Bidspirit auction | Sir Harry Hinsley Bletchley Park

Sir Harry Hinsley Bletchley Park WW2 signed rare Army Communications RAF cover. Sir Francis Harry Hinsley, OBE, FBA was an English intelligence officer and historian. He worked at Bletchley Park during the Second World War and wrote widely on the history of international relations and British Intelligence during the Second World War. At Bletchley Park, Hinsley studied the external characteristics of intercepted German messages, a process sometimes termed ”traffic analysis”: from call signs, frequencies, times of interception and so forth, he was able to deduce a great deal of information about the structure of Nazi Germany's Kriegsmarine's communication networks and even about the structure of the German navy itself. Hinsley helped initiate a programme of seizing Enigma machines and keys from German weather ships, such as the Lauenburg, thereby facilitating Bletchley Park's resumption of interrupted breaking of German Naval Enigma. He realised that, as the ships were on station for long periods, they would have to carry the code books (which changed every month) for subsequent months; these would likely be in a locked safe and might be overlooked when the crew threw Enigma materials (including the code book currently in use) overboard if the ship was boarded, an assumption which proved correct. In late 1943, Hinsley was sent to liaise with the US Navy in Washington, with the result that an agreement was reached in January 1944 to co-operate in exchanging results on Japanese Naval signals. Towards the end of the war, Hinsley, by then a key aide to Bletchley Park chief Edward Travis, was part of a committee which argued for a post-war intelligence agency that would combine both signals intelligence and human intelligence in a single organisation. In the event, the opposite occurred, with GC&CS becoming GCHQ. On 6 April 1946, Hinsley married Hilary Brett-Smith, a graduate from Somerville College, Oxford, who had also worked at Bletchley Park, in Hut 8. They moved to Cambridge after the war where Hinsley had been elected a Fellow at St. John's College. Hinsley was awarded the OBE in 1946 and was knighted in 1985. Good condition. Part of Single Vendor collection. We combine postage on multiple winning lots and can ship worldwide.