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.

Enigma and the Poles

Chris Smith (@spy_historian) tweeted a series of tweets about the Polish contribution to Enigma cryptanalysis this morning. I copy them here, adding some comments, and then write a bit more broadly about the issue. 

CS: Polish work on Enigma was truly impressive. They broke it while the British basically ignored it because they deemed it insoluble. A waste of time.

TC: The British had broken the commercial variant of Enigma early in 1927, and an improved solution was developed in time to exploit its use by the Spanish and Italian Navies during the Spanish Civil War and subsequently. I don't think it's fair to say that they thought the military variants insoluble, but up to 1939 they had no idea how to approach the problem. Put crudely, people who broke book-based codes, and simple electromechanical ciphers couldn't break more complex machine-based ciphers.

CS: They recognised the value of machine-based approaches. Though the Bomba was rapidly rendered obsolete by upgrades to Enigma systems, the Bomba was proof of concept. Use machines to break machines. I've argued elsewhere that Enigma and Bombas were an industrial revolution.

TC: Mechanical support to cryptanalysis wasn't new: Hollerith machines had been used in Room 40 during the First World War and other machines were being proposed in the second half of 1939 as GC&CS recruited from a deeper pool. The specific Polish breakthrough was to design, build and deploy a machine that mimicked Enigma. Following Turing's meeting in Parish with Rejewski he adopted the same concept for his (otherwise very different) Bombe.

CS: The contribution of the Poles, who shared their successes with the British, paved the way for upscaling that culminated in the SIGINT phenomenon that was #BletchleyPark. The BP Trust were right to create a Polish memorial, Prince Andrew was right to gift Poland an Enigma.

TC: Although the BP Trust were wrong to give one of the Enigmas GCHQ had loaned to them to Prince Andrew to gift to the Poles … !

CS: However, it has become a trope that this Polish contribution has been largely unrecognised in Britain and the US. My argument is that this is simply untrue. In fact, from the early days of Ultra becoming public knowledge - 1974 - the Poles were recognised.

CS: It is almost impossible to find a book that doesn't recognise their *massive* contribution. Yet these same texts often state that they have been under-recognised while recognising them. It is a weird, self-replicating myth. 

TC: The problem is that the nature, and particularly the source, of the Polish contribution was either ignored or grossly oversimplified (as largely was the case with the UK's own cryptanalytic work): so little was released by GCHQ in the first twenty years after the 1974 revelation that mythology filled the gaps. 

CS: So powerful is the myth, it has caused minor international spats. The Polish ambassador to the UK complained about Polish elision and misrepresentation (arguably rightly) in the 2001 film Enigma. In 2016, the Polish state commissioned a touring exhibition to correct the record.

TC: Both Enigma and The Irritation Game played their part in reinforcing the mythology (just as U-571 ignored the UK) but Hollywood blockbusters aren't documentaries.

CS: But the record didn't actually need correcting. The early British lit on BP/Ultra was clear that Poles did the lion share of early work. See: Lewin (1978), Calvocoressi (1979), Hinsley et al (1979), Collier (1982), etc.

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Actually, Hinsley et al were wrong and their record did actually need correcting. Vol 3 pt 2 (1988), Appendix 30 (pp 945-939) was written by Joan Murray (née Clarke) and Henry Dryden, both wartime Siginters who had stayed on to work at GCHQ, and who were retained after retirement to update the version of the Polish contribution recounted in Appendix 1 of Vol 1 which was written on the basis of records and knowledge which was later proved – for example by the publication of Rejewski’s memoirs – to be incomplete. At best, I don't think it's unreasonable to have expected Hinsley et al to have done rather better first time.

CS: So where does this all come from? As ever Group Captain F.W. Winterbotham. His big splash book, The Ultra Secret (1974), which (sort of) revealed Ultra totally got the Polish work wrong. He was writing from memory and, besides, didn't know everything. Loads of that book is wrong.

CS: Yet as soon as it was published, key people in the know, not least Tadeus Lisicki, a wartime Polish intelligence officer and cryptanalyst, wrote to the papers, in 1974, to point out the Polish work. Lisicki compiled a dossier that formed the basis of important books by Poles.

TC: By Poles, in Polish, and while some were later translated, their impact was limited, not least because the authors weren't appearing at book festivals, on Radio 4 or in broadsheet review pages.

CS: Examples include Garlinski (1979), Woytak (1979) and Kozaczuk (1984). All of which have appeared in English. Newspapers, TV shows, radio comedies and even movies have made the point - though poorly in the case of Enigma. So why does this myth of anglo 'chauvinism' persist?

CS: None of this is to dispute the role Poles such as Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski played. Quite the reverse. What fascinates me is the endurance of a myth that these pioneers have been elided from English language historiography. They haven't.

I remember telling a friend, when I became GCHQ's Historian-designate in 2008, that the two things I didn't see myself getting involved in were Enigma and VENONA. How wrong I was! Enigma remains a live issue for many – perhaps most – people outside the academic Intelligence Studies community who were interested in Intelligence history.

In the British public imagination the Bletchley Park story was the acme of the Boffinry: the British had been successful in the Second World War because they had out-thought their enemies. To the list of back-room boys coming up with Spitfire, Radar and bouncing bombs, was added the super-smart mathematicians who in complete secret helped win the war by breaking all German cryptographic systems. As with the Battle of Britain, Bletchley Park became part of a mythology of plucky little Britain fighting on alone and prevailing against all the odds, in spite of the evidence. The Polish contribution became merely transactional: a Pole handing over to the British an Enigma machine which was reverse engineered.

This popular narrative would not survive unchallenged the changes in Poland after 1989: the return to democracy, Poland joining NATO and the EU, and the move to the UK of younger Poles who had learned at least some of the story of Poland's contribution to the Enigma story. A Polish/UK Historical Commission reported in the first decade of the twenty-first century and described in English for the first time the breadth and depth of the Polish contribution to intelligence across the board, while GCHQ's massive 1994-2004 release of Second World War records had been absorbed and it was possible to begin to approach the question of Anglo-Franco-Polish cooperation on Enigma rather more reasonably than had been the case previously. Pioneering work by Dermot Turing and Marek Grajek also produced new accessible historical information that could be shared in English and Polish.

The problem I found as GCHQ Historian was that while 'the record' was becoming clearer, the Polish sense of their contribution having been slighted for so long had allowed a mythological counter-narrative to develop in which the UK and France would never have come near to solving Enigma without the Polish contribution. It was for that reason that I coined the term 'Enigma Relay' to try to make two points: first, that the credit of solving Enigma belonged to the allied team, the Poles, French, British and Americans each running separate laps and passing the baton; and second, that solving Enigma wasn't something worth 100 brownie points and that each of the four nations should scrabble to establish how many of the 100 they could each claim. International Intelligence cooperation doesn't work like that; solving Sigint problems doesn't work like that. I tried the 'Enigma Relay' out on a few people and then, when Polish, UK and French Sigint representatives agreed to meet in Warsaw in 2014 to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the tripartite meeting at which the three countries agreed to share all they knew, put the 'Enigma Relay' concept into the speech given there by Iain Lobban, Director GCHQ (https://www.gchq.gov.uk/news/director-gchq-commemorates-crucial-pre-war-enigma-information-sharing-meeting-poland).

Did this resolve all of the issues? No, of course not. Narratives and counter-narratives, and mythologies, have a life of their own and accurate history will always find it hard to compete against what non-historians would like a two dimensional 'truth' to look like. But reinforcing on every possible occasion the fact that success against Enigma took a lot more than a couple of very bright mathematicians thinking great thoughts, however crucial those great thoughts were, is part of the job. And making British audiences realise that most Sigint successes since 1939 are due to GCHQ's partnerships with Sigint agencies in other countries goes beyond mere intelligence history, and, hopefully, leads people to reflect that intelligence doesn't happen in a vacuum.

The Other Side...

'The Other Side' was the name given by members of GC&CS to SIS (and quite possibly vice-versa) when the two organisations shared premises at Broadway Buildings. SIS occupied the fourth floor while GC&CS occupied the third, and while there was a lot of reorganisation of office space (by the time of the move to Bletchley all nine floors of the building had been taken over), GC&CS never left the third floor. There was almost no contact between the two organisations other than at senior level and in the Distribution and Reference Section whose terms of references explicitly included liaison with SIS. This is not as odd as it might sound. The two organisations had totally separate functions (signals intelligence and communications security for GC&CS, human intelligence for SIS) and were funded differently: the Secret Vote for SIS, the Open Vote for GC&CS; all they shared was an address and a man in charge: 'C' who was Chief of SIS and Director of GC&CS.

When the two organisations moved to Bletchley Park in August 1939 the situation didn't change - in fact most of the SIS personnel who moved to Bletchley moved back to London in September once the Luftwaffe hadn't destroyed the capital, but not before a GC&CS member of staff Henry 'Pope' Dryden had written a poem - 'The Other Side' - about their near neighbours. (Dryden had joined GC&CS in February 1939: on his first day after reporting to the War Office he discovered that he would be based at 54 Broadway and was told never to speak to or indeed acknowledge anybody close to the building and after going in, only ever to say 'Third' to the lift operator.)

Such little knowledge of SIS that Dryden had acquired became vitally important in June 1940. he had been in France in uniform as part of the Sigint staff attached to GHQ, and as France collapsed, found himself and his team moving ever further south. He takes up the story:

'The next morning we almost missed the train, but found ourselves that evening in Vichy.  We spent the following morning, Sunday, stripped to the waist in the cellars of our hotel, burning in the furnace all our material except the keys we had recovered. We were not altogether surprised to learn after breakfast on 17 June that Marshal Pétain had announced that France had asked for an armistice, and also that we would be moving again that afternoon.   This time the train took us via Clermont-Ferrand, where we were told by our French friends that they had been ordered to stop.   We indicated that we thought we ought to try to get to England, and they immediately gave us a large lorry and advised us to make for Bordeaux.  We arrived there via Périgeux soon after dawn on 18 June.  Thanks to that uniquely British institution, the schools connection, the oldest member of our party, who had been at preparatory school with him, got in to see the Military Attaché in his bath at 6 a.m., and was given a chit authorising us to board the frigate Arethusa, then lying at the mouth of the Gironde with the primary task of evacuating the Polish Government-in-Exile and the Czech Intelligence Staff.  Embarkation was being supervised by a Guards officer, who took one look at our chit and said:  “This is no good. You need a chit from the Naval Attaché.” Recognising him as a member of what GC&CS called ‘The Other Side’, with whom I had often shared a lift at Broadway Buildings, I murmured in his ear: “We’re from the third floor”. Fortunately this had the desired effect; having spent the night on board, we sailed, unescorted, on a zig-zag course for Devonport. There we were received by the Women’s Voluntary Service with cups of tea such as we had not enjoyed for many weeks.'

(Incidentally, if anyone has a copy of the poem I would be really interested to see it.)