Intelligence Post WWII Part II

Milan – RAID SAS – Darwin Settlement. Painting
by Daniel Bechennec.
Visit Daniel’s Website for some fantastic Paintings

Special forces are a distinctively British contribution to
contemporary military capability. They have their origin in Winston Churchill’s
directive of July 1940 to ‘set Europe ablaze’, the immediate outcome of which
was the creation of the Special Operations Executive (SOE). Churchill’s belief,
ill-conceived though it proved to be, was that covert attacks by irregular
forces within the territory of German-occupied Europe could undermine Britain’s
enemy from within. He envisaged the work being done by local patriots, armed
and advised by British agents. Churchill’s scheme, though it did much to
restore the national pride of Europe’s defeated peoples, did little to weaken
Nazi power. His conception of forming irregular units had an indirect result,
however, that was permanently to alter the way in which states use military
force. Fertilised by the idea of SOE, the British army’s thinking in the middle
period of the Second World War turned towards the creation of its own irregular
forces, trained and equipped to operate inside enemy territory. The first such
units, organised at Churchill’s direct order, became the commandos, raiding
forces to be landed from the sea; they had their airborne equivalent in the
Parachute Regiment, which was trained and equipped to descend from aircraft
behind enemy lines.

The SOE, commando and Parachute Regiment ideas coalesced to
inspire free-thinking officers of the British forces in the Middle East during
1940–2 with a conception of their own: that instead of seeking to recruit
civilians to fight as irregular soldiers, they should turn professionals into
irregulars. The outcome was a coterie of unconventional units, the Long Range
Desert Group, Popski’s Private Army, the Levant Schooner Squadron, the Special
Air Service. When the war came to an end, most were disbanded to survive only
as romantic memories. The Special Air Service (SAS) found a different destiny.
It had had a very successful war, attacking airfields in apparently quiet
sectors of the desert and pinpoint targets in continental Europe; though stood
down in 1946, it was revived – as the Malayan Scouts – to conduct covert
operations against Communist terrorists in the Malayan jungle in 1948 and
thereafter accumulated many other functions. By the 1980s it had become the
instrument with which the army, often acting as the agent of the government,
conducted covert operations against terrorists and organised criminals inside
and outside the United Kingdom; it also acted as the irregular arm of the
regular forces in conventional operations. Quite small – its intensely
selective recruitment process limited its numbers to about 400 – its
effectiveness was out of all proportion to its numerical strength.

One of the functions at which it excelled was undercover
observation. SAS troopers learnt how to penetrate a landscape and disappear
inside it, ‘lying up’ in ‘hides’ for days at a time, surviving in great
discomfort to bring back eye-witness accounts of enemy locations and
activities. Northwood headquarters decided at the outset of Operation Corporate
that, because of the paucity of intelligence derived from signal interception
and overhead surveillance, it would be essential to insert SAS parties to watch
and report. Those missions would shortly be enlarged to include direct attack
on exposed enemy positions identified as offering critical threats to the
success of the expedition.

One was decided upon at the outset. The Argentinian presence
on South Georgia, though it lay 800 miles from the Falklands group, was seen as
an affront; it was also soon perceived as presenting an opportunity. During the
long preparatory period, as the task force moved south in stages during March
and April, the government felt increasingly under pressure to allay public
anxiety with news of success. The recapture of South Georgia would satisfy the
requirement. A mixed party of Royal Marines and SAS was therefore embarked on
HMS Antrim and detached to the objective. In extreme weather conditions and
with inadequate equipment, the party eventually got ashore, having narrowly
avoided disaster in the process, and completed their mission between 21–24
April. The Argentinian servicemen, who had replaced the scrap dealers, gave up
easily. The marines and SAS suffered no casualties, though many had been close
to death by mishap several times.

Following the South Georgia foray, the SAS, with its Royal
Marines equivalent, the Special Boat Squadron (now Service), was committed
directly to preliminary operations in the Falklands; at a later stage it also
took a full operational part in the fighting and attempted a number of still
mysterious penetrations of the Argentinian mainland, intended to give early
warning of Argentinian air strikes but also to intercept them by surprise
attack.

The first major special forces mission was launched against
the Falklands group in early May. Six Special Boat Squadron (SBS) teams and
seven four-man SAS patrols were landed by helicopter from the fleet, the SBS tasked
particularly to choose landing beaches, the SAS to gather intelligence of
Argentinian deployments. One SAS patrol lay up at Bluff Cove, eventually to be
chosen as a subsidiary landing place on the west coast of East Falkland, the
main island, one at Darwin, near San Carlos, the initial and main landing
place, three overlooking Port Stanley, the island capital on East Falkland,
three on the barely inhabited West Falkland. It was there that the SAS drew
first blood. On 14 May forty-five men of D Squadron, who had been guided to
their destination by a patrol inserted three days earlier, landed by helicopter
to strike at the airstrip on Pebble Island where the Argentinian air force had
based eleven Pucara ground-attack aircraft, guarded by a hundred men. The SAS
troopers were accompanied by forward observers from 29 Commando Regiment Royal
Artillery to direct the fire of frigates offshore. Under the bombardment the
SAS laid demolition charges which destroyed all the enemy aircraft and withdrew
without loss, leaving an Argentinian officer dead and two of his men wounded.

Two independent actions by special forces followed, one on
21 May, the day of the main landing in San Carlos Water, to seize Fanning Head,
which overlooked the approach, and during 25–27 May to secure look-out
positions on Mount Kent, dominating Port Stanley. Both were completely
successful. The Argentinians at Fanning Head were driven off by the SBS which,
in the period before the main landing, also sent patrols to Campa Menta Bay,
Eagle Hill, Johnson’s Harbour, San Carlos and Port San Carlos. On 20 May an SAS
patrol had also struck a serious blow at Argentinian ability to position troops
against the bridgehead, when it was secured, by finding an enemy helicopter
park and destroying the four Chinooks and Pumas waiting there. The two units,
22 SAS and the SBS, continued to be involved in operations on the islands after
the landings until the Argentinian surrender on 14 June.

After 4 May, however, when Sheffield was sunk by Exocet, the
main thought of those controlling special forces was to use them in some way
that would provide early warning of Exocet raids or eliminate the Super
Etendards which delivered them. In either case landings on the Argentinian
mainland would be required. The insertion of an SAS surveillance team was
attempted by helicopter against the base at Rio Grande on the night of 17–18
May; its mission was to assess the state of the defences and then retire
undetected into Chilean territory, where preparations had been made to receive
it. As the helicopter landed the pilot decided that his aircraft had been
detected and that he must make an escape to Chile. After a hurried flight
westward, he dropped his SAS passengers to proceed on foot across the border,
then landed inside Chilean territory and set fire to his machine. He and his
two crew were subsequently repatriated, having unconvincingly explained their
presence in Chilean airspace with the excuse that they had got lost. The SAS
invaders were discovered by an undercover liaison agent, taken to Santiago and
hidden there until the war was over.

The second element of the scheme to eliminate the Super
Etendards at Rio Grande failed because those detailed for the mission became
convinced that it would end in disaster. The plan required three troops,
forty-five men, to be crash-landed onto the runway in Hercules C-130 aircraft,
overcome the defenders, destroy the Super Etendards, kill the pilots, whom it
was hoped to trap in their quarters, and then march at high speed across country
to neutral Chile. The diplomacy of the operation was dubious; so was its
practicality. The soldiers’ confidence was not enhanced by the discovery that
the only maps of the region available dated from 1939 or had been photocopied
from The Times Atlas. At their last briefing before departure from England, two
highly experienced sergeants announced that they wished to remain behind,
apparently an unprecedented event in SAS history. In the face of their doubts,
the senior officer felt obliged to cancel the operation and stand the other
soldiers down. Some felt the dissenters should have been dismissed; others
accepted that they had reason on their side.

The planners’ reasons for preparing the operation, at the
extreme limit of risk though it was known to be, was demonstrated on 25 May
when two Super Etendards, refuelled north of the islands, approached the fleet
from an unexpected direction and launched Exocets. One was distracted by chaff
and fell into the sea, the second, attracted by the huge bulk of the container
ship Atlantic Conveyor, struck home. Conveyor caught fire and sank, taking with
it much vital heavy equipment, including three large Chinook troop-carrying
helicopters, and ten Wessex, which were intended to lift the infantry forward
towards Port Stanley. Their loss condemned the infantry to walk, thus seriously
setting back the final stage of the ground campaign.

After the attack on Conveyor, however, only one Exocet
remained to the Argentinians. Moreover, in fierce battles between the task force
and the enemy’s conventionally armed air units between 21 and 23 May,
twenty-three enemy aircraft had been destroyed, taking Argentinian losses to
one-third of their available strength. The Argentinian pilots had fought
throughout the campaign with great courage and unexpected skill but the air
battles over San Carlos Water had effectively defeated them. They were to
achieve one more spectacular success, at Bluff Cove on 8 June, but by then the
British ground forces were positioned on the high ground surrounding Port
Stanley, whose Argentinian garrison was already showing its readiness to
surrender.

There is some suggestion, unverified and unconfirmed, that
the task force’s ability to defend itself against air attack was reinforced
during May by the insertion of another, undetected SAS surveillance mission on
the Argentinian mainland and by the positioning offshore of nuclear submarines
as pickets. Certainly the full picture of the nature of the British
early-warning system during the three weeks, 21 May–14 June, of the phase of
intense fighting has not been disclosed. It cannot have succeeded by luck
alone, for the air cover available was scanty, only 36 Harriers before losses,
while the fleet’s missile defences were patchy. The remarkable total of losses
inflicted on the Argentinians, including 31 Skyhawks and 26 Mirages, speaks of
a more systematic warning achievement than chance would allow.

The task force suffered two grave intelligence defeats, both
attributable to failures at the human level. During the subsidiary campaign to
recapture South Georgia, a succession of attempts to extract an SAS party from
a position made untenable by ferocious Arctic weather was only saved from
disaster when a third helicopter succeeded, against every probability, in
rescuing both the party and the crews of the two helicopters which had crashed
in previous attempts to rescue it. The mission had been undertaken only because
an army officer with exploring experience on South Georgia had assured the
planners that the original mission was feasible; the episode provided an awful
warning that expert information can be as flawed as any other form of
intelligence. The second failure was more serious; early in the campaign a Sea
Harrier from Invincible was shot down in an attack on the Pucara base in West
Falklands (4 May); on the pilot’s body an Argentinian intelligence officer
found his briefing notes, which when deciphered revealed the position from
which the fleet was operating east of the Falklands. Until then it had been able
to hide from the enemy in the wastes of the ocean, while keeping close enough
to fight what was hoped would be a successful struggle to achieve air
superiority over the islands. After 4 May, also the date when Sheffield was
sunk by Exocet, Admiral Woodward was forced to withdraw the fleet beyond
Argentinian aircraft range, and to approach the islands only when absolutely
necessary.

The British had gone to war in the belief that their show of
force would bring about an Argentinian withdrawal by diplomatic negotiation.
After the sinking of Sheffield and the loss of the first Sea Harrier they were
obliged to recognise that the conflict was real; once the troops landed on 21
May optimism grew that resistance would collapse, as the Argentinian conscripts
were overcome by the superior fighting power of the British regulars. It was
during the first three weeks of the campaign that the issue hung in the
balance. An intelligence coup by the Argentinians, allowing them to strike one
of the British carriers or a big troop-carrying ship, Canberra or QEII, with an
Exocet might have shifted it their way. As it was, without access to American
satellite or signal intelligence, which the British enjoyed, and with
inadequate intelligence resources of their own, the Argentinians had to operate
by guess and chance. Neither sufficed.

The last large war of the twentieth century, that in the
Gulf against Iraq by the American-led coalition, was conducted within an
intelligence environment far more favourable to the intervening force than that
conditioning the Falklands War nine years earlier. The coalition was served
with, besides copious and continuous sigint, frequent overflying missions,
yielding high-resolution photography and much electronic and sensory data, as
well as satellite surveillance in all its forms. Because the Iraqis had
deployed their forces beyond their own borders, in Kuwaiti territory, the
coalition also had access to plentiful and exact cartography of the operational
area; the combatants made no complaints at all about the quantity or quality of
strategic intelligence available to them.

The acquisition of tactical intelligence in real time proved
much less satisfactory. Because the Iraqi air force took refuge at an early
stage in Iran, there was no need for early warning of air attack. What was
required was warning of the launch of Iraqi Scud missiles, aimed at coalition
forces, their Saudi bases and the territory of Israel; even more desirable was
information about the Scud launchers’ whereabouts. Early warning worked well,
allowing the destruction of Scuds in flight on several occasions. Location of
the launchers – a variant of the Meillerwagen that had made the V-2s so
difficult to attack in 1944–5 – proved effectively impossible. Despite the
insertion of numbers of special forces teams into Iraqi territory, no Scud
launcher was found and none destroyed. Iraqi ability to hide and protect its
weapons of highest value from detection by both external and internal
intelligence-gathering means underlay the international crisis that began in
2002 and persists at the time of writing.

Saddam Hussein’s defiance of the authority of the United
Nations, by his refusal to co-operate with its weapons inspectors as required
under Resolution 1441 of the Security Council, exemplifies the difficulties of
obtaining intelligence about modern weapons systems even under conditions
amounting to those of authorised espionage. The inspectors, though present in
considerable numbers – at least a hundred – on Iraqi territory, and ostensibly
enjoying unfettered freedom of movement and access, were consistently
frustrated, as late as March 2003, in their efforts to uncover stocks of
chemical and biological warfare materials which they had good reason to believe
had not been destroyed, as was required by UN resolution, and remained hidden
at a number of locations. The search for the components of nuclear warheads,
which it was also strongly believed Saddam was attempting to construct, proved
equally unavailing. The senior weapons inspector, Dr Hans Blix, complained that
he and his team were unable to fulfil their task – to report that Iraq had
fully complied with the provisions of Resolution 1441 – because they were
refused full co-operation by the Iraqi authorities, particularly the freedom to
interrogate in private Iraqi scientists known to be working on the weapons
programme. Neither Dr Blix nor Western anti-war protestors, who demanded more
time for the inspectors to continue, seem to have made any allowance for the
possibility that the objects of their search were so well concealed that
whatever the apparent co-operation furnished by the Iraqis and however long
investigations were protracted, his mission was bound to fail. The situation
was unprecedented. A potential international lawbreaker had been obliged to
open his borders to officially sponsored investigators of his suspected
wrongdoing and yet they remained unable to dispel the uncertainties surrounding
his intentions and capabilities. In absolutely optimum conditions, in short,
intelligence had failed.

Intelligence operations in the parallel ‘war against terror’
were equally frustrated, though for different reasons. The ‘war’ was misnamed,
for it was so one-sided as to deprive the opponents of terrorism of any of the
usual means by which one party to a conflict normally exerts pressure on the
other. Al-Qaeda, the movement which had taken control of and given leadership
to the diffuse forces of Islamic fundamentalist terror, has, though it means
‘the base’ in Arabic, no identifiable base and, after the defeat of the Taleban
in Afghanistan at the beginning of 2002, no territory. It is outlawed in many
Muslim states, where autocratic governments fear the threat it offers, through
accusations of their less than perfect adherence to the fundamentalists’
conception of Islam, to established authority. The size and composition of its
membership is unknown, as is the identity of its leadership, a few
self-declared but elusive figureheads apart, and the structure of its command
system, if one exists; it is a strength of al-Qaeda that it appears to be a
coalition of like-minded but separate groups rather than a monolithic entity.
Its finances, though it is known to possess large monetary resources, are
mysterious, since it apparently conducts transactions by informal but secure
word-of-mouth agreements traditional within Muslim societies. It does not
possess large armouries of conspicuous weapons, preferring to improvise – as by
its hijacking of civilian airliners on 11 September 2001 – or to make use of
readily concealed means of terrorist outrage, such as plastic explosive. Like
all post-1945 terrorist organisations, it appears to have learnt a great deal
from the operations of the Western states’ special forces during the Second
World War, such as SOE and OSS, which developed and diffused most of the modern
techniques of secret warfare among the resistance groups of German-occupied
Europe during 1940–4; the copious literature of secret warfare against the
Nazis provides the textbooks. Among the techniques described is resistance to
interrogation by captured operatives, which often failed against the Gestapo,
since it was prepared to use torture, but succeeds against today’s Western
counter-terrorist organisations, culturally indisposed to employ torture and
anyhow inhibited from so doing by domestic and international law. Despite the
arrest and detention of hundreds of al-Qaeda operatives, reports suggest that
they have successfully overcome American efforts to break down their resistance
to questioning.

The only point of penetration into the world of al-Qaeda
appears to have been found in its necessity to communicate. Intercommunication,
as this book suggests, has almost always proved the weak link in undercover
systems, whatever the methods used to make it secure. Al-Qaeda has apparently
thus far trusted to the difficulty presented to Western monitoring
organisations by the sheer volume of mobile and satellite telephone
transmissions, seemingly hoping that its person-to-person messages will be lost
among the daily billions of others. It has, fortunately, proved a false hope.
Modern methods of scanning and point-targeting of transmissions allow the
Western interception agencies to isolate and overhear an increasingly large
number of significant messages and so to identify suspects and locate where
they operate.

In the last resort, however, attacks on the al-Qaeda and
other fundamentalist networks will only be made successful by recourse to the
oldest of all intelligence methods, direct and personal counter-espionage.
Brave individuals, fluent in difficult languages and able to pass as native
members of other cultures, will have to befriend and win acceptance by their
own societies’ enemies. It is a technique perfected by the Israelis, whose
intelligence agencies enjoy the advantage of being able to recruit agents among
refugees from ancient Jewish communities in Arab lands, colloquial in the
speech of the countries from which they have fled but completely loyal to the
state in which they have found a new home. Western states will find such
recruitment more difficult. Islam imposes a powerful bond over fellow
believers; even Muslim immigrants of the second or third generation, loyal to
their Western countries of adoption in every other way, feel a strong aversion
to what seems betrayal of co-religionists by reporting them to the authorities
for religious zealotry. The problem of recruitment is acute in the United
States, which lacks both Muslim communities of large size or antiquity and
non-Muslim citizens with a knowledge of the appropriate languages. It may prove
easier in the old imperial countries, such as Britain and France, whose
intelligence agencies, particularly the British, actually have their roots in
the nineteenth-century need to police their colonial dissidents and which
retain a significant residue of language and other ethnographic skills.

A strange task confronts them. It diverges widely from that
of Bletchley and OP-20-G, which required the highest intellectual power and
rigorous dedication to the routines of radio monitoring, interception and
decipherment. The masters of the new counter-intelligence will not resemble the
academics and chess champions of the Enigma epic in any way at all. They will
not be intellectuals nor will they overcome their opponents by power of reason
or gifts of mathematical analysis. On the contrary: it will be qualities of
empathy and dissimulation that will equip them to identify, penetrate and win
acceptance by the target groups. Their work will resemble that of undercover
police agents who attempt to become trusted members of criminal gangs, with all
the dangers and moral compromises that such a life requires. Undercover work
within the terrorist groups of Northern Ireland, republican and loyalist alike,
has equipped British security and specialist police bodies to understand how such
undercover operations are best conducted, but the practice is always more
difficult than theory and will prove particularly so with religious fanatics.
Even ideological terrorists, such as the extreme nationalists of the Irish
republican tradition, are sometimes susceptible to temptation or threat;
republican fund-raising by blackmail and extortion has drawn the movement into
crime, with corrupting effect, while its ‘military’ ethos excludes the taking
of risks that threaten the lives of ‘volunteers’. Muslim puritans, by contrast,
seem resistant to financial temptation, have demonstrated their readiness to
commit suicide in furtherance of their violent aims, are committed to a code of
total silence under interrogation and are bound by ties of brotherhood which
have religious strength. No organisation, of course, is impervious to
penetration or is indestructible. All have their weak spots and weak members.
It may, however, take decades for Western intelligence agencies to learn how to
break into the mysterious and alien organisations and even longer to
marginalise and neutralise them.

The challenge will cast the agencies back on to methods
which have come to appear outdated, even primitive, in the age of satellite
surveillance and computer decryption. Kipling’s Kim, who has survived into
modern times only as the delightful literary creation of a master novelist, may
come to provide a model of the antifundamentalist agent, with his ability to
shed his European identity and to pass convincingly as Muslim message-carrier,
Hindu gallant and Buddhist holy man’s hanger-on, far superior to any holder of
a PhD in higher mathematics. Buchan’s Scudder, sniffing from clue to clue along
a trail leading from fur shop in Buda to the back streets of Paris, shedding
and adopting new disguises on the way, seems better adapted to the future world
of espionage than any graduate student in regional studies. It will be ironic
if the literature of imagination supplies firmer suggestions as to how the war
against terrorism should be fought than academic training courses in
intelligence technique provide. Ironic but not unlikely. The secret world has
always occupied a halfway house between fact and fiction, and has been peopled
as much by dreamers and fantasists as by pragmatists and men of reason.

The Western powers may come to count themselves fortunate
that, in their time of troubles during the two world wars, the central targets
of intelligence-gathering, enemy communications and secret weapons were
susceptible to attack by concrete methods: overhearing, decryption and visual
surveillance, together with deception in kind. They have already learnt to
regret the emergence of new intelligence targets that lack any concrete form:
aggressive belief-systems not subject to central authority, shifting alliances
of dangerous malcontents, stateless migrants disloyal to any country of
settlement. It is from those backgrounds that the agents of anti-Western
terrorism are recruited. Their recruiting grounds, moreover, are confusingly
amorphous, disguised as they are within communities of recently arrived
immigrants, many of them young men without family or documented identity, often
illegal border-crossers, who take on protective colouring within the large
groups of ‘paperless’ drifters merely seeking to avoid the attention of the
authorities.

The United States, protected as it is by its wide oceanic
frontiers and its strict and efficient border services, is certainly not
impervious to terrorist penetration, as the awful events of 11 September 2001
demonstrated. The western European states, physically contiguous to countries
which hundreds of thousands of young men energetically seek to leave and
constrained by their own civil rights legislation from returning illegals to
their jurisdictions of origin, even if the facts can be established, are much
less well defended. The security problem by which the Western European states
are confronted is not only without precedent in scale or intensity but defies
containment. The suspect communities grow continuously in size, the nuclei of
plotters and would-be evil-doers they conceal thereby acquiring greater
anonymity and freedom to prepare outrages. Financial support is not a problem,
since the terrorists enjoy access to funds extracted in their countries of
origin by blackmail in many forms, including straightforward protection money
but also donations represented as contributions to the cause of holy war. The
‘war on terrorism’ may be a misnomer, but it would be foolish to pretend that
there is not an historic war between the ‘crusaders’, as Muslim fundamentalists
characterise the countries which descend from the kingdoms of Western
Christendom, and the Islamic world. It has taken many forms over more than a
thousand years and fortunes in the conflict have ebbed and flowed. A century
ago it appeared to have been settled for good in favour of the West, when the
region’s technological superiority seemed to have reduced Islam to an
irreformably backward and feeble condition. Allah, Muslims might say, is not mocked.
Their certitude in the truth of their beliefs has driven those Muslims who see
themselves as religious warriors to seek ways of waging holy war that outflank
mere technology and promise to bring victory by the power of anti-materialist
forces alone. Muslim fundamentalism is profoundly unintellectual; it is, by
that token, opposed to everything the West understands by the idea of
‘intelligence’. The challenge to the West’s intelligence services is to find a
way into the fundamentalist mind and to overcome it from within.