A close examination of Alastair Denniston’s thirty-year career in Sigint still leaves many questions unanswered. Given the inherently secret nature of his work, it is not surprising that key documents relating to it remain classified,1 and opinion about the significance of his contribution is divided. Frank Birch, the official historian of British Sigint and former colleague of AGD both in Room 40 and at BP, showed little interest in AGD’s Berkeley Street organisation in his post-war history. While acknowledging the breadth of the work undertaken there, he was quite dismissive of its use in the war effort:
The work of the Diplomatic Sections was primarily concentrated on the systems of the Axis powers, Germany, Italy and Japan, and secondarily on those of China and France, but some 45 other countries – in Europe, South America and the Near and Middle East – also received attention. The Section’s fundamental function had been to spread research over the communications of all countries in readiness to intensify the attack on any in which the Foreign Office might, from time to time, show particular interest, and in the last months of war, the structure of the ‘Civil’ side of GC&CS tended to revert to type.
After AGD left BP, colleagues there seemed to look down on the work at Berkeley Street and considered it to be easy and unexciting. It is curious that they took this view, as did Birch, in the absence of any real understanding of its true value. Their criticism appears to have been driven by the fact that AGD had simply recreated the pre-war GC&CS without its military sections. The implication was that while the rest of BP had been transformed into an intelligence agency, AGD was stuck in the past. Ironically, it was AGD’s strategy in the interwar years which had consolidated all British Sigint under GC&CS and by 1944 facilitated this transformation.
In 2011, his grave was rededicated and GCHQ was represented to finally honour its first Director. Despite the attendance of GCHQ Departmental Historian, Tony Comer, at the rededication service and AGD’s contribution to Sigint being publically acknowledged for the first time, doubts persisted within the intelligence community. Only several years ago, I told a former head of GCHQ that I was writing AGD’s biography and his response was ‘Why would you write a book about him?’ One suspects that even such a senior figure would have known little of the true value of AGD’s contribution to Sigint over a thirty-year period.
It is hard not to come to the conclusion that any public acknowledgement of AGD’s work at Berkeley Street from 1942 to 1945 might have drawn unwelcome attention to a part of GC&CS that the British intelligence community prefers to pretend never existed. Even the award of a knighthood to AGD might have raised questions about British diplomatic Sigint, both during the war and immediately afterwards.
However, GCHQ have, for the first time, provided an opinion on the legacy of diplomatic and commercial Sigint during WW2:2
The point is that being exiled to Berkeley St made Diplomatic and Commercial seem like second class work in comparison to the military tasks carried out at BP. Furthermore, Denniston’s re-creation of pre-war GC&CS led most famously to the Eric Jones comment2 which spurred AGD into producing ‘The Government Code and Cypher School Between the Wars’. It wasn’t Sigint for the experts: it didn’t require the same talent. This differentiation was largely carried on into Eastcote even though the nationality of the military target had changed. It was generally thought that the best talent ought to work Soviet military. Right up to the end of the Cold War we talked about Soviet and NSWP (Non-Soviet Warsaw Pact) on the one hand, and, (almost dismissively) of ‘Rest of the World’ on the other. Denniston didn’t get his Knighthood because Menzies didn’t recommend him, and the source of the antipathy is the events of late 1941 when ‘C’ himself almost lost control of BP owing to AGD’s poor management of an increasingly complex organisation.3
The one person who would never challenge decisions which would affect the rest of his life and legacy was AGD himself. According to his son Robin:
My father was the most secretive man I knew. I learned more about his work from his colleagues than I did from him. Our whole family life was dominated by the fact that my father could not and would not talk about his job. ‘The less said the better’ was the ruling principle of his life.4
By 1973, Robin Denniston had become increasingly frustrated by the failure of the intelligence community to acknowledge his father’s many achievements. A career in publishing5 gave him a professional as well as a private perspective on the true history of Sigint over two world wars. He was particularly concerned about the circumstances of AGD’s removal from BP as he later wrote:
He got quite bad depression, which my mother called Scotch blight, in which he found it impossible to say anything for hours. After he was fired from Bletchley, he suffered enormously. He was very irritable. He had lost confidence in himself, betrayed as he saw it, and so did many, by his friends – by Travis, his subordinate for so many years who now took his job – no evidence at all that he behaved badly – by de Grey. The privacy of his temperament, the secretness of the job meant not only total security but no delegation. He found delegation very difficult not because he was possessive (I don’t think he was), he was a good and experienced cryptographer, but others like Knox and Cooper and Strachey might have been better and he knew it, and of course he readily acknowledged and supported the recruitment of the great mathematicians and chess players – areas in which he did not pretend to compete.6
Robin also felt that he knew very little of his father, who was 45 when he was born and spent much of his time working in London as head of GC&CS. He had gone to boarding school aged 13 in 1939, and thereafter was only home in the holidays when the war was all-consuming for AGD. Robin subsequently went straight to university from school aged 19 when AGD retired, and then married in July 1950 when he was 23. After that he was not at home and tensions between Robin’s first wife, Anne, and AGD had inevitably affected his relationship with his father. It no doubt contributed to his later effort to restore his father’s reputation to its rightful place in Sigint history. His role in the publishing world would help considerably in his efforts to, in the words of his daughter Candy, ‘finish unfinished business’. He had already learned that he needed to tread carefully when it came to the security services. As a young editor at Collins, he had told a publishing friend a little about Bletchley Park while his father was still alive. After his friend made a few enquiries, ‘within days GCHQ (the successor of GC&CS) had descended on my father’s retirement cottage asking him how he, the most discreet of all civil servants, could have become a security risk in his old age. Remarks were made about withholding his pension. He was furious, I was apologetic. There the matter rested.’
During the war, MI6’s counter-espionage Section V underwent an effective expansion. With a responsibility for the security of signals intelligence in the field, the section successfully exploited the use of what was known as ISOS reports, the generic term for decrypted German Abwehr signals intelligence traffic. MI6 had no history of counter-espionage work and learned how to use double-cross agents and mount ‘l’toxication’ or deception operations, designed to confuse the enemy as to its true intentions, from Paul Paillole, deputy of the French counter-espionage section of the pre-war Deuxième Bureau. Much had depended on the abilities of the section head, Felix Cowgill.
Cowgill had been recruited in March 1939 from the Indian Police, for whom he had made a special study of communism. He brought years of counter-espionage experience to bear on his post, but had no experience of Europe, having spent the previous twelve years running penetration agents in the Comintern’s network in Bengal, most recently as Deputy Commissioner of Special Branch. It had been understood that he would eventually succeed the Deputy Chief and former head of Section V, Valentine ‘Ve-Ve’ Vivian, as the resident MI6 expert on communism and director of a new operational department dealing with the subject. Cowgill’s ablest student within the Section was the successful head of its Iberian subsection, Kim Philby, who would eventually become the British secret service’s favourite son.
It was not until 1961 that senior intelligence officials such as Menzies had to acknowledge the bitter truth of Philby’s treachery. Philby defected to the Soviet Union in 1963, and several years later was living in Moscow and writing his memoirs. Clearly, the publication of such a book could damage the reputations of both Menzies and his service during the war. At the same time, the Sunday Times began a major examination of the Philby affair and assigned to it an experienced team of reporters, Bruce Page, David Leitch and Phillip Knightly. Their subsequent articles caused quite a stir and were subsequently published in 1968 by Andre Deutsch in the UK and Doubleday in the US.7 The book described the ‘British tradition of cryptographic skill’ and provided some detail of the activities of Room 40 and GC&CS at BP. It named AGD as a veteran of the former and the head of the latter organisation.
The Foreign Office tried to stop Kim Philby from publishing his memoir, My Secret War. No publisher wanted to take it on but Robin, a director of Hodder & Stoughton at the time, according to the Sunday Telegraph, ‘felt so strongly that the book ought to be published that he took the unusual step of offering to act as London agent for the book in his private capacity and on a no-commission basis’. He gave no reason for his support for the book, which could damage the reputation of ‘C’ and SIS. According to Menzies’ biographer, Anthony Cave Brown, ‘Robin Denniston believed that it was “C” who had been incompetent, not his father. He became a determined enemy of Stewart Menzies by ramming through the publication of Frederick Winterbotham’s memoir The Ultra Secret despite the threats of the British Government. And it was Robin Denniston who found Philby’s book a home at MacGibbon and Kee, a small but respected London publisher.’
It does seem that Menzies supported Philby far too long, having mistakenly reached the conclusion that he was innocent. MI5 informed him of their suspicions of Philby after interviewing him for the first time on 12 June 1951. Despite this, Menzies took Philby to dinner at the Travellers’ Club on 1 April 1952 and asked him ‘whether he wished for any advance of the bonus that was given to him at the time of his resignation’.8 Philby eventually confessed to being a Soviet spy on 13 January 1963 and on the 24th he was smuggled out of England by his Soviet handlers on the Russian freighter Dolmatova. All of this would have been known to Robin and Philby’s book was duly published in 1968. According to Robin’s daughter Candy: ‘I think Dad was keen to see the truth be revealed and hence his choice of a publishing career. Getting the Philby Memoirs was for him a coup because it was telling the truth about what he (Philby) had done.’ Robin’s son Nick believes that his father wanted the true story of AGD’s wartime activities to be told but at the same time was not averse to ‘putting right a few wrongs’.
A year before Winterbotham’s book, generally considered to be the first authorised account of GC&CS’s activities at BP, was published, another book appeared. Philby: the Long Road to Moscow by Patrick Seale and Maureen McConville included a fifteen-page chapter titled The Golf Club and Chess Society. This was apparently a jokey name coined by early recruits to GC&CS in the late 1930s. The chapter summarised the whole story of British Sigint, starting with the creation of Room 40 and ending with William Friedman’s letter to ‘Y’ Denniston on learning of AGD’s death. It also included personal details about the Denniston family, from AGD and Dorothy’s daily assault on The Times crossword puzzle to ‘Y’ and Robin playing rounders in the grounds of BP. Both ‘Y’ and Robin were thanked by the authors in the Acknowledgements.
Given his character and strong religious beliefs,9 it seems unlikely that Robin Denniston saw Menzies, as Cave Brown claimed, as an enemy. While he did show great animosity towards GCHQ near the end of his life, it is more likely that he was trying to set the record straight and establish his father’s true legacy. His support for Gordon Welchman’s book The Hut Six Story, the first to provide technical details of GC&CS’s work, was another example of this. He subsequently arranged for the publication of Welchman’s paper From Polish Bomba to British Bombe, which gave the true history of the Polish contribution to the breaking of the Enigma system. In a 1992 paper, Robin described the process which led to the publication of the Philby, Winterbotham and Welchman memoirs.10
According to Robin, Philby’s memoir was dismissed as a ‘plant’ by the British authorities, with the sole intention of creating division between the British and American secret services. Robin had never met Philby, but his parents had been on good terms with him and his sister ‘Y’ had, for a time, worked at MI6 headquarters in Ryder Street as a secretary for Philby and others. Robin had read the complete typescript in the offices of Percy Knowles, an American literary agent. It appeared to Robin to be a genuine account of key events in Philby’s career as a Soviet spy. He was completely convinced when he read Philby’s casual description of the move of the diplomatic and commercial Sigint traffic work from BP to its new headquarters in Berkeley Street. Over twenty years after Philby wrote his memoir, the activities and existence of Berkeley Street had not been officially acknowledged!
Rather cryptically, Robin responded to Cave Brown’s comments on his part in the publication of Philby’s book in a footnote:
He believes that its chances of publication would have been slender, given the Foreign Office’s campaign to prevent the book ever appearing, and attributes my own efforts on its behalf to a family dislike of Menzies, who, some may think, emerges rather badly from Philby’s pages. I, on the contrary, think he gets surprisingly kind treatment. It is true that my father never got on so well with Menzies as with his predecessor, ‘the admiral’, Hugh Sinclair, who was warmly admired by all his staff. Yet my father and Menzies remained in regular touch until the former’s retirement.
Robin began the process of planning his father’s biography, and in April 1982, met with Rear Admiral W.N. Ash, Secretary of the Defence, Press and Broadcasting Committee. Aware of the sensitivities within the intelligence community about such a book, he had put forward a more modest proposal. He suggested that he would collect information on a privileged basis and prepare a draft biography, not for publication but for submission to the appropriate authority. He would only begin discussions with Lord Weidenfeld about publication when the authorities gave him approval to do so. By July, Admiral Ash confirmed that he had put the proposal ‘into the machine’ but was still unable to let Robin have ‘a reaction’ to it.
Robin pressed on with his research and began by trying to contact the very few survivors of Room 40. He spoke to Patrick Beesley, who had just published an account of Room 40. Beesley told him that the only surviving member of Room 40 that he had found was W.H. Bruford. He also thought it would be difficult for Robin to find anything new about AGD’s work in WW1 or that ‘there would be sufficient fresh information to produce a book about your father’s working life’. One Berkeley Street veteran was more than happy to provide Robin with everything he could remember. Percy Filby had arrived at BP on 8 September 1940 and was assigned to Tiltman. He eventually ended up at Berkeley Street as head of the German section. He wrote to Robin on 15 April 1981 and gave him details about AGD’s removal and his strong views about those who had ‘plotted’ against him.11
While British post-war reports about the Berkeley Street operation were still classified, as they are to this day,12 he was able to acquire a copy of the McCormack Report (see Appendix 11) which provided an American description of the operation. He also obtained all of the war and post-war correspondence between AGD and William Friedman. He continued to accumulate a considerable amount of information about his father’s life, but a coherent structure for the book was still not in place.
In 2006, Robin was introduced by his daughter to the publisher Jerry Johns. Jerry agreed to work with him to put the book together. By this time Robin was nearly 80 and not in the best of health. Jerry recalls being ‘summoned’ to Robin’s house in Malvern where he lived alone, surrounded by piles of books, papers and other documents in somewhat chaotic circumstances, and he would be handed some material to work on. Robin continued to struggle with the book but eventually, in 2007, Polperro Press published Thirty Secret Years, A.G. Denniston’s work in signals intelligence 1914-1944.
On 4 October 2012, Iain Lobban, the Director of GCHQ, gave a speech at the University of Leeds called ‘GCHQ and Turing’s Legacy’. It was one of a number of events held to commemorate the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing. In his speech, Lobban publically acknowledged AGD’s role in the creation of GCHQ. He began by noting AGD’s recruitment of mathematicians:
It was this information which crystallised a crucial insight by Alastair Denniston, the Director of the Code and Cypher School, and a veteran of cryptanalysis in the First World War: he had already worked out that the forthcoming war and the profusion of mechanical encryption devices needed a new sort of cryptanalyst to complement the existing staff. He decided to look out wartime colleagues who had returned in 1919 and 1920 to the Universities (well, to Oxford and Cambridge) and asked them to identify what he described as ‘men of the professor type’, academics engaged in mathematical research who could be persuaded to turn their hands to cryptanalysis. In the first list of names drawn up in response to his request we can see the hint of what was to come: Alan Turing, Gordon Welchman and Max Newman.
He went on to say that:
One of the reasons for the success of Bletchley Park, and something that I and Alastair Denniston’s other successors have striven to maintain in GCHQ, is the organisation’s ability to make space to allow individuals to flourish, both in isolation, and within teams. I will be talking more about the importance of recognising and making space for the unique and different contribution that each person makes, but part of that recognition can often involve a leap of faith by the manager.
He concluded his remarks by drawing a clear line from AGD’s pioneering work to his own:
Let me conclude, though, by looking at Denniston, the Director in 1938 who saw Turing and accepted him as a new type of cryptanalyst for a new era. Obviously my job, like his, is to make sure that all of the wonderfully talented people we have retain their focus on the task set out for GCHQ by the government. But what drives me, what will make me feel that I have in a small way achieved a little of what he did, comes from focusing not just on the outputs and achievements of GCHQ, but on fostering, protecting and developing a culture which prizes passion and dedication, in which today’s and tomorrow’s Turings can achieve as much as the genius, the man Alan Turing, did.
In the end, the last word is probably best left, not to politicians and administrators, but to those who actually produced the signals intelligence which so dramatically affected two world wars. Writing in his personal memoir, the Head of the Air Section at BP, Josh Cooper, said of AGD:
He understood the wider problem of Sigint better than he was credited for. When he made me head of the Air Section he gave me a charge which I never forgot that I was to use cryptanalysis as one of the tools for obtaining intelligence by interception. But later when I asked for additional staff to build up an intelligence card index he became agitated and warned me earnestly not to ‘confuse cryptography with intelligence’, and said that the intelligence departments in Whitehall would object to this kind of thing.13
The two dominant figures in British and American signals intelligence of the twentieth century, John Tiltman and William Friedman, remained close friends with AGD for the rest of his life. In a letter to Robin, Tiltman said: ‘I had a great respect for your father … and remember him as a very good director and personal friend. I think I can claim that together with Josh Cooper I was about his [AGD’s] best supporter in a job which was by no means easy and I have always considered that he was quite unnecessarily roughly treated when Travis took over in 1942.’
Friedman, in his poignant letter of condolence to ‘Y’ Denniston, perhaps best summed up AGD’s career: ‘That so few of them should know exactly what he did towards achievement of victory in World War I and II is the sad part of the untold story of his life and of his great contribution to that victory.’