Extra - E48 - Bletchley's Foreign Relations with Tony Comer Part 1

Bletchley Park

History

4.8 • 177 Ratings

🗓️ 3 March 2016

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

March 2016

In November 2015, the GCHQ Departmental Historian made a rare public appearance as part of the Bletchley Park Presents lecture series. Tony gave a talk titled International Partnerships - Bletchley's Foreign Relations. In this first part of his talk he examined how foreign partnerships became an integral part of British signals intelligence shortly before World War Two.

Although parts of the story are told, the meeting with the Poles in Warsaw in July 1939, and the arrival of the Americans in February 1941, for example, the number of different relationships is greater than many people realise.

The simultaneous management of different levels of relationship with different countries added an often unsuspected level of complexity, and the need gradually to decouple from some relationships as the war in Europe came to an end, needed careful management.

This talk added rich detail to the Bletchley Park story.

Image: ©shaunarmstrong/mubsta.com

#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #Enigma, #History, #WW1

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.
0:41.8	Welcome to another Bletchley Park podcast Extra.
0:47.9	The GCHQ departmental historian Tony Comer came to Bletchley Park in November last year to talk about international cooperation in code breaking, not least of which formed the foundations of the US-UK special relationship,
0:56.4	which endures and remains vital to both nations to this day. In his talk, Tony examined some of the
1:02.8	lesser-known collaborations. It's not perhaps the best-known part of the Bletchley Park story, the web of relationships
1:16.5	with other countries and other agencies.
1:19.9	But I want to talk about that this afternoon and actually go back to an earlier period,
1:24.4	to the period of the First World War and the relationships that grew up then.
1:29.2	Talk about what happened between the wars, talk about what happened during the Second World War,
1:34.1	and then perhaps draw some conclusions about the necessity for signals intelligence organizations
1:41.4	actually to work in partnership with colleagues and allies
1:46.0	from other countries. SIGINT begins, as I think everybody knows, in August 1914,
1:54.5	SIGN signals intelligence. It's not as simple as that. Nothing ever is quite as simple as that.
2:00.4	There's a lot of evidence
2:01.5	that people are beginning to research, finally, looking at what happened before the First World
2:06.3	War and looking at the attempts made by a small number of people to develop cryptanalytic
2:13.8	skills. These were tiny numbers of people in each of the war office and the Admiralty.
2:21.3	The Admiralty itself were prepared to allow a member of the Naval Intelligence Division,
2:28.1	fleet paymaster Rotter, a very unfortunate surname. They were prepared to allow him between
2:33.3	1909 and 1913 to try to do
2:37.5	things with intercepted German messages, but he never had any success cryptanalytically
	...

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