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Menwith Hill's prisoner of conscience

5 May 1999

Date: Wed, 05 May 1999 13:22:29 +0100
From: Ian Brown <I.Brown@cs.ucl.ac.uk>
To: ukcrypto@maillist.ox.ac.uk
Subject: Menwith Hill's prisoner of conscience

The Independent, 5 May 1999.

Lindis Percy is 57, a vicar's wife and a Quaker. Meet Suffolk's most unlikely prisoner of conscience. By Ann Treneman

I set off to RAF Menwith Hill on a mission without realising that the place was not on the map. Sitting by the side of the road somewhere between Leeds and Bradford, I saw that this was entirely predictable. After all, Menwith

Hill is one of the world's largest listening-stations. It is top secret and supposedly run by the Americans. It is hardly going to appear, flagged by a little spying icon, in the AA Big Road Atlas of Britain. But, having driven 250 miles, I was not going to turn round. I asked directions.

"Take the B6451," said a woman. "It's near Blubberhouses."

This part of Yorkshire is shockingly beautiful and perhaps that is why Menwith Hill seems so ugly. You drive over the crest of the hill and suddenly the horizon fills up with what appear to be giant tumours. In fact they are 27 giant, golf-ball style "radomes" crowded together in what amounts to a very large field. This is a landscape freakish enough to have been photographed by Diane Arbus. Sheep graze nearby and there is a stone wall that acts as a bit of the perimeter fence.

As I drove round, a police car moved in behind me. [...]

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