GCHQ. Richard Aldrich
were of one mind on the ‘Russia problem’. On 31 July 1942, Geoffrey Stevens, a code-breaker from GC&CS, went out to Arlington Hall, the US Army’s code-breakers’ centre in Washington. One of the subjects he discussed there was the Soviet Union, and he was fascinated to learn that the Americans were intercepting all the Soviet traffic in and out of Washington. They were also collecting Soviet traffic elsewhere, for example between Moscow and the Soviet Embassy in Tokyo. He reported that the Americans ‘do nothing about it at the moment’ by way of decryption, since they were so pressed for code-breaking capacity against the Axis. However, sooner or later, he added, ‘They will inevitably try and break this since they do not trust the Soviets further than they could throw a steam-roller.’59 Much as Stevens predicted, the Americans began a Soviet Group in February 1943. Meanwhile, the British moved their own existing Soviet team from Ryder Street in London to larger premises at Sloane Square in late 1944.60 Although the two allies were still working in isolation on the ‘Russia problem’, the foundation of future collaboration was already emerging.
Anxiety about the Soviet Union increased markedly during early 1944. By April the Red Army was pushing into eastern Hungary, and this filled Moscow with a newfound confidence. Stalin’s determination to impose a Communist government on Poland was already evident, and pointed to future trouble. Some British diplomats in the Foreign Office remained hopeful about the possibility of post-war cooperation with the Soviet Union, but their military colleagues did not share their optimism. Indeed, the main future strategic planning body in Whitehall, the Post Hostilities Planning Committee, which was shared between the diplomats and the military, tore itself apart over this issue. The Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden had to step in in late 1944, and banned the further circulation of its papers. One staff officer lamented that there were to be ‘no more games of Russian scandal’. Russia was now a forbidden subject, and between late 1944 and early 1946 Britain’s main body of intelligence analysts, the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), did everything it could to avoid discussing the dreaded subject of the Soviet Union.61
Accordingly, it was only in June 1945 that the American code-breakers formally proposed to the British that they cooperate against the Soviet Union, giving the overall programme the code name ‘Bourbon’. The formal Anglo-American collaboration on the wider ‘Russian problem’ was so incredibly secret that it was not written down, and amounted to a simple handshake between Group Captain Eric Jones, the British sigint liaison officer in Washington, and a senior American naval officer in June 1945. Meanwhile, all eyes were on the Allied reoccupation of Europe and the remarkable sigint prizes that were even now being recovered from the smouldering ruins of the Third Reich.62
On 26th August one of the [German] operators from Army Group, South Ukraine…suddenly broke into violent remarks about Hitler, using the peculiarly foul language in which the Germans delight. The operator at Supreme Army Command tried to shut him up in equally filthy language. This interchange lasted for about ten minutes…
The incident is only noteworthy as a possible indication of the way things are going.
Nigel de Grey, Deputy Director at Bletchley Park, to Sir Stewart Menzies, 14 September 19441
By the autumn of 1944 the Second World War was ending and the Cold War had, to all intents and purposes, already begun. In the east, the German Army was collapsing fast, and by September Soviet forces were at the borders of Prussia. A month later, American forces had entered Germany from the west, capturing the ancient town of Aachen. While much bitter fighting lay ahead, the minds of officials in London, Washington and Moscow were increasingly focused on the post-war settlement. Wartime relations with Russia had never been easy. Stalin’s intense and unwavering suspicion was underlined by the fact that, throughout the war, he had refused to leave Soviet-controlled territory to meet Churchill and Roosevelt. Harsh Soviet behaviour in newly occupied areas like Poland already pointed to post-war confrontation and rivalry, and all eyes were on the advance into Germany.
Britain and the United States were gearing up for piratical raids on the headquarters and laboratories of a collapsing Third Reich, and Axis sigint material was the treasure that was most actively sought. A joint Anglo-American planning group began consulting with Bletchley Park about what material it wished to scoop from an occupied Germany. By early 1945, Intelligence Assault Units were moving into Germany alongside the fighting elements of Allied formations, looking for all kinds of top-secret German experimental weapons. Bletchley Park despatched its own Target Intelligence Committee teams, known as ‘TICOM teams’, made up of a mixture of British and American personnel, to seek out cryptographic equipment and sigint personnel from Germany. The whole TICOM programme was run on what Commander Edward Travis called ‘an entirely inter-allied’ basis.2
Suddenly, boffins in glasses and cardigans found themselves turned into amateur commandos. Whisked away to a quarry near Bletchley, those selected for this task were given a short course in the use of sub-machine guns and hand grenades. They began on the Thompson sub-machine gun, but soon found the lighter Sten gun to be an easier weapon to handle. None of them performed well, but nevertheless they were soon on their way to Hitler’s ‘Alpine Lair’ at Berchtesgaden. Major Edward Rushworth, one of the senior British officers from Hut Three, led a TICOM team of a dozen officers, accompanied by Selmer Norland, an American stationed at Bletchley Park. They arrived at the major German headquarters at Augsburg on 8 May, VE-Day. Augsburg had been home to the famous German ‘Fish’, or Geheimschreiber, the encyphered teleprinter which Bletchley had eventually defeated with the mighty ‘Colossus’ computer. Sadly, all these beautiful machines, lovingly manufactured by Lorenz, had been smashed and the cypher wheels had gone. The dejected team surveyed the debris. However, a day later their spirits rebounded when they gleefully recovered a single intact late-model ‘Fish’ from a town on the Austrian border.3
On 12 May 1945 they reached Hitler’s Alpine retreat. The Führer’s accommodation had been heavily bombed, but a hundred feet below ground was a maze of bunkers and tunnels to explore, including an emergency power station and a complete telephone exchange. No more cypher machines seemed to be in evidence, and the mission was tailing off when, as a last task, Rushworth set off for nearby Rosenheim on the Austrian border, to question a cryptographer who had been working for the German High Command (OKW). While they were there, a group of other German prisoners sent a message asking to speak to the ‘proper people’. This team had served in the OKW headquarters sigint units and now revealed that, terrified of the rapid Soviet advance, they had buried their equipment under the pavement in front of their headquarters. Called ‘OKW-Chi’, they had successfully broken what was referred to as ‘Russian Fish’. This was an encrypted Soviet military teleprinter that achieved an early version of packet switching, breaking each message into nine different parts and routing it along separate channels, before reassembling it. The Germans had already worked out that their code-breaking triumph would have post-war value, and hoped to sell themselves on as a complete team.4
They were not disappointed. By 23 May they had been encouraged to unearth and set up their equipment, allowing them to resume decrypting Soviet command traffic. The Bletchley team were in awe of this vast technical display, which was eventually packaged up again in over a hundred boxes and chests. The eight tons of equipment and the complete German staff were loaded onto five lorries, which then wound their way slowly through a devastated Germany towards Bletchley. They arrived on 6 June 1945, and the equipment was set up and tested at the nearby radio station of Wavendon Manor.5 The German team was later employed intercepting Soviet encyphered teleprinter traffic which