Alastair Denniston; code-cracker (46 years late)
Hyfler/Rosner
March 17, 2007, Saturday
1ST Edition
Recognition that is long overdue for a national hero;
More than 40 years after his death, one man's war efforts
are being celebrated COVER STORY . . . THE CODE CRACKER . .
.
BYLINE: RICHARD McCOMB
The death of 79-year-old Alastair Guthrie Denniston, a
retired British intelligence officer, went unreported.
There were no obituaries in the newspapers, no statement
from the Foreign Office on the passing of AGD of the GC&CS.
It was as if the cipher master had never existed.
The unremarked death of Denniston, and, more significantly,
the lack of acknowledgement about his contribution to
defeating Nazi Germany, always rankled with his son, Robin.
It was as if his father, who died at a seaside cottage
hospital in 1961, had been airbrushed from the history of
Britain's stunning war-time achievements, his legacy of
covert intelligence gathering and sensitive diplomacy
scratched from the record.
Robin, now aged 80, a former publisher and retired vicar
living in Worcestershire, has decided it is time for the
story to be told. More than four decades after his death,
the code-breaker is coming in from the cold.
Robin, who was ordained at Worcester Cathedral, has written
a compelling account of his father's life, Thirty Secret
Years, in the hope of bringing long-overdue recognition to
Dennis-ton's clandestine operations in signals intelligence,
a career that culminated in his work at the famous Bletchley
Park code-breaking centre during the Second World War.
No one outside the hush-hush world of Britain's security
network knows terribly much about the role played by
Commander Denniston in intercepting and deciphering top
secret enemy communications.
It is puzzling, particularly as he was reputedly one of the
first two Britons to clap eyes on an Enigma machine, the
device used by the Germans to send their encrypted messages.
Cracking the Enigma cipher - work undertaken under
Dennis-ton's command at Bletchley Park - and the production
of high level intelligence, known as Ultra, was critical to
Allied successes during the 1939-45 conflict.
Denniston also played a central role in persuading the
British and United States to exchange signals intelligence
in the era of mutual scepticism and North American
isolationism.
Yet when he left the service on May 1, 1945, officially
retired, Denniston was given an annual pension of just
pounds 591.
I put it to his son that it seems an extraordinary snub to
someone who should have been hailed as a national hero. "I
couldn't think of a better way to put it," says Robin
diplomatically. The sense of resentment is palpably English.
He does, however, hope publication of Thirty Secret Years
will set the record straight.
Alastair Denniston, the eldest of three children, excelled
at classics, mathematics and languages.
He attended university at the Sorbonne and Bonn. An
accomplished trilingualist, he became a language teacher at
the Royal Naval College on the Isle of Wight and it was his
fluency in German that led to him being tapped up by the
Admiralty in late 1914.
At the age of 33, Denniston entered the brave new world of
wireless interception and crypta-nalysis, becoming the
"watch-keeper" at Room 40 OB (Old Buildings) in Whitehall,
the Government's fledgling signals intelligence centre.
He and his staff were responsible for decrypting,
translating, assessing and processing secretly intercepted
messages between the German High Command and the Grand Fleet
during the First World War.
Little could anyone have known that this was the beginning
of the world's most sophisticated eavesdropping operations.
It was a close colleague of Den-niston's in Room 40, Nigel
de Grey, and a fellow linguist, William Montgomery, who
intercepted and decoded the Zimmer-mann telegram on January
16, 1917, an act that hastened the United States' entry into
the 1914-18 war. The secret message had informed the German
ambassador in Mexico City of plans to invade the US.
Denniston stayed on at Room 40 until 1919. His skills were
commended by none other than the then First Sea Lord,
Winston Churchill, at the Admiralty.
In a confidential letter to a senior Foreign Office figure,
Churchill wrote: "Denniston is not only the best man we have
had, but he is the only one we have left with special genius
for his work."
The Prime minister, David Lloyd George, tasked Denniston
with turning Room 40 into the new Government Code and Cipher
School (GC&CS), which, as Robin points out, "flourished and
succeeded, in absolute secrecy, in reading diplomatic
intercepts from all the major nations recovering from the
war, becoming, by 1938, the fledging GCHQ."
The work of GC&CS - renamed Government Communication
Headquarters from 1941 - may not have won the Second World
War for the Allies, but the interception and reading of
German signals shortened the conflict. Central to its work
was the successful cracking of the Enigma code.
It was the Polish Cipher Bureau that first made inroads into
cracking Germany's secret codes after building a duplicate
Enigma machine.
As Nazi invasion loomed in 1939, the Poles agreed to link up
with GC&CS. The work led to an astonishing assignment in
July of that year when Denniston and a colleague travelled
through Germany to meet up with their Polish contacts.
At 7am on July 26 - referred to in Denniston's report of the
visit as "THE day" - he and Dilly Knox, who spearheaded much
of Bletchley Park's early cryptic analytic successes, were
driven to a clearing in a forest outside Warsaw. Here the
Poles had built a strongly guarded office with underground
accommodation.
Denniston recorded that a Polish major had an Enigma machine
and "described in full detail the steps they had taken to
break down the cipher and obtain the wheel order and to read
the message. We followed him each to the best of our
ability."
The British code-breaker added: "I was unable to understand
completely the lines of reasoning but when, as seemed part
of the conference, we were taken down to an underground room
full of electronic equipment and introduced to the 'bombs'
early computers that worked out the Enigma settings I did
then grasp the results of their reasoning."
Germany invaded Poland several weeks later, on September 1,
with Britain and France declaring war on Germany two days
later.
While at Bletchley, Denniston shared with Churchill and
senior military planners all the latest information that had
been gathered by decrypting messages sent by the German Air
Force, its intelligence services and U-boat commanders
hunting in the North Atlantic.
During the Second World War, Denniston also played an
important role as bridge-builder between the British and US
intelligence communities. Before the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbour in 1941, the GC&CS boss made two visits to the
States in which he sought to gain American co-operation in
the war effort by offering to share British code-breaking
secrets.
Whitehall was hesitant but Denniston understood that by
sharing Ultra secrets the British would get access to
Japanese military ciphers and be able to read signals about
the campaign in the Far East.
Robin says: "It was a very key time because the thing was to
get America into the war. That is what Churchill was after
and my father quite materially helped that to happen.
"Of course, a lot of American voters and politicians didn't
want anything to do with European matters."
Denniston headed up Bletchley Park until February 1942 when
he was unceremoniously pushed aside and effectively demoted.
He was sent to London to work on diplomatic intercepts from
offices in Berkeley Street.
The affair left his father deeply embittered. The matter was
never openly discussed, but Robin says the family was aware
something was afoot: "We picked up on it. We had a smaller
car and my mother had to learn to cook.
"I was beginning my second year as a scholar at Westminster
School, evacuated to the Hereford/Worcester borders, and my
fees were paid by the bounty of the Westminster benefactors.
My sister, 18 months older, left school and went to a
secretarial college."
Robin had been evacuated to the Herefordshire countryside at
Whitbourne, near Bromyard, with fellow Westminster pupils
and remained there until the end of the war.
It was here that he met his future wife, Anne Evans, the
daughter of a Harley Street consultant physician. The couple
later bought a house called The Hope near Harpley, the
village where they met.
Denniston left government service on May 1, 1945. He worked
for a time as a schoolmaster before retiring to the New
Forest.
His wife, Dorothy, who had worked alongside him at Room 40
and Bletchley Park, died of breast cancer in 1958. Denniston
died three years later.
Robin, who lives in Malvern, says his father's influence in
intelligence work and cryptanaly-sis continued long after
his retirement.
"It is still evident in the vital importance signit signals
intelligence has for the security services of the UK, the
USA and a score of other developed nations," says Robin.
AGD's legacy lives on today in the work of the giant GCHQ
eavesdropping site at Cheltenham.
Asked about his own attempt to reinstate his dead father's
reputation, Robin believes the code-breaker would have
maintained a self-effacing outlook.
"I doubt whether my father, at the ripe age of 125, would be
much interested," says Robin.
"But I hope he would approve of this attempt to link his 30
secret years with the 90 years in which British signals
intelligence has proved such a valuable government tool, in
peace as well as war."
Thirty Secret Years: A G Denniston's work in signals
intelligence 1914-1944, by Robin Denniston. Polperro
Heritage Press (polperropress.co.uk), pounds 18.
I hope he would approve of this attempt to link his 30
secret years with the 90 years in which British signals
intelligence has proved such a valuable government tool, in
peace as well as war