Gordon Corera, best known as the security correspondent for BBC News, somehow finds time to write authoritative, well-researched and readable books on intelligence. Here he explores the evolution of computers from what used to be called signals intelligence to their transforming role in today’s intelligence world. The result is an informative, balanced and revealing survey of the field in which, I suspect, most experts will find something new.
He starts with an event that took place 101 years ago next month, when the British dredger Alert set off from Dover in the early hours to cut the German undersea telegraph cables. This inconspicuous act meant that throughout the first world war Germany’s overseas communications had to be sent by radio, which in turn meant they could be intercepted and eventually decoded. One of these intercepts was later instrumental in bringing America into the war, which helped shape our modern world.
The story of Enigma, Bletchley Park, Turing et al is well known (though that of Room 40, the 1914–1918 equivalent, less so).
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