GCHQ. Richard Aldrich
monitoring aircraft were rechristened 192 Squadron, and worked ever more closely with GCHQ. Meanwhile the radio countermeasures and jamming unit was rebranded as 199 Squadron. The RAF received four Boeing RB-29 ‘Washington’ aircraft, which were really American B-29 Superfortresses modified for listening. Their vast internal space allowed additional sigint equipment to be fitted by the sigint ground engineers at RAF Watton, who were known as the Special Radio Installation Flight, or ‘SRIF’. In 1953 two English Electric Canberras were acquired and refitted for secret sigint operations by SRIF. Their standard duty was flights along the borders of the Warsaw Pact, alternating with longer visits to the Baltic and the Mediterranean. Training of special operators was undertaken on slow but reliable Vickers Varsity aircraft.[23]
Beneath the sea, an even more sensitive sigint programme was under way. Much of what London and Washington knew about the Soviet Navy had been derived from captured German intelligence material harvested from Berlin in 1945, or from what the British had gleaned directly from their surprisingly good relations with the Soviet Navy during the war. However, this information was now outdated. The US Navy decided to send two submarines into the Bering Sea to test the possibility of undertaking listening operations off the major Arctic ports used by the Soviets. These successful pilot operations were limited to an investigation of the area using sonar. A much more ambitious mission was then attempted. This was a proper sigint collection operation, designed to scoop the signals that emanated from regular Soviet missile tests in the Barents Sea.[24]
In the summer of 1949 the US Navy picked its latest submarines for this mission, the USS Cochino and the USS Tusk. They had been built at the end of the war, and in 1948 they were modified to bring them up to U-boat standards and fitted with the latest snorkels. This allowed them to run submerged for long periods on diesel power, venting their exhaust to the surface. They had also been streamlined and fitted with the fastest available propulsion systems. The specialist elint equipment for capturing missile control signals, or ‘telemetry’, was installed by British sigint technicians at Portsmouth. The submarine chosen for fitting was the Cochino, under Commander Rafael Benitez. The name ‘Cochino’ was supposed to denote a species of trigger fish, but in Spanish it simply meant ‘The Pig’. Preparations were masterminded by Harris M. Austin from the US Naval Security Group and civilian sigint engineers. Additional aerials, known as ‘ears’, were fitted to the tailfin. The elaborate listening technology required the drilling of small holes for wires in the submarine’s pressure hull, which weakened it and did not best please the crew. Trials were held along the British coast in July 1949. In August the Cochino, escorted by three other submarines, including the Tusk, headed for Arctic waters. In the Barents Sea, the Cochino separated and sat off the coast hoping to collect the high-frequency signals that indicated a missile test, but found nothing of great interest. After a few days of lurking, it headed back to a rendezvous with the Tusk.[25]
However, disaster now struck. Four hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle the Cochino ran into a severe storm. Water poured in through a malfunctioning snorkel and a serious battery fire developed, burning for fourteen hours and producing large volumes of dangerous hydrogen. Some of the crew battled the fire using breathing equipment, but after a series of explosions they staggered back and admitted defeat. One crew member recalls: ‘They formed a grotesque aspect with their faces and hair burned. The skin was falling from their hands.’[26] Commander Benitez and his seventy-eight crew decided to abandon ship just after midnight. Despite a rescue by the Tusk, seven men were lost to the stormy seas off the Norwegian coast. Six of these fatalities were brave rescuers from the Tusk who were equipped with faulty survival suits, while the seventh was civilian signals intelligence expert Robert W. Philo from the Cochino. Commander Benitez was the last man to make the treacherous crossing – effected by a swaying plank – between the two vessels. By the time the Tusk pulled clear the Cochino was already half-submerged. ‘With a final burst of spray she disappeared from sight,’ plunging into 950 feet of water. The Tusk took the casualties, many with severe burns, to Hammerfest in Norway, from where they were flown to London.[27] These were the first casualties in one of the most secretive and dangerous areas of Cold War signals intelligence activity. However, London and Washington were not deterred. By the early 1950s, British and American sigint submarines were regular visitors to the headquarters of the Soviet fleet.[28]
Elint flights over the open sea were also sensitive and risky. On 8 April 1950 a US Navy elint aircraft, a PB4Y-2 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