NSA HQ based near Darmstadt in Germany

On March 10, 2004, two US generals -- Richard J. Quirk III of the NSA and John Kimmons, who was the US Army's deputy chief of staff for intelligence -- finalised an agreement to establish an operations centre in Germany, the European Security Centre (ESC), to be located on US Army property in Griesheim near Darmstadt. That centre is now the NSA's most important listening station in Europe.

The NSA had already dispatched an initial team to southern Germany in early 2003. The agency stationed a half-dozen analysts at its European headquarters in Stuttgart's Vaihingen neighbourhood, where their work focused largely on North Africa. 

The analysts' aims, according to internal documents, included providing support to African governments in securing borders and ensuring that they didn't offer safe havens to terrorist organizations or their accomplices.


The work quickly bore fruit. It became increasingly easy to track the movements of suspicious persons in Mali, Mauritania and Algeria through the surveillance of satellite telephones. 

NSA workers passed information on to the US military's European Command, with some also being shared with individual governments in Africa. A US government document states that the intelligence insights have "been responsible for the capture or kill of over 40 terrorists and has helped achieve GWOT (Global War on Terror) and regional policy successes in Africa."