Over here and under cover: It's Menwith Hill to us, but F-83 to the Americans. Duncan Campbell reports

WITHIN six months, a Titan 4 launcher now waiting on the pad at Cape Canaveral will blast off, carrying the latest extravagant achievement of US spy satellite technology. If the launch is successful, the United States will have put into orbit the biggest-ever space-borne electronic listening station, at a cost getting on for dollars 2bn.

The irony of the launch is that the new satellite was conceived and designed to service intelligence requirements that changed beyond recognition just as its construction began in 1989. In this changing world, where the CIA's greatest task in monitoring Russia is to make sure its agents buy and read all the available newspapers, US intelligence agencies have had to lay increasing stress on finding new targets, if they are to evade budget cuts. These include the growing portfolio of regional troublespots - and, much more controversially, economic intelligence concerning America's military and diplomatic allies.

Far from Washington, in the heart of the Yorkshire Dales, another part of the same new satellite project is taking shape on the ground. Menwith Hill station, a few miles west of Harrogate, is officially described as a Department of Defence 'communications relay station'. The truth is that it is Field Station F-83 in the National Security Agency's global surveillance network. Through spy satellites and spying on satellites, Menwith Hill's computers can gobble up and examine communications across half the planet.

On 15 May 1994 at Menwith Hill, the NSA expects to complete the installation of a fortified and top secret new intelligence centre, called 'Steeplebush II'. Inside, teams from two US corporations, Loral Space Systems and Lockheed Aerospace, are already at work installing the computers that will control and direct the new satellite.

The details of this and many other of the most highly classified projects of the world's most secret intelligence agency have come to light as the result of two years of amateur intelligence work by a remarkable group of middle-class Yorkshire women. For the past 12 years, the group of women from Otley, just north of Leeds, have questioned the presence and purpose of the Menwith Hill base. More recently, they have taken their protests into the base itself: in the past three years the women have entered on hundreds of occasions, often coming away with sensitive information about the NSA's plans, doubts and fears.

One document revealed that Menwith Hill was 'the largest field station in the (National Security) Agency and as such is responsible for a multibillion-dollar investment in Sigint (signals intelligence) systems'; another listed the 250 separate Sigint projects operated from the Hill.

According to the documents, one of the station's most important targets is Israel, whose government, military and commercial communications are monitored in Yorkshire via satellites positioned to look down on the Middle East. Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and other Middle East nations are also targets. And it seems that some British commercial communications within the Middle East - concerned with the prospective sale during the Eighties of Tornado bombers to Saudi Arabia - had been targeted by the NSA. In particular, according to Howard Teicher, who was then the director for politico-military affairs on the US National Security Council, the words 'Tornado' and 'Panavia' (the European consortium, including British Aerospace, that makes the Tornado) were put on NSA's 'watch list'. This meant that any communications to or from Saudi Arabia that included these words would be selected by Menwith Hill or its sister stations for examination, analysis and reporting.

One telling NSA document revealed the inner fears of the agency's last director, Admiral William Studeman, as he watched the end of the Cold War sweep away much of the organisation's previous raison d'etre. In a valedictory dispatch sent to Menwith Hill in April 1992 and obtained by the Otley women a few months later, Admiral Studeman confessed his anxieties about the future: 'Budget cuts and NSA's relative piece of the intelligence resource pie will likely diminish . . . many outsiders will want to rationalise a reduced threat dimension in order to further decrement intelligence for alternative agendas . . . Our efforts must be focused on important payoff projects. Marginal business must be killed off.'

Even at the height of the Cold War, listening stations such as Menwith Hill were far from exclusively focused on the Soviet target. From 1966 until 1976, according to a former NSA employee, Menwith Hill intercepted 'International Leased Carrier' (commercial) traffic as well as non-US diplomatic communications. During 1990, the Hill employed two groups of analysts. One division dealt with the Soviet Empire, the other with 'ROW' - or the 'Rest of the World'.

Whether these spying resources should be mobilised and/or extended to serve the commercial interest of US corporations has been what President Bill Clinton's new director of the CIA, James Woolsey, has called the 'hottest current topic in intelligence policy issues'. The debate continues to run strong in Washington, and has been deliberately played up by continued allegations of French industrial espionage against the United States.

The NSA has indicated that it wants to play in this game. According to Admiral Studeman in April 1992, 'The military account is basic to NSA (but) the demands for global access are growing. These business areas will be the two, hopefully strong, legs on which the NSA must stand . . . I believe that NSA is up to this great challenge by aggressively adapting to the new world, both as individuals and as a global enterprise.'

To the protesters in Otley, such plans appear to confirm their fears that bases such as Menwith Hill are ultimately inimical to their country's interests. And insiders such as Mr Teicher, the former US National Security Council director, refuse to offer assurances that the 'special relationship' will make Britain inviolable so far as US commercial or economic intelligence gathering is concerned. 'At the end of the day, national interests are national interests,' he said. 'And as close as the US and the UK are, sometimes our interests diverge. So never say never - especially in this business.'

Duncan Campbell's report on Menwith Hill for 'Dispatches' will be shown tonight on Channel 4 at 9pm.

(Photograph omitted)