Wednesday, June 27, 2018

Battle of the Beams

RV Jones, Knickebein, X-Gerät > .
The Battle of the Beams was a period early in WW2 when bombers of the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) used a number of increasingly accurate systems of radio navigation for night bombing in the United Kingdom. British scientific intelligence at the Air Ministry fought back with a variety of their own increasingly effective means, involving jamming and distortion of the radio waves. The period ended when the Wehrmacht moved their forces to the East in May 1941, in preparation for the attack on the Soviet Union.

Prior to the war, Lufthansa and the German aircraft industry invested heavily in the development of commercial aviation, and systems and methods that would improve safety and reliability. Considerable effort went into blind landing aids which allowed aircraft to approach an airport at night or in bad weather. The primary system developed for this role was the Lorenz system, developed by Johannes Plendl, which was in the process of being widely deployed on large civilian and military aircraft.

In WW2, the Lorenz beam principle was used by the German Luftwaffe as the basis of a number of blind bombing aids, notably Knickebein ('crooked leg') and the X-Gerät ('X-Apparatus'), in their bombing offensive against English cities during the winter of 1940/41. Knickebein was very similar to LFF, modifying it only slightly to be more highly directional and work over much longer distance. Using the same frequencies allowed their bombers to use the already-installed LFF receivers, although a second receiver was needed in order to pinpoint a single location.

The X-Gerät involved cross-beams of the same characteristics but on different frequencies, which would both enable the pilot to calculate his speed (from the elapsed time between crossing the Fore Cross Signal and crossing the Main Cross Signal), and indicate when he should drop his payload. The calculation was performed by a mechanical computer. Lorenz modified this system to create the Viktoria/Hawaii lateral guidance system for the V-2 rocket.

When the British discovered the existence of the 'Knickebein' system, they rapidly jammed it, however, the 'X-Gerät' was not successfully jammed until later. A later innovation by the Germans was the 'Baedeker' or 'Taub' modification, which used supersonic modulation. This was so quickly jammed that the Germans practically gave up on the use of beam-bombing systems, with the exception of the 'FuGe 25A', which operated for a short time towards the end of Operation Steinbock, known as the "Baby Blitz".

A further operational drawback of the system was that bombers had to follow a fixed course between the beam transmitter station and the target; once the beam had been detected, defensive measures were made more effective by knowledge of the course.

Black Chamber - Cipher Bureau - MI-8

.
Yardley - US Black Chamber (Military Intelligence Section 8) - UK-USA - Bletchley > .
CIA, MI6, FVEY, XX - Intelligence, Espionage, Cyber >> .
UK-USA - Bletchley Park >> .
Bletchley & Intelligence - Blakeney - >> .Intelligence, Surveillance - Gerere >> .

GCHQ, GC&CS, Ultra .. 

The Black Chamber (1919–1929), also known as the Cipher Bureau, was the United States' first peacetime cryptanalytic organization, and a forerunner of the National Security Agency. The only prior codes and cypher organizations maintained by the US government had been some intermittent, and always abandoned, attempts by Armed Forces branches prior to WW1.

Herbert Osborn Yardley (April 13, 1889 – August 7, 1958) was an American cryptologist. He founded and led the cryptographic organization the Black Chamber. Under Yardley, the cryptanalysts of The American Black Chamber broke Japanese diplomatic codes and were able to furnish American negotiators with significant information during the Washington Naval Conference of 1921-1922. Recipient of the Distinguished Service Medal. He wrote The American Black Chamber (1931) about his experiences there. He later helped the Nationalists in China (1938–1940) to break Japanese codes. Following his work in China, Yardley worked briefly for the Canadian government, helping it set up a cryptological section (Examination Unit) of the National Research Council of Canada from June to December 1941. Yardley was reportedly let go due to pressure either from the Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson or from the British.

In June 1917, Yardley became a 2nd lieutenant in the Signal Corps and head of the newly created eighth section of military intelligence, MI-8. One early case was the cryptogram discovered in the clothing of German spy Lothar Witzke after he was arrested at the Mexican border in 1918. The evidence linked Witzke to significant sabotage activity in the U.S.

Yardley proved to be a very good administrator and during the war the people of MI-8 performed well even if they did not have any spectacular successes. After the war, the American Army and the State department decided to jointly fund MI-8 and Yardley continued as head of the "Cipher Bureau". They located their operations in New York City for legal reasons.

Cracking Japanese codes was a priority. David Kahn states:
The most important target was Japan. Its belligerence toward China jeopardized America's Open Door policy. Its emigrants exacerbated American racism. Its naval growth menaced American power in the western Pacific. Its commercial expansion threatened American dominance of Far Eastern markets.
After almost a year, Yardley and his staff finally managed to break the Japanese codes and were still reading Japanese diplomatic traffic when Washington hosted the Washington Naval Conference in 1921. The information the Cipher Bureau provided the American delegation regarding the Japanese government's absolute minimum acceptable battleship requirements was instrumental in getting the Japanese side to agree to a 5:3 ratio instead of the 10:7 ratio the Japanese Navy really wanted. This allowed Japan only 18 battleships to 30 for the U.S. and 30 for Great Britain instead of the 21 battleships Japan desired. This was the height of Yardley's cryptanalytic career.

In February 1941, a group of Americans arrived at Bletchley Park, in what marked the beginnings of an extraordinary UK-USA intelligence alliance that continues to this day (video series commemorates the 80th anniversary of this alliance). Bletchley Park’s Research Historian, Dr David Kenyon and the National Security Agency’s senior historian, David Hatch, explore the tentative first steps taken by the UK and USA in February 1941 to begin sharing their codebreaking secrets. Kenyon and Hatch explore how this relationship developed during 1941 in the months before America formally entered World War Two.

Cryppies, Day Ladies, and Whiffling: The Just-Declassified Lingo of the NSA: A newly public document provides a fascinating peek into the lives and gibes of the National Security Agency's cryptographers.

Tuesday, June 26, 2018

Camouflage, Deception, Espionage, Intelligence

Deception in WW2 > .
Jasper Maskelyne - Magician Who Deceived the Nazis - WW2 Doc > . 
Lies and Deceptions that made D-Day possible - IWM > .
Hiding your Army | Military Camouflage - ttm > .  
Thermal Camouflage 

Camouflage, Deception, Espionage, Intelligence ..

Military deception (MILDEC) is an attempt by a military unit to gain an advantage during warfare by misleading adversary decision makers into taking actions detrimental to the adversary. This is usually achieved by creating or amplifying an artificial fog of war via psychological operations, information warfare, visual deception, or other methods. As a form of disinformation, it overlaps with psychological warfare. Military deception is also closely connected to operations security (OPSEC) in that OPSEC attempts to conceal from the adversary critical information about an organization's capabilities, activities, limitations, and intentions, or provide a plausible alternate explanation for the details the adversary can observe, while deception reveals false information in an effort to mislead the adversary.

Deception in warfare dates back to early history. The Art of War, an ancient Chinese military treatise, emphasizes the importance of deception as a way for outnumbered forces to defeat larger adversaries. Examples of deception in warfare can be found in Ancient EgyptGreece, and Rome, the Medieval Age, the Renaissance, and the European Colonial Era. Deception was employed during World War I and came into even greater prominence during World War II.In modern times, the militaries of several nations have evolved deception tactics, techniques and procedures into fully fledged doctrine.

5 Famous WW2 Covert Operations .
1. Operation Mincemeat
2. Operation Eiche
3. Operation Gunnerside
4. Operation Greif
5. Operation Fortitude South

Operation Bodyguard: Operation Fortitude North; Operation Fortitude South including Operation Quicksilver I-IV;

Operation Bodyguard was the code name for a World War II deception plan employed by the Allied states before the 1944 invasion of northwest Europe. The plan was intended to mislead the German high command as to the time and place of the invasion. The plan contained several operations, and culminated in the tactical surprise over the Germans during the Normandy landings on 6 June 1944 (D-Day) and delayed German reinforcements to the region for some time afterwards.

German coastal defences were stretched thin in 1944, as they prepared to defend all of the coast of northwest Europe. The Allies had already employed deception operations against the Germans, aided by the capture of all of the German agents in the United Kingdom and the systematic decryption of German Enigma communications. Once Normandy had been chosen as the site of the invasion, it was decided to attempt to deceive the Germans into thinking it was a diversion and that the true invasion was to be elsewhere.

Planning for Bodyguard started in 1943 under the auspices of the London Controlling Section (LCS). A draft strategy, referred to as Plan Jael, was presented to Allied High Command at the Tehran Conference in late November and approved on 6 December. The objective of this plan was to lead the Germans to believe that the invasion of northwest Europe would come later than was planned and to expect attacks elsewhere, including the Pas-de-Calais, the Balkans, southern France, Norway and Soviet attacks in Bulgaria and northern Norway.

Operation Fortitude was the code name for a World War II military deception employed by the Allied nations as part of an overall deception strategy (code named Bodyguard) during the build-up to the 1944 Normandy landings. Fortitude was divided into two sub-plans, North and South, with the aim of misleading the German High Command as to the location of the invasion.

Both Fortitude plans involved the creation of phantom field armies (based in Edinburgh and the south of England) which threatened Norway (Fortitude North) and Pas de Calais (Fortitude South). The operation was intended to divert Axis attention away from Normandy and, after the invasion on 6 June 1944, to delay reinforcement by convincing the Germans that the landings were purely a diversionary attack.

Operation Quicksilver was a military deception operation performed during the Second World War. Undertaken by the Allies in 1944, the operation threatened an invasion of France in the Pas de Calais region through the simulation of a large Field Army in South East England. Quicksilver formed part of the Operation Fortitude deception, itself part of the strategic Operation Bodyguard plan. The key element of Quicksilver was to convince the German that "First United States Army Group" (FUSAG) commanded by General George Patton would land in the Pas-de-Calais for the major invasion of Europe, after the landings in Normandy had lured the German defenders to that front. (FUSAG was a genuine army group headquarters which later became Omar Bradley's 12th Army Group, but was given a fictitious role and many non-existent divisions for purposes of deception.)

Juan Pujol García, known by the British code name Garbo and the German code name Arabel, was a double agent loyal to the Allies who played a crucial role in the deception by supplying Germany with detailed information from a network of non-existent sub-agents supporting the idea that the main invasion was to be in the Pas-de-Calais.

Quicksilver was subdivided into six subplans numbered I through VI:
  • Quicksilver I was the basic "story" for Fortitude: the First United States Army Group, based in the southeast of England, was to land in Pas-de-Calais after German reserves were committed to Normandy.
  • Quicksilver II was the radio deception plan of Quicksilver, involving the apparent movement of units from their true locations to southeastern England.
  • Quicksilver III was the display of dummy landing craft, including associated simulated wireless traffic and signing of roads and special areas. The landing craft, built from wood and canvas and nicknamed Bigbob's, suffered from being too light. Wind and rain flipped many over or ran them to ground.
  • Quicksilver IV was the air plan for Quicksilver, including bombing of the Pas-de-Calais beach area and tactical railway bombing immediately before D-Day.
  • Quicksilver V was increased activity around Dover (giving impression of extra tunneling, additional wireless stations), to suggest embarkation preparations.[12]
  • Quicksilver VI was night lighting to simulate activity at night where dummy landing craft were situated.
Operation Bodyguard succeeded and the Normandy landings took the Germans by surprise. The subsequent deception suggesting that the Normandy landings were a diversion led Hitler to delay sending reinforcements from the Pas-de-Calais region for nearly seven weeks (the original plan had specified 14 days).
Dummy tanks > .


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nv3oLT3K4OQ > .

Ghost Army Trailer > .

Cambridge Five

.

Camp X - STS 103

.
16-2-18 Inside Camp X: Trained to Forget | X Company | CBC > .
24-4-20 Canadian Defense Spending is a Joke | Solutions? - Waro > .
15-6-24 Camp X - U.S. Spy Training School = Americans Unaware - Smith > .
16-6-24 Inside Camp X: Hand-to-Hand Combat | CBC > .
Camp X was the unofficial name of the secret Special Training School No. 103, a WW2 British paramilitary installation for training covert agents in the methods required for success in clandestine operations. It was located on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario between Whitby and Oshawa in Ontario, Canada. The area is known today as Intrepid Park, after the code name for Sir William Stephenson, Director of British Security Co-ordination (BSC), who established the program to create the training facility.

The facility was jointly operated by the Canadian military, with help from Foreign Affairs and the RCMP but commanded by the BSC; it also had close ties with MI-6. In addition to the training program, the Camp had a communications tower that could send and transmit radio and telegraph communications, called Hydra.

Camp X was established December 6, 1941 by the chief of British Security Co-ordination (BSC), Sir William Stephenson, a Canadian from Winnipeg, Manitoba and a close confidant of Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The camp was originally designed to link Britain and the US at a time when the US was forbidden by the Neutrality Act to be directly involved in WW2.

On the day before the attack on Pearl Harbor and America's entry into the war, Camp X had opened for the purpose of training Allied agents from the Special Operations Executive (SOE), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) intended to be dropped behind enemy lines for clandestine missions as saboteurs and spies.

However, even before the United States entered the war on December 8, 1941, agents from America's intelligence services expressed an interest in sending personnel for training at the soon to be opened Camp X. Agents from the FBI and the OSS (forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA) secretly attended Camp X in early 1942; at least a dozen attended at least some training.

After Stephenson established the facility and acted as the Camp's first head, the first commandant was Lt. Col. Arthur Terence Roper-Caldbeck. The most notable individual in the Camp's history was Colonel William "Wild Bill" Donovan, war-time head of the OSS, who credited Stephenson with teaching Americans about foreign intelligence gathering. The CIA even named their recruit training facility "The Farm", a nod to the original farm that existed at the Camp X site.

Camp X was jointly operated by the BSC and the Government of Canada. There were several names for the school: S 25-1-1 by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), Project-J by the Canadian military, and Special Training School No. 103. The latter was set by the Special Operations Executive, administered under the cover of the Ministry of Economic Warfare (MEW) which operated the facility. In 1942 the Commandant of the camp was Lieutenant R. M. Brooker of the British Army.

In addition to operating an excellent document forging facility, Camp X trained numerous Allied covert operatives. An estimate published by the CBC states that "By war's end, between 500 and 2,000 Allied agents had been trained (figures vary) and sent abroad..." behind enemy lines.

Reports indicate that graduates worked as "secret agents, security personnel, intelligence officers, or psychological warfare experts, serving in clandestine operations". Many were captured, tortured, and executed; survivors received no individual recognition for their efforts."

The predominant close-combat trainer for the British Special Operations Executive was William E. Fairbairn, called "Dangerous Dan". With instructor Eric A. Sykes, they trained numerous agents for the SOE and OSS. Fairbairn's technique was "Get down in the gutter, and win at all costs … no more playing fair … to kill or be killed."

"Trainees at the camp learned sabotage techniques, subversion, intelligence gathering, lock picking, explosives training, radio communications, encode/decode, recruiting techniques for partisans, the art of silent killing and unarmed combat." 

One of the unique features of Camp X was Hydra, a highly sophisticated telecommunications relay station established in May 1942 by engineer Benjamin deForest Bayly. Bayly was the assistant director, with British army rank of lieutenant colonel. He also invented a very fast offline, one-time tape cipher machine for coding/decoding telegraph transmissions labelled the Rockex or "Telekrypton".

Communication training, including Morse code, was also provided. The camp was so secret that even Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King was unaware of its full purpose.

Traitors ..
After it had closed, starting in the autumn of 1945, Camp X was used by the RCMP as a secure location for interviewing Soviet embassy GRU cypher-clerk Igor Gouzenko, who had defected to Canada on September 5, 1945 (3 days after end of WW2) and revealed an extensive Soviet espionage operation in the country. Gouzenko provided 109 documents on the USSR′s espionage activities in the West. This forced Canada′s Prime Minister Mackenzie King to call a Royal Commission to investigate espionage in Canada.

Gouzenko exposed Soviet intelligence' efforts to steal nuclear secrets as well as the technique of planting sleeper agents. The "Gouzenko Affair" is often credited as a triggering event of the Cold War, with historian Jack Granatstein stating it was "the beginning of the Cold War for public opinion" and journalist Robert Fulford writing he was "absolutely certain the Cold War began in Ottawa". Granville Hicks described Gouzenko's actions as having "awakened the people of North America to the magnitude and the danger of Soviet espionage".

Gouzenko passed along copies of GRU documents implicating British physicist Nunn May, including details of the proposed meeting in London. 

Nunn May did not go to the British Museum meeting, but he was arrested in March 1946. Nunn May confessed to espionage. On 1 May 1946, he was sentenced to ten years' hard labour. He was released in late 1952, after serving six and a half years.  

Gouzenko and his family spent two years at the Camp X facility.

The training facility closed before the end of 1944; the buildings were removed in 1969 and a monument was erected at the site.



Chinese Spymasters

.
Chinese Spymasters - The New Warlords? - WW2 - Spies & Ties > .

China Initiative - Countering CCP's IP Theft

22-3-24 Controversy behind the China initiative, explained 1 | China in Focus > .
22-9-6 Xina steals military technology; copies Russian weapons - Lei > .
22-2-24 Assistant AG Matthew Olsen on Countering Nation-State Threats > .
22-1-14 Twists and Turns of the DOJ’s China Initiative - Diego > .

China Initiative - Countering CCP's IP Theft ..
TTP - Thousand Talents Scam ..

The China Initiative was launched by the United States Department of Justice, the FBI, and other United States federal agencies in November 2018. It is led by the United States Department of Justice National Security Division, and has been described as a "sweeping effort" to counter Chinese espionage in American businesses and research by eliminating spies and halting the transfer of information and technology to China. In addition, the China Initiative focuses on safeguarding "critical infrastructure against external threats through foreign direct investment and supply chain compromises, as well as combatting covert efforts to influence the American public and policymakers without proper transparency." There is no definition of what a China Initiative case is. It has been criticized as being ineffective, racially biased, and disproportionate. Some of the cases under the initiative were based on false evidence by the FBI. The China Initiative's end was announced on 23 February 2022, citing perceptions of unfair treatment of Chinese Americans and residents of Chinese origin.

On 23 February 2022, the DOJ announced that it was ending the China Initiative, largely due to "perceptions that it unfairly painted Chinese Americans and U.S. residents of Chinese origin as disloyal." Assistant Attorney General for National Security Matthew Olsen stated that the decision was not the abandonment of law enforcement response to the threat posed by China but a reframing and recalibration. According to Olsen, the DOJ will continue to combat threats posed by the Chinese government. China Initiative cases typically involved lying or omitting information on disclosure forms. Some cases resulted in convictions such as with Charles Lieber, who was found guilty of making false statements to federal officials and filing false tax returns. However other cases have been reined in or abandoned, such as with Gang Chen, or defeated in trial in the case of Anming Hu. A review of existing cases was conducted and the DOJ is "comfortable with where those cases are."

CIA's Acoustic Kitty Cold War Plan

.
Acoustic Kitty: The CIA's Plan to Spy... with Cats >skip ad to Early Training > .

Sunday, June 24, 2018

Espionage

Bletchley & Intelligence - tb >> .

Espionage Act - USA ..

GCHQ & Bletchley: Code-breaking hub Bletchley Park's contribution to World War Two is often over-rated by the public, an official history of UK spy agency GCHQ says. Bletchley still played an important role, and GCHQ had a significant influence in other conflicts.

GCHQ, known as Britain's listening post, was set up on 1 November 1919 as a peacetime "cryptanalytic" unit. During WW2, staff were moved to Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, to decrypt Nazi Germany's messages including, most famously of all, the Enigma communications. This provided an inside view of Nazi orders and movements.

The work was kept secret for decades but an official history of British intelligence in the war would later say it had shortened the conflict by two to four years and without it the outcome would have been uncertain.


The machine was an early attempt to automate code-cracking and, due to its complexity, was named after the illustrator W Heath Robinson.

The World War Two codebreaking machine, which went into operation at Bletchley Park in June 1943, is acknowledged as the inspiration for Colossus, the world's first programmable computer.

The Colossus, the world's first programmable computer, was designed off the back of work to try to improve the Heath Robinson.

Even after the launch of Colossus in 1944, the Heath Robinson continued to develop and was used in tackling messages sent between Hitler and the German High Command.

At the end of World War Two there were two "super Robinsons" in use and another two under development. The machine was operational until the 1950s.


The Colossus, the world's first programmable computer, was designed by a team led by Tommy Flowers at the General Post Office in London in late 1943.

It was programmed to run algorithms used to decipher messages sent among German High Command, who had encrypted them using their Lorenz cipher system.

After moving Colossus to Bletchley, in rural Buckinghamshire, the first Lorenz message was cracked on 5 February 1944, reducing the time it took to break the cipher from weeks to hours.

Bletchley Park was the wartime home of the Government Code & Cypher School which broke the German Enigma and Lorenz codes

The mansion dates from the 19th Century but the intelligence centre was rapidly assembled with mainly wooden structures in 1939 where mathematicians including Alan Turing and Bill Tutte worked.

After the war, two of the 10 Colossus machines ended up at the government's new GCHQ in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. The other eight were dismantled.

Saturday, June 23, 2018

Fifth Column


0:14 (Infiltrate state bureaucracy)
2:23 Induce state agencies to attack society
   3:02 Identify, then undermine, prominent individuals (progressors)
7:17 Encourage spy-mania, "fifth columnist" paranoia, conspiracy theories
8:47 Hobble bureaucracies through red tape and paperwork
10:51 Encourage moral decay, undermine trust, encourage anti-patriotic nationalist activism
12:18 Entangle the enemy in a resource-draining proxy war

A fifth column is any group of people who undermine a larger group from within, usually in favor of an enemy group or nation. According to Harris Mylonas and Scott Radnitz, "fifth columns" are “domestic actors who work to undermine the national interest, in cooperation with external rivals of the state." The activities of a fifth column can be overt or clandestine. Forces gathered in secret can mobilize openly to assist an external attack. This term is also extended to organised actions by military personnel. Clandestine fifth column activities can involve acts of sabotage, disinformation, or espionage executed within defense lines by secret sympathizers with an external force.

Fifth Column was the name MI5, the British Security Service, gave to a WW2 operation run from 1942 until at least 1947. It was initially intended to identify people who would be willing to assist Germany in the event of an invasion of the United Kingdom, but as it developed, it also acted to divert its targets away from harmful activities. Although it ended up providing information on more than 500 suspects, it was the source of conflict within MI5, and after the war ended it remained secret, with none of the targets ever aware that they had been its subject. It was revealed in a release of files to the National Archives in 2014.

The operation was run by the counter-sabotage section of MI5, designation B1c. The head of this small section was Victor Rothschild, who had joined MI5 in 1940 to do scientific liaison. He was assisted by Theresa Clay, an entomologist whom he'd recruited. The agent at the heart of the operation was Eric Roberts, a former bank clerk who had been working undercover for MI5 inside the British Union of Fascists since 1934.

"British intelligence officers mounted a covert operation to infiltrate and control hundreds of Nazi sympathisers in the UK during the second world war, according to newly declassified MI5 files. In the most significant indication so far of a “fifth column” of Hitler sympathisers in Britain, an MI5 mole known by his code name “Jack King” posed as a Gestapo agent to penetrate groups of fascists. They passed him information, believing that it was being channelled to Germany, and were rewarded with fake Nazi war medals distributed by their British masters. MI5 has not disclosed King’s real identity."

........... 

"The Second World War and the ‘fifth column’ scare of spring 1940 led to the enhancement of MI5's role after internal reorganization, following the near collapse of MI5 during the crisis; the supposed existence of the fifth column became a means by which MI5 came to justify its existence, growth, and importance. However, internment of aliens and fascists, and the proscription of the British Union of Fascists in July 1940 destroyed the non-existent threat of a Nazi-manipulated British fifth column. Political surveillance of other groups who opposed the war, most notably Jehovah's Witnesses and the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), provided the new justification for vigilance. Even after the CPGB adopted super-patriotism after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, MI5's simplistic interpretation of its ‘revolutionary defeatism’ remained unaltered. The deterioration in relations between the victorious allies and the coming of the Cold War enabled MI5 to justify its importance and to avoid the severity of the cuts that had threatened its existence after the First World War." 
Evolution of the Mythical British Fifth Column, 1939-46* .

Alien infiltration .
Black propaganda .
Copperhead (politics) .
Demographic threat .

ФСБ - NKVD, KGB, FSB

.
23-5-4 Ruscist Intelligence Capabilities in Decline || Peter Zeihan > .

Friday, June 22, 2018

GCHQ, GC&CS, Ultra

.
Bletchley Park: Decoding Enigma > .Top 5 Features of an Enigma | Bletchley Park > .
24-6-9 How a CIA Base Works & Pine Gap - fern > .
23-8-23 MI6 - History; (Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens) SIS Building - B1M > .

GCHQ & Bletchley: Code-breaking hub Bletchley Park's contribution to World War Two is often over-rated by the public, an official history of UK spy agency GCHQ says. Bletchley still played an important role, and GCHQ had a significant influence in other conflicts.

GCHQ, known as Britain's listening post, was set up on 1 November 1919 as a peacetime "cryptanalytic" unit. During WW2, staff were moved to Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, to decrypt Nazi Germany's messages including, most famously of all, the Enigma communications. This provided an inside view of Nazi orders and movements.

The work was kept secret for decades but an official history of British intelligence in the war would later say it had shortened the conflict by two to four years and without it the outcome would have been uncertain.

Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS): During WW1, the British Army and Royal Navy had separate signals intelligence agencies, MI1b and NID25 (initially known as Room 40) respectively. In 1919, the Cabinet's Secret Service Committee, chaired by Lord Curzon, recommended that a peacetime codebreaking agency should be created, a task which was given to the Director of Naval IntelligenceHugh Sinclair. Sinclair merged staff from NID25 and MI1b into the new organisation, which initially consisted of around 25–30 officers and a similar number of clerical staff. It was titled the "Government Code and Cypher School" (GC&CS), a cover-name which was chosen by Victor Forbes of the Foreign OfficeAlastair Denniston, who had been a member of NID25, was appointed as its operational head. It was initially under the control of the Admiralty and located in Watergate House, Adelphi, London. Its public function was "to advise as to the security of codes and cyphers used by all Government departments and to assist in their provision", but also had a secret directive to "study the methods of cypher communications used by foreign powers". GC&CS officially formed on 1 November 1919, and produced its first decrypt prior to that date, on 19 October.

Before the Second World War, GC&CS was a relatively small department. By 1922, the main focus of GC&CS was on diplomatic traffic, with "no service traffic ever worth circulating" and so, at the initiative of Lord Curzon, it was transferred from the Admiralty to the Foreign Office. GC&CS came under the supervision of Hugh Sinclair, who by 1923 was both the Chief of SIS and Director of GC&CS. In 1925, both organisations were co-located on different floors of Broadway Buildings, opposite St. James's Park. Messages decrypted by GC&CS were distributed in blue-jacketed files that became known as "BJs". In the 1920s, GC&CS was successfully reading Soviet Union diplomatic cyphers. However, in May 1927, during a row over clandestine Soviet support for the General Strike and the distribution of subversive propaganda, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin made details from the decrypts public.

During WW2, GC&CS was based largely at Bletchley Park, in present-day Milton Keynes, working on understanding the German Enigma machine and Lorenz ciphers. In 1940, GC&CS was working on the diplomatic codes and ciphers of 26 countries, tackling over 150 diplomatic cryptosystems. Senior staff included Alastair DennistonOliver StracheyDilly KnoxJohn TiltmanEdward TravisErnst FetterleinJosh CooperDonald MichieAlan TuringGordon WelchmanJoan ClarkeMax NewmanWilliam TutteI. J. (Jack) GoodPeter Calvocoressi and Hugh Foss.

Ultra was the designation adopted by British military intelligence in June 1941 for wartime signals intelligence obtained by breaking high-level encrypted enemy radio and teleprinter communications at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park. Ultra eventually became the standard designation among the western Allies for all such intelligence. The name arose because the intelligence obtained was considered more important than that designated by the highest British security classification then used (Most Secret) and so was regarded as being Ultra Secret. Several other cryptonyms had been used for such intelligence.

An outstation in the Far East, the Far East Combined Bureau was set up in Hong Kong in 1935 and moved to Singapore in 1939. Subsequently, with the Japanese advance down the Malay Peninsula, the Army and RAF codebreakers went to the Wireless Experimental Centre in Delhi, India. The Navy codebreakers in FECB went to Colombo, Ceylon, then to Kilindini, near Mombasa, Kenya.

sī vīs pācem, parā bellum

igitur quī dēsīderat pācem praeparet bellum    therefore, he who desires peace, let him prepare for war sī vīs pācem, parā bellum if you wan...