Speaker 1: Welcome to thrilling Threads, where we unpack the sources on
complex topics and give you what you need to be
well thoroughly informed.
Speaker 2: And today we are pulling back the curtain on one
of the most secretive, most critical, and honestly least understood
military assets on the entire planet.
Speaker 1: It's a surveillance space so remote and so central to
global conflict that it's often called Australia's Area fifty one.
Speaker 2: We're talking about the Joint Defense Facility Pine Gap. It's
HISS installation, nestled about eighteen kilometers outside of Alice Springs
or part way right in the heart of the Northern Territory.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And if you were to just you know, drive
down the access road Hat Road, you wouldn't get a
friendly welcome.
Speaker 2: No, not at all. You'd get these fiercely worded.
Speaker 1: Signs, unambiguous signs. Right, they just say turn around now
and absolutely no photography.
Speaker 2: And that road, that's the gateway. It's the entrance to
the operational pulse of modern US intelligence. And this is
the crucial part. It's drone warfare program.
Speaker 1: So our mission today is pretty clear. We need to
go beyond the secrecy and really unpack what this place does,
its function, its shadowy history, and its massive role in
the world today.
Speaker 2: We have to follow the thread that connects this remote
desert facility to I mean everything from tracking ballistic missiles
to directing lethal drone strikes, and it even gets into
the highest levels of global political intrigue.
Speaker 1: The origin story alone is straight out of a Cold
War thriller.
Speaker 2: It really is. The base was formally established in nineteen
sixty six, became operational in nineteen seventy.
Speaker 1: And the story they told the Australian public was intentionally blanned.
Speaker 2: Oh completely. It was marketed as this perfectly innocent space
research facility. The official name was the Joint Defense Space
Research Facility.
Speaker 1: A space research facility, but the truth was quite a bit.
Speaker 2: Different, immediately different. The sources we have confirmed that from
the absolute beginning, from the moment it was conceived, it
was covertly run by the CIA. So not science, not
peaceful scientific discovery. No, it's real, highly classified mission was
to monitor the Soviet Union's missile and weapons programs. They
were trying to collect telemetry data during the height of
the nuclear standoff.
Speaker 1: So a giant, super sensitive CIA listening post just disguised
as a science lab hidden away from the world, and.
Speaker 2: That cover story, as you can imagine, it didn't last
thanks to whistleblowers, most notably Edward Snowden. Leaked documents confirmed
what analysts has suspected for decades, which is that Pine
Gap is of criticality. It is America's single most valuable
intelligence site outside of US soil. It's a key cog
in the machine of global real time surveillance.
Speaker 1: That phrase right there, most valuable intelligence site outside US soil.
That's what we really need to focus on.
Speaker 2: And you can see it. The sheer physical growth of
the facility is the tangible, indisputable evidence of its escalating value.
And you know it's shifting mission.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack that physical structure, because this facility is
like a living, growing monument to America's global intelligence ambition.
Speaker 2: So when it opened in nineteen seventy, the main operations
building was relatively modest. It was about four thousand square
meters of floor space.
Speaker 1: Almost quoint compared to today. If you look at satellite
imagery now, that original size is well, it's almost laughable.
Speaker 2: It's completely dwarfed. Intelligence experts noted that by nineteen ninety nine,
so a few decades in it had already grown to
about eighteen antennas and today. Fast forward to today, and
the compound houses a staggering thirty eight ray domes.
Speaker 1: Those are the big white golf ball looking things for exactly.
Speaker 2: Those iconic white domes that protect the satellite dishes from
the the harsh desert environment and also from prying eyes.
Speaker 1: The internal expansion is what really gets me. Our sources
say the total floor space of the two main operation
buildings has increased fivefold, fivefold.
Speaker 2: It's now well over twenty thousand square meters.
Speaker 1: To give people a sense of that scale, let's try
an analogy. If you took the floor area of just
those two main buildings and laid it out, you'd be
looking at a space larger than the entire place field
of the Melbourne Cricket Ground, the mcg.
Speaker 2: WOW, or for our American listeners, it's comparable to more
than three and a half full sized American football fields.
This is an enormous high tech city, operating in total
isolation and just constantly expanding to meet global intelligence needs.
Speaker 1: And this is where the story gets really compelling. The
timeline of that growth.
Speaker 2: Right, because you would think logically that the big construction
boom happened during the Cold War when.
Speaker 1: The Soviet threat was at its peak, of course, but the.
Speaker 2: Data reveals this, this intriguing paradox, The base's biggest, most
significant expansion happened after the Cold War was officially over.
Speaker 1: That's fascinating. So its original purpose was fading away, but
the base itself was getting bigger and bigger.
Speaker 2: Exactly that post Cold War expansion. You can really see
it through the nineties and early two thousands. It signals
a huge pivot in the base's mission.
Speaker 1: The old job of listening to Soviet missile telemetry was gone.
Speaker 2: It was diminishing. Yeah, so the facility expanded dramatically to
read wrecked its capabilities. It moved its focus away from
the former Soviet Union and toward intercepting weapons and communications
signals from all across Asia.
Speaker 1: So countries like China and North Korea precisely.
Speaker 2: And then this expansion was just massively accelerated. After nine
to eleven, the focus shifted to supporting the global War
on Terror, so it needed real time intelligence for the
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Speaker 1: It went from a strategic listening post to a tactical
surveillance hub almost overnight.
Speaker 2: And you can't have that kind of global reach in isolation.
It's all facilitated through this monumental intelligence sharing structure that
we know as the Five Eyes Network.
Speaker 1: Right, So pine Gap is a critical node in that
alliance that's the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Speaker 2: And more than that, the base is a confirmed intercept
station for the Echelon program.
Speaker 1: Echelon, that's a name a lot of our listeners might recognize.
It's one of the earliest examples of truly global electronic surveillance.
Speaker 2: It's a very loaded word, for sure. It was formally
established in nineteen seventy one the snowed In leaks, though
they gave us crucial clarification. Echelon was actually a subprogram
under an even bigger umbrella called Frosting.
Speaker 1: Frosting started when pine Gap was established back in sixty six,
that's right.
Speaker 2: And the specific purpose of Echelon, what made it so
powerful from pine GAP's perspective was its target, which was
intercepting Intelsat satellite transmissions. Yeah, for decades, Intelsat was the
world primary commercial communication satellite system. It carried a massive
volume of commercial, diplomatic, private, I mean all sorts of
government communications.
Speaker 1: So we're not just talking about military radio chatter.
Speaker 2: No, this was Echelon via Pine Gap sweeping up a massive,
indiscriminate volume of global data. It went far beyond purely
military targets.
Speaker 1: The scale of this operation is just immense. But who
is actually in charge of this sprawling facility on Australian soil.
Speaker 2: It is run jointly, that's a requirement of the agreement,
but the organizational structure it reflects a pretty clear US dominance.
Speaker 1: In terms of personnel and priorities exactly.
Speaker 2: The Australian signals direct the ASD they're involved, But the
US presence is made up of three major intelligence services,
the CIA, the NSA and the NRO the National Reconnaissance Office.
Speaker 1: And the NSA provides most of the bodies on the ground.
Speaker 2: The overwhelming majority of operational personnel, yes, which really reinforces
its role as I mean, it's essentially the nssa's most
critical overseas fuel station.
Speaker 1: So even though the CIA might have provided the initial
covert hover story and often supplies the chief of facility,
the day to day work is NSA driven. It confirms
that signals intelligence focus precisely.
Speaker 2: The complexity of that partnership underlines the whole nature of
the agreement shared responsibility, but with highly skewed operational priorities.
Speaker 1: And the physical reality. The continuous construction, the doubling of
the ratomes, the five fold increase in floor space, it
all points to one thing.
Speaker 2: That this intelligence partnership is growing exponentially and it's driven
by US strategic needs, all leveraging Australia's unique geographical position.
Speaker 1: Okay, speaking of geography, that lead us right to the
next question, Why Pine Gap? I mean, why was the
desolate center of the Australian continent chosen for a base
with such an immense global reach.
Speaker 2: The location gives them several critical strategic advantages. They're rooted
in both physical security and orbital mechanics.
Speaker 1: Let's start with security.
Speaker 2: Okay, So the first historically was just its remoteness. Back
in the late sixties, intelligence agencies were very worried about interception.
Speaker 1: By spy ships.
Speaker 2: Exactly, Soviet spy ships would linger in international waters trying
to intercept signals being transmitted to ground stations. Pine Gap
was simply too far inland too difficult to.
Speaker 1: Access a physical fortress designed by isolation.
Speaker 2: But the more critical factor is its strategic position relative
to the equator. Its placement in central Australia allows it
to be the primary ground control station for spy satellites,
passing over one third of the globe.
Speaker 1: One third of the entire globe. What does that cover.
Speaker 2: That vast coverage area includes key geopolitical players and hotspots China,
the Asian parts of Russia, and the critical theaters in
the Middle East. It's uniquely situated to watch all three
major areas at the same time.
Speaker 1: Let's get into the technology that makes this continuous surveillance possible.
The core mission of pine Gap revolves around being the
ground station for a specific kind of satellite right.
Speaker 2: Yes, the control center and the principal downlink for US
signal intelligence satellites. The code name is Rainfall, but they're
better known as the Advanced Rayan satellites.
Speaker 1: And the key to these satellites is their orbit, their
geosynchronous Yes.
Speaker 2: And to visualize this, just imagine the Earth's spinning. These
satellites are positioned incredibly high, up over twenty thousand miles
or about thirty five thousand, seven eighty six kilometers above
the surface.
Speaker 1: And at that exact altitude, the satellite's speed matches the
Earth's rotation.
Speaker 2: Precisely, which means a satellite appears to just hang there,
fixed above a specific point on the place in its surface, which.
Speaker 1: Allows for continuous, unbroken surveillance coverage over their assigned patch
to the planet.
Speaker 2: They're always listening, always fixed on their area of interest,
and constantly downlinking massive amounts of data to the Pine
Gap dishes down below.
Speaker 1: And this coverage is just continental in scope. The Snowden
documents revealed the truly astronomical reach through specific mission data.
Speaker 2: That's right, we have details on Mission seventy six hundred
or M seventy six hundred. It was documented in two
thousand and five that mission used at least two of
these geosecretist satellites operating at the same time.
Speaker 1: And what did they cover.
Speaker 2: They provided a continuous high fidelity coverage of the majority
of the Eurasian land mass in Africa. It extended from
western Europe all the way across Asia.
Speaker 1: That's effectively monitoring communications and signal emitters across half the
world's major population centers and military hot.
Speaker 2: Zones, but the US strategic demand didn't stop there. Then
came Mission eighty three hundred M eighty three hundred, which
was the upgrade.
Speaker 1: What did that involve?
Speaker 2: It involved a four satellite constellation and that constellation expanded
coverage to an even more enormous swath of the globe
the former Soviet Union, China, South Asia, East Asia, the
Middle East, Eastern Europe, and even territories out into the
Atlantic Ocean.
Speaker 1: And Pine Gap is the only ground station with the
optimal position to handle all of that data in real time.
Speaker 2: It's downloading, analyzing, and processing strategic, tactical, political, and economic
communications signals across that entire monumental region.
Speaker 1: So beyond just listening, let's get specific about the types
of intelligence the base is collecting. Our sources mentioned SGANT,
COMMENT and PHISONT. Can you break those down for us?
Speaker 2: Of course, so signals intelligence or SIGANT, that's the broad
term for any intelligence gathered from electronics.
Speaker 1: Signals, the umbrella term.
Speaker 2: Exactly under that umbrella, we have two critical subsets. First
is communications intelligence or COMMENT. That involves intercepted wireless communications.
Speaker 1: So cell phones, radio transmissions, that kind of thing.
Speaker 2: Right, Encrypted diplomatic satelliteup links, military command and controlled chatter.
This is where analysts are literally listening to or reading
what people are saying or texting.
Speaker 1: And the third one fistened that's highly technical, isn't it?
Speaker 2: Fustant or foreign instrumentation Signals intelligence is arguably the most
critical for missile tracking, which you know was pine GAP's
original purpose.
Speaker 1: Okay, so what is it?
Speaker 2: This intelligence involves monitoring the unique electronic signatures, the telemetry
data that a foreign military system transmits during a test.
For instance, when a country tests a new ballistic missile,
that missile sends back data about its trajectory, fuel consumption,
stage separation, all of that.
Speaker 1: So feisan isn't telling you what they're saying, but how
their technology actually works exactly.
Speaker 2: Pine Gap collects that raw telemetry. The analysts then decode
and interpret it, telling the US not just that a
missile was launched, but precisely how capable its guidance system is,
how successful its stage separation was, how accurately it can
deliver a payload. It provides invaluable data on foreign military
cap abilities.
Speaker 1: And to keep up with this relentless demand for data,
pine GAP must be constantly evolving its hardware it is.
Speaker 2: The base is not static at all. A notable recent
change is the addition of several Taurus multi beam antennas.
Speaker 1: And what do they do.
Speaker 2: These are highly advanced dishes. They're specifically installed to intercept
transmissions from foreign and low orbit communication satellites with the
intelligence community calls foreign sat coom SAT, and they have
a major focus on Southeast and East Asia.
Speaker 1: So while the massive older dishes are focused on those
fixed geosynchronous satellites twenty thousand miles up.
Speaker 2: These newer multi beam antennas allow pine Gap to simultaneously
capture data from the thousands of low orbiting satellites that
are constantly whizzing through the region. It's an enormous expansion
of collection.
Speaker 1: Capacity and all of this converges on its role in
modern kinetic warfare, specifically missile defense.
Speaker 2: This is where its data becomes directly linked to the
US war fighting infrastructure.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's talk about that indiquession. The sources mentioned pine
Gap supporting things like the US Space Development Agencies PWSA
and the Missile Defense Agencies HBTSS. That's a lot of acronyms.
Speaker 2: It is, but if we connect the technical picture to
the strategic reality. Pine gaps data is now essential for
what they call birth to death tracking of advanced missile threats.
Speaker 1: What does that mean?
Speaker 2: The PWSA and HBTSS they're designed to detect hypersonic, ballistic
and cruise missile threats earlier than any land based or
sea based radar camp.
Speaker 1: Because terrestrial radar on the ground has a horizon, it
can't see the full trajectory of a high speed target
over the curve of the Earth precisely.
Speaker 2: And that's why pine GAP's role is so critical. Think
about a threat like a hypersonic glide vehicle an HGV,
which can move at mock five or faster through the atmosphere,
and it can maneuver.
Speaker 1: So it's not on a predictable path like a ballistic
missile right, and it.
Speaker 2: Often flies at lower altitudes. Terrestrial radar is simply too
slow and too late to establish a continuous track Cotinuous
high altitude wide area surveillance provided by the pine gap
controlled satellites is the only way to maintain a custody
chain on that target.
Speaker 1: A custody chain, and what do they do with that
continuous tracking data?
Speaker 2: The information collected and processed at pine Gap provides what
is called fire control quality tracking data, meaning meaning it's
the highly accurate, real time, positional and velocity information needed
to guide an interceptor missile to launch it and successfully
defeat an advanced threat like an HGV. Without the accuracy
and continuity pine Gap satellites offer, these high speed defense
systems simply cannot function effectively.
Speaker 1: It's just incredible to think about the scope. A massive
complex in the Australian desert is providing the microsecond precise
intelligence needed to track a hypersonic weapon launched over the
South China Sea.
Speaker 2: It links Australian land directly into the global defense architecture,
and it underscores the true depth of the integration. Pine
Gap is no longer just a listener. It is an
irreplaceable no in the entire US system of warfighting and deterrence.
Speaker 1: The base's role in tracking advanced weaponry is I mean,
it's a technical marvel. But the area that draws the
most intense ethical and legal controversy is its function as
a central gear in the US's legal drone operations.
Speaker 2: Right this is where the sing pine Gap collects translates
directly from data into targeted and often lethal military action.
Speaker 1: We're moving from strategic intelligence gathering to tactical targeting.
Speaker 2: Exactly, and pine GAP's single most critical military function in
this context is geolocation. Classified NSA documents confirmed that the
bases involved in the geolocation of cell phones used by
people throughout the world from the Pacific to the edge
of Africa.
Speaker 1: Let's just unpack that That means the geosynchronous satellites. Pine
GAP controls are essentially sweeping up the signals from mobile devices.
Speaker 2: The metadata, the transmission signature.
Speaker 1: And using those signals to pinpoint the location of the
user anywhere within that enormous eight three hundred coverage zone.
Speaker 2: This capability allows the intelligence to translate the mere presence
of a mobile signal into actionable coordinates. It creates the
targeting information that is then relayed in real time to
US drone operators.
Speaker 1: Which makes pine Gap essential for US drone attacks not
just in official war zones like Afghanistan and Syria.
Speaker 2: But also in clandestine operations run by the CIA in
countries where the US is not officially a war like Yemen, Pakistan,
and Somalia, and.
Speaker 1: The human cost of these operations is impossible to ignore
drone strikes have resulted in thousands of deaths, and that
includes significant civilian casualties.
Speaker 2: The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has cited reports suggesting hundreds,
sometimes over one thousand non combatant civilian deaths across various
operational theaters. And this brings us head on into the
deeply divisive issue of culpability.
Speaker 1: The ethics of Australia's involvement.
Speaker 2: And we have two very powerful conflicting viewpoints coming from
those who are closest to the material.
Speaker 1: Let's start with the culpability view. This is articulated very
forcefully by Professor Richard tis, a leading expert on Australian
security policy.
Speaker 2: Professor Tantra's argument is that because pine Gap contributes hugely
in real time to these lethal operations by providing the
critical targeting data, Australia is inherently culpable for the consequences.
Speaker 1: For all of it, whether it's happening today or in
a future conflict against a major power like North Korea.
Speaker 2: The argument is direct. Without the precise geolocation data from
pine Gap, many of these strikes would simply not be possible.
It makes Australia an indispensable partner in the act itself.
Speaker 1: That is a very powerful legal and moral accusation. But
there is a strong counter argument, and it comes from
people who actually worked inside the system.
Speaker 2: Right. David Rosenberg a former NSA pine Gap employee. He
served for eighteen years as a team leader of weapons
signals analysis.
Speaker 1: He confirms the base's geolocation capability, but he argues something
very different.
Speaker 2: He argues the facility's output actually helps limit civilian casualties.
Rosenberg's moral defense is that preventing civilian care casualties is
a high priority for intelligence operations. He claims pine Gap
provides accurate, highly detailed intelligence specifically to minimize harm, to
ensure that lethal strikes are directed only at verified military
targets and not at civilian infrastructure or unintended victims.
Speaker 1: That's a very complex ethical tightrope to walk, because even
if that's the intent to maximize precision and limit collateral damage,
how does that reconcile with the documented reports of so
many civilian deaths.
Speaker 2: That is precisely the ethical dilemma. Intent does not negate outcome.
Speaker 1: Is it possible for a system to be aiming for
accuracy but still inherently cause unacceptable collateral damage just because
the intelligence, no matter how precise, is imperfect.
Speaker 2: And instantaneous decisions have to be made. That's the heart
of it, and the sources highlight serious legal concerns. Rights
groups emphasize the potential for Australian personnel to be charged
with war crimes due to complicity.
Speaker 1: Emily Howie from the Human Rights Law Center of Australia,
she's been very specific about this, she has.
Speaker 2: She stated that Australian personnel could potentially face charges under
the Australian Criminal Code for complicity in extra judicial drone strikes,
defining unlawful killing using drones as a violation of both
international and Australian law.
Speaker 1: But if the legal basis is there, why haven't there
been any investigations.
Speaker 2: The difficulty lies in the structural complexity of the Five
Eyes network. She In Westmoreland, a former US Air Force
signals relay technician who worked in the drone network. He said,
these operations are pretty much a global affair.
Speaker 1: So because the network is so integrated and the data
is moving instantaneously between five different sovereign states, it creates
a kind of intelligence firewall against accountability correct.
Speaker 2: The real time collaboration blurs the lines of culpability. It
makes it extremely difficult to pin specific legal responsibility on
one country or even one individual, which just discourages any
single national authority from investigating.
Speaker 1: In this controversy. It isn't just an academic debate. It
is to direct physical resistance on the ground in Australia.
Speaker 2: Yes, the October twenty twenty five Gaza War blockade is
a really recent and specific example. Activists from a group
called Impartoi for Felstine they locked themselves to a concrete
filled barrel on Hat Road.
Speaker 1: They blocked the road for nine hours, physically obstructing Pine
Gap workers from getting to the base during a critical
shift change. And their legal justification for doing this was
incredibly provocative.
Speaker 2: They said they were preventing genocide. They asserted they were
blocking workers from assisting in the alleged sharing of geolocation
data with the Israeli Defense Forces the IDF, noting that
the base's satellite coverage includes the Gaza region.
Speaker 1: Professor Richard Tanter actually provided expert testimony in a similar
protest case.
Speaker 2: Before he did, he detailed the mechanisms by which Pine
GAP's intelligence is provided to the IDF via the US
National Security Agency. He noted that three out of the
four advanced Ryan satellites continuously surveiled the broad air that
encompasses Gaza, so.
Speaker 1: The technical capability to provide that real time tactical intelligence
is definitely there.
Speaker 2: It is now. The court didn't ultimately validate the protest
as a legal justification for a criminal offense, but the
action powerfully highlights the profound local distress over the basis
specific international military involvements.
Speaker 1: And we can't overlook the deeply rooted and long standing
opposition from the Arunte people, the traditional landowners of that region.
Speaker 2: That opposition is fundamental. It injects a critical layer of
indigenous sovereignty into this whole ethical debate.
Speaker 1: There's a quote from an Arunte elder, Felicity Hayes, that
is just devastating.
Speaker 2: It connects the ancient land to modern warfare. So directly,
she asked, who gave America the right to put their
military base on our sacred land and use our country
to kill innocent women, men, children, and old people overseas.
Speaker 1: The Erunite people never seeded their land. They see the
base as an imposition using their sacred country to perpetrate
loobal violence, all without their consultation or their consent.
Speaker 2: That quote, it just cuts right to the heart of
the matter, doesn't it. It's a century's old land rights
issue colliding head on with twenty first century warfare. It
makes Pine Gap a highly charged political symbol at home,
even as it controls global conflicts abroad.
Speaker 1: Let's pivot now and examine the internal political and management
structure of Pine Gap, which holds a well a very
controversial place in Australian history.
Speaker 2: Right, And you can't discuss the political narrative without detailing
the explosive nineteen seventy five dismissal of Prime Minister GoF Whitlam.
Speaker 1: This is a deep rabbit hole of political history, fraught
with conspiracy claims, it really is.
Speaker 2: Whitlam came to power with a distinct intention to assert
greater Australian control over US bases and alliances. He had
openly pledged to uncover Pine GAP's highly classified operations, and he.
Speaker 1: Was publicly questioning the benefit of these US spy bases right,
suggesting they offered no real advantage to Australia.
Speaker 2: He was and his tenure was short lived and very turbulent.
Just weeks after escalating his inquiries, he was controversially removed
from office by the Governor General, Sir John Kerr, who
invoked these rarely used constitutional reserve powers.
Speaker 1: And this is where the shadows of the intelligence community creep.
Speaker 2: In yes investigated journalists, most notably John Pilger, have claimed
that declassified CIA cables and internal documents strongly suggest US
Intelligence agency involvement CIA and MI six in the push
for Whitlam's removal.
Speaker 1: And the motivation, according to these sources, was.
Speaker 2: What to protect absolute US control over the pine GAF
facility to prevent an Australian leader from undermining this security
alliance at its most critical node.
Speaker 1: So the fact that specific documents related to the dismissal
have been withheld for so long it certainly fuels the
theory that the US intelligence community acted decisively to protect
its strategic asset.
Speaker 2: It established a chilling precedent that the base's operational security
might just supersede the will of the democratically elected Australian government.
Its cemented well. The command structure fundamentally reinforces US control
the chief of facility, and there have been sixteen since
nineteen sixty seven has always been a civilian, predominantly a
senior officer from the CIA or the NSA.
Speaker 1: So people like Michael Bartholomew or Tim Howell, both CIA veterans, exactly.
Speaker 2: That strong US intelligence community pedigree at the top ensures
that US strategic priorities remain paramount.
Speaker 1: What about the official Australian representation within that command structure.
Speaker 2: Australia's senior officer is known as the Australian Defense Representative
or ady Race. Sometimes they're called the Deputy Chief and
their job Their stated role is to ensure the Australian
government has full knowledge and concurrence of all activities taking
place at the facility. These are high level positions held
by significant figures like Rachel Noble, who is Deputy Chief
before rising to other high profile roles.
Speaker 1: So on paper, Australia has full oversight. But beneath the
chiefs how is the massive two hundred and four seven
operational demand managed.
Speaker 2: This brings us to the crucial operational structure centered around
the Mission Director, the MD. The MD is the highest
authority in the operations room during any given shift.
Speaker 1: Okay, and this is important because is due.
Speaker 2: To the continuous nature of global surveillance. The MD acts
as the chief of facility for seventy five percent of
the time.
Speaker 1: Seventy five percent, so basically anytime it's not a weekday,
during business.
Speaker 2: Hours, evenings, weekends, holidays. Yes, that means a relatively small
group of rotating personnel holds immense operational authority for three
quarters of the week. There are typically three mds, one
for each shift, rotated among senior US and Australian personnel.
Speaker 1: And the work itself sounds incredibly demanding.
Speaker 2: It is rigorous, twelve hour rotating shifts, often a pattern
of four on, four off, so two day shifts, two
night shifts, then four days off. It places immense authority
over critical global operations into the hands of just a
few senior staff members.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack a huge security paradox that our sources highlight.
It's this disconnect between the massive investment and technology and
the surprisingly low valuation of the human intelligence personnel, and this.
Speaker 2: Creates a critical security threat. It's a fundamental vulnerability in
the entire five Eyes architecture, not just at Pine Gap.
Speaker 1: The Alliance nations, including Australia, they pour billions into Sigant and.
Speaker 2: Joint billions into the technology, the satellites, the computers. Yet
virtually every major intelligence leak of the last decade, from
Edward Snowden's documents to the Vault seven leak by the
former CIA engineer Joshua Schulti.
Speaker 1: They didn't stem from technological failure.
Speaker 2: No, they stemmed from failures in human intelligence or human nity.
They were failures involving people.
Speaker 1: The core quoti being raised is whether critical national security
functions can effectively be outsourced and run on the cheap and.
Speaker 2: The facility relies heavily on contractors. David Rosenberg, the former
NSA employee. He noted that large corporations like Raytheon hire
civilian operators to man positions and operations monitoring data.
Speaker 1: And when a government relies so heavily on contractors and
morale is impacted by financial strain, the overall security vulnerability
just increases dramatically.
Speaker 2: Let's stop here, because this salary disparity is shocking. You're
talking about high pressure, high clearance national security jobs. What
are the actual numbers?
Speaker 1: Okay, consider this specific stark data point from the sources.
An Australian Defense Force security advisor at Pine Gap, dealing
with the most sensitive global intelligence on Earth.
Speaker 2: Their annual gross salary sits roughly between fifty eight thousand
dollars and sixty two thousand dollars AUD.
Speaker 1: Fifty eight to sixty two thousand, and many of these
roles require a university degree and specialized training that.
Speaker 2: Is extremely low for that level of responsibility. When you
factor in the high cost of living at a remote
center like Alice Springs, it seems like a self inflicted
security wound.
Speaker 1: Especially when you can trust it with civilian jobs.
Speaker 2: Right in the strong Australian mining and construction sectors. For example,
entry level FIFO fly and flyout construction jobs often start
between eighty thousand dollars and one hundred thousand dollars AUD.
Speaker 1: And they require no tertiary education.
Speaker 2: And certainly not the stress or scrutiny inherent in handling
classified national security information. So you have highly trained intelligence
personnel being paid significantly less than entry level civil.
Speaker 1: Workers, facing financial pressure, burnout from demanding twelve hour shifts,
and massive security responsibility.
Speaker 2: That financial pressure and disparity actively risks losing trained personnel
to the civil sector, and for those who remain it
can burden them with financial issues. Our sources suggest this
dramatically increases their security vulnerability compared to adversaries like Russia
and China, who reportedly do not outsource national security to
the same extent.
Speaker 1: They invest more heavily in retaining and compensating their human
intelligence capital, and.
Speaker 2: The sources strongly suggest this undervaluation of human capital poses
a far greater risk than any technological failure. It leads
directly to potential human tea failures and ultimately massive leaks.
It's a fundamental economic factor undermining national security At ALD
America's most critical overseas intelligence site.
Speaker 1: The paradox is just staggering.
Speaker 2: So if we synthesize this whole deep dive the Bass
dramatic political history, it's staggering physical scale, the geosynchronous surveillance capabilities,
tracking threats globally, and its deeply contested role in lethal
drone strikes, we see planing gaps evolution pretty clearly defined.
Speaker 1: It moved from a niche cold war listening post into
a modern nexus of global warfare, missile tracking and tactical targeting,
all operating with minimal transparency on Australian land.
Speaker 2: Which highlights a persistent and fundamental tension at the very
heart of the US Australia alliance. And we have to
return to the insightful perspective of the late Professor Des Baal,
a lifelong researcher of the facility. He stated that Australia
gets everything and nothing from the base.
Speaker 1: That paradox needs explaining.
Speaker 2: Okay, so Australia gets everything in the sense that it
receives full access to the raw intelligence flowing through the
five ICE channels, the high fidelity tracking data, the global
communication sweeps, the feisant telemetry.
Speaker 1: But it gets nothing.
Speaker 2: It gets nothing in the sense that the intelligence collected
and prioritized is fundamentally geared toward US strategic interests targeting China,
tracking Russian missiles, supporting US drone strikes. It's not necessarily
what Australia needs for its own independent, immediate regional security policy,
like a local maritime surveillance or domestic threats.
Speaker 1: So the Australian government pays a political and ethical cost
for access to intelligence that is primarily tailored to the
US global agenda.
Speaker 2: But there is a powerful, undeniable financial counter argument for
maintaining this status. Quote. Of course, there is defense experts
people like Peter Jennings. They estimate that maintaining this crucial
US alliance via pine Gap saves Australia billions of dollars
annually in defense spending as much as thirty two billion dollars.
Speaker 1: And that massive financial incentive reinforces the political difficulty the
near impossibility of ever closing or radically reforming the facility.
Speaker 2: Pine Gap therefore stands at this uncomfortable intersection of financial necessity,
geopolitical alliance, and serious ethical and legal concerns regarding complicity
in international.
Speaker 1: Strikes, and we have to conclude on the most profound
security risk raised in our sources. The base is described
as a fundamentally important element in US war fighting and
deterrence of conflict.
Speaker 2: Which makes Australia, as a result, a definite nuclear target
in any major conflict involving the US in a power
like China or Russia.
Speaker 1: The base is critical to US strategy. If that strategy
escalates to a global conflict, Australia is on the front
line simply by hosting this asset. The fate of a
nation and potentially the future of global conflict, flows through
the ray doomes of that remote desert outpost.
Speaker 2: So, considering the confirmed risks of complicity in international strikes
and the potential for the base to become a wartime target,
what specific reforms or demands for transparency should Australia prioritize
to reconcile its security alliance with its own national sovereignty
and ethical obligations? Want to Noah you think the o
acamma below.
Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us on this critical, thrilling thread.
We'll be back next time with another deep dive into
the powerful, often hidden stories behind the headlines.