The Bletchley Park Codebreakers (53 page)

The loss of the Gary Powers U-2 aircraft occurred in May 1960. A month later, an American RB-47 ferret aircraft engaged in maritime surveillance was lost over the Barents Sea, very close to Soviet airspace. The latter aircraft had been launched from RAF Brize Norton in Britain. American and Norwegian Sigint stations had tracked the aircraft, but disputed its course, plotting it thirty miles and twenty-three miles respectively from the Soviet coast. The aircraft crew had received orders not to go closer than fifty miles. The Soviet coastal limit was twelve miles and the margin for error was small. The twin shoot-downs reverberated in Britain in the early summer of 1960. There was a public furore and questions in the House of Commons. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was bitter when the Gary Powers shoot-down contributed to the collapse of the East–West summit in Paris, by which he had set much store. The Soviet Union exploited this to the full, threatening countries such as Britain and Japan, which hosted U-2 and RB-57D flights, with rocket attacks against the bases from which future flights were made over ‘Socialist’ countries. These threats were first made by the Soviet Minister of Defence, Malinovsky, on 30 May 1960 and were reiterated on 3 June to a packed press conference by Nikita Khrushchev himself. The Joint Intelligence Committee in London concluded that these threats were a bluff, nevertheless they induced a new climate of extreme caution on the part of Harold Macmillan.

The impact of these events in the summer of 1960 was similar to the Crabb affair in 1956. They served to crush a British plan for increased airborne surveillance and Sigint gathering against the Soviet fleet that had been emerging in the weeks and months immediately prior to the loss of the Gary Powers U-2 aircraft. In early 1960, the First Sea Lord had held a meeting with the US Navy’s Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) and agreed to an ‘increased accent on surveillance’. By March 1961, British plans for increased airborne surveillance of the Soviet fleet were put ‘into cold storage indefinitely’. Other long-established British programmes were brought to a close. Macmillan now required the Joint Intelligence Committee to prepare a review
of all aerial surveillance and submarine surveillance tasks so that he could assess provisionally the value of the intelligence gained from these sorts of activities. These developments contained an element of irony. In the 1950s, Britain and the United States had increasingly turned to technical means of examining the Soviet armed forces and Soviet scientific-technical developments, because human espionage inside the Soviet Union had proved increasingly hazardous and, with a few exceptions, notably unproductive. Forward technical surveillance was now proving to be less than risk-free.

Somewhat safer alternatives certainly existed. In the early 1950s, the British had begun cultivating an alternative form of seaborne surveillance: the possibility of gathering intelligence on the Soviet fleet from the relative safety of British trawlers operating in northern waters. This was similar to the Soviet Sigint trawler that became ubiquitous by the 1960s. This sort of activity was less provocative, though not without risk. However, the real solution to intelligence collection without provocation lay with American satellites that came on stream in 1964, providing both imagery and Sigint collection. It is often thought that the first intelligence dividends from satellites took the form of imagery provided by the Corona operations in 1964. In fact, Sigint satellites began their activities in 1962 with a series of successful and highly secret US launches codenamed ‘Heavy Ferret’. By 1970 they had been replaced by the much more sophisticated Rhyolite satellite. The Rhyolite satellite was able to intercept the ‘spillage’ from microwave telephone links, even though these were in theory ‘line of sight’ communications. The resulting information was so plentiful that it required immediate downloading, largely to the NSA sites in Britain at Menwith Hill and in Australia at Pine Gap. Both the NSA and GCHQ struggled to cope with the vast output of the Rhyolite satellite programme which provided astonishing numbers of intercepts.

Despite the advent of satellites, Britain retained a strong need for an airborne Sigint capability. In the 1960s much of this was provided by three specially converted Comet Mk 2 aircraft and four Sigint Canberras operated by 51 Squadron of RAF Signals Command. Their main purpose was to gather intelligence on Soviet air defences in support of the V-Bomber force, Britain’s main nuclear deterrent in the mid-1960s. They also carried our interception of telemetry from Soviet missile tests in the southern region of the USSR, a process that could not be conducted from the ground without missing crucial
data from the first ninety seconds of the missile’s flight. However, by 1966 Whitehall had begun to realize that the Sigint Comets would be coming to the end of their operational life in 1972. A long lead time was required to allow ‘time for the fit of special role equipment’ to any replacement aircraft. As early as October 1966 a special committee, led by the Chair of the London Signals Intelligence Board and composed of key figures from GCHQ and MoD, had concluded that the way forward was a special Sigint variant of the new Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft. The Chiefs of Staff endorsed this decision on 8 November 1966 and the Nimrod Sigint aircraft programme began to roll forward.

The special Sigint variant of the Nimrod was required partly because of alliance pressures. There was a limited choice of partners to share burdens with, for although the French had an airborne Elint capability, and were members of NATO, there was ‘no exchange’ with them. Other NATO partners, such as Norway and Turkey, offered ‘full co-operation’, but only used ground-based stations. At the core was the relationship with the United States. Air Vice-Marshal Harold Maguire, the Deputy Chief of Defence Staff for Intelligence, explained that, because of the significant British programme, they were the only NATO country receiving raw American Sigint. Accordingly, they were the only country with the capability ‘to make our own assessments in our area of interest and, where necessary, challenge US assessments’. Maguire stressed that this had been ‘critical’ when discussions on future NATO weapons system requirements had occurred. Moreover, the British airborne Sigint programme simply helped to pay Britain’s way in the broader politics of Anglo–American intelligence co-operation: ‘We know that our relatively small airborne Elint programme is appreciated by the Americans as a sharing of the collection task, particularly as their resources are stretched because of world-wide commitments. As with other British intelligence activities, such as JARIC (Joint Air Reconnaissance Intelligence Centre], it helps to repay in some degree the enormous quantity of material we receive from them.’

Indeed, some officials worried that the US had come to expect British assistance in the airborne Sigint field in Europe ‘and a failure would threaten the massive help they give us in the whole Sigint area’.

The cost of the Nimrod Sigint aircraft programme in the 1970s was considerable, initially estimated at some £14 million. This could
not be accommodated within the already tight Sigint budget. On 26 July 1967 this issue was addressed by the committee that supervised the budget of the British intelligence community, the Permanent Secretaries’ Committee on the Intelligence Services (PSIS), led by the Cabinet Secretary, Burke Trend. He quickly concluded that the Nimrods were ‘unacceptable as part of the Sigint budget’. However, everyone was agreed that they were an essential purchase and increasingly an integral part of Britain’s nuclear strategic weapons provision. Accordingly, airborne Sigint would henceforth become a formal part of the RAF vote rather than the Secret Service vote. In reality this decision only confirmed what had been a growing practice. Because of the rising cost of Sigint, much of the required finance had been buried in other budgets, and airborne Sigint provision had already been handled in this way as part of what the RAF called ‘our overall contribution to the hidden Sigint costings’.

The rapid growth of GCHQ’s interest in electronic intelligence and airborne Sigint in the 1950s and 1960s underlined the fact that Western Sigint was entering a new era in several respects. Comint, Elint and communications security (Comsec) were being joined by the equally technical fields of electronic warfare, radio counter-measures and radio deception. Alongside this there were also very elaborate and powerful efforts in the area of radio propaganda broadcasting and also jamming. The airwaves were becoming increasingly crowded and so in 1953–4, Lord Strang, previously the Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign Office, led a high-level investigation into the future higher direction of radio in war. GCHQ ‘were concerned that they should know the details of any radio deception plans’ developed by the services. The London Signals Intelligence Board (LSIB) offered Strang a detailed report on the dangers of different branches of the radio war coming into conflict with one another. They explained that ‘jamming of an enemy air force signals on one part of the front might prevent the interception of, say, enemy police force cipher messages from quite a different part of the front; study of these might have made it possible to solve, some months later, the cypher messages of submarines operating throughout the world’. John Sinclair, Chair of the LSIB, urged the necessity of ‘rapid, forceful and expert co-ordination of the different aspects of the radio war’. Current proposals would not suffice to provide the control during ‘the critical opening phases of a war … a grave weakness, which ought to be remedied’, but the
exact solution was not yet clear. Instead, the 1950s and 1960s saw an increasing proliferation of Cabinet committees and sub-committees. Throughout this period GCHQ itself continued to be managed by the LSIB rather than the Joint Intelligence Committee. Each spring, GCHQ brought forward an annual report ‘on measures to improve Sigint’ for LSIB approval. The LSIB also prepared for the British Chiefs of Staff a more general annual report on the state of British Sigint. Meanwhile the role of the Joint Intelligence Committee was to provide GCHQ with a broad overall list of targets on an annual basis. There were inevitable tussles between these various committees, with the Joint Intelligence Committee conscious that some of its broader reviews of British intelligence effectiveness ‘encroached on the preserves of LSIB’.

During the 1950s, most high-grade ciphers, for example one-time pads, used by the major powers, remained effectively impossible to break by the sweat of direct cryptanalysis, when employed correctly. As a result, increasing efforts were made to tap communications before they were enciphered. The era of large-scale bugging had arrived, accelerated by the development of transistors. Soviet efforts were revealed by the accidental location of a microphone in the office of the British naval attaché in Britain’s Moscow Embassy in July 1950. The British air attaché, who was testing a radio receiver, heard the voice of his colleague being broadcast loud and clear from another part of the building. An active search ensued but, alarmingly, the Soviets succeeded in removing the device before it could be found. In 1952 more bugs were found in the office of the American Ambassador, George Kennan, using ‘a special British detector’. In 1956, conference rooms in the US European Command Building were found to be seriously compromised by listening devices. Britain had not been slow to retaliate and in October 1952 Churchill ordered British defence scientists to begin a vigorous programme of developing British bugs for offensive use against the Soviets. By the late 1950s this was a busy field of activity.

Bugging, direct tapping of landlines and the breaking of the communications traffic of minor states ensured a stream of Sigint was routinely available to Whitehall. Little of this can be seen in the archives today due to the nature of security procedures attending it. Sigint material and ordinary working files never mixed. Before gaining access to Sigint, Foreign Office officials were required to attend a day course on Sigint security. Foreign Office staff could then go on the circulation list for BJs – Sigint material still being circulated in the
same blue jacketed files as they were before the war. This material was never to be referred to in ordinary Foreign Office paperwork and always remained in the distinctive blue jackets. BJs were circulated by special messenger, originating in the Permanent Under-Secretary’s Department and always returned there after use. There, in a small office in this Department, sat the Communications Security Officer, the work-a-day liaison with GCHQ. More humble files dealing with policy and correspondence lived in the Foreign Office registry. This hermetic separation has ensured the near invisibility of Sigint to postwar diplomatic historians.

Throughout the Cold War the physical entity that constituted GCHQ continued to expand. In 1952 it had moved to a single site in Cheltenham at what had been a former US Army base at Harthurstfield Farm. This became known as the Benhall site. But soon it was clear that more space was required and a further site on the other side of Cheltenham was acquired at Oakley. Benhall contained much of the technological and development effort, while Oakley contained the language training centre and administrative buildings. Around the main buildings at Oakley were the physical manifestations of continued Cold War growth an expanding network of low-level temporary buildings and Portakabin-type structures. Much of this work was devoted to defensive communication security as well as the more frequently remarked upon business of Sigint. Moscow maintained an aggressive Sigint programme and in the late 1980s it was estimated that the Soviet Union maintained a capability at least as extensive as that of the United States, deploying some 350,000 people. These were mostly located at some 500 ground stations inside Eastern Bloc countries or at locations such as Cuba.

GCHQ linkage to American facilities has always been important. The largest American Sigint base in Britain is at Menwith Hill, which has recently expanded further to accommodate American programmes withdrawn from Europe. In 1997, a new US Naval Security Group detachment arrived to join a major British Sigint site at RAF Digby, seventeen miles south of Lincoln. This American unit is fully integrated with the RAF 399th Signals Unit. Indeed, Digby constitutes a major all-arms Sigint and Comsec centre, in which members of the three armed services of both countries co-operate in a fully integrated operation. In the United States, the main interface is the National Security Agency Columbia Annex (CANX) at 7200 Riverwood Drive,
Maryland. This is a long, low, single-storey building, almost invisible behind its screening, which provides accommodation to the British Liaison Officer to the NSA and his staff, allowing a permanent GCHQ presence at Fort Meade. The long-term future of the Anglo–American Sigint relationship beyond the end of the Cold War was effectively shaped in the late 1980s. The main factor was the cancellation of the vastly expensive British Zircon Sigint satellite programme in 1987, which had been costed at £500 million for a geo-stationary satellite with a five-year lifespan. The project had been strongly advocated by the GCHQ Director Brian Tovey. Thereafter, Britain reportedly negotiated an agreement whereby she made a substantial contribution to the National Reconnaissance Office programme and was able to make some tasking requests. These developments marked an implicit admission that London was at last giving up any pretensions to being a premier league Sigint player.