The Codebreakers: The True Story of the Secret Intelligence Team That Changed the Course of the First World War (18 page)

Mackenzie withstood Hall’s scrutiny, insisting that it would take years for him to process his experiences and turn them into the written word. The interview ended, and though Mackenzie doubted whether Hall believed him, Mackenzie felt that he ‘thought he had frightened me out of persevering with this mythical work’. As it was, Mackenzie returned to Capri and his writing and played no further part in the war, his absence from duty justified on health grounds and fully supported by Cumming, who never lost his affection and respect for the troublesome Mackenzie.

Considering that Hall was the official guardian of one of Britain’s most closely kept secrets, the existence of Room 40, it could be argued that by making himself such a ubiquitous presence in the corridors of power and beyond, he increased the chances that it would be discovered. In fact, the reverse is true. Hall was hiding in plain sight. The more attention he attracted, the more he deflected it away from the codebreakers. He put himself at the forefront of the intelligence effort not only because it was in his nature to do so, but also because it made him a more effective gatekeeper.

Hall was determined to keep Room 40 under wraps, admitting that ‘there were several occasions when I made myself highly unpopular by refusing to divulge information to those who, perhaps not unreasonably, considered that they ought to have been given it’. After all, if the Germans got the merest hint of Room 40’s existence, they would instantly change all their code books, tighten the security of their communications, and monitor their use of wireless more carefully. All that Room 40 had gained would be lost.

Hall did not even trust other government departments with knowledge of Room 40’s existence. Outside of the Cabinet and a few high-ranking civil servants, it remained a secret, one Hall would go to considerable lengths to protect. A prime example of his intransigence was recorded by Basil Thomson: a naval man who ‘deserted in Spain and went to a German spy to give him all he knew about British naval movements’ was arrested after ‘the message sent … was intercepted by the Admiralty’. To keep Room 40’s role in the affair secret, Hall had the man charged with desertion, rather than colluding with the enemy. However, ‘through a blunder’, the culprit was allowed to go home to Barrow and get a job with Vickers, the armaments manufacturer.

Incensed, Hall had him arrested again and taken to London to be interned. At this point, the War Office got involved. They wanted the man set free ‘unless they were put into full possession of all the facts of the case’. Hall refused as it would mean revealing Room 40’s involvement.

Next, Hall approached the Home Office. Unfortunately, they asked for the same degree of corroboration, unsettled by the fact that the man’s fellow workers at the Vickers factory were threatening to go on strike if he wasn’t released. With nowhere else to turn, Hall called in Thomson, who interrogated the suspect and came to the conclusion that he was probably insane. Though it went against all his instincts, Hall let the matter drop. Maintaining the security of Room 40 was vastly more important than securing the conviction of one deluded sailor.

After Italy entered the war on the Allied side in the spring of 1915, Spain, Portugal and Greece were left clinging precariously to their neutral status. Each country faced similar problems: industrialisation had given rise to a militant left backed by powerful trade unions, opposed by entrenched conservative interests supported by the army and the Church, while weak liberal democratic governments came and went with dizzying rapidity. A mood of crisis was all-pervasive. Italy was in the same boat but took the plunge anyway.

Had the war ended as quickly as expected, the other Mediterranean countries might have been able to avoid too much collateral damage. As it was, the pressure increased for a commitment either way, resulting in deeply damaging splits that further destabilised them, as the Great Powers, desperate for any advantage that might break the deadlock, applied the thumbscrews.

Portugal succumbed first. In January 1915, a pro-German military coup unseated the government, followed a few months later by a popular rebellion against the new regime. When the tiny German force in East Africa, which had been evading all British attempts to run them down, crossed into the Portuguese colony of Mozambique, a decision became unavoidable and Portugal declared war on Germany in March 1916.

Hall’s main focus was on Spain, which had quickly became a political and diplomatic battleground and a front line in the espionage war. The Germans were favoured by the right-wing Carlists, while the republican radicals were pro-Allies, leaving the liberal government stranded somewhere in between. Aside from the country’s geographical location – its coastline offered access to the Mediterranean and the Atlantic – Spanish exports of iron ore, coal and fruit, particularly oranges, were of vital importance to the combatants.

Determined to have his own way, Hall took control of all covert activity in Spain, running agents and coordinating operations. As a result, much of the work carried out by Room 40’s new diplomatic section was focused on the German embassy in Madrid, which not only managed a large network of spies across the country, taking in all the major cities and the island territories, ably supported by the 70,000 German citizens living in Spain at the time, but also acted as a clearing house for communications with agents in other countries.

At the heart of this espionage set-up was the naval attaché, Baron Hans von Krohn, an unpleasant zealot who advocated using cholera bacilli to poison the main rivers on the Spanish—Portuguese border; this idea proved too much even for Berlin to contemplate and was rejected outright.

The Berlin—Madrid axis provided Room 40 with a treasure trove of information. When, during 1915, the Germans wrongly suspected that their messages to Madrid were being picked up by the French due to the work of either a spy or a traitor, they attempted to increase the security of their codes by introducing three new cipher keys. Unfortunately for them, the message containing these new keys was sent by wireless and fell straight into the lap of the grateful British codebreakers.

With Room 40’s intelligence to guide him, Blinker Hall looked around for somebody who could be sent to Spain to do his bidding. In an inspired move, he chose the well-known author A. E. W. Mason. This extraordinary man resembled the heroes of his many action-adventure novels and he performed his duties with relish, vigour and a devil-may-care attitude. As he saw it, the secret service was ‘a service with its traditions to create. Indeed, it had everything to create, its rules, its methods, its whole philosophy. And it had to do this quickly during a war.’

Born in 1865, Mason went to Oxford, where he became involved in theatrical and debating societies. After graduation, he embarked on an acting career and did a couple of years in rep before deciding to become a writer, alternating between stage plays and novels. He wrote a series of period romances which sold well, then produced his masterpiece,
The Four Feathers
(1903), a stirring imperial adventure. His reputation as a literary star was sealed by his West End hit
The Witness for the Defence
(1911), a courtroom thriller.

Meanwhile, he lived life to the full. He travelled widely, visiting North Africa, South America, India and Afghanistan. He was immensely sporty, taking in golf, fishing, yachting, cricket and mountaineering. Though never married, he had a string of lovers and a long-running affair with an American actress. A natural bon viveur, he was, as one of his friends noted, ‘the ideal club man … as good a listener as a talker’, with ‘an appreciation of food, drink and tobacco’.

Pushing 50 in 1914, he was initially part of a committee of literary heavyweights, including Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy and H. G. Wells, set up to produce propaganda material, but Mason had itchy feet. When he got the call from Hall in early 1915, he leapt at the chance to be part of the action.

In assessing Mason’s espionage career, it is difficult to untangle fact from fiction; in his writings they are completely interchangeable. A compulsive storyteller, he couldn’t resist the urge to get his experiences into print as quickly as possible, including transparent translations of many actual events and the people involved, with the main characters functioning as his alter egos. He did leave notes for an autobiography, which contained some of his field reports, while Hall, when he was putting together his own unpublished memoirs, asked Mason to supply details of ‘three or four incidents which I would particularly like to bring out’. These two sources offer solid confirmation of some of the fictionalised episodes that appear in Mason’s books.

In
The Summons
(1920), Mason is represented by the playwright Martin Hillyard. When war breaks out, Hillyard is called in to see Commodore Graham (Hall), who had ‘a whole array of cipherers and decipherers … in different rookeries in London. Commodore Graham’s activities embraced the high and the narrow seas, great capitals and little tucked away towns and desolate stretches of coast where the trade winds blew.’ Graham decides to send Hillyard on a cruise: ‘in the end his finger rested on the name of the steam yacht
Dragonfly
, owned by Sir Charles Henderson’. In reality, the yacht in question was the
St George
, owned by Lord Abinger. Mason was to assume the role of an eccentric millionaire, a ‘mad Englishman’. He cruised round Spain, Gibraltar, Morocco and the Balearics, hosting a non-stop house party. A permanent guest was W. E. Dixon, Professor of Pharmacology at Cambridge, who appears in the novel as Paul Bendish, an expert in codes and secret writing.

A U-boat encounter in 1916, ‘The Glass Tubes Affair’, was mentioned in Mason’s operational notebooks and referred to by Hall as ‘the incident of U-35 dropping the cases in Cartagena harbour’. These cases were packed with glass tubes containing hydrofluoric acid and were heading for France and England. The tubes were then going to be smuggled into various munitions factories and carefully hidden near explosive material. The acid, acting like a time fuse, would take four and a half hours to eat through the glass before setting off a chain reaction that would set the factory ablaze.

An account of how Mason was able to discover the details of U-35’s mission is included in
The Summons
and includes the tale, probably true, of the secret communication method used by a German agent in Barcelona who had his letters addressed to non-existent English people and bribed the postman to deliver them to him. Letters containing secret material were written in invisible ink. Mason’s fictional doppelgänger, Hillyard, gets hold of one and uses iodine to bring out the hidden message: ‘a submarine will sink letters … and a parcel of tubes between the twenty-seventh and thirtieth of July, within Spanish territorial waters off the Cabo de Carbon. A green light will be shown in three short flashes from the sea and it should be answered from the shore by a red and a white and two reds.’ Hillyard waits on a deserted beach on the relevant night, makes the necessary signals and picks up the consignment himself.

Mason also foiled German attempts to encourage rebellion in French Morocco. Operating from Spanish Morocco, the German agent on the ground was trying to arm and finance rebel attacks on the French colony. In early 1916, Mason wrote in an official report that he ‘crossed to Tangiers on 13 February in order to discover … what the Germans were really achieving in the Riff country and by what means we could best attack their influence there’. He managed to identify the local banker who was handling the flow of funds to the rebels, and was able to cut off their finance at source. He then turned his attention to the supply of weapons. In his short story ‘Peiffer’ (1917), he mentions foiling German plans to smuggle ammunition and 50,000 rifles into Morocco, while in the novel
The Winding Stair
(1923) he describes how the intelligence he produced led to the destruction of a major gun-running operation.

In this case, Room 40 decodes support Mason’s fiction. A message from 7 October 1916 revealed that the rebels were ready for action but chronically low on ammo; three weeks later, another intercepted message reassured them that seven men, four machine guns, 1,000 rifles and 50,000 francs were on their way. Within days, a million rifle cartridges were seized by local police at Madrid railway station.

According to Cleland Hoy, Room 40 ‘decoded many cipher messages that were passing between Morocco and Berlin’, including requests for more armaments: the weapons successfully made their way to the U-boat which would deliver them to Morocco. Having informed the French naval attaché at the Admiralty, Room 40 waited for further developments: ‘at last over the ether came the all-important message with the news that the U-boat had set out’ loaded with its deadly cargo. The submarine was followed by French planes, bombed and sunk off Larache, consigning the rifles and ammunition to the bottom of the sea.

In January 1917, fearing that his cover as a playboy yachtsman was close to being blown, Mason returned to England. As he explained in
The Summons
, ‘the purpose of the yacht was long since known to the Germans. The danger of torpedo was ever present … any means would be taken to force him to speak before he was shot … he carried hidden in a matchbox a little phial, which never left him.’ Mason did possess such a phial, probably cyanide, which he kept in a secret compartment in his desk for years after the war and often showed to his friends.

At the end of 1917, having been home for a number of months, Mason, whom Hall regarded as a prize asset, was in Mexico, a hornets’ nest of German intrigue. His replacement was a much less flamboyant character. Charles Thoroton, a Royal Marines colonel, was a dedicated professional who helped neutralise a major plot to transport wolfram from Spain to Germany. Mined in the Basque region, wolfram, also known as tungsten, was an iron ore used to create an alloy that made explosive projectiles – shells, shrapnel, grenades – considerably more effective.

During September 1917, Thoroton’s man in Bilbao reported that German agents were planning to smuggle large quantities of the precious metal out of the country. On 2 October, Room 40 decoded a message from Berlin to Baron von Krohn, the naval attaché and spymaster in Madrid, about the possibility of shipping wolfram by submarine: ‘the execution of this plan is perhaps possible in November in the neighbourhood of the Canary Islands’. Krohn replied on the 16th agreeing that it could be done. Later that month Thoroton’s agent located the warehouse near Bilbao where the wolfram would be stored before departure, and identified the ship, the
San Jose
, that would carry it.