Spooks and Secrete Stuff
By
Peter “PJ” Brown, 110 Sig Sqn, South Vietnam
(18 Dec 1967 - 19 Dec 1968)
“NO UNIT OR SOLDIER SHALL
PRODUCE OR USE SELF OR UNIT GENERATED CODES OR CIPHERS”
The
night was dark and stormy, no really it was, it gets stormy in the
tropics and that is a vital part of the story in addition to that it
was nasty year in 1968 for ionosphere’s (not as bad as next year but
that’s another story). The crux of the matter was that for High
Frequency (HF) Telegraphic transmissions, reception of messages was
difficult to impossible on some days and not much better during the
night, when one would have normally expected a quieter more
agreeable time.
During the day the sun
creates a natural noise line and a transmitted signal must overcome
this noise line to get through to a receiver. Any
spurious noise natural (lightning) or otherwise causes the signal to
be distorted and the message to be garbled. Strangely
enough there was no known jamming of our signals although this would
have been easy enough.
The result of the above
conditions is that the operators at each relay point routinely read
messages to ascertain if they are suitable for onwards transmission.
The Saigon / Melbourne link was a high priority
circuit and most traffic was monitored in this way and usually all
messages were monitored off the HF circuit. Whereas
only a portion of the traffic was needed to be monitored on internal
VHF/UHF Radio Relay links, they being less prone to noise induced
problems. As a result of expected garbles in
transmissions operators would look at the traffic and if an obvious
word or phrase was garbled then it was permitted to be changed to
reflect the intention of the sentence. Other wise no
changes is permitted to an originators message at all. Any
message with obvious faulty text was `rerun’ from the last
transmitting station by request of the receiving station. This led
to some; quite reasonable but unquestionably wrong changes made to
messages in transmission and some confusion as to the depth and
breadth of the operator’s responsibilities.
And so the stage is set and
that’s a good word for it. Your hero (me) plays a pivotal role as
always. Well perhaps a few characters need
introduction. The Communication Centre (COMMCEN) shift
was divided into three trades as was usual in those days.
The Switchboard Operator,
who had a separate room for his example of modern electronic
wizardry, the manual switchboard that had the codename “EMU”.
The Operator Shift comprising a Corporal and three Signalmen. All Operators or Operators Keyboard and Cipher.
The Duty Technician
whose ranks were usually either Signalman or Corporal.
We were all dressed in
long greens sleeves rolled down in mortal combat with the duty
mosquito. And as it happened, a pulloverbecause the
air-conditioning was working and just keeping pace with all the heat
producing electron valves used by most of the equipment of that era.
It was late but pre code change time when `Bloss’ the
Operator shift supervisor came in to see me. I was
diligently studying the printing on the log book pencil. “Brownie”
he said.
“The boys in Saigon said to give you a look at this as you’re the most experienced bloke on duty tonight” I felt quiet honoured until I realised that our total experience didn’t amount to much and I probably was. He handed me a punched baudot tape section with the characters printed on the side. I had a quick look and although the address group was ok but the text looked a bit crook I couldn’t make out any text at all.
“Put er through the page
printer and lets have another look” I said. Whilst we
were waiting for it to print Bloss explained that the supervisor in
Saigon had given him a call and said he had received this message
and it looked all garbled to him so he had asked for a rerun and got
it and whilst it was changed it still looked suspect to him maybe a
fault in the cipher equipment. And that was the reason
for calling me as I was probably the only one on that shift, in
country, that had experience working all of the current cipher
machines. We both had a good look at the message it
was three pages long the address groups at the head of the message
looked good, a few minor garbles but substantially correct strangely
it was addressed to a unit in Nui Dat that we hadn’t heard of nor
could we find it in communicators lists of address so that was
probably a garble as well.
The page printer clunked
into life and we all looked at the resulting print. The
line feeds and carriage returns were in the right places and the
whole header group looked good. The text contained no
heading and simply launched into what appeared to be continuous
figures and lots of brackets and a few dispersed characters. There
were enough carriage returns without line feeds to make us suspect
that this was simply a badly garble message. I
explained to Bloss that on the types of equipment that we were using
the more likely answer was the HF link to Melbourne was having a
difficult time. He said that he would tell the supervisor in Saigon
and they would try another rerun. Shortly after that I
heard the K Phone wind up and the night alarm in the switch go off.
Then I could hear the ring converters start up in the
line equipment located in the racks behind me. Hmmn hourly checks
completed so noted in the log book and the pencil looked to be a bit
of a puzzle I think I’ll inspect closer
Buzzzz. Bugger, the
SB-22 Switchboard in front of me dropped an eyeball and the
audible alarm went off. What now! Hmmm
I look up without raising my head, it’s the switch I plug the
operators line cord into the appropriate jack indicated by the
eyeball and answer “system control” - no harm in letting them know
whose boss. “Emu here Brownie” replied the insubordinate bloody
switchie “the Saigon SCO wants to talk to you”.
Click, as he puts me straight through. I wonder why he
uses the switch and not the direct line but leave that to the god
`Jimmy’ to work out.
“Yep” I answer
“have you had a chance to
look at that message?” he asks
“I‘ve talked to receivers
and they say the link sounds good not much fade and good clear
signal and it should be ok”
“that’s a bit odd ” I say
“the text is total crap, what’s the channel check look like?”
“good” he replies “five by five”
“what about engineering channel quality tests?” I ask
“good as
well about one garble in twenty lines”
Well that just about proves all our equipment at this end both the HF link and the telegraph equipment are proven good. “send a couple of long tests on the operators channel and then all we can do is wait for the rerun” I suggest to Grahame.
“yep will try that see you later after
the change?”
“oh shit I had better get
the safe open” I say looking at the time and noting that we have
fifteen minutes to go till the allocated time for code changes. All
stations will be off the air till then and there is nothing more we
can do.
“I’ll get started” I say “see you afterwards”
“Roger” Grahame rings off and so do
Got the bloody thing. Out with the code
books check the right month check the right circuits one for us and
one for the yanks. Get the keys start pulling down all the
circuits, the Operators have already closed the circuits and are
waiting for the code books. We are allowed a short period of grace
if things go wrong and they occasionally do but that’s another
story.
Three quarters of an hour
later all circuits have been tested and fives sent all backed up
traffic generated over the outage period is now starting to come
through. The operators start to clear that and I fill
in the log books lock the codes away and do a few hourly meter
readings. There is no sign of the message and as it
was only a routine message there was a 24 hour delivery time on the
message and it hadn’t expired as yet. All three trade
groups cleaned up for the oncoming shifts and since there was very
little happening the weird message got a mention by itself and would
probably been passed onto the COMMCEN Supervisor
when he came on duty at 0700. We the unwashed
dismounted and headed to the mess for breakfast then to bed before
the tropical sun made it too hot to sleep. Back on
duty at 1800 we were interested to see what had happened.
The straight answer was, nothing much the
day shift had had a heavy day and the message had been put on the
back burner although the rerun had come through but as yet no action
had been taken.
The time period for delivery
had definitely run out so I called the System controller in Saigon
and asked what had happened. He said that things were
too busy to worry about it at the moment as he was in the COMMCEN
helping to push tape. Hearing this I had a word with
Bloss and since we were not yet at full speed I suggested that we
get all three copies sent down to us and we would try and make a
complete copy from all three by comparing the common elements in
each message. Bloss got hold of the shift supervisor
and the other two copies were sent down and we set about comparing
the copies. We started out by putting the three tapes
together and looking through the punched holes this in effect wasted
half an hour and proved pretty useless. So we decided
to run off three page copies and compare them all by giving one to
each person. We then each read a line a half line at a
time and the text that appeared three times was pretty near going to
be the original.
This proceeded with some
difficulty as we had not seen any thing like this before and I mean
any of us. Although the comparison was relatively easy
as most of the text was appearing the same three time running it was
just that we could not make head or tail of it. There
were groups of numbers almost like off line encryption and then
there was plain text saying things like
sum result and divide by
following then further long figures and then there were
trigametric symbols that were spelled out. (There is
no provision for mathematical symbols in baudot code nor in the
print head characters.) We completed the task ands
all of us started to smell a rat. This was beginning
to look as though the text was correct or at least as the originator
had intended it to be. We however had grave doubts as
to which was correct there were a number of possibilities; either
the originator had intended it to be this way, as we now suspected,
and a private code was being used, or we had an unusual fault or a
transposed message. A transposed message was not
unusual as the computer message switch (STRAD) quite often dropped
the memory core down a track or two and messages occasionally got
tagged onto unintended addresses. Or it was still just
a common garbled message from further down the stream also not an
unusual occurrence.
So what to? Do
decide to recommend to Saigon that they rerun the message on more
time upgrading the priority to immediate. After that we organised
got a special engineering patch. I called
Graham Old and
asked him to meet me on the normal circuit by encrypted
means (uppers to the initiated). This meant
that we could both have a natter using the keyboard but have the
safety of having the subject hidden by the ciphering machine.
This we did pretty quickly and I explained my and now our
doubts as to the validity of the message. There was
one other factor that puzzled us and that was the inclusion of so
many figures in the text supposedly from a Signals unit to another
Signals unit. This we knew was impossible for
professional Signalers as everybody knew that you do not send
streams of figures as text in a message. There is just
too much danger of an important group getting garbled. All
figures should be sent and spelt out in words to avoid the danger of
misinterpretation. Wouldn’t do to have a digger
overpaid what? We waited for about two hours and then
the signal turned up like a bad penny or piaster if you please.
It was substantially the same as before so now we
decided to hold the message.
We had two reasons one was
that it looked like a private code and two we didn’t know the unit
it was addressed to. This came at about 0400 so rather than wake
everybody up we waited for the day workers, and all the nobbity nobs
to come to work. It was with some surprise that our
conclusions were supported. We then went off shift and
to bed with a clear conscience. When we came back on
there was a note to hold the signal until further notice.
The next day we had off, it was a shift change over
what to normal people would be a Saturday for us working soldiers it
was a work day under directing of either the duty officer or the
SSM. You remember the ones? Burning the dunnies,
refurbishing sandbag walls or building new bunkers. It
was during these delightful duties that Bloss and I noticed the
orderly room filling up with officers we didn’t recognise. They
seemed to be very buddy buddy with our lot, in
fact they seemed to be having a good laugh. It was Bloss that
noticed the spook amongst them.
“Brownie” he said
“isn’t that the bloke that ordered all you technicians to put
monitors on the telephone lines”. I was startled and
had a closer look.
“Bloody oath” I said “ the
very same”. We hadn’t been in strife for well
over three days, this is not looking good for the record books.
This was the turkey that had bought an eight channel
tape deck into the COMMCEN and ordered the shift technicians to
randomly monitor the telephone lines that were connected by the
Radio Relay links to Nui Dat and Saigon. We all refused saying that
to bring a tape deck into the COMMCEN was against all COMSEC rules
and only incidently breached our concerns about privacy. The
higherarchy explained that security over the radio links was
suspected of being poor and that we would monitor them and report
all breaches of security. We of course had the last
say in the matter and it was as usual “yes sir” if you blurr the sir
bit you can regain some element of self identity.
However this bloke was thick
with these unknown officers, almost as if they were in the same
unit. They disappeared towards the COMMCEN and
reappeared a short time later with a secure brief case and then
disappeared altogether. We never saw them again except
for spooky when he came to get his tapes and said nothing about
anything as usual. Bloss and I were summoned to the
COMMCEN Supervisors office and told that the signal had been hand
delivered and we were to speak no more about it. Blosss
quite correctly raised the issue of the unknown address group and
was told that that would be fixed by an amendment to the relevant
orders.
All of this had not gone
unnoticed by the rest of the unit including some Senior NCO’s and
even a few officers. We being the central characters
could only repeat what we had been told. However
nobody was going to leave it at that. Our sister unit in Nui Dat was
104 Signal Squadron and they routinely sent parties down to VungTau
for rest, scrounging and general nefarious activities. The first
time one of them turned up in our boozer (The Sand Bagers Inn, what
else?), we resolve to pump him full of booze inwards and information
outwards. Lucky for us the first one we tried was one of the guys
who happened to know there were secret units out there. He
explained that we had a monitoring party operating from NuiDat and
he thought the operated some non standard radios as they had been
asked for parts at various times. This was not the whole story of
course but we resolved to stick with it . Various parties came to
rest in our boozer (no pun intended) and it took about three more
weeks to eventually put the story together.
It turns out that there is a
secret unit up there they are operating radio direction finders and
as it happened an early type of computer to resolve the direction of
the receiving antenna onto a bearing to the (enemy) transmitting
station. This bloody signal was what all computer
pukes these days would recognise as a program upgrade. We
quite correctly identified it as a private code, which it was, and
as a consequence delayed a very important message. It
didn’t occur to these berks to put a heading line in the text to say
something to the operators like ‘the following text is to be passed
unchanged’ or something like that, no that would have revealed their
units identity and perhaps what they were doing, well that plan
didn’t work very well did it.
Our shift started up again
and we heard nothing more about the signal despite the fact that any
other signal that got delayed then the offending shift was very
quickly matted. As postscript we technicians got used
to the tape deck and there were some conversations that were serious
breaches of security. However I wouldn’t put it past
that lot to have their mates generate some so as to keep us guessing
they were that type of loveable blokes. Maybe as a
consequence of their activities and reconnaissance patrols there was
a series of B52 raids on the Long Hai Hills.
2013