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168 FIGHTING THE ELECTRONIC WAR
Konfrontasi ended after Sukarno was replaced by General
Suharto in 1966. Cheyne argued that this change was partly
prompted by British military successes: 'Sukarno would not have
been deposed except for his military failures in Borneo.' He
added that once Sukarno had been overthrown, the Claret operations
enabled Malaysia to negotiate from strength. Overall, he
concluded, it was 'a brilliantly successful story'.78
For much of this period a stream of high-grade diplomatic
sigint from Indonesia passed across the British Prime Minister
Harold Wilson's desk, providing an accurate barometer of the
thinking in the Indonesian capital of lakarta. 79 For Denis Healey,
Britain's Secretary for Defence, it was especially satisfying. On
30 May 1965 he had a conversation with the American Defense
Secretary, Robert McNamara, and explained that Britain could
not disengage from its commitments east of Suez until the
Confrontation came to an end. McNamara had replied gloomily,
'It will not end: But he was wrong. 80
Although the Indonesians did not rumble the secret of sigint,
they knew something was badly wrong. Senior officers believed
that the British had some sort of special radar equipment that
could track their patrols, and this was not a bad guess. 8l The
success of sigint in Borneo offered a longer-term legacy. The
British and Australians had developed a new kind of sigint that
interfaced directly with special forces in real time. In 1966, when
Australia sent a Task Force to Vietnam, this was accompanied
by a similar signals intelligence unit. 82 The same tactics were
deployed by Britain in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. This
approach has since become more commonplace, with the
Americans taking it to a new level with the elite Intelligence
Support Activity created in the 1980s, which was mostly deployed
against terrorists. Britain's new Special Reconnaissance Regiment,
formed in 2004, continues the tradition with its units of 'suitcase
men' who undertake short-range sigint, fully integrated
with tactical operations. Few remember that the SAS-sigint partnership
in the jungles of Borneo was its first proving ground. 83