The Bletchley Park Codebreakers Read Online Free PDF Page A

had no codes and did not risk using the Tsarist codes, which they must have inherited,’ Denniston said. ‘They began with simple transposition of plain Russian and gradually developed systems of increasing difficulty.’ One of the reasons that the Bolsheviks were unwilling to use the old Tsarist codes was the presence among the British codebreakers of the man responsible for devising a number of them. Ernst Fetterlein had once been the Tsar’s leading code-breaker, solving not just German and Austrian codes but also those of the British.
    ‘Fetterlein was a devotee of his art,’ one of his former colleagues in the Russian
Cabinet Noir
recalled. ‘I was told that once, when he was sent to London with dispatches, he sat morosely through breakfast until suddenly a complete change took place. He beamed, began to laugh and jest, and when one of the embassy officials asked him what the matter was, confessed that he had been worried by an indecipherable word which occurred in one of the English telegrams he had deciphered. Someone had in conversation mentioned the name of a small English castle to which the King had gone to shoot and this was the word in the telegrams which had bothered him.’ He sported a large ruby ring given to him by Tsar Nicholas in gratitude for his achievements, which included deciphering a message that led to the sinking of a number of German ships in the Baltic in 1914. This had a valuable spin-off for Fetterlein’s future employers. The Russians recovered a naval codebook from the light cruiser the
Magdeburg
, which they passed on to the British.
    Fetterlein fled from Russia during the October Revolution on board a Swedish ship. He and his wife narrowly evaded a search of the ship by the Russians, one of his new colleagues recalled him saying. ‘As the top cryptographer in Russia he held the rank of admiral and his storiesof the day the revolution occurred, when workmen stripped him of many decorations and bullets narrowly missed him, were exciting. It is said that the French and the British organisation were anxious to get him and Fetterlein simply sat there and said: “Well gentlemen, who will pay me the most?”’
    The British evidently offered the most money. Fetterlein was recruited by Room 40 in June 1918, working on Bolshevik, Georgian and Austrian codes. ‘Fetty, as we addressed him, would arrive precisely at 9.30 and read his
Times
until 10 when he would adjust a pair of thick-lensed glasses and look to us expecting work to be given to him. He was a brilliant cryptographer. On book cipher and anything where insight was vital he was quite the best. He was a fine linguist and he would usually get an answer no matter the language.’
    Fetterlein and his team, who included two female refugees from Russia and the occasional British Consul thrown out by the Bolsheviks, were easily able to keep on top of the relatively simple Bolshevik ciphers. This allowed them to ensure that the government of David Lloyd George was fully informed of the machinations of various elements of the Russian Trade Delegation, led by the Bolshevik Commissar for Foreign Trade, Leonid Krasin, which arrived in London in May 1920.
    The messages decrypted by GC&CS were known as BJs because they were circulated in blue-jacketed files, as opposed to the red files used for reports from the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), now better known as MI6. The Russian BJs showed Lenin telling Krasin that he must be tough with the British. ‘That swine Lloyd George has no scruples or shame in the way he deceives,’ said the Soviet leader. ‘Don’t believe a word he says and gull him three times as much.’ Lev Kamenev, the head of the Moscow Communist Party, was sent to London to take charge of the delegation. Very soon the decrypts showed that he was actively involved in the setting up of ‘Councils of Action’ across Britain, with the intention of using them, like the Russian Soviets, to prepare for a communist revolution