The Secrets of Station X Read Free Page A

he was quite the best. He was a fine linguist and he would usually get an answer no matter the language.
    Josh Cooper already knew Fetterlein, having been introduced to him by one of the teaching staff at King’s College.

    His experience and reputation were both great, and I was fortunate to find myself assigned to work with him on Soviet diplomatic, which at that time consisted of book cyphers, mostly one part, re-cyphered with a 1,000-group additive key. He took very little notice of me and left it to an Army officer who had been attached to GC&CS, to explain the problem. Traffic was scanty and it was hard to get adequate depth. It took me some time to realise that almost every group had two meanings. After about six weeks’ work, during which I rubbed holes in the paper with endless corrections, at last I read my first message which was from Moscow to the Soviet representative in Washington and was concerned with repudiation of debts by American states. Later we got much better material from Tehran, where traffic was a great deal heavier and was obtained from the Persian post office by MI6. Hitherto it had been exploited locally by an Army officer resident in Tehran, but now the work was transferred to GC&CS. Later still we got even more voluminous material obtained in the same way from the post office in Peking, and were able to solve for the first time whole additive tables.
    Despite Cooper’s problems with the cypher he was put to work on, the amount of Soviet messages continued to increase with the opening of a new Royal Navy intercept site at Flowerdown, near Winchester, an Army site at Chatham and an RAF site at Waddington, in Lincolnshire.
    The Russian messages disclosed a concerted attempt to provoke a Bolshevik revolution in Britain in 1920 and repeated attempts to subvert British society throughout the 1920s and 1930s, but this success was a double-edged sword. First in 1920 and then again in 1923 and 1927, the British government used Russian messages broken by the codebreakers as evidence of the communist threat to Britain, leading to changes in Soviet cypher systems that by the late 1920s had all but ended the codebreakers’ success against Russia’s diplomatic cyphers. Afterthe government’s 1927 admission that GC&CS was reading Moscow’s secret messages, the Russians began using the one-time -pad system which, when used properly, was unbreakable.
    The codebreakers had little in the way of formal training, Cooper recalled.
    The structure of the office was pretty hopeless. It had begun as six Senior Assistants and eighteen Junior Assistants but by the time I joined it was, I think, one Senior Assistant with a responsibility allowance (Denniston), twelve Senior Assistants and twelve Junior Assistants. Supporting staff consisted of a few misemployed typists, some women on MI6 books and, I believe, a few women employed as ‘JAA’ (Junior Assistant’s Assistant). For it was the Treasury’s understanding that Senior Assistants broke new cyphers and Junior Assistants decyphered and translated the texts. Recruitment by personal introduction had produced some very well-connected officers, especially among the seniors. At best they were fine scholar linguists, at worst some of them were, frankly, ‘passengers’.
    Very little interest was shown in naval or military messages in the immediate wake of the First World War and responsibility for assessing the value of these was left largely to naval and military intelligence. But in 1924, GC&CS set up a small Naval Section under William ‘Nobby’ Clarke, a veteran of Room 40 and then forty-one years old. It obtained its intercepts from the Scarborough station; from the new Royal Navy site at Flowerdown, which had replaced Pembroke; and from operators on board Royal Navy ships who intercepted foreign naval messages in their spare time. The Army still had its intercept site at Fort Bridgewoods, Chatham and in 1930 a