Secrets and Lies

the History Channel, original podcast. 1939. War with Germany is looming, and the British know they will need every advantage to stop the Nazis. They create one in a small group of brilliant mathematicians and scholars assigned to work secretly in a quiet country home called Blechley Park. With the help of a discovery first made by Polish intelligence officers, this team will work to break the key to the enigma code, the encryption used for German military communications. This crucial step is the first of many in the intelligence war waged by the Allies. This is World War II with Tom Hanks, Episode 9, Secrets and Lies. In the summer of 1940, Great Britain is threatened by Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler's armies have torn through Poland, Scandinavia, and Western Europe. Even France has fallen. Prime Minister Winston Churchill fears Britain will be next. The first few weeks of Winston Churchill's primersorship are probably the worst and most disastrous weeks in the history of Britain. The most catastrophic defeat on the consulate of Europe. Outclassed by the German landmarks, but the farfer in the skies above. Britain is facing defeat and starvation. By 1940, the British position looks practically hopeless. They've met the very marked a couple of times, and on both occasions, Norway and Dunkirk, they wound up running away, evacuating from the continent under fire. I think when you face the enormity of the challenge that Britain faced in 1940, if you're up against a stronger army, you've got to find other ways to get around them. The British have been working to crack enemy military code since the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Alistair Deniston leads the British government's code and cypress school, located at Bletchley Park, an old manor house in the English countryside. He served as an intelligence officer in the Royal Navy in World War I and has spent his entire career in cryptology. Deniston predicted that accurate cryptanalysis of the Vermax codes would be an important weapon in any war with Germany. We talk about the German way of war. Sometimes we say blitzkrieg or lightning war. It's about tanks, it's about aircraft, it's about mobile infantry, and of course artillery. All working together in the greatest possible harmony. They need to be able to communicate with each other in real time. Fast technical improvements in radio in the 20s and 30s make this possible. The radio is as important to the blitzkrieg as the tank or the stucco di bomber. It is Alistair Deniston who realizes that this German reliance on technical means of communication is also a real Achilles heel. If someone can step into that communications loop, they can intercept German reconnaissance reports, German orders, they can intercept in a sense German intentions. Deniston understands that signals intelligence is essential to combat Germany's new mechanized tactics. If you don't have vast numbers of tanks and you don't have the luxury of overwhelming military force, you need to find a way to win a war and that can involve using a bit of this intelligence. It provides incredible force multiplier particularly when you're outnumbered. It may give you that chance that you never thought you had before. But cracking the German ciphers is seemingly impossible. They're created by a complex device. The Enigma machine. The Enigma machine itself looks like a cross between a cash register and a tie prider and it's an electromagnetic machine that scrambles plain text into a code. You will press the key and that instigates an electric pulse that would run through a set of rotors. As they turn, it produces what we call ciphertext. If you press the D, it would come out as a T. If you press the D again, it would not come out as a T again, it would come out as a Z. Oh, some other random alert. The word Hitler, for example, if used in a message, is scrambled. This version isn't using Morse code, to the operator of another Enigma machine with the same settings. When the encoded word is typed in, it's possible to decipher the original message. If unique machine Germany was leading the world in this. It turns every German frontline position in World War II into a veritable data and information processing center. And to make the entire process secure, there is the Enigma machine. The Germans believe their signals are secure because of the complexity hardwired into the Enigma machine. The great thing about the Enigma machine is the vast number of ways that it can be set up every day. If I've got three rotors, each rotor can have one of 26 positions. So that's 26 times 26 times 26, which is 17 and a half thousand different ways of setting that up. That sounds like a big number, but it's not. Here is where it gets fun because on the front of the machine, the Germans have installed an extra device which is called the plugboard. If you had 10 cables, it's 150 million, million different ways to set up the plugboard. So if you multiply all these different options together, you end up with 156 million, million, million different ways of setting it up, which is more, I think, than they have been seconds in the universe. The Germans figured, and I think justifiably, that it was unbreakable. But Dennistan believes it's possible to crack the Enigma codes. He spends years recruiting mathematicians, linguists, and scholars from Britain's top universities. He reached out to the academic communities to Cambridge and Oxford, and he'd go to dinner with them. And he was kind of sussing out, you know, who's good at this, who might be useful looking, especially at mathematicians. It was a professional challenge. You're a mathematician, you've got a problem, you want to solve that problem. And here's the added benefit that you're doing it for your country and for your family, so that they don't have to grow up speaking German. A key recruit to Bletchley Park is a young academic from the University of Cambridge, an eccentric genius named Alan Turing. Let me tell you a bit about my uncle Alan Turing. He has always been interested in everything to do with science and maths. He likes the planets, he likes chemistry, he likes genetics, but what he's really interested in is logic problems, mathematical logic. Turing is only 27 years old, but he's already a world-renowned leader in the solving of mathematical problems with the help of mechanical devices. One of the greatest contributions that Alan Turing brings to codebreaking in this era is to understand that to attack the Enigma machine, the British are going to need their own machine. Turing begins by studying the critical work of Polish codebreakers. Before the war, these men built a machine that could sift through the many variations of the early Enigma settings. In 1939, fearing the Nazis were about to invade their country, the Poles presented their device to the British and French intelligence services. Turing now assembles a radically upgraded British version of this machine, the bomb. It's huge, imagine a wall drive, maybe a bit bigger, very noisy, very clunky. The British feed intercepted German signals into the bomb, then it rotates through the millions of possible Enigma settings. And by a process of elimination, reduces these to a smaller number that can be deciphered, revealing the original message. This is a sort of behemoth, the likeer which has never been seen before. It's got a hundred rotating drums, it's got one million soldered connections. How is this monster going to deliver? Turing and his team are in a race against time and Adolf Hitler. In August 1940, his Luftwaffe begins to attack royal air force bases in the south of England. The Battle of Britain has begun. Hitler has ordered the Luftwaffe to destroy the Royal Air Force and its bases before he invades Great Britain by sea. The defense of the country depends on the young RAF pilots and airmen sent up to defend Britain. At Blitchley Park, touring at his team have been working to improve the bomb. And now they're decrypting the Luftwaffe's enigma signals. You have got these extraordinary individuals, certainly not your carbon copy military types. Who have achieved what was believed to be impossible? Touring calls his new machine victory. After decryption, teams decode the German signals then feed the intelligence to the Royal Air Force fighter command. Blitchley Park is absolutely vital for the British defense in the Battle of Britain. Why? Because it reveals the Luftwaffe order of battle, so you can see who's going where when. And better still, it also reveals that the Germans have these direction-finding beams for their aircraft. And if you can intercept those beams, you know where the aircraft are going in advance. And you could therefore defend those targets far more adequately. It also reveals the true extent of German aircraft losses. Now that's a really important piece of information for the RAF because they know that the Germans are getting hamlet. So it is absolutely vital. The work at Blitchley Park is crucial to the RAF's victory in the Battle of Britain. Hitler indefinitely postpones the invasion. The scope and scale of the code-breaking operation expands with its success. The initial stage is the collection of the signals themselves at interception sites, but it all around the UK and overseas. Any signals that are encrypted would be relayed via teleprinter or via dispatch rider who would relay the material back to Blitchley Park. Now Alan Turing's bomb machine starts the key part of your encryption process. Then specialized teams will finalize that and decrypt that message, but it's in German now. So now you've got translators who are working to translate the message into English. We needed linguists, we needed people who were good at clerical administrative tasks and typing, which is why the site was trimmed in terms of numbers and scale. Finally, you need to analyze the message and send it out to commanders in the field so that they can put it in the use. This was to produce intelligence for all theatres of war. It wasn't just producing material for Europe, it was producing intelligence from North Africa in the Middle East, the Far East. This was a global war and it needed global intelligence. The enigma signals intelligence generated by Blitchley Park is given a name, ultra for ultra secret. Winston Churchill is its biggest champion. He has long believed that intelligence will help the allies win the war. For a general or a politician, to be able to read the innermost thoughts of your enemy is like a superpower. Churchill, we look at these intelligence reports in his bathroom, out in the garden. He wanted to see the raw intelligence, he was fascinated by it. And Churchill could see that in Blitchley Park he had a potentially war-winning tool. He made sure they had the resource they needed. He made sure they had access to him, he said they could get in touch with them any hour of the day no matter what. Churchill understands how important military intelligence can be. He was home secretary and led MI5, Britain's domestic intelligence service. Hitler, on the other hand, has long been skeptical of the usefulness of military intelligence. I don't think Hitler values intelligence in the same way that Churchill did. Hitler's a guy who believes in his instincts, he believes in his vision. Hitler is so caught in his own ideological thinking that he rejects out of hand intelligence that doesn't go along with his worldview. He doesn't rely on it all that much. German military intelligence, the Abwehr, is led by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. Canaris has planned German espionage campaigns all over the world, including in the United States. By all accounts, Hitler is largely very impressed by him. Canaris is very sophisticated. He is really on top of his job. He is terrifically well informed and he has some good ideas. But Canaris is a realist and the Abwehr's intelligence is often too candid for the fear. He keeps coming up with reports that suggests that a war with Britain would be a long hard war, that a war with the United States would be unwinnable, that even a war with the Soviet Union would be much more difficult. Nobody wants to hear from pessimists right now, especially an invincible Hitler at the height of his power. Hitler believed predominantly in military might, the great German military machine, and to be honest he has great reason to believe in the might of his army because it's achieving things that have never been achieved before. In Britain, Churchill doesn't have the military resources to attack Germany on the ground. So he creates the Special Operations Executive, which launches espionage and sabotage campaigns throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. But Churchill knows that this is not enough. He needs an ally. He needs the United States. G'day, I'm Justin Wolffers, host of the Platypus Economics Podcast. If there's one thing I've learned from a career teaching economics, it's that your life is shaped by economic currents you'll never see. A single price tag can explain things a thousand experts can't. People who understand economics, they make better decisions in their careers, their finances, their relationships, and their communities, and I want that for you. Listen to and follow Platypus economics, available now wherever you get your podcasts. After months of Luftwaffe attacks, Prime Minister Winston Churchill is determined to persuade the United States to enter the war. But America as an ally, he fears Hitler will defeat Great Britain and absorb the British Empire. One way for Churchill to gain American confidence and support is to share critical intelligence and information with the United States. Churchill is so desperate to get the Americans into the war that he does really anything he can to woo them. He wants the Americans to be impressed. He wants the Americans to enter this alliance, come into the war with confidence. And what could be more persuasive than showing off the Americans, telling them that you're on the way to building a pretty complete picture of everything your enemy is doing and thinking and saying in private. That's now how you want to have. In February 1941, first American delegation comes to Bletchy Park, Winston Churchill gives authorization. From then, the American and British partnership really started to move up pace. It blossomed. Intelligence officers from both countries work together throughout 1941. But in December, when Japan attacks Pearl Harbor, cooperation evolves into alliance. America is now at war with Japan. And days later, with Germany. America has almost no intelligence service before we enter the war. So there's Army and Navy code breakers, but there's no equivalent of the British foreign intelligence service. American intelligence is like the cottage industry. You know, it's the pre-industrial stage before Pearl Harbor occurs. Now the United States' work would be written to establish the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services. But as the Americans enter the war, the Germans still control a large portion of Soviet territory. And the Japanese continue to sweep through the Pacific and Southeast Asia. By 1942, you have an unprecedented trans-Atlantic collaboration. Intelligent sharing on every level, Americans are in every department in Blacksley Park, working alongside Britain. So this is a really significant enduring partnership. Altra's success gives the Allies an advantage, especially in the crucial battle of the North Atlantic. It reveals the location of Nazi U-boats, allowing Allied navies to avoid German wolf packs and safely re-root the all-important convoys. It has an incredible impact on the battle of the Atlantic, as a matter of fact, it swings the entire battle in the Allies' favor. Despite this, most of the German high commands still believe the Enigma codes are unbreakable. But Admiral Carl Donets, the commander of the Nazi U-boat fleet, cannot understand how Allied ships keep sailing around his submarines. Admiral Donets is by far the most security-obsessed military leader in the German war machine. And he sniffed out the fact that we're re-rooting our convoys. Admiral Donets orders an examination into the integrity of the Enigma codes and ciphers. His intelligence officers insist that the system is impregnable. They argue that the Allies are using radar to track U-boats or that there are spies in the German Navy. They launch investigations to identify possible traders. The Germans are so convinced that it is unbreakable, that they don't see what's going on, even if it steers them into the face. They never try to prove that it has been broken. They always try to prove that it cannot be broken, meaning that they always end up at their preferred answer. Everything is fine. In February 1942, Donets orders a security upgrade to the Enigma machine. A fourth rotor is added. Strengthening the encryption even further. In 1942, the German U-boat flitillas changed from the M3 to the M4 Enigma, adding fourth rotor, which added a huge layer of complexity to attacking the cipher. Basically, it takes the odds of 150 million, million, to 1 from the 3 rotor, up to an unfathomable 92-sep-tillion-to-one shot. This addition is a major setback for a bletchley park in the North Atlantic. It's almost like the lights going out on a grid of an electrical pattern. You can't find submarines anymore. Once again, German U-boats pose a grave threat to Allied shipping. Intelligence offices at Bletchley Park are no longer able to decrypt German naval signals. To utilize ultra in the battle of the Atlantic again, the British will attempt to seize the code books the Germans used to set their Enigma machines. The Allies are on the verge of losing the battle of the Atlantic. The first half of 1942 is once again referred to as "the happy time" by German U-boat commanders. One thing that can help the Allies is to restart Ultra in the Atlantic, but they need to decrypt the new Enigma messages. This code material is absolutely priceless for the Code Breakfast of Bletchley Park. It was used to set up the machine. It shows how it's supposed to be configured for every single day of every single month. The British launched secret raids to extract any intelligence they can find on German submarines, ships, and military facilities including Enigma code books. They call the raids "pinch operations". Pinch is British slang for stealing. The British intelligence officer Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming helps to coordinate pinch operations. In Fleming ends up at the Department of Naval Intelligence. Almost by accident, he's got no experience in intelligence work, but he very quickly finds his feet. He has his gift for analysis and weighing up intelligence options. Fleming, who later writes the James Bond novels, plans a pinch operation in connection with an Allied raid. Operation Jubilee will be a large amphibious landing, essentially a dress rehearsal for the expected invasion of Europe. It involves 1,000 aircraft and more than 230 ships. Their target is the heavily fortified French port of Dieppe. The Allies know they're going to have to "stage a landing" in Western Europe in order to win the war against Hitler's Germany. It's a test to see if you can seize a port. The center of this was the Royal Marine Commando, which were a British unit, but the vast majority were Canadian infantry. And then, of course, this was the debut of the United States of America. There were 50 United States Rangers that were going to go into combat on European soil in the Second World War for the first time. Lieutenant Commander Fleming and a small team called 30 Assault Unit are part of the raiding force. They have a specific objective. With Fleming coordinating aboard ship, 30AU will attempt to enter the German Navy's regional headquarters and a nearby supply depot. Both will likely contain code books for the new Enigma machines. From a pinch perspective, what is really important about Dieppe is that they have all these code books waiting to be distributed not only for the next month, but months in advance. But after initial success, the landing at Dieppe disintegrates. It is absolutely hell. You've got to run up this beach carrying all your kit and a rifle. And of course, you've got German machine guns, mortars, artillery, you name it, firing at you. It becomes an absolute slaughter. Over half of the Allied forces at Dieppe are killed, wounded or captured. Most of 30 Assault units men are killed. But at the end of the day, they come away with nothing, despite all the bloodshed. The raid on Dieppe is a failure from every angle. But the British still need German code books and intelligence to revive Ultra. Allied ships are ordered to make seizing German intelligence a part of every mission when possible. In the fall of 1942, HMS Petard is one of the small destroyer groups sent to hunt Nazi U-boats. When they locate U-559, they launch depth charges and force it to the surface. The U-boat crew abandon their submarine. With sinking slowly, and this gives the opportunity for the crew of HMS Petard to actually board the U-boat and try to pinch and capture the material from the sinking U-boat as it's going down. Three men rush inside. Lieutenant Tony Fasson, able seamen Colin Grazier, and a 16-year-old canteen assistant, Tommy Brown. They're down there working with flashlights, ransacking the place looking for anything. But it's a race against time because the U-boat is starting to fill with water. The three British sailors have minutes to find useful intelligence. What they find could help win the war. They go down to the signal's office, then they go into the captain's cabin and sure enough find the material and a lot of it. These guys freezing cold, petrified a bellow deck, feeding crucial, rich signals intelligence, these cypher birds up the conning tower. Almost like a conveyor belt, one guy to another to another. Suddenly, the submarine takes on this huge rush of water. The pressure of which pushes the teenager, Tommy, out of the conning tower like a cork from a bottle. But tragically, it kills the two men who've done this vital work below deck. They're actually trapped as the water starts to come in and they give their lives to affect the pinch operation which changes the course of the intelligence war. The courage of these three British sailors means Bletchley Park can once again decode the German Navy's enigma messages. But now the code breakers become. to become victims of their own success. The number of enemy signals they intercept in decode grows so rapidly that the bomb machines can no longer handle the sheer volume of material fed into them. The Allies need to process military intelligence on an industrial scale. So Great Britain turns to its ally, the United States. We send almost precious asset, the other side of the Atlantic. We send Alan Turing to America. In the winter of 1942, Turing meets Joe Dash, an electrical engineer at the National Cash Registered Company in Dayton, Ohio. As a result, the bomb machines evolve into an electrical as well as a mechanical weapon against the Third Reich. Dash's machine is transformative technology. He's invented the first electronic computer memory. The new machines are six times faster and are mass-produced in the hundreds. By decrypting messages at such speed and scale, the Allies are able to access key German information and, in combination with the mosaic of intelligence operations, deception, espionage, and sabotage, they can corroborate that their secret war is working. And the Spring of 1943, Allied forces under the leadership of Dwight Eisenhower have forced the German and Italian armies out of North Africa. The Allies' plan is to next invade the island of Sicily. The only real problem with Sicily is that it's somewhat of an obvious target. If you're looking at a map, Sicily's the first big island. The Allies believe it's necessary to spread a little disinformation around. Make Hitler and the German planners think the landing is coming somewhere else, perhaps and the Balkan Peninsula to the east, anywhere in Sicily. In February 1943, Ian Fleming and other British intelligence officers formulate a plan. It emerges from a list of ideas known as the Trout Memo. The Trout Memo is so called because it uses fly fishing as a kind of analogy for conducting deception operations against the Germans. Now it's widely believed that this was largely written by Ian Fleming. It's very much in his style and it shows that very imaginative thinking of which he's later going to be absolutely renowned, of course. Most of the suggestions in it are pretty far fetched, but there's one that actually does catch the eye and that's this idea of putting false information on a corpse and then allowing it to be discovered by the enemy. Intelligence officers believe this could be a way to feed the Germans false plans for an Allied invasion of the Balkans. It's a fiendish and dastardly idea. If the Germans believe the false documents, they will have the wrong idea of what the Allies are going to get up to. The British named the plan Operation Mintsmeet and presented to Eisenhower. Eisenhower's buy-in is required because Eisenhower is essentially the theater commander in the area. It's also indicative of American trust in this particular operation. With Eisenhower's approval, British intelligence moves to the next stage. They find the corpse of a homeless man in Britain and they build an entire story for him. A lifetime that he never actually enjoyed in person. They give him a uniform, they give him a career, they put identity cards in his wallet, they give him pictures of an imaginary girlfriend, the lovely Pam. He becomes Major Martin, British intelligence officer. The final step is to give Major Martin a briefcase containing fake plans for an Allied invasion of the Balkans. The Allies must now get Major Martin's documents into the hands of Germany's intelligence chief, Admiral Canaris. This is Jill Slesinger from JillOnMoney. Managing your small business finances shouldn't feel overwhelming. Zero brings your accounting, payroll, payments and analytics into one simple platform with automated features that clear away the daily busy work. You get a quick detailed look at what's coming in and what's going out. Over 5 million customers worldwide rely on zero and 91% of customers across the U.S., UK and Australia agree it's easy to use based on a 2024 survey. Get the clarity and confidence you need to make smart decisions for your business. Learn more at xero.com In the early hours of April 30, 1943, a British submarine drops a corpse dressed in the uniform of a royal marine into the sea off the west coast of Spain. A briefcase is attached to the corpse by a security chain. The British hope the documents inside the case will make their way to Adolf Hitler in Berlin. They've chosen Francisco Franco's Spain because they suspect the Spanish will pass the information to the Germans. A British know, the German intelligence agencies, especially the Abwehr under Wilhelm Canaris, have a really good relationship with the Spanish. So this is a far more clever and subtle way of getting deception information into German hands rather than just dumping it off the coast of Germany. Put it off the coast of Spain and you've got a more plausible way of that information coming through the pipeline. A Spanish fisherman finds the body. Soldiers guarding the coast take it to Spanish Navy officers who tell German intelligence agents in Spain what they found. The signals decrypted at Bledchley Park show the Germans are skeptical. The German agents in Spain simply don't take the bait, but in British intelligence there's this terrible panic that mincemeat is going to fail. It's just going to be ignored. To ignite interest in Major Martin, British intelligence writes a letter to the Spanish authorities demanding the return of the briefcase and the document inside. They want to make it look as though the British are deeply worried as though this really is a proper officer with real plans on him. This is a really daring gambit because it may seem too obvious, but actually the British are lucky. What that does is to get the local German agents to get hold of the plans that Major Martin is carrying, they photograph them, and they send those photographs back to their boss in Berlin, Wilhelm Kenaris. Kenaris is interested. He examines the plans for days, then hands them to Hitler. The fewer already suspects the Allies will attack through the Balkans, so he's inclined to believe the information. But propaganda chief Joseph Gerbels is wary. Gerbels is smart, and Gerbels, after all, is the Minister for Propaganda, for lies. He knows what it means to deceive people. He thinks it's a bluff. The information Kenaris gives Hitler confirms his instinct. Two days later, Blechley Park decodes a message. The Germans are moving troops toward the Balkans. Operation Mansmeet is working. The work of Blechley Park feeds into a deception campaign like this in a really important way. Ultra allows you to understand whether your enemy is buying the deception you're trying to sell. We can see, thanks to our Blechley decryptions, that Hitler is pulling Panzer units to the Balkans to Greece directly because of one dead corpse that's left floating off the shores of Spain. Two months later, the Allies land in Sicily and capture the island more quickly than anticipated. The depleted number of German defenders is a critical part of their success. This is one of the most successful intelligence operations of the Second World War. Canaris' reputation begins to suffer after Operation Mints meet. As the war goes on after that, Canaris will be more and more disliked and distrusted by Hitler and the other elites of the regime. In 1944, the Third Reich abolishes the Abwehr, and Canaris is accused of being involved in a plot to kill Hitler. A year later, he's hanged, just two weeks before the end of World War II. Accurate intelligence is critical to military victory, but ultimately the outcome is determined by combat. The decisive battle of the war against Nazi Germany is about to be fought, a terrible cost, in a strategically important Soviet city on the Volga River. World War II with Tom Hanks is produced by Netopia Limited, A&E Factual Studios, Playtone Productions, and Backpocket Studios in association with Motion Entertainment for the History Channel. This episode was narrated by Tom Hanks and mixed by John Lloyd, additional voicing provided by me, Jeremy Reagan. From the History Channel, our Executive Producers are Eli Lara and Liv Fiddler. For Playtone, Executive Producers are Tom Hanks and Gary Guetzman. For Backpocket Studios, our Executive Producer is Ben Dixteen.