Ever since the Victorian pioneers of military ballooning took to the skies over the deserts of Sudan in the 19th century, establishing a god-like all-seeing omniscience over rebels below, the dream of being able to observe and hear every move the enemy made, every conversation about battle plans, had been refreshed by new technological developments. During the Second World War, the arts of aviation and photography were melded into a spectacular secret enterprise that revolutionised reconnaissance missions: now it was possible not only to capture aerial views of enemy installations, but also to photograph them in such a way as to render three-dimensional images, from which so much more could be gleaned. From the point of view of Bletchley Park, the aural equivalent of this was the Y Service, faithfully and brilliantly eavesdropping on all enemy chatter, from the Luftwaffe pilots in the air to the commanders in the scorpion-infested deserts.
And now the innovations at Hanslope Park and the research laboratory at Dollis Hill were beginning to offer even more ambitious possibilities for GCHQ, which was placing itself very much at the forefront of this jet-age espionage. For Commander Travis and his cypher-breaking team at Eastcote, the mastery of signals intelligence was soon to be matched by a growing proficiency in what came to be termed electronic intelligence. It was here that the codebreakers really began to prefigure the wildest creations of Ian Fleming’s boffin Q.
The dignified real-life version of Q was the brilliant government scientist Dr RV Jones; he was the wizard who divined in the early stages of the Second World War that German bombers were being guided to their targets by specially transmitted radio-wave ‘beams’ that intersected over the position where the bombs were to be dropped. Dr Jones invented a way to ‘bend’ these beams; he might not have been able to stop the onslaught of the Blitz but, nonetheless, a great many potential Luftwaffe targets were missed. And importantly, Dr Jones’s deep study of this kind of guidance technology was helpful when it came to the bombing raids made by the British. Alongside this was a fast-growing ability to ‘read’ radar – that is, to monitor the enemy’s radar and divine intentions from the nature of the waves. When the war began, radar was still so new as to be regarded by some as a form of black magic; very swiftly, though, planes fitted with radios and antennae came to be essential in fast-moving espionage operations.
Picking up radar signals by flying directly over enemy territory, these planes could relay huge amounts of information back to analysts on the ground concerning enemy positions and plans. What had been rather clunky and primitive technology had, by the end of the war, become sleek and lethally effective. Such spy planes were flown over the vast jungles of Burma, sucking up intelligence on otherwise utterly hidden units.
Added to this, it seems that British advances in this field – so vaulting, so fast – were a source of enormous envy to senior figures in the American air force, who were astounded by their ingenuity. They were not slow to appropriate the principles but even so, in those immediate post-war years, British creativity was held up as the leading example. The spy-planes used for electronic intelligence reconnaissance flights were referred to colloquially as ‘ferrets’. One of the chief areas of ferret activity in the late 1940s was over East Germany. In 1948, the Joint Intelligence Committee had let Commander Travis and all at Eastcote know that their number-one priority in gathering information had to focus very strongly on Central and Eastern Europe. So began a series of quite daring cat-and-mouse missions, eluding the attentions of Soviet fighter planes; the ferrets were fitted with the very latest technology that Dr RV Jones and his fellow scientists could devise.
The Joint Intelligence Committee had very specific targets for intelligence, as a memo from the time reveals. ‘Development in the Soviet Union of atomic, biological and chemical methods of warfare’ was, naturally enough, at the top of the list. Added to this was the development of ‘scientific principles and interventions leading to new weapons, equipment or methods of warfare’. But war is not just about weapons or the mobilisation of troops. The committee was also desperate to know about ‘Soviet economic successes or reverses (such as the drought of 1946) likely to have an effect on foreign policy’ plus, pressingly, ‘significant internal political developments in the Soviet Union (especially question of succession to Stalin)’.1
This memo, from 1948, also demonstrated that the codebreakers of Eastcote and their Whitehall masters were even more alert to Stalin’s influence across the world than their American friends. The committee specifically wanted the cryptanalysts to find out all they could about ‘Soviet intentions in Germany and Austria’ and ‘Soviet relations with Jews in Palestine (particularly the extent of Soviet and satellite assistance of emigration)’. They sought information about any Russian manoeuvres in the Arctic; and (although they were later accused of looking in the wrong direction) also investigated any ‘Soviet intentions in China and Korea’.2
It was not all about the Soviet Union. The codebreakers also had a remit to investigate the Chinese, and the possible outcomes of the struggle between nationalist Chiang Kai-shek and the insurgent Mao Zedong. Despite the crucial listening station in Hong Kong, China and many other countries in the Far East were in danger of becoming a blind spot. In the case of Korea, it was because there was simply not that much traffic to intercept and analyse.
Nor was it all about a fear of Communism. The codebreakers were asked to carefully monitor ‘clandestine right-wing French and Italian movements’. By the late 1940s, Communism in Western Europe was waning as a political and parliamentary force; but a rising young generation was venting its anger in more than one form of extremism. GCHQ was also asked to penetrate ‘Zionist movements’ and their ‘intelligence services’.3 The chiefs of security in Whitehall must have yearned for Bletchley Park’s almost panopticon view of so many theatres of war; but these were years of instability and unpredictability.
Despite the vast scale of what was being asked of them, the codebreakers very quickly understood that these kind of operations should really stay within their departmental orbit, rather than that of the War Office (as the Ministry of Defence was called until many years after the war ended) or indeed any of the other services. Not that the aerial ‘ferret’ trawls over hostile territory in the east of Europe resulted in codes that needed breaking; but rather like radio traffic analysis, this was another means of almost providing a real-time commentary on enemy activities and troop dispositions.
The ‘ferrets’ concerned were Lancaster and Lincoln aeroplanes, specially refitted. The codebreakers began making serious use of them in the late 1940s; taking off from the British-occupied zone in West Germany, the pilots and the crew undertook many risky missions, ever conscious of the serious jeopardy posed by Russian fighters. They flew missions along the borders of regions such as Latvia and Lithuania, over the Baltic, and then further afield to the Black Sea, not straying into Soviet airspace but getting as close as imaginably possible. Some planes, taking off from the Middle East, were circling as far afield as Iran. Richard Aldrich noted that as the technology improved, these planes became flying intelligence fortresses. They were jammed with electronic surveillance equipment that was sometimes amusingly at odds with the now-antiquated planes carrying them.
For these aviation adventures, the codebreakers had teamed up with the Royal Air Force, which had of course been greatly slimmed down in the aftermath of the war. Pilots were taught about the importance of the work the listeners were doing, and about the vital importance of secrecy. And once a sweep had been made along the borders of East Germany, or Poland, or any of the other target regions, what would then happen to the raw data?
A specially dedicated RAF base was found for the gathering of all electronic intelligence: Watton in Norfolk. Here was gathered an extraordinary motley collection of outmoded Second World War planes which were all now used by the boffins not merely for grabbing information, but also for purposes of jamming Soviet radio-waves. It was a game that both sides were playing; the Russians were catching up quickly and with some proficiency. While old Halifax planes lurked in the skies of the Eastern European borderlands, Russian planes spiky with antennae were executing similar manoeuvres over Western Europe (and also over American bases scattered in other continents). Naturally, the Americans were swift to join the listeners in the skies: various US aircraft patrolled regions such as the Arctic, remaining alert for any pulses of radar that would signal clandestine enemy activity on the ground below.
There was some photography too; even though the need to stay out of Soviet airspace meant that the chance to capture images of military installations was limited, there were nonetheless shots that were of great help to the analysts back at base. This combination of intelligence gathering – the monitoring of radar pulses, the photography of bases, the recording of conversations on the ground below – was assembled as a sort of jigsaw of data. None of this was done for its own sake. That widespread sense in the late 1940s that conflict was once more going to flare meant that the patrols – already tense – carried the responsibility of reporting whether the Soviet enemy was just about to launch an attack. For their part, the Soviets, afflicted by the grinding paranoia of Stalin, would have been looking at the West with similar jumpy mistrust. The need for total accuracy on both sides was paramount. Any misinterpretation of movements along the Soviet border could have led to a continent, already on its knees, being forced into another bout of unthinkable carnage.
The hazards for the crews of these ‘ferret’ flights were occasionally unexpected. Signaller Frank Slee was commended for his bravery and quick thinking when ‘radio counter-measures’ equipment that he was working with in mid-flight overheated and burst into flames. Then there were the attendant technical difficulties of the work. Signaller William Lowther was warmly praised by his superiors for his notable powers of concentration as an on-board wireless operator, reading signals and direction-finding with pinpoint precision under circumstances of great stress and tension.
The man in charge of ensuring that the RAF’s brave and brilliant collection of intelligence was directed towards Eastcote, rather than the sister security agencies, was Lieutenant Colonel Marr-Johnson, who had a series of meetings with senior RAF commanders. There was another eager customer: Lieutenant Colonel Marr-Johnson’s friends in America. All the data gathered by the ferrets was to be shared with the United States; another sign of the closeness of the relationship.
This was of course just a few years before satellites. Now we all take for granted the idea that on our phones and computers, we can zoom in on pretty much anywhere on earth. After the end of the war, codebreakers and intelligence gatherers looked at maps of the Soviet Union and understood that they knew next to nothing; beyond the Iron Curtain was simply a haze. Michael L Peterson of the American National Security Agency later wrote of this information vacuum, and how intensely nerve-wracking it was.
‘Maybe you had to be there in the late 1940s and early 1950s to appreciate the degree of the nation’s concern over the threat posed by the Soviet Union…’ he wrote. ‘Maybe you had to be around also to appreciate the enormous gap in our knowledge of Soviet military and industrial capabilities hidden behind the Iron Curtain… Today if you look at an intelligence map of the former Soviet Union, you probably couldn’t see the geographical features for all the annotations. Covering the depictions of winding rivers, modest mountain ranges, great deserts, and miles and miles of tundra would be circles and squares and diamonds and arrows pointing to boxes of information everywhere.
‘…That annotated information map didn’t just happen. The information took years to acquire and validate… In 1945, the Soviet Union might as well have been on Mars.’ Peterson quoted from a 1947 USAF document outlining the peril that the crews of these reconnaissance flights faced. ‘This mission is considered a most hazardous one both from the natural peril and capture standpoints,’ it stated. ‘All flight personnel are volunteers and are fully apprised of possible consequences should the plane be forced to land in foreign territory. The crew is warned that in the event of detention repatriation will be attempted but will probably be unsuccessful. For purposes of cover, the project is described as a weather mission. Equipment for complete demolition of the plane and its equipment has been provided.’4
As Peterson went on to say, in fact many missions ended rather more violently, with the crews shot down and killed. The principle of ferrets also caused outbreaks of diplomatic fury. The Soviet ambassador in Washington vented his rage in 1947 after two US ferret missions had been detected over Soviet interests in Big Diomede island, near the Arctic Circle. It was also from the frozen far north that American crews made ferret forays into the vast Russian wastes of Siberia.
The US Navy – which had contributed so heavily towards the codebreaking efforts throughout the war against Japan – was also flying its own ferret missions from aircraft carriers. Amusingly, it was not only the British who had occasion to extemporise. Having decided to take part in ferret flights, the US Navy then realised that it did not have quite enough equipment for the planes to carry. A lot of machinery had been sold as surplus just after the war. The answer? Two US naval technicians were sent out on a shopping expedition. ‘Wearing civilian clothes and carrying large quantities of cash,’ went one naval report, ‘the two chiefs rooted through war surplus stores in New York City. They purchased all the intercept receivers, direction finders, pulse analysers, and other electronic reconnaissance equipment they could locate.’5
(Incidentally, Michael L Peterson was himself another example of the special spying relationship; before he later became a writer, he was transferred over to England to be a ‘cryptologic staff officer’ at the Forest Moor station in the 1970s.)
Another ingenious British–American collaboration involved the fathomless oceans: first, the Americans carried out experiments with submarines in the Bering Straits. The idea was that from deep beneath the waves, they could monitor the transmissions of Soviet naval bases. Two submarines were then chosen to undertake more detailed, full-time patrols. They were, according to Professor Richard Aldrich, sailed to Britain in order to be fitted out in Portsmouth. There were new instruments that could be used to detect any missile activity. At the rear of the submarines were specially fitted aerials. The Cochino was one of these submarines, and it set off on a maiden mission to patrol the Barents Sea and to listen out for any traces of Soviet missile use.
But tragedy and horror struck. Not through enemy action, but because of a vast storm that caused a hull breach. This in turn started a terrible chemical fire. And in the desperate efforts to extinguish it, one man died and others were hideously burned. The peculiarly nightmarish quality of serving on a submarine – in moments of serious jeopardy like that – can only have been heightened by the doubly horrible need for the craft to remain completely undetected by the Soviets, for fear that its technological secrets could be harvested. A companion submarine, the Tusk, came to the aid of the stricken vessel. Now surfaced, and smashed by roaring mountainous waves, the horror intensified as six prospective rescuers from Tusk who were trying to reach Cochino were swept overboard and lost; and yet somehow the wounded crew of Cochino were transferred, via unsteady plank, to the functioning ship, and then taken back to base for treatment.
No matter how bad the auguries from this initial mission were, these sorts of spy submarine missions were to proliferate greatly; as with all else, the Soviets were very swift to catch up with the Americans’ efforts. Such vessels were extremely effective, capturing evidence of missile testing and details of naval manoeuvres. Some years later on, they would also become involved in terrifying duels, Soviet craft attempting to ram British and American submarines.
In 1949, the terms of the Cold War were, in a sense, made official by the foundation of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation), the formal alliance between Western Europe and the United States. Britain’s foreign secretary Ernest Bevin – who had been so anxious for the United Kingdom to acquire its own nuclear capability – was sharply realistic about those who put their faith in more pacific organisations. ‘It seems vital to me’, he declared on one occasion, ‘not to deceive the peoples of the world by leading them to believe that we are creating a United Nations Organisation which is going to protect them from future wars, in which we share our secrets, while we know, in fact, that nothing of the kind is happening.’ Article 5 of the NATO treaty was the opposite of compromise: an armed attack against any one of the member states would be considered an attack against them all, and the response would be gauged accordingly.
This was one branch of America’s efforts to rebuild a continent with which it could trade; the other was the money that started filtering through via the Marshall Plan. It remains to some of a certain age a rather sore point that while the British were forced into miserable winters of scrimping in order to repay their wartime debts to America, the people of West Germany were boosted by the easier terms on which they were granted a vast injection of cash that led to an economic golden age for the mighty German manufacturing base. But whatever its own interests – the soaring post-war American economy needed Western Europe to regain its feet – the fact remained that this kind of reconstruction was absolutely vital to ensure that the embers of Nazism were fully extinguished. (Indeed, there are still dark suggestions that those embers were more stubborn than most realised; the TV producer who brought the Adolf Eichmann trial to television in 1961, for instance, recalled going to nightclubs in West Germany in the 1950s where old Nazi phrases were still being used by the clientele.)
And as NATO coalesced, so too did the plans of the US military: another reason Bevin was so determined that Britain should have its own nuclear capability, rather than be shackled to the US. Curtis LeMay, head of US Strategic Air Command, set out a plan for war against the Soviet Union; the firepower that would be required to bring Stalin to his knees. His calculations ran thus: it would take 133 nuclear bombs dropped on 70 Russian cities. Three million civilians were expected to be killed instantly; another four million would be grievously injured. There was a nauseating sense of momentum about such thinking, a gathering idea that the United States might be wise to make a pre-emptive strike before Stalin’s forces got the chance to inflict the same radiated horror upon America’s cities. This, after all, was the nation where Senator Joseph McCarthy’s enthusiasm for permanent, rolling witch-hunts against Communists was catching on throughout all sorts of institutions and communities; a nation where a travelling exhibition of American constitutional documents – on board ‘The Freedom Train’ – required entire towns to come out and worship these sacred texts of American exceptionalism when they arrived at the railroad station.
The curious irony is that the idea of pre-emptive attack was actually forestalled by the growth of the US military-industrial complex, and by the vast financial investments pumped into the quest to perfect bigger, better nuclear bombs: rather than irradiate the whole of Russia (and by extension, inevitably, vast swathes of Europe) could not America’s scientists simply outpace the Soviets and develop super-bombs so nightmarishly terrible in their potential that the Kremlin would be utterly cowed? And so the weapons race – particularly towards the goal of the hydrogen bomb – began.
And NATO (formed of France, Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Canada, the United States, Iceland, Italy, Portugal and Denmark) was not just about the Soviet menace either. It was also a means of helping to ensure that Germany, or at least the western half of it, would remain stable. For while the Americans were fretting about Stalin, the French were still rather more acutely anxious about the possibility of their neighbours becoming aggressive once more. While France and Britain were among the first signatories of the NATO treaty, the West Germans were kept out of it: for the time being, they still could not be trusted militarily. For the others, the signing of the treaty saw more waves of American money – this time being spent on military establishments and hardware – shoring up the line between the West and the Soviet bloc. Even as Britain continued with strict rationing, American bases of all varieties sprouted around the British landscape. From the point of view of the codebreakers, this was to include the striking listening establishment at the far tip of Cornwall.
The year 1949 also saw the Allies allowing West Germany to govern itself, ending the post-war period of occupation. British and American military bases would remain on West German soil, but the country itself would finally be going to the polls to elect its first post-war chancellor. That man was Konrad Adenauer. The government that he headed up was – thanks both to American aid and also a certain native work ethic on the part of the West Germans – almost preposterously successful, and indeed he stayed as chancellor for the next 17 years. Adenauer’s government was not based in Berlin, but Bonn. There was some suggestion that even if his country had not been split, Adenauer actually had little time for the regions of the east – the sundering suited him perfectly well. Indeed, it also suited a number of politicians in other countries. Some, like the British prime minister-to-be Harold Macmillan, took the view that for reunification of Germany to remain far off was very much for the best: it would stop the Germans ever being tempted into resuming old territorial ambitions.
Since the Berlin Blockade of 1948, tensions in that city, deep within the Soviet zone of occupation, had been heightening. But this was still some time before the vast concrete structure of the Berlin Wall went up. Here, West and East continued to co-exist – just – without any flare-ups of violence. (In the years before the Wall’s construction in 1961, it is estimated that some three million East Germans crossed over to the Western sector, and from there defected to Western Europe; many of these were doctors, lawyers and other trained professionals. Conversely, a rather small number of artists, writers and intellectuals made the journey to East Berlin, preferring to live in what they regarded as more ideologically pure austerity.)
This was the world that was being transmitted back to Eastcote and analysed. The men and women of GCHQ, charged with monitoring all incarnations of Communism, were now charting the Eastern bloc’s response to the super-charging of the West German economy, with all the temptations that prosperity presented for so many citizens of the East. George C Marshall had wanted the Russians to participate – and benefit from – the American money that was pumping in to the continent. Stalin, though, had refused. And now the landscape was beginning to assume its new shape: while West Germany disconcertingly sprang to rebuilt life in next to no time, a grey pall of poverty continued to hang over Poland, Czechoslovakia and others. There are two types of warfare: military and economic. As the West pulled sharply away from the Soviet bloc, so the pressure on the Kremlin started to rise. People living under Stalinist rule began to understand what it was that they were being denied.
Those citizens of Czechoslovakia, of Hungary, of Romania, were now required to live according to Stalin’s blueprint. In agriculture, for instance, any last traces of a peasant class were swept away; the collectivisation of private land began, and the poorer agricultural labourers were swept up into five-year plans. Meanwhile, there was also extensive industrialisation; under the ruler of steel (the meaning of Stalin’s adopted name), this was very much to be an age of steel. But, as Tony Judt has observed, even though the populations of Western Europe largely ignored what was happening in the East, there were vast numbers of people in the Eastern countries who had looked west towards cities like Vienna in search of culture and art. The culture of Soviet Russia was in many ways an alien imposition. This is not the sort of intelligence that is generally picked up by cryptanalysis; but the Eastcote codebreakers would nonetheless have been deeply aware of the rich life of cities such as Prague and Bucharest, and they must have wondered what sort of a story this new and sudden – even sullen – silence told.
But GCHQ’s curiosity had its budgetary limits too. Even if the organisation was once more expanding, to absorb those with the cultural as well as mathematical expertise to analyse the cryptology of its targeted nations, the financial arrangements dealt with by Commander Travis, Captain Hastings and Nigel de Grey at Eastcote were a matter of great delicacy and care.
Even the most everyday costs of GCHQ costs were a matter for haggling and scrimping. One memo, from Harold Fletcher (an old Bletchley hand) to the Foreign Office ran: ‘We shall find it necessary to send out each week a certain amount of laundry in the shape of roller towels. In the past, the cost of such laundry has been borne by “Special Funds” but as you know, these no longer exist. We have approached the Ministry of Works on this matter in the hope that they would accept liability, but they have informed us that this is a departmental commitment. I shall be grateful, therefore, if you will let me know whether the Foreign Office will be prepared to meet the accounts, which we estimate will be in the neighbourhood of £2 each week.’6
As much as their American counterparts in Arlington Hall may have protested that their work was being underfunded, it seems very unlikely that they would have been reduced to roller-towel bathos.
Moreover, there are moments now in recently released papers that afford a fascinating – if not faintly comical – glimpse into a pre-technological world of security arrangements. One such memo concerned the containers in which hyper-sensitive material would be conveyed to the necessary superiors in Whitehall, without the possibility of espionage. ‘The blue despatch boxes at present being used for delivery of our material to you are to be withdrawn, and will be replaced by boxes with a different type of lock,’ wrote the unnamed ‘Head of 3 Department’ in 1949. ‘The new key is enclosed herewith; on receipt of your acknowledgement, the new boxes will be brought into use. Would you return your old key to us in a new box and send back any of our old boxes which may still be in your possession.’
‘The new boxes’, the memo concluded, ‘can be easily recognised by the name “GCHQ” stamped on the lid.’ There is something highly evocative too about the furniture of the letter, from the address given as ‘Room 3/2911, Lime Grove, Eastcote, Ruislip’, to the telephone number in case of queries: ‘PINNER 7500, Ext. 43.’7
The very business of keys raised other security issues, this time the subject of an internal memo. ‘It is important that, in order to avoid the compromise of GCHQ, keys and the consequent danger to confidential documents, the following directions should be carefully followed… The person to whom a key is issued is personally responsible for looking after it and ensuring that it can never be lost or copied… If in abnormal circumstances it is essential that a key should be taken away from the office, it should be carried securely attached to the holder’s person. To take an impression of a key on plasticine or soap is the work of a few moments only. The opportunity for this must never be afforded by leaving keys lying about eg on the dressing table.’8
The dressing table! What wonderfully demure enemy agents they must have been worried about. Key etiquette required that in order to request a key, one had to make representations to the Establishment Officer in Room 3 at Eastcote; if the key was to be passed to another, then the transaction had to go through this office, and the key in question would remain the full responsibility of the previous holder until this exchange was properly acknowledged.
There was another very serious point. ‘GCHQ keys may not be taken out of the United Kingdom,’ the memo continued. ‘On any occasion on which the holder of the key proceeds abroad, the key should be returned to GCHQ for safe custody unless it is needed by a successor.’ And what about those keys that had been taken around Britain to one or more of Eastcote’s listening out-stations? They ‘should be returned by Registered Post in sealed envelopes’.9 Again, there is now something unutterably charming about spies having complete trust in the Royal Mail to deliver top-secret keys without fear of theft.
Some secret business could only ever be conducted face to face, and in the early weeks of 1949, Sir Edward Travis, accompanied by his assistant Commander Clive Loehnis, set off on a globe-circling tour to meet up with Australian signals intelligence superiors, and also their counterparts in the United States. A memo to a British diplomat outlined – in the era just before jet travel – what an undertaking this would be. After Australia, the memo ran, they ‘are returning to the UK via the USA… they will leave Honolulu on Saturday 26th March on flight number BP444 due at San Francisco on March 27th… They will need dollars and hotel accommodation for three nights. They will be travelling to Philadelphia on Weds 30th March by the UP (Union Pacific) overland train route… it would be kind if you could book them onward drawing room accommodation on this train.’10
Despite the considerable setback of the Soviet encryption changes, Travis’s codebreaking department had found its confident stride; quite independently of MI6, he and his lieutenants were quietly ensuring that they were covering as much of the earth as they could. The blank spaces on the vast intelligence maps were slowly but steadily being filled in: GCHQ’s bank of knowledge of military and scientific developments was growing. Certainly, the saga of the Cambridge Spies was due to cause huge trauma to other corners of Britain’s security operation, but the codebreakers – voyaging across the Atlantic and journeying across Europe – seemed quite secure about their own personnel, and about the aims of their organisation.
They were, as ever, ahead of their time. The White House and the leaders of the Western European nations saw – in the aftermath of the Berlin Blockade and the Soviet coup in Czechoslovakia– the advantage in becoming closer militarily. In the earliest days of NATO, a supreme headquarters was set up in a pleasant suburb of Paris near Versailles. The first Supreme Allied Commander Europe was General Dwight Eisenhower.
This development could hardly go unanswered by the Soviet Union; soon afterwards, it gathered together the Baltic and Eastern European states under its thrall into the Warsaw Pact, a military pact to counter NATO. But during this period, the spread of Communism was hardly confined to the east of Europe. The cryptanalysts were struggling – with limited resources and personnel specialising in the Far East – to hear and analyse some of the curious noises which were now coming from the other side of the world.