The village of Iver, in Buckinghamshire – about 20 miles (30 kilometres) from central London and about five miles (eight kilometres) from the Eastcote HQ of the codebreakers – had the faintest tang of show-business about it. The wealthy hamlet was very close to the Pinewood film studio which, despite the pinched nature of the times, was producing dozens of dramas and comedies, often with imported Hollywood stars. Home-grown stars such as Sidney James and Roger Moore were to acquire properties there. In the late 1940s, the neighbours of Nigel de Grey must have wondered if he had missed his vocation, and whether he should be working at Pinewood too.
As far as they knew, this unassuming man was a civil servant of some sort by day. But he was also a hugely enthusiastic amateur actor who threw himself into a variety of different amateur productions. De Grey had been a member of the Old Stagers, and the rather upmarket ‘Windsor Strollers’ too. Surely this quiet chap in his early sixties should have been working for producer Michael Balcon or director Basil Dearden?
The pleasing incongruity of Nigel de Grey’s story is that, of course, every day in that period he was right at the heart of the Cold War, fighting to break into Soviet cable traffic, as military and intelligence experts all around declared that the next world war was about to begin. De Grey had a kind of unnatural calm that was also extremely apparent when – at the behest of Eastcote’s director Commander Travis in 1948 – he put together a top-secret document looking towards the future of the codebreakers, laying the foundations of the new GCHQ by examining their recent history. The organisation was about to expand in numbers once more. So, learning from both successes and failures at Bletchley, how were the codebreakers going to continue to adapt to this new world of daily atomic jeopardy? How were they going to keep one step ahead?
‘Dear Eric,’ begins a neatly handwritten note at the top of this (now) de-classified document. De Grey was addressing this thesis to his colleague Group Captain Eric Jones (who was later to succeed Travis as the head of GCHQ). ‘A point I meant to make somewhere in the notes I sent you did not I think find a place after all.’1 This prefacing point was to do with the numbers of men needed for Y Service units dotted around the world. These brilliant radio experts were attached to army, navy and Royal Air Force and their staffing levels were dictated by the needs of those services. De Grey’s point was that the Y Service personnel should in fact match the enemy’s numbers – if the enemy had multitudes of trained wireless operators sending out illimitable signals, then similar numbers were needed on the British side to counter them.
‘No attempt was made prior to the war to estimate what the probable scale of enemy communications would be,’ wrote de Grey, adding that the resulting inadequacy of transmitters and personnel was an example of a ‘hidebound’ Whitehall. De Grey was thinking about the structure of this new GCHQ; and his friendly note to Eric Jones was about how to give it the investment it needed in the face of what must have seemed inevitable Whitehall cheese-paring. Although codebreaking was in some ways a much cheaper source of intelligence than having agents on the ground, the advent of the computer age meant that it would have to spend significant sums on innovative hardware. It also needed to fund the essential scientific research into new technological means of cracking codes and eavesdropping on the enemy. How were they to match the brilliant success rate of Bletchley?
‘Seventy-five percent of the justification for the existence of GCHQ in peace time is that it should be ready on or before the outbreak of hostilities,’ wrote de Grey. ‘It is obvious therefore that its mobilization plan must conform to the national or international military plan. It must assume, however problematical the situation may appear, that it will be successful, as it was in 1914–1918 and 1939–1945. Moreover, it is probably fair to say that its value in both wars was greater for strategical purposes rather than tactical – which does not imply any lack of “operational” importance. All the weight of the evidence goes to show that concentration of effort on the technical production side was the more successful policy.’2
This new age was at once nuclear and electronic; in the space of a heartbeat in the summer of 1945, there had been a dimensional change in the rules of engagement. De Grey knew that for the codebreakers to enjoy fresh victories, they, too, would have to embrace and get some way ahead of the computer era (as indeed their colleagues across the Atlantic were busy doing). But that did not necessarily mean a budget nightmare for the Ministry of War, setting up vast computerised codebreaking departments in stations across the world. De Grey and his fellow codebreakers were adamant that such things were more effectively handled when centralised.
‘There is not, provided communications are adequate, the necessity to set up large technical processing organisations at overseas commands for strategical codes and cyphers,’ he wrote. ‘There was considerable confusion of thought over this in the Navy,’ de Grey added. ‘What Commanders in Chief really wanted was a concentration of all the intelligence relevant to their command for their own staff to assess, what they thought they wanted and demanded was that the technical processes also should be carried out at their Fleet base.’ It might have worked for local issues, de Grey conceded, but even then only as long as all intelligence – no matter how seemingly unimportant – was sent back to the main codebreaking centre. The point was that the codebreakers’ strength lay in the fact they remained at the centre of the web.
‘Where more than one country is involved, the clear cut division of responsibilities and the closest integration of staff at all possible points in the common task were the two outstanding lessons of the American alliance,’ de Grey wrote. He forbore to add at that point that this particular alliance with the Americans was still going very strong. ‘This ensures the complete sharing of all technical knowledge and intelligence, avoids misunderstandings and determines who controls what.’
The other issue of course was the relative independence of the codebreakers; at Bletchley Park they had answered to MI6 and the Foreign Office. After the war, and following the split from MI6, this independence increased their determination to point out that they knew best ‘who controls what’.
The next war would be radioactive. Nigel de Grey, thinking as he wrote in that somnolent leafy west-London suburb of where the codebreakers would be best located when the sirens started crying out once more, posed the question: ‘First of all then, it has to be determined whether GCHQ should on mobilisation: 1) Stay put; 2) Move in the UK and if it do so, should it move to a) the heart of a populous city; b) a suburban area; c) a country area; d) below ground – eg the bottom of a coal mine or a clay pit.’
Drastic though the bottom of a coal mine sounded, even that might not have been sufficiently far from harm’s way in the event of an atomic attack. So de Grey also thought further afield. (Incidentally, his reference here to ‘GCHQ’ was part of increasingly common usage by the late 1940s; though many were still referring to the London Signals Intelligence Centre, those at Eastcote were now more frequently using the GCHQ acronym.) If they were to move abroad, Nigel de Grey wrote, should it be ‘to a) British territory, Canada, Australia, South Africa etc; b) Mandated territory – north Africa etc; c) Allied territory – America, Benelux etc, bearing in mind the proposed seat of the conduct of the war as a whole, or of any specific theatre of war. It is assumed that the main conduct of the war must necessarily be sited in conformity with the expected risk of disruption of communications (not merely telecommunications of course).’
De Grey was drily understating the prospect of nuclear Armageddon; but he added with more mordant wit that if international tensions were moving inexorably in that direction, ‘the signs and portents will not be lacking’.
The most important thing was to avoid improvisation; any moves made hastily in a crisis could imperil the entire operation. ‘On a lower level,’ de Grey wrote, ‘there is always a fatal tendency to regard any important cryptanalytical success as a special case requiring special measures to handle it. Success’, he added rather magnificently, ‘is the common form of GCHQ, it is to be expected, there should in a well organised establishment be no special cases or mistrust of a well-tried, well-seasoned staff.’ His suggestion here was that ‘dummy runs’ should never be overlooked. That way, de Grey wrote, things ‘should be all right on the night’.
And what about recruitment? Where were the new generation of codebreakers to come from? De Grey, it will be recalled, was an Old Etonian who had been recruited from the business world, at a time – before and during the First World War – when many codebreakers were either naval men or classicists drawn from Oxford and Cambridge. De Grey noted that very clearly at Bletchley, the idea of recruiting from Oxbridge – and pursuing gifted mathematicians – had been perfectly effective. So how should they now proceed at Eastcote and how many should they take on?
‘It is for decision’, de Grey wrote, ‘whether GCHQ will use one or more of the following channels for raising staff: 1) Direct contact with Universities, secondary schools etc. In general, this method produced not only the original 60 high grade people [for Bletchley Park before the war] but also considerable numbers afterwards. As national recruiting became more methodical,’ he continued, referring to Bletchley, ‘this system tended to clash with the proper authorities. There were also diminishing returns as men and women joined the Services. Government Code and Cypher School [the pre-war term for GCHQ] had no Establishment and these people were automatically taken on to Foreign Office books – the first 50 without “friction to the Treasury”.’ Could such an informal recruiting system be tolerated by the bean counters of late-1940s Whitehall?
And what of the less glamorous, less intellectual vacancies that the new organisation would demand? Again, de Grey thought warmly back to the war: ‘For lower grade labour,’ he wrote, ‘especially girls, large numbers were raised through the Foreign Office, in contact with the Ministry of Labour, who directed the more intelligent types for interview by the Foreign Office (Miss Moore).’ This, incidentally, is a throwback to an old Bletchley Park memo, equally breathtakingly sexist as it seems now, in which then director Commander Denniston complained about some of the ‘girls’ being sent his way; he wanted fewer of the ‘cook and messenger’ type, he said.3 Added to this, many ‘girls’ – including the absurdly glamorous debutantes such as Osla Benning – were recruited directly through smart social connections. In the new post-war world, with its radical Labour government, such an idea may have had a little less appeal.
There were other roles too to think about – the ‘lowest grade’, which might have included maintenance engineers and drivers. De Grey noted a little sourly that at Bletchley, some such workers came from local recruitment but that on the whole, the town and surrounding area had proved ‘mainly unproductive’. Wherever the codebreakers found themselves moving to in the event of a Third World War, it would have to be somewhere with streams of potential (and competent) manual and low-grade-clerical workers quite close by.
There were other skills to think of too, and de Grey analysed the men and women – linguists, traffic analysts – who had served in the huts and blocks, trying to pinpoint the factors that made them a success. ‘GC and CS did initially very well in securing a high grade team of young dons etc,’ he wrote. However, he added, ‘few women reached the highest levels.’ De Grey did not speculate on why that might have been the case; but his colleague Joan Clarke, attached to this new organisation having proved so brilliant at Bletchley, might have had her own views on the subject. Of course, it was much more than simple old-fashioned sexism; in cultural terms, there was at the time an overpoweringly strong bias in education in steering girls towards the humanities, and away from science and mathematics. Even if girls demonstrated high aptitudes in these fields, the cultural expectations of them – added to the social expectation that when they married and had children, all work outside the home would cease – meant that very few broke through. (Joan Clarke stands out today as much as Margaret Hilda Roberts, the young chemist from Grantham who studied at Oxford and later of course became Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.)
And had Alfred Dillwyn (‘Dilly’) Knox – a brilliant classicist codebreaker central to the cryptographic effort in the First and Second World Wars – still been alive, he might have had rather a different view on the contributions of women. At Bletchley Park, Knox seemed overwhelmingly to prefer working with them. One of his most dazzling young colleagues was Mavis Lever, just 19 when recruited. After the war, she had married fellow codebreaker Keith Batey (both sadly died not too long ago), and had left the cypher game, first to raise a family and then to return to academia. Her background, crucially, was in linguistics rather than mathematics. Now, in the late 1940s, Nigel de Grey, in setting out the template for the new GCHQ, was giving thought to the kind of ways such experts could be best utilised in the future.
‘Linguists: the pure linguist without other qualifications was not of great use,’ wrote de Grey. ‘Recorded opinion favoured 1) sound grammatical knowledge; 2) current idiom; 3) power to apply knowledge as a basis for guess work. Honours degree in Modern Languages not necessarily a sufficient linguistic qualification,’ he added. ‘Some additional test recommended.’4
He also explored the talents required by those working specifically on traffic analysis; here, it was more a question of ‘deductive faculty’ and a lithe intelligence, as opposed to any specialised gift. ‘In all of the above,’ de Grey wrote of the dons, the linguists and the analysts, ‘accuracy, quickness of work and some degree of puzzle-mindedness considered necessary.’
‘From the general point of view,’ he went on, ‘speaking “managerially”, there was [at Bletchley] a lack of men sufficiently experienced to take charge of sections where problems such as the handling of large volumes of paper arose… There was also a lack of commercially trained leaders eg women who had run typing pools in banks and insurance companies, accustomed to organising output up to a given rate per day, or men who had been sub-managers with a team working under them. The bank clerks, while excellently methodical, did not entirely fill the bill. No emphasis was laid in recruiting upon obtaining this type. Time was wasted by “talented amateurs”. Very many of the tasks were of a plain “factory” type.’
This fascinating view of codebreaking being an industrial activity, which first germinated with Gordon Welchman, was now finding its full voice in Nigel de Grey. At the time he wrote this, with the numbers of people working at Eastcote still a fraction of the crowds who had teemed around Bletchley Park, he was clearly planning for a future with a purpose-built environment, as opposed to a collection of slightly drab long pre-fabricated blocks abutting an American air force station outpost. For the expanding field of signals intelligence to be truly effective, it had to be able to operate in the way that Bletchley Park operated. And that also meant with the full backing of Downing Street.
Incidentally, de Grey was not completely sexist; having witnessed some of the miracles performed at Bletchley Park, he envisaged a key role for many women in this proposed establishment. ‘It was astonishing what young women could be trained to do,’ wrote de Grey. ‘EG Fish and bombe Wrens, Typex operators, in an incredibly short time with wonderful accuracy, although quite untrained to use their hands or apply their minds to such work.’5
So: these bright young women, unused in normal circumstances to applying their minds, and these bright young men, some potentially to be hauled straight out of their Sixth Forms: were these the most suitable people for the new codebreaking establishment to be going after? Funnily enough, although there was the sharpness, suppleness and adaptability of young brains to consider, de Grey also had experience of the potential setbacks of focusing mainly on youthful recruits. ‘Age,’ declared de Grey. ‘Recorded opinion lays emphasis upon youth because it is more trainable, more prepared to accept direction, better able to stand the strain, more flexible in mind – all obvious considerations.’ But, he continued, there were less obvious considerations too. ‘There are facts to be set against this: 1) Experience has a value and was none too prevalent [at Bletchley]; 2) cases of mental breakdown occurred equally between young and middle-aged; 3) both men and women are often tougher in middle age than in youth; 4) flexibility is not always so valuable as judgement.’
The mention of mental breakdowns was important: at Bletchley Park, a few such cases had been seen. Part of it was the huge pressure of the work; but another factor was the very nature of the work itself, that combination of dizzying intellectual pirouettes combined with often cruelly dull and laborious checking and re-checking. Modern electronic encypherment techniques reduced language to a vortex of anarchy; just a few years previously, one of the Polish mathematicians who had first cracked the German Enigma had stated that where there is arbitrariness, there is always – somewhere – a certain regularity. But the new computer age made such regularities almost invisible, generating cyphers with many thousands of millions of potential combinations. Angus Wilson (who in the 1950s became one of Britain’s most prominent and acclaimed novelists) had been a codebreaker at Bletchley Park; and there, his mind had buckled. The authorities had offered him a spell of recuperation in a special government institution. He turned it down, on the grounds that he was better off sticking with the madhouse he knew. The codebreaking mind was a distinctive thing – leaping laterally, able to hold the vastest abstract ideas. But clearly it was also prone to fragility. The coming of computerised cyphers was not going to ease that sort of pressure; especially if those codebreakers found themselves staring into the abyss of a Third World War.
And what of the Y Service – the brilliantly nimble men and women who had listened deep into the ionosphere, tracking crackling signals in deserts and jungles and on lonely mountains? Nigel de Grey noted that during the war, this had been one arm of the codebreaking process that had been slow to get going; part of the reason was the complexity of the job that required interceptors to translate Morse at the brain-burning rate of 30 words per minute. So it was difficult enough to find and recruit sufficient operators from among the young army, navy and air force conscripts. Here, the recruitment of women to work in establishments such as Beaumanor and Forest Moor eased a lot of the pressure. But – as de Grey noted with a dash of vinegar – when it came to civilians, there were fresh problems presented, one of which, in his view, was their tendency to belong to trades unions.
‘Trade union regulations were restrictive,’ he wrote, ‘and all GPO [General Post Office] and ex-GPO operators were unionists and stations manned by them were never 100% efficient: mixing of ex-GPO operators with War Office civilians led to trouble and ex-GPO men were segregated into a separate station. Union never forwent their restrictive practices.’6
There were Y service operatives who would have snorted with indignation at that assertion (and de Grey never made it clear which of the Y Stations had to be segregated). Certainly, there had been some flashes of ill-will at Beaumanor in Leicestershire. This was not so much down to the operators wanting to establish ‘restrictive practices’ as to simply improve the conditions in which they were working. Union representatives had protested to the station’s Commander Ellingworth about the bitterly uncomfortable huts in which the radio equipment was housed; the impossibility of concentration in the winter when the huts were so cold; and the near suffocation of the summer months, combined with the thick, un-air-conditioned fug of tobacco smoke. Nonetheless, codebreakers of Nigel de Grey’s generation (he had been born in the final years of Victoria’s reign) clearly had little time for what they obviously regarded as domestic Bolshevism. (And funnily enough, the relationship between GCHQ and union activity was a sore spot that would flare again in the years to come, most notably in 1982 when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher attempted to have unions shut out of the institution.)
And in the event of this new conflict, would the codebreakers be civilian or military? Bletchley Park had always operated in a kind of twilight zone. Wrens, ATS women and WAAFs were all required to wear their uniforms on duty, and were explicitly under service rules and discipline; yet they were working alongside men who – even when conscripted – had the choice of wearing the uniform or not. Many did so only for the purposes of obtaining free rail passes on their days off to London. In the Bletchley directorate, Colonel Tiltman consistently wore his uniform (always involving rather natty tartan trews), but joked with younger male recruits who insisted on wearing theirs. But behind these sartorial dilemmas had been a more philosophical problem: for instance, were codebreakers who were then sent off to stations like Heliopolis outside Cairo or the Far East Combined Bureau in Colombo under the sole command of their military superiors? What sort of weight would orders from Bletchley Park have? Indeed, in Egypt, this very fault line of authority had caused some venomous disputes: codebreakers accused by military colleagues of making Bletchley Park their priority, and not instantly sharing intelligence before Bletchley Park could analyse it.
But there was another fault line too: money. ‘Mixture of service and civilian produces gross inequalities of pay,’ observed de Grey. ‘Parliament always agitates for the services to be properly paid, indeed highly paid. No-one agitates for civilians.’ (Except perhaps trades unions, one would have been tempted to tell him.) He continued of the Bletchley Park experience: ‘While most civilians accepted their position equably, there were monstrous cases where men were doing the same (not similar) work and some getting nearly double the others. Such violent inequity tends to sap enthusiasm at times. Service officers in the Government Code and Cypher School were not in danger and some got staff pay… Decisions will have to be reached therefore on numbers duties and types of service officers… which the services propose to attach 1) on mobilisation; 2) subsequently.’
There was a note on the fresh difficulties that new technology would bring. For instance, de Grey observed, at Bletchley Park upon the outbreak of war, recruits preferred ‘preliminary training courses’ as opposed to learning at top speed on the job. The declaration of war had made that a practical impossibility for many; but de Grey noted, in the future, ‘a more highly developed organisation’ might be able to cover that gap. What was important in the wider context was to avoid some of what de Grey perceived as the deficiencies in the wartime service. This applied especially to the Y Service interceptors out in the field. ‘Many British and American Y units were sent overseas with expeditionary forces, untrained and useless,’ he wrote. ‘A bad operator is rather worse than useless eg RAF unit sent to Singapore, units sent with Torch to north Africa.’ Incidentally, it seems eyebrow-raising – even in the context of a ‘top-secret Ultra’ document circulated only among his close colleagues – that de Grey was willing to blame the 1942 fall of Singapore, and its capture by the Japanese, on hapless Y Service secret listeners; the intelligence failure was most assuredly rather larger than that…
Nigel de Grey’s point was that the skill of the Y Service operatives was specific and had to be nurtured; the army imagined that gathering intelligence in this way could be done by any old operator. It could not. De Grey’s answer was that such operatives should be spotted early, recruited early and trained early, and that their unique speed and talent and sharpness should be recognised accordingly. On top of this, when it came to recruitment of codebreakers in the future, the new GCHQ should have the authority to pick out the best candidates and exempt them from military conscription. ‘Great importance attaches to GCHQ being a party to if not the sole constituent of selection boards,’ observed de Grey.
‘If as has been said [signals intelligence] dances to the enemy’s tune and the saying is true, it is provident to guess the enemy’s programme before the band begins to play,’ he continued.7
And so to the gleaming technological innovations: what would the regenerated codebreaking department need, how many and how much? ‘High speed calculators – not much is here relevant,’ wrote de Grey. ‘It is no use thinking small on this subject. Preparation for, experimental work on and production of the first 6 bombes cost roughly £100,000. The large “Fish” calculator [that is, Tommy Flowers’s innovative Colossus machine] embodied 2400 valves of a type reckoned practically unprocurable. Experience’, de Grey added, ‘was that each new problem tended to require modification of existing machines or the devising of new ones. When a factory is geared up for large-scale production, any redesigning or modification throws the whole organisation out of step.’
‘Government Code and Cypher School had three main sources of supply: a) British Tabulating Machine Co, bombes and some subsidiary machines; b) GPO engineering research at Dollis Hill. Recourse when BTM was fully occupied was had to the Government’s Telecommunications Research Engineering establishment. The first device which they made far exceeded their powers of production and had to be farmed out to Mawdsleys for manufacture. It was far too long (18 months approx.) a process before it came to perfection. On the other hand, their work on Fish and a Japanese machine were most useful. But clearly, Government Research Departments, unless they embrace production (as at Dollis Hill whose work consisted in the main of assembly of standard parts and only a small amount of engineering) are not of more than limited use.’
Again, there might have been a personal bias against state-run concerns that led de Grey here to underplay the rather magical contribution that Dr Tommy Flowers and his GPO team at Dollis Hill had made; regardless of the amount of time needed to perfect these revolutionary machines – admittedly not an ideal factor in war – the fact was that they had moved cryptology into an entirely new dimension of possibility.
So where would this magical machinery come from, if not from the stolid and lumbering government departments? Like so many of his colleagues, Nigel de Grey got a flash of enthusiasm in his eyes when he looked across the Atlantic towards the work being done in America. ‘Very great assistance was afforded by both Navy and War departments in America,’ wrote de Grey. ‘The Navy contribution was outstanding in research on electro-mechanical devices. Their resources of manufacture were of course larger than ours.’ They still were, too – as we shall see, former Bletchley codebreaker Gordon Welchman was now over on the east coast, helping to usher in more of these electronic leaps.
And decoding brought with it a number of equally important subsidiary tasks – many to do with the secure transmission of the intelligence. Nigel de Grey was wondering how many copiers – ie early photocopiers provided by the company Roneo – would be required in a time of heightened international tension? There were other required items that would later become mainstays of the entire spy-fiction genre: microfilm cameras and microfilm readers. In the late 1940s, such things were just about available, but the special pleading in view of the cost was presumably very loud.
And unlike the slick ease with which James Bond and Avenger Emma Peel swiped, snapped and read their microdot documents, de Grey was less than impressed with the huge amounts of behind-the-scenes labour that the technology required. ‘Dealing with microfilm,’ he wrote, ‘which as a method of conveying large quantities of documents about the world should have been ideal, saving the burden on cables and air bags, proved particularly tiresome. It was easy to make 35mm and 16 mm film. But to enlarge them upon receipt was beyond the resources of most centres. 35mm was possible though lengthy and expensive. Only two automatic plants for enlarging and printing 16mm existed, one in London, one in America, both belonging to Kodak. They were both in demand for air-mail letters for the troops and were very expensive to operate, let alone possible risks to security. Recourse’, he added, ‘was had to film projectors and a copying staff which, although the work was of the dullest, achieved a fair output, but it was obviously a one-horse method. Staff of six girls.’
De Grey mused that the demand for photography and copying was so large that Bletchley had to install its own specialised department; and presumably would have to do so again at Eastcote – or indeed, wherever the codebreaking was carried out. ‘It is obvious that considerable development of a photographic copying department should form the subject of study and the organisation be kept informed of the latest apparatus and its suitability. Apparatus should be earmarked and supplies assured.’ Incidentally, it is rather sweet to consider that this super-secret proposal was essentially about a photocopying department. The world turns with unforgiving speed.
It is also worth bearing in mind – when we all have the books and monographs of the world’s libraries digitised at our fingertips in our homes – that the codebreakers in the late 1940s were scrabbling around trying to procure for themselves reference books and atlases. Expensive, detailed reference works were rare; facts could not be verified, as they can now, within the blink of an eye. ‘No large scale maps or charts existed in Government Code and Cypher School on mobilisation,’ wrote de Grey, eyebrows raised. ‘Hut 3 had none until the Battle of Norway. There were no existing channels for obtaining them.’
Indeed, given the highly esoteric nature of the codebreakers’ work – the need to grasp every last syllable of the enemy’s communications on subjects from local politics to topography – the omission was startling. ‘The only reference books were chiefly concerned with diplomatic activities eg Statesman’s Year Book, Almanack de Gotha etc,’ continued De Grey. ‘A few dictionaries – largely private property – practically no atlases. No technical literature whatever concerning the enemy armed forces save British blue books. No address books, telephone books, railway guides, tourist guides, motor maps. No vocabularies, no modern technical dictionaries, or standard works.
‘While the official publications on enemy forces were well informed on the aspect of standard weapon equipment, endurances, speeds and such like, they were not informative on organisation, structure or subordinate formations. It cannot be too strongly emphasised’, said de Grey, ‘that the need for such guidance was a paramount requirement in the early stages for the existing staff and later for instruction of new entry.’ And so for the new-look GCHQ? ‘It is suggested that unofficial handbooks or guides to the potential enemy forces, with emphasis on organisation, should be compiled on a loose leaf principle and constantly revised by GCHQ,’ stated de Grey. ‘Into them could be embodied official statistics etc where regarded as germane. Every effort fair and foul’, he added, with underlining, ‘should be made to acquire foreign service handbooks and manuals of instruction for the sake of information, idiom and technical equivalents. In this respect, GCHQ has quite different requirements from the Ministries. Compilations of this nature would save much time on the arrival of reinforcements.’
Funnily enough, the Bletchley Park database – which at that time was a vast number of cards, handwritten and cross-referenced, bearing information on enemy technical terms, and weapon jargon – had been maintained and added to by a platoon of highly dedicated debutantes, whose boredom thresholds had been stretched beyond imagination by the tedious nature of their work: every decyphered German message had been filleted for concrete terms – propellers, engine parts – and names, too, of as many officers and subordinates as could be contained on shelves in one big room. As Alan Turing and Professor Max Newman continued to struggle with the possibility of endowing a machine with a memory, information and knowledge was still a matter of physical hard copy.
It was highly unlikely, in the event of nuclear war, that Britain’s high-society debutante army might be raised again: many of them, such as the Honourable Sarah Baring, were married off and settled on grand estates. On top of this, there had been a shift in the global axis since the outbreak of war in 1939. By the late 1940s, it was no longer an automatic truism that aristocratic girls were ideal recruits because their social class meant that they were more disposed to loyally keeping secrets. The new GCHQ was clearly not going to be established on a base of cosy social connections.
Added to this was a new nervousness following the unwelcome revelations of the Venona decrypts; the hermetically sealed departments of dedicated codebreakers – American and British – were still unlocking the secrets of these messages, and still in the process of identifying those who had betrayed Allied secrets to the Soviets. But it was painfully clear that the Comintern (the body that united Communist parties internationally) had succeeded beyond perhaps even its own wildest dreams in infiltrating the most extraordinarily guarded US and UK areas. For GCHQ, recruitment in a new age of lethal atomic science would have to be even more circumspect than it had been before, and the threats and warnings given to those embarking on a career of cypher-cracking would need to be even more dire than those issued to personnel at Bletchley Park.
Added to this was the insight in de Grey’s monograph that – certainly at the time – signals intelligence could not quite operate at complete effectiveness without an accompanying element of human intelligence. The nature of the information de Grey required to have at his fingertips was traditionally the type obtained by human agency: from the humble tourist guides, to the more sensitive and detailed lists of personnel and senior commanders, and the innovative weaponry that they were to deploy. But de Grey – perhaps as a result of his wartime experiences – seemed to have limited patience with the idea of the codebreakers having extensive dealings with either MI5 or MI6.
‘It was a mistake to interpose SIS [MI6] between the ministries, service or civil, and the Government Code and Cypher School,’ observed de Grey. ‘There was no point in it, save possibly some obscure and long forgotten loose thinking about security… In the Japanese war of course, the India Office was a vitally interested customer but Government Code and Cypher School relations were never clarified quite satisfactorily owing chiefly to the long-standing interposition of SIS, difficult by then to set aside.’8
This was about more than a simple inter-service rivalry; more than a sense of clever codebreakers viewing MI6 agents – back then largely recruited, like the early days of Bletchley, through the smarter social echelons and Pall Mall clubs – as faintly incompetent. De Grey – and with him the codebreaking establishment – had clearly learnt the lesson from the war that prized intelligence should not be scattered about; that only the absolute bare minimum of people should be receiving such briefings, and certainly without any of the intelligence being filtered by agents from quite another discipline. ‘Experience of the war was always that direct reporting to the user was the cleanest and safest method,’ said de Grey, ‘for both sides knew exactly where they stood, could discuss problems direct, and Government Code and Cypher School could control security of use.’
But there was an unexpected security risk that de Grey mused upon, and in so doing, he threw a most intriguing light on the future relationship of the codebreakers with the wider government and the Westminster establishment. It was all to do with delicate matters of money. He noted that when it came to extremely expensive bombe machine production back in the early 1940s, the cost was covered first of all by MI6, and then, thereafter, by the Admiralty. It was ‘non-audited’, meaning that Bletchley did not have to make special representations to politicians or civil servants.
‘Another very useful arrangement was the “pool” fund of the GPO, established to cover service requirements,’ wrote de Grey. ‘Out of all this the work of the GPO Dollis Hill establishment for Government Code and Cypher School was financed and no special Treasury sanction was necessary. This relieved GC and CS of considerable labour and the necessity to violate security to obtain the required money.’
In other words: such financial secrecy was good for the defence of the realm; the fewer interfering and carping Whitehall types who knew what the codebreakers needed to raise money for, the better. This was perfectly sensible in a jumpy age, but there was also a hint of passive aggression too. De Grey knew very well – from British liaisons and from the sparky American codebreakers stationed at Eastcote who were puzzling their way through that mountain of Venona Russian encryptions – that the US was pulling away fast in technological terms, awash with money from a grateful and uninquisitive Congress.
‘In dealing with secret equipment,’ de Grey wrote for the benefit of his director Edward Travis, but also his business-minded colleague Eric Jones, ‘it is all important to have open doors to finance and not to have to go through the hierarchy pleading and explaining the necessity… A preliminary study of this whole subject is necessary and agreement with the Treasury as to what liberty of action GCHQ should be granted in time of war.’ But the sentiment from de Grey could not have been clearer: in time of war, GCHQ should be given what it wanted with absolutely no questions asked; for the questions themselves would throw up concerns about national security.
He illustrated the point with some facts from Bletchley concerning the British equivalent of Enigma, the Typex machines. They ‘were almost always in short supply’, de Grey noted. ‘Many important plans for communications were bunkered by shortage of these machines and the people to work them. Their gravest disadvantage was that they produced only a single tape copy. More time and staff were wasted in GC and CS duplicating by typewriter and duplicating machines than any other single thing and since an enormous proportion of the total traffic handled… when the Far Eastern war was in full swing passed through the Typex machine the lack of i) a page print and ii) any mechanical duplication was a really serious feature.’
The consequence was that backlogs developed; with all the thousands, and then millions, of messages pouring in from every theatre of war, and with the need for British units in the field to receive that intelligence, the system would come close to logjam. The result, de Grey said, was that they had to resort to ‘factory methods’ to get the work done.
‘This was done chiefly by keeping careful records of output per watch, per machine and per girl,’ said de Grey. ‘This showed up weaknesses, peak hours etc and enabled the manager to adjust numbers and skill per watch, additional training for slow workers and additional servicing of machines… Properly constructed chairs were found to minimise fatigue and increase output – but were seldom available.’ The time-and-motion techniques at last allowed Bletchley and its outstations to work out the optimum number of ‘girls’ needed to work the optimum number of machines. Some women appeared to have a natural knack for the work; others did not. It was not a precise science. In the various huts and blocks, other methods were tried to improve ‘productivity’ including the playing of ‘music while you work’. This did not improve speed; and de Grey noted that generally among Typex operators, morale was often low. With any new war – and the many emergencies that it could bring – such issues were far from being personnel trivialities; this was the very heart of intelligence and it needed to be working at peak condition.
And where should they all put themselves? Again, de Grey reached to the past for inspiration as he sought to outline the new sort of institution that would be needed. In 1939, he said of the move to Bletchley from St James’s Park, ‘central space was always lacking from the first mobilisation of 137 people in accommodation for 80. Building was always therefore against time.’ The blocks that were built, he said, at least constituted ‘an asset’ to the government, in the way that the ‘wooden hutments’ did not (although one wonders what the shade of de Grey would make of Bletchley Park’s exquisite restoration of said ‘wooden hutments’ for today’s modern museum – an English Heritage ‘asset’, no less). ‘It was a definite advantage’, wrote de Grey, ‘that we had on the staff a man who had had long experience in public works [actually water and drainage]’. This allowed him to override civil servants from the Ministry of War who in many cases were ‘amateurs’. This man, said de Grey, now dead, had left behind a legacy: ‘He left on his death complete plans for an underground building to house GC and CS in war-time.’
Even at the first stirrings of nuclear neurosis, many government departments were starting to think in subterranean terms. In the event of war, it was starting to be believed, everything on the surface would simply disappear in a scorching instant flash. There had been suggestions for underground housing of codebreakers before; prior to the move to Bletchley, one idea was to put the cypher experts in quarters and offices beneath the St James’s Park HQ of MI6. Hitler’s bombing, many assumed, would start the very minute war was declared, and the Luftwaffe attack would almost immediately leave the entire city shattered and in flames. But the underground notion was abandoned; delicate brainwork – and fissile personalities – meant that the chances of any startling innovations emerging from such close quarters was low.
But it was clear that Eastcote, on the outer fringes of London, could not be a permanent home. For some of the codebreakers, it was maddening to be stuck in suburbia: they wanted the neon and the rush of town. Others hankered for rural peace. It would not be too long before an inspirational compromise was suggested.
And what then of the larger number of recruits who would be needed to be drawn in at speed once Britain went to war with Stalin? Indeed, even without conflict, the spreading global reach of the Cold War mean that the codebreaking was poised to expand further. De Grey was concerned about human happiness (and its knock-on effects in the workplace); having seen the low morale of many women who worked in those cypher factories, he wondered how things might be improved for their successors.
‘It should not be forgotten that new entry will be entirely unfamiliar with Civil Service rules, regulations etc,’ he observed. ‘They are accustomed to payment on the knocker and unaccustomed to mistakes in deductions of income tax and subsequent recovery. They do not understand Civil Service jargon and circumlocution. They want to know exactly where they stand and actively resent delays in getting answers. Nothing saps new entry’s morale quicker than dilatoriness in dealing with their troubles.
‘A very large number, especially girls, have no other resource than their weekly pay,’ he added, a nod to the independent means of the smarter young women and an acknowledgement of the new generation of young working women coming through. At Bletchley, he said, ‘a very large number were badly treated – chiefly by blunders – and redress took months to obtain. Establishment can do a very great deal to make life tolerable to new entry, by clear explanation of conditions and prompt and accurate attention to hard cases.’9
Any feminist cheering that this might have evoked would, however, have been choked by his next point. He said of some new entrants that ‘they may appear and may be stupid but they need all the more to have humane handling.’ This unfortunate phrasing made many of the Typex operators sound like cattle. De Grey’s progressiveness only went so far. Of these badly treated Bletchley women, he said, ‘hardship cases were by no means confined to the lower decks’.
So much for the human factor; but the codebreakers were running a global operation in a world shifting dizzyingly fast. The ambitions of Nigel de Grey were evidently shared by his colleagues in the directorate, but could they ever hope to achieve them? They would have been all too aware how overshadowed they were by their one-time parent service MI6; and even more piercingly aware of the battles ahead to compete for ever shrinking sums of cash.
As we have seen, the Eastcote establishment had already been writhing under a number of financial frustrations, even down to the vexed question of whether the Middlesex setting entitled the staff to a few shillings extra of London weighting in their wages. But on a broader canvas, the impotence that de Grey – and doubtless many like-minded colleagues felt – was palpable. America was effervescent with innovation, a future filled with reel-to-reel tapes and flashing lights; there was little doubt that the lumbering Soviet empire was fast catching up. And here was Britain – the greatest and most creative of all codebreaking innovators – gradually suffocating in the grey sludge of austerity debt and Whitehall inertia as, across the world, vast chunks of empire snapped off, bringing a diminishment that was very hard to adjust to.
That said, there were still ‘overseas centres’, and the question of how they should be used in the forthcoming Third World War was also addressed. De Grey was anxious for clarity (a contrast to the opening months of the Second World War, when various separate departments appeared to be gainsaying one another). This new-look GCHQ would have very well-defined lines of communication with the military. Also, it was not just a matter of sending through thousands of decrypted messages; there had to be clarity in terms of who did the filtering of the military intelligence. De Grey’s preference was clearly that this should also stay within the realm of GCHQ. The whole set-up was cleaner that way.
And what about the Dominions, which were, at the time that de Grey was writing, being pulled into the unprecedentedly wide embrace of the UK/USA agreement? How things had changed! Canada, noted de Grey, had had a rather mixed codebreaking war. It was ‘part service, part civil, very active in interception but small and inexperienced in processing’. What about ebullient Australia? Quite apart from the fact that it was just about to suffer its own Soviet double-agent drama, it too had had an up-and-down war. ‘From the American standpoint,’ observed de Grey, ‘it had no intelligence reporting function, merely the production and circulation of decrypts.’ That said, the Australian authorities were proud of their signals intelligence operation, which was so active in the field units of the Australian army and air force.
Then there was the Indian elephant in the room: at the time that de Grey was writing, the Indian Congress had achieved independence, and Jinnah had his Pakistan. The weight of British signals and codebreaking work was based on that golf course just outside Colombo. Nigel de Grey harked back drily to the days when the Experimental Wireless Centre at Delhi had generated dramatic amounts of ‘acrimony’. This was partly a conflict of seniority – who got to control the flow of intelligence through Delhi and Colombo. It was, de Grey said, a ‘persistence of the traditions of the bad old days’, by which he meant that the military was inclined to sideline Bletchley Park’s overall centralised dominance. Added to this, the man in charge at Delhi, Lieutenant Col Marr-Johnson, had a notably corrosive manner. Codebreaker Alan Stripp, while not naming him, observed that ‘too often administration relied on authority rather than professionalism’. Of course, none of this was the fault of the Indian codebreakers, or those based in Ceylon; they had, said de Grey, done a splendid job against the specific complexities of Japanese codebreaking. What concerned him was that lack of centralised control; this new age would change all that. No matter how congenial the idea of anarchy may have been to the thought processes of cryptologists, the organisation behind them had to be strong and rigid and in complete charge at all times.
De Grey could not pronounce on the future role of the Commonwealth: the whole thing was ‘in flux’. But when it came to allies, he said, ‘all the evidence points one way… There cannot be a successful partial liaison – all or nothing.’ And the codebreaking centres, wherever they might be, had to resist the excessive demands of military brass-hats. All had been well ‘save for financial starvation’ in the 1930s, wrote de Grey. But then, with the war, the senior military hierarchy started to take a sharper interest in codes and in building up their own Y Services with ever expanding numbers of their own officers taking control (or trying to take control) of cryptanalysis. This, to de Grey, was an intolerable invasion. It ‘diminished the scope’ of the codebreakers. Moreover, each service ‘was a law unto itself’. Intelligence got duplicated – and this carried the danger of reflecting endlessly in a mad hall of mirrors.
Worse, Bletchley Park had been ‘none too clear on its principles and rather took the line of limiting its responsibilities’. In other words, it had offered itself as a batman or valet to the military, rather than maintaining the strict integrity of its own independence. That would have to change. ‘While it is obviously necessary to set a limitation on the responsibilities of any organisation…’ wrote de Grey, ‘GCHQ should not hesitate to pursue any course that may lead to better signals intelligence and better use of it, whatever the theoretical objections. Had GC and CS halted in its stride every time objections were made, there would have been no Naval Section, no intelligence work in Hut 3, no combination of sources in the BMP and no task control from Hut 6 or Hut 3 or Naval Section… On the other hand,’ he added, ‘GC and CS was a laggard in… military field code work and many other respects. It deserved a good deal of what it got.’
The magnificent conclusion de Grey was steering towards would have delighted his colleagues. ‘All this points towards clear thinking and plain speaking with GCHQ customers,’ he wrote. ‘It points too towards the lesson that the peace time organisation should be the skeleton of the war organisation – “the image of war without its guilt” [de Grey was quoting Robert Surtees on the subject, strikingly, of hunting]… so that on mobilisation it is a well-running machine. If that is done and GCHQ avoid the great mistake of GC and CS which was to create at the very first emergency an anomalous complex in its internal system entirely contrary to its planned and accepted organisation, friction and dangerous complications should be avoided.’
But perhaps the most startling aspect of this blueprint for the future was that it was being drawn up by a civilian with seemingly no consultation with any member of the armed forces that it would be dealing with, its ‘customers’. The codebreakers may have transformed Bletchley from a cottage industry into a worldwide factory; but the men running GCHQ seemed as defiantly quirky and eccentric as their forebears. In America, the mighty army and navy had contributed cryptanalysts such as Telford Taylor and Bill Bundy and the meshing of military and civilian personnel carried with it a feeling of determined military discipline; this sense – of an advanced and complex establishment deeply and inextricably intertwined with the military – continued and deepened after the war. With the nascent GCHQ, there was a faintly maverick flavour: not in any political sense (the codebreakers if they could be characterised at all in such terms were profoundly conservative) but rather that they did not welcome intrusion into their territory. Brigadier John Tiltman and Lieutenant Colonel Marr-Johnson were among the few to continue with their military careers. In contrast were figures such as the bearded sandal-wearing Highland-dancing expert Hugh Foss and the chess champion (and regular chess correspondent) Hugh Alexander. There was a sense of continuity with Bletchley – and with the First World War Room 40 operation – that verged on the defiant. Cloak-wearing Nigel de Grey – by day analysing the terrifying lurches in geopolitics that threatened Europe with further bloodshed and by evening appearing on stage in amateur productions with the Windsor Strollers – seemed somehow to symbolise this unashamed left-fieldedness.
Two key developments from Russia – viewed with horror by the British and Americans – combined with a torrid period for MI6 – would also come to mark the British establishment’s understanding of just how vital the new GCHQ would be.