The Secrets of Station X Read Free

‘Josh’ Cooper, who would become a leading member of Bletchley Park and subsequently its Cold War successor GCHQ, recalled being recruited as a ‘Junior Assistant’ in October 1925 when he was twenty-four.
    Like many other recruits, I had heard of the job through apersonal introduction – advertisement of posts was at that time unthinkable. In my case introduction came through the family of the novelist Charles Morgan, whose father Sir Charles Morgan of the Southern Railway was an old friend and chief of my father. I was one year down from University of London King’s College with a first in Russian and had found nothing better to do than teach at a preparatory school at Margate. My father was bewailing this at tea with the Morgans one day, and one of Charles’s sisters remarked that she had a friend called Sybil Pugh who worked at a place in Queens Gate where Russian linguists were actually wanted. So in due course I took an entrance exam which included a number of puzzles, such as filling in missing words in a mutilated newspaper article and simple mathematical problems calling for nothing more than arithmetic and a little ingenuity. I wasted a lot of time on these, thinking there must be some catch and rechecking my work and so did not finish the paper. Nevertheless I got top marks. There was also an interview board where I found Denniston, whom I had already met, and for the first time met ‘C’ (Admiral Sinclair) the Director of GC&CS. I do not think this exam was ever repeated but selection continued on a fairly haphazard basis right up to the [Second World] War.
    Cooper was set to work on Russian cyphers alongside Ernst Fetterlein, who had been codebreaker to the Tsar, where one of his main jobs was solving British codes, a role that was now reversed. ‘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 indecypherable word which occurred in one of the English telegrams he haddecyphered. 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.
    Fetterlein, who was by then fifty-two, had a large ruby ring given to him by Tsar Nicholas in gratitude for his achievements, which included breaking a German Navy message which enabled the Russian Navy to sink a number of German ships in the Baltic in 1914. This was helpful to 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 Russia during the Bolshevik takeover in November 1917, later telling William Filby, one of his new British colleagues, that he and his wife narrowly evaded a search of the ship by trigger-happy Bolsheviks. ‘As the top cryptographer in Russia he held the rank of admiral,’ said Filby. ‘His stories of 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, Filby said.
    Fetty, as we addressed him, would arrive precisely at 9.30 and read his Times until ten when he would adjust a pair of thicklensed glasses and look to us expecting work to be given to him. He was a brilliant cryptographer. On book cypher and anything where insight was vital