North West Cape Communications Base

In 1963, the US leased an area of North West Cape for the establishment of a VLF Communications Station, as part of its world wide nuclear submarine force communications network. The area's cloud-free atmosphere suited to VLF transmissions. The base was subsequently named the Harold Holt US Navy Communications Base, named after the former Prime Minister of Australia - who mysteriously drowned while he was in office.

The town of Exmouth, which is quite remote, was constructed in 1964 as the support town for the base. Today, Exmouth's claim to fame is the fact that it is the closest mainland town to the continental shelf. This results in there being very rich fishing grounds within close reach. In addition, it has colourful coral reefs very close to the shore.

The base's vast array of antennas and towers stand out in stark contrast to the harsh natural beauty of the surrounding terrain. The facility is divided into three principal sites - Areas A, B and C.   Area A lies on the northernmost tip of the peninsula is the North West Cape VLF Transmitter Station. It is supported by a central tower surrounded by two concentric circles each of six smaller towers ranging from 304 to 387 metres in height and is 2.5 km in diameter. It communicates over immense distances with submerged submarines in the Indian Ocean. The towers are the tallest located on a tropical cyclone prone coast in the world. When constructed, they were the tallest man-made structures in the southern hemisphere.

Rising to a dizzying height of 387 metres is Tower Zero, the tallest man-made structure in the Southern hemisphere when it was completed. It has carried anemometers at several levels since the early 1970's, although these have been in a poor state of repair for some years. Another 12 towers stand in two concentric rings around it. The towers support "large spider webs of wire" - the Very Low Frequency (VLF) antenna array covering one thousand acres - the largest in the world. In 1967 a navigation light was fixed to Tower Zero, making the nearby Vlamingh Head Lighthouse obsolete.

A few kilometres to the south is Area B. It consists of the installation's headquarters and the High Frequency transmitter site.  Area C - the main receiver site of this secretive facility - is located 60 km further to the south.

Collectively the three sites function as a window into an extraordinary world that few of us are privy to, the vast and often mind boggling world of military intelligence. In the overall web of facilities that make up the worldwide US intelligence gathering network, North West Cape, for many years, played an important and acutely sensitive role. It was never very far from the drama and controversy that pivoted around the fears of possible nuclear war between the superpowers.

The base played a major role in US communications and intelligence throughtout the Cold War, its importance first being realised by the Australian Government during the Middle East War of 1973. On 11th October, 1973, five days after the Middle East War broke out, North West Cape along with other US bases in Australia were put on full alert.

According to Richard Hall, in his book The Secret State (1978), this alert status was to escalate dramatically due to "an NSA misreading of Arabic in a Syrian message to the USSR which led Kissinger and Nixon to believe that Soviet troops might be sent to the Middle East." This fiasco climaxed early on the morning of 25th October, 1973, in Washington. A full nuclear alert went out to all US forces. North West Cape was used to communicate the alert to both conventional and nuclear forces in this region. The acute security alert status "Def Con 3" was reached.

During its early years, the base was manned totally by hundreds of US military personnel whose left-hand-drive fully imported Chevrolets, Pontiacs and Chryslers were more common around the town of Exmouth that Australian right hand drive vehicles. The Boeing Aircraft Company alone had 145 employees based at Exmouth to instal and service the communications equipment it had manufactured for the base.

In 1972, US Naval Communications Station Harold E Holt became a joint facility, with an RAN officer as second in command, and 35 Royal Australian Navy personnel integrated into the general operations at the base. Though many of the US personnel went home, enough stayed to retain the "American" flavour of the town.

At the time, the United States presence on Australian soil further complicated the political picture at a time when Australia supported an Indian Ocean 'zone of peace' and nuclear disarmament was a major Cold War issue.

In May 1974 several hundred people travelled to North West Cape from around Australia to protest and occupy the base and "symbolically reclaiming it for the Australian people". During the occupation the Eureka Flag was flown over the base with fifty five people arrested during the protest. Songs composed in the campaign against North West Cape and other US bases in Australia include We don't want no Yankee Bases and Omega Doodle which have become part of the Australian folkloric tradition. As a consequence, from 1967 until October 1992 a Naval Security Group Detachment was stationed at the facility.

Facts Stranger Than Faction

The North West Cape transmitter is just slightly north of the Tropic of Capricorn, and its antipode is directly in the middle of the Bermuda triangle.

It is almost certain that the earlier version of Pine Gap's Very Low Frequency Transceiver, which is located at North West Cape, was used to transmit very powerful undersea electric currents to US submarines which trail long antennae behind them. It is also known that electricity transmitted in this way can be 'strong' enough to recharge on-board high-voltage batteries known as plasma-dynamic storage cells

On 25th October 1973, two US Navy personnel observed a UFO hovering near the Base. Their report, in part, reads, "The object was due west of Area B, the location of the High Frequency Transmitter...it was completely stationary except for a halo around the centre, which appeared to be either revolving or pulsating... It suddenly took off at a tremendous speed and disappeared..."


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Where is it?

1,375 km north of Perth; 402 km north of Carnarvon.


The Base Today

Perhaps the collapse of the cold war has removed the need for covert communication by the US in the Indian Ocean, but for whatever reason, the United States turned over control of the station to Australia in 1999 and withdrew all its personnel. It was then run by the Australian Department of Defence with only a handful of staff, none of whom live on the base.

Today, the base is run by the private concern, Boeing Australia. In addition to the operation and maintenance of the Royal Australian Navy's Very Low Frequency (VLF) and High Frequency (HF) communications systems, Boeing's NES Systems Support and Operations division team provide comprehensive infrastructure support services at the base.

Boeing Australia is also the prime contractor for the operation and maintenance of the Transmit and Receive sites associated with the Naval Communications Station located in Darwin; the Maritime HF communication facility in Belconnen, ACT, the Defence Communications Network, located at the Defence Centre in Deakin, Canberra, the satellite communications systems, equipment laboratory and the telephone system at JDFN Woomera, SA, and to the Australian Defence Force for the operations and maintenance of classified satellite communications facilities at Geraldton (WA) and Shoal Bay (NT).

During the 1990s those parts of the station not included in operational areas were passed to the Defence Estate Organisation for management. Some buildings are now used for other than Defence purposes including dive operations, tourist accommodation, bar and bistro, ten-pin bowling and a community arts centre.

Communications Malfunction?

Dramatic suggestions have been made, though never proved, that powerful radio signals from the Naval Communications Station at Exmouth interfered with the computer of a Qantas jet on 7 October 2008, causing it to plunge 650ft in seconds as it passed over Exmouth on its journey to Perth from Singapore.

A similar event had taken place at almost the exact same spot three years prior.  Malaysia Airlines Flight 124, operated by a Boeing 777-2H6ER flying from Perth to Kuala Lumpur on 1 August 2005 also received faulty indications and the plane pitched upwards and stalled. Autopilot was disengaged and proved unusable for the remainder of the flight.

Investigators quickly established that a computer on the Qantas Airbus A330-300 sent wrong information to the autopilot, resulting in the pilots losing control, but just what caused that glitch has remained a mystery.

Checks were made on the type of laptop computers passengers were using - and even electronic games have come under survey - but the basic cause of the problem that sent the plane rising and then falling, resulting in some 70 passengers being injured when they were thrown against the ceiling, was never determined.

The pilot was a highly trained former air force flier who had flown Mirage jets. He made an emergency landing at Learmonth airport near Exmouth. At Learmonth, the plane was met by the Royal Flying Doctor Service and CareFlight, where 14 people were airlifted to Perth for hospitalisation, with 39 others also attending hospital. Two planes were sent by Qantas to Learmonth to collect the remaining passengers and crew. In all, 1 crew member and 11 passengers suffered serious injuries, while 8 crew and 95 passengers suffered minor injuries.

The report of the official investigation into the incident concluded that the accident "occurred due to the combination of a design limitation in the flight control primary computer (FCPC) software of the Airbus A330/Airbus A340, and a failure mode affecting one of the aircraft’s three air data inertial reference units (ADIRUs). The design limitation meant that, in a very rare and specific situation, multiple spikes in angle of attack (AOA) data from one of the ADIRUs could result in the FCPCs commanding the aircraft to pitch down."

On 27 December 2008, a Qantas A330-300 aircraft operating from Perth to Singapore was involved in an occurrence 350 nautical miles (650 km) south of Learmonth Airport while flying at 36,000 feet. At this time, the autopilot disconnected. The crew actioned the revised procedure released by Airbus after the earlier accident and returned to Perth uneventfully.

The incident again fuelled media speculation regarding the significance of the Naval Communications facility, with the Australian and International Pilots Association calling for commercial aircraft to be barred from the area as a precaution until the events were better understood. The manager of the facility claimed that it was "highly, highly unlikely" that any interference has been caused.

RAAF Base Learmonth, and The Learmonth Solar Observatory, which are both nearby, were not mentioned in any of the official investigations. The Learmonth Solar Observatory exists for the prime purpose of monitoring the sun, however other projects undertaken here, according to Government websites, include planetary defence, ionosphere (basically the upper atmosphere) monitoring and meteor detection and tracking. Whether the Observatory's activities could have caused the malfunctions has never been clarified.

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