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Behind the enigma : the authorised history…
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Behind the enigma : the authorised history of GCHQ, Britain's secret cyber-intelligence agency (utgåvan 2020)

av John Robert Ferris

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1162233,584 (1.83)2
For a hundred years GCHQ Government Communications Headquarters has been at the forefront of British secret statecraft. Born out of the need to support military operations in the First World War, and fought over ever since, today it is the UK's biggest intelligence, security and cyber agency and a powerful tool of the British state. Famed primarily for its codebreaking achievements at Bletchley Park against Enigma ciphers in the Second World War, GCHQ has intercepted, interpreted and disrupted the information networks of Britain's foes for a century, and yet it remains the least known and understood of British intelligence services. It has been one of the most open-minded, too- GCHQ has always demanded a diversity of intellectual firepower, finding it in places which strike us as ground-breaking today, and allying it to the efforts of ordinary men and women to achieve extraordinary insights in war, diplomacy and peace. GCHQ shapes British decision-making more than any other intelligence organisation and, along with its partners in the Five Eyes intelligence partnership, has become ever more crucial in an age governed by information technology. Based on unprecedented access to documents in GCHQ's archive, many of them hitherto classified, this is the first book to authoritatively explain the entire history of one of the world's most potent intelligence agencies. Many of the major international episodes of the last century including the retreat from empire, the Cold War and the Falklands become fully explicable only in the light of the secret intelligence record. Written by one of the world's leading experts in intelligence and strategy, Behind the Enigma reveals the fascinating truth behind this most remarkable and enigmatic of organisations.… (mer)
Medlem:Tony.C
Titel:Behind the enigma : the authorised history of GCHQ, Britain's secret cyber-intelligence agency
Författare:John Robert Ferris
Info:London : Macmillan, 2020.
Samlingar:Ditt bibliotek
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Taggar:Ingen/inga

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Behind the Enigma av John Ferris

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This dense book is an authorised history - written with a high degree of access to official papers - of GCHQ, the UK's code-breaking and electronic intelligence centre. It also covers its predecessor, the Government Code & Cipher School, and its more famous incarnation, Bletchley Park.

This is not an easy read. The author seems to have decided early on that his key audience would be cryptographers and analysts, and so there is a vast amount of cryptological jargon introduced early on, and the reader is left on their own in terms of looking for an explanation. If it's not the jargon, it's the abbreviations, not all of which are explained in the glossary at the back of the book. And, as the official history of an organisation, there is a lot of detail on internal politics, the layout of the GCHQ Cheltenham site (which, without a map, makes little sense), and a lot of Civil Service jargon, not all of which means what a reader even slightly familiar with the Civil Service will think it means. (The one major factual quibble I had was late on, when the author refers to the 'privatisation' of the Post Office in 1969. But that was no privatisation as we came to understand it in the 1990s; rather, it refers to the removal of the Post Office from the Civil Service and its reformation as a Government Owned Corporation [GoCo]. "Corporatisation" would have been a better word.)

It is instructive to compare this book with Richard Aldrich's GCHQ: the uncensored story of Britain's most secret intelligence agency, written in 2010. Aldrich's book concentrates on the post-war history of GCHQ, and picks its topics carefully from unclassified sources. For example, he was careful to avoid controversial matters such as the UK/USA alliance between GCHQ and America's NSA. John Ferris, writing ten years later, had the benefit of greater access to official material and a shift in attitudes regarding GCHQ generally. Ferris was also keen to examine the role of intelligence acquired from intercepts in decision-making at times of crisis. The result is a much more comprehensive work than Aldrich's - though readers may wonder if the resulting book is too comprehensive.

Ferris makes occasional humorous asides, and some of his turn of phrase is a little idiosyncratic. In other places, his wording is rather convoluted and I had to re-read some paragraphs a couple of times to fully understand what he was intending. It's not as if I don't read "difficult" books, but there were times when I actually struggled with the writer's language and constructions.

And yet: if anyone has had any contact with the secret world, there is gold to be mined from the verbiage. I admit to having some skin in this game. I was a civil service trade unionist through the 1980s, 90s and the first ten years of the current century. I had some brief contact with the GCHQ trade union campaign, or rather the ending of it, as the particular grouping within my union was the initial home for the reformulated GCHQ trade union after the incoming Blair government restored trade union rights in 1997. I was at our union conference that year when the lifting of the ban was announced, and as an executive member had some minor role in the stage management of the announcement.

But I also recollect that my sister, who lives near Bude, in Cornwall, location of the GCHQ listening station at Morwenstow, for a while had a neighbour in a long-term let who declared himself a "naval engineer on a radio listening ship". And once, at a science fiction convention, I met a visiting lone American who, when asked what he did for a living, said that he was "on secondment to Cheltenham from his company". When pressed, he just repeated, with added emphasis, "I'm on secondment to CHELTENHAM from my Company". Only then did the penny drop; even in those days, it was fairly general knowledge that "the Company" is how the CIA likes to refer to itself, "Oh," said a friend who was there, "don't worry, we've all signed the Official Secrets Act!” (Most of us were civil servants of one sort or another.) “Now, what did you think of Larry Niven's Ringworld?"

So I've always had some degree of interest in the secret world. And when I persevered with this book. I uncovered some gems. The book opens with the prehistory of signals intelligence (Sigint) which Britain was an early leader in, because the world's telegraph systems all passed through Britain. However, intelligence-gathering was haphazard in the nineteenth century, in part because of the official view that "Gentlemen don't read other Gentlemen's letters". But Realpolitik soon took over, and in the First World War, the UK was a world leader in signals interception and code-breaking, though this was helped a lot by other nations being exceptionally lax in this - both Germany and Russia worked from printed codebooks that were years old and not replaced even when they were known to have been compromised.

The ad hoc nature of the organisation of intelligence and code-breaking in the years up to 1918 are rather reflected in the story as told in the early chapters of the book. The narrative seemed very unstructured and this did not help comprehension, I have to admit to having skimmed quite a bit of the early story in the 1920s - until I hit pay dirt, in the form of an account of the breaking of Turkish codes during the confrontation between Britain and Turkey over the deployment of naval force in the eastern Mediterranean. This almost reached the stage of war; Bolshevik Russia sided with Turkey, and there was a de facto cold war between Britain and the Soviet Union up to their invasion by Germany in 1941.

Ferris explodes what he calls "the myth" of Bletchley Park. He doesn't tell the accepted story of Alan Turing, lone genius, struggling to break the aptly-named Enigma code. Rather, Ferris lays out the broader story that most cryptology in the pre-war years was done with cryptographic machines of which Enigma was only the most recent. And which GC&CS had already broken and had built the machines, the "bombes", to do that code-breaking. We see Turing briefly meeting the Polish cryptanalysts who worked with Enigma and who escaped from Poland in the first weeks of the war. After meeting these experts, and examining the patent application for Enigma which was in the Patent Office Library (not mentioned in this book), Turing announced that he knew how to break Enigma, and the rest was just a matter of time and number-crunching. And another part of the myth is that the team working on Enigma had a flash of insight, that many German signals always ended with the words "Heil Hitler!", thus giving the codebreakers a key. This is debunked as it is explained that textual analysis of signals in sufficient quantity will reveal to the experienced analyst series of common phrases and textual constructions which helps give access to the code. "Heil Hitler!" was just the latest such common phrase that enabled the codebreakers to do their work.

The myth of Bletchley Park continued with the accepted account of the fate of the first electronic computer, Colossus. The generally-accepted version of the story is that Churchill ordered Colossus destroyed at the war's end to preserve security. In fact:

- there were ten Colossus machines, not just one;
- two were retained by the organisation (now renamed GCHQ) because they were in use breaking Soviet teleprinter codes;
- the rest were dismantled mainly because the space or their parts were needed for other projects, or they could not be moved without dismantling them; and
- one of then was reassembled at UMIST in Manchester, and (with a few modifications) became the Manchester Mark One, the first publicly-acknowledged programmable electronic computer.

The "myth" of Bletchley Park is put into context as being one of the ways in which GCHQ had made its secret activities acceptable to the British public and to successive governments. This, in turn, made GCHQ spending - especially on their flagship HQ building, the "Doughnut" in Cheltenham - acceptable in the eyes of a polity otherwise sceptical of the scale of government spending on both large and small projects.

The book goes into considerable detail about the alliance between GCHQ and the American National Security Agency (NSA). This alliance exploited the cryptanalytical superiority of the British and allied it with the resources that the NSA could bring to bear on common security issues. This is not to say that all was sweetness and light; the US Navy, for example, had never wanted there to be any British involvement in the Pacific campaign in World War 2, and there were times when British and American interests did not perfectly align, such as the Suez Crisis and the Falklands War. But GCHQ proved an invaluable ally in the major struggles the NSA had - those with their own Government and their rival military services. Conspiracy theorists like to mutter darkly about the "New World Order"; this book talks at length about the intergovernmental conspiracy that really exists - but it is a technocratic conspiracy of equals to defend each other against the machinations of their own governments.

As I said above, I had some contact with the campaign to restore trade union tights at GCHQ. The account of the union ban in this book is quite straightforward and not tainted by partisan views of the roles of trade unions in general. It describes how industrial relations in GCHQ were a mess, brought about by its accretion over time of different grades and specialisms of staff with different representative structures which would inevitably cause demarcation disputes. However, the author misses a fundamental change in the business of state brought about by the union ban. Part of the opposition to the ban involved a legal challenge by the Council of Civil Service Trade Unions (CoCSU), and in the course of this challenge, the courts pointed out that civil servants did not have contracts of employment, instead being employed on the basis of being "Crown Servants". (In our unwritten constitution, you cannot make a contract with the Crown, as the Crown has supreme authority over the courts and so any court ruling against the Crown cannot be enforced.) This caused an anomaly in their employment status and thus the application of employment law to civil servants. As a consequence, all civil servants since the 1980s have had contracts of employment with their employing Department; those of us employed before the ruling were deemed to have a "quasi-contractual relationship"! with the Crown, which in effect worked like a contract. So a dispute in GCHQ had ramifications across the entire Civil Service.

There are a lot of accounts of different conflicts that the British were involved with, all analysed from the point of view of intelligence and security. This includes conflicts now generally forgotten, such as the Indonesian Confrontation. There is a detailed account of the Falklands War from the inside, especially throwing light on the sinking of the Argentinian warship General Belgrano. One of the key messages of the book is the way in which GCHQ competence in signals intelligence was not matched by the intelligent use of that information - in particular, the way that the World War 2 British Commander of Force Z, the detachment of the Royal Navy in Singapore, disregarded all the intelligence he was sent about Japanese intentions. The upshot of this was the loss of Singapore and of British naval supremacy in the Far East, which the author suggests was the key event that led to the eventual disintegration of the British Empire.

But all these gems have to be unearthed from amongst the alphabet soup of GCHQ jargon, and I can imagine that many readers will not last the course. Definitely a book for dipping into as a research source, rather than as a thrilling bedside read, which it is not. ( )
  RobertDay | Dec 8, 2023 |
This book is an authorised history of the British agency responsible for intercepting and analysing messages between governments, military, individuals or other entities in support of British strategic aims. In other words, spying through messages rather than by suborning people. ‘Authorised’ because the author was given access to agency archives previously regarded as classified.

The subtitle is useful, since without it you might think you were reading the corporate history of some middling manufacturing company of no consequence. If you are looking for any information on what GCHQ does (except at the most vague of levels), how they do it, or for any anecdotes or ‘war stories’ on success or failures, then this book contains none of that. If you want to read about the creation, merging and deleting of departments (all unnamed and who knows what they do), or the balance between male and female employees at various stages through the years, then this is the book for you.

Someone has taken what may have been a readable and interesting first draft of this book and edited each sentence individually to remove all meaning and information that may have been conveyed until we are left with just words on a page.

Of potential value to future historians of desk allocations in the Civil Service, or the true impact of the switch from foolscap to A4, this is worthless to the general reader.

So useless is this book that I am tempted to consider that it is all a big joke played on us, the reader. Perhaps by applying some algorithm to the text (every 11th word or 7th letter, say) an actual general history of GCHQ might appear. ( )
  pierthinker | Jul 25, 2022 |
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For a hundred years GCHQ Government Communications Headquarters has been at the forefront of British secret statecraft. Born out of the need to support military operations in the First World War, and fought over ever since, today it is the UK's biggest intelligence, security and cyber agency and a powerful tool of the British state. Famed primarily for its codebreaking achievements at Bletchley Park against Enigma ciphers in the Second World War, GCHQ has intercepted, interpreted and disrupted the information networks of Britain's foes for a century, and yet it remains the least known and understood of British intelligence services. It has been one of the most open-minded, too- GCHQ has always demanded a diversity of intellectual firepower, finding it in places which strike us as ground-breaking today, and allying it to the efforts of ordinary men and women to achieve extraordinary insights in war, diplomacy and peace. GCHQ shapes British decision-making more than any other intelligence organisation and, along with its partners in the Five Eyes intelligence partnership, has become ever more crucial in an age governed by information technology. Based on unprecedented access to documents in GCHQ's archive, many of them hitherto classified, this is the first book to authoritatively explain the entire history of one of the world's most potent intelligence agencies. Many of the major international episodes of the last century including the retreat from empire, the Cold War and the Falklands become fully explicable only in the light of the secret intelligence record. Written by one of the world's leading experts in intelligence and strategy, Behind the Enigma reveals the fascinating truth behind this most remarkable and enigmatic of organisations.

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