Unknown to many Australians, the country hosts a communication hub that its close military ally, the United States, has been using as an intelligence gathering post that intercepted information during the height of the Cold War era.

According to Agence France Presse (AFP), the Joint Defence Space Research Facility or Pine Gap was established at Australia's outback desert, located some 20 kilometres south of Alice Springs, in the 1970s and under the auspices of both Australian and British authorities.

Originally designed to eavesdrop on sensitive information broadcasted by the Soviet Union and its Asian and European satellites at a time when the world was gripped with fears of a nuclear showdown between the two superpowers, Pine Gap assumed new roles when the Soviet Union collapsed and threats attached to its existence frittered away.

Former U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence analyst David Rosenberg, who logged in some 23 years of work with the Washington-run Australian spy facility, told AFP that America utilised the station to sift though data that provided crucial help on the country's intervention policies during the Balkan conflicts in the early 1990s.

Come the onset of the Islamist militancy over the past 10 years, U.S. intelligence agents, Rosenberg said, extensively used the spy station in aid of America's campaign against terrorist groups, including the successive U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq in early 2000s.

The facility also contributed huge amount of information in the almost impossible task of tracking down al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, which culminated this year when the brain behind the 9/11 attack was killed by a crack team of U.S. commandos at his Pakistan hideout on May.

According to Rosenberg, who is writing a book on his experience while working at Pine Gap, the spy facility falls under the jurisdiction of the U.S. government but Australia enjoys leadership status and exercises full access to information gathered by the station since the 1980s.

Though officially out of the picture, Rosenberg told AFP that the Pine Gap, in its present from, now focuses its intelligence works in monitoring the post-bin Laden activities of terror suspects still at large and the alarming military developments in Asia.

Assumed to be on top of the list are China, now the world's second biggest economy, North Korea, India and Pakistan, the latter two still locked in silent hostilities that could easily spiral into a nuclear conflict.