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Trojan Horse Caused A Siberian Explosion
An anonymous reader writes "William Safire of the nytimes [nytimes.com] has an interesting column this week describing how the Soviets purchased bogus computer chips from the West in the 1970's. These chips caused what "was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space." Fascinating story."
It just makes for too nice a story. Why should we believe it?
Now is a time to remember that sometimes our spooks get it right in a big way.
Let's get this straight - Safire is bragging about the Americans blowing up gas pipelines???? I thought that was terrorism, at least if it is in Iraq. Lucky many weren't killed.
Deconstruct the State
Let's cause an explosion that could cause the death of hundreds (if not more), and then gloat about it.
Cold war or not, this is just callous disregard for human life.
Ich werde nie wieder denken
Instead, according to Reed -- a former Air Force secretary whose fascinating cold war book, "At the Abyss," will be published by Random House next month
:(
So, it's more an ad than anything else, isn't it ?
And the fact that it ended that dramatically just makes me kind of sceptical...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Tin foil hat on...
This guy works/worked for the intelligence services. He was/is involved in "disinformation" operations. The intelligences services in the USA and UK are currently under increadible scrutiny for having goofed big-time about Iraq. This guy gets an article published in the NY Times about a very successful operation that helped finish the Cold War. There is no evidence, other than this article, and it can't be proved or disproved.
Draw your own conclusions.
Tinfoil hat time!
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
A risky business, but there were thankfully no (recorded) casualties. It does make you realise that for some things it's a really good idea to look at the code!
Nice, in a way, to see the French and US governments working together too.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
We have:
Clearly Mr Safire needs to take his medication more regularly._O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
... but stories like this just underscore the existence of American Fascism.
I'm not trolling. I really think this.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Happy Trails,
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
An opinion piece written by a guy who said he used to work down the hall from a guy who said he knew all about this. This sounds more like a review for a book than an actual article. Nothing like a nice post to get all the lemmings whining about loss of life, etc.
slashdot, news for crazed liberal socialist zealots
The trans-siberian natural gas pipeline used technology by a UK company called Serck Controls. In those days, the telemetry computers were 6800 based and I believe they used DEC PDP-11s or more likely (because of export controls), Serck's own computers for running the main control system. I know they were working with a bundle of other western companies, but I thought they had the telemetry system side of it completely.
They didn't toss in the towel, they were forced to re-evaluate the viability of all stolen technology. Even "legit" technology would fall under scrutiny.
This would take time proportional to the amount of stolen technology, which is to say, a lot.
Sure, this didn't stop them, but add this and that and the other thing and that thing over there, and you get "lost the war".
Nobody in the article claimed more then "helped win the cold war" (emphasis mine), and I say that if you actually read the article insteading of projecting what you think it was going to say onto the article, you'd find that assertion perfectly defensible. I do.
Reading is fundamental.
Americans can have military and spy adventures abroad which topple governments, bring U.S.-friendly dictators into power, kill or main thousands, but it's not terrorism unless its another foreign power unleashing it.
Don't you get the underlying double standard yet? Besides which, Safire is a neocon lapdog fuckwit, getting strokes for cheerleading the conquering of other nations.
I know I know, this sounds like a troll, but if anybody still believes the U.S. really had a valid WMD pretense for its party with Death in Iraq, please explain in terms that don't include vague excuses like "it needed to be done" or "Saddam had it coming," because there are plenty of dictators still out there who the U.S. is still cozy with, and Saddam was one whom U.S. danced closely with.
One day (soon hopefully), american Democrats will pull their heads out of their asses and aggressively pursue the Republican's international war crimes the way they pursued the Clinton cigar story.
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
Anyone who has read Tom Clancy's "Red Storm Rising" knows that the events which kick off the 3rd World War are indeed a Siberean oil line being blown up, thus damaging their oil reserves unrepairably. Knowing Clancy's tendency to discover little details like this, and his incredibly acurate rendering of "What if" I can't say it would supprise me at all if this were a true event. Indeed the funniest thing to me is that Clancy except for a few years of ROTC never served in the military at all. (I believe he was an insurance salesman but I could eb wrong about that detail) When he first published his books the government tried to courtmarshall him only to find he had no military experience.
This is not a sig
If hundreds of people got hurt, it would have been easy to figure out who was behind it and this could have escalated the tension greatly.
...., well you get the point.
Even if people did get hurt (and given the situation, it wouldn't be all that shocking to later find out than some might have, the Soviet's perhaps not wanting to admit it), the point is that the Soviets got into that situation by stealing technology. It's hard to get all indignant about having the tech you stole backfire (literally) on you. After all, the Soviets could have simply lied and said that 1000 people were killed if they wanted to use this "underhanded" trick as fuel to the fire right?
did the US know that when they got started in this whole fiasco or do you think they would have done it anyways if there was the potential for many (as in hundreds) people to get hurt/killed?
Undoubtidly they did. After all, they knew the end result would be an explosion (or other catostrophic failure) and they couldn't possibly know exactly when or where. I think this is a one of those "acceptable collateral damage" things. Sacrafice a few to save the many. The good of the many outweighs
you somehow think only the west did nasty things during the cold war and the soviets hugged trees?
exactly how do you fight someone bent on killing you? you sing campfire songs to him?
nice warped view of history and human nature you have there
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"Wait. They did not fully cooperate. They kept balking and stalling at the inspection sites. They even went as far as to kick out the inspectors a few years ago. If they had fully complied, the inspections would have been completed 10 years ago."
Yes, they did refuse to cooperate. They interfered with and then outright stopped inspections when they learned the US was planting CIA agents as American inspection team members. This is what the whole "we'll let inspections resume if there are no Americans on it" thing was about.
"No, it decided that it would retaliate against Iraq unless it stopped terrorism and complied with the cease-fire requirements. It gave Iraq plenty of time to comply."
I'm sorry that like most Americans you missed the news cast the rest of the world got where half the administration is busy saying (CYA) they have no evidence that Iraq was linked to terrorist groups. Oh, and that whole WMD BS... Speaking of that, we really did give him all that stuff he gassed the kurds with back in the 80's. And sorry, I know you think a WMD is forever, but alot of that stuff actually has something known commonly as an "expiration date." Where the scumbags that put and helped that scumbag, and we're the scumbags removing the old one and probably going to end up putting in a new one. By the way, if you care so much about the kurds, you should see what all that depleted uranium we dumped over there in ammunition is doing to them.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
Unlike some people who have complained about loss of life, terrorism, etc I actually read the article.
I think at best the story is plausible. Look at in terms of two companies in the same field trying to get the better product out: Both companies are working hard to make their products better, but company A is pulling ahead (noticeably). So someone at Company B decides a little corporate espionage is in order and starts trying to get information and copies of Company A's product to backwards engineer and copy. Company B finds out and, rather than try and crack down (which would just force Company B to find another method of doing the same thing), Company A decides to deliberately make misinformation available. Company B takes said misinformation and unwittingly keeps up their own programs of spying and reverse engineerting, until a blatent error occurs that shows them they have been wasting time and money heading down the wrong trail and will need to go back to where they were several years before and start again from the beginning. Company A, on the other hand, doesn't have the 3 year loss and continues on ahead, widening the distance.
This seems like a good solution to me. If someone is leaching information about your research, deliberately mislead them, it's a lot cheaper than trying to crack down on security even further. If you know who the spies are, use that knowledge.
Now the part where software was mangled in order to cause problems with the pipeline, this also looks plausible and, considering the tensions at the time, a lot safer. Look at it this way: two countries facing off, both creating a larger and larger number of nuclear warheads and other forms of destruction. Instead of a massive killoff, a piece of software is altered to damage a pipeline (loss of money) and throw their last few years of research into question (costing more money and probably quite a few lost jobs).
The people who are crying about the damages of the exploding pipeline should sit down and seriously examine the tradeoffs between that and continued mounting pressures and growing numbers of weapons.
Now while the story sounds good, and it's the kind of thing we (well, some of us) want to hear (hostilities being resolved without bombs or deaths), I don't see enough proof in one article to fully believe it. The fact that this did come from a closed file makes it a little more believeable (those of you that thought this was just a story told to him from the guy down the hall need to RTFA) in that it should be possile to check the story against those files.
I think the story is plausible, but with only one source, and that being someone about to publish a book, I'm wary about believing it without a little more proof. I would like to believe it, but I'll hold off until I either see more articles about it (not connected to this author) or someone publishes the actual files.
--- Sidenote ---
For those of you who will continue to whine that this was an act of terrorism, please go look up the word terrorism and note that the target is to inflict terror. I thought that was pretty clear but obviously the point has missed a few of you who think that blowing something up is terrorism, or even leading someone else to blow up their own thing. The act of blowing something up is not automatically an act of terrorism.
Oh, and if you hate the US so much that you will take any tiny hint of wrongdoing and blow it all out of proportion, move.
Whee signature.
What did the US do to help win the Cold War? First of all, it's always mentioned in US schools or corporate media how the Russians occupied Eastern Europe with it's armies. What's not mentioned is that the US occupied Western Europe with it's armies. Until 1956 in France, the communist party (PCF) was the most popular party in elections. In Italy the communist party was so popular the US had to result in subterfuge and election tampering to keep Italy from going communist. In fact Italy was the main focus of the Cold War starting with Truman, and as late as 1976 communists were winning over one third of the vote, and coming in less than 5% behind the Christian Democrats (center-right) in Italy. The US ruling class supported the Spanish dictatorship because resistance continued even after the civil war was lost. Stalin agreed to not interfere with Greece, yet the resistance there to English/US meddling was so great that the US had to militarily take over the country and supprot dictators there as well. Not to mention the dictators and attacks on popular movements the US supported in Latin America, Asia, Africa and so forth.
The US said it had to do this because of the USSR. The US idle class said they would not have foreign bases if not for the USSR. Yet the USSR collapses and - nothing changes. The US continues with it's military bases and personnel on over half the countries on earth, military spending stays near cold war levels, billions go to Colombia to put down worker movements there, or Israel to pay for the Palestinian occupation. In fact, the US doesn't have the USSR to check it's power any more so it becomes even more bold since it has unilateral power. Nothing could prove the premise of the cold war was a lie like the actions of the US elite post-Cold War, who are making war on the world. Now they say they are against "terrorism" which apparently means anyone who does not like US troops in their country (Osama Bin Laden), and doesn't like having the US idle class take over the land and natural resources and exporting the profits back to the US. It should be noted of course that Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are old friends of the US elite who armed them during the 1980's, even though they had the same disregard for human life back then as they do now. If they didn't, the US ruling class would have never supported them.
How has this helped American workers? Not at all - blue collar jobs were shipped out for decades, and now white collar jobs are being shipped out. Mexicans and H1-Bs are imported for the jobs that are left. The US economy has been stagnating since the late 1960's (albeit a bump in the late 1990's) with a tepid growth of production while the rest of the world has been catching up - the EU's GDP rivaling the US's and Japan and the Asian tigers as well with China growing 8% a year or so. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage in the US is below what it was 35 years ago. Hours worked per year by worker have increased in the three-digit level. The economy has been in a sandrap for three years.
I guess Safire is telling us we should stop and think about how "great" it was
Other than the words "other country" and "software", I don't really see the connection.
During the Cold War, the Soviets had no software development industry worth the name, and so sought to buy software from Western countries, who, of course, refused. So the Soviets stole the software.
If that were the case today, America would have no (and never would have had any) software development industry worth the name. The Americans would have tried to buy Indian software, but the Indians would have refused. So the Americans would have stolen it.
That's not at all what's going on today...is it?
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
I couldn't find any info on this "most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space". I searched Russian sources as well (Russian is my native language). Anybody had more luck with this?
What I've found was the story about Reagan trying to expand technology sanctions against Western companies participating in the construction. This measure was indeed enacted in June 1982.
Here is one interesting link about the pipeline.
As you can see, there is no mention of any disasters, and the project is considered as a major success of the USSR that brought it a significant steady stream of hard currency. This was in fact one of the few Soviet victories during the Cold War.
This is why Brazil, China, Europe, Japan can't trust monopolistic softwares controled by one corporations in one contry.
This motivate every country oveer the world to seek independant software enginering and develop their own operating systems based on open source.
You may find this assertion a troll, but how could non-us trust softwares from Miscrosoft and hardwares from Intel ?
Here you know why China and Japan decided to develop their own CPU and chips as well as their own operating system.
You forget the FACT that while Allende was elected, he quickly destroyed democracy and turned Chile into a single-party terror state controlled by the USSR. He invited East German stormstroopers to put down the Chilean people. Allende was the true bloody tyrant. His overthrow is truly something to celebrate.
Being war-happy is something I do not understand. First, Allende was not a tyrant and never was. He simply was a good-meaning idealist turned into a loose cannon. He tried to push his ideals too quickly and too straightforward, and things went soon haywire. He never had a single East German stormtrooper (oxymoron, stormtroopers are a Nazi concept) as his aid, but he did have Cuban aides which refused to return home from a visit to Chile and poured more gasoline onto fire. In the end the economy collapsed and military, backed by CIA, arranged a coup.
If Allende was a sickness, Pinoched was too strong a medicine. It was like treating a bent knee by amputation. Pinochet turned Chile into a military dictatorship and ruined Chilean economy furthermore. His politics destroyed the Chilean middle class for good.
There are no examples of US imperialism post-WW2
Iraq, Grenada, Nicaragua, Philippines, Guatemala, Chile, Vietnam, you name it. Granted, often there was a red risk involved, but Vietnam was simply a blunder. US managed to turn Ho Chi Minh, a lukewarm Social Democrat admiring US constitution, into die-hard Communist.
Any parallels to contemporary situations are left as an exercise for the reader.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I don't want to spend a lot of time replying, but as one of a minority of slashdot readers who can actually remember 35 years ago, here is a brief summary:
The USSR's "0% unemployment rate and lack of poverty" is like saying that everyone in a prison has plenty of work to do and a place to sleep.
Comparing NATO bases in Western Europe with the Soviet Warsaw pact occupation of Eastern Europe is utterly ludicrous. When the Hungarians in 1956 and the Czechs in 1967 wanted to hold free elections, the Soviets rolled their tanks down the streets as a sign of authority. Do you seriously expect anyone to believe the US did anything remotely comparable in Western Europe?
As for the average inflation-adjusted wage being lower than it was 35 years ago, I can't really say, maybe you have studied government statistics that I have not. In any event, I don't see what it has to do with the cold war.
Yes he was. Specifically:
He annexed large tracts of the Chilean economy to his personal control.
He has his masters in Moscow send in stormtroopers from East Germany to kill the restive Chileans.
His "reforms" made Chile into a one-party state (ensuring him a lifelong dictatorship, if he had retained it.
He simply was a good-meaning idealist turned into a loose cannon
A man of such naked greed who sold his country to the USSR is not "well meaning".
He never had a single East German stormtrooper (oxymoron, stormtroopers are a Nazi concept)
Yes he did, and it is not an oxymoron, as fascism was alive and well in East Germany under Soviet occupation.
If Allende was a sickness, Pinoched was too strong a medicine
True. While Pinochet killed far fewer people that would have died if Allende had been allowed to run rampant, these people should not have died. Pinochet went (almost went to court?) for example for killing enemy foreign agents in his country. He should have deported them instead.
You still have given no examples of US imperialism. Most of what you named in fact were examples of the U.S. helping nations fend off imperialists.
US managed to turn Ho Chi Minh, a lukewarm Social Democrat admiring US constitution, into die-hard Communist.
You are mistaken in this. He was just a few degrees shy of Pol Pot. Even as early as the 1950s, Hi Chi Minh was executing thousands of farmers who were objecting to being put on slave plantations.
I am good friends with a Russian who left the USSR in the early 1980s (along with the rest of his family). *Everybody* lived in a state of poverty in the USSR. True, everyone was equal - equally poor.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
It goes way beyond issues of economic competition. It's a question of independence, control and security.
Everything went way beyond economic competition between the US and USSR. It was warfare between two countries who couldn't risk open conflict, but nevertheless fought hard at every other level, and for very good reasons. In hindsight we can now look back and say "The US didn't really need to pull all of those nasty tricks, the fundamentally inferior economic model would eventually have destroyed the Soviets regardless," but that was *far* from clear at the time.
And, actually, it's not entirely clear now... had the USSR been able to obtain some sort of clear military supremacy, they absolutely would have used that power to expand, and the economic boost gained through expansion may have enabled them to survive, grow and expand even more.
Destroying an enemy's energy infrastructure in wartime isn't "terrorism", it's sound strategy. This particular attack was exceptionally brilliant, in that it achieved key strategic goals while simultaneously maintaining the necessary fiction that the nations were not at war.
As for the question about what would have happened had this occurred in a populated area, well, it didn't, and the planners of this scheme knew where the pipeline was and where the population centers were. Who's to say what they would have decided if the pipeline had gone through a city?
Finally, the comparison to open source isn't really applicable, because the Soviets had to have stolen source code. You think you can integrate a pipeline control system, which controls hundreds or thousands of bits of custom hardware with an opaque binary? That sort of software *has* to be customized and tweaked to integrate, and it has to be in source form. The Soviet software engineers took stolen code of unknown quality and employed it to control a vital and fragile part of the Soviet energy infrastructure without reviewing it for correctness. That's a serious failure of due diligence.
In fact, exactly the same thing could happen with open source software downloaded from some web site. Open source makes due diligence possible, and allows you to hope that someone else has done it, but for stuff that really matters there's no substitute for doing the work yourself. The Soviets were lazy, the Americans were clever, and the Siberian pipeline paid the price.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Col. Vladimir Vetrov provided what French intelligence called the Farewell dossier. It contained documents from the K.G.B. Technology Directorate showing how the Soviets were systematically stealing -- or secretly buying through third parties -- the radar, machine tools and semiconductors to keep the Russians nearly competitive with U.S. military-industrial strength through the 70's. In effect, the U.S. was in an arms race with itself.
Maybe it took Safire thirty years to figure this one out (the guy doesn't seem to be too bright, despite his reputation), but the Soviets themselves were saying it at the time, as were the Europeans. Of course, they didn't put it as "we need to steel technology in order to keep up", they put it as "the US is forcing this arms race upon us".
"The pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines and valves was programmed to go haywire," writes Reed, "to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to the pipeline joints and welds. The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space."
Apart from the scientists and engineers this could have killed, it may also have condemned many civilians to a miserable existence and even killed them. Depriving civilians of heat and energy really is terrorism, whether it is perpertrated by the US or anybody else.
The Soviet Union was not a nice regime. But the end does not justify the means, and it is far from clear whether the downfall of its government and the resulting chaos is making the world safer. These kinds of dirty campaigns may have blowback a century from now, just like US intervention in the Middle East decades ago is hurting us now.
The last chapter of the history of this is not at all written yet. But one thing we can already be certain of: people like Safire, who gloat about such dirty tricks, are morally bankrupt.
See what locking into proprietary software gets you? If they had chosen an opensource vendor then they could have reviewed the code and maybe discovered the trojan!
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
You are lucky that you have never lived in a communist country. I live in a former Soviet "satelite" country which was not so poor but there was poverty during communist times. It may have been not so bad as in third world countries (people generally had something to eat and a place to live) but nevertheless quite a lot of people had miserable lives in Western standards. There were shortage of many basic products, many people lived in crappy homes (small rooms or only one room for the whole family, sometimes no hot water, no toilet, etc.) but the Party bonzos were affluent. There was strong corruption and there were people equal and "more equal". There were some areas that worked OK (I think the education was not that bad) but in general it was bad.
And did I mention freedom?
It may not be great now several years after collapse of the regime and not everything is perfect now (being unemployed is not funny), and there is a lot of room for improvement but most of the people are better now.
Save the bandwidth. Don't use sigs!
So the CIA is supposed to blow up pipelines, so that Europe doesn't become "dependent on Communist gas" and stays dependent on American oil?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
The primary difference between acts of war and acts terrorism is the target. When al Qaeda destroyed the Twin Towers, that was terrorism. When they crashed into the Pentagon, that was war. Terrorism is the specific targetting of civilians for the purpose of inspiring fear.
:)
That said, certain elements of the US media would do well to remember this distinction. If I hear Fox News calling attacks on military installations in Iraq "terrorism", I'll start suspecting them of bias.
All of that communist-era rhetoric sure sounds out of place in the 21st century.
First, the distinction between the "working class" and the "idle class" is bogus. Today, many workers own shares and many owners and owner/executives work extremely long, hard hours. Most CEOs are workaholics and entrepreneur-owners are worse.
Go to Best Buy and see what is happening with your "worker class". We are consuming goods and services that were simply unavailable and/or unaffordable in the 1960s. We are objectively richer in that we can afford to do and buy everything our predecessors could and more.
Communist rhetoric will fail as long as it is totally out of step with the lives people live every day. For instance, I would listen much more attentatively if you would stop talking about the working class (who are doing pretty damn well historically speaking) and start talking about the chronically undermployed class. But Marx wasn't interested in them so today's communists aren't interested either.
Col. Vetrov, aka Farewell, died because of the CIA involvement (If I remember well, he was caught communicating to American agents after the big explosion mentioned), and before DGSE could smuggle him and his family out of the USSR. In short, he paid the price for American incompetence.
That does not necessarily point to American incompetence.
"because of CIA involvement" means nothing.
1. Yes, he was killed while communicating with US agents
2. Yes, he was killed before DGSE could get him out of the USSR.
That could just as easily point to DSGE incompetence in not getting him out sooner. Or it could have been due to something else entirely. Or it could actually have been due to a screwup in the CIA.
But nothing in your statement would lead one to assume that he was killed due to any particular party screwing up.
Who said anything about a nuclear facility? Hell, even the Slashdot summary specifically says "Non-Nuclear".
Why?
No, Safire did not make that up, he was fed it by the Whitehouse and was gullible enough to print it rather than say what a crock. The Whitehouse story that the Whitehouse was threatened by a nuke was meant to cover the bad press Bush got for his panicked jetting arround the country aimlessly on airforce one.
There is a connection, the CIA obviously fed Safire this story in response to the pre-announcement over the weekend that there would be an 'investigation' into intelligence failures that led to the invasion of Iraq. The 'investigation' will not of course cover the intelligence that really failed, or rather was non existent - Bush himself.
So this little tidbit has been fed to Safire by the CIA to keep up their end of things. Unfortunately it is pretty difficult to work out what went on because the details are clearly contradictory. A trojan planted in the chips could not possibly lead to the failure of the pipeline, it is too low level. You would have to know about the design of the pipeline software in advance for that to work, and that is clearly impossible since not even the Russians would write software before they had the machine...
I suspect that the story is nothing more than repeated agency gossip. Lots of things used to blow up in the USSR, believe me they needed no help from the West to make shoddy equipment. Nothing in the damn place worked. Whenever something went wrong there would be some idiot hawk making some stupid claim that some scheme was responsible. None of them were very likely.
Deliberately blowing up a civilian pipe-line makes no sense, it would be an act of terrorism that the USSR could and would easily retaliate for. Blowing up a pipeline this way would be very risky, the soviets would certainly hold an enquiry and the chances are that the source would be identified.
Safire mentions the fact he was in the Nixon administration, and yes they did do a lot of bizare things that almost always turned out baddly. They replaced the democratic government of Chile with a thug who murdered at least 40,000 people in the first five years of his dictatorship. Guess what, the US is not trusted or very popular in Chile today. Nixon also got involved in a whole series of proxy wars against the Soviets, but when push came to shove they were very reluctant to actually face off against them directly.
Safire does admit that the Siberian piepline was financed by the UK and Germany. The chances that the US could pull off an action like this against UK interests are pretty slight, if you have ever been to NSA or GCHQ headquarters you will know exactly why.
The idea of Reagan collaborating with the French against Thatcher, just think about it for a moment. And that is before you remember that from 1976 to 1980 Jimmy Carter was in charge and the bulk of this covert operation is hypothesized to have taken place on his watch. Carter spent most of his time dealing with the consequences of CIA schemes that had gone baddly wrong. He lost the 1980 election because the CIA had thought it a great idea to replace the democracy in Iran with a dictator who the people hated and kicked out twenty years later.
The fact is that the CIA has been a collosal failure. It has consistently failed to provide the US with the intelligence it needed and it has meddled incompetently in other countries affairs, almost always causing a backfire. All the intelligence successes of the US have come from satelite and communications intelligence.
So no, Safire is not making this up, he is just repeating stories that anyone with the inside knowledge he claims would know are false. The fact is that speechwriters like Safire was are pretty minor functionaries.
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The explosion itself was set off by a passing passenger train. Killing 190, injuring 700.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
OK lets consider the technical issues, the explosion is alleged to have occurred in 1982, the secrets passed 7 years earlier.
Think about it just a bit, when did microprocessors become available in the US? When did computer based control systems become common in the West? (forget the Soviet Union for the moment).
I used the state of the art control systems available in 1985. Control systems using compressed air were still common. Electronic control systems were almost all analogue. Digital control systems were only just becomming common in control rooms.
The oil and gas plants tended to be much more conservative, I would not be suprised if they still use compressed air systems in a lot of applications, they may not be as accurate but they don't create sparks.
So just how credible is it that in 1982, three years earlier, that the Soviets who were at least 5 years behind technologically would throw themselves into using a technology that was bleeding edge in the West at the time? It just does not make any sense.
It is of course well established that the Soviets did build their own VAX and PDP 11 clones. These were still high value items though. We had only a single VAX 11/780 to run an entire chemical plant, one processor ran the plant and the other was hot-swap for when the other was on maintenance (don't ask I am sure they had only one PSU). Thats not a whole lot more processing power than an IBM PC.
Sure you could probably have done really bad things if you had got into the control system and sabotaged it on the ground. But the idea of planting a trojan in a chip just makes no sense. Its like claiming that you could stick a trojan in a memory chip or a resistor. Sure you can bring the system down, but not in a predictable way.
Finally, the CIA would have no way of knowing that their goosed up control system would not have found its way into a nuclear plant. The idea that they would have done this just makes no sense at all.
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The article makes no sense, it talks about software and chips interchangeably as if they are the same thing. I was simply putting the most credible interpretation on the garbled account Safire gives. It is crystal clear he has no idea what he is talking about, I suspect that neither has his source.
It is now well established that the Soviets had a mole at Intel who stole tapes containing chip 'masters' at that time. So it is credible that 'software' could mean chips as Safire refers to them.
OK lets try your version: Steal the 'software' for a pipeline? Exactly where would you get that in 1982? You can't get that type of thing off the shelf even today, the best you do is to get a package that you customize.
Back in 1982 you practically had to write your own device drivers, I had to rewrite several of the ones I used. The type of generic software that controls systens at a high level simply did not exist as a package in those days, it was exclusively written as bespoke. Second, software to control pipelines would not have been export controlled, the Soviets would not go to the expense of stealing what they could buy outright quite easily.
BP and the British govt were investors in the pipeline. BP run quite a lot of pipelines, they would almost certainly use something based on their own in-house code. The idea that BP would instead use something that the KGB stole off the US is somewhat wierd.
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Further, there are plenty of technical details that are "glossed over", but this is hardly suprising given that the writer is not technical. For the rest, you're making TONS of assumptions for which you simply don't have the information.
These chips didn't have to be CPUs, they could have merely been ROM chips. Remember your old design classes (yeah, it's been a while for me as well, but...)? In that manner you want it to function and give correct results nearly %100 of the time (to pass testing), but give wildly WRONG answers when a certian condition is hit. Not hard to do. With that in mind, they didn't need cutting edge technology like their VAX clone.
Therefore, the situation being described is VERY possible and even probable.
Sure you can bring the system down, but not in a predictable way.
EXACTLY my point! If anything, the author described a process which he thought was much more elegant and sophicticated than it really was. Chances are, this Gus Weiss fellow was as suprised as anyone else at the magnitude of the blast.
Finally, the CIA would have no way of knowing that their goosed up control system would not have found its way into a nuclear plant.
The article said we knew they were buying tech for this project from a certian Canadian company. From that it would appear we had pretty good info regarding where this was going.
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy
Paging Captain Obvious ...
If that were true, the USSR would be 'destroyed' right now, because they haven't been able to defend themeselves for about 14 years now. What does the fact that the US has shipped aid to the USSR say about your little theory? (Here's a clue - if you are out to 'destroy' someone, you usually don't help them up)
Let's face it. The Cold War worked. The nuclear arms race worked. Instead of taking on the USSR face-on, the US decided to simply keep them in thier place and let corruption and cascading beaurocracy rot the system away from the inside. In retrespect, quite brilliant, and it worked quite well.
This dubious article is just a puff-piece for a book about to come out...!
*meep*
I'm not surprised that you pump out this type of appology for fascism as AC. No, Pinochet did not 'execute', he had people murdered. There were 4,000 murdered during the coup alone. The figure of 40,000 is well established.
But lets imagine for a moment that he 'only' murdered 4,000. Was the Nixon administration justified in putting a murderer into power?
There is of course no evidence whatsoever for the claim that Allende was not elected by the people or that he planned any form of coup. Of course there are a lot of people who will make these claims to try to justify the coup, but they have no more substance than allegations that Saddam had WMD "that are ready for use within 45 minutes" as Tony Blair claimed.
Similar is true of the fascist Mossadegh. The Shah held off the advent of the much worse Khomeini reign of terror.
Mossadegh was no fascist, he was a nationalist whose 'crime' in the eyes of Eisenhower and Churchill was to insist that BP pay a fair price for the oil they took. Operation Ajax was justified to Eisenhower by claims made by the Dulles brothers that the USSR was plotting an invasion through the North. The fact that Stalin died before operation Ajax was not allowed to affect this analysis.
Justifying operation Ajax by what followed is ridiculous. The mullahs could not have taken over if Mossadegh had not been replaced by the Shah. The mullahs are the result of operation Ajax, not a justification for it. Next you will be claiming that the Versailles treaty should have imposed harsher conditions on Germany to prevent the rise of Hitler.
This happened only rarely. The CIA overall has been quite successful.
There actions have backfired far more frequently than they have succeeded. Noriega and Saddam were both CIA proteges, Pinochet, the Shah of Iran were installed in CIA led coups. Meddling in Guatelmala, Honduras, Nicaragua led to civil wars. And those are just the cases where the CIA were the principal actors.
The record of the CIA is by any objective standard a failure. The problem with the macho posturing they engage in is that you have to have brains and a strategy for realpolitique. The CIA strategy has been to prefer a strong man they feel they can control no matter how repressive and corrupt. This strategy fails because the strongmen who can be controlled can rarely control their own populations who depose them and the strongmen who can control their populations tend to refuse to be controlled themselves. Iraq and Iran show both modes of falure of the CIA strategy.
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The New York Times is the best news paper in the country, perhaps in the world. The fact that when there was a problem, it was so publicly and completely exposed and expained, by the Times itself, only increases their credibility.
It is pathetic what passes for news in this country with Fox and MSNBC in a race to the bottom. Thank god for the the NYtimes.
I suppose that's why the vast majority of fox viewers thought that Sadam was involved in 911.
(he wasn't)
It is clear that all you know about the NY times comes from Fox.
It does takes a certian amount of intelligence to read the times.
Yeah, actually I read the memoirs of the American ambassador to Paris at the time of this Soviet Oil Crisis. his name was Evan G. Galbraith (no relation to the economist Galbraith). In any case, the fear at the time was that the Soviets would simply subsidize a massive flow of oil into Europe at something well below market price (something a communist command-economy could easily do by fiat). While the Europeans would benefit in the short term from extremely cheap oil, the European oil companies in Britain and France mostly would go out of business. Needless to say, any American firms operating in Europe would also require massive subsidization from the government in order to compete at all. If all Western oil competition was removed from Europe, then the Soviets could effectively blackmail Europe through threatening to raise oil prices (not unlike how OPEC operates). This was seen by both the US government and the Western European governments as a poor situation to be faced with.
Also of note, was that this proposed construction was occurring around the same time as the Solidarity movement in Poland was gaining momentum. Increased Soviet influence over Europe could have hamstrung the Solidarity movement which lead to the eventual loosening of Soviet grip over Poland, and its subsequent freedom from status as a mere puppet state of the USSR. Further, the Soviets had recently invaded Afghanistan, an act which shocked most of the world, and which we strongly opposed. As you may well know, Afghanistan is a key pipeline route, and control of that in addition to the construction of a pipeline to Europe would give the USSR a geostrategic edge over the whole Eurasian landmass.
Galbraith was commissioned by Secretary of State Alexander Haig to examine possible alternative sources of oil, in view of this Soviet threat of predatory pricing (think Microsoft). Galbraith outlined possibilities in the North Sea and Dutch reserves in a cable that was subsequently leaked to the press and widely reported.
An embargo of parts necessary to build the pipeline was in existence for a while, but Reagan and Shultz (Sec. of State that succeeded Haig) dropped it under some pressure from the Europeans, whose companies wanted to sell the parts they had licensed from GE to the Soviets (typical). So the pipeline was delayed but eventually built. The delay caused Soviet costs to rise, while at the same time the demand for oil in Western Europe fell, putting the Soviets in a much less predatory position, as their revenues couldn't catch up with their costs. Additionally, the development of the North Sea and Dutch reserves helped lower the costs of British, French and American oil companies.
Read some history before you make sarcastic comments. The CIA came up with a very inventive technical solution that avoided direct economic or political conflict. It even avoided loss of life, something economic embargoes and sanctions are not very good at. The Europeans were on America's side on this one, even the French, despite their reservations about Reagan's embargo. This is not easily pigeonholed into some sort of Marxism 101 dependency-theory analysis if you've actually read what was going on in the world during that time.
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Apparently a major and deliberate act of sabotage was committed against their economy. How is this different than if they had sent a team of trained demolition experts to our country to sabotage a pipeline here and create a large non-nuclear explosion? They were certainly our military rival but we were not at war with them and we did not have any more of a moral right to commit acts of sabotage against their economy than did the Al Quaida terrorists to destroy office buildings in NYC. If everyone resorted to using large explosions when they disagreed with something, there would be a lot less discussion, more explosions, and no resolution of disputes.
So because the US thought the technological backward and poor Soviet Union could monopolize the energy market in Western Europe (IOW winning the capitalist game), they blew up a pipeline risking the lives of hundreds of people (yeah, they knew exactly that the pipeline would blow up in the middle of Nowhere, not middle of Novosibirsk). I wasn't being sarcastic, I am disgusted.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Why?
Because something like 10% of the Fort Meade staff and 30% of the GCHQ staff are British and US foreign nationals respectively. As a Brit I can get a gold ID card at Fort Meade which allows me to work basically anywhere on the site. No other foreign national can. Same in reverse at GCHQ.
The only exception is the Whitehouse, which I know about since as is well documented on slashdot I did some security work there but had to sit in a coffee shop across the road from the Executive Office Building. When Nixon was getting paranoid about everyone he started to believe that the British were spying on him. So he called in the NSA to have the oval office sweeped for bugs, he did not say why. As it happened the guy who was on duty that day was a Brit. So when he arrived Nixon went ape-shit and signed an executive order that requires all security personel working at the Whitehouse and Executive Office Building to be US citizens.
The idea that the CIA could do this type of thing and not have the Brits notice is simply not credible. In any case the US was bidding for the Siberian pipeline under Nixon, they only objected to the UK involvement after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.
During the Nixon-Ford-Carter period the official policy was detente. The idea that the CIA was off blowing up Siberian oil pipelines causing huge civilian casualties is stupid enough. The idea that a program this big could happen without someone telling either Carter or Wilson (the UK PM) is pretty rich.
In case you don't get the message here, I am not trying to claim that the CIA are not apt to act stupidly, they have done so many times. But they never did anything that was comparable to this, not intentionaly. Not even Gladio went this wrong.
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I was doing control engineering in the mid 1980s. Electronic control was just appearing. Microprocessors had only just appeared and 8 bit was state of the art in 1982.
There were electronic controllers but they were pretty clunky. They were analogue systems that used a series of op-amps to create a three term controller. there was an advantage to using those over a compressed air version but not much. You would still use compressed air to drive the valves - you still do in many cases.
As for the confused discussion of ROMs and such. These are analogue control systems. I am aware that you can use a ROM in the fashion described in a digital control system, it makes no sense for an analogue system.
The fact still remains that there was simply no component available in those days that was complex enough for it to be practical to hide a trojan in. Furthermore as others have pointed out quality control was so sloppy that everyone had to retest chips on arrival anyway. 10% of the chips you received would just be dead. No way could anyone build anything and have it work without testing.
Three term controllers are used as black box items, you test them in isolation. No way is anyone going to be able to predict how to sabotage a plant from the US. You would have no way of knowing which controller was going to go where.
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To paraphrase Uma Turman, it is the spirit of uninhibited innovation that USSR lacked, not the persistence and meticulousness (is that a right word?).
Several people mentioned it already and they are right. None of the hardware/software stolen in the 70-ies was used 'as is'. Hardware was reverse-engineered to the last bit, including peeling off the layers of the microchips to reveal the logic. The logic was validated and reproduced in the clones. Any abnormal piece of logic would inevitably surface. The software was butchered too, including replacement of all literal strings and production of 'design' documents that complied with USSR's own industry conventions/standards (which means all branching logic had to be analyzed).
Yes, the sheer amount of effort required for this has perhaps exceeded that of doing an independent design. But that was of secondary concern for the power elite - doing an 'own thing' requires taking responsibility for the results, which in the USSR's tradition might have meant rather unpleasant consequences. Enough to discourage true innovation on the top and supress it on the bottom.
All that said, I find this story too hard to believe. I knew several people directly involved in oil/gas industry in the 90-ies and they had only started introducing real computerized control systems into the pipelines (using western harware/software, LOL). To blow up in '82, a project of that magnitude would have to be started around '75 (Soviet economy had 5-year planning cycle). Control systems introduced in that period relied largely on analog designs and computers of pre-cloning-era vintage (cloning really took off in mid 70-ies). They were built using plain transistors (no chips), ferrite-solenoid memory, magnetic drums and tapes, punchcards/punchtapes. The one I worked with had 45 bits in a word. It was still on active duty in '93. And that was space field, not just some pipeline...
As a Finn, this sentence caught my eye:
Yes, we did invade Finland (to protect St. Petersburg from Nazi ally, and we paid for it with many lives).
Finland wasn't Germany's ally 1939 (Winter War). Finland was neutral then. Winter War was a tragic mistake - it drove a lukewarm neutral country into Nazi camp, making a possible ignorer into a certain enemy. In hindsight, Stalin should have bought all cellulose and other strategic materials from Finnish suppliers - Finnish industry recovering from depression would have been more than happy to run the factories with cogwheels glowing, and this trade sure would have secured Finland far better than any military intervention.
Inanite oblige.
I'm somewhat sad on what is happening east of our borders. In the Finnish eyes, USSR was no evil empire - no more evil than any other empires, including US. Certainly far less evil, than, say Mongols or Aztecs. Personally I saw little difference between USA and USSR anyway. In one empire you were screwed by the government, in another by the capitalist. What's the difference?
Russians were good trade partners, provided generous markets and paid well. Now all this is gone. The purchase force of Russia is almost nil, unemployment in Finland has stayed in double figures for fifteen years now, we have bread lines and war-crazy nationalists are driving this small, traditionally neutral, country to NATO which is a war alliance. Now today the only organized thing in Russia is crime. Almost all Finnish investments have gone to Baltic countries as they have managed to organize their system better and avoid the total collapse.
If US won the Cold War, it sure was a Pyrrhic victory. Of course Communists lied about Communism, but they told the truth about Capitalism. Then again, Finnish economy is protected from the outsourcing to India and proletarization of the middle class by odd language and strict employment laws. In the long run the winners are not the laissez faire market economies, but the countries which can keep the production and work force (and purchase power) in their own countries and prevent it slipping abroad - countries which can find the most productive balance between costs and benefits.
What is now going on in US is brazilification: the middle class disappears and impoverishes as their jobs slip to cheap countries, the rich get filthy rich and the poor become Lumpenproletariat. In the end there will be collapse: the corporations will collapse and go bankrupt as well as middle class jobs have been outsourced, the publich has gone broke and the public no more have purchase power. Nobody will buy their products anymore. This will lead either into Fascism or Neo-Barbarism.
I must say I miss the 1980s and the balance between USA and USSR. Healthy competition kept world in balance. Sure Stalin (kaputt 1953) was a paranoid lunatic, but how about Warren Harding in comparison? Again, I'm far better off than in the eighties, but not everyone in my country is, and I miss the stressless, peaceful life back then.