GCHQ

by Richard Aldrich

  21

  Thatcher and the GCHQ Trade Union Ban

  …it was carefully prepared in secret and it came as a bolt from the blue – bang!

  Mike Grindley, Chinese linguist, GCHQ1

  The acrimonious GCHQ trade union dispute that occurred in early 1984 has to be seen in the context of a wider struggle. For more than a decade both Labour and Conservative governments had been challenged by union power, especially in the area of economic policy. Margaret Thatcher was determined to end this, and during its first term in office her government passed a range of trade union legislation, restricting activities such as strikes and picketing. Although the unions had vowed to resist this, the moderate leader of the TUC, Len Murray, told his colleagues that if the Conservatives were elected for a second term in 1983, they would have to accept it. The Conservatives were re-elected, but confrontation continued. By the autumn of 1983 there was a high-profile printing dispute at Warrington and an ongoing miners’ strike led by Arthur Scargill. It was against this volatile background that the Thatcher government decided to ban unions at GCHQ, in a surprise decision announced in January 1984.

  The ban caused a furore throughout the union movement, and even the most moderate trade unionists were appalled. The personal position of Len Murray was undermined. He worked with the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, to put together a compromise in the spring of 1984 which he hoped would be acceptable to the Cabinet, but it was rejected on the personal whim of the Prime Minister. Jim Prior, the Northern Ireland Secretary, recalls that at that moment, ‘Len Murray was lost.’ It is hard to escape the conclusion that both Margaret Thatcher and the major unions used GCHQ as a pawn in a wider ideological battle. Neither the managers nor the trade unionists at GCHQ were directly responsible for what followed.2

  The issue of trade unions at Cheltenham is synonymous with the Thatcher era. After its eruption in early 1984, it constituted a running sore until it was resolved in 1997. Yet it is rarely realised that union issues were not new to the secret world, or indeed to GCHQ. Paradoxically, GCHQ had always had trade unions because it was even more secret than its sister services, MI5 and SIS, which did not. This was because many GCHQ workers were hidden inside other units – such as the Diplomatic Wireless Staff (DWS) – that might reasonably expect union representation. Moreover, unlike MI5 or SIS, Cheltenham was effectively a vast factory that produced intelligence on an industrial scale. The majority of employees at GCHQ and its outstations were working a shift system. In all factories, even secret ones, there is a clear hierarchy, and good labour relations are of the first importance. Yet the managers at GCHQ could be remote figures who were rather conscious of their grades. As a result, union issues had raged beneath the surface of British sigint since the 1950s.

  Disruption of GCHQ’s activities through union action was not the only source of anxiety. Officials believed there were also security issues. Although they conceded that no union official had ever been detected acting as a spy, nevertheless they worried that a significant proportion of officials in some key unions were Communists. Spy cases during the 1950s and 1960s had shown beyond any doubt that Communist Party membership often meant espionage, and Foreign Office officials feared ‘a direct, unfettered and undetectable line of liaison between staff having knowledge of secret affairs and Communists’. Some senior officials had pondered the alternative of a staff association, in other words a tame internal union not affiliated to the TUC, for staff in specialist establishments like GCHQ and Hanslope Park.3 Managers at both the DWS and GCHQ had liked the idea, but Ministers baulked at the political difficulties – it would mean withdrawing normal union membership from many existing staff, and conflict was anticipated. Without concrete evidence of union-related espionage it was decided to continue with the present situation.4 In fact, the main problem was labour relations, not espionage. GCHQ had faced constant issues with Radio Operators because of changing communications technology. New equipment and work of increased complexity meant new grades and many different levels of pay.

  On 11 November 1955, John Winnifrith, a Treasury official who looked after security matters, had reported, ‘Trouble is brewing in GCHQ.’ This was because of a complex dispute involving competing unions which wished to represent the Slip-Readers who worked alongside the Radio Operators, turning the electronic signals captured as sound into processible messages. The Civil Service Union was battling it out with the smaller Government and Overseas Cable and Wireless Operators Association, but Winnifrith explained to his superiors that ‘the politics go far further than that’. He had been told ‘in confidence’ that what was really behind this dispute was the fact that ‘management at GCHQ had deliberately brought this smaller association in to spike the guns of CSU’, as they did not want the Slip-Readers to join an already over-mighty union.5 This deliberate policy of ‘divide and rule’ on the part of Eric Jones, GCHQ’s Director in the early 1950s, was probably a mistake.

  In April 1962 the Radcliffe Inquiry into Security in the Civil Service had resurrected security fears about trade unions. MI5 now estimated that one third of full-time officials in the major Civil Service unions were either Communists or Communist sympathisers. The Electrical Trades Union had Communist full-time officials. At a number of secret establishments, primarily the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, MI5 was looking closely at specific trade union officials. However, this was slippery territory, since MI5 did not want GCHQ or Aldermaston to take precautionary action that would jeopardise its sources. Their greatest worry was that trade unionists, whose legitimate role was to hear staff grievances, would be able to ‘talent spot’ for the KGB, identifying disgruntled individuals who might be willing to act as ‘hostile intelligence agents’. Once again, management pressed for staff associations that had no links to mainstream unions. However, when Privy Councillors consulted the TUC they were warned that such a move would ‘meet with the strongest possible Trade Union opposition’. Fearing political confrontation, the government backed away.6

  Michael Herman, who was head of the prestigious J Division, dealing with Russian problems, observes that by and large there was not much union militancy at GCHQ. However, the Radio Operators had some genuinely awkward problems, including ‘age bulges’ resulting from the recruitment of a lot of wartime staff which blighted promotion prospects. Working conditions in some of the outstations like Cyprus and Hong Kong were also poor.7 In early September 1969, all this boiled over in a five-day strike. This was notionally a work-to-rule after the rejection of a recent pay claim. Some 2,200 Radio Operators were affected, and product from Cyprus and Hong Kong slowed to a trickle. Much of the operators’ work involved searching for radio traffic. During the dispute they found very little, but once it was over, production mysteriously bounced back to normal. Joe Hooper, the Director, intervened personally to persuade the Treasury to reconsider the rejected pay claim. John Somerville, his Principal Establishment Officer, later admitted that industrial action now became a ‘sword of Damocles’, because the 1969 work-to-rule had ‘an immediate and drastic effect on the work of GCHQ’.8 In the long term, the agency responded by moving away from manual collection by people who sat in huts with headphones on, towards more of the sort of automated systems already used by the Americans.9

  In February 1973 the Civil and Public Servants Association had called a one-day strike as part of a general dispute over government public-sector pay policy. Principal Establishment Officers from across the Foreign Office met to review the likely damage to operations. John Somerville explained that at GCHQ the situation was complex, since there were 7,500 staff distributed amongst forty different classes or grades. Half belonged to the Civil and Public Servants Association, and the majority favoured action. The Civil Service Union had also lodged a new pay claim that was likely to lead to trouble. Somerville’s main worry was the impact this might have on sensitive activities: ‘The principal area involved would be the computer centre which might have to be shut down.’ This was becaus
e the computers that undertook the core cryptanalysis ran around the clock, and depended on shift work. All this, he added, would have ‘unfortunate effects on certain aspects of bi-lateral cooperation’ by which he meant GCHQ’s collaboration with NSA.10

  The next serious dispute with the Radio Operators did not arrive until 1979. The strikes of that year, which rumbled on until 1981, were partly caused by an acceleration of the Cold War, driven by the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. Normally, fresh monitoring equipment for the Radio Operators at locations such as Cyprus and Hong Kong underwent a long period of development and operational testing. However, from 1979 a series of crises drove the emergency deployment of new sigint equipment, with little discussion about procedure. This time it was the local managers, or Station Radio Officers, who were upset. The Station Radio Officer was the local manager of resources, and his key role was tactical targeting. If an international event occurred that was of interest, he had responsibility to shift the station’s effort from routine targets to new targets of opportunity. Such redirection was required frequently during the multiple international crises that occurred between late 1979 and early 1980.

  Peter Little, who had been head of K Division, the part of GCHQ dealing with non-Soviet traffic, in the early 1980s, later identified the four international events which coincided with this long-running dispute: the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the hostage crisis in Iran, the invasion of Poland by Russia in 1980-81, and the main annual Soviet military exercise in September 1981. K Division was heavily involved in these issues.11 GCHQ’s allies had helped out by covering for the lost interception as a result of the dispute, but the disruption was embarrassing. Typically, additional coverage during the Polish crisis had been provided by Sweden’s sigint service, the FRA.12 There were other reasons for poor GCHQ performance during the Polish crisis, including the breakdown of equipment. However, unhappiness with coverage of this event fed into the ongoing Douglas Nicoll review.13 Michael Herman recalls his ‘feeling of sadness and shame…when a Cold War 24-hour surveillance unit for which I was responsible closed down for a night watch as part of a departmental pay dispute’. Again, the allies, including NSA, had to ‘take the strain’.14

  The Anglo-American relationship loomed large here, since the strikes impacted directly and painfully on GCHQ’s growing role as a processor of the ‘take’ from NSA’s new satellites. As we have seen, in the 1970s NSA was picking up vastly more product because of its new Ryolite satellites, but had less human processing power because of budget cuts. GCHQ, the Canadian and Australian sigint services had helped out by offering to analyse some of the material. Much of GCHQ was now a processing unit for the streams of sigint that NSA was beaming down to Menwith Hill in Yorkshire, and it feared anything that would disrupt this. In other words, GCHQ and NSA were now wired together in a way that they had not quite been before. Meanwhile, with union relations in Britain generally looking difficult, GCHQ anticipated more strikes across the whole Civil Service than in the past. Accordingly, Cheltenham’s managers now returned to the idea of a staff association to replace unions that had been floated in the 1950s and 1960s.

  Brian Tovey, a bullish figure who had taken over as Director of GCHQ in 1979, recalls that the strikes of that year were ‘the turning point’ for him. He was always puzzled by the presence of the unions at GCHQ, unlike NSA, which he characterised as a ‘cast-iron organisation’ with a military complexion. GCHQ’s industrial action was now impacting on the two agencies’ shared projects. Tovey would have to tell NSA: ‘We’ve had to drop this because of industrial unrest. Could you pick it up for us?’ The Americans found this bizarre. Something else had begun to bother Tovey. Traditionally, union strike action had tended to focus on departments that delivered mainstream public services, such as the National Insurance Office or the Department of Health and Social Security, since this disruption attracted publicity. However, during the late 1970s the union leaders in London had ‘twigged’ that disruption at GCHQ bothered the government.15

  By 1981, general industrial strife was accelerating, and in Tovey’s words the unions had made it ‘brutally clear’ that they regarded GCHQ as a ‘damn good place to hit’. As a result, he noticed ‘a reluctance to enter into work-sharing’ on the part of the Americans. When GCHQ offered further joint projects, NSA tended to think: ‘Oh Lord, we don’t know if we can rely on the British.’ Accordingly, in early 1981, when Tovey quietly informed his NSA opposite number, Bobby Ray Inman, of his plans to get the unions banned, Inman replied, ‘That’s marvellous.’16 Indeed, the perception of a threat to the Anglo-American intelligence relationship was now widely shared across government. Jim Prior, who was Secretary of State for Northern Ireland at the time, recalled that union action at GCHQ in 1981 ‘had very much upset the Americans’.17

  The next strike, on 9 March 1981, was part of a general day of action by the Civil Service Union. About a quarter of GCHQ staff walked out. Even at the time, local CSU officials at Cheltenham worried that this was a bad idea. Mike Vernon, a member of the CSU’s committee that looked after Radio Operators, was conscious of GCHQ’s declining position as a producer in the wider world of sigint agencies. GCHQ was looking old and tired alongside younger agencies such as the West German BND. Everyone knew that NSA was thinking about a closer relationship with the BND, and was investing heavily in its station at Bad Aibling in Germany. America had also repaired its relationship with Turkey, reducing the value of Cyprus. Vernon thought that jobs at some of GCHQ’s outstations were in jeopardy.18 Mike Bradshaw, another union official, admits that the CSU’s tactics between 1979 and 1981 included trying to embarrass GCHQ in front of its American partners. If the intention was to provoke a reaction, it worked.19

  Exactly why Margaret Thatcher chose to confront the unions over GCHQ in January 1984, rather than in 1981, remains a mystery. Brian Tovey had discussed the union matter at length with his board of directors in 1980, and had drawn up a secret plan for de-unionisation, code-named ‘Status’.20 He formally asked the government for a union ban following the CSU’s 9 March 1981 day of action, but as in the 1950s and 1960s, government Ministers recoiled in horror. The main opponent was the Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington, who objected on principle, viewing trade union membership as a basic human right. Even within the Permanent Secretaries’ Committee on the Intelligence Services (PSIS), Sir Douglas Vass at the Treasury and Frank Cooper at the Ministry of Defence argued that it would cause too much trouble.21 Francis Pym, Carrington’s successor as Foreign Secretary in 1982, would also have nothing to do with the idea of a union ban at GCHQ.22

  Margaret Thatcher later misrepresented this. Hiding ministerial dissent, she insisted that the reason no action was taken in 1981 was because it would have drawn undue attention to GCHQ’s intelligence-gathering activities, which were not yet publicly avowed. By contrast, she claimed after the Geoffrey Prime affair of 1982 that the truth about GCHQ’s duties was in the open.23 This is simply not a plausible explanation. The real nature of GCHQ had been revealed to the Russians by countless defectors, including the NSA operatives Martin and Mitchell in 1960, and to the British public by Duncan Campbell and the infamous ABC trial in 1978.24 So what suddenly changed Margaret Thatcher’s mind in 1984? Part of the reason was politics. Lord Carrington, one of the staunchest objectors to a union ban, had resigned over the Falklands. Now in her second administration, with a large post-Falklands majority, she was more confident. However, another issue lurked underneath: the much-feared polygraph. As we have seen, in July 1983, having reviewed the Prime case and visited NSA, the Security Commission had recommended the introduction of the polygraph at GCHQ. The unions feared that the polygraph was inaccurate, and that many innocent individuals would fail the test. Staunch union resistance was guaranteed, so the removal of the unions seemed to be a prerequisite for the introduction of this unpopular security measure.25

  The dark shadow of the polygraph also explains why government did not pursue obvious options such as a ‘continuit
y of service’ agreement – effectively a non-strike agreement – with the unions. Brian Tovey told the Employment Select Committee of the House of Commons that this would have left him perfectly satisfied. However, it would not have solved the underlying problem of union resistance to the polygraph. This left managers with no choice but to go down the more radical road of replacing the unions with a staff federation. The polygraph also shut off the other sensible option of closing union membership to new joiners. Given that union membership at Cheltenham was only about half the staff, this would have reduced it significantly over a decade, with the unions gradually withering on the vine. However, the polygraph issue required them to be removed abruptly.26

  NSA did not give GCHQ any sort of directive on the issue. Brian Tovey has stated that the Americans never explicitly requested the removal of trade unions at GCHQ, and that it was his own initiative. However, they had directly and repeatedly requested the introduction of the polygraph, and former Deputy Director of NSA Benson Buffham had come to London to reinforce this. The team NSA sent to Britain to assess the damage caused by Geoffrey Prime concluded that while the systems for handling sigint product securely were standardised throughout the UKUSA alliance system, the protocols for personnel security were lamentably weak. The sense of urgency was increased by the fact that some believed that Prime had assisted the KGB with the recruitment of further moles. The pressure for the polygraph influenced the way in which the trade union ban was implemented.27