GCHQ. Richard Aldrich
forced to abdicate. The Gurkhas had been slow in arriving because a British staff officer who loved paperwork had been laboriously recording the name of each man as he boarded the aircraft. Eventually, ‘an angry Brigadier threw the movement papers onto the tarmac’ and the rescue finally got under way.[69]
In early 1963, President Sukarno announced that he would step up the pace and pursue a policy of ‘Konfrontasi’ with Malaysia. By April, two thousand Indonesian ‘volunteers’, many of whom were commandos, were infiltrating into the neighbouring British colonies of Sarawak and Sabah in northern Borneo, and were soon clashing with units of Gurkhas. Buoyed up by their success, Indonesian troops actually attempted to raid the mainland of Malaysia in 1964. At this point the British government deployed the SAS, later assisted by similar special force units from Australia and New Zealand. By 1964 there were over ten thousand British and Commonwealth troops in Borneo. British soldiers were being awarded medals in a secret war that remained undeclared.[70]
Sigint assisted this clandestine conflict directly and decisively. Most importantly, it was used in a revolutionary new way in conjunction with special forces. In April 1964 the British commander in Borneo, General Walter Walker, was given permission to begin highly secret ‘Claret’ operations. These were counter-infiltrations across the border into the Indonesian territory of Kalimantan in southern Borneo, designed to take the war to the enemy. British forces were initially given permission to cross over the thousand-mile-long border into Kalimantan to a distance of three thousand yards. By 1965 this had been extended to twenty thousand yards.[71] Locating the enemy was the main challenge, and tactical sigint was used to provide accurate direction-finding on the elusive Indonesian jungle camps. Sigint operators would listen in to the Indonesian traffic to see if the Claret patrols had been picked up. On one occasion the operators listened in to the Indonesians as they prepared to ambush a Claret patrol, and were able to warn the intended victims, who then scooted back over the border. Tim Hardy, a Special Branch officer, recalls that the local British sigint teams had no difficulty intercepting Indonesian field pack radios, which were of Second World War vintage. Moreover, they used old-fashioned crystals to set the frequency, and ‘in defiance of all military rules, these never changed’. As a result Indonesian field communications were an open book, and sigint was ‘locking onto targets with pinpoint accuracy’. Hardy met SAS patrols coming back over the border accompanied by local Iban native trackers who carried ‘gory trophy heads’.[72]
From February 1965 onwards the British troops engaged in little other than Claret special operations. Brigadier Bill Cheyne, the Director of Operations in Borneo, declared that ‘CLARET operations so weakened the Indonesian resolve to fight that only their very best troops ventured into Sarawak latterly.’ The number of incursions fell so dramatically by late 1965 – they became ‘as rare as snakebite’ – that it was a major event when one occurred. Cheyne considered the use of tactical sigint vital, and for security reasons even the special forces were not told of this secretive source. Instead, there were stories of human agent operations and ‘other sources of intelligence to shelter behind’.[73] The top brass knew about it though, and Walter Walker, the British Commander in Chief, constantly praised the ability of sigint to pinpoint the enemy: ‘Nine times out of ten we knew his every move and we brought him to battle long before he had reached a point from which he could mortar a village, let alone a town.’[74]
Britain had developed an extensive sigint station in Singapore, run jointly with Australia. However, much of the sigint effort during the Confrontation was undertaken locally by 651 Signals Troop, staffed by personnel on special detachment from 13 Signals Regiment, the main British Army sigint unit in Germany. They worked closely with 693 Signals Troop from Royal Australian Signals. Mixed units moved freely between bases at Singapore, Labuan and Kuching. Signals intelligence functioned at several levels. The main support to Claret operations came from local radio direction-finding and voice interception. Telephone tapping on the Indonesian side of the border was also very productive. Meanwhile, higher-level Indonesian diplomatic traffic was also being read in Singapore and at GCHQ at Cheltenham.[75] The result was ‘high-grade intelligence that contributed significantly to the successful outcome of the conflict’.[76] Because of Australian worries about the disputed territory of West Irian, Indonesia remained Australia’s main signals intelligence priority through the 1960s, even higher than Vietnam.[77]
By March 1965 the British government was asking how long the Confrontation would last. The Joint Intelligence Committee Far East, which included Brian Tovey from GCHQ, did its best to answer this. Sigint was a helpful indicator, since it showed that Sukarno was deploying large-scale units of the Indonesian Army’s strategic reserve to Kalimantan, and further units seemed to be moving to Sumatra. All this suggested that Sukarno was not yet finished. Negotiations were getting nowhere, and the only serious rebellion inside Indonesia, on the island of Celebes, had suffered a setback. Sukarno was known to be ill, and optimistic officials hoped his death might be followed by an internal struggle between the Army and the Indonesian Communist Party. The intelligence from SIS was that ‘Sukarno may die at any time. Without an operation he is unlikely to last more than a year.’ In fact the Indonesian Premier seemed to be in alarmingly rude health, and the British Ambassador in Jakarta was sceptical about ‘secret sources’ on this subject.[78] Although there had been an abortive coup in September 1965, Sukarno was still clinging on, and by the end of the year the British Chiefs of Staff were considering serious military escalation, including much deeper Claret operations and commando raids into Sumatra.[79] The British effort now developed a significant naval component, with no less than a third of the entire British fleet deployed off Sumatra, often operating openly in Indonesian waters. Once again, signals intercepts were a crucial element in the naval campaign.[80]
Konfrontasi ended after Sukarno was replaced by General Suharto in 1966. Cheyne argued that this change was partly prompted by British military successes: ‘Sukarno would not have been deposed except for his military failures in Borneo.’ He added that once Sukarno had been overthrown, the Claret operations enabled Malaysia to negotiate from strength. Overall, he concluded, it was ‘a brilliantly successful story’.[81]
For much of this period a stream of high-grade diplomatic sigint from Indonesia passed across the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s desk, providing an accurate barometer of the thinking in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta.[82] For Denis Healey, Britain’s Secretary for Defence, it was especially satisfying. On 30 May 1965 he had a conversation with the American Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, and explained that Britain could not disengage from its commitments east of Suez until the Confrontation came to an end. McNamara had replied gloomily, ‘It will not end.’ But he was wrong.[83]
Although the Indonesians did not rumble the secret of sigint, they knew something was badly wrong. Senior officers believed that the British had some sort of special radar equipment that could track their patrols, and this was not a bad guess.[84] The success of sigint in Borneo offered a longer-term legacy. The British and Australians had developed a new kind of sigint that interfaced directly with special forces in real time. In 1966, when Australia sent a Task Force to Vietnam, this was accompanied by a similar signals intelligence unit.[85] The same tactics were deployed by Britain in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. This approach has since become more commonplace, with the Americans taking it to a new level with the elite Intelligence Support Activity created in the 1980s, which was mostly deployed against terrorists. Britain’s new Special Reconnaissance Regiment, formed in 2004, continues the tradition with its units of ‘suitcase men’ who undertake short-range sigint, fully integrated with tactical operations. Few remember that the SAS–sigint partnership in the jungles of Borneo was its first proving ground.[86]
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