{"id":97232,"date":"2017-08-21T12:00:20","date_gmt":"2017-08-21T11:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=97232"},"modified":"2017-08-20T16:43:58","modified_gmt":"2017-08-20T15:43:58","slug":"the-u-s-spy-hub-in-the-heart-of-australia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/08\/the-u-s-spy-hub-in-the-heart-of-australia\/","title":{"rendered":"The U.S. Spy Hub in the Heart of Australia"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Australian Defence Facilities Pine Gap in Feb. 19, 2016. Photo: Kristian Laemmle-Ruff\/@kristianlaemmleruff<\/p><\/div>\n

19 Aug 2017 \u2013 <\/em>A short drive south of Alice Springs, the second largest population center in Australia\u2019s Northern Territory, there is a high-security compound, codenamed \u201cRAINFALL.\u201d The remote base, in the heart of the country\u2019s barren outback, is one of the most important covert surveillance sites in the eastern hemisphere.<\/p>\n

Hundreds of Australian and American employees come and go every day from Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap, as the base is formally known. The official \u201ccover story,\u201d as outlined in a secret U.S. intelligence document, is to \u201csupport the national security of both the U.S. and Australia. The [facility] contributes to verifying arms control and disarmament agreements and monitoring military developments.\u201d But, at best, that is an economical version of the truth. Pine Gap has a far broader mission \u2014 and more powerful capabilities \u2014 than the Australian or American governments have ever publicly acknowledged.<\/p>\n

An investigation, published Saturday by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation<\/a> in collaboration with The Intercept, punctures the wall of secrecy surrounding Pine Gap, revealing for the first time a wide range of details about its function. The base is an important ground station from which U.S. spy satellites are controlled and communications are monitored across several continents, according to classified documents obtained by The Intercept from the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.<\/p>\n

Together with the NSA\u2019s Menwith Hill<\/a> base in England, Pine Gap has in recent years been used as a command post for two missions. The first, named M7600, involved at least two spy satellites and was said in a secret 2005 document to provide \u201ccontinuous coverage of the majority of the Eurasian landmass and Africa.\u201d This initiative was later upgraded as part of a second mission, named M8300, which involved \u201ca four satellite constellation\u201d and covered the former Soviet Union, China, South Asia, East Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and territories in the Atlantic Ocean.<\/p>\n

The satellites are described as being \u201cgeosynchronous,\u201d which means they are likely positioned high in orbit at more than 20,000 miles above the earth\u2019s surface. They are equipped with powerful surveillance technology used to monitor wireless communications on the ground, such as those sent and received by cellphones, radios, and satellite uplinks. They gather \u201cstrategic and tactical military, scientific, political, and economic communications signals,\u201d according to the documents, and also keep tabs on missile or weapons tests in targeted countries, sweep up intelligence from foreign military data systems, and provide surveillance support to U.S. forces.<\/p>\n

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An aerial image of the Pine Gap surveillance facility, located near Alice Springs in Australia\u2019s Northern Territory. Photo: BING<\/p><\/div>\n

Outside Pine Gap, there are some 38 radar dishes pointing skyward, many of them concealed underneath golfball-like shells. The facility itself is isolated, located beyond a security checkpoint on a road marked with \u201cprohibited area\u201d signs, about a 10-minute drive from Alice Springs, which has a population of about\u00a025,000 people. There is a large cohort of U.S. spy agency personnel stationed at the site, including employees of the NSA, the CIA, and the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that manages the spy satellites. Intelligence employees are joined by compatriots from the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force.<\/p>\n

Pine Gap \u201cplays a significant role in supporting both intelligence activities and military operations,\u201d according to a top-secret NSA report<\/a> dated from April 2013. One of its key functions is to gather geolocational intelligence, which can be used to help pinpoint airstrikes. The Australian base has a special section known as the \u201cgeopit\u201d for this function; it is equipped with \u201ca number of tools available for performing geolocations, providing a broad range of geolocation capabilities \u2026 in conjunction with other overhead, tactical, fixed site systems,\u201d notes an Aug. 2012 NSA \u201csite profile<\/a>\u201d of the facility.<\/p>\n

Richard Tanter, a professor at the University of Melbourne, has studied Pine Gap for years. He has co-authored, with Bill Robinson and the late Desmond Ball, several detailed reports about the base\u2019s activities for California-based security think tank\u00a0Nautilus Institute<\/a>. He reviewed the documents obtained by The Intercept, and said that they showed there had been a \u201chuge transformation\u201d in Pine Gap\u2019s function in recent history.<\/p>\n

The documents \u201cprovide authoritative confirmation that Pine Gap is involved, for example, in the geolocation of cellphones used by people throughout the world, from the Pacific to the edge of Africa,\u201d Tanter said. \u201cIt shows us that Pine Gap knows the geolocations \u2014 it derives the phone numbers, it often derives the content of any communications, it provides the ability for the American military to identify and place in real-time the location of targets of interest.\u201d<\/p>\n

The documents \u201cprovide authoritative confirmation that Pine Gap is involved in the geolocation of cellphones used by people throughout the world.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The base, which was built in the late 1960s, was once focused only on monitoring missile tests and other military-related activities in countries such as Russia, China, Pakistan, Japan, Korea, and India. But it is now doing \u201ca great deal more,\u201d said Tanter. It has shifted from \u201ca national level of strategic intelligence, primarily to providing intelligence \u2014 actionable, time-sensitive intelligence \u2014 for American operations in [the] battlefield.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2013, the Sydney Morning Herald reported<\/a> that Pine Gap played a key role in controversial U.S. drone strikes. Over the past decade, drone attacks have killed a number of top Al Qaeda, Islamic State, and Taliban militants. But the strikes \u2013 often taking place outside of declared war zones, in places such as Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan \u2013 have also resulted in the deaths of hundreds of civilians, and in some cases are considered by human rights advocates to constitute potential war crimes and violations of international law.<\/p>\n

The U.S. and its allies regularly use surveillance of communications as a tactic to track down and identify suspected militants. The NSA often locates drone targets by analyzing the activity of a cellphone\u2019s SIM card, rather than the content of the calls \u2013 an imprecise method than can lead to the wrong people being killed, as The Intercept has previously revealed. \u201cIt\u2019s really like we\u2019re targeting a cellphone,\u201d a former drone operator told us in 2014<\/a>. \u201cWe\u2019re not going after people \u2013 we\u2019re going after their phones, in the hopes that the person on the other end of that missile is the bad guy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Concerns about such tactics are amplified in the era of President Donald Trump. Since his inauguration earlier this year, Trump has dramatically increased drone strikes and special operations raids, while simultaneously\u00a0loosening<\/a> battlefield rules and seeking\u00a0to scrap constraints<\/a> intended to prevent civilian deaths in such attacks. According to analysis<\/a> from the group Airwars, which monitors U.S. airstrikes, civilian casualties in the U.S.-led war against the Islamic State are on track to double under Trump\u2019s administration.<\/p>\n

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Afghan villagers gather near a house destroyed in an apparent NATO raid in Logar province, south of Kabul, Afghanistan in Wednesday, June 6, 2012. Photo: Ihsanullah Majroh\/AP<\/p><\/div>\n

David Rosenberg, a 23-year veteran of the NSA who worked inside Pine Gap as a team leader for more than a decade, acknowledged that the base was used to \u201cgeolocate particular electronic transmissions.\u201d He told The Intercept and ABC that the base helps to \u201cprovide limitation of civilian casualties by providing accurate intelligence,\u201d and insisted that \u201cthe governments of Australia and the United States would of course want to minimize all civilian casualties.\u201d<\/p>\n

But that reassurance is unlikely to satisfy critics.<\/p>\n

Emily Howie, director of advocacy and research at Australia\u2019s Human Rights Law Centre<\/a>, said the Australian government needs to provide \u201caccountability and transparency\u201d on its role in U.S. drone operations. \u201cThe legal problem that\u2019s created by drone strikes is that there may very well be violations of the laws of armed conflict \u2026 and that Australia may be involved in those potential war crimes through the facility at Pine Gap,\u201d Howie said. \u201cThe first thing that we need from the Australian government is for it to come clean about exactly what Australians are doing inside the Pine Gap facility in terms of coordinating with the United States on the targeting using drones.\u201d<\/p>\n

For more than 100 years, Australia has been a close U.S. ally; the country has supported the American military in every major war since the early 1900s. This relationship was formalized in 1951, when Australia and the U.S. signed the ANZUS Treaty<\/a>, a mutual defense agreement. Australia is also a member of the Five Eyes surveillance alliance, alongside the U.S., the United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand. The country\u2019s electronic eavesdropping agency, the Australian Signals Directorate, maintains extremely close ties with its American counterparts at the NSA. The agencies have a \u201cmutually beneficial partnership,\u201d according to one top-secret NSA document<\/a>. While the NSA shares its \u201ctechnology, cryptanalytic capabilities, and resources for state-of-the-art collection, processing and analytic efforts,\u201d the Australians provide access to Pine Gap; they also hand over \u201cterrorism-related communications collected inside Australia,\u201d plus intelligence on some neighboring countries in their region, such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first thing we need from the government is for it to come clean about exactly what Australians are doing inside Pine Gap.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The relationship\u2019s foundations are strong, but some cracks may be beginning to appear. This was highlighted in late January when, after just two weeks in the Oval Office, Trump had a contentious first conversation with Australia\u2019s prime minister Malcolm Turnbull. Trump berated<\/a> his Australian counterpart over the terms of a refugee deal and abruptly ended the call, describing it as \u201cridiculous\u201d and \u201cunpleasant.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Trump has adopted a more confrontational tone with China \u2013 Australia\u2019s top trading partner \u2013 and he has threatened North Korea with \u201cfire and fury\u201d over its repeated missile tests. The situation has created a degree of uncertainty for Australia, and some in the country are pondering whether it is time to reevaluate its traditional alliances.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are changing moods in the United States,\u201d said John McCarthy, one of Australia\u2019s most distinguished and experienced diplomats, who formerly served as the country\u2019s ambassador to the U.S. \u201cSo, we then need to think, should we try and develop closer security relationships with other countries in Asia? Should we seek to improve our overall structural relationship with China?<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re entering into a very, very fluid situation in Asia,\u201d McCarthy added. \u201cI don\u2019t know what the outcomes are going to be. But \u2026 we have to be very, very nimble in terms of trying to create new structures, create new relationships, to be able to look at new circumstances from a very independent security perspective, if we are to do the right thing by the Australian people over the next generation or so.\u201d<\/p>\n

Because of Australia\u2019s proximity to the Korean peninsula, the North Korea issue is a particularly sensitive one. The city of Darwin in the Northern Territory is about 3,600 miles from Pyongyang, within range of an intercontinental ballistic missile strike. As such, the implications are severe for Australia: it could be dragged into a devastating conflict if the U.S. were to become embroiled in war with Kim Jong-un\u2019s rogue state. And despite its isolated position in the outback, Pine Gap would likely be at the forefront of the action.<\/p>\n

\u201cPine Gap literally hardwires us into the activities of the American military and in some cases, that means we will cop the consequences, like it or not,\u201d said Tanter, the University of Melbourne professor. \u201cPine Gap will be contributing hugely in real-time to those operations, as well as in preparation for them. So whether or not the Australian government thinks that an attack on North Korea is either justified, or a wise and sensible move, we will be part of that,\u201d Tanter added. \u201cWe\u2019ll be culpable in the terms of the consequences.\u201d<\/p>\n

The NSA and the Australian government\u2019s Department of Defence declined to comment.<\/p>\n

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Documents published with this article:<\/h2>\n<\/blockquote>\n