GCHQ
Richard J. Aldrich

The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency

Copyright

HarperPress

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperPress in 2010

Copyright © Richard J. Aldrich 2010

Richard J. Aldrich asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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For Libby (for the dark night-time)

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Sigint and Comsec Locations in the UK

Note on Terminology

Abbreviations

Introduction

THE 1940s BLETCHLEY PARK AND BEYOND

1 Schooldays

2 Friends and Allies

3 Every War Must Have an End

4 The KGB and the Venona Project

5 UKUSA – Creating the Global Sigint Alliance

THE 1950s FIGHTING THE ELECTRONIC WAR

6 ‘Elint’ and the Soviet Nuclear Target

7 The Voyages of HMS Turpin

8 Sigint in the Sun – GCHQ’s Overseas Empire

9 Blake, Bugs and the Berlin Tunnel

10 Embassy Wars

THE 1960s SPACE, SPY SHIPS AND SCANDALS

11 Harold Macmillan – Shootdowns, Cyphers and Spending

12 Harold Wilson – Security Scandals and Spy Revelations

13 Intelligence for Doomsday

14 Staying Ahead – Sigint Ships and Spy Planes

THE 1970s TURBULENCE AND TERROR

15 Trouble with Henry

16 Disaster at Kizildere

17 Turmoil on Cyprus

18 Unmasking GCHQ: The ABC Trial

THE 1980s INTO THE THATCHER ERA

19 Geoffrey Prime–The GCHQ Mole

20 A Surprise Attack – The Falklands War

21 Thatcher and the GCHQ Trade Union Ban

22 NSA and the Zircon Project

AFTER 1989 GCHQ GOES GLOBAL

23 From Cold War to Hot Peace – The Gulf War and Bosnia

24 The New Age of Ubiquitous Computing

25 The 9/11 Attacks and the Iraq War

26 From Bletchley Park to a Brave New World?

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

Appendix 3 – GCHO Organisation in 1946

Appendix 4 – GCHO Organisation in 1970

Appendix 5 – GCHO Organisation in 1998

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

By the same author

About the Publisher

Sigint and Comsec Locations in the UK

1 Adastral Park, Martlesham Heath, Suffolk, BT Research Laboratories, 1975–

2 Beaumanor/Garats Hay, Leic., post–war Army sigint base & Special Projects Agency, 1945–94

3 Bletchley Park; this remained a sigint training site after the war until 1985

4 Boddington, Glos, (RAF) military communications unit working with GCHQ

5 Bower, Bowermadden near Wick, listening station, closed 1975

6 Brawdy, Haverfordwest, Wales, 14 Signals Regiment (electronic warfare)

7 Brora, Sutherland, listening station, closed 1984

8 Capenhurst Tower, Cheshire, intercepting telephone traffic to Ireland, 1990–98

9 Cheadle, Staffs, (RAF) listening station, closed 1996

10 Cheltenham (Oakley and Benhall); GCHQ moved to the twin sites between 1952 and 1954

11 Chicksands, Beds, NSA/USAF until 1994, then UK Defence Intelligence & Security Centre

12 Cricklade, Wilts, GCHQ experimental radio station

13 Culmhead, Somerset, GCHQ Central Training School, replacing Bletchley, 1985–94

14 Digby, Lincs, main centre for RAF ground sigint and now UK joint services sigint centre

15 Edzell, Brechin, US Navy/NSA site, 1960–96

16 HMS Flowerdown, near Winchester, listening station, closed 1977

17 Gilnahirk, Belfast, listening station, closed 1978

18 Hanslope Park, near Milton Keynes, Diplomatic Wireless Service and DTMS

19 Hawklaw, (Cupar) Fife, listening station, closed 1988

20 Hereford, 264 Signal Squadron supporting 22 SAS

21 Irton Moor, Scarborough, listening station, now GCHQ Scarborough

22 Island Hill, Comber, Northern Ireland, closed 1977

23 Ivy Farm, Knockholt Pound, Kent, listening station

24 Kirknewton, near Edinburgh, US listening station, closed 1966

25 Menwith Hill, near Harrogate, US Army listening station, taken over by NSA 1963

26 HMS Mercury, near Petersfield, naval signals centre, 1941–93

27 Morwenstow, now GCHQ Bude, focused on satellite communications, 1969–

28 Oakhanger, (RAF) control centre for Skynet since 1967

29 Royal Radar Establishment, Malvern, from 1953, later Defence Research Agency

30 Waddington, Lincs, (RAF) Nimrod R1s of 51 Squadron since 1995

31 Watton, Norfolk, (RAF) Central Signals Establishment, 192 Squadron 1945–63

32 Whaddon Manor, Bucks, outstation of Bletchley Park, closed 1946

33 Wyton, Cambridgeshire, (RAF) Comets and Nimrod R1s of 51 Squadron, 1963–95

34 London

Chester Road, Borehamwood, (GCHQ/SIS) factory making radio microphones in the 1950s

Chesterfield Street W1, London office for GCHQ in the late 1940s

Dollis Hill, North London, Post Office Research Station, 1921–75

Eastcote, Harrow; GCHQ moved here in 1946 and some comsec staff remained after 1952

Empress State Building, Earl’s Court, listening station, 1962–94

London Processing Group, St Dunstan’s Hill, City of London, moved to Cheltenham 1975

Northwood Hills, small post–war GCHQ site; Permanent Joint HQ since 1996

Palmer St W1, LCSA headquarters until 1969; also GCHQ’s London office

Note on Terminology

On 1 November 1919, Britain created the Government Code and Cypher School, or ‘GC&CS’, the nation’s first integrated code-making and code-breaking unit. The term GC&CS remained in widespread use until the end of the Second World War.

By contrast, Government Communications Headquarters, or ‘GCHQ’, is a term of uncertain origin. Originally developed as a cover name for Bletchley Park in late 1939, it competed for usage with several other designations, including ‘BP’, ‘Station X’ and indeed ‘GC&CS’. However, the Government Code and Cypher School remained the formal title of the whole organisation in wartime. During 1946, GC&CS re-designated itself the ‘London Signals Intelligence Centre’ when the staff of Bletchley Park decamped to a new site at Eastcote near Uxbridge, although GCHQ remained in widespread use as a cover name. On 1 November 1948, as Britain’s code-breakers began to investigate a further move away from London to Cheltenham, the term GCHQ was formally adopted and has remained in use ever since.

‘Code-breaker’ is also a troublesome phrase. Codes are usually considered to be words substituted for others, often chosen somewhat at random. Typically, the military operations that constituted D-Day in 1944 were code-named ‘Overlord’. By contrast, systems of communication where letters and numbers are substituted in an organised pattern, either by machine or by hand, are referred to as cyphers. Yet the term code-breaker is so frequently applied to the people who worked at Bletchley Park and at GCHQ that this book follows common usage.

The constantly changing names of the Soviet intelligence and security services are especially vexing and so, despite the inescapable anachronisms, the Soviet civilian intelligence service is referred to as ‘KGB’ until 1989, while the military intelligence service is denoted as ‘GRU’. In Britain, the Security Service is denoted here by the commonly known term ‘MI5’ and its sister organisation, the Secret Intelligence Service or MI6, is referred to as ‘SIS’. Ships’ and submarines’ names are italicised, e.g. HMS Turpin. Onshore naval bases and training establishments, e.g. HMS Anderson, are not italicised.

Abbreviations

A-2—US Air Force Intelligence

ASA—Army Security Agency [American]

ASIO—Australian Security Intelligence Organisation

BDS—British Defence Staff, Washington

BfV—West German security service

BJ—‘Blue jacket’ file for signals intelligence or an individual intercept

Blue Book—Weekly digest of comint material for the PM

BND—Bundesnachrichtendienst – foreign intelligence service of West Germany

Brixmis—British Military Mission to the HQ Soviet Army in East Germany

BRUSA—Anglo–American signals intelligence agreement, 1943

‘C’—Chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS)

CESD—Communications-Electronics Security Department, succeeded by CESG

CESG—Communications-Electronics Security Group

CIA—Central Intelligence Agency [American]

comint—Communications intelligence

comsec—Communications security

CSE—Communications Security Establishment [Canadian]

CSU—Civil Service Union

CX—Prefix for a report originating with SIS

DIS—Defence Intelligence Staff

DMSI—Director of Management and Support for Intelligence in DIS

DSD—Defence Signals Department [Australian], formerly DSB

DWS—Diplomatic Wireless Service

elint—Electronic intelligence

FBI—Federal Bureau of Investigation [American]

GC&CS—Government Code and Cypher School

GCHQ—Government Communications Headquarters

GRU—Soviet Military Intelligence

GTAC—Government Technical Assistance Centre, established in 2000 – later NTAC

IRSIG—Instructions and Regulations concerning the Security of Signals Intelligence [Allied]

JIC—Joint Intelligence Committee

JSRU—Joint Speech Research Unit

JSSU—Joint Services Signals Unit, combined sigint collection units

KGB—Russian secret service

LCSA—London Communications Security Agency, until 1963

LCSA—London Communications-Electronics Security Agency, until 1965

LPG—London Processing Group

MI5—Security Service

MI6—Secret Intelligence Service (also SIS)

MiG—Mikoyan – Soviet fighter aircraft

MoD—Ministry of Defence

MTI—Methods to Improve, sequential five-year sigint programmes at GCHQ

NATO—North Atlantic Treaty Organisation

NSA—National Security Agency [American]

NTAC—National Technical Assistance Centre, previously GTAC

PHP—Post-Hostilities Planning Committee

PSIS—Permanent Secretaries’ Committee on the Intelligence Services

SAS—Special Air Service

SBS—Special Boat Service

SDECE—French intelligence service

Sigdasys—An allied operational sigint distribution system in Germany in the 1980s

sigint—Signals intelligence

SIS—Secret Intelligence Service (also MI6)

SOE—Special Operations Executive

SUSLO—Special United States Liaison Officer based in Britain

TICOM—Target Intelligence Committee dealing with signals intelligence

UKUSA—UK–USA signals intelligence agreements

VHF—Very High Frequency

Y—Wireless interception, usually low-level

Y Section—SIS unit undertaking interception activities

Y Service—Signals interception arms of the three services

Introduction
GCHQ – The Last Secret?

GCHQ has been by far the most valuable source of intelligence for the British Government ever since it began operating at Bletchley during the last war. British skills in interception and code-breaking are unique and highly valued by our allies. GCHQ has been a key element in our relationship with the United States for more than forty years.

Denis Healey, House of Commons, 27 February 1984¹

‘GCHQ’ is the last great British secret. For more than half a century, Government Communications Headquarters – the successor to the famous wartime code-breaking organisation at Bletchley Park – has been the nation’s largest and yet most elusive intelligence service. During all of this period it has commanded more staff than the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) combined, and has enjoyed the lion’s share of Britain’s secret service budget. GCHQ’s product, known as signals intelligence or ‘sigint’, constituted the majority of the secret information available to political decision-makers during the Cold War. Since then, it has become yet more significant in an increasingly ‘wired’ world. GCHQ now plays a leading role in shaping Britain’s secret state, and in the summer of 2003 it relocated to a spectacular new headquarters that constituted the single largest construction project in Europe. Today, it is more important than ever – yet we know almost nothing about it.²

By contrast, the wartime work of Bletchley Park is widely celebrated. The importance of decrypted German communications – known as ‘the Ultra secret’ – to Britain’s victory over the Axis is universally recognised. Winston Churchill’s wartime addiction to his daily supply of ‘Ultra’ intelligence, derived from supposedly impenetrable German cypher machines such as ‘Enigma’, is legendary. The mathematical triumphs of brilliant figures such as Alan Turing are a central part of the story of Allied success in the Second World War. The astonishing achievement of signals intelligence allowed Allied prime ministers and presidents to see into the minds of their Axis enemies. Thanks to ‘sigint’ we too can now read about the futile attempts of Japanese leaders to seek a favourable armistice in August 1945, even as the last screws were being tightened on the atomic bombs destined for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.³

However, shortly after VJ-Day, something rather odd happens. In the words of Christopher Andrew, the world’s leading intelligence historian, we are confronted with the sudden disappearance of signals intelligence from the historical landscape. This is an extraordinary omission which, according to Andrew, has ‘seriously distorted the study of the Cold War’.⁴ Intelligence services were at the forefront of the Cold War, yet most accounts of international relations after 1945 stubbornly refuse to recognise even the existence of the code-breakers who actually constituted the largest part of this apparatus.⁵ Nor did this amazing cloak of historical invisibility stop with the end of the Cold War. In 2004, following the furore over the role of intelligence in justifying the invasion of Iraq, Lord Butler, a former Cabinet Secretary, was appointed to undertake an inquiry into ‘British Intelligence and Weapons of Mass Destruction’. Butler’s report into the workings of the secret agencies was unprecedented in its depth and detail. However, GCHQ is mentioned only once, in the list of abbreviations, where we are told that the acronym stands for ‘Government Communications Headquarters’.⁶ This is all we learn, for in the subsequent 260 pages the term GCHQ is in fact never used, and the organisation is never discussed. The subject is simply too secret.

Sigint was not simply a Second World War phenomenon. Throughout the twentieth century, Britain’s code-breakers continually supplied Downing Street with the most precious jewels of British intelligence, discreetly delivered in what became known as the ‘Blue Book’. Nicholas Henderson, formerly Britain’s Ambassador to Washington, explains: ‘All Prime Ministers love intelligence, because it’s a sort of weapon…The intelligence reports used to arrive in special little boxes, and it gave them a belief that they had a direct line to something that no other ordinary departments have.’ It was partly for this reason that British Prime Ministers ‘never minded spending money on intelligence’. Signals intelligence also matters to political leaders because it allows them to hear the authentic voices of their enemies. Although Winston Churchill was the most famous recipient of such material, his predecessor, Neville Chamberlain, was also offered some remarkable insights into the mind of Adolf Hitler. In 1939, shortly after the Munich appeasement, Chamberlain was given an intelligence report which showed that Hitler habitually referred to him in private as ‘der alter Arschloch’, or ‘the old arsehole’. Understandably, this revelation ‘had a profound effect on Chamberlain’.⁷

However, constant exposure to secrets derived from the world of code-breaking, bugging and other kinds of secret listening has the capacity to induce paranoia. Harold Wilson regularly dragged his Private Secretary, Bernard Donoughue, into the bathrooms and toilets of Downing Street. Only there, with the taps turned on full and water sloshing noisily in the basins, did he feel immune to the threat of bugs.⁸ A top priority for Britain’s technical security specialists during the Wilson years was the installation of the latest scrambler phones at the Prime Minister’s holiday home in the Scilly Isles, so he could speak to Whitehall without fear of interception. Doubtless, Wilson would have been delighted to learn that some of his opponents felt equally oppressed by electronic surveillance. When Ian Smith, the Rhodesian leader, visited London in late 1965 he insisted on having some of the more sensitive conversations with his delegation in the ladies’ lavatory, convinced that this was the one location where British intelligence would not have dared to plant microphones.⁹

Secret listening terrified friend and foe alike. Harold Macmillan recalled the almost unbearable sense of oppression he felt on his visit to Moscow to see the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, in 1959. His delegation feared that British codes were compromised, and they were unable to talk freely, even outside in the open air, because of constant technical surveillance. He would have been fascinated to learn that, at the very same moment, Khrushchev and his immediate circle also felt increasingly anxious about KGB microphones, to the extent that they dared not speak freely, even amongst themselves in their own capital.¹⁰ In June 1966, to his immense fury, President Tito of Yugoslavia discovered that he was being bugged by his own security chief. ‘Concealed microphones have been installed everywhere,’ he exclaimed angrily to a friend: ‘Even my bedroom!’¹¹

The supreme example of the way in which eavesdropping could have political consequences was the Watergate scandal, which gradually brought about the downfall of President Richard Nixon between April 1973 and July 1974. Nixon had used a team of former CIA operatives known as ‘The Plumbers’ to burgle and bug premises used by the Democratic Party. Not everyone was shocked. In 1973, Britain’s Prime Minister, Edward Heath, made a visit to China. Mao Tse-tung asked him, ‘What is all this Nixon nonsense about?’ Heath asked what he meant by ‘nonsense’. Mao replied: ‘Well, they say he bugged his opponents, don’t they? But we all bug our opponents, don’t we, and everybody knows it? So what is all this fuss about?’¹² Others took bugging in their stride. When Tony Blair visited India in October 2001, his security team found two bugs in his bedroom, and reported that ‘they wouldn’t be able to remove them without drilling the wall’. Blair ‘decided against making a fuss’, and quietly moved to another room.¹³

Eavesdropping and code-breaking are certainly nothing new. Even in medieval times the crowned heads of Europe had recourse to secretive ‘black chambers’ where encyphered letters from diplomats were intercepted, opened and decoded in order to produce intelligence. However, the modern-day GCHQ owes its origins to the arrival of the radio and the enormous impact of science upon methods of fighting during the Second World War. It was the struggle against Hitler that revolutionised the importance of intelligence from encyphered radio messages. Blitzkrieg and surprise attack were the hallmarks of a new style of warfare that arrived in the late 1930s. The sheer speed of war now meant that secrets smuggled under the coat collar of a traditional human spy were no longer of much use to commanders. The code-breakers of Bletchley Park were the perfect answer, offering intelligence in ‘real time’ from intercepted enemy signals. In some cases, messages sent from Hitler to Rommel in the Western Desert were decoded and arrived on Churchill’s desk before they were read by their intended recipient. Soon, Bletchley Park presided over machine-based espionage on an industrial scale.

With the onset of the Cold War, ‘sigint’, as it had become known, seemed equally important for a dangerous new era of nuclear confrontation. Atomic weapons and equivalent breakthroughs in biological and chemical warfare, together with ballistic rockets such as the V2, against which there was no defence, were the new currency of conflict. World leaders were required to comprehend strange new threats and the accompanying possibility of devastating surprise attack – which Lord Tedder, the British Chief of the Air Staff, called a potential ‘nuclear Pearl Harbor’. The precarious world of early warning, deterrence and ‘targeting’ had arrived. Military chiefs demanded better intelligence, and concluded that global sigint coverage was indispensable to the Western allies. By the mid-1950s, Britain’s code-breakers had abandoned their nissen huts at Bletchley Park for new accommodation in Cheltenham, the distinctive radomes and satellite dishes of which became an integral part of the Cold War landscape.¹⁴

Ironically, the story of GCHQ after it entered ‘peacetime’ in 1945 is very much about military operations, and even war. Britain’s vast sigint programme was managed by GCHQ, but run in cooperation with the armed services, which used their bases, ships and aircraft to collect the raw enemy signals. As this book reveals, GCHQ sat at the centre of a spider’s web that consisted of many other hidden organisations, both civil and military, which helped it collect signals intelligence. Many of its stories intertwine closely with Britain’s long legacy of small wars and guerrilla conflicts in locations such as Korea, Malaya, Borneo, Aden and the Falklands. GCHQ’s operations also involved hair-raising confrontations with the Russians. Britain ran secret submarine spy missions designed to gather signals intelligence from the Russian fleet. Specially converted submarines entered the protected harbours of the Russian Navy and rose precariously beneath cruisers to within six feet of their electronic quarry. Submarines that were sent on sigint missions – known to their anxious crews as ‘Dodgies’ or ‘Mystery Trips’ – were detected off Murmansk and pursued by Russian destroyers with depth charges. GCHQ’s ocean-going activities have been a well-kept secret, but some British submariners still bear the scars of this secret signals war in the far north.

Code-breaking is sometimes depicted as highly technical – more ‘Billion Dollar Brain’ than James Bond – and therefore perhaps a little dull. But much of the GCHQ story involves dramatic incidents experienced by individual sigint operators in forward locations, including in submarines and aircraft. However it was done, gathering sigint almost always involved a three-stage process. First, someone had to listen in to and record the intercepted message. Throughout the Cold War this person was often the Godforsaken GCHQ ‘operator’ who sat for eight hours at a time in front of a rack radio made by Racal. With headphones on and the volume turned up to ‘max’ he or she endured the freezing cold of the German winter and the unbearable heat of the Iraqi summer. Once the message was captured it was passed back to Cheltenham for processing. If it was in code, it might be given to X Division, a section staffed by ‘boffins’ with vast computers whose power far outstripped that available to ordinary scientists. Finally, intelligence analysts would try to compose the resulting material into useful summaries. Stamped with an excruciatingly high security classification, it was then circulated to Cabinet Ministers, defence chiefs and senior policy-makers. Often, only a few hours after they had been read by the ‘high-ups’, the summaries were whisked away in ‘burn-bags’ and consigned to vast incinerators to protect their secrecy.

GCHQ is also synonymous with the mysterious international network known as ‘Echelon’, run by British and American intelligence. Echelon is the world’s largest information ‘vacuum cleaner’, drawing in huge amounts of communications – an estimated five billion intercepts every day. Yet much of what we have come to believe about this network is wrong.¹⁵ The Anglo–American sigint relationship is often portrayed as a cosy affair of affable, pipe-smoking professor types. In fact, the politics of intelligence was often opportunistic and harsh. Secretly, the British and Americans worked together to read the traffic of their own minor allies, including France and West Germany. Even at the top, relations between the two main partners, Britain and the United States, could turn nasty and involved sharp disagreements.

What bound Britain and America together in the world of signals intelligence was realism, not romanticism. Anglo–American intelligence cooperation was about trading ‘terrain for technology’. America had its own vast code-breaking organisation, the National Security Agency (NSA), with infinitely more resources than the British. However, the American code-breakers needed remote outposts in Britain’s ‘residual empire’ at which to base their listening stations, and they rewarded GCHQ handsomely with access to remarkable technology. Some locations, such as Cyprus, were so important to the collection of sigint that UKUSA actually helped to shape the international politics of the region. In 1974, faced with a financial crisis, the British government formally decided to withdraw from its bases in Cyprus in order to save money. Within days, Washington told London that this decision was not acceptable and they must stay. The reason was simple. The sigint bases that allowed America to listen in to the Middle East were quite indispensable. In 2009, more than thirty years after the British government’s decision to withdraw from Cyprus, the sigint bases are still there, and have grown considerably in size.

Cold War espionage activity enjoyed a high profile. British defectors such as Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean hit the headlines in the 1950s. The 1960s opened with the shooting down of the American U-2 spy plane piloted by Gary Powers, the CIA’s fiasco at the Bay of Pigs and the Profumo affair. Yet GCHQ managed to avoid the glare of unwelcome publicity until the last decade of the Cold War. Its journey from the shadows into the spotlight only began in 1976, when the radical journalist Duncan Campbell revealed its intelligence operations on Cyprus in an article in Time Out magazine. This led to the infamous ‘ABC trial’, at which Campbell and his associates were prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act. Thereafter, GCHQ’s hopes to return to obscurity were dashed by the Geoffrey Prime affair in 1982. Prime, who revealed the innermost working of America’s latest multi-billion-dollar sigint satellite programme to the Soviets, was one of the most damaging moles ever recruited from inside British intelligence. Just as the Prime case subsided, any hopes of a return to anonymity were obliterated by Margaret Thatcher’s controversial decision to ban trade unions at GCHQ.

Expensive technical agencies such as GCHQ and America’s NSA were obvious targets for cuts at the end of the Cold War. At the same time, both agencies were struggling to cope with the pace of the global information-technology revolution, that had made access to high-grade encryption easy for the private individual. All this, together with the exponential growth in internet traffic, threatened to make the work of GCHQ and NSA impossibly difficult. Soon the world was sending several million emails a second, and not even the great sigint leviathans could read them all. The days of the super-secret sigint agencies seemed numbered. However, in the 1990s Britain’s prominent role in the wars in Bosnia and then Kosovo reminded government that the need for sigint is perennial. In these Byzantine conflicts, the radio experts at Cheltenham were never quite sure which of the many different former Yugoslavian factions their various friends and allies were supporting.

Bitter conflicts such as Bosnia helped to convince Whitehall and Westminster that GCHQ was worth new investment. In 1996, under the direction of Sir David Omand, GCHQ began to develop plans for a remarkable new intelligence headquarters that quickly became known as ‘the Doughnut’ owing to its circular design. The intention was to bring all the staff together under one roof for the first time. Absorbing no less than fifteen miles of carpet and several hundred miles of fibre-optic cabling, ‘the Doughnut’ constituted the largest secret intelligence headquarters outside the United States. However, by the time it was completed in 2003, it was already too small. GCHQ had by then undergone a crash expansion following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Its employees, now numbering more than 5,200, were soon ‘hot-desking’. A shanty town of subsidiary buildings is already springing up around the new headquarters.

Today, in somewhat cramped circumstances, GCHQ struggles with some of the most difficult issues of the twenty-first century. Not only is it the leading edge of Britain’s struggle against al Qaeda, it is also involved in fundamental issues of freedom and privacy that will shape the future of our society. Over the last decade, Britain has engaged with global e-commerce and finance more enthusiastically than perhaps any other country in the world. Our porous electronic borders present their own enormous problems. Globalisation, and in particular the global communications revolution, has brought many benefits, but it has also allowed miscreants to communicate and organise anonymously. The need for GCHQ to monitor both terrorists and organised crime means that the distinction between domestic and foreign communications has less meaning than it once had. GCHQ used to be a wholly outward-looking foreign intelligence service, but this is no longer the case.

Who will rule the internet? Will ordinary citizens be allowed genuinely confidential communication? Would ID cards erode our privacy or extend our security? These are some of the questions that GCHQ ponders daily at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century. Britain is already one of the most watched societies in the world, and some would argue that it is now addicted to surveillance. In 2008, Britain announced a £12 billion project to modernise the interception of telephone calls and email. The following year GCHQ announced a remarkable project entitled ‘Mastering the Internet’ that collects the details of Britain’s communications and internet traffic for security purposes. Even Britain’s Director of Public Prosecutions thought things had gone too far. Tasked with taking the lead on technological aspects of intelligence, GCHQ now finds itself at the centre of controversies that are of immense public importance. Accordingly, the time is ripe to trace GCHQ’s long and secretive journey from the nissen huts of Bletchley Park – via the Cold War – towards what now looks increasingly like a Brave New World.

THE 1940s BLETCHLEY PARK AND BEYOND

1 Schooldays

‘How wonderful!’ I said. ‘Do you mean we’re overhearing Portsmouth ships trying to talk to each other – that we’re eavesdropping across half South England?’

‘‘Just that.’

Rudyard Kipling, ‘Wireless’, 1904¹

In December 1902, Guglielmo Marconi made history by sending the first wireless radio message across the Atlantic. Remarkably, only two years later, Rudyard Kipling foretold the possibility of exploiting such radio messages to gather intelligence. In 1904 he published a short story entitled ‘Wireless’ that focused on intercepting communications sent from Morse equipment on board Royal Navy ships off the Isle of Wight. Kipling is thought of as a quintessentially late-Victorian author, but here he looks to the future, more in the manner of H.G. Wells, as his characters fret over technical matters such as induction and radio frequencies. To the readers of this fictional first instance of radio interception, the process seemed utterly magical. The Morse instrument ‘ticked furiously’, and one of the listening party observes that it reminds him of a séance, with ‘odds and ends of messages coming out of nowhere’. His companion retorts that spiritualists and mediums ‘are all impostors’, whereas these naval messages that they are eavesdropping on are the real thing.²

Kipling’s ‘Wireless’ is the first public discussion of the secret business of signals intelligence, or ‘sigint’. The magical process of extracting information from the ether would be one of the twentieth century’s most closely guarded secrets. Initially, producing ‘sigint’ only required equipment that would allow a third party to eavesdrop on a conversation broadcast by a radio transmitter using ‘wireless telegraphy’, but as this possibility became more widely known, communicators often resorted to using cyphers to keep their messages private. Thereafter, producing sigint usually required skilled listeners to capture the message and then a team of code-breakers to unscramble it. If the message was sent by cable rather than wireless, the listening-in process could be no less difficult than the code-breaking, or ‘decyphering’.

What did Britain’s code-breakers make of Kipling’s public airing of their black arts? The simple answer is that there were none to ask. Indeed, there had been no British code-breakers for more than fifty years. In the distant past, Britain had possessed a ‘black chamber’ in which skilled ‘cryptanalysts’ had broken the codes contained in diplomatic correspondence and private letters. These arcane skills resided in the ‘Secret Department’ of the Post Office. However, in 1847 this was exposed in a scandalous episode when the House of Commons heard that the Home Secretary had ordered the interception of the private correspondence of the heroic Italian nationalist in exile, Giuseppe Mazzini. Shocked Members of Parliament ordered an inquiry, leading to the closure of the ‘Secret Department’, just as the telegraph initiated what we now understand as a Victorian communications revolution. By 1904, Britain had been without a code-breaking centre for more than half a century³

The immediate origins of MI5 and its sister service SIS (often known as MI6) can be traced to scares about German espionage in 1909. But British code-breaking was not revived until the very eve of the First World War. On 2 August 1914 the British Army set up a secret code-breaking section called MIlb. Soon, specialist Army units at various locations in Europe and the Middle East were busy intercepting German radio communications. One of the largest sites was the intercept station in Mesopotamia. In December 1916 the military code-breakers of MIlb were given a fabulous Christmas present when the drunken chief of the German signals organisation in the Middle East sent all his Radio Operators a seasonal greeting using the same obvious formula in no fewer than six different codes. Up until that point the British had only been able to read one of these codes, but with these clues they could read all six. In the First World War, the Second World War and again in the Cold War, poor discipline by the human operators often proved to be the great weakness in otherwise impregnable cypher systems.⁴

The Royal Navy code-breakers, who had established themselves in the Admiralty’s ‘Room 40’, achieved even greater success. Famously, they broke the ‘Zimmermann Telegram’, a message sent from the German Foreign Minister, Arthur Zimmermann, suggesting an alliance between Germany and Mexico against the United States. As an inducement, Mexico was to be offered the return of her lost territories in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. These revelations, made public in March 1917, were central in bringing the United States into the First World War on the side of Britain and France. The American entry into the war, together with a tightening blockade, persuaded Germany to seek an armistice the following year. The code-breakers of Room 40 celebrated with champagne. There are few more significant examples of the direct impact of code-breaking upon international relations.⁵

In 1919 the British government’s Secret Service Committee, chaired by Lord Curzon, the rather formidable Foreign Secretary, recommended that a unified peacetime code-breaking agency should be created. This involved the difficult merger of two quite separate organisations. The head of the Army code-breakers, Major Malcolm Hay, was awkward and argumentative, while his naval equivalent, Commander Alastair Denniston, proved to be suave and diplomatic. Denniston secured the job as chief of a new combined code-breaking organisation, which initially consisted of around two dozen intelligence officers and a similar number of clerical staff, and found himself installed in splendid accommodation at Watergate House in The Strand, next to the Savoy Hotel. Formed on 1 November 1919, the new organisation was given the name ‘Government Code and Cypher School’, or GC&CS, which was not inappropriate, since the leading code-breakers devoted a great deal of time to the patient training of new initiates.⁶ Both during the First World War and in the interwar period about half the staff of GC&CS and its predecessors were women, mostly in the clerical grades.

Almost immediately, GC&CS adopted a disingenuous description of its duties that would remain in place until the 1980s. Publicly, its functions were described as merely defensive; in other words, it was to assist in the provision and protection of codes and cyphers used by government departments. However, its more secret duty was to give priority to offensive activity, namely attacking the cypher communications used by foreign powers. GC&CS gradually shifted its focus to diplomatic traffic, and at the suggestion of Lord Curzon it was transferred to the control of the Foreign Office. It seemed natural that within the Foreign Office structure it should be placed under the supervision of Britain’s traditional overseas intelligence service, SIS, which recruited human spies. But a subliminal naval influence remained. The talented Chief of SIS, Mansfield Cumming (known within the organisation as ‘C’, the name by which the head of SIS would continue to be called), was a former naval officer. Cumming died in harness in 1923 and was succeeded by another sailor, the former head of Naval Intelligence, Hugh ‘Quex’ Sinclair. Naval intelligence and naval signals officers continued to exercise a profound influence on GC&CS and its successors as late as the 1970s.

The means by which Britain collected its intelligence was changing. During the First World War, much of its intelligence work had involved overhearing military wireless messages by means of receiving stations scattered around Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East. The shift to diplomatic traffic meant undertaking more work on encyphered diplomatic telegrams sent by cable. Each country had teams of code clerks who carefully encyphered diplomatic messages before they were sent by telegram using a worldwide network of cables. Although government cable censorship had officially ended in 1918, a private arrangement meant that all the commercial cable companies secretly handed over their traffic to GC&CS for copying. Most of the foreign embassies in London used cable companies to send their encyphered messages, and British dominance of international telecommunications networks meant that many of the world’s messages travelled over British cables at some point. Private companies such as Standard Cable & Wireless Ltd were almost an integral part of the worldwide British sigint system. This secret state-private network remained hidden until it was exposed by the journalist Chapman Pincher in February 1967 in the Daily Mail under the headline ‘Cable Vetting Sensation’.⁷

In 1925 both SIS and GC&CS were moved into Sinclair’s new secret service headquarters at Broadway Buildings, opposite St James’s Park tube station, which its occupants thought ‘more dingy than sinister’. The walls of the corridors were painted dark brown to a height of about four feet from the floor, and the ancient lifts moved between the many storeys with a slow clatter. The code-breakers were given the third floor. From here, the sigint product, which consisted of the verbatim text (or sometimes summaries) of the messages of foreign governments was distributed around Whitehall in files with special blue jackets that became known as ‘BJs’. GC&CS worked on the cyphers of many countries in the interwar period, including those of France, the United States and Japan, since they all shed light on international affairs; but the most important were those of Russia.⁸

Both MI5 and SIS, together with intelligence officers from the three armed services, were obsessed with the threat from Bolshevik Russia in the interwar period. GC&CS followed suit. There were good reasons for making Moscow the pre-eminent target. Bolshevik agents were actively seeking to subvert the British Empire, and sigint produced operational intelligence that could be used to thwart these plots. Alastair Denniston enjoyed a major advantage, having recruited Ernst Fetterlein, the Tsar’s leading code-breaker, when he fled Russia after the Revolution of 1917, and in the 1920s GC&CS was successfully reading Soviet diplomatic cyphers. Several times during that decade the British government directly accused the Soviets of underhand activities in London, making use of these intercepts and referring to them openly. In 1923, for example, Lord Curzon publicly quoted Soviet messages intercepted by GC&CS stations in India. The Soviets responded by changing their cyphers, but Fetterlein simply broke them again.⁹

However, in May 1927, a year after the General Strike, a disastrous row erupted over secret support from Moscow for the strikers and the distribution of subversive propaganda in Britain. A veritable centre for Soviet subversion was being run under the cover of its Trade Mission, located in the Arcos building in Moorgate. The building was raided on 12 May, but advance warning allowed the Soviets to destroy most of the incriminating material. The Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, was embarrassed. He ardently desired to break off relations with Moscow, but having failed to garner any incriminating evidence from the Arcos raid, he turned to the priceless intercepts provided by GC&CS. To the dismay of the code-breakers, Baldwin and his Foreign Secretary, Neville Chamberlain, read out four decyphered Soviet telegrams in Parliament in order to make their case. Alastair Denniston was especially bitter about this flagrant compromise of GC&CS secrets.¹⁰

Henceforth, the Soviets changed their cyphers and deployed more secure systems for communications with diplomatic and commercial missions overseas, including their intelligence stations. They now used the ‘one-time pad’ for their more important communications. The one-time pad was a breakthrough system created by an American army officer, Major Joseph Mauborgne, during the First World War and widely adopted by other powers. It involved using a sheet of random numbers to encypher a message. Each letter in the message was given a number. Each number was then added to another from a stream of random numbers taken from a sheet on the one-time pad. The result was a sheet of text that consisted simply of groups of five numbers, one after another. Recipients could decode the message if they possessed the same sheet from the same one-time pad. If that sheet was used only once – hence the name – and for a single message, the lack of repetition prevented decryption. In short, the code was unbreakable. The disadvantage was that it was slow and cumbersome, and therefore it was reserved for high-grade secrets. Moreover, vast numbers of pads with lists of random numbers were required. No country, not even the security-obsessed Soviet Union, could send all its communications by this means.¹¹

Nevertheless, after 1927, few Soviet diplomatic messages were being read by GC&CS. The only high-grade Soviet traffic that was decyphered were the messages of the Comintern, the part of the Soviet Communist Party that dealt with relations with Communist parties overseas. This effort was led by John Tiltman, a brilliant major from the Indian Army who had been running a small but successful interception effort in north India during the 1920s. In 1929 he was brought back to London to lead an expanded operation against Comintern communications (which were code-named ‘Mask’). This allowed the British government to learn of the secret subsidies paid by Moscow to the Communist Party of Great Britain and its newspaper, the Daily Worker. It also contributed to important successes against major Comintern agents in imperial outposts and international centres such as Singapore and Shanghai.¹²

Faced with the real threat of active subversion throughout the British Empire by the Comintern, GC&CS paid limited attention to military matters or the rise of the Axis until the mid-1930s. Germany, Italy and Japan were a remarkably low priority. Admittedly, a small naval section of GC&CS had been set up in 1925, and its most important work was done overseas by naval officers like Eric Nave, based in Hong Kong. From here they had ample practice at following military operations, because of the extensive fighting in Manchuria during the 1930s. Italy’s attack on Abyssinia in 1936 provided a new target for British code-breakers in the Middle East, located at sites such as Habbaniya in Iraq and Sarafand in Palestine. Remarkably, and despite the growing importance of air power, GC&CS only developed an RAF section in 1936, under Josh Cooper, a young and talented code-breaker who had joined the organisation a decade earlier with a First in Russian from King’s College London.¹³

Cyphers were important to the Axis military powers. One-time pads were slow and cumbersome. Moreover, they were out of step with the emerging new methods of warfare. Blitzkrieg, for example, required armoured forces to move forward at lightning speed, coordinating their activities with artillery and air support. So the pressure was on to find a way of making the growing volume of military radio traffic unintelligible to the enemy. Most developed countries turned to cypher machines to make their immense volumes of traffic secure.¹⁴ Complex cypher machines had been pioneered by banks and businesses – banks had long used fairly simple cyphers to keep commercial matters secret. In the 1920s, the German military adapted a Dutch invention to produce the Enigma cypher machine as an alternative to laborious hand cyphers. In fact, the first Enigma machines were sold commercially, and were widely used by banks and businesses. Enigma was what we now recognise as a ‘commercial off-the-shelf solution’ to a difficult military problem.¹⁵

The Enigma machine itself looked like an early typewriter in a square wooden box, but with a keyboard set out in alphabetical order rather than the traditional ‘QWERTY’ arrangement. As each letter key was depressed a set of lights that corresponded to the alphabet lit up, seemingly at random. The innovation was the rotors, which looked like fat metal wheels, embedded in the top of the machine. These rotated and scrambled the message in a highly unpredictable way. There were initially three – later four – rotors, with twenty-six positions relating to the letters of the alphabet. These moved round in a stepping motion that generated a cypher with an enormous number of possibilities. Moreover the complex nature of the rotation caused subtle changes in the stream of material, creating substantial headaches for any would-be code-breaker. The Germans were not alone in developing cypher machines. The British and Americans developed similar devices, respectively called the Typex and Sigaba.¹⁶

Critical to the breaking of Enigma was assistance from the secret services of France and Poland. French intelligence employed a lugubrious German agent called Hans Schmidt, who worked in the German military cypher department. Fond of the finer things in life, which the French secret service supplied to him in abundance, Schmidt divulged many technical documents about Enigma, including messages in both clear and encyphered text. He was later betrayed, and would commit suicide using cyanide procured for him by his daughter. By 1938 these secrets were being shared with the British through ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale, the SIS station chief in Paris. However, when the French gave the British material on German Air Force communications a further secret was accidentally revealed, namely that the French were also working on Enigma in collaboration with the Poles. In January 1939 Alastair Denniston took two of his top code-breakers, Hugh Foss and Dilly Knox, to Paris to meet their French and Polish opposite numbers. Eventually they discovered that the Poles had completely reconstructed the German version of the Enigma machine.¹⁷

Remarkably, by 1938 the Polish code-breakers were able to read the majority of German Army Enigma messages. The Polish breakthrough had been to train professional mathematicians to help them, together with the use of a primitive processor called the ‘bomba’ or ‘bombe’ – so named because of the alarming ticking noise it made – to find the rotor settings. One of their first ‘bombes’ was a weird contraption that consisted of no fewer than six Enigma-type machines wired together to provide rapid processing of possible solutions. Polish resources were limited, and by late 1938 new advances in the Enigma machine were running ahead of the ability of the Poles to do their calculations. But the precious secrets that the Poles taught the British were enough to continue the unravelling of Enigma. The timing was an extraordinary stroke of luck, since the talented Polish cypher bureau was within two months of being broken up by the coordinated German–Soviet invasion of Poland in the autumn of 1939. Before the Polish secret service was forced to flee Warsaw, its agents had achieved the remarkable feat of stealing several examples of the military Enigma machine from the German factory where they were made.

In the late 1930s, Britain lived in the shadow of the aerial bomber. Following the tragic fate of the Spanish town of Guernica in the spring of 1937, the presumption was that the first few days of the approaching war with Germany would bring untold destruction from the air, levelling the cities of Europe. By the Munich Crisis of 1938, Whitehall had begun to make emergency preparations. Admiral Hugh Sinclair, the Chief of SIS, was busy looking for alternative wartime accommodation away from London for both SIS and GC&CS. He soon settled on a country house, Bletchley Park, near Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire, as an ideal location for the code-breakers. Much has been made of Bletchley Park’s proximity to Oxford and Cambridge, but in fact the availability of good trunk cable communications was the dominant consideration. Bureaucratic bickering now erupted. Although GC&CS was run by the Foreign Office, its relocation was considered to be war contingency planning, so the diplomats insisted that the military pay the bill. Predictably, the War Office insisted that GC&CS was nothing to do with it, and emergency relocation for Britain’s most valuable wartime asset stalled. In the end, Hugh Sinclair bought Bletchley Park with his own money, paying over £7,500 (more than £330,000 at today’s prices). This remarkable act of generosity allowed the first wave of evacuated staff to arrive at Bletchley on 15 August 1939. Sinclair’s largesse did not stop there. He acquired a top chef from London to provide food to the code-breakers in a restaurant in the main hall, complete with full waitress service.¹⁸

The emphasis at Bletchley Park was distinctly military. The main body of GC&CS was initially broken up into Naval, Military and Air Sections and allocated to the ground floor of the main house, while SIS was given the top floor, indicating that it still ruled the roost. On the periphery, an ever-growing collection of numbered wooden huts – including the famous Hut Three and Hut Six – were being constructed. Particular activities were associated with each hut: typically, the core of the Enigma problem was worked on in Hut Six, while its exploitation for intelligence purposes was undertaken in Hut Three. One former code-breaker recalls that the main house was soon ‘too small for more than a handful of top brass and their immediate acolytes’. So Bletchley Park’s considerable garden, with its rosebeds and delightful maze, gradually disappeared beneath the expanding penumbra of temporary structures.¹⁹ The shadow of the bomber even reached out to Bletchley Park. The radio transmission infrastructure involved elaborate aerials which had the potential to give away the site’s location from the air. Accordingly, Bletchley Park’s own radio station was moved to nearby Whaddon Hall. As the operation gained momentum, other nearby premises were absorbed. Elmers School, a neighbouring boys’ boarding establishment, was requisitioned for the GC&CS Diplomatic Sections.

Bletchley Park was Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair’s last bequest to Britain’s sigint community. Through the early autumn of 1939 it was clear that he was terminally ill with cancer. His deputy and heir apparent, Stewart Menzies, was not regarded as a great brain, and indeed despised intellectuals. Sir Alexander Cadogan, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, vigorously resisted the idea that Menzies might succeed Sinclair, and argued for someone from outside SIS to shake the organisation up. Senior SIS officers, however, did not want ‘a new broom at this critical stage’.²⁰ Cadogan noted in his diary, ‘I am not satisfied that Menzies is the man,’ but Menzies did have a crude talent for furthering his own ambitions, which he soon demonstrated. On Sunday, 5 November he came to see Cadogan bearing the sad news of the death of Sinclair the previous day. Cadogan noted that he ‘gave me a sealed letter from “C” recommending him (M[enzies]) as successor’.²¹ Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, pressed for Menzies, who was finally accepted as the new Chief on 28 November.²²

The arrival of Menzies was a problem for Bletchley Park because the code-breakers were still subordinate to SIS. Under Menzies the administration of SIS was ‘chaotic’, and its headquarters was in ‘a state of upheaval’ throughout 1940.²³ Cadogan maintained his view that Menzies was a mentally disorganised intriguer who devoted more time to protecting the interests of SIS than to serious intelligence-collection. Typically, in March 1941, after Cadogan had met Menzies and the Directors of Intelligence of the three armed services, he recorded in his diary: ‘“C” as usual, a bad advocate on his own behalf. He babbles and wanders, and gives the impression he is putting up a smokescreen of words and trying to put his questioners off the track.’²⁴ Cadogan longed to see a thorough overhaul of SIS, which he regarded as an organisational basket-case. However, as the war dragged on, he had less and less time for the politics of intelligence.²⁵ Quite understandably, SIS wanted to keep all code-breaking under its wing, since it was a form of foreign intelligence-gathering. Menzies was also adamant that he should retain personal control over Ultra.²⁶ If possible, he preferred to take this material to Churchill personally, basking in its reflected glory. But he did not know how to manage Bletchley Park, and as a result it was under-resourced.²⁷ In the words of one SIS contemporary, Menzies regarded anything to do with personnel or administration as ‘dirty work’, and would go to considerable lengths to avoid it.²⁸

Bletchley Park may have been chaotic, but it was a creative and innovative chaos that allowed the code-breakers to make a fresh start in the Buckinghamshire countryside.²⁹ The head of GC&CS, Alastair Denniston, spent the autumn of 1939 making detailed war preparations. His task was to find new cryptographers to fill out the ranks of Bletchley Park. His valuable contacts with the Poles and their success with the ‘bombe’ had led him to realise that he not only needed more code-breakers, he also needed mathematically-inclined individuals. Most of the current inhabitants of GC&CS were linguists with a penchant for Latin and Greek. He now needed people who loved maths and machines, and in September 1939 he was actively scouring the high tables of Oxbridge colleges for talent. The brilliant new mathematicians he recruited included Gordon Welchman from Trinity College, Cambridge, who would run the heart of the code-breaking operations in Hut Six. He brought with him Stuart Milner-Barry from the same college, who was the chess correspondent of The Times and who eventually took over as head of Hut Six. In turn, Milner-Barry brought fellow members of the British chess team, Hugh Alexander and Harry Golombek, to Bletchley.³⁰

These arrivals came not a moment too soon. Hitler’s attack on Poland had tipped Europe into all-out conflict, and Bletchley Park was now a fully operational war station. The pressure was on to make progress against Enigma. The most brilliant mind engaged in this task was Alan Mathison Turing, who made an early and important contribution. Despite understanding the abstract problems of Enigma some months into the war, GC&CS was having difficulty in breaking any real Enigma messages, and was not delivering much product. To have examples of the machine was not enough, since the security of the messages it sent depended on the ‘key’, in other words the settings of the machine, which changed each day. Turing was sent to see the remnants of the Polish code-breaking team, now residing near Paris, to try to work out what the British were doing wrong. The Poles explained that the British had failed to think through the way in which the wiring was attached to the rotors of the Enigma machine.

In early 1940, with this further helpful shove from its allies, Bletchley Park began breaking substantial amounts of Enigma traffic. There were many different Enigma cyphers, and to distinguish them, they were colour-coded. In February 1940, Bletchley Park began breaking ‘Red’, which was an invaluable system used for liaison between the German Army and the Luftwaffe. Periodically, a change to a German cypher system would cause the British code-breakers to lose it for a while, and quite often recovering it depended on second-guessing the lazy habits of the operators. German overconfidence in the improved Enigma machine led to basic mistakes that greatly simplified the task of those whose objective was to tease out the rotor setting for each day.³¹

By early 1941, the flow of material from the breaking of Enigma was impressive. The intelligence from Bletchley Park was circulated on a very select basis, and was marked with the code word ‘Ultra’ to denote the extremely high level of security attached to the material. Menzies showcased his triumph by taking senior figures from Whitehall on day trips to Bletchley Park. On 11 January it was the turn of Alexander Cadogan. He noted in his diary:

Cold but thawing. Had a rush at the FO till 11, when I left with Menzies for Bletchley. Got there about 12.30. Very Interesting – I should like to spend a week there so as to try and understand it. A charming young Cambridge professor of geometry – Welshman [Gordon Welchman] – did his best with me. A good show, I think.³²

Others soon made the pilgrimage to the strange mock-Tudor mansion surrounded by temporary huts. On 6 September 1941 Winston Churchill himself, now Prime Minister, stood on a pile of bricks left by some workmen alongside Hut Six and gave an impromptu speech – delivered with deep emotion – about the value of Bletchley Park to the war effort.³³

Unbeknown to Churchill, Bletchley Park was in deep crisis. This was partly due to its rapid growth, and partly to the uncertain institutional boundaries that were evolving almost daily. The situation was exacerbated by a complex relationship with the ‘Y services’, the lower-order radio intercept organisations run by the Army, Navy and Air Force that fed Bletchley with captured traffic. Meanwhile the three armed services were themselves vying for increased control over who received the output from GC&CS. This was precisely the kind of complex organisational puzzle that Menzies was ill-equipped to deal with. Matters reached a head in the autumn of 1941, forcing Menzies to appoint a Joint Committee of Control, which included members of both SIS and GC&CS. However, as the historian Philip Davies observes, ‘Like so many of Menzies’ administrative initiatives, the committee proved unequal to the task.’³⁴ There was also a general resources problem. Having made significant inroads into German Enigma traffic, there were simply not enough staff at Bletchley Park to process the vast torrents of accessible German communications. Neither Alastair Denniston nor his deputy, Edward Travis, had the pull in Whitehall to overcome the shortage.³⁵

Churchill was not ignorant of this state of affairs for long. Recalling the Prime Minister’s kind words during his recent visit, the code-breakers resolved to go straight to the top. On 21 October 1941, four of the most brilliant minds at Bletchley Park, Hugh Alexander, Stuart Milner-Barry, Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman, wrote directly to Churchill to beg for more resources, explaining that their work was so secret that it was hard to explain their requirements to those who controlled personnel.³⁶ So secret was their missive that Milner-Barry took the train to London and delivered it personally to 10 Downing Street. Churchill was shocked by these revelations, and demanded ‘Action This Day’. He ordered his military assistant, General Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay, to ensure that GC&CS had everything it needed, and to report that this had been done.³⁷ As a result, Bletchley Park underwent a further expansion, and more importantly a major reorganisation.³⁸

GC&CS was now divided into two distinct parts, civil and military. The end of the Blitz meant that the civil side, which dealt with economic and diplomatic traffic, could be sent back to London with relative safety. It took up residence in Berkeley Street, partly because the work of attacking diplomatic codes often had to be coordinated with discreet telephone taps on the foreign embassies in London. The military side remained at Bletchley Park. This did not resolve the heated arguments about who controlled the spoils of GC&CS, but it did address the immediate accommodation problems, and created two organisations of a more manageable size. Menzies retained his post as overall Director, but was a notably absentee landlord. Alastair Denniston was sent to London as Deputy Director (Civil), while his talented deputy, Commander Edward Travis, remained at Bletchley as Deputy Director (Services).³⁹ Travis was now the rising star.⁴⁰

British code-breaking in the early years of the war was not just about the German military secrets revealed through Enigma. Even harder to break than the Enigma machine had been a German teleprinter on-line cypher machine known as ‘Tunny’, used by the German High Command to produce ‘Fish’ messages. On-line cypher machines were especially challenging because they were automatic, and sent a continuous stream of text, much of it dummy material, sometimes offering no obvious start or end points to each message. This went some way to eliminating another weakness of the Enigma machine – its operators, who were prone to human error. To address the problem of ‘Tunny’, the British later built ‘Colossus’, one of the earliest general-purpose electronic machines, and perhaps the first device that might be described as a ‘computer’. Conceived by Professor Max Newman and then developed by Tommy Flowers from the British Post Office research facility at Dollis Hill, this was one of the supreme technical achievements of the war.⁴¹

The achievements of the civil side of GC&CS have often been neglected. By 1940 it was analysing not only the diplomatic codes and cyphers of the Axis powers, but also those of more than twenty other countries. These included the Soviet Union, which did not enter the war until it was attacked by Germany on 22 June 1941. The diplomatic communications of quarrelsome allies such as the Free French, or important neutrals such as the Turks and the Spanish, proved as interesting and as useful as those of Germany. Moreover, the traffic of Germany’s allies, such as Japan, could shed a penetrating light on the mindset of Berlin. Throughout 1941 Hitler held regular meetings with Baron Oshima, the Japanese Ambassador in Berlin, often referred to as ‘Hitler’s Japanese confidant’. Japan had its own complex cypher, known as ‘Magic’, produced by a machine called ‘Purple’, and Oshima used it to send detailed accounts of his long conversations with Hitler to Tokyo. ‘Magic’ had been broken by the Americans, and early Anglo–American cooperation on code-breaking ensured that all this was being read in London. Remarkably, Berkeley Street was also working on the cyphers of the United States, which did not join the war until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941.⁴²

The dramatic events of 1941 transformed the course of the Second World War. Although the Battle of Britain had staved off the possibility of a German invasion, by the summer of 1941 Britain had been fighting for almost two years without a major victory. Therefore, Hitler’s bizarre decision to invade Russia in June 1941, which required the legions of the Wehrmacht to turn east, provided a welcome breathing space. After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Britain, the United States and Russia found themselves ranged together against the Axis in what was soon called the ‘Grand Alliance’. Welcome as this was, a genuine world war created new dilemmas for the denizens of Bletchley Park, who now confronted the ticklish issue of large-scale Allied cooperation in the business of code-breaking.

2 Friends and Allies

…there is no better analogy than the schoolboy with his stamp collection.

GC&CS, discussing intelligence cooperation with the Russians in 1943¹

The most secret aspect of Bletchley Park’s wartime work was its dealings with friends and allies. Many have pondered whether the British attacked Soviet codes and cyphers during the Second World War. The official history of British intelligence insists that Churchill ordered this activity to stop in June 1941, following Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, since Moscow had suddenly become an ally.² However, it is now clear that this is quite untrue. At the end of October 1941, intelligence chiefs were actually discussing the expansion of the sigint organisation in India, which was then dealing with ‘material from Russian, Persian and Afghan sources’. Remarkably, it was not yet working on German traffic.³ Moreover, in January 1942, and again in early 1943, the British and the Americans were discussing the mutual exchange of intercepted material from ‘Slavic nations’.⁴ Soviet cyphers had been the core business for Britain’s interwar code-breakers, and work on this material never stopped completely during the Second World War.

To understand why, we must cast our minds back to the approach of the war. During the 1930s, GC&CS continued to follow the traffic of the Comintern even after other Soviet systems were lost. This revealed persistent efforts to subvert the British Empire in locations such as India, Malaya and Hong Kong. Indeed, the Soviet Union appeared to be in league with Germany after the Nazi–Soviet Pact of August 1939. It is often forgotten that Poland was invaded by Germany and the Soviet Union together. For a nightmare period between August 1939 and June 1941, many suspected that Germany, Italy, Japan and the Soviet Union would act in uneasy concert, dividing the spoils of the world between them. This was precisely the plan that Germany’s Foreign Minister, Baron Joachim von Ribbentrop, was trying to press upon his irascible master. However, in the end Adolf Hitler’s racist outlook could not tolerate the idea of alliance with the Slavic peoples, and he had always declared his desire for ‘Lebensraum’ in the east.⁵

Throughout this dangerous period, before Hitler and Stalin turned upon each other, the Soviet Union remained a key intelligence target. SIS even organised a secret squadron to conduct aerial reconnaissance of possible bombing targets deep inside southern Russia, notably the oilfields. GC&CS developed close relations with code-breakers in the Baltic states who were also working on Soviet codes. A month after the outbreak of war with Germany, Clive Loehnis, a naval officer at GC&CS (who would become Director of GCHQ in the 1960s), told Alastair Denniston that additional premises were needed to cope with the increase in the interception of Soviet military traffic, so new buildings were erected at Scarborough.⁶ With the military chiefs keen to ‘get cracking on Russian traffic’, Denniston began a unique and profitable experiment. In 1939 GC&CS sent a party of British sigint operators to Sweden to work secretly out of the British Embassy in Stockholm, where there was better radio reception from Russia. The creation of this forward listening station was fortuitous, since Stalin embarked on the Winter War against Finland in November 1939, and GC&CS enjoyed a front-seat view of the whole proceedings.⁷

John Tiltman remained the key figure in the effort against Soviet communications. A colonel in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, he was noted for his smart uniform, which included tartan trews. However, as the war progressed he came under the influence of the spirit of Bletchley Park, and was often seen in a baggy pullover and green corduroy slacks.⁸ One of his first duties was to visit Helsinki to conclude a deal with the talented Finnish code-breakers. Britain funded the expansion of the Finnish cryptographic bureau, and supplied it with the latest equipment in return for material on the Soviets. In March 1940, after imposing a series of humiliating defeats on the Soviets, the Finns signed the Moscow Peace Treaty, ceding about a tenth of their territory.⁹ The sigint deal with the British was unaffected, and indeed in September 1940 its scope was expanded during a visit by Admiral Godfrey, the Director of Naval Intelligence. According to an internal GC&CS history written after the war, ‘The Finns had agreed to supply us with copies of all their intercepts and cryptographic successes, provided that we did the same.’ Preceding the agreement with the Americans by more than a year, this was perhaps Britain’s first comprehensive sigint alliance.¹⁰

By March 1940, the interception of Soviet traffic was big business. For the first time, collection began in the Middle East, at Sarafand in Palestine, although it was still sent to India for analysis. Soviet traffic was also being taken at Ismailia in Egypt and Dingli in Malta. Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, other British sigint operators were also listening to the Soviets before they packed up their equipment to move to Singapore in anticipation of a Japanese attack. The surge of Soviet traffic meant changes were required at GC&CS, where an inter-service Soviet section was created to work in close conjunction on naval, military, air, diplomatic and commercial material. After the fall of France in the summer of 1940, evacuated French cryptographers joined the effort on Soviet traffic at GC&CS. A Polish section, based at Stanmore on the northern fringes of London, soon discovered that it was able to listen in to Soviet traffic as far away as Ukraine.¹¹

Ultra had provided Bletchley Park with an intimate picture of the build-up of German forces in the east, prior to their attack on the Soviet Union. As early as January 1941 it was clear that Hitler’s vast armies were being moved eastwards in preparation for some grand project. Yet even with the evidence of many German divisions massing in the east, Whitehall refused to believe that Hitler was mad enough to deliberately opt for war on two fronts. Like Stalin himself, the British Chiefs of Staff believed that this was more likely to be a prelude to a German ultimatum, a bluff in which Hitler would demand the cession of some further territory in Eastern Europe. Throughout early 1941, Stalin believed that all war warnings were self-serving efforts at deception by the West, which sought to provoke a war between Germany and the Soviet Union. Stalin has frequently been ridiculed for ignoring the warning signs of the impending attack, but despite the benefits of Ultra, it was only the month before the fateful date of 22 June 1941 that British intelligence chiefs realised what was about to occur.¹²

Hitler’s decision to turn east was a fabulous stroke of luck for Britain. At a time when its forces were struggling, this was a most welcome redirection of the main German war effort. Taken together with Pearl Harbor at the end of the year, it is right to regard 1941 as nothing less than the fulcrum of the war. However, Bletchley Park now faced a new problem. Should it pass sensitive intelligence derived from Ultra to the new Soviet ally, which had been a dedicated enemy of Britain since 1917? The idea that two of Britain’s adversaries were about to fight to the death filled most military intelligence officers with ill-disguised glee. Many argued that passing sigint to the Soviets was pointless, since few expected them to hold out later than 1942. Others insisted that not even Ultra could penetrate the fog of self-deception with which Stalin had surrounded himself.¹³

In the event, Bletchley Park did develop a precarious sigint liaison with the Soviets. When the British Chiefs of Staff despatched a military mission to Moscow, the code-breakers decided to work through it to find out what the Soviets were doing. They began cautiously, asking about ‘low-grade material only’, notably German Air Force three-letter tactical codes. They intended to send an officer from Bletchley, and in the long term even hoped to persuade the Soviets to accept a British Y unit, or forward listening station, that would intercept German tactical messages on their front. In late 1941 the Soviets agreed to a visit from Squadron Leader G.R. Scott-Farnie, who worked on Britain’s Y interception system in the Middle East.¹⁴

Scott-Farnie gave the Soviets a good deal of information on low-grade German Air Force systems, but quickly came up against a different culture of intelligence exchange.¹⁵ The Soviets adored captured documents, and did not attach much credence to any information that was not supported by such evidence. Once the game of document exchange began, Scott-Farnie discovered that the Soviet approach ‘was precisely that of a horse dealer who enjoys the poste and riposte of a bargain, and they looked at the exchange of documents on an eye for an eye basis’.¹⁶

Bletchley now had to decide whether to follow up the Scott-Farnie Mission. Alastair Denniston was ‘full of hesitation because of the continued Soviet retreat before the German onslaught’, but the intelligence directorates of Britain’s three armed services thought it worthwhile. Josh Cooper, who had reviewed the exchanged material, concluded that the Soviets were ‘absolute beginners’ in their work on the German Air Force, but thought they should be shown the RAF Y stations at Kingsdown in Kent and Cheadle in Cheshire to point them in the right direction. If the Soviets were impressed, he added, they might allow a British Y unit to be sent to the Soviet Union.¹⁷ In the end, Edward Crankshaw, an Army Y Service officer, was sent out, armed with more barter material in the form of documents. This was to be ‘swapped’ with the Soviet interceptors, since Bletchley Park thought ‘there is no better analogy than the schoolboy with his stamp collection’. By the spring of 1942 Crankshaw was established in the Soviet Union, and was trading his wares.¹⁸ However, the greatest success in the Soviet Union was achieved by the Royal Navy. It was running supply convoys to the Russian port of Murmansk, and this justified the setting up of a radio station at the nearby town of Polyarnoe. A small naval Y intercept party was soon attached to it, and began cooperating with the Soviets on low-level German naval communications. This kept going until December 1944, and yielded good material on subjects such as the movements of the German battleship Tirpitz in northern waters.¹⁹

The main worry about giving Ultra to the Soviets was the insecurity of their own cyphers – in 1942, Bletchley Park was increasingly aware of the German ability to read a great deal of Soviet operational military traffic in the field. Frederick Winterbotham, who worked on sigint distribution, argued that Moscow simply had to be told about the weak security of its cyphers. However, Winterbotham’s colleagues insisted that it was ‘impossible’ to tell the Soviets, even though he had ‘invented a good cover story’ to explain how they knew.²⁰ The secret truth was that Bletchley Park was collecting second-hand sigint. The Germans were sending their own sigint from the Eastern Front back to Berlin using an Enigma key code-named ‘Mustard’, which in turn was being read by the British. Although much of the sigint obtained from the Soviets was operational, the British also noted that ‘first grade traffic can be read – at least in part’ by the Germans. Some of the German successes had stemmed from a Soviet codebook, ‘OKK–5’, known to have been captured by the Finns and given to the Germans. While the British had struggled to break these codes in the 1930s, the Germans were having more success.²¹ On 16 June 1942, Nigel de Grey, the Deputy Director at Bletchley Park, stepped in and settled the argument. He noted that Edward Crankshaw, the GC&CS liaison with the Soviets, would soon be returning from Moscow for another visit. He would be ordered to give the Soviets the details of their compromised cyphers and ‘the methods of reading’. This decision probably reflected the fact that, against all predictions, the Soviet forces were hanging on impressively and looked as if they were going to be in the war for some time to come.²²

In August 1942, Crankshaw briefed the Soviets on their appalling lack of security, typified by their alarming tendency to use low-grade cyphers for high-grade secrets.²³ There was abundant evidence of this in German Air Force Enigma, but Crankshaw only hinted at it by ‘somewhat tenuous means’. Predictably, the Soviets would not accept his warnings because ‘direct evidence was not forthcoming’. Depressed, he went back to Bletchley Park in February 1943, never to return to Moscow. He joined the staff at Bletchley Park and tried to keep the relationship going at a distance, ‘but the temperature was falling’. The Director, Commander Edward Travis, was only willing to allow the relationship to continue ‘if it is a solid gain for us’. The Polyarnoe naval listening station continued to function, but with the Soviets turning the tide on the Eastern Front they seemed to feel no need for further cooperation, and other contacts ‘petered out’.²⁴ On 9 February 1944, London discussed the possibility of a visit to Britain by Soviet cypher experts and decided against it.²⁵

Bletchley Park’s heated debate on what information to give to the Soviets was academic. All along, one of the KGB’s top agents, John Cairncross, had been working at Bletchley. Although Cairncross studied at Cambridge in the early 1930s, he was not recruited by Anthony Blunt, one of the key KGB talent scouts there, who found him both quarrelsome and arrogant. Instead, after Cairncross joined the Foreign Office in 1936, he was persuaded to work for Soviet intelligence by James Klugman, a prominent British Communist, who later served in the wartime Special Operations Executive. Although Cairncross was fearsomely intelligent, his difficult personality ensured that he was always being moved on. At the outbreak of the war with Germany he was sent to the Cabinet Office to work for the Cabinet Secretary, Lord Hankey. There he saw some of the early British thinking on the development of the atomic bomb. In 1941 he was moved to Bletchley Park, labouring in Hut Three on the Luftwaffe order of battle. His moment of triumph came in early 1943 when he was able to warn his KGB controller of the impending German armoured offensive at Kursk. Code-named ‘Operation Citadel’, this was the last great German push on the Eastern Front. It proved to be the largest tank battle of the Second World War, and the information provided by Cairncross proved to be important in launching an early attack upon the German tactical air force, much of which was destroyed on the ground. Stalin later awarded him the Order of the Red Banner in recognition of his achievement.²⁶

Soon after Kursk, Cairncross moved again. He now returned to London and ended up in Section V, the counter-intelligence section of SIS, working alongside Kim Philby. Although he worked with Philby, Guy Burgess and indeed Donald Maclean, Cairncross was unaware of their common allegiance to Moscow, and believed he was the sole high-grade KGB agent in Whitehall. Bizarrely, he was caught in 1951 because of an official note in his handwriting found in the flat of Guy Burgess after Burgess had fled to Moscow with Maclean. Cairncross had given Burgess this quite innocently in the course of official business, without knowing he was a fellow spy. Once the note was found, Cairncross was followed, and MI5 surveillance believed they had caught him trying to meet with his KGB controller. Without hard evidence he could not be prosecuted, and he was merely asked to resign. Ironically, the Ultra material that Cairncross passed to the KGB was taken more seriously by Moscow precisely because it was stolen. Had the British handed it willingly to their ally, Stalin’s suspicious mind would almost certainly have devalued it.²⁷

Cairncross was not the only KGB agent with access to Ultra. In late 1942, Anthony Blunt, another high-grade Soviet agent, was designated one of the two MI5 liaison officers who worked closely with Bletchley Park.²⁸ Anxiety about KGB agents and subversion was yet another reason that the British kept working on Soviet traffic. Monitoring stations, notably the Metropolitan Police intercept station at Denmark Hill in south London, reported an upswing in traffic between Moscow and secret agents in Britain. There was also a British field unit, called the Radio Security Service, that hunted for illegal agent radio transmissions, and it told the same story, although the agent traffic could not be broken.²⁹ John Croft, who worked at the GC&CS diplomatic code-breaking centre at Berkeley Street in London, was one of those who soldiered on with Soviet material. Croft was engaged on wartime Comintern traffic in Europe, known as ‘Iscot’, which could be read. Although circulated only to a very select group of individuals within Whitehall, this material mostly revealed a dutiful Soviet struggle against their shared enemy, Nazi Germany. There is no indication that this material was exchanged with Washington.³⁰

Early British cooperation with the American code-breakers was also tentative. Again, the obstacle was obsessive security. Security problems existed on several different levels. The British and the Americans had cooperated on sigint during the First World War, but this had bequeathed a legacy of doubt and anxiety, even distrust. In November 1940, when reviving sigint cooperation with the Americans was discussed, Alastair Denniston was quick to point out that after the First World War the ‘notorious’ American code-breaker Herbert O. Yardley had published a tell-all book about his experiences. The very name ‘Yardley’ caused a shudder in British code-breaking circles. Yardley was now working for the Canadians, and GC&CS insisted that they sack him summarily before they were allowed to join the wartime sigint club.³¹ Indeed, the Canadians were told that other agencies ‘would not touch Yardley with a ten foot pole’.³²

The British, and especially Sir Stewart Menzies, the Chief of SIS, were frosty towards the Americans, and regarded them as fundamentally insecure. By contrast, the Americans generously opted to share the secret of their spectacular code-breaking success against the Japanese ‘Magic’ diplomatic cypher with the British as early as January 1941, even handing over precious examples of their copies of the Japanese cypher machine. The British were ‘flabbergasted’. They did not expect the Americans to ‘simply walk in and plonk down their most secret cryptanalytical machine’.³³ Yet the British remained reticent, and did not initially reciprocate fully with their knowledge of Enigma. The jibe about American insecurity had a certain irony, since the British chose to send one of the priceless American copies of the ‘Purple’ machine out to their naval base at Singapore shortly before it fell to the Japanese. The machine was delivered by ship just as the Japanese invasion of Malaya began, and disappeared into the chaos of battle. To this day its fate is unknown.³⁴

Collaboration with Washington was also hard because American sigint was a house divided. Although William Friedman, the US Army’s best cryptologist, was busy advocating sigint cooperation with the British in early 1940, the US Navy’s chief code-breaker, Commander Laurance Safford, was adamantly set against working with allies. But after pressure from President Franklin D. Roosevelt the Navy had been won round, and the Americans sent a team of technical experts to Britain in early 1941. Known as the ‘Sinkov Mission’, they spent several weeks touring Bletchley Park and visiting outlying intercept stations. The British were willing to receive them because they knew the main focus of American attention was Japan. At this stage the British were keen to keep discussions focused on Japan, because this allowed them to hide the extent of their knowledge of the German Enigma system. Both Sir Stewart Menzies and Sir Alexander Cadogan were adamant that the Ultra secret would not be shared with the Americans.³⁵ Laurance Safford later represented the first Anglo-American exchanges of late 1940 and early 1941 as a one-way street in which the Americans handed over their precious ‘Magic’ material on Japan but got nothing in return. In fact this is far from the case. Prescott Currier, one of the Americans who came to Bletchley in early 1941, recalled: ‘All of us were permitted to come and go freely and to visit and talk with anyone in any area that interested us.’³⁶ Later that year, a select circle of American code-breakers were also given more details about Enigma.³⁷

The hottest issue was the distribution of sigint to the policy-makers. In late May 1941, Brigadier Raymond Lee, the American Military Attaché in London, conveyed an American request for comprehensive intelligence exchange in the Far East. There followed painfully slow and complex discussions about who would get sigint with what levels of security: ‘The whole thing has been so tangled up,’ he complained.³⁸ Sigint was also very confused in Washington. Unlike Britain’s GC&CS, American signals intelligence was less centrally organised, resulting in great rivalry between the armed services.³⁹ Because the American wartime sigint organisation was divided between the Army and the Navy, one of the great problems for the British was cooperating with one without upsetting the other. Famously, the Americans solved the tussle over who would decrypt Japanese codes by agreeing that the Army would decode the material on the even days of the month, and the Navy on the odd days. A more ludicrous system for the division of labour would have been hard to devise.⁴⁰

GC&CS might have been more centralised than the Americans, but it had less money. Expanded cooperation with America on Japan allowed GC&CS to shed some difficult code-breaking tasks. High-grade Japanese Army cyphers had proved impenetrable for a decade. By 1941, Bletchley Park was too busy with the European war, while its Far Eastern code-breakers were struggling to cope with the mass of material on Japanese espionage derived from low-level consular intercepts in South-East Asia. On 22 August 1941, Anglo-American cooperation lifted this task from their shoulders. During talks in Washington, Alastair Denniston persuaded the US Army that it should ‘take over investigation of Japanese main army cipher soon as priority commitment’. Shortly after, Captain Geoffrey Stevens from Singapore travelled to Washington carrying all the British material on the Japanese main army cypher.⁴¹ The British were glad to see the back of it. At the end of the war approximately 2,500 Americans would still be working on this one Japanese cypher to no avail.

All the while, Britain was also decyphering some American traffic. Amongst the decrypts selected for the personal perusal of Winston Churchill were those of many Allied and neutral countries. GC&CS was clearly working successfully on the American diplomatic code ‘Grey’ until December 1941.⁴² Remarkably, there was no embarrassment about this. In June 1941, while discussing comprehensive sharing of Far East intelligence, the British asked the US Military Attaché, General Raymond Lee, for his opinion on the security of American cyphers. This was the conduit through which sigint would pass between London and Washington. Lee replied tartly that the GC&CS already knew a great deal about this matter. He recorded in his diary:

The talk then turned again on the question of security. They wanted to know whether my despatches went by radio or cable and were relieved to hear that they went by cable, and were further relieved to hear that we have a direct wire straight into the War Department. However, I pointed out that this wire was subject to interception by their people here in England [GC&CS] and I had no doubt they had taken our messages and attempted to decipher them.

He added that it was now very much in the interests of GC&CS to be honest about the security of American cypher systems, ‘because the stuff that is going over it is more vital to them than to us’. Lee’s frank exchange with the British underlines one of the hidden benefits of cooperation between the Allied code-breakers. Once they began to share their most precious assets, ‘Magic’ and then eventually Ultra, improved communications security became paramount. London and Washington now had a vested interest in the impenetrability of each other’s messages. After all, if GC&CS could break American codes, then so, perhaps, could the Germans.⁴³

Churchill eventually wrote to Roosevelt and owned up to British work on American diplomatic codes. ‘From the moment we became allies,’ he explained, ‘I gave instructions that this work should cease. However, danger of our enemies having achieved a measure of success cannot, I am advised, be dismissed.’ In fact, it is unlikely that all work on American traffic ceased. In areas such as the Middle East, Britain had a considerable incentive to continue to work on American commercial traffic, much of which was in commercial code or plain text. Indeed, a close reading of Churchill’s assurance to Roosevelt suggests that it might have related to diplomatic traffic only.⁴⁴ Some GC&CS staff recall work on the traffic of American commercial attachés throughout the war, although as yet no documents have been released.⁴⁵ Predictably, clear traffic from American oil companies was being intercepted in 1944 as they began to look for new markets in Europe.⁴⁶

For this very reason, the US Army and Navy were agreed that nothing should be passed to the British about American code-making procedures, such as the Sigaba cypher machine. General George Marshall, the US Army Chief of Staff, specifically forbade any such exchange in September 1940.⁴⁷ Anxiety about protecting national cypher systems persisted through the war on both sides of the Atlantic. In February 1945 Britain’s newly formed Cypher Policy Board debated a proposal by its Secretary, Captain Edmund Wilson, for ‘free and complete interchange’ with the Americans on cypher machine development, together with scrambler phones and secure speech.⁴⁸ This horrified both Edward Bridges, the Cabinet Secretary, and Sir Stewart Menzies, Chief of SIS, and the idea was rejected. Cooperation on communications security would focus on machines specially designed for combined use.⁴⁹

The gradual collapse of the British monopoly over Ultra intelligence paved the way for closer Anglo-American sigint cooperation. As we have seen, Bletchley’s initial idea for wartime cooperation was that the Americans would continue their pre-war focus on Japanese traffic; meanwhile the British would handle the work on Enigma, dispensing its product to the Americans as they saw fit. Although they had informed the Americans about Enigma in 1941, some precise details of processing had been withheld. Bletchley was determined to prevent the Americans working on Enigma in parallel, even though the Battle of the Atlantic gave Washington a legitimate need for Ultra intelligence. However, once the German Navy introduced an improved Enigma machine with four rotors, the British could not produce enough ‘bombes’ to deal with the increased number of tests required to break it.⁵⁰ In September 1942, Joseph Wenger, who led the US Navy code-breakers, proposed spending $2 million to acquire no fewer than 230 four-wheel ‘bombes’. This was ten times the number available to Bletchley. John Tiltman, Britain’s Soviet code specialist, realised that American sigint was beginning to operate on an industrial scale, and that for Bletchley Park the game of ‘Ultra monopoly’ was surely up.⁵¹

In September 1942, Edward Travis and the head of Bletchley Park’s Naval Section, Frank Birch, travelled to Washington and concluded the ‘Holden Agreement’, which established full and integrated collaboration on German naval traffic, including Enigma. This was a key part of the emerging Anglo-American sigint relationship, and a constituent part of the secret alliance which still exists to this day.⁵² Travis’s hand was strengthened by the remarkable fact that the US Navy breathed not a word about the Holden Agreement to the US Army. The British therefore persisted in their hopes of keeping control over the processing of Ultra material derived from Luftwaffe and German Army traffic. Nigel de Grey, the Deputy Director of Bletchley Park, was apoplectic at the possibility of the Americans being allowed to duplicate further British work on Enigma. However, a US Army code-breaker based at Bletchley, Colonel Telford Taylor, suggested a tactful way forward. He advised his superiors in Washington that all they needed for the time being was a small ‘foothold’ in the work on Enigma, which would allow them to gain experience. More level-headed organisational types at Bletchley Park, such as Gordon Welchman, could see that the ability of the Americans to procure unlimited numbers of bombes was crucial, adding, ‘We certainly need help.’⁵³ The result was the BRUSA agreement, a further crucial landmark in the construction of the Anglo-American sigint relationship. On 17 May 1943, Bletchley agreed to American participation in work on German Army and Air Force traffic. A second Holden Agreement on naval sigint followed in 1944. These treaties were of enormous importance, and paved the way for more ambitious post-war sigint alliances.

The exigencies of war had broken Britain’s cryptographic monopoly on Ultra. However, Ultra was a military system, representing the core work of Bletchley Park. There is no evidence that Britain and the United States concluded an overarching treaty on diplomatic or commercial sigint, the material that GC&CS worked on at Berkeley Street. In 1942, Alastair Denniston, who had been moved sideways to manage diplomatic sigint, arranged for cooperation on a number of specific countries such as Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Japan and, of course, Germany. However, this was done on an ad hoc basis. There was no diplomatic BRUSA agreement. It seems that the Americans were not intercepting and working on a range of materials that would have prompted a wider deal. Typically, Denniston told John Tiltman, with evident relief, ‘They do no work on any of the Near Eastern governments.’⁵⁴

Denniston’s main point of contact in the United States was William Friedman and the US Army code-breakers, who dominated American work on diplomatic systems. The Americans were keen to cooperate, since up until 1941 the US Army had been intensely focused on the diplomatic cyphers of Japan. In 1940 the Americans lost access to Japan’s diplomatic cypher, and it was only recovered as the result of a prodigious effort by a team under Frank Rowlett. By contrast, British code-breakers were working on the diplomatic cyphers of some twenty-six different countries.⁵⁵ Therefore, when the Americans offered access to ‘Magic’, the British reciprocated with a wide range of diplomatic material, including high-grade Italian systems. Then, in March 1942, John Tiltman visited Washington and brought with him Spanish and Vichy French cyphers. Given the arrival of American forces in the Mediterranean, this was valuable material. By 1944 the Americans had received more material from the British on diplomatic cyphers used by the Greeks, Hungarians, Iranians and Iraqis. However, the processing went on behind a curtain. Denniston asked at one point, ‘Do they actually work on the stuff which we send them, or do they simply put it in their library?’ Diplomatic cyphers from countries that the British considered to be client states, such as Egypt, were withheld.⁵⁶

Sharing diplomatic product caused some embarrassing problems. Foreign diplomats in London or Washington often reported their conversations with British officials in the messages they sent home. The British sometimes did not want the Americans to ‘listen in’ on these conversations, since they might involve ‘disparaging remarks about American policy or officials’. Therefore, they developed a special reserved series called ‘Res’,

that contained material that was not to be given to the Americans. This was not an effective solution, because, as Alexander Cadogan, the senior official at the Foreign Office, explained to Stewart Menzies, the Americans would often obtain and break some of the same traffic themselves, and so would ‘become suspicious’. By the spring of 1944 the Americans clearly knew about ‘Res’, and pressed the British to abandon the practice. However, Cadogan refused, since the war was drawing to an end, and the antagonistic politics of post-war settlements were looming.⁵⁷

The Americans nurtured their own anxieties. Would Anglo-American sigint cooperation continue after the war? As early as 1942, Colonel Alfred McCormack, one of the more important visitors to Bletchley, warned his superiors in Washington that the British were ‘very realistic people’, and so would ‘certainly at some time – possibly while the war is still on – resume work on United States communications’.⁵⁸ However, continued convergence of Anglo-American sigint was ensured by early fears of the Soviet Union, which were visible as early as 1942. Senior officers on both sides of the Atlantic, including Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke and General Douglas MacArthur, were of one mind on the ‘Russia problem’. On 31 July 1942, Geoffrey Stevens, a code-breaker from GC&CS, went out to Arlington Hall, the US Army’s code-breakers’ centre in Washington. One of the subjects he discussed there was the Soviet Union, and he was fascinated to learn that the Americans were intercepting all the Soviet traffic in and out of Washington. They were also collecting Soviet traffic elsewhere, for example between Moscow and the Soviet Embassy in Tokyo. He reported that the Americans ‘do nothing about it at the moment’ by way of decryption, since they were so pressed for code-breaking capacity against the Axis. However, sooner or later, he added, ‘They will inevitably try and break this since they do not trust the Soviets further than they could throw a steam-roller.’⁵⁹ Much as Stevens predicted, the Americans began a Soviet Group in February 1943. Meanwhile, the British moved their own existing Soviet team from Ryder Street in London to larger premises at Sloane Square in late 1944.⁶⁰ Although the two allies were still working in isolation on the ‘Russia problem’, the foundation of future collaboration was already emerging.

Anxiety about the Soviet Union increased markedly during early 1944. By April the Red Army was pushing into eastern Hungary, and this filled Moscow with a newfound confidence. Stalin’s determination to impose a Communist government on Poland was already evident, and pointed to future trouble. Some British diplomats in the Foreign Office remained hopeful about the possibility of post-war cooperation with the Soviet Union, but their military colleagues did not share their optimism. Indeed, the main future strategic planning body in Whitehall, the Post Hostilities Planning Committee, which was shared between the diplomats and the military, tore itself apart over this issue. The Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden had to step in in late 1944, and banned the further circulation of its papers. One staff officer lamented that there were to be ‘no more games of Russian scandal’. Russia was now a forbidden subject, and between late 1944 and early 1946 Britain’s main body of intelligence analysts, the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), did everything it could to avoid discussing the dreaded subject of the Soviet Union.⁶¹

Accordingly, it was only in June 1945 that the American code-breakers formally proposed to the British that they cooperate against the Soviet Union, giving the overall programme the code name ‘Bourbon’. The formal Anglo-American collaboration on the wider ‘Russian problem’ was so incredibly secret that it was not written down, and amounted to a simple handshake between Group Captain Eric Jones, the British sigint liaison officer in Washington, and a senior American naval officer in June 1945. Meanwhile, all eyes were on the Allied reoccupation of Europe and the remarkable sigint prizes that were even now being recovered from the smouldering ruins of the Third Reich.⁶²

3 Every War Must Have an End

On 26th August one of the [German] operators from Army Group, South Ukraine…suddenly broke into violent remarks about Hitler, using the peculiarly foul language in which the Germans delight. The operator at Supreme Army Command tried to shut him up in equally filthy language. This interchange lasted for about ten minutes…

The incident is only noteworthy as a possible indication of the way things are going.

Nigel de Grey, Deputy Director at Bletchley Park, to Sir Stewart Menzies, 14 September 1944¹

By the autumn of 1944 the Second World War was ending and the Cold War had, to all intents and purposes, already begun. In the east, the German Army was collapsing fast, and by September Soviet forces were at the borders of Prussia. A month later, American forces had entered Germany from the west, capturing the ancient town of Aachen. While much bitter fighting lay ahead, the minds of officials in London, Washington and Moscow were increasingly focused on the post-war settlement. Wartime relations with Russia had never been easy. Stalin’s intense and unwavering suspicion was underlined by the fact that, throughout the war, he had refused to leave Soviet-controlled territory to meet Churchill and Roosevelt. Harsh Soviet behaviour in newly occupied areas like Poland already pointed to post-war confrontation and rivalry, and all eyes were on the advance into Germany.

Britain and the United States were gearing up for piratical raids on the headquarters and laboratories of a collapsing Third Reich, and Axis sigint material was the treasure that was most actively sought. A joint Anglo-American planning group began consulting with Bletchley Park about what material it wished to scoop from an occupied Germany. By early 1945, Intelligence Assault Units were moving into Germany alongside the fighting elements of Allied formations, looking for all kinds of top-secret German experimental weapons. Bletchley Park despatched its own Target Intelligence Committee teams, known as ‘TICOM teams’, made up of a mixture of British and American personnel, to seek out cryptographic equipment and sigint personnel from Germany. The whole TICOM programme was run on what Commander Edward Travis called ‘an entirely inter-allied’ basis.²

Suddenly, boffins in glasses and cardigans found themselves turned into amateur commandos. Whisked away to a quarry near Bletchley, those selected for this task were given a short course in the use of sub-machine guns and hand grenades. They began on the Thompson sub-machine gun, but soon found the lighter Sten gun to be an easier weapon to handle. None of them performed well, but nevertheless they were soon on their way to Hitler’s ‘Alpine Lair’ at Berchtesgaden. Major Edward Rushworth, one of the senior British officers from Hut Three, led a TICOM team of a dozen officers, accompanied by Selmer Norland, an American stationed at Bletchley Park. They arrived at the major German headquarters at Augsburg on 8 May, VE-Day. Augsburg had been home to the famous German ‘Fish’, or Geheimschreiber, the encyphered teleprinter which Bletchley had eventually defeated with the mighty ‘Colossus’ computer. Sadly, all these beautiful machines, lovingly manufactured by Lorenz, had been smashed and the cypher wheels had gone. The dejected team surveyed the debris. However, a day later their spirits rebounded when they gleefully recovered a single intact late-model ‘Fish’ from a town on the Austrian border.³

On 12 May 1945 they reached Hitler’s Alpine retreat. The Führer’s accommodation had been heavily bombed, but a hundred feet below ground was a maze of bunkers and tunnels to explore, including an emergency power station and a complete telephone exchange. No more cypher machines seemed to be in evidence, and the mission was tailing off when, as a last task, Rushworth set off for nearby Rosenheim on the Austrian border, to question a cryptographer who had been working for the German High Command (OKW). While they were there, a group of other German prisoners sent a message asking to speak to the ‘proper people’. This team had served in the OKW headquarters sigint units and now revealed that, terrified of the rapid Soviet advance, they had buried their equipment under the pavement in front of their headquarters. Called ‘OKW-Chi’, they had successfully broken what was referred to as ‘Russian Fish’. This was an encrypted Soviet military teleprinter that achieved an early version of packet switching, breaking each message into nine different parts and routing it along separate channels, before reassembling it. The Germans had already worked out that their code-breaking triumph would have post-war value, and hoped to sell themselves on as a complete team.⁴

They were not disappointed. By 23 May they had been encouraged to unearth and set up their equipment, allowing them to resume decrypting Soviet command traffic. The Bletchley team were in awe of this vast technical display, which was eventually packaged up again in over a hundred boxes and chests. The eight tons of equipment and the complete German staff were loaded onto five lorries, which then wound their way slowly through a devastated Germany towards Bletchley. They arrived on 6 June 1945, and the equipment was set up and tested at the nearby radio station of Wavendon Manor.⁵ The German team was later employed intercepting Soviet encyphered teleprinter traffic which the British code-named ‘Caviar’, and although the messages were mostly about administration rather than policy or strategy, they provided rare insights into the daily activities of Soviet armed forces in post-war Europe.⁶ More treasures followed, and ultimately a further five tons of documents pertaining to Soviet codes and cyphers would arrive. In mid-June, Edward Travis asked Russell Dudley-Smith, a senior Bletchley Park officer, to try to establish some priority in exploiting the mountain of material now pouring in, but little did they know that they would still be working on this material in 1951.⁷ One-of-a-kind equipment stayed in Britain, while any duplicates were shipped to America.⁸

Yet another important haul was brought in by Colonel Paul Neff, an American who headed TICOM Team 6. This group included William Bundy, later US Assistant Secretary of State under President Lyndon B. Johnson, and Geoffrey Stevens from Bletchley Park. In April 1945 they pushed into southern Germany at Magdeburg, near Leipzig, and took control of a castle at Burgscheidungen which had recently been the headquarters of a code-breaking unit of the German Foreign Ministry called the Balkanabteilung, whose tasks had largely focused on Soviet and Balkan traffic. The fourteen staff and their documents were flown to Britain and taken to Bletchley Park. Burgscheidungen was in an area that would later be designated as part of the Soviet Zone, so Neff destroyed all traces of the German code-breakers’ presence before departing.⁹

The British caught Generalmajor Klemme, the Senior Commander of Radio Intelligence for the Luftwaffe, at the Husum-Milstedt intercept station on 19 May 1945. At first he was taken to Neumuenster Prison, but from there he was brought to Britain, and worked with the Allies on sigint in Germany until 10 March 1948, when he was considered to have been drained of all he knew about Soviet communications. On 1 May 1945, Major Oeljeschaeger and Major Beulmann from the Berlin Cryptographic Centre, which had been based in a stable block of the Marstall-Neues Palais at Potsdam, had fled in the direction of Hitler’s complex at Berchtesgaden. A few days later, with the Allies closing in, they stopped at Viehoff to burn all the records of Branch 3, and they fell into Allied hands on 22 May near Munich. On 5 July they were flown to Britain and placed in a special camp. They were surprised to be welcomed by their Branch Chief, Lt Colonel Friedrich, who had been captured before them. By June 1945 the British and Americans had scooped up most of the senior Luftwaffe sigint officers whose traffic they had listened to assiduously for much of the war.¹⁰

The TICOM teams were competing with the Soviets, who were also swooping on German cryptographic assets. To their surprise, Bletchley Park discovered that the Soviets had taken over some German Enigma-based communications nets and Fish teleprinters, and had begun using them for their own purposes. However, initial hopes of a post-war dividend from the breaking of these machines were quickly dashed. Roy Jenkins, who was then working at Bletchley Park, recalls this odd interlude in May 1945:

When the Russians got to Berlin they took over the Fish machines in the War Ministry, somewhat changed the settings, and proceeded to use them for sending signals traffic to Belgrade and other capitals in their new empire. We continued to do the intercepts and played around with trying to break the messages. We never succeeded. I think it was a combination of the new settings being more secure (which raises the question of how much the Russians had found out about our previous success) and the edge of tension having gone off our effort.

Elsewhere, Allied recovery teams regularly overran German sigint operations that were still chattering away, producing decrypts of mid-level Soviet Army Group traffic.¹¹

The timing of raids on German sigint centres was a precarious matter. If they were captured too early there was a risk that this would cut off a flow of valuable material that Bletchley was intercepting, or else would alert the Germans to the fact that the British knew more about their cyphers than was desirable. London was especially anxious to avoid freelance raiding activities that might be counter-productive. As early as May 1944 the London Signals Intelligence Board, the supreme governing board which met monthly to set overall British sigint policy, learned that some independently-minded British intelligence officers in the Middle East were planning to use the Special Operations Executive to raid enemy signals intelligence centres in the Balkans. Sir Stewart Menzies, who chaired the board, warned them sternly that operations against such centres were ‘highly undesirable’, and that action should ‘on no account be undertaken’ without prior personal authority from him.’¹²

Bletchley’s corporate takeover of the Axis sigint effort was not limited to Germany. There were even greater TICOM dividends in occupied Italy.¹³ Many countries competed for the services of the talented Italian cryptanalysts. After the Italian surrender in 1943, some eighty Italian code-breakers under Major Barbieri continued to work for the Germans at a station near Brescia in northern Italy. At the end of the war in Europe they were at last interrogated in Rome, and proved to have a large quantity of material, including photocopies of the codebooks of Turkey, Romania, Ecuador and Bolivia. They had also reconstructed some of the codebooks from France, Switzerland and the Vatican, and had smaller amounts of British and American traffic. During the spring of 1945 Barbieri’s unit had been concentrating on French diplomatic traffic, ‘a large number being messages to Paris either from Bonnet [French Ambassador] in New York or from Catroux [French Ambassador] in Moscow’. This traffic offered insights into subjects as diverse as Soviet-Yugoslav relations, Soviet policy in Germany, French economic negotiations with the United States and French plans for exploiting the Saar coal mines in Germany.¹⁴

With British encouragement, this precocious Italian unit worked on into the post-war period, without deviating from its French target. The diplomatic unit at Berkeley Street was already doing extensive work on Britain’s European allies, regarding them as either insecure or untrustworthy, or both. Much of this suspicion stemmed from a sense of indignation at their behaviour in 1940. In November 1944, Churchill wrote to Eden: ‘The Belgians are extremely weak, and their behaviour before the war was shocking. The Dutch were entirely selfish and fought only when attacked, and then for a few hours…’ General de Gaulle’s Free French government in exile, as other historians have shown, came in for especially close attention from the code-breakers during the war, and this continued into 1946.

During the important diplomatic conferences that marked the end of the war, Jimmy Byrnes, the new American Secretary of State, was apparently more eager to see decrypted French material than anything else, concerned that Paris was likely to be working with Moscow.¹⁵ French traffic from Moscow was of great interest to London because the former French Air Minister, Pierre Cot, had indeed begun a special diplomatic mission to Moscow to examine the possibility of cooperating against Germany in post-war Europe.¹⁶

French traffic provided the British and Americans with a fabulous window on the diplomacy of Western Europe.¹⁷ Indeed, in mid-1946 half the US Army code-breakers’ end product was based on intercepting French communications.¹⁸ Alarmingly, the French still seemed keen to develop a close relationship with Stalin.¹⁹ The traffic from French Embassies in Eastern Europe proved especially interesting. Typically, an intercept from the French Embassy in Tirana gave detailed information on the balance of power in the Albanian Cabinet and the waning power of the pro-Moscow elements, and intercepted French intelligence traffic sometimes offered information about the KGB.²⁰ With the work on Soviet codes still gaining momentum, the chatter of other countries that were talking to Moscow provided insights into their thinking. On 13 August 1945, Edward Travis sent Joseph Wenger, the senior American naval code-breaker, a long missive about cooperation on post-war French and Dutch systems, and explained British plans ‘to increase the effort here, especially on French’, adding that British plans to focus on Paris ‘are going into effect at an early date’. French, Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American traffic was soon consolidated into a single group under Josh Cooper.²¹

Major Barbieri was proud of the work of his Italian code-breakers against the French, but he pressed for more staff. So many of the best cryptographers, he complained, had been captured by the French in North Africa, adding, ‘the French are now employing them in their own service!’ Nevertheless, the British concluded that the Italians were ‘doing remarkably well with the limited reserves at their disposal’.²² By mid-1946 they were giving them new tasks, including Soviet traffic which came from military cypher machines at division level code-named ‘Taper’. British liaison officers with the Italians were working closely with code-breakers in Britain on the identification of new Taper groups. Senior Italian sigint officers knew that Taper traffic ‘which had been taken with so much depth and continuity for the past month’ was Soviet in origin, but many of their underlings were in a state of blissful ignorance about what they were collecting and who the ultimate customer was.²³

The efforts of TICOM were not exclusively directed towards raiding priceless sigint secrets from the Germans, the Italians and the Japanese. They were also concerned with protecting Britain’s own secret communications. Until late 1943, Bletchley Park regarded weak security as a problem restricted to Britain’s allies. But the ability to read German messages had revealed a number of unexpected security nightmares for the Allies. Ultra had shown Britain’s code-breakers that the Germans could read many of the codes of the Allies, such as those of the Soviets and the Free French. In Asia, terrible cypher security and serious human agent penetration ensured that Chinese codes were effectively an open book to the Japanese, even though Tokyo’s code-breakers were mediocre. Accordingly, keeping Britain’s secrets safe meant keeping them away from many of her allies, whose communications were being read by friend and foe alike.²⁴

By the autumn of 1943 the security situation looked much worse. The Italians had now capitulated, and captured Italian code-breakers revealed their successes against British codes. Captain Edmund Wilson, who helped to look after cypher security at Bletchley Park, held prolonged ‘conversations’ with Commander Cianchi, head of the Italian Cryptographic Bureau in Rome, and his staff during late 1943. Wilson explained that he could hardly call them ‘interrogations’, since Cianchi had given all of Italy’s secret information so happily and freely. Wilson said that ‘very valuable information’ on the breaking of British naval cyphers had been obtained, and that Britain was ‘extremely fortunate’ to have the cooperation of its former opponents. He pressed his colleagues to be ‘very careful indeed in the use they made of the information’ from these sources.²⁵

The TICOM raids into Germany later confirmed that British naval cypher security had been especially weak. B-Dienst, the German naval sigint service, had been reading British naval codes and cyphers easily at the start of the war. In early 1940 this had allowed it to read British plans for the Narvik raid in Norway, contributing to Germany’s success in repulsing that action. In 1942, the Dieppe raid had also been given away to the enemy before it took place due to poor cypher security. Incredibly, the Germans had been given a full five days to prepare for this ‘surprise attack’. Allied troops – mostly Canadians – paid for this dearly in the slaughter that followed. B-Dienst achieved the height of its success against Atlantic convoy traffic in 1943, allowing alterations of convoy routes to be radioed to U-boat commanders within a few hours.²⁶

The autumn of 1943 saw a long-overdue inquiry into the security of British cyphers, carried out by Brigadier Chitty, who began by visiting Bletchley Park. His findings did not make for comfortable reading. ‘It is true,’ he reported, ‘that of the fourteen sections working at B.P. [Bletchley Park] one is named Security of Allied Communications. From a total staff of some six thousand, however, the part-time services of only one man (Dudley-Smith) plus two or three girls, are spared to equip this section.’ At a higher level there was a supervising body called the Cypher Security Committee, supposedly chaired by Sir Stewart Menzies, but this had not attracted Menzies’ interest. Moreover, it lacked the power to compel Whitehall departments to change any practices that they thought lax. Chitty had done a spot check of twelve departments around Whitehall, and found that few were taking cypher security seriously. Britain needed a decent operational security section at Bletchley Park, and a proper supervisory board with teeth.²⁷

No cypher system, Chitty warned, was unbreakable. Britain’s most sensitive material was sent by one-time pads, which were, in his opinion, ‘unassailable’ if used correctly. Yet he reminded his superiors that Bletchley was making a ‘most successful daily attack’ on the one-time pads of other countries, ‘which reach us in a steady stream by Photography, Theft, and the sifting of Embassy waste-paper baskets’. The majority of London government traffic went by Typex machine, the British equivalent of Enigma. This was much better than Enigma, but Chitty asserted that its security had never really been tested. Again, much depended on the diligence of the operators:

One of the most instructive lessons I learnt from the [Government Code and Cypher] School was the fact that the Hagelin machine used by several nations including the Americans, affords in practice a widely different degree of security in different hands. Whereas this machine, as used by the Swedes and the Finns, has so far been virtually unbreakable, in the hands of the Italians who are normally very good cryptographers, we have for a long time been able to read it with ease. This was entirely due to the increasing idleness of the Italian operators and their persistent disregard of the numerous security rules which have been laid down for them.

For routine traffic the Foreign Office used more elderly hand cyphers, and the services made use of field cyphers in their lower formations. Quite rightly, these were thought to be even less secure.²⁸

By March 1944, no less a figure than Winston Churchill himself was calling for a shake-up. A new supervisory outfit was created, called the Cypher Policy Board. Although Menzies was in the chair, Edward Travis from GC&CS, together with the Secretary of the War Cabinet and a representative of the Chiefs of Staff were also there to keep a stern eye on him. This top-level representation underlined a deep anxiety about cypher security. A new Deputy Director of GC&CS, known as the Communications Security Adviser, was also to be appointed, who would serve as the Secretary of the Cypher Policy Board. In reality, this person, Captain Edmund Wilson, was the new broom.²⁹ After the war, Wilson was replaced by Commander T.R.W. Burton-Miller, who operated from a new headquarters at 10 Chesterfield Street W1, conveniently close to both MI5 and SIS.³⁰ Soon they had extended their authority over the design and production of all British cypher machines, with Gordon Welchman their chief technical adviser.³¹

During 1944, Bletchley Park offered an impressive technical solution to worries about cypher security. It fielded a new and rather superior cypher machine called ‘Rockex I’ that produced what was effectively automated one-time pad traffic. Instead of using tiresome tear-off sheets from a one-time pad that had to be processed by hand, it used code tape, which carried the same information. This was initially used for messages between Bletchley Park and its sigint collaborators in Washington and Ottawa, together with the SIS wartime office in New York. A new version called ‘Rockex II’ was already being developed by the British. The machine was originally intended for the Special Communications Units that disseminated Ultra to Allied commanders in the field, but after the war it became a mainstream British cypher machine, and was still being used by smaller embassies in the 1970s.³²

The super-secret Rockex cypher machine also had another purpose. From 1944, it provided extra security for the communications network of Britain’s SIS agents around the world. With assistance from Bletchley Park, wartime SIS had been able to develop an effective long-range wireless network to support its overseas stations and agents in the field. Known as SIS Section VIII, this was run by Brigadier Richard Gambier-Parry from two country houses not far from Bletchley, at Whaddon Hall and Hanslope Park. These locations not only provided a wireless network for SIS, they also built covert radio sets hidden in suitcases used by British agents and fitted out vehicles for the Special Liaison Units that supplied sigint to overseas commands such as Montgomery’s Eighth Army. In addition, Hanslope Park had provided a base for a unit called the Radio Security Service, under Ted Maltby, that had used mobile detection vans to track the radio transmissions of enemy agents hiding in wartime Britain. SIS was a small organisation with small volumes of radio traffic, and up until 1944 it had been comfortable sending its traffic by slow but highly secure one-time pads. The Rockex machine allowed it to take a leap forward.³³

By 1944, SIS’s Section VIII had expanded considerably and was taking on new customers. With its new Rockex machines, it was carrying some traffic for Bletchley Park, typically from Canada, together with secret messages for the Special Operations Executive which conducted sabotage. The Foreign Office was now looking at this efficient radio network with growing interest, and at the end of the war SIS Section VIII was simply coopted to form the backbone of a new Foreign Office communications system called the Diplomatic Wireless Service. Gambier-Parry became the first Foreign Office Director of Communications. As early as 1943 some embassies, such as that in Cairo, had been switching over to ‘experimental use of official wireless’ by making use of local SIS facilities.³⁴ Although diplomatic wireless was technically banned by international diplomatic convention, in practice cable communications had frequently been disrupted during the war, and wireless had crept into widespread use as an alternative.³⁵

The gradual development of the Diplomatic Wireless Service at Hanslope Park during 1944 and 1945 was another critical building block in the creation of the modern British sigint community. Alongside the military sigint collection stations in locations such as Ceylon, the Diplomatic Wireless Service, or ‘DWS’, doubled as a secret monitoring service working from within British Embassies and High Commissions. The first permanent undercover sigint station was set up at Ankara in 1943. DWS staff numbered close to a thousand, and about half its time was devoted to secret collection on behalf of the British code-breakers. Over the years it produced important results from locations as far afield as Moscow and Luanda because of its ability to collect short-range transmissions.

In August 1945 the Second World War finally drew to a close. Winston Churchill was of the view that Bletchley Park was the deciding factor in the defeat of the Fascist powers: in 1945 he apparently told King George VI that Ultra had effectively won the war.³⁶ Robert Harris, author of the novel Enigma (1995), rightly points out that most of the major combatants had military forces that were superior to those of Britain, not least in their weapons technology. Bletchley Park was the one place where we enjoyed a crucial world lead.³⁷ Harry Hinsley, a junior figure at Bletchley Park, but later the official historian who produced a magisterial study of intelligence during the Second World War, has famously asserted that Ultra shortened the war by several years, saving countless lives on all sides. Without Ultra, he states, ‘Overlord would have had to be delayed until 1946’.³⁸ Andreas Hillgruber, the distinguished German historian of Hitler’s strategy agrees, adding that as a result the Soviets might well have advanced much further west.³⁹

Yet others, including the British historian Paul Kennedy, have argued that the Second World War was largely a battle of material production, and that once America and Russia were both pitted against the Axis, their industrial might made the outcome only a matter of time – epitomised by the use of the atomic bomb in August 1945. In reality, the debate about the overall value of Bletchley Park has a troubling ‘What if?’ quality. Inevitably, we are encouraged to ponder the alternative universe of ‘no Ultra’. Ralph Bennett, like Harry Hinsley a Bletchley Park veteran turned historian, has expressed impatience with such counter-factual speculations, regarding them as a parlour game. He has argued that the absence of Ultra would have forced the faster development of other forms of intelligence, such as aerial reconnaissance.⁴⁰ Peter Calvocoressi, another distinguished historian who spent the war at Bletchley Park, has dismissed Hinsley’s assertions as ‘silly’.⁴¹

Some propositions can however be advanced with confidence. Ultra and other kinds of sigint contributed hugely to the outcome of the Battle of Britain. The breaking of naval Enigma changed the course of the Battle of the Atlantic, allowing the Admiralty to direct convoys away from concentrations of U-boats and bringing the level of ship losses down to a bearable, although still frightening, level. This in turn allowed a breathing space for more successful anti-submarine warfare techniques to be developed which would finally turn the tide in the battle against the U-boat in 1943. Ultra also contributed greatly to the British naval victories at the Battle of Cape Matapan (March 1941) and the Battle of North Cape (December 1943). Parallel code-breaking work by the Americans in the Pacific allowed the dramatic interception of the aircraft carrying the brilliant Admiral Yamamoto, architect of Pearl Harbor, which sounded the death knell for Japanese naval forces in the Pacific. It is impossible to understand the war at sea without comprehending the contribution of Ultra in the west and the breaking of a range of Japanese cypher systems in the east. Appropriately, it fell to a naval officer, Commander Edward Travis, to pilot Bletchley Park as it sailed forward into the post-war era.

Even in the spring of 1945, final victory in Europe had loomed like the end of an interminable school year – with the distant summer holidays already beckoning. Bletchley Park, with its nearby dormitories and improvised tennis courts, had looked rather like a vast boarding school waiting for the end of term. Post-war worries were not troubling many of the brilliant minds there. Instead, for the most part they were yearning for an end to war and a return to peacetime activities. The majority of Bletchley’s wartime residents were exhausted from years of gruelling hard work. The intellectual pressure had been enormous, and some had suffered nervous breakdowns: Jean Thompson, a Wren who worked at one of the outstations, recalls that they routinely referred to Bletchley Park as the ‘Nut House’.⁴² Most code-breakers greeted the end of the war with relief, returning to their former activities in ivy-covered colleges, libraries and museums. However, a minority had been bitten by the intelligence bug. They understood the fundamental importance of what they had been doing for the future of international affairs, and would stay on.

Those who remained at Bletchley Park were also thinking of ‘escape’ – but in a different sense. For them, the end of the war did not so much offer an opportunity of personal freedom, but more the possibility of liberation for the GC&CS. Their remarkable achievements over the last five years suggested that GC&CS might cease to exist under the cloying direction of Britain’s traditional overseas secret service, SIS, where the senior staff were often failed cavalry officers recruited in White’s or Boodle’s. Instead, GC&CS might hope to become an intelligence agency in its own right, perhaps one of a new and different kind. Indeed, its rising status was already signalled by a gradual change in everyday usage from terms like ‘GC&CS’ and ‘BP’ to the rather grander cover name of ‘Government Communications Headquarters’, or ‘GCHQ’, which had been in intermittent use since early 1940.⁴³

Bletchley Park had already taken some important strides towards becoming a fully-fledged intelligence service. Peter Calvocoressi, one of its distinguished wartime denizens, recalls that in its pre-war incarnation the Government Code and Cypher School was exactly what its name implied, ‘and no more’. It made up codes for use by the British government, and broke the codes of other nations. But at Bletchley Park, and especially under Gordon Welchman in Hut Six, code-breaking was gradually married to an intelligence process to provide a sophisticated system for sigint exploitation. No less importantly, Bletchley also designed a means for the secure and rapid distribution of sigint to essential customers, even in distant theatres such as South-East Asia. The sheer pressure of wartime exigency forced rapid and logical developments that might otherwise have taken decades.⁴⁴

Another massive achievement was that Bletchley Park and its diplomatic equivalent at Berkeley Street in London were properly ‘integrated’, mixing up staff from the three armed services and civilians. This was immediately obvious to any visitor from the curious blend of uniform and civilian dress, often in exotic combinations. Occasionally a visiting Admiral or General would fulminate to see members of his service dressed in colourful pullovers, and demand that they return to full uniform. However, the top brass on day trips from Whitehall were little more than a temporary nuisance. During the 1940s a sigint service which mixed up civilians and personnel from the armed services was quite remarkable. It would take the Americans until the early 1950s to achieve an integrated organisation that mirrored Bletchley. In Nazi Germany as Calvocoressi recalls, the situation had been even worse, for there ‘six or seven different cryptographic establishments fought each other almost as venomously as they fought the enemy’.⁴⁵

In the social anthropology of intelligence, sigint was emerging as the dominant tribe. ‘The Ultra community at BP saw itself as – perhaps was – an elite within an elite,’ recalled one code-breaker. Material gathered by other kinds of intelligence agencies was merely ‘Top Secret’, but sigint material was compartmentalised as ‘Top Secret-Ultra’. The ability to impose draconian security on its product would be a hallmark of a fully-fledged sigint organisation, and dominated its relations with its friends and allies in the code-breaking world. This security obsession also extended to people. The security rule at Bletchley Park was ‘Once in, never out.’ In other words, once people had worked in sigint, there was a reluctance to allow them to move to other areas of war work, and they were effectively ‘captive’ for the duration of the war.

Dominance was partly about size. By the end of the war, over ten thousand people were labouring under Bletchley’s direction. The expanded bombe effort alone led to the creation of five further outstations as far away as Stanmore and Eastcote on the outskirts of London. Working alongside GC&CS were the listening units of the armed forces, known as the Y services. Although these fed high-grade material to Bletchley Park, they also worked on low-grade material for their own purposes. Often considered ‘poor relations’, they derived their intelligence either from listening in to low-level tactical communications that were not encrypted, including clear voice traffic, or by simply analysing the flow of traffic. Analysing the patterns of radio traffic, including volume and direction, even without breaking the codes, could reveal a great deal of information about the enemy, and GC&CS worked closely with the armed services to develop what were known as the ‘Y stations’. Bill Millward, who continued to serve long after the war, recalls that Bletchley Park’s relationship to the Y services was to become ‘a sort of university of signals intelligence, developing techniques which all might share’.⁴⁶ The Y services had been largely responsible for deducing the enemy ‘order of battle’, the structure, strength and location of the units of the German armed forces. The Navy ran intercept sites at Scarborough and Winchester. The Army ran a site at Fort Bridgelands near Chatham, and later opened a station at Beaumanor Hall near Loughborough in Leicestershire. The RAF were located at Cheadle in Cheshire, and developed a large new site at Chicksands near Baldock in Bedfordshire. Many of these locations would continue as sigint sites after August 1945.⁴⁷ All of them were symptomatic of an industrial revolution in secret intelligence: both Bletchley Park and the outstations operated like factories, with three gruelling shifts each day.

At a deeper level, there had also been a social revolution in British intelligence. Brilliant individuals who only a year before had been members of international chess teams or wrestling with obscure mathematical problems in Cambridge colleges, were now focused on intelligence. Remorselessly logical, they could see that Bletchley Park was the intelligence machine of the future. Moreover, they were outsiders, with no sense of bureaucratic anxiety and no fear of the ‘Establishment’. They fearlessly articulated what to them was self-evident. GC&CS, once a small school of code-breakers working in the service of SIS, had now vastly outgrown its parent organisation. Gladwyn Jebb, one of a number of rising British diplomats who were temporarily attached to intelligence duties during the war, noticed this dramatic change. The organisations like Bletchley Park had been forced to recruit widely from industry and the universities to fill their ranks, so they had forward-looking staff who brought with them modern organisational techniques.⁴⁸ Jebb complained that SIS had ‘too much of what I would call the “false beard” mentality…more especially amongst those who have been in the show for a very long time’. The world had moved on, he argued: ‘The idea of a deeply mysterious “Master Spy”, sitting in some unknown office and directing an army of anonymous agents, is as outdated as it is romantic.’⁴⁹

The Americans had also opened the eyes of GC&CS to what was technologically possible. Although hobbled by the bitter Army–Navy divide, Washington nevertheless threw vast scientific resources at sigint. On their visits across the Atlantic, a core of determined individuals from Bletchley were able to glimpse what the future might hold. In 1944 a small group of talented British code-breakers began the long-range planning that would turn wartime Bletchley Park – with its chess players and crossword puzzlers – into Britain’s premier post-war secret service, with a strong sense of identity, a large budget and predatory designs on other agencies. Three key figures were instrumental in this: Gordon Welchman, the man behind Bletchley Park’s intelligence processing centre; Harry Hinsley, who would serve as the ‘sherpa’ for the Anglo–American–Commonwealth sigint summits after 1945; and Edward Crankshaw, who had handled wartime sigint discussions with the Soviets. Hugh Foss joined them on his return from a posting in Washington.⁵⁰

On 15 September 1944, only weeks after the liberation of Paris, this planning group began to consider GC&CS’s post-war future. It was led by Gordon Welchman, who was Assistant Director for Mechanisation, and had also been responsible for Hut Six, where Enigma was broken. Some of the exciting ideas the group advanced for the future of GC&CS grew largely out of the Hut Six experience. It called for a more centralised ‘Foreign Intelligence Office’ as part of a coherent national intelligence organisation, and for a comprehensive body dealing with all forms of sigint, together with a modern signals security organisation with the latest communications engineering. This, the group believed, could become a truly modern ‘Intelligence Centre’ governing all types of interception activities.⁵¹

Welchman’s group was tough-minded. There were, it argued, few people in GC&CS with real ability in general planning and strategic coordination. They observed, ‘it would be difficult to count as many as a dozen’. This talent should not be wasted on the final year of the war against Japan. Instead, as soon as the war in Europe was over, ‘as many as possible of the few potential planners should be set to work in the direction of our three immediate objectives, instead of devoting more of their time to Japanese problems’. GC&CS should not lose touch with developments in the field of Japanese sigint problems, since there were interesting things to learn in this sphere. However, it should merely extract technical benefits from the Japanese War, rather than expend resources upon it. British commanders in Burma, like Field Marshal Bill Slim, realised that they were now a low priority for the intelligence services, and complained bitterly about it.⁵²

GC&CS realised that speed was of the essence. It was ‘imperative to make an approach to the present Prime Minister at the earliest possible moment’. Any successor to Churchill, it reasoned, however sympathetic, could not have a real appreciation of ‘the fruits of intelligence in this war’, or Churchill’s keen appreciation of the importance of tight security. In Churchill it had a heavyweight advocate, and it feared a return to the pre-war situation of under-recognition of what sigint could achieve; even now, the true scale of its wartime output was known to only a very few in high places. Moreover, the really talented sigint planners were newcomers, and would soon be recalled to their pre-war occupations unless some positive action was taken to retain them. Quite simply, this came down to cash. GC&CS had to have the status to secure ‘a sufficiently liberal supply of money to enable it to attract men of first rate ability’, particularly engineers and electronics experts. It was also aware that it would have to give equal weight to all types of intelligence about foreign countries, ‘including scientific, commercial and economic matters’. This was a tacit reference to the targeting of friendly states.⁵³

In January 1945, the torch of post-war planning passed to William F. Clarke. Clarke, who had served continuously in code-breaking from 1916, warned that the ‘enormous power wielded by the Treasury’ might soon be brought to bear on GC&CS. As had happened in 1919, work on military cyphers might cease in favour of concentration on diplomatic material only. This, he insisted, could be ‘disastrous’, because the resulting damage to ongoing cryptographic research might mean that in the event of a sudden future conflict, enemy military traffic would prove inaccessible. Even more problematic was the challenge of building up the prestige of GC&CS. Its very secrecy was its worst enemy, ensuring that many in elevated government circles did not know its true value. There was also the ‘potential danger’ of a Labour government coming to power, since the interwar Labour government had found many aspects of the secret state to be repellent.

Clarke also paused to consider the emerging United Nations. Allowing himself some momentary Utopian thoughts, he observed that if the new organisation took the step of abolishing all code and cypher communications, this action ‘would contribute more to a permanent peace than any other’. However, he conceded that this ‘is probably the counsel of perfection’, and was highly improbable. Instead, he predicted that energetic code-making and code-breaking would persist into the post-war world. On the matter of who would control the British code-breakers, he felt that in the past neither the Admiralty nor the Foreign Office had been satisfactory. The current system of control by SIS also brought with it ‘certain disadvantages’. Clarke vigorously asserted that GC&CS should break free, not only of SIS but also of the Foreign Office. Instead it should be a separate organisation under either the Chiefs of Staff or the Cabinet Office, and should be regarded as a wholly separate third secret service.⁵⁴

As late as October 1944, some senior figures at Bletchley were still arguing for re-absorption by SIS. John Tiltman, the Soviet specialist, argued that the code-breakers should be ‘closely fused with S.I.S. under the Director General [Sir Stewart Menzies] as the one and only Intelligence producing service’.⁵⁵ However, the stock of Menzies was continuing to fall among senior figures in Whitehall. In January 1945, the Chairman of the JIC, Victor Cavendish Bentinck, concocted his own influential vision of ‘the intelligence machine’. He suggested that GC&CS should remain under the overall direction of ‘C’, but at the same time it would be a separate organisation and ‘not a part of SIS’. It would boast its own budget alongside the other secret services as part of the Secret Vote, Britain’s quaintly titled intelligence budget.⁵⁶ It was thus Commander Edward Travis, not Menzies, who determined the final shape of GC&CS shortly after VJ-Day. Although peace had arrived, Travis’s mind was already focused on possible future conflict with the Soviets. Recalling the earliest days of the last war, he observed, ‘When information was most urgently required, very little was forthcoming.’ The next war was likely to be of shorter duration, with little time for mobilisation. In such a conflict the British would have to fight with what they had. It was essential that continuity be maintained, and that rapid expansion was possible on the eve of war.

Exactly when the post-war term ‘GCHQ’ came into common usage is a matter of dispute. It was first used as a cover name to confuse workmen dropping off furniture at the Bletchley Park site as early as the end of 1939.⁵⁷ By 1946, although technically still merely a cover name, it was used more and more widely to denote Britain’s code-breakers. Travis decided that the new post-war GCHQ would be divided into five groups run by his key subordinates.⁵⁸ To cover its multifarious tasks, he hoped to have a thousand civilians plus a hundred military staff at a new sigint centre located somewhere near to the policy-makers in London. By contrast, the outlying Y stations would be manned by about five thousand additional personnel, of whom only a few would be civilians. GCHQ’s own core staff fell rapidly from an end-of-war strength of 8,902 to a projected 1,010 for 1946.⁵⁹ Despite the dramatic drop in numbers, Travis concluded that the post-war deal he had struck with the Treasury was ‘on the whole most satisfactory’. For him it was about quality rather than quantity. A few days before Christmas 1945 he explained: ‘The war proved beyond doubt that the more difficult aspects of our work call for staff of the highest calibre, the successes by the Professors and Dons among our temporary staff, especially perhaps the high grade mathematicians, put that beyond doubt.’ He wanted suitable conditions with which to attract these sorts of people, although he knew this would be difficult.⁶⁰ Captain Edmund Wilson, Travis’s Principal Establishment Officer, echoed this view, arguing that of the 260 officers to be kept on in their post-war establishment, some two hundred of them must have not only initiative but also ‘first class brains’.⁶¹

Where would GCHQ’s new centre be? What it craved was a site in central London, next to the policy-makers, but even with the post-war demobilisation of many government departments, nothing suitable could be found. The solution was what John Betjeman would immortalise as ‘Metroland’. GCHQ moved to the outer fringes of north-west London, close to Harrow and Pinner. The precise location was Eastcote, which had been used as a wartime outstation of Bletchley Park. It was also close to Dollis Hill, where the laboratories of the Post Office Research Department had built the remarkable ‘Colossus’ computer. Together with Stanmore, Eastcote was one of two large out-stations built in 1943 to accommodate the ever-expanding number of bombes that were being used to cope with the flood of Enigma traffic. However, while it provided reasonable single-storey buildings that were superior to the huts of Bletchley, the overall site was regarded as cramped and unattractive. In June 1946, William Bodsworth, a British code-breaker, returned from a period in America to the cold and rain of an English summer to take over GCHQ’s Soviet section. He found his first sight of Eastcote ‘frankly shattering’. Expecting ‘a nice old country house’, instead he found it to be ‘more cheerless than any of the temporary buildings I have seen in this racket either here or abroad’.⁶²

Those who were leaving Bletchley for good and returning to civilian occupations were given the security warning of their lives. Edward Travis issued a ‘Special Order’ to everyone in GCHQ. He began by thanking them all for their admirable achievements and the substantial contribution they had made to the winning of the war. He then moved quickly on to the matter of maintaining secrecy, even after the end of hostilities. ‘At some future time we may be called upon again to use the same methods. It is therefore as vital as ever not to relax from the high standards of security that we have hitherto maintained. The temptation to “own up” to our friends and families as to what our war work has been is a very real and natural one. It must be resisted absolutely.’⁶³ However, in the Far East, the secret of ‘Magic’, the breaking of Japanese diplomatic codes, was already out. When Bruce Keith, commander of the vast British sigint station located at HMS Anderson in Ceylon, tried to outline Travis’s tight security measures, some of his subordinates openly laughed at him and observed that ‘the Americans had spilled the beans in the paper the other day’.⁶⁴

The move from Bletchley to Eastcote was undertaken during early 1946 in four main parties. The first was the priority group, and included the Soviet and East European Division; the last arrived in April 1946.⁶⁵ Staff turning up in leafy Pinner in search of lodgings were allowed to refer to their place of work as ‘GCHQ’, but they were told firmly that any reference to ‘signals intelligence’ was forbidden.⁶⁶ Between 1945 and 1948 the term ‘GCHQ’ was used interchangeably with both ‘London Signals Intelligence Centre’ and ‘Station X’.⁶⁷

Bletchley Park was now an empty shell in the Bedfordshire countryside. Barbara Abernethy, who had worked as Denniston’s personal assistant, recalls: ‘We just closed down the huts, put all the files away and sent them down to Eastcote. I was the last person left at Bletchley Park. I locked the gate and took the key down to Eastcote. That was it.’⁶⁸ Much of the machinery was broken up, including examples of the mighty ‘Colossus’ computational machine. However, Professor Max Newman, who had been central to its development, managed to secure two ‘Colossus’ machines for his new computing department at Manchester University. These were transported by the Ministry of War Transport at the price of thirty-four shillings a ton. Newman offered to send a junior university lecturer down ‘to sit on the van’ to make sure that the precious machines were not damaged in transit.⁶⁹ In fact, this was not quite the end of Bletchley Park’s active life in sigint, since GCHQ continued to use it for training courses as late as the 1960s.

The intention behind GCHQ’s post-war move to London was to service the centres of power in British government. Accordingly, in the autumn of 1945 Travis took the opportunity to look at how the sigint product – the ‘blue jackets’ or ‘BJs’– circulated around Whitehall. The Foreign Office was a big customer, receiving three sets of BJs daily. One set stayed with Ernest Bevin, the new Foreign Secretary and his war-weary Permanent Under-Secretary, Cadogan, ‘for their immediate information’. Another went to the Services Liaison Department, which worked closely with the JIC. The third went to the main departments. Virtually everyone in the operational core of the Foreign Office habitually saw BJs, but they were always kept separate from other documents in special boxes which were locked up overnight.⁷⁰

In MI5, the ritual of sigint security was closely observed. Distribution was presided over by the redoubtable ‘Mrs Arbuthnot’, who recorded everything meticulously in her log. Security of BJs seems to have been at its most lax inside SIS, where batches of them circulated around sections for as long as six weeks before being returned. Nor were they properly logged. GCHQ noted that, quite uniquely, inside SIS BJs were never treated as requiring special security measures, and indeed in some cases had ‘found their way into the General Office for filing’. This broke the cardinal rule that sigint was never to mix with ordinary paperwork.⁷¹

The first major international crisis of the Cold War era was not long in coming. In June 1948, the Soviets decided to block road and railway access to the western sectors of Berlin, which were controlled by the British, the French and the Americans. The Berlin Blockade was defeated by a massive airlift of some four thousand tons of supplies a day. Hidden amongst the innumerable supply flights heading to Berlin were anonymous but highly secret aircraft collecting sigint for GCHQ, which provided some of the best intelligence during the crisis. Even before the crisis ended in May 1949, GCHQ had already been working hard on the ‘Russian problem’ for almost five years. The early onset of the Cold War had not only provided GCHQ with new targets, but had helped to perpetuate the wartime alliance between British code-breakers and their counterparts in allied countries. This, as we shall see, was fundamental to the postwar success of GCHQ.

4 The KGB and the Venona Project

…Paul [Guy Burgess], and Yan [Anthony Blunt] consider that the situation is serious.

Message from the KGB station in London to Moscow,

February 1950¹

The ‘Venona Project’ was possibly the most astounding code-breaking effort of the early Cold War.² Employing perhaps no more than a hundred people, it exploited a weakness in KGB communications and decoded some of the messages sent by Soviet intelligence. As a result, it revealed key Soviet agents and illuminated the unexpectedly vast scope and scale of KGB espionage in the West during the 1940s. This material was so significant that even though no new messages were collected after 1948, British and American code-breakers continued to work on the residue until October 1980. Initiated by the Americans, Venona collected new partners – first the British, and later the Australians, the Canadians, the Dutch and even the ‘neutral’ Swedes. It is justly famous for revealing some of the ‘giants’ of Russian espionage, including Klaus Fuchs and Donald Maclean, but the vast pool of messages that remain unsolved is also significant. Even now, it points unambiguously to many other cases yet to be resolved.

Anxiety about the compromise of sigint secrets was always central to the code-breaking profession. Back in 1927, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s infamous exposure of the reading of Soviet high-grade systems in the House of Commons had taught a whole generation of interwar code-breakers the price of careless talk. Thereafter, anxiety about the Ultra secret persuaded more than ten thousand people to keep their wartime vow of silence for decades. However, Venona introduced an even greater level of paranoia, since it hinted at the possibility of hundreds of Soviet agents active inside the governments of the West, some in high positions. For this reason it is unlikely that Venona was ever made known to President Roosevelt, and it was three years before his successor, Harry Truman, was let into the secret. Clement Attlee, Britain’s first post-war leader, was not told until a major security case made it unavoidable in late 1947.³ Nevertheless, the Venona project was compromised by several Soviet agents within five years of its initiation. This did not entirely negate its value, since the Soviets could not prevent the West from continuing work on the immense volume of KGB messages that had already been collected during the 1940s, patiently revealing the names of important agents. In the late 1950s, for example, GCHQ suddenly began to have success with Soviet Naval Intelligence messages, having used a new analytic technique.⁴

The extreme secrecy of the Venona project was its Achilles heel. Although the material often pointed to the identity of Soviet spies in the West, for security reasons it could not be shown to those arrested to persuade them to confess; still less could it be produced in court. Any sensible defence lawyer would seek to probe the nature of Venona, not only exposing its fragmentary nature, but also revealing sensitive secrets about sigint. Therefore, once spies had been identified by Venona, they had to be either caught red-handed meeting with their KGB controller, or successfully interrogated and broken. The result was a game of cat and mouse in which the mouse sometimes got away. In 1951, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and John Cairncross were among those who escaped by a whisker. Remarkably, Theodore Hall, an American Communist spy within the atomic programme, also brassed it out, despite close interrogation, escaping what would almost certainly have been death in the electric chair.⁵ By contrast, in 1950 the atom spy Klaus Fuchs succumbed to repeated and patient questioning by MI5 after his arrest. He told his interrogators that he ‘supposed he would be shot’, and was pleasantly surprised when he wasn’t.⁶

Venona revealed the security-minded nature of the Soviets. Much of their traffic was encrypted using a one-time pad system. This was time-consuming and slow, but they were willing to put in vast effort to protect their communications. This required huge volumes of tear-off pads with sheet after sheet of random numbers. The difficulty of generating thousands of sheets of truly random numbers should not be underestimated, and no one is clear how the Soviets made them. One individual has recalled a room full of women simply shouting out any number that came into their heads, but this seems improbable. Others have described devices not unlike lottery machines, with numbered balls. Whatever system was used, the logistical difficulties of generating many thousands of one-time pads and distributing them proved too much for wartime Russia.⁷ Some time in early 1942, with Moscow on the verge of evacuation and much of Soviet industry badly dislocated, operators began to run out of pads. The KGB department that printed them committed the fatal error of reprinting twenty-five thousand pages. This made a small proportion of the messages, which should have been unbreakable, vulnerable to cryptanalysis. Far worse, they were sent to KGB units as well as to military and diplomatic users.⁸

The Venona project that exploited this mistake began in Washington. The Americans had collected Soviet messages during the war, but they lacked time to work on them. On 1 February 1943 the US Army’s code-breaking service, called the Signals Intelligence Service, began a modest effort to see if it could exploit Soviet diplomatic communications. The telegrams had been collected at Arlington Hall, in Virginia, a former girls’ school which was commandeered by the Army as its main code-breaking centre. Interest increased dramatically when it was discovered that some of the streams of traffic related to espionage. In October 1943 a young code-breaker, Lieutenant Richard Hallock, a Signal Corps reserve officer who had been a peacetime archaeologist at the University of Chicago, was looking at Soviet commercial traffic when he realised that the Soviets had committed a terrible error and were reusing their pads. This was an astonishing discovery, and thereafter Venona slowly began to unravel some of the KGB’s most precious secrets.⁹

The US Army’s head of signals intelligence, Carter W. Clarke, was the main enthusiast for Venona. Clarke was a tough, impatient, hard-drinking individual who many regarded as uncouth, but he was also a lateral thinker. Like many military intelligence chiefs in both Britain and the United States, he nurtured a deep-seated distrust of the Soviets, asserting bluntly: ‘They’re your friends today and they’re your enemies tomorrow, and when they’re on your side find out as much as you can about them because you can’t when they become your enemy.’¹⁰ The US Navy code-breakers also began work on Soviet traffic in the summer of 1943. The fact that by the autumn of 1944 the two rival armed services were both referring to all Soviet radio intercepts by the same code name of ‘Rattan’ suggests a directive from a high level. The following year the code name was changed to ‘Bourbon’.¹¹

By 1944, another talented young American code-breaker, Meredith Gardner, was busy making the first breaks into KGB traffic and even some from Soviet military intelligence (GRU). Other code-breakers were now drafted in to help. One of them was Cecil Phillips, a chemistry student who was sent to Arlington Hall in June 1943, initially to work on Japanese naval messages. In May 1944 he was switched to Soviet diplomatic traffic. He quickly realised the scale of duplication, and made a number of progressions that led to wider breaks in the cypher system used by the KGB.

However, substantial activity had to await the end of the war with Japan, when larger numbers of staff could be transferred to work on ‘the Russian problem’.¹² Some of the Soviet messages were double-encrypted, and so represented a fantastic level of difficulty. Nevertheless, on 20 December 1946 Gardner decrypted a KGB message listing the names of scientists who had been working on the wartime development of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, known as the ‘Manhattan Project’. In spring 1947 he decyphered a message that showed that the Soviets were being given highly classified material from inside the US War Department.¹³ KGB agents were rarely referred to by their real names in the messages. The British spy Donald Maclean, for example, was ‘Homer’ or ‘Gomer’. Accordingly, their identities had to be figured out from their activities and from what material they were providing to the Soviets.¹⁴

Early accounts of Venona suggested that the first breaks were achieved as a result of the recovery of a partly burned Soviet codebook found in Finland and sold to America’s wartime intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services. Stories have long circulated about how American diplomats insisted that protocol required that it be returned to the Soviets. In fact, up until 1952, the progress made on Venona was probably driven by the pure sweat of mathematics, and represented a remarkable intellectual achievement. A little help was gained by intercepting Japanese traffic that contained Soviet material purchased from the Finns in 1944. The Finns had not been reading high-grade traffic, but had learned enough to be able to sort messages into homogeneous groups, the first stage of a cryptanalytical attack.¹⁵ It was only in 1953 that the American team realised that one of the KGB systems it was working on related to a Soviet codebook that had been in their possession since 1945. At the end of the war TICOM Team 6, led by Lieutenant Colonel Paul Neff, had seized a copy of a partially burned Soviet codebook while exploring the German sigint centre at Burgscheidungen. The Germans had themselves seized the codebook from the Soviet Consulate in Petsamo in Finland during June 1941.¹⁶

The big shock was revelations about espionage within the Manhattan Project. This immediately raised the question of how the material might be employed for counter-espionage. Liaison was established with Robert Lamphere of the FBI’s Intelligence Division, which had responsibility for maintaining physical surveillance on Soviet espionage activities. Venona was of immense help to the FBI, but it was not a one-way street. Occasionally the Bureau undertook burglaries of Soviet premises and photographed Soviet documents. Over the next decade, attempts were made to match material from these ‘black bag jobs’ with Venona material, but sadly there were few connections. Nevertheless, Lamphere ensured a coordinated exploitation system with the code-breakers.¹⁷

Meredith Gardner recalls that tight security for Venona only crept in slowly. In the beginning, everyone in the branch where it was being worked on was potentially privy to it, and ‘no special treatment was given’. This was partly because cryptanalysts had to support each other by discussing problems, since systems were often related to each other. There were people who genuinely needed to know, and there were also ‘mere busy-bodies who perhaps considered themselves consultants at large for all’. The Army intelligence liaison man, Howard Barkley, heard that ‘there was something interesting going on’ and came for a look, even though he had not been formally indoctrinated. Knowledge of Venona ‘might have been picked up almost anywhere’ in the branch at Arlington.¹⁸

Yet Venona was ‘so sensational’ that eventually something unusual had to be done on the security front. The focus was less on restricting the knowledge that it existed than on tightly controlling the contents of the messages. However, counter-intelligence is a messy business. What the US Army code-breakers needed in order to identify the spies was background material from other government departments – so they were forced to work closely with a gradually expanding circle of people scattered across Washington. Typically, seven copies of one Venona message, issued on 30 August 1947 and entitled ‘Cover Names in Diplomatic Traffic’, were circulated. One went to GCHQ through its liaison, Colonel Patrick Marr-Johnson. The US Army code-breakers noted that the British surrounded the material with ‘rigid safeguards’. Two copies went to the heads of Army and Navy code-breaking. Four went to mainstream Army Intelligence, Naval Intelligence and FBI. The State Department was also an important collaborator. Given that informal secondary briefing must have taken place, this means that perhaps as many as thirty people may have been given information from one circulated Venona message.¹⁹ By contrast, an understanding on Venona was only reached with the CIA in September 1948, and detailed cooperation on active cases did not occur until 1952. Remarkably, this was six years after the American code-breakers had fully indoctrinated the British at GCHQ.²⁰

It was the TICOM raids of early 1945 into Nazi Germany that had forced the British and the Americans to reveal their respective hands on the ‘Russian problem’. TICOM was an Anglo– American project, and no one could disguise the fact that material on German code-breaking successes against the Soviet Union was one of its top priorities. TICOM led to some of the greatest successes of the early Cold War. During the autumn of 1945 some of its best results were coming from a Soviet encyphered teleprinter system code-named ‘Caviar’ which was almost certainly being broken with the help of the German team recovered by Rushworth and Norland on their foray into Germany. No less important was the breaking of a number of Soviet military machine cyphers that were not dissimilar to the Enigma machine, or its widely used Swedish equivalent, the ‘Hagelin’ machine. GCHQ code-named these machines the ‘Poets Systems’. The first success was with an encoded Soviet teletype system code-named ‘Coleridge’ that gave great administrative detail relating to the Red Army in Eastern Europe. Carefully combined with material from more basic techniques such as radio direction-finding, it provided a superbly detailed picture of the Soviet Army in Europe. Thereafter, a team of GCHQ cryptanalysts led by Gerry Morgan working with an American naval team helped to decrypt another Soviet system called ‘Longfellow’. Some of the best successes against Soviet machines were the product of the brilliant mind of Hugh Alexander, combined with the enormous computer power provided by GCHQ’s American allies. In the Far East, Soviet naval codes were beginning to yield, but immediately after the war, ‘Coleridge’ and ‘Longfellow’ were the most important Soviet systems being exploited by the West.²¹

Britain was told about the embryonic Venona project as early as August 1945, and thereafter John Tiltman, head of the Cryptographic Group at Eastcote, was kept informed of progress.²² However, full cooperation came a little later. The young American code-breaker Cecil Phillips spent six months at GCHQ’s new location at Eastcote collaborating with Philip Howse. They focused on Soviet traffic that had been collected in Australia by monitoring Moscow’s Embassy in Canberra. More senior figures such as John Tiltman did not give them much attention, since Phillips and Howse initially thought much of the traffic to be low-level consular material. In 1947 GCHQ received a further briefing, this time from Meredith Gardner, the key American analyst of the Venona messages. However, GCHQ did not set up a proper Venona office at Eastcote until December 1947, sparked by the recognition that the Australian material was actually KGB traffic.²³ Eastcote was itself in a state of permanent revolution, with sections being constantly reformed and merged, to the extent that the ‘rumblings of reorganisation’ drew comment from figures like Joseph Wenger, Washington’s senior naval code-breaker.²⁴ The rumblings were the sounds of growth. From an establishment of just over a thousand in December 1945, GCHQ was nudging three thousand staff by 1948, and was already looking for new premises to accommodate its swelling numbers.²⁵

The British had also collected plenty of interesting wartime KGB traffic. As early as June 1943, Alastair Denniston had met Colonel Ted Maltby of the Radio Security Service, together with Roger Hollis and John Curry of MI5, to discuss ‘the interception of certain apparently illicit transmissions from this country which have been “DF-ed” to the Soviet Embassy’. (‘DF’ referred to the technique of radio direction-finding by triangulating between several aerials, sometimes mounted on detector vans.) These messages had attracted interest because they had nothing in common with the old Comintern style of transmissions, and it was noted that they might well be KGB traffic as they showed ‘great technical skill’. Collecting this material stretched Britain’s interceptor resources, since the traffic had lasted for eight hours solid in every twenty-four-hour period. Meanwhile, it was also searching for an illegal Comintern radio station in Wimbledon, using a disguised Ford Thames van with direction-finding equipment and security personnel in civilian clothes.²⁶

By 1948, the Venona teams at GCHQ and Arlington Hall were small but extremely integrated. Although the British employed a different code name for Venona, calling it ‘Bride’, they adopted a standard procedure for the translations. The British cell was superintended by William Bodsworth, one of the initial team that began studying Enigma in 1937.”²⁷ Like so many interwar code-breakers, Bodsworth was a linguist, not a mathematician, having read Spanish at Cambridge. Cheerful and possessed of a gentle humour, he was dubbed ‘Snow White’ because of his mop of white hair. Bodsworth’s team undertook much of the laborious task of trying to reconstruct the Soviet codebooks. The seven dwarfs supplied almost enough nicknames for the Venona teams: by the end of 1950, the number of people at Eastcote working on ‘Bride’ remained at less than ten. For the Americans, British input was essential both to the efforts to track down the identity of figures like ‘Homer’ and to obtaining background material to allow the analysis of the KGB’s Canberra messages.²⁸

It is almost certain that the first person to alert the Soviets to the existence of the Venona project in any detail was a KGB agent named William Weisband. Born in the Soviet Union in 1908, Voldya Weisband had emigrated with his family to the United States in the 1920s. In 1940 he had changed his name to William, and had registered at the American University in Washington DC. By 1942 he was serving as a lieutenant in a US Army code-breaking unit in the Middle East. He was posted back to Arlington Hall in July 1944, and was soon working in the Soviet section. Weisband had in fact been a KGB agent since 1934, and he certainly displayed all the traits of a classic agent. Gregarious and popular, he had friends throughout what was now called the Army Security Agency, and charmed the senior officers. His reputation as a problem-solver allowed him wide access within the Soviet section, and Meredith Gardner actually recalls him looking at a list of names derived from Venona material in late 1946. Weisband was not himself identified by Venona, but seeing the messages decrypted must had made him feel queasy, since his name – or at least his code name ‘Zhora’ – was certainly buried in traffic somewhere. In 1948 the Soviets summarised Weisband’s reports that had been fed back to KGB headquarters in Moscow. They contained worrying news:

For one year, a large amount of very valuable documentary material concerning the work of the Americans on deciphering Soviet cyphers, intercepting and analysing open-radio correspondence of Soviet Institutions was received…On the basis of Weisband material, our state security organs carried out a number of defensive measures, resulting in the reduced efficiency of the American deciphering service. This has led to a considerable current reduction in the amount of deciphering and analysis by the Americans.²⁹

In May 1950 Weisband was named by another agent who had been revealed by Venona and interrogated by the FBI. Although Weisband was questioned, there was insufficient evidence to charge him. There was also a fear that a court case would advertise the work of signals intelligence to other countries, which might then take steps to upgrade their communications. He was never prosecuted for espionage.³⁰

Yet Weisband caused immense damage to Western code-breaking. On Friday, 29 October 1948 the Soviets implemented a massive change in all their communications security procedures. American code-breakers referred to this fateful event as ‘Black Friday’. Many Soviet radio nets moved over to one-time pads, which henceforth were not re-used. Much of the procedural material that had been sent ‘in clear’, or unencrypted, between operators running medium-grade Army, Navy, Air Force and Police systems, was now encrypted for the first time. Operator chatter was banned. In the space of twenty-four hours, most Soviet systems from which the West had been deriving intelligence were lost.³¹ This affected the ‘Poets Systems’ which the British and Americans had been reading successfully as a result of their raids into Germany in 1945.³² This was the most serious British intelligence loss of the early Cold War.

For the British, Venona was full of irony. As a joint programme with the Americans it symbolised the highest level of trust. However, its subsequent revelations damaged the most important parts of the transatlantic relationship, including agreements on code-breaking and atomic cooperation. This was because in early 1950 Venona uncovered Klaus Fuchs, who had come to Los Alamos as part of the British contribution to the Manhattan Programme, but was in fact an agent for the KGB. Venona also raised serious doubts about the possibility of Anglo–American–Commonwealth sigint and defence cooperation because of the number of KGB agents identified in Australia. Directly or indirectly, Venona also exposed four of the KGB’s top agents inside the British establishment: Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and John Cairncross. The main problem for the KGB was that it did not know how many of its previous messages had been broken by the Venona project, and which of its agents had been exposed. This made it hard for it to warn specific agents. Venona also contributed to Soviet paranoia about double agents who might be planting disinformation. The KGB’s strange tendency not to wholly trust even its best sources, including the SIS officer Kim Philby, was one manifestation of this.³³

In August 1949 Philby returned from a posting in Istanbul to London. He was preparing to take over from Peter Dwyer as SIS liaison officer with the CIA in Washington, and was briefed by Sir Stewart Menzies, Chief of SIS, together with two of his senior officers, James Easton and Maurice Oldfield. Oldfield, whose responsibility was counter-intelligence, explained Venona to him in detail. Philby’s blood probably ran cold as Oldfield observed that they had broken about 10 per cent of the KGB’s Washington–Moscow telegrams and were now searching for a British diplomat working for the KGB and code-named ‘Homer’.³⁴ Philby immediately requested a conference with his KGB controller, Yuri Modin. The KGB station in the Soviet Embassy in London reported the crisis that now confronted them:

Stanley [Philby] asked to communicate that the Americans and the British had constructed a deciphering machine which in one day does ‘the work of a thousand people in a thousand years’. Work on deciphering is facilitated by three factors: (1) A one-time pad used twice; (2) our cipher resembles the cipher of our trade organisation in the USA; (3) a half-burnt codebook has been found in Finland and passed to the British and used to decrypt our communications. They will succeed within the next twelve months. The Charles [Klaus Fuchs] case has shown the counter-intelligence service the importance of knowing the past of civil servants…Stanley, Paul [Guy Burgess], and Yan [Anthony Blunt] consider that the situation is serious³⁵

Yuri Modin recalls that Venona ‘hung over us like the sword of Damocles’.³⁶ Nevertheless, he and Philby agreed gloomily that in the short term there was nothing they could do, ‘only wait and behave with extreme care and caution’.³⁷ Arriving in Washington in November 1949, Philby was offered a ringside seat on Venona. He was given Venona summaries by the GCHQ liaison officer in Washington, and was actually taken to Arlington and briefed on the project in detail several times.³⁸ Incredibly, in July 1950 he put in a successful request for GCHQ to give him an extra copy of any Venona-related material it was sending to the Americans in Washington, so he could peruse it at leisure. In any other circumstances this would have been an espionage triumph, but it caused Philby no joy. The arrests at this time of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, perhaps the most famous figures ever to be charged with espionage for the Soviet Union, cannot have calmed his nerves.³⁹

Understandably, the Americans had initially refused to show the British the KGB Washington–Moscow traffic.⁴⁰ This delayed the search for the Foreign Office spy code-named ‘Homer’, who eventually turned out to be Donald Maclean. In 1947, the earliest period of good code recovery, analysts knew that several messages from late March 1944 began with a stock preamble and greeting. Such standard openings were a gift for code-breakers. In this case it read: ‘To the 8th section. Material “G”.’ The Eighth section was thought to receive political intelligence, and short breaks in other KGB messages showed that the material concerned Britain’s Ambassador in Washington, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr. By December 1948, further work by Philip Howse revealed that it seemed to originate from telegrams sent by Churchill. In January 1949, after a month of frantic night-time digging in the registry of the Foreign Office (a daytime search would have alerted the regular diplomatic staff), the originals were found. The circle of suspects was gradually narrowing. The final breakthrough came in August 1950, when the Americans recovered two short stretches of material that referred to ‘Homer’ being entrusted with decyphering a telegram from ‘Boar’ [Churchill] to ‘Captain’ [Roosevelt]. This pointed directly to someone in Britain’s wartime Washington Embassy, and the finger of suspicion began to circle over the heads of a very few people. Further work on the messages suggested that ‘Homer’ was married. However, it was only on 30 March 1951 that the code-breakers were sure that ‘G’ and ‘Homer’ were the same. This information placed him in New York in June 1944.⁴¹

At this moment, Philby knew that Maclean had been identified. However, he also knew that MI5 would have to gather traditional evidence against him to support an arrest, so a window of opportunity existed. Philby’s friend and fellow Soviet agent, the diplomat Guy Burgess, was being sent home from Washington in disgrace after an especially embarrassing drunken episode, and Philby used him to pass a message to Yuri Modin, their KGB controller in London. On Friday, 25 May 1951, Burgess and Maclean fled from Britain on a ferry to St Malo. It was a narrow escape: MI5 had planned to confront Maclean when he turned up for work the following Monday. Once in France, a KGB contact handed them false papers which ensured that they could travel in relative safety across Europe towards Moscow. The false papers were essential, since by now every security service in Europe was looking for them. Inevitably, suspicion also fell on Philby, not least because Burgess had been lodging with him in Washington, but there was no hard evidence. Philby was recalled and forced into retirement, but no other action was taken against him.⁴²

Venona also had ramifications in the British Commonwealth. In July 1947, Field Marshal Montgomery, now Chief of the Imperial General Staff, had held a meeting with Australia’s Minister for External Affairs, Dr H.V. Evatt, about joint weapons development in Australia. Montgomery noted that ‘good security precautions are very necessary’ because of the appearance in Australia of a spy who was connected to the Igor Gouzenkou case, in which a defecting KGB cypher clerk had revealed a major spy ring in Ottawa in 1946. But in November and December 1947 Venona revealed that despite enhanced security precautions, sensitive documents were regularly leaking from Canberra to the KGB.⁴³ These revelations soon made their way to the highest level. On 27 January 1948, Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoeter, Director of the CIA, warned President Truman: ‘Indications have appeared that there is a leak in high government circles in Australia, to Russia.’ He explained that MI5 was engaged in expansive undercover investigations to determine just where the leakages were.⁴⁴ Highly sensitive material had been passed to the KGB from the Department of External Affairs in Canberra. The Soviets considered it to be spectacular stuff, for it included copies of the ‘explosive’ future strategy papers drafted by the British Post Hostilities Planning Committee, or ‘PHP’. This was bare-faced anti-Soviet planning material, prepared with the encouragement of the British Chiefs of Staff, that had already resulted in rows in Whitehall. Anthony Eden, then Foreign Secretary, had banned its circulation abroad in late 1944, but by then it was too late, and the volatile PHP reports had already made their way via Canberra to Moscow.⁴⁵ The KGB chief in Australia considered the PHP papers to be such an important coup that he asked Moscow for permission to send them by cypher rather than courier. This was a bad mistake, for the two lengthy papers, ‘Security in the Western Mediterranean and the Eastern Atlantic’ and ‘Security of India and the Indian Ocean’, provided the code-breakers with a vast word-for-word ‘crib’ to get into other Soviet traffic.⁴⁶ Partly because it was relatively easy to identify which documents had been taken in Australia, the KGB Moscow–Canberra cables proved to be the most successful part of the Venona operation. Remarkably, by early 1948 so much progress had been made that GCHQ was virtually reading the messages in real time.⁴⁷

London did not regard the Australians as competent enough to handle this security crisis. In February 1948 Sir Percy Sillitoe, the head of MI5, was despatched to Australia. With him came Roger Hollis, head of MI5’s C Division (later himself wrongly accused of working for the KGB), concerned with protective security and background checks, and another senior security officer, Roger Hemblys-Scales. With Courtney Young, MI5’s resident Security Liaison Officer in Australia, they persuaded the Prime Minister, Ben Chifley and Defence Minister, Frederick Shedden, to permit vigorous investigations. In July, following further discussions with British Prime Minister Clement Attlee, the Australians accepted British proposals for the creation of an Australian equivalent of MI5 later known as the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO).⁴⁸ Sillitoe returned to London, but Hollis and Hemblys-Scales remained in Australia to set up ASIO and work on the list of Venona suspects, which numbered twelve.

Thereafter, ASIO was almost entirely focused on what it called ‘The Case’. Tracing documents quoted in KGB traffic indicated likely suspects, including a typist, Frances Bernie, who helped to run a Communist youth league and who worked personally for Dr Evatt, the Minister for External Affairs. It also pointed to two Australian diplomats with Communist leanings, Ian Milner and Jim Hill. Hollis and Courtney Young did not tell the Australians that the names came from intercepts, but the nature of the material led some of the more experienced ASIO hands to suspect sigint as the key source. Some of the suspects were referred to by code names rather than real names, and their identities could only be deduced by careful circumstantial guesswork. Milner and Hill, who were identified positively, refused to ‘come over’. William Skardon, MI5’s most experienced interrogator, made a soft approach to Hill when he visited London in 1950, trying to persuade him to ‘be sensible’ and ‘make a clean breast of it’, but Hill denied everything.⁴⁹

The ‘Venona Twelve’ kept ASIO’s staff of close to two hundred busy well into the 1950s. Each new suspect opened a world of further associates and contacts who required separate examination. The task was difficult, since the Communist Party of Australia had long expected to be banned, and had built up a substantial underground organisation. Not unlike the Communist Party of India, seasoned by years of security attention, it had also achieved some infiltration of the police. Even the infiltration of ASIO seemed a possibility. ASIO’s staff worked around the clock watching and bugging the flats of suspect Soviet diplomats in Canberra. Each visitor was tailed and investigated. ASIO’s staff were learning the hardest lesson of counter-espionage and counter-subversion: working security cases really diligently only manufactured more leads and opened more cases.⁵⁰ Almost a quarter of the Venona messages relating to Canberra still remain classified, presumably because they relate to KGB agents not pursued or prosecuted.⁵¹

The British and Australians were not alone in suffering KGB penetration. Although headlines about Klaus Fuchs and Donald Maclean generated anxiety about Britain amongst the American elite, those on the inside knew Washington had its fair share of Soviet agents. Venona uncovered spies in the State Department, the Treasury, even in the White House. They included Harry Dexter White, a senior Treasury official, and Laughlin Currie, who had been a personal assistant to Franklin D. Roosevelt. This was not particularly surprising, since the vast influx of academics and scientists moving into government work during wartime had inevitably included some Communist Party sympathisers. The Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA, which had recruited heavily from the East Coast academic establishment, harboured perhaps a dozen people working for the Soviets.

Venona had profound implications for the development of the security state in America, Britain, Canada and Australia. Just at the moment when the public were anxious to throw off the claustrophobic constraints of wartime security, officials were confronted with irrefutable evidence of a massive programme of Soviet espionage. Selling strong security measures in the late 1940s was an uphill task. This was nowhere more true than in Australia. The creation of ASIO by a Labor Prime Minister, Ben Chifley, was a remarkable development. Like the British Labour Party, its Australian counterpart had historically been sceptical about surveillance, associating it with right-wing anti-union activities. In Britain too, Venona led indirectly to the introduction of detailed personal background checks, or ‘positive vetting’, for officials. British civil servants resisted the idea, but it was increasingly clear that without it, Anglo–American strategic cooperation on matters like atomic energy was likely to end.⁵²

Venona represents a documentary source of high value, and has helped to resolve some of the most bitterly contested Cold War espionage cases. These include the famously controversial cases of the atomic scientist Julius Rosenberg and the diplomat Alger Hiss, who were both active espionage agents for the Soviets. In these important cases, Venona offers us what Nigel West has rightly called ‘a glimpse of the unvarnished truth’.⁵³ At the same time, much of the Venona material is rather fragmentary, and in 1995 it was further obfuscated by the lamentable decision of the British and American governments to blank out some names on grounds of potential political embarrassment. Some KGB code names for individuals were re-used and given to more than one person. Moreover, it is possible that a minority of the people who appear in the Venona cables did not knowingly have a relationship with Soviet intelligence officers, or were identified as possible targets for future recruitment, but were never actually recruited. The tendency of some intelligence officers to exaggerate their triumphs has also to be borne in mind. In short, Venona has provided us with fabulous revelations, but the full story awaits the moment when historians access the files of the KGB and Soviet military intelligence, or GRU, in Moscow. That will not happen for a long time yet.

5 UKUSA – Creating the Global Sigint Alliance

Much discussion about 100 per cent cooperation with the USA about SIGINT. Decided that less than 100 per cent cooperation was not worth having.

Admiral Andrew Cunningham, Chief of the Naval Staff,

21 November 1945¹

One of the most important legacies of the Second World War was the creation of the vast global signals intelligence alliance known as ‘UKUSA’. The signing of the UKUSA intelligence treaty between Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand has long been regarded as marking the birth of a secretive leviathan, a global multilateral alliance that has grown to embrace numerous countries and to command almost unlimited intelligence power. Its origins are often traced to a single landmark treaty between Britain, the United States and the Commonwealth deemed to be concluded in 1948. Indeed, the highly classified UKUSA treaty is widely considered to be nothing less than the linchpin of the West’s post-war intelligence system. UKUSA supposedly created a cosy Anglo-Saxon club sharing everything in the super-secret realm of sigint.

Remarkably, there is in fact no singular UKUSA ‘treaty’ of 1948, and none of the above assertions is true. Instead, UKUSA is less an alliance than a complex network of different alliances built up from many different overlapping agreements. It is the sum of a curious agglomeration of many understandings that were mostly between two countries only, that accumulated over more than two decades.² Britain and the United States concluded the main agreements in 1943 and 1946, together with a further convention in 1948. According to the historian Peter Hennessy they are still in force, and as recently as August 2006, some sixty years on, the authorities deemed them so sensitive that, after anxious deliberation, they announced that they could not be released.³ Further agreements were added – and continue to be added – creating a complex spider’s web of cooperation. However, each agreement has its limits, and all parties have withheld sigint material from each other. In short, there is no common pooling of material. Moreover, relations between the various parties have often been tense, and latterly Washington has threatened some adherents, including Britain, Australia and New Zealand, with suspension or exclusion. If UKUSA is an alliance, its members are only ‘allies of a kind’.⁴

It is also wrong to think of UKUSA as exclusively concerned with sigint. It is, rather, a sigint and security network. Security agreements on physical control of the sigint product and on protecting the security of communications were perhaps the most important aspects of the UKUSA network. Sigint reports on particular subjects were rigidly compartmentalised and given ‘Codeword’ status, ensuring that they could only be seen by people cleared to see that series, and making them effectively ‘above Top Secret’. Venona is the best-known example of such a Codeword. Much of this obsessive secrecy was codified in a biblical tome entitled ‘International Regulations on Sigint’, or ‘IRSIG’, which had reached its third edition by 1967.⁵ UKUSA was also about secretly undermining the communications security of other states, even neutrals and allies. Communications security, or ‘comsec’, is perhaps even more sensitive than sigint. The efforts of the UKUSA powers to control it have been among the darkest secrets of alliance politics in Western Europe. In short, the realm of sigint alliances is profoundly realist – at times even paranoid – with operators ‘taking what they can get’. While UKUSA might appear from the outside to represent a single powerful intelligence colossus, on the inside it was anything but unified.

The best example of allies spying on allies is provided by Finland. The end of the Second World War had not turned out well for the Finns, since their Russian enemy had returned to the Baltic in overwhelming strength. Anticipating the arrival of the Russians, the talented Finnish code-breakers decamped en masse to Sweden, complete with their relatives, equipment and support staff. There they began a veritable car-boot sale of their cryptographic wares, including the results of sixteen years of continuous work against Russian systems. The beauty of selling codes is that the same items can be sold many times over. Predictably, the Finns paid their ground rent by assisting the Swedish equivalent of Bletchley Park, the Förvarets Radioanstalt, or FRA. In the last days of the war they also sold complete Russian codebooks to the American wartime intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services, to Britain’s SIS and also to the Japanese. They also sold the Americans the details of the British codes they had broken, and work they had completed against some US State Department cyphers. The Americans were eager customers. This episode – known as the ‘Stella Polaris’ case because of its northern origins – underlines the duplicitous nature of friendships in the realm of code-breaking.⁶

In the autumn of 1945, even while the Stella Polaris case was ‘live’, President Roosevelt’s successor, Harry S. Truman, was engaged in the abolition of the Office of Strategic Services. Two years later its remnants would be revived to become the Central Intelligence Agency, but for now many of its intelligence officers were dispersed and its agents paid off. By contrast, Truman regarded sigint as indispensable, and secretly gave permission for the American code-breaking agencies to work on into the post-war period and ‘to continue collaboration in the field of communication intelligence between the United States Army and Navy and the British’.⁷ All major countries desired the maximum world coverage. On 19 November 1945, Admiral Andrew Cunningham, Britain’s senior naval commander, attended a critical meeting of the British Chiefs of Staff. There was ‘Much discussion about 100 per cent cooperation with the USA about Sigint,’ he recorded, adding that they ‘Decided that less than 100 per cent was not worth having.’ In Ottawa, George Glazebrook, a senior Canadian diplomat, recommended to the Canadian Joint Intelligence Committee that Canada enhance her independent sigint effort in order to stake a claim in this secretive emerging cooperative system. ‘It is paramount,’ he insisted, ‘that Canada should make an adequate contribution to the general pool.’⁸

Yet a ‘general pool’ was not what emerged. Moreover, the way ahead was strewn with obstacles and tortuous negotiations. The complex package of agreements, letters and memoranda of understanding was not completed until 1953. In this process, Britain derived considerable benefit from her dominance over her Commonwealth partners and her imperial bases. GCHQ’s approach was to align her Commonwealth affiliates to create a critical mass before entering negotiations with the Americans. The story of Britain’s sigint relations with Australia illustrates this well. In March 1945, with the end of the European war looming, Edward Travis set off from Bletchley Park on a veritable world sigint tour. The possibility of transforming wartime cooperative arrangements into a post-war sigint alliance was already in his mind.⁹ En route, he and his party visited major sigint centres at Heliopolis in Egypt and HMS Anderson in Ceylon. They arrived in Melbourne in early April, and spent time with the Australian code-breaking organisation there, called the Central Bureau. On 17 April they departed for New Zealand and then moved on to Hawaii, San Francisco and finally Washington. By the time they reached Hawaii they were running low on funds, and had to beg a cash advance from the Foreign Office before they could proceed further. At each stop, the possibility of continued post-war cooperation was gently raised.¹⁰

Relations with the Australians were somewhat awkward. Typically, London had reluctantly agreed that Sir Frederick Shedden, the new Australian Defence Minister, could be indoctrinated into the secrets of sigint, but only so he could use his power to prevent a reduction of Australian spending on intelligence. There had also been alleged leaks about intelligence in Canberra, and in September 1945 there were momentary doubts as to whether any cooperation with Australia on sigint would be authorised.¹¹ Indeed, by December 1945 a ‘dangerous position’ had developed, with the Australians seeming to want to go it alone with their own system; what was worse, there were rival elements within the Australian armed services. British liaison officers warned, ‘If we are not prompt to give a lead there may even be 3 or 4 rival shows in Australia with no hope of proper security.’ During the war, material collected in Australia and the Far East had often been sent back to Britain for analysis. However, there was now a possibility that the Australians might end up ‘insisting on full exploitation in Australia’. This was a situation that British code-breakers wanted to avoid at all costs, since final exploitation was power, and they wished to keep their Commonwealth associates in a subordinate position.¹²

The crucial moment in the creation of the global sigint alliance occurred on 22 February 1946, when Britain opened a two-week Commonwealth conference for ‘Signals Intelligence Authorities’. This gave them critical mass prior to concluding a deal with the Americans the following month. The attendance of Australia and Canada was a foregone conclusion, and given the significant contribution that New Zealand had made during the war to naval sigint, there were hopes that she would also join in.¹³ The conference was also attended by senior officers from GCHQ’s regional centres. Bruce Keith, the commander of HMS Anderson, the massive sigint collection station in Ceylon, was there, accompanied by his deputy, Teddy Poulden.¹⁴ At this conference Australia offered sixty-five operating teams, amounting to 417 personnel, from the three armed services as its contribution to a new global sigint network.¹⁵ Australia was persuaded to set up a British-style Joint Intelligence Committee and, most importantly, a unitary Signals Intelligence Centre along the lines of GCHQ, which was given the cover name Defence Signals Branch.¹⁶

The big issue was the choice of the director of Australian sigint. The Australians fielded four candidates, all experienced wartime intelligence officers. However, Travis told them bluntly that it would be a British officer. Some Australians were affronted, but on balance Travis’s decision was probably correct, since it ensured that Australia would have good access to British sigint. Travis’s choice was Teddy Poulden, who had spent the last two years of the war as deputy to Bruce Keith, the commander of HMS Anderson, on Ceylon.¹⁷ Poulden took over in April 1947, commanding a staff of around two hundred, about twenty of whom were GCHQ personnel on secondment. Although senior Australian sigint officers resented the fact that Poulden had his own private cypher for communicating with Travis, he was broadly considered to have done a good job. In the early 1950s he was succeeded by an Australian, Ralph Thompson, who remained in the position until 1978, making him easily the longest-serving Western sigint chief.¹⁸ In January 1947 a further Commonwealth sigint conference was held in London, and the Chifley government gave final approval for the integration of Australian sigint into UKUSA at the end of the year.¹⁹ However, this was delayed by the security concerns raised by Venona, so there was little sigint contact between Australia and the United States until 1949.²⁰

Canada’s sigint organisation under the long-serving Lieutenant Colonel Edward Drake suffered similar ‘colonial’ treatment. Although Drake was a Canadian, his deputy was the stalwart British code-breaker and expert on Russian systems Geoffrey Stevens, who arrived to take up his post in Ottawa in March 1946. A few weeks later, on 13 April, the Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King authorised the consolidation of a number of wartime organisations into a small post-war unit of about a hundred staff known as the Communications Branch of the National Research Council (CBNRC). A number of senior posts were filled by staff seconded by GCHQ, prompting locals to observe that CBNRC stood for ‘Communications Branch – No Room for Canadians’. By the late 1940s Drake had resolved to offset this British oligopoly by developing better relations with the US Army code-breakers.²¹

The two-week sigint conference that GCHQ had convened with the Commonwealth partners in February 1946 was a vital prelude to business with the Americans the following month.²² Indeed, the Australians and Canadians had given GCHQ permission to negotiate on their behalf.²³ On 6 March, William Friedman, one of the US Army’s most senior code-breakers, arrived in London to complete a revised version of the previous wartime agreements between Britain and the United States. The main section of the agreement which followed this policy conference between the principals was only four pages long; however, a UK-USA Technical Conference followed in June 1946 which added many annexes and appendices. Much of this new material was about attempting to agree on security procedures for handling sigint.²⁴ The terms of the 1946 agreement are still highly secret. Both parties agreed to ‘pool their knowledge of foreign comint organizations’, and that in any future negotiations with other parties ‘every effort should be made to avoid disclosure of US/UK collaboration in the COMINT field’.²⁵ Joseph Wenger, the head of America’s naval code-breakers, accepted that the 1946 conference had only dealt with generalities, and this had generated ‘some criticism’. Nevertheless, his priority was to ‘set up the framework and establish the will to make it work’, so in his view it was a great success, and ‘laid the foundation of a very fruitful and important partnership’.²⁶

For GCHQ, liaison with allies was all-important to its new status as a proper intelligence agency in its own right. By the spring of 1946, Edward Travis was operating with two deputies at Eastcote. Nigel de Grey was the senior deputy, and had responsibility for operational coordination between the five main groups at GCHQ, together with recruitment, training and security. Following the important allied sigint conferences of February and March 1946, Travis added a second deputy, a naval officer called Captain Edward Hastings who had much wartime experience of working with Canada. His responsibilities included liaison with the US, the Commonwealth and India, together with managing GCHQ’s overseas collection stations.²⁷

GCHQ’s strategy for cooperation with the Americans was to rapidly reorientate its collection towards Russia. Typically, the vast Forest Moor wireless station near Harrogate in Yorkshire, with an aerial farm of some ten square miles, was switched from collecting German traffic from the Eastern Front to Russian traffic as soon as the war drew to an end. British field units in Germany, Austria and Italy joined the suborned Italians in collecting Russian military traffic. The re-established sigint stations in Singapore and Hong Kong also focused on Russian traffic, with the latter specialising in KGB messages. All this made Britain an attractive partner for the United States.²⁸ The core of Anglo-American cooperation was a ‘relentless attack’ on the wartime generation of Russian cyphers. Figures like John Tiltman and Hugh Alexander provided the code-breaking expertise, while the Americans provided most of the processing capability.²⁹

All the three American armed services were routinely circulated with GCHQ finished product on Russia. A key instrument was the ‘Comintsum’, a digest of the latest ‘hot’ material which made its way around comint-cleared centres. London would send twenty copies of this sort of document to Washington on a regular basis, with two copies going to US Air Force intelligence, two to US Army intelligence and so forth.³⁰ On Russian military targets at least, the British and Americans operated smoothly as one machine. A very high priority was given to joint planning for the use of nuclear weapons in any future war. As early as 28 April 1948, General Charles Cabell, head of US Air Force intelligence, reviewed the intelligence arrangements in support of the current emergency atomic strike plan ‘Operation Halfmoon’. ‘At the present time,’ he noted with satisfaction, ‘there is complete interchange of communications intelligence information between the cognizant United States and British agencies. It is not believed that the present arrangements…could be improved.’³¹ This was cemented by a further Anglo– American agreement on communications intelligence signed in June 1948.

However, the sharing of material on other parts of the world remained selective, reflecting the political tensions of the moment. In 1948, even while the UKUSA alliance was gradually being drawn together, Britain and America were at loggerheads over Palestine and the emerging state of Israel. There was anxiety in London about sharing intelligence on the Middle East with the Americans. On 15 February 1948, Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee discussed the problem of circulating its own reports, which included material from SIS and GCHQ, to the newly formed CIA. Although British intelligence representatives in Washington were not aware of a specific ‘pro-Zionist bloc in the Central Intelligence Agency’, nevertheless they asserted that ‘Jewish sympathisers were no doubt included in its establishment’, and complained that there had been leaks. William Hayter, the Chair of the JIC, insisted that its material on Palestine should be shown in the first instance only to the Director of Central Intelligence in person. He added that ‘It should be explained to him that if he could not guarantee that they would not fall into pro-Zionist hands, then he could not be left with them.’ Even so, it was decided to withhold more sensitive recent reports on Palestine from the Americans.³² Meanwhile, ‘Operation Gold’, run by US Navy intelligence, was intercepting the cable traffic of Jewish arms smugglers, but this was not being shared with Britain, or indeed acted upon.³³

American links with the Commonwealth parties were also hesitant. The Americans were slow to do business with the Canadians. They worried about how much GCHQ had told the Canadians about Anglo-American agreements, and suspected that GCHQ was secretly giving Ottawa some American sigint.³⁴ During the 1948 discussions of possible CAN-USA sigint agreements, it became clear that the US Communications Intelligence Board was anxious to prevent an information free-for-all. It preferred to hand material to the Canadians on a ‘need to know’ basis, and was anxious to prevent a proliferation of sigint liaison officers.³⁵ Meanwhile, somewhat foolishly, Canada resisted the all-important standardisation of security procedures that was a foundation stone of the BRUSA agreement, so negotiations were ‘very difficult’, dragging on until 1953.³⁶ The Americans were even more wary of sigint cooperation with the Australians due to the KGB spy cases uncovered by Venona in the late 1940s. This, in turn, retarded the joint sigint effort against the newly formed People’s Republic of China from 1949. In late 1953, the advent of a Liberal (i.e. conservative) government in Australia triggered a full resumption of cooperation, formalised at a tripartite sigint conference between the Americans, British and Australians. New Zealand also came in as fifth partner. It was only at this point that the name ‘UKUSA’ was adopted at GCHQ’s request.³⁷

The most prickly area of alliance relations was the business of cypher security, which protected the secrecy of diplomatic communications. Foolishly perhaps, at a meeting in London in May 1947, the British launched an audacious bid to persuade the Americans to share the innermost secrets on matters of their code-making. The discussion revolved around the replacement of the Combined Cypher Machine, which had been developed for inter-allied communications during the war, but was now thought obsolete and vulnerable. The British were also keen to replace their own national machine, the Typex, but were desperately short of money as a result of post-war austerity, and argued that for reasons of economy any new cypher machines should be capable of inter-allied use, and proposed joint research and development with the Americans.³⁸ The Americans were startled: it had been a cardinal principle never to share the secrets of their unique and highly prized Sigaba machine. Hoping to overcome this psychological barrier, the British revealed that they were in fact already knowledgeable about Sigaba. They not only described its inner workings ‘quite accurately’, but confessed that they had ‘incorporated its principles in a radioteletype machine for their own use’. Hoping that they had pushed the Sigaba obstacle aside, the British then made their pitch. They claimed that they had developed an approach to cypher machines that was ‘new and revolutionary’, and ‘superior to the Sigaba principle’. They were happy to share this with the Americans, and perhaps make use of it in joint machines that might be developed for both national and allied use.

Far from being reassured, the Americans were horrified. Discussion had to be ‘temporarily discontinued’ while they withdrew to confer amongst themselves. The US Army could see no objection to releasing the Sigaba principle for use in a combined allied machine, since the British had clearly unravelled it. However, the US Navy offered ‘serious objections’, and used their veto. Thus the British were told that Sigaba had to be completely eliminated from the discussions. At this point they revealed their ‘new and revolutionary idea’ for future cypher machines, only to find that their American colleagues sneered at it and dismissed it as ‘impractical’ on engineering grounds. The two sides parted without agreement.³⁹

While GCHQ was overawed by the scale of American sigint resources, matters looked quite different from Washington. With the Second World War now over, and an economising Republican Congress controlling the federal purse-strings, resources for American co mint interception activities were remarkably tight. This contributed to American under-preparedness prior to the Korean War. It also enforced a division of labour between GCHQ and the Americans, and prevented American sigint from expanding its activities in Europe in the way it had hoped. In 1949, US Army Security Agency interception units in Europe were still passing much of their product to GCHQ for analysis, rather than back to Washington. Moreover, GCHQ retained primary responsibility for areas such as Eastern Europe, the Near East and Africa.⁴⁰ Because of this division of labour, the late 1940s saw the gradual development of American and British spheres of influence. In Scandinavia, for example, relations with Norway were an American responsibility, while those with the Swedes belonged to GCHQ, although this demarcation was not always strictly adhered to.⁴¹ GCHQ enjoyed the additional benefits of the panoply of bases provided by Britain’s imperial and post-imperial presence. Although the Empire was shrinking, the very process of retreat and the euphoria of independence often rendered the new successor states willing to grant limited base facilities to the departing British. These ‘communications relay facilities’ may have seemed innocuous, but in fact many countries were unwitting hosts to important GCHQ collection sites.⁴²

The outbreak of the Korean War early on the morning of Sunday, 25 June 1950 took Britain and the United States by complete surprise. Although they had comint units in locations such as Hong Kong and Japan, their main focus was Russian traffic, and their sigint capabilities against North Korea were non-existent. The NSA official history notes that there was ‘no person or group of persons working on the North Korean problem’, and even had they done so, they had ‘no Korean linguists, no Korean dictionaries and no typewriters’. Although the CIA had picked up what might be called ‘rumours of war’ from human agents, there was no high-profile attack warning delivered to policy-makers. During the first few weeks of the war, the Americans and their South Korean allies suffered serious reverses and were almost overrun. Sigint helped the Americans to beat back the attacks on their rapidly shrinking perimeter by providing excellent tactical intelligence, but they blundered again by missing the entry of the Chinese into the war in October 1950.⁴³

The Korean War resulted in a headlong expansion of American sigint. More than two thousand additional staff were recruited, and more than $5 million of additional spending on comint and comsec was authorised within weeks of the war commencing.⁴⁴ The outbreak of the war also meant crash expansion in Asia. The Americans informed London of their ‘urgent need’ for a US Air Force sigint unit to be deployed to Hong Kong, and other sites were quickly developed on Taiwan in an attempt to remedy the yawning intelligence gap in East Asia.⁴⁵

Korea had another important impact. With new employees flooding into the training wing at Nebraska Avenue in central Washington DC, the Americans soon had a vast backlog of people requiring security clearance before they could begin work. By the end of 1950, more than a third of sigint employees were ‘uncleared’. It was then discovered that since 1948 the CIA had been using the polygraph, or lie detector test, initially only to screen people who had access to sigint, although its use was soon extended to all CIA employees. By May 1951 it had been adopted for all American code-breakers, and polygraph examiners were testing ‘from seven in the morning till eleven at night’ to clear the backlog. Polygraphs soon became an embedded part of American sigint culture, but were not introduced at Britain’s GCHQ.⁴⁶

The Korean War was of enormous importance for GCHQ because it fundamentally reshaped the American sigint community. There had been several failed attempts to create a single unified American sigint organisation along the lines of GCHQ.⁴⁷ The war broke the logjam. In 1952, President Truman suddenly insisted on the creation of a strong central body called the National Security Agency, or ‘NSA’, under General Ralph Canine. The armed services fought a desperate rearguard action: in August 1952, General Samford of US Air Force intelligence denounced Truman’s desire for ‘strong central control’ as nothing short of a ‘major error’. However, Truman’s mind was made up, and in November he signed the order for the reshaping of American comint.⁴⁸ NSA was given unambiguous control over comint in a historic document called NSCID-9.⁴⁹ This brought about a reduction in, but not the elimination of, what the leading historian of NSA has called ‘the fractious and seemingly never-ending internecine warfare’ between the American service comint organisations. The British were immensely relieved. In the background, figures like Edward Travis had been quietly urging inter-service unity on their American collaborators since the summer of 1945.⁵⁰

The creation of NSA also had physical consequences. Up until this point there had been a plan to relocate the headquarters of American sigint to Fort Knox, near Louisville in Kentucky. However, it was now realised that the need for high-grade communications circuits and for civilian workers made this impossible. The policy-makers, who were the consumers of their intelligence ‘product’ in Washington, also protested about the move, rightly anticipating that it would mean a worse sigint service. They insisted that the new headquarters be within a twenty-five-mile radius of the Washington area.⁵¹ On 3 November 1952, Fort Meade on the northern edge of Washington’s Beltway was designated the likely new headquarters for NSA under a secret programme entitled ‘Project K’. Over the next five years this location would become the headquarters of the world’s largest, most expensive and most secretive intelligence agency⁵²

Britain’s GCHQ had made precisely the opposite decision. In 1952 it moved away from its suburban site at Eastcote on the perimeter of London to a comparatively distant location at Cheltenham in Gloucestershire. Although GCHQ had only finished the move to Eastcote in June 1946, by April 1947 it was already looking for a new home. This was partly because of the physical limitations of the Eastcote site, and also because Travis realised that in any future war there would not be time to relocate to a safe place like Bletchley, away from Soviet bombing. Several possibilities were considered, and in October 1947 GCHQ scouts had found promising twin sites at Oakley Farm and Benhall Farm, near Cheltenham, which were occupied by the Ministry of Pensions. These single-storey temporary office complexes had been built in 1940, initially for the possible evacuation of government from London during the Blitz. After 1942 they were used for the logistical organisation of the US Army in Europe. The wartime presence of the Americans was the key, since it had left a helpful legacy of improved trunk cable communications.⁵³

An alternative explanation for the choice of Cheltenham is offered by Professor R.V. Jones, one of the famous architects of the ‘Wizard War’ which deployed British science against Nazi Germany. Jones served as scientific adviser to GCHQ in the early 1950s, and recalls that the scout who initially found the Cheltenham site was Claude Daubney, one of the senior GCHQ staff who liaised with the Y Units of the armed services, and who spent much of his time in Whitehall. Daubney was a typical RAF officer of the thirties, handsome and ‘heavily moustached’. His main relaxation was betting on horseraces, and he argued endlessly with Jones about the theoretical possibility of beating the bookmakers. He ‘deliberately chose Cheltenham, as he told me, so that he could combine visits from his London office to GCHQ with attendance at Cheltenham races’.⁵⁴ Others support the idea that GCHQ was attracted to Cheltenham by its proximity to the racecourse.⁵⁵ Whatever the truth of the matter, the course would serve as an occasional helicopter landing pad for future visits by British Foreign Secretaries.⁵⁶ The move from Eastcote took place between 1952 and 1954, but the rapid growth of GCHQ during the Korean War meant space was tight even at the new location. This contributed to the decision to constitute comsec as a separate organisation called the London Communications Security Agency. Its staff either moved to central London offices in Palmer Street, or stayed at Eastcote.⁵⁷

In its move to Cheltenham, GCHQ created a unique intelligence town. It brought with it Bletchley Park’s formidable reputation for secrecy. Within a decade almost everyone in Cheltenham had a family member or friends who worked at GCHQ, but nobody talked about what they did. The town welcomed the ‘Foreign Office types’ with open arms, and GCHQ was soon contributing an enormous amount to its intellectual and artistic life, quite apart from being its biggest employer. The GCHQ staff were also sporty, providing most of the players in the Foreign Office football team that won the Civil Service Football Cup in 1952. This could present some peculiar problems. When local reporters covered matches in Cheltenham, they were told they could name the goal-scorers of the visitors, but not of the local team. Reporting these games tested their copywriting skills to the very limit.⁵⁸

The previous ten years had been a formative decade for GCHQ. By 1944, the code-breakers of Bletchley Park had made themselves Britain’s premier intelligence service. Out of the chaotic brilliance housed in a few wooden huts in the Buckinghamshire countryside came one of Britain’s most forward-looking and innovative organisations. Another crucial legacy of the late 1940s was the agreements with the United States and the Commonwealth that laid the foundations of UKUSA, a worldwide sigint alliance, agreements that are still in force today. Anxiety about Moscow had been a driving force behind these agreements, and even before the Second World War was properly over, the Western allies had been paying increased attention to Soviet cyphers. Despite the triumphs of Venona, and the uncovering of key KGB agents like Klaus Fuchs and Donald Maclean, Moscow’s higher-level communications remained mostly unbreakable after 1948. Accordingly, GCHQ and its partners were already searching for new kinds of intelligence-gathering to use against the Soviet Union, opening up a whole new vista in the electronic war.⁵⁹

THE 1950s FIGHTING THE ELECTRONIC WAR

6 ‘Elint’ and the Soviet Nuclear Target

Our intelligence about Soviet development of atomic weapons is very scanty.

Joint Intelligence Committee, 29 October 1947¹

In late August 1949, Lavrentii Beria, chief of the KGB, arrived at a small settlement on the steppes of Kazakhstan, not far from the city of Semipalatinsk. Here, Soviet scientists were hard at work in a set of temporary laboratories, intently focused on what they obliquely called ‘The Article’. They were referring to the Soviet Union’s first atomic bomb, now situated precariously on top of a scaffolding tower fifty miles away. Houses, locomotives, buses and even tanks, together with some unfortunate farm animals, had been placed close to the weapon to gauge the effects of an explosion. The Soviet Union’s chief nuclear scientist, Igor Kurchatov, gave the command to detonate, and a small but incredibly bright light appeared at the top of the tower. Suddenly it became a white fireball. A blast wave swept out, clearing everything in its path, as the explosion itself rapidly turned into a chaotic mix of orange, red and black. A dark mushroom cloud, five miles high, formed over the test site. Back in the laboratories, the scientists were jubilant and kissed each other on the foreheads. A month later, nineteen key figures from the nuclear programme, including a German scientist, were made Heroes of Socialist Labour. Beria is reported to have used the same list of names that identified those who would have been shot immediately had the test failed.²

In the event, it was Western intelligence that had failed. Soviet progress towards a nuclear weapon had been a top intelligence target. The predictions of Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee, the highest authority for analysis, had actually become steadily less accurate. By 1949, when the test took place, Britain’s top intelligence analysts were arguing that the probable date of the first Soviet test would be mid-1953. They were adrift by no less than four years. The CIA was no more accurate, and had similarly told President Truman that mid-1953 was the most likely date. Shocked by the surprise atomic test, Britain and America now redoubled their intelligence effort in the field of Soviet strategic weapons.³ Throughout the Cold War, the key target for GCHQ would remain Soviet nuclear weaponry. This included not only the atomic bomb programme, but work on ballistic missiles, bombers and other means of delivery. The Chiefs of Staff were worried by Britain’s relative vulnerability to nuclear attack, and wanted intelligence forecasts on this crucial issue. In their list of ‘sigint targets’ for 1948, the JIC exhorted Britain’s code-breakers to focus their efforts on this area, together with parallel strategic threats such as chemical and biological weapons.⁴ Other Soviet activities, including KGB espionage and diplomatic initiatives, only constituted GCHQ’s second and third priorities.

But ever since the massive revision of Soviet cypher procedure on ‘Black Friday’ in 1948, GCHQ had been having a hard time with its main target. The one-time pads employed for the highest-grade Soviet messages were now being correctly used, and so could not be broken, and machine cypher procedure on systems like Taper, effectively a Soviet military version of Enigma, had also been tightened up. Moreover, Moscow and its satellites enjoyed common borders and so often used landlines instead of wireless transmissions, which could not be easily intercepted. All this eventually prompted the British to follow the Soviets down the path of more extensive physical bugging of diplomatic premises in the mid-1950s.⁵

GCHQ was nevertheless providing Whitehall with large quantities of useful material on lower-priority issues. It continued its long tradition of attacking the communications of smaller states like France, Turkey and Egypt. The JIC had also asked it to look at subjects such as Arab nationalism and the relations of Arab states with Britain and the USA, and the attitude of France, Italy and the Arab states to the future of North Africa, especially Libya. Because of the ongoing insurgency in Palestine, GCHQ was also urged to focus on the Zionist movement, including its various intelligence services. All of these proved more accessible than Soviet traffic.⁶ The diplomatic traffic of smaller states also provided an excellent window on the Soviets. Conversations between Soviet diplomats and the officials of these countries were often captured in telegrams sent from Moscow that could be read with ease. In 1946 Alan Stripp, a British code-breaker who had spent the war working on Japanese codes, found himself redeployed to the Iranian border. Throughout the Azerbaijan crisis of that year, when the Soviet Union appeared to be behind a potential breakaway state in northern Iran, he worked on Iranian and Afghan communications.⁷ This sigint revealed the scale of Soviet activities and ambitions in the region, helping to trigger robust counter-pressure by President Truman.⁸

How the main target lists for sigint were drawn up was of central importance. In theory, they were created by the JIC. However, much of the preliminary work was undertaken by more shadowy committees working under the London Signals Intelligence Board, Britain’s supreme sigint authority. These enjoyed strong military input. When diplomats complained that political and colonial subjects were not getting enough attention, they did not get an enthusiastic response. Many felt that undue weight was being given to defence priorities, and to nuclear warfare in particular. The overwhelming emphasis given to defence had profound implications for the shape of British sigint. It accelerated the development of a revolutionary new kind of sigint that focused on equipment and military formations.⁹

During the Second World War, Bletchley Park’s primary emphasis had been the interception of communications signals for intelligence purposes. However, as the war progressed, there was growing interest in another kind of sigint that was derived from intercepting electronic signals, such as radar, which had been developed during the Second World War. A related field of interest was the growing use of radio waves to create missile guidance systems. Examining these enemy radio signals was known as electronic intelligence, or ‘elint’. Elint revealed a great deal about enemy weapons, and was also essential for conducting ‘radio warfare’, which involved jamming enemy signals and radar. The first example of this had been the successful efforts of Professor R.V. Jones to divert the beams used to guide the German bombers attacking London. These techniques were refined during the war against Japan. An elaborate elint unit was set up within Mountbatten’s South-East Asia Command under the improbable cover name of the ‘Noise Investigation Bureau’. In the summer of 1945, elint-equipped aircraft called ‘ferrets’ patrolled the night skies over Rangoon listening to Japanese radar.¹⁰ Elint and radio countermeasures, conducted jointly by GCHQ and special units of the RAF, were a massive growth area after 1945, partly because they were so closely linked to strategic weapons. One great advantage of elint was that it rarely required the reading of complex enemy codes.¹¹ Increasingly, the business of signals intelligence would consist of two branches, the familiar one of communications intelligence or ‘comint’ and the new one of elint.

Britain had excelled in the use of both comint and elint during the Battle of Britain, and later in bombing raids over Germany. One of the architects of this system was Arthur ‘Bill’ Bonsall, who would become Director of GCHQ in 1973.¹² This success had made a deep impression on American intelligence officers in Europe, who felt admiration and not a little envy¹³ In early February 1945, the US Army Air Force held a conference of all senior air intelligence officers (A-2s) across Europe, at which ‘every A-2 expressed his disappointment at our utter dependence on the R.A.F’ in sigint matters. The US Ninth Air Force had deployed some very effective converted Flying Fortresses as airborne listening stations, but the British had controlled the flow of strategic sigint. The lesson was clear. Colonel Robert D. Hughes, Director of Intelligence for the Ninth Air Force, told Washington that he wanted his own air sigint units with control over sigint policy and sigint research: ‘We feel that you should demand, and organize under your control, for peace as well as war, an organization similar to that of the R.A.F…Unlike other highly technical forms of intelligence, in which our American Air Forces have shared, we have continued to depend entirely on the R.A.F. for this level of work in “Y”.’¹⁴

Elint formed one of the closest parts of the Anglo-American sigint relationship during the immediate post-war period because it focused on the Soviet military target. Exchange on elint was not initially linked to the Allied sigint agreements reached at the end of the war, but in 1948 it was being brought within the growing body of Western intelligence pacts that formed UKUSA. GCHQ approached Washington with a proposal to ‘extend the present British-US Comint collaboration to include countermeasures, intercept activities and intelligence’ in the field of elint. This meant coordinated patterns of ‘ferret’ flights – effectively a division of labour – with the resulting intelligence being swapped ‘via Comint channels’.¹⁵ By the 1950s, GCHQ had achieved control over elint in Britain, and so was managing relations with all the various American outfits in this field. This had meant redrawing GCHQ’s charter to include not only comint but also elint, something which had not pleased everyone. R.V. Jones, who was Director of Scientific Intelligence at the Ministry of Defence in the early 1950s, strongly resented losing this part of his empire; the benefits of having all activities superintended by GCHQ were nevertheless overwhelming.¹⁶

Anglo-American sharing was important, because elint was an expensive business. Many of the target Soviet signals were short-range and could only be collected from ‘ferrets’, which were effectively flying intelligence stations. Initially, the RAF was ahead in this new field. By 1947 a fleet of specially equipped Lancaster and Lincoln aircraft patrolled the East German border, monitoring Soviet air activity. This was complemented by ground stations at locations such as RAF Gatow in Berlin listening to basic low-level Soviet voice traffic. British ‘ferrets’ made adventurous forays over the Baltic in June 1948 and the Black Sea in September 1948. Remarkably, they were soon crossing Iran to reach the Caspian Sea, thus flying perilous missions close to the very heart of the Soviet Union.¹⁷ On the ground, a British undercover team was also operating in northern Iran, monitoring Soviet radar in the Caucasus as well as Soviet missile tests at Kasputin Yar on the edge of the Caspian. The team conducting this work were posing as archaeologists, a favourite British cover for all sorts of intelligence work. Once a week they drove from the Iranian border with the Soviet Union to the British Embassy in Tehran to deliver their precious tapes.¹⁸

Early Western elint efforts in the air were spurred on by the knowledge that the Soviets had launched their own secret ‘ferret’ programme. In April 1948 an American radar station in Germany reported that it was being probed by ‘ferret’ aircraft, and in November a Soviet plane circled a US radar station at Hokkaido in Japan collecting signals for an hour, and then escaped without interception due to bad weather. Defectors also brought tantalising snippets. In May 1948 Baclav Cukr, General Secretary of the Czech Air Force Association, escaped to the West bringing knowledge of a group of Dakota-like planes at Zote airfield outside Prague. These mysterious aircraft were kept under constant guard in special hangars, and had ‘several special antennae on the outside’, a sure sign that they were elint collectors.¹⁹

During the war the vested interests of many different RAF commands had made it difficult to create a single coherent elint organisation.²⁰ Post-war rationalisation allowed the fusion of these elements. RAF Watton in Norfolk was selected as the new home of elint, and collected the remnants of many wartime units into 100 Countermeasures Group.²¹ The result was a weird menagerie of aircraft which were one-off flying laboratories adapted for various special tasks. The mainstays were twenty ageing Handley Page Halifax bombers. There were also B-17 Flying Fortresses, Lancasters, Mosquitoes and Avro Ansons, together with an Airspeed Oxford and a Percival Proctor. The unit at Watton soon received some new Avro Lincolns, effectively updated Lancasters. All were stuffed with unique items of electronic listening equipment and primitive wire recorders for collecting voice traffic.

Christened the Central Signals Establishment, or ‘CSE’, Watton boasted a Signals Research Squadron, a dedicated sigint unit known as Monitoring Squadron and a Radio Countermeasures Squadron. The Avro Lincolns were the best aircraft available, and they were given over to radio countermeasures and radar jamming, since they would have to work closely with RAF bomber formations in any future war with the Soviet Union. The Lincolns would soon be fitted with the revolutionary new carcinotron, or ‘backward wave oscillator’, in effect an electronic gun that produced powerful microwaves of the same frequencies used by radar, giving them enormous onboard jamming power. By contrast, some of the other airframes used for listening were antique. However, it was a venerable Halifax from Monitoring Squadron that was despatched on sigint collection duty over the Soviet Zone of Germany during the early stages of the Berlin Blockade in 1948. This was the first sign of a possible ‘hot war’ between East and West, and GCHQ decided it was time to share the lessons of sigint more widely. For the first time lectures on radio countermeasures and tactical sigint were given to officers passing through the RAF Staff College at Bracknell. A handbook on tactical sigint was prepared for all staff officers, albeit no mention was made of the mysterious ‘Ultra’.²²

In 1951 the monitoring aircraft were rechristened 192 Squadron, and worked ever more closely with GCHQ. Meanwhile the radio countermeasures and jamming unit was rebranded as 199 Squadron. The RAF received four Boeing RB-29 ‘Washington’ aircraft, which were really American B-29 Superfortresses modified for listening. Their vast internal space allowed additional sigint equipment to be fitted by the sigint ground engineers at RAF Watton, who were known as the Special Radio Installation Flight, or ‘SRIF’. In 1953 two English Electric Canberras were acquired and refitted for secret sigint operations by SRIF. Their standard duty was flights along the borders of the Warsaw Pact, alternating with longer visits to the Baltic and the Mediterranean. Training of special operators was undertaken on slow but reliable Vickers Varsity aircraft.²³

Beneath the sea, an even more sensitive sigint programme was under way. Much of what London and Washington knew about the Soviet Navy had been derived from captured German intelligence material harvested from Berlin in 1945, or from what the British had gleaned directly from their surprisingly good relations with the Soviet Navy during the war. However, this information was now outdated. The US Navy decided to send two submarines into the Bering Sea to test the possibility of undertaking listening operations off the major Arctic ports used by the Soviets. These successful pilot operations were limited to an investigation of the area using sonar. A much more ambitious mission was then attempted. This was a proper sigint collection operation, designed to scoop the signals that emanated from regular Soviet missile tests in the Barents Sea.²⁴

In the summer of 1949 the US Navy picked its latest submarines for this mission, the USS Cochino and the USS Tusk. They had been built at the end of the war, and in 1948 they were modified to bring them up to U-boat standards and fitted with the latest snorkels. This allowed them to run submerged for long periods on diesel power, venting their exhaust to the surface. They had also been streamlined and fitted with the fastest available propulsion systems. The specialist elint equipment for capturing missile control signals, or ‘telemetry’, was installed by British sigint technicians at Portsmouth. The submarine chosen for fitting was the Cochino, under Commander Rafael Benitez. The name ‘Cochino’ was supposed to denote a species of trigger fish, but in Spanish it simply meant ‘The Pig’. Preparations were masterminded by Harris M. Austin from the US Naval Security Group and civilian sigint engineers. Additional aerials, known as ‘ears’, were fitted to the tailfin. The elaborate listening technology required the drilling of small holes for wires in the submarine’s pressure hull, which weakened it and did not best please the crew. Trials were held along the British coast in July 1949. In August the Cochino, escorted by three other submarines, including the Tusk, headed for Arctic waters. In the Barents Sea, the Cochino separated and sat off the coast hoping to collect the high-frequency signals that indicated a missile test, but found nothing of great interest. After a few days of lurking, it headed back to a rendezvous with the Tusk.²⁵

However, disaster now struck. Four hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle the Cochino ran into a severe storm. Water poured in through a malfunctioning snorkel and a serious battery fire developed, burning for fourteen hours and producing large volumes of dangerous hydrogen. Some of the crew battled the fire using breathing equipment, but after a series of explosions they staggered back and admitted defeat. One crew member recalls: ‘They formed a grotesque aspect with their faces and hair burned. The skin was falling from their hands.’²⁶ Commander Benitez and his seventy-eight crew decided to abandon ship just after midnight. Despite a rescue by the Tusk, seven men were lost to the stormy seas off the Norwegian coast. Six of these fatalities were brave rescuers from the Tusk who were equipped with faulty survival suits, while the seventh was civilian signals intelligence expert Robert W. Philo from the Cochino. Commander Benitez was the last man to make the treacherous crossing – effected by a swaying plank – between the two vessels. By the time the Tusk pulled clear the Cochino was already half-submerged. ‘With a final burst of spray she disappeared from sight,’ plunging into 950 feet of water. The Tusk took the casualties, many with severe burns, to Hammerfest in Norway, from where they were flown to London.²⁷ These were the first casualties in one of the most secretive and dangerous areas of Cold War signals intelligence activity. However, London and Washington were not deterred. By the early 1950s, British and American sigint submarines were regular visitors to the headquarters of the Soviet fleet.²⁸

Elint flights over the open sea were also sensitive and risky. On 8 April 1950 a US Navy elint aircraft, a PBY-42 Privateer, launched from Bremerhaven in northern Germany, was shot down while trying to identify new Soviet missile bases along the Baltic coast. The crew of four, who had named their aircraft the Turbulent Turtle, all perished. The Soviets later salvaged the Privateer’s elint equipment from the waters of the Baltic, and were in no doubt about the nature of the mission. Further missions were postponed.²⁹ Within a month of the shootdown of the Privateer, General Omar Bradley, then Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, set out the case for resuming the flights, insisting that the intelligence they gathered was of the ‘utmost importance’. President Truman finally agreed to a resumption when told that US aircraft close to Soviet-controlled territory would be armed ‘and instructed to shoot in self-defense’. Truman minuted, ‘Good sense, it seems to me.’ The President’s green light was received on 6 June 1950, but after the outbreak of the Korean War later that month the flights were suspended for another few weeks due to ‘current hyper-tension and fear of further shoot-downs’. By the end of 1950, regular operations with RB-50Gs, ‘special mission’ elint aircraft adapted from an upgraded Superfortress bomber, were operating out of RAF Lakenheath airbase in East Anglia.³⁰

Norway was an early partner in all types of sigint operations. In 1952, Rear Admiral Anthony Buzzard, Britain’s Director of Naval Intelligence, paid a secretive visit to Norway. His requests were so sensitive that only handwritten notes were taken at the meetings. Buzzard asked for permission to launch special reconnaissance flights from Norway into Russian airspace using the RAF’s new Canberra aircraft, and also to run elint flights conducted within Norwegian airspace. However, the fate of the USS Cochino and then of the American Privateer had alerted the Norwegians to elint operations as a potential flashpoint, and they were cautious. Only permission for the latter flights within Norwegian airspace was granted.³¹ By the mid-1950s the Norwegian Defence Intelligence Staff was beginning to experiment with the use of commercial trawlers as platforms for intelligence-gathering in the Barents Sea. Initially these were used for photographic reconnaissance, but they were gradually expanded to involve sigint monitoring. A ‘cover’ shipping company, Egerfangst, was established to run these operations, and its first vessel, the Eger, was in operation by 1956 using equipment supplied by the American NSA.³²

Although the most important sigint collected at short range came through perilous operations by air and sea, the British and Americans also boasted vast armies of land-based listeners crouching over their radio sets in wooden huts, often in inhospitable locations. Tactical sigint in peacetime presented a problem, since there was not much for Y service sigint to listen to. Yet on the first day of any future war with Russia – and war, if it came, was expected to come suddenly – the RAF would be required to reconstitute its vast legions of secret listeners.³³ In the event, the three services kept a large inter-service intercept formation in place, using personnel who were doing National Service. During peacetime they were lent to GCHQ, and spent much of their time collecting a wide range of signals, including diplomatic and commercial traffic. One RAF sigint officer observed, ‘Our only function is to receive the stuff in its cryptic form – a purely mechanical process – and pass it on to the body whose job it is to break it down.’³⁴ By 1950 a system was in place whereby all those beginning National Service were asked if they would volunteer to learn Russian. The huge numbers of personnel who were trained up guaranteed a vast pool of tactical sigint operators who could be recalled on the eve of war, although GCHQ worried about how to hide the scale of the operation. This had profound consequences for the balance of power within post-war British sigint. It ensured that while the overall British sigint programme was coordinated by GCHQ, it was in fact provided by a complex alliance of GCHQ and the three armed services. This secret pact suited everyone – except for the Treasury, which struggled to track sigint spending, hidden as it was under a welter of misleading headings and cover organisations.³⁵

The outbreak of the Korean War on 25 June 1950 triggered a massive expansion of the riskier and more dangerous short-range operations to collect all types of sigint, including elint. Tensions were high, because the strategic planners believed that the outbreak of global war was not far away. Hitherto the Americans had been dependent on the British to cover much of north-west Europe, but now Americans began to arrive in numbers and their listening stations sprouted all over Britain, often disguised as RAF stations. In 1952 the 47th Radio Squadron of the US Air Force Security Service arrived at Kirknewton airbase in Scotland, from where it could monitor shipping off the Kola Peninsula. In October that year Squadron Leader J.R. Mitchell became the first dedicated ‘Liaison Officer for GCHQ’ on elint in Washington.³⁶

The accelerated pace of operations paid dividends. By 1952 elint experts in London and Washington had achieved a comprehensive picture of the Soviet Air Force. This had not required the breaking of Soviet codes. Instead, most of it was achieved through a mixture of elint or direction-finding, which simply meant using triangulation to locate specific Soviet units. GCHQ also listened in on clear voice traffic used by Soviet air-defence controllers giving instructions to fighters. There were large gaps in both Soviet air warning and coastal radar, which were mapped carefully. Anti-aircraft radar around Moscow was examined with special attention. Elint experts had been able to follow air-defence exercises in which the Soviets had used tiny strips of aluminium foil dropped from aircraft, known as ‘chaff’, as a radio countermeasure to fool radar operators into thinking large numbers of aircraft were airborne. Some of the more sophisticated Soviet work was thought to have been carried out by German experts captured by the Russians after 1945. Korea itself had proved to be a bonanza, with new Soviet radio equipment being captured, including direction-finding equipment which showed ‘marked improvement in design and construction’.³⁷

Success in the exciting new field of elint offset some recent disappointments. GCHQ and its American partners had not yet recovered the medium-grade Soviet cyphers lost during the infamous ‘Black Friday’ of October 1948. They had not detected the advent of the first Soviet atom bomb, nor had they anticipated the outbreak of the Korean War. However, the elint effort against the Soviet Air Force, which also involved direction-finding and traffic analysis, was one of the key areas in which GCHQ could claim outstanding achievement in the first postwar decade – and it was sustained.

There was an especially secret reason why GCHQ and NSA examined the operational anatomy of the Soviet ‘nuclear bear’ so minutely. During the early 1950s, target intelligence officers in London and Washington had been busy exchanging sensitive data on ‘the mission of blunting the Russian atomic offensive’. This meant planning early counter-force attacks against Soviet nuclear forces, especially bombers, in the hope of destroying them on the ground in Eastern Europe before they could be used in a future war. GCHQ had given particular attention to this matter because of the vulnerability of Britain, and the Americans were impressed by the progress London had made on it. GCHQ and the RAF’s secret units had amassed ‘a significant amount of evaluated intelligence, particularly in the special intelligence field, which would be of the greatest value’ if war broke out.³⁸

American officers considered that ‘vigorous efforts should be taken immediately to ensure rapid development of a joint research program to insure maximum exploitation of the British resources’. In short, it was not just the raw elint that the British had collected, but their sophisticated analysis of it that allowed it to be turned into high-quality finished intelligence, a legacy of the skills garnered during Bletchley Park’s Hut Three operation. Most of the airfields and the operational procedures for the Soviet Union’s nuclear air force in the European theatre had been mapped by 1952.³⁹ In June of that year a team from the US Air Force Security Service centre at Brooks Field, led by Major Hill, visited GCHQ and one of its outstations at Knockholt in Kent to further converge their activities in this area. Hill also wanted to discuss the creation of new ‘ground-based electronic intercept stations’ in Europe. Korea had greatly accelerated preparations for a ‘hot war’, and GCHQ’s elint success on Soviet air defences helped it to justify budget increases.⁴⁰

Throughout 1951 and 1952, global war often seemed imminent. Communist China had entered the Korean War in 1951, and numerous Soviet advisers were busy assisting the North Korean forces. Soviet and American pilots were actually fighting each other in the skies of East Asia. Although the public were never told, sigint made this fact clear to the secret listeners. In this increasingly fevered atmosphere, improved intelligence was given a high priority. On 22 January 1952 the British Chiefs of Staff met the Permanent Under-Secretary of the Foreign Office to review plans for accelerating intelligence. GCHQ was given a large tranche of new money over five years under the heading ‘Methods to Improve’. Its extensive shopping list included larger computers and ‘high speed analytical equipment’ for renewed attacks on high-grade Soviet communications. These were given the highest priority, and government research and supply elements were instructed accordingly. GCHQ and the Admiralty were beginning a new programme to build better receivers for ground-based and seaborne ‘Technical Search Operations’ which were critical to elint. Again, much of this was about targeting, and the Chiefs of Staff continually reiterated the ‘very great importance’ of speeding up technical development in these areas.⁴¹ By November 1952, British defence chiefs wanted increased expenditure on intelligence, and were unanimous that in the short term the emphasis should be on sigint.⁴²

Late 1952 was an exciting time for GCHQ. Equipped with a larger budget, staff had begun to move to their new headquarters at the twin sites in Cheltenham. It also had a new Director, Wing Commander Eric Jones. Given the rise of airborne sigint, it was appropriate that an RAF officer should have succeeded Edward Travis, who had been increasingly ill during the late 1940s with lumbago.⁴³ Jones was a Bletchley Park veteran who had proved himself while in charge of the critically important Hut Three. Bill Millward, another long-serving GCHQ veteran, recalls that at first glance ‘his qualifications for the post were not apparent’. He had spent the 1930s as a cloth merchant in Macclesfield. However, he was a quick learner, a natural diplomat and a man of obvious principle.⁴⁴ He had proved an excellent liaison officer in Washington towards the end of the war, and after the ‘happy outcome’ of the BRUSA conference of 1946 he had decided to ‘stay in the racket’.⁴⁵ This was good for GCHQ, since Jones proved to be a leader who inspired instinctive trust. In late 1952 he was busy filling the three hundred extra staff posts recently authorised. GCHQ had already proposed an additional increment of a further 366 staff, and was going from strength to strength.⁴⁶

In the late summer and the autumn of 1952, senior GCHQ officers like John Somerville had been pressing defence scientists and intelligence chiefs to join them in planning the future expansion of airborne sigint.⁴⁷ Good results were being obtained, and GCHQ was making the most of the facilities at its disposal, but there were just not enough ‘ferret’ flights, and the elint-collection effort needed ‘more equipment, personnel, aircraft and ships’.⁴⁸ The RAF was using its three RB-29 Washingtons, which were big enough for the increasingly complex equipment required.⁴⁹ It was a Washington that had captured the first recordings of ‘Scan Odd’, the new airborne radar which equipped Soviet fighters. However, the RAF’s Washingtons were slow and vulnerable compared to the upgraded American variant, which could reach 400 mph, as fast as a wartime fighter.⁵⁰ British elint specialists longed to enter the jet age with the military version of the de Havilland Comet, but there seemed to be no hope of getting this desirable aircraft. Part of the problem was that 192 Squadron was not seen as a front-line fighting unit, tended to be overlooked and was continually moved between commands over the next two decades.⁵¹ There was also an acute shortage of staff at GCHQ qualified in the rarefied field of elint analysis, which was made worse by the upheaval of the move to Cheltenham.⁵²

The required extra momentum came from the Americans. Washington pressed the British for more spending and more effort at a major US/UK elint conference in December 1952.⁵³ Accordingly, in 1953, Britain’s elint specialists acquired more small specialist Canberra jet aircraft, and a year later, after much discussion, the Treasury reluctantly approved the purchase of three much-prized de Havilland Comet C2s, a modified version of Britain’s first jet airliner. Until now, all of the sigint aircraft had been rough-and-ready adaptations. The Comet C2 was Britain’s first dedicated airborne sigint platform designed from scratch. In the spring of 1957 the first C2 arrived at CSE Watton and was placed in the hands of SRIF, the RAF’s secret team of sigint engineers, who were based in No.3 Hangar. Their task was to cram a whole mini-sigint ground station into the cramped interior of an airliner. For George Baillie, the Principal Scientific Officer at Watton, this was the most complex task his team would ever undertake. Equipping the three Comets was extremely expensive and time-consuming. It was therefore with complete horror that they discovered a fire in No.4 Hangar in the early hours of the morning of 3 June 1959. One plane was completely destroyed, leaving CSE with only two Comets to fulfil the many missions requested by GCHQ. The Treasury boggled at the cost of the unscheduled replacement of the third aircraft, and it was two years before GCHQ’s Deputy Director Joe Hooper persuaded it to find the money.⁵⁴

In America, the new NSA was now responsible for communications intelligence or ‘comint’, the most important area of signals collection and code-breaking. However, battles over elint stretched on into the 1960s. Even ten years after the creation of NSA, American officials envied the more centralised British model, which placed GCHQ in charge of both fields of sigint activity.⁵⁵ In 1953 the British approached the Americans to suggest a combined organisation for planning electronic warfare and radio countermeasures. The problem for the Americans was that they would first have to settle their bitter inter-service disputes, which was proving near impossible.⁵⁶ Notwithstanding this, the two nations managed to get together for a major US/UK Electronic Warfare Conference every two years.⁵⁷ The GCHQ approach made sense, because it was becoming harder to distinguish between signals that carried communications and other types of electronic signals. The Americans noted wistfully that this ‘has been recognised by the British, who have placed all electronic search and reconnaissance under the control of COMINT authorities’ – in other words, under GCHQ. In the US, control over these matters remained fiercely contested as late as the Vietnam War.⁵⁸

By 1953, elint was considered so valuable that more aggressive British operations were being authorised. These included clandestine operations on the ground. GCHQ had manufactured a new short-range elint reception and analysis kit, code-named ‘Deaf Aid’, that looked like a suitcase. SIS was sending agents into the Eastern Bloc with these sets – the results are still classified. The Joint Intelligence Committee decided that the equipment would also be secretly deployed in diplomatic posts inside the Eastern Bloc alongside the covert comint stations operated by the Diplomatic Wireless Service.⁵⁹ By February 1954 experimental versions were also being deployed on the ground by the British Military Mission, or ‘Brixmis’, effectively a team of roving military attachés in East Germany.⁶⁰ GCHQ was settled into its new accommodation by January 1954, allowing it to work with the Ministry of Defence’s Directorate of Scientific Intelligence on the much-needed expansion of T Division, the analytical unit at Cheltenham which made sense of elint once it was collected.⁶¹

All these new intelligence activities meant risk. In October 1952 A.V. Alexander, the Defence Secretary, and Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, had been chewing over the delicate question of who should approve the expanding programme of ‘ferret’ flights and perilous submarine missions around the edge of the Soviet Union. They agreed that the buck should be passed upwards to Downing Street, and a process developed whereby a list of proposed secret sigint missions was regularly sent to Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Rather disingenuously, Alexander told Churchill that Britain had in the past, in cooperation with the Americans, ‘carried out one or two flights with special aircraft near Soviet territory with the intention of “sniffing” at Russian transmissions’. In reality, a veritable fleet of elint aircraft had been buzzing around the perimeter of the Soviet Union for more than five years. Churchill was assured that they kept at least thirty miles from the Soviet coastline. Alexander continued:

The aircraft are almost certain to be picked up by Russian radar. In fact we shall be disappointed if they are not, for that is the whole object of the operations. But since the flights will take place at the darkest period of the month, and the Russians do not (as far as we know) possess airborne radar, the risks of actual interception are small.

In other words, if the intelligence operations against Soviet air defences were to succeed, they had to actually create alerts and prompt the Soviets to launch their fighters, as it was precisely these procedures that GCHQ wanted to listen in to. Alexander added that a key purpose in undertaking these operations was ‘making our own contribution to the Anglo–American intelligence pool from which we will expect valuable returns in kind’.⁶² What would happen if a secret British spy plane crashed inside the Soviet Union, or if a submarine was caught inside a Soviet harbour? So far the GCHQ’s clandestine collection programmes had been remarkably free of incidents, but this enviable record was not to last for much longer.⁶³

7 The Voyages of HMS Turpin

Depth charging continued for longer than I care to remember…

Tony Beasley, HMS Turpin, off the Soviet coast,

March 1955¹

By early 1953 the Americans had lost a submarine and an aircraft during perilous short-range sigint missions. Their human losses were already in double figures. By contrast, the British were increasingly confident, having flown many missions without incident. The lumbering RB-29 Washington aircraft of the RAF’s 192 Squadron regularly flew their routes around the Baltic, and were often ‘intercepted’ by Soviet fighters, but were never fired upon. This may have been because the British used a small number of experienced and specialised units for forward sigint collection who were dedicated to covert missions, working under the direction of GCHQ. Equally it could have been sheer good luck. However, in 1953 that luck was to change.

The first serious British ‘flap’ was the loss of an RAF Avro Lincoln on 12 March 1953. The Lincoln was effectively an improved version of the Lancaster bomber that had entered service just as the Second World War ended. It saw active service against insurgents in Malaya and Kenya during the 1950s, and although it remained Britain’s heavy bomber until the arrival of the first V-bombers in 1955, a number were transferred to intelligence duties. Some were allocated to 199 Squadron, the radio warfare unit that operated out of RAF Watton. Armed with a powerful carcinotron, they were capable of a formidable barrage of jamming, and were often called on to disrupt the sigint-gathering activities of Soviet spy trawlers around the coast of Britain.² The RAF also boasted a Radar Reconnaissance Flight of Lincolns that took ‘radar pictures’ of important landmarks denoting routes to key bombing targets. Some of the more precarious Anglo–American overflights of the Soviet Union during 1952 and 1954 were effectively engaged in an intelligence-mapping exercise for bombing missions that might be directed against Moscow and Kiev.³

The RAF Lincoln lost on 12 March 1953 was not directly involved in radio warfare or special duties. It was merely on exercise, and wandered out of one of the defined twenty-mile air corridors over the Soviet Zone between West Germany and Berlin. However, as we have seen, British and American exercises were often designed to trigger an alert so that Soviet air-defence systems could be listened in on. The frequent efforts to get their defences to ‘light up’ ensured that the Soviets were often on high alert, and were inclined to fire at anything that came into their territory. Accordingly, all RAF flying near the Soviet Zone of Germany involved an element of risk. This was underlined by a Polish pilot who chose to defect to the West on 5 March 1953, and landed his Soviet-built MiG-15 jet fighter in Denmark. He confirmed that MiG pilots were ‘under orders to shoot down an aircraft if it refuses to obey signals to land, even if it does not open fire’.⁴

On the morning of 12 March 1953, two Lincolns took off from the Central Gunnery School at Leconfield in Yorkshire. This was a routine training flight that involved an exercise with NATO partners and took place every fortnight, heading out over Germany on a simulated mission of about six hours. The first aircraft, ‘H’ (RF503), was under the command of Flight Sergeant Denham, and carried the Director of the Gunnery School, Squadron Leader Frank Doran. En route to Germany, as part of the exercise, Denham’s aircraft was ‘intercepted’ by Thunderjets of the Dutch Air Force, Belgian Meteors and RAF Vampires. Unusually, as they approached Kassel, still well inside the British Zone, they were surprised to see two Soviet MiG-15s underneath them. The MiGs conducted a number of mock attacks, but did not open fire. Their activity was recorded on the cine cameras that were attached to the gun turrets of the Lincoln for training purposes. The anxious crew turned north and then headed back to their base in Yorkshire.

The second Lincoln, ‘C’ (RF531), under the command of Flight Sergeant Peter Dunnell, was following along the same track, two hours behind. It also carried an important passenger, Squadron Leader Harold Fitz, who had just taken over as Commanding Officer of 3 Squadron and who had come along for the ride as co-pilot. Just after 1 p.m., near the air corridor that stretched across the Soviet Zone from Hamburg to Berlin, two more MiG-15s appeared. This time they opened fire. Although the Lincoln had strayed some way into the Soviet Zone, by the time it was fired on the crew had realised their error and retraced their steps. They were now just west of the River Elbe, inside the British Zone. The firing took place over the village of Bleckede, where ammunition belts from the MiGs were later recovered. The Lincoln entered a steep dive, still pursued by the MiGs, and broke up, with the main fuselage landing in a wood near Boizenburg, just inside the Soviet Zone on the eastern bank of the Elbe. Other parts of the aircraft, including the starboard wing, came down on Luneburg Heath, a British military exercise area fifteen miles south of Hamburg.⁵

Of the seven crew, four were found dead inside the wreckage. Three of the crew had managed to bail out, but one parachute failed to open. The other two crew members seemed to parachute successfully, but several shocked German witnesses testified that one of the Soviet MiGs swooped low and strafed them with cannon fire. Wilma Muller, one of the witnesses, testified that one of the crew had a ‘perforated parachute’ as a result of being fired upon. Both crew members whose parachutes had opened died of terrible wounds shortly after landing.⁶

The RAF concluded that the Lincoln had gone off course and strayed into Soviet airspace shortly after it entered the air corridor to Berlin. However, it was obvious that its intention was to head up one of the three twenty-mile-wide air corridors that connected the three sectors of Germany occupied by the West to Berlin. While the Soviets insisted that the British crew had fired first, it was soon proved beyond doubt that the Lincoln had been unarmed, since much of the firing mechanism from its turret guns was routinely removed on training sorties. However, the Foreign Office resisted the idea of pressing hard for compensation because inspection of the wreckage showed that the Lincoln was actually carrying some ammunition, even though it was unlikely that it had fired. ‘We might have to admit that the aircraft accidentally penetrated the Soviet Zone of Germany,’ it noted. Nevertheless, it was confident that, from where the cases from the Soviet cannon shells fell, the MiGs had downed the Lincoln over the British Zone.⁷

British Members of Parliament were outraged. They pressed for compensation from the Soviets for the crew’s families, and were told by the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Selwyn Lloyd, that the British High Commissioner in Germany had been ordered to ‘demand’ adequate payment. Churchill was clearly animated about the matter, but behind the scenes officials were soft-pedalling.⁸ High-level instructions were given to British representatives to ‘avoid post-mortems’, and instead to focus on talks that would avoid a repetition of the incident.⁹ Three months after the event, Foreign Office officials urged, ‘We should be in no hurry to do anything,’ and were anxious to prevent the public from learning that the Soviets had refused compensation from the outset.¹⁰ The bodies of the seven crew members who had fallen in the Soviet Zone were returned to RAF Celle, and eventually to their families.¹¹

While the Lincoln had not been on an intelligence flight, its progress was being carefully tracked by a British sigint unit on the ground at RAF Scharfoldendorf in the British Zone of Germany. The unit carefully transcribed the conversation between the MiG pilots and the Soviet ground controllers, which were ‘in clear’ voice communications. This sigint report was soon on the desk of the Prime Minister, and the unit received praise for catching the Soviets ‘red-handed’. The report made it clear that the Lincoln was shot down in cold blood, and led to Churchill’s bitter comments on the ‘wanton attack’ in the House of Commons.¹² It also helped to confirm that before turning around and retracing its steps, the Lincoln had in fact penetrated Soviet airspace ‘fairly deeply’.¹³ Later, the families of the crew members asked why Churchill was so certain about the exact pattern of events, but of course the sigint aspect of his information could not be revealed to them.¹⁴ Churchill ordered that in future all flights over Germany, including training flights, would not only carry ammunition but would also fly with guns ‘loaded and cocked’. In 1955 his successor, Anthony Eden, still required all training aircraft to carry ammunition when over Germany.¹⁵

An agreement with the Soviets on air incidents was badly needed. As air historians have noted, the first half of 1953 was a period of high tension in Western Europe. Only a few days before the Lincoln incident, an American F-84 Thunderjet had been shot down by a MiG. A week later a British European Airways Viking airliner was strafed by MiGs while travelling down the Berlin Air Corridor, but managed to limp home. A fortnight after that an American bomber was attacked by MiG-15s over Germany, but repelled them with vigorous cannon fire. In the Far East, where the Korean War was drawing to a close, things were even worse. On 27 July, a few hours before the final armistice came into effect, an American F-86F Sabre pilot shot down a civilian Aeroflot Il-12 airliner, killing all twenty-one persons on board. The Americans and the Soviets engaged in a protracted argument as to whether the airliner was over North Korea or China when it was shot down. No one could disguise the fact that the debris came down in China.¹⁶ Two days later, presumably in retaliation, the Soviets downed a US Air Force RB-50G Superfortress sigint reconnaissance aircraft near Vladivostok, with the loss of seventeen of the eighteen crew.¹⁷ The RB-50G was a much faster version of the RB-29 Washingtons flown by the RAF’s 192 Squadron, but it had still not been able to escape. All NATO aircraft flying near the Inner German Border were now operating on a fully-armed ‘fire back’ basis.¹⁸

Discussions between the four occupying powers over the RAF Lincoln did not go well. In 1945 the Allies had agreed that there would be three air corridors stretching from different points in the Western Zones of Germany across the Soviet Zone to Berlin, which was itself divided between the four powers. Sensibly, the Soviets suggested replacing the complex and confusing system of three different air corridors with a single wider corridor or ‘funnel’. The Allies refused, because although this solution would have been safer, each of the three corridors passed over a subject of ‘intelligence interest’. Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, who represented the British, explained to officials in London:

The crux of the matter is really how much importance we attach to the intelligence interest. The Americans are at present very strong on this (they are particularly anxious to retain ability to watch the Fulda Gap), and have suggested to us privately that we are not attaching sufficient importance to intelligence interest in the Northern Corridor.

Negotiations were made more complex by the fact that the French, who also had a sector in Berlin, were ‘obviously’ not told about the intelligence issues during the negotiations.¹⁹ The Americans later explained that the retention of the southern corridor was ‘an absolutely vital requirement’ for them, since what they needed above all was early warning of any concentration of forces signalling an impending Soviet attack. As well as the regular sigint flights that travelled down the corridors, the Americans were now using special aircraft equipped for lateral photography, claiming that the photographs were so good you could ‘see a golf ball on a tee at 40 miles’.²⁰ The Americans were ‘entirely rigid’ on intelligence interests being paramount. Accordingly, the negotiations foundered, and the existing system, with its three corridors, remained largely unchanged.²¹

The RAF sigint units based at CSE Watton were especially lucky not to lose any aircraft in this mini air-war. In 1954 a Gloster Meteor from 527 Squadron, which claimed to be on a ‘radio calibration mission’, strayed over the border into East Germany. This seems to have been due to a navigational error. The crew were oblivious to their mistake, but soon realised they were running short of fuel, and opted to land at the next visible airfield. The pilot, Sergeant Don Coleman, and his navigator, Sergeant Mike Thomson, stepped out onto the tarmac and – to their horror – realised that the approaching troops had red stars on their caps. The Soviets spent several weeks inspecting the aircraft before it was returned to the RAF. The incident earned Coleman the unwelcome nickname ‘Dan Dare’.

The following year, another Gloster Meteor on a ‘radio calibration flight’ from Watton arrived unannounced in East Germany. Again the pilots had run out fuel, but this time they could not find a runway, and opted for a belly landing in a field. After a suitable delay for technical inspection of the radio warfare equipment on board, the Meteor was again returned by the Soviets. On the night of 26 June 1955 there was a much more serious incident, when a radio countermeasures Lincoln (WD132) from 199 Squadron exercising over West Germany collided with a USAF F-86D Sabre jet fighter. The Lincoln crashed seven miles north of Bitburg, and all the crew were lost.²²

Early incidents like these mostly occurred in northern Europe. However, Turkey and the Black Sea were also of enormous intelligence importance because of the presence of rocket-testing sites in the southern Soviet Union around the Caucasus. As early as September 1950, Britain’s Technical Radio Interception Committee was directing a series of flights against Soviet radar targets on the Black Sea.²³ The sought-after prize was elint from Soviet guided missiles being tested at Kapustin Yar. In 1954, trials had been held in Turkey to see if ground stations could intercept the signals, but the equipment was not sensitive enough, and in any case it was hard to collect signals during the early stages of rocket flight, since they were blocked by hills near the launch site. The only option was to get closer to the take-off sites and to monitor from altitude, which meant flights over the Black Sea or the Caspian Sea. The most desperate option was perilous missions by SIS’s Technical Collection Service, with human spies furnished with specially equipped suitcases, rather like the suitcase radios carried by wartime resistance workers, which were something of a liability, since close inspection would have revealed their true purpose.²⁴ This was the unit that also specialised in gathering intelligence on the Soviet atomic programme.²⁵

The nearest miss probably occurred in 1955, when the RAF’s 192 Squadron identified the first MiG-15 with airborne radar by flying directly at the Soviet border in an area near the Caspian Sea. However, the slow-flying RB-29 Washington only narrowly escaped being shot down, and returned peppered with holes. The Squadron Commander, Group Captain Norman Hoad, was awarded an Air Force Cross for the discovery of this new Soviet airborne radar.²⁶ Was the risk worth it? As a result of this incident, in mid-December 1955 some members of the Joint Intelligence Committee began to challenge the remorseless collection of elint on Soviet air-defence capabilities. To some it seemed both expensive and dangerous. However, Eric Jones, the Director of GCHQ, argued that in the realm of sigint it was possible neither to dart about from one subject to another, nor to concentrate on one only. He reminded them that it was the extremely thorough, if tedious, collection of ‘order of battle’ intelligence that had allowed them to pick up specialist guided weapons activity that was of extreme interest to all three services, revealing new Soviet missile developments. While this was true, one might argue that Jones was bound to defend ‘order of battle’ activity for institutional reasons. Struggling against high-grade Soviet cyphers that could not be broken, this was the best product he could squeeze out from the other available electronic sources. Moreover, it reflected GCHQ’s secret deal with the armed services, which wanted sigint to have a strong focus on assisting military operations. The RAF shared the costs of airborne collection, and as Jones remarked, more than half of GCHQ’s work was now in support of defence activity.²⁷

Britain’s most dangerous and dramatic Cold War sigint operations remain largely unknown. Some of the most perilous missions were not in the air along the Inner German Border, but at sea. During the early 1950s, GCHQ and the Royal Navy had developed a joint programme for the concerted monitoring of Soviet signals around Murmansk and other important naval bases within the Arctic Circle. This involved sending submarines into Soviet territorial waters, and in some cases actually inside Soviet harbours. The Red Fleet knew these activities were taking place, and often responded with depth charges, making such secret missions breathtakingly dangerous.

The most important figures on these missions were the ‘sparkers’. These were radio communications operators who had been sent to the Royal Navy’s Signals School, located at the naval station HMS Mercury near Petersfield in Hampshire, for special training in sigint listening. Here, a secret unit called the Radio Warfare Special Branch cooperated with GCHQ and planned the naval dimension of Britain’s sigint operations. Its task was not only to record Soviet voice traffic and telegraphy, but also to listen out for elint, including transmission from new Soviet radars on high frequencies such as ‘S band’ and ‘X band’. In May 1953, ten new recruits passed through the basic radio course at Mercury and then, to their abundant horror, were told that they had ‘volunteered’ for duty on submarines. The Royal Navy had only recently lost the submarines HMS Truculent and HMS Affray in tragic accidents, so submarines were not a particularly popular assignment at the time. One of the more thoughtful individuals on this basic radio course, Tony Beasley, managed to dodge immediate deployment to submarines by volunteering for a sigint course with ‘Special Branch’ that included a long period ashore learning Russian at HMS Pucklechurch.

By 1954, Beasley had managed to join the elite ranks of the Radio Warfare personnel, which had its own heavily guarded compound on the northern edge of HMS Mercury. Here he was first instructed in Soviet communication procedures in preparation for his language course. Although HMS Mercury was far from the Soviet Union, radio signals bounced off the ionosphere at night, so transmissions from as far afield as Baku and Tbilisi could be heard comfortably. Towards the end of the ten-week ‘special course’ Beasley began to study the arcane subject of Soviet radars and guidance systems, which constituted elint collection. He had found his forte in the mysterious world of electronic signatures and wavebands, and accordingly he was diverted away from the Russian course at HMS Pucklechurch to become more of an elint specialist. Soon he was serving on fishery-protection vessels, including HMS Truelove, Mariner and Pickle. Operating out of Norwegian harbours such as Tromsø, their fishery duties gave them a legitimate reason to be close to Soviet exercises in northern waters, allowing them to sit listening at their leisure, often using their own personal monitoring equipment which they put together ‘Heath Robinson style’.

Late in 1954, Beasley and three of his comrades found themselves back at HMS Mercury, where they had been called in to see the head of the Radio Warfare Special Branch, Lieutenant Commander Harry Selby-Bennett. As experienced elint and comint operators, they had been selected for ‘special duties’. They were told to write six weeks’ worth of letters that would be posted to their families at intervals, but were given no information about where they were going, or even what they might do. Arriving at Portsmouth with their kitbags, they were transferred to a motor launch, still none the wiser about their mysterious task or their destination. One of the four suggested it might be a submarine, but the other three laughed out loud at the idea, since none of them had been through the stringent obligatory three-month submarine course at nearby Gosport, which included passing through the famous hundred-foot salt-water escape tower. Moments later they pulled alongside the vessel on which they were to serve for many months.

‘Never in a million years were we expecting a submarine,’ recalls Beasley. ‘We just could not believe it…Standing together like clockwork soldiers we were ushered towards the escape hatch, just forward of the conning tower and told to drop our holdalls down the steep ladder and follow. Time was of the essence.’ Their escort, Leading Seaman ‘Snowy’ Snow, was horrified to discover that none of his new charges had been trained for submarines, and regarded them as a danger to themselves and the rest of the crew. One of Beasley’s three fellow sparkers called out: ‘What’s the name of this iron coffin?’ The answer came back, ‘HMS Turpin.’²⁸

HMS Turpin was a Group 3 T-class submarine which entered service at the end of the Second World War. In 1945 the Allies were aware that their submarine technology was well behind that of the German U-boats, especially Hitler’s legendary late-model Type-21s. The Group 1 and Group 2 submarines that had been built earlier in the war were scrapped, but like the ill-fated USS Cochino, the Turpin and seven other Group 3 T-class submarines were sent for what was termed ‘Super-T Conversion’, essentially an interim measure before new classes of submarine came on stream. Crucially, the later Group 3 submarines were of welded rather than riveted construction, making them more streamlined than their predecessors. Their hulls were now lengthened to accommodate more electronic equipment, in some cases a sigint listening room, together with additional electric motors and new batteries. The deck gun was removed and the conning tower replaced with a more modern design that enclosed the periscopes and masts. The radar and sonar were improved. All eight boats could now achieve a speed of over eighteen knots, giving them an excellent chance of evading any Soviet hunters.²⁹

Tony Beasley and his three ‘Telegraphist Special’ comrades were treated to a tour of the Turpin. Snowy explained that, together with all the recent conversions to bring it up to the standard of the most advanced German U-boats, extra rib supports had been fitted to the pressure hull so that it could exceed its formal safety depth in case of an emergency. As the sparkers toured the submarine, their place in the operational jigsaw gradually became clear. Of the eight submarines that had been converted to Super-T specification, the Turpin and the Totem had been stripped of some of their radar and echo-sounding equipment, and had instead been fitted out with the most up-to-date sigint collection technology. The sigint receivers were attached to the snorkel and the aft periscope, and the wires trailed everywhere. The sigint operators had their own listening room near to the boat’s operations centre.

Questions as to where they were going were met with blank looks. Only the Commander, John Coote, knew their destination, and he was keeping his mouth firmly shut. Before departure, the Turpin received its final blessing when a harbour tug came out and painted over the serial number on the conning tower and spot-welded shut the escape hatches. This was because of the danger of ramming by a Soviet destroyer, which would rupture the hatches. With the escape hatches welded shut, all the escape apparatus was useless, so it had been removed, making space for more stores for the long journey ahead. The mission was code-named ‘Operation Tartan’, and the destination was the exercise area of the Soviet Northern Fleet on the Kola Inlet and the Rybachi Peninsula, deep inside the Arctic Circle.

During early March 1955 the crew endured a long journey north. Once they were within the Arctic Circle the sigint monitors began their work. Beasley’s colleagues monitored comint while he listened for ‘X band’ and ‘S band’ radar. While doing this, to his surprise he detected an unusual short-range radar known as ‘Q band’. GCHQ had warned him before departure that anything that was transmitted on ‘Q band’ would have a range of no more than two and a half miles. The signal faded and then returned much stronger. Beasley realised they were being rammed, and despite being new to submarines, instinctively shouted out the command to crash dive. This was a perilous business with the periscope and the snorkel still raised. Water began pouring into the control room through the snorkel. The periscope was quickly lowered, and its handles, that weighed close to a ton, hit Beasley, sending him crashing across the control room and inflicting a debilitating lifelong neck injury. The Turpin levelled off at 120 feet below the surface. The extremely cold water made sonar unreliable at any depth, and Soviet ships came and went for the next few hours, searching energetically, but without finding their quarry. Glad to have evaded the submarine hunters, Commander Coote waited for them to depart and then set a course for home.³⁰

Back in London, the Admiralty Signals Division was doing what it could to protect the secrecy of its submarine missions. One of the activities it undertook was a communications security survey of the radio transmission from HMS Totem, Turpin’s sister ship, while she was on an identical mission off the Soviet coast code-named ‘Operation Defiant’. The results were not good. The Signals Division warned the Director of Naval Intelligence that the KGB’s listeners, the Soviet equivalent of GCHQ, might well pick up ‘unusual very secret traffic on a home station submarine broadcast’ continuing over a number of weeks, and might also notice that Totem was absent from the normal exercise areas. In future, it suggested that a suitable cover plan with ‘dummy communications’ be thought up. This dummy traffic would have to run on a long-term basis if special submarine operations were to continue to be carried out at short notice without the Soviets identifying what was going on.³¹

Tony Beasley’s next mission to the Arctic Circle, ‘Operation Sanjak’, was yet more eventful. In July 1955 HMS Turpin had been loitering off the Soviet coast for over two weeks, but was experiencing problems with its elint equipment. Reception was good while the submarine was stationary, but not when it was in motion. They moved to the western edge of their patrol area so they could surface and see what was wrong. After a perilous climb up the submarine fin in a rolling sea, the problem, which proved to be a cross-threaded aerial, was resolved and Turpin submerged once more to complete the last few days of her patrol. The elint profiles of several radars from their intercept target list had already been collected, and with only two days to go they picked up an unusual contact. Commander Coote decided to chase this contact to the edge of their permitted area, moving closer to the coast than was allowed under their strict operating rules. Suddenly, Beasley intercepted an ‘X band’ radar very close to them, and picked up a contact dead ahead. The Turpin crash dived immediately.

All four sigint operators now reported multiple contacts. They were under attack. The warning was superfluous, since the propellers of several ships were quite audible as they passed directly over the submarine. Then came the horrible sounds of splashes. These were depth charges. Beasley recalls:

The first depth charge exploded way under our depth of 120 feet, followed by others, from different directions. A rather loud ‘clunk’ on our forward casing was followed by an enormous explosion which shook the boat, followed by others at a greater depth. Another depth charge exploded close above us rocking the boat much as before…Depth charging continued for longer than I care to remember.

Commander Coote took the submarine deeper and deeper, levelling off at their safety limit of 280 feet. Here they felt relatively secure, and decided not to move, relying on the cold water to render the Soviet sonar ineffective. However, they were painfully conscious that they were drifting in a strong current towards an area marked on their chart as being a probable Soviet minefield.

As they drifted away from the action the depth charges fell further and further away from their position. In the control room everyone sat in silence, wondering what was next. Further shocks were not long in coming. They heard strange rasping sounds running down the side of the hull, followed by a ‘twang’ as if a wire had been caught and had then come free. Some thought the noises were caused by pieces of ice, but they then realised they had entered the minefield, and that it was the hawsers that attached the mines to the sea bed to keep them from floating away that were scraping the Turpin’s sides. It was high time to cease drifting, set a course and pull away.

After a long run south they surfaced off the coast of Norway, and the crew inspected the damage. The periscopes and snorkel were grotesquely bent and completely unusable. Indeed, Turpin had been stripped of a large part of its extremities by the multiple blasts of the depth charges. Guardrails, aerials, the sensors and much of the tail fin had also been blown away. Most dramatically, the starboard outer casing had been torn apart, leaving a thirty-foot gash which in one place was three feet deep. However, the diesel engines were undamaged, and they headed for home, albeit with rather uncertain steering. Having lost their aerials, they could not communicate. Eventually they found a trawler out from Kingston-upon-Hull which relayed a message, allowing a rendezvous with a submarine depot ship, HMS Maidstone, which provided much-needed supplies of food and fresh water.

Returning to HMS Mercury, they were given a week’s leave. The four sparkers were then debriefed in person by Lieutenant Commander Harry Selby-Bennett, the Controller of naval sigint operations. After being briefly congratulated on a successful mission, they were told to their surprise that for reasons of ‘continuity’ of monitoring the Soviet transmissions they were about to board HMS Totem for a mission that would last another eight weeks. Understandably perhaps, Tony Beasley had now had his fill of submarines, which he had never volunteered for. Eventually he transferred to the Provost Branch, the Royal Navy’s police service, to complete his naval service of sixteen years.³²

Until 1956, Cabinet Ministers remained blissfully unaware of Britain’s intelligence ‘incidents’, including the two perilous missions of HMS Turpin in 1955. As a result the British remained more relaxed about forward operations than their American counterparts. By contrast the American intelligence community strained on a tight leash held by the State Department, and indeed President Eisenhower himself. However, all that was about to change. In April 1956 a single strange episode in Portsmouth harbour ensured that the situation was quickly reversed. Thereafter, growing hesitancy in Whitehall shifted the momentum in the world of sigint special operations away from Britain towards the United States. The turning point was the infamous ‘Buster’ Crabb incident. This offered Cabinet Ministers a first-hand glimpse of the sheer scale of political embarrassment that could be generated by bungled surveillance operations.

In April 1956 the Soviet cruiser Ordjoninkidze carried the Soviet Premier, Nikolai Bulganin, and Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the Soviet Communist Party, on a goodwill visit to Britain. Despite some robust exchanges between the Soviets and Anthony Eden, Churchill’s successor as Prime Minister, the visit went well, and the Soviet delegation departed on 27 April 1956. However, even as it 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 cruiser. Fourteen months later, in June 1957, a headless and handless body in a diving suit was recovered from the sea near Pilsey Island in the English Channel. Over the years, lurid tales of possible KGB abduction or beheading have circulated. However, newly released intelligence files show that Crabb was almost certainly killed by being drawn through the ship’s propellers. Churning the propellers at intervals was a standard defence against inquisitive divers whose presence was regularly suspected during such visits.

Buster Crabb had been the lead man on ‘Operation Claret’, an attempt by SIS to gain intelligence from the underwater inspection of the cruiser. He was one of the Royal Navy’s most experienced divers, and despite being demobbed in 1948 he was often recalled to help with difficult dives, including rescue work on submarines lost in accidents. Even at this early stage of the Cold War, such secret operations required political approval. But in this instance the system had broken down. The SIS officer who was tasked with securing the clearance for Operation Claret had suffered a family bereavement and had left the office before it had been obtained. His colleagues presumed that the green light had been given, but in fact it had not. The first rule of intelligence management – having political clearance – had been broken, and the cost for the whole British intelligence community was high.³³

What mattered to Eden was the public furore and the humiliation he suffered in the House of Commons. Not only had SIS bungled an unapproved mission, it also failed to cover its tracks. Despite the clumsy efforts of the local Special Branch to hide the evidence, including ripping out pages from the register of the hotel where Crabb had stayed, the press was soon on the trail. Journalists quickly established that this was an SIS mission, and that no ministerial authority had been given. Hugh Gaitskell, the leader of the opposition, enjoyed taunting his opponent on the issue. Eden was furious and decided to take disciplinary action, telling the Ministers concerned to order their staff to cooperate fully with the ensuing investigation. This process cast a long shadow over all the intelligence agencies, and ushered in an era of closer political control over special operations of every kind.³⁴

The head of the inquiry, Sir Edward Bridges, a somewhat nineteenth-century figure, employed the JIC to help him ferret out all aspects of the Crabb incident. As a former Cabinet Secretary, Bridges identified ‘certain questions’ of a broader nature. While intrusive intelligence operations clearly had a capacity to cause international repercussions, the systems for their authorisation were unclear.³⁵ Bridges recommended a broader inquiry reviewing all of Britain’s strategic intelligence and surveillance activities, and assessing ‘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 current Cabinet Secretary, working with Patrick Dean, Chairman of the JIC.³⁶ This review had immediate consequences for intelligence. In April 1956, coinciding with Khrushchev’s visit to Britain, some of the first examples of the CIA’s high-flying U-2 spy planes had arrived at RAF Lakenheath. These aircraft were mostly known for their work with high-altitude photography, but some of their missions were also sigint-orientated. Eden now decided that this, and a host of other special operations, had to stop, and the U-2s were sent to alternative bases in Germany.³⁷

Eden’s angry response had some unintended benefits. In 1952 Sir Stewart Menzies, Chief of SIS, had retired and was replaced by General Sir John Sinclair. The mediocre Sinclair had previously been Director of Military Intelligence, and while he was more competent than his predecessor, he was not a moderniser. He was now fired as a result of the Crabb incident; after the multiple inquiries he was pleased to go, and confessed to a friend in the sigint community that things were ‘getting too hot for me’. In the summer of 1956 Eden plumped for Sir Dick White, hitherto the Director General of MI5, as the new Chief of SIS.

White was a man of enormous energy, and a forward thinker. Together with his SIS staff officer, Harry ‘Shergy’ Shergold, he set about dragging SIS kicking and screaming into the mid-twentieth century. For the first time in almost two decades the organisation had an effective manager at the top, and it now developed into a really effective service.³⁸ White’s arrival also marked the formal end of SIS influence over sigint. Sinclair was the last Chief of SIS to chair the London Signals Intelligence Board, Britain’s highest sigint authority; this duty passed to Eric Jones, the Director of GCHQ.³⁹

Eden’s review was bad news for sigint special operations. As we have seen, no less secret than the spy flights were the submarine missions. These were now being conducted by the British and the Americans on the basis of mutual exchange, swapping product for product. However, Eden’s anger at the Buster Crabb incident meant that British submarine operations were cancelled. British officers in Washington spoke of their embarrassment that their half of the transatlantic deal could not be delivered on, warning that British efforts would soon be eclipsed by American submarine commanders in the Atlantic, who were pushing ahead ‘so as not to be outdone by the Pacific submariners’. Like Bletchley Park and Enigma a decade before, British Naval Intelligence wanted to keep its dominant position in the game of European submarine sigint. It urged not only that the programme be restored, but that it be followed by ‘a bigger and better operation’.⁴⁰

As predicted, by the end of 1956 the US Navy was indeed beginning its own independent sigint operations off Murmansk. Initially the American Office of Naval Intelligence had decided that the British were not even to be informed. However, they eventually realised that it would be foolhardy not to draw on the more extensive British experience of similar operations in these waters. Commander John Coote, who had been on the Murmansk run several times with the Turpin, and had joined the Americans on the USS Stickleback in the Pacific, was called in to brief the first American crew. This was 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. Second, and ironically, the US Navy had used the reports of previous British intelligence operations in the region to persuade the State Department that ‘the risks of detection are negligible’. Admiral Robert Elkins, the senior British naval officer in Washington, warned First Sea Lord Admiral Mountbatten that British intelligence prestige, which was currently high, would soon suffer ‘unless we resume these activities ourselves’.⁴¹

In 1957 a new Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, came to the rescue. Intrusive operations using British aircraft, ships and submarines for sigint and photography were gradually resumed. Between 1956 and 1960, twenty U-2 aircraft were involved in overflights, often from British bases. Some of these even used British pilots. Most of the deep-penetration flights were launched from Adana in Turkey, staging through Pakistan, and six RAF pilots were based there. By 1957, Britain’s elite Super-T submarines were gradually emerging from under the shadow of the Crabb incident, and were back in action on their perilous runs against the Soviet Northern Fleet.

In September 1957, HMS Taciturn took its turn to head north on what were routinely eight-week secret patrols. Most of the files relating to these highly secret missions remain closed. However, fortunately for us this ‘mystery trip’ was recorded by Michael Hurley, a young submariner, in what was undoubtedly an illegal personal diary. Setting sail from Portsmouth on 4 September, Commander Morris J. O’Connor chose not to tell his crew about the nature of the voyage until they were under way. Two days later, the crew were briefed. They were ‘going to snoop on the Russian Fleet exercises’ in the Arctic, and if they were detected it would be ‘very unpleasant and most dangerous’. O’Connor explained that they would be running submerged most of the time, and would keep radio silence. On their return they were to say nothing of their mission, ‘not even to wives and mothers’, since this would be ‘a wartime patrol’. After practising against a convenient British anti-submarine exercise off the Scottish coast, they took on more supplies at Greenock naval base in western Scotland and headed for the Arctic Circle. Extra personnel had come on board to assist with the listening, necessitating ‘hot bunking’ and meaning that water was in short supply.⁴²

On 24 September they were able to get quite close to a Soviet submarine, and were able to record its signature over a period of more than an hour. Listening was undertaken by a special team led by Lieutenant Commander George Lucas, a fluent Russian-speaker whom Hurley described as ‘fat, foreign looking with a slight accent’. However, the following day it was clear that they had been sighted, since ‘a large number of aircraft plus two or three destroyers searched for us’. O’Connor had strict written orders that in such circumstance the Taciturn should turn back and head for home. Aircraft continued to search for them as they made their way south. On 3 October they reached the safety of Faslane naval base on the west coast of Scotland, and ‘a package’, presumably the sigint recordings, was ‘whisked off to Prestwick airport’ and flown to the United States for analysis.⁴³

Michael Hurley was back on special operations six months later, with a further trip into Arctic waters. With much the same crew and the obligatory ‘special team’ on board they sailed down the Clyde and into open water on 13 March 1958. The extra personnel on board meant that water supply was again a problem. The special passengers consisted of the familiar Commander Lucas, who turned out to be Polish, together with a ‘boffin’ from the Underwater Development Establishment called Dr Newman and an American officer called Lieutenant Block. There were also two further communications intelligence specialists, including a Canadian. The routine was now familiar, diving deep by day and attempting to ‘snort’ by night, although this was often interrupted by Soviet aircraft. Snow storms provided ideal cover for the use of the snorkel. The very cold exterior water temperature meant that icy drops of condensation continually fell on the crew. The American officer took his turn at watches, and his distinctive voice on the Tannoy was a source of amusement. Dr Newman spent much of his time in the special sound room located in the Taciturn’s expanded hull, working on sigint collection.⁴⁴

On 28 March they moved in close to the Soviet coast, and began to encounter more signals traffic. The next day, they ‘got some good recordings’ and managed to take some film footage of peculiar ‘bullet shaped’ aircraft that they did not recognise, and thought were possibly prototypes. On 2 April Hurley noted in his diary that they were well inside an inlet, with land less than a mile away all around. He could see Soviet radar installations silhouetted on the coast, and wrote, ‘We are actually at the entrance to a harbour.’⁴⁵ If they were discovered here, there was little chance of escape, and Hurley realised that this was perilous work indeed.⁴⁶ By 3 April they had moved away from the coast and were in open water at periscope depth, busy making good recordings of two destroyers, a Skory class and a Kola class, together with some escorts, which were exercising. Hurley records what happened next:

Then suddenly out of the sun astern another Skory appeared coming towards us. We went down to 120ft. On Husk [a listening system] we could hear him coming as the sound of his engines grew louder. We went to Diving Stations and Defence State One (just in case), she passed right overhead like an express train went on a little then made a sharp turn and came back towards us again. As she did so she dropped three charges which seemed of course very loud…

The Taciturn went deep, down to 220 feet, and the Soviet ship moved away. Remarkably, a little later they came up and began recording the same vessels, although at a safer distance from both their quarry and the shore.⁴⁷ By 16 April they were on their way home. A week later they surfaced for the first time in thirty-four days. The Taciturn reached Faslane naval base four days later, to be greeted by a visibly relieved head of submarine operations. Radio silence meant that for two months no one knew the fate of submarines on these missions.⁴⁸

By the late 1950s the Super-Ts, once the most advanced boats the Navy could field, were suffering the wear and tear from long patrols. Commanders would now refer to ‘a shaky old T-boat’. Turpin, for example, had an elderly diesel engine for surface propulsion, in this case taken from another submarine, which had already seen twelve thousand hours of service. In 1957, while on an operation in the Atlantic, the main engine gave up the ghost and the Turpin suffered the indignity of being towed by an Admiralty tug for some five thousand miles.

Although the T-boats were no longer safe for perilous operations against the Soviets, the elderly Turpin was re-engined and sent on further Arctic intelligence missions under the command of Alfie Roake. The first set off on 21 October 1959, and the second, launched on 6 February 1960, set a record for snorkelling without surfacing of forty-two days.⁴⁹ On the second mission there were a number of ‘close encounters’. One of these was thought to be with a Soviet torpedo, but fired at long range, allowing the Turpin to evade it by going deep and combing the tracks. Their closest call was being pursued by a flotilla of six Soviet destroyers, which they escaped by diving to a remarkable 425 feet, well below their safety depth. Engineers later told Roake that his hull would have collapsed like an eggshell at 470 feet, and that they had a lucky escape.⁵⁰

Alfie Roake’s last mission into Soviet waters was launched in the spring of 1960. By now he was very conscious that the elderly Super-Ts were ‘nowhere near’ American standards. A new decade beckoned with the promise of the quieter and more reliable ‘O’ class submarines, and eventually nuclear vessels. Just like the Super-T class, some of these new boats were modified for a special intelligence role and would be despatched on further hazardous missions inside the Arctic Circle.⁵¹

8 Sigint in the Sun – GCHQ’s Overseas Empire

…with ‘Sigint’ locking onto targets with pinpoint accuracy, our military ached to have a go.

Tim Hardy, Special Branch, Sarawak, April 1964¹

In the 1950s, GCHQ’s top priorities were warning of an impending war with Russia, and gathering intelligence on Moscow’s growing nuclear arsenal. However, on a day-to-day basis, the Middle East, Africa and Asia were the regions where sigint made a tangible difference. Since the end of the Second World War, Britain had been involved in a prolonged ‘escape from empire’, retreating from her colonies and hoping to replace them with a vibrant Commonwealth of newly independent states. The reality was more complex, since many of these countries contained elements that were keen to evict the British faster than they wished to go. Some hosted guerrilla groups sympathetic to Moscow, others were divided communities that faced a troubled journey towards independence. The result was that Britain was involved in an endless litany of small wars that stretched from the dusty deserts of Yemen to the steamy jungles of Borneo. Because these were often guerrilla wars, finding the enemy could be the main challenge, and here sigint was in its element. Moreover, right across Asia and Africa, cyphers were less secure than those of countries like Russia, so GCHQ could also read plenty of high-grade diplomatic traffic.

Although sigint helped to smooth the end of Britain’s empire, GCHQ itself did not always want empire to come to an end. Because the 1950s and 1960s were an era when a great deal of communications was sent over long distances using high-frequency radio, GCHQ depended on the remnants of empire to provide a global network of ground stations to collect these signals. Indeed, Britain’s imperial real estate was one of the key contributions to UKUSA, and was of particular assistance to the United States. Accordingly, in many colonies there were defence and intelligence bases that Britain wished to retain, prompting officials to drag their feet over independence. Elsewhere, the British attempted to persuade post-independence governments to permit some bases to remain.²

Throughout the 1950s Britain fought one of the most protracted colonial struggles of the post-war era, the Malayan Emergency. The enemy were a hardened band of Communist guerrillas who had been Britain’s uneasy allies against the Japanese during the war. The military forces of the Malayan Communist Party, or ‘MCP’, led by Ching Peng, operated from refuges in the dense jungle. Britain did not initially recognise the seriousness of the Emergency in Malaya, allowing it to get out of hand. However, in October 1951 the MCP succeeded in assassinating Sir Henry Gurney, the British High Commissioner. Thereafter, striking back at the guerrillas and eliminating Ching Peng became a near-obsession for the security authorities in London. When Oliver Lyttelton, the Colonial Secretary, returned to London to report on Gurney’s assassination he promised the Cabinet that he would form special teams ‘aimed at certain individuals’. These were effectively killer squads, and he gave a firm assurance that they would ‘hunt down individual men from Communist higher formations through their families, properties, sweethearts etc.’.³

Locating the guerrilla headquarters in Malaya was easier said than done. In 1950 a sigint-equipped Lancaster from the RAF’s 192 Squadron was sent out to help in the hunt for the insurgents by tracking their radio communications. Later, undercover agents planted batteries with excessively high power on the guerrillas to damage their radios. When they were repaired, the workshops the guerrillas used were bribed to secretly modify the sets to give out a stronger signal. This gave the opportunity for sigint to achieve a direction-finding fix on the main guerrilla bases. Bombers from the RAF and the Royal Australian Air Force were standing by, and lightning raids were carried out on the deemed location of the signals. Avro Lincoln bombers dropped thousands of tons of bombs into the dense jungle at likely guerrilla locations. Their pilots were always impressed by the resilience of the jungle: their largest bombs vanished into the triple-canopied green foliage below them, and from the aircraft little impact was visible. It is not known how successful these operations were, but Ching Peng, the most important prize, certainly eluded them.⁴

In January 1952, Sir Gerald Templer arrived as the new High Commissioner in Malaya. Templer possessed the authority and charisma necessary to create a unified government machine and to implement an effective counter-insurgency strategy. Although famed for his emphasis on ‘hearts and minds’, he also sorted out intelligence, creating a coherent structure in which the army, the police and the civil authorities were forced to share intelligence. All this was done with his customary fiery language – he was quite incapable of uttering a sentence without a cussword in it.⁵

Despite Templer’s forceful direction, intelligence did not improve overnight. An important intelligence issue that was never quite resolved was the question of who was actually behind the insurgency. The Colonial Office and the Special Branch officers of the Malayan Police preferred to interpret the Emergency as a wicked plot initiated by Stalin or else Mao, while the British diplomats tended to see it more as a local anticolonial uprising. During the mid-1950s GCHQ began to intercept what it believed to be wireless traffic between the MCP guerrilla leadership and the Chinese Communist Party in Peking. The Special Branch presented this intelligence to senior British officials in Kuala Lumpur with some delight as evidence of its theory of external direction, but only in a summarised form. Diplomats in Kuala Lumpur were sceptical, and asked to see the full transcripts of the transmissions. A major altercation followed, with the diplomats accusing the Special Branch of bending the evidence, while the policemen accused the diplomats of a lack of trust. The issue of exactly how close the MCP was to Peking was never resolved.⁶

GCHQ’s most important outpost in Asia was Hong Kong. China was the venue of one of Britain’s early Cold War code-breaking triumphs. Between March 1943 and July 1947 GCHQ was able to read the high-grade Russian cypher traffic passing between Moscow and its mission at the headquarters of Mao Tse-tung’s People’s Liberation Army in Yunnan. This was a highly secret programme, and GCHQ only began passing material to the Americans in March 1946. The decision not to share until this point may have reflected anxieties about the strong differences within the American administration about China policy, but it is noticeable that the spring of 1946 also marks the advent of the revised BRUSA agreement.⁷ Exactly how this breakthrough was achieved when many other Russian high-grade cypher systems remained immune to attack is still a mystery. However, SIS had placed a rather eccentric officer called Michael Lindsay at Mao’s headquarters in Yunnan, where he was assisting the Chinese Communist communications team as their ‘principal radio adviser’. This may eventually prove to be part of the story.⁸

The British colony of Hong Kong was of special value to the United States. This reflected the fact that, after the end of the Chinese Civil War that brought Mao Tse-tung to power in 1949, the United States did not even have an embassy in mainland China. ‘Hong Kong became an American watchtower on China,’ recalls Jack Smith, who looked after the Far East in the CIA’s Office of National Estimates.⁹ GCHQ joined with the Americans and the equivalent Australian organisation, Defence Signals Branch, to develop the facilities in Hong Kong. Washington received the full intercept output of Hong Kong, but with the onset of the Korean War demands for intelligence went up sharply, and Washington considered that combined US–UK intercept facilities in the Far East were ‘far short of requirements’.¹⁰

In July 1952 the US Communications Intelligence Board persuaded its British opposite numbers of the ‘urgent need’ to send an additional eight-hundred-strong US Air Force sigint unit to Hong Kong to join the hard-pressed British and Australians. However, this was vetoed by the Governor of Hong Kong, Sir Alexander Grantham, who detested the way in which his territory had become host to a myriad of espionage activities.¹¹ Once the Chinese had intervened in the Korean War, an attack on Hong Kong by China was always a possibility. Therefore GCHQ negotiated emergency facilities at Okinawa in Japan for the British and Australian sigint personnel working there.¹²

Even in 1955, the United States was still negotiating for new sites in Asia. Sigint sites were not small or discreet, often requiring vast acres of wireless masts known as ‘aerial farms’ to capture signals of interest. In Taiwan, American officials had run into trouble securing a 335-acre site near Nan-Szu-Pu airfield where they had plans to locate hundreds of personnel from the Army Security Agency.¹³ With repeated clashes between the United States and Communist China over the Taiwan Straits in the late 1950s, the British government reviewed the future of Hong Kong, which seemed exposed, and pondered the short-term value of the continued British presence in the colony. Much turned on the mysteries of the UKUSA alliance, the Anglo–American–Commonwealth sigint pact of cooperation, since Hong Kong hosted British, Australian and American eavesdroppers.¹⁴ Alongside the GCHQ activities there were also vast British and American programmes in Hong Kong for running agents and interviewing defectors from mainland China. During the 1950s and 1960s, both the State Department and the Pentagon considered Hong Kong to be the single most important British overseas territory from the point of view of intelligence-gathering.¹⁵

In order to stimulate more defectors from China to Hong Kong, Britain launched ‘Operation Debenture’ in 1954. This was a covert radio project and constituted ‘the first UK operations of any magnitude for the penetration of Mainland China’. The aim was to provide an undercover broadcasting station that would increase the desire for contacts with the West amongst the Chinese middle classes, and increase defections across the border into Hong Kong. The emphasis was on the ‘purely “intelligence” angle’, and the defectors were needed because SIS human agent coverage of China was weak. The original intention had been to place this ‘black station’ in Hong Kong, but it was eventually located in Singapore, hidden at one of the military bases.¹⁶

The main GCHQ sigint stations in Hong Kong were on the coast at Little Sai Wan and the curiously-named outpost known as ‘Batty’s Belvedere’. The contribution of Australia’s Defence Signals Branch was important, since Australia had identified China as its top sigint target, followed by Indonesia and then Vietnam.¹⁷ During the late 1950s the commander of the sigint station was an Australian called Ken Sly, and originally it was staffed by airmen from the RAF’s 367 Signals Unit.¹⁸ A constant flow of National Servicemen had learnt Chinese at RAF Wythall near Birmingham and later at RAF North Luffenham in Leicestershire, but by 1957 the increasing use of civilians with qualifications in the language was reducing this considerable training requirement. There was also a separate cohort of Vietnamese linguists.¹⁹ Civilianisation brought unexpected security problems, since civilians could not be used for some of the menial duties carried out by service personnel. GCHQ tried to address this problem by employing deaf and dumb locals in the more sensitive locations on the sites.²⁰

Ken Sly was well aware of the attentions of Chinese intelligence. One of the locally employed Chinese, Wal Bin Chang, showed a propensity for taking photographs of groups on social occasions, and ‘also took care to photograph each one of us separately’. Moreover, he tended to volunteer for extra duties at unsociable hours. He was eventually captured on the border trying to cross over into Communist China with a number of documents, including a description of the personal habits of every NCO and officer at the base. He had been entertaining some of them in ‘girlie bars’, and admitted that he had persuaded one of the officers to sleep with his wife, adding: ‘In this way I will be able to obtain much more information of value to our side.’ The officer in question was swiftly discharged. Military staff at overseas listening stations working for GCHQ were a continual target for this sort of honey-trap.²¹ Ken Sly was eventually replaced by a civilian with the rank of Senior Linguist Officer, and moved on to serve in Australia and then with GCHQ at Cheltenham.²²

In both Hong Kong and Cyprus, the British were experimenting with intelligence-gathering radar. At Hong Kong the main site was located three thousand feet up the precipitous cliffs of Tai Mo Shan in the New Territories. Operated jointly by the RAF’s 117 Signals Unit and the Australians, it peered out into Chinese airspace, and its main purpose was ‘to provide intelligence information for the UK, USA and Australia’.²³ Western aircraft regularly intruded over the border to generate an elint response from Chinese defences.²⁴ The site was constructed with great difficulty in 1957 and was operated continuously into the 1980s. By a heroic effort, cranes and lorries had moved materials up to the summit by means of what was little more than a jeep track. During construction a ten-ton crane had been lost over the edge, but fortunately the RAF driver leapt clear before the vehicle disappeared over the cliff. Later, the RAF Regiment, known as the ‘Rock Apes’, who guarded the base, lost two Land Rovers over the cliff. This prompted a local humorist to erect a sign at the base of the uphill trail that warned: ‘Beware of Falling Rocks’.²⁵

GCHQ does not seem to have broken much high-grade Chinese traffic; nevertheless, there were intelligence success stories. One of the most important was the prediction of the detonation of China’s first nuclear weapon in 1964. Like all such programmes, China’s efforts to acquire a nuclear weapon required a vast technical and industrial effort, therefore imagery from overflights together with relatively low-level signals gave a good indication of progress. Archie Potts, the UK’s Deputy Director of Atomic Energy Intelligence, noted that for about five years the British had been aware of an important secret programme controlled by ‘a special ministry’. Plant construction had begun in 1958, with an elaborate effort to produce uranium ore. The Chinese had also ceased their public complaints about superpowers with nuclear weapons. All this prefaced China’s first nuclear test.²⁶

Although NSA viewed Hong Kong as Britain’s single most valuable overseas sigint station, GCHQ placed more emphasis on the Middle East. Immediately after the war, Britain had numerous interception stations. The most important was at Heliopolis in Egypt, which boasted many civilian operators and took in much of the region’s diplomatic traffic. The Army ran a large intercept station at Sarafand in Palestine, while the RAF ran a similar installation at RAF Habbaniya in Iraq. There were undercover listening stations buried within embassies and consulates in countries such as Turkey. By the 1950s Britain had also developed covert sites in northern Iran that were focused on Russia. However, the British Empire in the Middle East consisted of very few formal colonies and had long been an agglomeration of mandates, shaky treaty relationships and uncertain base rights granted by royalist regimes. Egypt, which had achieved independence in 1935, was especially anxious to divest itself of the disfiguring presence of British bases. Accordingly, British sigint gradually fell back towards its last proper colonial foothold in the region, the island of Cyprus.

Cyprus was increasingly the home for every kind of secret radio activity in the Middle East. This included not only Britain’s sigint assets but also the monitoring sites of the CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service, which listened in to news broadcasts around the world. In addition, Cyprus offered a safe haven for Britain’s overt and covert propaganda broadcasting in the region. This mushroomed during the premiership of Anthony Eden, who nurtured a special hatred of Egypt’s nationalist leader General Gamal Abdel Nasser, whom he viewed as a dangerous dictator. Eden urged a reduction of British radio propaganda directed at the Soviets in favour of targeting Nasser.²⁷ As early as 1954 he insisted that a new broadcasting station in Aden covering Iraq and Syria was to receive ‘first priority’, since Nasser’s radio station, The Voice of Egypt, was busily pouring out its own vitriolic message.²⁸ Britain’s main radio weapon against Nasser was the SIS-owned station in Cyprus, Sharq el-Adna. ‘Sharq’ had originated as a wartime British propaganda radio station that had been taken over by SIS in 1948, and been evacuated from Palestine to the safety of Cyprus. It was soon thought to be the most popular station in the region.²⁹ SIS was working with John Rennie, the head of Britain’s Information Research Department, to accelerate four other radio projects in the Middle East, including a secretive ‘black station’ that was being developed at two other sites on Cyprus with a transmitter that could reach as far as Aden.³⁰

On 29 October 1956 Eden launched ‘Operation Musketeer’, a surprise attack to capture the Suez Canal, which Nasser had recently nationalised. Sigint and radio warfare had an important part to play. Arrangements were made for the force commanders to receive a range of key intelligence materials from national sources, including photo-reconnaissance cover and ‘all CX [SIS] reports on Egypt’, as well as material from ‘special sources’, a somewhat coy cover name for sigint. GCHQ attached liaison officers to the main Army, Navy and RAF commanders, and detailed instructions were generated to provide cover for the ‘protection of SIGINT material’.³¹ Most of the sigint coverage came from 2 Wireless Regiment at Ayios Nikolaos near Famagusta in eastern Cyprus, with additional help from listeners at Dingli on Malta. While the coverage was good, the radio channels available to push this material forward to field commanders were often choked. In addition, a small tactical ‘Y’ intercept unit was being prepared to accompany the land force from Cyprus to the landings in Egypt, and was eventually based at Port Said.³²

The British not only had to hide the invasion preparations from the Egyptians, but also from the Americans. Britain had engaged in an elaborate plot with the French and the Israelis which hid the real reasons for the intervention by presenting it as the arrival of a so-called ‘peace-keeping’ force for the disputed Suez Canal Zone. Eisenhower and his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles were astonished by Anglo–French–Israeli collusion over Suez. In the autumn of 1956 Washington’s eyes were elsewhere, distracted by the uprising in Hungary, while in the Middle East its focus was on the possible breakup of Jordan and the likelihood of Israeli and Arab attempts to divide the spoils. American U-2 flights out of Turkey detected an Israeli mobilisation, but this was interpreted by some as part of Israeli ambitions on the West Bank. Allen Dulles, the Director of CIA, was tracking reports of an imminent coup in Syria.

Nevertheless, the ability of the British to hide ‘Operation Musketeer’ from NSA raises some interesting questions. What were American sigint liaison officers doing? During the Suez invasion there was a US Sixth Fleet exercise off Crete, yet American Naval intelligence conceded frankly that it had ‘no warning of British intentions’.³³ Much of the story can be explained by NSA’s obsessive focus on Russia, with the vast majority of its assets in locations such as Turkey looking northwards to the missile-testing stations of the Caucasus. Meanwhile NSA depended on GCHQ for much of its coverage of the Middle East. Moreover, the crisis occurred just as the American code-breakers were moving to their new building at Fort Meade. The failure to spot the Suez Crisis had a significant effect on NSA, triggering a post-mortem and the creation of new divisions based on country or geographical lines.³⁴

The British deliberately blanked their American allies. In a neat piece of choreography, the British Ambassador to Washington was replaced at this moment, with the new man being sent across the Atlantic by passenger liner. He was thus in mid-ocean when the Suez Crisis broke, and could not be accused of having deceived the Americans. In Tel Aviv, the British and French Military Attachés were told to give their American counterpart a wide berth.³⁵ However, the American Military Attaché realised something was up when his civilian driver, a reservist in the Israeli Army who had only one arm, one leg and was blind in one eye, was suddenly recalled to duty. His American employer deduced – quite correctly – that if his driver was being mobilised it could only mean one thing: imminent war.³⁶

The sharpest Americans knew something was afoot. On 12 September 1956 Robert Amory, Deputy Director for Intelligence at the CIA, set up a highly secret joint group from the CIA, NSA, the State Department and military intelligence to watch the Middle East round the clock.³⁷ Its main source of information was an expansion of the U-2 spy plane operations from Wiesbaden covering the Middle East. The CIA’s own U-2 official history claims that this allowed them to predict the attack on Egypt three days before it took place.³⁸ This is probably an exaggeration: the U-2 evidence of growing forces on the ground was not precise enough to make such a forecast. Allen Dulles, the Director of the CIA, told Eisenhower he believed the Israelis were about to attack Jordan. Eisenhower attached special significance to NSA reports of an increase in signals traffic between Tel Aviv and Paris.³⁹ Almost certainly from sigint, the Americans had also picked up news of a secret meeting between the British Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, and the French in Paris on or about 15 October. This was the very sensitive meeting that sealed the deal over the Suez invasion. Allen Dulles recalls: ‘I remember I had a long talk with Foster [Dulles] about what this might mean in view of the fact that we were not otherwise informed about it.’⁴⁰ But Eisenhower personally dismissed the significance of the military build-up on Cyprus, refusing to believe that Britain would be ‘stupid enough to be dragged into this’. Remarkably, six weeks after the invasion of Suez, many in the CIA were still uncertain whether the British had colluded directly with the Israelis.⁴¹ Both NSA and the CIA had also failed to predict the Russian invasion of Hungary, so 1956 was not their best year.⁴²

Deliberate American pressure on the pound eventually forced Britain’s ignominious withdrawal from Suez, and contributed to Eden’s sudden resignation in January 1957. Eden’s foreign policy may have failed, but the intelligence support he received had been excellent. In the wake of Suez, Selwyn Lloyd wrote to Eric Jones, the Director of GCHQ, congratulating him on the torrents of Middle East intelligence that sigint had provided during the crisis, particularly after the seizure of the canal. ‘I have observed the volume of material which has been produced by G.C.H.Q. relating to all the countries in the Middle East area,’ he wrote, suggesting that the traffic of many countries was being read, and added: ‘I am writing to let you know how valuable we have found this material and how much I appreciate the hard work and skill involved in its production.’ Jones passed on these congratulations to units such as the Army’s 2 Wireless Regiment on Cyprus and the RAF’s 192 Squadron.⁴³ There had also been shipborne signals interception by the Royal Navy. The RAF airborne signals element was especially important during the invasion. The ageing RB-29 Washingtons had been despatched from Watton to map the characteristics of Egyptian anti-aircraft defence. This included the habit of shutting down air-defence radar routinely just after midday – a priceless piece of information.⁴⁴

At a higher level, GCHQ read much of Cairo’s diplomatic traffic with key embassies in the region during the mid-1950s, such as those in Amman and Damascus.⁴⁵ It also read traffic with Egypt’s London Embassy.⁴⁶ No less importantly, GCHQ stepped up its watch on the Soviets. On 15 November 1956, Britain’s leaders were reassured that there was ‘still no evidence from signals intelligence sources of any large-scale Soviet preparations to intervene by force in the Middle East’.⁴⁷ However, there had been problems. Some of the newly civilianised sigint sites had complained about working round the clock during the crisis, causing managers to wonder about the wisdom of non-military intercept operations.⁴⁸

Despite GCHQ’s operational success, the Suez Crisis left a problematic legacy. It led directly to the eviction of GCHQ from some of its more valuable real estate in the Middle East and the Indian Ocean. In December 1956 GCHQ was just opening a large and well-equipped secret sigint station covering the Indian Ocean at Perkar on Ceylon, which had been constructed at a cost of close to £2 million. The Ceylonese government had wanted to free up access to the old sigint site at HMS Anderson for redevelopment. The purpose of the GCHQ site at Perkar was hidden from the Ceylonese, requiring the British to generate a cover story. Much debate had taken place in London over whether to let the Ceylonese Prime Minister, Solomon Bandaranaike, in on the real function of the station. GCHQ decided against candour, fearing ‘leakage’.⁴⁹ British officials had always been convinced that ‘the real purpose could be easily disguised’.⁵⁰

Endless effort had gone into the Perkar site. By 1955 it had been upgraded to monitor signals traffic from ‘all bearings’, and boasted a vast aerial farm that covered more than four hundred acres.⁵¹ Yet the Suez operation effectively destroyed this expensive new facility almost as soon as it was completed. The Ceylonese were incensed at Eden’s imperial escapade, and believed the British had refuelled ships in Ceylon en route to the invasion of Egypt. They now demanded a schedule for the removal of all foreign bases, without exception. The Treasury was aghast, stating that even a brief visit to Ceylon ‘brings home the complexity of these installations’ and ‘their vital importance’. Officials came up with the preposterous idea of using service personnel in civilian clothes in the hope of assuaging the Ceylonese.⁵² Bandaranaike stamped his foot, insisting that all the British, however attired, had to go. A compromise was agreed: ‘The GCHQ station can be given up entirely, but we should like to keep it in operation for five years.’ Ultimately, Britain had lost the best site in the Indian Ocean.⁵³

GCHQ felt the reverberations of Suez elsewhere. In Iraq, Britain enjoyed a good relationship with the ruler King Faisal. As a result, the British had been allowed to retain a number of bases. One of these was RAF Habbaniya, not far from Baghdad. Superficially this looked like so many military aerodromes in the Middle East, but in fact it housed 123 Signals Squadron, later 276 Signals Squadron, which ran a large sigint monitoring station. Airborne sigint flights from Habbaniya crossed into Iran, and then loitered over the Caspian Sea. However, as a result of Suez, Faisal’s political situation deteriorated rapidly, with uprisings in the cities of Najaf and Hayy. Iraq’s membership of the Baghdad Pact, a British-managed military alliance, only exacerbated popular hatred of the regime. Then, in the summer of 1958, Faisal’s ally, King Hussein of Jordan, asked for military assistance during a growing crisis in the Lebanon. The Iraqi Army put together an expeditionary force, but in the early hours of 14 July 1958 the assembled column turned against its own supreme commander, marched right into Baghdad and carried out a coup. Revolutionary officers arrived at the Royal Palace at 8 o’clock in the morning and ordered the King, his immediate family and his personal servants into the courtyard. They were politely asked to turn away from their captors, whereupon they were machine-gunned. Most died instantly, but Faisal survived a few hours. Fortunately, GCHQ intercepts of Egyptian diplomatic traffic gave precise information about Nasser’s parallel plots against the King of neighbouring Jordan a few days later, prompting timely British support for the beleaguered monarch.⁵⁴

However, Britain’s time in Iraq was now up, and the final departure from RAF Habbaniya was anything but orderly. The vast base had quickly been occupied by the Iraqi Fourth Armoured Division, and the British had even been denied access to their own signals installations and aerial farms. Most of the RAF’s 276 Signals Unit were evacuated to temporary tented accommodation on Cyprus, where they continued their interception work amid terrible conditions. Three hundred personnel remained at Habbaniya, presiding over the residual technical facilities and stores. They were continually provoked by Iraqi forces, and it was not unusual for them to ‘end up in the Iraqi guard room’. Although much of the radio equipment had been removed, the remnants included specialist signals vehicles, machine tools and fuel, together with the entire contents of a nearby RAF hospital.⁵⁵

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