The security of the continent required intelligence; and West Germany proved both for the British and the Americans a prime base for listening operations. Signals intelligence units dotted around the country could reach not only East Germany but further yet into the central reaches of Europe. As well as the day-to-day messages – those intercepted and put to use during the Berlin Blockade – there was also the element of direction finding. Fixing on the source of radio signals deep into Eastern Europe would give Britain and America an idea of the disposition of Soviet forces from day to day, hour to hour. This meant monitoring Poland and Czechoslovakia, and beyond too. This was not war, and as a result, there was not, on a day-to-day basis, that much in the way of astounding secret intelligence. The key to this period, for Eastcote, and also for its American counterparts, was intelligence in the deeper sense: the use of interception to see more clearly into the heart of the other side – what the Soviets were thinking, how they were reacting, how bellicose they were, how they viewed the life of the West as compared to the East. This was a period in which Stalin was, according to some, still perfectly confident that capitalism must fail. He had seen it implode under Hitler and the Nazis; he did not see why it should not be the case with America and Britain too.
But the introduction of the Deutschmark, the sudden revving up of industrial might, and the clear signs of growing Western wealth were a source of disturbance. Given that the chief source of any conflict is arguably economic at root, many anticipated a flashpoint developing.
From the point of view of British intelligence, there was an element of brinkmanship, too; during the Berlin blockade, there was an experimental RAF flight over East German territory. Part of this was to do with brand-new electronic eavesdropping technology (of which more in a later chapter). But this was also a deliberate jangling of the spider’s web, to see from which direction and how fast the spider would respond to the vibration. This was the new world of electronic intelligence, in which all those at Eastcote were taking a very close interest; that is, intelligence and communications gathered up by electronic means, and then analysed by the Eastcote cryptographers.
After the coup in Czechoslovakia and then the blockade of Berlin – the first concrete signs of Stalin grabbing what power he could in Europe – the work of the Cold War codebreakers was suitably stepped up. There were other corners of Europe that were particularly vulnerable, states and regions with local Communist parties that, in the wake of the conflict, seemed to attract more and more support. Greece was one of those acutely sensitive and – at the time – unhappy regions. For the Greeks, the war had not ended; it had instead been succeeded by bloody and bitter civil war. And in the swirling vortex of murderous passions, there were signs of the Soviets attempting to gain influence, eager for the prospect of a foothold in the Mediterranean. Not very far away, on Cyprus, a British listening station was focused implacably on monitoring and following every last movement of the Soviets.
The secret listeners on Cyprus were also carefully eavesdropping on Yugoslavia. Its leader Joseph Tito, while understanding that geographically it would be impossible for his country to keep Stalin’s Russia at arm’s length, was even so showing a remarkable spirit of independence. Very rare among Balkan and Central European leaders, he seemed not remotely cowed by Stalin’s power; and this lack of fear served in turn to stoke Stalin’s distrust of him. But this was to prove the start of a murderously farcical series of misunderstandings. Stalin, in his anger against Tito, expelled the Yugoslav Communist Party from the Cominform, the international Communist organisation. This, in turn, was misinterpreted by Britain and America; in Washington, it was assumed that Tito – defiant and proud – had expelled himself. And so, even though he was a devout Communist, the Americans and the British decided that he was to be supported at all costs as an anti-Stalinist. As historian Beatrice Heuser has noted, Yugoslavia was indeed to receive significant amounts of US financial aid. But not before there were further carnivals of confusion as the Central Intelligence Agency then attempted in 1949 to depose Tito and have him replaced (they failed – he stayed where he was and held this madly disparate country together even beyond his death in 1980).
But this is also an illustration of how intercepted intelligence – no matter how ingeniously sourced, how meticulously cross-referenced, how brilliantly comprehensive – is still subject to interpretation in the end. Messages and coded communications were one thing; but politics is as tangled and complex as the human heart itself, and sometimes the desires and impulses and actions of strangers – no matter if one listens to their every word – can still be difficult to fathom. In Yugoslavia, a nation that contained so many other nations – Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia – those ambiguities were woven deep into a living, pulsing history. Misinterpretation would be almost inevitable.
Elsewhere, Bulgaria was a focus of interest for the Allies, but again in the sense that it had little choice but to submit to the overwhelming dominance of Russia. Yet at that very early post-war stage, to some there was no such inevitability. As Beatrice Heuser has written, a great many American politicians thought it was eminently feasible that rather than becoming satellite states, these smaller countries would yearn for the freedom and comforts of the American way of life. To not want to do so, they reasoned, would surely be perverse and irrational.
In 1948, secretary of state George Marshall – whose plan in essence was the blueprint for the structure of Europe that we see today – told a group of US ambassadors: ‘The ultimate United States objective toward Soviet Balkan satellites – Yugoslavia, Albania, Bulgaria, Rumania and Hungary – may be summarized as the establishment of those states as democratic independent members of the family of nations, under conditions guaranteeing their peoples effective enjoyment of human rights and non-discrimination against US interests and interests of other peace-loving states.’
More, he said, the Americans were anxious to see the liberation of these states from the ‘totalitarian Soviet Balkan hegemony which has thwarted the democratic will of the majority of the peoples, infringed their independence and sovereignty and subjugated them to the domination of Moscow’. Nor were they intending to stand by passively. While the British codebreakers had been some way ahead of the Americans when it came to suspicion and dislike of the Soviet system, by 1948 the American government was very firmly framing the forthcoming struggle in Manichaean terms. President Harry S Truman – perhaps partly in the wake of Venona’s uncovering of so many US agents working covertly for Stalin – now declared in secret briefings that, in essence, it was now the United States versus the threat of world Communism. In other words, there were now two mighty forces in the world – and if you were not firmly aligned with one, then you must surely be aligned with the other. There seemed little room for any kind of middle ground.
Open hostilities were to be avoided; even with the economies of Western Europe firing back into life, the situation was still terrifyingly precarious. Yet even then, fascinatingly, it was the British Labour government that proved startlingly bullish. It had been monitoring, as mentioned, the ferocious Greek civil war; and the Foreign Office and the British security services had concluded that this was in large part being fomented by Stalin’s agents: the aim, squarely, was to turn Greece Communist. Was there action that could be taken to counterbalance this? The British government thought so. In 1948, it made a close study of the state of Albania, which had also fallen to totalitarian Communism under Enver Hoxha. Would it be possible to trigger a civil war there – in order to bring it into the sphere of the West? Julian Amery, who had taken part in covert wartime operations there, was one of the men asked to look into the possibilities, and how such a gambit might work.
There were a number of Albanian exiles, and had been ever since the end of the war. If members of this politically volatile group were to be dropped back in to their home country, could they spark a suitable conflict? The Americans were brought in on the idea, and they agreed. For various reasons
, it all came to nothing; but it was a measure of the extent to which Britain – even while in the throes of imperial withdrawal – still felt that it had a serious duty on the global stage.
Elsewhere in the region, Cyprus had been a British colony since the end of the First World War; once ‘rented’ out to the British by the Ottoman empire, it was taken over completely at the dissolution of that empire and became a key strategic post for the British. The corner of the island reserved for surveillance operations – Ayios Nikolaos – was within the British military base, and its immense value was widely understood; the Americans were especially keenly interested in the material that was being produced there. They, too, set up base here; a little later on, even the FBI would have a foothold, monitoring and analysing all media broadcasts in the region. Back in England, the BBC had some involvement in this, too: its Monitoring Service at Caversham in Oxfordshire was also taking in all sorts of broadcasts relayed from Cyprus and other Middle East stations and sharing items of interest with the Americans.
As the Cold War intensified, the Cyprus base was to acquire greater weight and importance; it was from here that the interceptors could reach deep into the Soviet Union; it was from here that disturbances detected in the atmosphere would mark Soviet nuclear testing. In the late 1940s, Cyprus also acquired a much more controversial use. Jewish refugees, their families slaughtered, the survivors subsisting in Displaced Person camps in Eastern Europe, were now attempting in far greater numbers to reach Palestine; the Jews would at last, and after so many years of broken promises, have their homeland. But the British, who still held the mandate for Palestine, did their utmost to shut the gates against this influx. The Jewish refugees they apprehended in the Mediterranean were instead diverted to Cyprus. From concentration camps in Poland to prison camps in the Mediterranean; amid the outcries about insensitivity and brutality, this was also a sign of a fast-changing world, and a world in which Britain’s own stature was crumbling with quite extraordinary speed. Nowhere was this more so than in the continent of Asia, where the sudden collapse of British rule was to have such immediate violent consequences, and at a time when intelligence was needed more than ever.
Chapter Ten
A Continent on Fire
The imminent collapse of the British Empire was not only a source of dismay to die-hard right-wing traditionalists. There were also those around Clement Attlee who were agitated by the prospect. Among them was his foreign secretary Ernest Bevin who, in the immediate aftermath of the war, was anxious that the nation would maintain its ‘prestige’ – that is, to hold on to its clout around international conference tables. But the Empire was imploding, unable to bear its own weight. It had been some time since colonial possessions had provided illimitable riches in trade and merchandise. The money required to rule was running out. From the point of view of the codebreakers, something akin to an elegant conjuring trick was needed; a means of Britain’s withdrawing from its colonies with such grace and abundant goodwill that these newly independent countries would still be happy to host top-secret cypher stations.
But the slide from power occurred with breathtaking speed. The entire world was being reshaped; and to a large extent, political pressure for this remoulding was coming from America, which painted itself as being aggressively ‘anti-colonialist’. It had its own reasons for its quiet determination to see Britain completely shorn of its old imperial possessions.
There was a whole new world of trading possibilities to be opened up, to America’s advantage; and with them new spheres of geopolitical influence. The old British Empire was, as many American politicians saw it, a fast-emptying space, a void that would have to be filled.
Paradoxically, however, the Americans also needed Britain to maintain good relationships with its old possessions: the younger nation, though enormously powerful, was still a relative newcomer to these wider geopolitics; the elder nation had decades, centuries, of accumulated international dealings. Many of Britain’s colonies and mandates were in crucial positions when it came to airfields and intercept stations. If ever the day came that a nuclear attack had to be launched against the Soviet Union via the Urals, for instance, the atomic weaponry could hardly come from Britain – no bomber could fly so far. An airfield in Peshawar (in what was then India and is today Pakistan), however, would be quite a different matter. Equally, the Americans needed signals intelligence in these places too, providing real-time analysis and commentary.
In the case of India, the question of independence – and just how speedily it could come – was causing the British to buckle from several angles. Even if there had been the will to hang on to the subcontinent – which there was not – political gravity was pressing down hard on the government. First, the Indian independence movement was terrifically powerful; allied to this was the fact that this movement had the goodwill of the rest of the world. Plus, Britain could simply no longer afford to hold on to its old jewel in the crown. It could scarcely afford to house its own population back at home. So it was inevitable that the Indian people would take control of their own destinies. Attlee’s hope was that they would at least stay within the Commonwealth.
He wanted to bargain: independence in return for certain favours. India could go its own way so long as British (and by extension American) forces and intelligence could continue to operate discreetly within its sphere.
The codebreakers and the secret listeners had been in India for almost as long as the original British merchants. Even though the technology of the 19th-century Great Game with Russia had obviously transformed – no more codes drawn into etchings of local butterflies, for instance – the principles of the contest remained the same. Now, strategists realised, the gradual British withdrawal from the Middle East might make Stalin think of striking through a newly vulnerable India, to get at the treasure of the oilfields that lay west of it. So in terms of early Cold War paranoia, India was right at the forefront of intelligence anxiety; the British and the Americans needed it dearly, not least for help to keep the Middle East secure for their own requirements.
One of the most prominent codebreakers in India throughout the war had been Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Marr-Johnson; though he was experienced and clever, he was also an abrupt figure with a sharp temper who seems to have been cordially disliked by many. However, like so many of the codebreakers, he had a startlingly rich hinterland. Whereas other code geniuses tended to have great aptitudes for music, Marr-Johnson’s talents lay towards poetry. Indeed, some years later, he had several volumes of poetry published: not what one would immediately expect from an abrasive military intelligence man who had spent so much time losing litres of sweat in remote jungle intercept stations. Marr-Johnson – who as we have seen had made valuable friends in Washington DC – had travelled out to the Wireless Experimental Centre in the salubrious suburbs of Delhi, from where he and his colleagues could see another great danger looming.
Independence for India would clearly not be enough: the subcontinent’s Muslim population wanted to be certain of their own security, and the obvious means of achieving that would be a form of secession. A state within a state was one possibility – but a full separation of Muslims and Hindus was gathering momentum.
The codebreakers and others in intelligence could see very well what the possible consequence of this would be: bloody civil war, with millions of casualties – an entire continent tearing itself apart. For some colonial British figures who were still there, this might have seemed a distant and abstract prospect; for instance, in some intercept stations, the officers still had their Indian servants who made the tea, obeyed the signs on certain doors that declared ‘No entry – to anyone at all’ (these were the most secret decryption rooms) and made their beds. The officers and their wives still dined out in very smart restaurants, went dancing at the smartest, coolest clubs. All these luxuries were supremely attainable, in a way that they most certainly were not back home; not just the material comforts, but also the languorous evenings of ri
ch sunsets and the pale glow of dancing fireflies. The fight to get a crowbar into the Japanese wartime codes had been as exhausting and even more monotonous and mentally tough than the struggle against Enigma. Yet for many, including men in the Intelligence Corps who had never before left England, India had been a new world of colour and strangeness and splendour.
Young Peter Budd – just 19 years old when the war against Japan ended – had been monitoring Japanese signals all over the subcontinent (including an astonishing 18-month stint in the remote paradise of the Cocos Islands). He was now conscious, as this chapter of empire began to close and the targets swiftly began to change, that he was a witness to history. Budd, a naval signals man for the Y Service, was being transferred to a defiantly landlocked intercept station near the North-West Frontier. He arrived by rail at Delhi. ‘A lot of Indians lived on the station under cover,’ recalls Budd. ‘We were sitting there waiting for the Bombay train to come in. Suddenly about a thousand Indians poured in. I was pushed right up to the edge of the rails.’ The reason for the commotion? ‘Closer to me than you are was Gandhi,’ says Mr Budd. ‘And next to him was Nehru.’ Both had just come from talks with Sir Stafford Cripps, the British president of the Board of Trade.
Budd’s journey took him to a base just outside Karachi where he soon settled down to a life of intense work but abundant material awards. He and his colleagues were allowed to wear civilian clothes. And owing to a tangled bureaucracy resulting in unexpectedly high wages – they were assumed to be officers, when in fact they were not – Budd and his friends ‘lived the life of Riley’, as he says. ‘We had tailor-made suits made from our own tailors, we ate out in restaurants.’ When all of this came to an end, and Peter Budd found himself back in late-1940s Britain, living in the pinched suburbs of west London, he knew that he would always look back on that period of secret signals interception with exceptional vividness.
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