WEBVTT - TechStuff Redux: Russia’s Espionage ‘Laboratory’ w/ Ben Taub 0:00:11.720 --> 0:00:14.480 Hi Os Voloshin here and Cara Price. We're taking the 0:00:14.520 --> 0:00:17.640 week off. Indeed, we'll be back with new episodes starting 0:00:17.680 --> 0:00:18.520 September tenth. 0:00:18.640 --> 0:00:21.119 In the meantime, instead of leaving this feed empty, we 0:00:21.160 --> 0:00:24.200 wanted to share an episode from earlier this year. This week, 0:00:24.320 --> 0:00:28.160 we're reairing my conversation with Ben Taub from February twenty sixth. 0:00:28.520 --> 0:00:31.480 He's a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist and a staff 0:00:31.480 --> 0:00:34.720 writer at The New Yorker. We discussed the tech being 0:00:34.800 --> 0:00:38.800 used by Russia to safeguard its nuclear arsenal and to 0:00:38.960 --> 0:00:42.760 spy on NATO countries, all in one of the coldest 0:00:42.760 --> 0:00:45.640 places on Earth. I interviewed Ben at a time when 0:00:45.680 --> 0:00:49.200 tensions between Russia and Norway were high, and as Russia 0:00:49.240 --> 0:00:52.040 clashed with NATO over the war in Ukraine. Hope you 0:00:52.159 --> 0:00:56.680 enjoy it and thanks for listening. Welcome to tech Stuff. 0:00:57.120 --> 0:00:59.560 This is the story, and this week our guest is 0:00:59.600 --> 0:01:03.840 the investigative journalist Ben Taub. Every Wednesday, we bring you 0:01:03.960 --> 0:01:06.600 an in depth interview with someone who has a front 0:01:06.680 --> 0:01:09.679 row seat to the most fascinating things happening in tech. 0:01:12.160 --> 0:01:14.560 Ben Taub, who writes for The New Yorker, and has 0:01:14.600 --> 0:01:18.119 won the Pulitzer and two National Magazine Awards. Has found 0:01:18.200 --> 0:01:22.120 himself up close in a tech battle for world supremacy, 0:01:22.800 --> 0:01:25.520 not really by design, but by following a good story. 0:01:26.080 --> 0:01:28.600 For Ben, it all started on the singing show The 0:01:28.680 --> 0:01:32.720 Voice No Really. Ben was an undergrad at Princeton, took 0:01:32.760 --> 0:01:35.040 a little time off to audition for The Voice and 0:01:35.120 --> 0:01:38.320 stashed away the stipend provided to performers on the show 0:01:38.720 --> 0:01:42.800 to fund his first foray into international journalism, traveling to 0:01:42.840 --> 0:01:46.240 the Turkish Syrian border, which gave him the bug not 0:01:46.319 --> 0:01:51.160 just for reporting, but reporting on the periphery of international conflict. 0:01:51.720 --> 0:01:55.560 After reporting in Syria and Chad, he found himself drawn 0:01:55.600 --> 0:01:58.680 to the periphery of a conflict animated by the fear 0:01:58.800 --> 0:02:03.960 of the twentieth century most fearsome technological innovation, the nuclear bomb. 0:02:04.560 --> 0:02:07.080 Chasing that story took Ben to one of the most 0:02:07.120 --> 0:02:11.480 remote and coldest places on Earth, the Norway Russian border, 0:02:11.919 --> 0:02:15.400 where a complex spy game is underway. He saw for 0:02:15.480 --> 0:02:19.880 himself up close gadgetary and systems that are almost blindingly 0:02:19.960 --> 0:02:23.200 high tech, but also tech as simple as a set 0:02:23.200 --> 0:02:26.840 of binoculars or a snowshoe, a reminder that sometimes the 0:02:26.840 --> 0:02:29.680 best tech for the job might have been around for centuries. 0:02:30.600 --> 0:02:34.000 Ben spent two years reporting mostly from a place called 0:02:34.080 --> 0:02:38.160 chukenis a Norwegian town of a few thousand people, just 0:02:38.200 --> 0:02:40.960 a couple of miles from the Russian border, where nuclear 0:02:41.040 --> 0:02:43.720 tensions are a fact of life. 0:02:43.840 --> 0:02:46.640 So right after Russia invaded Ukraine, I went up to 0:02:46.680 --> 0:02:50.720 northern Norway to join NATO military exercise called Cold Response 0:02:50.760 --> 0:02:53.200 that happens regularly, just to try to understand what are 0:02:53.200 --> 0:02:56.680 the stakes up here? And I was being driven around 0:02:56.720 --> 0:03:00.399 by a Norwegian Army spokesman and we started the gas 0:03:00.480 --> 0:03:02.960 station in the middle of nowhere, and he said, oh, 0:03:03.000 --> 0:03:03.880 you should talk to that guy. 0:03:03.919 --> 0:03:04.679 He's the border. 0:03:04.440 --> 0:03:06.600 Commander and it's filling up his gas like on the 0:03:06.639 --> 0:03:08.480 next one over. So I went up to him and said, 0:03:08.520 --> 0:03:10.880 I hear you're the border commander and he said, oh, yeah, yeah. 0:03:10.960 --> 0:03:13.200 And I was like, well, Rassia just invaded Ukraine like 0:03:13.240 --> 0:03:15.760 three weeks ago. Are you concerned about anything happening up there? 0:03:15.760 --> 0:03:19.080 And he's like no, why are you so certain? And 0:03:19.120 --> 0:03:21.280 he said when is your peace coming out? I don't know, 0:03:21.320 --> 0:03:22.760 like a year or longer. And he said, well, if 0:03:22.760 --> 0:03:25.440 it's that long, the truth is that we can see 0:03:25.440 --> 0:03:28.320 the activity on the other side, and we know who 0:03:28.320 --> 0:03:30.520 our counterparts are, and we've seen them for a long time. 0:03:30.520 --> 0:03:33.280 We see them train, we see them do everything, and 0:03:33.480 --> 0:03:36.200 they all got deployed down to Ukraine and they're all dead. 0:03:36.760 --> 0:03:38.360 It's like eighty percent of them died in the first 0:03:38.400 --> 0:03:42.480 three weeks of the war. So there's no one to invade. 0:03:42.640 --> 0:03:44.520 They have all the nuclear stuff, but like the actual 0:03:44.560 --> 0:03:47.280 ground forces on the other side of the border basically 0:03:47.280 --> 0:03:48.240 don't exist right now. 0:03:48.480 --> 0:03:52.760 If you've been to some extraordinary places, describe Shirkinness. 0:03:53.600 --> 0:03:57.240 So Checkinus is a small town on the Norwegian Russian border, 0:03:57.600 --> 0:03:59.720 high up in the Arctic, about as high north as 0:03:59.760 --> 0:04:03.520 you can in continental Europe, and yet it's weirdly accessible. 0:04:03.560 --> 0:04:04.920 You can fly there in two and a half hours 0:04:04.920 --> 0:04:07.400 from Oslo, and there's a sort of a daily flight. 0:04:07.880 --> 0:04:12.800 And it's subject to the strangeness of its position, both 0:04:12.840 --> 0:04:16.120 in terms of like geopolitics and in terms of geography. 0:04:16.240 --> 0:04:18.880 So in the winter, like you don't see the sun 0:04:18.920 --> 0:04:22.120 for two full months, it never rises. You do see 0:04:22.200 --> 0:04:25.120 daylight every day, but it's like a livid blue twilight. 0:04:25.440 --> 0:04:28.440 So you might have around the winter solstice, you might 0:04:28.480 --> 0:04:31.640 have about two hours of like blue gray where you 0:04:31.680 --> 0:04:35.440 can see from around ten am to noon and then 0:04:35.480 --> 0:04:37.320 it's black on either side. 0:04:37.760 --> 0:04:38.640 There during this time. 0:04:38.800 --> 0:04:40.760 Yeah, I stayed the whole time because I thought it 0:04:40.839 --> 0:04:43.839 was important. Basically, I went on and off for two years, 0:04:44.279 --> 0:04:46.400 and I knew I wanted to set it as a 0:04:46.400 --> 0:04:49.400 count intelligence story. And the whole point of counterintelligence work 0:04:49.600 --> 0:04:51.080 is that you can't see what's around you, even if 0:04:51.080 --> 0:04:53.200 you know that it's there. And that's what it's like 0:04:53.240 --> 0:04:56.080 in Shirkiness. Between sort of mid November and mid January, 0:04:56.080 --> 0:04:57.960 you don't see the sun and most of the time 0:04:58.000 --> 0:05:01.000 it's pitch black, and so everyone sort of eyeing each 0:05:01.000 --> 0:05:03.760 other and no one really can tell what's going on 0:05:04.400 --> 0:05:08.960 physically as well as what's underlying everyone's motivations and behaviors. 0:05:09.080 --> 0:05:11.080 So I thought that was a good place to set 0:05:11.680 --> 0:05:14.200 a cutter intelligence story because it's so ambiguous and strange, 0:05:14.320 --> 0:05:16.680 and to understand the place you have to experience I 0:05:16.720 --> 0:05:20.760 think a proper polar winter, because you can't really feel 0:05:20.760 --> 0:05:23.440 what it's like to live through that place unless you 0:05:23.480 --> 0:05:28.080 go through the vitamin D deficiencies and the depressive qualities 0:05:28.120 --> 0:05:30.360 of like not seeing the sun for two months. 0:05:30.600 --> 0:05:32.239 There's a reason they call it Nordic noir. 0:05:33.160 --> 0:05:35.039 But I loved that one of the first sentences in 0:05:35.080 --> 0:05:38.000 your piece, which was to survive the months of snow 0:05:38.000 --> 0:05:42.160 and ice. Predator resort to camouflage and deception, but so 0:05:42.200 --> 0:05:43.279 do their prey. 0:05:44.400 --> 0:05:47.440 It's true the wildlife up there behaves the same way 0:05:47.440 --> 0:05:48.000 as the people. 0:05:48.560 --> 0:05:52.919 And then you had this mission impossible esque experience in 0:05:52.960 --> 0:05:56.640 a navy plane. Please tell me about that. 0:05:56.760 --> 0:05:57.080 Sure. 0:05:57.200 --> 0:05:59.839 So the reason that this place is so geopolitically significant 0:05:59.920 --> 0:06:03.240 is because Russia has a massive coastline in the Arctic, 0:06:03.720 --> 0:06:07.040 but it's not really useful most of the time because 0:06:07.160 --> 0:06:11.440 everything east of Mirmansk freezes in winter, and so it's 0:06:11.600 --> 0:06:13.760 a source of tremendous frustration for the Russians that they 0:06:13.760 --> 0:06:17.400 have to keep their nuclear submarine force within listening range 0:06:17.480 --> 0:06:20.720 of NATO territory, which is Norway, and so in order 0:06:20.760 --> 0:06:23.040 to get into the North Atlantic, those submarines have to 0:06:23.080 --> 0:06:26.279 traverse along the northern Norwegian coastline through the Barren Sea. 0:06:27.080 --> 0:06:30.039 The challenge for the Russians is that they're extremely exposed 0:06:30.120 --> 0:06:32.920 during that transit because the Barren Sea is very shallow, 0:06:32.960 --> 0:06:35.039 which means that you can track submarines from the sky, 0:06:35.360 --> 0:06:37.960 and they can't dive, and they can't hide anywhere, and 0:06:38.040 --> 0:06:42.000 so there's an ongoing, constant sort of cat and mouse 0:06:42.040 --> 0:06:47.440 game between Russian submarines and NATO warships and spyplanes in 0:06:47.480 --> 0:06:49.839 the Arctic. It's happening all the time. It's just a 0:06:49.839 --> 0:06:52.320 game of look at me, looking at you. We are here, 0:06:52.440 --> 0:06:54.600 we have the right to do this. It's international waters. 0:06:54.800 --> 0:06:57.440 But it's pretty uncomfortable for you, and everyone's playing the 0:06:57.440 --> 0:07:00.520 same thing against everyone else. So I joined a US 0:07:00.640 --> 0:07:04.240 Navy P eight spyplane, which is a maritime. 0:07:03.839 --> 0:07:06.320 Patrol aircraft nicknamed the Poseidon, right. 0:07:06.240 --> 0:07:10.040 Yes, the Pight Poseidon US, and the Pight Poseidon is 0:07:10.080 --> 0:07:13.920 basically the most advanced submarine hunting aircraft in the world. 0:07:14.240 --> 0:07:17.480 And you fly over suspected submarine targets and they drop 0:07:17.840 --> 0:07:21.320 hundreds of SONA buoys into the water. And then to 0:07:21.400 --> 0:07:25.080 get the position of a submarine you need to know 0:07:25.160 --> 0:07:28.320 the temperature and the salinity of the water column, because 0:07:28.440 --> 0:07:32.960 the speed of sound travels differently in saltier water or 0:07:32.960 --> 0:07:36.600 colder water. And then once they know that, they drop 0:07:36.880 --> 0:07:39.840 hundreds of others that then sort of fall out a 0:07:39.840 --> 0:07:42.480 pre programmed array at different depths and build out a 0:07:42.520 --> 0:07:45.400 three D sound map of everything below the surface. And 0:07:45.440 --> 0:07:47.720 so that's how you basically try like submarines as they 0:07:47.720 --> 0:07:50.960 go under. The submarines, meanwhile, are constantly sort of hunting 0:07:51.040 --> 0:07:54.960 for thermoclines when the water column has anomalous temperatures for 0:07:55.000 --> 0:07:58.560 all kinds of strange geological reasons, and that way they 0:07:58.600 --> 0:08:01.400 can sort of mask their position. But it's tricky when 0:08:01.440 --> 0:08:04.160 the water is quite shallow. So on this particular flight, 0:08:04.280 --> 0:08:07.320 the US Navy was gathering intelligence on Russian surface vessels, 0:08:07.320 --> 0:08:10.680 auxiliary vessels for the military, a couple of warships, a 0:08:10.680 --> 0:08:13.200 couple of like you know, f SB tugboats and things 0:08:13.280 --> 0:08:15.640 that have spy equipment on board. And so they would 0:08:15.680 --> 0:08:19.200 fly overhead by about a thousand feet, and you know, 0:08:19.240 --> 0:08:22.080 we were flying in the dead of night, but this 0:08:22.240 --> 0:08:24.720 was in polar summer, so everyone can see everything. Oh 0:08:24.800 --> 0:08:27.280 my god, twenty four hours, son, Now how far above 0:08:27.320 --> 0:08:28.160 these ships are you? 0:08:28.200 --> 0:08:29.360 So we flew as. 0:08:29.200 --> 0:08:31.080 Low as three hundred feet. Was that terrifying? 0:08:31.360 --> 0:08:31.640 It was? 0:08:31.920 --> 0:08:35.199 Well, there's a moment where the mission commander, who's like 0:08:35.240 --> 0:08:37.400 a twenty seven year old intelligence officer says to me, 0:08:37.520 --> 0:08:39.760 or put on a life jacket because everytime we go 0:08:39.920 --> 0:08:42.160 below five hundred feet we have to put on life jackets, 0:08:42.160 --> 0:08:44.880 like that's not going to help. We're flying a place. 0:08:45.120 --> 0:08:47.280 The p Posidon is the same airframe as a Boeing 0:08:47.280 --> 0:08:49.720 seven thirty seven. We're flying five hundred miles an hour, 0:08:49.960 --> 0:08:52.360 three hundred feet off the water and a massive plane 0:08:52.400 --> 0:08:55.240 and then doing bank turns like chasing these ships and 0:08:55.280 --> 0:08:57.920 doing flybys and sort of a show of force like 0:08:58.080 --> 0:08:59.960 a life jack is not gonna help in that circumstance. 0:09:00.320 --> 0:09:02.439 And then sort of long afterwards, I thought about it, 0:09:02.600 --> 0:09:04.920 and this is speculation, but my belief is that it's 0:09:04.960 --> 0:09:06.719 probably so they can find the bobes. 0:09:07.160 --> 0:09:08.120 If there is a crash. 0:09:08.520 --> 0:09:10.800 So anyway, we were flying past all these ships, and 0:09:10.840 --> 0:09:13.720 there was like a British warship nearby and a Norwegian 0:09:13.760 --> 0:09:16.200 warship nearby, and they were being tailed by a Russian warship. 0:09:16.280 --> 0:09:19.160 And it just happens every day. So meanwhile, Chicken is 0:09:19.200 --> 0:09:22.800 the air traffic controllers can hear this contact between the 0:09:22.800 --> 0:09:25.880 Americans and the Russians the standard protocols since the Cold War, 0:09:26.200 --> 0:09:30.000 so the Americans would call a Zemily Azemi Azemilia Delta 0:09:30.040 --> 0:09:33.560 Echo Ivory Eagle saying to the Russian control tower, we 0:09:33.640 --> 0:09:37.160 are the American aircraft. And then the Russians reply, you 0:09:37.200 --> 0:09:40.760 know Delta, Echo, Ivory, Eagle, zamily As, Emily Azemia, and 0:09:40.800 --> 0:09:42.720 it's just acknowledging it is us. 0:09:42.960 --> 0:09:43.520 We're here. 0:09:43.720 --> 0:09:45.960 We're not friends, but nor are we here to attack. 0:09:46.240 --> 0:09:48.960 Exactly like we're gonna do our job. You're gonna do yours. 0:09:49.000 --> 0:09:50.840 You're gonna hate us doing our job. We're gonna hate 0:09:50.880 --> 0:09:53.080 you doing yours. And that's how things are always done. 0:09:54.320 --> 0:09:58.640 Tech stuff was was littered, often literally throughout the piece, 0:09:59.080 --> 0:10:01.800 or sometimes literally is say, I. 0:10:01.760 --> 0:10:04.440 Want to start with some of the most mundane. 0:10:04.679 --> 0:10:08.359 Tech elements though, which is how do people and specifically 0:10:08.720 --> 0:10:10.800 soldiers survive this environment. 0:10:11.480 --> 0:10:14.920 So the soldiers live out in these cabins, remote military cabins, 0:10:15.240 --> 0:10:17.240 you know, an hour and a half by snowmobile from 0:10:17.280 --> 0:10:20.200 the town. So if something happens in a white out, 0:10:20.679 --> 0:10:23.240 you basically need to carry on your back enough to 0:10:23.280 --> 0:10:27.720 survive in minus forty in a snowstorm for up to 0:10:27.760 --> 0:10:28.520 forty eight hours. 0:10:28.880 --> 0:10:29.360 So they do. 0:10:29.559 --> 0:10:31.960 They go in pairs on their patrols. They walk usually 0:10:32.040 --> 0:10:36.880 about ten, ten to eighteen kilometers per patrol between remote 0:10:36.920 --> 0:10:40.600 military cabins and sort of every single day, the entire 0:10:40.720 --> 0:10:42.800 length of the Russian Norwegian border is walked on the 0:10:42.800 --> 0:10:45.640 Norwegian side. Wow, it's one hundred and ninety eight kilometers, 0:10:45.880 --> 0:10:47.880 so it's not terribly long. It's not like the finish one, 0:10:48.120 --> 0:10:51.680 but they split it up and every single inch of 0:10:51.720 --> 0:10:53.600 it is walked. And part of that in the winter 0:10:53.720 --> 0:10:56.600 is that you can see from their own tracks if 0:10:56.600 --> 0:10:58.800 anything has moved across those tracks, and in the summer 0:10:58.800 --> 0:11:01.960 they take dogs to if if anything has cossed. But 0:11:02.760 --> 0:11:05.320 in the winter, when it's really really rough, often you'll 0:11:05.320 --> 0:11:07.839 lose your own tracks if it's been blowed over by 0:11:07.840 --> 0:11:08.520 the previous day. 0:11:08.720 --> 0:11:11.440 So the patrols in it are a form of data collection, 0:11:11.520 --> 0:11:14.480 right looking at all the people's footprints, sniffing for other 0:11:14.960 --> 0:11:18.120 people's scent, and of course the Poseidon flight was also 0:11:18.240 --> 0:11:21.920 a data collection exercise. Ultimately, what are some of the 0:11:21.960 --> 0:11:26.000 other kind of physical artifacts or manifestations of data collection that. 0:11:25.960 --> 0:11:28.080 You saw when you get to one of these remote 0:11:28.080 --> 0:11:31.200 military cabins. Usually the stuff out there is so simple. 0:11:31.400 --> 0:11:35.440 They'll have binoculars on a table or maybe a telescope 0:11:35.480 --> 0:11:37.920 like something you could buy in a shop, and when 0:11:37.920 --> 0:11:40.600 it's really wide out conditions. Yeah, some of these guys 0:11:40.600 --> 0:11:42.920 would just open the windows stick their head out because 0:11:42.920 --> 0:11:44.679 they could hear better than they could see. 0:11:44.760 --> 0:11:46.800 Wow. But that's the really remote stuff. 0:11:46.800 --> 0:11:48.800 And then they have these like proper stations that have 0:11:49.200 --> 0:11:53.080 all kinds of proper equipment. Some of that was classified, 0:11:53.240 --> 0:11:56.319 but it's the kind of thing that I sort of understood. 0:11:56.880 --> 0:12:00.680 Can see through darkness, can see through class can see 0:12:00.679 --> 0:12:04.599 through rain and build out a picture presumably involving Keat signatures, 0:12:04.640 --> 0:12:07.440 so you don't need to actually physically be able to see. 0:12:08.160 --> 0:12:10.160 So on the Russian side of the border, there are 0:12:10.200 --> 0:12:13.400 no patrols. Really, there's very few. They don't walk it. 0:12:13.679 --> 0:12:16.440 I never saw any Russians on patrol. So on the 0:12:16.440 --> 0:12:19.440 Norwegian side, any civilian has the right to roam to 0:12:19.440 --> 0:12:22.080 any part of Norway, including up to the border, like 0:12:22.160 --> 0:12:24.720 literally right next to it. On the Russian side, it's 0:12:24.720 --> 0:12:26.560 a closed military zone. It's where they keep a lot 0:12:26.559 --> 0:12:29.280 of their nuclear submarines, of course, but also land based 0:12:29.360 --> 0:12:32.959 nuclear weapons storage facilities. It's one of the most militarized 0:12:32.960 --> 0:12:36.160 places on the planet. So there are no Russian civilians 0:12:36.160 --> 0:12:38.280 who can walk in the border area at all. So 0:12:38.320 --> 0:12:40.920 then it's curious that in an area that has no civilians. 0:12:41.320 --> 0:12:43.720 If you drive along the border road on the Norwegian side, 0:12:44.040 --> 0:12:46.880 you'll often have your cell phone switch to the Russian network. 0:12:47.120 --> 0:12:51.320 They have really powerful like towers that traverse the river 0:12:51.520 --> 0:12:55.520 to basically see I think who's on the other side, 0:12:55.600 --> 0:12:58.400 because your phone will switch your sim card switches. Even 0:12:58.400 --> 0:13:00.760 as I had my phone and airplane mode specifically to 0:13:00.840 --> 0:13:03.120 avoid this, and the clock would change to the Russian 0:13:03.120 --> 0:13:05.880 times on even when it's an airplane mode. I don't 0:13:05.880 --> 0:13:08.840 really understand the technicalities of that, but that was definitely 0:13:08.840 --> 0:13:10.200 a form of collection on the other side. 0:13:13.040 --> 0:13:16.200 After the break, we'll have more from Ben Tao about 0:13:16.240 --> 0:13:20.640 things heating up in the Northern Fleet, including some whale. 0:13:20.320 --> 0:13:21.720 Based counter intelligence. 0:13:22.160 --> 0:13:22.839 Stay with us. 0:13:28.640 --> 0:13:30.960 There's been a lot about fishing boats in the press 0:13:31.000 --> 0:13:35.040 recently as vessels of war in terms of dragging their 0:13:35.080 --> 0:13:38.240 anchors through important cables. But the fishing boats hanging out 0:13:38.320 --> 0:13:41.600 around Chirkenis, these Russian fishing boats may have been for 0:13:41.720 --> 0:13:43.240 surveillance purposes. 0:13:42.840 --> 0:13:46.440 Right, Yeah, so they are fishing boats. They fish, but 0:13:47.040 --> 0:13:51.000 sometimes they have dual use equipment on board. There have 0:13:51.000 --> 0:13:55.920 been instances where there was a radio hidden in a 0:13:56.000 --> 0:13:58.480 compartment on one of the fishing boats that had access 0:13:58.520 --> 0:14:01.320 to Russian military frequencies. But that doesn't mean it's a 0:14:01.360 --> 0:14:03.640 spy boat, and it doesn't mean that anyone on board 0:14:03.720 --> 0:14:07.199 is actually working for the Russian security services. There are 0:14:07.200 --> 0:14:09.480 innocent explanations, and that's the tricky thing about all of it. 0:14:09.640 --> 0:14:12.480 I was like, well, what's an example of an innocent explanation. Well, 0:14:13.080 --> 0:14:15.480 if they're fishing in the waters near Novaya Zemlia, which 0:14:15.480 --> 0:14:18.480 has a ton of nuclear testing and other activities in 0:14:18.520 --> 0:14:22.040 that military testing as well, they might need to be 0:14:22.160 --> 0:14:25.160 able to access military frequencies so they can get warnings 0:14:25.200 --> 0:14:29.400 and such. The equipment itself isn't proof, but you get 0:14:29.520 --> 0:14:33.000 enough materials at a certain point as things start looking 0:14:33.040 --> 0:14:33.720 really strange. 0:14:33.800 --> 0:14:35.560 And there are these boat fishing which are allowed to 0:14:35.640 --> 0:14:37.200 dock in the Churkenis Harbor. 0:14:37.320 --> 0:14:39.720 Yeah, yeah, so Russian fishing boats can come to Chickeness. 0:14:39.760 --> 0:14:43.000 The fishermen walk around town. They go to the pub, 0:14:43.080 --> 0:14:45.720 the one pub, which is called Pub one. There's Johnny's 0:14:45.800 --> 0:14:48.960 lunch bar where you have lunch served by Johnny. There's 0:14:49.000 --> 0:14:52.200 a Chinese place called Shanghai and a type place called Bangkok. 0:14:52.400 --> 0:14:55.640 Oh in a central cafe called the Central Cafe, so. 0:14:55.640 --> 0:14:57.160 You're able to find your way around. 0:14:58.360 --> 0:15:02.080 It's not too hard. But the I just loved it there. 0:15:02.440 --> 0:15:04.360 I loved it there, and I thought that it was 0:15:04.400 --> 0:15:08.440 a place where the story is the ambiguities. It's something 0:15:08.480 --> 0:15:10.640 that you have to sit with and try to figure 0:15:10.680 --> 0:15:15.960 out slowly, and everything's opaque and also, honestly, it took 0:15:16.120 --> 0:15:18.360 a long time to get the sort of main characters. 0:15:18.360 --> 0:15:20.040 The head of counter intelligence for the region, a guy 0:15:20.080 --> 0:15:25.640 named Johann Rouasnas. Johann suspects that the FSB controls a 0:15:25.680 --> 0:15:28.400 lot of the crew going in on those fishing boats 0:15:28.880 --> 0:15:32.200 and saw a lot of fishing captains and fishermen have 0:15:32.400 --> 0:15:35.720 backgrounds of being sailors with the Northern Fleet, so these 0:15:35.720 --> 0:15:39.000 are former military officers, some of them maybe not former. 0:15:39.640 --> 0:15:45.080 Sometimes it's strange they have these sailor passports which are handwritten, 0:15:45.680 --> 0:15:48.680 and you know, he's like, why is everyone called Sergei 0:15:48.720 --> 0:15:49.720 Ivanov on this boat? 0:15:49.800 --> 0:15:51.480 Right? Are they really just fishing? 0:15:52.040 --> 0:15:56.120 And you know, it's a real concern for the Norwegian 0:15:56.160 --> 0:15:59.760 security services that after the Ukraine War kicked off, suddenly 0:15:59.880 --> 0:16:02.080 instead of being a lot of old dudes who look 0:16:02.360 --> 0:16:04.640 like they fish, there's a lot of young dudes who 0:16:04.680 --> 0:16:07.800 are doing pull ups in the harbor and sometimes strolling 0:16:07.800 --> 0:16:10.400 around town and uniforms that looked like military uniforms. 0:16:10.760 --> 0:16:16.160 Did Valdomir the whale come up and you're reporting my 0:16:17.000 --> 0:16:18.760 favorite the last five years? 0:16:18.880 --> 0:16:21.800 Okay, so do you want to describe to everyone who's 0:16:22.320 --> 0:16:25.720 follow me? The whale is a beautiful white whale, bluga whale, 0:16:25.720 --> 0:16:29.160 bluego whale who turned up in a Norwegian harbor wearing 0:16:29.960 --> 0:16:32.160 a head piece which looked to be like a GoPro camera. 0:16:32.920 --> 0:16:37.440 And there was some confusionist to where Vladimir came from, 0:16:37.680 --> 0:16:41.560 but the consensus was Vladimir was a spy whale who 0:16:41.640 --> 0:16:45.320 unfortunately was recently found dead, fate of many spies. 0:16:45.840 --> 0:16:50.400 You know. I heard that basically one theory was that 0:16:50.440 --> 0:16:53.320 Vladimir had actually been sort of they strapped a GoPro 0:16:53.440 --> 0:16:56.400 on him or harness on him, essentially as a massive 0:16:56.480 --> 0:16:59.400 sigh op that like, people would become obsessed with this 0:16:59.440 --> 0:17:02.000 and it would just from other things. It certainly worked 0:17:02.040 --> 0:17:04.440 on me well. But then it turns out that they 0:17:04.520 --> 0:17:07.440 actually do train blugle whales. But it's not so much 0:17:07.480 --> 0:17:11.000 to go into Norway and spy on Norwegian facilities. It's 0:17:11.119 --> 0:17:15.040 to protect the Northern Fleet. So these journalists at the 0:17:15.040 --> 0:17:18.320 Baron's Observer, which is this fabulous tiny newspaper in Turcuinus, 0:17:18.640 --> 0:17:22.120 two Norwegian guys and three Russian dissidents, they worked out 0:17:22.440 --> 0:17:26.680 and mapped through satellite images that near Severomorsk, where there's 0:17:26.680 --> 0:17:29.720 a big Northern Fleet submarine base, there are these pens 0:17:30.320 --> 0:17:32.280 where there are blugle whales that you can see on 0:17:32.320 --> 0:17:34.399 Google Maps. In them, I can show you there are 0:17:34.440 --> 0:17:37.000 blugle whales in these pens, and they are trained to 0:17:37.200 --> 0:17:40.639 spy on enemy submarines that might enter the Cola Fjord. 0:17:40.880 --> 0:17:43.760 It's a counterintelligence operation. So essentially you have these whales 0:17:43.800 --> 0:17:47.080 like patrolling the fjord and they've been trained essentially that 0:17:47.119 --> 0:17:50.520 if they encounter something anomalous and metal that they then 0:17:50.600 --> 0:17:53.600 come back and say like essentially like flat flat flap, 0:17:53.640 --> 0:17:55.480 give me a camera. Then they go back and do 0:17:55.520 --> 0:17:57.199 it again with a camera on them, and then the 0:17:57.240 --> 0:18:01.639 footage is reviewed. But Vladimir escaped, so he's more of 0:18:01.640 --> 0:18:04.760 a defector than a spy, and he was found dead 0:18:04.800 --> 0:18:07.080 and initially there was reporting that there was a bullet 0:18:07.080 --> 0:18:09.040 in his body. It was a huge sort of scandal 0:18:09.080 --> 0:18:11.280 and concern, but it turns out he died by eating 0:18:11.320 --> 0:18:11.720 a stick. 0:18:12.119 --> 0:18:14.679 Ohado. 0:18:15.600 --> 0:18:18.480 Part of what you report about is two sides trying 0:18:18.520 --> 0:18:21.240 to get as much information as they can on each other. 0:18:21.960 --> 0:18:24.480 But the other part is two sides trying to hurt 0:18:24.520 --> 0:18:26.320 each other, or at least one side trying to hurt 0:18:26.320 --> 0:18:30.080 the other. In the Russian case, this include everything from 0:18:30.720 --> 0:18:34.680 jamming the GPS system of the local airport which almost 0:18:34.680 --> 0:18:37.080 brought a plane down as far as I understand, to 0:18:37.960 --> 0:18:41.800 kind of digitally enable spear fishing and influence operations. So 0:18:42.480 --> 0:18:45.479 talk about some of the kind of technological ways in 0:18:45.520 --> 0:18:50.960 which Russia has tried to disturb life in the Chickenus region. 0:18:51.800 --> 0:18:54.720 They really kind of treat Chickenness as a kind of laboratory. 0:18:54.960 --> 0:18:58.159 It's this remote, isolated place, so essentially they use it 0:18:58.160 --> 0:19:01.080 as a kind of laboratory for various and telligence operations 0:19:01.320 --> 0:19:03.439 to see what's the sort of right alchemy of messing 0:19:03.480 --> 0:19:07.000 with the locals before something breaks. So you have psychological 0:19:07.000 --> 0:19:10.600 and influenced operations, you have a conscription of locals and 0:19:10.640 --> 0:19:15.000 exploitation for espionage purposes. You also have GPS jamming, as 0:19:15.000 --> 0:19:18.800 you mentioned in that case. It began in twenty seventeen 0:19:19.200 --> 0:19:21.760 the Russians were pissed about a NATO exercise elsewhere in 0:19:21.760 --> 0:19:25.639 Norway and started jamming GPS. The GPS jamming didn't affect 0:19:25.680 --> 0:19:27.639 the exercise at all, it was hundreds of miles away, 0:19:27.840 --> 0:19:29.520 but it did mean that for about two hundred to 0:19:29.520 --> 0:19:32.200 two hundred and fifty miles from the border, the area 0:19:32.200 --> 0:19:34.359 around Chickiness, you couldn't have. 0:19:34.400 --> 0:19:35.680 GPS on the ground level. 0:19:35.840 --> 0:19:37.840 It works as a vector, so if you're on the 0:19:37.880 --> 0:19:40.399 other side of a mountain, you're not affected. You can 0:19:40.880 --> 0:19:44.000 drive on Google Maps, but if you're within the vector, 0:19:44.480 --> 0:19:47.600 and particularly in a plane, you lose your position. The 0:19:47.600 --> 0:19:50.880 problem is that the only hospital for about five hundred 0:19:50.920 --> 0:19:53.880 miles is in Checkines, so they have an air ambulance 0:19:53.880 --> 0:19:56.639 that goes out to these remote, tiny airfields, and the 0:19:56.680 --> 0:19:59.200 air ambulance and some of these airfields don't have old 0:19:59.240 --> 0:20:02.640 school navigational equipment. So if they're going to a place 0:20:02.640 --> 0:20:04.840 that's been reliant on GPS, because that's how things are 0:20:04.840 --> 0:20:07.399 done now. Already in the Arctic, because it's close to 0:20:07.440 --> 0:20:10.520 the polls, GPS signals are quite weak and to jam 0:20:10.560 --> 0:20:13.920 them is very very straightforward. There's an electronic warfare system 0:20:14.240 --> 0:20:17.040 in the mountains near Pachenga on the Russian side. Then 0:20:17.080 --> 0:20:19.920 they just beam it and they do it every day. 0:20:19.920 --> 0:20:24.400 Now it's pretty much every day, completely unpredictable, but every 0:20:24.440 --> 0:20:27.320 single day there's jamming. And that's why the air ambulance 0:20:27.400 --> 0:20:30.280 nearly crashed once in Chirkiness, because it sets off all 0:20:30.320 --> 0:20:33.000