GCHQ

The RAF sigint units based at CSE Watton were especially lucky not to lose any aircraft in this mini air-war. In 1954 a Gloster Meteor from 527 Squadron, which claimed to be on a ‘radio calibration mission’, strayed over the border into East Germany. This seems to have been due to a navigational error. The crew were oblivious to their mistake, but soon realised they were running short of fuel, and opted to land at the next visible airfield. The pilot, Sergeant Don Coleman, and his navigator, Sergeant Mike Thomson, stepped out onto the tarmac and – to their horror – realised that the approaching troops had red stars on their caps. The Soviets spent several weeks inspecting the aircraft before it was returned to the RAF. The incident earned Coleman the unwelcome nickname ‘Dan Dare’.

The following year, another Gloster Meteor on a ‘radio calibration flight’ from Watton arrived unannounced in East Germany. Again the pilots had run out fuel, but this time they could not find a runway, and opted for a belly landing in a field. After a suitable delay for technical inspection of the radio warfare equipment on board, the Meteor was again returned by the Soviets. On the night of 26 June 1955 there was a much more serious incident, when a radio countermeasures Lincoln (WD132) from 199 Squadron exercising over West Germany collided with a USAF F-86D Sabre jet fighter. The Lincoln crashed seven miles north of Bitburg, and all the crew were lost.22

Early incidents like these mostly occurred in northern Europe. However, Turkey and the Black Sea were also of enormous intelligence importance because of the presence of rocket-testing sites in the southern Soviet Union around the Caucasus. As early as September 1950, Britain’s Technical Radio Interception Committee was directing a series of flights against Soviet radar targets on the Black Sea.23 The sought-after prize was elint from Soviet guided missiles being tested at Kapustin Yar. In 1954, trials had been held in Turkey to see if ground stations could intercept the signals, but the equipment was not sensitive enough, and in any case it was hard to collect signals during the early stages of rocket flight, since they were blocked by hills near the launch site. The only option was to get closer to the take-off sites and to monitor from altitude, which meant flights over the Black Sea or the Caspian Sea. The most desperate option was perilous missions by SIS’s Technical Collection Service, with human spies furnished with specially equipped suitcases, rather like the suitcase radios carried by wartime resistance workers, which were something of a liability, since close inspection would have revealed their true purpose.24 This was the unit that also specialised in gathering intelligence on the Soviet atomic programme.25

The nearest miss probably occurred in 1955, when the RAF’s 192 Squadron identified the first MiG-15 with airborne radar by flying directly at the Soviet border in an area near the Caspian Sea. However, the slow-flying RB-29 Washington only narrowly escaped being shot down, and returned peppered with holes. The Squadron Commander, Group Captain Norman Hoad, was awarded an Air Force Cross for the discovery of this new Soviet airborne radar.26 Was the risk worth it? As a result of this incident, in mid-December 1955 some members of the Joint Intelligence Committee began to challenge the remorseless collection of elint on Soviet air-defence capabilities. To some it seemed both expensive and dangerous. However, Eric Jones, the Director of GCHQ, argued that in the realm of sigint it was possible neither to dart about from one subject to another, nor to concentrate on one only. He reminded them that it was the extremely thorough, if tedious, collection of ‘order of battle’ intelligence that had allowed them to pick up specialist guided weapons activity that was of extreme interest to all three services, revealing new Soviet missile developments. While this was true, one might argue that Jones was bound to defend ‘order of battle’ activity for institutional reasons. Struggling against high-grade Soviet cyphers that could not be broken, this was the best product he could squeeze out from the other available electronic sources. Moreover, it reflected GCHQ’s secret deal with the armed services, which wanted sigint to have a strong focus on assisting military operations. The RAF shared the costs of airborne collection, and as Jones remarked, more than half of GCHQ’s work was now in support of defence activity.27

Britain’s most dangerous and dramatic Cold War sigint operations remain largely unknown. Some of the most perilous missions were not in the air along the Inner German Border, but at sea. During the early 1950s, GCHQ and the Royal Navy had developed a joint programme for the concerted monitoring of Soviet signals around Murmansk and other important naval bases within the Arctic Circle. This involved sending submarines into Soviet territorial waters, and in some cases actually inside Soviet harbours. The Red Fleet knew these activities were taking place, and often responded with depth charges, making such secret missions breathtakingly dangerous.

The most important figures on these missions were the ‘sparkers’. These were radio communications operators who had been sent to the Royal Navy’s Signals School, located at the naval station HMS Mercury near Petersfield in Hampshire, for special training in sigint listening. Here, a secret unit called the Radio Warfare Special Branch cooperated with GCHQ and planned the naval dimension of Britain’s sigint operations. Its task was not only to record Soviet voice traffic and telegraphy, but also to listen out for elint, including transmission from new Soviet radars on high frequencies such as ‘S band’ and ‘X band’. In May 1953, ten new recruits passed through the basic radio course at Mercury and then, to their abundant horror, were told that they had ‘volunteered’ for duty on submarines. The Royal Navy had only recently lost the submarines HMS Truculent and HMS Affray in tragic accidents, so submarines were not a particularly popular assignment at the time. One of the more thoughtful individuals on this basic radio course, Tony Beasley, managed to dodge immediate deployment to submarines by volunteering for a sigint course with ‘Special Branch’ that included a long period ashore learning Russian at HMS Pucklechurch.

By 1954, Beasley had managed to join the elite ranks of the Radio Warfare personnel, which had its own heavily guarded compound on the northern edge of HMS Mercury. Here he was first instructed in Soviet communication procedures in preparation for his language course. Although HMS Mercury was far from the Soviet Union, radio signals bounced off the ionosphere at night, so transmissions from as far afield as Baku and Tbilisi could be heard comfortably. Towards the end of the ten-week ‘special course’ Beasley began to study the arcane subject of Soviet radars and guidance systems, which constituted elint collection. He had found his forte in the mysterious world of electronic signatures and wavebands, and accordingly he was diverted away from the Russian course at HMS Pucklechurch to become more of an elint specialist. Soon he was serving on fishery-protection vessels, including HMS Truelove, Mariner and Pickle. Operating out of Norwegian harbours such as Tromsø, their fishery duties gave them a legitimate reason to be close to Soviet exercises in northern waters, allowing them to sit listening at their leisure, often using their own personal monitoring equipment which they put together ‘Heath Robinson style’.

Late in 1954, Beasley and three of his comrades found themselves back at HMS Mercury, where they had been called in to see the head of the Radio Warfare Special Branch, Lieutenant Commander Harry Selby-Bennett. As experienced elint and comint operators, they had been selected for ‘special duties’. They were told to write six weeks’ worth of letters that would be posted to their families at intervals, but were given no information about where they were going, or even what they might do. Arriving at Portsmouth with their kitbags, they were transferred to a motor launch, still none the wiser about their mysterious task or their destination. One of the four suggested it might be a submarine, but the other three laughed out loud at the idea, since none of them had been through the stringent obligatory three-month submarine course at nearby Gosport, which included passing through the famous hundred-foot salt-water escape tower. Moments later they pulled alongside the vessel on which they were to serve for many months.

‘Never in a million years were we expecting a submarine,’ recalls Beasley. ‘We just could not believe it…Standing together like clockwork soldiers we were ushered towards the escape hatch, just forward of the conning tower and told to drop our holdalls down the steep ladder and follow. Time was of the essence.’ Their escort, Leading Seaman ‘Snowy’ Snow, was horrified to discover that none of his new charges had been trained for submarines, and regarded them as a danger to themselves and the rest of the crew. One of Beasley’s three fellow sparkers called out: ‘What’s the name of this iron coffin?’ The answer came back, ‘HMS Turpin.’28

HMS Turpin was a Group 3 T-class submarine which entered service at the end of the Second World War. In 1945 the Allies were aware that their submarine technology was well behind that of the German U-boats, especially Hitler’s legendary late-model Type-21s. The Group 1 and Group 2 submarines that had been built earlier in the war were scrapped, but like the ill-fated USS Cochino, the Turpin and seven other Group 3 T-class submarines were sent for what was termed ‘Super-T Conversion’, essentially an interim measure before new classes of submarine came on stream. Crucially, the later Group 3 submarines were of welded rather than riveted construction, making them more streamlined than their predecessors. Their hulls were now lengthened to accommodate more electronic equipment, in some cases a sigint listening room, together with additional electric motors and new batteries. The deck gun was removed and the conning tower replaced with a more modern design that enclosed the periscopes and masts. The radar and sonar were improved. All eight boats could now achieve a speed of over eighteen knots, giving them an excellent chance of evading any Soviet hunters.29

Tony Beasley and his three ‘Telegraphist Special’ comrades were treated to a tour of the Turpin. Snowy explained that, together with all the recent conversions to bring it up to the standard of the most advanced German U-boats, extra rib supports had been fitted to the pressure hull so that it could exceed its formal safety depth in case of an emergency. As the sparkers toured the submarine, their place in the operational jigsaw gradually became clear. Of the eight submarines that had been converted to Super-T specification, the Turpin and the Totem had been stripped of some of their radar and echo-sounding equipment, and had instead been fitted out with the most up-to-date sigint collection technology. The sigint receivers were attached to the snorkel and the aft periscope, and the wires trailed everywhere. The sigint operators had their own listening room near to the boat’s operations centre.

Questions as to where they were going were met with blank looks. Only the Commander, John Coote, knew their destination, and he was keeping his mouth firmly shut. Before departure, the Turpin received its final blessing when a harbour tug came out and painted over the serial number on the conning tower and spot-welded shut the escape hatches. This was because of the danger of ramming by a Soviet destroyer, which would rupture the hatches. With the escape hatches welded shut, all the escape apparatus was useless, so it had been removed, making space for more stores for the long journey ahead. The mission was code-named ‘Operation Tartan’, and the destination was the exercise area of the Soviet Northern Fleet on the Kola Inlet and the Rybachi Peninsula, deep inside the Arctic Circle.

During early March 1955 the crew endured a long journey north. Once they were within the Arctic Circle the sigint monitors began their work. Beasley’s colleagues monitored comint while he listened for ‘X band’ and ‘S band’ radar. While doing this, to his surprise he detected an unusual short-range radar known as ‘Q band’. GCHQ had warned him before departure that anything that was transmitted on ‘Q band’ would have a range of no more than two and a half miles. The signal faded and then returned much stronger. Beasley realised they were being rammed, and despite being new to submarines, instinctively shouted out the command to crash dive. This was a perilous business with the periscope and the snorkel still raised. Water began pouring into the control room through the snorkel. The periscope was quickly lowered, and its handles, that weighed close to a ton, hit Beasley, sending him crashing across the control room and inflicting a debilitating lifelong neck injury. The Turpin levelled off at 120 feet below the surface. The extremely cold water made sonar unreliable at any depth, and Soviet ships came and went for the next few hours, searching energetically, but without finding their quarry. Glad to have evaded the submarine hunters, Commander Coote waited for them to depart and then set a course for home.30

Back in London, the Admiralty Signals Division was doing what it could to protect the secrecy of its submarine missions. One of the activities it undertook was a communications security survey of the radio transmission from HMS Totem, Turpin’s sister ship, while she was on an identical mission off the Soviet coast code-named ‘Operation Defiant’. The results were not good. The Signals Division warned the Director of Naval Intelligence that the KGB’s listeners, the Soviet equivalent of GCHQ, might well pick up ‘unusual very secret traffic on a home station submarine broadcast’ continuing over a number of weeks, and might also notice that Totem was absent from the normal exercise areas. In future, it suggested that a suitable cover plan with ‘dummy communications’ be thought up. This dummy traffic would have to run on a long-term basis if special submarine operations were to continue to be carried out at short notice without the Soviets identifying what was going on.31

Tony Beasley’s next mission to the Arctic Circle, ‘Operation Sanjak’, was yet more eventful. In July 1955 HMS Turpin had been loitering off the Soviet coast for over two weeks, but was experiencing problems with its elint equipment. Reception was good while the submarine was stationary, but not when it was in motion. They moved to the western edge of their patrol area so they could surface and see what was wrong. After a perilous climb up the submarine fin in a rolling sea, the problem, which proved to be a cross-threaded aerial, was resolved and Turpin submerged once more to complete the last few days of her patrol. The elint profiles of several radars from their intercept target list had already been collected, and with only two days to go they picked up an unusual contact. Commander Coote decided to chase this contact to the edge of their permitted area, moving closer to the coast than was allowed under their strict operating rules. Suddenly, Beasley intercepted an ‘X band’ radar very close to them, and picked up a contact dead ahead. The Turpin crash dived immediately.

All four sigint operators now reported multiple contacts. They were under attack. The warning was superfluous, since the propellers of several ships were quite audible as they passed directly over the submarine. Then came the horrible sounds of splashes. These were depth charges. Beasley recalls:

The first depth charge exploded way under our depth of 120 feet, followed by others, from different directions. A rather loud ‘clunk’ on our forward casing was followed by an enormous explosion which shook the boat, followed by others at a greater depth. Another depth charge exploded close above us rocking the boat much as before…Depth charging continued for longer than I care to remember.

Commander Coote took the submarine deeper and deeper, levelling off at their safety limit of 280 feet. Here they felt relatively secure, and decided not to move, relying on the cold water to render the Soviet sonar ineffective. However, they were painfully conscious that they were drifting in a strong current towards an area marked on their chart as being a probable Soviet minefield.

As they drifted away from the action the depth charges fell further and further away from their position. In the control room everyone sat in silence, wondering what was next. Further shocks were not long in coming. They heard strange rasping sounds running down the side of the hull, followed by a ‘twang’ as if a wire had been caught and had then come free. Some thought the noises were caused by pieces of ice, but they then realised they had entered the minefield, and that it was the hawsers that attached the mines to the sea bed to keep them from floating away that were scraping the Turpin’s sides. It was high time to cease drifting, set a course and pull away.

After a long run south they surfaced off the coast of Norway, and the crew inspected the damage. The periscopes and snorkel were grotesquely bent and completely unusable. Indeed, Turpin had been stripped of a large part of its extremities by the multiple blasts of the depth charges. Guardrails, aerials, the sensors and much of the tail fin had also been blown away. Most dramatically, the starboard outer casing had been torn apart, leaving a thirty-foot gash which in one place was three feet deep. However, the diesel engines were undamaged, and they headed for home, albeit with rather uncertain steering. Having lost their aerials, they could not communicate. Eventually they found a trawler out from Kingston-upon-Hull which relayed a message, allowing a rendezvous with a submarine depot ship, HMS Maidstone, which provided much-needed supplies of food and fresh water.

Returning to HMS Mercury, they were given a week’s leave. The four sparkers were then debriefed in person by Lieutenant Commander Harry Selby-Bennett, the Controller of naval sigint operations. After being briefly congratulated on a successful mission, they were told to their surprise that for reasons of ‘continuity’ of monitoring the Soviet transmissions they were about to board HMS Totem for a mission that would last another eight weeks. Understandably perhaps, Tony Beasley had now had his fill of submarines, which he had never volunteered for. Eventually he transferred to the Provost Branch, the Royal Navy’s police service, to complete his naval service of sixteen years.32

Until 1956, Cabinet Ministers remained blissfully unaware of Britain’s intelligence ‘incidents’, including the two perilous missions of HMS Turpin in 1955. As a result the British remained more relaxed about forward operations than their American counterparts. By contrast the American intelligence community strained on a tight leash held by the State Department, and indeed President Eisenhower himself. However, all that was about to change. In April 1956 a single strange episode in Portsmouth harbour ensured that the situation was quickly reversed. Thereafter, growing hesitancy in Whitehall shifted the momentum in the world of sigint special operations away from Britain towards the United States. The turning point was the infamous ‘Buster’ Crabb incident. This offered Cabinet Ministers a first-hand glimpse of the sheer scale of political embarrassment that could be generated by bungled surveillance operations.

In April 1956 the Soviet cruiser Ordjoninkidze carried the Soviet Premier, Nikolai Bulganin, and Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the Soviet Communist Party, on a goodwill visit to Britain. Despite some robust exchanges between the Soviets and Anthony Eden, Churchill’s successor as Prime Minister, the visit went well, and the Soviet delegation departed on 27 April 1956. However, even as it left the press had begun to speculate about the mysterious disappearance of a British naval diver, Commander Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb RNVR, in the vicinity of the visiting Soviet cruiser. Fourteen months later, in June 1957, a headless and handless body in a diving suit was recovered from the sea near Pilsey Island in the English Channel. Over the years, lurid tales of possible KGB abduction or beheading have circulated. However, newly released intelligence files show that Crabb was almost certainly killed by being drawn through the ship’s propellers. Churning the propellers at intervals was a standard defence against inquisitive divers whose presence was regularly suspected during such visits.

Buster Crabb had been the lead man on ‘Operation Claret’, an attempt by SIS to gain intelligence from the underwater inspection of the cruiser. He was one of the Royal Navy’s most experienced divers, and despite being demobbed in 1948 he was often recalled to help with difficult dives, including rescue work on submarines lost in accidents. Even at this early stage of the Cold War, such secret operations required political approval. But in this instance the system had broken down. The SIS officer who was tasked with securing the clearance for Operation Claret had suffered a family bereavement and had left the office before it had been obtained. His colleagues presumed that the green light had been given, but in fact it had not. The first rule of intelligence management – having political clearance – had been broken, and the cost for the whole British intelligence community was high.33

What mattered to Eden was the public furore and the humiliation he suffered in the House of Commons. Not only had SIS bungled an unapproved mission, it also failed to cover its tracks. Despite the clumsy efforts of the local Special Branch to hide the evidence, including ripping out pages from the register of the hotel where Crabb had stayed, the press was soon on the trail. Journalists quickly established that this was an SIS mission, and that no ministerial authority had been given. Hugh Gaitskell, the leader of the opposition, enjoyed taunting his opponent on the issue. Eden was furious and decided to take disciplinary action, telling the Ministers concerned to order their staff to cooperate fully with the ensuing investigation. This process cast a long shadow over all the intelligence agencies, and ushered in an era of closer political control over special operations of every kind.34

The head of the inquiry, Sir Edward Bridges, a somewhat nineteenth-century figure, employed the JIC to help him ferret out all aspects of the Crabb incident. As a former Cabinet Secretary, Bridges identified ‘certain questions’ of a broader nature. While intrusive intelligence operations clearly had a capacity to cause international repercussions, the systems for their authorisation were unclear.35 Bridges recommended a broader inquiry reviewing all of Britain’s strategic intelligence and surveillance activities, and assessing ‘the balance between military intelligence on the one hand, and civil intelligence and political risks on the other’. Eden gave this job to Sir Norman Brook, the current Cabinet Secretary, working with Patrick Dean, Chairman of the JIC.36 This review had immediate consequences for intelligence. In April 1956, coinciding with Khrushchev’s visit to Britain, some of the first examples of the CIA’s high-flying U-2 spy planes had arrived at RAF Lakenheath. These aircraft were mostly known for their work with high-altitude photography, but some of their missions were also sigint-orientated. Eden now decided that this, and a host of other special operations, had to stop, and the U-2s were sent to alternative bases in Germany.37

Eden’s angry response had some unintended benefits. In 1952 Sir Stewart Menzies, Chief of SIS, had retired and was replaced by General Sir John Sinclair. The mediocre Sinclair had previously been Director of Military Intelligence, and while he was more competent than his predecessor, he was not a moderniser. He was now fired as a result of the Crabb incident; after the multiple inquiries he was pleased to go, and confessed to a friend in the sigint community that things were ‘getting too hot for me’. In the summer of 1956 Eden plumped for Sir Dick White, hitherto the Director General of MI5, as the new Chief of SIS.