Report: UK Runs Secret Mideast Spy Station

Britain runs a secret monitoring station
in the Middle East to intercept large
numbers of telephone calls, e-mails and
Internet traffic that it shares with
intelligence agencies in the United
States, the Independent newspaper
reported on Friday.

The station is part of a 1 billion pound
($1.56 billion) global eavesdropping
project run by Britain to intercept digital
communications, the paper said, citing
leaked documents from former U.S.
National Security Agency (NSA)
contractor Edward Snowden.

Snowden's leaks have sparked a global
surveillance scandal that has pitted U.S.
President Barack Obama against the
Kremlin and prompted British Prime
Minister David Cameron's advisers to
demand the return of secrets from the
Guardian newspaper.

The London-based Independent, which
did not say how it obtained the
information from the Snowden
documents, said the British had tapped
into the underwater fiber-optic cables
which pass through the Middle East.
Britain's foreign ministry and a
spokesman for Britain's eavesdropping
agency GCHQ declined comment.

Data
gleaned from the monitoring station,
whose exact location the Independent
said it would not reveal, is then passed
onto GCHQ in Cheltenham, England, and
shared with the U.S. National Security
Agency.

Snowden's leaks have embarrassed
both Britain and the United States by
laying bare the extent of their
surveillance programs. London and
Washington say their spies operate
within the law and that the leaks have
damaged national security.

Underwater cables

Western intelligence agencies rushed to
improve their monitoring of Middle East
traffic after the attacks on the United
States on Sept. 11, 2001.

A network of worldwide cables pass
from Britain and the United States
through the Mediterranean, running via
the Suez canal linking India and the Far
East, according to a map from fiber-
optic cable providers, Alcatel-Lucent.
In the Middle East, underwater cables
from the sea link into a number of
points on land including Tel Aviv,
Athens, Istanbul, Cyprus and several
Egyptian cities.

Telecommunication links between
countries were expanded during the
British empire in an attempt to link its
colonies.

Britain still has two areas of sovereign
territory in Cyprus with a NATO military
base in south east Turkey.
Britain's monitoring station in the Middle
East was set up under former Foreign
Secretary David Miliband, who served in
that post between 2007 and 2010, the
Independent said.

The Guardian newspaper previously
reported in May that GCHQ had tapped
fiber-optic cables and shared personal
data with the NSA under a project
codenamed “Tempora.”
British police said on Thursday that
documents seized from the partner of a
Guardian journalist who has led
coverage of Snowden's leaks were
“highly sensitive,” and could put lives at
risk if they fell into the wrong hands.
Counter-terrorism detectives said they
had begun a criminal investigation after
looking at material taken from David
Miranda, partner of American journalist
Glenn Greenwald, during his nine-hour
detention at Heathrow Airport on
Sunday.

Miranda, a Brazilian citizen who had
been ferrying documents between
Greenwald and a Berlin-based journalist
contact of Snowden's, was held at
Heathrow under anti-terrorism powers.

He was released without charge minus
his laptop, phone, a computer hard drive
and memory sticks. He later left for
Brazil.

former U.S.National Security Agency (NSA)contractor Edward Snowden