Will The GCHQ Operation In Tehran Close?

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia of the GCHQ site.

Image by Iqra Newspaper via Flickr

 As of going to press I am not yet aware that our embassy has been closed, although it has been raided by students. The Iranian government has apologised and it would appear that their security forces protected the staff inside.

 As published on this blog before it would appear that Iran is now the number one target of the west ( and  the Israeli government ) in the middle-east. I have no particular truck with the way the Iranians work, but to ordinary Iranians life seems to be better than in the days when the west supported their friend, the Shah of Persia, whose autocratic regime tolerated no opposition and whose intelligence forces co-operated with those in the west. We heard no outrages against human rights suppression, in those days in exactly the same way that there is none today against the Saudis who ruthlessly crush any opposition in their country, including officially sanctioned torture and murder. When their tanks crushed the Arab Spring protesters in Bahrain opposition to this was confined to a few human rights organisations in the west and similarly I have not seen any protests by the USA or the UK governments to the ruthless put down of opposition forces in the Yemen.

 These double standards make a mockery of the west's support for the Arab spring, where it only intervenes to replace one set of gangsters with another (Libya being the latest example). However attempts to influence what is going on in the middle east may yet rebound on them, big time, and it will be interesting to see what emerges in Egypt, where there are indications that those demonstrating against the military regime may not represent the views of the wider population.

 Anyway, dear reader, as ever I have meandered off of the subject. One of the reasons that the British may not close their embassy in Tehran is that some of the supposed diplomats will be staff from GCHQ monitoring the diplomatic and military communication of the Iranians. This will be providing valuable intelligence to the west as, where better to have a listening station than in the middle of Tehran. Any decision to close the embassy, by the British authorities, will have to way up the effect of what the loss of this intelligence will mean.