Bletchley Park : Gordon Welchman
 

For those Members interested the recent BBC2 Programme 'Bletchley Park: Code-breaking's Forgotten Genius' is really worth watching.

BBC iPlayer - Bletchley Park: Code-breaking's Forgotten Genius

The documentary covers Gordon Welchman's ground breaking work alongside Alan Turing in the development of 'Traffic Analysis' during WWII and his continued work during the Cold War.

Best ...

Coff.

How can anyone call him 'forgotten' ... You might call it an insult to the man.

Welchman's "Hut Six Story" is one of the best known of the earlier books on the subject. The bound volume that i have is from 1982. In my view he is one of the better known.

Hodges' great book on Turing came out in 1983.

Unknown to the general public would perhaps be a better description.

Saw it last night on BBC2. Fascinating insight into the "bad boy" of Bletchley.

You could have at least spelt his name properly coughman!

S-D

:ok: Yes S-D ... Just tried to fix ... Only a mod can correct the main title line :(



PS. Thanks to the mod who corrected my spelling mistake in the main title line :)

He certainly shared with Turing the respect of others in "the trade". He also shared with him the dubious honour of being hounded and persecuted by the post war establishment. Not perhaps to the extent that Turing was driven to take his life, but nonetheless getting a despicable letter disowning and dishonouring him by the head of GCHQ, and being ostracised from the Intelligence community.

He was essentially a whistle-blower, claiming that we were making exactly the same mistakes that the Germans had made in the war, hence compromising our security.

Bad boy or patriot? Either way it still doesn't pay to blow whistles.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

He also provided the concept for JTIDS (TDMA) while he was at Mitre in 1967..

The problems at the end lay, it would seem, in a combination of the genius of his early years coming into conflict with the principles and possibly naivety of his later years. His war work was so far ahead of its time that the techniques he developed were still in use in the 1970s and 80s - and I believe derivatives of Enigma were still being used, including by the US and Russia. However, by this stage, he was out of the spying business and had no knowledge of what was going on, so to unilaterally go public did create a bit of a problem for the authorities who were still reliant on his techniques - as Sir John Scarlett described.

Could things have been handled differently, more discreetly - by both sides? Probably. If he genuinely believed that the same mistakes that cost the Germans dear in the 1940s were being repeated in later years, there were probably better ways to flag that up in the first instance than in a book freely available to all, including our enemies at the time.

Melchett ...

I think your summary and conclusion is spot on.

Coff.

Melchett01:-
I'm sure that you are right, but then it takes two to Tango as they say. He was indeed outside the UK Intelligence fraternity then, but he was in MITRE (until they pulled his Security Clearance). It was presumably what he learned there re Network Analysis that convinced him that the West was adapting the same complacent/arrogant assuredness of its invulnerability that so characterised the German weaknesses.

Would they want to know that? Probably not. Did he try to tell them? Probably. Did they instead shoot the messenger? Almost certainly. Did that drive him to publish and be damned? Possibly. We'll never know I guess, but it's a well trodden path with plenty of footfall to this very day.

Chugalug2

You are of course correct and many whistleblowers do so only once they feel they have run out of road elsewhere. Part of the weakness of Enigma lay in the fact that whilst the Germans had very good technical knowledge that allowed them to develop the kit in the first place, their crypt-analysis wasn't up to the same standard as either their technical capabilities or the capabilities of Allied crypt-analysts; as a result, they never fully understood the weaknesses of their own systems right to the very end of the war, thus enabling its exploitation.

Now that said, I think there are some instances, probably including this one that a whistleblower has to either circumvent the blockage in the chain of command or simply sit on their hands if they genuinely believe there to be a major operational weakness. If you do nothing publically, there is always the chance that the enemy hasn't yet worked things out for themselves and you buy yourself a bit more time. But by going public, all you are doing is guaranteeing that the enemy now knows your gaps and weaknesses.

With the luxury of hindsight, and had he not done so already, might it have been worth a letter direct to the Chairman of the JIC or even the PM's office if he felt so strongly rather than going public? At that point, with his reputation still intact, a man of his calibre would still have the credibility to make such senior people take note.

Even if you have no interest in WW2 or codebreaking, the whole Welchman case makes for an interesting discussion on the relationship between operational security, ethics, courage and values and would, I think, be an interesting case study at the likes of IOT and the various Staff Colleges.

Melchett ...

Interestingly that's exactly what he did during WWII by writing direct to Chruchill to secure additional resources for his work ... which he got.

Only at the weekends dear boy :ok:

Coughman and Melchette!

Don't you just love it.

As for Alan Touring ...............

He probably misunderstood the question re location on your listing Melchett. :E

CS:-
The difference being of course that Churchill was in charge of the conduct of a very hot war and required "Action This Day". Post war/Cold War and you are back to briefings, where Ministers, even Prime Ministers, are advised by the very people that you are blowing the whistle on! We sat on our hands re the Cambridge set, and a lot of good people died!

Very few are involved in Sigint, fewer are prepared to admit it and an even smaller number write about it. It is not easy to understand the nuances of this shadowy world as so little is available. A book that may help cast some light on what is involved is:

The Silent Listener by D.J. Thorp ISBN 978 0 7524 7739 8

YS

Melchett ... Well that was fun ... Sorry old Chap ;)

LB ... Are you trying to rain on our parade :}

Chugalug ... Yep agree with that :ok:

I wasn't blown away with it. Annoys me when they referred to the breaking of "codes" all through the program, when in fact they should say cipher. A cipher is the substituting of letters with another by using an algorithm, hence they can be cracked. A code is a a letter or word being substituted by another from a code book. Unless the enemy has the code book, it can't be cracked. A simple example, the code word for Berlin is "donkey". If a German agent, listening outside the open window of "Bomber" Harris's office, heard him say on the phone, "The target tonight is donkey", no computer anywhere would "crack" that donkey meant Berlin.

Also, it referred to the Bismark as a battle cruiser when it was a battleship. Additionally it said the Hood was Britain's most modern ship, when in fact it was already obsolescent by the time the war started.