Peace Researcher 30 – March 2005
As part of the Anti-Bases Campaign’s
Easter 2005 weekend of activities against spies and spybases, we will be going to
the Tangimoana spybase. It has been many years since anyone protested at
Tangimoana (we have to go back to the 1990 Touching The Bases Tour for the last
time that ABC was there). All the attention has been on the much better known,
and much more important, Waihopai spybase, in Marlborough. We thought it was
time we put Tangimoana back in the spotlight. ABC demands the closure, ASAP, of
Tangimoana and the abolition of the GCSB, which operates it. Here is what
Tangimoana does, taken from our Website www.converge.org.nz/abc.
Ed.
New Zealand’s Government
Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) operates a radio communications
interception facility called Tangimoana. The station is located 150 km north of
Wellington in sand-hill country on the West Coast of the North Island. The
sophisticated antennae are designed to pick up high frequency (or ‘short wave’)
radio signals from ships, aircraft and land-based transmitters around the
Pacific. Beyond high barbed wire-topped fences, electronic sensors, security
cameras and barred windows, the neon lights in the operations building can be
seen shining day and night. Here, rows of intercept officers sit at control
panels with headphones, searching for, listening to and recording radio
messages picked up through the different antennae.
At any time one officer may be
recording Vanuatu telex messages, another monitoring military communications in
New Caledonia and another tuning in to a Russian ship's radio frequency at its
usual reporting time to get a direction finding “fix” on its position. Until
the discovery and expose of the station by Owen Wilkes in 1984, New Zealanders
had no idea that their country was involved in spying on other countries'
communications.
For example, the French
communications targeted by Tangimoana are French military communications: radio
messages between French Polynesia and Paris, between French territories
including Mororoa Atoll (the former site of nuclear weapons testing) and
military communications in New Caledonia. Tangimoana also monitored the French
terrorists who sank the Rainbow Warrior.
The interception occurred in mid-July 1985 as they sailed away from New Zealand
on the yacht Ouvea. Their radio
messages were translated by GCSB personnel, but this was only after the Police
had already identified the yacht and it was too late to catch them.
Another major area targeted by
Tangimoana is communications between and within South Pacific nations and their
communications with the rest of the world. This includes a wide range of
political, economic and military communications: from political telexes in
Melanesia, to Fiji army communications, to Tongan patrol boats communicating
with their headquarters. There is even some monitoring of private ham radio
operators in the South Pacific if they are in a position to know about subjects
of interest (e.g., internal conflict within a Pacific Island nation). However
by the mid-1990s most of the non-military South Pacific communications had been
replaced by satellite (you can read about how Waihopai spies on civilian
satellite communications at http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/waihopai.html).
Since the second half of the
1980s computer technology has dramatically altered the operations at
Tangimoana. The station's Dictionary computer and the internal station computer
network are now central to its work. One of the staff asked the interviewer
(Nicky Hager): “…you do realise that Tangimoana and Waihopai collect for the
other agencies?”.
This comment partly refers to
special requests where Tangimoana may have better reception than other stations
in the network or is doing special interception work for another agency.
Mainly, though, it refers to the regular interception-sharing coordinated
within the Echelon (see Waihopai) global intelligence system of the US National
Security Agency. The Tangimoana collection schedule (i.e., schedule of whom to
spy on when) optimises collection for the whole network and the Dictionary
computer automatically sends raw intercept to the overseas agencies according
to their keyword specifications.
This has been adapted from “Secret Power:
New Zealand’s Role In The International Spy Network” by Nicky Hager, with
permission. That seminal book was published in 1996. As part of ABC’s
preparation for the Easter 2005 activities, we asked Nicky if he wanted to
update this. He replied that, as far as he knew, this was still current and
correct. Ed.
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