Colossus marched on into the early Cold War period. The last two Colossus II machines were assembled at Eastcote rather than Bletchley, and code-named ‘Blue’ and ‘Red’. These were rebuilt between 1948 and 1951, before being taken to Cheltenham in 1953 and employed until 1961. Also using the Colossus circuits were four new Robinson machines that were installed at Eastcote. These were eventually overtaken by ‘Colorob’, a new specialist machine developed with help from the defence electronics firm Ferranti and Manchester University. The most important GCHQ computer development was ‘Oedipus’, the first machine to exploit high-speed storage. Begun in 1951, Oedipus could store ten thousand fifteen-character phrases on its drum memory, an achievement far ahead of its time.30 The significance of Oedipus was that it was a powerful rapid-character-comparison machine with a capability greatly exceeding that of any general stored programme machine available commercially in the 1950s and 1960s. Much of this elaborate technology was devoted to unsuccessful attacks on high-grade Soviet diplomatic cyphers.31
However, GCHQ’s impact on computer development was not as great as that of NSA. Although NSA pursued a ‘policy of anonymity’, it was nevertheless later able to claim a string of very considerable computer firsts. Typically, the ‘Atlas 1’, delivered to NSA in December 1950, was the first parallel electronic computer with a drum memory. Its successor, ‘Atlas 2’, delivered in December 1953, was the first core memory computer. In March 1958 NSA received the first computer that relied wholly on transistors, called ‘Solo’, which became the model for many of Philco’s later commercial designs. In February 1962 it took delivery of ‘Harvest’, the first large computer with a completely automated tape library. Harvest strongly influenced the design of the IBM System 360, a breakthrough machine which was a familiar sight in GCHQ’s vast computer hall by the late 1960s.32 The later IBM-700 series was soon the mainstay of core operations at NSA and GCHQ. By 1968 Marshall Carter, NSA’s Director, could boast that he had over a hundred computers occupying almost five acres of floor space.33
In 1977 GCHQ took delivery of the first of its advanced American-built Cray super-computers. A super-computer breaks a problem down into many tasks that can all be done at the same time. By using different parts of its brain in parallel it can undertake vast calculations unbelievably quickly. The main applications are code-breaking, designing nuclear weapons and weather forecasting. At this time the world of super-computers was led by Seymour Cray, and the first production model rolled out of his company’s factory at Chippewa Falls, Minnesota in the spring of 1976. This was delivered to NSA, while the second went to NSA’s mathematical think tank at Princeton University.34 Remarkably, a Cray machine for Cheltenham was already under construction, and was shipped across the Atlantic the following year. In the autumn of 1976 the impending arrival of the Cray drove some of the construction work at GCHQ’s Benhall site, including a new building for the computer staff – known as X Division – together with a new Special Compartmentalised Intelligence Facility with reinforced strongrooms to hold their documents.35 The new Cray machine was so powerful that it required elaborate cooling, and much of the redevelopment at Cheltenham was in order to provide special ventilation and a supply of ‘chilled water direct to computers’.36 All this reflected a strategic decision by NSA to place more emphasis on supercomputing, a decision which was followed by GCHQ.37 They were soon rewarded, for in 1976 the West recovered the long-lost ability to read some high-level Soviet communications, including telegrams between Moscow and the Soviet Embassy in Washington.38
GCHQ was also making an important transition from using computers just for cryptanalysis to using them for everything, including sending sigint to customers. This was the beginning of a revolutionary breakthrough. As early as August 1967, Foreign Office planners remarked, ‘We hope to get proposals shortly from G.C.H.Q. in Cheltenham which would provide methods of random access by desk officers to the computer itself.’ GCHQ hoped that this would provide something like near real-time distribution of its precious sigint product to users in Whitehall. In the 1970s the old ‘blue jacket’ files full of sigint intercepts started to disappear, and online access for policy-makers slowly began to take over.39 Computers were also being used widely inside GCHQ. In 1967, Ken Sly, who had commanded the sigint unit at Hong Kong, took over from Nicodemus Doniach as head of a GCHQ branch called the Joint Technical Language Service, a group of thirty highly qualified linguists who not only undertook translations, but also compiled material ranging from dictionaries of Soviet military terms to handbooks of Arab names. When Sly took over they were working from a vast wall of index cards thirty yards long. He began a determined programme of computerisation, so this vast body of knowledge gradually became available to everyone in GCHQ.40
This change was of the first importance. GCHQ could see that computers were the shape of the future, and wanted to use them to improve every stage of the intelligence process. However, the gap between ambition and reality was huge. In 1973 GCHQ was still at the basic stage of trying to get lists of its previous files onto computer, moving away from card indexes. The ambition was to get enough information about the files into the system to allow for keyword searching. However, there was a mountain of files, and Gerry Bontoft, who presided over records, needed more staff and was battling a freeze on recruitment.41 GCHQ also kept personnel files for longer than most other departments in case they were needed for security enquiries.42 As a result, it was now bulging with records. Its Registry held a massive twenty-three thousand shelf feet of records generated by GCHQ’s twenty different divisions, and was adding four thousand files every year.43 The Registry predicted that it would hit a quarter of a million files by the year 2000. Matters were made worse by the determination of each division to keep its own over-stuffed registry. Managers wanted to destroy older sigint records received from US and Commonwealth allies, but the divisions resisted, pointing out that the United States in particular could not be relied upon to keep complete sets of its own reports.44
GCHQ did at least have good American-made IBM computers, whereas other areas of government were continually under pressure to take underperforming machines from the ailing British computer industry. The agency could always play the trump card of Anglo–American compatibility. By the mid-1960s, IBM was in a position that British officials described as an ‘oligopoly’, enjoying three quarters of the world’s computer market and spending £30 million a year on research and development. It recovered these costs easily through production runs of thousands of machines. GCHQ bought IBM computers not only because of NSA compatibility, but because its machines were cutting edge.45 Nevertheless, GCHQ still had an impact on the British computing industry during the 1970s. This came largely in the form of one person, Teddy Poulden, who was lent by GCHQ to the Cabinet Office as an adviser. Poulden was, in many ways, an unlikely figure for this role. He was a general sigint manager rather than a computer specialist. He had begun his career helping to run the vast British naval sigint station on Ceylon during the war, and his first post-war job had been to head the new Australian sigint organisation. However, he then spent a couple of years as the liaison officer at NSA at a time of increasing automation, and had learned to love computers. He became Coordinator of Technical Services at GCHQ, working closely with the computer section known as X Division.
Dick White, the go-ahead new Intelligence Coordinator in the Cabinet Office, was another avid computer enthusiast. In February 1969 he was chatting to Joe Hooper, the Director of GCHQ, about how computers were transforming the world of intelligence. Hooper happened to mention a new American system called ‘COINS’ (Community On-line Intelligence System) that was intended to provide a shared database across the whole US intelligence community. White was excited by this idea, and asked him for a detailed appraisal. Hooper rather relished giving White the doleful story. Begun in 1965 as a presidential initiative by Lyndon Johnson, after four years and vast expense it was still not working. The idea was to allow all the different Americ
an intelligence agencies to access each other’s computerised files, together with ‘read-only’ access for the Pentagon and the State Department. However, there were major difficulties with different file formats and terminology. The committee set up to address this had got nowhere, and was caught up in bitter bureaucratic wrangling.46
White was not deterred. By early 1970 he had persuaded the Joint Intelligence Committee to get busy in the area of new technology. Brian Stewart, Secretary of the JIC, created a joint team on Automatic Data Processing which also comprised MI5, SIS, the Defence Intelligence Staff and the Foreign Office. Teddy Poulden from GCHQ was given the job of chairing it.47 GCHQ and NSA had just completed a shared computer project to standardise the spelling of geographical locations in Russian.48 What GCHQ really thirsted for was progress on machine translation that would do some of the jobs currently undertaken by linguists, but so far this had failed on grounds of high costs and complexity.49 The Defence Intelligence Staff had looked at storing more of its material on computer, but had been horrified by the sheer labour required to keep such databases current. Despite these disappointments, they all recognised that NSA’s growing use of computers for data storage meant this was the future. ‘Most Sigint end-product already contained simple machine symbols’ as a result of its journey through the communications system, and NSA already maintained ‘an almost complete file of Sigint end-product for retrieval’ on computer. In June 1971 Poulden was rightly predicting that these changes would spread through the entire Western intelligence community over the next ten years.50 By 1974, Dick White’s successors as Intelligence Coordinator would be looking to computers in a desperate effort to cut staff numbers in the face of swingeing cuts to the intelligence and defence budgets.51
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 and Bernon Mitchell, who had talked enthusiastically at a press conference in Moscow about the way in which the West had collected and broken the diplomatic traffic of countries like Egypt and Indonesia. The third NSA defector was Jack Dunlap, who revealed a great deal about code-breaking to the Soviets in 1963. The British officials failed to mention their own security problems with figures such as Douglas Britten.55
Whitehall and Washington were now badly out of step. Timorous figures from GCHQ had spent the early 1970s worrying over the protection of wartime secrets. Suddenly, in 1974, to the horror of British officials, the Americans began to expose current secrets. In Washington the secret state was in full retreat as the American psyche suffered the triple blows of Watergate, Vietnam and the Oil Crisis. One of the manifestations of this new self-questioning political climate was court decisions which upheld the rights of dissident intelligence officers to write their memoirs. A CIA officer called Victor Marchetti had teamed up with a diplomat to write one of the first revelatory accounts of the CIA. The US government had demanded over two hundred deletions, but the courts later reduced this to twenty-two. Britain was alarmed. One of the joint operations revealed in the Marchetti book was the shared nature of Britain’s massive sigint and radar complex on Cyprus. In April 1974 Harold Wilson had just begun his second administration, and his new Cabinet Secretary, John Hunt, warned him of a ‘potential danger’ to the continued operation of Sandra and Cobra Shoe, with their ability to look deep into Soviet airspace, since the Cypriots did not know about American participation in these projects.56
The following year, the British intelligence community was shocked to the core by Congressional inquiries into intelligence under Senator Frank Church. The revelations included discussion of planned assassinations by the CIA. Richard Helms, who had been Director of the CIA until 1973, confided his feelings to his friend the former Hut Six code-breaker Bill Bundy. Helms felt he had ‘maintained discipline’ during his own tenure, but now ‘the dam had broken’ and secrets of all kinds were spilling out.57 British intelligence applied continuous pressure on the Americans to avoid revelations about their joint operations. In early April 1976 George Bush, the fourth new CIA Director in as many years, came to visit Harold Wilson. One of his purposes was to reassure the British that the Americans had curbed the Church Committee hearings, with their ‘vociferous demand for general disclosure of intelligence procedures’. British officials hoped that at last the pendulum had begun to swing back in favour of secrecy. John Hunt asked Wilson to take the opportunity during their discussions to reassure Bush about the high value Britain continued to place on the Anglo–American intelligence relationship. Hunt added that this relationship was on the up, because the Americans were under financial pressure and had lost listening stations in South-East Asia and in Turkey, making them more dependent on British help.58
Harold Wilson, now moving towards the end of his second term as Prime Minister, was both fascinated and terrified by intelligence matters. Unlike his officials, he seemed to rather enjoy the revelations of the Church inquiry. Indeed, only a month before George Bush arrived at Downing Street, Wilson had been visited by Frank Church, and spent longer chatting with him than he did with Bush. Church explained the workings of his Congressional inquiry at length, and Wilson responded that he ‘had always been assured that the CIA were not engaged in covert operations in this country’, adding that
he thought this was ‘98 per cent true’. Church said that he had been given the same assurance, and ‘agreed with his qualification’. Wilson then began to reveal some of his own espionage obsessions, especially his fears about South African intelligence agents in Britain who were active in the cause of apartheid, explaining that he thought both the CIA and the notorious South African secret service (BOSS) were behind the recent recruitment of British mercenaries for service in the Angolan civil war. Wilson also pressed Church on the possibility of the CIA having paid bribes to British companies. Church departed, assuring Wilson that he would send him his findings on CIA activities in Chile.59 Even more remarkable than the Church inquiry into the nefarious doings of the CIA was a parallel Congressional inquiry into NSA during 1975 which had uncovered ‘Project Minaret’, the illegal monitoring of domestic radicals. Although this inquiry had been secret, the material reached the front page of the New York Times in January 1976.60 By February, former NSA director Lew Allen was embroiled in legal action.61
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