Classified Pillow Talk

Some stories you hear are so fantastic, they have to be true.  In December 2005 I caught a cab in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, UK, and was told a very interesting story by the cabbie, whose name I don’t remember, so I’ll just call him Basil.  Cheltenham is where the British version of NSA, the Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) is located.  Since Basil picked me up not too far from GCHQ, he thought I might be interested in hearing his own story about a certain adventure he once had that made some GCHQ people very nervous, and almost cost him a valuable piece of furniture.

~o~o~o~

Basil the cabbie, probably sometime in the early 1980s, had been married to a woman who was an employee at GCHQ (I don’t know her name either; I’ll call her Beatrice).  At that time, housing was available on the grounds of GCHQ for its employees, and so Basil and Beatrice were living in a nice little flat near GCHQ, and Beatrice, presumably, had a blessedly short commute to work.

One evening after they had retired to bed and the room had grown quiet, Basil heard something rather odd, a very soft noise at the edge of his hearing.  Dah-di-dah-dit di-dit dah-di-dit dit …

“Can you hear that?” he asked Beatrice.

“Hear what?” she asked.

“That odd noise,” Basil described helpfully.

“No.” Beatrice answered, and that was the end of any conversation about odd noises that night.

The next night the same thing occurred – Basil heard that odd little noise, asked Beatrice if she heard it, and again she had not.

The noise continued to recur, though, and strangely enough, Basil could only hear it when he was in bed.  He eventually managed to convince Beatrice that he was not making this up, and since what he described sounded a lot like Morse code, Beatrice talked to someone at GCHQ, and amazingly, managed to convince that someone to come to their flat and have a lie down on their bed.  That gentleman did, in fact, hear Morse code, and shortly thereafter a higher-ranking succession of GCHQ personnel dropped by to lie down on the mattress and hear the Morse code.

After discovering that Basil’s mattress was receiving a rather sensitive Morse code signal, some GCHQ people approached Basil with some bad news.

“We need to take your mattress,” they told him.  “It could compromise British national security.”

“It’s my bloody mattress, and you’re not taking it,” Basil replied.

Well, apparently they couldn’t argue with that.  Basil got to keep his mattress, and not long after he refused to give it up, it fell silent for good.  GCHQ had changed their Morse code frequency so the signal could no longer be received by Basil’s mattress.  (Wouldn’t you have liked to have been the guy who had to write that memo?  “We have to alter the frequency rota because we have confirmed that an unauthorized mattress is receiving the current signal.”)  Basil and some GCHQ people speculated that perhaps the pig iron in the mattress’s box springs had just the right kind of crystal in it that it was able to pick up that one particular frequency.

This would have been a funny enough story as it is, but it gets better …

Basil’s mattress was the second occupant of that flat that had compromised British national security.  The previous occupant had been Geoffrey Prime, an infamous British turncoat and GCHQ employee who had informed the Soviets that Britain and the U.S. had cracked some high level Soviet encryption codes.  At the time that Basil’s mattress started its classified pillow talk, the British were still very sensitive about the whole Geoffrey Prime incident, and Basil’s mattress made a few people just a bit more jittery.  Eventually Basil and Beatrice moved out of that flat (and took the mattress with them), and the Brits tore the flat down to its studs, looking for any devices or other evidence of espionage that Prime might have left behind.

Basil, in addition to being a cab driver, was also a funeral director.  He was no fan of Prime, and stated quite firmly that he would offer his funeral director services for free, if he could see this traitor get buried.  According to Wikipedia, though, Prime is still alive; he was released from prison in 2001, and is living somewhere in Britain (if he’s smart, he’s nowhere near GCHQ).  I sincerely hope that Basil’s mattress, after learning its lesson that silence is golden, had a long and peaceful mattress life, and had no more run-ins (lie-ins?) with the British authorities.

Do you trust your box springs to not reveal your secrets?