The Imitation Game: how Alan Turing played dumb to fool US intelligence 圖靈如何裝傻,騙過美國情報人員
One of the few who knew that Bletchley had cracked Enigma was Ian Fleming – working in naval intelligence – but the Americans were kept in the dark. 海軍情報單位的艾昂.弗萊明是少數知道圖靈的布列徹利團隊已經破解Enigma密碼的人之一,但美國方仍被蒙在鼓裡......
On 12 November 1942, the mathematician Alan Turing arrived in New York, bound for
Washington DC and the headquarters of the US Secret Service, an organisation now
known as the CIA. More than 500 American ships had been sunk by German U-boats
since the US began sending supplies across the Atlantic to Europe in 1941 and naval
authorities were growing impatient with Britain’s reluctance to share more than
cursory details of progress at decrypting messages sent by the German high command
and encoded by the Enigma machine.
Officially, Turing was meant to disclose everything he and his team at Bletchley Park
knew about the workings of Enigma. In reality, he was under strict instructions from
MI6 to act as its official liar and keep the Americans in the dark as much as possible. It
was a strange role for a Cambridge mathematician with a fondness for crossword
puzzles, but Turing’s wartime work had landed him in the midst of a game of high-
stakes diplomacy.
Unknown to the Americans, Britain had been deciphering messages to and from the
German U-boat fleet since the summer of 1940. Within weeks of arriving at Bletchley
Park, Turing had invented an electromechanical machine called the Bombe that could
break any Enigma-coded message. The machine required two things – knowledge of
the Enigma hardware and a plain-text “crib” of around 20 characters likely to be in
the message, inferred using facts such as the weather and key dates such as Hitler’s
birthday.
Few were allowed to know. Most government officials and British naval officers
believed the vital information was coming from an MI6 master spy codenamed
“Boniface” who reportedly controlled a network of agents throughout Germany.
Boniface and his team of spies were entirely fictional.
One of those who knew the truth was the future author of the James Bond novels, Ian
Fleming, who was then working as a lieutenant commander in Britain’s naval
intelligence division. Fleming was involved in devising operations based on intelligence
received from Bletchley Park, but judging from his diary entries at the time, it is clear
that he and Turing didn’t see eye to eye.
“One of the reasons how we know Turing was so heavily involved with MI6 during the
war is due to Fleming’s diaries,” says Graham Moore, scriptwriter and producer of
The Imitation Game, which is finally released in the US on Friday. “Most of the time
he’s writing about how annoyed he is with Turing. Fleming was regularly proposing
plans and Turing was apparently in a position to be able to reject them. Fleming makes
it clear he doesn’t like the look of him. There’s a memorable extract where he writes
‘Turing came in like an undertaker’ and shot down whatever he was saying. One
imagines they were two very different sorts of British gentlemen.”
MI6 was especially wary of letting its American allies into the loop, fearing not only that
the information would leak but that Britain would receive little of value in return. With
the US Navy and US Army operating almost entirely independently, often plotting
against each other, British intelligence was convinced the information would be used
unwisely.
Turing’s role in Washington was to liaise with the leading American cryptanalysts and
convince them that Britain was struggling to match their expertise while taking note of
the machines they were developing, in particular a speech encryption system being
developed for private conversations between Winston Churchill and Franklin
Roosevelt. Judging by the minutes of the meetings, it’s a role he played perfectly, in a
stark contrast to his common portrayal on screen as someone incapable of judging the
nuances of social situations.
“He absolutely hated it because he had to play dumb while being grilled by these
mathematicians,” Moore says. “He had to pretend to be wowed by the progress the
Americans were making even though they were light years behind the British at that
point. But he had them convinced.”
Turing’s own reports from Washington are filled with disdain for what he saw as
America’s overreliance on technology rather than thought. “I am persuaded that
one cannot very well trust these people where a matter of judgment in cryptography is
concerned,” he wrote. “It astonished me to find that they make these elaborate
calculations before they had really grasped the main principles. [But] I think we can
make quite a lot of use of their machinery.”
American culture was alien to Turing, who was irritated by what he saw as their
incessant need for irrelevant small talk. “In one of his letters home, he’s complaining
about their speech and the fact they kept saying ‘ummm’, ‘errrr’, ‘but’ and all
these little stutters which got on his nerves,” Moore says. “He writes ‘Just say the
sentence and then stop!’”
Ironically, it was Turing’s trip to Washington that inspired some of the work in the
post-war years he is best remembered for and in particular his 1950 paper on a
machine that could think for itself. He met Claude Shannon, now known as “the father
of information theory”, and had a lengthy conversation about the idea of building an
electronic brain – a discussion that excited Turing so much he immediately bought
himself a book on electronic components for the long journey back across the Atlantic.
Turing went on to be involved in some of the earliest experiments in artificial
intelligence, designing computer programs to play draughts and even write love
letters. But one Tuesday morning in June 1954, he was found dead by his housekeeper,
a half-eaten apple by his bedside. A postmortem concluded that cyanide poisoning
was the cause of death, though the apple was not tested.
Two years previously, Turing had been convicted of gross indecency and given the
choice of prison or hormone treatment. He chose the latter, which rendered him
impotent, and as a result of the conviction he lost his security clearance and role
working for GCHQ, the government’s communication headquarters.
This appears to support the suicide hypothesis, but Turing’s level of access to
sensitive information during the war has only added to the enduring mystery of how he
died. Turing’s mother blamed her son’s careless attitude towards the storing of
dangerous chemicals. He had set up an electrical lab in the spare room of his cramped
lodgings in order to run experiments and it was suggested that the apple had become
contaminated this way. However some feel this story is simply too convenient.
“There are a large number of people who think he was deliberately killed because the
government were afraid he was going to talk,” Moore says. “The British had given
Enigma to Israel, saying it was an unbreakable machine and they should use it for all
their communication. They didn’t tell anyone they had actually broken it and were
continuing to listen in. So there was a lot of bluff and counter bluff going on.”
However Mortem Tyldum, director of The Imitation Game, has a different theory. He
believes the key to the mystery lies in Turing’s fascination with the Disney film Snow
White.
“There’s a scene I desperately tried to get in where he was waiting in Bletchley
village to be interviewed by Commander Dennison for a code-breaking position at the
start of the war. He was early and at the village cinema they were showing Snow White.
So he popped in, fell in love with the movie and almost became obsessed with it. I think
this gave him the idea of a suicide apple, and perhaps led him to actually kill himself.”
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