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12 August 1988US$1.75Air

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... and theydon't give adamn aboutpersonal

•pnvacy orcommercial

confidence.Pr~ect415is a top-secret new globalsurveillance system. It cantap into a billion calls a year inthe UK alone. Inside DuncanCampbell on how spyingentered the 21st century ...

They've got ittapedn the booming surveillance industry theyspy on whom they wish, when they wish,protected by barriers of secrecy, fortifiedby billions of pounds worth of high, hightechnology. Duncan Campbell reportsfrom the United States on the secretAnglo-American plan for a' globalelectronic spy system for the 21st

century capable of listening in to most of usmost of the time

American, British and Allied intelligenceagencies are soon to embark on amassive, billion-dollar expansion oftheir global electronic surveillancesystem. According to information

given recently in secret to the US Congress, thesurveillance system will enable the agencies tomonitor and analyse civilian communicationsinto the 21st century. Identified for the momentas Project P415, the system will be run by theUS National Security Agency (NSA). But theintelligence agencies of many other countrieswill be closely involved with the new network,including those from Britain, Australia, Ger-many and Japan-and, surprisingly, thePeople's Republic of China.

New satellite stations and monitoring centresare to be built around the world, and a chain ofnew satellites launched, so that NSA and itsBritish counterpart, the Government Commu-nications Headquarters (GCHQ) at Chelten-ham, may keep abreast of the burgeoning inter-national telecommunications traffic.

The largest overseas station in the ProjectP415 network is the US satellite and communi-cations base at Menwith Hill, near Harrogate inYorkshire. It is run undercover by the NSA andtaps into all Britain's main national and interna-tional communications networks (New State-sman, 7 August 1980). Although high techno-logy stations such as Menwith Hill are primarilyintended to monitor international communica-

tions, according to US experts their capabilitycan be, and has been, turned inwards ondomestic traffic. Menwith Hill, in particular, hasbeen accused by a former employee of grosscorruption and the monitoring of domestic calls.

The vast international global eavesdroppingnetwork has existed since shortly after thesecond world war, when the US, Britain, Can-ada, Australia and New Zealand signed a secretagreement on signals intelligence, or "sigint". Itwas anticipated, correctly, that electronic moni-toring of communications signals would continue. to be the largest and most important form ofpost-war secret intelligence, as it had beenthrough the war.

Although it is impossible for analysts to listento all but a small fraction of the billions oftelephone calls, and other signals which mightcontain "significant" information, a network ofmonitoring stations in Britain and elsewhere isable to tap all international and some domesticcommunications circuits, and sift out messageswhich sound interesting. Computers automa-tically analyse every telex message or datasignal, and can also identify calls to, say, a targettelephone number in London, no matter fromwhich country they originate.

A secret listening agreement, called UKUSA(UK-USA), assigns parts of the globe to eachparticipating agency. GCHQ at Cheltenham isthe co-ordinating centre for Europe, Africa andthe Soviet Union (west of the Ural Mountains).

The NSA covers the rest of the Soviet Union andmost of the Americas. Australia-whereanother station in the NSA listening network islocated in the outback-co-ordinates the elec-tronic monitoring of the South Pacific, and SouthEast Asia.

With 15,000 staff and a budget of over £500million a year (even without the planned newZircon spy satellite), GCHQ is by far the largestpart of British intelligence. Successive UK gov-

ernments have placed high value on its eaves-dropping capabilities, whether against Russianmilitary signals or the easier commercial andprivate civiliantargets.

Both the new and existing surveillancesystems are highly computerised. They rely onnear total interception of international commer-cial and satellite communications in order tolocate the telephone or other messages of targetindividuals. Last month, a US newspaper, the

Cleveland Plain Dealer, revealed that thesystem had been used to target the telephonecalls of a US Senator, Strom Thurmond. Thefact that Thurmond, a southern Republican andusually a staunch supporter of the Reagan admi-nistration, is said to have been a target hasraised fears that the NSA has restoreddomestic, electronic, surveillance programmes.These were originally exposed and criticisedduring the Watergate investigations, and theirclosure ordered by President Carter.

After talking to the NSA, Thurmond later toldthe Plain Dealer that he did not believe theallegation. But Thurmond, a right-wing Republi-can, may have been unwilling to rock the boat.Staff members of the Permanent Select Com-mittee on Intelligence said that staff were "digg-ing into it" despite the "stratospheric securityclassification" of all the systems involved.

The Congressional officials were first told ofthe Thurmond interception by a formeremployee of the Lockheed Space and MissilesCorporation, Margaret Newsham, who nowlives in Sunnyvale, California. Newsham hadoriginally given separate testimony and filed alawsuit concerning corruption and mis-spendingon other US government "black" projects. Shehas worked in the US and Britain for two corpo-rations which manufacture signal intelligencecomputers, satellites and interception equip-ment for NSA, Ford Aerospace and Lockheed.Citing a special Executive Order signed by Pres-ident Reagan, she told me last month that shecould not and would not discuss classified infor-mation with journalists. But according toWashington sources (and the report in the PlainDealer) she informeda US Congressman thatthe Thurmond interception took place at Men-with Hill, and that she personally heard the calland was able to pass on details.

Since then, investigators have subpoenaedother witnesses and asked them to provide thecomplete plans and manuals of the ECHELONsystem and related projects. The plans andblueprints are said to show that targeting of USpolitical figures would not occur by accident, butwas designed into the system from the start.

While working at Menwith Hill, Newsham isreported to have said that she was able to listenthrough earphones to telephone calls beingmonitored at the base. Other conversations thatshe heard were in Russian. After leaving Men-with Hill, she continued to have access to fulldetails of Menwith Hill operations from a posi-tion as software manager for more than a dozenVAX computers at Menwith which operate theECHELON system.

Newsham refused last month to discuss clas-sified details of her career, except with clearedCongressional officials. But it has been publiclyacknowledged that she worked on a large rangeof so-called "black" US intelligence program-mes, whose funds are concealed inside the costsof other defence projects. She was fired fromLockheed four years ago after complainingabout the corruption, and sexual harassment.

Lockheed claimed she had been a pook time-keeper, and has denied her charges of corrup-tion on "black" projects. But the many chargesshe is reported to have made-such as the useof top secret computers for football pools, or tosell a wide range of merchandise from theiroffices, and deliberate and massive overcharg-

ing and waste by the company-are but smallbeer in a continuing and wider scandal aboutdefence procurement. Newsham's testimonyabout overcharging by contractors is now thesubject of a major congressional inquiry.

From US sources not connected with Marga-ret Newsham, we have obtained for the firsttime a list of the major classified projects inoperation at Menwith Hill. The base currentlyhas over 1,200 staff, more than two thirds ofthem Americans. Other than the ECHELONcomputer network, the main projects at Men-with Hill are code-named SILKWORTH,MOONPENNY, SIRE, RUNWAY andSTEEPLEBUSH. The station also receives in-formation from a satellite called BIG BIRD.

Project SILKWORTH is, according to signalsintelligence specialists, the code-name for long-range radio monitoring from Menwith Hill.MOONPENNY is a system for monitoring satel-lite communications; RUNWAY is thought to bethe control network for an eavesdropping satel-lite called VORTEX, now in orbit over theSoviet Union. The base earlier controlled asimilar series of satellites called CHALET. Thenew STEEPLEBUSH control centre appears

connected with the latest and biggest of theoverhead listening satellites. These are code-named MAGNUM, according to US intelligencesources.

BIG BIRD, which is not usually connectedwith Menwith Hill, is a low-orbiting photo-graphic reconnaissance satellite. But inve-stigators have worked out, from details of theclearances necessary to know about BIG BIRD,that this satellite-and indeed, many othersatellites, variously disguised as "weather satel-lites"-also carry listening equipment. Onesuch sigint package is said to have been aboardthe doomed space shuttle Challenger, despiteits ostensibly civilianpurpose.

Recently published US Department ofDefense 1989 budget information has confirmedthat the Menwith Hillspy base willbe the subjectof a major $26 million expansion programme.Information given to Congress in Februarylisted details ofplans for a four-year expansion ofthe main operation building and other facilities atMenwith Hill. Although the testimony referredonly to a "classified location", the base can beidentified because of references to STEEPLE-BUSH. According to this testimony, the newSTEEPLEBUSH II project will cost $15 millionbetween now and 1993. The expansion is re-quired to avoid overcrowding and "to supportexpanding classified missions".

During the Watergate affair, it was revealed

that NSA, in collaboration with GCHQ, hadroutinely intercepted the international commu-nications of prominent anti-Vietnam war leaderssuch as Iane Fonda and Dr Benjamin Spock.Another target was former Black Panther leaderEldridge Cleaver. Then in the late 1970s, it wasrevealed that President Carter had orderedNSA to stop obtaining "back door" intelligenceabout US political figures through swapping in-telligence data with GCHQ Cheltenham.

Among important stations being developed inthe new P415 network, sources indicated, areBude in Cornwall, mainly run by GCHQ, BadAibling in Germany, and two sites in thePeople's Republic of China (which are used onlyfor monitoring the USSR). The western intelli-gence agencies have not yet resolved the ques-tion of how to replace the recently upgradedBritish intelligence listening station at ChungHom Kok in Hong Kong (which at the momentlistens to China itself) when the colony is handedback to China next decade.

In Australia three months ago, New ZealandDefence Minister Bob Tizard revealed that twoAustralasian interception stations planned forthe early 1990s willbe targeted on new commu-

nications satellites launched by third world coun-tries such as India and Indonesia. The newsatellite spy bases are at Geraldton in northernAustralia and Blenheim, New Zealand. The simi-lar British spy base at Morwenstow, near Bude,Cornwall, has been continuously expandedthroughout the 1980s, including the provision ofmassive US analysis computers.

If Margaret Newsham's testimony is con-firmed by the ongoing Congressional investiga-tion, then the NSA has been behaving illegallyunder US law-unless it can prove either thatThurmond's call was intercepted completelyaccidentally, or that the highly patriotic Senatoris actually a foreign spy or terrorist. MoreoverNSA's international phone tapping operationsfrom Menwith Hill and at Morwenstow, Corn-wall, can only be legal in Britain if special war-rants have been issued by the Secretary of Stateto specify that American intelligence agents arepersons to whom information from interceptsmust or should be given. This can not be establ-ished, since the government has always refusedto publish any details of the targets or recipientsof specific interception warrants.When the Menwith Hill base was first set up

there was no British law controlling phone tap-ping, or making unauthorised interception (suchas by foreign intelligence agenciesjillegal. Nowthere is, and telecommunications interceptionby the Americans from British territory would

clearly be illegal without the appropriate war-rant.

When the new Interception of Communica-tions Act was passed in 1985, however, it wasobviously designed to make special provision foroperations like ECHELON or Project P415 totrawl all international communications to andfrom Britain. A special section of the Act, Sec-tion 3(2), allows warrants to be issued to inter-cept any general type of international messagesto or from Britain if this is "in the interests ofnational security" or "for the purpose of safe-guarding the economic well-being of the UnitedKingdom". Such warrants also allow GCHQ totap any or all other communications on the samecables or satellites that may have to be picked upin order to select out the messages they want.So whether or not a British government warrantcan legally allow American agents to interceptprivate British communications, there is nodoubt that British law as well as British baseshave been designed to encourage rather thaninhibit the booming industry in international tele-communications surveillance.

Both British and American domestic commu-nications are also being targeted and interceptedby the ECHELON network, the US inve-stigators have been told. The agencies are al-leged to have collaborated not only on targetingand interception, but also on the monitoring ofdomestic UK communications.

Special teams from GCHQ Cheltenham havebeen flown in secretly in the last few years to acomputer centre in SiliconValley near San Fran-cisco for training on the special computersystems that carry out both domestic and inter-national interception.

The centre near San Francisco has also beenused to train staff from the "Technical Depart-ment" of the People's Liberation Army GeneralStaff, which is the Chinese version of GCHQ.The Department operates two ultra-secret jointUS-Chinese listening stations in the XinjiangUighur Autonomous Region, close to the SovietSiberian border. Allegedly, such surveillancesystems are only used to target Soviet or War-saw Pact communications signals, and thosesuspected of involvement in espionage and ter-rorism. But those involved in ECHELON havestressed to Congress that there are no formalcontrols over who may be targeted. And I havebeen told that junior intelligence staff can feedtarget names into the system at all levels,without any check on their authority to do so.Witnesses giving evidence to the Congressionalinquiry have discussed whether the Democraticpresidential contender Iesse Iackson was tar-geted; one source implied that he had been.Even test engineers from manufacturing compa-nies are able to listen in on private citizens'communications, the inquiry was told.

But because of the special Executive Ordersigned by President Reagan, US intelligenceoperatives who know about such politically sen-sitive operations face jail sentences ifthey speakout-despite the constitutional American pro-tection of freedom of speech and of the press.And inBritain, as we know, the government is inthe process of tightening the OfficialSecrets Actto make the publication of any information fromintelligence officials automatically a crime, evenif the information had already been published, orhad appeared overseas first. •

Special teams from GCHQ Cheltenham havebeen flown in secretly to a computer centre nearSan Francisco for training on computer systems

that carry out domestic and internationalinterception