GCHQ. Richard Aldrich
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Elint flights over the open sea were also sensitive and risky. On 8 April 1950 a US Navy elint aircraft, a PBY-42 Privateer, launched from Bremerhaven in northern Germany, was shot down while trying to identify new Soviet missile bases along the Baltic coast. The crew of four, who had named their aircraft the Turbulent Turtle, all perished. The Soviets later salvaged the Privateer’s elint equipment from the waters of the Baltic, and were in no doubt about the nature of the mission. Further missions were postponed.29 Within a month of the shootdown of the Privateer, General Omar Bradley, then Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, set out the case for resuming the flights, insisting that the intelligence they gathered was of the ‘utmost importance’. President Truman finally agreed to a resumption when told that US aircraft close to Soviet-controlled territory would be armed ‘and instructed to shoot in self-defense’. Truman minuted, ‘Good sense, it seems to me.’ The President’s green light was received on 6 June 1950, but after the outbreak of the Korean War later that month the flights were suspended for another few weeks due to ‘current hyper-tension and fear of further shoot-downs’. By the end of 1950, regular operations with RB-50Gs, ‘special mission’ elint aircraft adapted from an upgraded Superfortress bomber, were operating out of RAF Lakenheath airbase in East Anglia.30
Norway was an early partner in all types of sigint operations. In 1952, Rear Admiral Anthony Buzzard, Britain’s Director of Naval Intelligence, paid a secretive visit to Norway. His requests were so sensitive that only handwritten notes were taken at the meetings. Buzzard asked for permission to launch special reconnaissance flights from Norway into Russian airspace using the RAF’s new Canberra aircraft, and also to run elint flights conducted within Norwegian airspace. However, the fate of the USS Cochino and then of the American Privateer had alerted the Norwegians to elint operations as a potential flashpoint, and they were cautious. Only permission for the latter flights within Norwegian airspace was granted.31 By the mid-1950s the Norwegian Defence Intelligence Staff was beginning to experiment with the use of commercial trawlers as platforms for intelligence-gathering in the Barents Sea. Initially these were used for photographic reconnaissance, but they were gradually expanded to involve sigint monitoring. A ‘cover’ shipping company, Egerfangst, was established to run these operations, and its first vessel, the Eger, was in operation by 1956 using equipment supplied by the American NSA.32
Although the most important sigint collected at short range came through perilous operations by air and sea, the British and Americans also boasted vast armies of land-based listeners crouching over their radio sets in wooden huts, often in inhospitable locations. Tactical sigint in peacetime presented a problem, since there was not much for Y service sigint to listen to. Yet on the first day of any future war with Russia – and war, if it came, was expected to come suddenly – the RAF would be required to reconstitute its vast legions of secret listeners.33 In the event, the three services kept a large inter-service intercept formation in place, using personnel who were doing National Service. During peacetime they were lent to GCHQ, and spent much of their time collecting a wide range of signals, including diplomatic and commercial traffic. One RAF sigint officer observed, ‘Our only function is to receive the stuff in its cryptic form – a purely mechanical process – and pass it on to the body whose job it is to break it down.’34 By 1950 a system was in place whereby all those beginning National Service were asked if they would volunteer to learn Russian. The huge numbers of personnel who were trained up guaranteed a vast pool of tactical sigint operators who could be recalled on the eve of war, although GCHQ worried about how to hide the scale of the operation. This had profound consequences for the balance of power within post-war British sigint. It ensured that while the overall British sigint programme was coordinated by GCHQ, it was in fact provided by a complex alliance of GCHQ and the three armed services. This secret pact suited everyone – except for the Treasury, which struggled to track sigint spending, hidden as it was under a welter of misleading headings and cover organisations.35
The outbreak of the Korean War on 25 June 1950 triggered a massive expansion of the riskier and more dangerous short-range operations to collect all types of sigint, including elint. Tensions were high, because the strategic planners believed that the outbreak of global war was not far away. Hitherto the Americans had been dependent on the British to cover much of north-west Europe, but now Americans began to arrive in numbers and their listening stations sprouted all over Britain, often disguised as RAF stations. In 1952 the 47th Radio Squadron of the US Air Force Security Service arrived at Kirknewton airbase in Scotland, from where it could monitor shipping off the Kola Peninsula. In October that year Squadron Leader J.R. Mitchell became the first dedicated ‘Liaison Officer for GCHQ’ on elint in Washington.36
The accelerated pace of operations paid dividends. By 1952 elint experts in London and Washington had achieved a comprehensive picture of the Soviet Air Force. This had not required the breaking of Soviet codes. Instead, most of it was achieved through a mixture of elint or direction-finding, which simply meant using triangulation to locate specific Soviet units. GCHQ also listened in on clear voice traffic used by Soviet air-defence controllers giving instructions to fighters. There were large gaps in both Soviet air warning and coastal radar, which were mapped carefully. Anti-aircraft radar around Moscow was examined with special attention. Elint experts had been able to follow air-defence exercises in which the Soviets had used tiny strips of aluminium foil dropped from aircraft, known as ‘chaff’, as a radio countermeasure to fool radar operators into thinking large numbers of aircraft were airborne. Some of the more sophisticated Soviet work was thought to have been carried out by German experts captured by the Russians after 1945. Korea itself had proved to be a bonanza, with new Soviet radio equipment being captured, including direction-finding equipment which showed ‘marked improvement in design and construction’.37
Success in the exciting new field of elint offset some recent disappointments. GCHQ and its American partners had not yet recovered the medium-grade Soviet cyphers lost during the infamous ‘Black Friday’ of October 1948. They had not detected the advent of the first Soviet atom bomb, nor had they anticipated the outbreak of the Korean War. However, the elint effort against the Soviet Air Force, which also involved direction-finding and traffic analysis, was one of the key areas in which GCHQ could claim outstanding achievement in the first postwar decade – and it was sustained.
There was an especially secret reason why GCHQ and NSA examined the operational anatomy of the Soviet ‘nuclear bear’ so minutely. During the early 1950s, target intelligence officers in London and Washington had been busy exchanging sensitive data on ‘the mission of blunting the Russian atomic offensive’. This meant planning early counter-force attacks against Soviet nuclear forces, especially bombers, in the hope of destroying them on the ground in Eastern Europe before they could be used in a future war. GCHQ had given particular attention to this matter because of the vulnerability of Britain, and the Americans were impressed by the progress London had made on it. GCHQ and the RAF’s secret units had amassed ‘a significant amount of evaluated intelligence, particularly in the special intelligence field, which would be of the greatest value’ if war broke out.38
American officers considered that ‘vigorous efforts should be taken immediately to ensure rapid development of a joint research program to insure maximum exploitation of the British resources’. In short, it was not just the raw elint that the British had collected, but their sophisticated analysis of it that allowed it to be turned into high-quality finished intelligence, a legacy of the skills garnered during Bletchley Park’s Hut Three operation. Most of the airfields and the operational procedures for the Soviet Union’s nuclear air force in the European theatre had been mapped by 1952.39