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Come and join us for Richard Skaife's talk on German Signals Intelligence in WW2

About this event

Event description:

The German Armed Forces and government agencies developed extensive signals intelligence capabilities, both prior to and during WW2. Richard Skaife’s talk will examine the background to the German sigint capabilities, their organisations, tasking and objectives. He will outline their successes and the impacts of these activities on operations. He will examine their position in the wider German intelligence organisations and the German command decision making structure. He will look at German intelligence failures associated with the German Sigint organisations and present a view on the causes on these failures. “The results obtained by the Luftwaffe Signals intelligence organisation were outstanding” (Army Security Agency Report on European Axis Signals Intelligence in World War 2, Volume 1) 

Speaker's bio:

Richard Skaife served in the Army, Royal Signals, for 23 years, with service in Germany during the Cold War, in intelligence Northern Ireland in the 70s and in UK. In 1988-89 he served in the MoD and was responsible for Army tactical signals intelligence policy. While in that post he was chairman of the NATO committee on Land Electronic Warfare responsible for developing NATO Land EW policy. He retired from the Army in 1991 and since then has worked in commercial mobile telecommunications, in both terrestrial systems and mobile satellite systems. He chaired the European Telecommunications Standards advisory committee on security techniques. From 2006 he has been a consultant working internationally on telecommunications and security matters, with experience in the Middle East, USA and Asia. Between 2017 and 2021 he worked on the UK MoD next generation satellite system, Skynet 6.

When working with NATO in 1988 he was given a then just declassified copy of General Albert Praun’s report on German Radio Reconnaissance written in 1951 for the US Army Security Agency, the precursor to NSA, which sparked his interest in the subject.