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!

 

More Detail on Cairncross at Bletchley Park

Last week saw a major release to The National Archives of MI5 files, mainly concerning ‘The Cambridge Five’ or at least the three of them, Philby, Blunt and Cairncross, whom MI5 had the opportunity to investigate (Burgess and Maclean having skipped the jurisdiction).

I’ve obviously not been able to go through this new material in any detail, but I have looked at the parts of the Cairncross files which shed light on his time at Bletchley Park.

I covered some of this three years ago in Sigint Historian: Personnel Security at Bletchley Park - Part Two

There is some interesting new (to me) detail. Cairncross had been encouraged by his controller to join GC&S or SIS. When he first identified to MI5 the battle in which the Ultra material he had passed to his controller had given the Red Army a decisive advantage over the Germans he claimed it was the Battle of Kharkov (Kharkiv, of course, today), not Kursk. Interviewed in 1967, Peter Wright asked him whether he could remember anybody at Bletchley who might have been pro-Russian: his answer was that everybody at BP was pro-Russian because of the events of the war, but he named three people Hugo Gatti, Philip Pounsey and Douglas Parmier, but these are likely simply to be three names plucked out of the air. (None appear on the Bletchley Park Roll of Honour.)

Edit: I stand corrected. Hugh Gatty, Philip Pouncey and Douglas Parmeé are all on the BP Roll of Honour.

More insidiously, he said that his Soviet controller had once asked him why a former FO colleague, Roddy Greiffenhagen, had transferred to GC&CS, and whether this move would hit Greiffenhagen financially. After some investigation, MI5 discovered that Greiffenhagen was eased out of the FO ‘because of his total inability to do the work required’, and concluded that Cairncross was likely to have passed biographical details of other FO colleagues to the Soviets as well. He admitted to having passed a couple of pen pictures of GC&CS colleagues to his controller, but couldn’t remember who they were. This part of the release leaves a question mark over Greiffenhagen’s reputation: it’s a bit unfair, as there was no doubt an investigation subsequently: one, potentially, for a future release.

Cairncross said that his controller was annoyed when he engineered a transfer for himself from BP to SIS Section V at Ryder St to work on counter espionage (a section to which GC&CS deployed several members of staff as it began to resume its work on Soviet targets), the annoyance, he claimed, being because of the quality of the material he was passing from Hut 3. I wonder whether the presence there already of Kim Philby might have been a better reason for the controller’s annoyance.

There is a curious tale of Cairncross at Ryder St pestering somebody (whose name is redacted) at Berkeley St (where GC&CS diplomatic traffic was worked) to get information about a breakthrough made by Berkeley St. The unnamed person said that he had probably been indiscreet at the time, but reflecting on matters in 1967, thought that as Philby was handling this material, his indiscretions were probably not that relevant.

There is an amusing 1955 account by Henry Dryden (a Second World War Siginter who stayed on after the war). In the spring of 1949 Cairncross phoned Dryden at GCHQ, then at Eastcote, inviting him to lunch, and over the soup course asked whether GCHQ was a successful with Soviet encryption as it had been with German. Dryden ‘mumbled some sort of non-committal reply, bringing in the phrase “one-time pad” and tried to give the impression that one could not do anything to make progress’. This story, at least, is already in the public domain, having been told by Dryden in 1993, in a postscript to his contribution to Hinsley and Stripp’s Codebreakers.

There may well be more details in these files, and I’m sure there will certainly be in other files in the release, but three things stand out to me. The first is something I have mentioned before: how little the MI5 investigators knew of (never mind understood) how Sigint worked and their consequently appearing to deal with it as not as key an issue as were some others. The second, is that my judgement of three years ago, that of course it was likely there were other Soviet sympathisers at Bletchley, but that they were unlikely to have been able to pass on many great secrets, hasn’t changed, not least because of the third: that only if somebody had access to Bletchley’s serialised reported intelligence would it be possible to pass intelligible information to a hostile intelligence service.