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DISASTER AT KIZILDERE 301
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 intelligence 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.