Gchq: The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency

GCHQ: The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency, by Richard J. Aldrich (London: Harper Collins, 2010; pp. 666. £30).

Richard Aldrich is the foremost historian of the British intelligence agency GCHQ responsible for providing signals operations, ‘sigint’. GCHQ stands for Government Communications Headquarters and ‘sigint’ means code-breaking and collection of information by intercepting communications of all kinds by any means. The agency was created in 1946. GCHQ is the linear descendant of the Code and Cypher School of 1919 and the Bletchley code-breaking unit of the Second World War, when the British acquired a critical lead in cracking codes. GCHQ eventually evolved from codes and spies to the intercepting of anything from faxes to emails and satellite communications. GCHQ is linked to the National Security Agency, its American counterpart. This connection was forged in 1946, when the British and the Americans concluded an intelligence pact that became the heart of a very real special relationship based in British colonies. Cyprus and Hong Kong, among many other dependencies, became key listening posts during the Cold War.

In a brief historical introduction, Aldrich mentions that Neville Chamberlain was shocked when he learned from a decoded German message that Hitler referred to him as ‘der alte Arschloch’. Such anecdotal evidence is woven into this immense work, but Aldrich also has a central thread to his narrative: wars are won by industrial and military power. Intelligence or code-breaking can be critical in certain cases, as in the war against the U-boats in the North Atlantic, or later in the Konfrontasi against Indonesia in the 1960s. But ‘sigint’ often failed to anticipate major events, as in the case of the outbreak of the Korean War and, on the American side, the collusion of the British, French, and Israelis at Suez; nor did ‘sigint’ anticipate the subsequent crises of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Poland in 1980, or the Berlin Wall in 1989. In the case of the Falklands, crucial information did not come from GCHQ but from reference works in the Plymouth Public Library. Such examples may seem to be debunking the value of ‘sigint’, but they provide perspective on an intelligence agency which has functioned with relatively coherent command and, on the whole, without political interference.

Aldrich organises his massive study by decades, from the 1940s to the present. It is divided into roughly equal parts by the 1970s. At the close of the Second World War the British had forty-eight listening posts throughout the world, including Honduras, Bermuda, Aden, North Borneo, and, later, special submarines and reconnaissance ships such as HMS Endurance, which played a critical part in the Falklands War. GCHQ stations expanded exponentially after 1945 and are listed on the maps at the beginning of the book. The organisational themes in each decade are identified by certain dates, which reveal the changing temper of the times. In the 1950s the British lost their best site in the Indian Ocean, Ceylon, as a result of the British attack on Egypt. In the 1960s Hong Kong proved to be an effective watchtower, collecting information about China and Vietnam. In the next decade GCHQ was unmasked. With its cover blown in 1976, GCHQ had to justify its methods, which, at least to some contemporary observers, were perceived as pathways to a police state. In subsequent decades there were nightmares at the Public Record Office (now The National Archives) when cross-references to intelligence files came into the public domain in Colonial Office and Foreign Office files, and other such records. Official weeders attempted to screen sources and methods that might jeopardise national security, but the blanket of secrecy had begun to unravel.

Aldrich is a social anthropologist of sorts as well as an historian. His study of GCHQ personnel reveals an élite within an élite, at least in a self-regarding view, with a reputation for hard drinking and sexual adventure, and with a guarded attitude towards the American part of the clan. A high-ranking GCHQ officer wrote in 1962: ‘We cannot trust each other on sensitive matters’. The National Security Agency had at least equal mistrust of its British partner but insisted that security could be tightened if GCHQ would routinely use polygraph machines, even after it became common knowledge that wilful individuals could beat the system through the use of the drug meprobamate (not unlike the fictional drug in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World). In 1972, Richard Nixon said that polygraphs at least scared the Hell out of everyone concerned, but the British were steadfast in their refusal to use them. The date of Nixon’s remark is significant because it was during the same era that the Anglo-American special intelligence relationship reached its lowest point. Edward Heath and Henry Kissinger had such a falling out over Cyprus that the National Security Agency suspended communications with GCHQ, thus sending ‘shock waves through the British establishment’.

The end of the British Empire reduced the number of listening posts as well as naval and air stations. The British needed what the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, Paul Gore-Booth, called permanent colonial property. ‘We must surely be very tough about this’, he wrote, ‘The object of the exercise is to get some rocks which will remain ours. There will be no indigenous people except the seagulls’. In 1971 the British and American governments agreed that the inhabitants of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean would be removed to Mauritius and the Seychelles. One of the last of the significant colonial dependencies—the British Indian Ocean Territory—became a base for US naval and space-tracking operations.

Aldrich pays tribute to an American writer, James Bamford, who wrote a book in 1982 about the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, entitled The Puzzle Palace. Bamford proved that Sir Lewis Namier was right after all: there are no secrets, though some may not be easily accessible. By tracing obscure and often cryptic legislation, by studying scientific magazines, by extensive interviews, and above all by using the US Freedom of Information Act, Bamford in this and subsequent writings laid bare the workings of the NSA. With his own originality and research in unorthodox sources as well as official documents, Aldrich has now done the same for GCHQ and comes down to the present. Since September 11, 2001, government wiretaps and electronic monitoring have spun out of control. GCHQ concludes with a warning at what seems to be an historic trend in the making: when sophisticated surveillance combines with biometric monitoring, universal fingerprinting, and the gathering of DNA, civil liberties are more at risk than ever before.
Wm. ROGER LOUIS

University of Texas at Austin