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Operation Ivy Bells was a joint US Navy and NSA mission whose objective was to place wire taps on Soviet underwater communication lines during the Cold War.
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History
During the Cold War, the United States wanted to learn more about Soviet submarine and missile technology, specifically ICBM test and nuclear first strike capability.
In the early 1970s the US government learned of the existence of an undersea communications cable in the Sea of Okhotsk, which connected the major Soviet naval base at Petropavlovsk on the peninsula of Kamchatka to the Soviet Pacific Fleet's mainland headquarters at Vladivostok. At the time, the Sea of Okhotsk was claimed by Russia as territorial waters, and was strictly off limits to foreign vessels, and in addition, the Soviet Navy had installed a network of sound detection devices along the seabed to combat intruders. The area also saw numerous surface and subsurface naval exercises.
Despite these obstacles, the potential for an intelligence coup was too great to ignore, and in October of 1971, the United States sent the purpose-modified submarine USS Halibut deep into the area. Divers working from the Halibut found the cable in 400 ft (120 m) of water and installed a 20 ft (6.1 m) long device, which wrapped around the cable without piercing its casing, which recorded all communications made over it. The device was designed to detach and fall to the seabed if the cable was raised for repair.
Each month, divers retrieved the recordings and installed a new set of tapes. The recordings were then delivered to the NSA for processing and dissemination to other agencies. The first tapes recorded revealed that the Soviets were so sure of the cable's security that the majority of the conversations made over it were uncoded. The eavesdropping on the traffic between senior Soviet officers provided an invaluable view inside the region's naval operations.
Eventually more taps were installed on Soviet lines in other parts of the world, with more advanced instruments built by AT&T's Bell Laboratories which were nuclear powered and could store a year's worth of data. Other submarines were utilized for this role, including USS Parche. All in all, the intelligence gathered from these exercises helped end the Cold War, as it gave the United States a window directly into the Soviet mind 1.
The operation continued until 1981, when surveillance satellites showed Soviet warships, including a salvage vessel, anchored over the site of the tap. USS Parche was despatched to recover the device but her divers were unable to find it and it was concluded that the Soviets had discovered the operation.
Cover story and success
The tapping of the Soviet naval cable was so secret that most sailors involved did not have the security clearance needed to know about it. A cover story was thus created to disguise the actual mission: it was claimed that the spy submarines were sent to the Soviet naval range in the Sea of Okhotsk to recover the Soviet SS-N-12 'Sandbox' supersonic anti-ship missile (AShM) debris so that a countermeasure could be developed.
Although created as a cover story, this mission was actually carried out with great success: US naval divers recovered all of the SS-N-12 supersonic AShM debris, with the largest debris no greater than 6 inches, and a total of more than 2 million pieces. The debris was taken back to the US and the US Naval Laboratory reconstructed the AShM based on these pieces, and at least one sample was also reverse engineered. It was discovered that SS-N-12 AShM was guided by radar only, and the IR guidance previously thought did not exist. From the samples built, countermeasures were successfully developed and deployed.
Compromise of the Operation
Ronald William Pelton, a 44 year old veteran of the National Security Agency, was fluent in Russian and considered to be a highly skilled communications analyst/specialist but very bad at personal finance. Hostile toward the agency and dissatisfied with his position, Pelton was $65,000 in debt and filed for personal bankruptcy just three months before he resigned. With only a few hundred dollars in the bank, Pelton walked into the Soviet Embassy in Vienna, Austria, in January 1980 and offered to sell what he knew to KGB for money.
It is important to note that no documents were passed from Ronald Pelton to the Soviets because Pelton had an extremely strong memory. Ronald Pelton reportedly received only a total of $35,000 from the KGB for the intelligence he provided from 1980 to 1983, and for the intelligence on the Operation Ivy Bells, the KGB gave him $5,000. Surprisingly, the Soviets did not take any action despite the fact that Pelton had provided the details of these operations.
In July 1985, Vitaly Yurchenko, a KGB colonel who was the initial contact of Ronald Pelton in Washington D.C. defected to the US, and provided the information that eventually led to Pelton's arrest — it was only then that the Soviets acted. To this day, it remains unclear why it took the Soviets so long to act. The recording device captured by the Soviets was on public display in a museum in Moscow.
Notes
- ^ Sontag, Sherry; Christopher Drew with Annette Lawrence Drew (November 1998). Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage. PublicAffairs. ISBN 0-06-103004-X.
References
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- This page was last modified on 10 November 2008, at 01:24.
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