GCHQ aims to attract recruits with Science Museum spy exhibition

GCHQ is hoping to boost recruitment through an exhibition at the Science Museum that tells the history of the spy agency, which is the direct descendant of the wartime codebreakers at Bletchley Park.

An encryption key allowing the Queen to make private phone calls, a hotline-in-a-briefcase used by Margaret Thatcher and a Lego mock-up of the most sensitive area of the agency’s headquarters are among items and artefacts supplied for the show.

More recent items include the remains of a hard drive used to store top-secret documents leaked by the NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, but which was destroyed by editors at the Guardian to protect an investigative team and allow reporting to continue from another jurisdiction.

But GCHQ also has its eyes on the potential for the exhibition to pique the interest of a new generation of would-be intelligence officers with niche skills as it wrestles with how to increase its diversity and compete with private-sector companies whose pay scales it cannot match.