James Philip
Tales of Brave Ulysses
The Timeline 10/27/62 — Main Series is:
Book 1: Operation Anadyr
Book 2: Love is Strange
Book 3: The Pillars of Hercules
Book 4: Red Dawn
Book 5: The Burning Time
Book 6: Tales of Brave Ulysses
Book 7: A Line in the Sand (Available 1st June 2016)
Book 8: The Mountains of the Moon (Available 27th October 2016)
Books in the Timeline 10/27/62 — USA Series exploring the American experience of Armageddon from an entirely American point of view are now available:
Timeline 10/27/62 — USA Series:
Book 1: Aftermath
Book 2: California Dreaming
Book 3: The Great Society (Available 26th February 2016)
Book 4: Ask Not of Your Country (Available 31st July 2016)
To the reader: firstly, thank you for reading this book; and secondly, please remember that this is a work of fiction. I made it up in my own head. None of the fictional characters in ‘Tales of Brave Ulysses — Book 6 of the ‘Timeline 10/27/62 Series’ — is based on real people I know of, or have ever met. Nor do the specific events described in ‘Tales of Brave Ulysses — Book 6 of the ‘Timeline 10/27/62 Series’ — have, to my knowledge, any basis in real events I know to have taken place. Any resemblance to real life people or events is, therefore, unintended and entirely coincidental.
The ‘Timeline 10/27/62 Series’ is an alternative history of the modern World and because of this real historical characters are referenced and in many cases their words and actions form significant parts of the narrative. I have no way of knowing if these real, historical figures would have spoken thus, or acted in the ways I depict them acting. Any word I place in the mouth of a real historical figure, and any action which I attribute to them after 27th October 1962 never actually happened. As I always state — unequivocally — in my Author’s Notes to my readers, I made it all up in my own head.
The books of the Timeline 10/27/62 series are written as episodes; they are instalments in a contiguous narrative arc. The individual ‘episodes’ each explore a number of plot branches, and develop themes continuously from book to book. Inevitably, in any series some exposition and extemporization is unavoidable but I try — honestly, I do — to keep this to a minimum as it tends to slow down the flow of the stories I am telling.
In writing each successive addition to the Timeline 10/27/62 ‘verse’ it is my implicit assumption that my readers will have read the previous books in the series, and that my readers do not want their reading experience to be overly impacted by excessive re-hashing of the events in those previous books.
Humbly, I suggest that if you are ‘hooked’ by the Timeline 10/27/62 Series that reading the books in sequence will — most likely — enhance your enjoyment of the experience.
Chapter 1
PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL — MOST SECRET
J.W. Malling
K.H.S. Meredith-Hall
B.T. Terrell
C.H.O. Alexander
GCHQ, Benhall/Oakley
Cheltenham
Rt Hon Margaret Thatcher MP
Corpus Christi College
Oxford
England
11th March 1964
Dear Mrs Thatcher,
It is our understanding that prior to the removal of the government to Oxford it was not possible to find an appropriate gap in your diary to permit you to visit GCHQ at either the Benhall or the Oakley sites in Cheltenham. We feel confident that had you visited GCHQ and spoken to fellow departmental heads that the headlong post-war decline of this organisation might not have been permitted to continue.
At the end of the 1939-45 war the Government Code and Cipher School based at Bletchley Park was the premier code breaking and military traffic analysis centre in the World. Subsequent to the end of the 1945 war ill-advised cutbacks by the Atlee Government led to the return of over ninety percent of all of Bletchley Park’s wartime staff to the civilian sector of the economy sworn to indefinite silence under the terms of the Official Secrets Act. At that time budgetary parsimony and governmental neglect effectively ensured that Britain’s world lead in cryptography, nascent computing technology and modern electronics was allowed to wither on the vine. Some of our best people went to America, many others returned to academia and business. Several of our best people were subsequently persecuted by the Security Service, and in more than one case individuals were driven to early deaths by a combination of this persecution and by the sense of having been betrayed by their own government.
To cut a long story short in the early 1950s the GC and CS, renamed in 1946 as the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) with a remit similar to that of the American National Security Agency headquartered at Arlington, Virginia, moved from its temporary accommodation (1946 to 1952) at Eastcote in Middlesex into two sites outside Cheltenham where, by chance, it survived intact the war of October 1962.
The Cheltenham operation was always modest in comparison the NSA’s setup in Virginia. For one thing the operation has never been adequately funded, or given, within Governments of all political shades sufficient priority for resources to enable it to attract and to retain the best people.
While GCHQ ‘survived’ the recent war it would be accurate to report that what actually survived was the electronic ‘machine’ component of the GCHQ operation. Robbed of so many of its finest minds and with the elimination of the headquarters of MI5, MI6, the expertise and administrative backbones of the Foreign and Defence Ministry intelligence staffs, and stripped of the implicit structural support of Whitehall and other long established governmental infrastructures, the post-war GCHQ operation is analogous to a huge ‘brain’ suddenly shorn not just of all its key ‘inputs’ — its sense of taste, smell and its ability to hear and see far and wide across Europe and beyond — but physically crippled and in some respects paralysed. Moreover, unable to communicate anything but a tiny fraction of its ‘musings’ for want of experienced and trained staff to analyse its ‘outputs’, the organisation was largely deaf, dumb and mute at the very moment the civilian and military authorities needed, for example, intelligence on US ship movements and tactical intentions in the North Atlantic at the time of the passage of the Operation Manna convoys last November and December.
The authors of this letter have formed the opinion that the organs of the reconstituted Defence establishment and senior intelligence officers at the Ministry of Defence, the Home Office, and both MI5 and MI6 cannot have communicated to your Government the parlous state of GCHQ at this time.
Since October 1962 GCHQ has been unable to provide any meaningful traffic analysis for those areas of the Soviet Union suspected to have been only partially devastated in the recent war. This being the case it is impossible to form any manner of informed view as to the residual military capabilities of the undoubtedly, very hard hit former Soviet-Warsaw Pact block. This has made the meaningful interpretation of the limited information that has been available about the true Krasnaya Zarya/Eastern Mediterranean Theatre of Operations situation virtually impossible. Individual pieces of intelligence are meaningless without context, and context can only be established by good overall coverage and the consistent, systematic application of proven traffic analysis protocols to the relevant data sets.