FOR MOST of its 87-year history, the men and women of His Majesty’s Government Communications Centre (HMGCC), at Hanslope Park near Milton Keynes in central England, have toiled in obscurity to develop “operational technology”, or optech, for British spies—gadgetry like covert radio sets and bugs, and, later, software. In recent years that obscurity has lightened a bit. Journalists have been invited in (though shown little). HMGCC has also begun sharing some of its problems.
“Several UK Government bodies”, explained one document, avoiding any mention of MI5 or its ilk, “have a requirement to operate discreetly from unventilated, confined spaces.” Would companies have portable and quiet dehumidifiers which could stop the windows of surveillance cars steaming up? That was one of 28 “co-creation challenges”, in which HMGCC, working with intelligence agencies, invited firms to come up with solutions.
The tricky bit is describing classified problems in unclassified terms. Another challenge, co-sponsored with the British Antarctic Survey, a research institute, sought batteries that could operate at -40°C. Left unspoken was that the same technology was needed to power bugs and other sensors in remote places—imagine, say, a sniffer deposited outside an Iranian nuclear facility. A prototype was built in short order by a firm interested in batteries for the frozen-food sector, a fortuitous journey from haddock to espionage.
The challenges are unclassified, sparing small firms the expense of certification to handle state secrets. The time frame from problem to proof of concept is typically six months, avoiding the problem where minnows lack the cashflow to survive years-long government procurement. And companies can keep the intellectual property. All that is a refreshing change. In the past, big national-security and defence contractors would simply have bought promising startups and then sold the product to the agencies at a steep mark-up.
These initiatives embody a larger shift for British spooks. Their best technology used to be developed and built in-house. Now, as in the military world of drones and AI, much of it comes from the private sector. It is not easy for organisations that are accustomed to extreme secrecy to leave their windowless sanctuaries, talk about their work and engage with the world of technology and entrepreneurship. But the walls are steadily being broken down.
Take the National Security Strategic Investment Fund (NSSIF), launched in 2018 to provide venture capital for technologies with both civilian and national-security applications. The fund was a response to two problems. One was that the UK intelligence community, UKIC to insiders, was struggling to identify and access cutting-edge technology in the private sector. The other was that the private sector did not understand what the spies really needed. NSSIF was intended as a bridge.
It is largely a fund of funds, backing other investors, but it also takes direct stakes in six to eight companies each year. NSSIF looks at 10,000 firms a year, whittling those down to 1,000 that it meets. In at least one case it signed a contract for R&D work within ten days. Last year one of NSSIF’s companies, Foundries.io, was purchased by Qualcomm, a huge American chip firm—a rare example of a British government department producing a hefty profit.
Academics are also a target. The Heilbronn Institute for Mathematical Research, which has hubs in Bristol, London and Manchester, was set up in 2005 as a partnership between GCHQ, Britain’s signals-intelligence agency, and academics, allowing mathematicians to spend part of their time on research that can be published, and half on classified problems in cryptography. That allows a small group of academics to serve as “translators” between the secret and open worlds.
Another sign that the walls are being broken down is the encouragement of clusters of innovation around the country, often on the fringes of secret places. HMGC now operates an office in Milton Keynes, enabling outsiders to collaborate without having to venture out to its heavily guarded campus miles outside the city. GCHQ is supporting the “Golden Valley” development, a tech campus right next to its headquarters in Cheltenham.
“Proximity still matters,” argues Phil Budden, an MIT lecturer and former British diplomat involved in such innovation ecosystems. He contrasts the closed nature of the “high side”, insider parlance for classified systems, with the openness of the “low side”, the unclassified world. “You need low-side places where people can gather.” That benefits both sides. Companies can reach the people who will use their products; the spies are in closer touch with the people doing the innovating. “One of the good reasons to have secret people in these ecosystems is that a bit of the ecosystem rubs off on them,” says Mr Budden.
There are still plenty of obstacles to all this. The Treasury remains wary of NSSIF and its ilk making bets on individual companies. The economics of venture capital in the military world and the intelligence world are also very different. Defence ministries and armed forces want mass-produced things. The intelligence agencies “need the most bespoke thing that will have the highest impact in quantities of one or ten,” says an insider. Many of the technologies the spies need most are not amenable to traditional venture capital.
Britain’s failure to foster serious cyber firms—Darktrace in Cambridge is perhaps the only real example—should be a cautionary tale, says an ex-intelligence official who now works in the private sector. Part of the problem, he says, is that Britain’s efforts are spread thin. “On the spectrum of concentration of resources to scale, you’ve got Israel at one end and the United States on the other, and they both succeed for different reasons,” he says. “We’re in that flabby middle bit—not sufficiently concentrated and not sufficiently big.”
Culture is also a challenge. Britain’s spooks remain far more conservative in their approach to secrecy. Retired American spies proudly boast of their career in the CIA. British ones speak in euphemisms about their 30-year career as a “British diplomat” working in “national security”. Few serving officers are publicly avowed by name and role. That can be tricky when you meet a tech executive in California, explaining why you need their whizzy product. Bringing in outsiders is difficult when vetting can take nine months. “It’s really hard for the national-security community to change that lack of transparency, the caution around security clearances,” says Pia Hüsch of the Royal United Services Institute, a think-tank. “It doesn’t make it the most interactive community.”
Ms Hüsch says that insiders often speak fondly of Dominic Cummings, who served a brief and fiery spell as an adviser in Downing Street under Boris Johnson. Mr Cummings was a controversial figure, but he was seen as a vocal champion for bringing technology and national security closer together, she says. As Sir Richard Moore, the chief of mi6, acknowledged in 2021: “Unlike Q in the Bond movies, we cannot do it all in-house.” ■
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