David Rosenberg - Inside Pine Gap

The intelligence community gathered communications and weapons-related information in advance, assessing defence systems, troop readiness and the situation on the ground before the bombing campaign. While the four-day onslaught of sustained missile attacks failed to topple Saddam, most of the targeted sites had been damaged or destroyed. The US and UK pilots received some valuable experience in a hostile environment but suffered no casualties. This was a good achievement considering it was the first combat use of the B-1 bomber and the first time females flew in combat as United States Navy fighter pilots. [22] ibid. The women fighter pilots were a valuable, talented resource who proved, unsurprisingly, that they had the same ability as their male counterparts in this type of combat scenario.

The Clinton presidency saw US forces involved in conflicts over a diverse geographical area that included the Balkans, Iraq and Somalia. Sufficient manning was required to support these operations, but towards the end of the 1990s the number of qualified civilian applicants for staff positions in Operations for a two- or three-year tour fell dramatically as some traditional overseas-posting benefits were withdrawn. The reduced incentives contributed to a critical manning shortage, which reached crisis level when qualified operators from the United States had to come to Pine Gap on a temporary basis for three or six months. They would then rotate out and be replaced with other analysts, leaving the manning issue unresolved.

In the early 1990s, the shift workers had begun to complain to senior leadership about the work schedule, which at the time was a rotating eight-hour shift of days, swings and mids. Each shift went for seven days straight, which left little time for relationships and leisure. A vote was taken on several proposed new schedules and the schedule that won was a modified three-on, three-off twelve-hour shift. Now we were able to work for three days from 7.30 am to 7.30 pm, have three days off, work three nights from 7.30 pm to 7.30 am, and have another three days off. This required a slight modification to ensure that we worked eighty-four hours in a two-week period. However, the workforce in general was pleased that management had addressed the issue. The new schedule was almost unanimously accepted, and with the extra days off I was able to meet more people and make more friends in Alice Springs.

In 1994 I met an Australian woman (I’ll call her ‘Karen’) who would become my second wife. We met in Alice Springs and I found her to be intelligent, with a good sense of humour. She had a young son and we had many common interests. She also coped well with my work schedule and the fact that I couldn’t really talk about what I did.

In order to marry an Australian, I had to ask permission from Security. After several weeks of no response, and about two weeks before my scheduled wedding day, I asked the US chief of security at Pine Gap to find out the status of my request and was soon told that someone had ‘put it in a file and forgotten about it’. Eventually, Security expedited my request just in time.

Our wedding at the Olive Pink Botanic Garden went ahead as scheduled in October 1995 and I settled into domestic life again. But with a non–United States wife who didn’t hold a security clearance, I was unable to discuss the classified aspects of my work. For the first time, a part of my secret life extended to my family and into my very home, which meant that I couldn’t share many of my work-related concerns with my wife.

Karen had an eight-year-old son and shared custody of him with her ex-husband. One reason I remained in Alice Springs for so long and didn’t return to headquarters or apply for a different posting was the possible custody conflict that could arise with my stepson’s father if I left Australia with my wife and stepson. Not that there was really any inclination on my part to leave as it was easier and more profitable for me to stay put, and anyway I really loved my job! The work was still exciting to me, and on my days off I often looked forward to going back to work.

But less positively, my promotion efforts had been stalled at Grade 12 as the NSA required me to become ‘professionalised’ in order to be promoted to Grade 13, the start of management/leadership levels. This meant I was required to write an original thesis on a technical subject. I had written several reports on the operational characteristics of a specific weapon-associated system and used my own previous analysis as the basis for the original material. It took several months to put a final draft together but then I was ready to submit it to the Professionalisation Board at Ft Meade.

I soon arranged a trip to Ft Meade to defend my thesis, where I supported my conclusions and answered questions to show I knew the subject matter in detail. The board told me they were impressed with the content of my paper and that I had passed all the requirements. I was now professionalised with the NSA in my area of expertise (a technical, weapons-related area) and was elevated to Grade 13 during the next promotion cycle. [23] The NSA terminated the Professionalisation program around 2001, which made it much easier to become promoted to Grade 13 as candidates were no longer required to prove their expertise in a particular discipline. The decision to cancel the Professionalisation program was, of course, heavily supported by those who were at Grade 12 and below. I was now given supervisory responsibility for NSA analysts in my section, who were Grade 12 and below, and I found that I thrived on the new responsibilities of managing the career development of my team members, providing performance assessments and submitting promotion and award recommendations. My new job as a frontline manager and ‘working’ supervisor fitted nicely into my own career goals as I felt at home working in Operations, doing the ‘grunt’ work along with management responsibilities. For me, Operations work was infinitely more exciting than any desk job at Pine Gap. With my recent promotion and relatively long tenure at Pine Gap (six years), I became the de facto point of contact for many NSA employees in Operations when they needed advice on workplace issues.

Throughout the 1990s, a relatively new analysis discipline had become necessary at various sites around the world. This type of transmission was quite common, and you didn’t need to work for the government to know what the transmission was. When I first saw this in the electromagnetic spectrum, I had no idea what it was. I quickly asked a friend in another section to have a look. He immediately said, ‘That might be a ████████.' A huge crowd swelled around him for a look after the data was identified. ████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ I was excited about my discovery, and this soon became big news across the intelligence community and various collection sites. About one month later, other sites were now configured to look for these as well. I had given birth to a new analysis discipline at Pine Gap, and this baby would grow rapidly!

In 1996, I felt valued and appreciated by the NSA and was grateful that it had allowed me to remain in Alice Springs for such a long period of time. I had an excellent working relationship with senior management, but my supervisor at the time began insisting that I return to Ft Meade as he believed my career with the agency would stall if I remained in one place for too long. He was convinced that I would not achieve Grade 14 if I remained at Pine Gap. The agency wanted future leaders to have broad knowledge of its projects and relationships, and taking various assignments was the way to do this, but my desire to keep my family intact and avoid custody issues outweighed any goals of career advancement. This meant that I needed to prolong my tour in Alice Springs as long as possible, and my strategy to do this was to volunteer to move to another position in Operations that was experiencing manning issues and was partially staffed by personnel on ‘temporary duty’, known as TDYers. (Temporary duty, TDY, is the term used for an employee’s travel assignment to a location other than the employee’s permanent duty station. It usually lasts for a couple of days to several months but may extend to no more than one year.)