In October of 1971, in the midst of the Cold War, the nuclear-powered submarine USS Halibut entered heavily guarded Russian waters in the Sea of Okhotsk. Orchestrated by the joint efforts of the CIA, NSA, and U.S. Navy, her mission—code named Operation Ivy Bells—was to find and tap into an undersea communications cable that was connecting a Soviet naval base on the Kamchatka Peninsula with the Pacific Fleet's mainland headquarters in Vladivostok. The cable was a vital pipeline for Soviet communications, and as such represented a tremendous potential intelligence resource for the United States.
In 400 feet of water, the
Halibut's crew found the cable and installed a unique waterproof tap that was designed to detach and remain on the seafloor if the cable was ever hauled up for repairs. Each month for the next decade, the
navy secretly returned to retrieve the recordings and install new tapes—until 1981, when NSA employee Ronald Pelton sold classified information about Operation Ivy Bells to the KGB for $35,000......
In modern cable systems fibre optic cables use photons to transfer data. Modern tapping can be accomplished in one of two ways: either by splicing the cable and splitting the photon stream with a prism, or by bending the cable to a point where it begins to leak data. The documents leaked to
The Guardian by Edward Snowden in 2012 revealed how British and American intelligence agencies had tapped more than 200 of these cables as part of an ongoing mass-collection spying project launched in 2008, completely undermining the privacy of ordinary citizens across the world. The Guardian revealed how British intelligence agency GCHQ was intercepting data at a rate with the potential of collecting the equivalent of "all the information in all the books in the British Library 192 times every 24 hours".
Messages in the Deep - Builtvisible
