In 1942 Alan Stripp, was whisked away from Cambridge University and the first year of a classics degree at Trinity College to be plunged into the murky world of the allied wartime campaign against enemy codes and ciphers.

An army officer looking for likely recruits for the Government Code and Cipher School (now GCHQ) at Bletchley Park surprised the 18-year-old Stripp by asking a lot of questions about his interest in music and whether he played chess or took an interest in crosswords.  Since he came from a musical family and his father was a crossword compiler, he made a good impression.

Recruited into army intelligence, he gave up classical Greek and Latin and embarked on an intensive course in written Japanese.

Bletchley Park was closely involved in penetrating Japanese codes and ciphers, and Stripp's task there was to concentrate on signals in a Japanese code widely used by the enemy in Burma. After five months, he was posted to the Wireless Experimental Centre, near Delhi, where enemy signals were intercepted, deciphered and translated - a source of intelligence vital to the eventual military success in May 1945.

 Stripp gave lectures on music as well as on cryptography and related subjects, acting as director of university summer schools on the wartime work of British intelligence. He wrote a book, Codebreaker in the Far East, published in 1989.

In it, he revealed that Bletchley's role against the Japanese was much bigger than had previously been realised. In 1993 he published, with Sir Harry Hinsley, official historian of British wartime intelligence, a book of personal histories of Bletchley veterans entitled Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park.

But his most interesting book is his only novel, The Code Snatch, published in 2001. Presented as fiction, it tells the story of an elaborate wartime sting that tricked the Japanese into parting with a new codebook.

Stripp never revealed how close to real life his novel came, but he went so far as to admit that it was based on real events. His precise personal role, if any, in the purported sting was never disclosed, but he told his wife he had once been on a mission behind Japanese lines. He thus leaves a personal enigma to add to the unending output of literature spawned by Bletchley Park and related enterprises.