This authorised history of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), otherwise the official version of Signals Intelligence (Sigint) in Britain, has been a while coming. It should have been published in 2019 to coincide with the organisation’s centenary, but required a lot of signing off, not least from its close partners, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, collectively known as ‘Five Eyes’.
It was well worth the wait, not just for its unique access to internal papers, but also for its insight into current thinking at Britain’s most respected intelligence agency, a status gained partly because of its successes (most famously, its reading of German ULTRA material at Bletchley in the Second World War), but also because Sigint has become the most significant source of information (secret or otherwise) in the age of computers and the internet. As John Ferris puts it, ‘it makes professionals one-eyed men in a world of the blind’.
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