Coventry, Churchill and The Secret State

[Paul Mackin]

On Thu, 2003-05-15 at 05:21, Otto wrote:
> 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)


Thing of it was, however, information wasn't being allowed to flow back
to the Germans due to the fact that the  Churchill Tory/Labourite
government had taken in some cases quite radical steps to keep this from
happening.  The Ultra secret remained a secret not just until the end of
the war but for 30 years. While this might have constituted the
withholding of the right to know way beyond any "wartime necessity" it
was not secrecy for secrecies sake. Unless, that is, one takes as a mere
excuse that fact that thousands of Enigma machines captured after the
end of the war were used for many years by Britain's former colonies
that had gained independence.

I don't know  whether it's known if particular cities were compromised
during the Battle of Britain in order to protect the code-breaking
secret. What's important to remember is that at a certain point in 1940
it was realized that Germany was not going to win the Battle of Britain.
Their bombers were being shot down faster than they could produce
replacements.  The bigger concern was the possibility of Germany winning
the Battle of the Atlantic and shutting off contributions from America
vital to the survival of Britain. Bletchley Park had a big role to play
there.

P.
> 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
>