E157 - Security & Insecurity Part 2

Bletchley Park

History

4.8 • 177 Ratings

🗓️ 17 November 2023

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

November 2023

For our tenth anniversary episode, E141 “Security & Insecurity”, we discussed one of the most important factors in wartime codebreaking – secrecy. We looked at its effects on operations at Bletchley Park and the lives of those who worked there.

We had so much to talk about on that occasion that we didn’t have the chance to explore beyond the bounds of Bletchley Park. However, as signals intelligence travelled to the battlefronts where commanders made life-and-death decisions on a daily basis, security was a bigger problem than anywhere else.

In this follow-up episode, Research Officer Dr Thomas Cheetham is again joined by a special guest, former GCHQ Departmental Historian Tony Comer, to discuss the problems of security in the field. We’ll hear how the safe use of Ultra intelligence required good planning, flexibility and, most of all, trust.

Many thanks to Owen Moogan & Dr Ben Thomson for voicing our archival documents.

Image: ©Bletchley Park Trust 2023

#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #WW2, #Enigma, #GCHQ,

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The from the home of the codebreakers and the birthplace of modern computing.
0:32.6	This is the Bletchley Park podcast.
0:40.6	Welcome to the November 2023 episode of the Bletchley Park podcast
0:44.1	Security and Insecurity
0:46.7	Part 2
0:48.2	Longtime listeners will remember that
0:51.5	last year as part of our 10th anniversary episode, we recorded an
0:56.6	episode about security and insecurity at Bletchley Park. Now, Tom, ever since we recorded that
1:03.2	episode, you've wanted to do a second one, haven't you? Yeah, what I'm always interested in is
1:08.7	the impact of the intelligence, of course, and what
1:11.2	make the difference it makes of the war.
1:13.2	So what I wanted to bring in on that occasion was a bit of discussion about how security
1:17.9	is maintained when intelligence is disseminated out from Bletchley Park, to commanders
1:22.0	in the field, to government and so on.
1:24.8	We didn't really get a chance to do that, did we?
1:26.7	Because it was so jam-packed of information
1:28.8	just about more or less what happened behind the wire here at Lechley Park.
1:32.7	We didn't really move outside the wire, did we?
1:35.2	No, and we never got round to it, and we decided to separate it off
1:38.9	and come back to it another time.
1:40.7	So here we are.
	...

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