David Rosenberg - Inside Pine Gap

On 25 May 1961, President Kennedy announced his ambitious program to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth. In the ensuing five years, technology advanced rapidly, primarily driven by the needs of the military to combat the ongoing Cold War. When the JDSRF treaty was signed, the United States’ spy satellite program was still in its early stages, but spy satellites then quickly grew in size and eavesdropping capability. As successive spy satellites went up, greater amounts of increasingly complex data were sent down—relayed to the collection facilities where the data was processed and reported. When the United States needed a new facility, Australia was the perfect choice. Politically, the Australian Government was also eager to strengthen its alliance with the world’s most powerful country. Not surprisingly, Alice Springs’ 6400 residents extended a warm welcome to the Americans constructing the mysterious new government buildings as this large government project would be an economic boon to their relatively obscure outback town, providing jobs and many American dollars to local businesses over a long period of time.

The United States Government’s prime contractor for site construction was Collins Radio Corporation, which began work on the site in January 1967. In 2002 I became friends with Terry Lillis, the first Australian contractor hired during the construction phase, and he told me about the early days.

Terry was one of three brothers who owned the civil engineering firm Norter Excavations. Norter’s job was to excavate the land for Pine Gap, and Terry, a qualified boilermaker-welder, was the one who stood in a paddock of grass and swung the sledgehammer that embedded the marker that served as the datum point around which all subsequent construction would take place. The small ceremony was attended by at least one Australian government official, along with a ‘big Texan’ and other contractor personnel.

Work was now ready to begin, but the project immediately struck a ‘minor’ glitch: although Australia didn’t switch to the metric system until the mid-1970s, several contractors in Alice Springs had already begun using it. As the United States plans were all in imperial measures, this forced the contractors to carefully convert the units prior to construction to ensure that the infrastructure was built to scale.

Terry recalled one particular individual, whom he described as a relatively short Native American, who led the construction and also had a taste for whiskey. One day he asked Terry if he’d ever heard of Old Grand-Dad bourbon. When Terry said he hadn’t, he was quickly shown one of the ‘rounded-triangle’ bottles. ‘I really like this stuff,’ the American said to Terry, implying that a carton per week would put him in a beneficent frame of mind. Lillis winced at the bribe that was clearly suggested, but proceeded to purchase one carton of the liquid gold a week at the staggering 1967 price of about $25/bottle, helping to keep him and his men gainfully employed as the jobs kept rolling in: digging, compacting, dust compression, and so on.

At one point, the Americans needed a septic system installed and Terry realised that a rather large tank was needed for the many Americans who were scheduled to arrive. He knew of an abandoned old tank that could be unrivetted and transported to the site. Terry said he could alter the tank to suit the Americans’ needs and eventually installed the septic tank for the Yanks. The Australians thought this was pretty funny as—in typical Aussie fashion—they sometimes abbreviated the rhyming slang for ‘septic tank Yanks’ to ‘seppos’.

The amount of money that flowed from the Americans to the Australians was extraordinary: Pine Gap had become the second-stream economy in Alice Springs. The Americans lived large, even transporting their cars to Alice Springs by military transport plane. They often sold them to the locals when they left, almost always at a profit, with Alice Springs becoming inundated with left-hand-drive vehicles.

As construction progressed, a rubbish dump was partially excavated and named the Bone Yard. It became home to outdated equipment, air coolers, a huge amount of furniture (much of it good quality), and even cars and jeeps. Terry claimed that much of the ‘rubbish’ was buried because it was initially purchased tax-free and couldn’t legally be resold—a classic example of unnecessary and excessive government waste.

Alice Springs was now host to many Americans who loved to gamble, so Terry opened an ‘underground’ casino complete with a roulette wheel and a blackjack table that boasted a Canadian croupier. When not moonlighting as a blackjack dealer, the Canadian was a geologist assisting in the search for oil and gas near the Mereenie Basin.

The ‘casino’, which operated every second weekend, was well hidden from the authorities—in a back shed at a local sports bar where punters could stay until 3 am or their money ran out. In exchange for use of the shed, Terry gave the owner between $600 and $1000 each time the ‘casino’ opened for business. Later, when the Lasseters casino opened in Alice Springs, Terry’s backyard gambling business suffered and he was forced to close. Not to be outdone by Lasseters, and with the advent of the internet twenty-five years later, the entrepreneurial Lillis went on to establish Australia’s first successful internet horserace betting, with a website, centrebet.com, that he eventually sold for a huge profit in 1998. In 2000 he established another online betting site, centreracing.com.

A popular hangout for those working at the site, apparently, was Zedina’s restaurant and pub (now the Alice Pacific Resort). Many Americans frequented Zedina’s, but they were told to keep a low profile and stay out of trouble in Alice Springs so as not to draw unnecessary attention to the Base. With the large amount of American dollars available for spending, generous quantities of alcohol were consumed, inevitably leading to a few altercations between the Americans and Australians.

One source of conflict was the fact that local girls—always in short supply in Alice Springs—were attracted to the big-spending Americans, the glamour and intrigue surrounding the top-secret construction project, and rumours of CIA officers working in town. It was common knowledge that many women were ‘smuggled’ into the secure construction site after hours, where temporary housing for the Americans was located. There was also anger among the male Aboriginal population when American men began dating Aboriginal women. This sometimes led to Americans being targeted by the local Aboriginal men and heightened racial tensions in a town where Aboriginal rights were still evolving.

Eventually the initial construction work at Pine Gap was completed. This brought Terry’s work to an abrupt stop, although he did occasionally receive small, intermittent jobs afterwards. Other contractors began to be engaged, a shift that Terry attributed to security concerns; if any one person knew the complete civil infrastructure at Pine Gap this could compromise security. In spite of this, Terry remains a vehement supporter of Pine Gap to this day.

With major construction concluded, a walk-through of the facility took place on 29 April 1968. The next day the JDSRF’s maintenance and operations personnel officially assumed responsibility for the new installation, [4] Charlston, Jeffery A, Filling the Gap: Building the Joint Defence Facility, 40th Anniversary Edition 1967–2007 , (Pine Gap: 2007), p. 9. and shortly afterwards the heavy technical equipment arrived that was necessary to perform the work at the new facility. On 19 June 1970, after three years of extensive excavation and construction, Rhyolite 1 was launched. [5] http://www.astronautix.com/craft/rhyolite.htm