The Bletchley Park Codebreakers Read Online Free PDF

in Britain. They also disclosed that the Russians were pouring money into the London-based
Daily Herald
newspaper.
    To many of those in authority, it appeared that Britain was perilously close to its own communist insurrection. Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, wrote a furious memorandum to Lloyd George. The telegrams showed ‘beyond allpossibility of doubt … that Kamenev and Krasin, while enjoying the hospitality of England, are engaged, with the Soviet Government, in a plot to create red revolution and ruin this country’. He received support from Admiral Sinclair, who surprisingly urged the Government to publish the decrypted telegrams. ‘Even if the publication of the telegrams was to result in not another message being decoded, then the present situation would fully justify it,’ claimed Sinclair.
    Lloyd George then sanctioned the publication of eight of the telegrams as long as the newspapers claimed to have obtained them from ‘a neutral country’. But
The Times
ignored the official requests to keep the true source secret, starting its report with the words: ‘The following telegrams have been intercepted by the British Government.’ The Prime Minister called in Kamenev, who was due to return to Russia for consultations and told him there was ‘irrefutable evidence’ that he had committed ‘a gross breach of faith’. He would not be allowed back into the country.
    Despite the
Times
report, and further press leaks after Kamenev’s departure, the Russians did not change their ciphers. There was no doubt that they were aware of what had happened. Krasin told Maxim Litvinov, the Bolshevik Deputy Commissioner for Foreign Affairs, that the British ‘had complete knowledge of all your ciphered telegrams … which had strengthened the suspicion that Kamenev is the teacher of revolutionary Marxism and was sent here with the express purpose of inspiring, organizing and subsidizing English Soviets’.
    But the Russian ciphers were still not changed until three months later, when Mikhail Frunze, Commander-in-Chief of the Bolshevik forces fighting the White Russians in the Crimea, reported that ‘absolutely all our ciphers are being deciphered by the enemy in consequence of their simplicity’. He singled out the British as one of the main perpetrators. ‘All our enemies, particularly England, have all this time been entirely in the know about our internal military operational and diplomatic work,’ he added. A week later, the trade delegation in London was told to send correspondence by courier until they received new ciphers. They arrived in January 1921 and by April, Fetterlein had broken them.
    The main source of the coded messages coming into GC&CS was the international cable companies. Under a section added to the 1920 Official Secrets Act, they were obliged to hand over any cables passing through the United Kingdom – a requirement that was quite openlyput down to the ‘general state of world unrest’ created by communist attempts to replicate the October Revolution across Europe. But many of the messages emanating from Moscow were intercepted by Royal Naval intercept sites – based at Pembroke and Scarborough – and Army sites at Chatham, Baghdad and Constantinople. Although GC&CS remained under Admiralty control, the vast bulk of the messages it decrypted were now diplomatic rather than military or naval and in 1922, Lord Curzon, the Foreign Secretary, decided that the Foreign Office should take charge of the codebreakers. One senior member of staff attributed this to a conversation with the French ambassador during which the Foreign Secretary ‘expressed certain views which did not coincide with the views of his colleagues in the cabinet’. These were duly passed back to Paris, decrypted by GC&CS and circulated among Curzon’s cabinet colleagues. The codebreakers were moved from their Strand headquarters to 178 Queen’s Gate and a year later again put under