At Le Monde Diplomatique, New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager, who uncovered the Echelon surveillance system (on which I’ve blogged previously), reports on his more recent find, a massive Israeli signals interceptor at Urim, located in the Negev desert (if you want to look it up on a map, the coordinates are 31°18’34″N, long. 34°32’35″E, lat.)
It spies on friend and foe alike, he reports.
Salient points in this extremely important report:
*Urim is only 30 KM from Beersheba prison, where the activists from the Gaza flotilla were briefly held. Urim base is only 2 KM from the Urim kibbutz.
*Urim’s rows of satellite dishes have the capacity to detect the movements and communications of ships on the sea and thus would have monitored the flotilla before it was boarded.
*Urim is the Israeli counterpart of the satellite interception system, Echelon, a joint effort of the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (the Anglosphere), set up in 1996.
*Urim has expanded from intercepting communications between countries (Intelsat) to communications at sea (Immarsat) to regional communications.
*Urim filters out words and phone numbers of significance and passes them to signal intelligence HQ, Unit 8200 at Herzliya to the north of Tel Aviv, from where it’s relayed to the Mossad and other intel agencies. Unit 8200 is the equivalent of the NSA (US) and the GCHQ (UK).
“Unit 8200 and its counterparts – the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the American National Security Agency (NSA) – are less famous than their foreign intelligence and special operations agencies (MI6, the CIA and Mossad). Yet the signals agencies are far bigger.
The Urim base targets many nations, friend and foe. A former analyst at Unit 8200, a military service conscript, said she worked full time translating intercepted calls and emails from English and French into Hebrew. It was “interesting” work, studying routine communications to find the nuggets. Her section listened mostly to “diplomatic traffic and other off-shore [international] signals”. They also searched public internet sites.
The Urim base, said our sources, is the centre of a spying network that taps undersea cables (notably Mediterranean cables linking Israel to Europe via Sicily) and has covert listening posts in Israeli embassy buildings abroad. Unit 8200, which is officially part of the Israeli army, also has secret monitoring units within the Palestinian territories and uses Gulfstream jets fitted out as signals intelligence aircraft.
Excluding television satellites, most satellites, in an arc stretching from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, are probable targets: European, Arab, Russian and Asian, as well as the Intelsat and Inmarsat satellites. Images of the base show 30 listening antennas, making Urim one of the largest signals intelligence bases in the world. The only comparable-sized station is a US facility at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire, UK.
Other stations have been known about since the 1980s. There is a large NSA base near the German city of Bad Aibling, and another US base on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, just northwest of an airbase with a runway full of B-52 bombers. The main UK base, at Morwenstow, Cornwall, can be spotted through its 20 listening antennas above the cliffs. France has its own network, known as Frenchelon, under the General Directorate for External Security (DGSE), which includes several bases in France and its overseas territories.
But unlike these, Israel’s spy facility at Urim remained invisible for decades.”