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One of the problems with writing about Room 40, especially as a pioneer for Bletchley Park, is that Hall was operating, not just outside the law, but outside all conventions. He kept his ruses in his head, managed them by force of personality and his own charm, and wrote very little down. In the years after the war, he tried to deflect the real story over and over again by inventing little untruths and obscurities. So we will probably never know, for example, if it was Hall’s fake signal to Admiral Maximilian von Spee’s squadron in the Pacific which lured them so disastrously to the Falklands, where the battlecruisers Invincible and Inflexible lay in wait.
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