Churchill's Secret War Read online

  Why this was so leads to the third theme of this study – his lifelong interest in and use of signals intelligence.3 Churchill had always read naval and diplomatic intercepts. As early as 1915 when he was First Lord of the Admiralty he had personally drafted the first charter of Room 40 OB – the navy’s legendary decrypting department. Its longest serving member remarked scathingly of this charter, that ‘to have carried out his instructions literally would, no doubt, have safeguarded the secret but must also have nullified the value of the messages’ – because of the restricted distribution and the prohibitions attached to any mention of them.4 This sentence, it may be said, neatly encapsulates the whole problem of how to use intercepts while protecting their security – not enough security and they cease to exist; too much and they cannot be used. Churchill’s use of intercepts continued through the long interwar years of ‘his War against the Russian Revolution’ in 1920 and the Turks at Chanak in 1922.5 At the approach of the Second World War he was reading diplomatic intercepts received from a friend in government (Desmond Morton).6 He found the study of raw authentic intercepts, not gists or summaries or paraphrases, indispensable in formulating policy, and explained their importance to Lord Curzon in 1922. While this is now acknowledged, what he was reading between 1941 and 1945 has only recently been released and so has not yet been studied by historians.7 His written comments and observations on many of these messages can be seen for the first time, both on Axis service traffic (Enigma) and diplomatic (medium-grade) traffic. They are a pointer to his daily study of the inner movement of the war through the voices of his enemies, and of the neutrals.

  So far as Turkish neutrality went this was, of course, the responsibility of the Southern Department, not of the Minister of Defence. By reading the new (DIR/C) files alongside the FO files on wartime Turkey it is possible to discern significant differences in attitude between officials of the Southern Department whose Turkish remit was jealously safeguarded against GHQ ME, and against Churchill himself, who wished to ‘play the Turkey hand’ alone, and proceeded to do so in early 1943 much against the wishes of the foreign secretary and the rest of the War Cabinet. New connections can thus be drawn between Churchill and the FO over Turco-British wartime relations, themselves an organic development from the FO’s prewar policy towards Turkey, ably set out by D.C. Watt in his How War Came.8

  These causal connections cannot be fully developed without some account of two separate strands in British twentieth-century history. Chapter 2 describes the development of British cryptography from 1915, through the Russian, Turkish and Italian crises of the 1920s and ’30s. This is followed by an account of Turco-British relationships between the Dardanelles crisis of 1915 and the Chanak crisis of 1922 up to September 1939. A bridging chapter (3) carries the story of Churchill, wartime signals intelligence and the progress of the war in the Mediterranean to the end of 1941, at which point the DIR/C files come on stream. Thereafter until January 1943 when Churchill made his surprise visit to the Turkish leadership at Adana – and beyond, until early 1944 – the files relating to Turkey are reviewed in the light of the changing nature of the war.

  The Adana Conference was followed later in the year by two significant events – one disastrous, the other ludicrous. The disaster was the Dodecanese debacle of October 1943 in which British forces were beaten by better-officered Germans with a consequential loss of British credibility in the area.9 The other was the theft, inside the British ambassador’s residence in Ankara, of important Foreign Office papers by his Albanian valet, Eleysa Basna – codenamed ‘Cicero’ by the ambassador’s German counterpart in Ankara, Fritz von Papen. Chapter 8 seeks to demonstrate that, since much of this material was identical with Churchill’s own reading, and since captured German documents have demonstrated the great interest shown in it by Hitler, Goebbels and Jodl in Berlin, a revised account is necessary of what diplomats until recently have regarded as the biggest FO security lapse until Burgess and Maclean. This is written in the light of what we now know, fifty years later, about British cipher security, Churchill’s use of deciphered messages, and the state of the war in 1943–44.

  The Dodecanese debacle and the ‘Cicero’ affair conclude this study of Churchill’s use of signals intelligence and the FO’s policy towards Turkey in the Second World War. A year was to elapse before Turkey joined the Allies and in that year much diplomatic activity persisted, but the end was no longer in doubt and the focus of Churchill’s interest moved to western Europe, and to Operation ‘Overlord’, the invasion of Normandy in June 1944. The concluding chapter develops the basic thrust of my argument – that while the release of the new files is to be welcomed as revealing interesting new connections between Churchill and his war work, it does not materially alter the history of the Second World War.

  Wartime Turkey has been the subject of several ambassadorial memoirs (René Massigli, Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, Fritz von Papen) and spy memoirs (Eleysa Basna, Ludwig Moyzisch, Nicholas Elliot, Walter Schellenberg). The opening up of DIR/C is by far the most notable primary source, but does it add to or alter what is already in the books? Much was known before: Churchill knew it at the time because he read DIR almost every day. President I·nönü of Turkey knew it because he was reading much of the same material, the reports his ambassadors sent to the Foreign Ministry in Ankara, which was pivotal in formulating Turkish foreign policy. Whitehall knew it. Hitler and Goebbels knew it. Turkey-related diplomatic intercepts corroborate the historical record but contain few surprises, since the narrative is already in place. While that does not reduce their importance, which is in relating the study of diplomatic signals intelligence to foreign policy in wartime Whitehall, Berlin and Ankara, it may provide a convincingly negative answer to the question previously raised of the requirement to adjust the record.

  How the British came by the Turkish diplomatic telegrams is another question this book seeks to answer. British wartime radio and telegram interception and decryption at Bletchley Park have, of course, been the subject of a substantial literature of which Hinsley’s monumental British Intelligence in the Second World War holds pride of place.10 Prof Hinsley (with his co-authors) not only had full access to the files when writing, but was himself a key figure in running Bletchley Park from 1941 to 1944: originating, developing, modifying and operating the complex procedures which turned the raw messages which arrived at Bletchley at all hours of the day or night from many intercept stations scattered across the world into usable, relevant, topical material – still authentic despite the many processes they had gone through. Other BP veterans have written about signals intelligence in the Second World War including Gordon Welchman, Peter Calvocoressi and Ralph Bennett, but none of these, apart from Hinsley, had access to the diplomatic material which is the subject of this book.11

  Churchill famously told his researchers that his own history of the Second World War was not history, it was his case.12 Official historians, as will be shown, followed him, particularly in 1943 over the Adana Conference and the Dodecanese assault, not because he had put his ‘case’ together with his own selected documents before they had completed their task, but because they found that the files gave little extra useful information, and that what Churchill thought and did at the time, as recorded by him, remained the best source available. The Dodecanese affair is particularly illuminating, in that immediately after it Churchill ordered his personal staf to collect all his relevant memoranda and telegrams, in order to have ‘his case’ ready for publication. This was duly done and they appear as PREM 3/3/3 at the PRO and form the basis of his ‘Island Prizes Lost’ chapter in vol. 5 (Closing the Ring, London, Cassell) of his war history, published eight years later. They were published in toto in 1976 as vol. 2 of Principal War Telegrams and Memoranda (Kraus Thompson, 1976). It is rare for such a significant combined operation to be reported on by its principal participant, for his own actions to become, relatively without comment, the historical record. Nor did a subsequent generation of revisionis
t historians greatly alter the received, Churchillian, account of the years of the Second World War, as recent scholars have pointed out. The missing material for a definitive account of Churchill’s 1943 war work is to be found in the diplomatic intercepts. Though they throw valuable new light on what Churchill was up to in his eastern Mediterranean policy (as this book hopes to demonstrate) they require little, if any, rewriting of history. To trace these intercepts, through Churchill’s use of them, to his directives and memoranda – and then to his actual history, and on the lavish use made of them by both official and revisionist historians – is to gain a glimpse at last of how diplomatic decrypts infiltrated the historical record.

  I should like to thank Professors Kathleen Burk and David French of University College, London, for help and guidance in the preparation of this book; and also Professors Christopher Andrew and Peter Hennessy for encouragement and information. Thanks are also due to Rupert Allason MP, Dr Rosa Beddington, Dr Selim Deringil, Ralph Erskine, Professor John Ferris, Margaret Finch, Tony Fulker, Randal Grey, David Irving, Professor Sir Harry Hinsley, Rachel Maxwell-Hyslop, Dr Joe Maiolo, Simona Middleton, Sir Patrick Reilly, and the ed itors at Sutton Publishing. Special thanks are due to the staff of the PRO at Kew, at the Churchill Archives in Churchill College, Cambridge, and at the National Archives of Canada in Ottawa. Extracts from the Ian Jacob and Denniston papers are published by kind permission of the Archivist at Churchill College. An early version of chapter 2 appeared in Intelligence and National Security (July 1995). All quotations from PRO documents are Crown Copyright and reproduced by kind permission of the Public Record Office

  Robin Denniston

  I am after the Turk

  – Winston Churchill to Anthony Eden, 8 June 1942

  [Churchill’s] volatile mind is at present set on Turkey and Bulgaria, and he wants to organise a heroic adventure against Gallipoli and the Dardanelles

  – Lord Asquith to Venetia Stanley, October 1914

  Turks are most awful brigands. We daren’t threaten them, we can’t bribe them

  – Alexander Cadogan, 24 August 1942

  Turing: I am a code-breaker. I deciphered all the German codes and won the war single-handedly. That’s top secret, of course, nobody knows

  Ron [grinning]: Just me

  Turing: You and Mr Churchill

  – Hugh Whitemore, Breaking the Code

  Reading the whole war . . . every day, from the enemy viewpoint, the British being the enemy

  – Christine Brooke-Rose on Hut 3, Bletchley Park, Remake, p. 108

  The distribution of diplomatic intercepts throughout the chancelleries of many powers between the wars suggests an interesting new angle on both the conduct and the study of international diplomacy

  – The author, 1996

  It is said about Foreign Office minutes that if you read the odd paragraph numbers and the even paragraph numbers in series you get both sides of the case fully stated.

  – WSC, vol. 5, p. 627

  England has organised a network of intercept stations designed particularly for listening to our radio. This accounts for the decyphering of more than 100 of our codes. The key to those codes are sent to London where a Russian subject, Feterlajn, has been put at the head of cipher affairs.

  – Trotsky to Lenin, 1921

  CHAPTER ONE

  Why Turkey?

  Those who remember the operations of 1915 and 1916 in the Dardanelles and Mesopotamia may be glad that the Turks, who were then against us, are now for us. What is the cause of this change? It was because, during the same years in which the Germans turned to thievery, the Turks turned to honest ways.

  R.G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan, p. 374

  This chapter attempts to answer the question, why was Turkey so important to Churchill in 1941? It brings together Turco-British international relations from 1914 to 1943, relates Churchill’s failed attempt on Turkish neutrality in the First World War to his playing of the Turkey hand in the Second World War; links his perceptions of, and intelligence on, Turkish foreign policy to his war strategy, considers the balance of advantage of having Turkey as an active and demanding ally, and then summarises Turco-British relations between 1940 and 1943 using newly disclosed diplomatic intercepts.

  The following pages also touch on the importance of Turkish economics, geography and history in relation to world affairs since the ascendancy of Atatürk. His successors shared with Britain (and probably also with Germany) a common source of intelligence – ambassadorial reports from most European capitals sent to Ankara for their guidance, which were also intercepted and used by the FO in London. Churchill’s interest in signals intelligence generally is then integrated into the picture, particularly that related to Turkey. His obsession with the Turks had strong roots in the First World War, and thus can be seen to lead directly to his unilateral decision to seek out the Turkish leadership on Turkish soil in January 1943.

  Churchill and Turkey in the First World War

  To answer the question, ‘Why Turkey?’, some account of Turco-British relations in 1914–15 is first required, for significant parallels can be observed between British war strategy towards the Turks at the Dardanelles, in part driven by Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1914, and remarkably similar thoughts of a Balkan offensive launched from Turkey harboured by an older if not wiser Churchill in 1942–43.

  In August 1914 the German failure to destroy France following the ‘miracle’ of the Battle of the Marne induced the Reich to look at Turkey, then still neutral. A Turkish threat to distract Russian armies from Germany’s Eastern Front would stop Russian trade through the Dardanelles, might hasten Bulgarian involvement and would threaten British imperial communications at Suez. The parallel with the Second World War, so far as Germany was concerned, was clear, and von Falkenhayn in 1914, as Jodl would do in 1943, promoted the view that a threat to Suez would weaken British forces in the west.

  In Whitehall Winston Churchill urged the cabinet towards an offensive against Turkey – first conceived as involving a strong military contingent as well as the then all-powerful Royal Navy, subsequently a navy-only operation. The generals and admirals – ill-prepared culturally for the onset of total war – failed to deliver unequivocal support. On 30 October the Germans provoked the Turkish navy to shell the Russian Black Sea Fleet and provided Churchill with his opportunity in the Mediterranean. He unilaterally – and unconstitutionally – ordered the Royal Navy to shell the Turks stationed round the Dardanelles. This obliged the Turks to strengthen their defences, though their ammunition remained in short supply.

  Churchill’s advocacy of an attack on the Dardanelles was based on the perception that a successful result would give Britain the chance to dictate terms at Constantinople. However, he knew (as he would know about the Dodecanese assault in 1943) that the venture would be both costly and risky. In 1914 he found insufficient support for his plan: an attack on Turkey would only relax pressure on Russia, it was said, and play the German game. But he did have support from Adm ‘Jacky’ Fisher, the First Sea Lord, who wrote on 3 January 1915: ‘The attack on Turkey holds the field, assuming a strong body of British troops to achieve a continued assault.’ In the event, this was unforthcoming but Churchill pressed on, despite Fisher’s view, expressed to the Dardanelles Commission in 1917, that the naval operation alone was doomed to failure.

  The consequence of the confused leadership structure in Whitehall and of the First Lord’s determination to play the Turkey card himself, led to disaster for Britain. This remained in the collective memory as a stigma to be born by Churchill for the next twenty years.1 That leadership structure was no less confused at the outbreak of the Second World War, except that Churchill was in undisputed command by June 1940, and not compelled to work entirely through advocacy. A parallel situation with regard to Turkey quickly developed in the stricken years of 1940–41 but before that Turco-British diplomatic relations had taken a turn for the better. To see why, Turkey needs to be see
n in a European context.

  Turkey in Context

  The dismemberment of the Ottoman empire in 1879 followed the successful Russian siege of Erzerum five years earlier. Previously extending to the Adriatic in the west and the Danube basin in the north-west, the empire had been in decline since 1690. By 1878 new nation states had grown within the Ottoman boundaries; Bulgaria had thrown off the Turkish yoke in a revolt backed by fellow Slavs in Russia, to whom thereafter she was tied by race, religion and gratitude. Despite their victory over the British at the Dardanelles, the First World War proved disastrous for those in Ankara reluctant to face the realities of the post-Ottoman world.

  The Treaty of Versailles left Turkey with no European territory, and western leaders, in particular Lloyd George, were determined to exclude her from the Continent. She was disliked and feared by the international community. The dislike stemmed in part from a deep-seated anti-Muslim prejudice, partly explained by the residual predominance of Christian prejudices in the chancelleries of the great western powers. The legacy of Ottoman oppression and corruption had left Turkey the sick man of Europe and something of a pariah. The fear arose from Turkey’s strong tradition in arms, weakened but not allayed by being on the losing side in the First World War.

  The rise of Atatürk signalled to the architects of Versailles a recrudescence of Ottoman imperialism, symbolised by Turkish victory over Greece at Chanak in 1922. Greece, backed only by Britain and in spite of British public opinion, was repelled from Turkish territory amid some savage ethnic cleansing.2 A severe earthquake then compounded the problems of the Turkish leadership. Thereafter Atatürk was to prove a friend of the west, and Britain in particular, thanks in part to the close friendship he established with the British ambassador in Ankara, Sir Percy Loraine.