GCHQ

by Richard Aldrich

  Britain’s peacetime sigint targets were increasingly to be found in the Middle East. Egypt and Syria had received growing attention since the Six-Day War in 1967, and activities were coordinated with the Americans, who were also running ‘high-level covert flights’ against Syria at the rate of six a month.53 In 1969 the British were flying some sixty sigint flights a year from RAF Sharjah in Oman into Iran and out over the Caspian Sea, which was a superb area for collecting intelligence, since its shores were dotted with defence testing facilities.54 In 1970 the Shah of Iran personally offered the use of an airfield inside the country as a staging post, and these ‘valuable facilities’ greatly extended the duration of the RAF sigint operations and what they could achieve.55

  The American experience in Vietnam influenced Britain’s efforts to improve sigint support to commanders in Europe. In April 1972 the RAF’s Vice Chief of the Air Staff, Air Marshal Sir Denis Smallwood, met his opposite number, General John C. Meyer, together with their senior officers, for a day of affable discussions, mostly about Vietnam. One of the subjects covered was their ‘difference in sigint philosophy’. The British explained that once the Nimrod R1 came on stream, the plan was to feed selected information directly into the NATO intelligence network. In a European war, the Nimrod would fly about fifty miles back from the forward edge of the battle area, out of range of Soviet missiles, providing intelligence direct to operational commanders through a secure link. The RAF wanted to put experienced ground operators into the Nimrods, experts on the Soviet order of battle who would talk direct to operational formations. By contrast, the Americans explained that in Vietnam, the sigint take from their vast EC-135 aircraft was ‘fed back to NSA at Fort Meade near Washington and processed by computer sufficiently rapidly for tactical information to be fed back for effective USAF tactical reaction’. The British thought this hopelessly cumbersome – and some Americans were inclined to agree.56

  Sigint relations between NSA and the American armed services in Vietnam had been a disaster. The American system suffered from the same handicaps witnessed within NATO commands in Germany, with a refusal ‘to clear field commanders for the information they so badly needed’. Under Marshall Carter, NSA Director during the late 1960s, a fierce battle developed with the US Joint Chiefs of Staff that ‘poisoned the atmosphere’, and relations with the military were at ‘an all-time low’.57 John Meyer, who was about to take over at Strategic Air Command, confided that control of sigint in Vietnam was badly split between the communicators, the intelligence people and the operators. The RAF noted privately that NSA was ‘an organisation that does not rate highly with General Meyer’. So far no B-52 bombers had been lost, but there was a concern that ‘the Russians were learning a lot from the current operations’. By 1972 British sigint personnel were actually in Vietnam observing the performance of a new tactical sigint aircraft called Guardrail 2 which was on a test run by NSA.58

  In early 1974, Britain’s shiny new Nimrod R1s were about to begin their operations on the Soviet periphery. Although their activities were always referred to as ‘special’, in some ways their missions were routine, at least in the sense that the aircraft often followed a regular pattern. However, on 1 March 1974 these flights were suspended due to the impending British general election. David Omand, an official in the Ministry of Defence with a GCHQ background, explained that for some time past it had been the practice to suspend special intelligence operations at such times, partly to avoid any embarrassing international incidents during the run-up to an election. It was also intended to avoid ‘saddling new Ministers who take office after the election (whatever their Party) with the possibility of having to defend activities of which they may not have had an opportunity to hear about and endorse’. As a result, RAF sigint flights from Britain and bases abroad were halted, together with American reconnaissance flights from Britain and special intelligence operations by submarines. Lesser activities such as the overflying of ships of intelligence interest were reduced to ‘a low key’. All this underlines the emergence of a sophisticated British approach to clearing intelligence operations by the early 1970s.59

  In February 1974, the last operational month before the election, the Americans planned seventeen sigint flights from bases in the UK. Most of them were over the Baltic Sea and West Germany, and were by RC-135 ‘Looking Glass’ aircraft, a vast sigint version of the Boeing 707, flying out of RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk. Because these flights were routine they did not normally require approval by the Prime Minister. Instead they were approved by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office forty-eight hours ahead of take-off.60 The British were planning similar flights: ‘Operation Pat’, a series of twelve Comet sorties over the Baltic and the Polish coast, and ‘Operation Tibet’, seven Comet flights over the same area, all mounted from RAF Wyton. In the Mediterranean, eight Comet sorties were planned under ‘Operation Damage’, using RAF Akrotiri. Permission was also sought for five flights against targets along the Egyptian and Syrian coast, code-named ‘Operation Dolven’. However, in March and April, with the impending election, no activity took place. These flights were the last operations by the venerable Comets, since from May 1974 the RAF began to deploy its newly equipped Nimrod R1s.61

  Like so much of GCHQ’s activity, the whole Nimrod programme was premised on the eternal verities of UKUSA and the Anglo–American special intelligence relationship. It was also carefully calculated to reinforce the distinction in the American mind between Britain as a trusted second party and the Continental Europeans, an altogether lower species of sigint animal. In the late 1960s GCHQ appeared to be building on solid ground. On both sides of the Atlantic most of the senior sigint policy-makers, like Clive Loehnis, Joe Hooper and Joseph Wenger, had served in the Second World War, and had been present during the foundation of the UKUSA alliance. Although Marshall Carter, Director of NSA in the late 1960s, was new to the world of sigint, he was particularly anglophile. When Carter retired in July 1969, Joe Hooper wrote him an effusive letter of farewell, thanking him for his personal contribution to the NSA-GCHQ relationship and praising his ‘instinctive feeling for its nature and depth’. However, over the next two decades things would change. In the White House, Westminster and Whitehall a new generation of political leaders and policy-makers was emerging that did not take these things for granted – and there was trouble ahead.62

  THE 1970s

  TURBULENCE AND TERROR

  15

  Trouble with Henry

  Kissinger then said out of the blue…that the Special Relationship was collapsing.

  Rowley Cromer, British Ambassador to Washington,

  24 November 19731

  The late 1960s and early 1970s were dominated by the catastrophic war in Vietnam. Harold Wilson was fêted by the British public for keeping the country out of the quicksand of this prolonged struggle in South-East Asia. What they did not know was that Britain was secretly supporting the conflict by all means short of direct military intervention, and this included ‘in country’ operations by SIS and special forces. GCHQ made a significant contribution from its sigint sites in Asia, especially Hong Kong, even though North Vietnamese cyphers were notoriously secure. The gruelling war stretched American intelligence resources to breaking point, rendering assistance from GCHQ all the more valuable.

  Alongside Vietnam, there was the challenge of an improving relationship between the West and China. The early 1970s also witnessed a dramatic upsurge in Middle East terrorism, with Yasser Arafat and the PLO becoming a major sigint target. In October 1973 the Yom Kippur War suddenly erupted when Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel. This was followed in short order by the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. During these dramatic events sigint proved to be the main source of information for world leaders, often constituting two thirds of the intelligence which reached their desks. As a result the sigint bases came to be regarded as so valuable that in some cases their protection steered foreign policy. At remote locations such as the Chagos Islands i
n the Indian Ocean or Ascension Island in the Atlantic, the future of entire territories was shaped by the need for Anglo–American listening stations. Intelligence had once merely served the ‘special relationship’, but now secretive intelligence and defence projects lay at its very centre.2

  Although GCHQ and NSA worked ever more closely in the 1970s, there was also serious political turbulence. In 1969, Richard Nixon arrived in the White House. Nixon was an impressive foreign-policy President, but he was also an arch-conspirator. Not only did he launch plots and conspiracies, including Watergate, against others, he also saw them all around him. He distrusted his own intelligence services, and indeed most branches of government. One official assessment suggests that ‘During Nixon’s years in office, the relationship between the President and the CIA reached the lowest point in the Agency’s history’3 Nixon’s obsessive secrecy and paranoia were only exceeded by those of his National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, who was as brilliant as he was temperamental. Together they monopolised American foreign policy, kept important secrets from their own intelligence services and tested the patience of their British allies.4

  James Cable, a senior British diplomat and self-appointed ‘Kissinger expert’, remarked that in conceding unique influence over foreign affairs to Kissinger, Nixon had ‘invested a philosopher with powers greater than those wielded by most of the Princes of this world’. Kissinger had taught strategy at Harvard for many years, and now had his hands on the real levers of power. Seldom has a theorist of international affairs, Cable continued, been given such opportunities to practise what he preached. The problem for the British was that Kissinger’s philosophy was deeply realist, and was focused on the manipulative use of power.5 Worse still, as Cable noted, Kissinger was notorious for his ‘fits of petulance’, and ‘could behave badly on occasion’.6

  In November 1970 there was a new incumbent in Downing Street, in the shape of Edward Heath. Britain’s new Prime Minister was not convinced of the value of the special relationship. He tended to question the continual flow of American requests for new base rights on British territory, and was more inclined to seek friends in Europe. Over time, personal difficulties between Nixon, Kissinger and Heath led to serious problems in intelligence cooperation. These were only addressed in March 1974, when Heath departed, following an infamous winter of trade union unrest in Britain. Richard Nixon resigned a few months later as a result of Watergate; however, Kissinger stayed on to serve the new Gerald Ford administration as Secretary of State until 1977.

  Despite the potent mixture of personalities, the Anglo–American relationship under Nixon and Kissinger began well. One of Kissinger’s many peculiarities was that he often trusted senior British officials with confidences that he would not extend to the US State Department. From the outset, the Nixon presidency was dominated by efforts to resolve the Vietnam conflict. On 20 July 1970, Kissinger met the outgoing British Ambassador, John Freeman, to consider a sigint report about Nikolay Firyubin, the Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister, who had been overheard discussing the possibility of a major summit on Vietnam. Kissinger was sceptical, but the sigint report had clearly intrigued him, since the Soviets were now Hanoi’s principal backers. The source was ‘intercepts from internal communications’ secured during Firyubin’s recent visit to Delhi, and they seemed to show that the Soviets were keen on ‘a negotiated end to the war in the not very distant future’. Kissinger extended further confidences to the British:

  Firyubin…had told the Indians that there had been two occasions when Washington and Hanoi had been very near agreement and had failed to achieve it mainly because of the deep distrust on either side. Kissinger said that this was in fact true, although the information was only known in a very restricted circle in the White House. This piece of information, which had probably not been passed to us over intelligence channels, was of peculiar delicacy.7

  Although Kissinger felt the ‘intercept was insufficient evidence to form a judgement on Soviet intention’, he was clearly excited. At the same time, his powerful realist instincts pushed him towards the view that greater military pressure on Hanoi over the coming months would make the North Vietnamese more responsive at the negotiating table.8

  Kissinger’s conflicting thoughts about the Firyubin intercept underlined the limitations of Western sigint in the early 1970s. Sigint – and indeed imagery – was delivering fabulous information on Soviet technical and military activity. Supplemented by widespread bugging, it also offered superb insights into diplomatic exchanges at conferences outside Russia, when diplomats were vulnerable to short-range interception. The British had, for example, achieved excellent coverage of Alexei Kosygin, the Soviet Premier, during his recent stay at Claridge’s Hotel in London.9 Sigint was especially valuable against the leadership of North Vietnam, and offered useful insights into negotiations with Hanoi during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Yet the innermost thoughts of the Moscow leadership remained elusive. More than two decades after Black Friday, Soviet high-level diplomatic communications remained largely unreadable. Indiscretions by Soviet diplomats like Nikolay Firyubin on their travels offered only a fleeting glimpse of the thinking of the Politburo.10

  Some joint Anglo–American intelligence operations were attempting to lift the corner of this veil of secrecy. There had been considerable success in intercepting Soviet government telephone calls, which were carried by microwave relay systems. Much of this material was acquired at short range by technical teams in the British and American Embassies in Moscow. The British operation was code-named ‘Tryst’, and the American was ‘Broadside’. In 1972 the Canadians joined them with their own sigint operation, ‘Stephanie’. However, American journalists had blown these embassy-based sigint operations, first in 1966 and then more spectacularly in a long press article in 1971.11 Afterwards, the Soviets tried to counter such activities by bombarding foreign embassies with microwaves, believing that this disrupted the collection operations. John Nix, who served in the American Embassy in the 1970s, recalls the ‘great psychological pressure’ that American diplomats lived under in Moscow as the result of KGB activities. The repeated bugging incidents had made people jumpy, but the microwaves made things far worse, because the fact that radiation was being directed at the Embassy ‘led to galloping paranoia among everyone’. Nix adds that the health concerns appeared genuine, since the Embassy staff suffered ‘a large number of deaths from cancer’, and he recalls three occurrences of the wives of Embassy staff giving birth to children with severe defects; these incidents caused a ‘climate of near hysteria’, which was made worse by the State Department trying to keep the whole matter secret from its employees for as long as it could. Morale amongst Foreign Service officers in Moscow was ‘just terrible…the worst I’ve ever seen’.12

  The arrival of Nixon and Kissinger in the White House marked a revolution in America’s practice of foreign affairs. There had also been important changes in Britain, which while not quite so visible at the outset, were also unprecedented. With the advent of Edward Heath as Prime Minister, a new generation of officials, especially within the Foreign Office, had begun to question the relative value of the Anglo–American relationship, set against Britain’s new commitments to the European Economic Community which it had finally joined in late 1972.13 Indeed, the sanctity of the Anglo–American intelligence and defence relationship was being questioned at the very highest levels. Shortly after Heath arrived in office, the Americans had asked for further military bases on British territory. He responded with an uncharacteristically broad question. What, he asked, do ‘we get from the Americans in return for the various facilities for which they ask us?’ The unhappy recipients of this question were Alec Douglas-Home, the Foreign Secretary, and Lord Carrington, the Defence Secretary. They were uncomfortable for two reasons. First, the question touched on almost every aspect of British intelligence and defence planning. Drawing up an effective summary kept several luckless defence officials busy for two solid weeks. Second, it r
evealed Heath’s temperamental dislike of the special relationship.

  Carrington explained that the Anglo–American partnership was perhaps a natural one, given that the two allies’ ‘geography and size are so different’. Although the scope and scale of Britain’s residual empire was continually declining, the small remnants were nonetheless supremely valuable. Carrington continued:

  Because of the number of our remaining island dependencies, we are able to provide the Americans with facilities which they would get from no one else on a comparable scale. Indeed, the very fact of our possession of these dependencies enables us to make a considerable contribution to an alliance which is important to both of us but in which otherwise our respective contributions might be very ill-balanced.

  All this allowed Britain to benefit from what he called ‘the massive American military technological and intelligence machine’.14 Carrington argued that the hidden reciprocal benefits to Britain were in three areas: nuclear weapons, research and development, and intelligence. While these things were relatively invisible compared to the requested British real estate, they were nonetheless extremely valuable. Without American intelligence, he argued, ‘and particularly that derived from the NSA/GCHQ Agreement’, Whitehall would be unable to assess the key military developments inside the Eastern Bloc and China, and indeed would struggle even to produce good intelligence on lesser threats in the Middle East. However, the relationship was more than just a crude exchange of intelligence for facilities. Carrington argued that Britain was the only other country thinking on a global basis with whom the Americans could have ‘a meaningful exchange on matters of common interest from a basis of common intelligence’. Meanwhile, defence officials cautioned Heath that the loss of US intelligence ‘would reduce us to the same position as other European members of NATO’. Ominously, they also warned that the ‘present satisfactory relationship with the USA cannot be taken for granted. It has suffered setbacks in the past.’15