Operation Ivy Bells was a 1971 joint

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Central Intelligence Agency The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA; ) is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States tasked with advancing national security through collecting and analyzing intelligence from around the world and ...

(CIA), and

National Security Agency The National Security Agency (NSA) is an intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the director of national intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collection, and proces ...

(NSA) mission whose objective was to place wire taps on

Soviet The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

underwater communication lines during the

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. The operation was discovered by the Soviet Union in 1980, when NSA analyst Ronald Pelton defected and revealed the existence of the program.

Background

During the Cold War, the

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wanted to learn more about Soviet

submarine A submarine (often shortened to sub) is a watercraft capable of independent operation underwater. (It differs from a submersible, which has more limited underwater capability.) The term "submarine" is also sometimes used historically or infor ...

and missile technology, specifically

ICBM An intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) is a ballistic missile with a range (aeronautics), range greater than , primarily designed for nuclear weapons delivery (delivering one or more Thermonuclear weapon, thermonuclear warheads). Conven ...

test and nuclear first strike capability. In the early 1970s the U.S. government learned of the existence of an undersea communications cable in the

Sea of Okhotsk The Sea of Okhotsk; Historically also known as , or as ; ) is a marginal sea of the western Pacific Ocean. It is located between Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula on the east, the Kuril Islands on the southeast, Japan's island of Hokkaido on the sou ...

, which connected the major Soviet Pacific Fleet naval base at Petropavlovsk on the

Kamchatka Peninsula The Kamchatka Peninsula (, ) is a peninsula in the Russian Far East, with an area of about . The Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Okhotsk make up the peninsula's eastern and western coastlines, respectively. Immediately offshore along the Pacific ...

to the Soviet Pacific Fleet's mainland headquarters at

Vladivostok Vladivostok ( ; , ) is the largest city and the administrative center of Primorsky Krai and the capital of the Far Eastern Federal District of Russia. It is located around the Zolotoy Rog, Golden Horn Bay on the Sea of Japan, covering an area o ...

. At the time, the Sea of Okhotsk was claimed by the

Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

territorial waters Territorial waters are informally an area of water where a sovereign state has jurisdiction, including internal waters, the territorial sea, the contiguous zone, the exclusive economic zone, and potentially the extended continental shelf ( ...

, and was strictly off limits to foreign vessels, and the Soviet Navy had installed a network of sound detection devices along the seabed to detect intruders. The area also saw numerous surface and subsurface naval exercises.

Installation

Despite these obstacles, the potential for an intelligence coup was considered too great to ignore, and in October 1971, the United States sent the purpose-modified submarine deep into the

. Funds for the project were diverted secretly from the

deep-submergence rescue vehicle A deep-submergence rescue vehicle (DSRV) is a type of deep-submergence vehicle used for rescue of personnel from disabled submarines and submersibles. While DSRV is the term most often used by the United States Navy, other nations have different ...

(DSRV) program, and the modified submarines were shown with fake DSRV simulators attached to them. These were early diver lockouts. US Navy Divers working from ''Halibut'' found the cable in of water and installed a long device, which wrapped around the cable without piercing its casing and recorded all communications made over it. The large recording device was designed to detach if the cable was raised for repair. The tapping of the Soviet naval cable was so secret that most sailors involved did not have the

security clearance A security clearance is a status granted to individuals allowing them access to classified information (state or organizational secrets) or to restricted areas, after completion of a thorough background check. The term "security clearance" is ...

needed to know about it. A cover story was thus created to disguise the actual mission: it was claimed that the spy submarines were sent to the Soviet naval range in the Sea of Okhotsk to recover the Soviet supersonic anti-ship missile (AShM) debris so that countermeasures could be developed. Although created as a cover story, this mission was actually carried out with great success: U.S. Navy divers recovered all of the SS-N-12 debris, with the largest debris no larger than , and a total of more than two million pieces. The debris was taken to the U.S. and reconstructed at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. Based on these pieces, at least one sample was

reverse engineered Reverse engineering (also known as backwards engineering or back engineering) is a process or method through which one attempts to understand through deductive reasoning how a previously made device, process, system, or piece of software accompl ...

. It was discovered that the SS-N-12 AShM was guided by radar only, and the infrared guidance previously suspected did not exist.

Use

Each month, divers retrieved the recordings and installed a new set of tapes. The recordings were then delivered to the NSA for processing and dissemination to other U.S. intelligence agencies. The first tapes recorded revealed that the Soviets were so sure of the cable's security that the majority of the conversations made over it were unencrypted. The eavesdropping on the traffic between senior Soviet officers provided invaluable information on naval operations at Petropavlovsk, the Pacific Fleet's primary nuclear submarine base, home to

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and

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class nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines. Eventually, more taps were installed on Soviet lines in other parts of the world, with more advanced instruments built by

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that were

radioisotope thermoelectric generator A radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG, RITEG), or radioisotope power system (RPS), is a type of nuclear battery that uses an array of thermocouples to convert the Decay heat, heat released by the decay of a suitable radioactive material i ...

-powered and could store a year's worth of data. Other submarines were used for this role, including , , and . ''Seawolf'' was almost lost during one of these missions—she was stranded on the bottom after a storm and almost had to use her self-destruct charges to scuttle the ship with her crew.

Compromise

This operation was compromised by Ronald Pelton, a 44-year-old veteran of the NSA, who was fluent in Russian. At the time, Pelton was $65,000 ($ today) in debt, and had filed for

personal bankruptcy Personal bankruptcy law allows, in certain jurisdictions, an individual to be declared bankrupt. Virtually every country with a modern legal system features some form of debt relief for individuals. Personal bankruptcy is distinguished from corpora ...

just three months before he resigned. With only a few hundred dollars in the bank, Pelton walked into the Soviet embassy in

Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly known as Washington or D.C., is the capital city and federal district of the United States. The city is on the Potomac River, across from Virginia, and shares land borders with ...

in January 1980, and offered to sell what he knew to the

KGB The Committee for State Security (, ), abbreviated as KGB (, ; ) was the main security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 to 1991. It was the direct successor of preceding Soviet secret police agencies including the Cheka, Joint State Polit ...

for money. No documents were passed from Pelton to the Soviets, as he had an extremely good memory: he reportedly received $35,000 from the KGB for the intelligence he provided from 1980 to 1983, and for the intelligence on the Operation Ivy Bells, the KGB gave him $5,000. The Soviets did not immediately take any action on this information; however, in 1981, surveillance satellites showed Soviet warships, including a salvage vessel, anchored over the site of the tap in the Sea of Okhotsk. The USS ''Parche'' (SSN-683) was dispatched to recover the device, but the American divers were unable to find it and it was concluded that the Soviets had taken it. In July 1985, Vitaly Yurchenko, a KGB colonel who was Pelton's initial contact in Washington, D.C., defected to the United States and provided the information that eventually led to Pelton's arrest. , the recording device captured by the Soviets was on public display at the Great Patriotic War museum in

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References

External links

"Spy Book Fact of the Day: Ivy Bells"
from the ''Spy Book: The Encyclopedia of Espionage'' promotional site at

Random House Random House is an imprint and publishing group of Penguin Random House. Founded in 1927 by businessmen Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer as an imprint of Modern Library, it quickly overtook Modern Library as the parent imprint. Over the foll ...

"Operation Ivy Bells Sea of Okhotsk, Russia, 1970s-1981"
at ''Special Operations.com''
Red November, Inside the Secret U.S. Soviet Submarine War
{{Soviet Union–United States relations, state=collapsed 1971 establishments in the United States 1971 in the Soviet Union 1981 disestablishments in the United States 1981 in the Soviet Union Ivy Bells Soviet Union–United States military relations Ivy Bells Ivy Bells Sea of Okhotsk Signals intelligence Ivy Bells History of telecommunications 1981 in international relations 1970 in international relations 1971 in international relations Clandestine operations Espionage in the Soviet Union

Background

Installation

Use

Compromise

See also

References

Further reading

External links