The Codebreakers: The True Story of the Secret Intelligence Team That Changed the Course of the First World War (41 page)

During the 1950s, Hay visited Israel a number of times and produced several more books, including another investigation into the tortured relationship between Catholicism and Judaism. In September 1962 he fell seriously ill. He died on 27 December, aged 81. A private, modest man, Malcolm Hay was one of the unsung heroes of the First World War.

Blinker Hall spent the decade after leaving naval intelligence in politics. He was elected to a Liverpool constituency as Conservative MP in March 1919; his interventions in Parliament were mostly concerned with the welfare of sailors. At the next election, having taken on the thankless task of running the party organisation during the campaign, he lost his seat along with 88 other Tory MPs: Labour won and Ramsay MacDonald became prime minister.

Hall re-entered Parliament in 1925 as MP for Eastbourne but retired from politics in 1929, after painful surgery on his jaw. At the height of the Great Depression, a calamity that he feared would spark civil war, his beloved wife dropped dead of a heart attack while playing bridge. Theirs had been a long and loving relationship and Hall was devastated, relying on his Christian faith to get him through.

His own health remained poor. His doctors advised him not to spend any more winters in England, where the damp and cold ate away at his lungs. Over the next few years he visited Australia, New Zealand, California, the Caribbean and New Orleans. When not out of the country, he was a regular feature at the Garrick Club in London, and often seen in the company of his favourite field agent, the author and adventurer A. E. W. Mason.

Bizarrely enough, Hall also cultivated a friendship with Franz von Rintelen, the Dark Invader. Von Rintelen had masterminded German espionage in America until he was caught by Hall. Perhaps their shared naval background combined with mutual respect drew them together.

But Europe was facing a new breed of warrior, one that nursed fanatical hatred. Hall viewed the rise of Hitler and Nazism with alarm. As war became inevitable, he visited the new head of naval intelligence, John Godfrey, who was eager to pick his brains; according to Godfrey, Hall ‘very unobtrusively offered me full access to his enormous store of knowledge, wisdom, cunning and ingenuity’.

With Britain in the front line after the fall of France in 1940, Hall had no intention of leaving for his customary winters abroad; he would not desert his country in its hour of need, even if it risked his health. He joined the Home Guard and embarked on a remarkable correspondence with Amos Peaslee, an American lawyer who had been fighting for nearly 20 years to bring the Black Tom bombers to justice and squeeze compensation out of the German government. Hall was one of Peaslee’s key assets; he provided a considerable amount of Room 40 material to help bolster Peaslee’s case, and they became close.

Though no longer at the heart of the action, Hall still followed every twist and turn of the war, and his letters to Peaslee became a running commentary, full of trenchant forensic analysis of events as they unfolded. All told, they amount to hundreds of pages, so compelling and insightful that Peaslee shared them with the secretaries of the US army and navy, who handed them over to President Roosevelt.

The flow of material started to dry up during the winter of 1942–3: Hall contracted a serious lung infection, from which he would never really recover. In August 1943, an operation to rectify the damage failed and he died on 22 October, aged 73.

Hall’s immense contribution to the outcome of the First World War was neatly summarised in October 1919 during an awards ceremony at Cambridge University, at which he was to receive an honorary degree. The words of John Edwin Sandy, who was delivering the tribute, said it all: ‘how great then are the benefits we derived from him who … found out what the Fleets of the Germans were contriving, tracking down the size and objectives of their forces, who planted his own spies throughout all the world and thwarted those of the enemy, who passed on to our commanders the intelligence in reliance of which they finally achieved victory’.

The First World War is often described as marking the end of one era and the beginning of another. It might be more accurate to say that it represented the collision between two eras, as the old and the new clashed together, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes not. Military planners struggled to adapt their thinking to accommodate new technologies that were advancing more quickly than they were.

Room 40 and MI1(b) offer a striking counter-example of a successful blend of old-world brain power and new-world scientific invention. The wireless and the telegraph yielded a goldmine of information for the codebreakers, many of whom applied knowledge gained by studying ancient cultures at ancient universities. The results provided a stunningly comprehensive account of every aspect of the war. However, the ultimate test of the value of the codebreakers’ intelligence was in how it was used.

Room 40’s contribution to the naval war was potentially game-changing, providing as it did an unprecedented level of detail about the activities of the German fleet. Yet when it came to the crunch, like at the Battle of Jutland, the codebreakers’ insights were often wasted or misinterpreted. The rigid hierarchy, inflexibility and warring egos that characterised the Admiralty dogged the development of Room 40. It was only when the U-boat threat was at its height during 1917 that it was allowed to reach its full potential.

It was the codebreakers’ role in the diplomatic and espionage war that reaped the greatest rewards; whether it concerned the USA, Ireland, Spain, North Africa or South America, the results of Room 40’s work constantly undermined and hampered Germany’s efforts to tilt the war in its favour. Much of this success was due to the inspired leadership of Blinker Hall, who immediately recognised the importance of codebreaking and sought to maximise Room 40’s impact whenever and wherever he could.

Although in a war of this magnitude there are countless moments that might be said to have changed the course of the conflict, there are perhaps only a handful of incidents that can truly be said to have fundamentally altered the outcome: the Zimmermann telegram was one of them.

MI1(b), under the astute Malcolm Hay, also achieved notable successes in the diplomatic field, though, due to Hay’s insistence that the records be destroyed, the lack of evidence makes it hard to judge the real significance of this work, especially the extent to which it influenced policy. As to MI1(b)’s contribution to the overall military effort, it’s a more mixed picture. The slow uptake of wireless on the Western Front, and the fact that neither side could prevent the enemy from breaking its codes, somewhat blunted the effectiveness of the intelligence supplied by MI1(b) and its staff.

Nevertheless, by 1918, the British army had finally fully committed to wireless interception and codebreaking at an operational level and was busily issuing lengthy memoranda analysing the best ways to encode and decode messages. It was in the Middle East campaigns that the efforts of MI1(b) had the greatest impact, giving the Allies a decisive edge and the means to outwit the enemy.

Ultimately, the collaboration between MI1(b) and Room 40 created a framework on which the British could build after the war, along with a pool of amazing talent that would dominate the business of intelligence-gathering from then on, leading to the celebrated achievements of Bletchley Park during the Second World War.

During the inter-war years, the head cryptographers at the Government Code & Cypher School were Dilly Knox and Oliver Strachey. The volume of messages they handled rarely fell below the levels reached during the war, thanks to a clause in the 1920 Official Secrets Act that instructed cable companies to hand over copies of all telegrams passing through the UK ‘within 10 days of dispatch or receipt’.

Both were on a salary of £500 per year, not a negligible sum but far less than they were worth. Strachey could have scaled the heights of the civil service and earned considerably more; his ease with people, affability and social connections made him an ideal candidate for promotion. However, he genuinely loved his work and was content where he was. In his early years at GC&CS, he concentrated on cracking American codes. Asides from the Soviet Union, the USA was viewed as Britain’s greatest rival, challenging its supremacy at sea and around the globe.

In 1925, Strachey switched his focus to Japanese codes, particularly their naval ones: Japan had built up a formidable fleet and threatened Britain’s Far East Empire. By 1928, Strachey could read their operational code. During September 1934, he broke the Japanese cipher machine used by its naval attachés.

Dilly, on the other hand, given his eccentricities and his general impatience with those not on his intellectual level – he suffered all his life from being the cleverest person in the room – was not suitable for employment in any other branch of government. Not that he lacked an alternative. The door to academia was always open. His interpretation of the poems of Herodas, based on archaeological fragments that had obsessed him before joining Room 40 was finally published in 1922. Seven years later, an edition of his translation of Herodas into English was released by the Loeb Classical Library.

This renewed commitment to his former studies reflected his growing dissatisfaction with codebreaking. Some of this impatience was related to the revelations that ended diplomatic relations between Britain and the Soviet Union during 1927: the government publicly boasted about decoding intercepted messages from Moscow that revealed its subversive intent. With the cat out of the bag, the Soviets promptly adopted an almost unbreakable cipher system.

Given that Dilly had laboured for years on Soviet material, this turn of events must have been equally infuriating and disappointing. Suddenly deprived of anything to do, and looking for a task that would test his abilities, he shifted his attention to Hungarian codes, a hitherto neglected area. Dilly knew no Hungarian whatsoever and approached the whole thing as an abstract problem. Nevertheless, he prevailed; as Denniston noted, ‘Hungarian was successfully broken by Knox, but it is doubtful if the results obtained at the time justified the enormous effort on his part.’

Dilly’s quest to find a challenge worthy of his talents ended when the Nazis took power in Germany and he was confronted with the ultimate codebreaking conundrum: the Enigma machine. Its 676 possible settings could generate 11,000,000 different arrangements of the alphabet. Dilly devoted his life to unravelling its mysteries. His first breakthrough occurred in April 1937, when he managed to read messages sent by the Italian Enigma machine, which then allowed him to do the same for the one used by Franco in Spain. However, the German version remained unassailable.

A trip to Paris, along with Strachey and Denniston, to meet their French counterparts led to a visit to Poland in July 1939. The Poles had acquired a German machine and broken its ciphers. After a frustrating first day, during which Dilly lost his temper, he finally got to meet their key codebreaker, Rejewski, who brought him up to speed with his discoveries. Years later, Rejewski remembered how ‘Knox grasped everything very quickly, almost quick as lightning’.

Armed with this knowledge, and a replica Enigma machine, Dilly moved into Elmers Cottage in the grounds of Bletchley Park. He was joined by the brilliant Alan Turing, whose decrypting machines would pave the way for the modern computer. At this point, though, Turing was a codebreaking novice, reliant on Dilly’s expertise. Dilly liked Turing and appreciated his talent, but also found him ‘difficult to anchor down’ and struggled ‘to keep him and his ideas in some sort of order’: he could have been talking about his younger self.

Utilising tried and tested methods, developed during his Room 40 days, Dilly searched for any sloppy mistakes made by the Enigma operators. As a result, on 25 October 1939, he read a German Enigma message for the first time. He celebrated by writing a pastiche of the Lewis Carroll poem
Jabberwocky
.

It was a remarkable achievement, but the strain of carrying the Enigma burden for so long – years of intense mental struggle, striving against impossible odds and for incredibly high stakes – took its toll. In 1939 he was diagnosed with cancer. A preliminary operation forestalled the inevitable, but from then on he was living on borrowed time.

During the early part of 1941, Dilly and his team, which was almost entirely female, concentrated on the German naval Enigma machine and its Italian equivalent. Though the German machine proved intractable more tangible progress was made with the Italian one. Once solved, the intelligence gained allowed the British to take a significant portion of the Italian fleet by surprise at the Battle of Matapan, and sink four of its ships. True to form, Dilly marked the occasion by writing a poem.

Arguably, the most significant contribution Dilly made to the war effort was with his friend Oliver Strachey. In 1938, Strachey was put in charge of recruiting fresh blood, including the precociously gifted young mathematician Gordon Welchman, who would become a key figure at Bletchley. Welchman remembered being ‘most impressed by Oliver Strachey … he seemed to be giving an overview of the whole problem of deriving intelligence from enemy communications’.

On 11 November 1939, Strachey reached the official retirement age of 65. Given the circumstances, with Hitler master of Poland, there was no chance he was going to give up. Instead, he headed for Bletchley Park. On arrival, he occupied an old school building and set up Illicit Services Oliver Strachey (ISOS), which tackled intercepted German messages sent the old-fashioned way, by hand not machine, a method still employed by the
Abwehr
, the military and diplomatic intelligence arm of Hitler’s secret state.

During March 1940, Strachey started getting material from the Radio Security Service (RSS), run by none other than Eric Gill, the First World War wireless wizard. Set up in 1939, RSS intercepted covert radio communications between Nazi spies in the UK and their controllers in Hamburg. By December, Strachey had cracked the main cipher, enabling MI5 to identify and arrest all the German agents operating in Britain.