The Sorrows of Empire (26 page)

America’s surveillance network has grown so vast and formidable that in some respects it is feared as much as U.S. weaponry itself.”
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Because of secrecy the total number of these bases is impossible to know, but we are able to gain some idea of their extent and identify the most important ones. They are almost invariably located on foreign military installations, staffed by our military personnel but disguised as belonging to the country in which they are sited. They are normally listening and retrieval posts that transmit raw intercepts back to NSA headquarters at Fort George Meade, Maryland, or to the NSA’s top spy base, RAF Menwith Hill, located on the moorlands near Harrogate in North Yorkshire, England (“the largest spy station in the world,” as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament calls it).

There are three main forms of telecommunications. The first consists of telephone calls, faxes, e-mail, Internet connections, telegrams, and telexes sent and received via communications satellites owned and operated by the International Telecommunications Satellite organization (Intelsat), which is a treaty-based international organization. These satellites are in geostationary orbits so that they always maintain the same position in space relative to the earth. Created in 1964, Intelsat orbited its first satellite in 1967; as of 1999, it operated nineteen satellites. By 2002, 24 percent of its stock was owned by the Lockheed Martin Corporation. It is fairly simple, if expensive, to train an antenna from a ground listening post on an Intelsat or other communications satellite and eavesdrop on what it is sending and receiving. To get full coverage, however, listening posts need to be placed at strategic points all over the globe.

The volume of messages thus intercepted is huge. According to the director of the NSA, Lieutenant General Michael V. Hayden of the air force, during the 1990s international telephone traffic rose from an already impressive 38 billion minutes a year to over 100 billion a year. During 2002, the world’s population will spend over 180 billion minutes on the phone in
international calls
alone.
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All these messages can easily be intercepted, but voice-recognition technology remains unreliable. More commonly, spying is done by monitoring particular telephone numbers.

In contrast to these messages, a second form of telecommunications, shortwave and VHF (very high frequency) radio signals, carry only about
two hundred miles at the most before being shielded by the curvature of the earth. Ground-based monitoring stations have difficulty intercepting them. During the 1960s, the United States installed monstrous antennas 400 meters in diameter to listen to high-frequency radio signals at such places as RAF Chicksands Priory, near Bedford, thirty-five miles north of London; San Vito dei Normanni, near Brindisi in the “heel” of Italy; Ayios Nikolaos, in eastern Cyprus; Misawa Air Force Base, Japan; Elmen-dorf Air Force Base, Alaska; Udorn, Thailand; and Karamursel, Turkey. Their targets were Soviet and Warsaw Pact air force communications and diplomatic messages from all countries on earth.

Today the NSA listens to such messages—including mobile phones and city-to-city microwave radio transmissions—from space. For this purpose the National Reconnaissance Office launches spy satellites into stationary orbits strung out along the equator. There they serve as “electronic vacuum cleaners,” intercepting and beaming back to earth a huge array of messages. These satellites also take photographs, keep the oceans under surveillance, detect nuclear blasts, warn of missile launches and record the telemetry of their flights, transmit highly encrypted messages between NSA stations, and keep track of radar emanations. They require large arrays of antennas on earth to receive their output in intercepted messages.

Among the main American stations for downlinks from spy satellites are RAF Menwith Hill; RAF Morwenstow, in Cornwall, England; the air force base at Bad Aibling, near Augsberg, Germany; Pine Gap, near Alice Springs in central Australia (which also operates CIA satellites); Sabana Seca, Puerto Rico; “Summit Communications,” located in the suburbs of Taipei, Taiwan; and the Naval Air Facility within the U.S. Air Force Base at Misawa, Aomori prefecture, in northern Japan.
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Geopolitical analyst Paul Rogers of Opendemocracy.net revealed on November 29, 2002, that Pine Gap and Menwith Hill had been designated to pick up signals from a new Space-Based Infrared System (SBIRS) of satellites, which give an immediate indication of missile launches anywhere on earth and are key components in the Bush administration’s ballistic missile defense scheme.

In 1975, Australia’s Labor Party prime minister, Gough Whitlam, wanted to close the then-secret satellite intelligence base at Pine Gap. He
threatened to reveal that the base, which except for its antennas is mostly underground, was a wholly American-run military operation under the command of a CIA officer, facts that had been kept hidden from him. On November 11, 1975, in Australia’s greatest constitutional crisis, the governor-general of Australia, Sir John Kerr, after being briefed by the CIA, obligingly fired Whitlam and appointed opposition leader Malcolm Fraser as caretaker prime minister until elections could be called. Fraser was prepared to mobilize the army to maintain order, and Australia teetered close to revolution. In 1977, Warren Christopher, then assistant secretary of state for East Asia and later secretary of state, promised the deposed Whitlam that the United States would never again interfere in Australian domestic politics. But, of course, Pine Gap was not closed or brought under Australian government control.
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A third type of communications is via copper cables or high-capacity optical fiber networks. Unlike messages sent via cell phones and microwaves, which leak or bounce into the atmosphere and become interceptable, messages over cables can be spied on only if a physical tap is placed on the cable itself. The security of ordinary copper cable ended in October 1971 when an American submarine, the USS
Halibut,
put a tap on a Soviet military cable going to the Khamchatka Peninsula. Many other taps have been placed by the navy since then. In 1999, Congress authorized some $600 million to modify one of the newest nuclear submarines, the USS
Jimmy Carter
(named after the only president ever to serve on a submarine), to enable it to tap underwater fiber-optic cables. According to the
Wall Street Journal,
the
Jimmy Carter
“ will be the premier U.S. spy sub ... [with] state-of-the-art technology for undersea fiber-optic taps.”
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Bases for tapping into these cables include the submarine pens at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean; White Beach, Okinawa; La Maddalena Island, off Sardinia opposite Naples; Holy Loch, Scotland; and Rota, near Cádiz, Spain. The navy lobbies for more submarines, saying that they are needed for spy missions, but at roughly $2.3 billion each they are an expensive way to gather intelligence.
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Still, most experts believe that fiber-optic cables are harder to tap than copper and that they remain the most secure mode of communication—except, of course, for human messengers and homing pigeons. Planning for the 1998 Indian nuclear weapons tests was,
for example, done over fiber-optic lines, which is evidently why the U.S. intelligence community failed to gain prior knowledge of them. The Chinese are among the biggest purchasers of fiber-optic cable on earth.

Sigint (signals intelligence) bases designed to intercept the first two types of communications are quite conspicuous because they involve fields full of antennas covered in hard plastic domes to protect them from the weather and hide the direction in which they are pointed. There are, for example, over twenty telltale satellite dishes at Menwith Hill and fourteen at Misawa. With their covering domes, they look like huge golf balls. Sigint bases in England are disguised as Royal Air Force (RAF) stations even though there are few if any British personnel assigned to them. For example, Chicksands Priory, created in 1941 by the RAF for electronic spying on northern Germany and Poland during World War II, was turned over to the U.S. Air Force in 1950. Ever since, the United States has operated Chicksands for its exclusive use, not even sharing the information gathered there with NATO. These arrangements reflect the historical fact that the two governments never entered into any formal agreements on American bases in England. Parliament has, moreover, never taken a vote on the matter. What exists are letters dating from the early Cold War era drafted by British civil servants and countersigned by the American ambassador giving the United States the right to use RAF bases.
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For these reasons, it has never been possible to say with precision how many U.S. bases there are in Britain (although one well-informed source claims there were 104 by the end of the Cold War).
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Much information about the disguised American bases in Britain comes from peace activists like Lindis Percy, coordinator of the United Kingdom’s Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases, who has been arrested many times for breaking into them. One recent escapade occurred at RAF Croughton, twenty-five miles southwest of Stratford-upon-Avon, where Percy was charged with “aggravated trespass.” She then revealed to the press that the RAF designation was phony and that Croughton is actually a U.S. Air Force base. One authoritative but unofficial source says that the base’s active-duty personnel include 400 Americans and 109 employees of the British Ministry of Defense.
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Its function
is communications with U.S. Air Force aircraft, including nuclear bombers. The Americans dropped charges against Percy to prevent “embarrassing evidence” from being presented in open court.
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In June 2002, she had five injunctions against her for entering such bases, including Menwith Hill.

Since 1948, a highly classified agreement among the intelligence agencies of the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand allows them to exchange information not just about target countries but also about one another. This arrangement permits the United States’s National Security Agency, Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Canada’s Communications Security Establishment, Australia’s Defense Signals Directorate, and New Zealand’s General Communications Security Bureau to swap information with one another about their own citizens—including political leaders—without formally violating national laws against domestic spying. Even though the U.S. government, for example, is prohibited by law from spying on its own citizens except under a court-ordered warrant, as are all the other countries in the consortium, the NSA can, and often does, ask one of its partners to do so and pass the information its way. One former employee of the Canadian Communications Security Establishment revealed that, at the request of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain, the GCHQ asked the Canadians to monitor certain British political leaders for them.
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