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THATCHER AND THE GCHQ TRADE UNION BAN 423
about a closer relationship with the BND, and was investing
heavily in its station at Bad Aibling in Germany. America had
also repaired its relationship with TUrkey, reducing the value of
Cyprus. Vernon thought that jobs at some of GCHQ's outstations
were in jeopardy. IS Mike Bradshaw, another union official,
admits that the CSU's tactics between 1979 and 1981
included trying to embarrass GCHQ in front of its American
partners. If the intention was to provoke a reaction, it worked. 19
Exactly why Margaret Thatcher chose to confront the unions
over GCHQ in January 1984, rather than in 1981, remains a
mystery. Brian Tovey had discussed the union matter at length
with his board of directors in 1980, and had drawn up a secret
plan for de-unionisation, code-named 'Status',2° He formally
asked the government for a union ban following the CSU's 9
March 1981 day of action, but as in the 1950s and 1960s,
government Ministers recoiled in horror. The main opponent
was the Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington, who objected on
principle, viewing trade union membership as a basic human
right. Even within the Permanent Secretaries' Committee on
the Intelligence Services (PSIS), Sir Douglas Vass at the Treasury
and Frank Cooper at the Ministry of Defence argued that it
would cause too much trouble.21 Francis Pym, Carrington's
successor as Foreign Secretary in 1982, would also have nothing
to do with the idea of a union ban at GCHQ.22
Margaret Thatcher later misrepresented this. Hiding ministerial
dissent, she insisted that the reason no action was taken in
1981 was because it would have drawn undue attention to
GCHQ's intelligence-gathering activities, which were not yet
publicly avowed. By contrast, she claimed after the Geoffrey Prime
affair of 1982 that the truth about GCHQ's duties was in the
openY This is simply not a plausible explanation. The real nature
of GCHQ had been revealed to the Russians by countless defectors,
including the NSA operatives Martin and Mitchell in 1960,
and to the British public by Duncan Campbell and the infamous
ABC trial in 1978. 24 So what suddenly changed Margaret
Thatcher'S mind in 1984 Part of the reason was politics. Lord