GCHQ. Richard Aldrich
‘operator’ who sat for eight hours at a time in front of a rack radio made by Racal. With headphones on and the volume turned up to ‘max’ he or she endured the freezing cold of the German winter and the unbearable heat of the Iraqi summer. Once the message was captured it was passed back to Cheltenham for processing. If it was in code, it might be given to X Division, a section staffed by ‘boffins’ with vast computers whose power far outstripped that available to ordinary scientists. Finally, intelligence analysts would try to compose the resulting material into useful summaries. Stamped with an excruciatingly high security classification, it was then circulated to Cabinet Ministers, defence chiefs and senior policy-makers. Often, only a few hours after they had been read by the ‘high-ups’, the summaries were whisked away in ‘burn-bags’ and consigned to vast incinerators to protect their secrecy.
GCHQ is also synonymous with the mysterious international network known as ‘Echelon’, run by British and American intelligence. Echelon is the world’s largest information ‘vacuum cleaner’, drawing in huge amounts of communications – an estimated five billion intercepts every day. Yet much of what we have come to believe about this network is wrong.15 The Anglo–American sigint relationship is often portrayed as a cosy affair of affable, pipe-smoking professor types. In fact, the politics of intelligence was often opportunistic and harsh. Secretly, the British and Americans worked together to read the traffic of their own minor allies, including France and West Germany. Even at the top, relations between the two main partners, Britain and the United States, could turn nasty and involved sharp disagreements.
What bound Britain and America together in the world of signals intelligence was realism, not romanticism. Anglo–American intelligence cooperation was about trading ‘terrain for technology’. America had its own vast code-breaking organisation, the National Security Agency (NSA), with infinitely more resources than the British. However, the American code-breakers needed remote outposts in Britain’s ‘residual empire’ at which to base their listening stations, and they rewarded GCHQ handsomely with access to remarkable technology. Some locations, such as Cyprus, were so important to the collection of sigint that UKUSA actually helped to shape the international politics of the region. In 1974, faced with a financial crisis, the British government formally decided to withdraw from its bases in Cyprus in order to save money. Within days, Washington told London that this decision was not acceptable and they must stay. The reason was simple. The sigint bases that allowed America to listen in to the Middle East were quite indispensable. In 2009, more than thirty years after the British government’s decision to withdraw from Cyprus, the sigint bases are still there, and have grown considerably in size.
Cold War espionage activity enjoyed a high profile. British defectors such as Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean hit the headlines in the 1950s. The 1960s opened with the shooting down of the American U-2 spy plane piloted by Gary Powers, the CIA’s fiasco at the Bay of Pigs and the Profumo affair. Yet GCHQ managed to avoid the glare of unwelcome publicity until the last decade of the Cold War. Its journey from the shadows into the spotlight only began in 1976, when the radical journalist Duncan Campbell revealed its intelligence operations on Cyprus in an article in Time Out magazine. This led to the infamous ‘ABC trial’, at which Campbell and his associates were prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act. Thereafter, GCHQ’s hopes to return to obscurity were dashed by the Geoffrey Prime affair in 1982. Prime, who revealed the innermost working of America’s latest multi-billion-dollar sigint satellite programme to the Soviets, was one of the most damaging moles ever recruited from inside British intelligence. Just as the Prime case subsided, any hopes of a return to anonymity were obliterated by Margaret Thatcher’s controversial decision to ban trade unions at GCHQ.
Expensive technical agencies such as GCHQ and America’s NSA were obvious targets for cuts at the end of the Cold War. At the same time, both agencies were struggling to cope with the pace of the global information-technology revolution, that had made access to high-grade encryption easy for the private individual. All this, together with the exponential growth in internet traffic, threatened to make the work of GCHQ and NSA impossibly difficult. Soon the world was sending several million emails a second, and not even the great sigint leviathans could read them all. The days of the super-secret sigint agencies seemed numbered. However, in the 1990s Britain’s prominent role in the wars in Bosnia and then Kosovo reminded government that the need for sigint is perennial. In these Byzantine conflicts, the radio experts at Cheltenham were never quite sure which of the many different former Yugoslavian factions their various friends and allies were supporting.
Bitter conflicts such as Bosnia helped to convince Whitehall and Westminster that GCHQ was worth new investment. In 1996, under the direction of Sir David Omand, GCHQ began to develop plans for a remarkable new intelligence headquarters that quickly became known as ‘the Doughnut’ owing to its circular design. The intention was to bring all the staff together under one roof for the first time. Absorbing no less than fifteen miles of carpet and several hundred miles of fibre-optic cabling, ‘the Doughnut’ constituted the largest secret intelligence headquarters outside the United States. However, by the time it was completed in 2003, it was already too small. GCHQ had by then undergone a crash expansion following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Its employees, now numbering more than 5,200, were soon ‘hot-desking’. A shanty town of subsidiary buildings is already springing up around the new headquarters.
Today, in somewhat cramped circumstances, GCHQ struggles with some of the most difficult issues of the twenty-first century. Not only is it the leading edge of Britain’s struggle against al Qaeda, it is also involved in fundamental issues of freedom and privacy that will shape the future of our society. Over the last decade, Britain has engaged with global e-commerce and finance more enthusiastically than perhaps any other country in the world. Our porous electronic borders present their own enormous problems. Globalisation, and in particular the global communications revolution, has brought many benefits, but it has also allowed miscreants to communicate and organise anonymously. The need for GCHQ to monitor both terrorists and organised crime means that the distinction between domestic and foreign communications has less meaning than it once had. GCHQ used to be a wholly outward-looking foreign intelligence service, but this is no longer the case.
Who will rule the internet? Will ordinary citizens be allowed genuinely confidential communication? Would ID cards erode our privacy or extend our security? These are some of the questions that GCHQ ponders daily at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century. Britain is already one of the most watched societies in the world, and some would argue that it is now addicted to surveillance. In 2008, Britain announced a £12 billion project to modernise the interception of telephone calls and email. The following year GCHQ announced a remarkable project entitled ‘Mastering the Internet’ that collects the details of Britain’s communications and internet traffic for security purposes. Even Britain’s Director of Public Prosecutions thought things had gone too far. Tasked with taking the lead on technological aspects of intelligence, GCHQ now finds itself at the centre of controversies that are of immense public importance. Accordingly, the time is ripe to trace GCHQ’s long and secretive journey from the nissen huts of Bletchley Park – via the Cold War – towards what now looks increasingly like a Brave New World.
‘How wonderful!’ I said. ‘Do you mean we’re overhearing Portsmouth ships trying to talk to each other – that we’re eavesdropping across half South England?’
‘‘Just that.’
Rudyard Kipling, ‘Wireless’, 19041
In December 1902, Guglielmo Marconi made history by sending the first wireless radio message across the Atlantic. Remarkably, only two years later, Rudyard Kipling foretold the possibility of exploiting such radio messages to gather intelligence.