February 26, 2025 • 31 mins
Ben Taub is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and staff writer at The New Yorker. His piece, “Russia’s Espionage War in the Arctic,” covers tensions at the Russian border with Norway, an area Russia uses as a testing ground for future intelligence operations. Taub sits down with Oz to discuss the technology being used for survival and for espionage, as the war in Ukraine has escalated tensions with NATO.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Thanks for tuney into Tech Stuff. If you don't recognize
my voice, my name is Oz Valoshin, and I'm here
because the inimitable Jonathan Strickland has passed the baton to
Cara Price and myself to host Tech Stuff. The show
will remain your home for all things tech, and all
the old episodes will remain available in this feed. Welcome
(00:20):
to Tech Stuff. This is the story, and this week
our guest is the investigative journalist Ben Taub. Every Wednesday
we bring you an in depth interview with someone who
has a front row seat to the most fascinating things
happening at tech. Ben Taube, who writes for The New
Yorker and has won the Pulitzer and two National Magazine Awards,
(00:42):
has found himself up close in a tech battle for
world supremacy, not really by design, but by following a
good story. For Ben, it all started on the singing
show The Voice No Really. Ben was an undergrad at Princeton,
took a little time off to audition for The Voice
and stashed away the stipend provided to performers on the
(01:02):
show to fund his first foray into international journalism, traveling
to the Turkish Syrian border, which gave him the bug
not just for reporting, but reporting on the periphery of
international conflict. After reporting in Syria and Chad, he found
himself drawn to the periphery of a conflict animated by
(01:22):
the fear of the twentieth century's most fearsome technological innovation,
the nuclear bomb. Chasing that story took Ben to one
of the most remote and coldest places on Earth, the
Norway Russian border, where a complex spy game is underway.
He saw for himself up close gadgetary and systems that
(01:42):
are almost blindingly high tech, but also tech as simple
as a set of binoculars or a snowshoe, a reminder
that sometimes the best tech for the job might have
been around for centuries. Ben spent two years reporting, mostly
from a place called Chukenis, a Norwiedi in town of
a few thousand people, just a couple of miles from
(02:03):
the Russian border, where nuclear tentions are a factive life.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
So right after Russia invaded Ukraine, I went up to
northern Norway to join NATO military exercise called Cold Response
that happens regularly just to try to understand what are
the stakes up here, and I was being driven around
by a Norwegian Army spokesman and we stopped at a
gas station in the middle of nowhere and he said, oh,
you should talk to that guy.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
He's the border.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Commander and it's filling up his gas like on the
next one over. So I went up to him and said,
I hear you're the border commander and he said, oh, yeah, yeah.
And I was like, well, Russia just invaded Ukraine like
three weeks ago. Are you concerned about anything happening up there?
And he's like no, Why are you so certain? And
he said, when is your peace coming on? I don't know,
like a year or longer. And he said, well, if
it's that long. The truth is that we can see
(02:49):
the activity on the other side, and we know who
our counterparts are, and we've seen them for a long time.
We see them train, we see them do everything, and
they all got deployed down to Ukraine in the all
dead It's like eighty percent of them died in the
first three weeks of the war, so there's no one
to invade. They have all the nuclear stuff, but like
the actual ground forces on the other side of the
(03:10):
border basically don't exist.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Right now. If you've been to some extraordinary places, describe chirkinness.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
So Chickinus is a small town on the Norwegian Russian border,
high up in the Arctic, about as high north as
you can get in continental Europe, and yet it's weirdly accessible.
You can fly there in two and a half hours
from Oslo, and as there's a sort of a daily flight,
and it's subject to the strangeness of its position, both
in terms of like geopolitics and in terms of geography.
(03:40):
So in the winter, like you don't see the sun
for two full months, it never rises. You do see
daylight every day, but it's like a livid blue twilight.
So you might have around the winter solstice you might
have about two hours of like blue gray where you
can see from around ten am to noon, and then
it's black on either side.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
There during this time.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Yeah, I stayed the whole time because I thought it
was important. Basically, I went on and off for two years,
and I knew I wanted to set it as a
counter intelligence story. And the whole point of counter intelligence
work is that you can't see what's around you, even
if you know that it's there. And that's what it's
like in Shirkiness, between sort of mid November and mid January,
you don't see the sun and most of the time
it's pitch black, and so everyone's sort of eyeing each
(04:25):
other and no one really can tell what's going on physically,
as well as what's underlying everyone's motivations and behaviors. So
I thought that was a good place to set a
counter intelligence story because it's so ambiguous and strange, and
to understand the place you have to experience I think
a proper polar winter, because you can't really feel what
it's like to live through that place unless you go
(04:48):
through the vitamin D deficiencies and the depressive qualities of
like not seeing sun for two months.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
There's a reason they call it Nordic noir. But I
loved that one of the first sentences in your piece,
which was to survive the months of snow and ice
predative resort to camouflage and deception. But so do their
prey line.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
It's true the wildlife up there behaves the same way
as the people.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
And then you had this mission impossible esque experience in
a Navy plane. Please tell me about that.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Sure, So the reason that this place is so geopolitically
significant is because Russia has a massive coastline in the Arctic,
but it's not really useful most of the time because
everything east of Mirmansk freezes in winter, and so it's
a source of tremendous frustration for the Russians that they
have to keep their nuclear submarine force within listening range
(05:41):
of NATO territory, which is Norway, and so in order
to get into the North Atlantic, those submarines have to
traverse along the northern Norwegian coastline through the Barren Sea.
The challenge for the Russians is that they're extremely exposed
during that transit because the Barren Sea is very shallow,
which means that you can track submarines from the sky,
can't dive, and they can't hide anywhere. And so there's
(06:03):
an ongoing, constant sort of cat and mouse game between
Russian submarines and NATO warships and spyplanes in the Arctic.
It's happening all the time. It's just a game of
look at me, looking at you. We are here, we
have the right to do this. It's international waters, but
it's pretty uncomfortable for you. And everyone's playing the same
thing against everyone else, So I joined US Navy pight spyplane,
(06:27):
which is a maritime.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
Patrol aircraft nicknamed the Poseidon. Right, yes, the.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
Paight Poseidon, and the pe Poseidon is basically the most
evanced submarine hunting aircraft in the world. And you fly
over suspected submarine targets and they drop hundreds of SONA
buoys into the water, and then to get the position
of a submarine, you need to know the temperature and
the salinity of the water column because the speed of
(06:53):
sound travels differently in saltier water or colder water. And
then once they know that, they drop hundreds of others
that then sort of fall out a pre programmed to
array at different depths and build out a three D
sound map of everything below the surface. And so that's
how you basically try submarines as they go under. The submarines, meanwhile,
(07:13):
are constantly sort of hunting for thermoclines when the water
column has anomalous temperatures for all kinds of strange geological reasons,
and that way they can sort of mask their position.
But it's tricky when the water is quite shallow. So
on this particular flight, the US Navy was gathering intelligence
on Russian surface vessels, auxiliary vessels for the military, a
couple of warships, a couple of like you know, f
(07:36):
SB tugboats and things that have spy equipment on board,
and so they would fly overhead by about a thousand
feet and you know, we were flying in the dead
of night, but this was in polar summer, so everyone
can see everything. Oh twenty four hours sun. Now how
far above these ships are you? So we flew as
low as three hundred feet?
Speaker 1 (07:54):
Was that terrifying? It was, Well, there's a.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
Moment where the mission commander, who's like a twenty s
year old intelligence officer, it says to me, or put
on a life jacket, because every time we go below
five hundred feet we have to put on life jackets.
Like that's not going to help. We're flying a place.
The p Posidon is the same airframe as a Boeing
seven thirty seven. We're flying five hundred miles an hour,
three hundred feet off the water and a massive plane
and then doing bank turns like chasing these ships and
(08:19):
doing flybys and sort of a show of force, Like
a life jack is not going to help in that
circumstance and then sort of long afterwards I thought about it,
and this is speculation, but my belief is that it's
probably so they can find.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
The bies if there is a crash.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
So anyway, we were flying past all these ships and
there was like a British warship nearby and a Norwegian
warship nearby, and they were being tailed by a Russian warship.
And it just happens every day. So meanwhile, Chicken is
the air traffic controllers can hear this contact between the
Americans and the Russians. There's standard protocols since the Cold War.
So the Americans would call a Zemia Zemlia, Zemlia, Delta
(08:54):
echo Ivory Eagle, saying to the Russian control tower, we
are the American aircraft. And then the Russians reply, you know,
Delta echo Ivory eaglesamily as Emily Azamia, and it's just
acknowledging it is us.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
We're here. We're not friends, but nor are we here
to attack.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
Exactly like we're gonna do our job, you're gonna do yours.
You're gonna hate us doing our job, We're gonna hate
you doing yours. And that's how things are always done.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
Tech stuff was littered, often literally throughout the piece, or
sometimes literally should say, I want to start with some
of the most mundane tech elements, though, which is how
do people, and specifically soldiers survive this environment.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
So soldiers live out in these cabins, remote military cabins,
you know, an hour and a half by snowmobile from
the town, so if something happens in a white out,
you basically need to carry on your back enough to
survive in minus forty in a snowstorm for up to
forty eight hours.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
So they do.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
They go in pairs on their patrols. They walk usually
about ten, ten to eighteen kilometers per patrol between remote
military cabins and sort of every single day, the entire
length of the Russian Norwegian border is walked on the
Norwegian side.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Wow, it's one.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Hundred and ninety eight kilometers, so it's not terribly long.
It's not like the finished one, but they split it
up and every single inch of it is walked. And
part of that in the winter is that you can
see from their own tracks if anything has moved across
those tracks. And in the summer they take dogs to
sniff if anything has crossed but in the winter, when
it's really really rough, often you lose your own tracks
(10:30):
if it's been blowed over by the previous day.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
So the patrols in it are a form of data collection,
right looking at the peple's footprints, sniffing for other people scent,
and of course the Poseidon flight was also a data
collection exercise. Ultimately, what are some of the other kind
of physical artifacts or manifestations of data collection that you.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
Saw when you get to one of these remote military cabins.
Usually the stuff out there is so simple. They'll have
binoculars on a table or maybe a telescope like a said,
something you could buy in a shop, And when it's
really wide out conditions, it's some of these guys would
just open the windows stick their head out because they
could hear.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
Better than they could see. Wow.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
But that's the really remote stuff. And then they have
these like proper stations that have all kinds of proper equipment.
Some of that was classified, but it's the kind of
thing that I sort of understood. Can see through darkness,
can see through clouds, can see through rain, and build
out a picture presumably involving heat signatures, so you don't
(11:29):
need to actually physically be able to see. So on
the Russian side of the border, there are no patrols. Really,
there's very few. They don't walk it. I never saw
any Russians on patrol. So on the Norwegian side, any
civilian has the right to roam to any part of Norway,
including up to the border, like literally right next to it.
On the Russian side, it's a closed military zone. It's
(11:50):
where they keep a lot of their nuclear submarines of course,
but also land based nuclear weapons storage facilities. It's one
of the most militarized places on the planet. So there
are no russ civilians who can walk in the border
area at all. So then it's curious that in an
area that has no civilians, if you drive along the
border road on the Norwegian side, you'll often have your
cell phone switch to the Russian network.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
They have really powerful like towers.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
That traverse the river to basically see I think, who's
on the other side, because your phone will switch, your
SIM card switches, even as I had my phone in
airplane mode specifically to avoid this, and the clock would
change to the Russian time zone even within it's an
airplane mode. I don't really understand the technicalities of that,
but that was definitely a form of collection on the
other side.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
After the break, we'll have more from Ben tow about
things heating up in the Northern Fleet, including some whale
based counter intelligence. Stay with us. There's been a lot
about fishing boats in the press recently as vessels of
(12:57):
war in terms of dragging their anchors through I portant cables.
But the fishing boats hanging out around Chirkenis, these Russian
fishing boats may have been for surveillance purposes.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
Right, Yeah, so they are fishing boats. They fish, but
sometimes they have dual use equipment on board. There have
been instances where there was a radio hidden in a
compartment on one of the fishing boats that had access
to Russian military frequencies. But that doesn't mean it's a
spy boat, and it doesn't mean that anyone on board
(13:28):
is actually working for the Russian security services. There are
innocent explanations, and that's the tricky thing about all of it.
I was like, well, what's an example of an innocent explanation. Well,
if they're fishing in the waters near Nova'zemia, which has
a ton of nuclear testing and other activities in that
military testing as well. They might need to be able
to access military frequencies so they can get warnings and such.
(13:50):
The equipment itself isn't proof, but you get enough materials
at a certain point as things start looking really strange.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
And there are these boat fishing boats are allowed to
walk in the Churkenni's harbor.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Yeah, yeah, so Russian fishing boats can come to Chickeness.
The fishermen walk around town. They go to the pub,
the one pub, which is called Pub one. There's Johnny's
lunch bar where you have lunch served by Johnny. There's
a Chinese place called Shanghai, and a type place called Bangkok.
Oh in a central cafe called the Central Cafe.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
So you're able to find your way around. It's not
too hard. But yeah, I just loved it there.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
I loved it there, and I thought that it was
a place where the story is the ambiguities. It's something
that you have to sit with and try to figure
out slowly, and everything's opaque. And also, honestly, it took
a long time to get the sort of main characters.
The head of counter intelligence for the region, a guy
named Johann Rouaznez, Johann suspects that the FSB controls a
(14:49):
lot of the crew going in on those fishing boats,
and a lot of fishing captains and fishermen have backgrounds
of being sailors with the Northern Fleet and former military officers,
some of them maybe not former. Sometimes it's strange they
have these sailor passports which are handwritten, and you know,
(15:11):
he's like, why is everyone called Sergei Ivanov on this boat?
Speaker 1 (15:14):
Right?
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Are they really just fishing? And you know, it's a
real concern for the Norwegian security services that after the
Ukraine War kicked off suddenly instead of being a lot
of old dudes who look like they fish, there's a
lot of young dudes who are doing pull ups in
the harbor and sometimes strolling around town and uniforms that
looked like military uniforms.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
Did follow me? Of the whale come up and you're
reporting my favorite? Okay, so do you want to describe
to everyone who've followed me? Of the whale is a
beautiful white whale, beluga whale, bluego whale who turned up
in a Norwegian harbor wearing a headpiece which looked to
(15:55):
be like a go pro camera and there was some
confusionist to them came from, but the consensus was Valdemir
was a spy whale who unfortunately was recently found dead. Yeah,
fate of many spies.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
And you know I heard that Basically one theory was
that Vladimir had actually been sort of they strapped a
GoPro on him or harness on him, essentially as a
massive sy op that like, people would become obsessed with
this and it would distract from other things.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
It certainly worked for me well.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
But then it turns out that they actually do train
beluga whales, but it's not so much to go into
Norway and spy on Norwegian facilities. It's to protect the
Northern Fleet. So these journalists at the Baron's Observer, which
is this fabulous tiny newspaper in Tyurcinus, two Norwegian guys
and three Russian dissidents, they worked out and mapped through
(16:47):
satellite images that near Severmorsk, where there's a big Northern
Fleet submarine base, there are these pens where there are
bluga whales that you can see on Google Maps. In them,
I can show you there are bluga whales in these
pens and they are trained to spy on enemy submarines
that might enter the call of Fjord. It's a counterintelligence operation.
So essentially you have these wheels like patrolling the fjord,
(17:10):
and they've been trained essentially that if they encounter something
anomalous and metal that they then come back and say
like essentially like flat flat flap, give me a camera.
Then they go back and do it again with a
camera on them, and then the footage is reviewed. But
Vladimir escaped, so he's more of a defector than a spy.
And he was found dead, and initially there was reporting
(17:30):
that there was a bullet in his body. It was
a huge sort of scandal and concern, but it turns
out he died by eating a stick.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
Oh. Part of what you report about is two sides
trying to get as much information as they can on
each other. But the other part is two sides trying
to hurt each other, or at least one side trying
to hurt the other. In the Russian case, this include
everything from jamming the GPS system of the local airport
(17:58):
which almost brought a plane down as far as I understand,
to kind of digitally enable spear phishing and influence operations.
So talk about some of the kind of technological ways
in which Russia has tried to disturb life in the
Chickenis region.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
Yeah, they really kind of treat Chickiness as a kind
of laboratory. It's this remote, isolated place, so essentially they
use it as a kind of laboratory for various intelligence
operations to see what's the sort of right alchemy of
messing with the locals before something breaks. So you have
psychological and influence operations, you have a conscription of locals,
and exploitation for espionage purposes. You also have GPS jamming,
(18:39):
as you mentioned in that case, it began in twenty seventeen.
The Russians were pissed about a NATO exercise elsewhere in
Norway and started jamming GPS. The GPS jamming didn't affect
the exercise at all, it was hundreds of miles away,
but it did mean that for about two hundred to
two hundred and fifty miles from the border, the area
around Chickiness, you couldn't have GPS on the ground level.
(19:00):
It works as a vector, so if you're on the
other side of a mountain, you're not affected. You can
drive on Google Maps, but if you're within the vector,
and particularly in a plane.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
You lose your position.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
The problem is that the only hospital for about five
hundred miles is in Checkiness, So they have an air
ambulance that goes out to these remote, tiny airfields and
the air ambulance and some of these airfields don't have
old school navigational equipment. So if they're going to a
place that's been reliant on GPS, because that's how things
are done now already in the Arctic, because it's close
to the polls, GPS signals are quite weak and to
(19:34):
jam them is very, very straightforward. There's an electronic warfare
system in the mountains near Pachenga on the Russian side.
Then they just beam it and they do it every day.
Now it's pretty much every day, completely unpredictable, but every
single day there's jamming. And that's why the air ambulance
nearly crashed once in Chirckiness, because it sets off all
(19:54):
these alarms in the cockpit.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
So it's incredibly distracting to fly.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
So even if you can see and know your position,
you you are so distracted by the alarms going off
constantly that you kind of, you know, might forget to
put down the flaps. Even I experienced it driving around
in the car and lost my position fortually. Yeah, yeah,
because I was on the mountains, just facing Russia and
while I was driving along the river, and I didn't
know about GPS jamming at that point. It was the
next day that I met with Johann for the first
(20:19):
time and he told me about this, and I just like,
my phone's not working, the car is not working. But
you know, there's like not that many roads out there,
so I'll find my way back other technical ones.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
The Globus, Oh, yes, of course. Yeah. Globus is this enormous,
essentially data collection facility who's stated mission is to monitor
space junk. But I read in your story that a
Suddain point the cover blew off and the antenna wasn't
actually pointing to the space after all.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
Yeah, yeah, I was pointing directly at the Northern Fleet.
So yeah, Globus is actually the most advanced radar station
in the world. They have a series of ones iterations
that have been built over the past sixty years. Globe
is one two end three in the latest. It's built
by the Americans but operated by the Norwegian Intelligence Service.
Essentially so that the Norwegians can say to their population, we.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
Don't have any American military installations on our soil.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
Yeah, this is not we don't share data in real
time with the American Okay. But it's in a small
fishing village called Varda, and it's on a tiny island
the easternmost point of Norway. It's north of Chickenus, across
the fjord, like looking at Russia. Basically this tiny place.
It's so far east that you're actually like, you're east
of his stumble. You don't think of Norway A's as
east of his stumble, but it's east of his stumble.
(21:32):
It's used to Saint Petersburg. Anywhere that you're in the town.
You can see these huge radar balls that dominate the skyline.
But all the locals just pretend they're not there, and
a half of them have family members who work there,
whether as intelligence officers or as like cleaning staff.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
We'll be back after a short break with more from
Ben Taub about how the twentieth century's most terrifying tech
hangs over everything in the op Stay with us. You
know you mentioned that none of this would be such
a big problem if you know, Russian submarines had access
(22:13):
to the Atlantic from a different port, which of course
brings me to the big tech kahuna hanging over this
whole story, which is a nuclear bomb. Yeah, arguably the
greatest and most terrifying technological innovation of the twentieth century.
And as far as I understand, really the reason why
(22:37):
this place that you went is such a flashpoint.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
Yeah, at the end of the day, this place matters
in the event of escalations and everything that's done by
the Russian security services, all the mapping of the infrastructure,
of the influence operations on the locals is with an.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
Eye to.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Maintaining or creating the ability to take over Northern not
because they want it like they want Ukraine, but to
build out a buffer zone to protect the Northern Fleet,
to maintain the ability to fire nuclear weapons from submarines
in the event of all that nuclear war. So the
delicate cat and maskt all all the paight poseidons, all
(23:17):
the intel collection, all the on the Russian side, like
mapping out the infrastructure of a tiny Arctic village, is
just about can we take over northern Norway in a
flash to build out a buffer to feel more confident
that we don't need to find nuclear weapons if we
get into a real conflict with the West. So you
feel the war in Ukraine in Chirkiness. Like there's a
(23:37):
tiny Russian consulate in Chirkiness, there's a lot of Russian
dissidents in Ukrainian refugees living in Chirkiness. There's Ukrainian flags
in the center of town, and like protesting the Russian
consulate in front of you. So you really do feel
you feel the Ukraine War in Chirkiness because ultimately, escalation
anywhere in the Baltics, in Poland, in Ukraine is always
(24:00):
about turning up the temperature on nuclear threats.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
And how much of the nuclear infrastructure, nuclear submarines, nuclear
weapon delivery system in this area is holdover from Soviet
Union times, and how much of it is new systems
that are being developed and invested in and researched in
this area.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
With the invasion of Ukraine, it became sort of broadly
clear to the world that the Russian military is using
all kinds of old Soviet garbage and the personnel, the
officers are bad and everything sucks, right, But that is
not true of the Northern Fleet. Putin has invested so
deeply in the nuclear submarine capacity.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
This is state of the art.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
In the nineties, the Northern Fleet was in absolute disarray,
but in the early two thousands putin really really prioritized
as a strategic matter the development of proper nuclear submarines.
And those subs are quiet, they're fast, they're state of
the art, and the weapons systems on board are thought
to be the same, so there is no obvious asymmetries
(25:09):
that I'm aware of.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
So more than Ukraine, this is the existential area for
Russian self defense. That's exactly right.
Speaker 2 (25:17):
The Cola Peninsula is the existential area because this is
their last resort without nuclear weapons. Russia's economy is that
of Italy with nuclear weapons. You know, they have their
way in the world. Those subs are highly capable, and
they're also investing a ton in development systems for delivery
of nuclear weapons. So the Varda Globus station is really
(25:40):
fundamentally about the first layer of missile defense. So the
Russians have threatened to bomb Varda a couple of times.
They've flown jets, fighter jets at it in strike formation
and then peeled off just before they crossed international waters
and you wouldn't see this if you're a civilian. But
like the VARDA station is monitoring everything and they see
these jets flying at them to bomb them, and the
real millions of globis it has a technical matter and
(26:02):
the reason it's the most advanced to globalists three radar
station in the world is that it has the ability
I was told to distinguish. When you're launching nuclear weapons
out of a submarine or aircraft or other place, there's
multiple ballistic missiles going off at once, each of which
has several nuclear warheads, each of which can go to
a different target. So you're talking about, you know, a
(26:23):
single nuclear submarine can hit eighty targets or one hundred
targets or something and destroy an entire nation. So the
critical thing about VARD station the globis is that it
can distinguish which ones have nuclear warheads on board and
which ones are empty ballistic missiles as a distraction. But
layer one is can you detect which ones to prioritize,
because if you're dealing with one hundred missiles flying at
(26:45):
you at once, you need to know which ones to
really really worry about. And that's what that is all about.
And that's why the Russians hate it so much.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
Comes back to the beginning of your story in that
idea of camouflage.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
Yeah, it's all about detection, and most of it doesn't
happen in the visual spectrum. Everything's electro magnetic, and like
everything's done in ways that we cannot physically see. That's
why again, like you know, you see some equipment on
a watch tower or in the p eight and as
a lay person, I don't know what it is. But
also it would be impossible to explain even if I
didn't know what it was, because it's like it's the
(27:17):
kind of thing that really really really really matters to
the militaries, but doesn't really matter to everyday life.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
You described chickiness as as a crucible or a testing ground.
Have you seen any of the technologies or tactics that
have been deployed.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
Yeah, so it is. It's basically the test ground for
things that are then replicated elsewhere at scale. So the
GPS jamming, now it's ubiquitous. There's a whole sort of
host of close calls in the Baltics with pilots losing
the GPS positions starting again last fall. But again this
has been tested in Chickeness for many, many years before,
so it's really become this, as you said, a crucible,
(27:57):
a place where you test the limits of what you
can get away with and what a Western democracy and
society will tolerate, how it will try to explain or
not explain things to its population, and then where the
sort of limits are in terms of sort of what
is a military operation and what's merely a phenomenon that's
(28:18):
left unexplained.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
What do you think might happen next? It's tricky to know,
of course.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
Johann described to me the goal of all of these
operations in Shickinness as preparations for war. That doesn't mean
that war will ever happen, or that anyone wants that
war to happen. But if you're an FSB officer or
a GRU officer stationed in the Colo Peninsula and your
(28:47):
job is to prepare a war plan in case we
do need one, then you need to send people in
and map all the infrastructure in Shackiness and know exactly
what to hit and exactly how so that you do
have a plan for a war that you don't want
to ever get the order to pursue. And I think
most people hear the phrase preparations for war, they think
that that's backed by an intention for war. But there's
(29:10):
a difference, a major difference between preparations and intentions.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
As a closing thought, I think one of the most
striking lines on your whole piece was when one of
the sources said to you, the Russians ruined a great
spy game with their war in Ukraine. What does that mean?
Speaker 2 (29:29):
He and I talked a lot about that line, because
he didn't want to be flippant about the stakes in
Ukraine and suggesting that that that it was ever for fun.
But there is an element of respect among intelligence officers
where you unravel the other operation and you think, well done,
that was a good one.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
What are we missing?
Speaker 2 (29:52):
Especially in his job, in his role, he's not running
offensive operations against the Russians, He's trying to figure out
what are they doing in Norway to us. So like
there's a respect among spies for job well done, game
well played. We know you're doing this to us, We're
going to do the same to you. We're going to
try to catch who you've sent into our territory and
(30:13):
try to flip them right back on you. You described
it to me as a kind of It's like playing chess,
but you don't know what the rules are, where any
of the pieces are going, because it's changing constantly, and
suddenly it became about something else. When the war in
Ukraine kicked off, it was about aggression, it was about
planning for war, and it was about hurting people and
(30:37):
creating the circumstances where things can go really poorly, really fast.
One of his favorite lines, which I quite enjoyed, was
that kind of intelligence is like playing tennis and you
see a ball flying towards you, and you're about to
smash it, and then you just realize that it's an
orange and so everything you can look so closely something
(31:00):
and then only in the last second discover that everything
you thought is completely wrong.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
Bentaalb, thank you, Thank you us. That's it for this
edition of Tech Stuff. I'm os Voloshin and this episode
was produced by Eliza Dennis, Victoria Dominguez and Lizzie Jacobs.
It was executive produced by me Kara Price and Kate
Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Novelle for iHeart Podcasts. We've
(31:26):
had engineering help from Beheth Fraser and City Box. Jack
Insley mixed this episode, and Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song.
Join us on Friday for a special episode with a
familiar voice, Jonathan Strickland. Please rate, review, and reach out
to us at tech Stuff Podcast at gmail dot com.
(31:47):
We want to hear from them
Thanks for tuney into Tech Stuff. If you don't recognize
my voice, my name is Oz Valoshin, and I'm here
because the inimitable Jonathan Strickland has passed the baton to
Cara Price and myself to host Tech Stuff. The show
will remain your home for all things tech, and all
the old episodes will remain available in this feed. Welcome
(00:20):
to Tech Stuff. This is the story, and this week
our guest is the investigative journalist Ben Taub. Every Wednesday
we bring you an in depth interview with someone who
has a front row seat to the most fascinating things
happening at tech. Ben Taube, who writes for The New
Yorker and has won the Pulitzer and two National Magazine Awards,
(00:42):
has found himself up close in a tech battle for
world supremacy, not really by design, but by following a
good story. For Ben, it all started on the singing
show The Voice No Really. Ben was an undergrad at Princeton,
took a little time off to audition for The Voice
and stashed away the stipend provided to performers on the
(01:02):
show to fund his first foray into international journalism, traveling
to the Turkish Syrian border, which gave him the bug
not just for reporting, but reporting on the periphery of
international conflict. After reporting in Syria and Chad, he found
himself drawn to the periphery of a conflict animated by
(01:22):
the fear of the twentieth century's most fearsome technological innovation,
the nuclear bomb. Chasing that story took Ben to one
of the most remote and coldest places on Earth, the
Norway Russian border, where a complex spy game is underway.
He saw for himself up close gadgetary and systems that
(01:42):
are almost blindingly high tech, but also tech as simple
as a set of binoculars or a snowshoe, a reminder
that sometimes the best tech for the job might have
been around for centuries. Ben spent two years reporting, mostly
from a place called Chukenis, a Norwiedi in town of
a few thousand people, just a couple of miles from
(02:03):
the Russian border, where nuclear tentions are a factive life.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
So right after Russia invaded Ukraine, I went up to
northern Norway to join NATO military exercise called Cold Response
that happens regularly just to try to understand what are
the stakes up here, and I was being driven around
by a Norwegian Army spokesman and we stopped at a
gas station in the middle of nowhere and he said, oh,
you should talk to that guy.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
He's the border.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Commander and it's filling up his gas like on the
next one over. So I went up to him and said,
I hear you're the border commander and he said, oh, yeah, yeah.
And I was like, well, Russia just invaded Ukraine like
three weeks ago. Are you concerned about anything happening up there?
And he's like no, Why are you so certain? And
he said, when is your peace coming on? I don't know,
like a year or longer. And he said, well, if
it's that long. The truth is that we can see
(02:49):
the activity on the other side, and we know who
our counterparts are, and we've seen them for a long time.
We see them train, we see them do everything, and
they all got deployed down to Ukraine in the all
dead It's like eighty percent of them died in the
first three weeks of the war, so there's no one
to invade. They have all the nuclear stuff, but like
the actual ground forces on the other side of the
(03:10):
border basically don't exist.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Right now. If you've been to some extraordinary places, describe chirkinness.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
So Chickinus is a small town on the Norwegian Russian border,
high up in the Arctic, about as high north as
you can get in continental Europe, and yet it's weirdly accessible.
You can fly there in two and a half hours
from Oslo, and as there's a sort of a daily flight,
and it's subject to the strangeness of its position, both
in terms of like geopolitics and in terms of geography.
(03:40):
So in the winter, like you don't see the sun
for two full months, it never rises. You do see
daylight every day, but it's like a livid blue twilight.
So you might have around the winter solstice you might
have about two hours of like blue gray where you
can see from around ten am to noon, and then
it's black on either side.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
There during this time.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Yeah, I stayed the whole time because I thought it
was important. Basically, I went on and off for two years,
and I knew I wanted to set it as a
counter intelligence story. And the whole point of counter intelligence
work is that you can't see what's around you, even
if you know that it's there. And that's what it's
like in Shirkiness, between sort of mid November and mid January,
you don't see the sun and most of the time
it's pitch black, and so everyone's sort of eyeing each
(04:25):
other and no one really can tell what's going on physically,
as well as what's underlying everyone's motivations and behaviors. So
I thought that was a good place to set a
counter intelligence story because it's so ambiguous and strange, and
to understand the place you have to experience I think
a proper polar winter, because you can't really feel what
it's like to live through that place unless you go
(04:48):
through the vitamin D deficiencies and the depressive qualities of
like not seeing sun for two months.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
There's a reason they call it Nordic noir. But I
loved that one of the first sentences in your piece,
which was to survive the months of snow and ice
predative resort to camouflage and deception. But so do their
prey line.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
It's true the wildlife up there behaves the same way
as the people.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
And then you had this mission impossible esque experience in
a Navy plane. Please tell me about that.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Sure, So the reason that this place is so geopolitically
significant is because Russia has a massive coastline in the Arctic,
but it's not really useful most of the time because
everything east of Mirmansk freezes in winter, and so it's
a source of tremendous frustration for the Russians that they
have to keep their nuclear submarine force within listening range
(05:41):
of NATO territory, which is Norway, and so in order
to get into the North Atlantic, those submarines have to
traverse along the northern Norwegian coastline through the Barren Sea.
The challenge for the Russians is that they're extremely exposed
during that transit because the Barren Sea is very shallow,
which means that you can track submarines from the sky,
can't dive, and they can't hide anywhere. And so there's
(06:03):
an ongoing, constant sort of cat and mouse game between
Russian submarines and NATO warships and spyplanes in the Arctic.
It's happening all the time. It's just a game of
look at me, looking at you. We are here, we
have the right to do this. It's international waters, but
it's pretty uncomfortable for you. And everyone's playing the same
thing against everyone else, So I joined US Navy pight spyplane,
(06:27):
which is a maritime.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
Patrol aircraft nicknamed the Poseidon. Right, yes, the.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
Paight Poseidon, and the pe Poseidon is basically the most
evanced submarine hunting aircraft in the world. And you fly
over suspected submarine targets and they drop hundreds of SONA
buoys into the water, and then to get the position
of a submarine, you need to know the temperature and
the salinity of the water column because the speed of
(06:53):
sound travels differently in saltier water or colder water. And
then once they know that, they drop hundreds of others
that then sort of fall out a pre programmed to
array at different depths and build out a three D
sound map of everything below the surface. And so that's
how you basically try submarines as they go under. The submarines, meanwhile,
(07:13):
are constantly sort of hunting for thermoclines when the water
column has anomalous temperatures for all kinds of strange geological reasons,
and that way they can sort of mask their position.
But it's tricky when the water is quite shallow. So
on this particular flight, the US Navy was gathering intelligence
on Russian surface vessels, auxiliary vessels for the military, a
couple of warships, a couple of like you know, f
(07:36):
SB tugboats and things that have spy equipment on board,
and so they would fly overhead by about a thousand
feet and you know, we were flying in the dead
of night, but this was in polar summer, so everyone
can see everything. Oh twenty four hours sun. Now how
far above these ships are you? So we flew as
low as three hundred feet?
Speaker 1 (07:54):
Was that terrifying? It was, Well, there's a.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
Moment where the mission commander, who's like a twenty s
year old intelligence officer, it says to me, or put
on a life jacket, because every time we go below
five hundred feet we have to put on life jackets.
Like that's not going to help. We're flying a place.
The p Posidon is the same airframe as a Boeing
seven thirty seven. We're flying five hundred miles an hour,
three hundred feet off the water and a massive plane
and then doing bank turns like chasing these ships and
(08:19):
doing flybys and sort of a show of force, Like
a life jack is not going to help in that
circumstance and then sort of long afterwards I thought about it,
and this is speculation, but my belief is that it's
probably so they can find.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
The bies if there is a crash.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
So anyway, we were flying past all these ships and
there was like a British warship nearby and a Norwegian
warship nearby, and they were being tailed by a Russian warship.
And it just happens every day. So meanwhile, Chicken is
the air traffic controllers can hear this contact between the
Americans and the Russians. There's standard protocols since the Cold War.
So the Americans would call a Zemia Zemlia, Zemlia, Delta
(08:54):
echo Ivory Eagle, saying to the Russian control tower, we
are the American aircraft. And then the Russians reply, you know,
Delta echo Ivory eaglesamily as Emily Azamia, and it's just
acknowledging it is us.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
We're here. We're not friends, but nor are we here
to attack.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
Exactly like we're gonna do our job, you're gonna do yours.
You're gonna hate us doing our job, We're gonna hate
you doing yours. And that's how things are always done.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
Tech stuff was littered, often literally throughout the piece, or
sometimes literally should say, I want to start with some
of the most mundane tech elements, though, which is how
do people, and specifically soldiers survive this environment.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
So soldiers live out in these cabins, remote military cabins,
you know, an hour and a half by snowmobile from
the town, so if something happens in a white out,
you basically need to carry on your back enough to
survive in minus forty in a snowstorm for up to
forty eight hours.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
So they do.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
They go in pairs on their patrols. They walk usually
about ten, ten to eighteen kilometers per patrol between remote
military cabins and sort of every single day, the entire
length of the Russian Norwegian border is walked on the
Norwegian side.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Wow, it's one.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Hundred and ninety eight kilometers, so it's not terribly long.
It's not like the finished one, but they split it
up and every single inch of it is walked. And
part of that in the winter is that you can
see from their own tracks if anything has moved across
those tracks. And in the summer they take dogs to
sniff if anything has crossed but in the winter, when
it's really really rough, often you lose your own tracks
(10:30):
if it's been blowed over by the previous day.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
So the patrols in it are a form of data collection,
right looking at the peple's footprints, sniffing for other people scent,
and of course the Poseidon flight was also a data
collection exercise. Ultimately, what are some of the other kind
of physical artifacts or manifestations of data collection that you.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
Saw when you get to one of these remote military cabins.
Usually the stuff out there is so simple. They'll have
binoculars on a table or maybe a telescope like a said,
something you could buy in a shop, And when it's
really wide out conditions, it's some of these guys would
just open the windows stick their head out because they
could hear.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
Better than they could see. Wow.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
But that's the really remote stuff. And then they have
these like proper stations that have all kinds of proper equipment.
Some of that was classified, but it's the kind of
thing that I sort of understood. Can see through darkness,
can see through clouds, can see through rain, and build
out a picture presumably involving heat signatures, so you don't
(11:29):
need to actually physically be able to see. So on
the Russian side of the border, there are no patrols. Really,
there's very few. They don't walk it. I never saw
any Russians on patrol. So on the Norwegian side, any
civilian has the right to roam to any part of Norway,
including up to the border, like literally right next to it.
On the Russian side, it's a closed military zone. It's
(11:50):
where they keep a lot of their nuclear submarines of course,
but also land based nuclear weapons storage facilities. It's one
of the most militarized places on the planet. So there
are no russ civilians who can walk in the border
area at all. So then it's curious that in an
area that has no civilians, if you drive along the
border road on the Norwegian side, you'll often have your
cell phone switch to the Russian network.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
They have really powerful like towers.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
That traverse the river to basically see I think, who's
on the other side, because your phone will switch, your
SIM card switches, even as I had my phone in
airplane mode specifically to avoid this, and the clock would
change to the Russian time zone even within it's an
airplane mode. I don't really understand the technicalities of that,
but that was definitely a form of collection on the
other side.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
After the break, we'll have more from Ben tow about
things heating up in the Northern Fleet, including some whale
based counter intelligence. Stay with us. There's been a lot
about fishing boats in the press recently as vessels of
(12:57):
war in terms of dragging their anchors through I portant cables.
But the fishing boats hanging out around Chirkenis, these Russian
fishing boats may have been for surveillance purposes.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
Right, Yeah, so they are fishing boats. They fish, but
sometimes they have dual use equipment on board. There have
been instances where there was a radio hidden in a
compartment on one of the fishing boats that had access
to Russian military frequencies. But that doesn't mean it's a
spy boat, and it doesn't mean that anyone on board
(13:28):
is actually working for the Russian security services. There are
innocent explanations, and that's the tricky thing about all of it.
I was like, well, what's an example of an innocent explanation. Well,
if they're fishing in the waters near Nova'zemia, which has
a ton of nuclear testing and other activities in that
military testing as well. They might need to be able
to access military frequencies so they can get warnings and such.
(13:50):
The equipment itself isn't proof, but you get enough materials
at a certain point as things start looking really strange.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
And there are these boat fishing boats are allowed to
walk in the Churkenni's harbor.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Yeah, yeah, so Russian fishing boats can come to Chickeness.
The fishermen walk around town. They go to the pub,
the one pub, which is called Pub one. There's Johnny's
lunch bar where you have lunch served by Johnny. There's
a Chinese place called Shanghai, and a type place called Bangkok.
Oh in a central cafe called the Central Cafe.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
So you're able to find your way around. It's not
too hard. But yeah, I just loved it there.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
I loved it there, and I thought that it was
a place where the story is the ambiguities. It's something
that you have to sit with and try to figure
out slowly, and everything's opaque. And also, honestly, it took
a long time to get the sort of main characters.
The head of counter intelligence for the region, a guy
named Johann Rouaznez, Johann suspects that the FSB controls a
(14:49):
lot of the crew going in on those fishing boats,
and a lot of fishing captains and fishermen have backgrounds
of being sailors with the Northern Fleet and former military officers,
some of them maybe not former. Sometimes it's strange they
have these sailor passports which are handwritten, and you know,
(15:11):
he's like, why is everyone called Sergei Ivanov on this boat?
Speaker 1 (15:14):
Right?
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Are they really just fishing? And you know, it's a
real concern for the Norwegian security services that after the
Ukraine War kicked off suddenly instead of being a lot
of old dudes who look like they fish, there's a
lot of young dudes who are doing pull ups in
the harbor and sometimes strolling around town and uniforms that
looked like military uniforms.
Speaker 1 (15:35):
Did follow me? Of the whale come up and you're
reporting my favorite? Okay, so do you want to describe
to everyone who've followed me? Of the whale is a
beautiful white whale, beluga whale, bluego whale who turned up
in a Norwegian harbor wearing a headpiece which looked to
(15:55):
be like a go pro camera and there was some
confusionist to them came from, but the consensus was Valdemir
was a spy whale who unfortunately was recently found dead. Yeah,
fate of many spies.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
And you know I heard that Basically one theory was
that Vladimir had actually been sort of they strapped a
GoPro on him or harness on him, essentially as a
massive sy op that like, people would become obsessed with
this and it would distract from other things.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
It certainly worked for me well.
Speaker 2 (16:26):
But then it turns out that they actually do train
beluga whales, but it's not so much to go into
Norway and spy on Norwegian facilities. It's to protect the
Northern Fleet. So these journalists at the Baron's Observer, which
is this fabulous tiny newspaper in Tyurcinus, two Norwegian guys
and three Russian dissidents, they worked out and mapped through
(16:47):
satellite images that near Severmorsk, where there's a big Northern
Fleet submarine base, there are these pens where there are
bluga whales that you can see on Google Maps. In them,
I can show you there are bluga whales in these
pens and they are trained to spy on enemy submarines
that might enter the call of Fjord. It's a counterintelligence operation.
So essentially you have these wheels like patrolling the fjord,
(17:10):
and they've been trained essentially that if they encounter something
anomalous and metal that they then come back and say
like essentially like flat flat flap, give me a camera.
Then they go back and do it again with a
camera on them, and then the footage is reviewed. But
Vladimir escaped, so he's more of a defector than a spy.
And he was found dead, and initially there was reporting
(17:30):
that there was a bullet in his body. It was
a huge sort of scandal and concern, but it turns
out he died by eating a stick.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
Oh. Part of what you report about is two sides
trying to get as much information as they can on
each other. But the other part is two sides trying
to hurt each other, or at least one side trying
to hurt the other. In the Russian case, this include
everything from jamming the GPS system of the local airport
(17:58):
which almost brought a plane down as far as I understand,
to kind of digitally enable spear phishing and influence operations.
So talk about some of the kind of technological ways
in which Russia has tried to disturb life in the
Chickenis region.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
Yeah, they really kind of treat Chickiness as a kind
of laboratory. It's this remote, isolated place, so essentially they
use it as a kind of laboratory for various intelligence
operations to see what's the sort of right alchemy of
messing with the locals before something breaks. So you have
psychological and influence operations, you have a conscription of locals,
and exploitation for espionage purposes. You also have GPS jamming,
(18:39):
as you mentioned in that case, it began in twenty seventeen.
The Russians were pissed about a NATO exercise elsewhere in
Norway and started jamming GPS. The GPS jamming didn't affect
the exercise at all, it was hundreds of miles away,
but it did mean that for about two hundred to
two hundred and fifty miles from the border, the area
around Chickiness, you couldn't have GPS on the ground level.
(19:00):
It works as a vector, so if you're on the
other side of a mountain, you're not affected. You can
drive on Google Maps, but if you're within the vector,
and particularly in a plane.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
You lose your position.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
The problem is that the only hospital for about five
hundred miles is in Checkiness, So they have an air
ambulance that goes out to these remote, tiny airfields and
the air ambulance and some of these airfields don't have
old school navigational equipment. So if they're going to a
place that's been reliant on GPS, because that's how things
are done now already in the Arctic, because it's close
to the polls, GPS signals are quite weak and to
(19:34):
jam them is very, very straightforward. There's an electronic warfare
system in the mountains near Pachenga on the Russian side.
Then they just beam it and they do it every day.
Now it's pretty much every day, completely unpredictable, but every
single day there's jamming. And that's why the air ambulance
nearly crashed once in Chirckiness, because it sets off all
(19:54):
these alarms in the cockpit.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
So it's incredibly distracting to fly.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
So even if you can see and know your position,
you you are so distracted by the alarms going off
constantly that you kind of, you know, might forget to
put down the flaps. Even I experienced it driving around
in the car and lost my position fortually. Yeah, yeah,
because I was on the mountains, just facing Russia and
while I was driving along the river, and I didn't
know about GPS jamming at that point. It was the
next day that I met with Johann for the first
(20:19):
time and he told me about this, and I just like,
my phone's not working, the car is not working. But
you know, there's like not that many roads out there,
so I'll find my way back other technical ones.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
The Globus, Oh, yes, of course. Yeah. Globus is this enormous,
essentially data collection facility who's stated mission is to monitor
space junk. But I read in your story that a
Suddain point the cover blew off and the antenna wasn't
actually pointing to the space after all.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
Yeah, yeah, I was pointing directly at the Northern Fleet.
So yeah, Globus is actually the most advanced radar station
in the world. They have a series of ones iterations
that have been built over the past sixty years. Globe
is one two end three in the latest. It's built
by the Americans but operated by the Norwegian Intelligence Service.
Essentially so that the Norwegians can say to their population, we.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
Don't have any American military installations on our soil.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
Yeah, this is not we don't share data in real
time with the American Okay. But it's in a small
fishing village called Varda, and it's on a tiny island
the easternmost point of Norway. It's north of Chickenus, across
the fjord, like looking at Russia. Basically this tiny place.
It's so far east that you're actually like, you're east
of his stumble. You don't think of Norway A's as
east of his stumble, but it's east of his stumble.
(21:32):
It's used to Saint Petersburg. Anywhere that you're in the town.
You can see these huge radar balls that dominate the skyline.
But all the locals just pretend they're not there, and
a half of them have family members who work there,
whether as intelligence officers or as like cleaning staff.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
We'll be back after a short break with more from
Ben Taub about how the twentieth century's most terrifying tech
hangs over everything in the op Stay with us. You
know you mentioned that none of this would be such
a big problem if you know, Russian submarines had access
(22:13):
to the Atlantic from a different port, which of course
brings me to the big tech kahuna hanging over this
whole story, which is a nuclear bomb. Yeah, arguably the
greatest and most terrifying technological innovation of the twentieth century.
And as far as I understand, really the reason why
(22:37):
this place that you went is such a flashpoint.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
Yeah, at the end of the day, this place matters
in the event of escalations and everything that's done by
the Russian security services, all the mapping of the infrastructure,
of the influence operations on the locals is with an.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
Eye to.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Maintaining or creating the ability to take over Northern not
because they want it like they want Ukraine, but to
build out a buffer zone to protect the Northern Fleet,
to maintain the ability to fire nuclear weapons from submarines
in the event of all that nuclear war. So the
delicate cat and maskt all all the paight poseidons, all
(23:17):
the intel collection, all the on the Russian side, like
mapping out the infrastructure of a tiny Arctic village, is
just about can we take over northern Norway in a
flash to build out a buffer to feel more confident
that we don't need to find nuclear weapons if we
get into a real conflict with the West. So you
feel the war in Ukraine in Chirkiness. Like there's a
(23:37):
tiny Russian consulate in Chirkiness, there's a lot of Russian
dissidents in Ukrainian refugees living in Chirkiness. There's Ukrainian flags
in the center of town, and like protesting the Russian
consulate in front of you. So you really do feel
you feel the Ukraine War in Chirkiness because ultimately, escalation
anywhere in the Baltics, in Poland, in Ukraine is always
(24:00):
about turning up the temperature on nuclear threats.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
And how much of the nuclear infrastructure, nuclear submarines, nuclear
weapon delivery system in this area is holdover from Soviet
Union times, and how much of it is new systems
that are being developed and invested in and researched in
this area.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
With the invasion of Ukraine, it became sort of broadly
clear to the world that the Russian military is using
all kinds of old Soviet garbage and the personnel, the
officers are bad and everything sucks, right, But that is
not true of the Northern Fleet. Putin has invested so
deeply in the nuclear submarine capacity.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
This is state of the art.
Speaker 2 (24:46):
In the nineties, the Northern Fleet was in absolute disarray,
but in the early two thousands putin really really prioritized
as a strategic matter the development of proper nuclear submarines.
And those subs are quiet, they're fast, they're state of
the art, and the weapons systems on board are thought
to be the same, so there is no obvious asymmetries
(25:09):
that I'm aware of.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
So more than Ukraine, this is the existential area for
Russian self defense. That's exactly right.
Speaker 2 (25:17):
The Cola Peninsula is the existential area because this is
their last resort without nuclear weapons. Russia's economy is that
of Italy with nuclear weapons. You know, they have their
way in the world. Those subs are highly capable, and
they're also investing a ton in development systems for delivery
of nuclear weapons. So the Varda Globus station is really
(25:40):
fundamentally about the first layer of missile defense. So the
Russians have threatened to bomb Varda a couple of times.
They've flown jets, fighter jets at it in strike formation
and then peeled off just before they crossed international waters
and you wouldn't see this if you're a civilian. But
like the VARDA station is monitoring everything and they see
these jets flying at them to bomb them, and the
real millions of globis it has a technical matter and
(26:02):
the reason it's the most advanced to globalists three radar
station in the world is that it has the ability
I was told to distinguish. When you're launching nuclear weapons
out of a submarine or aircraft or other place, there's
multiple ballistic missiles going off at once, each of which
has several nuclear warheads, each of which can go to
a different target. So you're talking about, you know, a
(26:23):
single nuclear submarine can hit eighty targets or one hundred
targets or something and destroy an entire nation. So the
critical thing about VARD station the globis is that it
can distinguish which ones have nuclear warheads on board and
which ones are empty ballistic missiles as a distraction. But
layer one is can you detect which ones to prioritize,
because if you're dealing with one hundred missiles flying at
(26:45):
you at once, you need to know which ones to
really really worry about. And that's what that is all about.
And that's why the Russians hate it so much.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
Comes back to the beginning of your story in that
idea of camouflage.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
Yeah, it's all about detection, and most of it doesn't
happen in the visual spectrum. Everything's electro magnetic, and like
everything's done in ways that we cannot physically see. That's
why again, like you know, you see some equipment on
a watch tower or in the p eight and as
a lay person, I don't know what it is. But
also it would be impossible to explain even if I
didn't know what it was, because it's like it's the
(27:17):
kind of thing that really really really really matters to
the militaries, but doesn't really matter to everyday life.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
You described chickiness as as a crucible or a testing ground.
Have you seen any of the technologies or tactics that
have been deployed.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
Yeah, so it is. It's basically the test ground for
things that are then replicated elsewhere at scale. So the
GPS jamming, now it's ubiquitous. There's a whole sort of
host of close calls in the Baltics with pilots losing
the GPS positions starting again last fall. But again this
has been tested in Chickeness for many, many years before,
so it's really become this, as you said, a crucible,
(27:57):
a place where you test the limits of what you
can get away with and what a Western democracy and
society will tolerate, how it will try to explain or
not explain things to its population, and then where the
sort of limits are in terms of sort of what
is a military operation and what's merely a phenomenon that's
(28:18):
left unexplained.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
What do you think might happen next? It's tricky to know,
of course.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
Johann described to me the goal of all of these
operations in Shickinness as preparations for war. That doesn't mean
that war will ever happen, or that anyone wants that
war to happen. But if you're an FSB officer or
a GRU officer stationed in the Colo Peninsula and your
(28:47):
job is to prepare a war plan in case we
do need one, then you need to send people in
and map all the infrastructure in Shackiness and know exactly
what to hit and exactly how so that you do
have a plan for a war that you don't want
to ever get the order to pursue. And I think
most people hear the phrase preparations for war, they think
that that's backed by an intention for war. But there's
(29:10):
a difference, a major difference between preparations and intentions.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
As a closing thought, I think one of the most
striking lines on your whole piece was when one of
the sources said to you, the Russians ruined a great
spy game with their war in Ukraine. What does that mean?
Speaker 2 (29:29):
He and I talked a lot about that line, because
he didn't want to be flippant about the stakes in
Ukraine and suggesting that that that it was ever for fun.
But there is an element of respect among intelligence officers
where you unravel the other operation and you think, well done,
that was a good one.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
What are we missing?
Speaker 2 (29:52):
Especially in his job, in his role, he's not running
offensive operations against the Russians, He's trying to figure out
what are they doing in Norway to us. So like
there's a respect among spies for job well done, game
well played. We know you're doing this to us, We're
going to do the same to you. We're going to
try to catch who you've sent into our territory and
(30:13):
try to flip them right back on you. You described
it to me as a kind of It's like playing chess,
but you don't know what the rules are, where any
of the pieces are going, because it's changing constantly, and
suddenly it became about something else. When the war in
Ukraine kicked off, it was about aggression, it was about
planning for war, and it was about hurting people and
(30:37):
creating the circumstances where things can go really poorly, really fast.
One of his favorite lines, which I quite enjoyed, was
that kind of intelligence is like playing tennis and you
see a ball flying towards you, and you're about to
smash it, and then you just realize that it's an
orange and so everything you can look so closely something
(31:00):
and then only in the last second discover that everything
you thought is completely wrong.
Speaker 1 (31:04):
Bentaalb, thank you, Thank you us. That's it for this
edition of Tech Stuff. I'm os Voloshin and this episode
was produced by Eliza Dennis, Victoria Dominguez and Lizzie Jacobs.
It was executive produced by me Kara Price and Kate
Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Novelle for iHeart Podcasts. We've
(31:26):
had engineering help from Beheth Fraser and City Box. Jack
Insley mixed this episode, and Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song.
Join us on Friday for a special episode with a
familiar voice, Jonathan Strickland. Please rate, review, and reach out
to us at tech Stuff Podcast at gmail dot com.
(31:47):
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