TOUR VEHICLES
Apart from the cameras and lenses, the most important piece of equipment used by tours was their vehicles. They needed to transport the teams of three in reasonable comfort, provide the ‘office’ space for the intelligence collection, transport the large amounts of equipment needed for their threeor four-day missions and, most importantly, be the means to evade the opposition. Initially using Humbers, they settled into a long relationship with the West German Opel marque, running Kapitäns, then Admirals, and finally Senators. The cars were powerful, had decent tyres and ran on higher-octane Western fuel, but were also extensively modified to suit the very robust driving style needed on tour, much tougher than would be permitted anywhere else in the British military, closer to rallying than normal motoring.
They were maintained by the Mission’s in-house workshop and at 14 Field Workshops, REME, at Alexander Barracks. The early vehicles were all two-wheel-drive and relied on the power of their engines and the steel ‘panzer plates’ which were welded underneath the car to ride over difficult terrain. The Mission trialled a fourwheel-drive (4WD) Safari Land Rover in the late-1960s, but after it was written off in a road-traffic accident it wasn’t replaced. It was not until the mid-1970s that a reliable 4WD solution presented itself – the Ferguson Formula (FF) conversion, which converted the Opel Admiral executive saloon car into an off-road beast. Around the same time, the Mission also started using the new Range Rover, which was very capable off-road and offered a higher observation platform, despite being draughty and unreliable.
The arrival of the Mercedes 280GE Geländewagen, or G-wagen, in late 1979, however, gave the Mission the ultimate tour vehicle: fast enough on the road (although not as fast as the latemodel Opel Senator saloon), amazing off-road performance, Mercedes reliability and a roomy and comfortable ‘office’ for the tour members. The built-in electric-powered winch also made vehicle recovery much easier, as opposed to the manual hand-winches used on the saloon cars. The most famous modification to the tour cars was the ingenious custom lighting panel, sometimes called the ‘James Bond switch’, which allowed the driver or front seat passenger (the tour NCO) to manually control the vehicle’s lights: to turn everything off at the flick of a switch or turn on individual lights to mimic a motorcycle or the dim headlights of an East German Trabant. Sometimes the cars were driven with all lights turned off and the driver wearing night-vision goggles.