The article as it apears in hard copy in the magazine also includes the following sidebars: --"NSA'S BUSINESS PLAN: GLOBAL ACCESS" by Duncan Campbell --GREENPEACE WARRIOR: WHY NO WARNING? and --NZ's PM Kept in the Dark by Nicky Hager

IN THE LATE 1980S, IN A DECISION IT PROBABLY REGRETS, THE US PROMPTED NEW ZEALAND TO JOIN A NEW AND HIGHLY SECRET GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE SYSTEM. HAGER'S INVESTIGATION INTO IT AND HIS DISCOVERY OF THE ECHELON DICTIONARY HAS REVEALED ONE OF THE WORLD'S BIGGEST, MOST CLOSELY HELD
INTELLIGENCE PROJECTS. THE SYSTEM ALLOWS SPY AGENCIES TO MONITOR MOST OF THE WORLD'S TELEPHONE, E-MAIL, AND TELEX COMMUNICATIONS.

For 40 years, New Zealand's largest intelligence agency, the Government Communications
Security Bureau (GCSB) the nation's equivalent of the US National Security Agency (NSA)
had been helping its Western allies to spy on countries throughout the Pacific region, without
the knowledge of the New Zealand public or many of its highest elected officials. What the NSA
did not know is that by the late 1980s, various intelligence staff had decided these
activities had been too secret for too long, and were providing me with interviews and
documents exposing New Zealand's intelligence activities. Eventually, more than 50 people who
work or have worked in intelligence and related fields agreed to be interviewed.

The activities they described made it possible to document, from the South Pacific, some
alliance-wide systems and projects which have been kept secret elsewhere. Of these, by far the
most important is ECHELON.

Designed and coordinated by NSA, the ECHELON system is used to intercept ordinary e-mail, fax,
telex, and telephone communications carried over the world's telecommunications networks.
Unlike many of the electronic spy systems developed during the Cold War, ECHELON is designed
primarily for non-military targets: governments, organizations, businesses, and individuals in
virtually every country. It potentially affects every person communicating between (and
sometimes within) countries anywhere in the world.

It is, of course, not a new idea that intelligence organizations tap into e-mail and other
public telecommunications networks. What was new in the material leaked by the New Zealand
intelligence staff was precise information on where the spying is done, how the system works,
its capabilities and shortcomings, and many details such as the codenames.

The ECHELON system is not designed to eavesdrop on a particular individual's e-mail or fax
link. Rather, the system works by indiscriminately intercepting very large quantities of
communications and using computers to identify and extract messages of interest from the mass
of unwanted ones. A chain of secret interception facilities has been established around the
world to tap into all the major components of the international telecommunications networks.
Some monitor communications satellites, others land-based communications networks, and others
radio communications. ECHELON links together all these facilities, providing the US and its
allies with the ability to intercept a large proportion of the communications on the planet.

The computers at each station in the ECHELON network automatically search through the millions
of messages intercepted for ones containing pre-programmed keywords. Keywords include all the
names, localities, subjects, and so on that might be mentioned. Every word of every message
intercepted at each station gets automatically searched whether or not a specific telephone
number or e-mail address is on the list.

The thousands of simultaneous messages are read in "real time" as they pour into the station,
hour after hour, day after day, as the computer finds intelligence needles in
telecommunications haystacks.

SOMEONE IS LISTENING The computers in stations around the globe are known, within the network, as the ECHELON Dictionaries. Computers that can automatically search through traffic for
keywords have existed since at least the 1970s, but the ECHELON system was designed by NSA to
interconnect all these computers and allow the stations to function as components of an
integrated whole. The NSA and GCSB are bound together under the five-nation UKUSA signals
intelligence agreement. The other three partners all with equally obscure names are the
Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Britain, the Communications Security
Establishment (CSE) in Canada, and the Defense Signals Directorate (DSD) in Australia.

The alliance, which grew from cooperative efforts during World War II to intercept radio
transmissions, was formalized into the UKUSA agreement in 1948 and aimed primarily against the
USSR. The five UKUSA agencies are today the largest intelligence organizations in their
respective countries. With much of the world's business occurring by fax, e-mail, and phone,
spying on these communications receives the bulk of intelligence resources. For decades before
the introduction of the ECHELON system, the UKUSA allies did intelligence collection
operations for each other, but each agency usually processed and analyzed the intercept from
its own stations.

Under ECHELON, a particular station's Dictionary computer contains not only its parent
agency's chosen keywords, but also has lists entered in for other agencies. In New Zealand's
satellite interception station at Waihopai (in the South Island), for example, the computer
has separate search lists for the NSA, GCHQ, DSD, and CSE in addition to its own. Whenever the
Dictionary encounters a message containing one of the agencies' keywords, it automatically
picks it and sends it directly to the headquarters of the agency concerned. No one in New
Zealand screens, or even sees, the intelligence collected by the New Zealand station for the
foreign agencies. Thus, the stations of the junior UKUSA allies function for the NSA no
differently than if they were overtly NSA-run bases located on their soil.

The first component of the ECHELON network are stations specifically targeted on the
international telecommunications satellites (Intelsats) used by the telephone companies of
most countries. A ring of Intelsats is positioned around the world, stationary above the
equator, each serving as a relay station for tens of thousands of simultaneous phone calls,
fax, and e-mail. Five UKUSA stations have been established to intercept the communications
carried by the Intelsats.

The British GCHQ station is located at the top of high cliffs above the sea at Morwenstow in
Cornwall. Satellite dishes beside sprawling operations buildings point toward Intelsats above
the Atlantic, Europe, and, inclined almost to the horizon, the Indian Ocean. An NSA station at
Sugar Grove, located 250 kilometers southwest of Washington, DC, in the mountains of West
Virginia, covers Atlantic Intelsats transmitting down toward North and South America. Another
NSA station is in Washington State, 200 kilometers southwest of Seattle, inside the Army's
Yakima Firing Center. Its satellite dishes point out toward the Pacific Intelsats and to the
east. *1

The job of intercepting Pacific Intelsat communications that cannot be intercepted at Yakima
went to New Zealand and Australia. Their South Pacific location helps to ensure global
interception. New Zealand provides the station at Waihopai and Australia supplies the
Geraldton station in West Australia (which targets both Pacific and Indian Ocean Intelsats). *2

Each of the five stations' Dictionary computers has a codename to distinguish it from others
in the network. The Yakima station, for instance, located in desert country between the Saddle
Mountains and Rattlesnake Hills, has the COWBOY Dictionary, while the Waihopai station has the
FLINTLOCK Dictionary. These codenames are recorded at the beginning of every intercepted
message, before it is transmitted around the ECHELON network, allowing analysts to recognize
at which station the interception occurred.

New Zealand intelligence staff has been closely involved with the NSA's Yakima station since
1981, when NSA pushed the GCSB to contribute to a project targeting Japanese embassy
communications. Since then, all five UKUSA agencies have been responsible for monitoring
diplomatic cables from all Japanese posts within the same segments of the globe they are
assigned for general UKUSA monitoring.3 Until New Zealand's integration into ECHELON with the
opening of the Waihopai station in 1989, its share of the Japanese communications was
intercepted at Yakima and sent unprocessed to the GCSB headquarters in Wellington for
decryption, translation, and writing into UKUSA-format intelligence reports (the NSA provides
the codebreaking programs).

"COMMUNICATION" THROUGH SATELLITES The next component of the ECHELON system intercepts a range of satellite communications not carried by Intelsat.In addition to the UKUSA stations targeting Intelsat satellites, there are another five or more stations homing in on Russian and other regional communications satellites. These stations are Menwith Hill in northern England; Shoal Bay, outside Darwin in northern Australia (which targets Indonesian satellites); Leitrim, just south of Ottawa in Canada (which appears to intercept Latin American satellites); Bad Aibling in Germany; and Misawa in northern Japan.

A group of facilities that tap directly into land-based telecommunications systems is the
final element of the ECHELON system. Besides satellite and radio, the other main method of
transmitting large quantities of public, business, and government communications is a
combination of water cables under the oceans and microwave networks over land. Heavy cables,
laid across seabeds between countries, account for much of the world's international
communications. After they come out of the water and join land-based microwave networks they
are very vulnerable to interception. The microwave networks are made up of chains of microwave
towers relaying messages from hilltop to hilltop (always in line of sight) across the
countryside. These networks shunt large quantities of communications across a country.
Interception of them gives access to international undersea communications (once they surface)
and to international communication trunk lines across continents. They are also an obvious
target for large-scale interception of domestic communications.

Because the facilities required to intercept radio and satellite communications use large
aerials and dishes that are difficult to hide for too long, that network is reasonably well
documented. But all that is required to intercept land-based communication networks is a
building situated along the microwave route or a hidden cable running underground from the
legitimate network into some anonymous building, possibly far removed. Although it sounds
technically very difficult, microwave interception from space by United States spy satellites
also occurs.4 The worldwide network of facilities to intercept these communications is largely
undocumented, and because New Zealand's GCSB does not participate in this type of
interception, my inside sources could not help either.

NO ONE IS SAFE FROM A MICROWAVE A 1994 expos of the Canadian UKUSA agency, Spyworld, co-
authored by one of its former staff, Mike Frost, gave the first insights into how a lot of
foreign microwave interception is done (see p. 18). It described UKUSA "embassy collection"
operations, where sophisticated receivers and processors are secretly transported to their
countries' overseas embassies in diplomatic bags and used to monitor various communications in
foreign capitals. *5

Since most countries' microwave networks converge on the capital city, embassy buildings can
be an ideal site. Protected by diplomatic privilege, they allow interception in the heart of
the target country. *6 The Canadian embassy collection was requested by the NSA to fill gaps
in the American and British embassy collection operations, which were still occurring in many
capitals around the world when Frost left the CSE in 1990. Separate sources in Australia have
revealed that the DSD also engages in embassy collection. *7 On the territory of UKUSA
nations, the interception of land-based telecommunications appears to be done at special
secret intelligence facilities. The US, UK, and Canada are geographically well placed to
intercept the large amounts of the world's communications that cross their territories.

The only public reference to the Dictionary system anywhere in the world was in relation to
one of these facilities, run by the GCHQ in central London. In 1991, a former British GCHQ
official spoke anonymously to Granada Television's World in Action about the agency's abuses
of power. He told the program about an anonymous red brick building at 8 Palmer Street where
GCHQ secretly intercepts every telex which passes into, out of, or through London, feeding
them into powerful computers with a program known as "Dictionary." The operation, he
explained, is staffed by carefully vetted British Telecom people: "It's nothing to do with
national security. It's because it's not legal to take every single telex. And they take
everything: the embassies, all the business deals, even the birthday greetings, they take
everything. They feed it into the Dictionary." *8 What the documentary did not reveal is that
Dictionary is not just a British system; it is UKUSA-wide.

Similarly, British researcher Duncan Campbell has described how the US Menwith Hill station in
Britain taps directly into the British Telecom microwave network, which has actually been
designed with several major microwave links converging on an isolated tower connected
underground into the station.9

The NSA Menwith Hill station, with 22 satellite terminals and more than 4.9 acres of
buildings, is undoubtedly the largest and most powerful in the UKUSA network. Located in
northern England, several thousand kilometers from the Persian Gulf, it was awarded the NSA's
"Station of the Year" prize for 1991 after its role in the Gulf War. Menwith Hill assists in
the interception of microwave communications in another way as well, by serving as a ground
station for US electronic spy satellites. These intercept microwave trunk lines and short
range communications such as military radios and walkie talkies. Other ground stations where
the satellites' information is fed into the global network are Pine Gap, run by the CIA near
Alice Springs in central Australia and the Bad Aibling station in Germany. *10 Among them, the
various stations and operations making up the ECHELON network tap into all the main components
of the world's telecommunications networks. All of them, including a separate network of
stations that intercepts long distance radio communications, have their own Dictionary
computers connected into ECHELON.

In the early 1990s, opponents of the Menwith Hill station obtained large quantities of
internal documents from the facility. Among the papers was a reference to an NSA computer
system called Platform. The integration of all the UKUSA station computers into ECHELON
probably occurred with the introduction of this system in the early 1980s. James Bamford wrote
at that time about a new worldwide NSA computer network codenamed Platform "which will tie
together 52 separate computer systems used throughout the world. Focal point, or `host
environment,' for the massive network will be the NSA headquarters at Fort Meade. Among those
included in Platform will be the British SIGINT organization, GCHQ." *11

LOOKING IN THE DICTIONARY The Dictionary computers are connected via highly encrypted UKUSA
communications that link back to computer data bases in the five agency headquarters. This is
where all the intercepted messages selected by the Dictionaries end up. Each morning the
specially "indoctrinated" signals intelligence analysts in Washington, Ottawa,Cheltenham,
Canberra, and Wellington log on at their computer terminals and enter the Dictionary system.
After keying in their security passwords, they reach a directory that lists the different
categories of intercept available in the data bases, each with a four-digit code. For
instance, 1911 might be Japanese diplomatic cables from Latin America (handled by the Canadian
CSE), 3848 might be political communications from and about Nigeria, and 8182 might be any
messages about distribution of encryption technology.

They select their subject category, get a "search result" showing how many messages have been
caught in the ECHELON net on that subject, and then the day's work begins. Analysts scroll
through screen after screen of intercepted faxes, e-mail messages, etc. and, whenever a
message appears worth reporting on, they select it from the rest to work on. If it is not in
English, it is translated and then written into the standard format of intelligence reports
produced anywhere within the UKUSA network either in entirety as a "report," or as a summary
or "gist."

INFORMATION CONTROL A highly organized system has been developed to control what is being
searched for by each station and who can have access to it. This is at the heart of ECHELON
operations and works as follows.

The individual station's Dictionary computers do not simply have a long list of keywords to
search for. And they do not send all the information into some huge database that
participating agencies can dip into as they wish. It is much more controlled.

The search lists are organized into the same categories, referred to by the four digit
numbers. Each agency decides its own categories according to its responsibilities for
producing intelligence for the network. For GCSB, this means South Pacific governments,
Japanese diplomatic, Russian Antarctic activities, and so on.

The agency then works out about 10 to 50 keywords for selection in each category. The keywords
include such things as names of people, ships, organizations, country names, and subject
names. They also include the known telex and fax numbers and Internet addresses of any
individuals, businesses, organizations, and government offices that are targets. These are
generally written as part of the message text and so are easily recognized by the Dictionary
computers.

The agencies also specify combinations of keywords to help sift out communications of
interest. For example, they might search for diplomatic cables containing both the words
"Santiago" and "aid," or cables containing the word "Santiago" but not "consul" (to avoid the
masses of routine consular communications). It is these sets of words and numbers (and
combinations), under a particular category, that get placed in the Dictionary computers.
(Staff in the five agencies called Dictionary Managers enter and update the keyword search
lists for each agency.)

The whole system, devised by the NSA, has been adopted completely by the other agencies. The
Dictionary computers search through all the incoming messages and, whenever they encounter one
with any of the agencies' keywords, they select it. At the same time, the computer
automatically notes technical details such as the time and place of interception on the piece
of intercept so that analysts reading it, in whichever agency it is going to, know where it
came from, and what it is. Finally, the computer writes the four-digit code (for the category
with the keywords in that message) at the bottom of the message's text. This is important. It
means that when all the intercepted messages end up together in the database at one of the
agency headquarters, the messages on a particular subject can be located again. Later, when
the analyst using the Dictionary system selects the four- digit code for the category he or
she wants, the computer simply searches through all the messages in the database for the ones
which have been tagged with that number.

This system is very effective for controlling which agencies can get what from the global
network because each agency only gets the intelligence out of the ECHELON system from its own
numbers. It does not have any access to the raw intelligence coming out of the system to the
other agencies. For example, although most of the GCSB's intelligence production is primarily
to serve the UKUSA alliance, New Zealand does not have access to the whole ECHELON network.
The access it does have is strictly controlled. A New Zealand intelligence officer explained:
"The agencies can all apply for numbers on each other's Dictionaries. The hardest to deal with
are the Americans. ... [There are] more hoops to jump through, unless it is in their interest,
in which case they'll do it for you."

There is only one agency which, by virtue of its size and role within the alliance, will have
access to the full potential of the ECHELON system the agency that set it up. What is the
system used for? Anyone listening to official "discussion" of intelligence could be forgiven
for thinking that, since the end of the Cold War, the key targets of the massive UKUSA
intelligence machine are terrorism, weapons proliferation, and economic intelligence. The idea
that economic intelligence has become very important, in particular, has been carefully
cultivated by intelligence agencies intent on preserving their post-Cold War budgets. It has
become an article of faith in much discussion of intelligence. However, I have found no
evidence that these are now the primary concerns of organizations such as NSA.

QUICKER INTELLIGENCE,SAME MISSION A different story emerges after examining very detailed
information I have been given about the intelligence New Zealand collects for the UKUSA allies
and detailed descriptions of what is in the yards-deep intelligence reports New Zealand
receives from its four allies each week. There is quite a lot of intelligence collected about
potential terrorists, and there is quite a lot of economic intelligence, notably intensive
monitoring of all the countries participating in GATT negotiations. But by far, the main
priorities of the intelligence alliance continue to be political and military intelligence to
assist the larger allies to pursue their interests around the world. Anyone and anything the
particular governments are concerned about can become a target.

With capabilities so secret and so powerful, almost anything goes. For example, in June 1992,
a group of current "highly placed intelligence operatives" from the British GCHQ spoke to the
London Observer: "We feel we can no longer remain silent regarding that which we regard to be
gross malpractice and negligence within the establishment in which we operate." They gave as
examples GCHQ interception of three charitable organizations, including Amnesty International
and Christian Aid. As the Observer reported: "At any time GCHQ is able to home in on their
communications for a routine target request," the GCHQ source said. In the case of phone taps
the procedure is known as Mantis. With telexes it is called Mayfly. By keying in a code
relating to Third World aid, the source was able to demonstrate telex "fixes" on the three
organizations. "It is then possible to key in a trigger word which enables us to home in on
the telex communications whenever that word appears," he said. "And we can read a pre-
determined number of characters either side of the keyword."12 Without actually naming it,
this was a fairly precise description of how the ECHELON Dictionary system works. Again, what
was not revealed in the publicity was that this is a UKUSA-wide system. The design of ECHELON
means that the interception of these organizations could have occurred anywhere in the
network, at any station where the GCHQ had requested that the four-digit code covering Third
World aid be placed.

Note that these GCHQ officers mentioned that the system was being used for telephone calls. In
New Zealand, ECHELON is used only to intercept written communications: fax, e-mail, and telex.
The reason, according to intelligence staff, is that the agency does not have the staff to
analyze large quantities of telephone conversations.

Mike Frost's expos of Canadian "embassy collection" operations described the NSA computers
they used, called Oratory, that can "listen" to telephone calls and recognize when keywords
are spoken. Just as we can recognize words spoken in all the different tones and accents we
encounter, so too, according to Frost, can these computers. Telephone calls containing
keywords are automatically extracted from the masses of other calls and recorded digitally on
magnetic tapes for analysts back at agency headquarters. However, high volume voice
recognition computers will be technically difficult to perfect, and my New Zealand-based
sources could not confirm that this capability exists. But, if or when it is perfected, the
implications would be immense. It would mean that the UKUSA agencies could use machines to
search through all the international telephone calls in the world, in the same way that they
do written messages. If this equipment exists for use in embassy collection, it will
presumably be used in all the stations throughout the ECHELON network. It is yet to be
confirmed how extensively telephone communications are being targeted by the ECHELON stations
for the other agencies.

The easiest pickings for the ECHELON system are the individuals, organizations,and governments
that do not use encryption. In New Zealand's area, for example, it has proved especially
useful against already vulnerable South Pacific nations which do not use any coding, even for
government communications (all these communications of New Zealand's neighbors are supplied,
unscreened, to its UKUSA allies). As a result of the revelations in my book, there is
currently a project under way in the Pacific to promote and supply publicly available
encryption software to vulnerable organizations such as democracy movements in countries with
repressive governments. This is one practical way of curbing illegitimate uses of the ECHELON
capabilities.

One final comment. All the newspapers, commentators, and "well placed sources" told the public
that New Zealand was cut off from US intelligence in the mid-1980s. That was entirely untrue.
The intelligence supply to New Zealand did not stop, and instead, the decade since has been a
period of increased integration of New Zealand into the US system. Virtually everything the
equipment, manuals, ways of operating, jargon, codes, and so on, used in the GCSB continues
to be imported entirely from the larger allies (in practice, usually the NSA). As with the
Australian and Canadian agencies, most of the priorities continue to come from the US, too.

The main thing that protects these agencies from change is their secrecy. On the day my book
arrived in the book shops, without prior publicity, there was an all-day meeting of the
intelligence bureaucrats in the prime minister's department trying to decide if they could
prevent it from being distributed. They eventually concluded, sensibly, that the political
costs were too high. It is understandable that they were so agitated.

Throughout my research, I have faced official denials or governments refusing to comment on
publicity about intelligence activities. Given the pervasive atmosphere of secrecy and
stonewalling, it is always hard for the public to judge what is fact, what is speculation, and
what is paranoia. Thus, in uncovering New Zealand's role in the NSA-led alliance, my aim was
to provide so much detail about the operations the technical systems, the daily work of
individual staff members, and even the rooms in which they work inside intelligence facilities
that readers could feel confident that they were getting close to the truth. I hope the
information leaked by intelligence staff in New Zealand about UKUSA and its systems such as
ECHELON will help lead to change. n

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