 He had also continued to play chess, competing in the 1952 and 1956 Olympiads. This 1956 Olympiad trip to Moscow was risky, since Britain and the USSR, which had been allies during World War II, were by then locked into the Cold War, and Milner-Barry's wartime codebreaking knowledge would have been of great interest to the Soviets; the very fact that Britain had broken German codes on a massive scale was kept secret until 1974, when Frederick Winterbotham's book The Ultra Secret was published. He placed second in the British Chess Championship at Hastings 1953 (finishing behind only Daniel Yanofsky), with a score of 8 / 11; this would be his best result in British Championships.
