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500 GCHQ GOES GLOBAL
in on the high-frequency radios used by the Army and the
RUC. 43
Intelligence was no less vital during the mid-1990s, when
the British government had entered into tentative dialogue with
the Republicans. Key participants included Sinn Fein's Martin
McGuinness and senior British government figures including
Mo Mowlam, the Northern Ireland Secretary, and Jonathan
Powell, Tony Blair's Chief of Staff. Blair's immediate circle soon
noticed that the Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams was sensitive
to surveillance, and 'went without a mobile ... because he
knew he could be tracked on it'.44 Like not a few government
Ministers, Mo Mowlam struggled to deal with the intricacies of
using intercepts. She was regularly provided with transcripts of
IRA conversations derived from surveillance, yet she would
discuss sensitive political subjects, such as her battle to stop the
Prime Minister sacking her, with Martin McGuinness in circumstances
in which she was also likely to be captured by British
technical collection. More alarmingly, she sometimes introduced
details into her conversations with Adams and McGuinness that
she could only have been privy to from technical collection.
This led the Republicans to uncover listening devices in one of
their key safe houses. In May 1998 the security agencies accused
Mowlam of revealing a listening operation that had been
mounted against Gerry Kelly, a leading Sinn Fein official living
in Belfast. A wooden rafter in his house had been hollowed out
and packed full of listening equipment, which had been
providing good intelligence for three years.45 Needless to say,
the intelligence and security services did not consider Mo
Mowlam their all-time-favourite Northern Ireland Secretary.
The most striking physical feature of GCHQ's participation in
the imelligence war against the IRA was a lSO-foot-high concrete
tower built in 1989 within a secure compound at Capenhurst
in Cheshire owned by British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. It was on a
direct line between the British Telecom Medium Wave Tower
at Holyhead in Anglesey and another tower at Sutton Common
near Macclesfield, a microwave link which carried most of the