The Bletchley Park Codebreakers

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by Michael Smith


  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.

  The loss of the Gary Powers U-2 aircraft occurred in May 1960. A month later, an American RB-47 ferret aircraft engaged in maritime surveillance was lost over the Barents Sea, very close to Soviet airspace. The latter aircraft had been launched from RAF Brize Norton in Britain. American and Norwegian Sigint stations had tracked the aircraft, but disputed its course, plotting it thirty miles and twenty-three miles respectively from the Soviet coast. The aircraft crew had received orders not to go closer than fifty miles. The Soviet coastal limit was twelve miles and the margin for error was small. The twin shoot-downs reverberated in Britain in the early summer of 1960. There was a public furore and questions in the House of Commons. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was bitter when the Gary Powers shoot-down contributed to the collapse of the East–West summit in Paris, by which he had set much store. The Soviet Union exploited this to the full, threatening countries such as Britain and Japan, which hosted U-2 and RB-57D flights, with rocket attacks against the bases from which future flights were made over ‘Socialist’ countries. These threats were first made by the Soviet Minister of Defence, Malinovsky, on 30 May 1960 and were reiterated on 3 June to a packed press conference by Nikita Khrushchev himself. The Joint Intelligence Committee in London concluded that these threats were a bluff, nevertheless they induced a new climate of extreme caution on the part of Harold Macmillan.

  The impact of these events in the summer of 1960 was similar to the Crabb affair in 1956. They served to crush a British plan for increased airborne surveillance and Sigint gathering against the Soviet fleet that had been emerging in the weeks and months immediately prior to the loss of the Gary Powers U-2 aircraft. In early 1960, the First Sea Lord had held a meeting with the US Navy’s Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) and agreed to an ‘increased accent on surveillance’. By March 1961, British plans for increased airborne surveillance of the Soviet fleet were put ‘into cold storage indefi
nitely’. Other long-established British programmes were brought to a close. Macmillan now required the Joint Intelligence Committee to prepare a review of all aerial surveillance and submarine surveillance tasks so that he could assess provisionally the value of the intelligence gained from these sorts of activities. These developments contained an element of irony. In the 1950s, Britain and the United States had increasingly turned to technical means of examining the Soviet armed forces and Soviet scientific-technical developments, because human espionage inside the Soviet Union had proved increasingly hazardous and, with a few exceptions, notably unproductive. Forward technical surveillance was now proving to be less than risk-free.

  Somewhat safer alternatives certainly existed. In the early 1950s, the British had begun cultivating an alternative form of seaborne surveillance: the possibility of gathering intelligence on the Soviet fleet from the relative safety of British trawlers operating in northern waters. This was similar to the Soviet Sigint trawler that became ubiquitous by the 1960s. This sort of activity was less provocative, though not without risk. However, the real solution to intelligence collection without provocation lay with American satellites that came on stream in 1964, providing both imagery and Sigint collection. It is often thought that the first intelligence dividends from satellites took the form of imagery provided by the Corona operations in 1964. In fact, Sigint satellites began their activities in 1962 with a series of successful and highly secret US launches codenamed ‘Heavy Ferret’. By 1970 they had been replaced by the much more sophisticated Rhyolite satellite. The Rhyolite satellite was able to intercept the ‘spillage’ from microwave telephone links, even though these were in theory ‘line of sight’ communications. The resulting information was so plentiful that it required immediate downloading, largely to the NSA sites in Britain at Menwith Hill and in Australia at Pine Gap. Both the NSA and GCHQ struggled to cope with the vast output of the Rhyolite satellite programme which provided astonishing numbers of intercepts.

  Despite the advent of satellites, Britain retained a strong need for an airborne Sigint capability. In the 1960s much of this was provided by three specially converted Comet Mk 2 aircraft and four Sigint Canberras operated by 51 Squadron of RAF Signals Command. Their main purpose was to gather intelligence on Soviet air defences in support of the V-Bomber force, Britain’s main nuclear deterrent in the mid-1960s. They also carried our interception of telemetry from Soviet missile tests in the southern region of the USSR, a process that could not be conducted from the ground without missing crucial data from the first ninety seconds of the missile’s flight. However, by 1966 Whitehall had begun to realize that the Sigint Comets would be coming to the end of their operational life in 1972. A long lead time was required to allow ‘time for the fit of special role equipment’ to any replacement aircraft. As early as October 1966 a special committee, led by the Chair of the London Signals Intelligence Board and composed of key figures from GCHQ and MoD, had concluded that the way forward was a special Sigint variant of the new Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft. The Chiefs of Staff endorsed this decision on 8 November 1966 and the Nimrod Sigint aircraft programme began to roll forward.

  The special Sigint variant of the Nimrod was required partly because of alliance pressures. There was a limited choice of partners to share burdens with, for although the French had an airborne Elint capability, and were members of NATO, there was ‘no exchange’ with them. Other NATO partners, such as Norway and Turkey, offered ‘full co-operation’, but only used ground-based stations. At the core was the relationship with the United States. Air Vice-Marshal Harold Maguire, the Deputy Chief of Defence Staff for Intelligence, explained that, because of the significant British programme, they were the only NATO country receiving raw American Sigint. Accordingly, they were the only country with the capability ‘to make our own assessments in our area of interest and, where necessary, challenge US assessments’. Maguire stressed that this had been ‘critical’ when discussions on future NATO weapons system requirements had occurred. Moreover, the British airborne Sigint programme simply helped to pay Britain’s way in the broader politics of Anglo–American intelligence co-operation: ‘We know that our relatively small airborne Elint programme is appreciated by the Americans as a sharing of the collection task, particularly as their resources are stretched because of world-wide commitments. As with other British intelligence activities, such as JARIC (Joint Air Reconnaissance Intelligence Centre], it helps to repay in some degree the enormous quantity of material we receive from them.’

  Indeed, some officials worried that the US had come to expect British assistance in the airborne Sigint field in Europe ‘and a failure would threaten the massive help they give us in the whole Sigint area’.

  The cost of the Nimrod Sigint aircraft programme in the 1970s was considerable, initially estimated at some £14 million. This could not be accommodated within the already tight Sigint budget. On 26 July 1967 this issue was addressed by the committee that supervised the budget of the British intelligence community, the Permanent Secretaries’ Committee on the Intelligence Services (PSIS), led by the Cabinet Secretary, Burke Trend. He quickly concluded that the Nimrods were ‘unacceptable as part of the Sigint budget’. However, everyone was agreed that they were an essential purchase and increasingly an integral part of Britain’s nuclear strategic weapons provision. Accordingly, airborne Sigint would henceforth become a formal part of the RAF vote rather than the Secret Service vote. In reality this decision only confirmed what had been a growing practice. Because of the rising cost of Sigint, much of the required finance had been buried in other budgets, and airborne Sigint provision had already been handled in this way as part of what the RAF called ‘our overall contribution to the hidden Sigint costings’.

  The rapid growth of GCHQ’s interest in electronic intelligence and airborne Sigint in the 1950s and 1960s underlined the fact that Western Sigint was entering a new era in several respects. Comint, Elint and communications security (Comsec) were being joined by the equally technical fields of electronic warfare, radio counter-measures and radio deception. Alongside this there were also very elaborate and powerful efforts in the area of radio propaganda broadcasting and also jamming. The airwaves were becoming increasingly crowded and so in 1953–4, Lord Strang, previously the Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign Office, led a high-level investigation into the future higher direction of radio in war. GCHQ ‘were concerned that they should know the details of any radio deception plans’ developed by the services. The London Signals Intelligence Board (LSIB) offered Strang a detailed report on the dangers of different branches of the radio war coming into conflict with one another. They explained that ‘jamming of an enemy air force signals on one part of the front might prevent the interception of, say, enemy police force cipher messages from quite a different part of the front; study of these might have made it possible to solve, some months later, the cypher messages of submarines operating throughout the world’. John Sinclair, Chair of the LSIB, urged the necessity of ‘rapid, forceful and expert co-ordination of the different aspects of the radio war’. Current proposals would not suffice to provide the control during ‘the critical opening phases of a war … a grave weakness, which ought to be remedied’, but the exact solution was not yet clear. Instead, the 1950s and 1960s saw an increasing proliferation of Cabinet committees and sub-committees. Throughout this period GCHQ itself continued to be managed by the LSIB rather than the Joint Intelligence Committee. Each spring, GCHQ brought forward an annual report ‘on measures to improve Sigint’ for LSIB approval. The LSIB also prepared for the British Chiefs of Staff a more general annual report on the state of British Sigint. Meanwhile the role of the Joint Intelligence Committee was to provide GCHQ with a broad overall list of targets on an annual basis. There were inevitable tussles between these various committees, with the Joint Intelligence Committee conscious that some of its broader reviews of British intelligence effectiveness ‘encroached on the preserves of LSIB’.


  During the 1950s, most high-grade ciphers, for example one-time pads, used by the major powers, remained effectively impossible to break by the sweat of direct cryptanalysis, when employed correctly. As a result, increasing efforts were made to tap communications before they were enciphered. The era of large-scale bugging had arrived, accelerated by the development of transistors. Soviet efforts were revealed by the accidental location of a microphone in the office of the British naval attaché in Britain’s Moscow Embassy in July 1950. The British air attaché, who was testing a radio receiver, heard the voice of his colleague being broadcast loud and clear from another part of the building. An active search ensued but, alarmingly, the Soviets succeeded in removing the device before it could be found. In 1952 more bugs were found in the office of the American Ambassador, George Kennan, using ‘a special British detector’. In 1956, conference rooms in the US European Command Building were found to be seriously compromised by listening devices. Britain had not been slow to retaliate and in October 1952 Churchill ordered British defence scientists to begin a vigorous programme of developing British bugs for offensive use against the Soviets. By the late 1950s this was a busy field of activity.

  Bugging, direct tapping of landlines and the breaking of the communications traffic of minor states ensured a stream of Sigint was routinely available to Whitehall. Little of this can be seen in the archives today due to the nature of security procedures attending it. Sigint material and ordinary working files never mixed. Before gaining access to Sigint, Foreign Office officials were required to attend a day course on Sigint security. Foreign Office staff could then go on the circulation list for BJs – Sigint material still being circulated in the same blue jacketed files as they were before the war. This material was never to be referred to in ordinary Foreign Office paperwork and always remained in the distinctive blue jackets. BJs were circulated by special messenger, originating in the Permanent Under-Secretary’s Department and always returned there after use. There, in a small office in this Department, sat the Communications Security Officer, the work-a-day liaison with GCHQ. More humble files dealing with policy and correspondence lived in the Foreign Office registry. This hermetic separation has ensured the near invisibility of Sigint to postwar diplomatic historians.

 

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