In October 1982, U.S. infrared satellites detected "a
bizarre event out in the middle of Soviet nowhere", explains Thomas C. Reed in At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the
Cold War. A graduate of Cornell (B.S., Mechanical Engineering) and the
University of Southern California (M.S., Electrical Engineering), Thomas Reed was a
defense advisor to the Reagan White House and a former Secretary of the Air
Force under Presidents Ford and Carter. He was also a veteran of Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratories, where his work included thermonuclear weapons
physics.
A Fire Seen from Space
The "bizarre event" that American satellites observed was
also "the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space,"
Reed explains. This explosion, reported to be one-seventh the
magnitude of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan during World War II, vaporized
part of the Soviet Union's Trans-Siberian Pipeline, a newly-built conduit for
shipping natural gas to western Ukraine. From there, the gas that was supposed
to earn the U.S.S.R. $8-billion a year could be transported to the Eastern
Bloc, as well as to Central and Western Europe.
An Unreported Accident
Spanning 2,800 miles and equipped with 42 compressor
stations, the Trans-Siberian Pipeline was vulnerable – with or without
components from U.S. companies, the sale of which were embargoed from 1980 to
1984. According to a Time magazine
article from January 1984, the pipeline's first accident occurred on December
15 of the previous year, when a small fire at a compressor station destroyed some
electronic monitoring devices and control panels. But that fire was not the
first – nor was the first fire that small.
Agent Farewell
The massive blast of October 1982 remained largely
unreported until recently, when the National Security Archive told the tale of
Vladimir Vetrov, a KGB Colonel charged with stealing the secrets of Western
technology. In 1981, Vetrov passed 4,000 pages of highly-classified documents
about the Soviet Union's industrial espionage campaign to a French spy. French
intelligence then shared this information with the CIA, which learned that the
Soviets had infiltrated American laboratories, factories, and government
agencies.
Vetrov, whom the CIA code-named "Farewell", thus sparked one
of the most successful (at least that we know about) counter-intelligence
efforts in U.S. Cold War history. As National Security Archive blogger Bernie
Horowitz explains, the CIA began "doctoring" items on the Soviets'
technological "wish list" with flaws that "rendered them ultimately useless or
even hazardous". As Thomas C. Reed notes in At the Abyss, the Soviets were especially interested in "sophisticated
control systems" to automate the valves, compressors, and other components in
the Trans-Siberian Pipeline.
When the U.S. refused to sell software to the Soviets, a KGB
operative tried to steal some code from a Canadian company. Vladimir Vetrov notified
his handlers about this effort, and Western intelligence agents
modified the software before its receipt in the Soviet Union. As Thomas C. Reed
explains, "the pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines, and
valves was programmed to go haywire, after a decent interval, to reset pump
speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to
the pipeline joints and welds."
The rest, as they
say, is history.
Resources:
http://nsarchive.wordpress.com/2010/10/18/agent-farewell-and-the-siberian-pipeline-explosion/#_edn2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_C._Reed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urengoy%E2%80%93Pomary%E2%80%93Uzhgorod_pipeline
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,949950-1,00.html
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Re: Farewell: The Siberian Pipeline Explosion
