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ABSTRACT
Based on a hitherto unnoticed batch of letters between Sir Alfred Ewing and former Prime Minister Lord Balfour, this article discusses the Admiralty’s reaction to a lecture Ewing gave in 1927, detailing his experience as the man in charge of the World War I cryptographic unit, Room 40. Threatening Ewing with prosecution under the Official Secrets Act, the Admiralty prevented publication of the lecture in one of a series of actions that set the tone not just for the interwar years, but also for World War II and the Cold War. The article explains the Admiralty’s viewpoint and motives, and shows how Ewing offered a cogent if unsuccessful defence based on his views that dirty tricks should be discontinued in peacetime, and that the historical record should be set straight.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Christopher Andrew and David Dilks, ‘Introduction’ to Andrew and Dilks, eds. The Missing Dimension: Governments and Intelligence Communities in the Twentieth Century (London: Macmillan, 1984), 1. The authors took the phrase from an observation by Sir Alexander Cadogan (permanent under-secretary for foreign affairs, 1938–1946), quoted without attribution of date or circumstance in Dilks, ed. The Diaries of Alexander Cadogan, O/M., 1938–1945 (London: Cassell, 1971), 21.
2 See Ian Cobain, The History Thieves: Secrets, Lies and the Shaping of a Modern Nation (London: Portobello, 2016).
3 For permission to use and cite the items that inform this article, the author is grateful to the Balfour estate and the University of Edinburgh. For her advice on document location and permissions, thanks are also due to Jennifer Ozers, Search Room Archivist at the National Records of Scotland (NRS). The issue of secrecy regarding the intelligence services has attracted increasingly prominent attention since the great American debate over intelligence in the 1970s: see Christopher Moran’s Classified: Secrecy and the State in Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) and ‘Turning against the CIA: Whistleblowers During the “Time of Troubles”’, History 100 (April 2015): 251–4, as well as Daniel P. Moynihan’s, Secrecy: The American Experience (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). Historians have alluded to Sir Alfred Ewing’s wartime codebreaking work – see, for example, Christopher Andrew, Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community (London: Heinemann, 1985), 86–90, 93–4 – but, absent the documentation now available, the significance of his 1927 lecture and of the resultant furore has been missed, although the journalist and historian David Kahn did note it was an instructive parallel and precursor to the bitter debate over H.O. Yardley’s revelations about the American ‘Black Chamber’: Kahn, The Reader of Gentlemen’s Mail: Herbert O. Yardley and the Birth of American Codebreaking (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 160.
4 For an overview of this subject, see Cobain, “A Short History of a Very British Disease: The Origins and Rise of Official Secrecy,” Chapter 1 in Cobain, The History Thieves, 1–29.
5 R.V. Jones, “Alfred Ewing and ‘Room 40’”, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 34, no. 1 (1979): 65–90, includes the text of ‘Some Special War Work’, Ewing’s lecture of December 13, 1927, at 68–90.
6 James Alfred Ewing, An Engineer’s Outlook (London: Methuen, 1933), xiv.
7 E.I. Carlyle, “Ewing, Sir (James) Alfred (1855–1935)”, rev. W.H. Brock, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
8 Alfred Washington Ewing, The Man of Room 40: The Life of Sir Alfred Ewing (London: Hutchinson, 1936), 178.
9 Ewing, Engineer’s Outlook, xviii.
10 Room 40 charter quoted in Patrick Beesly, Room 40: British Naval Intelligence 1914–18 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1982), 16.
11 James Alfred Ewing, “Some Special War Work”, lecture, December 13, 1927, ed. David Kahn, Cryptologia 4 (1980): 194–203 and Cryptologia, 5 (1981): 5–12, at 4: 200–3. In a prefatory note, Kahn explained that he obtained the text from R.V. Jones, above. Jones said he obtained his copy from Ewing’s great-grandson, D.J. Wills: Jones, “Ewing”, 65.
12 Ernest R. May, The World War and American Isolation, 1914–1917 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 429; Jonathan R. Winkler, Nexus: Strategic Communications and American Security in World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 5–6; and David P. Nickles, Under the Wire: How the Telegraph Changed Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 151.
13 Ewing, “Some Special War Work,” 39; Andrew, Secret Service, 93, 247 (Andrew estimates that Ewing’s influence was on the wane after 1915).
14 Ewing, “Some Special War Work,” 37. On the basis of his analysis of the American press, one historian has gauged the impact of the Zimmermann Telegramme as ‘ephemeral’: Thomas Boghardt, The Zimmermann Telegram: Intelligence, Diplomacy, and American Entry into World War I (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2012), 180.
15 Hoy, 40 O.B., 27; Clarke quoted in Nigel West, Historical Dictionary of World War I Intelligence (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), 396.
16 Bernstorff quoted from an English translation by the Carnegie Endowment, Washington, D.C., in Ewing to Balfour, 16 January 1928, in GD433/2/20/2, National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh (henceforth, references to items in GD433/2/20/2 will be abbreviated to ‘NRS’). See also the acknowledgement of British intelligence’s role in decoding and publicizing the Zimmermann Telegramme in Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, My Three Years in America (New York, Scribner, 1920), 380–81.
17 A.G. Denniston, “The Government Code and Cypher School Between the Wars,” Intelligence and National Security 1 (January 1986), 54.
18 Filson Young, With the Battle Cruisers (London: Cassell, 1921), cited in Paul Gannon, Inside Room 40: The Codebreakers of World War I (Hersham: Ian Allan, 2010), 252.
19 John Ferris, “Whitehall’s Black Chamber: British Cryptology and the Government Code and Cypher School, 1919–29,” Intelligence and National Security 2 (January 1987), 57.
20 Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, 1911–1918 (New York: The Free Press, 2005 [1931]), 606.
21 Scotsman, November 7, 1925, cited in Ewing, Engineer’s Outlook, xxiii.
22 Ewing, “Some Special War Work,” 36; Burton J. Hendrick, The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, vol. 3 (London: Heinemann, 1922–1926), II, 214–15; Assistant Secretary of State Leland Harrison, letter to Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, May 22, 1922, in file ‘Page-Hendrick’, Records Kept by Leland Harrison, General Correspondence, Mexican to Propaganda, Box 7, RG 59, National Archives 2, Washington, D.C., USA; and Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, In Spies We Trust: The Story of Western Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 63; Boghardt, Zimmermann Telegram, 11.
23 Jules Witcover, Sabotage at Black Tom: Imperial Germany’s Secret War in America, 1914–1917 (Chapel Hill: Algonquin, 1989), 268; and Peter Freeman, “The Zimmermann Telegram Revisited: A Reconciliation of the Primary Sources,” Cryptologia 30 (2006): 109–10.
24 Jones, “Ewing,” 66–7.
25 Balfour, letter from his private London address to W. Addis Miller, secretary of the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution, December 1, 1927, reproduced in Jones, “Ewing,” 67–8. See also Miller to Balfour, November 25, 1927 and Ewing to Balfour, November 26, 1927, both in NRS.
26 Ewing, “Some Special War Work,” 36.
27 Ewing, “Some Special War Work,” 39. Hall claimed that Balfour had given him carte blanche to handle the Zimmermann Telegram: unpublished Reginald Hall autobiography, Draft D, Chapter 25, 22 (quoting Balfour memorandum of February 20, 1917), Papers of Admiral Sir Reginald Hall, Churchill College, Cambridge.
28 Andrew, Secret Service, 307.
29 Ewing, Engineer’s Outlook, 310.
30 On the dissolution of the State Department’s U-1, see Daniel T. Goggin and H. Stephen Helton, General Records of the Department of State (Washington, D.C.: National Archives: General Services Administration, 1963), 116–7.
31 Ewing, letter to Balfour, January 16, 1928 and Ewing, letter to the Secretary of the Admiralty, January 27, 1928, both in NRS.
32 Miller to Balfour, November 25, 1927, in NRS, and Jones, “Ewing,” Introduction by Jones, 67.
33 Ewing, “Some Special War Work,” 4, 195–6, 34; “War Work at the Admiralty,” Times, December 14, 1927, “Best Kept Secret of the War,” Aberdeen Press and Journal, December 14, 1927 (abbreviated text, page 7).
34 Ewing, handwritten letter to Balfour on foolscap (thus informal) paper bearing the University of Edinburgh logo, January 13, 1928, NRS. The section on the Naval Intelligence Division in The Navy List (London: HMSO) for October 1927 makes no mention of Mackeson, nor does he appear in the general index for October 1927, December 1927 or January 1928. But then, GCCS director Alastair Denniston does not appear, either. Perhaps this can be taken as one of the indications of the sensitivity of SIGINT work.
35 Admiralty circular, December 16, 1927, quoted in Freeman, “The Zimmermann Telegram Revisited,” 110, n23.
36 All quotations from a copy, in Ewing’s hand on university foolscap stationary, of a letter, O. Murray on behalf of the Admiralty to Ewing, December 21, 1927, NRS.
37 Clarke quoted in Gannon, Inside Room 40, 148.
38 Gannon, Inside Room 40, 252.
39 Ferris, “Whitehall’s Black Chamber,” 55.
40 Sinclair quoted in Moran, Classified, 63; Ferris, “Whitehall’s Black Chamber,” 60.
41 Completed in December 1944, the history found its way into print a full quarter-century after his death in 1961: Alastair G. Denniston, “The Government Code and Cipher School Between the Wars,” Intelligence and National Security 1 (January 1986): 48–70. It is reproduced in an appreciation by Denniston’s son: Robin Denniston, Thirty Secret Years: A.G. Denniston’s Work in Signals Intelligence, 1914–1944 (Clifton-upon-Teme: Polperro Heritage Press, 2007), 92–115.
42 Ferris, “Whitehall’s Black Chamber,” 55.
43 Andrew Webster, “Overview: British Signals intelligence and the London Naval Conference, 1930,” in R. Gerald Hughes, Peter Jackson, and Len Scott, eds. Exploring Intelligence Archives: Enquiries into the Secret State (London: Routledge, 2008), 41–3.
44 Herbert O. Yardley, The American Black Chamber (London: Faber and Faber, 1931); Walter LaFeber, The Clash: US-Japanese Relations Through History (New York: Norton, 1997), 170; Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, “H.O. Yardley: The Traitor as Hero,” in Cloak and Dollar: A History of American Secret Intelligence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 105, 110–12; and Christopher Moran, Company Confessions: Revealing CIA Secrets (London: Biteback, 2015), 37–8.
45 Harriette Floog, “The Arcos Raid and the Rupture of Anglo-Soviet Relations, 1927,” Journal of Contemporary History 12 (October 1977), 708.
46 Both quotations from Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London: Allen Lane, 2009), 155.
47 Floog, “Arcos Raid,” 721. For a collection of documents on ‘The ARCOS raid and the break in Anglo-Soviet relations, 1927’, viewable online courtesy of the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick, see https://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/library/mrc/explorefurther/digital/russia/arcos/ (accessed June 9, 2017).
48 Andrew, Defence of the Realm, 156.
49 David Kahn, The Reader of Gentlemen’s Mail: Herbert O. Yardley and the Birth of American Codebreaking (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 160.
50 Jeffreys-Jones, In Spies We Trust, 64.
51 Moran, Classified, 62–5.
52 Balfour quoted in Moran, Classified, 64.
53 Ewing to Balfour, January 16, 1928, NRS. Emphasis in the original.
54 Ewing to Balfour, January 13, 1928, NRS.
55 Julian S. Corbett, History of the Great War Based on Official Documents; Naval Operations, vol. 4, III (London: Longmans, 1923), 323–25.
56 A comparison might here be made with the claim by Bletchley Park codebreaker William Gordon Welchman that when Ultra-derived intelligence information was fed to the RAF during the Battle of Britain, there was no accompanying explanation that the data were reliable – again, because of an unwillingness to reveal the nature of the source: Welchman, The Hut Six Story: Breaking the Enigma Codes (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982), 280.
57 Balfour to John Jellicoe, who had been commander of the British Grand Fleet at the Battle of Jutland, quoted in Hines, “Sins of Omission and Commission: A Reassessment of the Role of Intelligence in the Battle of Jutland,” The Journal of Military History 7214 (October 2008): 1131.
58 Hines, “Sins,” 1117.
59 Jeffreys-Jones, In Spies We Trust, 56.
60 Balfour to Ewing, January 14, 1928. This form of defence would surface on future occasions – for example, when the journalist Duncan Campbell was charged under the Official Secrets Act following his disclosure of the existence of GCHQ in 1976, he produced a ‘proof of evidence’ indicating that others had already referred to Room 40’s successor. But as the details of the Ewing case remained under wraps, it could be said to have been less an instructive precedent than an episode within a behavioural continuum. See Duncan Campbell, ‘Proof of Evidence’ (compiled in 1978), shown to the author in the course of an interview, August 2, 2010. The Centre for Research Collections at the University of Edinburgh recently acquired the Duncan Campbell Papers.
61 Ewing to Secretary of the Admiralty, January 27, 1928, NRS.
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Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones
The author is an emeritus professor of history at the University of Edinburgh. His latest book is We Know All About You: The Story of Surveillance in Britain and America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently writing a book about the FBI’s exposure of the Nazi spy ring in 1938.