"Echelon" and beads

Arkady Mamontov’s film “The Base” about the intrigues of the United States in Kyrgyzstan is remarkable not only for its interesting historical approach - shaking beads and comparing the Kyrgyz to savages should apparently strengthen relations between Russia and Kyrgyzstan. However, the whole episode about cruel American imperialism and Russian friendship of peoples is “successful” - as if the city of Orenburg was built not by the Russian, but by the American army as a military outpost to pacify the Kyrgyz tribes, who in response kidnapped and sold American soldiers into slavery in the slave markets in Khiva and Bukhara.

Curious is Mamontov’s sensational statement that a secret facility (a two-story barracks) has been built and is operating at the Manas airport, which is a new station for the Echelon global electronic espionage system.

Such statements, in principle, begin to undermine the authority of Russian special services and faith in their knowledge.

The fact is that thanks to numerous scandals in the late 1990s and subsequent hearings in the European Parliament in April 2001, it is quite well known what the stations of the Echelon system usually look like: Menwith Hill and Bude in the UK, Waihopai in New Zealand or Yakima near Washington in USA. In all cases, these are fields of satellite dishes, often thirty meters in diameter (as in Menwith Hill). How to fit such a farm into a two-story barn is a question for RTR consultants.

However, eight years have passed since then, and the technology could have changed. It has indeed changed, and the main operator of the Echelon system, the US National Security Agency , has changed priorities. After all, “Echelon” was created starting in 1947, within the framework of the UKUSA agreement, signed by the Anglo-Saxon countries: Great Britain, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The system was built to control radio waves and intercept satellite communications. To this end, the five participating countries built several radio interception stations around the world, and the NSA installed several geostationary electronic intelligence satellites.

For fifty years this system was effective, but by the end of the 90s it was simply outdated: communications began to develop towards the use of fiber-optic networks laid underground and under water. Their peculiarity is that the signal in them cannot be intercepted without direct penetration into the cable.

As a result, in the 2000s, the NSA devoted resources to expanding its SCS (Special Collection Service) division - the Special Information Collection Service, which conducts covert operations to directly connect to cables (for these purposes, the NSA, for example, even converted the USS Jimmy Carter submarine).

SRC operators operate in countries with which the NSA does not have information sharing agreements. Today, however, the NSA's strategy, sometimes called "Echelon 2," is to instead of setting up its own stations abroad, encourage partners to build their own stations to process intercepted information (which this time look like giant computer centers) and share this information with Americans . The fact is that after the outbreak of the war on terrorism, the old “Echelon” scheme turned out to be useless: information obtained in this way regarding, for example, American citizens involved in terrorism, turned out to be impossible to use in court - this contradicts the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits unauthorized search and entry, which is equivalent to wiretapping. However, information obtained at the request of the NSA, but by the intelligence services of another country, is admissible. That's why in 2006, the Bush administration signed an agreement with the Mexican government to help build a new center for intercepting telephone conversations and Internet traffic. The center is controlled by Mexican intelligence services, but the agreement provides for full access for Americans to intercepted information, which can already be presented in court (and a significant part of American traffic passes through Mexico).The Swedish intelligence services followed the same pattern in July 2008, when they pushed through a bill to provide their intelligence services with access to Russian traffic passing through Sweden for exchange with the Americans. That is, it is more profitable for the NSA not to build its own interception stations, but to use others.

However, in the case of Kyrgyzstan, as far as is known, the American administration did not sign an agreement to provide assistance in the construction of a new interception center. And this hardly makes any sense, given that Kyrgyzstan is not a global communications hub. For the same reason, the landing of the SRC team at the Manas base to secretly install bugs on the cables is doubtful: there is simply nothing to connect to.

However, in addition to electronic reconnaissance, there is also radio intelligence, the purpose of which is to open the air defense system and control flights. Such NATO centers, known as ASOC - Air Sovereignty Operations Centers (in the Russian classification - national operational airspace control centers) are really built around Russia: in all the Baltic countries, as well as in Georgia, where this system showed itself during the war in South Africa. Ossetia. However, Russian television is unlikely to make a film about this. The fact is that for a long time, the guarantee that such a center would not appear in Georgia was Tbilisi’s participation in the CIS Unified Air Defense System. In the spring of 2005, the then Minister of Defense, and now Deputy Prime Minister Ivanov, stated that “Russia reserves the right to carry out preventive strikes as part of the fight against international terrorism,” transparently hinting at Georgia, and then, under the command of the Russian Air Force, training of the CIS air defense system began, within the framework of which Georgia was required to allow the Russian A-50 early warning aircraft to fly over its territory. After this, Georgia simply withdrew from the CIS air defense system.

Kyrgyzstan still remains a member of the CIS air defense, participates in joint exercises and allows the existence of Russian military bases on its territory. True, shaking beads can change this situation.