A German agent steals plans for Britain’s WWII D-Day battle and you must confirm the enemy agent’s identity and destination. The war rests on your shoulders, but beware - the clock is ticking. You only have one hour.

Escape rooms don’t get much more authentic than Mission Intercept in Cheltenham, England. The challenge was set by a real-life intelligence officer who spent 22 years working for Government Communications HQ (GCHQ), the British code crackers and spies who intercept and analyze electronic communications.

Lewis designed Mission Intercept to resemble his former GCHQ office and time in intelligence. "It's more about pressure, sorting through lots of data,” Lewis told reporters. “There's some encryption puzzles in there, (but there’s also) a lot of knowledge of technology, understanding languages, that sort of thing.”

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Escape room spy challenge 

Cheltenham is also home to GCHQ’s 6,000 or so staff. The spy agency is probably best known for overseeing the WWII Bletchley Park team who broke the German Enigma code, including Alan Turing who worked closely with American codebreakers and math masterminds. GCHQ code setters also famously send out the fiendishly difficult holiday brain teaser each year.

As an added bonus for Mission Intercept players, Lewis hid ‘Easter eggs’ in the escape room that GCHQ colleagues would recognize and incorporated historical details and photos from the private collection of a Navigator with the celebrated 617 Royal Air Force Squadron. The squadron, known as the 'Dam Busters', was involved in a 1943 operation that used "bouncing bombs" to destroy German dams.

Escape room players work through ID papers, military documents, and radio broadcasts to identify, locate, and intercept the enemy agent who has stolen Britain’s D-Day plans to invade German-occupied France. 
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GCHQ spy’s escape room challenge‍

It’s the type of escape room you might expect from a former spy who speaks French, Spanish, and a bit of Latin - one who doesn’t give away too much about his own history. Lewis wasn’t available for a SPYSCAPE interview so we did a little sleuthing ourselves.

Born in 1964, Lewis’ time at GCHQ coincided with the tech boom, stretching from the tail end of the Cold War to 2007 when Apple introduced its first iPhone. His specialties include programming and developing real-time computer systems and, as a GCHQ communications engineer, he “got quite good at innovation and doing things that other people thought was impossible,” according to his LinkedIn profile.

Lewis also headed up GCHQ’s National Technical Assistance Center (NTAC) for more than two years, which is responsible for ‘lawful interception’, recovering data from seized media, and offering technical advice to the government. 

When he’s not at the escape room, Lewis works at Cyber Security Challenge where he’s a part-time special projects manager - a talent spotter, of sorts - as the company’s mission is to “ensure a thriving and inclusive pipeline of talent into the cyber security industry” by developing games and competitions for students and young code breakers.

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Spy-themed escape rooms

Mission Intercept has plenty of competition worldwide from spy-themed escape room challenges including New York’s Cold War and Code Backslash in Dallas. Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CSE) - the spy agency that works closely with GCHQ - even helped build The Recruit escape room in Ottawa, Canada to boost its profile and help CSE recruit new SIGINT spies.

Cheltenham, home to GCHQ’s doughnut-shaped office since 2004, is also dotted with escape rooms like Operation Foresight, inspired by a real-life spy. Lewis has built something unique, however, a brain workout based on historically accurate information and real-life events with a debrief at the end of the challenge. Players rate it highly.

Lewis, who opened the room with his wife and stepson, told the local Gloucestershire newspaper that he viewed Mission Intercept as a personal challenge: “How can I, from my experience, build a room which incorporates the skills required of what I would say is a former and a modern-day intelligence officer, without breaking any rules and any laws?"

So far there’s been no unfriendly knock on the door from GCHQ security, so it seems Lewis' spy mission was a success.