Combined Bureau, Middle East

Combined Bureau, Middle East (CBME), British Army–RAF cryptanalytical organization, an outpost of the British government's Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, which was formed at Heliopolis, a Cairo suburb, in November 1940. Before that time work on Italian ciphers had been carried out by Bletchley, but after Italy entered the war in June 1940 the decrypts often took too long to reach those who had to act on them. Bletchley continued to work on Italian high-grade ciphers while CBME mostly worked on lower-grade ones, but it did break the Italian Air Force's high-grade cipher in East Africa, after it had been changed in November 1940. This proved invaluable to the British fighting the East African campaign as did CBME's subsequent ability, with the help of an outstation in Nairobi, Kenya, to break every lower-grade code and cipher used by the Italians in East Africa. From March 1941 CBME handled the inward flow of selected ULTRA intelligence from Bletchley and from June 1941 decrypted the hand ciphers used by the Abwehr in Turkey, and later by the Abwehr and Sicherheitsdienst (see RSHA) in the Balkans, the Aegean, and North Africa. It was closed in March 1944.