Radio Moscow and the Cold War

Radio Moscow

Geopolitics and international conflicts during the Cold War made it important for the United States and the Soviet Union to inform people or influence their political views, and this in many countries around the world. But how did they reach their audience?

Today, we can hardly imagine a world without the Internet, cable TV and satellites that brings all the news and information from across the globe in your lap. Yet, during most of the Cold War, people only had newspapers, local TV, FM and AM radio. The only solution to spread ideas was shortwave radio, as these waves travel around the globe and can be listened to by everyone with a shortwave radio.

Further down, you can listen to many fascinating English-language broadcast samples from Radio Moscow and other world services.

Both East and West had, and still have, shortwave radio stations with a world service. The best known are Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty on one side, and Radio Moscow, Radio Havana Cuba and Radio Peking on the other side. Everyone had their own truth and accused the other side of expansion drift, disinformation and inciting across the world. See also Cold War Signals.

One truly iconic station was Radio Moscow World Service. Their foreign service broadcasting started in 1929 with transmitters in Moscow and Leningrad, and later also relay stations in Vladivostok and Magadan. Radio Moscow reached the whole of Eurasia, Africa and North and South America. During the Cold War, their broadcasts reached across the world with transmitters in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and Cuba, and this in more than 70 languages.

Joe Adamov

Their most popular program was without doubt Moscow Mailbag with Joe Adamov answering letters from Americans. They dared to asked a wild range of questions, some critical and some truly hilarious, but Joe handled them all.

The iconic radio host, born in 1920, started working for Radio Moscow in 1942. He began hosting Moscow Mailbag in the 1950’s and did this for more than forty years. Raised in England and fluent in English, Adamov interviewed many important western politicians and was official translator at the trial of downed U-2 pilot Gary Powers. When Radio Moscow was renamed Voice of Russia in 1993, Adamov continued working as radio host until 2004. He passed away in 2005.

Moscow Mailbag clearly intended to disprove claims that circulated in the western world but also gave an interesting view on the Soviet mindset. There's a CBS audio interview with Joe Adamov at Expo 67 in Canada and one at PBS Red Files.

Unfortunately, few broadcast recordings survived the pre-digital Cold War era, and sometimes you need a stroke of luck, like studio recordings of Radio Moscow that surfaced in New York.

It all started in the 1960s, when New York Public Radio WNYC tried to bridge the cultural and political gap between the Soviet Union and the United States. They broadcast recordings on reels they received from Radio Moscow. Their content and sometimes obvious propaganda eventually caught the attention of the FBI, ending the propaganda party.

Fortunately, many tapes survived. They are now available at the New York Municipal Archives, and you can listen to many audio samples that immerse you in the Cold War atmosphere. The WNYC archive has some hundred recordings, so I selected some gems for you to get a taste of the collection.

In 1960, Joe Adamov explained in one of the many Moscow Mailbag episodes that there are no shortages in the USSR. He also talked about the 1960s prediction by Soviet economists, who expected the Soviets to have the highest standard of living in the world by 1980, leave the US far behind in production, and more optimistic news. In 1965, he countered rumours about the ousted Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and explained life in the USSR.

Nina Petrovna Khrushcheva, the wife of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, addressed in 1962 the concerns in letters of American women and explained the good intentions of the Soviets. Vladimir Pozner, another well known journalist, discussed bread and its historic and cultural significance in Moscow Meridian.

Radio Moscow discussed in 1960 the automation of Soviet industries and benefits for the workers. Moscow Radio wasn't always in the defensive, they also attacked the U.S. involvement in Vietnam and western propaganda in 1960. The Weekly Press Review (there are many episodes) are another gem that leaks the Soviets sentiment.

The complete archive is available at WNYC's New York Municipal Archives. They also explain how the tapes ended up in New York and the stir they eventually caused. Whether the broadcasts of Radio Moscow actually influenced the opinion of people remains a question. Mark Winek examined this in Radio Moscow and the Early Cold War.

Shortwave and DX enthusiasts also recorded many shortwave stations on reel-to-reel tapes or cassettes, and these are preserved in the fascinating digital Shortwave Radio Audio Archive (SRAA). They have recordings of Radio Moscow and their American counterparts Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe (RFE), Radio Liberty (RL) and many other stations.

There are quite a few interesting VOA recordings. They covered the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, the 1970 Palestinian aircraft hijacking in Jordan, a 1979 news broadcast that covers the 10th anniversary Apollo 11 moonlanding and the 1981 assassination attempt on President Reagan, to name a few. Over the years, RFE and RL have broadcast in 54 languages of the targeted countries and regions, such as Russian, Turkmen, Belorussian and many more.

Some fascinating recordings of Radio Moscow are the 1968 crisis in Czechoslovakia with the invasion of Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces. There's also the 1981 Polish crisis with declaration of martial law and the Soviet view on the situation in Poland.

SRAA also has various Radio Havana Cuba recordings, such as the 1974 speech by Fidel Castra, both in Spanish and English, and the 2016 commemoration on Castro's death. They also have many Radio Peking recordings, like China's First Satellite in 1970. You can also listen to the 1990 final broadcast of Radio Berlin International, marking the end of both the station and the existence of East germany.

You can search the SRAA database for any broadcast station, or search all Radio Moscow recordings or all Voice of America recordings. If “no results found” is returned, simply refresh their page to find the stations anyway..

More about the battle over radio waves on Cold War Signals. Interested in shortwave listening? The SWL Shortwave Listening page gives you an introduction. The SWLing Post blog has a wealth of information about shortwave, receivers and broadcast stations. Radio Moscow is still in the air, but changed its name in 1993 into Voice of Russia and renamed it again in 2014 into Radio Sputnik.

Note that the archived historical recordings are not intended to promote any point of view. Bear in mind that these stations had specific propaganda purposes in the Cold War era, and might not always portrait the facts accurately.

Happy listening... and don't believe everything you hear!

Cold War Radio Jamming

SW jamming antenna array

Radio jamming is the deliberate broadcast of an interference signal to prevent the reception of a radio transmission. When talking about radio jamming during the Cold War, we generally think about the disruption of enemy military radio communications and weapon systems signals, a small part of what is known as electronic warfare or EW.

However, radio jamming was also used extensively for non-military purposes during the Cold War. Although the Iron Curtain divided the world physically between East and West, no barbed wire, high fence or border guard could stop radio signals from travelling across borders. During the Cold War, propaganda was a powerful weapon in politics and the battle between ideologies. Winning the hearts of the enemy's civilian population was just as important as depicting the enemy as a tyrannic aggressor.

Both East and West excelled in doing so, but probably the best known examples are the extensive jamming of the powerful shortwave and medium wave stations of Radio Free Europe (RFE) and the Voice of America (VOA). Both these stations have broadcast for decades in various languages, mostly towards eastern-block and Latin American countries, to bypass the censored press in those countries.

Many Soviet citizens listened - often illegally - to these stations to catch a glimpse of what was happening in the West. Of course, these stations not only scheduled the usual international news and entertainment, but also propaganda, directed against the Soviet regime. Sometimes they even inserted covert messages for dissidents or intelligence personnel, operating inside the Soviet Union. It was hardly a secret that RFE initially was a CIA funded station, set up specifically to fight the Cold War by political and propaganda means.

As eager the Western policy makers and intelligence services were to get their broadcast across, into the Eastern-Bloc countries, so eager were the Soviets to prevent these signals from arriving to their citizens' radios. To counter this threat by the West, many very powerful jamming transmitters operated in Russia, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Poland, Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria, to name a few. It was often a cat and mouse game between the radio stations, slightly changing the frequency to enable their listeners to tune in clearly, and the jamming station operator tuning his jamming signal right onto the broadcast frequency.

To disrupt the reception of powerful shortwave radio stations, they used even more powerful jamming transmitters, up to 500 Kilowatt (that's a massive 500.000 Watt) with various interference signals such as noise, non-stop music or even recorded voices played backwards. These high-power jamming stations were often located near densely populated areas to increase their effectiveness. Radiation and health apparently were not an issue in those days.

Although the Cold War has ended more than two decades ago, the practice of jamming radio stations still continues in several countries. Amoung them are North Korea, China, Iran and Cuba. Radio jamming is a popular technique for some regimes to (try to) keep their citizens ignorant by extensive censorship.

To get an idea of the jamming equipment and methods they used, I highly recommend Rimantas Pleikys' Radio Jamming website with detailed information, many photos and sound samples of former East European jamming transmitters. He wrote Radio Jamming in the Soviet Union, Poland and other East European Countries (pdf - archived) and the book Radio Jamming, which is no longer available (maybe you can catch it second-hand).

Pleiky also made the video documentary Jamming (in English). Rimantas Pleikys is a former Minister of Communications and Informatics of Lithuania, amateur radio operator and founder of several radio stations.

Empire of noise from Polski Radio

More on Cold War Radio

• Radio Moscow and the Cold War
• Cold War Signals on our website.

Cold War Propaganda on Shortwave Radio

A true Cold War icon

An important part of the Cold War was fought over radio waves, but this battle was not limited to communications signals in voice, Morse or data, technical signals and signals intelligence.

 

There was also a fierce open battle of words that raged through the world. A battle for the minds and hearts of the enemies' people. Just as people could not easily cross the borders between East and West, accurate political and economic information and news could neither travel freely.

 

This was solved by using powerful shortwave transmitters that either spread information to those who were denied access to free press, or spread disinformation to turn the population against their government. Some shortwave world service stations, like Radio Moscow, Voice of America, Radio Havana or Radio Free Europe became true Cold War icons.

The Cold War Signals page at the website is now expanded with the Cold War of Words, fought over shortwave radio, including many fascinating audio samples. That page also explains the electronic battle between East and West, SIGINT collection, eavesdropping on the enemy, and mysterious signals of the Cold War. Another new addition to that page is Maximator, the secret European SIGINT alliance between Germany, the Netherlands, France, Denmark and Sweden.

More about Cold War Radio

• Radio Moscow and the Cold War
• Cold War Radio Jamming

Listen and learn... but don't believe everything you hear!

The Billion Dollar Spy

In January 1977, CIA chief of station Robert Fuller was filling up his car at a gas station in Moscow when a Russian man approached him, asked to talk with him and immediately dropped a note on Fuller's car seat. In the note he explained that he wanted to discuss strictly confidential matters with a U.S. official and proposed to arrange a meeting. Fuller reported the contact to CIA headquarters. They feared that the man was a dangle, a trap by the KGB to expose CIA operatives. Fuller was instructed to ignore the man.

The Russian man however persisted. He made two more attempts in February, each time dropping a note, proposing a signal and meeting. After being ignored again in May, it seemed that the KGB gave up the dangle. That summer, Gus Hathaway succeeded Fuller as chief of station Moscow. On December 10, the Russian man spotted a car with embassy licence plate, approached the driver and urged him to deliver his letter to a U.S. official. In that letter, delivered to Hathaway, the mysterious man explained that he had access to research into look-down radar and that he could also provide schematics for the new MiG-25 radar.

This information finally tickled CIA headquarter's interest. They assigned the codename CKSPHERE to the Russian man but did not find him worth the risk of exposing a CIA operations officer. Hathaway, by then convinced that CKSPHERE was most likely an engineer at a secret research laboratory, insisted on meeting the man. CIA however again ordered Hathaway to ignore the requests for a meeting.

On February 16, 1978, more than a year after the first contact, CKSPHERE again dropped a note, this time in Hathaway's car. By then, the man was desperate but afraid to reveal more personal information. Meanwhile, the Pentagon expressed to the CIA great interest in Soviet aircraft electronics and radar. On March 1, the Russian man once again approached Hathaway, who was just unlocking his car, and pushed a packet into Hathaway's hand. It contained all the personal details that convinced the station chief and the CIA that he was a genuine spy.

CKSPHERE now had a name. Adolf Tolkachev, engineer and leading designer at the Scientific Research Institute for Radio Engineering in Moscow, and he resented the Soviet system. The next seven years, Tolkachev provided a tremendous amount of highly sensitive information on Soviet research related to aircraft electronics, radar and weapons systems.

For Tolkachev it was a race against the clock. He knew that his game would eventually end and therefore tried to pass as much information as possible, often taking great risks with disregard for his own safety and despite his case officers urging him to be cautious. In the end, his information saved the Pentagon and the U.S. Air Force billions of dollars in research and development and made sure the West had a critical technological and military advantage over the Soviets.

The Billion Dollar Spy, researched and written by David Hoffman, brings Tolkachev's story, based on declassified documents and many interviews with the CIA personnel involved in the CKSPHERE case. Hoffman's extensive research resulted in a highly detailed account that isn't limited to the spy story itself but also provides a better understanding in how the CIA handled the case, the events that lead to the fall of CKSPHERE and consequent fall-out, all placed in the broader context.

The book offers a fascinating insight in the modus operandi of CIA station Moscow. It details the tricks of the spy trade, how the case officers set up meetings and performed surveillance detection runs, the various ways they communicated covertly with Tolkachev, and the spy gear the CIA developed and provided him over the course of eight years. The reader learns in detail how they ran such operations in Moscow station.

The book truly excels in the details and background information on the characters involved. You get to know Adolf Tolkachev through the many operations notes and letters with personal information he wrote to his handlers and you discover the reasons why he became so resentful against the Soviet state. Tolkachev was a complex man. He was intelligent and wanted to do things his way.

He declined the proposed use of dead drops or a spy radio. They gave him a SRAC (short range agent communications) to send messages by burst-transmission, and later even provided him with a novel satellite message system, but he never used them. He preferred meetings in person, despite the according risks. CIA gave him the most advanced spy cameras, but he insisted to use his own Pentax camera. He regarded money as a token of respect, rather than a means to get rich, but complained each time when he received too little money for what he believed to deserve.

His fear for getting caught alive contradicted with the ever increasing risks he willingly took. He therefore was worried about his wife and son but had already decided he would never leave Russia. There were also the little things. He often asked his handlers for music records from western bands, books or ink pens and gums for his son.

Hoffmann explains why the CIA, paralysed by James Angleton's paranoia in the 1950s and 60s, was so reluctant to set up operations in Moscow, the frustration of Gus Hathaway with CIA headquarters and his efforts to protect the man behind the source. Tolkachev's case officers, John Guilsher, David Rolph and Bill Plunkert had to operate and arrange face to face meetings despite overwhelming KGB surveillance. The meetings later became so risky that CIA decided to use Robert Morris, a deep cover, to meet Tolkachev. You can't get it more exciting.

The reader gets plenty of backgound information to understand how the CIA handled the cased. Hoffman also delves into the history of other spies, like GRU Colonel Oleg Penkovsky (HERO and YOGA), and Soviet diplomat Alexander Ogorodnik (TRIGON), and tells the stories of Marti Peterson, the first female CIA operations officer in Moscow and the exfiltration of KGB Major Victor Sheymov by David Rolph. Many more relevant people from the intelligence community are given a place in the book.

The fall of CKSPHERE is credited to Edward Lee Howard, a former CIA officer in training who was assigned to Moscow station but was fired before his departure to Moscow. He offered his services and all his knowledge about Moscow station to the Soviets. His downfall is also written down in this very comprehensive book that reads like a spy thriller. If you like to know the real deal, this well researched book is it. Visit the Billion Dollar Spy website that contains the prologue, additional photos and Original CIA documents.

The Billion Dollar Spy by David E. Hoffman, ISBN 9780345805973. More book reviews at my website.

The Billion Dollar Spy

Large SVR Spy Ring Arrested in the U.S.

On June 27, 2010, ten individuals were arrested in a ten-year joint operation between the FBI 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.

FBI Mugshots of the arrested illegals (names with & are real couples)
Donald Heatfield & Tracey Ann Foley, Juan Lazaro & Vicky Peláez, Anna Chapman,
Michael Zottoli & Patricia Mills, Richard & Cynthia Murphy, Mikhail Semenko.
Their real names:
Andrey Bezrukov & Elena Vavilova, Mikhail Vasenkov & Vicky Peláez, Anya Kushchenko
Mikhail Kutsik & Nataliya Pereverzeva, Vladimir & Lidiya Guryev, Mikhail Semenko.

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). During another surreptitious search, the FBI also found a short-wave radio and photographed notebooks with columns of seemingly random numbers . 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.

Anna Kushchenko
a.k.a. Anya Chapman

Private wireless networks to connect Laptops by LAN (Local Area Network) within a limited distance. were another method of covert communications. Russian citizen Anna Chapman, née Anya Kushchenko, the red haired spy vamp and one of the illegal SVR agents, 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 at 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 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. Dismanteling Russian operation at STRATFOR. Richard and Cynthia Murphy on Telegraph UK. The Illegals Program on Wikipedia.

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. Below an interview with Anna Chapman, earlier this year.

Anna Chapman - Sexy Hot Russian Spy

  

Overview of this Spy Case

• Large SVR Spy Ring Arrested in the U.S. 
• U.S. Russian Spy Exchange
• Spy Ring Betrayed by SVR Colonel
• FBI releases 2010 SVR Spy Ring information

Oleg Kalugin

Oleg Kalugin

Born in 1934 as the son of a NKVD officer, Oleg Kalugin was destined for a career in the intelligence services. After graduating from the Leningrad university he was recruited by the KGB. It was the start of a remarkable career in the First Chief Directorate, the foreign intelligence service, as undercover agent, mainly in the United States.

His first assignment in 1958 was as a student at the Columbia University in New York. Shortly after, he was employed as Radio Moscow correspondent at the UN in New York, of course under his cover as journalist, for the next five years. He returned to the Soviet Union to work under the cover of press officer in the Soviet Foreign Ministry in Moscow.

That was a run-up to a five year career as press officer for the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC from 1965 to 1970. In reality, he was chief of the Rezidency of the Soviet Embassy, in other words, head of the KGB office in Washington. Kalugin made a swift career in the First Chief Directorate and became the youngest general in the history of the KGB. As head of the KR line (foreign counterintelligence) he was involved in many of the most notorious spy cases in the Cold War period.

As a KGB General, Kalugin became more and more frustrated about the way the KGB worked and how it was lead. His criticism finally resulted in a demotion to a less important post in Leningrad in 1980. Having experienced the corruption from within the KGB an amongst Communist Party officials he retired from the KGB in 1990.

His public attacks on the KGB resulted in the loss of his KGB rank, his decorations and pension. However, thanks to public support, Kalugin obtained a seat in the Parliament of the USSR. After the 1991 putsch, Kalugin became advisor to Vadim Bakatin who finally dissolved the old KGB and initiated the reforms of the Russian intelligence services.

When Vladimir Putin became president of the Russian Federation, Oleg Kalugin saw this as a return of the old power of the KGB in politics, an opinion he also expressed in public. While visiting the United States for businesses, Kalugin was accused of treason.

He never returned to Russia and was convicted in absentia to 15 years in jail. The US refused to extradite Kalugin who now works as a staff members at the Counter Intelligence Centre. He remains a critic of Vladimir Putin. Kalugin published two books, Spymaster and The First Directorate, and was co-writer to several other books.

More about Oleg Kalugin at the CNN Cold War pages (archived). Kalugin was on Spycast interviews to discuss the Litvinenko poison murder, the  army of SVR Illegals operating in the U.S. and many more interviews.

Watch Former KGB Spy, Professor Oleg Kalugin

1983 - The Brink Of Apocalypse

Soviet RSD-10 Pioneer (SS-20)
 with three 150 kt MIRV warheads

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 Nuclear Missile Attack), a worldwide hunt for information that would indicate an imminent first strike by the United States.

Tension Builds Up
 

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. Once developed and in place, SDI would 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 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 when its autopilot system operated in the wrong mode and KAL 007 accidentally strayed without permission into Soviet airspace.

Click to visit TIME 1983

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, gathering 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.

Tickling the Soviet Nerves

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 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 DEFCON 1 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 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. Therefore, 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.

Radio Silence, Red Flags and Common Sense

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 pre-emptive attack. Fortunately, they kept their nerves together, waited and... nothing happened.

When President Reagan was informed 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.

Reagan 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 on for many years, I'm glad that lessons were learned from that frightening event. It could have been my and everyone else's last year.

Reykjavík Summit with Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.
The talks were the run-up to the INF and START treaties.

Learning from the Past

There is an excellent paper by Nathan Bennett Jones 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. Paul Dibb from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute wrote a special report on the 1983 nuclear war scare. The National Archive's Able Archer Sourcebook provides many declassified documents. If you're into reading, I can recommend General John Hackett's 1979 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.

A Cold Cold Year

1983 was a pretty eventful year, with Secretary Yuri Andropov inviting Samantha Reed Smith to visit the USSR in July, after she wrote him a letter. In August, NSA evacuated eleven tons of equipment in total secrecy from the U.S embassy in Moscow. The operation called the GUNMAN Project came after receiving intel about sophisticate bugs in embassy equipment. In September the mistakenly shootdown of KAL 007 and the Soviet early warning system for missiles going haywire, almost causing an all-out nuclear war. To top the year off, ABC aired in November the movie The Day After that gave an idea of how a nuclear war would look like, the movie that scared Ronald Reagan like hell.

COLD WAR CONVERSATIONS - The shooting down of KAL007, the Able Archer exercise and the nuclear war scare of 1983 is a fascinating interview with Brian Morra who served as Chief of Intelligence Analysis for US Forces Japan at Yakota airbase when KAL007 was shot down. He describes incidents between Soviet and US military aircraft after the shootdown, which almost caused a direct conflict. He wrote the fictional book The Able Archers, partly based on his personal experience of the incident and its aftermath.

The Able Archer 1983 The Brink of Apocalypse documentary explains exercise Able Archer, the Soviet reaction to it and how close we were to nuclear war.

Able Archer 1983 The Brink of Apocalypse

 
Watch also Nate Jones' Able Archer 83: The Secret History for the U.S. National Archives.

 

Related Posts on This Blog

•  3 Seconds from World War 3 The story of a Soviet satellite that mistakenly triggered a missile warning.
• Russia’s Modern Early Warning Systems Old and new early waring satellites and radar.
  
• Mysterious Cold War Signals Detailed description of the Duga phased array over-the-horizon radar.
• Dead Hand Revealed How the Soviets could still execute a retaliatory nuclear strike, even if a U.S. strike was detected too late.
• US Strategic Intelligence on the USSR and miscalculation of Soviet aggressiveness during the Cold War.

Russian Spies Arrested in Germany

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, the counter-terrorism team of the Bundespolizei. On Wednesday, the examining magistrate issued warrants against both and ordered their remand.

Update October 25, 2011: 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.

Update January 16, 2013: a closed-door trial of Andreas and Heidrun Anschlag is due to start in Germany (via IntelNews)

Update July 5, 2013: Russian spy couple sentenced

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, the full story in Spiegel Online International and The Moscow Times, 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 the posts Spies and Numbers, Cuban Agent Communications and on our Numbers Stations web page.

On this 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. Here's the story at Russia Today:

German police arrest couple suspected of spying for Russia

Markus Wolf - The Man Without A Face

Markus Wold

Last month, I had the chance, and time, to read several books, written by Markus Wolf, the legendary chief of the HVA (Haupt Verwaltung Aufklaerung), East Germany's foreign intelligence.

Wolf, the son of writer and physician Friedrich Wolf and brother of film director Konrad Wolf, fled as child in 1933 from the Nazi's and exiled to Moscow. After the war, he was sent to Berlin as journalist for the radio station in the Soviet Zone of occupation. As journalist, he followed the Nuremberg Trials against the Nazi leaders. In 1953, he was one of the founding members of the foreign intelligence service, a department of the ministry of state security, also called Stasi. As head of the HVA, Wolf developed the most effective secret service of the Cold War.

After retiring in 1986, he wrote a book which was originally a film project of his late brother Konrad, about Konrad and two friends, growing up in Moscow in the 1930's. Konrad joined the Sovjet Army, one friend the German Luftwaffe, and the third one joined the US forces. Still, after the war, the three friends meet again and keep contact. The book, Die Troika, a statement for friendship which also exposed the failure of communism, was published in East and West Germany. For the people in the East, Wolf, who supported the Glasnost and Perestroika, became a symbol of the ongoing changes in a country that rejected the changes in Eastern Europe.

Although Wolf headed only the foreign intelligence, one of many departments of Erich Mielke's Stasi, he became targeted as Stasi spy chief by the media during the period of the fall of the Berlin Wall. After the collapse of the German Democratic Republic, Wolf was charged and sentenced in the reunified Germany with espionage, bribery and treason, but that conviction was later overturned and he received a suspended sentence on lesser charges.

In the book The Man Without a Face you can read about the years in Moscow, the developement of the most successfull spy agency of the Cold War, and lots of inside information on famous spy cases.

In Die Trojka you get a taste of the life in the pre-war Sovjet Union, and how friends got separated by Stalins abuse of communism.

The last book I got to read was In eigenem Auftrag: Bekenntnisse und Einsichten, Wolf's diary of 1989-1990, describing in detail the political collapse of East Germany and how the GDR government of Erich Honnecker lead the country, the SED party and socialism into the abyss by rejecting any changes in policy.

More books on intelligence are found in my Book Reviews.

 

There's a good two-part documentary about HVA Chief Markus Wolf. It's in German, but you can enable CC Subtitles with Settings > Subtitles > Auto-translate > English.

• Man Without a Face, Part 1 - Markus Wolf's stellar rise
• Man Without a Face, Part 2 - Markus Wolf's long farewell

Igor Gouzenko - The Man Who Revealed the Cold War

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 shaken 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.

Inside the Soviet Embassy

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.

 

In June 1943 he was sent to Ottawa, where he lived with his wife and baby son in a small apartment. He worked at the embassy under GRU Colonel Nikolai Zabotin, who commanded 14 GRU officers that were 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. 

 

A Risky Defection

He approached the media and tried to contact the Minister of Justice but was initially turned down by all of them. The next night, fearing for his life, or at least apprehension by a Soviet team, Gouzenko hid with his wife and child at a neighbour, who notified the police. After the police caught Soviet officials breaking into Gouzenko's apartment, his story was finally taken seriously.
 

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.

Gouzenko in 1948 (Source: CSIS)

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 bureaucracies. Igor Gouzenko's defection also had some unexpected and devastating consequences that surfaced only three years later.

Vigilant Soviets take Measures

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 disclosing to 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.

Surprise Backlash

What did the Russians do? Nothing! To the outside world it seemed business as usual. 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 as 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, and for what messages.

It was a complete and unprecedented intelligence break-down. According to NSA, the Soviet communications changeover "came crashing down like a tidal wave on the beach of Anglo-American cryptology". This so-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.

A New Life

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. On that page you also find Gouzenko'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.

CBC Digital Archives has an interesting interview with Svetlana Gouzenko (old archive), a CBC interview with his daughter Evelyn Wilson, who is also interviewed in Gouzenko Deciphered by Canada's History. Much more video and audio are found on the CBC website by entering "Igor Gouzenko" in their search box.

More on the Black Friday communications black-out is found in NSA's National Cryptologic School - On Watch (chapt 3, p19 (pdf page 25). The Canadian Intelligence Resource Centre has some excellent papers related to Gouzenko. The Gouzenko Affair Revisited; The Soviet Perspective is an interesting document.

Cold War Conversations has an interview with Evy Wilson, the daughter of Igor and Svetlana Gouzenko and with author Andrew Kavchak. Evy Wilson talks about her father, life at the secret Camp X in Canada, and growing up in the United States under a false identity.

I recommend Andrew Kavchak's commemorative page with many press articles. For an in-depth view on Gouzenko's story, Andrew wrote the book Remembering Gouzenk (available at Amazon US, UK and other countries). Below his fascinating presentation of "The Gouzenko Affair - The Start of the Cold War".

Gouzenko Affair - History Presentation (March 21, 2019)

Mysterious Cold War Signals

ASA SIGINT truck at Czech border
Source: ASA Det J Schneeberg Vets

An important part of the Cold War was fought over radio waves and all sorts of radio signals filled the aether. A shortwave or VHF 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 radio amateurs and intelligence organisations.

 

Signals intelligence (SIGINT) comprises communications intelligence (COMINT) and electronic intelligence (ELINT). The latter is the interception and analysis of various technical signals such as weapons systems, navigation and radar. ELINT was an important part of the Cold War and is today still an indispensable part of modern intelligence gathering and warfare.

The secrets behind the signals were often revealed, either by ELINT or HUMINT (Human Intelligence i.e. espionage). However, some signals remained unidentified for decades and even rose to the stardom of mysterious Cold War signals. Speculation about their purpose fueled the paranoia of that era. Occupying certain frequencies for use in case of war, or the notorious Dead Hand autonomous launch system for nuclear missiles that would initiate a launch when the mysterious signal interrupted. Eerie, but only speculations.

Tracking Nukes

One of those mysterious signals was nicknamed Russian Woodpecker, with its characteristic repetitive tapping noise. The Woodpecker's annoying high-power signal - an estimated 10 Megawatt - switched between different frequencies and disrupted legitimate HF signals (3-30 MHz) from utility and amateur communications across the world. The signal first appeared in 1976 and continued until 1986. Only after the fall of the Soviet Union it was confirmed that the signal came from an over-the-horizon (OTH) radar, part of Soviet early warning system for  ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles, i.e.nukes).

Receiver antennas Chernobyl-2 site from the Duga-1 (source: Ingmar Runge)

The Soviet Duga-1 OTH (Rus. Дуга-1 ЗГРЛС) comprised two military sites in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR). The Liubech-1 transmitter site near Kloniv, and 50 km southwest the Chernobyl-2 receiver site near Chernobyl. Both transmitter site and receiver site each had two giant antennas. The huge antenna for the lower HF frequencies (right on photo) was 450 m (1476 ft) wide and 150 m (492 ft) high. The "small" antenna for the higher HF frequencies (left) was 250 m (820 ft) wide and 90 m (295 ft) high.

Duga-1 became operational in 1976 and was directed over Greenland towards North America. The Chernobyl-2 site was codenamed STEEL YARD by Western military intelligence, who apparently managed to photograph the site during the Cold War.

Coverage Duga-1, 2 and N radars
(Earth's northerly top view)

The first experimental OTH radar, called Duga-N or Duga (no number) was located in Ukraine near Mykolaiv at the Black Sea and directed towards China. Duga-N became operational in 1972.

The Duga-2 radar was located in the far east of the USSR, in the region Komsomolsk-on-Amur, with the transmitter in Lian and receiver in Bol'shaya Kartel, 50 km southeast of Lian. Duga-2 was directed over the North Pole towards Canada and North America. Note that the map shows the approximate coverage of the radars, not necessarily the actual reach, which depended on various conditions.

The Duga was designed to track ICBMs at 6-10.000 km (3400-6200 mi) and aircraft up to 3000 km (1865 mi). The actual range depended on the ionospheric conditions. They operated between 5 and 28 MHz, right on HF band (3-30 MHz), causing the strong interference. The huge antennas were phased array antennas where the beam could be directed electronically without any moving parts. The received signals were processed digitally.

 

Peeking Beyond the Horizon 

 

Most radar waves (30 MHz up to 300 GHz) go straight ahead. Radar therefore works line-of-sight (LOS) and the curvature of the Earth limits its range. You can't look beyond the horizon, only above it. If the Duga with its 150 m (492 ft) high antenna was a normal LOS radar, it's horizon was a mere 44 Km (27 mi) away, since the distance to its horizon in kilometer = √ 13 x 150 m (for miles use 1.5 x ft).

Therefore, the further an ICBM or nuclear bomber is, the higher it must fly or the closer it must get to become visible above the radar's horizon, and that's way too long after its launch. LOS radar was therefore insufficient to provide early warning in case of an attack against the Soviet Union.

The solution to this problem was the over-the-horizon radar station. In Russian, Загоризо́нтная радиолокационная станция (ЗГРЛС) i.e. Zagorizóntnaya radiolokatsionnaya stantsiya (ZGRLS).

Over-the-horizon radar principle

Over-the-horizon (OTH) radar transmits a powerful HF signal towards the ionosphere. Depending on the angle of the signal, the ionosphere reflects the signal back to Earth over a long distance, a so-called skip (hence the name Duga, Russian for arc) and can also reflect the signal from Earth back to the ionosphere multiple skips in a zigzag pattern, traveling huge distances around Earth.

When the OTH signal hits a moving ICBM, the reflected signal creates a small frequency shift (Doppler effect) as any radar does. However, only a very small portion, called backscatter, is reflected back by the ionosphere and effectively received by the OTH station. Complex digital processing is required to extract and analyse the very weak signal and the effect of the ionosphere and skips on the backscatter. Its accuracy and resolution are low, but the system works good enough for a raw early warning.

Disaster and Downfall of Duga- 1 

 

Noteworthy is that the Duga-1 receiver site Chernobyl-2 is located only 10 km (6 mi) from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. According to Vladimir Musiyets, former Commander Chernobyl-2, the installation was damaged during the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and never became operational again. The site now lays within the 30 km (18 mi) Chernobyl exclusion zone. Some sources state that the Woodpecker continued broadcasting until 1989. These reportings possibly refer to other OTH sites.

On the history of over-the-horizon radar (translation) by Yuri Davydov, chief designer OTH radar, details the history and technical aspects of the Duga radars. The Ukrainian Chernobyl -2: the secret twin of the city Chernobyl (translation) from the exclusion zone website has a short history and photos. Global Security also has details on the Duga stations. Radartutorial explains phased array antennas for radar, but if you're not that technical, watch Duga Radar - How it Works.

 

Chernobyl 35 Years Later has excellent photos of the Duga-1 antenna, the control station and its consoles. To get a good sense of the sheer size of the Duga-1 antennas, visit English Russia and check the 14th photo with people underneath the antenna. Many more photos at Lost Places and Egorka's gallery.

Note: The following video mistakenly states "Duga-3 alias Chernobyl 2". The Chernobyl-2 receiver in this video was, together with the Liubech-1 transmitter, part of Duga-1. There was never a Duga-3.

Chernobyl: The Duga radar (Russian Woodpecker)

 

Note: The BBC video mistakenly translated site "Chernobyl-2" into system "Duga-2", although Sergei Babakov in the interview correctly said "Чернобыль-2", which is part of Duga-1. Duga-2 was in the Far East, 9000 Km from Chernobyl. The video title should be Duga-1.

 

The secret Soviet radar hidden in Chernobyl’s shadow - BBC REEL

The mistakes about the different Duga radars are understandable, as each Duga had two separate sites, one transmitter and one receiver site, and the site numbers didn't match the unrelated Duga number.

 
Substitutes for the Duga System

By the mid-1980s it became clear that the computer technology, used for the Duga phased array radars, was insufficient. However, the 1972 Око program for early warning satellites resulted in the first-generation US-K and US-KS satellites, operational in 1982 and the Око-1 program with second generation УС-КMO satellites in 1991. From 2015 on, these satellites were replaced by satellites of the Unified Space Detection System and Combat Control system.

 

In 2005 the Russian Federation also started to build a new generation of phased array radars for early warning, called Voronezh. Seven of these radars are already operational across Russia. More detailed info at Russia's Modern Early Warning Systems.

Buzzing Air and Messages for Spies

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. 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, 40 km (25 mi) north-west of Moscow, and now appears abandoned.

The UVB-76 "Buzzer" at Numbers Stations Research and Information Center, including some rare voice recordings. Photos of the abandoned alleged Buzzer site are published on English Russia.

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.

 

Further Information about SIGINT on the Blog

• Tracking Cold War Signals Wullenweber FLR-9 antenna
• 3 Second from World War 3 Early warning going wrong 
• Russia's Modern Early Warning Systems
  
• OXCART and ELINT Research Stealth for A-12 and SR-71
• Silent Warriors, USAF C-130 downing in Soviet airspace
• USS Pueblo Incident Capture SIGINT ship by North Korea
• Numbers Stations and many related spy cases on the blog
  
• More posts about signals intelligence
  
  

More About SIGINT on the Website

Cold War Signals details the SIGINT battle during the Cold War. You can listen to many audio samples of signals from spy transmitter and international shortwave broadcast stations.

Numbers Stations explains the origins of these broadcasts, their purpose, who uses them and their encrypted messages. Also many documents of the spies cases that involved numbers stations.