"A Matter of High Policy"

Harold Charles 'Ken' Kenworthy is one of the less well-known of the technical experts of Second World War Sigint. He was Head of the Metropolitan Police Sigint unit when he became part of GC&CS in 1939, asked to oversee the work of the GPO operators at Brora, Cupar and Sandridge as well as that of his operators. He became Head of the GC&CS Research Station at Knockholt which took German teleprinter traffic. He designed the original 'Tunny' machine to process enciphered teleprinter signals. He progressed in GC&CS during the war, and continued to work in GCHQ afterwards.

Even less known is the story of how he came to be employed by the Police. He had become interested in Sigint when, as a Lieutenant RNVR, he was Port Wireless Operator at Gibraltar during the First World War. He carried out interception of Spanish government traffic to prove that it was they who were deliberately jamming British reporting of enemy submarine traffic, and developed the first British D/F network in the Mediterranean to focus on Austrian submarine traffic. After the war, he took up a post with the Marconi company. In 1922 he went with a party from Marconi to India: he demonstrated the state of the art in High Speed Working to the Indian PTT which immediately placed a large order for the equipment. Kenworthy was therefore moved on to help demonstrate transportable radio telephony to the Indian authorities, and set up and carried out successful experiments designed to show that radio telephones could be operated from moving vehicles. On his return to the UK he demonstrated this capability to Scotland Yard in January 1923, and when the Metropolitan Police ordered this equipment for their vehicles, Kenworthy was loaned to them by Marconi, a loan which eventually became a transfer. By 1926 he was Head of the Met's Sigint Station which was based at Scotland Yard until 1936. 

He wrote a short memoir of his Sigint service in 1957 when he retired which is now in TNA in Kew (in HW 3/81). One of the stories he tells is of illicit wireless usage during the 1926 General Strike which was exposed by innovative technical equipment he designed pretty well on the fly and which might have resulted in acute public embarrassment for a certain party had not 'higher policy' intervened to keep the matter secret. Now read on …

"During the years 1923 to 1926 a certain amount of interest was taken in the use of short wave and out of petty cash an experimental transmitter and one or two receivers were gradually constructed. It was on one of the latter that the first strange unknown signal was intercepted which had a direct bearing on future Foreign Office interception. It occurred on the first day of the General Strike in 1926 when one of the PC operators reported a station on short wave with a very strong generator hum using a German call sign 'ABA'. At least it appeared to be German but several things were observed. Firstly Berne three letter call sign allocations for Germany had not passed AD; secondly the station was so strong (from Scotland Yard) that a local station was suspected. Thirdly, it was assumed that as it was apparently working in London and using a false call sign, it must be unauthorised. Immediate contact was made to the Assistant Commissioner Special Branch Sir Wyndham B Childs. The Assistant Commissioner rang up Chief SIS with the result that a Col Peel arrived shortly with Mr L P Lambert [Wireless Technical Expert of GC&CS]. As soon as they were convinced of our reliability as communication personnel they agreed that we should endeavour to locate this station as it appeared to belong to a subversive organisation having some bearing on the General Strike. For some reason best known to SIS and Assistant Commissioner it was decided that the problem should be tackled by ourselves without calling in the GPO. To this end Mr G M Wright and Mr S B Smith, both well versed in DF practice were asked to co-operate and the Marconi Company set about improvising two mobile DF installations and installing the apparatus in Crossley Tenders loaned by the police. This work took time but in the meanwhile the author [i.e. Kenworthy] made a portable DF set and put it in a Gladstone bag. During this period all transmissions were being logged even to the number of callsigns. The signals which were being passed made it clear that other stations were being set up.

The portable set was put to good use. Influence by Assistant Commissioner and SIS made it possible to get access to roofs of buildings in the vicinity of the suspected source of signal which had been roughly located by taking a completely empty van and sitting on the floor with the Gladstone Bag. It was as well that this small piece of apparatus had been made because the two vans fitted by Marconi proved to be wash-outs owing to reflections from buildings making 'cuts' impossible. It was gratifying that the work put in by the Wireless Telegraphy staff of Scotland Yard and Mr Lambert was finally rewarded by actually 'walking in' from the roof tops into the top floor of a building housing the transmitter whilst the operator was using it. The result was an anticlimax as the transmitter had been set up by the Daily Mail, who thinking that Post and Telegraph personnel would be joining the strike at any moment decided to try and be ready for a 'coup'. The call sign ABA was derived from Alfred Harmsworth. As a matter of high policy nothing was ever published of this exploit."

Should Sigint/IA and Humint be Together? Where?

These notes have been prompted by the news that two former BND Presidents have called for "a new technical intelligence service based on the models of NSA in the US and GCHQ in the UK" and for the intelligence services to be resubordinated from the Chancellor to the MOD.  A link to this story is here. (They also suggest that the German oversight regime is burdensome and that new legislation is needed in Germany for interception, but this is an area in which the national context makes comparison with other countries difficult.)

I don't think that there's a "right model" for the structure of intelligence services in different countries but there are some points worth considering. 

The first is that the US isn't a model for any other country: nobody else can even begin afford such a massive structure with so much overlap (redundancy? - you pay your money and you take your choice). The fact that even the US Coastguard has its own Sigint service illustrates this point.

The second is whether Sigint and Humint ought to be part of one organisation. The UK model works for the UK but is a product of the way intelligence and security were organised after the First World War (when SIS was on the Secret Vote and GC&CS on the Open Vote) rather than of any great and lasting axiom. In recent years there have been moves to streamline support functions across the agencies where it makes sense, and to have senior members of staff do tours in each other's organisations, but as an aid to understanding and to introduce new ways of thinking rather than as a prelude to some sort of merger.

So I don't think that there's any reason in principle to insist that Sigint and Humint must be part of separate agencies; but I do think that they need to be separate within their agencies below the 'very senior management' level. That's because they are fundamentally different disciplines, meeting only at the point of producing intelligence. To generalise, but not, I believe, to caricature: Humint depends on maximum security to preserve the anonymity of its sources. If the Foreign Minister of Ruritania is secretly passing information to your service, you really, really don't want the fact to be common knowledge within it, and the effort that will go into de-sourcing and sanitising the intelligence produced from what he gives your agency, and controlling its handling outside will be critical. Within the intelligence production part of a Sigint agency, on the other hand, information sharing is just as critical. The starting point for Sigint production is knowing what communications links are available to you, and whether they might carry the potential sources of the intelligence you have been tasked with producing: that's a corporate task, not the work of an individual.

And to generalise once again: Humint and Sigint need teams with different mixes of people. Sigint will do best when it has a lot of deeply analytic people who will look at very large datasets methodically and not rush to judgement; Humint officers will often be people who able to make crucial decisions on the fly, trusting that their instincts are sufficiently developed and informed to generate good decisions. Sigint decisions are made once all relevant information has been considered; Humint decisions are made once enough information has been considered. Of course each discipline needs a good mix of personality types, but there is a fundamental difference in information processing between the two.

This means that for each of Sigint and Humint to be able to flourish in one agency, they have to be largely autonomous. Neither Humint nor Sigint is 'better' than the other: in fact they aren't really comparable. At different times there might be different emphasis put on the two disciplines and resource for one might be increased at the expense of the other, but the way they work, the timescales in which they plan, they way their product is disseminated, and the relationships they have with agencies in other countries is fundamentally different.

It goes without saying, I hope, that the process of assessment of Sigint and Humint, and the production of a considered all source view should be carried out of the agency or agencies that have produced the original intelligence.

As far as subordination is concerned: I think the vast majority of national intelligence agencies are responsible to their Ministers of Defence, and all have a greater or lesser military element as part of their structure. I think this is an area in which the national context is important, but in my opinion British Sigint was fortunate that GC&CS was transferred from the Admiralty to the Foreign Office in 1921, that control of all but the tactical activity of service Sigint elements became the responsibility of GCHQ during the Second World War, and that all service Sigint became formally part of GCHQ under section 3 (3) of the Intelligence Services Act of 1994

'In this Act the expression “GCHQ” refers to the Government Communications Headquarters and to any unit or part of a unit of the armed forces of the Crown which is for the time being required by the Secretary of State to assist the Government Communications Headquarters in carrying out its functions.'

This doesn't absolve GCHQ of having to produce the intelligence required by the UK and allied military, and it adds a cost of having to embed GCHQ civilian staff with military formations to make sure that the right intelligence is being produced and disseminated to those who need it, but being outside the chain of command, deploying rank-less civilians, and controlling the development of the technical facilities it deploys give GCHQ a flexibility that it is hard to imagine if the military still "owned" Sigint. This is only an opinion, but it is an informed opinion about Sigint in the UK: I have seen how military-managed Sigint works in NATO allies, and it can work just as well; but the context in which capabilities have been developed is very different.

I haven't talked about communications security/information assurance/cyber here: I'll address that soon. Responsibility for it in the UK was changed a couple of times in the twentieth century but it eventually returned to the UK's national Sigint organisation as a conscious change.

Britain's Greatest Female Codebreaker

Last week I spoke at the Irish Embassy in London at the launch of Jackie Uí Chionna's biography: Queen of Codes: The Secret Life of Emily Anderson, Britain's Greatest Female Code Breaker.

 

I am part of the first generation of Siginters who joined GCHQ after the Bletchley Park story had become avowed, and after the myth of Bletchley had begun to take hold (How a Tiny Number of Boffins and Chess Players Defeated Hitler and Won the War). For those of us interested in accurate history, it was a bit hard to situate the myth against the realities of Sigint in the Cold War, and I suppose it was the realisation that the myth was a myth, and that by taking back bearings from where GCHQ was at the end of the 1980s it might be possible to achieve a better and more three-dimensional understanding of wartime Sigint.

 

That in turn, under the guidance of Peter Freeman, developed into an interest in pre-Second World War Sigint: what happened in the period leading up to 1914 to turn Sigint from a vague idea in August 1914 into two going concerns by November 1914? What had the inter-war GC&CS achieved that meant that it had been factored in to war planning as a 'must-have' by 1938?

 

It was in this context that I first began to come up against references to Miss Emily Anderson. She had joined MI1(b) in 1918 from Galway University and was the only woman to become a Junior Assistant in GC&CS. She was formidable as a cryptanalyst, leading the Italian Section and recovering both Italian codebooks and the key material the Italians used for superencipherment. She trained new staff in cryptanalysis: not just members of staff, such as Wilfrid Bosworth and Josh Cooper, but also the military staff attached to GC&CS before being sent out to India or Palestine (Tiltman said that she seemed to bully his attached officers). In 1940 she had gone to Combined Bureau Middle East in Cairo to head up a detached GC&CS element to ensure that intelligence to support allied operations in that theatre was received as messages were decrypted, rather than depending on the vagaries of communications with Bletchley Park. She stayed there throughout the Western Desert Campaign, then returned to Berkeley Street to resume her work on enemy diplomatic telegrams and retired before GCHQ moved to Cheltenham. Awarded the OBE for her service in Cairo, she received after retirement the Cross of the Federal German Order of Merit for her work on transcribing the letters of Mozart and Beethoven.

 

I am normally chary of expressions like 'Britain's Greatest Female Codebreaker': if she was the 'greatest' shouldn't we be able to say who was second greatest, and third, and fourth? It strikes me, though, that in this case (as in Tiltman's) her claim to the title arises from the fact that there is nobody else at all on the same level. Margaret Rock, and Joan Clarke, for example, were exceptionally talented cryptanalysts, but achieved their results as parts of a team working on different elements of the same problem, able to draw on the successes of others to take their own work forward, and at a time, and in an organisation that recognised and accepted the fact that women were as able to do this work as men. Emily Anderson's talents were such that the Admiralty effectively ignored the fact that she was a woman and turned her into an honorary man (she was the only woman Junior Assistant) and paid her at much more than the top of the female pay scale in order that she would work for GC&CS. Her work on Italian diplomatic cryptosystems was a unique triumph: she made the recoveries and built the Italian books herself, and trained staff to be able to do as she did. Her insistence on going to Egypt so that the value of her work could best be realised by allied forces was another example of an indomitable desire to ensure that her skills weren't wasted.

 

I heartily recommend Jackie's biography of Emily Anderson, and have tried to be careful here not to reveal the fruits of her research. Her book makes clear that her achievements in musicology were as important as her work on cryptanalysis – and shows that she was able to use the same techniques in both fields; and the story of her family adds an unexpected element to her story. I have followed this story for six years since I was first in contact with Jackie and am astounded at the amount of new material she has been able to find.

 

Most importantly, the book confirms that Emily Anderson really was Britain's Greatest Female Codebreaker and deserves a much more prominent place in the Pantheon than she has enjoyed hitherto.

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An Old Friend in Unfamiliar Company

 

If this blog has a tutelary deity, I suppose it is Frank Birch. He was Historian of Room 40 after the First World War, and, after being Head of the Naval Section (HNS) at Bletchley Park, became the Historian of British Sigint in the Second World War. He and I share the distinction of being the only in-house historians of British Sigint to have entries in the IMDB, though with 48 credits as an actor and one as a director, I think it is fair to say that his is a more prolific record than mine; and the IMDB doesn't record his successes on the inter-war stage, particularly his renowned Widow Twankey. He was a Fellow of King's College and a lecturer in history at Cambridge University, and sufficiently interested in racehorses to publish an account of racehorse pedigrees in 1926.

Penelope Knox is quoted in Birch's DNB entry describing him as a 'a many-sided human being—a rather dull historian, an acceptable drinking companion, a mysterious private personality, a brilliant talker and a born actor'. This is a very rare description of Birch as a rounded person. For Siginters, he is HNS and Head of the Historical Section, the man who didn't want 'Music While You Work' played in his building; for historians of the cinema, he is a bit-part player in a few dozen minor British films; for genealogists he is the husband of the Hon Vera Benedicta Gage, daughter of the fifth Viscount Gage.

So it comes as a major surprise to find him appearing in files released by MI5, and, what's more, not as just a name, but playing a minor part (ironically, just as in his film career) in the story of the Cambridge Five.  From interviews with Floral Solomon (KV 2/4634-5) MI5 learned that Birch had been living with Aileen Furse for a while before the war. On 4 September 1939, at Aileen's behest, Mrs Solomon invited Birch to a lunch she was hosting in order to introduce him to Kim Philby, who wanted to work in intelligence. (According to Mrs Solomon, Birch appeared to have been quite open about his work in Room 40.) At that point Philby was working for The Times. According to a 1971 summary of the Solomon case "Afterwards BIRCH saw PHILBY alone and thought him quite suitable for intelligence work but thought he had too good a job at the time for him to try to recruit him".

Was this a polite put-down? It's tempting to think that Birch would think that being a journalist was inferior to being an intelligence officer in GC&CS, but 'Times Correspondent with the BEF' was an impressive job description, and given that little relevant material was being produced at Bletchley at the start of the war, it may well be that Birch was giving an honest opinion.

What difference might it have made if Philby had, in fact, been recruited to Bletchley Park? My guess is very little: he would have learned little of any practical value to the Soviet Union – certainly no more than Cairncross got access to a couple of years later (as I recounted here), and like Cairncross, would have pressed for a move to London to get a job of more value to his controllers. Any competent Soviet Sigint official would have been able to infer British capabilities from the material it was producing, and a job in London where processed Sigint reporting was crossing his desk along with other intelligence material and assessment of its value would have been more valuable.

As for Birch: it looks as though nobody thought he was other than an innocent in this matter. Aileen left him for Philby, eventually becoming the second Mrs Philby and mother of his five children.

Another couple of GCHQ names appear in another of the recently released files. Before an interview with Lord and Lady Rothschild (reported in KV 2/4632) Peter Wright was asked to ask them about Gerry Morgan (who had been a member of the Cambridge University Socialist Society in the later twenties and early thirties) and Barbara Duckworth Maclean (who was a contemporary of Lady Rothschild at Newnham College, and had been on the 'Aid to Spain' Committee). They weren't known to the Rothschilds, and I imagine this was simply an attempt to check whether anybody who had been a bit pink at Cambridge might have developed into something more ideologically sinister.

With the exception of some of GCHQ's Directors and a very small number of Bletchley veterans, most of the hundred thousand or so British Siginters since 1914 are just names, possibly with a very small amount of information attached about where they worked. What really is strange is to meet them in such an unfamiliar context.

 

First World War Sigint Liaison with the Russians

I've written before about attempts to establish a Sigint liaison with the USSR during the Second World War. Less well known is the attempt to do something similar during the First World War.

On 25 August 1914, Captain Adrian Simpson of the Royal Engineers Signal Section (the predecessor of the Royal Signals) embarked for Petrograd on a mission to look at the improvement of wireless telegraphy links between the UK and Russia to better facilitate liaison between the two allies, each of whom was fighting the Germans and Austro-Hungarians on different fronts. Simpson spent the period October 1914 to the end on January 2015 on the front with the Russian Army and returned to Petrograd where he compiled a report for the War Office. His report contrasted the extremely high quality of the equipment the Russians had built or purchased with the very poor quality of the operators.  He had worked hard to improve matters himself: he had rebuilt the antenna system at the main Petrograd wireless station and boosted the power available to the transmitters but was nevertheless hampered overall by the operators, all civilian even on the front.

His report highlights the poor organisation of Russian military wireless telegraphy: the Military Technical School notionally managed the system, but in fact the ‘Société Russe’ (owned by the Marconi Company but wholly under Russian control) manned and ran it, but without an understanding of how the military communicated; non-operational messages were delayed for days at a time as a matter of routine, even when they were urgent indents for essential supplies; and little or no attempt was being made to intercept German cipher messages, never mind decrypt them: as soon as operators realised that the message they were copying wasn’t one of the Russian Army’s they stopped copying it; worst of all was their poor security: they used the same callsigns and frequencies, and transmitted their messages en clair.

Simpson discussed all of these matters with the Russian Staff who agreed on the need to reorganise and overcome the problems Simpson had noted. They agreed to raise a small ‘Corps of Electricians’ of twenty British officers and sixty other ranks, all radio specialists, who would train and develop a cadre of Russian signallers who would transform Russian military telegraphy.

Two things happened which meant that the Corps, though constituted in the UK, would never travel to Russia. First, a Major Campbell was posted to Petrograd as the representative of ‘C’ to Russian Military Intelligence and, separate from the confusion and intrigue which arose in an Embassy which already housed a Military Attaché and a General Staff liaison officer with the Russian General Staff, his presence became associated with the Electricians, and the Russians came to believe that they would be a Corps of Siginters who would likely spend their time intercepting and reading Russian traffic. The Russians told the British they didn’t need these people any more.

And, anyway, a senior Russian officer had taken Simpson’s recommendations to heart and had begun a process of creating a Russian military signal service: though it wasn’t why the decision to refuse entry to the British electricians had been taken, it was in fact true that the Russians had learned enough from Simpson and his two UK radio specialist signallers had shown the Russian Army what it needed to do, not just in terms of its own signalling, but in developing a Sigint organisation as well. The Russian Army signallers became very competent indeed, and formed a specialist unit proud of its own technical competence. When the Revolution came, and after the descent of Russia into civil war, the unit declared for the Red Army and provided a Sigint service for the Bolshevik regime.

As in the Second World War no serious intelligence relationship with the Russian ally was ever developed in spite of the efforts made. First time round, however, it isn't hard to put the blame pretty squarely in the British side.