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House of Spies
St. Ermin's Hotel
By Peter Matthews The History Press
Copyright © 2016 Peter Matthews
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7509-6407-4
CHAPTER 1
THE FIRST WORLD WAR
CABLES AND CODES
It is generally believed that the British Secret Service's domination of the intelligence conflict between itself and Germany began in 1939 in Bletchley Park – it did not. The whole saga began quietly enough almost exactly a century ago in 1914 in the Admiralty Buildings, not more than a mile from St Ermin's Hotel. Years before the war began, the Committee for Imperial Defence in Whitehall had made plans to cut German communications in an action that would lay the foundations for making British intelligence a world-class service that would last for half a century.
As war was declared and hostilities began against Germany in 1914 the committee's plan was quietly put into action in an undramatic way. At the time, international communications were based almost entirely on undersea cables whose network spread like a spider's web under the oceans to connect the great cities of the world. The telegraphic messages were mainly intended to carry information and data concerned with international trade, but political and military communications messages rapidly took an increasing slice of the transmissions on the busy cable network.
Telephones and telegraph networks had changed the nature of international commerce, and even diplomacy, in the decade before the war but now it would also change the nature of war beyond imagining. Instructions and reports from the German Kaiser's embassies, and orders and reports from German warships and garrisons in German West Africa, all kept the cable network busy. The British were well aware of the system's importance because they were leaders in the use of undersea cable technology. They used the cable messaging system extensively themselves with speedy communications that were at the heart of the maintenance, administration and control of the diverse and distant parts of their great empire.
Britain's initial actions at the beginning of the war were directed against the enemy's network of cables that connected Berlin with its friends, embassies and forces around the world. Cable telegraphy was far more important at the time than wireless signalling, which was only just beginning to reach its workable technical capability. Even so, two orders were transmitted by wireless telegraphy as well as cable from the Admiralty on 3 August 1914. The first was sent to all commands of the British fleet with the priority 'Most Immediate', which takes precedence over all other messages. The signal, sent in the Admiralty naval code (which the German Kriegsmarine had broken) and transmitted at 11.21 a.m. read 'XIlTO SSZKAP ACAAP SZBEC SXUYZ'. All the ships of the fleet received and decoded it as 'Commence hostilities at once with Germany'. The signal was sent from aerials that can still be seen above the domed roof of the Admiralty Buildings.
The second message, transmitted within hours of the first, was sent to a cable ship in clear language to execute a 'war reserve' standing order of the Committee of Imperial Defence. The secret order was to sever Germany's international undersea cables, which the cable ship carried out just a couple of days after war was declared (the vessel may have been the Telconia or the Alert, the records are unclear).
The ship slipped her moorings in Harwich Harbour and steamed out into the North Sea, setting a course for the German coast near the town of Emden to dredge up five of the main telegraphic cables and slice them through. The cables they were to cut ran down the English Channel and connected Germany to France, neutral Spain, and the German colonies in Africa, as well as her many friends in North and South America. A few days later the Telconia returned and with second thoughts dredged up several more thousands of feet of cable just to make sure that the damage was irreparable.
Cable links between Europe and North America had been laid more than a decade before and became a well-established part of Germany's international communication system. Wireless technology, however, was emerging fast and Germany had just managed her first long-range transmission in 1913 from the wireless station at Nauen, near Berlin, to Togo in Germany's West African colony. The transmission was barely audible compared with that of a cable message, which would have been clear and distinct, so wireless telegraphy still had some way to go to be a reliable form of communication.
Following the Telconia's exploits, one of the war's earliest actions by British troops was to raid and destroy the German cable station at Lomé in West Africa. The destruction of their communications isolated German naval units in the waters of the South Atlantic, as without their cable connections the German cruiser squadrons could only receive wireless signals. They could be overheard by others and also, in responding to Berlin's signals, a vessel ran the risk of giving its position away to an enemy's listening and tracking station. Not that the British had much in the way of listening equipment in that early stage of the war, although listening stations began to quickly sprout along the coasts of the world's oceans just as soon as they found there were signals to intercept.
The need for interception and interpretation of wireless signals practised so well by Bletchley Park in the Second World War began with the Telconia's action in 1914 in the North Sea. It fundamentally changed the signals intelligence battleground, although neither the Committee of Imperial Defence nor the Imperial German High Command could have foreseen its implications. At a stroke German maritime communications had been deprived of their reliance on cable telegraphy for orders and reports of all kinds as well as diplomatic dispatches. This would later prove to be fatal to the Kaiser's war objectives, particularly in the war at sea.
The first indication of the vulnerability of wireless transmissions in Morse code soon became evident almost as the Telconia returned to harbour. Navies of the world had grasped the opportunities for communicating with their ships by wireless at an early stage in the development of the technology, and among the first to do so was Britain's Royal Navy. It made the first ship-to-ship transmission of a message during fleet manoeuvres in 1909, although reception was far from perfect. By the time the war began five years later every major vessel in the navies of world was equipped with radio transmitter and receiver sets, and the trained operators to operate them.
Even so, for the British Navy the first indication of transmissions intercepted from the German High Sea Fleet (Hochseeflotte) base was discovered by radio amateurs. They brought their message pads to the Admiralty within days of the declaration of war and Admiral Henry Oliver, the Director of Naval Intelligence, was given the first copies of wireless interceptions – the trouble was, they were in code. First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill ordered Oliver to set up a wireless intercept service and also establish a decoding facility at the Admiralty, and so Room 40 in the Admiralty Old Building was allocated for their use.
Britain's new intelligence bureau was destined to do great things in the war at sea and would later expand to provide an intelligence centre of wider dimensions. It would substantially influence the conduct of the war and even play a major part in ending it.
ROOM 40
With Room 40 OB, as it was designated, now the new home of his bureau, Admiral Oliver wanted the equivalent of an Alan Turing, the code breaker at Bletchley Park, to break the Imperial German Navy's coded transmissions. Oliver was lucky to have an old friend in Sir Alfred Ewing, who had an interest in codes and ciphers, and he invited Ewing to lunch at the United Services Club (now the Institute of Directors) in Pall Mall.
Ewing was offered the job of head of Room 40, which he immediately accepted; it turned out to be an inspired choice for the new intelligence bureau. He began a review of the various techniques of coding in the British Library, the British General Post Office and any other institutions that were able to help him. It soon became obvious that he would need a multi-talented team to help him tackle the difficult task that was beginning to emerge.
German transmissions were coming thick and fast from amateurs as well as naval wireless telegraphy personnel, who were now monitoring all transmissions in a disciplined manner in a chain of listening stations. They were quickly created up and down the eastern coast of England and Scotland to intercept and record German wireless transmissions using a device first developed by the army, which they called the 'wireless compass'. The apparatus could indicate the direction from which the wireless transmission came and, using the chain of direction finding (DF) stations that used the naval version of the wireless compass, two or more DF stations could take a reading on a transmission source. Where two or more direction finding readings converged would indicate the transmitter's location, and the DF station could estimate (sometimes quite accurately) where a U-boat or naval shore station transmitter was located when sending a signal.
DF stations were manned by trained wireless telegraphists who were organised by 'watches' around the clock in a way that missed little in the way of enemy transmissions. The network of listening stations and DF stations' techniques developed in the First World War was widely used in much the same way that 'Y' stations were in the Second World War.
Meanwhile, Ewing in Room 40 was not only beginning to crack the codes of some of the German wireless transmissions but also beginning to recruit others with similar code-breaking talents; he made some appointments that were as inspired as his own.
Oliver and Ewing decided that the team needed to have a variety of skills. German speakers were an obvious necessity, as was an understanding of naval procedures, practice and terminology, but there needed to be an overriding talent for understanding codes and ciphers. Ewing therefore looked first for candidates among naval personnel, and an early recruit was Commander Alistair Denniston, who was teaching German at Osbourne Naval College. Denniston thought that his appointment was a short-term one, but it was to become his life's work, enabling him to gain immense experience and become a leading figure in the intelligence community.
He was appointed to the Room 40 team, where he served until the end of the war and then he was appointed head of the bureau to lead it through the lean interwar years. Denniston led his small but experienced code-breaking team into Bletchley Park as war was declared in 1939, and, with its expertise gained during the First World War, it contributed substantially to 'the Park's' huge success in the second.
This was not the only link to British intelligence work made during the war, because Churchill served his apprenticeship in overseeing intelligence gathering and application in his supervision of Room 40. His experience in directing its activities in the First World War enabled him to see the value of intelligence and so he appreciated and supported his young intelligencers in the Second World War.
Churchill did not repeat the mistake in the Second World War that he had made in the management of Room 40, which was to allow the naval head of the agency, Admiral Oliver's, concern for secrecy to constrain the distribution and effect of the intelligence valuations. Oliver was allowed, in the early stages of Room 40's development, to keep his cards too close to his chest as he was unable to delegate work or responsibility for intelligence evaluations. Thus, the sharing of information with his colleagues was limited because Oliver's obsession was that he alone was absolutely essential to the operation of Room 40.
As he was unable to escape the heavy responsibility for his work and felt unable to share it with anyone, he would never leave the Admiralty War Room, day or night, for almost two years. He insisted on seeing everything and signing all correspondence himself; it is not an uncommon fault among intelligence officers, where the need for secrecy increases the burden a senior officer bears.
I have witnessed the effect that this can have on an individual. It can lead to every single aspect of his life and work being unnecessarily secret. I was aware of an intelligence officer who was warned that a senior government minister he was going to see did not have the necessary clearances for certain subjects to be discussed.
The intelligence systems management would change for the better later on in the war when another admiral, William 'Blinker' Hall, replaced Oliver, who was given a sea command. Ewing also later retired as he was worn out and exhausted from the service to his country. He had created a world-class interception and decoding organisation that would dominate the enemy in the art of intelligence. Methods of intercepting and decoding enemy wireless traffic had developed extraordinarily quickly from a standing start in the first months of the war where no organisation had existed previously. The Admiralty's intelligence bureau had gathered a hugely talented team, but what it now needed was what any code breaker needs and that was luck – and Room 40 found that in abundance.
The cryptologists in Room 40 were making slow but steady progress in understanding and penetrating the enemy's codes and ciphers as the code breakers gradually worked out how the keys of the encoded messages functioned. Many of the secret clues were held in books and papers that the enemy desperately wanted to keep safe and secure.
Encryption of messages into coded form is a science and like so many scientific disciplines has its roots in the culture of ancient Greece. The word 'cryptography' comes from the Greek kryptos (secret) and graphos (writing). The science divides into two aspects of the 'black art' of enciphering and deciphering messages. There is a difference between codes and ciphers – a code can be any form of prearranged signal, such as the array of flags that Nelson used in sending a message to his fleet, or dots and dashes indicating a particular letter in the Morse code. Sailors in particular were more at home with codes because they were simpler than ciphers (as long as you had the code book). A cipher is the substitution of one letter for another using a method that the recipient already knows and so will be able to reconstruct the message, but to do that they must have the cryptographic 'key'.
Julius Caesar used a code based on a Polybius square, which he used as a key, similar to that shown below:
[TABLE OMITTED]
The table was a simple construct and as long as the recipient had the table as a key he could easily decode the text. The letter A is represented by the number 11 and the letter Z as 55, thus to spell out the word 'war' would be ciphered as '25/11/24'.
The Polybius square was the basis of a coding method widely used in the trenches of northern France in the First World War, more than 2,000 years after the Romans first used it. Caesar also used a simple substitution code that took the letter A and substituted it for D, three places further on in the alphabet. B became E, and so on, so that the word 'Caesar' would be encoded as 'FDHVDU'. The decrypt was pretty easily worked out as long as you knew your alphabet backwards. This form of substitution cipher is called the Caesar Shift Code and represents one of the basic forms of today's modern encryption systems.
Codes that were being worked on by Room 40 were far more complex than those described above and the lights often burned late into the night in the Admiralty. Code breakers working on encoded German wireless transmissions needed a 'crib', and in the early days of the war they were soon to get not one but four. The first lucky strike occurred on the other side of the world in Australian waters. The German steamship Hobart was one of the few ships that had not installed a wireless set and so the captain was unaware that war had broken out. He was not alarmed when a party of sailors of the Royal Australian Navy boarded his vessel on what he assumed was a routine inspection, until the Australian Navy began to search his ship.
Secret papers issued by the Admiralstab (the German equivalent of the British Admiralty) were found, among which was the Handelsverkehrsbuch (HVB) code book used to communicate with German merchant ships. A copy was immediately dispatched to Room 40 and enabled staff to read the coded German transmissions sent to the ships of her merchant fleet. Why was a ship with no wireless set carrying books to encode signals?
At about the same time a small force of German cruisers were patrolling in the cold misty eastern Baltic Sea, in the waters of the Gulf of Finland close to the Russian coast. A dense fog separated the ships of the flotilla and the German cruiser Magdeburg alone was sighted by a Russian cruiser squadron patrolling the seas around their base in Konigsberg. They engaged and sank her, after which the Imperial Russian Navy sent down divers into the ship's signals cabin to recover the Admiralstab's most secret Signalbuch der Kaiserlichen Marine (SKM) code book.
The Russian Navy listened to German coded transmissions just to make sure that the German Navy was still using the code book in signals sent to its own ships. Having confirmed the value of the code book by making sure that it was still in use, it generously sent a copy to the British Admiralty. The original copy of the SKM code book resides in the British Public Records Office in Kew, while the HVB copy is on show in the National Archives and Records Office in Victoria, Australia.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from House of Spies by Peter Matthews. Copyright © 2016 Peter Matthews. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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