In 1971, London was also keeping secrets from the White House. A member of the Soviet trade mission in London, the thirty-four-year-old Oleg Lyalin, had been recruited as an agent by MI5 in the spring of 1971, and had then defected to Britain. In reality, Lyalin had been an officer in the sabotage section of the KGB. While serving in London he had been involved in developing the most unpleasant operations, including assassinations, that were to be initiated against British government officials on the eve of any future conflict with the West.16 Whitehall was shocked by what he had to tell, and concluded that this could not be tolerated. Lyalin also revealed the sheer numbers of KGB officers in London, and the relative freedom with which they operated. In September 1971, after some debate, the British government launched ‘Operation Foot’, in which close to a hundred Soviet diplomats and officials were declared persona non grata and expelled.17 London was aware that the Americans might resist this action for fear that it would upset détente, so the British chose not to tell them. Although the decision to expel the KGB officers was taken in principle in late May 1971, Nixon and Kissinger were only informed four months later, after the fact. The excuse offered by London was transparently lame. On 24 September 1971 Kissinger wrote to Nixon:
The British Ambassador has just delivered a letter to me advising of the UK government’s action. They will expel 90 Soviet personnel, mostly from various technical missions (over 550 Soviet personnel are in the UK). The Ambassador asked that I convey to you the Prime Minister’s sincere regret. He was unable to advise you in advance as planned. A press leak broke the story and required the government to move immediately this morning.18
Kissinger sensed that he had been deliberately kept in the dark, and was furious.19 The following week, Denis Greenhill, the senior official at the Foreign Office, also pondered whether American sigint flights from bases in Britain should be suspended until they had seen Moscow’s reaction to the expulsion of so many KGB officers, fearing that the Soviets might retaliate against one of these aircraft.20
In Downing Street, discreet resistance to American intelligence activities was gathering strength. During December 1971 Washington asked for permission to carry out more flights with super-secret Blackbird SR-71 Mach 3 reconnaissance aircraft from RAF Mildenhall. Heath took some persuading. However, Douglas-Home and Carrington argued that the targets were of mutual benefit. The most important was monitoring the Arab–Israeli ceasefire agreement reached after the Six-Day War of 1967. The Blackbird SR-71 also offered excellent imagery and sigint capabilities against any crises in Europe – typically, possible Soviet action against the more independently-minded parts of Eastern Europe such as Romania and Yugoslavia. Presciently, Carrington added that a rejection of the American request might strengthen the hand of those in Washington who believed that Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community would ‘herald some weakening in Anglo–American collaborative arrangements generally’.21
Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee was acutely conscious of the tensions between intelligence cooperation with Europe and its long-established close relationship with the Americans. Nevertheless, in April 1972 a delegation from the JIC headed to Paris to meet its French equivalent, the ‘Groupe de Synthèse et Prévision’. The French were keen for deep engagement, and clearly did not regard the visit as ‘a mere formality’. The British were also enthused, and saw it as an opportunity to ‘influence the French further towards the JIC type organisation’.22 At the same time the British recognised that this raised ‘an obvious conflict of interest’ between their obligation to routinely share assessments with Washington and the need to ‘protect politically sensitive assessments, particularly on France’. Already the JIC was being cautious and keeping most material about France from the eyes of the Americans, but British intelligence officers feared that holding everything back might be noticed, and would ‘increase [American] sensitivities on the effect of the UK/USA intelligence alliance of British entry into the EEC’.23 Washington would have been even less pleased to learn that SIS had raised the possibility of exchanging information on China with the KGB. Senior British officials noted: ‘It was not…desirable to initiate consultation with intelligence allies on this subject.’24
Meanwhile, there were unhappy experiences with major Anglo–American intelligence projects based in Britain. In the late 1960s the British and Americans had agreed to build a large ‘Over the Horizon Radar’ at Orford Ness on the coast of Suffolk, code-named ‘Cobra Mist’. This was an intelligence-gathering system that watched aircraft and missile developments inside the Eastern Bloc, up to two thousand miles away. It also provided a degree of early warning of missile launches. A similar system was already being jointly operated successfully and under conditions of great secrecy in Cyprus. The Americans agreed to provide the capital costs of Cobra Mist, amounting to £13.3 million, while the British provided the land and buildings, at a cost of £1.3 million. The Americans also paid the lion’s share of the running costs.25
Early trials of Cobra Mist focused on the monitoring of Soviet fighter reactions to RAF sigint flights in the Baltic. However, these tests revealed that the programme was not going well.26 As early as June 1971, Joe Hooper at GCHQ told Dick White,
the Intelligence Coordinator, of his private worries. Sir Alan Cottrell, the senior defence scientist, had compiled a damning report, and Hooper thought it contained ‘many passages which would be unsuitable for American eyes’.27 The whole system suffered from enormous amounts of background noise, and the intelligence dividends were thin. Efforts to solve the problems might cost another £20 million, and even then there was no guarantee of success. The whole concept of ‘Over the Horizon Radars’ might soon be eclipsed by a new generation of satellites that were much better at detecting missile launches.28 In addition, the limited intelligence that Cobra Mist was giving on Soviet aircraft movements was already available from sigint sources.29
Cobra Mist had also caused trouble in unexpected quarters. Keith Joseph, the Secretary of State for Health, was alarmed by the high-power radiation emitted by the radar and its effects on nearby residents. His officials feared that the latest cardiac pacemakers might be neutralised by the radar pulses. Improbably, Joseph argued that the leads which connected directly to the heart muscle ‘might pick up sufficient energy from a high frequency high intensity radiation to administer a lethal shock’. While he admitted that it was unlikely that such patients would be ‘found wandering along the foreshore at Orford Ness’, he nevertheless insisted that some would be ‘in grave danger of death’.30 No sooner had the excitable Joseph been reassured than technicians from the Post Office warned that the nearby town of Aldeburgh might lose all television reception. This rather more plausible prospect seemed to cause officials real anxiety.31
On 18 June 1973 the Americans formally announced that they wanted to pull out of Cobra Mist, leaving the British to wind up the operation and lay off hundreds of disgruntled staff.32 Burke Trend, the Cabinet Secretary, was horrified by the likely drain on Britain’s intelligence funds.33 Louis Le Bailly, the highly capable Director General of Intelligence at the Ministry of Defence, agreed that they were now faced with considerable costs for a white elephant, including restoring the ecology around the Orford Ness site, and ‘a considerable public relations problem’.34 MI5 warned that large numbers of the civilian technicians at Orford Ness were union members, and predicted strikes which might well spread to the missile warning station at Fylingdales in Yorkshire.35 Michael Herman, a senior GCHQ officer who was serving as Secretary of the JIC, was also concerned by the press discussion of Cobra Mist, because of the public references to ‘eavesdropping on Russian communications’ which were rare in 1973.36 In the end the British made the best of a bad job and converted Orford Ness into a Foreign Office transmitter site.37
Major failures such as Orford Ness were irritating, but were not unusual in the increasingly high-tech world of intelligence. The more serious problems in the Anglo–American intelligence rel
ationship were political in nature. In March 1973 Britain was still enjoying unique access to Henry Kissinger, and had been working closely with him on arms control. Indeed, Kissinger had prevailed upon the British to produce an early draft of a possible agreement with the Soviets on conventional arms control, or ‘Mutual Balanced Force Reductions’, while keeping his own State Department firmly out of the loop. For Rowley Cromer, the British Ambassador, this was a clear sign of ‘the highly devious nature of Kissinger’s intellectual make-up’. At the same time, Cromer was conscious of a change in Kissinger’s demeanour. There was now ‘an underlying element of strain and perhaps emotion’ beneath his outwardly calm exterior, and during their recent meetings Kissinger had verbally attacked almost every country he could think of, whether friend or foe, except the British and the Chinese. He had launched into lengthy tirades about the State Department, the Pentagon, government economists and the Europeans. Cromer found his general scorn for the Europeans ‘particularly disturbing’, adding, ‘I always have an uneasy feeling that we may commit some error which will bring down the Headmaster’s censure.’ It was, of course, good to enjoy such a close and confidential relationship with Kissinger, but Cromer warned, ‘It is a dangerous and complicated path that we tread.’38
Kissinger’s underlying nervousness was caused by the emergence of the Watergate scandal, involving Nixon’s use of former CIA agents to burgle the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate building in Washington, and to bug his political opponents there. The story had only just surfaced, but the strain was pronounced by the time Burke Trend and his team travelled to Washington to meet Kissinger again a month later. It was obvious that Watergate was already beginning to undermine the Nixon administration’s moral authority. Trend had been taking the lead in these conversations with Kissinger, and he now warned Edward Heath that on the matter of Europe, the Secretary of State was ‘a man in a hurry’: ‘There was a new urgency and impatience in his approach to the problem, which results, I suspect, from his increasing realisation that time is beginning to run against him.’ Kissinger said little to Trend about Watergate, other than to observe that he was ‘keeping clear of it’. However, everyone could see that he was on edge and his patience was fast running out.39
The Headmaster’s censure was not long in coming. It arrived unexpectedly during late July 1973 at a meeting in Washington between Kissinger and Trend. Kissinger remonstrated about failures to get a swift European response on his proposals for ‘Mutual Balanced Force Reductions’. Trend replied that Kissinger was being unrealistic about the new European institutions, and was ‘trying to get the machine to work faster than it was capable of’. He had expected the meeting to be tough, and even Kissinger characterised it as ‘a session of recrimination’. The substance of Kissinger’s complaint was that Britain had refused to discuss the arms control proposals with Washington before talking to the Europeans. He said rather bitterly that the US had ‘never treated Britain as just another country’, and warned that this would have ‘major consequences for bilateral relations between the US and the UK’. Several times he stressed that Anglo–American relations would be ‘severely affected by recent events’.40 The Cabinet Office was shocked by this outburst, and kept knowledge of the exchange on the ‘strictest need-to-know basis’.41
Kissinger was looking for a symbolic area to hit that would send a clear message to London. He chose the intelligence relationship. The next day, intelligence relations between the two countries were halted. NSA went quiet, and officials told Heath that the CIA had ‘suspended the supply of certain intelligence materials to us’. NSA and the CIA had been instructed to cease intelligence exchange with GCHQ and SIS. British officials regarded this as ‘sinister’.42 All the American intelligence agencies were surprised, but moved cautiously for fear of incurring the wrath of the White House. Bill Bonsall, who had only just taken over from Joe Hooper as Director of GCHQ, immediately headed off to Washington to see what he could find out. On 16 August Burke Trend was told that the JIC was trying to come up with some recommendations, although the problem was quite unprecedented: ‘All the indications are that the JIC are finding it hard to make up their minds.’43 In fact the JIC discussed Anglo–American intelligence relations at four consecutive meetings during late August and early September as it struggled to address the problem.44 Kissinger’s ‘cut-off’ had the desired effect, and sent shock waves through the British establishment. This event is so sensitive that even after more than thirty years have passed, the Cabinet Office still refuses to declassify further documents on the subject.45
The reactions of the American intelligence agencies to Kissinger’s insistence on a cut-off varied. NSA offered a legalistic response, insisting that its relationship with GCHQ was governed by ‘a binding international treaty’, so it would have to investigate and see what could be done. This was a polite way of telling Kissinger that it intended to ignore him. The CIA also fudged its reply on the matter of human intelligence or reports from agents that were supplied to SIS. Certainly at a station level, some cooperation continued. The area that was hit hardest was imagery, the supply of top-secret photographs from spy planes and satellites. The senior RAF officer tasked with collecting this sensitive imagery, who travelled to Washington once a week on an RAF Comet airliner, turned up and found that ‘The bag just was not there.’46
Political relations deteriorated further during August and September. Although Edward Heath was urged to write to Nixon on 17 August, it was not until 4 September that officials managed to extract a crawling letter from him.47 Heath assured the President that there was ‘certainly no question of the relationship between your country and our one becoming one of adversaries’. At the same time, he could not resist lecturing Nixon about the complementary nature of Britain’s relationships with Europe and the United States.48 Nixon’s response was notably brief and formal.49 Crispin Tickell, who led a Foreign Office mission to Washington in September 1973, discovered that many staffers on the US National Security Council believed that Britain was now ‘more European than the Europeans’. They were complaining loudly that ‘The British are pursuing a consistently anti-American policy on a wide variety of subjects.’50
Some British officials argued that in ‘the intelligence field’ the Americans were cutting off their nose to spite their face, since any suspension of cooperation was ‘not…in their own best interests’.51 Heath was determined to prove the point, and opportunities for retaliation were not long in arriving. At midday on Saturday, 6 October 1973, a coalition of Arab states inflicted a remarkable surprise attack on Israel that had not been foreseen by any of the world’s major intelligence services. The Yom Kippur War ranks alongside Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s attack on Russia in 1941 as one of the most extraordinary surprise attacks of all time. Two weeks before, on 25 September, King Hussein of Jordan had flown secretly to Israel to warn the Prime Minister, Golda Meir, of what was coming. However, Israeli intelligence did not believe that Egypt was capable of launching a surprise attack because it lacked air superiority, and so, despite receiving numerous other warnings, they closed their ears. On the morning of 6 October, hours before Egyptian forces pounced,
Meir’s Cabinet finally woke up to the fact that the country was about to be attacked. At this point they concluded, probably rightly, that Israel would be better off appearing to the world as an unambiguous victim, rather than trying to pre-empt the invasion.52
‘In the Yom Kippur War we were all wrong – even Mossad,’ recalled Louis Le Bailly, Britain’s Director General of Intelligence at the Ministry of Defence. On the Friday morning, two days before the attack, one of the younger colonels in Britain’s Defence Intelligence Staff did actually predict the Egyptian moves precisely, but he was overruled by a general who had recently visited the Israeli defences along the Suez Canal, known as the Bar-Lev Line, and insisted they were impregnable ‘on the Israeli say-so’. On the Friday afternoon ‘a girl from GCHQ’ also got it right in a discussion
of the Current Intelligence Group on the Middle East, but was similarly shot down by her colleagues. The brilliant Egyptian deception plan, masterminded by the Soviets, had only two flaws. First, the Soviets had evacuated their own families from Damascus to Tripoli by ship on the preceding Thursday evening. Second, on the Friday night the Soviets launched a new satellite over the region. Both of these tell-tale events were missed by Western intelligence.53 Louis Le Bailly was so convinced that all in the Middle East was quiet that on the Thursday before the Yom Kippur attack he sent his own youngest daughter out to spend the summer working on an Israeli kibbutz.54
In terms of collection at least, GCHQ’s American partner NSA did rather better. An inquiry led by Congressman Otis Pike later concluded that as early as the last week of September, NSA had been ‘picking up clear signals that Egypt and Syria were preparing for a major offensive’. However, this sigint material was voluminous low-grade administrative chatter, and did not attract the interest of rarefied intelligence analysts. Meanwhile, some of the high-grade material that revealed the attack only reached decision-makers in Washington days after the fact. Pike noted ruefully that costly intercepts from NSA’s vast sigint machine had detected some of the Egyptian preparations for war, but the intercepts achieved ‘scant impact’ on high-level reporting, so the most valuable intelligence had never reached the policy-makers.55
To the intense anger of Washington, the British adopted a policy of strict neutrality towards the war. This extended even to intelligence, with London implementing tight restrictions on American spy flights from British bases. U-2 spy flights by the CIA from Cyprus were banned, and tough limits were placed on flights from Britain by the larger SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance aircraft. Not only did the British impose a very cumbersome process for ministerial approval for any American spy flights during the crisis, they also insisted that the resulting ‘take’ must not on any account be given to Israel. The Germans were equally obstructive. American intelligence officers were furious. According to Richard Helms, who had served as Director of the CIA up to early 1973, British attitudes caused shock at the CIA’s Langley headquarters: ‘CIA cancelled all contacts…when Heath demanded 2 conditions for US landing rights in UK during [the] Middle East Crisis.’56 In the event, Kissinger baulked at these restrictions, and marathon SR-71 operations were flown from Griffiss Air Force Base in New York State, the nearest unrestricted operational base. It was not for nothing that this secret programme was code-named ‘Giant Reach’.57
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