Thirty two years ago, the then director of GCHQ, Sir Peter Marychurch, who has died aged 89, wrote an angry letter to one of Britain’s acclaimed wartime codebreakers. He accused Gordon Welchman, head of Bletchley Park’s famed Hut Six, of damaging national security. “Each time a person like yourself of obviously deep knowledge and high repute publishes inside information about the inner secrets of our work, there is more temptation and more cause for others to follow suit,” he wrote. “We do not expect outsiders to show any great sense of responsibility in what they publish, but you can perhaps understand that it is a bitter blow to us, as well as a disastrous example to others, when valued ex-colleagues decide to let us down.”
Welchman’s offence was to publish a paper acknowledging work done by Polish codebreakers before the second world war that contributed to the subsequent success of British codebreakers at Bletchley Park. His aim was to correct misleading passages in Sir Harry Hinsley’s official history of British intelligence in the second world war.
Marychurch’s outburst, which I reported at the time, provoked a stinging rebuke from Sir Stuart Milner-Barry, Welchman’s successor at Hut Six and another illustrious codebreaker. In a letter to the Guardian, he described Marychurch’s attack on Welchman as a “prime example of the lengths to which GCHQ’s paranoia about the preservation of ancient secrets will carry them”. To speak of “direct damage to security” was “surely absurd”, said Milner-Barry, who added: “To suppose that the battles which we had to wage before the birth of the first computer (which must seem to present-day cryptanalysts rather like fighting with bows and arrows) could be relevant to security now is just not credible.”
However Marychurch, who had joined Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, in 1948, and was director from 1983 to 1989, had been indoctrinated to say absolutely nothing about the work of the intelligence-gathering agency based in Cheltenham and its wartime predecessor, the Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park. And he stuck rigidly to his initial instruction, even though the role of the agency had been officially “avowed” after Geoffrey Prime, a former GCHQ officer who had been spying for the Russians for many years, had been caught, in 1982, and the ban on trade union membership there had been imposed by Margaret Thatcher two years later. This dragged GCHQ into an unwelcome spotlight and sparked a long and public dispute that damaged morale for the rest of his directorship.
So passionate was Marychurch about secrecy that, in a confidential internal memo, he forbade staff from appearing as extras in the film The Whistle Blower, a 1986 work of fiction concerning GCHQ. One GCHQ officer was reported to have described him as “from the Reds-under-the-beds school. He’s tough, shrewd and calculating, determined that GCHQ should be non-accountable.”
Marychurch was soon involved in another controversy. In 1987 the investigative journalist Duncan Campbell revealed that the government was planning to build its own signals intelligence-gathering satellite, codenamed Zircon. In an affidavit supporting a court injunction, Marychurch claimed a planned BBC programme on the project would cause serious damage because “it could cause the US to lose confidence in the United Kingdom’s ability to protect the highly classified information involved and to reduce or withdraw their co-operation (which is essential to the UK) in this and related fields of great importance to the country’s security”. If alerted to the existence and purpose of the Zircon project, hostile intelligence services could take protective counter-measures, he said.
The affidavit was too late to stop the New Statesman from publishing an article by Campbell about the project. It soon emerged that the Treasury was strongly opposed to Zircon because of its soaring cost, and the project was cancelled.
Marychurch was the son of Eric, a bank clerk, and his wife, Dorothy. He was educated at the Lower School of John Lyon in Harrow, north-west London then joined the RAF in 1945. He was sent on a Russian language course at Cambridge university and a cryptography course at Eastcote, Middlesex, where GCHQ was briefly based before moving to Cheltenham. A contemporary is quoted as saying: “He was hopeless at decoding, but organised a very nifty cricket match.”
He joined GCHQ as a cryptanalyst from the RAF in 1948. From 1953 he had a spell at the US National Security Agency (NSA) in Fort Meade, Maryland, and, after returning briefly to the UK, was sent out to RAF Pergamos in Cyprus, a GCHQ listening post, between 1958 and 1960. He worked briefly again at Cheltenham before being posted to London to work in the joint intelligence committee staff in 1964.
In 1969 he became head of the branch responsible for counter-espionage and counter-intelligence work, and built close relationships with MI5. After a posting with the Australian Defence Signals Directorate in Melbourne, helping them to develop their role in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US), he returned to the UK and eventually succeeded Sir Brian Tovey as GCHQ director.
He is described by GCHQ insiders as no great intellectual, more of an administrator, in striking contrast to Tovey, and one who deferred too much to the security establishment in Whitehall. However, in his book Spycatcher, Peter Wright described how Marychurch, as a young cryptanalyst, “transformed my laborious handwritten classifications by processing the thousands of broadcasts on computer and applying ‘cluster analysis’ … which made the classifications infinitely more precise. Within a few years this work had become one of the most important tools in western counterespionage”.
And, as director during a turbulent period in the intelligence world, he not only oversaw innovative technological developments, but stood up for what he believed was right. He was genuinely concerned about the working conditions of his staff, especially those of the GCHQ’s ranks of radio operators which, thanks to the Treasury’s parsimony, were not as good as they deserved.
Marychurch was a keen supporter of music and opera and, following his retirement, was chairman of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (1994-2000) and chairman of the Cheltenham music festival. He was knighed in 1985 and received a medal for distinguished public service from the US Department of Defense in 1989.
He is survived by his wife, June (nee Pareezer), whom he married in 1965.
Peter Marychurch, intelligence officer, born 13 June 1927; died 21 May 2017
- This article was amended on 4 July 2017. Peter Marychurch did not write to Gordon Welchman because Welchman had written an update to his book, The Hut Six Story, but because of a paper acknowledging work done by Polish codebreakers before the second world war. The official history had failed to correctly document how this contributed to the subsequent success of British codebreakers at Bletchley Park.