Pine Gap, the American spy base in Australia | This is the key to the defense pact between Washington, London and Canberra

The Pine Gap base is halfway between Adelaide in the south and Darwin in the north, surrounded by the Simpson Desert. A vast territory of reddish dunes, like a movie. Strange figures in the wind-eroded rock give the area a lunar face, which could have inspired Ray Bradbury. The CIA controls the infrastructure of the site that Snowden, its former contractor, has linked to the Echelon spy ring. The biggest in history. For decades, Australia and the United States have kept their real goals a secret with uncomfortable effort. A typical Cold War surveillance platform, it was born with the aim of spying on the nuclear development of the former Soviet Union and its allies.

When former Australian Prime Minister Gough Witlam hinted at a possible closure of the base – he ruled between 1972 and 1975 – he was removed from office. The resignation was requested by the Governor General and Representative of the Queen of England in Australia, John Kerr, an official closely linked to the CIA. It was the only time in just over 50 years that the United States had risked running out of Pine Gap. The Labor politician was legally protected to shut it down. The agreement signed in ’66 between the two countries provided that after nine years, either could cancel it if it notified a year earlier. But that didn’t happen and Witlam cost him his exit.

A movie story

The base story was covered by Netflix in a six-chapter miniseries released in October 2018. Australian production company Screentime gives some idea of ​​how Pine Gap works, but it hasn’t had much success. It was even built in Vietnam for what that country saw as a geopolitical script error. Twice a card appears which assigns China a maritime zone in conflict with its neighbor. The Vietnamese took it as a crime. In the dialogues, there is a critical passage in the United States on grassroots control. It happens when the local deputy chief tells his boss, “Australians are very used to accepting. Throughout the history of Pine Gap, the boss has always been an American ”.

Project Rainfall: The Secret History of Pine Gap is a book by Tom Gilling based on declassified documents from the United States and Australia. Its author maintains in the text the idea that UFOs are the object of study for the base. Journalist Alex Salmon wrote of the investigation in September 2019: “Gilling expertly documents the secret history of Pine Gap, the secrecy surrounding his role in the American war machine. And how that makes Australia a military target in the event of future US imperialist wars. While it doesn’t explicitly call for a shutdown of Pine Gap, the book provides more than enough evidence to shut it down and end Australia’s military alliance with the United States. “

What is currently shown is quite different. AUKUS has strengthened the strategic partnership between the two countries and the United Kingdom. It is not the only one in the region. There is also the Quad (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue), a coalition made up of the United States, Australia, India and Japan in the Indo-Pacific area, a relatively new geopolitical concept.

Prestigious Australian intelligence analyst Desmond Ball also defined Pine Gap as a “war machine” in 2014, a few years before his death. From this base in the early 1970s which barely had two antennas and which was born as a joint space research facility for defense – according to the treaty signed in 1966 -, it moved in 2017 to a complex of 38 antennas covered by their respective radomes. structures that look like gigantic golf balls and protect them from the elements. But not only the facilities have grown exponentially. His endowment too.

The first American families settled in the Alice Springs area, the town closest to the base, when the base was opened. The secondary tasks were given to Australians, who would end up occupying half of the posts. From the Cold War to the aftermath of the Twin Towers, Pine Gap has nearly doubled its workforce, according to Ball. Imitating this desert landscape, some agents of the base pretended to be gardeners. Alice Springs had a high density of them. The secrecy of the local government has contributed to this gossip becoming frequent and even appearing in the media.

The lands where this spy nucleus operates are considered sacred by the original peoples of the region who were evicted decades ago. The stories of sightings of flying saucers also proliferate there. Nothing that happens in this part of the world where China’s influence is notorious is foreign to Pine Gap or the informational voracity of the CIA and the NSA (United States National Security Agency). If the United States had 686 military bases outside its territory in 2015 – a number that some reports now estimate at nearly a thousand – the one operating from central Australia is its Big Brother. The wars Washington waged on the basis of its selective anti-terrorism creed encompassed the former Yugoslavia, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. All the countries that were destroyed by indiscriminate bombing. Today, they are replaced by drones with which are committed surgical strikes which do not prevent the so-called collateral damage against defenseless civilians. For that, the United States must continue to spy, and Pine Gap is its lifeblood.