A Tale Of Two Navies. Anthony Wells
improved through the 1970s and right up to the demise of the USSR, the Soviet navy developed a strategic and tactical plan that involved striking first against major US and NATO naval formations. This required significant coordination, timing of deployments and arrival on station, secure low-probability-of-intercept (LPI) communications, and weapons that the planners in Moscow assessed would do the job—that is, deliver a massed surprise and decapitating strike. The tattletale was only one of the assets involved. Others included surface, subsurface, and air assets of several types, and, increasingly, space-based systems for tracking and targeting. Breaking into, compromising, and rendering ineffective this part of the Soviet Ocean Surveillance System was a crucial task, one that the US Navy and Royal Navy, along with their intelligence communities, addressed in full.
There was, however, an additional Soviet component, one that was extremely flexible, deceptive, and at times difficult to locate and track. This comprised the noncommercial use of Soviet and other Warsaw Pact merchant fleets, plus the even more challenging flag-of-convenience surrogates used clandestinely by the KGB and GRU for a variety of intelligence operations. This added component was nontrivial. The KGB and the GRU recognized that they could place merchant vessels in places that a Soviet or Warsaw Pact naval vessel could never go, into the very ports and hearts of the European NATO navies, including the Royal Navy, and into certain US ports that the US government had opened to Soviet- and Warsaw Pact–flag carriers. In the case of surrogate flag-of-convenience vessels there was little NATO governments could do legally and overtly under the various maritime agreements together with the law of the sea. (It should be noted at this point and for future reference that the United States is, unlike the United Kingdom, not a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea [UNCLOS] or to the United Nations convention establishing and maintaining the International Criminal Courts [ICC] at The Hague in the Netherlands.)
The KGB and the GRU selected merchant vessels that ostensibly belonged to well established trading organizations and equipped them with often very capable intelligence collection systems, including sonar and the latest SIGINT and ELINT devices. Photographic collection was easy. A merchant ship visiting Greenock on the Clyde could listen to local communications while sending highly trained crew members ashore on collection missions. These individuals could travel by rental car to such sites such as the Royal Navy nuclear storage facility at Coulport or to the Holy Loch, where they could observe US nuclear submarines berthed. Deployment schedules could be collected, tug frequencies monitored, weapon movements noted, and perhaps most dangerous of all, some of those who went ashore did not return. UK port immigration and customs officials checked crews in and out but could never guarantee that the same persons arrived with the ship and sailed with it. The KGB and the GRU had an ideal way to insert agents and recover them, without the risks of airport and regular port transit, or indeed of clandestine insertion by other means, such as submarines. The KGB inserted agents regularly into and out of Europe in such ways, and the GRU inserted the far more dangerous long-term “sleepers,” tasked to integrate with and live among local communities.
These sleepers were extremely highly trained personnel with perfect language skills, culture, and detailed local knowledge, acquired after multiple clandestine visits before final insertion for what in some cases was decades, often without the knowledge of their owners or operators. They were equipped with totally fictitious identities and documentation. The objectives for these GRU personnel, many of them Spetsnaz trained, was not classic espionage, recruiting and running agents, but rather acquiring detailed local intelligence. In the case of the Royal Navy, they were interested in the location of crucial strategic communications systems and likely routing, weapon storage facilities, strategic fuel-supply sites, and covert command-and-control facilities. Perhaps most worrisome of all was the task given to a select few to assassinate, in the event of a major confrontation between the West and the Soviet Union, the key leadership of the United Kingdom. In the 1980s Mrs. Margaret Thatcher was indeed at the very top of the target list.
At the operational level, these vessels had highly classified war orders to which only their political officers had access: mining in key ports and approaches, scuttling in crucial channels, and destroying with hidden weaponry military infrastructure, and even, where access was possible, attacking warships in harbor or in transit with heavily disguised surface-to-surface weapons. Other targets included logistics and infrastructure oil tanks, aviation fuel supplies, communications sites, and bridges.
The nuclear era did not prevent limited war. The 1960s were a decade of considerable challenge for both the US Navy and the Royal Navy. We will look at operations in due course, but before we do let us examine the technological challenges posed by the Soviet and Warsaw Pact threat and the ways in which the two competing systems, communism and capitalism, vied with one another in unprecedented ways to gain the military edge at all levels of naval warfare. The 1960s witnessed the Cuban Missile Crisis, the war in Vietnam, the Six Day War in the Middle East of June 1967, the United Kingdom’s confrontation with Indonesia in support of its former colony, Malaysia, and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. They also saw the beginning of a space race and, most important of all, confrontation at sea on a scale and in ways not seen before in peacetime.
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