like the operator who transmitted for Owens. Kaulen’s only second languages were English and French, an odd choice for a wireless operator who was to remain for months in Norwegian waters. On the other hand, if the Germans wanted to do a wireless deception — a Funkspiel — on the operator of Owens’s transmitter, should they have figured out that it was under British control, it would make sense that they would use a person just like Kaulen, and do it from a ship.4
Kaulen’s ability to understand English would be handy for confirming that he had Owens’s signal, since he only spoke English. As for getting the correct frequency, that would not have been a problem: as a Nest Bremen spy, Kaulen’s commanding officer would have been the Abt I Luft chief at Ast Hamburg — Major Ritter.
At Major Gill’s urging, the Radio Security Service in London began avidly collecting the new traffic and, because he and Trevor-Roper shared a flat, they would work on the material in the evenings. By simple anagramming, they found they could break other messages, and these revealed that Hamburg was in contact with spies in Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg.5
On March 20, at a meeting with Gill and Captain Robertson of MI5, Commander Denniston of the Government Code & Cipher School agreed to assign one of his codebreakers to the traffic.6 This was to be sixty-six-year-old Oliver Strachey, who had briefly held a job with the India railway system before marrying the suffragette Rachel Conn Costelloe and enjoying a reversal of household roles until his First World War stint with MI1(b), the War Office code-breaking agency that Colonel Simpson had headed. He stayed on after the war when MI1(b) merged with the navy’s Room 40 to form the Government Code & Cipher School (GC&CS). He was then with a GC&CS team working on German naval traffic.
Gill and Trevor-Roper were convinced they had found the Radio Security Service’s noble purpose. They saw it as opening a window on the operations of the German secret services. Denniston remained cool. Strachey did not produce a decrypt from the new intercepts until April 14, a week after the German invasion of Norway.7
Denniston’s dismissiveness is indicated by the fact that Strachey was no more than one senior citizen with a pencil and paper, whose output was assigned the lofty and surely sardonic title, Intelligence Service (Oliver Strachey) — ISOS. Denniston had good reason to be skeptical. The ciphers used for the messages Gill and Trevor-Roper were so excited about were of a First World War vintage that, thanks to the indiscretion of a former director of Naval Intelligence, the Germans had to know the British could easily break. Denniston could be sure they would not be using them for messages of any real value.
The former Naval Intelligence head in question was the famous Admiral Reginald Hall, who had presided over the codebreakers of the Admiralty’s Room 40 during the First World War. He is widely credited with covertly releasing the intercepted “Zimmerman Telegram,” which in 1917 helped bring the United States into the war. In 1919, the war over, he left the navy in a swirl of ill-feeling, probably having to do with how difficult he had been to work with while serving in his positions of high responsibility. He tended to be arrogant and autocratic, and there were some in senior government circles who probably were not sad to see him go, shoved a little, perhaps, by not giving him certain honours that he might have felt he deserved. He took with him some ten thousand decrypts of German navy, Foreign Office, and espionage messages, and stashed them at home.
In 1925, an American civilian lawyer approached Hall on the off chance he could help him with a case he was working on aimed at getting Germany to pay for damages for the “Black Tom” explosion that shook New York Harbor in 1916. What he needed was hard evidence linking the destruction of a munitions depot to German agents.
Kaulen’s ability to understand English would be handy for confirming that he had Owens’s signal, since he only spoke English. As for getting the correct frequency, that would not have been a problem: as a Nest Bremen spy, Kaulen’s commanding officer would have been the Abt I Luft chief at Ast Hamburg — Major Ritter.
At Major Gill’s urging, the Radio Security Service in London began avidly collecting the new traffic and, because he and Trevor-Roper shared a flat, they would work on the material in the evenings. By simple anagramming, they found they could break other messages, and these revealed that Hamburg was in contact with spies in Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg.5
On March 20, at a meeting with Gill and Captain Robertson of MI5, Commander Denniston of the Government Code & Cipher School agreed to assign one of his codebreakers to the traffic.6 This was to be sixty-six-year-old Oliver Strachey, who had briefly held a job with the India railway system before marrying the suffragette Rachel Conn Costelloe and enjoying a reversal of household roles until his First World War stint with MI1(b), the War Office code-breaking agency that Colonel Simpson had headed. He stayed on after the war when MI1(b) merged with the navy’s Room 40 to form the Government Code & Cipher School (GC&CS). He was then with a GC&CS team working on German naval traffic.
Gill and Trevor-Roper were convinced they had found the Radio Security Service’s noble purpose. They saw it as opening a window on the operations of the German secret services. Denniston remained cool. Strachey did not produce a decrypt from the new intercepts until April 14, a week after the German invasion of Norway.7
Denniston’s dismissiveness is indicated by the fact that Strachey was no more than one senior citizen with a pencil and paper, whose output was assigned the lofty and surely sardonic title, Intelligence Service (Oliver Strachey) — ISOS. Denniston had good reason to be skeptical. The ciphers used for the messages Gill and Trevor-Roper were so excited about were of a First World War vintage that, thanks to the indiscretion of a former director of Naval Intelligence, the Germans had to know the British could easily break. Denniston could be sure they would not be using them for messages of any real value.
The former Naval Intelligence head in question was the famous Admiral Reginald Hall, who had presided over the codebreakers of the Admiralty’s Room 40 during the First World War. He is widely credited with covertly releasing the intercepted “Zimmerman Telegram,” which in 1917 helped bring the United States into the war. In 1919, the war over, he left the navy in a swirl of ill-feeling, probably having to do with how difficult he had been to work with while serving in his positions of high responsibility. He tended to be arrogant and autocratic, and there were some in senior government circles who probably were not sad to see him go, shoved a little, perhaps, by not giving him certain honours that he might have felt he deserved. He took with him some ten thousand decrypts of German navy, Foreign Office, and espionage messages, and stashed them at home.
In 1925, an American civilian lawyer approached Hall on the off chance he could help him with a case he was working on aimed at getting Germany to pay for damages for the “Black Tom” explosion that shook New York Harbor in 1916. What he needed was hard evidence linking the destruction of a munitions depot to German agents.
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