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.
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.
Monday, February
08, 2010
Cuban
Agent Communications
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 refered 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 Cubans 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).
Monday, February
15, 2010
Dead
Hand revealed
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 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.
Tuesday, March
30, 2010
2012
Alan Turing Year
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.
Thursday, April
22, 2010
Mind
of a Code Breaker
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. 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.
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).
On June 27, 2010, ten
individuals were arrested in a ten-year
joint operation between the FBI (US
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 US with the
money hidden in the luggage. 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 US
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 US and bring it along to Moscow. When
he returned to the US 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) withing 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 US 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.
Update July 3: 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
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: 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.
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.
Interview with Anna Chapman, earlier
this year (CNN).
I will add more links to additional
information in the next few days...
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Peace Ambassador of the Cold War
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".
25
years ago, 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.
Friday, July 09, 2010
US - Russian Spy Exchange
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 US 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 US 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
officerwho 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. US 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 US citizens involved? Case
not closed...
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
KP4EU Enigma Video
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 his way to say
thanks for the Challenge and the Enigma
simulator. Muchas gracias, Angel!
Saturday, July 24, 2010
The Farewell Dossier
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, codenamed Farewell,
was stationed as Line X officer in France
during the 1960's and later on, in
Moscow, supervised 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.
Friday, August 6, 2010
Holiday Reading Stuff
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.
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)!
Thursday, September 9, 2010
One-time encryption in Today's World
Ontime
pad encryption is a most basic encryption
algorithm where a truly random key is
applied on a given 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 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.
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, an 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!
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 was 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.
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.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Mysterious Cold War Signals
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 a few 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, 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 13 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 was located
in Chernobyl (now Ukraine). 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. Some sources say 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, 40 Km (25
miles) 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, Lost Places (hit
"next" at the end of the pages)
and Egorka's gallery. If
you enter "chernobyl duga-3" 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 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
launche system on this
previous blog.
Friday, November 5, 2010
Code Book Collection
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.
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 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
Friday, November 26, 2010
1983 - The Brink of Apocalypse
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 (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.
The Soviet
Committee for State Security KGB (Komitet
gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti) ran
numerous intelligence operations in
foreign countries during the 20th
century. Its First Chief Directorate PGU
(Pervoye Glavnoye Upravleniye),
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 (Federal'naya
sluzhba bezopasnosti), the Foreign
Intelligence Service SVR (Sluzhba
Vneshney Razvedki) and the Federal
Agency of Government Communications and
Information FAPSI (Federal'naya
Agenstvo Pravitel'stvennoy Svayazi i
Informatsii). 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.
Friday,
December 17, 2010
Callimahos and the Dundee Jar
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.
The National Security
Agency's Center for Cryptologic History
published a large number of documents
about the 
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 
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
I
already wrote about 
On June 27, 2010, ten
individuals were arrested in a ten-year
joint operation between the FBI (US
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 
Another method of
covert communications involved private
wireless networks to connect Laptops by
LAN (Local Area Network) withing 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.
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 
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.
25
years ago, 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.
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
officerwho 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.
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, codenamed Farewell,
was stationed as Line X officer in France
during the 1960's and later on, in
Moscow, supervised 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 13 years. For decades,
its purpose remained unknown to the
general public.
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.
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.
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.
The Soviet
Committee for State Security KGB (Komitet
gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti) ran
numerous intelligence operations in
foreign countries during the 20th
century. Its First Chief Directorate PGU
(Pervoye Glavnoye Upravleniye),
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.
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.
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.