Northwest Spy Station

[sfc_darrel]

NORTHWEST SPY STATION SEES ALL, HEARS ALL -- AND KEEPS IT ALL TO ITSELF

By JAMES LONG

On a blustery April morning in 1941, several truckloads of Depression-era government workers arrived at a muddy field along Portland's Northeast Halsey Street near 148th Avenue. They began digging holes, not sure what for. But the holes had to be very precise.

Three young men with survey equipment checked and rechecked each location, consulting frequently over a roll of plans they unfurled in the pelting rain. A tall spruce pole went into each hole. Most had cross-pieces for wire to be strung in various diamond shapes. Soon the field resembled a fleet of ships sunk to the mast. This peculiar undertaking drew the curiosity of the only other human in the area, a turkey farmer who wandered across the street and asked in a friendly way what the workers were up to. He never got a clear answer and went back to feeding his turkeys, pondering the strange ways of government.

The farmer could not have known that he and his gobbling flock were now neighbors of one of America's most secret electronic spy stations of World War II and the Cold War that followed. It lasted almost three decades, then gave way to a newer, far more advanced station near Yakima that combs the airwaves for the likes of Osama bin Laden.

The new station sits on the edge of a U.S. Army base outside Yakima in the apple-growing region of central Washington. Experts who follow intelligence matters say the station is part of something called Echelon, a controversial effort to gather everything moving through the air in international communications:

Every private phone call. Every fax. Every e-mail. Every company memo. Every merchandise order. Every wired invoice. Every ship-to-shore telex. Every money transfer. Every bank transaction. Every sales pitch. Every birthday greeting. Every valentine. Everything resembling a radio wave.

The reason for all this snooping, they say, is that intelligence agencies realized long before Sept. 11 that not every national security threat comes from big, lumbering targets like the North Korean missile command. Private-practice enemies like Mohamed Atta are out there, too, they say, and may be chatting on their mobile phones.

Location no longer a secret Francis McCann, a Federal Communications Commission radio engineer who helped design and build the Halsey Street station, enjoyed telling the story years later and gave the first hint about Echelon.

He mentioned that the Halsey operation's "functions" had been moved "to another state." He never said where. But this was 1971, which was very shortly after the National Security Agency opened its post near Yakima.

Since then, the new station's cover has grown so thin that it's possible to get directions to it from the Yakima Valley Visitors and Convention Bureau.

A long article. Read at...
http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/ne...020428-nsa.htm

No doubt security is unhappy about this. The froze this winter and now they'll bake this summer.