Life in all parts of the Company tends to be intensive – what is this word ‘weekend’ – but the obvious purpose leads to plenty of job satisfaction, which is often the first thing that strikes newcomers. But you know how it is, when you’re busy – you can always manage something more, and we manage to get people away for adventure training as well. This year, members of the Company will have taken part in mountain climbing in Italy, scuba-diving off Devon, gliding, sailing, ski-ing and walking around the Isle of Man. By the way, life would be quite different for many of us if it were not for the support from our wives.
Palestinian and domestic political extremism hardly affected British Forces in West Germany. The Provisional IRA switch to terrorism and consequent attacks on British forces and their dependants in Belgium and West Germany led to Security Wing, Headquarters British Army of the Rhine ordering wide-ranging security reviews that kept both Security Companies busy with Protective Security surveys and inspections, now enhanced in the Manual of Army Security to include ‘Protection from Terrorist Attack’. In Northern Ireland 120 Security Section had played an important role in developing counter-measures. This cryptic comment from 45 Security Section in Rheindahlen reveals much:
…should any of our valued readership come across the elusive “Mr Farrell” whose BMW boot-load of explosives got its fuse wet here in August 1978, thus failing to demolish a NAAFI packed full of families – then do let us know…
Although the West German authorities accepted that Irish extremism was not solely a British problem, the British Security Service Organisation, with some justification, insisted that it was a domestic problem, even though some Intelligence Corps posted from Northern Ireland recognized the same case files. The Organisation also disagreed with Intelligence and Security Group (Germany) that the Corps experience in Northern Ireland could balance German inexperience. In Ashford the Special Intelligence Wing moved into Repton Manor and concentrated largely on Special Duty training in Northern Ireland, Belize and elsewhere.
In the Far East, the disbandment of the Intelligence and Security Group in Singapore in 1970 left 10 Intelligence and Security Company as an independent command in Hong Kong that also supported British military interests in South Korea, Brunei and Nepal. It usually hosted an Australian Intelligence Corps captain and a SNCO and, by 1978, had absorbed three Hong Kong Military Service Corps NCOs into the Corps. Two Field Intelligence NCOs supported the 48 and 51 Gurkha Infantry Brigades patrolling the border until both formations amalgamated into the Gurkha Field Force in the mid-1970s. Its Intelligence Section was soon heavily involved when tides of Chinese illegal immigrants and refugees flowed from Vietnam seeking sanctuary. In 1977 the Company moved from Argyle Street to a new building in Gun Club Barracks. In addition to Security Intelligence investigations, the Company became an important intelligence agency for the Governor when the Royal Hong Kong Police mutinied in 1978 over investigations by the Independent Commission Against Corruption. Several of its investigators were former Corps. The Company was heavily involved providing architect liaison advice to major rationalizations of British Forces, Hong Kong during the mid-1970s, the most complex probably being the transfer of the sprawling Victoria Barracks to the 28-storey Prince of Wales Building at HMS Tamar Naval Base. Using the principles of Protective Security, and Security Intelligence because of hostile intelligence service interest, Captain Hugh Webb, the GSO 3 Security, began the Secure by Design architectural liaison process until day-to-day responsibility was transferred to Staff Sergeant van der Bijl, then with the Hong Kong Island Detachment. He then spent the next two years overseeing the security requirements, which included liaising with UK and Hong Kong government organizations from the Public Works Department site office, where his seat was a lavatory bowl, and ensuring that equipment and security furniture sent from UK was not compromised. His wife Penny (formerly Lance Corporal Weaver, Training Wing, Intelligence and Security Group, Germany) was employed in Q Quartering, which had direct responsibility for the project, and typed in the specifications that the ‘Officers’ Mess will have French widows in the ante room’–as opposed to ‘French windows’. Members of 10 Intelligence and Security Company brought up the rearguard when Victoria Barracks, which included Flagstaff House and the underground command post, was evacuated by carrying out final security sweeps. Also involved in the project were the HQ British Forces Security Officers. Throughout, support was given to the HMS Tamar Royal Naval Liaison Office.
The final act of 10 Intelligence and Security Company was to cover the military withdrawal before Hong Kong was handed to the People’s Republic of China in 1997. This left the only Intelligence Corps in the Far East to be those on loan to the Royal Brunei Armed Forces.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Regular Years The 1980s
Failures attract much more attention that successes
Paul Crick
Northern Ireland
In 1980, Major General James Glover, then Director, Defence Intelligence Staff and previously Commander, Land Forces Northern Ireland, predicted in his assessment Operation Banner in Northern Ireland: Future Terrorist Trends that the Army would remain in Northern Ireland until the mid-1980s. He suggested that in relation to the Provisional IRA that if the word ‘terrorist’ was substituted by ‘soldier’, his comments about it could equally refer to an Allied army. Growing politicisation within the republican movement led to the Provisional spokesman Danny Morrison famously asking in 1981,
‘Who here really believes we can win the war through the ballot box? But will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in one hand and an Armalite in this hand, we can take power?’
Over the next decade, force levels generally remained at about 10,500 divided into six resident, four roulement and several Ulster Defence Regiments battalions controlled by 8 and 39 Infantry Brigades. In the meantime, 3 Infantry Brigade had been disbanded, its operational area transferred to 39 Brigade. In 1980, one in eight Regular soldiers was directly involved in intelligence activities and the quality of the product sufficiently good that for two years at the end of the decade, the Provisionals were prevented from mounting a bombing campaign in Belfast.
Operation Banner: An Analysis of Military Operations in Northern Ireland, was prepared in 2006 under the direction of General Sir Mike Jackson, who had initially been commissioned in the Intelligence Corps before joining the Parachute Regiment and was Chief of the General Staff. It describes how three elements of the conventional four-phase Manouevrist Approach strategy of Find (identifying those involved), Fix (with surveillance) and Strike (arrest or interdiction), interfaced with framework operations – such as patrols, vehicle check points and searches – denied the terrorists room to manoeuvre. The final stage, Exploitation (using propaganda) was not widely used by the Army.
With the Way Ahead strategy firmly established, the Security Forces essentially now held the line to give politics a chance. In Operation Tonnage, bases were target-hardened against mortar and missile attacks. Weapons Intelligence tracked the development of IRA mortars that eventually ranged from Mark 1 ‘copper tube and 6in nail’ in the early 1970s to Mark 15 industrial gas tubes ‘Barrackbusters’. The nature of terrorist mortar attacks meant that fire control was limited and overshoots causing co-lateral damage not unknown. Brigade Headquarters developed meticulous plans for the convoys transporting plant and construction material to sites with battalions providing route and flank protection. Imagery Intelligence played a vital role in plotting main supply routes diversions and plotting potential obstacles, such as telegraph lines and pylons, pinch points, for example, the obstacles of bridges and crossroads, and identifying ambush sites of culverts and embankments. International protocols surrounding surveillance of the border were solved by a chain of watchtowers. Elsewhere, purpose-built observation posts, generally fitted with Information Technology terminals and cameras, replaced the breeze block and corrugated iron bunkers equipped with radio or field telephone. International intelligence co-op
eration had established that the IRA had acquired Semtex explosive, 12.7mm DShK Soviet machine guns and SA-7 Grail surface-to-air missiles from Libya to add to their arsenal of RPG-7s and Projected Recoilless Improvised Grenades. Several consignments were intercepted by foreign customs operations.
West Germany
In West Germany, a British Security Service Organisation suggestion that British nationals were not prime IRA targets was rather undermined in February 1980 when Colonel Mark Coe (late Royal Engineers) was shot dead outside his Bielefeld married quarter. As the Provisional IRA strategy switched from insurgency to terrorism and spread to Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, HQ Intelligence and Security Group (Germany) re-reformed 2 Intelligence Company and enhanced Human Intelligence by attaching a section to each Company. It also supported West German counter-terrorist operations monitoring relationships between the IRA and domestic urban guerillas and hostile intelligence services. By 1983, the need for timely and accurate intelligence led to the adoption of Operational Security by combining Human, Signals and Photographic Intelligence with Protective Security, a philosophy designed to prevent the discovery of the three-stage Security Intelligence strategy of assessing the threat, installing counter-measures and systematic Protective Security assessments.
Security Intelligence operations against hostile intelligence services continued. Defector information was always useful. Debriefs of regular travellers employed by British Forces, Germany allowed military intelligence to be updated established that one in every ten reported direct approaches. One East German intelligence officer shocked a woman by describing her employment and a recent car crash and then attempted to trap her into blackmail by suggesting that she supply telephone directories, staff lists and information on forthcoming exercises. On returning to West Germany, she agreed to be played back by her local security section, which gave Security Wing the opportunity to ask questions and enhance its understanding of East German targeting. Travellers visiting relatives in and near the Permanently Restricted Areas out of bounds to the British Military Mission, in particular the Letzlinger Heide training area, regularly returned with information of value to Intelligence Wing. For years, Allied intelligence agencies suspected that East European commercial transport entering West Germany collected information about NATO activity. A British executive employed in a company trading deliveries of raw materials transported on Moscow-based Sovtransavto vehicles and talent spotted by an Intelligence Corps officer serving in Headquarters 1st Armoured Division in Verden, supplied sufficient information that enabled Security Wing to collate driver details and plot delivery routes, some of which passed through Permanent Restricted Areas out of bounds to the Soviet Military Mission. A source working for an import/export firm in Hamburg that was part-owned by a Russian, collected information on the movement of shipping containers, but a major failure in both instances was that civilian intelligence consumers failed to ask specific questions for future tasking.
Subversion of British military personnel was unusual but not unknown. During the mid-1970s, an investigation into the loss of classified information during an exercise that had apparently occurred in the thirty yards between a command post and a vehicle found that the individual responsible had fallen into a ‘honey trap’ while attending a sports scholarship in Moscow. During the 1980s, Operation Memphis was activated whenever evidence emerged that a Serviceman married to a German or a locally-employed civilian with relatives in Eastern Europe had been targeted because of their access to specific information. After a military Russian interpreter was asked to supply a copy of Jane’s All the Worlds Tanks, a BAOR newspaper and an out-of-date military telephone directory protected by a low classification, 2 Intelligence Company and a civilian security agency ran the counter-intelligence. During another meeting, the interpreter was asked to supply the names of Intelligence Corps living in a Sergeants Mess. After he had been posted to Northern Ireland and was then contacted, a plan was devised to expose IRA connections with the Soviet Consulate in Dublin, Intelligence Corps advice to a civilian security agency that the Russians and East Germans would not meet the interpreter in West Berlin, because it was too dangerous, was rejected. The operation collapsed. When an East German intelligence officer approached a former soldier married to a German who regularly visited her East German aunt, his wife displayed considerable aptitude when she persuaded the East German to visit the Soviet War Memorial in Berlin and insisted on taking photographs. In the words of the Intelligence Corps officer running the operation ‘You can see the pained expression on his face as he tried to smile and weep softly at the same time.’ The photographs confirmed other travellers had been approached by the same East German.
Out of Area Operations
Intelligence and Security Group (United Kingdom) supported several Out of Area Operations, sometimes at short notice but always mindful that there was a requirement to keep the demands of Northern Ireland at full strength.
When the Rhodesian bid for Unilateral Independence collapsed in 1980, six Intelligence Corps joined the Commonwealth Monitoring Force in Operation Agila to supervise the ceasefire between the Rhodesian Armed Forces, who were confined to barracks, and the Patriotic Front dispersed in thirty-nine rendezvous points and fourteen assembly areas. Three collated intelligence at HQ Monitoring Force while the remainder collected information in a country the size of France.
Between 1983 and 1984, a contingent of seven Intelligence Corps supported Commander, British Forces, Lebanon in Beirut when a multinational force intervened during the civil war after the Israeli invasion. A sergeant was posted to the British Embassy and the remainder were on port and airfield security and intelligence collection, often under fire from the warring factions and insurgents from Syria.
One long-running, commitment was Belize. Shipwrecked English sailors first landed in 1638 and induced tension with Spanish loggers from their colony of Honduras throughout the 18th Century, not that the loggers settled in British Honduras. When the neighbouring Guatemala insisted in 1961 that the colony was an ‘associated state’, diplomatic relations collapsed and three years later, Britain took control of British Honduran internal security, foreign affairs and defence by deploying an infantry company. In 1973, in anticipation of independence and in spite of the persistent ‘Belice es Guatemala’, British Honduras was renamed Belize. The origins of the name are unclear with some suggesting it originates from the Mayan word be’lix, meaning ‘muddy water’, as applied to the Belize River. With the principal threat being military from Guatemala, others were subversion of the Mayan from fundamental religious bodies and the activities of intelligence services, not necessarily hostile. By 1977, the British military presence had increased to a 1,500-strong battle group supported by Harriers, Army and RAF helicopters, the Belize Defence Force and a Royal Navy guard ship lurking offshore. The annual Exercise Montezuma’s Revenge in about October saw a UK-based battle group test the defence of Belize. Force Intelligence was usually reinforced from Intelligence and Security Group (United Kingdom).
Intelligence Corps representation at HQ British Forces Belize in Airport Camp included the GSO 2 (Intelligence) and the Force Intelligence and Security Section, most on six month rotations, a few on two year tours. Intelligence sources included infantry patrols scouting the jungle and visiting Mayan villages, the armoured reconnaissance squadron, observation posts, such as Cadenas in the far south-west overlooking a Guatemalan camp, and the Joint Service Signals Unit, which had several Spanish-speaking Intelligence Corps, providing Signals Intelligence.
Initially, there were two Field Intelligence NCOs with one (West) accommodated in a bungalow at San Ignacio, not far from Salamanca Camp and covering the border crossing point. The Field Intelligence NCO (South) lived in the ‘cowboy town’ of Punta Gorda in the southern district of Toledo supporting the Battle Group HQ at Rideau Camp. As Great Britain discussed dual sovereignty during the early 1980s during several years of intense tension in Central America, a third Field intelligen
ce NCO (South West) was established to provide an intelligence tripwire in the Mayan villages along the south-western border. Most undertook specialist training at Repton Manor and several completed intensive Spanish language courses at the South Bank Polytechnic at the Elephant and Castle, London followed by conversation with a native Spanish speaker before deployment. Their wartime role was counter-intelligence support to the Battle Group HQ and combat teams in the north. As had been practiced in Borneo and Northern Ireland, the Field Intelligence NCOs worked closely with Special Branch and since both covered two important points of entry from Guatemala, they applied Travel Control Security principles. The volatility of regional tension and communist subversion in Central America saw Belize being seen as an oasis of security and tranquility for backpackers. Most were keen observers and a mine of information about the volatile geo-politics of the region. The Field Intelligence NCO (South) masqueraded as an immigration official when the twice weekly launch arrived at Punta Gorda with backpackers and traders from Puerto Barrios. When two from Crossmaglen in Northern Ireland appeared at Punta Gorda in 1980, the Field Intelligence NCO was suddenly absent from the Customs office.
Sharing the Secret Page 40
