Alan Turing: The Enigma (110 page)

The public emphasis was placed upon the secrets of atomic physics. But all the time, there existed that other area of secrecy, which did not even officially exist. This,
a fortiori
, would have been subject to the same considerations, for it, too, was intimately linked with the arrangements of the Special Relationship. An American arriving at the CIA office in London in 1952 would discover
⁵⁷
that ‘the wartime partnership was still paying off handsomely.’

The British, recognising the importance of keeping the United States actively engaged in an effort to contain Soviet disruptive thrusts, were extraordinarily open and cooperative with Americans in intelligence matters. They provided not only most of their highest-level joint intelligence estimates but also supplied the station chief in London with most of their clandestine intelligence M16 reports.

As during the war, such intelligence was not confined to that derived from spying. There was Sigint:

Some of the material thus exchanged with liaison services was from intercepted electronic signal messages. Eventually most of this material was worked into the reporting system of the National Security Agency, the consolidated cryptanalysis and signals intelligence facility set up in 1950…

If the CIA represented an American imitation of the British secret service, the existence of the far more secret NSA simply reflected the rather later victory of the arguments for centralisation which in Britain had prevailed after the First World War. The Americans had learnt from British
experience, and it was in London, ‘the hub of the closest intelligence exchange in all history’, that this particular American official perceived ‘what vast benefits our allies provided in the way of good intelligence. Without them, the alliance system itself could not function effectively.’ The exchange was formalised ‘by roughly dividing the world between them and exchanging the materials recorded’. The British had taught the lesson learned at Bletchley, that

One of the Yard’s top-rankers, Commander E.A. Cole, recently spent three months in America consulting with FBI officials in putting finishing touches to the plan. …

The Special Branch began compiling a ‘Black Book’ of known perverts in influential Government jobs after the disappearance of the diplomats Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess, who were known to have pervert associates. Now comes the difficult task of sidetracking these men into less important jobs – or of putting them behind bars.

there is no way to be on top of intelligence problems unless you collect much more extensively than any cost-accounting approach would justify and then rely on the wisdom and experience of analysts to sift out the small percentage of vital information that needs to be passed to the top of the government.

The CIA’s espionage was ‘supplemented greatly’ by these contributions, and correspondingly

In Great Britain these extensive liaison arrangements were supplemented by equally crucial exchanges in the counter-espionage and counter-intelligence field – also important in liaisons with other allies with good internal security services.

This being so, British Intelligence had to accommodate itself to American security rules, just as did atomic research. Accordingly, the case of Alan Turing was one that also had to be seen through American eyes. Regardless of any post-1945 developments, he had been the top-level liaison between the two countries in 1943, and admitted into secret American establishments. Besides knowing so many technical details, he was a person ‘on top of intelligence problems’. He knew how the systems worked as a whole – the people, the places, the methods, the equipment. Had the headline been ‘ATOMIC SCIENTIST FOUND DEAD’, the questions would have been immediate and public. In Alan Turing’s case, the questions were not obvious, but precisely because the field of his expertise was even
more
closely guarded than that of nuclear weapons. And it was the Ultra secret that Churchill personally cared about, the adventures of the secret service being useful largely as cover stories. Alan Turing had stood at the very centre of the Anglo-American alliance. His very existence was a glaring embarrassment, and one which put the British government in the position of being answerable for his behaviour. As John Turing had found as a small boy, this was no easy responsibility. Not only the quiet trial at Knutsford, but also his visits to countries bordering on the eastern bloc were subjects that in contemporary American eyes, were they to come to American notice,
⁵⁸
would be tantamount to an international incident. These were exceedingly deep waters.

Fundamentally it was not his homosexuality that presented a difficulty to the mind of security, but the lack of control, the element of the unknown. The coroner said that ‘with a man of his type’ – a man of the Professor type! – no one could tell what his mental processes would do next. That
iconoclastic ‘originality’ had been acceptable in the brief period of ‘creative anarchy’, which had even stomached the arrogance and will-power required to solve the unsolvable Enigma, and force the implications upon an unwilling system. But by 1954 a very different mentality prevailed. At Alan’s last Christmas visit to Guildford he had left behind some papers; calming his mother’s anxiety about them he betrayed his impatience with post-war Newspeak:
⁵⁹

The note on [the] M of S
^*
document about secrecy etc. is all eyewash really. The document is ‘unclassified’ (an idiotic word of American origin meaning ‘not in the least secret’. It arises by documents being ‘classified’ according to their degrees of secrecy, hence secret documents get to be called ‘classified’, and hence, worst of all ‘unclassified’ does not mean ‘not as yet assigned to any category’ but ‘not secret’).

He belonged to an age of implicit trust and class-based discretion, at a time when trust and discretion were being mechanised and classified. In the climate of 1954 it was almost irrelevant that he had no time for the Soviet Union, for
all
were under suspicion until ‘cleared’, and everything that was not the purest White, could be considered potentially Red.

With the loss of strategic independence, and the end of imperial confidence, Alan Turing’s country had changed. His old housemaster had declared him ‘essentially loyal’, and in rather the same way an assumed ‘essential loyalty’ had satisfied the recruiters of the new men. It probably never occurred to them that a well-connected English person could take an abstract, foreign idea seriously enough for it to make any difference. Fifteen years later, events had proved otherwise. If the 1940s had made the idea of ‘intelligence’ into something very concrete and definite, the 1950s forced the concept of ‘loyalty’ to an equal explicitness. And the Cambridge which had supplied the intelligence was an unknown quantity in respect of loyalty. This was a time at which Patrick Blackett, once the trusted adviser of an independent Royal Navy, was being pointed out among Manchester University staff as ‘the fellow traveller’.

Alan Turing, by comparison, was the entirely apolitical person. But he came from the dissenting King’s background; he had supported the ‘very good’ Anti-War demonstration in November 1933. He had never moved in the sophisticated circles of Burgess and Maclean, and had not been elected an Apostle, but connections could easily be found by anyone who chose to look for them. At a time of guilt by association – when there was nothing but association to go on – he was guilty. They had made some incredible mistakes, and how could they be sure Alan Turing was not yet another, given his instructions by the Red Queen twenty years before? What would constitute a proof? It was Wittgenstein’s awkward question, applied to real life. Burgess and Maclean had been absurd and clumsy players of the
imitation game – but were there others more skilful, yet to be found out? Even if such gross suspicions had been entirely ruled out, the fact was that by combining and concentrating the two great unthinkables, cryptanalysis and homosexuality, mysteries of ‘stinks’ and ‘filth’ respectively, he had rendered himself a demon, arousing the most primordial insecurities. And it was at a time when British securities had evaporated. The old social discipline offered no defence against nuclear war, but neither did scientific methods offer better than plans for revenge and suicide. Torn between a subservient trust and a resentful anxiety regarding American machinations, to which British power had been surrendered, a panic over spies and homosexuals provided Great Britain with a suitable diversion.

The tide in the affairs of men had turned in 1943, and by the summer of 1954 had obliterated the patterns drawn in the Second World War. Stalin had gone, but this had made no difference to the system of threat and counter-threat, apparently beyond the control of individuals. A Soviet hydrogen bomb had been tested in August 1953, presenting the possibility of devastation greater than the most pessimistic prognostications of 1939, and of a scale far outweighing that offered by the British bomb tested in October 1952. But it was the American test on 1 March 1954, the 14-megaton blast catching the crew of the
Lucky Dragon
, that suddenly jolted public consciousness. On 5 April, in a rare Commons ‘defence’ debate, Churchill saw fit to reveal the terms of the 1943 Quebec agreement between Britain and the United States, on which the Americans had reneged, and said:

No words of mine are needed to emphasise the deadly situation in which the whole world lies … the H-bomb carries us into domains which have never confronted practical human thought and have been confined to the realms of phantasy and imagination.

What was fantasy and what was reality? There was American pressure on the British to join in a military intervention in Vietnam, after the French defeat on 7 May at Dien Bien Phu. Churchill’s refusal brought about talk of a ‘British betrayal’, and strains to the
quid pro quo
of the Special Relationship. Fears of a new Asian war were not unfounded; on 26 May an American admiral spoke of a ‘campaign for complete victory’ in Vietnam, including the use of nuclear weapons. A general described using atomic bombs to ‘create a belt of scorched earth across the avenues of Communism to block the Asiatic hordes’. Dulles now said that he was ‘very hopeful’ that the British government would ‘change their attitude’.

June 1954 was a period of particular uncertainty, with the Geneva talks on Vietnam being compared with those of Munich. Now it was the turn of American city populations to practise taking cover in air raid shelters, while in Britain there was a revival of the Home Guard – recruitment was in progress at Wilmslow during the last week of May. The tension was as great
in Europe as in Asia, with West German rearmament being the inflammatory issue. The rules had changed, and the past had changed its meaning. Not only the silver bars had been lost for good; other bridges had been destroyed, and new ones built in solid concrete. Now it was the turn of the U-boat men to be called back, while the hunt for spies and traitors was occupying their erstwhile enemies. It was on 2 June that the newspapers revealed that ‘new man’ at Princeton to be loyal but a ‘security risk’. Robert Oppenheimer, guilty of wrong ideas and associations, was someone that no one could be certain about. And there was another special feature of the newspapers that Whitsun weekend. Faded, stilted, almost embarrassed tributes were being paid to the men who had landed on the beaches of Normandy, exactly ten years before.

Alan Turing was not an island, but a stray eddy in a sea of troubles. The coroner referred to the ‘balance of his mind’ and to him becoming ‘unstable’. It was an image not remote from his own morphogenetic model of the moment of crisis. As the political temperature rose, his equilibrium would become more and more unstable. The smallest event could have been the trigger. One particular issue would have concentrated his demand for freedom on the one hand, and the implications of past promises on the other. Could he have gone abroad again in the summer of 1954 – when no one knew what might happen next, and in the midst of an official panic over homosexuality? The Foreign Office had been issuing stern memoranda on Soviet entrapment during the past year,
⁶⁰
in parallel with an extension of ‘positive vetting’ on 31 March 1954, and fortified by the disclosures of the Russian defector Petrov. Meanwhile the Montagu trials had shown that fond British beliefs in velvet-glove government were not always to be sustained. There was always the possibility of another case being brought against Alan, manufactured out of an affair long in the past. This was one aspect of the wave of prosecutions now taking place, and one which threatened to drag down friends – even on the merest suspicions and flimsiest allegations. Even the newspapers, if he could bear to read them, could have told him this. He was in a corner. He had always been prepared to confine his fight to his own personal space – the space that others chose to allow him. But by now he was left no space at all.

E.M. Forster
⁶¹
, outdoing the King’s heresy with grand bravura, had written in 1938 that if he were faced with the choice between betraying his country and betraying his friends, he hoped he would have the courage to betray his country. He would always put the personal above the political. But for Alan Turing, unlike Forster, or Wittgenstein, or G.H. Hardy, it was more than a theoretical question. For him not only had the personal become the political, but the political was the personal. He had chosen and promised for himself in working for the government. The choice for him therefore was that between betraying one part of himself and betraying another part. And however much he wavered between these alternatives,
there was a solid logic to the mind of security, one that could not be expected to take an interest in notions of freedom and development. He had no rights to such things, as he would have had to admit. He might have outwitted the Home Guard, but when it came to questions that mattered, there was no doubt that he had placed himself under military law. There was a war on; there was always a war on now.