‘Traffic Analysis tells one where and what one’s enemy is ‘physically’ doing; where his forces are deployed, his state of readiness and consequently where one’s own defences are the most vulnerable. It also tells one where the best place to attack him has been in the past, and might be again in the future. Traffic Analysis is so vital that frankly, without it and the ‘complete picture’ it gives you of the enemy’s strength and dispositions it is immaterial whether one can, or cannot read his coded radio transmissions. Bill Welchman, a certifiable genius by any measure, was the first man to understand this and to put his ‘big idea’ into practice. Military intelligence, all intelligence in fact, is about context. Facts tell you nothing in the absence of context; incidentally, that’s a common journalist, academic and political misunderstanding!’
Margaret Thatcher had been positively rapt by this stage.
‘Alan Turing?’ She had asked.
‘If Bill Welchman was a certifiable genius I hardly know where to begin with Alan. Alan Turing ran Hut Eight. Hut Eight’s job was to crack the U-boat Enigma. SHARK. Turing was a truly remarkable fellow. After the war he was on the short list for the British Team at the London Olympics for the marathon, he was still one of the top five or six long-distance runners in the country even though he would have been in his mid-thirties by then. Turing was the man who designed the first electro-magnetic machine, ‘a computer’, to speed up the code-breaking process. He was the master logician who had sat down and worked out, in his own head, how such a machine would work, built it, eventually got it to work and won the Battle of the Atlantic. Granted, albeit with a little bit of help from the Royal Navy. We had had some early success reading SHARK in 1941 and 1942 but then the bloody Germans started using an extra ‘rotor’ on the naval version of the Enigma machine and breaking SHARK became exponentially more problematic. It was Bill Welchman, who by 1943 was in charge of mechanisation at Bletchley Park, as well as being the poor chump who was responsible for liaising with the Americans, who actually designed a modification to Turing’s code-breaking machine — his bombe — that speeded things up so that we could start reading SHARK again. Bill Welchman and Alan Turing became the ‘big men’ at Bletchley later in the war; with Milner-Barry and Hugh Alexander respectively taking over the running of Hut Six and Eight from about 1943 onwards.’
Margaret Thatcher had been burning with questions.
‘What happened to The Wicked Uncles? Apart from Hugh Alexander, I mean?’
Airey Neave had picked up the story at this point.
‘Poor Turing was driven to suicide in 1954. The local police in Manchester persecuted him because he was a known homosexual and nobody in authority who knew anything of his exemplary wartime service raised a finger to help him. The whole affair was a disgrace. Bad show all round.’
‘Oh, and what about Welchman and Milner-Barry?’
‘Bletchley Park was comprehensively dismantled after the war. A pale, penny-pinching shadow of the wartime Government Code and Cipher School was set up at Eastcote in Middlesex in 1946 but GCHQ, again in a parsimonious sort of way, wasn’t established in Cheltenham until the early 1950s. Stuart Milner-Barry joined the Treasury in 1946, I think. He was an Under-Secretary by the time of the October War. He went missing the night of the war. Bill Welchman got so fed up with the penny-pinching of the Atlee Government that he moved to the United States in 1948. The last I heard he had become an American citizen and he was a top man in the National Security Agency in Virginia.’
And now after a gap of over eighteen long, lost years, GCHQ and one of the legendary Wicked Uncles — Hugh Alexander — who had won the Second World War, was back in business reading Jericho.
Airey Neave was smiling like a Cheshire cat.
The Prime Minister could not but help asking herself how much pain and grief might have been averted if governments of the day had built on, instead of throwing away everything that Bletchley Park had achieved in the seventeen lost years between the end of Hitler’s war and the disaster of the October War?
“I hope you’re not trying to keep me in suspense, Airey?” Margaret Thatcher half-asked, half-cautioning her friend as she focused on the here and the now.
“I wouldn’t dream of it, Margaret.” The Secretary of State for National Security was having trouble stifling a chuckle. “One of the first intercepts we fully decrypted was from the forward HQ of the Red Army’s 10th Guards Tank Division describing a series of attacks on its columns along the road from Mahabad to Piranshahr by guerrillas. It seems the division’s movement schedule has been put back between four and five days and a whole mechanised corps is backing up along the road all the way back to Qoshachay and Malekan!”
“Guerrillas?”
“Yes. If I didn’t know better I’d start thinking the Red Army is getting acquainted with my old chum Lieutenant-Colonel Francis Harold St John Waters, VC, rather better than they’d like.”
Margaret Thatcher looked at her former mentor with more than a tincture of incredulity in her eyes.
“Surely one man can’t possibly be responsible for holding up a whole division for five days, Airey?”
“Ah, well, that’s the thing,” the man guffawed cheerfully, “if what’s going on in those mountain passes between Mahabad and Piranshahr is really Frank Waters’s work, there’s no way he’s going to be satisfied holding up just one division for just five days, Margaret!”
Chapter 23
It was the sort of country where the only place you could hide was in plain sight. Nevertheless, it was beautiful country, especially at this time of year when the winter wind no longer blew and the heat of the mid-day sun was yet to sear the flesh of exposed faces and limbs red brown. Like an old soldier anywhere and from any age, Lieutenant-Colonel Francis Harold St John Waters, VC, was always thankful for small mercies.
Behind the groaning, pitching and rolling old Ford six-wheeler they had ‘requisitioned’ in Mahabad four days ago the sooty black mushroom of smoke rising from the burning carcass of the T-62 slowly drifted downwind on the breeze falling off the sheer-sided mountains on the northern rim of the valley. In the seconds after the huge detonation all the other vehicles in the column had halted, Red Army officers had jumped out and stared back. The numerous local villagers caught up in the monumental traffic jam had started hitting their horns; oddly, the Russians seemed to be under orders not to do anything to alienate the civilian population, a thing that came hard to most Soviet soldiers.
Frank Waters could see how much the Russian rank and file wanted to start shooting the grubby old men and women who peered into their trucks as if they were inspecting cattle sent to market. The invaders wanted to start taking hostages, making ‘examples’ but somebody at the top had had the common sense to not compound his present difficulties by inciting a general guerrilla insurgency along the whole length of his chaotic lines of communication. In this sort of country every household had a long rifle of indeterminate vintage in a cupboard; in this sort of country somebody was always feuding with somebody else and if people got shot well, that was just the way things were. In country like this two or three men with rifles could block the Mahabad to Piranshahr road at any point between here and the border with Iraq.