Posted on 10/04/2001 3:22:55 PM PDT by blam
THURSDAY OCTOBER 04 2001
Counsel of war
BY CHRISTOPHER ANDREW
Never tell an enemy that you can read his messages, or untold lives may be lost. That maxim applies to tackling Osama bin Laden just as it did to fighting Hitler
At a time when the British intelligence community faces its greatest challenge since the Cold War, this week also sees a major commemoration of the greatest achievement in British intelligence history: the success of the Bletchley Park codebreakers in cracking the German Enigma and other enemy ciphers. The “Ultra” intelligence derived from this success shortened the Second World War, probably by at least a year. The film Enigma, based on Robert Harris’s bestselling novel about Bletchley Park, is now on general release. A new book, Action This Day, published in aid of the Bletchley Park Trust, brings together for the first time the recollections of Bletchley veterans and the work of intelligence historians.
Both Enigma and Action This Day underscore one simple lesson that remains of crucial importance in the current intelligence war against Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda network. The genius of the codebreakers and the skill of those who intercepted enemy communications during the Second World War would have been to no avail if their secret had not been kept. If the Nazi high command had discovered that Enigma had been broken, as they very nearly did, their cipher systems would have changed and there would have been no Ultra. The cost of that discovery would have been measured in, at the very least, hundreds of thousands of lives.
One of the most memorable sequences in Enigma intercuts footage of codebreakers in a Bletchley Nissen hut struggling to break the U-boat version of the Enigma cipher with film of a convoy in the North Atlantic, carrying crucial war supplies, which is about to be intercepted by a U-boat wolf-pack. But for Bletchley’s success in breaking that Enigma variation at the end of 1942, the Battle of the North Atlantic, the longest drawn-out battle in the history of naval warfare, might well have ended in victory for the U-boats.
The extraordinary intelligence produced by Bletchley Park was probably the best-kept secret in modern British history. The 10,000 men and women who worked there were, in Churchill’s phrase, “the geese who laid the golden eggs and never cackled”.
Not until the Ultra secret was declassified in the mid-1970s did Bletchley veterans begin to cackle. A student in my Cambridge college at the time told me how, during the holiday, he and his family had watched the first BBC documentary on Bletchley which showed wartime Wrens (members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service) operating the “Bombes” used to break Enigma. At the end of the programme, his mother turned to the rest of the family and told them “that’s where I worked. That’s what I did”. Until then, neither her husband nor her children had known that she had been a wartime codebreaker.
The most extraordinary thing about this extraordinary story is that, so far as the codebreakers were concerned, it was not unusual. Shortly before the publication in 1979 of the first volume of the official history of wartime intelligence by Sir Harry Hinsley, the distinguished historian, Hinsley addressed a reunion of Bletchley Park veterans and their spouses. Afterwards, the husbands of several former Wrens approached Hinsley (himself a Bletchley veteran) and said “my wife never breathed a word to me”.
For the mostly youthful wartime recruits to Bletchley Park, “indoctrination” into the “Ultra” secret was an experience that had few, if any, previous parallels in British history. Until their recruitment to Bletchley, hardly any were even aware that Britain had a signals intelligence (Sigint) agency that broke other countries’ codes. Yet suddenly they found themselves, during Britain’s “finest hour”, in possession of a secret the revelation of which might do irreparable damage to the war effort. No wonder that some, perhaps many, suffered from nightmares in which they unwittingly gave away the secret.
Some of those nightmares must have been revived recently by the publicity given to the intelligence offensive against bin Laden by the US Sigint agency, NSA, and its British ally, GCHQ (the successor to Bletchley Park). A few years ago an official in the Clinton Administration appears to have revealed that, during a visit to NSA, he had heard highly classified recordings of satellite telephone conversations between bin Laden and his mother. The story of those conversations has since been published worldwide.
It has also been reported widely that when a US warship in the Indian Ocean launched Tomahawk missiles against bin Laden’s Afghan terrorist base in retaliation for the bombing of American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the missiles were locked on to the signal from his satellite phone.
The damage done by such revelations does not compare with the horrendous consequences that would have resulted from the wartime revelation of the Ultra secret. But it represents an appalling intelligence “own goal”.
Unsurprisingly, bin Laden no longer uses his satellite phone, and tracking him down has become much more difficult. The lesson, obvious to all who worked at Bletchley Park, is to stop telling bin Laden anything about the intelligence operations against him.
Sadly, there is no sign that the lesson has been learnt. Stories continue to be published about the interception of “every phone call, fax, Internet and microwave transmission in or out of Afghanistan by the joint UK-US Echelon surveillance system to try to locate bin Laden and his closest lieutenants . . . using a voice-recognition scanner”.
There also continue to be leaks about the monitoring of mobile telephone conversations among the al-Qaeda network. According to one US senator, NSA intercepted a call from one member of the network to another after the terrorist attacks on September 11, which announced exultantly “we have hit the targets”. Having seen his words reported in the press, both the terrorist and his associates will doubtless be more cautious in future.
In order to provide incontrovertible proof to Nato and other allies of bin Laden’s responsibility for the September 11 attacks, it is necessary to provide them with classified information, some of it probably drawn from the interception of al-Qaeda communications. But the case for giving publicity to our ability to listen in to Osama bin Laden and his network rests on one of two desperately threadbare arguments: either that the terrorists pay no attention to what the Western media reveal about intelligence surveillance of them; or that it does not matter if they do.
In fact they do pay attention, and it does matter.
Although al-Qaeda’s ideology is simplistic, it seems to have access to sophisticated IT. One of the newest items of intelligence jargon is what some experts call “Hackint” — intelligence obtained from the penetration of information systems. According to a US presidential commission, the global population with the computer skills required for Hackint operations and other forms of cyber-attack against important Western targets has grown from a few thousand 20 years ago to about 19 million today. It would be naive to assume that none of them works for al-Qaeda.
Among the most worrying disclosures in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon was evidence that the terrorists had discovered the White House security codewords in use on September 11. Two days later, President Bush’s press secretary, Ari Fleischer, told journalists that, at the time of the attacks, a threat against the President and Air Force One had been telephoned to the White House by a caller using the codewords. As a result, Bush’s security advisers told him to stay away from the White House for much of the day and flew him to Louisiana and Nebraska before they judged it safe for him to return to Washington.
Since then the story has become confused. Although reaffirmed last week by a senior official in the Bush Administration, it was contradicted by CBS, which claimed that the telephone call “never happened” and that White House staffers had “apparently misunderstood comments made by their security detail”.
Whatever the truth of Fleischer’s statement that White House codes were penetrated, it should act as a warning that al-Qaeda has computer hackers as well as suicide bombers.
The less that is said in public about GCHQ and NSA operations against bin Laden and al-Qaeda, the more likely they are to succeed.
Past experience suggests that this simple lesson will not be learnt easily. Churchill is now remembered rightly as the chief protector of the Ultra secret. What is usually forgotten, however, is that he learnt the importance of Sigint security the hard way after committing a series of intelligence gaffes.
During the 1920s Churchill was one of those who compromised Britain’s most important intelligence source — the Sigint derived from breaking Soviet codes. The “perfidy and treachery” in intercepted Soviet diplomatic telegrams was, he declared, so outrageous that their contents should be made public whatever the consequences.
Then, as now, some of the worst Sigint indiscretions concerned Afghanistan. The breaches of security were on a scale which far exceeded recent revelations about bin Laden’s telephone calls. In May 1923 the Cabinet authorised the Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, to quote decrypted Soviet telegrams from Moscow to the Soviet envoy in Kabul, Fyodor Raskolnikov, in a diplomatic note protesting at Soviet “subversion” on the North-West Frontier. Not content with quoting from Soviet decrypts, Curzon taunted Moscow publicly with the fact that its telegrams to and from Kabul had been intercepted and decrypted by British codebreakers:
“The Russian Commissariat for Foreign Affairs will no doubt recognise the following communication, dated February 21, 1923, which they received from Mr Raskolnikov . . . The Commissariat for Foreign Affairs will also doubtless recognise a communication received by them from Kabul, dated November 8, 1922 . . . Nor will they have forgotten a communication, dated March 16, 1923, from Mr Karakhan, the Assistant Commissary for Foreign Affairs, to Mr Raskolnikov . . .
After a series of such monumental breaches of Sigint security, in 1927 Moscow introduced the virtually unbreakable “one-time pad” cipher system. The head of Britain’s interwar Sigint agency, A.G. Denniston, wrote bitterly that the result of the Government’s revelations about the breaking of Soviet codes had been “to compromise our work beyond question”. For the next 20 years British cryptanalysts were able to decrypt almost no high-grade Soviet communications.
The lessons of 1927, which led to the loss of Britain’s most valuable interwar intelligence source, were crucial to the later protection of the Ultra secret. No politician took those lessons more to heart than Winston Churchill. After he became Prime Minister in 1940, he allowed only half a dozen of his 36 ministers to share the secret of the cryptanalysts’ “golden eggs”. The Special Liaison Units set up to pass Ultra to commanders in the field were, at the time, the most sophisticated system ever devised to protect the secrecy of wartime intelligence. The profound change in Churchill’s attitude to Sigint security is shown in the contrast between his books on the world wars. In his memoirs of the First World War he had written lyrically of the importance of Sigint; in his memoirs of the Second World War there is no mention of Ultra.
Churchill was wrong to conclude that the Ultra secret should never be revealed. Its disclosure in the mid-1970s did no observable damage to national security. The role of Sigint in 20th-century British history was far too important for it to be erased permanently from the historical record. Intelligence historians are right to complain that Whitehall is too slow to release the Sigint archive. Second World War decrypts began to reach the Public Record Office 30 years afterwards. Though it is now
50 years since the Korean War, however, its Sigint records are still classified.
While Whitehall’s determination to protect the secrecy of 50-year-old Sigint successes is difficult to defend, however, its concern with recent and current Sigint security is wholly justified.
The beginning of the Falklands conflict provides a cautionary example of the damage that can be done by breaches of Sigint security just as our forces are preparing to engage an enemy several thousand miles from home.
On the eve of the departure of the British task force for the South Atlantic in 1982, the Labour MP, Ted Rowlands, revealed to the Commons that, when he had been Minister of State at the Foreign Office only a few years earlier, GCHQ “had been reading (Argentinian) telegrams for many years”.
“Argentina, in terms of intelligence,” Rowlands declared, was “an open book”. After his Commons speech, it was so no longer. Argentina changed its codes and Britain’s ability to read its diplomatic and some of its service traffic was lost at the very moment when it was needed most. One of those most closely concerned with intelligence during the Falklands conflict remembers Rowlands’s gaffe as “incredibly damaging”: “He got a real rocket, but the damage was done. At the time it seemed possible that the damage might be catastrophic. We suddenly lost the ability to locate two Argentinian submarines which we feared might threaten the task force.”
There is a clear and present danger that revelations about the Sigint offensive against international terrorism may do similar damage. The time has come to relearn the lessons of Bletchley Park and the Ultra secret.
Christopher Andrew’s most recent book (with Vasili Mitrokhin) is The Mitrokhin Archive (Penguin, £9.99). He is also a contributor to the new volume published in aid of the Bletchley Park Trust, Action This Day, edited by Michael Smith and Ralph Erskine (Bantam Press, £25). GOVERNMENTS' HEARING AIDS
Listening satellites: Menwith Hill, In Yorkshire, the world's largest electronic surveillance field station, controls a network of listening satellites, most of which are now directed at the Middle East. In fixed orbits 40,000km above the Earth, satellites employ listening dishes more than 50 metres across. These can intercept and relay low-powered radio signals, including those from mobile phones. They can also discriminate between individual operators and radio equipment.
Echelon: After the Second World War, intelligence agencies from the US, Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand developed the Echelon listening network. The system collects information through radio antennae, satellites and sniffer devices that collect Internet communications from data packets. The system also recognises certain key words or phrases from a “dictionary” provided by the Americans. Messages containing key words are intercepted by intelligence officers. All information comes to GCHQ in Cheltenham.
The Internet: Dictionary-type systems also monitor communication via the Internet. The taps into Internet cable are highly controversial, as they monitor huge quantities of messages sent by US citizens.
When a woman who has lost a friend to killers, and demands reptibution against them, we fire her. Our leading publisher says he does not wish to be associated with such violent people who hate our killers. Understanding killers it the name of the game with the RIGHT AND THE LEFT.
That kind of information is dangerous to your life. For it says we will punish people who want to do to the muslims what they did to us.
What it says is we will never retaliate with as much force as we are attacked with. That says to bin Ladin and the muslims that we will not hurt them just becuase they hurt us.
Why should bin Laden be concerned where our guns are. We would fire anyone who wanted to use them... Just ask National Review and the girly boys in charge. Just ask Ann Coulter what happens to those that propose it.
NO!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.