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The European Cryptologic Center at Darmstadt, Germany
July 22, 2013
The National Security Agency’s principal SIGINT processing, analysis and reporting center in Germany is the European Cryptologic Center (ECC), located in Building 4373 within the so-called Dagger Complex U.S. Army base outside the small town of Griesheim, which is located five miles west of the city of Darmstadt.
The Dagger Complex is located on the grounds of the August-Euler Airport on the southside of Griesheim. On the north side of the airfield stands five radome-enclosed parabolic dish antennas, which are connected to a small operations and satellite control building. These five antennas at Grieshheim were built back in 2003-2004 by the old Naval Security Group Command as part of a classified program called Project ICEBox to replace comparable antennas systems used to control the U.S. Navy’s constellation of ocean surveillance satellites in orbit over the earth. In addition to Griesheim, there were at least two other ICEBox mission ground stations located at Misawa, Japan and Buckley Air Force Base, Colorado. The Naval Security Group Command detachment at Griesheim was deactivated in the fall of 2006, and the old ICEBox facility was taken over by NSA to service the collection and communications requirements of the newly created European Cryptologic Center (ECC), which is operated on behalf of NSA by the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM).
The ECC’s operations complex is located a little more than one kilometer south of the ICEBox antenna field in a cramped U.S. Army base called the Dagger Complex, which used to be the operations site of a U.S. Air Force SIGINT collection squadron during the 1950s. Although it does not say so at the base’s main gate, the ECC occupies virtually the entire complex, with all administrative and operations functions taking place in Building 4373 on the base’s east side.
Working Inside the ECC’s operations complex are about 50 NSA civilians, a company of the U.S. Army’s 24th Military Intelligence Battalion of the 66th MI Brigade, a small U.S. Air Force unit designated Detachment 1, 693rd ISR Group, a small team of U.S. Marine Corps SIGINTers belonging to Sub-Unit 1, Company G of the Marine Cryptologic Support Battalion on rotation from their home base at RAF Menwith Hill in England, as well as an unspecified number of defense contractors.
NSA and INSCOM have gone to great lengths to keep everything about the ECC a secret. Other than one or two uninformative job postings on the internet, the only substantive mention of the ECC is contained on page 9 of a April 9, 2013 powerpoint presentation by a senior INSCOM official about his organizations organization and functions, which includes an aerial photograph of the Dagger Complex and confirms that the Center’s only function is SIGINT.
What else goes on at the ECC is somewhat obscure because of the secrecy surrounding its operations, but I understand it to include the processing, analysis and reporting of all SIGINT of interest to U.S. European Command and U.S. Africa Command, both headquarted in Stuttgart, Germany. According a few resumes posted on job sites, there are billets for Serbo-Croatian, Russian and Arabic linguists at the site, but these posting are too few and far between to establish anything further about the geographic areas covered by ECC’s linguists and intelligence analysts.
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