The secrets Whitehall will not reveal

Press, 12 November 1977, Page 14

The secrets Whitehall will not reveal

By

CHRISTOPHER ANDREW,

director of

studies in history at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in the ••Observer.”

The “Ultra" secret is now officially out. Researchers in the new Public Record Office at Kew are already hard at work on a first batch of German decrypts from the Second World War.

For many years the story of the war-time codebreakers in Bletchley Park was a closely guarded secret. No reference to them was allowed in the official histories of the war. But after the unofficial revelations of the past few years, Whitehall has abandoned the attempt to keep a secret which has ceased to be secret.

Not all the clandestine history of the Second World War can, however, yet be written. It is still unclear whether Whitehall intends to release the intercepted communications of allied and neutral powers as well as those of the enemy. And though many intelligence reports to the service Ministries and commanders in the field are now available, the records of the intelligence services themselves are still kept secret. According to a recent article in “Computer Weekly,” many technical details of “Colossus,” the world’s first computer, used at Bletchley from 1943 to crack the “enigma” code, remain classified. By now Colossus would be about as useful to an enemy as a Spitfire.

The gaps that remain in the war-time records are, however, a minor matter in comparison with the gaps in the pre-war records. The Government now finds itself in the ludicrous position of making available decrypted German messages for 1941, but refusing to release decrypted Russian messages for 1921.

While war-time codebreakers are now (quite rightly) acknowledged as war heroes, peacetime code breakers of 20 years before are still taboo. Whitehall is reconciled to the view that decoding an enemy’s communications in wartime is no worse than trying to blow him up and can therefore be decently admitted. But it cannot bring itself to admit that such

things are done in peacetime.

It is, of course, an open secret that every major power possesses a cabinet noir (like the American National Security Agency or the British Government Communications Headquarters) which tries to intercept its rivals' communications. Now that the wartime successes of British codebreakers are no longer an official secret, it is ludicrous to suppose that public revelation of their pre-war successes could cause any possible harm to national security. Just as the history of the Second World War was distorted until recently by withholding war-time intelligence files from the Public Record Office, so the history of British foreign policy before the war is still distorted by withholding prewar intelligence records. The story of the Zinoviev letter provides a striking example of that distortion. The incomplete and bowdlerised nature of the Foreign Office files has led to the false assumption that the interception of the letter was an altogether ex» ceptional event for which some exceptional explanation (like forgery) had therefore to be found. In fact the Zinoviev letter was only one of a stream of Soviet and Comintern documents intercepted by British intelligence. The interception of Russian communications for much of the 1920 s has been an even better-kept secret than the interception of German communications during the Second World War. The two most recent books on Anglo-Soviet relations in the mid-1920s do not consider even the possi* bility that Soviet communications were successfully intercepted. Enough inter-war intelligence documents have escaped the censorship of Whitehall (in the private papers of former Ministers, in Indian archives and in a limited number of British official files) to demonstrate the fatuity of the censorship from the viewpoint of national security. The intelligence documents of the inter-war years al-

ready to be found in corners of the archives suggest that the intelligence files as a whole contain a sorry tale. The sorriest part however, concerns not the intelligence services (which on a number of occasions provided remarkable secret intelligence) but the Government, whose sheer inability to make sensible use of either the intelligence services or the information they provided sometimes descended to low farce. Lord Curzon’s reaction as Foreign Secretary to the intrigues revealed by intercepted Russian and French telegrams was, on several occasions, to collapse into a condition of impotent rage. Early in 11921 he informed the Cabinet that the evidence of Russian mendacity was such that he could no

longer bring himself even to reply to the communications of the Russian Foreign Minister: “With so colossal and finished a liar it is useless to cope ... the fusilade might go on till the dark haired among us become grey, the grey-haired white, and the white bald.”

In 1923 Curzon became convinced, from intercepted telegrams, that the French Ambassador was involved in a dastardly intrigue to bring about his downfall: “This is the worst thing that I have come across in my public life.” For his remaining months in office he declined to see the ambassador at all. Further scenes in the black comedy of the Government’s misuse of its intelligence services were played out during the 1926 General Strike. One such

scene is recorded in the Cabinet minutes. The Home Secretary, Joynson-Hicks (“Jix” to his friends), was in the habit of secretly monitoring the bank accounts of, inter alia, Arcos (the Russian Trading Company) and the major British unions. At one Cabinet meeting Jix triumphantly deduced from the almost simultaneous payment of large Sums by Arcos to the C o-operative Wholesale Society and withdrawal of large sums from the Society by certain unions that the Soviet Union “was without doubt providing money on the first day of the General Strike for the financing of the strike.” Three days later Jix reported in confusion that he had jumped (not for the last time) to false conclusions

and that there was in fact “no reason to connect the two transactions." The brilliantly successful British use of secret intelligence during Montgomery’s desert campaigns, during the battle of the North Atlantic in 1942-43 and at other moments of the Second World War, has thus to be set against a good deal of black comedy in the prewar period. By opening much of the archive on the spectacular intelligence successes of the Second World War while continuing to withhold intelligence records on the dismal failures of earlier years, Whitehall is contriving — intentionally or unintentionally — to present a highly unbalanced history of the intelligence services.