September 3, 2025 • 32 mins
We’re taking this week off! But don’t worry, we’ll be back with new episodes starting September 10th. In the meantime, we’re sharing some of our favorite interviews from the year so far. This week, Oz talks with journalist Ben Taub about Russia’s ice-cold testing ground for new espionage tech.
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.
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
Hi Os Voloshin here and Cara Price. We're taking the
week off. Indeed, we'll be back with new episodes starting
September tenth.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
In the meantime, instead of leaving this feed empty, we
wanted to share an episode from earlier this year. This week,
we're reairing my conversation with Ben Taub from February twenty sixth.
He's a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist and a staff
writer at The New Yorker. We discussed the tech being
used by Russia to safeguard its nuclear arsenal and to
(00:38):
spy on NATO countries, all in one of the coldest
places on Earth. I interviewed Ben at a time when
tensions between Russia and Norway were high, and as Russia
clashed with NATO over the war in Ukraine. Hope you
enjoy it and thanks for listening. Welcome to tech Stuff.
This is the story, and this week our guest is
(00:59):
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 in tech.
Ben Taub, who writes for The New Yorker, and has
won the Pulitzer and two National Magazine Awards. Has found
himself up close in a tech battle for world supremacy,
(01:22):
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 show
to fund his first foray into international journalism, traveling to
(01:42):
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 the fear
of the twentieth century most fearsome technological innovation, the nuclear bomb.
(02:04):
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 are almost blindingly
high tech, but also tech as simple as a set
of binoculars or a snowshoe, a reminder that sometimes the
(02:26):
best tech for the job might have been around for centuries.
Ben spent two years reporting mostly from a place called
chukenis a Norwegian town of a few thousand people, just
a couple of miles from the Russian border, where nuclear
tensions are a fact of life.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
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 started the gas
station in the middle of nowhere, and he said, oh,
you should talk to that guy.
Speaker 4 (03:03):
He's the border.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
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, Rassia 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 out? 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
(03:25):
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 and they're 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 border basically
(03:47):
don't exist right now.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
If you've been to some extraordinary places, describe Shirkinness.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
So Checkinus is a small town on the Norwegian Russian border,
high up in the Arctic, about as high north as
you can in continental Europe, and yet it's weirdly accessible.
You can fly there in two and a half hours
from Oslo, and 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.
(04:16):
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 (04:37):
There during this time.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
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
count intelligence story. And the whole point of counterintelligence 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 sort of eyeing each
(05:01):
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 cutter 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
(05:23):
go through the vitamin D deficiencies and the depressive qualities
of like not seeing the sun for two months.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
There's a reason they call it Nordic noir.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
But I loved that one of the first sentences in
your piece, which was to survive the months of snow
and ice. Predator resort to camouflage and deception, but so
do their prey.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
It's true the wildlife up there behaves the same way
as the people.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
And then you had this mission impossible esque experience in
a navy plane. Please tell me about that.
Speaker 4 (05:56):
Sure.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
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
(06:17):
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,
and they can't dive, and they can't hide anywhere, and
(06:38):
so there's 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 a US
(07:00):
Navy P eight spyplane, which is a maritime.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Patrol aircraft nicknamed the Poseidon, right.
Speaker 3 (07:06):
Yes, the Pight Poseidon US, and the Pight Poseidon is
basically the most advanced 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
(07:28):
the speed of 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 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 like submarines as they
go under. The submarines, meanwhile, are constantly sort of hunting
(07:51):
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 SB tugboats and things
(08:13):
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
my god, twenty four hours, son, Now how far above
these ships are you?
Speaker 4 (08:28):
So we flew as.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
Low as three hundred feet. Was that terrifying?
Speaker 4 (08:31):
It was?
Speaker 3 (08:31):
Well, there's a moment where the mission commander, who's like
a twenty seven year old intelligence officer says to me,
or put on a life jacket because everytime 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
(08:52):
and then doing bank turns like chasing these ships and
doing flybys and sort of a show of force like
a life jack is not gonna 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 the bobes.
Speaker 4 (09:07):
If there is a crash.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
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 the standard protocols since the Cold War,
so the Americans would call a Zemily Azemi Azemilia Delta
(09:30):
Echo Ivory Eagle saying to the Russian control tower, we
are the American aircraft. And then the Russians reply, you
know Delta, Echo, Ivory, Eagle, zamily As, Emily Azemia, and
it's just acknowledging it is us.
Speaker 4 (09:42):
We're here.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
We're not friends, but nor are we here to attack.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
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 2 (09:54):
Tech stuff was was littered, often literally throughout the piece,
or sometimes literally is say, I.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
Want to start with some of the most mundane.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
Tech elements though, which is how do people and specifically
soldiers survive this environment.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
So the 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 4 (10:28):
So they do.
Speaker 3 (10:29):
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. Wow, it's one hundred and ninety eight kilometers,
so it's not terribly long. It's not like the finish one,
but they split it up and every single inch of
(10:51):
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 if if anything has cossed. But
in the winter, when it's really really rough, often you'll
lose your own tracks if it's been blowed over by
the previous day.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
So the patrols in it are a form of data collection,
right looking at all the people's footprints, sniffing for other
people's 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.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
You 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 something you could buy in a shop, and when
it's really wide out conditions. Yeah, some of these guys
would just open the windows stick their head out because
they could hear better than they could see.
Speaker 4 (11:44):
Wow. But that's the really remote stuff.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
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 class can see
through rain and build out a picture presumably involving Keat signatures,
so you don't need to actually physically be able to see.
(12:08):
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 where they keep a lot
of their nuclear submarines, of course, but also land based
(12:29):
nuclear weapons storage facilities. It's one of the most militarized
places on the planet. So there are no Russian 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.
They have really powerful like towers that traverse the river
(12:51):
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 and airplane mode specifically to
avoid this, and the clock would change to the Russian
times on even when 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 2 (13:13):
After the break, we'll have more from Ben Tao about
things heating up in the Northern Fleet, including some whale.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
Based counter intelligence.
Speaker 4 (13:22):
Stay with us.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
There's been a lot about fishing boats in the press
recently as vessels of war in terms of dragging their
anchors through important cables. But the fishing boats hanging out
around Chirkenis, these Russian fishing boats may have been for
surveillance purposes.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
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
(14:03):
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 Novaya Zemlia, 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
(14:25):
and such. The equipment itself isn't proof, but you get
enough materials at a certain point as things start looking
really strange.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
And there are these boat fishing which are allowed to
dock in the Churkenis Harbor.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
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, so.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
You're able to find your way around.
Speaker 4 (14:58):
It's not too hard. But the I just loved it there.
Speaker 3 (15:02):
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 Rouasnas. Johann suspects that the FSB controls a
(15:25):
lot of the crew going in on those fishing boats
and saw a lot of fishing captains and fishermen have
backgrounds of being sailors with the Northern Fleet, so these
are former military officers, some of them maybe not former.
Sometimes it's strange they have these sailor passports which are handwritten,
and you know, he's like, why is everyone called Sergei
(15:48):
Ivanov on this boat?
Speaker 4 (15:49):
Right? Are they really just fishing?
Speaker 3 (15:52):
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 (16:10):
Did Valdomir the whale come up and you're reporting my
favorite the last five years?
Speaker 2 (16:18):
Okay, so do you want to describe to everyone who's
follow me? The whale is a beautiful white whale, bluga whale,
bluego whale who turned up in a Norwegian harbor wearing
a head piece which looked to be like a GoPro camera.
And there was some confusionist to where Vladimir came from,
but the consensus was Vladimir was a spy whale who
(16:41):
unfortunately was recently found dead, fate of many spies.
Speaker 3 (16:45):
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
sigh op that like, people would become obsessed with this
and it would just from other things. It certainly worked
on me well. But then it turns out that they
actually do train blugle whales. But it's not so much
(17:07):
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 Turcuinus,
two Norwegian guys and three Russian dissidents, they worked out
and mapped through satellite images that near Severomorsk, where there's
a big Northern Fleet submarine base, there are these pens
(17:30):
where there are blugle whales that you can see on
Google Maps. In them, I can show you there are
blugle whales in these pens, and they are trained to
spy on enemy submarines that might enter the Cola Fjord.
It's a counterintelligence operation. So essentially you have these whales
like patrolling the fjord and they've been trained essentially that
if they encounter something anomalous and metal that they then
(17:50):
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 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
(18:11):
a stick.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Ohado.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
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 which almost
brought a plane down as far as I understand, to
(18:37):
kind of digitally enable spear fishing and influence operations. So
talk about some of the kind of technological ways in
which Russia has tried to disturb life in the Chickenus region.
Speaker 3 (18:51):
They really kind of treat Chickenness as a kind of laboratory.
It's this remote, isolated place, so essentially they use it
as a kind of laboratory for various and telligence operations
to see what's the sort of right alchemy of messing
with the locals before something breaks. So you have psychological
and influenced operations, you have a conscription of locals and
exploitation for espionage purposes. You also have GPS jamming, as
(19:15):
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.
Speaker 4 (19:34):
GPS on the ground level.
Speaker 3 (19:35):
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, you lose your position. The
problem is that the only hospital for about five hundred
miles is in Checkines, so they have an air ambulance
that goes out to these remote, tiny airfields, and the
(19:56):
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 jam
them is very very straightforward. There's an electronic warfare system
in the mountains near Pachenga on the Russian side. Then
(20:17):
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 Chirkiness, because it sets off all
these alarms in the cockpit, so it's incredibly distracting to fly.
So even if you can see and know your position,
you are so distracted by the alarms going off constantly
(20:38):
that you kind of you 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 time and
he told me about this, and I just like, my
phone's not working, the car's not working, but you know,
(21:01):
there's like not that many roads out there, so I'll
find my way back other technical ones. The Globus, oh, yes,
of course. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
Globus is this enormous, essentially data collection facility whose stated
mission is to monitor space junk. But I read in
your story that a certain point the cover blew off
and the antenna wasn't.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
Actually pointing to the space after all.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
Yeah, yeah, I was pointing directly at the Northern Fleet.
Speaker 4 (21:26):
So yeah.
Speaker 3 (21:27):
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,
and 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 (21:44):
Don't have any American military installations on our soil.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
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 Rasha, 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 dumble, but it's east of his stumble.
(22:07):
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
I half of them like have family members who work there,
whether as intelligence officers or as like cleaning staff.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
We'll be back.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
After a short break with more from Ben Taub about
how the twentieth century's most terrifying tech hangs over everything
in the Arctic. Stay with us. You know, you mentioned
that none of this would be such a big problem
if you know Russian submarines had access to the Atlantic
(22:50):
from a different port, which, of course brings me to
the big tech kahuna hanging over this whole story, which
is a nuclear bomb.
Speaker 4 (23:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Arguably the greatest and most terrifying technological innovation of the
twentieth century, and as far as I understand, really the
reason why this place that you went is such a flashpoint.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
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,
all the influence operations on the locals is with an
eye to maintaining or creating the ability to take over
northern Norway, not because they want it like they want Ukraine,
(23:39):
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.
Speaker 4 (23:46):
That nuclear war.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
So the delicate cat and mask, all the paight poseidons,
all 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
(24:10):
you feel the war in Ukraine in Churchiness, like there's
a tiny Russian consulate in Churchiness. There's a lot of
Russian dissidents in Ukrainian refugees living in Churchiness. 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 Churchiness because ultimately,
(24:30):
escalation anywhere in the Baltics, in Poland, in Ukraine is
always about turning up the temperature on nuclear threats.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
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 3 (24:58):
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.
Speaker 4 (25:12):
That is not true of the Northern Fleet.
Speaker 3 (25:14):
Putin has invested so deeply in the nuclear submarine capacity.
Speaker 4 (25:21):
This is the state of the art.
Speaker 3 (25:22):
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
(25:45):
that I'm aware of.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
So more than Ukraine, this is the existential area for
Russian and self defense.
Speaker 4 (25:52):
That's exactly right.
Speaker 3 (25:53):
The Cola Peninsula is the existential area because this is
their last resort without nuclear weapons. Russia's economy is that
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 fundamentally
(26:16):
about the first layer of missile defense. So the Russians
have threatened the Bombvarda 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 brilliance of globis
has a technical matter and the reasons the most advanced
(26:40):
globalist 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 single nuclear sub can hit eighty targets
(27:01):
or one hundred targets or something and destroy.
Speaker 4 (27:03):
An entire nation.
Speaker 3 (27:05):
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
you at once, you need to know which ones to
really really worry about. And that's what that is all about,
(27:26):
and that's why the Russians hate it so much. Comes
back to the beginning of your story in that idea
of camouflage. Yeah, it's all about detection, and most of
it doesn't happen in the visual spectrum. Everything's electromagnetic, 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.
(27:47):
But also it would be impossible to explain even if
I didn't know what it was, because it's like it's
the kind of thing that.
Speaker 4 (27:53):
Really really really really.
Speaker 3 (27:55):
Matters to the militaries but doesn't really matter to everyday life.
Speaker 2 (27:59):
Just described Trickiness as as a crucible or a testing ground.
Have you seen any of the technologies or tactics that
have been deployed.
Speaker 4 (28:10):
Yeah, so it is.
Speaker 3 (28:11):
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 their GPS positions starting again
last fall. But again this has been tested in Schickeness
for many, many years before, so it's really become this,
as you said, a crucible, a place where you test
(28:34):
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 left unexplained.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
What do you think might happen next?
Speaker 4 (28:59):
It's tricky to know, of course.
Speaker 3 (29:01):
Johann described to me the goal of all of these
operations in Shaickinness 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
(29:22):
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
(29:45):
a difference, a major difference between preparations and intentions.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
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 Russian ruined a great
spy game with their war in Ukraine. What does that mean?
Speaker 3 (30:05):
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 was 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. What are
(30:26):
we missing? 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.
Speaker 4 (30:43):
We know you're doing this to us, We're going to
do the same to you.
Speaker 3 (30:46):
We're going to try to catch who you've sent into
our territory and try to flip them right back on you.
He 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
(31:08):
about planning for war, and it was about hurting people
and creating the circumstances where things can go really poorly,
really fast. One of his favorite lines, which I quite enjoyed,
was that conor intelligence is like playing tennis and you
see a ball flying towards you, and you're about to
(31:30):
smash it, and then you just realize that it's an
orange and so everything you can look so closely at
something and then only at the last second discover that
everything you thought was completely wrong.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
BENTAALV, thank you, Thank you Oz. That's it for this
edition of tech Stuff. I'm os Vloshin and this episode
was produced by Eliza Dennis, Victoria Dominguez and Lizzie Jacobs.
It was executive produced by me Kara Price and Kate Osborne,
The Kaleidoscope and Katrina Novelle for iHeart Podcasts. We've had
(32:02):
engineering help from the Heath Fraser and City Box. Jack
Insley mixed this episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
Join us on Friday for.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
We want to hear from them.
Hi Os Voloshin here and Cara Price. We're taking the
week off. Indeed, we'll be back with new episodes starting
September tenth.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
In the meantime, instead of leaving this feed empty, we
wanted to share an episode from earlier this year. This week,
we're reairing my conversation with Ben Taub from February twenty sixth.
He's a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist and a staff
writer at The New Yorker. We discussed the tech being
used by Russia to safeguard its nuclear arsenal and to
(00:38):
spy on NATO countries, all in one of the coldest
places on Earth. I interviewed Ben at a time when
tensions between Russia and Norway were high, and as Russia
clashed with NATO over the war in Ukraine. Hope you
enjoy it and thanks for listening. Welcome to tech Stuff.
This is the story, and this week our guest is
(00:59):
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 in tech.
Ben Taub, who writes for The New Yorker, and has
won the Pulitzer and two National Magazine Awards. Has found
himself up close in a tech battle for world supremacy,
(01:22):
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 show
to fund his first foray into international journalism, traveling to
(01:42):
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 the fear
of the twentieth century most fearsome technological innovation, the nuclear bomb.
(02:04):
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 are almost blindingly
high tech, but also tech as simple as a set
of binoculars or a snowshoe, a reminder that sometimes the
(02:26):
best tech for the job might have been around for centuries.
Ben spent two years reporting mostly from a place called
chukenis a Norwegian town of a few thousand people, just
a couple of miles from the Russian border, where nuclear
tensions are a fact of life.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
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 started the gas
station in the middle of nowhere, and he said, oh,
you should talk to that guy.
Speaker 4 (03:03):
He's the border.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
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, Rassia 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 out? 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
(03:25):
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 and they're 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 border basically
(03:47):
don't exist right now.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
If you've been to some extraordinary places, describe Shirkinness.
Speaker 3 (03:53):
So Checkinus is a small town on the Norwegian Russian border,
high up in the Arctic, about as high north as
you can in continental Europe, and yet it's weirdly accessible.
You can fly there in two and a half hours
from Oslo, and 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.
(04:16):
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 (04:37):
There during this time.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
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
count intelligence story. And the whole point of counterintelligence 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 sort of eyeing each
(05:01):
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 cutter 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
(05:23):
go through the vitamin D deficiencies and the depressive qualities
of like not seeing the sun for two months.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
There's a reason they call it Nordic noir.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
But I loved that one of the first sentences in
your piece, which was to survive the months of snow
and ice. Predator resort to camouflage and deception, but so
do their prey.
Speaker 3 (05:44):
It's true the wildlife up there behaves the same way
as the people.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
And then you had this mission impossible esque experience in
a navy plane. Please tell me about that.
Speaker 4 (05:56):
Sure.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
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
(06:17):
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,
and they can't dive, and they can't hide anywhere, and
(06:38):
so there's 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 a US
(07:00):
Navy P eight spyplane, which is a maritime.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
Patrol aircraft nicknamed the Poseidon, right.
Speaker 3 (07:06):
Yes, the Pight Poseidon US, and the Pight Poseidon is
basically the most advanced 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
(07:28):
the speed of 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 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 like submarines as they
go under. The submarines, meanwhile, are constantly sort of hunting
(07:51):
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 SB tugboats and things
(08:13):
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
my god, twenty four hours, son, Now how far above
these ships are you?
Speaker 4 (08:28):
So we flew as.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
Low as three hundred feet. Was that terrifying?
Speaker 4 (08:31):
It was?
Speaker 3 (08:31):
Well, there's a moment where the mission commander, who's like
a twenty seven year old intelligence officer says to me,
or put on a life jacket because everytime 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
(08:52):
and then doing bank turns like chasing these ships and
doing flybys and sort of a show of force like
a life jack is not gonna 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 the bobes.
Speaker 4 (09:07):
If there is a crash.
Speaker 3 (09:08):
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 the standard protocols since the Cold War,
so the Americans would call a Zemily Azemi Azemilia Delta
(09:30):
Echo Ivory Eagle saying to the Russian control tower, we
are the American aircraft. And then the Russians reply, you
know Delta, Echo, Ivory, Eagle, zamily As, Emily Azemia, and
it's just acknowledging it is us.
Speaker 4 (09:42):
We're here.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
We're not friends, but nor are we here to attack.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
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 2 (09:54):
Tech stuff was was littered, often literally throughout the piece,
or sometimes literally is say, I.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
Want to start with some of the most mundane.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
Tech elements though, which is how do people and specifically
soldiers survive this environment.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
So the 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 4 (10:28):
So they do.
Speaker 3 (10:29):
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. Wow, it's one hundred and ninety eight kilometers,
so it's not terribly long. It's not like the finish one,
but they split it up and every single inch of
(10:51):
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 if if anything has cossed. But
in the winter, when it's really really rough, often you'll
lose your own tracks if it's been blowed over by
the previous day.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
So the patrols in it are a form of data collection,
right looking at all the people's footprints, sniffing for other
people's 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.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
You 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 something you could buy in a shop, and when
it's really wide out conditions. Yeah, some of these guys
would just open the windows stick their head out because
they could hear better than they could see.
Speaker 4 (11:44):
Wow. But that's the really remote stuff.
Speaker 3 (11:46):
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 class can see
through rain and build out a picture presumably involving Keat signatures,
so you don't need to actually physically be able to see.
(12:08):
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 where they keep a lot
of their nuclear submarines, of course, but also land based
(12:29):
nuclear weapons storage facilities. It's one of the most militarized
places on the planet. So there are no Russian 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.
They have really powerful like towers that traverse the river
(12:51):
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 and airplane mode specifically to
avoid this, and the clock would change to the Russian
times on even when 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 2 (13:13):
After the break, we'll have more from Ben Tao about
things heating up in the Northern Fleet, including some whale.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
Based counter intelligence.
Speaker 4 (13:22):
Stay with us.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
There's been a lot about fishing boats in the press
recently as vessels of war in terms of dragging their
anchors through important cables. But the fishing boats hanging out
around Chirkenis, these Russian fishing boats may have been for
surveillance purposes.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
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
(14:03):
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 Novaya Zemlia, 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
(14:25):
and such. The equipment itself isn't proof, but you get
enough materials at a certain point as things start looking
really strange.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
And there are these boat fishing which are allowed to
dock in the Churkenis Harbor.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
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, so.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
You're able to find your way around.
Speaker 4 (14:58):
It's not too hard. But the I just loved it there.
Speaker 3 (15:02):
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 Rouasnas. Johann suspects that the FSB controls a
(15:25):
lot of the crew going in on those fishing boats
and saw a lot of fishing captains and fishermen have
backgrounds of being sailors with the Northern Fleet, so these
are former military officers, some of them maybe not former.
Sometimes it's strange they have these sailor passports which are handwritten,
and you know, he's like, why is everyone called Sergei
(15:48):
Ivanov on this boat?
Speaker 4 (15:49):
Right? Are they really just fishing?
Speaker 3 (15:52):
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 (16:10):
Did Valdomir the whale come up and you're reporting my
favorite the last five years?
Speaker 2 (16:18):
Okay, so do you want to describe to everyone who's
follow me? The whale is a beautiful white whale, bluga whale,
bluego whale who turned up in a Norwegian harbor wearing
a head piece which looked to be like a GoPro camera.
And there was some confusionist to where Vladimir came from,
but the consensus was Vladimir was a spy whale who
(16:41):
unfortunately was recently found dead, fate of many spies.
Speaker 3 (16:45):
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
sigh op that like, people would become obsessed with this
and it would just from other things. It certainly worked
on me well. But then it turns out that they
actually do train blugle whales. But it's not so much
(17:07):
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 Turcuinus,
two Norwegian guys and three Russian dissidents, they worked out
and mapped through satellite images that near Severomorsk, where there's
a big Northern Fleet submarine base, there are these pens
(17:30):
where there are blugle whales that you can see on
Google Maps. In them, I can show you there are
blugle whales in these pens, and they are trained to
spy on enemy submarines that might enter the Cola Fjord.
It's a counterintelligence operation. So essentially you have these whales
like patrolling the fjord and they've been trained essentially that
if they encounter something anomalous and metal that they then
(17:50):
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 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
(18:11):
a stick.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Ohado.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
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 which almost
brought a plane down as far as I understand, to
(18:37):
kind of digitally enable spear fishing and influence operations. So
talk about some of the kind of technological ways in
which Russia has tried to disturb life in the Chickenus region.
Speaker 3 (18:51):
They really kind of treat Chickenness as a kind of laboratory.
It's this remote, isolated place, so essentially they use it
as a kind of laboratory for various and telligence operations
to see what's the sort of right alchemy of messing
with the locals before something breaks. So you have psychological
and influenced operations, you have a conscription of locals and
exploitation for espionage purposes. You also have GPS jamming, as
(19:15):
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.
Speaker 4 (19:34):
GPS on the ground level.
Speaker 3 (19:35):
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, you lose your position. The
problem is that the only hospital for about five hundred
miles is in Checkines, so they have an air ambulance
that goes out to these remote, tiny airfields, and the
(19:56):
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 jam
them is very very straightforward. There's an electronic warfare system
in the mountains near Pachenga on the Russian side. Then
(20:17):
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 Chirkiness, because it sets off all
these alarms in the cockpit, so it's incredibly distracting to fly.
So even if you can see and know your position,
you are so distracted by the alarms going off constantly
(20:38):
that you kind of you 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 time and
he told me about this, and I just like, my
phone's not working, the car's not working, but you know,
(21:01):
there's like not that many roads out there, so I'll
find my way back other technical ones. The Globus, oh, yes,
of course. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
Globus is this enormous, essentially data collection facility whose stated
mission is to monitor space junk. But I read in
your story that a certain point the cover blew off
and the antenna wasn't.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
Actually pointing to the space after all.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
Yeah, yeah, I was pointing directly at the Northern Fleet.
Speaker 4 (21:26):
So yeah.
Speaker 3 (21:27):
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,
and 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 (21:44):
Don't have any American military installations on our soil.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
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 Rasha, 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 dumble, but it's east of his stumble.
(22:07):
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
I half of them like have family members who work there,
whether as intelligence officers or as like cleaning staff.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
We'll be back.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
After a short break with more from Ben Taub about
how the twentieth century's most terrifying tech hangs over everything
in the Arctic. Stay with us. You know, you mentioned
that none of this would be such a big problem
if you know Russian submarines had access to the Atlantic
(22:50):
from a different port, which, of course brings me to
the big tech kahuna hanging over this whole story, which
is a nuclear bomb.
Speaker 4 (23:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Arguably the greatest and most terrifying technological innovation of the
twentieth century, and as far as I understand, really the
reason why this place that you went is such a flashpoint.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
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,
all the influence operations on the locals is with an
eye to maintaining or creating the ability to take over
northern Norway, not because they want it like they want Ukraine,
(23:39):
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.
Speaker 4 (23:46):
That nuclear war.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
So the delicate cat and mask, all the paight poseidons,
all 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
(24:10):
you feel the war in Ukraine in Churchiness, like there's
a tiny Russian consulate in Churchiness. There's a lot of
Russian dissidents in Ukrainian refugees living in Churchiness. 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 Churchiness because ultimately,
(24:30):
escalation anywhere in the Baltics, in Poland, in Ukraine is
always about turning up the temperature on nuclear threats.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
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 3 (24:58):
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.
Speaker 4 (25:12):
That is not true of the Northern Fleet.
Speaker 3 (25:14):
Putin has invested so deeply in the nuclear submarine capacity.
Speaker 4 (25:21):
This is the state of the art.
Speaker 3 (25:22):
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
(25:45):
that I'm aware of.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
So more than Ukraine, this is the existential area for
Russian and self defense.
Speaker 4 (25:52):
That's exactly right.
Speaker 3 (25:53):
The Cola Peninsula is the existential area because this is
their last resort without nuclear weapons. Russia's economy is that
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 fundamentally
(26:16):
about the first layer of missile defense. So the Russians
have threatened the Bombvarda 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 brilliance of globis
has a technical matter and the reasons the most advanced
(26:40):
globalist 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 single nuclear sub can hit eighty targets
(27:01):
or one hundred targets or something and destroy.
Speaker 4 (27:03):
An entire nation.
Speaker 3 (27:05):
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
you at once, you need to know which ones to
really really worry about. And that's what that is all about,
(27:26):
and that's why the Russians hate it so much. Comes
back to the beginning of your story in that idea
of camouflage. Yeah, it's all about detection, and most of
it doesn't happen in the visual spectrum. Everything's electromagnetic, 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.
(27:47):
But also it would be impossible to explain even if
I didn't know what it was, because it's like it's
the kind of thing that.
Speaker 4 (27:53):
Really really really really.
Speaker 3 (27:55):
Matters to the militaries but doesn't really matter to everyday life.
Speaker 2 (27:59):
Just described Trickiness as as a crucible or a testing ground.
Have you seen any of the technologies or tactics that
have been deployed.
Speaker 4 (28:10):
Yeah, so it is.
Speaker 3 (28:11):
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 their GPS positions starting again
last fall. But again this has been tested in Schickeness
for many, many years before, so it's really become this,
as you said, a crucible, a place where you test
(28:34):
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 left unexplained.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
What do you think might happen next?
Speaker 4 (28:59):
It's tricky to know, of course.
Speaker 3 (29:01):
Johann described to me the goal of all of these
operations in Shaickinness 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
(29:22):
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
(29:45):
a difference, a major difference between preparations and intentions.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
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 Russian ruined a great
spy game with their war in Ukraine. What does that mean?
Speaker 3 (30:05):
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 was 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. What are
(30:26):
we missing? 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.
Speaker 4 (30:43):
We know you're doing this to us, We're going to
do the same to you.
Speaker 3 (30:46):
We're going to try to catch who you've sent into
our territory and try to flip them right back on you.
He 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
(31:08):
about planning for war, and it was about hurting people
and creating the circumstances where things can go really poorly,
really fast. One of his favorite lines, which I quite enjoyed,
was that conor intelligence is like playing tennis and you
see a ball flying towards you, and you're about to
(31:30):
smash it, and then you just realize that it's an
orange and so everything you can look so closely at
something and then only at the last second discover that
everything you thought was completely wrong.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
BENTAALV, thank you, Thank you Oz. That's it for this
edition of tech Stuff. I'm os Vloshin and this episode
was produced by Eliza Dennis, Victoria Dominguez and Lizzie Jacobs.
It was executive produced by me Kara Price and Kate Osborne,
The Kaleidoscope and Katrina Novelle for iHeart Podcasts. We've had
(32:02):
engineering help from the Heath Fraser and City Box. Jack
Insley mixed this episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
Join us on Friday for.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
We want to hear from them.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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