Tony Beasley’s next mission to the Arctic Circle, ‘Operation Sanjak’, was yet more eventful. In July 1955 HMS Turpin had been loitering off the Soviet coast for over two weeks, but was experiencing problems with its elint equipment. Reception was good while the submarine was stationary, but not when it was in motion. They moved to the western edge of their patrol area so they could surface and see what was wrong. After a perilous climb up the submarine fin in a rolling sea, the problem, which proved to be a cross-threaded aerial, was resolved and Turpin submerged once more to complete the last few days of her patrol. The elint profiles of several radars from their intercept target list had already been collected, and with only two days to go they picked up an unusual contact. Commander Coote decided to chase this contact to the edge of their permitted area, moving closer to the coast than was allowed under their strict operating rules. Suddenly, Beasley intercepted an ‘X band’ radar very close to them, and picked up a contact dead ahead. The Turpin crash dived immediately.
All four sigint operators now reported multiple contacts. They were under attack. The warning was superfluous, since the propellers of several ships were quite audible as they passed directly over the submarine. Then came the horrible sounds of splashes. These were depth charges. Beasley recalls:
The first depth charge exploded way under our depth of 120 feet, followed by others, from different directions. A rather loud ‘clunk’ on our forward casing was followed by an enormous explosion which shook the boat, followed by others at a greater depth. Another depth charge exploded close above us rocking the boat much as before…Depth charging continued for longer than I care to remember.
Commander Coote took the submarine deeper and deeper, levelling off at their safety limit of 280 feet. Here they felt relatively secure, and decided not to move, relying on the cold water to render the Soviet sonar ineffective. However, they were painfully conscious that they were drifting in a strong current towards an area marked on their chart as being a probable Soviet minefield.
As they drifted away from the action the depth charges fell further and further away from their position. In the control room everyone sat in silence, wondering what was next. Further shocks were not long in coming. They heard strange rasping sounds running down the side of the hull, followed by a ‘twang’ as if a wire had been caught and had then come free. Some thought the noises were caused by pieces of ice, but they then realised they had entered the minefield, and that it was the hawsers that attached the mines to the sea bed to keep them from floating away that were scraping the Turpin’s sides. It was high time to cease drifting, set a course and pull away.
After a long run south they surfaced off the coast of Norway, and the crew inspected the damage. The periscopes and snorkel were grotesquely bent and completely unusable. Indeed, Turpin had been stripped of a large part of its extremities by the multiple blasts of the depth charges. Guardrails, aerials, the sensors and much of the tail fin had also been blown away. Most dramatically, the starboard outer casing had been torn apart, leaving a thirty-foot gash which in one place was three feet deep. However, the diesel engines were undamaged, and they headed for home, albeit with rather uncertain steering. Having lost their aerials, they could not communicate. Eventually they found a trawler out from Kingston-upon-Hull which relayed a message, allowing a rendezvous with a submarine depot ship, HMS Maidstone, which provided much-needed supplies of food and fresh water.
Returning to HMS Mercury, they were given a week’s leave. The four sparkers were then debriefed in person by Lieutenant Commander Harry Selby-Bennett, the Controller of naval sigint operations. After being briefly congratulated on a successful mission, they were told to their surprise that for reasons of ‘continuity’ of monitoring the Soviet transmissions they were about to board HMS Totem for a mission that would last another eight weeks. Understandably perhaps, Tony Beasley had now had his fill of submarines, which he had never volunteered for. Eventually he transferred to the Provost Branch, the Royal Navy’s police service, to complete his naval service of sixteen years.32
Until 1956, Cabinet Ministers remained blissfully unaware of Britain’s intelligence ‘incidents’, including the two perilous missions of HMS Turpin in 1955. As a result the British remained more relaxed about forward operations than their American counterparts. By contrast the American intelligence community strained on a tight leash held by the State Department, and indeed President Eisenhower himself. However, all that was about to change. In April 1956 a single strange episode in Portsmouth harbour ensured that the situation was quickly reversed. Thereafter, growing hesitancy in Whitehall shifted the momentum in the world of sigint special operations away from Britain towards the United States. The turning point was the infamous ‘Buster’ Crabb incident. This offered Cabinet Ministers a first-hand glimpse of the sheer scale of political embarrassment that could be generated by bungled surveillance operations.
In April 1956 the Soviet cruiser Ordjoninkidze carried the Soviet Premier, Nikolai Bulganin, and Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the Soviet Communist Party, on a goodwill visit to Britain. Despite some robust exchanges between the Soviets and Anthony Eden, Churchill’s successor as Prime Minister, the visit went well, and the Soviet delegation departed on 27 April 1956. However, even as it left the press had begun to speculate about the mysterious disappearance of a British naval diver, Commander Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb RNVR, in the vicinity of the visiting Soviet cruiser. Fourteen months later, in June 1957, a headless and handless body in a diving suit was recovered from the sea near Pilsey Island in the English Channel. Over the years, lurid tales of possible KGB abduction or beheading have circulated. However, newly released intelligence files show that Crabb was almost certainly killed by being drawn through the ship’s propellers. Churning the propellers at intervals was a standard defence against inquisitive divers whose presence was regularly suspected during such visits.
Buster Crabb had been the lead man on ‘Operation Claret’, an attempt by SIS to gain intelligence from the underwater inspection of the cruiser. He was one of the Royal Navy’s most experienced divers, and despite being demobbed in 1948 he was often recalled to help with difficult dives, including rescue work on submarines lost in accidents. Even at this early stage of the Cold War, such secret operations required political approval. But in this instance the system had broken down. The SIS officer who was tasked with securing the clearance for Operation Claret had suffered a family bereavement and had left the office before it had been obtained. His colleagues presumed that the green light had been given, but in fact it had not. The first rule of intelligence management – having political clearance – had been broken, and the cost for the whole British intelligence community was high.33
What mattered to Eden was the public furore and the humiliation he suffered in the House of Commons. Not only had SIS bungled an unapproved mission, it also failed to cover its tracks. Despite the clumsy efforts of the local Special Branch to hide the evidence, including ripping out pages from the register of the hotel where Crabb had stayed, the press was soon on the trail. Journalists quickly established that this was an SIS mission, and that no ministerial authority had been given. Hugh Gaitskell, the leader of the opposition, enjoyed taunting his opponent on the issue. Eden was furious and decided to take disciplinary action, telling the Ministers concerned to order their staff to cooperate fully with the ensuing investigation. This process cast a long shadow over all the intelligence agencies, and ushered in an era of closer political control over special operations of every kind.34
The head of the inquiry, Sir Edward Bridges, a somewhat nineteenth-century figure, employed the JIC to help him ferret out all aspects of the Crabb incident. As a former Cabinet Secretary, Bridges identified ‘certain questions’ of a broader nature. While intrusive intelligence operations clearly had a capacity to cause international repercussions, the systems for their authorisation were unclear.35 Bridges recommended a broader inquiry reviewing all of Britain’s strategic intelligence and
surveillance activities, and assessing ‘the balance between military intelligence on the one hand, and civil intelligence and political risks on the other’. Eden gave this job to Sir Norman Brook, the current Cabinet Secretary, working with Patrick Dean, Chairman of the JIC.36 This review had immediate consequences for intelligence. In April 1956, coinciding with Khrushchev’s visit to Britain, some of the first examples of the CIA’s high-flying U-2 spy planes had arrived at RAF Lakenheath. These aircraft were mostly known for their work with high-altitude photography, but some of their missions were also sigint-orientated. Eden now decided that this, and a host of other special operations, had to stop, and the U-2s were sent to alternative bases in Germany.37
Eden’s angry response had some unintended benefits. In 1952 Sir Stewart Menzies, Chief of SIS, had retired and was replaced by General Sir John Sinclair. The mediocre Sinclair had previously been Director of Military Intelligence, and while he was more competent than his predecessor, he was not a moderniser. He was now fired as a result of the Crabb incident; after the multiple inquiries he was pleased to go, and confessed to a friend in the sigint community that things were ‘getting too hot for me’. In the summer of 1956 Eden plumped for Sir Dick White, hitherto the Director General of MI5, as the new Chief of SIS.
White was a man of enormous energy, and a forward thinker. Together with his SIS staff officer, Harry ‘Shergy’ Shergold, he set about dragging SIS kicking and screaming into the mid-twentieth century. For the first time in almost two decades the organisation had an effective manager at the top, and it now developed into a really effective service.38 White’s arrival also marked the formal end of SIS influence over sigint. Sinclair was the last Chief of SIS to chair the London Signals Intelligence Board, Britain’s highest sigint authority; this duty passed to Eric Jones, the Director of GCHQ.39
Eden’s review was bad news for sigint special operations. As we have seen, no less secret than the spy flights were the submarine missions. These were now being conducted by the British and the Americans on the basis of mutual exchange, swapping product for product. However, Eden’s anger at the Buster Crabb incident meant that British submarine operations were cancelled. British officers in Washington spoke of their embarrassment that their half of the transatlantic deal could not be delivered on, warning that British efforts would soon be eclipsed by American submarine commanders in the Atlantic, who were pushing ahead ‘so as not to be outdone by the Pacific submariners’. Like Bletchley Park and Enigma a decade before, British Naval Intelligence wanted to keep its dominant position in the game of European submarine sigint. It urged not only that the programme be restored, but that it be followed by ‘a bigger and better operation’.40
As predicted, by the end of 1956 the US Navy was indeed beginning its own independent sigint operations off Murmansk. Initially the American Office of Naval Intelligence had decided that the British were not even to be informed. However, they eventually realised that it would be foolhardy not to draw on the more extensive British experience of similar operations in these waters. Commander John Coote, who had been on the Murmansk run several times with the Turpin, and had joined the Americans on the USS Stickleback in the Pacific, was called in to brief the first American crew. This was on the understanding that he told no other British naval officers in Washington. These new American submarine intelligence operations off Murmansk had been triggered by two factors. First, the cancellation of British operations. Second, and ironically, the US Navy had used the reports of previous British intelligence operations in the region to persuade the State Department that ‘the risks of detection are negligible’. Admiral Robert Elkins, the senior British naval officer in Washington, warned First Sea Lord Admiral Mountbatten that British intelligence prestige, which was currently high, would soon suffer ‘unless we resume these activities ourselves’.41
In 1957 a new Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, came to the rescue. Intrusive operations using British aircraft, ships and submarines for sigint and photography were gradually resumed. Between 1956 and 1960, twenty U-2 aircraft were involved in overflights, often from British bases. Some of these even used British pilots. Most of the deep-penetration flights were launched from Adana in Turkey, staging through Pakistan, and six RAF pilots were based there. By 1957, Britain’s elite Super-T submarines were gradually emerging from under the shadow of the Crabb incident, and were back in action on their perilous runs against the Soviet Northern Fleet.
In September 1957, HMS Taciturn took its turn to head north on what were routinely eight-week secret patrols. Most of the files relating to these highly secret missions remain closed. However, fortunately for us this ‘mystery trip’ was recorded by Michael Hurley, a young submariner, in what was undoubtedly an illegal personal diary. Setting sail from Portsmouth on 4 September, Commander Morris J. O’Connor chose not to tell his crew about the nature of the voyage until they were under way. Two days later, the crew were briefed. They were ‘going to snoop on the Russian Fleet exercises’ in the Arctic, and if they were detected it would be ‘very unpleasant and most dangerous’. O’Connor explained that they would be running submerged most of the time, and would keep radio silence. On their return they were to say nothing of their mission, ‘not even to wives and mothers’, since this would be ‘a wartime patrol’. After practising against a convenient British anti-submarine exercise off the Scottish coast, they took on more supplies at Greenock naval base in western Scotland and headed for the Arctic Circle. Extra personnel had come on board to assist with the listening, necessitating ‘hot bunking’ and meaning that water was in short supply.42
On 24 September they were able to get quite close to a Soviet submarine, and were able to record its signature over a period of more than an hour. Listening was undertaken by a special team led by Lieutenant Commander George Lucas, a fluent Russian-speaker whom Hurley described as ‘fat, foreign looking with a slight accent’. However, the following day it was clear that they had been sighted, since ‘a large number of aircraft plus two or three destroyers searched for us’. O’Connor had strict written orders that in such circumstance the Taciturn should turn back and head for home. Aircraft continued to search for them as they made their way south. On 3 October they reached the safety of Faslane naval base on the west coast of Scotland, and ‘a package’, presumably the sigint recordings, was ‘whisked off to Prestwick airport’ and flown to the United States for analysis.43
Michael Hurley was back on special operations six months later, with a further trip into Arctic waters. With much the same crew and the obligatory ‘special team’ on board they sailed down the Clyde and into open water on 13 March 1958. The extra personnel on board meant that water supply was again a problem. The special passengers consisted of the familiar Commander Lucas, who turned out to be Polish, together with a ‘boffin’ from the Underwater Development Establishment called Dr Newman and an American officer called Lieutenant Block. There were also two further communications intelligence specialists, including a Canadian. The routine was now familiar, diving deep by day and attempting to ‘snort’ by night, although this was often interrupted by Soviet aircraft. Snow storms provided ideal cover for the use of the snorkel. The very cold exterior water temperature meant that icy drops of condensation continually fell on the crew. The American officer took his turn at watches, and his distinctive voice on the Tannoy was a source of amusement. Dr Newman spent much of his time in the special sound room located in the Taciturn’s expanded hull, working on sigint collection.44
On 28 March they moved in close to the Soviet coast, and began to encounter more signals traffic. The next day, they ‘got some good recordings’ and managed to take some film footage of peculiar ‘bullet shaped’ aircraft that they did not recognise, and thought were possibly prototypes. On 2 April Hurley noted in his diary that they were well inside an inlet, with land less than a mile away all around. He could see Soviet radar installations silhouetted on the coast, and wrote, ‘We are actually at the entrance to a harbour.’45 If
they were discovered here, there was little chance of escape, and Hurley realised that this was perilous work indeed.46 By 3 April they had moved away from the coast and were in open water at periscope depth, busy making good recordings of two destroyers, a Skory class and a Kola class, together with some escorts, which were exercising. Hurley records what happened next:
Then suddenly out of the sun astern another Skory appeared coming towards us. We went down to 120ft. On Husk [a listening system] we could hear him coming as the sound of his engines grew louder. We went to Diving Stations and Defence State One (just in case), she passed right overhead like an express train went on a little then made a sharp turn and came back towards us again. As she did so she dropped three charges which seemed of course very loud…
The Taciturn went deep, down to 220 feet, and the Soviet ship moved away. Remarkably, a little later they came up and began recording the same vessels, although at a safer distance from both their quarry and the shore.47 By 16 April they were on their way home. A week later they surfaced for the first time in thirty-four days. The Taciturn reached Faslane naval base four days later, to be greeted by a visibly relieved head of submarine operations. Radio silence meant that for two months no one knew the fate of submarines on these missions.48
By the late 1950s the Super-Ts, once the most advanced boats the Navy could field, were suffering the wear and tear from long patrols. Commanders would now refer to ‘a shaky old T-boat’. Turpin, for example, had an elderly diesel engine for surface propulsion, in this case taken from another submarine, which had already seen twelve thousand hours of service. In 1957, while on an operation in the Atlantic, the main engine gave up the ghost and the Turpin suffered the indignity of being towed by an Admiralty tug for some five thousand miles.
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