Cyberstrike

by James Barrington

  Author’s Note

  SINCGARS

  SINCGARS stands for Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System. It’s a piece of standard military equipment and comes in various flavours, including the AN/PRC-119 manpack radio, which permits communication with airborne units. Typically, each patrol would include a soldier carrying one of these units.

  Another is the AN/PRC-148 MBITR handheld unit. The designation MBITR stands for Multiband Inter/Intra Team Radio and is a personal combat radio system developed to address the requirement for individual communications on the battlefield. This is reflected in the designation AN/PRC, which stands for Army/Navy Portable Radio used for two-way Communications.

  The SINCGARS system operates in the VHF – Very High Frequency – FM radio band and employs frequency hopping, changing 111 times every second, to ensure secure communications.

  Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt and the GAU-8/A Avenger

  When combat aircraft are designed, the provision of weapon mounting points is of crucial importance. Usually, pylons are fitted on the underside of the wings or occasionally on the base of the fuselage. The obvious exceptions are heavy bombers like the American B-52, which carry their payload inside the fuselage in bomb bays, and stealth aircraft like the Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk and the Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit, which have to carry their weapons internally to preserve their extremely low radar cross-section and avoid compromising their stealth capability.

  But there is one aircraft that breaks all the rules. It doesn’t so much carry a weapon as is built around a weapon. The Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt, affectionately known as the Warthog, or just the Hog, and rather less affectionately as the ULF, or Ugly Little Fucker, is essentially an airframe constructed around a cannon. It’s effectively a flying gun.

  The GAU-8/A Avenger is a Gatling-type gun as big and heavy as a large family car, tipping the scales at over four thousand pounds when fully loaded, representing over 15 per cent of the unladen weight of the A-10. What that means in practice is that if it ever has to be removed from the aircraft the tail of the Thunderbolt has to be supported first – otherwise the aircraft will tip backwards when the gun is taken out.

  The weapon is mounted very slightly towards the port side of the A-10 to allow the firing barrel of the Avenger – it has seven rotating barrels – to be aligned precisely with the centreline of the aircraft to avoid the massive recoil from shifting the aircraft off the attack line. This is essential because the recoil generated by the weapon firing is 10,000 pounds-force, slightly more than the 9,000 pounds-force output generated by each of the A-10’s jet engines.

  It fires 30mm projectiles fitted with plastic driving bands, to help preserve barrel life, from cartridges nearly a foot long, at a rate of 3,900 rounds per minute, meaning that the entire standard magazine load of 1,150 rounds would be exhausted in just eighteen seconds of continuous firing. To preserve barrel life and conserve ammunition the weapon is normally limited to one- or two-second bursts.

  Accurate up to 4,000 feet or about three-quarters of a mile, the shells pour out of the rotating barrels at the rate of sixty-five every second, delivering a virtually solid stream of ordnance, more like a hose pipe than a machine gun. It’s an enormously effective tank-buster, typically employing a five-to-one mixture of PGU-14/B API (Armour-Piercing and Incendiary) rounds and PGU-13/B HEI (High Explosive Incendiary) rounds. The PGU-14/B rounds are slightly the heavier of the two, mainly because each shell has a penetrating core of depleted uranium and titanium inside an aluminium outer body, which delivers enormous kinetic energy on impact. ‘PGU’ stands, rather boringly, for ‘Projectile Gun Unit’, a kind of military confusion-speak for ‘cartridge’ or ‘bullet’.

  Abū Omar al-Qurashi al-Baghdadi

  Hamid Dawud Muhammad Khalil al-Zawi was born in 1959 in a village called Al-Zawiyah (hence his name) near Haditha in western Iraq and had an almost entirely undistinguished career as a police officer before working in an electronics repair shop and becoming the imam of a local mosque. Things changed for him, and for tens of thousands of other people, when coalition forces led by the United States of America invaded Iraq in 2003.

  Al-Zawi responded by starting his own small terrorist gang and then became a major figure in the militant opposition group known as the Mujahideen Shura Council. This was formed in January 2006 and was an umbrella organisation that contained half a dozen Sunni Muslim insurgent groups including the Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn, far better and more concisely known as ‘al-Qaeda in Iraq’. The council didn’t last long, being disbanded in October of the same year, and was replaced by ISI, the Islamic State of Iraq, essentially a rebranded al-Qaeda in Iraq. Al-Zawi became one of the three leaders of the new insurgent organisation, taking the position of the First Emir of the Islamic State of Iraq.

  Not only did al-Zawi change his profession radically, switching from being an imam responsible for the religious education, welfare and guidance of his congregation to acting as a Kalashnikov-toting terrorist leading an insurgent group that specialised in slowly beheading people in front of video cameras, but he also changed his name.

  A kunya

  Names can be confusing and, in the Arab world, somewhat flexible. Given names can be replaced by a kunya, a teknonym or paedonymic that identifies the individual by reference to their offspring. So a man, irrespective of his actual name, may become known as Abū Waleed, meaning ‘father of Waleed’, while a woman can be called Umm Muhammad as the ‘mother of Muhammad’. But a kunya can also have an entirely different and less innocent meaning, being used as a nom de guerre by Arab terrorists and unconventional or clandestine warriors. Osama bin Laden, for example, used the kunya ‘Abū Abdullah’.

  Hamid al-Zawi first adopted the kunya Abū Mahmud, but then adopted the noms de guerre Abū Omar al-Qurashi al-Baghdadi and Abū Hamza al-Baghdadi. The ‘al-Baghdadi’ suffixes literally translate as ‘the one from Baghdad’ or ‘who came from Baghdad’, meaning that his origin was either Baghdad city or the Baghdad Governorate, which of course it wasn’t: the village of Al-Zawiyah is located in the Al-Anbar Governorate. Presumably he deliberately chose the name as part of his nom de guerre to try to associate himself with the capital of the country.

  The name Abū Omar appeared on the radar of the coalition forces at a fairly early stage as a spokesman for the Mujahideen Shura Council, but his very existence was persistently questioned. In July 2007 an American military spokesman stated definitively that he did not exist and that the various verbal statements attributed to him were actually spoken by an Iraqi actor. A terrorist captured by the coalition forces also claimed that Abū Omar was a fiction and had been created simply so that a man of Iraqi origin could be perceived as the leader of an insurgent group run by foreigners, meaning al-Qaeda. This story was reinforced in March 2008 by another terrorist group – Hamas-Iraq – which claimed the same thing, that the Abū Omar character had been created by al-Qaeda as the Iraqi face of the insurgent organisation.

  There was further confusion when the Iraqi Interior Minister stated that Abū Omar – or al-Baghdadi as he was commonly known – had been captured in Baghdad in March 2007. That was apparently somebody else who looked a bit like him. Then the same source claimed al-Baghdadi had been killed during a joint American–Iraqi operation north of the capital. That was followed by another report that the man had been arrested by the Iraqi military in April 2009, with photographs released to prove it. ISI denied this claim as well as all the others in a statement made by al-Baghdadi himself, and he continued to release audio statements and recordings throughout 2009 and 2010.

  He was finally and definitively identified as one of the people killed in the raid on the safe house near Tikrit in April 2010.

  Vektor, Gosudarstvennyy Nauchnyy Tsentr Virusologii I Biotekhnologii (Vector, Russian State Centre for Research on Virology and Biotechnology)

  Koltsovo Naukograd, Novosibirsk Oblast, Siberia, Russia

  Koltsovo – Коль
цо́во in the Cyrillic alphabet – was created in 1974 around Vektor, the Russian State Centre for Research on Virology and Biotechnology, an institute that studies particularly dangerous viruses. Named after Nikolai Koltsov, a respected Russian biologist, the settlement was granted naukograd or science town status on 17 January 2003 and is part of the group of Russian laboratories known as the Biopreparat.

  Vektor itself is located a short distance to the east of the main town of Koltsovo as part of a scattered cluster of buildings encircled by a boundary road. The location is relatively secluded and has a permanent garrison of Russian Army soldiers because of what’s held in the building. The six-storey structure contains samples of some of the most lethal bugs on the planet, including the Ebola, Marburg, Lassa, dengue and yellow fever viruses, and secure biosafety level 4 – BSL4 – laboratories where work on these deadly pathogens can be carried out in safety. Safety in this case is something of a relative term: in 2004 a female researcher at Vektor died after pricking herself with a needle contaminated with Ebola. The establishment is one of only two locations in the world, the other one being the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, that are official repositories for samples of the smallpox virus.

  During the Cold War Vektor was heavily involved in the development of biological weapons, but today it’s an important research centre concentrating on creating antiviral vaccines and drugs, and on developing diagnostic tools and protocols for the treatment of infectious diseases.

  Officially, that is. In fact, the unit’s remit is far wider than that and includes a number of other, largely unrelated disciplines linked only by the two facts that the materials involved in the research are both extremely small and are dangerous or lethal to human beings. But lethal viruses and bacteria are not the only sub-microscopic entities that require specialised handling and storage.

  After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Vektor management found that although its diminished client base still included the Russian government and various organs of the state, many of the approaches it received were from outside, often from well outside, the boundaries of the new Commonwealth of Independent States. But a research project was a research project no matter where the principals were located, and Vektor had no particular difficulty in accommodating requests, as long as those requests were backed by a sufficiently attractive offer of remuneration. And one of the defining characteristics of many of its new customers was that they had very substantial, in some cases effectively unlimited, sources of funding.

  Theory of flight

  The most commonly accepted explanation of why aircraft fly is based on a theorem worked out by a Swiss mathematician named Daniel Bernoulli in 1738, when the only things in the air were birds, bats and insects, none of which bore much resemblance to an aircraft. Bernoulli calculated that if the upper surface of an aerofoil section is curved, like a modern aircraft’s wing, air will have to travel faster over it compared to the speed of the air along the underside. That means the air over the upper surface will be at a lower pressure than the lower, so the wing will be ‘sucked’ or lifted upwards. This is known as lift.

  But there’s a problem. If the theory is right, then an aircraft should not be able to fly if it is upside-down, because then the effect of lift would be to force the aircraft down towards the ground. But display aircraft at air shows and the like routinely fly upside-down for prolonged distances, so Bernoulli can’t be entirely correct.

  It also doesn’t explain why aircraft with flat, non-aerofoil wings, like some modern fighters, still manage to get into the air.

  The other main contender is the Newtonian principle, based on his Third Law, which suggests that an aircraft’s wing is forced upwards by the pressure of the air on its lower surface as the speed increases. The argument is that air has mass, and so the downward pressure of the lower surface of a wing should result in an equal and opposite force from the air to push the wing upwards.

  This theory is more comprehensive because it can be applied to wings of any shape and is equally valid when an aircraft is flying inverted. However, the theory does not explain why there is a measurable area of low pressure above an aerofoil wing when an aircraft is in flight.

  Joint Special Forces Aviation Wing (JSFAW)

  One of the newest units in the military, the JSFAW was only created in April 2001 as a somewhat unlikely marriage of 7 Squadron of the Royal Air Force, flying Chinook HC2 heavy-lift helicopters, and 658 Squadron of the Army Air Corps, which operates the much smaller Eurocopter AS365N3 Dauphin II. The latter aircraft is often referred to by the British press as ‘Blue Thunder’, presumably on the reasonable if rather dull grounds that it’s painted blue and makes a lot of noise.

  A front-line helicopter base and specifically the home base of the British Chinook force, RAF Odiham at Hook in Hampshire, not far from Basingstoke, is home to 7 Squadron RAF of the JSFAW while 658 Squadron AAC is based at Stirling Lines, home of the Special Air Service (SAS) at Credenhill, near Hereford.

  The JSFAW is nothing if not flexible, certainly in terms of what it comprises, with at least two sub-units no longer a part of it. 657 Squadron AAC was a part of the JSFAW, flying Lynx AH9A helicopters and based at RAF Odiham until the squadron was disbanded in 2018, while 651 Squadron AAC was based at Aldergrove in Northern Ireland at the Joint Helicopter Command Flying Station and originally operated Lynx and Apache helicopters before being disbanded in 2003. Three years later it was reformed as a part of the JSFAW, flying Defender AL1 and AL2 fixed-wing turboprop aircraft, better known in civilian commercial use as the Britten Norman BN-2T-4S Defender 4000, originally the Britten Norman Islander.

  But although 651 Squadron is still operational, it’s no longer a part of the JSFAW. The squadron’s function was to provide UK special forces in Iraq and Afghanistan with ISTAR, meaning Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance. In Iraq the squadron was based at Al Amara, and in Afghanistan at Basra, and in both countries it was primarily involved in detecting and monitoring movements by insurgent groups. In Iraq, it also provided ISTAR support to the SAS Task Force Black, and more recently supplied airborne surveillance over East London during the Olympic Games in 2012.

  Hawala

  The hawala value transfer concept arose in India as early as the eighth century and differs from all modern financial systems in that funds are not physically transferred from the sender to the recipient. Instead, the sender deposits a sum with a hawaladar together with a password or other means of verification and another hawaladar in the destination city is informed about the transaction. The recipient approaches that hawaladar, provides the necessary verification and is given the agreed sum less a small commission.

  But the funds are never actually transferred during the transaction: the system is based upon, and relies totally on, honour and the belief that the debt owed by the sending hawaladar will be repaid. In practice, each hawaladar maintains careful records of all transactions and the settlement of debts may not necessarily take the form of cash but can involve the provision of services, the supply of goods or other options.

  Allāhu akbar

  This Arabic expression is known as the Takbir, meaning the ‘magnification of God’, and it translates into English as ‘God is great’. It’s a very common expression used on a daily basis by Muslims in a wide variety of different contexts, including within the calls to prayer uttered by the muezzin – the adhān – as well as in normal conversation to express feelings or emotions like happiness or sadness, or just as a simple statement of faith.

  It is one of the most used and religiously significant expressions in Islam, and not just as part of a spoken language. The expression Allāhu akbar can be found in the middle of the Iraqi flag, repeated multiple times on the flag of Iran and, since 2004, on the flag of Afghanistan as well. It has also been used as a battle-cry during conflict and more recently during terrorist attacks.

  The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Criminal Justice Information
Services (CJIS) Division

  In October 1991 building work began on a nearly one thousand acre site in Clarksburg, West Virginia. The client was the FBI, and in July 1995 the structure was completed both on time and under budget – somewhat strangely for a government contract of any sort. The main building occupies half a million square feet and includes a cafeteria with seating for 600 people, an auditorium with seats for 500 and a computer centre that extends to some 100,000 square feet.

  This was designed to be the home of the Criminal Justice Information Services Division, a high-technology arm of the FBI. Numerous technology-based programmes were either incorporated within it at its inception or were later transferred to it. These included IAFIS (Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System), NCIC (National Crime Information Centre), NIBRS (National Incident-Based Reporting System) and UCR (Uniform Crime Reporting).

  FACE (the Facial Analysis, Comparison and Evaluation Services Unit) is also based there. The database available through FACE is vast: it comprises over 400 million images culled from numerous sources and including almost 200 million photos from driving licences and ID pictures, nearly 150 million visa photos and, inevitably, over 25 million police mug shots.

  Task Force Black

  The defeat of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship was a beginning rather than an end for covert operations in Iraq. Although Hussein was about the only leader who’d managed to keep al-Qaeda out of his country while he was in power, after the campaign ended the terrorist organisation moved in. Fighting a group like al-Qaeda is akin to fighting smoke: the enemy is insubstantial and elusive, and it was recognised that using conventional military forces and tactics wasn’t going to be enough.