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 of 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 RAF 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 RAF 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 snort mast. The latest sonar, codenamed ‘Quickie’, was installed. 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, Barny Rowe, 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, ‘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 Rowe 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 Rowe 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 multiple contacts. 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.