Kitabı oku: «GCHQ»
GCHQ
The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency
Richard J. Aldrich
Copyright
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Harper Press in 2010
Copyright © Richard J. Aldrich 2010; 2019
Cover photographs © Don Klumpp/Getty Images (radio telescope); Getty Images (radar domes).
Richard J. Aldrich asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008351809
Ebook Edition © 2019 ISBN: 9780007357123
Version: 2019-07-01
Dedication
For Libby
(for the dark night-time)
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
List of Illustrations
Maps
– Sigint and Comsec Locations in the UK
– Overseas British Sigint Stations and Facilities
Note on Terminology
Abbreviations
Introduction: GCHQ – The Last Secret?
THE 1940s: BLETCHLEY PARK AND BEYOND
1. Schooldays
2. Friends and Allies
3. Every War Must Have an End
4. The KGB and the Venona Project
5. UKUSA – Creating the Global Sigint Alliance
THE 1950s: FIGHTING THE ELECTRONIC WAR
6. ‘Elint’ and the Soviet Nuclear Target
7. The Voyages of HMS Turpin
8. Sigint in the Sun – GCHQ’s Overseas Empire
9. Blake, Bugs and the Berlin Tunnel
10. Embassy Wars
THE 1960s: SPACE, SPY SHIPS AND SCANDALS
11. Harold Macmillan – Shootdowns, Cyphers and Spending
12. Harold Wilson – Security Scandals and Spy Revelations
13. Intelligence for Doomsday
14. Staying Ahead – Sigint Ships and Spy Planes
THE 1970s: TURBULENCE AND TERROR
15. Trouble with Henry
16. Disaster at Kizildere
17. Turmoil on Cyprus
18. Unmasking GCHQ: The ABC Trial
THE 1980s: INTO THE THATCHER ERA
19. Geoffrey Prime – The GCHQ Mole
20. A Surprise Attack – The Falklands War
21. Thatcher and the GCHQ Trade Union Ban
22. NSA and the Zircon Project
AFTER 1989: GCHQ GOES GLOBAL
23. From Cold War to Hot Peace – The Gulf War and Bosnia
24. The New Age of Ubiquitous Computing
25. The 9/11 Attacks and the Iraq War
26. 7/7: The London Bombings
27. Who left GCHQ’s backdoor open?
28. Deny / Disrupt / Degrade / Deceive
Picture Section
Appendix 1: Directors of GCHQ and NCSC
Appendix 2: GCHQ Timeline
Appendix 3: GCHQ Organisation in 1946
Appendix 4: GCHQ Organisation in 1970
Appendix 5: GCHQ Organisation in 1998
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
From the reviews of GCHQ
About the Author
By the Same Author
About the Publisher
Illustrations
Alastair Denniston. (US National Archives and Records Administration)
Edward Travis. (US National Archives and Records Administration)
Voice interception during the Second World War. (US National Archives and Records Administration)
Arlington Hall, where Venona was broken. (US National Archives and Records Administration)
UKUSA meeting in the early 1950s. (US National Archives and Records Administration)
Russian radio equipment captured in Korea, 1951. (US National Archives and Records Administration)
President Sukarno of Indonesia, whose ‘Konfrontasi’ was defeated with the help of British sigint. (US National Archives and Records Administration)
British phone-tapping equipment from the 1950s. (US National Archives and Records Administration)
George Blake. (Imperial War Museum)
Tony Beasley. (By permission of Tony Beasley)
HMS Turpin. (Royal Submarines Museum)
A Russian sigint ‘trawler’ in the North Sea. (UK National Archives)
The cypher room of Britain’s Embassy in Peking after it was overrun by ‘protesters’ in 1967. (UK National Archives)
Clive Loehnis. (National Portrait Gallery, London)
Commander Robert ‘Fred’ Stannard. (Imperial War Museum)
The Blue Peter team admire Britain’s first Skynet communications satellite in November 1969. (UK National Archives)
Sigint operators at RAF Chicksands in Bedfordshire listen in to the Soviet Air Force. (US National Archives and Records Administration)
Benhall, one of the two GCHQ sites at Cheltenham in the 1970s. (Gloucester Citizen)
USS Oxford, one of America’s spy ships. (US National Archives and Records Administration)
US President Richard Nixon and CIA Director Richard Helms. (US National Archives and Records Administration)
An American SR-71 Blackbird spy plane at RAF Mildenhall, October 1973. (US National Archives and Records Administration)
Bodies of some of the kidnappers after the shoot-out at Kizildere in March 1972. (By permission of Batu Erkan)
The Mayor’s house at Kizildere after the siege. (By permission of Batu Erkan)
HMS Endurance during the Falklands War. (US National Archives and Records Administration)
HMS Conqueror after sinking the General Belgrano. (Imperial War Museum)
Geoffrey Prime. (Imperial War Museum)
Benson Buffham. (US National Archives and Records Administration)
GCHQ protesters in Cheltenham in 1984 after the trade union ban. (Gloucester Citizen)
An ‘Odette’ intercept unit during the Gulf War in 1991. (MoD/Royal Signals Museum)
A supporter of the Anonymous group holds up a placard featuring a photo of Edward Snowden during a rally in Berlin, November 2013 (Getty Images)
‘The Doughnut’. (© Topfoto)
MAPS
Note on Terminology
On 1 November 1919, Britain created the Government Code and Cypher School, or ‘GC&CS’, the nation’s first integrated code-making and code-breaking unit. The term GC&CS remained in widespread use until the end of the Second World War.
By contrast, Government Communications Headquarters, or ‘GCHQ’, is a term of uncertain origin. Originally developed as a cover name for Bletchley Park in late 1939, it competed 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.
Abbreviations
A-2 | US Air Force Intelligence | |
ASA | Army Security Agency [American] | |
ASIO | Australian Security Intelligence Organisation | |
BDS | British Defence Staff, Washington | |
BfV | West German security service | |
BJ | ‘Blue jacket’ file for signals intelligence or an individual intercept | |
Blue Book | Weekly digest of comint material for the PM | |
BND | Bundesnachrichtendienst – foreign intelligence service of West Germany | |
Brixmis | British Military Mission to the HQ Soviet Army in East Germany | |
BRUSA | Anglo–American signals intelligence agreement, 1943 | |
‘C’ | Chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) | |
CESD | Communications-Electronics Security Department, succeeded by CESG | |
CESG | Communications-Electronics Security Group | |
CIA | Central Intelligence Agency [American] | |
comint | Communications intelligence | |
comsec | Communications security | |
Crypto AG | Swiss information security company | |
CSE | Communications Security Establishment [Canadian] | |
CSOC | Cyber Security Operations Centre (Cheltenham) | |
CSU | Civil Service Union | |
CX | Prefix for a report originating with SIS | |
DIS | Defence Intelligence Staff | |
DMSI | Director of Management and Support for Intelligence in DIS | |
DSD | Defence Signals Department [Australian], formerly DSB | |
DWS | Diplomatic Wireless Service | |
elint | Electronic intelligence | |
FBI | Federal Bureau of Investigation [American] | |
G-8 | Group of Eight summit | |
G-20 | Group of Twenty summit | |
GC&CS | Government Code and Cypher School | |
GCHQ | Government Communications Headquarters | |
GRU | Soviet Military Intelligence | |
GTAC | Government Technical Assistance Centre, established in 2000 – later NTAC | |
IMP | Interception Modernisation Plan (Home Office) | |
IRSIG | Instructions and Regulations concerning the Security of Signals Intelligence [Allied] | |
ISAF | International Security Assistance Force (Afghanistan) | |
ISP | Internet Service Provider | |
JIC | Joint Intelligence Committee | |
JSRU | Joint Speech Research Unit | |
JSSU | Joint Services Signals Unit, combined sigint collection units | |
JTRIG | Joint Threat Research and Intelligence Group | |
KGB | Russian secret service | |
LCSA | London Communications Security Agency, until 1963 | |
LCSA | London Communications-Electronics Security Agency, until 1965 | |
LEWT | Light Electronic Warfare Teams | |
LPG | London Processing Group | |
MI5 | Security Service | |
MI6 | Secret Intelligence Service (also SIS) | |
MiG | Mikoyan – Soviet fighter aircraft | |
MoD | Ministry of Defence | |
MTI | Methods to Improve, sequential five-year sigint programmes at GCHQ | |
NATO | North Atlantic Treaty Organisation | |
NCSC | National Cyber Security Centre | |
NSA | National Security Agency [American] | |
NTAC | National Technical Assistance Centre, previously GTAC | |
OCS | Office of Cyber Security (London) | |
PHP | Post-Hostilities Planning Committee | |
PSIS | Permanent Secretaries’ Committee on the Intelligence Services | |
RAE | Royal Aircraft Establishment Farnham | |
RICU | Research, Information and Communications Unit | |
SAS | Special Air Service | |
SBS | Special Boat Service | |
SDECE | French intelligence service | |
Sigdasys | An allied operational sigint distribution system in Germany in the 1980s | |
sigint | Signals intelligence | |
SIS | Secret Intelligence Service (also MI6) | |
SOE | Special Operations Executive | |
SUSLO | Special United States Liaison Officer based in Britain | |
TICOM | Target Intelligence Committee dealing with signals intelligence | |
Tor | The Onion Router – anonymous communication software | |
UKUSA | UK–USA signals intelligence agreements | |
VHF | Very High Frequency | |
Y | Wireless interception, usually low-level | |
Y Section | SIS unit undertaking interception activities | |
Y Service | Signals interception arms of the three services |