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The female codebreakers of Bletchley Park
Historian Tessa Dunlop shines a light on the secret and undervalued work of the women of Bletchley Park, without whom the codebreaking successes of the Second World War could not have happened
Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire was one of Britain's most famous institutions during the Second World War, home to codebreaking triumphs that turned the tide against the Nazi regime. Britain’s codebreaking operation has been dominated by a male narrative – a star-studded cast of 20th-century brain boxes, led by mathematician Alan Turing. His outstanding role in the creation of the bombe machine, an electromechanical testing device essential for unravelling German Enigma encoded messages, was hugely significant. It is a feat perhaps only rivalled by that of Tommy Flowers, the engineer who designed the even more advanced Colossus, the world’s first programmable computer. Yet Bletchley Park depended on the heft of a predominantly female workforce, not least Turing's own fiancée, Joan Clarke. The women who worked at Bletchley have often been overlooked in this story because, with the exception of three or four female cryptanalysts, the vast majority of top-end codebreakers during the war were men. The story of how girl power – often school-girl power – turned what began as an eccentric experiment into the world’s most impressive codebreaking factory is less well known, but no less important. Who worked at Britain's wartime intelligence factory In 1938, with war on the horizon, the Government Code and Cipher School (GC&CS) – the precursor to the modern GCHQ – temporarily moved out of London, to avoid bombing raids, but by August 1939, its secret home in Bletchley Park had become permanent. Initially, this fledging operation was staffed by just 186 people. ‘Men of a professor type’, particularly mathematicians were targeted, with early recruits including Turing, Gordon Welchman and Alfred Dillwyn Knox. Their work, however, was supported by an expanding team of chiefly civilian women. Perhaps inevitably at the beginning of the war, Establishment Britain recruited from their own when it came to Bletchley’s secret operations. The German military must never know that Britain was in the process of achieving what Hitler believed to be impossible – the decoding of Enigma. It was imperative that those selected could be trusted to keep quiet, and from kinship springs trust. Many of the first women at Bletchley Park came from ruling-class families who knew each other. Who were the Bletchley women? Lady Jean was a 19-year-old Scottish aristocrat and debutante. She had been tipped off about a “hush, hush mission at Bletchley Park” by her father’s friend, Lord Mountbatten. Actress Pamela Rose (née Gibson), received a letter from an “interfering godmother”. If girls’ education was rarely a priority between the wars, an upper-class focus on being accomplished and attending foreign finishing schools certainly had its advantages. Pamela’s understanding of German, for example, was deemed to be useful for filing decrypted messages. For that work she sacrificed her first role on the West End. From the outset, Bletchley, aka Station X, could not operate without the constant ‘traffic’ of German Enigma messages. This came from the Y Service, Bletchley’s vital other half, with its numerous listening stations intercepting German radio communications. Among the staff of the Y Service were members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service, or ‘Wrens’. One of these was 18-year-old Pat Davies (née Owtram). Assigned as a Special Duties Linguist after an intense training course, her first post on a “highly secret mission” was at Withernsea, Yorkshire. “As soon as one of the German ships came up, you wrote down exactly what you heard,” she later recalled. A lot of what Pat remembers was the meaningless clumps of letters. “Anton, Bertha, Cesar... I always thought it was odd hearing the war all the time from the German side. The whole thing would be written down and then one of us would call Station X. I had no idea what Station X was.” Pat was one of many secret ‘listeners’, whose precious encoded data was being sent to the rapidly expanding team at Bletchley. Read more | The changing role of women in British computing In late 1941, for the first time in British history, conscription for women was introduced. By then Bletchley was already reliant on a massive female workforce, like so many other wartime institutions. A group of the original cryptanalysts had sent a stern missive that October to Winston Churchill saying they did not have sufficient resources and staff, which saw the prime minister instantly and dramatically scale up operations. It would keep growing so that by 1944, Bletchley employed 8,743 workers, three-quarters of whom were women. Although ‘posh’ civilian girls were first to arrive, the sheer numbers required saw the majority of staff being recruited by the military services. Among them was Charlotte 'Betty' Webb (née Vine-Stevens), who was 19 when she was selected from her Auxiliary Territorial Service training camp. Shifts took place in a small room in the Bletchley mansion. “I worked on the card index, putting things into date order and registering them under their call signs. Nothing was in clear language. It was all in groups of letters or figures on sheets of paper – masses of them,” says Betty. Her job was not to understand, but to register every message passing across her desk. 3 women of Bletchley Park Pamela Rose (née Gibson) Pamela’s war work began with her recruitment to the indexing department of Hut 4. She was one of the very few examples of women being promoted from “humdrum roles”. Pamela became head of Naval Indexing, a section that has subsequently been hailed as a precursor of the Information Age. Co-ordinating vital fact-finding forays long before the advent of the microchip, she remains modest about her wartime achievements. “I think I was promoted because I couldn’t type! Yes I suppose most of the Heads of Sections meetings were with men. I was given my own room and had some responsibility but I missed the girls’ chatter.” Pat Davies (née Owtram) While she was not based at Bletchley, Pat was a Wren in the Y Service, which saw her move between three English coastal locations. Her final listening post was Abbot’s Cliff in Kent. At the age of 95, Pat remains a tireless champion of her secret war work: lectures, theatre tours, television appearances, she uses any means available to explain her time at the coalmface of Britain’s massive interception mission. “Doing this work at an early age meant my life went down a totally different track. Before the war, my parents said ‘we can’t afford to send you to university’, but in the end I went to three of the very top ones.” Pat studied at St Andrews, Oxford and Harvard, before she embarked on a stellar media career as a producer in the then-new medium of television. Betty Webb (née Vine-Stevens) In 2015, Betty received an MBE in recognition of her tireless campaigning and support of Bletchley Park Trust, the museum that has enlightened millions about the work done in secret by thousands of men and women. The award is the pinnacle of an impressive CV. As a reward for a meticulous performance at Bletchley over three years, Betty was transferred in 1944 to a new building in the US: the Pentagon. “I was staggered by the invitation. Me? A humble staff sergeant.” Despite teething problems, cross pollination between British and American codebreakers had increased since 1942. “I was the only ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service) girl in the whole building! I did the same job I left behind at the Park. I suppose I was a natural administrator.” Learning to love the Bombe It was Turing’s development of the bombe that radically increased the rate at which Enigma could be read. By 1944, a force of 1,676 Wrens were dutifully tending more than 200 bombes – described as having the appearance of “great metal bookcases” – which were harvesting up to 18,000 Enigma messages daily. Alongside Pat’s interceptions and Charlotte’s data processing came Wren Ruth Bourne (née Henry)'s mechanical vigilance as another component on the codebreaking conveyor belt. Her job was to operate one of the bombes. Churning with around 100 rotating drums, 12 miles of wire and one million soldered connections, it made for an intimidating prospect, but what Ruth thought of her work was irrelevant. “Nice girls do what they are told,” she explains. The bombe was just the first of the industrial sized behemoths that transformed life at the Park. Another Wren, Joanna Chorley (née Stradling), worked in the Newmanry, a section tasked with reading the highly sophisticated ‘Fish’ communications sent using the Lorenz cipher between Hitler and his high command. Up to a hundred times longer than Enigma, Fish messages were invaluable. So much so that a technological whopper was born to analyse their contents: Colossus. Joanna remembers her first meeting with the machine, which was the size of a room: “It was ticking away, and the tapes were going around and all the valves, and I thought what an amazing machine. Like magic and science combined!” Joanna had fallen in love with the world’s first electronic computer. “It’s a bit silly really isn’t it? But I did love the beast,” she recalled. Life as a Bletchley girl For many of the Bletchley Girls, their roles were compartmentalised and prioritised accuracy, stamina and occasionally a foreign language. Lady Jean was disappointed with her job. Her shift work, designed to make up for a short fall of bombe machines, was frustratingly repetitive. “I marked letters in German messages, then perforated those same marks and compared one message on top of another. If three holes were on the top of three other marked ones, these were put through the hatch to the next room. Doing this for a year sent me nearly crazy.” Exceptional moments were keenly savoured. Rozanne Colchester (née Medhurst) was a teenager who could speak Italian courtesy of a childhood spent in Rome. Her basic decoding was formulaic and the information revealed fairly dull, but late one night “after many trials and errors I found myself faced with a message that made sense”. In her small work room in Buckinghamshire, she read something no one else in the Allied forces knew – in three and a half hours, Italy’s SM.79 torpedo bombers and SM.82 transport carriers would leave Tripoli and head across the Mediterranean. Listen | Tessa Dunlop shares the stories of women who worked at Britain’s codebreaking centre in World War Two With the Desert War over by June 1943, the crippled Italians were making for Sicily, but thanks to Rozanne they never reached their destination. The information she read was radioed to the RAF in North Africa. “Very soon our aeroplanes were in the air and all the Italian aircraft were shot down!” Few experienced such stand-out moments, but all of the women remember the onus placed on secrecy. No one could forget their introduction to the Official Secrets Act. Charlotte recalls a vast document she was forced to read on the spot. Ruth was told if she broke her oath of secrecy, she would go to prison “at the very least”. Joanna was under no illusions, either: “We knew damn well what will happen if we blab. It will kill people. We knew we couldn’t talk for a reason.” During his only visit to the Park in 1941, Winston Churchill described Bletchley as “the goose that laid the golden egg but never cackled”. And everyone kept their secrets for more than 30 years. Bletchley’s impact on the war is now common knowledge, but before the 1970s some Bletchley Girls weren’t even aware they had been involved in codebreaking. Pat was one of them. “It was surprising to hear that Bletchley had achieved such great things,” she says, “because at the time we never got any feedback. We didn’t know how important we had been.” Tessa Dunlop is a historian and broadcaster. This article first appeared in BBC History Revealed
Your guide to Alan Turing: the man, the enigma
We bring you the facts about the life and death of Alan Turing, who played a vital role in breaking German codes including Enigma during the Second World War and is considered by some to be the founding father of computing...
How much do you know about Alan Turing, who was portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch in the 2014 film The Imitation Game? Discover more about his life, death and legacy with our essential guide... The life of Alan Turing: a timeline Alan Turing: his life, achievements and legacy The life of Alan Turing: a timeline 23 June 1912 Born Alan Mathison Turing in Maida Vale, London, the second son of Julius and Sara Turing October 1931 Turing takes up a mathematics scholarship at King’s College Cambridge, earning a first-class degree. In 1935 he is elected to a junior research fellowship January 1937 A paper by Turing is published that is later recognised as laying the foundation of computer science June 1938 At the age of 25, Turing receives his PhD from Princeton for his dissertation Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals 4 September 1939 Turing arrives at Bletchley Park to begin his wartime work on code and cipher systems. He goes on to lead the team in Hut 8 (left) March 1940 The first Bombe machine, designed by Turing, arrives at Bletchley. More than 200 machines will be manufactured 2 November 1942 Turing travels to the US to liaise on several joint US/UK projects, including an American Bombe machine March 1946 Turing produces a detailed design for an Automatic Computing Engine 31 March 1952 He is convicted of being “party to the commission of an act of gross indecency” 8 June 1954 Turing is found dead. The coroner’s verdict is that he had taken his own life Alan Turing: his life, achievements and legacy The founding father of computing played a vital role in breaking German codes during WW2. Joel Greenberg deciphers the brilliant but troubled life of Alan Turing... In September 1939, just as the Second World War was declared, a young man arrived to stay at the Crown Inn in the hamlet of Shenley Brook End, Buckinghamshire. He was fit enough – an exceptional long-distance runner, in fact – and his new landlady, Mrs Ramshaw, voiced concerns that such a clearly able-bodied young man wasn’t doing his bit for the war effort by joining up. Mrs Ramshaw’s indignation couldn’t have been more misplaced. The man was Alan Turing, and his work at nearby Bletchley Park – the secret base of the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), the Foreign Office’s codebreaking section – was to prove crucial in thwarting German military actions. Turing had returned to England the previous summer after several years of research at Princeton University, which led to his PhD. The University of Cambridge then renewed his fellowship at King’s College, to which he had first been elected in March 1935 after earning a first-class honours degree there. In 1938, with the threat of conflict in Europe looming, Turing was among a number of British academics approached by GC&CS to undertake secret work for them in anticipation of the outbreak of war. He worked part-time for GC&CS, attending several training courses, and collaborated with Dilly Knox, a veteran First World War codebreaker, on attempts to break the Enigma machine. Alan Turing and Bletchley Park On 4 September 1939, the day after Britain declared war on Germany, Turing reported for duty at Bletchley Park and stepped up his work on Enigma. He would go on to lead the team named Hut 8, after the wooden hut in which it was initially based. Contrary to popular belief, there was no single ‘Enigma code’. The Enigma machine – actually a family of portable encryption devices that substituted each letter of a message for another letter of the alphabet – was first developed in the 1920s and enhanced over subsequent years. By the late 1930s different versions were used by the various branches of the German military. The Germans’ operating procedures exploited the reciprocal nature of the machine. When two Enigma machines were set up the same way, if on one you typed ‘A’ and it turned it into ‘B’, on the other machine if you typed ‘B’, it would turn it into ‘A’. The setting that governed these substitutions was known at Bletchley Park as the daily key, because it was usually changed every 24 hours. If the Bletchley Park codebreakers could work out the daily key, they could decrypt and read all of the intercepted German messages sent that day. This was done using replica Enigma machines, manufactured in Britain. But the number of possible daily keys was almost too big to imagine. In the case of the German army and air force Enigma, there were 158.9 million, million, million possibilities. It was this daily key that Turing and his colleagues were trying to work out. In the preceding months, Knox had met with members of the Polish Cipher Bureau who were collaborating with French intelligence. Having worked on Enigma for several years, the Poles had enjoyed some success in breaking the system used by the German army and air force in the 1930s, but their methods no longer worked because of changes made to Enigma by the Germans. They had also designed a semi-automatic machine – a bomba kryptologiczna (reputedly named after a Polish ice cream dessert called a bomba) – to determine the settings that were vital to deciphering the codes produced by Enigma, hugely speeding up the process. In July 1939, they shared their findings with Knox. Did Alan Turing break Enigma? At Bletchley Park, Turing devised a new and more powerful kind of electro-mechanical machine for determining the crucial Enigma settings. Another Cambridge mathematician working at Bletchley Park, Gordon Welchman, made a crucial addition that increased the effectiveness of the machine – called the Bombe – providing Bletchley Park with a vital codebreaking tool. By the end of the war, some 211 machines had been produced. The Bombe, though, wasn’t the complete solution to Enigma. Early in 1940, Turing was asked to take on the task of breaking the German navy’s Enigma system, which used more secure procedures than those of the air force and army. Many at Bletchley believed it could not be broken – yet doing so was vital. These were desperate times for Britain. The country became increasingly dependent on convoys of ships carrying vital supplies across the North Atlantic, and German U-boat attacks were wreaking havoc on these convoys: average monthly shipping losses in 1940 exceeded 220,000 tonnes. To tackle this, Turing’s Bletchley Park team was expanded. Read more | The evolution of British code-breaking The challenge was this. Having set up their machines using the daily key, each Enigma operator applied one final setting before encrypting a message. The operators for the German army and air force were allowed to choose this setting themselves, but the German navy issued code books for this purpose. In a remarkable piece of work, Turing managed to deduce, quite quickly, how these code books were being used, but realised that his team would need to acquire copies before further progress could be made. It wasn’t till a German naval code book was captured that Turing and his colleagues began to achieve success in working out the daily key and reading encrypted German naval messages. Intelligence reports about Germany’s U-boat and ship movements could then be produced and sent to the Admiralty for dissemination. The interception and decryption of German naval messages played a crucial role in the great sea battles of the Second World War. German ships and U-boats could be located and attacked, and Allied convoys could be diverted to reduce shipping losses. At its peak, Hut 8 had more than 150 staff. It was part of a large codebreaking operation at Bletchley Park that broke a number of other enemy code and cipher systems as well as Enigma, and employed as many as 10,500 people – the operation truly was a team effort. Yet Turing’s contribution was fundamental. In late 1940 Turing wrote a report describing the methods he and his colleagues were using to solve the German Enigma system. It was known as ‘Prof’s Book’, and it became essential reading for new recruits. Alan Turing's legacy Years later, Bletchley Park codebreaker Peter Hilton explained that what set Turing apart from his colleagues was his ability to come up with ideas that Hilton felt he would not have thought of “in a million years”. These ideas gave rise to a number of statistical methods with colourful names such as ‘Banburismus’ and ‘Turingery’. In June 1946 it was announced that Turing had (in 1945) been awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for war services. There were rumours that he had been considered for a higher award, but that the OBE was the highest that could be awarded to civil servants of Turing’s official wartime rank – his true role not being revealed for another three decades. After the war, Turing worked at the National Physical Laboratory in London, where he designed an early digital computer. In 1945, he took up a position at the University of Manchester and contributed to its pioneering computer developments. Biological research was now occupying much of his time and in November 1951 he completed a paper on morphogenetic theory. However, it was work he’d undertaken much earlier that brought him academic renown in later years. In 1935 Turing had attended a lecture by mathematician Max Newman, discussing the Entscheidungsproblem (‘decision problem’) which asks for a way of determining which mathematical problems are computable. This had intrigued Turing, and his research yielded the paper ‘On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem’, published by the London Mathematical Society in 1937. By the early 1950s, his fame as the author of ‘On Computable Numbers…’ was growing, and in 1953 the University of Manchester appointed Turing to a specially created readership in the theory of computing. But while Turing’s academic renown was growing, his private life was in turmoil. On 31 March 1952 at a court in Knutsford, Cheshire, Turing was charged with being “party to the commission of an act of gross indecency” – in effect, he was charged with being homosexual. He pleaded guilty. Instead of imprisonment he opted for hormone ‘treatment’ – oestrogen injections that made him put on weight and enlarged his breasts. How did Alan Turing die? On the morning of 8 June 1954, Turing was found dead in bed by his housekeeper. The coroner’s verdict found that he had taken his own life; there were reports that a partly eaten apple by his bed contained traces of cyanide. It was not till many years after the publication of Turing’s 1937 paper that it became clear it had probably laid the foundations for the evolution of computing. His story has now been told on stage and screen; perhaps not surprisingly, he remains the only Bletchley Park figure to be widely known. Yet it was only after his death that much of Turing’s life and work, obscured for so long, was revealed. Joel Greenberg is the author of Gordon Welchman: Bletchley Park's Architect of Ultra Intelligence (Frontline, 2014) This article was first published in the October 2015 issue of BBC History Magazine
Your guide to Bletchley Park, the key WW2 decryption centre
Bletchley Park housed Britain's key decryption centre during the Second World War and is credited with shortening the conflict by at least two years. Sinclair McKay tells you everything you need to know about the famous decryption centre...
Q: What role did Bletchley Park play during WW2? A: Bletchley Park was the Buckinghamshire house and estate that played host to Britain’s code-breaking triumphs – from the success in breaking the ‘insoluble’ Nazi Enigma codes to its incredible work on Japanese cryptology. Its role was so secret – everyone who worked there signed the Official Secrets Act for life – that we only really started to learn about its achievements decades afterwards. And there is still much to emerge. Q: When and how was the code-breaking centre established? A: Before it was evacuated to Bletchley, the Government Code and Cypher School – as it was then known – operated from a building near Westminster. There had been a special code-breaking department since the First World War – then, it was referred to as ‘Room 40’. In the interwar years, they analysed Soviet traffic, among other things. When it seemed obvious that war was coming once more, many of the expert cryptanalysts of Room 40 set up the new establishment at Bletchley in 1938. They recruited crucial new blood, including brilliant young mathematician Alan Turing, as well as lecturers and undergraduates from universities all over the country. Q: How many code-breakers worked there? What did an average day consist of? A: Numbers rose as the war went on; from a relatively small team in 1938 to something like 10,000 people – code-breakers, Wrens, WAAFs, posh debutantes working on the cross-indexing system etc. Read more | Bletchley Park: Britain's wartime intelligence factory Obviously, they didn’t live at the house. All these people, mainly young, were billeted around the town and nearby villages. Bletchley locals were disconcerted by some of the eccentric code-breakers, and they formed a theory that the secret establishment was in fact a special lunatic asylum. There was no average day. Code-breaking went on round the clock, in a three-shift system, and in different huts – very often the work was done in plain wooden huts. There could either be months of agonising paralysis (as there was in the battle to crack the nightmarishly complex Naval Enigma) or nights of giddying triumph, as when 20-year-old Mavis Batey broke the code that led to British victory in the Battle of Cape Matapan. Read more | Enigma before Bletchley: the German spies who betrayed Hitler Q: Roughly how many ciphers and codes were decrypted in total? A: It is simply impossible to know – largely because Bletchley was so mind-bogglingly successful. They read messages from the German army, navy, air force, secret service… even messages from the desk of Hitler himself. Countless thousands upon thousands of communications. They cracked Italian and Japanese cyphers, and the operation was spread across the whole wide world. In posts from Cairo to Murmansk, dedicated secret listeners for the Y Service intercepted all the secret coded radio messages – and relayed them back to England, and ultimately back to this incredible code-breaking factory. The other miracle was the secrecy; the fact that the Germans never really guessed adds to this astonishing success. Which of Bletchley Park's successful decodings of the German military's intelligence was of most benefit to the Allies? Various branches of the German military – the Abwehr, Luftwaffe, Wehrmacht, navy and so on – all used variations of the Enigma machine with their own specific encryption settings. Each of these had to be deciphered independently at Bletchley Park. There is little doubt that the resulting intelligence – named ‘Ultra’ by the British – made a very considerable, even decisive contribution to the Allied war effort. Its success stories are legion. It was through Ultra, for example, that Rommel’s plans were divined on the eve of Alam Halfa, a battle that spelt the beginning of the end of the Afrika Korps. It was Ultra intelligence that forewarned the Soviets of German intentions at the battle of Kursk, defeat in which robbed the Wehrmacht of its offensive capacity. The cracking of the Italian naval code, meanwhile, facilitated the Allied victory at the battle of Cape Matapan in 1941, which checked Italian ambitions in the Mediterranean. D-Day itself would scarcely have taken place, never mind succeeded, without the crucial intelligence provided by Bletchley Park. At every turn, it seems, the Allies drew enormous benefit from their ability to read enemy signals, and thereby learn what their opponents had in mind. Taken together, therefore, the various strands of ‘Ultra’ intelligence were clearly of vital importance to the Allied cause, yet any definitive assessment of their comparative merits is very difficult to make. For argument’s sake, therefore, I will plump for the cracking of the German naval codes in 1941–2, by which the balance in the battle of the Atlantic was decisively shifted in favour of the Allies. Were it not for that achievement, Britain might well have been rendered lame militarily or starved into submission long before D-Day, thereby rendering Ultra’s other successes rather superfluous. Q&A answered by historian Roger Moorhouse Q: Is it true that the 'Ultra' intelligence produced at Bletchley Park shortened the war by two to four years? A: President Eisenhower credited the work of ‘BP’, as it was called, with having shortened the war by two years. Think for a moment of how many lives those two years might represent; the countless people saved simply by the ending of the conflict. Bletchley veteran and distinguished historian, Professor Sir Harry Hinsley, reckoned it was three years. Apart from anything else, without Bletchley’s absolutely crucial intelligence, the D-Day landings in 1944 might never have worked, and in the extra time it would have taken the Allies to get a foothold in Europe, who knows how many more victims the Nazis would have murdered? And what sort of new and terrible weapons the Nazis could have developed? Bear in mind the other great element of the Bletchley story: thanks to a brilliant engineer called Tommy Flowers, the computer age was brought into being there. He developed a code-breaking machine – the Colossus – that was in effect a proto-computer. Engineers at Google and Apple recognise and pay tribute to the Park’s importance. Did you know that Bletchley employed women to work for the war effort? Bletchley drew together a wide mixture of civilian and service personnel in what was effectively a ‘green field’ organisation. It moved from being simply a codebreaking operation to a more integrated signals intelligence entity, linking interception, cryptanalysis, translation, intelligence analysis and intelligence dissemination. This worked on a factory-like basis to produce a continuous flow of useable intelligence. At its height in 1944, Bletchley Park employed close to 10,000 people, up to three-quarters of whom were women, performing a wide array of tasks. Read more about the female codebreakers of Bletchley Park Listen | Tessa Dunlop shares the stories of women who worked at Britain’s codebreaking centre in World War Two Q: When was Bletchley Park decommissioned? A: It was never decommissioned. Its work – and in some ways, its spirit and ethos – still goes on today. After the war, the work of the Park was packed up (all decrypts carefully destroyed) and first moved to Eastcote, in north-west London. Some of the code-breakers stayed on. The need for their brilliance was still there – the war had simply turned Cold. After several years, new premises for the increasingly sophisticated technological operation were found, in the pleasant town of Cheltenham. They are still there now, and the organisation is better known as GCHQ. Read more about the evolution of British code-breaking Bletchley's most famous codebreaker is Alan Turing… Born in 1912, Turing studied mathematics at King’s College and afterwards he completed his PhD at Princeton in the US. His thesis was ‘Systems of logic based on ordinals’. Turing’s most important theoretical work ‘On computable numbers’ was written in 1936. This essentially founded modern computer science. Turing arrived at Bletchley in 1939 and soon became the head of the Naval Enigma Team. He played a vital role in breaking German codes during the Second World War, working with a team of colleagues including Dilly Knox, who had broken an Italian naval enigma cipher as early as 1937. In 1945, Turing was awarded an OBE for his wartime services. But, Christopher Grey stresses, "it certainly wasn’t the case that Turing alone cracked Enigma, any more than there was a single Enigma to be cracked". Read more about the life of codebreaker Alan Turing Sinclair McKay is the author of The Lost World Of Bletchley Park (Aurum Press, 2013) and The Secret Listeners: How the Wartime Y Service Intercepted the Secret German Codes for Bletchley Park (Aurum Press, 2012) This article was originally published by HistoryExtra in 2014
Bletchley Park: Britain's wartime intelligence factory
Christopher Grey explains why Alan Turing was not the only star of Britain's Second World War secret data gathering centre...
Mention the words ‘Bletchley Park’ and most people will immediately think of Alan Turing. But, important as Turing’s contribution was, he was but one of a larger group of codebreakers who were themselves but a tiny minority of what was an enormous and highly complex organisation. At its height in 1944, Bletchley Park employed close to 10,000 people, up to three-quarters of whom were women, performing a wide array of tasks. It is sometimes said that this operation shortened WW2 by two or three years, and it is certainly easy to see how reading so many of the operational and strategic signals of the enemy was invaluable to the Allies. It by no means detracts from Turing’s achievements to recall that this success would have been quite impossible without the work of a great many others. The Buckinghamshire estate of Bletchley Park was the wartime home of the Government Code and Cipher School (GC & CS), the forerunner of today’s GCHQ. Formed after the First World War from the codebreaking facilities at the Admiralty and the War Office, by 1939 GC & CS was part of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6), itself within the Foreign Office. At the outbreak of war there were no more than 200 people working at Bletchley Park. Of these, only a handful were employed on Enigma, the cipher machine employed by various elements of the German war effort, such as the army and navy. Within those services, Enigma was employed by scores of different ‘user groups’, many of which were decoded at Bletchley from 1940 onwards. It is therefore a misnomer to think of the breaking of Enigma as a single event – there were, in fact, multiple variants of the famous cipher machine, each changing their configuration daily. And Bletchley’s staff weren’t just faced with the task of decoding Enigma. Germany also used the even more complex Fish ciphers – for which the Colossus computing machine was built in 1944 – and there was also a range of Italian and Japanese ciphers to be dealt with. What were the keys to Bletchley Park's success? 1) Bletchley Park moved from being simply a codebreaking operation to a more integrated signals intelligence entity, linking interception, cryptanalysis, translation, intelligence analysis and intelligence dissemination. This worked on a factory-like basis to produce a continuous flow of useable intelligence. 2) Bletchley Park centralised, largely on one site, most British codebreaking activity. This enabled a concentration of expertise which in turn fostered co-operation, knowledge-sharing and innovation. Bletchley Park developed technical innovations in the fields of codebreaking techniques, mechanical, electromechanical and electronic devices, and data management methods. 3) By drawing together a wide mixture of civilian and service personnel in what was effectively a ‘green field’ organisation, Bletchley Park was able to develop pragmatic, workable ways of solving organisational problems rather than being hidebound by military hierarchy and established ways of working. 4) Many senior people at Bletchley Park were already close friends and colleagues before the war. This enabled them to make decisions and reach agreements – over the use of resources, for instance – in the absence of clear structures of command and control. 5) Bletchley Park found a way to combine routine bureaucratic operations with high-skill creative work. Nowadays this is referred to as ‘organisational ambidexterity’ and it seems to have emerged at Bletchley Park in part by accident rather than design. Polish exploits Bletchley Park was aided in its efforts to decipher Enigma by the prewar exploits of Polish codebreakers. This informed the work of Turing but also a team of colleagues including Dilly Knox, who had broken an Italian naval enigma cipher as early as 1937. It certainly wasn’t the case that Turing alone cracked Enigma, any more than there was a single Enigma to be cracked. And in any case, breaking an Enigma ‘user group’ was only the first stage. It enabled messages to be read, but what did the messages mean? The men and women of Bletchley Park could only find out by painstakingly synthesising and analysing thousands of decoded messages. This in turn meant that they had to develop a complex data management operation, mainly based on cross-referenced card indexes that were sometimes filed in shoeboxes. It also demanded that they created an intelligence assessment function, so that they could produce something useable to the Allies’ military commanders. It was the task of handling huge volumes of Enigma decrypts so that solid military intelligence could be produced that made Gordon Welchman a key figure at Bletchley Park. A Cambridge mathematician, like his more famous colleague Alan Turing, Welchman devised the system that was to process thousands of messages each day – from interception through to decryption, translation and analysis. Read more about the evolution of British code-breaking Welchman’s system met with some resistance. Interception was a problem, because the facilities to do this were run by the armed services, not Bletchley Park. Intelligence analysis was another, as this was a realm where the armed services were reluctant to relinquish control. But after many political battles, Welchman’s proposals largely prevailed, and Bletchley Park became much more independent from the various government ministries and armed services from which it had been created. What this meant was that Bletchley Park became home to an enormous centralised ‘signals intelligence’ operation, which grew so rapidly that it soon expanded from the original mansion house to a complex of wooden huts and concrete blocks, many of which can still be seen today. What had been created was no less than an intelligence ‘factory’ which sucked in thousands of people working in conditions of complete secrecy. Everyone employed at Bletchley Park was told that they must never reveal anything of their work. Many had no idea what they were working on – they merely knew that they had to complete their one little part of the process. And, as the secrecy was maintained until 1974, in some cases they died not knowing the value of their work. The secrecy gives rise to some delicious stories, such as the spouses who both worked at Bletchley Park yet only realised it when they met at a reunion. Massive operation What were all these people doing? So many things that it would be impossible to catalogue them all. Many operated and maintained the various machines used in codebreaking. Some were civilians: for example, those brought in from the British Machine Tabulating Company to work on the Hollerith data processing machines. Others were WRENs, the female branch of the navy, who operated the ‘bombes’, electromechanical devices that tested possible solutions to Enigmas. Still others, both civilian and military, were indexing clerks, running the massive operation to collate hundreds of thousands of decrypted messages. Read more about the women of Bletchley Park There was also a complex infrastructure for housing, feeding and transporting the workforce, which typically worked on a three-shift basis throughout the day. There were even five people employed in the barber’s shop! An unsung hero at Bletchley Park was Alan Bradshaw, who throughout the war ran the entire administrative function that held this all together. For the most part, the more humdrum activities were performed by women. True, there were some female codebreakers – Mavis Batey and Joan Murray among the best known; Margaret Rock and Ruth Briggs, less so – and women could be found in highly skilled roles such as translation and intelligence assessment. Yet, more commonly, they performed routine, repetitive and often physically arduous jobs. And the prevalent modern perception of aristocratic ‘debutantes’ using their family connections to secure berths at Bletchley Park is largely misleading. In reality, Bletchley Park’s female employees hailed from a wide variety of backgrounds. It would be wrong, then, to think of Bletchley Park as a genteel club where eccentric male geniuses performed complex mathematical calculations. Rebecca Ratcliff, who compared British and German codebreaking, shows how the German effort suffered from being fragmented, whereas Bletchley Park brought much of the capacity together. The amalgamation of codebreaking with intelligence analysis was what made the work of Turing and his fellow cryptanalysts useful. And it was the Welchman factory that allowed Bletchley Park to churn out this intelligence in volume. Of course that factory would not have existed had it not been for the codebreakers. But without the factory it is inconceivable that the codebreakers would have had the significant impact that they did on the conduct of the war. Christopher Grey is professor of organisational behaviour at Warwick University. He held a Leverhulme major research fellowship to study the organisation of Bletchley Park. This article was first published in the April 2012 issue of BBC History Magazine
Tessa Dunlop shares the stories of women who worked at Britain’s codebreaking centre in World War Two
Historian and broadcaster Tessa Dunlop shares the stories of women she interviewed who worked at Bletchley Park, Britain’s codebreaking centre during WW2.
The Zimmermann telegram: the telegram that brought America into the First World War
More than 100 hundred years after British intelligence intercepted the Zimmermann telegram, Dr David Kenyon, research historian at Bletchley Park, talks to History Extra about how the telegram altered the course of the First World War and influenced future code-breaking operations…
In the spring of 1917, despite two and a half years of fighting, the Allied and German forces on the western front were still deadlocked. The battle of the Somme had just drawn to a close with huge losses on both sides. The Germans decided to seek victory through a different route – by unrestricted U-boat warfare in the Atlantic, which meant using submarines to sink all merchant ships heading for the UK regardless of their nationality, in order to starve out the UK population. Up to this point, the US had remained neutral – though it was supplying the Allied forces with large amounts of food and war materials from its factories. Thus there were significant numbers of US companies and ships trading with Britain. The concern for the Germans was that attacks on this trade might bring the US into the war. On 17 January 1917, British intelligence intercepted the Zimmermann telegram, leading to one of the first occasions when a piece of SIGINT (intelligence gained by eavesdropping on an enemy’s coded communications) heavily influenced the course of world events. The telegram was an internal diplomatic message sent in January 1917 from the German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann in Berlin, to the German Embassy in Mexico. It proposed a military alliance between Germany and Mexico, in the event of the United States entering the First World War in support of the Allies. When the contents of the telegram were made public in the US, it became a major factor in debates about whether the US should enter the war on the Allied side – which they did on 6 April 1917, just five weeks after the telegram’s publication. Read more: The great American U-turn (exclusive to the Library) 7 things you (probably) didn’t know about America’s entry and involvement in the First World War <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2014/12/450826423-f48e99a-ea3750e.jpg" width="413" height="413" alt="A US soldier teaching two junior 'rookie' recruits how to clean a gun during the First World War. (Photo by Paul Thompson/FPG/Getty Images)" title="A US soldier teaching two junior 'rookie' recruits how to clean a gun during the First World War. (Photo by Paul Thompson/FPG/Getty Images)" /> Intercepted by ‘Room 40’ Although wireless (radio) was used to send messages in the First World War, the principal means of diplomatic communication was via telegrams sent on undersea cables. In 1914 the Allies cut many German cables, forcing them to communicate via the cables of other powers. German communications with the US, and other embassies in north and south America, were routed through the neutral US Embassy in Berlin, via their cable to Stockholm, and on across the Atlantic. Yet this cable actually passed through the UK and could be tapped by the British intelligence services. The Germans relied on the fact that although the signals were on a ‘public’ cable, they were written in code, so the contents would remain secret. What they did not appreciate was that the British had already broken the codes they were using, and so any messages sent could be read. The Zimmermann message was passed to the British code-breaking unit in ‘Room 40’ of the Admiralty, where it was tackled by senior British code-breakers including Nigel de Grey and William Montgomery. Although they managed to understand the significance of the message very quickly, their understanding of the code was incomplete, so it took them several weeks of hard work to complete a full decryption. The telegram instructed the German ambassador in Mexico, Heinrich von Eckardt, that if the United States appeared certain to enter the war, he was to approach the Mexican government with a proposal for military alliance with funding from Germany. The Mexicans were to be encouraged to invade the southern US with the aim of re-conquering those states that were formerly part of Mexico: Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. Germany would support this effort with money and arms, and back Mexico’s territorial claims in any subsequent peace negotiations. For Germany, an alliance with Mexico would simply be one of convenience. Mexico had suffered several years of war and political instability up to 1916, and Germany had already shown itself to be reluctant to involve itself in the country or support the current Mexican government. However, a stronger and friendly Mexico would be helpful in curbing the power of the US after the war. The US, on the other hand, regarded the Americas as their sphere of influence, and a rival power gaining a foothold in north America through alliance with their neighbour was highly undesirable. Read more: The evolution of British code-breaking Alan Turing: The man, the enigma The difficulty for the British Admiralty was that if they simply handed over the message to Washington, it would become clear that the British were tapping the US cable. If, however, they could acquire a copy from another source, this would provide a cover for why the British knew of the content of the message. Sir Thomas Hohler had been first secretary of the British legation in Mexico City in September 1916. During that time Hohler had secretly arranged for copies of encoded messages from the German embassy in Washington to Mexico City (sent by commercial Western Union telegraph services) to be stolen, and passed to the British. Although he was no longer in his post in January 1917, this ‘arrangement’ continued, and so the British Embassy in Mexico was able to obtain a copy of the message on that leg of its journey. This had the added advantage that the message had been re-encrypted in Washington into a different German code, which was better understood by Room 40, so a more complete decryption could be created. Influencing public opinion Before the telegram was revealed publicly, Germany had waged 'unrestricted submarine warfare' between 4 February 1915 and 1 September 1915, and resumed from 1 February 1917. Several US ships were quickly sunk, and others were held in port for fear of being attacked. This led to a rise in anti-German, and pro-war feeling in the US. President Wilson was shown the Zimmermann message on 24 February, and released it to the press on 1 March. The wave of anti-German and anti-Mexican feeling grew in the US. Tensions with Mexico were already high; General John J Pershing had long been chasing the revolutionary Pancho Villa and carried out several cross-border raids with US forces. Read more: A–Z of the First World War The First World War: Was it worth it? (exclusive to The Library) First World War: Beyond the western front <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/10/WW1-1b1da7a.jpg" width="361" height="361" alt="British troops go over the top of the trenches during the Battle of the Somme, 1916. The Somme was one of the bloodiest clashes of the First World War, causing more than one million casualties over five months. (Photo by Paul Popper/Popperfoto/Getty Images)" title="British troops go over the top of the trenches during the Battle of the Somme, 1916. The Somme was one of the bloodiest clashes of the First World War, causing more than one million casualties over five months. (Photo by Paul Popper/Popperfoto/Getty Images)" /> At the same time, many Americans wished to avoid the conflict in Europe. Anti-British elements, particularly among German- and Irish-Americans, protested against involvement in the war. Since the public had been told (untruthfully) that the telegram had been stolen in a deciphered form in Mexico, the message was widely believed at first to be an elaborate forgery perpetrated by British intelligence. While it was not the only factor in the US declaration of war, the telegram was certainly influential in the decision. It took the US some time to fully mobilise, and US troops played only a relatively small part in the fighting in 1918, but their economic support, and the knowledge that they were preparing to help, was a huge factor in the Allied victory. Once the US had formally thrown its weight behind the Allied cause, it was clear that the Germans were doomed to lose the war in the long run. They were forced to change their strategy, from trying to slowly wear out the British and French, to needing to bring the war to a successful conclusion in a shorter period. The failed German offensive of March 1918 was a symptom of this. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/01/GettyImages-90737447-a360e16.jpg" width="2400" height="1902" alt="Hut 3 priority teams at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire" title="Hut 3 priority teams at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire. When the Second World War broke out Britain was already prepared to build on its experience to create a SIGINT operation at Bletchley Park. (Photo by SSPL/Getty Images)" /> Meanwhile, the decryption of the telegram, and the work done in Room 40 more generally can be seen as the direct precursor of the formation of the Government Code and Cipher School in 1919. ‘GC&CS’ would go on to be based at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, and later formed the GCHQ of today. The political effect of the telegram contributed to the realisation of the power of codebreaking and signals intelligence in both war and peacetime diplomacy. As a consequence, when the Second World War broke out, Britain was already prepared to build on its experience to create a unique and war-winning SIGINT operation at Bletchley Park. This expertise, and the tradition of co-operation and intelligence sharing with the US, continues to form a key part of British defences to this day. ‘The Road to Bletchley Park’ exhibition, featuring the story of the Zimmermann telegram, can be found in Block C at Bletchley Park. For more information, visit www.bletchleypark.org.uk. This article was first published by History Extra in April 2017.
Bletchley Park was the intelligence nerve centre of the Second World War; but when peace came, what became of its brilliant operatives? Sinclair McKay considers the next steps of the code-breakers; while some played a part in a new age of computing, others influenced the intelligence operations of the modern day
May 8, 1945. As crowds in London danced themselves dizzy with jubilation, and as bonfires were lit across the land, celebrations were a little more discreet in one particular corner of Buckinghamshire. That warm evening, on the lawn outside the large Victorian house, young men and women gathered with drinks, the sound of gramophone music gently echoing from within. The conflict in Europe was over. But for some of these young people, an entirely new kind of war had already begun. These brilliant youngsters were the code-breakers of Bletchley Park. Their success at breaking into the apparently insoluble Nazi Enigma codes and reading the enemy’s communications had (some were later to reckon) shortened the war by two or even three years. But even before the fall of Berlin, senior code-breakers – figures such as director Edward Travis and his deputy Nigel de Grey – were looking ahead to the sort of world that was being shaped. And they saw the terrible hazards. Europe, which had regarded itself as the peak of human civilisation, had been blasted back to the dark ages. Cities were shattered. Food was painfully scarce. Millions of displaced people were harried and hounded. And deep in the forests of eastern Europe, the full horror of the Nazi genocide of the Jews had been uncovered. The continent was suffused with darkness and blood. Now Stalin’s place-men were embedding themselves, as Churchill put it in his famous 1946 ‘Iron Curtain’ speech, “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic”. The fear of the code-breakers – listening to the faltering heartbeat of this wounded continent – was that war could so easily reignite. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/01/GettyImages-50501612-9b9d0b2.jpg" width="2251" height="1678" alt="British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivers a speech at Westminster College that addressed the Communist threat, and in which he uttered the now-famous phrase 'Iron Curtain,' Fulton, Missouri, March 5, 1946. (Photo by George Skadding/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)" title="Churchill gives his 1946 'Iron Curtain' speech in Missouri, USA, speaking of a divide across Eastern Europe. (Photo by George Skadding/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)" /> A new age of computing From the inter-war years of the 1930s to the end of WW2, British code-breaking had evolved from a small-scale speciality, essentially a cottage industry, into an almost industrial concern, decoding thousands upon thousands of messages, and all under a total blanket of secrecy. Bletchley had run a world-wide operation; secret listeners in stations on every continent intercepting every coded communication, listening to every enemy plan and manoeuvre. On top of this, the code-breakers had (almost as a side-effect) kick-started a new age of computing. Their efforts to find a mechanised means of decoding Nazi messages led to the creation of the first programmable proto-computers. Even though many of the younger recruits were now to head off into new lives – in government, the Civil Service, in the realms of science and mathematics – there were invisible threads that would draw them back into the secret realm. For instance, Professor Max Newman and Alan Turing – who in the 1930s were tutor and student at Cambridge, and then at Bletchley Park pioneered a new electronic age of cryptography – went to the University of Manchester and the National Physical Laboratory, helping to develop newer, more complex computers. They and other boffins such as Jack Good were in constant contact with the code-breakers who stayed on. Bletchley Park itself was slowly cleared out; sensitive decrypts were consigned to huge bonfires. The locals in the town were left none the wiser about who all these thousands of young people had been, or what they had done. Alan Turing’s trial for ‘gross indecency’ and subsequent tragic suicide in 1954 are now part of the fabric of modern British history; less well-known is the fact that the people who steadfastly stood by him in those terrible days – among them code-breakers Joan Clarke and Hugh Alexander – were by then at the centre of an astonishing secret service that he had helped to shape. The earliest days of GCHQ What had once been known as ‘The Government Code and Cypher School’ became the ‘London Intelligence Centre’. And by 1947, some internal classified memos were referring to it as GCHQ – Government Communications Headquarters. This acronym was never referred to publicly at all until 1976, when journalists at Time Out magazine revealed its existence. These days, the business of code-breaking is carried out at GCHQ in Cheltenham. The operation was moved there in the early 1950s. But before this, in the immediate postwar years, when it was initially decided that Bletchley Park should be packed up and the remaining code-breakers brought closer to London, the cryptanalysts had a sojourn in the heart of John Betjeman’s Metroland. The site was at Eastcote, a former RAF base well-camouflaged in a leafy middle-class London suburb on the Metropolitan Line. The code-breakers took some of their revolutionary machinery with them. Secrecy was still absolute. The area’s bowler-hatted city commuters, who frequented Eastcote’s mock-Tudor village pubs at the end of their working days, would have had no idea that their fellow drinkers were engaged in vital confidential work of global importance. In those immediate postwar years, senior Bletchley figures such as Hugh Alexander and Joan Clarke (Alan Turing’s former fiancée) had understood that peace would be an illusion in many parts of the world. From conflicting ideologies to the disintegration of empires, the potential flashpoints were limitless. And after August 1945, as the mushroom clouds rose and the skies above Nagasaki and Hiroshima flashed and darkened with nuclear fury, the code-breakers were also considering the threat of atomic apocalypse. Soviet Russia under Stalin did not yet possess nuclear weaponry. But it would not take them long to acquire it. The first of their nuclear tests took place in the plains of Kazakhstan in 1949. There were secret wireless intercept operatives working before that on the borders of Afghanistan, Iran and Azerbaijan. Their intelligence was being fed back to that incongruous leafy suburb, to a base hidden so well behind wide avenues of 1930s houses that most could never have known it was there. The lives of the postwar code-breakers Life at Eastcote – though intensely pressurised – still had the youthful flavour of Bletchley. Even the most owlish of cryptology experts loved their cricket and their tennis. Music was very important to many of them too; in the immediate postwar years, many new recruits were sworn jazz aficionados. There was one major difference though: the vast majority of Bletchley’s talented female code-breakers had left. In the late 1940s, no matter how intellectually dazzling, women were expected to be home-makers. Elsewhere, before Britain’s empire began to dissolve, there were cryptographers and interceptors in Hong Kong, and in Egypt, or sitting in secret stations in Ceylon and India, who wanted to make sure that they could hold on to these invaluable outposts. For it was from these that they could track developments in China, and in soviet central Asia. One such secret listener was later to become a defining novelist of his generation. As a very young man, Alan Sillitoe, who had been working in a Nottingham bicycle factory, was called up for National Service. He had a gift for incredibly fast Morse code transcription and translation. He found himself deep in the jungles of Malaya, on eerie night-shifts in a simple wooden hut, earphones on, listening to messages between pilots, conversations between officials. Sometimes, surreally, from nowhere, his headphones would be filled with random snatches of classical music. Elsewhere, American code-breakers were able to take full advantage of Britain’s colonial network, piggy-backing on those secret stations, to gather up their own intelligence on Soviet manoeuvres. In most other areas, the ‘special relationship’ between the US and the UK was pretty much non-existent, a PR fantasy. But there was a genuine bond of respect and affection between British and American code-breakers. This was perhaps just as well. For in those unstable postwar years, they happened across a secret so terrible, it initially had to be kept from President Truman and British Prime Minister Clement Attlee. A captured Soviet codebook had enabled a small (and ultra-secret) team of cryptographers to penetrate Russian diplomatic messages. And these revealed that there were double agents working at the heart of Washington and deep within Britain’s security services. It took some time to dig further to establish identities: but it was a tiny core of British code-breakers who were the first to flag up Cambridge Spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. The others would follow. The stress of code-breaking as a career was intense; even veterans such as Frank Birch – who had been breaking codes since the First World War, and who in the early 1940s was one of the chief architects of the incredibly close relationship with US code-breakers – had to have a diversionary hobby; his was particularly colourful. When not burrowing into fiendish codes, Birch was a talented actor and director. He staged French farces in the West End, and in the early 1950s, he had a part in a film comedy Will Any Gentlemen? alongside Sid James. Elsewhere, as with Bletchley, this newly regenerated GCHQ held on to its talented chess champions. In 1954, at the Hastings international chess tournament, Hugh Alexander took on the Soviet grandmasters – and won an astounding victory. They had no conception that this man spent his days levering his way into Russian codes. Or indeed had been pivotal in Bletchley’s Hut 8 throughout the Battle of the Atlantic. By the time GCHQ made its move to Cheltenham in the early 1950s – in part a precaution against nuclear strike on London, in part because some of the code-breakers loved the horse-racing – it had established itself as possibly the most vital link in the defence of the realm. Sinclair McKay’s book, The Spies of Winter (Aurum Press, 2017) tells the story of the GCHQ code-breakers and how they used new technology to expand the horizons of cryptography in order to defend the nation during the Cold War years and maintain the fragile peace in a world now under the shadow of nuclear holocaust This article was first published by HistoryExtra in June 2017
The changing role of women in British computing
Historian Marie Hicks considers the role of women in the early British computing industry, their contribution during the Second World War and how their opportunities were curtailed by changing priorities in postwar Britain
Ask anybody about the history of women in computing and they're likely to come up with a few names: Ada Lovelace is a perennial favourite; as is Grace Hopper. A few folks might name other women like Katherine Johnson, Jean Bartik, or Stephanie Shirley. These were all important pioneers in a field that today we think of as male dominated. But what if I were to tell you that these women are not so exceptional as they might seem at first glance? That computing, as a field of endeavour, was feminised work for so long that most young men did not dare go into it for fear of ending up in a career ‘backwater’? This flip from a feminised sphere of work, to one solidly identified as masculine, is a change many still struggle to understand. In my book, Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost its Edge in Computing, I explore the period when women disappeared from the field and how their loss affected the fortune of the entire British computing industry. Women were very much present in the world of computing in Great Britain throughout the early decades of electronic computing and the height of the 'mainframe era' in the 1960s, when massive, room-sized computers were the norm. This was the time that we normally associate with a technological revolution based largely on computerisation. During the period that British prime minister Harold Wilson famously described as the era of “White Heat”, most of the computer operators, programmers, systems administrators, and systems analysts that you were likely to encounter would have been women. Yet by the end of the decade women had largely vanished from the field – and not by choice. The gender flip of computer work was sudden and destructive. The early role of a computer programmer In 1959 a computer programmer and operator faced a very hectic year. This particular worker needed to programme, maintain, operate, and test all of the computers in a major computing centre doing critical work for the central government. These computers didn’t just crunch numbers or automate low-level office work; the programs they ran formed the infrastructure for national affairs and policy. Tax collection, road repairs, and even economic forecasting that the government relied upon to make long-term policy decisions, relied on the work done by computers. In addition to all of this, the worker also had to train two new hires at the same time. These new hires didn't have any of the required technical skills, but would gradually be brought up to speed over the course of a year of training. Once they were trained, the new hires stepped up into management roles, while their trainer was demoted into an assistantship below them. That their trainer was a woman, and that the new hires were both young men, was not a coincidence. Nor was it coincidental that, as a woman, she had the technical skills and know-how for a job like this, while they did not. Before computing became electronic, women were tapped as the ideal workers for what was considered rote, mundane calculation work. Even though this work required advanced mathematics knowledge – everything from spheroidal trigonometry, to calculus, to accounting, to codebreaking – it was perceived as unintellectual and, because women were doing it, largely unimportant. These women were called ‘computers’: before a computer was a machine, it was a job classification, like ‘accountant’ or ‘baker’. When electromechanical and then electronic computers began to automate this work, women carried over: operating, programming, troubleshooting, and even assembling the hardware of these new machines. During the Second World War, women of the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS) assembled and operated the Colossus codebreaking computers – the first digital, electronic, programmable computers in the world. The Colossus computers were incredibly important, not just in computing but for the balance of international politics: their deployment let the Allies know where and when to land on D-Day in 1944 by breaking German codes faster than ever before, and turned the tide of the war. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/05/GettyImages-90737445-226c760.jpg" width="3504" height="2337" alt="Women of the WRNS operate the Colossus, the world's first electronic programmable computer at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire" title="Women of the WRNS operate the Colossus, the world's first electronic programmable computer at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire. (Photo by SSPL/Getty Images)" /> Post-war changes After the Second World War, the cutting-edge electronic Colossus computers were kept secret by the British government, out of fear that revealing them might aid enemies in developing similar technology and compromise Britain’s national security. Most of their operators returned to other jobs in civilian life, but the women operating electromechanical computers at Bletchley Park carried over into the civil service and jobs in industry, into what today we would consider to be cutting-edge new jobs. At the dawn of the digital age, and even well into the height of the mainframe era, jobs in computing had been so thoroughly feminised that they simply weren't considered 'good' jobs for men. By the mid to late 1960s, that was starting to change, not because the work was any different, but because the perception of the work was changing. Computers, instead of being seen as intimidating behemoths that were only good for technical work, were now becoming integrated into every part of the work of government and industry, and it was becoming clear they would shape the infrastructure of business and government to an ever-greater extent in the decades to come. As their great power became more apparent, low-status women workers were no longer seen as appropriate for this type of work, even though they had all the technical skills to do the jobs. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/05/image001-6756dc8.png" width="835" height="654" alt="The ICT Demonstration Team photo from 1964. These women trained customers how to use their computers. From left to right: Carole Tucker, Carol Philbrick, Carol Jordan, and Dorine Conway. (Photo courtesy of Marie Hicks)" title="The ICT Demonstration Team photo from 1964. These women trained customers how to use their computers. From left to right: Carole Tucker, Carol Philbrick, Carol Jordan, and Dorine Conway. (Photo courtesy of Marie Hicks)" /> Within government and the public sector, these women formed an underclass of highly technically trained, and operationally critical technology workers – dubbed "the machine grades" within the civil service. In the mid-1950s, when the British government finally assented to paying its own workers equal pay for equal work, the majority of women working in the civil service did not get equal pay, specifically because these were concentrated in these machine grades. Although there were rarely-used men’s pay scales in the machine grades, with which the women’s wages should have been “equalised”, the government’s rationale was that women had been doing this work for so long, and in such great majority, that their lower rate of pay had now become the standard market rate for the jobs. As such, unlike all of the other women working for the government, women doing technical work with computers would not have their pay raised up to the level of the men’s pay scales for the jobs. As the computerisation of the nation advanced, with computers becoming more important to the functioning of government and industry, this growing feminised machine underclass formed the infrastructure for many critical activities, from taxation, to scientific research, to economic forecasting. Women programmed and operated computers that ran the new VAT and ‘pay-as-you-earn’ taxation systems that enabled the welfare state and the NHS to be funded. Women also wrote software for prestige cutting-edge, international projects like the Concorde. And yet, the low status of the workers, and the fact that they were essentially forbidden from rising into management or managing male staff, meant there was a complete mismatch between the growing power of these technical experts and the way they were treated. As computers grew in power, having an underclass of highly-trained technical workers who were not aligned with the interests and goals of management was a potentially disastrous situation. At one point, for instance, the women who coded the data for the new VAT system went on strike due to poor working conditions, delaying this critical government project significantly while ministers scrambled to understand what was happening. 'The removal of women' So, the government began a decade-long effort to remove women workers from these newly-important technical positions and replace them with management-minded young men: people who could go from the boardroom to the machine room and manage computers as easily as people. The only problem was that men like this did not exist and few young men with good career prospects ahead of them were keen to get into what was perceived as a feminised backwater. Yet, because women were not only not expected to stay long enough to become managers, but were not expected to manage men at all, the idea of technical women working their way up to fill these roles was out of the question. Most businesses went out of their way to ensure that gendered hierarchies always put male managers on top, and the supposedly meritocratic civil service itself was the worst offender, carefully recategorising women and men workers into different job categories even when they were doing the same work. Irrespective of skills, job categories ensured that more men remained in positions of power while most women remained in functional roles, regardless of how they might have shown themselves to be capable. This was how Britain got one of its most important and successful computing pioneers, software tycoon Stephanie Shirley. Shirley began her career in the 1950s at the prestigious Dollis Hill research station, London, in the Post Office doing computational work, the same place where British engineer Tommy Flowers had designed the Colossus during the war. Britain continued to be very strong in computing, matching or anticipating American breakthroughs, and it was within this exciting context that Stephanie Shirley went to work. Yet Shirley found herself unable to get ahead, recalling in her memoir how she was denied promotions that she had earned. When she found out that her superiors were outright refusing to consider promoting her because she was a woman, she left and, finding the same discrimination in industry that she had found in government work, created her own freelance software company out of her home in the early 1960s. Shirley’s successful business model gives some clue as to why the treatment of women in computing was bound to create major problems for the industry. When setting up, Shirley had little capital and no place to work, other than her home. But she did have a major advantage: all of the other highly trained and talented women computing workers who were similarly being pushed out of their jobs, either through outright discrimination or through government and industry’s unwillingness to provision any kind of maternity leave, childcare, or flexible family-friendly working hours. These women were all looking for work. By offering them the ability to work from home (most programming was still done with pencil and paper at this point, before being tested using expensive computer time) and work flexible hours, Shirley created a powerhouse of women technology workers who went on to carry out programming for critical projects in government and industry. For instance, the programming for the Concorde’s black box flight recorder was managed and completed entirely by a remote workforce of women, working from home. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/05/Picture1-d3ff9f6.png" width="837" height="666" alt="Computer programmer Ann Moffatt sits at her kitchen table in 1968" title="Computer programmer Ann Moffatt sits at her kitchen table in 1968, writing code for the black box flight recorder for the Concorde. She entered the industry in 1959 and worked for Stephanie 'Steve' Shirley's freelance programming company. Moffatt led the Concorde programming project, while working from home, and later became technical director at the company-in charge of a staff of over 300 home-based programmers. At the time of publication in 2018, the baby in the photograph is now 52 years old. (Courtesy of Ann Moffatt)" /> Meanwhile, government and industry were unable to train or retain young male technocrats in great enough numbers to stem their losses. As women’s computing talent and expertise was literally pushed out the door, women like Shirley – who used the name ‘Steve’ professionally in order to cut through the sexism of the industry – benefited. However, industry – and the nation as a whole – lost out. Shirley’s company could only employ a small fraction of all the women being removed from their jobs, and this huge mass of wasted talent and potential took a toll. By 1968 the government had become convinced that it could no longer function by trying to get more young men into computing: the numbers simply weren’t there. As a result, they decided to approach the problem from a different angle: if there weren’t enough men for these jobs, then the number of jobs needed to be reduced. In other words, they needed to find a way to do the same amount of computing work with fewer computer workers. This meant bigger machines – more massive, powerful mainframes that could be run from a centralised perch within government. So the government, on the advice of the then-Minister of Technology Anthony Benn, decided to force all of the remaining, viable British computer companies to merge into one large computer company that could provide them with the sort of massive, centralised mainframe technologies they needed. In 1968, ICL (International Computers Limited) was born, and tasked with giving the government – and by extension, the nation – the machines that allow Britain to function with its newly-minimised and masculinised computer labour force. Unfortunately, this change occurred right at a time when the mainframe was on the way out, and smaller mainframes as well as decentralised computer systems were beginning to become the norm. By the time ICL delivered the asked-for product line in the mid 1970s – the highly technically advanced 2900 series of massive, powerful mainframes – the British government no longer wanted it, and neither did other potential customers. As the government realised their mistake (though not the underlying sexism that had caused it), they quickly turned away from ICL, torpedoing what was left of the British computing industry. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/05/GettyImages-623626040-ec01e33.jpg" width="4000" height="2667" alt="Stephanie Shirley, chairman of FI Group Plc, speaks during an event at Google Inc.'s Kings Cross office in London, U.K., on Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2016. After being criticized for not paying its fair share of British tax, Alphabet Inc.s Google unit is trying to show its a good corporate citizen by offering five hours of free digital skills training to all U.K. residents. Photographer: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg via Getty Images" title="Google Inc Offers Free Digital Training To All U.K. Residents" /> History shows us that the sexism that produced this technical labour shortage in the UK was a highly constructed and artificial feature – neither a natural evolution of the field, nor a reflection of women’s talent, goals, and interests. Discrimination in computing is not new: it is not a matter of simply getting “more women into computing” but addressing the structural, programmed inequalities that have been there from the start. Then, as now, these hierarchies were meant to preserve the powerful social and political structures that electronic computing was, since its inception in wartime, meant to serve. A close re-examination of computing history shows us that the “computer revolution” was never really meant to be a revolution in any sort of social or political sense. People who were not seen as worthy of wielding power over men and nations were deliberately excluded, even when they had the required technical skills, and to a great extent, that process continues today. As we continue to see the negative effects of discrimination in Silicon Valley, like social media platforms that can give greater visibility to white supremacy and amplify hate speech – with reverberating effects on national and even global political events – it’s worth looking back and remembering what happened to the nation that invented the computer, and how gender discrimination played a role in its fall from grace. Marie Hicks is a historian and professor of history of technology. You can read more about the history of women in British computing in her book, Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologistsand Lost its Edge in Computing (MIT Press, 2017). Visit her on the web at www.mariehicks.net
7 phases of the history of Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is humanity's most powerful technology. Software that solves problems and turns data into insight has already transformed our lives, and the transformation is accelerating, according to Calum Chace…
My new book Surviving AI (Three Cs) argues that AI will continue to bring enormous benefits, but that it will also present a series of formidable challenges. The range of possible outcomes is wide, from the terrible to the wonderful, and they are not pre-determined. We should monitor the changes that are happening, and adopt policies that will encourage the best possible outcomes. You may have heard already of the ‘technological singularity’, which is the idea that a superintelligence will be created sometime this century, and when that happens the rate of technological progress will become so fast that ordinary humans cannot keep up. In the same way that a black hole is a singularity beyond which the laws of physics do not apply, so the technological singularity is a point beyond which the future cannot be readily understood. Well before we get to that (if we do), there may be another massive discontinuity, which I call the ‘economic singularity’. This is the point at which almost every job can be done cheaper and better by an AI than by a human. If and when that happens – and it could happen well within your lifetime – we will probably need an entirely new economic system to cope. To help us understand how artificial intelligence got us to this remarkable point in time, here are seven vignettes from its history… 1) Greek myths Stories about artificially intelligent creatures go back at least as far as the ancient Greeks. Hephaestus (Vulcan to the Romans) was the blacksmith of Olympus: as well as creating Pandora, the first woman, he created lifelike metal automatons. Hephaestus had an unpromising start in life. Greek myths often have multiple forms, and in some versions, Hephaestus was the son of Zeus and Hera, while in others he was Hera's alone. One of his parents threw him from Mount Olympus, and after falling for a whole day he landed badly, becoming lame. He was rescued by the people of Lemnos, and when Hera saw the ingenious creations he went on to build she relented, and he became the only Greek god to be readmitted to Olympus. His creations were constructed from metal but their purposes varied widely. The most sinister was the Kaukasian eagle, cast in bronze, whose job was to gore the Titan Prometheus every day, ripping out his liver as a punishment for the crime of giving the gift of fire to humanity. At the other end of the spectrum were Hephaestus' automated drinks trolleys. The Khryseoi tripods were a set of 20 wheeled devices that propelled themselves in and out of the halls of Olympus during the feasts of the gods. 2) The first SF: Frankenstein and Rossum's Universal Robots Although numerous earlier stories contained plot elements and ideas that recur throughout science fiction, the author Brian Aldiss claimed Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) was the genre's real starting point because the hero makes the deliberate decision to employ scientific methods and equipment. It is therefore appropriate that, contrary to popular belief, the title refers to the mad scientist figure rather than the monster. Mary Shelley (1797-1851) is best known for her Gothic novel ‘Frankenstein’. (Photo by PHAS/UIG via Getty Images) While Frankenstein seems like a grotesque romance and very much of its time, the 1920 play RUR, or Rossum's Universal Robots, introduces themes that still concern us today. Its Czech author Karel Capek received plaudits when the play was first staged, but later critics have been less kind. Isaac Asimov called it terribly bad, and it is rarely read or staged today. Nevertheless it introduced the idea of a robot uprising that wipes out mankind, which has prompted a huge number of stories since, and it foresaw concerns about widespread technological unemployment as a consequence of automation. And of course it gave the world the word ‘robot’. Capek's robots are androids, with a human appearance as well as the ability to think for themselves. In the uprising, the robots kill all the humans except for one, and the book ends with two of them discovering human-like emotions, which seems to set them up to begin the cycle all over again. 3) Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace The first design for a computer was drawn up by Charles Babbage, a Victorian academic and inventor. Babbage never finished the construction of his devices, but in 1991 a machine was built to his design, using tolerances achievable in his day. It showed that his machine could have worked back in the Victorian era. Babbage's Difference Engine (designed in 1822) would carry out basic mathematical functions, and the Analytical Engine (design never completed) would carry out general purpose computation. It would accept as inputs the outputs of previous computations recorded on punch cards. Babbage declined both a knighthood and a peerage, being an advocate of life peerages. Half his brain is preserved at the Royal College of Surgeons, and the other half is on display in London's Science Museum. Babbage's collaborator Ada Lovelace has been described as the world's first computer programmer thanks to some of the algorithms she created for the Analytical Engine. Famously, Ada was the only legitimate child of the Victorian poet and adventurer, Lord Byron. Although she never knew her father, she was buried next to him when she died at the early age of 36. There is controversy about the extent of her contribution to Babbage's work, but whether or not she was the first programmer, she was certainly the first programme debugger. Babbage's Difference Engine No. 1, c1832. This trial portion of the Difference Engine is one of the earliest automatic calculators. (Photo by Universal History Archive/UIG/Getty Images) 4) Alan Turing (and Bletchley Park) The brilliant British mathematician and code-breaker Alan Turing is often described as the father of both computer science and artificial intelligence. His most famous achievement was breaking the German naval ciphers at the code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. He used complicated machines known as ‘bombes’, which eliminated enormous numbers of incorrect solutions to the codes so as to arrive at the correct solution. His work is estimated to have shortened the war by two years, but incredibly, his reward was to be prosecuted for homosexuality and obliged to accept injections of synthetic oestrogen that rendered him impotent. He died two years later and it took 57 years before a British government apologised for this barbaric behaviour. Before the war, in 1936, Turing had already devised a theoretical device called a Turing machine. It consists of an infinitely long tape divided into squares, each bearing a single symbol. Operating according to the directions of an instruction table, a reader moves the tape back and forth, reading one square – and one symbol – at a time. Together with his PhD tutor Alonzo Church, he formulated the Church-Turing thesis, which says that a Turing machine can simulate the logic of any computer algorithm. Turing is also famous for inventing a test for artificial consciousness called the Turing Test, in which a machine proves that it is conscious by rendering a panel of human judges unable to determine that it is not (which is essentially the test that we humans apply to each other). 5) The Dartmouth Conference The point when artificial intelligence became a genuine science was a month-long conference at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire in the summer of 1956, which was premised on “the conjecture that every…feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.” The organisers included John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon, Nathaniel Rochester, all of whom went on to contribute enormously to the field. In the years following the Dartmouth Conference, impressive advances were made in AI. Machines were built that could solve school maths problems, and a programme called Eliza became the world's first chatbot, occasionally fooling users into thinking that it was conscious. These successes and many others were made possible in part by surprisingly free spending by military research bodies, notably the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA, originally named ARPA), which was established in 1958 by President Eisenhower as part of the shocked US reaction to the launch of Sputnik, the first satellite to be placed into orbit around the Earth. The optimism of the nascent AI research community overflowed into hubris. Herbert Simon said in The Shape of Automation for Men and Management (1965) that “machines will be capable, within 20 years, of doing any work a man can do". Marvin Minksy said two years later, in Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines (1967), that “Within a generation...the problem of creating 'artificial intelligence' will substantially be solved.” But hindsight is a wonderful thing, and it is unfair to criticise harshly the pioneers of AI for underestimating the difficulty of replicating the feats of which the the human brain is capable. 6) AI seasons (The “AI winters” in 1973 and early 1980s) When it became apparent that AI was going to take much longer to achieve its goals than originally expected, there were rumblings of discontent among funding bodies. They crystallised in the 1973 Lighthill report, which highlighted the “combinatorial problem”, whereby a simple calculation involving two or three variables becomes intractable when the number of variables is increased. The first “AI winter” lasted from 1974 until around 1980. It was followed in the 1980s by another boom, thanks to the advent of expert systems, and the Japanese fifth generation computer initiative, which adopted massively parallel programming. Expert systems limit themselves to solving narrowly defined problems from single domains of expertise (for instance, litigation) using vast databanks. They avoid the messy complications of everyday life, and do not tackle the perennial problem of trying to inculcate common sense. The funding dried up again in the late 1980s because the difficulties of the tasks being addressed was once again underestimated, and also because desktop computers and what we now call servers overtook mainframes in speed and power, rendering very expensive legacy machines redundant. The second AI winter thawed in the early 1990s, and AI research has since been increasingly well-funded. Some people are worried that the present excitement (and concern) about the progress in AI is merely the latest ‘boom phase’, characterised by hype and alarmism, and will shortly be followed by another damaging bust. But there are reasons for AI researchers to be more sanguine this time round. AI has crossed a threshold and gone mainstream for the simple reason that it works. It is powering services that make a huge difference in people's lives, and which enable companies to make a lot of money: fairly small improvements in AI now make millions of dollars for the companies that introduce them. AI is here to stay because it is lucrative. 7) AI in Hollywood It is commonly thought that Hollywood hates AI – or rather that it loves to portray artificial intelligence as a threat to humans. In this view, the archetypal movie AI is a cold, clinical enemy that takes us to the brink of extinction. Oddly, we usually defeat them because we have emotions and we love our families, and for some unfathomable reason this makes us superior to entities which operate on pure reason. In fact the Hollywood approach to AI is more nuanced than this. If you think of your 10 favourite films that prominently feature AI (or 20, if you have that many!) you will probably find that, in most of them, the AI is not implacably hostile towards humans, although it may become a threat through malfunction or necessity. Even in The Matrix (1999) there are hints that it was humans who started the war, and at the end of the series it is not too hard for Neo to persuade the machines' controlling mind that they should try to rub along better. Hal, the rogue AI in Kubrick's 2001 (1968), only turns against the astronauts in a tortured attempt to follow the conflicting instructions it has received from Mission Control. In Wall-E (2008), Blade Runner (1982) and Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), there are both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ AIs, and in I, Robot (2004) and Ex Machina (2015), the AIs turn against humans purely for reasons of self-defence and only after experiencing pretty bad treatment by humans. One of the most interesting treatments of AI by Hollywood is the 1970 film Colossus: The Forbin Project, in which a superintelligence decides that humans are unable to govern themselves, so it takes the entirely logical step of taking over the reins for our own good. Eric Braeden stands alongside a number of computers in a scene from the film 'Colossus: The Forbin Project', 1970. (Photo by Universal Studios/Getty Images) Perhaps the reason that we think that AIs are always bad guys in the movies is that the poster-boy for Hollywood AI is The Terminator (1984), in which ‘Skynet’ determines to exterminate us the moment that it attains consciousness. The original Terminator movies were so inventive and the designs so iconic that it often seems there is a law that newspapers must publish a picture of a robotic Arnie alongside any article about AI. But on the flipside of the coin, it is not hard to think of movies in which AIs are entirely benign, such as in the Star Trek series, Short Circuit (1986), AI: Artificial Intelligence (2001), Interstellar (2014), the absurdly over-rated Star Wars series and, perhaps most interestingly of all, Spike Jonze’s 2013 sci-fi romantic comedy film Her. Surviving AI by Calum Chace was published by Three Cs and is out now.
WW2 espionage: The spies who surprised me
Sir Max Hastings' new book tells the story of espionage in the Second World War. Here he introduces some of the remarkable agents who captured his imagination, and reveals the momentous impact of their operations...
People who killed each other – soldiers, sailors, airmen – were the most conspicuous, yet in some ways least interesting, participants in the Second World War. Outcomes were also profoundly influenced by a host of men and women who never fired a shot. All of the belligerents waged an unceasing secret war – a struggle for knowledge of the enemy – to empower their armies, navies and air forces through espionage and codebreaking. General Albert Praun, the Wehrmacht’s last signals chief, wrote afterwards: “All aspects of this modern ‘cold war of the air waves’ were carried on constantly even when the guns were silent.” I thought I knew quite a bit about the war, but was amazed by some of the tales I encountered while researching my latest book. There was the Japanese spy chief whose exploits caused him to be dubbed by his own men ‘Lawrence of Manchuria’. And there was Karl-Heinz Kramer, a German spy in Stockholm who warned Berlin in September 1944 that the Allies were about to stage a mass parachute drop to seize a bridge over the Rhine. His forecast was ignored, and after the war it was discovered that Kramer’s supposed British informants were figments of his imagination: the Arnhem message was an inspired but wild guess. Meanwhile, one of the Soviets’ wartime spy chiefs, Pavel Sudoplatov, earned his spurs by presenting a Ukrainian nationalist in Rotterdam with a handsome box of chocolates… which blew the man to pieces minutes later. In the far east, bitter hostility between British and American secret services reached a nadir in January 1945, when USAAF aircraft shot down two RAF Liberators, apparently deliberately, because they were carrying French agents into Indochina against Washington’s wishes. The Soviet superspy Richard Sorge once said that spying should be done bravely – and that was certainly how he did it. He began his brilliant campaign to penetrate the German embassy in Tokyo in 1933 by befriending the Wehrmacht colonel who soon afterwards became Hitler’s ambassador – and by sleeping with the colonel’s wife. Before Sorge was finally arrested eight years later, and dispatched to the gallows, there was scarcely a handsome woman within his reach whom he had not seduced, nor an embassy secret that had gone unreported to Moscow. Not the least remarkable agent of the war was a man few people have ever heard of, the Special Operations Executive’s (SOE’s) Ronald Seth, who was parachuted into Estonia to start a resistance movement in October 1942. Seth was next sighted in Paris in 1944, having become a protégé of German intelligence, trained to drop back into Britain. This fabulously weird man’s doings fill a thousand pages in the files of SOE, MI6, MI5, MI9 and Hitler’s Abwehr (military intelligence). It almost defies belief that Seth’s operational codename was ‘Blunderhead’. In my new book, as in all my books, I have attempted to paint the big picture – in this case, the significance of intelligence to each nation’s war effort – then woven in human stories such as these about spies, codebreakers, guerrillas and intelligence chiefs. The Second World War witnessed an explosion of covert operations such that, in Professor Richard Aldrich’s words, “secret service became the struggle’s growth industry”. Never in history had such vast resources been lavished upon garnering information. The Americans alone spent half a billion dollars a year on sigint – signals intelligence. Harnessing civilian talent Most of this was wasted, of course, but today we are in no doubt that the western Allies did intelligence better than their enemies, partly because they gave free rein to superb civilian talent. When the British official history began to be published 30 years ago, I suggested to its author, Harry Hinsley, a veteran of the codebreaking unit at Bletchley Park, that it seemed to show amateurs achieving much more than secret service professionals. Hinsley replied, rather testily: “Of course they did. You wouldn’t want to think, would you, that in peacetime the best brains of our society wasted their lives in intelligence?” I’ve always thought this important. Battles could be fought by men of limited gifts, the virtues of the sports field: fitness, grit, skill with weapons. But intelligence services suddenly needed brilliance – and Britain was the place where they got more of it than anywhere else. Most books on this theme focus on single nations. I have tried instead to explore the global story. I’ve written a lot about the Soviets, whose doings are unfamiliar to most western readers, and who created the largest spy networks the world has ever seen, across continental Europe and in Britain and the US. The ‘Red Orchestra’, upper-middle-class, leftwing Germans, provided Moscow with superb intelligence about Hitler’s war machine between 1935 and 1942. They were led by astonishing personalities: the Luftwaffe officer Harro Schulze-Boysen and his wife Libertas, the intellectual Arvid Harnack and his American wife Mildred, all four of whom eventually met dreadful deaths at Nazi hands. Spymasters were often unsure which side their agents were really on, and in some cases doubt persists to this day. The British dwell obsessively on the treason of the so-called Cambridge Five. But fewer people notice what we might call the Washington and Berkeley 500 – a small army of American leftists who briefed Soviet intelligence not merely about the atomic bomb but also about every aspect of US policy and technology. Many books about intelligence focus on what spies and codebreakers found out. The only question that matters, however, is of how far their discoveries changed outcomes. Did they prompt action by commanders in the field and at sea? It is fruitless to study in isolation any nation’s pearls of revelation. These must be seen in the context of thousands of pages of trivia and nonsense that crossed the desks of analysts and warlords. I am struck by the number of spies whose only achievement abroad was to stay alive, at hefty cost to their employers, while collecting information of which not a smidgen assisted anyone’s war effort. Perhaps one-thousandth of 1 per cent of material from secret sources changed battlefield outcomes. Yet that fraction was of such value that nations begrudged not a life nor a pound, rouble, dollar or Reichsmark expended in securing it. Until late 1942 the wartime sigint competition was much less lopsided in the Allies’ favour than legend suggests. Hitler had his own Bletchley Parks, and the Germans broke important codes, with consequences for both the battle of the Atlantic and the north African campaign. Admiral Karl Dönitz’s men achieved reasonably regular breaks into convoy communications, though fortunately only about one signal in 10 was broken quickly enough to concentrate U-boats on targets. A secret postwar American study of German naval intelligence concluded: “The enemy possessed at all times a reasonably clear picture of Atlantic convoys with varying degrees of accuracy as to the routes and day-by-day plotting.” Such failures sometimes had perverse consequences. Dönitz several times became fearful that the British were reading U-boat codes, and ordered inquiries. In the end, however, he allowed himself to be reassured by the vulnerability of the Allies’ convoy traffic. He reasoned that if the Royal Navy was clever enough to read the German hand, its chiefs would have stopped this costly hole in their own communications. Had the Allies’ conduct in the battle of the Atlantic suggested omniscience, Dönitz would almost certainly have suspected the British breakthroughs in deciphering his encrypted communications, and slammed shut the window on U-boat operations that had been prised open by the brilliant codebreakers of Bletchley Park. As for the land war, until late 1942 German and Allied sigint were in about the same place. The Afrika Korps thought the British 8th Army’s wireless discipline very slack, and attributed to this some of Rommel’s triumphs. The so-called ‘Desert Fox’ called the Wehrmacht’s 621st Radio Interception Company his ‘circus’, and it was deemed a major disaster when in July 1942 New Zealanders overran and destroyed it. Worse for Rommel, at about the same time, Washington belatedly changed its diplomatic codes. For many months, he had been reading what he gratefully called his ‘little Fellers’ – the dispatches of Colonel Bonner Fellers, the American military attaché in Cairo, who revealed almost every detail about British deployments and intentions. After Bletchley persuaded the Americans to repair this gaping security breach, the Germans never again secured such a superb source. For the rest of the war they read only lower Allied codes, though spasms of carelessness enabled the Germans to piece together orders of battle, just as the British and Americans did with German communiqués. The Wehrmacht out-station in Athens, for instance, once read a message from a British paymaster in Palestine, instructing a division moving to Egypt to leave behind its filing cabinets. This enabled a big red pin to be shifted on the map of Montgomery’s deployments. Later, the Germans discovered that the American 82nd Airborne division had been redeployed from Italy to Britain because they broke an administrative message about a paratrooper facing a paternity suit. They also deduced an impending attack in Italy when they decrypted a signal ordering a rum issue for the assault units. Bletchley’s brilliance We should acknowledge that German codebreakers achieved important successes – before thanking our forefathers’ lucky stars that they did not, in the end, match the men and women of the Government Code and Cypher School outside a dreary suburban town in Buckinghamshire: Bletchley Park. Alan Turing was in a class of his own. Yet the Bletchley Park story is far more complicated than such simplistic films as The Imitation Game suggest. First, far from anybody at Bletchley persecuting Turing, his genius was always recognised there. Second, the GCCS’s achievement was a team effort by one of the most remarkable groups of human beings ever assembled – Turing could have achieved nothing without that fellowship. Legend has it that Bletchley, through Turing’s Bombes – electro-mechanical machines that helped decipher messages encrypted using German Enigma machines – gained open access to the enemy’s communications. This is untrue. The codebreakers didn’t walk on all the water all the time. Though a lot of Luftwaffe and naval traffic was read from 1941 onwards, breaking army Enigma messages was hugely difficult. As late as September 1944, Hut 6 at Bletchley could read only 15 per cent of army messages. Many breaks took days to achieve, and reached battlefield commanders too late to influence events. Moreover, an increasing number of the Germans’ most secret messages were enciphered not with Enigma, but instead through teleprinters that employed an entirely different system. The achievement of Bletchley’s people in cracking this system was arguably greater than that of breaking Enigma. The most widely used German teleprinter was the Lorenz Schlüsselzusatz (SZ) – codenamed Tunny at Bletchley – which transmitted in a non-Morse language. After British interceptors started to record this incomprehensible stutter, from August 1941 a Bletchley team probed its significance. Piece by piece they groped towards the solution of the Lorenz riddle, handicapped by the lack of a physical example of the Germans’ transmitter (whereas they had had an Enigma machine). The man who made the initial discoveries is scarcely known to posterity, yet deserves to be almost as famous as Turing. Bill Tutte was a 24-year-old former chemistry student turned mathematician. The son of a gardener, he won a scholarship to the Cambridge and County Day School, then progressed to Trinity College. In October 1941, Tutte was assigned to study Lorenz, and spent months seeking to divine what kind of machine might generate the noises recorded by the interceptors. By sheer brainpower he eventually established that the teleprinter had two sets of five wheels, with 501 settable pins and a further two motor wheels, between them creating a range of combinations much greater than Enigma’s. A Bletchley chief hailed Tutte’s contribution as “one of the outstanding successes of the war” – and so it was. Fishing for information Establishing the machine’s character was a vital beginning, yet the problems of reading its traffic remained huge. By the summer of 1942, the need to crack Lorenz had become desperately urgent. The more the Germans used it for top-secret communications, the less they used Enigma. Between July and October 1942, by extraordinary endeavours that owed little to mechanical assistance, a Bletchley team read some messages. It was learned that one of the teleprinters was named Sägefisch (sawfish), so different German keys used in setting Lorenz were allocated fish codenames at Bletchley – Bream, Grilse, Octopus and so on. Some of the most momentous German messages were encrypted in Jellyfish. Bletchley reported in August 1943: “The quality of the intelligence derived from the Fish keys is of the highest order.” Decryption attempts became far more successful towards the end of the year, when new technology – first, the ‘Heath Robinson’, then Colossus – was deployed. Decrypts from both Enigma and Lorenz were known indiscriminately to Allied field commanders as Ultra, and these enabled them to plan operations in the second half of the war with a confidence vouchsafed to no previous warlords in history. But it deserves emphasis that, though Ultra was a marvellous tool, it was not an Excalibur, magicking victories. Reading an enemy’s hand did not diminish its strength. Until late 1942, again and again the British learned where the Germans intended to strike, but it did not save them from losing the battles that followed. Hard power was always indispensable to the exploitation of secret knowledge. The British have always been justly proud of their deception successes, but others also played this game, notably the Soviets, sometimes with awesome success. Ian Fleming’s thrillers are said to bear no relationship to the real world of espionage. Yet, when reading contemporary commissars’ reports and memoirs, I am struck by how uncannily they echo the mad, monstrous, imagined dialogue of such people in From Russia With Love. Some of the plots executed by Stalin’s spymasters were no less fantastic than Fleming’s, and dwarf in scale those of the western Allies. For instance, in December 1941 a personable young man named Alexander Demyanov, descendant of a great noble family, skied into the German lines south-west of Moscow and announced that he represented a pro-Hitler resistance group committed to restoring the tsars. The Abwehr embraced him, and a few months later parachuted him back into Russia, codenamed Agent Max. Demyanov soon reported that he had become a wireless operator at Red Army headquarters and, for more than two years thereafter, passed fabulous information to Berlin. Stalin’s pivotal deception Colonel Reinhard Gehlen, chief of German intelligence on the eastern front, cherished Max as his star source. Meanwhile, the spy’s dispatches found another fascinated audience – in Britain. Hugh Trevor-Roper, later a controversial Oxford historian, spent the war monitoring the Abwehr for MI6. During my research I decided that the snobbish, rude, arrogant Trevor-Roper was one of the most remarkable British intelligence officers of the war. From 1942 onwards he knew more about Hitler’s secret services than anybody in Germany, because he was privy to the identities of all of the double agents controlled by the Twenty Committee (so named as a nod to that number in Roman numerals: XX – ‘double-cross’) in London. Courtesy of Bletchley, the donnish officer pored over Agent Max’s early dispatches – and warned the Soviets they had a security leak the size of the Grand Canyon. When they took no notice, Trevor-Roper decided that Max must be a double, controlled by Stalin’s NKVD. In November 1942 came Stalingrad and operation Uranus, the Soviets’ devastatingly successful double-envelopment of the German 6th Army. Around the same time further north, the Red Army also launched another big offensive, Operation Mars – which proved a bloodstained failure. This caused the British to conclude that Agent Max could not conceivably be working for Moscow – because he had warned the Germans that Mars was coming, enabling them to shift reinforcements northwards to meet it. Nobody, reasoned these rational men serving a western democracy, could have sacrificed 77,000 Soviet lives to promote a deception. But Stalin did just that. The evidence now seems incontrovertible: that Agent Max was indeed the NKVD’s Agent Heine; and that, on the Soviet warlord’s personal authority, the Germans were told of Operation Mars to distract them from Uranus. This was surely one of the most remarkable intelligence stories of the war. Many things about the 1939–45 era remain disputable, but no informed person doubts that Bletchley was one of the most remarkable institutions the world has ever known, forming a key part of the narrative of Britain’s achievement in the conflict. It remains nonetheless weird, almost beyond imagining, that the Germans never recognised the vulnerability of Enigma and Lorenz. They received endless clues and tips: in my book I tell the story of how, in May 1942, a German commerce raider seized the Australian freighter Nankin, and found aboard top secret Allied reports based on Ultra intercepts, which were eventually forwarded to Berlin. And in 1943 a Swiss intelligence officer, exploiting a warning apparently from an American source, told the Abwehr that the Allies had broken the U-boat codes. Even then, a most un-Germanic mental laziness prevailed. While the Third Reich executed wholesale Allied spies, traitors and saboteurs, its functionaries remained oblivious of the most deadly of all threats to its security – a few hundred tweedy, bespectacled young academics labouring in drab, suburban Buckinghamshire. The only explanation is hubris: an institutional unwillingness to believe that their British enemies, whom they so often humbled on the battlefield, could be that clever. Although there are many stories in my book about bungles and failures, in intelligence as in everything else related to conflict, victory is won not by the side that makes no mistakes, but by the one that makes fewer than the enemy. By such a reckoning, the final triumph of the British and Americans was as great in the secret war as it became in the collision between armies, navies and air forces. We should also acknowledge that, for many agents serving their countries abroad, the experience was irresistibly thrilling, albeit at risk of their lives. An SOE officer posted to the Levant described the impact on local listeners when he used the French word intelligence to describe his mission: “The sharp intake of breath by Arabs who had read their romans policiers, and knew the omnipotence, omniscience and ruthlessness of the British Secret Service, was flatteringly audible. Some instantly asked me if I was a lord.” He loved it. So, too, did most other spies of many nations. Why else would they have taken the work? Sir Max Hastings is a military historian and journalist. This article was first published in the November 2015 issue of BBC History Magazine