Hope also provided intercepts directly to another official who, of all those privy to “the Mystery,” had perhaps the greatest appreciation for the value of its secrets: Capt. William Reginald Hall, director of naval intelligence. It was Hall who had recommended that Commander Hope, then a member of his intelligence division, should be transferred to Room 40. Despite being chief of naval intelligence, Captain Hall had no direct control over Room 40—as of early 1915 his intelligence division and Room 40 were separate entities—but his name more than any other would come to be associated with its achievements.
Hall was forty-four years old, and a former warship captain. He became director of naval intelligence in November 1914, filling a post once held by his father. He was short and brisk, with a face full of points and angles and a prominent bill-like nose, all of which gave him the look of a woodpecker in a captain’s cap. This was reinforced by a neurological quirk that caused him to blink rapidly all day long and that earned him his own naval nickname, “Blinker.” One of his most ardent admirers was America’s Ambassador Page, in London, who in a letter to President Wilson heaped praise like a man in love. “I shall never meet another man like him,” Page wrote; “that were too much to expect. For Hall can look through you and see the very muscular movements of your immortal soul while he is talking to you. Such eyes the man has! My Lord!”
Hall delighted in the gamesmanship of war and was said to be utterly ruthless, albeit in an engaging way. His secretary, Ruth Skrine—later to marry and bear the wedded name Mrs. Hotblack—recalled how one acquaintance had described Hall as being part Machiavelli, part schoolboy. The Machiavelli side “could be cruel,” she said, “but the schoolboy was always round the corner, and his love of the dangerous game he, and all of us, were playing would bubble out, and the fun and hazard of it all would fill him with infectious delight.” He was, she said, “uncannily quick at sizing up a man.” When contemplating some new escapade, she recalled, Hall would rub his hands together, “grinning like a crafty little French Abbé.”