Episode Four

The ground upon which it was built, however, was still owned by the Government. Nestling conveniently in the vale between two hills, with an entrance disguised by a tunnel between them, a new, far darker project was born.

In the late fifties Department C19 had been established. It was primarily a little brother to M15, an off-shoot of the Civil Defence programme instigated in the defence boom of the Cold War. As the decade progressed, C19 acquired a reputation for involvement in some of the less well documented paramilitary excursions. After what was referred to in ministerial papers, all marked Top Secret and Eyes Only, as 'The Shoreditch Incident', the responsibility for the Intrusion Counter Measures Group was handed over to C19 with a recommendation that it be used as the foundation for an entirely new organisation. An organisation set up to deal with those out-of-the-ordinary events which fell outside the remit of the regular army.

A decision was made to mix military and scientific measures and an experienced Air Force Group Captain, Ian Gilmore, was promoted and asked to lead the new unit. He in turn requested the scientific help of an advisor called Rachel Jensen whom he knew to have been pivotal in Turing's work with computers during the war, expanding upon the aborted Judson Ultima Machine.

Although she had retired to write her memoirs in Cambridge, Jensen agreed to help Gilmore, also suggesting the recruitment of a number of her Cambridge protégés, including Allison Williams, Ruth Ingram and Anne Travers. A few years later, London was evacuated, reportedly due to a nerve-gas explosion that froze the capital, focused on the area within the Circle Line of the Underground system. That incident was handled by an army officer, Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart who, on Gilmore's recommendation, was instrumental in setting up the organization known as UNIT - the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce. As its moniker suggested, this set-up had a wider remit than the Intrusion Counter Measures Group, and was answerable not just to C19, but also to a central governing body in Geneva.