A former counterintelligence officer of the Pacific Fleet - let's call him Dmitry Ilyich K - spoke about this operation, surprising in its audacity, by the American special services, who organized wiretapping of negotiations on a government cable laid along the bottom of the Sea of Okhotsk. Although, according to him, the Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, who collaborated with the CIA, trumpeted this to the whole world. In his book "Confession of the Chief of Intelligence" there were so many lies and inaccuracies that the then leadership of the Pacific Fleet was forced to "correct" the dashing journalist.
Let's find out more about this …
Submarine "Khalibat".
Counterintelligence certificate
“The beginning of these events dates back to the 70s of the last century,” says Dmitry Ilyich. - Then a top-secret military cable was laid along the bottom of the Sea of Okhotsk, connecting the headquarters of the Pacific Fleet with the base of Soviet submarines and the Center. Negotiations were conducted on it, which concerned the deployment of Soviet nuclear submarines in the Pacific Ocean, the location of submarines designed to retaliate against the United States, the results of launching ballistic missiles from the Astrakhan Kapustin Yar test site to the Kura test site in the Kamchatka region. This information was immediately transmitted to the USSR Ministry of Defense. The Americans guessed about the existence of the "underwater telegraph bridge", but they could not find out where this cable was laid.
In the early 1970s, the negotiations were accidentally detected by electromagnetic radiation by one of the American submarines passing by (at that time they were grazing in the Sea of Okhotsk, like ours off the Atlantic coast of the United States). Since then, American submarines have been regularly hovering over Soviet cables. But, of course, they could not do it imperceptibly - staying in one place for several days.
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And then in the secret laboratories of the Pentagon developed a unique deep-sea vehicle, stuffed with spy electronics. It was a seven-meter cylinder ("cocoon") with a diameter of over a meter with sixty miniature tape recorders inside and a plutonium power source - in fact, a mini-nuclear reactor. A removable induction sensor could receive electromagnetic radiation from a Soviet cable without breaking its sheath.
For its laying in September 1972 the newest nuclear submarine "Khalibat" set off. At a depth of 65 meters, 32 miles off the coast of Kamchatka, Khalibat spotted the cable and hovered over it. The SEALs installed a cocoon next to the cable and returned. After such a success, the Pentagon could not come to their senses with joy for a long time, calling what had been done "the special operation of the century." The submarine went to the shores of Kamchatka to seize top-secret information and change the tape cassettes only a month later. Thus began the implementation of Operation Ivy Bells.
COCOON (CIA eavesdropping container).
On the evening of January 14, 1980, a telephone call rang at the Soviet embassy in the United States. The unidentified person, who introduced himself as a federal government employee Ronald Pelton, asked for a meeting. At the appointed hour, a red-bearded stranger slipped into the embassy. He informed the security officer on duty of the purpose of the parish. It was … about the interception by the Pentagon of top-secret negotiations of the Soviet command on a submarine cable in the Sea of Okhotsk. He was ready to report this in more detail for only 35 thousand dollars.
Ronald said that he became bankrupt and he needed the money to pay back his debts. It turned out that he, a former employee of the US National Security Agency, did not pass the routine polygraph (lie detector) certification, having lied that he did not use drugs. The case was aggravated by a strained relationship with management. They could not help but notice the employee's passion for weed. Pelton was demoted, his salary was cut in half, and he, accustomed to a high salary, could not stand it, began to use more and more "nonsense" and ended up outside the gates of the agency.
In the Soviet embassy, the agent was promised to pay a high fee for any information that became known from wiretapping to the agency's employees. Ronald happily agreed - at his old job he had a lot of friends who wanted to sell any information for bucks and knew how to keep their mouths shut. We agreed that Pelton would transmit information at the appointed day and hour in Vienna, where he often went on new work.
Before leaving, Ronald was advised for his own safety to shave off his beard and change into an old embassy locksmith's overalls. A minibus was waiting for him at the corner. At a safe house in the vicinity of Washington, Pelton was fed dinner and taken home, wishing him success.
"Cocoon" raised from the depths
So, says the former intelligence officer of the Pacific Fleet, Rear Admiral of the Reserve Anatoly Tikhonovich Shtyrov:
- In August 1981, an unforeseen, but generally ordinary event occurred in the headquarters system of the Kamchatka operational zone: cable communication on the Petropavlovsk - Magadan - Center line was terminated. Experts came to the conclusion: the cable is damaged, namely its underwater part in the Shelikhov Bay (Sea of Okhotsk. - Author's note). The nature of the malfunction is insulation failure and leakage. The most likely reason is that the fishermen were injured when anchored. Fishermen are partisan people; they tend to look through the nostril at all the forbidden zones drawn on the maps.
The Pacific Fleet was requested. The fleet of cable vessels did not have at hand: one was being repaired in Singapore, the other was occupied in some area … And so on. The Kamchatka flotilla pulled hard, equipped a detachment in the Penzhinskaya Bay - a hydrographic vessel, a tug and a boat. The task is to take the cable from the coast, lift and turn over the deck, find and vulcanize the damaged area.
The detachment left. In difficult stormy conditions, hiding behind the capes, the sailors began a hard thankless job.
However, the unexpected happened: discovering the place of the break, while repairing the cable, suddenly one of the divers noticed a strange healthy object, which was also warm to the touch.
No one had any idea what it was, no one suspected the existence of this Cocoon. It was a real sensation. It was supplemented by the fact that in addition to the designers of the Cocoon, the assemblers also decided to distinguish themselves with genius - on one of the walls there was proudly a sign "Made in USA". This "cocoon" covered the cable. Subsequently, the contraption was called the "black box".
When the divers began to examine the "cocoon", they noticed that one end of the cylinder was heating up. There was a concern that this was a time bomb. Therefore, we decided not to disconnect the cocoon from the cable and not to lift it up.
This unexpected and unpleasant fact at the command post of the flotilla decided not to discuss and to suppress the chatter on this score.
Reported to Vladivostok and Moscow. The "organs" were involved in the case. We received an instruction: cut a section of the cable, do not disconnect the "black box" and under no circumstances open it - explosive self-liquidators are possible. In other words - do not poke around in the contraption. Deliver the find to the base …
We began to think what to do with this gift. After reasoning like "blow up the fuck / study in Moscow", the head of the Politburo Andropov decided to open it and study it in Moscow. There the goals of the device and the method of operation were clarified.
The device was made in the form of a steel cylinder over 5 m long and about 1200 mm in diameter. Several tons of electronic equipment for receiving, amplifying and demodulating the signals taken from the cable, as well as a nuclear (plutonium) power source, were mounted in a hermetically sealed pipe. The estimated period of work was tens of years.
The device also included a special inductive sensor that took information directly from the cable. And not only from a conventional cable, but also protected by double armor made of steel tape and steel wire.
The signals from the sensor are pre-amplified by an antenna amplifier, and then sent for demodulation, isolation of separate conversations and recording on tape recorders.
Eavesdropping conversations are recorded by 60 automatically operating tape recorders, which, if there are signals in the cable, turn on, and if they are absent, they stop. Each tape recorder is designed for 150 hours of recording. The total recording volume of overheard conversations is about 3000 hours.
During the next voyage, the American nuclear submarine in the Shelikhov Bay did not find the "cocoon" on the spot. So the Russians guessed everything! But how? It was then that the Americans remembered that in the winter of 1980, outdoor agents had spotted a stranger from the back who had darted into the Soviet embassy. But the outdoor did not wait for his release. Although some Russian in overalls came out of the building …
Over time, this unreported event became a thing of the past and was overshadowed by new ones, you never know what is overlapping in our rapidly flowing life.
A deep diving rig used during Operation Ivy Bells.
The solution to the mysterious event in the Shelikhov Bay, continues A. T. Shtyrov, I found it when I was already retired. I flipped through Bob Woodworth Shroud's book "US Secret Wars 1981-1987" in my spare time and read in it: "The most disturbing message to the FBI was the top-secret Navy report, prepared in 1982 on Operation Ivy Bells." It claimed that in 1981 the Soviet Union had discovered a listening device because an agent had told the Russians about it. The report ruled out coincidence or luck: the Russians knew where and what to look for."
And further: “Admiral Stansfield Turner (who headed the CIA under Carter. - Ed. Ed.) Gave several examples: now the Navy has created a complex apparatus" cocoon "that can be placed over a submarine cable and left to record negotiations for weeks and months, and then pick them up.
Each operation, especially if it is carried out in Soviet territories, must be approved by the president. If even one submarine is hijacked, the consequences will be equal to the incidents with the U-2 aircraft and the spy ship Pueblo combined.
Such operations were the pride of the Navy, which has always been considered a lover of the most daring deeds.
As in other reconnaissance operations, everything was based on the mistakes of the opposite side. The Russians believed that it was impossible to eavesdrop on submarine cables, and therefore used simple codes, and sometimes did without them. And this brought big "bribes" from the negotiations of Soviet officials with each other …"
“The CIA received information that between 1975 and 1980, Soviet intelligence acquired an important agent from the NSA. It turned out to be Robert B. Pelton, who was fired in 1979.
In November 1985, Pelton was arrested. At one of the court hearings, Pelton's lawyer mentioned the operation, code-named Ivy Bells. The judge immediately stopped the interrogation.
Operation Ivy Bells began in the late 1970s, but failed in 1981 …"
“To the east of the Soviet coast, deep at the bottom of the Sea of Okhotsk, the NSA and the US Navy installed one of the most advanced and sophisticated eavesdropping devices from a submarine, with the help of which information was taken from a deep-sea Soviet cable that provides the operation of key Soviet military and other communication lines. The device had a specially enclosed cable device, which allowed electronic methods to penetrate into it, without physical contact with individual wires.
One of the most challenging aspects of Operation Ivy Bells was the removal of the tapes from the device.
A specially equipped submarine was to appear regularly in the Sea of Okhotsk. Military scuba divers used a mini-boat and even an underwater robot to locate the recording "cocoon" and change the tapes, which were then sent to the NSA for decryption. Although the messages were a month old or more old, they contained valuable information.
Of particular interest were reports related to the tests of Soviet ballistic missiles. The missiles were completing their flight in the Kamchatka Peninsula area, and all information about missiles and tests was transmitted over this cable.
The operation in the Sea of Okhotsk was successfully carried out until 1981. But once on a satellite photo, a congestion of Soviet ships was noted just in that section of the Sea of Okhotsk where an American eavesdropping device was attached to the cable.
Later, when an American submarine arrived in the area to replace films, it was greeted by two Soviet submarines. The Americans all this time were unaware of any discovery of Cocoon.
The NSA concluded that the device had fallen to the Russians and that the operation had failed.
The Navy examined all the intelligence it had obtained, and a report was drawn up so secret that access to it was given to a strictly limited number of people. The report denied the possibility of coincidence or luck on the part of the Russians. So, the authors of the report argued, there was a leak of information. Military espionage? Yes. The report concluded that the Russians have their own agent in the spheres of American intelligence.
The reasons for the loss of the recorder in 1981 were a mystery until the information that provided the key to Pelton's exposure in 1985 was obtained. Casey (Director of the CIA. - Author's note) hoped that Pelton would be convicted without revealing the secret of Operation Ivy Bells …
Pelton's trial took place on May 21, 1986. On the first day of the trial, the location of Operation Ivy Bells, the Sea of Okhotsk, was announced.
Pelton was sentenced to three life sentences plus ten years."
BATTLE WITH THE ATOMIC "BABY"
The story of Rear Admiral A. T. Shtyrova continues the former head of the counterintelligence department of the Navy, Rear Admiral Vladimir Petrovich Ivanov:
- I remember that story very well … 32 miles from the western coast of Kamchatka, from a depth of 65 meters, a Soviet cable ship lifted another section of an underwater cable. It was on it that the sailors discovered two strange cylindrical objects the size of a 250-liter barrel. An incomprehensible device tenaciously gripped the armored cable, plunging a steel sting into its sheath. The cylinders were removed and transferred to counterintelligence. In one of the sealed containers, we found 32 very capacious mini-tape recorders.
The other was a miniature nuclear reactor for powering eavesdropping equipment. The reactor was immediately sent to Kazakhstan to the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site. There he was placed in an adit for underground explosions and volunteers called: who would dare to lower the compensating grid and thereby defuse an actually atomic baby bomb. After all, a self-liquidator could be placed on it, which could work if handled carelessly. Two officers volunteered: one is a nuclear specialist, the other is a counterintelligence officer. They entered the adit, melted to a glassy shine by the previous nuclear explosion, and there they managed to safely lower the compensating grid. Both were awarded the Orders of the Red Banner.
Upon the discovery of the eavesdropping device, we prepared a statement for the press and television, but … Gorbachev was preparing for negotiations with Reagan, and the case fell silent.
In the Museum of the National Security Agency there is a Cocoon model, where it is written that this is an outstanding achievement of American scientists, which made it possible to break a number of ciphers of the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union did not recognize the fact of opening the ciphers.
Here's another version: "Red" turned in a defector
In 1985, Colonel Vitaly Yurchenko, First Deputy Head of the American Department of the First Main Directorate of the USSR KGB, shed light on this mysterious story, who voluntarily appeared at the US Embassy in Rome. He was the Russian security officer who received the red-bearded informant in January 1980. Yurchenko did not know his real name. The guest named her only to the leadership, to which he asked to take him. But Yurchenko remembered the signs of the "guest" and described them.
The National Security Agency got to work. It was necessary to find a spy among 580 people who worked and quit in those years. It was like looking for a needle in the hay. Yet the meticulousness of the detectives has borne fruit. By dropping out, we finally got to Pelton. It was not immediately possible to split it. But during the confrontation, Yurchenko immediately recognized the informant.
Ronald flinched and confessed everything when he was promised to replace the electric chair with life. The jury gave him a funny sentence: three life sentences plus another ten years.
It would be naive to believe that the Americans stopped wiretapping - after the loss of the "cocoon", they did it from nuclear submarines. The same "cocoon" was installed by craftsmen from the National Security Agency at the bottom of the Barents Sea. From there they received invaluable information - about the deployment of our submarines off the coast of Sweden, Norway and other NATO states, under the ice of the Arctic, about all nuclear tests on Novaya Zemlya. Although the incident in Shelikhov Bay forced the Soviets to change the codes and encryption of the ongoing negotiations.
According to the former First Deputy Chief of Intelligence of the Pacific Fleet, Rear Admiral Anatoly Tikhonovich Shtyrov, in response to the lies of journalist Bob Woodward, the long-term interception of negotiations by the Americans did not bring significant damage to the security of the USSR. According to him, “the leak was, but not as important as it was presented to the American taxpayers. The fact is that the signal goes through the government communication cable already encrypted, and it can only be decrypted using a special key. If it is not, then it may take a hundred years to decrypt. The Americans managed to remove some information that had a weak degree of protection and was not a state secret. But not more. So the American taxpayers' money was simply thrown into the Sea of Okhotsk."
- Most offensive of all, - Dmitry Ilyich concludes, - that Gorbachev, as the commander-in-chief, was immediately informed about the find in Shelikhov Bay. But the secretary general decided not to take any measures - on the nose was a meeting with "friend" Reagan. A statement on the regular violation of Soviet territorial waters by the American side and the interception of negotiations by the command of the Pacific Fleet had already been prepared, but Moscow did not give the go-ahead for this.
So they would have kept silent about the incident if Bob Woodward of the Washington Post had not rang about it all over the world.