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466 GCHQ GOES GLOBAL
with the Kuwaiti royal family. Back in January 1965, shortly
after Joe Hooper took aver from Clive Loehnis as Director of
GCHQ, one of his first tasks was to discuss the future of a small
GCHQ team in Kuwait whose brief was to constantly sweep the
airwaves for signs of an Iraqi attack. 'While the team was a
reasonable insurance factor in providing timely warning of an
external attack,' he explained to the JIC, 'it could do little or
nothing to give Sigint warning of internal unrest or a coup:
Hooper was pressed for resources, and wondered whether the
team's task could be carried out by the bigger sigint stations on
Cyprus. However, GCHQ did not want to suffer the 'loss of
tactical Sigint information on the Basra brigade', the key unit
of the Iraqi Army. This could only be collected at short range,
so it decided the team should stay in place. 4 Sigint against Iraq
did not operate in isolation. There was also regular photographic
intelligence from a Canberra photo reconnaissance aircraft flying
along the edge of the Iraqi frontier to detect an Iraqi military
build-up. In an emergency, typically a warning from SIS or
GCHQ, British diplomats in the Persian Gulf could order highlevel
photographic flights over the Basra area of southern Iraq,
penetrating up to fifty-five miles inside the border, to confirm
or disprove indications of a coming attack. 5
No less than twenty-five years later, the alert system worked.
On 27 July 1990, five days before Iraq's attack on Kuwait, the
JIC gave a clear warning that aggression was likely.6 Although
no one spotted the precise timing, warning signals continued
to grow. 7 On 29 July, Iraq's Soviet-built long-range radar units,
code-named 'Tall King', became very active, having been silent
for some months. There was now a considerable programme of
satellite monitoring of Iraq, mostly through imagery, which was
expected to provide twenty-four hours' notice of an attack.
However, despite warnings of troops massing on the Kuwait
border, the prevailing thinking in the White House and Downing
Street was that this was a bluff. What had made anticipating
Iraq's intentions harder was the sophisticated training that the
United States had itself offered to the country in the mid-1980s