GCHQ. Richard Aldrich
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
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