(This entry is a summary of a talk given on July 10, 2010by Nigel West on board Queen Mary 2, headed from New York to Southhampton, UK. Disclaimer: Any errors or omissions in the following are totally my own and should not be attributed to Nigel West.)
The term “special relationship” often heard mentioned by the President of the United States and The Prime Minister of Great Britain has a specific, narrow meaning related to intelligence and spills over into the nuclear program.
It really is an extraordinary relationship, particularly between NSA and GCHQ, the FBI and MI5. It began at the end of December 1940. There was considerable doubt, even in Britain, if the UK could survive WWII without the USA.
Two FBI agents, Hugh Clegg and Clarence Hince , went to the UK in December 1940 to determine if the UK had a secret means to survive and win the war with Germany.MI5 had booked only one room for the two of them (thinking they were boyfriend, girlfriend.)They had an extraordinary tour of secret facilities including Bletchley and the Radio Security Service (RSS). They were authorized to share everything in hopes of wooing USA help.
They learned of Group 5 traffic. This was a radio transmitter channel between Long Island and the Abwehr in Germany. The encryption was very crude and easily broken. It became clear the Nazis had a big operation in the US. Revealing this to the FBI would raise the problem of the FBI closing the operations and the Nazis would realize their hand ciphers were broken.
Some traffic was relayed to Enigma channels. This gave an advantage to breaking Enigma by comparing easily broken messages with those encrypted by Enigma.
Arthur Owen, a Welshman, was known to be suspect. He was taking in to custody and tried to make a deal. The Germans gave him a radio. He had been sending weather reports to Germany. RSS recruited amateur radio operators in the UK and were thrilled with Owens because he transmitted. Owens was codenamed SNOW. They were astonished he was transmitting to Hamburg. But triangulation showed the Germans were using a trawler radio ship. They began monitoring this ship and discovered the same message from the spy ship to Hamburg was Enigma encrypted. Thus if you know the message it is possible to work out the key setting for Enigma. This was crucial since knowing the settings was elemental in breaking the Enigma encryption for other messages.
Not just the settings on one machine but for all machines were changed across Europe, making Enigma quite readable. By sending weather reports Owens gave MI5 a huge advantage. But now the question was, could the two US agents be trusted with this information?
When told, the two FBI agents didn’t react at all. This surprised RSS. The agents owned up that they knew all about the Long Island operations since they were sending it. They had blown the ring and took over transmission. They had been tipped off by William Sebold. Frederick Joubert Duquesne [see http://www.paperlessarchives.com/duquesne.html] was a key German agent in the US. The FBI filled every person meeting Duquesne. Thirty-two spies were identified by observation.
MI5 and RSS discovered a huge advantage with cooperating with the US. This began an astonishing exchange between the US and the UK. Among some of the areas of information were (1) degaussing; (2) centimetric radar, and (3) proximity fuse.
Degaussing is the process of decreasing or eliminating an unwanted magnetic field. The term was first used by (then) Cmdr Charles F. Goodeve, RCNVR, during World War II while trying to counter the German magnetic mines that were playing havoc with the British fleet.
Centimetric Radar was developed by the British to determine the altitude and speed of aircraft and was crucial in the Battle of Britain. [See http://www.vectorsite.net/ttwiz_03.html]
The Proximity Fuse concept originated with British researchers (particularly Sir Samuel Curran) and was developed under the direction of physicist Merle A. Tuve at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab (APL).
Sir Marcus Oliphant in the UK worked in nuclear physics. In a television interview he recalled the following [see http://www.australianbiography.gov.au/subjects/oliphant/script.html]
Now the interesting thing is that working with me in the laboratory at that time were two German refugees, from Hitler's Germany. One was named Piles [sic. His name was Rudolf Peirels] the other one's name Frish [sic. The name is Otto Frisch. He was the nephew of Lise Meitner, and the two of them have priority in the discovery of nuclear fission. Fred Wilson]. These two people together, of course they were enemy aliens, they weren't allowed to know anything about this secret weapon or radar you see. So they had to be kept out of that.
So not being allowed to do that, they set to work to do some calculations about nuclear energy, about the possibility of getting nuclear energy, and, they lo and behold -- they came through with a paper, which they said that if one could separate the uranium then one could make a bomb of enormous power and they calculated the amount of uranium 235 that was required and also the explosive force that might be produced.
And this was absolutely hair-raising. Here were these two chaps not allowed to have anything to do with the secrets of radar, producing this paper on this possibility of making a nuclear weapon. So this paper was sent to the United States to inform them. So I had to dash across to America in connection with the Magnetron, but while I was there, I was asked to see what had happened to our report, the Piles Frish [sic. Frisch-Peirels] report, so I went to the, to Washington, to the Chairman of the American committee, who was the head of their department that was responsible for standards, their standards laboratory. And he was a real stick in the mud and he'd taken this report, thought it was a bit interesting, but had stuck it in his safe and hadn't circulated it to the other members of the committee.
So I went straight away to see[Vannevar] Bush and [James] Connant, who were the President's scientific and technical advisers and both of them took the point of view, well this is very interesting but this if for the next war, not for this war.
So still dissatisfied, I got on an aeroplane and went to see [Ernest O.] Lawrence whom I'd worked with you see and knew to be a live wire and a member of the committee. So I told him about this, and he was so upset that he got on the plane with me and we went back to Washington. Within a few days the man had the project well on its way. And we moved to America, whole of the British team moved to America.
The Frisch-Pierels Report did suggest it might be possible to develop and air-transportable weapon. But this was hardly an option for the UK owing to the enormous resources required. Henry Tizard was impressed with the report and had the connections within the Ministry of Defence to take it to the War Cabinet, who found it should be further considered. [The Frisch-Pierels Report is published in Serber, Robert (1992). The Los Alamos Primer, Appendix I, “The Frisch-Peirels Memorandum,” Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. It isf also found in Clark, Ronald W.(1965) Tizard. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 215-17. Actually there are two memoranda, the first of which was lost until the British historian Ronald W. Clark discovered it among the papers of Henry Tizard, some twenty years after the end of World War II.]
John Cairncross became an aide to Lord Hankey, secretary to the British Cabinet. He typed the final report to the Prime Minister. Cairncross and Donald Maclean were active at that time but knew nothing of each other. Cairncross admitted to spying in 1951 after MI5 found incriminating papers in his possession. Some believe that the information he supplied about the Western atomic weapons programmes kick-started the Soviet nuclear programme.
It became clear that huge resources would be needed to build an atomic weapon. The government decided that it would develop a reactor at Chalk River in Canada. In the US the decision was finally made to go on with the weapon development. Vannevar Bush was the scientific head of the project and General Leslie Grove was the factotum. It was indeed an Anglo-American project. The UK depended on the US but maintained its own development.
The special relationship extended to cooperation with the OSS. The VENONA cooperation on cryptography became the BRUSA-UKUSA. In June, 2010 the NSA-GCHQ declassified and posted on the internet the early papers of this cooperation that extended through the 1950s.[See http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukusa/]
British pilots trained on U2 aircraft to get imaging of the Soviet Union. U2 aircraft flew so high they were immune to Soviet missiles. British planes adapted to deliver nuclear weapons, but standoff targeting was required. That is, delivery of a weapon at a considerable distance from the target so the delivery platform is not seen and never visually acquires the target. This necessity led to cruise missiles. The first British cruise missile was Skybolt (December 1962). However President John Kennedy cancelled the program without warning the UK. Kennedy met MacMillan to deal with this. MacMillan begged for assistance, so Kennedy shared the Polaris missile. Stung by being unwarned and in political difficulty, MacMillan vowed to have the Union Jack on the nose cone of every British Polaris.
The American needed ground stations for NSA and the UK had little islands all over the world, remnants of the empire. NSA shared its product (even raw data.) In 1970 the UK elected an anti-American prime minister (Edward Heath). As a young man he was dismayed by US isolationism before WWII. Further, the US did not help the UK, French, and Israeli attack in Suez. During the 1973 Yom Kippur War Heath refused permission for the US to use any UK bases for resupply.
The US reconnaissance aircraft, the SR71 “Blackbird”, was a great aircraft but burned a huge amount of fuel. British bases were needed for refueling. There was an enormous US antipathy to Heath. The US-UK finally got together after Heath. Nevertheless, the US-UK intelligence cooperation was unaffected.
The Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) in Britain is at the apex of British Intelligence. At its table sits the heads of the secret agencies plus Whitehall representatives and it reaches agreed views, by consensus, which are then circulated to an inner group of ministers and departmental consumers. It prepares and circulates the “Red Book, the classified weekly summary of current events which senior ministers take home and read each weekend.” The US CIA station chief also sits on the JIC.” [West, Nigel (1997). The Secret War for the Falklands. London: Little, Brown and Co., p. 26]
When a new prime minister is named in Britain, he (or she) makes a call on the Queen. The outgoing minister is quickly and quietly shown the back door of the palace. Upon return to Number 10, Downing Street the new PM is told to write three letters, for the UK nuclear submarine commanders. It is he who must determine what they are to do in the event of a nuclear attack on the UK (and decapitation of the UK command system). The cabinet secretary gives guidance but it is the PM who must write the letters. They have some options which the PM must prioritize
- Use your own initiative.
- Go to Australia (become part of the retaliation).
- Place yourself under command of the U.S. President.
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