The WWII snoops who took on the Russians: The team that bravely decoded secret Soviet messages
- Code-breakers helped crack the Enigma code during World War Two
- After war they were moved to a new HQ in a dreary London suburb
- They created a machine so Churchill and Roosevelt could talk privately
THE SPIES OF WINTER
by Sinclair McKay
(Aurum Press £20)
It says a lot about the general mood of paranoia in the early Fifties that the British and U.S. security services set up a codebreaking organisation without informing either the Prime Minister or the U.S. President.
The only problem was that the Venona Project, as it was known, was so secret that no one dared use it — for fear of alerting their enemies to the fact that their codes had been broken.
When the War ended in 1945 there were plenty of people who assumed that the codebreakers had had their day, but as Sinclair McKay reveals, quite the reverse proved to be the case.
Code Queen: Codebreaker Alan Turing’s former fiancee Joan Clarke (played by Keira Knightley in the film The Imitation Game)
The need for snooping on your enemies — and quite often on your friends — was stronger than ever.
Nonetheless, the codebreakers themselves faced an uncertain future.
Bletchley Park, the centre of Britain’s wartime codebreaking operations, was soon closed down — the ‘bombes’ that had been built to help decipher the Enigma code were dismantled, the well brought-up young ladies who comprised a large portion of its workforce despatched back to London.
Much to the annoyance of those who were kept on, their new HQ was in the dreary London suburb of Eastcote. One codebreaker, expecting to find another ‘nice old country house’, was appalled to be confronted by ‘a Soviet-style correction camp’.
Eastcote may have been festooned with barbed wire, but security was astonishingly lax — local schoolchildren used to climb in through a hole in the wall and steal top secret equipment.
The codebreakers who worked there now had a new enemy — the Russians. Much of their time was taken up with decoding secret Soviet messages, gleaning information that first put them on the trail of the spies Philby, Burgess and Maclean.
THE SPIES OF WINTER by Sinclair McKay
Meanwhile, Alan Turing, the man who had done more than anyone else to break the Enigma code, had been moved to another top-secret location in Northamptonshire.
Turing had a new project, one that involved enormous machines the size of wardrobes linked by labyrinths of wire and cable.
Christened Delilah after the Biblical figure — because she too had been ‘a deceiver of men’ — it scrambled and enciphered voice transmissions so Churchill and Roosevelt could talk securely on the telephone. Anyone listening in would hear only white noise.
Eventually GCHQ — Government Communications Headquarters — as it had been rechristened, outgrew the gloomy confines of Eastcote and started looking for another home.
The reason Cheltenham was chosen, it is said, is because the man responsible for finding a new site was mad-keen on horse-racing and wanted somewhere within easy reach of a race-course. But the air of paranoia remained as thick as ever — it wasn’t until 1976 that the public even learned of GCHQ’s existence.
By then codebreaking bore little resemblance to anything that had gone on at Bletchley Park.
But some staff coped well with change — Turing’s former fiancee Joan Clarke (played by Keira Knightley in the film The Imitation Game) worked at GCHQ off and on until she retired.
As he has proved before, Sinclair McKay has no peers when it comes to the history of Bletchley Park — and its aftermath. Lucid, well-researched and rich in detail, The Spies Of Winter is a valuable addition to the genre.
