604 • ZIRCON
any other living person, otherwise the Secret Service would be an
impossibility.’’
While Sinclair’s original error may have been made in good faith,
his subsequent cover-up made him all the more culpable. Equally, it
must have seemed to him that further lies were more attractive than
the grave constitutional crisis into which the country would have
fallen, knowing that SIS’s intervention during a general election
campaign was certainly believed by the Labour party to have helped
change history.ZIRCON. GCHQcode name for a satellite system designed to inter-
cept Soviet signals while in geostationary orbit. Although planned
for many years, as a successor to the U.S.National Security
Agency’srhyoliteprogram, it failed to win treasury backing until
theFalklandsconflict of 1982 served to highlight British depen-
dency on signals intelligence and GCHQ’s lack of resources. The
true cost of the highly secret and expensive project, amounting to
$700 million, had been concealed within the Ministry of Defence’s
budget, and when details leaked in January 1978 the BBC offices in
Glasgow were raided and an injunction issued to prevent publication.
The project was later scrapped on grounds of cost, and GCHQ agreed
to participate in an NSA alternative, codenamedmagnum.
ZU PUTLITZ, WOLFGANG.The son of a famous aristocratic family
from Potsdam, Wolfgang zu Putlitz sought to join the German diplo-
matic corps after his service in a Uhlan Guards regiment in Finland
during the World War I. He already had a knowledge of French, but
to improve his grasp of English the Prussian nobleman traveled to
England in 1924 with an introduction toIona von Ustinov, better
known simply as ‘‘Klop,’’ who was then the London correspondent
of a German newspaper and fulfilled the role of a press attache ́at the
embassy. Zu Putlitz stayed with the Ustinovs and spent several weeks
at Oxford, where he became friendly with several undergraduates,
including a youngGraham Greene.
Upon his return to Berlin, zu Putlitz passed the Foreign Ministry
examinations and was posted to the German embassy in Washington,
D.C. He spent five years in America, latterly as charge ́d’affaires in
Haiti, before he returned to Berlin to be put in charge of the press
section dealing with British and American journalists.