Coincidence, Serendipity, Synchronicity or Voodoo?

Lately, it seems like there is a lot of coincidence going on in my reading and viewing life, from the ridiculous to, well, maybe not the sublime, but at least the not-at-all-ridiculous. But let's start with the ridiculous.

When I woke up on Monday, March 4, I'd never heard of the Harlem Shake. Within a space of 45 minutes, I came across three separate features about it online and on TV. Breathless, top-line reports as if this is something earth-shattering. I decided to look at the bright side, though. The advent of the Harlem Shake probably means the end of days for Gangnam Style, right?

Enough silliness; on to the not-at-all-ridiculous, where coincidence has multiplied and intensified to the point that it feels like synchronicity, or some kind of voodoo.

FDR's Secret Train Platform

A few months ago, I read two books that each referred to a bit of historical trivia I'd never heard about: President Franklin D. Roosevelt's top-secret train stop under Grand Central terminal in New York City. As you probably know, FDR was a New Yorker and often visited the city during his presidency, for personal and political reasons. It was important to him that he not be seen in his wheelchair, so he used a secret train stop to allow him to arrive out of sight of the press and other passengers and visitors to Grand Central.

According to legend, FDR's private armored train would travel to Grand Central and stop at the underground Waldorf Astoria Hotel platform. Some claim that upon arrival, his Pierce Arrow automobile would simply drive out of the railcar and onto an elevator that would whisk the car to the hotel's garage and allow FDR to get into the hotel unobserved.

The first I heard about this was when I read Jack 1939 (Riverhead, 2012) by Francine Mathews, who is probably better known to mystery readers as Stephanie Barron, author of the Jane Austen "Jane and the . . . " series and the Merry Folger series set in Nantucket, Massachusetts. Unfortunately, Jack 1939 is dreadful, but that's neither here nor there at the moment. Mathews uses the secret train stop as the scene of a hush-hush meeting between FDR and new college graduate John Fitzgerald Kennedy, in 1939. JFK is about to go off on the traditional graduate's European tour, and FDR asks him to do some discreet spying to assess the political situation in various locales.

No sooner had I gratefully put down Jack 1939, than I read Robert H. Reid's Year Zero (Del Rey, 2012). This very silly but entertaining novel features Nick Carter, a New York City intellectual property lawyer teetering on a career precipice. Only his bringing in some fantastic new client can save him from his firm giving him the boot. That save doesn't seem likely, though, until a couple of aliens materialize in his office, bringing him the biggest copyright infringement case of all time.

Aliens Carly and Frampton tell Nick (who they incorrectly think is Nick Carter from The Backstreet Boys in a second career) that aliens discovered Earth music some years back, during the "Kotter Moment"; the instant when their monitoring of US airwaves allowed them to hear the Welcome Back Kotter sitcom's theme song. It threw them into such ecstasies that brains literally melted. They sent teams to secretly copy all of the Earth's music for the listening delight of the universe.

This turns out to be a problem––even aside from the brain melting. The universe is run by the Refined League, which insists that all local laws be obeyed. That means that the United States' draconian fines for unauthorized music copying will bankrupt the entire universe. Some think a better solution is to obliterate the Earth. Carly, Frampton and Nick race against the clock to find a solution before the Earth goes boom.

A recurring location in this delightful caper is––you guessed it––the secret Grand Central tunnel and, specifically, the platform under the Waldorf Astoria. Author Reid tells us the FDR story, as well as the platform's use in this story, which is to serve as live/work space for the alien drudge clericals whose job is to do the actual music copying and broadcasting into space.

L. Ron Hubbard

Lawrence Wright's recent best-seller, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief (Knopf, 2013) is a fascinating look inside the secretive movement, from its establishment by pulp sci-fi writer L. Ron Hubbard, to the present day. I was listening to it on audiobook when I picked up Jake Arnott's House of Rumour (Little A/New Harvest, 2013), a kaleidoscopic vision of the 20th century, mashing together the real and imagined, with a focus on World War II spycraft and a circle of West Coast science fiction writers.

When Arnott's (imagined) character, aspiring writer Larry Zagorski, is invited to a social meeting of Robert Heinlein's (real) Mañana Society, who should be there, across the room and hitting on girls, but L. Ron Hubbard. Not only that, but in the WW2 spycraft part of the story, we see double agent Tricycle, who is one of the eccentrics featured in Ben MacIntyre's Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies, which I reviewed here. To make for a trifecta of coincidence, there is even a part of House of Rumour that takes place at the doomed Jonestown colony in Guyana, which I'd read about in detail a few months ago in Julia Scheeres's A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown.

House of Rumour is an ambitious and fascinating book, but, in my view, its fractured plot and disjointed narrative don't come together until too near the end of the book to make it successful. Still, this is an unusual novel of ideas that should appeal to many. A review in The Guardian says that the book "perhaps most resembles The Da Vinci Code, rewritten by an author with the gifts of characterization, wit and literacy."

Bletchley Park

Given my obsession with World War II espionage, it's not much of a surprise when multiples of the same war topics come up in my reading and viewing. Still, the codebreakers at England's Bletchley Park seem to be practically living at my place recently. Sinclair McKay's The Secret Life of Codebreakers: The Men and Women Who Cracked the Enigma Code at Bletchley Park, which I reviewed here, focuses on the daily life in Bletchley Park for the 10,000-plus men and women who worked there in utter secrecy to crack the codes used by the Axis powers during World War II.

Ben MacIntyre's Double Cross spotlights the oddball pack of double agents whom British intelligence used in the field––like Tricycle, mentioned above. These agents had no direct contact with Bletchley Park, but cryptographers there were involved in the agents' work, especially decrypting messages that the agents obtained for them or led them to.

Just last week, Bletchley Park popped up again, as PBS began airing the three-part British miniseries (from ITV), The Bletchley Circle. Set in London in the 1950s, four women who had worked at Bletchley Park are finding out, as Sinclair McKay details so well in The Secret Life of Codebreakers, that postwar life can't hold a candle to the sense of purpose and feeling of excitement they'd had during the war. Life is flat, gray and dull. That is, until they decide to use their various skills, honed during their war service, to catch a serial killer.

Even if you're not all that interested in codebreaking or Bletchley Park, you might want to try The Bletchley Circle for its depiction of how tough it was for these women to adjust to postwar life. Returning to the everyday was a letdown for any Bletchley Park veteran, but women had further to fall, as they went back to the humdrum of housework and clerical and service jobs, and husbands who may not have a clue about their talents or any respect for their war work. No wonder chasing down a serial killer seemed like a great idea.

* * *

I don't know exactly why there has been so much unintentional coincidence in my reading of late, but I'm finding that the depiction of people or events in one book tends to have a different slant or emphasis from the portrayal in another book, and these two views inform and enrich my reading of both books. It's a case of the whole being more than the sum of the parts.

Book Review of Sinclair McKay's The Secret Life of Codebreakers

The Secret Life of Codebreakers: The Men and Women Who Cracked the Enigma Code at Bletchley Park by Sinclair McKay

Imagine being a member of a team whose work was said to have shortened World War II by at least two years––and not being able to tell anybody about it for decades. Your friends, neighbors and family may even have thought you were a coward who failed to join up and fight for your country. That's exactly the position of the 10,000-plus men and women who worked at England's Bletchley Park to crack the codes used by the Axis powers during the war. They were summoned to Buckinghamshire with no disclosure of the reason for the summons and were required to sign the Official Secrets Act almost as they arrived.

It wasn't until over 30 years later that the requirement of silence was lifted. During all those years, unlike other wartime groups, Bletchley Park's personnel had no reunions and were deprived of the chance to sit and reminisce with old colleagues. By the time they could share their stories with their families, most of their parents had died.

Much has been written about how Germany's Enigma code was broken at Bletchley Park––or BP, as it was often called––but Sinclair McKay's principal focus in this insightful book is the people there; who they were, their working and living conditions, and the social environment in this hothouse atmosphere. And what a grab-bag of personnel BP was. University dons, debutantes and inner-circle graduates of Eton and Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge worked alongside the working class––mostly young women––with little of the social stratification that normally typified British life. Because of their long working hours and strict secrecy, they had to entertain themselves in their off hours. And they did, with amateur theatricals, singing groups, dancing, films, tennis, hiking and chess and bridge games.

The work at BP was performed in trying conditions. The manor house was used, but most personnel worked in hastily-built, long buildings they called huts, which were hot in summer and frigid in winter. The secrecy at BP was not just applicable to the outside world, but to other personnel outside the hut. That made each hut like its own cloistered community, intense with shared purpose and long hours. One veteran tells of having to phone in reports, not knowing until decades later that she was speaking with someone in the next-door hut.

BP is best known as the place where Alan Turing and others developed the precursors of modern computers. Germany's Enigma encryption machine performed its encoding mechanically, and Turing's conviction was that decryption should be possible by using a machine. The "bombes," as they were called, that the BP team eventually developed were massive machines straight out of science fiction of the era, with electrical connections snaking all over, long strips of paper feeding through, and loud, rackety clacking noise as the bombes ran through thousands and thousands of possible decrypts.

But before Turing's machines came online––and even afterward––hard work and ingenuity cracked codes, even Enigma codes. The BP boffins were able to study some early Enigma machines, so they knew how they worked. They used that knowledge, together with insights about human nature, to come up with starting places for decryption.

The "Herivel Tip" was a way to increase the odds of figuring out that day's cipher key from an Enigma machine. The cipher key was a three- or four-letter combination on a rotor with multiple rings of letters, a little like a luggage lock. The cipher key was used to encrypt the plaintext message, and anyone who knew the cipher key could decrypt the encrypted message. Hut 6's John Herivel imagined that a hurried or lazy Enigma operator might not bother to lift the rotor out of the machine to spin the rings and reset the cipher key for the day. If the operator took the shortcut of changing the setting by just sticking a finger inside the machine and pushing the rings, that would limit how far a ring could rotate from the previous day's setting. Since the starting position of the rings before the reset was typed––unencrypted––in the first message sent for the day, this greatly narrowed down the possibilities for the current day's key and allowed the analyst to run through them all first.

Hervel's Tip wasn't the only insight into human nature that allowed codes to be cracked. Other BP personnel remembered to see the Enigma operators as humans with ordinary frailties too. The Abwehr's Enigma machine used a four-letter cipher key, so BP's personnel would start by trying out common four-letter curse words and names.

I got a particular kick out of reading about how Operation Double Cross helped in decryption. I recently read Ben Macintyre's excellent Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies, which describes the double agents used by British intelligence. Because British intelligence knew what these agents' reports to their German contacts said, when the reports reappeared in German encrypts, they were readily decrypted, thus revealing that day's cipher key.

McKay is at his best when describing how BP's personnel applied their brain power and quirky styles of thinking to their formidable task. BP just gathered a group of academics, bright people from the various armed services, and civilians with language and other skills (like being particularly good at the Times cryptic crossword puzzle) and told them to get on with it. Despite the many privations, most recall it as the time of their lives, and nothing afterward ever quite touched the level of the experience. McKay isn't quite as good at bringing to life the BP personnel in their off hours, but reading about the human context of the work at BP makes this book a valuable reading experience for anyone who enjoys World War II social history.

The Secret Life of Codebreakers will be published by Plume (a division of Penguin Group USA) on September 25, 2012. It was published in the UK last year under the title The Secret Life of Bletchley Park: The WWII Codebreaking Centre and the Men and Women Who Worked There.

Note: I received a free advance reading copy of this book for review. Versions of this review appear (or may appear in the future) on Amazon and Lunch.com under my usernames there.