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20
A Surprise Attack - The Falklands War
... a series of intercepted signals . .. left little doubt that an invasion
was planned for the morning of Friday 2 April.
John Nott, Secretary of State for Defence l
GCHQ's intelligence about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
in the last days of 1979 was excellent, but other recent surprise
attacks and military interventions had taken the British
completely unawares. 2 Over the previous decade or so there
had been quite a few. In 1968, as we have seen, the Joint
Intelligence Committee had spectacularly failed to predict the
Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia and the subsequent crushing
of the Prague Spring. Over the next ten years there had been
other nasty surprises, including the Arab-Israeli War of 1973
and the Chinese attack on Vietnam in 1979. The invasion of
Afghanistan in late 1979 and early 1980 was quickly followed
by Soviet intervention in Poland.
The overall performance of British intelligence in spotting
these surprise attacks and military crises was at best mediocre.
Brooks Richards, the Cabinet Intelligence Coordinator, decided
to probe what has been called 'the dog that didn't bark'. 3 In
other words, he wanted to know why the record of Britain's
JIC was poor when it came to warning of military aggression. 4
The person he chose to investigate was Douglas NicolL a veteran
of Bletchley Park's Hut Six. 5 Working alongside Gordon
Welchman and Stuart Milner-Barry, he had spent the Second
World War puzzling over the intricate code-breaking problems
of Enigma. After the war he was one of a minority who had