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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."
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
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.
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
Any parallels to contemporary situations are left as an exercise for the reader.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
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.
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!
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.
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
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
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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