Spooks Corner

by New Worker correspondent

The secret Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has for 66 years operated right in the heart of Westminster.

"For the first time, we are able to reveal the role our Palmer Street office has played in keeping the capital and the country safe," said GCHQ in a statement, speaking about a drab, anonymous office block opposite St James's Park Tube station in central London.

The intelligence agency that specialises in phone-tapping and electronic eavesdropping has now left the building for a new secure facility in Manchester as part of its network extension project. Last year the agency’s ‘Tempora’ programme, an operation that allows it to tap into and store large volumes of data, including phone calls, messages and internet communication, was exposed in the media.

GCHQ was originally established in November 1919 as a code-breaking unit. During the Second World War, GCHQ personnel moved to Bletchley Park where they decrypted German messages and cracked the Nazi’s Enigma machine code.

The service moved its headquarters from the London suburb of Eastcote to Cheltenham in the early 1950s, whilst retaining a covert centre in the capital to liaise with the Government and provide a convenient seat for its director. GCHQ has other offices in Bude, Scarborough and Harrogate. The agency's National Cyber Security Centre was opened in 2017 near Victoria in London.

"As we depart our Palmer Street site after 66 years, we look back on a history full of amazing intelligence, world-leading innovation, and the ingenious people who passed through those secret doors. Then, as now, it's a history defined by the belief that with the right mix of minds, anything is possible," Director of GCHQ, Jeremy Fleming, said.

In the 1980s the agency hit the headlines when the Thatcher government banned all unions at GCHQ on alleged ‘security’ grounds. Over 100 GCHQ staff refused to take the £1,000 inducement or to join a bogus ‘staff federation’ set up to replace the civil service unions that had represented their grades. Fourteen of them were sacked in a long-standing dispute that only ended when union rights were restored by the incoming Labour government in 1997.