The Secrets of Station X (6 page)

The accommodation remained primitive and as late summer turned first into autumn and then into winter, the codebreakers found the heating to be woefully inadequate. ‘It was
dreadful
,” said Barbara Abernethy. ‘We had an electric stove which didn’t work and a very poor heating system. We all froze. We had to wear coats and mittens.’ It was even colder in the huts, which were bleak after the comfort of the house. Bare concrete floors disguised with a coating of red tile paint, windows with blackout curtains, wooden trestle tables, light bulbs with no shades and inefficient electric heaters, or worse, cast iron coke stoves with metal chimneys going up through the asbestos roof or inefficient paraffin heaters. ‘They were awful,’ said Phoebe Senyard.

But it was wartime and across Britain there was very much a spirit of make-do and live for the day. Funding for all that was required to take place at Bletchley was low and there had been no real breakthrough into the German Enigma cypher but
morale remained remarkably high. ‘Christmas was now
drawing
near and the question of leave arose,’ said Phoebe Senyard.

W
hen German forces crossed the border into Poland, Rejewski and his fellow codebreakers were forced to flee to Bucharest. Hoping to join Knox and resume their work breaking Enigma, they went first to the British embassy where the ambassador told them he could do nothing to help them until he had spoken to London. Sadly for the British, the staff at the French embassy were far better briefed on the importance of the Polish codebreakers and arranged for them to leave for Paris
immediately
. Attempts by Knox, Denniston and Menzies to bring them to Bletchley Park failed and they were incorporated into the French intercept site – the
Poste de Commandement Bruno
, based in the beautiful Château de Vignolles, in Gretz-Armainvilliers, on the north bank of the Marne, twenty-five miles south-east of Paris. British codebreakers were posted to the château, with one of them, Henry Dryden, recalling his time at what the British called the ‘Mission Richard' for reasons quite separate from the codebreaking he carried out. ‘My enduring memories of the two months I spent there have no military connotations,' Dryden said. ‘Never before or since have I seen such a
remarkable
display of roses, nor heard so many nightingales singing against each other, nor eaten so much Brie in so short a time.'

Turing had spent his time since arriving in the Cottage working on Naval Enigma, which Knox had put to one side since it was a more difficult problem than German Army and
Luftwaffe
Enigma. He had also been busy devising a machine, called the Bombe, after the
Bomby
, although it was a more
complex piece of equipment than its Polish namesake. This would test the encyphered messages against commonly used streams of text – known to the codebreakers as cribs – to narrow down the possibilities for the keys, settings and wheel orders of the Enigma machines. Turing enjoyed a good degree of progress on both. Menzies agreed funding of £100,000 for the
construction
of the first Bombes and the British Tabulating Machinery company (BTM) was commissioned to build it, with the work supervised by the BTM research director Harold ‘Doc' Keen. Then in December 1939, Turing managed to work out the indicator systems for five days of pre-war Naval Enigma traffic. But neither the Poles in France nor the British could manage to break a wartime Enigma message. Dennis Babbage, one of the young mathematicians who had joined the small party in the cottage, recalled that attacks were made on numerous days' traffic. ‘One after the other they went down and a general gloom descended.'

This period was not entirely wasted because the
codebreakers
discovered one feature of the way in which the ordinary signals operators set up the machine. The operators were using pronounceable sequences of letters for the three-letter message settings on the machine, these were usually the first three letters of a word, or their girlfriends' names, sometimes even the first three letters of obscenities. They became known as Cillies because one of the first that was spotted was CIL, an abbreviated form of the German girl's name Cilli. ‘Just occasionally you would get a chap who was rather fond of the same letters,' said Susan Wenham, who was twenty-eight and one of the young female codebreakers recruited from Newnham College, Cambridge. ‘It might be for some personal reason. Perhaps one chap might use his girlfriend's initials for the setting of the wheels or his own initials. Something like that, you know, silly little things. They weren't supposed to do it but they did.' Searching for Cillies became something of an art, said Mavis Lever, another of the young female codebreakers, who also worked on four-wheeled
Enigmas. ‘One was thinking all the time about the psychology of what it was like in the middle of the fighting when you were supposed to be encoding a message for your general and you had to put three or four letters in these little windows and in the heat of the battle you would put up your girlfriend's name or dirty four-letter German words. I am the world's expert on dirty German four-letter words!'

But no actual cyphers were being broken and the pressure got to Knox, who had just been appointed Chief Assistant, effectively the chief cryptographer. He threatened to resign, an approach he was prone to take when he felt the battle to break the cyphers was not being pursued with sufficient vigour by those in charge. At the Pyry conference, he and Denniston had promised to send the Poles more of the Zygalski sheets, which they had been unable to procure. These had been produced, but never sent. In a letter to Denniston, Knox insisted that the Zygalski sheets must be taken to the Poles in France immediately. ‘My personal feelings on the matter are so strong that unless they leave by Wednesday night I shall tender my resignation,' he said. ‘I do not want to go to Paris but if you cannot secure another messenger I'm actually at the moment completely idle.'

In fact, Turing was sent to Mission Richard with the Zygalski sheets and a brief to find out why the codebreakers were unable to get into the wartime cyphers. The Zygalski sheets allowed Rejewski to make the first break into the German wartime Enigma: a German Army message in what the codebreakers dubbed the
Green
cypher for the 28 October 1939. Turing's visit also uncovered the reasons for the British codebreakers' failure to break any wartime Enigma. The information the Poles had given them was inadvertently wrong, providing the incorrect turnover points for two of the wheels. Shortly after Turing's arrival back in the UK, Knox used the corrected information to break the
Green
Army Enigma settings for 28 October and, within days, an Enigma key known as the
Red
was broken for 6
and 17 January 1940. (The first Enigma cyphers to be worked on by GC&CS were given the names of colours because progress was listed on boards using coloured crayons, the green and red crayons simply being the first that came to hand.)

Despite Knox's undoubted brilliance as a codebreaker, there were those who felt that something more intensive along the lines of a codebreaking production line would be required once the Phoney War came to an end and British troops became involved in the fighting.

‘One decision had been taken just prior to the first success,' noted Nigel de Grey, who took charge of intelligence production.

Commander Edward Travis, Denniston's deputy, had been the government's main adviser on what type of codes and cyphers to use before the war, a secondary role of GC&CS. Short, stout and bald, with small round spectacles, ‘Jumbo' Travis was fifty-one years old and an able and forceful administrator who did not feel himself bound by the traditions of the veteran codebreakers. He put one of the impressive new younger men identified by de Grey in charge of Hut 6. Gordon Welchman, a
studious, pipe-smoking man in his early thirties with dark hair and a moustache, who was far more dynamic than his academic appearance suggested, had already begun recruiting his own people to man the section. Stuart Milner-Barry, the 33-
year-old
Chess Correspondent of
The Times
and a fellow student of Welchman's at Trinity College, Cambridge, was one of the first to join Hut 6, as Welchman's deputy. When the war broke out he had been in Argentina playing chess for Britain, along with his friends 30-year-old Hugh Alexander and 28-year-old Harry Golombek. They too soon joined, as did the 31-
year-old
Scottish chess champion J. M. ‘Max' Aitken; 30-year-old Dennis Babbage, from Magdalene College, Cambridge and Howard Smith, also thirty and like Welchman a Fellow of Sidney Sussex. (Smith would later serve as British Ambassador to the Soviet Union and then as head of MI5.) Continuity with Knox's efforts was provided by John Jeffreys. Knox continued to carry out research into various problems in the Cottage while Hut 6 prepared to carry out what was hoped to be the
day-to
-day breaking of Enigma. It is important to realise that at this stage no one was sure whether the success would continue. Indeed, there were concerns that it might not last at all, that the Germans were bound eventually to realise that Enigma was not secure, de Grey recalled.

The break into the Enigma cypher led to strict security being imposed on the work going on at Bletchley Park. Menzies issued orders giving GC&CS the covername ‘Government Communications Headquarters' – the name by which it is still known to this day – adding that ‘this should be sufficient
explanation
for the curious to account for the presence of personnel from so many different government departments.' Hut 6 and Dilly Knox's Enigma Research Section became ‘barred zones' for anyone who was not working there.

The potential intelligence haul from Bletchley Park's ‘Most Secret Source' was immense. But de Grey was right. It hung by a very slim thread. The British had managed to penetrate the Enigma cyphers only because the Germans had been careless and did not adhere strictly to their signals instructions. If they found out and strengthened or even changed their cypher systems, all the codebreakers' efforts would be wasted. There were already strict regulations in place preventing staff from talking about their work, but these were now reinforced to the point that most of the people at Bletchley who were not working on Enigma, or a related issue – the vast bulk of the people working there – were not even aware that it had been broken. ‘We knew nothing about Enigma at all until long after the war,' said Julie Lydekker, one of the clerks in Cooper's Air Section. ‘It was a very strange set-up. We were very much in water-tight compartments because of the security so one really only knew one's own sections.'

The lack of understanding in the services and in Whitehall of the extent of what was going on at Bletchley led them to send people who while fluent in German were never going to match up to the very tight vetting procedures, Josh Cooper recalled.

When Gwen Davies was sent to Bletchley Park, as an 18-year-old member of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), she was told she was being posted to nearby RAF Chicksands. ‘When I arrived at Chicksands I was taken into the administration office where there was a driver waiting and he said with perfect
seriousness
: “Do we blindfold her or do we use the covered van?” and ultimately they used the covered van, I was shut into the back of a blacked out van and taken to Bletchley.'

She was dumped with her luggage outside the gates of the park and told by a young guard that she couldn't come in because she didn't have a pass. ‘I was by this time hungry, thirsty and very, very annoyed. “Look,” I said, “I don't know where I am, and I don't know what I'm supposed to do.” “Come to the right place then,” said the guard, “most of 'em here look as if they didn't know where they was and God knows what them doing”. An elderly guard told him to leave me alone, and said that I was to go to the hut at the left of the gates. “Somebody will come and see to you,” he said, “and if you want to know
where you are, you're at Bletchley Park.” “And if you want to know what that is,” added the younger guard, sniggering, “it's the biggest lunatic asylum in Britain.”'

Davies was given a security lecture and told never to reveal, even to her close family, what she did at Bletchley.