GCHQ

by Richard Aldrich

  Always looking for a high-profile target, the TPLA leader in Istanbul proposed the occupation of a Western embassy, but after some reconnaissance work it was concluded that security was so tight that the scheme was abandoned. Instead, they turned their attention to the more remote intelligence bases. They now chose a GCHQ sigint site at Carsamba, near the Black Sea town of Unye, where new equipment made by Plessey and Marconi was being installed. This was close to a larger American sigint site at Samsun. Surprisingly, despite the kidnapping of the American sigint personnel the previous year, security was poor. The kidnapping operation was led by Mahir Cayan, and had strong local support from left-wing lawyers and teachers who had been sacked as a result of the recent government clampdown, and were happy to assist the militants. They knew that there was no security at the GCHQ accommodation areas, which were in the neighbouring village of Unye.

  On 26 March 1972 Cayan and his team, disguised as Turkish officers and carrying Sten guns, were able simply to walk into the accommodation block where eight GCHQ technicians were having dinner. First they forced their captives to open the safe, and stole documents and money. Then they asked, ‘Who of you is the toughest?’, chose three hostages and tied up the rest, giving themselves a ten-hour start.37 The abductees were two British nationals, Gordon Banner and Charles Turner, and a Canadian, John Law. All three were sigint technicians whose cover story was that they were staff from Cable & Wireless Ltd doing contract work for the Ministry of Defence. However, recently declassified documents confirm that they were in fact full-time GCHQ staff. Bundled into a truck, they were driven away from the coast over winding roads towards the mountain village of Kizildere, which was a TPLA stronghold. Five more TPLA members were waiting in the house of the local Mayor, which became their base. The Turkish Foreign Ministry later explained that it was worried about the safety of the fifty GCHQ staff working in Turkey at the two other GCHQ sites because it feared that Communist sympathisers within the Turkish Air Force might have tipped off the kidnappers about their routine movements.38

  The British Foreign Secretary, Alec Douglas-Home, quickly deduced that the main purpose of the kidnapping was to force the release of the three most prominent members of the TPLA and TPLF who were under imminent sentence of death in Istanbul. He asked Roderick Sarell, the British Ambassador in Ankara, to discreetly enquire what was being done about the death sentences. The first thing the Turkish government did was to postpone the executions.39 On 28 March the Prime Minister, Dr Nihat Erim, wrote to the British Prime Minister, Edward Heath, thanking him for expressing confidence in the Turkish effort and assuring him that the country’s ‘entire security forces’ were attempting the rescue of the three hostages.40 Although Douglas-Home had received assurances from Cheltenham, he nevertheless asked Roderick Sarell to double-check that the security precautions to protect the remaining personnel at Unye and the two other Black Sea sites were indeed adequate.41

  The next day, Douglas-Home made an optimistic statement in the House of Commons. He perpetuated the cover story that the hostages were ‘three Ministry of Defence civilian radar operators’, working with the Turkish Air Force.42 However, even as he spoke, the Turkish Prime Minister made a hard-hitting TV address which closed the door on any bargaining with the kidnappers over the impending death sentences. ‘It is an empty dream on their part,’ he declared, ‘to imagine that this kidnapping will yield any result for them.’ He was determined to resist ‘blackmail’, and insisted that the kidnappers would be ‘hunted down’. The law, he added, would be enforced ‘to the bitter end’.43 True to his word, a massive search of the area surrounding the half-finished GCHQ facility at Carsamba was launched. Commandos with helicopters were brought in, and by 29 March the hide-out at Kizildere had been located. Operations on the ground were led in person by the Turkish Interior Minister, Ferit Kubat, who was accompanied by a posse of journalists. The next day, at 5.30 in the morning, he began talking directly to the terrorists through an open window in the Mayor’s house. When he told them to give up the hostages and surrender, the terrorists insisted on the release of their three comrades awaiting death in Ankara. Later they reduced their demands to their own safe passage to the Syrian border. Kubat insisted that they surrender unconditionally.

  These tense personal exchanges continued for some time. Ertugrul Kurku, one of the TPLA gunmen, recalls that at a certain point in the proceedings, the terrorists brought the hostage Charles Turner, who was the leader of the GCHQ party, to the window and allowed him to talk to the Interior Minister. Turner shouted anxiously, ‘Don’t fire. If you do so they will kill us.’ He explained that the kidnappers were desperate, and effectively regarded themselves as a suicide squad, determined to succeed, or else to die in the attempt. The security forces were increasingly frustrated, and shouted back: ‘They have no human feelings any more. They will kill you anyway!’ Turner repeated that if the security forces opened fire, they would be killed immediately.

  Eventually, at about midday a local sympathiser, Sener Sadi, a Marxist lawyer, was brought to the village to try to break the deadlock. He was taken to the operations centre, a farm building not far from the Mayor’s house, where he met Kubat and a slightly sinister-looking intelligence chief from MIT, wearing sunglasses and a fur-collared coat. After long discussions, Sadi agreed to advise the kidnappers to surrender. He called to them through a window and through holes they had made in the roof of the Mayor’s house, telling them that if they surrendered and did not harm the hostages, nothing would happen to them. This met with expressions of incredulity from the kidnappers. The security forces then shouted that the kidnappers would die in any case.44 What happened next is disputed, but Ertugrul Kurku, the sole surviving kidnapper, recalls:

  At 14.20 hours firing started from the houses around us. [Mahir] Cayan, Saffet Alp and I were upstairs. We were taken aback by the firing and jumped down. Mahir [Cayan] shouted ‘Ingilizler’ [The British]…His warm blood was dripping down onto me from upstairs. I saw Mahir Cayan’s arm dangling out of the hole upstairs. I ran up. However, because firing continued, I could not pull him down. I touched his body. He had been shot through the head. He was dead. I came down. While I was seeing to Mahir, one or more of our friends had killed the Britishers…45

  Accounts differ as to who shot first. The terrorists’ supporters insisted that it was the Turkish special forces who began the firing, after which everyone else joined in.46 The military insist that they only fired once they heard shooting within the house, and presumed that Mayir Cahan was killing the hostages.47 Either way, the kidnappers and the special forces were now freely exchanging automatic fire. The terrorists threw grenades, and the authorities replied with an RPG-7 rocket launcher and later a mortar. They then tried teargas, but the kidnappers continued to fire as they rushed the building. All three hostages had already been tied up and executed at close range with pistols. After the intense firefight the building was searched, and all but one of the terrorists was also found to be dead.48

  The surviving terrorist, Ertugrul Kurku, had taken up a position near the door, armed with two sub-machine pistols which he fired together. However, when grenades and rockets started to explode, he retreated into an adjacent barn, and seems to have hidden under a haystack, where he was eventually discovered. Some have alleged that he might have been an informant of the Turkish intelligence service. After the fighting was over, a note was found under a bloodstained pillow near to where the three GCHQ technicians were murdered which suggested that the terrorists were effectively seeking martyrdom. It declared that everyone ‘dies sooner or later’, and that the ‘revolutionary path is difficult’ and is ‘lighted with blood of every guerrilla that falls’.49

  Some of the wives, children and friends of the three hostages had gathered at the British Embassy in Ankara, hoping for a successful resolution. The Ambassador now had the sad duty of explaining that things had gone very badly.50 The Turkish Prime Minister, Nihat Erim, wrote to Edward Heath expressing his shock and grief a
t the ‘senseless murder’ of the technicians and asking for his condolences to be passed on to the families. He also offered his assurance that no effort would be spared in tracking down the ‘relentless desperadoes’ who were responsible for this ‘dastardly crime’. Heath responded by praising the energy of the security forces ‘despite the tragic outcome’.51 Roderick Sarell had sent a flash message to Heath’s private secretary stating that the kidnappers had blown themselves up, and that the Turkish Army ‘to the last refrained from firing’. This was hardly an accurate account of the proceedings.52 Heath sent messages of sympathy to the wives of Gordon Banner and Charles Turner.53 In Istanbul the leftists protested against the death of so many of their fighters with a series of bombings around the city on 30 March and again on 5 April.54

  It was only on 5 April, when Embassy officials received the personal effects of the three GCHQ staff from their apartment at Unye, that they discovered a lengthy ransom note left by the kidnappers. The other five GCHQ technicians, who had been held briefly but not taken, were security-conscious, and had thrown scattered papers, including the ransom note, into a desk and locked it. American officials observed that the existence of the note had been kept a secret, and it had not been shown to the families. They added that ‘its late discovery is embarrassing to the British Embassy’. The last section of the overlooked ransom note read:

  As our Peoples Revolutionary Vanguard we, expressing with action this wish and protest say: if it is wished that in the Turkey of 1972 a single patriots or vanguard warrior’s life should be ended by the rope of oligarchy, the Peoples Revolutionary Vanguard, that is us, will liquidate with bullets these British agents also.

  If we may put it briefly: For saving the lives of these British agents who work for NATO, the military organ of Anglo–American Imperialism, the chief enemy of the people of the world, our conditions are plain.

  The executions will be called off immediately.

  Richard Fyjis-Walker, the British Counsellor, commented that while the late discovery of the note was embarrassing, had it been found earlier it would not have changed the course of events. More embarrassing was a further discovery made by British intelligence officers who were working with GCHQ to investigate the incident. It turned out that the kidnappers had enjoyed easy access to the GCHQ technicians because they ‘had the misfortune to be living above the local cell leader of the Turkish People’s Revolutionary Army’. Whoever had done the security checks on the billets for the GCHQ staff probably had a little explaining to do.55

  The TPLA were not quite finished with their spate of terror. They attempted three further operations in an effort to secure the release of their jailed colleagues, hijacking a Turkish Airlines flight to Sofia in Bulgaria, then attempting, but failing, to capture two Turkish policemen and to assassinate the Turkish General in charge of martial law in Ankara. Once again the TPLA demonstrated what British officials described as access to ‘good local intelligence’.56 In response, judicial proceedings were accelerated, and the three TPLA leaders who the terrorists had attempted to have freed were hanged on 6 May 1972. Having made a loud proclamation of their belief in Marxist revolution, each was allowed to kick out the chair from under himself. However, being denied the services of a proper gallows, their deaths were prolonged and agonising.57 On 19 June there was an assassination attempt on another GCHQ technician involved in the same Black Sea project, but he escaped unhurt.58

  The following year, the widows of the murdered technicians brought a case for compensation against the British government, supported by their trade union.59 The authorities did not acquit themselves well. One of the issues that appears to have caused official anxiety was the belatedly discovered ransom note. As the court case approached, Georgina Wright, head of the Foreign Office South-East European Department, noted: ‘The demand note could cause problems – we did not release information about it at the time as it was found in the flat from which the technicians were kidnapped a week after the murder.’60 Her colleagues noted that there were other documents that would cause ‘serious difficulties’ if they were released to the court.61 There was also a more general wish to conceal GCHQ’s involvement in the affair from public view.62

  In the event, the claims were dealt with by John Somerville, GCHQ’s Principal Establishment Officer.63 Somerville had been out to Turkey in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. He also allowed the solicitors of the widows to speak to two of the technicians who were not taken, once they had been security vetted.64 With the support of the trade union, Beryl Turner, the widow of Charles Turner, pursued an action alleging government negligence in which her husband was described as ‘a civil servant’. She argued that the attack was ‘reasonably foreseeable’, given that ‘certain American personnel employed in a similar capacity to the deceased’, as well as the Israeli Consul General, had been kidnapped in the previous twelve months, and that the GCHQ staff were not warned, no secure accommodation was offered and no guards provided. Understandably, what seemed to vex her most was the fact that the landlord who had provided the accommodation for the technicians was a local leader of the TPLA.65

  GCHQ attempted to argue that, at the time, the violent attacks had seemed to be limited to Ankara and Istanbul. However, this was not the case, since the militants had previously mounted a failed attack on the sigint base at Dakiyir in remote south-east Turkey, making it clear that all such sites were vulnerable. At that point, stronger security measures probably should have been taken. Moreover, although warning circulars reached British staff at diplomatic premises, they were ‘not sent to personnel at the operational sites’.66 In the event, the action never went to trial since GCHQ – wisely perhaps – opted to settle out of court.67 Compensation of £10,000 was paid to the families, although the GCHQ aspect of the case was not publicly revealed until a debate in the House of Commons ten years later.68

  For GCHQ, the deaths of Gordon Banner, Charles Turner and John Law were a terrible tragedy. Since the 1950s, the agency had realised that collecting sigint on the Eastern Bloc would mean more short-range collection, more special operations and more risk. Yet the British prided themselves on their professionalism, and had lost no one in their overflights and secret submarine missions, despite some close calls. This reflected a mixture of sound risk-assessment and a measure of good luck.

  By contrast, the deaths at Kizildere smacked of incompetence, and were probably avoidable. They followed a period when intelligence personnel were clearly being earmarked as targets by a ruthless group. Indeed, on 1 June 1971, after the capture of the American sigint airmen, the British Ambassador, Roderick Sarell, had expressly warned London of the ‘danger of further political kidnappings to be used as a bargaining counter with the authorities’.69

  It seems unlikely that the Soviets were directly behind the attacks in Turkey. However, Moscow did hope to use the pressure generated by these incidents to reduce the Western intelligence presence in the country. In 1972, NATO and the Warsaw Pact had both withdrawn some troops from central Europe under Kissinger’s cherished Mutual Balanced Force Reduction agreement. Turkey was worried that these Soviet forces might be redeployed close to its borders. In 1973, Soviet diplomats aired a possible bilateral Soviet–Turkish security accord. Red Army units would be withdrawn from the border with Turkey, and in return Ankara would close the major US–Turkish airbase at Incirlik and insist on the removal of communications-monitoring sites along the Black Sea coast.70 The regional stakes were made higher by the rivalry between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus, another critically important listening location. By March 1972 Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee had already warned that trouble was brewing in Cyprus, and that the question was looming larger in Turkey’s relations with both Britain and the United States. GCHQ might well have hoped that its troubles in the eastern Mediterranean were now over – but in fact they had only just begun.71

  17

  Turmoil on Cyprus

  At 14.26 hours one of a group of seven Turkish tanks
, which had approached to within a few hundred yards of the NW corner of the Ayios Nikolaos perimeter, fired three shells into the Sovereign Base Area…

  Commander British Forces Near East, recounting events of 15 August 19741

  Cyprus was a powderkeg. Repeatedly conquered by contending waves of Greeks and Turks down the centuries, it had been populated by settlers from both communities. In 1878 it was acquired by the British as a colony, and in 1960 the Cypriot Republic gained independence from Britain, with its new President, Archbishop Makarios, presiding over the two communities by means of a complicated constitution which guaranteed an existence for the island that was separate from both Greece and Turkey. For Britain, and also the United States, a key goal of the constitutional settlement had been permanent access to almost a hundred square miles of military bases that remained British sovereign territory, and the primary purpose of which was the collection of signals intelligence. However, a number of prominent Greek Cypriots still hankered after ‘enosis’, or union with Greece, and since independence Greece and Turkey had come close to conflict over the island on several occasions.

  Cyprus was of incredible importance to British sigint. Having lost its stations in Iraq, Egypt and Palestine, the island was GCHQ’s last foothold in the Middle East. For America too, Cyprus was increasingly important, given the US listening station just to the north of Nicosia at Yarallakos. Moreover, the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and the rise of Middle East terrorism ensured that demand for sigint from the region had rocketed. Therefore, in the mid-1970s something very odd began to happen. Not only did sigint support the making of foreign policy, but foreign policy began to support the collection of sigint. One might argue that during this period the political future of a number of island territories – not just Cyprus, but also Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and Ascension Island in the Atlantic – were largely shaped by their value as listening stations. The sigint tail had begun to wag the policy dog. There can be no clearer indication of the importance of GCHQ and NSA in the last quarter of the twentieth century than their powerful influence on the history of Cyprus.