GCHQ
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‘Buccaneering’ was the right term for this kind of work. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a new task for Britain’s communications security experts was protecting embassy code rooms against piratical raids by the enemy. The most sophisticated plot was launched by the KGB in Moscow in the autumn of 1964, when a low-frequency radio beam was used to induce a malfunction in a teleprinter in the code room of the British Embassy, causing a small fire.33 Roderic Braithwaite, one of Britain’s most senior intelligence officials, recalls that within minutes the building was ‘surrounded by alleged Soviet firemen’; however, it was ‘pretty obvious that some of these people were not firemen at all’. They were in fact bugging technicians from the KGB’s sigint department, the highly secret Eighth Directorate. The Ambassador, Humphrey Trevelyan, was called out of a performance by the visiting English National Opera at a Moscow theatre.34 He arrived at the Embassy to discover that the valiant British code-room staff had barricaded the door and were successfully fighting off the ‘furious’ KGB firemen, while others tried to extinguish the fire. One of the KGB officers recalls that it was ‘a real Mexican stand-off’. Privately, the KGB sigint team were enormously impressed by this dedication to duty, and one of them later declared that it was a wonderful display of ‘British stiff upper lip’. When the code room was rebuilt all the materials, including the bricks and concrete, were brought out from Britain, sealed and guarded in diplomatic trucks.35
There were even more serious problems for British diplomats in Mao Tse-tung’s China. The country was undergoing a vast political convulsion known as the ‘Cultural Revolution’, a frenzy of extreme – almost anarchic – activity by radical student groups and self-appointed ‘Red Guards’. In August 1967 they began attacking and ransacking diplomatic premises, including the British Embassy in Peking. Percy Cradock, the Ambassador, remembers the mob banging on the Embassy windows shouting ‘Kill! Kill!’ At one point the whole Embassy staff thought they were going to be burned with petrol, but in the event they were merely pulled out of the building and beaten. ‘I was swept along by the mob,’ recounts Cradock, ‘and beaten mainly about the shoulders and back.’ After they were released the staff were able to destroy classified papers that had survived in one of the strong rooms. The Foreign Office security specialists had provided them with ‘a remarkable chemical compound’ in the form of a powder that apparently only needed to be scattered on the files and left for a period in order to reduce them to ashes. They followed the instructions on the tin, and retreated to a safe distance:
Unfortunately when we returned we found the files neatly charred around the edges, rather like funeral stationery, but still perfectly legible. And there was a side effect of which we had not been warned: powerful tenacious fumes had been generated, turning the strong-room into an effective gas-chamber.36
The files were eventually taken out and burned by hand. However, the staff had been unable to protect the Embassy Communications Centre, which contained cypher machines and materials. Only the generators survived intact.37 Mingled in with the revolutionary mob was a specialist team of Chinese code experts. An SIS officer stationed in Peking at the time recalls: ‘They knew exactly what they were looking for.’38 Communications security experts in London later confirmed the Chinese success, lamenting that they had acquired a Rockex, one of Britain’s top-grade post-war cypher machines.39
Following this attack, Britain routed its classified telegram traffic to Peking through the nearby French Embassy. Although the French were ‘simply splendid’, the duty cypher clerks at the Quai d’Orsay in Paris struggled with the high volume of daily traffic. The British also recognised that the French were ‘scared stiff of a leak’, which might trigger Chinese revolutionary action against their Embassy in Peking. British Embassy staff in Paris, who were part of the new conduit for telegrams to London, took the precaution of never mentioning the matter on the telephone line between Paris and London, even though ‘(as far as we know) only the French authorities are likely to have tapped it’. The real problem was which Frenchmen knew about the back-channel arrangement. It turned out that even the President had not been told, so the French diplomats were ‘apprehensive of the resentment as much of General de Gaulle as of Chairman Mao’.40
The Americans had suffered a similar code-room raid in Taiwan ten years before. There had been a riot outside their Embassy in Taipei, which had been penetrated. Cryptographic material had been taken after ‘the walls of the code room were broken through with sledgehammers’. Some one hundred rotors for cypher machines were also taken, although many were later recovered from the Embassy grounds after the intruders fled. No one had believed that the Embassy code room would be penetrated until it was too late to destroy the cryptographic equipment. While the cypher team claimed that they had locked the safe containing the crucial rotors, the evidence indicated that in fact they had not done so, since the safe was open but showed no sign of damage.41
All new buildings, whether embassies abroad or intelligence headquarters at home, were now a massive communications security headache for both the British and the Americans.42 When SIS moved from Broadway Buildings near St James’s Park to its new tower-block site at Century House in Westminster Road in 1966, about a quarter of the refurbishment costs were for communications security work, including soundproofing and double windows.43 Even worse was the problem of new embassy buildings in Communist countries. The gradual thawing of the Cold War in the 1960s, followed by a process of ‘détente’, led to the British recognition of East Germany. All of a sudden there was a need to develop a new British Embassy in East Berlin. From the outset it was assumed that this building would be a major target for the East German Intelligence Service, which was known to use the most sophisticated technical devices.44
James Reeve, the Ambassador Designate, was given the task of locating a suitable building for the new embassy, his choice governed largely by communications security anxieties. Accommodation was in short supply in East Berlin, and to his dismay the only premises that would fit the bill were an apartment block fronted by a rather garish shop selling ladies’ lingerie. Reeve feared that the placing of one of Her Majesty’s Embassies over such an establishment ‘would doubtless attract amused comment if not criticism’. Nevertheless, security ruled all, and work on converting the upper floors of the building into an embassy went ahead. Reeve recalls:
While this preparatory building work was underway, we had no doubt that various pieces of spying equipment such as fibre optics and listening devices were also being installed. Our own installation of physical security and alarm systems at the Embassy, as well as the construction of an inner-casing sound-insulated conference room, were undertaken by direct British labour with the material brought across from West Berlin.
The shell of the specially insulated conference room required several tons of cement. Reeve hoped fervently that the administrators of the building had given the correct load-bearing figures for the floors, ‘or otherwise the lingerie shop below would be in for a surprise’.45
A team of nine technicians had made their way from Hanslope Park to the construction site in East Berlin.46 Months of hard work lay ahead. Dealing with the bugging threat was the major task, and the first stage was for all the old communications wiring to be stripped out of the building from the second floor up.47 They then created a temporary room that was impervious to radio waves, called a ‘Belling Lee’, to shield their cypher equipment, before building a more permanent shielded cypher room. They also installed a ‘cocktail noise’-generating system to block surveillance devices, and supervised the construction of the secure conference facility, which they called the ‘speech safe room’.48 After the ransacking of the cypher room in the Peking Embassy in 1967, they worried that the building might be quickly overrun by an orchestrated riot, so they provided cypher-equipment destruction kits.49 Despite all these elaborate precautions, James Reeve recalls that there were still moments during his tour of service in Berlin that reminded him of what he
delicately called ‘the need for circumspection in office conversation’. One day he was about to head out to a meeting at the East German Ministry of Foreign Affairs. At the very last moment he decided to take an expanded delegation of five colleagues, rather than the previously announced team of three. When they arrived, a tray with five coffee cups was already waiting for them.50
Embassy wars – a feverish battle with bugs and telephone taps – were a dominant theme that connected the 1950s and the 1960s. Over a period of twenty years, diplomatic missions ceased to be elegant salons peacefully advancing their nations’ interests and were gradually transformed into technical fortresses from which espionage was both launched and repelled. Ironically, as the Cold War moved from a period of intense hostility, symbolised by figures such as Stalin, towards the possibility of détente under a new generation of leaders such as Khrushchev, the increased diplomatic interaction between East and West only offered yet more possibilities for electronic espionage.
Other important changes were now visible. In the 1950s, GCHQ’s Director Eric Jones had enjoyed tremendous success in the new field of elint, often as the result of daring operations that pushed submarines and aircraft to their very limit. In the 1960s his successor, Clive Loehnis, faced new challenges. Aircraft and submarines were still important, but looked increasingly vulnerable. Meanwhile, computers and satellites were coming to the fore as the new wonder weapons of high-tech espionage. GCHQ’s partners in America were running a billion-dollar business, and the code-breakers of Cheltenham were anxiously wondering how they would manage to keep up
.
THE 1960s
SPACE, SPY SHIPS AND SCANDALS
11
Harold Macmillan – Shootdowns, Cyphers and Spending
It seems to me these things may become very dangerous.
Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to Foreign Secretary
Alec Douglas-Home, 1 August 19601
At 8 o’clock on the morning of 1 May 1960, Captain Igor Mentyukov was standing quietly at a bus stop in the small town of Perm, two hundred miles north of Sverdlovsk in central Russia. Mentyukov was a top fighter pilot – but there was no flying scheduled today, since this was May Day, a major holiday for all the Soviet people. Quite unexpectedly, one of the ground crew from the nearby airbase rushed up and told him to report for immediate action. An American U-2 spy plane was even now heading in their direction, and the orders from Soviet Air Defence Command were to shoot it down. Minutes later, arriving breathless alongside a Sukhoi SU-9 fighter, the latest model to enter service, Mentyukov was dismayed to discover that it was unarmed. His commander explained apologetically that there had not been time to load any ammunition or missiles. Moscow was now insisting that he take off immediately in civilian clothes and ram the intruder. ‘Take care of my wife and mother,’ he muttered glumly in the last moments before take-off.2
His target was a CIA U-2 spy plane, piloted by Gary Powers. The U-2 was effectively a rocket-powered glider that was capable of cruising at over seventy thousand feet, making it immune to air defences, and was used to collect both photography and sigint over Russia. The U-2 had entered service in 1956, and its pilots had flown more than twenty successful missions; however, Soviet technology was catching up. Mentyukov’s new SU-9 fighter engaged afterburners from the moment of take-off, turning it into a veritable rocket. When he finished his momentous climb he was very close to Powers, but his high speed caused him to overshoot. Somewhat relieved to find that he was already perilously low on fuel, he was excused the more demanding part of his mission and was ordered back to base.3
About ten minutes later, Powers came within range of a Soviet surface-to-air missile battery. Three missiles were launched. One missed its target, the second destroyed a hapless Soviet MiG-19 that was speeding towards the intruder, but the third exploded just under the U-2, badly damaging its tail and sending it into a spin. Powers made an inelegant exit from the doomed aircraft, failed to press the self-destruct mechanism that would have destroyed its cameras, and was saved by his parachute, which deployed automatically. Later that day the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, was delighted to discover that not only was the U-2 largely intact, but its pilot had been captured alive. President Eisenhower was unaware of this, and blundered by offering the public a preposterous cover story about a weather research mission – which was soon revealed to be a sham.4
The U-2 overflight programme, which had included six British RAF pilots, was intimately connected to sigint. Not only did the aircraft collect sigint as well as imagery, but most of the targets they were probing had been initially found by sigint. Moreover, Soviet efforts to shoot them down revealed a wealth of detail about Russian air defences, which were closely monitored. Sigint showed that Moscow’s command and control system was poor, radar coverage was patchy and fighter reaction times were slow. With each U-2 flight dozens of fighters scrambled to try to shoot the aircraft down, often revealing hitherto unknown units and fighter bases. All this had encouraged confidence about the invulnerability of the high-flying U-2. Indeed, NSA staff who listened in to Soviet radars and fighter controllers during the Gary Powers flight argued that he had only been shot down because, quite inexplicably, he was flying at only thirty-five thousand feet and was heading in the wrong direction (British intelligence sources seem to confirm this story).5 In late June 1960 the CIA’s Director, Allen Dulles, confided to a friend that he was sure Powers ‘was not shot down at normal altitude’, but later the CIA and NSA fell into a bitter dispute over exactly how the U-2 had been intercepted by the Soviets.6
The Gary Powers shootdown triggered a major diplomatic confrontation between Moscow, Washington and London. The incident encapsulated many of the wider international trends of the 1960s. During the decade there were major flashpoints such as the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. There were also serious confrontations in the Third World, the largest being the Vietnam War, which kept the temperature at boiling point. Although engaged in an arms race, East and West had achieved nuclear parity, signalled by the deployment of Soviet missiles which could reach the American homeland. In theory at least, all-out confrontation now seemed to be a remote possibility because of nuclear deterrence. Intelligence had an important part to play in the unfolding drama. On the face of it, constant intelligence monitoring, including sigint and imagery, exercised a stabilising influence on world affairs, reassuring both sides that no sneak attack was imminent and making arms control more feasible. However, the operations that gathered the intelligence, such as the Gary Powers flight, involved an element of risk and provocation. For both the British and the Americans, risk calculation became an increasingly important part of managing intelligence operations. In turn, this sense of risk helped to drive one of the most important developments of the decade, the first tentative efforts at the collection of intelligence from the safety of satellites in space.
Two months after the U-2 shootdown, with the controversy still raging, an American RB-47H ferret aircraft was shot down by Soviet MiGs over the naval airbases of the Kola Peninsula, close to where British submarines regularly conducted surveillance. Only two of the five crewmen survived. This was the first close reconnaissance mission the West had risked after the loss of the U-2. Although less publicised than the Gary Powers episode, this calamity reverberated more strongly for Britain, since the plane had been launched from RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire. American and Norwegian sigint stations had tracked it, but disputed its course, plotting it thirty miles and twenty-three miles respectively from the Soviet coast. The crew had received orders not to go closer than fifty miles. The Soviet coastal limit was twelve miles, but at aircraft speeds the margin for error was small.7 The two crew members who survived, having been rescued by a Russian trawler, confirmed to their Soviet captors that they had left Brize Norton at 10 a.m. on 1 July, but told them little else.8
Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was exceedingly bitter about the Powers shootdown, beca
use it contributed to the collapse of the impending East-West summit in Paris. Macmillan had worked hard to encourage this meeting, and reportedly exclaimed that ‘the Pentagon is blowing up the Summit Conference’.9 Macmillan noted in his diary that the Americans had committed ‘a great folly’. He expressed personal disappointment with Gary Powers, who ‘did not poison himself (as ordered) but has been taken prisoner (with his poison needle in his pocket!)’. He lamented that the Soviets had captured the aircraft, the cameras, the photographs and the pilot, adding: ‘God knows what he will say when he is tortured!’10
Russia exploited the incident to the full, threatening countries such as Britain and Japan, which hosted the reconnaissance flights. On 30 May the Soviet Minister of Defence, Rodion Malinovsky, warned that ‘crushing blows by rocket forces will be dealt to the bases from which they take off. On 3 June these threats were repeated by Nikita Khrushchev himself to a packed press conference. In London, the Joint Intelligence Committee concluded that these threats were a bluff. Nevertheless they induced extreme caution on the part of Harold Macmillan.11 Two weeks later, Patrick Reilly, the British Ambassador in Moscow, tried to smooth matters by telling the Soviet Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko, how distressed London was at the negative impact on East-West relations. Gromyko, who was in an ‘ugly mood’, replied in ‘unusually discourteous language’, declaring that Russia ‘knew the true facts’ about the secret missions.12
London, Washington and Moscow engaged in a ritual argument about the exact position of the RB-47 when it was shot down over the sea. The Americans stated that it never came closer than forty-eight miles to Soviet airspace. Moscow claimed that the plane was ‘specially equipped for espionage operations’, and was definitely shot down over Soviet territorial waters. The problem for the Americans was that only a month previously, their cover story about the Gary Powers U-2 being a weather research aircraft had quickly been exposed as a tissue of lies, prompting a humiliating climbdown by President Eisenhower. Gary Powers himself was subjected to a show trial in front of the world’s media, and the Soviets promised that the two surviving members of the RB-47 crew would soon be ‘brought before the court and tried with the full rigour of the Soviet law’.13