ECHELON

Opening

ECHELON is a real signals intelligence collection system run by the partners of the UKUSA Agreement: the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, now commonly called the Five Eyes. Created in the late 1960s to monitor Soviet and Eastern Bloc military and diplomatic traffic, it was formally established in 1971 and built around ground stations that intercept communications satellites.

By 2001 a European Parliament committee had concluded that its existence was "no longer in doubt" and that it was aimed at private and commercial communications. The dispute was never really whether ECHELON existed. It was what the system was used for once the Cold War that justified it had ended, and how far its reach extended.

Timeline

5 March 1946Britain and the United States sign the signals intelligence agreement later known as UKUSA. It is extended to Canada in 1948 and to Australia and New Zealand in 1956. Its full text stays secret until the NSA and GCHQ release it on 25 June 2010.

1966According to NSA newsletters published in 2015, the agency sets up an umbrella program code-named FROSTING to collect and process satellite communications. ECHELON becomes its sub-program for intercepting Intelsat transmissions, while a sister program, TRANSIENT, targets Soviet satellites.

1971ECHELON is formally established, by the BBC's account. The first US satellite ground station for the program, code-named JACKKNIFE, is built that year near Yakima, Washington, at a cost of about $21.3 million; it becomes fully operational on 4 October 1974. GCHQ had begun operating a satellite intercept station at Morwenstow in Cornwall in 1970 and 1971.

Through the later Cold War. The network grows to include stations such as RAF Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire and Bad Aibling in Bavaria, and its targets broaden as satellite and digital traffic expand.

1988Duncan Campbell's New Statesman article "Somebody's Listening" describes a signals intelligence program code-named ECHELON. The same year Margaret Newsham, a Lockheed employee working under NSA contract, tells members of Congress that the calls of Senator Strom Thurmond were being collected.

1994The NSA reportedly intercepts calls between the French firm Thomson-CSF and Brazilian officials over a contract worth about $1.3 billion to $1.4 billion for an Amazon surveillance system, known as SIVAM. The intercepts allegedly show bribery. Washington informs the Brazilian government, and the contract goes to Raytheon of Massachusetts. The same year, US intelligence reportedly learns that Airbus agents are offering bribes to a Saudi official over a $6 billion aircraft deal, which goes to American manufacturers led by Boeing.

January 1995CIA Director James Woolsey says publicly, "We are not in the business of spying for private firms. We assess international economic trends ... and support trade negotiations." The denial does not address the bribery cases.

22 February 1995France asks the United States to recall five Americans, four of them diplomats, accusing them of being intelligence agents who tried to recruit aides to French ministers to pass on classified information on trade matters, including the French position in telecommunications talks.

1996New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager publishes Secret Power, the first detailed description of how ECHELON works. A European Parliament report cites the book two years later.

March 1999Australia becomes the first UKUSA government to confirm the relationship publicly. Martin Brady, director of the Defence Signals Directorate, tells the Nine Network that the agency "does co-operate with counterpart signals intelligence organisations overseas under the UKUSA relationship."

7 March 2000Woolsey, five years out of office, gives a briefing at the Foreign Press Center in Washington. He says he continues "to hold security clearances," that the only two cases in the Campbell report concern bribery, and that US practice is to tell the government being bribed rather than the American competitor.

17 March 2000Woolsey's Wall Street Journal opinion piece, "Why We Spy on Our Allies," opens by conceding the spying and the use of computer keyword searches, then states the justification bluntly (quoted below).

July 2000The European Parliament sets up a Temporary Committee on the ECHELON Interception System, chaired by the Portuguese politician Carlos Coelho, after concern in European industry about economic espionage.

May 2001A committee delegation travels to Washington for meetings with the CIA, the NSA and the Department of Commerce. The US government cancels all of them, and the delegation cuts its trip short.

July and September 2001The committee publishes its final report on 11 July. On 5 September the Parliament adopts it by 367 votes to 159, with 34 abstentions. The adopted text puts the system's existence beyond doubt but judges its technical reach "probably not nearly as extensive as some sections of the media had assumed." On industrial espionage the report says: "It is frequently maintained that Echelon has been used in this way, but no such case has been substantiated."

2013Edward Snowden's disclosures about PRISM and other NSA programs renew interest in ECHELON as an earlier chapter of the same Five Eyes infrastructure, although the programs are distinct.

3 August 2015The Intercept publishes two internal NSA newsletters from the Snowden archive, confirming for the first time that the NSA used the code word ECHELON.

Key figures

R. James Woolsey, CIA director from 1993 to 1995, did not take the usual "neither confirm nor deny" line. Instead he defended spying on European firms on the record, limited it to bribery, sanctions-busting and dual-use technology, and drew a disputed line between countering corruption and helping an American competitor.

Martin Brady, director of Australia's Defence Signals Directorate, gave the first public acknowledgment of the UKUSA relationship by any member government in 1999.

Duncan Campbell, the British investigative journalist, named ECHELON in print in 1988 and wrote Interception Capabilities 2000 for the European Parliament's technology assessment panel, STOA. That study is the "Campbell report" Woolsey answered.

Nicky Hager, the New Zealand journalist, wrote the first detailed account in 1996 and testified to the Parliament's committee in April 2001.

The Temporary Committee and its chairman Carlos Coelho produced the most thorough formal investigation the system has received. Its conclusions were measured, and the US government refused to meet its delegation.

Physical and documentary trail

For a signals intelligence program, ECHELON is unusually well documented. The record includes the UKUSA texts released in 2010, Australia's 1999 confirmation, the European Parliament's report and resolution of 2001, the Campbell and Hager studies, Woolsey's transcribed briefing and signed opinion piece, and the NSA newsletters published in 2015.

The record is thinner on scope. The Parliament found that the system depended chiefly on satellite interception, which carried only a small share of traffic in high-volume areas, and that the partners had access to only a limited proportion of cable and radio communications. Commercial misuse beyond the bribery cases was alleged but, in the committee's words, never substantiated.

That's right, my continental friends, we have spied on you because you bribe. Your companies' products are often more costly, less technically advanced or both, than your American competitors'. As a result you bribe a lot.

Things you might not know

• An Australian prime minister was kept in the dark. The UKUSA Agreement was so secret that Gough Whitlam only learned of it in 1973, after the raids on Australia's security intelligence headquarters.
• The NSA would not say the name. In 1999 an NSA spokeswoman told the Christian Science Monitor, "We will not confirm or deny the existence of any system called Echelon."
• The Parliament told citizens to encrypt. Its 2001 resolution urged private individuals to encrypt e-mail, describing "an unencrypted e-mail message" as "like a letter without an envelope."
• The report opens with Juvenal. The committee used "Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes" ("But who will watch the watchers?") as the epigraph to its report.
• A whistleblower went public in 1972. Former NSA analyst Perry Fellwock, writing as Winslow Peck, described a global network of listening posts in Ramparts magazine sixteen years before Campbell named ECHELON.
• Woolsey reached for Hamlet. At his 2000 briefing he said that discussing the issue without bribery "is like talking about it without talking about the prince of Denmark."
• A German wind turbine is the other famous allegation. The Parliament's report discussed claims that the NSA intercepted the turbine maker Enercon and passed details of a new generator to its American rival Kenetech, a case never proved.

Competing explanations

A Cold War intelligence system later used, legitimately, against corruption in international contracts, as Woolsey describes. Supporters of this reading point out that he named cases and a mechanism (warning the bribed government, not the American bidder) rather than offering only a vague denial. They also cite the Aspin-Brown Commission's statement that US agencies "are not tasked to engage in 'industrial espionage.'"

Systematic economic espionage under an anti-corruption cover. On this reading, the two bribery cases are a defensible sample of a wider pattern that benefits American firms. The committee itself warned that detailed interception "poses the risk that information may be used for the purpose of competitive intelligence-gathering rather than combating corruption," and noted that talks with the Commerce Department's Advocacy Center were cancelled. With so few cases public, the evidence is too narrow to settle the question either way.

A real capability whose reach was overstated. This reading follows the committee's conclusion that the system mainly sorted intercepted satellite traffic and reached only a limited share of cable and radio communications. It treats ECHELON as neither an all-seeing apparatus nor a narrow anti-corruption tool, but something in between whose limits are still incompletely documented.

Later life of the case

ECHELON remains a foundational case in the history of surveillance disclosure and in some ways set the template for the 2013 Snowden revelations. Two details still stand out: an American government that, according to a BBC correspondent in May 2001, "still refuses to admit that Echelon even exists," and the cancellation of every meeting with the Parliament's investigators. The 2015 newsletters finally put the code word on an NSA document, but they left the scope question where the committee had left it.

Finding

ECHELON is a real, multinational signals intelligence system of Cold War origin. Australia has acknowledged it, the European Parliament has formally investigated it, and leaked NSA documents name it. A former CIA director has openly defended its use against European companies in two bribery cases, the Thomson-CSF and Airbus contracts, so that use is a matter of record, not merely an allegation by critics. The one question still open is how far its commercial use went beyond those cases.

What still will not resolve: a full accounting of commercial intelligence use beyond the two named cases, and a definitive technical picture of what the system could intercept. The European Parliament acknowledged both gaps rather than closing them, and the United States has never filled them.