The Secret Life of Bletchley Park (32 page)

Yet, despite the earlier Molotov/Ribbentrop pact, the fact remains that from 1941 to the end of the war, the Russians were, for coldheartedly pragmatic reasons, Britain’s allies. Was it therefore the blackest treachery to pass information to them that would help them in their fight against the Germans?

Authors such as Chapman Pincher and Christopher Andrew would emphatically – indeed, furiously – say yes. They argue that the actions of the Cambridge Spies resulted in the brutal deaths of a great many British agents whose identities had been betrayed. Added to this, the leaking of information throughout the war to Stalin gave him an unfair advantage in bargaining terms at the Yalta Conference. And of course, there was the gravest betrayal of all. In his later years, Cairncross denied that after the war he had passed on nuclear secrets to enable the Soviets to start their own atomic weapons programme. Yet such secrets were passed; and such secrets kept the Cold War in frost for decades and eastern Europe unwillingly under the thumb of an oppressive regime.

Despite the evidence of the Cairncross case, there was a huge amount of vigilance around the country. The general wartime assumption was that unusual or furtive behaviour would be immediately spotted by colleagues, and reported. During the war years, civilians would regularly report the suspicious behaviour of others to the authorities concerned.

Not only that, but they were highly effective in doing so. As a vivid example, in 1940, three German agents – two men and one woman – disembarked from a submarine off the coast of Scotland. They sailed by dinghy to the tiny fishing harbour of Port Gordon. There, having concealed the dinghy, and obviously dressed in civvies, they made their way through the village up to the railway station at the top of the hill.

At the station, one of the agents tried to buy train tickets for the three of them; he gave the station master a fifty-pound note. Never having seen such a thing in his entire life, the station master excused himself, went into his office and made a quiet telephone call about the three people ‘who didna’ seem right’. Minutes later, they were arrested. The outcome was that the two male spies were hanged.

As it happens, this was the village that my father was born and
brought up in, and the story was repeated proudly throughout his childhood. The woman, my father says, ‘went on to marry someone in the village’. An exceedingly fine joke – but the point still stands that not only were ordinary people constantly on the alert for spies, they were perfectly right to be so.

The John Cairncross/Bletchley story also highlights something else that is rather striking; the fact that such major breaches of security – if indeed that is what it really was – did not happen more often.

There is a fascinating story in Andrew Sinclair’s study of the Cambridge Spies,
The Red and the Blue
, in which the motives and philosophy of such treachery was debated by Kim Philby and Malcolm Muggeridge at the villa of Victor Rothschild in Paris 1944 after the liberation. According to Sinclair, Rothschild ‘vehemently opposed Churchill’s decision to withhold from Stalin the Bletchley information about German battle plans on the eastern front’. He was not aware that John Cairncross had been smuggling some of that very information. Muggeridge told Rothschild that ‘caution over the Bletchley material was legitimate because the Russians had passed on to the Germans all they knew about the British during the Nazi-Soviet pact’.
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At this point, according to Sinclair, an outraged Philby declared that everything should be done to support the Red Army, even if it meant compromising the Bletchley material.

As Sinclair points out, neither Kim Philby nor Guy Burgess had any access to Bletchley documentation; nevertheless, that even such a conversation could be held is a stark illustration of how fortunate it was that the Bletchley secret was never disclosed.

For reasons still unknown, John Cairncross was never prosecuted. Instead, he went to live abroad, and eventually joined a United Nations food agency. To this day, there are allegations of cover-ups; that Cairncross was the alleged ‘Fifth Man’, after Burgess, Philby, MacLean and Blunt, who had betrayed the whole of the British intelligence service to the Soviet Union. It also seems inconceivable that a man of his sympathies, openly expressed, could have passed
the vetting to have worked in an establishment like Bletchley Park (without, that is, the authorities deciding for their own purposes to place him there).

But in general terms, what vetting was there? Certainly some veterans were aware that before they started work at the Park, discreet enquiries about their characters and lives had been made with headmasters and the like. They were left in no doubt that their lives had been thoroughly scrutinised.

To this day, Sheila Lawn is never entirely certain what process led her to the Park. ‘I simply came in because there was quite a tranche of people from the Scottish universities,’ she says. ‘And I suppose the fact that I had taken my name out of signing up to be a teacher, and into this – they may have thought, “Well she’s keen enough to do that.” I don’t know.’

This prompts her husband Oliver to recall: ‘When Sheila came – with this tranche from the Scottish universities – this other girlfriend that I had at the Park before Sheila was
also
one of them. There were quite a few from the Scottish universities. They were scouting quite carefully.’

Mrs Lawn herself recalls one unusual day at university before the summons for Bletchley came: ‘I was invited to my amazement by the principal and his wife to Sunday afternoon tea, and the other people there were a lot of senior, older students. I had a very pleasant tea, and chatted with people and so on – but it struck me as being very odd because I hadn’t heard of any of my own age group on my French/German course being invited.

So I thought, “I wonder what the reason for that tea was? Whether they just stick a pin in and say, ‘We’ll take this one, we’ll take that one’?” Though I didn’t feel in any way that I was being conscripted.’

As the Hon. Sarah Baring has mentioned, some of the debs were scrutinised only so far as to ensure that they were not madly in love with Hitler. And as for the codebreakers themselves? It wasn’t a question of old school tie so much as the old university gown. Also,
given the youth of so many of the original intake of codebreakers and linguists, they would not have needed more than the usual check – there is a limit to the amount of seditious activity that an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old in pre-war Britain could have engaged in, give or take the odd Cambridge Apostle or two.

The same James Klugman who apparently recruited Cairncross to the Soviet cause was also implicated in another suspected security breach involving Bletchley a little later in the war. This involved Yugoslavia, and the apparent need to ensure that Churchill gave his backing to the partisan leader Josef Tito and not the Royalist leader Mihailovic.

Klugman was suspected by some of having secretly influenced the government decision to back the partisans, despite the fact that Tito and his supporters were Communist sympathisers, and almost certain to take post-war Yugoslavia down a Communist road. It was felt that the governance of the country would be best left to its people; but in the meantime, the government would support the side that appeared best placed to fight Hitler’s armies.

Documents uncovered in the 1990s appeared to show that information sent from Bletchley Park to Downing Street and the relevant Whitehall departments concerning the complex layers of the Yugoslav situation was somehow not reaching the people that it should. An anonymous Bletchley operative came forward and said:

Of course, Britain had its own agents out in the field, and its own elaborate plans for counter-espionage coups. One came in 1940, when Alan Turing and Peter Twinn had still to crack the impossibly complicated naval Enigma. A young lieutenant-commander from Naval Intelligence came to Bletchley Park to discuss possible means of tricking Germans out of their key settings.

That young commander was Ian Fleming, and the man he conferred with was Dilly Knox. Fleming’s eventual plan had the working name ‘Operation Ruthless’. It involved the use of an ‘airworthy German bomber’ to be obtained from the Air Ministry; a ‘tough crew of five, including a pilot, WT operator and word-perfect German speaker. Dress them in German Air Force uniforms, add blood and bandages to suit’. The plan was to ‘crash the plane in the Channel after making SOS to rescue service’ and, justifying the operation name, ‘once aboard rescue boat, shoot German crew, dump overboard, bring rescue boat back to English port.’

The idea, of course, was to snaffle the ship’s Enigma key settings. Fleming himself volunteered for the mission, although there was no chance that he would be accepted for it; anyone with any knowledge of the Enigma operation, and of the work being done at Bletchley Park, would never be allowed out into the field for fear of capture by the enemy and subsequent torture, leading to top secret information being revealed.

Unfortunately, the weather conditions and other circumstances were never quite right for ‘Operation Ruthless’, it seemed, and eventually it was shelved. Alan Turing and Peter Twinn apparently looked like ‘undertakers cheated of a nice corpse’ at the news.
⁶

This scheme aside, Fleming would be a regular sight at the Park, liaising between the codebreakers and Naval Intelligence. ‘About once a fortnight I visited Bletchley Park,’ he said. It has been wrily noted by Mavis Batey in her monograph on the subject that his creation James Bond would have enjoyed no such privilege, and indeed would not have made it past the sentry post – access to the
secret of Ultra and Enigma was granted, outside the Bletchley Park staff, to very few.

On top of this, it might also be noted that two of Fleming’s Bond novels –
From Russia with Love
(published in 1957) and
You Only Live Twice
(1964) – are more explicit than any of the other 007 adventures when it comes to codes and codebreaking. In
From Russia with Love
, the complex plot revolves around a Soviet enciphering machine called LEKTOR. In
You Only Live Twice
it is a Japanese deciphering system called ‘MAGIC 44’. There is no mention of Bletchley; after all, Fleming had signed the same Official Secrets Act as everyone else. But, as he once said of his own work: ‘Everything I write has a precedent in truth.’

Perhaps the reason we have heard so little about security breaches at the Park is because such information remains sensitive today. There was one dramatic episode in 1942 which showed, however, that Britain’s code encipherments had in fact been penetrated by the Nazis.

Given the amount that the British knew about Enigma right from the start of the war, it was obvious that they should develop a different, more advanced system: this was Typex (Or ‘Type X’). Thanks to Bletchley, rigorous orders on the use of this system were given out: for instance, that no proper names should be used within the coded message itself (such inclusions, as had been discovered with Enigma, made cribs easier to find).

Nevertheless, for a while during the North African campaign in 1941, Rommel appeared to have an almost supernatural sense of Montgomery’s every move, and was outmanoeuvring the British with seeming ease. Frustration and anxiety mounted. British Intelligence knew that it simply had to be a security breach. And they were right.

Bletchley Park decrypted an Italian message stating that Rommel owed all his good fortune to the fact that an American cipher sent from Cairo was being read regularly. Churchill was informed, and
the Americans were swiftly on to the case. The unfortunate leaker was one Colonel Fellers, who had simply been sending news of British positions back to his superiors in Washington. An enquiry found that he was innocent of treachery; the problem was that the code he had used was too easy to crack.

The men and women of Bletchley would have to live with the effects of this intense and obsessive secrecy for decades to come. But at the time, with the tremendous pressures that they were all facing, what sort of pressure valves were there? One extraordinarily fruitful one was the Park’s artistic life: what had started in the early days with little clubs and societies forming was, by 1943, a wide-ranging mix of classical music, opera, dancing and amateur dramatics. Hard as Bletchley’s people worked, they knew on some level that it would be necessary to play hard too, in order to keep their minds fully refreshed. And the nature of the cultural activities that they engaged in tells us much about the aspirations of a smart young generation.

When one listens now to wartime songs and entertainers, one is generally listening to the material that was performed to the troops, and played into the dance halls and the factories: Flanagan and Allen; George Formby; Tommy Trinder; Arthur Askey; the Andrews Sisters; Anne Shelton; Billy Cotton and his Band; Jack Buchanan; Vera Lynn. The tone was ceaselessly uplifting and ceaselessly uncomplicated, from George Formby’s risqué suggestions of knowing what to do with his gas-mask to Vera Lynn and her white cliffs. This is not to say that such entertainments were naive, or even simple; merely that they were pitched at a certain emotional level that could be enjoyed by all – popular culture at its best.

Tellingly, though, the sort of culture that the denizens of Bletchley Park went in for was, from the start, markedly more highbrow. One senses that this was not in any way deliberate; it was simply that many of the young codebreakers and linguists had been pulled away from their university lives (and in an age when fewer than five per cent of young people in any one year would attend university), and part of their education had been to inculcate an interest in the arts.