GCHQ

From February 1965 onwards the British troops engaged in little other than Claret special operations. Brigadier Bill Cheyne, the Director of Operations in Borneo, declared that ‘CLARET operations so weakened the Indonesian resolve to fight that only their very best troops ventured into Sarawak latterly.’ The number of incursions fell so dramatically by late 1965 – they became ‘as rare as snakebite’ – that it was a major event when one occurred. Cheyne considered the use of tactical sigint vital, and for security reasons even the special forces were not told of this secretive source. Instead, there were stories of human agent operations and ‘other sources of intelligence to shelter behind’.

 The top brass knew about it though, and Walter Walker, the British Commander in Chief, constantly praised the ability of sigint to pinpoint the enemy: ‘Nine times out of ten we knew his every move and we brought him to battle long before he had reached a point from which he could mortar a village, let alone a town.’

Britain had developed an extensive sigint station in Singapore, run jointly with Australia. However, much of the sigint effort during the Confrontation was undertaken locally by 651 Signals Troop, staffed by personnel on special detachment from 13 Signals Regiment, the main British Army sigint unit in Germany. They worked closely with 693 Signals Troop from Royal Australian Signals. Mixed units moved freely between bases at Singapore, Labuan and Kuching. Signals intelligence functioned at several levels. The main support to Claret operations came from local radio direction-finding and voice interception. Telephone tapping on the Indonesian side of the border was also very productive. Meanwhile, higher-level Indonesian diplomatic traffic was also being read in Singapore and at GCHQ at Cheltenham.

 The result was ‘high-grade intelligence that contributed significantly to the successful outcome of the conflict’.

 Because of Australian worries about the disputed territory of West Irian, Indonesia remained Australia’s main signals intelligence priority through the 1960s, even higher than Vietnam.

By March 1965 the British government was asking how long the Confrontation would last. The Joint Intelligence Committee Far East, which included Brian Tovey from GCHQ, did its best to answer this. Sigint was a helpful indicator, since it showed that Sukarno was deploying large-scale units of the Indonesian Army’s strategic reserve to Kalimantan, and further units seemed to be moving to Sumatra. All this suggested that Sukarno was not yet finished. Negotiations were getting nowhere, and the only serious rebellion inside Indonesia, on the island of Celebes, had suffered a setback. Sukarno was known to be ill, and optimistic officials hoped his death might be followed by an internal struggle between the Army and the Indonesian Communist Party. The intelligence from SIS was that ‘Sukarno may die at any time. Without an operation he is unlikely to last more than a year.’ In fact the Indonesian Premier seemed to be in alarmingly rude health, and the British Ambassador in Jakarta was sceptical about ‘secret sources’ on this subject.

 Although there had been an abortive coup in September 1965, Sukarno was still clinging on, and by the end of the year the British Chiefs of Staff were considering serious military escalation, including much deeper Claret operations and commando raids into Sumatra.

 The British effort now developed a significant naval component, with no less than a third of the entire British fleet deployed off Sumatra, often operating openly in Indonesian waters. Once again, signals intercepts were a crucial element in the naval campaign.

Konfrontasi

 ended after Sukarno was replaced by General Suharto in 1966. Cheyne argued that this change was partly prompted by British military successes: ‘Sukarno would not have been deposed except for his military failures in Borneo.’ He added that once Sukarno had been overthrown, the Claret operations enabled Malaysia to negotiate from strength. Overall, he concluded, it was ‘a brilliantly successful story’.

For much of this period a stream of high-grade diplomatic sigint from Indonesia passed across the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s desk, providing an accurate barometer of the thinking in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta.

 For Denis Healey, Britain’s Secretary for Defence, it was especially satisfying. On 30 May 1965 he had a conversation with the American Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, and explained that Britain could not disengage from its commitments east of Suez until the Confrontation came to an end. McNamara had replied gloomily, ‘It will not end.’ But he was wrong.

Although the Indonesians did not rumble the secret of sigint, they knew something was badly wrong. Senior officers believed that the British had some sort of special radar equipment that could track their patrols, and this was not a bad guess.

 The success of sigint in Borneo offered a longer-term legacy. The British and Australians had developed a new kind of sigint that interfaced directly with special forces in real time. In 1966, when Australia sent a Task Force to Vietnam, this was accompanied by a similar signals intelligence unit.

 The same tactics were deployed by Britain in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. This approach has since become more commonplace, with the Americans taking it to a new level with the elite Intelligence Support Activity created in the 1980s, which was mostly deployed against terrorists. Britain’s new Special Reconnaissance Regiment, formed in 2004, continues the tradition with its units of ‘suitcase men’ who undertake short-range sigint, fully integrated with tactical operations. Few remember that the SAS–sigint partnership in the jungles of Borneo was its first proving ground.

9

Blake, Bugs and the Berlin Tunnel

… you cannot speak in the residences, town or country, put at our disposal. Every room is ‘wired’. You cannot speak in a car, or train, or even outside the house if it be a small compound or garden. There is a danger of the apparatus picking up what you say.

Harold Macmillan, diary of his official visit to Moscow, February–March 1959

Signals intelligence was delivering effective support to British policy in the Third World during the 1950s and 1960s. The new realm of elint was busy measuring radars and rockets around the perimeter of the Soviet Union. However, GCHQ had stalled badly against high-grade Soviet cyphers, the most prestigious target. William Weisband’s treachery in the 1940s had inflicted severe damage on almost all available streams of Soviet communication. In 1952 GCHQ had been given a substantial tranche of extra money to accelerate its work. Much of this had been thrown at the ‘Russian problem’ in the hope of returning to the glory days of Ultra, but the work went slowly. The code-breakers were left grubbing their way through low-grade Soviet administrative systems in the hope of picking up fragments of useful information, or else reading Soviet intentions reflected in the traffic of other countries that Moscow was conversing with. Alternative routes to sigint on the Soviet Union were badly needed.

This was a direct spur for the now famous tunnel operations under Vienna and Berlin launched by Britain’s SIS in partnership with the CIA. The CIA’s own secret history of the Berlin tunnel operation makes it clear that these schemes were a direct response to the calamitous loss of sigint on Black Friday. ‘As early as 1948,’ it noted, ‘Intelligence Officers became interested in the benefits to be derived from tapping Soviet and Satellite landlines on a scale not previously considered necessary. The loss of certain sources during this period created gaps in our intelligence coverage which were particularly unfortunate during this period of Cold War escalation.’ By tapping into telephone lines, the West hoped to pick up sensitive voice traffic that the Soviets were not troubling to encrypt, because unlike messages sent by radio transmitter, underground landlines were thought to be inaccessible and therefore secure.

The idea of tapping phone lines in Vienna and Berlin mirrored existing activities by the KGB. As early as October 1946, the British Control Commission in Germany had reviewed the twenty-two ‘secrephones’ or scrambler phones installed in Berlin for communication with the British Zone of Germany, and had found them wanting. The encypherment provided by the scrambler was weak, and with the telephone lines passing through the Soviet Zone, they were presumed to be tapped. Even within the British Zone, the military had been anxious about allowing Germans who worked in telephone exchanges to have access to military telephone directories, since this would give them a ‘comprehensive guide to the most profitable extensions on which to listen in’. Only specially screened Germans were put to work in the telephone exchanges.

Poor telephone security had the potential to blow high-grade British cyphers. For example, it had long been known that the direct telephone line between the British element of the Allied Commission for Austria and London was monitored by the Soviets, and in early February 1948 British intelligence had discovered that they were ‘strengthening their interception arrangements’. The problem was that although officials in the British headquarters in Vienna were given continual security warnings, the officials they were talking to in London were less diligent. Frequently, telephone conversations were about agreeing the final text of a document, which was then sent by telegram in a high-grade cypher. For the Soviet code-breakers this was a gift, since they now had both the encyphered text and the clear text.

 By 4 August 1949, John Bruce Lockhart, the head of SIS in Germany, was confident that the Soviets had ‘100% coverage of the telephone lines between Berlin and the Western Zones’.

Predictably, SIS had already launched its own offensive activities.

The first operation took place in Austria, which like Germany was under four-power occupation. In late 1948 an SIS officer at the Vienna station, Peter Lunn, happened to notice that the main telephone cables running under the British sector went out towards a major headquarters in the Soviet Zone. A twenty-foot tunnel code-named ‘Conflict’ was soon dug from a British police post to the underground cable, and an engineer was brought in from the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill to attach a tapping device. SIS was reluctant to tell the Foreign Office what it was doing, and so only informed the local Foreign Office Head of Mission, Harold Caccia. Conveniently, Caccia had recently been Chairman of the JIC, and so was favourably disposed. ‘Conflict’ was so successful that two other tunnels were dug, code-named ‘Sugar’ and ‘Lord’. One reached out from the basement of a British-run jewellery store, the other from a villa in the suburbs of Vienna occupied by a British Army officer and his wife.

The volume of illicit recordings and intercepts from these three tunnels was so great that SIS’s Section N, which handled telephone transcripts from routine taps on foreign embassy telephones, was overwhelmed. SIS had to set up an entirely new section called ‘Section Y’ at 2 Carlton Gardens, just off Pall Mall, staffed partly by former East European exiles and with units for transcription, translation and analysis.

 SIS was now desperate for Russian linguists, and brought together a motley crew. Some were retired British officers, going back as far as the Boer War. There were many émigré Poles, including a dashing cavalry officer with an eyepatch, and plenty of White Russians. They were joined by recent trainees in Russian, but the latter struggled with the language of the intercepts, which was not only very colloquial, but filled with obscenities. The lexicon that was eventually produced to assist the newcomers was classified ‘Top Secret Obscene’.

In 1953 Peter Lunn was chosen to head the vast SIS station in Berlin, housed in the splendid Olympic Stadium. Unsurprisingly, he soon decided to repeat his Viennese activities. This time full Foreign Office clearance was easy to obtain because of the flow of wonderful material already coming from Vienna. In contrast to Vienna, the Americans were invited in at the outset of the Berlin operation. This was partly because of a desire to share costs, but also because of the existence of an ideal building close to the Soviet telephone cables, located in the American sector.

 The whole operation was a tightly compartmentalised Anglo–American affair. Few officers in the huge CIA or SIS stations in Berlin knew of the tunnel’s existence, although back in London a CIA officer was made deputy head of Section Y, which specifically looked after the tunnel.

 Berlin was a superb place to collect Soviet comint. Its phone lines carried communications not only to Moscow, but also Warsaw and Bucharest. Although the operation was complex, the underlying hope was that once in place, it might go on undisturbed for a long time.

SIS agents in the East Berlin Post Office provided maps of the locations of the cables, and in February 1954 digging began in earnest. Vitally important was the installation of the taps themselves, which consisted of heavy metal clips. This involved freezing the lines to prevent the interference being detected in the East, a ticklish phase that was again carried out by a special Dollis Hill Post Office research team. Finally, at the end of February 1955, the Berlin tunnel was operational. Elaborate anti-humidity barriers had to be erected to prevent damp affecting the electronics. The CIA maintained a small local unit for on-the-spot monitoring of circuits for the protection of the project and also to provide items of ‘hot’ intelligence for Berlin.

The overall ‘take’ from the Berlin tunnel was vast, and far exceeded the capacity of any local monitoring. Some twenty-eight telegraphic circuits and 121 voice circuits were being monitored at any one time. Voice traffic was recorded on fifty thousand reels of magnetic tape, amounting to twenty-five tons of material. At the peak of operation the voice processing centre at Chester Terrace, overlooking Regent’s Park in London, employed 317 people, and eventually 368,000 conversations were transcribed. The teletype processing centre employed a further 350 people. For each day of the tunnel’s operation the output was four thousand feet of teletype messages. Western intelligence services considered it to be a key source of early warning of attack. There was excellent material on Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956, and tantalising information about Soviet efforts to process uranium for their nuclear programme.

 Several hundred officers of the KGB and of their sister service, the GRU or Soviet military intelligence, were also identified. The tunnel was exposed by the Soviets on 21 April 1956, little more than a year after its activation, as a result of the treachery of George Blake, an SIS officer working for the Soviets. Nevertheless, the processing of the vast haul of intelligence material the West had already captured went on until 30 September 1958.

These gloomy subterranean activities shine a surprisingly bright light on the intelligence services of both East and West. In particular they illuminate a jealous rivalry. Some CIA officers have suggested that the British initially decided not to tell the Americans about their early tunnel operation in Vienna, and that SIS only came clean when the Americans arrived at the idea independently, forcing the British to reveal their own solo operation. Later, it has been claimed, the Americans failed to admit to the British that they could read certain types of the traffic taken from Berlin, using a technique called ‘Tempest’, which allowed them to hear the faint echoes of plain text as messages were tapped out on keyboards – although this story is unverified. What is quite clear is that while data was freely shared, its sheer volume sometimes defeated analysis. The quantity of traffic was immense. Overall, forty thousand hours of telephone conversations were recorded, and six million hours of teletype traffic were taken. Entire buildings full of translators battled to stay ahead of the wave, but inevitably fell behind.

Astoundingly, this was partly because the CIA decided it would rather fall behind than work with its main rival, NSA. The CIA did not tell NSA about the Berlin tunnel. Indeed, it was running an entire rival sigint unit called ‘Staff D’ in parallel with its compatriots at Fort Meade, led by a code-breaker they had poached called Frank Rowlett.

 NSA’s Director, General Ralph Canine, first found out about the Berlin tunnel by reading of its exposure by the Soviets on the front page of the

New York Times

 in late April 1956. He literally shouted with anger when he realised the extent of the CIA intrusion into what he considered to be NSA turf. The two chiefs, Allen Dulles and Canine, nurtured an intense personal dislike, and the bitterness between NSA and the CIA lasted for years.

 Even in the 1970s the CIA still had numerous rival intercept operations spread around the world.

Another person who was angered when the tunnel hit the headlines in April 1956 was the Berlin SIS Chief, Peter Lunn. The Western press hailed the tunnel as a brilliant intelligence success, and heaped praise on the CIA. Neither the Soviets nor the American newspapers mentioned the British, despite the fact that the tunnel was packed with their equipment. This was too much for Lunn, who assembled the whole staff of the Berlin SIS station and recounted the story from beginning to end.

 Everybody seemed to love the so-called ‘espionage tunnel’. In East Berlin, British officials reported, it had been ‘turned into a major tourist attraction and scarcely a day passes without a delegation of one sort or another being conducted through it’.

 In private, they noted, the Soviets admired the craftsmanship and the quality of the equipment.

The Berlin tunnel is perhaps the most controversial intelligence operation of the 1950s. Much of the controversy stems from the fact that on 22 October 1953, even before its construction began, George Blake, an SIS officer working for the KGB as a double agent, was part of a team briefed about the planned tunnel. Blake had been captured by the North Koreans in 1950, and was recruited during his incarceration. On his release he had returned to duty and had been sent to work for Section Y, which was undertaking the tunnel operation. In early 1954 he handed over the complete plans of the tunnel to his KGB controller during a rendezvous on the top deck of a London bus. Yet, incredibly, despite this leak, the tunnel was still a success, and gathered good intelligence. The KGB had to allow the operation to continue uninterrupted in order to protect Blake’s cover as a top ‘agent in place’.

 For the same reason, the KGB did not warn Eastern Bloc officials who were routing communications through Berlin. This included the GRU, which was responsible for Soviet Army intelligence operations. It decided that the tap would be endured for a year, and then ‘accidentally’ discovered in April 1956. In the meantime it passed out general security warnings to bureaucrats about using telephones, but to the KGB’s dismay, most officials ignored them.

 On the night of 21–22 April 1956, engineers in the East pretended to bump into the tunnel while repairing damage caused by heavy rain. Clearly there were other tunnels of this sort: recently declassified CIA documents reveal that in September 1953 ‘similar operations’ (in the plural) were being ‘conducted elsewhere’. Eventually, audacious operations of this kind were carried out by the West underneath Moscow itself.

The KGB’s selfish behaviour towards the GRU during the Berlin tunnel episode mirrored the attitude of the CIA towards NSA. Protection of its own security and its own sources was paramount. Unusually, in the Berlin tunnel episode, both sides could claim victory. The KGB successfully protected Blake until he was exposed by a Polish intelligence officer working for the Americans in 1959, while the West gained enormous quantities of data about its Eastern Bloc military opponents. Both sides were offered some reassurance against the possibility that its enemies were planning a surprise attack. In that sense at least, Cold War intelligence was neither fruitless nor necessarily a cause of increased tensions. Collectively, these operations calmed everyone’s fears, and their most substantial benefits might be measured through greater stability and the perpetuation of an uneasy peace.

Oddly, the Blake case seems to have helped, not harmed, Anglo–American intelligence relations, owing to the sensitive way it was handled by the Director of the CIA, Allen Dulles. On his retirement in September 1961, Dick White, the Chief of SIS, thanked Dulles for his generous attitude, saying: ‘This was never more manifest than in your recent handling of the Blake case. I only hope that you yourself realise what a splendid impression you made upon us all by your magnanimity and understanding of our difficulties.’ There were, White noted, many other incidents in which Dulles’ intervention had ‘restored trust and confidence between us’.

 In fact, by this time the horrors of the Blake case had been overshadowed by the defection of William H. Martin and Bernon F. Mitchell, two American NSA civilians who turned up in the Soviet Union in August 1960. Mitchell was a distinctly odd person who had once admitted to sexually experimenting with dogs and chickens, but had still been allowed to pass his NSA vetting. After their defection, GCHQ was informed and the usual damage assessments were set in train. Although Martin and Mitchell blew a number of GCHQ’s operations, and talked about them publicly at a Moscow press conference, the British reaction was muted. There was general relief that, for once, the defectors were not British-employed.

The Berlin tunnel was part of a general explosion of bugging and telephone tapping in the 1950s. Both SIS and the KGB saw this as a way to get around the problem of highly secure encryption and listen in to the enemy. The Soviets led the way on bugging because of their long history of listening in on Western diplomatic premises in Moscow.

 In July 1950 the Air Attaché at the British Embassy in Moscow was testing a wireless receiver when he heard the voice of the Naval Attaché, who was in a nearby room, broadcasting loud and clear. Despite a painstaking search, no bug could be found. The general opinion was that Russian employees within the Embassy had quickly removed it. Now the hunt was on, and the ‘sweepers’ who searched for bugs were busy all over Moscow. In January 1952 a microphone was found in the American Embassy. Then in September of the same year an American sweeper heard the voice of George Kennan, the American Ambassador, being transmitted, but no one could find the offending bug. Painstaking work with a British detector eventually located it.

 Its sophistication stunned Western observers: it was a resonating device that required no external power supply, and so could remain in operation indefinitely. Consisting of a metal chamber about ten inches long, it transmitted when bombarded with microwaves from a nearby building and was hidden in a wooden model of the Great Seal of the United States which was on display in Kennan’s office and which had been given to him by the Soviets as a present. In order to persuade the Soviets to activate the device, Kennan pretended to dictate a telegram, which enabled the sweepers to home in on it. Kennan recalls that he felt ‘acutely conscious of the unseen presence’.

The discovery of this microwave bug triggered alarm in London. On 9 October 1952 Churchill urged MI5 and SIS to ‘take all necessary action’, and told A.V. Alexander, his Defence Secretary, that the episode was ‘most important’ as it showed ‘how far the Soviets have got in this complex sphere’. He ordered an active programme of research into both defensive security measures and offensive bugging techniques for Britain’s own use. In the short term, MI5 busied itself protecting certain key rooms in Whitehall. Meanwhile, Sir Frederick Brundrett, the Chief Scientific Adviser at the Ministry of Defence, was asked to coordinate technical investigations into bugging possibilities for SIS, particularly with new transistor-based devices. Since the original find of an advanced Soviet bug in Britain’s Moscow Embassy in 1950, three different scientists in Britain had already ‘developed miniature devices which would transmit voices in the room in which they are. All the devices are different in principle from that discovered in Moscow.’ It was now necessary to move from laboratory prototypes into the field, for Ministers in London called for ‘devices suitable for offensive action by ourselves’.

 By July 1954, Brundrett’s group had four prototype bugs ready for field trials by SIS operatives.

Why were the new audio bugs being rushed ahead, when the familiar and reliable techniques of telephone tapping had been around for years? One of the reasons is that Soviet telephone security discipline was good. George Blake illustrates this well with his recollections of the efforts of the SIS Y Section to tap Soviet and Chinese telephones during the Geneva Peace Conference of May 1954. This important conference sought a settlement to the wars in Korea and Vietnam, and set up the International Control Commission on Vietnam, consisting of observers from India, Poland and Canada. SIS sent a team to Geneva headed by Blake, with two translators, who worked with the enthusiastic support of the Swiss security service. They were set up in the suburbs of Geneva with two recording machines and a few desks. However, it was soon clear that no hot tips were going to reach Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary, and his negotiating team: ‘The Staff of the Communist delegations observed strict telephone security. They never discussed anything with even a remote bearing on their position and tactics at the negotiating table, or gave any inkling of what concessions they were prepared to make.’ If such information was going to be scooped it was only going to happen when diplomats thought they were at a safe distance from a phone, which they had been trained to look upon as akin to a venomous serpent.

The Y Section excursion to Geneva was far from valueless. SIS was amazed to see how the Soviet and Chinese Communist delegations dealt with each other on the basis of complete equality. No less interesting were the family conversations of the famously stern and unbending Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov. To the surprise of the secret listeners, Molotov enjoyed long and patient chats with his six-year-old grandson, who recounted his daily school activities. One evening Mrs Molotov complained that her best friend’s son was having difficulty getting a place at Moscow University. ‘Could he ring the rector and arrange it? Rather grudgingly, Molotov consented.’

 One wonders if, at this point, Blake ever paused to reflect that the Soviet Communist system that he admired and the British system were really not so very different. SIS gathered plenty of such ‘social intelligence’, since Blake recalls that during the mid-1950s his unit also bugged Polish diplomatic premises in Brussels, the Soviet Embassy in Copenhagen, the Bulgarian Embassy in London and numerous locations in Cairo.

The Soviets got some of their own back in late February 1959, when Prime Minister Harold Macmillan made an official visit to Moscow. He recorded his main impressions in his diary, noting for example that ‘Mr Khrushchev is the absolute ruler of Russia and completely controls the situation.’ He then added:

The second impression – dominating everything else – was the strange experience of being surrounded by friends and advisers … and yet being practically unable to communicate with them at all, by word or writing, except in one room in the Embassy in conditions of great discomfort, inside a plastic tent with a gramophone record playing continuously. This is because you cannot speak in the residences, town or country, put at our disposal. Every room is ‘wired’. You cannot s