Peter Marychurch
Sir Peter Harvey Marychurch KCMG (13 June 1927 – 21 May 2017[1]) was Director of the British signals intelligence agency, GCHQ, a post he held from 1983 to 1989.
Career[edit]
Educated at The John Lyon School, Marychurch served in the Royal Air Force immediately after the Second World War and then joined GCHQ in 1948.[2] According to the memoirs of a former MI5 intelligence officer, in the 1960s, Marychurch, then a young GCHQ cryptanalyst, applied computerised cluster analysis to the problem of traffic analysis of espionage traffic.[3] Marychurch lends his name to the "Sir Peter Marychurch award", an honour given annually for work in international cryptology.[4] He spent several years working at the Government Communications Security Bureau, New Zealand's SIGINT agency.[5] He became Director in 1983 and at the request of the Government continued in that role until 1989.[6]
He also served as the chairman of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music from 1994 to 2000.[7]
He died on 21 May 2017 at the age of 89.[8]
References[edit]
- ^ Birthdays Tomorrow The Independent, 12 June 1993
- ^ Who's Who 2010, A & C Black, 2010, ISBN 978-1-4081-1414-8
- ^ Peter Wright, Spycatcher, p. 153, 1987
- ^ Office of the Director of National Intelligence Archived 2016-03-03 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Aldrich, David, GCHQ, Harper Press, 2010, ISBN 978-0-00-727847-3, p.445
- ^ Hansard 22 July 1986
- ^ Royal School of Music Annual Review 2000
- ^ Sir Peter Marychurch KCMG
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