The story goes that when potential staff members came to Bletchley Park, just outside of London, they were interviewed by a top member of British Intelligence. If the interviewer felt the applicant was right for the job, he would very carefully outline the position. Secrecy, it was explained, would be paramount. And then would come the clincher.
The interviewer, according to the story, would take out a pistol from a desk drawer and place it on the desk in front of him. He would then inform the candidate that he had been made privy to information vital to the security of Great Britain. He had been told the most sensitive secrets of the war.
Then the candidate was given the offer he could not refuse. Because of the seriousness of the matter, if the candidate turned down the job, he would be shot. Candidates invariably accepted.
It is hard to take this story literally, but as an apocryphal tale it certainly emphasizes the importance of absolute secrecy. Great Britain’s very life as a nation hung in the balance.
What happened at Bletchley Park is one of the war’s best-kept secrets, probably even more guarded than the atomic bomb project. It involved a German coding machine called Enigma, a German device that scrambled messages radioed to military and naval commanders into secret codes.
The deciphering of the German code was called Ultra by the British. Mathematicians, cryptanalysts, and intelligence officers participated in the task. Stewart Menzies has been selected to represent all of those involved in Ultra: not just the Englishmen trying to decipher the codes, but also the Poles who discovered Enigma and brought it to England.
Deciphering an Engima
Stewart Menzies was born in London in 1890. During World War I, he was decorated for bravery. He entered military intelligence, which quickly became his life’s work.
World War II brought him to the very top of the intelligence community. In November 1939, Menzies became chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service. He was now in charge of the Ultra program. The war was already two months old, and Ultra was busy uncovering Adolf Hitler’s (Number l) military secrets. Menzies, now known as “C,” would become the model for Ian Fleming’s character “M” in the James Bond novels.
How did Ultra begin? Prior to 1939, German intelligence experts were working on a machine designed to foil code-breakers. The machine was Enigma, which created an almost infinite array of possible permutations and combinations of codes. The machines were produced in quantity in a German factory.
A Polish mechanic worked in the factory and had the notion that these machines might be signaling devices. He stole one and took it back to Poland. The Polish secret service made a replica and had it sent to England.
The machine had four rotating drums. Around the drums were letters of the alpha-bet. A typewriter would be hooked up to the machine and a secret message typed in. The machine scrambled the message into code.
When the machine arrived in England, Britain’s Code and Cipher School was in Bletchley Park, and the building was used by the code-breakers. Mathematicians and cryptanalysts, using the earliest computer techniques, broke the code. When war came, England could read all the messages being sent in secret to Hitler’s field commanders. Great pains had to be taken to prevent the Germans from discovering that their code had been compromised.
Keeping Secrets: Sacrificing Coventry
It was Menzies who was responsible for the very limited distribution of the decoded messages. Because the code breaking was called Ultra, every message coming from it was deemed an “Ultra message.”
The task was difficult. What do you do when you intercept a message that the Germans are going to bomb Coventry, as British Intelligence did on November 14, 1940? If you suddenly deploy aircraft and anti-aircraft weapons to Coventry, you may well tip off the fact that the German code has been broken. So you take the hit; to do otherwise is to risk discovery and lose the advantage of knowing what the enemy is up to. Coven-try was bombed in late November.
Ultra was invaluable to the Allies. It was used during the Battle of Britain to keep track of coming air raids. It was useful in North Africa both for Montgomery (Number37)at El Alamein and the Americans landing in French North Africa. It was useful in the invasions of Sicily and Normandy. Not only did the Allies know what Hitler was going to do, but they knew when, where, how, and by whom.
Ultra was also essential in the battle against the menace of the U-boat wolf pack. It was so effective that German naval chief Karl Doenitz (Number 64) was quoted as complaining, “The enemy knows all our secrets, and we know none of his.”
A Final Betrayal
Menzies continued his intelligence role after the war, retiring in 1952. A decade later, he was shocked to learn that one of his most trusted colleagues, Kim Philby, had been a “mole,” spying for the Soviet Union. Philby had actually been in charge of countering Soviet espionage. It was Philby who was the so-called “third man” who had warned Soviet spies Anthony Burgess and Donald Maclean that they were about to be arrested for Soviet espionage. All three ended up living in Moscow for the rest of their lives.
The betrayal devastated Menzies. He died in 1968.
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