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A SURPRISE ATTACK - THE FALKLANDS WAR 403
telephone link using Skynet, which allowed the operations room
at Cheltenham to talk directly to the intelligence officers on the
ship. However, distribution to lower levels was more difficult.
As Denton Green observed, the Falklands War was 'very strange',
and many arrangements had to be improvised. 60
A set of bizarre circumstances soon made communications yet
more difficult. In common with many British government agencies
in the 1980s, GCHQ was now required to outsource its
building maintenance rather than relying on a local workforce.
Some weeks into the Falklands War, a gang of contractors
appeared outside the Falklands operations room in Cheltenham
and announced that they had come to resurface the roof. In
times gone by they would have been sent away with a flea in
their ear, but this would now involve hefty cancellation charges.
So, with the nerve centre of sigint operations operating below,
the labourers began work on the roof of the single-storey office
building, ripping off the old felt, spreading fresh sealant and
recovering. Vats of boiling tar surrounded the hapless sigint
teams. As late spring turned to early summer the temperature
rose, but the windows could not be opened. The tar men were
not cleared for comint, or indeed any kind of 'int'. For a week,
conversations with HMS Hermes were hilarious. The intelligence
officer on Woodward's staff would say, 'Hang on, I can't hear
you. Some Harriers are just taking off!' Cheltenham would reply,
'Well, we can't hear you either, there's too much banging on
the roof!'61
During late April, even as the Task Force headed south,
General Alexander Haig, Reagan's Secretary of State, had been
engaged in a slightly comic reprise of Kissinger's famous 1970s
'Shuttle Diplomacy'. Presenting himself to Margaret Thatcher
as an honest broker, he had been subjected to a severe tonguelashing
by the Prime Minister, in which she made ready comparisons
between the military dictators in Buenos Aires and Adolf
Hitler. Despite her obvious vexations at American attempts to
play the honest broker, Thatcher entered into the diplomatic
exchanges in good faith. Rather to her relief, on 19 April the