Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [99]
21 1943: The Hazards of Careless Talk
In Robert Harris’s best-selling 1995 novel Enigma, the core of the story concerns a spy at work at Bletchley. The tension mounts inexorably because the consequences are so utterly unimaginable. For if the Germans gain one whisper or one inkling that the British have cracked their encoding system, then they will make that system infinitely more complex – and with that, they will be almost impossible to defeat. It is one of those rare thrillers where the publisher might say with some justification that the fate of the world depends upon the novel’s heroes.
Some Bletchley veterans are fans of the novel; they admire the way that Harris skilfully evoked life at the Park while adding a thriller element. But that very element, they say, while entertaining, is in fact extremely implausible. Secrecy and security, according to some, was woven into the texture of life at Bletchley to an extent that it became almost pathological. Some veterans were to recall that security at the Park was heavy and unremitting. There are stories of women who worked there who refused even to have medical operations carried out for fear of blurting indiscretions out under anaesthetic. There was a story concerning a lady academic at Cambridge attending parties in London, getting drunk and boasting about her work … and she was never heard of again. Intriguingly, there were other slips – accidental, unintentional – that were to demonstrate just how vulnerable the Park was to careless talk.
When western Europe shockingly fell to the Germans with such speed in 1940, the popular belief in Britain that the country would suffer a similar fate had been extremely strong. As Mimi Gallilee recalls, everything possible was done to confuse potential invaders: ‘everyone had to stay quiet about everything then – for instance, all railway station names were removed from platforms.
‘And all directions were deliberately muddled – so that if we were invaded, or if there were people who shouldn’t be in this country – they couldn’t find their way easily by signposts.’
But this was not just a matter of marauding soldiers or cunning foreign spies; it was a matter of the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, any one of whom might be plotting away with secret wireless sets. It was around this point that the notion of the ‘fifth columnist’ – the outwardly normal citizen secretly working with the enemy to undermine society – seized the national imagination. German propagandists played upon this anxiety in broadcasts to Britain, in which they would, for instance, announce that the church clock in Banstead, Surrey, was running five minutes slow. How, people wondered, could they acquire such information unless such places were crawling with fifth columnists? But the Germans might not have had to work all that hard to create conditions of paranoia. In every city and every town, any transgressive or unusual behaviour was noted and reported.
What Bletchley Park veterans tend not to refer to now are the episodes when the Park was itself caught up in espionage dramas – not merely the cunning British transmissions of false information and black propaganda from the riding stables of nearby Woburn Abbey (by means of a fake German radio station called Gustav Siegfried Eins, which specialised in smears about Nazi officials), but murkier episodes that across the years have provoked allegation and counter-allegation. As we shall see, there were instances where careless talk was talked – by Wrens, by lieutenants, by mechanically minded clever-dicks – and on these occasions, the Bletchley authorities were swiftly on the case. There was no shortage of voluntary surveillance in Britain at that time.
But while the necessity of keeping the secret was obviously vital above all else, it seems that the Park hierarchy was largely remarkably trusting of its young recruits. For the