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Menwith Hill-
A Long Walk Spoiled...
The election of George
Dubya Bush as the next President of the United States might
well ensure that a little known RAF base near Harrogate becomes
the scene of Greenham Common style mass protests. PHIL O'CONNOR
tees up and aims for the eagle.
_________________
Once upon a time three enormous golf balls appeared upon
a remote windswept hill upon the North York Moors off towards
Whitby. The year was 1963. RAF Fylingdales was born. These
giant contraptions emerged out of the mist like something
otherworldly - surrounded by stone walls and sheep for as
for as the eye could see.
Soon more of these gigantic structures began
to appear up in the hills behind Harrogate too. This complex,
known as RAF Menwith Hill, was rather different than the new
early warning system over the moors at Fylingdales. For a
start this wasn't an RAF base at all, even though it was based
on land owned by the Crown. From the beginning this was an
American operation, taken over in the early sixties by the
United States National Security Agency. A law unto itself
thanks to a long standing UKUSA agreement going back to Cold
War days - the so-called Special Relationship we sometimes
hear about. Over a quarter of a century 23 of these strange
golf balls (called radomes) were built around it's 560 acres,
transforming the landscape. And there are more to come as
the base continues to expand.
Menwith Hill is now the world's largest,
best funded, and most sophisticated listening post. Its
giant radomes, masts and satellite dishes are reputedly capable
of carrying out several million "intercepts" per
hour. It picks up of all kinds of electronic communications.
From commercial satellites to phone calls, emails and Internet
downloads just like this one.
 The
sheer size of the base's civilian staff gives a clue to the
scope of this secretive place. In 1998 the Sunday Times reported
that it had 1,400 staff including engineers, physicists, mathematicians,
linguists and computer scientists - plus over 370 Ministry
of Defence staff. All live inside the base with their families.
Reportedly there were over 289 children under the age of four
living on the site at that time. Menwith Hill has an internal
town centre with houses, shops, schools, a chapel and a sports
centre. It's the biggest town in England that does not appear
on our road maps. It sits quietly behind razor wire and watchtowers
and guard dogs and surveillance cameras.
So what exactly is going on behind those
fences? Well, the official line is much same as thirty
years ago. It is a "Communications Relay Centre"
for the Department of Defence, say the M.O.D. Observers say
that this is a colossal understatement. From day one the site
has focussed on all the international cable and microwave
communications passing through Britain. In the early 60s it
had IBM's most sophisticated computer hardware automating
a labour-intensive keyword-based scrutiny of Telex transmissions.
Since then it is said that the place has sifted through every
kind of international message, telegram and phone call from
citizens, corporations and governments. Sucking up electronic
information like some giant vacuum.
Its present capabilities are mind boggling.
A recent trespass trial in York exposed a new British Telecom
installation of a high capacity fibre-optic cable capable
of sending 100,000 simultaneous phone calls - one of BTs main
transmission towers is less than four miles away. Experts
also say that the main European and Asian spy satellite system
- known as Vortex - is controlled from within its fences,
to say nothing of the constant monitoring of commercial satellites.
Recently a report called "Assessing the
Technologies of Political Control" was published by the
Civil Liberties Committee of the European Parliament. It read
in part: "Within Europe all e-mail, telephone and fax
communications are routinely intercepted by the United States
National Security Agency transferring all target information
from the European mainland via the strategic hub of London,
then by satellite to Fort Meade in Maryland, via the crucial
hub at Menwith Hill in the North York Moors in the UK."
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Such information, it can be argued, is vital
in the fight against terrorism and international
drug trafficking. But European critics are insisting that
Menwith Hill is just as capable of providing the NSA with
invaluable information about contract tenders, oil prospecting
or international trade deals. They may have a point. The fight
against clandestine arms deals, or the trading of nuclear
material to terrorists or dictatorships inevitably means careful
scrutiny of commercial trade communications.
But Menwith Hill's extraordinary technology
is capable of reaching much farther still. Beyond Eastern
Europe and the Gulf and into Asia, and a new cold war. And
in the aftermath of the recent US elections the stakes are
about to be raised considerably. George
Dubya Bush, the freshly elected President of the USA has said
that he strongly supports the idea of a $15bn defence programme
called 'National Missile Defence' ( or NMD), and our mate
Tony Blair and his cronies have very quiet on the subject.
NMD is a high-tech defence system for tracking incoming missiles
then shooting them down with ground-based rockets. It is a
massive increase in US military spending. The very first recipients
of these new systems would be the early warning station at
Fylingdales and our friendly little listening post at Menwith
Hill - America's eyes and ears.
This so-called "Son of Star Wars"
programme would inevitably be seen by Russia, China and others
as a major escalation of a new cold war. This new infrastructure
would be seen to break US obligations under the 1972 Anti-Ballistic
Missile Treaty and it would, in the words of the US Space
command, project military power "across the full range
of conflict", that is the whole globe. In effect the
US would be able to attack without being attacked.
Any enemy of America would surely aim at taking
out it's major defence systems. A defence system that protects
America, but not Britain will make Britain a primary a primary
nuclear target. As Nick Cohen observed last year in the Independent,
If you want to overwhelm your enemy, you overwhelm his defences.
Only in this case America's defences will be a bunch of giant
golf balls on a North Yorkshire hillside.
If you have any comments to make on this subject,
visit Rant!
our community debate.
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The Yorkshire Brand - A new rose for old
The
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The
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