Sigint assisted this clandestine conflict directly and decisively. Most importantly, it was used in a revolutionary new way in conjunction with special forces. In April 1964 the British commander in Borneo, General Walter Walker, was given permission to begin highly secret ‘Claret’ operations. These were counter-infiltrations across the border into the Indonesian territory of Kalimantan in southern Borneo, designed to take the war to the enemy. British forces were initially given permission to cross over the thousand-mile-long border into Kalimantan to a distance of three thousand yards. By 1965 this had been extended to twenty thousand yards.68 Locating the enemy was the main challenge, and tactical sigint was used to provide accurate direction-finding on the elusive Indonesian jungle camps. Sigint operators would listen in to the Indonesian traffic to see if the Claret patrols had been picked up. On one occasion the operators listened in to the Indonesians as they prepared to ambush a Claret patrol, and were able to warn the intended victims, who then scooted back over the border. Tim Hardy, a Special Branch officer, recalls that the local British sigint teams had no difficulty intercepting Indonesian field pack radios, which were of Second World War vintage. Moreover, they used old-fashioned crystals to set the frequency, and ‘in defiance of all military rules, these never changed’. As a result Indonesian field communications were an open book, and sigint was ‘locking onto targets with pinpoint accuracy’. Hardy met SAS patrols coming back over the border accompanied by local Iban native trackers who carried ‘gory trophy heads’.69
From February 1965 onwards the British troops engaged in little other than Claret special operations. Brigadier Bill Cheyne, the Director of Operations in Borneo, declared that ‘CLARET operations so weakened the Indonesian resolve to fight that only their very best troops ventured into Sarawak latterly.’ The number of incursions fell so dramatically by late 1965 – they became ‘as rare as snakebite’ – that it was a major event when one occurred. Cheyne considered the use of tactical sigint vital, and for security reasons even the special forces were not told of this secretive source. Instead, there were stories of human agent operations and ‘other sources of intelligence to shelter behind’.70 The top brass knew about it though, and Walter Walker, the British Commander in Chief, constantly praised the ability of sigint to pinpoint the enemy: ‘Nine times out of ten we knew his every move and we brought him to battle long before he had reached a point from which he could mortar a village, let alone a town.’71
Britain had developed an extensive sigint station in Singapore, run jointly with Australia. However, much of the sigint effort during the Confrontation was undertaken locally by 651 Signals Troop, staffed by personnel on special detachment from 13 Signals Regiment, the main British Army sigint unit in Germany. They worked closely with 693 Signals Troop from Royal Australian Signals. Mixed units moved freely between bases at Singapore, Labuan and Kuching. Signals intelligence functioned at several levels. The main support to Claret operations came from local radio direction-finding and voice interception. Telephone tapping on the Indonesian side of the border was also very productive. Meanwhile, higher-level Indonesian diplomatic traffic was also being read in Singapore and at GCHQ at Cheltenham.72 The result was ‘high-grade intelligence that contributed significantly to the successful outcome of the conflict’.73 Because of Australian worries about the disputed territory of West Irian, Indonesia remained Australia’s main signals intelligence priority through the 1960s, even higher than Vietnam.74
By March 1965 the British government was asking how long the Confrontation would last. The Joint Intelligence Committee Far East, which included Brian Tovey from GCHQ, did its best to answer this. Sigint was a helpful indicator, since it showed that Sukarno was deploying large-scale units of the Indonesian Army’s strategic reserve to Kalimantan, and further units seemed to be moving to Sumatra. All this suggested that Sukarno was not yet finished. Negotiations were getting nowhere, and the only serious rebellion inside Indonesia, on the island of Celebes, had suffered a setback. Sukarno was known to be ill, and optimistic officials hoped his death might be followed by an internal struggle between the Army and the Indonesian Communist Party. The intelligence from SIS was that ‘Sukarno may die at any time. Without an operation he is unlikely to last more than a year.’ In fact the Indonesian Premier seemed to be in alarmingly rude health, and the British Ambassador in Jakarta was sceptical about ‘secret sources’ on this subject.75 Although there had been an abortive coup in September 1965, Sukarno was still clinging on, and by the end of the year the British Chiefs of Staff were considering serious military escalation, including much deeper Claret operations and commando raids into Sumatra.76 The British effort now developed a significant naval component, with no less than a third of the entire British fleet deployed off Sumatra, often operating openly in Indonesian waters. Once again, signals intercepts were a crucial element in the naval campaign.77
Konfrontasi ended after Sukarno was replaced by General Suharto in 1966. Cheyne argued that this change was partly prompted by British military successes: ‘Sukarno would not have been deposed except for his military failures in Borneo.’ He added that once Sukarno had been overthrown, the Claret operations enabled Malaysia to negotiate from strength. Overall, he concluded, it was ‘a brilliantly successful story’.78
For much of this period a stream of high-grade diplomatic sigint from Indonesia passed across the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s desk, providing an accurate barometer of the thinking in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta.79 For Denis Healey, Britain’s Secretary for Defence, it was especially satisfying. On 30 May 1965 he had a conversation with the American Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, and explained that Britain could not disengage from its commitments east of Suez until the Confrontation came to an end. McNamara had replied gloomily, ‘It will not end.’ But he was wrong.80
Although the Indonesians did not rumble the secret of sigint, they knew something was badly wrong. Senior officers believed that the British had some sort of special radar equipment that could track their patrols, and this was not a bad guess.81 The success of sigint in Borneo offered a longer-term legacy. The British and Australians had developed a new kind of sigint that interfaced directly with special forces in real time. In 1966, when Australia sent a Task Force to Vietnam, this was accompanied by a similar signals intelligence unit.82 The same tactics were deployed by Britain in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. This approach has since become more commonplace, with the Americans taking it to a new level with the elite Intelligence Support Activity created in the 1980s, which was mostly deployed against terrorists. Britain’s new Special Reconnaissance Regiment, formed in 2004, continues the tradition with its units of ‘suitcase men’ who undertake short-range sigint, fully integrated with tactical operations. Few remember that the SAS–sigint partnership in the jungles of Borneo was its first proving ground.83
9
Blake, Bugs and the Berlin Tunnel
…you cannot speak in the residences, town or country, put at our disposal. Every room is ‘wired’. You cannot speak in a car, or train, or even outside the house if it be a small compound or garden. There is a danger of the apparatus picking up what you say.
Harold Macmillan, diary of his official visit to Moscow,
February–March 19591
Signals intelligence was delivering effective support to British policy in the Third World during the 1950s and 1960s. The new realm of elint was busy measuring radars and rockets around the perimeter of the Soviet Union. However, GCHQ had stalled badly against high-grade Soviet cyphers, the most prestigious target. William Weisband’s treachery in the 1940s had inflicted severe damage on almost all available streams of Soviet communication. In 1952 GCHQ had been given a substantial tranche of extra money to accelerate its work. Much of this had been thrown at the ‘Russian problem’ in the hope of returning to the glory days of Ultra, but the work went slowly. The code-breakers were left grubbing their way through low-grade Soviet administrative systems in the hope of pic
king up fragments of useful information, or else reading Soviet intentions reflected in the traffic of other countries that Moscow was conversing with. Alternative routes to sigint on the Soviet Union were badly needed.
This was a direct spur for the now famous tunnel operations under Vienna and Berlin launched by Britain’s SIS in partnership with the CIA. The CIA’s own secret history of the Berlin tunnel operation makes it clear that these schemes were a direct response to the calamitous loss of sigint on Black Friday. ‘As early as 1948,’ it noted, ‘Intelligence Officers became interested in the benefits to be derived from tapping Soviet and Satellite landlines on a scale not previously considered necessary. The loss of certain sources during this period created gaps in our intelligence coverage which were particularly unfortunate during this period of Cold War escalation.’ By tapping into telephone lines, the West hoped to pick up sensitive voice traffic that the Soviets were not troubling to encrypt, because unlike messages sent by radio transmitter, underground landlines were thought to be inaccessible and therefore secure.2
The idea of tapping phone lines in Vienna and Berlin mirrored existing activities by the KGB. As early as October 1946, the British Control Commission in Germany had reviewed the twenty-two ‘secrephones’ or scrambler phones installed in Berlin for communication with the British Zone of Germany, and had found them wanting. The encypherment provided by the scrambler was weak, and with the telephone lines passing through the Soviet Zone, they were presumed to be tapped. Even within the British Zone, the military had been anxious about allowing Germans who worked in telephone exchanges to have access to military telephone directories, since this would give them a ‘comprehensive guide to the most profitable extensions on which to listen in’. Only specially screened Germans were put to work in the telephone exchanges.3
Poor telephone security had the potential to blow high-grade British cyphers. For example, it had long been known that the direct telephone line between the British element of the Allied Commission for Austria and London was monitored by the Soviets, and in early February 1948 British intelligence had discovered that they were ‘strengthening their interception arrangements’. The problem was that although officials in the British headquarters in Vienna were given continual security warnings, the officials they were talking to in London were less diligent. Frequently, telephone conversations were about agreeing the final text of a document, which was then sent by telegram in a high-grade cypher. For the Soviet code-breakers this was a gift, since they now had both the encyphered text and the clear text.4 By 4 August 1949, John Bruce Lockhart, the head of SIS in Germany, was confident that the Soviets had ‘100% coverage of the telephone lines between Berlin and the Western Zones’.5
Predictably, SIS had already launched its own offensive activities. The first operation took place in Austria, which like Germany was under four-power occupation. In late 1948 an SIS officer at the Vienna station, Peter Lunn, happened to notice that the main telephone cables running under the British sector went out towards a major headquarters in the Soviet Zone. A twenty-foot tunnel code-named ‘Conflict’ was soon dug from a British police post to the underground cable, and an engineer was brought in from the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill to attach a tapping device. SIS was reluctant to tell the Foreign Office what it was doing, and so only informed the local Foreign Office Head of Mission, Harold Caccia. Conveniently, Caccia had recently been Chairman of the JIC, and so was favourably disposed. ‘Conflict’ was so successful that two other tunnels were dug, code-named ‘Sugar’ and ‘Lord’. One reached out from the basement of a British-run jewellery store, the other from a villa in the suburbs of Vienna occupied by a British Army officer and his wife.6
The volume of illicit recordings and intercepts from these three tunnels was so great that SIS’s Section N, which handled telephone transcripts from routine taps on foreign embassy telephones, was overwhelmed. SIS had to set up an entirely new section called ‘Section Y’ at 2 Carlton Gardens, just off Pall Mall, staffed partly by former East European exiles and with units for transcription, translation and analysis.7 SIS was now desperate for Russian linguists, and brought together a motley crew. Some were retired British officers, going back as far as the Boer War. There were many émigré Poles, including a dashing cavalry officer with an eyepatch, and plenty of White Russians. They were joined by recent trainees in Russian, but the latter struggled with the language of the intercepts, which was not only very colloquial, but filled with obscenities. The lexicon that was eventually produced to assist the newcomers was classified ‘Top Secret Obscene’.8
In 1953 Peter Lunn was chosen to head the vast SIS station in Berlin, housed in the splendid Olympic Stadium. Unsurprisingly, he soon decided to repeat his Viennese activities. This time full Foreign Office clearance was easy to obtain because of the flow of wonderful material already coming from Vienna. In contrast to Vienna, the Americans were invited in at the outset of the Berlin operation. This was partly because of a desire to share costs, but also because of the existence of an ideal building close to the Soviet telephone cables, located in the American sector.9 The whole operation was a tightly compartmentalised Anglo–American affair. Few officers in the huge CIA or SIS stations in Berlin knew of the tunnel’s existence, although back in London a CIA officer was made deputy head of Section Y, which specifically looked after the tunnel.10 Berlin was a superb place to collect Soviet comint. Its phone lines carried communications not only to Moscow, but also Warsaw and Bucharest. Although the operation was complex, the underlying hope was that once in place, it might go on undisturbed for a long time.
SIS agents in the East Berlin Post Office provided maps of the locations of the cables, and in February 1954 digging began in earnest. Vitally important was the installation of the taps themselves, which consisted of heavy metal clips. This involved freezing the lines to prevent the interference being detected in the East, a ticklish phase that was again carried out by a special Dollis Hill Post Office research team. Finally, at the end of February 1955, the Berlin tunnel was operational. Elaborate anti-humidity barriers had to be erected to prevent damp affecting the electronics. The CIA maintained a small local unit for on-the-spot monitoring of circuits for the protection of the project and also to provide items of ‘hot’ intelligence for Berlin.11
The overall ‘take’ from the Berlin tunnel was vast, and far exceeded the capacity of any local monitoring. Some twenty-eight telegraphic circuits and 121 voice circuits were being monitored at any one time. Voice traffic was recorded on fifty thousand reels of magnetic tape, amounting to twenty-five tons of material. At the peak of operation the voice processing centre at Chester Terrace, overlooking Regent’s Park in London, employed 317 people, and eventually 368,000 conversations were transcribed. The teletype processing centre employed a further 350 people. For each day of the tunnel’s operation the output was four thousand feet of teletype messages. Western intelligence services considered it to be a key source of early warning of attack. There was excellent material on Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956, and tantalising information about Soviet efforts to process uranium for their nuclear programme.12 Several hundred officers of the KGB and of their sister service, the GRU or Soviet military intelligence, were also identified. The tunnel was exposed by the Soviets on 21 April 1956, little more than a year after its activation, as a result of the treachery of George Blake, an SIS officer working for the Soviets. Nevertheless, the processing of the vast haul of intelligence material the West had already captured went on until 30 September 1958.13
These gloomy subterranean activities shine a surprisingly bright light on the intelligence services of both East and West. In particular they illuminate a jealous rivalry. Some CIA officers have suggested that the British initially decided not to tell the Americans about their early tunnel operation in Vienna, and that SIS only came clean when the Americans arrived at the idea independently, forcing the British to reveal their own solo operation. Later, it has been claimed,
the Americans failed to admit to the British that they could read certain types of the traffic taken from Berlin, using a technique called ‘Tempest’, which allowed them to hear the faint echoes of plain text as messages were tapped out on keyboards – although this story is unverified. What is quite clear is that while data was freely shared, its sheer volume sometimes defeated analysis. The quantity of traffic was immense. Overall, forty thousand hours of telephone conversations were recorded, and six million hours of teletype traffic were taken. Entire buildings full of trans lators battled to stay ahead of the wave, but inevitably fell behind.14 Astoundingly, this was partly because the CIA decided it would rather fall behind than work with its main rival, NSA. The CIA did not tell NSA about the Berlin tunnel. Indeed, it was running an entire rival sigint unit called ‘Staff D’ in parallel with its compatriots at Fort Meade, led by a code-breaker they had poached called Frank Rowlett.15 NSA’s Director, General Ralph Canine, first found out about the Berlin tunnel by reading of its exposure by the Soviets on the front page of the New York Times in late April 1956. He literally shouted with anger when he realised the extent of the CIA intrusion into what he considered to be NSA turf. The two chiefs, Allen Dulles and Canine, nurtured an intense personal dislike, and the bitterness between NSA and the CIA lasted for years.16 Even in the 1970s the CIA still had numerous rival intercept operations spread around the world.17
Another person who was angered when the tunnel hit the headlines in April 1956 was the Berlin SIS Chief, Peter Lunn. The Western press hailed the tunnel as a brilliant intelligence success, and heaped praise on the CIA. Neither the Soviets nor the American newspapers mentioned the British, despite the fact that the tunnel was packed with their equipment. This was too much for Lunn, who assembled the whole staff of the Berlin SIS station and recounted the story from beginning to end.18 Everybody seemed to love the so-called ‘espionage tunnel’. In East Berlin, British officials reported, it had been ‘turned into a major tourist attraction and scarcely a day passes without a delegation of one sort or another being conducted through it’.19 In private, they noted, the Soviets admired the craftsmanship and the quality of the equipment.20
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