Nigel West - GCHQ - The Secret Wireless War, 1900–1986

GCHQ

THE SECRET WIRELESS WAR 190086

Nigel West

GCHQ

The Secret Wireless War, 19001986

This edition published in 2019 by Frontline Books,

an imprint of Pen & Sword Books Ltd,

47 Church Street, Barnsley, S. Yorkshire, S70 2AS

First published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1983.

Copyright Nigel West

ISBN: 978-1-52675-578-0

eISBN: 978-1-5267-5579-7

Mobi ISBN: 978-1-5267-5580-3

The right of Nigel West to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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I owe a debt of gratitude to the following:

Lord Sandhurst, for access to his fathers records of the Radio Security Service and Special Communications Unit 1; Jrgen Rohwer; Donald Shirreff; Ralph Erskine; Roy Rodwell of the Marconi Company; Barbara Tuchman; David Kahn; Pat Hawker; Gerry Openshaw; all the former members of RSS who kindly gave their help; and the Radio Society of Great Britain.

The staff of the Public Records Office in Kew; the British Museum; the Imperial War Museum; Churchill College, Cambridge; Kings College, London; the GPO Archives, London; the Royal Signals Museum, Blandford; the Intelligence Corps Museum, Ashford.

DIRECTORS OF GCHQ

National Security Agency

Fort George G Meade

Maryland

SIGINT is the much-misunderstood abbreviation used by the intelligence community for the term signals intelligence. Misunderstood because invariably, whenever SIGINT is mentioned in a wartime context, people say, Oh yes, ULTRA and all that business. In fact, decryption is just one part of the SIGINT spectrum. This, the most secret aspect of covert information gathering and the most difficult to research also includes interception, direction-finding and traffic analysis.

Although the breaking of an opponents ciphers is the ultimate goal, there is little point in being able to read an enemys messages unless it can be determined who sent them, when and from what location. Astonishingly, valuable intelligence can be gleaned by analysing the volume of traffic from one particular wireless station. A sudden increase in output may herald a major offensive; a change in location might signify an important troop movement; an operators unofficial chatter to his other contacts might betray a change in procedure.

Since the publication of Fred Winterbothams The Ultra Secret in 1974, the contribution made by the code-breakers at Bletchley Park has become public knowledge. Numerous books have followed. None, however, has fully explained quite how the raw material examined by Bletchleys cryptanalysts was originally acquired. Who carried out the work of interception and from where? How did the Allied wireless operators know which frequencies to monitor, and what were the breakthroughs which made the whole operation possible? The purpose of this book is to answer these questions and trace SIGINTs extraordinary history from the early days of wireless, before the First World War, to current times.