E43 - The Special Relationship

Bletchley Park

History

4.8 • 177 Ratings

🗓️ 10 February 2016

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

February 2016

75 years ago, a tentative meeting was held late at night, aided by sherry, in the office of Alastair Denniston, then Head of the Government Code and Cypher School.

It was to prove an important turning point in the history of both the UK and the US. That night, as intelligence secrets were shared, the Special Relationship was founded. That alliance continues to be crucial to both nations today.

To celebrate this anniversary, the Directors of GCHQ and the NSA visited Bletchley Park together and spoke about how important the relationship remains today. This episode takes a peek behind the curtain of secrecy that surrounded that visit, and shares today’s intelligence chiefs’ admiration of what was achieved here.

And we hear from Veteran Dulcie Klusman, who had her own Special Relationship. While serving as a civilian at Bletchley Park, she met her American beau Bill, who became her husband and the reason she moved from the UK to the US. Before that, though, her letters arranging to meet him were intercepted and inspected - in case she was giving away vital secrets.

Image: ©shaunarmstrong/mubsta.com

#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #Enigma, #WW2Veteran, #History, #Churchill

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The From the home of the co-breakers and the birthplace of modern computing, this is the Bletchley Park podcast.
0:43.3	Welcome to the February 2016 episode of the Bletchley Park podcast, The Special Relationship.
0:51.0	This month we take you back to the 8th of February 1941 when a long and difficult journey ended with a historic meeting.
0:55.3	Four US intelligence officials had travelled to Bletchley Park in the Buckinghamshire countryside to share secrets of their code-breaking work with their British
0:59.6	counterparts. This was unprecedented. That meeting was the beginning of the US-UK special
1:05.7	relationship, which 75 years on continues to be fundamental to both nations' intelligence operations and national security.
1:14.7	To celebrate this anniversary, the directors of GCHQ and the NSA today
1:19.6	met in Alistair Deniston's office in the mansion at Bletchley Park,
1:23.8	to stand in the very spot where it all began on a dark cold night over Sherry. Then and now,
1:30.3	it happened here. Also this month, we hear from GI Bride, Dulcy Klusman, who sorted and
1:36.3	distributed incoming signals in Hutt 14 and Block E between 1942 and 45. She was the only bride in the group she sailed across the Atlantic with,
1:46.1	who was moving to Bozeman, Montana, where she still lives today. Dulcy became a person of
1:51.3	interest to local news outlets for a while when her story emerged. But first, in the words of the
1:56.9	director of the US National Security Agency, Bletchley Park represents an entwined history
2:02.3	between our two nations. The visit of both Admiral Michael S. Rogers and the director of
2:08.0	GCHQ Robert Hannigan showed how the special relationship is just as important today as it was
2:14.3	75 years ago. These are the gates that were the entrance to Bletchley Park during the Second World War.
2:22.0	The UK Signate Organisation, the Government Code and Cipher School, had moved here in August 1939
2:27.6	and by the middle of 1940 had started to make serious inroads, certainly into German Air Force Enigma traffic.
2:37.0	Yes. And the Americans who came here, I know understood the importance of the building in their time,
2:45.0	and I really appreciate the importance of it today. This is like the hometown for both American and British cryptologists.
	...

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