38 | 4 CRImE AND PUNISHmENT
The movie The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing, had a scene show-
ing Turing, his brain profoundly affected by the hormones, unable even to start a crossword
puzzle, let alone solve it.^16 The scene is entirely fictitious, like much of the movie (The New York
Review of Books described this as ‘one of the film’s most egregious scenes’).^17 At the time the scene
portrayed, the real Turing was busy with his own computer-assisted quest for the secret of life.
The kjell crisis
A difficult spell blew up towards the end of Turing’s probation with the arrival of a postcard
announcing the visit of his Norwegian boyfriend, Kjell Carlsen.^18 Turing described his rela-
tionship with Kjell as one of ‘Perfect virtue and chastity’.^19 ‘A very light kiss beneath a foreign
flag, under the influence of drink, was all that had ever occurred’, he said. But the last thing he
needed was Kjell turning up in Wilmslow during his probation. The postcard drew an aston-
ishing response from the authorities, who must have been snooping on Turing’s mail. Kjell
never reached Turing. ‘At one stage police over the N of England were out searching for him,
especially in Wilmslow, Manchester, Newcastle etc.’, Turing told Robin Gandy.^20 Kjell found
himself back in Bergen.
The state was evidently keeping a very close watch indeed on Alan Turing. He knew Britain’s best
codebreaking secrets, and his arrest had come at exactly the wrong time. Guy Burgess and Donald
Maclean had defected to Moscow in the middle of 1951, sparking a scandal that in the public mind
associated treachery, Cambridge intellectuals, and homosexuality. MI5 and the Secret Intelligence
Service would not want to be caught napping again. It was also in 1951 that the American sci-
entists Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were sentenced to death for passing atomic weapons secrets
to the Russians; their execution in the United States and the Kjell episode happened at virtually
the same time. On both sides of the Atlantic anxiety about security was at white heat.
At that point in the Cold War the authorities must have seen Turing as one of the West’s
biggest security risks. During the war with Germany he had been a near-omniscient overlord of
the Allied crypto-world—knowledge that had a long shelf life—and now, horror of horrors, this
queer freethinking Cambridge intellectual had a foot in the atom world too. The Manchester
computer was being used for atomic weapons work and Turing had been consulted at the out-
set, when the authorities approached the Manchester Computing Machine Laboratory about
the need to carry out ‘a series of very lengthy calculations’.^21 From that first contact in 1950 a
permanent relationship quickly developed, and in October 1953 the British Atomic Weapons
Research Establishment signed a formal agreement to purchase large blocks of time on the
Manchester computer for top-secret work.^22
What Turing called the ‘Kjell crisis’ seemingly passed, and a few weeks later in April 1953
his probation came to an uneventful end, well over a year before his death. He was rid of the
organo-therapy, and in the warm sunny spring of 1953 the skies were blue again.
After the punishment
At the start of the summer of 1953 Turing packed his luggage for a holiday at the newly opened
Club Méditerranée in Ipsos, on the Greek island of Corfu.^23 Sun, sea, men. He sent a postcard
saying that he had met a lovely young man on the beach.