MSNBC Paints a Rosy Picture of Echelon

["Robert Kemp" <sensuant@hotmail.com>]

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http://www.msnbc.com/news/310730.asp?cp1=1

Keeping an ‘ear’ on East Timor

Australia, New Zealand hand intelligence over to Washington

By Robert Windrem NBC NEWS PRODUCER


Sept. 12 — As the East Timor crisis has heated up, the United States has 
been
using electronic intelligence gathered nearby in Australia and New Zealand,
two nations in a spying alliance officially known as the UKUSA treaty, but
known in the spy trade as the “WASP Alliance.”


IN FACT, President Bill Clinton said Sunday the U.S. stood ready to assist a
U.N. peacekeeping force with intelligence. Electronic spy bases throughout
Australia and New Zealand gather communications intelligence primarily by
downlinking signals from Indonesia’s Palapa constellation of four 
satellites,
strung out over the 3,000-mile island chain, as well as communications from
ships and planes, radio receivers and other satellites.

  East Timor, said experts, has been a priority since the time of the 1975
Indonesian invasion, although little of what the intelligence has revealed
has ever been made public. Intelligence priorities have included not only
military communications out of East Timor, but policy discussions in 
Jakarta.

Australia and New Zealand share their intelligence and analysis with the 
U.S.
National Security Agency as well as the electronic eavesdropping agencies of
Canada and Britain.

“Along with our allies, we have it just about covered,” said Jeffrey T.
Richelson, author of the “U.S. Intelligence Community.”

  “We have for quite a long time.”

Australia is primarily responsible for intercepting Indonesian
communications, Richelson said, with New Zealand having some as well.
Australia has primary responsibility under the UKUSA agreement for the area
west of New Guinea; New Zealand covers the islands to the east.

‘FOOTPRINT’ PROVIDES INTELLIGENCE
The most critical base, said Richelson and others who follow the 
intelligence
community, is at Shoal Bay, near Darwin in Northern Australia. Built in 
1974,
just before the first Palapa satellite was launched, the base is code-named
Project Larswood.

Project Larswood has several advantages, most notably its location within 
the
“footprint” of the key Palapa satellites, the area in which the satellites’
signals can be received by any dish. Those satellites were built by a U.S.
defense contractor, Hughes, and excess space on them was leased to other
nations in Southeast Asia, giving Project Larswood access to international
communications as well as Indonesian. Desmond Ball of Australia National
University has said the Shoal Bay interception dishes provided the 
Australian
Defense Signals Directorate “with extraordinary access to Indonesian
communications.”
And although some of the communications carried on the satellites is no 
doubt
encrypted, it can be fed from Australia to the U.S. National Security
Agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., where the world’s largest bank of
supercomputers are used to break down the encryption, in near real time if
possible.

WATCHING TRAFFIC
  In addition, Richelson said the base is also home to an ocean surveillance
base that can and is used to track Indonesian naval and air traffic, helping
policy makers determine if ships or planes are moving into East Timor.


“We would be able to pick up a fair amount of of military traffic, including
mobile military using other assets flying out of Australia,” said John Pike
of the Federation of American Scientists.

  “The P-3 could connect, for example. The Australians would certainly have
adequate collection resources ... that if [U.S. National Security Adviser]
Sandy Berger wanted to know something, he could learn about it from them.”

Pike noted that the United States could also use its own air force and naval
assets in the area, but is more likely to rely on the allies in the region.

  “U.S. collection assets have not been preferentially tasked yet, because
there is no anticipation we would be sending troops in.”

But U.S. spy satellites also play a role. An Orion spy satellite stationed
22,300 miles above Indonesia can pick up, at least in theory, walkie-talkie
communications from East Timor and then downlink them in real-time to a 
joint
U.S.-Australian site at Pine Gap in South Australia. Trumpet satellites that
fly in elliptical orbits can pick up cell phone calls in Jakarta and relay
them back to the U.S. In fact, Australian ships have monitored Indonesia
activities in East Timor using shipboard receiving equipment since virtually
the beginning of their occupation, sometimes using the cover of monitoring
illegal fishing, experts said. NBC’s Ned Colt reported that Australian ships
were in international waters Monday, continuing to monitor the situation.

SHARING RESOURCES
Sometimes, Australia tasks New Zealand’s frigates to do the same monitoring
when they are on exercises in the South Pacific or in a friendly port. If
near East Timor, the ships will be tasked to intercept that traffic. A New
Zealand radio receiving base is in Tangimoana, north of Wellington. The
analysis of the signals is done in Australia, where the biggest of four DSD
analysis cells is devoted to Indonesian language communications.

The Australian assets are not limited to sites outside Indonesia. Nicky
Hager, a New Zealand peace researcher who revealed the existence of the
worldwide Echelon electronic spy operation, reported in his book, “Secret
Power” that specialized intercept equipment code-named “Reprieve” had been
installed in Australia’s embassy in Jakarta.

“The operations were said to take a whole room of the embassy building and 
be
able to listen to local telephone calls at will,” Hager wrote.  The spying
also includes international communications in and out of Indonesia. UKUSA
bases at Geraldton in western Australia and Waihopai on New Zealand’s north
island have dishes aimed at the Intelsat communications satellites which
carry the bulk of international phone calls, faxes and e-mail. The dishes 
use
the “Echelon” system to look for key words and topics in both written and
spoken communications.

  Robert Windrem is an investigative producer for NBC News.




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