It's almost midnight on February 8th, 1941. The day staff of Bletchley Park north of London have long gone home,

with the secretive nature of their war duties, many spend

yet another evening fabricating cover stories for their friends and families, what they did

today at work. Back here at Bletchley only a few people remain, the regular night staff,

but there is a luminary among them. Commander Alistair Deniston recently recovered from a bladder

stone late last year.

Now back on duty, tonight, he scans the rainy darkness outside the window for visitors.

Even while their appointed arrival is expected and imminent,

Deniston is unclear how exactly he should act,

how freely he should share with these visitors,

these Americans he's never met before,

can they really be trusted with valuable British intelligence? Hello friends. This is American History Hit and I'm Don Wildman. Nice to have you.

The United States and Great Britain have long claimed a special relationship, a uniquely collaborative cooperation

seemingly based on shared cultural identities, a friendly bond between nations with a common

past. But this simplistic attribution belies a more complex

interdependent relationship based on a long-term military alliance and perhaps

most importantly on shared intelligence gathering and code-breaking, a history that began as so much has in our modern era with World War II.

The CIA and the US launched in 1947 and MI6 in Great Britain officially titled The Secret Intelligence Service, SIS, founded in

1999, are both tasked with essentially the same responsibility.

Secret collection of human intelligence in foreign lands

that may pose a threat to their nations. But throughout the last 80 years, through wars

both hot and cold, the CIA and MI6 have joined forces numerous times to improve their capacity and reach.

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