GCHQ

by Richard Aldrich

  It was public knowledge that Argentina had only a limited number of Exocets, and several remarkable operations were now launched to reduce their effectiveness. First of all, warning was needed of when the Exocet-armed Super Etendard jet fighters took off. This meant deploying special forces inside Argentina. Robert Denton Green recalls: ‘The idea was to get a guy onto the runway to tell us whenever aircraft took off. It worked, to a certain extent, but was very hit and miss.’69 Second, the French were persuaded to hand over the technical details and elint profiles of the missiles. Most importantly, SIS launched an operation to prevent more missiles being bought on the open market. Roberto Calvi, an Italian banker who aided a global Argentinean effort to procure more Exocets, ended up dead under Blackfriars Bridge in June 1982.70 Calvi was also the banker to the Papacy in Rome, and had Mafia connections. We now know a little more about this murky subject. David Fischer, an American diplomat, claims to have met the man who killed Calvi sitting on a toilet in a restaurant in Rome clutching an AK-47. This improbable figure was an ex-Mafia hitman who had been developed as an American agent during the hunt for a kidnapped commander of American forces in Italy, General James Dozier. By 1982 he was clearly a confirmed CIA asset, suggesting that the Americans were perhaps assisting SIS on the ground in their anti-Exocet campaign.71

  Meanwhile, in the South Atlantic, there was a concerted effort to degrade any Argentine intelligence systems. Typically, there were suspicions about an Argentine trawler called the Narwal which was shadowing the Task Force and which appeared to be a sigint spy trawler. Eventually Admiral Woodward ordered Captain Jeremy Black, the commander of the carrier HMS Invincible, to go and capture her. After careful reconnaissance she was attacked with cannon fire by two Harriers in the hope of disabling her. When she failed to stop, a thousand-pound bomb was dropped, which failed to detonate. After more cannon fire the trawler was stopped, and slowly began to sink. Helicopters were despatched with an SBS boarding party. Although the Narwal had indeed been gathering intelligence, she was not a sophisticated ‘elint trawler’ of the Russian type. She had once been a normal fishing vessel, and had been commandeered by Lieutenant Commander Gonzales Llanos of the Argentinean Navy at pistol point. The twenty-four fishermen on board, one of whom had been killed in the Harrier attack, were a rather miserable press-ganged crew. Llanos was about to throw his intelligence materials overboard, but was warned sternly by the SBS party that if he did so, he would follow them into the ocean. Captain Black was relieved to hear that an Argentinean intelligence officer had been captured on board, complete with all his files, codes and equipment, making the operation what Woodward called ‘a fair cop’.72

  Three weeks earlier in the conflict, the British had a much narrower squeak with an Argentinean military Boeing 707 reconnaissance plane. Decked out in Argentinean Air Force regalia, it was presumed to be the equivalent of a Nimrod sigint aircraft. On 21 April it was buzzed by a Harrier, but could not be shot down because the fleet was not yet in the Exclusion Zone. Nicknamed ‘the Burglar’, this aircraft was a daily visitor, and a cause of some anxiety. Woodward was given permission via the Skynet secure phone to shoot it down if he was close and had positive identification. Three days later, after more unwelcome visits the British achieved a good lock-on with the radar of their Sea Dart missile system. Woodward recalls that the aircraft approached at 350 knots, and within two minutes would be within the permitted range for shootdown – ‘At which point he is ours.’ But with twenty seconds to spare Woodward yelled ‘Weapons tight!’, withdrawing permission to fire. It was not ‘the Burglar’ but a Brazilian airliner running from Durban to Rio de Janeiro. On 3 July 1988 the American cruiser USS Vincennes infamously shot down an Iranian airliner bound for Dubai over the Gulf, mistaking it for an attacking fighter aircraft and killing all 290 people on board. The British had been only inches from a similar disaster.73

  Special operations to prepare a path for British amphibious landings on the islands began on 20 May. The initial landings were destined for San Carlos Water, a calm inlet on East Falkland. However, the narrow entrance to the inlet was commanded by a steep bluff called Fanning Head that offered a superb vantage of the surrounding area. Sigint had intercepted orders for an Argentine heavy weapons company with 105mm guns and mortars to move into the area. The exact location was uncertain, because the sigint operatives were still puzzling over the way in which the Argentines transmitted their map references. Later in the campaign, sigint was brought together with captured maps marked up in pen, obtained from prisoners of war, that resolved the mystery.74 On the night of 20 May an operation was launched using the SBS to find and neutralise the heavy weapons unit. They would be accompanied by a Royal Marine naval gunfire controller, Captain Hugh McManners, who would direct shellfire from HMS Antrim onto the edge of the enemy positions. When they judged that the Argentineans had had enough, another officer, Captain Rod Bell, who spoke excellent Spanish, would call on them to surrender using a loudspeaker.75

  This rather elaborate plan was concocted in the wake of the recent surrender of Argentine forces on South Georgia, and reflected the fact that British commanders now believed that much of the garrison would probably give up without a fight, if offered the option. The plan was to insert the SBS party from Antrim by night, using two helicopters. However, the operation was complicated by the fact that the sigint pointed to three possible enemy locations that were quite widely dispersed. To deal with this, a preliminary reconnaissance flight was undertaken by a modified Wessex helicopter with a newly installed thermal image camera – so new in fact that the crew were still reading the manual. The helicopter was a rather improbable-looking beast, earning it the nickname ‘Humphrey’. During this mission all the occupants, who included the SBS commander and McManners, were nervous because a Sea King helicopter had just been lost at sea with eighteen members of the SAS. However, the new equipment worked perfectly, ‘vacuuming up’ thermal images, first picking up the bungalows of the settlement at the far end of the San Carlos inlet and eventually revealing the Argentine heavy weapons company as a cluster of ‘bright green glow worms’. They returned to brief the whole patrol, which departed an hour later in two helicopters so heavily laden that they struggled to get airborne.

  The excessive weight was caused by the fact that every second member of the thirty-man SBS fighting patrol carried a belt-feed General Purpose Machine Gun, in the hope that this massive firepower, together with tracer ammunition, would allow them to pretend to be a much bigger force than they really were. By the time the patrol approached Fanning Head, the Argentine heavy weapons company were already firing their artillery out to sea. McManners immediately called in a heavy barrage from Antrim which consisted of twenty salvoes set as airbursts, exploding fifty feet above the ground. The massive explosions turned night into day, and the Argentine guns quickly fell silent. McManners then called in sporadic rounds to keep the position busy while his patrol advanced. But Captain Bell’s loudspeaker failed, and efforts to persuade the remaining enemy to surrender were only partly effective. With dawn fast approaching, an intermittent firefight developed, vast clouds of tracer bullets skimming towards the enemy. Fanning Head was soon secure, and the SBS patrol made its way down to the beach to watch the main landing force heading up San Carlos Water towards its landing points. Overhead, Argentine aircraft had already begun to attack the landing ships and their escorts, extracting a high cost. Mirage jets from the Argentine Air Force streaked by the SBS patrol, only fifty feet above the water.76

  It was now the morning of 21 May, and the troubled landings at San Carlos Water began in earnest. Brigadier Julian Thompson had arranged for a diversionary attack to be put in by D Squadron of the SAS at Darwin and Goose Green, where there were large concentrations of Argentine troops. These parties were able to call in gunfire from HMS Ardent and HMS Glamorgan to make their attack look serious: ‘Signals intercept traffic afterwards revealed that the Argentineans believed they were under attack from the main force, whic
h was our intention.’77 Sigint continued to be fed in a steady stream to Admiral Woodward on Hermes, and informed the air and naval war. However, once Brigadier Thompson and his 3 Commando Brigade HQ were ashore at San Carlos, it was harder to get sigint to the land forces. Remarkably, because of its highly classified nature, some information was withheld from Thompson’s intelligence staff, so initially they had difficulty figuring out Argentinean strengths and positions. The withheld information was mostly sigint, and the authorities were adamant that it could not be released.78

  Thompson ended up generating much of his own local sigint. Fortunately his intelligence staff had picked up a local radio link transmitting messages from enemy troops on the Falklands to their families in Argentina. Not only were these messages in clear, they also carried the name, rank, unit and location of the sender. This amazing security lapse by the Argentineans gave Thompson much of the information he needed on the enemy positions. Good intelligence came from local interception by tactical sigint from the Royal Marines’ own Y Troop sigint unit, or from patrolling by the SAS and SBS. Nevertheless, the failure to push national sigint from GCHQ to the front line seems to have led to problems. Notably, 450 British paratroopers led by Colonel H. Jones captured Goose Green, at considerable cost, defeating a force four times their size. The Defence Intelligence Staff in London seem to have received a full picture of the enemy forces at Goose Green, but it does not appear that local British commanders were ever fully aware of the size or nature of the force they were confronting.79

  Brigadier Thompson himself recalls how poorly he was served by national intelligence, and the rather fragmented information that was available to him once his troops were on the ground:

  We had very little intelligence, and what we had was often wrong. For example, the Argentinean commander Menendez was labelled a hard-hitting tough guy, but actually was a conciliatory sort of chap, probably selected to be governor, who in my view was not a good choice to fight a battle. The intelligence picture did improve, mainly from radio intelligence monitoring. Although we built up an accurate picture of which units were where on the islands, we didn’t know what equipment they had.80

  Rather as the British Army of the Rhine had planned in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, the intelligence gap was filled not from national assets, but by the local commander’s own Y Troop and by special forces, who were often moving within yards of the Argentine positions.

  Useful intelligence also came from the islanders. The most remarkable was perhaps Reg Silvey, the keeper of the lighthouse at Cape Pembroke. When Argentine patrols required him to hand over his radio transmitter, he only handed over his second set. Having dismantled his radio mast, he then used the steel core of his washing line and his remaining transmitter to send information on Argentine troop movements to the British. He also listened in on transmissions by the Argentine forces, which they mistakenly considered immune to interception because they were low-power and short-range. Moreover, he created confusion by recording Argentine radio traffic and then rebroadcasting it later on the same frequency. Perhaps the most valuable information he provided was the fact that there were no islanders on the Stanley Airport peninsula, clearing the way for sustained shelling and several marathon bombing raids by RAF Vulcans, code-named ‘Black Buck’.81 General Mario Menendez, the Argentine military governor, confirms that some islanders were caught communicating with the British fleet, and although the Argentinean forces would have been within their rights to shoot them, their treatment was restrained.82 Carlos Bloomer-Reeve, the Argentine Secretary General, also recalls that the senior officers were ‘trying to arrest a lot of people’ in their search for ‘an illegal radio station’.83

  The Argentineans were clearly doing their own tactical sigint. General Menendez claims: ‘We intercepted all communications by radio from the British troops,’ but what this actually amounted to, and how it was used, is not clear.84 In the latter stages of the campaign Brigadier Thompson was treated to a brief but dramatic insight into the hazards of enemy radio direction-finding. The headquarters of his 3 Commando Brigade had been set up on the reverse slopes of Mount Kent as the Royal Marines prepared to attack Mount Tumbledown, and he recalls that the Argentineans located them using radio direction-finding. Nearby helicopters also helped to give away their position. His headquarters were soon attacked by two A4 Skyhawks which dropped seven thousand-pound bombs in two passes, and then attacked with cannon fire. It was a miracle no one was killed. The tent in which Thompson was about to give attack orders to his commanders was pepper-potted with shrapnel, and the chairs they were about to sit on had their aluminium legs sliced off.85

  On 15 June, British troops marched into Port Stanley and the Argentinean forces surrendered. A month later the last prisoner was exchanged and released. On 12 October there was a victory parade through London. Three days later, Lieutenant General Sir James Glover, Britain’s most senior Army intelligence officer, visited Washington and gave a detailed briefing on intelligence and the Falklands War to his opposite number General William Odom, head of US Army intelligence. In the Falklands campaign, Glover said, sigint had provided 90 per cent of intelligence. Comint had performed exceedingly well, and had proved ‘invaluable’. Elint had proved more of a ‘mixed blessing’. The most important lesson – soon forgotten, of course – was that local army sigint units often found they were collecting strategic sigint that related to high policy, while strategic sigint collectors using national resources found they were often collecting tactical sigint of more use to those in the front line. The systems were not well designed to move this material in a sophisticated way to the right customers. There had been time delays when targets changed, and problems with getting sigint to the fighting units as the pattern of battles changed hour by hour.86 Nevertheless, sigint had been hugely important, and at the end of the campaign Brian Tovey, the Director of GCHQ, sent a message to all the staff at Cheltenham which read: ‘High level praise. Never has so much praise been accorded. There can be no doubt that this praise has been well deserved. It has been earned by hard and dedicated work by you as individuals.’87

  Sigint shone partly because of the weakness of other sources. Imagery was often unavailable due to cloud cover. The Army had no drones, and aircraft were only covering sporadic tactical targets. SIS was ‘slow to develop’ in the region, but its work with the Defence Intelligence Staff against Exocet shipments had been invaluable. PoW interrogations and the islanders themselves had been helpful. Intelligence weaknesses for forward operations required much use of special forces, which had made a ‘critical contribution’. The need for intelligence prior to the landings had really stretched the special forces. The other missing element, again a perennial problem in British military operations, was good, reliable, secure communications. The British had become aware from their own sigint of their vulnerability to Argentinean sigint. What the Army now wanted was a jump forward to ‘burst communications’ that would defeat enemy listening. Deception was fairly successful, but tended to consist of small-scale activities and lacked an overall strategic theme.88 The poor performance of the Nimrods, on which Britain had blown such a large slice of its sigint budget, is still a mystery. Lt Colonel David Chaundler, who served in the Defence Intelligence Staff until halfway through the campaign, asserted, ‘The Nimrods were achieving very little,’ despite the enormous effort that was being put into refuelling them.89 At least eight maritime reconnaissance Nimrods operated from Ascension Island, and one R1 sigint aircraft seems to have flown from the Chilean base at Punta Arenas.90

  In a crisis you find out who your friends are. In 1982 the Americans were very helpful, but Britain’s European allies rallied to her cause even quicker.91 The Defence Secretary, John Nott, remarked: ‘In so many ways [President] Mitterrand and the French were our greatest allies.’ This included considerable assistance with signals intelligence. Recent revelations suggest that sigint from French Guyana, and also from the Dutch site at Eemnes, was important in assisting th
e British effort.92 Margaret Thatcher also pronounced Mitterrand to be an ‘absolutely staunch’ ally.93 Not only did the French refuse to hand over the Exocets that the Argentineans had already paid for, they offered the British details of the electronic signatures of the missiles. The Spanish also proved to be firm friends, shutting down a covert operation by an Argentine underwater demolition team to attack British ships at Gibraltar. Surprisingly, Israel supplied weapons and training to the neo-fascist Argentinean regime during the conflict. This continued after the war, when the Israelis refitted three Argentinean Air Force 707s of the ‘Burglar’ variety with new sigint equipment so they became the equivalent of Britain’s Nimrod R1 listening aircraft.94

  The Falklands War was profoundly important for the development of British sigint, and triggered GCHQ’s ill-fated experiment with an independent sigint satellite system in the mid-1980s. During the Falklands War, American defence and intelligence agencies had certainly been very helpful. NSA had allowed the retargeting of one of its powerful sigint satellites for a few hours each day, and handed the ‘take’ over to GCHQ. After some argument, imagery satellites had also been diverted at considerable financial cost, since their operational lives were shortened. However, this episode also illuminated a dangerous dependency on American satellite technology for future military operations. By 1983 Cheltenham had begun to ask, what would happen if one day the Americans decided not to be quite so accommodating? Flushed with success from a good sigint performance in the Falklands campaign, GCHQ’s Director, Brian Tovey, now stepped forward with a proposal. The result was plans for GCHQ’s own sigint satellite, code-named ‘Zircon’ – by far the most secret British defence project of the 1980s.95