I watched the news until about 3 am, then attempted to get some much-needed sleep before waking at 6 am. I was scheduled to work a twelve-hour day shift and was eager to find out what my role would be. Unsurprisingly, thoughts of the attack kept me awake all night, and in the end I headed into work running on adrenaline—sleepless but nevertheless wide awake.
It was the most sombre ride to work I had taken in eleven years. On the drive in, the terrorist attacks were the only topic of conversation and the driver had the news turned up louder than usual. Everyone was either listening to the latest reports or talking about what they had heard from their families. Our families in the United States were fearful of more attacks and they wanted to know what we at Pine Gap could tell them that they had not heard on the news; they were convinced we would know much more than what was broadcast on CNN. However, CNN found out about the attacks before we did, and besides saying that we believed Al-Qaeda was responsible, our advice in general was to keep watching CNN. This wasn’t very reassuring to those who believed the United States was always one step ahead of our adversaries—or, for that matter, CNN.
Like almost every United States Government and military facility, 9/11 forced Pine Gap to make security checks more thorough, and when I finally arrived in Operations the atmosphere was all business. As reported around the world, the intelligence community had a new goal—to hunt down those behind the attacks. My colleagues and I assisted in this task and in identifying specific threats. Make no mistake, Australia and America are blood brothers, and the Australians I worked with were as committed as the Americans to destroying the Al-Qaeda leadership and their network.
Afghanistan had been identified as bin Laden and Al-Qaeda’s base of operations, and they were supported and protected by the Taliban leadership. When the United States sought justice for the 9/11 attacks, Afghanistan would again bear the brunt of a large military invasion. Fortunately, war-torn Afghanistan with its outdated military equipment had no hope of fighting off the American and coalition forces, but the United States needed to neutralise its ability to launch SAMs, which would keep the skies relatively safe for bomber and surveillance aircraft.
President Bush would effectively rally the country to the call to destroy the terrorist organisation that had been the mastermind behind 9/11, and he was poised to garner world sympathy and military/ logistical aid for Operation Enduring Freedom—Afghanistan in the battle against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. A small portion of the world was seen on the news rejoicing at the destruction within the United States, but the majority of world leaders knew that a similar attack was possible anywhere. The sobering terrorist attacks of 9/11 resulted in more than forty countries providing troops and logistical support[7] as the United States prepared its forces for battle in the mountainous land of Afghanistan with the goal to remove the Taliban and destroy the Al-Qaeda leadership and infrastructure.
Analysts at many agencies worked diligently assessing Afghanistan’s weapon systems and communications networks as those of us in the eavesdropping intelligence community prepared for the subsequent bombing campaign that began on 7 October. Soon after hostilities started, coalition aircraft neutralised any threats to overflights of Afghanistan, with bombings continuing unabated. With help from Northern Alliance ground troops, the Taliban collapsed on 9 December, and the United States and those countries providing troops to Afghanistan now had the job of occupying the country and rebuilding the government and infrastructure.
The hunt for Osama bin Laden, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri and the Taliban leader Mullah Omar, continued during the occupation. President Bush vowed ‘to smoke them out’,[8] a threat he repeated on several occasions as US citizens demanded justice for the attacks. In order to destroy both the terrorist leadership and the cohesiveness of the Al-Qaeda network, it was important above all else that these three men be captured or killed quickly.
The American Government ultimately killed bin Laden in a daring military operation deep within Pakistan almost ten years after the horrible events of 9/11. But the inability of the intelligence community to find and capture or kill bin Laden (and, for that matter, al-Zawahiri and Mullah Omar) soon after 9/11 was a significant intelligence failure that allowed Al-Qaeda and the Taliban to remain intact, to continue to terrorise innocent civilians and to plan for successive leadership. The search for al-Zawahiri and Mullah Omar was still continuing almost ten years on.
With the newly declared ‘War on Terror’, Afghanistan would continue to consume a large number of intelligence resources for many years, but with no real military threat remaining within Afghanistan, our priorities shifted and we moved on to search for other threats.
Relatively early in the new millennium, one of my Aussie team members happened to find a new ██████████ signal. I was very familiar with this system and decided to examine the characteristics—immediately recognising that something about it didn’t look as I had expected. I alerted my co-workers on an adjacent position and asked them to confirm my observation and collect some data, which soon determined it to be a significant modification to a known threat system. We alerted another site in the United States and they confirmed our findings. We had worked well with them before and a strong sense of cooperation and collaboration existed between the two sites. Unfortunately, after our discovery a petty and unnecessary competition ensued between the two sites as we each tried to receive credit for the new discovery.
When I noticed the new characteristics, I thought they may have been seen before but I believed perhaps the operators working that day might not have noticed the subtle differences. So I reviewed some of our earlier data and, sure enough, we had seen it more than once, about one week earlier. Even our resident expert for this system had missed this modification after looking directly at the data! I immediately wrote a report on our earlier data, and after obtaining more information over the next two days, we decided it was sufficiently distinctive to warrant a unique name to distinguish the new system from its similar counterpart.
Meanwhile, the other site had read our report, reviewed some of their own previous data and found that they had seen this new emission a day or two before our initial intercept, and they hastily prepared a report assigning their own name as they wanted to beat Pine Gap to the punch! We then issued a much more detailed report using our unique name, which resulted in two names being used for the same system. When this happens in the intelligence community, the NSA is the deciding body that determines which name will be used and which will be cancelled. The other site claimed ‘first night’s rights’ as they had seen the characteristics before Pine Gap, although without input from Pine Gap they would have been clueless that they had intercepted anything new. But as Pine Gap had identified the characteristics first and immediately informed the other site, we believed credit for the new discovery should be given to us.
NSA soon returned their verdict: Pine Gap lost the name battle and the other site’s name would be used because they had seen the signal first, regardless of any assistance they received from Pine Gap. My colleagues and I simply continued to use our name anyway, in silent protest, until a permanent name replaced the NSA-approved temporary name. The physical separation between Pine Gap and NSA headquarters often resulted in insufficient advocacy for our analysis results, a problem that still hadn’t been rectified by the time I left in 2008. But from then on our reporting methodology changed and we began issuing ‘quick and dirty’ reports whenever something new was found, with the caveat that a new name would be issued if subsequent analysis results deemed it necessary. The working relationship between the Operations personnel of the two sites suffered from mistrust and a lack of sharing of data (as was generally found in the intelligence community pre-9/11) for more than two years because the other site didn’t acknowledge the assistance made available to them from Pine Gap. By contrast, the operators at Pine Gap were recognised by senior management, and analysts on the team were presented with a team award.