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Behind the Enigma: The Authorized History of GCHQ, Britain’s Secret Cyber-Intelligence Agency
The definitive history of GCHQ, one of the world’s most tight-lipped intelligence agencies, written with unprecedented access to classified archives.
For a hundred years GCHQ – Government Communications Headquarters – has been at the forefront of British secret statecraft. Born out of the need to support military operations in the First World War, and fought over ever since, today it is the UK's biggest intelligence, security and cyber agency and a powerful tool of the British state.
Famed primarily for its codebreaking achievements at Bletchley Park against Enigma ciphers in the Second World War, GCHQ has intercepted, interpreted and disrupted the information networks of Britain's foes for a century, and yet it remains the least known and understood of British intelligence services.
It has been one of the most open-minded, GCHQ has always demanded a diversity of intellectual firepower, finding it in places which strike us as ground-breaking today, and allying it to the efforts of ordinary men and women to achieve extraordinary insights in war, diplomacy and peace. GCHQ shapes British decision-making more than any other intelligence organisation and, along with its partners in the Five Eyes intelligence partnership-including the United States' National Security Agency-has become ever more crucial in an age governed by information technology.
Based on unprecedented access to documents in GCHQ's archive, many of them hitherto classified, this is the first book to authoritatively explain the entire history of one of the world's most potent intelligence agencies. Many major contemporary conflicts-between Russia and the West, between Arab nations and Israel, between state security and terrorism-become fully explicable only in the light of the secret intelligence record. Written by one of the world's leading experts in intelligence and strategy, Behind the Enigma reveals the fascinating truth behind this most remarkable and enigmatic of organisations.
For a hundred years GCHQ – Government Communications Headquarters – has been at the forefront of British secret statecraft. Born out of the need to support military operations in the First World War, and fought over ever since, today it is the UK's biggest intelligence, security and cyber agency and a powerful tool of the British state.
Famed primarily for its codebreaking achievements at Bletchley Park against Enigma ciphers in the Second World War, GCHQ has intercepted, interpreted and disrupted the information networks of Britain's foes for a century, and yet it remains the least known and understood of British intelligence services.
It has been one of the most open-minded, GCHQ has always demanded a diversity of intellectual firepower, finding it in places which strike us as ground-breaking today, and allying it to the efforts of ordinary men and women to achieve extraordinary insights in war, diplomacy and peace. GCHQ shapes British decision-making more than any other intelligence organisation and, along with its partners in the Five Eyes intelligence partnership-including the United States' National Security Agency-has become ever more crucial in an age governed by information technology.
Based on unprecedented access to documents in GCHQ's archive, many of them hitherto classified, this is the first book to authoritatively explain the entire history of one of the world's most potent intelligence agencies. Many major contemporary conflicts-between Russia and the West, between Arab nations and Israel, between state security and terrorism-become fully explicable only in the light of the secret intelligence record. Written by one of the world's leading experts in intelligence and strategy, Behind the Enigma reveals the fascinating truth behind this most remarkable and enigmatic of organisations.
848 pages, Hardcover
Published October 20, 2020
141 people are currently reading
1822 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
October 24, 2020
Disappointed
The book is written in a heavy and cumbersome style. Heavy going. If this was a report presented to me for signature, it would have been rejected and sent for rewriting.
The book is written in a heavy and cumbersome style. Heavy going. If this was a report presented to me for signature, it would have been rejected and sent for rewriting.
July 16, 2024
A dense, clearly written and well-researched history of GCHQ. Apparently GCHQ approached Ferris in the aftermath of the Snowden leaks to write this (he refers to privacy concerns as “conspiracy theories”)
Ferris covers politics and the influence of the British diplomatic and military establishment in GCHQ’s creation. Much of the book deals with technical and institutional issues, and if you're looking for human drama or colorful escapades you’ll be disappointed. The book is also focused heavily on the twentieth-century, and GCHQ’s role in the modern world is, perhaps unsurprisingly in an authorized history, not as detailed. It does help to have prior knowledge of the era.
The narrative can be a bit repetitive and convoluted, since Ferris often looks at historical eras through various perspectives. Sometimes Ferris will mention certain organizations without ever having introduced them. The book could have used more maps, since he mentions certain GCHQ sites pretty often. Some may find the book boring, as it sometimes reads like the final report of a committee or commission of some kind. When covering the 2013 Snowden revelations about GCHQ, Ferris refers to “scandals” but doesn’t cover them in detail. Nor is Katherine Gun’s story given much space. At one point Frank Rowlett is called “Frank Rowland.”
A careful and informative work, if dry.
Ferris covers politics and the influence of the British diplomatic and military establishment in GCHQ’s creation. Much of the book deals with technical and institutional issues, and if you're looking for human drama or colorful escapades you’ll be disappointed. The book is also focused heavily on the twentieth-century, and GCHQ’s role in the modern world is, perhaps unsurprisingly in an authorized history, not as detailed. It does help to have prior knowledge of the era.
The narrative can be a bit repetitive and convoluted, since Ferris often looks at historical eras through various perspectives. Sometimes Ferris will mention certain organizations without ever having introduced them. The book could have used more maps, since he mentions certain GCHQ sites pretty often. Some may find the book boring, as it sometimes reads like the final report of a committee or commission of some kind. When covering the 2013 Snowden revelations about GCHQ, Ferris refers to “scandals” but doesn’t cover them in detail. Nor is Katherine Gun’s story given much space. At one point Frank Rowlett is called “Frank Rowland.”
A careful and informative work, if dry.
January 31, 2021
This is a heavy book, just the thing to put in the pocket of an enemy spy before dropping him off the back of a trawler. It is not easy to read, flashing past some episodes and wallowing through others. That a coding machine was captured at Dunkirk and why they went to Cheltenham were new facts to me. The 'four grandparents rule' with exceptions allowing women in Jerusalem and colonials in Hong Kong, thus ruling out German Jewish exiles and fluent second generation ethnic Brits, while allowing in disgruntled Oxbridge grads like Philby and Blunt is discussed with much more honesty than I expected. It would sell better as a five volume paper series, but perhaps the authors don't want this read too widely.
February 22, 2022
Overly verbose, incredibly dry, awfully boring, even interesting elements are made so drawn out the reader loses interest. Feels like the author was paid a penny a word and was trying to make millions.
December 14, 2020
This book is very thick and heavy, and not worth the trouble to try to read it. It could have been great if it were ghostwritten for the author who clearly knows the topic intimately, but doesn’t know how to tell a story magazine style, a common professorial failing. With sharp editing and a glossary, even a timeline, this could have been the gripping history I was looking forward to. Instead I waded through about 175 pages of plodding and confusing text into the Bletchley era. How can you screw that topic up?? After that I gave up and never even made it as far as GCHQ in Cheltenham. Who edited this thing? Seemingly no one. Could have been a crisp, compelling 200 pages. Instead it reminds me of the tedious books I was forced to read in my history classes in England. Particularly as this is an official history of GCHQ and seemingly the first official history of any intelligence service worldwide, it’s a PR vehicle that fails miserably. Could have been great.
November 23, 2020
I really wanted to like this book, and I'm sure it has some fascinating insights. However, it is a ponderous read; focusing on the more of on vagaries of the internal politics at GCHQ rather than the victories that SIGINT enabled.
A disappointment.
A disappointment.
July 12, 2021
Most people have heard of MI5 and MI6 and even when they were officially denied for years, people knew why existed. GCHQ is the third part of our intelligence services and even though they have been around for 100 years, very few knew about them or what they did. When they did emerge from the shadows after the terrorist attacks in America and England they were still very circumspect about revealing any operational details.
A large number of people still haven’t really heard of them, though a large number of people are aware of the efforts during World War 2 in taking the work that the Polish did and breaking the Enigma codes of the Nazis. There were thousands of people involved in this process but one of two have become household names, Alan Turing and Tommy Flowers. Thankfully it isn’t too heavy on the Bletchley Park years. They do get a chapter of their own, but the emphasis is on all of their histories so there were things that I learnt about that I had never come across before.
Ferris begins the book way back in the 1840s tracing the origins of British efforts to intercept and break coded messages from those that were perceived as the enemy and to maintain the control we had over our global empire. It was a messy process though and each service undertook its own way of doing it. It would take a war to focus the attention from piecemeal collection to a department that is a central point for all its consumers of intelligence. This was to become the GC&CS. They shared a building with MI6 at one point and were under the secret umbrella of the Foreign Office.
In between the wars their prolific output of intercepted and broken transmissions of a huge number of countries never ceased. At one point there were thousands of messages being analysed. Germany was not of the priority list for most of that time, however, that would begin to change as they realised that Germany was in discussion with Italy and Japan and developing secret relationships with as yet unknown intents. Those would soon be revealed and the world would plunge into another war.
The amazing work in World War Two gave the allied powers great insight into the way that the Axis powers were thinking. Of all the chapters it is probably the most critical of the work that was completed. Post-war the goalposts changed dramatically and an ally in the war became enemy number one. The cold war had arrived and would shape world history for the next four and half decades. It was a time of close cooperation between America and the UK and other members of the five eyes network. There are chapters on the events in Palestine, Indonesia, the move out to Cheltenham and the rise in computers for codebreaking and of course the advent of the internet age along with all the positives and negatives that it has brought.
This is a fairly comprehensive guide to the history of GCHQ. However, being the official history there are no revelatory bits in it, rather it is the sanitised and unredacted version that portrays the organisation is mostly good light. I did have a couple of issues with it. The timeline that Ferris has chosen to use is different to the one I would have preferred. He has looked at the way that they changed in response to different world events, the cold war, the Indonesian conflict, the Falklands War. My preference would have been to take it a decade at a time which I feel would give a better flavour of the way that demands on their skills were shifting as world events unfolded. There is almost nothing on the way that they do things, I wasn’t expecting it in the book to be honest, but it would have been nice to read a little on the techniques and methods they use. He does mention traffic analysis a number of times, which looks at how people send messages and can derive an enormous amount of intelligence from that. It might not be for everyone as it can be a bit dry at times. I have read the official histories of the other secret services, Defend the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 by Christopher M. Andrew and MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service, 1909-1949 by Keith Jeffery and it felt that those authors had a wider scope to critically analyse the activities that those agencies had done over the years. 3.5 stars
A large number of people still haven’t really heard of them, though a large number of people are aware of the efforts during World War 2 in taking the work that the Polish did and breaking the Enigma codes of the Nazis. There were thousands of people involved in this process but one of two have become household names, Alan Turing and Tommy Flowers. Thankfully it isn’t too heavy on the Bletchley Park years. They do get a chapter of their own, but the emphasis is on all of their histories so there were things that I learnt about that I had never come across before.
Ferris begins the book way back in the 1840s tracing the origins of British efforts to intercept and break coded messages from those that were perceived as the enemy and to maintain the control we had over our global empire. It was a messy process though and each service undertook its own way of doing it. It would take a war to focus the attention from piecemeal collection to a department that is a central point for all its consumers of intelligence. This was to become the GC&CS. They shared a building with MI6 at one point and were under the secret umbrella of the Foreign Office.
In between the wars their prolific output of intercepted and broken transmissions of a huge number of countries never ceased. At one point there were thousands of messages being analysed. Germany was not of the priority list for most of that time, however, that would begin to change as they realised that Germany was in discussion with Italy and Japan and developing secret relationships with as yet unknown intents. Those would soon be revealed and the world would plunge into another war.
The amazing work in World War Two gave the allied powers great insight into the way that the Axis powers were thinking. Of all the chapters it is probably the most critical of the work that was completed. Post-war the goalposts changed dramatically and an ally in the war became enemy number one. The cold war had arrived and would shape world history for the next four and half decades. It was a time of close cooperation between America and the UK and other members of the five eyes network. There are chapters on the events in Palestine, Indonesia, the move out to Cheltenham and the rise in computers for codebreaking and of course the advent of the internet age along with all the positives and negatives that it has brought.
This is a fairly comprehensive guide to the history of GCHQ. However, being the official history there are no revelatory bits in it, rather it is the sanitised and unredacted version that portrays the organisation is mostly good light. I did have a couple of issues with it. The timeline that Ferris has chosen to use is different to the one I would have preferred. He has looked at the way that they changed in response to different world events, the cold war, the Indonesian conflict, the Falklands War. My preference would have been to take it a decade at a time which I feel would give a better flavour of the way that demands on their skills were shifting as world events unfolded. There is almost nothing on the way that they do things, I wasn’t expecting it in the book to be honest, but it would have been nice to read a little on the techniques and methods they use. He does mention traffic analysis a number of times, which looks at how people send messages and can derive an enormous amount of intelligence from that. It might not be for everyone as it can be a bit dry at times. I have read the official histories of the other secret services, Defend the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 by Christopher M. Andrew and MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service, 1909-1949 by Keith Jeffery and it felt that those authors had a wider scope to critically analyse the activities that those agencies had done over the years. 3.5 stars
March 23, 2021
It's incredible to me how a topic that is so fascinating can be made so boring. Really disappointing; focused more on politics than on the operational stories and technical detail that I was hoping for. I abandoned it around page 40.
July 27, 2022
In the introduction it talks about how part of the reason the book exists is so GCHQ can be more transparent about their history and function to the public......but I think most of the public would struggle to finish the introduction given how turgid the book is.
April 19, 2022
One of the few books that I have been unable to complete. I have no doubt that the information is correct, but the style and language make it unreadable for me.
January 18, 2021
"... as boring as watching paint dry..."
Mental note: never ever buy or read another book written by a Professor.
Mental note: never ever buy or read another book written by a Professor.
October 14, 2022
This is a weighty tome (800 plus pages) and the authoritative history of perhaps the least glamorous of the U.K.'s principal security services. However, the facts illustrated in this book clearly demonstrates the critical role GCHQ plays in national security and perhaps one could argue is more relevant and more important than its more glamorous siblings, MI5 and MI6. From its incept in the early twentieth century we see the heights reached by Bletchley Park, the immediate forerunner to the (renaming) creation of GCHQ. The success of cracking the Nazi Germany Enigma code by computer-creating cryptographer heroes such as the now famous Alan Turing, is perhaps the height of the glamour. Post WW2 Bletchley Park staff were transferred over to a permanent base in rural Gloucestershire. Cheltenham later housed the service in the legendary doughnut, a purpose built facility that can rival James Bond's flash new Thames-side MI6 HQ. The main division of labour at GCHQ falls into two branches - SIGINT and COMINT. Mathematicians are well sought for their crypto-analytic skills and GCHQ also encourages linguistically skilled talent. Most workers tend to stay in the organisation until retirement although the pay rates can be rather low and promotion opportunities thin on the ground. However, job satisfaction exists with interesting, varied, intellectually stimulating and critically important jobs. As well as skilled university recruits, a lot of workers are recruited in the administrative divisions and women have always been treated on a more or less level par with their male colleagues. The initial post WW2 focus on the agency was for targeting Russia, with linguists retraining and as much as 90% of the interceptions being directed to behind the Iron Curtain. GCHQ had success against the Soviet Union to a degree much more than HUMINT counterparts. MI5 and MI6 were often left lagging in comparison with KGB master spies. GCHQ has developed and is almost totally integrated with the American equivalent of signals intelligence, the NSA (National Security Agency) in the United States of America. Intelligence sharing in the secret UKUSA handshake agreement allowed all but the most politically sensitive data between the two nations to be completely shared. Five Eyes (including Commonwealth partners, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) is also important as is co-working with NATO allies but the USA with its larger budget and technological dominance has really been an asset to GCHQ development and from their point of view the NSA appreciates the skilled dedication of more traditional and experienced British siginters. As the twentieth century progressed, the digital age continued to rapidly develop on a global scale. GCHQ has to constantly adapt and master new communications technologies and acquire the latest state of the art equipment, necessary to maintain Britain's post-imperial role as a primary global power. Enemies also change and Germans have given way to Soviets, the collapse of the USSR after the fall of the Berlin Wall, leading towards an internet dominated age where Islamic Salafi Jihadists strike terror in Western democracies and rising China sends an unleashed horde of cyberattackers, their quest to steal Western technology and disrupt libertarian values in their global competitors. The internet is a revolution and there is a demand for the public to be protected. In recent years GCHQ has emerged from the shadows and reluctantly revealed some of its clandestine secrets and the Directors of the present day have a need to be media savvy as well as being able to cloak and dagger brief the politicians and its foreign office and military masters. I found the details of the trade union problems in the 1970s to be surprising and interesting and can understand why unionisation was banned at GCHQ as a result of protecting national security. The most memorable chapter of the book was the case studies on Palestine (Israel), Konfrontasi (Indonesia() and Falklands conflict (Argentina). Being a linguist experienced in Mandarin Chinese, Arabic and Russian, someone who is techwise and also keen on protecting the nation and Commonwealth and allies of the U.K., and with the doughnut being half hour train ride away, I have written to them on multiple occasions, seeking some form of mutually beneficial employment but alas, the door is firmly closed and I have not heard but a peep emanating from the elusive GCHQ. Interesting book though, and well-researched and written in detail. Recommend.
August 4, 2022
You probably know the habit of news feeds to grab your attention with a title and then repeat the title ten more times with no additional information. If you bother to read to the end then you'll realise that the entire article could be 10% of the length and still be verbose.
So it is with this authorized history. Everything is in there at least twice and usually thrice but with no discernible structure. Time and again I was lead to think of that review of "Waiting for Godot". "A play in where nothing happens, twice." Well this is the book.
So it is with this authorized history. Everything is in there at least twice and usually thrice but with no discernible structure. Time and again I was lead to think of that review of "Waiting for Godot". "A play in where nothing happens, twice." Well this is the book.
October 4, 2022
Understandable why it might be circumspect in parts, given the subject, but there's absolutely no excuse for being so badly written. One clunky paragraph after another. This from the Falklands section picked at random is typical: "GCHQ provided Whitehall's first and best warnings of Argentine intentions, and of changes in them, though diplomats provided useful and parallel analyses. GCHQ monitored Argentine signals, intially without concern. Naval exercises explained Argentine actions."
January 16, 2021
One of the more interesting textbooks for any student taking a class on the history of national intelligence. Despite the title, "cyber" doesn't really come into play until the tail end and don't expect a lot of discussion of Alan Turing's role at Bletchley Park. As expected, a good portion of the book covers the Falklands and World War II.
October 12, 2023
A really detailed and interesting read. I definitely had to treat it more like a textbook, and I made a lot of notes while I was reading (partly to keep track, and partly to keep quotes I liked or found interesting, because I borrowed this from the library).
I'd love a follow-up with more detail on the NCSC, if that would be possible.
I'd love a follow-up with more detail on the NCSC, if that would be possible.
April 1, 2021
Reads as if written by the military, could not finish.
July 23, 2021
Boring and difficult to read. I quit reading at p. 140.
September 7, 2025
Interesting, but a bit dry in places. I hoped for more on the decryption methods.
November 23, 2022
Delighted to have the opportunity to start reading this book. It is huge and full of information providing great insight into the fascinating history of intelligence. Not one to snuggle up in bed with, but has definitely enlightened my view of some things, which in my case is personal. (My mother was a codebreaker at Bletchley Park - See Codebreaker Girls: A Secret Life at Bletchley Park - Pen and Sword Books.)
January 5, 2022
Took me lot of time to finish this book. The extra star is for the description of how Britain's GCHQ changed rather transformed in the unipolar world and the digital world that came in into existence in 1990.
Else I would have given three stars for a longish historical descriptions
Else I would have given three stars for a longish historical descriptions
August 2, 2023
Long and Dry but chalk full of interesting stuff.
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews