Director's Departure Leaves A Big Hole At GCHQ

The early departure of Robert Hannigan (pictured) as UK’s GCHQ chief, was recently announced and it marks not so much the end of an era as the transition between eras. 

The agency’s famous HQ in Cheltenham, a metallic doughnut the size of the UK’s Wembley Stadium, might look futuristic but was designed in the late 1990s before anyone worked out just how much data the intelligence services would have to intercept and analyse. Or how much of espionage would involve codebreaking, and on such an unprecedented scale. 

The workload exploded as it opened in 2003 and suddenly a GCHQ designed for 5,000 staff looked too small. New ways of working were needed.

Hannigan was brought in, as outsiders occasionally are to GCHQ, to administer some course correction. Its analysts needed to change the way they looked for jihadis, so as not to be drowned in the tsunami of data. The agency also needed to change the way it dealt with the outside world, especially in an era where the basic work of the agency could be misrepresented by the likes of Edward Snowden as massive-scale scandalous hacking, rather than the metadata analysis that the agency has always done. 

It’s tough for GCHQ to defend itself, because spies don’t talk. Hannigan tried to open up, a little, to implement a little glasnost, as it were (he had an article in the FT on his first day in the job). He believed that the agency had to do a better job of defending itself if it wanted a long-term future, and that it does have a good story to tell.

He took the helm in an era when jihadi-catching was becoming a lot harder. Just a few years ago, pretty much every email could be intercepted fairly easily. Then encryption started to be offered as standard, so the proportion of hackable emails fell from 100pc to about zero in the space of five or six years. 

Even ten years ago, jihadis were using GSM mobiles, easily traceable given the signals they gave out. The Islamic State is made up of a younger generation who survived by being smart enough not to use mobiles, and can set up their own satellite networks. They know how to conceal their communications, and how to take on dozens of identities. Tracking down a jihadi now is not like looking for a needle in a haystack, needles stand out. It’s like looking for a specific piece of hay in a haystack.

And for all that, GCHQ has managed to adapt and stayed ahead of the bad guys, as it has been doing since the days of Bletchley Park. Like all intelligence agencies, its success is measured in stories that we don’t hear about; attacks that never happen.

And why is Hannigan leaving so early? Those hoping for a conspiracy theory are likely to be disappointed: talk of a family illness is likely closer to the mark. Hannigan said in his resignation letter that he wants a successor to be firmly embedded by GCHQ’s centenary in 2019, but this job is of such importance that ministers expect a successor to be found by Easter.

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