4140 E Y E S P Y I S S U E 1 0 , 2 0 0 2 E Y E S P Y I S S U E 1 0 , 2 0 0 2

been through a terrible campaignon the Somme. Over a million laymen dead, sixty thousandcasualties on a single day, half a million soldierslost at Verdun alone for nothing, or perhaps morecorrectly, a few hundred feet of mud-soakedland. It was a gigantic slaughtering machine inthe barbed wire and trenches. America sat backand watched, feeling safe and secure in isolation.Britain and much of Europe seemed puzzled byapparent American indifference.

In the drab confides of Room 40, Nigel de Greyrolled out a message. It was a string numbergrouping from the German code book. TheGermans used printed code books, then usedanother book to encrypt the message again foradditional security. The mechanical encryptionmachines such as Enigma had yet to beinvented. Room 40 had acquired copies of thecode books from sinking ships a fact unbeknown

to the Germans.

This message interested deGrey, for it was long, too long

for a normal cable. It was also coded only onceand not enciphered again to make it moresecure. To this day no one knows why it did nothave the second, ‘extra layer’ of protection.

The first thing that caught the mens attentionwas the code - 13042, which signified adiplomatic code variant. They also noticed97556 near the end of the message. This turnedout to be Alfred Zimmermann, the GermanForeign Secretary. At the beginning they found‘Most Secret’ and ‘for your Excellency’s personalinformation’, addressed to Washington. Thecable was therefore intended for Count vonBernstorff the German Ambassador in Washington.

Whilst considering to put the message aside forfuture analysis, the word ‘Mexico’ was found.

The Lusitania

How an intricate British NavalIntelligence Plot Brought the

United States into the Great War

The ZimmermannTelegram

SECRET HISTORY

By Alan Simpson

Alfred Zimmermann

Checked, and re-checked, it still came back‘Mexico’. Why would the Germans be talkingabout Mexico? Further down the words “US andJapan” appeared. This caused alarm.

US President Woodrow Wilson

The Zimmermann Telegram planted with WesternUnion by British Naval Intelligence

he Zimmermann Telegram isprobably the most important and farreaching intercepted message in thehistory of espionage and intelli-gence. Historians acknowledge thatit helped sculpture the world we livein today. And in the ongoing debateover Echelon and the USA intercep-T

tion of e-mails, faxes and telephone calls, weoften forget that this is not a new process.Intercepting communications has been thesource of intelligence for centuries.

At the beginning of the twentieth century therewere no satellites, no encrypted microwave relaynetworks, just copper wire, telegraph operators andundersea cables between continents. Most wereconsidered secure. And Gentlemen would surelynot dream of listening to each other’s privateconversations! But the British Foreign Office hadother ideas.

At the time, the world’s major undersea cableswere either British, or ran through British-

breaking process had long outgrown the originalRoom 40, it was such a good nondescript coverthat the title was retained.

As in WWII it was naval codes sent by wirelessthat were the most important for Britain and itssurvival.

On 17 January 1917, one of thousands of codedmessages thumped into Room 40, along the oldpneumatic message tubes (some people maystill remember this type of system running inoffices and retail stores). The message waspicked up by Nigel de Gray, a seconded thirty-one-year old publisher, and Reverend WilliamMontgomery, a forty-six-year old scholar. Neitherfitting the image of today’s James Bond. But theywere about to begin the process that changedthe course of the WWI and history.

To ‘paint’ the background to that eventful day,Britain, France and Germany had been locked ina bloody three-year-war, and their troops had just

The ZimmermannTelegram

controlled countries or territorial waters. Thetrans-Atlantic cables were classic examples.They were monitored and their contents copiedfor the benefit of the British Empire.

On the first day of the Great War in 1914, theAdmiralty ordered the British cable-laying ship,Telconia, to drag up the German undersea cablesoff Emden on the Dutch/German border, cut themand deprive the Kaiser of his key communicationlinks’. They were left with wireless or cablesthrough a neutral country. Either way they wouldbe read by Whitehall. Most of their communica-tions’ traffic was subsequently switched toNauen, a high-powered transmitter outsideBerlin. A half-century before the NationalSecurity Agency was even conceived, the BritishEmpire was running its own low-tech Echelon.

BRITISH ADMIRALTY OFFICE - ROOM 40

During WWI, Britain had a very effective code-breaking organisation housed in Room 40 at theAdmiralty. Though war had meant the code-