The Secrets of Station X (29 page)
Read The Secrets of Station X Online
Authors: Michael Smith
There were very considerable class differences at Bletchley Park itself. I took up with a girl who I was quite surprised to find was a countess’s daughter, because with my middle-class Jewish background that wasn’t the kind of person you would normally mix with. But it was a place where all sorts met and there were dances and parties and we enjoyed ourselves to a certain extent. But there was always the background and the need to know criteria, that is to say you didn’t ask questions about what other people were doing or working on. You never went beyond your own narrow field as it were.
Maurice Wiles was moved from the Japanese Military Attaché Section to the team decoding the Army Air material sometime in the first half of 1943.
The main work was done by four of us. Alexis Vlasto, who was one of the few who had not come via the Bedford school, was in charge. He was a Japanese and Russian linguist. Very quiet, very relaxed with a nice ironic sense of humour. George Ashworth, later Registrar of Manchester University, was the quickest mind among us. He had a wonderful memory. He would say: ‘Oh, I remember something similar to that four months ago.’ The other was Mervyn Jones. He was rather
introverted with a lovely sense of humour, not particularly outgoing. I remember the day the war ended and there was nothing to do, he came in and pulled out an Aristophanes text and sat there chuckling away to himself. Then he put that away and pulled out a musical score.
There were also musical evenings organised by Alexis Vlasto who married Jill Medway, who was a very good musician. As a civilian, I belonged to the Home Guard, which was a bit like Dad’s Army. We weren’t very efficient. There was a good deal of competition between the two platoon commanders and we had night exercises. Max Aitken, the Scottish chess champion, was one of these people whose limbs are very uncoordinated. Marching alongside him was often very comical. There were a lot of very good chess players at BP. We used to have evenings when Hugh Alexander and Harry Golombek, both members of the British chess team, would take on twenty boards.
I found the codebreaking a stimulating mental activity. I think being a civilian it was very easy for me to have a very relaxed time with the senior hierarchy and the most junior person, although that was certainly true of many of those who were in the services as well. I felt it was a very relaxing way to work. There were certainly boring periods. It’s a much
longer-term
thing than a crossword and it was vital in codebreaking to do the groundwork first, to read through the text first because that can be how you begin to spot the patterns.
The year 1943 was also notable for an invasion of more US
liaison
officers ahead of the invasion of Europe. Despite the initial agreement in 1941, there were continuing disputes between GC&CS and the US Army codebreakers over who should do what, and what each side should reveal to the other. There was a continuing distrust of the Americans at Bletchley, with a fear that they might too easily give the
Ultra
secret away. This was based on justified concerns. What leakages there were of signals intelligence had appeared in the US news media. There were
immense problems on the Japanese side where the US frequently refused to assist and the British at one point threatened to break off relations entirely.
The Americans meanwhile were determined to set up an operation to break Enigma in America and did not want to be beholden to the British in any way. This was unrealistic. The British had by now made such advances that the Americans could not have possibly managed on their own. Telford Taylor, the head of the US Army liaison team, urged caution while at the same time being brutally candid about what the Americans wanted.
What we really want at this time is to gain a foothold in ‘Enigma’ and develop technical competence, and gradually develop a supplementary operation so as to improve joint coverage. What we ultimately want is independence, but if we get a foothold and develop our technique, independence will come anyhow. As our position in Europe gets better established, we will be less dependent on the British for intercept assistance.
The British reluctance to allow the decrypts to cross the Atlantic for security reasons continued to mar the relationship. General George Strong, who as G-2 was the US Army officer in charge of signals intelligence, remained highly suspicious of British motives. ‘The picture that emerges is of G-2 and the British authorities walking around and eyeing each other like two mongrels who have just met,’ wrote Ted Hilles, one of the senior US Army officers at Bletchley Park. ‘Presumably and quite naturally, the ministries in London were reluctant to risk source’s neck sharing this precious information with an unproved and shadowy group in Washington.’
A US mission went to Britain in April 1943 and was involved in ‘difficult and protracted negotiations’ with Travis and Menzies. But in mid-May, the two sides signed a
groundbreaking accord. The BRUSA agreement set out a
division
of responsibilities between Bletchley Park and Arlington Hall. The British would control the interception and decryption of German radio messages while the Americans concentrated on Japanese. US liaison officers would be based at Bletchley Park where they would have access to ‘all decoded material’ and the right to pass those they selected back to Washington or on to US commanders in the field.
‘The proposal is now that the Americans, though not exploiting E [Enigma] in the USA, should have a party in this country working either here at BP or elsewhere,’ Travis told the BP management committee. ‘Moreover some American officers would be attached to Hut 3 and would report to the USA from there. In this way General Strong would make certain he was not cheated of information.’
But with concerns over American security a predominant factor in the negotiations, it was agreed that all this
material
should be passed ‘through existing British channels’. Information that was to be sent to field commanders would be passed via the British Special Liaison Units, the agreement said.
Where an American officer is commander-in-chief, an American officer, properly trained and indoctrinated at Bletchley Park, will be attached to the unit to advise and act as liaison officer to overcome difficulties that may arise in regard to differences in language. The preservation of secrecy is a matter of great concern to both countries and, if the highest degree of security is to be maintained, it is essential that the same methods should be pursued by both countries at every level and in every area concerned, since a leakage at one point would jeopardise intelligence from these sources not in one area only but in all theatres of war and for all services.
Telford Taylor was sent to Bletchley to head up the US Army intelligence team there. He persuaded Travis to send someone
from Hut 3 over to America to pick out US intelligence officers who would fit into the hut’s somewhat rarified atmosphere. The man selected for this task was Jim Rose, who was to remain close friends with Taylor for the rest of the latter’s life.
‘When Telford came over in 1943, he asked me to go out to Washington to interview candidates for Bletchley,’ Rose said.
Most of the officers who came to Bletchley I chose. There were some very bright people. One of them was Lewis Powell, who became a judge of the US Supreme Court. There was a man who became managing editor of the
Washington Post
, Alfred Friendly. There were quite a lot of lawyers and their reception in Hut 3 was extremely friendly and they all felt integrated.
While the Hut 3 reporters selected by Rose came, like Taylor, from the Special Branch, the US Army equivalent of the Intelligence Corps, the codebreakers came from the Signal Intelligence Service of the US Army Signal Corps and were under the command of Captain Bill Bundy, a law student from Harvard whose studies had been interrupted by the war.
I went to Arlington Hall in the spring of ’43. And I remember vividly, a group of us, a very small group, were convened in a room there and told: ‘What you’re going to hear today is
something
you will not discuss.’ They went on with the briefing about what was then in that circle called Yellow, which was the whole Enigma-breaking operation. After considerable sparring back and forth an agreement had been reached between the American and the British governments that the Americans would keep the major role on Japanese material and the British would maintain the major role on German, but as a sort of codicil to that it was agreed that a small American
contingent
, thirty to fifty, should go to Bletchley Park to integrate right into the organisation there and I was picked to be the commanding officer of that outfit.
Amid conditions of great secrecy they were sent to England on board the SS
Aquitania
, Bundy recalled.
I think we were twenty in our advance contingent and on the way over we had to bunk with other services. Our cover story was that we were pigeon experts in the Signal Corps. I don’t think we used it very often, Lord knows it would have broken down very quickly, you didn’t really have to explain what you were doing on a troopship, but that was the cover story we used.
Art Levenson, a young Jewish mathematician, was one of Bundy’s advance party. ‘We were a somewhat select group,’ he said.
But this was the first experiment in cooperating in the codebreaking business between any two countries in history and I don’t know if you want to put your best foot forward, but you want to put one of your better feet forward. I don’t think I’d ever met an Englishman in my life until that point. We went to Lichfield, which was the ‘repo-depot’, the reporting depot where everybody who was coming to the UK or the European theatre went to. Then we were in London for a few days, and then we were sent up to Bletchley. We were introduced to Brigadier Tiltman and they treated us like visiting generals.
But underlying the VIP treatment was a continuing mutual distrust. ‘I remember with horror the American invasion when every section had an American,’ said Jean Howard, who worked in Hut 3.
We believed they had no sense of security and were terrified that material they took out of the Hut would go astray. We felt strongly that they would never have come into the war but for Pearl Harbor. They were different animals, and the English they spoke had different meanings. They were fat, we were
emaciated. They were smart (eleven different sorts of uniform), we were almost in rags. They were rich, we were poor. They brought in alcohol: ‘Have a Rye sister.’ ‘We don’t drink here.’ We were overworked and exhausted, and having to teach people who barely knew where Europe was, was the last straw.
The mutual mistrust came to a head during celebrations to mark the 4 July, recalled Barbara Abernethy.
We were challenged by the Americans to a game of rounders. They nearly went home. Now in the United States, you don’t need to get all the way home in one go to score. As long as you get all the way home eventually you score. Now our rules for rounders of course were very tough. You had to go all the way round in one go. It was a lovely day, we all played well, and at the end of the game we all sort of clapped each other on the back and the Americans said: ‘Well, we’re sorry we beat you’ and the British captain said: ‘I’m sorry, but we beat you.’ The Americans were a little touchy. They were convinced that they’d won and it took a bit of explanation on somebody’s part to soothe ruffled feathers. It all ended with drinks all round, actually we agreed we’d won by our rules and they’d won by their rules. So that was alright. But they never asked us to play again.
They might never play rounders again, but the Americans were placed in various parts of the Park and soon mixed in well. Both sides swiftly got over their prejudices. While the British had seen the Americans as brash and careless about security, the Americans had believed that the British would be too ‘
stiff-upper-lipped
’ to get on with. ‘We thought they’d be aloof, hard to reach, buttoned up, as we say. That it would be very hard to get to know them and that they’d probably be rather cold,’ Bundy recalled.
Well that broke down, I should say, in the first forty-eight
hours and certainly the first time that you had a mug of beer with a Britisher. If we’re talking original stereotypes, they didn’t last.
One felt right away a concern on the British side whether Americans could keep their mouths shut and they dealt with this, I thought brilliantly, as they dealt with the whole security problem throughout. No stern lectures or anything of that sort, just quietly saying how important it was not to let a bit of this come out. So very quickly and in a very low key but totally persuasive way we were indoctrinated with the basic security principles that governed all the Enigma material and all the cypher and codebreaking materials at all grades, all levels throughout the war, it was just terribly well done.
Gradually as the two sides got to know each other, a level of mutual respect replaced the suspicion and relationships between the two sides became very much closer. ‘We didn’t have a separate American unit within the Enigma cypher breaking structure,’ Bundy recalled. ‘We were integrated on an individual basis in the various offices of Hut 6, or on the translation and
exploitation
side Hut 3, and it was, from the standpoint of personal relations, a terribly good relationship, taking people as they came, as they were, laughing about the national differences and customs, a very relaxed, very giving and taking relationship.’
Art Levenson recalled having a ‘pretty heavy’ social life at Bletchley Park.
We were a handful of Americans and we were, I guess,
somewhat
exotic. There were lots of Wrens around. They invited us to lots of parties and we had a great time. I made many friends that I still have. It was great fun, they were wonderful people, a great crowd. I had been full of stereotypes about the English. ‘They’re distant and have no sense of humour, they won’t speak to you unless you’re introduced’ and all kinds of nonsense. But these were the most outgoing people, who invited us to
their homes and fed us when it was quite a sacrifice, and with a delightful sense of humour. Maybe there were some English that fitted the stereotype but there were none at Bletchley, they were all a delight and just enough screwballs to be real fun.
