Sigint Communications (part 1)

This follows on from my previous post, in which I said, referring to a twitter discussion: 

'Part of agreeing with @jock_bruce here is a belief that environmental awareness is an essential precursor for Sigint, and that all is a waste of time without adequate Sigint Comms from intercept site to HQ. Sigint is about the whole of Comms.'

Sigint relies on having a dedicated, high-quality, high speed communications network, linking its national headquarters, intercept stations, intelligence allies and customers. High quality is absolutely essential; high speed will always be necessary in some parts of the network but not in others; a dedicated network is the outcome of two factors: the need for the highest levels of security across the whole of the network, and the need to ensure that prioritisation of traffic flow is something decided on by the Sigint agency and not by the organisation that supplies the comms infrastructure.

The first issue is to ensure that the headquarters can communicate with its intercept stations and with its customers. Preparing for the Second World War, one of the advantages of choosing Bletchley Park as the war station for GC&CS was the fact that the GPO had laid trunk cabling along the LMS railway. When the military elements of GC&CS returned to London after having deployed temporarily to Bletchley during the crisis of autumn 1938, they were able to make reasonable guesses about the comms capacity they would need in wartime, and by August 1939 BP had been well linked by teleprinters and telephones both to intercept stations in the UK and to Whitehall. This network of landlines was expanded and improved during the war under the aegis of the Y Committee. Overseas, however, underpinning the whole question of Sigint communications was the GC&CS policy of centralising UK cryptanalytic effort in the UK, partly from the increasing complexity of cryptanalytical problems, partly from the dearth of trained cryptanalytical staff if a large number of service centres were to be established overseas. (Later experience and the development of cryptanalytical machinery tended to confirm the original policy.) Three overseas cryptanalytical centres were in existence in 1939: the FECB for which GC&CS trained first naval and subsequently military officers; Sarafand, an Army commitment insofar as staffing was concerned, and Simla for which the Government of India found the personnel.

The Mediterranean campaign produced the CBME and the various commands in the field. The FECB was replaced by Delhi and Colombo/Kilindini on the entry of Japan which brought into existence the American organisations in Washington and the SWPA and the inter-allied Combined Bureau in Brisbane. The American policy was likewise to centre cryptanalytical work in Washington. Interception was spread right round the world and intercepted traffic had to be sent to the main centres as rapidly as possible. Long distance air mails were as a rule neither rapid nor certain enough as a principal means of conveyance, so that the whole or nearly the whole burden of carrying the signal correspondence of the Japanese Armed forces round the world fell upon Allied telecommunications. The intelligence produced from the intercept then had to be redisseminated by the same means.

The main source of material from GC&CS between the wars was Diplomatic correspondence which passed over the ordinary commercial WT services, for which interception in the United Kingdom was pure routine, or by cable, the lines of which in very many cases transited British territory. By special arrangements copies of all such Diplomatic correspondence were supplied to GC&CS, coming from overseas where required by sea bag. This was a leisurely proceeding but adequate for the Government' s purposes.

On the military side, and recognising that timeliness was likely to be a bigger issue for military Sigint than for diplomatic, the first meeting to investigate improvements in timeliness was held December 1937 but resulted in little other than an agreement that specified military intercept might be sent by air bag (under diplomatic protection) rather than by sea. The collection of DF bearings, however, needed a more real-time solution. 'C' wrote in April 1938 that 'cable companies claimed that the result of the Derby could be received in the uttermost corners of the earth within 5 seconds of the result being known' and that this must be mirrored by the Signal branches of the Services if DF was to be of any value. This didn't result in any specific action.

In September 1939 the problem of Y communications did not loom very large. The Army interception units that accompanied the BEF only had eleven intercept sets and ten DF sets between them and no plan was in place to site them near the network of telegraph and telephone lines established by the Royal Corps of Signals. The use of wireless for passing DF results was forbidden on security grounds. It was assumed that any Sigint would only be relevant to the BEF Staff so no dedicated link to the UK was planned. The RAF intercept unit sent to France was linked by WT to Cheadle, and thus, if necessary, with GC&CS but was regarded as an offshoot of Cheadle rather than an independent unit, since there was no Air GHQ in France until the end of January 1940. In other words no special system of communications for Y formed a part of the BEF pre-war plan, while in the case of the RAF the deployed unit was part of the home defence system. After a reorganisation of the Army Y system an I(s) staff was formed and sited near GHQ, as was 2 Company GHQ Signals, and a cryptanalytic party formed from the Military Section of GC&CS was sent to the French GQG. Smaller intercept units were moved to Corps HQs at Roubaix and Douai but the only communication with them was by bad telephone lines or by dispatch rider over singularly bad roads. I(s) was, however, in touch with MI8 by unreliable teleprinter though it was recognised that these links would only work while units were static. Material intercepted close to the Front could not be sent to GHQ in a timely manner, so I(s) missed many of the perceived advantages of being in the operational theatre rather than in the United Kingdom. The only means of any military intercepted traffic reaching the United Kingdom was by air bag, though a new DF station erected near Chartres was linked to Chatham by telephone and formed part of the Chatham DF network.

The first RAF unit at Fismes placed two DF units in Bar sur Seine and Amiens in order to form a baseline. These stations were linked by French Post Office landlines and Fismes was eventually linked to AI1(e) through the British controlled Rheims Central. This, it would seem, was led through to Leighton Buzzard Defence Teleprinter Network Switchboard and so, when working, gave them access to Cheadle and GC&CS (though all traffic has to pass en clair). The DF telephone lines connecting Bar sur Seine and Amiens with Fismes constantly broke down and when the organisation was later linked to the Intelligence Staff at AASF and BAFF the same occurred: 'our greatest handicap is landlines' reported the unit. The result was that Fismes seldom got more than a single line bearing, which made DF (and the DF units) essentially useless. A second RAF unit was formed to intercept Italian Air Force traffic from the south of France. This unit had no communications with GC&CS (which produced a lot of good IAF reports) and was handicapped by having few if any trained operators: it was of no real value. It used a courier service, French as far as Paris and British thereafter, which was expected to get the material intercepted through to GC&CS in 24 hours but, in fact, took about a week.

The Admiralty claimed to have a satisfactory teleprinter line to pass naval intercepts from the South of France and told AI1(e) who managed to obtain one, but only in May 1940. In the same way efforts to connect the Bar sur Seine station by British line to Fismes were only successful on the day when the station was handed over to the French during the retreat.

There were, however, arrangements for GC&CS communications with the French: in May 1939 it was agreed that Paris should telephone London at 3 p.m. each day and reports would be exchanged and confirmed later by bag. By August 1939 there was some level of communication between Bletchley Park and the Deuxième Bureau by RT, presumably conducted by Section VIII SIS. A courier service carrying cryptanalytical information continued and was extended to cover meteorological intercepts. The cryptanalytical party from GC&CS sent to the French GQG to collaborate on German Police ciphers and medium echelon Army traffic s needed no dedicated communications with the UK.

The 'Manual of Military Intelligence in the Field' current in 1940 stated that 'Wireless telegraphy is such a reliable and efficient medium of intercommunication that its use in war is indispensable to a modern army. Indeed it is likely that it may prove the only practicable method of signal communication in campaigns involving rapid movement over long distances' but in terms of Sigint nothing had actually been planned to make this a practical proposition.

There are several points to be made about this first phase of Sigint communications. First, nobody had thought about the problems of dealing with the dissemination of high echelon traffic that had to be worked at the centre. Second, there was no solution of German Enigma and no optimism in GC&CS that there might be, so there was no reason to think out a plan for disseminating it. When the Norwegian key was broken in April 1940 there were only normal signals channels and normal signals crypt systems to disseminate the intelligence. When the main GAF key was broken during the Battle of France it was far too late to institute a new communications plan.

The Army view of field Sigint was that it would be wanted in the field and they arranged for interception and for DF on a local scale. They foresaw 'rapid movement' by the enemy but not the corollary: that this would need rapid Sigint communications to cope with it. They had been slow to interest themselves in strategic DF and the development of the Chatham DF network was, at the outbreak of war, still a comparatively recent idea. Chartres DF was an outpost of this network and was given communications in conformity with the scheme. But that the same principle applied to the field units seems to have been overlooked. Very much the same may be said of the RAF field organisation.

Lastly, the Battle of France was over so quickly that there was nothing to inform planning for better communications: either between units; or between units and the deployed Intelligence Staffs; or between any deployed unit and the centre in the United Kingdom. Given the overwhelming defeat of the Allied Armies it would have been hard to show that lack of Sigint communications had in any way affected the issue or that the contribution of Sigint to the general pool of intelligence had been other than comparatively meagre. So when the focus of the war moved to the Mediterranean, Sigint as a whole was still lacking in experience of its real requirements for either long distance communications or with Command Headquarters or for field communications between Y units, and between them and any base organisation formed in the rear.

 

Environmental Knowledge as a Precursor to Sigint

 

This post arises from a brief discussion on Twitter recently of a comment by Jock Bruce that 'If amateurs talk tactics, and professionals talk logistics, then intelligencers talk comms' to which I answered 'Part of agreeing with @jock_bruce here is a belief that environmental awareness is an essential precursor for Sigint, and that all is a waste of time without adequate Sigint Comms from intercept site to HQ. Sigint is about the whole of Comms.' This post addresses environmental knowledge, the first part of my reply.

Everything below refers to Sigint as practised in the Second World and Cold Wars. This is mainly because it's simpler and easier to explain and understand, but also because none of it is in any way classified. The principles are as true today as they always have been, but I don't intend to explain how they have been adapted in the digital era. How does an Analyst Catch a Terrorist? might give you a start if you are interested. Also, and for the record, no Danes were harmed in the production of this blog post, and the memory of regular attendance at a NATO committee whose Chair, a (retired) Danish Army officer, offered a shot of Gammaldansk to all attendees at 8.00 each morning the committee met, has always drawn me to an idea that Denmark's marauding past might be a lot nearer to the surface than people think.

Let us imagine that the UK and Denmark have become bitter enemies and that the threat of armed conflict is no longer a matter of fantasy. GCHQ's Director goes to a series of meetings in Whitehall and is told that GCHQ must start producing intelligence on the Danish military to assess the level of threat posed to the UK. He gets back to Cheltenham and finds that GCHQ has never really targeted Denmark: there are a few diplomatic and Comintern reports, as well as a bit of  Venona, but nothing since the early 1940s, and nothing of significance ever. So what does it do?

We know that the Danish armed forces will be highly structured and that there will be a radio communications system that closely mirrors the command structure, and therefore the order of battle, of the Danish military. We know that there will be formal processes for transmitting orders from higher to lower levels in the hierarchy and for these orders to be acknowledged, as well as for other information to be exchanged. We know that these processes will be highly structured. We know this because military communications are pretty well standardised. There is a best way of using the electromagnetic spectrum to support military activity and this was discovered and developed in the first half of the twentieth century in much the same way by everybody.

So GCHQ's first stop is Defence Intelligence to ask what it knows about the Danish armed forces. Through the Defence Attaché in Copenhagen they will have at least a top level understanding of the structure of the Danish military. It is likely that they will quickly be able to come up with a diagram like this from open source (NB not Osint – more on this later):

(see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Danish_Army#/media/File:Royal_Danish_Army_-_Organization_2021.png)

I will stick to the Danish Army from now on, but developing intelligence on the other two arms of service will happen in the same way.

This is the first concrete information GCHQ has about the organisation of the Danish Army and is of great importance because we can predict from the order of battle how different elements of the Danish Army will communicate with each other. For example, there will be a top level Command network linking Army Command, 1 Bde and 2 Bde. It may well include each of the regiments listed on the Orbat (plus or minus the Guards units: are they purely ceremonial or do they have war roles?) depending on how the military is structured to transition from peacetime to war. Defence Intelligence will be developing its understanding of how the rectangles on the Orbat diagram translate into working relationships with the Danish Army and there will be an ongoing dialogue between DI and GCHQ over this. There will of course be a host of subordinate units: each regiment is likely to have battalions, and each battalion companies: but how many, and where, and what comms structures support them?

GCHQ's collection sites will have been tasked to look for Danish military comms. This is like looking for needles in a haystack, but search specialists have a range of skills and tools which make this less frightening that it might seem to the layman. Direction Finding (DF), for example, makes it easy to say that various unidentified comms aren't from Denmark, as well as giving more or less confidence that other comms are. Linguists will be preparing working aids to teach operators basic differences between Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, so that operator chat can be made use of.

Typically at each level of the hierarchy, from the top level Command network described above, to brigade or regimental networks, the search specialists will be looking for patterns: a Control station calls up subscriber stations to its network at fixed times (say morning and late afternoon) one by one. They acknowledge the call up. Control then says which stations it has messages for, and the subscribers say whether they have messages for Control. Some of the messages in both directions will be relays: for example Control asks the subscriber to forward the message to a subordinate subscriber on a subordinate network or the message might be travelling upwards.

But who is who is not very clear: each entity will have a callsign by which it is identified, and it is highly likely that the callsign will be encrypted and so will change every day. Networks at each level of the hierarchy will work in the same way, so it won't be immediately obvious whether an operator is listening to a top level or a low level. Operator chat will give clues; DF will help; analysis of the messages being relayed to see how many levels of hierarchy they pass through; information from allies will give other clues. You will notice that the content of messages doesn't need to be decrypted for this activity to be carried out. Decryption is a very-nice-to-have short cut, but most of this traffic analysis needs to be done anyway. Hopefully, after a few months, a reasonably clear idea of how the Danish Army communicates will have been developed.

But this is no more than a snapshot. Periodically, each network will change the frequencies it works on and its callsign systems. It will have different procedures for use in wartime, procedures which may or may not be the same as the procedures it uses when the units with which each subscriber is linked deploy on exercise.

But the Danish Army has been brought to the same position as the military forces of countries which GCHQ has been monitoring to 'maintain continuity'. There is an art in making sure that the minimum amount of collection resource (because nobody has ever been able to collect everything) can be applied to making sure that the maximum amount of information about the comms structures of potential targets will be produced. For example, a fortnightly check on the comms structure of a logistics battalion in northern Jutland may be enough to reassure you that nothing has changed; a monthly DF check that the callsign associated with a Headquarters element in a bunkered command post is still in situ may be enough for reassurance, but the frequency with which these checks take place has to be adequate to give adequate notice if there is any change.

The key aim of 'maintaining continuity' is ensuring that regular patterns are known and understood. No country can afford to keep its military on high alert for long, and certainly can't keep it on any sort of alert level for ever. Units have to be rotated between more or less forward roles, have to be reskilled to take on new responsibilities, have to be adapted to new roles, as well as having to respond to random events like weather, but these are all more or less predictable, and the manner in which units adapt, as seen from their comms, can give the clue to how they might adapt to future conditions: to war.

So after a few months we have a good handle on the Danish Army. We know what normality looks like. We know what it looks like when it changes its alert level. We know how its comms are likely to change when readiness levels change. We are confident that if they are ordered to war stations, we will be aware and will be able to report it, and to follow them as their comms move to wartime modes.

But none of this is intelligence. We have developed all of the sources of information available to us to be able to keep a handle on how the Danish Army is communicating. But it is only when we take that information and extrapolate from it, for example to say that a major comms change is a regular occurrence rather than an indicator that the Army is preparing for its war role, that we are producing intelligence.

I said above that the organogram showing the high level Danish Army Orbat wasn't intelligence: it's information. It assembles readily available data into readily usable information, but it doesn't answer what for a Sigint organisation – as well as the subsequent all source assessment that Sigint feeds into – is the key question: 'so what?' The same question applies to Osint: yes, finding the data and assembling it into information is important, but the 'intelligence' part of Osint should mean that it explains how the information illuminates what the target's intentions and realistic capabilities are.

All of this is environmental knowledge. Until this level of knowledge has been built up, a Sigint organisation can't begin to produce intelligence. It has to expend significant resource to maintain the environmental information that enables it to turn into an intelligence producer when a target turns active, and is no longer just watched on a 'care and maintenance' basis. And if it has been difficult and complicated with a nation state's military forces, how much more difficult is it with an individual with a telephone? And if state interception of HF signals in free space where users had 'no expectation of privacy' was once unconstrained by the law, as the state (in the UK at least) 'owned' the way in which the electromagnetic spectrum was used, how much more complex is it today to navigate all of the necessary oversight and legislative constraints to obtain and retain information which might never be used?

I suppose that what I want you to go away with is that Sigint is a much more complicated business than you might have thought, and certainly isn't about intercepting and listening to every telephone conversation between London and Washington. The art and science of Sigint happens a lot further back than the point at which intelligence reports are produced, much as a military force's achieving significant effect on the battlefield owes almost everything to what had happened in the background, over a long period of time.

"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."

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.

Who was 'Jumbo' Travis?

I've had a couple of questions recently about 'Jumbo' Travis, Sir Edward Travis. He was Deputy Head of GC&CS from 1919-1942, then Deputy Director (Services) 1942-44, then Director GCHQ until he retired in 1952. Apart from three cryptanalysts (Alexander, Tiltman and Turing) he was the only person to have a room named after him in the Doughnut when GCHQ moved there in 2001. He was obviously a key figure, but he really isn't well known.

He passed for Paymaster in 1909 and might have had a normal Paymaster career, but found himself posted as Secretary's Clerk to Admiral Jellicoe, the  Commander in Chief on 4 August 1914. By 1916 he had been loaned to the Admiralty by Jellicoe for the compilation of cryptosystems to be used by the Fleet, Jellicoe having being astounded at Travis's breaking the codes used by the C in C himself.

When GC&CS was formed in November 1919 Travis became its number two, responsible for GC&CS's over mission, cipher security. He had a public persona as the UK's representative at international naval communications conferences, and was also responsible for acquiring the UK's first Enigma machine (now in the possession of GCHQ). He was unsuccessful as the person responsible for cipher security: although only able to advise, and not mandate, standards for security to UK ministries, his advice was dire, and he must carry a significant share of responsibility for the fact that all of UK military systems (with one exception) were being read by the Germans by June 1940. (It's interesting that the one exception, Typex, an Enigma clone made more complex than Enigma), was  designed by an RAF officer who refused to allow GC&CS any say in the design of his machine.

By 1938 Travis had been given responsibility for the Service sections of GC&CS - though I'm not aware that anybody has looked at how this came about. (Was 'C' - at that time 'Quex' Sinclair - already looking for a wartime alternative to Denniston, GC&CS's Head?) The first period of GC&CS's time at Bletchley Park is normally told in terms of Denniston's increasing  inability to manage the rapid expansion of wartime Sigint and gradually losing control, but rarely in terms of Travis's being able to be seen by everyone as the man who could make Bletchley work. 

A year after Denniston's dismissal from Bletchley Park with the diplomatic and commercial mission, Travis was able for the first time to enunciate (at least in part) a vision for Sigint in which he would create an organisation in which GC&CS/GCHQ would be in command of Sigint and the military would merely provide manpower and intelligence requirements. His mastery over the 'comitology' - bending the committee structure created to oversee Sigint to give him what he wanted - gave him complete control over Second World War Sigint in the UK. He not only achieved this, but also made himself (and GCHQ) independent of SIS, allowing 'C' to retain the title of Director-General Sigint without any control or responsibility for it. He also developed Denniston's vision of UKUSA and developed a system of Sigint sharing that neither 'C' or anybody else was able to stop (perhaps better, that neither 'C' or anybody else was able to understand).

After the war, Travis created the GCHQ which would be so successful during the Cold War. He redrew the boundary between cryptanalysis and traffic analysis and allowed Sigint to become the predominant supplier of intelligence on the Soviet bloc to defence Intelligence.

Ironically, he never understood communications security beyond the basic codebook level of the first part of the First World War, and, after having some responsibility for the dire state of British insecurity until Sir Edward Bridges began to knock heads together in 1942, was happy to see Comsec as, first of all semi-independent of GCHQ, and eventually as an agency completely (well, almost completely) independent of GCHQ.

Travis isn't well known because he falls between the stools on which the myth of Second World War British Sigint balances. He understood cryptanalysis but wasn't a cryppie. He was a manager in an organisation which thought it could do without management. He saw the big picture of 'ownership of Sigint' before anybody else, and manipulated the committee structure to enable him to 'bag' ownership for GCHQ. But mainly he had a vision for what a Sigint organisation - an intelligence organisation in which each discipline needed to produce intelligence from the interception antenna to the finished end product report - might look like, a global vision he had conceived while the people with whom he was meeting were simply fighting to place their towels on deckchairs.

Gwen's Road to Bletchley Park

In December 2022 we said farewell to a 98 year old former colleague, Gwen Tovey who in 1942, while still Gwen Herbert, had begun a career in signals intelligence which lasted until she retired. Seven or eight years before she retired, she dictated her memories of her time at Bletchley and of the move of GCHQ to Cheltenham into a cassette recorder and these were transcribed by a friend. This transcription was spread across a number of separate pieces which were shared with retired and current members of GCHQ. At her funeral I asked members of her family and the friend who had transcribed them whether I could publish them here, and as everybody agreed, here is the first instalment.

Part One: "Why Me?"

The inhabitants of Bletchley Park were many and various, and so were the routes by which they got there - but I challenge any survivor to match the unlikelihood of my selection! The process which led to my first walk up the narrow. dark and sooty path from Bletchley station to the gates of the park and the suddenness of my encounter with a world which up to then had existed only in books were probably also rather unusual but utterly captivating.

In late 1941 I was in the third year Sixth Form of a small grammar school for girls in a town of some thirty thousand people, eight miles north of Coventry. My Head Mistress came home from some conference and said that the ATS proposed recruiting a dozen or so Oxford graduates for some unspecified special duties and there might conceivably be room for one or two school-leavers in the group. I had just spectacularly failed the entrance exam for Girton and had said that I was not going to try again in the middle of a war. So I said 'yes' to trying for one of these hypothetical places. I can't pretend that this was pure patriotism. It was a decision influenced by the bone-aching chill of two nights at Girton in November and by the humiliating realisation that it would be ridiculous to think that my languages were up to university standards. My German was almost entirely self-taught as the only staff member who could teach it succumbed to TB after two lessons. My written French was up to scholarship standard but speaking it was another matter. I had never even seen a foreigner until the War brought Poles to a nearby airfield (and the King's Own Scottish Borderers to the town, speaking an equally incomprehensible language). My ever resourceful Headmistress persuaded the Polish Meteorological Officer to give me practice in French conversation. I never told her, but the last thing Jerzy wanted to do was to talk French because, like many of his fellow officers, he had been badly treated in France; but he kept up the pretence because he liked using the school tennis courts and liked even more my mother's raspberry jam and sponge cakes. He wanted to talk (in English) about Shakspir and Sho (GBS of that Ilk). Jerzy went on to anglicise his name and to marry the daughter of a British Admiral and became Professor of Physics in a northern university.

So now imagine me in early 1942, possibly about to become a mole, aged 17¾, paralysingly shy, wearing a borrowed "grown up" hat, setting out for London where I had never been. I found my way to Devonshire House and was shown into a dusty room and asked to fill in forms. Under the heading "languages" I put down Modem English, Middle English on the strength of having "done" Chaucer's Prologue, French, Latin and elementary German. Then I was led into an interview room. The Chairman was a rather short and rather round Colonel. On his left was an ATS Senior Commander (Major) wearing as much make-up as a film star. The third member of the Board was a civilian from the British Museum named C. J. Gadd. (Some 55 years later when I became fascinated by ancient Sumerian history, I discovered he was famous for having recognised that a carved cylinder seal found in the city of Ur came from the Indus valley. This led to much work on the incredible amount of trade between the two civilisations between 2500 and 1900 BC.)

Most of the interview passed in a blur, but I clearly remember answering two questions in a way which could have led them to believe that I knew far too much about what I was being interviewed for and that it might be safer to have me inside, as it were. The first pivotal question was "what do you think you might do when you leave school?", and the second was "what would you call a circle turned inside out?" My totally innocent answers were, firstly, that I thought it would be interesting to be part of the BBC team which was monitoring German Public Radio broadcasts, though I feared my German was not good enough, and secondly, that if a circle were turned inside out its radii might look like a star. The answer caused a definite frisson because of course recruits would be studying German communications and the German names for military communications in the most used formats were Kreis and Stern - circle and star. I cannot think of any other reason why they should have chosen me, but after an agonising wait they said I had been accepted on condition that the ATS also considered me suitable.

That ends the first part of my saga. The next was bizarre but in a different way.

Part 2: "Basic Training" - for what?

After being accepted by the BP Selection Board I was given a date to attend an ATS recruitment centre. I cycled to Coventry, sailed through the medical but found the officers were distinctly miffed by the strict instructions they had received that on no account was I to be put through their trade aptitude tests. However, I passed muster, and two weeks after leaving school I proceeded to Talavera Barracks in Northampton, where we were doled out with approximately fitting and hideously unflattering uniform. My appearance was not improved when I washed my khaki stockings in Persil and they came out bright yellow. (I did once play Malvolio). We lived in one of the numerous wooden huts, each labelled "28 men - 8 horses". We slept on bunk beds on excruciatingly hard straw-filled palliasses. At night earwigs fell down on the unfortunate girl on the top layer and crawled down to the overheated recruit on the lower level.

The command "outside in threes" had us marching off to meals, P.T., route marches, lectures on hair nits and the Battle of Talavera, but most often to drill on the barracks square. There, in a blisteringly hot August, we marched about, exasperating the male Regimental Sergeant Major since half the company never learned which was their left leg. My worst experience was when, standing to attention, and having been told "do not blanketty blank dare to blink", I became squintingly aware that a large wasp was crawling up my plump cheek. The route marches affected many of the girls in my hut - a lot of them were conscripts from East London. After what seemed to me a gentle stroll, admittedly over some fairly hummocky fields, they returned exhausted and with badly blistered feet. Another trial was gas drill. The ATS sergeant had repeatedly instructed us what to do if there were a gas warning. She suddenly shouted "Gas" so we flung ourselves on the ground, wrenched off our caps and fumbled our gas masks out of their cardboard boxes, which we carried everywhere, and put them on. Sadly, a little white dog appeared and ran away with my cap. The squad was spluttering with laughter and so had to take off their gas masks. The sergeant, fearing she was losing control of the squad, was minded to put me on a charge until some bold soul pointed out that a prostrate girl in a gas mask could not possibly be capable of "Conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline".

We were not allowed out of camp without some very special reason so were able to save four weeks' pay which in total amounted to £2.

Thus ended my first encounter with the real ATS. Subsequently we were attached to the Intelligence Corps. The discipline they had tried to instil into us at Talavera was replaced by the discipline of the job we were doing and a determination to avoid as far as possible any interference with that job.

Part 3: Secret revealed

After our exertions in Northampton we were given a 48-hour leave before gathering at Beaumanor, the ancestral home of the Herrick family in Leicestershire. The Manor is surrounded by parkland and by 1942 this was planted with aerials and wooden huts. In the huts ATS girls laboured to transcribe the Morse code radio transmissions of German military units of all kinds. Reams of paper (which we called logs) were filled with messages and any intervening chatter. This was mainly in Q-code - for example QSA IMI means "what is my signal strength?". When we got to the park two of our group, both German linguists, were sent to join people attempting to decrypt the messages but most of us became "traffic analysts", following networks and stations as they changed frequencies and callsigns every day and trying to establish order of battle and to help cryptographers in various ways.

Many, many books, some good and some awful, have been written about techniques employed at Bletchley and at its outstations, but for any younger colleagues who want to learn about what it was like and how it fitted into the wider picture and its importance I would recommend two books by Michael Smith - "Station X", published in 1988 and "Secrets of Station X", published in 2001. The latter has more technical details but the former version has more about the atmosphere and the personalities. A remarkable evocation of Bletchley, both inside and outside the park, appears in Robert Harris's novel "Enigma" (comparable with his evocation of "Pompeii").

But before we knew anything of all this we were asked to sign the Official Secrets Act: anyone who felt they did not want to were to say so and would be released. It was now that we got to know the others in our group. I had already met, though only briefly, two other school-leavers who were friends from GPDST Sutton High School but Talavera had kept us pretty well restricted to our hut groups. There were eleven Oxford graduates and various life-long friendships began at this time. When we got into the classroom the next day we found an ATS subaltern, drafted in from who knows where (I suspect nepotism) and a whole group of soldiery who were destined for tactical units in the field.

The work was fascinating from day one to the penultimate day which we spent endeavouring to make sense of the great heaps of logs and reporting on our findings and then to the very last day when we were told that all had done well and all must have a prize of sewing a lance corporal's stripe onto our uniform because there were no Privates in the Intelligence Corps. (Some hardened battle-scarred fellows would say there were no soldiers either and that the rather attractive Tudor rose of the badge represents a pansy resting on its laurels).

We had some guest lecturers from BP but most of the instruction was done by Major Jolowicz, in civilian life the Professor of Law at Oxford. He was brilliant, not just in expounding technical matters and methods of attack, but also in somehow creating an atmosphere of hushed reverence. This was only broken once when an aircraft crashed into a hillside just beyond the manor and two Canadian soldiers were up and away out of the big bay window before Major J could thunder "Sit down".

The second of the resident lecturers (puzzlingly from a famous naval family) looked like a teddy bear in his khaki battle dress and was a man of great deliberation. He once drew a complex diagram on the blackboard in blue chalk, contemplated it in silence for a few moments, and then rubbed it out and did it all again in red.

There were snags in life, of course, not as far as the work was concerned but out of office hours. Moving from earwiggy huts to billets in substantial houses in the rural surroundings of the manor should have been pleasant, but unfortunately I didn't like either the girl I was billeted with or our landlady. Elizabeth was grumpy and sleepy, grumpy because I woke her every morning clattering about polishing my shoes and buttons while she wanted to sleep to the last minute. Our landlady was very nouvelle riche, always talking about her dead "hubby" who took her to Monte Carlo and gave her gifts of wonderful china - the hideous stuff was in glass cabinets all round the house, and I nearly crashed into one of them when I fell down the stairs one night on the way to the bathroom. The bathroom contained the only example I have seen of a shiny steel bath which acted as a distorting mirror when one sat in the regulation allowance of 2" of water. Every morning, once we were dressed, we had to slog the one and a half miles along the road and up the drive to the manor without even a cup of tea. Breakfast was taken in a beautifully panelled room and usually consisted of a sort of bright yellow pasty stuffed with some rather fusty prunes.

There was very little in the way of entertainment and at first I was rather shy of all these people who seemed so sophisticated. Their casual conversations were full of references to theatres, opera, art galleries, museums and foreign holidays. However, I soon began to enjoy trips on local buses to the only cinema in miles and an occasional fairly edible meal at a British Restaurant which cost 6 (old) pence. The chief pleasure for most of us came from walks in the countryside including field paths and going up and down the occasional craggy hill.

I quite often walked with a soldier who had been born in a high valley in Switzerland and then emigrated to some remote spot in the Canadian Rockies. Friedrich was intent on teaching me what he considered to be essential life skills. One of these, that of coming rapidly downhill without falling over, did come in useful in later Scottish holidays, though I never had occasion to test the rest of this lesson, which is that it is the only way to escape if you are being pursued by a bear. Nor did I ever find myself in the middle of nowhere in deep snow, and be thankful to know that by digging myself a deep hole I could survive the night. Friedrich also considered me dangerously innocent. One evening, having escorted me to the landlady's garden gate, he proceeded to teach me how to break the hold of a man attacking from behind. This was all in broad daylight and was witnessed by Mrs Whatever-Her-Name-Was, who wrote to my parents that she feared for my morals. This sent my mother into a fit but my father simply laughed because he had met Friedrich and Mrs X when he cycled over (petrol strictly for business) to bring me some apples from the garden. He knew perfectly well that any danger to my morals was, to say the least, unlikely. Disaster – potentially greater than that of any little white dog – was averted and I went on with full marks, unsullied name and a clear conscience to all the wonders of Bletchley Park.

I'll aim to put out the next instalment next week.