GCHQ. Richard Aldrich
for usage with several other designations, including ‘BP’, ‘Station X’ and indeed ‘GC&CS’. However, the Government Code and Cypher School remained the formal title of the whole organisation in wartime. During 1946, GC&CS re-designated itself the ‘London Signals Intelligence Centre’ when the staff of Bletchley Park decamped to a new site at Eastcote near Uxbridge, although GCHQ remained in widespread use as a cover name. On 1 November 1948, as Britain’s code-breakers began to investigate a further move away from London to Cheltenham, the term GCHQ was formally adopted and has remained in use ever since.
‘Code-breaker’ is also a troublesome phrase. Codes are usually considered to be words substituted for others, often chosen somewhat at random. Typically, the military operations that constituted D-Day in 1944 were code-named ‘Overlord’. By contrast, systems of communication where letters and numbers are substituted in an organised pattern, either by machine or by hand, are referred to as cyphers. Yet the term code-breaker is so frequently applied to the people who worked at Bletchley Park and at GCHQ that this book follows common usage.
The constantly changing names of the Soviet intelligence and security services are especially vexing and so, despite the inescapable anachronisms, the Soviet civilian intelligence service is referred to as ‘KGB’ until 1989, while the military intelligence service is denoted as ‘GRU’. In Britain, the Security Service is denoted here by the commonly known term ‘MI5’ and its sister organisation, the Secret Intelligence Service or MI6, is referred to as ‘SIS’. Ships’ and submarines’ names are italicised, e.g. HMS Turpin. Onshore naval bases and training establishments, e.g. HMS Anderson, are not italicised.
GCHQ has been by far the most valuable source of intelligence for the British Government ever since it began operating at Bletchley during the last war. British skills in interception and code-breaking are unique and highly valued by our allies. GCHQ has been a key element in our relationship with the United States for more than forty years.
Denis Healey, House of Commons, 27 February 1984[1]
‘GCHQ’ is the last great British secret. For more than half a century, Government Communications Headquarters – the successor to the famous wartime code-breaking organisation at Bletchley Park – has been the nation’s largest and yet most elusive intelligence service. During all of this period it has commanded more staff than the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) combined, and has enjoyed the lion’s share of Britain’s secret service budget. GCHQ’s product, known as signals intelligence or ‘sigint’, constituted the majority of the secret information available to political decision-makers during the Cold War. Since then, it has become yet more significant in an increasingly ‘wired’ world. GCHQ now plays a leading role in shaping Britain’s secret state, and in the summer of 2003 it relocated to a spectacular new headquarters that constituted the single largest construction project in Europe. Today, it is more important than ever – yet we know almost nothing about it.[2]
By contrast, the wartime work of Bletchley Park is widely celebrated. The importance of decrypted German communications – known as ‘the Ultra secret’ – to Britain’s victory over the Axis is universally recognised. Winston Churchill’s wartime addiction to his daily supply of ‘Ultra’ intelligence, derived from supposedly impenetrable German cypher machines such as ‘Enigma’, is legendary. The mathematical triumphs of brilliant figures such as Alan Turing are a central part of the story of Allied success in the Second World War. The astonishing achievement of signals intelligence allowed Allied prime ministers and presidents to see into the minds of their Axis enemies. Thanks to ‘sigint’ we too can now read about the futile attempts of Japanese leaders to seek a favourable armistice in August 1945, even as the last screws were being tightened on the atomic bombs destined for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.[3]
However, shortly after VJ-Day, something rather odd happens. In the words of Christopher Andrew, the world’s leading intelligence historian, we are confronted with the sudden disappearance of signals intelligence from the historical landscape. This is an extraordinary omission which, according to Andrew, has ‘seriously distorted the study of the Cold War’.[4] Intelligence services were at the forefront of the Cold War, yet most accounts of international relations after 1945 stubbornly refuse to recognise even the existence of the code-breakers who actually constituted the largest part of this apparatus.[5] Nor did this amazing cloak of historical invisibility stop with the end of the Cold War. In 2004, following the furore over the role of intelligence in justifying the invasion of Iraq, Lord Butler, a former Cabinet Secretary, was appointed to undertake an inquiry into ‘British Intelligence and Weapons of Mass Destruction’. Butler’s report into the workings of the secret agencies was unprecedented in its depth and detail. However, GCHQ is mentioned only once, in the list of abbreviations, where we are told that the acronym stands for ‘Government Communications Headquarters’.[6] This is all we learn, for in the subsequent 260 pages the term GCHQ is in fact never used, and the organisation is never discussed. The subject is simply too secret.
Sigint was not simply a Second World War phenomenon. Throughout the twentieth century, Britain’s code-breakers continually supplied Downing Street with the most precious jewels of British intelligence, discreetly delivered in what became known as the ‘Blue Book’. Nicholas Henderson, formerly Britain’s Ambassador to Washington, explains: ‘All Prime Ministers love intelligence, because it’s a sort of weapon … The intelligence reports used to arrive in special little boxes, and it gave them a belief that they had a direct line to something that no other ordinary departments have.’ It was partly for this reason that British Prime Ministers ‘never minded spending money on intelligence’. Signals intelligence also matters to political leaders because it allows them to hear the authentic voices of their enemies. Although Winston Churchill was the most famous recipient of such material, his predecessor, Neville Chamberlain, was also offered some remarkable insights into the mind of Adolf Hitler. In 1939, shortly after the Munich appeasement, Chamberlain was given an intelligence report which showed that Hitler habitually referred to him in private as ‘der alter Arschloch’, or ‘the old arsehole’. Understandably, this revelation ‘had a profound effect on Chamberlain’.[7]
However, constant exposure to secrets derived from the world of code-breaking, bugging and other kinds of secret listening has the capacity to induce paranoia. Harold Wilson regularly dragged his Private Secretary, Bernard Donoughue, into the bathrooms and toilets of Downing Street. Only there, with the taps turned on full and water sloshing noisily in the basins, did he feel immune to the threat of bugs.[8] A top priority for Britain’s technical security specialists during the Wilson years was the installation of the latest scrambler phones at the Prime Minister’s holiday home in the Scilly Isles, so he could speak to Whitehall without fear of interception. Doubtless, Wilson would have been delighted to learn that some of his opponents felt equally oppressed by electronic surveillance. When Ian Smith, the Rhodesian leader, visited London in late 1965 he insisted on having some of the more sensitive conversations with his delegation in the ladies’ lavatory, convinced that this was the one location where British intelligence would not have dared to plant microphones.[9]
Secret listening terrified friend and foe alike. Harold Macmillan recalled the almost unbearable sense of oppression he felt on his visit to Moscow to see the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, in 1959. His delegation feared that British codes were compromised, and they were unable to talk freely, even outside in the open air, because of constant technical surveillance. He would have been fascinated to learn that, at the very same moment, Khrushchev and his immediate circle also felt increasingly anxious about KGB microphones, to the extent that they dared not speak freely, even amongst themselves in their own capital.[10] In June 1966, to his immense fury, President Tito of Yugoslavia discovered that he was being bugged by his own security chief. ‘Concealed microphones have been installed everywhere,’ he exclaimed angrily to a friend: ‘Even my bedroom!’[11]
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