The Bletchley Park Codebreakers (52 page)

The semi-feudal relationship which London enjoyed is no better illustrated than in Australia where Sigint operations were controlled by London. Only in 1940 did Australia establish her own separate organization. When this became the Australian Defence Signals Bureau, formed at Albert Park Barracks in Melbourne on 12 November 1947, it remained in the shadow of GCHQ. Four Australian applicants for the directorship were rejected in favour of Britain’s Commander Teddy Poulden, who filled the senior posts with twenty GCHQ staff and communicated with GCHQ in his own special cipher. During the winter of 1946–7, a Commonwealth Sigint conference was held in London, chaired by Edward Travis, during which each country received designated spheres of activity. Canada’s Sigint organization, under the long-serving Lieutenant-Colonel Ed Drake, suffered similar treatment. On 13 April 1946 the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, authorized the consolidation of a number of wartime organizations into a small postwar unit of about 100 staff, known as the Communications Branch of the National Research Council (CBNRC). Again, the senior post was filled by staff seconded by GCHQ, prompting Canadians to say that CBNRC stood for ‘Communications Branch – No Room for Canadians’.

Although GCHQ representatives were often over-awed by the scale of American Sigint resources, matters looked quite different from Washington. With the war over and an economizing Republican Congress controlling the federal purse-strings, resources for American communications intelligence (Comint) interception activities were remarkably tight before 1950. This led to a state of parlous under-preparedness prior to the Korean War. It also prevented the European expansion that American Sigint had hoped for. In 1949, US Army Security Agency interception units in Europe were still passing their product to GCHQ, rather than back to Washington, for analysis. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, GCHQ retained primary responsibility for areas such as Eastern Europe, the Near East and Africa. This period also
saw the development of spheres of influence. For example, relations with Norway were an American responsibility, while relations with the Swedes belonged to GCHQ, although this demarcation was not strictly adhered to. GCHQ enjoyed the benefits of a panoply of bases provided by Britain’s imperial and post-imperial presence. Although the empire was shrinking, the very process of retreat often rendered the new successor states more willing to grant limited base facilities to the departing British. These facilities seemed innocuous, being termed ‘communications relay facilities’, but the reality was often different. Many countries, such as Ceylon, were unwitting hosts to GCHQ collection sites. Island locations, including Britain, were intrinsically attractive because they would be slower to be overrun by the enemy in wartime military operations.

In the 1950s, Anglo–American relations were made easier in the Comint field by the arrival of the National Security Agency (NSA), which imposed some order upon the squabbling of the US armed services. In 1952 the Brownell report had recommended to President Truman the creation of a strong centralizing force. The three separate American armed services fought a desperate rearguard action against the creation of the NSA. General Samford of US Air Force intelligence denounced ‘strong central control of the national COMINT effort’ as a ‘major error’. He also warned darkly about Comint slipping away towards civilian control under the office of the Secretary of Defense. But Truman’s mind was made up and the NSA began to reshape American Comint. The efforts of the NSA to extend its control over electronic intelligence (Elint), the interception of electronic signals like radar, and to ‘fuse’ it with Comint processes would be more troubled and stretched on into the 1960s. American officials often envied the more centralized British model.

The closest Anglo–American intelligence relationship during the immediate postwar period was probably that developed between RAF intelligence and the US Air Force. General Charles Cabell (later Deputy Director of the CIA) was head of US Air Force Intelligence as the USAF became fully independent of the US Army in 1947–8. While establishing an expanded intelligence organization and getting to grips with being a fully independent service, the Americans found RAF intelligence to be an ideal partner. RAF intelligence was headed by the convivial Lawrie Pendred, who was anxious to cement the Anglo–American relationship. This growing friendship also reflected
the fact that GCHQ had identified air power as a critical area for Sigint, especially those arcane forms of Sigint associated with strategic bombing. Sigint in the air was one of the major growth areas of the early intelligence Cold War.

Air intelligence was keen to develop Elint. It was invaluable for the operational planning for air attack against the Soviet Union. It was equally invaluable to anyone planning peacetime ‘spy-flights’ over Soviet airspace and looking for gaps in Soviet radar cover. Thus, in this area, air intelligence collectors were also consumers, not least to protect the security of their own missions. Elint was first developed by the Allies in the face of radio-guided German air raids during the Second World War and was later sited at the Central Signals Establishment at RAF Watton. Towards the end of the war, it continued to be refined against Japan.

Initially, the RAF was ahead in this new field. By 1947 a fleet of specially equipped Lancaster and Lincoln aircraft patrolled the East German border, monitoring Soviet air activity. This was complemented by a programme of monitoring of basic low-level Soviet voice traffic by ground stations at locations such as RAF Gatow in Berlin. British ‘Ferrets’ began their first forays into the Baltic in June 1948 and the Black Sea in September 1948. In that year they began to be supplemented by American prototype B-29 Ferrets flying missions from Scotland to the Spitzbergen area. B-29 Ferrets were also supplied to the RAF under the Mutual Assistance Act from 1950. By 1948 much of the perimeter of the Soviet Union was covered. A British undercover team was operating in northern Iran, monitoring Soviet radar in the Caucasus as well as Soviet missile tests at Kasputin Yar on the edge of the Caspian Sea. The team conducting this was posing as archaeologists, a favourite British cover for intelligence work.

The Comint and Flint effort against the Soviet Air Force and associated strategic systems was one of GCHQ’s key areas of achievement in the first postwar decade. The arrival of the first Soviet atomic bomb in 1949 may have eluded them, but its subsequent operational deployment certainly did not. During the early 1950s the Joint Intelligence Bureau in London and the USAF target intelligence staffs had been busy exchanging sensitive data on ‘the mission of blunting the Soviet atomic offensive’. This involved the early counter-force targeting of Soviet nuclear forces in the hope of destroying them on the ground before they could be used. Senior officers in London had
given particular attention to this matter because of the vulnerability of the UK. The Americans were impressed by the ‘considerable progress that London had made on the counter-atomic problem’. GCHQ and the RAF had amassed ‘a significant amount of evaluated intelligence, particularly in the special intelligence field, which would be of the greatest value’. Most of the airfields and the operational procedures for Soviet strategic air forces in the European theatre had been mapped by 1952. The full Anglo–American intelligence exchange in this field was somewhat ironic given the different views held in London and Washington on nuclear strategic issues at this time. However, full intelligence exchange on targets continued regardless.

Between 1956 and 1960 several ‘incidents’ reverberated upon intelligence-gathering from seaborne and airborne platforms. In each case ministers in London reacted more strongly than their counterparts in Washington, constraining the nature and frequency of subsequent operations. For the practitioners, this underlined the value of working with allies. In the late 1940s and early 1950s the British had been more relaxed about forward operations, such as over-flights, and had passed their dividends to Washington. After 1956 the situation was reversed. London’s hesitancy in the face of various flaps and shoot-downs accelerated the shift of momentum in the world of Sigint towards the United States.

The scale of political embarrassment that could be generated by bungled surveillance operations was first underlined by the infamous Commander ‘Buster’ Crabb incident. In April 1956 operations were mounted against the Soviet cruiser
Ordjoninkidze
during the visit of Marshal Bulgarin and Nikita Khrushchev to Britain. Despite some robust exchanges, the visit went well and the Soviet delegation departed on 27 April 1956. But even as they left the press had begun to speculate about the mysterious disappearance of a British naval diver, Commander Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb RNVR, in the vicinity of the visiting Soviet warships. His headless body was later recovered from the sea. Anthony Eden intended to take ‘disciplinary action’ because the mission had been unauthorized and told the ministers concerned to order their staff to co-operate fully with the inquiry. As a result, John Sinclair, the Chief of MI6, was replaced by Sir Dick White, previously Director-General of MI5.

Sir Edward Bridges, a somewhat nineteenth-century figure, conducted a thorough inquiry, employing the Joint Intelligence Committee mechanism to help him ferret out all aspects of the Crabb
affair. Bridges rightly identified ‘certain questions’ of a broader nature arising out of this event. On the one hand, intrusive intelligence operations clearly had a capacity to cause international repercussions, but, on the other hand, the systems for their authorization were unclear. Bridges recommended a new and broader inquiry, to review all of Britain’s strategic intelligence and surveillance activities. It would assess ‘the balance between military intelligence on the one hand, and civil intelligence and political risks on the other’. Eden gave this job to Sir Norman Brook, the Cabinet Secretary, working with Patrick Dean, Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. This review had important consequences for intelligence. In April 1956, simultaneous with Khrushchev’s visit to Britain, the first CIA U-2s had arrived at RAF Lakenheath and some U-2 work was Sigint-orientated. Eden now decided that this, and a host of other operations, had to go.

Eden’s review also impacted on naval Sigint. Even more secret than the U-2s were joint intelligence operations by British and American navies using submarines. But in the backwash from the Crabb affair, British submarine operations were cancelled and so the British half of the deal on Anglo–American submarine-derived Sigint could not be delivered. British officers in Washington spoke of their ‘embarrassment’, which would persist ‘until we can make good our part of the bargain’. Their underlying concern was that Britain would be eclipsed by similar operations by the American submarine commander in the Atlantic, which they were expanding ‘so as not to be outdone by the Pacific submariners’. British Naval Intelligence wanted to keep their stake in the game and so urged not only that current operation be restored, but that it be followed by ‘a bigger and better operation’. Admiral Inglis, the British director of Naval Intelligence in London, was agitated. The main scoop provided by this series of American operations had been a choice selection of short-range Comint and Elint: ‘considerable’ VHF voice, Identification Friend or Foe (IFF), and radar transmission was recorded, mostly from airborne and coastal defences. The take was voluminous. Moreover, while the Soviets seemed prepared to repel ‘unfriendly air intrusion’, by contrast ‘no difficulties were placed in way of submarine visitors’ and Soviet anti-submarine capability seemed low. The Commander-in-Chief Pacific Fleet was already pressing Washington to abandon the twelve-mile restriction on operations near the Soviet coast. But the question now was, were there to be any further British operations?

By the end of 1956 the Royal Navy felt things slipping away from them. Admiral Elkins, the senior naval officer at the British Joint Staff Mission in Washington, wrote to Mountbatten to voice his concern. As predicted, the US Navy was beginning its own independent operations off Murmansk. Initially, the American Office of Naval Intelligence had decided that the British Naval Intelligence Division was not to be informed. But Admiral Warder from the secretive American OP-31 section entrusted with this mission decided that it would be foolhardy not to draw on extensive British experience of similar operations in these waters. So the British Commander John Coote, who had been on the Murmansk run several times, was called in to brief the first American crew. But this was only on the understanding that he told no other British naval officers in Washington. These new American submarine intelligence operations off Murmansk had been triggered by two factors. First, the cancellation of British operations: Elkins lamented the fact that ‘we are no longer providing sufficient cover in an area where we have hitherto been a reliable and productive source’. Second, the US Navy had used the reports of previous British intelligence operations off Murmansk to persuade the State Department that these activities were valuable while ‘the risks of detection are negligible’. Elkins accepted that the British cancellations had been a high-level political decision. But he also warned that British prestige in the operational and intelligence fields, which was currently high, would soon suffer ‘unless we resume these activities ourselves’.

In the late 1950s, Harold Macmillan allowed the gradual restoration of intrusive operations using British aircraft, ships and submarines for photography and Sigint. Moreover, between 1956 and 1960 twenty U-2 aircraft were involved in overflights. Some U-2 flights used British bases or pilots. Most of the deep-penetration flights were launched from Adana in Turkey and six RAF pilots were based there. Because Turkey would not allow penetration directly into the Soviet Union, U-2s staged on to Peshawar in Pakistan before crossing the Soviet border. Along the southern border of the Soviet Union, Soviet radar stations were more dispersed and a variety of attractive targets presented themselves, including a range of missile testing centres at Kazakstan and the Caspian Sea and at Kapustin Yar on the Volga. Some of these flights substituted Sigint packages for cameras; however, the Sigint package that the U-2 could carry was fairly light.
Serious airborne Sigint activity of an intrusive variety was sometimes carried out by the American-modified version of the British Canberra, the RB-57D which, with improved engines and an improbable wingspan, could reach nearly 60,000 feet, compared with the 70,000 feet available to the U-2.