Throughout the US presidential transition in 2001, threats emerged that required monitoring in the intelligence community. Russia's weapons testing had accelerated, China had experienced a huge surge in technical capability and was developing more reliable, accurate weapon systems, including ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and surface-to-air missiles.
Iraq remained under constant surveillance as well.The United States was also concerned that Saddam Hussein might resurrect his weapons of mass destruction program and didn't want to miss any developments with this or the L29, an aircraft that could be either piloted or flown as an unmanned aerodynamic vehicle. Perhaps the greatest threat to US forces came from North Korea, a secretive country with a reclusive leader and 1.2million armed soldiers, making it the fourth largest standing army on Earth and the world's most militarised country; it was actively developing cruise and ballistic missiles that posed a real threat to the region. The threats confronting president Bush were assessed to be very real. President Bush faced his first foreign policy crisis on April 1, 2001, when a United States Navy EP-3E Aries II surveillance aircraft collided in mid-air with a Chinese J-8II interceptor fighter jet.
The badly damaged EP-3E was forced to make an emergency landing on China's Hainan Island, but the collision resulted in the death of the Chinese pilot. The intelligence community immediately mobilised to discover the fate of the 24 crew members and the EP-3E, which contained sensitive intelligence-gathering and cryptologic equipment that would need to be destroyed quickly by the crew before landing and while on the ground at Hainan.
The grounded aircraft was dismantled, remaining in China until July 3. To help defuse the situation and return the crew to the US, president Bush issued China with what was called the ''Letter of the Two Sorries'', stating that the US was ''very sorry'' for the death of Chinese pilot, and ''very sorry the entering of China's airspace and the landing did not have verbal clearance''. Just five months after this, the terrorist attacks in the US took place on September 11, 2001. Al-Qaeda had remained a known threat, but the extent of the organisation had not been completely identified. Unfortunately, when 9/11 occurred, the majority of the leadership in each US intelligence agency believed that they had ''exclusive ownership'' of the intelligence obtained by ''their'' agency. This problem was systemic within the intelligence community. I was at home when the attacks occurred, I suspected who was responsible and I phoned a friend in the United States [telling] him this was most likely the work of al-Qaeda. As the towers collapsed, my feelings of anger and revenge had me hoping that Bush could quickly prove who was responsible - and retaliate with deadly force. But the US's response would come later, after conclusive proof was obtained. Unfortunately, this necessary delay gave the al-Qaeda and Taliban leadership time to move to secure hiding places.
It was the most sombre ride to work I had taken in 11 years. On the drive in, the terrorist attacks were the only topic of conversation. Our families in the US were fearful of more attacks and they wanted to know what we at Pine Gap could tell them. However, CNN found out about the attacks before we did, and our advice in general was to keep watching CNN. Like almost every US 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.
The intelligence community had a new goal - to hunt down those behind the attacks. 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.
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 October 7. With help from Northern Alliance ground troops, the Taliban collapsed on December 9, and the US and those countries providing troops to Afghanistan now had the job of occupying the country and rebuilding the government and infrastructure.
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. Relatively early in the new millennium, one of my Australian 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. [It was] soon determined to be a significant modification to a known threat system. We alerted another site in the US 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.
The discovery turned out to be emitted from a modified weapon system that was expected to be exported from the large weapons-producing country in question.
With help from the US and its allies, the fledgling government in post-Taliban Afghanistan was struggling to establish legitimacy and some degree of control within its country. Meanwhile, Bush had begun to make accusations that Saddam Hussein and Iraq were linked to the al-Qaeda terrorist network. Bush apparently believed, and wanted the world to believe, that Iraq posed a threat to the US. He then claimed that Iraq had purchased yellowcake uranium from Niger and the country was somehow rebuilding its chemical and biological weapons stockpiles.
The intelligence community had been concerned with Iraq since I arrived in 1990. In January 2003, rumours of an invasion had changed to threatening words when president Bush stated of Saddam Hussein: ''He is a danger not only to countries in the region but ... because of his al-Qaeda connections, because of his history ... [also] to Americans. And we're going to deal with him. We're going to deal with him before it's too late.'' The intelligence community had prepared in advance, with intelligence collection tasking in place, and knew some information about the situation on the ground before the Iraq War air campaign began on March 20, 2003. Meanwhile, it was known that Iraq had acquired the Aviaconversia GPS jamming equipment from Russia, in violation of the 12-year ban on sales of military equipment to Iraq. These jammers are designed to disrupt the flight of weapons that use the GPS signal for navigation and were placed in various locations throughout Iraq.
With hostilities under way, the intelligence community actively searched for members of Saddam Hussein's former leadership circle, hoping to find the 52 faces on the deck of cards presented by the Bush administration. In a stable country, target signals are mostly understood and are quite predictable, but in a country that had been overrun with invading forces, with a military that had been shattered, communication methods were forced to change, as the destruction of a country's infrastructure, particularly power generation, limits the number of electronic signals that can be conveniently transmitted.
When the US and its allies invaded Afghanistan after 9/11, I believed this was the correct course of action because it had been shown that al-Qaeda was behind 9/11 and they were supported and protected by the Taliban. They had essentially committed an act of war against the US that required a military response which had been sanctioned by the United Nations. I was, however, not confident that president Bush's claims that Iraq had been allied in some way with al-Qaeda were true, nor was I convinced that Iraq had any WMD.
I was also concerned that Bush had failed to gain UN approval for military action against Iraq; this greatly reduced the aid the US would receive from potential allied countries. I was also fearful of the massive cost of the potentially long-term aftermath. During my time with the National Security Agency, I had read reports on many military-related subjects. I had also read reports about WMD within Iraq for over a decade and I had never read a report concluding that Iraq had any WMD after 9/11. Although I had concerns that Bush's reasons for invading Iraq were groundless, my colleagues and I continued to perform our roles to the best of our ability: the lives of American and allied soldiers were our highest concern. While Bush declared victory, the US military was still part of the ongoing mission to search for and find Saddam Hussein.
Finally, on December 13, 2003, Saddam was captured near Tikrit in Operation Red Dawn. On November 5, 2006, he was sentenced to death by hanging and on December 30, 2006, he was executed at Camp Justice. It is tragically ironic that both president George H.W. Bush and president George W.Bush left their successors with the burden of ongoing problems in Iraq - one through incomplete action, the other through what proved to be an unjustified invasion. Iraq had become a dismal, expensive legacy for both presidents. America had changed under president Bush, and this was succinctly expressed by a popular columnist who reported this fundamental shift of American traditional policy shortly after the start of the Iraq War: ''For better or for worse, a new nation will be born here. For the first time in its history, the US has claimed for itself, and now puts into action, a doctrine of pre-emption, the right to hit first any nation we suspect of hostile intent ... But the new nation being born here is not just a product of the Bush Doctrine. It's also the product of Washington's recent taste for unilateral action ... We are becoming a go-it-alone nation, a don't-give-a-damn-what-anybody-else-says nation. And ultimately, because of that, a frightening nation ... But beneath the veneer of normalcy we watch and wait and pray that Washington knows what it is doing. Time will tell. In the meantime, bombs fall. Missiles fly. And in the thunder of their explosions, the old America passes.'' The ''cowboy diplomacy'' that so well characterised president Bush's eight years in office - ''You're either with us or you're with the terrorists'' - was a simple man's outlook on a very complex issue that alienated the US from many traditional allies. I personally felt offended that president Bush was telling me that if I disagreed with his policies, I supported the terrorists. One inalienable right that made the US a great nation was the freedom to disagree peacefully with the government, but president Bush had just told me I was not allowed to disagree with his policies. If I did, I was ''with the terrorists''. This was no longer my United States.
From Inside Pine Gap by David Rosenberg (Hardie Grant, $35.00).
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