Right Man - Right Reason?

This is (yet another) story about the problems ‘Need to Know’ can cause. We start with an MI5 account of surveillance of a Soviet Intelligence officer, Pavel Kuznetsov, with the cover of a Second Secretary at the Soviet Embassy in London 

25.4.52.

KUZNETSOV left home with his boy at 8.35 am and went by 'bus to KPG.

He came out via the passage leading to York House Place at 10.20 am boarded a 31 'bus, immediately alighted, and jumped onto a 27 'bus travelling on it as far as Hammersmith.

In Hammersmith Broadway he alighted and got on a No 9 'bus heading for Mortlake. He stood on the platform while this 'bus crossed the Broadway and then ran forward to another No.9 'bus which had stopped just in front. Again he remained on the platform until the 'bus started off.

It would have been sheer folly to have attempted to board this bus so that we had to rely on taxis which, unfortunately, were not available.

A search was made at Mortlake and this being unsuccessful it was decided to travel to Richmond.

At 11.15 am KUZNETSOV was seen waiting at a 'bus stop in Richmond and he in fact boarded the very 'bus on which our assistants were travelling. He came aboard and sat not far away panting and breathing heavily, as though the shaking off of his pursuers was indeed most strenuous work.

He alighted at Marble Hill Park, Twickenham, sat reading his newspaper on a seat in this park from 11.30 am until noon and then walked back along the riverbank to Richmond.

After some window crawling and excursions into back streets he boarded a No 65 'bus, travelled to Kingston and arrived outside the Century-Elite Cinema at 1p.m.

When he moved away from the front of this cinema, after a stay of only a few moments, he was joined by a man ("D") and they entered the Normandie Restaurant (Bentalls).

At 2.25 pm they left the restaurant and walked through quiet back streets to Canbury Gardens, Kingston, where they positioned themselves on a seat in such a manner that they could see anyone approaching from any angle.

KUZNETSOV was observed making notes in a pocket book and the man "D" took from his inside coat pocket a large sheet of stiffish paper about 15" x 15" which he opened out on his knees. He then appeared to be drawing or explaining by hand movements details from this sheet. Occasionally KUZNETSOV would lean over and appeared to be asking for a fuller explanation following which his friend would again refer to this paper. On the rare occasions that a person passed by, "D" folded the paper and put it in his pocket.

They were in Canbury Gardens from 2.40 pm until 4.10 pm and separated the moment they left the gardens, without as much as a nod of the head.

Reluctantly we had to allow KUZNETSOV to proceed and concentrated our forces on the contact who walked back to Kingston, travelled by 85 'bus to Putney and thence by train to Earlesfield. He was finally housed at 36, Elborough Street, SW18 going in by key at 5.10 pm.

The demeanour of this man "D" changed completely during the afternoon. When he first met KUZNETSOV he was in a happy mood, apparently without a care in the world. During his sojourn on the park seat his face became more grave as time went by and when he parted from KUZNETSOV he was in a state of nervous tension.

When first seen the papers "D" was carrying could be seen jutting out from his inside pocket but after he had left KUZNETSOV they were not visible.

"D" is described as:

Looks 20-25. 5 ft 8 ins. Slight build. Oval face. Sallow complexion. Clean shaven. Small nose. Small chin. Dark brown straight hair, distinct parting on left going across crown of his head. Large feet, flat footed and walks with rolling motion.

Dressed in fawn belted gabardine raincoat, fawn suit with faint yellowish stripe, no hat, brown leather shoes, yellow socks.

Voters' list particulars for 36, Elborough Street, SW18 show:

MARSHALL William F.

MARSHALL Mary A.E.       

MORGAN Elizabeth. 

(KV 2/1636 s.2a 19520426)

William and Mary’s son, also William (though often Bill), wasn’t on the list because he worked elsewhere. Specifically, he was a radio operator for the Diplomatic Wireless Service (DWS). There was only one conceivable reason for his meeting a Soviet intelligence officer, but no evidence that he had committed a crime.

MI5 began a thorough investigation: within a couple of days they had full access to the salient details of his working life: after National Service in the Royal Corps of Signals where he was trained as a radio operator, he had joined the Diplomatic Wireless Service on 1 November 1948 and had been allocated accommodation at Bletchley Park where some of the wartime huts had been turned over to become a Ministry of Labour hostel for members of the DWS. He was posted to Egypt in July 1948, returning to the UK and to work in October 1949. In December 1950 he was posted to the British Embassy in Moscow, returning to the UK in December 1951.

On 30 April 1952, Gambier-Parry, the head of the DWS met representatives of MI5 and MI6 in the Foreign Office. He revealed that Marshall’s posting to Egypt had been to support SIS, whose wireless station had been moved from Cairo to Ismailia. Gambier-Parry was happy to accept that Marshall had been communicating with the Russians, but stressed that as a radio operator he would have had not access to the contents of classified messages, only to the cipher text. Marshall would have known about DWS comms procedural matter: callsigns, frequencies, schedules etc but Gambier-Parry was inclined to think that this information was particularly important. He also made clear that Marshall’s hostel was also used by the Post Office Training School and GCHQ trainees.

It was agreed that only a couple of DWS personnel would be made aware of what was going on, and that they would be looking to see when Marshall visited London to give MI5 the best possible chance to catch Marshall meeting Kusnetsov. Meanwhile MI5 would continue their investigations to establish what sort of motive Marshall might have had for becoming a Soviet agent (if that was what had happened).

In all of the paperwork discussing the means by which MI5 would investigate Marshall’s life there is an interesting paragraph about Bletchley Park:

The huts are situated in a small section of park land in front of a fairly large country house in Bletchley village itself. The park land is covered in huts of various patterns and grouped together in different formations. At present the GPO occupy the country house and various huts and buildings. Other huts are used by the Board of Education’s pupil teachers, the Ministry of Civil Aviation, the Ministry of Works and GCHQ trainees.

(KV 2/1636 s.29a 19520509)

It is clear that at this stage nobody involved in MI5 has any idea what Bletchley Park had been, or what GCHQ trainees were being trained in. This might well mean that those reporting had little idea what GCHQ actually did. (GCHQ continued to train its radio operators at Bletchley Park until the 1980s.)

A real insight into Marshall’s character came from a letter sent to George Carey Foster, Foreign Office Head of Security, by Lambert Titchener, Head of Chancery at the Moscow Embassy. He said:

I have very little substantive information to give you which will throw any light on his political leanings. Although he behaved very oddly throughout most  of his time here, and I will describe his behaviour in a  subsequent paragraph, it was not until the last day that an action of his, on reflection, would cause suspicions of the kind you appear to have in mind.

2. He was due to leave by the late train for Leningrad;  and had already been relieved of duty to finish his packing. He was missing most of the day, and it was not until 10 pm, by which time his absence was causing disquiet, that he returned  in a taxi from the town. He was asked where he had been, and  answered evasively that he had been making a few purchases. I did not attach much importance to this at the time, because  it was in keeping with the way he had behaved during most of his tour here.

...

4. Marshall was a perfect example of the type who should not be sent here. He was an introvert, antisocial to a degree I have never seen before. At staff cocktail parties he would be found in a corner behind a screen,if he turned up at all, or in some other obscure spot.He was most difficult to draw into conversation, and he had a meanness which it would be difficult to surpass. If asked to give a cigarette to a  colleague, he would ask for a cigarette back the following day.

...

6. So far as his work was concerned, it was not of a very high order, and adverse reports on it were sent back by Cole. Towards the end he apparently suffered from lapses of  memory.

...

7. All in all he was an unfortunate choice, but such grounds for suspicion as we had were concerned solely with his arrested mental development and his ability to stand up to the strain of work here.

(KV 2/1636 s.32a 19520513)

Meanwhile the War Office had sent information about Marshall’s military career. He had been called up in 1945 (after having spent some time as a trainee at a Merchant Navy Training Centre) and after training had been classified and remustered as Operator Special BIII, posted first to the War Office Wireless Service at Forest Moor’s detachment at Woodhouse and then joined 2 Wireless regiment in Palestine, where he stayed until leaving the Middle East in April 1948.

Later in May, Marshall met Kuznetsov again, and the Foreign Office started pressing  for the case to be brought to a conclusion as soon as possible. MI5 were in agreement, as by now they had greater insight into Marshall.  They had seen his employment file at DWS which said:

‘… that he exhibited considerable persistence in applying for a post with DWS. On 25th May 1948 he applied for a temporary post with DWS pending receipt of information concerning a Government Grant to enable him to attend Colwyn Bay Radio College. He stated he was familiar with DWS procedure, as he had been attached to the DWS link

at Fayid, MELF when serving as a signalman with GSI (8) in the Middle East. He was informed that he could not be taken on as a temporary employee. On 12th June 1948 he wrote stating that he had not been granted the Government allowance to enable him to attend the Radio College and was therefore applying for permanent employment with DWS. He was told that no vacancies existed. On 5th July he applied again saying that he would greatly appreciate it if his name could be placed on record and if he could be notified when a vacancy occurred. On 12th September 1948, without having been notified, he applied again and was told to submit the necessary forms. As a result of this application he was taken on.

…

On 22nd September 1950 MARSHALL wrote from the Middle East stating that he understood his overseas tour was about to be terminated, after one year and two months. He added that, as the normal tour was two years, he would appreciate it if he could be posted abroad again as soon as he returned to the UK for ten months, in order to complete his two year tour. He said that, as he understood Moscow postings lasted only ten months or a year, he would like to be considered for Moscow.’

(KV 2/1637 s.61a 19520603)

Marshall was arrested and charged under the Official Secrets Act on 14 June 1952. A list of new comms procedures to be used by the DWS had been left in a place to which he would have had access and was carrying these when he met Kuznetsov. Kuznetsov was also temporarily detained and searched (there was a diplomatic row subsequently) and denied knowing Marshall – which, as Marshall was carrying a diary detailing eight previous meetings as well as this one and the next, was not a particularly plausible lie.

The investigation continued: attention was drawn to the fact that Marshall had been friendly with a Russian woman employed by the Embassy, and a belief there that Marshall had spent his last day in Moscow with her. He was remembered on occasions as being impress by the Soviet regime and that towards the end of his time there, he used to take long solitary walks.

On 13 June 1952 Marshall made a statement.

I was born in London on 22nd December, 1927 and was brought up there and educated there till 1941.I then went to the Rotherhithe Nautical school which was then in Wales. I was there until December 1943 when I returned to London. I then went to the British School of Telegraphy, Clapham Road, Stockwell for just over a year. From February till November, 1945, I was unemployed, in which time I was trying to get away to sea. In November, 1945, I volunteered for the Royal Signals and served in England till May, 1947. I then served about six months in Palestine and five months in Egypt. During the time I was in Palestine and Egypt I did wireless intercepting and telegraphy. After demobilisation in April, 1948, I was unemployed till July, 1948, when I was given a government grant to continue studies in wireless telegraphy. I was three months at a wireless school at Earls Court. I do not remember the address. While I was in Fayid, Egypt, I first got to know that there was such a thing as a Diplomatic Wireless Service. I did some work on one of their circuits and got the idea that I would like to join the service on my return to civil life. I made several applications but heard nothing till Autumn 1948, when I was called for an interview.

...

Towards the end of December, 1950, I was offered a posting in Moscow because an operator there had fallen sick and I accepted forthwith because I was on my beam ends financially. The pay offered for Moscow was considerably higher than in England. I flew to Moscow arriving there on 31st December, 1950, and started work at the British Embassy. I was a misfit at the Embassy at Moscow from the start. The people there were not my class of people and I led a very solitary life. I kept to myself, spoke to as few people as possible, did my work as well as I could and just waited for the time to come home. I was disgusted with the pettiness of life at the Embassy. I began to take an interest in the Russian way of life. I was impressed by the efforts of the Russian people and by their ideals. They seemed to me to be trying to build a society which would allow the fullest scope for human endeavour although I think they still have a long way to go. 

...

Shortly after my return to England, I went to the Soviet Embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens to hand in a Russian pass which I had forgotten to hand in in Moscow. I saw there a man who introduced himself as Mr Paul Kuznetsov. He did not say what position he occupied. He told me that the pass was not Russian but British and suggested I return it to the Foreign Office. About a quarter of an hour's conversation followed and we found we had a good deal in common and we looked at life in a similar sort of way.

(KV 2/1638 s.97z 19520619)

I don’t think this is a case that need detain us further: Marshall was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, and after being sentenced Marshall refused to talk to MI5. Whether he had been recruited in Moscow or on his return to London was something chewed over, but given Marshall’s refusal to talk, precise details were never uncovered. The case was remembered as the first in which a Soviet agent had been uncovered because of detailed surveillance of the activities of a Soviet intelligence officer.

Many of you, however, will have worked out by now that there was a line of enquiry, that was never pursued, and that happened because nobody dealing with the nitty-gritty detail of the case would have known that there was a Sigint angle, and none of those at the top of MI5 who would have noticed it would have seen more than summaries of the case.

Marshall’s army career was spent first in learning how to be a Sigint operator and then being posted to 2 Wireless Regiment at Sarafand in Palestine, the principal War Office Sigint station in the Near East since the end of the First World War. It was after this posting (which included some time in Egypt where he became acquainted with the work of the DWS).

I don’t think that it would have made a significant difference to this case, but it exposes the fact that a serious investigation into an Official Secrets Act case was blind to a potentially important piece of information. GCHQ’s only involvement in the case was to request the suppression of details of how the Soviets might use the information Marshall was about to hand over as it might reveal techniques used by GCHQ. Though not part of the case, it was also revealed early in the investigation that GCHQ occasionally monitored DWS communications to advise on their security.

Dilly Knox once famously asked: ‘How do I know whether I need to know something if I don’t know what it is?’ and I have never seen a good answer to the question. Excessive secrecy can be as bad as poor security. And what might most MI5 staff have missed during most of the Cold War because of a lack of any understanding of Sigint (just as nearly all GCHQ employees were ignorant of what MI5 did). Need-to-Know is a double-edged sword which often seems to have one very blunt edge.

 

The Bletchley Chapter of 'People Against Uncongenial Work'

Much of the success of Bletchley Park during the Second World War is owed to the combination of great talent and an atmosphere in which it could flourish: a combination of the Common Room of a college, the managed anarchy of the tiny pre-war GC&CS, and the respect for – or at least the toleration of – people who didn’t conform to the societal norms and expectations of mid-twentieth century Britain.

But that isn’t the whole story. Nigel de Grey, in his Organisation and Evolution of British Sigint (TNA HW 75-78) refers at times to the unwillingness of some of the people who benefited from BP’s toleration of individualism to take their share of necessary chores, the necessity of which was not obvious to them. Here are two examples.

‘The Tube Central

The Pneumatic Tube System was installed in order to overcome the delay in distribution attendant upon the use of messengers, the only labour available for which were girls from local primary schools on leaving, whose hours of work were strictly controlled by Civil Service regulations and whose enthusiasm and discipline was not noticeably high, and to take the place of the belt conveyors which had been in operation to adjacent sections. The principle adopted was to have four main trunk double lines to the four requisite office blocks terminating at a point where a single line internal system conveyed the traffic to the several requisite points within the office block. The "cross country" tubes were laid underground and the distances were in some cases the maximum possible, hence the necessity for relaying within the blocks. The system suffered from two main troubles, firstly that the bore of the tubes and hence of the containers was not large enough to cope with the documents to be distributed or indeed to carry the overall volume; secondly that owing to indifferent manning of the local stations by the user sections the maximum was never got from the system. Communications Section was forced eventually to man both ends of the trunk lines but the interior terminals were as a rule manned by casual, not to say extremely casual, labour and Communications Section received very little cooperation from the Sections, some of which seemed to find any routine beyond their capabilities or infra dig.

Time stamping Machines

Analogous to this laxity was the difficulty experienced by Communications Section over the Stromberg time-stamping machinery. The regular and rapid flow of papers (decrypts, signals and so forth) was an essential to the main function of GC&CS, namely decrypting and reporting to the combat commands. To achieve this it was essential to time the arrival and departure of documents at each stage of the handling so that any bottle neck should at once be revealed and steps taken to relax it. In order to make this easy electric time-stamps were introduced in May 1943 (when, it will be remembered, GC&CS was "working-up" for the Second Front) and installed at strategic points in the Cypher Office, the Main Teleprinter Room, the Auto Room, the Tube Central, Huts 3, 6 and 8, Naval Section and Air Section. To avoid all discrepancies the clocks in these machines had to be synchronised daily, a routine for which was laid down on the principle of dialling TIM in London. The minutes of the Communications Committee show the struggle that Communications Section had to get the Sections to conform to this very simple routine. All sections were careless but Hut 6, a key point, consistently ignored not only the synchronisation of their clocks for weeks at a time but the use of the stamp at all. Thus when in the autumn of 1943 Communications Section were straining every nerve to increase the rapidity of their service to Hut 6 and asked for the cooperation of Hut 6 in testing the results of their experiments in handling, the tests broke down three times because Hut 6 would not use the time stamps properly. Hut 8, another key point, two months after the institution of the time stamps was found to have locked its Stromberg up in a cupboard and left it there. Another section's clock had stopped and never been used again. Thus the two worst offenders were the two sections which employed the highest grades of labour, both being manned principally by university trained personnel who had no doubt been taught to think for themselves. The instances quoted, perhaps trivial in a sense, were none the less symptomatic of the difficulty of getting any businesslike routine carried out, any suggestion of mechanisation in an organisation manned by untrained labour and with whom no disciplinary action could be taken except that of dismissal should they prove insensible to an ordinary reprimand.’

The voices of the educated – ‘university trained personnel who had no doubt been taught to think for themselves’ – tend to predominate in the story of Second World War British Sigint, and it’s too late to gather the memories of those trying to improve the information flow using Time and Motion methods such as the use of Stromberg time stamping machines; and, anyway, the value of the results of the graduates’ work in cryptanalysis and machine-based solutions on any day probably outweighed any benefit potentially lost. But nevertheless qualified people with skills which might have improved the way that BP worked were being ignored.

And this wasn’t the worst thing that was happening. As de Grey hints in telling the story of 14 year old ‘girl’ messengers, and as is clear from any telling of the stories of (for example) cipher operators, not all jobs at BP were stimulating or interesting; not all needed great minds; and many were as dreary as might have been found in any factory job to which labour had been directed, but with the additional pressure that those working (mainly women) on these tasks could say next to nothing outside work about the dreary, mundane nature of their working lives.

A necessary consequence of the industrialisation of UK Sigint during the Second World War was the creation of production line jobs which, like those in contemporary factories, were not stimulating. Add to that a need-to-know system, in which the people doing the most menial jobs knew the least about the way in which their work contributed to the organisation as a whole, and it is not hard to see that without wartime regulations on directed labour, Bletchley Park might have found it difficult to achieve the success it did.

 

 

 

Need to Know and Action-On

 

I don't think anybody could disagree with the notion that secret intelligence should only be available to those who need to know. The devil is in the detail:

The strict application of the "need to know" principle from early 1940 onwards was designed to protect the Enigma secret. 'C' was obsessive about the need to protect the fact that the machine the Germans trusted so much that it became their work-horse for encryption had been broken. (In the last LSIB meeting he attended on 1 July 1952 he said that that 'he was convinced that it was only by the most rigid imposition of security that we had won the last war' (Liddell's diaries KV 4/474)).

"Need to know" was imposed inside Bletchley Park as well as outside. Henry Hayward, the Senior Security Officer used to lecture new entrants and impress upon them that 'Secrets which you do not need to know are an unnecessary burden and someone else's secret is never quite so secret as one's own' (de Grey HW 43/78). Staff were discouraged from discussing the work of their section with colleagues from other sections.

In fact, this did not suit the way a Sigint organisation needs to work. It led people to believe that because intelligence derived from cryptanalysis needed a greater level of protection than other intelligence, decrypted material was more important, more valuable, than the rest. The reductio ad absurdam of this position came when the section dealing with German experimental weapons could not get cover of the Luftwaffe nets which produced the intelligence on the development of V-1s and V-2s because it came from plaintext messages and operator chat (HW 43/82 Section K). It also inhibited the sharing of information between huts (except at the most senior level) even though Enigma usage was common across all elements of German forces. Although the area is under-researched, I think it likely that over-rigorous application of "need-to-know" at least contributed to the long delay between it being clear from decrypted material that the Germans were reading to codes in use in the North Atlantic and their being secured.

By the end of the war, the CMY section controlled all UK collection resources in the European theatre, and allocated tasking through a process in which all involved were aware of what needed to be collected, and why, and to what extent. Not every message on every network needed to be collected and decrypted in full every day. For example, a reserve formation might only need to be monitored at its morning call-up once a week to confirm that there was no change in the list of subscribers or their location, freeing up receiver time for other tasks. The relevant importance of the different services, or of diplomatic traffic sent by wireless, could be rebalanced on a daily basis as requirements changed. But this only worked because there was a reconsideration of "need to know": in fact its replacement. By sharing the maximum amount of relevant information CMY was able to optimise the use of allied resources and produce more wanted intelligence for customers. London ministries stated their requirements and people who understood the technicalities of Sigint collection and processing answered them.

The compartmentation which "need to know" had led to within GC&CS was replaced in post-war GCHQ by a system which used vetting as a starting point for creating an organisation with far fewer compartments than had operated at Bletchley Park. Access to Sigint reporting might still be rigorously compartmented outside, but within the organisation there would be no artificial barriers to knowledge sharing.

This doesn't mean, of course, that everybody within GCHQ had access to everything: a member of staff couldn't simply walk into another office and demand to read their reports; furthermore, a process developed which gave extra protection to particularly sensitive lines of traffic; but it meant that a realistic attitude was taken to sharing information.

However, Sigint organisations' need to protect their secrets do not translate simply into the way other parts of the national security community like to handle and process information, and much less how to use it.

A principle created in 1941 when Sigint was first being sent to N Africa applies to this day (though is perhaps more metaphorical than literal today). In it, no recipient of a Sigint report is an action addressee; rather, all are information addressees. You see a shadow of the old signal form every time you receive an email: who it's from, to whom it is addressed, and to whom it is copied. These map onto the From, To, and Info addresses on a signal form. If you are sent a copy of a signal for information, it meant precisely that: you were not authorised to act on that information. The information (the intelligence in the case of Sigint reports) 'belongs' to the originator – the 'From' addressee – and if you are an 'Info' addressee you cannot do anything with the content of the signal without the authority of the originator, the owner.

This concept of ownership is important: 'someone else's secret is never quite so secret as one's own'; but ownership means that the originator can prevent the information being used in a way that might compromise the source of the intelligence or the method used to derive it; it also means that the originator can mandate the standards for storing and sharing the intelligence. This meant that from the 1940s onwards Sigint reports could only normally be read within special facilities (though senior people might have the reports taken to them) by people cleared according to standards agreed to by GCHQ.  

Yet however good the intelligence, it is ultimately valueless if it can't be used. This meant creating a process (Action-On) in which the originator of the intelligence created a plausible alternative source for the information. The classic example of Action-On comes from North Africa during the Second World War: suppose that GHQ learned from a decrypted Enigma message that a convoy carrying supplies for Rommel's Afrika Korps was leaving Sicily for Tunis. Obviously the UK wanted to destroy or disrupt the convoy but simply to attack it would flag up to the Italians and Germans that (at least potentially) the UK had had prior knowledge of the convoy's departure. How could an attack be launched without tipping the enemy off? The best answer was to launch a reconnaissance aircraft on a route which would allow it to spot the resupply convoy and be spotted by it, then allow a sufficient amount of time for the reconnaissance aircraft to radio the information back and for an attack to be mounted by allied forces notionally about other business. This means that some convoys would get though (and some reconnaissance aircraft would get shot up) but these were prices it was thought worth paying.

One of the hardest disciplines to impose was that of only granting access to secret intelligence according to need, and not according to seniority. It was Churchill who, with 'C' removed names from the original list he was given of those with access to Enigma reporting, and at the other end of the production line, restricting access to Y Stations to those with a legitimate reason for entry, rather than simply because it fell under the responsibility of a Command cut across a fundamental piece of military doctrine: how could a Commander be responsible for a unit on his establishment if he had no access to it? The issue was managed, but not simply.

The Second World War saw the first attempt to manage large volumes of secret intelligence produced by large number of people who entered the secret world with little or no background in secrecy. "Need-to-know" was probably the best principle to apply at first: preserving the secret of Enigma was probably one of the most important tasks facing Government in the first half of 1940; but while restricting the circle of knowledge helped protect the secret, it was at a cost of efficient and effective intelligence production for most of the Second World War.

Source Protection

 

Sigint End Product (EP) is the intelligence sent to customers which contains the producing agency's considered view of what material it has intercepted actually means, and is therefore carefully protected, as it can reveal both the source of the intelligence and the methods by which it has been produced. As early as the First World War, was separated into two types depending on whether it had been derived from cryptanalysis or traffic analysis (TA, though up to 1940 it was more commonly referred to as Wireless Telegraphy Intelligence (WTI)). TA reporting was given a wider circulation than cryptanalytic, as it was reasonable to assume that people in other countries knew that their wireless traffic could be intercepted and that it might be possible to draw inferences from it, but both types of reporting were classified. Protecting the source of the intelligence, to ensure that it was not compromised as a source, was part of the process.

There was a rough and ready demarcation between the Services and GC&CS pre-Second World War. The Services believed that they 'owned' TA and GC&CS was prepared to see the Army and RAF distribute TA-derived EP to a wider circulation than was given to decrypts. GC&CS controlled its own product but applied the 'Most Secret' classification indiscriminately to all of its EP, meaning that decrypted diplomatic EP and a decrypted tactical aircraft signal were each given the same classification

With the solution in January 1940 of the current Enigma settings of the German Air Force and later Army the situation changed: 'C' agreed with the service Directors of Intelligence not only to restrict the circulation of Enigma-derived intelligence, but to sanitise EP so that it looked like intelligence from agents rather than Sigint. This meant that 'Most Secret' now covered two different levels of protection: the old 'Most Secret' and the new 'Most Secret CX/JQ' (most intelligence recipients knew that CX meant that the report came from an agent; JQ was used as these were the next two letters to IR (Intelligence Report)).

During the Battle of Norway Sigint was of such operational value that its dissemination became a problem but the battle was over before any handling mechanism could be set up to handle it. The Battle of France came next but it was not until May 22nd, not long before the end, that the German Air Force Enigma was solved regularly. Neither the UK nor France knew how to handle a flood of highly classified material, and neither knew how to interpret it or assess its validity (neither had any idea about how to manage the bilateral exchange either). Some EP reached the British GHQ but is unlikely to have been of any use (see my Sigint Historian: Locking a Stable Door below). The War Office's teleprinter links were of poor quality and completely insecure in France, so an SIS radio link was established in the last few days.

The Admiralty was somewhat better placed. They were already disseminating information to their ships at sea and by using encryption systems with a restricted distribution believed that they could send Most Secret and CX/JQ to their commanders securely (but see Sigint Historian: Ten avoidable problems which made the Royal Navy's encryption exploitable in 1939). Lower-grade decrypts were marked Most Secret by the Admiralty so there was no essential difference in the dissemination of this and CX/JQ.

This was over-complicated. It meant that the value of the intelligence was not at first recognised by recipients and subsequently gave rise to the theory that source CX/JQ was more reliable than (other) Sigint.

Before sending CX/JQ to the Middle East the Y Board agreed two significant principles for overseas dissemination: only to use the most secure cipher systems; and to give Sigint a minimum distribution, and to prohibit redissemination to subordinate commands, except in orders to formations which needed the intelligence for operational reasons, in which case the intelligence would be further sanitised. This clearly established the principle that control of Sigint lay in the UK.

Mobile SIS radio units (SCUs) were used as channels of communication within the Middle East theatre: they weren't intrinsically more secure, but were a time-saving convenience, and a means by which security policy mandated by the UK could be maintained. Any GC&CS EP could be disseminated direct to Commands from Bletchley Park rather than through the Service Ministries. Security of the handling of both decrypted and paraphrased texts was controlled absolutely at either end by 'C'. ('C' wrote to the Director of Military Intelligence in December 1940: "on the question of Security I am directly responsible to the Minister of Defence (i.e. the PM) regarding certain aspects of Y work"; by 1944 he claimed that he was responsible for its Security, not just 'certain aspects' of it: nobody demurred. Did he ask the PM? Did he simply assert his authority?)

When naval machine ciphers were added to the CX/JQ product the Admiralty no longer continue to disseminate Sigint to its naval recipients in the Mediterranean, where this new material was handled in the same way as material for the Army or RAF. But the rest of the output of GC&CS and of service Sigint, both lower-grade decrypts and TA, continued to be disseminated the channels instituted before the war and their security was governed by the Service regulations laid down for Secret and Most Secret documents.

The first attempt formally to classify Sigint and standardise dissemination protocols began in 1941 when it was felt that a 'looseness' had grown up in the way various forms of Signal Intelligence were described and that this looseness was in itself a source of misunderstanding and consequently a danger to security. 'Y Intelligence' was defined as a category of 'Intelligence obtained from a scrutiny of foreign messages intercepted, particularly as to callsigns, frequencies, volume of traffic, indications of priority and from DF bearings'.

A generic codeword ULTRA now covered high grade traffic: in other words, the marking MOST SECRET ULTRA would appear on documents. Its use meant that Sigint no longer needed to be sanitised to suggest that the originator was an agent. As high grade diplomatic became important to Service commands ULTRA began to cover a lot more than Enigma, and needed to be handled and disseminated to many more locations. To avoid duplication and a consequent risk to cipher security all ULTRA now had to be passed through GC&CS. This also meant that security regulations governing both the use and the handling of the ULTRA intelligence should be promulgated from the UK to all recipients. It was difficult to get an agreed set of regulations which would meet the security requirements and the practical requirements of overseas centres, while giving sufficient latitude to the Commands to use the intelligence: this took until June 1942.

In the summer of 1943 Edward Travis negotiated an agreement with the War Department in Washington which included the principles of the existing ULTRA Regulations and Sigint Security, meaning that US would in principle conform to UK regulations. The first step was the issue in October 1943 of an agreed 'Nomenclature', a set of definitions, most important of which was that the words 'Signal Intelligence' included the whole Sigint  process: interception, decryption, analysis (cryptanalysis and TA) and reporting; and 'Y' was limited to interception at stations and DF. More Sigint codewords were set up so that ULTRA was used for the EP from high grade codes and ciphers; PEARL, for EP from low and medium grade codes and ciphers; and THUMB for EP from TA.

The drafting of the complete instructions took much longer, not because they were controversial, but because it was hoped to produce a set of regulations applicable worldwide (in Europe the US had simply adopted UK procedures). They were produced in three separate documents, finally issued on 1 February 1944, but the Admiralty refused to bind itself, adding a statement saying effectively that it would do its own thing, though that just happened to be the same thing as promulgated by the regulations.

The next necessary step was to ensure that analogous regulations covering both British, Australian and American Forces were promulgated in the Far East and SWPA. UK regulations applied in India, but not in Australia, and the Americans, while they had subscribed in Washington and in Europe to the British regulations, had specifically not done so for the Pacific theatre. In July 1944 agreed regulations for ULTRA were promulgated, and in November 1944 for PEARL and THUMB. The USN, however, did not accept them and issued their own regulations in April 1945, dividing Special Intelligence into two categories only – ULTRA, which they extended to cover what in Europe would be considered PEARL, and PINUP, which was essentially THUMB.

It took the formation of STANCIB as an overarching authority in the US, equivalent to the Sigint Board in the US, and, in the UK, the Admiralty's grudging acceptance that GCHQ was the 'owner' of Sigint to allow negotiations for a single set of regulations to take place after the signing of the BRUSA Agreement in 1946, regulations which were to be applied in the US and US, and eventually in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

So much for handling and dissemination: like Protective and Personnel Security, both of which I have written about before, they are aspects of security around which it was possible to write regulations (however difficult it might be to get sailors to sign up to them) and to enforce. There are still two more aspects of security to deal with, however, and these were much more subjective: 'Need to Know' and 'Action On' are integral parts of Source Protection. 'Action On' is a core issue: there is no point collecting information and turning it into intelligence if nobody can use it; but equally, there is no point using intelligence if its use will make the enemy realise that its secret information is known. 'Need to Know' makes obvious sense: nobody thinks that all secret information should be widely available to everybody; but who decides who needs to know what?

Security at Bletchley Park

One way in which British Sigint during the Second World War anticipated the way many people work today was in having not just to find ways to provide physical security for the vast quantities of sensitive data being created, but in persuading large numbers of workers with no instinctive or habitual feeling for secrecy to protect the material they dealt with. I've written about the way in which infiltration by communists or communist sympathisers was handled – but how did Bletchley Park ensure that its site remained secure and persuade the ordinary people who made up its staff not to talk about their work, to the extent that few said anything about their involvement with Sigint for thirty years after the war came to an end? 

The initial approach to security at Bletchley Park was to surrounded it with secrecy. The name "Bletchley Park" was not to be mentioned: instead it was referred to as "Station X"; staff were forbidden to reveal the location, even to their families. However staff had to billeted and it was impossible to prevent it being known that Bletchley Park had been taken over by the Government. SIS came up with a cover story – that Bletchley Park was involved with the Air Defence of London – which it was thought would satisfy local inquisitiveness, but this cover story was not used when Bletchley Park was temporarily occupied in 1938 during the Munich Crisis and staff were told what their cover was until after the site was occupied in August 1939. The initial staff scattered about the neighbourhood – members of the Foreign Office, professors of Modern Languages, historians and mathematicians – had no obvious qualification for air defence: it is hard to believe that any one of them could have answered the simplest question if asked.

After SIS had mostly returned to London, the GC&CS leadership decided to change the cover story and to refer to the organisation at Bletchley as "Government Communications Headquarters", a name that was vaguer and potentially covered a broader field than Air Defence. But again the first staff of GC&CS knew about the new name was when in October 1939 they found it displayed on a large white painted signboard at the entrance gates – a sign which was subsequently removed.

The idea of keeping secret where staff were broke down almost at once. People had lives to live outside work and consequently had to have an address and, anyway, after a time some moved their families into houses nearby. At first an accommodation address had been provided: Room 47, Foreign Office; but as numbers grew the amount of work for the Foreign Office became too much, the last straw, allegedly, was when a motor cycle was delivered there. It was only in 1942 when a Bletchley PO Box Number was arranged, mainly for those whose billet address was uncertain, and a London Box Number was arranged which could be used for letters sent abroad (on which the Bletchley address was forbidden).

(There were fewer problems with the Y Stations: there was no question of concealing their presence or their function. But it was common knowledge that WT was used by the Services and the normal measures common to any Service station to prevent unauthorised visitors were satisfactory, though care was needed to prevent senior officers from entering without authorisation. Most commanding officers adopted some cover story for local use, for example that they were relaying weather reports.)

At Bletchley, physical security developed slowly. A solid iron ring fence was put up in the spring of 1940, but as GC&CS grew the fence had to be considerably lengthened and chain wire netting was substituted for the ironwork. There were only two official entrances. The most that can be said for the fencing was that it offered a sort of deterrent: it offered virtually no obstacle to a determined person and was neither lit nor patrolled at night. (During a Home Guard exercise early in 1943 the attackers removed a complete section under cover of darkness with no more formidable weapon than a spanner, and so attacked the defenders, somewhat unsportingly it was felt by the defenders, from the rear.) But it kept out casual intruders and ridiculously insecure as it probably was, it served its purpose during the war.

Every member of GC&CS and certain regular visitors were issued with standard passes. Theoretically passes were examined at the entrance gates but in practice they were simply waved at the gate guards by staff on their way in. There were two kinds of guard on the gates, Military Police, with armed sentries, and unarmed Foreign Office Security Police, recruited from pensioners in the Metropolitan Police. They got to recognise GC&CS staff and were probably the best security GC&CS had against infiltration. The Military Police boarded the incoming coaches and stopped all cars so that passes could be shown. Staff without passes were detained until recognised or claimed by their sections and these cases were reported to the Administration. Of course there were plenty of cases of people who had forgotten passes coming in at busy times and dodging the guard, of passes being handed through the fence out of sight of the gate by someone who had already entered, and of passes lent by someone coming off duty on foot to a pass-less colleague still outside the gate. In fact the number of forgotten passes each morning was considerable and steps had to be taken to make getting those staff into work as tiresome as possible, both to the individual and to their section, which had to send somebody to the guard hut to vouch for their identity. The alternative would have been to refuse entry altogether, which as there was no public transport would have left most individuals who were billeted outside Bletchley with no means of getting back to their billet as well as the loss of a day's work. There were relatively few cases of passes being lost: a fine was imposed to pay for a replacement. Like the fence, the pass system was adequate for the time and place, though not really offering much in the way security.

Temporary passes were issued to craftsmen and others who had business within the perimeter by BP administration. They either remained in sight or were escorted by the Military Police. Visiting military officers also received temporary passes and had to be vouched for by one of a small number of authorised staff from GC&CS. They were also escorted while on site. Further limitations were put upon the entry to work areas both by visitors and by staff from other sections, according to their "need to know".

Standing Orders provided that no room was to be left unoccupied unless all papers had been locked away. At times, whole rooms had to be locked and regarded as "cupboard rooms". The Foreign Office police patrolled buildings each night and all open windows or unsecured papers were reported, papers being kept by the police until the next morning. A "security officer" was appointed in each section to coordinate this within the section but there were many examples of carelessness among staff unaccustomed to this sort of behaviour. It was made more difficult anyway because the cupboards supplied were of poor quality and many of their doors opened enough when locked for a hand to be inserted without difficulty and the fastenings could be broken away by a sharp pull. It made all the fuss made about securing classified material seem futile.

Paper was by far the greatest security issue for GC&CS. The quantity was enormous. Forty or fifty thousand enemy signals entered GC&CS every day and the Cypher Office was handling between two and three million cypher groups (a further twenty or thirty thousand messages between BP and UK authorities) a week. The floors of the signals and deciphering rooms were covered in tape all of which had a gummed underside which stuck to shoes on a damp day. Each section generated formal papers of every kind and received large quantities as well. Most was carefully handled and the registration process prevented even more problems. But there was a lot of unrecorded paperwork as well, and the acute national shortage of paper meant that paper had to be kept for recycling rather than be simply destroyed by burning.

The routine for dealing with confidential waste was to have it collected once a day, sacked, tied up, locked up and taken once a week to a local paper-mill where it was tipped into bleaching vets under the supervision of the GC&CS security officer who had taken it there. This process worked reasonably well. The only difficulties came from GC&CS staff. They produced three kinds of waste – white paper, coloured paper (e.g. carbon paper, brown paper, cardboard boxes) and "hard core" which included almost every conceivable object except paper. The paper mills insisted that white paper should be separated from coloured paper as only white paper waste could produce pulp clean enough for new paper (coloured pulp was used for cardboard). Any hard object in the waste was liable to break the machinery, and glass in particular was dangerous to the workers. Three containers had to be supplied to every room for the three different kinds of waste. Paper waste of both grades was treated as secret while hard core was dealt with at the local council tip. The problem was to persuading staff to use the proper container and from a security point of view the danger lay in the hard core bins. Each member of staff was told how things worked on arrival in their section, was given written instructions, was again specifically reminded at a Security lecture, but carelessness remained an outstanding feature.

Physical security measures at GC&CS were probably not any worse than procedures in the Ministries, except that the grounds in which the offices stood were more vulnerable than a London building. The title "Government Communications Headquarters" worked well enough, though this disguise wore rather thin when the Army ordered shoulder flashes to be added to uniforms and the Bletchley area was thronged by soldiers labelled "Royal Corps of Signals" and "Intelligence Corps" – from a GC&CS point of view an unfortunate association of ideas. But in general GC&CS consistently pursued this policy of being low key, avoiding appearance before local tribunals or in any matter that might engage the attention of the Press or public. The cover stories probably increased rather than reduced curiosity. By far the best protection for GC&CS staff was simply to say that they couldn't talk about their work: to appear, as Churchill remarked of them during his visit 'innocent though engaged in a sinister occupation'.

Every new entrant (civilian or service, at Bletchley or at stations) read and signed an extract from the Official Secrets Act as did everybody leaving in a formal "signing off" process. In GC&CS after the signing of the Official Secrets Act staff were warned that no mention of the nature of the work outside the organisation was allowed, and this warning was included in the Standing Orders issued to them. Further security instruction was left to Section Heads to handle and this system continued until the beginning of 1942 when all security-related matters were centralised when Henry Hayward became Senior Security Officer for GC&CS.

Being "war entry" himself, he realised that suddenly exposing new entrants to highly secret information was an unusual experience and potentially a source of acute anxiety to some, while for others security rules would be no more important than rationing rules or petrol restrictions, which most people were prepared to dodge on the quiet. His solution was to ensure that Security became part of everybody's work rather than a bolt-on, and to do so, he rethought the way that new entrants were trained in security.

His plan was to give a simple lecture to every new entrant a few days after they arrived, followed by the signing of a solemn declaration which listed the main points of the lecture. This paper dealt in the main with the best answers to be given to ordinary everyday questions from acquaintances. It was handed out to be read and signed after the lecture, returned to the Directorate and, as it was a confidential document, its arrival or non-arrival until chased offered a clue to the reliability of the individual. This did not take the place of signing the Official Secrets Act, but supplemented it. Each batch of recruits – the intake was at first about 30 arriving every Monday morning – attended the lecture some three or four days after being signed on. They were divided into three categories according to the "need to know" their work attracted: those engaged in Sigint proper; those employed in support areas such as the Communications Section where there was no need for them to hear about the methodology of Sigint; and staff such as messengers, maintenance and catering, who might enter offices at times and who would certainly overhear other people talking about classified subjects. The lecture was varied according to the audience, the last category being especially warned against inquisitiveness, talking outside the perimeter of anything they saw (for example machinery) or anything they heard, but were otherwise given no information about the purpose of the organisation. The same lecture was given to the WRNS at Stanmore and Eastcote. Hayward visited these stations at longer intervals and audiences varied from about 100 up to 250.

His lecture always covered the following points:

1) Explanation of the provisions of the Official Secrets Act.

2) The Purpose of GC&CS.

3) The effect of its work on operations.

4) How it might be lost and the effect of doing so.

5) 'There is only one way of keeping a secret, and that is to tell it to nobody' not even to the nearest and dearest or others in the same uniform.

6) Behaviour: 'Do not surround yourself with mystery and avoid arousing curiosity' and how to answer casual or not so casual questions.

7) Not to write indiscreet letters.

8) The principle of need to know. 'Secrets which you do not need to know are an unnecessary burden and someone else's secret is never quite so secret as one's own', and how this led to the principle that members of one section should not discuss their work with members of another except when necessary.

9) The honour of the Service.

(Before anyone asks, I do not know what "The honour of the Service" covered.)

Hayward gained a further insight into the sort of issues staff needed to be warned about as all security breaches were reported to him. Most cases fell into one of three main categories: victims of the confidence trick – senior officers saying 'I know all about your work as I was an intelligence officer in the last war' or parents saying 'You can surely trust me'; people who deliberately attracted attention ("men of mystery"); and what he described as "chatterboxes and letter writers". Of these the last category was by far the largest and the most easily dealt with.

Staff were told that it was their duty, however unpleasant, to report security breaches at once and Hayward ensured that incidents were handles in such a way as to minimize any personal animosities. In his words: "It was made to appear rather more a question of helping a weaker vessel than reprimanding a naughty child."

Hayward arranged periodically for a week or so's censorship on all letters leaving or entering the area in which GC&CS staff were living. This produced on each occasion a small crop of letters which were returned to GC&CS for action. No really serious security breach was discovered and all were easily dealt with, but it demonstrated the need to explain in simple language what constituted careless talk and what was meant by security.

American Air Force officers regularly invited WRNS and other young women employees to their dances. Unfortunately the drinks served tended to be both stronger and more plentiful than most of their guests were accustomed to. The presence of women in Naval uniform in the heart of the country was intriguing and led to a degree of innocent questioning. So many cases of indiscreet talk occurred that GC&CS felt obliged to ask the WRNS not to allow their personnel to visit certain American stations. The problem was passed on to the US Army Sigint authorities in the UK, who sorted things out at their end. The security problem was perceived to be greater because of the likelihood that some at least of these officers might fall into enemy hands.

There were some cases of mental breakdown. Fortunately in an early case the patient, by that time in a nursing home, wrote to a colleague about work matters. It was immediately appreciated that a letter like this could be sent to anyone. MI5 was called in and arranged for doctors and nurses to be interviewed and letters censored. This became a standard procedure.

Security breaches during the Second World War were relatively infrequent and easily dealt with.  The idea that maintaining secrecy was an integral part of everybody's job became embedded within the organisation, and many of the practices begun there continued after the war, and indeed to the present day.