Sir Peter Harvey Marychurch (13 June 1927 – 21 May 2017) was Director of the British signals intelligence agency,

GCHQ Government Communications Headquarters, commonly known as GCHQ, is an intelligence and security organisation responsible for providing signals intelligence (SIGINT) and information assurance (IA) to the government and armed forces of the Uni ...

, a post he held from 1983 to 1989.

Career

Educated at

The John Lyon School ("May the fortune of the house stand") , established = 1876 , closed = , type = Public School Independent Day School , religion = , president = , head_ ...

, Marychurch served in the

Royal Air Force The Royal Air Force (RAF) is the United Kingdom's air and space force. It was formed towards the end of the First World War on 1 April 1918, becoming the first independent air force in the world, by regrouping the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) an ...

immediately after the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposi ...

and then joined GCHQ in 1948. According to the memoirs of a former

MI5 The Security Service, also known as MI5 ( Military Intelligence, Section 5), is the United Kingdom's domestic counter-intelligence and security agency and is part of its intelligence machinery alongside the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), G ...

intelligence officer, in the 1960s, Marychurch, then a young GCHQ cryptanalyst, applied computerised cluster analysis to the problem of

traffic analysis Traffic analysis is the process of intercepting and examining messages in order to deduce information from patterns in communication, it can be performed even when the messages are encrypted. In general, the greater the number of messages observe ...

of espionage traffic. Marychurch lends his name to the "Sir Peter Marychurch award", an honour given annually for work in international cryptology. He spent several years working at the

Government Communications Security Bureau The Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) ( mi, Te Tira Tiaki) is the public-service department of New Zealand charged with promoting New Zealand's national security by collecting and analysing information of an intelligence nature. ...

New Zealand New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island count ...

SIGINT Signals intelligence (SIGINT) is intelligence-gathering by interception of '' signals'', whether communications between people (communications intelligence—abbreviated to COMINT) or from electronic signals not directly used in communication ...

agency.Aldrich, David, ''GCHQ'', Harper Press, 2010, , p.445 He became Director in 1983 and at the request of the Government continued in that role until 1989. He also served as the chairman of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music from 1994 to 2000. He died on 21 May 2017 at the age of 89.Sir Peter Marychurch KCMG
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References

1927 births 2017 deaths Directors of the Government Communications Headquarters {{crypto-bio-stub