The first three months of 1942 saw major offensives taking place on multiple fronts. The Soviet offensive was going well in January. The Japanese were advancing steadily down Malaya towards Singapore and British forces were trying to advance in North Africa. Naval battles were taking place along the French coast, in the North Atlantic and the Java Sea. In March, AGD and the main body of GC&CS’s Diplomatic Section moved back to London. The German Section remained temporarily at BP along with the Commercial Section until its accommodation was ready in another building in London. The Diplomatic Section was housed in former flats at Numbers 8 and 9 Berkeley Street and took up four floors capable of housing seventy-five staff. The adjoining house, Numbers 6 and 7, also had floors available with capacity for around seventy staff. This expansion space would be needed as the Japanese Section (translating and codebreaking) was rapidly expanding along with the Italian, Near Eastern and some of the smaller sections.
The Commercial Section later moved to two floors of Aldford House in Park Lane, which were also previously residential flats. As the section worked closely with the MEW, this located them closer to that ministry. Only occasional contact took place between the country sections at Berkeley Street and the Commercial Section at Aldford House and little contact took place between them and the Naval, Military and Air Section at BP.
AGD, with his new designation of Deputy Director (Civil) (DD(C)), now found himself in charge of an organisation much the same size as the one he had brought to BP in August 1939. Percy Filby headed up the German Diplomatic Section when it moved to Berkeley Street later in March. According to Filby, while he never heard AGD comment on the move from BP, ‘That he was crushed there was no doubt; he seldom smiled, showed unusual irritation and in general was far from his normal self.’1
However, AGD quickly threw himself into the work of his new section and was at his desk from 9.00 am until everyone else had left. He established a personal rapport with all ranks of his staff through regular visits to each country section, making suggestions but never interfering with the work. He never seemed to panic and almost all looked on him with considerable affection. AGD had recruited some excellent linguists and mathematicians. There were also several titled ladies and scholars such as Professor Adcock, Professor of Classics at Cambridge and Ernst Fetterlein. The latter was the top Russian cryptographer who had been brought out of retirement after invaluable service during WW1. He was only useful on book ciphers where insight was required. ‘Fetty’, as he was known, would arrive precisely at 9.30 am and read The Times newspaper until 10.00 am at which point he was ready to take on any task assigned to him. Filby continued to use Fetterlein when he was in his seventies, ill and at home.
Some of the older civil servants caused AGD problems as they demanded their rights which they believed to include having separate offices and other staff to do their bidding. They had worked on diplomatic material between the wars but didn’t fit in with younger experts and translators recruited by AGD. They insisted on working 10.00 am until 4.00 am rather than 9.00 am until 5.00 pm like the rest of the staff. Filby, as head of the large German section shared a room with four colleagues. One of the old guard told him that if she didn’t have a room of her own, she would not come to work. As Filby later recalled:
How Denniston mollified her I will never know, but after a week’s absence she meekly asked me if she could have a table and chair. She was an excellent translator, but with her status as the senior lady of the Foreign Office she insisted on translating only messages less than a week old! When there was nothing to her liking she brought from her drawer her manuscript of a definitive biography of Beethoven, which later became a classic.
Malcolm Kennedy worked as an intelligence translator in the Japanese Diplomatic Section from September 1939 to March 1942, and then moved to Berkeley Street until December 1942. In his diary, he offered the old guard’s view of AGD’s management style. In an entry for 4 March 1942 he wrote:
Orders definitely issued for our branch of the F.O. to return to London next week. Feel very sore about it, as the move has been manoeuvred by certain ‘interested parties’ and by gross misrepresentation of the facts, while A.G.D. is so utterly spineless, that on his own admission, he has made no attempt to point out the serious snags and difficulties involved. No small portion of the personnel who, for one reason or another, are unable to go, have had to resign and for many of us, the move will entail 4 to 5 hours travel daily to and from work with an early start (from 8 a.m.) and a late return (9 p.m. or later). And yet A.G.D. has the brass to contend that efficiency will be increased ‘in the tenser atmosphere of London’! We and others have sent in memos and made personal protests, pointing out how efficiency will be seriously affected rather than increased, but our warnings are simply brushed aside and we are censured by A.G.D. for having the temerity to question the decision. ‘I never questioned it’, he said, as though this were to his credit, though by his very admission he damns himself as utterly unfitted to be head of a show like ours. By failing to put forward his views and to point out the facts, he is guilty of negligence and incompetence and has failed deplorably in his duties as No.1.2
AGD never seemed to let such personal bitterness interfere with his efforts to drive the organisation forward. Kennedy’s diary entry for 7 March 1942 shows how AGD tried to rouse his staff for the job ahead:
A.G.D. has circulated an absolute masterpiece of fatuous ‘pep talk’ to those of us who are being sent back to London. In it he describes our coming return there as being ‘in the nature of the adventure in the middle of the war’ and says we shall be able to ‘carry out our duties more in the front line’ and that the ‘tenser atmosphere of London will urge us on still further’, though how he reconciles this with his assertion that we shall be ‘more exposed to daylight raids’ is somewhat mystifying! It is all in line however, with his remark to us the other day that, if we continued to work in the peaceful atmosphere of B.P. our work might suffer from ‘dolci furviante’.
Not all of the old guard behaved in this way and E. Earnshaw-Smith, Frederic Catty and A.G.R. Rees, to name three, fitted in well with the new recruits such as Gerald Tomlins and Stanley White who worked in Filby’s section. White, a bank official from Wallasey, near Liverpool, controlled the main linguists in the section while Tomlins, also a bank official, had a good knowledge of German knowledge.
Many of the more productive staff regularly worked fifteen-hour days, seven days per week. Few staff took leave and they rarely asked for a day off. Some were of high social status and included Dorothy Hyson (1942–5) who married the actor Anthony Quayle in 1947, Ela Beaumont (1942–5), later the Countess of Carlisle, and Sheila Thorpe (1942–5), who married Tomlins during the war.
AGD held few staff meetings but was always well informed about the work of each section While they were kept separate with little fraternisation, AGD began holding monthly Heads of Sections meetings also attended by the Head of the Commercial Section. He worked closely with Earnshaw-Smith, the head of the Distribution and Reference (D&R) Section, as his deputy, designated as Assistant Director (Civil) (AD(C)).
By the end of the 1942 AGD, along with his administrative, trafficsorting staff and the D&R Section with typists, numbered twenty-five and occupied roughly one floor of the combined houses, joined by a door. The Axis sections staff numbered seventy-five, of which forty worked in the German Section and this grew to sixty by mid-1943. The Japanese and Italian Sections, comprising both cryptanalysts and linguists, each had twenty staff. The remaining country sections, of which the French, Portuguese, Near East and Chinese were the biggest, had fifty staff between them. During its first year of operation at Berkeley Street, AGD’s organisation circulated 13,095 translations, compared to 8,485 in 1940. The recipients included the Foreign Office, which received all of them while the Admiralty received 6,901, the War Office 6,927 and the Air Ministry 6,158. MI5 received 9,315 compared with 1,166 in 1940.
According to Filby, ‘unproductive’ sections were sent to Berkeley Street believing that it would keep AGD occupied but have little impact on the war. However, AGD had increasingly more access to Menzies as the diplomatic and commercial output became interesting and attracted his attention. Menzies, along with Admiral Cunningham, the Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, started to visit AGD on a regular basis. Travis also visited Berkeley Street and after a V1 flying bomb hit the Lansdowne Hotel in Berkeley Square and missed their rooms by a few yards, he tried to get some of the sections returned to BP on the grounds of security. This suggestion was, however, rejected by Menzies. From mid-1943, visits from the top brass were continuous and Anthony Eden gave them a dinner at the Café Royal along with a show, ‘Crest of the Waves’. AGD had finally come into his own, with his full access to Menzies restored.3
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In early 1942, there was an information exchange with Arlington Hall in Washington, home to the American Signals Intelligence Service (SIS), run by William Friedman. Filby visited Arlington Hall and Solomon Kullback 4 visited first Berkeley Street and then BP in April. Kullback brought with him some German diplomatic material, and AGD was able to reciprocate with his section’s own material which included a work sheet used by a cryptographic clerk in the German embassy. He had apparently crumpled it up and thrown it into a wastepaper basket where it was recovered by a British spy in the embassy. Kullback spent two weeks at Berkeley Street.
Filby also visited Canada and discovered that tensions existed between US and Canadian intelligence agencies. The Canadians wanted to know why he was visiting the US, but Filby could only refer them to a contact in the US, as he was bound by secrecy. The Admiralty proposed an Allied wireless intelligence conference, and it took place in Washington from 6 to 16 April 1942. Unfortunately, the wireless intelligence agreement that AGD had secured with the US Navy’s OP-20-G the previous year was not working. Canada was represented by Captain Ed Drake, head of several key Canadian listening stations, Colonel William Murray, head of the Canadian Army’s wireless intelligence programme, and Commander John de Marbois, in charge of Canadian wireless interception. The Americans sent senior staff from both OP-20-G and SIS. Commander John Redman, Vice Chief of US Navy Operations, opened the conference. The British delegation was led by Humphrey Sandwith,5 head of the Admiralty’s Y service, and included Captain Roger Winn, head of the Admiralty’s U-boat tracking room. There were also representatives from Britain’s RSS and the British Foreign Office.
Sandwith proceeded to give a fairly detailed description of Britain’s Sigint organisation:
The Admiralty is responsible for reading every available intercepted and decrypted naval or naval air signal generated by Britain’s enemies or potential enemies.
The War Office is responsible for the intercepted signals of enemy military organisations.
The Air Ministry is responsible for reading the intercepted signals of enemy air organisations, except those signals generated by aircraft over water.
The Foreign Office is responsible for reading intercepted and decrypted commercial and diplomatic messages.
The Radio Security Service (reporting to MI6) is responsible for illicit wireless transmissions in the UK, although it has recently expanded this responsibility to include illicit transmissions emanating from countries of the ‘Empire’ and neutral countries.
Each of the five organisations cited above has its own wireless intercept or Y service and these are administered by a Y Committee composed of the heads of the 5 Y services plus certain senior intelligence officials. The head of this committee is an admiral [probably DNI].
The cryptographic centre is ‘Station X’ [GC&CS at BP] and consists of about 2000 people drawn from the 2 services and the Foreign Office. It does both cryptanalysis and TA. The results are pooled.
The wireless interception programme of the 5 Y services is determined half by the traffic needs of the cryptographers and half by the needs of the TA.
Because the cryptographic centre is in England, the main intercepting stations, Scarborough and Flowerdown, are there also. For traffic that cannot be received in Britain, there are intercept stations at Freetown, Pretoria, Durban, Colombo, Melbourne, Bermuda, Alexandria, and several in Canada.
The 65 receivers at Scarborough are all on German traffic whereas those at Flowerdown cover Italy, Spain, France, and any other countries heard in Britain.6
Sandwith also provided details of eighteen direction finding stations in Britain plus six in Australia, four in New Zealand, four in South Africa and fourteen in Canada. He provided details of successful operations such as the sinking of the Bismarck and the battle against the U-boats.
In late April, Lieutenant C.H. Little of the Canadian Navy was sent to London to confer with intelligence authorities there. His main task was to persuade the British to supply Canada with decrypts from non-naval Japanese traffic being sent to Britain from Canadian listening stations on the West Coast.7 In mid-May 1942, Little visited Section V of MI6 in St Albans and met with Felix Cowgill, MI6’s counter-espionage chief. He wanted to know why Canada was receiving so little South American espionage traffic. Cowgill in turn questioned whether any agreement to provide it was in place
However, AGD got on well with Little. He gave him a tour of the London offices and even invited him home for the weekend. AGD offered Canada the decrypts of high-grade Japanese diplomatic traffic. This included the ‘Purple’ encrypted messages from the Japanese ambassador in Berlin. In return, AGD asked that Canada continue to monitor Japanese traffic, concentrating specifically on the Japanese diplomatic and commercial messages being received by the Point Grey station near Vancouver. 8 AGD also supplied Little with a list of countries and call signs being monitored as of 3 June 1942. They included: Germany, Japan, Afghanistan, Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, Eire, France, Germany, Hungary, Iran, Italy, Japan, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey, Russia and the Vatican.9
AGD made repeated requests that Canada concentrate on Japanese commercial traffic but Tommy Stone, the head of the Canadian Examination Unit, said that their work was for Canada, not as a service for Britain. On 6 June AGD wrote to Little, suggesting they try to work together so as to avoid duplication of effort:
You will remember at our conference with the Director that he stressed the importance of your Japanese work and asked that steps to expedite this material should be taken. I therefore asked that the Admiralty (whilst you were at sea) arrange for the Japanese Government material obtained by Point Grey [Vancouver] to be wired home, and it is now possible to make use of the Ferry Command to transmit raw material, preferably unsorted frequently. Where the material is known to be either diplomatic or commercial it would save delay if you could address the package to DD(C) London. I believe it arrives via the Air Ministry.
AGD worked hard to build on the success of the visit to BP by representatives of SIS and OP-20-G in February 1941, known as the Sinkov Mission. The material that the Americans brought to BP included a copy of the German diplomatic code book Deutsches Satzbuch Nr. 3 (called ‘DESAB 3’ by the SIS). His efforts led to full cooperation between SIS and GC&CS and ultimately to success against two very difficult German diplomatic cipher systems. The German Foreign Office used three different methods to encipher DESAB 3: OTPs (a system codenamed GEE by the SIS), a system using double encipherment (called GEC by SIS and ‘Floradora’ by GC&CS) 10 and reciprocal bigram tables, known as Spalierverfahren. Germany was confident about the security of OTPs and double encipherment systems, and lazy practices enabled SIS to recover part of the code book using cryptanalytic methods. A complete copy was obtained from the Army and FBI, taken from a German courier in July 1940, as he passed through the Panama Canal on a Japanese steamship. He was also carrying 3,500 OTP sheets. GC&CS had already reconstructed part of DESAB 3 and had made more progress than SIS on the method of encipherment being used.11 It had also received a copy of the book from the east coast of Africa.
De Grey had been overseeing work on German Diplomatic systems in March 1941, along with Patricia Bartley12 and several others including Filby. They had possession of material captured in Iceland in May 1940 from the German Consulate which was part of the ‘Floradora’ system. However, the absence of daily indicators had made breaks impossible, and work on ‘Floradora’ had almost been abandoned March 1941. As AGD would later note, ‘Floradora’ was broken because of three factors: ‘The basic book fell into our hands; close cooperation with USA; and SS [Secret Service] work by an able ally who obtained first-hand information and one page of figures from a German cypher officer.’
Progress was slow but, by July 1941, considerable progress had been made with messages from 1940 and early 1941 being frequently readable. 13 In August, AGD was able to report that ‘liaison with America has been conspicuously successful’ and that ‘‘Floradora’ could not have been broken at all without an initial pooling of our resources’.14
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By the end of 1942, AGD had a staff of around 200 and his organisation’s primary responsibility was to break diplomatic messages for the Foreign Office. This could yield useful intelligence which would then be passed to Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). It also processed plain-language and encoded commercial traffic for Britain’s MEW, and AGD had considerable autonomy in this work. Information from both enemy and neutral nations, combined with that from Censorship, was used to plot the economic progress of the war and to set strategic priorities. While the German Section had been considerably enhanced, it was still not producing a consistent amount of decrypted material. The ‘Floradora’ cipher was not broken until August 1943, so work was concentrated on registration and key recovery.
As well as the ‘Purple’ machine, the Japanese used a transposition cipher on a code, of which 75 per cent had been recovered, along with 90 per cent of the code itself. This had resulted in some material of considerable intelligence value. The ten linguists involved needed to be well qualified to deal with the sometimes imperfectly recovered telegrams to and from the Japanese Ambassadors. The cryptanalysts working on the machine encrypted material collaborated with the linguists on some of the keys being used with the hand systems. While the main Italian systems had been changed in July and the new systems could have been difficult to master if used correctly, Italian misuse meant that messages continued to be read.
After the fall of France, the French Section targeted the traffic of the Vichy Government. Up to November 1942, they continued to use existing ciphers, which allowed the section to exploit its previous work. The Free French government was established in Algiers and also started to use old systems, but eventually both ‘Governments’ introduced some new systems towards the end of the year. Eastern European government traffic was also targeted, whether ‘free’, friendly, or hostile. Polish traffic was read when the code and keys used by the Polish General Staff in London and its military attachés in Berne, Washington and Stockholm were obtained. Work was carried out on Yugoslav, Bulgarian and Romanian traffic. As Germany advanced to Stalingrad and El Alamein, Near Eastern traffic became of interest, such as Persian, Turkish and Arabic, with sixteen staff covering the traffic of six governments. Sections in India and Sarafand had been reinforced, and an officer was sent to Baghdad and later Teheran to work on Persian Diplomatic traffic on the spot. Success was achieved with Saudi-Arabian, Iraqi, Afghan and Egyptian.
The Chinese Section had grown to five linguists and four supporting staff, and traffic was regularly being read. Given the vulnerability of the Chinese systems, a cipher expert was sent from India to Chunking (now Chongqing in south-west China) to improve their diplomatic and military ciphers. As new staff became available, the traffic of more neutral countries was covered if it was felt that the enemy may seek to exploit their strategic position or natural resources. A South American Section was established to cover Argentina, Chile and Mexico, all of which were of particular interest to American diplomatic agencies. Traffic was easy to break but a shortage of linguists over a number of languages hampered progress. By the end of the year, the section numbered twelve and systems in use were sufficiently recovered to enable most of the traffic to be read.
Swiss traffic was targeted for its ‘economic warfare’ value, and the Section was set up in January 1942 with two expert cryptanalysts with other ongoing work and a few linguists. By the end of the year about 1,000 messages had been circulated with most being of ‘economic warfare’ value, and others dealt with the affairs of a number of governments whose interests were represented by Switzerland in enemy countries. As the Italians might use Vatican representatives to seek peace negotiations, the Papal ciphers were also targeted.
In the first half of 1943 the Japanese Section was enhanced, along with a growth in both volume and interest in the translated messages issued. In particular, the communications of the Japanese Ambassador in Moscow proved to be strategically valuable. The German Section was expanded to fifty and considerable progress was made, with current material on the ‘Floradora’ cipher being read from the beginning of the year. The Italians had made their new systems more secure by changing substitution keys daily. However, some posts continued to use old daily keys, thus neutralising the latest precautions. Mussolini was deposed in July, and in September the Royal Italian Government surrendered unconditionally. However, Mussolini was freed from captivity by the Germans and set up a Fascist government at Salo in northern Italy, supported by the Germans. Posts in various countries were reporting to and taking orders from Mussolini. As the Italian diplomatic service was always royalist by tradition, all major ambassadors and ministers in countries where they could safely do so, supported the King and handed all ciphering equipment over to the Allies. It was therefore assumed that these ciphers would be obviously compromised and never used again. However, when cipher traffic was intercepted it was clear that compromised ciphers were still in use. While the Italian Section had been dissolved when Italy surrendered, a small group remained to look at traffic. For seven months, most Fascist traffic was in plain text. Traffic was intercepted between Salo on Lake Garda and Berlin, Madrid, Tokyo and Budapest. Eight hundred messages were intercepted between September 1943 and January 1944, giving a picture of the Italian set-up at Salo and the attitude of the Germans. Given the vulnerability of Italian systems after their surrender, a joint Anglo-American Mission with Berkeley Street and ASA staff were attached to the Allied Control Commission in Italy from 1 October 1944.
On the American front, there continued to be problems over the ownership of diplomatic and commercial traffic. On 25 November 1942, John R. Redman had written to the Vice Chief of Naval Operations via the Director of Naval Communications. Redman was the Communications Officer on the staff of the Commander-in-Chief, US Pacific Fleet, Admiral Chester Nimitz, and in February 1942, had been put in charge of OP-20-G. His memo dealt with the current problem of cryptanalytical and decryption operations on diplomatic traffic.15 He recommended that the Army be permitted to take over all of the diplomatic work rather than persisting with the current arrangement, which was inefficient and not desired by either OP-20-G or SIS. His proposal was approved by the Standing Committee for Co-ordination of Cryptanalytic Work on 25 August.
A joint British, Canadian and US conference was held at Arlington Hall on 15 January 1943 to formalise the sharing of diplomatic and commercial traffic. MI6 and GC&CS were represented by Kenneth Maidment and Tiltman, Canada by Drake, Tony Kendrick16 and Murray, and the US by Colonel Frank W. Bullock, head of Signal Security Service (formally Signal Intelligence Service), Major Telford Taylor from Military Intelligence Service (G-2), Colonel Alfred McCormack, deputy chief of the Special Branch, and William Friedman. Remarkably, the US Navy’s only representative was an ensign.17 The US Army wanted total American ‘self-sufficiency’ in the worldwide monitoring of diplomatic traffic and wanted Canada and Britain to fill in gaps in their coverage. It was agreed that once a month they would exchange lists of what they were monitoring, and the exchange of data would be through Maidment’s office in New York. Maidment worked for GC&CS and had been sent along with a small team to work with Benjamin Deforest (Pat) Bayly at British Security Coordination (BSC). Before the war, Bayly was a professor at the University of Toronto, and he had been hired by William Stephenson, the senior representative of British intelligence for the entire western hemisphere. Stephenson himself had been sent to the United States on 21 June 1940 to covertly open and run BSC, over a year prior to the US entering the war. The BSC office, headquartered in Room 3603 in the Rockefeller Center, became an umbrella organisation that by the end of the war represented the British intelligence agencies MI5, MI6/SIS, SOE (Special Operations Executive) and PWE (Political Warfare Executive) throughout North America, South America and the Caribbean.
In April 1943, new negotiations began between GC&CS and the US Army’s Special Branch in London and Washington. William Friedman, Colonel Alfred McCormack and Lieutenant Colonel Telford Taylor arrived in London on 24 April. AGD paid a courtesy call on the American delegation at their hotel on 1 May. In the afternoon, Friedman, McCormack and Taylor made their first visit to Berkeley Street. AGD had already discussed the visit with Menzies, and a schedule of what the Americans wanted to see was agreed. They spent three days from 4 May going through the various sections at Berkeley Street.
On 2 May they met with Travis and other British officials and on 8 May Travis and Eddie Hastings18 travelled to the US. Britain wanted the US to concentrate on Japanese Army and Air Force traffic. While there, Travis completed, on 17 May, an agreement in Washington with General George Strong, the US Army’s Military Intelligence chief. The so-called ‘BRUSA Agreement’ was signed on 24 May and formed the basis of all subsequent Anglo-American Sigint cooperation. Travis returned to Britain on 11 June and met with Friedman and McCormack before they returned to the US the following day. McCormack would return to the UK and he and Taylor subsequently produced detailed reports for the Army Intelligence Group at Arlington Hall about the Berkeley Street operation (see Appendix 11). While Travis had been in the US, Friedman and McCormack had met with various senior military figures in Britain, and visited BP as well as Berkeley Street. Friedman was effusive in his praise for British code breaking activities, many of which had been set in motion by AGD. He commented that:
Their achievement is astounding not only because of the breadth of the concept upon which the operations are based and of the directness with which they are prosecuted, but also because of the manner in which the British tackled and successfully solved a cryptographic system which apparently presents insurmountable and impenetrable bulwarks against attack by pure cryptanalysis. It must be understood that the solution was attained not by cryptanalysis at all but by exploiting to the fullest degree possible the weaknesses injected into the system by the methodicalness of the Germans in their formulation and operation of the system, by studying and making use of the well-known German addiction to fixed habits, and by taking advantage of the occasional carelessnesses and blunders on the part of German cipher clerks. The margin upon which the British had and still have to operate in their solution is indeed a very narrow one, so far as technical cryptanalytic weaknesses in the system are concerned, but dogged British persistence, extremely painstaking attention to minute details, and brilliance in coordinating and integrating into one vast picture the many small operations involved, have brought about a success beyond the wildest expectations of any cryptanalyst’s fancy.
Moreover, the success the British have attained and continue to attain in this field is also astounding in that they have been able to keep the whole operation utterly secret from the enemy for so long a time, despite the hundreds of people who participate in the operations and despite the various tenuous threads upon which these operations rest – threads which might be broken by a mere whisper in the proper place at any moment.19
Friedman and McCormack visited AGD at Berkeley Street on 6 May and got a revised draft of a proposal for division of work on ‘Floradora’. On 22 May, Friedman had a chat with AGD about a paper drafted by AGD which outlined the proposed basis of a talk with Taylor, McCormack and himself about the future relations in neutral and Allied fields. AGD had written that after McCormack had seen all of AGD’s sections and knew ‘all our methods’, he wanted to draft a detailed plan for continued liaison, but that it would need to be submitted ‘to our respective chiefs’.20 There was already substantial cooperation on enemy diplomatic and commercial traffic which was just as well, since the BRUSA Agreement had avoided the issue of diplomatic traffic. In fact, it only called for full cooperation and complete exchange of cryptanalytical results and intercepts from the traffic of the German Army and Air Force, as well as the German intelligence service, the Abwehr. Even with this cooperation, the British were reluctant to share with Washington any diplomatic messages from neutral countries which were sent by cables controlled by Britain. The Americans in turn went to great lengths to conceal from the British their work at Arlington Hall on Russian diplomatic codes.
On 17 May 1943, the US Army agreed formally that Arlington Hall would concentrate on Japanese military traffic and leave the breaking of German and Italian military ciphers primarily to the British. Each side would be responsible for ensuring that the resulting intelligence got to Allied commanders in the field. AGD’s 21 May paper attempted to address the existing problems:
It has occurred to me and others here that your visit provides a good opportunity to define the scope and limits of the liaison which we are trying to build up between G.C. & C.S. (Civil side) and Arlington Hall and G2 (Diplomatic and Commercial).
For my own personal part in this matter I have urged during and since my visit to Washington in August 1941 that Arlington’s greatest contribution to the war effort is the effective and operational reading of Japanese military cyphers and that G.C. & C.S. was and is prepared to fill any intelligence gap in diplomatic work which may result from a supreme effort on Japanese Military by Arlington. I wish to repeat this and I know I shall have the support of my superior officers.
Colonel McCormack’s letter to me on his arrival gave me great hope that mutual misunderstandings were going to be cleared up and that we should straighten out the line of liaison. I have arranged that you should see every section and every detail in order that you may be familiar with ‘our methods’ and appreciate our aims, which are, in short, to provide our several customers with all possible intelligence derived by cryptography from telegrams from enemy and neutral sources. When you know all our departments who are in any way affected by our liaison, e.g. (in England) Foreign Office, M.E.W. and the Service Departments, whose efforts may be influenced by the knowledge of our cooperation. The bases of the liaison between A and B are:
Cryptographic documents i.e. code books and key tables obtained either by cryptography or by S.S. methods.
Raw material, i.e. telegrams obtained by W/T interception, by cable censorship or by S.S. methods.
The translated versions of the raw material.
Note: In London it is not the duty of G.C. & C.S. to extract intelligence from these translations: that is left to the Intelligence Sections in the receiving Ministries with whom G.C. & C.S. is in close touch.
So far as enemy countries are concerned (Germany, Japan, Italy) it should be our aim to make the liaison absolutely complete and I believe we are already achieving this. If either A or B requires a telegram in cypher or en clair, it is passed without delay. It might be noted that Arlington helped us into the Japanese purple.
The immediate problem is the prosecution of the war and I consider it would be to our mutual advantage if G2 had their representative in London (Lt. Col. Taylor) as a liaison officer to G.C. & C.S. (civil side). He should have the entry to our D & R and all sections … As to the purely cryptographic part of the liaison, this should continue to be direct between Arlington Hall and the sections but Colonel Taylor would be available here to clear up questions hard to solve by letter or telegram.
A.G.D. 21/5/4321
McCormack summed up their discussions as follows: ‘Denniston says that if Arlington wants to divert any talent from present Japanese operations to turn them to JAC he is prepared to take up the full slack and to transmit finished translations of all material here. Second, he expresses a desire to give Arlington traffic and information of every kind that has to do with winning the war.’22 Meanwhile, AGD and Friedman had become good friends and they subsequently spent a golfing weekend together at AGD’s home in Surrey.
AGD was keen to give the Americans the benefits of British experience and of traffic obtained over many years. He was however, limited by a Foreign Office dictate forbidding the sharing of cable traffic into and out of London. He was also reluctant to share traffic in areas which he considered to be of prime British concern such as from various Near East areas. However, he did accept that given the American commitment in those areas, he may have to share information with them. He was prepared to share everything his team knew about methods of solution but he did not want to share so-called crypt documents such as code books, key tables, obtained either through cryptography or secret service methods. AGD thought it was more important to concentrate on liaison on the intelligence rather than the cryptography side of the work and he was annoyed by the interface role played by the BSC under Stephenson.
McCormack summed up AGD’s views as follows:
Denniston has said on several occasions that he did not like being unable to deal directly with Arlington on traffic exchange problems or on how exchanges should be handled. He also is very anxious to obtain good liaison with G-2 and has been going on the assumption that Taylor is to be quartered with him to function in that capacity. While there would be no point in trying to work out any revised traffic deal now, certainly not for us to try it, it appears to me that there is some value in pursuing discussions with Denniston along the above lines, so as to test his general ideas by specific cases, in order to carry back a fairly good idea of what sort of deals his authority permits him to make and what the general viewpoint here is on these various problems. His attitude, in my opinion, will permit all important intelligence problems along his alley to be solved satisfactorily, one way or another. Note also that Denniston, more than anybody else here, has turned his people over to us for questioning and given us a free run of his place.
According to McCormack, AGD was willing to let American staff in London read anything of interest and forward it on to Washington. However, in some cases, the Americans insisted on the material in its raw form and the appropriate keys to read it. He went to say:
It [i.e. Washington] has just thrown Denniston into a state of bafflement by asking for Iraqi keys. This request would be roughly equivalent – if we still had the Philippines – to the British asking Arlington for Philippine keys, since Iraq is not only in reality part of the British Empire but the cornerstone, because of its oil, on which the whole Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean situation rests. Denniston however, wanted to put Arlington in a position to read whatever Iraq stuff it might intercept, insofar as he could do it without going to the Foreign Office for specific authority. Hence he authorized his people to explain the Iraq system to Taylor, and Taylor duly passed the information along, and Denniston felt that he had met Arlington’s demands without having to create an issue here. If questioned by the Foreign Office, he could always say that Iraq uses simple substitution which any cryptanalyst who had an Arabic linguist at hand could solve in half an hour, and so he really only told Arlington what it could have found out for itself in a very short time.
Now however, Arlington turns this matter into a major issue by a formal request for keys, forcing Denniston either to put himself on record as refusing something that Arlington specifically asked for or to create an issue by asking the Foreign office for permission. If Denniston is right about the difficulty of solving the Iraq system, what sense does all this make?
AGD had offered, through McCormack, to take on Japanese work and, according to McCormack, had expressed to him ‘a desire to give Arlington traffic and information of every kind that has to do with winning the war, by which he means complete exchanges of all enemy traffic and crypt information plus anything that Arlington wants to get out of the non-enemy field where, as in the case of Turkey, we have asked for it and stated reasons connected with the war effort’. AGD also agreed that ‘in the crypt field each country wants to establish for itself a position of independence so that it can get and turn its efforts toward any class of traffic that may interest it’.
On 21 May 1943, McCormack sent his first dispatch to Washington, describing AGD’s organisation:
Denniston’s show, commonly called Berkeley Street, has none of the hectic atmosphere of Park but rather gives [the] impression of a well established operation that goes along through wars and peace. General impression is typified by the two ladies who receive and sort incoming traffic. [This was corrected in a later dispatch.] (They started as telegraph clerks in Post Office in reign of Queen Victoria and were fully familiar with general field when they joined present organisation in 1919.) These little birdlike old ladies receive and register incoming material and they have acquired such great familiarity with it that [they] can do everything except actually decipher it. Whole organization is very simple and they seem to accomplish a great deal with quite limited personnel. Whole outfit consists of two hundred.
The Americans assigned Taylor to work with the British on diplomatic traffic as the US liaison officer at GC&CS with full access to BP and Berkeley Street and their decrypts. However, he was ordered to confine himself exclusively to the diplomatic decrypts being produced by AGD’s team.23 His eventual replacement, Major Bancroft Littlefield became a close friend of AGD. He corresponded with his wife during his stay in Britain for the last few years of the war and his letters24 provide a snapshot of the life enjoyed by American officers stationed in Britain.
The following extract is from a letter written on 26 March 1944:
I had luncheon Friday with the British Major (ex school teacher) whom I went on the automobile trip with (I can’t remember what I then told you his name was). He called me Thursday and (as one does over here) rather formally invited me to luncheon the following day – to meet him at a restaurant on Deane [sic – Dean] Street in Soho (Gennaro’s Restaurant). When I got there I found he had brought along his brother and half brother – the former a private in the Medical Corps – the latter a clerk in the War Office. We had a most entertaining time – and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. After lunch I came back to work, en route seeing a February Atlantic Monthly in a bookshop window (quite unusual I think; at least the first time I’ve seen one) and buying it.
Saturday (yesterday) was another social day. I worked all morning until about 2 pm – then had soup and a sandwich with Ed Kellog at a funny English Snack Bar near where he lives (Queen Street). Then we went together over to a performance by the French players here in town of the ‘Paquebot Tenacity’ – a very inconsequential 3 act creation whose chief merit was that it attracted a wholly French audience at the Institut Francais du Royamme-Uni on Queensway Place, Kensington, and that we soaked up a good deal of French during the course of the afternoon.
McCormack attempted to report on the amount of traffic being handled by Berkeley Street in a dispatch to Washington dated 21 May 1943:
Records maintained at Berkeley Street do not include figures for total traffic and I did not ask them to go to geographical sections and add up all these figures, but they receive ‘thousands’ of messages per day. Their serial numbers of circulated diplomatic items crossed one hundred thousand early in 1942. Do not have present range of number.
By the end of 1943, AGD’s Diplomatic Section now numbered 250 with his own office which directed administration, traffic sorting, the D&R Section and the typing section numbering forty-five staff. The main enemy country sections were the Japanese (dealing with hand and machine systems) and German Sections, each with fifty staff. The French and smaller enemy sections had thirty staff, while neutral and friendly country sections had seventy. Small research sections were being built up to deal with new developments such as the use of the Hagelin machine. The total number of translations issued in 1943 was 14,050, of which the Foreign Office received all, the Admiralty 5,481, the War Office 5,697, the Air Ministry 4,162, the MEW 1,702 and MI5 9,850.
Space became short at Berkeley Street, so smaller sections were moved to Aldford House. From October onwards, night raids gradually increased and the staff (serving by rota as part of the Fire Watch of the area) manned fire-fighting equipment through some noisy nights. Staff also contributed to the 2nd Home Guard Battalion of the City of London Regiment. By the autumn of 1943, old German traffic had been cleared and current traffic was being exploited. This allowed some resource to be freed up to look at the OTP system, some of which had been exposed.
The Japanese had introduced three new systems of encrypted code, so cryptanalysts and linguists worked together to produce an increased volume of translated decrypts of good quality which more than compensated for the loss of Italian intelligence. The French Section was working on both Vichy and Free French systems. The Vichy Government had only introduced new systems in Europe and the Near East, which were never identified. In the Far East, a mix of former systems being used or keys originally developed for one system being used with another, meant that the section maintained control of the Vichy traffic to some extent. Ethiopian traffic was investigated at the end of the year and read by April 1944, and the Syrian main system was also broken.
By the end of 1943 no action had been taken on Redman’s proposal of the previous year. On 13 December, Frank Rowlett, now a Lieutenant Colonel in the Signal Security Agency (SSA, the new name of SIS), reported on a meeting between Army and Navy representatives to discuss the allocation of commercial traffic. It appeared that while the President had initialled an informal note to the Director of the Budget on 8 July 1942, no action had been taken by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It appeared that there was confusion about whether or not the agreement was in force. One of the problems seemed to be the difficulty in separating Japanese commercial and diplomatic traffic, as Japan treated them as one and the same.
By the beginning of 1944, AGD’s organisation was in full production with established procedures in place. Apart from material obtained from the US, the principal source was through the censorship measures put in place in telegram ‘clearing houses’ such as those in London and Ottawa. Foreign Office intercept stations in the UK, Canada, India, Australia and South Africa also provided material, as did secret intelligence services in neutral capitals. When all non-commercial material came into Berkeley Street, clerks routed it to the appropriate country section where it was registered under a number of headings. It was then passed to cryptanalysts for processing and if successful, results were passed to the Head of Section who decided which material should go to D&R.
All internal processing was done in longhand but typed before being distributed externally as GC&CS reports, and continued to be known as BJs. Copies of all distributed material were also sent to the Foreign Office, Menzies, the War Office, Air Ministry and Admiralty. Some material was not sent to service ministries if it revealed that a British diplomat abroad had been compromised in some way. Teleprinter links were available to Menzies’s office, BP and the intercept stations at Denmark Hill and Sandridge. However, they were not used for circulating material, apart from some of exceptional importance to Menzies himself. Various government offices had liaison officers at Berkeley Street and most of them were senior figures. These included those of Menzies, the Prime Minister, the Foreign Office, the War Cabinet and SIS amongst others.
Distribution policy was simple; distribute everything that might have some intelligence value, however small. Berkeley Street was more a production organisation like Arlington Hall than an intelligence organisation with important operational functions like BP. McCormack noted in his report that ‘In case of Berkeley Street as in case of BP, what impressed us was that they are taken to see that all information gets out to those who can make use of it.’
Berkeley Street was able to analyse the messages that it processed through its imaginative record-keeping system. A ledger or book contained sheets, roughly thirteen by sixteen inches, for every city which originated messages. Each of these sheets in turn catalogued messages by the city to which it was destined. Each city was then subdivided into nationalities and for each of these was recorded, the call signs of the originating and destination station, intercepting station or stations, estimated number of messages sent, number of messages sent, number missed and additional information to aid analysis. McCormack was very impressed with this system and recommended that his colleagues at Arlington Hall consider implementing something similar. He noted that it was possible ‘to see what intercept stations produce important material and in what volume, to determine at a glance what sources of information there are in each principal city and how many of them are being tapped and of course to see how much of each type of traffic is being brought in’.
The CMY (Commercial Y) Section was moved from BP to Berkeley Street in 1944 and accommodated in the same building as the cryptanalytic sections. It controlled the intercept positions employed on international commercial W/T. Research sections were expanded to respond to monthly cryptanalytic reports from country sections on unsolved problems. A senior cryptanalyst coordinated these reports and kept AGD informed about developments. By the end of the war, the diplomatic sections had created a similar research-orientated structure to that which existed before the war began.
The cryptanalytical process at Berkeley Street started with the head of a country section (head of a subsection for larger country sections) deciding if a decrypt was sufficiently complete and reliable to be passed on. He would then decide if it was of sufficient interest to be submitted for issue and if the translation was accurate. Translation was not always necessary, as in the case of the Foreign Office which preferred to see French decrypts in their original text. The D&R section was crucial to this process as it ultimately decided which material should be circulated and supervised the mechanics of doing so. They in effect acted as a reference bureau for the cryptanalysts. The section was headed by Eric Earnshaw-Smith, who had been a member of MI1(b) before joining the fledgling GC&CS in 1919. He also acted as AGD’s deputy. His assistant was Ore Jenkins, a Professor of Medieval History and Modern Greek at Cambridge. D&R kept indexes of all circulated material in longhand on cards. It had mainly a reporting function and never more than five staff. Its working model was to use the Heads of sections as outposts of a Central Distribution Office and, in effect, Intelligence Officers. The Head of D&R kept the Heads briefed so that they could deliver on this intelligence role. Information continually flowed to them and included directions received from ‘user’ departments for specific intelligence and valuations of recently circulated product, collateral material such as Foreign Office telegrams and dispatches, foreign newspapers, and press cuttings. While all collateral material was returned to D&R for filing, larger sections kept their own card indexes and other intelligence records. This was all coordinated by a Central Intelligence Officer.
D&R’s first task was an editorial one, as it had to ensure that the judgment of the section heads was sound. In some cases, intelligence deemed worthy of distribution might already be in the hands of the user department from another source or known to the Central Distribution Officer but not yet to the Section. However, this never exceeded five per cent of submitted translations. Secondly, checks were required to judge the clarity of the translation, and the Section maintained a very high standard in this regard. The nuances which exist in Diplomatic material can be lost without precise translations in place. An example of this is a telegram from the Italian Ambassador saying: ‘I believe that the Foreign Secretary was at some pains during our conversation to leave me with the impression that his government was uneasy about the course of events.’ It was translated as: ‘I think that at the end of our conversation what the Foreign Secretary was laboriously trying to say was that his Government was afraid of what might happen’ – which misses the finer points of the message and would not be trusted by a Foreign Office reader. Continuity from pre-war experience enabled the Central Distribution Officer to press for more clarity in translation, even for languages such as Arabic. Finally, a check was needed for consistency with known facts. Subject matter of a day’s traffic could be extremely varied and even, on occasion, quite technical.
The cryptanalyst/translator required an encyclopaedic knowledge of current affairs and to support them, a central library of reference books, card indices and records of unpublished information was built up under the Head of D&R. He was tasked with ensuring that nothing was issued which would not make sense to a user department. He was also able to refer failed decryption back to a Country section and his analysis usually proved to be correct. In one instance, a pilot from the Italian LATI airline reported details of an Allied convoy to Rome (this was standard and done twice a week). The Italian encoder mistakenly located the position by longitude and latitude in the middle of Spain. This was not picked up by the translator but by his section head. It would almost certainly have been picked up by D&R.
One D&R index was based on names, and over 19,000 were on file by mid-1943. One interesting name was that of the Japanese Ambassador to Berlin, Hiroshi Ōshima, who frequently sent messages in code from Berlin to Tokyo, containing information of great interest to the Allies. The largest index dealt with treaties, catalogued by country, and included details about treaties and negotiations for treaties among various governments. A ‘Cabinet Book’ recorded important officials in various governments, subdivided by country. It contained newspaper clippings and notes giving names of cabinet officials and elected officers. A file of ships recorded all ships which were named in intercepted messages. The ‘Diary’ was a large bound book which was assigned two opposite pages for each day. All events were recorded which might be of interest to anyone working on material and might involve such events. Each item was referenced to its source and thus fuller information if required. A ‘Who’s Who’ file illustrated the thoroughness of the Section. It consisted of Foreign Office printed bulletins with details of foreign diplomats, supplied by British diplomats abroad. One diplomat was described as having a young wife who was very short-sighted and therefore wore very thick glasses!
D&R also kept a reference library for use by all Berkeley Street staff. It included a ‘Geographical Handbook Series’ published by the ‘Naval Intelligence Section’ of the Admiralty which contained considerable information about various countries. An annual publication of the Empire Parliamentary Association called ‘Report on Foreign Affairs’ gave a chronology of all important events during the year for each country. Foreign language press was also monitored with relevant articles sent to interested sections. All geographical sections kept their own reference material. McCormack summed up this part of the operations as follows: ‘Whole key to this British operation lies in the infinite pains which they take with the files while never losing sight of their very practical objectives.’
D&R also graded and annotated diplomatic translation, and from 1942, user departments asked that all translations include both the grading believed to be attached by the sender to the cipher used by him for that message and their own rating of the security of the cipher used.25 Accurate and consistent gradings proved to be difficult to achieve but user departments felt that they gave some indication of the secrecy desired by the sender and the likelihood of them being read by other governments. Ratings/gradings were supplied by Sections under the guidance of the D&R.
Pre-war experience had shown that for the diplomatic country sections, linguists could be trained as cryptanalysts and be responsible for translation. In some cases, they would even be tasked with the selection of decrypts for submission. The exception to this was the Japanese ‘Purple’ traffic. This differed from the model adopted for the Service sections because of the sheer volume of traffic faced by them and machine rather than hand ciphers in general use. The merger of cryptanalytic and linguistic skills was made possible by recruiting people of a very high intellectual standard with a good knowledge of international affairs.
The head of a country Section could, on his own discretion, translate and issue only part of a message. In some cases, this was driven by the subject matter changing and the remainder not being of interest. Summaries or digests of message subjects were not kept as it was found to be too labour intensive with little accrued value. More reliance was placed on the judgment and working relationship between the section Heads and Central Diplomatic Intelligence Officer. The diplomatic sections were part of a stable organisation at the beginning of the war with considerable experience. Once it moved to Berkeley Street, AGD was able to maintain and even enhance its efficient operation.
Diplomatic country Section work concentrated primarily on the systems of Germany, Italy and Japan. Secondary targets were China and France. In addition, some forty-five countries in Europe, South America and the Near and Middle East were targeted. Of the individual country sections, the Japanese and German were the biggest and most fruitful in terms of intelligence. The Japanese Section consisted of fourteen experienced and able staff who received all messages after they were logged by their clerks. One member of the Section handled liaison with the US and Australian Japanese intelligence sections dealing with diplomatic and commercial traffic. Head of the Section was Oswald White, who at the beginning of the war was Consul General in Tientsin and had long service experience in Japan and China. He, or a deputy in his absence, prioritised all messages before sending them for translation. The staff who under,took this work included W.B. Cunningham, formerly Consul to the Japanese Imperial Government (JIG26), Norman Roscoe who was Consul to JIG during WW1 and E. Hobart-Hamden, probably the world’s leading JIG scholar and co-editor of the Standard Dictionary. They described themselves as the Translation Bureau and the leading lights included, Captain Rayment, an officer of Naval Intelligence and JIG expert and translator for the Navy, and Captain Harold Shaw, a civilian and ex-consul.
McCormack illustrated the effectiveness of this Section’s work as follows:
Lord Farrar, who sits as Economic Warfare Minister for purpose of handling most secret information in continental economic field and in fact for whole world, told us yesterday that 85 per cent of all important information about South Central economic picture has been built up from Berkeley Street production, the contributions by censorship, foreign press, radio broadcasts and agents being trivial in comparison with our material.
Most of the 1,000 JIG commercial messages which came into the section each day were in plain text so translation was the main task. Their sources included Point Grey and other west-coast Canadian stations and were sent over every week or ten days by bomber. Much of it was of little use, consisting of small financial and commercial transactions but about a dozen items per day were of interest. They might reference ships by name or routing and include the address of enemy military or naval units. The volume of this material was around 1,500 items per week. A second source was material in commercial code intercepted in Mauritius and a third came from UK stations picking up continental traffic. The output of the JIG Commercial Section went in longhand to Alford House where Berkeley Street’s Commercial Section was housed.
The German Section dealt primarily with ‘Floradora’ and was headed from October 1939 until 1943 by 25-year-old Patricia Bartley, who had been recruited from Oxford at the beginning of the war by John Tiltman. She was assisted by Percy Filby, formerly librarian of one of the libraries attached to Trinity College, Cambridge. Staff numbers under Hartley reached thirty-seven and key members were Adcock and Fetterlein, S.A. Trantor, Pallinger, a former school master and Potter, a German Foreign Office expert on diplomatic English. Bartley left Berkeley Street to return to Oxford to complete her Ph.D. However, her health deteriorated and she never returned to London.27 By early 1944, they were passing English versions of every message of importance in ‘Floradora’ with a delay of perhaps 24 hours, sometimes less. Progress was even made against OTPs, which should be unbreakable as settings are only used for one message. However, messages were being sent by Berlin (so-called Multex messages) to all posts in OTP but to Dublin in ‘Floradora’. The messages were long and the same length in both systems, which could make tests productive. At the same time, several German pads were acquired from American sources. They could be assembled to work out the logical design of the machine that produced them. German diplomatic traffic of high importance was encrypted using OTPs. In collaboration with the Americans, the machine which produced these was reconstructed, but only one series of messages was read between Berlin and Madrid in March and April 1945.28
The Vichy Government traffic was read until the North African landings when they made belated cipher changes. They introduced three new systems which remained unsolved, but for Far East traffic they used improvised modifications of existing systems which GC&CS read.
The Near East Section was headed by Dr Thomas Thacker, Professor of Semitic Languages at Durham University. His team included Raymond Thornhill, a clergyman and former pupil of Thacker’s at Durham, Simpson, a geographer from the University of London, and Gungry from Cambridge University. They dealt with messages in Turkish, Persian and Arabic. The Persian sub-section was run by Frederick Humphreys, who was the Archivist for many years at the British Embassy in Persia. He was assisted by John Boyle who had learned Persian at the School of Oriental Studies. Thacker and Dr Bernard Lewis, who had lectured in the Islamic History School for Oriental Studies, ran the Arabic sub-section. Other code books were being read which were used by Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Egypt, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Nepal and Ethiopia. The Turkish sub-section received about fifteen to thirty messages per day in 1943 and circulated on average six per day. Other traffic received by country per month was Saudi Arabia fifteen to twenty; Iraq four to five; Iran 1,000; and Afghanistan twenty to twenty-five.
The Italian Section was headed by Frederic Catty from the Spring of 1942 until September 1944. Two women handled Vatican traffic from April 1942. By 1 December 1942, the Section had read 550 out of 664 messages received but only sixty-four were considered worth translating and circulating as it was mostly of an ecclesiastic, charitable or personal nature. Italian diplomatic systems were strengthened at German instigation in July 1942, but misuse led to it being broken by the end of the year. Further innovations by the Italians in January 1943 were also overcome due to their carelessness in use.
The Portuguese and Brazilian Section was run by Arthur Exell, a botanist who had researched Portugal and its colonies. It had no permanent staff and the Brazilian side was handled by Exell’s wife, Mildred, and an assistant. The Portuguese used a combination of book and machine ciphers, all of which were read by this Section.
Of the smaller European countries, a Romanian Section was run by R. Greiffenhagen, a former diplomat. Most of the traffic was commercial in nature, dealing with, for example, purchases of Spanish lead and blankets and Spanish demands for oil in exchange. The Bulgarian Section was run by Gabriel Woods but processed very little traffic. He also handled Yugoslavian and other Balkan country traffic.
Following the Nazi-Soviet pact in August 1939, GC&CS had broken the Soviet meteorological cipher and read a number of naval signals along with some 1,000 army and police methods. While useful as a source of tactical information, it yielded little of strategic importance. According to Hinsley: ‘All work on Russian codes and cyphers was stopped from 22 June 1941, the day on which Germany attacked Russia, except that, to meet the need for daily appreciations of the weather on the Eastern Front, the Russian meteorological cypher was read again for a period beginning in October 1942.’29 However, it does appear that Britain was working on Soviet traffic again by 1943. This had been decided at meeting that year between ‘C’ and the Director General of the Security Service in the US.30 A covert section was set up at Berkeley Street under Professor David Bernard Scott, a senior administration officer and a Cambridge mathematician. It was tasked with breaking a system which appeared in late 1943 when the RSS picked up Morse code signals which was presumed to be a reinstatement of the Communist International or Comintern network (officially abolished in May 1943) and had been inactive for some time. Scott reported directly to AGD and the section had three to four staff. Scott broke the cipher being used in about a month. None of this traffic was shared with the US.
As the Soviet Army advanced, traffic increased on this network and the section was increased to around twelve staff. According to John Croft who worked in the section, they included ‘the wife of a University of London professor, two 18-year-olds straight from school, one a classical scholar from Belfast, the other from Winchester College; the wife of one of the directors of J. Lyons and Co., the caterers; and a lady who asked for a transfer from MI5 in Curzon Street because she had had enough, so she said, of the society debs (who in wartime had been recruited to that outfit) gossiping about all the other society people under surveillance.’ Croft was one of four or five cryptanalysts and a Russian expert.31 He worked alongside one of the Fetterlein brothers who were brought out of retirement to translate the decrypts. These were then typed up, classified as top security with limited circulation such as the CSS and Churchill’s assistant on security matters, Major Desmond Morton. Only AGD visited the section, and telephone communications with RSS or Berkeley Street was through scramblers. In early 1945, the traffic could no longer be broken as it was now being enciphered using OTPs.
In late 1944, a special section was working on non-Morse traffic on military and civil circuits. The Strong/Travis agreement of 1943 did not cover traffic from non-service enemy or neutral sources. Between August and September 1943, Roger Randolph of G-2 Special Branch visited Berkeley Street. He was shown almost everything and in his report he covered Russian issues under ‘Miscellaneous matters’. His summary was: ‘Prior to 1941 Russian diplomatic traffic was studied. The conclusion was reached that it was one-time pad and accordingly the research was abandoned. At the present time Russian diplomatic traffic is not being analysed and none of it is being read.’32
However, Randolph did not say that GC&CS had stopped collecting Soviet diplomatic traffic. Clearly, the whole issue was very sensitive and it may be that AGD was under instructions not to share this with the Americans. According to David Alvarez: ‘Ironically, the Americans remained unaware that in late 1944 GC&CS established its own secret unit to study Russian internal traffic (civil and military) in Sloane Square, London.’33 He went on to say that:
By the end of the war, the United States had developed a large and productive signals intelligence organization that was reading the diplomatic traffic of almost every government in the world from Afghanistan to Yugoslavia. Much of this success was due to the diligence and skill of American cryptanalysts. No small part, however, was played by the British codebreakers at the Government Code and Cypher School. Throughout the war GC&CS provided timely advice and assistance that significantly advanced the American programme in diplomatic signals intelligence. The value of the British contribution was accurately summarized by the US Signal Security Agency (previously SIS) in a post-war review of operations: ‘It is doubtful whether success in solution of certain diplomatic systems could have been achieved in time to be useful had not the British supplied the necessary information. The debt of the SSA to GC&CS in shortening the period between the beginning of study and the production of translations was in the case of the diplomatic traffic of certain governments very great indeed.’ Without doubt, the British had been most helpful and cooperative.
A Research Section was headed by Norman Sainsbury and they were tasked with taking on new problems and making enough progress to be able to hand them over to the Language Section. Sainsbury could speak Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish, but Scandinavian countries used Hagelin systems, of which Berkeley Street had no expertise. By 1943, they were concentrating on the principal diplomatic system being used by the Free French. The bulk of the traffic was provided by Cable and Wireless Ltd.
The Commercial Section was based in Aldford House, a few streets from Berkeley Street. It was founded and led by G.L.N. Hope and the majority of his staff were women. They were dealing with some 7,000 messages per day by 1943 and almost all of them were in plain text. The German traffic dealt with things such as the sale of machinery or transactions in grain or mohair with Turkey and Spain. The traffic started to decline due to the restrictions placed on the use of codes by many governments and German occupation. The section did deal, however, with diplomatic codes which had commercial significance
All diplomatic traffic went by cable and wireless based on available routes. During WW1, the censorship organisation had provided all cable traffic. The small amount of wireless traffic was picked up by the Service intercept stations. While cable censorship ended in 1919, a Home Office order in 1921 required the Central Telegraph Office and the Cable Companies to submit all traffic handed to them to the Foreign Office for scrutiny. Censorship was re-imposed in September 1939 and at the same time, wireless traffic was steadily increasing. Traffic was picked up by Service Intercept stations kept active after WW1 by the Admiralty at Pembroke (later Flowerdown) and Scarborough, the War Office at Chatham and the Air Ministry at Waddington. The Metropolitan Police at Denmark Hill had also contributed German clandestine material from secret transmitters in embassies and legations, discovered during 1937–8.
With war looming, independent intercept stations were set up to take diplomatic traffic. These were staffed and maintained by the Post Office and operationally controlled by the Foreign Office. At the beginning of the war, two were operational, at Sandridge, Hertfordshire and Cupar (later closed down and replaced with one at Hawklaw), near Fie in Scotland. A third soon came into operation at Brora in the Scottish Highlands. They contributed Services traffic as well, being part of the Y Service. A special section, CMY (Commercial Y), was set up to centralise development and coordination, and evolved from WTC (W/T Coordination) in 1942. It eventually set up headquarters at Berkeley Street. Two more stations were set up at Whitchurch in 1943 and Wincombe in 1944.
Overseas sources were Mauritius, Ottawa, Delhi, Abbottabad, West Africa, Melbourne, Cape Town, Simons Town, Suez and Malta. Only the censorship and intercept post at Mauritius was under direct Foreign Office control, dealing with Japanese and French traffic. The rest were Service intercept centres, British and Dominion, which agreed to allocate a certain number of sets to diplomatic coverage. By July, 1945 the proportion of general traffic intercepted had reached 86 per cent and, of priority traffic, 96 per cent. Comprehensive arrangements with the US for the exchange of cable and wireless materials filled in any gaps in each side’s coverage.
The total number of translations of diplomatic and commercial messages peaked in 1943 at 14,050. All went to the Foreign Office, twothirds to MI5, one-third to the Service Ministries and 8 per cent to MEW. Staff numbers didn’t increase after 1943 and when the Japanese Section was increased, it was mainly from other Sections. AGD and his organisation were now at the forefront of British intelligence gathering. In April 1944, they decrypted a Dublin message sent the previous day and subsequent events exemplified this. As Percy Filby later recalled:
On Monday I went to see Commander Denniston and handed him the Dublin message. It was an innocuous message and Denniston appeared to wonder why I had troubled to show him it. But when I asked him to look at the date he was startled and when I told him of the results of the weekend work, he shook hands, dialled his scrambler phone and said, ‘Denniston here, may I speak to C?’ C came on the line and Denniston said, ‘C, I have some good news for you, may I come over?’ Denniston put on his hat, carefully folded the message and placed it in his inner pocket and almost ran from the building.
The Foreign Office allowed the messages from the German Consul in Dublin, Hempel, to go through the Leicester Square office for transmission to Berne, on the basis that it was a neutral to a neutral. This did allow the messages to be delayed for seven days so that AGD’s section could read the contents before the intended recipient. As D-Day approached, Dublin was passing possible dates and places for the landings in France. While no one at Berkeley Street knew the exact date, they were given a number to ring for any dates that were suggested in decrypted messages. This message did exactly that.
Staff numbers in AGD’s organisation in London eventually peaked at between 250 and 275 with only the Japanese Section seeing significant expansion. Translated decrypts issued in 1944 totalled 13,153 and in 1945 up to Japan’s surrender, 8,512. The Admiralty, War Office and Air Ministry received only one-third of the total product available. However, the Intelligence Exchange at BP was receiving all material and therefore intelligence from diplomatic attaché and commercial intercept was being received by Military Commands overseas by both signal and courier. A total of 72,624 decrypts were distributed to the Foreign Office between 3 September 1939 and 15 August 1945. It received, with only a few exceptions, all of the material, while thirteen other Departments each received a portion of the total, based on their particular interests. In general, ten major cryptanalytic country sections with between five and twenty-five staff produced a weekly average of 233 decrypts during the period above.
Life at Berkeley Street continued to be hazardous and the offices there were narrowly missed by V1 and V2 attacks on London as the work was relentless through 1944 and 1945 until VE Day. Suddenly, at the end of December 1944, AGD gathered his staff together. He informed them that he intended to retire and wanted to thank them for their work and loyalty to him personally. He was to be replaced by his deputy, Eddie Hastings. AGD held a dinner for some of his section heads and wished them well. He advised those that planned to stay in GCHQ, the postwar GC&CS organisation, that their lives would be different. ‘Before the war you came home and discussed the day with your wives, but now never again will you be able to share your life with your family. Some wives will not mind, but most do have some disappointment, so do think carefully before you decide.’34
Was this the speech of a bitterly disappointed man or just realistic advice from an experienced intelligence officer? In any event, AGD simply put on his hat and walked out of Berkeley Street to the Green Park Underground Station, saying nothing to his fellow workers. There was no official thank you or goodbye from GCHQ or the Foreign Office. It is not known if he was asked to nominate any of his staff for decorations but it appears that not one award was given to the 250 individuals who contributed to the success of AGD’s Berkeley Street organisation.