Pine Gap

Pine Gap (Military Base, Black site)
A secret mass surveillance CIA base in Australia, named as reasoning for a coup in the 1970s.

Pine Gap is the commonly used name for a US satellite surveillance base in the Northern Territory, operated the United States and - nominally - Australia. The station is partly run by the CIA, NSA & the NRO and is a vital part of the ECHELON-Program. When the Australian government hinted at closing the site, it led to the the 1975 Australian coup.

Official Narrative

Pine Gap, or officially the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap (JDFPG) is a satellite surveillance base and Australian Earth station approximately 18 km (11 mi) south-west of the town of Alice Springs, Northern Territory in the center of Australia.

The station is partly run by the CIA, NSA, and NRO. The classified name of the base is the Australian Mission Ground Station, while the unclassified cover term for the NSA function of the facility is "RAINFALL".

A former US agent lifts the lid on some of the top secret projects he worked on while at Australia's remote Pine Gap "spy station" - Channel 10 Australia.

Usage

The base is used in the Five Eyes ECHELON-program for mass surveillance of not only military and enemy but also friendly and private citizens. It fuels a "global system for intercepting communications exists, operating by means of cooperation proportionate to their capabilities among the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand under the UKUSA Agreement, is no longer in doubt. It may be assumed, in view of the evidence and the consistent pattern of statements from a very wide range of individuals and organisations, including American sources, that the system or parts of it were, at least for some time, code-named ECHELON. What is important is that its purpose is to intercept private and commercial communications, and not military communications."

Importance

The location is strategically significant because it controls United States spy satellites as they pass over one-third of the earth, including China, Russia, and the Middle East. Central Australia was chosen because it was too remote for spy ships passing in international waters to intercept its signals.

Surveillance of Australia

Australia itself is within the "footprints" of the geosynchronous satellites controlled from Pine Gap. Already in the 1970s, the base picked up signals, including possibly phone conversations and data transmissions, both within, and to and from, Australia. Labor PM Gordon Scholes told parliament in 1977 that it was "fairly evident that almost any international telephone call leaving Australia can be monitored by satellite, the information being fed to the United States of America or other countries."

The security academic Des Ball asked "The question is really one of what happens to the recordings of these Australian transmissions once they are sorted out - are they destroyed or passed back unread to the Australian intelligence and security agencies, or are they retained and those of interest read and analysed by the CIA and NSA?"

Exposure

Full article: 1975 Australian coup

Gough Whitlam was considering closing the base during his reign in the 1970s as Prime Minister of Australia. Victor Marchetti, a CIA officer who had helped run the facility, revealed in 2014 that the urge of Whitlam to close the base caused so much outrage in Washington D.C that the CIA and MI6 staged a coup to remove Whitlam from power. On 11 November 1975, just before Whitlam was set to reveal the base and burn the CIA officers working there, he was fired from office by Governor-General John Kerr, which later was exposed as a CIA asset. In a 2020 whitewash, the ABC reported that John Kerr had called the allegations "nonsense" in a 1976 letter to queen Elizabeth II.

 

Related Quotation

Page	Quote	Author	Date
Australia/1975 coup d'état	“There were a number of points of tension between Whitlam's government and the United States intelligence apparatus. Whitlam had close ties with the United States, in 1964 receiving a "Leader" travel grant from the U.S. Department of State to spend three months studying under U.S. government and military officials. After coming to power, Whitlam quickly removed the last Australian troops from Vietnam. Whitlam government ministers criticised the US bombing of North Vietnam at the end of 1972. The US complained diplomatically about the criticism. In March 1973, US secretary of State William Rogers told Richard Nixon that "the leftists [within the Labor Party would] try to throw overboard all military alliances and eject our highly classified US defence space installations from Australia". In 1973, Whitlam ordered the Australian security organisation ASIS to close its operation in Chile, where it was working as a proxy for the CIA in opposition to Chile's president Salvador Allende. Whitlam's Attorney-General Lionel Murphy used the Australian Federal Police to conduct a raid on the headquarters of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) in March 1973. CIA Chief of Counter-Intelligence, James Angleton, later said Murphy had "barged in and tried to destroy the delicate mechanism of internal security". Australian journalist Brian Toohey said that Angleton considered then Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam a "serious threat" to the US and was concerned after the 1973 raid on ASIO headquarters. In 1974, Angleton sought to instigate the removal of Whitlam from office by having CIA station chief in Canberra, John Walker, ask the director general of ASIO, Peter Barbour, to make a false declaration that Whitlam had lied about the raid in Parliament. Barbour refused to make the statement. In 1974, Whitlam ordered the head of ASIO, Peter Barbour, to sever all ties with the CIA. Barbour ignored Whitlam's order and contact between Australian and US security agencies was driven underground. Whitlam later established a royal commission into intelligence and security. Jim Cairns became Deputy Prime Minister after the 1974 election. He was viewed by US secretary of state Henry Kissinger and defence secretary James Schlesinger as "a radical with strong anti-American and pro-Chinese sympathies". The US administration was concerned that he would have access to classified United States intelligence. Whitlam instantly dismissed ASIS chief WT Robinson in 1975 after discovering ASIS had assisted the Timorese Democratic Union in an attempted coup against the Portuguese administration in Timor, without informing Whitlam's government. Whitlam threatened to reveal the identities of CIA agents working in Australia. He also threatened not to renew the lease of the US spy base at Pine Gap, which was due to expire on 10 December 1975. The US was also concerned about Whitlam's intentions towards its spy base at Nurrungar.”	Wikipedia	2022

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