"CODEBREAKING IN THE LITERATURE"
Willian Bundy paper on codebreaking in the literature in 1981
THE LITERATURE OF SPIES AND CODEBREAKING IN WORLD WAR II
A Layman's Guide
By
William Bundy
I
When Anne Reeves asked me to speak on this occasion my first inclination was to put into words the deep feelings I have always had for books and libraries. But then I thought of the story of a distinguished American lady Ambassador to Rome who used the occasion of an audience with the Pope to expound on the merits of the Faith. His Holiness listened for a time and then gently interjected: "But Mrs. Luce, I am a Catholic!" Obviously you care the same way about books, and about this especially vital and excellent community library.
My wife had a better idea. For a decade now she has had to put up with my passion for the, recent flood of books on what was done by intelligence agencies, especially British ones, during the Second World War. As an Army officer whose seniority derived largely from an earlier letter of greeting from the President, I happened to command a small American detachment that worked for the last 21 months of the European War, on a totally integrated basis, with the British code-and cipher-breaking headquarters at a grubby railroad junction called Bletchley, 50 miles north of London. But the very strict compartmentation under which all of us there worked meant that I had only a general idea what our efforts added up to, and no notion at all of what was happening in sending and catching spies or in deception based on both. So, starting with the revelations of John Masterman in 1972 and F. W. Winterbotham in 1974, I have devoured all the non-fiction and fiction on the subject and not always kept my thoughts to myself. So when Mary suggested I now share them here, what she was saying, in effect, was: "Why don't you stop boring our friends at every third dinner party, and get it out of your system?"
The literature just since 1972 covers a wide range. I have put on the counter to my left a selection of the books I shall be talking about, as well as a few of those on other subjects that I shall mention. The post-1972 material on spies and code-breaking ranges from the recently published first two volumes of the official history of British Intelligence in the Second World War, too dry for most lay readers, but of course the highest authority of all, through best sellers like Masterman's The Double-Cross Winterbotham's The Ultra Secret, Anthony Cave-Brown's Bodyguard of Lies and William Stevenson’s A Man Called Intrepid, all the way to Ken Follett's recent Eye of the Needle (both a book and a crackerjack movie) and The Key to Rebecca. As we shall see, not all the labels under which these books will be found in the shelves are accurate: some of the "non-fiction" contains large chunks of fictitious material, while some of the "fiction" (like The Key to Rebecca) is at least based on what actually happened. In any case, the collection should be of interest not merely to buffs of intelligence and military history, but to those of us who like our thrillers to be somewhere close to what did happen or might have happened.
II
In focusing on this particular period and subjects, I am of course leaving out a great many other books that deal with covert activities in the War. But let me just mention a few favorites some of you may share:
On the resistance within occupied Europe, and the heroism of those who participated in it and sheltered Jews, escaped Allied forces, and others in danger, I think of: Charles Morgan's The River Line, a novel based on intimate knowledge of the escape network for downed fliers. Morgan was in British Naval Intelligence and in fact the chief recruiter of Ian Fleming and many others there; Bruce Marshall's The White Rabbit, about a British agent working with a French network; Corrie ten Boom's The Hiding Place, a tremendously moving account of a Dutch family sheltering Jews, filling out the classic Story of Anne Frank.
And one book that Mary and I first read to our children. Alas, we have not kept our copy but it is a wonderful story of Norwegian children taking gold bars one by one on the bottom of their sleds, from their village at the top of the hill down to a cave by the water, under the noses of the Germans, so that the gold could be taken away for safety and Allied use. Years later we asked a Norwegian friend whether the story was true; twinkling ever so slightly, Dr. Gudmund Harlem (father of the recent lady Prime Minister of Norway) answered: "Oh yes, it was our whole gold reserve, and I was on the boat that got it from the cave and took it to England."
There is a massive literature, published in Britain and in the once-occupied countries, on the European resistance and British help to it. That help was conducted by a special and separate British organization, The Special Operations Executive. The grim character of its work is well captured in a British official history, SOE In France, by M.R.D. Foot, which was published in 1966 and contains the true version of a great many stories that have floated in and out of the more recent literature.
Moreover, I cannot attempt to do justice to American intelligence and covert activities. R. Harris Smith's OSS, published in 1972, is a superb account from open sources, with a vast bibliography both of materials on OSS itself and of the literature, as of that date, on foreign secret services and underground movements.
Likewise, I shall not try to get into the whole range of books on codebreaking. David Kahn's The Codebreakers, published in 1967, is a masterful treatment that goes all the way back into history but also includes a lot of the key breaks of codes and ciphers in World War II, with the notable exception of the British breaking of the Enigma machine cipher and the German high-level teleprinter system. In the same year, Walter Lord's Incredible Victory is a beautifully written and intensely dramatic account of how the U.S. Navy's reading of Japanese naval ciphers made possible the victory at Midway in June 1942, which was in all probability the turning point of the Pacific War. And, more recently, Ronald Clark's The Man Who Broke Purple is a well-deserved tribute to the father of contemporary American cryptanalysis, my old boss and teacher William F. Friedman, who with a handful of colleagues broke the Japanese military attaché cipher ("Purple”) and also the diplomatic traffic which, promptly read and wisely interpreted, might have had our forces at Pearl Harbor on the alert almost exactly 40 years ago. Ronald Lewin (of whom more below) has now completed a comprehensive book on the breaking of Japanese codes and ciphers, which I gather will be published early next year.
Finally, bearing directly on a large part of my chosen field, there had been prior to 1972 a few important revelations. H. Montgomery Hyde's Room 3603 (entitled The Quiet Canadian in its British edition) presented in 1962 a brilliant account of the work of Sir William Stephenson as the head of British intelligence and counter-espionage operations based in New York. Ewen Montagu's The Man Who Never Was reads like a detective story but is in fact a precise account of how the British put ashore the body of a dead officer in Spain in 1943, with papers designed to persuade the Germans (as they did successfully) that the next Allied thrust would be against Crete rather than Sicily. A whole host of books dealt with one of the apparent great German successes of the war, the valet called Cicero who photographed the cables of his master, the British Ambassador in Istanbul. And another German, H.J. Giskes, boasted all too accurately in London Calling North Pole of the way the Germans had captured virtually all the Dutch operators dropped by the British in Holland and, as they say in the trade, "doubled" the whole network so that they simply went on capturing others as they were sent.
In fact, if one had taken the literature up to 1972, one might have concluded that the score in the European Theater was just about even, with both the British and the Germans having limited successes. On the Pacific front it was the Russians who had had a man who probably remains the most successful single spy of the war, Richard Sorge, whose exploits as an ostensible German agent are covered in a number of books, most recently in Fitzroy Maclean's Take Nine Spies. And, of course, Soviet spies provided Moscow with a great deal of accurate information on Allied nuclear weapon projects, an activity well summarized in a book called The Atom Bomb Spies, by H. Montgomery Hyde in 1980.
III
But all of this, important as much of it was in terms of impact.on later events and particular actions during the war, and deeply moving, as almost all of it is from the standpoint of human heroism and dedication, was, it now appears, only the prelude to the major revelations of the last decade. For the British had in fact been vastly more successful than anyone was prepared to disclose for 27 years after the close of the war. By far their greatest successes had been in three fields, counter-espionage, large-scale deception operations, and above all the breaking of the major high-level German cipher systems. All three had been handled during the war by groups of people operating, as I have already noted, in extremely tight and separate compartments. And it is an extraordinary tribute to the discipline of those groups, British and British-trained, that only bits and pieces of the deception story had leaked out by 1972, and nothing at all on counter-espionage or the breaking of the high-level ciphers, as the experience of the excellent David Kahn attests. No doubt many of us who were involved in our little parts of these expected to go to our graves still holding on to the secrets whose importance had been so dinned into us throughout our wartime service.
The man who broke the ice was not an underling. Sir John Masterman was in 1972 the just-retired head of Worcester College in Oxford. As Head of the British XX Committee ("20" or Double Cross to taste, an indication of the occasional British whimsy in these matters), he had prepared at the end of the war a thorough summary of how the British had captured the early agents sent by the Germans to Britain, learned their radio procedures and duplicated them (as the Germans themselves had done in Holland), and used those same radio messages to identify and capture literally every single agent sent by the Germans to Britain for the rest of the war. At the same time they used the continuing radio reports of the "doubled" agents to supply the German Abwehr with intelligence that contained just enough accurate material to establish high credibility but, at crucial points in the war, enough slanted material to lead the Germans to precisely the wrong conclusions, most notably on the main thrust of the Allied invasion of Europe in 1944.
Masterman decided on his own that at this distance of time there could be no serious security damage in publishing this account. I suspect that his feelers to the British authorities had met with an almost instinctive rebuff. At any rate, he quickly gave up the idea of publishing in the first instance in England, and instead sent his manuscript to Chester Kerr, who was then the head of the Yale University Press and a long-time colleague and peer of Princeton's own Herb Bailey.
The manuscript was not a typical University Press book. But Kerr at once jumped at it and undertook to publish it. Masterman and Kerr knew that publication in the United States could not legally be blocked by the British authorities, as it could have been in Britain itself under the Official Secrets Act and the system of "D-Notices" the British still use to forestall publication of secret information. They were dealing from strength, but they were prepared to, and did, submit the manuscript to the British for a final review of any details that could have affected living individuals involved.
The result was The Double-Cross System a classic and a landmark. It not only told a dramatic story of extraordinarily imaginative "doubling" of an enemy network, but opened the way to further work in the whole area of deception operations. One thing Masterman did not reveal, however, was that much of the success of The Double-Cross System derived from the fact that the British were reading the Enigma-ciphered traffic of the Abwehr (under Admiral Canaris) so that they could at all times know exactly how well their planted material was going down.
This particular gap was soon closed. Many of the British members of the wartime British espionage organization, MI-6, were, and are, major literary figures, the impact of Graham Greene's MI-6 experience on his whole range of novels would be a study in itself. And one of Greene’s close colleagues, Malcom Muggeridge, prolific writer and sometime journalist and editor of Punch, published in early1974 the second volume of his memoirs, Chronicles of Wasted Time: The Infernal Grove.
In one small chapter, describing his life as a British intelligence operator in Lourenco Marques, he told (quite simply and calmly) how he had benefitted enormously from having, each day, the deciphered text of his German opposite number's latest traffic to and from Berlin. Muggeridge went on to indicate that the same cipher-breaking had extended to high-level German military communications, and that this was known to his colleagues in MI-6 in London, including one Kim Philby. (We shall come back to this.) But so far as I can tell the predominantly literary readers of Muggeridge's memoirs simply did not catch on to the significance of what he had written.
Rather, the true public English-language revelation of the breaking of the Enigma cipher came later that year from another top-level official in the business, like Masterman, namely Group Captain F. W. Winterbotham. His decision to publish in 1974 The Ultra Secret, first in Britain and shortly thereafter in the United States, may well have been inspired by Masterman's example. At any rate it was clearly a publication not sanctioned by the authorities, and based entirely on his own recollections and on the file of German high-level military communications that had been captured at the close of the war and published in due course by the British for the benefit of military historians.
The result is a spotty book, now overtaken on many key points and even inaccurate on a few matters of how the breaking was done, which was not Winterbotham's business. But it was certainly Winterbotham who put Ultra, the code word used for the Enigma material during the war, on the literary map.
So the cat was out of the bag, and the next two significant books came not from participants but from enterprising young journalists. Anthony CaveBrown had for some years been working on a book on British deception operations, drawing heavily on the official history of SOE and later on Masterman, and also making use of a lot of the OSS files in Washington. As he tells the story, he actually learned about the breaking of Enigma, apparently prior either to Muggeridge's or Winterbotham’s books, when an American General blurted out the secret to him on a beach in New England. (I later astounded the author by trying out on him my wife’s shrewd guess as to both the General and the beach, and will be happy to discuss these with those familiar with Martha’s Vineyard and its inhabitants.) At any rate, he was able to weave in a fair amount of Winterbotham's material on the breaking of Enigma, in what became the celebrated Bodyguard of Lies, published in 1975, a year after Winterbotham. It is a vast and sprawling book, heavily criticized on some central points by British reviewers, not open to any charge of understatement, but still a remarkable feat of research and investigation, with its hero (and apparently a principal source) being Sir Stewart Menzies (pronounced "Mingus" in proper British circles). Menzies was the Head of the British Intelligence Service (SIS) during the war and after, known only as "C" to all of us at the time, his name forbidden to be mentioned in British newspapers; more recently, and hardly to his pleasure, he had been the apparent prototype of the fading Chief depicted in John Le Carre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. But Menzies did deserve enormous credit for his leadership of British espionage and cipher-breaking operations in the war.
The second "journalist" book followed a year later. As I have noted, Sir William Stephenson was indeed an authentic stalwart in British intelligence, whose story had been accurately told by Montgomery Hyde in 1962. Why he should have felt another book was needed can only be left to conjecture, his relations with Menzies had never been good, according to my British friends, and it may be that he was somehow made aware of the pending Cave-Brown book in which Menzies was the hero of British intelligence (while Sir William never appears at all!) At any rate, sitting in retirement in Bermuda, Sir William Stephenson got together with an enterprising Canadian journalist, named by coincidence William Stevenson, and the result was A Man Called Intrepid (that being Sir William's code name in cables), published originally in the United States in 1976 and which became almost at once a runaway best-seller. American reviewers raved about it, and I have no doubt that many of you here have read it as gospel truth.
Unfortunately, it is not. My own suspicions were aroused when I took down the earlier Hyde book on Sir William from the shelf and found that large chunks of Intrepid were lifted virtually unchanged from Hyde's accurate and restrained account of Sir William's real and significant contributions, especially in advising William Donovan on the organization of what became the OSS. Likewise some of the best true yarns in Intrepid - like the British lady spy who seduced an Italian Naval officer and thus got Italian codes from the Italian Embassy in Washington, come from Hyde. But there are also lamentable garbles, including the discussion of Noel Coward's service in intelligence.
If Intrepid had merely been a somewhat sloppy re-hash of Hyde, there would have been no serious reason to quarrel with it. But in fact it went a great deal further and claimed in effect that Sir William Stephenson (from New York) had been responsible for a great many, if not all, British operations in France. This claim is both wildly implausible on its face, and totally at variance with all the official histories. The real fact is that his responsibilities were liaison with the F.B.I. and to some extent with OSS, and the conduct of some imaginative espionage and counter-espionage activities in North and South America.
Finally, Intrepid claimed that Sir William had played a major part in the original research on the Enigma machine that led to its breaking, and, most sensationally of all, that he had had private and personal meetings with President Roosevelt in 1940 and 1941, feeding him ULTRA material and thus influencing Roosevelt to move toward getting into the war. Both claims appear to be totally false, the first on the private testimony of my Bletchley colleagues, the second on the categorical statements in the British official histories that no intelligence derived in any identifiable sense from. ULTRA was shared with the United States, at least until mid-1941, and never through Sir William.
When the book was published in Britain several months after its American edition, the informed reviews were savage. The book is in my considered judgment a monstrous fraud. I am reminded of; what an eminent Episcopal Bishop of Massachusetts once said when he was asked about the adherence of a relative to a particular revivalist sect: "What is true in it is not new, and what is new in it is not true."
By 1977 it appeared entirely possible that the field was being taken over by uninformed (or misled) exploiters and charlatans. Happily, however, Gresham's Law, that bad money drives out good, was soon refuted by the appearance of four absolutely first-rate books by senior participants and responsible scholars. The first of these, Ewen Montagu's Beyond Top Secret U is an utterly charming, accurate, and I believe reasonably full account of the major British deception operations, as pithy and concise as Cave-Brown is rambling and prolix. (Alas, it was published only in England.) The other three dealt with the uses of the breaking of Enigma: R.V. Jones' The Wizard War (1978), Patrick Beesly's Very Special Intelligence (1978) (also published only in England) and Ronald Lewin's Ultra Goes to War (1978).
Each of these three is well written, and all are essentially accurate and full. I cannot recommend them too highly. R.V. Jones, at the time a brash young scientist somewhat reminiscent of the James Watson of The Double Helix, is not one to minimize his own contribution. But the story he tells of how the ULTRA material was used in the Battle of Britain and eventually to blunt German bombing of the island, and later how it was used to detect at an early stage the German development of the V-1 and V-2, these and a host of other exploits were indeed as Jones tells them.
Similarly, Patrick Beesly has told the naval story, in great detail, from the vantage point of one who was in the key intelligence rooms of the Admiralty while it was going on. No one who reads his book will be left in doubt that, without the British successes against the Naval version of the Enigma, the crucial Battle of the Atlantic would have been at least infinitely more costly and might have been lost altogether to the massive and sophisticated German U-boat campaign from 1942 onward. The story is made still more dramatic by the fact that the Germans suspected a problem, added a new complication to the Naval version of the machine, and for a year in 1942 thwarted all of the efforts of the Bletchley section that dealt with Naval Enigma. (My own work during the war was on the German army and air-force versions of the Enigma. Our Hut 6 was right next door to the naval breakers n Hut 8, but I never knew one single thing about their successes or problems!). When Hut 8 did again get on top of the U-boat cipher in early 1943, the British were able thereafter to route their convoys in masterful fashion to avoid the U-boat wolfpacks and losses dropped tremendously; without the turnaround it probably would not have been possible to mount the massive 1944 invasion of Europe. More personally, a great many Americans who crossed the Atlantic from the spring of 1943 onward (as I did) literally owe their lives to Hut 8.
The third of this "trilogy of excellence" is Ronald Lewin's book on how ULTRA affected the major land and air campaigns of the war. Lewin is a trained military historian, with many good books under his belt. He knows his stuff and he writes well. The result is a superb account of how terribly important ULTRA was in all the major military campaigns, including the Battle of Britain, Montgomery's victories in the desert, the major 1944 European campaigns, and notably the decisive breakout by Bradley and Patton in July, 1944. (In this case, as Winterbotham had already roughly recounted, the ULTRA material provided clear advance information of Hitler’s attack on what was then the weak point of Bradley's position, so that the attack was decisively defeated and Bradley, Montgomery and Patton went on, under Eisenhower, to roll up the German armies and in short order to free Paris and virtually all of France.)
Taken together, these three books provide a solid basis for understanding the enormous difference that the breaking of the Enigma made. Since then, the flow of excellent books has continued. Within the past two years, Ralph Bennett's highly detailed study of the impact of ULTRA on the Normandy campaign, Ultra in the West (1979, London only), both fleshes out the story of the great successes of that time and examines two controversial cases where ULTRA apparently failed. The first of these, the Arnhem debacle of September 1944, was in fact foreseen both by people in Bletchley and by one courageous Major on the staff of the British Airborne Corps that conducted the operation. To these readers of ULTRA, it seemed all too likely that a German armored division was indeed refitting precisely at Arnhem and that it was back in fighting condition. But his superiors refused to heed the warning of Brian Urquhart (now Under Secretary General of the United Nations) and what happened is told all too vividly in Cornelius Ryan's classic account, A Bridge Too Far, which many of you must have seen in the graphic movie version.
The second, the failure to predict the German offensive in the Ardennes in December 1944, is a very tangled story. Essentially, the Germans were able to use land-lines to a very great extent instead of radio messages that could be intercepted; even so, as Bennett argues, there should have been enough clues to predict roughly what might happen and when, so that the episode remains one of the few real intelligence failures in the latter part of the war.
For good measure, there has been published in the past year a small jewel of a book on both the human and professional side of the Bletchley "Huts" that focused on the German army and air force. Like Bennett, Peter Calvocoressi was there, and can write. His Top Secret Ultra (1981) is as good a short treatment of what it was really like at Bletchley as we are likely to get. The only gap it leaves, which at least one of my senior wartime colleagues wishes to fill but has so far been thwarted by British security concerns, is a truly professional account of the breaking techniques. An extraordinary combination of mathematical theory and brilliant opportunism in catching constant German errors produced the first Enigma breaks in 1940; the machine techniques were in a very real sense the foundations of modern electronic computer technology. That is a book that remains to be written (1).
Finally, what could be the capstone of the whole edifice now has two of its blocks in place. When Winterbotham went public, the British finally decided to go ahead with the long-postponed official history of British Intelligence in the Second World War, knowing that the ULTRA story lay at the heart of this (and indeed that any history of intelligencc would be an absurdity without it) they entrusted the task to a team headed by another of my wartime Bletchley colleagues, F. H. Hinsley of Cambridge. His first volume takes the story to June of 1941, ending with the dramatic story of how the British totally predicted the German invasion of Russia, down to date and basic battle order, and did their very best, in messages from Churchill himself, to tell Stalin what was about to happen. And the second volume, which I got only the other day, carries the story forward to the middle of 1943. I have not yet finished reading it but already find one highlight, the first official admission that Bletchley was reading not only the Enigma but the vastly more complex high-level teleprinter ciphering system. For this they use even more complex electronic testing machines than were used for the Enigma breaking.
Both volumes are authoritative, and convincing on many still-disputed issues. As I have already noted, they put the last spike in the coffin of Intrepid. And they also clarify, for keeps, such controversial and dramatic questions as whether the British refused to warn the authorities in Coventry of the German raid that wrecked that city in November of 1941, in order to preserve the long term security of the fact that Enigma was being broken. It turns out that that particular story is not true, although of course there were a great many cases during the war when ULTRA warnings could not be acted on for that very basic reason; happily, the British were able to develop the technique of plausible alternative sources of information such as air reconnaissance to the point where the constraint was not serious.
On the minus side, however, the two volumes so far published of the official history make terribly dry reading except for real history buffs. They religiously avoid personalities, and even the most dramatic stories are told in what is often almost a caricature of British understatement. But if one puts these official histories alongside the others I have described above, one can indeed end by paraphrasing what Churchill said of the R.A.F. fighter pilots in the Battle of Britain; "Never in the history of human conflict have so many political leaders and military commanders been better served by so few", by an intelligence organization that started with only a few highly talented individuals and at its peak never rose to more than approximately 10,000 people 'in the know'. It is a great story, and I suspect we shall learn only a little more about the basic facts when the final volumes of the official history come out over the next few years.
IV
For the sake of narrative coherence and simplicity, I have to this point treated the story as if it were solely a story of British imagination and organization. But it would be a grave injustice not to note the role played by the Poles and the French. In fact, well before Muggeridge and Winterbotham's English-language revelations of 1973 and 1974, the fact that the Enigma machine was broken would have been known to careful readers of at least two books that had been available for some years in Polish. I regret to say that I do not know the Polish literature properly, but these earlier Polish publications will be found in the material and especially in the footnotes of one recent book by a dedicated (though technically amateur) Pole, Jozef Garlinski, The Enigma War, published in Britain in 1979 and by Scribners here in 1980. And the French side of the story was told in 1973 by Colonel Gustave Bertrand in a book published in Paris and called simply Enigma. Again I regret to say that I have not dug this out, but have relied on the extensive references to it both in the Garlinski book and in the first volume of the British official history, which contains in an Appendix what seems to me a fair and honest statement of the British debt to both the Poles and the French for their pre-war efforts.
Essentially, the story is that both the Poles and the French were well ahead of the British prior to 1939, in getting information on the German decision to use the Enigma machine, which had been invented in the 1920s and which the Germans proceeded to make much more complex and, as they believed throughout the war, unbreakable. (Indeed it might have been if it had not been for the egregious and basic errors of German operators especially in the early stages of the war.) By the early 1930s, the Poles had obtained an actual Enigma machine of the type then used by the Germans, and were able to break some German maneuver traffic at that time and right up to 1939. In this they were assisted directly both by French agents, in getting the machine, and in the late 1930s by French cryptographic efforts under Colonel Bertrand. By contrast, in the 1930s the British knew only that the Germans were in all probability going to use Enigma as their principal high-level cipher, but they had not mounted any great effort either to get a machine or to work out the theoretical problem of solving it.
Then, in September 1938 or July 1939 (the accounts seem to differ), the Poles made a fateful decision, to share fully what they had learned both with the French and now with the British. Sir Stewart Menzies (then Deputy Head of the British Secret Intelligence Service) and a top man from the cipher headquarters (not yet moved to Bletchley) journeyed to Warsaw for two conferences with the Poles and Colonel Bertrand, and at the second of these, in July 1939, the Poles turned over to the British and French full replicas of the German machine, which included above all the crucial wiring of the rotating wheels. And it was this machine that became the basis of determined British efforts in the fall of 1939 to develop new techniques for solving it, with eventual success in early 1940 (2).
What the Poles (and apparently the French to a lesser extent) had done was indeed a significant cryptanalytic accomplishment, done principally by a handful of gifted Polish mathematicians. And the same Polish team had developed a rudimentary mechanical way of replicating the action of the Enigma so as to test possible settings more rapidly.
But it is a mistake to suppose that it was the Poles who "solved" the Enigma as it went into use by the Germans when the war began. On the contrary, early in 1939 the Germans had totally confounded the Polish analysts by adding new wheels, so that the machine simply could not be solved on a continuing basis without a whole new invention, first of calculating and then of electronic technology. Whether the Poles could eventually have risen to the occasion one can only speculate. The historical fact is that it was the British who were able, first in theory and then in practice, to invent the electronic "bombes" that did the job from the Spring of 1940 onward. But the Poles deserve tremendous credit, and the French significant credit, both for keeping the secret inviolate all during the war and later, and for their earlier efforts, without which, as the British official history rather dryly puts it, the British probably would not have made their breakthrough until perhaps nine months later than they did. It suffices to say that this delay would have made ULTRA unavailable during the Battle of Britain, and quite possibly not at concert pitch to play by the spring of 1941 the crucial role it did in locating the Bismarck and in predicting the Soviet offensives in Greece and Crete, and of course eventually in Russia.
And this brings me to one last loose end that is still the subject of controversy. What did the British tell the Russians and how, as their breaking of the German army and air force Enigma provided them, from the spring of 1941 onward, with a comprehensive picture of German order of battle on the Eastern Front and often of key German plans for military offensives?
That the British were not prepared to trust the Russians with the real secret, that they had broken Enigma, is entirely clear. Politics aside, the practical risks of doing so would have been enormous, in a military situation where high-level Russian Commanders were frequently captured and Moscow itself seemed for months about to fall. The British of course did not know at that time that Kim Philby was a Soviet spy. As Muggeridge makes clear, Philby was "in the know," and it is a safe guess that he told the Russians Enigma was being broken either during the war or at latest shortly after it. Happily, his Soviet superiors never leaked to the Germans.
But at the same time it was clearly the decision of Churchill himself that the Russians should somehow be informed of the major warnings of forthcoming German action that emerged from the Enigma breaks. (These of course were immensely valuable to the British themselves in getting a much clearer picture of what was going on in the Eastern Front than they were ever able to get through military liaison with the Russians.) And there is one dramatic version of what was done, hinted at by Muggeridge and now developed more fully in a book published last year in Britain and this year in the United States, Anthony Read and David Fisher's Operation Lucy. According to this version, the British Secret Service had managed to plant one of its agents, Alexander Foote, in the mid-1930s in the Soviet intelligence network in Europe, so that when the war moved to Russia in 1941 Foote was installed in Switzerland as a working member of the principal Soviet spy ring there. And the story, dramatically and I am sure honestly told by Read and Fisher, is that Foote, under the supervision of a senior SIS Officer named Dansey, fed ULTRA material received from London to his Soviet superiors, alleging that it came from an undisclosable group of German officers in the High Command under the overall code name of "Lucy." The claim is that this was the channel used to give the Soviets the substance of key ULTRA material without betraying its true sources.
It is a superb story, and I must say that I was totally convinced by Operation Lucy when I read it earlier this year. I thought that the mystery had finally now been cleared up. But then I got, a month ago, the second volume of the British official history. There one finds a careful and apparently full account of how Churchill, from 1941 to the middle of 1943, did indeed convey key ULTRA-derived warnings to Stalin through the British Military Liaison Mission in Moscow, disguising the sources. But to my consternation this second volume of the official history states flatly that "there is no truth whatever in the claim that ULTRA material was passed to the Russians at any time through the so-called "Operation Lucy" in Switzerland."
I leave it at that. Is this the last word, or is there some ulterior present reason for the British to deny the "Lucy" story as Read and Fisher tell it? Your guess is as good as mine. One cannot help noting that the official histories remain extraordinarily close-mouthed, and perhaps on occasion deliberately misleading, as to the details of British espionage and counter-espionage operations.
One final word about Ken Follett's novels, which I am sure many of you have read in the last two years. On one, The Key to Rebecca, the story is straightforward. If you look at Cave-Brown's Bodyguard of Lies, you will find that the essential story of a German agent and his Egyptian belly dancer colleague seducing a British officer in the Cairo headquarters is historically accurate. Follett has made it a lot more lurid and dramatic than it may have been in real life, but this is indeed a case of "fiction" that is very close to fact.
Eye of the Needle is a totally different situation. There Follett, as I think he explains, has invented out of the whole cloth (a yarn) about what might have happened if the British had not succeeded, as Masterman convincingly states they did, in rounding up every single German agent in Britain during the war. Many of you know the story or have seen the movie at the Garden Theater, so I will not go into detail. It assumes that one German agent survived, that he was put on the trail of the massive British deception operation that faked a major landing in the Calais area, with Normandy only a diversion, and that he came very near to alerting Hitler to the truth. It makes a great story, and along the way the book uses some of what I have been describing, particularly that the British were able to read the "Needle's" messages to and from Berlin, and in the end, after he was finally killed, to fake a final message in his style that "confirmed" that the Calais landing plans were indeed for real.
So what Follett has done is to take a small slice of truth and merge it into an otherwise wholly fictitious story. I don't blame him a bit and I enormously enjoyed both the book and the movie. But they are not to be confused with what actually happened. As many, including myself, can testify personally from post- war interrogations of our German opposite numbers, there is no doubt whatever that Hitler (although not Rommel) fell for the Calais deception hook, line and sinker. And there are a lot of Americans living today, perhaps some in this room, who would have died if he had not.
(1) Bundy was aware of Welchman's plans to write his own memoir which became The Hut 6 Story
(2) Bundy is referring to the Pyry Meeting but like other commentators at the time, mistakenly thought that Menzies was part of the British delegation
Image: William Bundy, pictured in 1982. Credit: William Adams.
