The recent murder of a British spy has focused public attention on the UK's top secret Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).A few years ago, Britain's most secretive intelligence agency began staging an annual family day for its employees. The Government Communications Headquarters, better known as GCHQ, inched open the doors of its Cheltenham offices to give relatives of the 5,000 staff a glimpse of what goes on there.
There was a time when such transparency would have been unthinkable. Even the very existence of the hush-hush surveillance centre was officially denied until its cover was blown in the 1970s. GCHQ's 30 or so listening posts and outstations dotted around the country were disguised as defence establishments and any snoopers peering through the electrified fences received short shrift. Twenty years ago, it would have been inconceivable for Gareth Williams, the man found murdered in a London flat this week, to have been so readily identified as a GCHQ worker on secondment to MI6 – and certainly not before the police had established the motive for his gruesome demise. Nor would it have been disclosed that GCHQ workers in London live in a network of Pimlico flats registered to a shadowy offshore front company. And why were a mobile phone and numerous SIM cards laid out on a table near the murder scene? There are some in Whitehall who are irritated that this information has come out before they can establish exactly what occurred.
Even though Mr Williams may have been killed for reasons that have nothing to do with his work, the circumstances of his death have shone an unwelcome light into the world he inhabited. True, it is less mysterious than it used to be. GCHQ now has a website, and its giant £330 million doughnut-shaped building at Benhall is hardly hidden away. But what goes on inside, especially the surveillance techniques, remains highly sensitive and top secret. The family day is partly designed to "reduce the mystique" surrounding GCHQ and give relatives a sketchy idea of its work because employees are forbidden from talking about it openly. But while a number of special exhibits were on show, visitors were kept well away from any sensitive areas.
This gradual emergence of GCHQ from its jealously guarded obscurity follows the decision of its two sister services, MI5 and MI6, to open up (the former more so than the latter). But while transparency is now all the rage, the hand of GCHQ's director, Iain Lobban, was also forced by the prospect of the public sector spending axe – with the secret agencies not immune from serious cuts. Although the figures are never broken down, Lobban's organisation takes the lion's share of the annual £2.4 billion intelligence budget because of its highly technical work and expensive kit.
GCHQ, aware it would have a serious fight on its hands, evidently decided to justify the sums spent on it by going public about the need for surveillance – if not its techniques. As part of the offensive, the BBC was given unprecedented access to GCHQ this year for a documentary presented by Gordon Correra. In an article for this newspaper, Correra likened the inside of the "doughnut" to a bustling modern airport, with open-plan offices leading off the circular thoroughfare.
"The technical brain of GCHQ is underground," he explained. "Pass through the security points and you arrive in a series of vast halls with endless rows of blinking computers. In all there are about 10,000 square metres of computer space, an area into which the Wembley football pitch could comfortably be fitted."
It is here where code-breaking experts like Gareth Williams ply what can be a lonely trade intercepting communications, whether by phone, fax or email or via other electronic signals. They are in the frontline of a new form of warfare fought in the ether. The principle enemies are jihadi terrorists, in this country and overseas, and state-sponsored cyberhackers (especially Chinese) who are trying to find out our secrets.
By: Shelldrake
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