|  | History - 2 Canadian Special Wireless Section Type "B"History
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| Security
A few comments on security. Y information can give a tremendous advantage to any commander fighting a battle but like anything else it has certain problems associated with it. It is perishable. You know it's not much good if it is untimely to a commander. It has the problem of being subject to deception. The source must be protected. If you are intercepting good information from a radio link and our military response appears to the enemy to be closely tied to his communications, he may send out false information. Mind you, successful deception has its problems too. For reasons of the above, and possibly because of limited resources, an organizational decision had been made that Y units would not exist forward of corps level.
How signal intelligence is handled by commanders and the Intelligence staffs is also important for its protection. We were told that the Intelligence staffs tried to have Y information confirmed from possibly two additional sources, i.e., air reconnaissance, captured prisoners, or documents. Thus delaying its use made it difficult for the enemy to associate Y as part of the intelligence.
I would like to mention our operations after we crossed the Rhine and moved forward in direct support of the 4th Armoured Division in battle and how we responded. We were pleased with our results, but were apprehensive when Intelligence staff, untrained in the handling of Y, were sending messages forward saying: "Intercept says this. . .". Fortunately at that stage the German forces were somewhat disorganized and we hoped that they could not respond with deception. The normal phrase that was supposed to be used was: "A reliable source says. . .".
Document classification was another aspect of security. A special codeword was added to the classification of all documents requiring restriction within signal intelligence channels and these documents were handled on a "need-to-know" basis.
Now a bit about physical security of the unit. A unit of one hundred or so men is a reasonably sized fighting force if correctly trained and organized for such purposes. We had trained and structured the men into an infantry type organization so that each would know which section, platoon, etc., he was allotted for fighting purposes and who were his NCOs and Officers. With rifles, Bren guns, and a few Projectors Infantry Anti-Tank we felt we could make some sort of accounting of ourselves. This defence was used only once. We were in loose contact in France, near Cassel, when a Maquis element informed us that two officers and sixty German 55 soldiers were moving towards us. They were one and one-half miles away. Maquis was the name given to the French resistance fighters. The information given was that the 55 had killed a Maquis, a civilian, and wounded another individual. We sounded the alert and took up a defensive position. As it turned out the Germans did not materialize - thankfully for us. Apparently, they were trying to rejoin the main body of the German Army; later we learned they had been taken prisoner.
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