The National Archives (UK) has published a large file with fascinating intelligence from more than 500 intercepted and decrypted German, Italian and Japanese radio communications between 1941 to 1945. This is a unique release of historical significant information.
The messages, translated into English, originate from the duty officer of Hut 3 (translation, analysis and dispatch) in Bletchley Park, home of the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) and the center of British codebreaking efforts during the Second World War.
The large scale interception, decoding and analysis of millions of encrypted radio and teletype messages was one of the best kept secrets of the war. All these intelligence reports were classified "MOST SECRET" or TOP SECRET ULTRA" and the information was used with extremecaution to protect its source.
The published documents contain a wide range of tactical and logistical information, situation reports, downed aircraft and casualties, interrogation of prisoners, details of meetings of the highest ranking military, situation in occupied countries, the failed assassination attempt on Hitler, theft of art, and much more.
Some decrypts even show grave violations of the Geneva conventions such as direct orders to execute prisoners of war. I'm sure that some of these decrypts helped to convict many high ranked officers during the Nuremberg trials after the war. An historical treasure of information and a must read!
You can download file DEFE 3/573 from the National Archives. Note that this is a large 166 MB pdf file that can take a while to download! I you want to sift through many other intercepted communications, please visit this link at the National Archives or use its search engine. More about the breaking of German Enigma machine traffic is found on my website.
Today, the National Security Archive published the English translation of ВИРУС A (Virus A), about the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan, written by historian and investigative journalist Vladimir Snegirev with the assistance of retired KGB Colonel Valery Samunin, an intelligence veteran who worked in Afghanistan. The book is available as free download.
Snegirev's fascinating book tries to unravel the chain of events and provides a broader view on why and how the Soviets became engaged in a battle they were destined to lose. A battle that proved to be one too many for the Kremlin and the Soviet Union. The book suggests that the Soviet invasion was a case of mission creep, getting involved much more than initially planned. Do take in mind that the book represents the views of Russian authors.
The Soviet invasion force was not the first, nor the last, to miscalculate the strength of the resilient Afghan warriors. The British were there before them and the United States and NATO followed. Each had their own reason to challenge the Afghan people. But how did it start?
Revolution in the Republic
Mohammad Daoud Khan
The origins of the Soviet intervention are found in the Saur revolution. On April 28, 1978, troops of the Khalq faction of the Communist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) stormed the palace in Kabul, killing president Mohammad Daoud Khan and violently ending his government.
The PDPA, headed by Khalqist Nur Muhammad Taraki, imposed a socialist and secular regime, provoking a fierce opposition by the conservatives. From its inception, the PDPA suffered from internal conflicts between its Khalq and Parcham factions
To keep themselves in power and address the internal conflicts, the
Khalq faction, having seized power in the PDPA, imprisoned, tortured or
murdered thousands of Parchamists, members of the intelligentsia and the
traditional and religious elite. The violent purge and repression were
lead by second in power Hafizullah Amin, also a Khalqist.
Babrak Karmal, leader of PDPA's Parcham faction, fled the country. A chain of events started.
Neither the Afghan nor Soviet government had foreseen this chain of
events, nor did they had it under control.
In the first half of 1979, the Afghan government repeatedly requested
support from Soviet forces to help them with their fight against the
Mujaheddin. The first small detachment of Soviet troops and tanks
arrived in June of 1979 to help securing the government in Kabul.
Andrei Gromyko, Nur Mohammed Taraki and Leonid Brezhnev. Moscow 1979.
On
September 9, Taraki visited Moscow to negotiate more support. The Soviet leaders had warned that Amin's violent repression was becoming a serious problem and an insurgency was brewing.
Undesired Change of Power
Hafizullah Amin
On his return to Kabul on September 11, Taraki tried but failed to neutralize Amin's power. Three days later, after a shootout in the presidential palace, ambitious
pupil Amin staged a coup and ordered the detention of Taraki. One day later, a Soviet battalion was prepared to rescue Taraki, but never received the order because the Afghan Army, fully under control of Amin, had a stronger position than the limited number of Soviet troops.
The hesisation of the Soviets to intervene had wrongfully convinced Amin that he had the backing of the Kremlin. Three weeks later, Amin ordered the killing of his tutor Taraki. Moscow however was far from happy with Amin because his repression induced more and more opposition, endangering the young socialist revolution.
Soviet Intervention
Eventually, on December 25 and under the guise of military support for Amin, the Soviet 40th army, including ground and airborne troops, entered Afghanistan to stabilize the country. Two days later they initiated operation Storm-333. Russian elite Alpha and Zenith units, dressed in Afghan uniforms, stormed the presidential palace and killed Amin. Some 700 Spetsnaz took over the media and all government and military buildings.
Soviet troops entering Afghanistan
Two days later, Babrak Karmal, who fled the country six months earlier during Amin's July purge, returned from exile in Czechoslovak. Back in the country, and with support of the Kremlin, Karmal became the new Afghan president. The Soviets however got themselves a costly and deadly ten years war with the Mujahideen, which eventually contributed to the downfall ot the USSR.
How did it come that far? How did the Soviets become much more involved that they initially had planned? Were they taken hostage by the chain of events and forced to intervene, or did they made critical political or military mistakes in the run of events, leading up to the invasion?
Snegirev's fascinating book tries to shed a light on the decision making process. The book focuses especially on the conflict between president Taraki and Amin, the September coup with the assassination of Taraki by Amin, how Soviet intelligence and the Kremlin assessed and responded to these events and the operation to eliminate Amin and install Babrak Karmal as new president.
Many Tried and Failed
Lessons learned? Seeing what happens today in Afghanistan, I doubt that. From the very first chapter, the book has a chilling resemblance with the events that occurred in recent years.
Many questions remain. Did the Soviet Union and the United States both entered Afghanistan to help the Afghan people to emerge from the "dark ages", or was it to serve their geopolitical agenda? Would the Soviet Union have succeeded in eliminating fundamentalism and creating a modern Afghanistan without the - some say misplaced - U.S. support to the Mujaheddin and Pakistan in the 1980's? Would that have ended the conflict much sooner, with less bloodshed and fewer refugees seeking shelter in Pakistani camps, the hatchery of the Taliban?
The former Afghan king Nadir Shah, president Daoud and the PDPA consecutively also tried to create a "modern" and secular Afghanistan, albeit often with questionable methods. They all failed because they failed to change the situation for the ordinary Afghans. The key to defeating fundamentalism is to help a population to develop its country, at the same time respecting its traditions and religion.
They could have brought prosperity by helping with irrigation projects to stimulate agriculture. The average Afghan peasant is not a wealthy drug dealer but cultivates poppy plants because it's a resilient crop and they have no other means to survive. They also failed to spread education.
Take a look at the misleading photos of Afghanistan in the 1950's. They failed because these photos only portrayed the urban life of the lucky few. They failed because they forgot the ordinary Afghans, while all too occupied with fighting fundamentalism and not with winning the support from the people.
A Quagmire of Interests
Does the United States and its allies stand any change today in achieving those same goals? In fact, for the Afghan peasant, regular agriculture, if any, still stands no chance against the benefits of heroine fields and only a very few enjoy freedom and education outside the large cities, where corruption is rampant. Just like before 1979, young girls get acid thrown in their faces when they walk without hijab or attend school, and just as during the PDPA era, the country's leaders enjoy little support from the population, caught between tradition, fundamentalism and modernisation.
Today, ten years after crossing the Afghan borders once again, foreign powers again fail to consolidate their military victory over the fundamentalists with enduring peace and prosperity. Neighbouring countries still support the adversaries of the Afghan government for various reasons, as they have done for centuries. Many questions remain, but looking at the past gives us a grim glimpse of the future. However, it should also gives us the opportunity to learn from the past. Shouldn't it?
It seems as if nothing can prevent the recurrence of the events after the withdrawal of the Soviet forces in 1989. History has proven that leading this unique Afghan tribal society with its own traditions and values into modernisation, or just even stabilizing the country, proves most difficult, if not impossible. Stability might well be an unpopular outcome for the key players, given the country's strategic location in the region (Pakistan, Iran). Unfortunately, there's no such thing as "the Afghan problem" but a complex mix of inter-regional political and religious problems which cannot be solved by the Afghans themselves, nor - manu military - by the West on their own.
Yesterday, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York unsealed the indictment of 11 members of an illegal Russian military procurement network. All suspects were arrested on 2 and 3 October and search warrants were executed at seven locations.
With the help of ARC Electronics Inc, based in Texas, and APEX Systems LLC, a firm, based in Moscow Russia, they illegally exported high-tech microelectronics from the United States to Russia, for use in the Russian defense industry.
Pivotal figure in the case is Alexander Fishenko. Born in the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan, Fishenko graduated from the Leningrad Electro-Technical Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia and immigrated in 1994 to the United States where he became a naturalised citizen in 2003.
Fishenko, who headed ARC and partially owned APEX, is also charged with acting as an unregistered agent of the Russian government as he illegally exported the microelectronics for use by Russian government, military and intelligence agencies. Fishenko, now a U.S. citizen, might well be trialed and jailed as an American, working for Russia, and not as a Russian agent working in the United States, making a spy swap, as seen in the large 2010 U.S. spy case, unlikely.
The other indicted members of the network are Alexander Posobilov, Lyudmila Bagdikian, Sevinj Taghiyeva, Shavkat Abdullaev, Anastasia Diatlova, Viktoria Klebanova and Svetalina Zagon, all working for ARC Electronics, Sergey Klinov and Dmitriy Shegurov from APEX and Yuri Savin from ATRILOR Inc, a Russian firm who regularly purchaised electronics from ARC.
The members of the network are charged with the procurement and export of controlled microelectronics without the required licences, falsifying documents and hiding the true destination and application of the microelectronics. By doing so, they violated the Arms Export Control Act. They are also accused of setting up a scheme to obtain the controlled electronics from U.S. manufacturers, misleading them with false end-users documents, and devising ways to export these to Russia.
The exported high-tech electronics, which cannot be produced in Russia, are usable in various military systems (radar, weapons guiding systems, detonation triggers etc.) and are subjected to strict U.S. government control. From 2002 to date, ARC shipped some 50,000,000 dollar worth of these microelectronics to Russia.
From what we can read in the U.S. attorney's letter supporting the motion to detention, the suspicion of a manufacturer about the identity of an alleged end-user forced them to submit a (falsified) Voluntary Self Disclosure with the Department Of Commerce. This probably triggered the criminal investigation which involved the interception of a substantial amount of phone and e-mail conversations, all providing what the investigators call overwhelming evidence.
Only a few days ago I wrote about industrial espionage in my previous blog about the spy couple that was indicted last Thursday: "...espionage has gone global and probably on an even larger scale than before. Especially economical and technological (corporate) espionage...". And what do you know, the ink of my article isn't dry yet, and we encounter another textbook example of this new style espionage.
Technically, this new case is not an espionage operation, ran by a foreign government, but a criminal case about illegal export, falsifying documents and fraud, incidentally to the benefit of a foreign government. Yet, in the end, the techniques used and the final results are very similar to espionage: getting hands on the adversary's technology by means of deception.
Moreover, in this case, they took industrial espionage, in the Cold War era the expertise of the KGB's Directorat T, to another level. In the Soviet era, defense industry espionage was limited to obtaining documents, research papers and theft of limited quantities of equipment or electronics in order to reverse-engineer and copy the technology (copyright as in "the right to copy"). For many years, Soviet technology trailed the West by a decade and Directorat T was to close that gap. However, the Soviet plan economy was unsuitable to timely produce the copied technology and profit of the billions of roubles, saved in R&D costs.
Surprisingly, despite Russia's technological and economical advances, they now didn't even bother trying to reverse-engineer or copy the electronics, but simply imported them in large quantities for immediate application in the defence industry. By doing so they of course again saved themselves the immense R&D costs. The consequences of this industrial espionage are obvious. Nevertheless, most companies are unaware about the risk they are exposed to.
In the Cold War era, defense contractors, and especially those who produced state-of-the-art military technology, were guarded closely by intelligence and security organisations and their personnel was properly screened. In part, this still counts today. However, R&D and production of critical technology is shifted more and more to civilian companies who produce commercial off-the-shelf technology, often controlled by export laws. It's cheaper, but poses more risks.
The trend towards industrial espionage and illegal export is a double-edged sword. It cuts into a nation's security and into its economy. I'm afraid that we will see much more of this type of espionage and industrial theft in the future. Time will tell how devastating the consequences could be. Or how the neo-Cold War heat has increased another few degrees today.
To end with bit of humour: the slogan on the ARC Electronics website is "we build our business AROUND YOU" (including capitals). I presume with "around you" they meant around the customs. Speaking of hidden messages!
