[CW] A Canadian opens up about her secret wartime work — eavesdropping on Japan

[spud roscoe]

Hi Tommy:

Most interesting. I worked a U2 going over the Yukon Territory into Russia in 1963 or 1964. I was operating an Aeradio Station up there.

Before that I was radio officer in a square-rigger just off Cuba in October 1962 when President Kennedy told the Russians to get out of Cuba. We were told Kennedy told Russia exactly where each of their subs were and that they would not be home for supper if they did not get out of Cuba, and that is the reason they backed down.

Is there any truth to that?

73
Spud VE1BC





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From: David J. Ring, Jr.<mailto:djringjr at gmail.com>
Sent: November 9, 2021 12:43 PM
To: cw at mailman.qth.net<mailto:cw at mailman.qth.net>
Subject: Re: [CW] A Canadian opens up about her secret wartime work — eavesdropping on Japan

Another story of secret wartime work by Tommy Judson,
Being a Navy Spook

My Cold War Military Experience

I declined the invitation to become an Army Officer by not accepting the contract offered me at the end of my second year at college thinking I would not have to go into the armed services - HA!

Fast forward a few years and just a couple months after my 23rd birthday my draft notice arrived in the mailbox.  Checking around I found the Navy had an active duty program the same length as what an army draftee would spend away from home so signed up.

Shortly thereafter packed my bags and left to go on active duty.  My first experience was ending up being immersed in studies at a Defense Language Institute manual morse Russian Language school many miles from home.

The school lasted six months and after graduation I was sent to Karamursel Turkey near the border between Turkey and Russia.  The U.S. Air-force had a manual morse communications facility there to work with the aircraft surveillance program based in Nicosia Cyprus.

U-2s and RB-47s that were launched at the base in Cyprus used all the distance from south to north across Turkey to reach a very high operational altitude.  They had a planned preflight route that incorporated a complex set of turns forming different shapes in the sky.  The Air Forces’s reason for us to monitor the Russian communications was to determine when the Russians first spotted planes approaching their boarder and just how good their early warning system was working as well as determine the system’s blind spots.  It was also very important to learn the ability of the Russian system to accurately track the overflights.

Navy manual morse intercept operators would copy the Russian manual morse circuits so the flight path could be plotted just the same as the Russians were doing to see how close it was to the planed diagram we had already traced upon the large clear glass wall separating those of us reading the traffic from the analysts. (I worked a job on both sides of that wall.)

Sometimes the flight paths actually penetrated into Russian  territory; however, U-2 overflights from Nicosia, Cyprus to Keflavik, Iceland and back again had been discontinued shortly after Gary Francis Powers was shot down in 1961, the year I was drafted.

When our intercept showed that Russian fighters were being scrambled we would immediately flash a message to designated U.S. area commanders.  All this required the ability of several intercept operators with back-ups to monitor multiple frequencies used by Russian tactical and early warning systems at bases located around the perimeter of the country.

We always watched subsequent flights closely because they usually had a predetermined flight path that took the aircraft directly toward any observation site that seemed weak in the previously intercepted traffic.  We would compare that to any other military ground movement communications to see if any new equipment or troops had been moved there enhancing their early warning and defense capability.

However my official Navy job was to work with intercepted submarine traffic to ID Russian submarines and to determine how they were being sent overland to the Black Sea from the main sub base located at Murmansk on the north sea.  We found there was a system of canals linking several lakes and the Volga River allowing the subs to sail overland all the way to the Black Sea.  This was a crucial move by the county because all their other sea ports were iced in most of the year even though they had a massive ice breaking fleet.  The Bosphorus Strait leading out of the Black Sea into the Mediterranean Sea was their only route to deploy their subs worldwide most of the year. (See notes below for more information on that route.)

About 3 months into my tour in Turkey orders came for me to go to a new base opening in Edzell Scotland.  I remember being called into the division officer’s office and being told there was something wrong and they would try to work it out.  They told me that no way in hell an E-4 “R” brancher would be sent to a new state of the art intercept facility and be placed into the Processing and Reporting division as the orders outlined.  (I had no idea what they were talking about but they still blamed me for requesting the transfer through my congressman.) The Division Officer and Division Chief said they both had been trying to get sent there for the couple years that the the big state of the art Wullenweber system was under construction.

That “dinosaur cage” antenna was being built to allow superior listening capability of Russian military communications by the National Security Agency to be part of a world wide system of intercept sites.  Canada and Great Briton were partners in this world wide endeavor.

They couldn’t stop me from getting that new billet so I hopped a flight in Istanbul and left Turkey, neither wished me well.

My specific job once in Edzell was to develop and maintain a logging system of all callsigns used by everyone in the Russian Navy in the Baltic and North Sea areas.  The purpose was to specifically determine their communications network design and ship deployment along with their chain of command. As the file developed, all Russian sites on land and at sea were connected on a large diagram to help us determine how the Russia navy worked and what it was doing at any given minute.

(Had been issued my own personal “GUHOR” stick - a circuit diagramming tool.)

My one person office was a very popular place and when the other analysts came to gather info from my files they would take a break and talk a while.  I learned about their jobs, their families and plans after retirement.  I was privileged to know more about work being done at the work station they represented than nearly any other individual besides themselves.  I usually remembered what each had told me about their jobs and would look for any info in the reams of data I was going through I thought they might be interested in and send it to them.  That way my extra set of eyes would help catch pertinate intelligence data and make their jobs easier and sometimes more comprehensive.  Most were very senior E-8’s and E-9’s along with a couple junior 1615 crypto officers.

Keeping up with the Russian Navy was made especially difficult because of Gary Francis Powers being shot down. The Russians changed their communication encryption system shortly thereafter.  However we were slowly breaking the codes but had a long way to go.

Note:
To this date I do not play word games at all after staring at all the gibberish copied by the collection department and attempting to understand it!  It was a game to see who of the connected U.S. stations could first fill in the one time code pad blanks that were changed every morning at 3 A.M.  This is where being a ham paid off - we could usually remember an operator’s quirks from before the pad changed to after and at the very least recover callsigns and sometimes the names of their superiors almost immediately.  This would give us good info to fill in a handful of squares on the new blank matrix.

Therefore we (hams - only two of us were there) could usually follow commanders as they traveled through the military commands and ships - they took their own Manual Morse operators with them and we could readily pick them out.

All of the above is typical military - my school training was all about Russian submarines and their part in the cold war chain rattling.  Did have to pick out any sub traffic from the volumes of paper sent back to us from Collection to the Processing and Reporting department and send activity reports every four hours to NSA, GCHQ (British Intelligence Agency) and CBNRC (Canadian Intelligence Agency).

I did many different jobs while working for the Naval Security Group and the time spent there flew by.

Upon returning home I was contacted, because of having a Top Secret Codeword security clearance, by the Air Force Security Service out at Kelly field on the outskirts of San Antonio, my home town.  I went to see about working there and found out I would have to travel quite extensively to different sites around the globe to check the accuracy of their equipment and adjust it if necessary - no thanks. Had been away from home long enough and wanted to get back to my chosen profession - structural engineering, a job I enjoyed and retired from after collecting 35 years longevity toward a great lifelong retirement pension.

Note:
About ten years ago my spouse and I took a boat ride from St. Petersburg Russia through some of those same linked lakes and on down the Volga to Moscow where I had so closely monitored the subs traveling to and from the black sea.

I took my Garmin handheld GPS loaded with their latest international mapping software along to check out the sub route I had previously watched while in the Navy.  Sure enough the route we were taking was quite a distance from the route shown on the Garmin map.  It showed our boat was traveling overland quite a distance from the canals and lakes on some occasions. We went through many of the locks associated with the channels linking the North Sea sub base with the Black Sea.  This misinformation had been provided world mapping systems on purpose in an attempt to provide security for this very vital submarine route to a warm water port.

It was interesting to me that when we had concluded the trip and were being taken to the airport in Moscow to fly home I was sitting in the back of the bus away from others trying to organize my photos and our tour guide sat down close to me.  She moved closer and looked me directly in the eyes then in a whisper asked just how come I knew so much about her country. I froze, caught my breath and gave a cover story about taking classes in school about the history of the Second World War.  No way in hell was I going to tell her I was a Russian language qualified communications cryptologist for the U. S. National Security Agency.

She explained she asked because she figured I must be able to at least read Russian because I never asked directions especially where the bathrooms were located.

I don’t know why but I was really shaken but calmed down as the plane lifted off the runway headed home.

Tommy Judson, CTRC (RET), November 9, 2021

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecNojn1ZDvQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5D9pHfiBBo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRX7JCL2R5E


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