Operation Ivy Bells
The Operation Ivy Bells was an intelligence operation of the United States in 1971 with the aim of a military submarine cable in the Pacific Fleet of the Soviet Navy educate. The operation was carried out for almost ten years with data loggers changed every month and generated strategic information about military connections in the Soviet Union . In 1981, through a tip from a US source, the Soviet services discovered the listening device and removed it.
Soviet submarine cable
A military submarine cable ran at an average depth of around 400 ft (approx. 120 m ) in the Sea of Okhotsk , a marginal sea of the Pacific . The naval base for submarines in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky ( Kamchatka ), northeast of the Kuril Islands , exchanged information with the headquarters in Vladivostok in the southwest via this 5- inch cable connection . Both bases played a major role in the communications of the Soviet Pacific Fleet.
Attaching the monitoring device
The idea of siphoning off Soviet submarine cables had been around for a long time. Captain James Bradley had wanted to start such a mission for some time, but was hindered by the technical obstacles of detection-free eavesdropping and the difficulties of deep-sea diving. Finally he was able to convince Henry Kissinger and his advisor General Alexander Haig and received approval for the risky mission.
In 1971, under the direction of Captain James Bradley, combat swimmers of the US Navy dived from the US boat USS Halibut (SSN 587) wearing water-heated diving suits to the cable running in Soviet territorial waters and attached an approximately 6 m (20 ft) long listening unit. The device was galvanically separated from the cable, so that no mechanical intervention on the cable was necessary. The facility recorded all communications on magnetic media.
business
Every month divers exchanged the data carriers and brought the magnetic tapes to the National Security Agency (NSA) for decryption . This was astonished to find that a large part of the communication was unencrypted, as the Soviet military assumed the security of their connection.
Exposure
In 1981, US spy satellites observed a fleet of Soviet military ships over the undersea cable. Another espionage submarine, the USS Parche (SSN-683) was quickly dispatched to recover the facility. On arrival this was no longer available.
Treason
After lengthy US counter-espionage investigations, the NSA analyst Ronald Pelton (* 1941) was arrested for betraying Operation Ivy Bell to Soviet services for a salary of USD 35,000. He had offered the information to the Soviet embassy in Washington. He did not submit any written documents, but used his very good memory to put information on record. Pelton was sentenced to life in prison and released on November 24, 2015.
classification
The success of Operation Ivory Bells prompted the US services to siphon off a number of other Soviet undersea cables. The espionage submarines USS Halibut (SSGN-587) and the USS Seawolf (SSN-575) , and in the 1980s and 1990s also the USS Richard B. Russell (SSN-687) installed additional listening devices, some of which were nuclear-powered. To this day, the success of the operation is considered to be the start of wiretapping activities on submarine cables. Today, the services are increasingly using the so-called backbones of the communication networks at the land stations.
The Ivy Bells listening device has been exhibited in the Central Museum of the Great Patriotic War in Moscow since 1999 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Olga Khazan: The Creepy, Long-Standing Practice of Undersea Cable Tapping . In: The Atlantic . July 16, 2013 ( theatlantic.com [accessed January 6, 2017]).
- ^ Operation Ivy Bells. In: www.military.com. Retrieved January 6, 2017 .
- ↑ Ronald Pelton, a spy, released from US custody after 30 years . In: Tagesspiegel . November 26, 2015 ( tagesspiegel.de ).