Operation Spherical 1964/65 - Tony Cunnane's Life and Times

From mid-1963 I was one of two Air Electronics Officer (AEO) instructors on No 232 Operational Conversion Unit at RAF Gaydon near Leamington Spa in the heart of England. Our job involved teaching pilots, navigators and AEOs about the intricacies of the so-called 'all-electric' Valiant medium bomber.

At this time my three AEO colleagues in the next door Victor Bomber office at RAF Gaydon were having to take it in turns to go on detachment to RAF Changi, Singapore, to man what was known as the Medium Bomber Detachment, part of Far East Command. The old Far East Air Force (FEAF) was now known as Air Headquarters Far East, commanded by Air Marshal Sir Peter Wykeham. The Victor detachment at Changi in total consisted of one pilot, one navigator plotter, one navigator bomb-aimer and an AEO - in other words a complete Victor bomber crew minus a co-pilot. The AEOs went out for two months at a time which meant their turn came round at rather less than six-monthly intervals taking into account transit and handover times. Since the three of them had been working this routine for several years the novelty had worn off, they were well stocked up with duty-frees and they were looking for excuses for not going east again.

Having been to Singapore as an airman wireless fitter in the 1950s, I was looking for any excuse to return to that fascinating island city and I kept asking why I could not take a turn at the detachment in Changi. At the time I didn't know what the job entailed. This was the Bomber Command "need-to-know" principle at work: if you didn't need to know, then you were not told anything and that principle was strictly adhered to all the time I served in Bomber Command - except, as it was to turn out, during my temporary duty in the Far East Air Force.

Since 1962 Indonesia and Malaysia had been waging an undeclared war known by both parties as 'Confrontation'. It resulted from a belief by Indonesia's President Sukarno that the planned creation of the Federation of Malaysia, which actually came into effect in September 1963, represented an attempt by Britain, as he put it, "to maintain colonial rule behind the cloak of independence granted to its former colonial possessions in south-east Asia". The UK, Australia and New Zealand already had a military presence in Malaya and Singapore but they sent additional forces to the area to reinforce those and Malaysia's own services.

My perseverance eventually paid off a short time after I had been promoted to flight lieutenant. At Gaydon, I was given an informal briefing of what the job would involve. The main RAF reinforcement contribution would consist of sixteen Victor Mk 1 bombers. They were on permanent UK standby to fly out to the Far East at short notice, flying through Cyprus, the Middle East and Gan in the Maldives. This was known as Operation Spherical. The plan required that the Victors should arrive in the Far East within 48 hours’ notice of the order to deploy being given. From time to time small numbers of Victors flew out to Singapore to exercise the operational plan. A very contentious part of the plan dictated that once the bombers reached the longitude of Gan, roughly 73 degrees East, CinC Bomber Command would handover operational command and control to CinC Far East Command. Clearly Bomber Command did not relish losing control of a significant chunk of the UK Strike Force for a little, and probably unlikely, war in the Far East.

The plan, if the confrontation between Malaysia and Indonesia deteriorated, was that the Victor bombers would be tasked in a conventional, ie non-nuclear, role to reinforce the Canberra light bombers already in theatre. In those days the Canberras were often referred to as the Light Bomber Force (LBF) and the V-Bombers as the Medium Bomber Force (MBF). The possible use of the Victor bomber, with its capability of carrying thirty five 1,000 pound conventional bombs in its capacious bomb bay, might seem to be overkill. However, Indonesia stretches over 3,000 miles from one end to the other and the Victor was the only aircraft that then had the necessary range to deal with potential targets at the far extremes of the Indonesian archipelago.

In order to take my place on the Medium Bomber Detachment, I had to learn about the Victor's specialist electronic countermeasures (ECM) equipment which was then highly secret because it was the same equipment that would have been used to help the Victors reach their targets in the event of nuclear war against the USSR. The Valiant bombers, my speciality, did not have this equipment and so I was given a three-day course at Gaydon which was supposed to equip me for the role. Then I was sent out to Changi ahead of my first operational detachment for an on-the-job briefing.

I flew out from Lyneham in Comet 4 XR398 on 28 October 1964 and arrived at RAF Changi mid-morning the following day. I was astonished to learn how large was the presence of the RAF in Singapore - Far East Command had far more operational aircraft in theatre than the entire RAF has in 2011. I was amazed to discover that I would be deemed to be the Command's expert in electronic warfare and would be required to compile Victor war plans in conjunction with my two navigator colleagues. Part way through that week, the HQ group captain who was in overall charge of Operation Spherical was driven almost to apoplexy when he discovered that I had been given highly secret briefings for which I did not have the necessary security clearance. It was also the first time that I became aware of security clearances higher than the standard one that all V Bomber aircrew required. That was the end of my advance training and I was promptly sent back to UK – on Comet 4 XR396 – arriving at Lyneham on 6 November.

I returned to Changi on 10 December 1964, this time with the necessary upgrade to my security clearance, which had somehow been negotiated in barely one month when it usually took up to three months. The AEO I was replacing, Flight Lieutenant Dick Waddell, left for UK on the aircraft I had travelled out in - he couldn't wait to get home for Christmas. Our handover briefing lasted about 20 minutes in a secluded corner of the transit lounge at Paya Leber, then the civilian airport for Singapore.

I started work the next day. My role was to create ECM and communications orders for each of several dozen target routes the navigators had drawn up indicating, amongst other things, what radio calls were to be made and details of which ECM equipments were to be switched on and off at various points along the route. Not all of the routes started from or ended at airfields on Singapore Island and that involved extra planning considerations. Because I was a competent typist, thanks to my time in Ceylon a decade earlier, I also had the job of typing out hundreds of pages of highly complex instructions (incredibly, there were no professional typists with the necessary security clearance). The four of us in Medium Bomber Operations were provided with supposedly up-to-date intelligence data which indicated where Indonesia's ground radars and communications centres were located and whether they were thought to be serviceable or not and the latest information about the Indonesian Air Force’s aircraft state. As this data changed regularly we had to modify our plans accordingly.

One day I went over to the Command Intelligence Centre, in a different building a short distance away, to collect some new data. Normally one of our navigators did this but when the telephone call came through to our office saying the data was ready for collection, they were both out so I took it upon myself to go instead. Big mistake! I was let into the highly secure building without any check on who I was. I was then left alone in an office while the occupant, a flight lieutenant, went somewhere else to get the data I required. The Command Intelligence Officer, a group captain but not the one who had sent me back to UK some weeks earlier, saw me looking at some large wall maps of Indonesia and asked who I was. I told him. He then asked what my security clearance was but I couldn't give him the correct answer because I didn't know what the appropriate code word was. The group captain was very angry with the flight lieutenant when he returned and tore into him with impressive loquacity. One phrase he used was, "He's not one of us!" That seemed, to me, a very odd phrase to use and I heard it used about me again a few months later when I was sent to collect some miniature tape recorders from a UK signals unit in Singapore just before a Victor overnight clandestine transit to Darwin. Putting one and one together to make two, I guessed this time what the phrase might mean but it wasn't until many years later in another appointment that I had confirmation. Raw intelligence data, sigint, comint and elint - signals, communications and electronic intelligence, were protected by even higher security clearances than the one I held previously. By that time I had become one of them! I also learned that you should never ask an individual what his own security clearance is; you always need that information in advance from an authorised agency. (Digression. I can now safely confess that many years later on a visit to GCHQ, I was asked by someone who did not know me what my security clearance was. To see what would happen, I gave him the code word for a clearance higher than the one I held. He accepted it without question and was about to brief me about something I had no requirement to know when another individual, who did know me, came in and whispered something to him. The first chap then left the room in great confusion.)

However, security in Far East Command HQ clearly left a lot to be desired. Twice, as a result of other officers' lapses, I had already become privy to sensitive stuff I was not supposed to know about. Classified matter, but not the V Bomber sort, was openly discussed in bars, messes and other insecure places and officers seemed to assume that the local staff were either deaf or did not understand enough English!

No-one ever questioned my competence to be part of the Medium Bomber Detachment because everyone assumed that I must have the necessary qualifications to do the job otherwise I wouldn't have been there. Thus, I was left to get on as well as I could. I was vaguely worried about this but thankfully none of my plans was ever put to the test!

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