British Intelligence and the Fear of a Soviet Attack on Allied Communications

Abstract

This article considers British intelligence fears about a Soviet attack on Allied communications. It includes a reproduction of a 1959 assessment by the Joint Intelligence Committee focusing on the means of communication across the Atlantic, and the means by which the Soviet Union could interfere or intercept them.

Keywords:

• Cold War
• David Kahn
• Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ)
• National Security Agency (NSA)
• research experiences for undergraduates

Notes

¹Various inferences to this can be found in [1].

²“National Security Agency Releases History of Cold War Intelligence Activities,” The National Security Archive, George Washington University. http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB260/ (accessed December 2014).

³The most detailed account is [2]. See also a number of recent articles by David Easter: [7, 8, 9, 10].

⁴For more, see [5].

⁵[11, p. 228]. In fact, comint more broadly remains an underexplored area of research. See [3, p. 179].

⁶For a fascinating account of what is known, see [14, pp. 1–24].

⁷For more detail on the preceding paragraphs on the JIC, see [13].

⁸For more, see [3, pp. 185–186].

⁹On LCSA, see [3].

¹⁰CAB 158/37, JIC(59)54 – Part I, Soviet Interdiction Of Allied Communication – Part I – List Of Vital Targets In The Atlantic Area, 14 July 1959.

¹¹Cutting cables deliberately to stop communication or tapping into them to procure intelligence was, of course, not new. Just consider the intelligence supply from the Vienna and Berlin tunnels. See [15].

¹²For the history of British thinking on cable security and imperial communications, see P. M. Kennedy “Imperial Cable Communications and Strategy, 1870–1914,” The English Historical Review 86:341 (1971); see also for further examples, Studies in Intelligence: Journal of the American Intelligence Professional 57:2 (2013), p. 71; Bob Woodward, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA (Simon and Schuster: London, 1987), p. 449; Matthew Aid, “How the CIA Cut an Undersea Cable and Helped American Sigint Collectors During the Korean War,” available at http://www.matthewaid.com/post/65052358164/how-the-cia-cut-an-undersea-cable-and-helped; [2, p. 468].

¹³CAB 158/37, JIC(59)54 – Part III, Soviet Interdictions Of Allied Telecommunications Part III - Deployment And Use Of Soviet Capabilities, 10 May 1961.

¹⁴The only real attempt to look at this, albeit written at a time of very few intelligence record releases, is [6].

¹⁵Colonel L. Kuleszynski, “Some Problems of Surprise in Warfare,” Military Thought, Number 5, 1971, in [17].

¹⁶TNA: CAB 158/37.

¹⁷H. A. Kissinger. 1957. Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. New York: Harper & Bros., p. 95.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Goodman

Michael S. Goodman is ‘Reader in Intelligence and International Affairs’ at the Department of War Studies, King's College London. His most recent book, The Official History of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Volume I: From the Approach of the Second World War to the Suez Crisis, was published in 2014 by Routledge.

Huw Dylan

Huw Dylan is a Lecturer in Intelligence Studies and International Security at the Department of War Studies, King's College London. His research is focused on British intelligence in the Cold War, and his book Defence Intelligence and the Cold War was published in autumn 2014 with Oxford University Press.