Suspected French terrorist Willie Brigitte tried to get information from his wife, former soldier Melanie Brown about the top-secret spy facility at Pine Gap, French police sources say. During her four days of interrogation by French officials in Paris last month, police said Ms Brown recalled incidents with Brigitte in Sydney that, on reflection, seemed suspicious to her. In particular, Ms Brown is understood to have told French interrogators that Brigitte questioned her at length about the US-Australian electronic intelligence station at Pine Gap, near Alice Springs. He asked her if she had ever been inside the base when she was in the Australian Army Signal Corps, whose members are experts in communication intercepts. While in the army, Ms Brown was reportedly training in Arabic and performed a tour of duty in East Timor. Before joining up, she had been a corporal in the Air Training Corps.
| And she thought he only wanted her for her body... |
Brigitte asked her about the transmission systems and the low-frequency electronic transmitting antennae the US had reportedly installed in Pine Gap. French police sources said Ms Brown, 27, insisted she had not revealed any military secrets to Brigitte.
A convert to Islam, Ms Brown said last week she had decided to end her marriage to Brigitte, who was deported from Australia to a Paris prison late last year.
| She'll prob'ly go back to being a Jewish lesbian. Or maybe become a Buddhist. She hasn't tried that yet... |
But in an apparent change of heart on Tuesday, Ms Brown told reporters as she visited Brigitte in prison that she loved and supported him. French police sources say that by the end of her interrogation by French counter-espionage officers, Ms Brown felt Brigitte had lied to her and might have been a terrorist.
"You mean, Inspector Camembert... He was only using me?"
"You were a pawn, Madam. A pawn in a deadly game!" |
Sources said Ms Brown told the investigators Brigitte never threw anything out, but often burnt personal papers or handwritten documents in the kitchen sink.
| "And you did not find that a bit... unusual, Madam?" |
One day, he burnt his passport, which contained his Pakistani visa. When Ms Brown asked him why he was doing this, he told her it was none of her business.
| "None o' yer business, woman! Attend to yer chores!" |
Almost every morning, Brigitte was visited by the same man, and they sat together for long periods in front of a computer connected to the internet. Ms Brown never saw the visitor’s face, but she knew him because she recognised his particular way of knocking at the door.
| "Shave and a haircut, two bits!" |
Brigitte seemed interested in Ms Brown’s money. French police said she had accumulated relatively sizeable savings, especially after her missions in East Timor, and Brigitte strongly encouraged his wife to write her will. Some of the more speculative French investigators have hypothesised that Brigitte might have intended to persuade his wife to carry out a suicide attack on a US military facility.
| Or he was going to bump her off and use the money for a fling with someone named Trixie... |
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