GCHQ. Richard Aldrich

home the complexity of these installations’ and ‘their vital importance’. Officials came up with the preposterous idea of using service personnel in civilian clothes in the hope of assuaging the Ceylonese.⁵² Bandaranaike stamped his foot, insisting that all the British, however attired, had to go. A compromise was agreed: ‘The GCHQ station can be given up entirely, but we should like to keep it in operation for five years.’ Ultimately, Britain had lost the best site in the Indian Ocean.⁵³

      GCHQ felt the reverberations of Suez elsewhere. In Iraq, Britain enjoyed a good relationship with the ruler King Faisal. As a result, the British had been allowed to retain a number of bases. One of these was RAF Habbaniya, not far from Baghdad. Superficially this looked like so many military aerodromes in the Middle East, but in fact it housed 123 Signals Squadron, later 276 Signals Squadron, which ran a large sigint monitoring station. Airborne sigint flights from Habbaniya crossed into Iran, and then loitered over the Caspian Sea. However, as a result of Suez, Faisal’s political situation deteriorated rapidly, with uprisings in the cities of Najaf and Hayy. Iraq’s membership of the Baghdad Pact, a British-managed military alliance, only exacerbated popular hatred of the regime. Then, in the summer of 1958, Faisal’s ally, King Hussein of Jordan, asked for military assistance during a growing crisis in the Lebanon. The Iraqi Army put together an expeditionary force, but in the early hours of 14 July 1958 the assembled column turned against its own supreme commander, marched right into Baghdad and carried out a coup. Revolutionary officers arrived at the Royal Palace at 8 o’clock in the morning and ordered the King, his immediate family and his personal servants into the courtyard. They were politely asked to turn away from their captors, whereupon they were machine-gunned. Most died instantly, but Faisal survived a few hours. Fortunately, GCHQ intercepts of Egyptian diplomatic traffic gave precise information about Nasser’s parallel plots against the King of neighbouring Jordan a few days later, prompting timely British support for the beleaguered monarch.⁵⁴

      However, Britain’s time in Iraq was now up, and the final departure from RAF Habbaniya was anything but orderly. The vast base had quickly been occupied by the Iraqi Fourth Armoured Division, and the British had even been denied access to their own signals installations and aerial farms. Most of the RAF’s 276 Signals Unit were evacuated to temporary tented accommodation on Cyprus, where they continued their interception work amid terrible conditions. Three hundred personnel remained at Habbaniya, presiding over the residual technical facilities and stores. They were continually provoked by Iraqi forces, and it was not unusual for them to ‘end up in the Iraqi guard room’. Although much of the radio equipment had been removed, the remnants included specialist signals vehicles, machine tools and fuel, together with the entire contents of a nearby RAF hospital.⁵⁵