James Long - Sixth Column

It was just what Mackeson had told him they’d be saying. From the point of view of his liaison job at the Facility, he was heartily pleased there was no mention of any involvement by Wayne Spargo in the Facility’s research programme. Only thing was, with Spargo dead, who knew whether it still had the side-effects?

National Security Agency Field Station Ramsgill Stray does not exist. However any reader interested enough to head for its supposed location may pass on the way, a few miles to the west of Harrogate on the A59 to Skipton, a large array of white golf balls marked on the maps only as ‘Menwith Hill Camp’. This is NSA Field Station F83, the largest of nine or ten similar American installations in Britain. Whenever it has to be referred to (usually when one of a group of remarkable women peace protesters has made another trip inside and been arrested for their pains) Menwith Hill is described vaguely as a NATO or MOD installation. It is not. Its purpose is to bug communications and although MOD Police really do guard the large number of American personnel there, its agenda is entirely American. It can certainly listen to our international phone calls, faxes and domestic mobile phones. Duncan Campbell and Linda Melvern alleged in a New Statesman article that Menwith Hill did have a covert link into the BT system enabling it to listen in on our domestic phones.

The late Bob Cryer, Labour MP for Bradford South, devoted a lot of time to trying to get the status of Menwith Hill discussed in the House. In his last speech on the subject in the Commons, he said: ‘The fact that domestic intrusion exists at Menwith Hill Station is surely shown by the fact that British Telecom has a thirty-two-thousand telephone line capacity from Hunter’s Stone Post Office tower along the B6451 to Otley. There cannot be thirty-two-thousand telephones on the base in simultaneous use; that defies credibility. The Hunter’s Stone Post Office tower happens to be a pivotal point of more than one million route miles of microwave connections installed in Britain. The cable from Hunter’s Stone Post Office tower runs directly to Menwith Hill. There has never been any parliamentary authority to allow this serious and unwarranted intrusion into our telephone network.’

Sadly Bob Cryer was killed in a car accident in spring, 1994.

Lindis Percy, Annie Rainbow and other campaigners have been arrested on many occasions at Menwith Hill, succeeding in the High Court in establishing that by-laws used to arrest them were illegal.

Even in America, the NSA (the largest of the American security organizations) is little known to the public. I am indebted to the writer James Bamford, whose excellent book on the NSA, The Puzzle Palace is published by Penguin. For some incomprehensible reason, however, it is at the moment only available on the American market.

I am also indebted to Mike Briggs at Leeds/Bradford airport and to Mike Sullivan for painstaking care in helping me get the flying details right and in Mike Brigg’s case for a memorable flight.

Chemists at Shell and BP helped me with details of PIBs. In case anyone gets the urge to sabotage a plane, I have left out one important detail.

Finally there is Rage. This is an extrapolation from two starting points. Some researchers believe one or two food additives may be responsible for much more severe behavioral disorders than is currently officially accepted. At the same time a great deal of research effort is going into what is euphemistically called ‘non-lethal weaponry’. This extends from lasers that blind troops to chemicals that can affect the behaviour of fighting forces.

© James Long 1995

James Long has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

First published in 1995 by Simon & Schuster Ltd.

This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.