The Codebreakers: The True Story of the Secret Intelligence Team That Changed the Course of the First World War (19 page)

However, a few weeks later, the
San Jose
sailed without the ore. A different ship, the
Erri Berro
, had been selected for the mission. This was confirmed by Room 40, as was the procedure it would follow: ‘the sailing vessel will receive sealed instructions concerning recognition signals. When sighting a U-boat at the rendezvous she will lower and unfurl her sails and hoist a Spanish flag as well as blue and yellow pennants under one another. At night she will show a blue and yellow light.’

At first Hall was adamant that the ore should not leave Spain, but he swiftly changed his mind after Room 40 decoded another message from Berlin to Krohn: ‘U-cruisers 156 and 157 can be at the Canaries on November 24th. Each can take about 40 tons of wolfram ore … please report details and meeting place can be settled.’ Two further messages gave the rendezvous point, code name U Platz 30.

Hall realised that this was a chance to get not only the wolfram, always useful and always in short supply, but the U-boats as well. A naval operation was put in motion to destroy them, approved by Jellicoe and the French naval commander-in-chief, who had overall responsibility for the Mediterranean theatre. Four E-class British submarines were assigned to the U-boats, while HMS
Duke of Clarence
was to intercept the ore shipment.

The German U-boats, U-156 and U-157, began their journey to the Canaries on Christmas Day. Their delayed departure was due to problems with the
Erri Berro
, which, after changing crew and having repair work done, finally set forth on New Year’s Eve at 4 p.m. Two hours later the
Duke of Clarence
was on its way to intercept it. Half an hour into the New Year, it captured the
Erri Berro
with the wolfram on board. However, as tow lines were being attached to the offending vessel,
Clarence
bumped into it, inflicting irreparable damage; as evening fell, the British were left no choice but to scuttle it. The Spanish sailors were taken prisoner and sent to a detention centre in South Kensington.

This still left the matter of the U-boats. E-35 and E-48 arrived at the meeting point, close to the Canaries, on 30 January. U-156 was waiting, having spent the intervening period bombarding Portuguese coastal towns. The British submarines fired three torpedoes. Two missed; one hit but failed to explode. The other U-boat, U-157, never showed at all. Both it and its sister ship made it safely back to Germany.

Hall, who mostly kept his volcanic temper in check, was so annoyed that when he returned home to find his wife entertaining some ladies to tea, he kicked over a table laden with sandwiches and stomped out without a word. Some compensation for the escape of the U-boats came in the months that followed. Once the Spanish crew of
Erri Berro
were repatriated, the story appeared in the Spanish press and the resulting scandal ended with Krohn being expelled from Spain.

Before Krohn was unceremoniously run out of town, he’d been a firm advocate and facilitator of biological warfare. By 1917, Room 40 had picked up a stream of messages suggesting that Spain was a transit point for anthrax and glanders bacilli. Carried by submarine from Austria’s Adriatic bases, the diseases arrived at Cartagena harbour, where they were unloaded and then shipped by liner to South America to be injected into mules and cattle destined for the Allies. Mason provided the first solid proof of this nefarious business: he stopped a consignment of anthrax that had been hidden in shaving brushes.

More was to come. During February 1918, Thoroton, acting on Room 40 decodes, tipped off the local chief of police at Cartagena and U-35 was caught with 12 cases of anthrax and glanders concealed in lumps of sugar. The fact that this horrific cargo was travelling under orders from the German embassy presented Hall with an opportunity to embarrass the German ambassador, who was already smarting from the dismissal of Krohn.

To perform this delicate mission, Hall employed his personal secretary, Lord Herschell. As lord-in-waiting to both Edward VII and George V, Herschell was extremely well connected and was friends with the Spanish monarch, King Alfonso XIII. He presented the damning evidence to the King, and, shocked by this blatant abuse of diplomatic privilege, Alfonso politely told the German ambassador that he was no longer welcome in Spain.

Support for Germany was wearing thin in Spain. Between April 1917 and April 1918, in a desperate effort to disrupt trade with the Allies, U-boats sank 40 Spanish merchant ships and killed 100 sailors. For the same reason, German agents promoted labour unrest, strikes and industrial sabotage. By 1918, they were conspiring with anarchist groups as well as recruiting informers and crooked cops, including the head of Barcelona’s political police. These murky dealings culminated in the assassination of José Barret, a major player in the Catalan metallurgy industry, whose factories supplied the French with shells. The investigation into this brutal murder implicated government officials and local dignitaries. Shocked into action, politicians passed an espionage bill to crack down on German spies.

As the war drew to a close, Hall’s agents were paid the highest possible compliment by the Spanish government: it begged him not to withdraw them because, according to Edward Bell, Hall’s confidant at the US embassy in London, they were ‘a far more reliable source of information … than their own police and civil authorities’.

King Constantine, the Greek monarch, was pro-Germany. The prime minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, who’d been elected in June 1915, was pro-Allies. The potential for conflict between them increased when Bulgaria entered the war in October 1915 and helped the Germans and Austrians crush Serbian resistance. The Allies, bogged down at Gallipoli and fearing that the strategic balance in the Balkans was going against them, asked Venizelos if the surviving remnants of the Serbian army could seek refuge in the Greek territory of Salonika.

Venizelos agreed to their request, but when news of the deal came out, his government collapsed and he was forced to resign. A new administration, supported by the King and preaching benevolent neutrality, rejected the Salonika plan. Ignoring their wishes, and with Venizelos still agitating on their behalf, the Allies went ahead anyway and began landing a force of 75,000 British and 75,000 French troops at Salonika.

Given the uncertainty surrounding Greek policy, it was imperative that MI1(b) tackle their diplomatic codes; Malcolm Hay remembered that ‘in 1916 information about what was going on in Greece was badly wanted’. MI1(b) had access to ‘very long messages which were passing in great numbers between King Constantine … and Berlin’, but there was a major stumbling block. Hay had no means of knowing in what language the messages were written.

His right-hand man, John Fraser, was given the job of solving the riddle. A lecturer in Latin at Aberdeen University and later Professor of Celtic at Oxford, Fraser mastered 21 languages by the end of the war and was instrumental in cracking the codes of 11 different countries.

After several weeks of intense study Fraser concluded that the text must not be in Greek, but in French. This was the breakthrough they were looking for. Fraser immediately telegrammed Hay, who was out of the office for a few days, the simple message ‘Pillars of Hercules have fallen’. After that, progress was swift. Fraser applied his discovery to a number of different code books, some in Greek, some in French, and, with Room 40’s cooperation, set about reconstructing them.

By the end of the year, MI1(b) had the inside track on the deteriorating political situation in Greece. Venizelos continued to press for a clear commitment to the Allies. The King resisted as long as he could before being forced to abdicate in June 1917. Venizelos began to mobilise the army so it could lend support to the Allies at Salonika.

At the time, there were around 680,000 troops, British, Italian, French and Russian, rotting away on what had been dubbed the Macedonian Front. Two dismal and short-lived attacks were launched against the Bulgarians in the summer of 1916 and the spring of 1917; otherwise a dispiriting stalemate was the order of the day, only broken in the last few months of 1918 when the Allies went on the offensive and the Bulgarian army broke and ran, leaving its government no choice but to seek peace.

Malcolm Hay’s conviction that MI1(b) should play a much greater role than it had under his predecessor led inexorably to an expansion of his team and larger premises to accommodate them. While he lived alone at 20 Gloucester Place, Hay’s staff moved to a large building in Cork Street in the heart of the West End. The core codebreaking team grew from three to eleven: by the end of the war there were 20, plus 60 clerical and secretarial staff, almost all women. They had their work cut out, as Hay recalled: ‘thousands of telegrams filled up the cupboards at Cork Street. Although my staff had increased it was impossible to read everything.’

Like Blinker Hall, Hay recruited mostly from academia: there was a medieval historian, a classicist, a lecturer in palaeography, an Egyptologist, an Arabist, an expert on Celtic languages, a philologist, the curator of the Ashmolean Musuem in Oxford, a mountaineer, and an ex-consul formerly based in Tokyo.

The security and privacy of MI1(b)’s operations was jealously guarded. To distract and detain unwanted visitors from neutral countries, a dummy room was maintained at the War Office. The entrance to Cork Street itself was guarded by ‘a trusty warrant officer of prizefighter physique’; if anyone got past him, Hay had a colleague available to act as a decoy by giving ‘the impression of a typical British idiot’. A letter to the police, regarding ‘the nuisance caused by the large number of itinerant musicians’ who congregated on the streets outside, politely demanded that the constabulary prohibit ‘street noise in the immediate vicinity’.

The codebreakers at Cork Street focused mainly on diplomatic traffic. Unlike Room 40, which had been gifted copies of the relevant German code books early in the war, the decipherers at MI1(b) had to start from scratch. Hay noted that ‘before decoding the messages, we had to reconstruct the code books’; many of them were non-alphabetical, adding to their complexity, while ‘some embassies used to encipher their codes’. However, as he proudly stated, ‘all these difficulties were overcome, Cork Street was never defeated’. By 1918, his team had broken the diplomatic codes used by the USA, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Italy, the Vatican, Holland, Greece, Romania and Japan.

One of MI1(b)’s most significant achievements was cracking the ‘Für GOD’ system used by the German General Staff to encode messages sent three times a week to their secret agents in North Africa and the Middle East via the all-powerful Nauen transmitter. As the messages carried no signature, no address and no call sign, each normally a standard point of entry for the codebreakers, they had already defied Room 40’s experts. The system was eventually solved by Captain Brooke-Hunt, one of Hay’s key staff, who discovered that it contained 22 mixed alphabets and 30 random cipher keys of 11–18 letters, generating a dizzying array of variables and alternative letter combinations, making it extremely difficult to discover any repetitions or recurring patterns. The intelligence gained from this breakthrough was shared with Room 40, and Hall used it to stop German gun-running to rebels in French Morocco.

This was one of the few examples of the burgeoning cooperation between MI1(b) and Room 40 that we have on record. Unfortunately very little else remains to illuminate their relationship. Hay and Blinker Hall had a private telephone line installed and spoke at least once a day. Sadly, neither left any record of their conversations. A few documents in the archives feature requests by Room 40 for material from MI1(b) about South American codes, the exchange of notes and code books relating to Spain, and some American material.

One such communiqué from Room 40 to MI1(b) concerned Oliver Strachey, who was by then overseeing its Middle Eastern work: ‘touching on the Turkish question, I wonder if Strachey would like to see some intercepts of a year ago when Constantinople and Berlin were only joined by WT. As there is now an expert in this language something might in time be made of them which would throw light on subsequent events.’

This kind of exchange of material and ideas between Room 40 and MI1(b) reflected the informal camaraderie that developed over the course of the war, driven by a healthy sense of competition. It was in stark contrast to other sections of the intelligence community, which were beset by suspicion and barely concealed hostility. How much the diplomatic work carried out by Malcolm Hay’s team dovetailed with Hall’s efforts to manipulate the foreign policy of neutral countries and counter German efforts to do the same, we will never know. That said, the very fact that Hall and Hay brushed aside the mutual loathing that characterised the relationship between the Admiralty and the War Office demonstrated that their commitment to defeating the enemy took precedence over departmental politics.

January 1916 was deceptively warm and dry in London, as if spring were coming early to assuage the bloody wounds of war. The British had just finished evacuating troops from the disaster of Gallipoli, after suffering close to 115,000 killed or wounded. On the Western Front, where the war was now entrenched into its second winter, the Germans and the French were about to begin the Battle of Verdun, the longest single battle of the war and one that would claim more than 700,000 combatants by the time it was finished – with no victor – in December 1916.

Blinker Hall was under no illusion that the war was going to get any easier, despite US President Woodrow Wilson dispatching his unofficial Secretary of State Colonel Edward House to Europe in early January to work out an Anglo-American strategy for peace. Though House spoke with French and German leaders about ending the war, he spent most of his time in London telling the British that the Germans would relaunch unrestricted submarine warfare, suspended in November 1915, and that this would bring the Americans into the conflict. But when?