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WHAT is the essence of Britain's “special relationship” with America? Shared history, perhaps, or a common language, a military alliance? No less significant is the extensive exchange of intelligence between the two countries' spies. The cold-war games of Britain's MI6 and America's CIA are reasonably familiar. But the British outfit that is most tightly bound to America is GCHQ, the Government Communications Headquarters, whose job is to break codes and process electronic-signals intelligence, known in the trade as “sigint”. It is also the biggest and most secretive of British agencies, so Richard Aldrich's book is a welcome account of the body that inhabits a mysterious doughnut-shaped building outside Cheltenham.