Security Service

I spent six months learning Morse code at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi Mississippi.  I was not very good at it and I didn’t get much better after I was sent to the 6950^th Security Group at RAF Chicksands.  I  sat at a rack of two World War II era radios, R390s, and listened to the Russians and other Warsaw Pact members send Morse code for eight hours a day.

It was easy enough to find people sending it.  Our giant antenna array was pointed at Eastern Europe and Western Russia.  There were bands on the radio dial that were particularly rich with traffic.  We would listen to two radio operators chattering back and forth, telling each other who they were and what they were going to send, and then they settled into the body of their message sending groups of four or five letters and numbers in long sequences some going on for pages.  We couldn't read it.  We just sent it on.  I don't know if anyone else could read it.  

Sometimes we copied airplanes, civilian and military, Estimated Times of Arrival, Airports, directions and other details.  I even copied trains sending Morse code, but no one was very interested in that.  We’d look for stuff, Soviet space efforts, army units, sometimes civilian activity.  There were assignments and things we copied regularly and there were times we just searched for what we could find. 

My first summer there I copied Russian tank units.  We watched the buildup of Warsaw Pact Military Exercises in the summer of 1968.  Dubcek and the Czechoslovakian people were in the midst of Prague Spring.   Leonid Brezhnev and the hardliners in the Soviet Union were against it.  It felt like the excitement of Perastroika 20 years too early, but just as the US crushed Salvador Allende five years later, Brezhnev crushed Dubcek. 

I remember the night in August, 1968, we came to work a midnight shift.  All week we had seen Polish, East German, Bulgarian, Hungarian and Russian units staging on the borders of Czechoslovakia.  And then they went in.  It was amazing, hundreds of thousands of troops pouring into a small country and securing it in a tight lockdown in just a few hours.  They seemed to have soldiers  at every corner and tanks everywhere.  The Czechoslovakians resisted but it was futile against such a force. 

For the next few days we tensely watched as Dubcek flew to Moscow to meet the Russians.  Within a week or two Czechoslovakia had a new government returning meekly to the Soviet fold. 

The sheer naked power of the Soviet military was frightening to watch.  NATO, the U.S. and its allies, of course, went on alert.  In Security Service we were always on alert, but within a few hours the rest of the US Military in Europe stood ready if the Russians moved beyond Czechoslovakia.  The small British military was ready with us and over a period of weeks, the rest of NATO put itself into position to resist a Russian invasion.  Quickly it was obvious the only credible force between the Russians and Paris was the U.S. Military. 

I was going to work one day that week and a Britain patted me on the arm and said, “Hello, Yank, glad you’re here.” 

The rest of the time the job was mostly boring.  I did not enjoy the work and I wasn’t very good at it.  One time we were told to search everything to find out when a Soviet manned satellite would be coming down.  I told the Sergeant it would be 0126 Greenwich Mean Time or Zulu as we called it.  He came back a few minutes later and said, “You’re right!  You’re right!  How did you get that?”  I told him I read it in the London Times that morning.   

Copying Morse code for three years was not my best job.  I was proud to be part of NATO and the defense of Europe against the Russian Bear.  I loved being in England.  When it was happening four years seemed like a long time out of my life, but looking back it was a good time.