EPILOGUE
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 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 1950–53 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 1980–88 saw much heavy fighting, Iran’s lack of heavy equipment and use of underage 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 second 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 by even 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 1981–82 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 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 wavered, 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 economics 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 agencies, 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 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 2nd 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 at night, when 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 countermeasure 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 and 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.Glasgowand 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.1 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 that would eliminate the risk at source. Britain’s special forces would be committed to find and destroy the Exocet units in their home bases.
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 1940–42 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 and 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.2 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.3
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.4
The planners’ reasons for preparing the operation, at the extreme limit of risk though it was known to be, were 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.5 Certainly the full picture of the nature of the British early-warning system during the three weeks, 21 May–14 June, 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.6
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 saved from disaster only 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 QE2, 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 1944–45—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 law-breaker 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 Taliban 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 though 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, although it is known to possess large monetary resources, are mysterious, since it apparently conducts transactions by informal yet 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 1940–44; 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 counterterrorist 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 al-Qaeda and other fundamentalist networks will be made successful only 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 indestructible. All have their weak spots and weak members. It may, however, take decades for Western intelligence agencies to learn how to break in to the mysterious and alien organisations and even longer to marginalise and neutralise them.
The challenge will cast the agencies back onto 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 anti-fundamentalist agent, with his ability to shed his European identity and to pass convincingly as a Muslim message-carrier, Hindu gallant and Buddhist holy man’s hanger-on, far superior to any holder of a Ph.D. 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 a 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.