[2019]

I mentioned in an earlier chapter that my approach to intelligence at GCHQ was that of a factory manager interested in volume, accuracy and value, as well as customer satisfaction. On the one hand we strove to deliver a slicker and cheaper product, on the other to make progress in the permanent battle against Soviet security measures. There was a constant striving for quality, with the memories of what Bletchley achieved in the war as an ideal objective. It is from this standpoint that I offer reflections on the system for intelligence requirements and priorities which notionally drove our Cold War activity. Philip Davies has described this formal machinery more extensively in his comparative study of UK and US intelligence, but I add some personal thoughts on it here.

I start with the minutes of a JIC review of Defence Intelligence Targets on 28 April 1955. This meeting was held in the light of a recent JIC assessment that any war with the Soviet Union was likely to be nuclear rather than conventional. It was one of the Committee's more thought-provoking discussions of its intelligence objectives, after a striking and controversial opening statement by Eric Jones, later Sir Eric, who had been GCHQ's Director since 1952. Jones was an unusual leader who had left school at fifteen to join the family textile business before establishing his own firm. He had joined the Royal Air Force in 1940 and then distinguished himself at Bletchley, staying with GCHQ after 1945.

At the JIC, of which GCHQ had just become a full member by 1955, Jones argued that the new assessment of nuclear war meant that Cold War intelligence was now more important than preparations for ‘hot’ war. He therefore questioned the importance of the JIC's requirements for collecting intelligence on the Soviet order of battle, arguing against detailed specifications of what was sought from GCHQ. Instead he advocated for broad collection objectives with bilateral consultation over implementation. This was in some ways a replay of the wartime debates about Bletchley's role, forcefully brought out in Sir Arthur Bonsall's presentation some years ago at our Oxford Intelligence Group about Bletchley's air section and its struggle to become a Sigint centre.