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… with ‘Sigint’ locking onto targets with pinpoint accuracy, our military ached to have a go.

Tim Hardy, Special Branch, Sarawak, April 1964[1]

In the 1950s, GCHQ’s top priorities were warning of an impending war with Russia, and gathering intelligence on Moscow’s growing nuclear arsenal. However, on a day-to-day basis, the Middle East, Africa and Asia were the regions where sigint made a tangible difference. Since the end of the Second World War, Britain had been involved in a prolonged ‘escape from empire’, retreating from her colonies and hoping to replace them with a vibrant Commonwealth of newly independent states. The reality was more complex, since many of these countries contained elements that were keen to evict the British faster than they wished to go. Some hosted guerrilla groups sympathetic to Moscow, others were divided communities that faced a troubled journey towards independence. The result was that Britain was involved in an endless litany of small wars that stretched from the dusty deserts of Yemen to the steamy jungles of Borneo. Because these were often guerrilla wars, finding the enemy could be the main challenge, and here sigint was in its element. Moreover, right across Asia and Africa, cyphers were less secure than those of countries like Russia, so GCHQ could also read plenty of high-grade diplomatic traffic.

Although sigint helped to smooth the end of Britain’s empire, GCHQ itself did not always want empire to come to an end. Because the 1950s and 1960s were an era when a great deal of communications was sent over long distances using high-frequency radio, GCHQ depended on the remnants of empire to provide a global network of ground stations to collect these signals. Indeed, Britain’s imperial real estate was one of the key contributions to UKUSA, and was of particular assistance to the United States. Accordingly, in many colonies there were defence and intelligence bases that Britain wished to retain, prompting officials to drag their feet over independence. Elsewhere, the British attempted to persuade post-independence governments to permit some bases to remain.[2]

Throughout the 1950s Britain fought one of the most protracted colonial struggles of the post-war era, the Malayan Emergency. The enemy were a hardened band of Communist guerrillas who had been Britain’s uneasy allies against the Japanese during the war. The military forces of the Malayan Communist Party, or ‘MCP’, led by Ching Peng, operated from refuges in the dense jungle. Britain did not initially recognise the seriousness of the Emergency in Malaya, allowing it to get out of hand. However, in October 1951 the MCP succeeded in assassinating Sir Henry Gurney, the British High Commissioner. Thereafter, striking back at the guerrillas and eliminating Ching Peng became a near-obsession for the security authorities in London. When Oliver Lyttelton, the Colonial Secretary, returned to London to report on Gurney’s assassination he promised the Cabinet that he would form special teams ‘aimed at certain individuals’. These were effectively killer squads, and he gave a firm assurance that they would ‘hunt down individual men from Communist higher formations through their families, properties, sweethearts etc.’.[3]

Locating the guerrilla headquarters in Malaya was easier said than done. In 1950 a sigint-equipped Lancaster from the RAF’s 192 Squadron was sent out to help in the hunt for the insurgents by tracking their radio communications. Later, undercover agents planted batteries with excessively high power on the guerrillas to damage their radios. When they were repaired, the workshops the guerrillas used were bribed to secretly modify the sets to give out a stronger signal. This gave the opportunity for sigint to achieve a direction-finding fix on the main guerrilla bases. Bombers from the RAF and the Royal Australian Air Force were standing by, and lightning raids were carried out on the deemed location of the signals. Avro Lincoln bombers dropped thousands of tons of bombs into the dense jungle at likely guerrilla locations. Their pilots were always impressed by the resilience of the jungle: their largest bombs vanished into the triple-canopied green foliage below them, and from the aircraft little impact was visible. It is not known how successful these operations were, but Ching Peng, the most important prize, certainly eluded them.[4]

In January 1952, Sir Gerald Templer arrived as the new High Commissioner in Malaya. Templer possessed the authority and charisma necessary to create a unified government machine and to implement an effective counter-insurgency strategy. Although famed for his emphasis on ‘hearts and minds’, he also sorted out intelligence, creating a coherent structure in which the army, the police and the civil authorities were forced to share intelligence. All this was done with his customary fiery language – he was quite incapable of uttering a sentence without a cussword in it.[5]

Despite Templer’s forceful direction, intelligence did not improve overnight. An important intelligence issue that was never quite resolved was the question of who was actually behind the insurgency. The Colonial Office and the Special Branch officers of the Malayan Police preferred to interpret the Emergency as a wicked plot initiated by Stalin or else Mao, while the British diplomats tended to see it more as a local anti-colonial uprising. During the mid-1950s GCHQ began to intercept what it believed to be wireless traffic between the MCP guerrilla leadership and the Chinese Communist Party in Peking. The Special Branch presented this intelligence to senior British officials in Kuala Lumpur with some delight as evidence of its theory of external direction, but only in a summarised form. Diplomats in Kuala Lumpur were sceptical, and asked to see the full transcripts of the transmissions. A major altercation followed, with the diplomats accusing the Special Branch of bending the evidence, while the policemen accused the diplomats of a lack of trust. The issue of exactly how close the MCP was to Peking was never resolved.[6]

GCHQ’s most important outpost in Asia was Hong Kong. China was the venue of one of Britain’s early Cold War code-breaking triumphs. Between March 1943 and July 1947 GCHQ was able to read the high-grade Russian cypher traffic passing between Moscow and its mission at the headquarters of Mao Tse-tung’s People’s Liberation Army in Yunnan. This was a highly secret programme, and GCHQ only began passing material to the Americans in March 1946. The decision not to share until this point may have reflected anxieties about the strong differences within the American administration about China policy, but it is noticeable that the spring of 1946 also marks the advent of the revised BRUSA agreement.[7] Exactly how this breakthrough was achieved when many other Russian high-grade cypher systems remained immune to attack is still a mystery. However, SIS had placed a rather eccentric officer called Michael Lindsay at Mao’s headquarters in Yunnan, where he was assisting the Chinese Communist communications team as their ‘principal radio adviser’. This may eventually prove to be part of the story.[8]

The British colony of Hong Kong was of special value to the United States. This reflected the fact that, after the end of the Chinese Civil War that brought Mao Tse-tung to power in 1949, the United States did not even have an embassy in mainland China. ‘Hong Kong became an American watchtower on China,’ recalls Jack Smith, who looked after the Far East in the CIA’s Office of National Estimates.[9] GCHQ joined with the Americans and the equivalent Australian organisation, Defence Signals Branch, to develop the facilities in Hong Kong. Washington received the full intercept output of Hong Kong, but with the onset of the Korean War demands for intelligence went up sharply, and Washington considered that combined US–UK intercept facilities in the Far East were ‘far short of requirements’.[10] In July 1952 the US Communications Intelligence Board persuaded its British opposite numbers of the ‘urgent need’ to send an additional eight-hundred-strong US Air Force sigint unit to Hong Kong to join the hard-pressed British and Australians. However, this was vetoed by the Governor of Hong Kong, Sir Alexander Grantham, who detested the way in which his territory had become host to a myriad of espionage activities.[11] Once the Chinese had intervened in the Korean War, an attack on Hong Kong by China was always a possibility. Therefore GCHQ negotiated emergency facilities at Okinawa in Japan for the British and Australian sigint personnel working there.[12]

Even in 1955, the United States was still negotiating for new sites in Asia. Sigint sites were not small or discreet, often requiring vast acres of wireless masts known as ‘aerial farms’ to capture signals of interest. In Taiwan, American officials had run into trouble securing a 335-acre site near Nan-Szu-Pu airfield where they had plans to locate hundreds of personnel from the Army Security Agency.[13] With repeated clashes between the United States and Communist China over the Taiwan Straits in the late 1950s, the British government reviewed the future of Hong Kong, which seemed exposed, and pondered the short-term value of the continued British presence in the colony. Much turned on the mysteries of the UKUSA alliance, the Anglo–American–Commonwealth sigint pact of cooperation, since Hong Kong hosted British, Australian and American eavesdroppers.[14] Alongside the GCHQ activities there were also vast British and American programmes in Hong Kong for running agents and interviewing defectors from mainland China. During the 1950s and 1960s, both the State Department and the Pentagon considered Hong Kong to be the single most important British overseas territory from the point of view of intelligence-gathering.[15]

In order to stimulate more defectors from China to Hong Kong, Britain launched ‘Operation Debenture’ in 1954. This was a covert radio project and constituted ‘the first UK operations of any magnitude for the penetration of Mainland China’. The aim was to provide an undercover broadcasting station that would increase the desire for contacts with the West amongst the Chinese middle classes, and increase defections across the border into Hong Kong. The emphasis was on the ‘purely “intelligence” angle’, and the defectors were needed because SIS human agent coverage of China was weak. The original intention had been to place this ‘black station’ in Hong Kong, but it was eventually located in Singapore, hidden at one of the military bases.[16]

The main GCHQ sigint stations in Hong Kong were on the coast at Little Sai Wan and the curiously-named outpost known as ‘Batty’s Belvedere’. The contribution of Australia’s Defence Signals Branch was important, since Australia had identified China as its top sigint target, followed by Indonesia and then Vietnam.[17] During the late 1950s the commander of the sigint station was an Australian called Ken Sly, and originally it was staffed by airmen from the RAF’s 367 Signals Unit.[18] A constant flow of National Servicemen had learnt Chinese at RAF Wythall near Birmingham and later at RAF North Luffenham in Leicestershire, but by 1957 the increasing use of civilians with qualifications in the language was reducing this considerable training requirement. There was also a separate cohort of Vietnamese linguists.[19] Civilianisation brought unexpected security problems, since civilians could not be used for some of the menial duties carried out by service personnel. GCHQ tried to address this problem by employing deaf and dumb locals in the more sensitive locations on the sites.[20]

Ken Sly was well aware of the attentions of Chinese intelligence. One of the locally employed Chinese, Wal Bin Chang, showed a propensity for taking photographs of groups on social occasions, and ‘also took care to photograph each one of us separately’. Moreover, he tended to volunteer for extra duties at unsociable hours. He was eventually captured on the border trying to cross over into Communist China with a number of documents, including a description of the personal habits of every NCO and officer at the base. He had been entertaining some of them in ‘girlie bars’, and admitted that he had persuaded one of the officers to sleep with his wife, adding: ‘In this way I will be able to obtain much more information of value to our side.’ The officer in question was swiftly discharged. Military staff at overseas listening stations working for GCHQ were a continual target for this sort of honey-trap.[21] Ken Sly was eventually replaced by a civilian with the rank of Senior Linguist Officer, and moved on to serve in Australia and then with GCHQ at Cheltenham.[22]

In both Hong Kong and Cyprus, the British were experimenting with intelligence-gathering radar. At Hong Kong the main site was located three thousand feet up the precipitous cliffs of Tai Mo Shan in the New Territories. Operated jointly by the RAF’s 117 Signals Unit and the Australians, it peered out into Chinese airspace, and its main purpose was ‘to provide intelligence information for the UK, USA and Australia’.[23] Western aircraft regularly intruded over the border to generate an elint response from Chinese defences.[24] The site was constructed with great difficulty in 1957 and was operated continuously into the 1980s. By a heroic effort, cranes and lorries had moved materials up to the summit by means of what was little more than a jeep track. During construction a ten-ton crane had been lost over the edge, but fortunately the RAF driver leapt clear before the vehicle disappeared over the cliff. Later, the RAF Regiment, known as the ‘Rock Apes’, who guarded the base, lost two Land Rovers over the cliff. This prompted a local humorist to erect a sign at the base of the uphill trail that warned: ‘Beware of Falling Rocks’.[25]

GCHQ does not seem to have broken much high-grade Chinese traffic; nevertheless, there were intelligence success stories. One of the most important was the prediction of the detonation of China’s first nuclear weapon in 1964. Like all such programmes, China’s efforts to acquire a nuclear weapon required a vast technical and industrial effort, therefore imagery from overflights together with relatively low-level signals gave a good indication of progress. Archie Potts, the UK’s Deputy Director of Atomic Energy Intelligence, noted that for about five years the British had been aware of an important secret programme controlled by ‘a special ministry’. Plant construction had begun in 1958, with an elaborate effort to produce uranium ore. The Chinese had also ceased their public complaints about superpowers with nuclear weapons. All this prefaced China’s first nuclear test.[26]

Although NSA viewed Hong Kong as Britain’s single most valuable overseas sigint station, GCHQ placed more emphasis on the Middle East. Immediately after the war, Britain had numerous interception stations. The most important was at Heliopolis in Egypt, which boasted many civilian operators and took in much of the region’s diplomatic traffic. The Army ran a large intercept station at Sarafand in Palestine, while the RAF ran a similar installation at RAF Habbaniya in Iraq. There were undercover listening stations buried within embassies and consulates in countries such as Turkey. By the 1950s Britain had also developed covert sites in northern Iran that were focused on Russia. However, the British Empire in the Middle East consisted of very few formal colonies and had long been an agglomeration of mandates, shaky treaty relationships and uncertain base rights granted by royalist regimes. Egypt, which had achieved independence in 1935, was especially anxious to divest itself of the disfiguring presence of British bases. Accordingly, British sigint gradually fell back towards its last proper colonial foothold in the region, the island of Cyprus.

Cyprus was increasingly the home for every kind of secret radio activity in the Middle East. This included not only Britain’s sigint assets but also the monitoring sites of the CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service, which listened in to news broadcasts around the world. In addition, Cyprus offered a safe haven for Britain’s overt and covert propaganda broadcasting in the region. This mushroomed during the premiership of Anthony Eden, who nurtured a special hatred of Egypt’s nationalist leader General Gamal Abdel Nasser, whom he viewed as a dangerous dictator. Eden urged a reduction of British radio propaganda directed at the Soviets in favour of targeting Nasser.[27] As early as 1954 he insisted that a new broadcasting station in Aden covering Iraq and Syria was to receive ‘first priority’, since Nasser’s radio station, The Voice of Egypt, was busily pouring out its own vitriolic message.[28] Britain’s main radio weapon against Nasser was the SIS-owned station in Cyprus, Sharq el-Adna. ‘Sharq’ had originated as a wartime British propaganda radio station that had been taken over by SIS in 1948, and been evacuated from Palestine to the safety of Cyprus. It was soon thought to be the most popular station in the region.[29] SIS was working with John Rennie, the head of Britain’s Information Research Department, to accelerate four other radio projects in the Middle East, including a secretive ‘black station’ that was being developed at two other sites on Cyprus with a transmitter that could reach as far as Aden.[30]

On 29 October 1956 Eden launched ‘Operation Musketeer’, a surprise attack to capture the Suez Canal, which Nasser had recently nationalised. Sigint and radio warfare had an important part to play. Arrangements were made for the force commanders to receive a range of key intelligence materials from national sources, including photo-reconnaissance cover and ‘all CX [SIS] reports on Egypt’, as well as material from ‘special sources’, a somewhat coy cover name for sigint. GCHQ attached liaison officers to the main Army, Navy and RAF commanders, and detailed instructions were generated to provide cover for the ‘protection of SIGINT material’.[31] Most of the sigint coverage came from 2 Wireless Regiment at Ayios Nikolaos near Famagusta in eastern Cyprus, with additional help from listeners at Dingli on Malta. While the coverage was good, the radio channels available to push this material forward to field commanders were often choked. In addition, a small tactical ‘Y’ intercept unit was being prepared to accompany the land force from Cyprus to the landings in Egypt, and was eventually based at Port Said.[32]

The British not only had to hide the invasion preparations from the Egyptians, but also from the Americans. Britain had engaged in an elaborate plot with the French and the Israelis which hid the real reasons for the intervention by presenting it as the arrival of a so-called ‘peace-keeping’ force for the disputed Suez Canal Zone. Eisenhower and his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles were astonished by Anglo–French–Israeli collusion over Suez. In the autumn of 1956 Washington’s eyes were elsewhere, distracted by the uprising in Hungary, while in the Middle East its focus was on the possible break-up of Jordan and the likelihood of Israeli and Arab attempts to divide the spoils. American U-2 flights out of Turkey detected an Israeli mobilisation, but this was interpreted by some as part of Israeli ambitions on the West Bank. Allen Dulles, the Director of CIA, was tracking reports of an imminent coup in Syria.

Nevertheless, the ability of the British to hide ‘Operation Musketeer’ from NSA raises some interesting questions. What were American sigint liaison officers doing? During the Suez invasion there was a US Sixth Fleet exercise off Crete, yet American Naval intelligence conceded frankly that it had ‘no warning of British intentions’.[33] Much of the story can be explained by NSA’s obsessive focus on Russia, with the vast majority of its assets in locations such as Turkey looking northwards to the missile-testing stations of the Caucasus. Meanwhile NSA depended on GCHQ for much of its coverage of the Middle East. Moreover, the crisis occurred just as the American code-breakers were moving to their new building at Fort Meade. The failure to spot the Suez Crisis had a significant effect on NSA, triggering a post-mortem and the creation of new divisions based on country or geographical lines.[34]

The British deliberately blanked their American allies. In a neat piece of choreography, the British Ambassador to Washington was replaced at this moment, with the new man being sent across the Atlantic by passenger liner. He was thus in mid-ocean when the Suez Crisis broke, and could not be accused of having deceived the Americans. In Tel Aviv, the British and French Military Attachés were told to give their American counterpart a wide berth.[35] However, the American Military Attaché realised something was up when his civilian driver, a reservist in the Israeli Army who had only one arm, one leg and was blind in one eye, was suddenly recalled to duty. His American employer deduced – quite correctly – that if his driver was being mobilised it could only mean one thing: imminent war.[36]

The sharpest Americans knew something was afoot. On 12 September 1956 Robert Amory, Deputy Director for Intelligence at the CIA, set up a highly secret joint group from the CIA, NSA, the State Department and military intelligence to watch the Middle East round the clock.[37] Its main source of information was an expansion of the U-2 spy plane operations from Wiesbaden covering the Middle East. The CIA’s own U-2 official history claims that this allowed them to predict the attack on Egypt three days before it took place.[38] This is probably an exaggeration: the U-2 evidence of growing forces on the ground was not precise enough to make such a forecast. Allen Dulles, the Director of the CIA, told Eisenhower he believed the Israelis were about to attack Jordan. Eisenhower attached special significance to NSA reports of an increase in signals traffic between Tel Aviv and Paris.[39] Almost certainly from sigint, the Americans had also picked up news of a secret meeting between the British Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, and the French in Paris on or about 15 October. This was the very sensitive meeting that sealed the deal over the Suez invasion. Allen Dulles recalls: ‘I remember I had a long talk with Foster [Dulles] about what this might mean in view of the fact that we were not otherwise informed about it.’[40] But Eisenhower personally dismissed the significance of the military build-up on Cyprus, refusing to believe that Britain would be ‘stupid enough to be dragged into this’. Remarkably, six weeks after the invasion of Suez, many in the CIA were still uncertain whether the British had colluded directly with the Israelis.[41] Both NSA and the CIA had also failed to predict the Russian invasion of Hungary, so 1956 was not their best year.[42]

What is remarkable is the rather poor performance of policy makers, despite the availability of excellent sigint. Regarding Egypt, GCHQ code-breakers were probably aided by awful Arab security mistakes. Outrageously, Cairo sent the frequent articles by Nasser confidant Mohamed Heikal in the Al-Ahram newspaper to Egyptian embassies via secret code. This was extremely helpful to GCHQ cryptanalysts who were able to compare the encoded messages with the open source articles in Al-Ahram and accordingly derive intelligence on the Egyptian encryption setting. Moreover, the work of the cryptanalysts was also accelerated in various mischievous ways. The Western allies appear to have supplied various Middle Eastern countries with code machines which had vulnerabilities known to NSA and GCHQ. Alongside this technique, that involved a weakened key length, British and American agents also bugged the various cipher rooms in foreign embassies, suborned cypher clerks and therefore saw their cryptographic documents.

Yet this had an unexpectedly helpful impact on the Soviet position. On 2 November 1956, the Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev told the Egyptian ambassador in Moscow, el-Kouni, that the USSR would stir public opinion against the Western invasion but no military aid would be forthcoming. However, after the Soviets successfully suppressed the uprising in Hungary, Khrushchev altered his view and became more bullish. On 5 November, the USSR despatched threatening messages to Britain, France and Israel insisting they terminate their invasion. The telegram sent to London hinted at nuclear missile attacks and warned that Moscow was ‘fully determined to crush the aggressors by the use of force.’ The next day Eden and the British cabinet opted to halt the Anglo-French operation and decided on a ceasefire. Peter Wright, in his controversial memoir, insists that Sigint convinced the Joint Intelligence Committee that Moscow was about to intervene. Apparently, one message acquired by GCHQ suggested that there had just been a meeting between the Soviet Foreign Minister and el-Kouni at which Moscow explained their plans to mobilise aircraft ready for a confrontation with Britain. Wright insists that: ‘The panic provoked by this cable … did as much as anything to prompt Eden into withdrawal.’ Meanwhile the CIA warned Eisenhower that the Soviets might intervene, most likely via Syria.

Fascinatingly, this was probably a Soviet deception. As David Easter has shown, the USSR may have exploited their knowledge that Britain had broken Egyptian high-level cyphers to project these threatening signals to London. Peter Wright explains that soon after the GCHQ listening device was installed in London’s Egyptian London, MI5 observed a Soviet team of ‘sweepers’ checking out the embassy for bugs and microphones. They seem to have found the listening device next to the cypher machine but curiously they did not address it or deal with it. Khrushchev later admitted to the Egyptians that he had used them as a channel of confusion, explaining: ‘we had to use you as a tool in this deception’. This referred to reports that Moscow was preparing to act in the region.[43]

Deliberate American pressure on the pound also eventually forced Britain’s ignominious withdrawal from Suez, and contributed to Eden’s sudden resignation in January 1957. Eden’s foreign policy may have failed, but the intelligence support he received had been excellent. In the wake of Suez, Selwyn Lloyd wrote to Eric Jones, the Director of GCHQ, congratulating him on the torrents of Middle East intelligence that sigint had provided during the crisis, particularly after the seizure of the canal. ‘I have observed the volume of material which has been produced by G.C.H.Q. relating to all the countries in the Middle East area,’ he wrote, suggesting that the traffic of many countries was being read, and added: ‘I am writing to let you know how valuable we have found this material and how much I appreciate the hard work and skill involved in its production.’ Jones passed on these congratulations to units such as the Army’s 2 Wireless Regiment on Cyprus and the RAF’s 192 Squadron.[44] There had also been shipborne signals interception by the Royal Navy. The RAF airborne signals element was especially important during the invasion. The ageing RB-29 Washingtons had been despatched from Watton to map the characteristics of Egyptian anti-aircraft defence. This included the habit of shutting down air-defence radar routinely just after midday – a priceless piece of information.[45]

At a higher level, GCHQ read much of Cairo’s diplomatic traffic with key embassies in the region during the mid-1950s, such as those in Amman and Damascus.[46] It also read traffic with Egypt’s London Embassy.[47] No less importantly, GCHQ stepped up its watch on the Soviets. On 15 November 1956, Britain’s leaders were reassured that there was ‘still no evidence from signals intelligence sources of any large-scale Soviet preparations to intervene by force in the Middle East’.[48] However, there had been problems. Some of the newly civilianised sigint sites had complained about working round the clock during the crisis, causing managers to wonder about the wisdom of non-military intercept operations.[49]

Despite GCHQ’s operational success, the Suez Crisis left a problematic legacy. It led directly to the eviction of GCHQ from some of its more valuable real estate in the Middle East and the Indian Ocean. In December 1956 GCHQ was just opening a large and well-equipped secret sigint station covering the Indian Ocean at Perkar on Ceylon, which had been constructed at a cost of close to £2 million. The Ceylonese government had wanted to free up access to the old sigint site at HMS Anderson for redevelopment. The purpose of the GCHQ site at Perkar was hidden from the Ceylonese, requiring the British to generate a cover story. Much debate had taken place in London over whether to let the Ceylonese Prime Minister, Solomon Bandaranaike, in on the real function of the station. GCHQ decided against candour, fearing ‘leakage’.[50] British officials had always been convinced that ‘the real purpose could be easily disguised’.[51]

Endless effort had gone into the Perkar site. The base had been upgraded to monitor signals traffic from ‘all bearings’, and boasted a vast aerial farm that covered more than four hundred acres.[52] Yet the Suez operation effectively destroyed this expensive new facility almost as soon as it was completed. The Ceylonese were incensed at Eden’s imperial escapade, and believed the British had refuelled ships in Ceylon en route to the invasion of Egypt. They now demanded a schedule for the removal of all foreign bases, without exception. The Treasury was aghast, stating that even a brief visit to Ceylon ‘brings home the complexity of these installations’ and ‘their vital importance’. Officials came up with the preposterous idea of using service personnel in civilian clothes in the hope of assuaging the Ceylonese.[53] Bandaranaike stamped his foot, insisting that all the British, however attired, had to go. A compromise was agreed: ‘The GCHQ station can be given up entirely, but we should like to keep it in operation for five years.’ Ultimately, Britain had lost the best site in the Indian Ocean.[54]

GCHQ felt the reverberations of Suez elsewhere. In Iraq, Britain enjoyed a good relationship with the ruler King Faisal. As a result, the British had been allowed to retain a number of bases. One of these was RAF Habbaniya, not far from Baghdad. Superficially this looked like so many military aerodromes in the Middle East, but in fact it housed 123 Signals Squadron, later 276 Signals Squadron, which ran a large sigint monitoring station. Airborne sigint flights from Habbaniya crossed into Iran, and then loitered over the Caspian Sea. However, as a result of Suez, Faisal’s political situation deteriorated rapidly, with uprisings in the cities of Najaf and Hayy. Iraq’s membership of the Baghdad Pact, a British-managed military alliance, only exacerbated popular hatred of the regime. Then, in the summer of 1958, Faisal’s ally, King Hussein of Jordan, asked for military assistance during a growing crisis in the Lebanon. The Iraqi Army put together an expeditionary force, but in the early hours of 14 July 1958 the assembled column turned against its own supreme commander, marched right into Baghdad and carried out a coup. Revolutionary officers arrived at the Royal Palace at 8 o’clock in the morning and ordered the King, his immediate family and his personal servants into the courtyard. They were politely asked to turn away from their captors, whereupon they were machine-gunned. Most died instantly, but Faisal survived a few hours. Fortunately, GCHQ intercepts of Egyptian diplomatic traffic gave precise information about Nasser’s parallel plots against the King of neighbouring Jordan a few days later, prompting timely British support for the beleaguered monarch.[55]

GCHQ intercepts clearly made a difference. As David Easter shows, on 17 July, Macmillan chose to have an unusual cross-party meeting with Hugh Gaitskell, the Labour opposition leader, to set out the reason why he had despatched forces to Amman. The Prime Minister chose to reveal to Gaitskell that he had seen ‘the intercepts’ that confirmed Nasser’s active plots in Jordan. Various figures including Duncan Sandys and Julian Amery were already agitating for intervention, but it was only when GCHQ material arrived on 16 July that the cabinet swung behind Macmillan and opted to join with the Americans in sending troops. The British deployment in Jordan complimented the despatch of American marines to the Lebanon.[56]

However, Britain’s time in Iraq was now up, and the final departure from RAF Habbaniya was anything but orderly. The vast base had quickly been occupied by the Iraqi Fourth Armoured Division, and the British had even been denied access to their own signals installations and aerial farms. Most of the RAF’s 276 Signals Unit were evacuated to temporary tented accommodation on Cyprus, where they continued their interception work amid terrible conditions. Three hundred personnel remained at Habbaniya, presiding over the residual technical facilities and stores. They were continually provoked by Iraqi forces, and it was not unusual for them to ‘end up in the Iraqi guard room’. Although much of the radio equipment had been removed, the remnants included specialist signals vehicles, machine tools and fuel, together with the entire contents of a nearby RAF hospital.[57] The plan was for a massive ‘end of empire’ garage sale. Items from Habbaniya were offered to the new Ba’athist government. The Iraqi Army took the heavy weapons, explosives and ammunition, but were warned soberly that some of these were in ‘a dangerous or doubtful condition’. What materials the Iraqi government did not want were then sold publicly. However, in the revolutionary climate, the ensuing auction was pure bedlam. Such was the shouting and violence that the petrified auctioneer tried to sell off the entire stock of the base as one lot. Another sale, of vehicles, was sabotaged by the appearance of a small but violent nationalist mob whose members held ‘a rope noose … menacingly over the head of anybody who attempted to purchase’ anything. The end of the British Empire is often portrayed as a serene process, but in the Middle East its passing was neither orderly nor pleasant.[58]

Cyprus was now a vast GCHQ refugee camp, holding sigint personnel who had made their exodus from the listening stations at Sarafand in Palestine, Heliopolis in Egypt, and now Habbaniya. Over a thousand found themselves in a tented encampment at RAF Pergamos.[59] A special signals unit was already at the forty-three-acre site, which was dominated by aerials, but the refugees from Habbaniya represented a further unscheduled expansion.[60] Pergamos and the Army station run by 2 Wireless Regiment (soon renamed 9 Signals Regiment) at Ayios Nikolaos now constituted the key sigint stations in the region, with over a thousand personnel. Further west, there was a British sigint station at Dingli on Malta with 230 staff, and a few dozen on Ascension Island and at Gibraltar; but Cyprus was the leviathan.[61] Negotiations over the exact extent of the Sovereign Base Areas on Cyprus were ongoing, but at least for the time being, relations with the island’s authorities were relatively cordial.[62] The negotiations reached a climax in 1959. The British delegation, led by Julian Amery, Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, started with an extravagant bid for four hundred square miles of territory, and eventually settled for ninety-nine square miles.[63] By this time the aerials and antennae of the largest sigint base on Cyprus, Ayios Nikolaos, had begun to encroach on the municipal area of Famagusta itself. The ruler of Cyprus, Archbishop Makarios, protested, and GCHQ agreed that it could retreat a little without serious damage to its operations.[64]

The main problem for GCHQ was that the two Cyprus Sovereign Base Areas were increasingly expensive to run. This partly reflected an ongoing insurgency by a guerrilla force known as EOKA, which wanted unification or ‘enosis’ with Greece. Matters were made worse by the intense divisions between the Greek and Turkish communities on Cyprus. As a result, the security of the two sigint stations required a minimum land force garrison, including a heavy RAF presence. GCHQ’s extensive aerial farms were also vulnerable to sabotage. However, once the Chiefs of Staff had accepted that the major bases ‘must be retained because of the SIGINT facilities’, other things followed. Typically, the RAF decided to keep its main regional stockpile of nuclear weapons, code-named ‘Tuxedo’, at Dhekelia. In other words, while the Cyprus garrison was not there solely for sigint, it was the sigint facilities that made it irreplaceable.[65] The periodic outbreaks of inter-communal strife on Cyprus led to questions from the Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who asked in December 1963 whether Britain really needed bases there. Peter Thorneycroft, the Defence Secretary, responded with an unqualified yes, explaining that Cyprus ‘houses most important SIGINT stations and it also provided a base from which special reconnaissance flights are carried out’. Thorneycroft said that while most of the other activities could be relocated, intelligence was the sticking point, since it was ‘not considered that SIGINT facilities could be adequately replaced elsewhere’.[66]

The impact of GCHQ’s work in the Middle East is best illustrated by the Yemen Civil War. This conflict had its origins in a coup by the leader of Yemen’s republican faction, Abdullah as-Sallal, who overthrew the newly crowned Imam al-Badr in 1962. However, the Imam escaped and the royalist faction was soon receiving support from Saudi Arabia and, more covertly, from Britain, Jordan and Israel. Predictably, the republicans were supported by General Nasser, with perhaps seventy thousand Egyptian ‘volunteers’. King Hussein of Jordan pressed London to intervene on behalf of the Imam, and an elaborate mercenary operation was developed, using both SIS and the SAS. Sigint not only gave a detailed picture of Egyptian troop deployments, but also revealed tensions between republican ministers and the Chief of Staff of the Egyptian armed forces. The British reportedly found breaking the codes of Egyptian forces in the field ‘a bit of fun’, and also had no difficulty in reading higher-level diplomatic traffic. GCHQ intercepts seem to have been important in October 1962, informing the JIC, and later the Cabinet, about the morale of the Egyptian troops. The Governor of neighbouring Aden, Sir Charles Johnstone, had suggested that this was low, but intercepts showed quite the reverse. This prefigured a long struggle with the Egyptian proxies which dragged on until 1970.[67]

The Yemen conflict also illustrates the value of GCHQ intelligence in revealing one of the darkest aspects of war – the use of chemical weapons. It is now clear that, from December 1966, the Egyptians repeatedly used gas against Royalist villages. Although Cairo publicly denied using such diabolical weapons, the West had clear evidence that it was using poison gas. In 1967, the British noted that they had plenty of evidence at ‘a very high security classification.’ The Egyptians used both phosgene and mustard gas in their bombing raids. The source was communications between the Egyptian commanders in Yemen and Cairo.[68]

The most decisive role played by sigint was during the ‘Confrontation’ between Indonesia and the British-backed Federation of Malaysia during the early 1960s. In fact the ‘Confrontation’ was an undeclared war which involved troops from Britain, Australia and New Zealand. President Sukarno of Indonesia had decided that Britain’s creation of the Federation of Malaysia in 1962, which included parts of the island of Borneo, was an attempt to maintain a colonial presence by stealth and should be resisted. The first shots were fired in December 1962, when the Indonesian government attempted a coup against the Sultan of Brunei, an independent pro-British state on the island of Borneo. The Indonesians used a proxy force to try to capture the Sultan, and also attempted to seize Brunei’s oilfields. The revolt was suppressed using Gurkhas flown in from Singapore, but it was a close-run thing. Had the Gurkhas arrived an hour later, the Sultan might have been captured and forced to abdicate. The Gurkhas had been slow in arriving because a British staff officer who loved paperwork had been laboriously recording the name of each man as he boarded the aircraft. Eventually, ‘an angry Brigadier threw the movement papers onto the tarmac’ and the rescue finally got under way.[69]

In early 1963, President Sukarno announced that he would step up the pace and pursue a policy of ‘Konfrontasi’ with Malaysia. By April, two thousand Indonesian ‘volunteers’, many of whom were commandos, were infiltrating into the neighbouring British colonies of Sarawak and Sabah in northern Borneo, and were soon clashing with units of Gurkhas. Buoyed up by their success, Indonesian troops actually attempted to raid the mainland of Malaysia in 1964. At this point the British government deployed the SAS, later assisted by similar special force units from Australia and New Zealand. By 1964 there were over ten thousand British and Commonwealth troops in Borneo. British soldiers were being awarded medals in a secret war that remained undeclared.[70]

Sigint assisted this clandestine conflict directly and decisively. Most importantly, it was used in a revolutionary new way in conjunction with special forces. In April 1964 the British commander in Borneo, General Walter Walker, was given permission to begin highly secret ‘Claret’ operations. These were counter-infiltrations across the border into the Indonesian territory of Kalimantan in southern Borneo, designed to take the war to the enemy. British forces were initially given permission to cross over the thousand-mile-long border into Kalimantan to a distance of three thousand yards. By 1965 this had been extended to twenty thousand yards.[71] Locating the enemy was the main challenge, and tactical sigint was used to provide accurate direction-finding on the elusive Indonesian jungle camps. Sigint operators would listen in to the Indonesian traffic to see if the Claret patrols had been picked up. On one occasion the operators listened in to the Indonesians as they prepared to ambush a Claret patrol, and were able to warn the intended victims, who then scooted back over the border. Tim Hardy, a Special Branch officer, recalls that the local British sigint teams had no difficulty intercepting Indonesian field pack radios, which were of Second World War vintage. Moreover, they used old-fashioned crystals to set the frequency, and ‘in defiance of all military rules, these never changed’. As a result Indonesian field communications were an open book, and sigint was ‘locking onto targets with pinpoint accuracy’. Hardy met SAS patrols coming back over the border accompanied by local Iban native trackers who carried ‘gory trophy heads’.[72]

From February 1965 onwards the British troops engaged in little other than Claret special operations. Brigadier Bill Cheyne, the Director of Operations in Borneo, declared that ‘CLARET operations so weakened the Indonesian resolve to fight that only their very best troops ventured into Sarawak latterly.’ The number of incursions fell so dramatically by late 1965 – they became ‘as rare as snakebite’ – that it was a major event when one occurred. Cheyne considered the use of tactical sigint vital, and for security reasons even the special forces were not told of this secretive source. Instead, there were stories of human agent operations and ‘other sources of intelligence to shelter behind’.[73] The top brass knew about it though, and Walter Walker, the British Commander in Chief, constantly praised the ability of sigint to pinpoint the enemy: ‘Nine times out of ten we knew his every move and we brought him to battle long before he had reached a point from which he could mortar a village, let alone a town.’[74]

Britain had developed an extensive sigint station in Singapore, run jointly with Australia. However, much of the sigint effort during the Confrontation was undertaken locally by 651 Signals Troop, staffed by personnel on special detachment from 13 Signals Regiment, the main British Army sigint unit in Germany. They worked closely with 693 Signals Troop from Royal Australian Signals. Mixed units moved freely between bases at Singapore, Labuan and Kuching. Signals intelligence functioned at several levels. The main support to Claret operations came from local radio direction-finding and voice interception. Telephone tapping on the Indonesian side of the border was also very productive. Meanwhile, higher-level Indonesian diplomatic traffic was also being read in Singapore and at GCHQ at Cheltenham.[75] The result was ‘high-grade intelligence that contributed significantly to the successful outcome of the conflict’.[76] Because of Australian worries about the disputed territory of West Irian, Indonesia remained Australia’s main signals intelligence priority through the 1960s, even higher than Vietnam.[77]

By March 1965 the British government was asking how long the Confrontation would last. The Joint Intelligence Committee Far East, which included Brian Tovey from GCHQ, did its best to answer this. Sigint was a helpful indicator, since it showed that Sukarno was deploying large-scale units of the Indonesian Army’s strategic reserve to Kalimantan, and further units seemed to be moving to Sumatra. All this suggested that Sukarno was not yet finished. Negotiations were getting nowhere, and the only serious rebellion inside Indonesia, on the island of Celebes, had suffered a setback. Sukarno was known to be ill, and optimistic officials hoped his death might be followed by an internal struggle between the Army and the Indonesian Communist Party. The intelligence from SIS was that ‘Sukarno may die at any time. Without an operation he is unlikely to last more than a year.’ In fact the Indonesian Premier seemed to be in alarmingly rude health, and the British Ambassador in Jakarta was sceptical about ‘secret sources’ on this subject.[78] Although there had been an abortive coup in September 1965, Sukarno was still clinging on, and by the end of the year the British Chiefs of Staff were considering serious military escalation, including much deeper Claret operations and commando raids into Sumatra.[79] The British effort now developed a significant naval component, with no less than a third of the entire British fleet deployed off Sumatra, often operating openly in Indonesian waters. Once again, signals intercepts were a crucial element in the naval campaign.[80]

Konfrontasi ended after Sukarno was replaced by General Suharto in 1966. Cheyne argued that this change was partly prompted by British military successes: ‘Sukarno would not have been deposed except for his military failures in Borneo.’ He added that once Sukarno had been overthrown, the Claret operations enabled Malaysia to negotiate from strength. Overall, he concluded, it was ‘a brilliantly successful story’.[81]

For much of this period a stream of high-grade diplomatic sigint from Indonesia passed across the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s desk, providing an accurate barometer of the thinking in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta.[82] For Denis Healey, Britain’s Secretary for Defence, it was especially satisfying. On 30 May 1965 he had a conversation with the American Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, and explained that Britain could not disengage from its commitments east of Suez until the Confrontation came to an end. McNamara had replied gloomily, ‘It will not end.’ But he was wrong.[83]

Although the Indonesians did not rumble the secret of sigint, they knew something was badly wrong. Senior officers believed that the British had some sort of special radar equipment that could track their patrols, and this was not a bad guess.[84] The success of sigint in Borneo offered a longer-term legacy. The British and Australians had developed a new kind of sigint that interfaced directly with special forces in real time. In 1966, when Australia sent a Task Force to Vietnam, this was accompanied by a similar signals intelligence unit.[85] The same tactics were deployed by Britain in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. This approach has since become more commonplace, with the Americans taking it to a new level with the elite Intelligence Support Activity created in the 1980s, which was mostly deployed against terrorists. Britain’s new Special Reconnaissance Regiment, formed in 2004, continues the tradition with its units of ‘suitcase men’ who undertake short-range sigint, fully integrated with tactical operations. Few remember that the SAS–sigint partnership in the jungles of Borneo was its first proving ground.[86]