CIA plot led to huge blast in Siberian gas pipeline

[Tankanator]

A CIA operation to sabotage Soviet industry by duping Moscow into stealing booby-trapped software was spectacularly successful when it triggered a huge explosion in a Siberian gas pipeline, it emerged yesterday.

Thomas Reed, a former US Air Force secretary who was in Ronald Reagan's National Security Council, discloses what he called just one example of the CIA's "cold-eyed economic warfare" against Moscow in a memoir to be published next month.

Leaked extracts in yesterday's Washington Post describe how the operation caused "the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space" in the summer of 1982.

Mr Reed writes that the software "was programmed to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to pipeline joints and welds".

The CIA learned of Soviet ambitions to steal the software via a French KGB source, Col Vladimir Vetrov, codenamed Farewell. His job was to evaluate the intelligence collected by a shadowy arm of the KGB set up a network of industrial spies to steal technology from the West.

The breakthrough came when Vetrov told the CIA of a specific "shopping list" of software technology that Moscow was seeking to update its pipeline as it sought to export natural gas to Western Europe.

Washington was keen to block the deal and, after securing President Reagan's approval in January 1982, the CIA tricked the Soviet Union into acquiring software with built-in flaws.

"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," Mr Reed writes.

The project exceeded the CIA's wildest dreams. There were no casualties in the explosion, but it was so dramatic that the first reports are said to have stirred alarm in Washington.

The initial reports led to fears that the Soviets had launched a missile from a place where rockets were not known to be based, or even had detonated "a small nuclear device", Mr Reed writes in his book.

While some of the details of the CIA's counter-offensive have emerged before, the sabotage of the gas pipeline has remained a secret until now. Mr Reed told the Post he had CIA approval to make the disclosures.

Mr Vetrov's spying was discovered by the KGB and he was executed in 1983.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldn ... eline.html