Lincoln Wright – The United States freighted state-of-the-art intelligence equipment directly to Canberra during the East Timor crisis, providing Australia with vital information about the Indonesian army and the militia groups that opposed independence.

Australia has its own intelligence-gathering capability for the Asia-Pacific region, but the US has the most advanced systems, especially those that interpret raw intelligence data.

When Australia got the go-ahead to lead the peace-keeping force to East Timor at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum summit in Auckland, the US quickly went ahead with its promise of intelligence and logistics assistance. assistance.

A giant US Galaxy plane, with the characteristic flip-top nose, arrived at RAAF Base Fairbairn in late September and unloaded a large quantity of computer software, hardware and other electronic equipment used to analyse electronic signals intelligence.

The equipment was then transferred to Australia's top-secret Defence Signals Directorate, at Russell Hill, which is the Defence Department's ear to the world of electronic signals deemed important to national security.

Professor Des Ball, of the Australian National University's Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, said the US equipment would have been used to analyse signals intelligence downloaded from a special US Navy spy plane over Timor.

The US stations two squadrons of these planes overseas, one in Spain and the other in Japan, and Canberra was the "downlink" to transfer the intelligence data, he said.

The navy plane gathered the signals intelligence from Timor and then downloaded it to the Defence Signals Directorate in Canberra, where the American equipment was then used to process the data. It was most likely that a team of American signals intelligence experts were on hand to help use the equipment.