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104 BLETCHLEY PARK AND BEYOND<br />

The previous ten years had been a formative decade for GCHQ.<br />

By 1944, the code-breakers of Bletchley Park had made themselves<br />

Britain's premier intelligence service. Out of the chaotic<br />

brilliance housed in a few wooden huts in the Buckinghamshire<br />

countryside came one of Britain's most forward-looking and<br />

innovative organisations. Another crucial legacy of the late<br />

1940s was the agreements with the United States and the<br />

Commonwealth that laid the foundations of UKUSA, a worldwide<br />

sigint alliance, agreements that are still in force today.<br />

Anxiety about Moscow had been a driving force behind these<br />

agreements, and even before the Second World War was properly<br />

over, the Western allies had been paying increased attention<br />

to Soviet cyphers. Despite the triumphs of Venona, and<br />

the uncovering of key KGB agents like Klaus Fuchs and Donald<br />

Maclean, Moscow's higher-level communications remained<br />

mostly unbreakable after 1948. Accordingly, GCHQ and its<br />

partners were already searching for new kinds of intelligencegathering<br />

to use against the Soviet Union, opening up a whole<br />

new vista in the electronic war. 59

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