l4sfdrx

BLAKE, BUGS AND THE BERLIN TUNNEL 181
Improbably, the sharp end of British bugging technology was the
sleepy suburb of Borehamwood. Tucked away amongst the mock­
Tudor dwellings of north London was a most peculiar Foreign
Office factory employing four hundred people. The location was
the small Chester Road Industrial Estate. Few of the local residents
knew what happened here; they were only conscious of a
twelve-foot-high barbed wire fence patrolled by aggressive
Alsatian dogs. 40 In the mid-1950s the site was run by Lieutenant
Colonel Robert Hornby, who had been chief engineer for a
commercial radio company, Philco, before the war, and then head
of the technical ~ide of SIS's wartime Section VIII radio unit at
Whaddon HallY The secret factory had been acquired on a lease
taken out privately by Brigadier Gambier-Parry, who had transformed
SIS's Section VIII into the Diplomatic Wireless Service,
and was financed through private bank accounts. 42 Even Edward
Bridges, one of the denizens of the British secret state, regarded
this as 'a pretty queer sort of set-up'.43 Although it was formally
known as 'Department B', the intelligence officers who frequented
the discreet factory at 4 Chester Road knew it simply as the 'bug
shop'. Their work tended to reflect world events. The build-up
to the Suez Crisis had resulted in a high demand for bugs, and
in October 1956 officials noted, 'This year the Factory has been
kept fully occupied because in addition to the forecast programme
of production it has had many short term demands on it arising
out of the political crisis in the Middle East.' To keep a steady
flow of work they had also put in bids for outside work, such as
development contracts for specialist comsec equipment required
by the London Communications Security Agency.44
British eavesdropping received a boost in June 1957, when
Dick White successfully pressed the Chiefs of Staff to assist with
an accelerated programme of bugging Soviet premises. 'Orthodox
methods of obtaining intelligence were particularly ineffective
against totalitarian states,' he explained, because it was so hard
to run human agents in these countries, 'and consequently some
new method of "breaking through" was essential.' On the defensive
side there was also the danger of falling behind the Soviets.