GCHQ. Richard Aldrich
British anti-submarine exercise off the Scottish coast, they took on more supplies at Greenock naval base in western Scotland and headed for the Arctic Circle. Extra personnel had come on board to assist with the listening, necessitating ‘hot bunking’ and meaning that water was in short supply.[42]
On 24 September they were able to get quite close to a Soviet submarine, and were able to record its signature over a period of more than an hour. Listening was undertaken by a special team led by Lieutenant Commander George Lucas, a fluent Russian-speaker whom Hurley described as ‘fat, foreign looking with a slight accent’. However, the following day it was clear that they had been sighted, since ‘a large number of aircraft plus two or three destroyers searched for us’. O’Connor had strict written orders that in such circumstance the Taciturn should turn back and head for home. Aircraft continued to search for them as they made their way south. On 3 October they reached the safety of Faslane naval base on the west coast of Scotland, and ‘a package’, presumably the sigint recordings, was ‘whisked off to Prestwick airport’ and flown to the United States for analysis.[43]
Michael Hurley was back on special operations six months later, with a further trip into Arctic waters. With much the same crew and the obligatory ‘special team’ on board they sailed down the Clyde and into open water on 13 March 1958. The extra personnel on board meant that water supply was again a problem. The special passengers consisted of the familiar Commander Lucas, who turned out to be Polish, together with a ‘boffin’ from the Underwater Development Establishment called Dr Newman and an American officer called Lieutenant Block. There were also two further communications intelligence specialists, including a Canadian. The routine was now familiar, diving deep by day and attempting to ‘snort’ by night, although this was often interrupted by Soviet aircraft. Snow storms provided ideal cover for the use of the snorkel. The very cold exterior water temperature meant that icy drops of condensation continually fell on the crew. The American officer took his turn at watches, and his distinctive voice on the Tannoy was a source of amusement. Dr Newman spent much of his time in the special sound room located in the Taciturn’s expanded hull, working on sigint collection.[44]
On 28 March they moved in close to the Soviet coast, and began to encounter more signals traffic. The next day, they ‘got some good recordings’ and managed to take some film footage of peculiar ‘bullet shaped’ aircraft that they did not recognise, and thought were possibly prototypes. On 2 April Hurley noted in his diary that they were well inside an inlet, with land less than a mile away all around. He could see Soviet radar installations silhouetted on the coast, and wrote, ‘We are actually at the entrance to a harbour.’[45] If they were discovered here, there was little chance of escape, and Hurley realised that this was perilous work indeed.[46] By 3 April they had moved away from the coast and were in open water at periscope depth, busy making good recordings of two destroyers, a Skory class and a Kola class, together with some escorts, which were exercising. Hurley records what happened next:
Then suddenly out of the sun astern another Skory appeared coming towards us. We went down to 120ft. On Husk [a listening system] we could hear him coming as the sound of his engines grew louder. We went to Diving Stations and Defence State One (just in case), she passed right overhead like an express train went on a little then made a sharp turn and came back towards us again. As she did so she dropped three charges which seemed of course very loud …
The Taciturn went deep, down to 220 feet, and the Soviet ship moved away. Remarkably, a little later they came up and began recording the same vessels, although at a safer distance from both their quarry and the shore.[47] By 16 April they were on their way home. A week later they surfaced for the first time in thirty-four days. The Taciturn reached Faslane naval base four days later, to be greeted by a visibly relieved head of submarine operations. Radio silence meant that for two months no one knew the fate of submarines on these missions.[48]
By the late 1950s the Super-Ts, once the most advanced boats the Navy could field, were suffering the wear and tear from long patrols. Commanders would now refer to ‘a shaky old T-boat’. Turpin, for example, had an elderly diesel engine for surface propulsion, in this case taken from another submarine, which had already seen twelve thousand hours of service. In 1957, while on an operation in the Atlantic, the main engine gave up the ghost and the Turpin suffered the indignity of being towed by an Admiralty tug for some five thousand miles.
Although the T-boats were no longer safe for perilous operations against the Soviets, the elderly Turpin was re-engined and sent on further Arctic intelligence missions under the command of Alfie Roake. The first set off on 21 October 1959, and the second, launched on 6 February 1960, set a record for snorkelling without surfacing of forty-two days.[49] On the second mission there were a number of ‘close encounters’. One of these was thought to be with a Soviet torpedo, but fired at long range, allowing the Turpin to evade it by going deep and combing the tracks. Their closest call was being pursued by a flotilla of six Soviet destroyers, which they escaped by diving to a remarkable 425 feet, well below their safety depth. Engineers later told Roake that his hull would have collapsed like an eggshell at 470 feet, and that they had a lucky escape.[50]
Alfie Roake’s last mission into Soviet waters was launched in the spring of 1960. By now he was very conscious that the elderly Super-Ts were ‘nowhere near’ American standards. A new decade beckoned with the promise of the quieter and more reliable ‘O’ class submarines, and eventually nuclear vessels. Just like the Super-T class, some of these new boats were modified for a special intelligence role and would be despatched on further hazardous missions inside the Arctic Circle.[51]
Sigint in the Sun – GCHQ’s Overseas Empire
… with ‘Sigint’ locking onto targets with pinpoint accuracy, our military ached to have a go.
Tim Hardy, Special Branch, Sarawak, April 1964[1]
In the 1950s, GCHQ’s top priorities were warning of an impending war with Russia, and gathering intelligence on Moscow’s growing nuclear arsenal. However, on a day-to-day basis, the Middle East, Africa and Asia were the regions where sigint made a tangible difference. Since the end of the Second World War, Britain had been involved in a prolonged ‘escape from empire’, retreating from her colonies and hoping to replace them with a vibrant Commonwealth of newly independent states. The reality was more complex, since many of these countries contained elements that were keen to evict the British faster than they wished to go. Some hosted guerrilla groups sympathetic to Moscow, others were divided communities that faced a troubled journey towards independence. The result was that Britain was involved in an endless litany of small wars that stretched from the dusty deserts of Yemen to the steamy jungles of Borneo. Because these were often guerrilla wars, finding the enemy could be the main challenge, and here sigint was in its element. Moreover, right across Asia and Africa, cyphers were less secure than those of countries like Russia, so GCHQ could also read plenty of high-grade diplomatic traffic.
Although sigint helped to smooth the end of Britain’s empire, GCHQ itself did not always want empire to come to an end. Because the 1950s and 1960s were an era when a great deal of communications was sent over long distances using high-frequency radio, GCHQ depended on the remnants of empire to provide a global network of ground stations to collect these signals. Indeed, Britain’s imperial real estate was one of the key contributions to UKUSA, and was of particular assistance to the United States. Accordingly, in many colonies there were defence and intelligence bases that Britain wished to retain, prompting officials to drag their feet over independence. Elsewhere, the British attempted to persuade post-independence governments to permit some bases to remain.[2]
Throughout the 1950s Britain fought one of the most protracted colonial struggles of the post-war era, the Malayan Emergency. The enemy were a hardened band of Communist guerrillas who had been Britain’s uneasy allies against the Japanese during the war. The military forces of the Malayan Communist Party,