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122 FIGHTING THE ELECTRONIC WAR
getting this desirable aircraft. Part of the problem was that 192
Squadron was not seen as a front-line fighting unit, tended to
be overlooked and was continually moved between commands
over the next two decades. 51 There was also an acute shortage
of staff at GCHQ qualified in the rarefied field of elint analysis,
which was made worse by the upheaval of the move to
Cheltenham. 52
The required extra momentum came from the Americans.
Washington pressed the British for more spending and more
effort at a major US/UK elint conference in December 1952. 53
Accordingly, in 1953, Britain's elint specialists acquired more
small specialist Canberra. jet aircraft, and a year later, after much
discussion, the Treasury reluctantly approved the purchase of
three much-prized de Havilland Comet C2s, a modified version
of Britain's first jet airliner. Until now, all of the sigint aircraft
had been rough-and-ready adaptations. The Comet C2 was
Britain's first dedicated airborne sigint platform designed from
scratch. In the spring of 1957 the first C2 arrived at CSE Watton
and was placed in the hands of SRIF, the RAF's secret team of
sigint engineers, vvho were based in No.3 Hangar. Their task
was to cram a whole mini -sigint ground station into the cramped
interior of an airliner. For George Baillie, the Principal Scientific
Officer at Watton, this was the most complex task his team
would ever undenake. Equipping the three Comets was
extremely expensive and time-consuming. It was therefore with
complete horror that they discovered a fire in No.4 Hangar in
the early hours of the morning of 3 June 1959. One plane was
completely destroyed, leaving CSE with only two Comets to
fulfil the many missions requested by GCHQ. The Treasury
boggled at the cost of the unscheduled replacement of the third
aircraft, and it was two years before GCHQ's Deputy Director
Joe Hooper persuaded it to find the money. 54
In America, the new NSA was now responsible for communications
intelligence or 'comint', the most important area of
signals collection and code-breaking. However, battles over elint
stretched on into the 1960s. Even ten years after the creation of