GCHQ. Richard Aldrich
Faisal’s political situation deteriorated rapidly, with uprisings in the cities of Najaf and Hayy. Iraq’s membership of the Baghdad Pact, a British-managed military alliance, only exacerbated popular hatred of the regime. Then, in the summer of 1958, Faisal’s ally, King Hussein of Jordan, asked for military assistance during a growing crisis in the Lebanon. The Iraqi Army put together an expeditionary force, but in the early hours of 14 July 1958 the assembled column turned against its own supreme commander, marched right into Baghdad and carried out a coup. Revolutionary officers arrived at the Royal Palace at 8 o’clock in the morning and ordered the King, his immediate family and his personal servants into the courtyard. They were politely asked to turn away from their captors, whereupon they were machine-gunned. Most died instantly, but Faisal survived a few hours. Fortunately, GCHQ intercepts of Egyptian diplomatic traffic gave precise information about Nasser’s parallel plots against the King of neighbouring Jordan a few days later, prompting timely British support for the beleaguered monarch.[55]
GCHQ intercepts clearly made a difference. As David Easter shows, on 17 July, Macmillan chose to have an unusual cross-party meeting with Hugh Gaitskell, the Labour opposition leader, to set out the reason why he had despatched forces to Amman. The Prime Minister chose to reveal to Gaitskell that he had seen ‘the intercepts’ that confirmed Nasser’s active plots in Jordan. Various figures including Duncan Sandys and Julian Amery were already agitating for intervention, but it was only when GCHQ material arrived on 16 July that the cabinet swung behind Macmillan and opted to join with the Americans in sending troops. The British deployment in Jordan complimented the despatch of American marines to the Lebanon.[56]
However, Britain’s time in Iraq was now up, and the final departure from RAF Habbaniya was anything but orderly. The vast base had quickly been occupied by the Iraqi Fourth Armoured Division, and the British had even been denied access to their own signals installations and aerial farms. Most of the RAF’s 276 Signals Unit were evacuated to temporary tented accommodation on Cyprus, where they continued their interception work amid terrible conditions. Three hundred personnel remained at Habbaniya, presiding over the residual technical facilities and stores. They were continually provoked by Iraqi forces, and it was not unusual for them to ‘end up in the Iraqi guard room’. Although much of the radio equipment had been removed, the remnants included specialist signals vehicles, machine tools and fuel, together with the entire contents of a nearby RAF hospital.[57] The plan was for a massive ‘end of empire’ garage sale. Items from Habbaniya were offered to the new Ba’athist government. The Iraqi Army took the heavy weapons, explosives and ammunition, but were warned soberly that some of these were in ‘a dangerous or doubtful condition’. What materials the Iraqi government did not want were then sold publicly. However, in the revolutionary climate, the ensuing auction was pure bedlam. Such was the shouting and violence that the petrified auctioneer tried to sell off the entire stock of the base as one lot. Another sale, of vehicles, was sabotaged by the appearance of a small but violent nationalist mob whose members held ‘a rope noose … menacingly over the head of anybody who attempted to purchase’ anything. The end of the British Empire is often portrayed as a serene process, but in the Middle East its passing was neither orderly nor pleasant.[58]
Cyprus was now a vast GCHQ refugee camp, holding sigint personnel who had made their exodus from the listening stations at Sarafand in Palestine, Heliopolis in Egypt, and now Habbaniya. Over a thousand found themselves in a tented encampment at RAF Pergamos.[59] A special signals unit was already at the forty-three-acre site, which was dominated by aerials, but the refugees from Habbaniya represented a further unscheduled expansion.[60] Pergamos and the Army station run by 2 Wireless Regiment (soon renamed 9 Signals Regiment) at Ayios Nikolaos now constituted the key sigint stations in the region, with over a thousand personnel. Further west, there was a British sigint station at Dingli on Malta with 230 staff, and a few dozen on Ascension Island and at Gibraltar; but Cyprus was the leviathan.[61] Negotiations over the exact extent of the Sovereign Base Areas on Cyprus were ongoing, but at least for the time being, relations with the island’s authorities were relatively cordial.[62] The negotiations reached a climax in 1959. The British delegation, led by Julian Amery, Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, started with an extravagant bid for four hundred square miles of territory, and eventually settled for ninety-nine square miles.[63] By this time the aerials and antennae of the largest sigint base on Cyprus, Ayios Nikolaos, had begun to encroach on the municipal area of Famagusta itself. The ruler of Cyprus, Archbishop Makarios, protested, and GCHQ agreed that it could retreat a little without serious damage to its operations.[64]
The main problem for GCHQ was that the two Cyprus Sovereign Base Areas were increasingly expensive to run. This partly reflected an ongoing insurgency by a guerrilla force known as EOKA, which wanted unification or ‘enosis’ with Greece. Matters were made worse by the intense divisions between the Greek and Turkish communities on Cyprus. As a result, the security of the two sigint stations required a minimum land force garrison, including a heavy RAF presence. GCHQ’s extensive aerial farms were also vulnerable to sabotage. However, once the Chiefs of Staff had accepted that the major bases ‘must be retained because of the SIGINT facilities’, other things followed. Typically, the RAF decided to keep its main regional stockpile of nuclear weapons, code-named ‘Tuxedo’, at Dhekelia. In other words, while the Cyprus garrison was not there solely for sigint, it was the sigint facilities that made it irreplaceable.[65] The periodic outbreaks of inter-communal strife on Cyprus led to questions from the Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who asked in December 1963 whether Britain really needed bases there. Peter Thorneycroft, the Defence Secretary, responded with an unqualified yes, explaining that Cyprus ‘houses most important SIGINT stations and it also provided a base from which special reconnaissance flights are carried out’. Thorneycroft said that while most of the other activities could be relocated, intelligence was the sticking point, since it was ‘not considered that SIGINT facilities could be adequately replaced elsewhere’.[66]
The impact of GCHQ’s work in the Middle East is best illustrated by the Yemen Civil War. This conflict had its origins in a coup by the leader of Yemen’s republican faction, Abdullah as-Sallal, who overthrew the newly crowned Imam al-Badr in 1962. However, the Imam escaped and the royalist faction was soon receiving support from Saudi Arabia and, more covertly, from Britain, Jordan and Israel. Predictably, the republicans were supported by General Nasser, with perhaps seventy thousand Egyptian ‘volunteers’. King Hussein of Jordan pressed London to intervene on behalf of the Imam, and an elaborate mercenary operation was developed, using both SIS and the SAS. Sigint not only gave a detailed picture of Egyptian troop deployments, but also revealed tensions between republican ministers and the Chief of Staff of the Egyptian armed forces. The British reportedly found breaking the codes of Egyptian forces in the field ‘a bit of fun’, and also had no difficulty in reading higher-level diplomatic traffic. GCHQ intercepts seem to have been important in October 1962, informing the JIC, and later the Cabinet, about the morale of the Egyptian troops. The Governor of neighbouring Aden, Sir Charles Johnstone, had suggested that this was low, but intercepts showed quite the reverse. This prefigured a long struggle with the Egyptian proxies which dragged on until 1970.[67]
The Yemen conflict also illustrates the value of GCHQ intelligence in revealing one of the darkest aspects of war – the use of chemical weapons. It is now clear that, from December 1966, the Egyptians repeatedly used gas against Royalist villages. Although Cairo publicly denied using such diabolical weapons, the West had clear evidence that it was using poison gas. In 1967, the British noted that they had plenty of evidence at ‘a very high security classification.’ The Egyptians used both phosgene and mustard gas in their bombing raids. The source was communications between the Egyptian commanders in Yemen and Cairo.[68]
The most decisive role played by sigint was during the ‘Confrontation’ between Indonesia and the British-backed Federation of Malaysia during the early 1960s. In fact the ‘Confrontation’ was an undeclared war which involved troops from Britain, Australia and New Zealand. President Sukarno of Indonesia had decided that Britain’s creation of the Federation of Malaysia in 1962, which included parts of the island of Borneo, was an attempt to maintain a colonial presence by stealth and should be resisted. The first shots were fired in December 1962, when the Indonesian government attempted a coup against the Sultan of Brunei, an independent pro-British state on the island of Borneo. The Indonesians used a proxy force to try