GCHQ Centenary

John Howell Excerpts

Thursday 11th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Alex Chalk]

I am very grateful to my right hon. Friend. Selflessness and discretion are the watchwords that so many of these dedicated public servants live by, and he has explained the point extremely well.

[John Howell (Henley) (Con)]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Chalk]

I give way.

[John Howell]

My hon. Friend mentioned cyber. Would he pay tribute, with me, to all those people who work in cyber, because that is the most incredibly difficult area to deal with, and they are doing us a great service?

[Alex Chalk]

I am very happy to do so, and I will come on to that in a moment. Let me make some progress now.

As the title of the debate suggests, GCHQ has been at the frontline of our nation's security for 100 years and, although based in Cheltenham, it is truly a UK-wide institution. Three of GCHQ’s directors have come from Scotland. Scots were behind the founding of signals intelligence. The Director of Operations for the National Cyber Security Centre is Welsh. Today, GCHQ has sites across our nation.

The organisation was formed in 1919 under the original name of the Government Code and Cypher School, specialising in cyphers and encryption—securing our own codes and cracking those of our adversaries. As the engaging GCHQ Instagram stories have reminded us, cryptography and military intelligence are as old as war itself. The Spartans used cyphers. Julius Caesar did too. Elizabeth I’s famous spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, used the methods of a 9th-century Arabian scholar, Abu Yusuf al-Kindi, to crack enemy codes. Shakespeare wrote in the play “Henry V”:

“The king hath note of all that they intend,

By interception which they dream not of.”

Those words are engraved on a plaque at Bletchley Park.

Back in 1919, the Government Code and Cypher School was the result of the merger of Room 40 in the Admiralty, responsible for naval intelligence, and MI1(b) in the War Office, responsible for military intelligence. It was said in one of the books that I have read on this subject to be,

“an eccentric mix of art historians, schoolmasters, Cambridge dons and Presbyterian ministers”.

In those days, being able to solve the Daily Telegraph crossword in under 12 minutes was, it appears, routinely used as part of the recruitment test; but of course we know that GC&CS broke the German Navy’s codes, and famously it intercepted the 1917 telegram for German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann that revealed the German plan to begin unrestricted submarine warfare in the north Atlantic, in breach of the commitment to US President Woodrow Wilson. That contributed to the US joining the allied war effort.

In 1939, GC&CS was given the name GCHQ to better disguise its secret work. In that year, shortly after Munich, Neville Chamberlain was given an intelligence report that showed that Hitler habitually referred to him in private as “der alter Arschloch”. Parliamentary decorum prevents me translating that, Mr Speaker, but I can say that that revelation, in the words of one diplomat, was said to have

“had a profound effect on Chamberlain.”

By June 1944, Bletchley Park had accessed the communications between Gerd von Rundstedt, the Commander of the German Army in the west, and his superiors in Berlin. The importance of decrypted German communications—known as the “Ultra secret”—which my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) has referred to, to the war effort is universally recognised. It gave the Allies an invaluable insight into the enemy’s capabilities and intentions.

Of course, the world has moved on a great deal since then. In 1984, Denis Healey said in this House of Commons:

“GCHQ has been by far the most valuable source of intelligence for the British Government ever since it began operating at Bletchley during the last war. British skills in interception and code-breaking are unique and highly valued by…our allies. GCHQ has been a key element in our relationship with the United States for more than forty years.”—[Official Report, 27 February 1984; Vol. 55, c. 35.]

As the director of GCHQ said at an event I attended in London only yesterday, GCHQ might be 100 years old, but its time is now.