Intelligence in War: The Value--And Limitations--Of What the Military Can Learn About the Enemy

by John Keegan

  Refuelling, in the air and at sea, was an essential requirement, for the task force was to operate without a land base nearer than Ascension Island in the middle of the Atlantic. Until the airfield at Port Stanley could be recaptured, air refuelling was less vital, for long flights over the ocean could not be numerous. All fuel, and other supplies to the warships, however, had to be transferred ship-to-ship while under way.

  The assembly of the task force was a race against time, not only because of the need to confront the Argentinians with an armed response as rapidly as possible but also because of the season; the onset of the South Atlantic winter at the end of June would bring sub-Arctic weather necessitating withdrawal from the region. Everything, from completing dockyard maintenance to supplying the soldiers with warm clothing, had to be done at the highest speed; at the outset it seemed that many requirements could not be met.

  It was not only the pace of material preparation that had to be forced; so too did that of planning and intelligence gathering. The two were intimately connected and interdependent. Britain had no base in the region and no allies. Chile, long on bad terms with its Argentinian neighbour, was disposed to be helpful but could not risk openly siding with Britain; most other South American countries supported Argentina’s claim to the Falklands, if only out of regional solidarity. How was the campaign to be fought? Clearly there must be an amphibious landing but it would have to be launched from the task force’s ships, not from land. That required the navy to close up to the islands, at least while the troops got ashore, but also to remain nearby during daylight so that the carrier aircraft could provide support. Worryingly, the islands, though 400 miles from the nearest stretch of Argentinian coast, were just not far enough offshore to lie outside the range of the enemy’s land-based aircraft. The troops, once landed, would be vulnerable to air attack. Far more worryingly, the warships and transports would also be at risk, except at night, when they could stand off to the east into the broad expanse of the ocean.

  How serious was the risk? That proved, both at the outset of the campaign and during its development, an embarrassingly difficult question to answer. No one in Britain really knew; no one, indeed, knew anything much that was useful about Argentina’s armed forces. For reasons of economy, the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) had closed down all but one of its stations in South America; that remaining was in Buenos Aires but its chief was too overworked to collect anything but political intelligence. The service attachés, navy, army and air, were supposed to report on their Argentinian opposite numbers; but in recent years they were more often required to act as salesmen for the British defence industries, so the excuse went afterwards; in practice, attaché appointments were final postings at the end of a middling officer’s career, a farewell present for an unexceptionable life. This was not particular to Argentina but the general rule; only those officers posted to the Soviet Union had the duty of acquiring intelligence and were fitted by ability and training to do so.

  Yet the collection of pertinent information in any reasonably open society, which Argentina was, is not difficult and need not conflict with diplomatic propriety. Readily available service magazines contain valuable snippets of information which, if collated, quickly yield an order of battle; so do local newspapers, from stories about local men in uniform and the social affairs of locally stationed units. Service histories are also fruitful sources; units tend to occupy the same barracks for decades. Armies and navies are relatively unchanging organisations and, to anyone who takes the trouble to form a picture of their organisation, rarely conceal secrets about their location, strength or function requiring specialised intelligence scrutiny to uncover.

  The archives of the Defence Intelligence Service in London ought, in short, to have contained copious and detailed reports on the Argentinian navy, army and air force in April 1982. They did not. The cupboard was almost bare. The officers of the task force have in consequence left a record of a shaming and hurried search in public libraries for such standard works as Jane’s Fighting Ships and the Institute for Strategic Studies’ Military Balance. Little was to be found. The Military Balance allots no more than two or three pages to a country the size of Argentina; Jane’s Fighting Ships is largely a photographic album. Moreover, as the most important of Argentina’s warships, the carrier Veinticinco de Mayo, was the ex-British HMS Venerable, venerable indeed since launched in 1943, and three of its largest destroyers were British-built or designed, Jane’s could tell little the British did not know already. The marines and soldiers scanning the Military Balance must have been even more disheartened. It lists the barest information of numbers of units and quantities of equipment and those in separate sections; no picture of units’ capabilities is discernible, therefore, while units are not named nor are their peacetime locations specified. That omission may have been seriously misleading in the frenzied days of early April 1982. The Argentinian army’s three best formations were the VI, VIII and XI Mountain Brigades (Peron, incidentally, was a mountain infantry officer), which, by reason of their training and familiarity with cold climate, seemed the obvious choice for Falklands duty. Because of the junta’s fear that Chile might profit from their commitment to the Falklands to strengthen its position in the disputed Cape Horn region, however, it had left the mountain brigades in their peacetime stations and decided to employ lower-grade formations drawn from the warm borders of Uruguay. GCHQ is known to have been intercepting the mountain brigades’ radio traffic, confirming that they were still located in the far south even as the invasion fleet put to sea. The task force officers, apparently dependent wholly on scantily published information about the location and capability of their potential opponents, did not even know that.

  The navy was quite as badly informed. Admiral Sandy Woodward, commanding the warships and transports aboard the old carrier Hermes, had a general picture of the risk he faced. It consisted of three elements: attack by land-based Argentinian aircraft, some of which were equipped to launch Exocet, the French-supplied sea-skimming missile (also aboard some of Woodward’s ships), which was difficult to distract by electronic countermeasure and deadly if it struck home; the Argentinian surface fleet, known from radio intercepts to be at sea and organised in two groups formed respectively around the Veinticinco de Mayo and the ex-American heavy cruiser Belgrano, apparently deployed to mount a pincer movement; and Argentinian submarines. The diesel-propelled submarines were known to be difficult to detect but, it was believed, could be held at bay by the British nuclear submarines in the area; the surface fleet had been warned not to enter an “exclusion zone” proclaimed around the islands by Britain and would be attacked if it did (it did not and was attacked anyhow, by HM Submarine Conqueror, and Belgrano sunk); it was hoped to overcome the Exocet threat by positioning destroyers and frigates as radar pickets between the islands and Argentina to provide early warning and to distract any missiles that got through by firing “chaff,” which simulated a larger target than the threatened ship.

  In practice the two Argentinian diesel submarines did not manage to attack the task force; the surface fleet, partially incapacitated by equipment failure aboard the Veinticinco de Mayo, turned back from the exclusion zone and returned to port after the sinking of the Belgrano. The Exocet aircraft, by contrast, inflicted heavy damage on the task force and, with others delivering more conventional ordnance, came close to achieving a naval victory that would have secured the Falklands and humiliated Britain for decades to come.

  The Argentinian air-launched Exocet, a modified version of the maritime model, known as the AM-39, was mounted on a Super Etendard aircraft, supplied by France, like the missile itself. The British believed correctly that Argentina had only five AM-39s, but wrongly that it had only one Super Etendard; the right number was five. As important as the aircraft–missile combination was the maritime reconnaissance aircraft that alerted the Super Etendards at their Rio Grande base to the presence of the task force within attack range. An antiquated American aeropl
ane, the SP-2H Neptune, it possessed the capability to linger beyond the horizon formed by the earth’s curvature but to keep the British under radar surveillance by bobbing up over it at regular intervals. The Super Etendards, when vectored towards the target, flew at sea level, beneath British radar, until close enough for the Exocet to strike. The pilots needed to gain altitude only once or twice, and then briefly, for their own radars to acquire their targets and automatically programme the missiles to depart in the correct direction. Once launched the Exocet maintained height just above sea level by an on-board altimeter and finally homed on the target ship down the beam of its own radar.

  Admiral Woodward and his staff had been wrongly informed that the Super Etendards’ range was only 425 miles, too short to reach the task force east of the islands. In fact, by refuelling from one of Argentina’s two KC-130 tankers, they could achieve launch positions. On 4 May, two days after the sinking of the Belgrano, two Super Etendards, flying from Rio Grande, approached the task force; their directing Neptune had been spotted by British radar but was thought to be searching for Belgrano survivors. Glasgow and Coventry, deployed as radar pickets west of the task force, caught echoes of the attacking aircraft as they rose above the horizon to correct their final approach paths. The British ships fired chaff and both Exocets, travelling only six feet above the sea, were deflected by their own course-corrections. Sheffield, twenty miles distant, was currently transmitting on its radio link to satellite, which prevented its hearing the warnings transmitted by its sister ships or operating its own radar. Its crew were therefore oblivious of impending danger and neither fired chaff nor manoeuvred. She was hit in the forward engine room by one of the Exocets which, though its warhead failed to explode, started a fire that eventually forced her abandonment, after heavy loss of life.

  The manifestation of the Exocet threat was to exert a decisive effect both on the management of the campaign and on the intelligence effort that underlay it. Admiral Woodward at once withdrew the task force far to the east of the islands, where it was to remain until the landings began on 21 May. At the same time the Northwood joint services headquarters, from which Operation Corporate, as the campaign was code-named, was directed, began a frenzied search for means to improve intelligence collection and to strike directly at the Argentinian air menace. Of signal intelligence there was no shortage; the Argentinian army, navy and air force generated a large volume of traffic, which was intercepted not only by GCHQ, through its intercept station at Two Boats on Ascension Island, ostensibly a branch of the Cable and Wireless Company, but by the NSA, the American intelligence community having decided to lend its British partners full support at this time of need, and by a New Zealand intercept station at Waiouru.1 The United States was also generous with satellite intelligence. The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) had three systems in operation that could together provide electronic and imaging data, White Cloud, KH-8 and KH-11; it could also offer data from occasional overflights by the SR-71 high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft.

  The limitation on the usefulness of overhead surveillance was, first, its intermittence—White Cloud made only two passes a day—but, second, that by the time it became available, the damage had been done. Overhead surveillance could have warned of the Argentinian invasion fleet setting sail, in time for the British government to have issued an ultimatum; once the fleet had arrived, it could supply little further information that was useful.

  It was, among other factors, for that reason that the Northwood headquarters decided, after the shock of the first Exocet attack, to move from passive to active counter-intelligence methods. Since traditional means of warning—including satellite intelligence—had failed to avert the threat, the Ministry of Defence would be ordered to mount operations that would eliminate the risk at source. Britain’s special forces would be committed to find and destroy the Exocet units in their home bases.

  Special forces are a distinctively British contribution to contemporary military capability. They have their origin in Winston Churchill’s directive of July 1940 to “set Europe ablaze,” the immediate outcome of which was the creation of the Special Operations Executive (SOE). Churchill’s belief, ill-conceived though it proved to be, was that covert attacks by irregular forces within the territory of German-occupied Europe could undermine Britain’s enemy from within. He envisaged the work being done by local patriots, armed and advised by British agents. Churchill’s scheme, though it did much to restore the national pride of Europe’s defeated peoples, did little to weaken Nazi power. His conception of forming irregular units had an indirect result, however, that was permanently to alter the way in which states use military force. Fertilised by the idea of SOE, the British army’s thinking in the middle period of the Second World War turned towards the creation of its own irregular forces, trained and equipped to operate inside enemy territory. The first such units, organised at Churchill’s direct order, became the commandos, raiding forces to be landed from the sea; they had their airborne equivalent in the Parachute Regiment, which was trained and equipped to descend from aircraft behind enemy lines.

  The SOE, commando and Parachute Regiment ideas coalesced to inspire free-thinking officers of the British forces in the Middle East during 1940–42 with a conception of their own: that instead of seeking to recruit civilians to fight as irregular soldiers, they should turn professionals into irregulars. The outcome was a coterie of unconventional units, the Long Range Desert Group, Popski’s Private Army, the Levant Schooner Squadron, the Special Air Service. When the war came to an end, most were disbanded, to survive only as romantic memories. The Special Air Service (SAS) found a different destiny. It had had a very successful war, attacking airfields in apparently quiet sectors of the desert and pinpoint targets in continental Europe; though stood down in 1946, it was revived—as the Malayan Scouts—to conduct covert operations against Communist terrorists in the Malayan jungle in 1948 and thereafter accumulated many other functions. By the 1980s it had become the instrument with which the army, often acting as the agent of the government, conducted covert operations against terrorists and organised criminals inside and outside the United Kingdom; it also acted as the irregular arm of the regular forces in conventional operations. Quite small—its intensely selective recruitment process limited its numbers to about 400—its effectiveness was out of all proportion to its numerical strength.

  One of the functions at which it excelled was undercover observation. SAS troopers learnt how to penetrate a landscape and disappear inside it, “lying up” in “hides” for days at a time, surviving in great discomfort to bring back eye-witness accounts of enemy locations and activities. Northwood headquarters decided at the outset of Operation Corporate that, because of the paucity of intelligence derived from signal interception and overhead surveillance, it would be essential to insert SAS parties to watch and report. Those missions would shortly be enlarged to include direct attack on exposed enemy positions identified as offering critical threats to the success of the expedition.

  One was decided upon at the outset. The Argentinian presence on South Georgia, though it lay 800 miles from the Falklands group, was seen as an affront; it was also soon perceived as presenting an opportunity. During the long preparatory period, as the task force moved south in stages during March and April, the government felt increasingly under pressure to allay public anxiety with news of success. The recapture of South Georgia would satisfy the requirement. A mixed party of Royal Marines and SAS was therefore embarked on HMS Antrim and detached to the objective. In extreme weather conditions and with inadequate equipment, the party eventually got ashore, having narrowly avoided disaster in the process, and completed their mission between 21 and 24 April. The Argentinian servicemen, who had replaced the scrap dealers, gave up easily. The marines and SAS suffered no casualties, though many had been close to death by mishap several times.

  Following the South Georgia foray, the SAS, with its Royal Marines equivalent, the Special Boat Squadron
(now Service), was committed directly to preliminary operations in the Falklands; at a later stage it also took a full operational part in the fighting and attempted a number of still-mysterious penetrations of the Argentinian mainland, intended to give early warning of Argentinian air strikes but also to intercept them by surprise attack.

  The first major special forces mission was launched against the Falklands group in early May. Six Special Boat Squadron (SBS) teams and seven four-man SAS patrols were landed by helicopter from the fleet, the SBS tasked particularly to choose landing beaches, the SAS to gather intelligence of Argentinian deployments. One SAS patrol lay up at Bluff Cove, eventually to be chosen as a subsidiary landing place on the west coast of East Falkland, the main island, one at Darwin, near San Carlos, the initial and main landing place, three overlooking Port Stanley, the island capital on East Falkland, three on the barely inhabited West Falkland. It was there that the SAS drew first blood. On 14 May forty-five men of D Squadron, who had been guided to their destination by a patrol inserted three days earlier, landed by helicopter to strike at the airstrip on Pebble Island where the Argentinian air force had based eleven Pucara ground-attack aircraft, guarded by a hundred men. The SAS troopers were accompanied by forward observers from 29 Commando Regiment Royal Artillery to direct the fire of frigates offshore. Under the bombardment the SAS laid demolition charges which destroyed all the enemy aircraft and withdrew without loss, leaving an Argentinian officer dead and two of his men wounded.