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BLETCHLEY PARK BRAINTEASERS

About the Author

Sinclair McKay is the author of the Sunday Times bestseller Bletchley Park Brainteasers as well as the bestselling Secret Life of Bletchley Park. He writes for the Spectator and the Telegraph and spends much of his life eyebrow-deep in dusty archives! He lives in east London.

About the Book

Have you ever daydreamed of being approached to be a secret agent? Fancied yourself being propelled into an elegant and dangerous world of spies?

Long gone are the days when the tap on the shoulder was largely a result of social connections, now the secret services have cast their nets wider and it’s your chance to join the ranks. Whether you have a linguistic flair, an instinct for espionage or good old common sense, pit your wits against some of the greatest minds of our time with ingenious brainteasers including secret languages, sabotage themed brain bogglers and hidden codes.

Blending extraordinary and illuminating tales of the secret services from over the years and a wide range of mind-twisting puzzles, Secret Service Brainteasers will test your mental agility to discover:

Do YOU have what it takes to be a spy?

To top code-cracker Jean Valentine, a true inspiration. Ever since working for Bletchley Park, her enthusiasm for conundrums has never diminished and she likes to solve six impossible puzzles before breakfast. This is also for the ordinary men and women across the years who, when drawn into the realm of the secret services, have shown extraordinary bravery.

INTRODUCTION

Of all idle childhood daydreams, it must surely be one of the most common: what is it like to be approached out of nowhere and invited to become a spy?

The fantasy might run something like this: a cryptic meeting, maybe amid the tall bookcases and red leather armchairs of a grand Pall Mall club; then the mission. A posting to a far-distant foreign city, pulsing with colour and rich fragrance. And a brief to blend in, to infiltrate sinister secret societies, with the aim of bamboozling your opponents to reveal classified information or forbidden documents. How far could you get without letting your nerves show?

And now the reality. By and large, the business of being recruited for the secret services is (relatively) transparent these days: no armchairs, no glasses of port. MI6 advertisements radiate friendly advice. But no matter how open and inclusive spooks might now wish to appear, the truly important things remain unspoken. The vetting is as daunting and unforgiving as it ever was; no friend of yours will go unchecked. And the essential clandestine requirements of the job stay hidden from view. These are broadly the same as they were over 100 years ago, when the official British secret services as we know them came into being. To be an agent, there are certain qualities one must possess.

Given how lethally serious and consequential the real work is, it is curious that when we think of spying, we still associate it with secrets whispered in shadowed corners, figures in black stealing through darkened rooms in search of classified documents, heavily accented femmes fatales, and agents receiving orders from brusque bosses behind walnut desks. In a touch-screen age of algorithms and GPS, this imagery ought to be antique. Funnily enough, though, it actually holds true in broad principle. This is because successful spying is all about human contact. These images also help explain the constant grip that espionage has over our imagination even today.

Now, it tends to be the case (as I have found) that those who have been employed by MI5 or MI6 enjoy making the point – with a faint smile – that actually the work is generally rather tedious, repetitive and colourless. This is a pose of immense worldliness, adopted by those who have clearly never known the tedium of much more ordinary workplaces.

And in a wider sense, it is quite simply untrue: regardless of the exact nature of the games that spies must play, the whole thing – even in the drabbest, greyest settings – inevitably crackles with the electricity of crucial geopolitical purpose.

Spying is an entire way of looking at the world. It is about observing people, landscapes, texts, and seeing concealed meanings. It is about interpreting language, searching for disguised significance. The spy does not have to be a great intellectual. What she or he does have to be is needle-sharp at understanding human nature.

And no matter how many technical leaps there have been in terms of ubiquitous electronic surveillance – whether hacking computers, phones or cameras – there still remains the fundamental spying divide: and it is defined by the terms ‘sigint’ and ‘humint’. ‘Sigint’ is short for ‘signals intelligence’ – that is, the art of listening in to all the coded communications of opposing nations, and unravelling their meanings. But there is still a vital need for ‘humint’, short for ‘human intelligence’ – that is, the agents out there in the field, making contacts, forging alliances of trust, cajoling, listening and, where necessary, finding physical means of getting hold of intelligence. This is still the heart-pounding side of spying.

It has also been one of the great constants throughout history: as long as there have been civilisations, there have been spies. From biblical times to the modern-day era, the secret agent must be both brave enough and skilful enough to move among the enemy without being detected. Discovery can mean death. The ability to adopt new guises and personas can become a lethal version of a child’s dressing-up game. In the earliest days of MI6 (the foreign-facing branch of the British secret service), at the start of the twentieth century, there was a fascination for and delight in disguises. One agent called Paul Dukes, infiltrating himself into revolutionary Russia, used an extraordinary array of wigs, false moustaches and different costumes in order to fraternise with murderous Bolsheviks and psychotic Cossacks.

Also there right from the start of MI6 was an open love for the latest technology and trick gadgetry. There was a general obsession with perfecting the ideal invisible ink, using materials that any agent might easily obtain, however unpleasant. One such – said to be quite successful – was semen.

There is something about the real-life looking-glass world of spying that the most popular fiction never quite seems to catch. In the case of Ian Fleming’s James Bond, once you subtract the implausibly exotic women and the fairy-tale ogre villains, you are actually left with very little in the way of good honest espionage. Conversely, the weary operatives who populate John Le Carré’s ‘Circus’, endlessly alert to traitors and moles, and ground down by the whole sour existential crisis of the Cold War, seem to see it all as a repellent charade.

For the rest of us, that is not how the daydream goes. There is that subconscious conviction that the whole business of spying must be both hugely exciting and also rewardingly virtuous. Not to mention elegant and sophisticated.

Perhaps one of the finest screen interpretations of the spying game as escapist fantasy is given in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), in which advertising executive Cary Grant is mistaken for an agent in a smart New York club, subsequently finds himself chased down by assassins across the country and, as the escapade unfolds, actually evolves into the spy everyone has wrongly assumed him to be. The various ordeals – including being machine-gunned from a crop duster plane, and dangling off the edge of Mount Rushmore – appear to regenerate him. The moral of the story is that even if one is quite without morals, a spirit of adventure can still bring fulfilment.

Yet it is only comparatively recently that spies became folk heroes. Before the twentieth century, they were more often figures who inhabited a darkened world of shifting loyalties and multiple betrayals. In the febrile Elizabethan age, spying was very often a lethal business, a maze of torture and sudden violence. Paranoia about Catholic agents seeking to undermine Elizabeth’s rule meant young men were sent to travel across the continent to gather intelligence about communication networks linking enemy countries such as Spain with contacts back in London: spies to root out spies.

Later, as the shockwaves of the French Revolution reverberated across the Channel, agents were sent deep undercover to Paris to try to evaluate any possible threat or risk of contagion to Britain. In those paranoid times, the Duke of Portland, heading up what was an early incarnation of a national secret service, was said to have recruited the young Romantic poet William Wordsworth, who travelled extensively throughout France and the various principalities of Germany.

And of course, spies have come over to Britain too: in the late nineteenth century, London’s sawdust-strewn pubs jostled with young new arrivals from France, from Germany, from Russia. Some were revolutionary anarchists – mingling and plotting in pub back-rooms – but others had a more singular purpose: they were double agents from the Russian secret police seeking to eliminate political enemies. Some things change little across the years. Novelists and playwrights were starting to be drawn to this netherworld of codenames, secret signs, bombs and tumult. A popular literary serial at the time was ‘Ruth the Betrayer’, featuring all manner of underground cabals, hermetic passwords and pistol shots.

Women were central to these and subsequent blood-and-thunder narratives, but mainly as dark-eyed amoral enemy agents, ruthless about drawing ambassadors under their spells of enchantment, the better to creep into embassy studies in the dead of night to open official safes. As if answering some public demand for a real-life equivalent, there was, during the First World War, the tragi-comic distraction of the adventures of ‘Mata Hari’, whose assumed name was to find a form of immortality as the real woman behind it was gradually forgotten. As we shall see later, her real-life espionage exploits were almost designed for readers desperate for escapism. That stereotype continued long after the war in the works of Ian Fleming: Pussy Galore indeed! In the real corridors of the secret service, pioneering female agents of the 1960s such as Daphne Park faced a struggle to be taken seriously as equals. Dame Stella Rimington, who rose to head MI5 a couple of decades later, broke through that glass ceiling with aplomb.

Despite its limitations, fiction has sometimes been a surprisingly clear window into the reality of spying. It was at the end of Queen Victoria’s reign that espionage in the service of empire first found its more certain expression in terms of public consumption: Rudyard Kipling’s classic novel Kim, published in 1901, is both storming adventure and philosophical proposition. Set in India, this is a realm in which the young protagonist is eventually recruited to help the British secret services, and finds himself in the Himalayas facing Russian agents, and all while his elderly Tibetan lama companion is attempting to find enlightenment.

Here is where we also acknowledge the other huge draw of the world of espionage: that of the sinister enemies. In many cases, fiction writers have hardly had to exaggerate. Since Tsarist times, Russia appears to have specialised in giving the world undercover agents of unparalleled malevolence: from the Leninist agents of the Cheka, to the heavies of Stalin’s NKVD, to the flinty and merciless assassins of the post-war KGB. It is almost as if the Russian intelligence services revel in their reputation for darkness. They have not been alone in this. In his 1966 novel The Comedians, Graham Greene creepily evoked the Tonton Macoute, the Haitian secret police of ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier – but no fiction could be more chilling than the hideous reality.

The sense of an implacable foe is central. When we daydream of being recruited, we are holding in our heads the idea not merely of being sent on missions for Queen and country, but also squaring up to frightening and powerful enemies, who can only be thwarted with guile and wit. It is certainly the case that the secret services prize gazelle-like mental agility, the ability to extemporise, to think on your feet in an emergency. Who among us would have the level-headedness displayed by the aforementioned MI6 operative Daphne Park in an ambush deep in Africa in the early 1960s? With her jeep surrounded by gunmen not interested in hearing cover stories, she leaned over to the back seat, opened a wooden crate, reached inside and pulled out a bottle of whiskey with a broad smile. The other bottles in the crate were offered around and her smile proved contagious.

But there is another branch of fascination here too, and that is the psychology of those who betray their own side. The story of the Cambridge Spies – their recruitment at university in the 1930s, their rise within the secret services, the volume of material they passed to Stalin’s Russia, and their subsequent unmasking – still inspire films, plays, novels and histories. Not because they were in any way anti-heroes but rather because they played such a hazardous game without ever losing poise. How did they not buckle?

In contrast to this moral murk, however, is the undeniably brighter side of espionage: the delight in the sheer inventiveness and occasional absurdity of the gadgets devised for use in the field. Who could ever decline a visit to Q’s laboratory? This aspect of Bond’s life was curiously accurate: MI6 really did have a Quartermaster (Q) and during the war and afterwards, there really were workshops devoted to adapting briefcases to contain daggers and gold coins, to disguising bombs as items such as potatoes, and to using sheep with fake fleeces as means of getting sensitive documents across borders.

The key word in all of this is ‘intelligence’: the justification for underhand methods, disguises, even betrayals. The agent will weave any deception necessary in order either to safeguard secrets, or to steal them. There is another term too: ‘tradecraft’ – an innocent word that seems to place the ability to break into forbidden zones and listen in on the enemy on the same level as carpentry or breadmaking. In the 1980s, Spycatcher author Peter Wright described with some relish how he and his colleagues ‘bugged and burgled’ their way across London. On one ethical level, this might make highly virtuous readers wince. But heavens, even the stiffest moral compasses can wobble a little when the cause is just, when it saves lives and – crucially – when it is just so juicy to read about.

So the puzzles here are designed to challenge you on a variety of levels. The question ‘have you got what it takes?’ does not refer to mere dexterity with words and numbers. They are also about how quickly you can summon your wits under pressure; how keen an eye you have for anomalies; how alert you are to tone when it comes to identifying friend or foe; how steely your logic is when required to find an escape route; how inspired and imaginative your lateral thinking is when confronted with poetic riddles in which the secrets are concealed.

Espionage is an ever-evolving contest: wits matched against counter-wits. Some of the puzzles here are historical conundrums of the sort that Edwardian and later agents would have been expected to tackle with speed. Some have been inspired directly by more modern secret service recruitment tests. Others, involving everything from radio transmission challenges to maps, are there to give you an idea of the practical proficiency needed out in the field.

Paradoxically, in an ever-changing, ever-unstable world, the spy will remain a constant. Because ultimately you will always need people who can divine the true intentions of others. Espionage might frequently be a dirty business – but in a more high-minded sense, it is also a branch of philosophy. Hopefully, this wide range of puzzles will also prove as beguiling, diverting and dazzlingly devious as any of the best secret agents!