"A Matter of High Policy"

Harold Charles 'Ken' Kenworthy is one of the less well-known of the technical experts of Second World War Sigint. He was Head of the Metropolitan Police Sigint unit when he became part of GC&CS in 1939, asked to oversee the work of the GPO operators at Brora, Cupar and Sandridge as well as that of his operators. He became Head of the GC&CS Research Station at Knockholt which took German teleprinter traffic. He designed the original 'Tunny' machine to process enciphered teleprinter signals. He progressed in GC&CS during the war, and continued to work in GCHQ afterwards.

Even less known is the story of how he came to be employed by the Police. He had become interested in Sigint when, as a Lieutenant RNVR, he was Port Wireless Operator at Gibraltar during the First World War. He carried out interception of Spanish government traffic to prove that it was they who were deliberately jamming British reporting of enemy submarine traffic, and developed the first British D/F network in the Mediterranean to focus on Austrian submarine traffic. After the war, he took up a post with the Marconi company. In 1922 he went with a party from Marconi to India: he demonstrated the state of the art in High Speed Working to the Indian PTT which immediately placed a large order for the equipment. Kenworthy was therefore moved on to help demonstrate transportable radio telephony to the Indian authorities, and set up and carried out successful experiments designed to show that radio telephones could be operated from moving vehicles. On his return to the UK he demonstrated this capability to Scotland Yard in January 1923, and when the Metropolitan Police ordered this equipment for their vehicles, Kenworthy was loaned to them by Marconi, a loan which eventually became a transfer. By 1926 he was Head of the Met's Sigint Station which was based at Scotland Yard until 1936. 

He wrote a short memoir of his Sigint service in 1957 when he retired which is now in TNA in Kew (in HW 3/81). One of the stories he tells is of illicit wireless usage during the 1926 General Strike which was exposed by innovative technical equipment he designed pretty well on the fly and which might have resulted in acute public embarrassment for a certain party had not 'higher policy' intervened to keep the matter secret. Now read on …

"During the years 1923 to 1926 a certain amount of interest was taken in the use of short wave and out of petty cash an experimental transmitter and one or two receivers were gradually constructed. It was on one of the latter that the first strange unknown signal was intercepted which had a direct bearing on future Foreign Office interception. It occurred on the first day of the General Strike in 1926 when one of the PC operators reported a station on short wave with a very strong generator hum using a German call sign 'ABA'. At least it appeared to be German but several things were observed. Firstly Berne three letter call sign allocations for Germany had not passed AD; secondly the station was so strong (from Scotland Yard) that a local station was suspected. Thirdly, it was assumed that as it was apparently working in London and using a false call sign, it must be unauthorised. Immediate contact was made to the Assistant Commissioner Special Branch Sir Wyndham B Childs. The Assistant Commissioner rang up Chief SIS with the result that a Col Peel arrived shortly with Mr L P Lambert [Wireless Technical Expert of GC&CS]. As soon as they were convinced of our reliability as communication personnel they agreed that we should endeavour to locate this station as it appeared to belong to a subversive organisation having some bearing on the General Strike. For some reason best known to SIS and Assistant Commissioner it was decided that the problem should be tackled by ourselves without calling in the GPO. To this end Mr G M Wright and Mr S B Smith, both well versed in DF practice were asked to co-operate and the Marconi Company set about improvising two mobile DF installations and installing the apparatus in Crossley Tenders loaned by the police. This work took time but in the meanwhile the author [i.e. Kenworthy] made a portable DF set and put it in a Gladstone bag. During this period all transmissions were being logged even to the number of callsigns. The signals which were being passed made it clear that other stations were being set up.

The portable set was put to good use. Influence by Assistant Commissioner and SIS made it possible to get access to roofs of buildings in the vicinity of the suspected source of signal which had been roughly located by taking a completely empty van and sitting on the floor with the Gladstone Bag. It was as well that this small piece of apparatus had been made because the two vans fitted by Marconi proved to be wash-outs owing to reflections from buildings making 'cuts' impossible. It was gratifying that the work put in by the Wireless Telegraphy staff of Scotland Yard and Mr Lambert was finally rewarded by actually 'walking in' from the roof tops into the top floor of a building housing the transmitter whilst the operator was using it. The result was an anticlimax as the transmitter had been set up by the Daily Mail, who thinking that Post and Telegraph personnel would be joining the strike at any moment decided to try and be ready for a 'coup'. The call sign ABA was derived from Alfred Harmsworth. As a matter of high policy nothing was ever published of this exploit."

Where in the System should Comsec Belong?

I have written before about the parlous state of cryptography – communications security – before the Second World War, and until the point late in 1941 when Sir Edward Bridges, the Cabinet Secretary, began to interest himself in the subject. In January 1944 the Prime Minister accepted a proposal from the Chiefs of Staff Committee. It agreed that: 

1. A controlling authority should be established with responsibility for:

(a) Policy regarding the security of British encryption systems, including decisions on any new encryption devices and on any safeguards which might be necessary in their use.

(b) Ensuring due supervision of encryption by the Services and by Government Departments.

2. The Controlling authority should be known as the Cypher Policy Board (CPB), and its decisions should be regarded as having ministerial approval. It should consist of:

(a) The Director General of the Government Code and Cypher School ('C') – Chair

(b) A representative appointed by the Chiefs of Staff Committee

(c) The Cabinet Secretary.

3.  A new section of GC&CS should be established to deal with the security of British encryption (and of Allied systems in so far as British commands were concerned). This section would have as its head an Assistant Director of GC&CS known as CSA (Communications Security Adviser) who would also act as Secretary of the CPB and Chair of the existing JIC Cypher Security Committee would now be responsible to the CPB.

(Not included in this plan was 'wireless security'. MI5 was responsible for ensuring that the only people transmitting were those authorised to do so, and for monitoring their use of transmitting equipment; and for ensuring that the physical security of transmitters was maintained. It carried out those responsibilities without reference to GC&CS: indeed, for practical purposes their main direct relationship during the Second World War was in connection with the encryption systems used by German agents. The transfer of the Radio Security Service (RSS) to GCHQ after the war would eventually lead to an increased collaboration between GCHQ and MI5 on the intercept of illicit transmissions, but that is another story.)

This structure paralleled the structure for oversight and management of Sigint: a board of stakeholders (CPB for Comsec, LSIB for Sigint) oversaw the tasking and budget for the two parts of GCHQ, leaving Director GCHQ and CSA to operate within the framework they were assigned.

The structure for Comsec was maintained for some years but the services were unhappy about the pace of development of new encryption machines, and felt that the proliferation of committees (for example the Services Cypher Policy Committee, the Speech Secrecy Panel, the Cypher Machine Development Panel) was pulling the CPB away from its original terms of reference. The matter was formally discussed at a meeting of the Cypher Policy Board in October 1952. Sir Edward Bridges gave his opinion that it was inappropriate that a Sigint organisation – GCHQ – should be responsible for cryptographic policy. A review of the CPB was commissioned which eventually concluded that a different agency, independent of GCHQ, and to be known initially as the London Communications Security Agency, should be responsible for Comsec, under the oversight of a new London Communications Security Board. The Board was chaired by 'C' initially, and the Heads of the Signals and Intelligence Divisions of each of the Service ministries, as well as representatives of the Foreign Office and GCHQ, were members. From 1956 the Foreign Office nominated a Chairman (Pat Dean) common to the JIC, LSIB and LCSA. 'C' remained on the Board, and for the first time the Director General of MI5 (Sir Roger Hollis) was invited to be a member.

A new Director LCSA, Captain Stannard, was appointed in November 1957 and the LCSB Chair wrote a letter to Hollis in which he referred to a decision taken by the PUS of the Foreign Office, the Joint Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, and the Chiefs of Staff (to whom collectively the LCSB was responsible) that Director LCSA should be responsible under the general direction of the Director-General of the Security Service for day-to-day decisions on behalf of the LCSB. This would entail an amendment to the terms of reference of the Director LCSA who wrote a paper outlining the role of the LCSA and its relationship to DG MI5 and Director GCHQ.

These can be summarised as:

(a) Transmission Security: LCSA should advise on the transmission security of all communications and non-communications equipments and techniques and agree with the authorities concerned on the principles of protection.

(b) Cryptographic Security: LCSA should, in addition to its current work on the protection of communications against cryptanalysis, advise on the means of cryptographic security protection in all new forms of communications and develop the appropriate security techniques and equipments required.

(c) Requirements for Communications Electronics Security Equipment: LCSA should be responsible for:

(i) Evaluation and determination of requirements

(ii) Development of appropriate security techniques

(iii) Coordination of research, development, and production to meet new requirements.

(d) Consultation with the Security Service

The provision of advice on all aspects of Transmission and Cryptographic security should be the joint responsibility of the Security Service and LCSA. The former should advise on personal, documentary and other physical security measures to protect the equipment and related information, whilst the latter should advise on measures to protect the transmissions. LCSA should provide the Security Service with the technical guidance which it might require in this connection and incorporate Security Service advice in the communications-electronics measures which it recommended.

(In fact it proved impossible to define exactly the respective responsibilities of LCSA and the Security Service, and agreement on the advice to be given depended on the close personal relationships (which always existed) between the contact officers of the two departments.)

From these conclusions the new terms of reference were framed, and these included the following:

'The LCSA will be under the charge of a Director who, under the general direction of the Director General Security Service, will be responsible for day to day decisions on behalf of the LCSB … The Director LCSA will:

(a) consult Director General Security Service on all matters concerning general security policy

(b) consult Director Government Communications Headquarters on all appropriate aspects of

communications-electronics security and ensure that his advice and assessments are fully taken

into account.'

However sound all this may have been in theory, it had two serious weaknesses. First, DG MI5 had no understanding of communications, which largely determined Comsec policy; and second, the UK's Comsec release policy (ie which systems could be released to which foreign nations) was governed by Intelligence interests which were not the responsibility of DG MI5.

The LCSB approved the new terms of reference. However, in discussion it became clear that while 'Communications Electronics Security' meant the security of communications and non-communications transmissions, Hollis thought that it was simply some sort of elegant variation on 'Electronic Communications'.

Stannard also tried to change the status of the LCSB from Ministry of Defence Committee to Cabinet Committee. This proposal took the lid off a can of worms: LCSB (like LSIB) were each subordinate to Official Committee on Communications-Electronics which was set up in 1958. The terms of reference of neither the LCSB nor the LSIB referred to this supervision because they were in existed before the Official Committee had been established. Dean pointed out, however, that a proposal to transfer the LCSB from the Defence List to the Cabinet List might give rise to a review of the status of LCSA The Director LCSA was under the general direction of DG MI5 but his salary was paid by the Foreign Office. The arrangements for paying the staff of the Agency were complicated because they were those used for paying GCHQ staff and were hidden in the budgets of five other ministries. LSIB, in a closely related position to LSIC's was, for security reason, not listed as either a Cabinet or a Defence Committee. It was agreed at the meeting that no action would be taken, but that Dean would mention the anomaly of the Board's present status to the Cabinet Secretary and make sure that the service Chiefs were aware of the increasing civil functions of the Board and Agency. The Ministerial responsibility for the Agency was also discussed. This matter had not been covered when the terms of reference were drafted which placed the Director LCSA under the general direction of DG MI5. It was agreed at the meeting that it was important to make it clear whether the Home Secretary or the Foreign Secretary should be answerable to Parliament for the Agency. Dean suggested that representatives of the Security Service, LCSA, the Security Department of the Foreign Office, and GCHQ should meet and submit recommendations. In spite of lengthy discussions no change was either suggested or made in the Ministerial responsibility for LCSA: the lid was put back on the can before any of the worms could escape. It seems clear that the decision to alter the status of the Director LCSA was made hastily and without any detailed examination of the implications.

In April 1965 there was a radical change in the organisation when LCSA, SCDU (Services Communications Development Unit), and JSRU (Joint Speech Research Unit) were integrated into one department. Up till this time, although LCSA exercised operational control of SCDU and JSRU, they were administered by the GPO. This division of responsibility had never been a very satisfactory arrangement and, following an interdepartmental enquiry in 1964, LCSA took over full control of both units. It was also decided that a new title was needed to show that a new organisation was coming into being. In a letter to Burrows, the LCSB Chair, copied to DG MI5 and Director GCHQ, Stannard suggested "Government Communications-Electronics Security Agency", pointing out that the existing title had on occasions given the impression of a commercial concern and was unlikely to appeal to those who had worked for such a well-known department as the GPO. He did not propose that the title of the Board should be changed, since it was well-known and fitted in with that of its signal intelligence counterpart. Hollis did not like the proposed title, first because it was too close to GCHQ, and GCB, both of which were already in use, second because LCSA's responsibility extended beyond Government communications, and third because he did not think the organisation was an agency. He suggested 'Electronic Communications Security Department' (he still didn't understand the meaning of the order of the words). Hooper, Director GCHQ, commenting on both Stannard's and Hollis's letters, pointed out that communications electronics security was correct, because electronics security referred to non-communications transmissions and suggested that if it was the word 'agency' which implied a commercial status, then 'Communications Electronics Security Department', with the abbreviation CSD would be appropriate. Stannard wrote to Sir Bernard Burrows accepting this, but proposed the short title CESD. Hollis objected to 'communications security' as being too wide and doubted the responsibility for 'electronics security'. Burrows, however, agreed with Hooper's proposal as amended by Stannard, and this was accordingly submitted for acceptance by the Board.

From this point on, the influence of DG MI5 in CESD affairs waned rapidly. Like LCSA before it, CESD administration services were provided by GCHQ; its London Headquarters were in GCHQ's Palmer St building; its cryptographic services were underpinned by mathematicians from GCHQ; and the JSRU technical staff now joining CESD were members of the Royal Navy Scientific Service attached to GCHQ. It was too small to stand alone, and in 1969 it returned to GCHQ, though with a conscious and generally accepted autonomy within the organisation.

Putting its direction under MI5 was a mistake: Comsec had to be linked in policy terms to its opposite, Sigint, rather than to its complement, physical security. Comsec policy must take account of Sigint policy; whereas physical security policy has little bearing on the matter at all. This doesn't mean Comsec and physical security are not closely connected, particularly at the practical level, and it doesn't mean that the Comsec should be subordinated to Sigint, even if both are part of the same organisation: that was why there were separate oversight boards – LSIB and LCSB – for the two disciplines.

Sir Edward Bridges had been correct in identifying the cause of the weakness of British cryptography in 1941 as the lack of attention which the primarily Sigint organisation had devoted to Comsec between the wars, and was right to be suspicious that service complaints about the slow pace of development of new cryptographic equipment in the postwar period might be used to GCHQ not giving enough priority, but the solution was better informed and detailed oversight by the Sigint and Comsec Boards, not organisational change. Bridges retired in 1956, and it is not hard to imagine that Stannard's proposal that Hollis should become his boss was as much a search for somebody to protect him from Director GCHQ as for a more coherent structure for Comsec.

Should Sigint/IA and Humint be Together? Where?

These notes have been prompted by the news that two former BND Presidents have called for "a new technical intelligence service based on the models of NSA in the US and GCHQ in the UK" and for the intelligence services to be resubordinated from the Chancellor to the MOD.  A link to this story is here. (They also suggest that the German oversight regime is burdensome and that new legislation is needed in Germany for interception, but this is an area in which the national context makes comparison with other countries difficult.)

I don't think that there's a "right model" for the structure of intelligence services in different countries but there are some points worth considering. 

The first is that the US isn't a model for any other country: nobody else can even begin afford such a massive structure with so much overlap (redundancy? - you pay your money and you take your choice). The fact that even the US Coastguard has its own Sigint service illustrates this point.

The second is whether Sigint and Humint ought to be part of one organisation. The UK model works for the UK but is a product of the way intelligence and security were organised after the First World War (when SIS was on the Secret Vote and GC&CS on the Open Vote) rather than of any great and lasting axiom. In recent years there have been moves to streamline support functions across the agencies where it makes sense, and to have senior members of staff do tours in each other's organisations, but as an aid to understanding and to introduce new ways of thinking rather than as a prelude to some sort of merger.

So I don't think that there's any reason in principle to insist that Sigint and Humint must be part of separate agencies; but I do think that they need to be separate within their agencies below the 'very senior management' level. That's because they are fundamentally different disciplines, meeting only at the point of producing intelligence. To generalise, but not, I believe, to caricature: Humint depends on maximum security to preserve the anonymity of its sources. If the Foreign Minister of Ruritania is secretly passing information to your service, you really, really don't want the fact to be common knowledge within it, and the effort that will go into de-sourcing and sanitising the intelligence produced from what he gives your agency, and controlling its handling outside will be critical. Within the intelligence production part of a Sigint agency, on the other hand, information sharing is just as critical. The starting point for Sigint production is knowing what communications links are available to you, and whether they might carry the potential sources of the intelligence you have been tasked with producing: that's a corporate task, not the work of an individual.

And to generalise once again: Humint and Sigint need teams with different mixes of people. Sigint will do best when it has a lot of deeply analytic people who will look at very large datasets methodically and not rush to judgement; Humint officers will often be people who able to make crucial decisions on the fly, trusting that their instincts are sufficiently developed and informed to generate good decisions. Sigint decisions are made once all relevant information has been considered; Humint decisions are made once enough information has been considered. Of course each discipline needs a good mix of personality types, but there is a fundamental difference in information processing between the two.

This means that for each of Sigint and Humint to be able to flourish in one agency, they have to be largely autonomous. Neither Humint nor Sigint is 'better' than the other: in fact they aren't really comparable. At different times there might be different emphasis put on the two disciplines and resource for one might be increased at the expense of the other, but the way they work, the timescales in which they plan, they way their product is disseminated, and the relationships they have with agencies in other countries is fundamentally different.

It goes without saying, I hope, that the process of assessment of Sigint and Humint, and the production of a considered all source view should be carried out of the agency or agencies that have produced the original intelligence.

As far as subordination is concerned: I think the vast majority of national intelligence agencies are responsible to their Ministers of Defence, and all have a greater or lesser military element as part of their structure. I think this is an area in which the national context is important, but in my opinion British Sigint was fortunate that GC&CS was transferred from the Admiralty to the Foreign Office in 1921, that control of all but the tactical activity of service Sigint elements became the responsibility of GCHQ during the Second World War, and that all service Sigint became formally part of GCHQ under section 3 (3) of the Intelligence Services Act of 1994

'In this Act the expression “GCHQ” refers to the Government Communications Headquarters and to any unit or part of a unit of the armed forces of the Crown which is for the time being required by the Secretary of State to assist the Government Communications Headquarters in carrying out its functions.'

This doesn't absolve GCHQ of having to produce the intelligence required by the UK and allied military, and it adds a cost of having to embed GCHQ civilian staff with military formations to make sure that the right intelligence is being produced and disseminated to those who need it, but being outside the chain of command, deploying rank-less civilians, and controlling the development of the technical facilities it deploys give GCHQ a flexibility that it is hard to imagine if the military still "owned" Sigint. This is only an opinion, but it is an informed opinion about Sigint in the UK: I have seen how military-managed Sigint works in NATO allies, and it can work just as well; but the context in which capabilities have been developed is very different.

I haven't talked about communications security/information assurance/cyber here: I'll address that soon. Responsibility for it in the UK was changed a couple of times in the twentieth century but it eventually returned to the UK's national Sigint organisation as a conscious change.

The Other Side...

'The Other Side' was the name given by members of GC&CS to SIS (and quite possibly vice-versa) when the two organisations shared premises at Broadway Buildings. SIS occupied the fourth floor while GC&CS occupied the third, and while there was a lot of reorganisation of office space (by the time of the move to Bletchley all nine floors of the building had been taken over), GC&CS never left the third floor. There was almost no contact between the two organisations other than at senior level and in the Distribution and Reference Section whose terms of references explicitly included liaison with SIS. This is not as odd as it might sound. The two organisations had totally separate functions (signals intelligence and communications security for GC&CS, human intelligence for SIS) and were funded differently: the Secret Vote for SIS, the Open Vote for GC&CS; all they shared was an address and a man in charge: 'C' who was Chief of SIS and Director of GC&CS.

When the two organisations moved to Bletchley Park in August 1939 the situation didn't change - in fact most of the SIS personnel who moved to Bletchley moved back to London in September once the Luftwaffe hadn't destroyed the capital, but not before a GC&CS member of staff Henry 'Pope' Dryden had written a poem - 'The Other Side' - about their near neighbours. (Dryden had joined GC&CS in February 1939: on his first day after reporting to the War Office he discovered that he would be based at 54 Broadway and was told never to speak to or indeed acknowledge anybody close to the building and after going in, only ever to say 'Third' to the lift operator.)

Such little knowledge of SIS that Dryden had acquired became vitally important in June 1940. he had been in France in uniform as part of the Sigint staff attached to GHQ, and as France collapsed, found himself and his team moving ever further south. He takes up the story:

'The next morning we almost missed the train, but found ourselves that evening in Vichy.  We spent the following morning, Sunday, stripped to the waist in the cellars of our hotel, burning in the furnace all our material except the keys we had recovered. We were not altogether surprised to learn after breakfast on 17 June that Marshal Pétain had announced that France had asked for an armistice, and also that we would be moving again that afternoon.   This time the train took us via Clermont-Ferrand, where we were told by our French friends that they had been ordered to stop.   We indicated that we thought we ought to try to get to England, and they immediately gave us a large lorry and advised us to make for Bordeaux.  We arrived there via Périgeux soon after dawn on 18 June.  Thanks to that uniquely British institution, the schools connection, the oldest member of our party, who had been at preparatory school with him, got in to see the Military Attaché in his bath at 6 a.m., and was given a chit authorising us to board the frigate Arethusa, then lying at the mouth of the Gironde with the primary task of evacuating the Polish Government-in-Exile and the Czech Intelligence Staff.  Embarkation was being supervised by a Guards officer, who took one look at our chit and said:  “This is no good. You need a chit from the Naval Attaché.” Recognising him as a member of what GC&CS called ‘The Other Side’, with whom I had often shared a lift at Broadway Buildings, I murmured in his ear: “We’re from the third floor”. Fortunately this had the desired effect; having spent the night on board, we sailed, unescorted, on a zig-zag course for Devonport. There we were received by the Women’s Voluntary Service with cups of tea such as we had not enjoyed for many weeks.'

(Incidentally, if anyone has a copy of the poem I would be really interested to see it.)