No less than twenty-five years later, the alert system worked. On 27 July 1990, five days before Iraq’s attack on Kuwait, the JIC gave a clear warning that aggression was likely.6 Although no one spotted the precise timing, warning signals continued to grow.7 On 29 July, Iraq’s Soviet-built long-range radar units, code-named ‘Tall King’, became very active, having been silent for some months. There was now a considerable programme of satellite monitoring of Iraq, mostly through imagery, which was expected to provide twenty-four hours’ notice of an attack. However, despite warnings of troops massing on the Kuwait border, the prevailing thinking in the White House and Downing Street was that this was a bluff. What had made anticipating Iraq’s intentions harder was the sophisticated training that the United States had itself offered to the country in the mid-1980s during the war between Iraq and Iran. This included lessons on secure communications, encouraging the extensive use of landlines with fibre-optic cables, together with many reserve communication channels. Nevertheless, the intelligence community had warned of a likely invasion, but political leaders simply discounted it. As with the Falklands, they had difficulty with the concept that there were old-fashioned military dictators around who still liked going to war.8 Reassurances from Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak that, despite the military build-up, nothing would happen also misled the West.9
Operation ‘Desert Storm’, designed to retake Kuwait, was unleashed on 17 January 1991 with a wave of air attacks. Oddly, this conflict resembled the vast tank battles that NATO had prepared to fight with the Soviets in central Europe during the Cold War. The United States supplied by far the largest component of troops, and Britain the next. Ranged alongside them were contributions from France, Australia and many Middle Eastern states, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Once the Gulf War began in earnest, British and American sigint experts became involved in complex discussions about how much of the Iraqi signals infrastructure should be left intact to permit continued monitoring, perhaps with the intention of locating Saddam Hussein. They also had to think about their own deception operations, which were distributing false orders to Iraqi battalions. British forces conducted a classic operational deception, superintended by a unit code-named ‘Rhino Force’. On several field exercises by Britain’s First Armoured Division, messages were transmitted on low power to avoid interception by Iraqi signals intelligence units. During the actual ground attack, on 23 January, recordings of these earlier transmissions were played back at full power. They were then heard clearly by the Iraqis. By that time most of the British forces had moved about 125 miles to the west to link up with the main US Seventh Army Corps in their attack, yet the Iraqis thought they were heading in the opposite direction. The British tuned in to what remained of the Iraqi command network, and further signals intelligence showed that the Iraqis had bought this deception in its entirety. Meanwhile, a secret radio station based in Saudi Arabia pretended to be ‘Radio Kuwait’, and broadcast the false news that Kuwait City had already fallen to the allies, causing several Iraqi units to flee for fear of being cut off.10
Operation ‘Desert Storm’ illustrated the close relationship between special forces and sigint. The main task assigned to British special forces was hunting down Iraqi Scud missile launchers. The SBS was given responsibility for eastern Iraq, while the SAS was allocated the west. In addition to the Scuds, the SBS was given a further important target: a major terminal for the fibre-optic cables that provided the backbone of Iraq’s remarkably modern and secure communications network. This nexus was located about thirty miles from Baghdad, alongside an oil pipeline. A team of thirty-six men, with four hundred pounds of explosive, was taken to the site by two Chinook helicopters during the night of 22 January.11 Their task was to disable a section of the communications network which lay a few feet beneath the sand.
The flight time was at least two hours each way, leaving only a limited period of darkness in which to complete the mission. Most of the party formed a defensive circle with machine guns and grenade launchers, while the remainder began searching for their target. After much scurrying about with ground scanners and cable locators a number of holes were dug, but infuriatingly no cable was found. Dawn was fast approaching, and the helicopter crews were becoming more and more anxious. Eventually the commander chose the hole that seemed most likely to be close to the cable, filled it with all their explosives and set a charge, hoping they were near enough. On their return to base they were told that they had indeed severed the cable. The main task of the mission was to force the Iraq regime ‘up onto the air’, in other words to make it use wireless communications that could then be intercepted, and there was indeed an increase in high-frequency radio traffic. However, not all the fibre-optic networks were destroyed, and thereafter the cables proved largely invulnerable to bombing.12
Forcing the Iraqis to rely more on high-frequency radio offered GCHQ several advantages. It is widely alleged that radio equipment sold to Baghdad prior to the Gulf War was subtly adapted so that the British could monitor its transmissions more easily. This is not to suggest that the British manufacturers, Racal, were aware that their equipment had been altered in this way. Racal, which had long experience of making such equipment, were the main suppliers of rack radios to GCHQ for its own monitoring operations. Several senior staff from GCHQ had become directors of Racal. The alleged decision to modify the radios was taken perhaps as early as 1985, when Iraq spent £42 million on state-of-the-art Racal Jaguar V radios, equipped with frequency-hopping to allow them to counter Iranian monitoring and jamming on the battlefield. Remarkably, Racal was building a radio factory in Iraq when the Gulf War broke out in 1991. In any case, exchanges between Iraqi commanders could be read by both GCHQ and NSA.13
Iraqi communications discipline was very good, and sigint failed to find the location of a single Scud missile during the Gulf War.14 The conflict revealed once more the familiar weaknesses that existed in British intelligence support for major expeditionary operations – something witnessed in the Falklands ten years before. At each level, British Army formations depended mostly on their own intelligence assets, and there was little inter-service cooperation. Information flowed from GCHQ and from the imagery centre at RAF Brampton in Cambridgeshire, but mostly because officers at Divisional HQ in the Gulf had ‘mates’ at the desk level in Cheltenham who they could telephone directly. The tactical exploitation of national intelligence assets was poor. However, this time the lessons were learned, and by 1996 Britain had created a Permanent Joint Headquarters at Northwood with an intelligence division specifically tasked with solving many of these problems.15
In contrast to the situation in previous conflicts, by 1991 GCHQ was no longer invisible to the British public. During the approach of the Gulf War a prankster had taken advantage of this and posted hundreds of letters using forged GCHQ notepaper, ordering people to report to Lichfield barracks in Staffordshire to commence two weeks of crash training prior to being flown out to the Gulf by an RAF Hercules transport plane. The recipients, apparently chosen at random and mostly with no previous military service, endured not a little anxiety.16 Senior managers at GCHQ were forced to issue warnings telling the public to ignore the hoax letters.
One of the big discoveries of the Gulf War of 1991 was the scale of Iraq’s stocks of chemical weapons. The task of monitoring their destruction after the end of hostilities was allocated to a mission of UN inspectors called the United Nations Special Commission, or UNSCOM. They picked their way through innumerable military sites and palaces, some of them with as many as five hundred separate buildings, looking for weapons declared illegal under UN rulings. Soon a number of these observers, who in many cases were British, Australian or American military personnel on loan, were conducting short-range sigint using scanners, and delivering the material to their national intelligence agencies and also to the Israelis. This so-called Special Collection Element within UNSCOM was suggested by Scott Ritter, a former US Marine officer who had been working with U
NSCOM since 1995. It often recorded Iraqi warnings to weapons facilities that the inspectors were on their way, but given that the material took weeks to process, this was of little help to the inspectors on the ground. Arguments soon developed. Israel’s sigint agency, called Unit 8200, was helpful and provided the inspectors with complete transcripts, but the Americans only returned small amounts of redacted material to UNSCOM.17
NSA and GCHQ would use UNSCOM as short-range collectors up until 1996, but predictably they were paranoid about sharing any decrypted product which carried the ominous caveat ‘Special Compartmented Intelligence – Top Secret/Final Curtain’. As a result, relations between the inspectors and NSA were increasingly frosty. When Scott Ritter came to Britain in the hope of developing closer relations between his Special Collection Element and GCHQ, his contact at GCHQ apologised and said that they could not assist him. He explained: ‘Even if we could handle the material, the special relationship between the UK and the Americans prevents us from sharing the take with an outside agency, such as UNSCOM, without the express permission of the Americans,’ and added apologetically, ‘This permission isn’t being given.’ Later, another British official explained the full picture to him. The GCHQ station on Cyprus had identified strange burst transmissions coming from the UN headquarters in Iraq. GCHQ concluded that there was a separate CIA communications intercept operation inside the building, put in place by its local agents. This was an automated ‘black box’ operation that collected local Iraqi signals and then compressed them to be sent as a short ‘burst’ signal to American U-2 aircraft which flew over Baghdad about once a day. In short, GCHQ had concluded that America no longer had any need of UNSCOM to collect sigint inside Iraq.18
One of the important features of intelligence in the 1990s was the improving relations between the UKUSA countries and Israel. A few years earlier, Bill Odom, the Director of NSA, had denounced the head of Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad, Nahum Admoni, as ‘a nasty slippery man’ who had refused to cooperate with NSA and GCHQ on sigint programmes against the Soviets. Admoni retired in 1989, and was replaced by Shabtai Shavit, who was regarded as much more amenable.19 NSA, GCHQ and the Israelis now worked much more closely on Iraq, yet at the same time they were at loggerheads elsewhere, most obviously in the former Yugoslavia, which by the summer of 1991 was collapsing into a series of bitter civil wars. Many Western intelligence services suddenly found themselves seriously at odds with each other in this complex conflict, with its bewildering factions. The United States worked closely with Germany’s BND to assist the Croats and Bosnian Muslims in an effort to create a level playing field. Meanwhile, it regarded the British as too friendly with the Bosnian Serb headquarters at Pale, where SIS undoubtedly enjoyed good sources of intelligence. Along with the secret services of Greece and the Ukraine, Mossad was openly pro-Serbian, and was concerned by the CIA’s close cooperation with Turkey and Iran in a covert operation to fly in arms and jihadist fighters from the Middle East to bolster the Muslim cause, in clear contravention of the United Nations arms embargo. The former Yugoslavia also offered some fascinating lessons in the tortuous politics of allied signals intelligence.20
Bosnia was a place where relations between GCHQ and NSA were tense. Intelligence sharing between the two allies on the Balkans was limited, and NSA was very reluctant to provide its British partner with any intelligence on the Muslim factions that were favoured by Washington. Meanwhile, General Sir Michael Rose, a former head of the SAS and now the British Commander in Chief of the United Nations Protection Force, found that his biggest problem was the insecure and elderly communications equipment that the British Army had endured for years. The need for better radios had been one of the obvious lessons from the Falklands, but Britain’s defence bureaucrats had bungled hopelessly. Rose realised that his UN headquarters in Sarajevo were effectively under surveillance by the Americans. He himself was regarded as a ‘legitimate target’ for sigint collection by the USA, since he was officially serving as a UN military chief, rather than as a British commander.21
NSA worked closely with the German BND to offer sigint support to the various Muslim elements, not least to Croatia, which had suffered badly at the hands of the Serbs in the fighting of 1991 and 1992. They focused on boosting the work of Admiral Davor Domazet, chief of Croatia’s military intelligence during the struggle against secessionist Serbian guerrillas in the east of the country. This was especially visible during 1993, when Croatian forces pushed forward into the Medak Pocket, and again in August 1995, when they conducted a lightning offensive known as ‘Operation Storm’. This was supported by unmanned intelligence-gathering drones which allowed Croatian artillery to locate the positions of rebel Serbs on the ground. Reportedly, the drones were operated by the CIA from a base at Zadar on the Adriatic coast. More importantly, NSA supplied Croatian signals intelligence units with improved satellite dishes for electronic surveillance of telephone traffic.22
Sigint was a major factor in the Croatian success. The Croatian equivalent of NSA, the National Central Electronic Reconnaissance Agency (NSEI), was the most significant and secretive part of the country’s intelligence system. In 1995 it was able to listen in on panicked phone calls to Slobodan Milošević the Serbian leader in Belgrade, pleading for help as Serb forces were pushed back during ‘Operation Storm’. It was also able to follow Miloševiၾ in his efforts to put pressure on neighbouring Montenegro. NSEI successfully monitored other key participants across all regions of the former Yugoslavia. These included the British, who found themselves subject to aggressive sigint collection by multiple elements. However, while NSEI was good on sigint, it was bad on its own communications security. Accordingly, when the Croatians shared the sigint they had collected on the British amongst themselves, this was in turn picked up by additional parties and shared again.23
Milos Stankovic, a British major from the Parachute Regiment who was serving on General Rose’s United Nations staff at Sarajevo, explains this strange situation in a section of his memoirs appropriately entitled ‘The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party’. It was accepted by the long-serving British officers accompanying Rose that their offices were under technical surveillance by the Americans, and probably the Croatians and Bosnian Muslims too. However, the Bosnian Serb leaders in Pale, such as Radovan Karadſić and Ratko Mladić, also seemed to have advance warning of any British initiative. Stankovic patiently explained the situation to a new initiate on the British team:
…the Serbs were bugging the buggers…if you’ll excuse the pun. Everyone was bugging each other. No secrets in the Balkans. The only people not playing this game was the UN. It’s simple: Rose is discussing [NATO Commander in Chief, US General John] Galvin’s programme in his office the previous day, the Yanks or the Bosnians bug that conversation, and then the Serbs listen in to what the Bosnians are saying to each other. Before you know it that little tidbit had landed on Mladić’s desk…
NSA actually had a covert listening station in the American Embassy in Sarajevo which was ‘busy hoovering up every single little electronic bleep and fart’. The NSA team had arrived in Yugoslavia under military cover as US Army officers, but ‘could not carry it off very well’.24 By November 1994, numerous incidents of uncanny preknowledge on the part of the Bosnian Muslims offered multiple confirmation of technical surveillance. General Michael Rose was conscious of this, and sometimes used it for deception purposes. However, it made attempts to negotiate difficult, since the Bosnian Muslims always had the upper hand over the Serbs because of their better technical coverage.25 To cap it all, Britain could hear itself being listened to. Its own sigint operations were being conducted on the ground, using ‘Odette’ and ‘Vampire’ intercept units.26 Sigint was also collected by two Royal Navy frigates based in the Adriatic, and RAF Nimrod Rls flying out of NATO bases in Italy.27
By early 1995 Rose had been succeeded as UN Commander in Bosnia by another senior British officer, General Rupert Smith. One day shortly after his arrival, Smith made a
number of urgent calls to London on a supposedly secure scrambler phone, and then hurried from his headquarters to the nearby American Embassy for a meeting. While he spoke with senior Americans on the top floor, his military aide wandered around the lower floors of the Embassy. To his amazement, despite the fact that Smith was on the top floor, the aide could hear his commander’s voice coming from a room at the end of a corridor. This proved to house an interception centre, where staff were busy listening to one of the telephone conversations Smith had held with London only an hour before. As a result of this confirmation that a joint CIA-NSA listening operation was being directed towards the UN headquarters, Smith was more careful with his communications thereafter, often using the encrypted radios of the Special Air Service, which he believed to be more secure.28
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