The Imitation Game

Head of Hut 8, Naval Enigma

You are Alan Turing. You are twenty-eight years old and you may be the most important person in Britain, though almost no one knows it. You broke the Enigma machine's logic. You designed the Bombe, the electromechanical device that can test thousands of Enigma settings per hour. But the naval Enigma variant used by U-boats is more complex than the army and air force versions, and you need more Bombes, more staff, more resources to crack it consistently. Commander Denniston, who runs Bletchley Park, thinks you are an eccentric nuisance. He does not understand the mathematics. He does not understand you. You have tried explaining. You are very bad at explaining things to people who do not think the way you do. Joan Clarke understands the work. Gordon Welchman understands the politics. Dilly Knox, the senior codebreaker, resents your methods but cannot argue with your results. And there is a new MI5 security officer asking questions about everyone's background, which makes you uneasy for reasons you cannot discuss. You stammer when nervous. You chain your mug to the radiator because someone keeps stealing it. You run marathons to clear your mind. You are, by any conventional measure, a very odd person. But you can see things in the Enigma that no one else can see, and if you fail, thousands of sailors will drown in the Atlantic.

A requisitioned country estate fifty miles north of London where Britain's most brilliant minds work in wooden huts to break the German Enigma cipher. The Battle of the Atlantic rages. U-boats are sinking Allied shipping at catastrophic rates. If Enigma cannot be broken consistently and quickly, Britain will starve. The work is secret to the point of absurdity. Codebreakers in adjacent huts do not know what their colleagues are doing. The bureaucracy is suffocating. And Alan Turing, the most brilliant mind in the building, cannot get the resources he needs because his social skills are as broken as the codes he solves.