Hawklaw Y Station

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Barrack of the formerly secret radio eavesdropping station (photo 2007)
The HRO of the National Radio Company was the most widely used wireless receiver in the British Y stations

Hawklaw Y Station was a British military base . It was about four kilometers north of the city center of the Scottish town of Cupar . During the Second World War , there was an important radio eavesdropping point for the British secret service ( Y service ) .

history

The plant was commissioned in 1942 for the British Foreign Office . The main task was to eavesdrop on the enemy radio traffic . These included the German Enigma machine encrypted and Morse code sent secret texts and using the Lorenz cipher encrypted secret German radio teletype (British code name Fish ). These were captured in Hawklaw, recorded and forwarded to Bletchley . There the British Codebreakers succeeded in deciphering the Enigma slogans as well as the radio telex and their intelligence analysis . The German radio broadcasts often contained information that was important for the war effort, which the British grouped under the code name Ultra and used for their own planning.

After World War II, especially during the Cold War , the station was used as a listening post for more than forty years by the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) , the successor organization to GC & CS , before it was closed in 1988.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ James A. Reeds, Whitfield Diffie , JV Field: Breaking Teleprinter Ciphers at Bletchley Park: An edition of I. J. Good, D. Michie and G. Timms: General Report on Tunny with Emphasis on Statistical Methods (1945). Wiley - IEEE Press, 2015, p. 524. ISBN 978-0-470-46589-9 .
  2. ↑ Hawklaw Y Station (English). Retrieved March 27, 2017.

Coordinates: 56 ° 19 ′ 48 ″  N , 3 ° 0 ′ 28 ″  W.