I've written before about attempts to establish a Sigint liaison with the USSR during the Second World War. Less well known is the attempt to do something similar during the First World War.
On 25 August 1914, Captain Adrian Simpson of the Royal Engineers Signal Section (the predecessor of the Royal Signals) embarked for Petrograd on a mission to look at the improvement of wireless telegraphy links between the UK and Russia to better facilitate liaison between the two allies, each of whom was fighting the Germans and Austro-Hungarians on different fronts. Simpson spent the period October 1914 to the end on January 2015 on the front with the Russian Army and returned to Petrograd where he compiled a report for the War Office. His report contrasted the extremely high quality of the equipment the Russians had built or purchased with the very poor quality of the operators. He had worked hard to improve matters himself: he had rebuilt the antenna system at the main Petrograd wireless station and boosted the power available to the transmitters but was nevertheless hampered overall by the operators, all civilian even on the front.
His report highlights the poor organisation of Russian military wireless telegraphy: the Military Technical School notionally managed the system, but in fact the ‘Société Russe’ (owned by the Marconi Company but wholly under Russian control) manned and ran it, but without an understanding of how the military communicated; non-operational messages were delayed for days at a time as a matter of routine, even when they were urgent indents for essential supplies; and little or no attempt was being made to intercept German cipher messages, never mind decrypt them: as soon as operators realised that the message they were copying wasn’t one of the Russian Army’s they stopped copying it; worst of all was their poor security: they used the same callsigns and frequencies, and transmitted their messages en clair.
Simpson discussed all of these matters with the Russian Staff who agreed on the need to reorganise and overcome the problems Simpson had noted. They agreed to raise a small ‘Corps of Electricians’ of twenty British officers and sixty other ranks, all radio specialists, who would train and develop a cadre of Russian signallers who would transform Russian military telegraphy.
Two things happened which meant that the Corps, though constituted in the UK, would never travel to Russia. First, a Major Campbell was posted to Petrograd as the representative of ‘C’ to Russian Military Intelligence and, separate from the confusion and intrigue which arose in an Embassy which already housed a Military Attaché and a General Staff liaison officer with the Russian General Staff, his presence became associated with the Electricians, and the Russians came to believe that they would be a Corps of Siginters who would likely spend their time intercepting and reading Russian traffic. The Russians told the British they didn’t need these people any more.
And, anyway, a senior Russian officer had taken Simpson’s recommendations to heart and had begun a process of creating a Russian military signal service: though it wasn’t why the decision to refuse entry to the British electricians had been taken, it was in fact true that the Russians had learned enough from Simpson and his two UK radio specialist signallers had shown the Russian Army what it needed to do, not just in terms of its own signalling, but in developing a Sigint organisation as well. The Russian Army signallers became very competent indeed, and formed a specialist unit proud of its own technical competence. When the Revolution came, and after the descent of Russia into civil war, the unit declared for the Red Army and provided a Sigint service for the Bolshevik regime.
As in the Second World War no serious intelligence relationship with the Russian ally was ever developed in spite of the efforts made. First time round, however, it isn't hard to put the blame pretty squarely in the British side.