For those working amid the sand and the flies in the piercing heat, or indeed for those thousands of miles away again intercepting messages in wet warm emerald forests, mesmerised at night by the flickering glow of fireflies, it must have seemed for a time in 1945 that the British Empire would carry on much as before. The war was won and, superficially, the old order had not itself been called into question. Empire was a matter of administration and bureaucracy, or so it must have seemed to many. What could be more natural than Britain’s holding on to its bases in Egypt and Palestine, in Ceylon and India, and in Cyprus and Hong Kong?
Winston Churchill was gone, unsentimentally voted out before the war had even ended. His Labour deputy, Clement Attlee, was now prime minister. Ernest Bevin was his pugnacious foreign secretary. Britain was financially shattered: it had been driven practically to bankruptcy by the pressures of war production from 1940. Yet the economy alone was not Attlee’s main spur when he considered Britain’s position in this ruined, traumatised world. He was already thinking in terms of Britain voluntarily surrendering its imperial influence to a new technocratic council of nations (what would shortly become the United Nations).
But for the moment, the British codebreakers were at the absolute centre of influence. They were faster than many to understand that the Soviet Union under Stalin would be seeking to expand its own interests ruthlessly, not just through Eastern Europe, but into Asia as well. The codebreakers saw too that the Soviets would have a keen interest in the Balkan states, all the way down to Greece and the Mediterranean; and that the rich oil fields of Saudi Arabia and Iraq would be a new crucible of tension. The Combined Code and Cypher School in Heliopolis, just outside Cairo, Egypt, had proved more than invaluable throughout the Desert War against the German forces led by General Erwin Rommel, sometimes knowing more about his supply lines than he did. Now, although the focus of its work had shifted, it remained vital.
Because most aspects of the Second World War are now so intensely familiar to us, it is slightly startling to look instead at those immediate post-war weeks and months; to imagine how the peoples of Europe and Russia, of China and Japan could function amid such utter devastation. It is sometimes assumed or imagined, for example, that the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps was an occasion of tearful joy; in fact, on the part of both the liberators and the prisoners, it was anything but. There was horror on the part of the liberators, a sort of paralysed trauma from the prisoners. Those Jews who survived – who had seen their entire families murdered in the most appalling circumstances – what were they to do now? For some, the immediate and macabre-seeming answer was simply to stay put in the camps: the world outside was not to be trusted to any degree. At least now, within the fences of these obscene compounds, there was a bizarre measure of security among familiar faces. Beyond the gates were the people who had consigned them to this hell in the first place. There were some Jews who started to think of making the return to their old towns and villages deep in Eastern Europe; as we will see later, these journeys were not to end well. Forget any semblance of delicate justice: what were these people to do, where and how were they to live?
And although some might be tempted to see a satisfying symmetry, the same was quickly being asked of 20 million displaced German citizens: as Nazi rule ended in Czechoslovakia and in many parts of Eastern Europe, so the local populations in those countries immediately turned to look at the German speakers who had been sent to live among them. Those Germans, too, were soon to understand the pitilessness of persecution.
This, then, in 1945, was the Europe that the codebreakers were listening to. Germany itself was bloody, broken and mute. Once busy city streets had been crushed into grey dust; entire urban skylines had been obliterated. Women quite beyond number had been raped by invading Soviet soldiers, and these countless individual traumas were to resonate. Food was in desperately short supply; rations in Germany were down at one point to a few slices of bread, a herring and some jam to last a week. In many senses, the continent of Europe had been thrown back to the Dark Ages, fractured by war and threatened with famine.
Berlin, the German capital, was carved up into four sectors, run by the victorious Allies: the British, Americans, French and, of course, Russians. There was a solid practical reason for Bletchley Park’s wartime triumphs to remain completely secret, and that was that some of the codebreaking technology that they had pierced during the war was still very much in use. The Bletchley secret had also been assiduously kept from the Russians; although intelligence from decrypts had been carefully filtered through to Stalin, its exact provenance had always been disguised. This secrecy was later to pay off: for instance, some years later, as East Germany (or the ‘German Democratic Republic’) went behind the shadow of the Berlin Wall, officials sometimes still used Enigma machines.
The months before the end of the war had brought other developments that foreshadowed the secret cypher conflicts to come. Of particular significance in late 1944 was the discovery, in Finland, of a partially burned Soviet code-book, the vital key into a wide range of Russian communications. The Finnish cryptographers had made some use of it, feeling their way into the Russian codes, but they passed it on in turn to the Americans. The US cryptographers at Arlington Hall were quick to get to work. The Americans had as much of a knack for recruiting from unexpected quarters as the British. A key cryptographer assigned to this vitally important task was a woman called Gene Grabeel, ‘a Virginia schoolteacher,’ who, according to NSA history, ‘began the effort to read the Soviet diplomatic messages’.1
What she started snowballed into one of the most shattering revelations of treachery, for amid the thousands of Soviet messages that Grabeel and a very small (and hyper-secret) team of American and British codebreakers were to set to work on were communications that would uncover double agents working at the very heart of the Washington and Whitehall atomic establishments. As a result, that partially burned code-book found in Finland – together with more Russian encryption material discovered in May 1945 in Saxony and Schleswig, Germany – was to become a vital part of a mosaic of intelligence finds.
The Government Code and Cypher School successfully fought for its independence. It has been suggested that the wartime achievements of Edward Travis and his team had been rather appropriated by Sir Stewart Menzies and MI6; that Menzies wanted to see his own department garlanded with lavish praise; that if it had not been for Bletchley, MI6 would have emerged with very little credit from the conflict. But now the codebreakers were a service in their own right, under the auspices of the Foreign Office – because, despite the ruins and the human devastation and the financial chaos, it was also perfectly clear in this new world that the fast-evolving technologies of signals intelligence would be on a par with what was called ‘humint’ (or human intelligence), involving secret agents on the ground.
There was another incentive for a greater concentration on code-work: it was a great deal more economical than the expensive business of running spies and double agents. Also, unlike the skittish agents (just exactly how skittish, the security services were to discover to their terrible cost in subsequent years), codebreaking work was reliable: there was no treachery.
The cabinet and Whitehall knew that Britain’s imperial status would be changing; that India would soon be making the transition to independence. But as an empire within an empire, Commander Edward Travis’s global network of listening stations was, at this point in history, pretty much unparalleled, and indeed more powerful than any other on earth. No other nation, not even America, had an equivalent scope.
Naturally, America was keenly aware of this fact. The codebreakers at Arlington Hall had maintained extremely good relations with their British counterparts. Even though the Americans had been focused on their struggles against Japan, they had been squick to see what the British were seeing; that if there was to be further war in the years ahead – when, perhaps, economies had recovered sufficiently – then it would most likely be against Stalin’s Soviet Union.
As well as enjoying a sense of fellowship with director Edward Travis, Captain Wenger of the US Navy codebreakers had formed a firm friendship with Bletchley’s Frank Birch, a longstanding senior veteran who blended his brilliant codebreaking career (stretching back to the First World War) with an equally lively (and incongruous) curriculum of professional acting on stage, screen and early television.
‘Dear Birch,’ wrote Captain Wenger on 7 September 1945, ‘I trust you will forgive me for not having written sooner but we have been in a mad whirl here ever since peace broke out. As with you, we are in the midst of demobilisation and post-war planning and are struggling to find solutions to complex problems while many of the basic policies are still undecided or unknown to us.’ (In other words, it was all very well the codebreaking partners having ears all over the world, but they also required those in charge to indicate what their priorities should be.) ‘My object in writing at this time is simply to express my great appreciation of the great relations we have enjoyed throughout the war. Your unfailing spirit of co-operation and helpfulness was in no small way responsible for the fine teamwork that prevailed throughout our operations.
‘It seems to me,’ Wenger continued, ‘that the joint efforts of the two organisations can always be looked upon as a model of combined action. I trust,’ he added, ‘that this will find you in the best of health… Please convey my best wishes to Mrs Birch and to all of my good friends at Bletchley Park.’2
Wenger had supposed that Frank Birch was now going to take a break from this intense life. He was wrong. For the post-war codebreakers in 1945, there was to be a foretaste of the continuous nerve-stretching crises to come. It centred on a small and rather obscure region of western Asia: Azerbaijan, then part of the north of Iran.
The chief protagonists in this tussle were the British and the Russians. This was the first time since their wartime alliance that the two powers had found themselves in active dispute. The skirmish was to serve almost as an orchestral prelude – a tight, local outbreak of hostility that encapsulated the fears, neuroses and misunderstandings of the conflict to come.
The importance of this region was little to do with its extraordinary history. It had more to do with the gulping appetites of the motor age, and the mineral wealth of the land. In the latter years of the war, the Allies had kept a very tight grip on Iran, which had originally declared its neutrality in the conflict; the area had been absolutely key, first for transporting supplies to the Russians after Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union, and also for its flow of oil. For their part in this wartime control of the country, the Soviets occupied the north-west of Iran.
Naturally the Soviets showed no signs of wanting to move out again after the war, and when Azerbaijan declared its independence from Iran – with the backing of Stalin – Britain and America felt their interests to be imperilled. The British interest was particularly acute: it more or less owned the oil that was pumping out of Iran’s wells and it had every intention of holding on to this advantage. So at this point, the British needed to delve deep into the minds of Iran’s rulers: where did they secretly stand? Would they use this crisis as a trigger for rising up and ejecting the deeply resented British colonial presence?
And so it was in late 1945 that the Bletchley Park codebreaker Alan Stripp, a bright young man who had been cracking Japanese cyphers in Colombo, found himself being sent on a new mission to listen in to Iran and to break its codes. In order to do this, he was to be posted to the extensive ‘Wireless Experimental Depot’ in Abbottabad, in India’s North-West Frontier province, around 100 miles (160 kilometres) from Afghanistan (Abbottabad was to claim greater geopolitical fame in 2011 when it was revealed to be the refuge of the al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, assassinated by an American squadron). Signals from Iran and Russia poured into this station.
Though the journey across the continent, largely by rackety railway in sweltering weather, was arduous, Stripp relished the new challenge, which combined codebreaking with a more old-fashioned kind of approach. Cryptology, for all its terrific satisfactions, was a desk job. The posting to this remote station – with all of its historical resonances dating from the 19th-century ‘Great Game’ (ie the military manoeuvring) in the region between Britain and Russia – spoke more of high adventure. ‘My job… was to study Farsi, the main language of Iran and Afghanistan, and much closer to the languages of north-west Europe than many found in between,’ Stripp wrote. ‘It is a beautiful and flexible language with a strikingly simple structure and a fine literature.’3 According to Stripp, this top-secret cryptological listening station in the wild and beautiful foothills of the frontier had been established before the war – indeed, it might have even been there since the First World War. The unit that Stripp found was small, and was presided over by a Colonel Harcourt who had read Persian at Oxford.
Stripp insisted that even though the station had been reading Afghan and Iranian encoded messages for years, they had ‘certainly’ stopped working on the Soviet messages that they would surely also have been overhearing. Now that the war was over, this was changing fast. ‘Abbottabad was concerned with finding out what it could about Iran’s real intentions,’ wrote Stripp. ‘The traffic we studied, therefore, was not military but diplomatic, with a single code system covering every aspect of diplomatic and consular activity from summaries by overseas press attachés of local newspaper reports on Iran, at the brighter end, to routine requests for permission to issue a visa at the more tedious extreme.
‘This may sound pedestrian,’ he added, ‘but after the Japanese grind, it was a welcome distraction; moreover, the atmosphere of the small unit was very appealing.’4 These were the deep twilight days of Empire in the region; Stripp was in a world of manservants and ‘native bearers’ that was soon to disappear. But the dispute with Russia – the Soviets continuing to arm the rebels in the north of Iran in their struggle with Tehran – was a dress rehearsal for the tense stand-offs to come. Out there among the rich foothills of India, Alan Stripp was at the heart of the first Cold War skirmish.
But in early 1946, the truth was also that Russia was still weak and wounded; it needed time to convalesce. Even though Iran was starting to bubble with resentment not only about Soviet interventions, but also about British and American military occupation, the Kremlin felt that it had to stand down. As they did so, Stalin’s men attempted to wrest an oil concession from the Iranian authorities. But as soon as the Soviet forces had pulled back, the Iranian government tore this agreement up. Moscow was not quite able at this stage to retaliate. This relative weakness only served to exacerbate the neurotic paranoia and aggression within the Kremlin: the proof they needed of Britain and American perfidy.
And it was Alan Stripp and his colleagues who were in place, instantly intercepting, decrypting and analysing Russian movements. This was a test case for the new incarnation of the codebreakers: their ability to garner invaluable intelligence from every corner of the earth, no matter how remote. (Incidentally, these events of 1945 and 1946 also had repercussions that can be felt to this day – many parts of the modern Iranian establishment still nurse poisonous resentment of the British interference in their affairs, to say nothing of the sequestering of their oil, which continued with even greater establishment cynicism throughout the 1950s.)
Stripp was blithe, however. In his station set amid a stunning landscape of mountains and wildflowers, there was much in the job to be relished. He was so at ease with the Farsi language that he regarded the actual codebreaking as a crossword-style relaxation. And he could see history unfolding before his eyes in Abbottabad and northwards: how local politics in the region was to take on global consequences. ‘The fly in the Afghan ointment was the Faqir of Ipi,’ Stripp later wrote. ‘A celebrated old rogue who, with his forebears, had long played a tune which many tribesmen in the whole Hindu Kush area were happy to dance to. He was again becoming restive and the Pathans were getting excited. A lot of this was simply letting off steam: the rugged local tradition expressed joy at fairs, festivals and weddings, or grief at funerals, by firing rifles into the air. Sometimes things got out of hand, and kidnapping, arson, murder and attacks on local forts (on both sides of the border) led to the risk that any clumsy action by the civil or military administration could produce a dangerous flare-up.’ The town of Abbottabad was no less restive. ‘With the end of the war, the “Quit India” campaign was gaining strength and there were many points on which Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs could not agree.’ Given the subsequent partitioning of India and Pakistan in 1947 – with the resulting carnage and vast death toll – there was an element of macabre understatement in this.
Yet Stripp also wanted to pay tribute to the ferociously hard-working ‘Indian wireless operators’ attached to the station who were utterly committed to their interception duties ‘at a time when their loyalty to the British might well have been in question, for any appeal to their patriotism would have been diluted by the ending of the war.’5 They were also rather brilliant cricket players.
In 1946, it was time for the Wireless Experimental Depot team to pack up – and each of the men was offered the chance to apply for a full-time job with the codebreaking HQ. Some did and were accepted; but Stripp felt that this would be his chance to return to academia.
His story, though, throws light on a wide web of British interception and codebreaking that had been carefully constructed over a period of decades; indeed, as soon as the very first telephone cables were being laid under oceans in the earlier years of the century, and across continents, the British had been pioneers in making arrangements to have those cables tapped and monitored. By the mid-1920s, the Government Code and Cypher School had made a secret deal with the communications company Cable and Wireless which was laying down the connections: even back then, few were the cables that ran across borders which were not being actively monitored.
Meanwhile, a far-sighted Commander Edward Travis, preparing for his organisation’s move to Eastcote, had decided to take stock not only of British intercept stations, but also of the set-ups in the Commonwealth and the Dominions, interception bases ranging from New Zealand to Canada. He set off on an epic journey around the world.
Travis’s grand tour started at the station in Heliopolis, based in the old Flora and Fauna museum with its elaborate glass and steel architecture; then he progressed to Mombasa, where the codebreakers were ensconced in a rather ornate old school house overlooking the Indian Ocean. Travis then travelled across that ocean to inspect the rather more extensive cypher base at HMS Anderson in Colombo, Ceylon. And from there it was onwards to the Antipodes. Australia had a formidable interception and decryption setup and there was a lot of cross-traffic and co-operation between stations in Melbourne, Canberra and HMS Anderson. Commander Travis wanted to be sure that in the post-war landscape, the British operation retained its essential superiority; that there would be no worrying outbreaks of independence in the passing upwards of intelligence. On top of this, there had been concerns about the occasional instance of leaking in Canberra. It was vital that no-one knew of code systems that had been broken. According to security expert Professor Richard Aldrich, the Australians were actually quite happy to swallow the British arrangement, for it equally gave them access to all the latest developments in British signals intelligence.
The grand tour did not end there. Travis and his party then journeyed on to Hawaii, which again was the hub of a complex listening operation, this one obviously run by the Americans; and thence onwards to Washington DC. Canada was key to this codebreaking alliance too. It was recognised in Ottawa that Canada’s own codebreaking efforts could give the country some independent heft in the alliance of intelligence communities. But as with Australia, so with Canada: Britain was for some time to remain very much the senior partner. As a worldwide operation, the scale was quite breathtaking. And because of Empire and Commonwealth and Dominions, the British briefly had what the Americans did not have: the ability to listen to any nation in any corner of the earth.
The manpower and machinery to cope with the interceptions being received from all over the planet did not all converge at Bletchley Park: it would have been a physical impossibility and the teleprinters would most likely have melted. Instead, there were numerous out-stations, filled with the young men and women of the ‘Y’ services (the ‘Y’ was short for ‘wireless’). These operatives, high-speed Morse experts all, would receive both encrypted and decrypted messages sent on from Y Service colleagues around the world. The domestic out-stations were spread across the Home Counties of England, which took in all the raw intelligence and then fed it on to Bletchley; and in the new post-war world, they continued to do so. The staff, though, had gone through a bit of reconfiguration, and the intelligence now went to the new headquarters at Eastcote.
Naval signals were intercepted in Hampshire at HMS Flowerdown – a pleasingly bucolic name for what was in fact a rather utilitarian establishment just outside Winchester, noted among Wrens not only for the pressure and demands of the work, but also for a certain amount of knicker-theft. Flowerdown was also unusually progressive: throughout the war, this had been one of the few places where uniformed sailors and Wrens had worked side by side. Consequently, it had also been a simmering hotbed of romance.
In the aftermath of war, HMS Flowerdown was also where many young male Morse interceptors – who had been based everywhere from the remotest, bluest isles of the Indian Ocean to the wild shores of East Africa – now came back to address new challenges. These were young men with sharp, agile brains and reflexes, enabling them to take down accurately 30 coded words per minute. One such operator, barely 19 when he got back to Hampshire from the Cocos Isles, remembered how striking it was that the sole focus of their efforts was now Russian messages; as ever, the young Y Service operatives were never told why. Equally, they were still very strictly working under the Official Secrets Act: no-one was to know that they were listening in to all the Soviet communications that they could.
Other branches of the services had their own arrangements. The Royal Air Force, for instance, also employed secret listeners. Their intercepted encrypted signals were routed through to Chicksands Priory, in Bedfordshire, a rather more aesthetically pleasing prospect than HMS Flowerdown, with its pre-fab Nissen huts; parts of Chicksands Priory dated back to the 15th century. This antiquity was counterbalanced by an arrestingly futuristic spectacle nearby of a Stonehenge of radio masts – vast concentric circles laid out in an array across the land. Chicksands was later to stand as the perfect symbol of the close relationship between the British and the Americans, as an American team of interceptors in essence took the site over in 1950. But the great – and sometimes comical – point of continuity, from the point of view of the Bedfordshire locals, was the secrecy. Throughout the war, everyone knew better than to ask questions; after the war, inquisitiveness increased. Any local people asking whether it was true that Chicksands was some kind of spying headquarters were told matter-of-factly that it was not: it was simply an ordinary RAF establishment. But everyone could see with their own eyes that rather beautiful array of aerials.
Chicksands had played an honourable part in the codebreakers’ secret war with Germany; originally based at RAF Cheadle, in Cheshire, there were men and women there who were faster than their counterparts at Bletchley Park. Before the advent of the computer age, in fact, these young people came to be known as ‘the human computors’ (sic). Among their number was a bright young man called Arthur Bonsall who some decades later – in the 1980s – would rise to become the Director of GCHQ. As well as getting early crowbars into Luftwaffe Enigma codes and pilots’ messages, the team at Chicksands were, in 1941, at the centre of the operation to sink the German battleship Bismarck. It was their intercepts of Luftwaffe communications – some of which involved an anxious Luftwaffe officer who had a relative serving on board the Bismarck – that, once decoded, gave clues as to the elusive co-ordinates of the much-feared vessel. Once this intelligence had been passed through Bletchley Park, the British were able to act: first, by sending RAF planes flying over the Bismarck as if by chance, to give the impression that the ship had been spotted from the air; nothing could be allowed to hint that in fact the Bismarck’s messages had been read and decyphered.
There was the occasional outbreak of friction between Bletchley and the out-station ‘human computors’. Because of security, the codebreakers at Bletchley hated it when codes were broken unbidden, and off site; and this was the case with young Arthur Bonsall’s team (as indeed it was elsewhere with another department, the Radio Security Service, and one of its brilliant young operatives, Hugh Trevor-Roper).
The Chicksands operation, together with those spectacular mast arrays (and occasional concerts from American band leader Glenn Miller, attended by hundreds of adoring WAAFs [members of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force], further proof of fruitful Anglo-American accord), made the interception work even slicker and faster. The main building at RAF Chicksands had once been a priory belonging to the Gilbertine order, and it was said to be suitably haunted. The chief spectre was that of a nun. The story went that she had become pregnant and had been walled up alive for her sins; her lover was beheaded.
By August 1945, Germany’s defeat had been followed by that of Japan. VJ night saw a number of Chicksands personnel off duty at last; in that warm summer darkness, WAAFs gathered around the nearby YWCA for a huge bonfire and celebratory drinks. But as with the other corners of the codebreaking enterprise, the work went on. And in the new post-war chill, RAF Chicksands had been designated as ‘European Signals Centre’. For the next five years, the personnel left on base would be focusing on the signals coming out of Central Europe.
Wars do not just suddenly stop, like a heavy rainstorm followed by sunshine. Treaties may be signed, but the violent aftershocks are felt by everyone for an extraordinary amount of time afterwards. How were the Allies to deal with the German people? How were they to be, as the phrase came to be used, ‘de-Nazified’? How was the country to be run? Who would feed the population and try to ensure that they did not begin the whole murderous cycle all over again?
Agonising questions branched out from that: the survivors of the concentration camps – what was to become of them? Added to this was the terrifying and all-embracing oppression that came with Soviet rule, which itself always teetered on the edge of state-approved anti-Semitism (and indeed, by the 1950s, openly tipped over into it). The continent was swarming with displaced persons (or DPs). There were, for example, a great many Polish men who had fought with the Allies, but who had no intention of returning to their own country, now under the domination of their implacable Russian enemies and their Polish Communist collaborators. Many of those who did return would be subjected in the months to come to grotesque trials for having fought alongside capitalists and imperialists, regardless of whether they were Allies or not. The Poles knew that to return would be to face either face instant violent death or the protracted living-death of the Gulag. But where could they go?
And over all these individual and mass traumas flew the spectres of disease and starvation. The shadow that had fallen over 20th-century Europe disfigured many thousands times more lives than any previous conflict. For the Western Allies, the overwhelming question was: how could a semblance of civilisation be restored so swiftly after the savagery of the war? And what sort of government would Germany have? Could it in fact be trusted to govern itself? And the nation was clearly bankrupt, so how could it be expected to pay out reparations to compensate those it had so implacably conquered and destroyed?
Decrypted messages – signals intelligence – were to be absolutely at the centre of these efforts to try and keep the continent stable. The British may no longer have been monitoring armies, but they had to stay sharp and alert and pinpoint-accurate, to ensure that the continent did not slide into an even deeper abyss. They needed first warning of trouble or violence from a hundred different quarters; and most secretly, they needed to understand precisely the thinking of the governments of so many different nations, and in particular, those in the east. They needed – through monitoring and decyphering the airwaves – to judge and anticipate the actions of others; this applied to everyone, from the Jews in Palestine to the separatists in India.
Most particularly, it applied to Stalin’s Soviet Russia. Commander Travis’s codebreakers were light years away from the British public in their views of Stalin’s regime. The cryptographers had a long-standing, deep-rooted distrust and loathing of the Bolsheviks; the general public had, throughout the war, developed a much more favourable view. Throughout the war, ‘Uncle Joe Stalin’ had become hugely popular, especially in more working-class areas. Maisky, the Russian ambassador to Britain, recalled how warmly he was received in visits to the East End of London. He also reported on how images of Stalin, when flashed up in cinema newsreels, always drew cheers. With no public knowledge of the true nature of Stalin’s rule (famines and the deaths of millions were shrugged off as dark rumour), Soviet Russia and Communism looked to many like the image of the future. Codebreaking veterans, long-standing foes of the Soviet regime, must have listened to such sentiments in grim silence.
Of course, it was not only the codebreakers who had a more realistic view of Stalin. But even though it was believed in Whitehall that Russia would clearly be the enemy in a future conflict, not everyone believed that the Soviets would be in any immediate position to fight a conventional war. There was physical and economic exhaustion. The losses and the traumas inflicted by the Nazis would require a lengthy period of recovery. But there was another fear, of a more insidious form of invasion. The anxiety was that the Soviets would not actually have to pick up a weapon; that all they had to do was to infiltrate Soviet sympathisers into the political classes and the trades unions of France, Italy and other countries such as Czechoslovakia. They would work to convert the countries from within to the religion of Communism. In the moral disorientation of the war’s aftermath, there would be a great many who would succumb. There was evidence that huge numbers already had.
Given the rumbling, violent weeks and months after the war, it is easy to imagine both the dread of Communism spreading and also, for many on the ground, its overwhelmingly seductive desirability. For a younger generation of Europeans, the world and all its promise had been torn down around them, and the fascists had done more than anyone to destroy it. This, it seemed to many, was the end result of capitalism. It was a system that had made a continent collapse in on itself. Therefore, surely the only chance for a proper new start, a society where men stood a chance of being equal, lay with the purity of the Soviet system?
So the listeners at Chicksands and other locations were not merely focusing on the Russians, but also on the sort of political noise coming out of regions such as provincial France; codebreakers were alert to any traffic, any communication, passing between Paris and Moscow.
The army also had its own band of dedicated wireless listeners. The signals intelligence that they picked up was sent on for analysis not too far away from Chicksands: it went to Beaumanor in Leicestershire (the main house of which again outdid Bletchley Park in terms of its pleasing aspects). All three of these establishments – Bletchley, Chicksands, Beaumanor – had lively, youthful atmospheres; the operatives at Beaumanor took this a stage further with their own quarterly magazine, devoted to gossip, jokes and satire, which continued well after the war, up until 1950. After August 1945, the numbers of people based in and around this fine 19th-century house naturally thinned, but there were some young men – there as civilian operators – who now found themselves facing National Service. That is, they were to do the same job – the high-intensity interception of Morse code messages from every continent – but they were to do so in uniform, and with sergeant majors bawling at them.
Close by the elegant Beaumanor Hall was the equally pleasing 19th-century property Garats Hay, which not only hosted wireless interception work, but was also a training camp for a great many young people; despite the secrecy of the work, there are photographs from the 1940s and 1950s of young smiling men, either in huts or in the grounds. And equally, there are many fond recollections of the pub in the local village of Woodhouse Eaves. These youngsters – drawn from all sorts of backgrounds, but quite often linked by a fanatical and almost obsessional love for radio – underwent extraordinarily intensive Morse training. One poet, simply calling himself ‘Wireless Operator’, contributed this verse to an in-house magazine:
‘Livid pulses striking free/In beatings of the rhythmic Morse
Up to the stratosphere, over the sea/Away from the tall and virile source…
Hands outstretched, a million masts receive/Electrical sensations, ethereal words,
Faster than the gods perceive,/ Smoother than the birds.’6
Which makes the work sound rather tranquil; the truth was different, especially during the war years. Gwendoline Gibbs was an ATS girl with the Y Service who had been posted to Garats Hay in 1944 and who stayed on a little after the war’s end, as the interception targets were reconfigured. She recalled the crushing pressure she and all her colleagues had been under. It was not simply a matter of transcribing signals; they were also battling against interference and jamming, knowing that the messages they were taking down could mean the difference between life and death. On top of this, the hours were murderous: long shifts, followed by uneasy sleep. There were a few nervous breakdowns. Operators were moved to different posts, different shift patterns – but when on leave, they still alarmed their families, looking as they did like the living dead. Of course, the work during – as well as after – the war was very strictly under the Official Secrets Act; no-one in the Y Service could tell a soul what it was that they were doing.
That said, Gwendoline Gibbs also recalled that the young atmosphere of Garats Hay – the Regency house surrounded by utilitarian Nissen huts – could often make people combust with hilarity. At the end of the war, the focus of her work swiftly shifted to the monitoring of Russian signals. The intensity was undimmed; but youthful energy sought other outlets too. As with HMS Flowerdown, and the intermingling of young women and men, there were outbreaks of romance everywhere. Yet these were also more innocent times. ‘As one girl said, at a later reunion,’ recalled Gwendoline, ‘if someone had said “rape”, I would have thought that they meant cattle food.’7
Amazingly, at a time when the nation was still struggling on the tiniest rations of butter, meat and sugar, the food at Garats Hay was extremely good. ‘The cooks were first class,’ wrote Gwendoline. ‘We had plenty of salads, with chopped raw cabbage, dried apricots and apples as well as fresh fruit. One of the cooks made superb pastry – we all looked forward to her apple pies.’ The women of Garats Hay also became adept at adapting the less flattering aspects of their uniforms. Especially hated was the army regulation underwear. ‘Most of us had cut off the long legs of the khaki knickers, the “passion killers”,’ remembered Gwendoline Gibbs, ‘and sewn the bottoms so that they resembled French knickers – so much sexier!’8
There was also more of that Anglo-American co-operation. Gwendoline recalled that until the end of 1945, there was a trio of ‘American intelligence chaps’ who proved very popular. There was ‘Forbes Sibley, Fred Allred and “Mac”, a charming trio,’ she said, ‘one of whom, Mac I think, was reputed to have a little black book containing all the names of the girls he’d been out with.’
In 1946, in common with so many other grand properties at the time, Beaumanor Hall was put up for sale: the passing of the owner, W Curzon Herrick, had left the family and estate with unsupportable death duties to pay. They could no longer afford the place. Landed gentry were hardly the priority for Clement Attlee’s post-war government. The Loughborough Monitor reported: ‘Mansion bought by the War Office. It is remembered that the Mansion was taken over by a Radar Station (sic) during the war and considerable money was laid down on equipment and permanent fixtures. It is still used as a radar centre and the War Office have already stated that the building will be maintained in its present state so as to preserve the beauty of its setting.’
The end of the war was also bringing prodigious leaps in technology: at Bletchley, codebreakers had been working with pioneering electronic decryption techniques and at Garats Hay, there would be similar preparation for a new era of what would be termed ‘elint’ – that is, electronic intelligence. Which, once again, would prove catnip to new young recruits fascinated by this world of secret communications.
In this new environment, Commander Travis had faced another important consideration: large numbers of academics – the professors and scholars who had been so essential and innovative in their codebreaking work – were now returning to Oxford, Cambridge and the other universities from which they had been drawn. Obviously, since they had all signed the Official Secrets Act, there was no fear of any indiscretions. Equally, though, it was important that they should understand that their secret expertise could well be called upon in the future. Strong and congenial links were to be maintained. Indeed, such links served the double purpose of giving the codebreakers a form of occasional informal consultation, and the academics the supreme flattery of knowing that their superior intellects were still confidentially required.
Among the younger academics who had worked in those Bletchley huts, mathematicians Shaun Wylie and Irving ‘Jack’ Good were examples of men who either were kept closely in the loop on matters cryptological or indeed were hauled back into it full-time (as was the case with Good).
So it was that Commander Travis, when in discussion with the Treasury about the sort of personnel this brand new branch of intelligence would need, was swift to pay the academics proper tribute. ‘The war proved beyond doubt that the more difficult aspects of our work call for staff of the highest calibre,’ he wrote in a memo. ‘The successes by the Professors and Dons among our temporary staff, especially perhaps the high grade mathematicians, put that beyond doubt.’9 These were the sorts of minds that he wanted to carry on attracting. Curiously, there was to prove a strong line of continuity in terms of personality types, running from the nascent Government Code and Cypher School, through Bletchley Park and now into this computerised future: in other words, the new generation of codebreakers were to prove every bit as focused yet whimsical and quietly eccentric.