I am a producer for NBC Nightly News in New
York. In 1986, I spent several days in Rosman and nearby Asheville
researching Rosman and shooting it from the ground and the air. The
ground level shooting was mostly fruitless, but I still have video I shot from
a helicopter.
At the time, Rosman had 14 dishes in a bowl like
area in Pisgah. It was quite secret as the Sun notes. However, the
FAA never instituted any restrictions over the site, as it did with other
sites.
We included it in a two part series we did in
1986 called "The Eavesdropping War"--NBC having refused to kill the story, as
requested by then-NSA director William Odom. Odom threatened legal
action if we ran the piece. They are particularly concerned about
Rosman.
We determined that Rosman had several
missions.
One was intercepting communications from
Soviet geosynchronous satellites, the Gorizont and Raduga. We were told
interception had two values: 1. the satellites were used to communicate with
Russian forces in Cuba and 2. they were also used to communicate with Soviet
SS-20 sites in Europe...several of which were in East Germany. The farthest
Raduga, as I recall, was at 14 degrees west, putting it in range of
both Rosman and East Germany. It should be noted that Rosman is
almost due north of the old Soviet headquarters in Lourdes, Cuba, southwest of
Havana. Lourdes, of course, is also the largest satellite sigint base in the
Russian equivalent of Echeon, which I just wrote about for msnbc.com. I
was told that Rosman was used in part to capture signals being sent between
Lourdes and the Soviet sigint downlink at Vatutinki outside
Moscow.
The other mission was intercepting signals from
the agent satellite network the Soviet Union maintained to communicate with
its agents worldwide. A crude version of Iridium, it contained eight
satellites in low earth orbit.
The property was ceded to the DoD from the
General Services Administration in December 1980, at the close of the Carter
administration, on the same day another smaller NASA site outside of London
was turned over to DoD.
At the end of the Cold War, with the signing of
the INF Treaty and lessened tensions, it was shut down and some of its
equipment sent to the NSA base in Sebana Seca, P.R.
I hope this was helpful to you. If you need
to call, give me a ring at 1-800-NBC-NEWS, ext. 7390.