Spying from the skies
The following is extracted from an article in The Guardian 'The lesson for the US: money can't buy safety from terrorism' (15 September 2001), the focus of which was on the failure of sophisticated intelligence gathering to prevent the attack on the World Trade Centre. It provides a good overview of some of the space-based and other elements of global electronic spying.
US intelligence has a budget approaching $30bn (£21bn) - roughly the size of the GDP of Kuwait. It employs more than 100,000 people, and owns vast arrays of hardware. At the centre is George Tenet. He is the director of central intelligence and the man who coordinates the various US spy agencies. He has huge resources. The espionage agency, the CIA, employs more than 16,000 around the world.
The FBI is one of the largest law enforcement agencies ever; with annual funding of about $3bn, it has 11,400 special agents and more than 16,400 other employees in 55 American cities and abroad. The FBI spends one-sixth of this budget on intelligence gathering alone.
But it is on technology where budgets - quite literally - go through the stratosphere. The existence of the national reconnaissance office (NRO) was declassified only in 1992. With its $6.2bn annual budget, its mission is to run spy satellites - "spaceborne assets needed to enable US global information superiority".
The National Security Agency collects foreign signals intelligence (SIGINT) operates in conjunction with the NRO. The NSA's 21,000 employees - including the world's largest collection of linguists and mathematicians - are based at Fort Meade, with the rest scattered overseas.
Nine other agencies, ranging from army intelligence (budget $1bn) through to the departments of treasury, energy, transportation (more than $1bn) and the national imagery and mapping agency ($1.2bn) are also involved in intelligence gathering. Add into the equation intelligence work by non-intelligence agencies and the budget exceeds $27bn.
Interception
The majority of these formidable systems have remained targeted on traditional forms of possible attack by hostile nation states - especially those that might have weapons of mass destruction.
Their efforts are governed by the vast array of technology at their disposal:
• Listening stations: The main allied station in the Middle East is now the British station, Ayios Nikolaos, in eastern Cyprus. Satellite interception antennae are directed at Arab, Turkish and international communications satellites. A listening station in China, run by the German BND intelligence service, stayed operating even after the Tiananmen Square massacre. If it is still operating in the Pamir mountains, it would be the west's most important electronic surveillance asset close to Afghanistan.
• Space surveillance: Satellites orbit the earth every 90 minutes. Some, known as Keyhole, take photographs; others, in the Lacrosse and Vega series, use radar to obtain images through cloud and at night. All relay their information immediately to Washington.These satellites can obtain pictures of training camps, using infra-red or heat photography to determine whether camps are occupied. Modern commercial imaging satellites can detect one-metre objects. Spy satellites are about ten times more powerful. But only four of these hugely expensive satellites, which are easy to spot, may be in orbit at once.
• Listening satellites: Another network of between eight and 12 satellites intercept signals from the earth's surface. Menwith Hill, in Yorkshire, is the largest electronic surveillance field station in the world. It directs and controls a constellation of listening satellites now directed mainly at the Middle East. The dominant feature of the station, which employs dozens of Arabic, Farsi and Hebrew linguists, is an array of 29 giant, white golfball-like radomes, each of which hide a satellite-tracking antenna. Launched into high fixed orbits about 40,000km above the earth, secret SIGINT satellites called Vortex, Magnum, Mercury and Orion unfurl listening dishes over 50 metres in diameter. These satellites can intercept and relay low-powered radio signals, including mobile phones. They can also discriminate between individual operators and radio equipment.
• Spy planes: Under the codename "papermate", the Royal Australian Air Force sends spy planes over Pakistan to detect nuclear preparations. These missions, which have been mounted from the US Indian Ocean base at Diego Garcia, could be extended to Afghanistan if Pakistan or Iran were willing to cooperate. A sophisticated new system, called Classic Story, can identify individual voices and could flash a warning if a wanted person was heard.
• Echelon: This controversial global monitoring system targets international civil communications channels passing through satellites. At Morwenstow, Cornwall, millions of satellite phone calls, faxes, e-mails and data links are monitored every hour. Information is relayed automatically from Britain to the US. It is highly dependent on sophisticated computer filtering software, called dictionaries, which hold thousands of key words or other templates for selecting messages of interest.
• Internet: Dictionary type systems also monitor the internet. NSA's taps into internet cable are among the spy agency's most sensitive secrets, because they scoop up huge quantities of messages sent by US citizens. The NSA has had to construct databanks capable of holding petabytes of data. Such databanks are up to one million times bigger than an average PC.
• Submarines: The US Navy's special tapping submarine, USS Parche, won special commendations for its work throughout the 1990s. In 2004, the Parche will be replaced by a giant new tapping submarine, the USS Jimmy Carter, which is currently being refitted at a cost of more than $400m. Once in service, the Jimmy Carter will be able to carry large surveillance packages the size of a small bus on to the seabed. It will be equipped to tap modern optical fibre cables.
• Embassies: Most American and many allied embassies and consulates are equipped with "special collection" equipment. For many years, the US embassy in Moscow tracked conversations Soviet leaders had from their limousines. Special monitoring equipment can be used to monitor and reconstruct emissions from unprotected computer screens.