Government Communications Headquarters

The Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is a British intelligence agency

Intelligence agency

An intelligence agency is a governmental agency that is devoted to information gathering for purposes of national security and defence. Means of information gathering may include espionage, communication interception, cryptanalysis, cooperation with other institutions, and evaluation of public...

responsible for providing signals intelligence (SIGINT) and information assurance

Information Assurance

Information assurance is the practice of managing risks related to the use, processing, storage, and transmission of information or data and the systems and processes used for those purposes...

to the UK government and armed forces

British Armed Forces

The British Armed Forces are the armed forces of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.Also known as Her Majesty's Armed Forces and sometimes legally the Armed Forces of the Crown, the British Armed Forces encompasses three professional uniformed services, the Royal Navy, the...

. Based in Cheltenham

Cheltenham

Cheltenham , also known as Cheltenham Spa, is a large spa town and borough in Gloucestershire, on the edge of the Cotswolds in the South-West region of England. It is the home of the flagship race of British steeplechase horse racing, the Gold Cup, the main event of the Cheltenham Festival held...

, it operates under the guidance of the Joint Intelligence Committee.

CESG (originally Communications-Electronics Security Group) is the branch of GCHQ which works to secure the communications and information systems of the government and critical parts of UK national infrastructure.

GCHQ was originally established after World War I as the Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS or GC&CS), by which name it was known until 1946.

GCHQ is the responsibility of the UK Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs

Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs

The Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, commonly referred to as the Foreign Secretary, is a senior member of Her Majesty's Government heading the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and regarded as one of the Great Offices of State...

, but it is not a part of the Foreign Office, and its Director ranks as a Permanent Secretary

Permanent Secretary

The Permanent secretary, in most departments officially titled the permanent under-secretary of state , is the most senior civil servant of a British Government ministry, charged with running the department on a day-to-day basis...

Structure

GCHQ is led by the Director of GCHQ, currently Iain Lobban

Iain Lobban

Iain Robert Lobban, CB is the Director of British intelligence gathering facility GCHQ, having succeeded Sir David Pepper in July 2008.-Education and career:...

, and a Corporate Board, made up of Executive and Non-Executive Directors. Reporting to the Corporate Board is Sigint missions (comprising Maths & cryptoanalysis, IT & computer systems, Linguists & translation and the Intelligence analysis unit), Enterprise (comprising Applied Research & emerging technologies, Corporate knowledge & information systems, Commercial supplier relationships and Biometrics), Corporate management (comprising Enterprise resource planning, Human resources, Internal audit and the Architecture team) and the Communications-Electronics Security Group.

Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS)

During the First World War, Britain's Army

British Army

The British Army is the land warfare branch of Her Majesty's Armed Forces in the United Kingdom. It came into being with the unification of the Kingdom of England and Scotland into the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707. The new British Army incorporated Regiments that had already existed in England...

and Navy

Royal Navy

The Royal Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the British Armed Forces. Founded in the 16th century, it is the oldest service branch and is known as the Senior Service...

had separate signals intelligence agencies, MI1b and NID25

Room 40

In the history of Cryptanalysis, Room 40 was the section in the Admiralty most identified with the British cryptoanalysis effort during the First World War.Room 40 was formed in October 1914, shortly after the start of the war...

(initially known as Room 40) respectively. In 1919, the Cabinet's Secret Service Committee, chaired by Lord Curzon, recommended that a peace-time codebreaking agency should be created, a task given to the then-Director of Naval Intelligence, Hugh Sinclair

Hugh Sinclair

Admiral Sir Hugh Francis Paget Sinclair KCB , nicknamed "Quex", was a British intelligence officer. Between 1919 and 1921, he was Director of British Naval Intelligence, and helped to set up the Secret Intelligence Service before the Second World War.-Career:Sinclair joined the Royal Navy in the...

. 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", a cover-name chosen by Victor Forbes of the Foreign Office. Alastair Denniston

Alastair Denniston

Commander Alexander Guthrie Denniston CMG CBE RNVR was a British codebreaker in Room 40 and first head of the Government Code and Cypher School and field hockey player...

, who had been a member of NID25, was appointed as its operational head. It was initially under the control of the Admiralty

Admiralty

The Admiralty was formerly the authority in the Kingdom of England, and later in the United Kingdom, responsible for the command of the Royal Navy...

, 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." GCCS officially formed on 1 November 1919, and produced its first decrypt on 19 October.

Before the Second World War, GCCS was a relatively small department. By 1922, the main focus of GCCS 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. GCCS came under the supervision of Hugh Sinclair, who by 1923 was both the Chief of SIS

Secret Intelligence Service

The Secret Intelligence Service is responsible for supplying the British Government with foreign intelligence. Alongside the internal Security Service , the Government Communications Headquarters and the Defence Intelligence , it operates under the formal direction of the Joint Intelligence...

and Director of GCCS. In 1925, both organisations were co-located on different floors of Broadway Buildings, opposite St. James's Park

St. James's Park

St. James's Park is a 23 hectare park in the City of Westminster, central London - the oldest of the Royal Parks of London. The park lies at the southernmost tip of the St. James's area, which was named after a leper hospital dedicated to St. James the Less.- Geographical location :St. James's...

. Messages decrypted by GCCS were distributed in blue jacketed files that became known as "BJs".

In the 1920s, GCCS was successfully reading Soviet Union diplomatic ciphers. However, in May 1927, during a row over clandestine Soviet support for the General Strike

General strike

A general strike is a strike action by a critical mass of the labour force in a city, region, or country. While a general strike can be for political goals, economic goals, or both, it tends to gain its momentum from the ideological or class sympathies of the participants...

and the distribution of subversive propaganda, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin

Stanley Baldwin

Stanley Baldwin, 1st Earl Baldwin of Bewdley, KG, PC was a British Conservative politician, who dominated the government in his country between the two world wars...

made details from the decrypts public.
During the Second World War, GCCS was based largely at Bletchley Park

Bletchley Park

Bletchley Park is an estate located in the town of Bletchley, in Buckinghamshire, England, which currently houses the National Museum of Computing...

in present-day Milton Keynes working on, most famously, the German Enigma machine

Enigma machine

An Enigma machine is any of a family of related electro-mechanical rotor cipher machines used for the encryption and decryption of secret messages. Enigma was invented by German engineer Arthur Scherbius at the end of World War I...

and Lorenz

Lorenz cipher

The Lorenz SZ40, SZ42A and SZ42B were German rotor cipher machines used by the German Army during World War II. They were developed by C. Lorenz AG in Berlin. They implemented a Vernam stream cipher...

ciphers, but also a large number of other systems. In 1940, GCCS was working on the diplomatic codes and ciphers of 26 countries, tackling over 150 diplomatic cryptosystems. Senior staff included Alastair Denniston

Alastair Denniston

Commander Alexander Guthrie Denniston CMG CBE RNVR was a British codebreaker in Room 40 and first head of the Government Code and Cypher School and field hockey player...

, Oliver Strachey

Oliver Strachey

Oliver Strachey , a British civil servant in the Foreign Office was a cryptographer from World War I to World War II....

, Dilly Knox

Dilly Knox

Alfred Dillwyn 'Dilly' Knox CMG was a classics scholar at King's College, Cambridge, and a British codebreaker...

, John Tiltman, Edward Travis

Edward Travis

Sir Edward Wilfred Harry Travis KCMG CBE was a British cryptographer and intelligence officer, becoming the operational head of Bletchley Park during World War II, and later the head of GCHQ.-Career:...

, Ernst Fetterlein

Ernst Fetterlein

Ernst Constantin Fetterlein was a Russian cryptographer who later defected to Britain.Fetterlein was born in St Petersburg, the son of Karl Fedorovich Fetterlein, a German-language tutor, and Olga Fetterlein, née Meier. He studied a variety of eastern languages at the University of St Petersburg,...

, Josh Cooper

Josh Cooper (cryptographer)

Joshua Edward Synge Cooper CB, CMG was an English cryptographer.He joined the Government Code and Cipher School as a Junior Assistant in October 1925 to specialise in Russian codes and ciphers. He was down from King’s College London with a First in Russian and was teaching at a preparatory...

, Donald Michie

Donald Michie

Donald Michie was a British researcher in artificial intelligence. During World War II, Michie worked for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, contributing to the effort to solve "Tunny," a German teleprinter cipher.-Early life and career:Michie was born in Rangoon, Burma...

, Alan Turing

Alan Turing

Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS , was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine, which played a...

, Max Newman

Max Newman

Maxwell Herman Alexander "Max" Newman, FRS was a British mathematician and codebreaker.-Pre–World War II:Max Newman was born Maxwell Neumann in Chelsea, London, England, on 7 February 1897...

, William Tutte, I. J. (Jack) Good

I. J. Good

Irving John Good was a British mathematician who worked as a cryptologist at Bletchley Park with Alan Turing. After World War II, Good continued to work with Turing on the design of computers and Bayesian statistics at the University of Manchester...

, Peter Calvocoressi

Peter Calvocoressi

Peter John Ambrose Calvocoressi was a British political author, historian and a former intelligence officer at Bletchley Park during World War II.-Early years:...

and Hugh Foss

Hugh Foss

Hugh Rose Foss was a British cryptographer.-Life:Foss was born in Kobe, Japan, where his father the Rt Revd Hugh Foss was a missionary bishop, and he learned Japanese....

.

An outstation in the Far East, the Far East Combined Bureau

Far East Combined Bureau

The Far East Combined Bureau, an outstation of the British Government Code and Cypher School, was set up in Hong Kong in March 1935, to monitor Japanese, and also Chinese and Russian intelligence and radio traffic...

was set up in Hong Kong in 1935, and moved to Singapore in 1939. Subsequently with the Japanese advance down the Malay Peninsular, the Army and RAF codebreakers went to the Wireless Experimental Centre

Wireless Experimental Centre

The Wireless Experimental Centre was one of two overseas outposts of Station X, Bletchley Park, the British signals analysis centre during World War II. The other outpost was the Far East Combined Bureau....

in Delhi, India. The Navy codebreakers in FECB went to Colombo

Colombo

Colombo is the largest city of Sri Lanka. It is located on the west coast of the island and adjacent to Sri Jayawardenapura Kotte, the capital of Sri Lanka. Colombo is often referred to as the capital of the country, since Sri Jayawardenapura Kotte is a satellite city of Colombo...

, Ceylon, then to Kilindini, near Mombasa

Mombasa

Mombasa is the second-largest city in Kenya. Lying next to the Indian Ocean, it has a major port and an international airport. The city also serves as the centre of the coastal tourism industry....

, Kenya

Kenya

Kenya , officially known as the Republic of Kenya, is a country in East Africa that lies on the equator, with the Indian Ocean to its south-east...

.

GCCS was renamed the "Government Communications Headquarters" in June 1946.

After World War II

GCHQ was at first based in Eastcote

RAF Eastcote

RAF Eastcote, also known over time as RAF Lime Grove, HMS Pembroke V and Outstation Eastcote, was a Ministry of Defence site in Eastcote, within the London Borough of Hillingdon....

, but in 1951 moved to the outskirts of Cheltenham

Cheltenham

, setting up two sites there — Oakley and Benhall. GCHQ had a very low profile in the media until 1983 when the trial of Geoffrey Prime

Geoffrey Prime

Geoffrey Prime is a British former spy for the Soviet Union while working for the Royal Air Force and later for Government Communications Headquarters, the British cryptography agency, during the 1960s and 1970s...

, a KGB

KGB

The KGB was the commonly used acronym for the . It was the national security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 until 1991, and was the premier internal security, intelligence, and secret police organization during that time.The State Security Agency of the Republic of Belarus currently uses the...

mole within GCHQ, created considerable media interest.

Since the days of WWII, US and British intelligence have shared information. For the GCHQ this means that it shares information, and gets information from, the National Security Agency

National Security Agency

The National Security Agency/Central Security Service is a cryptologic intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the collection and analysis of foreign communications and foreign signals intelligence, as well as protecting U.S...

(NSA) in the US.

Public key encryption

Early in the 1970s, the asymmetric key algorithm was invented by staff member Clifford Cocks

Clifford Cocks

Clifford Christopher Cocks, CB, is a British mathematician and cryptographer at GCHQ.He invented the widely-used encryption algorithm now commonly known as RSA, about three years before it was independently developed by Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman at MIT...

, a mathematics graduate: this fact was kept secret until 1997.

Trade union disputes

In 1984, GCHQ was the centre of a political row when the Conservative

Conservative Party (UK)

The Conservative Party, formally the Conservative and Unionist Party, is a centre-right political party in the United Kingdom that adheres to the philosophies of conservatism and British unionism. It is the largest political party in the UK, and is currently the largest single party in the House...

government of Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990...

prohibited its employees from belonging to a Trade Union

Trade union

A trade union, trades union or labor union is an organization of workers that have banded together to achieve common goals such as better working conditions. The trade union, through its leadership, bargains with the employer on behalf of union members and negotiates labour contracts with...

. It was claimed that joining such a union would be in conflict with national security

National security

National security is the requirement to maintain the survival of the state through the use of economic, diplomacy, power projection and political power. The concept developed mostly in the United States of America after World War II...

. Appeals to British Courts and European Commission of Human Rights

European Commission of Human Rights

European Commission of Human Rights was a special tribunal.From 1954 to the entry into force of Protocol 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights, individuals did not have direct access to the European Court of Human Rights; they had to apply to the Commission, which if it found the case to be...

were unsuccessful. Appeal to the ILO

Ilo

Ilo is a port city in southern Peru, with some 58,000 inhabitants. It is the largest city in the Moquegua Region and capital of the province of Ilo.-History:...

resulted in a decision that government's actions were in violation of Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise Convention. The ban was eventually lifted by the incoming Labour

Labour Party (UK)

The Labour Party is a centre-left democratic socialist party in the United Kingdom. It surpassed the Liberal Party in general elections during the early 1920s, forming minority governments under Ramsay MacDonald in 1924 and 1929-1931. The party was in a wartime coalition from 1940 to 1945, after...

government in 1997, with the Government Communications Group of the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) Union being formed to represent interested employees at all grades. In 2000, a group of 14 former GCHQ employees, who had been dismissed after refusing to give up their union membership, were offered re-employment, which three of them accepted.

Post Cold War

Since 1994, GCHQ activities have been subject to scrutiny by Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee

Intelligence and Security Committee

The Intelligence and Security Committee is a committee of parliamentarians appointed by the Prime Minister to oversee the work of the Intelligence machinery of the United Kingdom...

. Post-Cold War

Cold War

The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...

, the aims of GCHQ were set out by the Intelligence Services Act 1994.

At the end of 2003, GCHQ moved to a new circular HQ (popularly known as 'the Doughnut'): at the time, it was the second-largest public-sector building project in Europe, with an estimated cost of £337 million. The new building, which was designed by Gensler

Gensler

Gensler is an American design and architecture firm headquartered in San Francisco, California. The firm was founded in 1965 by Art Gensler, Drue Gensler, and James Follett, and originally focused on corporate interiors...

and constructed by Carillion, is the base for all of GCHQ's Cheltenham

Cheltenham

operations.

The public spotlight fell on GCHQ in late 2003 and early 2004 following the sacking of Katharine Gun

Katharine Gun

Katharine Teresa Gun is a former translator for Government Communications Headquarters , a British intelligence agency...

after she leaked to The Observer
The Observer
The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...

a confidential email from agents at the American National Security Agency

National Security Agency

addressed to GCHQ agents about the wire-tapping of UN delegates in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war

2003 invasion of Iraq

The 2003 invasion of Iraq , was the start of the conflict known as the Iraq War, or Operation Iraqi Freedom, in which a combined force of troops from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Poland invaded Iraq and toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein in 21 days of major combat operations...

.

GCHQ gains its intelligence by monitoring a wide variety of communications and other electronic signals. For this, a number of stations have been established in the UK and overseas. The listening stations are at Cheltenham itself, Bude, Ascension Island

Ascension Island

Ascension Island is an isolated volcanic island in the equatorial waters of the South Atlantic Ocean, around from the coast of Africa and from the coast of South America, which is roughly midway between the horn of South America and Africa...

, with the U.S.A., at Menwith Hill. Ayios Nikolaos Station in Cyprus is run by the British Armed Forces

British Armed Forces

for GCHQ.

In March 2010, GCHQ was embroiled in controversy after it emerged it had lost 35 laptops, potentially containing highly sensitive national intelligence data.

CESG

The Communications-Electronics Security Group (CESG) of GCHQ provides assistance to government departments on their own communications security: CESG is the UK national technical authority for information assurance

Information Assurance

Information assurance is the practice of managing risks related to the use, processing, storage, and transmission of information or data and the systems and processes used for those purposes...

, including cryptography

Cryptography

Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties...

. CESG does not manufacture security equipment, but works with industry to ensure the availability of suitable products and services, while GCHQ itself can fund research into such areas, for example to the Centre for Quantum Computing at Oxford University and the Heilbronn Institute at Bristol University.

CESG runs a number of schemes such as CHECK

Check

Check may refer to* A small crack in the glass, also known as a check, in the glass container industry* Cheque , an order for transfer of money* Check box, a type of widget in computing...

, CLAS

CESG Listed Advisor Scheme

The CESG Listed Adviser Scheme is a programme run by CESG, to provide a pool of information assurance consultants to government departments and other public-sector bodies in the UK....

, and CAPS

Caps

Caps is the plural of the form of headgear cap. Caps may also refer to:-Science and technology:* Caps, exploding pellets in a cap gun* CAPS , N-cyclohexyl-3-aminopropanesulfonic acid, a buffering agent in biochemistry...

International relationships

GCHQ operates in partnership with equivalent agencies worldwide in a number of bi-lateral and multi-lateral relationships. The principal of these is with the United States (National Security Agency

National Security Agency

), Canada (Communications Security Establishment

Communications Security Establishment

The Communications Security Establishment Canada is the Canadian government's national cryptologic agency. Administered under the Department of National Defence , it is charged with the duty of keeping track of foreign signals intelligence , and protecting Canadian government electronic...

), Australia (Defence Signals Directorate

Defence Signals Directorate

Defence Signals Directorate is an Australian government intelligence agency responsible for signals intelligence and information security .-Overview:According to its website, DSD has two principal functions:...

) and New Zealand (Government Communications Security Bureau), through the mechanism of the UK-US Security Agreement, a broad intelligence sharing agreement encompassing a range of intelligence collection methods.

Relationships are alleged to include shared collection methods, such as the system described in the popular media as ECHELON

ECHELON

ECHELON is a name used in global media and in popular culture to describe a signals intelligence collection and analysis network operated on behalf of the five signatory states to the UK–USA Security Agreement...

, as well as analysed product.

Constitutional legal case

A controversial GCHQ case determined the scope of judicial review of prerogative powers (the Crown's residual powers under common law). This was Council of Civil Service Unions v Minister for the Civil Service
Council of Civil Service Unions v Minister for the Civil Service
Council of Civil Service Unions v Minister for the Civil Service [1985] AC 374, commonly known as the GCHQ case, was an English administrative law which held that the Royal Prerogative was subject to judicial review...

[1985] AC 374 (often known simply as the "GCHQ case"). In this case, a prerogative Order in Council had been used by the prime minister (who is the Minister for the Civil Service

Minister for the Civil Service

In British government, the Minister for the Civil Service is responsible for making regulations regarding Her Majesty's Civil Service, the role of which is to assist the governments of the United Kingdom in formulating and implementing policies...

) to ban trade union activities by civil servants working at GCHQ. This order was issued without consultation. The House of Lords had to decide whether this was reviewable by judicial review

Judicial review

Judicial review is the doctrine under which legislative and executive actions are subject to review by the judiciary. Specific courts with judicial review power must annul the acts of the state when it finds them incompatible with a higher authority...

. It was held that executive action is not immune from judicial review simply because it uses powers derived from common law rather than statute (thus the prerogative is reviewable). Controversially, they also held that although the failure to consult was unfair, this was overridden by concerns of national security.

Leadership

The following is a list of the heads of the operational heads of GCHQ and GCCS:

Alastair Denniston
Alastair Denniston
Commander Alexander Guthrie Denniston CMG CBE RNVR was a British codebreaker in Room 40 and first head of the Government Code and Cypher School and field hockey player...

CMG
Order of St Michael and St George
The Most Distinguished Order of Saint Michael and Saint George is an order of chivalry founded on 28 April 1818 by George, Prince Regent, later George IV of the United Kingdom, while he was acting as Prince Regent for his father, George III....

CBE
Order of the British Empire
The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is an order of chivalry established on 4 June 1917 by George V of the United Kingdom. The Order comprises five classes in civil and military divisions...

(1921 – February 1942) (continued as Deputy Director (Diplomatic and Commercial) until 1945).
Sir Edward Travis
Edward Travis
Sir Edward Wilfred Harry Travis KCMG CBE was a British cryptographer and intelligence officer, becoming the operational head of Bletchley Park during World War II, and later the head of GCHQ.-Career:...

KCMG CBE
Order of the British Empire
The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is an order of chivalry established on 4 June 1917 by George V of the United Kingdom. The Order comprises five classes in civil and military divisions...

(February 1942 – 1952)
Sir Eric Jones
Eric Malcolm Jones
Sir Eric Malcolm Jones KCMG CB CBE is a former director of the British signals intelligence agency, GCHQ, a post he held from 1952 to 1960.-Career:...

KCMG CB
Order of the Bath
The Most Honourable Order of the Bath is a British order of chivalry founded by George I on 18 May 1725. The name derives from the elaborate mediæval ceremony for creating a knight, which involved bathing as one of its elements. The knights so created were known as Knights of the Bath...

CBE
Order of the British Empire
The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is an order of chivalry established on 4 June 1917 by George V of the United Kingdom. The Order comprises five classes in civil and military divisions...

(April 1952 – 1960)
Sir Clive Loehnis
Clive Loehnis
Sir Clive Loehnis KCMG is a former director of the British signals intelligence agency, GCHQ, a post he held from 1960 to 1964.-Career:Loehnis was born in 1902 in Chelsea, London...

KCMG (1960–1964)
Sir Leonard Hooper
Leonard James Hooper
Sir Leonard James Hooper KCMG CBE was a former director of the British signals intelligence agency, GCHQ, a post he held from 1965 to 1973.-Career:...

KCMG CBE
Order of the British Empire
The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is an order of chivalry established on 4 June 1917 by George V of the United Kingdom. The Order comprises five classes in civil and military divisions...

(1965–1973)
Sir Arthur Bonsall
Arthur Bonsall
Sir Arthur Wilfred Bonsall KCMG CBE is a former director of the British signals intelligence agency, GCHQ, a post he held from 1973 to 1978.-Career:...

KCMG CBE
Order of the British Empire
The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is an order of chivalry established on 4 June 1917 by George V of the United Kingdom. The Order comprises five classes in civil and military divisions...

(1973–1978)
Sir Brian John Maynard Tovey
Brian Tovey
Sir Brian John Maynard Tovey KCMG is a former director of the British signals intelligence agency, GCHQ, a post he held from 1978 to 1983.-Career:...

KCMG (1978–1983)
Sir Peter Marychurch
Peter Marychurch
Sir Peter Marychurch KCMG is a former Director of the British signals intelligence agency, GCHQ, a post he held from 1983 to 1989.-Career:...

KCMG (1983–1989)
Sir John Anthony Adye
John Adye
Sir John Anthony Adye KCMG is a former Director of the British signals intelligence agency, GCHQ, a post he held from 1989 to 1996.-Career:...

KCMG (1989–1996)
Sir David Omand
David Omand
Sir David Bruce Omand GCB is a former senior British civil servant.-Career:Educated at Glasgow Academy and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Omand started out with the Government Communications Headquarters. After years of service with the Ministry of Defence, from 1996 to 1997 he was Director of...

GCB (July 1996 – December 1997)
Sir Kevin Tebbit
Kevin Tebbit
Sir Kevin Reginald Tebbit, KCB CMG ) is a former British civil servant.-Career:He was educated at the Cambridgeshire High School for Boys and St John's College, Cambridge. From January to July 1998, Tebbit was director of GCHQ...

KCB CMG
Order of St Michael and St George
The Most Distinguished Order of Saint Michael and Saint George is an order of chivalry founded on 28 April 1818 by George, Prince Regent, later George IV of the United Kingdom, while he was acting as Prince Regent for his father, George III....

(January–July 1998)
Sir Francis Richards KCMG CVO
Royal Victorian Order
The Royal Victorian Order is a dynastic order of knighthood and a house order of chivalry recognising distinguished personal service to the order's Sovereign, the reigning monarch of the Commonwealth realms, any members of her family, or any of her viceroys...

DL
Deputy Lieutenant
In the United Kingdom, a Deputy Lieutenant is one of several deputies to the Lord Lieutenant of a lieutenancy area; an English ceremonial county, Welsh preserved county, Scottish lieutenancy area, or Northern Irish county borough or county....

(July 1998 – April 2003)
Sir David Pepper
David Pepper
Sir David Pepper KCMG was the director of the British intelligence agency GCHQ from 2003 to 2008.-Career:Pepper gained a doctorate in theoretical physics from St John's College, Oxford. He joined GCHQ in 1972, and worked in intelligence operations. In 1995 he became Director of Administration...

KCMG (April 2003 – July 2008)
Iain Lobban
Iain Lobban
Iain Robert Lobban, CB is the Director of British intelligence gathering facility GCHQ, having succeeded Sir David Pepper in July 2008.-Education and career:...

CB
Order of the Bath
The Most Honourable Order of the Bath is a British order of chivalry founded by George I on 18 May 1725. The name derives from the elaborate mediæval ceremony for creating a knight, which involved bathing as one of its elements. The knights so created were known as Knights of the Bath...

(July 2008–present)

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Structure

Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS)

After World War II

Public key encryption

Trade union disputes

Post Cold War

CESG

International relationships

Constitutional legal case

Leadership

See also

Further reading

External links