Tuesday, September 21, 2010

GCHQ - Richard J. Aldrich


This is the uncensored story of Britain's most secret intelligence agency, Government Communications Headquarters.

This book tells the story of Britain's electronic spying from WWII up until the present day.

It is a fascinating read and shows that the real intelligence gathering was done by "geeks" rather than by James Bond.

Tales of amazing bravery are told, we have submarines going into enemy harbours and getting as close as 6 feet away listening to signals from the opposition.

It shows how the electronic intell. gathering has had a huge bearing on all major military operations since WWII.

All is not perfect though, for some reason the British intelligence community did not learn from McLean , Philby and others. Geoffry Prime, the last really damaging spy found inside GCHQ was allowed to work for two years in a high security area before he was even vetted. Everyone was later surprised when he was found to be a spy and a paedophile!!!!!!

One very interesting fact written of here was that the Auckland power outages of 1998 were caused by hackers in Holland, rather than by faulty equipment in New Zealand, something that has never been spoken of here.

This is a very good book, not too technical and flows nicely covering many of the major moments of the 20th century.

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