Dirk's Weblog

Oleg Penkovsky

2012-01-21T20:54:00.000+01:00

Penkovsky during his trial

GRU colonel Oleg Penkovsky was one of the few valuable intelligence source, recruited by the West during the Cold War. The information he provided to the West puts him in the same league as CIA crown jewels GRU general Dmitri Polyakov and avionics electronics expert Adolf Tolkachev, influencing American and British intelligence assessment and policy making during the Cold War.

Born in 1919 as the son of a White Army officer who died during the war against the Bolsheviks, Penkovsky followed in his father's footsteps and entered the Soviet army in 1939 as artillery officer. After the Second World War, he graduated from the Frunze Military Academy and joined the GRU (military intelligence) where he received intelligence training. Penkovsky was sent abroad under the cover of military attaché of the Russian Embassy to Turkey, to spy on Turkish and U.S. military installations and later received training in missile and rockets weaponry.

Problems with his superiors, apparently because of his father's past, affected his assignment in Turkey and later caused a planned assignment in India to be cancelled. These were probably the seeds for his disillusion in the Soviet system and his dislike for the politics of Nikita Krushchev.

In 1961, prior to leaving for London to set up a Soviet spy network, Penkovsky contacted British and American intelligence officers through a British businessman in Moscow. During his frequent travels to the West for his GRU missions, Penkovsky, now a double agent codenamed HERO and YOGA, met with CIA and MI-6 officers and underwent extensive debriefings. He also handed over numerous photos and documents to personnel of the British embassy to Moscow. His information gave the Western intelligence agencies a good view on the strength of the Soviet forces and provided evidence that Soviet military and technical capabilities were overestimated.

When in 1962 the Soviets began deploying nuclear missiles on Cuba, at the doorstep of the United States, Penkovsky provided invaluable intelligence about the progress of the deployment of the missiles. During the subsequent Cuban Missile Crisis, his detailed information gave the Kennedy administration an important tactical and diplomatic advantage over the Soviets, making Penkovsky one of the few men that prevented a nuclear war and change the course of the Cold Ward.

During 1962, the KGB became aware of a mole in the Soviet intelligence community. It is assumed that either British MI-6 mole George Blake or NSA courier Jack Dunlap tipped off the Soviets, eventually leading them to Penkovsky. After an extensive surveillance, KGB officers arrested Oleg Penkovsky on 22 October 1962, just hours before U.S. president Kennedy would address the nation about the Soviet missiles on Cuban soil. GRU colonel Oleg Penkovsky was tried in may 1963. After his public trial, which was extensively covered in the media, he was found guilty to treason, sentenced to death and executed.

There's a featured story on Penkovsky on the CIA website, which also contains numerous numerous documents, related to the Penkovsky case. Below a Cold War Spies video, with interviews with former CIA Chief of Missile Division Sidney Graybeal, Penkovsky's CIA contact Joe Bulik and KGB interrogator Alexander Zagvozdin.

Enigma Simulator Update

2011-12-05T22:00:00.000+01:00

Santa Claus has brought to you a new - major - update of my Enigma simulator. After some 300.000 downloads of the sim worldwide (who said history and maths are boring?), I decided to create a last major update with ideas that have floated around in my head in recent years. Since the Mayas have predicted the end of the world in 2012, I took the opportunity to put the new sim in Santa's sock so that you can enjoy the little gizmo before we all go with a big bang in the next year. And the best of all... is free!

Screenshots of the new Enigma simulator: Enigma I, M3 and M4

What's new in this version? There's a major graphical revision with a different front cover and internal view for each of the Enigma models (Heer and Luftwaffe, Kriegsmarine M3 and M4). There are now two types of rotors (with letters or with numbers) and the plug board is revised, with different layouts for the various models. The plug board layout order is also changeable. The individual plugs are now visible on top view. A new photo gallery is added, with new images that I shot from various Enigma machines. The new sound effects are recorded from a real enigma machine, there's a sound on/off option and the Auto Typing function is improved. Finally, the help file is re-written and expanded. I hope these are enough reasons to go see what Santa brought to you!

The Enigma simulator 7.0 is downloadable from Cipher Machines and Cryptology and comments on the new version are most welcome through my website. Have fun!

BREAK THE CODE!

2011-11-27T11:29:00.001+01:00

A new codebreaking contest, called BREAK THE CODE!, is now on-line. The challenge is organised by the Polish state institutes Wielkopolska Region and the Office for War Veterans. The game starts on December 10, 2011, but the 3-person teams can already register to take part at this challenge.

The challenge is created to commemorate the Polish achievements in breaking the German Enigma cipher machine prior to the Second World War. The two best teams will play the finals in Poland. The trip is part of the prize, apart from electronic equipment. Only European citizens (Poland excluded) can compete for the prizes. Non-Europeans are also invited to enter the contest and will be included in the over-all game classification.

The information about how the game works and how to register is already available on the website. For each stage in the contest, a lecture, related to cryptography, will be published on the website. The first lecture, to make the teams familiar with codebreaking and the contest, is already available from the game control panel. For more information on this great initiative, please visit their website codebreakers.eu.

If you think you're up to the job, don't hesitate! Put together a team of three and register before December, 10, when the challenge starts.

FBI releases 2010 SVR Spy Ring information

2011-11-03T18:39:00.000+01:00

Last Monday, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation released a large amount of information, including documents, images and videos, on last year's case of illegal Russian intelligence agents, operating in the United States.

The decade-long counterintelligence operation, codenamed Ghost Stories, resulted in the arrest and expulsion of ten agents of the SVR (Russian Foreign Intelligence). More on this story is found on the FBI news page, and all released material is published on the FBI's The Vault webpage.

Below two remarkable videos from typical clandestine techniques, taken by the FBI during operation Ghost Stories. Both events are describes on page 8 of the complaint United States vs Zottoli (real name Mikhail Kutzik) and United States vs Metsos (disappeared after his arrest in Cyprus).

The first video, made in Queens, New York, on May 16, 2004, shows Christopher Metsos, executing a brush pass with an official from the Russian Mission to the United Nations. Metsos receives a bag containing money. A brush pass is a clandestine transfer of objects or documents by exchanging identical items, such as a shopping bag or a news paper.

The second video, made near Wurtsboro, New York, on June 8, 2006, shows Michael Zottoli, recovering a package from a dead drop, containing money, buried by Christopher Metsos. A dead drop is a container, often hidden on a public place, that is used for clandestine transfer without the two participant ever meeting each other. The courier hides the container, signals the receiver that a drop is executed and the content is retrieved later on (hours, day or even years after the drop).

For an overview of this spy case, see also these previous posts:

Spy Ring Arrested in the U.S. June 29, 2010

U.S. Russian Spy Exchange July 9, 2010

Spy Ring Betrayed by defecting SVR Colonel November 12, 2010

Christos Military and Intelligence Corner

2011-11-01T11:03:00.000+01:00

There are not too many websites or blogs about Signals Intelligence during the Second World War, especially not the kind that focuses on specific parts of the war over radio waves. Last July, Christos started a new blog that mainly covers the German intelligence efforts. He already provided some most interesting information about the German interception and cryptanalysis of enemy codes and ciphers.

There's little known about the German work on SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) because much of this information, and many of the German military who worked in that field, were picked up at the end of the war. The British-American TICOM project (Target Intelligence Committee) was especially focused on gathering important cryptologic information, and to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Soviets. Unfortunately for historians, they did a good job in hiding that information from the public, but more and more information is gradually released into the public.

Christos' weblog articles fill up a gap in the blogosphere and I hope he keeps on writing and providing valuable links to documents and web pages on German cryptologic work during WW2. It is important that the story of the war is based on information of both sides, and the German intelligence work and cryptologic successes should receive their place in that history. We now know that, although the implementation of German cryptologic systems was often weak, they did develop magnificent crypto equipment, had some fine cryptologists and excelled in the field of radio technology and interception.

Do visit Christos's Military and Intelligence Corner to discover that other view on WW2 Signals Intelligence. If you're interested in German SIGINT, you might start off by reading European Axis Signal Intelligence in World War II, published last year by NSA on their Declassification and Transparency project. These documents give an excellent view on the organisational structure and results of Germany's wartime intelligence.

German signals intelligence has always been underestimated or portrayed as inferior. This was not only the case during WW2 but also during the Cold War. The misconception that East German intelligence relied mostly on Human Intelligence was an expensive one, as you can read on my blog about Stasi SIGINT operations.

Russian Spies Arrested in Germany

2011-10-22T22:49:00.054+02:00

Last Tuesday, a married couple was arrested in Germany and charged with spying for the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service SVR. According to the German Attorney General in Karlsruhe, "the accused worked for a foreign intelligence service for long time".

According to Der Spiegel, the alleged spies were arrested on October, 18, in Baden-Württemberg and Hessen by the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), Germany's Federal Criminal Police, and by the Spezialeinheit GSG 9, BKA's counter-terrorism and special operations team. On Wednesday, the examining magistrate issued warrants against both and ordered their remand.

Updated October, 25: the married couple operated as illegal agents in Germany under the cover names Andreas and Heidrun Anschlag. The couple caught the attention of the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), the German Domestic Intelligence Agency, after the FBI busted the Russian Spy ring in June 2010. Apparently, the couple had regular contacts with Anna Chapman, one the the US spy ring members.

BKA raided the couple's house at Ewiges Tal in Marburg-Michelbach on Tuesday at 06.30 a.m. They caught Heidrun red-handed whilst receiving an encrypted broadcast on a shortwave radio, connected to a computer. In a coordinated operation, Andres was arrested in an apartment, close to his work, where he sometimes spent the weeknights when commuting to his work. After the raid, BKA specialists did an extensive house search of several days, which included the use of a mobile X-ray laboratory.

According to the couple's documents, Andreas, age 51, was born in Argentina and raised in Austria. In 1988, he move to Germany and studied engineering in Aachen until 1998. In 1990, he married Heidrun, age 45 and born in Peru. Until recently, Andreas was working as a project manager in Balingen. They have a grown-up daughter. However, German authorities in South America confirmed that their documents were falsified. BKA also confiscated two forged Austrian passports. Moreover, Andreas speaks with a Russian accent, although he stated to speak German, Spanish and English only.

Apparently, the couple was already working for the KGB, the predecessor of the SVR and FSB, during the Soviet era, and had travelled over Mexico to West Germany in 1988. Andreas had recently quit his job, sold his car and was ready to leave Germany "to work abroad". Probably, the couple got cold feet or were tipped off by their spy agency. At the end, the German investigators outwitted them.

This new espionage case again confirms that the Cold War espionage activities continue to be an important part of intelligence gathering today, or how the Cold War turned into a Cold Peace. Undoubtedly, today's intelligence gathering focuses more on industrial and economic espionage, given the many spy cases involving Russian and Chinese agents that surfaced in recent years.

A spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Berlin refused to comment on the spy case. An unidentified SVR official told the Russian newspaper Izvestia that the couple was part of a group that had retired from the agency. Such sleeping agents could still be used as a mailbox for occasional communication with other agents, but are otherwise left alone.

Again, encrypted messages over shortwave radio were used to send operational messages to illegal agents, operating in foreign countries. It shows that such communications are still popular and regarded as a secure way to communicate... unless you're caught red-handed. Most likely, not their way of communicating, but extensive BKA surveillance made it possible to caught them in the act.

I'm sure we will hear more about this new spy case in the next few days and weeks. Any new information will be added to this blog post...

More about this espionage case is found on the press release of the German Attorney General (translation), the full story in Spiegel Online International and The Moscow Times (both in English), an Oberhessische Presse news video, Deutsche Well in English, Focus (transl.), Russia Today, Ria Novosti and news video on 1TV First Channel Russia (transl.).

More on espionage communications through shortwave radio is found on my blogs Spies and Numbers, Cuban Agent Communications and on my website page on Numbers Stations. On my weblog, you can also find posts on the June 2010 arrest of the SVR spy ring in the United States, related to the couple, now arrested in Germany, the U.S. - Russian spy exchange, and a follow-up on the U.S. spy ring. An example of industrial espionage in the KGB era is found on this blog post. Much more to discover under the blog espionage label.

The story at Russia Today (direct link to RT):

Edgar Allan Poe and Cryptography

2011-08-29T19:14:00.222+02:00

Edgar Allan Poe

To most people, cryptography has always been an obscure science of codes and secrets, performed by weird maths wizards. Explaining how cryptography is intertwined with today's society, media and economy might evoke a bit of understanding of how important it is, but the general public won't let a minute of sleep for it. The situation hasn't changed that much in the last century. On the contrary, 170 years ago, people were actually far more interested in cryptography than today, and this was, in large part, due to one man called Edgar Allan Poe.

A poet, author, literary critic and editor, Edgar Allan Poe has written about all kinds of things, but he's best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre. Poe was obviously attracted to cryptography because it is both science and mystery. He was interested in how code making and code breaking worked, but also in cryptography as an esoteric, almost black art, that appealed to people's imagination.

In 1840, Poe wrote some newspaper articles about cryptography and challenged the public to send him their own enciphered message. Encouraged by the reader's response, Poe published the essay "A Few Words on Secret Writing". He had sparked such a great interest in cryptgraphy that it was inevitable that he would write a story that incorporated cryptography. In 1843, his famous "The Gold-Bug" was a huge success. The story helped popularize cryptopgraphy as it never had before.

People loved to solve cryptogram puzzles in newspapers, they started to use secret writing on post cards and lovers sent messages to each other through encrypted newspaper adds. There has probably never been a greater interest in cryptography as in the 18th and early 19th century. The public interest and awareness has since disappeared. Regrettable, because cryptography is, more than ever, vital to our everyday life, and still is an exciting science with stories that appeal to the imagination (Enigma, the Navajo code talkers, Cold War espionage, the Zodiak killer etc...).

Although Poe is iconic for his use of cryptography in popular literature and became known as the man who could break any cryptogram (an overstatement), he was only a vivid amateur cryptologist. Nevertheless, he was of great influence, for he was a great ambassador of cryptography who pulled it out of its obscure and dark dungeon. More about the man who learned the people how to decipher messages is found on Edgar Allan Poe's The Gold-Bug, which still is a great introduction to cryptography.

One-time Pad History Rewritten

2011-07-26T20:46:00.007+02:00

Does the discovery in an old telegraph codebook rewrites the history of cryptography? Until now, Gilbert Vernam was generally accepted as the inventor of the unbreakable one-time encryption. His teletype system was later improved by Joseph Mauborgne and paper versions of the systems later became widely used for diplomatic and military communications.

Recently, Steven Bellovin, professor of computer science at the Columbia University School of Engineering, discovered a 1882 telegraph codebook in the Washington Library of Congress. This codebook, compiled by a Frank Miller, describes a superencipherment of telegraph codes by random "shift-numbers" that should not be repeated. Did Bellovin discover the proof that one-time pad was invented 35 years earlier? Should the history of cryptography regarding one-time pads be rewritten?

Let us first explain what was actually discovered. Telegraph codebooks were used extensively in the 19th century to reduce costs of telegrams by compressing words and phrases into codewords or into a combination of letters or digits. Codebooks did not provide any cryptographic security. Therefore, the codes were sometimes superenciphered (an additional layer of encipherment over the code) with a short key to improve its security. Miller's codebook contains 14,000 words or phrases (some are blanks) with their corresponding codewords and a serial number. So far, nothing special.

The codebook also provides instructions for a superencipherment. These instructions are what makes his work extraordinary. In his preface, Miller writes: "the sender and receiver must each cancel "shift-numbers" as soon as they are used". He further states that "if the senders finds that the addition of the key (to the serial-number) produces a sum greater than the highest serial number (14,000) in this book, he must deduct said last serial number (14,000) from said sum." If the receiver finds that the enciphered word "is less than the key which is to unlock it, he must temporarily add to said serial-number the highest number in this book (14,000) and deduct the key from the sum".

Now, let us recapitulate this: to calculate the ciphertext, the sender adds a key (the shift-numbers) to the plaincode numbers (serial numbers). When the total is more than 14,000, he subtracts 14,000. To decipher, the receiver subtracts the key from the ciphertext. However, if the ciphertext is smaller than the key, he first adds 14,000 to the ciphertext and than subtracts the key. This is essentially a modulo 14,000 additive cipher.

Further down, Miller describes the shift-numbers as "a list of irregular numbers" and "the difference between such numbers must not be regular". He also explains that when a shift-number has been used, it should be erased from the list and not used again. Next, some examples are given where words are replaced by their serial-number (plaincode) and a shift-number (key) is added.

This is clearly the essence of one-time pad encryption. Text is converted into numbers, a random key is added by modular arithmetic and the key should not be used again. Moreover, Miller explains that each correspondent should wirte his own shift-numbers list in black ink in a book and the correspondent's list in red ink upon the opposite page. He clearly distinguishes the black (encipher) and red (decipher) shift-numbers. By doing so, he avoids simultaneous use of the same shift-numbers, something that could occur when both correspondents use one single list of shift-numbers.

Unfortunately, Miller falls short in explaining that each shift-number should have a value between 0 and 14,000. He neither addresses the issue of generating truly random values. This could affect the security of the cipher as the user could be seduce into selecting smaller shift-values that don't require the cumbersome modulo 14,000 calculations. The complicated modulo 14,000 might well be the reason why his system never received the attention and success it deserved. Taking the individual digits of the serial numbers as independent, and applying a modulo 10 (add without carry, subtract without borrowing) would have been much easier and faster. We can only speculate about the reason why Frank Miller's one-time encryption never became publicly know.

Steven Bellovin speculates whether Miller's work might somehow, indirectly through Parker Hitt and Joseph Mauborgne, have reached Gilbert Vernam. However, Vernam, as an electrical engineer, approached the one-time encryption from an entirely different angle and discovered a completely different solution of teletype five-bit punched paper tapes using modulo 2 on each of its five bits. Fact is that Frank Miller's work disappeared in oblivion.

It is indisputable that Frank Miller was the first to invent the one-time pad encryption, albeit less practical than in its current form. 35 years later, Gilbert Vernam invented a completely different electromechanical cipher system that incidentally had the same mathematical properties as Miller's pencil-and-paper cipher. Finally, it were the German cryptologists Werner Kunze, Rudolf Schauffler and Erich Langlotz who developed a one-time pad system for use with pencil and paper, thus re-inventing Frank Miller's encryption scheme.

We may conclude that both Miller and Vernam independently invented one-time pad, and both deserve credit for the same achievement, although in a completely different form. But ultimately, we must acknowledge Frank Miller as the first to have invented the one-time pad concept. Sadly, as far as we know, his invention did not influence the history of cryptography. Nevertheless, history rewritten! And finally, not to be forgotten, Steven Bellovin can be credited for discovering the inventor of one-time pad. Congratulations, Steven!

More details about Miller's 1882 telegraphic codebook are found in Steven Bellovin's paper on Frank Miller (direct link to pdf). The history and use of one-time pads is found on my website. More on various old telegraphic codebooks is found on my post about the Nick Gessler collection.

First Strike

2011-07-25T18:32:00.002+02:00

Minuteman missile in its silo

It is always interesting to have a retrospective view on the Cold War history (yes, that's easy with hindsight) and see how accurate, or inaccurate, the assumptions were back then, influenced by the mind set of those days. First Strike, the 1979 PBS documentary, is a good example of how assessment of one's own capabilities and of those of the opponent can trigger an enormous arms build-up in an era where disarmament and weapons control and limitations were the words of the day.

The documentary starts with a dramatization of a Soviet surprise first strike attack, destroying nearly all Minuteman missile silos, wiping nuke carrying B-52's from their runways and sinking nuclear submarines in their ports and at see. Crippling the U.S. Strategic Forces in minutes was a daunting prospect in those days, in fact, it still is, but one can question the accuracy of this scenario, and the capabilities of the Soviets in those days. Spicy detail: actual Air Force personnel and air force installations were used to film the documentary.

The fear for such a scenario was undoubtedly real, both in the U.S. and in the Soviet Union, but fear has often been a bad counselor. In the next part of the documentary, analysts from the Defense and Strategic Studies Program, Rand Corporation, Research and Development, and other think tank experts defended their what-if theories in the documentary. Pretty scary and risky statements and conclusions! Parts of the documentary were later used in the notorious 1983 movie The Day After (which even scared the hell out of Ronald Reagan). Both documentary and movie were very good at convincing tax payers, both in the United States, in Europe... and unfortunately also in the Soviet Union. War scare at its best.

As we now know, the fear was real, the facts and the estimated treat were not (the latter paradoxically later made itself come true). If fear did achieve one thing, then it were the exorbitant defense budgets on both sides, which eventually resulted in the collapse of the Soviet economy and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The route chosen made many on both sides poor and a few very rich. Both sides never intended to strike first, both believed the other one would do so, and no one used its nukes.

Words could have done the job just as well, and much cheaper. One can discuss ages about the sense or nonsense of Assured Mutual Destruction and yes, it did the job, but there must have surely been better solutions, with less risk of escalation (we did have a few close encounters of the third World War kind, see here). Lessons learned? Who knows? Today's analysts still have a tough job with the current military and geopolitical situation.

You can watch the documentary First Strike on YouTube in four parts: part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4, or watch it here below with a link to the next part at each end. More on the U.S. estimates on the Soviet strategic capabilities, and how it often deviated from Soviet reality, is found on my post on US Strategic Intelligence on the USSR. In my Farewell Dossier post, you can read how the defense budget itself was used as a weapon to destabilize the Soviet Union. If you want to find out more on the Minuteman missiles, you can visit the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site website, where you'll discover lots of information, images and interview with Minuteman personnel. You can pay a virtually visit to a Minuteman Missile site with spherical panoramas (click-and-drag to move around).

Igor Gouzenko - The Man Who Revealed the Cold War

2011-07-22T11:00:00.011+02:00

Igor Gouzenko

The defection of Igor Gouzenko is probably the one single case that truly marked the beginning of the Cold War.

One month after the end of the Second World War, the Allied forces were still celebrating their victory over Nazi Germany. During the war, the Canadian forces had been part of the second - Western - front against the German forces, to relief the pressure on their Russian Allies in the east. Only four months earlier, the Americans and Soviets had shook hands when they met at the River Elbe in Germany. Many innocently believed that this ended all hostilities and that they could pick up their lives from before the war.

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Igor Sergeyevich Gouzenko had completed his second year as a cipher clerk in the Soviet embassy to Canada in Ottawa, Ontario. Gouzenko, then 26, was a member of the GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence). After returning from the Russian front two years earlier, he received training in coding and cipher work. He was sent to Ottawa in June 1943 and lived there with his wife and baby son in a small apartment. At the Embassy, he worked under GRU Colonel Nikolai Zabotin, who commanded 14 GRU officers, involved in espionage operations against Canada. Gouzenko worked in the coding room, the inner sanctum of the Embassy, where he was responsible for enciphering and deciphering of secret GRU intelligence messages between Ottawa and Moscow.

In August 1945, Gouzenko was instructed to return to Russia. Having tasted of the Western individual freedoms and being disgruntled about the Soviet intelligence operations against Canada, their former ally, he decided to defect and seek asylum for him and his wife and child. On the evening of September 5, 1945 he left the embassy, carrying 109 secret documents on Soviet espionage activities in the West. He approached the media and tried to contact the Minister of Justice but was initially turned down by all of them. Fearing for his life or at least apprehension by a Soviet team, Gouzenko hid with wife and child the next night at a neighbour, who notified the police. After the police caught Soviet officials braking into Gouzenko's apartment, his story was finally taken serious.

Gouzenko in 1948 (Source: CSIS)

On September 7, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police took over the case and Gouzenko handed over the secret documents. The Gouzenkos were placed in protective custody and Igor was interviewed by Canadian officials, Britain's MI5 and the FBI. The 109 documents that Gouzenko took along from his GRU cipher office proved to be of exceptional intelligence value. They revealed a large Soviet spy operation to obtain military, scientific, and technological information, by whatever means, in Canada, Britain and the United States.

Information, provided by Gouzenko and his documents, lead to extensive counter-intelligence operations and resulted in the apprehension of a series of spies and people who collaborated in some way with the Soviets. But above all, these revelations shocked the intelligence communities, politicians and public opinion. No one expected such aggressive intelligence operations against their country from the former Soviet ally, nor could they have imagined the scale of infiltration in several Western intelligence agencies and bureaucracie.

Igor Gouzenko's defection also had some unexpected and devastating consequences that surfaced only three years later. Already before the Gouzenko case, American Signals Intelligence eavesdropped on Soviet encrypted communications and the codebreakers in Arlington Hall broke their cryptographic systems with great easy. In the first week after his defection, Moscow warned all its intelligence posts and agents abroad that their operations were compromised. This warning however was not picked up by the Americans, as they were unable to penetrate the Soviet intelligence communications.

Once Gouzenko's information was fully exploited, the U.S. could no longer openly use covertly obtained intelligence without disclosing their eavesdropping capabilities to their new Cold War enemy. The idea developed to release and use more sensitive communications intelligence with the Gouzenko defection as a plausible cover. The Soviets didn't know exactly what information Gouzenko actually compromised, and this could give the U.S. and Britain the opportunity to use critical information without warning off the Soviets that their cryptographic systems were breached.

Unfortunately, just as before the Gouzenko case, they did not consider a Soviet penetration of their own intelligence community. In fact, the Soviets did have several penetration agents inside different Western intelligence agencies. The irresponsible use of sensitive info, derived from encrypted traffic, tipped off the Soviets that their cryptographic systems were insecure. By 1948, Soviet sources within the U.S. codebreaking community had reported which crypto systems were read by the Americans.

What did the Russians do? Nothing! To the outside world it seemed business as usual and Arlington Hall happily continued to eavesdrop on their new enemy. In reality, the Soviets had quietly initiated a large research program to vastly improve their communications security. They continued using the compromised systems but undoubtedly took their precautions and no longer gave away critical information over those channels. Then, on Friday, October 29, 1948, when the British and American eavesdroppers were busy usual on their Russian targets, they suddenly suffered a complete black-out.

Moscow had secretly planned a complete makeover of all their communications channels. From one moment to the next, they introduced complex radio callsign and frequency schedules and all high level communications changed to the unbreakable one-time pad encryption. Every single crypto system that the U.S. had been reading went silent. Previously unencrypted channels were now encrypted and the new systems were a mystery. They no longer used the familiar crypto system indicators, leaving the eavesdroppers with no clues about who was using which system when for what messages.

It was a complete and unprecedented intelligence break-down. According to NSA, the changeover "came crashing down like a tidal wave on the beach of Anglo-American cryptology". This co-called Black Friday was a loud wake-up call. The Soviet Union had entered the battlefield of signals intelligence and it was an impressive entry. It took the National Security Agency six years to even begin to recover from this slap in the face.

The Gouzenkos were granted asylum and relocated under a new identity. Igor Gouzenko, who later appeared in several television interviews, was know for the white bag over his head that protected his identity (not a luxury, given the KGB's reputation with traitors). In 1948, Gouzenko's memoirs were published under the title This Was My Choice (see Amazon). Igor Gouzenko died of a heart attack in 1982 at Mississauga, Canada and was survived by his wife Svetlana and their eight children.

More on Igor Gouzenko is found on the Canadian Camp X website and on Richard Brisson's Cryptographic and Clandestine Tradecraft. On Richard's site you'll also find Guzenko's story "Stalin sent me to Spy School", published in the Coronet magazine (direct links to each page: [1][2][3][4][5]). On Videofact you can read Gouzenko's statement from one month after his defection.You can watch his famous interview on CBC Digital Archives, and an interesting interview with Svetlana Gouzenko. The Canadian Intelligence Resource Centre has some excellent papers related to Gouzenko. There, I can recommend "The Gouzenko Affair Revisited: The Soviet Perspective" (at the bottom). More on the Friday black-out is found in the National Cryptologic School's On Watch document.

The National Cryptologic School - On Watch

2011-07-19T16:50:00.154+02:00

NSA building at Fort Meade

The National Cryptologic School - On Watch, Profiles from the National Security Agency's Past 40 Years, is a 76 page document that highlights some of the key moments in the history of the National Security Agency (NSA).

The document starts with Japan's last days of war and the transition from the different American wartime cryptology efforts into one post-war agency in Arlington Hall that controlled the Army Security Agency, the Naval Security Group, and the Air Force Security Service. However, the in 1949 created Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA) lacked the power to enforce a real centralized coordination between the individual parts of the intelligence community.

Meanwhile, the 1945 defection of GRU officer Igor Gouzenko in the Soviet Embassy of Ottawa was used by U.S. intelligence as a cover to release communications intelligence. The Soviets however knew, through a source inside Arlington Hall, that their communications were not compromised by Gouzenko but by the vulnerability of their systems. It was the start of a Soviet research program to improve their Communications Security, which resulted in the 1948 blackout of American and British intelligence on the Soviet communications.

The sudden change in radio procedures and the use of one-time pads for all Soviet high level traffic was a disaster that took six years to overcome. In 1949, AFSA codebreakers discovered the double use of one-time pads in old Soviet intelligence traffic, giving them various clues on Soviet infiltration of U.S. intelligence services. This initiated several counter-intelligence operations. The results of this operation, now called VENONA, eventually unveiled the Cambridge spy ring (Phylby, Maclean, Blunt and Burgess), atom bomb spy Klaus Fuchs and many other agents (see also VENONA Declassified).

AFSA's successor, the National Security Agency, was created in 1952. The United States finally had its centralised cryptologic intelligence agency. The Korean War was NSA's trial of fire, which resulted in a dearly needed reorganisation of its communications capabilities. The explosion of the French-Vietnamese conflict and fear for Soviet expansion initiated a major SIGINT buildup in Southeast Asia in the early 1960's. It was soon followed by thousands of U.S. military advisors. In the 1964 Gulf of Tonking incident, USS Maddox, a destroyer on DESOTO patrol (SIGINT missions in hostile waters), was attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. It would be the prelude to a complete involvement of American armed forces and intelligence in Vietnam.

NSA's SIGINT efforts would continue to play a major role in combat operation, with signals collection both on the ground and in the air, until the end of the Vietnam war in 1975. Vietnam also fueled the development of miniaturized voice encryption equipment. The secure voice system NESTOR became a widely used standard during that war. During this conflict, NSA also suffered many losses, as you can read in my Silent Warriors post.

The agency quickly outgrew its former girl's school in Arlington. In 1966, NSA relocated to its current buildings in Fort Meade to keep up with the ever growing work load. Nothing, however, could prevent the intelligence disaster that struck NSA two years later, when USS Pueblo AGER-2, a SIGINT vessel, operating near North Korean waters, was attacked and seized by the North Koreans. Loaded with SIGINT equipment and a vast amount of highly classified documents, the ship was a treasure trove for the North Koreans and their Soviet allies. The compromise of equipment, documents and knowledge effected NSA's SIGINT capabilities for many years (see also USS Pueblo Incident).

The paper has some minor redactions, but gives a good general view on some of NSA's achievements and some of its failures. You can find the complete paper at the National Archives' The Secret Sentry Declassified or download it directly from this link.

FedFlix on the Internet Archive

2011-07-08T23:43:00.024+02:00

Fedflix is a project to digitize a large number of U.S. Government movies. It is a Joint Venture between the National Technical Information Service and Public Resource Org, which is also supported by the National Archives.

The FedFlix archive is published on the Internet Archive and it is a real treasure trove of Government movies related to intelligence agencies, espionage, the Cold War and various other subjects. There's a wide variety of historical movies, instruction movies, documentaries and interviews, and best of all, they are available as free download.

Many movies are also made available on Youtube, but at the FedFlix website you can download each movie in various video formats (MPEG4 and h.264 are the most commonly used). Just right-click the proper video format link and select "Save Target As...".

From the numerous titles, and I have selected here below a few that fit the profile of this weblog. Of course, there are many more movies, from how to fly a P-47, over Morse techniques, to atomic bombs, available on the FedFlix section of the Internet Archive. In total, there are more than 7,000 movies to discover! Select this link to view the complete list of movies and enter FedFlix AND your keyword in the search box and hit the GO! button to find your desired movies.

Enjoy watching them! If you discover any other interesting movies in the FedFlix database, please post them in the comments of this post.

Science of Spying

2011-06-25T12:36:00.090+02:00

Allan W. Dulles

Science of Spying is a 52 minutes documentary, produced by NBC in 1965. The video was made available to the U.S. government and is now available at the Internet Archive in cooperation with FedFlix, which makes available various government movies. Science of Spying presents several operations, carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in Cuba, Vietnam, Iran, Latin America and Congo.

Of course, the interviews with former CIA director Allen Dulles, Deputy Director for Plans Richard Bissell and others must be met with lots of skepticism. Many of the facts, presented back in 1965, were either inaccurate or deliberately wrong, as some of the many currently declassified documents have shown. Nevertheless, it is an interesting movie that gives an insight in the view on intelligence work in the 1950's and 1960's.

You can view the complete movie here below, or you can download it for free at the Internet Archive's FedFlix collection.

OXCART and ELINT Research

2011-05-14T16:21:00.055+02:00

The National Security Archive contains a paper from Gene Poteat about electronic intelligence on Soviet air defenses to assisted research of stealth technology for the OXCART spy program. Gene Poteat, an electrical engineer and physicist, worked on the OXCART project.

By the end of the 1950's, the CIA's regular U-2 spy plane missions over the Soviets Union collected most valuable intelligence. The U-2's were also equipped with basic ELINT (Electronic Intelligence) and discovered a build-up of Soviet air-to-ground radars. The new radar, codenamed TALL KING by NATO, would become a serious threat to the vulnerable U-2 reconnaissance flights.

Meanwhile, CIA's top secret OXCART program was to produce a stealthy high-speed high-altitude spy plane and Kelly Johnson's legendary Skunk Works started the development of OXCART's Lockheed A-12 (the precursor to the well known SR-71 Blackbird). The first shootdown of a U-2 plane in 1960, over Soviet airspace, only urged the CIA even more for a solution to the radar threat.

Lockheed A-12 OXCART (source: wiki commons)

In 1959, Gene Poteat was assigned to the CIA's ELINT Staff Office to assist in the development of the stealth technology to make OXCART invisible to Soviet radar. However, before devising an answer to Soviet radar, they first had to know what kind of radar the Soviets used, how it performed and where it was located. At that time, there was hardly any information on Soviet radar capabilities, let alone to make an intelligence estimate on the subject. ELINT on Soviet systems was virtually non-existing, but OXCART should be invisible to radar.

The CIA engineers had to find ways to intercept and analyse radar signals from very large distance. The C-97 and RB-47 airborne ELINT platforms, flying near East-German and Soviet borders, provided the first information to develop precise measurement systems and radar jamming equipment. ELINT missions with this new equipment, placed on C-97, RB-47, C-130 and RC-135 platforms, supplemented with clandestine CIA missions, provided lots of valuable information. They could finally map the locations and coverage of the TALL KING radars (image: Soviet P-14 VHF Radar "TALL KING").

They also developed the MELODY system, a so-called bistatic interception that uses objects like the Soviet's own missiles, or even the moon, to reflect radar signals over very large distance, far beyond the horizon. This enabled tracking and analysis of remote radar locations inside Russia.

A new project, codenamed PALLADIUM, measured the sensitivity of Soviet radar and the skills of Soviet radar personnel. To do so, PALLADIUM platforms received the radar signals, manipulated the signal and sent it back to the Soviets. This way, they could create any type of ghost aircraft from any size, at any speed. CIA cooperated with NSA, whose SIGINT capabilities could intercept the Soviet military reactions, or the lack of it, to these bogus radar information. These performance tests on Soviet radar provided the engineers with a basis for the required specifications for the OXCART stealth program.

At the end, it turned out that OXCART could never be stealthy enough to evade Soviet radar. Fortunately, OXCART's A-12 could outfly any surface-to-air missile with its incredible speed of 3.35 Mach (2,550 Mph or 4.103 Km/h). Only thirteen A-12's and its variants, the two M-21 drone carriers and three YF-12A, were ever build . Nevertheless, PALLADIUM made possible the development of sophisticated radar jammers and warning systems, and assisted in the research to reduce a plane's radar cross section. The OXCART planes eventually retired to be succeeded by its notorious sister plane SR-71. The F-117 stealth fighter would be, with the help of PALLADIUM intelligence, the first to remain invisible to Russian air defense.

The CIA's ELINT Staff Office continued with various other projects, related to Soviet radar. Satellite imagery disclosed a huge radar, deep inside the Soviet Union. The HEN HOUSE, as this radar was codenamed, was a high powered over-the-horizon radar, capable of following U.S. satellites and distant missiles or aircraft. The CIA installed a receiver on a Baltic Sea island to intercept and analyse that radar. The MELODY system, with its bistatic intercepts, also provide electronic intelligence, showing that the Soviets were cheating on the 1972 ABM treaty negotiations. Many more projects will probable never be disclosed.

The small group of CIA engineers were among the first who used the aether to understand and deceive the enemy's electronic systems. This secretive and highly technical black art eventually evolved into today's indispensable Information Warfare.

Gene Poteat's paper can be downloaded from this National Security Archive link on their Science, Technology and the CIA pages, or alternatively at this link (better readable). Poteat's bio is found on WIP. More about flying ELINT platforms on my ELINT at NSA and Silent Warriors posts. An example of a high power over-the-horizon radars is found on my Mysterious Cold War Signals.

Below a nice video from the prototype YF-12A variant of the A-12 OXCART (the A-12, by the way, was even faster than its successor SR-71). There are also two documentary fragments part 1 (3 min) and part 2 (15 min) about the A-12 OXCART.

Bart Lee's Radio Spies

2011-04-14T18:56:00.016+02:00

Bart Lee (K6VK) from the California Historical Radio Society and Antique Wireless Association has written extensively on early radio communications and signals intelligence. He has the technical knowledge on radio communications but also did thorough research on the subject.

One of his splendid works is "Radio Spies, Episodes in the Ether Wars", a comprehensive 134 page work on radio interception and signals intelligence. The papers traces the origins of radio intelligence in the early 1900's and covers its rapid evolution due to the exponential rise of wireless telegraphy during Word War I. Radio communications were used by all of the military forces, and friend and foe discovered the benefits of radio communications, but also its drawbacks. Exploiting the disadvantages became an essential part of military strategy, politics, diplomacy and espionage.

Signals intelligence, traffic analysis and cryptology developed rapidly into a race between those who were seeking secure communications and those who intercepted and exploited it. If World War I was the kick-off for radio intelligence, then World War II confirmed that signals intelligence and codebreaking had become a vital part of modern warfare. Since then, radio is a powerful weapon. Bart Lee did a wonderful job on explaining the evolution of radio interception and the efforts by American, British, Soviet, Japanese and German intelligence organisations to master the radio waves.

I can highly recommend Radio Spies, Episodes in the Ether Wars (pdf) on Bart's web pages. The images that go with the paper are found in this pdf file. Many more great publications, related to radio communications history and technology, are found on Bart Lee's web pages, hosted on the California Historical Radio Society's Radio History section.

GRU General Dmitri Polyakov

2011-03-22T11:38:00.055+01:00

Dmitri Fyodorovich Polyakov, Major General in the GRU, the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, was the highest ranking Soviet officer ever to have been recruited by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Hardly known to the public, Polyakov was without a doubt the most important and influential American intelligence asset of the Cold War era.

Born in the Ukraine in 1921, Polyakov graduated from Artillery School in June 1941, the same month that Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. He served as an artillery officer in the Second World War, where he received decorations for bravery. After the war he studied at the Frunze Military Academy and received GRU courses after which he entered the GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence). In 1951 he was sent on his first mission for a five years tour to New York with the Soviet Military Staff Committee of the United Nations.

In 1959, on his second tour in New York, Polyakov approached FBI counterintelligence agents and offered them to work as an informant. Within the FBI he was known by the codename TOPHAT. Because of his intelligence value, Polyakov was turned over to the CIA, who gave him the code names BOURBON and ROAM. As a Soviet officer, he had access to reports on missiles, tanks, military procedures and the Soviet way of thinking.

As a GRU officer, he was able to identify all GRU officers abroad, and how and where they were operating. As a high ranking GRU officer, he also had access to Soviet economic and foreign policy, information that grew in importance as he climbed up in the GRU ranks. Polyakov proved to be the crown jewel of the CIA, providing extremely valuable inside information to U.S. intelligence . In 1980, Polyakov retired as GRU officer, ending a 21 year career as a spy for the United States.

By the end of 1985, the CIA's Soviet-East European Division, controlling intelligence assets in the Soviet Union, started losing agents in the Soviet Union. Some were arrested, others disappeared. Despite draconian security measures to protect these sources, one operation after the other was lost, and the CIA had no idea what was going on. It triggered on of the largest mole hunts ever in the U.S. intelligence community. Meanwhile, the CIA believed that Polyakov slid through the net because, as a dedicated sportsman, he continued to write articles for a Soviet hunting magazine.

However, suspicion arouse in 1986 when his publications came abruptly to an end. The CIA had already cut contact with Polyakov for security reasons and had no idea what was going on. It was only in 1988 that General Polyakov's true fate became known, when the Soviet newspaper Pravda published his execution. Already in 1986, he was arrested by the KGB, put on trial and sentenced to death for treason (image: Polyakov during his trial).

It would take a joint CIA/FBI team nine years to find the mole that gave their agents to the Soviets. On February 21, 1994, the FBI arrested Aldrich Hazen Ames on charges of espionage on behalf of Russia and the former Soviet Union. He was the CIA counterintelligence branch chief for Soviet operations in 1983. It was only 2001, after the arrest of FBI counter-intelligence agent Robert Philip Hanssen on February 18, that it became clear that Polyakov was betrayed by both Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, two of the most damaging spies in the American history.

On the National Archives website, there are two interesting interviews, one with Sandy Grimes, CIA expert on Soviet intelligence, and another with John Mabey, FBI counter-intelligence agent, about their involvment in the Polyokov case. Elaine Shannon published Death of a Perfect Spy on Time. More about the GRU is found on this previous blog and more on Aldrich Ames on this blog.

Below, the Cold War Spies episode on Aldrich Ames, the mole who betrayed Polyakov to the Soviets. It shows video footage of Polyakov's arrest and his trial.

USS Pueblo Incident

2011-02-05T20:05:00.013+01:00

January 5, 1968. USS Pueblo leaves the US Navy base in Yokosuka, Japan. Its destiny is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), commonly known as North Korea. USS Pueblo, designated AGER-2 (Auxiliary General Environmental Research), is a so-called technical research ship for oceanographic survey. In reality, the vessel is stuffed with SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) and ELINT (Electronic Intelligence) equipment. Its real mission is a joint Navy/NSA spy program to eavesdrop on North Korean and Soviet communications.

USS Pueblo AGER-2 in 1967

January 20. USS Pueblo is observed a first time by a North Korean submarine chaser at 16 miles from the North Korean coast. Two days later, two fishing trawlers pass by at very close distance of USS Pueblo. The visitor is sighted and events start to enroll. The next day, January 23, USS Pueblo is approached by a DPRK sub chaser and, according to the US Navy, is challenged to show her nationality. After raising the U.S. flag, USS Pueblo is ordered to stand down or be fired upon.

According to the North Koreans, USS Pueblo is well inside their territorial waters. The U.S. version of the incident locates the spy ship far outside North Korean territory, but the North Koreans claim 50 nautical miles territorial waters, where international standards are 12 nautical miles. Whatever its position, USS Pueblo is in serious trouble. She desperately attempts to maneuver away from the much faster DPRK sub chaser, which is joined shortly after by four torpedo boats and another sub chaser. Two MIG-21 fighter jets fly over.

For more than two hours, the DPRK vessels attempt to board USS Pueblo and repeatedly order the vessel to have to or be fired upon. The spy ship constantly manoeuvres to avoid the boarding but the cat and mouse game ends when one sub chaser opens fire with its 57 mm cannon on Pueblo's deck, wounding several crew members. USS Pueblo also receives machine gun fire from other DPRK vessels. Not equipped to respond to a serious threat (only .50 caliber machine guns are aboard, but covered to avoid suspicion and thus unmanned) USS Pueblo has no other option than to comply.

During the incident, USS Pueblo has continuous radio contact with the U.S. Naval Security Group in Japan, but air support is not be available on time. Meanwhile, below deck, intelligence personnel start destroying all sensitive documents and equipment. Normally, such spy ship, operating alone and close to enemy waters without protection, should carry only the absolute minimum of sensitive material. USS Pueblo, however, is loaded with documents and equipment. After an hour of emergency destruction, only a small percentage of the classified material aboard the ship is destroyed. An intelligence disaster is inevitable.

USS Pueblo is forced to follow the DPRK vessels but is fired upon again when she stops just outside North Korean territorial waters, killing one crew member and wounding several others. North Korean personnel now boards the vessel and takes over control. USS Pueblo is taken to Wonsan Naval Base, in southeastern North Korea. The Pueblo crew is moved to prisoner of war camps where, according to the crew, they are starved and regularly tortured while in North Korean custody.

Eleven months later, and only after a written apology and admission by the U.S. that USS Pueblo had been spying, its crew was released. On December 23, 1968, the 82 crew members crossed the DMZ border with South Korea (after the release, the U.S. immediately verbally retracted the ransom admission). The story however did not end with the release of the prisoners. The capture of USS Pueblo was an intelligence nightmare. North Korea and its ally, the Soviets, seized large volumes of sensitive documents and cryptographic equipment, causing shock waves throughout the naval security and intelligence community.

Since then, USS Pueblo remained in the custody of North Korea. In 1999, the vessel moved from Wonsan to the North Korean capital Pyongyang, where it is now a primary tourist attraction on the Taedong river, alongside the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum. USS Pueblo AGER-2 is the only American naval vessel held in captivity in the world. More information on USS Pueblo and its history is found on the beautiful USS Pueblo website. Many pictures from a visit to Pyongyang are available on Brian McMorrow's USS Pueblo photo gallery.

The USS Pueblo incident was one of the most catastrophic events to have damaged the codebreaking efforts of the National Security Agency (NSA). The National Security Archive's The Secret Sentry Declassified published two documents related to the incident: The Capture of the USS Pueblo and Its Effect on SIGINT Operations (pdf-document 3) and some of the captured documents, from a North Korean expose on the ship’s mission (pdf-document 24).

One of the crypto systems, compromised in the incident was the TSEC/KW-7 (see Jerry Proc's website). Until today, the question remains whether the capture of USS Pueblo was a coincidence or that is was triggered by naval communications specialist John Walker and his spy ring. It is questionable whether the SIGINT and crypto equipment was indeed a planned target, since the North Koreans took that long before boarding the vessel, giving the crew the chance to destroy documents and equipment. More on John Walker and USS Pueblo in an interview with KGB General Boris Solomatin.

Such SIGINT and ELINT missions have always been hazardous, even in peacetime. The Cold War was all but cold for the many intelligence technicians, sailors and pilots who lost their lives while collecting intelligence. During an Israeli raid on USS Liberty AGTR-5, 34 crew were killed and and 173 wounded. Many SIGINT airplanes also got their share in the losses. The EC-121 #135749 (VQ-1) shootdown over the Sea of Japan in 1968 (all 31 killed) and the C-130A-II #60528 shootdown over Armenia in 1958 (all 17 killed) are only two of more than 40 reconnaissance aircraft that were shot down. NSA's National Vigilance Park has published a paper called A Dangerous Business: The U.S. Navy and National Reconnaissance During the Cold War.

Callimahos and the Dundee Jar

2010-12-17T17:41:00.038+01:00

There's a curious story on how a marmalade jar became a symbole of cryptanalytic skills within the National Security Agency (NSA). It all began in the late 1950's, when Lambros Demetrios Callimahos created the Intensive Study Program in General Cryptanalysis (ISPGC), also known as the CA-400 course.

It was the first extensive high-level course for experienced and senior cryptanalysts. Callimahos based his course on William Friedman's manual on Military Cryptanalysis. He revised and expanded Friedman's work into the new training manuals Military Cryptanalytics I and II and molded it into an extremely demanding course, unequaled in wide range of subjects and in dept.

The students rushed trough the Military Cryptanalytics manuals to continue with exercises in cryptanalysis of codes, ciphers, cipher machines and traffic analysis. While solving their crypto problems, they were assisted by aids who helped them to speed up their paper work. By doing so, Callimahos managed to reduce a most complex course from 12 to 4 month. Clearly not a course for wannabees that were still wet in the pants!

He composed many new examples and problems that the students had to solve. At the end of each course, the students had to solve the notorious Zendian Problem. The students received 375 encrypted military messages, intercepted from the fictional third world country Zendia. The messages were encrypted with various manual systems and cipher machines. Within two weeks, they had to break all exploitable message. It was the perfect opportunity to merge all their skills into one single fictional yet most difficult codebreaking operation. The exercise prepared them perfectly to tackle the real stuff.

The course was also the start of a tradition of gatherings for the graduates at a local restaurant. While making the reservation for a diner, Callimahos faced the problem that he could not disclose the real - secret - purpose of the group. He quickly devised the name Dundee Society by looking at a marmalade jar that served as a pencil holder at the CA-400 course. The Dundee Society was born! Since then, every graduate received a Dundee jar, which became a symbol of a truly extraordinary course for elite cryptanalysts. In 1977, Lambros Callimahos died much too soon, at the age of 66.

You can read the story of the Callimahos course (pdf) on the NSA website. More on the Cryptologic Almanac, as part 1 and part 2. In 2003, Callimahos was inducted in the NSA's Hall of Honor.

William Friedman's Military Cryptanalysis is available as part I, part II, Part III and Part IV (pdf's) at the NSA website.

KGB Operations in the U.S.

2010-12-04T14:09:00.021+01:00

The Soviet Committee for State Security KGB (Комитет Государственной Безопасности) ran numerous intelligence operations in foreign countries during the 20th century. Its First Chief Directorate PGU (Первое Главное Управление), responsible for foreign intelligence and espionage, stationed many agents, often under diplomatic cover, in embassies and trade mission all over the world, and also used illegal agents under false identities. The PGU's main target was of course the United States.

In 1991, the KGB was dissolved and divided into several different organisations. The most important parts are now know as the Russian Federal Security Service FSB (Федеральная служба безопасности), the Foreign Intelligence Service SVR (Служба Внешней Разведки) and the Federal Agency of Government Communications and Information FAPSI (Федеральное Агентство Правительственной Связи и Информации). Despite the reorganisation and new names, they still can't leave their old habits, as you can read in my post on the large SVR spy ring in the U.S.

There's an interesting 130 minutes documentary about KGB operations in the United States in the 20th century on Youtube. You can view the complete 1981 documentary (in black & White) here, or watch five separate parts (in color) via the links below the video.

See also part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5 (in color)

1983 - The Brink Of Apocalypse

2010-11-26T19:08:00.078+01:00

One of the most frightening episodes of the Cold War took place in November 1983. It was probably the closest we ever got to a full blown nuclear war between the Unites States and the Soviet Union, even closer than during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. And it all happened in total secrecy.

In 1983, tensions between Washington and Moscow rose to a dangerous level. The Soviet Union, who had always trailed the United States in the field of technology, finally closed the gap in military power by an immense increase of their nuclear arsenal to more than 11,000 warheads. Soviet leader Yuri Andropov, convinced that the U.S. would attack the USSR sooner or later, was determined to get a strategic advantage. He also initiated operation RYAN (Raketno-Yadernoe Napadenie or Nuclar Missile Attack), a worldwide hunt for information that would indicate an imminent first strike by the United States.

U.S. President Ronald Reagan on the other hand wanted to regain superiority by taking a technological lead. The U.S. also tried to provoke enormous defense expenditures by the USSR to bring them on the verge of bankruptcy. In March 1983, Reagan presented his Strategic Defense Initiative or SDI, also referred to as the Star Wars program. SDI would, once developed and in place, neutralize any Soviet missile that was launched towards the United States. This would render the Soviet strategic arsenal ineffective. Reagan also decided to deploy Pershing II nuclear missiles all across Europe, at the doorstep of the USSR. It was a game of poker with high stakes and it caused a very rapid deterioration of relations between the two powers. In a provocative speech, Reagan called the USSR an Evil Empire.

Two events were the catalyst of a catastrophic chain of events. The first one occurred on September 1, when Korean Air Lines flight 007 deviated from its assigned route and accidentally strayed into Soviet airspace. Soviet Command, convinced that the Boeing 747 was a spy plane, sent four Sukoi and MiG interceptors. Indeed, USSR air space was frequently violated by USAF airplanes that gathered technical intelligence, and the airliner flew over Soviet military installations in the Kuril Islands. The SU-15's were ordered to shoot down the plane. All 269 civilian passengers and crew aboard were killed. The Western world was outraged and condemned the Soviets.

The second event occurred on the night of September 26. Inside a bunker of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces near Moscow, Lieutenant colonel Stanislav Petrov resumed his night shift. His bunker was part of an early warning system with satellites, to detect incoming U.S. Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. Suddenly, their computers detected a missile launch and minutes later gave a missile attack alarm. Eventually, the system reported five missiles. Indoctrinated that any U.S. nuclear strike would be massive, Petrov distrusted the computer reports and ignored the alarm. He could not believe that they would only launch five missiles. He was right and it proved to be a life saving decision. The event was kept secret but the flawed early warning system showed the vulnerability of the Soviets and made them even more nervous.

The seeds for a dangerous chain of events were sown. Then, on November 2, NATO started a large command post exercise, codenamed Able Archer. The exercise was a simulation of a conflict that culminated in a nuclear war. There were no real troop movements involved. It was a communications only exercise with signals troops all across Western Europe, sending coded messages, and lead from a NATO nuclear bunker in Belgium. The scenario included a gradually escalating situation, with communications between heads of states, periods of total radio silence and eventually a DEFCON1 alert, indicating an imminent nuclear attack.

Russian forces intercepted the communications and were puzzled. Their traffic analysis told them there was a huge event going on. NATO used the words Exercise Exercise Exercise on each of their messages. However, after the events one month earlier, the Soviets were convinced that any attack by NATO would start under the disguise of an exercise. The encrypted communications and unexplained radio blackouts (simply pauses in the war game) added to the paranoia of the Russians. Moreover, Soviet intelligence officers abroad were expected to report signs of an imminent attack. Reports that stated otherwise were unacceptable for the KGB leaders and the Kremlin. So the agents, in good KGB bureaucratic tradition, reported non-existing signs.

By November 7, according to the exercise scenario, NATO forces failed to counter a chemical attack and preparations were made to initiate a large nuclear strike. Alarmed by the increased coded communications between NATO countries, the U.K. and the United States, the Soviet Army and Air force initiated a massive war-time deployment of troops in Eastern Europe and their nuclear arsenal was prepared for launch, thumbs ready on the buttons! Their Northern Fleet steamed to the Baltic and nuclear missile submarines disappeared under the sea surface.

On the eve of November 8, NATO command decided to start the nuclear attack. They pushed the big red button, exercise Able Archer was finished and everyone went home. Total silence in the aether. Little were they aware that Soviet command expected the attack to come on a holiday, when the Russians were off-guard, and November 7 was Revolution Day in Russia. When Able Archer ended, all went deadly quiet and the Soviets were ready to counter the attack or initiate a preemptive attack. Fortunately, they kept their nerves together, waited and... nothing happened.

When President Reagan was informed afterwards by intelligence and spies about how scared the Soviets really were, and how U.S. intelligence failed to notice how close they were to a nuclear war, he was shocked and decided to drastically change the relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. He soon started talks with the new Soviet leader, Michail Gorbatsjov. It was the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Being stationed in West Germany, from early 1983 onwards for many years, I'm glad that lessons were learned from that frigtning event. It could have been my and everyone else's last year.

There's a very good and gripping documentary about those extraordinary events in 1983 on the Internet. You can watch the full 74 minutes documentary 1983 - The Brink Of Apocalypse (8 parts) on Youtube (see below, at the end of each part there's a link to the next part). There is an excellent paper on the Wilson Center Cold War Project about Operation RYAN and Able Archer (pdf) and the CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence published a piece on the 1983 Soviet War Scare. Good reading stuff! For an idea of how a nuclear war looks like, watch The Day After (1983), the movie that scared Ronald Reagan like hell. I can recommend General John Hacket's book The Third World War, August 1985 (see Amazon) about how a war in Europe would look like if they bring tactical nukes on the war theatre. It's a fictionalized but very accurate scenario.

More information on how the Soviets perceived the U.S. nuclear threat is found on my previous blog on U.S. Strategic Intelligence on the USSR. Read also 3 Seconds from Word War 3. On my Silent Warriors blog you can ready about the risks of U.S. spy missions above the USSR.

U.S. Spy Ring betrayed by Defecting SVR Colonel

2010-11-12T11:16:00.039+01:00

The sensational case of the ten illegal Russian agents (see previous blog) gets yet another intriguing twist. According to investigative journalists of the Russian newspaper Kommersant, SVR (Russian Foreign Intelligence) Colonel Aleksandr Vasilyevich Shcherbakov blew the cover of the spy ring, before defecting to the United States. It is questioned whether Vasilyevich is the real name of the defector.

Update November 19: Russian intelligence sources (see links below) named Colonel Alexander Poteyev as the double agent who betrayed the spy ring. Poteyev was reportedly deputy director of the SVR's Directorat S that controls the illegal agents in the United States. He is a former KGB ‘Zenith’ Special Forces member who served in Afghanistan. In the 1990's, he was operating undercover in New York where he was recruited by the CIA in return for a financial settlement.

Meanwhile, Russia's Intelligence Services remain silent and the U.S. State Department has no comment. The Kommersant source said that Poteyev is nothing more than a traitor: "We know who he is and how he did it. Money was his only incentive. Make no mistake, we already send a Mercader after him." (ref. Ramon Mercader was the KGB assassin who killed Leon Trotski). According to a Kremlin source, Poteyev's fate is more than unenviable, as he will live in fear for the rest of his life.

Officially, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies busted the spy ring after a many years investigation. As it turns out now, Colonel Poteyev, who worked at the Illegals department, betrayed SVR General Michael Vasenkov (A.K.A. Juan Lazaro), one of the illegal agents in the U.S. spy ring. This started the avalanche of arrests, leading to the expulsion of the ten illegal agents, the biggest spy scandal since the end of the Cold War.

Michael Vasenkov (photo right) started his intelligence career in the 1960's when the KGB's First Chief Directorate PGU (Foreign Intelligence) sent him to Spain. In the 1970's, during a tour in South-America, he obtained Peruvian citizenship as Juan Lazaro, by using a Uruguayan birth certificate of a 1947 deceased boy. In the 1980's, he married the Peruvian journalist Vicky Pealez (one of the also expelled spy ring members) and moved to the United States. This was the start of an impressive deep cover carrier.

Vasenkov assimilated perfectly. He earned a degree in political science and he cultivated highly placed friends among left wing Democrats. He apparently provided the Soviet Union with invaluable information. In the 1980's he received the Hero of the Soviet Union distinction, the highest possible Soviet award, and was recently promoted to General.

After Poteyev's tip-off, Vasenkov was arrested but insisted during the interrogations that his arrest was a mistake. His cover was so perfect that U.S. intelligence had no evidence against this respected 65 year old family man. Many influential American friends and relatives, who had no idea of the truth, backed up his fake identity. He kept denying until Poteyev provided a folder with documents that identified Lazaro as SVR operative Michael Vasenkov. According to Gennady Gudkov, member of the Committee on National Security, "there is indirect evidence that Poteyev was recruited by the Americans several years ago and, thus, he was able to prepare his escape, taking files of our agents and even information he might have obtained from other departments".

It is now clear that both Russia and the United States downplayed the espionage case and resolved it with a swift spy exchange to preserve the reset in relations between the two countries. An unprecedented investigation is now initiated by Russia's law enforcement, including Russia's Federal Intelligence Agency FSB, to find out why Poteyev betrayed the 10 agents and how Russia's intelligence failed to notice the betrayal and could not prevent his defection. Especially the fact that he betrayed a highly respected deep cover agent fell very bad within the intelligence services.

The SVR had no idea and never suspected Colonel Poteyev, not even after he refused a promotion to an even more sensitive post, possibly to evade the required thorough background check a lie detector test. This occured one year before the fall of the spy ring. Poteyev's daughter already lived in the United States and his son, an officer in the federal drug enforcement service Gosnarkokontrol, left Russia for the United States shortly before the spy ring was uncovered. No one within the SVR questioned his behaviour. Poteyev fled to the United States only three days before President Medvedev's visit to the United States. The FBI arrested the illegals soon after Medvedev's return to Moscow.

This again puts the pressure on Mikhail Fradkov, head of the SVR. The embarrassing case fuels the criticism on the segregation of the SVR after the radical reform of the intelligence services in 1991, and supports the proponents of reorganising the SVR back under control of one large intelligence agency, just as the First Chief Directorate was a part of the KGB during the Soviet era.

Meanwhile, Russian President Medvedev said that there was nothing new to the case and that he knew the details about the betrayal from the very start. Indeed, last July, Prime Minister Putin stated during an interview that it was a sell-out and they knew the traitors by name. The ten spies had a tough job and their arrests were not caused by their own mistakes. According to Medvedev's press secretary, the SVR agents received state awards during a Kremlin ceremony last month. As I predicted in my July blog... again, case all but closed.

More about this story on the Russian Коммерсантъ news paper (translation). More about Alexander Poteyev at Interfax Moscow (translation). The case is also followed closely by CI Centre. More details about the spy ring on my blogs Large SVR Spy Ring Arrested in the U.S. and U.S. - Russian Spy Exchange.

Update November 3, 2011: The FBI release a large number of documents, photos and videos from operation Ghost stories, the investigation and arrests of the ten illegal SVR agents. All information is released through the FBI records webpage The Vault.

More video news from Moscow on this case below and at Russia Today Youtube. As an end note, a more than entertaining view on the 'Mercader' treatment by Bazzel Baz on MNSBC

Code Book Collection

2010-11-05T16:10:00.007+01:00

Nick Gessler just published a beautiful collection of old military and civilian code books. He scanned all pages of each book and made them available as pdf files on his website.

The code books are dated between 1878 and 1947. There are several military field codes, Artillery codes, a 1941 Air-Ground Liaison code, but also civilian code books: Telegraph codes, railway codes, cotton trade codes and various merchant and phrase code books, Larabee cipher codes, an Imperial Combination Code, Inter-State cipher and pocket code books.

These are all code books in the true sense of the word code in cryptography: large substitution tables to convert words and phrases into letter groups or digits. Today, such code books would not stand a change against cryptanalysis. However, in the early days of communications they did provide some security and had another important benefit: they could reduced the length of a message considerably. In the 1800's and early 1900's, the often commercial electric telegraph (land lines) were virtually the only way to communicate over long-distance. Reducing the message length was a plus if a telegram was payed per word or per character.

Visit Nick's great Code Book collection and don't forget to check out his main page also, the Cryptology & Steganography Collections with many images of crypto hardware. Most of his code books are also available on the Internet Archive.

Mysterious Cold War Signals

2010-10-19T18:36:00.061+02:00

An important part of the Cold War was fought in the aether. All sorts of radio signals, communications in voice, Morse or in data, radar and navigation signals were transmitted and intercepted by East and West. A shortwave receiver with a good antenna was, and still is, all you need to discover innumerable signals. Of course, these signals also caught the attention of both Intelligence organisations and civilian radio amateurs.

TechELINT (Technical Electronic Intelligence), the interception and analysis of signals from weapons systems, navigation and radar systems, were an important part of the Cold War, and still are an indispensable part of modern intelligence gathering and warfare. What system is a signal originating from, what does it tell about the opponent's equipment and its performance, and how can we take countermeasures? Advances in electronics for communications and weapons systems constantly fueled a race between those who developed various types of transmitters and those who wanted to intercept and analyse these signals.

Often, the secrets behind the signals were revealed, either by TechELINT or espionage. However, some signals remained unidentified and some of them even rose to the stardom of mysterious Cold War signals. There was much speculation about the purpose of these signals, some of which broadcast continuously for decades. Possible explanations were occupying certain frequencies to have them available in case of a crisis or war, beacons, or even the notorious so-called Dead Hand, an autonomous launch system for nuclear missiles that supposedly would be activated if the mysterious signals were interrupted because of the elimination of Soviet military command. Scary scenarios! Nothing more than speculations.

One of these mysterious signals was nicknamed the Russian Woodpecker, because of its characteristic repetitive tapping noise. The Woodpecker's annoying high-power signal (an estimated 10 Megawatt) switched between different shortwave frequencies and disrupted legitimate utility and amateur broadcasts all over the world. The broadcast started in 1976 and continued for 10 years. For decades, its purpose remained unknown to the general public.

After the fall of the Soviet Union it was confirmed that the strange signal originated from an over-the-horizon (OTH) radar as part of the Soviet Anti Ballistic Missile early warning system. The Soviet Duga-3 OTH system is located in Chernobyl (now Ukraine). The transmitter site was called Chernobyl-2. The system was codenamed Steel Yard by Western military intelligence, who apparently managed to photograph the transmitter site during the Cold War (image: view from on top of the gigantic Duga-3 antenna).

Normal radar works line-of-sight, the curvature of the Earth therefore limiting its range to a few hundred kilometers. This was insufficient to provide early warning in case of an attack against the Soviet Union with ICBM's (Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles). OTH radars transmit very powerful signals towards the ionosphere. The ionosphere reflects these signals over very long distances towards the ground. A very small portion is reflected back to the atmosphere and received by the OTH station. Moving objects like ICBM's create a small frequency shift (Doppler effect) in the reflected signals. It requires complex filtering to extract the very weak shifted signals from the backscatter, and its accuracy and resolution are low, but the system works perfectly for a raw early warning.

Noteworthy is that the Duga-3 site is located only 6 miles (10 Km) from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. According to Vladimir Musiyets, former Commander of the Chernobyl-2, the installation was damaged during the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and never became operational again. The site now lays within the 18 miles (30 Km) Chernobyl exclusion zone. Some sources state that the Woodpecker continued broadcasting until 1989. These possibly refer to two other OTH sites.

Another famous mysterious Soviet signal is known under its call-sign UVB-76. The station, nicknamed The Buzzer, started in 1982 with a two-seconds beep tone and switched after a decade of operation to a monotonous 25 buzz tones per minute, every single day, until 2010. The station was extensively observed by radio amateurs (without doubt an equally monotonous job) and only a handful of voice conversations were recorded in its 28 years of operation. Its call-sign UVB-76 was revealed during one of its rare voice conversations. The purpose of The Buzzer remains unknown until today. UVB-76 stopped broadcasting in August 2010 and remains silent since then. The transmitter site is located near Povarovo, 25 miles (40 Km) north-west of Moscow, and now appears abandoned.

Another true Cold War icon are the notorious Numbers stations. The stations broadcast streams of numbers or letters in voice or Morse and are used by intelligence agencies to communicate with their agents, operating abroad. Although the Cold War officially ended, there are still many active numbers stations and new keep popping up! I previously wrote several posts on these spy stations. This weblog query will show them all.

More information on the Soviet Duga-3 OTH system is found on Global Security and Wikipedia. Photo's of the so-called Chernobyl-2 site with its huge antenna's (inside the nuclear exclusion zone) are now available on English Russia (see 14th photo with people below, to get an idea of the immense size of the antenna: each dipole cone is larger in diameter than a person!), Lost Places (hit "next" at the end of the pages) and Egorka's gallery. There's a nice video on YouTube of two guys climbing the OTH antenna (see below). If you enter 51°18′19.06″N 30°03′57.35″E in the Google Earth Fly To box, and use the 3D Buildings option, you get a good view of the enormous OTH antenna.

More on the UVB-76 Buzzer at Wikipedia. Photo's of the - abandoned - alleged UVB-76 Buzzer site are published on English Russia. More about ELINT on this previous blog post and details on the real Soviet Dead Hand missile launch system on this previous blog.

To end with a more "cheerful" note, here are some other video's of the quiet surroundings of the Woodpecker: Chernobyl's reactor No 4 with another kind of signal: radiation meter alarm. Talking about scary signals!

Former Stasi Cryptologists work for NATO

2010-09-27T21:30:00.050+02:00

Archives from the former East-German Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS), better known as the Stasi, have already shown the excellent skills of their SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) department HA III. Little was known about what happened with all those most capable experts after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the former German Democratic Republic...until now.

The German magazine Der Spiegel now revealed that cryptologists from the former East-German central cipher bureau ZCO (Zentralen Chiffrierorgan), were secretly recruited by the German Federal Office for Information Security BSI (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik ). They are now employed at Rohde & Schwarz SIT GmbH, a front company for the secret recruiting operation and a subsidiary of the renowned German communications and security firm Rohde & Schwarz.

The Stasi cryptologists had already proved very successful in both making and breaking codes during the Cold War era. They managed to break several encryption systems, including the secure communications of the West-German Foreign Intelligence Agency BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst). The last thing the German government wanted, after the dissolving of East-Germany in 1990, was the exodus of Stasi crypto expertise to other countries. The defection of these cryptologists and a compromise of Western encryption technology to rogue states would be a nightmare. It was decided to recruit them, whatever it takes.

Rohde & Schwarz SIT became both a surreptitious employment pool for former Stasi crypto experts and a most successful subsidiary of Rohde & Schwarz, in both commercial and security point of view. SIT took over Siemens' cryptology division and employs many of Germany's top mathematicians. They are specialised in Information and Communications Security, offer encryption for numerous analog and digital systems, and are currently an important supplier of high security crypto equipment for NATO (image above: Rohde & Schwarz Elcrodat 4-2 voice and data encryption).

Or how a former enemy of NATO (and partner of the Soviets) became a vital part of NATO's communications security. At the end, the secret operation prevented critical crypto expertise to go awalk and provided experienced mathematicians for BSI's crypto bureau. A win-win situation.

Let's just hope that none of these Stasi cryptologists are still serving their old mentor, the former KGB 8th Main Directorat Communications and Cryptography (now absorbed by Russia's SIGINT agency FAPSI). I'm sure the German Federal Intelligence BfV (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz) has them all checked thoroughly. Nevertheless, recruiting old enemies is a hazardous undertaking (see Heinz Felfe), and far-sighted Russian Intelligence has a splendid record in long-term planning regarding former Soviet states (see also Hermann Simm).

The full story, in English, can be read on the website of Der Spiegel. Do also visit the Rohde & Schwarz SIT GmbH website. On the splendid SAS- und Chiffrierdienst website you will find more information about the East-German Zentralen Chiffrierorgan (ZCO), and plenty of info and images of Stasi encryption equipment (click its "Technik" link at the lower left). More about the Stasi SIGINT capabilities on this previous blog, and more on Russia's FAPSI (today's counterpart/sister agency of the former ZCO) on this previous blog.

Operation Ivy Bells

2010-09-12T14:40:00.023+02:00

Both the United States and the former Soviet Union ran numerous aggressive Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) operations against each other during the Cold War era. A most spectacular one was operation Ivy Bells, a top secret joint operation between the US Navy, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA). Ivy Bells enables the eavesdropping on high level communications of the Soviet Pacific Fleet.

Communications cables were, and still are, an interesting target for intelligence agencies. The 1953 Berlin Tunnel operation is a well known example of the tapping of a land cable. Especially in the pre-satellite era, undersea cables were the only method of high-volume communications between continents or islands. In the early 1970's, the US discovered the existence of such an undersea cable in the Sea of Okhotsk, in the north-east of the Soviet Union.

The cable connected the Soviet naval submarine base in Kamchatsky, north-east of the Kuril Islands, with Vladivostok Fleet headquarters in the south-west. Both bases played an important role in the Soviet Pacific Fleet communications. Although a very attractive intelligence target, the Sea of Okhotsk was Soviet territorial waters, forbidden for foreign ships and heavily protected. The Soviets also carried out many surface and subsurface naval exercises in these waters. An attractive target but far from friendly enviroment.

Despite the high risks to a SIGINT operation in that area, US intelligence could not pass this opportunity and started a most complex top secret operation to tap into the Okhotsk cable. In October 1971, the nuclear submarine USS Halibut (SSGN-587) entered the Sea of Okhotsk in search of the cable. Saturation divers with special rebreather equipment eventually found the cable at a depth of 400 feet (120 m) and installed a 3 feet (1 m) long tapping device, which was wrapped around the cable to register the signals by induction. This avoided the need for piercing trough the cable.

The signals were recorded on tapes that were recovered on a regular basis. To its surprise, NSA discovered that the Soviets felt so confident about the security of the undersea cable that the majority of the communications were unencrypted. Needles to say that the gained intelligence was invaluable. Due to its success, Bell Laboratories was asked to develop a new tapping device that could capture more lines simultaneously from the cable and could record for several months.

The new ingenious tap, which was installed the next year, measured 20 feet (6 m), weighed 6 tons and had a nuclear electrical power source. Each month, the USS Halibut divers retrieved the recording tapes and installed new ones. Back in the US, the tapes were analysed by the NSA and processed for further use in the intelligence community. It proved to be a spectacular intelligence coup. The tapes provided a front seat view on Soviet naval operations.

The 20 feet 6 tons tapping device for the Soviet cable in the Sea of Okhotsk

Operation Ivy Bells's success lead to further operations to install more advanced tapping devices onto other Soviet undersea cables across the world. Several other submarines were brought into the operation to install taps and retrieve recordings. The operation lasted for a decade, until surveillance satellites showed several Soviet war ships on top of the Okhotsk tap. A US submarine later discovered that the tapping device had disappeared. As it turned out in 1985, the top secret operation was betrayed in 1981 by Ronald Pelton, a former NSA employee. Nonetheless, US intelligence retrieved an enormous quantity of military information during the ten years of tapping the undersea cables, giving them an important lead in the Cold War.

More about Operation Ivy Bells on Special Operations Com and on Everything2. On AboutSubs you'll find more on the heroic USS Halibut (SSGN-587) and there's a 1960 video on USS Halibut on New Zealand History. FAS published the interception capabilities 2000 report, which includes information on subsea cables and submarine cable interception. More about the Berlin Tunnel land-line tap on this previous post.

One-time encryption in Today's World

2010-09-09T15:06:00.053+02:00

One-time pad encryption is a most basic encryption algorithm where a truly random key is applied on the same amount of data. The nice thing about it is that this method, which was invented 93 years ago, is mathematically unbreakable. There's no way to crack it with current or future computer power, simply because it is mathematically impossible. Although this sounds impressive, there are some drawbacks. The key must be truly random, must be as long as the actual data that should be encrypted, and you can use a particular key only once. The consequence is a cumbersome key distribution with associated security problems.

Before we go any further, I must point out here that we're going to talk about modern one-time encryption applications, not the pencil-and-paper spy craft (see image). Neither is this article about small one-time passwords or one-time keys which are only valid for a single encryption session with some algorithm under control of that key, and certainly not about the many snake-oil applications that pretend to be unbreakable because they claim to be using one-time encryption, while they actually are not. Remember: key as long as the data, truly random and used only once. There's no way around these three conditions without messing up the unbreakable part (although many wrongly claim to have a solution)!

So, cumbersome key distribution...and that's where the mathematicians, or crypto-experts as you like, come in the play. In 1973, they invented asymmetric encryption which solves the problem of key distribution. Symmetric encryption requires the same key for encryption and decryption, and all people involved need a copy of that same key. With asymmetric public key cryptography however, you have key pairs that consist of a public key for encryption which you can share openly with everybody, and a private key for decryption that you keep secret. This solves the problem of key exchange. Since the invention of asymmetric key encryption, many crypto experts are buzzing around that it is the holy grail. Well...not quite.

Their system has nothing to do with the message security, only with the - unproven - key exchange security. Unfortunately, asymmetric encryption is not suitable for the encryption of large amounts of data. Hence, we only use it to encrypt a random key. Next, the actual data is encrypted with a traditional symmetric encryption algorithm, under control of that key. Finally, we send the complete package, encrypted key and encrypted data, to the recipient. Key distribution problem solved! What actually happened is that they took traditional symmetric algorithms, of which they are are not really sure whether they are secure (they are not, as they are deterministic), but hey, they found an easy/lazy way to exchange the keys for those traditional algorithms. Problem solved. Doooh!?

Bearing this in mind I just love David Boak's (NSA) magnificent quote: "the ‘approved’ systems have simply been shown to adequately resist whatever kinds of crypto-mathematical attacks we, with our finite resources and brains, have been able to think up. We are by no means certain that the [opponent] equivalent can do no better". This says alot, if not all.

How secure their asymmetric encryption might be, it doesn't change the fact that the actual data is encrypted with a traditional symmetric encryption algorithm and that's not a question of so-called insurmountable mathematical problems to crack asymmetric encryption, but a question of cryptanalysis of man-made algorithms, prone to weaknesses (not to mention mathematical shortcuts, back doors or bluntly faulty application). By the way, didn't Auguste Kerckhoffs and Claude Shannon learned us that, if we don't know how to break it, it isn't unbreakable, and any system that reduces a large secret (the data) to a smaller secret (a key) is deterministic and will never be unbreakable,

What happened is that, by focusing on the practical advantages of asymmetric key encryption and welcoming its large scale application and commercialisation, many mathematicians lost track of what really matters: message security. They say that one-time encryption is rendered superfluous in the era of asymmetric encryption. Just because it's less practical? By saying this, they actually prove themselves wrong, as the one has nothing to do with the other. They solved the key distribution problem and not the message security problem.

One time encryption, on the other hand, solves the message security perfectly (isn't that what we really need) but has a nasty key distribution issue. It would have been nice if those wizz kids solved that one! Well, maybe they did, but just don't tell us...but I doubt that. Cryptography is always a balancing between effort (comfort), costs and security. You can favor one of those - a bit - to the prejudice of the others, for a particular situation, but you can't say that comfort is better than security, and should never nibble on security in favor of comfort, when security is important.

Modern crypto algorithms provide reasonable but practical security and privacy, essential to our economy and everyday life. Sure, it made our lives easier and how else could we do all those things like buying on the Internet, using credit cards on-line, and many other things. But let us be serious, the combination of traditional encryption algorithms and asymmetric key algorithms provides nothing more or less than 'reasonable' security, and it will never provide real security or long term security.

But what is worse, is that the general public has become blinded by today's easy encryption systems and their commercial success. They don't realize that real privacy and security comes with a price called "effort & discipline", not to be confused and - unfortunately - incompatible with "easy-to-use". This might not be essential to the average man in the street, but it does matter if we talk about a company's production secrets, trade secrets or political activism, to name a few.

Some experts argue that the distribution of large quantities of keys, inherent to one-time encryption, is impractical. However, today’s electronics are capable of generating large numbers of truly random keys, and current one-time encryption software can process large quantities of data at high speed. Current data storage technology such as USB sticks, DVD’s, external hard disks or solid-state drives enable the physically transport of enormous quantities of truly random keys.

Actual sensitive communications are often limited to a small number of users. In such cases, one-on-one communications with the associated key distribution, possibly in configuration with a star topology to connect multiple users, is no longer really a practical problem, especially considering the security benefits (this quote will not be popular with cryptologists, but it is true).

By using a co-called sneakernet (transferring data on removable media by physically couriering), you can reach a throughput (amount of data per unit time) of one-time key material that is greater than what a network can process on data that must be encrypted. In other words, it could take a few hours to get a terabyte of key material, stored on an external drive, by car to someone, but it will take days or even weeks to consume that amount of keys on a broadband network.

A terabyte sized key can easily encrypt you e-mail traffic for a year, including attachments (you just try to send or receive a terabyte of data, most Internet providers won’t even offer such amount of traffic). Therefore, if security is preferred above practical key distribution, and physical key exchange is possible beforehand, then one-time pad is the right choice. Some commercial firms offer such one-time encryption solutions, mostly to government and defense agencies, and for good reasons.

Conclusion: yes, public key algorithms are useful and have earned their place in the market of reasonably secure large scale communications, and yes, one time encryption will stay the preferred solution when unconditional security is required. Stop comparing apples and oranges, we need both! And for anyone who states that one-time encryption is history, I have one advice: provide the actual mathematical proof that your asymmetric system and accompanied symmetric algorithm are safe, today and tomorrow (I can with one-time encryption). Bring it on, Bruce!

I wrote a paper called Is One-time Pad History, about one-time encryption and the illusions of modern computer cryptography. More about the history of one-time pad on my website. On Mils Electronic, a key technology company, there's more about one-time encryption (pdf) and secure message exchange (pdf).

Holiday Reading Stuff

2010-08-06T18:00:00.004+02:00

We're half-way trough the holidays, and while some of us will surely have an exciting and adventurous vacation, some others will have to obey their wife's request for a lazy baking-brown-vacation on some remote club hotel swimming pool.

For those unfortunate ones who don't have any idea on how to survive those long hours at the pool, I selected a list of excellent previously posted papers. Behind each paper there's a [i] link to additional information. I suggest to print them out - leave your laptop at home - and put them in your luggage. All files are downloadable by right-clicking and selecting "Save Target As..." You'll have many hours of reading fun, instead of boring things like observing other husbands wives in bikini.

1. USSR General Col. Danelevich Interview [i]
2. Cuban Agent Communications [i]
3. Assessment Aldrich Ames case [i]
4. The Berlin Tunnel Operation [i]
5. Ana Belen Montes Affidavit [i]
6. East German SIGINT Operations [i]
7. Anna Chapman and Mikhail Semenko complaint [i]
8. David Boak's COMSEC Lecture [i]
9. Analysis John Walker Case [i]
10.Report on the First Nuclear Explosion [i]

I also compiled a zip with several interviews and reports on major espionage cases, which is available on simple request by e-mail (don't forget to add your e-mail address).

And if you take your MP3 player with you on vacation, here's a great BBC4 Radio program on Numbers Stations. Recent espionage cases like the SVR spy ring in the US, the Kendall Myers, Carlos Alvarez or Ana Belen Montes cases have shown that the era of these Cold War spy stations is far from over.

A tip: although all these documents are declassified, some airport customs might experience an anafylactic shock while viewing them. If you do want to cross a border, put the papers in your wife's luggage and deny everything. Burn after reading (the papers, not the wife)!

The Farewell Dossier

2010-07-24T18:00:00.023+02:00

Farewell is a recent Cold War espionage movie, based on the actual case of Vladimir Vetrov, an engineer who worked at the KGB's Directorate T. The 2009 movie was shown at several film festivals and is recently released.

The real story of Farewell begins at the end of the 1960's, when Soviet R&D in the field of electronics and computers trailed the West by a decade. In 1970, a new organisation, called Directorate T, was established within the KGB to start an aggressive intelligence collection of Western science and technology. Line X was it's operational section with many KGB and GRU officers covertly operating in foreign Rezidentura across the world.

The Line X operations were most successful and produced thousands of high quality R&D documents that could enable the Soviets to close the gap with the West, if it wasn't for their inability to organise the required corresponding industry and economy. Nevertheless, Line X provided crucial information that enabled the development and copying of Western technology on a large scale. It saved them billions of Russian Ruble.

In 1981, French President Mitterand personally informed US President Ronald Reagan that the French intelligence service DST had a source within Directorate T. KGB Colonel Vladimir Vetrov (photo right), codenamed Farewell, was stationed as Line X officer in France during the 1960's and supervised later on in Moscow the evaluation of all intelligence, collected by Line X. He revealed the names of more than 200 Line X officers, many of their recruited agents, and provided information about the Line X targets. Although Western intelligence suspected the Soviet collection of R&D, they were astonished by its size and success.

Farewell initiated one of the most important deception operations of the Cold War. Instead of dismantling the Line X operations, US intelligence decided to feed Line X with false information that appeared genuine but would fail later on, when actually applied. Knowing exactly what Line X was looking for, the CIA and FBI supplied the KGB with all kinds of flawed technology. A remarkable aspect of the operation was that, if discovered by the Soviets, it would still be a success, as the Soviets would be suspicious about anything that was collected by its Line X officers.

Farewell enabled the US to keep ahead of Soviet military technology, economics and industry, and played an important role in the aggressive US arms build-up to lure the Soviets into keeping pace with the American military industry. The Soviet efforts to close that gap eventually lead to the bankruptcy and collapse of the Soviet Union. Reagan called Farewell one of the most important espionage cases of the 20Th century. You can read the full story on the Farewell Dossier on the CIA's Studies in Intelligence. The Mitrokhin Archive (see my book reviews) also contains information on Soviet science and technology espionage, the Farewell case and on Vetrov.

In the movie, Colonel Vetrov's name is changed into Grigoriev. As for the rest of the story, any resemblance with real persons and events is not a coincidence. You can watch the Farewell Movie trailer (HD) at Youtube or here below. More about the movie and user revies at the Internet Movie Data Base. Don't read the spoilers! Farewell is not a flashy action movie but one in the genre of the brilliant The Lives of Others (see its trailer, and make sure to get the original and subtitled version) or The Russia House, about ordinairy people who get involved in espionage and how it profoundly changes their lives. Movies that leave you speechless after seeing them.

KP4EU Enigma Video

2010-07-20T20:01:00.013+02:00

Angel Saavedra (KP4EU) from Puerto Rico, one of the Enigma Challenge competitors, compiled a most beautiful video about the Enigma machine. The video is a tribute to the famous cipher machine and it even shows my Enigma software. The radio Hams among us should take a pencil and paper as there's also a Morse message to copy. The message is Angel's way to say thanks for my Enigma Challenge and the Enigma simulator. Muchas gracias, Angel!

U.S. - Russian Spy Exchange

2010-07-09T16:13:00.070+02:00

On July 9, 2010, the sensational case of the 10 Russian illegal agents, arrested in the United States, has come to an end with the largest spy exchange since the end of the Cold War.

During the July 8 Southern District of New York court hearings they all pleaded guilty to conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government. Under the plea agreements, they had to disclose their real identities, all their assets were confiscated and they were expelled immediately from the United States. They are transferred to the Russia. In exchange, Russia agreed to release four individuals that were jailed for their alleged contact with Western intelligence services. This solution to the spy case was arranged after extensive negotiations between the U.S. and Russia to avoid any tensions in relations between the two countries.

Andrey Bezrukov (a.k.a. Donald Howard Heathfield) and Elena Vavilova (a.k.a. Tracey Lee Ann Foley), the couple with two sons age 16 and 20, Mikhail Anatonoljevich (a.k.a. Juan Lazaro) and Peruvian born Vicky Pelaez who have a son together, Vladimir Guryev (a.k.a. Richard Murphy) and Lydia Guryev (a.k.a. Cynthia Murphy) who have two daughters age 9 and 11, Mikhail Kutsik (a.k.a. Michael Zottoli) and Natalia Pereverzeva (a.k.a. Patricia Mills), Mikhail Semenko (who operated under his real name) and Anya Kushchenko (a.k.a. Anna Chapman) were all deported by airplane on July 9. Christopher Metsos, whose real name remains unknown, disappeared in Cyprus after being bailed. The spy exchange took place at the tarmac of the Vienna's Schwechat airport in Austria, with the Russian and U.S. airplanes next to each other (photo AP).

Another airplane, coming from Moscow, carried the four men who were released by the Russian Federation. They are all Russian citizens who allegedly cooperated with intelligence services in the West: Igor Sutyagin, a Russian arms control and nuclear weapons specialist was sentenced to 15 years in 2004 for passing information on nuclear submarines and other weapons systems to a British firm that, according to Russia, was a CIA cover. Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military intelligence colonel was serving a 13 years sentence since 2006 for passing the names of dozens of Russian agents to the British Foreign Intelligence Service MI6. Alexander Zaporozhsky, a former colonel in the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service SVR (Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki) was convicted for passing information on Russian agents that operated in the US. He served an 18 years sentence since 2001. The last one is Gennady Vasilenko. His background is unclear but he appears to be a former KGB officer who had contact with the CIA. He was arrested in 2005, while working as security officer at NTV television, and charged with illegal possession of arms and resistance to arrest. Apparently, he was not convicted for espionage.

After the exchange, the Russian airplane returned to Moscow’s Domodedovo airport with the 10 expelled SVR agents. The other airplane flew from Vienna to the RAF base in Brize Norton, United Kingdom, to drop off Igor Sutyagin and Sergei Skripal, and then continued to Washington Dulles International with Andrey Bezrukov and Alexander Zaporozhsky. The exchanged spies will surely undergo extensive debriefing in Russia, the UK and the United States.

The big spy swap was announced officially by a US Department of Justice statement. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder stated that "this was an extraordinary case, developed through years of work by investigators, intelligence lawyers, and prosecutors, and the agreement we reached today provides a successful resolution for the United States and its interests."

More details and court documents are found in my blog on the Russian Spy Ring in the United States. As part of the plea agreement the 10 agents are not allowed to release any information on the spy case in the media, although this is stuff for many books and movies. Nevertheless, we will undoubtedly learn more details later on. The investigation and the extensive surveillance took 10 years and not all of the results were disclosed in court. Who were their contacts? Did they recruit people? Are U.S. citizens involved? Case not closed...

Update November 12, 2010: Case obviously not closed. Four months after uncovering this spy ring, the true reason of its failiure surfaces: the 10 agents were betrayed from the inside. More to read in U.S. Spy Ring betrayed by Defecting SVR Colonel.

Update: on a more frivolous note, Anya Kushchenko (a.k.a. Chapman) has some difficulty to keep herself out of the media, as seen on English Russia. Well, it's hard to live up to you Bond-girl status.

Update November 3, 2011: The FBI release a large number of documents, photos and videos from operation Ghost stories, the investigation and arrests of the ten illegal SVR agents. All information is released through the FBI records webpage The Vault.

Peace Ambassador During the Cold War

2010-07-08T18:28:00.022+02:00

The story of Samantha Reed Smith is both amazing and tragic. She became a symbol of hope and friendship during the Cold War era and she managed to obtain an answer about the nuclear threat, straight from the ultimate source within the Kremlin. Few realised back then that what she learned from her source was a correct view on Soviet strategic intentions, a view that was recently backed-up by declassified interviews with Soviet policy makers and high ranked Soviet military. An achievement even the CIA could not match. The amazing thing about her is that she was only 10 years old and her source was Soviet President Yuri Andropov.

The early 1980's brought a new rise in tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States. After years of so-called détente, a new build-up of strategic nuclear weapons started in both East and West. In November 1982, ten year old American Samantha Smith took the bold decision to write a letter to the newly appointed Soviet leader Yuri Andropov. Driven by the fear for a global war, she wanted to ask Yuri Andropov whether he had peaceful intentions or that he wanted war, as some media wrote. Here's her actual letter to the Soviet Leader:

"Dear Mr. Andropov,

My name is Samantha Smith. I am ten years old. Congratulations on your new job. I have been worrying about Russia and the United States getting into a nuclear war. Are you going to vote to have a war or not? If you aren't please tell me how you are going to help to not have a war. This question you do not have to answer, but I would like to know why you want to conquer the world or at least our country. God made the world for us to live together in peace and not to fight.

Sincerely,

Samantha Smith "

The Soviet newspaper Pravda published her letter but she did not receive any reply. Therefore, she wrote to Soviet Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Dobrynin, asking him whether Andropov would answer or not. And he did! On April 26, 1983, she received a response from President Yuri Andropov himself, in which he explained that the people of the Soviet Union wanted to live in peace and would never ever be the first to use nuclear weapons or start a new World War. He also invited her to visit the USSR, meet children of her own age and visit an international children's camp. She attracted massive media attention in the USSR and the US, and she became known as America's youngest ambassador.

On July 7, 1983, Samantha flew to Moscow with her parents. During the two week trip, she visited Moscow and Leningrad, and went to the Artek pioneer camp. She was struck by the friendliness of the people and told on a Moscow press conference that the Russians were "just like us". Five months later, she visited Japan as child goodwill ambassador. Others followed in her footsteps, including eleven year old Katya Lycheva from the Soviet Union, who visited the United States. Samantha also became a media celebrity, hosted a special on Disney Channel, wrote the book "Journey to the Soviet Union", interviewed politicians and co-starred with Robert Wagner in the television series "Lime Street".

Two years later, on August 25, 1985, tragedy struck when Samantha Smith and her father died in a plane crash. Their small Beechcraft 99 crashed just before landing, killing all six passengers and two crew on board. She was mourned by millions of people at home and in the Soviet Union. Vladimir Kulagin from the Soviet Embassy, who attended the funeral, read a personal message of condolence from Mikhail Gorbachev, and President Reagan sent his condolences in writing to her mother. The Soviet Union issued a commemorative stamp, built a monument in Moscow and even named an asteroid to her. Manchester, her hometown in Main, honored her with a statue and the first Monday in June of each year is officially named "Samantha Smith Day" in Maine. In 1985, Samantha's mother also founded the Samantha Smith Foundation, which fostered student exchanges between the the US and the USSR.

"When Samantha Smith was killed in a plane crash, millions of people all over the world grieved as if for their own child. For, in a way, she was a child of the world - a symbol of childhood itself, a guardian of our dreams and hopes for children everywhere" (from Citizen Diplomats: Pathfinders in Soviet American Relations)

The Samantha Smith website brings the story of this little girl that, in her own way, brought East and West a bit closer and sparked a glimmer of hope, something many diplomats and politicians could not achieve back then. On her website, you can see Andropov's letter, read about the foundation, view many images (use "next page" at the bottom of each page) and visit her Youtube channel with videos about her visit to the USSR and interviews . The US Embassy in Russia also has a tribute page on Samantha. Her innocently naive, yet noble initiative resulted in a written statement from the Soviet leader that the Soviet Union would never start a nuclear war. It might sound naive but, as the records have shown, it was true. Her noble intentions to bring people together should be an example to all of us, never to be forgotten.

Large SVR Spy Ring Arrested in the U.S.

2010-06-29T20:04:00.053+02:00

On June 27, 2010, ten individuals were arrested in a ten-year joint operation between the FBI (U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation) and the Counterespionage Section and the Office of Intelligence within the Justice Department’s National Security Division. The FBI used a wide range of counterintelligence and investigation techniques to observe the Illegals and collect evidence. The arrest were announced at the U.S. Department of Justice Briefing Room.

All ten individuals allegedly carried out long-term deep-cover operations on US soil on behalf of the Russian foreign intelligence agency SVR (Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki). Goal was to recruit sources in policy-making circles and collect Intel to send back to Russia. The court documents (see below) read as a real Cold War thriller. The perfect stuff for books and movies! Another example of how the Cold War still lives on as a Cold Peace.

The court complaint documents reveal numerous details on the espionage activities and a range of true spy craft methods to communicate. Moscow Center (SVR Headquarters) used non-commercial steganographic software to insert text messages in images, located on publicly available websites. During surreptitious searches, the FBI discovered and copied sets of computer disks containing steganographic software and found a hidden paper with a 27 characters key. Website links, retrieved from their hard-drives, directed to website images that contained well over 100 hidden messages, communications between the Illegals and Moscow. These so-called Internet Messages contained all kinds of operational instructions.

The Illegals also received encrypted radio messages by burst transmission (sending data on high speed). The FBI also found a short-wave radio and photographed notebooks with column of seemingly random numbers during another surreptitious search. These are typically used to receive encrypted numbers messages. During audio surveillance (bugging) of the suspects house, the FBI heard the sounds of receiving a burst transmission. Surveillance of conversations in their house also revealed the use of invisible ink to convey messages to Russian government officials.

To enable clandestine payments from the SVR to the Illegals, they travelled to South American countries to receive money and returned to the U.S. with the money hidden in the luggage. Back in the US, they exchanged bags with money in various city parks. Several of these exchanges were recorded during FBI video surveillance.

The FBI searched bank safe deposit boxes containing documents, photos and U.S. and Canadian birth certificates, to create the false identities of the Illegals. The Illegals also received false British and Irish passports to travel via Europe to Russia. The required false passports were provided by brush-passes in Europe. On one occasion, an Illegal was ordered to buy a laptop in the U.S. and bring it along to Moscow. When he returned to the U.S. with the - probably SVR customized - laptop, he received instruction on how to use it for communications with Moscow.

Christopher Metsos, a secret SVR agent, assisted the spy network but was based outside the Unites States. He was arrested on 29 June in Cyprus. He had several meetings with the network members. These meetings were recorded on video by the FBI. Metsos also received money from a Russian diplomat. One part of the money was given to other Illegals and another part was buried in New York. Two years later, another conspirator dug it up. Several other money exchanges were done by a so-called brush-pass, where they swapped bags when passing each other on the train station stairs. Several other brush-passes between Russian government officials and the Illegals to exchange cash and a memory stick were observed by the FBI.

Another method of covert communications involved private wireless networks to connect Laptops by LAN (Local Area Network) within a limited distance. Russian citizen Anna Chapman, born Anya Kushchenko, the red haired spy vamp and one of the illegal SVR agents (see photo), was observed ten Wednesdays in the vicinity of a Russian government official. In one occasion, she used her laptop in a coffee shop while a black minivan stopped along the coffee shop. FBI registered a network connection between their two PC MAC addresses. Other LAN connections were established between the Chapman in a book story and the Russian official across the street and between Illegal agent Mikhail Semenko in a restaurant and a car with diplomatic licence plate on the parking.

Last Saturday, after having problems with her wireless network exchanges, Anna Chapman was lures into a sting operation by an FBI undercover agent. Pretending to be a Russian official, he asked her help to deliver a false passport to a supposedly illegal agent. Surveillance right after the meeting showed that Chapman bought a cellphone and pre-payed card under a false name, apparently to contact SVR after she got suspicious. She did not appear on the sting meeting on Sunday. A similar sting operation ran against Mikhail Semenko on that same Saturday. An FBI undercover agent met with Semenko and discussed with him about his network communications. Semenko was asked to deliver money by dead-drop (a hidden cache) in a park on Sunday. He was observed carrying out the assignment last Sunday, the day that the complete network was arrested.

All alleged spies, or at least illegals having contact with Russian intelligence, are charged with conspiring to act as unregistered foreign agents and eight of them with money laundering. They are currently not charged with espionage and it is unclear if and what information they sent to Russia and whether this information damaged U.S. national interest.

You can find the criminal complaints with the results of the FBI investigation on the U.S. Department of Justice website or you can read or download them direct from the following links: Complaint1 (pdf 1.2 Mb) The United states vs Anna Chapman and Mikhail Semenko and Complaint2 (pdf 2.3 MB) The United states vs Christopher R. Metsos, Richard Murphy, Cynthia Murphy, Donald Howard Heathfield , Tracey Lee Ann Foley, Michael Zottoli, Patricia Mills , Juan Lazaro and Vicky Pelaez. Finally, here are the Deparment of Justice Metsos and Mills, Zottoli and Semenko bail letters.

This case is another example of how difficult these covert communications are in today's digital world, and why it is a very bad idea to combine normal personal computers with cryptography and espionage. Modern covert communications are countered with just as modern surveillance and interception, and old-school espionage communications still depend on human success and failure. The Cold Peace hasn't changed that much since the Cold War. More about FBI successes on catching Cuban spies at my Cuban Agent Communications blog and paper.

Update July 3, 2010: until now, three suspects have admitted the use of a false identity. Michael Zottoli told investigators he is a Russian citizen and that his real name is Mikhail Kutzik. Patricia Mills confessed that her name is Natalia Pereverzeva and all her family and relatives live in Russia (see Detention Letter). Juan Lazaro admitted working for the SVR under a false name but refuses to give his true identity. Anna Chapman, nee Anya Kushchenko, is identified as the daughter of Vasily Kushchenko, a high-ranked MID (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) official and, according to her ex-husband, a former senior KGB officer (see Telegraph UK). Christopher Metsos, who was arrested in Cyprus, disappeared withing 24 hour of being bailed. Therefore, the Department Of Justice requested the Judge to refuse any bail for the other suspects.

Update July 9, 2010: the 10 suspects are exchanged with 4 Russian individuals that served sentences in Russia for alleged cooperation with Western intelligence services. More information is found in my US - Russian Spy Exchange blog post.

Update November 12, 2010: Four months after uncovering this spy ring, the true reason of its failiure surfaces: the 10 agents were betrayed from the inside. More to read in U.S. Spy Ring betrayed by Defecting SVR Colonel.

Update November 3, 2011: The FBI release a large number of documents, photos and videos from operation Ghost stories, the investigation and arrests of the ten illegal SVR agents. All information is released through the FBI records webpage The Vault.

A follow up with numerous articles is published on the CI Centre news page and more will follow. Some media on this case: Spies in the suburbs on BBC News. Anna Chapman on Mail Online and on ABC News. Background info on Richard and Cynthia Murphy on CI Centre and the New Jersey Star. Spy ring financial intel on CNN Fortune. Donald Heatfield on the New York Times. Michael Zottoli and Patricia Mills on The Seattle Times. Vicky Pelaez on NY Daily News. Juan Lazaro on CBS News. Why Russia and the US still Spy by Peter Earnest. The Illegals Program on Wikipedia. Dismanteling Russian operation at STRATFOR. Richard and Cynthia Murphy on Telegraph UK. More on the ending of this case on my US - Russian Spy Exchange blog and on U.S. Spy Ring betrayed by Defecting SVR Colonel .

Interview with Anna Chapman, earlier this year (CNN).

Noor Inayat Khan Documentary

2010-04-28T21:41:00.011+02:00

I already wrote about Noor Inayat Khan in April last year. She's one of the forgotten hero's of the Second World War. Noor was a Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent that operated behind enemy lines, in occupied France. As a wireless operator in Paris she held the most dangerous SOE post in France, with the SD Sicherheitsdienst (the Nazi intelligence service) constantly on her tail.

There's a 50 minutes five-part documentary called "The Princess Spy", in which her relatives go back in her traces to see what she did and how her life tragically and brutally came to and end. A gripping story.

Your can view parts [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] or start the video here below . At the end of each part the video shows a link to the next part (don't forget the maximize button at the bottom-right).

More on the story of Noor Inayat Khan and additional links on this previous post.

Mind of a Code Breaker

2010-04-22T19:25:00.014+02:00

On You Tube there's a great documentary video from NOVA called World War II Mind of a Code Breaker. It's the story of the British code breakers in Bletchley park and explains the vital role code breaking and Signals Intelligence played during the Second World War. The documentary tells the story of the German Enigma and Lorenz cipher machines. It's a 12 part video, in total 113 minutes, so take your time for it, it's well worth it! A link to the next part is shown at the end of each video, or you can click the links here below. Of course, much more about Enigma is found on my website.

Parts: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]

2012 Alan Turing Year

2010-03-30T20:52:00.008+02:00

On June 23, 2012, it will be 100 years ago that Alan Turing was born in London. He played a vital role in the development of the modern computer, was an ace codebreaker and designer of the Turing bombe that broke encrypted German messages during the Second World War.

Turing went to study at King's College, Cambridge where he graduated in 1934 with first-class honours in Mathematics. From 1936 to 1938 he studied at Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey. He studied pure mathematical work, but also cryptology and he built an electro-mechanical binary multiplier. In 1938 he obtained his Ph.D. from Princeton. After Princeton he also started to work part-time with the Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS), the infamous British WWII codebreakers.

During the war he was the lead man on breaking German military message traffic. He designed the Turing bombe (later enhanced by Gordon Welchman), a device to crack Enigma messages by searching the right settings for a given piece of ciphertext and its presumed related plaintext. He also developed a Bayesian statistical technique to assist in breaking the German naval Enigma. The intelligence profit, gained from his code breaking successes, were a most vital advantage that ensured Allied victory in WWII.

After the war he worked at the National Physical Laboratory on the design of the ACE (Automatic Computing Engine) and presented a paper which was the first detailed design of a stored-program computer. In 1949 he became deputy director of the computing laboratory at the University of Manchester, and worked on software for the Manchester Mk1, one of the earliest stored-program computers. He continued to contribute to early computer development, mathematics and artificial intelligence.

Being homosexual, Turing was convicted in 1952 for alleged misconduct (homosexuality was not allowed by the law) and was given a choice between imprisonment or probation conditional on his agreement to undergo hormonal treatment. Turing's conviction also led to the removal of his security clearance, depriving him of his cryptographic consultancy work for GCHQ. On 8 June 1954, Alan Turing committed suicide by eating a cyanide poisoned apple. The man who saved countless lives with his code breaking during WWII and founder of modern computer science was let down by his country.

On 10 September 2009, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown released a statement describing Turing's treatment as appalling: "Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can't put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him ... So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work I am very proud to say: we're sorry, you deserved so much better".

More information about the coming events to celebrate the Turing Year are found on the Alan Turing Year website. On this website you will also find a list of excellent resources regarding Alan Turing and his work.

Dead Hand revealed

2010-02-15T20:13:00.017+01:00

There have been numerous speculations about the notorious "Dead Hand", developed by the former Soviet Union to counter a nuclear attack by the United States, even when all political and military Soviet leaders would be knocked out by an initial attack. Books and many papers are written about the subject by all kinds of "experts", but they all had one common flaw: they were all based on assumptions.

September last year, the National Security Archive published previously classified 1995 interviews with many important former Soviet military and political decision makers. In one of the interviews, Vitalii Leonidovich Kataev, former Senior Advisor to the Central Committee Defense Industry Department (now Defense Department), talks about the real "Dead Hand".

The "Dead Hand" is one of two trigger systems on a system of Command Missiles. These missiles are well concealed and extremely well protected missiles, deployed near clusters of Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) silos. Once launched into near space, they transmit launch orders to the clusters of ICBM's they are assigned to. This enables the automated launch of a large numbers of ICBM's, even when military command is disabled by a U.S. nuclear attack

As said, there are two ways these Command Missiles might be launched or 'triggered'. The first one is by central control, when an enemy attack is detected but there's no time left for normal launch procedures (read: when the nukes strike Soviet soil it will be too late, so hit the button). The second way is the notorious "Dead Hand", which is only operational when the decision makers unblock a no-fire mechanism at the center. From that moment on, the launch of a Command Missile is under control of numerous triggers. If the sensors register a flash, seismic shock, radiation or atmospheric density, the Command Missile is launched and in turn will launch its cluster of ICBM's. You can read about the Dead Hand system in the Kataev interview.

This might seem a most scary scenario, left in the hands of computers and sensors. However, it always needs human intervention before activation and was only to be used in extremely threatening situations, where it was expected that all decision makers were already dead upon launch. It is now clear that the Soviets well understood, and feared, the consequences of a nuclear strike, either preemptive or retaliatory, and believed that such scenarios would always be fatal to both the Soviet Union and the United States. The Soviets were absolutely not trigger-happy, but it was an ideal method of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) and effective deterrence.

The 1995 study and interviews show how U.S. analysts exaggerated Soviet aggressiveness and understated the Kremlin's fear for nuclear war. It places the Dead Hand doomsday scenario papers, based on assumptions, in another perspective. I can highly recommend a most interesting series of interviews with retired General-Colonel Andrian A. Danilevich, General Staff Officer until 1990 and former assistant for Doctrine and Strategy to Marshal Akhromeev. Download (right-click) or read the Danilevich interview here. More on the Nuclear Vault.

Cuban Agent Communications

2010-02-08T13:13:00.014+01:00

The United States has always been the principal foreign target of the Cuban Intelligence Service. Ana Belen Montes, Calos and Elsa Alvarez and Walter Kendall Myers and his wife Gwendolyn are some of the agents who worked for Cuban Intelligence and were jailed for espionage against the United States in recent years.

Information, released into the public, showed that all these illegal agents received encrypted operational messages via shortwave radio, broadcast by Cuban Numbers Stations. These mysterious stations always had a fascinating reputation. They are used by Intelligence Agencies since many decades and have proven to be a most secure way to covertly sent messages behind enemy lines. However, now these most secure shortwave communications provided evidence against all agents that were involved in the Cuban spy cases.

How was it possible that such a solid encryption system failed several times? As it turns out, it were bad implementation and operational procedures that compromised a veteran system of spy trade craft. Just as with the VENONA project (see previous post), these Cuban spy cases are mistakenly referred to as cases of broken one-time pads. On my website you can find a paper I wrote about these espionage cases, how numbers messages work and why the system failed, all based on FBI documents and court papers. You can download or read Cuban Agent Communications (pdf) directly or visit the Papers section on my website.

More information on Cuban espionage in the Unites states is found on the Latin American Studies website. On the CIA FOIA page there's a 14 page information report on selection and training of Cuban intelligence agents abroad (select "View Document in Full for Printing" and zoom in for a good read).

VENONA Declassified

2010-01-09T18:20:00.011+01:00

The National Security Agency's Center for Cryptologic History published a large number of documents about the VENONA project on its Declassification Initiatives section. The VENONA story is a summary of the Intelligence, derived from deciphered VENONA messages, and explains how the codebreakers succeeded in deciphering these important messages.

The top secret VENONA project was initiated in 1943 by the U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Service in Arlington Hall, Virginia, and was continued by its successor, the NSA, until 1980. What started as an attempt to exploit and decipher Soviet diplomatic and trade communications would soon become a vital source of information about Soviet Intelligence operations in the United States. Analysts discovered that portions of the encrypted Soviet diplomatic communications contained espionage related information.

Richard Hallock, Cecil Phillips and Meredith Gardner were the key players in the VENONA decryption efforts. Analysis identified five different ciphering systems on the diplomatic traffic. The messages were encoded into digits with the aid of different sets of codebooks and additionally enciphered with so-called one-time pads (see image right). These one-time pads, containing series of truly random numbers, are added to the message digits. A one-time pad provides mathematically unbreakable encryption, if used only once.

However, the codebreakers discovered that the Soviets mistakenly reused a small portion of these pads. Time pressure and tactical circumstances during the Second World War lead in some cases to the distribution of more than two copies of certain keys. Although VENONA is often referred to as the project that broke Soviet one-time pads, they never actually broke one-time pads, but exploited a most fatal implementation error: you should never ever reuse a one-time pad.

Nonetheless, the codebreakers faced an enormous challenge. Due to the vast quantity of intercepted messages, the few reused pads and the lack of Soviet codebooks they had to decipher and reconstruct the messages and codebooks painstakenly, piece by piece, solely relying on cryptanalysis. It took 37 years before they closed project VENONA.

From 1946 on, they began to read portions of KGB (Soviet Security Service) messages that had been sent between the KGB station (rezidentura) in New York and Moscow Center. The derived Intelligence was sensational. When VENONA ended, around 3,000 messages (only a fraction of the intercepted traffic) were partially or completely deciphered. These were mostly communications between the KGB's First Chief Directorate (Foreign Intelligence) and its KGB Station Chiefs.

The messages revealed critical information on KGB and GRU (Military Intelligence) operations in the United States and Great Britain, and the KGB's role in the Soviet consulates, the TASS news agency, COMINTERN and the AMTORG Trading Corporation. The decrypts disclosed massive espionage efforts against the U.S. Departments of State and Justice, the Department of the Treasury, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and the War Department.

Information, derived from VENONA, identified many Soviet Intelligence operations, hundreds of Soviet agents and people who collaborated with the Soviets. This enabled the arrest of major Soviet spies such as Klaus Fuchs and Harry Gold (MANHATTAN Project and A-Bomb), the Rosenberg's spy ring, and the identification of Donald Maclean, which lead to the unmasking of "Cambridge Five" members Kim Philby (image) and Guy Burgess.

Because of its importance, and the difficulty to decipher and identify the covernames and codenames in the messages, the VENONA project lasted until 1980, providing the FBI and CIA over the years with vital counter-intelligence information to solve many spy cases. VENONA is a good example of "we will get you, sooner or later", as many spies were arrest upto decades after they stopped spying.

The VENONA story (pdf), many of its deciphered messages and other related documents are found on NSA's VENONA project page (see menu at the right of that page). Another very good reference is The Secret Sentry, recently declassified by The National Security Archive. It contains the extensive 66 page VENONA document and other previously top secret documents, related to the Korean war and Vietnam.

Mythbusters on RSA Conference

2009-12-26T13:50:00.022+01:00

Discovery Channel's Mythbusters, notorious for building and testing the most crazy things, were at the RSA Conference 2009 last April, to present their XXL Jefferson Disk. The RSA Conference organisation wanted an original demonstration of a crypto device and Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage designed and built this super-sized Bazeries Cylinder. The device was later auctioned on e-bay, with the proceeds to the EFF - Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Jamie and Adam had distributed a ciphertext among the conference participants and demonstrated the decryption of that text on their huge Jefferson Disk the following day. This was followed by an entertaining interview with Adam and Jamie, explaining how their opposite characters are the secret to success during the development of the Mythbusters experiments. Adam even mentioned that he owns an Enigma-E, Paul Reuvers' and Marc Simons' well known electronic version of the Enigma machine.

You can watch the video of Adam's and Jamie's demonstration (thanks to David Goodman for the tip) which is found on the RSA Conference 2009 Keynote Webcast. The webcast page is really worth a visit as you can view video's of many conference speakers, all of them key players in cryptography science and industry.

Cipher Machine Simulators

2009-12-23T13:58:00.014+01:00

The world of cipher machines has always been a mysterious and exciting story of military and diplomatic secrets, codes and the protection of vital information. In the passed years I wrote several accurate simulations of the most notorious machines in the 20th century. If you haven't discovered them yet, check out the WW2 German Enigma and Hagelin M-209, the Cold War Hagelin BC-52 and the American KL-7 ADONIS. They are available as freeware download on my website.

As a little preview you can click this picture to see how you can turn your desktop into a Top Secret Communication Center. A fun way to spend the Christmas holidays!

(Click the picture to see it at full size)

Heinz Felfe

2009-12-20T16:00:00.027+01:00

In 2006 the CIA released some historically significant documents on Heinz Felfe, the former head of the West German office of Counter-Intelligence against the Soviets. Felfe was arrested in 1961 and charged with espionage for the KGB, the very same service he was supposed to combat.

The documents are of great importance. They show in detail how both Soviet and Western Intelligence Services hired, recruited and exploited a large number of former Nazi SS officers. Many of them occupied crucial posts during the Cold War, a tremendous security risk to the Allies.

During the Second World War, Heinz Felfe was a Nazi SS officer with the SD Sicherheitsdienst, the Foreign Intelligence branch of the SS. After the war he was recruited in Münster by British Intelligence. Their cooperation ended in 1950 when he was suspected of working for the Soviets. Felfe however managed to get a job in the Counter-Intelligence section of the Gehlen Organization, the predecessor of the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst), West German Intelligence. This agency, sponsored by the US Army and the CIA, was lead by general Reinhard Gehlen, the former head of WWII German intelligence on the Eastern Front.

Felfe’s superiors in the Gehlen Organization, many of whom had also worked during WWII for Nazi intelligence organizations, were themselves Soviet agents. This cleared the path for Felfe's advances in the hierarchy of West German Intelligence. In 1955 he became head of the counter-intelligence against the Soviets, at the same time being a Soviet agent himself. No wonder the Gehlen Organization had a disappointing record in supplying valuable intelligence on the Warsaw Pact.

A higher living standard than his wage could provide, his often expressed bitterness on the Allied destruction of Dresden, his criticism on Western democracy, clues from Soviet defectors and information, collected by the CIC (US Army Counterintelligence Corps) eventually led to his arrest by West German authorities in 1961. In 1969 he was released to East Germany in exchange for three West German spies.

Heinz Felfe caused enormous damage and embarrassment to Western Intelligence. His position enabled him to obtain information from his and many other West German offices such as the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz BfV (West German Federal Intelligence) and the Foreign Ministry. According to the CIA, Felfe compromised a large number of CIA agents, about 15,000 documents and sabotaged most counter-espionage, surveillance and arrest operations against Soviet agents in West Germany.

All information is found at the CIA Heinz Felfe files (pdf) link. In these documents, Felfe has the codename FRIESEN. These extraordinary CIA files are published by the FAS Project on Government Secrecy on their e-print page, which contains many more interesting documents.

Last year, the Frankfurter Allgemeine (German) published an article about the FSB - Russia's Federal Security Service - honoring Heinz Felfe at this 90th birthday (translated version here). Felfe published his full biography in 1988 in East-Germany (ISBN: 3373002737). This book, which was not for export, is more complete than the West version. Nice read. Felfe died in May last year.

Enigma Patents

2009-12-18T19:20:00.004+01:00

The Crypto Museum website has published a large number of original patents, related to the German Enigma cipher machine. These documents, dated from 1918 to 1923, show the development of the Enigma machine and contains a large number of detailed technical drawings. Electrical circuits, different types of ciphering wheels and various mechanisms to advance them, printing systems and much more.

Some of the patents were filed by German engineer Arthur Scherbius, others by firms such as Gewerkschaft Securitas of Berlin and Chiffriermaschinen AG, both related to Scherbius. However, similar patents were filed by firms in the United States, the Netherlands, France and the United Kingdom, some of them related to Germany based companies.

All patents are available in pdf format on Paul Reuvers' and Marc Simons' Crypto Museum Enigma patents page. More patents are found on Arthur Bauer's Foundation for German Communication.

Secure Passwords with Diceware

2009-12-14T12:16:00.003+01:00

Good passwords or passphrases are crucial. They are used as login to protect your computer or e-mail accounts, to encrypt files or to verify that you are who you say you are, and above all, to protect your privacy. It is obvious that no one should be able to guess your password or devise an automated attack, fast enough to go through all possible combinations.

Picking a good password isn't that easy. It should be easy to remember (but not for the bad guys) and at the same time be strong enough. You could use the commonly suggested combinations of lower and upper case letters, punctuations and symbols. This isn't the most convenient solution.

Diceware is another way to compose strong password phrase. A Dice passphrases is a combination of words, selected from a list of 7776 words. No fancy software, on-line generated stuff or complicated algorithms. Each word is selected randomly by throwing a dice five times (6⁵=7776). A combination of five words gives 28.4¹⁸ possible combinations, comparable with a 64 bit key, which is pretty strong and sufficient for general use. Six words provide a 77 bit strength and seven words 90 bits, which is more than sufficient for today's and future computer power. Since all combinations are completely random, there's no other way to find the passphrase, other than searching trough all possible combinations, which is an infeasible task.

All you need is the Diceware word list and a dice, and to memorize five or more words. And it's all for free! All about Diceware is found on Arnold Reinhold's Diceware website. Meanwhile, the Dice word list is available in many different languages. It's the perfect method to select mathematically strong and secure passwords.

Soviet Military Journals

2009-11-23T18:57:00.012+01:00

The CIA recently released a large number of sensitive Soviet and Warsaw Pact military journals from 1961 to 1984. These declassified documents give an insight in Soviet strategy and military studies in a wide range of subjects.

Developments in missile weapons programs, training, communications, intelligence, combat support, troop movements, combat against enemy missile submarines, use of nuclear power, electronic warfare, organizational structures. You name it, it's there. Hundreds of documents, some of them previously classified as top secret. A great resource on Soviet military capabilities.

Some interesting journals related to communications (1962 - 1976):

Providing Communications in the Far North
Radio Deception as Radio Counteraction
Application of Radio-electronics for Reconnaissance
Radio Counter-measures Ground Troops
Radio-electronics and Intelligence
Communications Problems in Modern Warfare
Soviet View on US Field Army Intell Capabilities
Combat with Enemy Electronic Equipment
Security of Radio Communications forward moving troops
Warfare Against Enemy Radio-electronic Means

The complete list of more than eight hundred documents is published on the CIA's Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) Electronic Reading Room. Quite a few hours of reading fun!

Aldrich Ames

2009-11-11T10:15:00.018+01:00

Aldrich Ames is without doubt the most damaging American spy ever. Ames was a CIA employee for 31 years and spent most of his career in the Directorate of Operations (DO), which is responsible for carrying out CIA clandestine operations around the globe. He had access to virtually all CIA operations against the former Soviet Union and later Russia, and to the names of recruited Soviet Intelligence officers and agents that operated in the Soviet Union. Ames' betrayal at the height of the Cold War caused the imprisonment of many CIA sources and the execution of at least ten agents in the Soviet Union. His was able to carry out his espionage activities without detection for almost nine years.

After his first 1969 overseas assignment to Ankara, Turkey, he returned in to CIA headquarters in 1972 where he spent four years in the Soviet-East European Division (SE) of the DO. After a five year tour in New York he was stationed for two years in Mexico City in 1982 and continued to specialize in Soviet cases. When he returned to headquarters in 1983, he was made counterintelligence branch chief for Soviet operations. In September 1989, after a tour in Rome, Italy, Ames returned to the SE Division and was assigned to the office that supported all Soviet and East European operations in Europe. In 1990, he was reassigned to the Counterintelligence Center (CIC).

The astonishing about his CIA career, which gave him access to the most sensitive operations and documents, was the fact that he held all these positions regardless serious personal and professional misconduct, violation of security rules, large expenditures he could not account for with his CIA salary, a serious drinking problem and a generally poor performance on his CIA posts. The Ames case was a failure of the system with an excessively tolerant bureaucracy within the CIA, where security was lax and ineffective and where his serious misconduct was never recorded on paper.

As investigations later showed, Ames walked into the Soviet Embassy in Washington in April 1985 and handed over CIA files to the duty officer. It was the start of a nine years spying career with numerous meetings with the KGB (Soviet Intelligence) on his tours in Mexico City and Rome. During these meetings, and later on through dead-drops in the United States, Ames provided the KGB with a huge quantity of highly sensitive documents about U.S. foreign, defense and security policies, CIA operations against the Soviet Union and the names of virtually all Soviet agents of the CIA. Ames received substantial payments for the information he provided. This enabled him to purchase a new Jaguar and a $540,000 home with cash. In total, the KGB paid over $1.8 million and $900,000 more had been set aside for him.

In 1985, CIA started investigating the leaks, the ever failing operations, and their vanishing agents. It took nine years, two special CIA and FBI task forces and an Inspector General report to find out who was the mole and how it was possible that Ames could continue to spy for nine years, despite his suspicious behaviour. On February 21, 1994, agents from the FBI arrested Aldrich Hazen Ames on charges of conspiracy to commit espionage on behalf of Russia and the former Soviet Union.

The 55 page document "Assessment of the Aldrich H. Ames Espionage Case" by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is a very detailed record on Aldrich Ames' career, his espionage activities, what went wrong at the CIA during the mole hunt and how he was finally caught. You can read or download the report at this Hanford link (right-click and save target as...) or read it at the CI Centre website. More about Ames is found on Crime Library. The National Security Archive has an eight page interview with Ames. On youtube you can find the movie Aldrich Ames: Traitor Within (in 10 parts), which depicts pretty well why and how Ames became a traitor, and how the mole hunt brought him to a stop. Below there's also the Cold War Spies episode on Ames.

Fall of the Iron Curtain

2009-11-09T00:05:00.014+01:00

Exactly 20 years ago the Berlin Wall came down. Few young people realize how important November 9, 1989 actually was and how it effects their lives today. Before that date, the world was divided into East and West and this wasn't merely geographically. Virtually every country on the globe had taken side, willingly or not. The Cold War raged over the world for almost 45 years and it was often far from cold in many Asian, African, Middle eastern and South American countries.

The fall of the Berlin Wall wasn't the beginning of the end, but became a symbol of the dissolving of the Iron Curtain and the start of the reunification of the (East) German Democratic Republic and the (West) German Federal Republic. It was the result of a long struggle for independence in several countries of the Soviet Union. A struggle that was initiated bravely by the Polish trade union Solidarnosc, publicly and strongly supported by the Polish born Pope John Paul II.

The fall of the Wall without any violence or intervention by East German or Soviet forces encouraged other countries to initiate their own fight for independence. Soon after, the Soviet Union collapsed which changed the global picture completely. There's plenty information available on the Internet about the Wall, why and how it was build, how it was to live behind the Wall before 1989 and how it changed the world.

The Guardian's Berlin Wall: 20 Years On brings a five episode video series with the complete story on the Berlin Wall. The Woodrow Wilson Center presents many important documents on The Rise and Fall of the Berlin Wall, a part of their Cold War International History Project. Escape from the GDR is a very good six-part 50 minutes documentary on Youtube about the history of the Wall. More video's are found on the English pages of the Chronik der Mauer website. Another great resource is Dismantling the Iron Curtain on the National Security Archive. If you want to discover how the Wall was constructed and its military aspects, I can highly recommend US Army Border Operations. More about the Cold War is found on this blog post. Lots of info to read and videos to watch, but certainly worth while!

DARPA

2009-11-04T20:25:00.009+01:00

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency DARPA is a most unique agency. In contrast to other agencies and commercial firms they are blessed with the freedom to fail.

Although this might sound odd, this approach, and of course the associated budget, are making the impossible possible. DARPA is a frontier in innovative technology with breakthroughs in many different fields of military and other technology.

Created in 1958, DARPA has been responsible for early research and development of experimental airplanes, stealth technology such as multifaceted surfaces, radar-absorbent materials, infrared shielding and heat dissipation. They were pioneer in missile technology, target acquisition systems, guiding radar and Laser systems. DARPA is involved in new material technologies for fighter aircraft and special radars for UAV's (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles). Satellites are another field of interest for DARPA.

Often, research and prototypes failed. These failing projects however were often the cradle for new technologies and materials, which were developed as a part of these projects. Sometimes, they developed things that would not be applicable untile many years after. They invented the future, so to speak.

But who can explain this better than DARPA. The 14 page paper Fifty Years of Inventing the Future is a good overview of DARPA's history from 1958 to 2008. In the Multimedia section of their Newsroom there's a great 25 minutes documentary on the history of DARPA in three parts: part 1, part 2 and part 3 (worthwhile downloading by right-clicking the links). More interesting information is found on DARP's history page and their video page. They also have a News Section and a PodCast with downloadable mp3 interviews about DARPA projects

USAFSS Misawa History Page

2009-10-13T18:26:00.017+02:00

The USAFSS Misawa website contains a well documented history page. The United States Air Force Security Service (USAFSS) was the Air Force intelligence from 1948 until 1979. After some name changes, the service is currently known as the Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency (AF ISR). I've published a post, earlier this month, on the USAFSS Silent Wariors and the shootdown of one of their C-130's.

The Misawa history page contains three excellent pdf documents: USAF Intelligence History Timeline brings the complete story from the USAFSS in 1948 to the AF ISR Agency in 2008, USAFSS - An Enlisted Command about its unique enlisted force, and the NSA 50th Anniversary publication about the National Security Agency's history between 1952 and 2002. These extensive documents provide a detailed overview on Signals and Electronic Intelligence in the US Air force and NSA.

ELINT at NSA

2009-10-12T18:03:00.016+02:00

The National Security Agency (NSA) just published a paper about the history of Electronic Intelligence (ELINT) at the National Security Agency. ELINT is all information that is obtained from electronic signals, other than speech or text. Within ELINT there are two main branches, Technical and Operational ELINT.

Technical ELINT or TechELINT is the interception and analysis of signals that origin from radars, weapons systems, navigation systems and such, in order to retrieve information on how these systems work, perform and how they are used. TechELINT is useful to determine what technology the opponent applies, the capabilities of his equipment and how to take countermeasures against his systems.

Operational ELINT or OpELINT is focused on the interception of all kinds of signals on specific locations, in order to find out the opponent's location and structure. OpELINT determines the operational structure (order of battle) of the opponent forces, the so-called Electronic Order of Battle (EOB). This, of course, is important to assess his strength and provides vital tactical information on the battlefield.

The paper describes the origins of modern ELINT in the Second World War, and later on the establishing of the Army-Navy Electronics Evaluation Group (ANEEG) within the Department of Defense. NSA eventually took over the ELINT operations in close cooperation with other agencies such as the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) with its satellites and the Navy aircraft platforms. The paper gives a good overview on the history of NSA's ELINT mission and its systems. You can find it at the NSA website, the Cryptome website or download it directly at this link (zip).

CI Centre Podcasts

2009-10-06T21:16:00.034+02:00

There are some interesting podcast interviews, related to espionage, on the website of the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies (CI Centre). The first one is a talk with CI Centre President David Major about the unmasking of MI6 officer George Blake, the KGB mole and who revealed the Berlin tunnel SIGINT operation to the Soviets. Michael Goleniewski, a Russian Spy in Poland, passed information to the CIA which lead to the surveillance of KGB spy handler Konon Molody, aka Gordon Lonsdale. This resulted in the arrest of the Portland spy ring. Goleniewski also revealed that a mole was operating in the MI6, British foreign Intelligence. Further investigation by MI5 lead to George Blake (photo), who knew about the Berlin tunnel from the earliest beginning of the planning. The David Major talk is available as part 1 and part 2.

The second podcast is an interview with former KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin about Kim Philby, one of the most notorious spies ever. Philby (photo), headed the Soviet counter-espionage section of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service and, at the same time, was a successful Soviet agent, causing devastating damage to Western Intelligence. After the defection of KGB agent Golitsyn his treason was exposed and Philby fled to the Soviet Union. After being received as an hero, he settled in Moscow and received a pension. Without any goals or challenges in his life, Philby started drinking heavily. Oleg Kalugin was put on his case and reintroduced him in the KGB, asked his help on some cases, and let him give lectures, which gave a Philby new goals in his life. The Kalugin interview is available at this podcast link.

These podcasts are available on the CI Centre Podcast page, where you can find many other fascinating talks and interview. More info on my weblog about the Berlin tunnel and KGB Geneneral Kalugin, and further readings on Philby on my Book Review.

And here are two videos from the Cold War Spies series about and with George Blake and Kim Philby.

Silent Warriors

2009-10-03T14:36:00.024+02:00

September 2, 1958. A four-engined C-130 transport aircraft from the US 7406th Support Squadron with tail number 60528 is flying along the Turkish-Soviet border. Six crew members and eleven US Airforce Security Service (USAFSS) personnel are on board. The aircraft is flying in Turkish airspace, from Incirlik to Trabzon, and its mission is to gather intelligence by orbiting near the Soviet border. They are instructed to stay 100 miles from Soviet airspace. The crew reports passing over Trabson at an altitude of 25,500 feet and acknowledges a weather report.

Soviet air defense radars are tracking the C-130. At 1440 hours, four MiG-17 interceptors from the 25th Fighter Regiment's Yerevan base are scrambled and are heading toward the C-130. Suddenly, the C-130 mysteriously deviates from his route, turns east and crosses the border into Soviet Armenia. According to the Soviets, they entered their airspace at 1507 hours. The first two Soviet interceptors arrive at 1508 hours and Senior Lieutenant Lopatkov fires several warning shots at 1509. The pilots of the C-130 start to maneuver and climb to an higher altitude. Meanwhile, the other two MiG arrive and the pilots request permission to engage the C-130. At 1511 hours, their Command gives permission to attack the C-130. All four MiGs attack the airplane in turn, using their cannon and rockets.

A C-130 at NSA, refurbished to resemble C-130A-II #60528

The camera of the third MiG captures the C-130 with its left outboard engine on fire and the fourth MiG pilot reports the C-130 breaking up before his attack. Seven minutes after the first attack, the C-130 crashes and explodes on impact, killing all seventeen crew members. It takes four days for the United States to confront the Soviets with the disappearing of their spy flight. On September 12, Soviet authorities acknowledged that they found an aircraft that 'apparently crashed' on their territory. Five months later, the US goes public on a United Nations meeting and present tape recordings of intercepted conversations between the Soviet fighter pilots during the attack on the C-130. The Soviets continue to deny any involvement in the shootdown. The remains of the six crew members were returned. There was no word on the eleven USAFSS members that were aboard the C-130.

This wasn't the first nor the last. During the Cold War period, more than 40 reconnaissance aircraft were shot down. Flying these spy missions was a risky business and the reconnaissance programs were kept secret. The public never knew about these losses and their families and fellow soldiers were left to mourn alone. The end of the Cold War allowed the US to release some information and pay tribute to these Cold War warriors. In 1991, Russian President Yeltsin began releasing information on the shoot down. In 1993, a US Army graves excavation team recovered an ID tag that belonged to a USAFSS technician aboard 60528.

On the National Security Agency (NSA) website, there's a special page on the C-130 Shootdown, with the story on aircraft 60528 and declassified documents with additional information. You can also listen to the actual recordings and read the transcripts of the intercepted radio traffic between the MiG pilots as they engage the C-130. A good moment to stand still for a moment and remember the soldiers, fallen in the silent war. It's all found on this page. The Aerial Reconnaissance memorial at the National Vigilance Park, near the NSA building, honors these silent warriors. NSA's also published a paper called "A DANGEROUS BUSINESS: The U.S. Navy and National Reconnaissance During the Cold War".

There are several websites, dedicated to lost USAFSS crews. 6994th Security Squadron and Silent Warriors are two of them. A brief history of the USAFSS is found on this page. The EC-47 History Site is dedicated to the Douglas EC-47 electronic warfare platforms, sometimes referred to as "Electric Gooneys" (scroll down on the main page to find the main directory!).

US Strategic Intelligence on the USSR

2009-10-01T07:00:00.012+02:00

The National Security Archive recently published new documents on the The Nuclear Vault, its Nuclear Documentation Project. Many previously classified interviews with former Soviet officials reveal that US Strategic Intelligence exaggerated the aggressiveness of the Soviets during the Cold War. The interviews give a unique insight on the Soviet strategic weapons policy and decision-making during the Cold War.

Apparently, the Soviets, who always assumed a first strike by the US, tried to keep a nuclear superiority in terms of numbers only for defensive reasons. Although the Soviet military preferred a proportional response to an attack, they didn't believe that a nuclear war could be limited. The interviews confirm that the USSR never had the intend to launch a first strike, but did consider a preemptive attack in case of a real threat. With a US first strike scenario in mind, they believed their nuclear overweight would deter the US of executing a first strike. The Soviet military was convinced that a conventional superior Warsaw Pact could stop a NATO offensive without using nuclear weapons, but feared a response with tactical nuclear weapons that would escalate to the use of strategic weapons.

They knew a nuclear assault on NATO forces in Europe would cause an ecological disaster that would also affect Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. This lead to a situation where the USSR was trying to avoid war at all costs, but if attacked, would use any weapons they had, leading to an all-out nuclear war. This means that a US policy of keeping up with the USSR might have been an unnecessary and dangerous path towards an involuntary and catastrophic response by the Soviets. The failing US assessment of the Soviet threat could have caused a situation of "you get what you asked for". Fortunately, it never came that far (I wouldn't be here any more to write this).

The many interviews with all those former Soviet officers, analysts and important decision makers, and their views on nuclear deterrence issues are a most fascinating read. All chapters of document 2 are a must. Especially chapter IV about strategic decision making and Brezhnev's incompetence are astonishing. Don't miss the General Danilevich interview! All documents are available for download at this Nuclear Vault page.

If you want to have an idea of what all those missiles look like, check out the Russian and Soviet Nuclear Forces Guide on FAS, with detailed tech specs and photos of all types of missiles.

TSEC/KL-7 Simulator

2009-09-25T18:54:00.011+02:00

I just finished and uploaded my newest cipher machine simulation. It's an accurate simulation of the TSEC/KL-7 Cipher Machine, codenamed ADONIS or POLLUX. The KL-7 was an off-line rotor cipher machine, developed in the late 1940's by the American Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA) and introduced by the newly formed National Security Agency (NSA) in 1952. The KL-7 is one of those Cold War beauties with a remarkable history.

The new freeware KL-7 simulator provides an authentic look and feel with its hands-on approach. With all known surviving KL-7’s sanitized, stripped from all rotor and stepping unit wiring, this simulator is the only remaining way to actually work with this beautiful machine. After my Enigma, M-209 and Hagelin BC-52 sims, this new sim again gives you the chance to actually work with a famous crypto machine, and use all nuts and bolts just as an operator did on the real machine. There's even an option to rewire all rotors yourself, to individualize the machine.

Most of the men who actually worked with this machine are at least well in their sixties or seventies, and the sim is an attempt to keep the history about that magnificent machine alive. The simulator comes with a 15 page manual, including the technical details and the history of the KL-7.

Update v4.1, March 25, 2011: The KL-7 simulator is now updated with the most recent details about its principle of operation, the stepping unit and the mode switch. The sim now produces realistic sounds, sampled from a real KL-7 in operation. Additionally, the manual is expanded with recently by NSA declassified information on the developement of the KL-7.

You can download the KL-7 simulator on my website and all your comments and feedback are most welcome. Enjoy it!

Crypto Museum

2009-08-21T17:45:00.009+02:00

Paul Reuvers and Marc Simons finally found the time to merge all their wonderful information and photos of cipher machines into a beautiful website. The Crypto Museum website is a refreshingly new site with lots of information on many cipher machines such as the well known German Enigma, various Hagelins, the Swiss Nema, the American M-209, KL-7 and SIGABA, but also less known machines. The Swedish Transvertex, the Gretacoder, several crypto devices from Philips, Siemens and many many more.

Don't forget to click the 'More Information' link on each item, which brings you to more detailed information and images. By clicking the numerous thumbnails that accompany each machine you can view hundreds of superb and very detailed photos they took of these marvels. But there's more!

They also collected information and took photos of spy radio sets, burst encoders and several direction finders. Some of these are true Cold War jewels. The site is still under construction, although the collection is quite impressive already. A Kits section, News section and a Shop are in the pipe-line. Paul and Marc are by the way the developers of the Enigma E, the electronic kit that works exactly like the real thing.

Good information on old crypto machines is rare, and good websites on these machines are hardly available (Jerry Proc is one of the few). The Crypto Museum website is therefore a unique initiative with an unmatched collection of high quality images. A true delight of the senses, molded into a well designed and synoptic website. I can only urge you to visit the Crypto Museum website. A must! The list of cipher machines is found on this page, but as I mentioned before, there's much more to discover. Now, go... go!

Enigma Challenge News

2009-08-19T16:35:00.008+02:00

On August, 17, Martin Eklöf from Sweden was the 20th person to break all 10 messages of the Enigma Cipher Challenge. He did it in an incredible four days and used software he wrote himself (in C language) to crack the Enigma messages. Congratulations to Martin!

Meanwhile, the competition is running for more than three years now and no less than 126 brave codebreakers joined this challenge. New competitors keep entering the challenge. If you want to give it a try, don't hesitate. You don't require any professional crypto skills or be a math geek. Some logical thinking and a bit of persistence will do the job and gets you in the Table of Honor.

Enigma Mathematics

2009-08-10T21:45:00.013+02:00

The German Enigma cipher machine is the best known example of an ingeniously designed encryption device that ultimately was a true disaster, as it proved to be the Achilles heel of the German forces. Their blind thrust in the Enigma was partially based on the theoretical security of the machine, which was a truly astronomical 3 x 10¹¹⁴ . There's an NSA paper (pdf) on this theoretical number. It was absolutely impossible to perform an exhaustive search on a machine with so many possible variations, not even with today's computerpower.

But the German cryptologists were wrong. Deadly wrong! The Allied codebreakers did break it and intercepted and deciphered millions of German military tactical messages during the war, revealing many battle orders and plans, and thus changing the outcome of war.

In reality, a Wehrmacht (Army) Enigma machine had a practical security (number of possible different settings), of only 1.07 x 10²³. Now, this is still a huge number. To give you an idea of the size of the number 1.07 x 10²³, you need 1.5 x 10¹⁵ sheets of paper (0.0039 inch each) to make a stack from the Earth to the Sun and with 1.07 x 10²³ sheets you can build roughly 70,000,000 of these stacks! No wonder the German cryptologists believed it was secure.

However, the security of a crypto device is more than key sizes and numbers, theoretical security and having to search through all possible combinations. On my website you can find all the facts and figures about Enigma's mathematical security. There's also a very good Cryptologia paper by Rebecca Ann Ratcliff on the misleading statistics on Enigma and how dangerous it can be to rely on such theoretical security.

Crypto AG Magazines

2009-07-24T18:55:00.009+02:00

The Crypto AG magazine is published every four months. The magazine focuses on various aspects of cryptography such as ICT security, software and hardware cryptographic technology, cyber threats, security management and many more.

In the 1/2009 issue you can find the chapter "Milestones in the history of the company part 1: the 1950s". In this article, you'll find the Crypto AG family tree on mechanical cipher machines and a description and images of several Hagelin machines such as the C-36, C-52 and the CD-57. Some Telex encryption equipment and one-time pad are also mentioned. I'm most curious to the next parts of this series.

The magazines are available in English, German, Spanish, Russian and Arabic. They are downloadable from the Cyrpto AG website. If this magazine is new to you, it's worth while reading some of the previous publications.

Bletchley Park Veterans Honored

2009-07-12T10:53:00.036+02:00

Exactly 70 years after the Government Code and Cipher School (GC&CS) began its codebreaking work, the veterans that served in Bletchley finally received official recognition. Finally! Finally!!!

During the Second World War, Bletchley Park was the center of all British codebreaking efforts and employed more than 7000 people. They were a remarkable mix of military and civilian cryptanalysts, mathematicians, students, women and men. Anyone they could find with skills that could help in the breaking, analysis, registration and distribution of the millions of messages, intercepted by the many Y stations. The intelligence, produced by GC&CS and codenamed ULTRA, played a decisive role in the outcome of the Second World War by providing vital information to the commanders at the battlefield.

Unfortunately, all the magnificent work at Bletchley was top secret and remained secret for many years after the war. Churchill called the codebreakers the geese with golden eggs that never cackled. The British Secrecy Act prohibited all personnel to reveal their excellent work and how important it was for their county. For outsiders, these people were ordinary citizens that did not enlisted in the armed forces or served their country during the war in any other way. The ignorant couldn't be more wrong, but the people involved couldn't tell the truth. Most of them took the secret with them in their grave.

After the war, GC&CS relocated to Cheltenham and most of the documents, equipment and eight of the ten Colossus computer were destroyed. Bletchley stayed the best kept secret of the Second World War until the 1970's, when information slowly trickled into the public. In 1991, Bletchley Park was saved from demolition and the Bletchley Park Trust was formed to maintain the site as a museum, devoted to the codebreakers. The site opened to visitors in 1993.

Some of the most brilliant people made important contributions, not only to the codebreaking but also to science and technology in general. People like Alan Turing, regarded as father of modern computer science, who designed the bombe, a machine to crack Enigma. Gordon Welchman made important contributions to cryptanalysis of Enigma and refined the bombe. Tommy Flowers developed Colossus, assisted by Max Newman. Colossus was the first ever digital computer. Of course, there were many more nameless people at Bletchley who helped in many different ways to break the huge stream of German message traffic.

And now, finally, their work is officially recognised. These people, at least in their 90's now, are eligible for a commemorative badge. The Foreign Secretary told he was delighted that the vital and secret work of Bletchley Park in the Second World War is being recognised. On 16 July, a ceremony will be held in Bletchley Park in the presence of His Royal Highness The Duke of Kent. More about this event in this press release. More information about Bletchley and its history is found on the Bletchley Park National Codes Centre website.

To give you an idea of how Bletchley Park looks now, just watch the video below. Use the maximize button on the video to view it full-screen! I can highly recommend a visit to the museum!

And here's another short video, honoring the secret work of the Bletchley Park codebreakers.

Teufelsberg

2009-06-14T11:47:00.036+02:00

Teufelsberg (Devil's mountain), located in west Berlin, Germany, has a most unique history. With its 375 ft (114 m) it is the highest hill in the Berlin area, and it's man-made! It is made of 12 million cubic meter rubble, from about 400,000 destroyed buildings, during the rebuilt of Berlin after the Second World War.

In the late 1950's, Allied mobile listening post, eavesdropping on East German and Soviet communications, discovered that Teufelsberg was an ideal location, with its unobstructed reception of signals from all directions. In 1961, the US Amry Security Agency (ASA) started their first SIGINT operations out of trucks on top of the hill. Soon after, the first buildings were constructed, and Field Station Teufelsberg gradually grew over the next years to become one of the largest Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) stations ever.

Although Teufelsberg was located in the British sector of Berlin, there was a close cooperation between British and US intelligence. Initially operated by the ASA, the American part of the station came under control of the Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) in 1977. Since then, the NSA provided most of the personnel and equipment for its ELINT (electronic Intelligence) and SIGINT operations.

With its large antenna park and huge dishes in their radomes, they intercepted East German and Soviet radio communications, directional microwave links and satellite transmissions, and captured and analysed different types of Radar. If it was in the air, they got it. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the station became useless and American and British troops abandoned Teufelsberg in 1991.

As if the hill's history wasn't mysterious enough, the secret that lies beneath is just as curious: the Nazi military-technical college, designed by Albert Speer. When the Allies captured Berlin, they tried to demolish it with explosives, which turned out to be impossible. They decided to bury the massive building under a pile of rubble from destroyed Berlin.

That story starts in the 1930's, when Adolf Hitler ordered his chief architect Albert Speer to develop a new Berlin. Nazi Project 'Welthauptstadt Germania' (World Capital Germania) included a huge Olympic stadion, a new Chancellary, an avenue of victory, a triumphal arc and other monumental architecture. Here's a video of how it would look like. In 1937, they started with the first part of the project, the Wehrtechnische Fakultät or military-technical college. Changing priorities during the Second World War halted the project and it was never resumed. Today, there's even an association, called Berlin Unterwelten (underground), that wants to explore the remains of the elite military academy underneath the Teufelsberg.

More about the Teufelsberg SIGINT station on this website. There's also a site with nice panoramic pictures (may take a while to download). Field Station Berlin Veterans Group (FSBVG) wants to save the Teufelsberg site. To have a birds-eye look on Teufelsberg, start up your Google Earth and type "Berlin Teufelsberg" in the search box. Key in "Bischofsgruen Schneeberg", to fly to another one. With "Brocken Schierke", you'll jump right to the most famous former Soviet station in East Germany. More about US listening stations on US border operations in Germany.

On youtube there are several video's about Teufelsberg and how it looks now. Here's one to start with:

The Berlin Tunnel

2009-06-09T16:30:00.030+02:00

One of the most spectacular SIGINT operations in the Cold War era was project PBJOINTLY, the Berlin tunnel. It was a CIA operation to tap the three main Soviet communications cables in the Soviet-occupied sector of Berlin. Planning and construction lasted for five years and started in the late 1940's with penetrating the office of the East German post to covertly obtains plans of the Soviet network. In 1952, they had all information to determine the ideal location for the tap, and trial tappings on other locations were performed.

It became a joint operation between the US and British intelligence. Mid 1953, construction planning started. The US Engineering Corps would dig the 1500 feet (500 m) tunnel underneath the East German border and the British would drive the vertical shaft towards the cables, only 27 inches (68 cm) beneath the surface alongside a highway, and provide the tapping of the cable. Some 3,000 tons of sand had to be disposed without border guards noticing it. A warehouse project near the tunnel was set up as cover and the tunnel dirt was disposed in its basement. All planning and work had to be done in absolute secrecy, with as little as possible people involved. Meanwhile, linguists in Russian were recruited and trained.

In August 1953, tunneling started, right beneath border guards, forcing engineers to halt and keep silent, each time the guards walked over. By March 1955 the tunnel and the tap room, a large air-conditioned sealed room with electronics, were completed. The three main Soviet landlines were tapped, the signals preamplified in the tap room and sent further down the tunnel for recording. It was a marvel of planning and engineering. The cables carried 1200 channels. 28 telex circuits and 121 voice channels were recorded continuously, transcribed and analysed.

Nonetheless, on April 21, 1956, after eleven months of eavesdropping, the tunnel was discovered. Apparently by accident, when East Germans dug up a faulty cable. However, later on, British intelligence discovered that George Blake, an MI6 officer who was involved from the earliest beginning of the planning, had been recruited by the KGB as early as 1952. He informed his Soviet contacts as soon as the final location of the tunnel was planned. The tunnel and the mole, what's in a name.

At the end, the question remains how successful the 6.7 million dollar operation was, and to whom. The Soviets knew right from the start, but could not react as this would compromise their MI6 mole. Why did they allow eleven months of tapping? What was the value of the intercepted intelligence? Did the Russians fed the CIA with fake and misleading information? Was this a magnificent intelligence coup by the West, or one by the East? We'll never know...

More information about the tunnel and its construction in this CIA document (pdf 3.4 Mb), published on the FAS. It includes all technical aspects, describes the aftermath of the operation and the complete report on the discovery by the Soviets. On the CIA Studies in Intelligence pages you will find many original CIA documents regarding the Berlin Tunnel and on this page an account of one of the operations officers. Below a Cold War Spies video which includes an interview with George Blake.

Update: Operation Ivy Bells was the undersea equivalent of the Berlin tunnel. Read more about the tapping of the Soviet cable in the Sea of Okhotsk in my September 2010 post.

Spies and Numbers - The Kendall Myers Case

2009-06-06T17:26:00.031+02:00

On June 5, 2009 the US Department of Justice announced that US State Department official Walter Kendall Myers and his wife Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers were arrested on charges of espionage for the Cuban government for nearly 30 years. Myers, now retired, worked at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR). He held a Top Secret security clearance and had daily access to classified information. This is without a doubt a most damaging spy case.

He and his wife acknowledged having received encrypted messages from Cuban Intelligence via a shortwave radio they possessed. The Columbia State District Court indictment stated that "Cuban intelligence broadcasts encrypted shortwave radio messages in Morse Code or by a voice reading numbers" and also that "It was part of the conspiracy that Cuban Intelligence would and did broadcast shortwave messages in Morse Code which were receive by Kendall Myers". Cryptome published the State Court indictment (3.3 MB zip file) which contains sections describing the numbers station.

This case once again confirms that the mysterious numbers stations are indeed used by Intelligence agencies to communicate with their agents. The streams of numbers or letters are sent by powerful shortwave transmitters in Morse or by voice. Although there were more numbers stations in the Cold Ware era, many are still very active and, not surprisingly, some of them are Cuban. Radio amateurs monitor these broadcasts and they sometimes give nicknames to stations, according to the introduction phrase. The Cuban Spanish Lady "Attencion", described at Simon Mason's Shortwave Espionage pages, is one of them.

Although no government or legal broadcaster has ever acknowledged the existence of numbers stations or admitted any involvement with these stations, the official court documents again show clearly that these stations are indeed used by intelligence services to send secret messages. And still, every day, numbers messages are transmitted all over the world. Who's listening to them?

More about the Myers case is found on the US DOJ website. If you want to read more about the mysterious numbers stations, just visit my numbers web page. The FBI affidavit (pdf) and the Court Indictment on the Ana Belen Montes case, a Cuban agent caugth in 2001, are also published. It describs in detail how she received and deciphered numbers messages. And as a bonus, here's a video of a numbers reading machine, used by the East German Ministerium für Staatssicherheit. Update: In november Tom Diaz wrote a good two-part post called "Spies Like Them" on the Myers case. Read Part One and Part Two on his Fairly Civil weblog.

Update July 16, 2010: The US Department of Justice announced that Walter Kendall Myers is sentenced to life imprisonment without parole and that Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers is sentenced to 81 months in prison, for their 30 years spying carreer and for passing highly-classified U.S. national defense information to the Cuban Intelligence.

Nicky Hager's Secret Power

2009-05-25T16:17:00.023+02:00

Secret Power, Nicky Hager's fascinating book about New Zealand's role in the ECHELON spy network, is now online and free available. The book brings the story of the global SIGINT (Signal Intelligence) operations (call it spying or eavesdropping or whatever) by the New Zealand GCSB (Government Communications Security Bureau), in close cooperation with the United Kingdom, the United States and other countries.

The information in the book is based on years of research and interviews with staff members of the GCSB and describes in detail who was targeted by ECHELON and how they did it. It also reveals details on the UKUSA agreement, which enables massive gathering and sharing of Signal Intelligence between the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Due to the combined SIGINT operations of the UKUSA countries, Hager's investigations provide an insight view, not only in GCSB's kitchen, but also in Britain's GCHQ, the American NSA and the Australian DSD. Hager was one of the first to bring out information on the ECHELON project. A truly fascinating book. Don't miss it!

You can view or download the complete e-book on his website. Just right-click the "Full Book" link (at the top of the page) and select "save target as...". It's a 22Mb file containing 301 great pages! More info on my Book Review page. For some other history on the GCSB, check out this previous post.

NSA Director on RSA Conference

2009-05-08T17:15:00.014+02:00

On 21 April, Lieutenant General Keith Alexander gave a talk at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco. Cryptome published the transcript of his talk of which the main topic was cyber security. Keith Alexander is the director of the National Security Agency, so he knows what he's talking about. The talk was a strong pleading for cooperation between the government, industry and academia.

There's a need to protect one country’s networks. The cyber attacks on countries like Estonia, Latvia, and more recently Georgia have shown how devastating these attack can be, and how cyber crime evolved to cyber warfare. Can we provide early warning for such attacks? NSA protects military and intelligence networks, but what’s the NSA’s role in securing the other networks that are vital to the US? How do they assist the Department of Homeland Security? Lots of questions to solve.

That’s where the Comprehensive National Cyber Initiative comes in. But they face tremendous challenges and problems. According to Alexander, the NSA will have to work closely together, not only with other government departments, but also with the industry and academia. However, this means sharing knowledge and technology that needs to be kept secret. That's not obvious. And what's the right balance between civil liberties, privacy and a nations security?

There's a long way to go and it's easy to criticise the government, but they have a tough job. It's clear that the NSA director reaches out to the academics to help fight cyber crime and warfare. Critics will say NSA is recruiting the public (opinion), but still, there's a war to be fought on the Internet, and who's going to fight it?

You can watch the video of the talk on the RSA Conference Webcast and his talk is written out and published on this Cryptome page. Worth while reading. More information about Lieutenant General Keith Alexander is found on this NSA biography page.

Intelligence on the Web

2009-05-01T11:50:00.004+02:00

On the Maryland Loyola College website there's a vast collection of Intelligence web links. These pages cover an enormous number of intelligence organisations worldwide and various subjects and document, related to intelligence. If you don't find it here, it's probably more secret than the NSA. The links are divided into three main groups:

The Strategic Intelligence page covers the intelligence and security organisations from all over the world, documents to strategic intelligence and related laws, reports and journals, terrorism and counter terrorism. It also includes many links to historical documents and subjects.

The Military Intelligence page includes information regarding US military intelligence agencies, military intelligence units, defense intelligence documents and historical references.

The Economic Intelligence section contains links to economic espionage, competitive intelligence, government economic and business intelligence and journals, articles, papers and other documents, related to economic and business intelligence, as well as commercial sites related to intelligence.

Cryptology documentaries

2009-04-24T17:48:00.029+02:00

Cryptology is a wonderful science with a most interesting history. Unfortunately, few people know what cryptology actually is, and what it means to us. Code makers and code breakers influenced history for thousands of years and determined politics and the outcome of many wars in the past, and it will continue to do so in the future.

One of the reasons that cryptology is unknown to the public is that it has been a very obscure science for ages. Even today, only a few books found their way to the general public and documentaries about cryptology on TV science or history channels are most rare. Nonetheless, some very interesting documentaries exist and it is a pity that they are seldom showed on TV.

On Youtube, there are quite a few good videos to discover. A nice one is the 45 minutes documentary Top Secret NSA from Discovery, about the role of the National Security Agency in recent history (on the image you see NSA's Puzzle Palace). It was the first time NSA allowed a view inside. The complete video is available as Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 and Part 5, first part here below.

There's also a good 40 minutes documentary on History Channel in four parts: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 and Part 4. It covers the complete history of cryptology from the ancient up to today (only the final part seems to be missing).

It would be nice if the TV programmers aired such documentaries a little bit more so that cryptologists were placed a little bit more in the well deserved spotlight. Their actual work however will rarely see daylight.

Rear Admiral Showers on SpyCast

2009-04-19T11:47:00.022+02:00

The International Spy Museum just published a new podcast interview with Rear Admiral 'Mac' Showers. He served 31 years in the US Navy and 12 years in the CIA. During the Second World War he served as CINCPAC intelligence analyst on deciphered Japanese messages, encrypted with JN-25, the main Japanese naval code. Showers worked for Admiral Nimitz in a team of codebreakers, linguists and analysts. Nimitz asked them: "tell me today what the Japanese are doing tomorrow". They did, and made important contributions to the American victory in the Pacific.

Showers explains in the interview the first important achievement of the codebreakers, with the Japanese attack on Port Moresby in March 1942. Deciphered messages enabled the US Navy to counter the offensive in what is known as the Battle of the Coral Sea. However, the most important contribution of the codebreakers to the war in the Pacific is without a doubt the deciphering of the plans for the Battle of Midway on 4 June 1942. The Japanese fleet was heading towards the Midway Atoll with a total of 126 ships, including 4 aircraft carriers. Intelligence from the codebreakers provided the US Navy an important tactical advantage and although completely outnumbered (they only had 3 aircraft carriers and 32 ships) they decisively defeated the Japanese Imperial Navy in a surprise attack.

Admiral Showers also talks about how a single deciphered message lead to the downing of Admiral Yamamoto's airplane. Yamamoto, chief in command of the combined Japanese fleet, made an inspection tour in the South Pacific. The message revealed all flight details about when and where Yamamoto would be, including arrival and departure times and locations. Yamamoto was killed on 18 April 1943 when his G4M bomber, escorted by seven Zeros, was shot down by Airforce P-38's near Bougainville in the Solomon Islands.

This is a unique 30 minutes interview with one of the few surviving veterans of the intelligence battle in the Second World War. You can listen to it on Spycast but it might be more practical to download the 26 Mb file from the Spycast feed. Just right-click the April 14, 2009 mp3 file and select "Save Target As...". More about Donald 'Mac' Showers on Navy TV and on NSA's Hall of Honor.

Noor Inayat Khan

2009-04-07T20:10:00.006+02:00

Noor Inayat Khan, the exotic in Russia born descent of an Indian muslim prince, was the first British female Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent in WW2 to be sent to occupied France as a wireless operator. Although some officers doubted whether she was suitable for SOE operations, she was infiltrated in June 1943 under the false identity of Jeanne-Marie Regnier and codename Madelaine, to occupy the most dangerous SOE post, Paris.

While constantly relocating to avoid being captured, she transmitted German troop movements to London. Wireless operator was a high risk job, as they could only stay in the air for a few minutes. The German Sicherheitsdienst SD was very skilled in tracing clandestine radios with direction-finding equipment. They managed to track down and arrest virtually all operators. Noor was one of the few remaining. Well aware of the risks, she turned down several offers to return to London.

After four months, Noor was betrayed and consequently arrested by the SD in October 1943. She resisted her arrest so fiercely that she was treated as an extremely dangerous prisoner. Although interrogated in the Gestapo headquarters for five weeks, she never gave any information. She made two escape attempts, one just after her arrest and another on 25 November, together with two other SOE agents. Both attempts failed.

Noor was relocated to a prison in Pforzheim, Germany, where she was regarded as very dangerous and kept in chains and in solitary confinement. Ten months later, on 11 September, Noor was moved to the Dachau concentration camp, where she was cruelly beaten by an SS officer, prior to her execution in the early morning of 13 September 1944. Her last word was "Liberté". She was 30 years old. The remarkable Noor Inayat Khan was posthumously awarded the George Cross as one of only four women ever to receive this award, and also the French Croix de Guerre.

More to read about Noor Inayat Khan on 64-Baker Street, Camp X, Camp Dachau website, and spy master William Sephenson on Noor. Definitely worth reading!

Update: On YouTube, there's a five-part documentary called "The Princess Spy". Click the links to view parts [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Crypto Machines with One-time Keys

2009-04-03T16:15:00.005+02:00

In my previous post I already mentioned the ETCRRM, a device to encrypt teletype signals with one-time tapes. Systems that use the principle of one-time key encryption were very popular until the 1980's, because of their absolute security. Most of these machines encrypted five-bit teletype signals by mixing (Exclusive Or function - XOR ) the plain signal with a one-time key tape. Each one-time tape consisted of truly random five-bit values and there were only two copies of each tape, one for both ends of the teletype link. Each tape was to be used only once, and destroyed after used.

Of course, the one-time tape method required a complex logistical support to securely distribute a large amount of one-time tapes. Something that could only be supported by government departments such as the military, intelligence services and diplomacy. As you can imagine, an enormous amount of one-time tapes travelled around the world by courier or in diplomatic bags, since you needed as much one-time tapes as there were message to be send.

A five bit teletype punched paper tape. Can you read it?

Although a pretty old system (developed by Gilbert Vernam in 1917) its unbreakable encryption kept it popular until sophisticated electronic crypto machines and modern computer algorithms provided enough security. Nevertheless, some electronic or software one-time key systems still exist for special purposes where absolute security has priority.

Some of the one-time key ciphering machines are the American TELEKRYPTON, B-2 PYTHON, SIGTOT and SIGSALY (which used one-time noise), the British BID-590 NOREEN (see image) and 5-UCO, the Canadian ROCKEX, the Dutch ECOLEX series, the Swiss Hagelin CD-57, CX-52 and T-55 with superencipherment, the German Siemens T-37-ICA and M-190, the East-German and T-304 LEGUAN, the Czech SD1, the Russian M-100 SMARAGD and M-105 N AGAT, and the Polish T-352/T-353 DUDEK, and of course, the Norwegian ETCRRM, famous from the Washington/Moscow hotline. I'm sure I forgot many more, any suggestions are welcome.

Apart from being unbreakable, one-time tape systems were quite simple and did not have any secret crypto technology aboard, as mixing one-time keys with plain text is a commonly known basic method of encryption. Whereas other encryption machines were considered as listed secret crypto equipment, one-time tape devices were mostly unclassified. Only the one-time tapes themselves were considered secret material. More about one-time pad on my website.

Washington-Moscow Hot Line

2009-04-01T16:20:00.004+02:00

The direct link between United States and the Soviet Union, and later the Russian Federation, is a well known legacy of the Cold War. The Cuban missile crisis, generally regarded as the moment in which the Cold War came closest to nuclear war, made the US and USSR realise that reliable and secure communications are essential in event of a crisis.

The Hotline became operational in August 1963 and was a full duplex teleprinter (Telex) circuit. Although the hot line always has been shown as a red telephone in movies and popular culture, the option of a speech link was turned down as it was believed that spontaneous verbal communications could lead to miscommunications, misperceptions, incorrect translation or unwise remarks, which are serious diplomatic disadvantages in times of severe crisis. Nevertheless, the red phone myth lived a long life.

The real hot line was a direct cable link, routed from Washington-London-Copenhagen-Stockholm-Helsinki to Moscow. It was a double link with commercial teleprinters, one link with English character teleprinters and the other link with Cyrillic character teleprinters. The links were encrypted with one-time tapes by means of four ETCRRM's (Electronic Teleprinter Cryptographic Regenerative Repeater Mixer). The one-time tape encryption provided unbreakable encryption, absolute security and privacy. Although a higly secure system, the unclassified standard teleprinters and ETCRRM's (see image, by Jerry Proc) were sold by commercial firms and therefore did not disclose any secret crypto technology to the Soviets.

In 1974 the hot line underwent a first modernization and a new link was established by two American Intelsat and two Soviet Molniya II satellites. The original wire circuit was kept as a back-up. A second upgrade, the addition of a high-speed facsimile link, became operational in 1986. From that moment on, the Hot Line consists of two satellite links and one wire teleprinter circuit.

A very detailed description of the Washington-Moscow hot line is found on Jerry Proc's great Crypto Machines, which also contains a ETCRRM page. On my April 2009 Image of the month you can view the ETCRRM in high-res (don't forget to click the image to enlarge, and click once more to zoom in!). The ETCRRM was a pretty popular device, used for high level military communications in several countries.

For more information one one-time tapes, please visit my one-time pad page. If you're curious about 'Red Phones' and what they actually are, you can check out Jerry's Red Phone webpage.

Stasi SIGINT Operations

2009-03-11T16:30:00.007+01:00

The Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS) of the former DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republiek), commonly known as the Stasi, is widely recognized as the most effective Intelligence agency of all former Soviet states, and the HVA (Haupt Verwaltung Aufklaerung) under Markus Wolf is probably the most successful Foreign Intelligence service ever to have existed. With an enormous number of agents, operating in the West, the HVA with its HUMINT (Human Intelligence) was considered to be the most important Intelligence source for both East Germany and the Soviet Union.

However, research of the Stasi archives, seized in Gera when the DDR collapsed, show that Hauptabteilung III or HA III, the SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) directorat of the MfS, also mounted massive SIGINT assaults on the West. According to the archives, the SIGINT operations proved to have been as significant, and in some cases even more important than HUMINT. This is interesting, because the general idea was that the HVA success more or less compensated the lack of SIGINT capabilities. It is now estimated that 30 up to 50 percent of all Intelligence information during the 1980's was collected by SIGINT.

HA III had 25 departments, over 2000 staff officers and some 80 installations in East Germany. They monitored shortwave transmissions and more than 30,000 West German telephones from military, diplomatic and intelligence personnel from both West Germany and NATO. They also eavesdropped on radio signal paths (telephone relay) used by the Federal Post Office, and on VHF radios of the BND (West German intelligence) surveillance teams. Virtually all West German satellite-based telephone, Telex, fax, and data transmissions were monitored, as well as the MARISAT, FLEETSATCOM, LEASAT, and INTELSAT communications satellites.

HA III worked closely and efficiently together with the HVA and other parts of the MfS, which enabled them to collect vast quantities of critical information. HA III even had a special bilateral liaison with its KGB counterpart. Western Intelligence clearly underestimated the MfS's capabilities.

The complete article is found on this page at the CIA Studies in Intelligence section. More information also available in the Ben Fisher paper (pdf) and on Spycatcher.

New Zealand COMSEC History

2009-03-10T16:01:00.003+01:00

At the New Zealand GCSB (Government Communications Security Bureau) website there's a publication by Eric Morgon about the History of Information Assurance in New Zealand. It describes the means of message protection from the early days before the Second World War until the 1970's.

You can read about the early cipher and codes New Zealand used, and how the Organisation of National Security (ONS) in 1930's urged for more and better cryptographic protection. During the Second World War they abandoned insecure ciphers such as Playfair and some Telegraph Ciphers and switched to different types of book ciphers and one-time pads. Also the Typex Mark II CCM (Combined Cipher Machine) was introduced during the war.

In the post-war chapter there's the KL-7 and the 5 UCO one-time pad on-line Telex enciphering system, and in the final chapter they explain how COMSEC became more and more important within the Government. To read the publication, open it directly from this pdf link (325 Kb) or go to the History of IA page.

Paper Enigma Replika

2009-03-07T20:00:00.004+01:00

Unless you're living on another planet, you probably have noticed there's a financial crisis. I can imagine that many people are dreaming of their own Enigma machine, but currently have more useful things to do with their money. The really unfortunate among us could try out Mike Koss' Paper Enigma which works like the real thing but doesn't look like a real Enigma. However, now there's also a paper Enigma that looks exactly like the real thing!

You can construct your own Enigma machine with only a color printer, scissors and a bit of glue. Go to the Paper Replika website download the pdf Enigma M4 Naval machine, print it out in color and put it together. That's it! You don't need stiff card paper, plain paper will do just fine. This is the perfect solution for those who always wanted an Enigma machine on their desk without paying their pants off. It's very beautiful, with realistic colors and nice details like an opening lid, plugs, rotors that stick out, and even the typical M4 handles. With some patience and a sharp cutter, you'll be able to make a real beauty. If you donate $2.00 you can obtain a larger version without the website credits on the machine.

How To Learn Morse

2009-03-05T22:00:00.011+01:00

Today, we rely heavily on modern technology to communicate. Telephone, mobile or satellite phones, it's so easy to use. So, why bother learning a 163 year old system called Morse? Morse is one of the most basic ways to communicate, but also one of the most reliable and flexible. You can send Morse by land line, by radio, with a signal lamp, or even as an alternative to the tap code, by replacing a dot (did) by a knock and a dash (dah) by a double knock. But the probably most important advantage, the system uses a very sophisticated noise filtering and error correction system: the human ear and brain! More about Morse on Wikipedia.

The military has used Morse for many years. As modern equipment took over the job, Morse was generally abandoned in the 1990's. However, realizing that they lost the only reliable way to communicate over long distance with HF radio in poor condition, many armed forces re-introduced Morse courses, and its usefulness has been proven for signal operators, Special Forces an many others. And it's here to stay! Satellite and telephone will remain prime targets in any war and if knocked out (even China has done successful tests to blow satellites out of space), Morse would be the only way to get your message across, even in the worst conditions. For the same reasons, Morse still is very popular among amateur radio operators.

So, why learn Morse? Well, I know a few reasons. As a start, it's fun to learn and to play with. Also, you never know you might end up in an emergency situation where communication could save your life. With a simple flash light you can easily send a message over several miles in the dark. Finally, Morse is like riding a bike: once you get it, you never loose it. Now, how do you learn Morse? The most popular ways are the Farnsworth Timing and the Koch method. Both of them makes it easy to learn Morse in little time.

On the Just Learn Morse Code website you can download a free software tool to learn Morse. Personally I prefer the free G4FON Morse Trainer, which has less options, but is less complicated in use. Both programs use the Koch method, described on David Finley's website. You start by learning two characters at relatively fast speed, and once you master them, you can add more and more characters to the exercises. Write down what you hear and check it after the exercise with the program output. A character speed of 15 words per minute (WPM) and a code speed of 9 WPM are ideal to start. You'll be amazed with your progress in just a few hours.

And how fast is Morse? Below there's a nice video. It's a SMS (mobile phone) vs Morse contest. Check it out and see who's the fasted.

More information and a vast archive of images about Morse equipment is found on Tom Perera's wonderful Telegraph Museum http://www.w1tp.com/

Estonian Spy Scandal

2009-02-27T17:47:00.021+01:00

Last September, a spy scandal has sent shock waves through NATO. Meanwhile, more details have surfaced on what is believed to be the most damaging spy operation in decades. Those who believed that the end of the Cold War also meant the end of Intelligence operations by Russia on Western soil, think again.

Apparently, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service SVR (Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki) mounted a most successful many years' operation against NATO with the aid of Herman Simm, an Estonian Government official and the former Chief of Police, who made career as head of the Ministry of Defense department, responsible for secret coordinations between NATO and the European Union.

NATO officials say he caused 'historic damage', comparable with the Aldrich Ames spy case, the CIA agent who passed critical CIA information to the KGB for many years. According to investigators, the KGB established contact with Simm as early as the 1980's, when Moscow realized that Estonia would eventually become independent. Simm was recruited by the SVR, the successor of the KGB, when Estonia was a NATO candidate in the mid 1990's. While being a so-called 'sleeper', his career moved him into the perfect spot to pass virtually all secret documents, exchanged within the EU and NATO, to Russians. These included confidential NATO analyses on Kosovo, the Georgian war and the missile defense program. One of his means of communication with the SVR was a seemingly old radio, in reality a converted and sophisticated radio to contact his spy handler.

This shows that Russia has more than an eagle eye on Europe, and how security has become a serious problem in the ever expanding NATO alliance, which includes several former Soviet states. Thoroughly and far-sighted, as Russian intelligence always has been, they undoubtedly placed their chess pieces already many years ago in the future heart of the Western chess-board. You have to give it to them, they have a brio for long-term planning.

More on this spy case on CI Centre, WordPress, Spiegel Online and Поместить (Russian).

An interesting view on the successor of the Cold War: The Cold Peace.

US COMSEC History

2009-02-25T16:32:00.021+01:00

The National Security Agency (NSA) recently released a 1973/1981 NSA Lecture by David Boak about Communications Security, under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Already released last December, I only recently had the time to read the 158 page document thoroughly. Volume I starts with the history of COMSEC and how awareness and research evolved into practical concepts and regulations. Also, the development and characteristics of some important cipher systems are described (p54). Another chapter describes the problems they faced in the field of TEMPEST and hostile Signal Intelligence (p85), with examples of how difficult it is to suppress unwanted signals, emitted by all kinds of communications devices.

Volume II (p95) includes Operations Security (OPSEC), the problems with Remote Keying, Programmable COMSEC Modules (PCSM), the issue of public use of cryptography (p127), the use of cryptography on general purpose computers and the lack of security knowledge by the public (p135). There's also a chapter on the use of the Nestor voice encryption system in Vietnam. Emergency destruction of equipment is another complex issue. Examples of how things can go wrong are the USS Pueblo incident and the 1979 takeover of the US embassy in Iran (p147). Finally, there's a chapter on Murphy's Law (p155), with some hilarious actual examples in the field of COMSEC.

Although some 30 years old, the lecture is even today pretty up-to-date. In particular, the public use of cryptography is still an issue of discussion, with NSA trying to protect the nations security and SIGINT capabilities, against the public, demanding its privacy. Also, the security problems that are related to the use of crypto applications on computers still aren't solved and, to be honest, I don't believe the Tempest and SIGINT problems of commercial PC's will ever be solved. The modern PC is just a very very bad concept. David Boak already in 1973 recognized the inevitable insecurity (read: leak as hell) of today's computer. I remember an NSA official saying "in 99 percent of the cases we don't have to break anything, we simply retrieve the plain version". I'm still waiting on the first secure PC. And yes, MAC users, you're just as leak, only less targeted. Keep on dreaming.

There are quite a few blanked pages, but still plenty of information available to discover. You can directly read the NSA COMSEC Lecture pdf or go to governmentattic.org and discover more documents that are released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

The Ultimate Spy Book

2009-02-15T14:16:00.005+01:00

Keith Melton is a well known author of several spy books and an expert on espionage equipment and clandestine devices. He has an enormous collection of these unique spy tools. This book is beautifully illustrated with more than 600 detailed images of ingenious spy accessories and weapons. The book starts with a brief historical review on the beginnings of espionage, the First World War and the Russian revolution. Melton takes us back to the Second World War, with the British SOE - Special Operations Executive , the American OSS - Office of Strategic Operations and the German Abwehr, Sicherheitsdienst and Gestapo. The covert communications equipment, suitcase radios, special weapons, the cracking of codes and Soviet wartime spy rings.

However, the major part of the book is, not surprisingly, about the Cold War. The Cold War was a period in history that was characterised by mistrust and fear between East and West. These were the heydays of espionage, with Berlin as the capital of spies. Many of the most notorious spy cases were about the battle for intelligence information between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. This battle was fought in the sky, with U2 spy planes and satellites, but also on the ground by intelligence officers and their agents in enemy territory. Hidden and automatic cameras for observation such as the Robot Star, small mini cameras like the famous Minox or the F21 with its lens in a jacket button for clandestine photography and small camera systems to copy documents. Communications equipment for covert operations, monitoring equipment, dead drops to secretly pass documents and films. It's all in the book.

Melton also brings us the story of secret operations and the special devices that were developed for these operations. If there are spies, there's counter-intelligence. Bug detectors, anti-eavesdropping equipment, interception of documents and all kind of tools to burgle or secretly gain access to installations or documents of the enemy. Training and recruitment, spy rings, false covers and legends, it's all there. But above all, The Ultimate Spy is a book to watch, with many splendid photos about the art of spy-craft and its technology. A book that would make James Bond's Mister Q jealous. ISBN: 0789404435

More book reviews are found on my website.

US M-209 Simulator Update

2009-02-12T19:49:00.007+01:00

I just finished an update of my US M-209 Cipher Machines Simulator. The M-209 was an American licenced version of the Hagelin C-38. In 1940, Boris Hagelin went to the United States to promote his C Type pin-and-lug machines which resulted in the largest sale ever of crypto machines. The US military selected his C-38 as tactical ciphering device and designated it as M-209. By the end of the Second World War over 140,000 of these small M-209 machines were produced in the US.

The M-209 Sim is an accurate software replica of that famous crypto device, fully compatible with the real machine, with authentic graphics, very realistic handling and all the nuts and bolts, just like the real thing.

The new 3.0 update now incorporates a practical drop-down menu, a pdf help file that explains how the machine was used by the US Army and detailed instructions of the original encryption procedures. You can download the simulator on my website.

Cyber Security Tips

2009-02-08T19:52:00.002+01:00

Everyone with a computer and a network connection should pay a visit to US Computer Emergency Readiness Team US-CERT website. US-CERT is founded to protect the Internet structure within the United States, analyze and reduce threats in cyber space, respond to cyber incidents and to spread warning information. To perform this tremendous task, the US-CERT works together with the Department of Homeland Security and several private and public sectors. They have lots of useful information, not only for US citizens, but for everyone who has a computer.

An important part of making the Internet a bit more secure is to provide good information to the computer user. On the Alerts and Tips page you can find information about current security problems and vulnerabilities, important security updates and patches for various computer platforms.

A most interesting page are the Cyber Security Tips. What is cyber security, what can you do to protect your computer and network, what kind of threats can you expect, and how do I protect myself against them? They give tips on safe communication, using e-mail and browsing on the net, and how to keep your software up-to-date and secure. Privacy, protecting it with encryption, passwords, it's all there. Those who often use a computer but are not really computer geeks can really learn here to avoid some important security mistakes they make on computers and learn to protect their privacy.

This information on the Security Tips page should come with each new computer that you buy. Actually, using a computer without these basic tips is like driving a car for the first time and not having any clue of the road signs and traffic rules. So, be safe and read it!

Recent Espionage Cases

2009-02-01T11:50:00.013+01:00

On the US Department of Defense PERSEREC website (Defense Personnel Security Research Center) there's an interesting collection of recent espionage cases (from 1975 onwards).

PERSEREC gets its directions and research priorities from the Office of the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense (HUMINT, Counterintelligence and Security). PERCEREC assists the personnel of DoD on matters of security. They are part of the Defense Human Resources Activity (DHRA)

Their Selected Reports section contains many reports and studies on intelligence, espionage and security. One of those reports is the extensive "Espionage Against the US by Americans 1947–2001", an analyses of 150 spy cases. Who commits espionage, and why and how they did it. You can download the full report here.

Update: in case of a broken link, you can download the recent espionage cases here or browse by category here.

Numbers Tool

2009-01-28T19:19:00.009+01:00

I just uploaded a new version of my freeware Numbers tool. With Numbers 6.2 you can generate and print series or random numbers, formatted as standard one-time pads, one-time worksheets or custom number sequences. You can also view and print five different letters-to-figures conversion tables for use with one-time pad encryption

The program uses very sensitive mouse movement coordinates, together with time measurements of these movements, to initialize ten random number generators that are mixed together. With its random source seed and a seed depth of 9.3*10¹¹⁹⁸ the program is practically usable to generate one-time pads.

The program is downloadable as exe file only or full install on my website.

SIGABA CCM

2009-01-09T15:41:00.010+01:00

The SIGABA was probably the most secure rotor cipher machine during WW2. The SIGABA ECM Mark II (CSP 888/889) had three banks of five rotors each. One set of five rotors was used to encrypt the alphabet. The other two banks of rotors were used to scramble the signals that control the movement of the encryption rotors. The result is a very irregular and complex stepping of the encryption rotors. The SIGABA was a most secure machine and its message traffic has never been broken. It remained in service until the 1950's, when it was replaced by more modern systems such as the KL-7 and on-line ciphering machines.

During WW2 the US and Britain both developed a compatible cipher machine system, based on their own machines. On American side the special SIGABA CCM (Combined Cipher Machine), designated ASAM 5 by the Army and CSP-1700 by the Navy, was equipped with the CSP-1600 Typex compatible rotor cage. This machine was interoperable with the CCM version of the British Typex cipher machine. After the war, the CCM remained in service between The US, Britain and Canada, and later on within NATO.

The SIGABA was a wonderful machine that incorporated the newest developments in the field of cipher machines. Unfortunately all machines were systematically withdrawn and destructed for reasons of security. Only a hand-full most rare ECM Mark II's survived in museums and the special SIGABA CCM version is an even more endangered species. The story of the Famous German Enigma cipher machine is now widely known to the public, but regretfully the SIGABA with its far better cryptographic strength as the Enigma is only known within the world of cryptography.

More information is available on several good websites. On my January Image of the Month page you can see the rare SIGABA CCM in detail. On the Pampanito website you can read all about the history of the ECM Mk II. They also published the complete SIGABA manual. More technical details are found on John Savard's website. Jerry proc provides more military information on both the SIGABA ECM Mk II and the CCM version. Finally, you can also read the Cryptologia article on SIGABA

Until the end of February there's a one-chance opportunity to view the unique SIGABA CCM version at the Secret Messages exhibition in the Jan Corver Museum.

Siemens Hell-Feldfernschreiber

2008-12-28T18:25:00.018+01:00

A most ingenious way to relay text from one point to another is the Hellschreiber, developed by Rudolf Hell in the 1920's. The Hellschreiber enables readable and error-free communication, even under poor conditions, over radio or land-lines. Text characters are composed by a 7 x 14 matrix and sent as a serialized audio signal to the receiver. The Hell receiver prints out the characters on paper with a unique double winded spindle. It's a simple yet robust system that enables a speed of 150 characters per minute.

The ingenious of the Hell design is how it visually handles error correction and synchronisation problems. The special spindle prints the text twice on the paper ribbon in order to make it readable in all conditions, even when sender and receiver are not fully synchronised.

The Hellschreiber went into service in 1934 and its speed and reliability made it very popular with press agencies and very suitable for diplomatic and military communications. The German Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine used the system from 1935 until 1945 for field operations. Although this beautiful machine has become obsolete due to the introduction of Telex, Fax and e-mail, the device, and even software versions of it, remains popular with radio amateurs.

On Frank Dörenberg's web pages there's a magnificent Hellschreiber page. Frank has composed a detailed historical and technical description of the Hellschreiber. Make sure to visit the 'How it Works' section with its beautiful animated images that demonstrate perfectly how the machine works.

HASH THAT!

2008-12-12T16:26:00.008+01:00

For all newbies in the world of cryptography or anyone who is wondering what cryptography can do for us, there's an interesting project called HashThat! at ThinkQuest, the website, created by students and for students. It's a very beautiful and clear introduction in cryptography and a fun page to read and discover.

The Fundamentals section explains what crypto means, the crypto vocabulary, and the basics of cryptography. In the Down The Ages section you can learn about the history of cryptography through the ages and get familiar with some of the most famous cipher machines. After reading the Relevance Today page you will understand how important crypto is to us in all day life. The Lighter Side and Interact sections are fun to read, listen and play, and there are interesting audio interviews with Phil Zimmermann and crypto history icon David Kahn. Make sure to explore the menus at the right of each page!

I can recommend a visit to the HashThat! website. Look and learn!

Image of the Month

2008-11-17T20:53:00.005+01:00

This month I started a new page on my website called Image of the Month. Each month there will be a new beautiful or rare image, related to cipher machines and cryptology. Each image will highlight a special object or story about crypto devices and include a description and links to additional information.

The first image is a very rare Enigma model, the predecessor of the Abwehr Enigma G, taken at the splendid Secret Messages exhibition (see previous post). However, the selection of images will not be limited to my own work. If you have a beautiful and detailed high resolution image of a crypto device, it could be selected as Image of the Month! Of course, the owner of the image will preserve all rights, receives full credits, and the image will be used exclusively as Image of the Month. More information on how to submit an image on the Image of the Month page on Cipher Machines & Cryptology.