Powers of Sigint and Comint

This book is a deep dive into one of Britain's pioneer intelligence agencies

Behind the Enigma: The authorised history of GCHQ Britain’s secret cyber intelligence agency

Author: John Ferris
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Pages: 823

Price: Rs 999

The acquisition, and analysis of signals intelligence and communications intelligence — information and data sieved out of intercepted communications — can provide a decisive edge “in a large minority of cases” according to the author. Humint — the acquisition of intelligence by humans — has been far more glamorised in countless books and films. But signals intelligence and communications Intelligence — Sigint and Comint— is more reliable, and 99.9 per cent of modern intelligence acquisition falls into this category.

This is a deep dive into the 101-year history of Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, commonly known as GCHQ, one of the pioneer Sigint agencies. The author is, remarkably enough, not British. He’s a Canadian professor, who was given access to a large chunk of GCHQ records, with an agreement to steer clear of certain sensitive areas.

The book has 15 chapters, subdivided into multiple sub-sections. It’s a door stopper written in academic style with an assumption that readers will have a working knowledge of modern military history and realpolitik.

Historically, Sigint started with covertly reading diplomatic mails, and the deciphering of semaphore signals on battlefields. It exploded in the era of telegraphs and radio. After a sprint through several centuries, John Ferris focuses on details at Sigint from World War I to the present. GCHQ evolved out of its predecessor, The Government Code and Cipher School (GCCS), after World War I. GCCS operated out of Room 40 of the Admiralty Headquarters and deciphered radio and telegraph signals. “Room 40” started a tradition of recruiting talented amateurs. It had 9,500 personnel by 1918, including over 2,000 women, some of them cryptographers.

Among other triumphs, GCCS deciphered the Zimmermann Telegram. This January 1917 missive from Germany’s foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann proposed an alliance between Germany and neutral Mexico, with the former offering to aid the latter in an invasion of the USA if the US (also neutral at the time) declared war against Germany.  

In World War II, GCHQ operated out of a country mansion, Bletchley Park.  It recruited crossword puzzlers, chess-players, archaeologists, linguists and, above all, mathematicians like the genius Alan Turing, to decrypt Axis codes. The Germans used a multi-geared coding device called the Enigma, which Bletchley Park cracked in one of its most famous breakthroughs. The book’s title is a play on words, referencing that episode.

In GCHQ jargon, good intelligence was “Ultra” or higher category than “most secret”. That word has also entered espionage’s lexicon. The two long WWII chapters detail events like the Battle of Cape Matapan. The decryption of Italian naval codes by Mavis Beatey allowed the interception and decisive defeat of an Italian fleet.

Dr Ferris reviews GCHQ’s role in the endless spiral of the Cold War’s Spy vs Spy environment. He admits GCHQ never managed to break top-level Soviet codes. When it comes to the postwar period, he’s especially interesting in his exposition on Sigint when Britain controlled the mandated territory of Palestine and Trans-Jordan before the creation of Israel. One of GCHQ’s problems in deciphering encrypted Hebrew messages was that the only experts were Jews with uncertain allegiances.

Dr Ferris also offers new information on the “Konfrontasi” of Malaysia versus Indonesia in the 1960s where the British played a major role in shoring up Malaysia. In the Falklands War of 1982, the UK pulled off the incredible feat of sending a task force 14,000 kilometres south to recapture a bunch of windswept islands off the coast of Argentina. Sigint played a huge role.

Coming to more modern times, GCHQ’s decision to commission an authorised history was possibly sparked by an embarrassing incident in 2013. A contractor working out of Hawaii for America’s National Security Agency downloaded humongous quantities of classified GCHQ data and handed this to the media. Edward Snowden opened several cans of worms as a consequence. GCHQ had to figure out how he’d hacked it. Questions were also raised by politicians, constitutional lawyers and activists about egregious violations of privacy as the pervasive nature of GCHQ’s surveillance became clear.  

Interestingly, Dr Ferris believes that this model of sweeping suspect-less surveillance and omnivorous acquisition of digital data is pretty much the only way forward in the cyber-era. His apologia, “GCHQ did not openly address the operational and legal elements of bulk collection because it did not know how to do so, rather than having anything to hide.”

Post-Snowden, questions were also raised about GCHQ’s cooperation with its “frenemy”, the NSA, and the insecurities vis a vis the “Five Eyes” relationship which was also evident. The UK-USA relationship started during World War II but it’s been under stress many times, notably during the 1956 Suez Crisis.

Dr Ferris also describes how several directors shaped the service. The role of women and GCHQ’s “latent sexism” is something he mentions. Over 75 per cent of the WWII staff at Bletchley were women, including many talented cryptographers. But GCHQ has never had a woman at the helm and it was only in 2006 that the first women was appoin­ted to a senior managerial role. (Both MI5 and MI6 had female chiefs long ago).  

This is a rather ponderously-written book. But it is worth the effort if one is willing to work at learning the military history Dr Ferris takes for granted. It offers multiple insights into the ways in which Sigint and Comint can drive policy.