Very neat. Should impress the geeks on the board.
http://www.theage.com.au/text/articles/2005/09/09/1125772695364.html?oneclick=true
Note: Full article posted due to registration required.
http://www.theage.com.au/text/articles/2005/09/09/1125772695364.html?oneclick=true
Note: Full article posted due to registration required.
Revealed: secrets of the spies in our skies
Date: September 10 2005
The truth behind secret US missions over Victoria in the '60s is stranger than fiction, writes Brendan Nicholson.
IT WAS one of the best-kept secrets of the Cold War. A clandestine operation, with overtones of Dr Strangelove, was played out against the backdrop of superpower paranoia in — of all the surreal settings — rural Victoria.
Only now, more than 40 years later, and still shrouded in official secrecy, are details of the United States' operations on Australian soil beginning to emerge.
In May 1961 a group of distinctively shaped, oddly named US spy planes began flying a series of top secret missions from East Sale RAAF base.
Their role — the Australian government said at the time — was to take part in a global survey of radiation levels to gauge the impact of nuclear bomb testing. Later the government said the planes were engaged in weather reconnaissance.
Forty years on, the Australian government documents that could reveal what those aircraft really did on "Operation Crowflight" are still classified. But US documents, unearthed from military archives by Australian historian and author Dr Philip Dorling, show that it had nothing to do with the weather.
At the time, the Victorian Peace Council called for protests against the US Air Force deployment and speculated that it was part of a US plan to carry out nuclear tests at Maralinga.
But the real goal of Operation Crowflight was even stranger. It was to collect, from the sky over the Southern Ocean, a rare gas called krypton-85 with which the US hoped to calculate the size of the Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal.
The saga began on July 4, 1960, when the US embassy in Canberra passed a note to the Australian Defence Department outlining the proposal and suggesting the radiation sampling cover story.
A month earlier U-2 had become a household name around the world when a spy plane belonging to the US Central Intelligence Agency and piloted by Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union.
Now the US was asking Australia to allow it to fly three of the planes, with their distinctive albatross-shaped wings, along with six other US planes as part of a mission that might influence the outcome of the Cold War.
The US ambassador in Canberra, William Sebald, called on prime minister Menzies on July 5, 1960, to discuss the project. Documents obtained by Dr Dorling show that some in the Australian Defence Department doubted whether the cover story would be swallowed in scientific circles because the results would not appear to justify the high cost of the operation.
There was also some concern about using U-2s so soon after the downing of Powers' aircraft over the USSR, and the resultant collapse of the Paris Summit between US president Dwight Eisenhower and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev.
CIA U-2 operations in east Asia, including flights over communist China, had also attracted unwelcome publicity with the crash landing of a U-2 in Japan.
Perhaps, suggested the US embassy, the planes could be "rechristened" for their Australian sojourn. The State Department, however, pointed out that the planes were already well known and that "an unsuccessful attempt at camouflage of this kind would make the United States a laughing stock".
Krypton-85 is an isotope produced when weapons-grade plutonium is manufactured. It is then carried off around the planet on air currents.
By collecting air samples around the world, the US Air Force planned to work out how much krypton-85 existed. By subtracting the amount of the gas created by the plutonium production of the US and its allies, they could make a reasonably accurate estimate of the amount of plutonium produced by the Soviets and from there calculate roughly how many bombs the USSR had.
Crowflight's real purpose was kept a very closely guarded secret because the United States feared that if the Soviets found out about it they would suppress the emission of the gas from their plutonium production reactors.
Such sampling of rare gases to detect nuclear activities was not new.
In 1944 the US Air Force had carried out a series of low-level reconnaissance flights over Germany looking for traces of xenon-133, a radioactive gas produced by fission in a nuclear reactor, in a bid to detect any German nuclear activity. They found none because the Germans had not built a reactor.
Much more recently, krypton-85 sampling has been and continues to be used as a means to monitor North Korea's nuclear weapons program.
But when Dr Dorling, who is writing a book on the Australian-US defence relationship, asked the Australian Defence Department for the records of this project from 40 years ago, access to critical records was refused on the grounds that declassification would reveal details of liaison and co-operation between Australia and the United States that were "of continuing sensitivity and remain properly classified".
The department said the files contained information communicated in strict confidence by the US Government.
"The US Government has asked that the information not be released to the public. The release of this information would therefore constitute a breach of confidence owed to the US Government," he says.
In the end Dr Dorling turned to declassified US records, which included enough of the material to tell the story.
The US Air Force planned to take high altitude air samples simultaneously at various sites around the world during November 1960 and May 1961. The initial flights were carried out from the RAAF base at East Sale and involved three U-2 and four JB-57 aircraft (modified Canberra bombers) supported by two C-54 search-and-rescue aircraft. Up to 200 personnel were involved.
Operation Crowflight continued until early 1966. High-performance RB-57 reconnaissance aircraft were employed in the latter stages before the operation was transferred to Argentina.
But Dr Dorling argues the operation raised more difficult questions that remain relevant today.
The Crowflight operation, he says, was an important part of Australia's growing defence collaboration with the US. Before the North-West Cape Naval Communications Station became operational at Exmouth, Western Australia, in 1967, it was the largest US defence project in Australia.
But it was never referred for consideration by the Australian cabinet and was not covered by any treaty or memorandum of understanding.
"Operation Crowflight was highly visible but its purpose was highly secret and was known to only a handful of Australian officials.
"The fact that krypton-85 sampling is a method of detecting clandestine nuclear programs is well known so it's hard to see why this has to remain security classified in Australia to this day apart from a desire by the Australian and US departments of defence not to admit past disinformation."
Dr Dorling says that after 40 years, Crowflight provides a good illustration of the hidden dimensions of the Australia-US alliance.
"Behind the press releases and communiques issued by government ministers and officials, there is the critical realm of clandestine intelligence collection and exchange," Dr Dorling says.
"To a large degree this is the real bedrock of the alliance, cloaked in secrecy and disinformation, and any true understanding of our relationship with the United States must take these elements into account."