Interview With Outgoing Head of GCHQ

Charles Moore

Daily Telegraph

October 12, 2014

GCHQ: ‘This is not Blitz Britain. We sure as hell can’t lick terrorism on our own’

On the outskirts of Cheltenham stands a huge circular building known as The Doughnut. This is the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the heir of the war-winning codebreakers in those little huts in Bletchley Park. The 5,500 employees monitor the communications of the world – in the interests, says the relevant Act, of national security, “economic well-being’’ and combating serious crime – but they do not communicate with us.

I pass through multiple security, traverse “the Street’’ that circles inside the edifice, and sit down to wait. I am the first print journalist ever to interview GCHQ’s director, Sir Iain Lobban. He is about to leave after six years in the top job and 31 in the organisation.

He is bursting to speak. Young Iain, a Southport boy fresh with a languages degree from Leeds University, began here in 1983. At that time, GCHQ was the dingy provincial sister of the big boys in Whitehall – MI5 (the Security Service) and MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service). Today, thanks to the march of technology, it dominates. Foreign heads of government come on pilgrimages here. The director has a seat on the National Security Council (NSC). GCHQ is our most important global intelligence asset.

Yet just as everything got good for the boys in Cheltenham – this being the techie world, most still are boys – it also got bad. Last year, The Guardian published the information Edward Snowden had purloined from the US National Security Agency (NSA). Some of what he revealed compromised GCHQ: “He made my job a thousand times more difficult,’’ one man charged with cracking terrorists’ internet games tells me. At a time when Isil, also known as Islamic State, is a clear and present threat, the imperative is greater than ever. In the eyes of GCHQ’s critics, Snowden also revealed unacceptable levels of intrusion into the personal data of British citizens.

Sir Iain Lobban, left, shows Charles Moore around GCHQ

“When I heard the news,’’ says Iain Lobban, “I lay awake saying to myself: ‘I hope this isn’t a Brit.’” He asked colleagues if they suspected anyone in their departments (“Anyone on a protracted holiday?’’), but he doubted it because “We would have noticed something a lot earlier – red tags on the security file.”

Snowden was a contracted systems administrator without personal commitment to the NSA. Lobban believes that GCHQ “treats our contractors as if they are people. We wouldn’t ‘body-shop’ them,’’ so such profound disaffection is unlikely here. But if the leak had been British, he admits, “That would have been the end of me.’’ As it was, senior NSA officials came to Cheltenham and apologised to staff: “This happened on our watch.’’

So the man in charge is boiling with a mixture of pride in his troops and frustration at what has happened. I have never met a top bureaucrat so unlike Sir Humphrey – colloquial, boyishly showing off, passionate. He bounces into the room as if there are springs in his black suede shoes.

“Let’s get going,’’ he says, before the door has swung shut. We have four hours together, but he never stops. “It’s the awards first,’’ he says, and we join a party for staff members celebrating 30 years’ service. Lobban likes to hand out their medals in person, firing off jokey quiz questions about 1984, their year of joining (“Which Swedish group won the Eurovision Song Contest? No, it was not Abba. It was the Herreys with Diggi-loo, Diggi-ley”). Exact dates feature. They are a nerdy obsession of Iain Lobban. “I worked in America,” he tells me, “for three years, two months and 13 days.”

The atmosphere is merry. Sir Iain is “Iain” to all – though also, I notice, “Boss”. He has no director’s parking space and no office, only an open-plan desk “within shouting distance of the lawyers”. This is modern management style. But it also reflects a view dating back to 1914, when Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, issued a charter to “Room 40”, GCHQ’s signals intelligence (SIGINT) ancestor. SIGINT’s unique importance, Churchill wrote, lay in getting inside the mind of the enemy: only then can you predict his actions, and secure your own communications against him. To achieve this, says Lobban, you must mirror what you are dealing with. In the Cold War, GCHQ mirrored the Soviet security structures. In the age of the internet, they must swim as freely as possible in its democratic soup.

The heart of The Doughnut is a courtyard big enough to contain the Royal Albert Hall, with huts for smoking (“lots of the best ideas are thought up there”) and a monument to colleagues who died on active service – five in Afghanistan. On 7/7, the day in July 2005 when British Islamists blew themselves and others to pieces on a London bus and Tube, some staff were playing frisbee on this grass. As the news came through, people rushed out and told them to stop. This was the shocking day – “I remember the nausea,” says Lobban. It was also the moment GCHQ had to seize: “It was about the internet. We started to identify the DNA of the networks the terrorists used.”

One lesson of 7/7 was speed. Lobban leads me to the “24/7/365” area, in which small 12-hour shifts monitor GCHQ systems and news bulletins. Through something called Action On, they can act so quickly and freely that “they don’t have to wake me up”. If British special forces want to make a sudden assault on terrorists, GCHQ can help tell them what is happening on the ground. “We listen, so they can act.”

Iain Lobban: ‘After 13 years, maybe it’s time for someone else to have a go at this amazing job’

Elsewhere in the sweeping circle of The Doughnut is a room known as INOC (Internet Ops Centre). Here we meet a man described as “the Mr Fixit for any problem”. He assembles a solutions team to match the best technical capabilities with the most urgent operational requirements. Today, he is working on the highest-priority national security target, pulling together multiple feeds of data to work out how they communicate and with whom. But it has got harder: before Snowden helped the enemy, he says, it took him a fortnight to “deliver the magic”. Now it takes six weeks.

Much as Lobban loves to introduce his resident geniuses, he is tapping his fingers to show me as much as possible. On we scurry to a subterranean room too secret to be publicly named, “where operators and techies collide”. Here they study laptops and phones seized, their encryptions and the patterns of behaviour they reveal. They gather forensic materials which, unlike interceptions, are admissible in court evidence. They also supply kit “in theatre”: plastic cases of air-portable equipment are stacked in corners. At other desks sit operators who track and analyse the spread of images of child exploitation and Islamist beheadings across internet networks, swimming alongside the people they seek.

Deep below lies the data centre, the massive processing power of GCHQ’s own cloud – great halls filled with the latest water-cooled super-computers, using as much electricity as the entire neighbouring town of Bishop’s Cleeve.

Iain Lobban and I stop to wash our hands. He stares at himself in the mirror, fingering his chin, all energy suddenly drained. “God, I’m completely wiped out,” he says. “It’s always like this by Friday afternoon.” He has spent part of the week “somewhere hot and sandy”.

We sit for a final chat. A cup of tea revives him. I want him to answer the obvious questions. What about the problem of mass surveillance? His analogy is with a “huge hayfield’’. GCHQ needs as much of the hayfield as possible, but only to extract the few needles it seeks. “I could walk you through the whole legal process of interception. You have to specify very precisely. You can’t just write ‘suspected terrorist’ to get the access you want.”

What about all the “meta data”, the external information about how many emails were sent, to whom etc? “Look,” he challenges. “Who has the info on you? It’s the commercial companies, not us, who know everything – a massive sharing of data. The other day I bought a watch for my wife. Soon there were lots of pop-up watches advertising themselves on our computer, and she complained. ‘It’s that bloody internet,’ I tell her.”

Even as he is about to retire, Lobban remains amazingly excited by what he does. “GCHQ has always been extraordinary, but we weren’t as extraordinary in the past. The scale of the ask has mushroomed, and so has our impact,” making Britain’s work far more important to the United States and the rest of the world. Nowadays, with his strong encouragement, the sharing of intelligence goes well beyond the traditional “Five Eyes” – the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Great Britain. Counter-terrorism, cyber-security and counter-proliferation have seen to that. “It’s nonsense not to share with the French,” he says, or with some eastern European countries, Gulf states and Asian and Far Eastern ones. “This is not Blitz Britain. We sure as hell can’t lick terrorism on our own.”

He wants more recognition given to his staff, who “just give without being asked” but must remain anonymous. “I’m a bit bored with sniffer dogs getting credit for drug-busts, not GCHQ.” And he wants to emphasise the agency’s engagement. Look at cyber-attack: “We moved from steepling our fingers and giving arcane technical advice to telling businesses, ‘You’re being robbed blind,’ and showing them how to protect themselves.”

What particularly thrills him is that GCHQ can be in the thick of it. He thinks the NSC is “one of the best things this government has done” because it “takes the sentiment in the room and translates it into tasking for each organisation”. Take the current issue of British hostages held overseas. The NSC galvanises everything to help: “It’s Civis Britannicus sum. Brilliant.”

This month, Iain Lobban leaves, still only 54 years old. “After 13 years on the GCHQ board, maybe it’s time for someone else to have a go at this amazing job.” He will have three months’ rest, walk the Cotswold Way, “learn Spanish properly” and spend more time with his six-year-old daughter. “It will be nice to see something on the news without that Ghostbusters feeling that I’m supposed to be doing something about it.” But he will deeply miss his colleagues and the work he loves: “It will feel like an amputation.”