GCHQ. Richard Aldrich
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]
The creation of new headquarters for GCHQ and NSA coincided with further additions to the transatlantic sigint agreements. In March 1953, Clive Loehnis from GCHQ led a team that spent fifteen days in Washington discussing closer agreements between the two sigint leviathans. This included a new team of American liaison officers based at Cheltenham called ‘USGRO’, who would sift through GCHQ’s intelligence product looking for material of interest to a variety of customers in Washington, including the CIA, the FBI and the armed services. The ‘USGRO’ team lived with GCHQ’s Z Division, who looked after British sigint customers in Whitehall in a similar way. From 1953, the term ‘UKUSA’ agreement entered common usage.[58]
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.[59]
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.[60]
‘Elint’ and the Soviet Nuclear Target
Our intelligence about Soviet development of atomic weapons is very scanty.
Joint Intelligence Committee, 29 October 1947[1]
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. They were adrift by no less than four years. The CIA was no more accurate, and had similarly told President Truman that mid-1953 was the most likely date. Shocked by the surprise atomic test, Britain and America now redoubled their intelligence effort in the field of Soviet strategic weapons.[3] Throughout the Cold War, the key target for GCHQ would remain Soviet nuclear weaponry. This included not only the atomic bomb programme, but work on ballistic missiles, bombers and other means of delivery. The Chiefs of Staff were worried by Britain’s relative vulnerability to nuclear attack, and wanted intelligence forecasts on this crucial issue. In their list of ‘sigint targets’ for 1948, the JIC exhorted Britain’s code-breakers to focus their efforts on this area, together with parallel strategic threats such as chemical and biological weapons.[4] Other Soviet activities, including KGB espionage and diplomatic initiatives, only constituted GCHQ’s second and third priorities.
But ever since the massive revision of Soviet cypher procedure on ‘Black Friday’ in 1948, GCHQ had been having a hard time with its main target. The one-time pads employed for the highest-grade Soviet messages were now being correctly used, and so could not be broken, and machine cypher procedure on systems like Taper, effectively a Soviet military version of Enigma, had also been tightened up. Moreover, Moscow and its satellites enjoyed common borders and so often used landlines instead of wireless transmissions, which could not be easily intercepted. All this eventually prompted the British to follow the Soviets down the path of more extensive physical bugging of diplomatic premises in the mid-1950s.[5]
GCHQ was nevertheless providing Whitehall with large quantities of useful material on lower-priority issues. It continued its long tradition of attacking the communications of smaller states like France, Turkey and Egypt. The JIC had also asked it to look at subjects such as Arab nationalism and the relations of Arab states with Britain and the USA, and the attitude of France, Italy and the Arab states to the future of North Africa, especially Libya. Because of the ongoing insurgency in Palestine, GCHQ was also urged to focus on the Zionist movement, including its various intelligence services. All of these proved more accessible than Soviet traffic.[6] The diplomatic traffic of smaller states also provided an excellent window on the Soviets. Conversations between Soviet diplomats and the officials of these countries were often captured in telegrams sent from Moscow that could be read with ease. In 1946 Alan Stripp, a British code-breaker who had spent the war working on Japanese codes, found himself redeployed to the Iranian border. Throughout the Azerbaijan crisis of that year, when the Soviet Union appeared to be behind a potential