Intelligence and National Security

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How I came to write The Hut Six Story

Gordon Welchman

To cite this article: Gordon Welchman (2017): How I came to write The Hut Six Story, Intelligence
and National Security, DOI: 10.1080/02684527.2017.1303222

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Published online: 22 Mar 2017.

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 Intelligence and National Security, 2017
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02684527.2017.1303222

FROM THE INTELLIGENCE ARCHIVE

How I came to write The Hut Six Story

Gordon Welchman
Edited with an introduction by Joel Greenberg

ABSTRACT
Gordon Welchman was a Cambridge mathematician and one of the key
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figures working at Bletchley Park (BP) during World War Two. In 1974, he
decided to write his own memoir following the publication of other books
on the subject. His book ‘The Hut Six Story’ was published in both the US
and UK in early 1982 and was the first to include technical details about the
BP operation. Pressure on his publishers from the NSA and GCHQ ultimately
resulted in the book being withdrawn from their lists. On 14 May 1982, he
wrote this previously unpublished paper, explaining his motives.

Introduction
Gordon Welchman was a key member of the team at Bletchley Park (BP) that successfully read millions of
encrypted military, diplomatic and commercial communications sent by the Axis powers during World War
Two. Along with Alan Turing, Welchman developed a completely new production-orientated approach to
machine cryptanalysis. After drawing up an organization plan to exploit this new approach, he was tasked
with heading up the team that worked on German Army and Air Force signals. His team was called Hut 6
after the wooden building that they occupied at Bletchley Park from late January, 1940 until February 1943.
Welchman’s early life, his work during World War Two and his career afterwards is described in my biog-
raphy of him published in 2014.1 During the course of my research I discovered numerous documents that
had been stored, at Welchman’s request, by several of his children in 1985. A previous INS paper2 describes
this in detail as well as Welchman’s own account of how his life and ultimate fate contrasted to that of his
BP colleague, Alan Turing. The previous paper also describes the origins of Welchman’s own memoir of his
work at BP as well as some of his post-war work. The memoir included a final section which warned of the
flaws in the communication systems used by NORAD3 and the threat to NATO4 posed by the conventional
forces of the Warsaw Pact countries. As Welchman said:
I am convinced that our tactical communications constitute a glaring gap in our national defences. In our craze for
technological achievement in weapons systems we have put the cart before the horse.5
Several authors have written about Welchman’s motivation for writing ‘The Hut Six Story’ as well as the
reasons for his heavy-handed treatment by both GCHQ and the NSA.6 My biography of Welchman also con-
siders these issues. It is likely that the intelligence agencies had two main concerns with Welchman’s book.
Firstly, Winterbotham and other authors7 had little knowledge of the technical details behind BP’s success.
So they had simply attributed it to BP’s ability to break German encryption machines such as Enigma. The
intelligence agencies seemed happy with this but Welchman offered a different explanation for the success
against the Enigma machine which he described as a ‘comedy of errors’8:

CONTACT  Joel Greenberg  joelmg6@gmail.com

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 2    J. GREENBERG

The German errors were of several kinds. They stemmed from not exploring the theory of the Enigma cipher machine
in sufficient depth; from weaknesses in machine operating procedures, message-handling procedures, and radio
net procedures; and above all from failure to monitor all procedures. In their planning they failed to make proper
use of history, and they failed to recognize new characteristics that had no historical precedent. Looking back, it is
amazing that so much could hang on such slender threads.
In other words, Welchman was saying that the vulnerability of an encryption system like Enigma lay not
with the system itself but with the people responsible for its deployment.
The second reason for concern lay with Welchman’s assertion that no tactical communication system is
safe from a concentrated attack against it, particularly a state sponsored one. Given assertions about Russian
government sponsored cyber attacks against the US which may have influenced the 2016 US Presidential elec-
tion, Welchman’s foresight in 1982 was remarkable and must have alarmed intelligence agencies at the time.
Finally, Welchman had personal reasons for telling his story as he wrote one evening in 19759:
Another facet of the Bletchley story that has been in my mind all these years is the fact that we drafted a lot of
young men into the game. Many of them pleaded to be allowed to take an active part in the war, for instance as
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RAF pilots. But their knowledge of what was happening at Bletchley made this impossible. I have been haunted by
one particular young man who was recruited for Bletchley because of his ability, and was doing a magnificent job.
He received a vile letter from his former headmaster, implying that he was a disgrace to his school!

It is now possible to give Gordon Welchman the final word on this matter. One of the documents that I discov-
ered amongst the Welchman material was a paper written by him and dated 14 May 1942. Here, published
for the first time, is Welchman’s own account of why he wrote ‘The Hut Six Story’.
Joel Greenberg

World War Two started in September 1939. During the first year I studied the radio communications
system of the German army and air force and built up the organization known as Hut Six, that succeeded
in breaking their Enigma traffic from early 1940 to the end of the war in 1945.10 From 1943 to 1945 I was
Bletchley Park’s Assistant Director for Mechanization. In this position, one of my functions was to keep
an eye on the security aspects of new technological developments in British military communications.
I was very unhappy about trends in military thinking on communications methodology that were
beginning to appear. But, after the end of the war, I soon became heavily involved in other activities
and thought no more about military communications until I joined the MITRE Corporation in 1962. By
that time I had become a U.S. citizen, having emigrated to this country in 1948.
My first assignment in MITRE brought me back to military communications. By 1966 I was convinced
that U.S. tactical communications capabilities were unsuited to the types of limited war that were then
being studied. The trends that worried me in 1945 had continued. I started to study military history
and forward-looking writings of military scientists to determine the military considerations that should
underlie the design and development of tactical communications capabilities. By summer 1968 I was
able to set out tentative ideas for a general-purpose battlefield communications system using advanced
technology that was not available to the Germans in World War Two. Much of my thinking was based
on the good features of the German system, involving mobile interlocking radio nets, of which our
planners of the 1960s seemed totally unaware. I wished that I could use historical examples from my
World War Two experience to prove my points. But I felt at that time that discussion of anything related
to Hut Six had to be avoided.
However, as a result of my wartime experience, I felt very strongly that methods of obtaining cryp-
tographic security must be included in the early stages of system design. So I wrote a guarded statement
of my ideas on how security could be obtained. This statement was classified.
Here I had a problem. What I really had in mind could well prove close to a cryptographic system that
would actually be used, in which case it might be highly sensitive. Furthermore, several years earlier
the U.S. Air Force had taken out a patent for an idea of mine related to radar reconnaissance, and it was
impressed on me that all patentable ideas arising from work on USAF contracts must be reported, so
that the U.S. Air Force can protect itself from possible claims by others who might have the same idea.
 INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY   3

To deal with this responsibility for patent disclosure in the cryptographic field, I made contact with
a USAF patent lawyer who put me in touch with a crypto-security man at Hanscom Air Force Base.11 I
explained my ideas and was told that similar methodology had already been considered and that the
necessary patents had already been taken out. Incidentally, the competence of this officer made me
feel that the security aspects of our tactical communications were being well looked after.
After summer 1968 I continued my studies of military considerations that should underlie the con-
cepts and methodology of our tactical communications systems. By 1970 I had written a 200-page
document entitled ‘A Concept of Selective Access to Tactical Information’. This document contained no
mention of my ideas on cryptographic matters, was unclassified, and was approved for public release.
I retired from MITRE in June 1971, but was retained without a break as a consultant with a contract
for a maximum of 540 h in a year. My attention was switched from tactical communications to studies
of the Soviet threat in Europe. I started to use unclassified sources, such as the publication of the Royal
United Services Institute and the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and accounts by German
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generals of their World War Two operations against the Russians.

Then, in summer 1974, when I was on vacation in England, Winterbotham’s ‘The Ultra Secret’ was
announced.12 At last it seemed that I could take full advantage of my wartime experience in my work
for MITRE on U.S. military problems. But it did not prove to be as simple as that.
My first reaction was to contact two wartime associates, Stuart Milner-Barry and Peter Calvocoressi,
suggesting that we collaborate in a three-author book. I would write about my contribution in the first
year of the war and the German errors that made our success possible. Stuart would write about how the
increasingly numerous Enigma keys13 were broken by his Hut Six Watch with the help of the bombes14
that began to arrive late in 1940. Peter would write about how decoded messages were handled by
the Intelligence Watch in Hut Three.
I went ahead and, purely from my own memory, produced a draft for my part of the book by summer
1975. Stuart and Peter, however, were stymied. They could not write their parts without access to records,
which was denied. So the idea of a three-author book had to be abandoned. I was to go on alone.
It should be noted that Stuart and Peter were concerned with writing about their wartime experi-
ences. Of the three of us, I was the only one currently involved in military planning and concerned with
the relevance to today’s problems of my wartime experience.
A little later, on another vacation trip to England, I met the head of British Government Communications
Headquarters (GCHQ) in his London Office and asked him15 when I would be free to use the Hut Six
experience in my work for the U.S. military establishment. He told me why GCHQ could not yet agree
to the revelation of my knowledge, particularly of the bombe, but said that in three or four years I
would be able to go ahead. I have no written record of this conversation, but I feel quite certain that
my memory is correct.
Soon after publication of Winterbotham’s ‘The Ultra Secret’ I was greatly impressed by revelations of
clandestine activities in Masterman’s ‘The Double Cross System’, David Kahn’s ‘The Codebreakers’, Cave
Brown’s ‘Bodyguard of Lies’, and William Stevenson’s ‘A Man Called Intrepid’.16 I was also doing a lot of
reading about World War Two in connection with MITRE studies of the Soviet threat in Europe. I became
very struck by the extreme importance of the ‘Combined Arms’ approach to military operations, and
realized that this approach must be broadened to include many forms of clandestine activity, including
cryptology. Because today’s problems are so much more complex than those of World War Two, it is
even more essential to achieve the kind of interdisciplinary cooperation on which the success of Hut
Six and the exploitation of Hut Six Ultra Intelligence17 depended. More and more I felt that my unique
knowledge of the real reasons for the German failure and our success over Enigma contains important
lessons for today. Believing that I would soon be allowed to tell my story, I went on writing my book,
putting more and more emphasis on lessons for today. But I was careful to warn the few people who
saw my proofs that I had not yet obtained permission from GCHQ to reveal some of the details of Hut
Six operations.
In October 1976 I joined a MITRE project that was handling the development of the revolutionary
Joint Tactical Information Distribution System (JTIDS).18 For a time my principal tasks were to study how
 4    J. GREENBERG

the capabilities of JTIDS could be applied in the initial phase of a conventional Warsaw Pact attack on
West Germany. I helped to develop a realistic worst-case scenario of enemy air operations that could be
used to test the adequacy of JTIDS information-handling capacity and concepts of net management.
In March 1978, however, I was asked to take a look at the security measures that were being developed
for JTIDS with the idea that my wartime experience might be of value.
I was seriously disturbed by what I found, and became even more convinced that details of my Hut
Six Story could be extremely valuable to the people in whom the security of our tactical communications
will depend. But I could not produce convincing arguments without revealing the historical evidence
on which they were based.
In November 1979 my consulting work was switched again; this time to a project concerned with
a new technology-orientated system aimed at helping combat commanders to detect and attack the
most profitable targets in and around the battle zone. Again, though very impressed by the ability of
my colleagues, I was disturbed by failure to take advantage of historical evidence and to recognize
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the extreme importance of what I have come to think of as The Three Cs; namely, COMMUNICATION,
COLLABORATION, and COORDINATION.
While looking into JTIDS security measures, I had been seriously worried by the lack of communication
between the different fields of expertise that should have been collaborating in the planning stage in
order to achieve coordination in the later phases of development and exploitation. I do not question the
specialized technical ability of NSA’s cryptological experts, of whose work I have no knowledge whatever.
I have learned, however, that, in the procurement of new military systems for use on battlefields of the
future, the importance of tactical communications is often underestimated and that communications
security, if considered at all, is only tackled as an afterthought, when system design is pretty well frozen.
In fact the vital importance of NSA’s contribution to system development is not widely recognized by the
military procurement people, let alone by politicians and the general public. This situation, if allowed
to persist, could be extremely dangerous for our future national security.
Even if proper communication and cooperation could be established between all of the fields of
expertise that should be involved in military planning systems, the current concerns of NSA, of which I
personally have no knowledge, would no doubt be far too sensitive for discussion outside a highly secre-
tive community. On the other hand it seemed to me that the importance of having NSA cryptological
experts in the picture from the outset could be brought to the attention of our military establishment
by the use of relevant historical episodes. It seemed, also, that I had a very special dual responsibility
in that at the age of 74, I was the only person alive with inside knowledge of a very telling episode in
cryptological history,19 and I was also in touch with military problems of today.
In my book I was trying to establish three important themes. First, that the German failure was largely
due to the isolation of the designers of the machine from the many people who would be involved in
its use. Second, that the British success was largely due to excellent communication, collaboration and
cooperation among the many specialized activities that were involved. Third, that for the security and
survival of our military capabilities in war, we must adopt a true ‘combined arms’ approach that extends
to many clandestine activities as well as to all branches of the military services.
As I thought about these matters, I went on refining what I had to say about today’s problems and
became more and more convinced that the publication of my book was important for the future of
our national security. At the time, and indeed until mid-April 1982, I believed that the only obstacle
was GCHQ in London. I felt confident that, if the whole book could be presented to a number of influ-
ential people in the British military world, as well as to GCHQ, the majority opinion would be in favour
of publication, but I didn’t know whom to approach. I thought of making contact with a top-level
communications man in the Ministry of Defence, whom I had met at MITRE when he was setting up a
cooperative arrangement with the JTIDs project. He had been in the desert campaigns, and it was he
who told me about the failure of British tank radios and general lack of coordination that contributed
to Rommel’s initial success. I felt sure that he would give strong support, but I found that he had retired.
In the end I had to make the decision myself. I believed, wrongly as it turns out, that the ideas that
occurred to me in England during the first months of the war could not possible be regarded as classified
 INTELLIGENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY   5

information in the United States. It was a choice, therefore, between doing something that seemed
important for our future national security or submitting to the possibility of a veto by the British GCHQ,
veto that in the view of former head of that organization, would have ceased to be valid several years
earlier. It seemed quite clear that, as a U.S. citizen, the future security of my country must come first.
So, late in 1980, I decided to go ahead with publication.
The flaw in my reasoning was that until mid-April 1982, after the book had been published, I was
not aware of an international agreement concerning cryptology set out in a document known as 18
USCS #798. When I joined MITRE in 1962 I signed a statement to the effect that I had been given an
‘Initial Security Briefing’. I feel quite certain, however, that this briefing did not include any mention of
18 USCS #798. Indeed there was no reason for telling me about this document then, or at any later date,
because my work for MITRE has never required a special clearance for cryptological matters. Thus, when
I made my decision, I did not know that in the field of cryptography information regarded as classified
in England would automatically be regarded as classified in the United States.
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The writing of my book was entirely my own enterprise, done at my home and in my own time.
Because of the potential value of the book to MITRE personnel working on military projects, the
President, Bob Everett, provided editorial and word processing support. I showed my drafts to a few
key people in MITRE to get their comments and to make quite sure that I was not saying anything about
MITRE activities that should not be made public.
The book, I hope, is not quite the end of my work on matters of national security.20 In it, I have not
spelled out some of my deepest concerns because they are related to information that is very properly
classified SECRET. Now that the book has been published, I would like to do a little writing about spe-
cific ways in which it can be of value to people at MITRE and elsewhere who are working on military
advanced planning. Such writing, however, is likely to involve information and ideas that should be
classified. Some of it may need to be submitted to NSA for approval. Secrecy over what we are planning
to do in the future can be of great importance.
The Hut Six Story shows that the Germans tried hard to conceal the details of the military version of
their Enigma and of their procedures. If we had not known both at the outbreak of the war, we might
never have established our ability to break their traffic. For the Germans also introduced a series of
modifications as the war went on. This bit of history, revealed and discussed in my book, strongly
suggests that our technological plans for the future may deserve far more protection than secrets of
the distant past. Regrettably we tend to be so excited about our new technological ideas that we give
them away in open literature.

Notes
1. Greenberg, Gordon Welchman.
2. Welchman, Ultra Revisited.
3. North American Air Defense Command.
4. North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
5. Welchman, The Hut Six Story, 197.
6. Hooper, Official Secrets; West, The Secret Intelligence War 1900–86. West’s book was republished several years later
with the new title: The Sigint Secrets.
7. Cave Brown, Bodyguard of Lies; Lewin, Ultra Goes to War.
8. Welchman, The Hut Six Story, 163.
9. Greenberg, Gordon Welchman, 138.
10. In October 1939, Welchman drew up a comprehensive plan calling for the close coordination of radio interception,
analysis of the intercepted traffic, breaking Enigma keys, decrypting messages on the broken keys and extracting
intelligence from the decrypts. He presented the plan to Commander Edward Travis, the Deputy Head of GC&CS
who immediately saw the urgent need to act on it. On 18 November, the instructions were sent in a memo to
Commander Alastair Denniston, the Head of GC&CS to set up a new Production Section as described in Welchman’s
plan. TNA, HW 14/2, HW14/22. The Production Section became known as Hut 6 and Welchman was asked to be
its head. Welchman would say later in life that his proposal to Travis was probably his greatest contribution to the
war effort and many historians would agree with him.
 6    J. GREENBERG

11. After World War Two, Hanscom became the US Air Force’s centre for the development and acquisition of electronic
systems. It worked closely with MIT to develop a new air defence system for the US, something Welchman was
involved in through his work for MITRE.
12. Winterbotham’s book was previewed along with lengthy extracts in the Sunday Telegraph on 21 and 28 July 1974.
13. The daily setting of the Enigma machine was known as the ‘daily key’ at BP.
14. The bombe was an electromechanical machine, designed by Alan Turing and Welchman. It worked out part of
the daily key. The machines were built by the British Tabulating Machine Company at their factory in the town of
Letchworth, about 30 miles from BP. By the end of the war, some 211 machines had been built.
15. Welchman met with his former BP colleague, Sir Leonard (Joe) Hooper.
16. See References section.
17. Ultra was the name given to intelligence which was produced at BP and sent to the various Service Ministries.
18. JTIDS is a fully operational command and control system, providing information, distribution, position, location
and identification capabilities for the US Air Force, Army, Navy, Marine Corps and British, French and NATO forces.
Its elegant system design allows for future expansion and adaption and has proved to stand the test of time.
19. Welchman was not the only person alive with insider knowledge of the Hut 6 operation in 1980 when he wrote
this paper. However, none would have had his breadth of knowledge of so many aspects of the BP operation.
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20. Regrettably, the publication of ‘The Hut Six Story’ led to Welchman’s security clearance at MITRE being withdrawn
and the end of his career in matters of national security.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Joel Greenberg is a writer whose current research focuses on the evolution of signals intelligence from its beginnings
in the early days of World War One through to the end of World War Two. He is the author of a biography of Gordon
Welchman, one of Bletchley Park’s key figures throughout World War Two. His book is the basis of a joint BBC/Smithsonian
Network 2015 documentary about Welchman – The Forgotten Genius of Bletchley Park. He has just completed the
authorized biography of Alastair Denniston, the first Head of GCHQ which will be out in July 2017.

References
Calvocoressi, Peter. Top Secret Ultra. New York: Ballantine Books, 1981. (first published in 1980).
Cave Brown, Anthony. Bodyguard of Lies. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.
Hinsley, F. H., and Alan Stripp. Codebreakers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Hooper, David. Official Secrets. London: Martin Secker & Warburg Limited, 1987.
Greenberg, Joel, and Gordon Welchman. Bletchley Park’s Architect of Ultra Intelligence. London: Pen & Sword, 2014.
Kahn, David. The Codebreakers. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968.
Lewin, Ronald. Ultra Goes to War, The Secret Story. London: Hutchison, 1978.
Masterman, J. C. The Double-cross System: The Incredible True Story of How Nazi Spies Were Turned into Double Agents. London:
The Lyon Press, 2000.
Stevenson, William. A Man Called Intrepid: The Secret War. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976.
Welchman, Gordon. The Hut Six Story, Breaking the Enigma Codes. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1982.
Welchman, Gordon. “From Polish Bomba to British Bombe: The Birth of Ultra.” Intelligence and National Security 1, no. 1
(1986): 71–110. doi:10.1080/02684528608431842 [Taylor & Francis Online].
Welchman, Gordon, Harry Hinsley, and Edward Crankshaw. 1944. A Note on the Future of GC&CS. TNA HW 3/169, 17 September.
Welchman, Gordon. “Ultra Revisited, A Tale of Two Contributors.” Intelligence and National Security 3, no. 2 (2017): 244–255.
doi:10.1080/02684527.2016.1253221. [Taylor & Francis Online].
West, Nigel. GCHQ, The Secret Wireless War 1900-86. London: Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1986a; republ.
West, Nigel. The Sigint Secrets, The Signals Intelligence War, 1900 to Today, Including the Persecution of Gordon Welchman.
London: Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1986b.
Winterbotham, F. W. The Ultra Secret. London: Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1974.