Soviets Burned By CIA Hackers?

When the Reagan White House discovered that the USSR was stealing American technology, it planted a Trojan horse in a chip that controlled pipelines. An author says the hack caused a huge explosion, but former KGB members deny they were duped. By Steve Kettmann.

The author of a new book detailing a plan to use a Trojan horse embedded in stolen software to wage economic war against the Soviet Union fired back Thursday at charges the book's revelations are "rubbish."

Thomas C. Reed, a former secretary of the Air Force and special assistant to President Reagan, detailed the stunning story in At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War.

According to Reed, the Reagan administration faced a choice in 1981 when it "gained access to a KGB agent in their technical intelligence directorate" and discovered that Soviet theft of American technology had been "massive."

"In essence, the Pentagon had been in an arms race with itself," Reed said in a phone interview.

Rather than arrest everyone they could to try to close the operation down and halt further espionage, CIA director William Casey and National Security Council staffer Gus Weiss cooked up a better plan: They turned into hackers.

"(Soviet agents) stole stuff, and we knew what they were going to steal," Reed said. "Every microchip they stole would run fine for 10 million cycles, and then it would go into some other mode. It wouldn't break down, it would start delivering false signals and go to a different logic."

The most spectacular result of this hacking, according to Reed, was a massive explosion during the summer of 1982 in the controversial pipeline delivering Siberian natural gas to Western Europe.

Soviet spies stole software needed to operate the pipeline, not knowing that "it had a few lines of software added that constituted a Trojan horse," said Reed. "They checked it out, it looked fine, and ran just fine for a few months. But the Trojan horse was programmed to let it run for four or five months and then the pumps and compressors are told, 'Today is the day we are going to run a pressure test at some significantly increased pressure.'"

He continued: "We expected that the pipeline would spring leaks all the way from Siberia to Germany, but that wasn't what happened. Instead the welds all blew apart. It was a huge explosion. The Air Force thought it was a 3-kiloton blast."

Former KGB agent Vasily Pchelintsev, who was reportedly head of the KGB office in the area of the 1982 blast, told the English-language Moscow Times in a recent interview that Reed's account was inaccurate. "What the Americans have written is rubbish," the former agent said.

Pchelintsev said the only explosion that occurred in Siberia that year came in April, not during the summer, and was near the city of Tobolsk in the Tyumen region. A government investigation blamed the explosion -- which was not disclosed in public until after Reed's book -- on construction violations, Pchelintsev said.

The former KGB agent added that no one was killed in the explosion, the damage was repaired within one day and the pipeline in question supplied gas locally, to the city of Chelyabinsk, not to Western Europe along the Urengoi-Uzhgorod pipeline.

"I have the greatest respect for Russian old-timers trying to piece together the shards of history," Reed responded. "I do not know Vasily Pchelintsev, and his use of the word 'rubbish' is a little strong, but if he really was there 25 years ago, in Tyumen, he may have access to some pieces of the story.

"On the other hand, the KGB is hardly a repository of factual reporting, and the findings of any 'government commission' from the Soviet era should be discarded prima-facie. Protection of 'state secrets' was their mission, not truth or accuracy."

Reed acknowledged one mistake. Another former KGB agent pointed out that the technology-stealing "Directorate T" was set up in 1918, not 1970, a point Reed conceded. Lenin, he said, talked of the need to pursue Western technology "with both hands."

Reed said the details of his account had been thoroughly vetted by the CIA and approved for publication. He said several former top Reagan officials had confirmed the reliability of Weiss, his source on the story. Weiss died in November 2003.

"Weiss was awarded the Intelligence Medal of Merit by the U.S. government, the French Legion of Honor by that nation's government," Reed said. "Weiss published the Farewell Dossier story within channels, specifically the CIA's Studies in Intelligence in 1996. In 2000, an expanded version was published in the Journal of U.S. Intelligence Studies. During the years that followed there was every opportunity for the intelligence community to take issue with his account. To my knowledge, no one did."

Reed only learned of the pipeline explosion in recent years. At the time, he was one of many White House officials scrambling to figure out what had caused the massive explosion.

"Gus Weiss came down the hall to tell me and others, 'Don’t worry about it,'" Reed recalled. "I asked why. He said, 'Some things in the White House you don't ask why.'"