Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [107]
As 1941 wore on, it became increasingly obvious thanks to the messages being deciphered by Bletchley that the Germans would indeed be launching an assault on Russia. It was the belief of many in Intelligence that if this was the case, then the Russians would capitulate very fast, possibly within weeks, which would then leave Hitler free to turn his attentions back to Britain.
So how could Russia be warned without the source of British information being compromised? In April, the British ambassador in Moscow, Sir Stafford Cripps, was deputed to send a warning to Stalin that such an attack was looming. Stalin’s initial reaction was that Hitler was bluffing. However, Russian defence was stepped up. And from the day of the German invasion onwards, Churchill, though anti-Bolshevik to his core, ordered that Russia be helped in various ways.
At the end of June 1941, when Hungary declared war on the Soviet Union, with the result that Russia was fighting on multiple fronts (as well as Germany, it was also in conflict with Finland, Romania and Albania), Bletchley Park managed to break the ‘Vulture’ Enigma key; this was the key that concerned German military orders being given on the Eastern Front. The very next day, Churchill ordered that Stalin should be vouchsafed this intelligence, as long as its source was obfuscated. The job of passing it on was given to Cecil Barclay, who worked in British Military Intelligence and was based in the British Embassy in Moscow.
The Russians were extremely slow to show any gratitude for the nuggets of intelligence passed their way through such tortuous routes. Indeed, they greeted with disbelief and suspicion the news, deduced from Bletchley Park, that the Germans had penetrated the Russian cipher system: they took that to mean that their ciphers had been broken by the British.
So how much information did Churchill spoon-feed to the Soviets? There has been recent speculation about the Russian ‘Lucy’ spy network in Switzerland, which passed back extremely high-quality intelligence to Moscow; so good, in fact, that it was believed to have emanated within German High Command. The speculation has been that much of ‘Lucy’s’ top information was gleaned from Bletchley Park, and that Churchill covertly chose to use the ‘Lucy’ route in order to pass vital knowledge to Stalin. But Bletchley’s official history states baldly that there was no truth in this.
Later, in 1943, the Bletchley decoders broke a German key which they called ‘Porcupine’. For a few weeks, they were able to intercept all German air force messages, particularly those relating to movements and operations in southern Russia. The passing of information was carried out with the greatest of care – sometimes, as before through the British Embassy in Moscow – in order to jealously protect the source of the information.
And how much did the Russians really know or understand about Britain’s system of codebreaking? One would immediately think that the Cairncross handover of decrypts must have provided a fairly strong indication. As the war progressed, the Russians certainly learned of the existence of Bletchley Park, which they referred to as ‘Krurort’. According to Miranda Carter’s biography of Anthony Blunt, he also handed over Bletchley decrypts to his Soviet controller. If this is the case, then it does seem remarkable that the Russians never worked it out. However, according to Peter Calvocoressi, Russian intelligence never