However, GCHQ maintains a “nothing held back” relationship with the most powerful intelligence-gathering organization on earth, whose activities are rooted in the deep black of space. From there America’s National Security Agency (NSA) uses its armada of satellites to spy on the globe. The threat of terrorism has increased NSA’s power; fresh targets are added to its electronic shopping lists by the CIA and other members of the U.S. intelligence community.
NSA cost more than $4 billion to run in 2005, employed twenty-seven thousand full-time experts, analysts, and technicians, plus a team of shredders to dispose of forty tons of paper a day; it also could call upon a hundred thousand U.S. servicemen and civilians scattered around the world. Part of its budget is spent on running highly secret listening posts in Britain: at Chicksands in Bedfordshire, Edzell in Scotland, Brawdy in Wales, and, the largest of all, at Menwith Hill near Harrogate in the north of England. All are linked to GCHQ and its own monitoring stations in Cyprus, West Germany, and Australia. It ensures nowhere is beyond surveillance.
Behind NSA’s double-chain fence, topped by barbed wire interwoven with electric strands, its acres of computers vacuum the entire electromagnetic global spectrum, homing in on a dictionary of key words in scores of languages. Nothing politically, economically, or militarily significant in a telephone call, a conversation in the office of the secretary general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, in a fax or an e-mail, escapes NSA’s attention. While the UN headquarters in New York is sovereign territory and placing a bug there is illegal under international law, it is routinely done by NSA and GCHQ to spy on hostile countries and those deemed to be friendly to the United States and Britain; the latter are spied upon mainly for commercial reasons or to give London and Washington an edge on diplomatic negotiations. NATO allies are also under regular surveillance at the UN, and Mossad keeps a yaholomin unit in New York to spy on Arab and other missions.
The material finds its way through the electronic corridors of the intelligence community in Washington and London, and on to Tel Aviv. In turn, Mossad reveals intelligence to NSA and GCHQ on a need-to-know basis. Master copies of NSA data are stored in temperature-controlled vaults underground. Somewhere among the library of secrets are the 1,015 intercepts of surveillance it admits to carrying out on Princess Diana and Dodi al-Fayed in the weeks before their deaths in Paris. In 2005, NSA continued to resist all attempts by Dodi’s father, Mohammed, to obtain copies of the intercepts, insisting they contained material of “national importance.”
In the run-up to the war with Iraq, both agencies combined to provide their political masters—ultimately President George Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair—with sensitive private conversations of at least one leader who had steadfastly pledged his support for the war.
On February 9, 2003, Sir Richard Dearlove, then the dapper, soft-spoken director general of Britain’s MI6, had by early afternoon made several telephone calls about a surveillance operation to be mounted against Spain’s prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar, Spain’s ambassador at the United Nations, and senior officers at the Foreign Ministry in Madrid. Code named Condor, the operation was marked “Beyond Secret,” the highest classification MI6 shared with GCHQ and NSA.
Dearlove had spoken to George Tenet, the director of the CIA. Each had a high regard for the other; they were professionals at the top of the increasingly murky world intelligence gathering had become in the run-up to the war with Iraq. It was a world where, in the memorable words of Britain’s former prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, “no one could surprise like a friend.”
Deeply embattled over the coming war with Iraq, Tony Blair had secretly agreed for Aznar, a man he called a “trusted friend,” to be spied upon. Britain and America—Blair and Bush—wanted to be absolutely certain that their Spanish ally in the imminent conflict remained as steadfast in his commitment behind the scenes as Aznar did in public. Over 95 percent of Spaniards either opposed going to war or were lukewarm about the idea. “There was an air of crisis, verging on panic in both Downing Street and the White House,” recalled George Galloway, a maverick Labour MP—and later founder of the Respect Party—and regarded by Blair as a leader of the antiwar movement growing in Britain. “For Aznar to crack under pressure would be a disaster.”
