Read The Bletchley Park Codebreakers Online
Authors: Michael Smith
The Bletchley Park Codebreakers (51 page)
After the war, GCHQ managed to escape from the control of ‘C’ and disengage itself from the even more fraught internal management problems of MI6. It swallowed up what had been the wartime Radio Security Service, although it was divorced from the London Communications Security Agency until their eventual re-amalgamation in 1969. In looking at the internal structure of the postwar GCHQ, it is impossible not to see the legacy of the hard lessons of Bletchley Park, Ultra and the Second World War.
The Cold War GCHQ continued to serve a brace of consumers in Whitehall, as well as foreign but allied collaborators in the UKUSA ‘special relationship’. As such, its structure has still had to cope with the importance of customer requirements, but also take into account the dangers of insistent and intemperate customer demand when it interferes with the bread and butter work of Sigint. As a result, what we see in the Cold War GCHQ is a division – like that of the Cold War MI6 – into five main directorates or Divisions: H Division, consolidating cryptanalysis into a single administrative entity; J and K Divisions handling the operational work of Sigint production, J Division handling the Soviet Bloc and K Division the rest of the world; X Division providing specialized computing services (GC&CS was, of course, the birthplace of the first semi-programmable electronic computer, Colossus, for attacking Tunny signals); and finally Z Division responsible for Requirements and Liaison, handling links between GCHQ and its customers in Whitehall and its allies in the UKUSA Sigint alliance. Under these arrangements, it was able to retain its links to customers in Whitehall and Downing Street through Z Division, but without quite the same problem of divided loyalties, as liaison with consumers was divorced from the practical work of doing Sigint.
The structure of demand in government circles also changed, with an increasingly powerful JIC in the Cabinet Office from 1957. From
there the JIC has since been in a position to arbitrate between competing demands for intelligence among customers, and empowered to lay down clear and agreed national intelligence priorities through the annual National Intelligence Requirements Paper. Of course, whether these smoothly oiled mechanisms would run quite as slickly in a case of crisis of national survival comparable to the Second World War has never really been put to the test, and hopefully is unlikely to be so tested in the foreseeable future. Nonetheless, the experience of the Second World War, of the problems and crises created by unexpected success, proved as vital to creating the postwar British intelligence system as the only slightly harder lessons learned from unavoidable failure. During those glory years of Ultra at Bletchley Park, GC&CS and its masters and customers in the British Government were forced to identify genuine weaknesses and difficulties in their traditionally collegial way of doing things. Solutions had to be found that allowed the intrinsic problems to be resolved, or at least minimized, without sacrificing the strengths of that way of doing things. The solutions were not unalloyed good or bad ones, but risks and trade-offs that, overall, served admirably well and provided that vitally necessary institutional setting for what was undoubtedly the jewel in Britain’s wartime intelligence crown.
The postwar Soviet Union and the threat it posed to the western democracies dominated future planning for the British intelligence and security services throughout 1944 and 1945. MI6 began looking towards Moscow as the main postwar enemy, setting up a small anti-Soviet section under the service’s rising star Kim Philby, later revealed as ‘the Third Man’ in the Cambridge spy ring. The codebreakers also began looking to their future. Travis set up a small committee comprising Harry Hinsley, now one of his key aides; Gordon Welchman, the head of Hut 6; and Edward Crankshaw, who had spent time in Moscow dealing with the Russians on Sigint. They pressed for a combined foreign intelligence organization, taking in both Sigint and human intelligence, a logical development of the situation
that already existed in the control by ‘C’ of both GC&CS itself and of the distribution of its material. In the event, the opposite occurred. The postwar successor to Bletchley Park discarded both the links to MI6 and its old name, adopting the wartime cover name of GCHQ as its new title. It moved first to Eastcote in north London, and later to Cheltenham, as an independent Sigint organization, separate from MI6 although still under Foreign Office control. It remained highly secretive. Its existence only became widely known in the 1970s and 80s through a series of trials over leakage of Sigint secrets and a badly handled bout of industrial action, which led to a number of workers being sacked. This chapter by Professor Richard J. Aldrich shows that, despite the obsessive secrecy surrounding GCHQ, there is a good deal that can be learned about it through careful research in the British and US archives.
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It is all but impossible to draw a distinction between Bletchley Park’s work on wartime Germany and its growing work on the Soviet Union in the 1940s. Knowledge of wartime Germany required the tracking of events on the eastern front and involved learning as much as possible about the Soviet effort. British intelligence began to value the Germans for their knowledge of the Soviet Union as soon as Ultra came onstream. German messages used to send their own Sigint summaries about the Soviet Union back to Berlin were, in turn, intercepted by the British. This ‘second-hand’ Sigint proved to be London’s best source on the performance of the Soviet forces. As early as 1943 the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) – Britain’s highest intelligence authority – was able to produce detailed and accurate reports on the capabilities of the Soviet Air Force, based on
Luftwaffe
Sigint material.
In July 1944 Whitehall began consulting at Bletchley Park about what material they wished to scoop up from what would soon be occupied Germany. Suitably briefed, by early 1945, Intelligence Assault Units were moving into Germany with the forward elements of Allied formations, looking for all kinds of German documents, experimental weapons and atomic plant. Combined Anglo–American Target Intelligence Committee (TICOM) teams were despatched from Bletchley Park to Germany to seek out cryptographic equipment and Sigint personnel. They were not disappointed. Stopping at various
German headquarters along the way they ended up at Hitler’s Berchtesgaden, where they found a
Luftwaffe
communications centre and a large amount of communications equipment. Eventually German POWs were persuaded to lead them to a vast haul of materials buried nearby and four large German lorries were loaded to capacity with the contents that were then unearthed. The team returned to Bletchley Park – which was increasingly referred to as ‘GCH Q’ – with its booty on 6 June 1945.
GCHQ relocated and reorganized at the end of 1945. Some of its wartime equipment was constructed at the laboratories of the Post Office Research Department at Dollis Hill in north London, and it was no coincidence that the Director of GCHQ, Sir Edward Travis, chose to move the organization to a temporary site at Eastcote near Uxbridge in north-west London, only a few miles from Dollis Hill. Here it remained until 1952, when his successor, Eric Jones, oversaw the move to two permanent sites in Cheltenham.
One of the most important battles won by GCH Q during 1945 was its struggle with the Treasury. In the autumn, while Travis was in the United States seeking to sustain the Anglo–American Sigint alliance, one of his deputies, Captain Wilson, was busy arguing for exceptional financial measures to help retain the best senior staff beyond the end of the war. Wilson warned that ‘there is a grave danger of us losing key personnel which are irreplaceable’. Accordingly, an early tranche of money was released while officials argued over the request for 260 officers as part of a core GCH Q staff of 1,010 (this compared with a wartime allocation of 8,902 staff). Travis returned in late November 1945 to join the fray. He explained that the large quota of senior staff was essential for a new ‘Sigint Centre’ at Eastcote, from which he would be able to provide a better service to Whitehall. His blueprint for the new GCH Q at Eastcote envisaged six main groups: Technical (Interception and Communications), Traffic Analysis, Cryptographic Exploitation, Cryptographic Research, Intelligence, and Cipher Security.
By mid-December 1945, Travis had won the argument and had reached a deal with the Treasury that was ‘on the whole most satisfactory’. But in conveying these feelings to the Treasury he did not miss an opportunity to lecture them on the importance of affording good staff and facilities for GCHQ:
The war proved beyond doubt that the more difficult aspects of our
work call for staff of the highest calibre, the successes by the Professors and Dons among our temporary staff, especially perhaps the high-grade mathematicians, put that beyond doubt. We cannot expect to attract many men of that calibre but we should have suitable conditions with which to attract them.
From his remarks I do not think Winnifrith [a Treasury official] realizes how in some spheres our work is akin to that of the scientific services. For instance, one of our mathematicians has evolved, and made mostly with his own hands, a prototype model of a telephone scrambler of a unique system, and one which gives very great security, and yet of a size that could be used in an aircraft or a car. Although very much wanted, this is a project on which Government scientific establishments have so far failed. Again, the theory on which some of our very secret instruments have been constructed must surely be regarded as a very considerable scientific achievement.
Travis had rightly anticipated the shape of the main challenge that awaited GCHQ in the 1950s and 1960s, namely to stay ahead in a field that increasingly required cutting-edge developments in physics and electronic engineering, something that was likely to place intense strain on GCHQ’s budget.
In the late 1940s, the key target for GCHQ was the Soviet A-bomb. The British Chiefs of Staff were fascinated by the problem of Britain’s relative vulnerability to attack by weapons of mass destruction and wanted forecasts on this crucial issue. The JIC ordered Britain’s codebreakers to focus their efforts upon this, together with other strategic weapons systems such as chemical and biological programmes, ballistic rockets and air defence. Although the JIC placed these subjects in a special high category of priority, it was to no avail. The Soviet bomb took the Western allies by surprise in late August 1949. Other Soviet activities, including espionage and diplomatic initiatives, constituted second and third priorities for GCHQ, but here too there were thin pickings. Many Soviet messages employed one-time pads which, if correctly used, could not be broken. The extent to which Britain was surprised by the Tito–Stalin split in 1948 underlines the limited success enjoyed against its diplomatic targets. Secure Soviet ciphers were only part of the problem. Moscow and its satellites used landlines, which could not be easily intercepted, instead of wireless transmissions.
The limited headway that Britain and the United States had made
with Soviet Bloc communications by the late 1940s, including the Venona programme, which attacked KGB intelligence traffic, was soon nullified by the espionage of William Weisband. Weisband was serving with the US Army Security Agency and was privy to most of what the West was obtaining from Soviet channels. As a result, on Friday, 29 October 1948, the Soviet Union underwent a massive change of code and cipher security, eliminating most of the channels that the West could read, including some machine-based, mid-level military systems. In part it was this catastrophe that prompted the British to follow the Soviets down the path of more extensive physical bugging in the mid-1950s. It also prompted the British and the Americans to accelerate their efforts to intercept Soviet telephone landlines by tunnelling under the Soviet sectors of Berlin and Vienna. Several tunnels are known to have been dug in these locations, but it is not unlikely that there were others.
Difficult Soviet targets aside, GCHQ was nevertheless providing Whitehall with large quantities of material in the late 1940s, albeit of a secondary and tertiary order. They continued to attack the communications of many states with vulnerable cipher systems. Some neutral states were persuaded to adopt Enigma or Enigma-type machines previously used by the Axis, in the belief that these machines provided a secure means of communication. This was a belief that GCHQ did nothing to undermine. The JIC had requested material on subjects such as Arab nationalism and the relations of Arab states with the UK and USA, the attitude of the Soviet Union, France, Italy and the Arab states towards the future of the ex-Italian colonies, especially Libya. GCHQ was also urged to focus on the Zionist movement, including its intelligence services. These subjects proved more accessible. In 1946, Alan Stripp, a codebreaker who had spent the war in India working on Japanese codes, suddenly found himself redeployed to the Iranian border. During the Azerbaijan crisis of 1946, he worked on Iranian and Afghan communications (but not Soviet communications) with considerable success.
Although GCHQ was always the largest postwar British secret service, much of its activity was hidden by the use of the signals units of the armed services for interception. Each of the three services operated half a dozen sites in Britain. GCHQ also had a number of civilian outstations including a Sigint processing centre at 10 Chesterfield Street in London, a listening post covering London at Ivy Farm, Knockholt,
in Kent and a listening post at Gilnahirk in Northern Ireland. GCHQ had overseas stations hidden within Embassies and High Commissions overseas. There were also service outposts. In the Middle East, the base of Ayios Nikolaos, just outside Famagusta on Cyprus, became a critical intelligence centre, receiving further Army and RAF Sigint units as they gradually departed from Palestine, Iraq and Egypt. Further east, the Navy maintained its intercept site at HMS Anderson near Colombo in Ceylon, and the Army began reconstruction of its pre-war Sigint site at Singapore. But the main British Sigint centre in Asia after 1945 was Hong Kong, initially staffed by RAF personnel. Here, together with help from their Australian counterparts, they captured Chinese and Soviet radio traffic.
Despite London’s decision to give GCHQ the lion’s share of British intelligence resources and the tendency to bury some of the programme in other budgets, it was difficult to meet the expanding costs of Sigint. On 22 January 1952, the Chiefs of Staff had met together with the Permanent Under Secretary of the British Foreign Office to review plans for improving British intelligence. GCHQ came out on top in this exercise. Its cutting edge programmes, mostly in the area of computers and ‘high speed analytical equipment’ for communications intelligence, were given ‘highest priority’. The Chiefs of Staff continually reiterated the ‘very great importance’ of speeding up development and construction in these ‘very sensitive’ areas. By November 1952 a major review of British intelligence was underway. The process was prolonged by the primitive nature of available managerial instruments. Nevertheless, all were clear that in the short term the emphasis should be ‘for Sigint’. Eric Jones, the Director of GCHQ in the 1950s, reported that he was busy filling the 300 extra staff posts recently authorized. GCHQ had proposed a further increment for an extra 366 staff to follow. GCHQ was moving from strength to strength.
As early as 1945, most English-speaking countries had committed themselves to postwar Sigint co-operation. Policy-makers at the highest level had come to expect a world in which a global Sigint alliance rendered enemy intentions almost transparent. They were not about to relinquish that privilege willingly. In the autumn of 1945, when Truman was winding up the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), America’s wartime secret service organization, he was also giving permission for American Sigint activity to continue and approved
negotiations on continued Allied co-operation. All desired the maximum option. Yet the way ahead was strewn with obstacles and the package of agreements, letters and memoranda of understanding, often referred to as the UKUSA treaty, that sealed this alliance, was not completed until 1948. As this agreement emerged, Britain derived considerable benefit from her dominance over Commonwealth partners.
