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INTELLIGENCE FOR DOOMSDAY 247
In the late I960s the West had launched a charm offensive
towards the Eastem Bloc called 'detente', which aimed to
encourage precisely the liberal tendencies that Brezhnev had
now cracked down on. The invasion of Czechoslovakia in August
1968 did not derail Western efforts to pursue detente. However,
it did raise awkward questions. NATO forces had presumed a
good degree of warning of any Soviet attack on the West, but
would they actually receive this warning if a Third World War
broke out The invasion also prompted British commanders in
Germany to think harder about intelligence in the first anxious
hours of a confrontation between East and West. Although
Brixmis provided a fabulous source of both operational and
technical intelligence, it was a peacetime mission and was
expected to be rounded up before any military action took place.
Thereafter, commanders would need a reliable source of intelligence.
Their primary need was to track the movement of the
main Soviet thrusts, together with reinforcements mustering
anything up to three hundred miles to the rear. In a future war,
British commanders would hope to disrupt the Warsaw Pact's
emerging battle plan and destroy its momentum. The most
demanding task would be surveillance well behind the enemy
front line.
One might have expected senior British commanders to have
turned to sigint and GCHQ. Instead, during the 1960s those in
Germany seem to have rejected the wonders of electronic monitoring
in favour of the least technical option, human reconnaissance
from 'stay-behind patrols'. This was often referred to
in the local parlance of hardy special forces soldiers as 'the Mk.1.
Eyeball'. From the onset of any future war, intelligence inside
the Soviet-occupied areas would have been provided by dedicated
stay-behind parties from NATO special forces. Prevailing
doctrine suggested that these special forces had several deeppenetration
roles in wartime. These included the collection of
intelligence by active or passive methods, offensive operations
by small parties, cooperation with partisans or guerrillas, and
assistance to escapers such as downed pilots. However, in the