The Codebreakers: The True Story of the Secret Intelligence Team That Changed the Course of the First World War (35 page)

From decodes, Allenby knew the exact location, size, composition and tactical intent of the enemy. Armed with this knowledge, he could then decide where he wanted the Turks to think he was going to attack, and where he was actually going to. He wanted to strike inland towards Beersheba, and hoped to convince the Turks that his offensive would be directed at Gaza.

Based on the assumption that the enemy was also intercepting and decoding British communications – according to the German general Limon von Sanders, ‘we often deciphered their wireless messages in spite of their frequent changes of cipher key’ – disinformation could be spread. False messages were broadcast on a daily basis. To make sure they could be read, the British deliberately leaked the key to solving them by announcing it
en clair
. Whether or not the Turks had fallen for these measures could be established through their wireless chatter.

The most daring, yet simple, act of deception involved a British officer riding into an area where Turkish patrols were known to loiter with intent. Having spotted him, they opened fire and he escaped, ‘accidentally’ leaving his knapsack behind. In it were maps and papers laced with misleading information, plus some helpful notes on the British cipher being used to transmit the fake wireless messages. The Turks were delighted with their find, as army orders revealed: ‘one of our NCO patrols … came back with some very important maps and documents … no doubt as important and valuable to the enemy as they are to us’.

Allenby launched his offensive in the autumn of 1917. Expecting the attack elsewhere, the Turks at Beersheba were taken completely unawares and were quickly overrun. With air superiority bolstered by the fact that MI1(b) had cracked the wireless code used by German aircraft, the EEF advance pushed remorselessly ahead.

Having excelled as a codebreaker on the Western Front, the journalist Ferdinand Tuohy was now roaming the Middle East as an ambassador for wireless intelligence. He recalled how the order for a Turkish assault ‘was sent out by cipher by wireless from Jerusalem … we deciphered the first message … and were able to act … before the enemy commander knew himself what was expected of him’. Soon afterwards, Jerusalem was in British hands; the last desperate wireless message from its Turkish defenders said it all: ‘the enemy is in front of us only half an hour from here … fighting has been going on day and night … this is our last resistance. Adieu Jerusalem.’

As Allenby pushed towards Syria, he resorted again to deception: this time he pretended that he was going to strike inland, while his main thrust was actually directed along the coast. The Battle of Megiddo effectively ended Turkish resistance. With more troops, artillery and aircraft than his predecessor, and with Lawrence’s Arabs protecting his flanks, Allenby had considerable advantages. The Turkish army was weakened by disease, malnutrition, mass desertion and the loss of its best units to a futile assault on the Caucasus. Nevertheless, victory was assured by Allenby’s astute handling of the material analysed by the codebreakers in London, Cairo and Baghdad, all supplied by the wireless masts built by Eric Gill.

During 1917, the war of attrition reached the home fronts. All the belligerents were suffering from shortages of food and other basic commodities. Raw materials were scarce. Rationing became the order of the day. The cost of financing the conflict was ruinous for all concerned; inflation was rampant, national debts astronomical. Strike action, labour agitation and anti-war feeling were on the increase. Those in power realised that victory or defeat would depend on who could best withstand the strain. Russia was the first to crack: it was hunger that drove the citizens of Petrograd and Moscow onto the streets to topple the tsarist regime in March 1917.

For many socialists and liberals in England who had instinctively despised the autocratic system in Russia, felt distinctly uncomfortable about any form of alliance with it, and hoped that a more democratic, progressive government might take its place, the fall of the Romanov dynasty was a cause for celebration. Oliver Strachey and his friend Leonard Woolf, husband of Virginia, honoured the revolution by opening the 1917 Club in Soho as a meeting place for sympathetic intellectuals and politicos. Ramsay MacDonald, Labour Party leader and future prime minister, was a founding member.

Not everyone was so enthusiastic about the Russian Revolution. The Allied leaders were justifiably concerned that it would lead to Russia’s exit from the war, which would present the Germans with the chance to switch their forces from the Eastern Front to the West, thereby giving them numerical superiority. As it was, the aptly named provisional government, dependent as it was on British and French money to stay afloat and ward off the economic crisis afflicting Russia, stayed in the war and gambled its credibility on a new offensive against the Germans in July. It began promisingly but quickly unravelled as the Russian army disintegrated from within.

By now, many of the rank-and-file, inspired by the example of their comrades in the major cities, had joined self-governing soldiers’ committees (soviets), and either rejected, changed or simply ignored orders, while officers were sacked, beaten up and sometimes hanged. At the same time, many thousands of the peasant conscripts who formed the bulk of the army melted away as they downed their weapons and drifted back to their villages, eager to take part in the spontaneous confiscation of the lands and estates of the nobility. To all intents and purposes, the Russian army had ceased to exist as a fighting force.

Prior to the chaotic events of 1917, neither Room 40 nor MI1(b) had endeavoured to break Russian codes. Malcolm Hay observed that ‘no attempt was made to read Russian cables before the Revolution. These cables, enormous in number, and encoded by a complicated system, would have required special staff.’ Meanwhile, over at Room 40, relations with their Russian counterparts had been extremely good, partly due to the debt of gratitude Room 40 owed the Russians for their decision to hand over the German naval code books they retrieved from the sinking
Magdeburg
early in the war. Blinker Hall and his staff liaised with Russian naval staff in Moscow, helped them with the cipher keys used by the German fleet in the Baltic, and supplied information about its movements, whereabouts and intentions: ‘every step in their preparations, every movement of the squadrons was known at once … whence the information was loyally forwarded to the Russians’. Notoriously secretive and reluctant to entertain visitors, Room 40 even opened its doors to Commander Przyleneki, a representative from Russian naval intelligence.

But, over the summer of 1917, with the German army advancing ever deeper into Russia and food shortages mounting, the country became chronically unstable; the Provisional Government’s hold on power, tenuous at best, simply evaporated. Into the vaccum stepped Lenin and his Bolsheviks. Supported by the all important workers and soldiers’ Soviets that were effectively running the big cities, Lenin seized power in November and immediately declared his desire to come to terms with the Germans.

Fearing for the safety of his Russian colleagues and the sensitive material he had shared with them, Hall’s immediate reaction was to cable them on 4 October: ‘in view of the present situation, I earnestly beg you to burn all documents and papers concerned with our mutual work. Should situation improve I can replace everything and will keep you advised.’

But the situation didn’t improve. As Lenin strengthened his grip, British policy entered a black hole of confusion and uncertainty, not helped by the swift emergence of the Bolsheviks’ own deadly efficient secret service, the
Cheka
. MI6 tried to get agents, including the writers Somerset Maugham and Arthur Ransome, close to the leadership, and cooked up ever more ambitious and frankly ludicrous schemes to derail the Bolshevik juggernaut, but with little effect.

The one positive development was the arrival in London of Ernst Fetterlin, Russia’s leading cryptographer, during July 1918. Born in 1873 in St Petersburg, Fetterlin studied languages at university and joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1896. Over time he became the tsar’s top codebreaker, penetrating German, Austrian and British codes. With a price on his head and Russia descending into a brutal, pitiless civil war, Fetterlin, accompanied by his Swedish wife, managed to evade the Cheka and escape the country on a Swedish ship.

Totally broke, with no possessions except the clothes on his back and a large ruby ring, a present from the tsar for his services that he was considering selling, Fetterlin was welcomed with open arms by Room 40. He made an instant impact, bringing his knowledge of Austrian codes, an area so far neglected by Room 40, and displaying the kind of talent that led a colleague to remark that ‘on book ciphers and anything where insight was vital he was quite the best. He was a fine linguist and he would usually get an answer no matter the language.’ As for the Bolsheviks, they were slow to develop their own codes: when they did, Fetterlin was ready for them.

The two men who would mastermind the Bolshevik takeover, Lenin and Trotsky, were both in exile when the tsar was driven from his throne, and might not even have made it to Russia had it not been for the Germans and the British. The Germans, keen to promote chaos in their enemy’s back yard, furnished Lenin with a special train to make sure he got home unmolested. Trotsky took a more circuitous route. His bizarre journey was an unforeseen consequence of yet more carnage on American soil.

On Tuesday 10 April 1917, just a few days after the United States had declared war on Germany, a series of explosions rocked ‘F’ Building at the Eddystone Ammunition Corporation in Chester, Pennsylvania, 17 miles down the Delaware River from Philadelphia. Working in ‘F’ that morning were 380 people loading shrapnel into shells with a highly explosive black powder known as the ‘base charge’. ‘Nearly eighteen tons of black powder, ignited in some way not yet determined, set off 10,000 shrapnel shells in the loading and inspecting building,’ the
New York Times
reported, ‘completely demolishing that structure and causing a series of detonations that shook a half dozen boroughs within a radius of ten miles of the munition plant.’

One hundred and thirty-three people, mostly girls and women, were killed in the deadliest act of sabotage yet staged in the United States, and initially, German agents were fingered as the likely suspects. However, the shells that exploded were part of a rush shipment to Russia, and reports soon surfaced that the plant’s large contingent of Russian workers had received letters telling them to stay home on that day. An account in the
Philadelphia Inquirer
quoted a Russian inspector at the plant as saying he believed the explosion was caused by sabotage. A later report by an American investigator said: ‘At the time of the explosion, a great many Russians were employed in the Eddystone plant, including a commission of inspectors, but on that day, not one of these inspectors was in the loading room where the blast occurred.’

That same investigator claimed to have intercepted a telegram to a man named Meyers in New York City, just an hour after the blast, which read: ‘Explosion occurred at Eddystone. Our crowd safe. Woskoff.’ The investigator thought that ‘Meyers’ could really be Leon Trotsky, who had arrived in New York in January and had been working for
Novyi Mir
, a socialist Russian-language newspaper. It was no secret that Trotsky opposed the war and supported German socialists as part of his dream of an international revolution; he would not want any armaments to reach the provisional government in Russia because he was planning to overthrow them. But by the time of the explosion at Eddystone, Trotsky was on his way to continue the revolution in Russia, one that had toppled tsar Nicholas’s government and the tsar himself, who had abdicated on 15 March.

Trotsky was detained on his way back to the revolution thanks to a warning sent to London by Blinker Hall’s naval attaché in America, Australian Guy Gaunt, who had been promoted in rank to commodore. Five days later, Trotsky, his wife Natalya, his sons Sergei, 9, and Lyova, 11, along with five other revolutionaries, had sailed from New York for Europe aboard the Norwegian-American liner SS
Kristianiafjord
. On 30 March, the ship arrived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the closest North American port to Europe, and the assembly point for ships heading via convoy into the U-boat-infested Atlantic.

The day after the
Kristianiafjord
arrived in Halifax, a message flashed from London to the British naval control officer in Halifax, Captain O. M. Makins, instructing him to remove Trotsky and his fellow revolutionaries from the ship and await further instructions. The cable said that Trotsky and his companions were ‘Russian socialists leaving [the United States] for the purpose of starting revolution against present Russian Government for which Trotsky is reported to have 10,000 dollars subscribed by socialists and Germans’. The British were worried about further destabilisation of their Russian ally which was in internal revolt but still fighting on the Allied side. Trotsky’s aim and that of his ilk was to make peace with Germany, allowing the Germans to devote more men and resources to the Western Front.

Trotsky’s family were lodged in Halifax, and he was carted off to an internment camp at Amherst, 100 miles north-west of Halifax, commanded by Colonel Arthur Henry Morris, whom Trotsky claimed treated him worse than the tsar’s secret police. The internment camp was located in the former buildings of the Canadian Car and Foundry Company, which had been confiscated from its German owner. When Trotsky arrived in April 1917, it housed 851 German prisoners of war. Of these, about 500 were captured sailors and another 200, according to Trotsky, ‘workers caught by the war in Canada’, while 100 or so were German officers and ‘civilian prisoners of the bourgeois class’.

Before long, the multilingual Trotsky, a spellbinding orator, had turned the camp into a mini socialist state, lecturing the prisoners about the revolution in Russia and the glories of the coming new world order, one where the government of the people would end the criminal war. The men were so in awe of him that they tried to prevent him from doing camp chores, or having to queue for food, and when Colonel Morris put him in solitary confinement after the German officers expressed alarm that he was going to turn all the Germans into communists, the prisoners responded with a petition bearing 530 signatures calling for his release.