Tri-Service

US Set To Open £200m Intelligence Centre In UK

The Independent is reporting The Pentagon will spend £200m on a new Joint Intelligence Analysis Center in the UK.

The paper suggests the centre will be built at RAF Croughton, a US Air Force Base near Milton Keynes.

It would act as an ultra-secure data centre that would be the US headquarters for European and African military communications.

It would employ up to 1,250 staff analysing intelligence from more than 50 countries. The centre is due to be operational by 2017.

RAF Croughton is reported to have a cable link to GCHQ and act as a relay station for CIA communications.

Currently much of this work is carried out at RAF Molesworth in Cambridgeshire but that site is set to be closed as part of a US cost-cutting drive.

All of this type of work will now be carried out at RAF Croughton in Buckinghamshire.

This comes despite the unhappiness of the head of the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Intelligence, Devin Nunes.

Nunes wants any new centre to be based in the Azores, the Portuguese controlled Islands in the North Atlantic.

Mr Nunes is a third generation Californian whose family emigrated from the Azores.

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Picture: David Luther Thomas