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operator, working for the other side, will pick this up and specifically identify location, signaller and unit from the nature of the dits and dahs. This is direction finding, or ‘DFing’ for short. Being DF’d is not a good idea. It is difficult to imagine, when you are in the back of beyond, that anyone can be listening at all, but they are. On one occasion I was asked to test a new military radio. It was big and bulky, but had all manner of knobs and buttons that allowed you to change frequencies as often as you liked. The earlier SAS radio, the PRC-316, had only a limited frequency choice. As a result it was easier to DF, despite being a lovely machine to use. The new design was meant to avoid such troubles.
    I took it to some woods near London and started sending fully encoded messages to our radio base. I do mean fully encoded. Fast, efficient message keying in numerical format, using destructible one-time pads, held by me and the radio base only. Security was as foolproof as it gets. And yet it wasn’t. Within five minutes of keying my first message, an unidentifiable but strong Morse message came over my set. Dit-dit-dit, dit-dah, dit-dit-dit. Dit-dit-dit, dit-dah, dit-dit-dit. Those are the Morse symbols of the letters ‘S.A.S.’ Someone, somewhere, had identified me on this new, marvellous, supposedly undetectable radio. Not only had they isolated my frequency, but they had established my unit, something a trained signaller would never transmit uncoded. I had been DF’d well and true. A very spooky feeling when stuck in gloomy woods near south London. Furthermore, it was impossible to say who had DF’d me. Russians, Americans, Chinese? I had no idea.
    As a trained signaller, many doors are open to you. It is not a skill that everyone takes to. However, security tests were my interest. Some were easy, some not so easy, but I soon became master at breaking into all manner of civilian or military establishments. I remember one very well. Our patrol had been tasked to penetrate a storage depot in western Scotland, in order to lay dummy charges against some missile warheads. The depot was miles from anywhere, frequently patrolled by Ministry of Defence personnel, the MOD police, with dog handlers and some military support. They were all told we might attempt an attack. Other SAS patrols meanwhile were ordered to infiltrate alternative establishments around Scotland, including the sabotage of a nuclear submarine. The submarine group was completely successful.
    We decided to infiltrate by night, reconnoitre (‘recce’) the place, and return twenty-four hours later for the definitive attack. Aerial photographs had been given to us, the primary target of the warhead store being barely 100 feet from the MOD police base. We were also given a secondary target, a transformer, in case our efforts on the warhead store failed. As part of our pre-operation planning we had established that the primary target’s main door was secured by a huge, bulky padlock. Carrying a thermolance, a device like a welding rod, was impractical, so the technical boys in London made a special tungsten carbide hacksaw blade. We were assured it would cut through anything within ninety seconds. That would be fine, I agreed.
    The recce went well. Dropped off some distance away by Land Rover, we approached the depot across country from some ten kilometres. The area was largely uninhabited, which was good to see. Locals can be the enemy on occasions such as this. They notice if even a blade of grass has been moved and are on the telephone immediately to the police. The annual exercises in Scandinavia were classics in this respect. There, the whole civilian population was warned, well before the SAS ever arrived, that UK troops would attempt to sabotage their various key establishments. Advertisements would be pinned up everywhere. The result was the entire civilian and military populations would be mobilized to catch you. Families would go for