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By Michael Smith

When the British army commandeered Bletchley Park in 1939 nobody may have guessed that by way of 1945 its inmates might have contributed decisively to the Allied conflict effort.

A melting pot of Oxbridge dons and maverick oddballs labored evening and day at Station X to decode the Enigma cypher utilized by the Germans for high-level communications. That they succeeded, altering the process the conflict, is testomony to an indomitable spirit that wrenched British intelligence into the fashionable age, as international battle II segued into the chilly War.

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Additional info for The Secrets of Station X: The Fight to Break the Enigma Cypher

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Like many other recruits, I had heard of the job through a personal introduction – advertisement of posts was at that time unthinkable. In my case introduction came through the family of the novelist Charles Morgan, whose father Sir Charles Morgan of the Southern Railway was an old friend and chief of my father. I was one year down from University of London King’s College with a first in Russian and had found nothing better to do than teach at a preparatory school at Margate. My father was bewailing this at tea with the Morgans one day, and one of Charles’s sisters remarked that she had a friend called Sybil Pugh who worked at a place in Queens Gate where Russian linguists were actually wanted.

She was fluent in French, German and Flemish and was working at the Foreign Office. When Denniston asked for a new typist, she found herself sent across to Broadway. ‘I was posted over there for a week not knowing what I was doing and told that it was strict secrecy,’ she said. ‘I was there for a week and they apparently approved of me because I was kept on and I stayed there. Life was very civilised in those days, you know, we stopped for tea and it was brought in by messengers. I was very impressed by this, first job I’d ever had and it seemed paradise to me.

They included documents on how to use the machine as well as photographs showing the Stecker system and how it worked, Cooper recalled. They also suggested that the French were not working alone. They had not disclosed that they had other signals intelligence partners. But a Scarlet Pimpernel on the German Air Force Safety Service traffic had obviously been produced from material intercepted not in France but on the far side of the Reich. It gave data on stations in eastern Germany that were inaudible from Cheadle, but was weak on stations in the north-west that we knew well.

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