The Spies of Winter

by Sinclair McKay

  The push for Indian independence had gathered incredible speed, presenting new challenges. How could any authority, any nation, no matter how ingenious, plan the re-ordering of an entire landmass, overnight? And given the 1946 Soviet manoeuvres in Iran and close to the borders of Afghanistan, what was there to stop the territory fast moving into the Eastern bloc’s sphere of influence? What of all the MI6 agents still stationed throughout India? There was one more security issue on this checklist: a mineral called thorium, which was bountiful in certain areas of India. Thorium was one of the prime ingredients needed for the new generation of atomic bombs. There was very little chance that the Americans were going to allow such a precious prize to lie unprotected and fall into the hands of Soviet atom bomb scientists.

  On top of this, despite all the accusations of oppression and repression, the war had forged a strong visceral link between British colonial administrators and their subjects; two million Indian men had served in the armed forces and 87,000 men had been killed. Certainly, Britain owed India almightily; but was a swift withdrawal really the best thought-out means of repaying this debt? Lord Mountbatten was made Viceroy of India in 1947; plans for the partitioning of the country – with the Muslim populations granted the creation of Pakistan – were drawn up. Jawaharlal Nehru’s Indian National Congress and Mohammed Jinnah’s Muslim League had become convinced that this was the only way that Hindus and Muslims would co-exist in peace.

  As it happened, not even that was enough. And while maps were being drafted by British officials, civil servants elsewhere were packing up all signs of their administration. This included intelligence: sensitive files concerning dealings with Muslim and Hindu groupings in various parts of the subcontinent were carefully destroyed.

  During the war, the entirety of India had been peppered with Y Service stations sending invaluable material back to Bletchley Park about the Japanese. A number of Indians were being introduced to the latest techniques in signals intelligence and interception and now, as India prepared to slough off suffocating British rule, those sharp codebreaking operatives were beginning to move in.

  But independence came seemingly before all sensible plans had been acted upon; for instance, the new maps showing what was to be Hindu and what was to be Muslim territory had not even yet been published. Partition was to turn into a mass stampede of panic and of terror.

  Word spread through communities large and small, whispered by untold numbers of people, right across the subcontinent. The fearful rumours raged like a contagion; entire villages told themselves the exodus had to be made now, before religious enemies came to slaughter them. This, in turn, seemed to spark some form of homicidal hysteria, as murderous Muslims and Hindus alike set about fulfilling the others’ worst fears.

  In the north of the country particularly – the most sensitive in terms both of local hostilities and the wider geopolitical picture – the land was soon soaked with blood. At first, sick with apprehension and bewilderment, and then frantic with fear, millions of people, hearing word that their land was to become either Hindu or Muslim, began to pack up and flee. But they were not permitted to do so unmolested. These vast numbers of people, seeking to rush across these new borders that no-one had told them about, became the targets for criminals, desperadoes and for murderers who hated them for their beliefs. In some parts of the countries, there were columns of refugees 45 miles (55 kilometres) long making the dangerous journey towards sanctuary. So many of these people – especially the women – were targeted. Rape, murder, massacre; there were desperate, sickening scenes and there was no-one to offer help.

  Railway trains were packed with terrified refugees. They would get held up by bandits and killers – and every single passenger on board would be murdered, leaving only the driver and guard alive so that the trains would then arrive in distant cities filled from top to bottom with corpses.

  Amid this terrifying butchery and seemingly unstoppable anarchy, there was little in the way of useable intelligence; another complicating factor in the hasty handover. MI6 had tried to make some mutually satisfactory arrangements with the Indian secret authority that was to replace it. And indeed some progress had been made until Clement Attlee insisted that the Secret Intelligence Service withdraw from the country altogether: independence meant independence and the British had a duty to stay true to their promises.

  But the widespread re-organisation of signals intelligence was one of the reasons why there was little prior indication of the horrific violence to come. In truth, even if there had been all the signals in the world available, what realistically could have been done? Added to this, Indian and Pakistani signals intelligence now had to start focusing on one another, in an atmosphere of rancorous and frightened suspicion, especially in disputed territories such as Kashmir. Across a mighty continent, everything appeared to be being made up on the hoof; and the mass suffering this caused was unstoppable and unimaginable.

  Yet despite the carnage in the countryside, the handover of intelligence responsibility in the cities eventually became more orderly. British Army signals officers had been training up their Indian counterparts in various degrees of encryption and decryption. Some operators found that when partition came, they had to move swiftly. Norman Logan recalled: ‘I was a member of the South Staffordshire regiment but was attached to 2nd Indian Airborne Division Signal Regiment after being converted to cyphers in 1946. The regiment was at that time situated in Clifton, which was part of Karachi… under the command of Lieutenant Colonel David Horsfield.

  ‘Towards the spring of 1947,’ Logan continued, ‘the unit relocated… to Quetta and it was here that it saw the independence of both India and Pakistan in the August of that year. 2nd Indian Airborne Division Signal Regiment was designated an “Indian army unit” and moved very quickly from Quetta (Pakistan) into India. The British army contingent… moved to the transit camp in Karachi from where we were repatriated to the UK.’1

  While MI6 had had to pack its bags, its sister service MI5 had made more subtle arrangements, and forged a close bond with the Delhi Intelligence Bureau. Despite all the horror of the mass migration, the British government held on to good will for having been willing to keep its promise to leave. To this end, Viceroy Mountbatten was to stay on another year until 1948.

  And what of the Wireless Experimental Centre in New Delhi? The prospect of Indian independence meant a certain amount of precautionary spring-cleaning before a new wave of secret listeners came in. Codebreaker Alan Stripp remembered how the base was systematically purged of all sensitive material. ‘Whole truckloads of paper’, he wrote, were shovelled into a ‘poorly designed and hastily built incinerator, from the chimney of which, as we watched, Top Secret documents wafted, half burned, over the astonished western suburbs of New Delhi.’2

  Yet for all the turmoil that was to come to the region, there was a great deal of continuity, British officers working hand-in-glove with their Indian and Pakistani successors. Curiously, one reason for this was not anxiety about the Russians, and their ever-looming shadow over the mountains of Afghanistan, but actually about the Americans. Even at a time when the codebreakers were working with such unprecedented closeness, there were a few officials in Whitehall who feared that the Indian and Pakistani cypher bureaus would be lured into forming much stronger relationships with the US than with themselves; the US, after all, could hand over huge sums of money in return for all sorts of security investment. The British had nothing like that to offer. Added to this, the Americans had during the war established a large signals intelligence base for their own purposes in Delhi.

  It is striking to think that even now – in fact, particularly now – the topic of American and Pakistani co-operation in matters of communications and codes is a subject of the most exquisite sensitivity and official silence. It has sometimes been said that the disputed region of Kashmir – bitterly tugged between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan for decades – is where the next world war will be ignited. These are pl
aces in which interceptors and codebreakers have always had to tread most lightly.

  And no matter how much Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Marr-Johnson may have argued for the essential benevolence of British rule, there were recent catastrophic events in the subcontinent that appeared to prove otherwise, including the hideous 1943 rice famine which Britain had done little to help alleviate and which – even now – some suggest darkly was partly engineered by Churchill at a time when the Indian Nationalists were at their height.

  And whatever Whitehall and indeed the codebreakers in Washington DC might have thought, Nehru and some around him were not at all convinced that a close security relationship should continue. Indeed, Nehru considered that ‘entanglement in the power politics of Great Powers’ would only sharpen the hazards and dangers that India would be exposed to. He felt that the main threat to India was posed by the Soviet Union; and that if the Soviets chose to annexe India, Britain would not have anywhere near the strength to even begin to help. So why then provoke the Soviets by continuing a cosy relationship with the former colonialists?

  Over in Ceylon, the vast listening base at HMS Anderson in Colombo – an onshore concern teeming with smart Morse experts and codebreakers – continued its work even as the country reached towards its own independence. Partly there was a sense that the Ceylonese government allowed its continuance as a way of avoiding finding itself subsumed within India’s politics. There was also an element of subterfuge on the British part: most of the activities within HMS Anderson were top-secret, and indeed were to remain that way for some time after the war. The government of Ceylon simply did not know that this naval base was being used for surveillance purposes.

  Nor did the Ceylonese authorities know just how vital this base was considered to be by Whitehall. The site was vast, the personnel boasted impressive numbers, and part of the incredibly secret work being done there was as a Far East branch of the Diplomatic Wireless Service, which made its focus the communications and traffic of foreign diplomats. The intercepts and decrypts would then be sent back to Eastcote.

  Like the Wireless Experimental Centre in New Delhi, HMS Anderson still seemed very much steeped in the old empire. The base itself had been sited on a golf course. Those who came to work there marvelled at the lushness and occasionally startling diversity of the local wildlife; snakes were encountered frequently. Although white naval uniform was strictly adhered to, the less constricted out-of-hours life was alluring: Colombo itself was an attractive town with enough night-clubs and restaurants to keep young sophisticates happy. Then there was the world beyond, up in the hills; a world of incomparably rich tea plantation owners in sumptuous villas, attended by numerous servants. The atmosphere in those immediate post-war months cannot have given any indication that any of this was to change; the British were still in charge not merely politically, but culturally too.

  The spirit of the base remained youthful; the young Morse experts and teleprinter operators loved putting on shows: cabarets, musicals, comedy revues. And indeed, the recruits kept coming: radio-mad boys, spotted as they reported for National Service, the combination of their intelligence and enthusiasm for a new generation of communications technology marking them out for the voyage into the colourful tropics.

  One such young man, recruited in 1946, was Laurence Roberts. In fact, he had trained just before the end of the conflict at the secret station in Leighton Buzzard (then in Buckinghamshire), just a few miles from Bletchley Park (it was also at Leighton Buzzard that WAAFs learned about plotting and filtering for RAF Fighter Command). Laurence Roberts was a deft hand with technical issues such as Single Side Band Transmission, used in high-frequency radio circuits. He had also done some teaching at the nearby radio station base in Cardington, Bedfordshire. But in 1946, his expertise was required right the way across the world. He recalled: ‘This time there was no secret destination. It was the Far East. After getting as far as Singapore and two weeks at a transit camp, it was back on a troopship and I finished up at another signal centre – Gangodewella, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), five miles (eight kilometres) inland from the capital Colombo. This was peacetime overseas service and miles away from the “Active” job a few years earlier.’3

  It might have lacked that immediate sense of urgency, but the stations in Colombo – as well as those in other colonial spots – were keeping an hour-by-hour watch on the larger picture unfolding in the region; so much was still uncertain, so little could be guessed about what the real Soviet intentions might be in this part of the world. And despite Roberts’s sense of ‘peacetime’, some rules were still strictly observed. ‘We even had to wear a proper uniform on duty, nothing like the Western desert,’ he noted wryly. ‘The one big plus sign was being able to get into the old colonial town of Colombo when off duty. By the time I got to Colombo,’ he continued, ‘a lot of the high speed W/T Morse circuits had converted to Radio Teleprinter Operation. It meant a whole new procedure system had to be learnt; a means of routing a message from originating station to its final destination by typing the instructions on to the original punched tape. It was slower than automatic Morse because the limiting speed of a teleprinter was 66.6 words per minute. But the saving was in not having to type the message out from the receiving Morse tape. It was a good system.’4

  Life was not entirely friction-free in this rich paradise: secret though the work was, some of its technical aspects were of enormous interest to certain entrepreneurial locals. ‘At Colombo… the transmitters were a few miles from the receiving station (which was at the main campsite) and they were connected by landlines for keying the transmitted signals,’ remembered Laurence Roberts. ‘The native population took a liking to the cable between the two stations and would steal lengths of it and turn it into profit. This would mean a shut-down of the W/T link until it could be repaired.’ Happily, technology was making further jumps forward. ‘The situation was resolved by the introduction of a microwave radio link between the receiving and transmitting station,’ recalled Roberts. ‘A special party came out from the UK (the radio branch of RAE Farnborough). I believe this was one of the first uses of microwave technology and it was very successful.’5

  Incidentally, the Soviets had been working on similar technological lines – and the deployment of microwave lines to spy on Western embassies became the bane of many a politician’s life, requiring military, security and political figures to zip themselves up in soundproof tents before talking.

  Roberts’s life in Ceylon was less fraught, although Indian independence in 1947 brought a new, slightly more fervid atmosphere to Colombo. Ceylon’s own independence was not too far off. ‘My stay at Colombo was at the time that India and Ceylon gained independent status… and later, when Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated [in 1948], resulting in a lot of tension among the local population. Colombo was out of bounds and lots of extra guards were posted and at one time nobody was allowed out. But gunboat diplomacy was still a means of restoring order in those days. A Royal Navy cruiser came into Colombo harbour, disembarked the Royal Marine band and all available hands and marched through the town to the naval barracks.’6

  The days were fast approaching when such an attitude would be utterly unthinkable. Laurence Roberts was, not too long after this incident, posted back to Britain; the last problem he had wrestled with in terms of signals intelligence was sun spots: in that part of the world, such astronomical phenomena could cause very real difficulties, resulting in black-outs and signals having to be sent back to Britain via submarine cable.

  Ceylon’s independence came in 1948, just as India and Pakistan were being confirmed in their own new status. But the work at HMS Anderson continued without any stoppages. It has been suggested that the Americans were very keen to set up a listening station outside Colombo, which would have been run under the aegis of the US Navy. Their desire was, however, thwarted. The Ceylonese government was content to see the British forces continue in place; the presence of the Americans would have seemed too much of an unwel
come intrusion. Of course, neither they nor indeed any other nation-state would have known at that time the startling extent to which the British and Americans were in any case sharing information and intelligence. The positioning of the Colombo base was particularly advantageous and fruitful in the intelligence that it continued to provide to both allies.

  Yet in strictly technical terms, HMS Anderson, parked as it was between a busy railway line and a vast farm of electricity pylons and beneath the landing path of a nearby airport, was never the most ideal location from which to listen to faint signals in the first place; during the war, it had been a matter of extemporisation (the base had first been evacuated across the Indian ocean to Mombasa after a Japanese attack; on its return in 1943, the underlying structural difficulties had never been fully addressed). But the camp stayed where it was for the next couple of years, the British personnel continuing to be drawn from bright young lads, and all members of the camp remaining enthusiastic for Colombo’s bright and exotic life. Eventually, the base was asked by the Ceylonese authorities to move a few miles away (the reason was that the government had now earmarked the site for extensive property development). The British happily – and gratefully – complied. An extensive and extremely expensive new secret interception complex was built a few miles away in the hills of Perkar (eliminating all the old annoyances to do with electricity pylons). The Ceylonese authorities were still not told that the main role of the base was interception.