GCHQ

by Richard Aldrich

  But everything was not as it appeared. Cabinet Ministers believed that Hunt had been sent to Washington to tell the Americans about the demise of the Cyprus bases. In reality, GCHQ and the Cabinet Secretary seem to have been involved in an audacious game of poker with the Americans. The idea was to persuade them to pay for the presence on Cyprus. On the very day that Hunt endured the invective of Kissinger, Schlesinger and Colby in Washington, Derek Tonkin from the Permanent Under-Secretary’s Department was explaining the underlying strategy ‘in the strictest confidence’ to planners from the BBC monitoring service. The BBC was about to discuss its own radio monitoring station on Cyprus with its American associates who performed the same task for the CIA. Tonkin made it clear that despite the Cabinet decision to withdraw, nothing should be taken for granted. ‘It might be,’ he explained, ‘that the Americans would offer to pay for some of the facilities in Cyprus.’ Indeed, he was rather optimistic and hoped the Americans would be willing to provide ‘substantial financial assistance’. He lamented that the British financial position was so bad that the country ‘had long passed the time when we might have felt embarrassed’ about asking the Americans for money. Meanwhile, the BBC was advised to plan on the basis of a continued British presence on Cyprus.42

  America’s willingness to pay towards the costs of bases on Cyprus was connected to the steep deterioration of its relations with Turkey during the invasion. Ankara had expected Washington to put pressure on Athens to stop the coup attempt against Makarios. Kissinger had not done this, and instead, once the Turkish invasion began, the United States suspended military assistance to Turkey. The Turks, already nurturing resentment over American efforts to deter a Turkish invasion of Cyprus ten years earlier, retaliated by closing down the vast complex of American bases that sprawled across their country. At a stroke, the United States lost the use of numerous intelligence-gathering facilities which had cost tens of millions of dollars to create and had been staffed by literally thousands of operatives. This was an earthquake in the sigint world, and the net result was that NSA became more dependent on Cyprus.43 Kissinger regarded the loss of the Turkish bases as nothing short of ‘a disaster’.44 NSA’s relations with Turkey had been difficult for some time. During the 1960s the deal had been that NSA would help Turkey to expand its own sigint capability in return for access to ‘certain intelligence sites’. However, by the early 1970s the cost of sigint assistance to Turkey was rising ‘astronomically’. The Americans had tried to revise the agreement, but this had been indignantly rejected by Ankara.45

  In February 1975 Sir John Aiken was told that British forces on Cyprus were not going home after all. However, the island was now reshaped into an intelligence-only base. This meant the sigint, communications and radar facilities would stay, together with airfields to provide a foothold for British and American intelligence-gathering aircraft. Beyond this, the only other forces remaining were those required to defend them. In practice this meant about a thousand personnel, including two hundred civilians from GCHQ.46 The search for economies was a strain for GCHQ, with quite a few duties being done by staff on short visits, and there was a struggle to find volunteers.47 Little of the cost of staying on Cyprus appears to have been drawn from the intelligence budget.48 The British were now keen to assist the Americans in using all the facilities in Cyprus. In April 1975 America requested spy flights to investigate Soviet arms shipments to Syria via the ports of Latakia and Tartus. These needed to be launched frequently and at short notice, yet there was ‘no suitable US programme that would provide the intelligence’. Predictably, British intelligence officers were delighted to offer a Cyprus-based operation, and explained that:

  When faced with attempting to provide some return for the enormous amounts of intelligence material provided by the US, the UK is always at a disadvantage by having so few opportunities to gain information, especially air photography. To redress the imbalance, any opportunity that presents itself should be exploited to the full. The reconnaissance of the ports of Latakia and Tartus is such an opportunity, especially as it has resulted from a direct request for assistance.49

  This coincided with the expansion of the American U-2 detachment on Cyprus. The additional personnel and ground equipment arrived by American transport aircraft which were requested to arrive and depart after dark, to avoid local curiosity.50

  The American Defense Secretary, James Schlesinger, remained anxious about British defence cuts. In early September 1975, during a NATO Nuclear Planning Group meeting at Monterey in California, Schlesinger had taken Roy Mason, the British Defence Secretary, aside and told him that he would deplore further reductions in British defence expenditure. Indeed, he threatened that if this happened the United States would have to ‘reconsider its bilateral arrangements’ in areas such as communications intelligence, and also on assistance in respect of nuclear weapons, including improvements to Britain’s Polaris missiles. He emphasised that he was conveying the attitude of the US government as a whole.51 When Schlesinger visited London on 24 September he was given renewed assurances that Britain had halted any plans for withdrawal from Cyprus which had ‘impactions for US defence facilities there’. He also took the opportunity to emphasise the ‘crucial importance’ of American base expansion on the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.52

  London and Washington continued to think about sigint on Cyprus, pondering how to meet their shared intelligence-gathering needs in the most economical way.53 In February 1977 Dr David Owen, who had taken over as Foreign Secretary under the Callaghan government, spoke with Clark Clifford, American Special Emissary to the eastern Mediterranean, who was taking the lead on Cyprus. Clifford had recently been on a tour of the region, and conferred with Owen in London on his way home. On intelligence, Owen wanted to put on the record Britain’s ‘deep gratitude for the privileged treatment they had received from the US in this field’. He then explained that while Britain had kept the Cyprus bases because of their immense value to ‘the joint intelligence effort’ of the two countries, the presence there was expensive, and so remained ‘a natural target for cuts’. He added, ‘We had intended in 1974 to withdraw from the SBAs, but had decided not to do so in response to an American request to remain.’ However, Britain’s finances were in a parlous state, and the question needed to be looked at again. In short, the British needed further subsidies. Clifford admitted that, while the intelligence from Cyprus was ‘not unique’, with America’s Turkish bases out of action it was ‘very useful at present’. He asked exactly how much the Cyprus bases were costing, and after a little thought offered the prospect of ‘some economic arrangement’. Owen was visibly cheered.54

  Britain and the United States were now a rather odd couple. During the early 1970s their alliance relationship had suffered a number of vexations. The Americans had been disconcerted by Britain’s irritating shift towards Europe, while Washington had alarmed London with its tendency to act unilaterally, especially in the Middle East. Yet for that very reason the British were determined to try to preserve the intelligence connection. Derek Tonkin, who looked after intelligence coordination at the Foreign Office, put this rather well, explaining that because of these political tensions ‘The intelligence exchange with the Americans is perhaps the last bastion of the “special relationship”.’ Moreover, he added, for the British the intelligence relationship was now as much about watching Washington as about watching the rest of the world.55

  Despite their growing political differences, in the late 1970s Britain and America shared many practical problems in the realm of sigint. Both NSA and GCHQ suffered deep cuts in their budgets. On 13 July 1976, Joe Hooper, the Cabinet Office Intelligence Coordinator, briefed the British Chiefs of Staff on the impact of the cuts. Intelligence spending was scheduled to fall by 10 per cent over a period of four years, and Hooper warned that any further reduction would mean both losses of intelligence on targets of the highest priority and ‘serious risk to US/UK relations both in intelligence and
other fields’. The Chiefs of Staff, led by Michael Carver, responded that Britain ‘above all should preserve its special intelligence relationship with the US’.56 However, not everything was gloomy. Hooper argued that Britain should take every opportunity to gather intelligence from Cyprus, capitalising on the Americans’ loss of their facilities in Turkey and the continuing volatility of the Middle East.57

  The dramatic events in Turkey and Cyprus illustrated another serious problem shared by Britain and the USA, namely the shrinking pattern of bases in the Third World. Whether they were owned by the British or the Americans, overseas bases were a perennial source of conflict with nationalist politicians. Back in May 1964 the US National Security Council had reviewed the problem of ‘politically unstable or unreliable countries’ in which the Americans had intelligence facilities. The list was long, and included Cyprus, Greece, Turkey, Ethiopia, Libya, Kenya, Morocco, India and Pakistan.58 However, in the Indian Ocean the British seemed to have come up with a novel plan to sidestep these problems by seeking to create an Anglo– American base in a country without any indigenous people. Britain persuaded Mauritius and the Seychelles to detach a string of small islands in order to create a new sovereign area to be called the British Indian Ocean Territories, or ‘BIOT’. The fly in the ointment was that in reality there was a small indigenous population, so the plan called for their enforced removal to Mauritius. What had seemed like a good idea quickly turned into a source of grave embarrassment.59

  The main focus was the tiny island of Diego Garcia. The Pentagon had made its first request for a possible communication station there in August 1963.60 An agreement was reached at the end of December 1966 and a station was built in late 1970. The original intention was that Britain would meet the cost of resettling the island’s inhabitants and ‘buying the agreement of Mauritius and the Seychelles’, while the Americans would pay for the installations. However, as time went on it became clear that the ‘sweetener’ demanded by Mauritius and the Seychelles to give up the islands was larger than expected – in the region of £10 million. Ministers decided that Washington should contribute to this, and American defence officials reluctantly agreed, on condition that this neocolonial activity could be hidden. The arrangement was carried out secretly, by deducting the American contribution from money that Britain owed for buying Polaris missiles.61 By the following year a full financial agreement had been drawn up, stating that the United States would ‘forgo the R&D surcharge to the extent of $14 million’.62 American defence officials knew that Congress would not approve of America subsidising the ‘separation of the Chagos archipelago’ to create a new British colony. Indeed, British Treasury officials seemed to enjoy the discomfort of their allies and noted, ‘There is plenty of reason for embarrassment.’63 If anyone asked whether there had been any American financial contribution they were to say that ‘no payment had been made by the US Government’.64 In April 1967, Richard Sykes of the Foreign Office noted that ‘in view of the extreme delicacy of this subject’ the circulation of papers was being kept to the absolute minimum. Nevertheless, the Americans were increasingly nervous about telling what was ‘frankly an outright lie’.65

  Almost as soon as the communications facility had been built on Diego Garcia, the Americans were requesting further expansion. This was linked to an earlier imperial sigint episode in East Africa. During the Second World War the British had given America permission to build a sigint station at Kagnew in Ethiopia. By March 1951 there were over 1,312 staff there, providing what NSA’s Director, General Ralph Canine, described as ‘unique and profitable intercept coverage’.66 Some of the work at Kagnew was focused on the Soviets, but the base also collected manual Morse from much of Africa and the Middle East. This was especially valuable during the Congo crisis of 1960, when the different factions fought for control over the province of Katanga, and the US Ambassador to the United Nations later sent a letter of commendation to the commander of the Kagnew station for his excellent support to the UN mission, provided through intercepts. Most of the automatic high-speed Morse intercepted was commercial, and some of it related to Middle East oil deals. At its most active period Kagnew’s vast antennae farms sprawled over some 3,400 acres, and its five thousand personnel had all the facilities of a small town, including tennis courts and swimming pools. However, by 1969 this ideal spot for sigint collection was threatened by growing fighting between the Ethiopian military, which was supported by the Americans, and the rebel Eritrean Liberation Front, backed by Syria and the Soviet Union.67 By 1972 there were only nine hundred personnel, and by 1974 Kagnew was simply a relay station for nuclear submarine communications, with a staff of little over a hundred. Two kidnapping episodes in 1975 helped accelerate its final closure in 1977.68

  In June 1973 American officials in London explained to the British that they had been forced ‘to reduce certain activities conducted by the US Army at Kagnew Station, Asmara’, and the most practical way of compensating for this would be the enlargement of the station on Diego Garcia. This would restore ‘coverage in Gulf of Oman, Arabian Sea and Western Indian Ocean, where Kagnew phase-out would have caused temporary degradation’ to signals intelligence operations.69 The British were taken aback at this ‘very considerable’ expansion of the facilities.70 The cost of Diego Garcia now doubled. Part of the increased expenditure was for a sigint system designed to track Soviet submarines. The American trump card was ongoing support for Britain’s own nuclear strategic submarines: Kissinger and Schlesinger did not hesitate to link Diego Garcia to ongoing discussions about the successor to the Polaris system that formed the core of the British nuclear deterrent. Kissinger specifically referred to a recent message from Heath to Nixon enquiring about this matter, adding that ‘A favourable reply on Diego Garcia would be very welcome and useful in the context of your message.’71 In fact the British Ambassador to Washington, Rowley Cromer, had already signalled to the Americans that the expansion of Diego Garcia would be conditional on ‘US willingness to assist Britain to carry through its Super Antelope program aimed at modernising and upgrading its Polaris submarine force’. Who articulated this deal first is unclear, but both sides saw it as a quid pro quo.72

  The deal almost came unstuck because of the confrontation about intelligence and bases between Heath and Kissinger in late 1973. The hot question was whether the Americans would be given what they called ‘unrestricted access’ to the base at Diego Garcia in a crisis.73 Having seen Heath restrict access to bases in both Cyprus and Britain during the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, Washington was not about to make the same mistake again. But Heath wanted precisely these sorts of restrictions on Diego Garcia. On 10 January 1974 Sir John Hunt warned Heath, ‘This will not be easy.’74 Three weeks later it was a hapless Hunt who was sent on a special mission to the White House to find an agreed formula. On 30 January he and Kissinger met at the White House with their officials. Kissinger, who clearly had the confrontations with Heath over intelligence flights in October 1973 fresh in his mind, explained that they might well be ‘confronted with the same sort of differences between our two Governments as there had been at the time of the Middle East War’. If Heath refused access in some future crisis, the Diego Garcia facilities on which America would have spent many millions would be ‘useless’. Britain ‘had to be realistic’.75

  With Hunt due to fly back to London within hours, he met Kissinger privately to try to resolve the deadlock. Their solution was a remarkable one. Publicly, the position would be a ‘joint decision’ on the use of the bases in a crisis, seemingly retaining the British veto. However, behind the scenes there would be a highly secret exchange of letters between Heath and Nixon that effectively changed this to mere consultation. Sure enough, on 5 February Heath wrote a carefully crafted letter assuring Nixon of this ‘on a very personal basis’. ‘These understandings are agreeable to me,’ replied Nixon.76 The British Embassy assured London that the exchange was being handled ‘very restrictively indeed in the White House’.77 />
  The difficulties that would dog Diego Garcia for years had only just begun. In September 1975 Harold Wilson was told by his officials that there were continuing problems with the indigenous population. ‘Our real difficulty,’ they admitted, ‘arises from the failure of the Mauritius Government to use the money we gave them to resettle those evacuated from Diego Garcia.’ Mauritius had been paid over £12 million, but this money had seemingly disappeared. Officials said that they were doing what they could to persuade the Mauritian government to meet their responsibilities, but they had been ‘dragging their feet’.78 Meanwhile, Diego Garcia became a byword for misrule, and a point of transatlantic friction. In 1981 the State Department complained that the local Royal Navy contingent that was supposed to keep order on the island was ‘unable to cope with spreading lawlessness’. It noted, ‘the drug problem is out of hand’, and that recently ‘rampaging construction workers and sailors reportedly have smashed up the British Club’.79

  In their different ways, events in Turkey, Cyprus and Diego Garcia are important examples of how the ruthless requirement for signals intelligence bases has impacted on the wider fabric of the international system. On Diego Garcia the effect was especially stark, translating into a Canute-like resistance to the end of empire and the cruel deportation of an island population. This was surely one of the more dismal episodes in recent British history. Many of the deportees were second- or third-generation islanders, for whom Diego Garcia was their rightful home. Ahead lay years of legal battles as the indigenous islanders attempted – unsuccessfully – to end their forced resettlement and achieve the right to return.80 When the original secret deal over Diego Garcia was done, Sir Paul Gore Booth, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, had expressed the British attitude frankly: ‘We must surely be very tough about this. The object of the exercise is to get some rocks which will remain ours. There will be no indigenous people except the seagulls…’81