584 • WISEMAN, SIR WILLIAM
of Bletchley’s work, to preempt Cave Brown, was greeted with dis-
may in Whitehall, but the decision was taken not to place any legal
obstacle in his path—or, in the words of Admiral Farnhill, then secre-
tary of theD NoticeCommittee, ‘‘Objections to publication on the
grounds of security were not sufficient to warrant his advice that pub-
lication would contravene D Notices.’’
Winterbotham’s authoritative revelation that much of the enemy’s
cipher traffic had been intercepted and decrypted astonished the pub-
lic and led to a dramatic revision of previously published histories,
particularly those of the great military strategists such as Field Mar-
shal Bernard Montgomery and General Dwight D. Eisenhower,
whose own memoirs had neglected to mention the ‘‘most secret
source’’ of intelligence they had relied upon. Understandably, SIS
was especially anxious about Winterbotham’s breach of security,
even though he had returned to civilian life in 1945. Certainly the
organization was aware of every stage of the book’s production pro-
cess, for his editor was herself closely connected to SIS, her sister
being married to Michael Wrigley, one of SIS’s senior directors.
The publication ofThe Ultra Secreteventually forced the govern-
ment to agree to the release of relevant material to the Public Record
Office and led to a radical reappraisal of the Allied prosecution of
the war. It also made the author deeply unpopular with his former
colleagues, especially those he had himself reprimanded for minor
breaches of wartime security. Winterbotham shrugged off the criti-
cism and went on to publish two further volumes of memoirs,The
Nazi ConnectionandThe Ultra Spy,before he died in January 1990.WISEMAN, SIR WILLIAM.Educated at Winchester and Jesus Col-
lege, Cambridge, William Wiseman was the 10th baronet, having
succeeded his father in 1893 at the age of eight. A partner in the New
York brokers Kuhn, Loeb & Co. on the outbreak of World War I, he
was commissioned into the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry and
was gassed in Flanders. After a convalescence, he was posted to
Washington, D.C., ostensibly attached to the British Purchasing
Commission, to liaise with Colonel Edward M. House, President
Woodrow Wilson’s influential special adviser. In reality he repre-
sented theSecret Intelligence Servicein the United States and em-
ployedSomerset Maughamas a courier to support the Kerensky
government in Moscow.