HistoryExtrahttps://www.historyextra.comHome of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast2026-08-05T15:16:53.000Zhourly12000-01-01T12:00+00:00Inside Pompeii with Tom Hiddleston: the hidden detail that most people misshttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/inside-pompeii-tom-hiddleston-video/2026-08-05T15:16:53.000ZTom Hiddleston, star of Loki and The Night Manager, wants to challenge what you think you know about Pompeii.
His National Geographic docudrama follows three real Romans from the historical record through the disaster to ask: could anyone survive?
Ahead of the launch, HistoryExtra’s Kev Lochun sat down with the Hollywood actor to find out how ancient history reaches through time, how we tell stories of the past without making them about ourselves, and how he would have reacted if he’d been in the Forum in AD 79 when Vesuvius erupted.
National Geographic’s Pompeii: Out of Time premiered in July and is available to stream on Disney+ now.
View Green Video on the source website
For more on ancient Pompeii, don't miss Kev's four-part podcast series with Dr Jess Venner, all episodes available now
]]>Alan Turing's greatest achievement wasn't cracking Enigmahttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/alan-turing-greatest-achievement-cracking-enigma-video/2026-07-17T09:03:43.000ZAfter his vital work helped to shorten the Second World War, Alan Turing turned his attention to an even more extraordinary question: can machines think?
More than 70 years before today's explosion in artificial intelligence, Turing imagined computers that could learn from experience, proposed what became known as the 'Turing Test', and helped lay the foundations for the digital world we now live in.
In this video, HistoryExtra's Danny Bird explores the remarkable life of one of the 20th century's greatest scientific minds – from his groundbreaking work at Bletchley Park to his pioneering research into computing, machine intelligence and biology.
We also examine the tragic persecution he faced as a gay man in post-war Britain, and how his reputation was transformed after his death.
Listen to the full podcast interview with David Kenyon
View Green Video on the source website]]>Henry Paget: life of the weekhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/henry-paget-life-of-the-week-podcast/2026-06-09T08:14:52.000ZHenry Paget, 5th Marquess of Anglesey, lived a life of extravagance, luxury and theatre – and for this, he was the subject of much intrigue. In this episode, Michael Hall speaks to Charlotte Vosper about Henry's life story and the legacy of a man dubbed the 'Dancing Marquess'.
If you'd like to hear more from Michael about the queer lives connected to the National Trust and it's properties, then check out our discussion of his latest book A Queer Inheritance
]]>Weimar's descent from democracy to barbarismhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/weimars-descent-from-democracy-to-barbarism/2026-06-03T06:50:29.000ZWeimar is a small German city. Yet it looms large in European history. In the 1920s, it was synonymous with liberalism, internationalism and the fine arts. Yet, within a decade, many of its residents had embraced Nazism and Hitler was professing his love for the city. Here, in conversation with Spencer Mizen, historian and author Katja Hoyer reveals how the city that gave its name to Germany's great social democratic experiment succumbed to tyranny.
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GO BEYOND THE PODCAST
If you'd like to hear more from Katja Hoyer talking about German history on the HistoryExtra podcast, then you can check out this Life of the Week episode on Otto von Bismarck
]]>Alan Turing: life of the weekhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/alan-turing-life-of-the-week/2026-06-02T09:43:08.000ZAlan Turing is one of the most celebrated of all British scientists. His work in cracking Nazi codes at Bletchley Park and his role in the evolution of the computer has earned him worldwide acclaim. Yet he died at the age of just 41, two years after being prosecuted for committing homosexual acts. Here, in conversation with Spencer Mizen, David Kenyon, the research historian at Bletchley Park, explores a brilliant life marred by tragedy
]]>Alternate history: what if Alan Turing and Bletchley Park had not cracked the Enigma code?https://www.historyextra.com/membership/alternate-history-alan-turing-enigma-code/2023-06-23T07:46:25.000ZFrom 1940, the Allied war effort received a huge boost when scientists at Bletchley Park became able to decipher encrypted instructions sent by the Nazi military command using the Enigma machine. Being able to read these messages proved to be a vital tool that arguably altered the course of the Second World War.
Without it, history might have taken a very different shape. One of the first theatres in which the cracking of Enigma had an impact was the battle of the Atlantic, which raged throughout the war in Europe. Until the breakthrough at Bletchley Park, German vessels operating in wolfpacks were able to pick off Allied ships carrying crucial supplies and armaments east across the ocean.
Once in possession of vital intelligence about the enemy’s location, though, an Allied fleet could divert its route and avoid significant loss of life. “Knowing where the wolfpacks were allowed the Allies to simply sail around them,” confirms Michael Goodman, professor of intelligence and international affairs at King’s College London.
“But how do you conceal from the Germans that you’re reading these codes? You can’t just bypass every single submarine because then it becomes obvious. It’s a classic intelligence conundrum: at what point do you reveal your hand?”
Winning the battle of the Atlantic
Keeping their cards close to their chest gave the Allies an advantage in the Atlantic, allowing supplies to reach other theatres. “Enigma was a force enabler,” observes Professor Goodman. “It provided a window into what the Germans were thinking and doing, but it didn’t tell the Allies what to do. It still had to be applied – but in the Atlantic it saved ships and it saved lives.”
In context: Bletchley Park and Enigma
At the start of the Second World War, a talented team of mathematicians and cryptologists was gathered at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire. Initially aided by the Polish intelligence services, they were charged with cracking the German Enigma machine, used by the Nazis to encrypt top-level messages. The experts, notably Alan Turing, developed a code-breaking machine and system for deciphering German instructions, which had a significant impact on the direction of the war.
Without the cracking of Enigma, would Germany still have ruled the Atlantic’s waves? “I think that’s probably true,” confirms Professor Goodman, before positing another conundrum:
“Had Hitler succeeded in marshalling the Atlantic, would he then have pushed on to the US? Or might he have linked up with the other Axis powers to push into the Americas, not just the US? I’d have been surprised if he had been able to extend into another theatre, but it could have been an option.”
One significant likely consequence of continued German control of the Atlantic has been much discussed: had Enigma not been cracked, it’s unlikely that the war would have ended in 1945. “I absolutely believe Enigma shortened the war,” says Professor Goodman. “The general consensus is that it did so by two or three years.”
Bletchley Park and D-Day
With control of the Atlantic wrested from Germany, the Allies could focus attention elsewhere – and the work of the codebreakers at Bletchley Park proved fundamental to the success of D-Day in 1944.
“The intelligence that preceded the landings was all about whether the Germans had swallowed the deception plan,” explains Professor Goodman. “Did they believe that it was going to happen farther north along the coast, near Calais rather than in Normandy? And what level of opposition could be expected when the Allies landed? This was totally based on the intelligence gathered. And that was down to cracking Enigma.”
Did you know?
Women at war
Initially, recruits for Bletchley Park came from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. As the war progressed, though, they were drawn from various sources, particularly the women’s services. By 1945, 75 per cent of the staff were women.
- On the podcast | The women of Bletchley Park
Would the Allies have risked an invasion the size and scale of D-Day without the intelligence that had been harvested? “By then, the war was very much going the Allies’ way, and it was absolutely a decision taken by them that there had to be an invasion of northwest Europe,” explains Professor Goodman.
“But would it have taken place in the way that it did? And would they have committed as many forces? Possibly not, because for such a deception to succeed, you have to know it’s been swallowed by the enemy. And you couldn’t know that without something like Enigma. Had the deception plan not worked, and had all those German forces still been in Normandy and not redeployed to Calais, the loss of life on the Allies’ side would have been truly horrendous. It was still bad on D-Day.”
More from our alternate history series
- What if... Argentina had won the Falklands War?
- What if... Alexander the Great hadn't died so young?
- What if... Japan hadn't attacked Pearl Harbor?
- What if... the Spanish Armada had landed in England?
- What if... Magna Carta hadn’t been written?
- What if... Abraham Lincoln hadn’t been assassinated?
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- What if... the Cuban Missile Crisis had escalated?
Without a large-scale invasion like D-Day – or, at least, one at that particular juncture – it’s again likely that the war would have lasted longer than it did. And who knows what direction it would have taken in those extra years. Would it, for instance, have given Hitler more time to develop an atomic programme, with dramatic consequences for Europe and the wider world?
- Read more | Why did the Allies win the Second World War?
Professor Goodman thinks probably not. “The main German scientists who were captured towards the end of the war were interned in a house in Cambridgeshire,” he explains. “When the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the rooms they were in were bugged. It was very clear they didn’t really know how to develop an atomic bomb. Would they have got there in another three years?
“Perhaps they would have grown their V1 and V2 programmes instead. Hitler was certainly turning towards bigger types of weapons like those.”
So it can be suggested that the cracking of Enigma at least indirectly helped avert another devastating Blitz for the people of Britain. “Whether these German missiles would have made a strategic difference is another question,” concludes Professor Goodman, “but certainly the effect on the UK population, both physically and in terms of morale, could have been very significant.”
Michael Goodman is professor of intelligence and international affairs at King’s College London and author of The Official History of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Volume 1 (Routledge, 2014). Nige Tassell is a journalist specialising in history.
This article was first published in the June 2023 issue of BBC History Revealed
]]>Your guide to Alan Turing: the man, the enigmahttps://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/alan-turing-life-death-legacy-facts-enigma-sexuality-timeline/2021-05-26T13:00:03.000ZHow much do you know about Alan Turing, who was portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch in the 2014 film The Imitation Game? Discover more about his life, death and legacy with our essential guide...
- The life of Alan Turing: a timeline
- Alan Turing: his life, achievements and legacy
The life of Alan Turing: a timeline
23 June 1912 Born Alan Mathison Turing in Maida Vale, London, the second son of Julius and Sara Turing
October 1931 Turing takes up a mathematics scholarship at King’s College Cambridge, earning a first-class degree. In 1935 he is elected to a junior research fellowship
January 1937 A paper by Turing is published that is later recognised as laying the foundation of computer science
June 1938 At the age of 25, Turing receives his PhD from Princeton for his dissertation Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals
4 September 1939 Turing arrives at Bletchley Park to begin his wartime work on code and cipher systems. He goes on to lead the team in Hut 8 (left)
March 1940 The first Bombe machine, designed by Turing, arrives at Bletchley. More than 200 machines will be manufactured
2 November 1942 Turing travels to the US to liaise on several joint US/UK projects, including an American Bombe machine
March 1946 Turing produces a detailed design for an Automatic Computing Engine
31 March 1952 He is convicted of being “party to the commission of an act of gross indecency”
8 June 1954 Turing is found dead. The coroner’s verdict is that he had taken his own life
Alan Turing: his life, achievements and legacy
The founding father of computing played a vital role in breaking German codes during WW2. Joel Greenberg deciphers the brilliant but troubled life of Alan Turing...
In September 1939, just as the Second World War was declared, a young man arrived to stay at the Crown Inn in the hamlet of Shenley Brook End, Buckinghamshire. He was fit enough – an exceptional long-distance runner, in fact – and his new landlady, Mrs Ramshaw, voiced concerns that such a clearly able-bodied young man wasn’t doing his bit for the war effort by joining up.
Mrs Ramshaw’s indignation couldn’t have been more misplaced. The man was Alan Turing, and his work at nearby Bletchley Park – the secret base of the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), the Foreign Office’s codebreaking section – was to prove crucial in thwarting German military actions.
Turing had returned to England the previous summer after several years of research at Princeton University, which led to his PhD. The University of Cambridge then renewed his fellowship at King’s College, to which he had first been elected in March 1935 after earning a first-class honours degree there.
In 1938, with the threat of conflict in Europe looming, Turing was among a number of British academics approached by GC&CS to undertake secret work for them in anticipation of the outbreak of war. He worked part-time for GC&CS, attending several training courses, and collaborated with Dilly Knox, a veteran First World War codebreaker, on attempts to break the Enigma machine.
Alan Turing and Bletchley Park
On 4 September 1939, the day after Britain declared war on Germany, Turing reported for duty at Bletchley Park and stepped up his work on Enigma. He would go on to lead the team named Hut 8, after the wooden hut in which it was initially based.
Contrary to popular belief, there was no single ‘Enigma code’. The Enigma machine – actually a family of portable encryption devices that substituted each letter of a message for another letter of the alphabet – was first developed in the 1920s and enhanced over subsequent years. By the late 1930s different versions were used by the various branches of the German military. The Germans’ operating procedures exploited the reciprocal nature of the machine. When two Enigma machines were set up the same way, if on one you typed ‘A’ and it turned it into ‘B’, on the other machine if you typed ‘B’, it would turn it into ‘A’.
The setting that governed these substitutions was known at Bletchley Park as the daily key, because it was usually changed every 24 hours. If the Bletchley Park codebreakers could work out the daily key, they could decrypt and read all of the intercepted German messages sent that day. This was done using replica Enigma machines, manufactured in Britain. But the number of possible daily keys was almost too big to imagine. In the case of the German army and air force Enigma, there were 158.9 million, million, million possibilities. It was this daily key that Turing and his colleagues were trying to work out.
In the preceding months, Knox had met with members of the Polish Cipher Bureau who were collaborating with French intelligence. Having worked on Enigma for several years, the Poles had enjoyed some success in breaking the system used by the German army and air force in the 1930s, but their methods no longer worked because of changes made to Enigma by the Germans. They had also designed a semi-automatic machine – a bomba kryptologiczna (reputedly named after a Polish ice cream dessert called a bomba) – to determine the settings that were vital to deciphering the codes produced by Enigma, hugely speeding up the process. In July 1939, they shared their findings with Knox.
Did Alan Turing break Enigma?
At Bletchley Park, Turing devised a new and more powerful kind of electro-mechanical machine for determining the crucial Enigma settings. Another Cambridge mathematician working at Bletchley Park, Gordon Welchman, made a crucial addition that increased the effectiveness of the machine – called the Bombe – providing Bletchley Park with a vital codebreaking tool. By the end of the war, some 211 machines had been produced.
The Bombe, though, wasn’t the complete solution to Enigma. Early in 1940, Turing was asked to take on the task of breaking the German navy’s Enigma system, which used more secure procedures than those of the air force and army. Many at Bletchley believed it could not be broken – yet doing so was vital.
These were desperate times for Britain. The country became increasingly dependent on convoys of ships carrying vital supplies across the North Atlantic, and German U-boat attacks were wreaking havoc on these convoys: average monthly shipping losses in 1940 exceeded 220,000 tonnes. To tackle this, Turing’s Bletchley Park team was expanded.
- Read more | The evolution of British code-breaking
The challenge was this. Having set up their machines using the daily key, each Enigma operator applied one final setting before encrypting a message. The operators for the German army and air force were allowed to choose this setting themselves, but the German navy issued code books for this purpose. In a remarkable piece of work, Turing managed to deduce, quite quickly, how these code books were being used, but realised that his team would need to acquire copies before further progress could be made.
It wasn’t till a German naval code book was captured that Turing and his colleagues began to achieve success in working out the daily key and reading encrypted German naval messages. Intelligence reports about Germany’s U-boat and ship movements could then be produced and sent to the Admiralty for dissemination.
The interception and decryption of German naval messages played a crucial role in the great sea battles of the Second World War. German ships and U-boats could be located and attacked, and Allied convoys could be diverted to reduce shipping losses.
At its peak, Hut 8 had more than 150 staff. It was part of a large codebreaking operation at Bletchley Park that broke a number of other enemy code and cipher systems as well as Enigma, and employed as many as 10,500 people – the operation truly was a team effort. Yet Turing’s contribution was fundamental.
In late 1940 Turing wrote a report describing the methods he and his colleagues were using to solve the German Enigma system. It was known as ‘Prof’s Book’, and it became essential reading for new recruits.
Alan Turing's legacy
Years later, Bletchley Park codebreaker Peter Hilton explained that what set Turing apart from his colleagues was his ability to come up with ideas that Hilton felt he would not have thought of “in a million years”. These ideas gave rise to a number of statistical methods with colourful names such as ‘Banburismus’ and ‘Turingery’.
In June 1946 it was announced that Turing had (in 1945) been awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for war services. There were rumours that he had been considered for a higher award, but that the OBE was the highest that could be awarded to civil servants of Turing’s official wartime rank – his true role not being revealed for another three decades.
After the war, Turing worked at the National Physical Laboratory in London, where he designed an early digital computer. In 1945, he took up a position at the University of Manchester and contributed to its pioneering computer developments. Biological research was now occupying much of his time and in November 1951 he completed a paper on morphogenetic theory. However, it was work he’d undertaken much earlier that brought him academic renown in later years.
In 1935 Turing had attended a lecture by mathematician Max Newman, discussing the Entscheidungsproblem (‘decision problem’) which asks for a way of determining which mathematical problems are computable. This had intrigued Turing, and his research yielded the paper ‘On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem’, published by the London Mathematical Society in 1937. By the early 1950s, his fame as the author of ‘On Computable Numbers…’ was growing, and in 1953 the University of Manchester appointed Turing to a specially created readership in the theory of computing.
But while Turing’s academic renown was growing, his private life was in turmoil. On 31 March 1952 at a court in Knutsford, Cheshire, Turing was charged with being “party to the commission of an act of gross indecency” – in effect, he was charged with being homosexual. He pleaded guilty. Instead of imprisonment he opted for hormone ‘treatment’ – oestrogen injections that made him put on weight and enlarged his breasts.
How did Alan Turing die?
On the morning of 8 June 1954, Turing was found dead in bed by his housekeeper. The coroner’s verdict found that he had taken his own life; there were reports that a partly eaten apple by his bed contained traces of cyanide.
It was not till many years after the publication of Turing’s 1937 paper that it became clear it had probably laid the foundations for the evolution of computing. His story has now been told on stage and screen; perhaps not surprisingly, he remains the only Bletchley Park figure to be widely known. Yet it was only after his death that much of Turing’s life and work, obscured for so long, was revealed.
Joel Greenberg is the author of Gordon Welchman: Bletchley Park's Architect of Ultra Intelligence (Frontline, 2014)
This article was first published in the October 2015 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]>The evolution of British code-breakinghttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-evolution-of-british-code-breaking/2019-02-06T09:00:39.000ZMay 8, 1945. As crowds in London danced themselves dizzy with jubilation, and as bonfires were lit across the land, celebrations were a little more discreet in one particular corner of Buckinghamshire. That warm evening, on the lawn outside the large Victorian house, young men and women gathered with drinks, the sound of gramophone music gently echoing from within.
The conflict in Europe was over. But for some of these young people, an entirely new kind of war had already begun.
These brilliant youngsters were the code-breakers of Bletchley Park. Their success at breaking into the apparently insoluble Nazi Enigma codes and reading the enemy’s communications had (some were later to reckon) shortened the war by two or even three years. But even before the fall of Berlin, senior code-breakers – figures such as director Edward Travis and his deputy Nigel de Grey – were looking ahead to the sort of world that was being shaped. And they saw the terrible hazards.
Europe, which had regarded itself as the peak of human civilisation, had been blasted back to the dark ages. Cities were shattered. Food was painfully scarce. Millions of displaced people were harried and hounded. And deep in the forests of eastern Europe, the full horror of the Nazi genocide of the Jews had been uncovered. The continent was suffused with darkness and blood.
Now Stalin’s place-men were embedding themselves, as Churchill put it in his famous 1946 ‘Iron Curtain’ speech, “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic”. The fear of the code-breakers – listening to the faltering heartbeat of this wounded continent – was that war could so easily reignite.
A new age of computing
From the inter-war years of the 1930s to the end of WW2, British code-breaking had evolved from a small-scale speciality, essentially a cottage industry, into an almost industrial concern, decoding thousands upon thousands of messages, and all under a total blanket of secrecy. Bletchley had run a world-wide operation; secret listeners in stations on every continent intercepting every coded communication, listening to every enemy plan and manoeuvre.
On top of this, the code-breakers had (almost as a side-effect) kick-started a new age of computing. Their efforts to find a mechanised means of decoding Nazi messages led to the creation of the first programmable proto-computers.
Even though many of the younger recruits were now to head off into new lives – in government, the Civil Service, in the realms of science and mathematics – there were invisible threads that would draw them back into the secret realm. For instance, Professor Max Newman and Alan Turing – who in the 1930s were tutor and student at Cambridge, and then at Bletchley Park pioneered a new electronic age of cryptography – went to the University of Manchester and the National Physical Laboratory, helping to develop newer, more complex computers. They and other boffins such as Jack Good were in constant contact with the code-breakers who stayed on.
Bletchley Park itself was slowly cleared out; sensitive decrypts were consigned to huge bonfires. The locals in the town were left none the wiser about who all these thousands of young people had been, or what they had done.
Alan Turing’s trial for ‘gross indecency’ and subsequent tragic suicide in 1954 are now part of the fabric of modern British history; less well-known is the fact that the people who steadfastly stood by him in those terrible days – among them code-breakers Joan Clarke and Hugh Alexander – were by then at the centre of an astonishing secret service that he had helped to shape.
The earliest days of GCHQ
What had once been known as ‘The Government Code and Cypher School’ became the ‘London Intelligence Centre’. And by 1947, some internal classified memos were referring to it as GCHQ – Government Communications Headquarters. This acronym was never referred to publicly at all until 1976, when journalists at Time Out magazine revealed its existence.
These days, the business of code-breaking is carried out at GCHQ in Cheltenham. The operation was moved there in the early 1950s. But before this, in the immediate postwar years, when it was initially decided that Bletchley Park should be packed up and the remaining code-breakers brought closer to London, the cryptanalysts had a sojourn in the heart of John Betjeman’s Metroland.
The site was at Eastcote, a former RAF base well-camouflaged in a leafy middle-class London suburb on the Metropolitan Line. The code-breakers took some of their revolutionary machinery with them. Secrecy was still absolute. The area’s bowler-hatted city commuters, who frequented Eastcote’s mock-Tudor village pubs at the end of their working days, would have had no idea that their fellow drinkers were engaged in vital confidential work of global importance.
In those immediate postwar years, senior Bletchley figures such as Hugh Alexander and Joan Clarke (Alan Turing’s former fiancée) had understood that peace would be an illusion in many parts of the world. From conflicting ideologies to the disintegration of empires, the potential flashpoints were limitless. And after August 1945, as the mushroom clouds rose and the skies above Nagasaki and Hiroshima flashed and darkened with nuclear fury, the code-breakers were also considering the threat of atomic apocalypse.
Soviet Russia under Stalin did not yet possess nuclear weaponry. But it would not take them long to acquire it. The first of their nuclear tests took place in the plains of Kazakhstan in 1949. There were secret wireless intercept operatives working before that on the borders of Afghanistan, Iran and Azerbaijan. Their intelligence was being fed back to that incongruous leafy suburb, to a base hidden so well behind wide avenues of 1930s houses that most could never have known it was there.
The lives of the postwar code-breakers
Life at Eastcote – though intensely pressurised – still had the youthful flavour of Bletchley. Even the most owlish of cryptology experts loved their cricket and their tennis. Music was very important to many of them too; in the immediate postwar years, many new recruits were sworn jazz aficionados. There was one major difference though: the vast majority of Bletchley’s talented female code-breakers had left. In the late 1940s, no matter how intellectually dazzling, women were expected to be home-makers.
Elsewhere, before Britain’s empire began to dissolve, there were cryptographers and interceptors in Hong Kong, and in Egypt, or sitting in secret stations in Ceylon and India, who wanted to make sure that they could hold on to these invaluable outposts. For it was from these that they could track developments in China, and in soviet central Asia.
One such secret listener was later to become a defining novelist of his generation. As a very young man, Alan Sillitoe, who had been working in a Nottingham bicycle factory, was called up for National Service. He had a gift for incredibly fast Morse code transcription and translation. He found himself deep in the jungles of Malaya, on eerie night-shifts in a simple wooden hut, earphones on, listening to messages between pilots, conversations between officials. Sometimes, surreally, from nowhere, his headphones would be filled with random snatches of classical music.
Elsewhere, American code-breakers were able to take full advantage of Britain’s colonial network, piggy-backing on those secret stations, to gather up their own intelligence on Soviet manoeuvres. In most other areas, the ‘special relationship’ between the US and the UK was pretty much non-existent, a PR fantasy. But there was a genuine bond of respect and affection between British and American code-breakers.
This was perhaps just as well. For in those unstable postwar years, they happened across a secret so terrible, it initially had to be kept from President Truman and British Prime Minister Clement Attlee. A captured Soviet codebook had enabled a small (and ultra-secret) team of cryptographers to penetrate Russian diplomatic messages. And these revealed that there were double agents working at the heart of Washington and deep within Britain’s security services.
It took some time to dig further to establish identities: but it was a tiny core of British code-breakers who were the first to flag up Cambridge Spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. The others would follow.
The stress of code-breaking as a career was intense; even veterans such as Frank Birch – who had been breaking codes since the First World War, and who in the early 1940s was one of the chief architects of the incredibly close relationship with US code-breakers – had to have a diversionary hobby; his was particularly colourful.
When not burrowing into fiendish codes, Birch was a talented actor and director. He staged French farces in the West End, and in the early 1950s, he had a part in a film comedy Will Any Gentlemen? alongside Sid James.
Elsewhere, as with Bletchley, this newly regenerated GCHQ held on to its talented chess champions. In 1954, at the Hastings international chess tournament, Hugh Alexander took on the Soviet grandmasters – and won an astounding victory. They had no conception that this man spent his days levering his way into Russian codes. Or indeed had been pivotal in Bletchley’s Hut 8 throughout the Battle of the Atlantic.
By the time GCHQ made its move to Cheltenham in the early 1950s – in part a precaution against nuclear strike on London, in part because some of the code-breakers loved the horse-racing – it had established itself as possibly the most vital link in the defence of the realm.
Sinclair McKay’s book, The Spies of Winter (Aurum Press, 2017) tells the story of the GCHQ code-breakers and how they used new technology to expand the horizons of cryptography in order to defend the nation during the Cold War years and maintain the fragile peace in a world now under the shadow of nuclear holocaust
This article was first published by HistoryExtra in June 2017
]]>Spies through the ageshttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/history-spies-espionage-intelligence-secret-world/2018-07-09T15:48:12.000ZProfessor Christopher Andrew discusses his new book The Secret World, which explores the history of intelligence and espionage from ancient times until the present day.
]]>Money, love and revenge: the motivations of spies through historyhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/money-love-and-revenge-the-motivations-of-spies-through-history/2017-07-24T09:16:38.000ZAldrich Ames, a CIA officer turned KGB mole; Ryszard Kuklinski, a Polish colonel who spied for the USA during the Cold War; Belle Boyd, a spy for the Confederacy during the American Civil War. (Pictures by Jeffrey Markowitz/Getty Images/Apic)
The world of espionage continues to intrigue and thrill every new generation. It is not for nothing that espionage is described as the ‘second oldest profession’. The Bible tells us that Samson’s treacherous mistress Delilah has come to symbolise female infidelity, but her betrayal had nothing to do with adultery. She was a spy for the Philistines, working at their behest to bring down the leader of the Israelites.
My new book The Anatomy of a Traitor sets out to investigate why she and other spies betray their country or cause, putting their lives and those of their family at risk. The reasons Delilah betrayed Samson may seem simple; the Philistines paid her more than 5,000 pieces of silver, but closer examination suggests a range of possibilities, of which money is only the most obvious…
Why do spies spy?
Understanding agent motivation ‒ why spies spy ‒ is vital for the intelligence services. Agent is the correct technical term; the word spy is anathema to most intelligence officers, who understandably shy away from comparisons with Ian Fleming’s famous creation, James Bond. There is a key difference between an intelligence officer and an agent: the officer is on the staff of an intelligence service; the agent is a freelance operative recruited by an individual officer for a specific role.
In the case of this book, former CIA and MI6 officers had an agreement with me that they would only talk on the basis of anonymity. The CIA officer was a Cold War era officer. The MI6 officer worked during the later stages of the Cold War and into the more recent era, covering counter-terrorist operations.
Spies may be recruited because they have direct access to the intelligence that is being sought, such as a traitor inside the target country or organisation, or because they have access to a region where the intelligence officer cannot operate, such as a businessman selling his wares in a country like North Korea. They might have a specific skill that is needed to acquire the intelligence, such as the local knowledge and linguistic ability to impersonate an insider. It is these agents, and only rarely the intelligence officers themselves, who are the real spies.
“The motivation of a continuing agent is, or should be, the subject of constant study on the part of his case officer,” one former CIA officer said. “Unless a case officer knows what it is that drives his agent, he cannot know to what lengths the man (or woman) will go, freely or under pressure, what risks he is willing to take, at what point he will break, tell another intelligence service what he is doing, or simply stop producing.”
“An agent’s motivation can be changed, either by circumstances or through the efforts of an interested and patient case officer,” the officer added. “Some of the less desirable motives – money, hatred, love of adventure, fear – can be redirected and tempered by a careful programme of indoctrination designed to bring out whatever finer purposes the agent has.”
Many people are prepared to spy for money. It is the simplest of motives, and it has a number of advantages. The agent knows from the start what he or she is getting, while if the handler obtains signed receipts confirming that the money has been paid this leaves an agent who has betrayed his employers with little choice but to continue providing information. “With an agent whose motivation is purely financial, it is generally easier to terminate the relationship when his intelligence is no longer of value,” one former MI6 officer said. “It is just a business relationship. With other motivational forces, terminating an agent can be far more time consuming and complicated.”
Who would be a spy?
But even with money there are complications. It is rarely the only reason that someone spies. Aldrich Ames, the so-called ‘Two Million Dollar Spy’, who betrayed more than a dozen top CIA agents to the Russians spied as much out of ego as for wealth.
Aldrich Ames, an American CIA officer who became one of the most successful double agents for the Soviet Union and Russia. (Photo by Jeffrey Markowitz/Sygma via Getty Images)
Both he and his father, who was also a CIA officer, had been rejected as poor case officers and were stuck behind desks. Ames needed to prove to himself that he was a brilliant spy, a real James Bond, and the Russians gave him the opportunity to do so. In one revealing moment, Ames described how, while stationed in Italy, he travelled to Switzerland to stash his latest payment from the KGB in a secret bank account. Driving over the Alps in his Jaguar with his beautiful Colombian wife by his side, he said he pictured himself as a latter-day Bond.
The ‘second oldest profession’ attracts more than its fair share of people with inflated egos and other personality traits which would be considered a dangerous liability in any job, let alone one where lives – including very often the lives of the agents themselves – depend on getting it right. Espionage appeals to a myriad of adventurers, risk-takers, fantasists and egotists.
Most intelligence services employ psychologists to weed them out, but sometimes what seem to be flaws in their personality can make them surprisingly successful as agents. Sidney Reilly, the so-called ‘Ace of Spies’, is frequently derided as a fantasist who was nowhere near as good as the legend. In fact, he was one of the most successful spies of all time, but his risk-taking ultimately proved his downfall and, after mounting one too many missions into Russia, he was captured and killed.
Spy Sidney Reilly (born 1874 in Ukraine) who obtained Persian oil concessions and German naval secrets for Britain. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Sex and romance can also provide very powerful motivations for the spy and have produced a wealth of fascinating spy stories from Samson and Delilah right up to the present day. The female spies of the US Civil War who used their sexual charms to persuade Union officers to divulge secrets they passed on to the Confederacy included the 17-year-old Belle Boyd, who was described by one jealous love rival as “the fastest girl in Virginia, or anywhere else for that matter”.
During the modern era, the Warsaw Pact’s intelligence services exploited the very human need for intimacy with another person to produce some exceptionally valuable spies. The East Germans excelled at this, using so-called ‘Romeo spies’ to seduce West German women working in government or NATO posts, including Gabriele Gast who, as deputy head of the Warsaw Pact section of the West German intelligence service, was one of the most influential spies of the Cold War.
But while in cases like those of Gast, Reilly and Ames, the motivations of sex, money, risk-taking and egotism worked spectacularly, they are ultimately unreliable. The most effective spies are motivated by revenge, patriotism, or ideology.
Belle Boyd, a spy for the Confederacy during the American Civil War. (Photo by APIC/Getty Images)
The power of revenge
Revenge is extraordinarily powerful. Nothing carries someone across the line between simply thinking they might pass secrets to the enemy and actual betrayal more reliably than the intense and deep-felt anger created by some evil inflicted against them or their family.
One of the best agents run by the British secret service during the First World War was a German naval engineer who had the run of the German North Sea and Baltic dockyards. Karl Krüger spied purely out of revenge. His MI6 file says he was “very embittered with his country” and offered his services to Britain after being court-martialled for hitting a relative of the Kaiser. Krüger’s reports from Germany provided invaluable and highly accurate intelligence on the damage inflicted on the German Imperial Navy and the situation inside Germany itself.
Patriotism might seem an odd motive for betrayal, but one of the best western spies of the Cold War was Polish army officer Ryszard Kukliński, who betrayed Warsaw Pact secrets for the good of his country.
Kukliński’s father had been a Polish resistance fighter who died in the Nazi Sachsenhausen concentration camp. After the Soviet occupation, Ryszard joined the Polish Army but became disillusioned with communism following the Warsaw Pact’s 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia.
During a sailing ‘holiday’, designed to spy on naval bases in West Germany, Holland and Belgium, Kukliński made contact with the CIA; he wrote a letter to the United States Embassy in Bonn, Germany, offering to provide information about Soviet strategic plans. The letter eventually made its way to a CIA officer, who sent a cable to CIA headquarters recommending that the Agency try to make contact with Kuklinski. And so began Kuklinski’s double life as a spy, reporting on the Warsaw Pact preparations to crack down on the Polish independent trade unions which rose to prominence in the early 1980s.
The last Polish Army identification of Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski before he escaped from Poland to the US.
Kukliński’s reports, passed to CIA officers using the using classic counter-surveillance tradecraft, covered preparations for martial law to counter industrial unrest. These led the US to warn Moscow against a Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion, ensuring that his country escaped the fate of Czechoslovakia.
After being exposed and exfiltrated with his family in a daring CIA operation, a Polish military court sentenced Kukliński to death for treason. But following the collapse of communism, he was rehabilitated and the Polish Supreme Court absolved him of any crime, ruling that he had passed the Americans secrets in ‘a higher cause’.
The only ‘higher cause’ to match patriotism might be ideology. The belief that sharing secrets with the other side is the right thing to do has been the motive for many of the most productive spies in history, including the infamous Cambridge Spy Ring.
Ana Montes, an American opponent of her country’s actions in Central America during the 1980s, was spotted by the Cubans as a potential agent while taking part in student protests. Once recruited, she joined the US Defense Intelligence Agency, where she became one of the leading experts on El Salvador, Nicaragua and Cuba.
Montes passed her Cuban spymasters everything that crossed her desk, including the names of US agents who were executed as a direct result of her betrayal. The subsequent investigation described Montes as "one of the most damaging spies in US history", yet her story ‒ like many of those in The Anatomy of a Traitor ‒ remains virtually unknown.
Michael Smith’s book, The Anatomy of a Traitor, was published in June 2017 by Aurum Press, an imprint of The Quarto Group.
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