www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2004/0426/feat-strange-04-26-04.asp
Thomas Reed watched the Cold War from a privileged perspective inside the White House as a member of President Reagan's National Security Council. His book, "At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War," contains seldom-publicized details of the intrigue and subterfuge employed to topple the Soviet Union. In the book, Reed, also former secretary of the Air Force, raises the curtain on an incident in the early 1980s that demonstrated, in his opinion, the importance of American technological superiority in defeating the Soviets in the nuclear game that never turned hot. "There are several lessons learned from the Cold War that count today," Reed said in a recent interview. According to an unpublished document known as the Farewell dossier, the United States supplied the Soviet Union with faulty software that eventually led to a major pipeline disaster. Reed said such a ploy would never have been undertaken if the Soviet secret police, the KGB, had not been engaged in the theft of Western technology. "The US was not in the business of polluting technology it sold abroad, but Farewell was about the Soviets stealing technology," he said. "Once you get into that business, you pay the consequences." Reed, who was not directly involved with the operation, said he understood the program to be widespread. In fact, when the Soviets discovered in 1985 just what had happened, they were left wondering what other systems were likely to fail as a result -- they had no idea what technology was legitimate and what was bogus. But the Soviets couldn't complain without admitting to the Western world that they had been stealing the technology in the first place. "It was the computer equivalent of the U-2," Reed said, referring to the famous high-altitude planes the United States used to spy on the Soviets.
Powers, doing so would admit they couldn't reach them to shoot them down." The following is an excerpt from "At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War" by Thomas Reed, a member of the National Security Council during the Reagan administration. The tale that follows is extracted and in some cases quotes from unpublished notes by Gus Weiss, one of Reed's associates at the NSC. Those notes are titled "The Farewell Dossier: Strategic Deception and Economic Warfare in the Cold War." The Farewell dossier There could be no clearer delineation between the Old Shoes and the Pragmatists than the matter of the Farewell dossier. In the early 1970s, the Nixon administration put forth the idea of dtente. Henry Kissinger's hopes were that "over time, trade and investment may leaven the autarkic tendency of the Soviet system." He believed that dtente might "invite the gradual association of the Soviet economy with that of the world economy and thereby foster interdependence that adds an element of stability to the political relationship." In 1972 he told a group of senior party officials: "We communists have to string along with the capitalists for a while. We need their credits, their agriculture and their technology. But we are going to continue massive military programs, and by the mid-1980s, we will be in a position to return to an aggressive foreign policy designed to gain the upper hand with the West." Reagan was inclined to ignore Kissinger's theories of dtente and to take Chairman Brezhnev at his word, but all doubt was swept away on July 19, 1981, when the new American president met with President Franois Mitterand of France at an economic summit meeting in Ottawa. In a side conversation, Mitterand told Reagan of his intelligence service's success in recruiting a KGB agent in Moscow Center. The man was part of a section evaluating the take from Soviet efforts to acquire, and if necessary steal, Western technology. The source, Colonel Vladimir I Vetrov, was designated "Farewell" by the French Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire. He enjoyed an ideal port for viewing the work of the "Line X" collection apparatus within the KGB's Technology Directorate. Reagan expressed great interest in Mitterand's sensitive revelations and was grateful for his offer to make the material available to the US administration. The dossier, added to the "KUDO" intelligence compartment, arrived at the CIA in August 1981. They set forth the extent of Soviet penetration into US and other Western laboratories, factories and government agencies. They made clear that the Soviets had been running their research and development on the back of the West for years. Given the massive transfer of technology in radars, computers, machine tools and semiconductors from US to USSR, the Pentagon had been in an arms race with itself. The Farewell dossier also identified hundreds of case officers, agents in place and other supporters of information and parts throughout the West and Japan. During the early years of dtente, the US and the USSR had set up working groups in agriculture, civil aviation, nuclear energy, oceanography, computers and the environment. The purpose was to start the construction of "peaceful bridges" between the superpowers. Working group members were to exchange home-and-home visits. The Soviets thoroughly corrupted this process by inserting intelligence officers into those delegations dealing with technology of interest to them. Farewell made the extent of this subterfuge glaringly apparent. Aside from agent identification, the most useful information in the Farewell dossier was the KGB's shopping list: its targets for technology acquisition and theft during the coming few years. When the Farewell dossier arrived in Washington, Reagan asked Director of Central Intelligence Bill Casey to come up with a clandestine operational use for the material. During the fall of 1981, one of my National Security Council associates, Dr. He devised a remarkable plan: "Why not help the Soviets with their shopping? Now that we know what they want, we can help them get it." There would be just one catch: The CIA would add "extra ingredients" to the software and hardware on the KGB's shopping list. Weiss presented the plan to Casey in December 1981, and Casey took it to the President in January 1982. Notably absent from the meeting were any of the White House's strong believers in dtente. There were no written memoranda reflecting that meeting, or for that matter, the whole project, for many in the intelligence community were concerned about the security of the new, computerized, internal NSC communication system. The Weiss project targeted the Soviet military/industrial needs as set forth in the Farewell dossier. "Improved" -- that is to say, erratic -- computer chips were designed to pass quality-acceptance tests before entry into Soviet service. Only later would they sporadically fail, frazzling the nerves of harried users. Flawed but convincing ideas on stealth, attack aircraft and space defense made their way into Soviet ministries. The production and transportation of oil and gas was at the top of the Soviet wish list. A new trans-Siberian pipeline was to deliver natural gas from the Urengoi gas field in Siberia across Kazakhstan, Russia and Eastern Europe, into the hard currency markets of the West. To automate the operation of valves, compressors and storage facilities in such an immense undertaking, the Soviets needed sophisticated control systems. They bought early model computers on the open market, but when Russian pipeline authorities approached the US for the necessary software, they were turned down. a KGB operative was sent to penetrate a Canadian software supplier in an attempt to steal the needed codes. US intelligence, tipped by Farewell, responded and -- in cooperation with some outraged Canadians -- "improved" the software before sending it on. Once in the Soviet Union, computers and software, working together, ran the pipeline beautifully -- for a while. Buried in the stolen Canadian goods -- the software operating this whole new pipeline system -- was a Trojan horse. In order to disrupt the Soviet gas supply, its hard-currency earnings from the West and the internal Russian economy, the pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines and valves was p...
|
http://csua.com/feed/