'Y' oh 'Y'

By TONY NASH

A sometimes lighthearted, sometimes serious overview of one man's twenty years of spying for GCHQ, as a member of the then highly secret 'Y' Service, beginning with his cloak and dagger recruitment after training as a telegraphist.

The first posting is Cheadle, in Staffordshire, where the Polish Air Force is the target, where lightning literally does strike, a dead body is found, and where a pop song results in a ludicrous charge of 'Conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline'.

From there, the action moves to Uetersen, near Hamburg, a station whose vulnerability so close to the East German border causes it to be moved to a safer location - Hambühren, near Celle, where the job changes to Codes and Ciphers, handling end-product Top Secret Codeword material, using the English equivalent of the German Enigma machine. A very old motor car with the strangest working brakes in the world is purchased, and a risqué liaison with a dangerous and exciting woman has comical and fascinating results, including a 'Night at the Opera' and a sporting brush with German nobility.

A spell back in England, at RAF Digby, intercepting Russian Air Force nets, and leading a decidedly sporting life is followed by a posting that is as unique as it is unexpected for an RAF spec-op, teamed up with two other corporals to be stationed at RAF Gatow, in Berlin, for the express purposes of intercepting the unusual 'burst' transmissions of Russian and East German secret agents working in the West; the conversion of those bursts into readable signals, and the attempts to locate the agents and arrest them, using triangulation from three direction-finding outstations. Berlin provides wonderful opportunities for sport and hobbies outside of working hours, and the chance to indulge in a nefarious activity, which, through an innocent contact with a Communist spy, so very nearly leads to disaster.

A spell as Chief Examiner for Trade Group 11A at North Luffenham, where another close encounter with the Grim Reaper occurs, is followed by a final tour back in Berlin, working on ELINT, and ending with the author's exciting entry into the even murkier, but highly exciting world of HUMINT.

A rollicking crackerjack, which explodes in every chapter with an eclectic mix of raw humour, riveting action, personal betrayal, high success, and pathos.

• Language: English
• Publisher: TONY NASH
• Release date: Nov 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393667155

TONY NASH

Tony Nash is the author of over thirty detective, historical and war novels. He began his career as a navigator in the Royal Air Force, later re-training at Bletchley Park to become an electronic spy, intercepting Russian and East German agent transmissions, during which time he studied many languages and achieved a BA Honours Degree from London University. Diverse occupations followed: Head of Modern Languages in a large comprehensive school, ocean yacht skipper, deep sea fisher, fly tyer, antique dealer, bespoke furniture maker, restorer and French polisher, professional deer stalker and creative writer.

Book preview

Never mind; laugh it off; laugh it off; it’s all part of life’s rich pageant.

(Arthur Marshall – "The Games Mistress" – 1937)

Other works by this author:

THE TONY DYCE/NORFOLK THRILLERS:

Murder on Tiptoes

Murder by Proxy

Murder on the Back Burner

Murder on the Chess Board

Murder on the High ‘C’

Bled and Breakfast

THE JOHN HUNTER THRILLERS:

Carve Up

Single to Infinity

The Most Unkindest Cut

The Iago Factor

Blockbuster

Bloodlines

Beyond Another Curtain

HISTORICAL/WWI NOVELS:

A Handful of Destiny

A Handful of Salt

A Handful of Courage

WWII EPIC:

No Tears For Tomorrow

THE HARRY PAGE THRILLERS:

Tripled Exposure

Unseemly Exposure

So Dark, The Spiral

THE NORWEGIAN SERIES

CNUT – The Isiaih Prophesies

CNUT – Paid in Spades

CNUT – The Sin Debt

CNUT – They Tumble Headlong

CNUT – Night Prowler

CNUT – Past Present

CNUT – Cry Wolf

Copyright © Tony Nash 2016

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT:

My sincere thanks to my good friend, Chris Boyd, who not only proof-read this book, but aided me with chronology and details that were somewhat dim in my memory.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AND NICKNAMES USED:

Sked – the schedule of working times used by a station or network.

CO – Commanding Officer

SIGINT – Signals Intelligence

HUMINT – Human Intelligence

HA III – Hauptabteilung III – the Sigint Directorate of the MIS

MIS also STASI – Ministerium für Staatsicherheit – Ministry of State Security

SNCO – Senior Non-commissioned Officer

SHQ – Station Headquarters

SWO – Station Warrant Officer – usually in charge of admin.

BZ – British Zone

RT – radio telephony – voice transmissions

MT – motor transport

Rupert – Army officer

Pongo – soldier

Retd. – retired

AMU – Air Force Maintenance Unit

Q – GCHQ

NAAFI – Navy, Army and Air Force Institute

QT – quiet

WO – Warrant Officer

Erk – an airman of very junior rank

CHAPTER ONE

It was not the most inspiring sight in the world.

Delhi in mid-monsoon season had nothing on RAF Compton Bassett, as the ancient Swindon Omnibus Company ‘Arab’ bus, made by Guy Motors, wheezed to a stop close to the guardroom, its engine panting like an old, worn out dog, trying to recover its breath after struggling to the top of the hill.

The contrast to my surroundings of the previous two years could not have been greater. A barely controlled despair attempted to overcome my usual ‘half full’ attitude to any adversity in life, and I had that gut-tightening ‘What the hell have I done?’ feeling we all know.

Those last two years I’d spent basking in the glorious sunshine of Southern Rhodesia, as it was called then, enjoying every minute of my Air Navigator training at RAF Gwelo, but after the swingeing cuts I was an intrepid birdman no longer.

Demobbed on Thursday, two weeks and four days earlier, on the third of April 1951, I had looked around at what Civvy Street offered and knew that whatever I opted for, I would miss the ‘Mob’.

For better or worse, it had got under my skin.

Mad? Sure - as a bloody hatter, but that was me. Being Taurus, every decision I’ve made in life has been almost instantaneous, and any regret shoved to one side.

Probably the most striking example of that decision making process came thirty-odd years after I left the RAF, when I sat in the hot seat of ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire’ and gabbled out an answer to the eight thousand pound question that I knew damned well to be wrong, and actually knew the right answer, but then, with those five hundred watt floods and a camera lens rammed up against your eyes, it’s easy for your mind to go completely ga-ga. That’s my excuse, and I’m sticking with it.

In actual fact, both my wife and I were damned pleased I didn’t win a huge sum, because in the week between my two appearances on the show we had dozens of phone calls and letters from people we vaguely knew, and a lot whom we didn’t, with pleading requests – anything from we can’t afford shoes for our kids to you know we always liked you; could you help us out with our mortgage debts?

Very few of them even bothered to say ‘Please’.

Two men turned up at our door during that week, one assuring me that he had been one of my bosom pals during my RAF days. I had never set eyes on him before.

The other was a second cousin on my mother’s side who was researching the family history.

And, of course, every charity in the country was after me, at the door, by post and on the phone.

We were ex-directory, and the local newspaper snoops trawled the pubs in the area, asking if anyone knew our telephone number and address. One of the guys who worked for me, holding up the bar at his local, gave them both details, which they published, under the heading, LOCAL MAN GOES FOR THE MILLION.

I could have throttled him, but satisfied myself with a ten-minute, top of the voice blast, which seriously questioned, among other things, his parentage.

In point of fact, since I did not win the million, it made little difference.

The sad thing is that had I actually won that money we would have had to move.

The decision to rejoin made, a quick return visit to the local recruiting office in Norwich had me signed up as an erk, headed for ‘Air Signaller/Wireless Operator’ training, with the admonition from the recruiting officer that any hopes I had of the former was pie in the sky, since after the cutbacks, that trade was now just about a dead duck, and I had better resign myself to the latter.

Grabbing my kitbag as I rose to leave the bus, and faced with a severe soaking, I forced the thought to the surface that at least I was still alive to be soaked, and that brought forth a wry grin as I thought back a couple of months.

The Hastings, which carried the number 624 and was to supposed to be flying us all the way back to Blighty, took off from Salisbury on time, and the flight, though bumpy as usual from the late morning turbulence that preceded the afternoon ‘duty cumulous’, was pleasant enough and a nice contrast to the Avro Anson 19s I’d spent so many hours in. Flying always ceased at lunch time in Rhodesia, to avoid the three hundred foot, stomach wrenching plunges and uplifts of the post meridian, which preceded the evening thunderstorms, with their unbelievably fantastic displays of lightning, which went on till midnight on most evenings.

We landed at Nairobi in the late afternoon for an overnight stop and immediately decided to go into town to see the sights.

I made my first mistake on the bus, when, used to addressing all male coloureds as ‘boy’ – the standard appellation used in Rhodesia, I asked the bus driver as we were about to get off, ‘What time does the bus collect here to go back to the airfield, boy?’

He jumped out of his seat, eyes alight with anger and flailing his arms in the air, ‘I no boy! I bus driver! You no call me boy!’

He looked as if he was about to burst a blood vessel.

For an outburst like that in Rhodesia, he would have been yanked unceremoniously out of his bus, beaten severely about the head by the police, and carted straight off to jail.

It taught me an important lesson.

There was no apartheid in Kenya, and, of course, though we were ignorant of it, dissension was coming up to boiling point. It was only a scant twelve months later that the Mau Mau atrocities began, and I could easily envisage my bus driver clutching an AK47, shooting, torturing, beheading and disembowelling white settlers at the side of Dedan Kimathi, the Mau Mau leader. What a difference a few hundred miles made. The wave of uprising was rolling across Africa, and Rhodesia, although backward in that respect, would not be exempt. Several of my good friends lost their lives not long after I left.

The facilities provided at the airfield included a tiny RAF cinema, and we trooped in, not knowing what to expect.

We might have known – it was ‘Hellzapoppin’, with Ole Olson and Chick Johnson, which had been funny the first time we saw it at the Astra back at Gwelo. There was no plot to speak of, and the only bit which stuck in the memory was the delivery boy, carrying a small potted plant, who called gently and politely at the beginning of the film, ‘Paging Mrs Jones, paging Mrs Jones’’ and reappeared at intervals throughout the entire film with an ever larger tree, becoming more and more desperate, until at the end he is in tears, driving a sixty-foot articulated lorry with an enormous fir tree and screaming, ‘Mrs Jones’ at the top of his voice.

I doubt the film has aged well.

We walked along the banks of the wide, fast swirling river, also called the Nairobi, its waters the colour of strong tea, and I wondered idly how the fish managed to survive. If there were any, which I doubted, they would need to be able to feed by smell, because the visibility was zero.

Smell was what Nairobi was all about.

I was well used to animal odours, having been brought up on a farm, and helped my father with the two hundred pigs and other animals we had, but the incredible effluvia of Nairobi put the healthy smells of animals into the shade, and the pièce de résistance was the meat market, whose unbelievable pong almost knocked you off your feet.

Used to the cleanliness of an English butcher’s shop, the sight of freshly slaughtered carcasses hanging in the strong sunlight and covered with what looked like a million bluebottles was unbelievable. How anyone eating any of that meat could survive constant and dangerous stomach upsets was just impossible to grasp, but the locals obviously did. The flies were having a field day, without being bothered in the least by those selling the meat. I guess they looked at the fly eggs as extra calories.

A few minutes was quite enough to spend there, but the smell of that market has stayed with me throughout my life, and I can still recall it now. The nearest thing to that miasma that I have come across was the German Stinkkäse that was once offered to me. How anyone ever managed to eat it I couldn’t imagine – I certainly refused it, but at least it came in smaller quantities.

We spent the night in RAF transit accommodation at the aerodrome and took off the following morning, with the pilot making a detour, so that we could get a glimpse of Mount Kilimanjaro in the distance, before setting course for Aden.

The Hastings approached over the sea to touch down at RAF Khormaksar, whose well chosen station motto was ‘Into The Remote Places’, at tea time, and the skinny, ginger haired and moustachioed sergeant with his clipboard who assembled us as we de-planed said that there was not enough accommodation for all of us at Khormaksar and asked for three volunteers to go to alternative accommodation at 114 MU in Steamer Point for the night.

Ignoring the strict ‘Never volunteer for anything’ admonition of my father, who had gone right through the First World War as a regular soldier, and managed to only get shot twice, I, Pete Green and Charlie Oldsworth, the ‘three musketeers’, always ready for a bit of skulduggery and with similar bizarre senses of humour, put our hands up, thinking we would be able to see a lot more of Aden than the others while we were there, and were told to go out of the building to the Jeep that was waiting for us and which would bring us back to the departure area at nine the next morning.

We enjoyed the ride, taking in the unusual sights and smells, blissfully unaware that we had been duped.

The driver of the Jeep dropped us off outside the mess and shrugged when I asked him if he would be picking us up on the morrow. It should have told me something.

In fact, after finally getting something to eat, having persuaded a disgruntled cook wanting to get off to his evening pleasures into fudging around to find us some leftovers, it was too late to leave camp and we sank a few bevvies in the NAAFI and crawled into bed.

At a quarter past eight, coming out of the cookhouse after breakfast the next morning, we heard an aircraft taking off and watched it with interest as it flew low above us.

Pete said it just before I did, ‘Hey! That’s our bloody Hastings!’

The ‘624’ was plainly visible on its side.

No Jeep turned up for us, and after standing there sweating in the appalling heat for over half an hour we went in search of transport.

An unhelpful and uninterested SP in the guardroom listened to our story, shaking his head, and finally told us we would have to catch the bus.

That was an experience in itself, but with the help of an Indian bus driver who spoke some English, we eventually made it.

We were stopped by the guard and had to tell our tale again, then ran to the departure area, where we found our three kitbags standing in a forlorn little group in the middle of the floor, like a solitary stook of corn in a stubble field, forgotten by the harvesters.

There was no one in sight.

After standing around for over half an hour like an unwanted minority group we set off to look for SHQ and someone who could tell us what the hell was going on.

The SWO was not in his office, and his clerk had not a clue what we were talking about, but told us to wait while he made some enquiries and not to answer the phone.

He disappeared out of the door and was gone so long we began to wonder if he’d deserted, but eventually came back with an aged, overweight sergeant, his body tanned to dark leather and with a face so full of furrows that it seemed one could plant potatoes in it.

He looked us over with a lugubrious expression before asking, ‘You are the three who volunteered to stay behind because the aircraft was overloaded, aren’t you?’

Our combined, disbelieving, jabbering voices were stilled by his shout of ‘Shut up!’

He asked for just one of us to speak and Pete told him our story, which made him nod knowingly.

‘That’s our beloved Sergeant Pettiford for you. Would you have volunteered if he’d told you the real reason?’

We looked at each other and shook our heads.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘you’re stuck with it now.’ He seemed to derive pleasure from our discomfort.

I asked, ‘When can we expect the next aircraft?’

He shrugged, ‘Your guess is as good as mine; a week, a month. That’s if you’re lucky; could be three.’

Charlie asked the all-important question, ‘Can we get some pay?’

The sergeant nodded, ‘I guess I can organise that for you.’

‘And is it okay to go out of camp?’

‘Of course, but watch the locals. They’ll have the shirts off your backs before you can say ‘Shufti cush’, and on that subject for Christ’s sake don’t touch the local whores or you’ll regret it for the rest of your lives. They’re poxed up to the eyebrows.’

He did not warn us about the one thing which we needed most to be warned about, but then he probably didn’t realise he was dealing with three idiots.

He was as good as his word, and a hour or so later we wandered out past the guardroom with local currency in our pockets, the East African shilling, then at par with the English shilling, which made bargaining easy for us.

One of the other erks had told us that the Crater was worth a visit, and where to catch the bus.

It was an experience, with sights and smells unlike any we’d seen before. It was a unique place, where the average daily temperature was over a hundred Fahrenheit and the rainfall less than two inches a year.

The novelty soon palled, and we caught another bus back and down to Steamer Point.

The harbour and beaches were crowded, and we wandered along observing everything. There were several vessels at anchor, quite a distance away across the bay. One of the most distant, at about a mile and a half, was an American destroyer.

Suddenly, Pete flung his arm out, pointing to the beach below us, ‘Look! Canoes we can hire. Let’s paddle out to that Yankee ship and shout Daddy at the sailors.’

I had spent many hours a week on the water during most of my life before joining up, either in my one-man canoe on the river behind our house or punt-gunning after waterfowl, and was game for anything of that sort, but the craft he was pointing at were vastly different from anything I had ever sailed in before.

To call them ‘canoes’ needed a great stretch of the imagination.

They were literally nothing but rough-hewn, hollowed out tree trunks, sharpened at both ends into something resembling a prow and a stern; the most ungainly vessels imaginable, but they obviously floated. The paddles were unwieldy straight branches, flattened at one end.

We began the haggling process with the native owner, a wizened, dried up old man, wearing nothing but a loin cloth, who spoke only Arabic, of which at that time I had no knowledge at all, but money spoke, and he took several of our notes with a shrug after I had with a circling finger described an hour on my watch, but kept urgently trying to tell us something. We should have found an interpreter.

Pete and I began to shove the two-seater towards the water and Charlie struggled with the single-seater, shouting for us to help him launch.

We finally had both ungainly vessels floating and climbed in.

They were dreadful beasts to try and move, but we made some slow progress.

After twenty minutes I had had enough; it was tiring, with little reward for effort, and the American vessel still looked the same distance away.

‘Let’s go back, Pete.’ I suggested, and he agreed.

He shouted over to Charlie and we turned the dugouts in a huge circle and pointed them back towards the beach.

A few minutes later, with the soporific splash of the paddles and the debilitating heat almost lulling me to sleep, I dabbed the paddle towards the water again – and hit something solid!

I’d been looking ahead, but swung my head round to see what I’d hit, expecting anything but what I saw: a dark grey body that looked the size of a nuclear submarine only inches away from the canoe, and with a huge triangular fin in the middle.

At that moment the enormous body plunged beneath the waves, leaving a bloody great hole in the water. The laws of physics regarding the displacement of water being what they are, that hole was filled mighty fast, and the canoe tipped dangerously, itself trying to do some of that filling up, while I swung my body as hard as I could to the left to counterbalance the movement.

Pete swung round angrily, ‘What the fuck are you doing!’

I tried to shout ‘Shark!’ but no sound came out of my mouth, not even a hiss. Shock had lost me my voice.

His anger mounted, ‘What? Stop pissing about!’

I tried again, mouthing the word over and over again, but he didn’t get it and continued swearing about me trying to tip us over.

At that moment the shark tried again, its huge body rising higher than our gunwale, the top of its dorsal fin level with my eyes.

Pete’s mouth dropped open, and his eyes went wide.

The canoe rolled again, but this time both of us leant the other way.

He turned and began to paddle as if the Devil himself was at his back. I did the same and we tried out damndest to get that chunk of wood up on a first-degree plane, with no success whatsoever.

Charlie had been several yards in front, paddling with ease, but we passed him, doing at least a quarter of a knot faster the way we were paddling, and as we drew level we both pointed at the water and tried to shout ‘Shark!’.

Though it was not the moment for merriment, I noticed that Pete too had lost the use of his voice.

Charlie, in his turn, went through the ‘What?’ routine and kept shaking his head, not understanding what we were trying to tell him.

Then the shark did another repeat performance and he saw it.

This time we saw its whole body. It was more than twice as long as our canoe.

The beach seemed miles away, but we sweated buckets as we tried to reach it.

The shark did its thing every couple of minutes all the way in, and it was only by sheer luck that our counterbalancing kept us afloat and in the canoe.

Charlie was lucky. He escaped entirely the shark’s attentions.

At last the beach neared and we saw scores of dark faces eagerly watching the display, obviously hoping it would become a blood sport.

The last attack was only forty yards or so from the shore, and I guess the shark realised it would ground itself if it went in any closer.

The sound of the sand grinding on the bow was the finest I had ever heard in my life, but neither of us was about to step out of the canoe with that beast so close by.

Many willing hands dragged us up the beach, and then we almost fell out onto the blessed sand, worn out.

Charlie arrived and was pulled up too.

The little native who owned the canoes was doing a song and dance around us, gesticulating madly and repeating over and over words similar to those he had used before we launched. Too late, I realised he had been trying to warn us not to go out too far.

Though I had forgotten about it, I’d read somewhere that the shark population of the Red Sea is one of the highest per square mile of all the seas in the world,