![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This paper analyses the Admiralty’s Monthly Intelligence Report for the opening period of the Cold War. The sources reveal how the Service adjusted to East-West confrontation. A picture emerges of an organisation gradually adapting to a new geopolitical reality, particularly the differences between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as maritime adversaries. Despite growing geopolitical tension, only in 1948 following the Corfu Channel incident and Soviet takeovers in Eastern Europe did Monthly Intelligence Report declare the Cold War as the new status quo.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 For example: Dylan, Defence Intelligence and the Cold War: Britain’s Joint Intelligence Bureau, 1945–1964, New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
2 Twigge, Hampshire, and Macklin, British Intelligence: Secrets, Spies and Sources, Kew: The National Archives, 2008, p.148–149.
3 For the naval origins of the Security Service/MI5 see Judd, Alan, The Quest for C: Mansfield Cumming and the Founding of the Secret Service, London: Harper Collins, 1999.
4 Travis, Sir Edward Wilfrid Harry, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Aldrich, Hidden Hand: plate 10, Clarke, Bob, Four Minute Warning, Britain’s Cold War, Stroud, Glos: Tempus, 2005, p.127 and Twigge et. al. British Intelligence, pp.248–9.
5 Ryan, Joseph, ‘The Royal Navy and Soviet Seapower, 1930–1950: Intelligence, Naval Cooperation and Antagonism’, PhD, University of Hull, 1996, pp.225–32.
6 The intelligence studies discipline, a predominantly Cold War field, rarely refers to naval intelligence nor uses these MIRs, e.g. Aldrich, Richard, Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence, London: John Murray, 2001; Aldrich, ‘GCHQ and SIGINT in the Early Cold War 1945–70’, Intelligence and National Security Vol. 16, no. 1, March 2001’, 67–96; Andrew, Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community, London: Heinemann, 1985; Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5, London: Penguin, 2010; Andrew, Christopher, The Secret World: A History of Intelligence, London: Allen Lane, 2018; Dylan, Defence Intelligence and the Cold War Britain’s Joint Intelligence Bureau, 1945–1964, New York: Oxford University Press, 2014; Davies, The Authorised History of British Defence Economic Intelligence: A Cold War in Whitehall, 1929–90, London: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2019; Ferris, Behind the Enigma: The Authorized History of GCHQ, Britain’s Secret Cyber-Intelligence Agency, London: Bloomsbury, 2020, Jeffery, Keith MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service, 1909–1949, London: Bloomsbury, 2010; Keegan, Intelligence in War Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda, London: Hutchinson, 2003; Schlaepfer, ‘Signals Intelligence and British Counter-Subversion in the Early Cold War’, Intelligence and National Security Vol. 29, no. 1, 2 January 2014, pp.82–98.
7 There is a limited literature on the development of the Soviet Navy in this period. Bryan Ranft and Geoffrey Till’s 1983 The Sea in Soviet Strategy is the definitive study of the Cold War period, but like most analyses of the Soviet military there is a preoccupation with translations of published doctrine. In this case the key figure is Admiral Sergey Gorshkov, head of the Soviet Navy 1956–85 and the first advocate of the navy as an independent arm of communist foreign policy. Gorshkov’s ideas are mostly drawn from his 1976 treatise The Sea Power of the State. See Pierre, Andrew J. ‘The Sea Power of the State’ book review, Foreign Affairs, Winter 1979.
8 ADM 223/224 October 1946; ADM 223/225 April 1947; ADM 223/226 September 1947; ADM 223/227 May 1948; ADM 223/229 March 1949; Boyd, British Naval Intelligence, p.170.
9 ADM 223/229 January 1949, p.9; ADM 223/235 January 1952, p.1; Hennessy, The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War, London: Allen Lane, 2002, pp.24–25; Herman, Intelligence Power in Peace and War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p.247.
10 Aldrich, GCHQ, 114; Aldrich, Hidden Hand, 253; Andrew, The Secret World, 674; Boog, ‘German Air Intelligence in the Second World War’, Intelligence and National Security Vol. 5, no. 1, April 1990, pp.350–424. Occasionally, interception of Japanese cipher traffic had revealed information on German technological developments which would later prove useful in relation to the Soviets. See Boyd, British Naval Intelligence, p.462.
11 Sontag and Drew, Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of Cold War Submarine Espionage, New York: Public Affairs, 1998, 6; Ford, Rosenberg, and Balano, The Admirals’ Advantage: U.S. Navy Operational Intelligence in World War II and the Cold War, Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2014, 38; Boyd, British Naval Intelligence, p.356, 476. This exchange echoed wartime cooperation and was a precursor to a formal operational intelligence sharing agreement between ONI and NID signed by Rear Admirals Thomas Inglis (USN) and Eric Longley-Cook (RN) in 1951. See Beesley, Very Special Intelligence: The Story of the Admiralty’s Operational Intelligence Centre 1939–45, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1977, p.110.
12 Boyd, British Naval Intelligence, p.564.
13 Ibid., p.355, 410.
14 My late grandfather, a Leading Coder in HMS BERMUDA, recalled that shore leave was not granted at Murmansk in January 1944, the explanation given being the extreme cold. This wartime policy was continued when the light cruiser HMS BELLONA visited in June 1946; ADM 223/223 June 1946, 10.
15 For example, Admiral Bruce Fraser’s port call at Kronstadt near Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) in July 1946. This was the first RN visit to the area since it had been blockaded and bombarded in 1919 during the campaign against the Bolsheviks, which MIR carefully pointed out. ADM 223/224 July 1946, 41–42; Dunn, Battle in the Baltic: The Royal Navy and the Fight to Save Estonia and Latvia 1918–20, Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2020.
16 Wells, ‘Studies in British Naval Intelligence 1880–1945’, PhD, University of London, 1972, p.240.
17 Aldrich, Hidden Hand, 250, 409, 538; Andrew, The Secret World, 672; Herman, Intelligence Power, p.52, 159–9; Andrew, The Defence of the Realm, 366–77; Goodman, The Official History of the Joint Intelligence Committee, p.284.
18 For example, ADM 223/223 January 1946, 2 and ADM 223/227 January 1948.
19 Boyd, British Naval Intelligence, p.415.
20 ADM 223/234 September 1951; Benbow, ‘The Impact of Air Power on Navies: The United Kingdom, 1945–1957’, DPhil, University of Oxford, 1999, p.76.
21 Major Gary Powers’ flight plan for 1 May 1960 had included a photographing of the dockyards at Severodvinsk on the White Sea. He never reached that far north. Powers’ U-2 was shot down over the Urals by an SA-2 surface to air missile and he was captured and show trialled. Had Powers completed his mission, his would have been only the second aerial photography of the area and the first of Severodvinsk. See Maddrell, ‘Britain’s Exploitation of Occupied Germany for Scientific and Technical Intelligence on the Soviet Union’, DPhil, Cambridge University, 1998, 324; Aldrich, GCHQ, p.108; Herman, Intelligence Power, 187; Boyd, British Naval Intelligence, p.567.
22 ADM 223/235 January 1952.
23 Vego, ‘Soviet Russia: The Rise and Fall of a Superpower Navy’ in Erickson, Goldstein, and Lord, China Goes to Sea: Maritime Transformation in Comparative Historical Perspective, Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2009, p.202.
24 Twigge et. al., British Intelligence, 153; Aldrich, GCHQ, 115.
25 ADM 223/229 June 1949, p.46.
26 Clarke, Four Minute Warning: Britain’s Cold War, Stroud: Tempus, 2005, 133; Twigge et. al, British Intelligence, 156; Aldrich, Hidden Hand, 523; Herman, Intelligence Power, 12.
27 ADM 223/231 January 1950, pp.39–41.
28 Ministry of Defence, Joint Doctrine Publication 2–00 Understanding and Intelligence Support to Joint Operations, p.2-1–2-6.
29 Both King George VI and Prime Minister Winston Churchill had praised the role of Bletchley Park in limiting losses in the Battle of the Atlantic. Mountbatten, inducted into Japanese ULTRA (naval and military) and MAGIC (diplomatic) as Supreme Commander South-East Asia in 1944 had found the intelligence ‘enchanting’. Aldrich, GCHQ: The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency, London: HarperPress, 2011, p.60 and Ziegler, Mountbatten: the Official Biography, London: Guild, 1985, p.268.
30 Aldrich, GCHQ: The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency, London: HarperPress, 2011, p.132.
31 Andrew, The Secret World: A History of Intelligence, p.672.
32 Goodman, The Official History of the Joint Intelligence Committee, p.250.
33 JIC(45)265(O) Post-War Organisation of Intelligence, 7 September 1945 at CAB 81/130. See also Herman, Michael in Dover, Robert and Goodman, Michael (eds.) Learning from the Secret Past: Cases in British Intelligence History, Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press 2011, p.24 and Dylan, Huw, Defence Intelligence and the Cold War: Britain’s Joint Intelligence Bureau 1945–64, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014, p.2. See also Wells, Anthony Roland, PhD thesis, Studies in British Naval Intelligence: 1880–1945, University of London, 1972, p.435.
34 Dylan, Defence Intelligence and the Cold War: Britain’s Joint Intelligence Bureau, 1945–1964, p.6–9 and Herman in Dover, Robert and Goodman, Michael (eds.) Learning from the Secret Past, Ch. 1.
35 Goodman, The Official History of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Ch.6, Fig. 12.
36 Ibid. p.250.
37 Joint Doctrine Publication 2–00 Intelligence Support to Joint Operations, Ministry of Defence, 3rd Ed, 2011, p.2–9.
38 ADM 223/225 January 1947, p.26.
39 Maddrell, ‘Britain’s Exploitation of Occupied Germany for Scientific and Technical Intelligence on the Soviet Union’, 1998, p.15.
40 Grove, Eric, Vanguard to Trident: British Naval Policy Since World War II, London: The Bodley Head, 1987, p.29 and Ford (Lt Cdr USNR) and Rosenberg (Capt USNR), The Admiral’s Advantage: US Navy Operational Intelligence in World War II and the Cold War, Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2005, p.32.
41 Ranft and Till, The Sea in Soviet Strategy, p.154.
42 Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery, London: Penguin, 2017, 332–35; Ford, Rosenberg, and Balano, The Admirals’ Advantage, 32; CAB 158/1 ‘Soviet Interests, Intentions and Capabilities’, 6 August 1947.
43 ADM 223/223 May 1946, 16. See also Boyd, British Naval Intelligence, 519–20, 523.
44 Boyd, British Naval Intelligence, 561; Hennessy and Jinks, The Silent Deep: The Royal Navy Submarine Service Since 1945, London: Allen Lane, 2015, 52; Llewellyn-Jones, ‘The Royal Navy on the Threshold of Modern Anti-Submarine Warfare, 1944–49’, PhD, King’s College London, 2004, pp.12–14, 159–60; Barnes, Dead Doubles, p.160.
45 The instigator of this research, the scientist Hellmuth Walter, had been captured in Kiel on 4 May 1945 by 30 Assault Unit, a Royal Marines special operations group whose missions were planned by the NID’s Commander Ian Fleming. Walter and Admiralty scientists worked on re-commissioning the experimental U-1407 as HMS METEORITE at Barrow-in-Furness in September 1946. See Hennessy and Jinks, The Silent Deep, 50; Boyd, British Naval Intelligence, p.524, 537.
46 ADM 223/228 October 1948, pp.38–39.
47 Haddon, ‘Union Jacks and Red Stars on Them: UK Intelligence, the Soviet Nuclear Threat and British Nuclear Weapons Policy’, PhD, Queen Mary University, 2008, 222; Boyd, British Naval Intelligence, 567, 585–86; Andrew, Secret Service, 496; Hennessy, The Secret State, 42; Vego, ‘Soviet Russia’, 215. Penkovsky was a Colonel in the Soviet military intelligence agency, the Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye (GRU). See Barnes, Dead Doubles, p.161.
48 ADM 223/225 March 1947, p.37.
49 Boyd, British Naval Intelligence, pp.560–62, 730.
50 Grove, Vanguard to Trident, p.42; Benbow, ‘The Impact of Air Power on Navies’, pp.37–49.
51 ADM 223/227 February 1948, p.47; Boyd, British Naval Intelligence, 563; Grove, Vanguard to Trident, p.64; Ryan, ‘The Royal Navy and Soviet Seapower’, pp.207–10.
52 Grove, Vanguard to Trident, 21; ADM 223/224 December 1946, p.16.
53 ADM 223/226 July 1947, p.28.
54 ADM 223/226 September 1947; ADM 223/226 December 1947, 23. Soviet submarines being serviced at Swinemünde were photographed in July 1947 with the pictures published in that September’s MIR. See also: Wilczek, ‘Nazi Torpedo Test Site Could Become Floating Monastery’, The Times, 20 October 2020.
55 ADM 223/226 July 1947, p.37.
56 ADM 223/230 August 1949, pp.39–40.
57 ADM 223/233 April 1951, 19; Baldwin, ‘The Soviet Navy’, p.594.
58 Grove, Vanguard to Trident, pp.64–65.
59 ADM 223/224 August 1946, p.30; ADM 223/226 September 1947, p.40.
60 Aldrich, Hidden Hand, 521. SIS operative Commander Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb disappeared while attempting to dive the hull of the visiting Sverdlov-class cruiser Ordzhonikidze at Portsmouth on 19 April 1956. His headless body was discovered in Chichester harbour 14 months later. The exact circumstances of Crabb’s death have never been fully explained. Ian Fleming likely used the incident as one of his sources of inspiration for the underwater sections of the 1961 James Bond novel Thunderball. See Twigge et. al., British Intelligence, 149; Moran, ‘Never to Be Disclosed: Government Secrecy in Britain 1945–1975’, PhD, University of Warwick, 2008, pp.135–157, Macintyre, For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond, London: Bloomsbury, 2008, pp.93–94.
61 Grove, Vanguard to Trident, 97; Admiralty, Naval Instructional Film, Spithead Review 1953. See also description of Sverdlov-class Hull 4 in ADM 223/234 July 1951, p.39.
62 Ziegler, Mountbatten, p.553 and 586–7. See also Grove, Vanguard to Trident, 97–8. The Shorts Seamew prototype rudimentary anti-submarine aircraft was designed for reservist aircrew to quickly be able to put to sea in merchant aircraft carriers to counter the Soviet submarine threat. Similarly, the Fairey Gannet carrier-borne anti-submarine warfare aircraft was specifically produced from 1949 to counter the threat from a growing Soviet submarine fleet. See Hamilton-Paterson, James, Empire of the Clouds: When Britain’s Aircraft Ruled the World, London: Faber & Faber, 2010, p.232.
63 Herman, Intelligence Power, pp.241–42; Hampshire, ‘The Rise of the Chinese Navy: Past, Present & Future’, The Naval Review, August 2020, p.342.
64 West, foreword to Wells, Between Five Eyes: 50 Years of Intelligence Sharing, Oxford: Casemate, 2020, p. vii.
65 Imperial War Museum. Aside from this photograph, no more thorough collection was conducted on Sverdlov during her 1953 visit. R.V. Jones gives the reason that the Secretary of State for Air, Lord De L’Isle, thought it would be ‘impolite’ to the Russians. Such reticence in 1953 may have been another reason for deploying divers such as Buster Crabb to survey Ordzhonikidze in 1956. Jones, Reflections on Intelligence, London: Heinemann 1989, p.22.
66 This was a view reflected at the national level by the JIC – the Berlin blockade was the point of no return; Hennessy, The Secret State, p.22.
67 ADM 223/227 March 1948, p.2.
68 Gaddis, John Lewis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, p.281–2.
69 ADM 223/223 March 1946, 65; Axworthy, Iran: Empire of the Mind, London: Penguin, 2008, 237–39; Crist, The Twilight War: The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran, New York: Penguin, 2012, p.9.
70 ADM 223/225 February 1947, p.41.
71 ADM 223/226 August 1947; Sanderson, Hans, and Fauser, Patrik, ‘Environmental Assessment of Sea Dumped Chemical Warfare Agents’, Aarhus: Danish Centre for Environment and Energy, 2015.
72 ADM 223/230 November 1949, p.22.
73 Baldwin, ‘The Soviet Navy’, p.602.
74 ADM 223/224 November 1946, 18; ADM 223/225 February 1947, p.38.
75 The discussion of Russian access to the sea and the need for warm water ports has become something of a historical trope. Continued access to Tartus on the Mediterranean coast is written about as one of the primary reasons for Russian intervention in Syria, e.g. BBC News, ‘How Vital Is Syria’s Tartus Port to Russia?’ 27 June 2012.
76 Goodman, The Official History of the Joint Intelligence Committee, p.263; Aldrich, Hidden Hand, pp.271–72.
77 Corfu Channel (United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland v. Albania), International Court of Justice, 1949.
78 HMS MAURITIUS, LEANDER, SAUMAREZ and VOLAGE were on what would now be termed a ‘Freedom of Navigation’ patrol through the Corfu Channel following Albanian shore fire against cruisers HMS ORION and SUPERB in May 1946. Grove, Vanguard to Trident, pp.153–55.
79 ADM 223/224 December 1946, p.72; ADM 223/225 January 1947, 60; ADM 223/225 February 1947, p.57; ADM 223/228 December 1948, p.46.
80 Joint Doctrine Publication 2–00 Intelligence Support to Joint Operations, Ministry of Defence, 3rd Ed, 2011, pp.5–13.
81 For example, HMS CONCORD at Nanking (now Nanjing) where Soviet warships were also alongside. ADM 223/229 May 1949, p.46.
82 The importance of obtaining political clearance for high-risk naval intelligence operations became clear in the aftermath of the Crabb affair. By embarrassing Prime Minister Anthony Eden and the First Sea Lord (Mountbatten), Crabb’s death threatened the intelligence relationship with the United States. U-2 reconnaissance aircraft had arrived at RAF Lakenheath in April 1956, but as a consequence of the Crabb affair were re-assigned to Wiesbaden, Germany. Standing authorisation for submarine intelligence-gathering missions was cancelled. See Moran, ‘Never to Be Disclosed’, pp.135–57; Twigge et. al., British Intelligence, 149; Aldrich, GCHQ, pp.140–43; Aldrich, Hidden Hand, pp.521–26; Andrew, Secret Service, p.495; Ziegler, Mountbatten, 534 and Hennessy and Jinks, The Silent Deep, p.108.
83 Grove, Vanguard to Trident, p.82.
84 Wright, ‘Aircraft Carriers and Submarines: Naval R&D in Britain in the Mid-Cold War’ in Bud and Gummett (eds.), Cold War, Hot Science, London, Science Museum, 2002, 148; Grove, Vanguard to Trident, 38; Benbow, ‘The Impact of Air Power on Navies’, p.4.
85 Idem.; Andrew, Secret Service, 499; Barnes, Dead Doubles, 161.
86 Ranft and Till, The Sea in Soviet Strategy, 156–57; Herman, Intelligence Power, 241–42; Hampshire, ‘Chinese Navy’, 342; Vego, ‘Soviet Russia’, 221; Boyd, British Naval Intelligence, p.587.
87 This reflected a division within the British government stretching back to 1944. The Foreign Office wanted to maintain friendly relations with the Soviets and work with them to build a new post-war world order along United Nations lines. In contrast, the War Office, in particular the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, were wary. It is likely the Admiralty view was somewhere in between. See Aldrich, Hidden Hand, p.43.
88 Carpenter, ‘Putin’s Russia Is Not the Soviet Union Reborn’ The National Interest (Online), 14 January 2020; Kanet, ‘The Superpower Quest for Empire: The Cold War and Soviet Support for “Wars of National Liberation”’ Cold War History Vol. 6, no. 3, August 2006, pp.331–52’. See also Westad, The Global Cold War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
89 Only in rare cases do historians cross the 1945 line, preferring usually to see it as the end of one era and the start of the next. For an exception see Robb-Webb, The British Pacific Fleet: Experience and Legacy, 1944–50, Corbett Centre for Maritime Policy Studies Series, Farnham: Ashgate, 2013.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Andrew Ward
Andrew Ward is a serving naval officer. He spent some of the 2020 coronavirus lockdown researching records of the Admiralty’s Naval Intelligence Division at the National Archives, Kew. This paper is the product of that research.