The Secrets of Station X Read Free Page B

military codebreaking section was formed at GC&CS under the command of Captain John Tiltman. The RAF had set up its own intercept station at Waddington, Lincolnshire, in 1927, but it was not until 1936 that an Air codebreaking section was created in GC&CSwith Cooper in charge. Two years later, the RAF intercept site moved from Waddington to Woodhead Hall at Cheadle, in Staffordshire. There were also a number of intercept stations at various sites overseas at the end of the First World War, including Malta, Sarafand in Palestine, Baghdad, and Abbottabad on the North-West Frontier. A Royal Navy intercept station was set up in Hong Kong in 1934 as the threat from Japan became more evident. The messages provided by this network and the international cable companies were augmented by diplomatic and clandestine messages intercepted by a small Metropolitan Police wireless unit based initially in the attic at Scotland Yard and from the mid-1930s in the grounds of the Metropolitan Police Nursing Home at Denmark Hill, south London. The unit, which was controlled by Harold Kenworthy, a Marconi wireless expert, was co-opted by Sinclair to provide GC&CS with both intercepts and technical advice.
    By now, Sinclair had moved both the codebreakers and his MI6 staff to a new joint headquarters at 54 Broadway, close to Whitehall and the centre of power. The resurgence of Germany under Adolf Hitler and the Nazis had led to a realisation that war was inevitable and determined efforts were being made to try to break the German cyphers. Cooper recalled that the British codebreakers had almost totally ignored them since the end of the First World War assuming they must be unbreakable:
    Another grave fault in the old GC&CS was the tradition, which I found firmly established when I joined, that German cyphers were invincible. Considering what Room 40 had achieved in 1914–18 it seems extraordinary that anyone should believe this, but it was generally assumed that no civilised nation that had once been through the traumatic experience of having its cyphers read would ever allow it to happen again, and that after the wide publicity given to Room 40’s results, together with unfortunate leakages to the Germans during the Peace Conference it would be wasteof time to work on German high-grade systems. The result was that for twenty years one man was employed to read the German diplomatic low-grade code traffic which was of no intelligence value whatever.
    Germany had indeed learned its lesson from the publication of the Zimmermann Telegram and, during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, its delegation used the one-time-pad system, blocking British attempts to read its communications with Berlin. It also began looking at the possibility of using cyphers generated by a machine. The publicity given to the success of the British codebreakers during the First World War led a number of nations to adopt machine cyphers, which were seen as more difficult to break. The most famous of these was the Enigma machine. The first British contact with the machine came in 1921, when it was still in development. It was shown to the British military attaché in Berlin, in the hope of persuading the British armed forces to use it.
    The German Navy introduced the Enigma machine cypher in 1926 and for a brief period it remained a possibility that both the British and the German armed forces might use it. In 1927, Commander Edward Travis, a member of GC&CS who oversaw the construction and security of British codes and cyphers, asked Hugh Foss, a specialist in machine cyphers, to test the commercially available machine.
    The Enigma machine resembled a small typewriter encased in a wooden box. It had a typewriter-style keyboard, set out in the continental QWERTZU manner, which differed slightly from the standard British/American QWERTY keyboard. Above the keyboard, on top of the box, was a lampboard with a series of lights, one for each letter of the alphabet. The operator