Two Officers With Microphones

 

This is another illustrative extract from Signal!, Captain Barrie Kent’s history of signalling in the Royal Navy. It is about the latter part of the Battle of the North Cape in December 1943 when Scharnhorst was sunk. I’ll quote from the book and then make two points: will you guess what they are?

‘At 1723 Fraser (CinC Home (HMS Duke of York) signalled to Burnett (FO 10th Cruiser Squadron (HMS Belfast)): “Steer south to get between enemy and his base”. Duke of York continued firing as the range increased but at about 1830 it became apparent that Scharnhorst's speed had been reduced - she had been hit and a broken steam pipe temporarily reduced her speed to ten knots. This enabled the four destroyers – HMS Savage, HMS Scorpion, HMS Saumarez and the Norwegian HNoMS Stord - to close in and attack her with torpedoes.

In the RCO things had risen to a crescendo:

“One had no time to think of the enemy's shells which could be heard whistling overhead and exploding with sharp cracks. Our own broadsides became less noticeable, as did the rough sea. Quick decisions had to be made, but with a backlog of coding and decoding in the small RCO, when an urgent signal for CS10 was handed in from the plot

I ordered it to be made in plain language as it could not help the enemy even if he read it. Having broken the ice, we used P/L from time to time when appropriate.”

No one actually saw the Scharnhorst sink - she just disappeared from radar screens. When destroyers reported picking up survivors, Courage (Fleet Signal Officer) was at last able to originate the signal: “Admiralty from C-in-C: Scharnhorst Sunk – 262100”. Dawnay (Fleet Wireless Officer) remembered:

“I had great difficulty in getting the signal through and eventually got Iceland to take it – just two groups of Fleet Code. Then came a busy hour of signalling, clearing up the mess and giving instructions what to do and where to go. By this time the Duke of York was steaming by herself at high speed for the Kola Inlet: with U-Boats about, she had been hanging around for quite long enough. Having transmitted the last orders I reimposed silence on MF, and comparative peace reigned once more.”

But the problems faced by Courage and Dawnay were not over.

“A situation dreaded by all signal officers arose: Admiral Fraser wished to talk to Admiral Burnett on the R/T. Neither had received any training whatever in how so use this method of communication.”

Unable to persuade the C-in-C to desist Dawney embarked on a lesson:

“First Sir, you press this thing when you wish to speak: when you have finished, you say ‘Over’ and release it, and listen to Admiral Burnett. Finally, you must use callsigns or you will make it too easy for the Germans. Yours, Sir, is WIGLEY, and Admiral Burnett's is REMBRANDT.” Then the trouble started. "WIGLEY? Who gave me this ridiculous name? You?"

Meanwhile Admiral Burnett was happily in ignorance of the fact that he was about to be summoned to the microphone, nor did he have the benefit of instruction from the Fleet Wireless Officer.

Courage again:

“In Duke of York we heard only one side of the conversation, which went like this: ‘Bob, is that you? Bob, can you hear me?’ (‘Say “Over” and release the handle’ from Dawnay). ‘Bob, are you clutching your thing? I'll send you Jamaica. I'm off to Russia, follow me when you can’ (‘Out!’ from Dawnay). It may have done more good than harm - it was clear that even “very senior officers” must be property trained in this double-edged means of rapid communication. It also made us all laugh.”'

First of all, I admire the fact that it was the Fleet Signal Officer who took the decision to send a message en clair whether or not its content meant that it would be expected to be encoded before being sent. There was a permanent tension between signallers of all services and the Comsec ‘authority’ in GC&CS: the former wanted to be able to send signals as quickly as possible; the latter was insistent that maintaining security came before all other considerations. Here is an obvious example of when sending en clair will make no difference whatsoever. If the security organisation can’t make a system that makes sending a classified message as (relatively) straightforward as sending an unclassified message, then it should be a problem for the security organisation, not the signaller. As described above, the signaller had enough problems finding a way of getting the signal to the Admiralty in London, eventually finding an RN Comcen in Iceland which could relay the message.

Second is a naval equivalent to what many soldiers would say was the greatest threat to safety possible: an officer with a map! How about two Admirals with push-to-talk radios and no idea how to use the equipment, never mind how to pass secure information via that medium? The pragmatism of the signallers, the pretty certain guess that the Kriegsmarine would have other things to do rather than have its signallers search for insecure RN communications, the prudent decision (again) that there was unlikely to be any real security implication if the message was sent, and finally the opportunity to give everyone in the Comcen the chance for a bit of an after-action laugh (‘Bob, are you clutching your thing?’ - ooh err, Missus!) all suggest that the signallers on HMS Duke of York would eventually go off watch on a high.

 

 

 

 

Right Man - Right Reason?

This is (yet another) story about the problems ‘Need to Know’ can cause. We start with an MI5 account of surveillance of a Soviet Intelligence officer, Pavel Kuznetsov, with the cover of a Second Secretary at the Soviet Embassy in London 

25.4.52.

KUZNETSOV left home with his boy at 8.35 am and went by 'bus to KPG.

He came out via the passage leading to York House Place at 10.20 am boarded a 31 'bus, immediately alighted, and jumped onto a 27 'bus travelling on it as far as Hammersmith.

In Hammersmith Broadway he alighted and got on a No 9 'bus heading for Mortlake. He stood on the platform while this 'bus crossed the Broadway and then ran forward to another No.9 'bus which had stopped just in front. Again he remained on the platform until the 'bus started off.

It would have been sheer folly to have attempted to board this bus so that we had to rely on taxis which, unfortunately, were not available.

A search was made at Mortlake and this being unsuccessful it was decided to travel to Richmond.

At 11.15 am KUZNETSOV was seen waiting at a 'bus stop in Richmond and he in fact boarded the very 'bus on which our assistants were travelling. He came aboard and sat not far away panting and breathing heavily, as though the shaking off of his pursuers was indeed most strenuous work.

He alighted at Marble Hill Park, Twickenham, sat reading his newspaper on a seat in this park from 11.30 am until noon and then walked back along the riverbank to Richmond.

After some window crawling and excursions into back streets he boarded a No 65 'bus, travelled to Kingston and arrived outside the Century-Elite Cinema at 1p.m.

When he moved away from the front of this cinema, after a stay of only a few moments, he was joined by a man ("D") and they entered the Normandie Restaurant (Bentalls).

At 2.25 pm they left the restaurant and walked through quiet back streets to Canbury Gardens, Kingston, where they positioned themselves on a seat in such a manner that they could see anyone approaching from any angle.

KUZNETSOV was observed making notes in a pocket book and the man "D" took from his inside coat pocket a large sheet of stiffish paper about 15" x 15" which he opened out on his knees. He then appeared to be drawing or explaining by hand movements details from this sheet. Occasionally KUZNETSOV would lean over and appeared to be asking for a fuller explanation following which his friend would again refer to this paper. On the rare occasions that a person passed by, "D" folded the paper and put it in his pocket.

They were in Canbury Gardens from 2.40 pm until 4.10 pm and separated the moment they left the gardens, without as much as a nod of the head.

Reluctantly we had to allow KUZNETSOV to proceed and concentrated our forces on the contact who walked back to Kingston, travelled by 85 'bus to Putney and thence by train to Earlesfield. He was finally housed at 36, Elborough Street, SW18 going in by key at 5.10 pm.

The demeanour of this man "D" changed completely during the afternoon. When he first met KUZNETSOV he was in a happy mood, apparently without a care in the world. During his sojourn on the park seat his face became more grave as time went by and when he parted from KUZNETSOV he was in a state of nervous tension.

When first seen the papers "D" was carrying could be seen jutting out from his inside pocket but after he had left KUZNETSOV they were not visible.

"D" is described as:

Looks 20-25. 5 ft 8 ins. Slight build. Oval face. Sallow complexion. Clean shaven. Small nose. Small chin. Dark brown straight hair, distinct parting on left going across crown of his head. Large feet, flat footed and walks with rolling motion.

Dressed in fawn belted gabardine raincoat, fawn suit with faint yellowish stripe, no hat, brown leather shoes, yellow socks.

Voters' list particulars for 36, Elborough Street, SW18 show:

MARSHALL William F.

MARSHALL Mary A.E.       

MORGAN Elizabeth. 

(KV 2/1636 s.2a 19520426)

William and Mary’s son, also William (though often Bill), wasn’t on the list because he worked elsewhere. Specifically, he was a radio operator for the Diplomatic Wireless Service (DWS). There was only one conceivable reason for his meeting a Soviet intelligence officer, but no evidence that he had committed a crime.

MI5 began a thorough investigation: within a couple of days they had full access to the salient details of his working life: after National Service in the Royal Corps of Signals where he was trained as a radio operator, he had joined the Diplomatic Wireless Service on 1 November 1948 and had been allocated accommodation at Bletchley Park where some of the wartime huts had been turned over to become a Ministry of Labour hostel for members of the DWS. He was posted to Egypt in July 1948, returning to the UK and to work in October 1949. In December 1950 he was posted to the British Embassy in Moscow, returning to the UK in December 1951.

On 30 April 1952, Gambier-Parry, the head of the DWS met representatives of MI5 and MI6 in the Foreign Office. He revealed that Marshall’s posting to Egypt had been to support SIS, whose wireless station had been moved from Cairo to Ismailia. Gambier-Parry was happy to accept that Marshall had been communicating with the Russians, but stressed that as a radio operator he would have had not access to the contents of classified messages, only to the cipher text. Marshall would have known about DWS comms procedural matter: callsigns, frequencies, schedules etc but Gambier-Parry was inclined to think that this information was particularly important. He also made clear that Marshall’s hostel was also used by the Post Office Training School and GCHQ trainees.

It was agreed that only a couple of DWS personnel would be made aware of what was going on, and that they would be looking to see when Marshall visited London to give MI5 the best possible chance to catch Marshall meeting Kusnetsov. Meanwhile MI5 would continue their investigations to establish what sort of motive Marshall might have had for becoming a Soviet agent (if that was what had happened).

In all of the paperwork discussing the means by which MI5 would investigate Marshall’s life there is an interesting paragraph about Bletchley Park:

The huts are situated in a small section of park land in front of a fairly large country house in Bletchley village itself. The park land is covered in huts of various patterns and grouped together in different formations. At present the GPO occupy the country house and various huts and buildings. Other huts are used by the Board of Education’s pupil teachers, the Ministry of Civil Aviation, the Ministry of Works and GCHQ trainees.

(KV 2/1636 s.29a 19520509)

It is clear that at this stage nobody involved in MI5 has any idea what Bletchley Park had been, or what GCHQ trainees were being trained in. This might well mean that those reporting had little idea what GCHQ actually did. (GCHQ continued to train its radio operators at Bletchley Park until the 1980s.)

A real insight into Marshall’s character came from a letter sent to George Carey Foster, Foreign Office Head of Security, by Lambert Titchener, Head of Chancery at the Moscow Embassy. He said:

I have very little substantive information to give you which will throw any light on his political leanings. Although he behaved very oddly throughout most  of his time here, and I will describe his behaviour in a  subsequent paragraph, it was not until the last day that an action of his, on reflection, would cause suspicions of the kind you appear to have in mind.

2. He was due to leave by the late train for Leningrad;  and had already been relieved of duty to finish his packing. He was missing most of the day, and it was not until 10 pm, by which time his absence was causing disquiet, that he returned  in a taxi from the town. He was asked where he had been, and  answered evasively that he had been making a few purchases. I did not attach much importance to this at the time, because  it was in keeping with the way he had behaved during most of his tour here.

...

4. Marshall was a perfect example of the type who should not be sent here. He was an introvert, antisocial to a degree I have never seen before. At staff cocktail parties he would be found in a corner behind a screen,if he turned up at all, or in some other obscure spot.He was most difficult to draw into conversation, and he had a meanness which it would be difficult to surpass. If asked to give a cigarette to a  colleague, he would ask for a cigarette back the following day.

...

6. So far as his work was concerned, it was not of a very high order, and adverse reports on it were sent back by Cole. Towards the end he apparently suffered from lapses of  memory.

...

7. All in all he was an unfortunate choice, but such grounds for suspicion as we had were concerned solely with his arrested mental development and his ability to stand up to the strain of work here.

(KV 2/1636 s.32a 19520513)

Meanwhile the War Office had sent information about Marshall’s military career. He had been called up in 1945 (after having spent some time as a trainee at a Merchant Navy Training Centre) and after training had been classified and remustered as Operator Special BIII, posted first to the War Office Wireless Service at Forest Moor’s detachment at Woodhouse and then joined 2 Wireless regiment in Palestine, where he stayed until leaving the Middle East in April 1948.

Later in May, Marshall met Kuznetsov again, and the Foreign Office started pressing  for the case to be brought to a conclusion as soon as possible. MI5 were in agreement, as by now they had greater insight into Marshall.  They had seen his employment file at DWS which said:

‘… that he exhibited considerable persistence in applying for a post with DWS. On 25th May 1948 he applied for a temporary post with DWS pending receipt of information concerning a Government Grant to enable him to attend Colwyn Bay Radio College. He stated he was familiar with DWS procedure, as he had been attached to the DWS link

at Fayid, MELF when serving as a signalman with GSI (8) in the Middle East. He was informed that he could not be taken on as a temporary employee. On 12th June 1948 he wrote stating that he had not been granted the Government allowance to enable him to attend the Radio College and was therefore applying for permanent employment with DWS. He was told that no vacancies existed. On 5th July he applied again saying that he would greatly appreciate it if his name could be placed on record and if he could be notified when a vacancy occurred. On 12th September 1948, without having been notified, he applied again and was told to submit the necessary forms. As a result of this application he was taken on.

…

On 22nd September 1950 MARSHALL wrote from the Middle East stating that he understood his overseas tour was about to be terminated, after one year and two months. He added that, as the normal tour was two years, he would appreciate it if he could be posted abroad again as soon as he returned to the UK for ten months, in order to complete his two year tour. He said that, as he understood Moscow postings lasted only ten months or a year, he would like to be considered for Moscow.’

(KV 2/1637 s.61a 19520603)

Marshall was arrested and charged under the Official Secrets Act on 14 June 1952. A list of new comms procedures to be used by the DWS had been left in a place to which he would have had access and was carrying these when he met Kuznetsov. Kuznetsov was also temporarily detained and searched (there was a diplomatic row subsequently) and denied knowing Marshall – which, as Marshall was carrying a diary detailing eight previous meetings as well as this one and the next, was not a particularly plausible lie.

The investigation continued: attention was drawn to the fact that Marshall had been friendly with a Russian woman employed by the Embassy, and a belief there that Marshall had spent his last day in Moscow with her. He was remembered on occasions as being impress by the Soviet regime and that towards the end of his time there, he used to take long solitary walks.

On 13 June 1952 Marshall made a statement.

I was born in London on 22nd December, 1927 and was brought up there and educated there till 1941.I then went to the Rotherhithe Nautical school which was then in Wales. I was there until December 1943 when I returned to London. I then went to the British School of Telegraphy, Clapham Road, Stockwell for just over a year. From February till November, 1945, I was unemployed, in which time I was trying to get away to sea. In November, 1945, I volunteered for the Royal Signals and served in England till May, 1947. I then served about six months in Palestine and five months in Egypt. During the time I was in Palestine and Egypt I did wireless intercepting and telegraphy. After demobilisation in April, 1948, I was unemployed till July, 1948, when I was given a government grant to continue studies in wireless telegraphy. I was three months at a wireless school at Earls Court. I do not remember the address. While I was in Fayid, Egypt, I first got to know that there was such a thing as a Diplomatic Wireless Service. I did some work on one of their circuits and got the idea that I would like to join the service on my return to civil life. I made several applications but heard nothing till Autumn 1948, when I was called for an interview.

...

Towards the end of December, 1950, I was offered a posting in Moscow because an operator there had fallen sick and I accepted forthwith because I was on my beam ends financially. The pay offered for Moscow was considerably higher than in England. I flew to Moscow arriving there on 31st December, 1950, and started work at the British Embassy. I was a misfit at the Embassy at Moscow from the start. The people there were not my class of people and I led a very solitary life. I kept to myself, spoke to as few people as possible, did my work as well as I could and just waited for the time to come home. I was disgusted with the pettiness of life at the Embassy. I began to take an interest in the Russian way of life. I was impressed by the efforts of the Russian people and by their ideals. They seemed to me to be trying to build a society which would allow the fullest scope for human endeavour although I think they still have a long way to go. 

...

Shortly after my return to England, I went to the Soviet Embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens to hand in a Russian pass which I had forgotten to hand in in Moscow. I saw there a man who introduced himself as Mr Paul Kuznetsov. He did not say what position he occupied. He told me that the pass was not Russian but British and suggested I return it to the Foreign Office. About a quarter of an hour's conversation followed and we found we had a good deal in common and we looked at life in a similar sort of way.

(KV 2/1638 s.97z 19520619)

I don’t think this is a case that need detain us further: Marshall was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, and after being sentenced Marshall refused to talk to MI5. Whether he had been recruited in Moscow or on his return to London was something chewed over, but given Marshall’s refusal to talk, precise details were never uncovered. The case was remembered as the first in which a Soviet agent had been uncovered because of detailed surveillance of the activities of a Soviet intelligence officer.

Many of you, however, will have worked out by now that there was a line of enquiry, that was never pursued, and that happened because nobody dealing with the nitty-gritty detail of the case would have known that there was a Sigint angle, and none of those at the top of MI5 who would have noticed it would have seen more than summaries of the case.

Marshall’s army career was spent first in learning how to be a Sigint operator and then being posted to 2 Wireless Regiment at Sarafand in Palestine, the principal War Office Sigint station in the Near East since the end of the First World War. It was after this posting (which included some time in Egypt where he became acquainted with the work of the DWS).

I don’t think that it would have made a significant difference to this case, but it exposes the fact that a serious investigation into an Official Secrets Act case was blind to a potentially important piece of information. GCHQ’s only involvement in the case was to request the suppression of details of how the Soviets might use the information Marshall was about to hand over as it might reveal techniques used by GCHQ. Though not part of the case, it was also revealed early in the investigation that GCHQ occasionally monitored DWS communications to advise on their security.

Dilly Knox once famously asked: ‘How do I know whether I need to know something if I don’t know what it is?’ and I have never seen a good answer to the question. Excessive secrecy can be as bad as poor security. And what might most MI5 staff have missed during most of the Cold War because of a lack of any understanding of Sigint (just as nearly all GCHQ employees were ignorant of what MI5 did). Need-to-Know is a double-edged sword which often seems to have one very blunt edge.

 

Records and Memory

 

One of the more interesting questions I had to answer as GCHQ historian was why a large collection of intercepted message logs encrypted in the JAGUAR key (used by the Luftwaffe) from the period after D-Day had been retained. These logs once analysed have no value (because any value they have has been realised through the analysis), and were normally kept for a few months ‘just in case’ before being disposed of.

This batch, however had been kept so that a serious TA (traffic analysis) study could be made of Luftwaffe communications before the Ardennes Offensive. How the pattern of communications activity had changed as the German retreat continued, and how German preparations for an offensive had been misinterpreted, or at least not recognised, was an important piece of retrospective analysis as it would provide an indicator or warning of preparations for an offensive in future conflicts.

More on the results of analysis of Luftwaffe communications another day, but for now I want to focus on the difference between what those involved wrote about German Army intercept during the period before the Offensive in the summer of 1945 in The Sixta History (HW 43/82-94), seven or eight months after the event; what one of the authors wrote 40 years later from memory, though after discussion with former colleagues and reading the first of the works about Second World War Sigint; what Ralph Bennett, who had reported the material which was released by the MOD in the 1970s, and what Hinsley’s Official History says.

This isn’t about intelligence and the Ardennes Offensive except insofar as they provide a hook on which to hang a few thoughts about records and memory, and the perils of relying on either without more context than most writers on British Sigint in the Second World War can access.

I start with the relevant extract from The Sixta History: this is ‘deep analysis’ by the people who had worked this material day in, day out, and typical of much of the intelligence activity of a Sigint organisation; it might be hard to understand to those not steeped in it. Remember that Sigint analysts can’t ask their targets why they have changed the way they work, and have to look at information they are able to get about their targets’ operational activity to map back to the way they communicated, and thus identify potential indicators and warnings.  For example, a day’s radio silence in the German Army was identified on two occasions in October and November 1944 as being related to the move of a formation to a new location.

(In this extract ‘star’ refers to a communications network consisting of a ‘control’ and two or more ‘outstations’ which may or may not be allowed to work ‘laterally’ to one another. This was on the whole the most common communications structure as it corresponded most closely to the shape of order-of-battle subordination.)

‘German Army

Activity before and during the Ardennes Offensive.

It will be of interest to compare the W/T activity shortly after D day (described in Section 5) with activity before and during the Ardennes offensive, which was launched on Dec 16, 1944. Activity in the west generally had been very low in October and November, 1944, and it was obviously the policy of O.B. West at the time to restrict W/T communication to a minimum. A wireless silence had been ordered for the area of H.Gr.G on Oct. 13 for the transfer of Pz. A.O.K.5. and for certain static units of O.B.West on Nov. 9. The latter order may in fact have applied to all forward W/T links in the west for activity on the L/F Netz was extremely low from Nov. 6 (only one message was passed on 9th) and continued low throughout November and December. Similarly, two of the main stars of H.Gr.B (Beta 4S – operational and Beta 5S - supply) ceased activity about this time. 5S was active until Nov.7 and 4S until Nov.10.

A reference to Diagram 3 (Supplement 10), however, shows that from about Nov. 15. one of the operational stars of H.Gr.B (Beta 4S-) resumed activity and that by the end of the month the supply star (Beta 5S) and two other operational stars (Beta 7S and 8S) were also active. Beta 7S was in fact first identified on Dec.1.  In addition a new star of Panzer A.O.K. 6 (G2S) appeared on Nov. 28. In view of later events it can only he assumed that H.Gr.B was then trying out its new W/T links, based on a new Funkplan in preparation for the coming offensive. Thus although the forward L/F Netz was almost inactive prior to the offensive, links back from army were rather more active than usual. From a long-term point of view, however, the low activity generally in October and November and the wireless silences ordered were to some extent an indication that the Germans wished to conceal their future plans.

It is worth noting here that, owing to the low volume of traffic in November, Bantam, the main Enigma key in the west, was broken on only 3 occasions, and there was thus no indication from Army decodes of the coming offensive. It is clear that the intelligence staffs finally responsible for advising commands in the light of decode information should be aware of any gaps in W/T activity or cryptographic success, which might affect the completeness of their information.’

To summarise, those involved in network analysis recognised that something significant was going on, and recognised that the wireless ‘silence’ (more accurately a ‘communications minimise’) was indicative of a least a relocation of units. They also realised that intelligence staff should have made the Commands aware that something was happening with the Germans’ comms. There’s an element of ‘Not me, guv’ to this: traffic analysts were at the bottom of the pile and information flowed upwards. ‘someone’

Forty years after the event, Neil Webster, one of the authors of The Sixta History who had worked in the Fusion Centre, the point at which decrypted messages and TA were brought together before being sent to Hut 3 intelligence analysts for reporting (and with no access to the surviving records of) wrote (in Cribs for Victory, published in 2011 but written by 1984:

‘It was December 1944 and the German armies appeared to be in full retreat, when Rushworth and I read a message setting up a new 'star' on which were all the armoured divisions, including some transferred from the Russian front. They were given orders to maintain wireless silence apart from occasional calling and keying to keep in touch, keying that should never go on long enough for a bearing on the station to be taken. They did just that. The intercept stations were told to listen on the announced frequency and they picked up the announced call signs and a little keying at intervals but nothing else. At a meeting of officers of our unit, we considered whether to tell Hut 3 that this looked rather like preparation for a counter offensive. I was all for telling but the meeting decided not to for the rather poor reason that it would make a big fuss and we would look silly if we were wrong. A few days later came the Ardennes offensive for which the Allies were unprepared.

I talked about this later with Peter Calvocoressi, the head of Air Intelligence section in Hut 3, and he told me not to feel too badly about it, as Hut 3 already suspected from increases in railway traffic and other indications. Then why did not Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force know? I asked, Peter explained that Hut 3 was shy of going beyond its job of amending and explaining German messages. Drawing broad conclusions was for the intelligence staff at SHAEF, who had information from all sources. So Hut 3 did not tell SHAEF of the conclusions they were beginning to draw and SHAEF did not draw any conclusions, as is clear from Winterbotham's book The Ultra Secret, where he states there was no evidence of the enemy offensive from Bletchley or anywhere else.

Peter Calvocoressi, in his book Top Secret Ultra, gives a different account, quoting the story of the announcement of the new network as an example of valuable radio intelligence, as if I had actually told him in time. I'm sure I should have, even though it was not my job. I knew him and I should have told him the facts and asked his opinion. But at the time I didn't. Nor, I think, can Bax or Malabre [Rodney Bax and Basil Malabre were fellow army officers in Sixta] have commented on the message announcement as this would have been enough to put Winterbotham's staff on their guard. I still feel badly about it. It was so unlike Bletchley. And it cost lives.’

Each of these messages has a very different tone. The first is very matter of fact: it tells a story of low levels of activity (and therefore of cryptanalytic breaks) and an understanding that radio silence could be evidence of the relocation of a unit. (Later on, the fact that the closer they were to the German border, the more the German Army could take advantage of a landline network, which meant they didn’t need to use their radios as much.) The extract focuses on the need to ensure that levels of activity, and levels of cryptanalytic success are part of the Sigint story that should be sent to intelligence officers to give necessary context to the information they are giving to Commands about enemy activity.

Webster’s description is more dramatic: a meeting that interpreted the minimal intercept as probably part of the preparation for a counter-offensive, and the decision not to tell Hut 3 because it was the absence of activity that was the evidence for such an interpretation; Hut 3 having drawn similar conclusions from other indicators but not telling SHAEF, because it was SHAEF’s job to do the all-source analysis, not Bletchley’s. Webster also makes a value judgement – ‘It was so unlike Bletchley. And it cost lives’ – that is difficult to accept at face value. Interpretation of the intelligence it produced was not particularly welcome either in the Intelligence Divisions of the Service Ministries or those of the Commands.

Ralph Bennett sets out his stall as a commentator when, in Ultra in the West, he writes:

‘It is unusual to have the opportunity, when young, of sharing in the creation of an archive and then to be able to use it in later life for the purpose of historical research. I am conscious of my good fortune, but also of the hazards it brings. Writing 'from the inside', I have the advantage of knowing exactly how Ultra was handled. Re-reading the 1944-5 signals, although after so long an interval, has even brought back surprisingly vivid recollections of the particular circumstances in which some of the thousands which bear my initials were drafted. But this advantage has demanded the counterbalance of a deliberate will to write objectively; I have tried, for instance, to be as quick to point out what Ultra did not or could not do as to draw attention to its triumphs. It has also enlarged the historian's familiar problem, the avoidance of hindsight, not least because in this instance it has an unfamiliar twist.

Hut 3's job was to process with meticulous care a stream of intelligence items as they came in, and to publish them, under appropriate safeguards, to those who could use them. Our function was to elucidate each item, not to access the broad significance of them all or to issue periodical commentaries upon the intelligence as a whole. It was not for us to write position papers or propose action, scarcely even to suggest that a certain interpretation might be placed upon a number of apparently unrelated items if they were viewed together in a particular light, unless the reason for doing so derived from our specialized technical knowledge. These things were the province of command staffs and service ministries; we were neither an operational headquarters nor an aloof body of strategists. But since we did not issue appreciations or forecasts, we could hardly make mistakes on the grand scale, although we might err in translating or interpreting single items. There is nothing, for instance, to record what Hut 3 thought at the time about the evidence for an offensive in the Ardennes assembled in chapter 7, or even that it had a collective opinion at all. Awareness of this immunity from past error has made me very cautious before expressing my conviction that the field commanders more than once seriously mistook the true meaning of the Ultra intelligence with which we supplied them.’

I don’t think this will do. For a start, Bennett was working solely on the Hut 3 material released to TNA in DEFE 3 and had no access to other intelligence sources (either in 1944 or in 1978-79 when he was writing his book), and, anyway, had no experience of all-source of multi-source analysis assessment. Furthermore, as he notes in a 1983 letter to Webster reproduced in Cribs for Victory, he had forgotten that TA’s two primary tasks lay in driving collection resources to produce the cribs which would allow cryptanalysts to discover that day’s keys, and in providing the information about comms usage which would mean that stations could be tasked as productively as possible. Bennett has written a partial account, one which in this context is designed to show that Hut 3 produced valuable and relevant intelligence that the Allied Commands should have interpreted as preparations for a large-scale German offensive in the Ardennes.

Hinsley’s account is more nuanced than Bennett’s. It shows that the all-source analysts in the Commands were working with limited amounts of material from sources other than Ultra, that some of the messages were only decrypted days after they had been sent and intercepted, and cites one report which BP didn’t circulate as having been important, but decides, if far less trenchantly than Bennett, that the Allies should have done better.

These four examples show how easy it is even for people who were at Bletchley during the Second World War not to interpret BP’s records authoritatively. Neither Bennett nor Hinsley were traffic analysts (and even if Hinsley and his researchers had had access to The Sixta History it is very likely that they would have concluded that what it described was ‘in the noise’ rather than a clear contribution to intelligence). Without understanding the context in which intelligence was created and disseminated, it is hard to write something that doesn’t look like special pleading.

Underlying this are two aspects of BP that I have talked about before: first, that thoughtlessly applied ‘need-to-know’ can be a pernicious drag on any intelligence organisation as it stops analysts from understanding completely exactly what the link in the chain prior to theirs actually means; and second, that the various snobberies in the organisation (for example that cryptanalyst were somehow ‘better’ than any other analysts, or that graduates – especially Oxbridge graduates – were intellectually superior to non-graduates) hampered intelligence production: perhaps as much as need-to-know.

Each of these four works is valuable but were for different audiences. The Sixta History is a detailed account of how first information, and subsequently intelligence came to be derived from study of the way in which the German Army and Air Force used wireless telegraphy for their communications. It is dense and demands at least a basic understanding of radio communications network: it was written by traffic analysts as a guide for future traffic analysts. Cribs for Victory tells the story of how the people who developed this analytical technique did so, but focuses on the people. Bennett is the first person to show exactly how Ultra illuminated enemy operations and intentions. Hinsley (and his people) looked beyond Ultra to the whole of British Intelligence, and addressed the big picture rather than trying to analyse tens – perhaps hundreds – of thousands of individual reports.

I have an extra level of interest in the issues arising from this: This story interests me for several reasons: I managed the release processes for both Cribs for Victory and The Sixta History; I am an advocate for TA’s being recognised as a discipline as important as cryptanalysis in Sigint; I want to see better informed works recounting British Sigint history; and I like dispelling myths. Now that practically all of the relevant Sigint material surviving from the Second World War has been released, it is time to look again at the way that the material from GC&CS was prepared, disseminated and used. There is a long way to go!

 

 

Oversensitive Censorship

Just as it’s never difficult to overclassify a piece of information, it’s never difficult to find reasons not to declassify. The same principle governed the way official censorship operated during the Second World War: everybody knew that ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’, and censors, responsible for second guessing what the enemy just might infer from an odd sentence, could be just as cautious. What follows is a diary entry dated 19 April 1945.

‘Are you security-minded? I mean, really security-minded? Yes; I agree the war in this theatre of operations is nearly at an end, but we must be careful. Are you as careful as this, for example?

The Films Division of the Ministry of Information sponsoring a brief film of the foolishness of unnecessary train journeys decided that the dialogue of a garrulous woman traveller relating her unnecessary journey to her sister, talking of Crewe station thus: "I never saw so many people in my life, if there was one Canadian soldier, there were fifty thousand," should be amended to, "if there was one Canadian soldier, there were thousands."

The official explanation: "Security reasons; just think how awful if there were fifty thousand."

Terrible; but perhaps they meant the crush on the platforms!’

(John Paddy Carstairs Kaleidoscope and a Jaundiced Eye Hurst & Blackett London 1946)

When Opposite Sides Share the same Crypto

I imagine that very few people think about the cryptographic consequences of a country breaking up but they can be significant, especially if the break-up is violent. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, for example, produced within days two opposing armed forces which used the same encryption systems which had to be modified on the fly by people with little cryptographic experience. The same thing happened in France in 1940 when the Free French military broke away from those who accepted the Armistice. One such break-up during the Second World War, that of the division of Italy into areas controlled by Mussolini’s Italian Social Republic based in Salò and those controlled by the Kingdom of Italy and based in Salerno, were written up after the war by Fred Catty, Head of the Italian Diplomatic Section in Berkeley St. (Commercial and Diplomatic Sigint were hived off from Bletchley Park to London early in 1942.)

Italian Diplomatic ciphers had been read without difficulty by GC&CS until in 1941 the Germans committed to joint operations with the Italians in North Africa. The Germans had been reading Italian systems themselves and simply refused to share classified material with their ally. However, the Germans decided that ensuring that the Italians gave nothing away of German intentions was more important than reading their traffic. They informed the Italians about the weakness of their systems and in July 1942 the old systems were gradually replaced by new ones. Fortunately for Berkeley Street the Germans did not bother to supervise Italian use of the new systems so they were never as secure as they should have been. In fact, by the end of 1942 the Italian Diplomatic Section was as successful as it had been before the new systems were introduced. In January 1943 the Italians appear to have had some misgivings and they added an extra level of security which should have brought GC&CS to a full-stop: but operator error neutralised the precautions the Italians had taken.  

In July 1943 Mussolini was deposed but escaped from captivity and set up his own Neo-Fascist Government in North Italy. In September the Royal Italian Government accepted unconditional surrender. Mussolini had his own Foreign Ministry located at Salò (Lake Garda) with its own WT Station while the Royal Italian Foreign Ministry was based at Salerno.

What follows is Mr Catty’s description (from HW 43/4 which hasn’t been released but which is quoted in HW 43/75-77, de Grey’s draft history, which has) of what happened next. It is worth highlighting that that the UK and US were as lax as the Germans had been in supervising their new allies’ security, and that the organisational and geographical separation of communications intelligence and communications security in the UK wasted cryptanalytic effort at Berkeley St.

‘There was quite an extensive array of posts which would claim to represent this Neo-Fascist Government abroad. In all of Europe occupied by the Germans the former Italian Ministers perforce remained Fascist; in addition, in Madrid, besides the 'Royal" Italian Embassy, Mussolini 'accredited' a Dr. Morreale (believed to have been the brother of Clara Petacci) as his 'Ambassador'. In Tokyo the Ambassador preferred interment as a 'Royalist', but Col. Principini, Military Attaché, took over. All these and isolated posts in various countries would now be trying to report to and take orders from Mussolini.

In the South there was now a 'Royal Italian' Government (at Salerno until Rome was taken nearly a year later). The Italian Diplomatic Service was always royalist by tradition. And now all the major ambassadors and ministers in countries where they could safely do so, declared for the King and put themselves at the disposal of the Allies. In Madrid the Royal Embassy handed over all its cyphering material for inspection to the Allied Representatives.

Meanwhile the Salerno Government, being subject to the control of Allied Force Headquarters for its communications, made a case first that it needed to communicate with Royal Italian posts abroad and subsequently that it should have cyphers (deposited if need be) in which to do so.

All the cyphers hitherto used by the Foreign Ministry in Rome had obviously to be considered as now equally useless to either side. The Germans in Rome had ample opportunity of ransacking the "Ufficio Cifra". We know that they did so. At the same time they must have known that Royal Embassies would deliver up their stock to us and that men who knew all this material were in Allied hands. It was a reasonable conclusion that neither we nor the Germans would ever be concerned with these codes and tables again.

It should be recorded that it was the unreasonable that happened. When cypher traffic was intercepted, as in the French case, both sides were found using the compromised cyphers.

Owing to the urgent needs of Japanese and other sections at Berkeley Street the Italian Section had, as soon as Italy surrendered, been quickly dissolved. Fortunately there remained a small nucleus to examine any cypher traffic which might need investigating, and its problem, for the first six months was (again contrary to all reason) not a Fascist, but a Royal, pro-allied cypher.

For the first seven months the Fascist traffic which was intercepted was almost entirely in plain text. This was probably an order made by the Germans, since, from an intercept in December we knew that they were reducing the strength and status of Fascist posts everywhere and they may well at this juncture not have had time to bother with supervising Fascist cyphers.

Traffic was intercepted between Salò and Berlin, Madrid, Tokyo and Budapest. Between September 1943 and January 1944 there were 800 intercepts, none of them separately important, but together giving a picture of the set-up at Salò the attitude of the Germans, and who were Mussolini's adherents abroad.

But there began to be intercepted in January cypher traffic between the Royal Embassy in Madrid and the Salerno Foreign Office which was entirely different from any known Italian Diplomatic Cypher. It was found to be a transposition, believed double since prolonged efforts failed to break it. We were in fact spending our efforts on a system which Allied Military headquarters had approved (and as we later learned) improved for the Italians on our side.

Eventually the key-book was sent to us. The keys at that time were derived from an English illustrated magazine. Though it was a 'deposited' system, it was not certain that the traffic was being read at Caserta [ie Allied Military HQ], and this was therefore done and the contents, when of interest, translated at Berkeley Street.

From this it became clear firstly that the system, being laborious, was unsuited to the long dispatches which diplomats have to send; secondly that the Italians were ignoring rules which were part of the security of the system, and thirdly that Madrid was being told to retransmit messages received in this system to a post which did not hold it. This last would be a major blunder, of which the Italians were quite capable.

But our interception of Royal Italian showed even worse to be going on, of which Allied Force Headquarters in Italy could not be aware, since they controlled only the use of cypher into and out of Italy. Between Madrid and seven other posts various of the old and completely compromised cyphers were being used.

This gradually led the Foreign Office to the conclusion that to advise the Italian Foreign Office and ensure that it used only secure cyphers and used them correctly a joint Anglo-American Mission staffed by Berkeley Street and ASA, Washington should be attached to the Allied Control Commission in Italy. This mission arrived in Rome on 1st October 1944. It consisted of the head of the Italian Section at Berkeley Street with one secretary and of an officer who had worked in the Italian Section at ASA, Washington. It worked in Rome as a subsection of the Communications Section of the Allied Control Commission until the end of hostilities in Italy in May 1945. Its terms of reference were:

1. To watch Italian diplomatic communications and their security.

2. To provide the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Italian missions abroad with suitable means of communication.

3. To keep the Foreign Office, State Department and Allied Control Commission informed of the contents of Italian telegrams.

4. To keep GC&CS and the corresponding US organisation informed regarding Italian cyphers and lines of communication.

The Italian Foreign Office, now reestablished in Rome, had been informed through the Allied Control Commission of items 1 and 2, and no doubt suspected 3. Contact with its cypher bureau was established at once on the amicable footing that our control was a necessity while operations were impending. Each party was well aware that it was dealing with its professional opposite numbers who had obligations which would be veiled throughout the official dealings by a good-humoured reticence.’

 

Austerity in Post-War GCHQ - and Help from Friends

Austerity, belt-tightening, peace dividend: at various points during my career HMG found ways to make my life less simple, either by cutting GCHQ’s budget and therefore the resource we had available to put against a particular issue; or, more simply, by making sure I had a pay rise of less than the rate of inflation (as happened for each of the last ten years before I retired).

But much as I might have grumbled at the time (and since) I have to say that I never faced the conditions that GCHQ staff faced in the first few years after they left Bletchley Park in April 1946 to return to London: in fact to a former Bombe outstation at Eastcote, between Harrow and Ruislip in NE London.

Bletchley Park was too big for the much reduced Sigint organisation, and staff who had been with the organisation before the outbreak of war had been promised a return to London when peace came. However, not only was the London location not civil service premises in Broadway, nor anywhere else in SW1 (as returnees might have expected) for that matter, but the premises they were to occupy in Eastcote were just the same wartime TOBs – Temporary Office Buildings – many of them had spent years working in during the war.

The country was broke: there was no money for infrastructure other than to make do, and mend what could be repaired. Much of the damage caused by the 1940-42 blitz and the V-weapon attacks of 1944-45 remained unrepaired. The housing stock, which was already substandard in the 1930s, was in a much worse state after a decade of neglect. Not only that, but food rationing was still in place – in fact was even more severe than in wartime.

The winter of 1947/48 was exceptionally cold, so cold that transport was sufficiently disrupted to cause the breakdown of the national distribution network. And this caused more problems in the cities than in more rural areas, as food could not be brought from the areas in which it was produced to the areas in which it could not be produced. Rationing of potatoes — something that hadn't happened during the war — was introduced.

So I think of my predecessors in Eastcote in December 1949. It was more than ten years since the beginning of the war, and yet heating was limited, public transport was the only way to and from work, and salaries were low and highly taxed. (Income tax was 45%, while for those on salaries above £2000 (there were very few at GCHQ) the higher level of tax was 55%.) The 56 conditioned weekly working hours of wartime had been moved back to 42.5 (exceptionally: the rest of the Civil Service was on 45), but it had already been announced that these 42.5 hours would rise to 45.5 hours the following year, with Saturday morning working reintroduced. In short, things were bleak.

As I said at the beginning, this was austerity with a vengeance, but in December 1949, as had been the case in December 1947 and December 1948, there was a tiny challenge to the austerity in GCHQ. Not a staff rebellion, not some outrageous act of theft, but the action of a large number of unknown friends. On 22 December 1949 staff received a message from AD(P) (Assistant Director Personnel. responsible for HR, Finance and Personnel Security). This post was held by Eric Jones, who would later become GCHQ Director. He came from a family of textile manufacturers based in Manchester who had been commissioned into the RAF as a Group Captain and had been posted to Bletchley Park specifically to make Hut 3 (German Army and Air Force analysis and reporting) work efficiently and productively. For the time, his approach was singular: he dealt with all of his subordinates with courtesy and tact, treating them all, from the most junior, as individuals. This brought out the best in his staff and as a result Hut 3 tended to be a happy place to work. (Some of his Directorate colleagues referred to him, somewhat sniffily, as 'the Manchester Businessman': it was not meant to be complimentary.)

AD(P)'s message informed staff of the Christmas signal that the Director had sent to the Coordinator, the head of the (US) Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA), the predecessor of NSA.

The Notice reads as follows

‘Signal to Coordinator

The distribution of gifts so kindly sent by staff of AFSA has just taken place. This wonderful generosity, and the friendship of which it is the token, is warmly appreciated by all, whether lucky or unlucky in the draw. By it, over the past three years, about a thousand of GCHQ staff, covering the lower salary scales, have shared the parcels.

Please be good enough to convey this message to the staff of AFSA, with the thanks and best wishes for Christmas and the New Year of the whole staff at GCHQ.’

What had happened was that the staff at AFSA, who had heard through US liaison staff in London of the hardships facing their UK opposite numbers, had decided in 1947 to send Christmas parcels to GCHQ. At GCHQ, it was agreed that only clerical staff, the people who couldn’t easily afford to supplement their rations on the black market, should enter a draw for the parcels. And the clerical staff quickly worked out that by pooling their tickets and sharing the results of the draw for the parcels, the chances of some supplement to the Christmas ration was more likely. In this context, ‘about a thousand of GCHQ staff, covering the lower salary scales’ meant just about everybody in clerical positions. It's hard to imagine nowadays, but each of those food parcels made a difference between an austerity Christmas and an old-fashioned "eat, drink and be merry" Christmas.

This is also a demonstration of the fact that UKUSA has always been something more than an arrangement of expedience. The relationship with partners has an added dimension because of the continual contact between individuals from each of the agencies. At this level, the relationship isn’t between allies so much as friends, and friends look out for each other. (And it shows the boundless generosity that characterises so many Americans. In November 1948 the organising committee at AFSA was quoted $1000 for the thousand eight ounce packages of tea and the thousand one pound packets of sugar it sent alongside the CARE packages.)

I wonder what the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come would have had to show all those people: their dreams might not have gone much beyond the basics: enough to eat; a warm house; nice clothes; but imagine how pleased they would be if they could look into the future and see that as the world changed, and the country managed to sort itself out, the need for the food parcels went away.

One or two old lags might recognise this as a reworked version of something I posted internally in GCHQ when I was still ‘inside the wire’. My thanks to my successor for letting me retell the story and for letting me use the photographs.

Sigint in Fiction

I had an articled published last month in the John Buchan Journal (unsurprisingly, the journal of the John Buchan Society). It is about the way that John Buchan drew on his First World War experience as a customer of Sigint to use cryptanalysis in one of his books and in a short story to advance the narrative, and to develop characters.

A key point, I feel, is that it is impossible to describe the process of cryptanalysis in a work of fiction and make it interesting for the general reader. Buchan’s answer was to give a vague idea of an encryption system: Playfair in one, double transposition in the other; make the reader understand that this is something really difficult, and that therefore the practitioners have to be intelligent, and not just lucky; and move on, making the story (or the relevant part of the story) about people who break codes or ciphers, not about the process of breaking them.

Two of the novels of Dorothy L Sayers have cryptanalytic sub-plots. Lord Peter Wimsey certainly shows himself to be intelligent in breaking the messages concerned, but the eight or nine pages in Chapter 28 of Have His Carcase, in which he goes step by step through the process of breaking a message enciphered with Playfair, and takes no prisoners while doing so. (She doesn’t try quite as hard in The Nine Tailors, in which she describes in just two or three pages an encryption method which uses as its key the course of the treble bell in a peal of Kent Treble Bob Major.)

Perhaps the process of cryptanalysis is of limited interest to the reader of a novel because the process of Sigint – interception, analysis, cryptanalysis – is analogous (though less interesting) to having somebody physically steal a copy of the message. The point the author is aiming at is that somebody who shouldn’t have had access to the message now has it, so the story can move on. There are more and less interesting ways of doing this, and pausing the story so that Lord Peter can show off is at the ‘less’ end of the scale.

I’m not aware, and I think the reason why is clear, that there is that much at all about Sigint in literature. I’ve dealt with Buchan; From Russia With Love is the only Bond story which touches on it (the attempt to steal a Soviet encryption device draws from British plans to steal Enigmas during the Second World War that Ian Fleming was closely involved with); John Hale’s The Whistle Blower is about cryptologists, but not cryptology; are there any more?  (I'm speaking of British novels.)

There is one candidate for a novel about GCHQ, though: The Tin Men by Michael Frayn. His National Service was spent being trained in Russian so that he could be a Sigint linguist. The novel is about a research organisation: The William Morris Institute of Automation Research. The institute is at the forefront of automation: computers are being programmed to write newspaper articles, produce popular TV shows and say prayers. But problems begin when programmers begin to program computers to welcome HM The Queen on a royal visit to the Institute. No spoilers, but it is as funny a book as you would expect the author of Noises Off to have written, and could probably claim the title of the first satirical novel about AI.

The novel was published in 1965, at a time when any mention of GCHQ and the work it carried out would have brought an author to charges under the Official Secrets Act. But in the succeeding fifty years the story has been passed down in GCHQ that The Tin Men was Frayn’s attempt to make sense of the UK’s national Sigint organisation.

Do read it!