The key to global British power

“GCHQ provides intelligence, protects information and informs relevant UK policy to keep our society safe and successful in the Internet
Age“, so reads the headline message on the Government Communication Headquarters website. This is a classic example of British understatement, effortlessly disguising what is in fact the most strategic asset in British foreign policy formulation and implementation.

If there is one single organization that explains the longevity of the United Kingdom's global reach in the post-colonial period, then it is surely the GCHQ, a massive worldwide eavesdropping enterprise, which obtains over 80% of the United Kingdom's intelligence and provides critical support to both the domestic Security Service (MI5) and the foreign Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), as well as the British armed forces.

Founded more than 90 years ago, the GCHQ specializes in the art of secret listening, and after America's National Security Agency (NSA), it is the most prolific signals intelligence (sigint) agency in the world.

It is against this backdrop of global dominance and strategic indispensability that Richard J Aldrich's GCHQ: The uncensored story of Britain's most secret intelligence agency, immediately attracts elevated significance. A scrupulous researcher, Aldrich's main achievement has been to construct an independent and non-official history of the GCHQ.

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While Aldrich recounts the exploits at Bletchley Park, he is keener to unravel the mystery of the post-war UKUSA Agreement, a much misunderstood subject, whose unraveling has not been helped by sensationalist and conspiracy-oriented reporting and analysis. Often referred to as "Echelon" by the global media, this agreement is widely understood to underpin Anglo-American domination of the sigint realm and by extension the world of secret intelligence.

Using declassified files and other sources Aldrich outlines the intricacies of the UKUSA Agreement as more a "complex network of different alliances built up from many different overlapping agreements" than a single treaty. UKUSA soon incorporated a second tier of Anglo-Saxon countries, namely Canada, Australia and New Zealand, thereby creating a massive sigint network with global coverage.

Aldrich's main contribution to the understanding of Echelon is his detailed description of the periodic tensions underlying the core UKUSA sigint agreement. Most importantly, he recounts the episode in July 1973 when the legendary American statesman Henry Kissinger ordered an abrupt termination to all intelligence cooperation with the UK as a retaliatory measure over disputes on European security policy.

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