Intelligence in War: The Value--And Limitations--Of What the Military Can Learn About the Enemy

by John Keegan

  What precipitated the search for harder evidence of pilotless weapons was, so we must believe from the official account, a piece of pure John Buchanism. Readers of The Thirty-Nine Steps will remember how Scudder, the hunted American, tells Richard Hannay how he detected the evil behind the Black Stone. “I got my first hint in an inn on the Achensee in Tyrol. That set me enquiring and I collected my other clues in a fur-shop in the Galician quarter of Buda, in a Stranger’s Club in Vienna, and in a little bookshop off the Racknitz-Strasse in Leipsic. I completed my evidence ten days ago in Paris.” According to the British official history, the first substantial report of “rockets” was received, on 18 December 1942, by SIS (MI6) from a chemical engineer “who was travelling extensively on his firm’s business.” Neither he nor his nationality is identified, but he had apparently overheard “a conversation in a Berlin restaurant between a Professor Fauner [a Professor Forner was known to exist] of the Berlin Technische Hochschule and an engineer, Stefan Szenassy.”39 They discussed a rocket carrying five tons of explosive with a range of 200 kilometres. The chemical engineer, under SIS prompting, produced two more reports of the rocket’s characteristics, including the detail that it was tested at Swinemünde (near Peenemünde).

  The “chemical engineer” then disappears from the record, reinforcing the suspicion, held by numbers of historians of Nazi Germany, that the Nazi state contained more well-placed sympathisers with the Allied cause than the danger of discovery by the Gestapo would suggest; there are numbers of “de-Nazifications” after 1945, restorations to public position, restitution of fortune that are otherwise inexplicable.40 The chemical engineer deserved whatever reward events subsequently brought, for the convenient juxtaposition of his table with Professor Fauner’s in the Berlin restaurant in December 1942 led directly to the decision to subject Peenemünde to close photographic reconnaissance, to repeated overflights and thus to the great bombing raid of 17–18 August 1943.

  It has been suggested that the Peenemünde raid should have been staged earlier, should have been better organised or should have been repeated. Counsels of perfection: not until mid-1943 was the photographic evidence clear enough to identify the site as the centre of the German secret weapons programme (there were other candidate sites, at Kummersdorf and Rechlin). The raid, though missing parts of the site through failures of marking, all too familiar to Bomber Command, did terrible damage and resulted in the transfer of much of the research and production programme to other, more remote or less vulnerable sites, in central and southern Germany and deep within Poland. To repeat the operation, even had Peenemünde remained a “target-rich” objective, would have been very costly. That of 17–18 August 1943 brought the loss of 40 aircraft, out of 600, an attrition rate of 7 per cent, considerably higher than was deemed “acceptable” by Bomber Command.

  Thereafter, there was little that the intelligence services could do. They had identified the threat and had directed the offence to the point of danger. Once the Germans, in reaction to the great Peenemünde raid, had removed the substance of the secret weapons programme from harm’s way, the intelligence services could only, after an effort to predict the date of the opening of the campaign, attempt to put the Germans off their aim. In that, through the double-cross system, they had a certain success.

  Honours in the V-weapons campaign, if that word can be used about a method of making war on civilians, go to the Germans. Both the V-1, the first cruise missile, and the V-2, the direct technical ancestor of all extra-atmospheric missiles and of the space rockets, were far in advance of any aeronautical weapon produced by their enemies in 1939–45. Wernher von Braun, who was to become an American citizen and to be celebrated as “the father of the space programme,” was a scientific genius. The men who produced the V-1 were aeronautical technicians of the first class. Had Hitler had the vision to devote a proportion of Germany’s scientific effort similar to that given to other weapon programmes to nuclear weapons, it is possible that, with the V-weapons, he could have won the war. The Nazi nuclear research programme was dissipated between too many competing research organisations. There was no Dornberger, no von Braun, no Peenemünde and never enough money.41 The world, nevertheless, had a very narrow escape.

  EPILOGUE

  Military Intelligence Since 1945

  MILITARY OPERATIONS have changed greatly since the end of the Second World War, most of all because the development of nuclear weapons has effectively prevented the major states from fighting the sort of full-scale struggles for decision which are the subject of this book. Big wars are now too dangerous for big countries to fight. That does not mean the world has become a safer place for the common man. On the contrary. It is estimated that armed conflict since 1945 has killed fifty million people, as many as died in the Second World War. Most of the victims, however, have perished in small-scale, random struggles, many scarcely to be dignified even by the name of civil war. In the last fifty years it is not the methods or weapons of 1939–45 that have harvested the major proportion of violent deaths—aerial bombardment or battles between great tank armies or the relentless grind of infantry attrition—but skirmish and all too often massacre with cheap small arms.

  Even in such few major wars as have been fought, there have been few large-scale conventional battles and their number has tended to decline over time. Thus, while the Korean War of 1950–53 was almost exclusively a conflict of infantry and tank armies, and the Arab–Israeli wars of 1956–73 likewise, the biggest war of all, in Vietnam, was a protracted counter-insurgency struggle, marked by the clash of armies scarcely at all. Though the Iran–Iraq War of 1980–88 saw much heavy fighting, Iran’s lack of heavy equipment and use of underage conscripts in suicide attacks made it an unequal contest bearing little resemblance to other wars of the twentieth century. In 1991 Iraq was forced to abandon its illegal occupation of Kuwait as a result of defeat in one major tank battle; but its army, more concerned to surrender than to stand its ground, cannot really be said to have given battle at all. The same can be said of its performance in the second Gulf War of 2003, in which intelligence played an important role in the targeting early on of the Iraq leadership.

  That episode apart, the post-war military record yields few examples of outcomes being influenced by operational intelligence of the sort assessed in the previous chapters. Intelligence services have never been busier than they are in the nuclear world and consume more money than has ever before been spent. By far the greater proportion both of effort and funds is devoted, however, to early warning and to listening, continuous processes, intended to sustain security, not to achieve success in specific or short-term circumstances. The elaborate infrastructure of early warning—radar stations, underwater sensors, space satellite systems, radio interception towers—is enormously expensive to build, maintain and operate and so are its mobile auxiliaries, particularly airborne surveillance squadrons. The intelligence material thus collected, categorised by professionals as sigint (signals intelligence), overlapping with comint (communications intelligence) and elint (electronic intelligence), requires processing and interpretation by thousands of analysts and computer technicians. What they do and what they achieve is rarely published. The public anyhow seems indifferent to what is unquestionably the most significant sector of contemporary intelligence activity. Understandably, the complexities of intelligence technique must baffle even highly educated laymen. Only the most specialist of experts can hope to comprehend what intelligence agencies now do. It is possible, with application, for the interested general reader to follow descriptions of how the Enigma machine worked and of how the problems it presented to cryptanalysts were overcome. Modern ciphers, created through the application of enormous prime numbers to language, belong in the realm of the highest mathematics and are alleged to defy attack by even the most powerful computers yet built.

  It is not surprising, therefore, that the intelligence world attracts attention only when there is a breach of security, typically in recent year
s by the “defection in place” of an intelligence operative who yields to greed or lust or exhibits defects of character not identified at the time of recruitment. There has been a steady trickle of such scandals, long post-dating the sensational unmasking of the “Cambridge” spies in Britain and affecting the American and Soviet services which were presumed to have been warned against such occurrences in their own ranks by the “Third” and “Fifth” Man episodes.

  Public interest is also engaged by accounts of the effect of human intelligence, humint, on recent or current military operations, where such effect can be shown. Humint has unquestionably played a major part in Israel’s successful efforts to hold at bay its Arab neighbours in four major wars, much minor conflict and its continuous struggle for security, for the ingathering of Jews from neighbouring lands allowed its intelligence services to recruit patriotic operatives who spoke Arabic bilingually and were able to pass as natives in their countries of former residence. It is understandable that the successes of Israeli humint remain almost completely secret. During the Vietnam War the American CIA conducted a large-scale campaign of destabilisation against the Viet Cong, largely by the targeted assassination of Viet Cong leaders in the South Vietnamese villages. Operation Phoenix remains unacknowledged; the Vietnam War was eventually lost; it would nevertheless be illuminating to know what effect Phoenix had on its conduct.

  The only conventional military conflict of recent times for which a reasonably complete picture of the influence of intelligence on operations is available in all or most of its complexity—signit, elint, comint, humint and photographic or imaging intelligence—is the Falklands War of 1982, between Britain and Argentina. Rights of sovereignty over the Atlantic islands of the Falklands or Malvinas, which include such Antarctic outliers as South Georgia, Graham Land and the South Shetland, Orkney and Sandwich groups, has been disputed between Britain and Argentina since the nineteenth century. The small Falklands population is exclusively British (the other territories are effectively uninhabited) but it is a universal and deeply held belief in Argentina that the lands are theirs. Argentina has a troubled political history. Once a country of great wealth, which attracted to it over the last century large numbers of immigrants, including poor Italians seeking a better life outside Europe and an English minority who came to supply its commercial and professional class, Argentina suffered serious economic decline in the mid-twentieth century. Discontent brought to power a populist Peronist regime, so called after Colonel Juan Peron, its leader. Peronist mismanagement provoked a military coup in the 1970s. When the military junta itself became unpopular, it decided to restore its fortunes by reviving the claim to the Falklands. Recovering the Malvinas was a cause around which all Argentinians could unite.

  Britain was long used to Argentina’s Falklands demands. It did not take their revival in 1981–82 very seriously. Negotiations proceeded at the United Nations in New York: they were not marked by urgency, and the British found the Argentinians in reasonable mood. Unknown to Britain, however, the junta, led by General Leopoldo Galtieri, had already decided to mount an invasion at latest by October of 1982, when it was calculated that the only Royal Naval ship on station, the ice patrol vessel Endurance, long scheduled for retirement, would have been withdrawn. As late as March 1982, no military preparations had been made and no diplomatic crisis appeared to impend. Then what seems a chance factor altered the tempo. An Argentinian scrap reclamation party arrived at Leith in South Georgia, the Falklands dependency, declaring it was there to dismantle an old whaling station. The scrap men raised the Argentinian flag but failed to seek permission for their work from the local station of the British Antarctic Survey, the government authority. When visited, they hauled down the flag but did not regularise their presence. Constantino Davidoff, their leader, denied then and afterwards that he was sponsored by the Argentinian navy, but he is believed to have had a meeting with naval officers before landing. Once he was ashore, the British Foreign Office felt it had to act; the Ministry of Defence was more reluctant, since it regarded operations 8,000 miles from home as beyond its capabilities. Under Foreign Office pressure, a case was made to the Prime Minister, Mrs. Margaret Thatcher, who ordered Endurance, with a party of marines from Port Stanley, the Falklands capital, to sail for South Georgia and to await orders.

  The unexpected despatch of Endurance perturbed the junta. If the scrap men were removed, Argentinian prestige would be damaged; but the presence of Endurance challenged it to military action, which it did not plan to take for several months. The Argentinians wavered, first sending a naval ship to take off most of the scrap men, then sending another with a party of Argentinian marines to “protect” those left. It was the turn of the British government to dither. It sought guidance from its own and the American intelligence services as to what Argentina intended. The signs were unclear. Budgetary economics had run down the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) station in Buenos Aires; what signal information could be supplied by Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and by its sister signals organisation, the National Security Agency (NSA), did not clarify the picture. The British agencies enjoyed a warm and co-operative relationship with the American agencies, based on much exchange of mutually useful material; but the CIA depended on MI6 for human intelligence, while both GCHQ and the NSA were confused by the volume of radio traffic suddenly generated in the South Atlantic by Argentinian but also Chilean vessels; the two navies were conducting a large-scale routine exercise.

  Britain fell into a week-long bout of indecision; it had decided it could not tolerate any further Argentinian intervention in the affairs of its South Atlantic dependencies; but it shrank from any overt measure that would provoke Argentina to action. Eventually, the decision was taken out of its hands. On 26 March, the junta, under pressure from street demonstrations against its economic austerity programme, but even more fearful of public reaction if it appeared to back down before British diplomatic protest over the South Georgia affair, decided to advance the timetable for its invasion of the Falklands and launch the operation at once.

  The Falklands were effectively undefended. Of their population of 1,800, 120 of the men belonged to the Falklands Islands Defence Force, but they were untrained and equipped only with small arms. An official British military presence was provided by Naval Party 8901, a detachment of forty Royal Marines; their number had recently been doubled by the arrival of their reliefs. Apart from Endurance, currently in Antarctica, there were no naval ships in the Southern Hemisphere. The Argentine armada, which began to land at dawn on 2 April, could not therefore be repelled, though it was briefly opposed. Naval Party 8901, depleted by the despatch of twelve men to reinforce South Georgia, was ordered by the governor, Sir Rex Hunt, who had been warned by London that an invasion force was at sea, to guard the airfield and the harbour. When an advance party of 150 Argentinian commandos landed, they were engaged, and in a firefight around Government House, two were killed. It was clear to Sir Rex Hunt, however, that resistance was hopeless, and after two hours, he ordered surrender. Soon afterwards the vanguard of 12,000 Argentinian troops began to land, while the Argentinian air force took control of the airfield.

  The news caused an immediate and major political crisis in London. The 2nd of April was a Friday; an emergency session of Parliament, which never sits at the weekend, was called for the following day. The consensus at Westminster was that if the government could not demonstrate its willingness and ability to confront the Argentinians, it would have to resign. Fortunately for Mrs. Thatcher, a woman of iron will but untried powers of decision, she had already instituted precautionary measures. Alerted by the enormous volume of radio traffic generated by Argentinian preparations, she had ordered a submarine to sail for the South Atlantic on the previous Monday, 29 March. Much more important, indeed, as was to prove critically for the whole Falklands saga, she had on Wednesday evening ordered that a naval and military task force should be asse
mbled to depart at once for the South Atlantic. Her desire to recapture the Falklands was never in doubt; the impetus to the decision was supplied by the arrival in her room in the House of Commons when she was consulting her ministers of the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Henry Leach, who gave it as his professional opinion that Britain had the power to mount such an operation and that the navy could set out by the coming weekend. He also assured the Prime Minister of victory. On return to his office he sent a signal: “The task force is to be made ready and sailed.”

  Its first elements departed on Monday 5 April, while its military complement was hastily assembled in Britain to follow. Three submarines, two nuclear-powered, one diesel, formed the spearhead; there were to follow, over the course of the weeks to come, 2 aircraft carriers, embarking 20 Harrier aircraft and 23 helicopters, 23 destroyers and frigates, 2 amphibious ships, 6 landing ships, 75 transports, ranging in size from large passenger liners to trawlers, and 21 tankers. The majority of the transports and tankers were “taken up from trade”—chartered or requisitioned, that is, from the merchant service.

  The troops to be embarked would eventually comprise the whole of 3 Commando Brigade (40, 42, and 45 Commando, Royal Marines, 29 Commando Regiment Royal Artillery and 59 Commando Squadron Royal Engineers), attached to which were 2nd and 3rd Battalions, the Parachute Regiment, two troops of light armoured vehicles of the Blues and Royals, thirteen air defence troops, the commando logistic regiment and the brigade’s helicopter squadron. There was also a large complement of Special Forces, including three sections of the Special Boat Squadron (SBS) and two squadrons of the Special Air Service (SAS). To follow later was 5 Infantry Brigade (2nd Scots Guards, 1st Welsh Guards and 1st/7th Gurkha Rifles) with some artillery and helicopters. The Royal Air Force deployed elements of seventeen squadrons, flying fighters, bombers, helicopters, reconnaissance aircraft and air refuelling tankers.