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NSA AND THE ZIRCON PROJECT 455
expand its coverage of sub-Saharan Africa, and at a meeting
with his senior staff an 16 July 1986 adorn expressed high
hopes of an ambitious new GCHQ covert collection operation
that was being mounted from the British Embassy in Luanda,
the Angolan capital. He also pondered using more sigint ships,
and asking the BND to do some work in southern Africa. South
Africa's communications security was improving, with burst
transmission and frequency-hopping, forcing GCHQ and NSA
to concentrate on clear voice traffic. 62
Terrorism was now an extremely high-profile concern, with
Libya the main focus because it was directly aiding terrorist
groups in the West, including the IRA. Indeed, a low-level war
with Libya was gradually developing. During the early 1980s
the eccentric Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, had
become increasingly paranoid about dissidents and exiles who
opposed his regime. After hanging two students outside the
gates of Tripoli University, he had ordered his secret service to
attack what he called 'stray dogs' abroad, resulting in a series
of bombings and shootings against opposition groups based in
Britain. With the help of MIS, three Libyan assassins were caught
and sentenced to life imprisonment. Some of these attacks had
been organised from within the Libyan Embassy at S St James's
Square in London, now renamed the 'Libyan People's Bureau'.
GCHQ was decoding Libyan communications freely, and during
the early 1980s it had intercepted several of Gaddafi's alarming
messages demanding violent action. 63
However, on the morning of Tuesday, 17 April 1984 the British
authorities were taken unawares by a new wave of violence.
Seventy-five demonstrators were protesting outside the Libyan
People's Bureau over the recent execution of further students
in Tripoli who had been critical of Gaddafi, and the police were
trying to keep them separate from an angry group of pro-Gaddafi
loyalists. At 10.18 a.m. a prolonged burst of automatic fire from
two Sterling sub-machine guns came from the windows of the
Libyan People's Bureau, resulting in the death of twenty-fiveyear-old
WPC Yvonne Fletcher. Eleven demonstrators were also