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264 SPACE, SPY SHIPS AND SCANDALS
Lieutenant General Marshall Carter, the Director of NSA, also
continued to insist that it had been a deliberate attack. The issue
of the Liberty remains a matter of bitter controversy. 18
Months later there was a further disaster. In January 1968
the USS Pueblo, a smaller NSA vesseL was captured by North
Korea while eavesdropping off its coast, leading to an elevenmonth
stand-off. The crew were poorly trained, and the facilities
to destroy secret equipment and documents if threatened
were close to non-existent. Accordingly, the haul of cryptological
materials secured by the North Koreans and their Soviet
advisers was considerable. 19 Some have argued that the real
purpose of the capture of the Pueblo was acquiring an American
KL-47 cypher machine. This would have been invaluable, since
the KGB had already received the keys to this cypher from one
of its top agents in the United States, John Walker, an American
naval communications expert. 20 Sigint ships, which had looked
so attractive a few years before, were now considered a liability.
The Liberty and Pueblo disasters had alarmed Cheltenham;
however, the main problem was overambitious plans colliding
with shrinking budgets. In the autumn of 1968, soon after Dick
White was appointed as Cabinet Office Intelligence Coordinator,
he was asked to conduct a further inquiry into the alarming
issue of the spiralling sigint budget. GCHQ's supership was
cancelled. New sigillI aircraft were now catching the attention
of planners, while what remained for naval sigint was redirected
towards the latest submarines. 21
Hitherto, much of Britain's seaborne sigint effort had consisted
of a partnership between GCHQ and the Navy's venerable Super­
T submarines. In 1960 the intrepid submarine commander John
Coote had taken HMS Totem on several listening missions around
the Soviet Union's Arctic coast, but he confessed that his vessel
was now 'well past ... her "sell-by" date'.22 Surprisingly, instead
of being scrapped, both the Totem and the Turpin, two veteran
spy subs, were purchased by the Israeli Sea Corps, along with
HMS Truncheon. In 1965 the ageing submarines were refitted,