GCHQ

Success in the exciting new field of elint offset some recent disappointments. GCHQ and its American partners had not yet recovered the medium-grade Soviet cyphers lost during the infamous ‘Black Friday’ of October 1948. They had not detected the advent of the first Soviet atom bomb, nor had they anticipated the outbreak of the Korean War. However, the elint effort against the Soviet Air Force, which also involved direction-finding and traffic analysis, was one of the key areas in which GCHQ could claim outstanding achievement in the first postwar decade – and it was sustained.

There was an especially secret reason why GCHQ and NSA examined the operational anatomy of the Soviet ‘nuclear bear’ so minutely. During the early 1950s, target intelligence officers in London and Washington had been busy exchanging sensitive data on ‘the mission of blunting the Russian atomic offensive’. This meant planning early counter-force attacks against Soviet nuclear forces, especially bombers, in the hope of destroying them on the ground in Eastern Europe before they could be used in a future war. GCHQ had given particular attention to this matter because of the vulnerability of Britain, and the Americans were impressed by the progress London had made on it. GCHQ and the RAF’s secret units had amassed ‘a significant amount of evaluated intelligence, particularly in the special intelligence field, which would be of the greatest value’ if war broke out.38

American officers considered that ‘vigorous efforts should be taken immediately to ensure rapid development of a joint research program to insure maximum exploitation of the British resources’. In short, it was not just the raw elint that the British had collected, but their sophisticated analysis of it that allowed it to be turned into high-quality finished intelligence, a legacy of the skills garnered during Bletchley Park’s Hut Three operation. Most of the airfields and the operational procedures for the Soviet Union’s nuclear air force in the European theatre had been mapped by 1952.39 In June of that year a team from the US Air Force Security Service centre at Brooks Field, led by Major Hill, visited GCHQ and one of its outstations at Knockholt in Kent to further converge their activities in this area. Hill also wanted to discuss the creation of new ‘ground-based electronic intercept stations’ in Europe. Korea had greatly accelerated preparations for a ‘hot war’, and GCHQ’s elint success on Soviet air defences helped it to justify budget increases.40

Throughout 1951 and 1952, global war often seemed imminent. Communist China had entered the Korean War in 1951, and numerous Soviet advisers were busy assisting the North Korean forces. Soviet and American pilots were actually fighting each other in the skies of East Asia. Although the public were never told, sigint made this fact clear to the secret listeners. In this increasingly fevered atmosphere, improved intelligence was given a high priority. On 22 January 1952 the British Chiefs of Staff met the Permanent Under-Secretary of the Foreign Office to review plans for accelerating intelligence. GCHQ was given a large tranche of new money over five years under the heading ‘Methods to Improve’. Its extensive shopping list included larger computers and ‘high speed analytical equipment’ for renewed attacks on high-grade Soviet communications. These were given the highest priority, and government research and supply elements were instructed accordingly. GCHQ and the Admiralty were beginning a new programme to build better receivers for ground-based and seaborne ‘Technical Search Operations’ which were critical to elint. Again, much of this was about targeting, and the Chiefs of Staff continually reiterated the ‘very great importance’ of speeding up technical development in these areas.41 By November 1952, British defence chiefs wanted increased expenditure on intelligence, and were unanimous that in the short term the emphasis should be on sigint.42

Late 1952 was an exciting time for GCHQ. Equipped with a larger budget, staff had begun to move to their new headquarters at the twin sites in Cheltenham. It also had a new Director, Wing Commander Eric Jones. Given the rise of airborne sigint, it was appropriate that an RAF officer should have succeeded Edward Travis, who had been increasingly ill during the late 1940s with lumbago.43 Jones was a Bletchley Park veteran who had proved himself while in charge of the critically important Hut Three. Bill Millward, another long-serving GCHQ veteran, recalls that at first glance ‘his qualifications for the post were not apparent’. He had spent the 1930s as a cloth merchant in Macclesfield. However, he was a quick learner, a natural diplomat and a man of obvious principle.44 He had proved an excellent liaison officer in Washington towards the end of the war, and after the ‘happy outcome’ of the BRUSA conference of 1946 he had decided to ‘stay in the racket’.45 This was good for GCHQ, since Jones proved to be a leader who inspired instinctive trust. In late 1952 he was busy filling the three hundred extra staff posts recently authorised. GCHQ had already proposed an additional increment of a further 366 staff, and was going from strength to strength.46

In the late summer and the autumn of 1952, senior GCHQ officers like John Somerville had been pressing defence scientists and intelligence chiefs to join them in planning the future expansion of airborne sigint.47 Good results were being obtained, and GCHQ was making the most of the facilities at its disposal, but there were just not enough ‘ferret’ flights, and the elint-collection effort needed ‘more equipment, personnel, aircraft and ships’.48 The RAF was using its three RB-29 Washingtons, which were big enough for the increasingly complex equipment required.49 It was a Washington that had captured the first recordings of ‘Scan Odd’, the new airborne radar which equipped Soviet fighters. However, the RAF’s Washingtons were slow and vulnerable compared to the upgraded American variant, which could reach 400 mph, as fast as a wartime fighter.50 British elint specialists longed to enter the jet age with the military version of the de Havilland Comet, but there seemed to be no hope of getting this desirable aircraft. Part of the problem was that 192 Squadron was not seen as a front-line fighting unit, tended to be overlooked and was continually moved between commands over the next two decades.51 There was also an acute shortage of staff at GCHQ qualified in the rarefied field of elint analysis, which was made worse by the upheaval of the move to Cheltenham.52

The required extra momentum came from the Americans. Washington pressed the British for more spending and more effort at a major US/UK elint conference in December 1952.53 Accordingly, in 1953, Britain’s elint specialists acquired more small specialist Canberra jet aircraft, and a year later, after much discussion, the Treasury reluctantly approved the purchase of three much-prized de Havilland Comet C2s, a modified version of Britain’s first jet airliner. Until now, all of the sigint aircraft had been rough-and-ready adaptations. The Comet C2 was Britain’s first dedicated airborne sigint platform designed from scratch. In the spring of 1957 the first C2 arrived at CSE Watton and was placed in the hands of SRIF, the RAF’s secret team of sigint engineers, who were based in No.3 Hangar. Their task was to cram a whole mini-sigint ground station into the cramped interior of an airliner. For George Baillie, the Principal Scientific Officer at Watton, this was the most complex task his team would ever undertake. Equipping the three Comets was extremely expensive and time-consuming. It was therefore with complete horror that they discovered a fire in No.4 Hangar in the early hours of the morning of 3 June 1959. One plane was completely destroyed, leaving CSE with only two Comets to fulfil the many missions requested by GCHQ. The Treasury boggled at the cost of the unscheduled replacement of the third aircraft, and it was two years before GCHQ’s Deputy Director Joe Hooper persuaded it to find the money.54

In America, the new NSA was now responsible for communications intelligence or ‘comint’, the most important area of signals collection and code-breaking. However, battles over elint stretched on into the 1960s. Even ten years after the creation of NSA, American officials envied the more centralised British model, which placed GCHQ in charge of both fields of sigint activity.55 In 1953 the British approached the Americans to suggest a combined organisation for planning electronic warfare and radio countermeasures. The problem for the Americans was that they would first have to settle their bitter inter-service disputes, which was proving near impossible.56 Notwithstanding this, the two nations managed to get together for a major US/UK Electronic Warfare Conference every two years.57 The GCHQ approach made sense, because it was becoming harder to distinguish between signals that carried communications and other types of electronic signals. The Americans noted wistfully that this ‘has been recognised by the British, who have placed all electronic search and reconnaissance under the control of COMINT authorities’ – in other words, under GCHQ. In the US, control over these matters remained fiercely contested as late as the Vietnam War.58

By 1953, elint was considered so valuable that more aggressive British operations were being authorised. These included clandestine operations on the ground. GCHQ had manufactured a new short-range elint reception and analysis kit, code-named ‘Deaf Aid’, that looked like a suitcase. SIS was sending agents into the Eastern Bloc with these sets – the results are still classified. The Joint Intelligence Committee decided that the equipment would also be secretly deployed in diplomatic posts inside the Eastern Bloc alongside the covert comint stations operated by the Diplomatic Wireless Service.59 By February 1954 experimental versions were also being deployed on the ground by the British Military Mission, or ‘Brixmis’, effectively a team of roving military attachés in East Germany.60 GCHQ was settled into its new accommodation by January 1954, allowing it to work with the Ministry of Defence’s Directorate of Scientific Intelligence on the much-needed expansion of T Division, the analytical unit at Cheltenham which made sense of elint once it was collected.61

All these new intelligence activities meant risk. In October 1952 A.V. Alexander, the Defence Secretary, and Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, had been chewing over the delicate question of who should approve the expanding programme of ‘ferret’ flights and perilous submarine missions around the edge of the Soviet Union. They agreed that the buck should be passed upwards to Downing Street, and a process developed whereby a list of proposed secret sigint missions was regularly sent to Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Rather disingenuously, Alexander told Churchill that Britain had in the past, in cooperation with the Americans, ‘carried out one or two flights with special aircraft near Soviet territory with the intention of “sniffing” at Russian transmissions’. In reality, a veritable fleet of elint aircraft had been buzzing around the perimeter of the Soviet Union for more than five years. Churchill was assured that they kept at least thirty miles from the Soviet coastline. Alexander continued:

The aircraft are almost certain to be picked up by Russian radar. In fact we shall be disappointed if they are not, for that is the whole object of the operations. But since the flights will take place at the darkest period of the month, and the Russians do not (as far as we know) possess airborne radar, the risks of actual interception are small.

In other words, if the intelligence operations against Soviet air defences were to succeed, they had to actually create alerts and prompt the Soviets to launch their fighters, as it was precisely these procedures that GCHQ wanted to listen in to. Alexander added that a key purpose in undertaking these operations was ‘making our own contribution to the Anglo–American intelligence pool from which we will expect valuable returns in kind’.62 What would happen if a secret British spy plane crashed inside the Soviet Union, or if a submarine was caught inside a Soviet harbour? So far the GCHQ’s clandestine collection programmes had been remarkably free of incidents, but this enviable record was not to last for much longer.63

7 The Voyages of HMS Turpin

Depth charging continued for longer than I care to remember…

Tony Beasley, HMS Turpin, off the Soviet coast,

March 19551

By early 1953 the Americans had lost a submarine and an aircraft during perilous short-range sigint missions. Their human losses were already in double figures. By contrast, the British were increasingly confident, having flown many missions without incident. The lumbering RB-29 Washington aircraft of the RAF’s 192 Squadron regularly flew their routes around the Baltic, and were often ‘intercepted’ by Soviet fighters, but were never fired upon. This may have been because the British used a small number of experienced and specialised units for forward sigint collection who were dedicated to covert missions, working under the direction of GCHQ. Equally it could have been sheer good luck. However, in 1953 that luck was to change.

The first serious British ‘flap’ was the loss of an RAF Avro Lincoln on 12 March 1953. The Lincoln was effectively an improved version of the Lancaster bomber that had entered service just as the Second World War ended. It saw active service against insurgents in Malaya and Kenya during the 1950s, and although it remained Britain’s heavy bomber until the arrival of the first V-bombers in 1955, a number were transferred to intelligence duties. Some were allocated to 199 Squadron, the radio warfare unit that operated out of RAF Watton. Armed with a powerful carcinotron, they were capable of a formidable barrage of jamming, and were often called on to disrupt the sigint-gathering activities of Soviet spy trawlers around the coast of Britain.2 The RAF also boasted a Radar Reconnaissance Flight of Lincolns that took ‘radar pictures’ of important landmarks denoting routes to key bombing targets. Some of the more precarious Anglo–American overflights of the Soviet Union during 1952 and 1954 were effectively engaged in an intelligence-mapping exercise for bombing missions that might be directed against Moscow and Kiev.3

The RAF Lincoln lost on 12 March 1953 was not directly involved in radio warfare or special duties. It was merely on exercise, and wandered out of one of the defined twenty-mile air corridors over the Soviet Zone between West Germany and Berlin. However, as we have seen, British and American exercises were often designed to trigger an alert so that Soviet air-defence systems could be listened in on. The frequent efforts to get their defences to ‘light up’ ensured that the Soviets were often on high alert, and were inclined to fire at anything that came into their territory. Accordingly, all RAF flying near the Soviet Zone of Germany involved an element of risk. This was underlined by a Polish pilot who chose to defect to the West on 5 March 1953, and landed his Soviet-built MiG-15 jet fighter in Denmark. He confirmed that MiG pilots were ‘under orders to shoot down an aircraft if it refuses to obey signals to land, even if it does not open fire’.4

On the morning of 12 March 1953, two Lincolns took off from the Central Gunnery School at Leconfield in Yorkshire. This was a routine training flight that involved an exercise with NATO partners and took place every fortnight, heading out over Germany on a simulated mission of about six hours. The first aircraft, ‘H’ (RF503), was under the command of Flight Sergeant Denham, and carried the Director of the Gunnery School, Squadron Leader Frank Doran. En route to Germany, as part of the exercise, Denham’s aircraft was ‘intercepted’ by Thunderjets of the Dutch Air Force, Belgian Meteors and RAF Vampires. Unusually, as they approached Kassel, still well inside the British Zone, they were surprised to see two Soviet MiG-15s underneath them. The MiGs conducted a number of mock attacks, but did not open fire. Their activity was recorded on the cine cameras that were attached to the gun turrets of the Lincoln for training purposes. The anxious crew turned north and then headed back to their base in Yorkshire.

The second Lincoln, ‘C’ (RF531), under the command of Flight Sergeant Peter Dunnell, was following along the same track, two hours behind. It also carried an important passenger, Squadron Leader Harold Fitz, who had just taken over as Commanding Officer of 3 Squadron and who had come along for the ride as co-pilot. Just after 1 p.m., near the air corridor that stretched across the Soviet Zone from Hamburg to Berlin, two more MiG-15s appeared. This time they opened fire. Although the Lincoln had strayed some way into the Soviet Zone, by the time it was fired on the crew had realised their error and retraced their steps. They were now just west of the River Elbe, inside the British Zone. The firing took place over the village of Bleckede, where ammunition belts from the MiGs were later recovered. The Lincoln entered a steep dive, still pursued by the MiGs, and broke up, with the main fuselage landing in a wood near Boizenburg, just inside the Soviet Zone on the eastern bank of the Elbe. Other parts of the aircraft, including the starboard wing, came down on Luneburg Heath, a British military exercise area fifteen miles south of Hamburg.5

Of the seven crew, four were found dead inside the wreckage. Three of the crew had managed to bail out, but one parachute failed to open. The other two crew members seemed to parachute successfully, but several shocked German witnesses testified that one of the Soviet MiGs swooped low and strafed them with cannon fire. Wilma Muller, one of the witnesses, testified that one of the crew had a ‘perforated parachute’ as a result of being fired upon. Both crew members whose parachutes had opened died of terrible wounds shortly after landing.6

The RAF concluded that the Lincoln had gone off course and strayed into Soviet airspace shortly after it entered the air corridor to Berlin. However, it was obvious that its intention was to head up one of the three twenty-mile-wide air corridors that connected the three sectors of Germany occupied by the West to Berlin. While the Soviets insisted that the British crew had fired first, it was soon proved beyond doubt that the Lincoln had been unarmed, since much of the firing mechanism from its turret guns was routinely removed on training sorties. However, the Foreign Office resisted the idea of pressing hard for compensation because inspection of the wreckage showed that the Lincoln was actually carrying some ammunition, even though it was unlikely that it had fired. ‘We might have to admit that the aircraft accidentally penetrated the Soviet Zone of Germany,’ it noted. Nevertheless, it was confident that, from where the cases from the Soviet cannon shells fell, the MiGs had downed the Lincoln over the British Zone.7

British Members of Parliament were outraged. They pressed for compensation from the Soviets for the crew’s families, and were told by the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Selwyn Lloyd, that the British High Commissioner in Germany had been ordered to ‘demand’ adequate payment. Churchill was clearly animated about the matter, but behind the scenes officials were soft-pedalling.8 High-level instructions were given to British representatives to ‘avoid post-mortems’, and instead to focus on talks that would avoid a repetition of the incident.9 Three months after the event, Foreign Office officials urged, ‘We should be in no hurry to do anything,’ and were anxious to prevent the public from learning that the Soviets had refused compensation from the outset.10 The bodies of the seven crew members who had fallen in the Soviet Zone were returned to RAF Celle, and eventually to their families.11

While the Lincoln had not been on an intelligence flight, its progress was being carefully tracked by a British sigint unit on the ground at RAF Scharfoldendorf in the British Zone of Germany. The unit carefully transcribed the conversation between the MiG pilots and the Soviet ground controllers, which were ‘in clear’ voice communications. This sigint report was soon on the desk of the Prime Minister, and the unit received praise for catching the Soviets ‘red-handed’. The report made it clear that the Lincoln was shot down in cold blood, and led to Churchill’s bitter comments on the ‘wanton attack’ in the House of Commons.12 It also helped to confirm that before turning around and retracing its steps, the Lincoln had in fact penetrated Soviet airspace ‘fairly deeply’.13 Later, the families of the crew members asked why Churchill was so certain about the exact pattern of events, but of course the sigint aspect of his information could not be revealed to them.14 Churchill ordered that in future all flights over Germany, including training flights, would not only carry ammunition but would also fly with guns ‘loaded and cocked’. In 1955 his successor, Anthony Eden, still required all training aircraft to carry ammunition when over Germany.15

An agreement with the Soviets on air incidents was badly needed. As air historians have noted, the first half of 1953 was a period of high tension in Western Europe. Only a few days before the Lincoln incident, an American F-84 Thunderjet had been shot down by a MiG. A week later a British European Airways Viking airliner was strafed by MiGs while travelling down the Berlin Air Corridor, but managed to limp home. A fortnight after that an American bomber was attacked by MiG-15s over Germany, but repelled them with vigorous cannon fire. In the Far East, where the Korean War was drawing to a close, things were even worse. On 27 July, a few hours before the final armistice came into effect, an American F-86F Sabre pilot shot down a civilian Aeroflot Il-12 airliner, killing all twenty-one persons on board. The Americans and the Soviets engaged in a protracted argument as to whether the airliner was over North Korea or China when it was shot down. No one could disguise the fact that the debris came down in China.16 Two days later, presumably in retaliation, the Soviets downed a US Air Force RB-50G Superfortress sigint reconnaissance aircraft near Vladivostok, with the loss of seventeen of the eighteen crew.17 The RB-50G was a much faster version of the RB-29 Washingtons flown by the RAF’s 192 Squadron, but it had still not been able to escape. All NATO aircraft flying near the Inner German Border were now operating on a fully-armed ‘fire back’ basis.18

Discussions between the four occupying powers over the RAF Lincoln did not go well. In 1945 the Allies had agreed that there would be three air corridors stretching from different points in the Western Zones of Germany across the Soviet Zone to Berlin, which was itself divided between the four powers. Sensibly, the Soviets suggested replacing the complex and confusing system of three different air corridors with a single wider corridor or ‘funnel’. The Allies refused, because although this solution would have been safer, each of the three corridors passed over a subject of ‘intelligence interest’. Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, who represented the British, explained to officials in London:

The crux of the matter is really how much importance we attach to the intelligence interest. The Americans are at present very strong on this (they are particularly anxious to retain ability to watch the Fulda Gap), and have suggested to us privately that we are not attaching sufficient importance to intelligence interest in the Northern Corridor.

Negotiations were made more complex by the fact that the French, who also had a sector in Berlin, were ‘obviously’ not told about the intelligence issues during the negotiations.19 The Americans later explained that the retention of the southern corridor was ‘an absolutely vital requirement’ for them, since what they needed above all was early warning of any concentration of forces signalling an impending Soviet attack. As well as the regular sigint flights that travelled down the corridors, the Americans were now using special aircraft equipped for lateral photography, claiming that the photographs were so good you could ‘see a golf ball on a tee at 40 miles’.20 The Americans were ‘entirely rigid’ on intelligence interests being paramount. Accordingly, the negotiations foundered, and the existing system, with its three corridors, remained largely unchanged.21