In 1966 an agreement was signed between the Australian Defence Force and the CIA to build surveillance satellites to intercept information about missiles and communications from Soviet and other governments. The Pine Gap joint defence facility was built shortly thereafter on an 1780 ha excision of land belonging to the Central Arrernte people. No permission was sought from traditional custodians, nor was permission granted, for the alienation of this land and construction of a military base on it.
The Pine Gap Joint Defence Facility is widely regarded as the most important US intelligence facility outside of the US. 800 people – from a town of 28,000 thousand – work at ‘the base’. According to Felicity Ruby, half work for US (National Security Agency (NSA), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Reconnaissance Office) and Australian government agencies (Australian Signals Directorate, Australian Federal Police). The other half are private contractors working for Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics, as well as tech firms such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard. The US military contractor Amentum, currently before a US court on charges of human trafficking in Kuwait, is in charge of logistics for the base, and employs 400 people.
Pine Gap is integral to the global US war machine. As a former US National Security Agency employee put it, drones are “like the tip of the spear but the rest of the spear is actually the global communications surveillance system” of which Pine Gap is one of the most important parts. Pine Gap provides targeting data for US and allied drone and missile strikes in places such as Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria that have killed thousands of civilians. Pine Gap, a more-than-decade-old article in The Age clarifies, “can provide targeting information to US and allied military units within minutes”.
Intelligence-sharing from Pine Gap to the Israeli military throughout its ongoing bombardment of Gaza is one of the key ways the Australian government has participated in the Gaza genocide and failed its obligations under the UN Genocide Convention. Workers at the base have been busy throughout the months of preparation leading to the US-Israeli war on Iran, collecting signals intelligence (SIGINT) and geolocation data via geosynchronous satellites over the Indian Ocean to fill US and Israeli target banks. Throughout the war, workers at the base have been busier still, relaying real-time intelligence to feed into intelligence products made available to the US and Israeli militaries.
The base supports the global climate-wrecking activities of the US military – the world’s largest institutional emitter – in military interventions and wars that are often premised on securing access to oil and other fossil fuels for US corporations.
The Pine Gap facility has long been identified by military analysts and anti-nuclear activists as central to US nuclear war planning and as a high-priority target for US adversaries in the event of conflict erupting. The Australian government has for decades acknowledged the high risk of a nuclear attack on the base. The surveillance capabilities of the facility make nuclear warfare more likely by strengthening US options for a first-strike nuclear attack on its enemies. The military significance of Pine Gap, in turn, makes Central Australia a target. Now, with a new nuclear arms race underway and Pine Gap undergoing its largest-ever expansion in order to hunt and target Chinese missile silos, Mparntwe/ Alice Springs is increasingly in the crosshairs of nuclear confrontation.