of you will handle this matter entirely yourself, and if possible burn this letter when you have read it. The whole subject is secret in a degree, which affects the safety of both our countries. The fewest possible people should know.

I take advantage of the Ambassador’s homeward journey to send you this by his hand, to be delivered into yours personally.111

While collaboration between Britain and the US was going well on the diplomatic front, AGD was becoming concerned that the Americans were going back on their promises to him in August. On 23 December, he wrote to Washington with his concerns:

In a telegram from War Department, A. 16 of 18th December they raise the question of investigating the German Air-Army cypher. During my visit it was agreed that we should be responsible for this investigation and that when USA were in real need of this work we should invite their party to join ours.

Could you find out if their views on this procedure have changed and if they wish to begin their own investigations now? It is devoutly hoped by all here that any such investigations will not interfere with their progress on Japanese work for which we count on them.

We could send by bag two days of traffic and certain keys (all information on this being sent in cypher) but bag communication is very slow.

Could you also find out if they are intercepting any of this material? I am sending by bag material for German air to ground traffic.112

This development prompted AGD ‘to organise, without delay, an interservice Japanese Section comprising all phases of Japanese work, ie, Diplomatic, Naval, Military and Air’.113

By the end of 1941, the pressure on AGD was growing with political battles continually being fought with the Service ministries and internal staffing and administration problems a constant concern. Inter-Service difficulties were also ever present and according to Birch:

Throughout the history of Sigint in the Second World War there is noticeable the pursuit of satisfactory compromises between two pairs of alternative and mutually incompatible ideas: - Service versus inter-service structure of Sigint and centralisation versus decentralisation of cryptanalysis. In these early days, whenever the inter-service pooling of some Sigint function was mooted, one or other of the Services was apt to discover that its needs were different from those of the other two. When inter-service coordination of D/F was proposed, ‘the Navy and Air Force had to deal with rapidly moving targets, whereas the stations the Army would try and place were either fixed or capable of only a small movement from day to day’.114‘ In the matter of ‘Operational Intelligence’, as we shall see, the Admiralty was ‘different’, in that it was ‘an executive organisation’ and therefore needs an O.I.C. inside itself, whereas the Army and Air Force need rapid dissemination from the source (GC&CS) to their executive commands.115 So, too, when an Air Section was set up in GC&CS in 1936, Air Ministry felt that it had been ‘formed for a somewhat different purpose to the other two’.116

BP has grown in a haphazard way out of small body of research workers to a heterogeneous establishment numbering some 1,500 persons. I am urging ‘C’ with some success to put his house in order and to tackle the administrative problems involved, and what I hope to aim at is that there should be a Senior Officer in administrative charge of the whole establishment, who will look after administration, security, welfare, feeding, housing, etc. … leaving Denniston and the technicians to pursue their highly important specialities.117

The operational control of the sets allotted for E work is an hour-tohour business which should be left in the hands of experts, provided of course that these experts follow the general policy laid down by higher authority and report any emergency action that they have taken. This operational control could not be done efficiently by a body of men meeting only once a week and provided only with MI8 returns on which to base their decisions.119

According to historian Christopher Andrew, ‘Without the expertise painstakingly built up at GC&CS on minimal resources by Denniston between the wars, Bletchley Park’s wartime triumphs would have been impossible.’ However, now others argued that AGD did not have a great vision, that he only wanted a restricted remit for GC&CS, i.e. cryptography, not the wider role of Sigint and all that entailed. The reality was that the two were inexorably bound together, but the Service Ministries insisted that it was their job to determine what intelligence was useful and what wasn’t as well as evaluating it. If they sensed that they were being second guessed by the civilians at GC&CS, they would move to take over the cryptography role as well, making GC&CS a small research section. So AGD insisted, at least in any document that he produced, that the role of GC&CS should be restricted to cryptography pure and simple. In reality, he knew full well that their work was indivisible from other Sigint activities. His strategy would eventually win BP the right to be in total command of Sigint.

The Brigadier decided ‘to extend the inquiry beyond the purely military side, in order to gain an insight into the organisation as a whole and to compare the systems in the Air and Naval Sections with that in the Military Section, with a view to seeing what features in the Naval and Air Sections might profitably be adopted in the Military’. He also decided ‘to enquire into the administration of the GC&CS, for … it is evident that administration plays a direct and important part of the efficiency of the work carried out’. His report was presented on 30 January at a special meeting of the Director, ACSI and Travis.124 Menzies acted quickly and, by 3 February, issued instructions for a radical reorganisation of GC&CS:

Reorganisation GC&Cs

With the ever increasing work, I have found it necessary to carry out a reorganisation of the GC&CS.

The posts of Head of the GC&CS and Deputy Head of the GC&CS have been abolished and the work of the GC&CS will henceforth be divided into two parts:

Civil

Services

Commander Denniston and Commander Travis are appointed Deputy Directors to control the Civil and Services’ sides respectively, with the titles of Deputy Director (C) and Deputy Director (S).

Civil Side:

The Deputy Director (C) (Commander Denniston) with headquarters at Wavendon, will control this side of the work, i.e. the Diplomatic and Commercial Sections.

Mr. Earnshaw-Smith is appointed Assistant to Commander Denniston, with the title Assistant Director (C).

Service Side:

The Deputy Director (S) (Commander Travis), with headquarters at B/P, will control the Service Sections, including Hut 3, ISOS and ISK [Intelligence Services, Knox] , and will exercise general control at B/P and Elmers.

Mr. N. de Grey is appointed Assistant to Commander Travis with the title Assistant Director (S).

Colonel Tiltman, in addition to his duties as Commandant No. 4 IS, will act as Chief Cryptographer and will take charge of the Research Section.

The Deputy Director (S) will represent the GC&CS at the Y Board and for the time being at the Y Committee. Colonel Tiltman will be responsible for Liaison with the FECB and the USA Bureaux. Mr. Cooper will be responsible for Liaison with the CBME.

Administration:

Administration will be unified under Paymaster Commander Bradshaw, who is appointed as Assistant Director with the title Assistant Director (A). He will be responsible to the Deputy Directors for meeting their requirements. The JCC is abolished.

Effect is to be given to the above directions with the minimum of delay.

Heads of Sections are to inform members of their sections of this reorganisation.

(Signed) [S.G.M. Menzies, Chief of SIS]

Director 125

On 30 January 1942, AGD wrote to Tiltman, Bradshaw, Cooper, Birch, Malcolm Saunders, Denys Page,126 Knox, de Grey, Eric Earnshaw-Smith127 and Henry Maine:128

In consequence of the great expansion of G.C. & C.S., the Director has decided to abolish the posts of Head and Deputy Head and to nominate myself and Cdr. Travis as Deputy Directors and to divide the organisation into two parts:

The Civil side including Diplomatic & Commercial Sections. The Services side including Naval, Military, and Air Sections and ISOS and ISK.

The Civil side will be under my direction with Mr. Earnshaw-Smith as my assistant. Cdr. Travis will control the Services side with Mr. de Grey as assistant.

The Director will circulate his decision as to General Administration in a few days.129

New terms of reference were also approved by the Y Board for the Y Committee on 5 February 1942.130 Birch later noted in his official history that:

What strikes one most about comparing the old with the new is a change of outlook, a better understanding and a broader perspective of Sigint. It is, for instance, no longer ‘the needs of the three Services, and of the GC&CS’ that need co-ordinating, but ‘the activities of the Y services’, and increasing concern is shown with developments overseas, the Y services in the Dominions and the Y Committees now established in Cairo and at Gibraltar, liaison with the Allies and Sigint.

A number of factors led to the restructuring of GC&CS and AGD’s subsequent removal from BP. The Service Ministries had continued to express concerns about GC&CS and in particular, AGD’s view that all service cryptanalysis work should be centralised at BP. The problems within Hut 3 reflected badly on AGD as he was ultimately responsible for the smooth delivery of BP’s ‘product’ to them. The Americans continued to apply pressure and it was proving difficult to secure agreement on the best division of labour in intelligence work between the two countries across multiple theatres of operation. The ‘Action This Day’ letter certainly would have been noted in Whitehall as further evidence of AGD’s inability to effectively run the BP operation. Interestingly, Gordon Welchman, who had written the letter, believed that it was ill health that had forced him out.131 According to the Official History of MI6, AGD’s removal from BP by Menzies was a demotion.

I do not regard him as a success. I think he failed between the wars to get GCHQ (GCCS as it was) the status & facilities it needed. And he was on a pretty good wicket in the years just before 1939. The organisation was having stunning success in reading the Spanish Civil War codes & had clearly demonstrated its potential trifling expenditure. Denniston’s posting to London was clearly demotion. Indeed Denniston said to one of my colleagues, when his posting was arranged & Travis took over ‘I am not jealous of Travis – what grieves me is the realisation that I didn’t prove man enough for the job.’132

Others took a more charitable view of AGD’s contribution to GC&CS’s early success. Ralph Bennett, a former duty officer in Hut 3, said of AGD’s removal:

Denniston had spent his life in the time of the battle of Hastings dealing with hand codes and not much information that you could use militarily. Then he found himself in charge of a huge growing organisation, a lot of us younger and in some ways thinking along different lines, and he got a bit outdated in some ways and was shunted out. It was a bit of bad luck for him because he was a very good chap but he was overtaken by events.133

In contrast to the major difficulties that emerged in 1943 over the US Army’s desire to attack Heer [Army] and Luftwaffe Enigma, cooperation between Britain and the United States on diplomatic codebreaking was remarkably trouble-free from its start in early 1941. Partly for that reason, and partly no doubt because of the range of countries potentially involved, no formal agreement about diplomatic Sigint was ever concluded between the US War Department and GC&CS. Inevitably there were misunderstandings from time to time, but they were resolved, in no small measure due to the wise approach adopted by Alastair Denniston, who was wholeheartedly in favour of Sigint cooperation with the United States. Denniston was a man of vision on this issue, just as he had been in 1939 when he recruited Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman to join GC&CS when war with Germany was declared. Sadly, there has been insufficient recognition of his vital role in laying the foundations of GC&CS’s wartime successes and in paving the way for Britain’s important Sigint alliances with the United States.

Travis was deputy to Denniston and a crony of de Grey. They had endless talks in the crucial days and although they were held next door the walls were wooden and since we were almost always working in complete silence I couldn’t help hearing the conversations sometimes. De Grey’s voice was that of an actor and I knew ages before it happened that they didn’t feel Denniston could cope with the enormous increase demanded of Ultra and other problems. AGD was headstrong and didn’t like criticism; after all, he had carried the group throughout the 1930s, against criticism quite often, and now that war had actually occurred he wanted to be at the helm, in charge of the organisation he had created. Travis and de Grey were perfectly right. 134

Obviously he [AGD] was disappointed and extremely bitter, but whenever I went to stay with him and with Dorothy he was relaxed. The villain of the piece was really a man named Freeborn, leader of the machine group from Letchworth. He was power hungry and realized that with AGD out of the way he could manipulate to his heart’s content. Even Travis would generally address Freeborn: ‘Mr Freeborn, we have a particularly difficult time in front of us. Do you think you could spare a few machines?’ Freeborn would look at a board and ruminate, and would finally state that if he cut A and B he could accommodate Travis. Having got his own way he attacked AGD unmercifully, and because his Hollerith machines were now all powerful he virtually controlled all but Ultra. AGD was given the sop at Berkeley Street but to the horror of Freeborn it turned into a gigantic success for AGD. We used to work 18 hours a day, seven days a week as if to prove that AGD could control and direct. ‘C’ was always on good terms with AGD and one day in 1943 he was able to turn to AGD and congratulate him on a great success, with more to come. Freeborn called me into his office and he asked me to come back to Bletchley with my team. ‘Travis will OK it if you wish’. I declined and he promised to stop further promotion.

Evidence of his management style compared to AGD is highlighted in a 1940 incident when Oliver Strachey had begun a petition about messing arrangements. Travis wanted to treat this as akin to ‘mutiny’. AGD wrote to him saying: