In October 1951, 284 FSS withdrew to the Military School in the Suez Garrison and assumed responsibility for the southern sector of the Canal Zone. The School was guarded by locally recruited wardens but, one morning in March 1953, the section awoke to find the compound gates open, the transport was missing and discarded warden uniforms littered the grounds. It then moved into Suez Garrison and deployed detachments in Fayid and Corunna Barracks. The FSO, Captain Roberts, once became involved in a riotous mass of workers from the nearby factory and was seen to be:
…fighting a lone battle for survival amidst an atmosphere thick with fragmented wickerwork chairs and powdered glass. During this fracas, FS were seen at their observatory best, and long before the workers themselves knew what they were about, FS were despatching sitreps in all manner of directions from the comparative safety of a nearby Greek Bar.
Formed in October 1951 in Maresfield as a direct result of the unrest in the Canal Zone, 242 FSS became the Canal Zone Field Security section. Reporting to the Defence Security Officer (Canal), it had a varied brief that included source handling and investigations into sabotage, high tension power cables being a popular target. On 21 January 1952, it accompanied 2 Parachute Battalion as it fought its way into the Muslim Cemetery where 300 cases of stolen 40mm ammunition were found. Four days later, in an attempt to disrupt the terrorism in the Canal Zone Base, Operation Eagle involved the counter-intelligence screening of more than 1,000 regular and auxiliary police after the Army had raided their barracks in Bureau Sanitaire in a bloody five-hour battle that cost fifty policemen and four soldiers their lives. The next day fundamentalists murdered twenty-six foreigners and burnt their bodies before order was restored. When Captain Reginald Riley was threatened with assassination, the General Officer Commanding, General Sir George Erskine, loaned his personal armoured staff car as a wedding limousine so that he could marry his French-born wife in the Roman Catholic cathedral in Moascar Garrison and then transferred him to 3 FSS in Libya.
By 1954 the British presence in Suez had become politically untenable and as GHQ Middle East started transferring troops to Cyprus, the FS sections monitored the destruction of classified documents and closed classified document registers and carried out security sweeps of barracks and depots to ensure that no stores and equipment that should not have been left behind was not forgotten. The closure of the Defence Security Office led to its duties being transferred to 251 FSS for the final evacuation.
Libya
After the Italian occupation had ended in 1973, Tripolitania and Cyrenaica remained under British administration. In 1947, a mandate was agreed with the Allies that relinquished all Italian claims to Libya. Middle East Command had responsibility for Libya and when 1st Infantry Division began arriving from Palestine, it did so with 3 FSS, the Divisional FS section since 1939.
In 1948 3 FSS arrived from Palestine and, taking over from 260 FSS in Tripoli, then moved into the Officer’s Mess in Kuffra Barracks to support 1st Infantry Division, as it had done since 1939. Between 1948 and 1949, the FSO was Captain P.P.P. McCraith, of the North Irish Horse who sometimes rode a horse to his office. Others members of the Section included Sergeant John Attenborough (brother to Richard, the film director, and David, the wildlife presenter) and Sergeant Fred Everson, whose son, Peter, became Director, Intelligence Corps in the 1990s. An interesting member of the section was the Arab-speaking Sergeant Peter Ward, who had lived in Libya for several years. His father, a Harley Street surgeon, had been Winston Churchill’s doctor during the 1930s. In 1945, while serving with 575 (XXX Corps) FSS in Rangoon investigating war crimes, Ward had walked fifteen miles to a town to investigate a suspect named U Mau Mau only to discover most people had the same surname.
The 1949 Bevin/Sforza Agreement saw a week of disturbances during which the section helped enforce the curfew. By January 1950 a detachment was based in a flat in Benghazi. In September Captain Roy Bignell, the FSO, moved the Section to a flat in Tripoli. One NCO recorded:
Our pockets bulging with Ration Allowance money as we scavenge for ourselves. Actually, we do not do too badly; for those with a taste for Italian cooking, a tiny restaurant caters within our means.
On 24 December 1951, Libya became the first former European colony in Africa to declare independence under the principles of the Atlantic Charter; however, since the country did not have adequate military forces, Middle East Command provided the reformed 25th Armoured Brigade in 1952 as a garrison. The desert was also used as a training ground for British forces from the United Kingdom and West Germany.
By 1954 Libya had established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and as anti-British riots and nationalist sentiment escalated, 3 FSS monitored Soviet and Egyptian Intelligence Service activity and exploited several high grade political informants. The antennae on the roof of the Egyptian Military Attaché’s house was also measured and ‘borrowed’ documents photographed against the white tiles of Bignell’s bathroom using a box camera. During the Suez crisis, the encyclopaedic knowledge of Sergeant Ward became almost indispensable to the extent that when the British Ambassador was faced with a difficult security situation, his first question, allegedly, was, ‘What does Ward say?’ When the 10th Armoured Division reformed during the 1956 Suez Crisis, 48 FSS, which had spent the war in Northern Ireland, was reformed as its FS section.
In 1957/58, 3 FSS was retitled as FSS Tripolitania and confined its operations to protective security of British units and monitoring the desert training areas bordering Tunisia and Algeria being used by freedom fighters opposing French rule in Algeria. As the British began withdrawing from Libya in 1960, when 48 FSS was disbanded, with the Intelligence Corps maintaining a Field Security presence commensurate with troop levels until 1967, when it was represented by the Security Detachment, RAF El Adem. In March 1970 the British withdrew, and the Field Security was, as customary, among the last to leave. Two years later, Engineer Corps Lieutenant Muammar Gaddafi overthrew King Idris and introduced his version of Arab nationalism, that would contribute to regional and international tension over the next forty years.
East Africa
FS cover in East Africa was largely confined to two sections. Based at Mogadishu in Somaliland, 257 FSS submitted reports that could upset the colonial status quo, such as tribal affairs ranging from the theft of camels to smallpox outbreaks. Close liaison was maintained with District Commissioners. When 277 FSS arrived in Nairobi from the Canal Zone in 1946, it was integrated with an East African detachment commanded by Captain Bill Williams, formerly GSO 2 (Intelligence), HQ East Africa Command, who had selected the increment from the King’s African Rifles and was careful to mix tribes. Several NCOs had served in Burma and one wealthy corporal owned two trucks and several bicycles. A detachment supported Gilgil internment camp for detainees from Palestine, one problem being the risk of Jewish expatriates assisting escapes. The marriage between Sergeant J.D. Davidson, who became ICA Regional Secretary in Scotland, and an Auxiliary Territorial Service member caused such local interest that the General Officer Commanding contributed his car as a wedding carriage.
In June 1950 277 FSS was disbanded but as the Mau Mau uprising gathered pace and an Emergency was declared in October 1952, Captain E.C.W.R. Hall formed the FS (East Africa) Section that investigated Mau Mau penetration of military units by forging identification permits to acquire weapons and medical supplies. They also vetted local labour. By 1954, the East African FS Section had expanded to include four staff sergeants and three African NCOs.
In a campaign that was principally run by the colonial police, the main Intelligence Corps contribution was the provision in 1954 of an Army Photographic Interpretation Section commanded by Major C.A. Lowe:
The enemy in Kenya is a particularly difficult one from the PI point of view. The only signs of his movement and occupation of territory are tracks and huts. Even on the ground, these signs are not easily visible; for a large part of the Mau Mau use game tracks and their huts or ‘hides’ are u
sually hidden in dense forest and well camouflaged into the bargain. From the air photography we are trying to find, therefore, enemy track activity in a country which is covered with tens of thousands of game tracks, and enemy dwelling hidden in dense forest and usually constructed or camouflaged with the natural vegetation growing in the area. The whole of the Mount Kenya and Aberdare Mountains areas have been mosaiced and of the 300 mosaics about 200 have been reproduced in quantities down to infantry company.
Two Divisional Military Intelligence Officers, of whom two were Intelligence Corps, supported the Kenya Police by collecting and collating Operational Intelligence. One, Captain Frank Kitson (The Rifle Brigade), later wrote the controversial Low Intensity Operations in 1971.
When, in 1960, a British battalion was sent as part of a UN force to Cameroon during its conversion to independence, it was accompanied by French-speaking interrogators, who, ‘by patience and keeping any promises’ discovered Algerian and Red Chinese complicity in training the insurgents.
The Cyprus Emergency
Cyprus had been part of the Ottoman Empire for 318 years until 1878 when its administration was ceded to Great Britain keen to protect the Suez Canal and the route to India. During the First World War, the island was annexed when Turkey sided with Germany and was offered to Greece as an inducement to enter the war with the Allies against Bulgaria. This was refused. The population majority were of Greek heritage.
Consisting of a sergeant major, a sergeant and four corporals, 299 FSS was reactivated in Famagusta in 1946 to screen Jewish immigrants en route to Palestine, now deemed to be illegal for a year, and detained in internment camps, such as at Caralaos and Xylotymbou near Dhekelia. In addition to ships arriving from European ports, as the crisis in Palestine grew worse, several left Black Sea ports, almost certainly to embarrass the ‘British Imperialists’. Sergeant Leonard Andrews recalls:
These refugees were crammed solidly into the ships which were mainly ‘rust buckets’ and on the point of sinking by the time they reached the Levant. Even so, they were reluctant to leave them and had to be forcibly transferred to the British transports. By the time they arrived at the camps they were often in a pitiful condition, filthy, smelly and verminous.
The section conducted a counter-intelligence census of every town and village on the island to pinpoint Jewish extremists. Notes in the July 1949 Intelligence Corps magazine noted:
The Section continues to probe out the secrets of the island’s most remote villages. Nothing is too inaccessible for our intrepid riders, who are fast reaching TT Standard!
When the state of Israel was created in 1948, the census was discontinued.
Meanwhile, despite the fact that Cyprus had no recent historical links with Greece, the Greek-Cypriot leader Archbishop Makarios was demanding union with Greece (enosis). He then convinced Lieutenant Colonel Grivas, the former leader of the right-wing X resistance group in Occupied Greece, to organize a military campaign. After conducting two clandestine reconnaissances, Grivas formed EOKA (Ethniki Organosis Kyprion Agoniston) and developed a strategy based on the fact that while the nature of Cyprus as an island would restrict operations, the Troodos Mountains were suitable for guerrilla operations and the towns and villages provided opportunities for ambushes, assassinations and unrest. He recognized the value of intelligence as:
The pilot which guides one to the right course of action and brings one to one’s objective; it is also a scout which spots traps and rocks which the enemy sets in one’s path in the hope of tricking and finally crushing his opponent. No fight can be carried on without intelligence’. (Memoirs of George Grivas)
Knowing he could rely upon Greece for support, Grivas proposed using the postal system and couriers, as opposed to radios, and started recruiting informants. In the background hovered Turkey, determined to protect the Turkish-Cypriot minority. When Middle East Command moved to Cyprus in 1954, the peninsula at Akrotiri was selected for an airfield and land at Episkopi and Dhekelia as British garrisons. GHQ moved to Wolseley Barracks, Nicosia in December and was joined in early 1955 by 147 FSS, commanded by Captain Leo Hillman, transferring from the Canal Zone. Meanwhile, the Command Field Security Wing had consigned more than fifty Middle East sections to history with little ceremony. Captain Hillman was a remarkable soldier. Born Leo Loebel in Vienna to prominent Jewish Socialists, the family left Austria and settled in Palestine. After a spell in the French Foreign Legion, he enlisted in the Auxiliary Military Pioneer Corps and adopted the surname Hillman. He joined the Specialist Interrogation Group and was one of the few to survive the disastrous 1942 raid on Tobruk. Awarded the Military Medal while serving with raiding forces in the eastern Mediterranean, he was commissioned into the Pioneer Corps and then, in 1944, underwent SOE training. When an Austrian Gestapo officer was executed during an anti-Nazi uprising, in 1945 he parachuted into Austria masquerading as the officer to promote mayhem and collect intelligence on senior Nazi leadership, but he was ‘captured’ by the Russians who did not believe that he was not a Nazi, and he spent several months in a prison camp until his release was negotiated. In the meantime, he had been awarded the Military Cross. At Wolfsburg Internment Camp in Austria, Hillman interrogated the head of the Vienna Gestapo, SS-Brigadier Franz Josef Huber, and then commanded 309 FSS in Hamburg, where he was nearly court-martialled for killing a wanted German resisting arrest.
The Korean War had finished in 1954 and although operations were underway in Malaya and Kenya, Great Britain faced another counter-insurgency conflict when Greek-Cypriot demands and EOKA opened its campaign on 1 April by detonating several bombs. When a grenade exploded in Wolseley Barracks, Sergeant Alan Gudgeon reported the attack to Captain Hillman, however, he, like many in Cyprus, thought it was an April Fool’s Day trick. Gudgeon persisted and it was only after another explosion in Nicosia that Hillman swore him to secrecy over his misjudgment. Corporal Mike Warner investigated a bomb left in an RAF teleprinter vehicle at Four Mile Point near Famagusta. But intelligence on EOKA was limited and throughout the summer the demoralized Cyprus Police struggled to contain the tension. On 1 October, 253 FSS arrived from Colchester and deployed ‘A’ Detachment to cover the Panhandle, Kyrenia and Famagusta Docks, where there had been a theft of arms and ammunition, while its ‘B’ Detachment covered Larnaca and Dhekelia and supported the Royal Navy intercepting caiques smuggling weapons and explosives, sometimes in small religious statuettes and barrels of olives.
In early October, Field Marshal Sir John Harding arrived as Governor and opened largely fruitless talks with Makarios. During the negotiations, a bomb was thrown at the married quarter of Sergeant Dick Stafford of 147 FSS. Rushing into a bedroom to retrieve his revolver from under a pillow, while he was making for the front door, he was fortuitously held back by his shaken wife. A few seconds later a bomb exploded below the veranda. Stafford was in a second incident when a grenade exploded near him and Staff Sergeant Crane in one of the many disturbances in Metaxas Square, Nicosia. During the night of disorder in Nicosia on 18/19 November, the section supplied Corporal Law as an armed escort for an Army lorry ferrying the wounded to hospital. Sergeants Butt and Davis were following in a Land Rover when the convoy was ambushed with grenades. Fortunately no-one was hurt, however, Law later discovered that he was wearing two different kinds of shoes and was worried that, had he been blown to pieces, EOKA would have claimed two victims.
On 26 November, Harding declared a State of Emergency and announced that the Army would lead the internal security response. To improve Security Forces integration and the flow of intelligence, Harding formed the Internal Security Training School and also established Security Committees centred on the eight administrative districts of Cyprus, each reporting to the Command District Committee and each supported by a district intelligence officer. As joint Military and Police HQs, also known as MILPOLs, gripped their operational areas, intelligence began to flow. Under the control of the GSO 1 (Intelligence) reporting direct to the Director of Operations wa
s military vetting, an Intelligence cell, Field Security HQ and the Travel Control Security Unit.
In 1954 Brigadier Robert Stevens had succeeded Colonel Hinchley-Cook, who had died in service, and took advantage of the disbandment of Anti Aircraft Command (TA) to increase the Travel Control and Security Group war establishment to 159 officers and 523 other ranks. Taking over 1a, Iverna Gardens and a nearby gun site at Warwick Road from 499 (London Welsh) Heavy Anti Aircraft Regiment, twelve Women’s Royal Army Corps officers and 154 other ranks joined the Group, as did Royal Navy Reservists, RAF Volunteer Reserve and Women’s Royal Air Force RAF and ninety-eight Maritime Royal Army Service Corps to man launches and vehicles. In 1949 the Auxiliary Territorial Service reformed as the Women’s Royal Army Corps. By 1956, Stevens, now Group Commandant, formed his Group into Northern and Southern Regions, each commanded by a lieutenant colonel, and consisting of several Districts and drill halls covering thirteen ports and airports. The Group boosted its establishment again when Mobile Defence Columns, used to reinforce defensive stop lines in the UK and the Coast Regiment RA, were both disbanded. Group HQ moved to 1, Fitzjohns Avenue, Swiss Cottage. Stevens introduced Trade Tests to test competencies.
Sharing the Secret Page 32
