Pine Gap

Pine Gap, a "remote ground station in central Australia" near Alice Springs, was built to operate the second class of American signals intelligence satellite, developed by the CIA 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 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.¹²

The allegation carried by Sean McDade's Canadian inquiry into PROMIS of a shared allied system with a "two-way" back door concerned a meeting at Los Alamos, not the Australian station.³