In a secluded valley in the heart of Australia lies one of the world’s most important intelligence facilities. 

Over almost 60 years it’s grown in scale and capability, drawing Australia into wars and eavesdropping on countless countries. 

Why doesn’t the public know more?

The room is small and sterile.

The walls are bare.

Wires wrap around the brown-haired, lanky electrical engineer’s chest.

David Rosenburg sits nervously in a chair.

He’s doing his first polygraph test.

“Have I ever committed a crime against the United States government?”

“Do I know any individuals who might be a threat to the United States government?”

David is deep inside the National Security Agency — the NSA — in Maryland.

It’s America’s eyes and ears on the world.

If he passes the test, David will fulfil a childhood dream of becoming a spy.

He loved how the heroes would bug phones, get information and “beat the bad guys”.

Failing the first, David takes three polygraph tests in total.

He undergoes rigorous psychological testing and finally the letter arrives to say he’s made it.

He’s a spy.

A few years into the job, David hops on a long-haul flight to the remote Australian outback town of Alice Springs.

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This is where America has set up arguably the most important intelligence facility beyond its own borders – Pine Gap.

David would work here for 18 years and witness first-hand its expansion in size and capability.

But how much do Australians know about this spy base in the heart of the country?

Back in the mid 1960s, when Pine Gap was just an idea, there was no talk of spies.

At least, not to the public.

Sold on a lie – A ‘space base’

Pine Gap was sold to locals as a “space research” facility.

The promise of an economic injection through housing and new supermarkets was welcome news.

Long-term Centralian Des Nelson remembers the eight-year-long drought that had taken hold of the town.

Families were packing up and the dust storms were relentless.

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Des became a well-respected botanist and was asked to assess the value of the Pine Gap land.

He says it was beautiful country but no-one thought to consult the traditional owners.

“Questions like that just weren’t considered,” Des says.

There’s a story that circulated for years that a group of men, including CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) officers, cracked a case of Australian red wine on the Pine Gap acreage to celebrate.

The paperwork was signed between the US and Australian governments in December 1966.

Soon building began 18 kilometres south of Alice Springs in the folds of the MacDonnell Ranges.

The so-called space base was hidden in a valley and consisted of large white oversized golf-ball-looking domes.

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A mysterious charm offensive

Des was taken with the good-looking American newcomers.

“I had got the impression that they were like ambassadors,” he says.

But strange things soon started happening.

Des remembers a New Year’s party where one American man had too much to drink and picked a fight with anyone talking to his girlfriend.

“And next day he was gone, never saw him again,” Des says.

Loose-lipped Americans were sent packing, particularly if they talked about Pine Gap, because Pine Gap was never a “space base” — it was a spy base.

It had a crucial role in the Cold War.

The politics of nuclear fear

Alice Springs was perfectly placed to help the United States spy on the Soviet Union.

This was in part due to its geography, according to Pine Gap expert Professor Richard Tanter from Melbourne University and the Nautilus Institute.

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Nuclear annihilation hung heavy between the superpowers and America wanted an edge.

They wanted to know just how good the Soviets’ missiles were.

Pine Gap provided a ground station to gather information collected by satellites spying on the USSR.

But this also made Pine Gap a nuclear target for America’s enemies.

Everything was cloaked in secrecy.

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When Labor’s Gough Whitlam took government in 1972, he promised Australians a progressive agenda.

That included revealing the secrets of Pine Gap.

Whitlam felt the American government had left Australia in the dark.

He didn’t know Pine Gap was run by America’s CIA for years.

“There now need be no secrecy,” he said in his first press conference as prime minister.

Journalist Brian Toohey was a staffer for the Whitlam government back then.

He says the head of the defence department, Arthur Tange, gave the first Pine Gap briefing and deliberately misled Whitlam about who was running the facility.

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“Gough was left with being unable to tell the Australian public what happened at Pine Gap,” Brian says.

The relationship between the American and Australian governments was tense during the Whitlam years.

Brian remembers officials in Washington getting fired up when Whitlam refused to extend the Pine Gap agreement.

It was 1974.

Referring to foreign military bases, Whitlam said on the floor of parliament: “We do not favour the extension or prolongation of any of those existing ones.”

“As contingency planning, the whole of the US Defense Department and CIA … said that they would shift it to Guam, a Pacific island that America owned,” Brian Toohey says.

Before Whitlam could do anything about Pine Gap he was infamously dismissed on November 11, 1975.

Rumours the CIA was responsible for the prime minister’s removal endure, but no definitive evidence has proven this to date.

Whitlam was out, but opposition to Pine Gap would continue to grow.

The women get wild

In November 1983, 26-year-old Jenny Taylor found herself pushing the security gate into Pine Gap back and forth with a large group of women.

“We got it off its hinges and lifted it up, walked along holding onto it and singing like mad,” Jenny says.

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Around 800 women had converged in Alice Springs as part of an international peace movement.

The women pitched their tents along the road to Pine Gap for two weeks.

There were marches, street theatre and papier-mâché missiles.

To them, Pine Gap was a nuclear target and a patriarchal war machine.

They wanted to shut it down.

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In the small conservative town of Alice Springs, the women stood out.

“It was a dawning of consciousness for me,” Jenny says.

“We looked a little wild … a bit dusty and bedraggled.”

More than 100 women were arrested over the fortnight.

The camp got national headlines and motivated more people to come to Alice Springs and protest Pine Gap over the decade.

Australia’s defence minister during the 1980s, Kim Beazley, had no time for the activists.

“I used to say when looking at those demonstrators … ‘So you don’t want arms control and you want a nuclear war? Well done. Get stuck in’,” he says.

Mr Beazley did have something in common with the protesters though.

He believed Pine Gap and other US-Australia joint facilities put Australia in the crosshairs.

“It was a nuclear target back in the 1980s, but nevertheless it was necessary to host them because they are absolutely critical to the global balance on which peace and stability was based.”

And then the Cold War ended.

But Pine Gap was just ramping up.

Pine Gap and the US war machine

Spy David Rosenburg was rushed out to Alice Springs in October 1990.

America and Iraq were counting down to the Gulf War.

The spy base hidden in the Australian outback had a new role in the US war-fighting machine.

It played a key intelligence-gathering role as the United States and its allies began dropping bombs on Baghdad.

David says the aerial bombardment strategy was aimed at minimising loss of life.

The number of large radomes on the desert floor has consistently grown over the years along with Pine Gap’s capabilities.

Australia has found itself drawn into one war after another through the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap.

By September 11, 2001, Pine Gap was bigger than it had ever been but its surveillance powers were blindsided.

The war on terror and beyond

David Rosenburg was in Alice Springs and immediately the hunt was on to find those responsible for the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil.

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Bombs rained down on Afghanistan and then Iraq.

It’s impossible to link specific US air strikes and drone strikes with Pine Gap’s targeting intelligence.

However, documents leaked by former NSA officer Edward Snowden in 2013 confirmed Pine Gap is involved in America’s battlefield operations around the world.

“Pine Gap became extremely important in the age of drone warfare in helping to find the targets,” Richard Tanter, Pine Gap expert from Melbourne University, says.

“Helping to find cell-phone users, satellite-phone users but where were they in real time, and where were they very precisely.

“Pine Gap became critical in feeding … that potential target information into what was called the White House’s kill chain decision making and is still critical for that today.”

These revelations have seen a new wave of protesters calling for Pine Gap’s closure and greater transparency with the Australian public.

The road into the outback spy base has been blocked twice by protesters since the war in Israel/Gaza began in October last year.

Activists claim the facility is providing intelligence to the Israeli Defence Force via the United States to target Palestinians in the Middle East.

Former NSA employee David Rosenburg believes the war in Israel/Gaza would be of significant interest to the US.

He confirms that Pine Gap’s eavesdropping capabilities cover the Middle East.

In 2013, the NSA signed an agreement to share signals intelligence to Israel.

Despite this precedent, it’s unknown whether the NSA is currently sharing intelligence from Pine Gap or what that intelligence would be used for.