Turing files reveal his loathing for US codebreakers
BRITAIN: When Alan Turing was sent to America as a high-level scientific liaison officer in 1942 he did not exactly build bonds of common friendship.
The US immigration authorities, the mathematician complained, ‘‘were very snooty’’ and he considered his opposite numbers incompetent and untrustworthy.
Just how long this view of the US persisted has been revealed in a newly discovered cache of letters from a decade later.
When asked in 1953 if he would attend a conference across the Atlantic Turing replied: ‘‘I would not like the journey, and I detest America.’’
The comment was a rare flash of Turing’s personal views, amid 150 items of professional correspondence found in an old filing cabinet at the University of Manchester.
They cover the last five years of his life, before his suicide in 1954, and were spotted by an academic clearing out a storeroom.
Although today Turing is most famous for his work with the codebreakers of Bletchley Park, helping to crack the German Enigma transmissions, that was kept top secret at the time. Turing also continued his prewar research, working on early computers at the university.
The correspondence, however, gives no hints about his state of mind as he struggled with his homosexuality, for which he was convicted of gross indecency in 1952 and put on hormone treatment.
That conviction led to his exile from contacts at GCHQ, the successor to Bletchley, and his withdrawal from the intelligence community, in which he had once been a shining star.
It was a long way to fall for a man who, in November 1942, had been sent as an official delegation to visit the US’s top secret codebreaking facilities. He declared himself unimpressed.
‘‘I am persuaded that one cannot very well trust these people where a matter of judgment in cryptography is concerned,’’ he wrote in a report on the visit.
He added, however, that the American codebreakers were not without their uses. ‘‘I think we can make quite a lot of use of their machinery.’’ - The Times