The Blob

Friday, February 27, 2004

The Farewell Dossier

The full story of espionage by the U.S. and the former Soviet Union is only beginning to come to light. But in recent weeks, a remarkable story has surfaced about an audacious plan by the C.I.A. to stem the tide of technology plunder of U.S. secrets by the former KGB: The Farewell Dossier. It makes for riveting reading.

It is a story of a C.I.A. campaign of computer sabotage resulting in a huge explosion in Siberia - all engineered by a mild-mannered economist named Gus Weiss - helped us win the cold war. During a summit conference in Ottawa on July 19, 1981, President François Mitterrand of France took then President Ronald Reagan aside to reveal that France had recruited a key K.G.B. officer in Moscow Center.

Col. Vladimir Vetrov provided what French intelligence called The Farewell Dossier. It contained documents from the K.G.B. Technology Directorate showing how the Soviets were systematically stealing - or secretly buying through third parties - the radar, machine tools and semiconductors to keep the Russians nearly competitive with U.S. military-industrial strength through the 70's. In effect, the U.S. was in an arms race with itself.

Reagan passed this on to William J. Casey, his director of central intelligence, now remembered only for the Iran-contra fiasco. Casey called in Weiss, then working with Thomas C. Reed on the staff of the National Security Council. After studying the list of hundreds of Soviet agents and purchasers (including one cosmonaut) assigned to this penetration in the U.S. and Japan, Weiss counseled against deportation.

Instead, according to Reed, a former Air Force secretary whose fascinating cold war book, At the Abyss, will be published by Random House next month, Weiss said: "Why not help the Soviets with their shopping? Now that we know what they want, we can help them get it." The catch: computer chips would be designed to pass Soviet quality tests and then to fail in operation.

In our complex disinformation scheme, deliberately flawed designs for stealth technology and space defense sent Russian scientists down paths that wasted time and money.

The technology topping the Soviets' wish list was for computer control systems to automate the operation of the new trans-Siberian gas pipeline. When we turned down their overt purchase order, the K.G.B. sent a covert agent into a Canadian company to steal the software; tipped off by Farewell, we added what geeks call a "Trojan Horse" to the pirated product.

"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."

The result of this was that the Soviets could no longer trust any of the technologies stolen from the west. They eventually fell further and further behind. There are many reasons why the former Soviet Union collapsed. But this was certainly one that is certainly astounding. The loss of natural gas resulting from the C.I.A. opedeprivedprieved the Soviets of badly needed hard currency at a critical time. It is a story of cunning by someone who was anything but the classic James Bond.

Reed, who served in the National Security Council from January 1982 to June 1983, said the United States and its NATO allies later "rolled up the entire Line X collection network, both in the U.S. and overseas." Weiss said "the heart of Soviet technology collection crumbled and would not recover."

However, Vetrov's espionage was discovered by the KGB, and he was executed in 1983.

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