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.

My Peculiar Summer

I don't mean that the summer has been odd; what I mean is that in just the last few weeks, I've read two books in Christopher Fowler's Peculiar Crimes Unit series. A few weeks ago, I reviewed the ninth in the series, Bryant & May and the Memory of Blood, here. Now I've just read––or listened to, to be more accurate––the tenth in the series, Bryant & May and the Invisible Code.

The latest tale begins in the churchyard of St. Bride's. On a bench sits a young woman, reading a book, while two children play nearby. When they annoy her, she goes into the quiet and deserted church. The children, who are playing a game called Witch Hunter, stealthily follow her in, because one of them is convinced she is a witch. Minutes later, the woman keels over, dead. The children believe that the witch-killing curse they cast on her did its job.

When the autopsy fails to identify a specific cause of death, Arthur Bryant, the nuttier half of the Bryant & May team and co-leader of the Peculiar Crimes Unit, naturally wants the case. But the City of London police have jurisdiction and the PCU, being personae non gratae in the Home Office, lack the political backing to muscle them aside.

Certainly, their enemy-in-chief, that satan in a three-piece suit, Oscar Kasavian, isn't about to lift a finger to help them. He has promised to wipe out the PCU and, particularly, its beyond-retirement-age leads. Imagine Bryant and May's surprise, then, when Kasavian almost humbly asks them to help him with a problem involving his wife, Sabira.

Sabira is much younger than Kasavian, and is an émigré from a working-class family in Albania. She's finding it trying to be the wife of someone whose job is full of secrets, and has begun thinking that she is being stalked and threatened. She is depressed and volatile. Sabira is also habitually and cruelly taunted by the mean-girl sorority of wives of Home Office top-level bureaucrats. Small wonder she has begin acting out in ways that could jeopardize Oscar Kasavian's position.

Bryant and May are hardly thrilled by what they see as a baby-sitting job and a no-win assignment but, as they and the rest of the PCU team begin to investigate, the case takes on ever larger proportions. Governmental corruption, whistleblowers in private industry, mental illness and its history in London, private clubs and their arcana, Russian gangsters, codes and ciphers, and the supernatural are all thrown into this heady mix. On top of all that, there are disquieting revelations of how the British class system, cronyism and the complete disregard of commercial/governmental conflicts of interest all conspire to ensure that a cabal of venal and ruthless men stay in power.

But this is no grim, cynical, deadly serious police procedural. With the PCU, that's just not possible. Arthur Bryant is the absent-minded fellow with his latest meal evidenced down the front of his rumpled clothes, his cell phone rendered unusable by the melted sweets all over it, and a brain that defines "nonlinear." He can't understand why people take exception to his insults––or to his conducting experiments at home and in the office involving things like pig carcasses and explosives. John May is Bryant's opposite: sartorially impeccable, careful to massage egos when necessary, and a believer that the simplest answer is usually the right one.

Despite their vast differences, Bryant and May make an effective team and, as always, they go right down to the wire in their investigation. I was listening to the book while walking and was so riveted by the book's last chapters that I walked a lot further than I'd intended. (Hmm, how about a new marketing approach for audiobooks: So enthralling you won't even notice you're exercising while listening!)

Most modern police procedurals remind us how reliant current investigations are on database searches, GPS, phone and internet records, forensics and all the accoutrements of our technological age. Bryant and May operate in our world, but their methods are refreshingly old-fashioned. You will never have to read about establishing time of death by analyzing the life cycle of maggots, for example. Arthur Bryant may find some other way to gross you out, but you'll be laughing at the same time.

Christopher Fowler just tells a good, entertaining story and doesn't gum it up with attempts to show he is knowledgeable about the latest gadgetry and techniques (that will all be hopelessly outdated in about five minutes anyway.) And he doesn't use protagonists who we know are supposed to be cool because of the way they dress, or talk, or listen to edgy music, or seduce people, or take or give a beating. Bryant and May are old, they wouldn't know what a lifestyle is if it smacked them upside the head, and yet they are cooler than any other detectives I can think of because they know what's right and they're going to keep on doing it, just the way they've done it since they got together way back in World War II, with blithe disregard for all that's changed around them.

Like so many books in the Peculiar Crimes Unit series, this one is also notable for its use of London settings in the story. Fowler tells us that St. Bride's Church is known as the journalists' church because of its location on Fleet Street, traditional home of London newspapers. It sits in the oldest part of London, known as the Square Mile, or the City of London, which is still a city in its own right, and has its own Lord Mayor––who, by the way, is not Boris Johnson, the flamboyant Mayor of London we saw during this summer's Olympics. The City is also home to the legal community's Inns of Court, which also play a dramatic part in the story, along with Sir John Soane's Museum, across from Lincoln's Inn Fields, and home to Hogarth's A Rake's Progress.

Fowler's descriptions of churches, museums, streets and history bring the city alive. He clearly loves London, especially its hidden places, like alleyways, mews, back passages of old buildings and tunnels. If you're fascinated by London, too, you might want to spend some time visiting Christopher Fowler's blog, especially this London walk, or this one, or this one with teeny tiny statues, or this collection of 15 excellent London websites. And these are just from 2012.

If you're already a fan of the PCU series, I can give you a preview of what's coming up, courtesy of Fowler's blog. He wrote recently that this latest book wrapped up a story arc, and he asked for comments to help him solidify his ideas about where to go for his next book. Here's his conclusion:

"One of these [next two PCU novels] will definitely feature an incapacitated Bryant and lots of old cases in the course of uncovering a new one, while the other book will be pretty sinister and dark-themed.

Plus, more eccentric characters, strange bits of London, oddments of history, arcana, sleuthing, impossible murder and general weirdness. Oh, and something impossible happening in the ultimate locked room, the Tower of London."

I can hardly wait.

Note: Mysteriously, Bryant & May and the Invisible Code is not yet published in book form in the U.S., even though the audiobook is. Being a naturally impatient person and a big fan of both this series and the narrator of the books, Tim Goodman, I got it as soon as it was available. Based on the U.S. publication date of the preceding book, I'd guess that this one will be published in the U.S. sometime in the first half of 2013.

The next-to-last image and the two Bryant & May cartoon images in this post are from Christopher Fowler's blog. Versions of this review appear on the Amazon and Audible product pages, under my username there.