Author: Rainbow Kursk
On June 5, 1986, an NSA employee named Ronald Peilton was sentenced to life in prison by a court on charges of espionage and treason.
Before that, the NSA agent, who was unable to pay off his debts, finally thought of his old rival, the Soviets, and offered to make overtures to him, saying that he would betray the top-secret "Ivy Bells" program on the condition that the Soviets help pay back the arrears. Soon after, the Soviet spy got an important piece of information from the American agent, and it turned out that the Soviet submarine cable had been eavesdropped by the American submarine for a decade!
According to this intelligence, in 1981, the Soviet Navy's Pacific Fleet rushed out to sweep away the listening equipment set up by the United States next to submarine cables! To this end, Agent Ronald Perton received a $35,000 award from the Soviets and existed as a "dark pile" in the Us National Security Agency.
Image: Divers looking for submarine cables.
During the Cold War, the Soviet Navy's Pacific Fleet's nuclear submarine base was located on the Kamchatka Peninsula, while the Pacific Fleet Command was located in Vladivostok, across the sea.
To facilitate communication, the Soviets laid an undersea cable in the Sea of Okhotsk between the two places. Because this was regarded as a strategic place by the Soviets, in addition to frequent military exercises, surface radar and underwater sonar were densely packed here, which can be said to be a treasure under the eyes of the Soviets.
Therefore, when the Soviets used submarine cables to communicate, they did not encrypt the signals and did not take other communication protection measures.
Image: The submarine cable between Vladivostok and Kamchatka, with a red circle where americans eavesdrop.
The U.S. Navy has long been very interested in this area, and if it can successfully eavesdrop on Soviet communications, it can know the deployment and movement of nuclear submarine bases in the former Soviet Union and effortlessly obtain confidential information of the Soviets.
So in the 1970s, the United States carefully planned a very risky and very bold underwater eavesdropping operation, the "Ivy Bells".
The first thing to do is positioning!
The Soviets' communications cables were only 12.7 centimeters in diameter, while the surrounding waters covered an area of 1.58 million square kilometers. In October 1971, the U.S. nuclear submarine Halibut quietly sneaked into the northern Sea of Okhotsk, turning on searchlights and underwater cameras, carefully searching the location of cables.
Unexpectedly, in order to prevent fishing boats from causing damage to the submarine cable, the Soviets deliberately inserted a "no approach" mark on the seabed, which is tantamount to making a joke of "there is no silver here for three hundred and two". After a week of searching, the U.S. military found the cable on the seabed at a depth of 120 meters.
Photo: The U.S. nuclear submarine Halibut, which is monitoring submarines over submarine cables, was initially a cruise missile nuclear submarine.
Here we would like to talk about the nuclear submarine Halibut (SSGN-587).
The submarine was originally a cruise missile nuclear submarine capable of launching early large strategic cruise missiles in surface conditions. But by the 1970s, these cruise missiles were outdated, and cruise missile submarines were no longer necessary.
In April 1968, a Soviet Golf-class conventionally powered ballistic missile submarine, the K-129, sank, leaving the Soviets clueless due to the submarine's mispositioning. The Americans, on the other hand, relied on a global network of hydroacoustic surveillance to accurately locate the Soviet submarine with a nuclear warhead. So began to carry out the salvage operation code-named "Sand Dollar".
During this period, the nuclear submarine "Halibut" was modified, the spacious missile depot was changed into a diving operation depot, and equipment such as mechanical arms was added to become a submarine special operation nuclear submarine. Later, halibut actually found and salvaged part of the wreckage of the Soviet K-129 submarine.
Photo: Halibut, converted into a submarine for submarine operations.
Back to the bottom of the Sea of Okhotsk!
Divers from the halibut nuclear submarine installed eavesdropping equipment on the Cable Lines of the Soviets.
But then the U.S. military found that a dozen communication lines shared the submarine cable, and the eavesdropping message was mixed with Russian words with various accents, and the eavesdroppers could not extract useful information from it.
To this end, the US military specially commissioned the American Telegraph and Telephone Company to develop a new monitoring equipment. This bugger is made of stainless steel, just set on the outside of the cable, built-in instruments to receive, strengthen, decode the signal, in addition to the plutonium battery power, when there is a signal in the cable, the device will automatically turn on, eavesdropping on the spill signal inside the cable.
The content of intelligence information is recorded by tape, which can record 150 hours of content, and after the tape is used up, it is replaced by THE US military diver, and the tape can obtain confidential intelligence after the analysis of US intelligence experts.
Image: Schematic of u.S. divers placing a listening device.
Since then, U.S. nuclear submarines have to sneak into the Soviet-controlled Sea of Okhotsk every year to maintain or upgrade bugging devices, and the entire eavesdropping operation lasted for 10 years without being discovered.
In fact, the American nuclear submarines were already operating on the outskirts of the main base of the Soviet Pacific Fleet and the nuclear submarine base on the Kamchatka Peninsula, which showed boldness and arrogance, and also showed that the Soviet Union's so-called strict offshore anti-submarine system at that time was actually full of loopholes.
Photo: U.S. intelligence experts analyzing communications from audio tapes.
In fact, the story should end here! But it's not!
In the early 1980s, Ronald Peilton, who had defected to the Soviet Union to pay off his debts, became the most critical "mole" in the Soviet Intelligence System in the United States! The Soviets also attached great importance to him, always protecting his security and asking him to provide as much American intelligence as possible.
The Americans have nothing to gain from this, too! It can be seen that the fierce intelligence war in the process of us-Soviet hegemony at that time was really you have me and I have you!
This changed until the morning of August 1, 1985!
It was an ordinary morning, at the Soviet Embassy in Rome, Italy, when Vitaly Yurchenko, deputy director of the Soviet KGB's first department, greeted his colleagues and went out, saying he was going to take a walk around the Vatican Museums. The KGB agent in charge of U.S. and Canadian affairs arrived in Rome a week ago. As a result, in the evening, the Soviets found that the new Yurchenko was missing, and the embassy staff was afraid that there was a car accident or other accident, and reported it to the Italian police.
But soon, they finally learned the truth – Yurchenko, who had worked for the KGB for 25 years and was deeply appreciated and trusted by his superiors, defected!
Photo: KGB headquarters during the Soviet era.
From Yurchenko's mouth, the CIA learns of two important lurking spies, one is former NSA agent Ronald Perton, and the other is a secret person code-named "Robert".
Ronald Palton was soon arrested and sentenced to life in prison on June 5, 1986, on charges of espionage and treason, ending the story of the "Ivy Bells." And Yurchenko confessed another spy code-named "Robert" was actually CIA agent Edward Lee Howard, who also betrayed a large number of American spies in the Soviet Union to the KGB behind his back, and when he learned that Yurchenko would give the code name "Robert", he knew that he could not hide, so he took the opportunity to escape to the Soviet Union! The U.S. intelligence community caused a far great earthquake far superior to that of Ronald Peilton.
On July 12, 2002, Edward Lee Howard died with a secret in a villa outside Moscow. His friend said he fell off the stairs of his villa, broke his neck, and died suddenly, and the CIA responded to concerns with the same famous words as ever— "We neither admit nor deny!"
The death of Edward Lee Howard put the final end to the thrilling spy stories of the Cold War!
Image: CIA quote: "We neither acknowledge nor deny"!