Understrike

by James Barrington

  The existence of The Thing was discovered entirely by accident in 1951 when a radio operator working inside the British Embassy in Moscow inexplicably found himself listening to American voices on an open radio channel.

  The British alerted the Americans, who began an immediate investigation. Two technicians were sent to Moscow and used a signal generator and receiver combination that would produce feedback in the presence of a hidden transmitter, and they discovered the bug. The Federal Bureau of Investigation was tasked with analysing the device, and employed a man named Peter Wright, then a scientist and technician working for the British Marconi Company. He later became a counter-intelligence officer for the Security Service, MI5, and was the author of the controversial book Spycatcher. The detailed analysis of the device produced by Wright resulted in the British developing similar bugs under the codename Satyr, many of which saw use by the principal Allied powers during the 1950s.

  An exact full-size replica of The Thing, a potent testament to both Russian ingenuity and American embarrassment, is now on display in the NSA’s National Cryptologic Museum in Maryland.

  Russian ‘critically ill patient repatriation’

  The Russians have often used the ‘critically ill’ technique to recover a defector for prolonged and probably terminal questioning, the heavily sedated victim often being strapped to a stretcher and attended by a doctor and nurse who are simply there to ensure he reaches the interrogation room alive.

  This was the fate of Konstantin Volkov back in 1945. Volkov was the Russian vice consul in Istanbul and also an agent of the NKVD. The Narodnyy Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del, or the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the Soviet Union’s interior ministry, included the secret police force and was responsible for political repression, countless extrajudicial executions. It had implemented Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge during which roughly a million Russians were executed, most by being shot.

  Volkov contacted the British authorities in Istanbul and asked for two things: political asylum for himself and his wife in Britain and £27,000, a substantial sum of money in 1945. In return for this he would reveal the identities of 314 Soviet agents working in Turkey and some 250 Soviet agents operating in Britain. More significantly, he also offered to provide the names of three Soviet agents then operating within the British intelligence community. He stated that two of these people worked in the Foreign Office, and the third was a counter-intelligence officer then based in London. The latter individual was Kim Philby, who was then, with the level of incompetence that marked so many operations run by British intelligence at this time, given the job of processing Volkov’s claim and request, so that he was actually investigating himself.

  Philby saw the danger, immediately informed his controller in Moscow of the offer made by Volkov, and set off for Istanbul, travelling as slowly as he possibly could. The journey to Turkey took him three weeks, and by the time he arrived in Istanbul Volkov had already been flown out to Moscow on a Russian transport aircraft, swathed in bandages. He was never seen again.

  The Jakarta Incident

  In June 1982 a British Airways Boeing 747, callsign Speedbird 9, flew through a cloud of volcanic ash produced by the eruption of Mount Galunggung in West Java, about which the flight deck crew knew nothing and which did not appear on their weather radar because the ash was dry and the radar was intended to detect moisture in clouds. At 37,000 feet, all four engines failed, one after the other, in a period of about one minute.

  What keeps aircraft in the air is the lift from the wings, not the engines, and the Boeing 747 has a glide ratio of about 15 to 1, meaning that it can glide for 15 miles for every mile that it loses in altitude. From 37,000 feet, that would mean the aircraft could stay in the air for approximately 23 minutes and in that time glide for a distance of 91 nautical miles. The crew declared an emergency to Jakarta Area Control and selected the emergency code, 7700, on the aircraft’s secondary surveillance transponder and steered the 747 towards Jakarta Airport.

  Their problem was compounded by the mountainous terrain on the south coast of the island of Java, which required the aircraft to be above 11,500 feet when crossing the coast. The crew decided that if they were unable to restart any of the four engines and maintain altitude by the time the aircraft reached 12,000 feet, then they would abandon the approach to Jakarta, turn back over the Indian Ocean and attempt a ditching at sea, an extremely risky manoeuvre in an aircraft of that size, and something that had never been done before in a Boeing 747.

  The crew began engine restart procedures, despite being above the recommended in-flight start envelope altitude of 28,000 feet, but these attempts all failed. When the aircraft reached 13,500 feet and had cleared the invisible ash cloud, they managed to restart the number four engine, allowing the aircraft captain, Eric Moody, to reduce but not halt the rate of descent. Soon afterwards, they managed to restart the number three engine, and that permitted him to begin a gentle climb, and they also restarted the number one and two engines, though the number two engine surged minutes later and shut down again.

  They maintained an altitude of 12,000 feet, but as they approached the airport they found they could see almost nothing through the windscreen because of the abrading effect of the ash cloud, and a visual landing proved impossible. They flew the ILS, the instrument landing system, but even that was not entirely successful because the vertical guidance system was not working. That meant the aircraft could head directly towards the runway but the system would not provide height information. To counter this, the aircraft’s first officer began monitoring the DME, the distance measuring equipment, which told them how far away they were from the runway. An aircraft maintaining a 3 degree glide path will lose approximately 300 feet for every track mile run, and so the first officer told the captain the height of the aircraft should be descending through at each mile they passed, based on the DME reading.

  Moody later stated that it was ‘a bit like negotiating one’s way up a badger’s arse’, which perhaps makes one wonder what he got up to in his spare time if he was that familiar with the nether regions of a badger.

  The aircraft landed successfully, but they were unable to taxi the 747 off the runway because they could not see through the windscreen.

  The subsequent investigation of the incident showed that as the ash had been ingested by the engines it had melted and stuck to the sides of the combustion chambers. But as the engine cooled after flaming out, the ash solidified and enough of it broke off to allow a clean air flow through the engine, allowing it to be successfully restarted. Engine numbers one, two and three were replaced at Jakarta, the windscreen was changed and the fuel tanks drained and cleared of ash, after which the 747 was flown back to London. There, the number four engine was also changed before the aircraft could be returned to service.

  Nineteen days after Speedbird 9 lost all its engines, a Singapore airlines Boeing 747 had to shut down three of its engines as it flew through the same area, after which the airspace was permanently closed and new air routes put into operation.

  As a means of keeping in contact, the crew and passengers formed the Galunggung Gliding Club, and the Guinness Book of Records included the flight as the longest recorded glide in a non-purpose-built aircraft. Interestingly, this record didn’t last long, being broken by two Canadian aircraft. The first incident took place in 1983, the following year, and involved Air Canada Flight 143, a Boeing 767, which ran out of fuel at 41,000 feet on a flight from Montréal to Edmonton.

  This incident was caused by a combination of an electronic fault on the instrument panel, but more significantly by the fuel load having been calculated in pounds instead of kilograms, a fact that nobody noticed at the time, meaning that the tanks held less than half the quantity of fuel that should have been loaded. The aircraft flew for 17 minutes after the engines stopped.

  The emergency landing, at Royal Canadian Air Force Station Gimli, was complicated by part of the runway being used for a sports car race at t
he time, and by the completely silent approach of the 767, which touched down with hardly anyone on the ground noticing. Luckily, the gravity drop the pilots had been forced to use to lower the undercarriage without engine power had not locked the nose wheel into position, and this was forced back up into the undercarriage well when the aircraft touched down, and the friction generated by the nose of the fuselage sliding along the runway ensured that the aircraft stopped well before ploughing into the crowds of spectators. No serious injuries were suffered by people on the ground or in the aircraft.

  A couple of decades later, in 2001, Air Transat Flight 236 also broke the record, running out of fuel on a transatlantic flight from Toronto to Lisbon, due to a fractured fuel line that was dumping fuel at the rate of about one gallon a second. Luckily, the captain was an experienced glider pilot, and landed the Airbus safely at Lajes Air Base after gliding it for about 65 miles.

  DEFCON

  DEFCON stands for DEFense readiness CONdition, and there are five possible states that can be applied to the American military machine. These are:

  about 65 miles.

  DEFCON

  DEFCON stands for DEFense readiness CONdition, and there are five possible states that can be applied to the American military machine. These are:

  State Readiness Implication

  DEFCON 1 Maximum Nuclear war is iminent

  DEFCON 2 Entire Armed Forces can engage Final preparations for nuclear war

  DEFCON 3 Air Force can mobilise in 15 minutes General increase in force readiness

  DEFCON 4 Above normal readiness Strengthened security and enhanced intelligence operations

  DEFCON 5 Normal readiness Normal peacetime state

  To avoid any possible confusion, exercise scenarios involving an increase in the DEFCON state do not use the word ‘DEFCON’. Instead, five alternative codewords have been introduced. These are COCKED PISTOL (DEFCON 1); FAST PACE (DEFCON 2); ROUND HOUSE (DEFCON 3); DOUBLE TAKE (DECON 4) and FADE OUT (DEFCON 5). Details of the DEFCON system and its meanings were only declassified in 2006.

  Project 949 and Project 949A

  Until 2007, when the American Ohio-class ballistic missile carrying submarines were adapted to deploy cruise missiles, the Russian Project 949 (NATO reporting name Oscar I) and Project 949A (NATO reporting name Oscar II) submarines were the largest cruise missile carrying boats in the world. Two Project 949 (Granit) submarines, designated K-525 and K-206, were built at the Sevmash shipyard in Severodvinsk, the first laid down in 1975 and the second in 1979. The boats remained in service with the Soviet Northern Fleet until 1996 when they were decommissioned, and they were scrapped in 2004. A total of 11 Project 949A (Antey) submarines, an improved design, were subsequently built at Severodvinsk, five being assigned to the Northern Fleet.

  These are large vessels, the displacement tonnage of the 949A boat being 14,700 when surfaced and 19,400 submerged, with a length of over 500 feet, and a beam of 60 feet. They are powered by two pressurized water-cooled reactors that drive a pair of steam turbines, delivering just over 73,000 KW of power to twin shafts fitted with seven bladed propellers and giving it a surfaced speed of 15 knots and up to 32 knots when submerged. The armament is impressive, including four 21-inch torpedo tubes in the bow, typically 28 Tsakra (SS-N-15, NATO reporting name Starfish) and Vodopad/Veter (SS-N-16, NATO reporting name Stallion) anti-submarine missiles fitted with nuclear warheads, and 24 P-700 Granit (SS-N-19, NATO reporting name Shipwreck) cruise missiles carrying either high explosive or nuclear payloads.

  Easily the most famous Project 949A submarine was the Kursk, K-141, which was lost in the Barents Sea on 12 August 2000, with the loss of all 118 crew on board. The boat was involved in the Summer-X exercise, the first such evolution planned by the Russian Navy in over ten years and that included 30 large ships, four attack submarines and a significant number of smaller ships. The crew of the Kursk were considered to be the best in the Northern Fleet and had won a citation for performance excellence. The boat was one of the very few vessels authorized to carry a full combat load of weapons at all times.

  During the exercise, the submarine successfully fired a Granit missile fitted with a practice warhead and two days later, on the morning of 12 August, the crew prepared to engage the Fleet flagship, the Kirov-class battlecruiser Pyotr Velikiy (Peter the Great) with dummy torpedoes. At 07.28 UTC, 11.28 local time, there was an explosion when preparing to fire the weapons and the submarine sank in just over 350 feet of water some 85 miles off Severomorsk. A second explosion occurred just over two minutes after the first. The subsequent investigation into the accident found that HTP (High-test peroxide), a form of highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide used to propel torpedoes, had leaked through a faulty weld in the weapon. The HTP expanded enormously in volume and ruptured the torpedo’s kerosene fuel tank, which caused the first explosion, the force of which was equal to between 220 and 550 pounds of TNT. The second explosion was much greater in power, equating to between 3 and 7 tons of TNT, and was most likely caused by the heat from the first explosion causing the warheads of several live torpedoes to detonate. This explosion was recorded by seismographs in Europe, measuring as high as 4.2 on the Richter scale, and was even detected in Alaska.

  Rescue assistance was offered by both the British and Norwegian navies, but this was first refused by Russia, which stated that all the crew would have died within minutes of the explosions. In reality, when the wreck was entered by Norwegian and Russian divers on 21 August, 24 bodies were found in the turbine room at the stern of the submarine, their names recorded in a note written by the officer present, Captain-Lieutenant Dmitri Kolesnikov. They had all survived the explosions and lived on for some time before eventually succumbing either to the flames or to suffocation.

  A Dutch consortium was awarded the contract to raise the vessel by Russia, and this was completed between 2001 and 2003, the largest section of the hull being towed to Severomorsk and placed in a floating dry dock where it could be inspected.

  Defense Support Program (DSP)

  The innocuous sounding Defense Support Program is the principal means used by the United States to detect missile or spacecraft launches, or nuclear explosions, using sensitive infrared cameras mounted on satellites in geosynchronous orbits. To permit fast detection of a launch and acquisition of the missile by tracking the intense heat generated by its motor, these satellites spin, allowing their sensor arrays to scan their target area once every ten seconds. Each satellite covers one particular part of the planet, the first four, known as Block 1, Phase 1, being launched between 1970 and 1973. A total of 23 satellites were launched in all, some obviously now non-functioning. The last DSP launch was in November 2007, and the entire system will eventually be entirely replaced by a new program called SBIRS, the acronym referring to Space-Based Infrared System satellites.

  Northwood

  In the grounds of Eastbury Park, near the London suburb of Northwood, is one of the most important military headquarters facilities in Britain, controlling five separate military command structures, including the NATO Allied Maritime Command and Commander Operations for the Royal Navy. The original Eastbury Park house burned down in 1969 and in the first few years of the twenty-first century there were major construction works on the site, culminating in a new building to house the Permanent Joint Headquarters, which opened in 2010. Even today, much of the site lies underground, in hardened and semi-hardened facilities intended to survive a nuclear attack, and is operated by the three principal arms of the United Kingdom’s Armed Forces: the Royal Navy, the Army and the Royal Air Force, headed by the Chief of Joint Operations.

  Submarine communications

  Getting a message of any kind to a submarine that is proceeding along the surface of the sea is no more difficult than sending a message to any other location on the surface of the planet and permits a large range of different communication methods to be used, from various radio frequencies to satphones. But the entire purpose of the submarine is to o
perate below the surface of the water – the clue is in the name – and the moment a boat dives, all conventional communication systems cease to operate, because radio waves do not penetrate to the depths at which submarines operate. But as with all rules, there is one single exception: ELF. Or rather two: ELF and VLF.

  Nothing to do with unlikely characters from the Lord of the Rings, ELF stands for extremely low frequency, and ELF – and its slightly less effective companion VLF, very low frequency – transmissions do provide a way of getting a message to a submerged submarine. Not, in fairness, a long or a comprehensive message, and not in any way a conversation, submarine communications being virtually by definition only one way. The moment a signal is sent from any kind of a transmitter, an organization with the correct type of intercept equipment can pinpoint that transmitter’s location with a fair degree of accuracy, as long as the signal was detected by two or more receivers. So submarines listen, but do not respond, hence the nickname ‘Silent Service’ acquired a long time ago by the Royal Navy’s Submarine Service.

  ELF, which is defined as radio signals with a frequency between 30 Hz and 300 Hz, and with a wavelength of between 10,000 and 1,000 kilometres, is the only radio band that can penetrate deep below the surface of the ocean. In America there are two ELF transmission sites in Michigan and Wisconsin that use miles of cable mounted on towers to send out what are known as PLSO – ‘phonetic letter spelled out’ – messages that can be received by submarines at their normal operating depth. The other option is VLF, occupying the frequency band between 3 and 30 kHz and with a wavelength of between 100 and 10 kilometres, which offers the ability to send far more information in a transmission, but which does not penetrate to anything like the same depth. VLF is also used for other purposes, including communicating with satellites that can then relay the messages to other units, communicating with surface ships, for global communications during hostilities, aircraft and ship navigation equipment but, just like ELF, these are all one-way communication links.