Posted on 09/16/2001 8:20:09 PM PDT by HAL9000
BRITAIN is playing a key role in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect in last week's flying bomb attacks on New York and Washington, via the top-secret electronic spy base at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire.Every phone call, fax, internet and microwave transmission in or out of Afghanistan is being monitored by the site's joint UK-US Echelon surveillance system to try to locate bin Laden and his closest lieutenants.
The network, which is run by America's National Security Agency, uses satellites, the GCHQ complex at Cheltenham and a series of "outstations" globally to sift communications for nuggets of intelligence.
The 1600 Americans and 370 British employees at the Menwith Hill facility, seven miles west of Harrogate, have been ordered to concentrate on pinpointing the Saudi's whereabouts to allow him to be eliminated by a cruise missile strike or captured in a special forces raid.
His communications are being intercepted to build up evidence linking him to terrorist attacks in East Africa and Yemen using a voice-recognition scanner attached to the Echelon network.
Echelon is also understood to be crucial to unravelling bin Laden's labyrinth of front companies and offshore bank accounts to help the West to strike directly at the funding of his Al Qaeda terrorist organisation.
When the US launched a Tomahawk barrage against his Afghan training bases in retaliation for the bombing of their embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, at least two of the missiles were locked on to the signal from bin Laden's mobile phone.
Menwith Hill's electronic eavesdroppers had narrowed his position to the terrorist base at Zhawar Kili, south-west of the Afghan town of Khost, and then transmitted the co-ordinates of his Cellnet signal to a US warship waiting in the Indian Ocean.
The terrorist was tipped off by sympathisers working for Pakistan's secret service, the shadowy Inter-Services Intelligence agency, and switched off the signal before fleeing the area. About 20 of his men died in the attack.
Since then, according to intelligence sources, he moves frequently and communicates with his overseas agents by encrypted internet messages.
His constant movement, apart from time spent in his virtually impregnable Hindu Kush bunker complex, has earned him the nickname of the "Islamic Pimpernel".
A source told The Herald: "The two priorities are to locate the man himself and to identify and close off his finances. Bin Laden specialises in refining other groups' plans and then bankrolling selected operations. He is more of a terrorist venture capitalist than an Islamic warrior."
RAF Menwith Hill is known to the NSA as field station F83, a codename that belies its importance as the largest spy base in the world and the principal source of the West's interception of international signals' traffic.
Its "RAF" title is an attempt to conceal its real purpose and American ownership. To the hundreds of communications experts, linguists, mathematicians and military personnel who man it round the clock, it is simply known as "The Hill".
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