US has eyes in the sky watching you

IN THE controversy now surrounding the US missile attack on the Syrian air base from which the sarin gas attack is said to have been launched, one thing seems to have been overlooked. There was no surprise either in Washington or Moscow when either attack took place.

We live in an age of permanent and total surveillance. Everything we do is watched, everything we say is eavesdropped. It’s just a fact. Ever heard of the NRO? It’s the American National Reconnaissance Office. Based between Washington City and Dulles Airport in a nondescript complex that could pass for a series of no-windows warehouses, the NRO commands and operates the spy satellites.

Silently rolling in space, endlessly and invisibly circling the planet, about the size of a single-decker London bus, these satellites photograph everything – wide spectrum or, on command, tiny details. This vast harvest of images is fed without delay to all the other US agencies.

Not far away is one of the largest Army camps in the US, Fort Meade, Maryland. Army camps are all called “Fort” something to evoke the old Wild West frontier but there is nothing olde-worlde about Meade. It is as big as a city. At its heart is the equally secretive NSA – the National Security Agency. It listens.

It listens to everything – the radio calls, the emails, the phone messages (landline and mobiles, control-to-aircraft and of course the Maydays.) It listens in every known language and dialect and decodes what is encrypted. Never presume you are having a private chat “online”. If the Yankees want to hear you, they will.

FAR below the satellites, in altitude terms, are the drones. A dozen agencies plus the armed forces have their drone fleets now, some surveillanceonly, some weaponised with under-wing missiles.

And we have them too. Not a satellite programme but GCHQ – Government Communications Headquarters – at Cheltenham, a great doughnut of a building that co-operates on a minute-byminute basis with Fort Meade.

We also bring to the table a range of worldwide out-stations (such as Akrotiri on Cyprus), useful relics of the empire. This constant US-GB co-operation is the real “special relationship”, not the silly posed handshakes of the politicians.

So when Assad’s bombers with the poison gas cargo took off last week for the harmless little town of Khan Sheikhoun someone near Washington was listening to the cockpit chit-chat and knew the pilot’s nickname.

And when the USS Ross, out in the Mediterranean launched its Tomahawk missiles in retribution, the Syrian airbase of Shayrat was already abandoned – after a warning. That was why only six died. Someone was saying “We can if we want, and if you continue, we will.” No, not to Bashar al-Assad, to Vladimir Putin. And he was listening. And the world keeps turning, surveilled day and night.

Four years ago the West could have crushed Assad’s air force and all from the air, without a boot on the ground. Well, more than 95 per cent of the horrors of Syria are not inflicted by the tyrant’s armour or artillery, or combat soldiers but by his air force.

In late May 1967 the Israeli air force crushed Nasser’s Egyptian air force, parked on the ground, in a single morning. And that was the Six Day War pretty much won. Command of the skies is a warwinner. Now it is too late. Trump cannot crush without starting World War Three. We can only hope to bring Putin to the table.