Reagan Approved Plan to Sabotage Soviets

The New York Times ^ | February 27, 2004 | David E. Hoffman reviews "At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War"

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Thomas C. Reed, a former Air Force secretary who was serving in the National Security Council at the time, describes the episode in "At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War," to be published next month by Ballantine Books.

............."In order to disrupt the Soviet gas supply, its hard currency earnings from the West, and the internal Russian economy, 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 pipeline joints and welds," Reed writes.

"The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space," he recalls, adding that U.S. satellites picked up the explosion. Reed said in an interview that the blast occurred in the summer of 1982.

"While there were no physical casualties from the pipeline explosion, there was significant damage to the Soviet economy," he writes. "Its ultimate bankruptcy, not a bloody battle or nuclear exchange, is what brought the Cold War to an end. In time the Soviets came to understand that they had been stealing bogus technology, but now what were they to do? By implication, every cell of the Soviet leviathan might be infected. They had no way of knowing which equipment was sound, which was bogus. All was suspect, which was the intended endgame for the entire operation."

Reed said he obtained CIA approval to publish details about the operation. The CIA learned of the full extent of the KGB's pursuit of Western technology in an intelligence operation known as the Farewell Dossier. Portions of the operation have been disclosed earlier, including in a 1996 paper in Studies in Intelligence, a CIA journal. The paper was written by Gus W. Weiss, an expert on technology and intelligence who was instrumental in devising the plan to send the flawed materials and served with Reed on the National Security Council. Weiss died Nov. 25 at 72........

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Paul Schweizer's books Victory (1994) and Reagan's War (2002) are very good on this subject.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

CORRECTION: This is a Washington Post story.

[Qwinn]

Democrats are outraged.

Qwinn

[Bonaparte]

Gotta love the Gipper. :-)

[Cincinatus' Wife]

[Boston Globe] US let Soviets obtain faulty technology, book says

WASHINGTON -- In January 1982, President Ronald Reagan approved a CIA plan to sabotage the economy of the Soviet Union through covert transfers of technology that contained hidden malfunctions, including software that later triggered a huge explosion in a Siberian natural gas pipeline, according to a new memoir by a Reagan White House official.

Thomas C. Reed, a former Air Force secretary who was serving in the National Security Council at the time, describes the episode in "At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War," to be published next month by Ballantine Books. Reed writes that the pipeline explosion was just one example of "cold-eyed economic warfare" against the Soviet Union that the CIA carried out under Director William J. Casey during the final years of the Cold War.

At the time, the United States was attempting to block Western Europe from importing Soviet natural gas. There were also signs that the Soviets were trying to steal a wide variety of Western technology. Then, a KGB insider revealed the specific shopping list and the CIA slipped the flawed software to the Soviets in a way they would not detect it.

"In order to disrupt the Soviet gas supply, its hard currency earnings from the West, and the internal Russian economy, 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 pipeline joints and welds," Reed writes.

"The result was the most monumental nonnuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space," he recalls, adding that US satellites picked up the explosion. Reed said in an interview that the blast occurred in the summer of 1982.

"While there were no physical casualties from the pipeline explosion, there was significant damage to the Soviet economy," he writes. "Its ultimate bankruptcy, not a bloody battle or nuclear exchange, is what brought the Cold War to an end. In time the Soviets came to understand that they had been stealing bogus technology, but now what were they to do? By implication, every cell of the Soviet leviathan might be infected. They had no way of knowing which equipment was sound, which was bogus. All was suspect, which was the intended endgame for the entire operation."

Reed said he obtained CIA approval to publish details about the operation. The CIA learned of the full extent of the KGB's pursuit of Western technology in an intelligence operation known as the Farewell Dossier. Portions of the operation have been disclosed earlier, including in a 1996 paper in Studies in Intelligence, a CIA journal. The paper was written by Gus W. Weiss, an specialist on technology and intelligence who was instrumental in devising the plan to send the flawed materials and served with Reed on the National Security Council. Weiss died Nov. 25 at the age of 72.

The sabotage of the gas pipeline has not been previously disclosed, and at the time was a closely guarded secret. When the pipeline exploded, Reed writes, the first reports caused concern in the US military and at the White House. "NORAD feared a missile liftoff from a place where no rockets were known to be based," he said, referring to North American Air Defense Command. "Or perhaps it was the detonation of a small nuclear device." However, satellites did not pick up any telltale signs of a nuclear explosion.

"Before these conflicting indicators could turn into an international crisis," he added, "Gus Weiss came down the hall to tell his fellow NSC staffers not to worry."

The role that Reagan and the United States played in the collapse of the Soviet Union is still a matter of intense debate.

Some contend that US policy was the key factor -- Reagan's military buildup; the Strategic Defense Initiative, Reagan's proposed missile defense system; confronting the Soviets in regional conflicts; and rapid advances in US high technology. But others say that internal Soviet factors were more important, including economic decline and President Mikhail Gorbachev's revolutionary policies of glasnost and perestroika.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2004/02/27/us_let_soviets_obtain_faulty_technology_book_says/

[Cincinatus' Wife]

[Texasforever]

Tom Dasheal is troubled.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Democrats are outraged.

And still pushing the LIBERAL line:

..... But others say that internal Soviet factors were more important, including economic decline and President Mikhail Gorbachev's revolutionary policies of glasnost and perestroika.....

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Tom Dasheal is troubled.

He most certainly is.

[Texasforever]

Kerry demands investigation into what GW knew and when he knew it.

[sonofatpatcher2]

Way to go, Ronnie! God Bless You!

[Democrap]

The bombing starts in 5 minutes.

[longtermmemmory]

Where is the graphic of kerry saying communism is an overrated threat.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Where is the graphic of kerry saying communism is an overrated threat.

Right now he's milking the Passion, but he'll get to it.

...."I don't know," he said when asked if he would see the Mel Gibson film about the last days of Jesus' life and its particularly harrowing focus on his crucifixion. Kerry, a Catholic, said he was worried about the movie's potential anti-Semitism. Some critics have complained that Gibson portrays Jews as responsible for Jesus' death. "I am concerned," he told reporters. "I don't know if it's there or not but there's a lot of it around now. I think we have to be careful." ..... Source

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Kerry demands investigation into what GW knew and when he knew it.

Yes, well he can demand until the cows come home because a true Commander in Chief conducts wars to protect the country and sometimes that requires secrecy.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Bump!

[AmericaUnited]

A man among men. One Freeper's name has always said it best for me... "Longs for Reagan"

[Cincinatus' Wife]

The LIBERALS hated Reagan as much as they do Bush.

[Fledermaus]

I once was asked why Reagan was allowing more technology sold to the Soviet Union. I said, "we probably tainted the software"!

I knew I was right.

Just like how John Ashcroft now taints the evidence we get on certain terrorist...to watch them, follow them, listen in on them...to they day they die if necessary.

Too bad liberals like Kerry have tried to suppress our ability to do these nasty things for decades.

[fuzlim]

The biggest thing Reagan did for destroying the Soviet Union was the US support for Islamic fundamentalist groups in Afghanistan.

It was these groups, with US aid coming through Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, that cost the Soviets their empire.

Unfortunately, when it was over the groups decided there was no sense going out of business. They have since spread to almost every corner of the globe, with amazing results.

The heroin sales they used for funding back then are still going strong today. Well, except for a brief period when the Taliban managed to clamp down on the trade.

In fact, since the US war in Afghanistan the heroin is back in full swing, with most of it being funneled through Kosovo, the playground of the KLA.

For the unfamiliar, the KLA was the group that played a major role in the break up of Yugoslavia. The 78 day NATO bombing campaign against the Serbs helped them immeasurably, although probably coincidentally.

In any case, now they are able to carry on business as usual, with nary a peep from the administration. I guess ends are everything and means are, well, just, means.

[Fledermaus]

That's too simplistic of a view for me to agree.

While it was a response and consequence in fighting the Soviet Union, Afghanistan was just another decision based on the best available options. Like Iraq vs. Iran (we never sold Iraq chemicals, that's a lie and fabrication by the media). Or we used Noreiga or the Shah of Iran.

It's a messy world. Soviet communism was the biggest threat at the time. Do I wish our bureaucrats and elected officials of both parties had looked farther ahead? Sure.

I wish a lot of common sense things they are uncapable of accomplishing. Doesn't mean I'm ready for anarchy just yet. Maybe in a year or two.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Too bad liberals like Kerry have tried to suppress our ability to do these nasty things for decades.

They don't want the U.S. to be a superpower. It drains resources for necessary constituent buying and it interferes with international deal making diplomacy. They need a weak U.S. so they can try communism again - this time on a world-wide scale where the elites can rule the masses.

"Hillary Clinton and the Radical Left" Hillary Clinton and the Third Way***......For these self-appointed social redeemers, the goal-"social justice"-is not about rectifying particular injustices, which would be practical and modest, and therefore conservative. Their crusade is about rectifying injustice in the very order of things. "Social Justice" for them is about a world reborn, a world in which prejudice and violence are absent, in which everyone is equal and equally advantaged and without fundamentally conflicting desires. It is a world that could only come into being through a re-structuring of human nature and of society itself.

Even though they are too prudent and self-protective to name this future anymore, the post-Communist left still passionately believes it possible. But it is a world that has never existed and never will. Moreover, as the gulags and graveyards of the last century attest, to attempt the impossible is to invite the catastrophic in the world we know.

But the fall of Communism taught the progressives who were its supporters very little. Above all, it failed to teach them the connection between their utopian ideals and the destructive consequences that flowed from them. The fall of Communism has had a cautionary impact only on the overt agendas of the political left. The arrogance that drives them has hardly diminished. The left is like a millenarian sect that erroneously predicted the end of the world, and now must regroup to revitalize its faith.

No matter how opportunistically the left's agendas have been modified, however, no matter how circumspectly its goals have been set, no matter how generous its concessions to political reality, the faithful have not given up their self-justifying belief that they can bring about a social redemption. In other words, a world in which human consciousness is changed, human relations refashioned, social institutions transformed, and in which "social justice" prevails.

Because the transformation progressives seek is ultimately total, the power they seek must be total as well. In the end, the redemption they envision cannot be achieved as a political compromise, even though compromises may be struck along the way. Their brave new world can ultimately be secured only by the complete surrender of the resisting force. In short, the transformation of the world requires the permanent entrenchment of the saints in power. Therefore, everything is justified that serves to achieve the continuance of Them......***

[Fledermaus]

Oh my! I'm fanning myself now!

Better than a lap dance! I've got ones and fives ready!! lol

Excellent!

[WaterDragon]

Good for Reagan!

[Cincinatus' Wife]

LOL

[Cincinatus' Wife]

"The house we hope to build is not for my generation but for yours. It is your future that matters. And I hope that when you are my age, you will be able to say as I have been able to say: We lived in freedom. We lived lives that were a statement, not an apology." · Ronald Reagan

Reagan and the Soviets

"You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children - this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children's children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done." - 1964 A Time For Choosing Speech

[Wumpus Hunter]

I like how we "let" them STEAL the stuff to srcew themselves with! There was a thread about a month ago about how we even designed faulty IC chips specifically for them to steal.

Contrast this with the rat approach - selling them whatever they want and sticking the money in your pocket.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Contrast this with the rat approach - selling them whatever they want and sticking the money in your pocket.

The Clinton foreign policy.

[steverino62]

Regarding the last paragraph of this article: those who argue that internal Soviet factors caused the collapse of the Soviet Union often ignore the dynamic interplay between external and domestic variables. One cannot objectively read Gorbachev's central committee and party congress speeches, for instance, without concluding that Gorbachev intended for glasnost and perestroika to reverse Soviet economic decline precisely because that decline adversely impacted Soviet security and foreign policies. In reality, these so-called internal sources of causation were strongly, perhaps decisively, shaped by external considerations.

[IGOTMINE]

You reek or troll.

I've read your other posts. I classify you as a stealth Moby.

I'll be watching.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

But the Left is trying to make lemonade.

[Atlantic Friend]

As an added tidbit of information, Farewell was the codename of a Soviet official working for the French intelligence service, the DGSE. What Farewell told his controllers was that the Soviet Union was becoming expert at obtaining Western technology that could be used militarily by buying high-tech civilian goods that used the same electronic components.

French President François Mitterrand told President Reagan during a G-7 meeting in 1981 IIRC, and then Farewell was a shared sourced of information for both French and US intelligence services. I seem to remember that Farewell went out of business in the late 80s.

[Coop]

Look at the bright side, IGM. At least our friend here writes complete sentences and paragraphs. Even posts "replies" instead of just hit-'n-run garbage articles.

We're attracting a higher class of folk here to FR.

[Cincinatus]

"And here you thought that the collapse of that dang ol' Soviet Union was just a coincidence, huh?"

[EQAndyBuzz]

I am sure Clinton is still getting his cut from the Kosovo heroin profits.

[Jeff Gordon]

The sabotage of the gas pipeline has not been previously disclosed,

The story of the sabotaged pipe line was told many years ago in a book about Reagan's war with the Soviet Union. The book did not give the details this article gives. It did say that the sabotage was implemented by tricking the Soviet Spies to buy sabotaged technology.

[atomicpossum]

Do a web search for the 'Farewell Dossier' for more info, there's even someon the CIA website...

[Cincinatus' Wife]

The Farewell Dossier
By WILLIAM SAFIRE, NY Times 2/2/04
Feb 2, 2004, 08:28


Here is the unremarked story of "the Farewell dossier": how 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.

Weiss worked down the hall from me in the Nixon administration. In early 1974, he wrote a report on Soviet advances in technology through purchasing and copying that led the beleaguered president — détente notwithstanding — to place restrictions on the export of computers and software to the U.S.S.R.

Seven years later, we learned how the K.G.B. responded. I was writing a series of hard-line columns denouncing the financial backing being given Moscow by Germany and Britain for a major natural gas pipeline from Siberia to Europe. That project would give control of European energy supplies to the Communists, as well as generate $8 billion a year to support Soviet computer and satellite research.

President François Mitterrand of France also opposed the gas pipeline. He took President Reagan aside at a conference in Ottawa on July 19, 1981, 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."

Our Norad monitors feared a nuclear detonation, but satellites that would have picked up its electromagnetic pulse were silent. That mystified many in the White House, but "Gus Weiss came down the hall to tell his fellow NSC staffers not to worry. It took him another twenty years to tell me why."

Farewell stayed secret because the blast in June 1982, estimated at three kilotons, took place in the Siberian wilderness, with no casualties known. Nor was the red-faced K.G.B. about to complain publicly about being tricked by bogus technology. But all the software it had stolen for years was suddenly suspect, which stopped or delayed the work of thousands of worried Russian technicians and scientists.

Vetrov was caught and executed in 1983. A year later, Bill Casey ordered the K.G.B. collection network rolled up, closing the Farewell dossier. Gus Weiss died from a fall a few months ago. Now is a time to remember that sometimes our spooks get it right in a big way.

Source:2004 Ocnus.net Top of Page

http://www.ocnus.net/cgi-bin/exec/view.cgi?archive=40&num=10082

[atomicpossum]

CIA website:

Duping the Soviets
The Farewell Dossier
Gus W. Weiss

Article here

[Colonel_Flagg]

<< But others liberals say that internal Soviet factors were more important, >>

There.

[doug from upland]

Somehow, that man pointing his finger has a little more meaning than the rapist pointing his finger.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Bump!

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Thanks for the LINK!

[BabsC]

That and not being around Hitlary, notice the weight loss? That nose looks more and more like Duranty every day.

[RGSpincich]

I don't want to know, and don't want others to know, how this stuff happens. Just let it happen. LLSS

[IGOTMINE]

Note my #30.
I claim the kill.

[Paul Ross]

BUMP!

This is what we need to be doing to China and India, but instead it looks like it will be the other way around.

Here is a 2005 Report by the Defense Science Board on High Performance Microchip Supply

I am willing to bet that neither Condoleeza Rice (State Dept.) nor Stephan Hadley (Natl Security Advisor) or Dan Bartlett (Pres. Counselor)ever read it.