Abstract
Government Communications Headquarters or ‘GCHQ’ is Britain’s largest intelligence agency. Currently commanding some 6,000 employees, it moved to new premises in Cheltenham in 2003 which for the previous few years constituted the largest building project in Europe and which is known locally as the ‘Doughnut’, GCHQ together with its defensive arm, the Communications-Electronics Security Group and their various historical predecessors have presided over the complex matter of gathering intelligence from the ether and also attempting to protect the security of British codes and ciphers for more than a century.1 In GCHQ’s distinctive new building international relations meets big science. Deep below the offices of the linguists and the analysts are vast computer halls. The exact size and type of these computers are secret but GCHQ is rumoured to have several machines each with a storage capacity of 25 petabytes (25,000 terabytes) equipped with over 20,000 cores to provide rapid parallel processing. Such computers are required for only a few specialist scientific tasks: simulating complex weather systems, mapping the human genome, designing nuclear weapons and of course cryptography — the science of making and breaking ciphers.2
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
The history of British communications security is an especially important area that has long been neglected. For a path-breaking essay on cipher and document security see, D. Dilks, ‘Flashes of Intelligence: The Foreign Office, The SIS and Security Before the Second World War’, in C. Andrew and D. Dilks (eds), The Missing Dimension: Governments and Intelligence Communities in the Twentieth Century (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 101–25.
More recently see J. Ferris, ‘The British “Enigma”: Britain, Signals Security and Cipher Machines, 1906–1946’, Defense Analysis, 3, 2 (1987), pp. 153–63 and also
R.A Ratcliff, Delusions of Intelligence: Enigma, Ultra, and the End of Secure Ciphers (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006).
R.J. Aldrich, ‘The Ultimate Spy: Why the Real James Bond is a Supercomputer’, BBC Science Magazine, 248 (November 2012), pp. 55–9.
See for example Matthew Aid, Secret Sentry: The Top Secret History of the National Security Agency (New York: Bloomsbury 2009);
Matthew Aid and Cees Wiebes (eds), Secrets of Signals Intelligence During the Cold War and Beyond (London: Frank Cass, 2001);
D. Ball and D. Homer, Breaking the Code: Australia’s KGB Network (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1988);
J. Bamford, The Puzzle Palace: America’s National Security Agency and Its Special Relationship with GCHQ (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1983);
J. Bamford, Body of Secrets: How NSA and Britain’s GCHQ Eavesdrop on the World (London: Doubleday, 2001).
However see S. Lavington, ‘In the Footsteps of Colossus: A Description of Oedipus’, IEEE Annals of Computing, (2006), pp. 44–55. On wartime and the emergence of computers there is a vast literature. See especially B.J. Copeland, Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park’s Codebreaking Computers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006);
P. Gannon, Colossus: Bletchley Park’s Greatest Secret (London: Atlantic Books, 2006);
A. Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (London: Burnett Books, 1992);
W.W. Chandler, ‘The Installation and Maintenance of Colossus’, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 5, 3 (1983), pp. 260–2;
A.W. Coombs, ‘The Making of Colossus’, IEEE Annals of the History of Cornputing, 5, 3 (1983), pp. 253–9;
T. Sale, ‘The Colossus of Bletchley Park — The German Cipher System’, in R.H. Rojas (ed.), The First Computers: History and Architecture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 2000) pp. 351–64.
Correspondence in the papers of Arthur Cooper (presently in private hands). On Josh Cooper, see A. Bonsall, ‘Bletchley Park and the RAF Y Service: Some Recollections’, Intelligence and National Security, 23, 6 (2008), pp. 827–41.
Barrie H. Kent, Signal! A History of Signalling in the Royal Navy (East Meon: Hyden, 2004) pp. 140–2.
R.J. Aldrich, Intelligence and the War Against Japan: The Politics of Secret Service (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) p. 236.
See also D. Ford, Britain’s Secret War Against Japan, 1937–1945 (London: Routledge, 2006) p. 210;
P. Elphick, Far Eastern File: The Intelligence War in the Far East 1930–1945 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1998) pp. 94–105;
M. Smith, The Emperor’s Codes: Bletchley Park and the Breaking of Japan’s Secret Ciphers (London: Bantam, 2000) pp. 207–16;
M. Smith, ‘An Undervalued Effort: How the British Broke Japan’s Codes’, in M. Smith and R. Erskine (eds), Action this Day (London: Bantam, 2001) pp. 127–51;
A. Stripp, Codebreaker in the Far East (London: Frank Cass, 1989).
C.M. Andrew, ‘The Growth of the Australian Intelligence Community and the Anglo-American Connection’, Intelligence and National Security, 4, 2 (1989), pp. 213–57.
N. Hager, Secret Power: New Zealand’s Role in the International Spy Network (Nelson: Craig Potton, 1996), pp. 61–3.
J.W. Young, ‘The Wilson Government’s Reform of Intelligence Co-ordination, 1967–68’, Intelligence and National Security, 16, 1 (2001) pp. 133–51. The Trend reforms echoed a wider review of government under Fulton.
R.J. Aldrich, ‘Counting the Cost of Intelligence: The Treasury, National Service and GCHQ’, English Historical Review, 128, 532 (2013), pp. 596–627.
The definitive history of ICL is Martin Campbell-Kelly, ICL: A Business and Technical History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
Glen O’Hara, ‘Attempts to Modernize: Nationalization and the Nationalized Industries in Post-War Britain’, in Franco Amatori, Robert Millward and Pier Angelo Toninelli (eds), Reappraising State-Owned Enterprise: A Comparison of the UK and Italy (London: Routledge, 2011) pp. 50–67.
‘Uncle Sam’s Nyet to ICL Deal’, 6 January 2000, Computing.co.uk, online at: http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/ 1853985/uncle-sams-nyet-icl-deal [accessed 8 april 2014] On the wider effects of Cocom see, M. Mastanduno, Economic Containment: CoCom and the Politics of East-West Trade (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).
Campbell-Kelly, ICL, pp 284–6. On CPRS see Christopher Pollitt, ‘The Central Policy Review Staff 1970–1974’, Public Administration, 52, 4 (1974), pp. 375–92 and also
Rodney Lowe, The Official History of the British Civil Service: Reforming the Civil Service, Vol. 1: The Fulton Years, 1966–81 (London: Routledge, 2011) pp. 155–90. The functions of the CPRS were mostly transferred to the Downing Street Policy Unit in the 1980s.
Martin Campbell-Kelly, ‘The ACE and the Shaping of British Computing’, in B. Jack Copeland (ed.), Alan Turing’s Electronic Brain: The Struggle to Build the ACE, the World’s First Computer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) pp. 149–72.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2014 Richard J. Aldrich
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Aldrich, R.J. (2014). GCHQ and UK Computer Policy. In: Murfett, M.H. (eds) Shaping British Foreign and Defence Policy in the Twentieth Century. Security, Conflict and Cooperation in the Contemporary World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137431493_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137431493_11
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-49227-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-43149-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)