GCHQ by Richard Aldrich

Author:Richard Aldrich [Richard J. Aldrich]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007357123
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2016-06-22T16:00:00+00:00

In the early 1970s the public knew almost nothing about the breathtaking achievements of high-tech espionage. Overhead, satellites were collecting millions of telephone calls which were then being word-searched by computers of mind-boggling complexity. Yet the British people were still not even aware of the wartime achievements of Bletchley Park. Ultra and its conquest of the German Enigma machine were still shrouded in government secrecy. Indeed, the official histories of the Second World War had been artfully constructed to hide code-breaking and deception from public view. But in 1974 all was suddenly revealed in a memoir called The Ultra Secret by Frederick Winterbotham, who had looked after the distribution of Ultra to operational commanders in the field. Those who had worked at Bletchley Park had taken their vows of secrecy very seriously, and in some cases for thirty years had not told even their husbands or wives what they had worked on during the war. Now they could speak about what they had done.52

Kim Philby was a major reason why the government eventually chose not to oppose the publication of Winterbotham’s tell-all memoir. Burke Trend, the Cabinet Secretary, hoped that the revelations it contained would help restore the reputation of British intelligence, which had taken a battering in recent years as a result of the vast publicity given to the defection of the KGB moles who had burrowed deep inside the intelligence services. Philby’s deliberately misleading memoir, published in 1968, was especially damaging, and had prompted the government to produce its own official history of intelligence, and even to release some wartime sigint records from Bletchley Park for use by historians.53 Managing the public image of the intelligence community was entirely new territory for the authorities, who now faced the nightmare task of screening top-secret files before they reached the Public Record Office at Kew. The archives from the Second World War were enormous, and weeding them to extract the specific bits of intelligence material that were still deemed too sensitive for release was a Herculean task. However, officials were spurred on by news that the Soviets were taking a close interest in what was released. In July 1970 the Security Department of the Foreign Office warned that the Soviets had sent a researcher from Moscow to look through the newly released records at Kew, ‘not merely from a historical point of view but also with an eye on current British government procedures’. Officials observed that ‘Time spent in cleansing the record of intelligence…is not spent in vain.’54

What the KGB had already managed to find out about current GCHQ activities had formed part of the deliberations over the release of wartime sigint records from Bletchley Park. ‘The Russians in particular know of our sigint successes,’ noted one official, adding that the worst leaks had occurred because of ‘three defectors from NSA who were fully informed on Anglo/US sigint in the ’50s and early ‘60s’. Primarily, this was a reference to the defection in 1960 of the American code-breakers William Martin

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