GCHQ. Richard Aldrich
NSA was given unambiguous control over comint in a historic document called NSCID-9.49 This brought about a reduction in, but not the elimination of, what the leading historian of NSA has called ‘the fractious and seemingly never-ending internecine warfare’ between the American service comint organisations. The British were immensely relieved. In the background, figures like Edward Travis had been quietly urging inter-service unity on their American collaborators since the summer of 1945.50
The creation of NSA also had physical consequences. Up until this point there had been a plan to relocate the headquarters of American sigint to Fort Knox, near Louisville in Kentucky. However, it was now realised that the need for high-grade communications circuits and for civilian workers made this impossible. The policy-makers, who were the consumers of their intelligence ‘product’ in Washington, also protested about the move, rightly anticipating that it would mean a worse sigint service. They insisted that the new headquarters be within a twenty-five-mile radius of the Washington area.51 On 3 November 1952, Fort Meade on the northern edge of Washington’s Beltway was designated the likely new headquarters for NSA under a secret programme entitled ‘Project K’. Over the next five years this location would become the headquarters of the world’s largest, most expensive and most secretive intelligence agency52
Britain’s GCHQ had made precisely the opposite decision. In 1952 it moved away from its suburban site at Eastcote on the perimeter of London to a comparatively distant location at Cheltenham in Gloucestershire. Although GCHQ had only finished the move to Eastcote in June 1946, by April 1947 it was already looking for a new home. This was partly because of the physical limitations of the Eastcote site, and also because Travis realised that in any future war there would not be time to relocate to a safe place like Bletchley, away from Soviet bombing. Several possibilities were considered, and in October 1947 GCHQ scouts had found promising twin sites at Oakley Farm and Benhall Farm, near Cheltenham, which were occupied by the Ministry of Pensions. These single-storey temporary office complexes had been built in 1940, initially for the possible evacuation of government from London during the Blitz. After 1942 they were used for the logistical organisation of the US Army in Europe. The wartime presence of the Americans was the key, since it had left a helpful legacy of improved trunk cable communications.53
An alternative explanation for the choice of Cheltenham is offered by Professor R.V. Jones, one of the famous architects of the ‘Wizard War’ which deployed British science against Nazi Germany. Jones served as scientific adviser to GCHQ in the early 1950s, and recalls that the scout who initially found the Cheltenham site was Claude Daubney, one of the senior GCHQ staff who liaised with the Y Units of the armed services, and who spent much of his time in Whitehall. Daubney was a typical RAF officer of the thirties, handsome and ‘heavily moustached’. His main relaxation was betting on horseraces, and he argued endlessly with Jones about the theoretical possibility of beating the bookmakers. He ‘deliberately chose Cheltenham, as he told me, so that he could combine visits from his London office to GCHQ with attendance at Cheltenham races’.54 Others support the idea that GCHQ was attracted to Cheltenham by its proximity to the racecourse.55 Whatever the truth of the matter, the course would serve as an occasional helicopter landing pad for future visits by British Foreign Secretaries.56 The move from Eastcote took place between 1952 and 1954, but the rapid growth of GCHQ during the Korean War meant space was tight even at the new location. This contributed to the decision to constitute comsec as a separate organisation called the London Communications Security Agency. Its staff either moved to central London offices in Palmer Street, or stayed at Eastcote.57
In its move to Cheltenham, GCHQ created a unique intelligence town. It brought with it Bletchley Park’s formidable reputation for secrecy. Within a decade almost everyone in Cheltenham had a family member or friends who worked at GCHQ, but nobody talked about what they did. The town welcomed the ‘Foreign Office types’ with open arms, and GCHQ was soon contributing an enormous amount to its intellectual and artistic life, quite apart from being its biggest employer. The GCHQ staff were also sporty, providing most of the players in the Foreign Office football team that won the Civil Service Football Cup in 1952. This could present some peculiar problems. When local reporters covered matches in Cheltenham, they were told they could name the goal-scorers of the visitors, but not of the local team. Reporting these games tested their copywriting skills to the very limit.58
The previous ten years had been a formative decade for GCHQ. By 1944, the code-breakers of Bletchley Park had made themselves Britain’s premier intelligence service. Out of the chaotic brilliance housed in a few wooden huts in the Buckinghamshire countryside came one of Britain’s most forward-looking and innovative organisations. Another crucial legacy of the late 1940s was the agreements with the United States and the Commonwealth that laid the foundations of UKUSA, a worldwide sigint alliance, agreements that are still in force today. Anxiety about Moscow had been a driving force behind these agreements, and even before the Second World War was properly over, the Western allies had been paying increased attention to Soviet cyphers. Despite the triumphs of Venona, and the uncovering of key KGB agents like Klaus Fuchs and Donald Maclean, Moscow’s higher-level communications remained mostly unbreakable after 1948. Accordingly, GCHQ and its partners were already searching for new kinds of intelligence-gathering to use against the Soviet Union, opening up a whole new vista in the electronic war.59
6 ‘Elint’ and the Soviet Nuclear Target
Our intelligence about Soviet development of atomic weapons is very scanty.
Joint Intelligence Committee, 29 October 19471
In late August 1949, Lavrentii Beria, chief of the KGB, arrived at a small settlement on the steppes of Kazakhstan, not far from the city of Semipalatinsk. Here, Soviet scientists were hard at work in a set of temporary laboratories, intently focused on what they obliquely called ‘The Article’. They were referring to the Soviet Union’s first atomic bomb, now situated precariously on top of a scaffolding tower fifty miles away. Houses, locomotives, buses and even tanks, together with some unfortunate farm animals, had been placed close to the weapon to gauge the effects of an explosion. The Soviet Union’s chief nuclear scientist, Igor Kurchatov, gave the command to detonate, and a small but incredibly bright light appeared at the top of the tower. Suddenly it became a white fireball. A blast wave swept out, clearing everything in its path, as the explosion itself rapidly turned into a chaotic mix of orange, red and black. A dark mushroom cloud, five miles high, formed over the test site. Back in the laboratories, the scientists were jubilant and kissed each other on the foreheads. A month later, nineteen key figures from the nuclear programme, including a German scientist, were made Heroes of Socialist Labour. Beria is reported to have used the same list of names that identified those who would have been shot immediately had the test failed.2
In the event, it was Western intelligence that had failed. Soviet progress towards a nuclear weapon had been a top intelligence target. The predictions of Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee, the highest authority for analysis, had actually become steadily less accurate. By 1949, when the test took place, Britain’s top intelligence analysts were arguing that the probable date of the first Soviet test would be mid-1953.