Bletchley Park

this is Gordon Welshman a world war two code-breaking hero without him the top-secret German Enigma codes might never have been broken the war could have lasted two more years and tens of thousands more would have died Gordan Welshman should be famous his contribution to the war was as great as Alan Turing's why have we never heard of him when I was a child there was always in the family the sense that dad hadn't done something quite important during the war but of course we didn't really know the details and it couldn't really be talked about Gordon Welshman was the architect of a code-breaking technique that was so clever and so powerful that its wartime use at Bletchley Park still remains classified like tearing his extraordinary legacy began at Bletchley and continues to this day just as Turing is now celebrated as the genius behind the computers that dominate our world so Welshman's influence is everywhere but until now it has remained in the shadows his secret work in code-breaking and communications had an impact beyond anything he could ever have imagined only now with Edward Snowden's recent revelations of the extent of global surveillance by GCHQ in Britain the NSA in America and we understand Gordon Welshman's true legacy it seems to me that some of the things really have been kept secret too long Turing was undone by his private life but is now officially pardoned and celebrated as a genuine British hero but when Gordon Welshman chose to come out of the shadows to reveal his secrets the dark world of espionage was waiting this man who dared tangle with his own legacy was ultimately destroyed by September 1939 as Britain declared war on Nazi Germany an extraordinary ragtag army was being assembled at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire to fight a secret war their mission was to crack the hardest code ever devised created on a machine called enigma enigma lay at the heart of the German armed forces communications system if they could break in these chess masters crossword addicts and Bridge fanatics might just save Britain from the Nazis the best and the brightest were being recruited from Britain's top universities - of this elite with a renowned mathematician Alan Turing at the Dean of Sidney Sussex College Cambridge Gordon Welshman Gordon welchman was actually quite glamorous he was good-looking and he knew he was good-looking he had a way with the ladies he was fantastically bright very pugnacious obviously very proud man he did mountain climbing needed sailing he loved dancing here's a man who clearly been watching Hollywood movies who's come Errol Flynn and vomit doughnuts very much that act of dashing young chap could have filled him as opposed to the shambling absent-mindedness of many of his colleagues Welshman was one of the five original elite code breakers given the impossible task of decoding the Enigma machine enigma used the combination of rotors plug forwards and wires to put the german messages into secret code the chances of breaking this code were one in 159 million million million Welshman was set on a radical approach he ignored the unreadable messages and concentrated instead on what he could read the first few letters and numbers of each message were not encode these were call signs like addresses identifying who the messages were to and fro it was a brilliantly simple starting point it would prove crucial as I studied that first collection I began to see somewhat dimly that I was involved in something very different welshman started to track these call signs who was communicating with whom how often and in which direction they call it chat that comes over the air and by this means we can build out the picture of a German unit of the air force for example the headquarters any outstation Jude house and how they keep in touch with a who saw her and send messages we were dealing with an entire communication system that would serve the needs of the German forces the call signs came alive as representing those forces whose commanders would have to send messages to each other the technique welshman was using was called traffic analysis was this simple observation that a message must include details of the sender and the receiver which would allow Welshman to see the entire network of the enemy with this simple insight modern code-breaking was born and it allowed Welshman to begin unraveling the enemy's secrets from hundreds of miles away and they had a big war map and you could visually you see the whole set up is there German communication system it was Bletchley --zz first major breakthrough it had been achieved without reading a single message without an analysis of traffic you would never have been able to use cryptography to win the war when you hear phrases like traffic analysis or signals intelligence it doesn't immediately sound quite so so glamorous really but I think possibly that's one of the reasons why Gordon welchman hasn't been recognized so much but if people knew just how absolutely he was the kind of spine of the entire black sheep park operation then they would look at him in a completely new way enigma codes had still not been broken but Welshman already knew the exact position and strength of thousands of German troops and hundreds of aircraft using the power of traffic analysis he now realized that Bletchley Park could become as forceful a part of Britain's defenses as the Army Navy and Air Force their weapon would be intelligence no one else seemed to be doing anything about this potential goldmine so I drew up a comprehensive plan which called for the close coordination of radio interception analysis of the intercepted traffic the breaking enigma keys decoding messages on the broken keys and extracting intelligence from the decodes this was still the phoney war before fighting between Germany and Britain began but Welshman was proposing a total reorganization of Bletchley Park a radical plan that would require far more people than a few Tweedy professors solving puzzles Welshman went to his boss he won high-level approval for my plan and we were able to start recruiting the high quality staff that would be needed Welshman's creation was called Hut six a modest name that belied the magnitude of just what was achieved within its walls in this modest heart brilliant people made breakthroughs that helped change the course of the war for more than seventy years had lay derelict unloved and abandoned until it was painstakingly restored by the Bletchley Park Trust to how it would have been in 1940 we had two or three or four little lights hanging our wires from the ceiling and we had collapsible chairs and tables not very comfortable and that was our equipment so it really wasn't for a high-powered government machine Jane Fawcett was one of 400 people who worked at Hart six all were sworn to the utmost secrecy many took their secrets to their graves now only a handful are still alive I was in the Royal core of sequence before rather against my will I was transferred to Bletchley and there I was learning to be an interceptor I saw I know this men with suitable qualifications required for transfer to the Intelligence Corps a bit of a romantic I thought well you know I might get involved in some some death sign operations Bletchley scoured the country for the right source of people for top-secret work you have the very posh debutantes drawn from the higher echelons of society initially apparently because it was felt that the smarter a girl's family the more likely it was that she'd be able to keep a secret those happy days I did the season which was where the debutante photographs come from and I regarded that as a complete waste of time and money and then the war broke out I got a letter from one of my best friends who said were terribly busy we really need you could you come and help as German Panzers raced across Western Europe Bletchley Park at last found a way to read Enigma traffic intelligence it produced was codenamed ultra almost immediately it gave them a major breakthrough 30 years after the war and the only filmed interview welshman ever gave he revealed how this intelligence had been turned to advantage during the British forces retreat from France at Dunkirk in the Battle of France probably the most important thing which came out of ultra we were still breaking then was that it was realized so early that we were in a hopeless position it showed hot6 had been established just in time and it was decided to get out as quick as we could and this meant that there was time to organize the Armada of small boats that managed to get the troops back out of it from Dunkirk the immediate success of hot six was a testament to Welshman steely eyed vision you do need this because in an understand establishment filled with absent-minded boffins who was walking into cupboards thinking is the way out of the room or trying to stuff sandwiches into their pipes you need someone just know the clarity of thought of Gordon Welshman well I think he was the right person at the right time I think he probably had a lot of personal characteristics that were really vital for his work here he doesn't have any time for faffing about there's a war on and he has a very particular idea of how this water before by the end of 1940 part six was at the heart of the whole Bletchley Park operation here they used traffic analysis to select and target particular German radio networks and operators their traffic was then intercepted and decoded thanks to a remarkable new mechanical device which was helping to break key enigma signals on a daily basis it was called the bomb it's simulated all the possible rotor configurations of the Enigma machine a bomb could check them hundreds of times faster than a human being but it was very limited to run a test known as a bomb run it needed to compare a short phrase from the code with what the codebreakers guessed might be the original message for example German messages might begin with the words Heil Hitler this guest text was known as a crib if they were right in there guess the bomb could start cracking the code but they needed accurate cribs to find them Welshman realized the human routines of the German operators could be the vulnerable link what Welshman discovered was that by understanding the way that the Germans used the communications you could start to predict more easily where particular types of message would come there was a German commander in Brittany somewhere who were joined the war regularly sent in every morning a message saying Allison or no everything's okay here is send phrase he used every morning which was a godsend to the Decrypter in hat 6 it was a godsend because if they could work out what these encoded letters were they were on their way to cracking the code so coming me they targeted specific operators trying to provoke them into using predictable phrases they called it gardening this German officer in Brittany used to report lone aircraft approaching so we used to send regular lease aircraft over so he'd send the same message armed with a crib the bletchley team could now start a bomb run and hope to find the enigma settings but it was a race against time the German codes were changed at midnight and the bomb might take days to find an answer even if they cracked the code it would be too late to help the Allies Welshman's genius was to come up with a modification of Alan Turing's brilliant design and make it work many times faster it's Gordon Welshman who spots the one thing that the machines need that could give them an almost uncanny elegance and beauty of the way that they were Welshman came up with an inspired improvised solution a simple electrical circuit that dramatically improved the chances of finding the correct rotor settings it was called the diagonal board the impact was immediate it reduced bomb runs from days down to hours or even minutes the German codes could be cracked sometimes before they were even read by the intended enemy recipient so here we see an example of Gordon Grossman's fantastic mathematical intelligence coming through easily a match for that of Alan Turing a Dunkirk ultra intelligence had proved it's worth snatching thousands of British troops from death or certain capture in May 1941 Bletchley Park proved intelligence could also bring victory the main part of our fleet was out pursuing the Bismarck she was the latest German ship and the best they made got in the Navy and very important the battle cruiser Bismarck was the most feared ship of the German Navy on May the 24th 1941 she sank the pride of the British Navy HMS hood Britain's most modern and biggest ship 1400 British sailors lost their lives only three of her crew survived Churchill ordered the might of the Royal Navy to hunt a Bismarck down but where was she at Bletchley Welshman's team believed German messages might reveal her location Gordon was always in the depths of the deepest thought so he wasn't a very sociable person as far as I remember but then why should he be because he hadn't got time to talk to people like me he was just riding and tremendously important horse and trying to get there because it was possible to get there sifting through the entirety of German naval communications for any reference to the Bismarck was a daunting challenge what I had to do was to take the Enigma telegrams as they arrived in hot6 and I had to put them into the machine that I had to look at them and see whether they were all in German of course see whether they appeared to be of any interest then the breakthrough they had been waiting for we discovered this message from a German commander to the commander of the Bismarck say where are you going I'm worried about my son who's on board and the message came back which I got which said pressed at last they had a location the Bismarck was heading for the port of Brest in northern France being used by the German Navy a powerful Royal Navy battle group was immediately ordered to hunt down the Bismarck in this perhaps the most dramatic naval film ever taken who sees salvos from the Bismarck failing to hit one of our battleships this was joined the chase right across the Atlantic while the Nazi ship was running from the guns of our squadron and I was on duty for 24 hours during that period without really having anything to eat or certainly no sleep but it was terribly exciting a torpedo dropped from a swordfish biplane disabled the rudder of the Bismarck the British cruisers closed in we were all absolutely on our toes wondering what's gonna come through next as we knew it was wrong as a major battle it fell to hot six to decode the very last message sent from the Bismarck ship unmanageable we shall fight to the last shell long live the Fuhrer and eventually Osaka the flagship of the German Navy went down with over 2,000 of her crew I mean that was the day to remember we were constructing a dig so that half the pieces were missing now it's all made a picture and they're all the dicks all came together we were invigorated immediately it was Britain's first significant victory in the darkest days of World War two Bletchley Park had proved that intelligence could sink ships yet Welshman knew that they were chronically under-resourced still a cottage industry and they could achieve so much more the staff and the bombs were working around the clock but vital intelligence was not being picked up in time Welshman realized that he had no choice but to go to the very top he together with Alan Turing and Stuart Mill the Barry wrote this fantastically audacious rather cheeky message to Winston Churchill Gordon put a lot of pressure on Churchill to produce more staff for us because he realized that we were grossly overworked and under considerable strain and that our equipment was appalling now imagine writing a letter like this to Winston Churchill dear Prime Minister some weeks ago you paid us the honor of a visit and we believe that you regard our work is important we think however that you oughta know that this work is being held up and in some cases is not being done at all principally because we cannot get sufficient staff to deal with it this has got Gordon Welshman all over it just going to write to the top man and that's exactly what Gordon welchman did and he got an instant reply make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report me that this has been done action this day this memo had a remarkable effect bletchley did indeed receive more resources major building work followed the park was transformed from a ramshackle collection of hearts into a giant code-breaking production line now 70 years later this is what remains of it hot6 moved from their drafty wooden shed into this huge brick building thousands of people worked here around the clock and in conditions of absolute secrecy breaking into supposedly unbreakable German messages it represented a remarkable recognition of the power of code breaking in the war effort two bombs became 200 the population of Bletchley Park steadily rose to over 8,000 people by the end of the war and this was Welshman's office his vision had turned a country mansion into the world's first code-breaking Factory Bletchley Park was breaking enigma daily revealing the inner secrets of the German war machine and it was changing the course of the war they tapped into Rommels battle plans and his forces were driven out of North Africa they located the u-boat wolf pack's lurking in the Atlantic and these were ruthlessly hunted down and thanks to Bletchley the Allies knew they had successfully deceived Hitler into believing the d-day landings were purely a diversion leaving his forces exposed to the mass invasion of Allied troops that followed the boffins at Bletchley were taking on the might of an awe-inspiring Teutonic army and winning their work has been credited with helping shorten the war by two years and Gordon Welshman was central to this achievement to think of him as the Henry Ford of EE is not a bad metaphor the industrialization of cryptography that's an astonishing achievement so this is hot six exciting this is the place the decoding room oh look at these machines so this is administration ah this is dad and Stewart on the berry in this office and I can see who's who there's dad's pipe many memories of him fiddling with pipes must have been a haze of smoke they've done a beautiful job and look stronger every day we've got to keep at it they must have needed that a lot during their 50 nowadays my goodness dad actually said here and you know how it went from just one or two hundred people arriving in August 1939 at Bletchley Park to in a nearly ten thousand people working there in January 1945 if we pick him out as probably the most central figure his legacy is in what Bletchley Park achieved what Bletchley Park contributed to the success and the Allied victory in in 1945 and it's hard to have a bigger legacy than that one war was over but another was about to start it was to see another remarkable contribution from Gordon Welshman but at a devastating personal cost operations at bletchley were finally shut down in the spring of 1946 most of the people who had worked there were allowed to leave and rejoin everyday life in post-war Britain but they were given dire warnings never to speak of their wartime work the amazing thing about that she traversed of us who have survived it was the fact that we did manage to keep it secret had never been allowed to talk to anybody about what I've been doing pledge me my mother and father didn't know my wife didn't know when I married it I mean unbelievable really but such secrecy should have prevailed knowing that you've done so much to help change the course of events how do you adjust to a life afterwards however the legacy of heart six would endure Welshman's creation would find itself the model for GCHQ in Britain and the National Security Agency the NSA in America but the British government almost bankrupt from the war was forced to scale back their operations he found himself more and more frustrated with the attitude of British government towards this new field that they'd helped create which is of course this kind of study of communicate and development of communication systems and of electronics it was such a terrible waste to him bletchley had led the world with its remarkable inventions but Welshman now thought Britain was squandering this legacy you also have a sense of a man who understands very very well about the computer revolution the computer age that's about to come into being because this is a computer Agence is brought into being at Bletchley Park Welshman realized he had to seize the opportunity to build on what he had already created at Bletchley Park he was determined to stay at the forefront of the computer revolution that meant America the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was asked by the three military services to establish a new research center they created mitre to develop top-secret defense technologies they were recruiting the finest brains I imagine that their powers would be in England I got touch with powers that be in the United States and said they had this wonderful guy he was like a job working here put Gordon Welshman right back at the heart of another intelligence war the Cold War one of the most dangerous threats to our nation's security is the possibility of attack by high-speed enemy bombers armed with nuclear weapon this was warfare on a global scale huge strides in technology were needed to hold the so-called Red Menace at bay during that period was the Cuban Missile Crisis okay I mean that was that was really a tough period okay I built a bomb shelter in my basement in Bedford Massachusetts a large scale nuclear attack on the United States could produce a patchwork pattern of Fallout covering two-thirds of the nation we cannot afford to take that chance Welshman was given the highest civilian security clearance it meant becoming a US citizen the job did require a very high security clearance in fact it was high enough so that it the fact that I had it was classified with the frightening prospect of a nuclear confrontation Welshman was given the vital task of ensuring US military communications were capable of withstanding attack all he had learned at Bletchley Park was now applied to help achieve American supremacy on a scale that would dwarf hot6 traffic analysis in world war ii led Welshman to understand the way information flowed in battle in how many different ways it flowed Welshman realized military communications hadn't really moved on since his days at Bletchley headquarters issued an order units made reports but in modern warfare instant access to battlefield information was essential and computer technology was advancing fast enough to make this possible he said hey with this digital communications we can do some things that we've never been able to do before where once he had used traffic analysis to break into German networks now Welshman used all his experience to do the opposite he developed a new kind of network constantly updated immediately shared and totally secure to serve a battlefield where information was power everybody periodically broadcast bits of information about where they were what they were doing Welshman called his idea a horseshoe but we would all recognize it today as the cloud welshman system instantly connected planes submarines ground forces battleships all the elements of the command structure all at the same time and that went out into the sky and anybody who was interested in knowing what friendly aircraft are in this area could immediately get those reports sort of like an instant google and this was three four decades before Google Gordon came up with this radical idea in and people looked at it and said hey that's pretty good and so you know my boss called me in and said okay make it work his ideas were really a game changer they changed the way people thought about command and control and they changed the way battles were managed and warfare was fun that's still in use today and it will be for long times the legacy of the two giants of Bletchley Park endures to the present day Alan Turing made a decisive contribution to the computer revolution Gordon Welshman's work prefigured how the Internet in the cloud would later develop and how technology would enable a surveillance society in 1971 gordon welshman moved to the new england town of Newburyport and married his third wife teenie we started coming pretty much as soon as he moved in and we visited regularly it was a place he really enjoyed he liked living here he loved the town he was now 65 and still at the peak of his powers he had made a decisive impact on both the Second World War and now the cold yet everything he had achieved was known only within his clandestine world remarkably the success of Bletchley Park had stayed secret for two decades but then in 1974 an event occurred which had unexpectedly far-reaching consequences the ultra secret a book by an ex mi6 officer revealed for the first time the role of code breaking in winning the second world war Whitehall agreed that it would be better for for there to be a controlled disclosure and non sensational version by Fred Winterbottom but that opened the floodgates suddenly daylight was being shown on a hitherto secret world it was a shocking moment for all those like Welshman who had taken their oath of secrecy so seriously for years and years I didn't even read the histories of the war because I was afraid that somehow or other I might reveal something that I'd learned from ultra nevertheless Welshman now felt for the first time he could tell his family what he had done in the war I think it was an enormous relief he could tell these stories and could talk to us and could share memories that he kept count down for so long there was a transformation in his manner I think another thing that was a revelation was the discovery that my grandfather of all people was a sort of prototype of a computer geek by chance another veteran of the secret war was also living in Newburyport I was invited to dinner party one night right there and then out of a blue sky Gordon said well I was at Bletchley during the war and of course my mouth just fell open because I had been working as an intercept operator in Chicksands all the stuff that we had taken went to Bletchley an idea began to form in Welshman's mind but he should write his story I seem to have a very special responsibility in that I was the only person alive with inside knowledge of a very telling episode in Cryptologic history in 1977 he also took the deliberate decision to appear on the BBC which for the first time on television dared to reveal the still classified story of ultra intelligence I don't know whether I should say this but it seems to me that some of the things really have been kept secret too long that there is a point at which you do more damage by deceiving your own people about the true history of world war two then you could possibly do by telling now the stories as it actually hadn't he wrote his book here he would go off on his own if he wanted to work and you didn't disturb him yes in his in his study or his office but then he'd emerged and he'd be granddad again determined to set the record straight as well as to give public recognition to those whose work had been war winning he discreetly contacted old colleagues he wrote from his own prodigious memory he had no access to official papers which was still classified it would take him seven years I think it was almost a compulsion to ride the book it's a very good human and understandable thing for this man to think that I don't care how much trouble this gets me into I want the world to know what I achieved I think my father felt that he had an important insight on a particular piece of history which very few other people had and he just kept reading the obituaries and realizing that there were fewer and fewer people left the hot six story was published in the United States in February 1982 and in the UK the following May for the first time in print the full secret history of code-breaking z' role in world war ii was lay bare including Welshman's use of traffic analysis as well as telling the true history from an insider's perspective the book included a warning Welshman believed lessons from the war were being ignored the Americans were making the very same mistakes with their security but the Germans had once made he thought he could talk about this in a way that would reach the general public that would not disclose any secrets it would not tell tales you shouldn't he hoped it would make some money but he really hoped it would generate a conversation the secret world didn't wait long to hit back I was on my way to work and this kind speeded up and stopped right smack and then almost in the middle of the road nobody stops yeah so I had to see what was going on this Gordon's house right there and the two men jumped out wearing black suit black tie and like sunglasses they look like the men in black and they raced across the street Gordon answered the door and you could see them you know busily discussing something and all of a sudden good and took the door and he slammed it almost in their faces later I found out that it was a national security agency there had been books about the ultra secret prior to his publication there was no putting the toothpaste back in the tube the secret was out but watchman's book was the first about crypt analysis by an actual insider who had done it what Gordon welchman was doing was not so much disclosing the nuts and bolts of attacking enigma he was saying there is no communication system that can resist this kind of crypt analytical attack if our continent would attack this read telephone would be lifted from its cradle and instantly the United States would launch the greatest counter-attack in signals intelligence remained at that time at the very heart of the intelligence conflict that was being conducted during the Cold War so this was as important and a secret as it could get I think that people who saw what he wrote felt he was imperiling current operations Welshman's world war two work in traffic analysis might have been 40 years before but what he had discovered was still so vital to the secret world that revealing it even now was considered dangerous it was an irony that would all but destroy him on the 22nd of February 1982 the NSA returned these two young gentlemen came in one from NSA and one from I believe it was Air Force intelligence they said well this information has never been declassified and therefore is still in violation of wartime Secrets laws Gordon was taken aback he said this is absurd they were delivering a message to him and it was an ominous message I believe they had conversations with mr. welchman beyond that I'm not sure that I can talk about anything meaningful and it became clear the American authorities we're not going to back off it was really quite devastating he was quite unprepared for that Welshman knew about another writer who was preparing a book revealing the dark secrets of the NSA itself which was doing everything it could to stop publication welshman enlisted his help we lived in the same area so we could actually get together physically and it's probably the kind of things that you don't want to talk over the telephone especially when you're dealing with NSA they were basically telling me couldn't write anything he couldn't do any publicity he couldn't answer questions from reporters he couldn't appear on television shows and so forth and that was a really big problem the NSA was effectively trying to kill Welshman's book threatened with jail he was forced to cancel all publicity publication in the UK made matters worse then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had to be briefed on the problem of Gordon Welshman the cabinet secretary wrote to the Prime Minister explaining what issues were at stake also explaining that it was unlikely that there was any legal way of proceeding against Gordon Welshman instead Bamford believes the British pushed the NSA to keep up the pressure on Welshman I think GCHQ played an enormous the important role maybe the most important role I think a lot of the guidance at NSA was getting it was coming from GCHQ the directors of NSA and GCHQ were almost like partners in the same organization the NSA threatened Welshman with a little-known lor drafted in 1940 to deal with the sharing of cryptology this same law is now being used on NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden the part of the Espionage Act I think is ten years in prison and a heavy fine though these were very very serious charges I could see he was nervous I thought I could see the physical effects that the NSA was having on that devastates somebody that spent their entire life trying to protect us and British governments and now they're being told that they're gonna be charged with a crime possibly for giving secrets to the enemy there was one final act with devastating consequences on the 29th of April 1982 well Sherman security clearance was withdrawn all of a sudden he disappeared dear mr. Welshman as you know the Department of Defense has raised questions about your recent publication the mitre corporation believes it would be mutually beneficial to temporarily suspend your access to classified materials and technical data and the custody of mitre until the situation has been resolved this suspension is effective this date please acknowledge receipt of this letter by signing in the space provided below and he signed below yes this this would have been absolutely devastating rather than stay silent Welshman went on the offensive he wrote letters and articles which he hoped would exonerate him including a recently discovered unpublished paper Ultra revisited a tale of two contributors the stories of Allen cheering's life and mine have two things in common first we were regarded by our boss as the two greatest contributors to the wartime success of Bletchley Park second we have been branded as security risks what has happened to me can be compared with what happened to curing for many in the intelligence community Welshman was being naive to imagine he could reveal the secrets of hot6 with impunity but he never lost his belief that this was information the public needed to know afraid those of basic fact is that what most women would not be involved any of this he was in no position to know himself and it was in a position to set himself up as the authority on what could not be leased what they didn't stop and think was that the way in which cryptanalyst approached the breaking of enigma was a sensitive in the 1980s and is a sensitive today as it was at the time he was getting into an area of decision-making that wasn't quite for him with Welshman gagged by the security services his book flocked the remaining unsold copies of the hot six story were pulped the strain was was also coming at a very difficult time he'd had some more medical problems and to add to the pressure Welshman's wife teeny believed they were being put under surveillance she did talk about you know the feeling of being watched it's really dead ports a Blythe's on the end of his life it was a cruel irony that welshman a master of the secret world who helped win world war ii by breaking enemy codes and helped the west win the Cold War by keeping their communications secret would himself fall foul of the secret state I believe that the rules at the time about secrecy were really inflexible the people who administered inflexible rules themselves had spent a full career being indoctrinated with the idea that secrecy was the base I am today glad that the book is out my hunters had more to do with the sort of pathological hit enormous hysterical secrecy which is a kind of British disease and it may be that he was just a victim of that in its dying woman's I'm not saying that he was blameless he had broken the procedures and the law was never invoked but he lost his job and his livelihood without ever appearing in court or whatever facing any criminal charge by now Welshman was seriously ill with cancer but he continued with his fight to set the record straight it prompted this letter from the head of GCHQ it was as I believe you know a great shock to my predecessor and to the US authorities when you published your book in 1982 without consulting us and in defiance of undertakings which thousands of others have faithfully observed I am disappointed to find you following a similar path again in 1985 the letter went on it is a bitter blow to us as well as a disastrous example to others when valued ex colleagues decide to let us down and finally you know do you think he realized that it wasn't going to go away they probably couldn't successfully prosecute him but they would break him financially Gordan Welshman never redeemed himself three months later on October the 8th 1985 he died it made two of the last three years of his life really quite hellish but his legacy would continue after his death his methods and insights not only became part of the West's military thinking they became the very heart of the new intelligence networks as the world became more and more connected via computer in June 2013 Edward Snowden leaked tens of thousands of highly classified files our intelligence agencies were harvesting metadata our phone numbers our computers IP addresses the websites we visit those we message or call and where we are at any given moment it suddenly occurred to me that actually what we don't now do with metadata is in a sense a highly developed version of what Welshman started with traffic analysis that's what it is metadata and analytics now in the digital world are essentially our way of doing traffic analysis and it can be very very revealing for many what Snowden was revealing was that we live in a surveillance state the GCHQ and the NSA have turned Welshman's legacy against their own citizens destroying our privacy but for others traffic analysis is keeping us safe after 9/11 it was CIA analysts airs in many ways to Welshman and Bletchley Park who led the hunt for the most wanted man on the planet Osama bin Laden if I want to understand how to destroy this terrorist organization if I want to take him down as an organization then I have to look for their vulnerabilities and they look for their vulnerabilities I have to understand their network the technique they used had been pioneered by Gordon Welshman in hot six it was the modern equivalent of his traffic analysis what we call link analysis or network analysis the more sophisticated version of that is is the absolutely critical tool in finding covert networks whether it's terrorists or crime networks because they're trying to hide their entire organizational structure how can I find these people or this place how can I do it with enough precision that I'm not just going to bomb an entire town first develop to Bletchley Park and then honed in the state data analysis would now lead a team of u.s. Navy SEALs to Osama bin Laden today Edward Snowden is branded a traitor for revealing the secrets of modern traffic analysis Gordon Welshman also went public for something he truly believed in but after a glittering career he spent the last years of his life fighting illness fighting for his reputation and feeling outcasts from the very world he had helped build Alan Turing's brilliant work at Bletchley Park has made him an iconic figure in our history his pioneering spirit sparked the computer revolution and is now part of all our lives it was Gordon Welshman's misfortune that his equally brilliant achievement has not earned him the public accolades it deserves his top-secret work impacts on every one of us now as much as Turing's but it was to be this very secrecy that was to deny him his rightful place in our history Gordon welchman unquestionably was a genius his genius however is probably only recognized within the intelligence community to which he made such an extraordinary contribution 99.9% of the people in the world have never heard of Gordon welchman and you say the name Gordon Welshman and they just kind of stare back at you and yet he contributed so much shortening the war by two years good heavens saving thousands of lives and yet nobody knows who is I have no qualms about saying you was the genius of course a theme here is Gordon Welshman the forgotten man of Bletchley Park I'm enormous ly proud of my grandfather still sometimes distressed about how what happened after he published his book and how much that meant to him he was certainly proud of what he'd done it's always an element that Parsippany he didn't get recognized but it's too bad he couldn't be here today

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Keywords: bletchley

Id: xnr4pM-ntdc

Length: 59min 0sec (3540 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 07 2015