GCHQ. Richard Aldrich
whose tasks had largely focused on Soviet and Balkan traffic. The fourteen staff and their documents were flown to Britain and taken to Bletchley Park. Burgscheidungen was in an area that would later be designated as part of the Soviet Zone, so Neff destroyed all traces of the German code-breakers’ presence before departing.[9]
The British caught Generalmajor Klemme, the Senior Commander of Radio Intelligence for the Luftwaffe, at the Husum-Milstedt intercept station on 19 May 1945. At first he was taken to Neumuenster Prison, but from there he was brought to Britain, and worked with the Allies on sigint in Germany until 10 March 1948, when he was considered to have been drained of all he knew about Soviet communications. On 1 May 1945, Major Oeljeschaeger and Major Beulmann from the Berlin Cryptographic Centre, which had been based in a stable block of the Marstall-Neues Palais at Potsdam, had fled in the direction of Hitler’s complex at Berchtesgaden. A few days later, with the Allies closing in, they stopped at Viehoff to burn all the records of Branch 3, and they fell into Allied hands on 22 May near Munich. On 5 July they were flown to Britain and placed in a special camp. They were surprised to be welcomed by their Branch Chief, Lt Colonel Friedrich, who had been captured before them. By June 1945 the British and Americans had scooped up most of the senior Luftwaffe sigint officers whose traffic they had listened to assiduously for much of the war.[10]
The TICOM teams were competing with the Soviets, who were also swooping on German cryptographic assets. To their surprise, Bletchley Park discovered that the Soviets had taken over some German Enigma-based communications nets and Fish teleprinters, and had begun using them for their own purposes. However, initial hopes of a post-war dividend from the breaking of these machines were quickly dashed. Roy Jenkins, who was then working at Bletchley Park, recalls this odd interlude in May 1945:
When the Russians got to Berlin they took over the Fish machines in the War Ministry, somewhat changed the settings, and proceeded to use them for sending signals traffic to Belgrade and other capitals in their new empire. We continued to do the intercepts and played around with trying to break the messages. We never succeeded. I think it was a combination of the new settings being more secure (which raises the question of how much the Russians had found out about our previous success) and the edge of tension having gone off our effort.
Elsewhere, Allied recovery teams regularly overran German sigint operations that were still chattering away, producing decrypts of mid-level Soviet Army Group traffic.[11]
The timing of raids on German sigint centres was a precarious matter. If they were captured too early there was a risk that this would cut off a flow of valuable material that Bletchley was intercepting, or else would alert the Germans to the fact that the British knew more about their cyphers than was desirable. London was especially anxious to avoid freelance raiding activities that might be counter-productive. As early as May 1944 the London Signals Intelligence Board, the supreme governing board which met monthly to set overall British sigint policy, learned that some independently-minded British intelligence officers in the Middle East were planning to use the Special Operations Executive to raid enemy signals intelligence centres in the Balkans. Sir Stewart Menzies, who chaired the board, warned them sternly that operations against such centres were ‘highly undesirable’, and that action should ‘on no account be undertaken’ without prior personal authority from him.’[12]
Bletchley’s corporate takeover of the Axis sigint effort was not limited to Germany. There were even greater TICOM dividends in occupied Italy.[13] Many countries competed for the services of the talented Italian cryptanalysts. After the Italian surrender in 1943, some eighty Italian code-breakers under Major Barbieri continued to work for the Germans at a station near Brescia in northern Italy. At the end of the war in Europe they were at last interrogated in Rome, and proved to have a large quantity of material, including photocopies of the codebooks of Turkey, Romania, Ecuador and Bolivia. They had also reconstructed some of the codebooks from France, Switzerland and the Vatican, and had smaller amounts of British and American traffic. During the spring of 1945 Barbieri’s unit had been concentrating on French diplomatic traffic, ‘a large number being messages to Paris either from Bonnet [French Ambassador] in New York or from Catroux [French Ambassador] in Moscow’. This traffic offered insights into subjects as diverse as Soviet–Yugoslav relations, Soviet policy in Germany, French economic negotiations with the United States and French plans for exploiting the Saar coal mines in Germany.[14]
With British encouragement, this precocious Italian unit worked on into the post-war period, without deviating from its French target. The diplomatic unit at Berkeley Street was already doing extensive work on Britain’s European allies, regarding them as either insecure or untrustworthy, or both. Much of this suspicion stemmed from a sense of indignation at their behaviour in 1940. In November 1944, Churchill wrote to Eden: ‘The Belgians are extremely weak, and their behaviour before the war was shocking. The Dutch were entirely selfish and fought only when attacked, and then for a few hours …’ General de Gaulle’s Free French government in exile, as other historians have shown, came in for especially close attention from the code-breakers during the war, and this continued into 1946. During the important diplomatic conferences that marked the end of the war, Jimmy Byrnes, the new American Secretary of State, was apparently more eager to see decrypted French material than anything else, concerned that Paris was likely to be working with Moscow.[15] French traffic from Moscow was of great interest to London because the former French Air Minister, Pierre Cot, had indeed begun a special diplomatic mission to Moscow to examine the possibility of cooperating against Germany in post-war Europe.[16]
French traffic provided the British and Americans with a fabulous window on the diplomacy of Western Europe.[17] Indeed, in mid-1946 half the US Army code-breakers’ end product was based on intercepting French communications.[18] Alarmingly, the French still seemed keen to develop a close relationship with Stalin.[19] The traffic from French Embassies in Eastern Europe proved especially interesting. Typically, an intercept from the French Embassy in Tirana gave detailed information on the balance of power in the Albanian Cabinet and the waning power of the pro-Moscow elements, and intercepted French intelligence traffic sometimes offered information about the KGB.[20] With the work on Soviet codes still gaining momentum, the chatter of other countries that were talking to Moscow provided insights into their thinking. On 13 August 1945, Edward Travis sent Joseph Wenger, the senior American naval code-breaker, a long missive about cooperation on post-war French and Dutch systems, and explained British plans ‘to increase the effort here, especially on French’, adding that British plans to focus on Paris ‘are going into effect at an early date’. French, Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American traffic was soon consolidated into a single group under Josh Cooper.[21]
Major Barbieri was proud of the work of his Italian code-breakers against the French, but he pressed for more staff. So many of the best cryptographers, he complained, had been captured by the French in North Africa, adding, ‘the French are now employing them in their own service!’ Nevertheless, the British concluded that the Italians were ‘doing remarkably well with the limited reserves at their disposal’.[22] By mid-1946 they were giving them new tasks, including Soviet traffic which came from military cypher machines at division level code-named ‘Taper’. British liaison officers with the Italians were working closely with code-breakers in Britain on the identification of new Taper groups. Senior Italian sigint officers knew that Taper traffic ‘which had been taken with so much depth and continuity for the past month’ was Soviet in origin, but many of their underlings were in a state of blissful ignorance about what they were collecting and who the ultimate customer was.[23]
The efforts of TICOM were not exclusively directed towards raiding priceless sigint secrets from the Germans, the Italians and the Japanese. They were also concerned with protecting Britain’s own secret communications. Until late 1943, Bletchley Park regarded weak security as a problem restricted to Britain’s allies. But the ability to read German messages had revealed a number of unexpected security nightmares for the Allies. Ultra had shown Britain’s code-breakers that the Germans could read many of the codes of the Allies, such as those of the Soviets and the Free French. In Asia, terrible cypher security and serious human agent penetration ensured that Chinese codes were effectively an open book to the Japanese, even though Tokyo’s code-breakers were mediocre. Accordingly, keeping Britain’s secrets safe meant keeping them away from many of her allies, whose communications were being read