The piercing cries of seagulls, combined with the deep roar of cold waves crashing on black pebbles, did not help the concentration of the highly strung Soviets. These men, the Soviet Union’s supplest minds, were already agitated enough after an unsatisfactory trip around the tourist spots of London, followed by this journey to the freezing south coast, where the contest was being held. The English did not play the game in the same way: instead of deep focus, there was rush and commotion. They started too early in the morning, and added to this was an unusually heavy haze of tobacco and the unbearable hum of pointless chatter from onlookers. The Soviets – and the grim undercover NKVD security men who were supervising them closely – were growing increasingly tense.
This was a tournament that was quietly weighted with global consequence, lethally serious yet at the same time – thanks to the English hosts – charged with some ironic wit. The setting for this clash between violently opposed ideologies could not have been more pleasingly incongruous; it was an out-of-season theatre near the promenade at the seaside town of Hastings, in Sussex. It was January 1954, and the weather by the seafront was ferociously wet and cold. Doughty women out walking their dogs in the freezing spume dodged into the tea-rooms attached to the theatre in order to avoid the knife-keen winds. The Russians regarded their constant entrances and exits as further intolerable distractions. These ladies could have no conceivable idea of the significance of the contest being played here; they could never have guessed that among those crammed into this room of brightly painted pillars and velvet curtains were agents of a foreign power. Before the dog-walking ladies, at a range of tables, and operating in a dense mist of cigarette smoke, were many men in suits, some young, but most middle-aged. They were hunched over chessboards.
These were the world’s chess Grandmasters, gathered from all over for an annual competition – the Hastings International Chess Congress – which was (and is) held every winter in this otherwise unassuming seaside town. Among the players, for the first time since the Cold War had begun, were participants from the USSR: Alexander Tolush, David Bronstein and Vladimir Alatortsev. They had arrived in Britain at a time when relations between the British and the Russians had reached a point of permanent mutual neurosis, distaste, suspicion and contempt. And the game of chess was regarded as being very much more than a symbol of national intellectual prowess. Unknown to the wider world, there was a battle taking place here in this hall that in some way was as significant as any movements of submarines, tank regiments or intercepted coded messages.
Soviet pride – and concomitant insecurity – was at its most intense. Even with Joseph Stalin – leader of the Soviet Union from 1924 to 1953 – recently dead, senior figures in the Kremlin were tormented by the idea that the Western powers looked down on them. If the Soviets knew what a particular branch of British intelligence had waiting for them here in Hastings, they might have thought again about allowing their Russian Grandmasters to make the journey. As it was, the main English representative at this tournament was not immediately familiar to the Grandmasters. In such a closed and hermetic world, they must have wondered quite where this handsome, amused-looking man had materialised from. And as intellectually confident and dazzling as Bronstein and Tolush were, these towering giants of the game must have wondered how it was that this English player came by such effortlessly confident body-language – even an easy smile – as he settled down before the chessboard.
Hugh Alexander was the perfect emblem of a new department of British intelligence that was fast establishing its indispensability. He – and several of his friends dotted around those smoky Hastings halls in that dark winter – were brilliant codebreakers. For several years, Alexander’s own work had been devoted to penetrating Soviet encrypted messages gathered from deep in Eastern Europe, their codes devised by men such as those he was now playing chess against. Alexander and his colleagues were rich in experience and, indeed, success. Hidden deep in the darkest shadows of British establishment secrecy, there was only a handful of people in and around Whitehall who knew the full extent of their extraordinary accomplishments. The NKVD agents in the hall could not have imagined, as they watched Alexander locking wits with their team, that this was the man who, in 1942, had helped steer Britain through the worst of the Battle of the Atlantic by penetrating Hitler’s most unthinkably complex codes.
The codebreaking triumphs carried out at Bletchley Park, a large house and estate to the north of Buckinghamshire, was one of the more astonishing stories of the Second World War. The unravelling of the Nazi Enigma codes had enabled the cryptographers, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, to see right into the heart of the enemy’s plans. When the war ended in 1945, the senior codebreakers understood very well the frightening fragility of this new peace. They had developed an extraordinary new espionage muscle. Unlike human intelligence, which often relied on unstable, untrustworthy double agents and psychologically damaged individuals, codebreaking and intercepted messages had a kind of crystalline, unblemished purity. The cryptographers knew that they had to sharpen their skills and their scope further in order not only to defend the nation, but also to ensure the stability of other regions. This was a world-spanning game. In that January of 1954, Hugh Alexander – now one of the mainstays of the regenerated codebreaking department known as Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) – took several days away from his secret duties in order to accept a symbolic challenge from an unwitting Kremlin.
Curious though it may seem, this chess tournament – covered by the world’s press – offered a chance of victory that Britain’s spies badly needed. The last few years had been very difficult. British intelligence had suffered the humiliating exposure and defection of the MI6 double agents Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in 1951. The revelation of treachery at the very heart of the secret state was compounded by concomitant repercussions among Britain’s allies. A notable irony in the torrid saga of these traitors – Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt were to be exposed later, and the alleged ‘Fifth Man’ John Cairncross only in 1979 – was that their activities had been uncovered first by American codebreakers and then by their British GCHQ colleagues. This was one success – both bitter and horrifying – that had even initially been kept from the British prime minister and the American president, so volcanic were its implications.
But the wider point was this: the generation that had emerged from Bletchley Park was very swift to find its operational feet in those first few traumatic years of the Cold War. The international climate froze over fast, and generals on either side anticipated the world at any moment being convulsed with conflict once more. The codebreakers, after having gone for a few years under the title of ‘London Signals Intelligence Centre’, were by the 1950s a completely free-standing department. The initials ‘GCHQ’ were never referred to in public, its existence unspoken in newspapers and even in Parliament. Quietly, and invisibly, the codebreakers established themselves as an all-seeing, all-hearing force, concealed at the very centre of British life.
The world was faced with the entirely new prospect of global devastation. First, America detonated two atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Then, the subsequent treachery of atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs, who passed the scientific secrets of nuclear weaponry over to the Russians, enabled Stalin to build his own atomic bomb by 1949. There was now for the first time the possibility of a war which could poison and kill generations to come. From the start, the codebreakers trained themselves to be alert, not merely to messages from on high, but also to the seemingly blander encoded communications from Soviet fleets in the Arctic, or between Russian military figures in Kazakhstan. Any day might bring the indication that an atomic offensive was being planned.
The codebreakers were also learning to stretch beyond simple cryptography into the new dimensions opened up by fast-developing technology: listening devices that could be used hundreds of yards away from the target; aeroplanes armed with super-focused cameras; submarines that could prowl the darkness of the deep, intercepting communications and also other signs of nuclear activity. Cunning wireless interceptors, engineers and scientists built secret tunnels under city streets. From these claustrophobic warrens beneath Vienna, and later Berlin, they could tap unseen and undetected into telephone cables that were hot with calls to and from Moscow. No method of eavesdropping would be deemed too outlandish; all that mattered was the capture of as many conversations and commands as possible. Bletchley Park had been the incubator for the codebreaker’s brilliance. In this freezing new world, they were now ready to listen to the world’s every heartbeat.
What was happening in Hastings in January 1954 was far from frivolous: it was the symbolic affirmation of the codebreakers’ new powers. By taking on Soviet Grandmasters, senior GCHQ operative Hugh Alexander was letting the Kremlin know that even though Britain’s imperial era was ending, the country still possessed the intellectual arsenal to thwart the creep of Communism. The first years of the Cold War had been jagged, harrowing, uncertain: an entire continent was suffused with blood, the millions of displaced survivors trying pitifully to find some tokens of familiarity and home amid poverty, malnutrition, local violence and some of the cruellest winters seen over the last 100 years. The word ‘peace’ was almost laughably empty: Europe was exhausted and the wounds were gaping wide. It would not have taken much for the violence to begin all over again. It had already resurfaced in the Soviet brutalisation of German women, and in the fate of Jews who tried to return to their old villages. From the point of view of the Western Allies, Russian ambitions and desires were unreadable. Stalin had been swift to lay claim to vast tracts of Eastern Europe. Western policymakers fretted as to just how far his territorial plans extended.
In Britain, most of the men and women who had fought and worked for the war effort were returning to their old roles, in offices, factories or indeed back at home. At Bletchley Park, by August 1945, the number of people involved in the production of thousands of daily decryptions – a workforce that at its peak numbered around 10,000 – started thinning out with some speed. This was quite natural; but those who ran this (still gravely secret) operation were concerned. The world was scarcely more stable now than it had been at the heart of the conflict; the Bletchley Park directorate, who were soon to move premises, still had need of the very finest minds to unlock the codes of rival nations and powers.
A codebreaker is a quite different creature to other intelligence operatives. The discipline of cryptology, which experienced its true renaissance in the Second World War, was at that time becoming very strongly aligned with the pure theory of mathematics, and indeed philosophy. Before then, code-cracking had been the realm of classicists and linguists. The electronic age would completely change this approach. Pure mathematicians dive deep into oceans of abstraction, where numbers may or may not be symbols of a quantifiable reality, where algebraic and geometric theories that can have no conceivable application in the outside world may be explored for decades. Yet in the late 1930s, when the generation of mathematicians spearheaded by the likes of Alan Turing were drawn into the fight to break Enigma, suddenly all those ethereal abstractions found a concrete application: here, with these German encryption machines that could generate 159 million million million combinations of letters, was an area where the sheer force of pure mathematics could be gleefully unleashed in the effort to bring meaning to unfathomable chaos.
And so from the very start, the codebreaker was both a proud personality and also – owing to that ability to stare into incalculable intellectual depths – rather difficult to anchor down. It was often said of Alan Turing that he was hopeless at eye contact, and tended to sidle awkwardly into rooms. He was not the only codebreaker to be viewed as eccentric. But he has, of late, become an emblem or an archetype for the entire discipline. The point was that, unlike the rather public-school/clubland and socially assured ethos of MI6 – Britain’s foreign-intelligence service – this new generation of cryptographers was less predictable in its working methods and could frequently be the cause of exasperation in Whitehall, where senior civil servants recoiled from accounts of apparent anarchy. The war had proved that this apparent disorder had worked magnificently – when yoked to a properly structured organisation. Halfway through the conflict, when Commander Edward Travis had taken the helm, the work of Bletchley Park was transformed from resembling a cottage industry – the work carried out in wooden huts – to a sleek industrial production line, with specially built blocks housing fantastic new technology. In these, the codebreakers produced thousands upon thousands of decrypts each day.
More important than that was the fantastic reliability of the intelligence that Bletchley Park produced. There were no rogue double agents who would say anything to ensure that they got their money; here simply were decrypted transcripts of the enemy talking. And talking freely, since they were so confident that their codes could never be broken. What Bletchley Park gathered in was usually the truth. In the world after the war, the possibilities of listening in had multiplied unthinkably. The codebreakers were very much the future.
They had vaulting, intuitive minds, working with fast-evolving technology, but in many ways the ethos was unchanged. When Hugh Alexander walked into that old theatre in Hastings in January 1954 to face the most formidable opponents any chess player could hope to meet, there was a blitheness, almost a studied carelessness, about his approach. Throughout the Cold War, the stakes for the codebreakers grew ever greater as the superpowers evolved new weaponry, extended their control over fresh territories, and sharpened their influence over geo-strategic hotspots right the way across the world. But Alexander and his colleagues – together with their American counterparts – understood that to remain effective, their minds had to have a diamond clarity. There were some who relieved that extraordinary mental pressure by immersing themselves in antique-coin collecting; one who used madly energetic Highland dancing as a release. For Hugh Alexander, recreation was a chessboard, and the adrenalin rush of facing outstandingly brilliant rivals.
The early evolution of GCHQ was far from an unalloyed success story. In those fractured, nervous years after the war, there were stumbles and mistakes. Yet from a department of seemingly ungovernable geniuses emerged an organisation that continues to work to preserve national security from within the (necessary) shadows. These days, GCHQ is showing a more open face to the world; newspaper journalists have, for the first time, been invited to see a few (though obviously not all) of its workings at its impressive headquarters in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. The GCHQ that works endlessly to ensure the security of the nation is the direct legacy of Bletchley Park. The men and women who broke into Hitler’s codes were to build an institution that would go very much further. But the story of the genesis of GCHQ is also about a world in violent convulsion. In those first terrible years of the Cold War, security agencies in Britain and America alike were thoroughly infiltrated and undermined, the rules of this brand-new game were still being fathomed by two brand-new world-dominating superpowers, and all the continents of the earth were suffering the traumatic aftershocks of war. The codebreakers were among the very few to be able to divine a route through this new and hazardous labyrinth of mirrors. The men and women who built a new codebreaking institution in the late 1940s and early 1950s very soon became sharply aware that the nation would – quite without any member of the public knowing it – come to rely not only on their ceaseless vigilance but also on their free-wheeling ingenuity.