Sir Peter Marychurch
Director of GCHQ who tightened security at the centre after the Geoffrey Prime spy scandal
SIR PETER MARYCHURCH, who has died aged 89, was the director of Government Communications Headquarters, better known as GCHQ, the government’s top-secret eavesdropping and communications centre at Cheltenham, during the Cold War years of the 1980s, when the institution was exposed to public scrutiny for the first time; though tough and shrewd, he struggled to deal with the fall-out from the notorious Geoffrey Prime spying case and with the implementation of a ban on trade unions at the centre, announced by Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1984.
A GCHQ “lifer”, having joined in 1948 after service in the RAF, Marychurch had spent nearly 40 years climbing up the Civil Service career ladder. Starting as a young cryptanalyst, in 1975 he became an assistant secretary, was promoted to under secretary in 1979, and deputy secretary and director four years later in 1983.
In a previous posting Marychurch had been responsible for developing relationships with Sigint (Signals Intelligence) agencies in other Nato countries and his time as director was also marked by the Zircon project for a British designed-and-built signals intelligence satellite.
Although Zircon was cancelled by the Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson in 1987 on grounds of cost, Marychurch oversaw a range of innovative technological developments not only inside GCHQ but in joint development work with partners in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance (Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the US), helping to strengthen the multilateral UKUSA agreement for cooperation in signals intelligence.
But Marychurch’s achievements were overshadowed by problems of security and growing press interest in GCHQ, whose cover had first been blown in 1976 by an article in Time Out, which led to the arrest and prosecution of the journalists Crispin Aubrey and Duncan Campbell, along with the Army signals corporal John Berry.
GCHQ’S role, however, was not officially “avowed” until 1982, when it was triggered by a real spy scandal involving Geoffrey Prime, a linguist working with classified material at GCHQ. Prime was convicted that year of spying for the Soviet Union after an abbreviated and partly secret trial at the Old Bailey, during which it emerged that he had been passing highly sensitive information about America’s Sigint satellite programme to the Russians for 14 years.
A misfit with an unhealthy interest in young girls, Prime had employed many of the trappings of spy fiction: dead-letter drops, miniature cameras, invisible ink, microdots and “one-time pads”. During his trial it was revealed that the so-called “Billion Dollar Spy” had been positively vetted no fewer than four times, had lied successfully during his recruitment and named unsatisfactory referees. The cost of his treachery, discovered quite by chance, was officially estimated by the US Defense Department at $1,000 million. After nearly 40 years in the shadows, GCHQ had suddenly become an object of great public curiosity – just as Marychurch took the helm.
In the media frenzy that followed Prime’s conviction, it became the director’s task to keep as much as possible about what happens at GCHQ tightly under wraps. The centre housed secret electronic monitoring systems which were linked to the Americans, and the Foreign Office feared that further revelations might lead to diplomatic convulsions, cutting Britain off from American intelligence.
Marychurch’s blanket security clampdown even extended to a memo, which he marked confidential, forbidding his staff from appearing in the Michael Caine spy film The Whistle Blower (1987). He advocated lie detector tests for all staff, and offered to take one himself.
Partly due to paranoia over the Prime case, and partly due to the long history of union unrest at the Cheltenham centre (in the words of Marychurch’s predecessor, Sir Brian Tovey, the unions had made it “brutally clear” that they regarded GCHQ as a “damn good place to hit”), in January 1984 the government announced a union ban at GCHQ on the grounds of national security.
Some 7,000 GCHQ staff belonged to a union and the announcement signalled the start of an acrimonious dispute that dogged Marychurch’s entire watch as GCHQ director. The government offered £1,000 in compensation to each employee who agreed to give up their union membership.
When 95 per cent accepted, Marychurch set about creating a Government Communications Staff Federation to replace the unions, taking care to refer back to the Foreign Office the precise terms under which such a body would be acceptable to the government. These included having its activities subject to a veto by both the GCHQ director and the Foreign Secretary.
But legal arguments with the five per cent who had not accepted the ban continued and in May 1984 the unions won a judicial review of the ban, which was ruled illegal in July. Anticipating this, the Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey Howe, flew by helicopter from London to Cheltenham for an emergency conference with Marychurch. Meanwhile 100 GCHQ employees rejoined their unions, having already spent their £1,000 compensation payment, a handsome sum in the mid-1980s. One such “rejoiner”, having booked a trip for his family to Dallas, crowed: “We’re going courtesy of Mrs Thatcher!”
More serious for Marychurch was the reaction of some of GCHQ’S mathematicians and computer experts, who argued that it was illogical for the West to lecture others about the rights of free trade unions like Solidarity in Poland while clamping down on unions at home. Many headed to the private sector, draining GCHQ of some of its best people, and leaving Marychurch to reckon up the cost of losing half his higher executive officer-rank computer experts in the space of a year.
Faced with a demoralised workforce and dwindling esprit de corps, Marychurch found himself trapped in the public spotlight, as the activities of GCHQ were repeatedly picked over by Fleet Street and the broadcast media. “Almost every aspect of the work and location of GCHQ was rehearsed again and again in the press,” noted Geoffrey Howe. “Our most secret service had become almost the most public.”
Marychurch fervently supported the union ban at the time, feeling that previous industrial action had damaged Britain’s intelligence gathering capabilities. The dispute dragged on for 13 years until an incoming Labour administration overturned the ban in 1997 (though with a no-disruption guarantee as part of the agreement), and Marychurch later made it clear that he was pleased to see the ban lifted.
The son of Eric, a bank clerk, and Dorothy Marychurch, Peter Harvey Marychurch was born on June 13 1927 and educated at the Lower School of John Lyon, Harrow. During service in the RAF from 1945 to 1948 he was taught military Russian by White Russian exiles at Cambridge under the direction of the Russianborn academic linguist Elizabeth Hill. He then joined GCHQ, at the time located at Eastcote, near Pinner. It moved to Cheltenham in 1952.
In his book Spycatcher, Peter Wright recounted how Marychurch, then a young cryptanalyst, had helped him with his work on Soviet broadcasts from Moscow to their agents in the West. Marychurch, he wrote “transformed my laborious handwritten classifications by processing the thousands of broadcasts on computer and applying ‘cluster analysis’ to isolate similarities in the traffic, which made the classifications infinitely more precise. Within a few years this work had become one of the most important tools in Western counterespionage.”
As he rose through the ranks, Marychurch analysed Soviet Air Force traffic, spent time at the National Security Agency (NSA) in Washington with the American cryptologist Ann Caracristi, and worked in the Joint Intelligence Committee staff in the 1960s. In 1969 he became head of the branch responsible for counterespionage and counter-intelligence work.
Later he served in Melbourne as the senior GCHQ officer at the Defence Signals Directorate, helping the Australians to develop their own contribution to the Five Eyes partnership. He was called back early to become director of planning and then director of organisation, his responsibilities including oversight of GCHQ’S response to the Prime case.
Marychurch’s obsession with secrecy was evident in 1985 when the great wartime cryptanalyst Gordon Welchman published an article entitled “From Polish Bomba to British Bombe: The Birth of Ultra”, which had been cleared for publication by the government’s Defence, Press and Broadcasting Committee (better known as the D Notice Committee), which advises on the publication of material with a bearing on national security.
Four days after the draft was cleared, Marychurch wrote an angry letter to Welchman, accusing him of “direct damage to security”: “We do not expect outsiders to show any great sense of responsibility in what they publish,” he told Welchman, “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.”
It was, observed Welchman’s former Bletchley colleague Sir Stuart Milnerbarry, himself a former senior civil servant, “a prime example of the lengths to which GCHQ’S paranoia about ancient secrets will carry them”. Welchman died a few months later, aged 79.
Perhaps by way of revenge, in 1986 a disgruntled staffer at GCHQ ridiculed Marychurch by leaking the fact that a suspicious parcel addressed to him at the top secret centre had been the subject of a full-scale security alert before the bomb squad opened it to reveal a pair of the director’s woolly winter socks which he had left behind after visiting a military base.
Inside GCHQ, Marychurch was regarded as an approachable man who enjoyed encouraging young analysts and tried to make “parish visits” on Monday and Friday afternoons. He seldom appeared in public, but to mark the 40th anniversary of the signing of the UK/US security co-operation agreement in 1986, he broke cover to present his opposite number at the National Security Agency, William Odom, with a piece of a Colossus Mark II, the world’s first programmable electronic computer, developed at Bletchley Park, to exhibit at the National Cryptologic Museum.
A lifelong music lover, in retirement Marychurch served as chairman of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music between 1994 and 2000. During the same period, he also chaired the Cheltenham Arts Festivals, and for four years (1993-97) was chairman of the Cheltenham International Festival of Music. From 1998 until 2007 he was president of the Cheltenham Arts Council.
He was knighted in 1985. Among his other honours were the Medal for Distinguished Public Service, presented by the US Department of Defense in 1989.
Peter Marychurch married, in 1965, June Ottaway (née Pareezer), who survives him.
Sir Peter Marychurch, born June 13 1927, died May 21 2017