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16
Disaster at I(izildere
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 1972 1
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 telephonetapping
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,