Sigint Historian

This is (yet another) story about the problems ‘Need to Know’ can cause. We start with an MI5 account of surveillance of a Soviet Intelligen...

  One of the more interesting questions I had to answer as GCHQ historian was why a large collection of intercepted message logs encrypted i...

Just as it’s never difficult to overclassify a piece of information, it’s never difficult to find reasons not to declassify. The same princi...

I imagine that very few people think about the cryptographic consequences of a country breaking up but they can be significant, especially i...

Austerity, belt-tightening, peace dividend: at various points during my career HMG found ways to make my life less simple, either by cutting...

I had an articled published last month in the John Buchan Journal (unsurprisingly, the journal of the John Buchan Society). It is about the...

Last week saw a major release to The National Archives of MI5 files, mainly concerning ‘The Cambridge Five’ or at least the three of them, P...