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SIGINT IN THE SUN - GCHQ'S OVERSEAS EMPIRE 165
captured and forced to abdicate. The Gurkhas had been slow
in arriving because a British staff officer who loved paperwork
had been laboriously recording the name of each man as he
boarded the aircraft. Eventually, 'an angry Brigadier threw the
movement papers onto the tarmac' and the rescue finally got
under way.66
In early 1963, President Sukarno announced that he would
step up the pace and pursue a policy of 'Konfrontasi' with
Malaysia. By April, two thousand Indonesian 'volunteers', many
of whom were commandos, were infiltrating into the neighbouring
British colonies of Sarawak and Sabah in northern
Borneo, and were soon clashing with units of Gurkhas. Buoyed
up by their success, Indonesian troops actually attempted to raid
the mainland of Malaysia in 1964. At this point the British
government deployed the SAS, later assisted by similar special
force units from Australia and New Zealand. By 1964 there
were over ten thousand British and Commonwealth troops in
Borneo. British soldiers were being awarded medals in a secret
war that remained undeclared. 67
Sigint assisted this clandestine conflict directly and decisively.
Most importantly, it was used in a revolutionary new way in
conjunction with special forces. In April 1964 the British
commander in Borneo, General Walter Walker, was given
permission to begin highly secret 'Claret' operations. These were
counter-infiltrations across the border into the Indonesian territory
of Kalimantan in southern Borneo, designed to take the
war to the enemy. British forces were initially given permission
to cross over the thousand-mile-Iong border into Kalimantan
to a distance of three thousand yards. By 1965 this had been
extended to twenty thousand yards. 68 Locating the enemy was
the main challenge, and tactical sigint was used to provide accurate
direction-finding on the elusive Indonesian jungle camps.
Sigint operators would listen in to the Indonesian traffic to see
if the Claret patrols had been picked up. On one occasion the
operators listened in to the Indonesians as they prepared to
ambush a Claret patrol, and were able to warn the intended