It is our view that you should be made aware that post-war GCHQ has lost over seventy-five percent of its world-wide listening posts, and ninety percent of its supporting ‘intellectual muscle’.
This has resulted in a situation in which the primary intelligence gathering tool at the disposal of the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom is unable to meaningfully fulfil its vital function.
Moreover, what intelligence GCHQ is generating is worthless because there is virtually nobody qualified to rigorously assess its veracity or to analyse what it may mean.
Pray forgive our impertinence, Prime Minister. GCHQ has always operated in such an opaque bubble of secrecy that we, as senior directors, literally have no idea whether prior to your assumption of the premiership you were let into the secret of what really goes on at GCHQ, or what previously went on at Bletchley Park during the 1945 war.
For example, we have no way of knowing if you have ever heard of the word ‘ENIGMA’ or ‘ULTRA’ in this connection. Between 1939 and 1945 ULTRA was the biggest secret of all. Back in those days we called the German U-Boat code ‘SHARK’. Shortly after we broke that code we (and the Royal Navy, of course) won the Battle of the Atlantic in a matter of weeks. But for the work of GCHQ the 1939-45 war might have been lost; conceivably it might still be going on! Breaking the German (and later the Japanese) codes probably saved the lives of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of our people and shortened the war by many years.
While politician and generals were awarded peerages and medals and ‘cashed in’ publishing memoires that only told half the story of how victory was actually won, the names of those who made victory possible have never been made public, or publicly acknowledged on grounds of ‘national security’.
While we as the heirs to such remarkable men, geniuses in any other land or at any other time in history such as Alan Turing and Bill Welchman, take for granted that the work that went on at Bletchley Park won the war very few people outside our circle are ‘in the know’ and judging by the way your Government has treated GCHQ in the three months since you became Prime Minister, it is clear that memories of lessons learned painfully in previous conflicts have been grievously neglected or completely forgotten.
We for example, know that Montgommery was not ‘reading Rommel’s mind’ before El Alamein in 1942, rather he was reading the Desert Fox’s radio traffic to and from Berlin, and every little bit of chit chat he exchanged with his Panzer commanders, everything. Monty literally knew what Rommel was thinking before, during and after the battle which is why Churchill was so upset after the Battle of El Alamein that Monty had allowed the rump of the Afrika Korps to escape.
At times during the war we were decrypting German and Japanese radio traffic faster than their front line units! By the mid-years of the 1939-45 war Bletchley Park was the biggest code-breaking factory on the planet and like idiots when the war was finished we just shut it down. Ever since then we have been totally dependent upon, some would say at the mercy of, the Americans and in the way of these things our friends across the Atlantic grew accustomed to telling us exactly and precisely what they want us to know.
Had you visited us before the Government removed to Oxford we would have communicated all this and much more to you in person. If as presently seems likely we are fighting a war against enemies we barely see and understand less, this it is because GCHQ is failing the nation, and the reason it is failing the nation is because the nation has shamelessly neglected it. In Cheltenham we have some of the most advanced computing equipment in the world but without funding, manpower and the intellectual power locked away in our universities (still comfortably insulated from the reality of the common man in their silvery academic towers) and the reconstruction of its former support structures you might as well, frankly, knock down both GCHQ buildings at Benhall and Oakley, and go back to making do with sticks and stones.
Our deepest fear is that some dreadful unforeseen disaster will befall the country and our brave armed forces, because GCHQ in its current state simply did not, and could not, see that disaster coming.
Thank you for reading this letter. We hope and pray that you will see fit to ensure that GCHQ’s work is given the funding and support that, in the national interest, it deserves.
Respectfully we are:
J.W. Malling (Director of Signal Interception and Radio Communications Engineering)
K.H.S. Meredith-Hall (Director of Traffic Analysis)
B.T. Terrell (Director of Computing Technologies)
C.H.O. Alexander (Director of Cryptanalysis)
Chapter 2
Thirty year old Barry Lankester had survived the Coventry blitz in November 1940 as a small child. After this early trial by fire he had lived a life only a little less ordinary than his fellow pupils at Bablake School which he had left in 1951. Having joined the British Broadcasting Company — the BBC — in 1955 he had slowly begun to build a modest career in radio and television in the years before the October War. The highlights of his pre-war career had been introducing Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem at the 1962 Coventry Festival; and from 1960, becoming ‘the voice’ that introduced the popular daily radio serial ‘The Archers’ across the BBC network. But the war had swept away all that and in the immediate aftermath his ‘broadcasting career’, such as it had been had counted for nothing in the chaos. For several months he had worked for — or more correctly, been dragooned by — the West Midlands Regional Emergency Commissioner’s (REO) Office and become a part of the Wolverhampton-based regional ‘Information Group’. Basically, he had become one of several supposedly ‘trusted and reassuring’ mouthpieces for the REO, disseminating essential public administration, rationing and health information and directives; and whatever sanitised version of the local news that the authorities deemed it fit for the surviving populous to hear.
However, everything had changed on the night of 30th January in Cheltenham when he had found himself playing the role of nervous, timid — and to be honest, frightened — moderator in the now legendary ‘Clash of Titans’. That was the night when the new Prime Minister, every bit the dazzling blond bombshell he had been warned to expect; and the wizened, tortured eminence grise of Midlands and national politics, former intelligence officer, poet and scholar John Enoch Powell, the Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West, had gone ‘head to head’ in a no holds barred debate before a countrywide radio audience of millions in the febrile gladiatorial atmosphere of the packed old Edwardian Town Hall. That night had accidentally launched his post-war career on a new, wholly unexpected and exhilarating new ballistic trajectory. The ‘great debate’ had ended in the high drama of a failed assassination attempt on the life of the Prime Minister, the wounding of Enoch Powell and one of Margaret Thatcher’s Royal Marine bodyguards — neither seriously, thankfully — and overnight the name of Barry Lankester became forever associated with and therefore known to every household in the land. Moreover, for reasons beyond his ken, his own BBC ‘big wigs’ had concluded that he had deported himself so well that the Corporation had stumbled upon a new Alan Whicker or a likely new Richard Dimbleby, and promoted him accordingly. It was all a little bizarre and he was still getting used to it but who was he to look a gift horse in the mouth?
In the last few weeks the former introducer of ‘The Archers’ had been ‘borrowed’ by The Ministry of Information and personally despatched by the Secretary of State — Iain Norman Macleod, one of the Prime Minister’s closest lieutenants — to Lisbon, Gibraltar and latterly, Malta, to make a series of special ‘foreign movie features to boost morale on the Home Front’. Along the way he had, among other things, been catapulted from the deck of a Royal Navy aircraft carrier — HMS Eagle — in the second seat of de Havilland Sea Vixen jet fighter, been ferried hither and thither on numerous Royal Fleet Air Arm and RAF helicopters, been royally entertained in the Mess of a V-Bomber Squadron and the Wardrooms of half-a-dozen frigates and destroyers and frankly, he had had the time of his life.