The Secret Life of Bletchley Park by Sinclair McKay

Author:Sinclair McKay
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781845136833
Publisher: Aurum Press
Published: 2011-08-13T04:00:00+00:00

18 1942: Grave Setbacks and Internal Strife

‘You mustn’t think that it was all harmony at BP,’ says one veteran. ‘There were some pretty ferocious internal squabbles too.’ As 1942 dawned, some of these internal pressures were finally to erupt.

While it enjoyed the untrammelled and deep admiration of Churchill, the quasi-academic atmosphere of Bletchley Park was not otherwise viewed outside with universal approbation. Particularly, it appears, within certain corners of Whitehall, there was disquiet concerning the way that information was parcelled out. And after the difficulties and frustrations of the previous year, with the immensely long struggle to finally break the naval Enigma, the Park was coming under fresh pressure from various directions.

Thanks to Dilly Knox, Bletchley Park had at the end of 1941 scored another tremendous, almost priceless success in the cracking of the Abwehr code – that is, the codes used by the German military intelligence service. The Abwehr used a subtly different Enigma machine, and the breaking of the Abwehr code was something of a personal triumph for Knox – now so ill with cancer that he was working from home.

Back at Bletchley, Oliver Strachey was specifically assigned to monitor messages between Abwehr HQ and its agents. And the decrypted messages were to prove to the security services the success of an audacious operation known as the ‘Double-Cross’ system.

The idea was that captured Abwehr agents should be left in their positions and simply turned by the British – in other words, made to work as ‘double agents’. That way, not only could all German espionage within Britain be monitored but also, the information that these agents sought from the British for their German paymasters would tell MI5 exactly what German intelligence did and did not know about such things as defences and planned manoeuvres.

There was another terrific advantage: the reports that the German agents made, in code, would be followed through the Abwehr networks, helping to break the keys for their particular Enigma cipher.

Such a plan now sounds almost too preposterous to work; and yet it did, handsomely. Captured German agents were given a stark choice: either face a firing squad or obey the orders of an MI5 officer. Once turned, the agents were given information to feed back to their German masters. Most of this was accurate, though inconsequential; some, crucially, was completely false. In other words, these agents were used for strategic deception. As the war went on, one such agent, Wulf Schmidt, known as ‘Harry Tate’, was so spectacularly successful that not only did the British secret service consider him ‘a pearl’, the Germans were even more pleased with him and awarded him the Iron Cross.

As Kim Philby (himself turned down for a job at the Park, as we shall find later) noted in his otherwise not wholly reliable memoirs, the breaking of the Abwehr code also gave Bletchley Park a weird glimpse of ‘the intimate life of German intelligence officers’:

There was the case … of Axel the police dog. He had been posted from

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