Tony Comer: GCHQ’s Spy Historian Comes in From the Cold
5
minute read
By
SPYSCAPE
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Martin Anthony ‘Tony’ Comer isn’t just an intelligence operative. He is the keeper of Britain’s spy secrets - a Government Communications HQ historian who decides what the public can and can’t see. In 2009, he also became GCHQ’s spokesman, the public face of the very private electronic eavesdropping agency that shares intelligence with America’s NSA.
Tony retired in 2020 after 37 years with GCHQ, so SPYSCAPE sat down with him to find out what an intelligence historian actually does and lob a few troublesome questions his way for old-time’s sake.
Tony Comer: possibly the only spy you'll ever (knowingly) meet
Comer is the eighth historian to work at the Cheltenham, England-based signals intelligence agency and the first to identify himself on camera. GCHQ’s doughnut-shaped office is home to 6,000 cyber experts who monitor electronic communications and keep an eye out for threats.
‘For a lot of people’, Tony said, ‘I am the only member of an intelligence service they will ever meet - or at least know that they have met.”
Born in Greater Manchester, England, Tony majored in Hispanic studies at university - mostly literature of the Iberian Peninsula and South America - and taught English in Spain. He joined GCHQ as a Spanish and Portuguese linguist in 1983 and later worked in operations with the British Armed Forces and as the UK representative on the NATO Signals Intelligence committee.
Tony was named Departmental Historian in 2009 which involved writing the classified history of GCHQ internally, deciding which documents would be made public, and advising the agency about past operations so they could make well-informed decisions about future ops.
”Technology changes so quickly SIGINT reinvents itself every 10 or 15 years but somebody has to be able to understand and explain the foundation on which all of this current stuff is being built. Somebody has to know why we do things in a particular way or explain - when a problem comes up - explain the issues, why decisions were taken.”
It also fell to Tony to explain the basics of technology to some members of Britain’s House of Lords, the appointed upper chamber of Parliament where the average age is 71. “One or two of these were people for whom the fountain pen is cutting-edge technology.”
Tony Comer was named GCHQ Department Historian in 2009
Tony Comer: the spy who can’t reveal his surname
The job also involved representing the agency externally - putting a friendly face on GCHQ during a period of transition when it was trying to shape its brand identity as a transparent public body with a private role.
Comer has had a few surprises along the way. When he was first introduced publicly as GCHQ’s historian, the agency thought it best for Tony’s safety if he used only his first name.
Things progressed smoothly until The Manchester Evening News, Comer’s hometown paper, ran a story about a local boy who had done well for himself, describing him as: “Manchester-born Tony Comer, who has worked for the agency for the last 30 years, but couldn’t reveal his surname.”
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Martin Anthony ‘Tony’ Comer isn’t just an intelligence operative. He is the keeper of Britain’s spy secrets - a Government Communications HQ historian who decides what the public can and can’t see. In 2009, he also became GCHQ’s spokesman, the public face of the very private electronic eavesdropping agency that shares intelligence with America’s NSA.
Tony retired in 2020 after 37 years with GCHQ, so SPYSCAPE sat down with him to find out what an intelligence historian actually does and lob a few troublesome questions his way for old-time’s sake.
Tony Comer: possibly the only spy you'll ever (knowingly) meet
Comer is the eighth historian to work at the Cheltenham, England-based signals intelligence agency and the first to identify himself on camera. GCHQ’s doughnut-shaped office is home to 6,000 cyber experts who monitor electronic communications and keep an eye out for threats.
‘For a lot of people’, Tony said, ‘I am the only member of an intelligence service they will ever meet - or at least know that they have met.”
Born in Greater Manchester, England, Tony majored in Hispanic studies at university - mostly literature of the Iberian Peninsula and South America - and taught English in Spain. He joined GCHQ as a Spanish and Portuguese linguist in 1983 and later worked in operations with the British Armed Forces and as the UK representative on the NATO Signals Intelligence committee.
Tony was named Departmental Historian in 2009 which involved writing the classified history of GCHQ internally, deciding which documents would be made public, and advising the agency about past operations so they could make well-informed decisions about future ops.
”Technology changes so quickly SIGINT reinvents itself every 10 or 15 years but somebody has to be able to understand and explain the foundation on which all of this current stuff is being built. Somebody has to know why we do things in a particular way or explain - when a problem comes up - explain the issues, why decisions were taken.”
It also fell to Tony to explain the basics of technology to some members of Britain’s House of Lords, the appointed upper chamber of Parliament where the average age is 71. “One or two of these were people for whom the fountain pen is cutting-edge technology.”
Tony Comer was named GCHQ Department Historian in 2009
Tony Comer: the spy who can’t reveal his surname
The job also involved representing the agency externally - putting a friendly face on GCHQ during a period of transition when it was trying to shape its brand identity as a transparent public body with a private role.
Comer has had a few surprises along the way. When he was first introduced publicly as GCHQ’s historian, the agency thought it best for Tony’s safety if he used only his first name.
Things progressed smoothly until The Manchester Evening News, Comer’s hometown paper, ran a story about a local boy who had done well for himself, describing him as: “Manchester-born Tony Comer, who has worked for the agency for the last 30 years, but couldn’t reveal his surname.”
He learned another lesson in media management after inviting a journalist from the local Gloucestershire Echo into the GCHQ museum in 2009 for a piece on ‘Cheltenham’s Secret Museum’, which was supposed to be his safe, unthreatening introduction to dealing with the press.
One of the museum exhibits was a list of attendees from a 1939 Cryptanalysis 101 course offered by GCHQ’s predecessor - GC&CS - during WWII. Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien’s name appeared on the list which led the journalist to ask if Tolkien worked as a Bletchley Park codebreaker.
“I answered that he hadn’t. Why not? Because the nation had declared war on Germany and not Mordor,” Tony recalled. “Of course, my attempts to broaden cultural horizons among junior members of staff wasn’t what got into the published article, but the glib joke about not declaring war on Mordor was.
“I was phoned a couple of days later by a journalist, who asked a couple of questions and then sold the story on to The Daily Telegraph where it hit the Internet and then the world.”
While it may have been easy for GCHQ to promote stories about Bletchley Park and the success of WWII code-breaker Alan Turing, it was more of a challenge to address the Katharine Gun GCHQ whistleblowing case which revolved around Britain and America’s alleged plot to use signals intelligence to swing the UN vote on the legality of the 2003 Iraq War.
Gun’s case was thrust into the spotlight again in 2019 when Hollywood released Keira Knightley’s Official Secrets, a thriller told from Gun’s point of view. Tony bristles at the suggestion that the UK may have helped America gather electronic information on UN delegates from Chile and Mexico to blackmail or manipulate them into supporting the 2003 invasion of Iraq at a time when the war’s legality was in question. Comer sees diplomatic intelligence as a lever.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Votes are being manipulated?” Comer said. ”Diplomatic intelligence is about - and always has been since the First World War - is about knowing what other people are doing as a support to diplomacy. There’s no country that is going to change what it's doing because someone else has secretly heard what they are planning.
“At the very, very best it gives people, on the side who are doing surveillance, a better insight into the way thinking has developed to give them potentially better levers to pull to help persuade people.”
NSA and GCHQ whistleblower Edward Snowden was granted Russian citizenship in 2022
GCHQ & Edward Snowden
In 2013, another whistleblower, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, revealed that GCHQ was secretly bulk-collecting Internet communications on an industrial scale, then reassembling, filtering, and analyzing intel related to national security. The European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2021 that GCHQ breached privacy rights by intercepting and harvesting electronic data although judges found bulk interception in itself was not illegal.
Snowden remains a tricky subject for GCHQ. Comer has sidestepped questions in the past, describing Snowden’s revelations as “inaccurate” and “damaging, mainly to the mission, but also to GCHQ’s reputation”.
“The only thing I’m going to say about Snowden,” Comer told Intelligence and Security in early 2022, “is that the black cloud of the publicity given to the information he stole, which made some of GCHQ’s targets disappear from view, had a silver lining: it brought forward change to the legislative framework in which GCHQ operated, and it changed the nation’s relationship with GCHQ, which had to earn its ‘license to operate’ by being more open.”
Comer said he increased his public speaking engagements following Snowden’s revelations and felt a different mood among Britons than the one portrayed in the newspapers: “an appreciation by the public for what they thought the intelligence services were doing for them, in particular, ‘keeping us safe’. As the only avowed member of an intelligence agency most of them would ever meet, I found warmth, not hostility.”
Anonymous hackers volunteered to help Ukraine in the war with Russia
Ukraine’s ‘Hacker Army’
More recently, the world’s attention has focused on Russia, the war in Ukraine, and Anonymous, the group that volunteered to help build a ‘Hacker Army’ to fight an electronic war with Russia. Have the online vigilantes made any difference?
“I think it is very interesting that everyone assumed the Russian attack on Ukraine would take place in an atmosphere where there would be massive hacking attacks - not just on Ukraine but on the whole of Western Europe - and that just has not happened. And that’s mainly because Western countries have become so much more sophisticated in understanding how hacking works,” Comer told SPYSCAPE.
“Ukraine may say ‘Oh, let's create a great hacker Army’. It’s a bit pointless. The Russians are not so naive that they’re going to let attacks [happen]. You’ll get Botnets doing denial-of-service attacks and things like that,” Comer added, but he notes there’s been no large-scale attacks.
The GCHQ ‘Doughnut’ in Cheltenham, England
Tony Comer: Finally in from the cold?
Perhaps understandably, Comer is less interested in going into specifics about more secretive matters, such as what Russia may be building under its Dublin Embassy. Nor is Comer interested in discussing the finer details of Russia planting a flag underwater at the North Pole to stake a claim to the energy-rich Arctic off Canada’s shores. Instead, he pivots into a discussion about Greenland and who owns the Northwest Passage.
To be fair, Comer may want to steer clear of discussing Canada at all as he’s already endured a good-natured ribbing after publicly stating that he enjoys Canada - but only eight months a year.
“One or two Canadians were a bit sniffy about my comment,” he admits, and Tony received feedback along the lines of ‘The winters are part of what makes Canada Canada.’ “I’m afraid that my reply was that the English climate is what has made me a wimp!”
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