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THE NEW AGE OF UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING 495<br />

Aitken, was the real value of this to British national interests20<br />

Aitken sensed weakness. He pressed for a deep probe of GCHQ<br />

led jointly by Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd and himself for<br />

the Treasury. The real work was to be led by an outsider - Roger<br />

Hum, the successful chairman of Smiths Industries, which made<br />

technical instruments. 21 Hum's review team was formidable. It<br />

included Alice Perkins (a.k.a. Mrs Jack Straw), one of the most<br />

effective Treasury officials, and David Omand, 'a fearlessly<br />

outspoken Deputy Secretary at the MoD' .22 The schedule was<br />

tight. Commissioned on 12 December 1994, the team reported<br />

back to Ministers on 25 March 1995.23 GCHQ suffered a body<br />

blow. Hum took almost £200 million per annum off<br />

Cheltenham's budget in one bite, somewhere close to a quarter<br />

of its spending. This left managers in deep shock. No British<br />

intelligence agency had suffered such deep retrenchment since<br />

the end of the Second World War.24 These cuts heralded 'massive<br />

and dramatic change', qnd staff understandably had 'fears for<br />

the future'. The vast Cold War 'silos' were broken up, resulting<br />

in the death of the mighty J Division, which handled sigint on<br />

Russia, and K Division, which handled the rest of the world.<br />

Even greater changes lay in store for the communications security<br />

wing. Hum suggested that this should go over to charging<br />

its Whitehall customers on a cost-recovery basis. 25<br />

If this was not enough, on 23 November 1995 it was<br />

announced that the GCHQ Director, John Adye, would be<br />

replaced by someone from outside the agency. This was David<br />

Omand, a senior official who had been part of the Hum Review<br />

team. Many at GCHQ greeted this news with 'consternation<br />

and disappointment', since it seemed to signal that internal<br />

candidates were not good enough. Some pondered aloud<br />

whether Omand was yet another 'axe man' sent to further<br />

downsize GCHQ. 26 In fact it was inaccurate to say that Omand<br />

was an 'outsider', since he had joined GCHQ straight from Corpus<br />

Christi College, Cambridge, in the 1970s. However, an obvious<br />

high-flyer, he had soon moved on to the Ministry of Defence.

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