Personnel Security at Bletchley Park - Part Three

The Right Club was a British fascist organisation, set up by Archibald Ramsay MP just before the start of the Second World War. It was virulently anti-Semitic and opposed to war with Germany. One of the people associated with it was Tylor Kent, a clerk at the US Embassy in London. He had access to messages which Winston Churchill, when First Lord of the Admiralty, and President Roosevelt exchanged through the US diplomatic bag. Another member of the club, Anna Wolkoff was instrumental in getting this, and other, information to the Axis powers via the Italian Embassy. This was discovered, and Kent and Wolkoff were both convicted under the Official Secrets Act and imprisoned.

MI5 was responsible for the investigation, and among Anna Wolkoff's possessions a membership card for the Right Club was found in the name of Muriel Wright. It took little time to work out that she was working at Bletchley Park and SIS confirmed that she was working for them "in their code and cypher department", ie GC&CS. MI5 and SIS agreed that Maxwell Knight, an MI5 officer would go to Bletchley to question her – SIS was particularly keen that the police should not be brought in.

Her statement is available on Anna Wolkoff's file which has been released to The National Archives (TNA) as KV 2/841.

Statement of MURIEL JOYCE WRIGHT, Room 47 Foreign Office. London. S.W.1.

I have been cautioned by Captain Maxwell Knight that anything I say will be taken down in writing and may be used in evidence. To show that I understand the nature of this caution I herewith append my signature. 

Signed: Muriel J Wright

My name is Muriel Joyce Wright. I am a spinster aged 30. I have been employed in a clerical capacity under the Foreign Office since 22nd April 1940.

I first met Anna Wolkoff in September 1938 having been introduced to her by my cousin Bridget Hurt (now Mrs Mellon). I worked in Anna Wolkoff's dress shop In Conduit Street during September and October 1938 when I left her employment after a disagreement with her over international affairs and the racial question. I did not see Anna Wolkoff again until a date in May 1939 when at the invitation of my aunt Lady Winifred Elwes I attended a meeting held - I think at the Caxton Hall, Westminster - which was addressed by Captain Ramsay M.P., another M.P. whom I believe was Mr. McGovan and a third speaker who had been some kind of an observer during the Spanish Civil War. While I cannot remember details of the speeches made, the general trend of Captain Ramsay's remarks were (sic) very favourable to the Nazi regime in Germany.

As I was leaving the meeting I saw Anna Wolkoff who asked me to join the Right Club. She handed me a card which I filled in and signed. I recognise the writing on the photographic copy of the Right Club card shown to me by Captain Knight as being my handwriting and signature. Anna Wolkoff also said something to me about distributing pamphlets saying that she would ring me up about it but she never did so. I only saw Anna Wolkoff once again between the date of the above meeting and the present date, this was about October or November 1939. I met her in the street in Lowndes Square. She stopped and talked to me about her holiday in Germany just before the outbreak of war saying that she did not think this country had a chance against Germany as their army was superior to ours in every way.

I have never seen Captain Ramsay except at the meeting referred to before and I have never taken any part in the activities of the Right Club, in fact when questioned about the Right Club by Captain Knight the title of the club conveyed nothing to me until I was shown the photograph of my membership card. I have never been a member of the British Union but I have known Captain Robert Gordon Canning for seven or eight years and I know that he was acquainted with Anna Wolkoff.

To the best of my knowledge and belief Anna Wolkoff does not know the nature of my employment or where I am employed.

I should like to state that I am not politically minded and have never belonged to any Pro-German organization.

This statement has been read over to me and it is true.

Signed: Muriel. J. Wright.

Witnessed by Maxwell Knight.

Captain General Staff, War Office, S.W.1.

June 30th 1940.

Based on this statement and her explanation of what had happened Maxwell Knight exonerated her completely: "I am satisfied from Miss Wright's behaviour and statement that she is not implicated in any sinister activities of the Right Club".

Maxwell Knight appears not to have been told (and did SIS know?) that Muriel Wright had been one of Ian Fleming's lovers since 1935. Fleming was, by now, personal assistant to Admiral Godfrey, the Director of Naval Intelligence. She had been working as an Air Raid warden late in 1939 and by the end of 1940 she was working for Fleming as a despatch rider for the Naval Intelligence Division. It isn't clear why she left Bletchley Park, but Andrew Lycett's biography of Ian Fleming suggests that she was neither temperamentally nor intellectually suited to GC&CS, and that the patronage that Fleming could dispense from this period onwards would easily extend to getting her into a more congenial job.

As far as I am aware this investigation is the only one carried out by MI5 on a member of Bletchley Park that has been released to TNA. I mentioned the case of Duncan Taylor yesterday: the MI5 officer on his case seems to have been unaware of what Taylor's work entailed, but the extract written by the Head of Security that I posted a couple of days ago, and some of the inferences about unreleased files one can draw from those that have been released, suggest that personnel security at Bletchley Park was a rather more complicated matter than many people suppose.

Personnel Security at Bletchley Park - Part Two

In 1943 an RAF Pilot Officer, Duncan Taylor, was posted to Bletchley Park. He was married to Barbara Kuczynski, one of a family of German refugees, all of whom seem to have been Soviet agents: the most famous was Barbara's sister Ursula, about whom Ben MacIntyre has written a bestseller, Agent Sonya. 

From evidence acquired from investigations into the Kuczynskis, MI5 believed that P/O Taylor was a communist sympathiser, and made enquiries about him to the RAF while he was posted to an Intelligence job in the Middle East. The RAF thought him slightly odd, but certainly not a traitor. After service in the Middle East, he was posted back to the UK: MI5 learned of this from a transcript derived from a telephone tap (available from The National Archives on KV 2/2935):

"Margot rang Barbara (slightly foreign) who said that they had come back on Friday. Barbara said that Margot must be free for Hilary (man) one day. Barbara said that she was in bed cutting out educational articles in the 'Times' that he wants! She said that everything is just the same now between herself and her husband after so long as he has been 2½ years in Egypt. He is now in Bletchley."

On the original document, there is a mark next to "He is now in Bletchley" and one or two authors have made something of it. I think that the lack of any sort of follow-up to this note makes it highly unlikely that whichever MI5 officer saw this realised what Bletchley Park was, or what GC&CS did there: I think it more probable that this was a simple 'note to self' that, if necessary, Taylor could be located.

David Burke's Family Betrayal, one of several books about the Kuczynski family, claims that Barbara had been recruited into the GRU by her sister Ursula, and that Barbara cultivated and kept close to several fellow-travellers who were employed at Bletchley Park. He names Mary Tyler (née Southcombe), Dorothy White (née Gerrish) and Hyam Maccoby. 

I know nothing about these three, but it is hard to believe that among the tens of thousands of different people involved in the various aspects of Sigint during different periods of the Second World War one or two fellow-travellers didn't slip through. The question is what difference they made, and the answer, I think, unlike in the case of Cairncross, is likely to be that they made very little difference.  

Bletchley Park did not produce the finished, assessed intelligence that was normally produced in the service ministries' intelligence divisions and which would have been of much more value to the USSR. Sigint organisations rarely produce single items of earth-shattering value. The value of their reporting comes from building up a picture out of hundreds or thousands of individual items of traffic. This is why I am dubious about the value of the 5832 documents allegedly passed to the Soviets by Cairncross, especially as none of the information in them could possibly reach Moscow for days or weeks after the time of their transmission. They would contain microscopic fragments of information: "1 SS Panzer Division reports that it is continuing operations in the W and WNW of its sector"; not a full Order of Battle, or the Operational Plan for the Eastern Front.

And only a small proportion of all of those thousands of people who worked in Sigint will have had any access at all to intelligence: the largest part of the work of Bletchley Park was about keeping Bletchley Park in business. This doesn't mean just the people involved in administering the organisation, managing recruiting, accommodating, paying, feeding, and housing the workforce; separate from this the process of working with interception sites to develop and maintain an understanding of how the Axis Armed Forces communicated so that relevant communications could be identified and intercepted when they were needed, was much more complex and labour-intensive than most people realise. My educated guess is that no more than 15% (and probably less) of staff at Bletchley Park were working on intercepted material to produce intelligence, and that after the cryptanalysts, traffic analysts, translators, emenders and indexers had done their work, possibly as few as 2% of staff created or handled Bletchley Park's 'end product', the finished intelligence sent to its customers.

Nobody knows exactly what material Cairncross was giving to his Soviet controller, but the idea that he supplied enough information to enable the USSR to defeat Nazi Germany at Kursk is risible: he could no doubt provide some operational information of interest to the Soviets, but not in a large volume, or in a timely manner; and the relevance of anything that crossed his desk was serendipitous for the Soviets. The big secret that the Soviets learned from Cairncross was that GC&CS was able to break high-grade German ciphers and that it used electromechanical technology as part of its cryptanalytic attack. By comparing what Cairncross revealed with what they were able to do themselves, and with the material they captured from the Germans, the Soviets would also be able to predict how effective UK attacks on German encryption systems would be against Soviet systems.

This brings me to 'need to know'. Everybody who has read about Bletchley Park knows that there was excessive compartmentation of information. Keeping the number of people 'in the know' to a minimum was preferred to spreading the circle of knowledge to anybody who might have been able to take advantage of it. Dilly Knox is reported to have asked: "How do I know whether I need to know something if I don't know what it is?", a point of view with which most of us involved with compartmented classified information will have shared at one point or another, but while excessive need to know will have hampered the efficiency of the organisation, it will also have acted as an effective brake on the activity of any Soviet agents at Bletchley.

Tomorrow I'll look at the only MI5 interrogation of somebody working at Bletchley Park that I have come across.

 

 

 

 

 

Personnel Security at Bletchley Park - Part One

Looking at the relationship between GC&CS and MI5 during the Second World War I have come across a few things which are tangential to my main area of interest, but which I feel are worth a bit of discussion. One of these is personnel security.

I've recently finished Chris Smith's excellent The Last Cambridge Spy, his biography of John Cairncross, the Soviet Agent who worked at Bletchley Park (as well as in SIS and elsewhere in Whitehall), who is famously alleged to have passed 5832 documents from Hut 3 to his Soviet handlers and to have passed the intelligence which enabled the Red Army to defeat the Wehrmacht at the Battle of Kursk in 1943.

In most of the popular literature Cairncross is usually portrayed as the only agent the Soviets had inside Bletchley Park: I believe it is more realistic to say that he was likely to have been the only successful Soviet agent inside BP (though I don't think that the 5832 documents are the measure of his success). We can certainly identify one person posted in to Bletchley – Duncan Taylor, the brother in law of Ursula Kuczynski ('Agent Sonya') – who was aware of (and comfortable with) the fact that most of his wife Barbara's family had worked or were working for the USSR. We also know the names of friends of Barbara who were communist sympathisers working at Bletchley. But a posting to Bletchley Park was less likely to enable a Soviet agent to acquire valuable intelligence than might have been possible in MI5 or SIS, and certainly less than in the Foreign Office of the Intelligence Divisions of the Service ministries.

The authorities responsible for security at Bletchley Park were well aware of the threat posed by the Communist Party of Great Britain and were alert to the need to look out for party members. Their response was more subtle than it might have been, and was effective – when it identified them.

In his Organisation and Evolution of British Sigint (HW 43/75-78 The National Archives) Nigel de Grey quoted the "Head of Security" (probably Henry Hayward, the Senior Security Officer from January 1942 to at least late 1945) as follows:

"Having been put wise by SIS and MI5 to the system adopted by the Communist Party for penetrating British secrets I asked that … the first [case] of its kind, and all subsequent ones should be left in my hands in the first place and to be allowed to ignore the Director's order [i.e. from 'C', the Head of SIS] that all Communists should be immediately dismissed. I appreciated that most of the reports would concern young and intelligent people from the Universities, who would have no idea of the thumbscrews that might later be put upon them by the Party if it were learnt that they were engaged in secret work. I had been made aware of the difficulties of split loyalties that would then be created and I did not fail to recognize the miseries of mind that might ensue. I felt sure that in the majority of cases I should find little hesitation on the part of such young people when they were squarely faced by the necessity of choosing one loyalty or the other, if it were done in a friendly and understanding way. Very different might be the position had they been entangled in the subtle net of the Party. The point was to warn them of the dangers and to prevent their becoming entangled and so faced with the grimmest of dilemmas.

All such cases I dealt with in private and found the majority comparatively easy to handle since they were mostly in fact but the mildest of adherents who were interested as most intelligent young people were in the subject of communism because it was new and were shocked and horrified when told of the trap that might be laid for them. I was able to quote specific cases (supplied to me by MI5) which carried conviction."

There were, however, two difficult cases. The first concerned a young man who had already been convicted of the grossest insecurity … he had revealed in the Common Room of his former college to a number of dons present not only that he was engaged in the solution of German submarine keys of the Enigma machine, but also the dilemma caused by the introduction of the fourth wheel. It would of course have been arranged for the case to be heard in camera, but the accusation and its importance would have to be revealed not only to the prosecuting counsel and solicitors but to the defending counsel and solicitors, to the boy's parents and to all the officers present in court – a calculated minimum of some 60 or 70 persons. 'C' declined to take such a risk on so delicate a subject and the young man was retained in GC&CS because he was a poor type whom we felt was better kept under our own eye than launched into military service with danger of reneged indiscretions that we should know nothing of. It emerged that his parents were ardent communists and that he himself attended Party meetings, though there was no proof that he had done so during the war. It was obvious that this was no case for an interview of the kind I have described. One could be sure that its tenor would be reported to his parents and that the Government' s knowledge of Communist methods would be revealed and probably under pressure more of the vital secrets of GC&CS. I consulted earnestly and long with MI5 and SIS and it appeared that all the arguments which had induced us to hold on to him after his case of insecurity still held good. All that we could do was to arrange for the head of his section to keep a fatherly eye upon him in this new direction and to report from time to time upon his behaviour. MI5 also took appropriate steps to keep an eye upon his outside movements. (This paragraph conflates two separate accounts of this story given by de Grey.)

"The other case concerned an Army Y officer who was due to visit GC&CS for instruction.    On the day he was to arrive it was discovered that his wife was a well-known 'Forces Contact' (a communist who acted as a link between the Party and members of the Armed Forces) who was under surveillance and he was obviously an unwelcome visitor. We felt obliged to tell DD Y (the Head of Army Sigint) so and consequently put MI8 in an extremely awkward position since the officer was due for promotion to the command of a Y unit in the field and had been sent home for instruction at GC&CS prior to taking up his new post. In spite of careful coaching by MI5 in the delicacy of handling these cases, the whole situation was bungled. The officer was denied his command and posted to India, where he was not only told the reason for his posting but placed in a job where every secret of Signal Intelligence passed through his hands. He became a thoroughly disgruntled man and threatened to bring his case of victimization to the notice of the Army Council.

Other cases of proved Party adherence by people of mature age were dealt with discreetly and the people dropped from the organisation as soon as opportunity – such as reorganisation and redundancy – occurred. Another means adopted way to post them to work they disliked and accept their resignations when offered. These methods may not sound very pretty but one cannot afford in my own view to put on kid gloves over Security in Signal Intelligence. The prime object is that 'Source' should be protected and the matter carried out in such a way that no sense of grievance is created."

(It says a lot about the Senior Security Officer that his vision of taking the kid gloves off, even when the UK was engaged in total war, was to post unwanted people to work they wouldn't like, so that they would resign and go to work elsewhere.)

More on the specific cases of Cairncross and Duncan Taylor tomorrow.