INTELLIGENCE
LORDS OF THE RING H inside the new GCHQ
Don’t breathe a word, but Eye Spy has gained access to the government’s new top secret GCHQ building in Cheltenham...
e was supposed to have been a professional. He should have known better, but in the end he could not resist. Using a satellite phone, the senior al-Qaida operative excitedly called two associates and congratulated them on their cold-blooded assassination of an American diplomat. The call cost the man his liberty. It may yet cost him his life. Though he would not have known it at the time, his telephone call to two men accused of murdering the US diplomat Laurence Foley in October 2002 - killed in the garden of his Amman home by a volley of
eight shots - was a fatal error. The call was intercepted by Britain’s electronic eavesdroppers at GCHQ, Cheltenham, and allowed coalition spooks to track the man from northern Iraq, to Syria, to Turkey - then straight into the arms of the waiting CIA.
most powerful intelligence gathering agency. Encouraged by its biggest budget increase since the end of the cold war, GCHQ is now in the process of moving into a new £1.1 billion headquarters in the Cheltenham suburb of Benhall.
Four months later, the information extracted from the man in a Turkish interrogation cell was to play a major role in US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s address to the UN Security Council accusing the Iraqi regime of having links to al-Qaida - thus helping to pave the way for Gulf War II. “Iraqi officials deny accusations of ties with al-Qaida,” said Powell. “These denials are simply not credible.”
Popularly known as ‘the doughnut,’ the four-story building is an amazing sight, looking for all the world as though an alien space ship has landed amid the rows of sleepy semis. At its heart lies a huge courtyard garden, bigger than the Albert Hall, which serves as a green refuge for the 4,000 linguists, code breakers, mathematicians and other experts who will clock into GCHQ each morning to wage covert war against the world’s most dangerous terrorists and criminals.
It was a classic example of the top secret work that goes on at GCHQ, Britain’s The smart outer glass facde of GCHQ’s new headquarters
Beneath the turf lurks a four-metre high blast-proof concrete vault, the length and breadth of Wembley Stadium, which houses banks of super mainframes that comprise the most powerful computer system in Europe. These feed an IT set-up of vast complexity, zapping their signals around the doughnut via 5,500 miles of cabling and 6,000 miles of electrical wiring.
US diplomat Laurence Foley (centre)
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