---
alias:
- Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap
category: Military Installation
created: 2026-09-22
location: Northern Territory, Australia
summary: The CIA's satellite ground station in central Australia near Alice Springs,
  controlling the RHYOLITE, AQUACADE, MAGNUM and ORION signals satellites, and one
  of the four main stations of the ECHELON network.
tags:
- Place
- PineGap
- CIA
- NSA
- ECHELON
- SIGINT
- Australia
updated: 2026-09-22
---

Pine Gap, a "remote ground station in central [Australia](/places/australia/)" near Alice Springs, was built to operate the second class of American signals intelligence satellite, developed by the [CIA](/organizations/central-intelligence-agency/) and "initially known as RHYOLITE and later AQUACADE," whose successors were named MAGNUM and then ORION; their targets, in Duncan Campbell's 1999 account to the European Parliament, "include telemetry, VHF radio, cellular mobile phones, paging signals, and mobile data links." Campbell listed it with Buckley Field in Colorado, [Menwith Hill](/places/menwith-hill/) in England and Bad Aibling in Germany as one of the four principal ground stations for American signals satellites; Nicky Hager, writing from New Zealand in 1996, described "the controversial Pine Gap base in central Australia" as "a major ground station for spy satellites" feeding, with Menwith Hill and Bad Aibling, "into the global network" of [ECHELON](/programs/echelon/).[^1][^2]

The allegation carried by [Sean McDade](/people/sean-mcdade/)'s Canadian inquiry into [PROMIS](/programs/promis/) of a shared allied system with a "two-way" back door concerned a meeting at [Los Alamos](/places/los-alamos/), not the Australian station.[^3]

[^1]: Campbell, Duncan. *Interception Capabilities 2000,* report to the European Parliament's STOA panel, April 1999, paras. 40, 42. https://irp.fas.org/eprint/ic2000/ic2000.htm
[^2]: Hager, Nicky. *Secret Power: New Zealand's Role in the International Spy Network,* Craig Potton, 1996, chs. 2-3. https://archive.org/details/hager-nicky-secret-power_202012
[^3]: House Report 102-857 (1992) and the Bua report (1993), searched in full; Seymour, Cheri, *The Last Circle,* TrineDay, 2010, as cited on [[Sean McDade]].