GCHQ. Richard Aldrich
of the importance of tight security. In Churchill it had a heavyweight advocate, and it feared a return to the pre-war situation of under-recognition of what sigint could achieve; even now, the true scale of its wartime output was known to only a very few in high places. Moreover, the really talented sigint planners were newcomers, and would soon be recalled to their pre-war occupations unless some positive action was taken to retain them. Quite simply, this came down to cash. GC&CS had to have the status to secure ‘a sufficiently liberal supply of money to enable it to attract men of first rate ability’, particularly engineers and electronics experts. It was also aware that it would have to give equal weight to all types of intelligence about foreign countries, ‘including scientific, commercial and economic matters’. This was a tacit reference to the targeting of friendly states.53
In January 1945, the torch of post-war planning passed to William F. Clarke. Clarke, who had served continuously in code-breaking from 1916, warned that the ‘enormous power wielded by the Treasury’ might soon be brought to bear on GC&CS. As had happened in 1919, work on military cyphers might cease in favour of concentration on diplomatic material only. This, he insisted, could be ‘disastrous’, because the resulting damage to ongoing cryptographic research might mean that in the event of a sudden future conflict, enemy military traffic would prove inaccessible. Even more problematic was the challenge of building up the prestige of GC&CS. Its very secrecy was its worst enemy, ensuring that many in elevated government circles did not know its true value. There was also the ‘potential danger’ of a Labour government coming to power, since the interwar Labour government had found many aspects of the secret state to be repellent.
Clarke also paused to consider the emerging United Nations. Allowing himself some momentary Utopian thoughts, he observed that if the new organisation took the step of abolishing all code and cypher communications, this action ‘would contribute more to a permanent peace than any other’. However, he conceded that this ‘is probably the counsel of perfection’, and was highly improbable. Instead, he predicted that energetic code-making and code-breaking would persist into the post-war world. On the matter of who would control the British code-breakers, he felt that in the past neither the Admiralty nor the Foreign Office had been satisfactory. The current system of control by SIS also brought with it ‘certain disadvantages’. Clarke vigorously asserted that GC&CS should break free, not only of SIS but also of the Foreign Office. Instead it should be a separate organisation under either the Chiefs of Staff or the Cabinet Office, and should be regarded as a wholly separate third secret service.54
As late as October 1944, some senior figures at Bletchley were still arguing for re-absorption by SIS. John Tiltman, the Soviet specialist, argued that the code-breakers should be ‘closely fused with S.I.S. under the Director General [Sir Stewart Menzies] as the one and only Intelligence producing service’.55 However, the stock of Menzies was continuing to fall among senior figures in Whitehall. In January 1945, the Chairman of the JIC, Victor Cavendish Bentinck, concocted his own influential vision of ‘the intelligence machine’. He suggested that GC&CS should remain under the overall direction of ‘C’, but at the same time it would be a separate organisation and ‘not a part of SIS’. It would boast its own budget alongside the other secret services as part of the Secret Vote, Britain’s quaintly titled intelligence budget.56 It was thus Commander Edward Travis, not Menzies, who determined the final shape of GC&CS shortly after VJ-Day. Although peace had arrived, Travis’s mind was already focused on possible future conflict with the Soviets. Recalling the earliest days of the last war, he observed, ‘When information was most urgently required, very little was forthcoming.’ The next war was likely to be of shorter duration, with little time for mobilisation. In such a conflict the British would have to fight with what they had. It was essential that continuity be maintained, and that rapid expansion was possible on the eve of war.
Exactly when the post-war term ‘GCHQ’ came into common usage is a matter of dispute. It was first used as a cover name to confuse workmen dropping off furniture at the Bletchley Park site as early as the end of 1939.57 By 1946, although technically still merely a cover name, it was used more and more widely to denote Britain’s code-breakers. Travis decided that the new post-war GCHQ would be divided into five groups run by his key subordinates.58 To cover its multifarious tasks, he hoped to have a thousand civilians plus a hundred military staff at a new sigint centre located somewhere near to the policy-makers in London. By contrast, the outlying Y stations would be manned by about five thousand additional personnel, of whom only a few would be civilians. GCHQ’s own core staff fell rapidly from an end-of-war strength of 8,902 to a projected 1,010 for 1946.59 Despite the dramatic drop in numbers, Travis concluded that the post-war deal he had struck with the Treasury was ‘on the whole most satisfactory’. For him it was about quality rather than quantity. A few days before Christmas 1945 he explained: ‘The war proved beyond doubt that the more difficult aspects of our work call for staff of the highest calibre, the successes by the Professors and Dons among our temporary staff, especially perhaps the high grade mathematicians, put that beyond doubt.’ He wanted suitable conditions with which to attract these sorts of people, although he knew this would be difficult.60 Captain Edmund Wilson, Travis’s Principal Establishment Officer, echoed this view, arguing that of the 260 officers to be kept on in their post-war establishment, some two hundred of them must have not only initiative but also ‘first class brains’.61
Where would GCHQ’s new centre be? What it craved was a site in central London, next to the policy-makers, but even with the post-war demobilisation of many government departments, nothing suitable could be found. The solution was what John Betjeman would immortalise as ‘Metroland’. GCHQ moved to the outer fringes of north-west London, close to Harrow and Pinner. The precise location was Eastcote, which had been used as a wartime outstation of Bletchley Park. It was also close to Dollis Hill, where the laboratories of the Post Office Research Department had built the remarkable ‘Colossus’ computer. Together with Stanmore, Eastcote was one of two large out-stations built in 1943 to accommodate the ever-expanding number of bombes that were being used to cope with the flood of Enigma traffic. However, while it provided reasonable single-storey buildings that were superior to the huts of Bletchley, the overall site was regarded as cramped and unattractive. In June 1946, William Bodsworth, a British code-breaker, returned from a period in America to the cold and rain of an English summer to take over GCHQ’s Soviet section. He found his first sight of Eastcote ‘frankly shattering’. Expecting ‘a nice old country house’, instead he found it to be ‘more cheerless than any of the temporary buildings I have seen in this racket either here or abroad’.62
Those who were leaving Bletchley for good and returning to civilian occupations were given the security warning of their lives. Edward Travis issued a ‘Special Order’ to everyone in GCHQ. He began by thanking them all for their admirable achievements and the substantial contribution they had made to the winning of the war. He then moved quickly on to the matter of maintaining secrecy, even after the end of hostilities. ‘At some future time we may be called upon again to use the same methods. It is therefore as vital as ever not to relax from the high standards of security that we have hitherto maintained. The temptation to “own up” to our friends and families as to what our war work has been is a very real and natural one. It must be resisted absolutely.’63 However, in the Far East, the secret of ‘Magic’, the breaking of Japanese diplomatic codes, was already out. When Bruce Keith, commander of the vast British sigint station located at HMS Anderson in Ceylon, tried to outline Travis’s tight security measures, some of his subordinates openly laughed at him and observed that ‘the Americans had spilled the beans in the paper the other day’.64