GCHQ Read online

  The supreme example of the way in which eavesdropping could have political consequences was the Watergate scandal, which gradually 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 opponents, 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. Many 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. 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 t
he 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.

  THE 1940s

  BLETCHLEY PARK AND BEYOND

  1

  Schooldays

  ‘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. In 1904 he published a short story entitled ‘Wireless’ that focused on intercepting communications sent from Morse equipment on board Royal Navy ships off the Isle of Wight. Kipling is thought of as a quintessentially late-Victorian author, but here he looks to the future, more in the manner of H.G. Wells, as his characters fret over technical matters such as induction and radio frequencies. To the readers of this fictional first instance of radio interception, the process seemed utterly magical. The Morse instrument ‘ticked furiously’, and one of the listening party observes that it reminds him of a séance, with ‘odds and ends of messages coming out of nowhere’. His companion retorts that spiritualists and mediums ‘are all impostors’, whereas these naval messages that they are eavesdropping on are the real thing.2

  Kipling’s ‘Wireless’ is the first public discussion of the secret business of signals intelligence, or ‘sigint’. The magical process of extracting information from the ether would be one of the twentieth century’s most closely guarded secrets. Initially, producing ‘sigint’ only required equipment that would allow a third party to eavesdrop on a conversation broadcast by a radio transmitter using ‘wireless telegraphy’, but as this possibility became more widely known, communicators often resorted to using cyphers to keep their messages private. Thereafter, producing sigint usually required skilled listeners to capture the message and then a team of code-breakers to unscramble it. If the message was sent by cable rather than wireless, the listening-in process could be no less difficult than the code-breaking, or ‘decyphering’.

  What did Britain’s code-breakers make of Kipling’s public airing of their black arts? The simple answer is that there were none to ask. Indeed, there had been no British code-breakers for more than fifty years. In the distant past, Britain had possessed a ‘black chamber’ in which skilled ‘cryptanalysts’ had broken the codes contained in diplomatic correspondence and private letters. These arcane skills resided in the ‘Secret Department’ of the Post Office. However, in 1847 this was exposed in a scandalous episode when the House of Commons heard that the Home Secretary had ordered the interception of the private correspondence of the heroic Italian nationalist in exile, Giuseppe Mazzini. Shocked Members of Parliament ordered an inquiry, leading to the closure of the ‘Secret Department’, just as the telegraph initiated what we now understand as a Victorian communications revolution. By 1904, Britain had been without a code-breaking centre for more than half a century3

  The immediate origins of MI5 and its sister service SIS (often known as MI6) can be traced to scares about German espionage in 1909. But British code-breaking was not revived until the very eve of the First World War. On 2 August 1914 the British Army set up a secret code-breaking section called MIlb. Soon, specialist Army units at various locations in Europe and the Middle East were busy intercepting German radio communications. One of the largest sites was the intercept station in Mesopotamia. In December 1916 the military code-breakers of MIlb were given a fabulous Christmas present when the drunken chief of the German signals organisation in the Middle East sent all his Radio Operators a seasonal greeting using the same obvious formula in no fewer than six different codes. Up until that point the British had only been able to read one of these codes, but with these clues they could read all six. In the First World War, the Second World War and again i
n the Cold War, poor discipline by the human operators often proved to be the great weakness in otherwise impregnable cypher systems.4

  The Royal Navy code-breakers, who had established themselves in the Admiralty’s ‘Room 40’, achieved even greater success. Famously, they broke the ‘Zimmermann Telegram’, a message sent from the German Foreign Minister, Arthur Zimmermann, suggesting an alliance between Germany and Mexico against the United States. As an inducement, Mexico was to be offered the return of her lost territories in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. These revelations, made public in March 1917, were central in bringing the United States into the First World War on the side of Britain and France. The American entry into the war, together with a tightening blockade, persuaded Germany to seek an armistice the following year. The code-breakers of Room 40 celebrated with champagne. There are few more significant examples of the direct impact of code-breaking upon international relations.5

  In 1919 the British government’s Secret Service Committee, chaired by Lord Curzon, the rather formidable Foreign Secretary, recommended that a unified peacetime code-breaking agency should be created. This involved the difficult merger of two quite separate organisations. The head of the Army code-breakers, Major Malcolm Hay, was awkward and argumentative, while his naval equivalent, Commander Alastair Denniston, proved to be suave and diplomatic. Denniston secured the job as chief of a new combined code-breaking organisation, which initially consisted of around two dozen intelligence officers and a similar number of clerical staff, and found himself installed in splendid accommodation at Watergate House in The Strand, next to the Savoy Hotel. Formed on 1 November 1919, the new organisation was given the name ‘Government Code and Cypher School’, or GC&CS, which was not inappropriate, since the leading code-breakers devoted a great deal of time to the patient training of new initiates.6 Both during the First World War and in the interwar period about half the staff of GC&CS and its predecessors were women, mostly in the clerical grades.