Keep Out!: Top Secret Places Governments Don't Want You to Know About

Unlike the United States, Russia, and China, Australia is, for a country with a land mass of nearly three million square miles, remarkably and refreshingly free of government-designated no-fly zones. With one exception. No, it’s not the airspace above the nation’s capital, Canberra. Nor, as you might expect, is it the skies directly over the residence of the current Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard. Rather, the flight-free area in question protects the staff and work of a highly classified installation previously called the Joint Defense Space Research Facility, now officially titled the Joint Defense Facility Pine Gap. To most Aussies, however, it’s referred to simply as Pine Gap.

Situated in central Australia, about 11 miles from the town of Alice Springs, Pine Gap is an area dominated by dry, arid grassland, with temperatures that, in the summer, regularly reach nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit. It is described in careful terms by the Australian government as a satellite-tracking station — which it is, but it’s also far, far more than that. It’s a place that would likely have given George Orwell nightmares. That’s right: Feeds from spy cameras in overseas nations and around their own country end up in the heart of Pine Gap — secret surveillance of worldwide targets as well as elements of the Australian populace deemed to be targets of interest, which in today’s world may include genuine homegrown terrorists, but can also involve everyday citizens grousing about the ever-increasing number of state-of-the-art surveillance cameras popping up across the nation’s cities.

The origins of the facility can be traced back to 1966, the year in which the governments of Australia and the United States of America secretly signed what has become known as the Pine Gap Treaty. In simple terms, it allowed for the establishment, on Australian soil, of a highly classified eavesdropping facility that, for the most part, would be manned by personnel from the U.S. NSA and CIA. And that is precisely what happened: At the dawn of the 1970s, hundreds of Americans employed in the secret worlds of intelligence-gathering and espionage made their quiet way to Australia, to a brand-new facility equipped with the latest state-of-the-art surveillance equipment and technologies.

Today, vast radomes — protective enclosures for radar antennae — dominate the base, giving it an otherworldly appearance. Its number of employees is now rumored to be close to a thousand. Top Secret operations involving spy satellites, telephone and Internet surveillance, and sophisticated, clandestine means of eavesdropping at both a foreign and a domestic level are the norm. In a somewhat surreal situation, given that the base is on Australian soil, all Australian employees of Pine Gap are legally unable to access one part of the installation known as the National Cryptographic Room, which falls under U.S. jurisdiction. And, by the same token, U.S. personnel are denied access to the Australian Cryptographic Room. Both are said to secretly spy on each others’ rooms, however.

Much of the work undertaken at Pine Gap is undeniably done in the legitimate name of national security, and focuses upon such areas as terror threats, determining if foreign nations are abiding by arms-control treaties, and intelligence-gathering. But, as the Age of Terror progresses, concerns are rising that a significant portion of the work at Pine Gap is now based around watching Australia’s own law-abiding citizens, rather than just those overseas individuals and groups who might wish to do the nation and its people harm. For example, in 2010, a Pine Gap whistleblower revealed that the base was involved in the secret monitoring of telephone and e-mail activities of Australian citizens attached to animal-rights movements, the Global Warming community, and the 9/11 Truth Movement. Not surprisingly, issues like this have led more than a few people to make their outrage known. One of the most notable aspects of the complaints about the work undertaken at Pine Gap is that they do not come from overseas nations, angered that their actions are being monitored to an intensive degree, but from the Australian people themselves, who have proven to be highly proactive when it comes to the issue of highlighting, and demonstrating against, what may very well be going on behind the heavily guarded doors of the secret base.

When Pine Gap celebrated its 20th anniversary in 1986, there was no party, no birthday cake, and no candles. Instead, Pine Gap personnel were faced with the sight of more than 300 women demonstrating outside the base, before they stormed the facility (and were quickly arrested in the process). Anxious to play down the affair, authorities quickly and quietly dropped all charges. It was much the same in 2002, when no less than 500 people loudly protested on the perimeter of the installation about Pine Gap’s escalating involvement in the War on Terror, and the extent to which Australia was getting dragged into the controversial hostilities seemingly erupting all across the Middle East. For the most part, the demonstrators made their point and went on their collective way. As the hostilities in Iraq and Afghanistan continued to grow, however, strong-arm tactics began to surface.

The one case that, more than any other, thrust the work of Pine Gap into the public domain had its origins in December 2005, when four members — Adele Goldie, Jim Dowling, Donna Mulhearn, and Bryan Law — of a group called Christians Against all Terrorism found their way into the base. In what was certainly a unique scenario, the four had publicly announced, in advance, that it was their intention to enter the base and inspect the extent to which staff at Pine Gap were assisting in the enabling and targeting of missiles engaged in the bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan. Unsurprisingly, all four were arrested before they had a chance to take a breath. This time, however, there was no attempt to release the protestors and sweep the events under a thick carpet of diplomacy. This time, the Australian government meant business.

Asserting his position of authority, Attorney General Philip Ruddock quickly invoked a seldom-used law to prosecute all four: the Defense (Special Undertaking) Act of 1952. If convicted of violating the law, the four faced serving 14 years in jail — seven for trespass and a further seven for taking unauthorized photographs of the installation. And you thought security at Area 51 was tough. Potentially even more serious, however: the 1952 act also provided the government with nearly unlimited powers to take action in events relevant to the purposes of the defense of the Commonwealth. In other words, provided it successfully argued that its actions were in the name of the defense of the nation, the Australian government could pretty much do whatever it wanted to do.

The legal counsel for the four came up with an argument that many saw as quite logical when the case finally went to trial in 2007. The Defense (Special Undertaking) Act specifically — as its name implies — covers issues of a defensive nature; the argument put forth by the four’s defense was that the actions at Pine Gap were perceived by the members of Christians Against all Terrorism as not being defensive. Instead, the argument went, Pine Gap was involved in offensive acts — namely, offering intelligence data that assisted in the military attacks on overseas nations such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

Justice Sally Thomas, however, was having none of it. Had she accepted the argument, it would have set a very dangerous precedent from the government’s perspective: Much of Pine Gap’s work is focused on spying on foreign nations, and it could be argued in future cases that, by definition, spying on the enemy overseas is not, technically speaking, defensive. Therefore, invoking the 1952 legislation would not just be pointless, it would be illegal too. Even though the government knew full well that the defense’s argument was not exactly an invalid one, the case was not thrown out of court. In fact, Goldie, Dowling, Mulhearn and Law and were successfully prosecuted to the full extent to which officialdom was conceivably able.

Although the prosecution team strived for — and the government secretly yearned for — the four to serve prison time, it was not to be. Collectively, they received fines totaling only $3,500—which they flatly refused to pay. An utterly exasperated Australian government pushed to overturn the verdict and punishment and put all four behind bars at the earliest opportunity — like right now. Well, that didn’t work either. What did happen was that the legal team for Goldie, Dowling, Mulhearn and Law quickly launched an appeal, and, remarkably, got the entire conviction quashed and nullified, as a result of concerns relative to the perceived unconstitutional way in which the act of 1952 had been introduced, interpreted, and used against the four. While the foursome celebrated their freedom, the government quietly seethed. The secret work of Pine Gap continued on behind closed doors.

UFOS

Pine Gap has been linked to matters of a much stranger nature than covert intelligence-gathering, however: More than a few UFO reports have surfaced from this area. Since the early to mid-1970s, eyewitnesses have described seeing strange balls of bright light hovering over the base; gleaming, saucer-shaped aircraft have been seen soaring across the surrounding land; and, according to an Australian university professor named J.D. Frodsham, on one particular night in 1989, a hunting party in the area secretly watched as a set of camouflaged doors opened in the grounds of Pine Gap, out of which surfaced a metallic-looking, circular-shaped vehicle that rose vertically and then sped away into the night sky.

Combined with the fact that Pine Gap was previously known as the Joint Defense Space Research Facility, incredible stories such as these have inevitably given rise to the notion that a secret alien base — perhaps not unlike that which is allegedly buried below the town of Dulce, New Mexico — exists underneath Pine Gap. Although, given the current status of the highly advanced technology employed at Pine Gap, one might conclude that the UFOs are, in reality, classified vehicles of a very terrestrial nature: Perhaps they may actually be surveillance craft not unlike the remotely piloted vehicles (RPVs) or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) now being flown in the skies of the Middle East. If so, as seems to be the case at Area 51, Pine Gap personnel might prefer and even encourage people to believe such vehicles have alien origins. Either way, from the depths of the Nevada desert to the Australian interior, it seems, secret bases and UFOs, whatever their point of origin, go hand-in-glove.