It has been pointed out that one of the dark ironies of the codebreaking effort during the Second World War was that if the Germans had recruited their country’s finest Jewish minds – as opposed to murdering them – then their cryptological departments would have been rather more successful. Certainly, Bletchley Park had been boosted by a great range of hugely talented Jewish recruits; many stayed on after the war to help found the new GCHQ. And many of those who left still maintained contact with the world of cryptology. But that is not to say that the experience of the Jewish codebreakers was universally comfortable. For some, the post-war landscape was to bring unexpected complications.
Yet the ethos of this new GCHQ – as well as its approach to the most intransigent problems – would much later find a powerful echo in Israel’s extraordinarily effective modern equivalent: the intelligence department called Unit 8200. Indeed, some of the key philosophical lessons of the British codebreaking operation are still very much in place in Israel.
Among the first Jewish recruits to have been drawn to the codebreaking effort in 1939 had been Miriam Rothschild, a brilliant biologist, sister of Jacob and a member of the famous banking family. There was Professor Max Newman, the Cambridge mathematician who had been a tutor to the young Alan Turing. Among the Wrens was Ruth Bourne who, after having sat an intelligence test, guessed very quickly what line of work she was going to be ushered into. ‘I had read enough spy novels,’ she said. She added that for her, the urgency of helping the war effort had an extra dimension: the prospect of the Nazis invading Britain literally gave her nightmares.
Among the young undergraduates lured in from university were Walter Eytan and his brother Ernest. They had changed their name from Ettinghausen; and they had the distinction of being the only German-born men to work at Bletchley Park.
‘The security clearance must have been singularly perceptive,’ Walter Eytan wrote, ‘since such antecedents might so easily have disqualified us for BP, and in the United States certainly would have done. I suppose the responsible officer, knowing or discovering that we were Jews, must have concluded, correctly, that we had an extra interest in fighting Hitler, and therefore might be even more ardent than the others at our BP work.’1
The nature of the war work was such that Eytan’s dramatic post-war destiny was formed in that crucible. ‘I may be the only one’, he wrote, ‘who will recall a peculiarly poignant moment when in late 1943 or early 1944 we intercepted a signal from a small German commissioned vessel in the Aegean, reporting that it was transporting Jews, I think from Rhodes or Kos, en route for Piraeus ‘zur Endlösung’ (‘for the final solution’). I had never seen or heard this expression before, but instinctively I knew what it must mean, and I have never forgotten that moment. I did not remark on it particularly to the others who were on duty at the time,’ continued Eytan, ‘perhaps not even to my brother – and of course never referred to it outside of BP, but it left its mark – down to the present day.’2
At Bletchley, Walter and Ernest had formed a Zionist society, and held many meetings and discussions over dinners and drinks. The overarching theme was, of course, the necessity of forming an Israeli state after the war: how it was to be achieved, how the mass immigration could be managed. Strikingly, these discussions – and the passions fomented – were to affect the careers of both brothers in profound ways.
With the war over, the Eytans elected to stay on with the codebreaking operation. With the move to Eastcote, Ernest became what was termed an ‘intelligence librarian’. This was, in part, the crucial role of building up a codebreakers’ library, to help pinpoint certain technical recurring terms emerging from decrypts. These could be anything from abstruse military details to the richer corners of cultural life. Meanwhile, his brother Walter Eytan’s own life was very shortly to take a turn for the more dramatic.
In 1946 – as the wider world absorbed the horror of what had happened in Europe, and the abject conditions that the survivors were living in – Walter Eytan left GCHQ and took himself to Palestine. There was a state to be founded and he was determined to be in there at the very beginning of it.
In wider terms, the increasing tension and outbreaks of violence in Palestine created a fascinating fault line for the codebreakers and interceptors both in Britain – which of course still had the mandate over the territory – and in America too. Ever since the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the British government had been committed in principle to the establishment of a homeland for Jewish people. Yet in the intervening years, it had struggled – with the help of the military and the RAF – to try to keep the peace in the territory between warring Jews and Arabs. Sometimes the British methods – implemented against both sides – were both clumsy and casually brutal: for instance, the aerial bombing of settlements using increasingly sophisticated aviation and firepower. The result was that the British were ardently hated. Come the end of the war and it was clear that to a great many Jewish people, there was simply no time to be lost. Millions had been foully slaughtered; the Nazis had aimed to murder every single Jew. Now, in this new era of Soviet control of Eastern Europe, the world was scarcely any safer.
Yet the British were equally determined to try and halt the Jewish exodus that was fast gathering pace, the fishing boats setting sail across the Mediterranean from French ports, heading for the Palestinian port of Haifa. What the government wanted above all else was stability – not least for its own interests. The Chiefs of Staff had stated that ‘it was essential to the security of the British Commonwealth to maintain our position in the Middle East in peace and to defend it in war’. There was paranoia about Soviet infiltration across the region through agents in Egypt’s capital Cairo; and others lurking in Jerusalem. On top of this, Britain was fast running out of money. The foreign secretary Ernest Bevin had suggested moving military and air force operations from Cairo to Mombasa – air technology had greatly improved, it was argued, so there was scarcely any more need to maintain a costly army in Egypt. The idea was abandoned, not least because it was at the same time becoming increasingly apparent how bountiful the oil-fields of nearby Saudi Arabia would prove; the Middle East was becoming indispensable to the economies of Europe and America.
And this was another reason why the British started behaving so viciously towards Jewish refugees: it was in part the diplomatic need to keep the ever more powerful Arabs on side. And so, as the refugee boats approached the coast of Palestine, British naval vessels headed them off, and took all those on board prisoner. These unfortunate refugees were then conveyed as previously mentioned, to a prison camp on Cyprus. The symmetry with the concentration camps was hideous; but to the British government, it was a problem seemingly without an answer. Before the war had ended, Attlee’s Labour Party had largely been committed to the idea of mass Jewish immigration of around 100,000 people and the creation of a Jewish state. Now, all was in confused flux. There were some Jews calling for a shared ‘motherland’ for two Semitic peoples – Jews and Arabs alike. There were even some Arab scholars who were calling for a Jewish state, though one in which Arabs had full rights. But all this was against a decades-long backdrop of violence between the Arabs and Jews. And with British intransigence, it was a group of Jewish terrorists who were to step that violence up.
The Irgun group was responsible for the 1946 atrocity of the blowing up of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, in which 91 people – Arab and Jewish and British – were killed. The British army stationed in Palestine went after Irgun and three of the group’s operatives were executed. Their comrades had little doubt what to do next. Two British sergeants were kidnapped by Irgun – and were themselves hanged. The atmosphere in Palestine, for Arabs, Jews and ordinary British soldiers, was razor-edged.
America, and President Truman, were not helping. Truman had demanded that Palestine be opened up to hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees. This led to a rare explosion of exasperation from Clement Attlee, who pointed out, in a pained fashion, that America would have no responsibility for then trying to keep the peace between Arabs and the increased numbers of Jews. The foreign secretary Ernest Bevin went rather further, insisting that Truman had only made this declaration because he did not want thousands of Jewish refugees turning up in New York.
In the midst of all this violence and hatred – the Zionist Stern gang terrorising Arabs, Arabs murdering Jews – arrived Walter Eytan. After all those years decoding German messages of horror, and after the evenings of Zionist discussion with Joe Gillis and others, he could at last see where his destiny lay. Indeed, of all the Jewish codebreakers at Bletchley, Eytan’s subsequent career was the most spectacular.
On arrival in Palestine, he joined what was in essence the Israeli government-in-waiting, called the Jewish Agency. Among Eytan’s intellectual gifts was a dazzling flair for languages; and it was not long before he was becoming indispensable on the diplomatic front. He secured a position working for future Israeli premier Golda Meir and – as the British began their helpless and angry withdrawal – he started working with UN commissioners on issues such as the peaceful dividing up of Jerusalem. And indeed, as soon as the state of Israel came into official being in May 1948, Eytan became director general of the newly formed Foreign Ministry.
And in this role, he was not only furiously energetic, but also witty and inclined to understand that there could be no simple answers. For instance, at a time when many of his colleagues held little but the darkest contempt for Arabs, he himself was in favour of Israelis and Arabs meeting halfway in terms of economic co-operation to help build up the entire region. He went on to engage Egyptian diplomats in talks; these were doomed ultimately to failure but again, Eytan was open to the wider world, with a healthy respect for his counterparts. He took this engaging, open skill around the world, seeking to establish diplomatic ties and full recognition for Israel everywhere from Burma to Iran. While Israel’s first premier David Ben-Gurion was implacable about the need to demonstrate strength at all times, Eytan was there to prove that the new state of Israel had a lively, functioning intelligence. Indeed, Israel swiftly developed a lively, functioning codebreaking unit, too, doubtless with the help of a few top tips from its expert foreign minister.
This had an unexpected repercussion for his brother back at Eastcote, though. Ernest Eytan was highly thought of – his work during the Battle of the Atlantic had been admired – and it had seemed natural that he should carry on doing what he was so good at. But his brother’s growing stature within Israel proved troublesome to a few in authority; it was suggested that Ernest might even pose a security risk. Now possibly there was a case to be made before the establishment of Israel that the family link might be construed as awkward. Afterwards, though, and it is difficult not to recoil at a tang of straightforward anti-Semitism in the implied suggestion that the ties between the Jewish brothers were far stronger than any sense of national loyalty or indeed the strictures of the Official Secrets Act. On top of this, it took the relevant authorities a long time to reach a final decision. It was only in 1952 that Ernest Eytan, ensconced quite happily at Eastcote, was moved. Another – rather less intense or secretive – civil service berth awaited at the Inland Revenue.
Other Jewish codebreakers forged beguilingly varied lives. The brilliant Rolf Noskwith carried on for a bit at GCHQ Eastcote but he left in 1946 to attend to the family business. His father had been very successful with a lingerie firm and Noskwith wanted to ensure that Charnos, as it was called, kept thriving. A rather longer stint was put in by Squadron Leader Nakdimon Shabetai Doniach. Within those grim, plain grey pre-fabricated buildings at Eastcote, his innate elegance with languages made him a natural tutor to other codebreakers. According to historian Martin Sugarman, he ‘was in charge of teaching Russian and overseeing the teaching of Chinese to Foreign Office officials’.3 Even more vitally, at Eastcote, Doniach continued the technical expertise of the cryptanalysis operation; in an evolutionary step forward from Bletchley’s exhaustive card index system, he oversaw the creation of a complete technical Soviet dictionary. Any terms that came up – military, mechanical, avionic – would be logged, registered and monitored closely, the repetitions helping terrifically in cracking future codes and also sizing up military potential in different regions.
There were other notably brilliant Jewish codebreakers who found a sort of lifetime vocation in cryptology. Indeed, there were several American recruits who, after the Park wound up, returned to the US and continued with codebreaking efforts, working in close union with their UK counterparts for many years afterwards. Among them were Arthur Levenson, Captain Abraham Sinkov and Major Solomon Kullback. Sinkov was a mathematician, born in Philadelphia and educated in New York, who had been recruited into William Friedman’s US cryptography efforts the year before the war broke out. Months before Pearl Harbor, Sinkov was among the small, incredibly secret party who travelled across the Atlantic via battleship to visit Bletchley Park, and to share German and Japanese codebreaking secrets and techniques.
He was later posted around the world, pulling off dizzying feats in cracking Japanese codes at astonishing speed. On his return to the US, Sinkov became closely involved in the growing computerisation of the field; and he became a pillar of what was later to become the National Security Agency – GCHQ’s transatlantic cousin. As is traditional, Sinkov’s family had no idea what it was that he actually did, either in the war or afterwards. His son said that whenever Sinkov was asked, he would reply ‘I am a mathematician.’ On the occasion of his 90th birthday, President Clinton sent him a letter thanking him for all the work he had done on so much vital cryptography. That must have rather let the cat out of the bag; but then, who better to finally reveal Sinkov’s true achievement than the President himself?
An even more ebullient Jewish figure in Britain during the war and afterwards back in the US, where he continued the signals intelligence work in partnership with GCHQ, was Solomon Kullback. He was a Brooklyn boy, educated in New York. Like Sinkov, his talents had been spotted early on by William Friedman. Enrolled in cryptography courses, the men were encouraged by Friedman to continue their more straightforward education by attending night classes and working extremely hard Kullback, like Sinkov, attained his doctorate in mathematics. He and Sinkov then progressed further in the code game. Before the war, code-generating machine manufacturers would try to persuade the US government into buying up their systems. Kullback was one of the men appointed to test these machines and their breakability. He invariably did break their codes, and the machines in question were not taken up. ‘We solved them for our own amazement and amusement,’ Kullback later said.4 As a result, according to the NSA, he and Sinkov did a great deal between them to ensure that US codes were as watertight as possible, at about the time when they were starting to get a serious lever into the Japanese codes.
In 1942, Major Kullback (the military ranking came with the codebreaking) made the voyage across the Atlantic to join the cryptology revolution; throwing himself into the hut system at Bletchley, the beguiling atmosphere of ‘near anarchy’ and the concomitant startling brilliance of its successes against Enigma. He was embedded deep in Bletchley’s secrets, having also been made privy to the diplomatic codebreaking operation – spanning the globe – that was operating from Berkeley Street and which from 1942 was headed up by Commander Alastair Denniston. As well as focusing specifically on diplomatic cyphers, the operatives at the Berkeley Street premises in central London had also set about decrypting commercial communications from around the world.
Major Kullback formed an admiration for his British counterparts. ‘I found the British most helpful and co-operative,’ he later said. ‘They were completely frank, open and above board with me and kept no detail of their operation, procedures, techniques or results from me.’6 After the war, and firmly back in the US, Kullback became the chief scientist of the National Security Agency, staying with the codebreakers and liaising with the British until the 1960s before moving into academia at George Washington University. Colleagues recalled with fondness how Dr Kullback would respond to codebreaking triumphs with the exclamation: ‘We dood it!’ This was a catch-phrase used by Hollywood comic entertainer Red Skelton. It may have sounded more beguiling coming from the master cryptographer.
One other brilliant British codebreaker, who might have stayed on, instead followed Walter Eytan in his determination to help forge a new nation. Michael Cohen had left the Eastcote codebreaking operation by 1948; it was then that he started coding messages for the Jewish Agency Offices in London to be sent across to Jerusalem. Thereafter, with the state of Israel newly declared, he set sail for the port of Haifa. It was there that Cohen helped set up the ‘British kibbutz’ in the Upper Gallilee region. There followed years of intensive agriculture; and in cultural terms, the start of a period in which the British political left as a whole looked across at this burgeoning Israeli life of communal farms, with communal dining and family facilities, and sighed for what looked like the establishment of a form of utopia.
As a result, Cohen left the codebreaking far behind him and, when later pressed to recall any details of that life (by the 1980s, numerous books were being published and the secret was out), he simply smiled and mentioned the two beautiful Wrens that he had worked with.
It was not always perfectly easy to be Jewish in Britain during the middle years of the century, and there were codebreaking veterans who recalled minor outbreaks of anti-Semitism; cries from military men about the requirement for everyone to go ‘kosher’; and sly suggestions that Whitehall did not want to see too many Jewish people getting into positions of high authority within the codebreaking establishment. Frankly, it would be surprising if there had not been any such tensions: British society as a whole was scarcely free of prejudice – this was an era in which certain golf clubs would not admit members with Jewish-sounding names. But on the whole, the memories were positive – and this indeed was to prove crucial to the future. One such man who could reminisce very fondly over his codebreaking days was Arthur Levenson.
Levenson, like Solomon Kullback, was a Brooklyn boy, and also like Kullback, almost preternaturally intelligent. Indeed, it was Kullback who gave him his introduction to the world of cryptography just before the outbreak of war. After training – both in codes and in the military life – Levenson was shipped out to Bletchley Park alongside figures such as Bill Bundy. In conversation years later, Levenson was very wry and witty about the world that he found there.
‘We were treated like, oh, marvellous,’ he said. ‘I mean Americans were very few and we were supposedly integrated but we were treated as something special. They were very nice to us. The Director would invite us out, give us pink gin.’5
After the war Levenson stayed on a little longer, working, as he said, ‘on a few problems’ – one of which, as we have seen, was plunging into the darkness of Germany to salvage Tunny machines and to question German cryptographers. Following these extraordinary experiences, he returned to the US, and after several years in Army Intelligence, became one of the key figures in the National Security Agency. The continued harmonious relationship between the Americans and the British reached a sort of good-humoured apogee in Levenson; and the Lewis Carroll-like eccentricity of many of the key British codebreakers – and their enthusiasm for fighting their way out of thickets of mathematics and language – also found an echo in Levenson’s huge love for the works of James Joyce.
Indeed, his love for Joyce is a superb glimpse into the aesthetic tastes of codebreakers: novels such as Ulysses and Finnegans Wake were written, in part, as gleefully encoded texts, the meanings hidden deep within. Ulysses is more straightforward, though abounding in puns, reversals and indeed the recurring mystery of the postcard (coded) message ‘U.P: up’. Finnegans Wake was Joyce’s deliberate exercise in cryptology: the language constantly dissolves and reforms, entire paragraphs resemble cryptic crossword clues. Above it all is the sense of the author devising this enigma, an explicit, witty and mischievous tease for even the most intellectual of readers. Levenson – who in later years was assigned some of the knottiest cryptographic problems by the National Security Agency – must have adored wrestling with the novel that is composed of the swirling dreams of one man, penetrating the poetry and half rhymes and the baffling absurdist knockabout comedy routines to fish out its true themes of sex and death and the oppressive nature of history.
One of Joyce’s great preoccupations, threaded through Ulysses, was that of a nation strangled and oppressed by colonialism and seeking to find its own voice and language; to recover a true sense of nationhood. Similarly, some of the Jewish codebreakers had an almost spiritual passion about the need for Israel to come into being as a ‘kingdom’; throwing off both the British and the Arabs. As with other Zionists, there were the pragmatists and moderates who sought some way – as Winston Churchill had suggested – to partition the land so that it could be shared among Arab and Jew alike. Then there were others who burned with a holier zeal; these believed that political violence was justified to establish the state. What sort of state it would be was merely window-dressing, fine detail. As a result, when the British effectively threw in the towel in 1947 and announced that within a year, the territory would be left under the watchful eye of the United Nations, events turned ugly.
The codebreakers and secret listeners based in Sarafand were among the many British personnel who were going to have to pack up sensitive equipment and incredibly confidential paperwork amid an atmosphere of escalating anarchy. The Irgun guerrilla group was attacking British soldiers and Arab Palestinians; the Arabs were attacking Jews; and the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were beginning to crackle with gunfire. But there was a sense among some British soldiers that it was very important to hold back in terms of fire: a moral imperative that Jews should not be attacked after all the unimaginable horrors visited upon them in Europe. This was also a point when the world had little sympathy for the British position. There were still haunted, emaciated Jewish refugees living in European Displaced Person camps. How could they be denied the safety and security that everyone else took for granted?
Signals officer Peter Davies, based in Sarafand, recalled the atmosphere as the time came for him and his intercept colleagues to try and ship their entire operation out. Some were headed for Cairo; other bits of equipment were to be shipped back to Britain; yet further items were to be consigned to the flames. In terms of interceptors and codebreakers, some of the operation in Jerusalem and Sarafand was being moved over to an ever expanding base on Cyprus.
Startlingly, the copper wire used in their wiring systems became sought-after treasure: in the aftermath of war, there was a worldwide shortage. And so the signals officers found themselves racing against Bedouin raiders to get to remote desert installations to clear them out. Added to this, British withdrawal was fraught with the possibility of random death; soldiers climbing to the top of telephone poles became tempting targets for snipers.
In May 1948, the British mandate in Palestine came to an end. But it might be noted that there are those in today’s Israeli equivalent of GCHQ – the world-beating Unit 8200 – who, even in the midst of technology scarcely conceivable to many, cheerfully reflect one of the key approaches to cyphers set down back in Britain, at Bletchley and GCHQ: that of the work being carried out in an atmosphere fizzing with free-wheeling free-thinking. One former Unit 8200 officer recently told the Financial Times that operatives are expected to be argumentative, to question everything and at times to disobey their senior officers. ‘In intelligence, you can’t only work by rules,’ he said. ‘You need to be open-minded. We teach them [new recruits] how to work out of the box.’7 Edward Travis and Nigel de Grey would have nodded vigorously at this.
By 1948, the British still had a foothold in Egypt, with operations continuing at Heliopolis, and still assiduously monitoring Russian communications. But that foothold was growing shakier by the week; Egyptian nationalists were growing angrier about the idea of foreign soldiers patrolling their streets.
A great deal was being asked of the codebreakers at Eastcote. The startling and rapid dissolution of the British Empire – the extinguishing of its power in Asia and key regions of the Middle East – punched a hole in the gathering of intercepted communications. A sudden Soviet switch in encryption techniques was going to present the cryptologists with another crisis, on the face of it insurmountable. Yet at this crucial moment in the late 1940s – when Britain’s influence was melting, and the influence of America growing – their work carried on as feverishly as ever. And while political relations between Britain and the US became rather scratchier, the codebreakers themselves not only continued their unusually harmonious arrangements, but also were by now allowing others into this warm embrace too. Eastcote and Arlington Hall were forming, with Canada, Australia and New Zealand, a codebreaking superpower: a global team of some of the most towering intellects, pitting themselves against the savage complexities of Soviet secrecy.
And in the midst of this kaleidoscope of inter-continental change, one senior Eastcote codebreaker was set the task of plotting out the future of GCHQ; what could the codebreakers learn from their own history, and most particularly from their own mistakes, that would make them a more formidable force in the difficult years to come?