TARGET 081112

Menwith Hill Station,
England

Looking like a bunch of puffball mushrooms on the
landscape, it is actually a communications spying station.

Menwith Hill in the UK is the principal NATO theater "Ground Segment Node for High Altitude Signals Intelligence" satellites. The key words in that title are "signals intelligence". That means that electronic signals can be intercepted and monitored.

The facility, jointly operated with the UK's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), is now capable of carrying out two million intercepts per hour.

The station as it looks from the ground.

Menwith Hill Station was established in 1956 by the US Army Security Agency (ASA), and was operated by ASA from 1958 until its turnover to the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) in June 1966. Even now, the U.S. Army's 713th Military Intelligence (MI) Group remains the Executive Agent for the NSA Menwith Hill field site, which was awarded the NSA's "Station of the Year" prize in 1991 after its role in the Gulf War.

The British Air Intelligence Agency 451st Intelligence Squadron (451 IS) is an integral part of Menwith Hill Station (MHS). Inside the closely-guarded 560 acre base are two large operations blocks and many satellite tracking dishes and domes.

The white plasticized canvas coverings protect the antennas from the weather and also from spying.

Initial operations focused on monitoring international cable and microwave communications passing through Britain. In the early 1960s Menwith Hill was one of the first sites in the world to receive sophisticated early IBM computers, with which NSA automated the labor-intensive watch-list scrutiny of intercepted but unenciphered telex messages. Since then, Menwith Hill has sifted the international messages, telegrams, and telephone calls of citizens, corporations or governments, cell phone calls, internet email, and other forms of electronic communications in order to select information of political, military or economic value. Menwith Hill is also alleged to be an element of the ECHELON system.

So, are you being spied on? Yes. The thing that most people don't understand, though, is that an estimate of over 99% of the signals, phone calls, etc. are of no interest, so are simply discarded. If you're not into drugs, crime, international trafficking, or any other high-interest activity, the computers ignore your signal, and it is never seen by any human. If you're not doing anything wrong, then there's no need to be paranoid. "They" don't care.

The official cover story for Menwith Hill is that it is an all-civilian base which is a Department of Defense communications station. The British Ministry of Defence describes it as a "communications relay centre."

Like all good cover stories, this has a strong element of truth to it. Until 1974, Menwith Hill's SIGINT (Signals intelligence) specialty was evidently the interception of International Leased Carrier signals, the communications links run by civil agencies such as the Post, Telegraph and Telephone ministries of eastern and western European countries. Interception of satellite communications began at Menwith Hill as early as 1974, when the first of more than eight large satellite communications dishes were installed.

In 1984, British government completed an extension project known as STEEPLEBUSH, with new communications facilities and buildings for STEEPLEBUSH, to include a 50,000 square foot extension to the Operations Building and new generators to provide 5 Megawatts of electrical power. It also provided a new satellite earth terminal system to support the classified systems at the site. With another $17.2 million being spent on special monitoring equipment, project STEEPLEBUSH cost almost $160 million dollars and expanded Menwith Hill's capabilities enormously.

The station from a spy-in-the-sky satellite.

But the world of intelligence gathering is always a situation of "Spy vs. spy". Spies are always spying on each other. It dawned on the people developing Menwith Hill that the spy-in-the-sky satellites they were watching were also watching them. Intelligence analysts in other countries could watch the construction of the special antennas and know what signals would be intercepted by them. So now, the "radome" coverings are constructed first and new antennas are actually built inside the "puffball" coverings where they can hide what they are doing from the very same people upon whom they are spying.

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