Thursday, November 09, 2006

All Your Electromagnetic Transmissions Are Belong To Us

This is worth mentioning, as while you try not to talk about these locations for as long as someone doesn't start blowing the whistle too loud, all you really need is someone to pass by and feel the hyper-sensitive harassment due to Trimingham's ELINT capabilities -- and news articles keep coming about this particular case.

"The Ministry of Defence has admitted that a fault at a radar dome was responsible for causing electrical problems with dozens of cars. Engines and lights cut out and speedometer dials swung up to 150mph as motorists drove past the dome. At the time the MoD said there was no guarantee that the Trimingham radar on the north Norfolk coast was the cause."

Read some of the memories of a serviceman that was stationed there during the 60s :

"Another story that might be of interest relates to the time that a Russian trawler went aground at Skaw. The indications were that it was an Elint (Electronic intelligence gathering) vessel as the crew hid what they were doing from an RAF Shackleton which flew overhead as part of the search and rescue mission. Whether there was any spying equipment on board is debatable. In any event, the Unst folk did well in "liberating" fishing nets and sundry bits and pieces including the steering wheel, which was subsequently returned to the Russians. However, two RAF lads ­ a steward and a cook ­ found signals, maps and other papers in the skipper's cabin, some of this hidden under his mattress. They brought these back to me and our station intelligence officer had a look at them. By chance he was a Russian linguist and was able to provide a summary of what was in the documents before they were forwarded to the RAF intelligence staff at the Ministry of Defence. One of the documents proved extremely valuable to the Navy but what amazed them was that the translated summary had been done by an RAF flying officer on Unst."

You may also be interested in going through a table that "includes all military sites which have significant intelligence-gathering or analysis capability with official US presence; these are the sites which have figures for numbers of US and UK personnel".

Trimingham's radar dome courtesy of munkt0n, and Flickr's Radars group.

Related posts:
Why's that radar screen not blinking over there?
Achieving Information Warfare Dominance Back in 1962

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