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together with a packet of Bender’s private letters and other documents, had it transferred to the
Lejtenant Burakov
, The Allies had come into possession of the key secret of the Imperial German Navy, the one that could give them access to many others.
    Later, Russian divers supplemented Galibin’s find. Using strong electric lights to inspect the stony seabed up to 30 feet from the stranded vessel, they found in the clear waters the codebook that Szillat had thrown overboard and the one that Neuhaus had lost in the water.
    Recognizing the value of the codebooks and cipher keys to the British, the major naval power, the Russians loyally notified their ally of their find and said that they would give the British the documentsif they would send a small warship “as most secure means” of getting them and the officers accompanying them to Britain. The Russians courteously set aside for the British the undamaged code, the one found in Habenicht’s locker, which bore the serial number 151. They kept the waterlogged codes for themselves.
    The task of taking codebook No. 151 to England was assigned to three naval officers, Captain Mikhail A. Bedrov, Commander Mikhail I. Smirnov, and Count Constantine Benckendorff. A cosmopolitan, mustachioed combat veteran of the Russo-Japanese War, Benckendorff was the son of the ambassador to Great Britain. He had served a year as a cipher clerk in the London Embassy. One Sunday morning in September he was on watch on the battleship
Poltava
in Tallinn roadstead, pacing the quarterdeck and listening to the sailors’ choir chanting the Russian Orthodox mass, when a yeoman handed him an order to report immediately to the flag captain. On the flagship he was “amazed and delighted” to be told he would be going to London.
    He was given the precious codebook in St. Petersburg. It was in a satchel with a large piece of lead sewn in to make it sink in case he had to throw it overboard and with a strap to carry it over his shoulder. This bag he took with him to Archangel, where he boarded a Russian volunteer fleet steamer. The vessel was to meet H.M.S.
Theseus
at Alexandrovsk (now Polyarnyy), a port near Murmansk, where the aging cruiser had arrived early in September. Owing to delays and misunderstandings, the
Theseus
and the steamer did not sail until October 1. After an uneventful crossing over the top of Norway, punctuated only by a few vague U-boat warnings, they arrived on October 10 in Scapa Flow, the great circular basin north of Scotland that served as one of the Royal Navy’s chief bases; the Russian steamer went on alone, reaching the English port of Hull a couple of days later. After a slow night train ride, Benckendorff reached the Russian embassy at dawn. He greeted his parents, then routed out the naval attaché, and the two went, early on the morning of October 13, to the Admiralty. There, in one of the most significant moments in the longhistory of secret intelligence, they handed Winston Churchill, first lord of the Admiralty, a gift more precious than a dozen Fabergé eggs: the big, fat, blue-bound
Signalbuch der Kaiserlichen Marine.
    The
Signalbuch
went to the Admiralty’s fledgling codebreaking agency. This had come into being, quite by chance, on the day Britain entered the war. Though individuals in the British army had solved cryptograms in the Boer War and on India’s Northwest Frontier, the navy had never engaged in cryptanalysis and had made no preparations for it. But when hostilities formally commenced on August 4, 1914, radio stations of the Royal Navy, the post office, and the Marconi company began to pick up coded messages, apparently of German origin. These they forwarded to the Admiralty’s Intelligence Division. Its director, Rear Admiral H. F. Oliver, recognized their potential and knew at once who might realize it: his good friend, the director of naval education, Sir Alfred Ewing. A short, thickset Scot, given to wearing mauve shirts with white wing