Both new and old GCHQ buildings

HISTORY OF GCHQ

Government Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ for short, moved to Cheltenham in 1952, although the War Office had brought the land at the site at Benhall Farm and its sister site, at Oakley Farm already in 1939 to house Temporary Office Blocks which were to accommodate units and offices evacuated from London and the South East of England. In 1942 the site was handed to the US army, to become the headquarters of its Services of Supply (SOS). In 1944 this US headquarters moved to France and Cheltenham site became an outstation of the Ministry of Pensions.

Throughout the war GCHQ, which was until 1946 known as GC&CS, had its base in the famous Bletchley Park, now part of Milton Keynes, where secret codes were broken, most famously the German Enigma. After the war a new site needed to be found. Ideal candidate was a reasonable-size town, to provide enough housing, recruitment and amenities. As Benhall had vacant office buildings already owned by the Government, after much negotiation between central Government departments, by September 1949 it had been decided that GCHQ should move to Cheltenham.

The original GCHQ building

Part of the agreement with Cheltenham Borough Council was to build sufficient housing to accommodate GCHQ employees and a new Cheltenham suburb was born by 1952 – Hester’s Way. GCHQ buildings at Benhall and Oakley were finally finished in 1954. The local residents referred to them as 'the Foreign Office' and were discreet about the secret organisation which rather unexpectedly came to this fashionable spa town.

THE SPY PLACE

Throughout the Cold War GCHQ played an important part in the field of secure communications. In 1973 James H. Ellis , Clifford Christopher Cocks and Malcolm J. Williamson at GCHQ developed what is now known as public key encryption, where message is encoded with a widely distributed public key but can’t be decoded unless an individual owns a secret private key, making the process of encryption much easier. This fact was kept secret though until 1997.

Until the Geoffrey Prime spy scandal in 1982, the Government had refused to reveal what GCHQ's real role was. Geoffrey Prime had worked for the RAF on intelligence duties in West Berlin and also for GCHQ as a linguist. He was a section head and translator at GCHQ and involved in some of its most sensitive operations. He was sentenced at the Old Bailey in 1982 for 14 years of treachery during which time he passed photographs of hundreds of documents to his Russian handlers. He was released from Rochester Prison, Kent, after serving 19 years of a 38 year prison sentence.

BANNING OF THE TRADE UNIONS

Throughout the 1980s GCHQ got to the headlines again because of its banning of the independent Trade Unions for a fear that industrial action from their employees would be a threat to national security. Those not prepared to accept these new terms were offered transfers to other departments or had to leave the Civil Service. Eventually the last 14 employees who would not give up their union membership were dismissed.

People in Cheltenham felt sympathetic with GCHQ employees and the announcement of the Union Ban in late January 1984 was marked every year from 1985 to 1997 by a rally in Cheltenham town centre. When Labour Party won the 1997 elections, it promised the ban to be removed and those who were dismissed or transferred were able to returned to GCHQ.

The new GCHQ building

THE DOUGHNUT

In 1999 it was decided that a new purpose built building would be built to accommodate GCHQ staff at single site at Benhall. The buildings at Oakley were demolished and by 2003 the now famous doughnut shaped building was finished. It cost about £330m, making it the largest Private Finance Initiative project ever undertaken.

Today, two-thirds of Britain's intelligence comes from this single building. Its 4,500 staff patrol global cyberspace 24 hours a day to eavesdrop on millions of telephone conversations, emails, faxes and coded messages using 'Echelon', an American system, whic was given to GCHQ in the 1990s, enabling it to tap into any telephone conversation anywhere across the globe.