RAF Troodos
RAF Troodos ( Royal Air Force Station Troodos ) is the location of a high-performance radar system of the Royal Air Force near Kakopetria on Mount Olympos , the highest mountain in Cyprus . The system has a range of 1500 to 3000 km and is used for continuous monitoring of military and civil air traffic over Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and parts of Egypt and Turkey.
The location has become known as an important listening post for the British secret service GCHQ through publications by Edward Snowden since 2015 . Documents published from its internal wiki revealed that RAF Troodos is one of the "crown jewels" among the intelligence services' interception capacities when monitoring satellite communications , as information about Turkey and Israel as well as the states of North Africa are collected about it.
The facility is located on the summit of the Troodos Mountains . The facility has made this a restricted military area and is therefore no longer accessible. The system installed in 1974 is an unknown HF / VHF radar system. It is operated by 27 RAF employees from the Golf Section of the Joint Service Signal Unit Cyprus . This unit also operates Ayios Nikolaos Station, 100 miles away in the east of the island.
Troodos Station is the oldest surviving British military base in Cyprus. It was established in 1878. Originally, a recovery hospital was set up there for British soldiers from the Egyptian mission , who were supposed to recover from their missions in the desert in the winter temperatures. The British army and government also used it as a summer residence .
During the Cold War , the station was used to wiretap the Soviet Union . A wide-angle telescope at the British National Space Center Starbrook was built in 2006. It can detect objects in orbit up to 1.5 meters in size.
Web links
- British forces overseas posting: Troodos, Cyprus Website Ministry of Defense on gov.uk, accessed November 7, 2013
Individual evidence
- ^ Giorgos Georgiou: British Bases in Cyprus and Signals Intelligence. (pdf) Retrieved April 9, 2018 (English).
- ^ Cora Currier and Henrik Moltke: Israeli drone feeds hacked by british and american intelligence. January 29, 2016, accessed April 9, 2018 .
- ↑ CHARLES P. WALLACE: 'Like Old Beirut': Cyprus: A Way Station for intrigue. January 20, 1987, accessed April 9, 2018 .