Capturing wartime history to forge postwar intelligence liaison: Telford Taylor’s battle with the US Navy over the future of Anglo-American signals intelligence

ABSTRACT

Telford Taylor was not a career military intelligence officer, but his short career in military intelligence during World War Two had an outsized impact on the development of American interservice as well as Anglo-American signals intelligence. Near the end of the war, Taylor put forth a visionary proposal to harness wartime lessons learned against Germany and Japan in order to prepare for postwar collaboration against likely rivals, particularly the Soviets. While his British interlocutors were amenable to such a project, the US Navy was not.

KEYWORDS:

• Intelligence
• military
• United States
• United Kingdom
• SIGINT
• Navy
• codebreaking
• liaison

Introduction

I, against my brothers. I and my brothers against my cousins. I and my brothers and my cousins against the world. - Ancient Bedouin Proverb

At the end of the coldest January on record in Europe, the United States and allied military forces won the Battle of the Bulge, pushing the German Wehrmacht into retreat for the remainder of the war on the Western front. The allies were also gaining momentum on the Eastern Front. On 27 January 1945, Soviet forces liberated the Auschwitz concentration and death camp in Poland. That same day, a wartime US Army intelligence officer named Colonel Telford Taylor – remembered today mostly for prosecuting Nazi war criminals after the war – fired the opening salvo of a classified bureaucratic battle that shaped the Cold War and still reverberates two decades into the twenty-first century. That cold January morning, Taylor submitted a revolutionary proposal up the military chain of command. Aware that hostilities were drawing to a close, he sought to capture the lessons of history from the wartime Anglo-American signals intelligence collaboration so as not to relearn them at great cost as the world war transformed into a cold war. Taylor’s battle would last nearly the rest of the war, for his foe was a determined one. It was the US Navy.

The hard work of forging links across the Atlantic

From 1941 to 1943, the United States and the United Kingdom operated in a confusing jumble of bilateral agreements to collect, decrypt, process, and share signals intelligence during the Second World War. A series of transatlantic visits arranged for the exchange of techniques and even personnel between the British traffic analysis and cryptanalytic hub at Bletchley Park and America’s code breaking centers in Washington, sharing intelligence sources and methods that were heretofore sacrosanct. Such agreements were expedient, but they were fragmented, some of them between various US and British entities, such as the individual military services.¹

It would be incorrect to conclude that the US military service branches sent liaison officers to Bletchley Park solely because of a core belief in the value of cooperation with the British. It is impossible to understand the true motives for the American presence at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park without placing the budding Anglo-American SIGINT relationship squarely in the middle of longstanding Army-Navy intelligence rivalry. Both the US Army and the Navy dispatched officers to England not only to learn from their techniques and to pool information but also to keep an eye on their rival US military branches, seeking both to protect their own liaison equities as well as to prevent the British from sharing more with the rival service.

The first significant foray by Americans across the Atlantic to Bletchley occurred in early 1941 when two US Army and two US Navy codebreakers sailed on the new Royal Navy battleship King George V bearing gifts – six heavy wooden crates containing Purple analog machines, the ingenious and invaluable contraption that they were using to decrypt Japanese diplomatic traffic. The visit was remarkable for many reasons – not least that the two tiny American delegations barely coordinated with each other.² Their hosts immediately picked up on this and for the most part, dealt with them separately – even sending a different car for each service every morning even though they were staying in the same country house outside Bletchley. The British, who were fighting for their lives and had precious few allies since France had fallen in the summer of 1940, knew they needed to invest in the future, no matter what the short-term cost, and were willing to set more than a few stones in the foundation of liaison relationships. In the ten weeks that the four Americans stayed – a long time for houseguests, even in peacetime, let alone wartime – the leadership at GC&CS took time away from other pressing work to start building relationships with each service. From the summer of 1941, they followed up with reciprocal visits to Washington, each time repeating the pattern of dealing separately with the Army and the Navy.

Faced with the U-boat threat in the summer of 1942, the British deepened relations with the US Navy, and hosted long visits from American naval officers, notably at the Royal Navy’s Submarine Tracking Room in London, where operations officers put the decrypts to use to reroute convoys away from U-boats.³ In October 1942 Bletchley Park’s Deputy Director, Royal Navy Commander Edward Travis, traveled to Washington to secure the Travis-Holden Agreement, which formalized US Navy and GC&CS cooperation on the German Enigma codes. Little about the agreement was shared with the US Army.⁴ Sensing the Navy’s progress in liaison cooperation and not wanting to be left behind, the Army launched its own initiative, relying heavily on then-Major Taylor, a newly commissioned reserve officer with no military, let alone intelligence, experience; before the war, he had seldom even seen a military officer in uniform except on the fourth of July. In 1940, the Harvard Law School graduate had been serving as the general counsel for the Federal Communications Commission, a senior post not usually held by a 32-year-old.⁵

Taylor joined Army intelligence through the good offices of Alfred T. McCormack, a fellow lawyer who had also joined up for the duration. Alongside a regular officer named Colonel Carter W. Clarke, McCormack was running the Army’s Special Branch for turning raw intercepts into something like finished intelligence, vital wartime work by any measure. Taylor’s very first task, he later remembered, was to spy on the Navy for Clarke. As he put it, ‘the Navy doesn’t tell us anything,’ especially about its operations in the Pacific.⁶ Taylor did such a good job that Clarke selected him for another mission along similar lines – vital because ‘you know these bloody English … we don’t get anything they’re getting out of German traffic.’⁷ This may have sounded like a paranoid overstatement, but it contained more than a grain of truth. While the British were sharing Enigma traffic freely with the US Navy, the US Army and the British quarrelled, sometimes with surprising bitterness, over who could see what.⁸ In early 1943, Clarke’s vision was for Taylor to embed with the British at GC&CS so that the Army could get what it needed by way of technical know-how and end product – that is, at least as much as the Navy was getting.

William F. Friedman, the founder of Army codebreaking, and Alfred McCormack travelled to England with Taylor in April 1943 to learn as much as they could about GC&CS and not incidentally to start their liaison officer off on the right foot. Early on they paid a courtesy call on Sir Stewart Menzies, Chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6, which at the time oversaw British signals intelligence as well as its traditional remit, human intelligence), and went on to attend round after round of meetings and orientations followed by ‘alcoholic’ official lunches and dinners – except when the Americans invited the British to the massive US Army mess in central London nicknamed ‘Willow Run’ (after the Ford factory in Michigan that churned out a B-24 bomber every 63 minutes), where the food was more plentiful but there was no alcohol. The upshot of Friedman and McCormack’s trip was the Army’s own agreement with the British, known as the Travis– Strong agreement, initialled in May by GC&CS’s Commander Travis and Military Intelligence Division’s Major General George V. Strong.

In June, Friedman and McCormack went home, while Taylor stayed on in England to represent the Army at GC&CS. Upon his return, Friedman prepared a report that conveyed his impressions, including the conclusion that ‘the British success in this field represents, without question, the most astounding and the most important cryptanalytic and intelligence achievement in all history.’⁹ Coming from the man who led the team that had broken the Japanese diplomatic code in 1940, this was a breathtaking assertion. It reflected how much the Army now knew it could learn from the British and the supreme importance it attached to that work. In other words, until the spring of 1943, the Army had an imperfect understanding of British capabilities – and was only now shifting combined Army-GC&CS operations into high gear. It would be up to Taylor to drive on, at first almost single-handed. Despite his relative youth and inexperience, he would make an outsize contribution to the Army’s mission and ultimately to the transatlantic alliance.

In the murky, hyper-secret world of wartime signals intelligence, it was one thing to host a visit but quite another to allow a foreign liaison officer to move in. The wrong man could have damaged or even derailed this delicate phase of the relationship.¹⁰ But Taylor proved to be just the right person for the job. After a stint in London, he settled into life at Bletchley’s Hut 3, the Spartan concrete and brick structure where the British sifted decrypts to produce strategic military intelligence. His job was to insert himself into the stream of messages coming into the hut, and extract those that McCormack and Clarke needed to see in order to do their job – which was to produce the intelligence that the US Army needed as it prepared to invade Europe. Perhaps thanks to a lawyer’s keen eye for detail, Taylor excelled at this work. Persistent and professional, he pushed to expand his access, making his case to senior British managers, including MI6 chief Menzies himself, and enlisting the support of his own chain of command when they balked.¹¹

Taylor’s powerful intellect and pleasing manner eased the way; he forged good relations with his British counterparts, both in London and at Bletchley. They came to value what they viewed as ‘his strength of character combined with his spirit of friendly cooperation … [that led to] a completely harmonious and efficient integration of Anglo-American effort.’¹² It did not hurt that Taylor was able to mesh with the world-class academics from Cambridge and Oxford who worked at Bletchley and who, like him, were intelligence officers only for the duration. As an American observer at Bletchley remembered, ‘Taylor looked if anything younger than his mid-thirties” but was “sensitive and curious, an easy collocutor on any subject at a moment’s notice.’¹³ He was even an accomplished classical pianist who played for others to help break the enervating stress of non-stop codebreaking and report writing. With apparent pride, he would later reflect on how he and the Americans who eventually formed the Army’s team at GC&CS had become ‘in every sense part of the British set up.’¹⁴

Throughout his time at Bletchley, Taylor maintained a clear vision of his organization’s long-term goals, especially of greater American competency in SIGINT collection: ‘What we really want at this time is to gain a foothold in Enigma and develop technical competence, and gradually develop a supplementary operation so as to improve joint coverage.’ Second, and more importantly, Taylor revealed,

What we ultimately want is independence, but if we get the foothold and develop our technique, independence will come anyhow. As our position in Europe gets better established, we will be less dependent on the British for intercept assistance; as our skill in dealing with traffic grows, we will need less help in securing ‘cribs’.¹⁵

In 1943, an eventual split was anticipated; thus, independence in SIGINT expertise was the key to post-war intelligence success from the US Army’s perspective. As Stephen Budiansky has noted, the prevailing belief was that ‘cooperation with the British on the breaking of … codes would certainly wane as the end approached.’¹⁶ A related consideration was the fear, expressed by Colonel McCormack, that the British, being a ‘very realistic people … would certainly at some time – possibly while the war is still on – resume work on [intercepting and decrypting] United States communications.’¹⁷ For both reasons, it was crucial for America to have achieved full self-sufficiency when the near-inevitable parting of the ways occurred.

Surprising the key players most of all, the parting of the Anglo-American ways never occurred. On the contrary, as the war progressed, the collaboration between the US and UK grew ever closer. But the American military branches continued to maintain their own SIGINT independence from each other. During Friedman’s springtime visit, the US Navy successfully pressured the British not to let him see the equipment for decrypting German naval traffic at Bletchley, which he (understandably) took ‘as a severe reflection [on his] own status & trustworthiness’ and (rightly) attributed to the machinations of senior Navy officers in Washington, vowing to have it out with them after he returned home.¹⁸

In 1944 and 1945 the Navy softened its stance somewhat, agreeing to the creation of two mechanisms to promote inter-service liaison and make joint policy, the Army Navy Communications Intelligence Coordinating Committee (ANCICC) and the Army Navy Communications Intelligence Board (ANCIB).¹⁹ But such initiatives often made little difference in practice. Summing up the period from the spring of 1943 to the spring of 1945, Brigadier General Clarke complained about the uncooperative US Navy to his boss, Major General Clayton L. Bissell:

The Navy has steadfastly refused to exchange European Ultra intelligence with the War Department to allow us to know anything about their European Ultra estimates … . [Senior Navy Signals officers] have consistently tried to prevent the British from giving us German Naval Ultra even when it dealt with subjects of great importance to us. From early 1942 shortly after creation of Special Branch and our first negotiated agreement with the British down to the present time the Navy has uniformly, expect in the single case of [a] Major O’Boyle, excluded all Army officers from the premises at Bletchley Park where Naval Ultra is done.²⁰

Looking back to plan ahead

If in 1943 he was cooperating with the British but anticipating post-war American independence, by 1945 Taylor was envisioning Anglo-American intelligence cooperation after the war. He found himself presciently considering the value of capturing wartime lessons learned as the earliest wisps of the coming Cold War were beginning to rise.²¹ He wrote to Stewart Menzies proposing to initiate a ‘joint Anglo-American research project on European Ultra and Ultra handling techniques.’ Taylor averred, ‘such a project would be of the utmost value in … appraising British and American intelligence before and during the war, and in laying the foundation for effective military intelligence in future years.’ Taylor suggested that the project focus on the ‘history of the development of Ultra intelligence techniques (Hut 3 methods, cryptographic and intercept priorities, role of traffic analysis, etc.)’ and also examine the ‘operational use which was made of Ultra intelligence in the European war and of the security policies which preserved it over so long a period.’²²

Taylor’s proposed history project made sense to the London Signal Intelligence Board (LSIB), aptly described as ‘the supreme governing board which met monthly to set overall British sigint policy.’²³ But the members of the LSIB were understandably distressed to discover that the Army had approached them in a singular capacity and that the US Navy was not so much as an afterthought from the Army perspective. The British were hardly unaware of the fraught bureaucratic relations between America’s intelligence agencies; they had had a front-row seat for the fights among the Army, Navy, FBI, and Office of Strategic Services from 1940 on. Admiral John Godfrey, British Director of Naval Intelligence, an early British emissary to the US intelligence community, spoke for many of his colleagues when he reflected upon intermural relations: ‘These three departments [the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Military Intelligence Division, and the FBI] showed the utmost goodwill towards me and Ian Fleming but very little towards each other.’²⁴ As Joseph Persico would explain wartime intelligence in Washington: ‘Jealous and competitive, the Americans operated on the premise that knowledge is power, but that knowledge shared is power diluted.’²⁵

After considering Taylor’s proposal at the 12 March 1945 LSIB meeting, the British agreed in principle with the suggestion from the British Director of Naval Intelligence that the US Navy be included as well. This was not simply a gracious attempt to help resolve Army-Navy organisational rivalries. As the British experience with Ultra in the European Theatre demonstrated, information dominance is a key factor in maintaining maritime superiority. The London Board was already well aware of Ultra’s impact in the European Theatre, and it was keen to have a similar appreciation of the role and use of cryptanalysis in the more opaque Pacific Theatre: ‘the Board would also be glad to be informed what projects [the U.S.] War Department and Navy Department have for dealing with the Japanese war on the same lines.’²⁶

It was here on the rocks of US Army-Navy rivalry that the proposal foundered. If Taylor thought the hardest part was securing British agreement for such a project, he had underestimated the antipathy from the Navy. What Taylor was really suggesting was a historical ‘hot wash’, capturing lessons learned for the benefit of future war fighters (and not just for post-war bragging rights). Although in 2023 the value of a project to appreciate the lessons of history as not to re-learn them might be obvious, in 1945 this was hardly the case in the US Navy.

When the GC&CS representative in Washington broached the issue in April 1945 the war Europe was drawing to a close but the battle for Japan was raging on with no end in sight. When, citing Taylor’s proposal, he invited the ‘Navy to join in’ – and immediately ran into problems.²⁷ This ‘caused Army and Navy discussion’; he opined the matter could get elevated to a higher level and still not be resolved: ‘there is no doubt that Navy dislikes anything which looks like committing them to Anglo U.S. co-operation after the War, especially in the Far East.’²⁸ If the Navy refused to collaborate, the Army would, he thought, still want to complete the project in the interests of further Army-British collaboration. But he ‘would understand if you [Director, GC&CS] decided that you would prefer not to be a party to a U.S interservice disagreement.’²⁹ The British were clearly tired of being caught between the two American services.

The officer in charge of OP-20-G, Captain Joseph N. Wenger, USN, developed the Navy’s position.³⁰ He was characteristically wary, opining ‘more detailed information of the Army’s intentions is necessary.’ Although Wenger did not dismiss Taylor’s idea of a project for the European theatre, he was almost as wary of the British as he was of the US Army. ‘There are,’ he cautioned, ‘certain disadvantages to the British being included in a similar project for the Japanese war. As an example, their historians would be at the [Naval Communications Annex] for a considerable time after the cessation of all hostilities – a situation which might not be to our liking.’³¹ Besides wishing to preserve American prerogatives, Wenger also complained about Taylor’s methods, particularly the perceived high-handedness. The Army had approached a foreign partner before its own worthy annual football adversary: ‘I feel that the Army’s direct proposal in this matter is the sort of unilateral action we agreed to avoid. It appears definitely to ignore the ANCIB and ANCICC arrangements which should have properly been considered prior to making any proposals to the British.’³²

Predictably, the Army felt that the Navy’s accusations of a unilateral liaison with the British were unjustified. Taylor’s boss Carter Clarke defensively informed his own boss General Bissell that our informal discussions with the British on this general subject go back almost a year although until Taylor wrote his memorandum of 27 January 1945, they were on an informal basis … . Captain Wenger’s memorandum overlooks the fact that these discussions were going on long before the creation of the ANCIB and ANCCIC committees.³³ Clarke recommended that Bissell inform the Navy, through the American Director of Naval Intelligence, Rear Admiral Leo Hewlett Thebaud, ‘regardless of whether or not the Navy participates the Army intends to prosecute this research project in the European field.’³⁴ Clarke also believed that the Navy had no basis for concern vis-à-vis a corresponding Pacific Theatre project because ‘with the number of British officers who are now in G2 and at Arlington Hall there is no research problem really necessary insofar as the Japanese are concerned as they already have full access to all technical and intelligence data which we possess.’³⁵ In essence, the toothpaste was already out of the tube and, from the Army’s perspective, the Navy could participate or not, but the Army would move ahead in either case. This, of course, was not the desired outcome for the British who wanted it all: access to American codebreaking in the Pacific as well as collaboration with both the US Army and the US Navy.

Per Clarke’s suggestion, Bissell had the unenviable task of justifying the Army’s unilateral outreach to the British to his resentful Navy counterparts. To the Director of Naval Intelligence, Bissell delicately explained,

The British, who have always placed greater emphasis than we on this type of intelligence, have a long background of priceless experience. They are in a more advantageous position than we with respect to both traffic and collateral aids for this work.

Bissell left out any apology for not initially informing the Navy about the proposal, but his emphasis on Britain’s long experience resonated as conflict with the Soviets loomed. He also believed that the British would continue their excellence in code-breaking after the war and thus partnership in historical accounting would be beneficial for the American side: ‘Although on Japanese problems, both military and diplomatic, we have always been ahead of the British, there is no doubt that from an overall point of view the British have been in the lead and probably will continue in the lead after the war.’³⁶ Taking the long view, Bissell further imparted to Thebaud that

entirely apart from the direct results of the proposed project, the War Department has much to gain (and nothing to lose) from continuing its close collaboration with the British in the European theater after the final defeat of Germany … . This close working relationship is of inestimable value from the point of view of the long-range cryptanalytic and high-level intelligence activities of the War Department.

Most importantly from Bissell’s view was using Taylor’s proposed historical research project as a way to lock in British SIGINT cooperation after the war:

Our advantageous relationship with the British has been entirely the outgrowth of our military participation in the war, and we have no commitment from them which would automatically continue that relationship after hostilities cease. Unbroken continuity of that relationship will be facilitated if we can institute now a US-British working arrangement which by its nature will carry over after the war.³⁷

Repeating himself for emphasis, Bissell looked not just to the immediate post-war, but even into the medium term: ‘We have much to gain, and nothing to lose, by continuing that relationship after the war and if possible, extending it further.’³⁸

On 2 May 1945, the same day that Soviet forces raised their flag over the Reichstag in Berlin, Rear Admiral Thebaud finally acquiesced and confirmed Navy participation in Taylor’s research project, but sniffed, ‘We of the Navy do not feel that we stand to benefit to as great an extent because of the close working liaison which we have maintained with the British Ultra set-up since early in the war.’³⁹ Thebaud thus remained of the opinion that, because the Navy’s Holden Agreement predated the Army’s Travis-Strong Agreement, the Navy already knew all there was to know, and again echoed Captain Wenger’s earlier concerns about the British ‘Ultra historians’ overstaying their welcome ‘in our communication intelligence activities for a considerable time.’⁴⁰ Instead of trying to ‘lock in’ the British after the war like the Army wanted, the Navy wanted to lock them out. Thebaud cautioned Bissell about planning liaison relationships too far into what would become the Cold War: ‘We should not commit ourselves [to post-war agreements] until the whole question of future US-British communication intelligence collaboration has been determined on the highest levels.’⁴¹

While the Army was seeking to cement an enduring SIGINT alliance with the British, the Navy dragged its feet, only reluctantly participating in Taylor’s wartime documentation project. This imbalance was far from settled by October when a British delegation travelled to Washington to formalize an historic agreement among the two US services and the British. It would be much broader in scope and impact than the joint history project into which Taylor had just shanghaied the Navy, but he had in effect primed the pump. Transformed in large part by the Anglo-American special intelligence relationship, the Navy can credit Telford Taylor with pushing it to accept the resulting lessons learned.⁴²

Conclusion

Telford Taylor’s battle for historical capture of wartime insights offers a valuable perspective on the importance and interrelation between intelligence and history. Intelligence historians are usually concerned with what the study of secret intelligence can contribute to understanding how history unfolded, and this is a laudable goal in as much as consideration of the role of intelligence agencies and professionals has been convincingly cited as ‘the missing dimension’ of international relations.⁴³ Much less frequently considered, though potentially even more important for practitioners, is the inverse of this – how did history influence intelligence?

Indeed, the practices of intelligence and history relate to one another dynamically and in ways that only now scholars and practitioners are really beginning to understand and take into account. This was Telford Taylor’s visionary proposal to realize the strategic potential of the interrelation between intelligence and history. Taylor’s journey from 1943, when he wished to use British tutelage for future SIGINT independence, to 1945, when he sought to lock in future British partnership, reveals that sharing best practices and deep engagement with close allies yields symbiotic benefits, both in terms of strengthening liaison relationships as well as co-development of technological solutions to improve intelligence as in the case of Anglo-American cryptanalysis.

In 1947, Telford Taylor left the Army as a Brigadier General – a stunning five-year rise from his original commissioned rank of Major. Since he is commonly remembered as Chief of Counsel for War Crimes at the Nuremberg Tribunals, his other major contribution to history is all but forgotten: the story of a US Army intelligence officer who sought to use history to prepare the Anglo-American alliance for post-war challenges to come. It was no accident that his Army Distinguished Service Medal, awarded in 1946, was not for his efforts at Nuremberg but for a set of sensitive tasks that could, at the time, be vaguely described only as ‘exceptionally meritorious and distinguished service … in a position of great responsibility’ during the war.⁴⁴ But now we know why, and that it mattered even more than the author of his medal citation could have known.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David V. Gioe

David V. Gioe is a British Academy Global Professor of Intelligence and International Security in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London and history fellow for the Army Cyber Institute at West Point. Gioe is a former CIA officer and former intelligence officer in the US Navy. His analysis does not necessarily reflect any position of the U.S. government or Defense Department.

Nicholas Reynolds

Nicholas Reynolds is a retired CIA officer who has been a museum historian, taught at the graduate level, and written extensively on intelligence. His most recent book, Need to Know, World War II and the Rise of American Intelligence, was a New Yorker “Best of 2022” selection. Reynolds holds a DPhil in history from Oxford University.

Notes

¹ Complicating matters was the split in each American service between codebreakers, who respectively reported to the Army Signal Corps and the Naval Communications Service, and the intelligence officers in the Military Intelligence Department (MID or G-2) and the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). During the war, the Army created a ‘Special Branch’ to bridge the gap. Throughout the war, Navy intelligence struggled to find the best way to organize its various parts.

² See for example David Sherman, The First Americans, The 1941 US Codebreaking Mission to Bletchley Park (Ft. Meade, MD: NSA/Center for Cryptologic History, 2016). Another early proof of concept for both sides occurred in August 1942, with contributions from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, US Army codebreakers, and the German diplomatic section of GC&CS, which pronounced its liaison with American collaborators as ‘conspicuously successful,’ judging that the German diplomatic code FLORADORA ‘could not have been broken at all without an initial pooling of our resources.’ As quoted in Ralph Erskine, “William Friedman’s Bletchley Park Diary: A Different View”, Intelligence and National Security, 22, 3 (2007), 371.

³ See for example Nicholas Reynolds, Need to Know, World War II and the Rise of American Intelligence (New York: Mariner, 2022), 234–44.

⁴ Richard J. Aldrich, GCHQ: The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency (London: Harper Press, 2010), 43. Aldrich notes ‘the remarkable fact that the US Navy breathed not a word about the Holden Agreement to the US Army.’

⁵ Woven into Taylor’s many published works are remarks about his career choices. See for examples Telford Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials, A Personal Memoir (New York: Skyhorse, 2013), esp. ix-xii, and —, ‘Anglo-American Signals Intelligence Co-operation’, in F. H. Hinsley and Alan Stripp (eds.), Code Breakers, The Inside Story of Bletchley Park (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 71–3. See also Robert D. Farley, “Oral History Interview with Telford Taylor”, Defense.gov, DOC ID 4,234,888, 22 January 1985 https://media.defense.gov/2021/Jul/15/2002763518/-1/–1/0/NSA-OH-01-85-Taylor.PDF, (accessed May 3, 2023). It is interesting to note that Taylor tried first to join naval intelligence, but was turned away on account of poor eyesight.

⁶ Farley, Taylor Oral History, 23–4.

⁷ Ibid., 26.

⁸ For Army – GC&CS relations in 1943, see Robert L. Benson, A History of U.S. Communications Intelligence during World War II: Policy and Administration (Ft. Meade, MD: NSA, 1997), esp. pp. 97–118.

⁹ William F. Friedman, “Preliminary Report of Trip to England”, NSA.gov, REF ID: A-4146452, July 8, 1943 https://nsa.gov/Portals/75/documents/news-features/friedman-documents/correspondence/FOLDER_510/41784409082346.pdf, (accessed May 3, 2023).

¹⁰ A case in point was Captain Eddie Hastings, RN, GC&CS liaison officer in Washington. Disliked by many American officers, he made thinly veiled threats of rupturing transatlantic ties when he did not get his way. Benson, History of U.S. Communications Intelligence, 107.

¹¹ The UK National Archives (hereafter TNA), HW 37/4, Telford Taylor, [Memorandum about Reserved Series of Diplomatic Traffic], n.d.; Bissell to Menzies, 20 May 1944, referencing Taylor’s initiative. Taylor would go on to propose and help run a system of liaison officers at Army headquarters in the field to handle sensitive traffic, a win-win proposition based on a similar British system intended to protect secrets while disseminating vital information to commanders. See for example Farley, Taylor Oral History, 1–2, 58–60. Taylor himself drafted the order for Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall’s signature.

¹² TNA, WO 373/152, E. Beddington, Award Recommendation for Telford Taylor, 6 June 1945.

¹³ Landis Gores, Ultra: I Was There, Volume I (Morristown, NC: Lulu Press, 2008), 70.

¹⁴ Farley, Taylor Oral History, 55; Taylor, “Anglo-American signals intelligence co-operation”, 72.

¹⁵ Taylor to Clarke, 5 April 1943, quoted in Stephen Budiansky, “The Difficult Beginnings of US-British Codebreaking Cooperation”, Intelligence and National Security, 15, no. 2 (2000), 55–56. In codebreaking, a ‘crib’ is the part of a message that is known and can be leveraged to break into the unknown parts.

¹⁶ Budiansky, ”Difficult Beginnings”, 55–6.

¹⁷ Quoted in Stephen Budiansky, “Bletchley Park and the Birth of the Special Relationship,” in Action this Day: Bletchley Park from the Breaking of the Enigma Code to the Birth of the Modern Computer, ed., M. Smith and R. Erskine (London: Bantam, 2001), p. 234.

¹⁸ Colin MacKinnon (ed.), ‘Bletchley Park Diary, William F. Friedman’, 2013, ht tps:colinmackinnon.com/attachments/The_Bletchley_Park_Diary_of_William_F._Friedman_E.pdf, 31 passim, (accessed December 10, 2020).

¹⁹ Benson, A History of US Communications Intelligence, 134–8.

²⁰ National Archives and Records Administration II (hereafter NARA II), College Park, MD, Record Group (RG) 457, Historical Cryptologic Collection (HCC), Entry 9032, Box 124, Item 4684, Folder: ‘US-UK Correspondence concerning GC&CS Ultra History of WWII’, Brig. Gen. Clarke to Maj. Gen. Bissell, ‘Research on Ultra Intelligence’, 12 April 1945. Emphasis in original. Bissell replaced Strong in early 1944.

²¹ Aldrich, GCHQ, pp. 45–6 discusses early wartime concerns about the Soviets in both London and Washington.

²² NARA II, RG 457, HCC, Entry 9032, Box 1424, Item 4684, Folder: ‘US-UK Correspondence concerning GC&CS Ultra History of WWII’, Col. Telford Taylor to Director-General, ‘Proposed Joint Research Project – Ultra Intelligence’, January 27, 1945.

²³ Aldrich, GCHQ, 51.

²⁴ As quoted in Christopher Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush (London: Harper Collins, 1996), p. 99. Fleming was Godfrey’s aide, who prepared memoranda for American officials recommending ways to organize US intelligence.

²⁵ Joseph E. Persico, Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage (New York: Random House, 2002), 81.

²⁶ NARA II, RG 457, HCC, Entry 9032, Box 1424, Item 4684, Chairman London Signal Intelligence Board to Colonel O’Connor, 21 March 1945.

²⁷ TNA, HW 14/125, SLU Washington (GOR) to GC&CS, 13 April 13, 1945, HW 14/125.

²⁸ Ibid.

²⁹ Ibid.

³⁰ OP-20-G was the staff section in Washington responsible for cryptology. Since Wenger reported to the Director of Naval Communications, OP-20-G had a complicated relationship with the Office of Naval Intelligence.

³¹ NARA II, RG 457, HCC, Entry 9032, Box 1424, Item 4684, Folder: ‘US-UK Correspondence concerning GC&CS Ultra History of WWII’, Wenger to OP-20, ‘Joint Anglo-American Research Project’, 9 April 1945. The membership of the ANCIB and the ANCICC overlapped.

³² Ibid.

³³ ‘Clarke to Bissell’, ‘Research on Ultra Intelligence’, 12 April 1945. Located a few miles from the Pentagon on its own campus, Arlington Hall was the Army’s equivalent of Bletchley Park. Bissell was continuing his predecessor’s policy; Strong had been an early proponent of cooperation with the British.

³⁴ Ibid.

³⁵ Ibid.

³⁶ NARA II, RG 457, HCC, Entry 9032, Box 1424, Item 4684, Folder: ‘US-UK Correspondence concerning GC & CS Ultra History of WWII’, MGEN Bissell to RADM Thebaud, ‘Proposed US-British Research Project’, April 18, 1945.

³⁷ Ibid.

³⁸ Ibid.

³⁹ NARA II, RG 457, HCC, Entry 9032, Box 1424, Item 4684, Folder: ‘US-UK Correspondence concerning GC&CS Ultra History of WWII’, Thebaud to Bissell, ‘Proposed US-British Research Project’, 2 May 1945.

⁴⁰ Ibid.

⁴¹ Ibid.

⁴² Even though it remained fragmented and bureaucratically weak throughout the war, various parts of Navy intelligence had recovered from the signal failure at Pearl Harbor to excel at various tasks in both the Pacific and Atlantic theaters.

⁴³ Christopher Andrew and David Dilks, The Missing Dimension: Governments and Intelligence Communities in the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984).

⁴⁴ ”Synopsis of General Order No. 41”, Military Times, May 6, 1946, https://valor.militarytimes.com/hero/113199, (accessed May 2, 2023).