GCHQ

by Richard Aldrich

  GCHQ now became entangled with the fate of a single individual. This was a rising star in the Conservative Party called Jonathan Aitken. Having previously been a Minister for Defence, in 1994 he was appointed Chief Secretary to the Treasury, perhaps the most coveted post amongst younger Ministers and carrying Cabinet rank. Britain was in the middle of another expenditure crisis, and Aitken’s main task was to look for savings. One of the effects of the end of the Cold War had been to allow the Treasury to strip away a little of the mystery of secret services funding. For decades this had been grouped together as the ‘Secret Vote’ and decided upon by the Prime Minister. In 1994 the Treasury managed to make some inroads here, requiring each agency chief to face bilateral discussions with the Chief Secretary like ordinary mortals. As a result, much more of Britain’s carefully hidden intelligence spending became visible. At this point formal British intelligence spending was about £1.1 billion per year, of which GCHQ claimed the lion’s share as ever, at £850 million. MI5 and SIS received the crumbs from under the table, at £125 million each.19

  MI5 and SIS performed faultlessly in their meetings with Aitken. David Spedding, the new chief of SIS, was a Middle East expert and was at home in the post-Cold War environment. He explained how his networks of agents were a long-term business, and could not be rebuilt quickly in a crisis if they were cut back. Stella Rimington, Director General of MI5, together with her deputy, Stephen Lander, made a convincing case for protection of its budget focused on the IRA. They argued that while the Republicans were engaged in talks, they were also secretly re-arming, so MI5 too escaped lightly. Aitken confessed that he was ‘actually convinced by some of the arguments against cuts put forward by the spooks’.

  By contrast, John Adye, leading the GCHQ team, performed badly. Initially GCHQ produced ‘bewildering countermeasures’ by moving into the stratosphere of ‘technical incomprehensibility’. As Aitken studied the agency more closely, burning the ministerial midnight oil, he became convinced that there was something wrong. GCHQ, he concluded, was ‘suffering from out-of-date methods of management and out-of date methods for assessing priorities’. There was undoubtedly great technical wizardry. GCHQ was monitoring communications between Russian tank commanders in Chechnya – but what, asked Aitken, was the real value of this to British national interests?20

  Aitken sensed weakness. He pressed for a deep probe of GCHQ led jointly by Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd and himself for the Treasury. The real work was to be led by an outsider – Roger Hurn, the successful chairman of Smiths Industries, which made technical instruments.21 Hurn’s review team was formidable. It included Alice Perkins (a.k.a. Mrs Jack Straw), one of the most effective Treasury officials, and David Omand, ‘a fearlessly outspoken Deputy Secretary at the MoD’.22 The schedule was tight. Commissioned on 12 December 1994, the team reported back to Ministers on 25 March 1995.23 GCHQ suffered a body blow. Hurn took almost £200 million per annum off Cheltenham’s budget in one bite, somewhere close to a quarter of its spending. This left managers in deep shock. No British intelligence agency had suffered such deep retrenchment since the end of the Second World War.24 These cuts heralded ‘massive and dramatic change’, and staff understandably had ‘fears for the future’. The vast Cold War ‘silos’ were broken up, resulting in the death of the mighty J Division, which handled sigint on Russia, and K Division, which handled the rest of the world. Even greater changes lay in store for the communications security wing. Hurn suggested that this should go over to charging its Whitehall customers on a cost-recovery basis.25

  If this was not enough, on 23 November 1995 it was announced that the GCHQ Director, John Adye, would be replaced by someone from outside the agency. This was David Omand, a senior official who had been part of the Hurn Review team. Many at GCHQ greeted this news with ‘consternation and disappointment’, since it seemed to signal that internal candidates were not good enough. Some pondered aloud whether Omand was yet another ‘axe man’ sent to further downsize GCHQ.26 In fact it was inaccurate to say that Omand was an ‘outsider’, since he had joined GCHQ straight from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in the 1970s. However, an obvious high-flyer, he had soon moved on to the Ministry of Defence. Omand’s reputation for tough management and intellectual rigour caused visible panic at GCHQ.27 Wild rumours abounded that the target figure for further job losses was at least three thousand, leaving a staff of perhaps just over two thousand at GCHQ by the end of the century.28 In reality, Omand was GCHQ’s saviour, rapidly reordering it for the post-Cold War world and putting in place imaginative new plans that central government would fund. Meanwhile, the planned cuts were far more modest than the doom-mongers had suggested. GCHQ stood at 5,900 staff in April 1995, and managers envisaged a move to 5,300 over two years.29

  Omand performed open-heart surgery on GCHQ. He realised that both rapidly shifting targets and the increasing pace of technological evolution would mean abandoning the old structures. The central concept was now something called ‘Sinews’, or ‘Sigint NEW Systems’, which gained massive momentum by 2000. The aim of Sinews was to provide maximum flexibility of operations while avoiding wasteful overlap. In practice it resulted in the creation of fourteen domains, each with a defined area of work. The key to success was a small team of programme managers who could move people rapidly from task to task, and a lot of time was now spent balancing competing intelligence requirements. The whole purpose was to come to grips with the messy post-Cold War environment, with its myriad targets and changing priorities. One of the most important drivers of Sinews was a recognition that the culture of GCHQ had to change from a highly secretive ‘need to know’ towards ‘need to share’.30

  When David Omand took over on 1 July 1996, the most striking aspect of GCHQ was its physical dilapidation. His own office was a drab 1950s affair in C Block on the Oakley site. Even as GCHQ’s management sought to anticipate the challenges of the twenty-first century, their own windows looked out on a heritage theme park covered with 1940s prefabs. The contrast was made all the sharper by the fact that SIS had just moved into distinctive new London offices at Vauxhall Cross, by the side of the Thames, designed by the architect Terry Farrell, that could easily have been the work of the visionary television producer Gerry Anderson, creator of the 1960s puppet series Thunderbirds. More importantly, one of the obstacles to improving GCHQ was the fact that it was spread across innumerable small buildings on two sites, at Oakley and Benhall.31 Accordingly, in September 1996 Omand began to consider a Private Finance Initiative to provide new accommodation. He also improved the agency’s profile with a new high-level GCHQ post in Whitehall and new London facilities in Albany Court, across the road from its existing offices in Palmer Street.32

  The future shape of GCHQ was round – or to be more precise, doughnut-shaped. Under Omand’s new plan, by 2003 all of GCHQ’s activities were to be brought together on the Benhall site, in a vast new circular building with an open centre. The optimistic idea of post-Cold War peace was still in the air, and it was thought that while the building would take all of GCHQ’s staff, by the time it was completed lower numbers might even allow them to rent out some of the space.33 GCHQ would actually lease rather than buy its new quarters. When construction began in the late 1990s it was the largest building ever initiated by the British government, and indeed the largest construction project then in progress in Europe. The plan included an underground road to service the main building, and massive basement computer halls. Above ground, it required sixteen miles of carpet and provided more than a million square feet of office space. There was great excitement about ‘the Doughnut’, but also some trepidation. The new MI5 and SIS headquarters had each cost more than three times their original estimated price, largely due to computer problems, and by 1999 the projected figures for the GCHQ building were already being looked on with some scepticism.34

  In Britain, the advent of a new Labour government in 1997 brought further change. At the start of the 1990s a young Tony Blair – then Sha
dow Employment Secretary – told an enthusiastic GCHQ trade union rally that the first act of a Labour government would be to restore union rights to Cheltenham.35 The union issue had not been dormant. By the 1990s the GCHQ Trade Union Campaign was a small but hardened machine, working remorselessly to stay in touch with Blair, continually thanking him for speaking about GCHQ, congratulating him on the attainment of each Shadow Cabinet post and keeping him up to date with the campaign. Blair always responded warmly and enthusiastically.36 Gordon Brown was also energetic and sincere in his offers of assistance.37 Other key members of Blair’s team, including Peter Mandelson and Tessa Jowell, had continually praised what they called a brave and admirable activity. Now Labour was back in power, the unions were coming back to Cheltenham, with cloth caps, brass bands and banners flying, all somewhat out of step with David Omand’s new mood of modernisation.38

  In the two years before the election, Tony Blair regularly repeated his pledge to restore full trade union rights at Cheltenham. During the period June to September 1995 he repeated the undertaking on no fewer than four separate occasions.39 Yet trust between the GCHQ trade unions and the Labour Ministers who had backed them unstintingly for thirteen years was surprisingly fragile. Although publicly thanking the new Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, they suspected him of capitulating on the matter of a no-strike deal, and were sufficiently anxious to write to him asking him to deny rumours to this effect. Despite plaintive reassurances from Tony Blair, the last remaining GCHQ trade unionists expected to be sold down the river. In fact, Cook went for a voluntary agreement, exactly as the GCHQ Trade Union Campaign desired.40 The complex process of negotiating the ‘collective agreement’ began with the Director of GCHQ, Kevin Tebbit, making it clear that he wanted ‘no outside inducement to disruption’. The only sticking point was that the unions wanted an agreement on non-disruption by arbitration, while the managers desired a solid legal agreement.41

  IRA terrorism stood out as the seemingly perennial sigint target in the early 1990s. Down the years, perhaps GCHQ’s biggest contribution in Northern Ireland was in the electronic war against the radio-controlled bombs used by terrorists. Once the IRA moved away from old-fashioned command wires towards radio-controlled bombs, researchers at GCHQ came up with special equipment that inundated the Province with random radio signals on the bomb command frequencies. This caused a number of bombs to detonate while they were being constructed and tested. It was only after a number of volunteers had been killed or injured by their own bombs exploding in their secret workshops that the IRA realised what was happening. A scientific war developed, with the IRA creating a new type of bomb that was triggered by two separate coded signals. GCHQ eventually discovered this, and took further countermeasures, resulting in more IRA deaths. To counter this, the IRA tried to move to using other kinds of trigger, including adapting radar guns used by the police in speed traps.42

  The main source of technical collection on the IRA was local telephone tapping, most of which was undertaken by the Royal Ulster Constabulary Special Branch, together with bugging with microphones facilitated by the Army and MI5. The scale of bugging was so great that in the 1980s extra Army personnel had to be borrowed from units such as the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers to do the work. Telephone interception was an especially skilled business because of the sensitivity of the IRA to surveillance. The core analysis was provided by about thirty women working for the RUC in a building nicknamed ‘the hen house’, where real-time listening continued twenty-four hours a day. The analysts required the most acute skills, since it was often the inflection in a voice, the particular way in which someone said, ‘Are you coming out for a drink then?’, or even a period of silence, that suggested imminent activity. GCHQ had responsibility for longer-distance communications, including telephone lines between Northern Ireland, the British mainland and the Republic of Ireland. The IRA was known to run its own ingenious sigint operations, dismantling old television sets to obtain UHF/VHF receivers to allow them to listen in on the high-frequency radios used by the Army and the RUC.43

  Intelligence was no less vital during the mid-1990s, when the British government had entered into tentative dialogue with the Republicans. Key participants included Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness and senior British government figures including Mo Mowlam, the Northern Ireland Secretary, and Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s Chief of Staff. Blair’s immediate circle soon noticed that the Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams was sensitive to surveillance, and ‘went without a mobile…because he knew he could be tracked on it’.44 Like not a few government Ministers, Mo Mowlam struggled to deal with the intricacies of using intercepts. She was regularly provided with transcripts of IRA conversations derived from surveillance, yet she would discuss sensitive political subjects, such as her battle to stop the Prime Minister sacking her, with Martin McGuinness in circumstances in which she was also likely to be captured by British technical collection. More alarmingly, she sometimes introduced details into her conversations with Adams and McGuinness that she could only have been privy to from technical collection. This led the Republicans to uncover listening devices in one of their key safe houses. In May 1998 the security agencies accused Mowlam of revealing a listening operation that had been mounted against Gerry Kelly, a leading Sinn Féin official living in Belfast. A wooden rafter in his house had been hollowed out and packed full of listening equipment, which had been providing good intelligence for three years.45 Needless to say, the intelligence and security services did not consider Mo Mowlam their all-time-favourite Northern Ireland Secretary.

  The most striking physical feature of GCHQ’s participation in the intelligence war against the IRA was a 150-foot-high concrete tower built in 1989 within a secure compound at Capenhurst in Cheshire owned by British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. It was on a direct line between the British Telecom Medium Wave Tower at Holyhead in Anglesey and another tower at Sutton Common near Macclesfield, a microwave link which carried most of the telephone calls between mainland Britain and Ireland. The tower contained seven floors of secret monitoring equipment and three floors of aerials. Its staff were rumoured to be drawn from the Royal Radar Establishment at Malvern. The tower was closed in 1998 when the Irish government protested strongly and insisted on telephone calls being sent by a different route. Over a decade the Capenhurst tower had allowed GCHQ to intercept a vast volume of telephone traffic for analysis. A similar station on Croslieve Mountain in South Armagh is thought to have taken traffic between Belfast and Dublin. This was a classic example of the bonanza of clear voice material that could be provided by microwave telephone interception. Unsurprisingly, during the Peace Process in the 1990s the IRA was most anxious to see the physical architecture of surveillance in Northern Ireland removed, including the watchtowers that bristled with aerials and antennae.46

  On 15 August 1998, twenty-nine people died at the town of Omagh in County Tyrone in the most deadly bomb attack ever carried out in Ireland. This was the work of a small breakaway faction called the ‘Real IRA’. Recently, dramatic claims have been made suggesting that the Omagh bombing could have been disrupted by the security forces had intelligence from GCHQ been properly utilised. BBC investigative journalists said that GCHQ intercepted mobile phone calls from members of the Real IRA in the car carrying the bomb towards the target, and that these should have indicated that a major attack was being launched. There is no doubt that the RUC had asked for the mobiles in question to be given a very high priority for monitoring. Ray White, a former Assistant Chief Constable in the RUC, recalls that Special Branch had requested ‘live’ monitoring of particular mobile phone numbers in the hope of stopping such attacks.

  In September 2008 the BBC’s Panorama claimed that just ninety minutes before the attack, GCHQ captured a call to a suspect phone which contained the phrase: ‘We’re crossing the line,’ meaning the car carrying the bombers was passing from Eire into Northern Ireland. Forty minutes before the explosion, the words ‘The bricks are in the wall’
were heard on the same phone, a code understood to mean the bomb was in place. White claims that when Special Branch later asked why the information came so late, GCHQ said: ‘We missed it.’47 Understandably, the assertions that GCHQ had intercepted mobile phone calls prior to the detonation caused a public furore. Eventually the Intelligence Commissioner, Sir Peter Gibson, was called on to investigate.

  GCHQ is such a sensitive topic that Gibson’s report was never made public. Instead, a short summary was produced that was hedged around by the excruciating secrecy that still accompanies sigint. Nevertheless, to the discerning eye much was revealed. Gibson effectively conceded that the mobile phones of the Real IRA were indeed being monitored live by GCHQ—which underlines that these people were a very high priority. But there were two problems. First, the Real IRA knew this, and used obscure code words. It is unlikely that the conversations GCHQ captured prior to the bombing indicated clearly that an attack was under way. Second, GCHQ had insisted on convoluted procedures that restricted sigint very tightly to a few people in Northern Ireland. Some GCHQ staff had been lent out to RUC’s intelligence headquarters in Belfast; however, Gibson himself concedes that:

  Once intercept material reached RUC HQ and Special Branch South, any further publication and release of that material, even to another part, or other members, of Special Branch, was subject to strict conditions imposed by GCHQ…If those persons within the RUC HQ and Special Branch South who received intelligence from GCHQ wanted to disseminate it within the RUC or even within Special Branch a set procedure had to be followed…and a form of words cleared with GCHQ.