On 27 November 1943, Guy Liddell, a senior MI5 officer recorded a story about Winston Churchill. (Source TNA KV4/192)

How you maintain Communications Security in the heat of battle? A new post at siginthistorian.blogspot.com looks at the Battle of the North Cape and concludes that leaving it pragmatically to the people on the spot may be the most sensible approach.

Does anybody know of a reasonable documentary about the Nuremberg process (apart from episode 25 of The World at War)?

From Threads. www.threads.com/@contagiousl... Animal welfare meets immigration policy.

Out to lunch at a pub today and the server asked what drinks people wanted. One asked for Chardonnay and was told 'We don't have any Chardonnay but our house wine is made from the same grape'. 'OK. I'll have that then '

Excellent review!

I've had an article published in Diplomacy & Statecraft: 'Behind the Enigma: How GCHQ's Authorised History Appeared'. The first 50 people to click on the link get a copy for free! www.tandfonline.com/eprint/BCZTB...

I explore need-to-know again in a post at www.siginthistorian.blogspot.com looking at an Official Secrets Act case in which a clear Sigint connection was ignored because the investigators had no idea it existed.

How good is 'I was there' as a guarantee of historical memory? Not, perhaps, as good as it might seem. A new post at siginthistorian.blogspot.com looks at records and memory.

How to sort out parking on busy roads: this is what our council has done.

It's easy to overclassify and it's easy to be nervous about release. An illustration of this point in a new post on siginthistorian.blogspot.com

A new post at siginthistorian.blogspot.com looks at what can happen when two opposing sides are using the same cryptosystems.

RAF A400M ZM416 (c/s NAPER60) being used to teach pilots how to fly at 600 ft. I assume they have the aircon switched on!

Another superb piece by Gill - how many intelligence historians could follow their paper at a conference with a turn?

An excellent thread!

Excellent news that Bill Tutte is being commemorated on a VE-80 stamp. What a pity, however, that the Post Office doesn't seem to know that 'codebreak' isn't a verb and that codes and ciphers are different. If only there was a national agency that they could have approached for advice ... errr ...

I'm pleased to report that I asked the question that Daniel Shiu has answered in this article.

From the other place.

This is an excellent piece by Joe Devanny which spells out the extreme difficulties involved when an Inquiry has been asked to assess, not just how intelligence was acquired and assessed a quarter of a century ago, but how, at that time, without the benefit of hindsight,it should have been acted on.

A really interesting edition of Código Crystal. An interview with former CNI Head Felix Sanz Roldán (in Spanish) about secrecy and transparency. He argues that a release and declassification legislation would increase trust in intelligence agencies. www.rtve.es/play/audios/...

A peacock butterfly on the blackthorn flowers, enjoying the sun and not thinking about tariffs at all.

I know that this sort of thing - that somebody' conscience was troubling them enough about unpaid tax or whatever that they sent an anonymous or unidentifiable amount to the authorities - used to be relativey common. But was it only in South Africa that it made the Gazette?

Austerity was really hard in 1949: but there was a welcome mitigation for staff at GCHQ. See siginthistorian.blogspot.com for what happened.

Words fail me, too, and, I suspect, many more of us.

'It is time to seek closure and move to fresh subjects.' We should be so lucky … !

Is the earliest satirical novel about IA a heavily disguised satire on GCHQ as well? See my latest post on siginthistorian.com ...

This short thread points out really well some of the conceptual historical challenges the Omagh Inquiry faces.

The lives traitors live(d)! Post-confession Anthony Blunt's drinks bill was £100 a month in 1965 and he claims to have lived for a day on gin: when gin was £1/10/- (£1.50) a bottle.

Make Belgium Great Again

I just published some research on rotor machines and wired wheels that has been laying stagnant for about a year. It is nothing groundbreaking and I hope to take the research up again this year. cryptocellar.org/rotor/index....

For a long time, my post as GCHQ Historian was part of the Corporate Knowledge Division, which was where the librarians were based (they called themselves Information Specialists, but they were librarians, a title of honour). I still feel privileged to have worked as part of their team.

Some first thoughts on what newly released MI5 files on John Cairncross tell us about his time as a Soviet agent at Bletchley Park available at siginthistorian.blogspot.com. Some new detail, but there's nothing particularly spectacular.

The unexpected poetry of PhD acknowledgements science.anu.edu.au/news-events/...

The UK has some of the oldest and richest signals intelligence (SIGINT), cyber and communications security heritage in the world. NSIST has been established to preserve it - to protect the past for future generations to inform, research and enjoy. Please check out our website at www.nsist.org

A really interesting example of public consultation on law reform informing a Government decision here. An initial proposal to stop storing physical historic wills and move to digitised versions (with the physical copies destroyed) has been abandoned assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/677e4b...

First we had Javier Milei channelling Bernard Manning: now we have Elon Musk channeling Brian Potter!

Courtesy of @alcremades.bsky.social links to two new publications by ABIN, the Brazilian intelligence agency: repositorio.enap.gov.br/handle/1/8217 reflecting on 25 years of ABIN, and repositorio.enap.gov.br/handle/1/8216 lookng at the challenges 2025 will bring.

On the tenth day of Christmas my true love gave to me a photo of the seasonal isle at Waitrose.

A new post on siginthistorian.blogspot.com looks at how activity by the Admiralty between 1900 and 1914 prepared the ground for Room 40, even if they didn't create a Sigint organisation before the war.

Help sought! Can anybody identify the alphabet on this (probable) cipher wheel? TIA

I don't usually comment on current events on social media: partly a hangover from not being allowed to, partly because I can't think of a worse medium in which to discuss politics. But this poem by Clive James retweeted on X by Simon Sebag-Montefiore about Asma Asad is worth breaking the rule for.

Can you imagine the mutterings in the GRU canteen about ‘bloody foreigners taking our jobs’.

A new post on siginthistorian.blogspot.com explores Collection Management and ponders the unseen functions that Sigint needs to succeed. It also says just what job the Princess of Wales's grandmother and great-aunt were doing at Bletchley Park.

I owe Gordon so much for his patience with somebody who had never been interviewed before, from an organisation which had avoided the media for ever. I hope his future is full of new challenges successfully met!

We were invaded by dragons last night - well, a lesser spotted newt either managed to get 200 yards from the nearest stream or was brought along somewhere to expire in our garage. I've never seen one before.

What happened at Bletchley Parks when clever people were asked to do uncongenial tasks? You can possibly guess! See siginthistorian.blogspot.com

I encourage you to laugh at my musical efforts! Too old to care about looking ridiculous, and doing this kind of thing helps a historian to keep cheerful when there seems to be gloom and doom all around. www.youtube.com/watch?v=agNX...

Roger quickly came to the conclusion that Sparrows made useless skateboards.... linktr.ee/carlbovis

With its realistic portrayal of spycraft and encapsulation of the spirit of 1970s Britain, The Sandbaggers might just be the best ever TV series about espionage. x.com/EngelsbergId...