GCHQ. Richard Aldrich
brought about the downfall of President Richard Nixon between April 1973 and July 1974. Nixon had used a team of former CIA operatives known as ‘The Plumbers’ to burgle and bug premises used by the Democratic Party. Not everyone was shocked. In 1973, Britain’s Prime Minister, Edward Heath, made a visit to China. Mao Tse-tung asked him, ‘What is all this Nixon nonsense about?’ Heath asked what he meant by ‘nonsense’. Mao replied: ‘Well, they say he bugged his oppon-ents, don’t they? But we all bug our opponents, don’t we, and everybody knows it? So what is all this fuss about?’[12] Others took bugging in their stride. When Tony Blair visited India in October 2001, his security team found two bugs in his bedroom, and reported that ‘they wouldn’t be able to remove them without drilling the wall’. Blair ‘decided against making a fuss’, and quietly moved to another room.[13]
Eavesdropping and code-breaking are certainly nothing new. Even in medieval times the crowned heads of Europe had recourse to secretive ‘black chambers’ where encyphered letters from diplomats were intercepted, opened and decoded in order to produce intelligence. However, the modern-day GCHQ owes its origins to the arrival of the radio and the enormous impact of science upon methods of fighting during the Second World War. It was the struggle against Hitler that revolutionised the importance of intelligence from encyphered radio messages. Blitzkrieg and surprise attack were the hallmarks of a new style of warfare that arrived in the late 1930s. The sheer speed of war now meant that secrets smuggled under the coat collar of a traditional human spy were no longer of much use to commanders. The code-breakers of Bletchley Park were the perfect answer, offering intelligence in ‘real time’ from intercepted enemy signals. In some cases, messages sent from Hitler to Rommel in the Western Desert were decoded and arrived on Churchill’s desk before they were read by their intended recipient. Soon, Bletchley Park presided over machine-based espionage on an industrial scale.
With the onset of the Cold War, ‘sigint’, as it had become known, seemed equally important for a dangerous new era of nuclear confrontation. Atomic weapons and equivalent breakthroughs in biological and chemical warfare, together with ballistic rockets such as the V2, against which there was no defence, were the new currency of conflict. World leaders were required to comprehend strange new threats and the accompanying possibility of devastating surprise attack – which Lord Tedder, the British Chief of the Air Staff, called a potential ‘nuclear Pearl Harbor’. The precarious world of early warning, deterrence and ‘targeting’ had arrived. Military chiefs demanded better intelligence, and concluded that global sigint coverage was indispensable to the Western allies. By the mid-1950s, Britain’s code-breakers had abandoned their nissen huts at Bletchley Park for new accommodation in Cheltenham, the distinctive radomes and satellite dishes of which became an integral part of the Cold War landscape.[14]
Ironically, the story of GCHQ after it entered ‘peacetime’ in 1945 is very much about military operations, and even war. Britain’s vast sigint programme was managed by GCHQ, but run in cooperation with the armed services, which used their bases, ships and aircraft to collect the raw enemy signals. As this book reveals, GCHQ sat at the centre of a spider’s web that consisted of many other hidden organisations, both civil and military, which helped it collect signals intelligence. Some of its stories intertwine closely with Britain’s long legacy of small wars and guerrilla conflicts in locations such as Korea, Malaya, Borneo, Aden and the Falklands. GCHQ’s operations also involved hair-raising confrontations with the Russians. Britain ran secret submarine spy missions designed to gather signals intelligence from the Russian fleet. Specially converted submarines entered the protected harbours of the Russian Navy and rose precariously beneath cruisers to within six feet of their electronic quarry. Submarines that were sent on sigint missions – known to their anxious crews as ‘Dodgies’ or ‘Mystery Trips’ – were detected off Murmansk and pursued by Russian destroyers with depth charges. GCHQ’s ocean-going activities have been a well-kept secret, but some British submariners still bear the scars of this secret signals war in the far north.
Code-breaking is sometimes depicted as highly technical – more ‘Billion Dollar Brain’ than James Bond – and therefore perhaps a little dull. But much of the GCHQ story involves dramatic incidents experienced by individual sigint operators in forward locations, including in submarines and aircraft. However it was done, gathering sigint almost always involved a three-stage process. First, someone had to listen in to and record the intercepted message. Throughout the Cold War this person was often the Godforsaken GCHQ ‘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. More than forty 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,