
Smoke and flames billow after Israeli forces struck a high-rise tower in Gaza City, Oct. 7. Photo: Palestinian News & Information Agency, Wafa, for APAimages.
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Smoke and flames billow after Israeli forces struck a high-rise tower in Gaza City, Oct. 7. Photo: Palestinian News & Information Agency, Wafa, for APAimages.
By Peter Cronau – Nov 3, 2023
Peter Cronau reports on Canberraâs secret support for Israelâs brutal assault on Palestinians in Gaza through NSA intelligence satellites in the U.S. Pine Gap base near Alice Springs.
The Pine Gap U.S. surveillance base located outside of Alice Springs in Australia is collecting an enormous range of communications and electronic intelligence from the brutal Gaza-Israel battlefield â and this data is being provided to the Israel Defence Forces.
Two large Orion geosynchronous signals intelligence satellites, belonging to the U.S. and operated from Pine Gap, are located 36,000 kms above the equator over the Indian Ocean. From there, they look down on the Middle East, Europe and Africa, and gather huge amounts of intelligence data to beam back to the Pine Gap base.
After collecting and analysing the communications and intelligence data for the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), Pine Gap is providing it to the Israel Defence Forces, as it steps up its brutal assault on Palestinians in the Gaza enclave.
âPine Gap facility is monitoring the Gaza Strip and surrounding areas with all its resources, and gathering intelligence assessed to be useful to Israel,â a former Pine Gap employee has told Declassified Australia.
David Rosenberg worked inside Pine Gap as âteam leader of weapon signals analysisâ for 18 years until 2008. He is a 23-year veteran of the NSA.
The joint Australia/USA communications facility at Pine Gap near Alice Springs in Central Australia, April 2008. ( Skyring, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
âPine Gap has satellites overhead. Every one of those assets would be on those locations, looking for anything that could help them.â
âPine Gap facility is monitoring the Gaza Strip and surrounding areas with all its resources, and gathering intelligence assessed to be useful to Israel.â
Rosenberg says the personnel at Pine Gap are tasked with collecting signals such as âcommand and controlâ centres in Gaza, with Hamas headquarters often located near hospitals, schools and other civilian structures. âThe aim would be to minimise casualties to non-combatants in achieving their objective of destroying Hamas.â
Since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel that killed over 1,400 Israelis, both military and civilian, the Israel Defence Forces has bombed hundreds of targets inside Gaza, killing far more than Hamas militants. An estimated 9,000 people so far have been killed, including most shockingly 3,600 children.
United Nations agencies have deplored the nearly four-week Israeli bombing campaign saying,
âGaza has become a âgraveyardâ for children with thousands now killed under Israeli bombardment, while more than a million face dire shortages of essentials and a lifetime of trauma ahead.â
Pine Gapâs Global Role
Pine Gapâcontrolled Orion SIGINT surveillance satellites, showing collection coverage over the Middle East.  (Desmond Ball, Bill Robinson and Richard Tanter, âThe SIGINT Satellites of Pine Gap:  Conception, Development and in Orbitâ, NAPSNet Special Reports)
The sprawling satellite ground station outside Alice Springs, officially titled Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap (JDFPG), has been described as the United Statesâ second most important surveillance base globally.
About half the 800 personnel working at the Central Australian base are American, with Australian government employees making up fewer than 100 of the increasingly privatised staff.
The base is no mere passive communication collector. Personnel at the Pine Gap base provide vital detailed analysis and reporting on SIGINT (signals intelligence) and ELINT (electronic intelligence) it collects.
Israeli Minister of Heritage Suggests Dropping Atomic Bomb on Gaza
As well as surveillance of civilian, commercial and military communications, it provides detailed geolocation intelligence to the U.S. military that can be used to locate with precision targets in the battlefield.
This was first conclusively documented in a secret NSA document, titled âSite Profile,â leaked from the Edward Snowden archive to this writer and first published by ABC Australia in 2017:
âRAINFALL [Pine Gapâs NSA codename] detects, collects, records, processes, analyses and reports on PROFORMA signals collected from tasked target entities.â
These PROFORMA signals are the communications data of radar and weapon systems collected in near real-time â they likely would include remote launch signals for Hamas rockets, as well as any threatened missile launches from Lebanon or Iran.
âPine Gap detects, collects, records, processes, analyses and reports on PROFORMA signals collected from tasked target entities.â
This present war in Gaza is not the first time the dishes of Pine Gap have assisted Israelâs military with intelligence, including the detecting of incoming missiles, according to this previous report.
âDuring the [1991] Gulf War, Israeli reports praised Australia for relaying Scud missile launch warnings from the Nurrungar joint U.S.-Australian facility in South Australia, a task now assigned to Pine Gap.â
During the early stages of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the NSA installed a data link to send early warning of any Iraqi missile launches detected directly to Israelâs Air Force headquarters at Tel Nof airbase, south of Tel Aviv.
Israelâs Access to âFive Eyeâ JewelsÂ
Rendering of the âFive Eyesâ intelligence network that includes Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K., the U.S. (@GDJ, Openclipart)
The NSA âmaintains a far-reaching technical and analytic relationship with the Israeli SIGINT National Unit (ISNU),â according to documents published by The Intercept in 2014. The documents show the NSA and ISNU are âsharing information on access, intercept, targeting, language, analysis and reporting.â
âThis SIGINT relationship has increasingly been the catalyst for a broader intelligence relationship between the United States and Israel.
âThe Israeli side enjoys the benefits of expanded geographic access to world-class NSA cryptanalytic and SIGINT engineering expertise.â
Itâs thanks to the Pine Gap base, with its satellites so strategically positioned to monitor the Middle East region, along with its targeting and analysis capability, that Israel is able to make use of these benefits.
Another leaked document, a targeting exchange agreement from the U.K.âs surveillance agency, GCHQ, reveals one of the âspecific intelligence topicsâ shared among the NSA, GCHQ and ISNU was âPalestinians.â The document states that âdue to the sensitivitiesâ of Israeli involvement that particular program does not include direct targeting of Palestinians themselves.
The NSA considers their intelligence-sharing arrangement as being âbeneficial to both NSAâs and ISNUâs mission and intelligence requirements.â
This wide intelligence sharing arrangement potentially opens up to the Israelis the âjewelsâ of the Five Eye global surveillance system collected by the NSA global surveillance network, including by Australiaâs Pine Gap base.
Declassified Australia asked a series of questions of the Australian Defence Department about the role of the Pine Gap base in the Israel-Gaza war, and about the legal protections that may be in place to defend personnel of the base should legal charges of war crimes be laid. No response was received by deadline.
Peter Cronau is an award-winning investigative journalist, writer, and film-maker. His documentaries have appeared on ABC TVâs Four Corners and Radio Nationalâs Background Briefing. He is an editor and cofounder of DECLASSIFIED AUSTRALIA. He is co-editor of the recent book A Secret Australia â Revealed by the WikiLeaks ExposĂ©s.