‘The Germans used a electro-mechanical cipher machine called Enigma which was so fiendishly efficient at coding their communications that they never once during the war suspected that it was remotely possible that anybody could break it. A message coded using an Enigma machine meant that every character of every message could be encoded in billions of different ways. However, to cut a long story short The Wicked Uncles broke the Wehrmacht Enigma, then they broke the even more fiendishly complicated Kriegsmarine U-boat Enigma, and then they helped the Americans to break the Japanese equivalent, the JN-25 code. In so doing The Wicked Uncles practically invented two entirely new sciences; the science of Traffic Analysis and the Science of Electrical Computing. Alan Turing was also interest in a thing call AI, that Artificial Intelligence to simpletons like you and I but that’s a whole story in itself.’
The Home Secretary had asked if he could take notes; the Foreign Secretary had gravely shaken his head.
‘Only if you drink poison first, old man.’
Aged thirty-three William Gordon ‘Bill’ Welchman, the Marlborough schooled Trinity College mathematician had been Dean of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge in 1939. Alan Mathison Turing was twenty-seven in 1939, an old boy of Sherbourne College who had at the tender age of twenty-two been elected a fellow of King’s College Cambridge for his proof of the Central Limit Theorem. Thirty-two year old Stuart Milner-Barry had become a city stockbroker after winning Firsts in Classics and Moral Sciences at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1923 he had won the first British Boys’ Chess Championship and from 1932 onwards he had represented England at chess. The fourth Wicked Uncle was Irish-born Conel Hugh O’Donel Alexander, aged thirty in 1939, who like his friend Stuart Milner-Barry, was a former Trinity College man and an international class chess player. Before the war he had taught mathematics at Winchester College.
‘Bill Welchman ran Hut Six,’ Tom Harding-Grayson had explained. ‘Hut Six was in the business of attacking the German Army’s Enigma and Traffic Analysis.’
‘What exactly is traffic analysis?’ Roy Jenkins had asked plaintively.
‘The only plain language parts of any given Enigma message were the FROM and the TO components. These were meaningless codes of themselves but once Bill Welchman and his people had worked out, for example that CA85X was the Third Kampfgruppe of Fliegerkorps One in France, Bill’s people owned 3KG/FCI forever. By the time of the Dunkirk fiasco Hut Six had deduced the complete — and I do mean complete — German order of battle in the West. So, before we had broken a single Enigma message, Bill Welchman was able to pick up the phone and tell the powers that be not to worry about fighting the Battle of France because we had already lost it. Fortunately, that was just in the nick of time for the Navy could start pulling what was left of the British Expeditionary Force off the beaches of Dunkirk.’
Traffic Analysis told one where and what one’s enemy was ‘physically’ doing; where his forces were deployed, his state of readiness and consequently where one’s own defences were the most vulnerable. Without having this ‘complete picture’ of the enemy’s strength and dispositions it did not matter if one could, or could not read his coded radio transmissions.
Military intelligence, all intelligence in fact, is about context.
Facts tell you nothing in the absence of context; a common journalist, academic and political misunderstanding!
‘Alan Turing ran Hut Eight. Hut Eight’s job was to crack the U-boat Enigma. SHARK. He was a remarkable fellow, after the war he was on the short list for the British Team at the London Olympics for the marathon, one of the top five or six long-distance runners in the country even though he would have been in his mid-thirties by then. Turing was the man who invented an electro-magnetic machine, ‘a computer’ to speed up the code-breaking process. He was the master logician who had sat down and worked out, in his own head, how such a machine would work, built it, eventually got it to work and won the Battle of the Atlantic. Albeit, with a little bit of help from the Royal Navy. We had had some early success reading SHARK in 1941 and 1942 but then the bloody Germans started using an extra ‘rotor’ on the naval version of the Enigma machine and breaking SHARK became exponentially more problematic. It was Bill Welchman, who by 1943 was in charge of mechanisation at Bletchley Park, as well as being the poor chump who was responsible for liaising with the Americans, who designed a modification to Turing’s code-breaking machine — his bombe — that speeded things up so that we could start reading SHARK again. Bill Welchman and Alan Turing became the ‘big men’ at Bletchley later in the war; with Milner-Barry and Hugh Alexander respectively taking over the running of Hut Six and Eight from about 1943 onwards.’
The Home Secretary had had a mouthful of questions; but Tom Harding-Grayson was in a hurry to return to the Prime Minister’s rooms in Corpus Christi College.
Roy Jenkins had tried to keep things succinct.
‘Who actually ran Bletchley Park during the Second War?’
‘The War Office.’
‘What about GCHQ now? Its remit seems to overlap several departments…’
‘Under the War Emergency Acts GCHQ is a Defence Ministry problem. But,’ Tom Harding-Grayson had qualified, ‘rebuilding the defence-intelligence community which GCHQ formerly served has thus far been a piecemeal affair.’
‘What happened to The Wicked Uncles?’
‘Turing was driven to suicide in 1954. The local police in Manchester persecuted him because he was a known homosexual and basically, nobody in authority who knew the truth about his wartime service raised a finger to help him. The whole affair was a disgrace. My Minister forbade me to go to his funeral. Bad show all round.’
‘Oh, what about the others?’
‘Bletchley Park was dismantled after the war. A pale shadow of the wartime Government Code and Cipher School was set up at Eastcote in Middlesex in 1946 but GCHQ in Cheltenham wasn’t established until the early 1950s. Stuart Milner-Barry joined the Treasury in 1946 I think. He was an Under-secretary by the time of the October War. He went missing the night of the war. Bill Welchman got so fed up with the penny-pinching of the Atlee Government that he moved to the United States in 1948. The last I heard he had become an American citizen and he was a top man in the National Security Agency in Virginia.’
‘And Hugh Alexander…’ Roy Jenkins’s voice had trailed away as the penny dropped. The last of the four Wicked Uncles who had done so much to win Hitler’s war was currently incarcerated at Her Majesty’s pleasure in Gloucester. Courtesy of those idiots at MI5!
He fixed the Director General of MI5 in his sights.
“It has come to my attention that officers under your command have wilfully subverted the transmission of a lawful communication from senior government officers to the Prime Minister,” the Home Secretary remarked icily to Sir Roger Hollis, the tired, irritated Director General of the Security Service, “in the name of national security.”