The photographs of the Yalta Conference – the seated figures of Stalin, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill – looked, even by 1946, like a memento of a vanished age. There was the idea of an American president seated smiling, quite relaxed, with the Soviet dictator, whom he trusted and respected, even as that dictator demanded vast reparations from Germany. Also hinted at in the composition of this image was the suggestion that the United Kingdom was the absolute equal of these two vast powers. The following Potsdam Conference had taken place in the early summer of 1945, and halfway through it, Winston Churchill was abruptly replaced: he had lost the General Election and it was his successor, Clement Attlee, who slid into that chair. Meanwhile, Franklin Roosevelt had died in the spring of 1945 and Harry S Truman, who had been his vice president, acceded to the White House.
By 1946, any idea of warmth between the US and the Soviet Union was the shadow of a memory. Naturally, there has never been any such thing as a perfectly stable world; yet in Britain, the codebreakers now had to be alert to a range of new threats. These were not just military. Britain’s stature was fast dissolving like thawing snow; the empire starting to crack, colonial power stuttering. The country faced the loss not only of imperial revenue, but also valuable military and naval bases. The GCHQ codebreakers would have to work ever more nimbly to pinpoint in advance the secret intentions of hostile powers – wherever in the world they might be. Added to this was the prospect of a vast swathe of continental Europe living under an immovable Communist dictatorship. More insidious than the menace of Soviet armies was the idea – believed by some – that a young generation from Calais to Athens could become revolutionaries with no coercion at all. There were millions of children growing up who had known nothing but totalitarianism. What sort of world might they demand?
There might have been a few politicians in Washington DC who advocated continuing a friendly stance towards Stalin, but the clashing ideologies would soon make that inconceivable. The Communists were convinced that capitalism bore within it the seeds of its own destruction, and that the American way of life – soulless consumerism propped up by exploitation of the workers, as they saw it – would eventually fold in on itself. Likewise, Americans were convinced that the oppressive tyranny of Communism, not to mention the mad cycle of purges and political imprisonments, would eventually be shaken off by people yearning for liberty.
In the febrile months that followed Potsdam, the Americans had returned to their old position, that of viewing the Soviets with hostile suspicion; Stalin for his part mirrored these sentiments towards the US. But this new phase was more sharply defined by the now former prime minister Winston Churchill, and also by an American diplomat from Milwaukee. Churchill, having been invited over to America, delivered a speech in 1946 in Fulton, Missouri, in which he famously declared: ‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.’ Perhaps mindful of the sensibilities not merely of former allies, but also of the many British who felt sympathy for the Russians, Churchill said: ‘From what I have seen of our Russian friends and allies during the War, I am convinced there is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect for than weakness, especially military weakness. For that reason, the old doctrine of a balance of power is unsound… I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war. What they desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their powers and doctrines.’
Churchill was speaking of cementing the Anglo-American alliance, of continuing that high level of liaison between all services. Again, there was a very faint element of bathos there: the idea that somehow, the British would not finish up being junior partners to the greatest military force that had ever been assembled in history. But there was at least the shared ideological commitment.
It was the American diplomat George F Kennan who, having been posted to Moscow, in 1946 wrote what was called ‘The Long Telegram’; this essay set out some highly influential views on the rules of engagement between these new and vast superpowers. Whereas Churchill had looked at the new fault-line of power in military terms, Kennan brought an element of psychoanalysis, focusing on Stalin’s neurosis and ‘traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity.’ The plan of the Kremlin, Kennan wrote in 1946, was to undermine the West: to promote and encourage dissent and disunity, to turn Western workers against capitalism. Kennan proposed the idea of containment: that the way for the West to deal with this growing power was to throw up blocks and obstacles to any possibility of socialist advancement across borders, and to fence off any gaps there may be in Europe or Asia or the Middle East that Soviet allies might take advantage of. In 1945 and 1946, there were already the cases of northern Iran (where codebreaker Alan Stripp had been operating); plus, in the Mediterranean, the knife-edge political situation of Greece. The British, in that particular case, were forced to pull out and to end their financial support for anti-Communist forces there. Greece was plunged into fresh internal conflict between Communist and right-wing factions, having already been ravaged and ruined at the hands of the Nazis. From the point of view of Downing Street and the White House, it would take very little for Stalin to begin to exert influence in that corner of the world, which in turn would make the rest of the Mediterranean – including already Communist-inclined countries such as Italy – intensely vulnerable to further advance.
Could there have been a chance that the Cold War, as it came to be known, might have been averted? Might there have been the chance that Americans and Russians could still have continued smiling side by side at press conferences? Even if the White House and the Kremlin had both been filled with cooing doves, it seems profoundly unlikely: the very principle of the atomic bomb made America so manifestly more powerful than any other nation that the Soviets – whoever had been leading them – would have behaved with nervy suspicion. And from the US side, the oppressive Soviet system of government – the killings, the disappearances, the utter refusal to acknowledge in any way the indescribable horror of the 1930s, when Stalin’s rule combined terror and famine and the death of millions – meant that its containment was about limiting the advance of evil.
British political sophisticates may have regarded such a view as impossibly Manichaean, and that the suffering of Russians was a part of the larger process of bringing a truly just society into being. For a very long time, a large number of figures on Britain’s intellectual left were inclined to find explanations excusing the nature of Stalin’s rule.
Among the codebreakers at Eastcote, however, there was a sense of conviction that had come through simply listening. Among the older members of the team, there had been for a long time a sharp sense of the deadly potential of Bolshevism. Joshua (‘Josh’) Cooper, one of the organisation’s more notable and loveable eccentrics, had been pitting his wits against Soviet intelligence since the 1920s. His outward dotty manner – sudden exclamations of random words, falling under tables while interrogating German prisoners, throwing teacups into lakes – masked quite a serious ideological commitment to his work. At the end of the war, in the transition between Bletchley Park and Eastcote, it was Cooper who was arguing that this new phase of codebreaking work would require much greater funding to match any advances that the Soviets might make in computing and electronic encryption.
In a time when the British population was being rationed more severely than it was throughout the war, and when the nation’s debts were making the administration of empire impossible, the codebreakers were going to have to extemporise. Yet thanks to the careful groundwork of Gordon Welchman and Edward Travis during the war, the legacy of Bletchley Park carried one invaluable element that, for a time, made its work as effective as any being done by the Americans; and that was the sprawling web of Y service wireless intercept stations. Many of these were first established around the time of the First World War and the early inter-war years by Britain’s security services to secure an advantage in a new age of rapidly developing radio technology. They lay in or near regions that were seen as being vulnerable to Soviet influence.
The fear was not just that of Soviet rapacity, but also of the complete and utter collapse of an obliterated Europe. Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson addressed the US Senate in 1945 and told them: ‘In liberated Europe, you find that the railway systems have ceased to operate, that power systems have ceased to operate; the financial systems are destroyed. Ownership of property is in terrific confusion. Management of property is in confusion.’ Any sense of a structured working, functioning life ‘had come to a complete and total standstill’. Things seemed only to get worse through the long and lethal winter of 1946–47.
So at Eastcote, Commander Travis and Nigel de Grey had almost pre-empted the Americans in their unwavering focus on Soviet signals traffic. In Britain, the listening station at Forest Moor, just outside Harrogate, which had bustled with hundreds of Wrens throughout the war, was now switched full-time to monitoring the Soviet airwaves. Meanwhile, right the way around the world, in those listening stations in Ceylon and Singapore, the codebreakers were doing the same thing. It was not simply a question of hawkish cryptographers squaring up to an implacable Soviet enemy; in a sense, these units, and also the residual military listening units based in Europe, dotted around Italy and Austria and Germany, were listening to the faltering heartbeat of a continent.
Commander Travis and his colleague Captain Hastings were also assiduous at ensuring that their Commonwealth associates were keeping very much in step with this new world; this had meant to an extent that Travis had trodden on the toes of his Australian codebreaking counterparts – or subordinates as he would have seen it – insisting that their cypher activities be headed up by an Englishman. But there were hundreds, thousands of skilled personnel not only in Australia, but across Canada too; and Canada, of course, shares a northerly maritime border with the Soviet Union.
According to Richard Aldrich, any mismatch in wealth and investment between the British and the Americans was addressed quite simply. What the British lacked in computers, they gained in terms of scale of world-spanning coverage. And then of course, there were hundreds of young men who had a lightning flair for radio technology. The parts of the world these young people were based in were fissile. But the intelligence that they were then able to send back – intelligence shared with the Americans – was invaluable.
One of those bases – the Combined Bureau Middle East, based in Heliopolis, just outside Cairo, Egypt was still operating a comprehensive service, though the numbers working there were starting to decrease. There was a note of imperial grandeur about the intelligence-gathering setting, the glass and ironwork of the old museum HQ, a relic of unabashed Victorian cultural grandstanding amid the sands.
All of the radio intelligence gathered at Heliopolis had been relayed back to Whaddon Hall, Buckinghamshire. The immediate situation would have suggested that it was very much in Britain and America’s interests to keep the operation going in Egypt: a strategic spot from which to listen in to signals from southern Russia and the Balkan countries which were already within the Soviet sphere. But night was falling on the old British Empire, and on its old imperial ways of doing things.
Having tolerated Britain’s involvement in its affairs even after 1922 and the declaration of what turned out to be semi-independence, the Cairo authorities, having gained complete independence in 1936, made it quite plain that they now wanted the British to withdraw. The Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 had stipulated that 10,000 British troops could be stationed within Egypt’s borders; the war had taken that number up to about 200,000. And afterwards, demobilisation was slow. There were still over 100,000 troops stationed within the country’s Canal Zone. In other words, there were still populous British bases, and they were extremely unpopular with a rising generation of Egyptian nationalists. Whitehall had no wish to cause any unnecessary rancour; there was, apart from anything else, the need to think of keeping the Middle East calm and stable in order to safeguard oil supplies.
And Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee was quite content with the idea of pulling out completely; to him, imperialism was an anachronism. In addition, this was an age of air power, and of the atomic bomb. Old strategic concerns such as keeping Mediterranean routes open to the navy, and safeguarding the Suez Canal, were in Attlee’s view hopelessly outmoded. Senior military personnel from all three services argued bitterly with the prime minister about the principle of withdrawal. Chief of the Imperial General Staff Bernard Montgomery was particularly acerbic, as was former Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean, and former First Sea Lord Andrew Cunningham. But this was the flow of history; it was obvious to all in Whitehall, for instance, that India would very shortly be breaking free from British rule.
The core of the conflict between Whitehall and the military was to do with anxiety about the Soviet Union’s sensing a vacuum in the Middle East and filling it. There was also the question of Britain’s self-defence. No bomber at that stage could have flown all the way from Britain to populated Russia and back again – the British needed RAF bases and runways and facilities in the Middle East, from which they would if necessary be able to strike at Soviet industrial facilities in the Urals.
And above all, there was the painful matter of national prestige. It seemed to matter less to Attlee, with his visions of world authorities acting as world policemen. To his punchy foreign secretary Ernest Bevin, though, it was vital that Britain should not be infected with what he termed ‘pessimism’. And that meant – apart from many other things – maintaining a presence in the Middle East, because who else was there to do it? There was no guarantee, now the war was over, that America would not withdraw from the world stage and wrap itself once more in the blanket of isolationism. This was a moment when Britain was facing the Soviet Union and taking on the idea that if there were to be hostilities, there might not necessarily be all the help from America that was needed.
But Britain was also, to all intents and purposes, bankrupt. There was precious little money even for modest outbreaks of imperialism. And in the splendour of the sun at Heliopolis, the codebreakers and the secret listeners – some civilian – was now thinning out in terms of numbers, their base at the Flora and Fauna museum beginning to echo. In some senses, it was quite a life to give up. While for the military, the role of wireless interceptor could often be miserable (postings in the desert, with all the attendant sand and scorpions and thunderstorms so heavy that headphones would crackle and hearing would be permanently damaged), for the civilians, it was quite a different thing. Aside from the work at Heliopolis, life for many was a whirl of a defiantly old-fashioned kind of decadence: smart bars, dream-like nights on terraces, the gossip and intrigue of well-heeled expat society. Aileen Clayton, a WAAF, wrote that she stayed at ‘Shepheard’s Hotel, which in those days before the great post-war revolution, was sheer Edwardian opulence. There seemed to be myriads of Egyptian and Sudanese suffragis flip-flopping around the hotel in their heel-less slippers, clad in white galabiyahs, and red cummerbunds and fezes.’
‘The food,’ she added (and this would have been particularly true of severely rationed post-war Britain), ‘after the deprivations of England, was good and plentiful.’ There were ‘plentifully stocked shops and gay night clubs’.1 Egypt was still a monarchy, under the rule of King Farouk. But in the days after the war, his colourfully decadent era too was coming to the point of dissolution: the final days of an era of aristocrats dining at Cairo restaurants such as the Auberge des Pyramides, the king amusing himself by throwing coloured pom-poms around the other diners. Even for codebreakers without any of these gilded social connections, life had been a daze of scent and colour and sun.
Now some of this skilled mix of radio interceptors and cypher experts were to be relocated: some to the British base in Sarafand, Palestine; and more to the large base on Cyprus. Both were absolutely key positions to be in. Cyprus enabled the codebreakers to intercept a great deal of Russian traffic at the point when the Soviets were casting a long shadow over Greece. In Palestine, the British faced quite a different challenge: that of furious and desperate Zionism.
The Balfour Declaration of 1917 promised the Jewish people a homeland. Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour had written to Baron Rothschild and by extension to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. ‘His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,’ wrote Balfour, ‘and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights or political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.’
In 1941, with that homeland still a distant prospect, Bletchley Park codebreaker Oliver Strachey made his way into a very particular set of Enigma decrypts: the railway timetables and deportation communications that laid bare the escalating horror of the Holocaust in eastern Europe. These were the decrypts that made plain the need for that homeland. In the aftershock of war, though, the Palestinian question was, for the Foreign Office, one part of a complex interlocking structure of empire; a territory mandated since 1922, presided over by the British, and which the British were now having increasing difficulty keeping any kind of lid on.
There was a radio relay station in Sarafand, not far from Tel Aviv, that had been established in the 1920s. It had grown in size and numbers of personnel throughout the 1930s and was a key station throughout the war, sitting amid the bustle of a wider army encampment. Situated in the very heart of the Middle East, it was clear that its importance had not diminished in any way. But from 1945 onwards, life for the British in Palestine was going to prove explosive. As well as attempting to defuse the rising fury between Arabs and Jews – the Palestinian Grand Mufti had visited Hitler and made no secret of his support for the persecution of the Jews – the soldiers had to face hostility directed at them from all sides. And a younger Jewish generation – traumatised by a mass atrocity that the entire world had witnessed, and yet somehow did not want to talk about – was making ready to fight.
Then there were the thousands of Holocaust survivors in Europe who desperately wanted to leave that dark continent and make for the sanctuary of a Jewish homeland. The chief obstacles to their doing so were to be the British, as we will see later. There were many Jewish codebreakers back in England who had made incalculable contributions to the wartime cypher triumphs, and who were now looking on with some interest as the British authorities began to wriggle. In 1945, in Jerusalem, there was a graffito that appeared on a wall. It read: ‘British go home.’ Underneath, a British soldier had added: ‘If only we f****** well could.’ It was the codebreaking operatives in Sarafand who were picking up increasing amounts of traffic from Zionist groups; the local difficulties standing alongside the broader aims of divining Soviet intentions. Indeed, there was the further complication for the British that Stalin’s Soviet Union was apparently in wholehearted support of the right of the Jewish people to establish the state of Israel. This was in the brief period before the Kremlin returned to its older anti-Semitic attitudes.
For British codebreakers, there were more exotic and yet more tranquil corners to which they could find themselves being posted. One such was the port of Kilindini, Mombasa, on the East African coast. From a converted school – a rather wonderfully ornate structure of pink stone – overlooking the crashing waves, operatives such as Hugh Denham replicated the non-military Bletchley approach, working in civilian clothes and thus avoiding parades and other ‘time-wasting’ activities. From this base, and with their receivers picking up signals from far across the ocean, the team had made brilliant inroads into the Japanese codes in the teeth of technical difficulties involving the clarity of radio reception. They had originally gone there following a Japanese bombing attack on the base of HMS Anderson in Colombo, Ceylon. And in the immediate post-war period, Clement Attlee was to wonder if Mombasa might make an altogether more suitable base for a range of British forces than either Egypt or Palestine or Iraq.
In the meantime, HMS Anderson – perched on the other side of the Indian Ocean – was still very much in business after the Japanese capitulation in September 1945 in South-East Asia. It was here that those last languid days of the imperial life were played out before disbelieving young British people, fresh from modest backgrounds in England, whose eyes were opened to a world of colour and natural luxuriance that they had thought could never have existed outside of books. The base itself – single-storey huts, roofs woven of palm, tall radio transmitters looming up – was perfectly utilitarian; the life outside was anything but. Wren Jean Valentine, who had been breaking Japanese codes and who now had to wait a while for demobilisation after the war, was drawn deeply in: the smart restaurants, the elegant night-clubs and, away in the hills, the tea plantations, a world where all one had to do was press a small button under a table, and a servant would materialise.
And after the war, the social and cultural life of the base itself went on with some fervour. There was a string ensemble, a swing band and a thriving theatrical society. In terms of technology, this was less an age of Morse and more a time of advancing teleprinter developments. Laurence Roberts recalled one small setback: the cabling required for the machinery was too great a temptation for a few of the local population to resist. It was regularly stolen. But this in itself, he remembered, had the partial result of ushering in further advances in terms of early microwave transmissions. He, too, recalled that the great relief of such a posting was the terrific diversion of Colombo itself, which offered a great deal of entertainment to men and women alike.
There was also, quite naturally, romance, and it was thanks to her posting here – right the way around the world from her native Perth in Scotland, which she had left as an 18-year-old girl – that Jean Valentine was to meet pilot Clive Rooke. They married (though not without some initial resistance from Jean’s father back in Perth, who later grudgingly relented and gave his permission when it was pointed out to him that he had allowed his only daughter to set sail through U-Boat-infested waters, and also face the unquantifiable dangers of an Asian posting). Obviously they – and countless other young people like them, men and women alike – had shown conspicuous bravery in doing their duty; but the war had had another side effect for people like Jean and Clive. It had opened up a far wider world to them than perhaps they would otherwise have seen.
For Jean, the codebreaking work was running down fast, but she could not be demobilised because the ships sailing home were filled with exhausted (and traumatised) soldiers being brought back from the Far East. As it was, she and Clive Rooke, upon marrying, decided to stay in that part of the world. She recalls vividly being in Burma on the day in 1947 that India gained its independence.
India was a particular intelligence asset that Bletchley’s successors could ill afford to do without, regardless of the subcontinent’s coming independence. Indeed, in the aftermath of the war, the Indian authorities and representatives of various British services executed careful little dances of diplomacy around one another. A key figure in wartime signals intelligence in India had been Colonel Patrick Marr-Johnson, who was now back in the West as part of the team working to fine-tune and formalise the unprecedented intelligence alliance between Britain and the United States. The dance of diplomacy went a few steps further: the National Security Agency has released some fascinating correspondence between Colonel Marr-Johnson and senior US cryptologist William Friedman in Washington, from 1943, after Colonel Marr-Johnson had paid a visit. In one letter, Marr-Johnson reflects on the British position in India and how others might see it. ‘I wonder whether your daughter is still pondering deeply the question of the fate of India?’ he asks Friedman. ‘And whether I managed to persuade her that the British were not quite such evil ogres as she thought?’2
The listening stations in India were now absolutely key for monitoring Soviet activity, particularly in regions close to Afghanistan and the North-West Frontier (it is interesting to note how geopolitical fault lines appear to be every bit as enduring as the geological variety).
Appointed to Eastcote in late 1945 as Commander Travis’s second deputy, Captain Edward Hastings was the man in charge of dealings with India and his intelligence counterparts there. The imminent removal of all British soldiers and police from the subcontinent was one thing, but he was the man trying to ensure that unobtrusive listening stations might form part of what might be termed a diplomatic legacy.
And there was something about the very business of interception that was appealing to a certain sort of intelligent, sparky though not necessarily academically trained young man. Conscription continued in the form of National Service; in order to be able to bring tired troops home from their ordeals in the east, it was necessary to train up more young men back home, many of whom had just finished school and were looking at the prospect of apprenticeships. The science of radio made many of these young men angle themselves towards wireless operator roles. As in the war itself, the job of Direction Finding, interception, and incredibly swift Morse code transcription appealed to many sharp and nimble working-class lads.
Perhaps the most famous of the immediate post-war wireless operators was a young man from Nottingham who had been doing piece-work in a bicycle factory and was destined, late in the 1950s, to become one of the defining novelists of his generation. Alan Sillitoe realised that he had a knack for Morse, even though the training course that he was sent on was gruelling and so pressurised that it made one candidate succumb to a fit during a test.
Sillitoe knew that he and a few of his fellow recruits for RAF Signals were going to be shipped overseas; but the destination was a secret. He was expecting to sail out from Liverpool, but instead these boys first found themselves packed off to Southampton, in the midst of an utterly miserable, fuel-rationed British winter, bitingly wet and grey. The world that was to come was almost hallucinatory in its contrast. Within weeks, Sillitoe was in warm, hazy air, gazing from the deck of the ship over at Bedouins walking with camels on the banks of the Nile; he watched as ‘the mountains of Sinai turned purple in the afternoon light’ and he found a startling recall for all the Old Testament stories that he had been taught as a child. Across the Indian Ocean, he enjoyed a dazed stop-off in Colombo which, as Sillitoe observed, took the black-and-white photographs in books his grandparents had shown him and turned them into colour.
HMS Anderson was not his destination; they sailed on further. And so it was that Sillitoe, then just 18 years old, found himself among the rubber trees deep in Malaya. He adapted quickly to this new life of earphones, interference and calculations of ionosphere bounces, set against an eerie nocturnal backdrop of all-night shifts in a simple hut in the middle of a restless jungle. He and his colleagues were constantly on the lookout for snakes, which could nest anywhere in their camp. The job itself, those lonely moonlit shifts, sometimes took on a hauntingly surreal tone when, in between communications between passing aeroplanes and messages intercepted from wider shores, there were sometimes bursts of music out of nowhere: classical pieces that would seem to fill the silence and the darkness.
‘The music of the spheres came into my headphones,’ he wrote, ‘and I communicated in Morse with Rangoon and Singapore, chatted to Saigon using my bits of French, and even for half an hour after dawn made contact with such faraway places as Karachi, Hong Kong and Bangkok. Every transmitter, even if of the same make, had a different tone and, no need of call signs, one soon learned to know them and the moment of their tune-forking into the ears.’3
This was a brotherhood of wireless operators and the work was intensely focused at all hours; absolute accuracy was of course of the essence, as the communications would then be passed on to Eastcote for analysis. Yet, as Sillitoe noted, even despite the hours and those uncanny nights when all sorts of noises could be heard outside the listening station in the trees, there was also Tiger beer, the music from wind-up gramophones, and the serious pleasure of walking along the warm shore and watching the local fishermen haul in some bizarre-looking catches. Had it not been for National Service, this is a world that Sillitoe might never have expected to see; as it was, it clearly had an impact other than artistic, as in subsequent years he and his wife moved from Britain to Mediterranean shores.
And a little later, Sillitoe’s experience was tested to the limit as another fragment of Britain’s empire began to break off painfully, and he found himself in the middle of what is still termed the ‘Malayan Emergency’. But there was something about the philosophy of his work, hunched over earphones, that remained consistent. Years later, he said: ‘It’s therapy. I like to eavesdrop, though you’re meant to shred everything you take down. Once Morse has been implanted in your brain at the age of 16 or 17, it never leaves you.’4 That was the experience of many others, though the conditions in stations in Malaya and Singapore could often be extremely uncomfortable due to asphyxiating heat and indeed the vast, terrible thunderstorms at night that – if one was wearing headphones and transcribing – would crackle agonisingly like a lightning bolt through the brain.
Others wore the burden of travel lightly as well; there were some who had spent their war years working at Beaumanor Hall and RAF Chicksands and whose expertise was now needed out in the wider world. The winter 1946 number of The Woygian magazine, for interceptors past and present, contained exciting news from the Middle East. ‘Bill Hayward wrote from Cairo on December 9th where he – together with Pete James, Derek Basnett, Ron Blease, Bern Norwood and ‘Tubby’ Fagg – was hoping to go on to Cyprus but afraid it might be the Holy Land. Also in Cairo with another draft, similarly bound, are Sgt Tyler, ‘Doodlebug’ Tomlinson and NL Smith. Bill sends greetings… and adds that he thinks Egypt “sphinx”.’5
Of all the signals intelligence jewels that Britain possessed, the one with perhaps greater value than all the rest was a station that also proved remarkably resistant to the tide of empires; indeed, this particular territory only ceased to be British in 1997. The station was Hong Kong and the range of traffic that flowed through, was analysed and sent on was, even from 1945, quite formidable. Even before Mao Zedong wrestled his way to power in 1949 and established the People’s Republic of China, the listening base at Hong Kong was of exquisite importance not only to the British, but the Americans too.
Indeed, for years the colony had been the most crucial vantage point, eavesdropping on Chinese, Japanese and also Soviet Russian traffic. This scrutiny had been interrupted by the war: having ravaged great swathes of China, the Japanese forces besieged Hong Kong in December 1941, then overran and occupied it. The British codebreakers had moved out some way in advance, having anticipated such an attack; it was always vital that their secrets should stay firmly as far from the hands of the enemy as possible. Unfortunately, in this instance in 1941, the Hong Kong codebreakers had withdrawn to Singapore, and despite the finest cypher work, no analysts predicted the assault on Singapore that was to come in February 1942. As it was, the codebreakers made it out once more, and this time ended up at Colombo in Ceylon, and then further out at Mombasa.
Back in Hong Kong, the Japanese stayed in the territory until their war ended with the atomic blasts. So in 1945 there was as swift restoration as possible not just of everyday life and commerce, but also of intelligence gathering. Hong Kong was one of the great crossroads, teeming with agents of all sorts, as well as equally smooth-operating figures moving in the (perhaps even shadier) world of high finance. There was one signals intelligence station in a small hilly outcrop referred to for some reason as ‘Batty’s Belvedere’. It was highly popular with some of the military and civilian operatives thanks to a nearby tiny secluded bay, hemmed in on two sides by towering cliffs. When not on duty, there were terrific opportunities for swimming and sunbathing in rich blue waters. During the Japanese occupation, the station had continued in use, but of course in the service of the Japanese forces. Come the winter of 1945, and something of its old life had been restored. ‘It was a rough journey in an RAF truck to get to the summit,’ recalled one veteran signals-man years later, ‘but at 4am, when our shift began, the view of the surroundings was incredible, especially on a misty morning.’6 And in time, the infrastructure around the Belvedere was to improve rather dramatically as well.
Unlike those listening stations in the Middle East, operating under a cloud of increasing uncertainty, there was something – as one operative remarked – curiously tranquil about a small outstation like the Belvedere, or the nearby listening station RAF Little Sai Wan. In those immediate post-war years, as China sought to recover, there was still a reasonably open frontier with Hong Kong; in that period, many middle-class Chinese families moved across there. In the years that followed, with the massive social upheaval of the Communist revolution, that trickle of migration was to become a torrent, and Hong Kong would end up with shanty towns on its hillsides, people living in the most desperate poverty.
The listening posts around Hong Kong naturally called for experts in Chinese linguistics; in the 1940s, the operation was a little austere, involving recruits working in pre-fabricated huts, and looking, as one signals veteran recalled, rather like battery hens. They were happy battery hens, though. And as the Americans in the 1940s became increasingly concerned about the build-up of Communist influence in the region, the listeners of Batty’s Belvedere were to find themselves in one of the most secret hot spots on earth.
Meanwhile, though, the codebreakers at Eastcote were listening to the signals emanating from the unhappier corners of Europe, grimly logging the signs that the hunger and the hatred were bringing the prospect of a Third World War very much closer. On top of this, they were about to decrypt a cache of messages which would reveal, horrifyingly, the extent to which British and American security services had been infiltrated by Stalin’s agents.