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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