Continuing with The Crimes of Patriots,A True Tale of Dope,
Dirty Money & The CIA By Jonathan Kwitny

.... At the base, known as Pine Gap, American personnel read and relay back to the United States data from spy satellites stationed over the Soviet Union, China, and Europe. Through Pine Gap and two related bases in Australia, the United States picks up coded messages from Soviet missile launchings, and intercepts radar, radio, and microwave communications. Greeks have accused the Americans at Pine Gap of listening in on their telephone calls in Greece.

If an arms control agreement is to be reached, the base at Pine Gap, or one just like it, will be indispensable.

Information flows the other way through Pine Gap, too. With its Buck Rogers-style communications gear, the base relays orders from the Pentagon to our nuclear submarine fleet as it moves about, silently threatening to level the Soviet Union whenever it is thought the Soviet fleet is doing the same to the United States.

But as the CIA presence in Australia grew, so did the temptation to manipulate events, even in such a friendly country. In ways, what happened in Australia shows how the productive and the counterproductive sides of the CIA work everywhere. The vital operations at Pine Gap have been threatened by the political resentment of Australians, who, inevitably, learned their democracy was being manipulated.

Australians were suspicious from the founding of the huge Pine Gap base in 1968. They were told the base was part of the United States's space study program, a plausible enough explanation with the lunar landing scheduled for 1969. The sales pitch presented Pine Gap as a means by which Australian scientists might share in the knowledge brought home from galactic frontiers. But the pitch smelled fishy to many people, one of whom, in 1972, was elected prime minister of Australia.
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