Journal of Intelligence History | 2019
Memoirs of a Kenyan Spymaster
Abstract
noticed: the Abwehr (German military intelligence) Enigma machine was solved in October 1941 by Dillwyn Knox with the help of Mavis Lever and Margaret Rock – not by Oliver Strachey and his section in 1940 (p. 147). Stronger sub-editing would have moved the longer quotations (e.g. pp. 113–116 and 132–6) to appendices, and tidied up some detail such as missing page references for books. As anyone who has written on GC&CS’s senior members knows, it is very difficult to find out exactly what they did. Writing a full-length book on most of them is an almost impossible task – hence the sub-title about ‘Code-Breaking from Room 40 to Berkeley Street ...’. The sub-title covers a huge area, which inevitably results in major omissions: the book has very little on traffic analysis or breaking World War II hand ciphers, and nothing on cipher security, where GC&CS failed badly during the war. However, Joel Greenberg provides quite a lot of information about the work of Berkeley Street under Denniston’s leadership. He has done well with the limited material available on Denniston, and provided a fitting tribute to a sadly neglected, but very important, figure.