VICTORIOUS LIONS COACH USED TO SPY ON RUSSIANS
HE was the coach that led the British and Irish Lions to their only Test series victory against the All Blacks – and he was also a spy. Under Carwyn James’ coaching the Lions secured a historic 2-1 victory in 1971, leaving him with the legacy of being perhaps the greatest coach the game has ever known.
But in his new book, Into the Wind: The Life of Carwyn James, writer Alun Gibbard reveals a multilingual literature lover who spied on the Russians during the Cold War.
Despite being a Welsh nationalist who protested Ministry of Defence plans in Wales, he undertook his national service and joined the Navy.
There he was recruited to the nowdefunct Joint Services School for Linguists, where he learned Russian.
In Coulsdon, south London, and Bodmin, Cornwall, he was trained in the Russian alphabet, grammar and pronunciation.
From Coulsdon he went RAF Wythall for four months.
“This is where his knowledge of Russia and Russian would be applied specifically to a military situation,” Gibbard said.
“He learned to use sophisticated radio equipment in order to listen to secret Russian messages for analysis at GCHQ.
“They would have been given a specific list of call signs – the secret one-word pseudonyms given to tanks, ships, aeroplanes etc, to identify who was communicating with who.”
Ex-JSSL man Tony Cash said: “Call signs were changed regularly and GCHQ was particularly interested in learning who had become what.
“‘Hawk’ becoming ‘pig-iron’ for example, or ‘eagle’ changed to ‘bucket’.”
In 1954 he moved to Cuxhaven in Germany.
“Carwyn’s responsibility to in Cuxhaven was to listen to messages transmitted from Russia, specifically in his case to East Berlin,” said Gibbard.
“On his Murphy B40 receiver, he would listen in to Soviet military radio traffic, particularly voice messages between ships, planes, control towers and even, occasionally, Red Army conversations involving tanks, etc.
“A specially-designated building, the watch room, accessible only to men who had signed the Official Secrets Act, housed these receivers.
“Probably not more than 20 were manned 24/7.”
It was intense, detailed work. The pressure of government expectation bore down on them.
“British Intelligence services needed to know the whereabouts of Russian soldiers, planes, ships and submarines, as well as what weapons Russia might have at the time and which weapons were being developed by them,” Gibbard said.
“As at RAF Wythall, Carwyn’s instructions in Cuxhaven came from GCHQ in Cheltenham, who needed to know what was happening in Eastern Europe as the Cold War intensified.”
Weeks after leaving the JSSL he was involved with Eastern Europe again.
Swansea Rugby Club – the first British Club to venture behind the Iron Curtain – asked him to play on their tour of Romania.
As he was still bound by the Official Secrets Act he had to get clearance before he could accept the offer.
The team stayed in a hotel in the centre of Bucharest.
His former Navy pal Terry Davies was also on the tour.
“We all had an invitation to go and see a military air show,” he said.
“We all felt that this was an opportunity for the authorities to flex their military muscles in front of a Western audience.
“The little man from the embassy had his own agenda, though, and the fact he was short all of a sudden became relevant.
“He came with us but hid in the middle of our group, out of sight, and took photographs of all the planes in the show.”
The players had very little sleep in their hotel.
“It was on a cobbled road which tanks and other military vehicles would use constantly during the night until about 4am,” Gibbard said.
“Russian manoeuvres were evident enough.”
This was a bold venture by Swansea Rugby Club.
From 1947 until 1989 Romania was known as the Romanian Socialist Republic.
Stalin died a year before Swansea’s tour but he still cast a long shadow over Communist countries surrounding the USSR.
“Any attempt in Romania to oppose the Communist regime would be stamped on heavily,” Gibbard said.
“Millions were exiled, entire communities were displaced within their own country, and tens of thousands were killed.
“It was a country under oppression.”
Gibbard said it was unclear why the tour happened.
“This raises the question of Carwyn’s involvement on the tour,” he said.
“He had spent the year before the tour eavesdropping on the conversations of Russian intelligence, which would have included references to Romania.
“He would therefore have had a clear idea of what was happening there. If there were questions relating to reconciling national service with anti-military protests at university it would seem natural to ask the same question of his decision to accept Swansea’s invitation to tour an oppressed Communist country.”
Later in life Carwyn blamed “immaturity” for joining the Navy.
“I don’t think, maybe, that I heard enough about pacifism from the pulpit,” he said in the 1970s, on Welshlanguage TV programme Cywair.
“In Wales, during the war years – I was about 10 years old when war broke out – and in the years after, we constantly heard that ‘our side’ was good, was healthy.
“I would like to have heard more about the definite, strong objections to war. There’s no doubt that I am a pacifist today – and I have a little bit of a conscience that I served in the Navy.
“But at the same time I’m glad that I did so because I learned another language.”
Into the Wind: The Life of Carwyn James, by Alun Gibbard, is published by Y Lolfa and is priced £14.99