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SHOOTDOWNS, CYPHERS AND SPENDING 219
which was mostly picked up by dedicated military units of
listeners equipped with headphones sitting in Germany, Cyprus
and Hong Kong and working in close collaboration with GCHQ.
In December 1960 an inquiry by General Sir Gerald Templer,
the 'Tiger of Malaya', argued that the three intelligence service
directorates should be merged to form a single Defence
Intelligence Staff, and that most of the secret military listeners
who did sigint collection should be replaced by civilians and
put under the direction of GCHQ. Templer was right, since
National Service, which had provided an almost unlimited source
of personnel for ~hese military sigint units, was coming to an
end. 68
GCHQ's money problems were made worse by trying to keep
up with the Americans. Back in 1955, President Dwight D.
Eisenhower had appointed a major inquiry into intelligence,
headed by the leading scientist James R. Killian. Like Templer,
Killian had concluded that it was now 'exceedingly difficult' to
run human agents inside Russia, where the security police were
'brutally effective'. In future the USA would have to depend
on science and technology for its intelligence. This would mean
spending huge sums of money on spy satellites and codebreaking.
American intelligence, he noted, was verging on being
a billion-dollar-a-year business. Another intelligence inquiry,
the Hoover Commission, came to much the same conclusion.
It also proposed an all-out attack on Soviet cyphers using the
finest minds and the best computers that money could buy -
the equivalent of the Manhattan Project which had produced
the first atomic bomb. 69
By 1962 the cost of British sigint was rising fast, while overall
government expenditure was being cut. Something had to give.
The i~sue came to a head in a secretive Whitehall committee
called the Permanent Secretaries Committee on the Intelligence
Services, or PSIS. Chaired by the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Norman
Brook, it allowed the most senior denizens of Whitehall to debate
the sharing out of the money allocated to the secret services. 70
In January 1962, PSIS expressed undisguised horror at the rising