l4sfdrx

'ELINT' AND THE SOVIET NUCLEAR TARGET 111
had deployed some very effective converted Flying Fortresses
as airborne listening stations, but the British had controlled the
flow of strategic sigint. The lesson was clear. Colonel Robert D.
Hughes, Director of Intelligence for the Ninth Air Force, told
Washington that he wanted his own air sigint units with control
over sigint policy and sigint research: 'We feel that you should
demand, and organize under your control, for peace as well as
war, an organization similar to that of the R.A.F. ... Unlike other
highly technical forms of intelligence, in which our American
Air Forces have shared, we have continued to depend entirely
on the R.A.F. for this level of work in "Y" :14
Elint formed one of the closest parts of the Anglo-American
sigint relationship during the immediate post-war period because
it focused on the Soviet military target. Exchange on elint was
not initially linked to the Allied sigint agreements reached at
the end of the war, but in 1948 it was being brought within
the growing body of Western intelligence pacts that formed
UKUSA. GCHQ approached Washington with a proposal to
'extend the present British-US Comint collaboration to include
countermeasures, in~ercept activities and intelligence' in the field
of elint. This meant coordinated patterns of 'ferret' flights -
effectively a division of labour - with the reSUlting intelligence
being swapped 'via Comint channels'Y By the 1950s, GCHQ
had achieved control over elint in Britain, and so was managing
relations with all the various American outfits in this field. This
had meant redrawing GCHQ's charter to include not only comint
but also elint, something which had not pleased everyone. R.V.
Jones, who was Director of Scientific Intelligence at the Ministry
of Defence in the early 1950s, strongly resented losing this part
of his empire; the benefits of having all activities superintended
by GCHQ were nevertheless overwhelming. 16
Anglo-American sharing was important, because elint was
an expensive business. Many of the target Soviet signals were
short-range and could only be collected from 'ferrets', which
were effectively flying intelligence stations. Initially, the RAF
was ahead in this new field. By 1947 a fleet of specially equipped