GCHQ. Richard Aldrich
code-breakers had fully indoctrinated the British at GCHQ.20
It was the TICOM raids of early 1945 into Nazi Germany that had forced the British and the Americans to reveal their respective hands on the ‘Russian problem’. TICOM was an Anglo– American project, and no one could disguise the fact that material on German code-breaking successes against the Soviet Union was one of its top priorities. TICOM led to some of the greatest successes of the early Cold War. During the autumn of 1945 some of its best results were coming from a Soviet encyphered teleprinter system code-named ‘Caviar’ which was almost certainly being broken with the help of the German team recovered by Rushworth and Norland on their foray into Germany. No less important was the breaking of a number of Soviet military machine cyphers that were not dissimilar to the Enigma machine, or its widely used Swedish equivalent, the ‘Hagelin’ machine. GCHQ code-named these machines the ‘Poets Systems’. The first success was with an encoded Soviet teletype system code-named ‘Coleridge’ that gave great administrative detail relating to the Red Army in Eastern Europe. Carefully combined with material from more basic techniques such as radio direction-finding, it provided a superbly detailed picture of the Soviet Army in Europe. Thereafter, a team of GCHQ cryptanalysts led by Gerry Morgan working with an American naval team helped to decrypt another Soviet system called ‘Longfellow’. Some of the best successes against Soviet machines were the product of the brilliant mind of Hugh Alexander, combined with the enormous computer power provided by GCHQ’s American allies. In the Far East, Soviet naval codes were beginning to yield, but immediately after the war, ‘Coleridge’ and ‘Longfellow’ were the most important Soviet systems being exploited by the West.21
Britain was told about the embryonic Venona project as early as August 1945, and thereafter John Tiltman, head of the Cryptographic Group at Eastcote, was kept informed of progress.22 However, full cooperation came a little later. The young American code-breaker Cecil Phillips spent six months at GCHQ’s new location at Eastcote collaborating with Philip Howse. They focused on Soviet traffic that had been collected in Australia by monitoring Moscow’s Embassy in Canberra. More senior figures such as John Tiltman did not give them much attention, since Phillips and Howse initially thought much of the traffic to be low-level consular material. In 1947 GCHQ received a further briefing, this time from Meredith Gardner, the key American analyst of the Venona messages. However, GCHQ did not set up a proper Venona office at Eastcote until December 1947, sparked by the recognition that the Australian material was actually KGB traffic.23 Eastcote was itself in a state of permanent revolution, with sections being constantly reformed and merged, to the extent that the ‘rumblings of reorganisation’ drew comment from figures like Joseph Wenger, Washington’s senior naval code-breaker.24 The rumblings were the sounds of growth. From an establishment of just over a thousand in December 1945, GCHQ was nudging three thousand staff by 1948, and was already looking for new premises to accommodate its swelling numbers.25
The British had also collected plenty of interesting wartime KGB traffic. As early as June 1943, Alastair Denniston had met Colonel Ted Maltby of the Radio Security Service, together with Roger Hollis and John Curry of MI5, to discuss ‘the interception of certain apparently illicit transmissions from this country which have been “DF-ed” to the Soviet Embassy’. (‘DF’ referred to the technique of radio direction-finding by triangulating between several aerials, sometimes mounted on detector vans.) These messages had attracted interest because they had nothing in common with the old Comintern style of transmissions, and it was noted that they might well be KGB traffic as they showed ‘great technical skill’. Collecting this material stretched Britain’s interceptor resources, since the traffic had lasted for eight hours solid in every twenty-four-hour period. Meanwhile, it was also searching for an illegal Comintern radio station in Wimbledon, using a disguised Ford Thames van with direction-finding equipment and security personnel in civilian clothes.26
By 1948, the Venona teams at GCHQ and Arlington Hall were small but extremely integrated. Although the British employed a different code name for Venona, calling it ‘Bride’, they adopted a standard procedure for the translations. The British cell was superintended by William Bodsworth, one of the initial team that began studying Enigma in 1937.”27 Like so many interwar code-breakers, Bodsworth was a linguist, not a mathematician, having read Spanish at Cambridge. Cheerful and possessed of a gentle humour, he was dubbed ‘Snow White’ because of his mop of white hair. Bodsworth’s team undertook much of the laborious task of trying to reconstruct the Soviet codebooks. The seven dwarfs supplied almost enough nicknames for the Venona teams: by the end of 1950, the number of people at Eastcote working on ‘Bride’ remained at less than ten. For the Americans, British input was essential both to the efforts to track down the identity of figures like ‘Homer’ and to obtaining background material to allow the analysis of the KGB’s Canberra messages.28
It is almost certain that the first person to alert the Soviets to the existence of the Venona project in any detail was a KGB agent named William Weisband. Born in the Soviet Union in 1908, Voldya Weisband had emigrated with his family to the United States in the 1920s. In 1940 he had changed his name to William, and had registered at the American University in Washington DC. By 1942 he was serving as a lieutenant in a US Army code-breaking unit in the Middle East. He was posted back to Arlington Hall in July 1944, and was soon working in the Soviet section. Weisband had in fact been a KGB agent since 1934, and he certainly displayed all the traits of a classic agent. Gregarious and popular, he had friends throughout what was now called the Army Security Agency, and charmed the senior officers. His reputation as a problem-solver allowed him wide access within the Soviet section, and Meredith Gardner actually recalls him looking at a list of names derived from Venona material in late 1946. Weisband was not himself identified by Venona, but seeing the messages decrypted must had made him feel queasy, since his name – or at least his code name ‘Zhora’ – was certainly buried in traffic somewhere. In 1948 the Soviets summarised Weisband’s reports that had been fed back to KGB headquarters in Moscow. They contained worrying news:
For one year, a large amount of very valuable documentary material concerning the work of the Americans on deciphering Soviet cyphers, intercepting and analysing open-radio correspondence of Soviet Institutions was received…On the basis of Weisband material, our state security organs carried out a number of defensive measures, resulting in the reduced efficiency of the American deciphering service. This has led to a considerable current reduction in the amount of deciphering and analysis by the Americans.29
In May 1950 Weisband was named by another agent who had been revealed by Venona and interrogated by the FBI. Although Weisband was questioned, there was insufficient evidence to charge him. There was also a fear that a court case would advertise the work of signals intelligence to other countries, which might then take steps to upgrade their communications. He was never prosecuted for espionage.30
Yet Weisband caused immense damage to Western code-breaking. On Friday, 29 October 1948 the Soviets implemented a massive change in all their communications security procedures. American code-breakers referred to this fateful event as ‘Black Friday’. Many Soviet radio nets moved over to one-time pads, which henceforth were not re-used. Much of the procedural material that had been sent ‘in clear’, or unencrypted, between operators running medium-grade Army, Navy, Air Force and Police systems, was now encrypted for the first time. Operator chatter was banned. In the space of twenty-four hours, most Soviet systems from which the West had been deriving intelligence were lost.31 This affected the ‘Poets Systems’ which the British and Americans had been reading successfully as a result of their raids into Germany in 1945.