have enabled the United States and the United Kingdom to stay ahead in the covert and clandestine use of these and other unacknowledged operatives hosted by US and UK submarine crews on special missions.
In the constant cat-and-mouse contest of the Cold War, the United States and the United Kingdom stayed ahead, and we will examine why shortly. However, the Soviet Union sought, and today the Russians and Chinese still seek, to break into the most sensitive secrets associated with the design, building, operation, and maintenance of both nations’ nuclear submarines. Guarding those secrets remains a national counterintelligence priority, one not helped by the arrival of the Internet and cyber operations.
In the first part of the Cold War the Soviets were partially disabled, unknowingly so. They did not know what they did not know until the Walker spy ring complemented other espionage. They simply wanted to know how the United States and the United Kingdom did it all: the technology, the design, operational modes, and communications. Most of all, they wanted to know just how quiet the US and UK submarines were. What were they really up against? The Soviets became creative at the operational level.
New words entered the NATO lexicon; fresh abbreviations and acronyms were added regularly. One such acronym was AGI, Auxiliary General Intelligence (collector), a bland description of Soviet and other Warsaw Pact surface ships that were intelligence collectors disguised as civilian merchant ships. The Soviet Ocean Surveillance System (SOSS, for short) had many components; AGIs were crucial ones. These otherwise innocuous vessels gave themselves away by the antennas they sprouted over their superstructures—SIGINT and ELINT systems that were well known in NATO handbooks. Occasionally a unique system would appear, and it became the job of the technical intelligence-collection systems and the analysts at GCHQ, NSA, UK Technical Intelligence (Navy), and the US Naval Intelligence Center to figure out what it was. The Soviets positioned their AGIs in locations well known to and well surveilled by US and UK systems.
For example, the NATO-designated “Malin Head” AGI was stationed off Malin Head with the clear and explicit goal of collecting intelligence from the UK submarine base at Faslane and the nearby US strategic-missile-submarine tender and submarine support activity in Holy Loch. US and UK submarines followed similar routes from their bases down the Firth of Clyde to the outer channels between the Scottish islands and then the North and Norwegian Seas and the eastern Atlantic. US and UK submarines were on the surface for a considerable part of the transit for safety and navigational reasons before they could dive and leave their protective escorts, which included antisubmarine helicopters.
As the 1970s progressed the Soviets became more adventurous and clever. They coordinated data from the AGI with other SOSS sources and methods and espionage data to intercept a deploying SSBN heading for the deep ocean to begin a two-month strategic deterrent patrol. The patrol areas became increasingly distant from the Soviet Union as the range of the missiles increased from that of the original Polaris through Poseidon to the Trident D-5 and everything in between. From a Soviet perspective, intercepting, destabilizing, and potentially causing a mission abort of a UK or US strategic patrol would send a message to both countries’ leaderships that their primary strategic deterrent was not invincible. From a US Navy and Royal Navy perspective, ensuring that this did not happen was paramount, so a range of technical, operational, and intelligence ploys evolved to counter such assets as the Malin Head AGI. Along similar lines, the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies developed the simple tactic of following US and Royal Navy surface ships of all descriptions, from US nuclear-powered aircraft carrier battle groups to frigate squadrons and supply ships and oilers.
Where the latter went the shadowers hoped to find the fleet, and they were correct. From a Soviet Northern Fleet, Baltic, or Black Sea Fleet perspective, following a fleet tanker to its rendezvous point with a major formation could lead to significant SIGINT and ELINT collection opportunities. NATO’s EMCON (emission control) would obviate the latter, and Soviet listeners would be left only with listening to VHF (very high frequency) communications between combatants and supply vessels. NATO named these Soviet followers “tattletales.” There was more to them, however. As its capabilities improved through the 1970s and right up to the demise of the USSR, the Soviet navy developed a strategic and tactical plan that involved striking first against major US and NATO naval formations. This required significant coordination, timing of deployments and arrival on station, secure low-probability-of-intercept (LPI) communications, and weapons that the planners in Moscow assessed would do the job—that is, deliver a massed surprise and decapitating strike. The tattletale was only one of the assets involved. Others included surface, subsurface, and air assets of several types, and, increasingly, space-based systems for tracking and targeting. Breaking into, compromising, and rendering ineffective this part of the Soviet Ocean Surveillance System was a crucial task, one that the US Navy and Royal Navy, along with their intelligence communities, addressed in full.
There was, however, an additional Soviet component, one that was extremely flexible, deceptive, and at times difficult to locate and track. This comprised the noncommercial use of Soviet and other Warsaw Pact merchant fleets, plus the even more challenging flag-of-convenience surrogates used clandestinely by the KGB and GRU for a variety of intelligence operations. This added component was nontrivial. The KGB and the GRU recognized that they could place merchant vessels in places that a Soviet or Warsaw Pact naval vessel could never go, into the very ports and hearts of the European NATO navies, including the Royal Navy, and into certain US ports that the US government had opened to Soviet- and Warsaw Pact–flag carriers. In the case of surrogate flag-of-convenience vessels there was little NATO governments could do legally and overtly under the various maritime agreements together with the law of the sea. (It should be noted at this point and for future reference that the United States is, unlike the United Kingdom, not a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea [UNCLOS] or to the United Nations convention establishing and maintaining the International Criminal Courts [ICC] at The Hague in the Netherlands.)
The KGB and the GRU selected merchant vessels that ostensibly belonged to well established trading organizations and equipped them with often very capable intelligence collection systems, including sonar and the latest SIGINT and ELINT devices. Photographic collection was easy. A merchant ship visiting Greenock on the Clyde could listen to local communications while sending highly trained crew members ashore on collection missions. These individuals could travel by rental car to such sites such as the Royal Navy nuclear storage facility at Coulport or to the Holy Loch, where they could observe US nuclear submarines berthed. Deployment schedules could be collected, tug frequencies monitored, weapon movements noted, and perhaps most dangerous of all, some of those who went ashore did not return. UK port immigration and customs officials checked crews in and out but could never guarantee that the same persons arrived with the ship and sailed with it. The KGB and the GRU had an ideal way to insert agents and recover them, without the risks of airport and regular port transit, or indeed of clandestine insertion by other means, such as submarines. The KGB inserted agents regularly into and out of Europe in such ways, and the GRU inserted the far more dangerous long-term “sleepers,” tasked to integrate with and live among local communities.
These sleepers were extremely highly trained personnel with perfect language skills, culture, and detailed local knowledge, acquired after multiple clandestine visits before final insertion for what in some cases was decades, often without the knowledge of their owners or operators. They were equipped with totally fictitious identities and documentation. The objectives for these GRU personnel, many of them Spetsnaz trained, was not classic espionage, recruiting and running agents, but rather acquiring detailed local intelligence. In the case of the Royal Navy, they were interested in the location of crucial strategic communications systems and likely routing, weapon storage facilities, strategic fuel-supply sites, and covert command-and-control facilities. Perhaps most worrisome of all was the task given to a select few to assassinate, in the event of a major confrontation between the West and the Soviet Union, the key leadership of the United Kingdom. In the 1980s Mrs. Margaret Thatcher was indeed at the very top of the target list.
At the operational level, these vessels had highly classified war orders to which only their political
