Peter Marychurch

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Sir Peter Marychurch was the director of GCHQ from 1983 to 1989.[1]

In Spycatcher, Peter Wright recounted how Marychurch helped him with his work on Soviet broadcasts from Moscow to their 'illegal' (non-diplomatic) agents in the West:

A young GCHQ cryptanalyst named Peter Marychurch (now the director of GCHQ) transformed my laborious handwritten classifications by processing the thousands of broadcasts on computer and applying "cluster analysis" to isolate similarities in the traffic, which mad the classifications infinitely more precise. Within a few years this work had become one of the most important tools in Western counterespionage.[2]

Notes

  1. Birthdays, The Times, 13 June 2003.
  2. Peter Wright, Spycatcher, Viking, 1987, p.153.