Gwen's Finest Hour?

 

[TC Comment: this is the last instalment of Gwen Tovey's memoirs. I hope you've enjoyed them. This story hasn't been published before. I'll explain at the end why I think it is important as well as entertaining.]

One morning early in 1969, when I came into the office, I found some rather startling signals from RAF stations in Germany (Butzweilerhof and Teufelsberg). They were reporting that they could hear none of the usual air-to-ground voice traffic from the fighters of the Tactical Air Forces (TAF) in Germany, which should have been in full swing by that time. Now, a stand-down of all aircraft at least 24 hours before an attack was one of the indicators in a report which I had compiled some 10 years earlier, about likely Sigint indicators of Soviet intentions to attack.

So I had to do something about this at once. I summoned all eight Soviet Intelligence coordinators and asked them to go and find out what was happening on their targets, with particular reference to anything that had been mentioned in the Indicator paper. Some 10 minutes later they reported back and it seemed that all aircraft — the fighters, the light bombers, the bombers of the Long Range Air Force (LRAF) and the Transport Commands were silent and there were no tracking reports on the air defence nets.

We put together a report, which specified all this, but with a comment which played the whole thing down by pointing out that no other indications, which would be expected if this meant an intention to attack, were discernible. Particularly, there was nothing in the communications of the LRAF (the bombers of which could carry atomic bombs), which resembled their preparations for major exercises. There was nothing on the Strategic Rocket Forces (SRF) links, there was nothing on naval links. In fact the Navy seemed to be preoccupied with an annual tin-pot little exercise in the Baltic. But nevertheless I issued an Alert [TC: a way in which all Five Eyes Sigint intercept stations could be warned that something might be happening] and hastily got someone to send a teleprint to NSA, saying what we were up to, just before issuing the FLASH report.

The next morning the front pages of newspapers were full of photographs of the usual Red Square scenes of long columns of tanks and guns, bands and missiles and hundreds of marching troops to celebrate — Oh Hell! — International Women's Day. So then, when I got into the office, I had to write the hardest signal of my life, apologising humbly and saying that all was now well and totally normal.

What was my horror then to find later that day, that in a couple of days' time the Senior Intelligence Officer from Strike Command proposed to come down and visit us. On the appointed day I sat shaking in my shoes waiting to be summoned to the Division Head's office, where the RAF officer would doubtless lambast me. However, suddenly the door of my office opened and in he strode with a great grin on his face, saying 'Let me shake you by the hand. That was the best exercise we ever had'. Now what he had done was to put the whole V Bomber force in the air and when he had done this, he was assailed by queries from station commanders saying 'What the hell is all this about?' And he said 'This just might this time be for real'.

I don't think an intelligence coordinator today would have received the totally blank silence I did, when I consulted the JIC Watch and the Foreign Office before sending off the original alarm, because the Anniversary is quite well known about today. But I think it will be a very long time before Whitehall grants us an extra day's holiday every time March 8th comes around.

[TC Comment: It's only since retiring that I realise that I would have taken some of the lessons this story contains for granted while still serving. Specifically:

a.       The GCHQ 'Soviet Intelligence Coordinators' would have been the equivalent of Senior Executive Officers: middle managers, with a wealth of knowledge and experience of their target, but six grades below the Director, and five grades higher than the most junior clerical staff. And yet they could put out a qualified Alert message to the whole of the western alliance saying that something big might be happening.

b.      In 1969 it was a woman who made the decision, and nobody questioned it, as she was intelligence coordinator for the Soviet Tactical Air Force and knew and understood her target. Of course GCHQ in 1969 wasn't an outpost of 21st century liberal values about diversity – it's only just appointed its first woman Director! – but however much harder Gwen had to fight to get on as far as the men she was working with, once there her knowledge and expertise were more important than the fact she was a woman.

c.       When GCHQ realised that it had issued a misleading report it took responsibility and explained its mistake. Getting something wrong isn't the end of the world if you can explain why you drew the conclusions that you drew and show how that is a knowledge gap that has been plugged. The best example of this I have seen is in HW 75, the intelligence reporting on the Soviet Bloc being released into The National Archives, in which a report on Soviet Field Post Numbers (FPNs) from the very early 1950s was corrected more than 20 years later because the location of one of the FPNs had finally been shown to be erroneous. What matters in intelligence reporting is accuracy so that those assessing it understand exactly how much weight can be put on it.]