The Spies of Winter by Sinclair McKay

Author:Sinclair McKay
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: MBI
Published: 2016-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

‘The Signs and Portents Will Not Be Lacking’

The village of Iver, in Buckinghamshire – about 20 miles (30 kilometres) from central London and about five miles (eight kilometres) from the Eastcote HQ of the codebreakers – had the faintest tang of show-business about it. The wealthy hamlet was very close to the Pinewood film studio which, despite the pinched nature of the times, was producing dozens of dramas and comedies, often with imported Hollywood stars. Home-grown stars such as Sidney James and Roger Moore were to acquire properties there. In the late 1940s, the neighbours of Nigel de Grey must have wondered if he had missed his vocation, and whether he should be working at Pinewood too.

As far as they knew, this unassuming man was a civil servant of some sort by day. But he was also a hugely enthusiastic amateur actor who threw himself into a variety of different amateur productions. De Grey had been a member of the Old Stagers, and the rather upmarket ‘Windsor Strollers’ too. Surely this quiet chap in his early sixties should have been working for producer Michael Balcon or director Basil Dearden?

The pleasing incongruity of Nigel de Grey’s story is that, of course, every day in that period he was right at the heart of the Cold War, fighting to break into Soviet cable traffic, as military and intelligence experts all around declared that the next world war was about to begin. De Grey had a kind of unnatural calm that was also extremely apparent when – at the behest of Eastcote’s director Commander Travis in 1948 – he put together a top-secret document looking towards the future of the codebreakers, laying the foundations of the new GCHQ by examining their recent history. The organisation was about to expand in numbers once more. So, learning from both successes and failures at Bletchley, how were the codebreakers going to continue to adapt to this new world of daily atomic jeopardy? How were they going to keep one step ahead?

‘Dear Eric,’ begins a neatly handwritten note at the top of this (now) de-classified document. De Grey was addressing this thesis to his colleague Group Captain Eric Jones (who was later to succeed Travis as the head of GCHQ). ‘A point I meant to make somewhere in the notes I sent you did not I think find a place after all.’1 This prefacing point was to do with the numbers of men needed for Y Service units dotted around the world. These brilliant radio experts were attached to army, navy and Royal Air Force and their staffing levels were dictated by the needs of those services. De Grey’s point was that the Y Service personnel should in fact match the enemy’s numbers – if the enemy had multitudes of trained wireless operators sending out illimitable signals, then similar numbers were needed on the British side to counter them.

‘No attempt was made prior to the war to estimate what the probable scale of enemy communications would

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