How much longer could he hold out until the US grabbed him?
8
ALL OF THE SIGNALS ALL OF THE TIME
‘We have the brains: they have the money. It’s a collaboration that’s worked very well.’
It is visible from miles around on its cliff-top. Standing spectacularly exposed on Cornwall’s geographical ‘foot’, which protrudes far into the Atlantic, the eavesdropping station is impossible to hide. Some of the otherworldly array of gigantic satellite dishes are 30 metres across. The dishes are set around a white golf ball-shaped radome: votive objects laid before a faceless god. A high-security fence encircles the complex. Every few metres are CCTV cameras. A sign at the entrance reads: ‘GCHQ Bude’. There are guards. Visitors are unwelcome.
Near the front gate is Cleave Crescent, a miserable-looking hamlet of terraced houses. Around is a wooded valley, with ash trees, gorse and brambles. From the coast path there are stunning views: scudding waves, a steel-grey sea, and the jagged rock strata at Lower Sharpnose Point. There are gulls and sometimes a sparrowhawk, hovering against a wind-bashed headland.
One of the more charming files scraped by Snowden from the GCHQ intranet repository is a write-up of a trip to Bude by a group of spying trainees. They got the tour. They were allowed to peek inside the radome, climb up one of the larger satellite dishes, nicknamed Ocean Breeze, and peer at the antennae. On the way home they stopped off for an ice cream and dipped their toes in the Atlantic. The travel blog makes reference to Bude’s original role – contributing ‘Comsat to the SIGINT machine’. In other words, feeding intercepted satellite communications back to British and American intelligence.
This dramatic look-out on the UK coast has long been used for surveillance. Eighteenth-century customs officers kept watch for smugglers. The Victorian vicar Robert Stephen Hawker built himself a wooden hut to spot shipwrecks. He and his parishioners would fetch the bodies of drowned sailors up the sheer cliffs. During the second world war a military base was constructed, called Cleave Camp: there is a ghostly pillbox where gunners looked out for Nazi invaders.
GCHQ put a station here on government property in the late 1960s, in order to eavesdrop on commercial satellite links from Goonhilly Downs on the Lizard peninsula, 60 miles down the road. Goonhilly carried much of the world’s international telephone traffic, but became obsolete and closed in 2008.
However, Bude is now at the heart of a new and most ambitious secret project, developed by the UK. Its fruits are handed over to London’s US paymasters. The program is so sensitive that exposures of it by Edward Snowden drive British officials into fits of anxiety and rage. Those officials’ dream is to ‘master the internet’. This phrase of theirs was what Snowden meant when he told the startled journalists in Hong Kong that Britain’s GCHQ was worse and more intrusive even than the NSA.
Bude itself is a small seaside resort, popular with surfers and swimmers. It has a golf course, a high street with shops selling fresh crabs, an open-air swimming pool and a Sainsbury’s store. But its most important role is invisible. Just down the road is Widemouth Bay. Few of the holidaymakers who splash in its bracing waters know of the beach’s significance. But major undersea telecommunications cables from the US’s eastern seaboard emerge here. They are called Apollo North, TAT-8, TAT-14 and Yellow/Atlantic Crossing-2, also known as AC-2. Other transatlantic cables come ashore at nearby Land’s End. Thousands of miles long, the fibre-optic cables are operated by big private telecoms firms, often in consortia.
The landing points of these submarine cables are so important that the American Department of Homeland Security lists them as critical American national infrastructure (according to leaked US diplomatic messages). In this new world of internet-driven communications, Britain’s position on the eastern edge of the Atlantic makes it a hub. As much as 25 per cent of the world’s current internet traffic crosses British territory via the cables, en route between the US, Europe, Africa and all points east. Much of the remaining traffic has landing or departure points in the US. So between them Britain and the US play host to most of the planet’s burgeoning data flows.
Unsurprisingly, given their history, both countries’ spy agencies wanted to exploit their good luck and tap into all these submarine cables in order to eavesdrop. As technology changed, the two organisations had successively intercepted radio traffic, then microwave beams and ultimately satellite links. It was logical to seek now to break into the floods of internet and phone data which were travelling by the latest fibre-optic systems.
Postwar Britain originally won its place in the so-called ‘Five Eyes’ electronic spying team, along with Australia, Canada and New Zealand, by handing over access to a network of listening stations across the globe in Cyprus, Ceylon, Hong Kong, South Africa, Diego Garcia, Ascension Island and such Middle East client states as Oman. But with the loss of empire, some of that advantage evaporated.
Britain also gave the US two satellite stations of its own on British soil – Menwith Hill (known as ‘MHS’), on the southern edge of the Yorkshire Dales, and Croughton, which handles CIA communications. But the Brits constantly had their hands held out for cash. As one GCHQ chief, Sir David Omand, was heard to say optimistically: ‘We have the brains: they have the money.’
Thanks to Snowden we know to what extent, at least partially. In the period 2009 to 2012 the US government paid GCHQ at least £100m. In 2009 the NSA gave GCHQ £22.9m. The following year the NSA’s payments rose to £39.9m. This included £4m to support GCHQ’s work for NATO forces in Afghanistan, and £17.2m for ‘mastering the internet’. The NSA paid a further £15.5m towards redevelopments at GCHQ Bude. The gesture ‘protected (GCHQ’s core) budget’, at a time of austerity by David Cameron’s coalition. In 2011/2012 the NSA gave another £34.7m to GCHQ.
British officials sniff that the sums are tiny. ‘In a 60-year alliance it is entirely unsurprising that there are joint projects in which resources and expertise are pooled,’ a Cabinet Office spokesman says. But the cash gives the NSA further leverage. In one 2010 document, GCHQ acknowledges that Fort Meade had ‘raised a number of issues with regards to meeting NSA’s minimum expectations’. It said GCHQ ‘still remains short of the full NSA ask’.
Lurking always is the spectre of US displeasure. One internal paper warns: ‘The NSA ask is not static and retaining “equability” will remain a challenge in the near future.’ The UK’s biggest fear, says another, is that ‘US perceptions of the… partnership diminish, leading to loss of access and/or reduction in investment… to the UK.’
In other words, the British needed to keep up and demonstrate their worth. They were only a tenth of the size of their US partners. If they fell behind technically, the mighty NSA might cease intelligence-sharing, and Britain’s ability to punch above its weight in the world could end ignominiously.
It was against this background that the GCHQ director in charge of ‘mastering the internet’ wrote a pitch for a new British project on 19 May 2009. He asserted that the agency had been struggling with changes in technology: ‘It’s becoming increasingly difficult for GCHQ to acquire the rich source of traffic needed to enable our support to partners within HMG [Her Majesty’s government], the armed forces and overseas.’