The Secret Empire of Signals Intelligence: GCHQ and the Persistence of the Colonial Presence

Abstract

Why did Britain remove the population of an idyllic Indian Ocean archipelago? Why has Britain resisted granting citizenship to the inhabitants of another small island in the mid-Atlantic? Why does Britain still ‘own’ 90 square miles of Cyprus? The answer, we suggest, lies in part with the heritage of Bletchley Park, an obsession with informational dominance in world politics that demands the control of key nodes in international telecommunications around the globe. We also argue that intelligence studies have focused unduly on the human agent or the secret policeman and as a result, the issue of electronic imperialism has been a neglected aspect of intelligence collection across the Global South. Here we focus on Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and suggest that computers, colonies and ocean cables enjoy strange and unexpected connections that can alter the fate of small nations. We conclude that perhaps geographers, rather than historians or political scientists, deploy the most advanced conceptual tools for examining this phenomenon.