Inside Pine Gap: The Spy Who Came in from the Desert

In 1966, Australia and the US signed a treaty that allowed the establishment of a jointly run satellite tracking station, just south of Alice Springs. For more than forty years it has operated in a shroud of secrecy and been the target of much public and political controversy. For the first time, a US high-tech spy who worked at Pine Gap for 18 years speaks out to give an insider’s account of what happens behind those locked gates in the middle of the Australian desert.

Author David Rosenberg details his career with an American intelligence agency during a tumultuous period in history that covered the terms of three American Presidents, four Australian Prime Ministers, the end of the Cold War, a peace treaty between Israel and Jordan, two wars in Iraq, genocide in Rwanda, as well as the ‘War against Terror’ and the emergence of North Korea as a nuclear-armed nation. This is a fascinating glimpse inside the top-secret world of military surveillance.