Has the Cold War started yet? Evidence from the Royal Navy’s Monthly Intelligence Report 1946–52

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Naval intelligence
• Cold War origins
• Soviet Navy
• Battle of the Atlantic
• Corfu Channel
• 1948

Introduction

This paper provides insight into how the Royal Navy acted as a consumer of British intelligence, and therefore its role in the early Cold War, through a study of the Admiralty’s Monthly Intelligence Report (MIR) for 1946–52. Wartime naval intelligence is a well-known subject, particularly the role of ULTRA Enigma decrypts in the Battle of the Atlantic. However, after 1945, the focus in British intelligence studies tends towards rationalisation, amalgamation and preparation for the formation of the joint Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) as part of the new Ministry of Defence (MoD) in 1964.¹ Yet the Naval Intelligence Division continued in existence in the interim, mainly as a central analysis body supporting the Naval Staff, its wartime operational roles subsumed by other parts of the intelligence community.² Whilst the civilian intelligence organisations had significant naval influence during their foundings, after the Second World War, each assumed a non-military identity of its own and absorbed other components of the clandestine state.³ Notably, the Special Operations Executive became part of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in 1946 and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) was brought under direct Foreign Office control in 1946, although Commander Edward Travis RN stayed on as director until 1952.⁴

Primary sources on the post-war NID have been available since 1975 when records belonging to the defunct Admiralty were declassified and transferred to the Public Records Office into the ADM 223 series. Yet the post-war MIRs have been little studied, despite their potential value to Cold War historians, naval historians, and scholars of intelligence studies. Joseph F. Ryan used the post-war parts of ADM 223 to inform the final chapter of his 1996 doctoral thesis ‘The Royal Navy and Soviet Seapower, 1930–50’. His chapter ‘Post-War Intelligence 1946–50’ provides a useful summary of the MIRs up to the outbreak of the Korean War on 25 June 1950.⁵ Edward Hampshire used them sparingly in his 2008 survey of intelligence records held at the National Archives: his concentration is on the wartime parts of the ADM 223 series. The only book-length study to have been published on naval intelligence so far, Professor Andrew Boyd’s 2020 work British Naval Intelligence Through the Twentieth Century, does not use the post-war MIRs to inform Part V of an otherwise comprehensive history.⁶

Monthly Intelligence Report (MIR)

Monthly Intelligence Report was written at the Naval Intelligence Division in London, under the editorship of the Director of Naval Intelligence. Copies were distributed to every ship in the Fleet and to shore establishments, air stations, auxiliary vessels and around the Admiralty itself in Whitehall. Whereas a capital ship would receive eight copies of MIR, a submarine or minesweeper would only receive one. Readership was intended for members of the Wardroom (a ship’s officers’ mess) but readers were encouraged to use the contents in ship’s lectures or current affairs discussions held with an officer’s Division of sailors. MIR was one of the Admiralty’s main downwards communication channels. Information not urgent enough for high-frequency radio signal or too sensitive for routine mail was contained in MIR.

Following the expansion of the purview and competence of the Naval Intelligence Division (NID) during the First World War under Rear Admiral William ‘Blinker’ Hall’s leadership, MIR was published from 1919 until August 1939. During the Second World War, MIR was replaced with a more rudimentary Weekly Intelligence Report with various other publications produced locally and in conjunction with allies for different theatres of operations, a practice which reached its zenith in the Pacific theatre in 1945. The Admiralty’s traditional MIR resumed in January 1946, once again covering intelligence for the whole world. Especially in the early post-war years, MIR reads like an assortment of items of interest rather than a considered view of global maritime intelligence. The editor was the Director of Naval Intelligence, a Rear Admiral’s post in the post-war period carrying much prestige at the Admiralty and with a permanent seat on the national Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC).

Not everything in MIR should be taken at face value. It is an institutional publication with the prejudices and biases to be expected of the view from the centre. In particular, the MIR series 1946–52 shows strong bias against the Soviets/Russians as competent mariners, despite a lack of information for this assertion.⁷ The overall tone is reminiscent of First World War intelligence signals – Room 40ʹs ‘Admiralty Appreciations’.⁸ There is no evidence of a flow of feedback on MIR from Fleet units back to NID. Although contributions are periodically requested by the Director of Naval Intelligence on specific subjects, these are more requests for information (RFIs) to fulfil NID’s outstanding intelligence gaps than requests for feedback on the content of MIR. There is little evidence of a strong link between the collection of information by the NID from its sources across British intelligence and dissemination through MIR.

Collection on the Soviet Union was more challenging than had been the case with the Axis powers in wartime. The Soviet Union was a closed society with most locations off-limits to foreigners. The tailing of Western diplomatic and military personnel began before the Second World War and a paranoid wartime security culture continued into the Cold War. This made it difficult to obtain an accurate or complete picture of naval developments inside the Soviet Union or what the NID referred to as ‘the Satellites’, a growing list of countries behind the Iron Curtain.⁹

MIR’s authors had to rely on secondary sources rather than raw intelligence reporting, especially foreign newspapers and diplomat’s telegrams (DIPTELs) which could be quoted in MIR at SECRET. Intelligence officers no longer had the detailed photographic intelligence used during the Second World War agaisnt Germany. Signals intelligence dried up once the Soviets switched to unbreakable one-time pads in 1948. Other useful information streams such as interrogations of prisoners of war and captured materiel were not available against the Soviet target.

To fill their intelligence gaps, in the early post-war period NID relied on captured German intelligence on the Soviet Navy. Some Bletchley Park signal intercepts had contained Kriegsmarine intelligence on the Soviets and in 1946, the NID came into possession of the captured intelligence archives of the Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, as well as some Luftwaffe material.¹⁰ The dearth of readily available information necessitated a reliance on still older material. Pre-war NID assessments of the Red Navy remained in use as baseline studies. These documents and NID 11 and 16 sections’ wartime work on the Soviet Union were shared with the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) in Washington, D.C.¹¹ Debriefs of captured German prisoners of war (POWs) were used to shed light on Soviet naval strength. NID 11, working with the wartime MI9 debriefing section, screened some 400,000 German POWs and judged the information obtained to be ‘of great value’.¹² However, it is likely that many of these interrogations filled legacy intelligence gaps from 1939 to 1945 rather than providing information on the contemporary state of the Soviet Navy. Furthermore, the German de-emphasis on maritime operations on the Eastern Front meant that most German POWs in Britain with knowledge of naval matters were the fortunate survivors of the Battle of the Atlantic.¹³

Experience from the Arctic convoy route to Archangel and Murmansk in the Russian high north added some background detail. Reports from the wartime Senior British Naval Officer, North Russia (SBNO N-R) and ships’ companies were useful, but these personnel, however curious, had been subject to the same security constraints as any foreigner in the Soviet Union.¹⁴ Visits by HM Ships decreased after RA67, the last Arctic convoy, departed the Kola Inlet for the Clyde on 23 May 1945. Nevertheless, NID briefed and more importantly debriefed ships’ companies following rare visits by British warships to Soviet ports.¹⁵

Contemporary sources were rare, especially information graded ‘A1’ using an accuracy and reliability scale pioneered by NID in the Second World War.¹⁶ Human intelligence of all types proved to be of greater importance in the early Cold War than the historiographical emphasis on later technical intelligence methods suggests.¹⁷ A dearth of collection inside the Soviet bloc meant non-classified material assumed a greater proportionate value than had been the case when fighting the Kriegsmarine.¹⁸ The network of naval attachés, especially in Moscow but also in Berlin, Stockholm and the capitals of other communist states, provided valuable information rather than ready-made intelligence, continuing a pattern established in wartime.¹⁹ Attachés’ political analysis and reprints of communist propaganda informed the overall picture. Use of these sources gave these MIRs a strategic-political rather than strictly operational naval intelligence character.

When the opportunity presented itself in home waters, Soviet warships were photographed, sometimes from surface ships but more commonly by aircraft. These photographs were reproduced in MIR even if the quality was poor, for the benefit of ships’ companies and Fleet Air Arm aircrew. Given the advent of spy satellites and their ‘overhead’ imagery from the 1960s onwards, it is easy to forget how little imagery intelligence was available in the immediate post-war period. Overflights of Soviet territory to photograph dockyards were rare. Political approval was necessary because of the risks involved. The Soviet Air Force carefully guarded its airspace against foreign incursions, increasingly effectively as the period wore on with better-performing air search radars and the introduction of the MiG-15 jet fighter (photographed and profiled in MIR in September 1951 following its appearance over Korea).²⁰ These factors led to the development by the US Central Intelligence Agency of the U-2 very high altitude reconnaissance aircraft. However, naval sites had a lower priority than facilities connected with Soviet nuclear and missile programmes.²¹

Towards the end of this period, the NID correctly realised the growing importance of the Russian high north as the principal area of strategic concentration for the Soviet Navy.²² The coastline of the Barents Sea gave the Soviet Navy less restricted access to the open Atlantic than routes through the Baltic or from the Black Sea.²³ These remote and inhospitable sea areas were all but impenetrable until the advent of submarine intelligence gathering missions, starting with USS COCHINO in 1949 and the first British contribution, HMS ALCIDE, in September 1952.²⁴ British merchantmen did occasionally visit these Arctic waters. Reports from skippers featured in MIR, especially when new units or naval exercises were observed.²⁵ This foreshadowed the formalisation of covert espionage by British fishing vessels operating from Hull under Operation HORNBEAM in the early 1960s.²⁶

Very occasionally, MIR refers directly to a sensitive source such as a ‘wireless intercept’ or ‘an A1 source in the Baltic’.²⁷ In some places, the presence of an agent or paid informant can be inferred. However, in general, NID stuck to the intelligence principle of security: protecting the source of information.²⁸ This helped keep the classification of the MIR at SECRET rather than anything higher that would have limited its distribution and therefore its usefulness. MIR was not protected by further codewords to ensure a relatively wide distribution among the naval officer community. Nevertheless, destruction instructions were clear: by burning in specially provided bags before the next issue arrived on board. The movement of each individual copy was tracked within ships by signatures inside the front cover and a stark warning adorned each copy: ‘Attention is called to the penalties attaching to any infraction of the Official Secrets Act’ (see Figure 1). The SECRET classification protected sources of information and to preserve the Admiralty’s confidences from embarrassment by allies. For example, developments in the United States Navy and frank assessments of its wartime performance are common.

Figure 1. Monthly Intelligence Report for April 1948.

Following the spectacular successes of cryptologists against Nazi Germany by the Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park, TOP SECRET sources of intelligence played an increasing role in naval intelligence.²⁹ By 1955, more than half of the Government Communications Headquarters’ (GCHQ) work was in direct support of defence activity against Soviet or communist-bloc targets.³⁰ Nevertheless, the importance of a relatively low classified Monthly Intelligence Report remained, to allow all-source assessments to be shared around the Fleet without compromising sensitive sources and methods.

The most significant of these sources in the early Cold War was the TOP SECRET Project VENONA, a joint Australian-UK-US signals intelligence effort to break Soviet codes similar to the work against German Enigma in wartime. Instigated by the US War Department in February 1943 and shared with the UK and Australia at the end of the war, VENONA’s benefits were short-lived. A wholesale Soviet changeover to unbreakable one-time pads on 29 October 1948 (‘Black Friday’) relegated allied SIGINT to traffic analysis and low-level economic reporting. VENONA was not officially disclosed until 1995 when the Senator Moynihan-chaired congressional ‘Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy’ revealed post-war signals intelligence work against the Soviet Union.³¹ In the context of the early Cold War, it is worth remembering the areas of Allied intelligence preoccupation between the allied atomic weapon Manhattan Project and the detonation of the first Soviet atomic weapon in August 1949. Much of the most sensitive intelligence collection effort and the attention of the JIC was focused on nuclear work, leaving the NID to concentrate on both the Soviet Navy and general geopolitical matters judged to be of interest to a naval officer readership.³²

For naval units not privy to the latest TOP SECRET intelligence, MIR was an essential primer. Sophisticated data links between ships, aircraft and shore commands lay well in the future in the late 1940s, meaning isolated units had Jane’s Fighting Ships, MIR and their own radars and binoculars to build up a picture of their immediate surroundings. Sensitive intelligence could be sent to ships by high frequency radio signal, but these transmissions were subject to the same counterintelligence threat exploited by the West against the Soviets under Project VENONA.

The role of MIR in a changing intelligence landscape

MIR filled an important gap in intelligence dissemination, especially in the late 1940s and 50s as the architecture of British intelligence was being established. The greatest changes to intelligence occurred within Defence, or more accurately the Admiralty, War Office and Air Ministry, not amalgamated into a central Ministry of Defence until 1964. Even as early as September 1945, the JIC paper ‘Post-War Organisation of Intelligence’ recognised the need for a ‘first class intelligence system in peacetime’ to provide sufficient warning of a future war breaking out.³³

As part of the formation of MoD, a Defence Intelligence Staff was created, the forerunner of today’s Defence Intelligence. As such, before 1964, there were no defence-wide assessments and coordination between the different parts of the national intelligence effort was in its infancy. In the 1940s and 50s, the next level of intelligence assessment above a single Service or agency output was the papers of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). With a seat on the JIC, the Director of Naval Intelligence was a participant in JIC discussions. With no National Security Council yet established, the JIC was the primary official-level security forum of government, reporting up to the political level, the Cabinet, through the Chiefs of Staff Committee as shown in Figure 2. A first attempt at rationalisation, the Joint Intelligence Bureau (JIB) was created in 1948 to directly support the JIC in primarily geographical studies. The JIB was formed from NID’s sections 5 and 6 along with comparable parts of Military and Air Intelligence. The JIB produced papers on topics of broadly national rather than only Service interest, such as the global oil supply situation.³⁴³⁵

Figure 2. The organisation of British intelligence in 1955.³⁵

Whereas this national-level intelligence activity supported committees and politicians higher up the chain of command, MIR disseminated intelligence downwards, aiming always to be of interest and practical use at the front line. Furthermore, as the JIC moved away from supporting military commanders in wartime to providing national strategic warning, routine military intelligence fell to the NID and its sister organisations in the Army and Royal Air Force.³⁶

MIR is a product of its time. There are examples of assessments which later proved to be optimistic and those where undue caution was shown. To an extent, this is to be expected when writing intelligence; assessments aim to be predictive even when using incomplete information.³⁷ Although it would be unfair to judge the NID with perfect hindsight, the overall impression is one of adjusting slowly to the reality of confrontation with the Soviet Union. This was driven by both the long shadow left by the sacrifices of the Second World War, and the dearth of collection providing insight into the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Navy as a potential opponent

Here, our interest is in the intelligence provided in MIR; discovering what it reveals about the early Cold War from a British naval perspective. Counter to the established view of 1945 as a turning point in world history, for the Royal Navy the legacy of the Second World War lasted well into the 1950s, including in relation to the Soviet Navy. A lack of information from inside the USSR, combined with Soviet industrial asset stripping of their occupied zone of Germany, led to an assumption that fighting the Soviets at sea would be like fighting the Germans.

The idea that the Soviet Union would be Britain’s enemy in any future war only emerges in MIR from 1948. Initially, there is only gradual progress towards that conclusion and a preoccupation with the Second World War at sea. From MIR, the narrative is one of the Royal Navy catching up with new geopolitical realities on land, rather than the Cold War being stimulated by interactions at sea, until the second Corfu Channel mining incident in October 1946 and subsequent court case. Communist Albanian mines struck British warships which were subsequently fired on by shore batteries. Full details of proceedings at the International Court of Justice are beyond the scope of this article and are covered comprehensively in legal commentaries on maritime law. The incident served as a tangible maritime example of the Cold War’s beginnings and received extensive coverage in MIR.

The post-war Naval Intelligence Division was preoccupied with Soviet use of captured German technology, techniques and personnel. Despite similar tactics in use by the Western allies, a ‘without reference to the past’ Soviet policy on recruiting former Nazis was criticised in MIR.³⁸ In an October 1946, report on ‘German Science and the Russian Navy’ MIR stated that the Soviets ‘have been seeking by every possible means to harness German science and technique to their own military and civil needs … The chance to profit from the German defeat has been fully taken.’ NID’s preoccupation was partly because wartime Nazi intelligence documents obtained in occupied Germany were a significant source on the otherwise closed Soviet Union in those early years.³⁹

An Admiralty still traumatised by U-boats feared a Soviet maritime campaign like that waged by the Germans in both wars. Soon after VJ Day, both the Royal and US Navies were preparing themselves for convoy interdiction by a capable Soviet submarine force in the event of another land war in Europe, in effect a third Battle of the Atlantic.⁴⁰ The Soviet submarine threat was real. Ranft and Till clearly trace the link between a Soviet maritime doctrine of attacking enemy sea lines of communication in wartime and mass submarine construction in the USSR after the Second World War. By forcing Allied navies to defend convoys, the risk of attack on the Russian homeland from the sea was reduced. In 1948 Moscow claimed 1200 submarines under construction.⁴¹ With any Allied war effort after 1945 dependent on sea lines of communication, Soviet strategy would likely include an attempt to interdict the maritime lifeline to North America.⁴² As MIR noted as early as December 1946: ‘Russian submarines could certainly operate against seaborne trade using a technique similar to the German U-boat fleet.’

Of particular concern therefore was Soviet use of captured German submarine technology. By the end of the war, the Germans had developed long-range ocean-going U-boats capable of remaining concealed at periscope depth and running their diesel engines using a ‘Schnorkel’ air intake mast. Schnorkel-equipped boats and partially constructed prototypes were removed from the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany to shipyards in Leningrad, around Murmansk and on the Volga at Gorki (now Nizhny Novgorod).⁴³ Several captured German Type XXI and Type XXIII U-boats were put directly into Russian service, and German designs were copied for the first post-war new-build Russian submarines, the Schtchuka and K classes.⁴⁴

Less successfully, Soviet designers, with help from enticed or impressed German engineers, tried to master a High-Test Peroxide (HTP) system that would enable a submarine to operate underwater for even longer periods before surfacing.⁴⁵ The plans for the HTP-powered Type XXVI U-boat were painstakingly reconstructed and parts for a mock-up were shipped to Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) from factories in the Soviet zone of Germany.⁴⁶ The technology was temperamental and dangerous; NID did not predict a working Soviet HTP submarine would appear until 1951 and no frontline boats until 1954. Only one such boat was ever built in the Soviet Union, S-99 (Project 617), laid down in 1951. Diesel power predominated, but information from Oleg Penkovsky, an SIS recruited spy, would later reveal that the Northern Fleet had a prototype nuclear-powered submarine under construction at Molotovsk as early as 1952.⁴⁷

NID concentrated on accurately enumerating the ‘formidable’ Soviet submarine force of re-flagged Type XXI and XXIII U-boats and similar indigenous designs.⁴⁸ The growth in the Soviet submarine force was of interest beyond just the naval intelligence community. In September 1948, the newly formed Joint Intelligence Bureau (JIB) submitted to the overarching Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) a wide-ranging study of Soviet industrial war production potential. It concluded, as Boyd notes, that ‘all available evidence suggested the Soviet Navy intended to focus on building submarines and fast coastal craft.’⁴⁹ While the small craft would protect harbours, submarines would form the main offensive arm of the Soviet Navy, interdicting maritime trade and laying mines around Western ports.⁵⁰ NID estimates drawn from MIR (Table 1) and Boyd’s 2020 analysis show in stark numbers the British assessment of the threat from Soviet submarines:⁵¹

Table 1. NID estimates of Soviet submarine numbers.⁵¹

Year	Operational submarines
1939 (Germany)	65
1946	120
1948	160
1949	181
1955	370
1960	420

Also of interest to NID were Soviet efforts to salvage German hulks and wrecks such as the battlecruiser Gneisenau, ‘pocket battleship’ Lützow, destroyer Z33 and the abandoned partially completed aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin.⁵² In retrospect, all these vessels except Z33 were eventually broken up for scrap or sunk for target practice in the Baltic Sea. Reporting on them in MIR served a dual purpose: it alerted the Royal Navy to the remote possibility that these former nemeses could again pose a threat, and showed how their raising revealed the dishonesty of the Soviets (they were treaty-bound to be destroyed under the 1945 Potsdam Agreement). These ships lingered on with an uncertain and potentially menacing future into the 1950s.⁵³

Similarly, shore equipment was put to good use by Soviet occupying forces throughout Eastern Europe. The eastern German ports of Warnemünde near Rostock, Swinemünde (now Świnoujście) and Gdansk in Poland were Russian-run and existed for the support of the Soviet Navy first, local forces second.⁵⁴ Soviet access to the spiritual home of the German Navy at Wilhelmshaven was also permitted under the Potsdam Agreement. NID assessed that the Russian Naval Technical Mission ‘superintended’ removal of valuable naval industrial equipment to the newly constructed shipbuilding town of Molotovsk on the White Sea (renamed Severodvinsk in 1957).⁵⁵

More pressing was Soviet development of German research into the underwater weapons which could challenge Western dominance in surface ships and equip the feared submarine force. In August 1949 Soviet torpedo output was estimated at 100–120 per month, adding to a growing stockpile ready for a future war. A seven-page report titled ‘USSR Torpedo Development and Production’ in November 1951 emphasised that ‘German knowledge and practice in the torpedo field [has] been fully and carefully exploited – Japanese and Italian equipment [has] been examined.’ The report emphasised that torpedoes were a threat not only from Soviet submarines but also from surface ships, aircraft and shore-based tubes emplaced on breakwaters.

MIR regularly featured the threat from sea mines: ‘Russian construction of all ships down to the smallest MTBs [Motor Torpedo Boats] lays emphasis on fittings for mine carrying or mine laying’ and ‘development work using leading German mine experts has been given a high priority.’⁵⁶ In 1951, mines recovered in Korean waters were discovered on technical analysis to be of Russian manufacture.⁵⁷ Such was the level of concern that MIR in April 1951 gave a full report-length study on ‘Russian Mines Known to Exist’. This included the strikingly artistic illustrations reproduced at Figure 3. An accompanying essay on ‘Russian and Satellite Naval Mining’ made explicit the link between Soviet maritime strategy and minelaying: ‘there is ample evidence to show that the Russians intend to embark on a large-scale minelaying campaign in the event of war.’ The assessment was that Soviet mines were as good as the most advanced German weapons and would be a major factor in a Third World War.⁵⁸

Figure 3. ‘Russian mines known to exist’ illustration from Monthly Intelligence Report for April 1951.

MIR noted during Admiral Fraser’s visit to Kronstadt in July 1946 that Russian ‘press photographers of curiously unkempt appearance’ with long lenses took great care in photographing the masts and aerials of his flagship, the aircraft carrier HMS TRIUMPH. Similar interest was taken in HMS LIVERPOOL, CHEQUERS and CHAPLET during their port visit to Sevastopol in September 1947.⁵⁹ Richard Aldrich argues that Soviet frogmen surveying the hulls of British warships led directly to SIS’ keenness to employ Commander Lionel ‘Buster’ Crabb to dive the hull of Ordzhonikidze in Portsmouth in 1956 to find out about underwater equipment, with fatal results.⁶⁰

The laying down of modern, capable surface ships in the early 1950s came as a surprise, causing a stir, particularly when the cruiser Sverdlov attended the Coronation review at Spithead in June 1953 (Figure 4).⁶¹ MIR extensively covered the development of the ‘Red Navy’s new cruiser’, for example sea trials of Hull 4 (Aleksandr Suvorov) in the Baltic Sea in September 1951. The emergence of the capable Sverdlov-class cruiser led to the retention of Fleet carriers, the re-commissioning of the battleship HMS VANGUARD in 1951, and the NA-39/Blackburn Buccaneer naval strike aircraft programme, a direct example of intelligence-led procurement.⁶²

Figure 4. ‘USSR cruiser SVERDLOV arriving at spithead for the coronation Naval review’ 1953.⁶⁵

By comparing the Soviet Navy to the defeated Kriegsmarine in this period, NID underestimated the threat posed by the new superpower. Behind the detailed coverage of Soviet use of German naval technology lay two fallacious assumptions. First, that everything innovative or developmental was a copy or adaptation of German research. Secondly, that the Soviet way of war at sea would be similar to German strategy and tactics. Such attitudes led to a general underestimation of Soviet scientific effort and proficiency.⁶³ The Sverdlov-class foreshadowed later improvements in Soviet ship and submarine construction. Nikita Khrushchev's premiership (1953–64) coincided with an emphasis on quality over quantity in warships. By 1970, the Soviet Navy led the world in the development of guided anti-ship missiles launched from ships, shore batteries, long-range aircraft and submerged submarines. By this time, naval intelligence, by now part of the Defence Intelligence Staff, was fully concentrated on the Soviet Navy as the main maritime threat.⁶⁴ It had taken years of catching up with geopolitical realities in the early post-war years, including in the pages of MIR, to reach that threat assessment.⁶⁵

Contemporary Naval commentary on the emergence of Cold War

A perceived Soviet concentration on land power led MIR’s editors to regularly include matters of a peripheral interest to a sea officer readership. Information on the new superpower in international relations was so scarce that any reporting was deemed valuable. Such strategic-political level material gave overarching context to detailed naval intelligence on Soviet shipbuilding and warship movements. The tone of the ‘Editorial Commentary’ (which opened each MIR from March 1948 onwards) is notable for its increasing hostility towards the Soviet Union. Prior to 1948, MIR’s political reporting on the USSR had been largely factual and connected to naval matters. However, 1948 saw the communist takeover in Czechoslovakia in February and the Berlin blockade in June, events interpreted by NID as the starting gun for the Cold War proper.⁶⁶ The first MIR of 1949 opened with a detailed ‘Chronology of 1948’ establishing the Cold War as a geopolitical fixture.

MIR’s tone became stridently anti-Soviet, yet it still used the handrail of comparison with Nazi Germany. Soviet strategy in the late 1940s had historical parallels with German strategy in the 1930s. This was clearest in March 1948 when maps were printed showing ‘The March of Militant Communism’ from Russia westwards (Figure 5) and ‘The March of Nazism 1933–39’ from Central Europe outwards. The accompanying article stated baldly that ‘Stalin is now treading the same path as Hitler, swollen with the confidence of his own importance at home and blinded with the lust of domination.’⁶⁷ Communism posed an even greater threat than Germany had in the 1930s. Whereas Hitler had ‘sought a greater Germany’ through territorial acquisition along racial lines, ‘the Kremlin seeks the imposition of its own ideological way of living on all mankind.’ From a modern historiographical perspective, this was a prescient way of analysing the Cold War as an ideological contest.⁶⁸ By declaring the Cold War as having started in early 1948, MIR helped establish the baseline strategic threat which informed British naval policy for the next 40 years.

Figure 5. ‘The March of Militant Communism’ which appeared alongside a similar map titled ‘The March of Nazism 1933–39’ in MIR for March 1948.

MIR speculated on Soviet territorial intent in further examples of painting the Soviet Union as a latter-day Nazi Germany. Soviet reluctance to withdraw from Persia (now Iran) in 1946 received regular coverage in 1946, although concerns about Soviet expansion there contrasted with optimistic descriptions of how the withdrawal was under discussion at the new United Nations.⁶⁹ Russian dissatisfaction with Black Sea access arrangements through the Dardanelles and Bosporus (the 1936 Montreux Convention) was reported, including the implications on negotiations for Turkey to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO).⁷⁰

In the Baltic, MIR expressed particular concerns about Soviet expansion. The slow pace of the withdrawal of the Red Army from the Danish Island of Bornholm received much attention as did later incidents of overflight, minelaying exercises and chemical weapons dumping.⁷¹ As a treaty concession, in 1944 the Soviet government leased an area of land on the Finnish Baltic coast at Porkkala. MIR noted naval infantry using newly constructed landing craft for amphibious exercises there in September 1949.⁷² Sweden, Denmark and to an extent Finland are painted as helpless innocents in the face of Soviet attempts to declare the Baltic a mare nostrum. This was another deliberate reference to territorial ambition – like the Romans, Fascist Italy had termed the Mediterranean their sea before the Second World War.⁷³

To paint as wide a picture as possible, somewhat less plausibly MIR reported on Soviet interest in the strategic potentiality of Iceland, submarine reconnaissance of the Greenland coastline and a coal mining concession at Pyramiden on Spitsbergen in the northern Norwegian Sea.⁷⁴ These territorial possibilities were linked to a perceived Russian historical obsession with ice-free warm water ports and an expansionist intent.⁷⁵ However, by simply listing locations of Soviet interest, NID was failing to provide predictive intelligence on where the next flashpoint might occur. Joint Intelligence Committee analysis (to which NID contributed through DNI’s seat on the Committee) took a similar line. For example, in a 1952 ‘Perimeter Review’ designed to try to prevent another strategic surprise like Korea, Formosa (now Taiwan), British Honduras (now Belize) and the Falkland Islands were added to the list of locations of possible communist intent.⁷⁶ This almost scatter-gun analysis showed a lack of understanding of Stalin’s realism, the territorial counterpart to expansionist communist ideology. Belize and the Falkland Islands had no place in providing buffer zone security between the Soviet Union and Germany.

Mistrust between East and West was illustrated in the maritime domain in 1949. The first case brought before the International Court of Justice concerned the October 1946 Corfu Channel mining incident.⁷⁷ Britain argued that Albania should pay compensation for the damage and loss of life caused when HMS SAUMEREZ and VOLAGE struck mines in Albanian territorial waters while on innocent passage through the Corfu Channel in October 1946.⁷⁸ Albania argued that the warships were not on innocent passage under the provisions of the 1930 Hague Conference on International Law. The details of the case and its legacy for the present-day UN Convention on the Law of the Sea are beyond the scope of this paper – the Soviet delegation sided with now communist Albania. The case is an example of how mistrust between the Soviet Union and Britain had become the de facto position by 1948 – the Cold War had started. The Corfu Channel incident, court proceedings and how it illustrated the deterioration of the wartime alliance were fully reported in MIR.⁷⁹

Conclusion

Monthly Intelligence Report reveals something of the Royal Navy’s response to the start of the Cold War. Crucially, MIR clearly shows that the Cold War did not begin at sea. There were no maritime events comparable to the Berlin blockade and subsequent airlift (the Corfu Channel incident was a symptom rather than a cause of the Cold War). The Royal Navy was therefore reacting to the Cold War rather than being party to its initiation. In this way, MIR can be understood as an attempt by NID to cohere and summarise intelligence work from across the Service and wider government. This was particularly important given the upheaval in the organisation of British intelligence in the immediate post-war period. MIR is an early example of a military intelligence summary, what doctrine now terms an INTSUM, written by intelligence staffs to appraise their command of the available intelligence as well as provide external customers with a usable product at a usefully shareable classification.⁸⁰

Geopolitical tensions in Europe and Asia fed back into increasing wariness and intelligence interest in the Soviet Navy. Yet it remained a hard intelligence target. In part, this was because the Soviet Navy could not venture far from the Russian coastline in this period. When the two navies did interact, sailor-to-sailor contact was largely friendly and professional, albeit wary under the watchful eyes of Soviet security and political officers.⁸¹

Historians largely agree that the Cold War emerged from the fault lines left by the end of the Second World War on land: the division of Germany and what MIR for January 1950 called the ‘Sovietization of Eastern Europe’. Subsequent events, including the Korean War, were features of a continued, ever-deepening distrust and confrontation between the formerly allied powers. Of significant military and strategic-political importance was the detonating of the first Soviet nuclear weapon in August 1949, effectively freezing the conflict and preventing conventional escalation by capping action below perceived nuclear thresholds. It was this nuclear feature which marked the major distinction between the Second World War and the Cold War. One notable second-order effect was greater centralisation of command and control of military units, for example, the high-level political authorisation required for intelligence-gathering missions by submarines and photo-reconnaissance aircraft.⁸² Another feature of the nuclear stalemate was to isolate and protract regional conflicts, including Korea from 1950.

Yet even with the Soviets firmly established as the new adversary and the wholly new nuclear dimension to the confrontation, the character of the naval war that the NID was expecting closely matched British and Commonwealth experience against the Germans in 1939–45. Commerce raiding by cruisers, minelaying and unrestricted submarine warfare against sea lines of communication are forecasted along similar lines to the Second World War. Into the 1950s, the MIRs are replete with examples of Soviet use of captured German technology, the raising and refitting of old German warships and the use of German scientists and technicians. Grove argues that it was not until 1952 that the Admiralty realised that planning for a Third World War like the Second was outmoded.⁸³ Furthermore, by the mid-1950s, recognising the Soviet naval threat became a necessity for the Admiralty as it fought to maintain a sizeable fleet in the face of government retrenchment and inter-service rivalry.⁸⁴

The NID correctly assessed Soviet naval capability in the immediate post-war period to be poor. Ships were outdated and poorly maintained – the Red Navy had suffered from a lack of priority and investment since before the war. When coupled with a preoccupation with reviewing the 1939–45 naval war, MIR underestimated the future potential of Soviet sea power. Although intent is more difficult to infer than capability, Soviet naval aspirations were signposted in the writings of Admiral Gorshkov, the founding of a Soviet naval league in 1948 and some of Stalin’s speeches.⁸⁵ Alongside a nuclear weapon, sea power was one of the features of a modern superpower. This intent foreshadowed a Soviet naval build-up in the second half of the Cold War in support of a globalised foreign policy. The emergence of a much larger, qualitatively equal Soviet fleet in the 1970s came as a strategic shock.⁸⁶

The MIRs are a window onto how the Royal Navy reacted to a changing geopolitical situation in 1946–52. At the start of the period, the Soviet Navy was a barely known acquaintance rather than an adversary.⁸⁷ Through these MIRs it can clearly be seen how this attitude changed, particularly from the ‘Editorial Commentary’ almost certainly written by the DNI himself. Although at the strategic-political level, NID recognised the new realities of the Cold War, at the operational level, analysts were directly mapping German ways of waging naval war onto observed Soviet developments. Such an attitude has an echo today. Modern analysts may be drawn to a similar solution of copying pre-1990 assessments on Soviet equipment and tactics when analysing Russia and its former satellites, including countries in the developing world that benefitted from Soviet largesse.⁸⁸

The main conclusion from these primary documents is just how long it took the operational mindset to change from wartime. To an extent, this is understandable; at the NID and at sea, personnel who had fought the Second World War were still on station through the 1950s, augmented by new recruits and National Servicemen who themselves had grown up in wartime. It therefore took the Admiralty longer than the period between 1945 and the Korean War to fully adjust to the new demands of the nuclear age and the Cold War. With the benefit of hindsight, 1945 stands in history as a turning point: when one epoch ended and the next began.⁸⁹ The MIRs of this period emphasise that for those who had fought the Second World War, it took at least as long again for attitudes and outlooks to change.

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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.

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.