GCHQ. Richard Aldrich
SIS agents around the world. With assistance from Bletchley Park, wartime SIS had been able to develop an effective long-range wireless network to support its overseas stations and agents in the field. Known as SIS Section VIII, this was run by Brigadier Richard Gambier-Parry from two country houses not far from Bletchley, at Whaddon Hall and Hanslope Park. These locations not only provided a wireless network for SIS, they also built covert radio sets hidden in suitcases used by British agents and fitted out vehicles for the Special Liaison Units that supplied sigint to overseas commands such as Montgomery’s Eighth Army. In addition, Hanslope Park had provided a base for a unit called the Radio Security Service, under Ted Maltby, that had used mobile detection vans to track the radio transmissions of enemy agents hiding in wartime Britain. SIS was a small organisation with small volumes of radio traffic, and up until 1944 it had been comfortable sending its traffic by slow but highly secure one-time pads. The Rockex machine allowed it to take a leap forward.33
By 1944, SIS’s Section VIII had expanded considerably and was taking on new customers. With its new Rockex machines, it was carrying some traffic for Bletchley Park, typically from Canada, together with secret messages for the Special Operations Executive which conducted sabotage. The Foreign Office was now looking at this efficient radio network with growing interest, and at the end of the war SIS Section VIII was simply coopted to form the backbone of a new Foreign Office communications system called the Diplomatic Wireless Service. Gambier-Parry became the first Foreign Office Director of Communications. As early as 1943 some embassies, such as that in Cairo, had been switching over to ‘experimental use of official wireless’ by making use of local SIS facilities.34 Although diplomatic wireless was technically banned by international diplomatic convention, in practice cable communications had frequently been disrupted during the war, and wireless had crept into widespread use as an alternative.35
The gradual development of the Diplomatic Wireless Service at Hanslope Park during 1944 and 1945 was another critical building block in the creation of the modern British sigint community. Alongside the military sigint collection stations in locations such as Ceylon, the Diplomatic Wireless Service, or ‘DWS’, doubled as a secret monitoring service working from within British Embassies and High Commissions. The first permanent undercover sigint station was set up at Ankara in 1943. DWS staff numbered close to a thousand, and about half its time was devoted to secret collection on behalf of the British code-breakers. Over the years it produced important results from locations as far afield as Moscow and Luanda because of its ability to collect short-range transmissions.
In August 1945 the Second World War finally drew to a close. Winston Churchill was of the view that Bletchley Park was the deciding factor in the defeat of the Fascist powers: in 1945 he apparently told King George VI that Ultra had effectively won the war.36 Robert Harris, author of the novel Enigma (1995), rightly points out that most of the major combatants had military forces that were superior to those of Britain, not least in their weapons technology. Bletchley Park was the one place where we enjoyed a crucial world lead.37 Harry Hinsley, a junior figure at Bletchley Park, but later the official historian who produced a magisterial study of intelligence during the Second World War, has famously asserted that Ultra shortened the war by several years, saving countless lives on all sides. Without Ultra, he states, ‘Overlord would have had to be delayed until 1946’.38 Andreas Hillgruber, the distinguished German historian of Hitler’s strategy agrees, adding that as a result the Soviets might well have advanced much further west.39
Yet others, including the British historian Paul Kennedy, have argued that the Second World War was largely a battle of material production, and that once America and Russia were both pitted against the Axis, their industrial might made the outcome only a matter of time – epitomised by the use of the atomic bomb in August 1945. In reality, the debate about the overall value of Bletchley Park has a troubling ‘What if?’ quality. Inevitably, we are encouraged to ponder the alternative universe of ‘no Ultra’. Ralph Bennett, like Harry Hinsley a Bletchley Park veteran turned historian, has expressed impatience with such counter-factual speculations, regarding them as a parlour game. He has argued that the absence of Ultra would have forced the faster development of other forms of intelligence, such as aerial reconnaissance.40 Peter Calvocoressi, another distinguished historian who spent the war at Bletchley Park, has dismissed Hinsley’s assertions as ‘silly’.41
Some propositions can however be advanced with confidence. Ultra and other kinds of sigint contributed hugely to the outcome of the Battle of Britain. The breaking of naval Enigma changed the course of the Battle of the Atlantic, allowing the Admiralty to direct convoys away from concentrations of U-boats and bringing the level of ship losses down to a bearable, although still frightening, level. This in turn allowed a breathing space for more successful anti-submarine warfare techniques to be developed which would finally turn the tide in the battle against the U-boat in 1943. Ultra also contributed greatly to the British naval victories at the Battle of Cape Matapan (March 1941) and the Battle of North Cape (December 1943). Parallel code-breaking work by the Americans in the Pacific allowed the dramatic interception of the aircraft carrying the brilliant Admiral Yamamoto, architect of Pearl Harbor, which sounded the death knell for Japanese naval forces in the Pacific. It is impossible to understand the war at sea without comprehending the contribution of Ultra in the west and the breaking of a range of Japanese cypher systems in the east. Appropriately, it fell to a naval officer, Commander Edward Travis, to pilot Bletchley Park as it sailed forward into the post-war era.
Even in the spring of 1945, final victory in Europe had loomed like the end of an interminable school year – with the distant summer holidays already beckoning. Bletchley Park, with its nearby dormitories and improvised tennis courts, had looked rather like a vast boarding school waiting for the end of term. Post-war worries were not troubling many of the brilliant minds there. Instead, for the most part they were yearning for an end to war and a return to peacetime activities. The majority of Bletchley’s wartime residents were exhausted from years of gruelling hard work. The intellectual pressure had been enormous, and some had suffered nervous breakdowns: Jean Thompson, a Wren who worked at one of the outstations, recalls that they routinely referred to Bletchley Park as the ‘Nut House’.42 Most code-breakers greeted the end of the war with relief, returning to their former activities in ivy-covered colleges, libraries and museums. However, a minority had been bitten by the intelligence bug. They understood the fundamental importance of what they had been doing for the future of international affairs, and would stay on.
Those who remained at Bletchley Park were also thinking of ‘escape’ – but in a different sense. For them, the end of the war did not so much offer an opportunity of personal freedom, but more the possibility of liberation for the GC&CS. Their remarkable achievements over the last five years suggested that GC&CS might cease to exist under the cloying direction of Britain’s traditional overseas secret service, SIS, where the senior staff were often failed cavalry officers recruited in White’s or Boodle’s. Instead, GC&CS might hope to become an intelligence agency in its own right, perhaps one of a new and different kind. Indeed, its rising status was already signalled by a gradual change in everyday usage from terms like ‘GC&CS’ and ‘BP’ to the rather grander cover name of ‘Government Communications Headquarters’, or ‘GCHQ’, which had been in intermittent use since early 1940.43
Bletchley Park had already taken some important strides towards becoming a fully-fledged intelligence service. Peter Calvocoressi, one of its distinguished wartime denizens, recalls that in its pre-war incarnation the Government Code and Cypher School was exactly what its name implied, ‘and no more’.