Menwith Hill Station
01 May 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 group of women campaigners who had frequently entered the perimeter of the base. The Minister said it w