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 1964[1]

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 anti-colonial 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]