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526 GCHQ GOES GLOBAL
GCHQ support for previous major campaigns. Instead, the
problem was sharing between allies. The Americans were wellequipped
with pilotless drones that collected both imagery and
sigint, of which the British felt the lack. As the initial invasion
turned into a gruelling insurgency there was also a shortage of
personnel who were experienced in running human agents.
Some British sigint was being fed into American databases which
then proved to be 'for American eyes only', causing frustration
at the front line. There was no sharing of sigint with minor
allies. In fairness to British and American intelligence agencies,
while they had performed poorly on the issue of Iraqi WMD,
they had accurately predicted the difficulties of a hostile occupation
and the prolonged insurgency. 54
As the Iraq War commenced, GCHQ's Director, Sir Francis
Richards, was preparing to depart to become Governor of
Gibraltar. After a succession of three 'outsiders' as Director,
GCHQ was being handed back to one of its own, the fifty-fiveyear-old
Dr David Pepper. Joining GCHQ in 1972 after
completing a D.Phil. in physics at Oxford University, he had
risen to be Director of Administration by 1995, and served as
'aide de camp' during the Roger Hurn review. 55 Pepper not only
had a new role, he also had a brand-new office, located behind
the gleaming glass doors of 'the Doughnut', GCHQ's impressive
new headquarters at Benhall. The first wave of staff was
preparing to move in during August 2003, and senior officials
assured reporters that even the builders had gone through security
checks: 'We didn't want a repeat of the American Embassy
in Moscow, which was riddled with bugs.' The building was
secure, but unfortunately it was not big enough. Planned during
the 1990s contraction of intelligence, it was now too small to
hold all of the GCHQ staff, which with the surge against terrorism
was now approaching 5,300. About five hundred of these could
not be permanently accommodated, so some buildings were
retained on the old Oakley site, and 'hot desking' was the order
of the day. 56