GCHQ

THE 1950s FIGHTING THE ELECTRONIC WAR

6 ‘Elint’ and the Soviet Nuclear Target

Our intelligence about Soviet development of atomic weapons is very scanty.

Joint Intelligence Committee, 29 October 19471

In late August 1949, Lavrentii Beria, chief of the KGB, arrived at a small settlement on the steppes of Kazakhstan, not far from the city of Semipalatinsk. Here, Soviet scientists were hard at work in a set of temporary laboratories, intently focused on what they obliquely called ‘The Article’. They were referring to the Soviet Union’s first atomic bomb, now situated precariously on top of a scaffolding tower fifty miles away. Houses, locomotives, buses and even tanks, together with some unfortunate farm animals, had been placed close to the weapon to gauge the effects of an explosion. The Soviet Union’s chief nuclear scientist, Igor Kurchatov, gave the command to detonate, and a small but incredibly bright light appeared at the top of the tower. Suddenly it became a white fireball. A blast wave swept out, clearing everything in its path, as the explosion itself rapidly turned into a chaotic mix of orange, red and black. A dark mushroom cloud, five miles high, formed over the test site. Back in the laboratories, the scientists were jubilant and kissed each other on the foreheads. A month later, nineteen key figures from the nuclear programme, including a German scientist, were made Heroes of Socialist Labour. Beria is reported to have used the same list of names that identified those who would have been shot immediately had the test failed.2

In the event, it was Western intelligence that had failed. Soviet progress towards a nuclear weapon had been a top intelligence target. The predictions of Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee, the highest authority for analysis, had actually become steadily less accurate. By 1949, when the test took place, Britain’s top intelligence analysts were arguing that the probable date of the first Soviet test would be mid-1953. They were adrift by no less than four years. The CIA was no more accurate, and had similarly told President Truman that mid-1953 was the most likely date. Shocked by the surprise atomic test, Britain and America now redoubled their intelligence effort in the field of Soviet strategic weapons.3 Throughout the Cold War, the key target for GCHQ would remain Soviet nuclear weaponry. This included not only the atomic bomb programme, but work on ballistic missiles, bombers and other means of delivery. The Chiefs of Staff were worried by Britain’s relative vulnerability to nuclear attack, and wanted intelligence forecasts on this crucial issue. In their list of ‘sigint targets’ for 1948, the JIC exhorted Britain’s code-breakers to focus their efforts on this area, together with parallel strategic threats such as chemical and biological weapons.4 Other Soviet activities, including KGB espionage and diplomatic initiatives, only constituted GCHQ’s second and third priorities.

But ever since the massive revision of Soviet cypher procedure on ‘Black Friday’ in 1948, GCHQ had been having a hard time with its main target. The one-time pads employed for the highest-grade Soviet messages were now being correctly used, and so could not be broken, and machine cypher procedure on systems like Taper, effectively a Soviet military version of Enigma, had also been tightened up. Moreover, Moscow and its satellites enjoyed common borders and so often used landlines instead of wireless transmissions, which could not be easily intercepted. All this eventually prompted the British to follow the Soviets down the path of more extensive physical bugging of diplomatic premises in the mid-1950s.5

GCHQ was nevertheless providing Whitehall with large quantities of useful material on lower-priority issues. It continued its long tradition of attacking the communications of smaller states like France, Turkey and Egypt. The JIC had also asked it to look at subjects such as Arab nationalism and the relations of Arab states with Britain and the USA, and the attitude of France, Italy and the Arab states to the future of North Africa, especially Libya. Because of the ongoing insurgency in Palestine, GCHQ was also urged to focus on the Zionist movement, including its various intelligence services. All of these proved more accessible than Soviet traffic.6 The diplomatic traffic of smaller states also provided an excellent window on the Soviets. Conversations between Soviet diplomats and the officials of these countries were often captured in telegrams sent from Moscow that could be read with ease. In 1946 Alan Stripp, a British code-breaker who had spent the war working on Japanese codes, found himself redeployed to the Iranian border. Throughout the Azerbaijan crisis of that year, when the Soviet Union appeared to be behind a potential breakaway state in northern Iran, he worked on Iranian and Afghan communications.7 This sigint revealed the scale of Soviet activities and ambitions in the region, helping to trigger robust counter-pressure by President Truman.8

How the main target lists for sigint were drawn up was of central importance. In theory, they were created by the JIC. However, much of the preliminary work was undertaken by more shadowy committees working under the London Signals Intelligence Board, Britain’s supreme sigint authority. These enjoyed strong military input. When diplomats complained that political and colonial subjects were not getting enough attention, they did not get an enthusiastic response. Many felt that undue weight was being given to defence priorities, and to nuclear warfare in particular. The overwhelming emphasis given to defence had profound implications for the shape of British sigint. It accelerated the development of a revolutionary new kind of sigint that focused on equipment and military formations.9

During the Second World War, Bletchley Park’s primary emphasis had been the interception of communications signals for intelligence purposes. However, as the war progressed, there was growing interest in another kind of sigint that was derived from intercepting electronic signals, such as radar, which had been developed during the Second World War. A related field of interest was the growing use of radio waves to create missile guidance systems. Examining these enemy radio signals was known as electronic intelligence, or ‘elint’. Elint revealed a great deal about enemy weapons, and was also essential for conducting ‘radio warfare’, which involved jamming enemy signals and radar. The first example of this had been the successful efforts of Professor R.V. Jones to divert the beams used to guide the German bombers attacking London. These techniques were refined during the war against Japan. An elaborate elint unit was set up within Mountbatten’s South-East Asia Command under the improbable cover name of the ‘Noise Investigation Bureau’. In the summer of 1945, elint-equipped aircraft called ‘ferrets’ patrolled the night skies over Rangoon listening to Japanese radar.10 Elint and radio countermeasures, conducted jointly by GCHQ and special units of the RAF, were a massive growth area after 1945, partly because they were so closely linked to strategic weapons. One great advantage of elint was that it rarely required the reading of complex enemy codes.11 Increasingly, the business of signals intelligence would consist of two branches, the familiar one of communications intelligence or ‘comint’ and the new one of elint.

Britain had excelled in the use of both comint and elint during the Battle of Britain, and later in bombing raids over Germany. One of the architects of this system was Arthur ‘Bill’ Bonsall, who would become Director of GCHQ in 1973.12 This success had made a deep impression on American intelligence officers in Europe, who felt admiration and not a little envy13 In early February 1945, the US Army Air Force held a conference of all senior air intelligence officers (A-2s) across Europe, at which ‘every A-2 expressed his disappointment at our utter dependence on the R.A.F’ in sigint matters. The US Ninth Air Force had deployed some very effective converted Flying Fortresses as airborne listening stations, but the British had controlled the flow of strategic sigint. The lesson was clear. Colonel Robert D. Hughes, Director of Intelligence for the Ninth Air Force, told Washington that he wanted his own air sigint units with control over sigint policy and sigint research: ‘We feel that you should demand, and organize under your control, for peace as well as war, an organization similar to that of the R.A.F…Unlike other highly technical forms of intelligence, in which our American Air Forces have shared, we have continued to depend entirely on the R.A.F. for this level of work in “Y”.’14

Elint formed one of the closest parts of the Anglo-American sigint relationship during the immediate post-war period because it focused on the Soviet military target. Exchange on elint was not initially linked to the Allied sigint agreements reached at the end of the war, but in 1948 it was being brought within the growing body of Western intelligence pacts that formed UKUSA. GCHQ approached Washington with a proposal to ‘extend the present British-US Comint collaboration to include countermeasures, intercept activities and intelligence’ in the field of elint. This meant coordinated patterns of ‘ferret’ flights – effectively a division of labour – with the resulting intelligence being swapped ‘via Comint channels’.15 By the 1950s, GCHQ had achieved control over elint in Britain, and so was managing relations with all the various American outfits in this field. This had meant redrawing GCHQ’s charter to include not only comint but also elint, something which had not pleased everyone. R.V. Jones, who was Director of Scientific Intelligence at the Ministry of Defence in the early 1950s, strongly resented losing this part of his empire; the benefits of having all activities superintended by GCHQ were nevertheless overwhelming.16

Anglo-American sharing was important, because elint was an expensive business. Many of the target Soviet signals were short-range and could only be collected from ‘ferrets’, which were effectively flying intelligence stations. Initially, the RAF was ahead in this new field. By 1947 a fleet of specially equipped Lancaster and Lincoln aircraft patrolled the East German border, monitoring Soviet air activity. This was complemented by ground stations at locations such as RAF Gatow in Berlin listening to basic low-level Soviet voice traffic. British ‘ferrets’ made adventurous forays over the Baltic in June 1948 and the Black Sea in September 1948. Remarkably, they were soon crossing Iran to reach the Caspian Sea, thus flying perilous missions close to the very heart of the Soviet Union.17 On the ground, a British undercover team was also operating in northern Iran, monitoring Soviet radar in the Caucasus as well as Soviet missile tests at Kasputin Yar on the edge of the Caspian. The team conducting this work were posing as archaeologists, a favourite British cover for all sorts of intelligence work. Once a week they drove from the Iranian border with the Soviet Union to the British Embassy in Tehran to deliver their precious tapes.18

Early Western elint efforts in the air were spurred on by the knowledge that the Soviets had launched their own secret ‘ferret’ programme. In April 1948 an American radar station in Germany reported that it was being probed by ‘ferret’ aircraft, and in November a Soviet plane circled a US radar station at Hokkaido in Japan collecting signals for an hour, and then escaped without interception due to bad weather. Defectors also brought tantalising snippets. In May 1948 Baclav Cukr, General Secretary of the Czech Air Force Association, escaped to the West bringing knowledge of a group of Dakota-like planes at Zote airfield outside Prague. These mysterious aircraft were kept under constant guard in special hangars, and had ‘several special antennae on the outside’, a sure sign that they were elint collectors.19

During the war the vested interests of many different RAF commands had made it difficult to create a single coherent elint organisation.20 Post-war rationalisation allowed the fusion of these elements. RAF Watton in Norfolk was selected as the new home of elint, and collected the remnants of many wartime units into 100 Countermeasures Group.21 The result was a weird menagerie of aircraft which were one-off flying laboratories adapted for various special tasks. The mainstays were twenty ageing Handley Page Halifax bombers. There were also B-17 Flying Fortresses, Lancasters, Mosquitoes and Avro Ansons, together with an Airspeed Oxford and a Percival Proctor. The unit at Watton soon received some new Avro Lincolns, effectively updated Lancasters. All were stuffed with unique items of electronic listening equipment and primitive wire recorders for collecting voice traffic.

Christened the Central Signals Establishment, or ‘CSE’, Watton boasted a Signals Research Squadron, a dedicated sigint unit known as Monitoring Squadron and a Radio Countermeasures Squadron. The Avro Lincolns were the best aircraft available, and they were given over to radio countermeasures and radar jamming, since they would have to work closely with RAF bomber formations in any future war with the Soviet Union. The Lincolns would soon be fitted with the revolutionary new carcinotron, or ‘backward wave oscillator’, in effect an electronic gun that produced powerful microwaves of the same frequencies used by radar, giving them enormous onboard jamming power. By contrast, some of the other airframes used for listening were antique. However, it was a venerable Halifax from Monitoring Squadron that was despatched on sigint collection duty over the Soviet Zone of Germany during the early stages of the Berlin Blockade in 1948. This was the first sign of a possible ‘hot war’ between East and West, and GCHQ decided it was time to share the lessons of sigint more widely. For the first time lectures on radio countermeasures and tactical sigint were given to officers passing through the RAF Staff College at Bracknell. A handbook on tactical sigint was prepared for all staff officers, albeit no mention was made of the mysterious ‘Ultra’.22

In 1951 the 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 PBY-42 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 June 1950 triggered a massive expansion of the riskier and more dangerous short-range operations to collect all types of sigint, including elint. Tensions were high, because the strategic planners believed that the outbreak of global war was not far away. Hitherto the Americans had been dependent on the British to cover much of north-west Europe, but now Americans began to arrive in numbers and their listening stations sprouted all over Britain, often disguised as RAF stations. In 1952 the 47th Radio Squadron of the US Air Force Security Service arrived at Kirknewton airbase in Scotland, from where it could monitor shipping off the Kola Peninsula. In October that year Squadron Leader J.R. Mitchell became the first dedicated ‘Liaison Officer for GCHQ’ on elint in Washington.36

The accelerated pace of operations paid dividends. By 1952 elint experts in London and Washington had achieved a comprehensive picture of the Soviet Air Force. This had not required the breaking of Soviet codes. Instead, most of it was achieved through a mixture of elint or direction-finding, which simply meant using triangulation to locate specific Soviet units. GCHQ also listened in on clear voice traffic used by Soviet air-defence controllers giving instructions to fighters. There were large gaps in both Soviet air warning and coastal radar, which were mapped carefully. Anti-aircraft radar around Moscow was examined with special attention. Elint experts had been able to follow air-defence exercises in which the Soviets had used tiny strips of aluminium foil dropped from aircraft, known as ‘chaff’, as a radio countermeasure to fool radar operators into thinking large numbers of aircraft were airborne. Some of the more sophisticated Soviet work was thought to have been carried out by German experts captured by the Russians after 1945. Korea itself had proved to be a bonanza, with new Soviet radio equipment being captured, including direction-finding equipment which showed ‘marked improvement in design and construction’.37