The imminent collapse of the British Empire was not only a source of dismay to die-hard right-wing traditionalists. There were also those around Clement Attlee who were agitated by the prospect. Among them was his foreign secretary Ernest Bevin who, in the immediate aftermath of the war, was anxious that the nation would maintain its ‘prestige’ – that is, to hold on to its clout around international conference tables. But the Empire was imploding, unable to bear its own weight. It had been some time since colonial possessions had provided illimitable riches in trade and merchandise. The money required to rule was running out. From the point of view of the codebreakers, something akin to an elegant conjuring trick was needed; a means of Britain’s withdrawing from its colonies with such grace and abundant goodwill that these newly independent countries would still be happy to host top-secret cypher stations.
But the slide from power occurred with breathtaking speed. The entire world was being reshaped; and to a large extent, political pressure for this remoulding was coming from America, which painted itself as being aggressively ‘anti-colonialist’. It had its own reasons for its quiet determination to see Britain completely shorn of its old imperial possessions.
There was a whole new world of trading possibilities to be opened up, to America’s advantage; and with them new spheres of geopolitical influence. The old British Empire was, as many American politicians saw it, a fast-emptying space, a void that would have to be filled.
Paradoxically, however, the Americans also needed Britain to maintain good relationships with its old possessions: the younger nation, though enormously powerful, was still a relative newcomer to these wider geopolitics; the elder nation had decades, centuries, of accumulated international dealings. Many of Britain’s colonies and mandates were in crucial positions when it came to airfields and intercept stations. If ever the day came that a nuclear attack had to be launched against the Soviet Union via the Urals, for instance, the atomic weaponry could hardly come from Britain – no bomber could fly so far. An airfield in Peshawar (in what was then India and is today Pakistan), however, would be quite a different matter. Equally, the Americans needed signals intelligence in these places too, providing real-time analysis and commentary.
In the case of India, the question of independence – and just how speedily it could come – was causing the British to buckle from several angles. Even if there had been the will to hang on to the subcontinent – which there was not – political gravity was pressing down hard on the government. First, the Indian independence movement was terrifically powerful; allied to this was the fact that this movement had the goodwill of the rest of the world. Plus, Britain could simply no longer afford to hold on to its old jewel in the crown. It could scarcely afford to house its own population back at home. So it was inevitable that the Indian people would take control of their own destinies. Attlee’s hope was that they would at least stay within the Commonwealth.
He wanted to bargain: independence in return for certain favours. India could go its own way so long as British (and by extension American) forces and intelligence could continue to operate discreetly within its sphere.
The codebreakers and the secret listeners had been in India for almost as long as the original British merchants. Even though the technology of the 19th-century Great Game with Russia had obviously transformed – no more codes drawn into etchings of local butterflies, for instance – the principles of the contest remained the same. Now, strategists realised, the gradual British withdrawal from the Middle East might make Stalin think of striking through a newly vulnerable India, to get at the treasure of the oilfields that lay west of it. So in terms of early Cold War paranoia, India was right at the forefront of intelligence anxiety; the British and the Americans needed it dearly, not least for help to keep the Middle East secure for their own requirements.
One of the most prominent codebreakers in India throughout the war had been Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Marr-Johnson; though he was experienced and clever, he was also an abrupt figure with a sharp temper who seems to have been cordially disliked by many. However, like so many of the codebreakers, he had a startlingly rich hinterland. Whereas other code geniuses tended to have great aptitudes for music, Marr-Johnson’s talents lay towards poetry. Indeed, some years later, he had several volumes of poetry published: not what one would immediately expect from an abrasive military intelligence man who had spent so much time losing litres of sweat in remote jungle intercept stations. Marr-Johnson – who as we have seen had made valuable friends in Washington DC – had travelled out to the Wireless Experimental Centre in the salubrious suburbs of Delhi, from where he and his colleagues could see another great danger looming.
Independence for India would clearly not be enough: the subcontinent’s Muslim population wanted to be certain of their own security, and the obvious means of achieving that would be a form of secession. A state within a state was one possibility – but a full separation of Muslims and Hindus was gathering momentum.
The codebreakers and others in intelligence could see very well what the possible consequence of this would be: bloody civil war, with millions of casualties – an entire continent tearing itself apart. For some colonial British figures who were still there, this might have seemed a distant and abstract prospect; for instance, in some intercept stations, the officers still had their Indian servants who made the tea, obeyed the signs on certain doors that declared ‘No entry – to anyone at all’ (these were the most secret decryption rooms) and made their beds. The officers and their wives still dined out in very smart restaurants, went dancing at the smartest, coolest clubs. All these luxuries were supremely attainable, in a way that they most certainly were not back home; not just the material comforts, but also the languorous evenings of rich sunsets and the pale glow of dancing fireflies. The fight to get a crowbar into the Japanese wartime codes had been as exhausting and even more monotonous and mentally tough than the struggle against Enigma. Yet for many, including men in the Intelligence Corps who had never before left England, India had been a new world of colour and strangeness and splendour.
Young Peter Budd – just 19 years old when the war against Japan ended – had been monitoring Japanese signals all over the subcontinent (including an astonishing 18-month stint in the remote paradise of the Cocos Islands). He was now conscious, as this chapter of empire began to close and the targets swiftly began to change, that he was a witness to history. Budd, a naval signals man for the Y Service, was being transferred to a defiantly landlocked intercept station near the North-West Frontier. He arrived by rail at Delhi. ‘A lot of Indians lived on the station under cover,’ recalls Budd. ‘We were sitting there waiting for the Bombay train to come in. Suddenly about a thousand Indians poured in. I was pushed right up to the edge of the rails.’ The reason for the commotion? ‘Closer to me than you are was Gandhi,’ says Mr Budd. ‘And next to him was Nehru.’ Both had just come from talks with Sir Stafford Cripps, the British president of the Board of Trade.
Budd’s journey took him to a base just outside Karachi where he soon settled down to a life of intense work but abundant material awards. He and his colleagues were allowed to wear civilian clothes. And owing to a tangled bureaucracy resulting in unexpectedly high wages – they were assumed to be officers, when in fact they were not – Budd and his friends ‘lived the life of Riley’, as he says. ‘We had tailor-made suits made from our own tailors, we ate out in restaurants.’ When all of this came to an end, and Peter Budd found himself back in late-1940s Britain, living in the pinched suburbs of west London, he knew that he would always look back on that period of secret signals interception with exceptional vividness.
The push for Indian independence had gathered incredible speed, presenting new challenges. How could any authority, any nation, no matter how ingenious, plan the re-ordering of an entire landmass, overnight? And given the 1946 Soviet manoeuvres in Iran and close to the borders of Afghanistan, what was there to stop the territory fast moving into the Eastern bloc’s sphere of influence? What of all the MI6 agents still stationed throughout India? There was one more security issue on this checklist: a mineral called thorium, which was bountiful in certain areas of India. Thorium was one of the prime ingredients needed for the new generation of atomic bombs. There was very little chance that the Americans were going to allow such a precious prize to lie unprotected and fall into the hands of Soviet atom bomb scientists.
On top of this, despite all the accusations of oppression and repression, the war had forged a strong visceral link between British colonial administrators and their subjects; two million Indian men had served in the armed forces and 87,000 men had been killed. Certainly, Britain owed India almightily; but was a swift withdrawal really the best thought-out means of repaying this debt? Lord Mountbatten was made Viceroy of India in 1947; plans for the partitioning of the country – with the Muslim populations granted the creation of Pakistan – were drawn up. Jawaharlal Nehru’s Indian National Congress and Mohammed Jinnah’s Muslim League had become convinced that this was the only way that Hindus and Muslims would co-exist in peace.
As it happened, not even that was enough. And while maps were being drafted by British officials, civil servants elsewhere were packing up all signs of their administration. This included intelligence: sensitive files concerning dealings with Muslim and Hindu groupings in various parts of the subcontinent were carefully destroyed.
During the war, the entirety of India had been peppered with Y Service stations sending invaluable material back to Bletchley Park about the Japanese. A number of Indians were being introduced to the latest techniques in signals intelligence and interception and now, as India prepared to slough off suffocating British rule, those sharp codebreaking operatives were beginning to move in.
But independence came seemingly before all sensible plans had been acted upon; for instance, the new maps showing what was to be Hindu and what was to be Muslim territory had not even yet been published. Partition was to turn into a mass stampede of panic and of terror.
Word spread through communities large and small, whispered by untold numbers of people, right across the subcontinent. The fearful rumours raged like a contagion; entire villages told themselves the exodus had to be made now, before religious enemies came to slaughter them. This, in turn, seemed to spark some form of homicidal hysteria, as murderous Muslims and Hindus alike set about fulfilling the others’ worst fears.
In the north of the country particularly – the most sensitive in terms both of local hostilities and the wider geopolitical picture – the land was soon soaked with blood. At first, sick with apprehension and bewilderment, and then frantic with fear, millions of people, hearing word that their land was to become either Hindu or Muslim, began to pack up and flee. But they were not permitted to do so unmolested. These vast numbers of people, seeking to rush across these new borders that no-one had told them about, became the targets for criminals, desperadoes and for murderers who hated them for their beliefs. In some parts of the countries, there were columns of refugees 45 miles (55 kilometres) long making the dangerous journey towards sanctuary. So many of these people – especially the women – were targeted. Rape, murder, massacre; there were desperate, sickening scenes and there was no-one to offer help.
Railway trains were packed with terrified refugees. They would get held up by bandits and killers – and every single passenger on board would be murdered, leaving only the driver and guard alive so that the trains would then arrive in distant cities filled from top to bottom with corpses.
Amid this terrifying butchery and seemingly unstoppable anarchy, there was little in the way of useable intelligence; another complicating factor in the hasty handover. MI6 had tried to make some mutually satisfactory arrangements with the Indian secret authority that was to replace it. And indeed some progress had been made until Clement Attlee insisted that the Secret Intelligence Service withdraw from the country altogether: independence meant independence and the British had a duty to stay true to their promises.
But the widespread re-organisation of signals intelligence was one of the reasons why there was little prior indication of the horrific violence to come. In truth, even if there had been all the signals in the world available, what realistically could have been done? Added to this, Indian and Pakistani signals intelligence now had to start focusing on one another, in an atmosphere of rancorous and frightened suspicion, especially in disputed territories such as Kashmir. Across a mighty continent, everything appeared to be being made up on the hoof; and the mass suffering this caused was unstoppable and unimaginable.
Yet despite the carnage in the countryside, the handover of intelligence responsibility in the cities eventually became more orderly. British Army signals officers had been training up their Indian counterparts in various degrees of encryption and decryption. Some operators found that when partition came, they had to move swiftly. Norman Logan recalled: ‘I was a member of the South Staffordshire regiment but was attached to 2nd Indian Airborne Division Signal Regiment after being converted to cyphers in 1946. The regiment was at that time situated in Clifton, which was part of Karachi… under the command of Lieutenant Colonel David Horsfield.
‘Towards the spring of 1947,’ Logan continued, ‘the unit relocated… to Quetta and it was here that it saw the independence of both India and Pakistan in the August of that year. 2nd Indian Airborne Division Signal Regiment was designated an “Indian army unit” and moved very quickly from Quetta (Pakistan) into India. The British army contingent… moved to the transit camp in Karachi from where we were repatriated to the UK.’1
While MI6 had had to pack its bags, its sister service MI5 had made more subtle arrangements, and forged a close bond with the Delhi Intelligence Bureau. Despite all the horror of the mass migration, the British government held on to good will for having been willing to keep its promise to leave. To this end, Viceroy Mountbatten was to stay on another year until 1948.
And what of the Wireless Experimental Centre in New Delhi? The prospect of Indian independence meant a certain amount of precautionary spring-cleaning before a new wave of secret listeners came in. Codebreaker Alan Stripp remembered how the base was systematically purged of all sensitive material. ‘Whole truckloads of paper’, he wrote, were shovelled into a ‘poorly designed and hastily built incinerator, from the chimney of which, as we watched, Top Secret documents wafted, half burned, over the astonished western suburbs of New Delhi.’2
Yet for all the turmoil that was to come to the region, there was a great deal of continuity, British officers working hand-in-glove with their Indian and Pakistani successors. Curiously, one reason for this was not anxiety about the Russians, and their ever-looming shadow over the mountains of Afghanistan, but actually about the Americans. Even at a time when the codebreakers were working with such unprecedented closeness, there were a few officials in Whitehall who feared that the Indian and Pakistani cypher bureaus would be lured into forming much stronger relationships with the US than with themselves; the US, after all, could hand over huge sums of money in return for all sorts of security investment. The British had nothing like that to offer. Added to this, the Americans had during the war established a large signals intelligence base for their own purposes in Delhi.
It is striking to think that even now – in fact, particularly now – the topic of American and Pakistani co-operation in matters of communications and codes is a subject of the most exquisite sensitivity and official silence. It has sometimes been said that the disputed region of Kashmir – bitterly tugged between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan for decades – is where the next world war will be ignited. These are places in which interceptors and codebreakers have always had to tread most lightly.
And no matter how much Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Marr-Johnson may have argued for the essential benevolence of British rule, there were recent catastrophic events in the subcontinent that appeared to prove otherwise, including the hideous 1943 rice famine which Britain had done little to help alleviate and which – even now – some suggest darkly was partly engineered by Churchill at a time when the Indian Nationalists were at their height.
And whatever Whitehall and indeed the codebreakers in Washington DC might have thought, Nehru and some around him were not at all convinced that a close security relationship should continue. Indeed, Nehru considered that ‘entanglement in the power politics of Great Powers’ would only sharpen the hazards and dangers that India would be exposed to. He felt that the main threat to India was posed by the Soviet Union; and that if the Soviets chose to annexe India, Britain would not have anywhere near the strength to even begin to help. So why then provoke the Soviets by continuing a cosy relationship with the former colonialists?
Over in Ceylon, the vast listening base at HMS Anderson in Colombo – an onshore concern teeming with smart Morse experts and codebreakers – continued its work even as the country reached towards its own independence. Partly there was a sense that the Ceylonese government allowed its continuance as a way of avoiding finding itself subsumed within India’s politics. There was also an element of subterfuge on the British part: most of the activities within HMS Anderson were top-secret, and indeed were to remain that way for some time after the war. The government of Ceylon simply did not know that this naval base was being used for surveillance purposes.
Nor did the Ceylonese authorities know just how vital this base was considered to be by Whitehall. The site was vast, the personnel boasted impressive numbers, and part of the incredibly secret work being done there was as a Far East branch of the Diplomatic Wireless Service, which made its focus the communications and traffic of foreign diplomats. The intercepts and decrypts would then be sent back to Eastcote.
Like the Wireless Experimental Centre in New Delhi, HMS Anderson still seemed very much steeped in the old empire. The base itself had been sited on a golf course. Those who came to work there marvelled at the lushness and occasionally startling diversity of the local wildlife; snakes were encountered frequently. Although white naval uniform was strictly adhered to, the less constricted out-of-hours life was alluring: Colombo itself was an attractive town with enough night-clubs and restaurants to keep young sophisticates happy. Then there was the world beyond, up in the hills; a world of incomparably rich tea plantation owners in sumptuous villas, attended by numerous servants. The atmosphere in those immediate post-war months cannot have given any indication that any of this was to change; the British were still in charge not merely politically, but culturally too.
The spirit of the base remained youthful; the young Morse experts and teleprinter operators loved putting on shows: cabarets, musicals, comedy revues. And indeed, the recruits kept coming: radio-mad boys, spotted as they reported for National Service, the combination of their intelligence and enthusiasm for a new generation of communications technology marking them out for the voyage into the colourful tropics.
One such young man, recruited in 1946, was Laurence Roberts. In fact, he had trained just before the end of the conflict at the secret station in Leighton Buzzard (then in Buckinghamshire), just a few miles from Bletchley Park (it was also at Leighton Buzzard that WAAFs learned about plotting and filtering for RAF Fighter Command). Laurence Roberts was a deft hand with technical issues such as Single Side Band Transmission, used in high-frequency radio circuits. He had also done some teaching at the nearby radio station base in Cardington, Bedfordshire. But in 1946, his expertise was required right the way across the world. He recalled: ‘This time there was no secret destination. It was the Far East. After getting as far as Singapore and two weeks at a transit camp, it was back on a troopship and I finished up at another signal centre – Gangodewella, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), five miles (eight kilometres) inland from the capital Colombo. This was peacetime overseas service and miles away from the “Active” job a few years earlier.’3
It might have lacked that immediate sense of urgency, but the stations in Colombo – as well as those in other colonial spots – were keeping an hour-by-hour watch on the larger picture unfolding in the region; so much was still uncertain, so little could be guessed about what the real Soviet intentions might be in this part of the world. And despite Roberts’s sense of ‘peacetime’, some rules were still strictly observed. ‘We even had to wear a proper uniform on duty, nothing like the Western desert,’ he noted wryly. ‘The one big plus sign was being able to get into the old colonial town of Colombo when off duty. By the time I got to Colombo,’ he continued, ‘a lot of the high speed W/T Morse circuits had converted to Radio Teleprinter Operation. It meant a whole new procedure system had to be learnt; a means of routing a message from originating station to its final destination by typing the instructions on to the original punched tape. It was slower than automatic Morse because the limiting speed of a teleprinter was 66.6 words per minute. But the saving was in not having to type the message out from the receiving Morse tape. It was a good system.’4
Life was not entirely friction-free in this rich paradise: secret though the work was, some of its technical aspects were of enormous interest to certain entrepreneurial locals. ‘At Colombo… the transmitters were a few miles from the receiving station (which was at the main campsite) and they were connected by landlines for keying the transmitted signals,’ remembered Laurence Roberts. ‘The native population took a liking to the cable between the two stations and would steal lengths of it and turn it into profit. This would mean a shut-down of the W/T link until it could be repaired.’ Happily, technology was making further jumps forward. ‘The situation was resolved by the introduction of a microwave radio link between the receiving and transmitting station,’ recalled Roberts. ‘A special party came out from the UK (the radio branch of RAE Farnborough). I believe this was one of the first uses of microwave technology and it was very successful.’5
Incidentally, the Soviets had been working on similar technological lines – and the deployment of microwave lines to spy on Western embassies became the bane of many a politician’s life, requiring military, security and political figures to zip themselves up in soundproof tents before talking.
Roberts’s life in Ceylon was less fraught, although Indian independence in 1947 brought a new, slightly more fervid atmosphere to Colombo. Ceylon’s own independence was not too far off. ‘My stay at Colombo was at the time that India and Ceylon gained independent status… and later, when Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated [in 1948], resulting in a lot of tension among the local population. Colombo was out of bounds and lots of extra guards were posted and at one time nobody was allowed out. But gunboat diplomacy was still a means of restoring order in those days. A Royal Navy cruiser came into Colombo harbour, disembarked the Royal Marine band and all available hands and marched through the town to the naval barracks.’6
The days were fast approaching when such an attitude would be utterly unthinkable. Laurence Roberts was, not too long after this incident, posted back to Britain; the last problem he had wrestled with in terms of signals intelligence was sun spots: in that part of the world, such astronomical phenomena could cause very real difficulties, resulting in black-outs and signals having to be sent back to Britain via submarine cable.
Ceylon’s independence came in 1948, just as India and Pakistan were being confirmed in their own new status. But the work at HMS Anderson continued without any stoppages. It has been suggested that the Americans were very keen to set up a listening station outside Colombo, which would have been run under the aegis of the US Navy. Their desire was, however, thwarted. The Ceylonese government was content to see the British forces continue in place; the presence of the Americans would have seemed too much of an unwelcome intrusion. Of course, neither they nor indeed any other nation-state would have known at that time the startling extent to which the British and Americans were in any case sharing information and intelligence. The positioning of the Colombo base was particularly advantageous and fruitful in the intelligence that it continued to provide to both allies.
Yet in strictly technical terms, HMS Anderson, parked as it was between a busy railway line and a vast farm of electricity pylons and beneath the landing path of a nearby airport, was never the most ideal location from which to listen to faint signals in the first place; during the war, it had been a matter of extemporisation (the base had first been evacuated across the Indian ocean to Mombasa after a Japanese attack; on its return in 1943, the underlying structural difficulties had never been fully addressed). But the camp stayed where it was for the next couple of years, the British personnel continuing to be drawn from bright young lads, and all members of the camp remaining enthusiastic for Colombo’s bright and exotic life. Eventually, the base was asked by the Ceylonese authorities to move a few miles away (the reason was that the government had now earmarked the site for extensive property development). The British happily – and gratefully – complied. An extensive and extremely expensive new secret interception complex was built a few miles away in the hills of Perkar (eliminating all the old annoyances to do with electricity pylons). The Ceylonese authorities were still not told that the main role of the base was interception.
But then, several years later in the mid-1950s, Britain’s attempt to seize the Suez Canal back from Egypt’s Colonel Nasser, resulting in the country being roundly humiliated on the world stage, led to a turning-point further east. The Ceylonese authorities – infuriated by what they had seen as a contemptible imperial manoeuvre, and doubly furious that British naval ships had refuelled in Colombo – announced that they no longer wanted the British in their territory. Britain tried in vain to protest. The post-colonial slide seemed inexorable.
Elsewhere in the region, that process was rapid and abrupt; particularly so in Burma, where so many had fought such horrific battles in the humid jungles against the Japanese. It had been a war of filthy, terrifying forest skirmishes, of monsoons, vampire-like insects and suffocating heat, of untidy gunshots and bayonets thrust deep into guts. For the secret listeners of the Y Service, tracking and monitoring every last Japanese transmission, the territory brought all kinds of technical difficulties. Dennis Underwood recalled how, as a young Y Service operative in 1945, Burma was a prospect of ‘constant damp, always sweaty, plagued with prickly heat, message pads sticking to hands and wrists etc’. Then there were the tropical storms – many secret interceptors had hearing problems in later life. ‘The lightning would blow the fuses in the antennae feeds so that we lost our stations,’ recalled Underwood. ‘Better than having the sets burned out though.’7 The facilities proved a little more reliable (and better protected from the pervasive moisture) in the post-war years.
Strikingly enough, one codebreaker – Jean Valentine, the Wren who had been posted to HMS Anderson to work on Japanese codes – had in the interim returned to England with Clive Rooke, her husband-to-be; they married, lived in a London pock-marked by bomb-sites – and decided to move back east once more, to live in Burma’s capital Rangoon. Clive Rooke had flown with the RAF; and now, as a commercial pilot with BOAC, the couple could transfer to this new territory and enjoy, in comparison to the general population, quite spectacular luxury (certainly when compared to the soot and the cold of London). Jean and Clive lived in a house with servants, which was handy for when it came to dealing with some of the local wildlife. ‘I remember going into my bedroom one evening and between the bathroom and the dressing room, there was a snake coiled up,’ recalled Jean. ‘So I yelled for the boy [a servant] to come and deal with it – which he did – and then when I went off to bed, I found the snake’s mate coiled up in the dressing room.’
But Burma was wildly volatile: there was the simmering genesis of a civil war between the (largely) coastal- and lowland-dwelling Burmese and the Karens, communities who lived in the hillier territories and who were often Anglophile – to the extent that it was said that they received help from former British officers when it came to planning insurrection. Developments in India had led a charismatic young Burmese soldier called Aung San to take up the cause of independence with Britain, and he did so in the full expectation that he would be able to take full control from that point onwards. According to some, the British had done an unusually bad job of governing Burma; indeed, the authorities had, through neglect and ineptness, contributed greatly to poverty and crime. Unlike India, the civil service was ramshackle, there was little in the way of public transport and even though food was plentiful, its distribution was frequently ropey.
Nonetheless, it was convenient for the British to try and maintain some kind of a toehold, and the Burmese and the Foreign Office were able to negotiate an understanding. After the signing of an independence agreement, Aung San’s newly elected government would enjoy the protection of the British military for three more years. In return, of course, the British would have continued use of air bases and related stations. But this post-colonial agreement soon turned to bloodshed: in 1947, during a meeting of Parliament, Aung San and six of his cabinet colleagues were assassinated. The man behind the mass murder was swiftly identified as Aung San’s chief political rival U Saw, who had a few years previously met with Winston Churchill to discuss Burma’s future. The British authorities, in their last few weeks of colonial rule, put U Saw on trial. He was found guilty and sentenced to hang. It later emerged that U Saw and his political allies were being supplied with arms by renegade British officers, who were also giving weaponry to members of the Karen community.
But Burma, despite its border with China, was not quite so crucial to British interests as the territory of Malaya and Singapore, both recently wrested back from the Japanese. Indeed, Malaya was particularly important to Britain not just in defence terms, but also economically. Unlike India and Pakistan, this region, which was rich in rubber as well as other materials and minerals, still contributed hefty sums of money to the UK Treasury.
And the new-found independence of India and Pakistan was also to bring a fresh and unexpected difficulty to British security: both nations, utterly hostile to one another, were asking Britain to provide protection in various forms. It was an almost impossibly knotty dilemma for the Foreign and Colonial Office. To persuade India to stay within the Commonwealth – and thus at least spare a hole being punched in Britain’s economy – it would be necessary to apply a great deal of charm and generosity and practical aid: specifically, of a military nature. Yet at the same time, Pakistan – with its hyper-sensitive borders, and its extreme proximity to the Soviet sphere of influence – needed to be kept happy, too. Supplying help and expertise to both sides, without the other knowing, would not be an ideal solution.
For Edward Travis and Nigel de Grey back at Eastcote, all these were matters of the highest seriousness, and they also in part illustrated the growing importance of their particular espionage speciality. One could fill Pakistan – from its mesmerising cities to its remotest rural communities – with secret agents on the ground, but there would still only be a limited amount of useful intelligence that they would be able to report back. Intercept stations, on the other hand, would enable the codebreakers to listen to Stalinist Russia’s every heartbeat, across the vast plains and wastes with their industrial centres, particularly in the sensitive region from Siberia to Kazakhstan. Just as the West was beginning to become increasingly aware of its dependence on Middle Eastern oilfields, so too the Soviet Union would want to open up fresh lines of fuel to facilitate its modernisation. The job of what was still the London Signals Intelligence Centre was to listen out for the first indications of any incursion or infiltration, first into Pakistan, and then into the oilfields to the south and west of it. The process of decolonisation would have had an inevitable untidiness whatever happened: how does one dismantle a century of institutions overnight? But India and Pakistan were in what the Foreign Office termed the ‘north tier’ – countries adjoining Stalin’s empire whose integrity was now under constant threat.
Travis and de Grey also had an additional pressure: a growing conviction among British and American military figures that the Third World War was a matter of months away. There were many who thought that it would happen no matter what: there were cracks and fissures, geopolitical fault lines stretching right the way around the globe. One of the agonies for the personnel at Eastcote at that time was that – by comparison – the Second World War itself had been simple. There had been a central problem to solve – either in the form of Enigma, Tunny, the Japanese JN-25 – and though the intellectual gymnastics required were awesome, the results were immediately effective. Here, in this suburb at the end of the Piccadilly Line, receiving bundles of transmissions from agitated, angry regions far across the world, the codebreakers were looking not so much at a Cold War as a kind of Ghost War. This was not like tracking the movements of U-Boats, or eavesdropping on Panzer divisions. This was trying to keep tabs on a mighty empire, that of Stalin’s Russia, without ever being entirely certain what the intentions of that empire were.
This was a world of new regimes and new governments, many of which were far from being stable. And between 1947 and 1948, they also faced something of an unexpected internal development, to do with the culmination of an ancient Middle Eastern conflict.