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Gchq

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This is the uncensored story of Britain's most secret intelligence agency, Government Communications Headquarters.

This book tells the story of Britain's electronic spying from WWII up until the present day.

It is a fascinating read and shows that the real intelligence gathering was done by "geeks" rather than by James Bond.

Tales of amazing bravery are told, we have submarines going into enemy harbours and getting as close as 6 feet away listening to signals from the opposition.

It shows how the electronic intell. gathering has had a huge bearing on all major military operations since WWII.

All is not perfect though, for some reason the British intelligence community did not learn from McLean , Philby and others. Geoffry Prime, the last really damaging spy found inside GCHQ was allowed to work for two years in a high security area before he was even vetted. Everyone was later surprised when he was found to be a spy and a paedophile!!!!!!

One very interesting fact written of here was that the Auckland power outages of 1998 were caused by hackers in Holland, rather than by faulty equipment in New Zealand, something that has never been spoken of here.

This is a very good book, not too technical and flows nicely covering many of the major moments of the 20th century.

I reeled back as I got the book: British books this thick are usually horribly badly written, with a tiring never-ending use of passive voice. And where the author never let down a chance to use an obsolete four syllable adjective, where none would do better. ("See! I know a word!") - The forty pages of notes at the back didn't make it better. Seen it all before you know...

"OK, Let's slug it out. Let's see if we get to page thirty before I throw the book in the basket..."

But the writing was good. And it just became better and better. Especially when we got to the cold war... My breakfasts on street cafés in Paris got longer and longer. Even the labor strike in GCHQ in the eighties became readable.

For the cold war it fleshed out parts of the world that always have been somewhat hazy, perhaps dull. And you get stories that would have been a smash news hit on our days of news networks and internet. And without getting sensational.

Some seems to hold themselves aloft of reading novels by authors like Forsyth, Clancy Swedish Jan Guillou, and off coarse Belgian Albert Weinberg. But a series of books the last fifteen years are evidence that these authors really talked to people that was in the know: You read Aldrich's GCHQ, you come to a passage and you realize: "Oh, so that was the story behind that slightly cryptic subsentence in The Hunt for Red October..."

The book turned out to be a page turner.

Dr. Richard Aldrich's book on GCHQ is by far and away the best book written about the subject. No ifs, ands, or buts.

It is a weighty tome, weighing in at over 600-pages, and it certainly is not cheap. But you get your money's worth here. If you are really interested in the inner-workings of Britain's most secretive intelligence service and what it has been up to over the past 60+ years, this is the book you have to read.

You get it all here, both the successes and the failures, descriptions of the key personalities and the high-tech spy gear that the "Boys at Cheltenham" use, all written in a fashion that is both informative and quite readable.

It is also an honest book, candid and forthright about the darker aspects of GCHQ's work that in the past would have earned the author a less tha polite invitation to have a sit-down chat with the Crown Prosecutor's office. The material on GCHQ's up-and-down relationship with its American and English-speaking Commonwealth partners is particularly good.

Having spent the better part of twenty-five years myself researching the history of GCHQ's American counterpart, the National Security Agency (NSA), I can fully appreciate just how much work went into this book. The book's Source Notes are ample testament to how industrious Dr. Aldrich was in searching out information from a variety of archival sources about a spy agency that has gone to extraordinary lengths to keep even the most mundane aspects of its work out of the public realm.

Well done. I honestly wish there were more books like this out there for us to read.

Matthew M. Aid
Washington, D.C.

After reading this book one realises how porous National Security is! The extent that Nations have to go to, to maintain security, is so great, that a private conversation in the Sahara Desert is no guarantee that some device has not been designed to discover what is being discussed! Can you really trust your confident?

Aldrich doesn't describe his methodology: the sources he gives are British National Archives, plus some unpublished archives, e.g. British Telecom's, and about 50 sets of British and American 'Private Papers' - including Churchill, Lyndon Johnson, various Admirals, Air Commodores, Generals and the like. It's not clear how much of each, if any, was consulted. The notes begin with an (incomplete) list of abbreviations. The bibliography includes about 450 books - a couple of Billy bookcases full - largely on warfare, and biographies of politicians, spies and 'spymasters'. Technology, cryptography, and finance seem to be not Aldrich's strong suits. The book has a flavour of thrilling boys' action adventures; I don't think there's one single lesson drawn by Aldrich. Is 'intelligence' worth the money? Maybe worth more? Is it true that not one single difficult cypher has been cracked? Are these people perhaps careerists? What's the balance sheet between historical success and failure? What of events that might have taken place, but didn't? What general laws seem to apply to secrecy? Is it better to have many small intelligence groups - Norway, Holland, and other small countries are praised. Could negotiation be improved to bypass some of this? - Aldrich gives no answers.

Judging by the endnotes, we can reconstruct Aldrich's writing technique: I'd guess Aldrich made a list of topics that were published in the general press - 'burst onto the front pages'; then opened some popular books by (for example) Tony Benn, P Calvocoressi, Montgomery Hyde, H Sebag-Montefiore, Duncan Campbell; on such topics as the Cold War, nuclear weapons, Iraq, jungle warfare, Suez, Turkey, spy satellites, U2 and Gary Powers, 'the war on terror'. And then looked up private papers or biographies illustrating some picturesque act of derring-do, or, perhaps, heavy bombing against soft targets - for example, what he still calls 'communists' in Malaya.

The approach is 'open source research' - pioneered perhaps by James Bamford (American), and possibly Duncan Campbell (British). The idea is to fish through published material and look for disregarded but important bits, supplemented by Freedom of Information requests. It's similar in approach to Arthur Butz on the so-called 'Holocaust'; and Frederick Forsyth, who used published sources on the entire layout of 10 Downing Street for a novel.

Aldrich has the curious moral imbecility which comes with accepting all conventional views. Aldrich talks of the 'notorious South African secret service (BOSS)' but thinks nothing of the millions of deaths of Vietnamese, for example, and the forcible movement of populations there - some of the biggest ever in human history. His book gives the general impression that powerful countries can afford expensive intelligence, which helps them do what their steering elites think they want - the quality of the intelligence being more-or-less irrelevant.

The later chapters naturally can't use old documents - because these are still secret (or non-existent). So we have scattered topics - Diana and 'Squidgygate', drug crooks in south America using a computer, banks not wanting to reveal online frauds. And of course the fall of the Soviet Union - my guess is because the Jewish mafiosi no longer thought it worth keeping on - Aldrich prefers to think it was magic. And 9/11 - Aldrich, comically, repeats all the Al Quaeda stuff; this alone shows his book is official and worthless. Many generally-censored topics don't make it into the book: there's just a little bit about massacres in Indonesia - compare Pilger on this. The genocide in Clinton's time in Africa doesn't get in. Nor do many of the wars in Africa - Biafra was one - although intelligence must have been involved. No comment even on Pakistan/India war in 1948.

Other omissions include: Caversham Park listening station, part of the 'independent' BBC; weather forecasting as part of the MoD. Aldrich doesn't seem to know that physical examples of the Enigma machine were needed - there's an account somewhere of a U-boat tricked into surfacing. Nor does Aldrich mention the Berlin microphone, listening for settings of the wheels. There's little detail of cryptography; Littlewood pointed out that 'every cipher is breakable' is a legend (1953) and it follows inevitably that indirect methods - stealing coding pads, tapping phones, interceptions, bribing 'assets', have to be used. The only convincing thing I found is an account of 'public key cryptography' described as two padlocks (a technique relevant only to computers). There's not much on Hong Kong and China or Japan.

Some omissions probably exist for ideological reasons. Hungary 1956 is omitted. Vanunu is omitted. A Rothschild made money after the defeat of Napoleon, by reliance on a private signalling system - and no doubt the lesson has been retained, though of course Aldrich wouldn't mention that (though there was a Director of Economic Intelligence - Michael Kaiser - in the MoD who intercepted 'a large number of commercial telegrams'). Given that Soros and others speculate, presumably with more or less indefinite backing, against other currencies, this is of some public interest. Not just currency, but also raw materials are omitted, as is customary with hack historians: no mention of oil stealing by Kuwait. There's nothing on military actions around uranium ores. Tony Collins' '25 Mysterious Deaths in the Defence Industry' (1990) isn't even in the bibliography. A practical example of the downside of spying - the Tupolev TU-144 built from smuggled Concorde plans of a rejected design - is omitted.

Technology: Aldrich appears to have no serious grasp of technology, and accepts what must be a great deal of mythology - suitcase nuclear bombs, for example. He has no inkling that there's something odd about the entire nuclear issue. Microwave controlled microphones sound like someone's little joke. NASA- why didn't intelligence listen in to the 'moon' stuff? With their unmatched radio technology! Aldrich's accounts of old computers read like PR ads of the time, designed to promise the earth and hide unreliability. Aldrich discusses the rise of satellite transmission, though I don't think he has any idea how they work or what they do.

He dodges technology, but, possibly because it's easy to grasp, or is human interest as recommended to scriptwriters, gives descriptions - though not analyses - of numerous rivalries: RAF vs NSA, GCHQ vs SIS, secrecy vs exposure by legal systems, police vs GCHQ (amusing account of Prime), CIA vs NSA, NATO vs MI5, 'tradecraft' vs buggings. And US manufacturers of cypher machines vs European manufacturers - notably Swedish; US army vs US navy vs US airforce; Chile vs Argentina; land based spying vs spy ships vs satellites; competing unions (once) in GCHQ; KGB interdepartmental jealousies. Aldrich likes to use what presumably is still the language of military intelligence - 'assets', 'acquire their targets with their radar', 'assisting SIS on the ground', 'degrade Argentine intelligence systems'. He also likes to judge people, in a way which rationally is hardly possible: '.. distinguished security intelligence operator .. most skilled interrogator' [How can he be sure?]. One thing that amused me was '.. Denis Healey, one of the most intelligent people ever to hold ministerial office..'

Finance: It seems odd, in a world where 'foreign aid' from Britain is tens of billions per annum, and the costs of immigration fraud are probably greater, that Aldrich should have no idea of the relative costs of intelligence. Throughout his book there's a sense of "just look at this great big number!" I think this is a by-product of secrecy; I suppose hacks like to pretend they know these things. A typical example is the Manhattan Project, which allegedly produced the atom bomb. More money was spent on radar (according to Chrysler).

Bias: the bias most obvious to me is the complete omission of Jewish influence, notably over the USA, but also of course in Europe. The post-war money-making fraud of 'the Holocaust', and control over countless pressure groups, trusts, quangoes, unions, media and what have you goes unmentioned. The spies for the USSR, and indeed USSR as Jewish, is unmentioned; so is the secret export of western technology to the USSR. The Anglo-Israel War gets virtually no mention. The 'Liberty' - an intellidence gathering ship - is 'controversial'. Kissinger seems to have almost monopolised US foreign policy under Nixon - in fact the Vietnam War may well have been an attempt to get overall Jewish control of money in parts of south-east Asia. Many publicity outfits in the UK - the Rowntree foundation, the Scott trust of the 'Guardian', the New Statesmen, many unions, the violent 'Searchlight' organisation, are Jewish-funded. And so on up to 9/11. At any rate, here there are innumerable intelligence links which are completely unexplored by Aldrich.

Readers might be amused at this mistake - someone 'was born in the Soviet Union in 1908' (page 80). Something similar applies re Islam: Gaddafi and Libya, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Muslims in the heart of Serbia have some cursory account, but the full complications with oil and gas are omitted. And of course the third world inevitably get the sticky end; for example after World War 2 they were sold Enigma machines by the British, deliberately, as they were known to be crackable. Aldrich seems not to know about innumerable interventions in the third world, many of course very bloody.

Failures of intelligence are listed very rarely, in little paragraphs. They include: Pearl Harbor in 1941 - unbelievably, Aldrich professes to think this came figuratively out of the blue. We also have: Hitler's attack on the USSR, the 'outbreak' of the Korean War 1950, 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, 1967 'Six Day War', 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, 1973 'Yom Kippur/Ramadan War' by Egypt and Syria, 'failed to predict the end of the Cold War' 1989, 1990 Iraq against Kuwait. Aldrich draws no useful lessons from all this. Needless to say, the third world gets little mention. However, there's Ireland. The bombings suggest this was an intelligence failure - it looks like a failure to me! - but Aldrich doesn't draw this rather obvious conclusion. (Nor does he have anything useful to say on legalities - is the legal system up to the job?)

So - what is the point of this book? So far from being uncensored, it clearly follows the official establishment line at every step. It's possible it was commissioned by the 'Labour' regime disaster - it was recommended by the BBC, a sure sign of official approval. The idea may be to show the government is in control and despite a few understandable small mistakes, knows what it's doing for our benefit. Scarlett - appointed by Tony Blair - is virtually omitted, though there's a 2003 photo giving evidence into David Kelly's death. And yet he seems to have been complicit in public lies on Weapons of Mass Destruction. Presumably the entire organisation is under the control of people who will lie if their promoter pulls their strings. This must surely have some effect on morale at 'the doughnut'. Typically there are accounts of bodged reforms - '[Roger] Hurn's review team .. included Alice Perkins (a.k.a. Mrs Jack Straw) and David Omand...' It's almost incredible that Strawinski, who undemocratically decided to open the UK to mass immigration - no public consultation - let's not mince words; he's scum - should have a wife who is officially permitted to tamper with arrangements that might have a permanent damaging effect. There isn't much consideration of the mass of employees at GCHQ; they seem mainly interested in money and one gathers quite a few computer experts leave - politicians may reward bureaucrats, PFI schemers, lawyers, and company board member shareholders, but people who actually do useful work get left out in the cold.

If you're looking for a compendium of official views on GCHQ, in a form mimicking genuine research, this book might do. If you think the control of information is an important and difficult issue, you might decide to cross off Warwick University from future consideration.