| http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/04/29/stinwenws02006.html
Britain used captured Nazi code squad to spy on Russia Nick Fielding TWO hundred of Germany's top codebreakers were secretly brought to Britain in the dying days of the second world war to operate against the Russians. For years they enabled Britain to read top secret Russian communications. In March 1945 six specially selected Anglo-American teams fanned out across Germany, homing in on German coding centres identified after cryptographers at Bletchley Park broke the Enigma code. The Target Intelligence Committee (Ticom) teams, whose existence is still surrounded in secrecy, were told to capture as much German coding equipment as possible. According to Body of Secrets, a new book by James Bamford about America's National Security Agency, one Ticom team was sent to a castle in Saxony to capture a Nazi foreign office signals intelligence archive. The entire establishment, including its staff, was sent to Britain after clearance at cabinet level. The Ticom team also seized a convoy of trucks containing four German Fish encoding machines, a signals technician, German drivers and a lieutenant in charge. They, too, were taken to England. Two months later, says Bamford, more German prisoners revealed that Germany had built a machine that broke the highest-level Russian cyphers. It was buried beneath cobblestones in front of a building in Rosenheim. The cobbles were pulled up and 7Å tons of equipment were recovered. "Over the next several days the dark grey equipment was carefully lifted from its crates and set up in the basement of the building," writes Bamford. "Then, like magic, high-level encrypted Russian communications, pulled from the ether, began spewing forth in readable, plain text." According to Bamford, the capture of the Russian codebreaking machine was the main reason why the British and American governments have never released details of Ticom operations. Nigel West, who has written extensively on codebreaking during the war, said that Ticom was a brilliant success: "For a while all Soviet military communications were an open book." The material seized in Germany also told the allies which of their own codes had been broken. The most important allied ciphers were not cracked. But the Germans did break the Combined Naval Cipher No 3 used by British and American convoys across the Atlantic, and this resulted in many casualties after it was passed to the U-boat fleets. Not only Russian codes became vulnerable: encrypted communications for at least 35 other countries, including France, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and Ireland, were also fully or partially readable. The breakthrough on Russian codes, however, did not last long. After three or four years every one of these cypher systems went "dark", according to a recent National Security Agency report. This was because William Weisband, an American linguist born in Egypt of Russian parents, is thought to have told the Russians what was happening. Weisband was never charged with spying, but he was jailed for a year during the McCarthy witch-hunts. Last night Donald Foster, the Liberal Democrat MP for Bath, who has tabled several questions about the Ticom teams, said the government should be more forthcoming. "Large quantities of this fascinating and important material are available, some of which is already being released in America," he said. "It seems bizarre that people in the UK are being denied the opportunity to see these historic records." Further evidence of the help given by senior Nazis to the allies after the war emerged last Friday in Washington with the release of 20 CIA files which revealed that the Americans had recruited and protected many former officers, including some convicted of war crimes. They showed, for example, that Klaus Barbie, the "butcher of Lyons", and members of the Gehlen Organisation, a group of German intelligence officers opposed to the Soviet Union, had received funding and support from the US government. The collaboration was mainly with middle-ranking Nazis, including an SS officer who hunted Jews in Genoa, an emissary in Rome wanted for a 1944 massacre, a Nazi intelligence officer "well versed" in the deportation of Jews to Auschwitz, and the "intellectual leader" of an SS think tankwanted for war crimes. More files are expected to be released in the next few weeks. Body of Secrets: How America's National Security Agency has Achieved Global Reach, by James Bamford, is to be published by Doubleday on May 17, £20. |
