In 2015, details of this potential doomsday weapon first became public knowledge, and in 2018 the American Nuclear Posture Review confirmed that Russia was developing a ‘new intercontinental, nuclear armed, nuclear powered, undersea autonomous torpedo.’ It is known in Russia as Poseidon, and the United States’ code name for it is Kanyon.
According to both information released by the Russians and that derived from Western intelligence sources, the device is a submarine-launched autonomous drone almost 25 metres – about 80 feet – long and 1.6 metres, over 5 feet, in diameter, that functions something like an underwater cruise missile, and with impressive performance characteristics. Two existing submarines that are believed to have the capability of carrying this drone, mounted externally, are the Oscar-class submarine Belgorod and the Yasen-class boat Khabarovsk, and it has also been conjectured that the large Oscar-class submarines could carry as many as four of these weapons simultaneously.
Initial reports suggested the Status-6 device would have a top speed of around 100 knots, though this estimate was later reduced to a perhaps more realistic 50 knots, with a range of over 5,000 nautical miles and an ability to operate down to depths of over 3,000 feet. It incorporates stealth technology to avoid being detected by acoustic tracking devices of various sorts. Equally impressive is its potential payload. Analysis of the design suggests a warhead size of 4 metres by 1.5 metres – 13 feet by 5 feet – giving a total volume of 7 cubic metres, sufficient to accommodate a nuclear weapon with a yield of up to 100 megatons.
The largest nuclear weapon ever detonated was the Soviet RDS-200 Tsar Bomba tested in 1961, which measured 8 metres by 2.1 metres (26 feet by 7 feet) and had a calculated yield of 50 megatons. If its warhead had incorporated a uranium-238 tamper – an outer shell of uranium that would reflect escaping neutrons back into the exploding mass of radioactive material at the moment of detonation and hence greatly increase the explosive power – the yield could have been double that.
The Tsar Bomba was also known as Kuzma’s Mother, a reference to a promise made by the then First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev at a session of the United Nations General Assembly in 1960, to ‘show the United States a Kuzma’s mother,’ an idiomatic Russian expression more or less meaning ‘we’ll show you.’
The stated intention of the Status-6 weapon is to decimate an enemy’s naval ports and coastal cities, either by a direct strike using its massive warhead or, and potentially equally devastating, to perform a stand-off detonation of the weapon whilst still in deep water. A direct strike could also render coastal cities uninhabitable for some years by contamination with radioactive isotopes. There has been speculation, for example, that the warhead could be in the form of a cobalt bomb, what’s known as a ‘salted bomb’, incorporating cobalt pellets that would be transmuted in the explosion into radioactive cobalt-60 dust and debris that would fall on the surrounding landscape. Cobalt-60 has a half-life of a little over five and a quarter years. The stand-off detonation could produce a tsunami-like wave up to 500 metres (1,600 feet) high that would cause immense damage to the infrastructure and buildings along the coastline and for a considerable distance inland.
It is the enormous potential destruction that could potentially be caused by the Status-6 weapon that has caused it to be referred to as a doomsday device, a last-ditch weapon to be used only when all other forms of aggression have failed.
Some experts have suggested that this weapon is something of a paper tiger, a theoretical construct that doesn’t exist except as a few drawings and plans, which were intentionally leaked to try to intimidate the United States. However, the Nuclear Posture Review, a survey of American nuclear forces and assets undertaken every four years by the Department of Defense, a survey that of necessity considers American plans for nuclear conflict against potential aggressors, and the nuclear assets of those aggressor nations, clearly believes that the Status-6 weapon is a viable threat. The Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA, shares this view.
In 1991 there was an attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev and as a part of it the chief of the KGB, Colonel-General Vladimir Kryuchkov, used the organization’s resources in support of that coup. The rebellion failed, and on 23 August 1991 Kryuchkov was arrested and replaced by General Vadim Bakatin, who was instructed to dissolve the KGB, which he did on 6 November the same year.
Interestingly, Kryuchkov, who was imprisoned for his part in the coup but released three years later under an amnesty, clearly saw that the writing was on the wall as far as the Soviet Union was concerned and, as we are aware, it finally collapsed in 1991. But in the months before this happened, Kryuchkov reportedly diverted $50 billion worth of funds from the Russian Communist Party coffers to an unknown destination, presumably to provide himself with a comfortable retirement fund. He died in November 2007 at the age of 83.
But the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, the Committee for State Security, the ‘sword and shield of the party’, responsible for the Russian secret police, internal security and intelligence, was far too valuable to lose, and the result was little more than a cosmetic reorganization. The KGB’s previous functions continued essentially unchanged, and were divided between two new organizations.
The first of these was the SVR, the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation, the country’s external intelligence agency and the direct successor of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate or FCD. It was created in December 1991 and still occupies the FCD’s former headquarters in Moscow’s Yasenevo district. It was little more than a change of name, and only required minor alterations in titles and the like. The duties and functions performed by the KGB were continued without pause by the newly created organization.
The second was the Federal’naya Sluzhba Kontrrazvedki or FSK, the Federal Counter-intelligence Service, which provided exactly that – counter-intelligence – taking over the old KGB’s functions in this field. Like the SVR, it was created in the aftermath of the break-up of the KGB in 1991, but was reorganized into the FSB, the Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti Rossiyskoi Federatsii or Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, in April 1995.
The Caesar cipher is one of the oldest and simplest encryption techniques ever developed. Named after Julius Caesar, who employed it in his private letters and other correspondence, it’s a monoalphabetic substitution cipher where every letter in the original plaintext message is replaced by the letter which is located a fixed number of positions away from it in the alphabet. So a right shift of five, for example, would turn the words ‘SECRET MESSAGE’ into ‘NZXMZO HZNNVBZ’. The encrypted text is always gibberish, confirming that a cipher of some sort has been used.
This is a Caesar cipher with right shift of five, with the plaintext alphabet above and the encrypted or shifted version below:
| A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |
| V | W | X | Y | Z | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U |
As a refinement, breaking up the message into groups of, say, five letters adds an extra level of security, so the plaintext ‘SECRET MESSAGE’ would become ‘SECRE TMESS AGEXX’ the two final missing letters in the last group of five being replaced by the letter ‘X’. The encrypted version would then read ‘NZXMZ OHZNN VBZSS’ or possibly ‘NZXMZ OHZNN VBZXX’ depending on whether or not the letter ‘X’ representing a blank space was encrypted or not.
The obvious weakness of the Casear cipher is that, like all single alphabet substitution systems, it is very easy to break simply by using frequency analysis, identifying the letters that occur most often in any particular language, and applying that knowledge to the encrypted message.
In the example above, the encrypted letter ‘Z’ occurs four times, and in English the 12 letters used most frequently in any piece of text are, in order, E T A O I N S H R D L U, so it would be a reasonable guess that in this case the letter ‘E’ is represented by the encrypted letter ‘Z’. If that assumption were applied to the shift, then the plaintext could be read almost immediately.
Removing the vowels from the message, as described in the text of this novel, would add an extra layer of complication, and would make frequency analysis much more difficult or even impossible by removing five of the 12 commonest letters. Doing so would turn the plaintext ‘SECRET MESSAGE’ into ‘SCRT MSSG’ and into ‘NXMO HNNB’ as encrypted text.
However, today it is generally considered that a Caesar cipher offers almost no reliable encryption, though the substitution technique is still applied as part of other ciphers, including the Vigenère cipher, a polyalphabetic encryption system using interwoven Caesar ciphers.
The Thing was a passive cavity resonator, a bugging device hidden inside a replica of the Great Seal of the United States which was given by the Russian Young Pioneer organization to the American Ambassador to the Soviet Union in August 1945. It was a passive listening device which had neither a power supply nor any active electronic components, which meant that it was extremely difficult to detect using normal anti-surveillance equipment. It had to be illuminated by an external transmitter using a continuous radio signal on a specific frequency to work.
The Thing contained a capacitive membrane that was linked to an antenna. When the radio signal was transmitted and the device became active, any nearby sounds, such as people talking in the Ambassador’s residential study, where the Great Seal replica hung for seven years until the bug was finally discovered, penetrated the thin wood of the carving and caused the membrane to vibrate. This modulated the radio waves being received by the device, waves that were retransmitted and could then be demodulated by a receiver and recorded by the Russian team monitoring the operation, in a similar way to a programme being received by a normal radio.
The existence of The Thing was discovered entirely by accident in 1951 when a radio operator working inside the British Embassy in Moscow inexplicably found himself listening to American voices on an open radio channel.
The British alerted the Americans, who began an immediate investigation. Two technicians were sent to Moscow and used a signal generator and receiver combination that would produce feedback in the presence of a hidden transmitter, and they discovered the bug. The Federal Bureau of Investigation was tasked with analysing the device, and employed a man named Peter Wright, then a scientist and technician working for the British Marconi Company. He later became a counter-intelligence officer for the Security Service, MI5, and was the author of the controversial book Spycatcher. The detailed analysis of the device produced by Wright resulted in the British developing similar bugs under the codename Satyr, many of which saw use by the principal Allied powers during the 1950s.
An exact full-size replica of The Thing, a potent testament to both Russian ingenuity and American embarrassment, is now on display in the NSA’s National Cryptologic Museum in Maryland.
The Russians have often used the ‘critically ill’ technique to recover a defector for prolonged and probably terminal questioning, the heavily sedated victim often being strapped to a stretcher and attended by a doctor and nurse who are simply there to ensure he reaches the interrogation room alive.
This was the fate of Konstantin Volkov back in 1945. Volkov was the Russian vice consul in Istanbul and also an agent of the NKVD. The Narodnyy Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del, or the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the Soviet Union’s interior ministry, included the secret police force and was responsible for political repression, countless extrajudicial executions. It had implemented Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge during which roughly a million Russians were executed, most by being shot.
Volkov contacted the British authorities in Istanbul and asked for two things: political asylum for himself and his wife in Britain and £27,000, a substantial sum of money in 1945. In return for this he would reveal the identities of 314 Soviet agents working in Turkey and some 250 Soviet agents operating in Britain. More significantly, he also offered to provide the names of three Soviet agents then operating within the British intelligence community. He stated that two of these people worked in the Foreign Office, and the third was a counter-intelligence officer then based in London. The latter individual was Kim Philby, who was then, with the level of incompetence that marked so many operations run by British intelligence at this time, given the job of processing Volkov’s claim and request, so that he was actually investigating himself.
Philby saw the danger, immediately informed his controller in Moscow of the offer made by Volkov, and set off for Istanbul, travelling as slowly as he possibly could. The journey to Turkey took him three weeks, and by the time he arrived in Istanbul Volkov had already been flown out to Moscow on a Russian transport aircraft, swathed in bandages. He was never seen again.
In June 1982 a British Airways Boeing 747, callsign Speedbird 9, flew through a cloud of volcanic ash produced by the eruption of Mount Galunggung in West Java, about which the flight deck crew knew nothing and which did not appear on their weather radar because the ash was dry and the radar was intended to detect moisture in clouds. At 37,000 feet, all four engines failed, one after the other, in a period of about one minute.
What keeps aircraft in the air is the lift from the wings, not the engines, and the Boeing 747 has a glide ratio of about 15 to 1, meaning that it can glide for 15 miles for every mile that it loses in altitude. From 37,000 feet, that would mean the aircraft could stay in the air for approximately 23 minutes and in that time glide for a distance of 91 nautical miles. The crew declared an emergency to Jakarta Area Control and selected the emergency code, 7700, on the aircraft’s secondary surveillance transponder and steered the 747 towards Jakarta Airport.
Their problem was compounded by the mountainous terrain on the south coast of the island of Java, which required the aircraft to be above 11,500 feet when crossing the coast. The crew decided that if they were unable to restart any of the four engines and maintain altitude by the time the aircraft reached 12,000 feet, then they would abandon the approach to Jakarta, turn back over the Indian Ocean and attempt a ditching at sea, an extremely risky manoeuvre in an aircraft of that size, and something that had never been done before in a Boeing 747.
The crew began engine restart procedures, despite being above the recommended in-flight start envelope altitude of 28,000 feet, but these attempts all failed. When the aircraft reached 13,500 feet and had cleared the invisible ash cloud, they managed to restart the number four engine, allowing the aircraft captain, Eric Moody, to reduce but not halt the rate of descent. Soon afterwards, they managed to restart the number three engine, and that permitted him to begin a gentle climb, and they also restarted the number one and two engines, though the number two engine surged minutes later and shut down again.
They maintained an altitude of 12,000 feet, but as they approached the airport they found they could see almost nothing through the windscreen because of the abrading effect of the ash cloud, and a visual landing proved impossible. They flew the ILS, the instrument landing system, but even that was not entirely successful because the vertical guidance system was not working. That meant the aircraft could head directly towards the runway but the system would not provide height information. To counter this, the aircraft’s first officer began monitoring the DME, the distance measuring equipment, which told them how far away they were from the runway. An aircraft maintaining a 3 degree glide path will lose approximately 300 feet for every track mile run, and so the first officer told the captain the height of the aircraft should be descending through at each mile they passed, based on the DME reading.
Moody later stated that it was ‘a bit like negotiating one’s way up a badger’s arse’, which perhaps makes one wonder what he got up to in his spare time if he was that familiar with the nether regions of a badger.
The aircraft landed successfully, but they were unable to taxi the 747 off the runway because they could not see through the windscreen.
The subsequent investigation of the incident showed that as the ash had been ingested by the engines it had melted and stuck to the sides of the combustion chambers. But as the engine cooled after flaming out, the ash solidified and enough of it broke off to allow a clean air flow through the engine, allowing it to be successfully restarted. Engine numbers one, two and three were replaced at Jakarta, the windscreen was changed and the fuel tanks drained and cleared of ash, after which the 747 was flown back to London. There, the number four engine was also changed before the aircraft could be returned to service.
Nineteen days after Speedbird 9 lost all its engines, a Singapore airlines Boeing 747 had to shut down three of its engines as it flew through the same area, after which the airspace was permanently closed and new air routes put into operation.
As a means of keeping in contact, the crew and passengers formed the Galunggung Gliding Club, and the Guinness Book of Records included the flight as the longest recorded glide in a non-purpose-built aircraft. Interestingly, this record didn’t last long, being broken by two Canadian aircraft. The first incident took place in 1983, the following year, and involved Air Canada Flight 143, a Boeing 767, which ran out of fuel at 41,000 feet on a flight from Montréal to Edmonton.
This incident was caused by a combination of an electronic fault on the instrument panel, but more significantly by the fuel load having been calculated in pounds instead of kilograms, a fact that nobody noticed at the time, meaning that the tanks held less than half the quantity of fuel that should have been loaded. The aircraft flew for 17 minutes after the engines stopped.
The emergency landing, at Royal Canadian Air Force Station Gimli, was complicated by part of the runway being used for a sports car race at the time, and by the completely silent approach of the 767, which touched down with hardly anyone on the ground noticing. Luckily, the gravity drop the pilots had been forced to use to lower the undercarriage without engine power had not locked the nose wheel into position, and this was forced back up into the undercarriage well when the aircraft touched down, and the friction generated by the nose of the fuselage sliding along the runway ensured that the aircraft stopped well before ploughing into the crowds of spectators. No serious injuries were suffered by people on the ground or in the aircraft.
A couple of decades later, in 2001, Air Transat Flight 236 also broke the record, running out of fuel on a transatlantic flight from Toronto to Lisbon, due to a fractured fuel line that was dumping fuel at the rate of about one gallon a second. Luckily, the captain was an experienced glider pilot, and landed the Airbus safely at Lajes Air Base after gliding it for about 65 miles.
DEFCON stands for DEFense readiness CONdition, and there are five possible states that can be applied to the American military machine. These are:
about 65 miles.
DEFCON stands for DEFense readiness CONdition, and there are five possible states that can be applied to the American military machine. These are:
| State | Readiness | Implication |
|---|---|---|
| DEFCON 1 | Maximum | Nuclear war is iminent |
| DEFCON 2 | Entire Armed Forces can engage | Final preparations for nuclear war |
| DEFCON 3 | Air Force can mobilise in 15 minutes | General increase in force readiness |
| DEFCON 4 | Above normal readiness | Strengthened security and enhanced intelligence operations |
| DEFCON 5 | Normal readiness | Normal peacetime state |
To avoid any possible confusion, exercise scenarios involving an increase in the DEFCON state do not use the word ‘DEFCON’. Instead, five alternative codewords have been introduced. These are COCKED PISTOL (DEFCON 1); FAST PACE (DEFCON 2); ROUND HOUSE (DEFCON 3); DOUBLE TAKE (DECON 4) and FADE OUT (DEFCON 5). Details of the DEFCON system and its meanings were only declassified in 2006.
Until 2007, when the American Ohio-class ballistic missile carrying submarines were adapted to deploy cruise missiles, the Russian Project 949 (NATO reporting name Oscar I) and Project 949A (NATO reporting name Oscar II) submarines were the largest cruise missile carrying boats in the world. Two Project 949 (Granit) submarines, designated K-525 and K-206, were built at the Sevmash shipyard in Severodvinsk, the first laid down in 1975 and the second in 1979. The boats remained in service with the Soviet Northern Fleet until 1996 when they were decommissioned, and they were scrapped in 2004. A total of 11 Project 949A (Antey) submarines, an improved design, were subsequently built at Severodvinsk, five being assigned to the Northern Fleet.
These are large vessels, the displacement tonnage of the 949A boat being 14,700 when surfaced and 19,400 submerged, with a length of over 500 feet, and a beam of 60 feet. They are powered by two pressurized water-cooled reactors that drive a pair of steam turbines, delivering just over 73,000 KW of power to twin shafts fitted with seven bladed propellers and giving it a surfaced speed of 15 knots and up to 32 knots when submerged. The armament is impressive, including four 21-inch torpedo tubes in the bow, typically 28 Tsakra (SS-N-15, NATO reporting name Starfish) and Vodopad/Veter (SS-N-16, NATO reporting name Stallion) anti-submarine missiles fitted with nuclear warheads, and 24 P-700 Granit (SS-N-19, NATO reporting name Shipwreck) cruise missiles carrying either high explosive or nuclear payloads.
Easily the most famous Project 949A submarine was the Kursk, K-141, which was lost in the Barents Sea on 12 August 2000, with the loss of all 118 crew on board. The boat was involved in the Summer-X exercise, the first such evolution planned by the Russian Navy in over ten years and that included 30 large ships, four attack submarines and a significant number of smaller ships. The crew of the Kursk were considered to be the best in the Northern Fleet and had won a citation for performance excellence. The boat was one of the very few vessels authorized to carry a full combat load of weapons at all times.
During the exercise, the submarine successfully fired a Granit missile fitted with a practice warhead and two days later, on the morning of 12 August, the crew prepared to engage the Fleet flagship, the Kirov-class battlecruiser Pyotr Velikiy (Peter the Great) with dummy torpedoes. At 07.28 UTC, 11.28 local time, there was an explosion when preparing to fire the weapons and the submarine sank in just over 350 feet of water some 85 miles off Severomorsk. A second explosion occurred just over two minutes after the first. The subsequent investigation into the accident found that HTP (High-test peroxide), a form of highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide used to propel torpedoes, had leaked through a faulty weld in the weapon. The HTP expanded enormously in volume and ruptured the torpedo’s kerosene fuel tank, which caused the first explosion, the force of which was equal to between 220 and 550 pounds of TNT. The second explosion was much greater in power, equating to between 3 and 7 tons of TNT, and was most likely caused by the heat from the first explosion causing the warheads of several live torpedoes to detonate. This explosion was recorded by seismographs in Europe, measuring as high as 4.2 on the Richter scale, and was even detected in Alaska.
Rescue assistance was offered by both the British and Norwegian navies, but this was first refused by Russia, which stated that all the crew would have died within minutes of the explosions. In reality, when the wreck was entered by Norwegian and Russian divers on 21 August, 24 bodies were found in the turbine room at the stern of the submarine, their names recorded in a note written by the officer present, Captain-Lieutenant Dmitri Kolesnikov. They had all survived the explosions and lived on for some time before eventually succumbing either to the flames or to suffocation.
A Dutch consortium was awarded the contract to raise the vessel by Russia, and this was completed between 2001 and 2003, the largest section of the hull being towed to Severomorsk and placed in a floating dry dock where it could be inspected.
The innocuous sounding Defense Support Program is the principal means used by the United States to detect missile or spacecraft launches, or nuclear explosions, using sensitive infrared cameras mounted on satellites in geosynchronous orbits. To permit fast detection of a launch and acquisition of the missile by tracking the intense heat generated by its motor, these satellites spin, allowing their sensor arrays to scan their target area once every ten seconds. Each satellite covers one particular part of the planet, the first four, known as Block 1, Phase 1, being launched between 1970 and 1973. A total of 23 satellites were launched in all, some obviously now non-functioning. The last DSP launch was in November 2007, and the entire system will eventually be entirely replaced by a new program called SBIRS, the acronym referring to Space-Based Infrared System satellites.
In the grounds of Eastbury Park, near the London suburb of Northwood, is one of the most important military headquarters facilities in Britain, controlling five separate military command structures, including the NATO Allied Maritime Command and Commander Operations for the Royal Navy. The original Eastbury Park house burned down in 1969 and in the first few years of the twenty-first century there were major construction works on the site, culminating in a new building to house the Permanent Joint Headquarters, which opened in 2010. Even today, much of the site lies underground, in hardened and semi-hardened facilities intended to survive a nuclear attack, and is operated by the three principal arms of the United Kingdom’s Armed Forces: the Royal Navy, the Army and the Royal Air Force, headed by the Chief of Joint Operations.
Getting a message of any kind to a submarine that is proceeding along the surface of the sea is no more difficult than sending a message to any other location on the surface of the planet and permits a large range of different communication methods to be used, from various radio frequencies to satphones. But the entire purpose of the submarine is to operate below the surface of the water – the clue is in the name – and the moment a boat dives, all conventional communication systems cease to operate, because radio waves do not penetrate to the depths at which submarines operate. But as with all rules, there is one single exception: ELF. Or rather two: ELF and VLF.
Nothing to do with unlikely characters from the Lord of the Rings, ELF stands for extremely low frequency, and ELF – and its slightly less effective companion VLF, very low frequency – transmissions do provide a way of getting a message to a submerged submarine. Not, in fairness, a long or a comprehensive message, and not in any way a conversation, submarine communications being virtually by definition only one way. The moment a signal is sent from any kind of a transmitter, an organization with the correct type of intercept equipment can pinpoint that transmitter’s location with a fair degree of accuracy, as long as the signal was detected by two or more receivers. So submarines listen, but do not respond, hence the nickname ‘Silent Service’ acquired a long time ago by the Royal Navy’s Submarine Service.
ELF, which is defined as radio signals with a frequency between 30 Hz and 300 Hz, and with a wavelength of between 10,000 and 1,000 kilometres, is the only radio band that can penetrate deep below the surface of the ocean. In America there are two ELF transmission sites in Michigan and Wisconsin that use miles of cable mounted on towers to send out what are known as PLSO – ‘phonetic letter spelled out’ – messages that can be received by submarines at their normal operating depth. The other option is VLF, occupying the frequency band between 3 and 30 kHz and with a wavelength of between 100 and 10 kilometres, which offers the ability to send far more information in a transmission, but which does not penetrate to anything like the same depth. VLF is also used for other purposes, including communicating with satellites that can then relay the messages to other units, communicating with surface ships, for global communications during hostilities, aircraft and ship navigation equipment but, just like ELF, these are all one-way communication links.
Until 2007, motorists in Britain driving along the A5 trunk road or the M1 motorway past Hillmorton near Rugby would probably have noticed a large field containing a selection of extremely tall vertical masts linked by cables, and may even have wondered if they were passing a site used for the transmission of commercial radio and television channels. If they did, they were wrong.
From January 1926, the site was used to telegraph messages to the Commonwealth, and formed a part of what was known as the Imperial Wireless Chain. But from the 1950s onwards, using the VLF frequency of 15.975 kHz, the station was the principal means of communicating with submerged British submarines, with Criggion Radio Station in Powys, Wales, acting as a back-up.
The Rugby VLF station functioned until 2004, the last of the tall masts being demolished in August 2007, and its functions were taken over by the Skelton Transmitting Station located near Penrith in Cumbria. The principal aerial there is the tallest structure anywhere in the United Kingdom, a steel lattice mast 365 metres high that began operating in 2001. Skelton continues to act as the principal communications station in Britain for Royal Navy submarines.
The acronym SOSUS stands for Sound Surveillance System and was an important antisubmarine tool during the Cold War. It comprised lines of passive seabed acoustic listening posts located in the natural choke points of the oceans of the world, places like the area between Greenland, Iceland and United Kingdom, known as the GIUK Gap, and elsewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. The intention was to provide a way of detecting Soviet submarines after they had left their bases in the far north of Russia and as they moved out into the open Atlantic Ocean. Originally even the name SOSUS was classified, but both the name and the technology soon became something of an open secret, and the programme was finally declassified in 1991. SOSUS still exists today, but is used more for academic study of the deep ocean than for monitoring Russian submarines.
In the South China Sea, what is known as the Underwater Great Wall is operated by the Chinese to monitor submarine movements in the area, and since 2016 two specific underwater sensors have been positioned in the Challenger Deep and near the Micronesian island of Yap, apparently to monitor American naval and especially submarine activity on and around the island of Guam.
The use of lasers in submarine detection has a long history, beginning in the 1960s with infrared lasers tailored to detect a phenomenon known as the Bernoulli hump, water displaced by a submarine proceeding at a shallow depth, and Kelvin waves, the V-shaped wakes produced by submerged moving objects. But the main breakthroughs involved the use of blue-green lasers that can penetrate saltwater to a significant depth, and these began in the 1970s. The pulsed beam of the laser can penetrate at least as deep as the thermocline, the transition layer between the warmer surface water and the deeper and colder water of the ocean. The thermocline is important in submarine hunting, because it tends to reflect acoustic signals, such as active sonar pulses, meaning that submarine hiding below the thermocline will be invisible to a sonar transducer above that level, and vice versa. This is the main reason for the importance of variable depth and dunking sonar equipment.
Laser detection of a submarine is possible because turbulence is created as the boat moves through the water, and this disturbance can be discovered by monitoring the subsurface water temperature. Specifically, what are known as Brillouin and Rayleigh backscatter components can be analysed to produce a temperature-depth profile of the water, allowing the submarine waves present at or near the thermocline to be detected, and the location of the boat to be determined from this information.
DEVGRU is an acronym for another acronym – NSWDG – that’s a part of yet another acronym, JSOC. NSWDG stands for the United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group, and DEVGRU is an abbreviation for the last two words of that title. JSOC is the Joint Special Operations Command, and DEVGRU, better known to the public as SEAL Team Six (though this unit was officially dissolved in 1987) is the component of JSOC provided by the US Navy. And DEVGRU has yet another nickname, because within JSOC it’s often referred to as Task Force Blue. Almost everything about DEVGRU is classified and there is almost never any official comment upon it or its operations by the White House or the Department of Defense.
Along with Delta Force, the analogous unit formed from US Army personnel, DEVGRU functions as one of America’s principal counter-terrorist units, originally with the primary intention of working in maritime environments, but has expanded to include expertise in a wide range of specialized tasks including hostage rescue, reconnaissance, security and direct action of a number of types.
Operation Eagle Claw was the startlingly unsuccessful operation to try to resolve the Iran hostage crisis by force in 1979, and SEAL Team Six was formed as a full-time counter-terrorist unit intended to specialise in operations of this sort in the aftermath of this embarrassing failure. Like all similar special forces units, the selection process is rigorous and lengthy, the failure rate is extremely high and accidents and injuries often occur during training. Candidates must already be qualified SEALs – Sea, Air and Land Teams, the US Navy’s principal special operations force – and must have served at least two combat tours before even being considered for DEVGRU. Specialist training includes skills in land warfare, advanced defensive and offensive driving, battle training, diving, communications, unarmed combat and the like. They are also given instruction on lock-picking skills for everything from car doors to safes.
Successful candidates are assigned to one of four assault squadrons – Blue, Gold, Red or Silver – or to one of three specialized squadrons. These are Black Squadron, specializing in intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance, Gray Squadron, which provides specialized divers, mobility teams and transportation, or Green Team, which handles selection and training for DEVGRU. Each assault squadron comprises three troops, and these troops are also divided into smaller teams, the entire squadron being supported by a wide range of support personnel, from dog handlers to airmen and cryptologists, and the number of personnel working within DEVGRU is surprisingly large, averaging about 1,500 military and around 500 civilians, though these numbers fluctuate considerably from year to year.
DEVGRU is probably best known for Operation Neptune Spear, the location and assassination of the al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden on 2 May 2011. The operation was led by the CIA, with the activities of the DEVGRU SEALs being coordinated by JSOC. The ‘Night Stalkers,’ the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne) and personnel from the Special Activities Division of the CIA were also involved. The raid on bin Laden’s compound on the outskirts of Abbottabad in Pakistan was launched from Afghanistan, and the Pakistani authorities were not informed.
Intelligence sources suggest that the Pakistanis either knew exactly where bin Laden was living and did nothing about it, or they should have known where he was. It is reasonably certain that if the Americans had advised the Pakistanis about the raid in advance, bin Laden would have been somewhere else when the helicopters landed.
Another acronym, the SOG is the Special Operations Group. Nothing to do with the armed forces of America, the SOG is one of the most secretive and elite of all the arms operated by the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency. Although the SOG is a permanent entity, most of its members are not, being recruited from the various SEAL Teams as and when required for joint operations. This association began as long ago as the Vietnam War, and involved yet another acronym, MACV-SOG, the title meaning Military Assistance Command Vietnam – Studies and Observations Group.
Benign though the unit’s title may have sounded – it could almost have been some kind of administrative unit tasked with observing the daily routines of the Vietnamese – the reality was very different. In fact, MACV-SOG was both highly classified and multiservice, a dedicated special operations unit charged with waging unconventional warfare against the Vietnamese both prior to and during hostilities.
It was created on 24 January 1964 and initially carried out strategic reconnaissance in four countries: South Vietnam (properly the Republic of Vietnam), North Vietnam (the Democratic Republic of Vietnam), Cambodia and Laos. It captured and interrogated enemy prisoners, ran rescue operations behind the front line to find and recover crashed pilots and prisoners of war, and carried out a wide range of covert operations against the communist forces. It was involved in the majority of the significant campaigns during the conflict, from the Gulf of Tonkin incident, through the 1968 Tet Offensive and the Easter Offensive of 1972, one of the last and most significant campaigns of the war.
Joint operations directed by the CIA and primarily run by SEAL Team personnel are still being conducted today, as has been confirmed by a number of recent military operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
This was the North American (the letter ‘N’ indicates this) registration of a Gulfstream V executive jet known to have been used to fly suspected terrorists to various CIA black sites either for torture to extract confessions and information – these locations were usually in Jordan or Poland – or simply to execution sites in Egypt or Syria.
The aircraft was owned by a brass plate Delaware company named Premier Executive Transport Services, Inc. and the numerous extraordinary rendition flights the aircraft was involved in, many of which were extensively reported in the British media, all started at an airfield in North Carolina, near Smithfield. It was presumed, though it could not be established as fact, that the aircraft was on almost permanent contract to the American Department of Defense, or in reality to the CIA, throughout the duration of the so-called ‘War on Terror.’
These operations began no later than six weeks after the 9/11 attacks, on 23 October 2001, when the Gulfstream appeared at Jinnah International Airport in Pakistan where security officers forced a Yemeni citizen on board, after which it departed for an unknown destination. That set the pattern, and there were numerous subsequent sightings of the aircraft as it criss-crossed the world, being repeatedly seen at Washington Dulles International Airport, its invariable departure airport from mainland America, at Frankfurt, at Tashkent in Uzbekistan, in Poland, in Afghanistan and, very worryingly, in Glasgow, suggesting British complicity in, or at the very least knowledge of, what was going on – the process of so-called extraordinary rendition. In all, it was established that over a two-year period the aircraft flew to at least 49 destinations outside the USA, including Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Morocco and Uzbekistan.
The Swedish television channel TV4 aired a documentary entitled Det brutna löftet – ‘The Broken Promise’ – on 17 May 2004 that described in considerable detail what happened to two asylum seekers, Ahmed Hussein Mustafa Kamil Agiza and Muhammad Suleman Ibrahim al-Zery in December 2001. Both men were Egyptian nationals who had been accused of membership of Islamist terrorist organizations and subjected to arrest and harassment by the Egyptian security forces. They had been detained in the country and allegedly tortured whilst in custody, and had fled from their homeland, seeking a safer place to live. They had eventually arrived in Sweden and formally applied for asylum there, on the basis that if they returned to Egypt they faced almost certain detention, probable torture and even possible execution. Ahmed Agiza had been tried in absentia on a charge of terrorism by an Egyptian court, found guilty and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
Their application for asylum was rejected on the afternoon of 18 December 2001, and the Swedish government ordered their arrest and immediate expulsion. The men’s lawyers were not informed of the decision and the two men were refused permission to challenge their expulsion before an independent body.
They were arrested that afternoon and transported to Bromma Airport in Stockholm by officers of SÄPO, the Swedish Security Police, arriving at about 20.30. The ‘Guantánamo Bay Express’ arrived about half an hour later, and the two men were handed over to unidentified American agents who were wearing masks to conceal their identity.
They were already wearing hand- and ankle-cuffs, and without releasing them the American agents used scissors to cut their clothes from their bodies, stripping them naked. Each man then endured a full body cavity search, and a suppository containing unknown drugs or chemicals was inserted into his anus, presumably some kind of sedative or relaxant. They had adult nappies put on them, were forcibly dressed in dark overalls, and they were then chained to a specially designed harness in the aircraft and hooded. Then the aircraft took off for Egypt, the known location of a CIA black site.
Agiza was imprisoned in Egypt and subjected to repeated torture that meant he confessed to whatever the interrogators wanted him to. He was denied legal representation and three years later, at a manifestly unfair trial, he was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in jail for membership of a banned organization. He was eventually released on 2 August 2011.
Al-Zery was luckier. He was held in Tora prison, kept blindfolded for months, subjected to similar torture to Agiza, including repeated electric shocks to his genitals and nipples. He, too, confessed to offences he had not committed. Late in 2002 he finally learned that he was alleged to have been one of some 250 members of a banned organization, and that many of the other accused individuals had already been sentenced and executed. Finally, on 27 October 2003, he was released without charge.