Secrets and Lies

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 Bletchley 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 nine 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 premiership are probably the worst and most

disastrous weeks in the history of Britain. The most catastrophic defeat on the constant

severe. Outclassed by the German war mocks but not far from the skies above. Britain is facing defeat and by 1940 the British position looks practically hopeless. They've met the vermarked 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 faced 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 it. The British have been working to crack enemy military code since the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Alistair Dynastin 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.

Dynastin predicted that accurate crypt analysis of the vermarked codes would be an important weapon in any war with Germany. We talk about the German way of war that sometimes we say Blitz Krieger, 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 Blitz Krieger as the tank or the Stugodiber. It is Alistair Dynastin 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. Dynastin 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 an 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 typewriter 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 rotis, as they turn, it produces what we call ciphatex. If you press the D, it will come out as a T.

Or some of the random electric. The word Hitler, for example, if used in a message, is scramble.

“This version isn't using more 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. It's unique machine. Germany was leading the wilderness. It turns every German frontline position in World War II into a veritable data and information processing center. 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 ways that it can be set up every day. If I've got three rotis, 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 plug board.

If you had 10 cables, it's 150 million different ways to set up the plug board.

So if you multiply all these different options together, you end up with 150, six million million

“different ways of setting it up, which is more I think than that have been seconds in the universe.”

The Germans figured, and I think justifiably, that it was unbreakable. The dentist and 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. Your 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 Blechley 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 planet,

he likes chemistry, 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 co-breaking 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 polls presented their device to the British and French intelligence services. Turing now assembles it erratically upgraded British version of this machine, the bomb. It's huge,

imagine it will 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 the sort of beeheemoth, the like a witch 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

area of pilots and airmen, sent up to defend Britain. At Lichley Park, Turing and 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. Turing calls his new machine, victory. After decryption, teams decode the German signals, then feed the intelligence to the royal Air Force fighter command. Plesley 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 RF, because they know that the Germans are getting hammered.”

So, it is absolutely vital. The work at Bletchley 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 Bletchley Park. Now, Alan Turner's bomb machine starts the key part of your

encryption process. Then specialised teams will finalise that and decrypt that message,

but it's in German now, so now you've got translators where 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 mushroomed in terms of numbers and scale. Finally, you need to”

analyse 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 and at least the far east. This was a global war and it needed global intelligence. The Enigma signals intelligence generated by Bletchley Park is given a name, ultra for ultra secret. Winston Churchill is its biggest champion.

He is 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 super power. Churchill would look at these intelligence reports in his bath in his bedroom, out in the garden, he wants to see the raw intelligence he was fascinated by. And Churchill could see that in Bletchley 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 that 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 the Churchill did.

“Hitler's a guy who believes in his instincts. I believe in his vision.”

Hitler is so calm and his own in geological 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,

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 future. He keeps coming up with reports that suggest that a war with Britain would be a long hard war. That a war with the United States would be unwindable. 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 alances 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. After months of Luftwaffe attacks, Prime Minister Winston Churchill is determined to persuade the United States to enter the war.

Without 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 coming to 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're on half. The February 1941 First American delegation comes to bless you, Park. Winston Churchill gives authorization. From then, the American and British partnership really started to move up space. It blossomed. Intelligence officers from both countries work together throughout 1941.

But in December, when Japan attacks Pearl Harbor, co-operation 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 codebreakers, but there's no equivalent of the British foreign intelligence service. American intelligence is like the cottage industry. It's the pre-industrial stage before Pearl

Harbor occurs. Now the United States work with Britain 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 continued to sweep through the Pacific and Southeast Asia. By 1942, you have an unprecedented transatlantic collaboration, intelligent sharing, on every level. American soaring every department in Blacksley Park, working alongside Britain.

So this is a really significant enduring partnership.

“Ultra success gives the allies and advantage, especially in the crucial battle of the North Atlantic.”

It reveals the location of Nazi U-Botes, 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.

can't understand how Allied ships keep sailing around his submarines.

“Admiral Donitz is by far the most security of SAS military leader in the German war machine,”

and he sniffed out the fact that we're re-reaching our convoys. Admiral Donitz 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-Botes, 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 stares 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, Donitz orders a security upgrade to the enigma machine.”

A fourth rotor is added, strengthening the encryption even further. In 1942, the German new boat flattellers changed from the enthread to the enigma, adding fourth rotor, which added a huge layer of complexity to attacking the cipher. Basically, it takes the odds of 150 million million million to one from the three rotor, up to an unfathomable 92 septillion to one shot.

This addition is a major setback for a bletchly parker in the north Atlantic. It's almost like a light-scowing out on the grid of an electrical pattern. You can't find submarines anymore. Once again, German U-Botes pose a grave threat to allied shipping. Intelligence officers 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 codebooks the Germans use to set their enigma machines. The Allies 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-Botes 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 codebreakers 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 launch secret raids to extract any intelligence they can find on German submarines,”

ships, and military facilities, including enigma codebooks. They call the raids "pinch operations." Pinch is British slang for stealing. British intelligence officer Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming helps to coordinate pinch operations.

Inflaming 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 way 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 free hersel for the expected invasion of Europe, and involves a thousand aircraft and more than 230 ships. Their target is the heavily fortified French port of D.E.P. 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. They were 50 United States Rangers that were going to go into combat on European soil

Lieutenant Commander Fleming and a small team called 30 Assault Unit,

are part of the Rating Force. They have a specific objective. With Fleming Coordinating aboard ship, 30 AU will attempt to enter the German Navy's regional headquarters, and nearby Supply Depot. Both will likely contain codebooks for the new Enigma machines.

“From a pinch perspective, what is really important about D.E.P. is that they have all these codebooks”

waiting to be distributed not only for the next month, but months in advance. But after initial success, the landing at D.E.P. 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 D.E.P. are killed, wounded, or capture. Most of 30 Assault Unit's men are killed.

“But at the end of the day, they come away with nothing,”

despite all the bloodshed.

The raid on D.E.P. is a failure from every angle.

But the British still need German codebooks 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, H.M.S. Petard is one of a small destroyer groups sent to hunt Nazi Uboats. When they locate U559, they launch depth charges and force it to the surface.

The Uboat crew abandoned their submarine. With sinking slowly, and this gives the opportunity for the crew of H.M.S. Petard to actually board the Uboat and try to pinch and capture the material from the sinking Uboat as it's going down. Three men rush inside. Lieutenant Tony Fasson, able to see him in Colin Grazer, 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 Uboat 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 below deck, feeding crucial, rich signals intelligence.”

These sci-fi books, up at 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 to me out of the Conning Tower like a cork from a bottle, but tragically it kills the two men who have 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 virtually park can once again decode the German Navy's Enigma messages. But now the code breakers become victims of their own success. The number of enemy signals they intercept and 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 Atlantic. We send Alan Turing to America. In the winter of 1942, Turing meets Joe Desch, an electrical engineer at the National

Cash Register Company in Dayton, Ohio. As a result, the bomb machines evolve into an electrical,

Desch'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 in the Balkan Peninsula to the east. Any where, Sicily. In February 1943, E.N. 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 flyfishing as a kind of analogy for conducting deception operations against the Germans. Now it's widely believed that this was largely

written by E.N. Fleming. It's very much in his style, and it shows that very imaginative thinking, which he's later going to be absolutely renowned, of course. Most of the suggesteds 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. Then television's officers believe this could be a way to feed the Germans false plans for an allied invasion of the Balkans. It's a "being dish" and tacitly 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 Minsmeade 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 trusts 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.

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. The 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,

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 Bletchley 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 mince meat 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 if 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 the photograph them and they send those photographs back to their boss in Berlin, Wilhelm Canaris.

Canaris is interested. He examines the plans for days, then hands them to Hitler. The fear already suspects the allies will attack through the Balkans, so he's inclined to believe the information. The propaganda chief Joseph Gerbel's is wary. Gerbel's is smart and Gerbel's after all is, you know, the minister for propaganda, for lies, he knows what it means to deceive people. He thinks it's a bluff.

The information Canaris gives Hitler confirms his instinct. Two days later, Blechli Park decodes a message. The Germans are moving troops toward the Balkans. Operation Minsmied is working. The work of Blechli 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 Blechli decryptions, that Hitler is pulling a panzer units to the Balkans' two grays, 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 Minsmied. 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 Lera and Live Fidler. For Playtone, executive producers are Tom Hanks

and Gary Getsman. For Backpocket Studios, our executive producer is Ben Dicksteen.