It’s no enigma: professor chosen to write history of U.K. spy agency
Calgary military expert will have access to secret material on code-breaking work
Calgary professor John Ferris has been hand-picked by British intelligence for a once-in-a-century mission.
Ferris, a world-renowned military expert on the history of codebreaking, was chosen to research and write the official centennial history of the Britons’ communications intelligence agency.
He readily acknowledges that for the famous Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) to ask a Canadian to undertake the task of assembling and writing the definitive work of that agency, which covers a century of espionage amid war and crisis, is a unique honour.
But Ferris, a professor in the history department of the University of Calgary, said his past work has integrated him into the British historical scene, where he is known for his expertise in the field of British intelligence communications.
“It’s not as if I’m a complete foreigner. I’ve been working in this field of British communications and intelligence since 1982, so I’ve been doing this longer than anyone else,” he said.
Ferris is being given access to previously secret material from 1945 to the end of the Cold War, which details efforts to listen in to Soviet communications in a bid to break codes and expose spies and covert military planning.
He’ll also be covering the Second World War years in detail, a time when GCHQ became famous due to work at Bletchley Park involving Alan Turing and others who successfully cracked the Germans’ Enigma cipher machine and helped turn the Battle of the Atlantic in favour of the Allies.
That work in the early 1940s is today recognized as signalling the birth of the modern computer.
“Look at Alan Turing and GCHQ — the Brits funnelled a huge amount of money to a handful of genius mathematicians to build the most advanced data-processing machine. What they did is fundamental to the birth of the computer,” Ferris said.
The chapter on Bletchley will examine how the British broke Enigma and how they made use of that military information while the Germans still believed it remained secret.
“You can break it through genius but you can only exploit it by creating an industrialized system. You need to create a factory floor with thousands of machines being used to reconstruct German messages. It was necessary to create an organization that never existed before,” Ferris said.
“Everything you imagine about the intelligence and creativity of the people running it is true, but at the same time what you need is a bunch of worker bees. It is the most impressive intelligence organization I’ve ever seen,” Ferris said.
The official 100-year history of GCHQ will run from its founding in November 1919. Ferris must deliver a final draft of what will be a major opus in about 12 months, so it can be printed and published by October 2019.
Though it is a work of history, Ferris, who was born in Saskatchewan and received his first degree from the University of Alberta in Edmonton, was struck by the relevance to the security issues surrounding modern data.
However, he said there is one huge difference. In today’s world, it isn’t simply one state trying to break the secret information of another but a huge variety of nebulous organizations and cyber criminals that target individuals.
“When I started working in this field, I thought I was dealing with a very archaic, technical means of gathering intelligence that one state could use against another state. The more I started working with it the more I realized I was dealing with a lot of the levers of the modern age.
“Before 1995, the only people to create code-breaking operations were governments, but nowadays there are somewhere in the low millions of entities, mostly nongovernmental, that can break the emails of the overwhelming number of people in Calgary,” he said.
Ferris added it is important for people to learn lessons from the past to deal with this relatively new but virulent threat to their most personal information.
“Suddenly, it is no longer state versus state. It is people of one society against another. All of us are being imperilled. Because of the way social media works, we have become very accustomed to signalling, by exposing a great deal of data and information about ourselves. We are giving lots of people access to information about us that they can use against our interests.
“In the space of a generation, without realizing it, we have created a world where communications intelligence is part of everything we do.
“We need to learn lessons from the past in order to see what will happen in the future. I am convinced we are living in what I call the second age of signals,” he added.