Covering up Bletchley Park: Operation Boniface

Since August 1940, with the introduction of the Bombe, Bletchley Park had access to huge amounts of information pertaining to Axis plans and communications, that would, as is claimed, shorten the war by two to three years and ensure an allied success. This sudden access to so much valuable knowledge, however, presented a significant challenge in avoiding alluding to the groundbreaking development in the intelligence field.

This newfound ability to decode Axis communications had an uncertain and risky future, given that if the Axis had made at any point significant changes to the Enigma design and protocol, Allied comprehension of these messages would require massive redevelopment of technology at Bletchley Park. Indeed, in 1942, when German Marine units were ordered to add a fourth rotor to their machines, such a challenge was presented and for months Allied intelligence relied on naval raids of keys and passwords to decode Marine transmissions. And whilst the 1942 change was found not to have been motivated by security fears, it was still evidently vital that Bletchley Park’s work remain well covered-up.

Whilst, the Bletchley Park site’s location and security were of utmost concern (and there was only ever one spy found to have defied this rigorous assurance), it was undeniably difficult to make use of the fruits of its labour and keep them hidden at the same time: the information they were able to decode was vital to the war effort, but mismanagement of its use could have been disastrous.

Therefore, Bletchley Park, and more crucially its information, needed a cover story. In general, all of the Park’s work was claimed to have been collected by a spy called Boniface in Germany who controlled a large set of fictional agents.

What is surprising about Boniface and his agents, however, is the fact that he did not exist to fool the Nazi High Command. Instead, their purpose was mostly to explain the information to the other Allied Forces, most importantly the Americans. In November 1942, Alan Turing was sent over to the United States to speak to their Secret Service about the war effort, and his ultimate message, revealed by future James Bond writer Ian Fleming’s diaries, was that British Intelligence was having similar difficulties in trying to break German communication. Bletchley’s work was attributed to the spy.

Much of the information in contention given to the Americans, was the intelligence that allowed naval vessels to intercept or avoid German U-Boats. Particularly targeted were supply ships from the US to help British people survive avoiding starvation; the interception of these being an aim to starve Britain into surrender. The cracking of the Enigma played an important role in the so-called Battle of the Atlantic.

Naval Enigma was, after 1942, modified to contain 4 rotors instead of 3, which made Bletchley Park’s work in the Atlantic, much harder, and it was reported that no-one in British Intelligence bar Frank Birch and Alan Turing thought that it could ever be cracked. However, crucially, this change was not thought to have been underpinned by concern that codes had been cracked, but instead want of difference and revision in naval communication. Generally, the Nazis would believe rather long-winded arguments rather than accept the prospect that the Enigma could have been broken, and this allowed relatively poor spotter raids to fool them into the belief that U-Boat captures were entirely coincidental and not that there was any knowledge of their location.

Perhaps too much of British explanation of the unwillingness to change the Enigma carries the implication that all of Hitler’s High Command were completely mentally inept. There are reports of Hitler being warned of possible breach of the Enigma’s security, and the Nazis came close to discovering various spies that were important in uncovering protocol information for Bletchley Park. But none of this culminated in complete realisation of the full extent of British Intelligence, and no big changes to the communications’ design or protocol were ever made, which could be argued by some to have been a huge Achilles’ heel of the Nazi control over Europe.

This aversion to the reality of the level of intelligence among the allies, which arguably should have been obvious to the Axis Powers, is perhaps representative of a wider issue in the figureheads of the Nazi state, particularly Hitler himself - and one that may be relevant in leaders in modern society. The strong unwillingness to believe any theory that was reflective of any elements of his forces’ inferiority was an obvious bias to egocentrism. This effect can be described as egocentric bias, and can be a contributor to the false consensus effect, which confirms people to their belief that their own decisions are correct, ignoring a large amount of necessary judgement.

This effect is of course something that has been studied, and is perhaps of particular relevance today. We see lots of examples of this effect in history: for example, the Chernobyl control team in April 1986 believed for a while that the fault was much more minor than it actually was, despite being told otherwise - because they put too much faith in their engineering, believing that Soviet RBMK design of reactor could not meltdown in such a way. The worry of ego-centrism and overconfidence leading to making poor decisions is an important one today, given the increasing tyranny of some of our world leaders.

(image: expired Crown Copyright; public domain)