(From the Guradian - http://online.guardian.co.uk/).

December 2, 1998

Ronald Reagan's vision of Star Wars, involving Buck Rogers-style battles in space with laser guns and killer satellites, was once derided as the product of the former US president's preference for comics over official papers, and the vision of the Strategic Defence Inititative faded as the Cold War thawed. But now Star Wars is back, and high on its agenda is the establishment of a ground station on the Yorkshire moors. US officials have identified their surveillance centre at Menwith Hill, west of Harrogate, as the key European base to support a new generation of satellites that lie at the core of 21st century space warfare plans.

Menwith Hill, where tracking equipment is housed within familiar white domes, or radomes, was expanded earlier this year to include facilities for the Space Based Infra Red System (SBIRS), a missile tracking system that relies on a new generation of highly sensitive, low orbit satellites. This week the Ministry of Defence, which leases the land to the US National Security Agency, confirmed that construction will start next year on two 54-feet high radomes for the SBIRS, and that these will be in service by February 2000.

The ministry has also confirmed that Menwith Hill will be the SBIRS's European Ground Relay Station, one of up to four tracking stations outside the US that will relay data to the Space Command HQ at Buckley air force base near Denver, Colorado. The first two test satellites are due to be launched in 1999.

The new system has been hailed as vital by former US Air Force General Charles Horner, former commander of US Air Force Space Command. Previously he was coalition air forces commander in the Gulf war, where he became acquainted with the work of the Yorkshire station in relaying intercepted communications from the Middle East.

"During the Gulf War the efforts of Menwith Hill saved lives on the battlefield - not only British and American lives, but also Iraqi lives, because it allowed [us] to get that war over as quickly and efficiently as possible," he tells the makers of a television programme, Uncle Sam's Eavesdroppers, due to be screened on BBC2 tonight.

According to other US officials, Menwith Hill was one of two sites that gave the coalition forces early warning of Scud missile launches. It relayed communications data intercepted by geostationary satellites orbiting 22,000 miles above the Earth; the other station, at Nurrungar near Adelaide in South Australia, is the only site outside the US that tracks satellites equipped with infra-red telescopes, which detect the heat emitted as a missile is launched. By 2000, these early-warning satellites will be merged into the SBIRS.

The problem with existing infra-red equipment is that it loses track of missiles when the rocket motors burn out. During the Gulf war, the lack of any system to follow the missiles once they 'went cold' limited the effectiveness of the Patriot anti-missile systems that were deployed to defend bases and cities such as Tel Aviv and Jeddah from Scud attacks.

The most important part of SBIRS, which will include up to 30 satellites in three different types of orbits, will be a global network of low orbiting satellites with infra-red cameras, each of which it is hoped will be able to track up to 100 medium- or long-range targets. And this new generation of infra-red satellites will be able track cold objects with the help of sensors cooled near to absolute zero. Their data processing capabilities are also exceptional, and involve processing over 2 gigabits per second. A minimum of two satellites is necessary to get full positional information on any target.

The ability to track missiles in their mid-course phase is crucial to intercepting and destroying them, both in regional wars or if regional powers such as Korea, India, or Pakistan continue to develop long-range weapons. At first this interception will be done by missiles, such as the Patriot system, put on alert in Kuwait a month ago. But there is enormous domestic pressure in the US to take the next step, and use information from the new satellites to intercept missiles long before they are in range of their targets. The ultimate goal is a Ballistic Missile Defence System to protect the US, the shield that Reagan promised US electors in 1983 to render Soviet missiles 'impotent and obsolete'.

According to Horner, "should we decide to make the policy decision to have space-based Ballistic Missile Defence, the SBIRS capability gives you the means to point your space-based weapons, because SBIRS gives you the capability of not only seeing the hot missile weapons coming off the launch pad but also to track them, after the rocket extinguishes and it's a cold body in space".

US plans for space-based laser weapon systems have been quietly making progress throughout the 1990s, without significant controversy or comment. Earlier this year, the US tested a complete aiming and firing system for a space-based laser, claiming afterwards that the technology for aiming the laser accurately had now been fully proved. If such weapons are ever deployed, they will depend primarily on information from the SBIRS to find and destroy their targets.

Critics question the legality of the scheme. "This trend toward putting weapons of destructive capabilities [in space] is very threatening and certainly should be the subject of an international movement to bar weapons from space," says Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll of the Washington-based Center for Defense Information, a former US director of US Naval operations in Europe. He contends that SBIRS breaches the 1972 Anti Ballistic Missile treaty, which forbids the superpowers from launching any component of an ABM system into space. "It seems to me self-evident that the plan to put SBIRS up there is a pure violation," he concludes.

Horner disagrees. "If we put a space-based laser or space-based system that can fire projectiles onto oncoming ballistic missiles, we have not put a weapon in space," he claims. "We've put an anti-weapon in space. It's a neutraliser of weapons."

Menwith Hill's involvement in a revitalised Star Wars programme will increase the international controversy surrounding the centre that has arisen because of its 40-year-old role in intercepting military and civilian communications. In tonight's BBC film, the controversy will be further fuelled when a former US intelligence officer confirms for the first time that Menwith Hill intercepts commercial information. Over the past year, there has been concern in Europe about Menwith Hill's role in Echelon, a global computer network for processing and disseminating intercepted communications. Echelon, originally known as Project P415, is run by the NSA in conjunction with agencies in Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. A debate on Echelon was held in the European Parliament in September.

Colonel Dan Smith, former military intelligence attaché at the US Embassy in London until 1993 regularly visited Menwith Hill and worked with the information it intercepted. "In terms of scooping up communications, inevitably since their take is broadband, there will be conversations or communications which are intercepted which have nothing to do with the military, and probably within those there will be some information about commercial dealings," he says. In 1993, he recalls, there was "some discussion of whether or not the US government - either the [military] services or the National Security Agency - should be employed to collect commercial intelligence". He believes that the decision was then made not to spy for US companies. "In terms of specifically targeting for information of a commercial nature, that is not part of the policy of the government as I understand it," he says.

However, Smith's belief that the NSA did not then go ahead and make use of commercial intelligence is contradicted by accounts from other US sources. In 1993, former National Security Council official Howard Teicher described how the European aerospace company Panavia was specifically targeted over sales to the Middle East. "I recall that the words 'Tornado' or 'Panavia' - information related to the specific aircraft - would have been priority targets that we would have wanted information about", he said.

In 1995, the Baltimore Sun reported that the NSA had tapped into a commercial communications satellite and 'lifted all the faxes and phone calls between the European consortium Airbus, the Saudi national airline and the Saudi government.' The $6 billion contract subsequently went to the US companies, Boeing and McDonnell Douglas.

Menwith is the main - and perhaps the only - intelligence station covering Saudi Arabia.

Asked on tonight's BBC programme if official policy not to pass on commerical data meant that such activities did not happen to information intercepted at Menwith Hill, Smith concedes: "Anything would be possible technically. Technically they can scoop all this information up, sort through it and find out what it is that might be asked for... But there is not policy to do this specifically in response to a particular company's interest."

Uncle Sam's Eavesdroppers, a film for BBC North's Close Up North, is due to be broadcast in the north of England tonight (Thursday December 3) at 7 30pm on BBC2.

(See also Yorkshire CND's Menwith Hill web page).

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