Intelligence Post WWII Part I

Argentinian Invasion of the Falklands

Military operations have changed greatly since the end of
the Second World War, most of all because the development of nuclear weapons
has effectively prevented the major states from fighting the sort of full-scale
struggles for decision which are the subject of this book. Big wars are now too
dangerous for big countries to fight. That does not mean that the world has
become a safer place for the common man. On the contrary. It is estimated that
armed conflict since 1945 has killed fifty million people, as many as died in
the Second World War. Most of the victims, however, have perished in
small-scale, random struggles, many scarcely to be dignified even by the name
of civil war. In the last fifty years it is not the methods or weapons of
1939—45 that have harvested the major proportion of violent deaths – aerial
bombardment or battles between great tank armies or the relentless grind of
infantry attrition – but skirmish and all too often massacre with cheap small
arms.

Even in such few major wars as have been fought, there have
been few large-scale conventional battles and their number has tended to
decline over time. Thus, while the Korean war of 1950–3 was almost exclusively
a conflict of infantry and tank armies, and the Arab–Israeli wars of 1956–73
likewise, the biggest war of all, in Vietnam, was a protracted
counter-insurgency struggle, marked by the clash of armies scarcely at all.
Though the Iran–Iraq war of 1980–8 saw much heavy fighting, Iran’s lack of
heavy equipment and use of under age conscripts in suicide attacks made it an
unequal contest bearing little resemblance to other wars of the twentieth
century. In 1991 Iraq was forced to abandon its illegal occupation of Kuwait as
a result of defeat in one major tank battle; but its army, more concerned to
surrender than to stand its ground, cannot really be said to have given battle
at all. The same can be said of its performance in the 2nd Gulf War of 2003, in
which intelligence played an important role in the targeting early on of the
Iraq leadership.

That episode apart, the post-war military record yields few
examples of outcomes being influenced by operational intelligence of the sort
assessed in the previous chapters. Intelligence services have never been busier
than they are in the nuclear world and consume more money than has ever before
been spent. By far the greater proportion both of effort and funds is devoted,
however, to early warning and to listening, continuous processes, intended to
sustain security, not to achieve success in specific or short-term
circumstances. The elaborate infrastructure of early warning – radar stations,
underwater sensors, space satellite systems, radio interception towers – is
enormously expensive to build, maintain and operate and so are its mobile
auxiliaries, particularly airborne surveillance squadrons. The intelligence
material thus collected, categorised by professionals as sigint (signals
intelligence), overlapping with comint (communications intelligence) and elint
(electronic intelligence), requires processing and interpretation by thousands
of analysts and computer technicians. What they do and what they achieve is
rarely published. The public anyhow seems indifferent to what is unquestionably
the most significant sector of contemporary intelligence activity.
Understandably, the complexities of intelligence technique must baffle even
highly educated laymen. Only the most specialist of experts can hope to
comprehend what intelligence agencies now do. It is possible, with application,
for the interested general reader to follow descriptions of how the Enigma
machine worked and of how the problems it presented to cryptanalysts were
overcome. Modern ciphers, created through the application of enormous prime
numbers to language, belong in the realm of the highest mathematics and are
alleged to defy attack even by the most powerful computers yet built.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the intelligence world
attracts attention only when there is a breach of security, typically in recent
years by the ‘defection in place’ of an intelligence operative who yields to
greed or lust or exhibits defects of character not identified at the time of
recruitment. There has been a steady trickle of such scandals, long post-dating
the sensational unmasking of the ‘Cambridge’ spies in Britain and affecting the
American and Soviet services which were presumed to have been warned against
such occurrences in their own ranks by the ‘Third’ and ‘Fifth’ Man episodes.

Public interest is also engaged by accounts of the effect of
human intelligence, humint, on recent or current military operations, where
such effect can be shown. Humint has unquestionably played a major part in
Israel’s successful efforts to hold at bay its Arab neighbours in four major
wars, much minor conflict and its continuous struggle for security, for the
ingathering of Jews from neighbouring lands allowed its intelligence services
to recruit patriotic operatives who spoke Arabic bilingually and were able to
pass as natives in their countries of former residence. It is understandable
that the successes of Israeli humint remain almost completely secret. During
the Vietnam War the American CIA conducted a large-scale campaign of
destabilisation against the Viet Cong, largely by the targeted assassination of
Viet Cong leaders in the South Vietnamese villages. Operation Phoenix remains
unacknowledged; the Vietnam War was eventually lost; it would nevertheless be
illuminating to know what effect Phoenix had on its conduct.

The only conventional military conflict of recent times for
which a reasonably complete picture of the influence of intelligence on
operations is available in all or most of its complexity – signit, elint,
comint, humint and photographic or imaging intelligence – is the Falklands War
of 1982, between Britain and Argentina. Rights of sovereignty over the Atlantic
islands of the Falklands or Malvinas, which include such Antarctic outliers as
South Georgia, Graham Land and the South Shetland, Orkney and Sandwich groups,
has been disputed between Britain and Argentina since the nineteenth century.
The small Falklands population is exclusively British (the other territories
are effectively uninhabited) but it is a universal and deeply held belief in
Argentina that the lands are theirs. Argentina has a troubled political
history. Once a country of great wealth, which attracted to it over the last
century large numbers of immigrants, including poor Italians seeking a better
life outside Europe and an English minority who came to supply its commercial
and professional class, Argentina suffered serious economic decline in the
mid-twentieth century. Discontent brought to power a populist Peronist regime,
so called after Colonel Juan Peron, its leader. Peronist mismanagement provoked
a military coup in the 1970s. When the military junta itself became unpopular,
it decided to restore its fortunes by reviving the claim to the Falklands.
Recovering the Malvinas was a cause around which all Argentinians could unite.

Britain was long used to Argentina’s Falklands demands. It
did not take their revival in 1981–2 very seriously. Negotiations proceeded at
the United Nations in New York: they were not marked by urgency and the British
found the Argentinians in reasonable mood. Unknown to Britain, however, the
junta, led by General Leopoldo Galtieri, had already decided to mount an
invasion at latest by the October of 1982, when it was calculated that the only
Royal Naval ship on station, the ice patrol vessel Endurance, long scheduled
for retirement, would have been withdrawn. As late as March 1982, no military
preparations had been made and no diplomatic crisis appeared to impend. Then
what seems a chance factor altered the tempo. An Argentinian scrap reclamation
party arrived at Leith in South Georgia, the Falklands dependency, declaring it
was there to dismantle an old whaling station. The scrap men raised the
Argentinian flag but failed to seek permission for their work from the local
station of the British Antarctic Survey, the government authority. When
visited, they hauled down the flag but did not regularise their presence.
Constantino Davidoff, their leader, denied then and afterwards that he was
sponsored by the Argentinian navy but he is believed to have had a meeting with
naval officers before landing. Once he was ashore, the British Foreign Office
felt it had to act; the Ministry of Defence was more reluctant, since it
regarded operations 8,000 miles from home as beyond its capabilities. Under
Foreign Office pressure, a case was made to the Prime Minister, Mrs Margaret
Thatcher, who ordered Endurance, with a party of marines from Port Stanley, the
Falklands capital, to sail for South Georgia and to await orders.

The unexpected despatch of Endurance perturbed the junta. If
the scrap men were removed, Argentinian prestige would be damaged; but the
presence of Endurance challenged it to military action, which it did not plan
to take for several months. The Argentinians havered, first sending a naval
ship to take off most of the scrap men, then sending another with a party of
Argentinian marines to ‘protect’ those left. It was the turn of the British
government to dither. It sought guidance from its own and the American
intelligence services as to what Argentina intended. The signs were unclear.
Budgetary economies had run down the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) station
in Buenos Aires; what signal information could be supplied by Government
Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), by the American Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) and by its sister signals organisation, the National Security Agency
(NSA), did not clarify the picture. The British agencies enjoyed a warm and
co-operative relationship with the American, based on much exchange of mutually
useful material; but the CIA depended on MI6 for human intelligence, while both
GCHQ and the NSA were confused by the volume of radio traffic suddenly
generated in the South Atlantic by Argentinian but also Chilean vessels; the
two navies were conducting a large-scale but routine exercise.

Britain fell into a week-long bout of indecision; it had
decided it could not tolerate any further Argentinian intervention in the
affairs of its South Atlantic dependencies; but it shrank from any overt
measure that would provoke Argentina to action. Eventually, the decision was
taken out of its hands. On 26 March, the junta, under pressure from street
demonstrations against its economic austerity programme, but even more fearful
of public reaction if it appeared to back down before British diplomatic
protest over the South Georgia affair, decided to advance the timetable for its
invasion of the Falklands and launch the operation at once.

The Falklands were effectively undefended. Of their
population of 1,800, 120 of the men belonged to the Falklands Islands Defence
Force, but they were untrained and equipped only with small arms. An official
British military presence was provided by Naval Party 8901, a detachment of
forty Royal Marines; their number had recently been doubled by the arrival of
their reliefs. Apart from Endurance, currently in Antarctica, there were no
naval ships in the Southern Hemisphere. The Argentine armada, which began to
land at dawn on 2 April, could not therefore be repelled, though it was briefly
opposed. Naval Party 8901, depleted by the despatch of twelve men to reinforce
South Georgia, was ordered by the governor, Sir Rex Hunt, who had been warned
by London that an invasion force was at sea, to guard the airfield and the
harbour. When an advance party of 150 Argentinian commandos landed, they were
engaged and, in a firefight around Government House, two were killed. It was
clear to Sir Rex Hunt, however, that resistance was hopeless and, after two
hours, he ordered surrender. Soon afterwards the vanguard of 12,000 Argentinian
troops began to land, while the Argentinian air force took control of the
airfield.

The news caused an immediate and major political crisis in
London. The second of April was a Friday; an emergency session of parliament,
which never sits at the weekend, was called for the following day. The
consensus at Westminster was that, if the government could not demonstrate its
willingness and ability to confront the Argentinians, it would have to resign.
Fortunately for Mrs Thatcher, a woman of iron will but untried powers of
decision, she had already instituted precautionary measures. Alerted by the
enormous volume of radio traffic generated by Argentinian preparations, she had
ordered a submarine to sail for the South Atlantic on the previous Monday, 29
March. Much more important, indeed, as was to prove critically for the whole
Falklands saga, she had on Wednesday evening ordered that a naval and military
task force should be assembled to depart at once for the South Atlantic. Her
desire to recapture the Falklands was never in doubt; the impetus to the
decision was supplied by the arrival in her room in the House of Commons when
she was consulting her ministers of the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Henry
Leach, who gave it as his professional opinion that Britain had the power to
mount such an operation and that the navy could set out by the coming weekend.
He also assured the Prime Minister of victory. On return to his office he sent
a signal, ‘The task force is to be made ready and sailed.’

Its first elements departed on Monday 5 April, while its
military complement was hastily assembled in Britain to follow. Three
submarines, two nuclear-powered, one diesel, formed the spearhead; there were
to follow, over the course of the weeks to come, 2 aircraft carriers, embarking
20 Harrier aircraft and 23 helicopters, 23 destroyers and frigates, 2
amphibious ships, 6 landing ships, 75 transports, ranging in size from large
passenger liners to trawlers, and 21 tankers. The majority of the transports
and tankers were ‘taken up from trade’, chartered or requisitioned, that is,
from the merchant service.

The troops to be embarked would eventually comprise the
whole of 3 Commando Brigade (40, 42, and 45 Commando, Royal Marines, 29
Commando Regiment Royal Artillery and 59 Commando Squadron Royal Engineers),
attached to which were 2nd and 3rd Battalions The Parachute Regiment, two
troops of light armoured vehicles of the Blues and Royals, thirteen air defence
troops, the commando logistic regiment and the brigade’s helicopter squadron.
There was also a large complement of Special Forces, including three sections
of the Special Boat Squadron (SBS) and two squadrons of the Special Air Service
(SAS). To follow later was 5 Infantry Brigade (2nd Scots Guards, 1st Welsh
Guards and 1st/7th Gurkha Rifles) with some artillery and helicopters. The
Royal Air Force deployed elements of seventeen squadrons, flying fighters,
bombers, helicopters, reconnaissance aircraft and air refuelling tankers.

Refuelling, in the air and at sea, was an essential
requirement, for the task force was to operate without a land base nearer than
Ascension Island in the middle of the Atlantic. Until the airfield at Port
Stanley could be recaptured, air refuelling was less vital, for long flights
over the ocean could not be numerous. All fuel, and other supplies to the
warships, however, had to be transferred ship-to-ship while under way.

The assembly of the task force was a race against time, not
only because of the need to confront the Argentinians with an armed response as
rapidly as possible but also because of the season; the onset of the South
Atlantic winter at the end of June would bring sub-Arctic weather necessitating
withdrawal from the region. Everything, from completing dockyard maintenance to
supplying the soldiers with warm clothing, had to be done at the highest speed;
at the outset it seemed that many requirements could not be met.

It was not only the pace of material preparation that had to
be forced; so too did that of planning and intelligence gathering. The two were
intimately connected and interdependent. Britain had no base in the region and
no allies. Chile, long on bad terms with its Argentinian neighbour, was
disposed to be helpful but could not risk openly siding with Britain; most
other South American countries supported Argentina’s claim to the Falklands, if
only out of regional solidarity. How was the campaign to be fought? Clearly
there must be an amphibious landing but it would have to be launched from the
task force’s ships, not from land. That required the navy to close up to the
islands, at least while the troops got ashore, but also to remain nearby during
daylight so that the carrier aircraft could provide support. Worryingly the
islands, though 400 miles from the nearest stretch of Argentinian coast, were
just not far enough offshore to lie outside the range of the enemy’s land-based
aircraft. The troops, once landed, would be vulnerable to air attack. Far more
worryingly, the warships and transports would also be at risk, except when at
night they could stand off to the east into the broad expanse of the ocean.

How serious was the risk? That proved, both at the outset of
the campaign and during its development, an embarrassingly difficult question
to answer. No one in Britain really knew; no one, indeed, knew anything much
that was useful about Argentina’s armed forces. For reasons of economy, the
Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) had closed down all but one of its stations
in South America; that remaining was in Buenos Aires but its chief was too
overworked to collect anything but political intelligence. The service
attachés, navy, army and air, were supposed to report on their Argentinian
opposite numbers; but in recent years they were more often required to act as
salesmen for the British defence industries, so the excuse went afterwards; in
practice, attaché appointments were final postings at the end of a middling
officer’s career, a farewell present for an unexceptionable life. This was not
particular to Argentina but the general rule; only those officers posted to the
Soviet Union had the duty of acquiring intelligence and were fitted by ability
and training to do so.

Yet the collection of pertinent information in any
reasonably open society, which Argentina was, is not difficult and need not
conflict with diplomatic propriety. Readily available service magazines contain
valuable snippets of information which, if collated, quickly yield an order of
battle; so do local newspapers, from stories about local men in uniform and the
social affairs of locally stationed units. Service histories are also fruitful
sources; units tend to occupy the same barracks for decades. Armies, and
navies, are relatively unchanging organisations and, to anyone who takes the
trouble to form a picture of their organisation, rarely conceal secrets about
their location, strength or function requiring specialised intelligence
scrutiny to uncover.

The archives of the Defence Intelligence Service in London
ought, in short, to have contained copious and detailed reports on the
Argentinian navy, army and air force in April 1982. They did not. The cupboard
was almost bare. The officers of the task force have in consequence left a
record of a shaming and hurried search in public libraries for such standard
works as Jane’s Fighting Ships and the Institute for Strategic Studies’
Military Balance. Little was to be found. The Military Balance allots no more
than two or three pages to a country the size of Argentina; Jane’s Fighting
Ships is largely a photographic album. Moreover, as the most important of
Argentina’s warships, the carrier Veinticinco de Mayo, was the ex-British HMS
Venerable, venerable indeed since launched in 1943, and three of its largest
destroyers were British-built or designed, Jane’s could tell little the British
did not know already. The marines and soldiers scanning the Military Balance
must have been even more disheartened. It lists the barest information of
numbers of units and quantities of equipment and those in separate sections; no
picture of units’ capabilities is discernible, therefore, while units are not
named nor are their peacetime locations specified. That omission may have been
seriously misleading in the frenzied days of early April 1982. The Argentinian
army’s three best formations were the VI, VIII and XI Mountain Brigades (Peron,
incidentally, was a mountain infantry officer), which, by reason of their
training and familiarity with cold climate, seemed the obvious choice for
Falklands duty. Because of the junta’s fear that Chile might profit from their
commitment to the Falklands to strengthen its position in the disputed Cape
Horn region, however, it had left the mountain brigades in their peacetime
stations and decided to employ lower-grade formations drawn from the warm
borders of Uruguay. GCHQ is known to have been intercepting the mountain
brigades’ radio traffic, confirming that they were still located in the far
south even as the invasion fleet put to sea. The task force officers,
apparently dependent wholly on scantily published information about the
location and capability of their potential opponents, did not even know that.

The navy was quite as badly informed. Admiral Sandy
Woodward, commanding the warships and transports aboard the old carrier Hermes,
had a general picture of the risk he faced. It consisted of three elements:
attack by land-based Argentinian aircraft, some of which were equipped to launch
Exocet, the French-supplied sea-skimming missile (also aboard some of
Woodward’s ships), which was difficult to distract by electronic
counter-measure and deadly if it struck home; the Argentinian surface fleet,
known from radio intercepts to be at sea and organised in two groups formed
respectively around the Veinticinco de Mayo and the ex-American heavy cruiser
Belgrano, apparently deployed to mount a pincer movement; and Argentinian
submarines. The diesel-propelled submarines were known to be difficult to
detect but, it was believed, could be held at bay by the British nuclear
submarines in the area; the surface fleet had been warned not to enter an
‘exclusion zone’ proclaimed around the islands by Britain and would be attacked
if it did (it did not but was attacked anyhow, by HM Submarine Conqueror, and
Belgrano sunk); it was hoped to overcome the Exocet threat by positioning
destroyers and frigates as radar pickets between the islands and Argentina to
provide early warning and to distract any missiles that got through by firing
‘chaff’, which simulated a larger target than the threatened ship.

In practice the two Argentinian diesel submarines did not
manage to attack the task force; the surface fleet, partially incapacitated by
equipment failure aboard the Veinticinco de Mayo, turned back from the
exclusion zone and returned to port after the sinking of the Belgrano. The
Exocet aircraft, by contrast, inflicted heavy damage on the task force and,
with others delivering more conventional ordnance, came close to achieving a
naval victory that would have secured the Falklands and humiliated Britain for
decades to come.

The Argentinian air-launched Exocet, a modified version of
the maritime model, known as the AM-39, was mounted on a Super Etendard
aircraft, supplied by France, like the missile itself. The British believed
correctly that Argentina had only five AM-39s, but wrongly that it had only one
Super Etendard; the right number was five. As important as the aircraft–missile
combination was the maritime reconnaissance aircraft that alerted the Super
Etendards at their Rio Grande base to the presence of the task force within
attack range. An antiquated American aeroplane, the SP-2H Neptune, it possessed
the capability to linger beyond the horizon formed by the earth’s curvature but
to keep the British under radar surveillance by bobbing up over it at regular
intervals. The Super Etendards, when vectored towards the target, flew at sea
level, beneath British radar, until close enough for the Exocet to strike. The
pilots needed to gain altitude only once or twice, and then briefly, for their
own radars to acquire their targets and automatically programme the missiles to
depart in the correct direction. Once launched the Exocet maintained height
just above sea level by an on-board altimeter and finally homed on the target
ship down the beam of its own radar.

Admiral Woodward and his staff had been wrongly informed
that the Super Etendards’ range was only 425 miles, too short to reach the task
force east of the islands. In fact, by refuelling from one of Argentina’s two
KC-130 tankers, they could achieve launch positions. On 4 May, two days after
the sinking of the Belgrano, two Super Etendards, flying from Rio Grande,
approached the task force; their directing Neptune had been spotted by British
radar but was thought to be searching for Belgrano survivors. Glasgow and
Coventry, deployed as radar pickets west of the task force, caught echoes of
the attacking aircraft as they rose above the horizon to correct their final
approach paths. The British ships fired chaff and both Exocets, travelling only
six feet above the sea, were deflected by their own course-corrections.
Sheffield, twenty miles distant, was currently transmitting on its radio link
to satellite, which prevented its hearing the warnings transmitted by its
sister ships or operating its own radar. Its crew were therefore oblivious of
impending danger and neither fired chaff nor manoeuvred. She was hit in the
forward engine room by one of the Exocets which, though its warhead failed to
explode, started a fire that eventually forced her abandonment, after heavy
loss of life.

The manifestation of the Exocet threat was to exert a
decisive effect both on the management of the campaign and on the intelligence
effort that underlay it. Admiral Woodward at once withdrew the task force far
to the east of the islands, where it was to remain until the landings began on
21 May. At the same time the Northwood joint services headquarters, from which
Operation Corporate, as the campaign was code-named, was directed, began a
frenzied search for means to improve intelligence collection and to strike
directly at the Argentinian air menace. Of signal intelligence there was no
shortage; the Argentinian army, navy and air force generated a large volume of
traffic, which was intercepted not only by GCHQ, through its intercept station
at Two Boats on Ascension Island, ostensibly a branch of the Cable and Wireless
Company, but by the NSA, the American intelligence community having decided to
lend its British partners full support at this time of need, and by a New
Zealand intercept station at Waiouru. The United States was also generous with
satellite intelligence. The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) had three
systems in operation that could together provide electronic and imaging data,
White Cloud, KH-8 and KH-11; it could also offer data from occasional
overflights by the SR-71 high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft.

The limitation on the usefulness of overhead surveillance
was, first, its intermittence – White Cloud made only two passes a day – but,
second, that by the time it became available, the damage had been done.
Overhead surveillance could have warned of the Argentinian invasion fleet
setting sail, in time for the British government to have issued an ultimatum;
once the fleet had arrived, it could supply little further information that was
useful.

It was, among other factors, for that reason that the
Northwood headquarters decided, after the shock of the first Exocet attack, to
move from passive to active counter-intelligence methods. Since traditional
means of warning – including satellite intelligence – had failed to avert the
threat, the Ministry of Defence would be ordered to mount operations to
eliminate the risk at source. Britain’s special forces would be committed to
find and destroy the Exocet units in their home bases.