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by Richard Aldrich


  This vast outpouring of secrets and scandals soon reverberated in Britain. The most obvious target for British journalists was the activities of the CIA station in London. On 1 July 1976, three days before the bicentennial anniversary of American Independence, Maurice Oldfield, the Chief of SIS, spoke on the subject of Anglo–American intelligence relations. The occasion was the departure of the retiring head of the CIA station in London, Cord Meyer. Oldfield chose to praise Meyer’s extreme forbearance under ‘continuous and continuing press bombardment’. The Americans only had themselves to blame, since almost incredible stories were spilling onto the front pages of their newspapers. All enterprising British journalists had to do was read the latest spy revelations in the New York Times and the Washington Post, then think about what the British connections to these stories might be. Many of the latest exposures concerned NSA’s high-tech world of sigint, satellites and computers, and the press in London was soon asking questions about a mysterious British organisation called ‘GCHQ’.62

  GCHQ was unmasked in the summer of 1976 when the British investigative journalist Duncan Campbell wrote a pathbreaking article in Time Out magazine entitled ‘The Eavesdroppers’ with an American colleague called Mark Hosenball, giving great detail about both GCHQ and NSA activities.63 In Campbell’s own words, this was ‘the importation from the United States of post-Watergate investigative journalism’, something that was adopted by radical and left journalists in Britain ‘at considerable speed’.64 Campbell had interviewed a dissident former member of NSA who was visiting London, and then carried out his own research on GCHQ, piecing the story together from overlooked fragments of published material. The article was the first public exposure of what the agency actually did, and revealed significant details about the latest high-tech methods of interception. Cheltenham was horrified, and Mark Hosenball was quickly deported by the government as a threat to national security.

  Shortly after the ‘Eavesdroppers’ story appeared, Campbell and another radical journalist, Crispin Aubrey, were contacted by John Berry, a soldier who had served for many years with 9 Signals at the Ayios Nikolaos sigint base and who had read the article. Berry recounted his own experiences, which included listening in on armoured formations during the Yom Kippur War. He had once ‘heard a cry to Allah by an Egyptian soldier as his tank was hit by an Israeli shell’. Alerted by the ‘Eavesdroppers’ story, MI5 had been watching Campbell closely, and after meeting at Berry’s flat in February 1977, Aubrey, Berry and Campbell were arrested and prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act. This soon became known as the ‘ABC trial’, after the initials of the three defendants’ surnames.65

  The ABC trial was all about suppressing sigint secrets, and quickly became a cause célèbre. The prosecution fielded various sigint experts as witnesses, but tried to keep their identities secret, introducing them only as ‘Colonel A’, ‘Colonel B’ and so forth. A furore erupted when ‘Colonel B’ was revealed in the House of Commons to be none other than the redoubtable Colonel Hugh Johnstone, who had marched out to face down the Turkish tanks on the perimeter of the Ayios Nikolaos facility on Cyprus in July 1974.66At the trial, the defence counsel discovered that not only had the prosecution secretly applied to the judge to vet the jury, but that the jury contained three members who had signed the Official Secrets Act–indeed, the foreman was boasting to fellow jurors of his exploits in the SAS. When this was revealed on a television programme hosted by Russell Harty, the judge felt the process had been compromised and discharged the jury. A retrial had to be initiated, and proceedings were still ongoing in the summer of 1978.67

  A vigorous ‘ABC Defence Committee’ was operating from the Time Out offices in Southampton Street in London in support of the accused. The government took great interest in the ABC Defence Committee, and a vast amount of very recently declassified material in government files suggests that the authorities had people infiltrating the campaign. Government officials had only recently been debating whether to unveil the wartime Ultra secret, and now–to their disbelief–GCHQ’s current activities from locations such as Cyprus were in the public eye. The trial only raised the public profile of GCHQ further. On 10 March 1978 the ABC Defence Committee’s provocative newsletter announced a demonstration planned for 25 March which would begin at GCHQ’s Benhall site and end up at the main site at GCHQ Oakley. It urged:

  Now we have an excellent opportunity to get across–not least to the people of Cheltenham–what SIGINT is really doing, the fact that it’s illegal and the role of GCHQ as the hub of the system…We’ve been to MI5, MI6, Scotland Yard, parliament and many more. Now we’re going where much of the dirty work goes on–CHELTENHAM!68

  GCHQ had noted that Duncan Campbell had been investigating the American sigint site at Chicksands in Bedfordshire, that focused on the Soviet Air Force, and was clearly anxious about how the Americans would react to this.69

  When the ABC trial recommenced in the summer of 1978, the government was severely embarrassed. It turned out that most of the information that it deemed secret, including the duties of Colonel Hugh Johnstone at Ayios Nikolaos, was freely available to the public in the journal of the Royal Signals Regiment, The Wire. In August the defence took advantage of its increasingly strong position and offered a plea bargain.70David Owen, the Foreign Secretary, had initially supported the prosecution, but now badly wanted the case dropped, urging that ‘Almost any accommodation is to be preferred.’71As a result, Aubrey, Berry and Campbell were convicted of minor breaches of the Official Secrets Act, but most of the charges were dropped. Anthony Duff, the new Coordinator of Intelligence, considered that the overall impact of the case was ‘to make it more difficult to continue to refuse to acknowledge that we undertake SIGINT in peacetime or that GCHQ is involved’.72The Foreign Office legal adviser had been inspired by the case to look into whether the interception of communications between diplomatic missions in London and their home capitals was legal. He concluded that ‘It now seems clear that it is at least a dubious practice.’73

  The ABC trial was a landmark event. GCHQ had now been publicly ‘outed’ as Britain’s signals intelligence centre–even though government officials steadfastly refused to acknowledge the fact. Moreover, it inspired radical campaign groups to begin ‘watching the watchers’. They now probed constantly for new examples of secret activity that they could discuss in the radical press. The group that officials found most alarming was the State Research Association, which had been fostered by the National Council for Civil Liberties and was funded by the Rowntree Foundation. Its purpose was to publish material on recent developments in internal security and espionage, and its membership overlapped with the ABC Defence Committee. Its secretary was Tony Bunyan, and horrified defence officials noted that all the members ‘can be broadly described as unaffiliated revolutionaries’.74Michael Hanley, the Director General of MI5, identified Duncan Campbell as the person of greatest interest.75

  The ABC trial showed that sigint, with its vast satellite dishes and computers, was now just too big to hide. In 1978, as the trial drew to a close, the Cabinet Secretary, John Hunt, advised Prime Minister James Callaghan that there had been numerous press references to ‘the intelligence role of GCHQ, to its Director, to some of its stations, to its relationship with NSA and to the fact that it succeeded the Government Code and Cypher School’.76The government has repeatedly claimed that GCHQ’s identity as an intelligence organisation was only revealed in the 1980s. In reality, it was already widely known by 1976. What finally pulled the lid off Cheltenham was a revelatory book called The Puzzle Palace by the investigative journalist James Bamford. Published on 23 September 1982, it detailed the super-secret relationship between NSA and GCHQ by using the same methodical open source research employed by Duncan Campbell. This relationship was still very secret, and in NSA’s own words, ‘GCHQ was not amused.’ Yet much of what Bamford revealed about sigint lay in unclassified newsletters and obscure libraries; he had only pointed to what was in plain sight. NS
A concedes that Bamford’s research was ‘meticulous’, and that he ‘wrote the book’ on how to research a reclusive organisation from open sources.77Together, Duncan Campbell and James Bamford confirmed a fundamental truth: that there are no secrets, only lazy researchers.78Nevertheless, these new investigative writers were regarded as a serious threat, and one of NSA’s Directors later asserted that The Puzzle Palace was used by the Soviet Union and China to target Western sigint operations.79

  Remarkably, in 1982, even as Bamford’s book came out, GCHQ was still trying to keep a lid on certain technical aspects of Ultra. Although the importance of Ultra in assisting Allied wartime strategy had now been revealed, little had been said about the dark arts of code-breaking that had been practised in Bletchley Park’s Hut Six. Just as GCHQ had feared, once the general Ultra secret was out, veterans, historians and journalists rushed forward to write about code-breaking in more and more detail.80Gordon Welchman, who had been head of Hut Six, was one of these would-be authors. In 1941 he had drafted the famous plea sent to Churchill asking for more resources for Bletchley Park, to which Churchill had famously responded ‘Action This Day’.81Once he had heard about Frederick Winterbotham’s book The Ultra Secret, Welchman was burning to tell his own story, ‘regardless of the Official Secrets Act’.82He went to GCHQ for a chat with two senior figures, George Goodall and Douglas Nicoll. Although they were ‘very friendly’, they said they had no choice but to keep to the ‘party line’, and told Welchman that he must not give away the ‘methodological secrets’ of code-breaking.83

  Welchman went ahead regardless. When he finally ‘sprung’ his book on GCHQ in 1982, it was horrified. Entitled The Hut Six Story, it first appeared in the United States in order to evade censorship. Welchman continued to publish on code-breaking history, and in 1985 he wrote an article in a new journal founded by the historians Christopher Andrew and Michael Handel which would soon become the premier outlet for the new field of intelligence history. Welchman followed proper procedure and submitted his article to the D-Notice Committee, which requested no deletions. However, a few days later he received a stiff letter from the new Director of GCHQ that spoke of the ‘great shock’ his book had caused at GCHQ, and claimed his writings had done ‘direct damage to security’ and had ‘let us down’. The tone was rude at best, and caused indignation amongst veteran code-breakers.84The Welchman affair touched Bletchley Park veterans on both sides of the Atlantic: in 1985 his American friend Bill Bundy was asked to give a talk about Bletchley Park to a veterans’ group of ‘former cryptographic types’, but NSA called him to say that ‘in no circumstances’ should he talk about any Hut Six techniques.85

  Silly arguments about wartime secrets were soon swept away by the infamous Spycatcher affair. In 1985 Peter Wright, an MI5 officer who had worked closely with GCHQ’s Ken Perrin on short-range sigint, published his sensational but unreliable memoirs, subtitled The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer. The book revealed the level of paranoia about Soviet moles inside Western governments during the 1960s and 1970s, and the scale of MI5’s efforts to catch them. Like Welchman, in order to get around the Official Secrets Act Wright chose to publish overseas–in Australia, where he then lived. Sir Robert Armstrong, the Cabinet Secretary, made a farcical attempt in the Australian courts to defend Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s policy of blanket secrecy. Even now, Spycatcher remains the only memoir by a British intelligence officer that deals in any detail with post-war sigint. GCHQ informed NSA that it was ‘upset’ about Wright’s book, and now considered that many aspects of sigint were ‘at risk’.86Indeed, the publication of Spycatcher prompted GCHQ to ask Margaret Thatcher for a tougher Official Secrets Act, ‘making it a crime to leak’ and giving it the power to reduce the pensions of those found guilty of leaking.87

  Many found this decade of revelations bewildering. In early 1974, wartime Ultra was still a secret. By 1986, the shelves of bookshops were groaning under the weight of spy books. Intelligence history–both popular and academic–had arrived with a vengeance. Bletchley Park veterans such as Gordon Welchman, Bill Bundy and Stuart Milner-Barry were all avid readers of this new material. Milner-Barry felt obliged to read Spycatcher, partly because it accused so many of his former associates of being Soviet spies. Having read the book, he then purchased John Costello’s Mask of Treachery (1988), a biography of Anthony Blunt, which he judged ‘interminable’. Milner-Barry thought Costello was ‘paranoiac about homosexuals who abound on every page’, but he read on because there was a whole chapter devoted to John Cairncross, the ‘Fifth Man’, who had been in Hut Three. Oddly, Milner-Barry noted that ‘Neither I nor anybody I have asked in Hut 3 can remember Cairncross at all.’ He complained to his friend Bill Bundy: ‘I seem to have been reading nothing but moles for weeks and I am heartily sick of them all.’88

  Britain’s new Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, was also fed up with moles. On 17 November 1979, only months after her election, she was embarrassed and angered by the unmasking of Sir Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, as the ‘Fourth Man’. She was also incandescent with rage at the publication of Spycatcher. As with her predecessors Harold Macmillan and Harold Wilson, the House of Commons greatly enjoyed baiting her about these security failures. Thatcher was so exasperated by the continual spy revelations that she ordered a clampdown, even forbidding the publication of any further volumes in the government’s own official intelligence history series, initiated by Burke Trend and Dick White. The final volumes, including one by the world-famous military historian Michael Howard, were suppressed for almost a decade by the same groups of secret servants that had commissioned them in the first place.89Meanwhile, Westminster and Whitehall were now plunged into a legendary period of controversy and confrontation–the Thatcher era.90

  THE 1980s

  INTO THE THATCHER ERA

  19

  Geoffrey Prime–The GCHQ Mole

  …because of the nature of GCHQ’s work and their need for staff with esoteric specialisms they attracted many odd and eccentric characters. Prime did not stand out as he might have done elsewhere.

  UK Security Commission, Report on Geoffrey Prime,

  May 19831

  The Thatcher era was partly defined by mole-mania. In the autumn of 1979 Margaret Thatcher made an announcement in the House of Commons identifying Sir Anthony Blunt as the ‘Fourth Man’, one of a ring of Cambridge spies that had included Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. Her hand had been forced because several newspapers had hinted strongly at Blunt’s KGB identity. Because of Blunt’s close associations with the royal family–he was Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures–this was as much a social as a security scandal. It also confirmed the public perception of the Establishment as bungling toffs who were not to be trusted with security matters. Although the authorities had known about the Blunt case for more than a decade, his public exposure unleashed a worldwide media quest to uncover further traitors. A blizzard of unlikely names filled the pages of the newspapers, including three former senior members of MI5: Sir Roger Hollis, Graham Mitchell and Guy Liddell.2

  Margaret Thatcher found these matters intensely vexing. She was also extremely agitated about what she called ‘hostile forces’ attempting to foment industrial unrest. These included a broad swathe of Trotskyites and militants, some of whom were in touch with foreign governments, who wished to use industrial action for political purposes. Strikes at British Leyland, Britain’s last large-scale car manufacturer, which were intended to disrupt a government recovery plan, had been organised with the cooperation of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which was in turn taking money from the Soviet Union. Although the miners’ strike of 1982 had genuinely domestic origins, the Soviet Communist Party nevertheless funded it to the tune of more than half a million pounds, albeit against the advice of the KGB. Such active intervention in British internal affairs generated a certain amount of paranoia in British government. This extended to the Campaign for Nuclear Disa
rmament, which was also watched closely by MI5 for evidence of foreign influence. Several leading figures in CND were subjected to surveillance, including the future Cabinet Minister Harriet Harman. The Ministry of Defence was so worried about CND that it set up a special unit, DS.19, to counteract its activities, and wild rumours abounded that some of the protesters outside American bases were really Soviet special forces or ‘Spetnaz’ in disguise. In fact, during the 1980s the most dangerous KGB mole was in none of these places–instead he was at GCHQ.3

  Security within GCHQ had always been a nightmare. Elsewhere in government, a person who was regarded as a possible security risk could be gradually transferred to a less sensitive area. This option did not exist within GCHQ, since everywhere was sensitive. Security problems overlapped with trade union worries. Even in the mid-1950s, some GCHQ managers were anxious about Communist influence in the Electrical Trades Union, which was prominent at Cheltenham.4There was also the sheer scale of positive vetting required in such a large organisation: as we have seen, despite an increase in the numbers of investigating officers, a backlog had built up. Most of all there was the problem of document security. All of GCHQ’s basic ‘working material’ was highly secret, yet it was so super-abundant that it could not be catalogued. In other words it would be easy for a spy to smuggle out papers that his or her branch was working on.5In the 1970s the Security Commission had called for the certified destruction of top-secret documents that were no longer required. However, this concept was completely unworkable within GCHQ, since there was just too much such material. One of GCHQ’s key customers, the Warsaw Pact order of battle cell within the Defence Intelligence Staff, handled ‘about 10,000 CODEWORD signals’ each week. It was impossible to record all of these signals, still less to certify their destruction.6

 

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