The Sigint Secrets: The Signals Intelligence War 1900 to Today including the Persecution of Gordon Welchman

by Nigel West (pseud.)

Offering few anecdotal examples or representative characters, & concentrating on procedures of direction-finding, message interception, traffic analysis & code-breaking, this authoritative study by the European editor of Intelligence Quarterly focuses on the development of British systems of interception & analysis. West demolishes convincingly the widely held myth that the Allies solved the secret of the German Enigma coding machine early in the war & explains why British & American intelligence authorities have gone to extraordinary lengths to perpetuate that myth. The author then relates the grim story of Gordon Welchman, a British SIGINT ace who was hounded after publishing his memoirs which, in the view of the British Government Communications Headquarters & the US National Security Agency, threatened to expose the truth about Enigma. Photos.--Publishers Weekly

Genres: History

347 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988

Reviews

[Ryan Nary · Rating 3 out of 5]

James Bamford does a much better job writing about SIGINT. West's material should've been more exciting but his delivery was very dry. Also--and this may have been due to the time it was written--a lot of West's anecdotes were very thin on details, especially the resolution of ths Cuban Missile Crisis

[Granpy Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read. Brings back many past work issues. Loved it.

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dad was an US army cryptanalyst attached to the navy during World War II. His copy of The Secret Government, the first decent history of the CIA, was the first non-fiction book I ever read about intelligence operations. Those facts and the whole spy fad during the sixties got me interested in the subject of intelligence early on.

Rupert Allason's The Sigint Secrets is about signals intelligence, i.e. code making and breaking. Other than giving an overall history of the field and its development primarily in the U.K., it focuses on the German Enigma machine and Allied efforts to break it during the war. According to Allason, Enigma was never broken, despite copies of the machine being in Allied possession, and never could be broken--stories current to the contrary being entirely fallacious. Such scoops as the Allies got from snooping on Enigma transmissions were entirely because of bad procedures being followed by some Axis operators on some occasions. I'm no expert, but his arguments made sense to me.

[Steve Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good overview of SIGINT from 1900 to 1990. Mostly British activities but some US also, both WW2 and post war NSA. Near the end discusses the various British and American spies who worked for the Soviets. Somewhat dated now but still worth the read.