GCHQ. Richard Aldrich
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 outstations 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]
The move from Bletchley to Eastcote was undertaken during early 1946 in four main parties. The first was the priority group, and included the Soviet and East European Division; the last arrived in April 1946.[65] Staff turning up in leafy Pinner in search of lodgings were allowed to refer to their place of work as ‘GCHQ’, but they were told firmly that any reference to ‘signals intelligence’ was forbidden.[66] Between 1945 and 1948 the term ‘GCHQ’ was used interchangeably with both ‘London Signals Intelligence Centre’ and ‘Station X’.[67]
Bletchley Park was now an empty shell in the Bedfordshire countryside. Barbara Abernethy, who had worked as Denniston’s personal assistant, recalls: ‘We just closed down the huts, put all the files away and sent them down to Eastcote. I was the last person left at Bletchley Park. I locked the gate and took the key down to Eastcote. That was it.’[68] Much of the machinery was broken up, including examples of the mighty ‘Colossus’ computational machine. However, Professor Max Newman, who had been central to its development, managed to secure two ‘Colossus’ machines for his new computing department at Manchester University. These were transported by the Ministry of War Transport at the price of thirty-four shillings a ton. Newman offered to send a junior university lecturer down ‘to sit on the van’ to make sure that the precious machines were not damaged in transit.[69] In fact, this was not quite the end of Bletchley Park’s active life in sigint, since GCHQ continued to use it for training courses as late as the 1960s.
The intention behind GCHQ’s post-war move to London was to service the centres of power in British government. Accordingly, in the autumn of 1945 Travis took the opportunity to look at how the sigint product – the ‘blue jackets’ or ‘BJs’– circulated around Whitehall. The Foreign Office was a big customer, receiving three sets of BJs daily. One set stayed with Ernest Bevin, the new Foreign Secretary and his war-weary Permanent Under-Secretary, Cadogan, ‘for their immediate information’. Another went to the Services Liaison Department, which worked closely with the JIC. The third went to the main departments. Virtually everyone in the operational core of the Foreign Office habitually saw BJs, but they were always kept separate from other documents in special boxes which were locked up overnight.[70]
In MI5, the ritual of sigint security was closely observed. Distribution was presided over by the redoubtable ‘Mrs Arbuthnot’, who recorded everything meticulously in her log. Security of BJs seems to have been at its most lax inside SIS, where batches of them circulated around sections for as long as six weeks before being returned. Nor were they properly logged. GCHQ noted that, quite uniquely, inside SIS BJs were never treated as requiring special security measures, and indeed in some cases had ‘found their way into the General Office for filing’. This broke the cardinal rule that sigint was never to mix with ordinary paperwork.[71]
The first major international crisis of the Cold War era was not long in coming. In June 1948, the Soviets decided to block road and railway access to the western sectors of Berlin, which were controlled by the British, the French and the Americans. The Berlin Blockade was defeated by a massive airlift of some four thousand tons of supplies a day. Hidden amongst the innumerable supply flights heading to Berlin were anonymous but highly secret aircraft collecting sigint for GCHQ, which provided some of the best intelligence during the crisis. Even before the crisis ended in May 1949, GCHQ had already been working hard on the ‘Russian problem’ for almost five years. The early onset of the Cold War had not only provided GCHQ with new targets, but had helped to perpetuate the wartime alliance between British code-breakers and their counterparts in allied countries. This, as we shall see, was fundamental to the post-war success of GCHQ.
The KGB and the Venona Project
… Paul [Guy Burgess], and Yan [Anthony Blunt] consider that the situation is serious.
Message from the KGB station in London to Moscow, February 1950[1]
The ‘Venona Project’ was possibly the most astounding code-breaking effort of the early Cold War.[2] Employing perhaps no more than a hundred people, it exploited a weakness in KGB communications and decoded some of the messages sent by Soviet intelligence. As a result, it revealed key Soviet agents and illuminated the unexpectedly vast scope and scale of KGB espionage in the West during the 1940s. This material was so significant that even though no new messages were collected after 1948, British and American code-breakers continued to work on the residue until October 1980. Initiated by the