Sir Brian Tovey - obituary

Head of GCHQ whose time in office saw the introduction of lie detector tests after a KGB spy scandal

Brian Tovey
Brian Tovey Credit: Photo: GCHQ

Sir Brian Tovey, who has died aged 89, was director of GCHQ between 1978 and 1983, a turbulent period for Britain’s eavesdropping centre which culminated in its ceasing to be an official secret.

His period in charge at Cheltenham embraced the Geoffrey Prime spy scandal, a consequent move to introduce lie detector tests to assuage American concerns about the security of shared intelligence, and staff problems that would lead to Margaret Thatcher banning trade unionists from GCHQ.

Tovey’s years as director were notable for a renewed emphasis on technology to match increasingly sophisticated global telecommunications, and his success in convincing Mrs Thatcher that this mattered.

Though the Zircon spy satellite programme initiated as a result would later be cancelled, it refocused GCHQ staff on the continuing need for the kind of pioneering technology created by their forebears at Bletchley Park. A 33-year GCHQ veteran, Tovey was the first director not to have worked at Bletchley Park, but was crucially aware of its importance.

What mattered most to the Government, however, was continuing trust in GCHQ from a Reagan administration shaken by the ease with which Prime, a Soviet “mole”, had been able to pass on not only Britain’s own top secret material but information shared with GCHQ by America’s National Security Agency.

Prime’s treachery only came to light when police investigating an assault on a 14-year-old girl raided his home. He had been able to take 500 copies of sensitive documents with him when he left GCHQ, passing them on to the KGB. Crucially, these included details of an Anglo-American system for tracking Soviet nuclear submarines.

The NSA and the CIA joined forces to demand a complete overhaul of GCHQ’s vetting and security procedures. Tovey was equally determined to make a recurrence impossible, but when the American agencies proposed in 1983 that GCHQ adopt their routine practice of polygraph testing employees and new recruits, he was sceptical both about the reliability of the process and its impact on staff relations.

Tovey had up to then managed to prevent the issue of union membership at GCHQ boiling over, following industrial action there in 1981 against the government’s trade union reforms which had incensed Mrs Thatcher and unsettled the Americans. The TUC, sensing that it had overplayed its hand, offered a no-strike agreement. Tovey preferred this to an outright ban on union membership, which he feared would bring resignations, and did his best to keep the temperature low. But Mrs Thatcher was adamant and in January 1984, shortly after his retirement, matters came to a head.

A man of warmth and strategic flair, Tovey almost throughout his time at Cheltenham was unable to tell anyone where he worked; he fell back on saying he was with an electronics research organisation. The fiction that GCHQ did not exist ended with the Prime case; referring it to the Security Commission, Mrs Thatcher told the Commons its findings would be “laid before the House to the fullest extent compatible with national security”. This left it impossible not to mention GCHQ.

Brian John Maynard Tovey was born on April 15 1926, the son of the Rev Collett Tovey, Canon of Bermuda Cathedral during the 1930s, and the former Catherine Maynard. From St Edward’s School, Oxford, he won an exhibition in Modern History to St Edmund Hall. He left Oxford when he was called up in 1945, serving first with the Royal Navy and then the Army’s Intelligence Corps and Education Corps.

Tovey’s flair for languages led to his enrolling in 1948 at the School of Oriental and African Studies to read Chinese; emerging fluent in Mandarin, Cantonese and Vietnamese, he was snapped up by GCHQ. Starting as a junior assistant, he became a principal in 1957, an assistant secretary in 1967 and an under-secretary in 1975.

He made his reputation with two coups as a signal intelligence analyst. At the start of the Confrontation with Indonesia in 1963 Tovey was able to brief intelligence chiefs in Singapore with total accuracy on the deployment of President Sukarno’s naval, air and ground forces.

Five years on, as the divisional head responsible for SIGINT on the forces of the Warsaw Pact, his matching of photographs from the CIA with GCHQ’s own signals intelligence enabled him to predict with confidence the Soviet-led intervention in Czechoslovakia.

As the Kremlin showed increasing irritation with Alexander Dubcek’s liberal “Prague spring”, Tovey led his J division in monitoring the movements of Warsaw Pact forces in central Europe. They missed – briefly – only one: a tank division from Murmansk brought south by train under radio silence.

When Tovey’s assessment was put to the inter-agency Current Intelligence Group, the chairman exclaimed: “You don’t really think they would be mad enough to invade, do you?” When the intervention came just two days later, Tovey congratulated his staff on their prescience.

Having concentrated on technology in his final months at GCHQ, Tovey incurred controversy by becoming a director of Plessey Defence Systems. Alistair Graham, general secretary of the Civil and Public Services Association, said he had a “brass neck” to take the job, and should not be allowed into GCHQ.

Sir Brian Tovey

In the Commons, Mrs Thatcher was questioned on the appointment by Labour’s Tam Dalyell, a leading critic of the Falklands operation in which GCHQ’s work and American links were of great importance. She said two conditions had been attached: Tovey should not start until that December, and should take no part in Plessey’s dealings with GCHQ, or with the MoD on export licences for certain kinds of equipment.

Tovey admitted to an irony in his advising companies on keeping their communications secure when he had devoted his career to listening to other people’s messages. He stayed with Plessey less than two years before moving into general consultancy.

He chaired the Joint Electronics and Telecommunications Security Export Control Committee (JETSECC) of the Federation of the Electronics Industry, and from 1990 to 2001 the Fujitsu Europe telecoms R&D centre.

With his fourth wife, he also founded the Learning Skills Foundation and the charity Learning Skills Research, supporting the application of neuroscientific research to education methods. He was the founding chairman of the UK Mind Sports Olympiad, and a trustee of the Naval and Military Club.

In 1999 Tovey embarked on a second career as a historian of Italian art during the Baroque period. His special interest was the methodology of Filippo Baldinucci (1624-97), one of the most significant Florentine biographer-historians in that field and an adviser to that city’s wealthiest families.

From an 8,500 card index on Baldinucci’s six-volume Notizie dei Professori del Disegno da Cimabue in qua, compiled by Philip Pouncey, formerly of Bletchley Park and the British Museum, Tovey published The Pouncey Index of Baldinucci’s Notizie in 2005. The book launch was in the Uffizi Gallery.

Tovey wrote regularly for the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, the Art Newspaper and the Journal of the Society for Renaissance Studies. He conducted his research at first at London University’s Wartburg Institute and the British Institute in Florence, where he became renowned for his expansive lecturing style. Moving to Oxford in 2010, he worked in the university’s Sackler library on a biography of Baldinucci, completing it shortly before he died. He had also finished a popular biography of Michaelangelo.

Influenced by Baldinucci’s having been an “exemplar of lay spirituality”, Tovey converted to Roman Catholicism in 1995.

His interest in Baldinucci dated back to his time at GCHQ. While director, he reportedly shared it with Alexandre de Marenches, head of France’s SDECE – in return for intelligence on Russia’s war in Afghanistan.

He was appointed KCMG in 1980.

A romantic at heart, Brian Tovey was married four times. He married firstly Elizabeth Christopher, in 1949; they separated in 1959. He married again in 1961 and 1973, then in 1989 married his fourth wife, Mary Lane. She survives him, with a son and two daughters from his first marriage; a third daughter died in 2012.

Sir Brian Tovey, born April 15 1926, died December 23 2015