The SR-71 was a futuristic aircraft that flew on the edge of space, but its weakness was that it burned eight thousand gallons of fuel an hour at top speed. During ‘Giant Reach’ it would need to be refuelled in the air five times from no fewer than sixteen KC-135 tankers, meaning that the chances of something going wrong were greatly increased. Jim Wilson, one of the pilots, recalls one of the early flights from Griffiss Air Force Base. Somewhere south of Crete, ‘I lit the afterburners and started acceleration toward the target area.’ He then got a red warning light telling him that the engine oil quantity was low. He turned the afterburners off and on before pressing forward, fearing a ‘single engine emergency arrival at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv’. Returning from the target, he had only fifteen minutes’ worth of fuel left when he met up with the next tanker. On landing, the ground crew had recovered the imagery and the sigint from the aircraft within twenty minutes.58 Four flights were made from Griffiss before deteriorating weather forced the SR-71 teams to move to Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina, which was even further away.59
It has been alleged that these missions were helpful to the Israelis, who when handed the material they gathered were able to spot weak points in the Egyptian lines, contributing to their success in the latter stages of the war.60 Kissinger had also kept up American resupply to the region, and by 16 October the Israelis were pushing confidently into the Sinai.61 However, by 24 October Kissinger was calling for current intelligence on the exact positions of the two sides, whereupon Bill Colby, the Director of the CIA, admitted: ‘I don’t have any solid information.’ Yet another precarious ultra-long-range SR-71 mission was required. After agonising for some minutes, Kissinger exclaimed, ‘Let’s fly the thing. We’ve got to find out what’s going on.’62
The most controversial event of the Middle East War occurred a day later on Thursday, 25 October. Richard Nixon decided to put American forces on a nuclear alert, or ‘Defcon 3’, in an effort to send the Soviets a clear signal not to intervene in the conflict. Edward Heath was incensed, since he regarded this move as provocative and unnecessary. What was worse, Heath was the last person to find out. Most senior British officials knew early on the Friday morning, but Heath only found out from news sources in the afternoon. A furious Heath ordered an inquiry by a former Cabinet Secretary, Sir Edward Bridges: ‘I wish the highest priority to be given to this with no attempt whatever to hide any defects there may have been in our system at Home or defects in President Nixon’s conduct.’ Heath insisted that the ‘world wide nuclear alert’ had done ‘immense harm’, and complained that ‘an American President in the Watergate position [was] apparently willing to go to such lengths at a moment’s notice without consultation with his allies’, adding that he worried what this meant for the control of American nuclear forces based in Britain.63 On balance, Percy Cradock and the Assessments Staff agreed with Heath that the US nuclear alert was an overreaction:
US Sigint authorities at 0102 hours GMT on 26 October reported that there had been no evidence to suggest the Soviet Union’s military forces on a worldwide basis had assumed an increased state of alert. There were no significant anomalies or deviations from normal communications patterns that would indicate that the Russians had placed their forces on a higher degree of readiness. Specifically, there were no Sigint reflections of a change in the posture of strategic rocket forces or increased alert in the Soviet Navy.
Although the Assessments Staff tried to hedge, they had to agree with Heath that the Americans had overreacted. Moreover, Kissinger had seemingly misled Rowley Cromer, the British Ambassador, telling him that America was only moving to ‘a low level’ of military alert.64 Inexcusably, on the morning of 25 October everyone in Whitehall had been told about the American action except the Prime Minister. News had initially come in by telephone, but was soon confirmed by GCHQ, which had received the information ‘in an intelligence context’ from NSA. No one thought to tell Edward Heath.65
Kissinger railed against the British arms embargo and the restrictions attached to reconnaissance flights from bases in Britain and Cyprus.66 The new American Secretary of Defense, James Schlesinger, shared his irritation. Schlesinger had been appointed in July 1973, having previously served as a short-lived and intensely unpopular Director of the CIA.67 He vented his feelings during a heated exchange with Lord Carrington when they met in The Hague on 7 November, making a series of allegations. He insisted that London ‘had been in close collu sion with the French with the object of frustrating American policy objectives in the Middle East’, and accused the British of undermining Egyptian support for a ceasefire resolution put before the United Nations by the Americans. One of Schlesinger’s staff at the Department of Defense, almost certainly Harry Bergold, added privately that ‘stories about sinister Anglo/French collusion’ had been ‘fed’ to Schlesinger by other mischievous European allies, suggesting that the Dutch were the prime suspects.68
Edward Heath was adamant that Britain should also avoid spy flight incidents during the Middle East crisis, and ministers hurriedly reviewed all airborne sigint activities. Routine monitoring flights along the Inner German Border and in the Baltic were considered unproblematic. More worrying was a programme code-named ‘Operation Duster’ that involved sigint Comets flying out of RAF Akrotiri on Cyprus and along the Egyptian and Syrian coasts, together with Canberras from Luqa on Malta which flew along the Libyan coast. About a dozen missions a month were flown. Even more problematic was ‘Operation Hem’, a sigint marathon that passed through the region. Flights originated at RAF Wyton and made their way to Luqa before taking the opportunity to loiter along the Libyan coast. They refuelled again at Akrotiri and then headed east once more, listening along the Egyptian coastline, finally arriving at Tehran. They would then operate for a week out of Tehran and Mehrabad in Iran, flying along the borders with Russia and Iraq before heading back to Britain, revisiting Egypt and Libya on the way.69 Julian Amery, the Foreign Office Minister, emphasised that these flights must continue because of the ‘very valuable’ intelligence they collected, but over the eastern Mediterranean greatly increased safety distances were maintained, ‘keeping the aircraft very close to Cyprus’.70
The end of the Heath administration on 4 March 1974 signalled a gradual improvement in relations with the Americans. When Kissinger visited London later that month to talk with Harold Wilson’s second administration, he appeared somewhat chastened. Intelligence was again a symbolic issue. The Middle East War was now over, and Kissinger asked for a resumption of U-2 flights from RAF Akrotiri on Cyprus for monitoring the Arab–Israeli ceasefire. Because the war was over there could now be no question of spy flights favouring the operations of one side or the other, so London was amenable to these operations starting up again. British officials noted that they wished to avoid a repetition of the acrimonious exchanges of October 1973, and were now ‘anxious to be as helpful as we can’. Nevertheless, there were worries about the public reputation of the U-2 as a ‘spy plane’, and the British thought its distinctive shape would soon be noticed. Instead of opting for secrecy, they chose to tell Archbishop Makarios, the President of Cyprus, and President Sadat of Egypt about the flights, and even made a low-key announcement in the press. These U-2 intelligence missions were now to be overt-covert flights.71
By April 1974 the damage was being repaired. The CIA had sent another long-distance SR-71 flight over the disengagement area between the Israelis and the Egyptians in the Sinai Desert. This showed that both parties were complying fully with their ceasefire commitments. The CIA told British liaison officers in Washington that in recognition of British helpfulness over restarting the U-2 missions from Cyprus, it was willing to share the results of this flight. It was explained that ‘SR-71s would probably not be used in the vicinity of the area of disengagement’ once U-2s began operating from Cyprus again. Thereafter, the US National Photographic Intelligence Center would provide the British with ‘a duplicate positive copy of the film taken from
each U-2 flight’ over the Sinai, together with a complete written assessment generated by the CIA for its own purposes.72
However, the SR-71 flights over Syria continued, and remained a problem between the British and the Americans as late as July 1974. Admiral Bill Moffit, who worked with the CIA’s Office of Special Activities, met British liaison officers in Washington, and complained that the State Department was still discouraging requests to Britain for SR-71 flights out of RAF Mildenhall, believing it to be an area of continued sensitivity for London.73 The British explained the distinctions between spy flights during hostilities, which could lead to allegations of partisanship, and monitoring in support of a ceasefire. Moffit wanted permission for SR-71 flights from Mildenhall to monitor the fragile peace in the Middle East. U-2s were fine over the Sinai, but were not favoured for surveillance of the Golan Heights, since they were vulnerable and the Syrians could not be trusted not to fire on them. Although the higher-flying SR-71s were out of range of attack from the ground, the Americans did not want to undertake further marathon missions from the United States, and had recently been flying reconnaissance aircraft from carriers in the Bay of Naples. The British were quick to reassure Moffit that SR-71 flights from Britain could be resumed, adding that ‘The last thing we wanted was repetition of the October War misunderstanding.’74
In July 1974 there was a further changing of the guard when Richard Nixon finally resigned after struggling with the aftermath of the Watergate break-in for more than a year. Kissinger was staying on, but the British expected that the arrival of the Gerald Ford presidency would ‘change the whole environment in which Kissinger at present operates’ – a prospect that did not disappoint them.75 They still wondered what had caused Kissinger to take such a hard line on the Anglo–American relationship, and to impose the remarkable intelligence cut-off during August 1973. Richard Sykes, Rowley Cromer’s perceptive deputy at the British Embassy in Washington, asked himself the same question, as many agreed that the Americans’ behaviour was not in their own best interests. Sykes thought the answer could be summed up in one word: ‘Watergate’. From late April 1973, he argued, this had hung like a black cloud over everything, and if not for that abiding psychological pressure, Nixon and Kissinger would have taken a ‘more relaxed view’ of events on the inter national scene. Watergate had combined with Vietnam and the Oil Crisis to create a generally depressing political atmosphere in Washington. Sykes continued:
I am sometimes asked by English visitors why the Americans are in such a difficult and touchy frame of mind today. In reply, I say that they had to go through the equivalent, in our terms, of Suez, the Profumo case and the devaluation of £, not in a timescale of twelve years as we did, but in not much more than two. It was, therefore, not altogether surprising that they were being prickly and difficult.76
16
Disaster at Kizildere
Traitors! Pro-American dogs! These English agents were from NATO forces occupying our country…it is our most fundamental right and debt of honour to kill these agents by shooting them.
Statement by the Turkish People’s Liberation Army left at the village of Kizildere, 30 March 19721
The British intelligence community was not ready for the rise of terrorism. Although GCHQ’s sigint targets were more diversified than those of NSA, it remained terribly anxious to prove its value to Washington. This meant that Soviet military activity remained a very high priority for Cheltenham. While GCHQ and NSA had large-scale collection programmes in the volatile countries of the Middle East and Africa, especially telephone-tapping programmes, these too were tuned to watching either the activities of the Soviets or confrontations between Israel and its neighbours. In countries such as Iran, Ethiopia and Turkey, the vast sigint collection programmes of the West were mostly listening to signals from the Soviet Union. Little attention was being paid to new religious and social movements within these countries. It was for this reason that the West was taken by surprise by the fall of the Shah of Iran in February 1979. Where there was monitoring of local Middle Eastern traffic, its focus was often narrowly on oil and arms sales. David Owen, who was Foreign Secretary at the time of the rise of religious revolutionaries in Iran, laments that one of Britain’s mistakes was to take ‘short-term advantage of our Persian linguists to improve our commercial performance at the expense of in-depth political reporting’. On reflection, he felt that the right kind of monitoring by GCHQ, together with closer cooperation with Mossad, which knew about the opposition groups in Iran, was what had been required. ‘With our electronic sources…we could have analysed more and possibly anticipated events.’2
Turkey was another country where internal instability and violence impacted on the Western intelligence community because of the vast sigint presence there – over fifteen thousand NATO personnel, most of whom were Americans. In the late 1960s a left-wing movement had opposed growing Western economic and military influence in the country. These groups were broadly based, and counted amongst their numbers many students, academics, bureaucrats and even military officers. Their militancy reflected serious social issues, with soaring inflation and problems in the agricultural sector. In short, there was plenty of combustible material for radical groups to exploit. During the first months of 1970, left-wing activists became more violent, bombing public buildings and machine-gunning police stations.
February 1970 saw the first sign of serious trouble, when a group of eleven students was arrested at Diyarbakir, near the Syrian border. They had been undergoing secret training with the Palestinians near Damascus, and had been liberally supplied with arms and explosives. This training in Syria contributed to the growth of two different militant groups, the Turkish People’s Liberation Army (TPLA) and the Turkish People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). Both consisted of middle-class intellectuals who regarded themselves as a revolutionary vanguard. Like many revolutionary leaders, they suffered from a ‘Che Guevara complex’, believing that symbolic acts of violence could trigger a wider social revolution. Che Guevara had come to grief in 1967 during a futile attempt to stir the revolutionary consciousness of Bolivia, and was captured and shot by a police team, advised by the CIA. Turkey’s would-be revolutionaries would soon suffer a similar fate. However, in the meantime, the attacks in Turkey focused on the foreign intelligence presence, including sigint collection sites.3
NSA and GCHQ should have been more alert. They had substantial numbers of sigint personnel in Turkey because of the proximity of vast Soviet missile- and aircraft-testing sites around the Caspian Sea. It was the US Air Force that had led the sigint effort here. Back in January 1953, Colonel Arthur Cox from the USAF Security Service had arrived to seek out a site for the first American radio squadron, and selected Karamursel, a small market town forty miles south of Istanbul. The vast compound of seven hundred acres was shared with the US Naval Security Group. Although other monitoring stations were established in Turkey, Karamursel remained the largest, with close to a thousand personnel.4 It gradually passed under the control of the US Naval Security Group, since its main task was listening to the voice and Morse traffic of the Soviet Navy exercising in the Black Sea. It also hosted NSA’s regional communications centre, which relayed sigint from numerous other stations back to NSA headquarters at Fort Meade.5
Although Karamursel monitored Soviet space launches, including Yuri Gagarin’s historic flight in April 1961, it was not ideally placed to listen to missile tests further east, at places like Kapustin Yar. Accordingly, further sigint sites blossomed along the coast of the Black Sea, at Sinop and Samsun. These specialised in gathering the signals from new Soviet missiles as they were being tested – known as telemetry – and had special intelligence-gathering radars that tracked the missiles in flight.6 At Samsun, only three hundred miles from the Soviet border, listeners could discover when each missile type was perfected and passed into production. Other stations along Turkey’s northern coastline listened in to high-frequency communications.7
The intelli
gence gathered from these stations was a strategic treasure trove: some have suggested that three quarters of the Western intelligence on Soviet strategic weapons systems came from Turkey, together with smaller stations in neighbouring Iran. In the late 1960s, vast sums were invested in a new facility at Pirinclik Air Base, close to the Syrian border at Diyarbakir. Here the Americans constructed two huge intelligence radar systems, one for detection and the other for tracking. Even more secret were several small intelligence stations on the outskirts of the Turkish capital Ankara. Here the USAF base at Belbasi hosted a seismic intelligence station that captured the vibrations from underground atomic explosions at the Soviet weapon-testing facility at Semipalatinsk. Nearby were other sensitive posts eavesdropping on the diplomatic traffic generated by Ankara, hidden within America’s Military Mission headquarters and known as ‘TUSLOG’. (This stood for US Logistics Organisation in Turkey, and its inconspicuous name provided the cover for many intelligence activities.) Here the Americans successfully bribed a Turkish code clerk to hand over his own government’s cyphers.8
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