GCHQ

3 Every War Must Have an End

On 26th August one of the [German] operators from Army Group, South Ukraine…suddenly broke into violent remarks about Hitler, using the peculiarly foul language in which the Germans delight. The operator at Supreme Army Command tried to shut him up in equally filthy language. This interchange lasted for about ten minutes…

The incident is only noteworthy as a possible indication of the way things are going.

Nigel de Grey, Deputy Director at Bletchley Park, to Sir Stewart Menzies, 14 September 19441

By the autumn of 1944 the Second World War was ending and the Cold War had, to all intents and purposes, already begun. In the east, the German Army was collapsing fast, and by September Soviet forces were at the borders of Prussia. A month later, American forces had entered Germany from the west, capturing the ancient town of Aachen. While much bitter fighting lay ahead, the minds of officials in London, Washington and Moscow were increasingly focused on the post-war settlement. Wartime relations with Russia had never been easy. Stalin’s intense and unwavering suspicion was underlined by the fact that, throughout the war, he had refused to leave Soviet-controlled territory to meet Churchill and Roosevelt. Harsh Soviet behaviour in newly occupied areas like Poland already pointed to post-war confrontation and rivalry, and all eyes were on the advance into Germany.

Britain and the United States were gearing up for piratical raids on the headquarters and laboratories of a collapsing Third Reich, and Axis sigint material was the treasure that was most actively sought. A joint Anglo-American planning group began consulting with Bletchley Park about what material it wished to scoop from an occupied Germany. By early 1945, Intelligence Assault Units were moving into Germany alongside the fighting elements of Allied formations, looking for all kinds of top-secret German experimental weapons. Bletchley Park despatched its own Target Intelligence Committee teams, known as ‘TICOM teams’, made up of a mixture of British and American personnel, to seek out cryptographic equipment and sigint personnel from Germany. The whole TICOM programme was run on what Commander Edward Travis called ‘an entirely inter-allied’ basis.2

Suddenly, boffins in glasses and cardigans found themselves turned into amateur commandos. Whisked away to a quarry near Bletchley, those selected for this task were given a short course in the use of sub-machine guns and hand grenades. They began on the Thompson sub-machine gun, but soon found the lighter Sten gun to be an easier weapon to handle. None of them performed well, but nevertheless they were soon on their way to Hitler’s ‘Alpine Lair’ at Berchtesgaden. Major Edward Rushworth, one of the senior British officers from Hut Three, led a TICOM team of a dozen officers, accompanied by Selmer Norland, an American stationed at Bletchley Park. They arrived at the major German headquarters at Augsburg on 8 May, VE-Day. Augsburg had been home to the famous German ‘Fish’, or Geheimschreiber, the encyphered teleprinter which Bletchley had eventually defeated with the mighty ‘Colossus’ computer. Sadly, all these beautiful machines, lovingly manufactured by Lorenz, had been smashed and the cypher wheels had gone. The dejected team surveyed the debris. However, a day later their spirits rebounded when they gleefully recovered a single intact late-model ‘Fish’ from a town on the Austrian border.3

On 12 May 1945 they reached Hitler’s Alpine retreat. The Führer’s accommodation had been heavily bombed, but a hundred feet below ground was a maze of bunkers and tunnels to explore, including an emergency power station and a complete telephone exchange. No more cypher machines seemed to be in evidence, and the mission was tailing off when, as a last task, Rushworth set off for nearby Rosenheim on the Austrian border, to question a cryptographer who had been working for the German High Command (OKW). While they were there, a group of other German prisoners sent a message asking to speak to the ‘proper people’. This team had served in the OKW headquarters sigint units and now revealed that, terrified of the rapid Soviet advance, they had buried their equipment under the pavement in front of their headquarters. Called ‘OKW-Chi’, they had successfully broken what was referred to as ‘Russian Fish’. This was an encrypted Soviet military teleprinter that achieved an early version of packet switching, breaking each message into nine different parts and routing it along separate channels, before reassembling it. The Germans had already worked out that their code-breaking triumph would have post-war value, and hoped to sell themselves on as a complete team.4

They were not disappointed. By 23 May they had been encouraged to unearth and set up their equipment, allowing them to resume decrypting Soviet command traffic. The Bletchley team were in awe of this vast technical display, which was eventually packaged up again in over a hundred boxes and chests. The eight tons of equipment and the complete German staff were loaded onto five lorries, which then wound their way slowly through a devastated Germany towards Bletchley. They arrived on 6 June 1945, and the equipment was set up and tested at the nearby radio station of Wavendon Manor.5 The German team was later employed intercepting Soviet encyphered teleprinter traffic which the British code-named ‘Caviar’, and although the messages were mostly about administration rather than policy or strategy, they provided rare insights into the daily activities of Soviet armed forces in post-war Europe.6 More treasures followed, and ultimately a further five tons of documents pertaining to Soviet codes and cyphers would arrive. In mid-June, Edward Travis asked Russell Dudley-Smith, a senior Bletchley Park officer, to try to establish some priority in exploiting the mountain of material now pouring in, but little did they know that they would still be working on this material in 1951.7 One-of-a-kind equipment stayed in Britain, while any duplicates were shipped to America.8

Yet another important haul was brought in by Colonel Paul Neff, an American who headed TICOM Team 6. This group included William Bundy, later US Assistant Secretary of State under President Lyndon B. Johnson, and Geoffrey Stevens from Bletchley Park. In April 1945 they pushed into southern Germany at Magdeburg, near Leipzig, and took control of a castle at Burgscheidungen which had recently been the headquarters of a code-breaking unit of the German Foreign Ministry called the Balkanabteilung, whose tasks had largely focused on Soviet and Balkan traffic. The fourteen staff and their documents were flown to Britain and taken to Bletchley Park. Burgscheidungen was in an area that would later be designated as part of the Soviet Zone, so Neff destroyed all traces of the German code-breakers’ presence before departing.9

The British caught Generalmajor Klemme, the Senior Commander of Radio Intelligence for the Luftwaffe, at the Husum-Milstedt intercept station on 19 May 1945. At first he was taken to Neumuenster Prison, but from there he was brought to Britain, and worked with the Allies on sigint in Germany until 10 March 1948, when he was considered to have been drained of all he knew about Soviet communications. On 1 May 1945, Major Oeljeschaeger and Major Beulmann from the Berlin Cryptographic Centre, which had been based in a stable block of the Marstall-Neues Palais at Potsdam, had fled in the direction of Hitler’s complex at Berchtesgaden. A few days later, with the Allies closing in, they stopped at Viehoff to burn all the records of Branch 3, and they fell into Allied hands on 22 May near Munich. On 5 July they were flown to Britain and placed in a special camp. They were surprised to be welcomed by their Branch Chief, Lt Colonel Friedrich, who had been captured before them. By June 1945 the British and Americans had scooped up most of the senior Luftwaffe sigint officers whose traffic they had listened to assiduously for much of the war.10

The TICOM teams were competing with the Soviets, who were also swooping on German cryptographic assets. To their surprise, Bletchley Park discovered that the Soviets had taken over some German Enigma-based communications nets and Fish teleprinters, and had begun using them for their own purposes. However, initial hopes of a post-war dividend from the breaking of these machines were quickly dashed. Roy Jenkins, who was then working at Bletchley Park, recalls this odd interlude in May 1945:

When the Russians got to Berlin they took over the Fish machines in the War Ministry, somewhat changed the settings, and proceeded to use them for sending signals traffic to Belgrade and other capitals in their new empire. We continued to do the intercepts and played around with trying to break the messages. We never succeeded. I think it was a combination of the new settings being more secure (which raises the question of how much the Russians had found out about our previous success) and the edge of tension having gone off our effort.

Elsewhere, Allied recovery teams regularly overran German sigint operations that were still chattering away, producing decrypts of mid-level Soviet Army Group traffic.11

The timing of raids on German sigint centres was a precarious matter. If they were captured too early there was a risk that this would cut off a flow of valuable material that Bletchley was intercepting, or else would alert the Germans to the fact that the British knew more about their cyphers than was desirable. London was especially anxious to avoid freelance raiding activities that might be counter-productive. As early as May 1944 the London Signals Intelligence Board, the supreme governing board which met monthly to set overall British sigint policy, learned that some independently-minded British intelligence officers in the Middle East were planning to use the Special Operations Executive to raid enemy signals intelligence centres in the Balkans. Sir Stewart Menzies, who chaired the board, warned them sternly that operations against such centres were ‘highly undesirable’, and that action should ‘on no account be undertaken’ without prior personal authority from him.’12

Bletchley’s corporate takeover of the Axis sigint effort was not limited to Germany. There were even greater TICOM dividends in occupied Italy.13 Many countries competed for the services of the talented Italian cryptanalysts. After the Italian surrender in 1943, some eighty Italian code-breakers under Major Barbieri continued to work for the Germans at a station near Brescia in northern Italy. At the end of the war in Europe they were at last interrogated in Rome, and proved to have a large quantity of material, including photocopies of the codebooks of Turkey, Romania, Ecuador and Bolivia. They had also reconstructed some of the codebooks from France, Switzerland and the Vatican, and had smaller amounts of British and American traffic. During the spring of 1945 Barbieri’s unit had been concentrating on French diplomatic traffic, ‘a large number being messages to Paris either from Bonnet [French Ambassador] in New York or from Catroux [French Ambassador] in Moscow’. This traffic offered insights into subjects as diverse as Soviet-Yugoslav relations, Soviet policy in Germany, French economic negotiations with the United States and French plans for exploiting the Saar coal mines in Germany.14

With British encouragement, this precocious Italian unit worked on into the post-war period, without deviating from its French target. The diplomatic unit at Berkeley Street was already doing extensive work on Britain’s European allies, regarding them as either insecure or untrustworthy, or both. Much of this suspicion stemmed from a sense of indignation at their behaviour in 1940. In November 1944, Churchill wrote to Eden: ‘The Belgians are extremely weak, and their behaviour before the war was shocking. The Dutch were entirely selfish and fought only when attacked, and then for a few hours…’ General de Gaulle’s Free French government in exile, as other historians have shown, came in for especially close attention from the code-breakers during the war, and this continued into 1946.

During the important diplomatic conferences that marked the end of the war, Jimmy Byrnes, the new American Secretary of State, was apparently more eager to see decrypted French material than anything else, concerned that Paris was likely to be working with Moscow.15 French traffic from Moscow was of great interest to London because the former French Air Minister, Pierre Cot, had indeed begun a special diplomatic mission to Moscow to examine the possibility of cooperating against Germany in post-war Europe.16

French traffic provided the British and Americans with a fabulous window on the diplomacy of Western Europe.17 Indeed, in mid-1946 half the US Army code-breakers’ end product was based on intercepting French communications.18 Alarmingly, the French still seemed keen to develop a close relationship with Stalin.19 The traffic from French Embassies in Eastern Europe proved especially interesting. Typically, an intercept from the French Embassy in Tirana gave detailed information on the balance of power in the Albanian Cabinet and the waning power of the pro-Moscow elements, and intercepted French intelligence traffic sometimes offered information about the KGB.20 With the work on Soviet codes still gaining momentum, the chatter of other countries that were talking to Moscow provided insights into their thinking. On 13 August 1945, Edward Travis sent Joseph Wenger, the senior American naval code-breaker, a long missive about cooperation on post-war French and Dutch systems, and explained British plans ‘to increase the effort here, especially on French’, adding that British plans to focus on Paris ‘are going into effect at an early date’. French, Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American traffic was soon consolidated into a single group under Josh Cooper.21

Major Barbieri was proud of the work of his Italian code-breakers against the French, but he pressed for more staff. So many of the best cryptographers, he complained, had been captured by the French in North Africa, adding, ‘the French are now employing them in their own service!’ Nevertheless, the British concluded that the Italians were ‘doing remarkably well with the limited reserves at their disposal’.22 By mid-1946 they were giving them new tasks, including Soviet traffic which came from military cypher machines at division level code-named ‘Taper’. British liaison officers with the Italians were working closely with code-breakers in Britain on the identification of new Taper groups. Senior Italian sigint officers knew that Taper traffic ‘which had been taken with so much depth and continuity for the past month’ was Soviet in origin, but many of their underlings were in a state of blissful ignorance about what they were collecting and who the ultimate customer was.23

The efforts of TICOM were not exclusively directed towards raiding priceless sigint secrets from the Germans, the Italians and the Japanese. They were also concerned with protecting Britain’s own secret communications. Until late 1943, Bletchley Park regarded weak security as a problem restricted to Britain’s allies. But the ability to read German messages had revealed a number of unexpected security nightmares for the Allies. Ultra had shown Britain’s code-breakers that the Germans could read many of the codes of the Allies, such as those of the Soviets and the Free French. In Asia, terrible cypher security and serious human agent penetration ensured that Chinese codes were effectively an open book to the Japanese, even though Tokyo’s code-breakers were mediocre. Accordingly, keeping Britain’s secrets safe meant keeping them away from many of her allies, whose communications were being read by friend and foe alike.24

By the autumn of 1943 the security situation looked much worse. The Italians had now capitulated, and captured Italian code-breakers revealed their successes against British codes. Captain Edmund Wilson, who helped to look after cypher security at Bletchley Park, held prolonged ‘conversations’ with Commander Cianchi, head of the Italian Cryptographic Bureau in Rome, and his staff during late 1943. Wilson explained that he could hardly call them ‘interrogations’, since Cianchi had given all of Italy’s secret information so happily and freely. Wilson said that ‘very valuable information’ on the breaking of British naval cyphers had been obtained, and that Britain was ‘extremely fortunate’ to have the cooperation of its former opponents. He pressed his colleagues to be ‘very careful indeed in the use they made of the information’ from these sources.25

The TICOM raids into Germany later confirmed that British naval cypher security had been especially weak. B-Dienst, the German naval sigint service, had been reading British naval codes and cyphers easily at the start of the war. In early 1940 this had allowed it to read British plans for the Narvik raid in Norway, contributing to Germany’s success in repulsing that action. In 1942, the Dieppe raid had also been given away to the enemy before it took place due to poor cypher security. Incredibly, the Germans had been given a full five days to prepare for this ‘surprise attack’. Allied troops – mostly Canadians – paid for this dearly in the slaughter that followed. B-Dienst achieved the height of its success against Atlantic convoy traffic in 1943, allowing alterations of convoy routes to be radioed to U-boat commanders within a few hours.26

The autumn of 1943 saw a long-overdue inquiry into the security of British cyphers, carried out by Brigadier Chitty, who began by visiting Bletchley Park. His findings did not make for comfortable reading. ‘It is true,’ he reported, ‘that of the fourteen sections working at B.P. [Bletchley Park] one is named Security of Allied Communications. From a total staff of some six thousand, however, the part-time services of only one man (Dudley-Smith) plus two or three girls, are spared to equip this section.’ At a higher level there was a supervising body called the Cypher Security Committee, supposedly chaired by Sir Stewart Menzies, but this had not attracted Menzies’ interest. Moreover, it lacked the power to compel Whitehall departments to change any practices that they thought lax. Chitty had done a spot check of twelve departments around Whitehall, and found that few were taking cypher security seriously. Britain needed a decent operational security section at Bletchley Park, and a proper supervisory board with teeth.27

No cypher system, Chitty warned, was unbreakable. Britain’s most sensitive material was sent by one-time pads, which were, in his opinion, ‘unassailable’ if used correctly. Yet he reminded his superiors that Bletchley was making a ‘most successful daily attack’ on the one-time pads of other countries, ‘which reach us in a steady stream by Photography, Theft, and the sifting of Embassy waste-paper baskets’. The majority of London government traffic went by Typex machine, the British equivalent of Enigma. This was much better than Enigma, but Chitty asserted that its security had never really been tested. Again, much depended on the diligence of the operators:

One of the most instructive lessons I learnt from the [Government Code and Cypher] School was the fact that the Hagelin machine used by several nations including the Americans, affords in practice a widely different degree of security in different hands. Whereas this machine, as used by the Swedes and the Finns, has so far been virtually unbreakable, in the hands of the Italians who are normally very good cryptographers, we have for a long time been able to read it with ease. This was entirely due to the increasing idleness of the Italian operators and their persistent disregard of the numerous security rules which have been laid down for them.