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GCHQ

Page 46

by Richard Aldrich


  The unions were clearly petrified by the polygraph. In May 1983 the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, assured them that ‘no loyal servant has anything to fear’ from the polygraph, and promised further talks before it was introduced. However, the unions believed it would be introduced quickly, and perhaps operated by Americans.28 In July 1983 Armstrong explained that there was ‘a risk that the USA would question UKUSA exchange if the UK did not at least, run a pilot scheme to see if the polygraph was feasible’. He assured the unions that the machines would not be operated by Americans, but by MI5 personnel who were even now undertaking a fourteen-week training course in the USA.29 The unions now saw the introduction of the polygraph as a foregone conclusion. At Cheltenham, both security (R Division) and personnel (E Division) were thought to be keen, since it was known that Russian agents were briefed to avoid exposure to the polygraph if at all possible.30 By November 1983 the unions suspected that E3, part of the personnel division, already had machines hidden on the premises at GCHQ, although there were fervent denials.31 The following month, senior staff at GCHQ volunteered to act as guinea pigs, and a pilot machine was allocated to Personnel Security Branch (R12).32 Margaret Thatcher was personally committed to the polygraph, arguing that ‘people employed in work which makes them privy to that nation’s highest secrets would…accept the logic’ and realise that it was aimed at strengthening their organisation against ‘hostile penetration’.33

  The trade unions had good reason to resist the polygraph. The Royal Commission on Criminal Justice Procedure had recently examined the device, and concluded that while the claimed 86 per cent success rate sounded good, what it meant in practice was that there existed a high chance of honest people being branded a security risk. Moreover, any agents who slipped past the polygraph – which required only a modicum of training – would have their reliability falsely confirmed.34 No fewer than four NSA staff who defected to the Russians had taken and passed the polygraph test.35 Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania medical school had found that an effective way of fooling the machine was to take 400mg of a widely available drug called Meprobamate.36 The worry was not so much the testing of new entrants to GCHQ, but that many loyal staff with years of service might fail the test and have their clearances removed. In October 1983 the Society of Civil and Public Servants produced a campaign booklet with a chapter entitled ‘How to Beat the Polygraph’.37

  In December 1983 a secret Cabinet subcommittee was created to implement a GCHQ trade union ban. The members of this committee were Margaret Thatcher, the Defence Secretary Michael Heseltine, the Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe, the Employment Secretary Tom King and Deputy Prime Minister Willie Whitelaw. Howe recalled that this committee gave ‘a good deal of thought, or so we believed, to sugaring the pill’, and finally decided to offer GCHQ employees financial compensation for the loss of their union rights. In gloomy tones he noted that somehow ‘it fell to me’ to present this to the House of Commons in a ‘surprise’ statement on 25 January 1984. In fact the whole thing was prepared with such obsessive secrecy that Howe now recalls it with ‘astonishment’. Only two other major figures were told in advance. TUC General Secretary Len Murray and Shadow Foreign Secretary Denis Healey, both Privy Councillors, were called to Howe’s office in the Commons to be informed a few hours before the announcement. Healey, one of the most intelligent people ever to hold ministerial office, immediately recognised the scale of the impending blunder, and was ‘beside himself’ with delight at the political hay he would be able to make. ‘From the moment when I made my statement to the House,’ recalls Howe, ‘a huge storm of denunciation broke about my head.’38

  At GCHQ the implementation was also handled with pantomime secrecy. Brian Tovey, one of the foremost advocates of the ban, had now departed, and it fell to his successor, Peter Marychurch, to implement it. A general letter to all staff from John Adye, the Principal Establishment Officer, was photocopied in the United States and flown in. Its distribution, timed for the afternoon of Howe’s Commons statement, was handled by E Division, located in A Block at GCHQ’s Oakley site. The timing was complex, since there were many overseas stations, and the managers were called to Britain for a briefing.39 John Adye’s letter explained to staff that the option of belonging to mainstream trade unions was being withdrawn. They now had the option of giving up their right to union membership – even if they did not actually belong to a union – and receiving £1,000 in compensation. This was known as ‘Option A’. Alternatively, they could ask for redeployment elsewhere in the Civil Service, which was known as ‘Option B’. Those who refused to take either course risked being fired. The unions would be replaced by a new in-house staff federation. At 3 p.m., while the letter was being distributed to staff, John Adye met union leaders to give them a briefing.40

  The union representatives were in shock. They urged members not to sign away their rights, and then convened at Cheltenham’s Pittville Pump Room late in the afternoon to decide what to do. The strategy the unions chose to pursue was fairly reactive. Although they had the overwhelming support of most MPs, including many Conservatives, and the press, they had been stunned by the surprise announcement. Most believed that the government would accept a compromise. On 1 February Len Murray led a fourteen-strong TUC delegation to Downing Street, where they met Margaret Thatcher, Geoffrey Howe, Tom King, Willie Whitelaw and Robert Armstrong. The unions accepted that the anxiety about disruption to intelligence was not absurd, but took issue with the way the issue had been handled. They offered a ‘no disruption agreement’. King, Whitelaw and Howe also urged a compromise, Howe suggesting that staff could remain union members if they agreed not to engage in strike activity.41

  The fly in the ointment was Bernard Ingham, Margaret Thatcher’s Press Secretary. Howe captures Ingham’s role perfectly when he says that his strength lay in ‘his ability to articulate the Prime Minister’s prejudices more crisply even than she could herself’. Ingham told Thatcher that the press would see a compromise as a sign of weakness – in effect a ‘U-turn’. Lord Gowrie, Minister for the Civil Service, and Thatcher’s Principal Private Secretary, Sir Robin Butler, were also against compromise.42 Accordingly, on 28 February there was a second meeting, and the compromise was rejected. The unions then played into Thatcher’s hands by calling a one-day strike. The TUC had given a lot of ground, and Robert Armstrong, the Cabinet Secretary, had expected the compromise to be accepted. Indeed, he had signalled as much to the unions, and was now embarrassed. The Foreign Office later argued that the deal offered did not provide ‘sufficient guarantees’. In truth, it was rejected on a prime ministerial whim.43

  John Somerville, who served as GCHQ’s Principal Establishment Officer throughout the 1970s, observed: ‘When the union put their teeth on the table in February 1984, I cannot understand why the Prime Minister did not pick them up.’44 Brian Tovey also told the Employment Select Committee that the no-strike deal offered by Len Murray during the talks at Downing Street would have been much preferable to a ban on union membership.45 However, the Prime Minister was now very much in the driving seat. Indeed, in setting up the new Government Communications Staff Federation, which was designed to replace the unions, Peter Marychurch was very careful to refer back to London to identify the precise terms under which this body would be acceptable to the government.46 They included making its activities subject to veto by both the Director of GCHQ and the Foreign Secretary.47

  On 27 February 1984 an acrimonious House of Commons debated the GCHQ ban. The nub of the issue was disruption, and several trade unions had handed Margaret Thatcher priceless ammunition. Militants had boasted about creating difficulty at GCHQ, and appeared to gloat at the idea of interrupting intelligence work at such a sensitive security location. Thatcher quoted directly from two union documents, including a CSU campaign report of 1981 which spoke approvingly of applying pressure in ‘sensitive areas’.48 It also claimed that the day of action in March 1981 had caused ‘serious disruption and
inconvenience’, and that ‘international relationships with other governments had been under great strain’ – an obvious reference to NSA.49 Other unions had claimed that ‘48-hour walkouts have severely hit secret monitoring stations’, and that the government was ‘clearly worried and will be subject to huge pressure from NATO allies’. These union statements were uncomfortable facts that could not be denied.50

  Nevertheless, Denis Healey had a field day deriding Geoffrey Howe, and denounced the new Government Communications Staff Federation as a ‘yellow-dog union’. The exact degree of union disruption was disputed on all sides of the Commons. Sir John Nott, who had been Defence Secretary during the recent Falklands War, asserted, ‘Up to now they have not in any way affected operational capability in any area.’ Both proponents and opponents of the ban tended to fixate on the headline issue of the number of working days lost. The government claimed that ten thousand were lost due to the disputes of 1979-81, and stressed the fact that they occurred during a number of international crises. Opponents argued this was only a tiny fraction of the working days in a year. Neither side recognised that the real issue was the impact on specific sensitive programmes like J-Ops, which was far harder to measure.51 However, the later claim made by William Waldegrave, a Minister of State at the Foreign Office, on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme that ‘GCHQ was constantly out of action’ was certainly a wild exaggeration.52

  If the whole workforce at GCHQ had refused to sign away their rights, or had asked to be transferred, the ban would have failed. But the unions were on a losing wicket from the start. Firstly, GCHQ was only about half unionised. So for those who were not members, the offer of a £1,000 payment (equivalent to £3,500 at current prices) for giving up something they did not value was most attractive. Out of eight thousand staff, 7,700 eventually signed ‘Option A’ and happily collected their payment. Only 150 opted for a transfer, and about the same number refused to sign. Resistance to de-unionisation had melted away like the morning mist. Down the road in Cheltenham town centre, the effects were dramatic, since the payments immediately pumped almost £5 million into the local economy.53 Cheltenham retailers loved it, and a vast spending spree followed. Thomas Cook reported mammoth holiday bookings. One family booked a trip to Dallas, saying gleefully: ‘We are going courtesy of Mrs Thatcher.’ The manager of Cheltenham’s largest department store reported brisk sales of washing machines, videos and televisions, and some retailers arranged ‘emergency deliveries’ of luxury goods.54

  The more stalwart union members realised that they required a long-term strategy. The most important decision they took was to establish a GCHQ Free Trade Union led by Mike Grindley, a Chinese linguist. Created on 1 March 1984, it consisted of members of the six existing trade unions at Cheltenham and representatives from the UK outstations. It met in the GCHQ canteen on a Monday evening, and launched a regular campaign publication entitled Warning Signal. It adopted a three-pronged approach: firstly, mobilising strong support within the wider union movement; secondly, seeking a judicial review of government policy; and thirdly, securing firm promises from the opposition that full union rights would be restored under a future Labour government.

  During May 1984 attention switched to the courts. The unions had successfully obtained permission for a judicial review. The judge, Mr Justice Glidwell, focused on the cavalier nature of Margaret Thatcher’s initial decision to ban the unions, a simple verbal instruction to Sir Robert Armstrong on 22 December 1983, issued without discussion or process. Glidwell decided that the oral instruction had no standing, and moreover, that the GCHQ workers were entitled to consultation before such a dramatic change in their work practices took place. By contrast, the government case rested heavily on reference to the 1982 Civil Service Order in Council, an instrument which harked back to Royal Prerogative. This, the government argued, gave it the power to do pretty much whatever it liked without consulting Parliament. Glidwell was unimpressed, observing dryly that this was ‘an unusual way to legislate’. On 16 July he overturned the ban, reading out a judgement of no fewer than sixty-four pages which, as he put it, ‘raised matters of considerable constitutional importance’.55 The government had anticipated Glidwell’s judgement, since the previous day Geoffrey Howe had flown to GCHQ by helicopter for an emergency conference with Peter Marychurch.56

  In the wake of this, John Adye, the Principal Establishment Officer, warned staff that, pending a hearing on appeal, the position of GCHQ management would not change.57 Nevertheless, a hundred GCHQ employees now merrily skipped back and rejoined their unions, despite having spent their £1,000 ‘Thatcher payment’ in the department stores of Cheltenham. Their euphoria did not last long. Glidwell’s judgement was overturned in the Court of Appeal, where the government case focused determinedly on national security. The case then went to the House of Lords, where the five Law Lords, including Lord Scarman, all accepted that national security was paramount, something of a tradition amongst senior British judges. The Law Lords complained about the government’s use of outdated statutes, and muttered about ‘the clanking of the medieval chains of the ghosts of the past’.58 Nevertheless, they found in favour of the government in one of the most important legal judgements of the late twentieth century.59

  GCHQ now proceeded at leisure. It waited until 1986 before taking any action against the remaining union members, moving first against the ‘rejoiners’ who had scampered back to their unions. One of the problems for officials was Geoffrey Howe’s rash undertaking that there would be only one round of disciplinary proceedings, a promise that was soon broken. As the various employees fell into a range of categories, this was always likely to be a messy and prolonged business.60 For GCHQ, the small numbers of those who had refused to leave their union or had rejoined it was not the issue. The main problem was the impact on relations with the sizeable minority of employees who had signed away their rights only reluctantly, typically because of family commitments. GCHQ managers had expected trouble from the Radio Operators, but not from the more cerebral employees. In fact many of the mathematicians and computer experts reasoned that it was illogical for the West to be trumpeting the rights of free trade unions like Solidarity in Poland, yet to be clamping down on unions at home. Some mathematicians and cryptographers who worked in H Division chose to leave. This unit was GCHQ’s most valued human resource, and the damage was serious.61

  Alexander Hamilton, a leading cryptanalyst, decided to take early retirement. Hamilton was so eminent that his name had been given to several systems for decryption. George Toumlin, also in H Division, held out and expected to be sacked, but reached retirement age before this occurred.62 H Division’s anger at the management coalesced with other factors including poor pay and limited equipment budgets. George Brauntoltz, who worked at a senior level in H Division and had been with GCHQ for thirty years, was particularly outspoken. He argued that while the strikes had caused embarrassment, they had done little serious damage, which had in fact been inflicted by government pay policies which discriminated against scientists and engineers, making it hard to get the cutting-edge staff that code-breaking needed. There had also been continual cuts in capital expenditure at GCHQ, making it difficult to ‘get the tools to do the job’.63

  The point of exodus was frequently the Golden Valley Hotel on the edge of Cheltenham, which had long been used by ATV for the external shots for the daytime soap opera Crossroads. Inside, large electronics companies including GEC-Marconi, Racal and Plessey – some of GCHQ’s main suppliers – were busy offering GCHQ staff employment at 30 per cent above their existing salaries. Having taken a pleasing £1,000 from the government, many then chose to move on to well-paid employment in the private sector. GCHQ lost half of its Higher Executive Officer computer experts between 1984 and 1985. In 1983 it had lost none.64 ‘The sharks are now round GCHQ,’ claimed Denis Healey, adding with some amusement that Brian Tovey, the architect of the ban, was now also a consultant for Plessey.65 The GCHQ trade unions had high hopes of the
European Court. However, on 20 January 1987 the European Commission of Human Rights ruled their case inadmissible on the grounds that GCHQ resembled the armed forces, since its duties were intimately connected to national security. This was hardly surprising, given that the European Convention gives explicit exemptions on national security grounds. The government’s action was described as ‘drastic’ but ‘in no way arbitrary’. With all legal remedies now exhausted, the focus of the GCHQ trade unions’ campaign was now the repeated promises from the Labour Party to restore union rights in full.66 In 1983 the Labour leader, Michael Foot, had pledged himself to ‘restore in full all rights of the trade unionists at GCHQ’. In 1984 and again in 1987 his successor Neil Kinnock gave the same undertaking. The Labour Manifesto for the July 1987 general election included the promise, but Margaret Thatcher was returned to power for a third time, albeit with a reduced majority.67 The last trade unionist at GCHQ, Gareth Morris, was sacked on 2 March 1989.68

  Ironically, the government’s drive to bring in the polygraph, arguably the main reason for the abrupt nature of the ban in January 1984, failed. In 1985 the House of Commons Select Committee on Employment took a close look at the polygraph with experts from the British Psychological Society. They were scathing, and dismissed the machine as useless. Whitehall now chose to run a field test on members of MI5, hoping to prove its effectiveness. Although the tests were secret, the results were leaked to the Sunday Times by mutinous officials. Two hundred members of MI5 were tested. No less than 37 per cent failed, and in theory would now have to be removed from their posts as security risks.69 The government did not want to admit to the Americans that things were not going well. On 3 March 1986, Bill Odom, Director of NSA, made a note to himself to ‘Ask Peter Marychurch about poly of his people,’ but he does not seem to have had a clear answer from his British counterpart.70 By the end of the year, NSA realised that GCHQ was dragging its feet, and was reported to be ‘angered and dismayed’.71

 

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