How Helen Kilgariff set up a travel agency servicing the secretive Pine Gap spy base

Pine Gap, seen here in 1999, and NT travel agent Helen Kilgariff now. (Supplied: Antennas of Pine Gap, Nautilus Institute; ABC Alice Springs: Xavier Martin)

Helen Kilgariff was attempting to book flights from a desk inside the most secretive intelligence facility in the country.

The Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap is largely off limits to the average Australian as it undertakes highly classified intelligence gathering around the world.

But the Alice Springs travel agent had been given extraordinary access to operate beneath the oversized, golf-ball-shaped “radomes” on the edge of town.

It was the 1990s and it wasn’t easy.

Helen couldn’t even carry a computer or take a mobile phone through the front security gates.

“You couldn’t even really look up the flights that were available,” Ms Kilgariff said.

“It was frustrating because you had none of your tools there. You had a pencil and paper.”

After about six months she pulled the pin, but travel bookings continued thick and fast .

Travel agent to the spies

“My sister and I had a travel agency,” Ms Kilgariff said.

“And we had lots of American clients.”

The travel agency was on the main shopping strip in Alice Springs — Todd Street.

Set up in 1985, business was booming by the mid-1990s thanks in part to the influx of Americans.

“There were lots of people. The base [Pine Gap] increased in size and we knew that only because we’d have extra clients,” Ms Kilgariff said.

Given the demand, she said she was given access to help Pine Gap staff book holidays — but remembers it was all very “secret”.

“I knew that the CIA was out there [at Pine Gap] and I could probably have told you which of our clients were CIA,” she said.

She remembers booking holidays for one client, in particular, former National Security Agency (NSA) spy David Rosenberg, who worked at Pine Gap.

“I’m so trained up not to say anything,” Ms Kilgariff said.

“He did a Europe trip once that was, I thought, ‘Oh my God, that is a great trip.'”

The ‘hardship’ tour in the Australian outback 

Mr Rosenberg told the Expanse podcast that Pine Gap was classified as a hardship tour because it was so isolated.

“Also, I think because of the weather. It was very oppressively hot,” he said.

Mr Rosenberg, a former weapons signals analyst, worked at the intelligence facility from 1990 to 2008.

He loved living in Alice Springs and said there was significant compensation for taking a position in outback Australia.

This included additional leave and travel perks.

“They added quite a bit of extra money onto your salary,” Mr Rosenberg said.

“They also flew us business class.

“If you had a car they would ship your car over for you at no cost and you could drive your left-hand drive vehicle around Alice Springs.”

Mr Rosenberg remembers travel agent Helen Kilgariff as a “wonderful person, a bubbly personality”.

He would pop into the travel agency to say hello even when he wasn’t booking a trip.

Under surveillance 

Ms Kilgariff was quite sure she and her sister were investigated when the travel agency was booking flights for Pine Gap staff.

“They would have looked into us to make sure that we were OK,” she said.

“You can’t have that much to do with people who were top secret without … some sort of little profile.”

Ms Kilgariff said there are things she learnt while booking travel for Pine Gap staff that she still won’t talk about today.

But it’s unlikely a local travel agent today would ever gain the level of access Helen Kilgariff once had to Pine Gap.

Following the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, security scaled up significantly.

“All of the facilities everywhere had been placed on heightened alert,” Mr Rosenberg said.

“They were searching everybody. Every car had to be searched as well. So security was so heightened at that time.”

Follow Expanse: Spies in the Outback on the ABC Listen app to hear every episode.