Word: nato
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...clearly off to a bad start, even though penitent Turkish authorities promptly sacked the security chief and promised to send the forgetful official to some Turkish equivalent of Siberia. That night at dinner, President Cevdet Sunay gently reminded his guest that Turkey intended to remain a staunch member of NATO. Formerly, he said, Turkey had worked as hard as France for an East-West détente, but the occupation of Czechoslovakia had "unfortunately shown us that our optimism was too great...
Public Wish. In private talks, De Gaulle reportedly only echoed his public wish that Turkey "remain her own mistress" and conceded that Turkey's special "geographic, strategic and economic position" required it to remain an active NATO partner. That, for De Gaulle, was in itself quite a concession. Had the Czechoslovakian invasion not occurred, the general would certainly have done his best to persuade his hosts to drop out of NATO...
First there was the mysterious death of Rear Admiral Hermann Lüdke, suspected of photographing NATO documents for a foreign power. Then came the suicides of four other West Germans involved in government or defense work. West German counterintelligence agents had only begun to sort all that out when Bonn admitted yet another serious-and bizarre-security gaffe. Attorney General Ludwig Martin announced that three men had been arrested for providing the Soviet Union with secret equipment, including a U.S.-designed missile, stolen from a supposedly tightly guarded NATO base...
Ludke had held a CTS (Cosmic Top Secret) clearance in the SHAPE job and knew the most sensitive details of NATO logistics: the capacities of European ports, transport, defense industries; the location of nuclear weapons depots and ordnance stockpiles of the NATO armies, virtually down to the number of available artillery rounds. The photos suggested that he might be transmitting secrets to NATO's enemies...
Weakest Link. Most Germans are fairly inured to espionage cases. Their country, with an estimated 6,000 foreign agents operating inside its borders, has long been considered NATO's weakest security link. But even the most cynical were soon fascinated, for Ludke's death marked the beginning of an astonishing wave of suicides among government officials. On the day of Ludke's death, Major General Horst Wendland. 56, deputy chief of the Federal Intelligence Service, Bonn's equivalent of the CIA, shot himself in his office. The government explanation: he was despondent over an "incurable depressive...