The early departure of Robert Hannigan as GCHQ chief, announced today, marks not so much the end of an era as the transition between eras. The agency’s famous HQ in Cheltenham, a metallic doughnut the size of Wembley Stadium, might look futuristic but was designed in the late 1990s before anyone worked out just how much data the intelligence services would have to intercept and analyse. Or how much of espionage would involve codebreaking, and on such an unprecedented scale. The workload exploded as it opened in 2003 and suddenly a GCHQ designed for 5,000 staff looked too small. New ways of working were needed.
Hannigan was brought in, as outsiders occasionally are to GCHQ, to administer some course correction. Its analysts needed to change the way they looked for jihadis, so as not to be drowned in the tsunami of data. The agency also needed to change the way it dealt with the outside world – especially in an era where the basic work of the agency could be misrepresented by the likes of Edward Snowden as massive-scale scandalous hacking, rather than the metadata analysis that the agency has always done.
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