The Codebreakers: The True Story of the Secret Intelligence Team That Changed the Course of the First World War (31 page)

All did not go well, for the conspiracy had been infiltrated by British intelligence operatives – including Malcolm Reid, a ‘special immigration officer’ based in Vancouver, who ran informants along the Pacific Coast – and whose predecessor, William Hopkinson, had been killed by a Sikh assassin. The British also used the multiple talents of the occultist Aleister Crowley, who spoke several Indian dialects, made repeated trips to the West Coast, and who had already agitated on behalf of British intelligence as an Irish nationalist in New York since his arrival in the US in 1914.

When the
Annie Larsen
and the
Maverick
failed to rendezvous at Socorro Island, the arms-laden ship sailed north and on 1 July put in to port at Hoquiam, Washington, 200 miles south of the Canadian border. US agents, alerted by the British, seized the weapons, thereby inadvertently stopping another Indian plot arranged by Franz von Papen.

Germany’s military attaché had been visiting Seattle in May, where he made contact with German agent Franz Schulenberg and learned that there was a sizeable population of restive Indians just across the Canadian border in Vancouver. He had paid Schulenberg $4,000 to buy a ton of dynamite, as well as 50 guns with Maxim silencers, to send to one ‘Mr Singh’ in Sumas, Washington, situated right on the Canadian border. The idea was that the Indian revolutionaries would sabotage the Canadian railway system and cripple the shipment of vital men and materiel to the war. When the Americans seized the weapons on board the
Annie Larsen
, von Papen told Schulenberg to stand down for fear of being caught and exposing the German embassy’s nefarious reach.

It was Nathan who blew open the Hindu-German conspiracy, tipping off Inspector Tom Tunney of the NYPD that a person of interest was right under their noses. On 7 March 1917, Tunney’s men arrested Dr Chandra Chakravarty, a Ghadr leader, at his home in Harlem. After initially pretending to be someone else, the diminutive, fiery-eyed Chakravarty proved to be a fountain of detail, providing names and dates of conspirators in the plot to overthrow the British in India.

Tunney and his detectives went through Chakravarty’s papers, discovering that he had made $60,000 – or today’s equivalent of $1.2 million – over two years without doing very much overt work. The ‘little Hindu’, as Tunney called him, said he had inherited the money from his grandfather in India, and that ‘no less a personage than Rabindranath Tagore’, the Indian poet, had paid him, in December 1916, $25,000 of the $45,000 due from the estate’, with another $35,000 coming from a lawyer named Chatterji in March 1916.

Under further interrogation, Chakravarty revealed that the money had in fact come from Wolf von Igel, the right-hand man to Franz von Papen. ‘I spoke of the poet, Tagore, because he won the Nobel prize, and I thought he would be above suspicion,’ Chakravarty told Tunney, revealing that he had used the money to buy the house in Harlem, another house on 77th Street, where he planned to open a Hindu restaurant, and a farm at Hopewell Junction, 60 miles north of Harlem, as a meeting place for his fellow conspirators.

‘And when he had given us valuable information, and had appeared at the trial, and had been himself convicted and had served his sentence (a short term) in jail, and the smoke had cleared away, he was the owner of three nice parcels of real estate and a comfortable income,’ Tunney mused. ‘Dr Chakravarty, although a failure as a Prussian agent, fared pretty well as an investor of Prussian funds.’

The Hindu-German conspiracy trial, with which Chakravarty was so helpful, began on 19 November 1917 in San Francisco. It was the largest Indian revolutionary trial ever held outside of India, and finally saw the United States taking charge of the sedition and sabotage that had been going on within its borders since the war began, though Robert Nathan’s and British intelligence work and advice on legal strategy played a paramount role in its successful prosecution. Nearly 100 defendants were assembled before Judge William Van Fleet, including Franz von Bopp and his staff at the San Francisco German consulate, as well as the German consul at Honolulu, and 35 Indian students and revolutionaries, among them Chakravarty, Ram Chandra, and Ram Singh – a wealthy donor to the Ghadar party – and several members of a ‘shipping group’ who had been agents in the chartering and purchase of the
Annie Larsen
and the
Maverick
.

‘The trial of these men was one of the most picturesque ever conducted in an American court,’ remarked an observer. ‘The turbaned Hindus lent an Oriental atmosphere. Among the evidence were publications in six Indian dialects, also coded messages, all of which called for constant translation by interpreters and cryptographers. Witness after witness recited his amazing story of adventure. The action shifted quickly between the three focal points, Berlin, the United States, and India, with intermediate scenes laid in Japan, China, Afghanistan, and the South Seas as witnesses laid out the vast international plot.’

One of the Americans called to testify at the trial was William Friedman, a legendary American codebreaker who would be commissioned a major in the US army in May 1918 and join the cryptanalysis department. Before he was seconded into the army, Friedman and his colleagues at wealthy eccentric George Fabyan’s codebreaking compound outside Chicago had – when not trying to help Fabyan prove that Francis Bacon had written the plays of William Shakespeare – assisted Ralph Van Deman’s fledgling MI-8 unit decoding intercepts given to them by the British, by using the ‘frequency’ method – of some words being more popular than others. Friedman had determined that the Indians were using a dictionary to encode their messages, and as he explained his methods to the San Francisco courtroom, the accused, reported an observer, ‘glowered at one another. Had one of them sold out this secret?’

Tom Tunney, now a major in the army after his NYPD unit was drafted into intelligence service in December 1917, also testified as to the circumstances of Chakravarty’s arrest. His policeman’s eye noticed that the Indian defendants ‘did not seem altogether fond of each other … forever whispering, wagging their heads, stuffing notes down each other’s necks and when the testimony of one of their number grew too truthful they squirmed and scowled. Chakravarty’s life was threatened during the trial.’

But it wasn’t Chakravarty’s life that ended on 23 April 1918, the final day of the trial, when Judge Van Fleet adjourned to his chambers to prepare his charge to the jury. Ram Singh, seething at a perceived betrayal by Ram Chandra, pulled out an automatic pistol that he had procured during a recess and fired three bullets into Chandra, the fatal one entering his heart. United States Marshal James Holohan, sitting by the jury box and a ‘man of great stature … shot once with his arm high over his head, so that the bullet should clear nearby counsel. The shot broke Ram Singh’s neck.’

When order was restored, 29 of the defendants were convicted, with Franz von Bopp and his vice consul receiving the stiffest sentences, of two years each in a federal penitentiary, and fines of $10,000 (or $200,000 today). The sentences of the 13 Indian revolutionaries and students ranged from 22 months to 60 days, with Chakravarty – in thanks for his help – receiving 30 days in jail and a fine of $5,000, which he could easily pay off, as Tunney noted, with one of his German-financed New York properties.

‘The punishment is wholly inadequate to the crime,’ said Judge Van Fleet. ‘The German defendants represent a system that the civilised world cannot tolerate.’ British intelligence and the nascent American intelligence forces had triumphed at home, but the war in Europe, after another year of mass slaughter and the fall of the tsar, was at a critical point. With America mobilising its forces and beginning the process of packing them off to Europe, those in charge of that system realised that it was only a matter of time before they were overwhelmed on the Western Front. The Germans’ best hope of forcing a quick end to the war lay with their U-boat fleet.

The entry of the USA into the war put even more pressure on the German U-boats to deliver a knockout blow as quickly as possible. By inflicting severe losses on Britain’s Atlantic trade, the Germans hoped to render it unable to feed or equip its armies, reduce the civilian population to starvation, and force it to capitulate. With Britain gone, and Russia succumbing to revolution, France would surely seek peace, making America’s declaration of war irrelevant, given it would take them until 1918 to reach Europe in any numbers.

The German naval Chief of Staff calculated that ‘in five months, shipping from England will be reduced by 39 per cent’, with the result that ‘England will not be able to stand it’. Admiral Jellicoe, commander of the fleet during the Battle of Jutland and then in charge of the Anti-Submarine Division, shared this view, warning that the Germans ‘will win the war unless we can stop these losses – and stop them quickly’.

Room 40 was in the front line as the sea war reached its critical phase. Despite more regular changes of the cipher keys and call signs used by the U-boats, the codebreakers, drawing on their accumulated experience, and helped by the fact that the submarines frequently used wireless on their hunting trips, produced a steady stream of detailed information on the location and destination of the enemy. One example, taken from hundreds of similar assessments collected over the course of the campaign, serves to illustrate their pinpoint accuracy: from messages intercepted on 4 April 1917, they gleaned that ‘an enemy submarine was in 49 degrees 30 North 6 degrees 46 West apparently with partially disabled engine’.

At the same time, they were receiving increasing numbers of messages thanks to the 40 wireless stations that now spanned the UK: in the first two years of the war, Room 40 got an average of 27 U-boat intercepts a month; by the end of 1917 that number had jumped to 66, a figure that also reflected the intensification of U-boat activity.

Yet for all Room 40’s output, it could do precious little to physically protect the merchant ships or actually destroy the enemy. The latest U-boats were a formidable weapon: 240 feet long, weighing 820 tons, with deck guns and six torpedo tubes carrying up to 16 torpedoes. In the first few months of 1917 they wreaked havoc: during January they sank 181 ships, in February 259, in the first two weeks of April alone, 373 were condemned to the bottom of the ocean, while during May, 287 suffered the same fate.

Something had to be done. These losses were simply unsustainable. Only one in four merchant ships making the transatlantic trip survived the journey. They were going down far quicker than Britain’s capacity to replace them. The situation was so grave that the institutional myopia that had kept Room 40 isolated from the rest of Naval Intelligence was finally shaken off. For the first time, it really was all hands on deck.

The driving force behind this process of integration was Blinker Hall. In May, Room 40 established links with NID’s German Section (ID14), which collated all relevant intelligence from human sources such as agents and coast-watchers and included a team dedicated to interrogating captured U-boat personnel. Meanwhile, cooperation was established between Room 40 and the Enemy Submarine Section (E1), where information received from British and neutral sources concerning ‘ships attacked and reports of sightings and attacking submarines’ was analysed. Previously, E1 and Room 40 had worked completely separately, ignorant of each other’s existence: as Frank Birch remarked in a memo written after the war, this rigid system ‘entailed an enormous waste of time and loss of efficiency’. E1 was run by Fleet Paymaster E. W. C. Thring, whose knowledge of U-boat behaviour was second to none. His section was officially absorbed by Room 40 in the autumn.

A U-boat on the prowl

The final piece of the jigsaw was the Admiralty chart room, where staff hovered over huge maps, tracking the movement of U-boats and their prey. At last Room 40’s full potential was being realised. By July, daily U-boat situation reports were being circulated containing a summary of all the intelligence gained from the various sections.

But the most radical change in the composition of Room 40 came with the introduction of women. The amount of paperwork the existing staff had to deal with had grown to such an extent that it threatened to overwhelm them. Administrative support was desperately needed and the practice of employing young women for clerical work was well established in Edwardian society.

What we know about them comes mostly from the recollections of William F. Clarke, who joined Room 40 in March 1915. A barrister before the war, he applied to the navy hoping to see some action, but due to poor eyesight was confined to shore before Hall came calling. Though not much use as a cryptographer, Clarke became a self-appointed authority on Room 40.

At first there were some objections to females entering this all-male sanctum, but as Clarke noted, ‘once the ice had been broken the number of ladies rapidly increased’. The secretaries were managed by Lady Ebba Hambro, wife of Sir Everard Hambro, from a long-established merchant banking family that came originally from Copenhagen and opened their first branch in London in 1839. A forthright, no-nonsense character, she shocked her male colleagues by smoking a large cigar at one of their annual dinners, and wrote passable poetry, including a send-up of Room 40 called ‘Confidential Waste’.