Free The Secrets of Station X by Michael Smith

formation of the Wehrmacht in March 1935, it was clearly passing traffic between a number of ground stations. The British military intelligence section that controlled the Army Y station at Chatham, MI8, ruled that since the messages were between land-based stations they must be military rather than air force and therefore the responsibility of Army intercept operators rather than RAF operators. But once the codebreakers managed to crack it they soon discovered it was being used to encypher communications between various Luftwaffe headquarters.
    Since the end of 1938, the Red Enigma traffic had been the Army’s main priority. It came as something of a shock to MI8 to discover that for more than a year it had been funding an expensive operation which should have been carried out by the RAF. But trying to persuade Air Ministry that it should be intercepted by the RAF site at Cheadle rather than by Army operators at Chatham was a difficult task and Group Captain Lyster Blandy, who was in charge of the RAF interceptoperation, but unaware of the potential importance of the Enigma traffic, refused to allow his men to take encyphered messages, Cooper recalled. ‘Even after Enigma had begun to be read, early in 1940, when I suggested to Blandy that Air Ministry ought to take a hand in intercepting it, he replied: “My Y Service exists to produce intelligence, not to provide stuff for people at Bletchley to fool about with”.’ The Army was equally adamant that its men should not be tied up with intercepting Luftwaffe traffic and the row continued for several months at the beginning of 1940.
    The RAF eventually decided to allocate twenty sets to the Red traffic but this was not enough to provide sufficient messages and the operators at Cheadle did not have the same appreciation of the level of accuracy that was required in taking down the five-letter Enigma traffic. As a result, Chatham had to continue taking it as well.
    A section which could liaise with Chatham, Cheadle and the other intercept sites taking German Army or Luftwaffe messages was set up in Hut 6 with Travis ringing round the top London banks and begging them to loan him their brightest young men to coordinate between the academics who broke the cyphers and the service Y stations. This liaison section, known as Bletchley Park Control, was to be manned twenty-four hours a day and to stay in constant touch with the intercept sites to ensure that their coverage of radio frequencies and networks was coordinated and that as little as possible was missed. Where an important station was difficult to hear, it was to be ‘double-banked’, taken by two different stations so that the chances of picking up a false letter that might throw a spanner into the works were cut down and that the material that came to Hut 6 could be worked on with some degree of confidence by the Hut 6 codebreakers.
    â€˜We were told what we would cover and that came from Station X, the intercept control there would tell us what to cover that day with what priority,’ Joan Nicholls recalled.
    They would tell us if they wanted them double-banked, twopeople to take them, or if one good quality operator would be sufficient. We didn’t know that Station X was Bletchley Park. We never knew where it was. You were only told what you needed to know and we just needed to know that Station X was controlling what we actually monitored.
    Many of the messages themselves arrived from the outstations by motorcycle courier. But Traffic Registers giving the preambles and first six groups of the messages intercepted by the outstations were sent by teleprinter to the Hut 6 Registration Room. Here a number of female graduates recruited by Milner-Barry from Newnham College, where his sister had been vice-principal , tried to establish the specific Enigma cypher in use from the preambles, carefully examining them to see if there was any intelligence that could be garnered before the