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1
Schooldays
'How wonderful!' I said. 'Do you mean we're overhearing
Portsmouth ships trying to talk to each other - that we're eavesdropping
across half South England'
'Just that.'
Rudyard Kipling, 'Wireless', 1904 1
In December 1902, Guglielmo Marconi made history by sending
the first wireless radio message across the Atlantic. Remarkably,
only two years later, Rudyard Kipling foretold the possibility of
exploiting such radio messages to gather intelligence. In 1904
he published a short story entitled 'Wireless' that focused on
intercepting communications sent from Morse equipment on
board Royal Navy ~hips off the Isle of Wight. Kipling is thought
of as a quintessentially late-Victorian author, but here he looks
to the future, more in the manner of H.G. Wells, as his characters
fret over technical matters such as induction and radio
frequencies. To the readers of this fictional first instance of radio
interception, the process seemed utterly magical. The Morse
instrument 'ticked furiously', and one of the listening party
observes that it reminds him of a seance, with 'odds and ends
of messages coming out of nowhere'. His companion retorts
that spiritualists and mediums 'are all impostors', whereas these
naval messages that they are eavesdropping on are the real
thing.2
Kipling's 'Wireless' is the first public discussion of the secret
business of signals intelligence, or 'sigint'. The magical process
of extracting information from the ether would be one of the
twentieth century's most closely guarded secrets. Initially,
producing 'sigint' only required equipment that would allow a