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FROM COLD WAR TO HOT PEACE 467
during the war between Iraq and Iran. This included lessons on
secure communications, encouraging the extensive use of landlines
with fibre-optic cables, together with many reserve communication
channels. Nevertheless, the intelligence community had
warned of a likely invasion, but political leaders simply
discounted it. As with the Falklands, they had difficulty with
the concept that there were old-fashioned military dictators
around who still liked going to war.8 Reassurances from Egypt's
President Hosni Mubarak that, despite the military build-up,
nothing would happen also misled the West. 9
Operation 'Desert Storm', designed to retake Kuwait, was
unleashed on 17 January 1991 with a wave of air attacks. Oddly,
this conflict resembled the vast tank battles that NATO had
prepared to fight with the Soviets in central Europe during the
Cold War. The United States supplied by far the largest component
of troops, and Britain the next. Ranged alongside them
were contributions from France, Australia and many Middle
Eastern states, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Once the Gulf
War began in earnest, British and American sigint experts
became involved ill complex discussions about how much of
the Iraqi signals infrastructure should be left intact to permit
continued monitoring, perhaps with the intention of locating
Saddam Hussein. They also had to think about their own deception
operations, which were distributing false orders to Iraqi
battalions. British forces conducted a classic operational deception,
superintended by a unit code-named 'Rhino Force'. On
several field exercises by Britain's First Armoured Division,
messages were transmitted on low power to avoid interception
by Iraqi signals intelligence units. During the actual ground
attack, on 23 January, recordings of these earlier transmissions
were played back at full power. They were then heard clearly
by the Iraqis. By that time most of the British forces had moved
about 125 miles to the west to link up with the main US Seventh
Army Corps in their attack, yet the Iraqis thought they were
heading in the opposite direction. The British tuned in to what
remained of the Iraqi command network, and further signals