As time progresses, more and more interesting stories from
the Cold War become declassified and made public. I find these previously secret exploits quite interesting since a lot of the war was waged in secret, and there are many unsung heroes. There's a saying I heard that relates to this: if your intelligence service does something, and no one has a clue that they've done anything at all, then they're doing their jobs right.
Today's article is entitled, "
Soviets Burned By CIA Hackers," from Wired Magazine:
Thomas C. Reed, a former secretary of the Air Force and special assistant to President Reagan, detailed the stunning story in At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War.
According to Reed, the Reagan administration faced a choice in 1981 when it "gained access to a KGB agent in their technical intelligence directorate" and discovered that Soviet theft of American technology had been "massive."
"In essence, the Pentagon had been in an arms race with itself," Reed said in a phone interview.
Rather than arrest everyone they could to try to close the operation down and halt further espionage, CIA director William Casey and National Security Council staffer Gus Weiss cooked up a better plan: They turned into hackers.
"(Soviet agents) stole stuff, and we knew what they were going to steal," Reed said. "Every microchip they stole would run fine for 10 million cycles, and then it would go into some other mode. It wouldn't break down, it would start delivering false signals and go to a different logic."
The most spectacular result of this hacking, according to Reed, was a massive explosion during the summer of 1982 in the controversial pipeline delivering Siberian natural gas to Western Europe.
Soviet spies stole software needed to operate the pipeline, not knowing that "it had a few lines of software added that constituted a Trojan horse," said Reed. "They checked it out, it looked fine, and ran just fine for a few months. But the Trojan horse was programmed to let it run for four or five months and then the pumps and compressors are told, 'Today is the day we are going to run a pressure test at some significantly increased pressure.'"
He continued: "We expected that the pipeline would spring leaks all the way from Siberia to Germany, but that wasn't what happened. Instead the welds all blew apart. It was a huge explosion. The Air Force thought it was a 3-kiloton blast."
From another article entitled, "
CIA Slipped Bugs To Soviets":
"In order to disrupt the Soviet gas supply, its hard currency earnings from the West, and the internal Russian economy, the pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines, and valves was programmed to go haywire, after a decent interval, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to pipeline joints and welds," Reed writes.
"The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space," he recalls, adding that U.S. satellites picked up the explosion. Reed said in an interview that the blast occurred in the summer of 1982.
"While there were no physical casualties from the pipeline explosion, there was significant damage to the Soviet economy," he writes. "Its ultimate bankruptcy, not a bloody battle or nuclear exchange, is what brought the Cold War to an end. In time the Soviets came to understand that they had been stealing bogus technology, but now what were they to do? By implication, every cell of the Soviet leviathan might be infected. They had no way of knowing which equipment was sound, which was bogus. All was suspect, which was the intended endgame for the entire operation."
The entire ploy was quite brilliant in my opinion. Since the communists were stealing technology from America, we might as well let them steal faulty technology. This wouldn't be a bad strategy against a certain big communist country that happens to be stealing our technology these days.
If you're interested, a more detailed article about this exploit by the CIA is available in this article, "
CIA Slipped Bugs To Soviets," which comes from the Washington Post.
