In February 1941 four US officers were landed from a British warship at Sheerness, bundled into vehicles and driven to Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, a large redbrick house amid wartime huts. They were greeted at midnight by the head of Bletchley with sherry, whisky being in short supply.
They carried with them a secret device called the Purple Machine, which deciphered previously impregnable Japanese communications. In return, they were given full details of Bletchley’s breaking of the German Enigma cipher. Yet it would be another ten months before the US entered the war. This exchange between two governments of their greatest secrets, with no formal agreement beyond an understanding that they would work together, was an unprecedented act of intelligence co-operation, beginning what has become known as the Special Relationship.
It grew out of speeches by and private understandings between Churchill and Roosevelt. The actual exchange of ‘cryptographic information’ was initiated by Stewart Menzies, Chief of MI6 (Bletchley Park was acquired, set up and run by MI6 until it became GCHQ, an independent agency, in 1945).
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