Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [104]
In 1942, a striking communiqué was sent around all GC&CS employees, appealing to their sense of personal, rather than institutional, responsibility. It read:
Secrecy. This may seem a simple matter. It should be. But repeated experience has proved that it is not, even for the cleverest of us; even for the least important. Month after month instances have occurred where workers at BP have been heard casually saying things outside BP that are dangerous. It is not enough to know that you must not hint at these things outside. It must be uppermost in your mind every hour that you talk to outsiders.
Even the most trivial-seeming things matter. The enemy does not get his intelligence by great scoops, but from a whisper here, a tiny detail there …
It went on in a manner calculated to bring a blush to the cheeks:
There is nothing to be gained by chatter but the satisfaction of idle vanity, or idle curiosity: there is everything to be lost – the very existence of our work here, the lives of others, even the War itself.
Some of these breaches were rather sad. Particularly poignant was the incident in which a shop girl in Knightsbridge sparked a security alert at Bletchley Park when a couple of Wrens went into the shop, bought some clothes, and gave the address for them to be sent on to. The shop girl, seeing their address, immediately became very chatty about Bletchley and asked the Wrens if they were working on bombes.
The reason the shop girl knew so much about it was that she herself had worked at Bletchley, and in an extremely rare case had been discharged owing to ‘ill-health and incompatibility’. After this incident, she was ‘duly cautioned’ by MI5.8
In his account, Peter Calvocoressi was fascinating on that crucial point of secrecy: that, in the vast majority of cases, once a recruit was in on the purpose of Bletchley Park, there would be no way for them to back out and go elsewhere.
The Ultra community at BP saw itself as – perhaps was – an elite within an elite. Many of the things which made it successful made it also intense: the narrow catchment area, the smallness … of its cryptographic and intelligence sections, the edgy pressures of relentless work around the clock, the sense of responsibility and achievement, and the fact that there was no escape.
The rule, dictated by security, was: once in, never out. And this rule was rarely broken. There was a board or committee to which an inmate of BP might address a plea for a posting elsewhere. An application to this board would be followed by an interview and, almost invariably, the rejection of the plea.
A girl who had broken her heart and wanted to get away to give it a chance to mend might find sympathy, but she would not get release. The only transients on the Ultra side were officers who came to BP to be indoctrinated and trained before going to intelligence staffs in the field where they would handle Ultra material.9
Against this careful security, however, there were always fears among the administrative hierarchy. They were perfectly justified, it would seem. For instance, some now suggest that an unidentified spy, with the codename of ‘Baron’, operated within the Park in the early years of the war – a spy, crucially, feeding information not to the Germans but to Britain’s Russian allies. One name put forward is Leo Long, who worked in the War Office. In May 1941, he leaked a raw decrypt from Bletchley Park concerning the Germans’ forthcoming Barbarossa campaign against Russia.
Conversely, those who chose to help Russia on their own account were more alarmingly slapdash about the methods that they employed.
22 Bletchley and the Russians
Accidental babbling and careless drunken boasts were one threat to security, but the Park was also vulnerable to more calculating figures. And a more full-time and notorious spy at Bletchley Park, it emerged in the late 1990s, was John Cairncross – known to some, in tabloid terms, as ‘the Fifth Man’.
Bletchley had already experienced an extraordinary near-miss. In 1940, a Times correspondent called Kim