for the NSA, GCHQ and CSE.1 The intercept staff, mostly from military backgrounds, do not question the targets they are asked to monitor. They just follow whatever instructions come from Wellington or overseas: ‘that’s what we’re paid for’.
The station is located 150 kilometres north of Wellington in sandhill country near the small beach township of Tangimoana, not far from the Ohakea Air Force base at Bulls. The sophisticated antennae are designed to pick up high frequency (or short wave) radio signals from ships and land-based transmitters around the Pacific and beyond.
About 70 of the GCSB’s 200 staff work at the two collection stations:
Tangimoana and Waihopai. Between them these stations target two of the main types of long-distance communications: high frequency radio, where the messages are transmitted as radio waves between transmitters and receiv-ers; and satellite, where the message is transmitted up to a satellite and back down to a receiving satellite dish.
Within the UKUSA alliance the Tangimoana station is known by a very secret ‘station designator’: NZC-332. Even in the GCSB, many staff would not know this name. Inside the five-country signals intelligence system, all participating stations have such network names to identify them. These sta-Friendly South Pacific governments, Russian shipping and French nuclear testing have been major targets of the Tangimoana station.
tion designators are typed at the top of each report transmitted within the network, showing the station where a particular intercept was made and the stations and other locations to which it is being sent.
Most station designators have three letters and three numbers and are made up as follows: two letters indicating the country, one letter indicating what sort of staff run the station and some numbers (usually three) sig-nifying the particular station.2 Thus New Zealand’s civilian-run station at Tangimoana is NZ - C - 332. Likewise the old NR1 station was NZC-331 and Waihopai is NZC-333.
The Tangimoana station can be visited by turning off State Highway One between Foxton and Bulls towards Tangimoana Beach, then turning left into the gate of a Landcorp farm block a kilometre before Tangimoana township. A sealed road then leads you to the buildings and antennae. Un-til the discovery and exposé of the station by Owen Wilkes in 1984, New Zealanders had no idea that their country was involved in spying on other nations’ communications. While Wilkes was visiting a nearby farm, a friend suggested that he go for a walk along the beach to see a new facility run by
‘secret squirrels’.
NZC-331 GCSB NR1 station
NZC-332 GCSB Tangimoana station NZC-333 GCSB Waihopai station NZC-334 GCSB mobile station NZC-335 GCSB mobile station
UKC-102 UK civilian-run Singapore station UKC-201 UK civilian-run Hong Kong station
UKM-257 UK Army-run station at Ayios Nikolaos, Cyprus
UKC-1000 UK civilian-run telex interception site in Palmer Street, London
USA-38 US Air Force-run Misawa station in Japan
USD-110 US Yakima station in Washington State (probably) USD-1000 US Menwith Hill station in north England
USD-1025 NSA special liaison officer at GCHQ Cheltenham HQ USF-778 US Bad Aibling station in Germany
These top secret designators are used within the UKUSA network to identify the various intercept stations.
The antennae at Tangimoana receive radio waves in the high frequency range, named before the much higher very high frequency (VHF) radio and ultra high frequency (UHF) satellite frequencies were used. Unlike these higher frequencies, which can only be used to transmit in a straight line (i.e. short-range or to and from a satellite), high frequency (HF) radio can transmit right around the world with the signals bouncing back and forth between the earth and the upper atmosphere.
For most of this century HF radio has been used extensively for long-distance communications between countries and by ships and aircraft. HF radio has been used principally to transmit messages in Morse code and by telex, the two main targets of Tangimoana interception.
But even as Tangimoana was opening in 1982, technological changes were reducing the significance of HF radio. In 1982 the first Inmarsat satellite services were introduced for ships at sea—Tangimoana’s main target—and satellite communications were being used by more and more countries. By the time the Waihopai station opened, only seven years later, the use of HF radio by ships and South Pacific countries was declining rapidly.
According to GCSB staff, in the early years of the station about 80 percent of their work was interception of Morse code communications. But there was a ‘big drop off’ in the use of Morse around 1989 and in the early 1990s Morse has virtually died out in New Zealand. Only its continued use by Russian shipping keeps Morse interception going at Tangimoana.
The result has been a series of cuts to the Tangimoana staff since 1992, with some sections being restructured out of existence. In 1996 the once busy operations building has empty rooms. The communications staff were all made redundant or transferred in July 1995, the training unit was closed in 1993, the technical unit has been halved and, over the last five years, the intercept staff have been cut to a fraction of their previous numbers. From a staff of about 80 in the early 1990s, the station is left with only about 35 staff in 1996.3
Nonetheless HF radio will continue to be used for the foreseeable future by shipping and aircraft, at least as a back-up by isolated communities and extensively by the militaries of the world as one strand of their communica-tions networks. The role of Tangimoana in GCSB interception has reduced but will continue.
The station’s assigned ‘surveillance area’ covers the entire Pacific Ocean, Antarctica, the Southern Atlantic, including the Falkland Islands, and the southern Indian Ocean to South Africa. ‘You can see how powerful the
sta-tion is, it almost covers three quarters of the globe.’ The main volume of Tangimoana’s work, though, comes from the South Pacific region.
The majority of the station’s work, and that of its predecessor at NR1, has been interception of shipping: ‘If it moved, we listened to it’.4 Of all the shipping in the Pacific, however, the Tangimoana interception has mostly targeted Russian vessels. The view presented by the GCSB hierarchy has been that even Russian fishing trawlers ‘should be regarded as part of the Russian Navy’.
When Prime Minister David Lange returned from his one trip to Tangimoana’s surveillance area covers over half the earth’s surface, not just the primary South Pacific region. In addition, about 10 percent of interception is of special targets outside this area for the overseas agencies.
North America Asia
Pacific Ocean
Tangimoana
South Atlantic Indian Ocean
South America
Africa
Tangimoana in mid-1985 he reassured his colleagues about the harmlessness of the station, explaining that, as unlikely and absurd as it sounded, the station was targeted ‘135 percent on Russian fishing boats’. The proportion was a joke but it remains true that a major component of the station’s work, throughout its existence, has been monitoring the regular radio messages sent back to Russia from Russian fishing boats around New Zealand.
The station also intercepts radio messages sent home from Russian bas-es in Antarctica and communications between the bases. All 10 Russian bases—Russkya, Mirnjy, Molodzenaya and so on—are targeted at their regu-lar reporting times, which results in large quantities of intercept, including administrative reports, weather reports and reports from scientific ships in the region to the bases. The most inter-esting information collected has been reports about Russian exploration for oil and minerals in Antarctica.
In the mid-1990s HF radio is still used for nearly all communications by Russian fishing vessels; only a small number of new vessels use the costly Inmarsat satellite systems. Also, Russian fishing vessels still use Morse exten-sively. A Russian fishing trawler engineer spoken to in April 1994 confirmed that Morse is still used on most ships for telegram-style official and private messages back to Russia. Radio telex is used for longer messages such as catch reports for fishing companies.
Another priority target has been the occasional visits by Russian research ships to the South Pacific. When a Russian research vessel is in the region (and often after it has openly notified the New Zealand government that it would like to visit) the New Zealand military issues a secret ‘PIC warning’
to all New Zealand Navy vessels, major defence bases (including the Defence Scientific Establishment), a range of Australian organisations and the United States Commander-in-Chief for Pacific Forces, ‘any allied warships on New Zealand station’ and the GCSB.5
The New Zealand Defence Force refuses to reveal the meaning of ‘PIC’, claiming it to be an important national secret.6 It stands for potential intel-ligence collector—primarily the Russian research ships that visit Wellington Over half of the station’s staff have been cut in
the 1990s following target countries moving from radio to satellite.
and other New Zealand ports. According to a Defence source, such vessels have sometimes entered forbidden areas, but the cases that have been pub-licised do not appear very threatening.7 Similarly, when a Russian icebreaker was sent from Vladivostok to help Russian ships caught in ice in Antarctica, Tangimoana monitored the vessel each day, taking an interest in every detail of its trip.
In addition to Russian shipping, the station has increasingly monitored Japanese and other shipping, including fishing trawlers. Occasional special operations also occur, such as monitoring the controversial Japanese pluto-nium transport ship that passed through the South Pacific and close to New Zealand in 1993.
For a period in the late 1980s, under the Labour government, one of the station’s priorities was monitoring foreign fishing vessels using drift nets in the South Pacific. The intelligence collected was used as part of New Zealand’s diplomatic efforts to stop this environmentally destructive practice.
Most of Tangimoana’s inter-ception of shipping has been of vessels in the South Pacific. But there are also requests from the other UKUSA agencies, which give the frequency, time and location of a ship in which they are interested.
All these requests are acted on.
Very occasionally there are also re-quests from New Zealand Customs to look for a particular vessel.
The other area of communi-cations intercepted for analysis at the GCSB headquarters are from
South Pacific countries and French South Pacific territories. The French communications targeted by Tangimoana are military communications: radio messages between French Polynesia and Paris, between French territories including Moruroa Atoll and military communications in New Caledonia.
The main French language targets during most of the station’s existence have been communications concerning French nuclear testing.
Tangimoana tried in mid-July 1985 to monitor the French terrorists who sank the Rainbow Warrior as they sailed away from New Zealand on the yacht Ouvea (after the police had identified the yacht). The staff listened to all the marine frequencies and attempted to monitor other French vessels
East Timor and Bougainville are targeted for the Australian DSD.
with which the Ouvea might be in contact, but picked up nothing at all:
‘zero’. They presumed the yacht used satellite communications; but if the NSA intercepted any maritime satellite communications at its Yakima station, they were not passed on to New Zealand. (Tangimoana also failed to give any warning of the Fiji coup.)
Interception of communications between and within South Pacific nations and their communications with the rest of the world has mainly in-volved government and military telex communications. There is very wide targeting: from political telexes in Melanesia, to Fiji Army communications, to Tongan patrol boats communicating with their headquarters. There has even been some monitoring of private ham radio operators in the South Pacific (and New Zealand ones) if they are communicating to or from areas of interest (e.g. internal conflict within a Pacific Island nation). By the mid-1990s, however, nearly all non-military radio communications from South Pacific nations have been replaced by satellite. Tangimoana does not monitor the Japanese or other foreign embassies in Wellington. None of the embassies use high frequency radio for long-distance communications.
In addition to its primary role of South Pacific interception, it is rou-tine for Tangimoana to assist other UKUSA stations with their inter-ception tasks. As one of the workers explained, ‘We can pick up trans-missions from Tangimoana which other agencies cannot because of our siting.’ The nature of HF radio propagation means that the station at Tangimoana can sometimes receive signals from quite different parts of the world more clearly than other spy stations nearer to the source. Radio reception is always clearer at night, without interference from solar activity, and so, for example, Tangimoana at night may be the best place to pick up communications from a distant loca-tion where it is daytime. Also there may be storms or other disturbances in the atmosphere affecting reception elsewhere. In these cases Tangimoana can be requested to intercept targets in another agency’s area. About 10 percent of the station’s interception is of targets right outside the Pacific region. It is routine, Tangimoana staff say, that ‘If the Yanks can’t hear somewhere from their stations, they ask Australia or New Zealand.’
A radio officer at work in the station’s Operations Centre.
Raw intelligence gathered at Tangimoana is sent, heavily encrypted, to the GCSB Head Office in Wellington along normal Telecom lines (the whole station was once cut off when a cow chewed through the cable). The raw intelligence includes large quantities of telexes intercepted automatically by special equipment at the station which are sorted by the Tangimoana Dic-tionary located in the Wellington headquarters. As part of the ECHELON system, the Tangimoana collection schedule (i.e. schedule of who to spy on when) optimises collection for the whole network and the Dictionary com-puter automatically sends raw intercept to the overseas agencies according to their keyword specifications.
The intercept officers—known as radio officers or ROs—make up most of the staff and are at the centre of the station’s operations. There are about 20 of them working shifts; only five years ago there were about 50. They work in the Operations Centre, a room about 15 by 10 metres in size, with the interception equipment around three of the walls. The job is said to be ‘95 percent boredom’, sitting with headphones on for hours swinging manually through the frequencies, listening for assigned targets.
For Morse interception, the radio officers sit at the old radio consoles and first manually locate the target transmitter (usually a Russian vessel).
Inside the secret Tangimoana station: it operates as a wholly integrated component of the allied network. A detailed guide to the layout and workings of the Waihopai and Tangimoana stations is contained in Appendix B.
Administration WC
This involves searching for the right frequency because the ships change frequency often, both to improve transmission quality and to try to hide the transmission. The officers then listen to the Morse message, slowly typing the transcribed message onto their computers, which, at least until recently, were as old as the station.
Once the complete message is on the screen, the officers type at the top who the message should go to (usually the NSA, GCHQ and so on) and send it through the station’s internal computer network to the duty officer.
After he has checked it, it is sent off to the Wellington communications staff for distribution around the UKUSA network.
For telex communications, there is specialised receiving equipment de-signed to be compatible with target communications equipment. For example, French military communications, including those concerning French nuclear testing, have been intercepted by special telex machines which the radio of-ficers set to the right frequency and then leave to intercept automatically all the telexes on a particular communications link day after day. The Dictionary computer does the selecting.
Some equipment is designed to filter out radio messages that the sender is trying to disguise. At Tangimoana this equipment has regularly been used for Russian and French communications. For example, the transmitting equipment may break the message up and send different parts over differ-ent frequencies among other messages, or may remove certain parts of the frequency range of a message and send those separately. Special interception equipment is used to capture and reconstruct the target messages. Even more
Tangimoana organisation plan
sophisticated equipment is needed to detect and filter out messages where there is a continuous transmission of meaningless noise against which real messages are occasionally superimposed. This situation is encountered when the station intercepts certain land targets inside Russia for the NSA.
Often the intercepted messages are encrypted. In these cases the radio officers are recording gibberish—long, meaningless streams of letters or five-letter groups. The encrypted messages are simply sent on to the Wellington headquarters.
The shift supervisors allocate a series of tasks to each radio officer. For the first part of the morning it may be Russian trawlers during their standard reporting time, then a period intercepting Japanese ships at their known re-porting times, later Chinese ships north of Fiji and so on through the shift.
There are carefully worked out collection schedules determining the day’s tasks. If the task is new, the supervisor gives the radio officer the TEXTA details for that target on a card, showing the technical details of frequen-cies and transmission characteristics for the target transmitter. (TEXTA, the
‘Bible of the SIGINT community’, is the computer-generated digest of intel-ligence targets from all over the world. It is provided and regularly updated by the NSA and supplied to the station on microfiche.) Addressee lists are also received from the overseas UKUSA agencies, specifying which types of intercept should be sent to each.
Another area of the operations building, occupying offices beside and across the corridor from the Operations Centre, contains technical search officers and analysts. Their job is not interception but studying the immense clutter of radio traffic picked up by the station to identify possible targets for future interception.
The station’s orientation has also been reinforced through recruitment of foreign signals intelligence staff. Between 1979 and 1981, as Tangimoana was being designed and built, large numbers of new radio officers were ap-pointed and trained. About a fifth of the new staff were signals intelligence personnel recruited from the British GCHQ; a smaller number came from the Australian DSD. Most of the Tangimoana supervisor positions have been filled by these experienced overseas staff. Among the Australians are officers who worked as Army intelligence collectors in Vietnam (based at Da Nang and elsewhere) and there are British staff who worked in GCHQ stations in Hong Kong and Cyprus.
In general, the technology used by intelligence agencies is advanced compared with commercially available equipment, but at Tangimoana much
In general, the technology used by intelligence agencies is advanced compared with commercially available equipment, but at Tangimoana much