Farewell Dossier and US targeted attack against the Soviet Union
Thomas C Reed, former Secretary of the US Air Force, and member of Reagan's National Security Council relates a magnificent story in "At The Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War"(Ballantine Books, 2004).
He draws on unpublished notes of Dr. Gus Weiss, NSC member in Reagan's first term. Reagan had been told of a KGB agent who had been turned by France into a double agent in a summit meeting with French President Mitterand in Ottawa.
This agent, code named, in a premniscent coincidence, Farewell, had revealed a massive Soviet espionage apparatus that was actively collecting intelligence from US military and industrial organizations.
Colonel Vladimer I. Vetrov, the Farewell agent, provided details of the Soviet's infiltration of US laboratories, factories, and government agencies.
As Reed points out, the arms race between the two countries was being led by the US with the Soviet Union right behind as they engaged in well coordinated intelligence gathering involving hundreds of case officers, agents in place and informants.
He claims that even one of the Soviet Cosmonauts delegated to the Apollo-Soyuz joint space mission was a KGB agent.
The information gleaned from agent Farewell provided an understanding of the Soviet shopping list for technology that proved key to the US response.
Under the direction of Dr. Weiss the US began to systematically poison the information that the KGB gathered.
"Extra ingredients" in the form of buggy software and Trojan horses were added to the software and components that these agents acquired.
"Pseudosoftware disrupted factory output. Flawed but convincing ideas on stealth, attack aircraft, and space defense made their way into Soviet ministires." (p. 268)
The penultimate example that Weiss reveals in his notes shows how the placement of a ticking time bomb in control software was used to disrupt the life blood of the Soviet economy: oil and gas distribution. It is a lesson those responsible for critical infrastructure protection should take to heart.
A KGB agent suposedly penetrated a Canadian control software vendor. Learning of this, the US is alleged to have planted control software at the vendor that contained a Trojan horse, a ticking time bomb.
The buggy software was deployed throughout the Soviet Union's pipeline control system.
The software running the pumps, valves, and turbines was set to disrupt those operations at a future time, when pump speeds, and valve settings would cause pressure fluctuations that would destroy the pipeline.
The ensuing explosion was recorded by US spy satellites. What appeared to be a three kiloton explosion from space was in fact the result of a software time bomb.
UPDATE: Thanks to questions posed by Alex Klimberg, security researcher in Austria, I have determined that these alleged notes from Gus Weiss are the single source for the story of the exploding gas line.
No other evidence has been published that the "3 kiloton" explosion ever occurred. Numerous sources discuss these events but always with the same data provided in the link above at the CIA's archives.
Even William Safire, a contemporty of Weiss' in the Reagan White House, writing in the New York Times, does not add anything.
The economic disruption from the loss of a major pipeline was one claimed result of this cyber attack.
Another effect was that, as the Soviets came to understand what had happened, they lost faith in all of their software and controls as well as other intelligence they had been relying on.
When the US and NATO rolled up the Soviet spy ring in 1984-85 the Soviet Union became blind to further US technological advancement.
They were in the dark about the progress of the Strategic Defense Initiative (StarWars) and had lost faith in their earlier intelligence gathered from a now disrupted source.
The lesson to be learned is that cyber warfare techniques were used successfully in the early 1980's.
The military leaders of the world are now fully aware of the damage that can be done by the surreptitious introduction of bugged code.
Now that the Internet, which was in its infancy in 1982, has connected critical systems to a global network, the possibilities for exploitation are much greater.
Cyber war methodologies focused on similar types of disruption - economic, physical, and psychological, must be developed to achieve "information dominance".
