Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [111]
I was at Bletchley Park with the job of preparing a weekly summary of the Yugoslav situation for Churchill. At the time I wasn’t particularly suspicious that our information didn’t seem to be acted upon, but have become so since. I now wonder if many of our reports were sent to the section where people like Philby were working. Certainly Klugman seems to have played a more important role than was thought. Two former communist wartime agents assured me that he did, but they didn’t elaborate.5
Of course, Britain had its own agents out in the field, and its own elaborate plans for counter-espionage coups. One came in 1940, when Alan Turing and Peter Twinn had still to crack the impossibly complicated naval Enigma. A young lieutenant-commander from Naval Intelligence came to Bletchley Park to discuss possible means of tricking Germans out of their key settings.
That young commander was Ian Fleming, and the man he conferred with was Dilly Knox. Fleming’s eventual plan had the working name ‘Operation Ruthless’. It involved the use of an ‘airworthy German bomber’ to be obtained from the Air Ministry; a ‘tough crew of five, including a pilot, WT operator and word-perfect German speaker. Dress them in German Air Force uniforms, add blood and bandages to suit’. The plan was to ‘crash the plane in the Channel after making SOS to rescue service’ and, justifying the operation name, ‘once aboard rescue boat, shoot German crew, dump overboard, bring rescue boat back to English port.’
The idea, of course, was to snaffle the ship’s Enigma key settings. Fleming himself volunteered for the mission, although there was no chance that he would be accepted for it; anyone with any knowledge of the Enigma operation, and of the work being done at Bletchley Park, would never be allowed out into the field for fear of capture by the enemy and subsequent torture, leading to top secret information being revealed.
Unfortunately, the weather conditions and other circumstances were never quite right for ‘Operation Ruthless’, it seemed, and eventually it was shelved. Alan Turing and Peter Twinn apparently looked like ‘undertakers cheated of a nice corpse’ at the news.6
This scheme aside, Fleming would be a regular sight at the Park, liaising between the codebreakers and Naval Intelligence. ‘About once a fortnight I visited Bletchley Park,’ he said. It has been wrily noted by Mavis Batey in her monograph on the subject that his creation James Bond would have enjoyed no such privilege, and indeed would not have made it past the sentry post – access to the secret of Ultra and Enigma was granted, outside the Bletchley Park staff, to very few.
On top of this, it might also be noted that two of Fleming’s Bond novels – From Russia with Love (published in 1957) and You Only Live Twice (1964) – are more explicit than any of the other 007 adventures when it comes to codes and codebreaking. In From Russia with Love, the complex plot revolves around a Soviet enciphering machine called LEKTOR. In You Only Live Twice it is a Japanese deciphering system called ‘MAGIC 44’. There is no mention of Bletchley; after all, Fleming had signed the same Official Secrets Act as everyone else. But, as he once said of his own work: ‘Everything I write has a precedent in truth.’
Perhaps the reason we have heard so little about security breaches at the Park is because such information remains sensitive today. There was one dramatic episode in 1942 which showed, however, that Britain’s code encipherments had in fact been penetrated by the Nazis.
Given the amount that the British knew about Enigma right from the start of the war, it was obvious that they should develop a different, more advanced system: this was Typex (Or ‘Type X’). Thanks to Bletchley, rigorous orders on the use of this system were given out: for instance, that no proper names should be used within the coded message itself (such inclusions, as had been discovered with Enigma, made cribs easier to find).
Nevertheless, for a while during the North African