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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."
For some reason, I can equally imagine something like this happen from the Pentium I FDIV bug, can't you? :)
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
For the tin foil hat crowd, here is a register free link: The Story
In Soviet Russia, computer blows up you !
For a moment I thought you were talking about the recent explosion in Trojan Horses coming from Siberia (ok so its not exactly a trojan and its Russia not Siberia but what the hell ;^)
I rememeber that Russia once developed a base-3 computer called ``Trinity''. I cant find a link on it, but I know that it worked. I cannot imagine how logical operations would work on sutch a thing though.
It just makes for too nice a story. Why should we believe it?
this story has everything. technology, spies, massive explosions, and high ranking government officials dying. it doesn't get much better than this.
They must have planted an agent inside Microsoft...
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.
1. Supply computer chips to Soviets
2. ??????????*
3. PROFIT!
*KABOOOOM!
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
Oh yeah, this is the country that took over twenty million casualties in WWII and didn't cave, but they toss in the towel from a gas explosion and some computer problems.
Too bad Adolf didn't know that cold wars are so much easier to win than hot ones.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
My father was one of developers of top secret soviet chips in 1970's. Many of them were clones of western devices. We had lots of chips, transistors, Fortran listings and special books at home. Most of them were lost because we moved four times in last 24 years.
As far as we (me and my dad) know no chips or computers were purchased from "the West" before 1980's. We developed and manufactured clones of 360, PDP, VAX and others instead. They were software-compatible with Western ones but contained only Soviet (and other Eastern Europe) components.
Later we got VAXen (I remember two of them), Macs (no personal experience) and IBM PC.
wish to develop their own indigenous computer technologies industries instead of simply buying it from us and possibly subjecting themselves to this sort of intergovernmental terrorism? Had this explosion taken place in a populated area the blood would be on our hands.
It goes way beyond issues of economic competition. It's a question of independence, control and security.
Rather like your use of Open Source software.
KFG
I invite people to do a Google search on William Safire and assess for themselves his credbility and impartiality. I'm dubious about the first, but certain that he's not impartial.
To be fair, all the US did was sabatoge thier own software. Had they gone out and actually bombed the pipeline, I agree, it would have been really hard on "releations" with the Soviets. However, think about our side of it. Here it is twenty some years later and information like this is just now becoming public. Presumably it was the same on the Soviet side. So in effect, all this did was make the KGB really really suspicious of any software they stole from us. It is very unlikely many people in Siberia knew the real cause for the explosion. And even if they did, it's kind of hard to get angry when software you steal doesn't work.
Are you really going to call Adobe for support when the pirated version of Photoshop you pull off IRC doesn't work right?
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.
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
If you read the article, you know there were no known casualties. It's not a very in-depth piece, but I would guess it was planned that way from the beginning. I'm not usually one to defend the CIA or the whole concept of espionage, but I'm damned glad we won the Cold War, and doing so through intelligence activities involving no loss of life is better than through military action with the potential for nuclear war and mutually assured destruction and all that.
Besides, at least it's an example of the CIA doing what it's supposed to do. If I hear one more story about the CIA directly violating their charter by gathering domestic intelligence, well...I guess I'll just hate the CIA even more and not really do anything about it, but that sort of thing really pisses me off.
I found the meaning of life the other day, but I had write-only access.
Basically, the Soviets got suckered because they outsourced the software and chips to US firms.
Doesn't anybody see the similarity between what companies are doing now (with outsourcing) and the Soviet Union did 20 years ago?
And in case you're wondering, this is why Congress is afraid of cyber-terrorism - we literally used computers to kill people in Siberia in the 80's. Perhaps they are scared that the same thing could happen here?
I realize the fears of cyber-terrorism are overblown, but it is a real threat. The threat isn't from outside hackers, but rather, from insiders who plant trojan software programs and sabotage hardware. What would happen if a nuclear power plant computer was programmed to silently vent small quatities of nuclear waste over a period of months or years? By the time it would be noticed, it would be too late to avert disaster.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
From the article:
President Francois Mitterrand of France also opposed the gas pipeline. He took President Reagan aside at a conference in Ottawa on July 19, 1981, to reveal that France had recruited a key K.G.B. officer in Moscow Center. Col. Vladimir Vetrov provided what French intelligence called the Farewell dossier.
This little bit of information is more or less correct. "Farewell" was the code name assigned to Col. Vetrov by his French DGSE (French CIA) handlers.
The next time you are tempted to say that France is not an ally of the USA, just remember that little bit of transatlantic cooperation. I personally think Mitterand was a crook, a thief and a sleazeball -- and I am trying to stay polite, here... But, ultimately, he may have done the right thing here.
But Safire glosses over the saddest part of the Farewell history (emphasis mine):
Vetrov was caught and executed in 1983. A year later, Bill Casey ordered the K.G.B. collection network rolled up, closing the Farewell dossier. [...] Now is a time to remember that sometimes our spooks get it right in a big way.
What Safire does not says is that:
In short: every good intelligence in this story was supplied by the French, and the USA made a mess of it, an important source was killed and years of hard work were wasted.
A little bit like the recent situation with a middle-east country with vast oil reserves, but I digress... You can mod me down now. End of Rant mode.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Uh... care to explain how? Assuming this guy's not just talking out his ass to hype up CIA wins in the past: The U.S. initially simply turned down the purchase order for the technology when the Soviets approached them, but a KGB man told them that an agent was being sent in to steal it. The U.S. booby trapped the stolen technology which forced the Soviets to reevalutate the viability of ALL the technology they'd STOLEN over the years. So, it's facist to booby trap technology that your enemy is stealing from you for their own gain? Yea... that makes sense. Add in the fact that a blew up a pipeline in the middle of nowhere so nobody even got hurt...
Of course, if you'd read the article, you'd already know all this.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Even if true, they have ONE explosion and they suddenly suspect ALL the technology they've "stolen" from 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."
They even "stole" the software?
"But all the software it had stolen for years was suddenly suspect, which stopped or delayed the work of thousands of worried Russian technicians and scientists."
Personally, I would have suspected user error or home-grown sabotage first. But that's probably why I don't work for the KGB.
"Farewell stayed secret because the blast in June 1982, estimated at three kilotons, took place in the Siberian wilderness, with no casualties known."
Something blows up in the wilderness and they suspect stolen US technology was the culprit.
"Now is a time to remember that sometimes our spooks get it right in a big way."
-compare/contrast-
"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."
So, we have the FRENCH to thank for this success?
That's what they get for outsourcing their software.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
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
http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/96unclass/farewell. htm
"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.
Here is an article Gus Weiss wrote on the CIA's website that includes some other interesting tidbits. Including the design of the Buran (soviet space shuttle) being a rejected NASA design that was leaked to them as a part of this stuff.
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
> The Soviets stole Canadian software to control the operations of the pipeline. The Americans added a trojan horse to the software.
Not precisely true. The Americans sold technology to the Canadians, but wouldn't sell it to the Soviets. Soviet agents posed as Canadian defense contractors to get purchasing rights. The Americans knew they were doing it, and fed poisoned devices to those agents. The agents took the tech home to Russia and BOOM!
Virg
I certainly don't see myself "winning" anything by the collapse of the USSR, with it's 0% unemployment rate and lack of poverty
The USSR had a certain % of unemployment. However, it was illegal to report on it. Poverty was quite rampant in the USSR: with large quantities of people living in hovels, and millions dying of starvation over the course of its existence.
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
Both were always mentioned. However, it was well known that the Soviet armies in the USSR were an enemy occupying force to keep places like Poland as a Soviet colony, while the Allied forces remaining in Western Europe were to prevent Soviet invasion.
The US idle class said they would not have foreign bases if not for the USSR.
The idle class (the American unemployed) do not speak like this.
billions go to Colombia to put down worker movements there
The movements in Colombia are quite anti-worker.
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.
There is no "unilateral power". Even the retaliation against the terrorists in Iraq last year had a coalition of 60+ nations.
and doesn't like having the US idle class take over the land and natural resources and exporting the profits back to the US.
That has not happened for decades. Besides, the unemployed (idle class) are not really involved with this.
". I'm sorry, but I look back at things such as Safire boss Nixon's support of the democratically elected government of Chile overthrow, replaced by a bloody tyrant
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.
as there are many out there who are unhappy about their imperialism, as well as their class war against workers at home.
There are no examples of US imperialism post-WW2. "Class War" is also a myth, created by ignorant bigots (similar of mind to those who try to create "race war").
The U.S. gov't knew that 15 years earlier, Saddam gassed the Kurds, in part because U.S. companies and the CIA provided the materials needed to produce those WMD, and continued providing Iraq assistance even after the U.S. had knowledge of their use against the Kurds.
We also knew the WMD existed because the U.N. oversaw their destruction after Persian Gulf War I.
Isn't it funny that, after getting the green light from the U.S. to become a mass murderer, the U.S. spun that knowledge to begin their own campaign of death and destruction in Iraq? You don't know who to believe anymore.
BUSH IS LEAVING TOWN IN 2004!
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We give the Soviets bad chips. They give us TETRIS. Productivity drops to ZERO on both sides. Sounds fair to me.
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.
I'll bite.
The US had reason to believe that Iraq had some supply of weapons and perhaps some manufacturing capacity left. Why? Because that's what our intelligence and everyone else's led us to believe. Damn near everyone, Europeans included believe Iraq had some sort of weapons.
Hell, we knew they had the weapons in the mid 90s and Iraq failed to provide any documentation of the destruction of those weapons. While it's possible the Clinton administration's airstrikes took them all out, it seemed unlikely.
Meanwhile the ongoing sactions regime was doing a great job of crippling the Iraqi military and further programs. No fly zones allowed the creation of a healthy semi-autonomous and democraticish Kurdish state. Sadly though, these sactions were allowing the leadership in Iraq to live like kings while thousands of children died of malnutrition and poor medicine. Sponsering those kinds of sanctions is something liberals and conservatives alike should be saddened by. The situation had to change.
I would have prefereed an easing of sanctions coupled by a permenant long-term inspection program. However, that sort of high profile program would be an offront to Iraqi dignity and might have caused resentment if carried on for 20 years. I fully believe that our invasion of Iraq was a good thing for Iraq. I'm not sure it was a good thing for us. For Iraq though, it gives them a chance to build a free(er) country. Whether that works out or not remains to be seen.
Yes, many American, Britain, and allied troops of died. And yes, far more Iraq troops have died. And yes, many civilians died. That's sad. Hopefully though, we will see fewer Iraqi children dieing. And while it now appears that there was not a major threat of Iraq giving WMD to its agents or assorted terrorists, there was a threat percieved.
Now, if you'll permit me, I'll put on a neo-con mask. More important than reducing the threat in Iraq, was taking the stance that if you are developing WMD you might be next. Maybe we come off looking like heros, maybe we look like crazy cowboys out for vigilante justice. Either way, we strongly encourage countries who have big league aspirations to reconsider the WMD approach.
The reform of Libya, which made sizeable strides in the Clinton administration recently took on a very differant tone. It stopped being about past terrorism and a pledge to stop that, and changed to being about them giving up their WMD and revealing where they got them. One could argue they didn't want to be next. By that logic, one could say that we wanted to take out the Iraqi threat, but when there wasn't one, took care of the real Libya threat as a bonus. Frankly, if you trust Libya to protect their weapons from other nasties, you have more faith in them than I do.
That event opened our eyes to how the underground WMD market works. Witness the recent news from Pakistan as it comes to grips with being a major exporter of nuclear weapons technology. We're seeing some "I guess the US means business" reaction from other hotspots as well.
Neocon mask comes off.
It's possible that these developments might have occured without our actions in Iraq. We'll never know. I do agree with you that the Democrats and media need to be more skeptical of what we do and we need serious debate on the matter. I get terribly pissed off whenever I see anyone who questions our foriegn policy having their patriotism questsioned.
However, I think we went into Iraq with relatively noble intentions. We thought they had WMD, even if we were wrong or made the evidence sound a bit stronger than it was. In Iraq, I think our boys have done their best to shoot the people shooting at them and try to avoid hitting civilians. War sucks though, and since we've left the days of two armies meeting in a nuetral battlefied, civilians pay a terrible price. I would argue that describing our actions as war crimes is unfair and wrong.
If you want true war crimes, look to the man who last led Iraq. He gassed e
Did Safire get his dates mixed up? There was a huge petroleum gas explosion in the trans-Siberian pipeline in June 1989.
From this site:
Any parallels to contemporary situations are left as an exercise for the reader.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
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
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."
Whether this particular plausible story is tue or not, it does illustrate a very real and fundamental flaw in Soviet strategy. Their system did not generate as many breakthroughs as ours, and they at some point decided that it was a good idea to start obtaining Western science and technology through whatever means, which became a widespread practice.
However, the fundamental problem with copying is that you will ALWAYS be behind. The next problem is that if you don't wnat to get even farther behind, you will not take the time to check and re-test the technology that you obtain, thus leaving yourself open to disinformation, trojan horses, etc.
When the history was actually revealed, it turned out that we were far further ahead of the Soviets in almost all areas than anyone suspected. This was partly because western intelligence services had a bias to interpret their scarce data to elevate the Soviet's capabilities (legitimate caution to avoid being blindsided, bureaucratic impeitive to increase budgets, etc), but there wre also some genuine alarms from misread or misleading data.
My favorite was one I heard from a guy that works in the aerospace industry designing satellite and weapons systems, which I believe occurred in the mid-70s. They apparently got some dispersed radar data inticating that a MIG had taken off from Lybia and flown towards Egypt at an almost insane speed, indicating a huge technology breakthru. This data really got the attention of the right people, and of course the engineers in the classified aerospace programs were challenged to explain and beat this achievement. Some weeks later, they figured out that the plane had crashed, and the data was erroneous. But think of the engineers who had to receive this challenge -- talk about outrageous demands from management!
You're right. Lets try again:
When we blow things up, we are promoting freedom, democracy, and the American Way of Life(TM). What's more, the people we blow up aren't terrified, they are grateful for us liberating them, so how can it be terrorism? When people we don't like blow things up, it's terrorism.
Well, can you show me a successful communist regime that is not a highly-centralised government with a strongman at the top? Laos and Vietnam don't count, since they both have private sectors.
I forget who it was who said that a common misperception on communism is that it's a good idea that's just implemented poorly - every single time it's ever been tried. Communism is a fundamentally bad idea.
One day (soon hopefully) the U.S. voting public will pull their heads out of their asses and put someone in the White House who is not from either of those parties.
Just take a look at key military technology in the '60s and '70s:
First men in space: Russia (implies better ICBMs)
First operational jetfighter with thrust-vectoring (MIG): Russia
First working long-term space stations: Russia (also used for spying)
First undedectable stealth fighter dedected and shot down by: Russian technology in Yugoslavia (nice done, guys!)
World's most powerfull rocket: Russia (Energija), implies that they could launch a BIG amount of plutonium for a BIG shot.
Most reliable rocket technology: Russia
First figher plane with look-and-lock systems (you look at your enemy and the rockets automatically lock onto that target): Russia (IMHO the MIG25)
Well, sure, USA has a great deal of hightech gadgets lying around, but the Soviets are the guys that actually made them working.
There was also a big fuss about that the USSR stole the space shuttle technology for their Buran shuttle. Actually, the Buran uses a more modern design, has a much higher capacity, better aerodynamics and even can fly completly on automatic (whereas the US shuttle must be landed per joystick).
Sure, the USSR stole *some* technology, but the US wasn't any better. Didn't they steal MIG's whenever they saw a chance, just to try out how to beat them in air combat and integrate russian thruster-design into US fighters?
Look, this thing is totally safe! Built it myself, you know. You just press that button like this and then turn that lev
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 story is total crap.
I served in Strat. Int. and I can say with total confidence that -if- such a thing happened heads in the community would roll.
In a time of all out war, yes it would be ok.
But the Cold War was not all out war and such a thing would have been an act of war, and not worth the risk.
The Nixon and Reagan administrations would have been stupid enough to risk GTNW for a feather like that, but nobody else until GB2.
The pipeline was not a proper target for such an action.
Technology theft was a very big deal back in the 70s and 80s. There were many cases where Soviet chips were direct ripoffs of American designs, even to the point of including non-functional details from the American designs. The KGB and GRU invested huge amounts of effort into stealing Western technology. Stolen Western computer designs also allowed the Soviet Union to steal Western computer software.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
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.
There was a coal mine once that detonated 8 million pounds, or 4 Kilotons of ANFO in one shot. The Russians registered the blast on siesmographs and thought at first that it might have been nuclear.
what sig?
Here's some info about the fall which killed Gus Weiss:
washinton post article and Nashville Tenessean obit
Notice that Audrey Wolf, mentioned in the latter obit, is Joseph Wilson's literary agent.
Not that that should mean anything...
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
...has some tiny chance of being appropriate.
Actually, they bought the technology and tested it before they used it. It was against our laws for them to buy it, but they paid for it. That's not the same as stealing. And the article clearly states that the software was designed to pass tests and fail in actual operation.
Since this thread is about whether the U.S. cared whether it killed people or not, the fact that it was in the middle of Siberia is only relevant if the terrorists who planned the operation knew it would happen in a place where no one would be killed. They didn't.
This one might actually be right.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
It's one of those fundamental laws of math type things that a system based on the natural logarithm "e" will have the lowest error rate per calculation, all other things being equal. SInce no one can implement a 2.71... based logic system, 3 is closer to it than 2, and so the theoretical tech talent scouts would say it "has potential".
Every serious effort to develop higher than tri-valued logic starts from recognizing that the error rate will always go up, not just for a decimal system such as you describe, but for any number greater than 3, but there is some benefit from the design that will make some of those other things not equal, and so drive it back down.
Unless the designer can explain how those other design advantages will more than overcome the error rate increase, the machine will never be a practical working computer. Quite a few of these designs get proposed or supported by people who can't explain that point.
Who is John Cabal?
I do not think that Bush thought there were any operable WMD as he went to war.
I do think there are reasons that the war was handy (but probably not justified)
Mostly, this comes from looking at a map.
What countries in the region were not friendly with the US:
Syria: sponsored/sheltered Hezbollah/PLO
Iraq: Saddam
Iran: Anti-US since 1970's
Kuwait and the government of Saudi Arabia were pro US but the Saudi people themselves did not want our bases in their country (but did want protection from Iraq).
After the Afghan war and the Iraq war you have:
American bases out of Suadi Arabia.
The equivalent of American bases in Iraq instead.
American troops in place on both sides of Iran and on the Syrian border.
Evidence for Syria/Pakistan/Sudan that their regimes could be taken out within a week or two if they sponsor directly or indirectly any operations against America.
For those people who say we only go into countries with oil: They are absolutely right. If Iraq had no oil Saddam would have had no money to finance his army or his (former) weapons programs (which did at one time exist but seemed to have stopped in the 90's).
An ideal resolution to all this would be that Iraq forms a nice, democratic open country with international investment and an educated, well cared for population that shines as a glowing example of freedom and enterprise to the other countries in the region that are now dictatorships. Iraq as a Middle Eastern Japan would be the goal.
Is this going to happen? no.
Bush is going to rush the elections in order to be able to say he has things tidied up by the election. A Shiite majority is going to create a religious dictatorship a la Iran and the US is either going to walk away in disgrace or freak out and re-invade.
If that doesn't happen Cheney is going to divy up all the oil between his friends in Haliburton and Bush's cousins in Texas. The Shiite Theocracy, seeing this daylight robbery is going to nationalize the oil industry and Cheney is going to freak out and sponsor a coup that installs a military dictatorship. This will be OK with Cheney , as long as the dictatorship gives him a cut of the oil.
In 10 years time the dictatorship will not have enough money to keep their troops happy since the local economy will be trashed (no business except oil having been invested in). They will try to get bigger kickbacks from Cheney (or his successors). he will refuse. They will begin to sponsor small groups of terrorists to blackmail US with violence in return for aid a la North Korea. Back to business as usual.
If Cheney/Haliburton Bullshit could be cut out and someone else put in charge for 10 or 20 years in Iraq (UN or non-interested 3rd party -- Australia, Poland, Ireland, needs to be stable, non-power hungry, democratic and has a reasonable national debt). This third party occupation would only allow local elections, no national elections for 10 or 15 years. It is too soon.
But this won't happen. It will be a mess.
Still, at the moment things are better off in the region, not just because Saddam is gone, but more so because the lesson of Somalia has been proved false (kill a couple of Americans and put their abused corpses on TV. America will run away with its tail between its legs). Military power is best used as a threat. If the threat is not believed you have to actually go around and kill people. We have a credible threat again. We lost it after Somalia.
Osama said in his tapes about the WTC that he knew America would do nothing because he had seen what was done in Somalia. At least some countries like Syria will think differently now.
The CIA actually has a fairly long article (study?) on their website about this incident here
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*
Global Thermonuclear War and Game Boy Color.
I have never been in Yugoslavia, but I live in Russia, so my guess would be:
1) everyone was able to join labour unions
2) the home might have been owned by the state, but that didn't really matter after all
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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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I live in Russia and before that lived in the USSR (obviously). There was indeed poverty in Soviet Union, but there is also poverty in the US. People are dying from hunger in the United States - a sad fact, but this is not a secret and is freely admitted by the Americans themselves.
So what is important is the scale of poverty and the structure of income distribution. The fact is that today the decile ratio (total income of the richest 10% divided by total income of the poorest 10%) in Russia is 14, which is almost 4 times higher than in the USA and EU. The same ratio for Moscow is 45. So the social inequality is an order of magnitude greater than anything we had in Soviet Union.
And overall the real incomes are still lower today than they used to be in the 1980s after the GDP fell more than 50% in early 1990s. And the situation is much worse in other Soviet republics (except for Baltic states, thanks to generous investments from Scandinavia).
It is already 13 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but people are still worse off than they used to be. May be the personal incomes were not that low, compared with the Western countries, but it was more than compensated by great access to public services, such as free medicine, free education, free everything else. Yes, the state was corrupt, but not to the extent it became corrupt now.
P.S. Personally I am better off than I was, but when I consider the intangible things that were lost (like being proud of your country and stuff), I am no longer that sure. And of course, hope. Being a realist and relatively well informed about the economy (working in an investment banking and management consulting here for some time), I don't have any hope for the country that used to be my home. The only rational thing to do now is to move to the Western Europe.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
My family background includes strong Serbian ties. Many of my 3rd and 4th cousins live in areas that were our ancestors' homes for 400+ years. Those areas, btw, were and are Serbian enclaves in what is now Croatia.
My great-grandfather deserted in 1902 from the Prussian Army (a Serbian regiment on loan from the Austro-Hungarian Empire) after his firstborn son starved to death. (He was a draftee with a 25 year commitment, btw.) He made his way to the coast and found passage to the US. He left behind his wife and unborn daughter until he could send for them a year later.
At that time, his relatives were all, almost without exception, peasants. Hardworking illiterate farmers and blacksmiths. The most well off one that I know about owned a small shop in one of the villages.
The American branch of the family recently celebrated the centennial of our arrival in Chishom, Minnesota. At that gathering were mechanics, carpenters, engineers, teachers, salespeople, a couple of IT geeks, and at least one retired senior VP of an American corporation.
During WWI my family lost overseas relatives to the pogroms. During WWII it was the Ustache. We lost people during the last 6 cornered war, too. In most cases the dead were innocent civilians murdered by thugs in uniform.
Meanwhile, the surviving overseas branch (hampered as they are by the political mess that is the Balkans) have still managed to thrive. A century after my great-grandfather left I now have relatives over there who are microbiologists, psychiatrists, professors, business owners, and at least one lawyer that I know of. We still have some dirt poor farmers for relatives, too, and at least one family that I know is still in a refugee camp.
The thing is, they don't blame the West for all the deaths that they have suffered. They don't blame the Croatians, the Bosnians, the Moslems, or the Albanians. Heck, they don't even blame the rest of the Serbs who supposedly kicked off the war to 'save' them from the bloodthirsty Croatians. They know the difference between a thug in uniform and the guy down the street who grew up Roman Catholic instead of Serbian Orthodox.
Like every generation before them, they have mourned and buried their dead, picked themselves up, and got back to work building a better life for themselves and their children.
If they can do it, so can you. Don't blame others for your situation. Deal with things as they are. Work with your neighbors, your friends, and your relatives to better each other.
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.
Mosadegh nationalized the oil fields after Anglo-Persian refused to allow him to even have the books audited. It was well known that the Iranians were being cheated of the megre share they were allowed of the oil revenues. Even the US administration thought that Anglo-Persian had brought the crisis on themselves. Had they offered a 50:50 split they would have kept their place.
No, they were not. The Shah, secular whatever his faults, kept their power down.
The installation of the shah as dictator was never going to be very stable for very long. The Shah was only the second of his line, his father had replaced the previous monarchy only 40 years earlier. The way the Shah was installed meant that he would never be seen as anything more than a foreign puppet and his eventual fall was inevitable. It was highly unlikely that the mullahs would ever have gained control if operation Ajax had never taken place.
What are you smoking? Saddam's involvement with the CIA was brief, and long after he put himself in power.
Saddam came to power in a party coup with US support. The CIA provided him with lists of opponents to liquidate. The US supported Saddam from the very beginning of his rule, all the way through to the invasion of Kewait. Even that would have been allowed if he had only kept the northern oil fields where the Kewaitis had been under-drilling Iraq's oil fields which was the original agreement.
Iran did have CIA involvement. However, Saddam put himself in power, and the CIA only helped him (along with many others) during a brief part of his long reign.
The CIA was mucking about in Iraqi politics ever since the British left.
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This story is full of it! If you are into cold war history, the link to the original text written by Mr. Weiss seems to be a much better source.
The article is a shame for NYT.
Tell your good friend that Alex Belits, another Russian who is now in US after leaving Belarus/former USSR in 1993 called him a liar and a shill for American proprganda machine.
I remember the life in USSR in 70's and 80's pretty well, and it certainly was far from "poverty". Certainly far from poverty compared to US in 70's and early 80's unless one judges the life in US based on Hollywood movies, and life in USSR based on American propaganda's horror stories. Of course, someone who left USSR in 80's most likely has an ax to grind against Communists, and there could be valid reasons for this -- USSR Communists at that time were almost as corrupt as US Republicans are now. However it's a poor reason for inventing stuff or being a parrot for his new American "leaders" and "masters".
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
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...
You have so far failled to back any of your own allegations, folk can judge you by your posts. You like dictators, you like Bush, you peddle the type of conspiracy stories spun by Wolfowitz and Perle.
The infamous statement by the then US ambassador to Iraq on the Iraq dispute over the Kewaiti oil fields is well established "Washington has no stake in this local dispute".
Equally beyond dispute is the assistence given to Saddam during the war he started against Iran and in which he used the chemical weapons.
You would have to read a history of CIA operations in the middle east to verify the other claims, these are not online but easy enough to get hold of.
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