Menwith Hill Station (1)
01 January 1991
Menwith Hill Station
artdoc July=1994
The last major contribution made by Labour MP for Bradford South
Bob Cryer in parliament before his tragic death in a car accident
was to draw attention to the US National Security Agency (NSA)
base at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire - which has been
described as the biggest tapping centre in the world. Bob Cryer
led an adjournment debate on the subject after government
Ministers had been thrown into confusion, not knowing whether Bob
Cryer's questions reflected his lifelong commitment to
parliamentary accountability or his enthusiasm for railways.
Civil servants in the Ministry of Transport searched in vain for
Menwith Hill railway station. Not being marked on the maps the
spy station Menwith Hill could not be found. This ignorance
highlighted the very point he was making. If government officials
could not discover Menwith Hill, how was the public to discover
the truth? He raised the issue because successive Ministers
had refused to answer parliamentary questions hiding behind the
response: `the use of Menwith Hill...is subject to confidential
arrangements between the UK and US government'. In order to break
through the secrecy surrounding the issue Bob Cryer took the
opportunity to place the facts on the record.
`The Menwith Hill story starts with the purchase in 1955 of a
246-acre farm on rural moors west of Harrogate. On 15 September
1960, after the expenditure of $6.8 million, the US army security
field station opened. On 1 August 1966, control of the station
was transferred to the ostensibly civilian National Security
Agency of America...the takeover occurred because the army
resisted eavesdropping on diplomatic and economic targets'.
A former employee in the monitoring station describes its work
in the book `The Puzzle Palace'. Their work was to: `keep a
special watch for commercial traffic, details of commodities...
Changes were frequent. One week I was asked to scan all traffic
between Berlin and London and another week between Rome and
Belgrade..' The station, said Bob Cryer had some 1,200 US
employees and there were now 21 radomes (enormous monitoring
shells). British Telecom had installed a 32,000-telephone line
capacity connection to the Hunter's Stone Post Office tower -
which is the pivotal point for more than 1 million miles of
microwave connections in the UK. Moreover, the cable from the
post office tower runs directly to Menwith Hill. Why, Bob Cryer
asked, was this station still there, occupying moorland, when the
reason for its justification, the Cold War, was now over? He then
cited a `Dispatches' programme on which someone who had worked
at Menwith Hill told of intercepting a US Senator's phone call.
`Can the Minister assure us that Menwith Hill never listens in
to any telephone calls of UK MPs, not directly in the UK, but
bounced back over the various satellite systems?
He called for the `confidential' agreement to be published and
asked what rights UK citizens had if they believed they were
being spied on?
For the government, Minister of State for the Armed Forces,
Jeremy Hanley, replied. Mr Hanley said: `Although the end of the
Cold War has brought about changes in the focus of US and UK
defence concerns, the need for Menwith Hill station to continue
its role as part of a world-wide defence network remains...we
continue to live in a very uncertain world.' But the Minister
reserved his main defence of the monitoring station by attacking
peace campaigners - who Bob Cryer supported. He said:
`the irresponsible activities taking place at Menwith Hill cannot
be interpreted by any stretch of the imagination as being in our
national interest. I am afraid I can only despise the actions of
hon.Members who seem only too happy to jump on that particular
bandwagon and to indulge in damaging innuendo and downright
untruths about what goes on there.'
This attack was prompted by the actions of the gr