Interesting postings were 4 and 5 Security Companies, submitting reports to Security Wing, West Germany. Most sections were still based in houses in residential streets, as Field Security had done since May 1945. The 5 Company Osnabruck section was regularly commanded by an Australian Intelligence Corps officer. The Security sections were divided into Protective Security and Counter-Intelligence/Security Intelligence detachments and were supported by a Royal Army Ordnance Corps clerk administering classified information and, until the appearance of word processing, a typist. Most had a bar for liaison purposes. The principal threat remained from hostile intelligence services, in particular the Soviet and East Germans, conducting subversion and espionage. Sabotage was estimated to be likely during the transition to war. ‘Magdeburg Annie’ churning out daily five-figure coded transmissions from an East German radio station was a constant reminder of the threat. The 1969 The Rose and The Laurel revealed:
Among the highlights of the year was the perceptive ‘squaddy’ who was heard to remark in a loud voice during a ‘Threat’ presentation that ‘Magdeburg Annie’ never performed live for our demonstrations because she had been ‘tipped off’ that we would be listening for her. What touching faith!
Domestic subversion and Irish terrorism were added to the threats during the early 1970s.
Protective Security was an equally important function in ensuring that formations and units were guarded by conducting security surveys and inspections directed at the management of classified documents, protection of equipment and security of arms and ammunition. Until the early 1970s Sections used a variety of techniques to test barrack security, as their predecessors had done since 1940. A Royal Signals Yeoman of Signals was available to conduct technical ‘sweep’ of War Rooms and conference rooms for listening devices while a Security Section detachment carried out a physical inspection at the same time. Devices were discovered, particularly during the early occupation of HQ BAOR, probably clandestinely lodged during the construction phase. Interestingly, a report based on defector information suggested that Warsaw Pact intelligence agencies were reluctant to undertake technical attacks against British military and diplomatic premises outside their own countries because counter-measures were highly effective. While the Headquarters had its own Security Section to manage access into the ‘Big House’ itself, a detachment of the 4 Security Company section in the garrison conducted security reviews of the Branches. During exercises, the Security companies collected litter and material from vacated positions and checked for hides and presented their findings of breaches of security to, usually, shocked intelligence and security staff officers.
While Protective Security provided the visible defence, Security Intelligence investigated subversion and espionage. The West German constitution permitted freedom to express political opinion, including for those employed by the British Army of the Rhine. Nevertheless, watching briefs were maintained on politically-involved, locally employed civilians and military personnel showing subversive left- and right-wing sympathies. A civilian driver was dismissed for distributing Maoist propaganda and a combined Celle-based 51 Security Section and Royal Military Police operation conducted against neo-Nazis using the Lüneburg training area resulted in several arrests. When the Rhodesian Intelligence Service targeted soldiers with ‘kith and kin’ connections in the country, an investigation concluded most had received Rhodesian Army call-up papers in envelopes using correct military details and addresses and postmarked ‘Pretoria, South Africa’. Peace and pacifist movements were regarded as subversive because of their known infiltration by hostile intelligence services and thus, when the West German government concluded that a strata of rock near Dannenberg was ideal for the storage of nuclear waste and peace protesters pitched a camp near H Troop, 225 Signal Squadron, 51 Security Section in Celle discovered the activists had little interest in the Troop. Religious organizations with pacifism as a core belief were of concern, particularly those which sent preachers to visit the vulnerable dependants of soldiers serving in Northern Ireland. The theft of weapons in the early 1970s from a battalion about to deploy to Northern Ireland, and their recovery after the surveillance operation of a railway station left luggage locker, identified a link between an embryonic Black Power cell and the IRA. Swift military discipline prevented the subversion that was haunting US forces in Vietnam. Investigations into losses of identity cards usually led to heavy fines. Drug abuse investigations were transferred to the military police in the 1980s, except when there was an indication that users held a vetting clearance giving access to information classified Secret and above or there had been a breach of security.
The Mixed Service Organisation (MSO) was formed by the British in 1946 in order to give employment – for instance guarding ammunition compounds, drivers and defence units – to displaced Eastern Europeans former prisoners and concentration camp detainees reluctant or unable to return to their homelands. Employment generally followed national lines, for example, 612 Tank Transporter Squadron was mainly Polish. It was not unusual to find in the same unit, Mixed Service Organisation, some who had fought with the Allies, some former prisoners of war and some who had escaped malnutrition and ill-treatment by joining the German Army. The Organisation was vulnerable to subversion on two counts; first, the fractious politics of Eastern European emigré associations and secondly, some still had relatives living east of the Iron Curtain. When a Russian Intelligence Service assassin defected in the early 1970s and was identified to have been involved in an émigré organization, in 1973 most Allied security agencies reviewed their subversion threat assessments. Meanwhile, 4 and 5 Security Companies re-aligned their operations closer to developing sources. While ‘intelligence nuisances’ offering questionable information and spiteful denunciations were not uncommon, gems emerged, often generated by motives other than financial gain.
One Ukrainian had been a forced labourer at the V-2 manufacturing complex near the Nordhausen concentration camp in the Harz Mountains. Many of his colleagues were Slavs who converted their hatred of the Nazis into sabotaging the gyroscope bearings with powder and fine sand. But the sabotage was discovered and at every morning parade for several weeks a SS officer arbitrarily executed members of his group. When the Ukrainian was liberated from Belsen, he found employment with the British but then contracted TB and was treated in a military hospital. The sympathetic treatment he received paid dividends in 1973 during investigations into another Ukrainian supplying details of Liebenau Ammunition Compound to a contact in the Russian Intelligence Service in East Berlin. In June, Security Wing used the 51 Security Section offices to mount Operation Stern Post, in which joint Intelligence Corps and West German Security Services operations lifted several suspects in early morning raids. They were taken to Celle for interrogation on matters affecting British military interests before being transferred to the local authorities. One was led away shouting ‘Wait until the T-62s get here!’ Operation Rail Spike in December was directed against several Poles and locally employed civilians suspected of having contact with the Polish Intelligence Service and Polish Military Mission in West Berlin, where a favourite rendezvous was the Beate Uhse sexual appliances shop. So much information was collated over the next four years that it was allotted a separate cover name. When it was suspected that 23 Base Workshops in Wetter, near Dortmund, which repaired and refitted armoured vehicles, had been infiltrated by a hostile intelligence service, in an operation that solidified relationships between British and West German security agencies, an Intelligence Corps staff sergeant specifically posted to Wetter uncovered attempted and actual blackmail of German employees. Among those involved in the subversion was a Greek national. These operations so effectively undermined Mixed Service Organisation subversion that one Ukrainian émigré organization resorted to developing surveillance of its membership. By the 1980s the retirement of older MSO and recruitment of younger refugees recruited in West German resettlement camps saw a less frenetic atmosphere in units.
> In 1972 the Counter-Intelligence Company (Near East Land Forces) in Cyprus reformed as 11 Security Company with the Dhekelia and Episkopi Detachments converted to 111 and 112 Security Sections. Soon after a right wing Junta had seized power in Athens during the year and enosis again threatened, Lieutenant General Grivas clandestinely returned to the island and resurrected EOKA as EOKA-B. In early 1974 links had been established between EOKA-B and the Cypriot National Guard while the pro-Makarios Police Special Tactical Reserve reported increased arms smuggling from Greece. Strained relations between Archbishop Makarios and Greece finally collapsed when Makarios claimed that the National Guard was being subverted by Greek National Contingent officers.
Anxious Turkish-Cypriots could do little but observe as, on 15 July, EOKA-B launched a coup d’etat that saw Makarios replaced as President by the EOKA gunman Nicos Sampson. Learning about the coup a few hours before it broke, 11 Company, deployed its two Security Intelligence detachments outside the Sovereign Base Areas to collect information while the Protective Security element established an intelligence cell to pass information to Joint Intelligence Staff (Near East Land Forces). Amid spreading violence it soon became apparent that the contingency plans to evacuate Service dependants to the Sovereign Base Areas were flawed and 11 Security Company was tasked to help guide convoys. Corporal John Condon and a sergeant from 111 (Dhekelia) Security Section were guiding a convoy from Larnaca to the Eastern Sovereign Base Area when it encountered factional fighting. Condon returned to Lion House, the welfare centre in Larnaca, and, although trapped for the night, he passed information to Commander Dhekelia Area until the next morning. Finding a British combat jacket and United Nations blue beret, he gingerly drove between the opposing forces and reached the perimeter of Eastern Sovereign Base Area, where he used his Special Authorisation Card to persuade a suspicious lieutenant that he was Intelligence Corps. A staff sergeant and a lance corporal from the same section were both captured in Famagusta by a National Guard patrol commanded by a Greek Army officer. Suspected of being Cypriot Intelligence Service, they were robustly interrogated until another Greek officer realized that they were British soldiers. Another pair from 112 (Episkopi) Security Section helped evacuate families from Limassol.
With the Turkish-Cypriot minority at risk from a resurgent EOKA, Turkey invoked the Treaty of Guarantee and intervened on 20 July by a parachute landing north of Nicosia and amphibious forces near Kyrenia, while a ceasefire was agreed on 22 July. Headquarters British Forces needed information on the situation in Kyrenia and Corporal Condon and another from 111 Security Section joined the aircraft-carrier HMS Hermes, which had orders to evacuate about 1,500 tourists and foreign nationals trapped in the town. Using a Land Rover on the pretext of searching for refugees, the pair collected information on the Kyrenia beachhead. Next day, Sampson was replaced by Glafkos Clerides; however, talks between him and the Turkish-Cypriot leader, Rauf Denktash, failed and on 14 August the Turks broke off its beachhead. Corporal Condon was at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Ayios Nikolios, monitoring Greek-Cypriot refugees for spies and terrorist-related individuals fleeing from Famagusta to the tented refugee camp at Athna Forest inside the Eastern Sovereign Base Area. Major Alastair Kennedy at Headquarters, British Forces played a major role in resolving the massive refugee problem. On his second day at the checkpoint, Condon was accompanied by a Greek-Cypriot policeman and a Gurkha private when several Turkish tanks and armoured personnel carriers took up positions on an escarpment. Amid growing refugee panic, a 16th/5th Lancers troop and two sections of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers took up defensive positions while a British officer negotiated with a Turkish officer. In the troop was Trooper Paul Harman, who later transferred to the Corps. In violation of repeated United Nations Security Council Resolutions, Turkey seized about thirty-eight per cent of the island north of a demarcation line from Morphou to Famagusta that was eventually patrolled by the United Nations Forces in Cyprus. The island soon became a hot bed of communist, Palestinian and local intrigue.
Since the emergence of The First 100, many transferees from regiments, more interest was being taken in the heritage of the Intelligence Corps, in particular by the Depot Quartermaster, Lieutenant Colonel Bill Leary BEM, and Major Parritt, then commanding the Depot; however, artefacts and archives were not centralized. The two officers asked Colonel Tom Carter, the Corps Lieutenant Colonel, if they could develop a Corps Museum. However, he said that there was not enough material and anything of interest was bound to be classified. Notwithstanding this rebuff, they approached Colonel Jack Fielder, then commanding the Intelligence School, and he agreed that it would be a good idea. A small building opposite the Guardroom was identified and to disguise its proposed use, it was designated the ‘Recruit Training Room’. Meanwhile artefacts, documents and photographs were being assembled and then one day, the sign ‘Museum’ appeared. For several years, the Museum was organized on a self-help basis and then, on Corps Day in 1970, an important step was taken when Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer formally opened the Intelligence Corps Museum. In its present location at Chicksands, it is recognized to be an Army Museum and has three full time employees.
In 1977 His Royal Highness the Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh accepted the post of Colonel-in-Chief.
For those members of the Intelligence Corps not wearing civilian clothes, the everyday uniform of the bottle green sweater and distinctive green and grey side-hat had been distinctive. When the Army Dress Committee gave the Corps the opportunity to select a distinctive headwear, in a decision that took the Army and members of the Corps by surprise, Lieutenant General Sir Michael Gow, the Colonel Commandant, supported the adoption of the Cypress Green Beret on 1 July 1977. Grey had been the original choice but it clashed with the berets of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards, and Cypress Green, the traditional colour of military intelligence, emerged. The 6 Armoured Brigade and Signal Squadron Sergeant Major in Soest refused to allow the Brigade Intelligence Section to attend the weekly parade in their berets! Captain Chris Holtom, transferring from the Royal Tank Regiment in 1978 and apparently unaware of the new beret, was persuaded by a colleague to buy his Service Dress cap. On 14 October 1981 the Army Dress Committee authorized the Corps to be ‘all beret’ with effect from 1 January 1982. From the colour of the beret emerged the Corps being known as ‘Green Fly’ and ‘Green Slime’.
On 16 May 1979 the Intelligence Corps was awarded the Freedom of Ashford and, in spite of security concerns, a contingent assembled from the United Kingdom, Cyprus, Germany and Northern Ireland paraded through the town, commanded by Major Mark Durman. The previous June the 1939-1945 Roll of Honour was transferred to Ashford Parish from Winchester Cathedral, where it joined a second volume commemorating those who had lost their lives on active service since 1945. Brigadier Parritt recalled in 2011:
While carrying out research for The Intelligencers in the mid-1960s, I came across two facts. The Intelligence Corps War Memorial had been placed for safekeeping in Winchester Cathedral. At the end of the War, the officers and soldiers of the Intelligence Corps had subscribed money, I think about £1,500, towards an Intelligence Corps Chapel. I went to Winchester Cathedral and spoke to the Dean who had no idea that the Intelligence Corps War Memorial was in the Cathedral. He emphasised the marvellous displays recognising the Rifle Brigade and Gurkhas but had no knowledge of an Intelligence Corps Memorial. Eventually, he asked a gentlemen who had worked for a long time in the Cathedral who explained that ‘Yes, indeed the Memorial was in the Cathedral but was sited in a dark corridor outside the main visitor area.’ We discovered that it was a wooden stand beautifully carved with a Roll of Honour placed inside. On returning to Ashford I spoke to the Parish Priest of St Mary’s Church, Canon Sharpe, and asked if he would give room to the Memorial. He agreed, but there was significant opposition from Winchester who now wished to retain the Memorial. Eventually, Major John Burgess, who had taken over from me as OC Depot, went to Winchester with his RSM and brought the Memorial ba
ck to St Mary’s. It was well sited with a flower stand at the side. Each week, Corps wives in rotation would arrange a flower display and a recruit would turn a page.
The Chapel Fund was used to repair carvings on part of the church leading to the Altar and sides of the Choir at St Mary’s. A Corps Badge Memorial was sited behind the Altar. A Corps War Memorial was also placed on the gate leading to St Bartholomew’s Church at Maresfield. During the move from Ashford to Chicksands in 1996, the Roll of Honour was placed in the Church of St James, Garlickhythe, Garlick Hill, London, which had close connections with the Volunteers and the Worshipful Company of Painters-Stainers. A duplicate was placed in the Church in Chicksands. The Museum holds an electronic register of those killed on active service entitled ‘In the Name of the Rose’.
Meanwhile in Northern Ireland, the Provisional IRA Army Council switched its strategy from insurgency to one of the communist-style Long War, backed up by military and economic terrorism in England and Europe designed to persuade the British public to demand the withdrawal of the Army from Northern Ireland, curb investment in Ireland and Ulster and pave the way for an Irish republic governed by a revolutionary council. But the strategy was compromised when the Gardai in Dublin found draft proposals while arresting a hardliner. By 1977 the political three-phase Way Ahead strategy emerged from Stormont; ‘Criminalisation’ of terrorist acts and the removal of Special Category status from paramilitaries convicted of terrorism induced the ‘dirty protests’ in the H blocks at HMP Maze (formerly Long Kesh) that ended with several hunger strikes in the early 1980s. ‘Ulsterization’ saw government returned to Stormont and improvements in cross-border co-operation. ‘Normalization’ led to primacy being returned to the Royal Ulster Constabulary, aided by military support in areas of medium and high risk, for instance, parts of Belfast, South Armagh and East Tyrone. On 14 December the Intelligence Corps suffered its only ‘killed in action’ in Operation Banner when Corporal Paul Harman, aged 27 years and formerly 16/5th Lancers, was ambushed on the Monagh Road in West Belfast. In commemoration, the Harman Trophy replaced the Montgomery Trophy of a Corps round-robin football competition between the Military Intelligence Battalions held over a three-day weekend annually in September at Corps Headquarters. The final kicks off at 2.00pm on the Sunday with the winners presented with a FA Cup-style trophy. A ladies soccer competition was later added to the event. At its height of popularity, the Trophy competition was a date that Directors inked into their diaries and was an important gathering of Corps personnel outside of Corps Day. Fittingly, the first winners were the Force Intelligence Unit (Northern Ireland). Operational security had meant that 12 Intelligence and Security Company had not been mentioned in The Rose and The Laurel until, in 1979, an article described its size and outline of its activities, mentioning that the Corps tradition of a club, namely the Green Fly in Lisburn, had been maintained. Those who served in Northern Ireland will recognize these thoughts;
Sharing the Secret Page 39
