Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy became very aware that in more than a few cases during that emergency, the President, as National Command Authority, did not have positive control of all the nuclear assets of the United States.  In some cases, military officers as low as brigadier generals had authority to use nuclear weapons without direction from higher levels of the Department of Defense or the White House.  To eliminate this problem, President Kennedy directed the Department of Defense to create a secure, reliable, rapid way to communicate with American Forces anywhere in the world.

You can view of copy of his instruction, now on file at the JFK Presidential Library, by clicking here.

More info is available from the Federation of American Scientists at this link.

The United States Logistics Group, Detachment 150, located at Sahintepe, Turkey, which was a major Air Force communications link, but a very small military installation resulting from President Kennedy's order on improving command and control.  More than eighty percent of the secure and insecure communications to the American forces, Turkish General Staff and Turkish military forces passed through Sahintepe's radio antennas, receivers and transmitters.

To understand the complexity of the communications problem discovered by President Kennedy in the midst of a nuclear crisis, consider US forces were deployed within just the Republic of Turkey in the 1960s:

• Large main bases like Incirlik Air Base near Adana in southern Turkey and Karamursel Air Base in Izmit in northwest Turkey
• Headquarters bases such as NATO's Sixth Allied Air Force (6th ATAF) housed in various office buildings in the western city of Izmir
• Medium sized Honest John NATO missile base at Izmit across the Sea of Marmara from Istanbul
• Tiny radio sites at Alemdag in Istanbul's suburbs, Elmadag which overlooked the capital city of Ankara, and Sahintepe which was located at the top of a 3,000 foot mountain located about ten miles northeast of the coastal town of Gemlik in Bursa province

 Turkish nationals stated in 1982 that the first Americans arrived in early 1963 with radio trucks and the semi-temporary buildings were built in the next few years afterwards.  The radio systems used were microwave and tropospheric communications.  "Tropo", as it was called, was a technique for bouncing radio waves from one site off the troposphere in the sky to another site on the ground.  TUSLOG Detachment 150 bounced off the troposphere when relaying data and voice communications from the TUSLOG unit at Yamanlar outside Izmir to the west and Elmadag outside Ankara to the southwest.

TUSLOG Detachment 150 was renamed Detachment 12, 2006 Communications Group in the mid-1980s and closed in the mid-1990s during the post-war overseas base closure program.