Trojan Horse Caused A Siberian Explosion 1183
An anonymous reader writes "William Safire of the nytimes [nytimes.com] has an interesting column this week describing how the Soviets purchased bogus computer chips from the West in the 1970's. These chips caused what "was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space." Fascinating story."
Nice story but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me get this straight.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's get this straight - Safire is bragging about the Americans blowing up gas pipelines???? I thought that was terrorism, at least if it is in Iraq. Lucky many weren't killed.
Just great (Score:5, Insightful)
Cold war or not, this is just callous disregard for human life.
Quote (Score:5, Insightful)
So, it's more an ad than anything else, isn't it ?
And the fact that it ended that dramatically just makes me kind of sceptical...
Re:Let me get this straight.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Disinformation (Score:4, Insightful)
Tin foil hat on...
This guy works/worked for the intelligence services. He was/is involved in "disinformation" operations. The intelligences services in the USA and UK are currently under increadible scrutiny for having goofed big-time about Iraq. This guy gets an article published in the NY Times about a very successful operation that helped finish the Cold War. There is no evidence, other than this article, and it can't be proved or disproved.
Draw your own conclusions.
Gotta love Safire (Score:5, Insightful)
Tinfoil hat time!
Software caused the failure, not hardware (Score:5, Insightful)
Nice, in a way, to see the French and US governments working together too.
Logic (Score:1, Insightful)
We have:
Clearly Mr Safire needs to take his medication more regularly.Re:Let me get this straight.... (Score:3, Insightful)
sorry to say this ... (Score:0, Insightful)
I'm not trolling. I really think this.
Re:I'm seriously skeptical (Score:2, Insightful)
Happy Trails,
Erick
Re:Let me get this straight.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Didn't they? They sabotased the chips to blow up the pipeline. Americans are the ones responsible for the explosion.
With your logic I wouldn't be responsible for an explosion of an aeroplane if I would have intentionally manipulated its components in a way which would have led to their malfunction and the plane crashing.
Which one really is the rogue state which uses terrorist means to reach its economic ends?
Re:Let me get this straight.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Shockingly...yes. Why is sabotaging the computer chips any different from sabotaging the physical gas lines?? Blowing shit up, is blowing shit up - doesn't matter how you do it.
Excellent (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Let me get this straight.... (Score:-1, Insightful)
And you know that it was't terrorist who did this, since none of the people involved had long beards or lived in a dessert...
I doubt it... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Self-serving delusion (Score:5, Insightful)
This would take time proportional to the amount of stolen technology, which is to say, a lot.
Sure, this didn't stop them, but add this and that and the other thing and that thing over there, and you get "lost the war".
Nobody in the article claimed more then "helped win the cold war" (emphasis mine), and I say that if you actually read the article insteading of projecting what you think it was going to say onto the article, you'd find that assertion perfectly defensible. I do.
Reading is fundamental.
Re:Let me get this straight.... (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:Let me get this straight.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, did you ?
The article states that the Americans had a trojan horse planted into the robbed software. It was clearly designed to blow up the pipes.
Not that I approve of the KGB's stealing stuff, by the way... Hell, that's a lesson about not trusting binaries downloaded from random places. Open source rules !
It's not terrorism if Americans cause it (Score:1, Insightful)
Don't you get the underlying double standard yet? Besides which, Safire is a neocon lapdog fuckwit, getting strokes for cheerleading the conquering of other nations.
I know I know, this sounds like a troll, but if anybody still believes the U.S. really had a valid WMD pretense for its party with Death in Iraq, please explain in terms that don't include vague excuses like "it needed to be done" or "Saddam had it coming," because there are plenty of dictators still out there who the U.S. is still cozy with, and Saddam was one whom U.S. danced closely with.
One day (soon hopefully), american Democrats will pull their heads out of their asses and aggressively pursue the Republican's international war crimes the way they pursued the Clinton cigar story.
From the Life Imitating Art Dept. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Let me get this straight.... (Score:5, Insightful)
The store doesn't actually do it- it is the thief that is responsible.
We didn't sell the chips to the Russians, they were able to get them through 'less than honest' means. We did not put them in their hands and say 'use this'.
When I was in high school, one of my friends found his dads stash of pot. We took from it pretty liberally. I always laughed when I thought about him confronting us- "did you steal my marijuana?"
Re:Is this right? (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if people did get hurt (and given the situation, it wouldn't be all that shocking to later find out than some might have, the Soviet's perhaps not wanting to admit it), the point is that the Soviets got into that situation by stealing technology. It's hard to get all indignant about having the tech you stole backfire (literally) on you. After all, the Soviets could have simply lied and said that 1000 people were killed if they wanted to use this "underhanded" trick as fuel to the fire right?
did the US know that when they got started in this whole fiasco or do you think they would have done it anyways if there was the potential for many (as in hundreds) people to get hurt/killed?
Undoubtidly they did. After all, they knew the end result would be an explosion (or other catostrophic failure) and they couldn't possibly know exactly when or where. I think this is a one of those "acceptable collateral damage" things. Sacrafice a few to save the many. The good of the many outweighs
Re:sorry to say this ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Uh... care to explain how? Assuming this guy's not just talking out his ass to hype up CIA wins in the past: The U.S. initially simply turned down the purchase order for the technology when the Soviets approached them, but a KGB man told them that an agent was being sent in to steal it. The U.S. booby trapped the stolen technology which forced the Soviets to reevalutate the viability of ALL the technology they'd STOLEN over the years. So, it's facist to booby trap technology that your enemy is stealing from you for their own gain? Yea... that makes sense. Add in the fact that a blew up a pipeline in the middle of nowhere so nobody even got hurt...
Of course, if you'd read the article, you'd already know all this.
Re:Disinformation (Score:5, Insightful)
That's fine.
However, I do think we need a new term. People who express opinions about the possibility of dirty tricks by governments/government agencies are often labelled "kooks" or "conspiracy theorists", with the assumption that their ideas are not based on fact or logical thinking. However, there is another type of person that is increasingly common today. They are the mirror image of conspiracy theorists, people that - even when there is clear evidence of something funny going on - refuse to even consider the possibility.
For example, in February last year Colin Powell gave a presentation to the UN - remember that? Just in case you've forgotten, he said:
1) Iraq posseses 499-500 tonnes of chemical weapons agents.
2) Iraq has hidden warheads containing "biological warfare agent... in large groves of palm trees".
3) Iraq possesses a hidden factory equipped with thousands of centrifuges to make fissionable material for nuclear weapons
4) Iraq possesses at least seven mobile laboratories for producing biological warfare agents.
And other claims like this. Notice that he didn't say "might" or "perhaps", these were statements of fact. Meanwhile, in the UK Tony Blair was telling his electorate that he had seem incontrovertible evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but he couldn't tell us what it was so we'd just have to trust him. Now we know that nearly all these "facts" were wrong.
And yet, despite all this, there is a certain type of person that is completely unwilling to even consider the possibility that our governments have lied to us. Many people consider that the intelligence agencies "made mistakes", or perhaps even a few rouge elements in the intelligence agencies might have lied, but not the government.
I think there should be a new word for this type of person - a person who finds it impossible to imagine those in authority acting in a bad way even that is a reasonable logical conclusion based on the facts. Or perhaps there is already a word for this type of person and I don't know it. Any ideas anyone?
Re:Let me get this straight.... (Score:5, Insightful)
If this story is true, the Soviets bought the stuff in Canada. The chips were under an embargo so they could not buy them in the States legitimally.
fwiw, the pipeline was built and the world did not come to an end. Reagan also placed some restrictions on what US firms could sell to Europeans, something that led directly to the EU taking steps to become independent of US suppliers so that sort of thing can not happen again. I always got the impression that Airbus Industries were given more of a kick-start than they otherwise would have got for that reason. Airbus is now bigger than Boeing.
actually, the story sounds like a load of bull. Quite apart from anything else, it implies that French security sources exposed a valuable source to Mitterand who then exposed him to Reagan. That would have been insane, if you tell politicians then you are telling the world.
so... (Score:3, Insightful)
exactly how do you fight someone bent on killing you? you sing campfire songs to him?
nice warped view of history and human nature you have there
Re:Disinformation (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Let me get this straight.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Let me get this straight.... (Score:3, Insightful)
My turn...
Did you even RTFA? The Soviets stole Canadian software to control the operations of the pipeline. The Americans added a trojan horse to the software.
Re:They could have actually COOPERATED (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, they did refuse to cooperate. They interfered with and then outright stopped inspections when they learned the US was planting CIA agents as American inspection team members. This is what the whole "we'll let inspections resume if there are no Americans on it" thing was about.
"No, it decided that it would retaliate against Iraq unless it stopped terrorism and complied with the cease-fire requirements. It gave Iraq plenty of time to comply."
I'm sorry that like most Americans you missed the news cast the rest of the world got where half the administration is busy saying (CYA) they have no evidence that Iraq was linked to terrorist groups. Oh, and that whole WMD BS... Speaking of that, we really did give him all that stuff he gassed the kurds with back in the 80's. And sorry, I know you think a WMD is forever, but alot of that stuff actually has something known commonly as an "expiration date." Where the scumbags that put and helped that scumbag, and we're the scumbags removing the old one and probably going to end up putting in a new one. By the way, if you care so much about the kurds, you should see what all that depleted uranium we dumped over there in ammunition is doing to them.
Plausible, but probable? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think at best the story is plausible. Look at in terms of two companies in the same field trying to get the better product out: Both companies are working hard to make their products better, but company A is pulling ahead (noticeably). So someone at Company B decides a little corporate espionage is in order and starts trying to get information and copies of Company A's product to backwards engineer and copy. Company B finds out and, rather than try and crack down (which would just force Company B to find another method of doing the same thing), Company A decides to deliberately make misinformation available. Company B takes said misinformation and unwittingly keeps up their own programs of spying and reverse engineerting, until a blatent error occurs that shows them they have been wasting time and money heading down the wrong trail and will need to go back to where they were several years before and start again from the beginning. Company A, on the other hand, doesn't have the 3 year loss and continues on ahead, widening the distance.
This seems like a good solution to me. If someone is leaching information about your research, deliberately mislead them, it's a lot cheaper than trying to crack down on security even further. If you know who the spies are, use that knowledge.
Now the part where software was mangled in order to cause problems with the pipeline, this also looks plausible and, considering the tensions at the time, a lot safer. Look at it this way: two countries facing off, both creating a larger and larger number of nuclear warheads and other forms of destruction. Instead of a massive killoff, a piece of software is altered to damage a pipeline (loss of money) and throw their last few years of research into question (costing more money and probably quite a few lost jobs).
The people who are crying about the damages of the exploding pipeline should sit down and seriously examine the tradeoffs between that and continued mounting pressures and growing numbers of weapons.
Now while the story sounds good, and it's the kind of thing we (well, some of us) want to hear (hostilities being resolved without bombs or deaths), I don't see enough proof in one article to fully believe it. The fact that this did come from a closed file makes it a little more believeable (those of you that thought this was just a story told to him from the guy down the hall need to RTFA) in that it should be possile to check the story against those files.
I think the story is plausible, but with only one source, and that being someone about to publish a book, I'm wary about believing it without a little more proof. I would like to believe it, but I'll hold off until I either see more articles about it (not connected to this author) or someone publishes the actual files.
--- Sidenote ---
For those of you who will continue to whine that this was an act of terrorism, please go look up the word terrorism and note that the target is to inflict terror. I thought that was pretty clear but obviously the point has missed a few of you who think that blowing something up is terrorism, or even leading someone else to blow up their own thing. The act of blowing something up is not automatically an act of terrorism.
Oh, and if you hate the US so much that you will take any tiny hint of wrongdoing and blow it all out of proportion, move.
What helped "us" "win" the Cold War (Score:1, Insightful)
What did the US do to help win the Cold War? First of all, it's always mentioned in US schools or corporate media how the Russians occupied Eastern Europe with it's armies. What's not mentioned is that the US occupied Western Europe with it's armies. Until 1956 in France, the communist party (PCF) was the most popular party in elections. In Italy the communist party was so popular the US had to result in subterfuge and election tampering to keep Italy from going communist. In fact Italy was the main focus of the Cold War starting with Truman, and as late as 1976 communists were winning over one third of the vote, and coming in less than 5% behind the Christian Democrats (center-right) in Italy. The US ruling class supported the Spanish dictatorship because resistance continued even after the civil war was lost. Stalin agreed to not interfere with Greece, yet the resistance there to English/US meddling was so great that the US had to militarily take over the country and supprot dictators there as well. Not to mention the dictators and attacks on popular movements the US supported in Latin America, Asia, Africa and so forth.
The US said it had to do this because of the USSR. The US idle class said they would not have foreign bases if not for the USSR. Yet the USSR collapses and - nothing changes. The US continues with it's military bases and personnel on over half the countries on earth, military spending stays near cold war levels, billions go to Colombia to put down worker movements there, or Israel to pay for the Palestinian occupation. In fact, the US doesn't have the USSR to check it's power any more so it becomes even more bold since it has unilateral power. Nothing could prove the premise of the cold war was a lie like the actions of the US elite post-Cold War, who are making war on the world. Now they say they are against "terrorism" which apparently means anyone who does not like US troops in their country (Osama Bin Laden), and doesn't like having the US idle class take over the land and natural resources and exporting the profits back to the US. It should be noted of course that Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are old friends of the US elite who armed them during the 1980's, even though they had the same disregard for human life back then as they do now. If they didn't, the US ruling class would have never supported them.
How has this helped American workers? Not at all - blue collar jobs were shipped out for decades, and now white collar jobs are being shipped out. Mexicans and H1-Bs are imported for the jobs that are left. The US economy has been stagnating since the late 1960's (albeit a bump in the late 1990's) with a tepid growth of production while the rest of the world has been catching up - the EU's GDP rivaling the US's and Japan and the Asian tigers as well with China growing 8% a year or so. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics [bls.gov], the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage in the US is below what it was 35 years ago. Hours worked per year by worker have increased in the three-digit level. The economy has been in a sandrap for three years.
I guess Safire is telling us we should stop and think about how "great" it was
Re:Pitfalls of outsourcing... (Score:2, Insightful)
Other than the words "other country" and "software", I don't really see the connection.
During the Cold War, the Soviets had no software development industry worth the name, and so sought to buy software from Western countries, who, of course, refused. So the Soviets stole the software.
If that were the case today, America would have no (and never would have had any) software development industry worth the name. The Americans would have tried to buy Indian software, but the Indians would have refused. So the Americans would have stolen it.
That's not at all what's going on today...is it?
--Rob
Re:Let me get this straight.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Let me get this straight.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Disinformation (Score:2, Insightful)
Yep, sheep is a good term. I'm not sure what would motivate someone to mod you down to -1.
Re:Let me get this straight.... (Score:5, Insightful)
There's the biggest difference. When Americans sit down to plan about blowing things up, they actually put potential casualties and/or collateral damage on the agenda for discussion prior to doing so. When Terrorists sit down to plan about blowing things up, they have this seemingly brainwashed sense of the need to damage, maim, and kill innocent people *directly*.
Re:Disinformation (Score:5, Insightful)
"Responsible Citizen".
Check your facts. Don't blatantly believe that it's the truth just because it comes from GWB or CNN. If nobody challenges these authority figures, they can get away with ANYTHING. And they will.
MadCow.
I did some search (Score:3, Insightful)
What I've found was the story about Reagan trying to expand technology sanctions against Western companies participating in the construction. This measure was indeed enacted in June 1982.
Here is one interesting link [reformed-theology.org] about the pipeline.
As you can see, there is no mention of any disasters, and the project is considered as a major success of the USSR that brought it a significant steady stream of hard currency. This was in fact one of the few Soviet victories during the Cold War.
Re:Let me get this straight.... (Score:3, Insightful)
That's why we can't trust monopol hard/soft (Score:1, Insightful)
This motivate every country oveer the world to seek independant software enginering and develop their own operating systems based on open source.
You may find this assertion a troll, but how could non-us trust softwares from Miscrosoft and hardwares from Intel ?
Here you know why China and Japan decided to develop their own CPU and chips as well as their own operating system.
Allende facts (Score:1, Insightful)
Being war-happy is something I do not understand. First, Allende was not a tyrant and never was. He simply was a good-meaning idealist turned into a loose cannon. He tried to push his ideals too quickly and too straightforward, and things went soon haywire. He never had a single East German stormtrooper (oxymoron, stormtroopers are a Nazi concept) as his aid, but he did have Cuban aides which refused to return home from a visit to Chile and poured more gasoline onto fire. In the end the economy collapsed and military, backed by CIA, arranged a coup.
If Allende was a sickness, Pinoched was too strong a medicine. It was like treating a bent knee by amputation. Pinochet turned Chile into a military dictatorship and ruined Chilean economy furthermore. His politics destroyed the Chilean middle class for good.
There are no examples of US imperialism post-WW2
Iraq, Grenada, Nicaragua, Philippines, Guatemala, Chile, Vietnam, you name it. Granted, often there was a red risk involved, but Vietnam was simply a blunder. US managed to turn Ho Chi Minh, a lukewarm Social Democrat admiring US constitution, into die-hard Communist.
The fascinating thing about Bill Safire... (Score:5, Insightful)
Any parallels to contemporary situations are left as an exercise for the reader.
You are completely, utterly full of s*** (Score:1, Insightful)
The USSR's "0% unemployment rate and lack of poverty" is like saying that everyone in a prison has plenty of work to do and a place to sleep.
Comparing NATO bases in Western Europe with the Soviet Warsaw pact occupation of Eastern Europe is utterly ludicrous. When the Hungarians in 1956 and the Czechs in 1967 wanted to hold free elections, the Soviets rolled their tanks down the streets as a sign of authority. Do you seriously expect anyone to believe the US did anything remotely comparable in Western Europe?
As for the average inflation-adjusted wage being lower than it was 35 years ago, I can't really say, maybe you have studied government statistics that I have not. In any event, I don't see what it has to do with the cold war.
Allende vs Chile (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes he was. Specifically:
He annexed large tracts of the Chilean economy to his personal control.
He has his masters in Moscow send in stormtroopers from East Germany to kill the restive Chileans.
His "reforms" made Chile into a one-party state (ensuring him a lifelong dictatorship, if he had retained it.
He simply was a good-meaning idealist turned into a loose cannon
A man of such naked greed who sold his country to the USSR is not "well meaning".
He never had a single East German stormtrooper (oxymoron, stormtroopers are a Nazi concept)
Yes he did, and it is not an oxymoron, as fascism was alive and well in East Germany under Soviet occupation.
If Allende was a sickness, Pinoched was too strong a medicine
True. While Pinochet killed far fewer people that would have died if Allende had been allowed to run rampant, these people should not have died. Pinochet went (almost went to court?) for example for killing enemy foreign agents in his country. He should have deported them instead.
You still have given no examples of US imperialism. Most of what you named in fact were examples of the U.S. helping nations fend off imperialists.
US managed to turn Ho Chi Minh, a lukewarm Social Democrat admiring US constitution, into die-hard Communist.
You are mistaken in this. He was just a few degrees shy of Pol Pot. Even as early as the 1950s, Hi Chi Minh was executing thousands of farmers who were objecting to being put on slave plantations.
Re:Let me get this straight.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Essentially, terrorism is a Newspeak word. The same activity for the same purpose is only 'terrorism' if you're not on the U.S. government's 'good boy' list.
Thus, blowing up two buildings in New York is terrorism. Blowing up a whole country is 'a war for freedom and democracy'.
The only difference between the perpitrators of the acts is that one is done by a 'recognized' government and the other is not.
Note that there is a non newspeak definition that distinguishes terrorism from act of war as well. Terrorism is when the attacks are specifically targeted at creating a state of terror in a civilian population for political ends.
That definition is not favored by recognized governments as it provides them with no means to use terrorism while villifying others for doing the same.
Note that by the second definition, some in the U.S. government are guilty of terrorism against the citizens of th U.S.
Re:What helped "us" "win" the Cold War (Score:4, Insightful)
I am good friends with a Russian who left the USSR in the early 1980s (along with the rest of his family). *Everybody* lived in a state of poverty in the USSR. True, everyone was equal - equally poor.
Re:And we wonder why other nations. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
It goes way beyond issues of economic competition. It's a question of independence, control and security.
Everything went way beyond economic competition between the US and USSR. It was warfare between two countries who couldn't risk open conflict, but nevertheless fought hard at every other level, and for very good reasons. In hindsight we can now look back and say "The US didn't really need to pull all of those nasty tricks, the fundamentally inferior economic model would eventually have destroyed the Soviets regardless," but that was *far* from clear at the time.
And, actually, it's not entirely clear now... had the USSR been able to obtain some sort of clear military supremacy, they absolutely would have used that power to expand, and the economic boost gained through expansion may have enabled them to survive, grow and expand even more.
Destroying an enemy's energy infrastructure in wartime isn't "terrorism", it's sound strategy. This particular attack was exceptionally brilliant, in that it achieved key strategic goals while simultaneously maintaining the necessary fiction that the nations were not at war.
As for the question about what would have happened had this occurred in a populated area, well, it didn't, and the planners of this scheme knew where the pipeline was and where the population centers were. Who's to say what they would have decided if the pipeline had gone through a city?
Finally, the comparison to open source isn't really applicable, because the Soviets had to have stolen source code. You think you can integrate a pipeline control system, which controls hundreds or thousands of bits of custom hardware with an opaque binary? That sort of software *has* to be customized and tweaked to integrate, and it has to be in source form. The Soviet software engineers took stolen code of unknown quality and employed it to control a vital and fragile part of the Soviet energy infrastructure without reviewing it for correctness. That's a serious failure of due diligence.
In fact, exactly the same thing could happen with open source software downloaded from some web site. Open source makes due diligence possible, and allows you to hope that someone else has done it, but for stuff that really matters there's no substitute for doing the work yourself. The Soviets were lazy, the Americans were clever, and the Siberian pipeline paid the price.
And this is a good thing??? (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe it took Safire thirty years to figure this one out (the guy doesn't seem to be too bright, despite his reputation), but the Soviets themselves were saying it at the time, as were the Europeans. Of course, they didn't put it as "we need to steel technology in order to keep up", they put it as "the US is forcing this arms race upon us".
"The pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines and valves was programmed to go haywire," writes Reed, "to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to the pipeline joints and welds. The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space."
Apart from the scientists and engineers this could have killed, it may also have condemned many civilians to a miserable existence and even killed them. Depriving civilians of heat and energy really is terrorism, whether it is perpertrated by the US or anybody else.
The Soviet Union was not a nice regime. But the end does not justify the means, and it is far from clear whether the downfall of its government and the resulting chaos is making the world safer. These kinds of dirty campaigns may have blowback a century from now, just like US intervention in the Middle East decades ago is hurting us now.
The last chapter of the history of this is not at all written yet. But one thing we can already be certain of: people like Safire, who gloat about such dirty tricks, are morally bankrupt.
They should have used opensource (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's not terrorism if Americans cause it (Score:2, Insightful)
One day (soon hopefully) the U.S. voting public will pull their heads out of their asses and put someone in the White House who is not from either of those parties.
Re:What helped "us" "win" the Cold War (Score:5, Insightful)
You are lucky that you have never lived in a communist country. I live in a former Soviet "satelite" country which was not so poor but there was poverty during communist times. It may have been not so bad as in third world countries (people generally had something to eat and a place to live) but nevertheless quite a lot of people had miserable lives in Western standards. There were shortage of many basic products, many people lived in crappy homes (small rooms or only one room for the whole family, sometimes no hot water, no toilet, etc.) but the Party bonzos were affluent. There was strong corruption and there were people equal and "more equal". There were some areas that worked OK (I think the education was not that bad) but in general it was bad.
And did I mention freedom?
It may not be great now several years after collapse of the regime and not everything is perfect now (being unemployed is not funny), and there is a lot of room for improvement but most of the people are better now.
Re:No known casualties (Score:3, Insightful)
There *is* a clear definition of terrorism. (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, certain elements of the US media would do well to remember this distinction. If I hear Fox News calling attacks on military installations in Iraq "terrorism", I'll start suspecting them of bias.
Re:Let me get this straight.... (Score:3, Insightful)
No, he's bragging that a friend of his wrote a book. The book is bragging that the Russians blew up a pipeline as a result of a counter espianage coup by the US.
This is supposed to somehow balance the fact that the US intelligence about Iraq was crap.
Why a coup by one part of the US government is supposed to counterbalance an unconnected screw up by another is beyond me.
He would have had a better article (allbeit one which wouldn't suit his propoganda agenda) if he had written up the history of the US intelligence services decades long overestimation of the soviet nuclear/missile threat, and hence made it clear that the evaluation of the Iraqi threat was not an isolated slip up, but SOP.
How many ex-intelligence staff later get jobs with companies who sell uncle sam equipment `needed' to counter these threats...
Re:What helped "us" "win" the Cold War (Score:5, Insightful)
All of that communist-era rhetoric sure sounds out of place in the 21st century.
First, the distinction between the "working class" and the "idle class" is bogus. Today, many workers own shares and many owners and owner/executives work extremely long, hard hours. Most CEOs are workaholics and entrepreneur-owners are worse.
Go to Best Buy and see what is happening with your "worker class". We are consuming goods and services that were simply unavailable and/or unaffordable in the 1960s. We are objectively richer in that we can afford to do and buy everything our predecessors could and more.
Communist rhetoric will fail as long as it is totally out of step with the lives people live every day. For instance, I would listen much more attentatively if you would stop talking about the working class (who are doing pretty damn well historically speaking) and start talking about the chronically undermployed class. But Marx wasn't interested in them so today's communists aren't interested either.
Re:Farewell, CIA, DGSE and other rants... (Score:3, Insightful)
That does not necessarily point to American incompetence.
"because of CIA involvement" means nothing.
1. Yes, he was killed while communicating with US agents
2. Yes, he was killed before DGSE could get him out of the USSR.
That could just as easily point to DSGE incompetence in not getting him out sooner. Or it could have been due to something else entirely. Or it could actually have been due to a screwup in the CIA.
But nothing in your statement would lead one to assume that he was killed due to any particular party screwing up.
Re:Let me get this straight.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Strangely enough, they're not: [ucsm.ac.uk]
Re:It's not terrorism if Americans cause it (Score:3, Insightful)
I do think there are reasons that the war was handy (but probably not justified)
Mostly, this comes from looking at a map.
What countries in the region were not friendly with the US:
Syria: sponsored/sheltered Hezbollah/PLO
Iraq: Saddam
Iran: Anti-US since 1970's
Kuwait and the government of Saudi Arabia were pro US but the Saudi people themselves did not want our bases in their country (but did want protection from Iraq).
After the Afghan war and the Iraq war you have:
American bases out of Suadi Arabia.
The equivalent of American bases in Iraq instead.
American troops in place on both sides of Iran and on the Syrian border.
Evidence for Syria/Pakistan/Sudan that their regimes could be taken out within a week or two if they sponsor directly or indirectly any operations against America.
For those people who say we only go into countries with oil: They are absolutely right. If Iraq had no oil Saddam would have had no money to finance his army or his (former) weapons programs (which did at one time exist but seemed to have stopped in the 90's).
An ideal resolution to all this would be that Iraq forms a nice, democratic open country with international investment and an educated, well cared for population that shines as a glowing example of freedom and enterprise to the other countries in the region that are now dictatorships. Iraq as a Middle Eastern Japan would be the goal.
Is this going to happen? no.
Bush is going to rush the elections in order to be able to say he has things tidied up by the election. A Shiite majority is going to create a religious dictatorship a la Iran and the US is either going to walk away in disgrace or freak out and re-invade.
If that doesn't happen Cheney is going to divy up all the oil between his friends in Haliburton and Bush's cousins in Texas. The Shiite Theocracy, seeing this daylight robbery is going to nationalize the oil industry and Cheney is going to freak out and sponsor a coup that installs a military dictatorship. This will be OK with Cheney , as long as the dictatorship gives him a cut of the oil.
In 10 years time the dictatorship will not have enough money to keep their troops happy since the local economy will be trashed (no business except oil having been invested in). They will try to get bigger kickbacks from Cheney (or his successors). he will refuse. They will begin to sponsor small groups of terrorists to blackmail US with violence in return for aid a la North Korea. Back to business as usual.
If Cheney/Haliburton Bullshit could be cut out and someone else put in charge for 10 or 20 years in Iraq (UN or non-interested 3rd party -- Australia, Poland, Ireland, needs to be stable, non-power hungry, democratic and has a reasonable national debt). This third party occupation would only allow local elections, no national elections for 10 or 15 years. It is too soon.
But this won't happen. It will be a mess.
Still, at the moment things are better off in the region, not just because Saddam is gone, but more so because the lesson of Somalia has been proved false (kill a couple of Americans and put their abused corpses on TV. America will run away with its tail between its legs). Military power is best used as a threat. If the threat is not believed you have to actually go around and kill people. We have a credible threat again. We lost it after Somalia.
Osama said in his tapes about the WTC that he knew America would do nothing because he had seen what was done in Somalia. At least some countries like Syria will think differently now.
Re:awesome (Score:3, Insightful)
Who said anything about a nuclear facility? Hell, even the Slashdot summary specifically says "Non-Nuclear".
Re:Pentium I bug. (Score:4, Insightful)
No, Safire did not make that up, he was fed it by the Whitehouse and was gullible enough to print it rather than say what a crock. The Whitehouse story that the Whitehouse was threatened by a nuke was meant to cover the bad press Bush got for his panicked jetting arround the country aimlessly on airforce one.
There is a connection, the CIA obviously fed Safire this story in response to the pre-announcement over the weekend that there would be an 'investigation' into intelligence failures that led to the invasion of Iraq. The 'investigation' will not of course cover the intelligence that really failed, or rather was non existent - Bush himself.
So this little tidbit has been fed to Safire by the CIA to keep up their end of things. Unfortunately it is pretty difficult to work out what went on because the details are clearly contradictory. A trojan planted in the chips could not possibly lead to the failure of the pipeline, it is too low level. You would have to know about the design of the pipeline software in advance for that to work, and that is clearly impossible since not even the Russians would write software before they had the machine...
I suspect that the story is nothing more than repeated agency gossip. Lots of things used to blow up in the USSR, believe me they needed no help from the West to make shoddy equipment. Nothing in the damn place worked. Whenever something went wrong there would be some idiot hawk making some stupid claim that some scheme was responsible. None of them were very likely.
Deliberately blowing up a civilian pipe-line makes no sense, it would be an act of terrorism that the USSR could and would easily retaliate for. Blowing up a pipeline this way would be very risky, the soviets would certainly hold an enquiry and the chances are that the source would be identified.
Safire mentions the fact he was in the Nixon administration, and yes they did do a lot of bizare things that almost always turned out baddly. They replaced the democratic government of Chile with a thug who murdered at least 40,000 people in the first five years of his dictatorship. Guess what, the US is not trusted or very popular in Chile today. Nixon also got involved in a whole series of proxy wars against the Soviets, but when push came to shove they were very reluctant to actually face off against them directly.
Safire does admit that the Siberian piepline was financed by the UK and Germany. The chances that the US could pull off an action like this against UK interests are pretty slight, if you have ever been to NSA or GCHQ headquarters you will know exactly why.
The idea of Reagan collaborating with the French against Thatcher, just think about it for a moment. And that is before you remember that from 1976 to 1980 Jimmy Carter was in charge and the bulk of this covert operation is hypothesized to have taken place on his watch. Carter spent most of his time dealing with the consequences of CIA schemes that had gone baddly wrong. He lost the 1980 election because the CIA had thought it a great idea to replace the democracy in Iran with a dictator who the people hated and kicked out twenty years later.
The fact is that the CIA has been a collosal failure. It has consistently failed to provide the US with the intelligence it needed and it has meddled incompetently in other countries affairs, almost always causing a backfire. All the intelligence successes of the US have come from satelite and communications intelligence.
So no, Safire is not making this up, he is just repeating stories that anyone with the inside knowledge he claims would know are false. The fact is that speechwriters like Safire was are pretty minor functionaries.
Re:Pentium I bug. (Score:5, Insightful)
The explosion itself was set off by a passing passenger train. Killing 190, injuring 700.
Re:Pentium I bug. (Score:3, Insightful)
OK lets consider the technical issues, the explosion is alleged to have occurred in 1982, the secrets passed 7 years earlier.
Think about it just a bit, when did microprocessors become available in the US? When did computer based control systems become common in the West? (forget the Soviet Union for the moment).
I used the state of the art control systems available in 1985. Control systems using compressed air were still common. Electronic control systems were almost all analogue. Digital control systems were only just becomming common in control rooms.
The oil and gas plants tended to be much more conservative, I would not be suprised if they still use compressed air systems in a lot of applications, they may not be as accurate but they don't create sparks.
So just how credible is it that in 1982, three years earlier, that the Soviets who were at least 5 years behind technologically would throw themselves into using a technology that was bleeding edge in the West at the time? It just does not make any sense.
It is of course well established that the Soviets did build their own VAX and PDP 11 clones. These were still high value items though. We had only a single VAX 11/780 to run an entire chemical plant, one processor ran the plant and the other was hot-swap for when the other was on maintenance (don't ask I am sure they had only one PSU). Thats not a whole lot more processing power than an IBM PC.
Sure you could probably have done really bad things if you had got into the control system and sabotaged it on the ground. But the idea of planting a trojan in a chip just makes no sense. Its like claiming that you could stick a trojan in a memory chip or a resistor. Sure you can bring the system down, but not in a predictable way.
Finally, the CIA would have no way of knowing that their goosed up control system would not have found its way into a nuclear plant. The idea that they would have done this just makes no sense at all.
Re:Pentium I bug. (Score:4, Insightful)
The article makes no sense, it talks about software and chips interchangeably as if they are the same thing. I was simply putting the most credible interpretation on the garbled account Safire gives. It is crystal clear he has no idea what he is talking about, I suspect that neither has his source.
It is now well established that the Soviets had a mole at Intel who stole tapes containing chip 'masters' at that time. So it is credible that 'software' could mean chips as Safire refers to them.
OK lets try your version: Steal the 'software' for a pipeline? Exactly where would you get that in 1982? You can't get that type of thing off the shelf even today, the best you do is to get a package that you customize.
Back in 1982 you practically had to write your own device drivers, I had to rewrite several of the ones I used. The type of generic software that controls systens at a high level simply did not exist as a package in those days, it was exclusively written as bespoke. Second, software to control pipelines would not have been export controlled, the Soviets would not go to the expense of stealing what they could buy outright quite easily.
BP and the British govt were investors in the pipeline. BP run quite a lot of pipelines, they would almost certainly use something based on their own in-house code. The idea that BP would instead use something that the KGB stole off the US is somewhat wierd.
Re:Pentium I bug. (Score:5, Insightful)
Further, there are plenty of technical details that are "glossed over", but this is hardly suprising given that the writer is not technical. For the rest, you're making TONS of assumptions for which you simply don't have the information.
These chips didn't have to be CPUs, they could have merely been ROM chips. Remember your old design classes (yeah, it's been a while for me as well, but...)? In that manner you want it to function and give correct results nearly %100 of the time (to pass testing), but give wildly WRONG answers when a certian condition is hit. Not hard to do. With that in mind, they didn't need cutting edge technology like their VAX clone.
Therefore, the situation being described is VERY possible and even probable.
Sure you can bring the system down, but not in a predictable way.
EXACTLY my point! If anything, the author described a process which he thought was much more elegant and sophicticated than it really was. Chances are, this Gus Weiss fellow was as suprised as anyone else at the magnitude of the blast.
Finally, the CIA would have no way of knowing that their goosed up control system would not have found its way into a nuclear plant.
The article said we knew they were buying tech for this project from a certian Canadian company. From that it would appear we had pretty good info regarding where this was going.
Re:wow (Score:3, Insightful)
If that were true, the USSR would be 'destroyed' right now, because they haven't been able to defend themeselves for about 14 years now. What does the fact that the US has shipped aid to the USSR say about your little theory? (Here's a clue - if you are out to 'destroy' someone, you usually don't help them up)
Let's face it. The Cold War worked. The nuclear arms race worked. Instead of taking on the USSR face-on, the US decided to simply keep them in thier place and let corruption and cascading beaurocracy rot the system away from the inside. In retrespect, quite brilliant, and it worked quite well.
This paragraph says it all (Score:2, Insightful)
This dubious article is just a puff-piece for a book about to come out...!
Re:Chile corrections (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not surprised that you pump out this type of appology for fascism as AC. No, Pinochet did not 'execute', he had people murdered. There were 4,000 murdered during the coup alone. The figure of 40,000 is well established.
But lets imagine for a moment that he 'only' murdered 4,000. Was the Nixon administration justified in putting a murderer into power?
There is of course no evidence whatsoever for the claim that Allende was not elected by the people or that he planned any form of coup. Of course there are a lot of people who will make these claims to try to justify the coup, but they have no more substance than allegations that Saddam had WMD "that are ready for use within 45 minutes" as Tony Blair claimed.
Similar is true of the fascist Mossadegh. The Shah held off the advent of the much worse Khomeini reign of terror.
Mossadegh was no fascist, he was a nationalist whose 'crime' in the eyes of Eisenhower and Churchill was to insist that BP pay a fair price for the oil they took. Operation Ajax was justified to Eisenhower by claims made by the Dulles brothers that the USSR was plotting an invasion through the North. The fact that Stalin died before operation Ajax was not allowed to affect this analysis.
Justifying operation Ajax by what followed is ridiculous. The mullahs could not have taken over if Mossadegh had not been replaced by the Shah. The mullahs are the result of operation Ajax, not a justification for it. Next you will be claiming that the Versailles treaty should have imposed harsher conditions on Germany to prevent the rise of Hitler.
This happened only rarely. The CIA overall has been quite successful.
There actions have backfired far more frequently than they have succeeded. Noriega and Saddam were both CIA proteges, Pinochet, the Shah of Iran were installed in CIA led coups. Meddling in Guatelmala, Honduras, Nicaragua led to civil wars. And those are just the cases where the CIA were the principal actors.
The record of the CIA is by any objective standard a failure. The problem with the macho posturing they engage in is that you have to have brains and a strategy for realpolitique. The CIA strategy has been to prefer a strong man they feel they can control no matter how repressive and corrupt. This strategy fails because the strongmen who can be controlled can rarely control their own populations who depose them and the strongmen who can control their populations tend to refuse to be controlled themselves. Iraq and Iran show both modes of falure of the CIA strategy.
Re:Pentium I bug. (Score:2, Insightful)
It is pathetic what passes for news in this country with Fox and MSNBC in a race to the bottom. Thank god for the the NYtimes.
Re:NYT is not a great paper (Score:2, Insightful)
(he wasn't)
It is clear that all you know about the NY times comes from Fox.
It does takes a certian amount of intelligence to read the times.
Re:No known casualties (Score:2, Insightful)
Also of note, was that this proposed construction was occurring around the same time as the Solidarity movement in Poland was gaining momentum. Increased Soviet influence over Europe could have hamstrung the Solidarity movement which lead to the eventual loosening of Soviet grip over Poland, and its subsequent freedom from status as a mere puppet state of the USSR. Further, the Soviets had recently invaded Afghanistan, an act which shocked most of the world, and which we strongly opposed. As you may well know, Afghanistan is a key pipeline route, and control of that in addition to the construction of a pipeline to Europe would give the USSR a geostrategic edge over the whole Eurasian landmass.
Galbraith was commissioned by Secretary of State Alexander Haig to examine possible alternative sources of oil, in view of this Soviet threat of predatory pricing (think Microsoft). Galbraith outlined possibilities in the North Sea and Dutch reserves in a cable that was subsequently leaked to the press and widely reported.
An embargo of parts necessary to build the pipeline was in existence for a while, but Reagan and Shultz (Sec. of State that succeeded Haig) dropped it under some pressure from the Europeans, whose companies wanted to sell the parts they had licensed from GE to the Soviets (typical). So the pipeline was delayed but eventually built. The delay caused Soviet costs to rise, while at the same time the demand for oil in Western Europe fell, putting the Soviets in a much less predatory position, as their revenues couldn't catch up with their costs. Additionally, the development of the North Sea and Dutch reserves helped lower the costs of British, French and American oil companies.
Read some history before you make sarcastic comments. The CIA came up with a very inventive technical solution that avoided direct economic or political conflict. It even avoided loss of life, something economic embargoes and sanctions are not very good at. The Europeans were on America's side on this one, even the French, despite their reservations about Reagan's embargo. This is not easily pigeonholed into some sort of Marxism 101 dependency-theory analysis if you've actually read what was going on in the world during that time.
This is troubling (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:No known casualties (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Pentium I bug. (Score:3, Insightful)
Why?
Because something like 10% of the Fort Meade staff and 30% of the GCHQ staff are British and US foreign nationals respectively. As a Brit I can get a gold ID card at Fort Meade which allows me to work basically anywhere on the site. No other foreign national can. Same in reverse at GCHQ.
The only exception is the Whitehouse, which I know about since as is well documented on slashdot I did some security work there but had to sit in a coffee shop across the road from the Executive Office Building. When Nixon was getting paranoid about everyone he started to believe that the British were spying on him. So he called in the NSA to have the oval office sweeped for bugs, he did not say why. As it happened the guy who was on duty that day was a Brit. So when he arrived Nixon went ape-shit and signed an executive order that requires all security personel working at the Whitehouse and Executive Office Building to be US citizens.
The idea that the CIA could do this type of thing and not have the Brits notice is simply not credible. In any case the US was bidding for the Siberian pipeline under Nixon, they only objected to the UK involvement after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.
During the Nixon-Ford-Carter period the official policy was detente. The idea that the CIA was off blowing up Siberian oil pipelines causing huge civilian casualties is stupid enough. The idea that a program this big could happen without someone telling either Carter or Wilson (the UK PM) is pretty rich.
In case you don't get the message here, I am not trying to claim that the CIA are not apt to act stupidly, they have done so many times. But they never did anything that was comparable to this, not intentionaly. Not even Gladio went this wrong.
Re:so... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Pentium I bug. (Score:3, Insightful)
I was doing control engineering in the mid 1980s. Electronic control was just appearing. Microprocessors had only just appeared and 8 bit was state of the art in 1982.
There were electronic controllers but they were pretty clunky. They were analogue systems that used a series of op-amps to create a three term controller. there was an advantage to using those over a compressed air version but not much. You would still use compressed air to drive the valves - you still do in many cases.
As for the confused discussion of ROMs and such. These are analogue control systems. I am aware that you can use a ROM in the fashion described in a digital control system, it makes no sense for an analogue system.
The fact still remains that there was simply no component available in those days that was complex enough for it to be practical to hide a trojan in. Furthermore as others have pointed out quality control was so sloppy that everyone had to retest chips on arrival anyway. 10% of the chips you received would just be dead. No way could anyone build anything and have it work without testing.
Three term controllers are used as black box items, you test them in isolation. No way is anyone going to be able to predict how to sabotage a plant from the US. You would have no way of knowing which controller was going to go where.
They did examine every transistor (Score:2, Insightful)
Several people mentioned it already and they are right. None of the hardware/software stolen in the 70-ies was used 'as is'. Hardware was reverse-engineered to the last bit, including peeling off the layers of the microchips to reveal the logic. The logic was validated and reproduced in the clones. Any abnormal piece of logic would inevitably surface. The software was butchered too, including replacement of all literal strings and production of 'design' documents that complied with USSR's own industry conventions/standards (which means all branching logic had to be analyzed).
Yes, the sheer amount of effort required for this has perhaps exceeded that of doing an independent design. But that was of secondary concern for the power elite - doing an 'own thing' requires taking responsibility for the results, which in the USSR's tradition might have meant rather unpleasant consequences. Enough to discourage true innovation on the top and supress it on the bottom.
All that said, I find this story too hard to believe. I knew several people directly involved in oil/gas industry in the 90-ies and they had only started introducing real computerized control systems into the pipelines (using western harware/software, LOL). To blow up in '82, a project of that magnitude would have to be started around '75 (Soviet economy had 5-year planning cycle). Control systems introduced in that period relied largely on analog designs and computers of pre-cloning-era vintage (cloning really took off in mid 70-ies). They were built using plain transistors (no chips), ferrite-solenoid memory, magnetic drums and tapes, punchcards/punchtapes. The one I worked with had 45 bits in a word. It was still on active duty in '93. And that was space field, not just some pipeline...
Re:Proud of USSR? (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes, we did invade Finland (to protect St. Petersburg from Nazi ally, and we paid for it with many lives).
Finland wasn't Germany's ally 1939 (Winter War). Finland was neutral then. Winter War was a tragic mistake - it drove a lukewarm neutral country into Nazi camp, making a possible ignorer into a certain enemy. In hindsight, Stalin should have bought all cellulose and other strategic materials from Finnish suppliers - Finnish industry recovering from depression would have been more than happy to run the factories with cogwheels glowing, and this trade sure would have secured Finland far better than any military intervention.
Inanite oblige.
I'm somewhat sad on what is happening east of our borders. In the Finnish eyes, USSR was no evil empire - no more evil than any other empires, including US. Certainly far less evil, than, say Mongols or Aztecs. Personally I saw little difference between USA and USSR anyway. In one empire you were screwed by the government, in another by the capitalist. What's the difference?
Russians were good trade partners, provided generous markets and paid well. Now all this is gone. The purchase force of Russia is almost nil, unemployment in Finland has stayed in double figures for fifteen years now, we have bread lines and war-crazy nationalists are driving this small, traditionally neutral, country to NATO which is a war alliance. Now today the only organized thing in Russia is crime. Almost all Finnish investments have gone to Baltic countries as they have managed to organize their system better and avoid the total collapse.
If US won the Cold War, it sure was a Pyrrhic victory. Of course Communists lied about Communism, but they told the truth about Capitalism. Then again, Finnish economy is protected from the outsourcing to India and proletarization of the middle class by odd language and strict employment laws. In the long run the winners are not the laissez faire market economies, but the countries which can keep the production and work force (and purchase power) in their own countries and prevent it slipping abroad - countries which can find the most productive balance between costs and benefits.
What is now going on in US is brazilification: the middle class disappears and impoverishes as their jobs slip to cheap countries, the rich get filthy rich and the poor become Lumpenproletariat. In the end there will be collapse: the corporations will collapse and go bankrupt as well as middle class jobs have been outsourced, the publich has gone broke and the public no more have purchase power. Nobody will buy their products anymore. This will lead either into Fascism or Neo-Barbarism.
I must say I miss the 1980s and the balance between USA and USSR. Healthy competition kept world in balance. Sure Stalin (kaputt 1953) was a paranoid lunatic, but how about Warren Harding in comparison? Again, I'm far better off than in the eighties, but not everyone in my country is, and I miss the stressless, peaceful life back then.