Historical Records and Release

The Public Records Act 1958 places a legal requirement on government departments to transfer records to the National Archives 30 years after creation. GCHQ has a blanket exemption from this requirement but has made voluntary releases which appear on the National Archives catalogue under the HW series in over seventy classes.

Release of Bletchley Park and other GC&CS records

A 10 year exercise to review and release the majority of surviving records belonging to the Government Code and Cipher School, was completed in 2004. Records released date from 1919 and the beginnings of GC&CS, then located in London, up to VJ-Day (16 August 1945), and covering all war time activity by then carried out from Bletchley Park. This means that virtually all surviving SIGINT or SIGINT-related records from this period regardless of subject or target have been made available for public access.

Release of post-war historical records

HW15 contains records relating to VENONA (see footnote), complementing a release made by the National Security Agency in the United States. Additionally, a small release of post-War security records has been made and can be found in HW9.

Work is currently underway to review and release GCHQ intelligence reports dating from the early Cold war period, 1945-1950, on the Soviet bloc countries, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, USSR and Yugoslavia.

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Taken from HW 75/24

Text-only version of this image

The first set of these reports has been transferred to the National Archives in a new series, HW75. Further sets will be released in due course; owing to on-going sensitivities some details within the reports and including some entire reports, have been withheld.

Footnote
VENONA was the codeword applied to decrypts of Soviet intelligence messages transmitted between 1942 and 1948. The results led to the identification, and in a number of cases arrest and conviction, of many Soviet spies in the US, UK and other countries. The most famous achievements of VENONA were the provision of the initial leads that led to the arrests of the "Atom Spies" in the US (including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed), and the identification of Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby in the UK (all of whom fled to the USSR). Many of the agents' cover-names remain unidentified, even now.

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