You're Hello and welcome to Spycast from the Secret Files of the International Spy Museum in

Washington DC. I'm Mark Stout historian of the museum. I'm a PhD author and historian who served for 13 years as an analyst in the U.S. Intelligence Community.

Every month, the museum brings you interesting talks with authors,

scholars, and practitioners who has something to do with the world of

intelligence and espionage.

We're joined today by David J Thorpe who served in the British Army from 1955 to 1988 entering as an enlisted man and ultimately retiring as a major. He first enlisted as an

apprentice tradesman back in the Royal Corps of Signals and graduated from the

Apprentice College in 1958 as a telegraph operator. It's not directly germane to what

we're going to be discussing today, but I might be interesting for those of us who live in

this modern era to know that at that time in order to graduate he was required to be able to send and receive

high-speed Morse at a rate in excess of 30 words a minute for sending and 35 for

receiving so no small feat.

After graduating from the college, he was trained originally as an Arabic linguist

and served for a time at a communications intercept unit in Cyprus.

And then soon thereafter transferred to the British Army's Intelligence

Corps where he was trained in Russian and eventually received Commission as an officer.

In his specialist career he worked most aspects of the signals intelligence

business while he primarily worked on the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact

at various times he also worked on events in the Middle East on Quebec

separatists in Canada interestingly enough enough, the U.S. invasion of Grenada, and also the Falklands

war.

And the Falklands is what we're going to be talking about today.

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