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A SURPRISE ATTACK - THE FALKLANDS WAR 415
French were our greatest allies.' This included considerable assistance
with signals intelligence. Recent revelations suggest that
sigint from French Guyana, and also from the Dutch site at
Eemnes, was important in assisting the British effort. 92 Margaret
Thatcher also pronounced Mitterrand to be an 'absolutely
staunch' ally.93 Not only did the French refuse to hand over the
Exocets that the Argentineans had already paid for, they offered
the British details of the electronic signatures of the missiles.
The Spanish also proved to be firm friends, shutting down a
covert operation by an Argentine underwater demolition team
to attack British ships at Gibraltar. Surprisingly, Israel supplied
weapons and training to the neo-fascist Argentinean regime
during the conflict. This continued after the war, when the
Israelis refitted three Argentinean Air Force 707s of the 'Burglar'
variety with new sigint equipment so they became the equivalent
of Britain's Nimrod Rl listening aircraft. 94
The Falklands War was profoundly important for the development
of British sigint, and triggered GCHQ's ill-fated experiment
with an independent sigint satellite system in the
mid -1980s. During the Falklands War, American defence and
intelligence agencies had certainly been very helpful. NSA had
allowed the retargeting of one of its powerful sigint satellites
for a few hours each day, and handed the 'take' over to GCHQ.
After some argument, imagery satellites had also been diverted
at considerable financial cost, since their operational lives were
shortened. However, this episode also illuminated a dangerous
dependency on American satellite technology for future military
operations. By 1983 Cheltenham had begun to ask, what
would happen if one day the Americans decided not to be quite
so accommodating Flushed with success from a good sigint
performance in the Falklands campaign, GCHQ's Director, Brian
Tovey, now stepped forward with a proposal. The result was
plans for GCHQ's own sigint satellite, code-named 'Zircon' - by
far the most secret British defence project of the 1980s. 95