The first reference to the Guild of Painters was in 1283 as artisans who applied colour to solid materials, such as stone. Amalgamated with the Stainers, who applied colour to woven materials such as canvas, the Company received several Royal Charters beginning with Elizabeth I in 1589 and most recently Elizabeth II in 1981. It has become involved with Fine Art whilst still carrying out decorative work to buildings and ceremonial flags and banners. Winners of the annual TA military and intelligence skills in the Master’s Competition are awarded a silver rose bowl and known as the Master’s Company for the next twelve months. The Company annually presents a piece of silver to a member of the Corps, who has shown enterprise not directly associated with intelligence and security but which adds esteem to public relations to the Corps. On all formal occasions, an engraved sword presented to the Company in 2001 by Lieutenant General Sir John Kiszely MC, the Colonel Commandant, is placed in front of the Master.
The decision of the Adjutant-General not to support a regular Intelligence Corps began to unravel with tension in Europe, the Berlin Blockade, and the first stirrings of the Malayan Emergency. In June 1948 the Standing Committee on Army Post-War Problems accepted that ‘there was a need for a permanent Intelligence Corps in the Regular Army’ but that its strength would be confined to two Quartermasters, 161 officers holding short service commissions and 270 other ranks, but officers were not permitted to attend Staff College and therefore the Corps seniority ceiling was likely to be Major. Intelligence staff appointments would continue to be filled by officers on two year postings. In effect, intelligence was not seen as a career path and therefore it remained an unattractive prospect, a lean approach that meant that the Army was, not infrequently, committed to operations lacking adequate intelligence, such as Korea, Cyprus, Suez, the Falklands and Northern Ireland.
Oudenarde Barracks, which now forms part of the Aldershot Military Museum, proved unsuitable and, in 1948, HQ Intelligence Corps and Depot moved to a sprawling First World War camp of single storey brick and Nissan huts linked by a network of paths on gently sloping grounds south of Maresfield, near Uckfield, Sussex. Bounded by the A272 to the west, there was a large sports field but no drill square, so parades were usually held on the MT Park. Music for ceremonials was relayed on loudspeakers. Other ranks accommodation blocks focused on eight-man rooms, each with a coke-burning stove fed from a bin holding sufficient fuel for a week. Toilets, washrooms and bathrooms were in a separate block. For National Servicemen trained in smart Depots, the contrast with Maresfield was stark. Corporal Bill Rolfe transferring from the Royal Army Service Corps in 1948 found that ‘the Other Ranks Mess was dark and dismal’ and the ‘tops of two cupboards in the eight-man rooms were precarious ironing boards’. One young officer remembers the evil smell of the plate-washing grease traps outside the Cookhouse. The impact of the Adjutant General’s decision meant that, by 1949, few of the Permanent Staff officers and other ranks at Maresfield were badged Intelligence Corps, indeed, Officer Cadet Anthony Clayton can only remember two Intelligence Corps officers, both National Service, being involved with military training. Trade training had not changed markedly from Mytchett. Soldiers awaiting postings undertook a variety of tasks that included clerical duties at the Directorate of Military Intelligence at the War Office. The HQ and Depot were joined by the School of Military Intelligence, which included the FS Wing, an Interrogation block in the Joint Services School of Psychological Wing and the ‘Ling Wing’ which contained the Study Wing. Among those who trained at Maresfield were Intelligence Corps attending intensive Russian courses at the Joint Services School for Linguists at RAF Crail in Fife, and Cambridge and London Universities, christened by the Soviets to be the ‘Spy School’. Those who passed translated Soviet communications in cold, cramped ‘Gin Palace’ box-bodied vehicles near the German Border, translated Russian newspapers and acted as interpreters. Most were a cross-section of talented and politically aware young men fitting the requirements of the 1922 Manual of Military Intelligence, including the playwrights Alan Bennett and Dennis Potter, who dramatized his experiences as an analyst at the MI3 at the War Office in his play Lipstick on Your Collar, and Sir Edward Georges, a future governor of the Bank of England. In order to engender an esprit de corps, the first Corps Day held on 19 July 1949 at Maresfield was attended by Major General A.C. Shortt CB OBE, the Director of Military Intelligence designate.
Austria
In Austria, the Soviet Union dropped its support for Yugoslavian claims to Carinthia in 1948, which gave the Occupying Powers room to give Austria permission to hold a general election and then withdraw. In preparation, the FSOs were instructed to send the Allied Military Government samples of posters, in particular those produced by the Communist Party. Sergeant Bob Steers commanded the 68 FSS Spital detachment from a requisitioned traditional Austrian house on the outskirts of the town in picturesque countryside, not far from a lake and Mallnitz ski resort. It happened that Steers used the same gasthof as the local communist candidate and readily obtained examples of posters, hand-outs, lecture and speech notes and meeting schedules. The elections saw Renner elected as President and Austria adopting democracy and, much to the discomfort of Moscow, neutrality.
When the MI6 Head of Station, Vienna learnt from an Austrian official that cables linking the Red Army to Soviet forces in Prague, Budapest, Sofia and Bucharest ran through the British and French sectors, an opportunity was presented to tap them in Operation Conflict. Captain John Ham-Longman, then commanding 291 FSS, was instructed to run the operation. A terrace of single storey warehouses opposite Aspang railway station were requisitioned, ostensibly for use by the Railway Transport Officer, and then six Royal Engineers commanded by an officer dug a tunnel to the telephone cable passing through a cellar into which the tap was inserted. The sandy soil was deposited in the back garden of the house occupied by 20 FSS. When they finished, the sappers were sent to the desirable posting of Singapore to reduce the possibility of compromise. The cellar was divided into four compartments demarcated by layers of packing cases, which helped to deaden noise. The entrance to the listening post was through a strong door to a space that was defended by three soldiers armed with Sten guns. An inner door led to a rest area and the tap behind yet another door. When the technicians arriving from London by train with the interception equipment inadvertently alighted at a station in the Soviet sector, their phone call to 291 FSS saw Staff Sergeant Bob Steer and Sergeant Stan Enright rushing to extract them from a group of curious Soviet soldiers. The technicians inserted the tap and set up voice recordings that were transferred to wax cylinders. For the next two years, 291 FSS provided six men working three hours on duty and three off duty to monitor the intercepts and take the cylinders to HQ Intelligence Organisation (Austria) every day for interpretation. During the weekend, because traffic decreased, the roster was two hours and fours hours off duty. Smoking was then acceptable and since extractor fans were a rarity, the thick fug created in the cellar from Woodbines and Players led to the operation being known as ‘Smokey Joe’s’. The intercept was lifted in June 1951 when the Soviets re-routed their military telephone calls; nevertheless, a substantial quantity of intelligence was collected during the three years of Operation Conflict. It is a little known outstanding success that outshone a similar attempt in Berlin that was compromised by the spy George Blake.
When political power was transferred to the Austrians in early 1950, the Vienna Field Security sections were disbanded and counter-intelligence and protective security handed over to detachments reporting to the Field Security headquarters in Carinthia and Styria. The restoration of Austrian sovereignty in 1955 led to the withdrawal of 40,000 Soviet troops and the few remaining Western troops, but there was still intelligence to collect. Officials of the Austrian State Railways had been reporting Soviet troop movements to 291 FSS since the spring of 1951. The Section was attending a British Embassy function when an official reported increased Soviet rail activity. The section immediately went to
Aspang railway station and counted the Soviet troop trains heading east, verified equipment by lifting tarpaulins on flatbed wagons and collected serial numbers from vehicles that helped identify units.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The National Service Years The 1950s
A fight cannot be carried on without intelligence
George Grivas
The Malayan Emergency
As the British were preparing to leave Palestine in 1947, unrest broke out in Malaya. London was keen to give the colonies independence but when the Malayan states amalgamated to form a federated state in 1948, Chin Peng, who had been awarded the Order of the British Empire for his wartime resistance, renewed his campaign to replace the British colonial government with a communist regime. In the first of a series of major revolutionary surges that affected the Far East for the next twenty-seven years, he reformed his Malayan Peoples Anti-Japanese Army as the Malay Races Liberation Army and adopted the Maoist principle that small forces can conquer using a three phase strategy of:
• Creating ‘liberated areas’ by forcing rural police and colonial authorities to abandon government.
• Establishing guerrilla bases in these ‘liberated areas’ and training recruits.
• Crippling the economy with sabotage and then facing the British on the battlefield.
But the colonial authorities were reluctant to accept that an organization that had fought against the Japanese was taking up arms against its liberators. The Japanese linguist Captain Navin was travelling by train to Singapore to catch the troopship to Great Britain to be demobilized when he met a friend who had been working in HQ Malaya Command in Kuala Lumpur as an intelligence officer, also on his way home – for daring to predict in Intelligence Summaries that the Malayan Communist Party was about to act. That night the train came to a screeching halt when guerrillas blew up the railway in an early act of the eleven years Malayan Emergency. The communist offensive began in April with the murders of several estates’ foremen and then, when three expatriate managers were killed in mid-June in the northern state of Perak, a State of Emergency was declared in which military aid through the 17th Gurkha Infantry Division to the civil power was reinforced by mainly National Servicemen sent from Great Britain. Lieutenant General Sir Harold Briggs, who was appointed Director of Operations during the year, reduced Chinese support to the Communist Terrorists, usually known as CTs, by resettling squatters into about 500 defended villages and regulated inter-agency co-ordination by forming War Executive Committees at all levels
Little is known about Intelligence Corps activities in this period because most Field Security sections were integrated with Special Branch and those attached to military units were often used in operational intelligence support. In Johore Bahru 1 FSS, supporting 48 Gurkha Brigade in Pahang in the eastern foothills of the Cameron Highlands in March 1949, had NCOs attached to battalion intelligence sections. Chin Peng had his headquarters in the state. Meanwhile, 355 FSS supported HQ Malaya Command with fingerprinting, photographing and processing locally employed civilians’ applications and investigating security breaches. Throughout the Emergency, 103 Army Photographic Interpretation Section produced large annotated mosaics that proved vital for planning ambushes, and cordon and search operations. On patrol, 9in x 9in air photographs often complemented maps. Captured documents were exploited. During the year, the Singapore Special FSS captured five Communist Terrorists and weapons and subversive documents in a raid. A sergeant investigating breaches of security leaks about an operation at Mentakab discovered that a commanding officer was not only displaying a large map in his office showing deployments and plans, he was also allowing access by local officials and civilians, and twenty-five local contractors had been informed about the operation.
After High Commissioner Sir Henry Gurney was assassinated in 1951, General Sir Gerald Templer was appointed High Commissioner and Director of Operations in February 1952. Applying the psychological operations principle of ‘hearts and minds’ and national independence as the goals and developing post-1945 counter-insurgency techniques which soon became familiar, he created an integrated civil and military platform and adopted a strong counter-insurgency warfare strategy that earned him the nickname the ‘Tiger of Malaya’. The Federal battalions were strengthened, the Home Guard and the police were reinforced by Commonwealth units, and the Communist Terrorists were confined largely to the jungle, which enabled him to develop urban and rural ‘white areas’ free of terrorist activity that were rewarded with relaxed food supply and travel restrictions. He refined the intelligence structure and ensured that the State War Executive was supported by pyramids of local intelligence and security networks reporting to the Head of Intelligence. Increased confidence was enhanced by the Box 50 scheme in which terrorist activity could be reported anonymously.
In 1952, 355 FSS in Kuala Lumpur was made responsible for the whole of Malaya and spread detachments to Ipoh, Taiping, Penang, Seremban, Port Dickson, Kluang and Johore Bahru. The Corps lost its only killed in action during the Emergency when Lieutenant Peter Hunt, serving with HQ North Malaya Sub-District, was killed in an ambush on 29 April. Three others were non-battle casualties. When two corporals supporting the Garrison Headquarters and battalion in Pahang learnt that they were on a communist ‘hit’ list, they exchanged their pistols for Bren guns and their Land Rover for a Daimler Scout Car. In 1953, 355 FSS formed the Special Military Intelligence Unit specifically to work with Special Branch through Military Intelligence Officers, who were selected from any arm or service of the Army and tasked to work with the police to share and collate intelligence that could affect military operations. The following year, HQ Field Security Wing (Malaya) took over from 355 FSS. Commanded by a major and supported by a British and a Malay Army warrant officer running the Operations and Pass Issue Office, its 100 military and civilian staff were spread across Malaya in eleven detachments. By 1954, the Communist Terrorists were under sustained pressure as the net closed in on Chin Peng, to the extent that, by the end of the year, he had fled into Thailand. With independence a certainty, negotiations to end the Emergency failed, nevertheless, operations were mainly mopping up. As the intensity of internal security operations decreased the following year, the Field Security Wing, now commanded by Major L.G. Masterson, joined the 17th Gurkha Infantry Division in Seremban and reformed as 355 FSS divided into eight detachments. Meanwhile, 103 Army Photographic Interpretation Section became involved in interpreting for surveys of civil projects, such as road building and water-pipe laying. When Malaya gained independence in 1957, the British essentially returned to barracks.
Korea
At the same time as the Malayan Emergency escalated, another communist surge was emerging in the Far East. In 1945 the United Nations (UN) imposed a trusteeship that Korea, a wartime ally of Japan, would be divided into the area north of the 38th Parallel administered by Moscow while Washington governed the remainder but, within three years, two separate governments with different ideologies emerged.
In June 1950, when several North Korean divisions invaded the south in an expansionist strategy, on 25 June President Truman instructed US forces in Korea and Japan to assist the South Koreans, but they were unable to stem the offensive and were driven to the southern port of Pusan. After General MacArthur, as the senior UN military representative in the region, had appealed for reinforcements, 27 Infantry Brigade Group was despatched from 40th Division in Hong Kong. In September UN forces landing at Inchon linked up with the breakout from Pusan and drove the North Koreans north across the 38th Parallel and then escalated hostilities by pursuing them to the River Yalu on the Chinese border. The arrival of Australians, New Zealanders and Indians saw the Brigade renamed as 27 Commonwealth Brigade.
In early November, 29 Infantry Brigade Group joined 27 Brigade from Great Britain. It was supported by 904 (Mobile) FSS commanded by Captain D.W. Saunders MBE to provide counter-intelligence and protective security support. Leaving half the section at Pusan, Sau
nders moved up to Pyongyang with the British element but was caught up in the crisis when HQ Far East Command ignored prisoner of war intelligence that 300,000 Chinese Communist forces were about to attack. As winter cloaked the bleak hills, the UN forces recoiled under Chinese human wave tactics. When 29 Brigade briefly held the Chinese at the Imjin River in April 1951, 904 FSS was involved in the fighting. The arrival of 25 Canadian Infantry Brigade with its 1 (Canadian) FSS at Pusan saw the three brigades grouped into the 1st Commonwealth Division in July. The arrival of the Canadians was welcomed by the other half of 904 FSS but when allegations emerged that several NCOs from 904 FSS were dealing in the black market, the Canadians took over its responsibilities and 904 FSS was relegated to low level Field Security security functions. This included becoming the largest employer of local labour, behind the Royal Engineers; managing some civil affairs and two companies of the UN Security Guards, a para-military organization of former servicemen and police and ex-North Koreans prisoners established to prevent saboteurs and agents infiltrating into the prohibited border zone ten miles from the front line. It also provided guards at military installations. Sergeant Edward Hall disappeared under mysterious circumstances while conducting an investigation in a village, possibly captured and murdered by North Korean agents.
Sharing the Secret Page 30