By Richard J Aldrich
Reviewed by Duncan Campbell
The spying game
Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is the largest intelligence agency in Britain, a rank it has held since its predecessor expanded to confront coming war in 1939. Its principal task is "sigint" (signals intelligence): providing clients with information derived from intercepting, or spying on, the communications of others. Every detail of GCHQ's size, mission and methods was unknown to the public, press and most of parliament for more than half of its 70 years so far. The agency's capabilities - and, importantly, the limitations of these capabilities - are little understood.
More difficult still to foresee is the role that the new surveillance behemoth inside GCHQ's doughnut-shaped headquarters in Cheltenham may come to play as our lives and social being migrate fully into electronic form. In Britain as in the United States, the physical means to tap, track, store and assess this data are already embedded in secretly spliced optical fibre cable connections that loop around national telecommunications systems, pulling every sort of communication into an unseen nebula of data warehouses. But is this activity merely a large and super-secret version of Facebook or Google, "a vast mirror [that] reflects the spirit of the age", as this book concludes?
Richard Aldrich, an accomplished cold war intelligence historian, has taken a decade to produce the first substantial account of what is known about the agency, and what can be gleaned from recently released official archive material. He charts how, by 1964, GCHQ's demands and hidden financial allocations exceeded the entire cost of the Foreign Office. Its managers lobbied for a string of ambitious and costly projects: a nuclear-powered, aircraft-carrier-sized spy ship (never built); a small force of sky-sweeping Nimrod spy planes (flying from Lincolnshire now); and a spy satellite, Zircon (which never left the ground).
After decades of darkness, "GCHQ was unmasked in the summer of 1976", the book acknowledges, by a "path-breaking" article entitled "The eavesdroppers", which I wrote for Time Out. The agency's unwilling transition to public awareness was consolidated by the subsequent "ABC" Official Secrets Act trial of 1978, directed at myself and two others. Aldrich continues: "together Duncan Campbell and James Bamford [who wrote the first book about GCHQ's American equivalent, the NSA] have confirmed a fundamental truth: that there are no secrets, only lazy researchers". That's very kind, but I can't agree. I'll come back to that.
Behind and in front of GCHQ, there are the collectors and the recipients. The collectors use dangerous, costly means of bringing in signal intercepts: reconnaissance aircraft, special submarines, covert and uncomfortable listening stations in embassies and diplomatic missions. The recipients are the select few with clearance to see the "sensitive compartmentalised information" that is generated.
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