Variations on Enigma

Published on Saturday 23 August 2003 01:00

You didn’t have to be mad to work at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, but it probably helped.

Christine Large isn’t mad, and she denies being inordinately thick-skinned, but she must be extraordinarily single-minded in her devotion to Bletchley Park, as it is today, to have continued as director there over the past few years, despite running a gauntlet of vitriolic abuse, death threats, sacking then reinstatement and, perhaps most devastating, the theft of one of the former intelligence centre’s rare German Enigma code machines, as part of a campaign to discredit her.

The machine, G312, an eccentric-looking typewriter-like assembly with cogs and lightbulbs, housed in a hefty wooden case, was a particularly rare example of the type, one developed specially by Abwehr, the German intelligence service.

During the war that particular Enigma machine had taxed the genius of Bletchley’s staff almost to its limit as they tried to crack its messages, encrypted by an electrically triggered random selection of substitute letters in innumerable permutations. The odds against decoding an Enigma message make winning the Lottery look a safe bet.

As the codebreakers, hundreds of them, struggled to break the Enigma codes, particularly as employed by Germany’s U-boat fleet, the Battle for the Atlantic was raging, as submarine packs stalked the convoys succouring Fortress Britain. In effect, Bletchley Park’s secret warriors altered the fate of nations. In the process, they also developed the world’s first large-scale programmable computer.

Sixty years on, Large found herself embroiled in a lesser but personally distressing battle, to trace the missing machine which she regarded as essential in helping demonstrate to a still-ignorant public just how important Bletchley Park had been in winning the war. Her new book, Hijacking Enigma, alternates the hunt for the stolen encrypting machine with the desperate battle to crack the coded messages which it and its kind transmitted.

An extravagantly styled Victorian mansion in Milton Keynes, Bletchley Park was commandeered by the Government Code and Cypher School in 1938. Directly supported by Winston Churchill, the outfit’s staff included the eccentrically unorthodox papyrologist Dillwyn "Dilly" Knox and Hugh Alexander, a national chess champion. Also involved was the visionary mathematician and computer pioneer Alan Turing.

Today, Bletchley remains much as it was, if somewhat run-down, still flanked by the huts which housed the codebreakers. It looks an unlikely focus for several books and films, accurate or otherwise, and Large had never visited it until 1996. "I was invited to Bletchley for a small commercial event," says the inappropriately named Large, a diminutive but tough Northumbrian with a law degree who had lectured and worked in both private business and the voluntary sector. "I would have probably said no, except that, just once, my mother-in-law had mentioned that she worked there during the war, although she’d never really talked about it, and I thought, ‘I think I’ll check out what the old girl was up to.’"

"When I went there, the place was really quite moribund, but I had a guided tour and it registered in my mind that what my mother-in-law had been engaged in during the war had been a massive, secret operation which had played a part in changing the course of history. Something momentous had happened here, yet I knew very, very little about it and that would have been true for the majority of people. I thought what a tragedy it would be simply to let the site die, because locked up in it were so many achievements and so much potential."

Convinced that its future should be more than a faded museum, she became involved in volunteer work at Bletchley, by that time run by a board of trustees set up to save it from demolition in 1972. Somewhat to her surprise, she was invited to put her name forward for the post of director.

It proved a bitterly poisoned chalice. The trustees were split between "mothballers" and "modernisers", everyone had their own agenda, and some 250,000 was owed to landlords in utility costs. The fact that one woman trustee (in Large’s absence) described her as "a rattlesnake of a woman", before bursting into tears and walking out of a meeting, was a less than auspicious pointer to the future. Before long Large was receiving death threats on her answerphone.

In July 1999, the London Evening Standard carried allegations that she and her husband, Eric, were out to profit from an unethical property deal with BT, the joint owners of the 58-acre site. Following legal action, the paper published an apology. Then, in October that year, the board summarily sacked her, giving no reason. Five trustees disassociated themselves from the action, the Charity Commission was called in and an independent report was commissioned by the trust. Seven trustees left and a reconstituted board promptly reinstated Large.

The biggest bombshell, however, came on April Fool’s Day, 2000, when, after visiting hours, the G312 Enigma machine, one of three Enigmas in the collection, was found to be missing from its glass case, just a week before a hi-tech security system was due to be installed.

Enigmas change hands on a collectors’ market for thousands of pounds, but this particular Enigma machine was a particularly rare one, worth as much as 100,000. "The only other on public display," says Large, "is in America, screwed in behind plate glass in the National Security Agency museum in Fort Meade. But it’s what these artefacts come to symbolise, really. Think of the Rosetta Stone, what it means in terms of history, or as a triumph of ingenuity and determination. If it hadn’t been for the [code] traffic generated by this machine being intercepted and then decrypted at Bletchley, it’s quite conceivable that, for instance, the D-Day landings would not have been as successful as they were."

As the theft attracted media coverage nationwide and beyond, and a police operation to retrieve the machine got underway, a series of communications demanded 25,000 for the machine’s return.

It was a stressful time for Large, who was not only closely involved in the investigation but was also maintaining a demanding day job as director. The worst moments, she recalls, came when the middle-man involved in sporadic negotiations threatened to destroy the machine, "because whoever was behind him seemed to be rather unstable. Also when we were told that the machine was due to be delivered to the BBC and nothing happened, we thought that it must be either a hoax, or that perhaps BBC security had blown it up, as they did with mysterious packages."

In the event, the machine was returned to the BBC, addressed to a bemused Jeremy Paxman, who opened the bulky package in his Newsnight office, where it had been languishing while the presenter was on holiday. The machine was missing its essential rotors, which were later retrieved during a clandestine rendezvous at an M1 services cafe.

The investigation at times seemed as intense as any wartime intelligence operation, with covert surveillance of a graveyard where packages were delivered, tapped and taped phone calls and, eventually, the arrest of Dennis Yates, an antiques dealer who at one point had been involved in one of the Bletchley volunteer groups. He was arrested in a telephone box while phoning a journalist about the case. The theft had indeed been carried out in a bid to discredit Large, but Yates persistently claimed only to be the "broker" for the return of the machine on behalf of a mysterious third party he referred to, in somewhat comic-book terms, as "the Master".

Yates was convicted of handling stolen goods, with a charge of blackmail ordered to lie on his file. He served three months of a ten-month jail sentence before being released.

One can draw loose parallels between the double-dealing involved in retrieving the stolen Enigma machine and double agents involved in the Second World War intelligence battles, although in terms of the stakes, one was a world away from the other. People perished in the battle to retrieve as much coding information as possible.

An example was the taking of U-559 in the eastern Mediterranean in August 1942, when First Lieutenant Antony Fasson and Able seaman Colin Grazier, of the destroyer Petard, drowned when the stricken U-boat they were searching suddenly sank. The invaluable documents they had managed to transfer back to the Petard went back to Bletchley Park and helped its staff there make substantial inroads into decrypting U-boat signals and striking a significant blow in the Battle of the Atlantic.

With the return of the Enigma machine, the air has cleared at Bletchley, says Large, "although there’s still this element of having to be very careful, because the person or people behind Yates haven’t been caught. The police are hoping that someone out there might read the book and it might just prompt a memory that might assist them."

While malicious elements were making off with invaluable code machines, Hollywood was being light-fingered with the truth in its war movie U-571, which caused outrage among war historians and former service personnel - including Bletchley Park veterans - with its cavalier take on the capture of an Enigma machine in the North Atlantic. The Hollywood hijackers replaced the Brits with Americans, and even got the ocean wrong. Large and her Bletchley team, while dismissive of the film, managed to work things to their benefit, mounting a Not U-571 exhibition. It utilised a mock up of the conning tower of a U-boat, courtesy of the Elstree set of Enigma, the film based on Robert Harris’s novel, starring Dougray Scott and Kate Winslet, and rather more accurate rendering of the wartime codebreakers.

"One of the dangers of U-571, and one of the reasons I wanted to write this book, was that people started to believe the film," says Large. "Enigma had a far more accurate historical flavour, although it was based on a novel, and it wasn’t totally accurate."

Her book includes a photograph of herself with Dougray Scott at the premier of Enigma. "It was a wonderful evening," she recalls with some relish. "And I got to drive through Milton Keynes in a tank."

On 1 April last year, two years to the day when the Enigma machine vanished, Jeremy Paxman, unwitting fence for the stolen machine, came to Bletchley to open a new exhibition there, with G312 as its centrepiece. Today, Large sees the historic site’s mission as being "to build on the work of the wartime pioneers and inspire a new generation of pathfinders". To this end, the centre has a grant from the Gatsby Trust for a mathematics and technology education programme, as well as Government funding to encourage technology innovation.

What continues to excite Large, despite the unenviably rough ride she has endured, is her enduring belief in the importance, and even transforming effect, of Bletchley Park: "Once people understand what transpired here and the impact it had on a number of things we take for granted - including the computer I have here on my desk - they are unlikely not to be moved, or changed in even a small way.

"It can be like a pilgrimage. For me it was a pilgrimage, with a few trials along the way."

• Hijacking Enigma is published by Wiley on 28 August, at 16.99.