On March 28, 1972, British Secretary of State for Defense Lord Carrington stood up in the House of Lords and read a statement:

“I regret to inform the House that three Ministry of Defense civilian radar operators, working with the Turkish Air Force, were kidnapped on the evening of March 26 at Unye, on the Black Sea coast of Turkey.”

The operators’ names were Gordon Banner, John Law and Charles Turner. They were neither civilian technicians as Lord Carrington claimed nor members of the NATO staff as their kidnappers believed them to be. They were undercover intelligence officers working for the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) –  a British state secret that would not be revealed until the incident was discussed in the House of Commons in 1984. (Edward Snowden was not even born in 1972 and four decades had to pass before his leaks would turn the signals intelligence operations of GCHQ — along with the US and Israeli mass surveillance programs — into a widely discussed news item around the world.)

In fact, the real identity of those three men had nothing to do with the plight that awaited them. They were held captive in a house in the inland village of Kizildere by eleven young militants who hoped to use them to bargain for the release of three members of the Peoples’ Liberation Army of Turkey (THKO) that were put on the death row by the government.