Coventry, Churchill and The Secret State

[Otto]

Good post, interesting questions.
I'm currently reading Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon":

"Information flows from Germany to us, through the Ultra system at Bletchley
Park. That information comes to us as seemingly random Morse code
transmissions on the wireless. But because we have very bright people who
can discover order in what is seemingly random, we can extract information
that is crucial to our endeavors. Now, the Germans have not broken our
important cyphers. But they can observe our actions--the routing of our
convoys in the North Atlantic, the deployment of our air forces. If the
convoys always avoid the U-boats, if the air forces always go straight to
the German convoys, then it is clear to the Germans--I'm speaking of a very
bright sort of German here, a German of the professor type--that there is
not randomness here. This German can find correlations. He can see that we
know more than we should. In other words, there is a certain point at which
information begins to flow from us back to the Germans."
(Londinium)

Otto

----- Original Message -----
From: Bandwraith at aol.com
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Thursday, May 15, 2003 12:01 AM
Subject: Coventry, Churchill and The Secret State


One point the foreword makes very clearl is that it is
not possible to decide whether a given ruling junta is,
or is not, fascistic during a time of war. Re-examination
during a time of relative peace is required, apparently,
in order to see if the rulers are "subordinating civil
liberites" beyond any possible "wartime necessity,"
self-defined or not. The advent of the cold war, which we
now know began well before the end of WWII, certainly
problematized the ability to discriminate between actions
undertaken in the name of national security, and, what
might properly be called fascistic behaviour.

It is probabaly apochryphal that Churchill sacrificed the
city of Coventry in order to keep the goings-on at
Bletcthley Park secret. Those facts which have been
made available suggest that he knew, thanks to Turing,
et. al., but with insuffiecent time to do anything more
than to tip the Nazis off to the fact that Enigma had been
broken, and that he knew beforehand about the horrific
bombing to come.  Alas, if it could be shown that Churchill
knew and had enough time to warn the people of Coventry,
at the very least, it would provide insight into his priorities,
but such evidence might not be necessary to confirm the
presence of a "fascistic disposition" beginning to manifest
itself among the ruling elite of that time- especially when
confronted with the enormous power that the new industry
of mechanized intelligence was beginning to generate for
those "in the know."

By the time that Bletchley Park and the ULTRA team were
hitting their stride- according to a docu-history cobbled
together for PBS (not much shabbier than the NY Times
these days...)- Turing's "Brain" and associated Bletchley
efforts were sucking up about 1/5 of the entire output of
the British grid. 8000 day/night workers- mostly young women,
prized for their ability to accurately perform huge amounts
of arithmetical calculations, much like their Mahattan Project
counterparts in the U.S.- were being transported round the
clock to and from their then primitive workstations, in order to
keep the data flowing to Churchill and Co. Secrecy had never
been maintained on such a scale. Whole new areas of
governmental organization were developed, not just to manage
this new concept of mechanized information processing, but,
to control its flow, and, most importantly, to ensure its secrecy.

Secrecy for secrecy's sake.

The whole affair was entirely analogous to The Manhattan Project.
If America was developing the A-bomb, England was developing
the "I-bomb" or, information processing equivalent. The common
denominator was the birth, growth and evolution of the modern
Secret State, based on high speed communications, digital
processing and unaccountability.

After the Battle of Britain had been won, all eyes were on the Soviet
Union. The people in charge of the people in charge at both
Los Alamos and Bletchley Park were at least as preoccupied by
the threat presented by the Red Army, as by the Axis Powers, whose
fate, by that time, was inevitable. Although, neither the Nazis, nor the
Red Army, were aware of that.

At Los Alamos, there were people who- not unlike Orwell- were
concerned that the new power vouchsafed upon the U.S. Govt.
by the developement of the A-bomb would lead to an unparalled
fascism, and they took steps which they deemed necessary to
prevent that. Their behaviour, to say the least, was felt to be unseemly
by the powers that be. And while the USSR would have developed
nuclear weapons anyway, such subversives only served to lend
support to what was already becoming a self-sustaining need to
maintain a State of Secrecy.

Orwell may or may not have known about Bletchley Park, certainly
he knew about the Manhattan Project after Hiroshima. But even if
he didn't know pecisely about BP, he was certainly aware of the
increasing size and importance of the Secret State and could feel
its increasing need to control information.

respectfully