Power Play by Patrick Robinson Read Free Book Online Page B

behalf of the nation.
    Every aspect of life inside the perimeters is coded. Even the Christmas party is called something else. No one living anywhere near the vast Fort Meade complex has the slightest idea what happens inside the barricades. When the Maryland county officials placed a rubber cord on the road to try to ascertain the volume of traffic entering the complex, armed guards appeared as if by magic and sliced it into several pieces. Crypto City answers to no one.
    The OPS 2B building is a vast rectangle of black glass, and, inside, it contains a huge black granite wall. The great seal of the National Security Agency, twelve feet by eight feet, is carved into the stone, and above, written in solid-gold inlay, are the words They Served in Silence. Below, in the eight columns of the Memorial Wall, are the names of almost 160 military and civilian personnel who gave their lives in the line of duty.
    The black granite is polished so workers can see their own reflections. This is deliberate, designed to remind them starkly that they too serve, in silence, precisely the same cause as those who died for it.
    Personnel usually confirm they work for the Department of Defense. But no one is on record specifying their various areas of collecting and analyzing foreign communications and intelligence. Inside those razor-wire barriers, among the greatest collection of supercomputers the world has ever seen (or, rather, not seen), there are state-of-the-art systems, designed to raise the roof at the slightest suggestion of a cyberspace hacker trying to gain entry to any US government system.
    Nothing in Crypto City is quite what it seems. The outside structures actually shield the real building, which lies inside the shell, protected by thick bulletproof material, six inches of sound-numbing space with a copper screen designed to lock in every possible sound, conversation, and signal.
    That copper screen is constructed around almost every area of the entire complex, rendering the whole place acoustically impregnable. The aim of America’s NSA is to vacuum up every last particle of electronic
information on this planet, and far beyond, but not to allow one single atom of its own sounds to escape to the outside world.
    There are reputed to be a thousand listening stations on US territory worldwide, almost every one of them hooked up to Fort Meade. But there are also six hundred similar US operations all over the world.
    The main one stands in the UK, on the Royal Air Force Base at Menwith Hill Station, in the Yorkshire Dales near Harrogate, approximately two hundred miles north from where Admiral John Young sat with the first sea lord in Admiralty Arch, which guards London’s Trafalgar Square.
    Like Fort Meade, Menwith Hill irritates the life out of know-nothing left-wingers. The station stands in 545 acres of North Yorkshire and is the largest electronic listening station on earth. On its campus there are more than twenty-three giant Radomes, which look like enormous golf balls. Hidden inside these space-age Titleists are antennas intercepting the world’s naval and military signals.
    The Menwith Hill technicians form the world’s largest spy base, with a vast special area confined to Russia. The entire operation is run by the National Security Agency under the command of the US Air Force’s 421st Airbase Group.
    Menwith Hill, nestling in the folds of the Yorkshire Dales, has the strongest possible links not only to the US satellites but also to Buckley, the secretive 3,300-acre USAF base in Colorado, home of the 460th Space Wing, the missile-warning, space-tracking front line of the US military. In the Rocky Mountains near Denver, it, too, displays the gigantic golf balls, linking it to England’s Yorkshire Dales.
    The Menwith Hill listening station has been under US control since 1954, when the Western world was under the control of the former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Sir Winston