GCHQ

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 break-up 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]

What is remarkable is the rather poor performance of policy makers, despite the availability of excellent sigint. Regarding Egypt, GCHQ code-breakers were probably aided by awful Arab security mistakes. Outrageously, Cairo sent the frequent articles by Nasser confidant Mohamed Heikal in the Al-Ahram newspaper to Egyptian embassies via secret code. This was extremely helpful to GCHQ cryptanalysts who were able to compare the encoded messages with the open source articles in Al-Ahram and accordingly derive intelligence on the Egyptian encryption setting. Moreover, the work of the cryptanalysts was also accelerated in various mischievous ways. The Western allies appear to have supplied various Middle Eastern countries with code machines which had vulnerabilities known to NSA and GCHQ. Alongside this technique, that involved a weakened key length, British and American agents also bugged the various cipher rooms in foreign embassies, suborned cypher clerks and therefore saw their cryptographic documents.

Yet this had an unexpectedly helpful impact on the Soviet position. On 2 November 1956, the Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev told the Egyptian ambassador in Moscow, el-Kouni, that the USSR would stir public opinion against the Western invasion but no military aid would be forthcoming. However, after the Soviets successfully suppressed the uprising in Hungary, Khrushchev altered his view and became more bullish. On 5 November, the USSR despatched threatening messages to Britain, France and Israel insisting they terminate their invasion. The telegram sent to London hinted at nuclear missile attacks and warned that Moscow was ‘fully determined to crush the aggressors by the use of force.’ The next day Eden and the British cabinet opted to halt the Anglo-French operation and decided on a ceasefire. Peter Wright, in his controversial memoir, insists that Sigint convinced the Joint Intelligence Committee that Moscow was about to intervene. Apparently, one message acquired by GCHQ suggested that there had just been a meeting between the Soviet Foreign Minister and el-Kouni at which Moscow explained their plans to mobilise aircraft ready for a confrontation with Britain. Wright insists that: ‘The panic provoked by this cable … did as much as anything to prompt Eden into withdrawal.’ Meanwhile the CIA warned Eisenhower that the Soviets might intervene, most likely via Syria.

Fascinatingly, this was probably a Soviet deception. As David Easter has shown, the USSR may have exploited their knowledge that Britain had broken Egyptian high-level cyphers to project these threatening signals to London. Peter Wright explains that soon after the GCHQ listening device was installed in London’s Egyptian London, MI5 observed a Soviet team of ‘sweepers’ checking out the embassy for bugs and microphones. They seem to have found the listening device next to the cypher machine but curiously they did not address it or deal with it. Khrushchev later admitted to the Egyptians that he had used them as a channel of confusion, explaining: ‘we had to use you as a tool in this deception’. This referred to reports that Moscow was preparing to act in the region.[43]

Deliberate American pressure on the pound also 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.[44] 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.[45]

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.[46] It also read traffic with Egypt’s London Embassy.[47] 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’.[48] 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.[49]

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’.[50] British officials had always been convinced that ‘the real purpose could be easily disguised’.[51]

Endless effort had gone into the Perkar site. The base had been upgraded to monitor signals traffic from ‘all bearings’, and boasted a vast aerial farm that covered more than four hundred acres.[52] 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.[53] 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.[54]

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.[55]

GCHQ intercepts clearly made a difference. As David Easter shows, on 17 July, Macmillan chose to have an unusual cross-party meeting with Hugh Gaitskell, the Labour opposition leader, to set out the reason why he had despatched forces to Amman. The Prime Minister chose to reveal to Gaitskell that he had seen ‘the intercepts’ that confirmed Nasser’s active plots in Jordan. Various figures including Duncan Sandys and Julian Amery were already agitating for intervention, but it was only when GCHQ material arrived on 16 July that the cabinet swung behind Macmillan and opted to join with the Americans in sending troops. The British deployment in Jordan complimented the despatch of American marines to the Lebanon.[56]

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.[57] The plan was for a massive ‘end of empire’ garage sale. Items from Habbaniya were offered to the new Ba’athist government. The Iraqi Army took the heavy weapons, explosives and ammunition, but were warned soberly that some of these were in ‘a dangerous or doubtful condition’. What materials the Iraqi government did not want were then sold publicly. However, in the revolutionary climate, the ensuing auction was pure bedlam. Such was the shouting and violence that the petrified auctioneer tried to sell off the entire stock of the base as one lot. Another sale, of vehicles, was sabotaged by the appearance of a small but violent nationalist mob whose members held ‘a rope noose … menacingly over the head of anybody who attempted to purchase’ anything. The end of the British Empire is often portrayed as a serene process, but in the Middle East its passing was neither orderly nor pleasant.[58]

Cyprus was now a vast GCHQ refugee camp, holding sigint personnel who had made their exodus from the listening stations at Sarafand in Palestine, Heliopolis in Egypt, and now Habbaniya. Over a thousand found themselves in a tented encampment at RAF Pergamos.[59] A special signals unit was already at the forty-three-acre site, which was dominated by aerials, but the refugees from Habbaniya represented a further unscheduled expansion.[60] Pergamos and the Army station run by 2 Wireless Regiment (soon renamed 9 Signals Regiment) at Ayios Nikolaos now constituted the key sigint stations in the region, with over a thousand personnel. Further west, there was a British sigint station at Dingli on Malta with 230 staff, and a few dozen on Ascension Island and at Gibraltar; but Cyprus was the leviathan.[61] Negotiations over the exact extent of the Sovereign Base Areas on Cyprus were ongoing, but at least for the time being, relations with the island’s authorities were relatively cordial.[62] The negotiations reached a climax in 1959. The British delegation, led by Julian Amery, Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, started with an extravagant bid for four hundred square miles of territory, and eventually settled for ninety-nine square miles.[63] By this time the aerials and antennae of the largest sigint base on Cyprus, Ayios Nikolaos, had begun to encroach on the municipal area of Famagusta itself. The ruler of Cyprus, Archbishop Makarios, protested, and GCHQ agreed that it could retreat a little without serious damage to its operations.[64]

The main problem for GCHQ was that the two Cyprus Sovereign Base Areas were increasingly expensive to run. This partly reflected an ongoing insurgency by a guerrilla force known as EOKA, which wanted unification or ‘enosis’ with Greece. Matters were made worse by the intense divisions between the Greek and Turkish communities on Cyprus. As a result, the security of the two sigint stations required a minimum land force garrison, including a heavy RAF presence. GCHQ’s extensive aerial farms were also vulnerable to sabotage. However, once the Chiefs of Staff had accepted that the major bases ‘must be retained because of the SIGINT facilities’, other things followed. Typically, the RAF decided to keep its main regional stockpile of nuclear weapons, code-named ‘Tuxedo’, at Dhekelia. In other words, while the Cyprus garrison was not there solely for sigint, it was the sigint facilities that made it irreplaceable.[65] The periodic outbreaks of inter-communal strife on Cyprus led to questions from the Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who asked in December 1963 whether Britain really needed bases there. Peter Thorneycroft, the Defence Secretary, responded with an unqualified yes, explaining that Cyprus ‘houses most important SIGINT stations and it also provided a base from which special reconnaissance flights are carried out’. Thorneycroft said that while most of the other activities could be relocated, intelligence was the sticking point, since it was ‘not considered that SIGINT facilities could be adequately replaced elsewhere’.[66]

The impact of GCHQ’s work in the Middle East is best illustrated by the Yemen Civil War. This conflict had its origins in a coup by the leader of Yemen’s republican faction, Abdullah as-Sallal, who overthrew the newly crowned Imam al-Badr in 1962. However, the Imam escaped and the royalist faction was soon receiving support from Saudi Arabia and, more covertly, from Britain, Jordan and Israel. Predictably, the republicans were supported by General Nasser, with perhaps seventy thousand Egyptian ‘volunteers’. King Hussein of Jordan pressed London to intervene on behalf of the Imam, and an elaborate mercenary operation was developed, using both SIS and the SAS. Sigint not only gave a detailed picture of Egyptian troop deployments, but also revealed tensions between republican ministers and the Chief of Staff of the Egyptian armed forces. The British reportedly found breaking the codes of Egyptian forces in the field ‘a bit of fun’, and also had no difficulty in reading higher-level diplomatic traffic. GCHQ intercepts seem to have been important in October 1962, informing the JIC, and later the Cabinet, about the morale of the Egyptian troops. The Governor of neighbouring Aden, Sir Charles Johnstone, had suggested that this was low, but intercepts showed quite the reverse. This prefigured a long struggle with the Egyptian proxies which dragged on until 1970.[67]

The Yemen conflict also illustrates the value of GCHQ intelligence in revealing one of the darkest aspects of war – the use of chemical weapons. It is now clear that, from December 1966, the Egyptians repeatedly used gas against Royalist villages. Although Cairo publicly denied using such diabolical weapons, the West had clear evidence that it was using poison gas. In 1967, the British noted that they had plenty of evidence at ‘a very high security classification.’ The Egyptians used both phosgene and mustard gas in their bombing raids. The source was communications between the Egyptian commanders in Yemen and Cairo.[68]

The most decisive role played by sigint was during the ‘Confrontation’ between Indonesia and the British-backed Federation of Malaysia during the early 1960s. In fact the ‘Confrontation’ was an undeclared war which involved troops from Britain, Australia and New Zealand. President Sukarno of Indonesia had decided that Britain’s creation of the Federation of Malaysia in 1962, which included parts of the island of Borneo, was an attempt to maintain a colonial presence by stealth and should be resisted. The first shots were fired in December 1962, when the Indonesian government attempted a coup against the Sultan of Brunei, an independent pro-British state on the island of Borneo. The Indonesians used a proxy force to try to capture the Sultan, and also attempted to seize Brunei’s oilfields. The revolt was suppressed using Gurkhas flown in from Singapore, but it was a close-run thing. Had the Gurkhas arrived an hour later, the Sultan might have been captured and forced to abdicate. The Gurkhas had been slow in arriving because a British staff officer who loved paperwork had been laboriously recording the name of each man as he boarded the aircraft. Eventually, ‘an angry Brigadier threw the movement papers onto the tarmac’ and the rescue finally got under way.[69]

In early 1963, President Sukarno announced that he would step up the pace and pursue a policy of ‘Konfrontasi’ with Malaysia. By April, two thousand Indonesian ‘volunteers’, many of whom were commandos, were infiltrating into the neighbouring British colonies of Sarawak and Sabah in northern Borneo, and were soon clashing with units of Gurkhas. Buoyed up by their success, Indonesian troops actually attempted to raid the mainland of Malaysia in 1964. At this point the British government deployed the SAS, later assisted by similar special force units from Australia and New Zealand. By 1964 there were over ten thousand British and Commonwealth troops in Borneo. British soldiers were being awarded medals in a secret war that remained undeclared.[70]

Sigint assisted this clandestine conflict directly and decisively. Most importantly, it was used in a revolutionary new way in conjunction with special forces. In April 1964 the British commander in Borneo, General Walter Walker, was given permission to begin highly secret ‘Claret’ operations. These were counter-infiltrations across the border into the Indonesian territory of Kalimantan in southern Borneo, designed to take the war to the enemy. British forces were initially given permission to cross over the thousand-mile-long border into Kalimantan to a distance of three thousand yards. By 1965 this had been extended to twenty thousand yards.[71] Locating the enemy was the main challenge, and tactical sigint was used to provide accurate direction-finding on the elusive Indonesian jungle camps. Sigint operators would listen in to the Indonesian traffic to see if the Claret patrols had been picked up. On one occasion the operators listened in to the Indonesians as they prepared to ambush a Claret patrol, and were able to warn the intended victims, who then scooted back over the border. Tim Hardy, a Special Branch officer, recalls that the local British sigint teams had no difficulty intercepting Indonesian field pack radios, which were of Second World War vintage. Moreover, they used old-fashioned crystals to set the frequency, and ‘in defiance of all military rules, these never changed’. As a result Indonesian field communications were an open book, and sigint was ‘locking onto targets with pinpoint accuracy’. Hardy met SAS patrols coming back over the border accompanied by local Iban native trackers who carried ‘gory trophy heads’.[72]