GCHQ. Richard Aldrich
recognise the seriousness of the Emergency in Malaya, allowing it to get out of hand. However, in October 1951 the MCP succeeded in assassinating Sir Henry Gurney, the British High Commissioner. Thereafter, striking back at the guerrillas and eliminating Ching Peng became a near-obsession for the security authorities in London. When Oliver Lyttelton, the Colonial Secretary, returned to London to report on Gurney’s assassination he promised the Cabinet that he would form special teams ‘aimed at certain individuals’. These were effectively killer squads, and he gave a firm assurance that they would ‘hunt down individual men from Communist higher formations through their families, properties, sweethearts etc.’.[3]
Locating the guerrilla headquarters in Malaya was easier said than done. In 1950 a sigint-equipped Lancaster from the RAF’s 192 Squadron was sent out to help in the hunt for the insurgents by tracking their radio communications. Later, undercover agents planted batteries with excessively high power on the guerrillas to damage their radios. When they were repaired, the workshops the guerrillas used were bribed to secretly modify the sets to give out a stronger signal. This gave the opportunity for sigint to achieve a direction-finding fix on the main guerrilla bases. Bombers from the RAF and the Royal Australian Air Force were standing by, and lightning raids were carried out on the deemed location of the signals. Avro Lincoln bombers dropped thousands of tons of bombs into the dense jungle at likely guerrilla locations. Their pilots were always impressed by the resilience of the jungle: their largest bombs vanished into the triple-canopied green foliage below them, and from the aircraft little impact was visible. It is not known how successful these operations were, but Ching Peng, the most important prize, certainly eluded them.[4]
In January 1952, Sir Gerald Templer arrived as the new High Commissioner in Malaya. Templer possessed the authority and charisma necessary to create a unified government machine and to implement an effective counter-insurgency strategy. Although famed for his emphasis on ‘hearts and minds’, he also sorted out intelligence, creating a coherent structure in which the army, the police and the civil authorities were forced to share intelligence. All this was done with his customary fiery language – he was quite incapable of uttering a sentence without a cussword in it.[5]
Despite Templer’s forceful direction, intelligence did not improve overnight. An important intelligence issue that was never quite resolved was the question of who was actually behind the insurgency. The Colonial Office and the Special Branch officers of the Malayan Police preferred to interpret the Emergency as a wicked plot initiated by Stalin or else Mao, while the British diplomats tended to see it more as a local anti-colonial uprising. During the mid-1950s GCHQ began to intercept what it believed to be wireless traffic between the MCP guerrilla leadership and the Chinese Communist Party in Peking. The Special Branch presented this intelligence to senior British officials in Kuala Lumpur with some delight as evidence of its theory of external direction, but only in a summarised form. Diplomats in Kuala Lumpur were sceptical, and asked to see the full transcripts of the transmissions. A major altercation followed, with the diplomats accusing the Special Branch of bending the evidence, while the policemen accused the diplomats of a lack of trust. The issue of exactly how close the MCP was to Peking was never resolved.[6]
GCHQ’s most important outpost in Asia was Hong Kong. China was the venue of one of Britain’s early Cold War code-breaking triumphs. Between March 1943 and July 1947 GCHQ was able to read the high-grade Russian cypher traffic passing between Moscow and its mission at the headquarters of Mao Tse-tung’s People’s Liberation Army in Yunnan. This was a highly secret programme, and GCHQ only began passing material to the Americans in March 1946. The decision not to share until this point may have reflected anxieties about the strong differences within the American administration about China policy, but it is noticeable that the spring of 1946 also marks the advent of the revised BRUSA agreement.[7] Exactly how this breakthrough was achieved when many other Russian high-grade cypher systems remained immune to attack is still a mystery. However, SIS had placed a rather eccentric officer called Michael Lindsay at Mao’s headquarters in Yunnan, where he was assisting the Chinese Communist communications team as their ‘principal radio adviser’. This may eventually prove to be part of the story.[8]
The British colony of Hong Kong was of special value to the United States. This reflected the fact that, after the end of the Chinese Civil War that brought Mao Tse-tung to power in 1949, the United States did not even have an embassy in mainland China. ‘Hong Kong became an American watchtower on China,’ recalls Jack Smith, who looked after the Far East in the CIA’s Office of National Estimates.[9] GCHQ joined with the Americans and the equivalent Australian organisation, Defence Signals Branch, to develop the facilities in Hong Kong. Washington received the full intercept output of Hong Kong, but with the onset of the Korean War demands for intelligence went up sharply, and Washington considered that combined US–UK intercept facilities in the Far East were ‘far short of requirements’.[10] In July 1952 the US Communications Intelligence Board persuaded its British opposite numbers of the ‘urgent need’ to send an additional eight-hundred-strong US Air Force sigint unit to Hong Kong to join the hard-pressed British and Australians. However, this was vetoed by the Governor of Hong Kong, Sir Alexander Grantham, who detested the way in which his territory had become host to a myriad of espionage activities.[11] Once the Chinese had intervened in the Korean War, an attack on Hong Kong by China was always a possibility. Therefore GCHQ negotiated emergency facilities at Okinawa in Japan for the British and Australian sigint personnel working there.[12]
Even in 1955, the United States was still negotiating for new sites in Asia. Sigint sites were not small or discreet, often requiring vast acres of wireless masts known as ‘aerial farms’ to capture signals of interest. In Taiwan, American officials had run into trouble securing a 335-acre site near Nan-Szu-Pu airfield where they had plans to locate hundreds of personnel from the Army Security Agency.[13] With repeated clashes between the United States and Communist China over the Taiwan Straits in the late 1950s, the British government reviewed the future of Hong Kong, which seemed exposed, and pondered the short-term value of the continued British presence in the colony. Much turned on the mysteries of the UKUSA alliance, the Anglo–American–Commonwealth sigint pact of cooperation, since Hong Kong hosted British, Australian and American eavesdroppers.[14] Alongside the GCHQ activities there were also vast British and American programmes in Hong Kong for running agents and interviewing defectors from mainland China. During the 1950s and 1960s, both the State Department and the Pentagon considered Hong Kong to be the single most important British overseas territory from the point of view of intelligence-gathering.[15]
In order to stimulate more defectors from China to Hong Kong, Britain launched ‘Operation Debenture’ in 1954. This was a covert radio project and constituted ‘the first UK operations of 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