It is now virtually impossible to sort out the intricate intelligence bureaucracy in the Middle East. The RAF set-up in Cairo was pioneered by P/O Hugh Waters in February 1941; that autumn it was beefed up by the arrival of W/Cdr. Rowley Scott-Farnie whose job was to co-ordinate and control all RAF intelligence operations in the Middle East. In December 1941, Aileen Clayton was flown out to set up a system for intercepting radio traffic, a job which in less remote stations was usually done by WAAFs. Clayton brought with her the drums for the Type-X machines and the one-time pads, in diplomatic bags. RAF intelligence was then to be found in an unfinished building on the Suez Road at Heliopolis, a vast dusty pile which had originally been intended for a museum. Clayton was under the command of S/L J.R. Jeudwine, but her job brought her into contact with all parts of the operation, including the Communications Bureau Middle East under Freddie Jacobs, which she called ‘virtually a satellite of Bletchley’.
The Chief Signals Officer Air HQME, Air Commodore W.E.G. ‘Pedro’ Mann, told her that his greatest problem was training and organising a team to transmit the low-grade signals traffic that was being intercepted at Heliopolis in a secure code back to Bletchley for co-ordination and interpretation. She was ‘put in the picture’ about Ultra by Colonel Robert Gore-Brown, OC of all the SLUs in the Middle East. RAFHQ ME Command was housed then in a block of flats in the Garden City district of Cairo, a building known to the ranks as ‘Grey Pillars’.
Reg Greer said that his job was called ‘Secret and Confidential Publications Officer’. Given his penchant for upgrading himself whenever he could do so with impunity, he may well have worked for rather than as a Secret and Confidential Publications Officer. A publication which is secret has to be something like a one-time pad, which was both published, i.e. printed and distributed, and top, most, ultra secret. Once when I was in my Biggles phase I got interested in sending secret messages in codes. I wrote my code word, and then I made up the square with the other letters of a twenty-five-letter alphabet. Then I studied how to break a code like that by checking the frequencies with which certain letters appeared, and substituting for them the most-used letters in the language. Daddy was only mildly interested in what I was up to and I was only up to it because I thought it might bring us closer together. The way military intelligence works it must have driven us further apart. When Commander Edward Travis was awarded a knighthood for his work at Bletchley during the war, his wife could not imagine what it was for. If she had shown any real interest, he would have had to deceive her or avoid her.
By mid-1942 more than a thousand people were working for RAF intelligence in the Middle East. Throughout the protracted struggle in the desert the delay in receiving information back from Bletchley had been crucial, but any suggestion that the work of decryption should be delegated to local centres was resisted in the interests of protecting Ultra. The only solution was vastly to increase the volume of intelligence traffic back and forth between the Middle East and the intelligence establishment in England. The more signals intercepted, the greater amount of material in any code, the easier it was to break it. Dozens of people meticulously transcribed gibberish for hours on end, and retransmitted it re-encoded in another kind of gibberish. Many did not know what they were doing; others doubted its application, especially as those actually flying operations sneered at them. They were up to their armpits in bumf, while others were fighting and dying in blood and sand. It was their fate to rot well behind the lines in the Cheadle of the Middle East, working long hours in stifling heat, badly fed, worse housed, and never quite well, with little or no prospect of promotion or decoration.
In 1942, in preparation for Operation ‘Torch’ the intelligence operation at Combined HQ ME was strengthened by the appointment of high-ranking intelligence officers with close connections with Bletchley. The Director of Intelligence ME was Brigadier Terence Airey; his opposite number in the War Department was the Australian ‘Bill’ (Sir) Edgar Williams, later Montgomery’s Intelligence Officer.
Intelligence operations became very much more sophisticated. Intercepted signals were re-transmitted, especially if they concerned disinformation already disseminated by the ‘deception people’. One way of cracking the codes of the day was to transmit a readable British signal and wait for it to appear in code when it was re-broadcast for the information of German officers. Finding one’s way through the maze of genuine and phony signals needed expert interpreters of signals traffic. We must assume, I think, a shortage of cypher officers especially in view of the role projected for intelligence in Operation ‘Torch’. It would not be surprising if, for a time anyway, Air Intelligence Cairo ran their own indoctrination and training school specifically to train officers arriving from the Dominions; British intelligence officers must have been trained in conditions of tight security in England.
Daddy’s friend, Mr Admans, was offered work in Sigint, which he refused, calling it ‘a woman’s job’, but Daddy, who arrived at the same time, took it on. While he was at MECCS the Australian Casey visited the Middle East as a special envoy. Like Daddy he was appalled at the poverty of Egypt. He noted in his Diary that Egyptians were 90 per cent illiterate, and that a labourer was paid sevenpence ha’penny a day. He went forward into the Western Desert where ‘our deception people showed me a German Order of Battle of the enemy (us), with details of our divisions that didn’t exist, with names of unit and formation commanders and where each located. This revealing book was taken in the Western Desert. Our deception people told me it had taken many months of work to get the enemy convinced that these two Divisions existed, and they explained some of the means used in the process.’
While the deception people were seeding this kind of disinformation Rommel was getting accurate information about planned British counter-offensives from intercepted messages being transmitted to Washington by the American observer in Cairo, Colonel Fellers. Both Germans and Italians were reading his new top-secret code ‘Black’ thanks to a copy of the code-book, which was indeed bound in black, that had been stolen from the American embassy in Rome. Ultra meanwhile was providing information got from reading the traffic between Rommel and Kesselring and registered the German supply problems. The whole rigmarole would have seemed pretty far-fetched to the soldiers who were being driven pell-mell back across the desert to within sixty miles of Alexandria. Intelligence cannot win wars.
On 21 June Tobruk fell. Rommel raced for Cairo and Alexandria. Reg Greer went on studying his cyphers, but the tension must have been terrific. On Ash Wednesday GHQ in Cairo began burning documents in preparation for retreat. Regardless of present danger the intelligence network had to be built up if the Allies were to profit by their access to the German codes. The personnel being trained for intelligence work had to keep their heads down and concentrate on their frequency tables.
What did they do to you, Daddy, in those two months at MECCS? Did they make of you a ‘deception person’ or did they realise that you were a deception person already? Did they simply build on your natural secrecy, your non-committalness, your distaste for intimacy? Or did they secure your silence by more aggressive means? By emotional blackmail? By psychological pressure? Perhaps they made you take an oath.
Every member of the Secret Service catches the disease. They all live as if the right hand was not to be trusted to know what the left hand is doing. Once the initial breach has been made in the self, once a man has learned to live a double life, it is a simple matter to live a treble or a quadruple life. Did the boffins in Cairo discover that Daddy was a liar, a phony, fitted by temperament and experience to be a member of an SLU pretending to be something else? Mind you, compared to life with me, life in the RAF must have been easy. I won’t take ‘hush-hush’ for an answer.
The signals officer’s job was not without its dangers. The signals trucks were just at the right height to be hit by flak; under bombardment the officers had to wait until the last minute before jumping into the slit trench dug beside their vehicle. If a signal
was being intercepted, it was the tradition not to take cover until it had been transcribed. Nevertheless, regardless of personal courage in sticking at their post, intelligence officers were not in line for promotion or decoration because they had to remain inconspicuous. The Sigint teams were not allowed to be daring. They were prevented from explaining what must have seemed to be cowardice and standoffishness. They were forbidden to fraternise or confide. They were true to their word; they held their peace. Most, including F/O Greer, died with their mouths still shut. It was a ‘woman’s job’ after all.
Most of the intelligence teams had only the haziest idea of what their contribution actually was. Their daily reality was drudgery, and not merely mechanical drudgery, for they had to concentrate on accuracy. A mistaken letter or figure could cost lives. Hans Fischer, a German cryptanalyst, described his work to Bruce Norman, for his book Secret Warfare, the Battle of Codes and Ciphers, in harrowing terms: ‘staring at something which is meaningless and doing that for hours and days and sometimes weeks on end can be extremely boring. You may well go to sleep doing it. On the other hand you have to be alert all the time. It’s a tremendous strain, a psychological and nervous strain. You get into the attitude where you see figures and letters everywhere and try to read a meaning into them. Car numbers, telephone numbers. If they begin with 66 and end with 44 then you think that must have some significance. It’s with you all the time. You can’t escape it. It almost sends you mad.’
All the evidence points to a high level of stress from which there could be no relief, for intelligence officers were discouraged from fraternising. As an Australian Reg Greer had little in common with the English whether officers or men. His career as an intelligence officer seems to have been one of loneliness, tedium and tension. The big adventure quickly turned into a big ordeal.
P/O Greer emerged from MECCS on 1 July and hung around AHQ Egypt for five days, then got posted to something called 234 Wing which seems to have done anything but fly. On the fifteenth he went down to RAFHQ Western Desert, which if I’m not mistaken was at Burg el Arab. These were exciting times; things were definitely on the move. Montgomery had been appointed, and moved his establishment to Burg el Arab too. On 3 August Winston Churchill himself arrived in Cairo with his entourage, for a pow-wow with Smuts, Wavell, and the commanders of the three services in the Middle East, Auchinleck, Harwood and Tedder, all of whom were subsequently replaced for Operation ‘Torch’.
In 1942, 17,150 British officers and 268,000 British men, according to Lord Casey, were serving in the Middle East; 3,659 Indian officers, and 111,600 Indian men served with them, together with 3,260 South African officers and 61,750 men, 1,485 Australian officers and 30,500 men, and 1,970 officers and 29,700 men from New Zealand. Among the British, and their close relatives the New Zealanders, there was one officer to every fifteen men. Australians and South Africans had roughly the same leaven of officer material, about 5 per cent. Of the huge Indian force which numbered almost as many as all other Commonwealth troops, only one in thirty was considered worthy of officer status.
As an intelligence officer and an Australian in the RAF Reg Greer was doubly isolated. He was isolated first of all from the other services, then from the other ranks in his own service; he was a non-flying officer and therefore unable to enter the cameraderie of the air-crews, and he was involved in top-secret work, the nature of which could be never so much as hinted at. When Aileen Clayton went about her secret business in the desert, no one thought to challenge her usefulness, because she was a woman. An Australian unit sporting robust growths of beard in deference to the scarcity of water and the cruelty of the sun showed their appreciation of her civilising presence by appearing at lunch neatly shaven. They did not feel so kindly towards the male officers who were shining their bums in Heliopolis, while they struggled back and forth across the Western Desert, but called them the ‘Short Range Desert Group’ and the ‘Gabardine swine’. The fliers felt equally bitter about the Army which was unable to take advantage of the air cover that they were offering at such cost. In a situation of unremitting tension tempers quickly frayed; a South African showing up at the Kiwi Club three weeks after the first battle of El Alamein was asked by an Australian if he had run the whole way. In the ensuing brawl no prisoners were taken.
After Japan’s entry into the war, and after the cock-up in Crete, Australians became quite desperate to get out of the Middle East. Just how desperate can be judged from a sad episode in the official medical history of the RAF in World War II. ‘Cases of macular degeneration largely restricted to the left eye occurred among personnel of a Commonwealth Air Force during 1941. Such cases also displayed symptoms of neurosis and loss of confidence, the condition corresponding to no known syndrome. The possibility of over-exposure to direct sun rays was considered but could not be substantiated. Cases of night blindness were uncommon and mainly hysterical in origin. Ocular muscle defects among trained pilots frequently showed disappointing and even harmful response to orthoptic treatment. Such cases proved on investigation to be allied to psychiatric disabilities requiring treatment and usually lowering of category.’
It is unbearable to contemplate the desperation that drives men to stare at the sun, holding their eyelids apart so that the direct sunrays would burn blind spots on to their corneas, but clearly the medical officers thought it the only way the lesions they observed could have been produced. Morale in the Western Desert was a serious problem for all fighting men, but particularly for those who thought their lives were being thrown away while their loved ones were left unprotected at home. It was Montgomery who would point out that men are capable of extraordinary feats of endurance and courage if they are convinced that they are highly valued. If their living conditions are unbearable, if they do not get sufficient food and rest, if they are not convinced that they will be taken care of if wounded or ill, their motivation suffers. If they are treated as a rabble by commanding officers who understand nothing of their background and make no attempt to put them in the picture they will be more prepared to kill him than to die for him.
Commonwealth troops in the Western Desert were unimpressed by the British leadership and the British system of promotions and rewards that by-passed the ranks for a hereditary military caste of no proven ability in modern warfare. Many knew that the German military were organised on more democratic lines, with promotion strictly tied to merit and ability. Everyone in the Western Desert knew that the enemy commander was called Rommel; many did not know who the commander of the Allied forces was and could not have pronounced his name if they did. The coming of Monty, the most skilful self-promoter the British military have ever produced, on a par with the American virtuosi Patton and MacArthur, changed all that and with it the fortunes of the war. Montgomery stressed his Commonwealth links; on the strength of a period of his boyhood when his father was Bishop of Tasmania, he wore a sundowner hat for a while. The infantry loved it; not so my father.
Daddy’s dislike of Montgomery, who ‘arrived from England August 15 or 16, summed up the desert situation in a trice, issued quick ruthless orders, and behold! Victory!’ was shared by other intelligence officers. Montgomery had Ultra and had been briefed in how to use it. Even though he was not free to acknowledge Ultra in his memoirs, the intelligence staff who briefed him every day were sickened by the avidity with which he sought personal credit for extraordinary clairvoyance and cunning in the field. He made life unnecessarily hard for his SLU, by positioning their quarters as far as possible from his own bivouac, on the grounds that their meagre signalling might attract unwanted enemy attention. All this meant in practice was that every time a top-secret signal came through for Montgomery, the liaison officer had to run half a mile in the blackout to deliver it, only to have Montgomery pretend that it was of no consequence.
One of the very few war-stories my father ever told me contains part of the justification for thinking that Daddy was involved in Ultra. He was supposed to be flying from somewhere to somewhe
re with a machine, a decoding machine, I understood. As he sat beside the airstrip in a jeep, waiting to board the aircraft, someone ran up with orders to hand the machine over to a superior officer who was to take Daddy’s seat in the plane. Idly Flying Officer Greer watched the plane take off. Before it had climbed to its cruising altitude, a German fighter came in out of the sun and strafed it from end to end. The plane crashed in flames in sight of the airstrip.
Once upon a time we had letters from the desert, written in Daddy’s rather formless upright scrawl, all about how cold it got at night, so that two blankets weren’t enough, about Jerry coming over, and flares lighting up the landscape. There were photographs of men skinny-dipping off the North African coast. Nothing about what he was doing of course. In one of her ritual purgations Mother has destroyed these letters. They were addressed to her after all, and, if of no interest to her, of interest to nobody.
Reg Greer must have done well in the Western Desert. On 21 August he was promoted to the rank of Flying Officer and transferred to No. 22 Personnel Transit Centre where he had to hang about for three weeks before setting out on his worst ordeal. (It was probably here that the episode related above took place.) He was on his way to Malta. Flying into Malta was not impossible; but it was dangerous. If the aircraft carrying the Type-X machine had ditched over the Mediterranean the Ultra secret could well have been blown right there. Reg Greer was stood down to wait for another means of transport, and probably another Type-X machine.