Speaker 1: Hi Os Voloshin here and Cara Price. We're taking the
Speaker 1: week off. Indeed, we'll be back with new episodes starting
Speaker 1: September tenth.
Speaker 2: In the meantime, instead of leaving this feed empty, we
Speaker 2: wanted to share an episode from earlier this year. This week,
Speaker 2: we're reairing my conversation with Ben Taub from February twenty sixth.
Speaker 2: He's a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist and a staff
Speaker 2: writer at The New Yorker. We discussed the tech being
Speaker 2: used by Russia to safeguard its nuclear arsenal and to
Speaker 2: spy on NATO countries, all in one of the coldest
Speaker 2: places on Earth. I interviewed Ben at a time when
Speaker 2: tensions between Russia and Norway were high, and as Russia
Speaker 2: clashed with NATO over the war in Ukraine. Hope you
Speaker 2: enjoy it and thanks for listening. Welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 2: This is the story, and this week our guest is
Speaker 2: the investigative journalist Ben Taub. Every Wednesday, we bring you
Speaker 2: an in depth interview with someone who has a front
Speaker 2: row seat to the most fascinating things happening in tech.
Speaker 2: Ben Taub, who writes for The New Yorker, and has
Speaker 2: won the Pulitzer and two National Magazine Awards. Has found
Speaker 2: himself up close in a tech battle for world supremacy,
Speaker 2: not really by design, but by following a good story.
Speaker 2: For Ben, it all started on the singing show The
Speaker 2: Voice No Really. Ben was an undergrad at Princeton, took
Speaker 2: a little time off to audition for The Voice and
Speaker 2: stashed away the stipend provided to performers on the show
Speaker 2: to fund his first foray into international journalism, traveling to
Speaker 2: the Turkish Syrian border, which gave him the bug not
Speaker 2: just for reporting, but reporting on the periphery of international conflict.
Speaker 2: After reporting in Syria and Chad, he found himself drawn
Speaker 2: to the periphery of a conflict animated by the fear
Speaker 2: of the twentieth century most fearsome technological innovation, the nuclear bomb.
Speaker 2: Chasing that story took Ben to one of the most
Speaker 2: remote and coldest places on Earth, the Norway Russian border,
Speaker 2: where a complex spy game is underway. He saw for
Speaker 2: himself up close gadgetary and systems that are almost blindingly
Speaker 2: high tech, but also tech as simple as a set
Speaker 2: of binoculars or a snowshoe, a reminder that sometimes the
Speaker 2: best tech for the job might have been around for centuries.
Speaker 2: Ben spent two years reporting mostly from a place called
Speaker 2: chukenis a Norwegian town of a few thousand people, just
Speaker 2: a couple of miles from the Russian border, where nuclear
Speaker 2: tensions are a fact of life.
Speaker 3: So right after Russia invaded Ukraine, I went up to
Speaker 3: northern Norway to join NATO military exercise called Cold Response
Speaker 3: that happens regularly, just to try to understand what are
Speaker 3: the stakes up here? And I was being driven around
Speaker 3: by a Norwegian Army spokesman and we started the gas
Speaker 3: station in the middle of nowhere, and he said, oh,
Speaker 3: you should talk to that guy.
Speaker 4: He's the border.
Speaker 3: Commander and it's filling up his gas like on the
Speaker 3: next one over. So I went up to him and said,
Speaker 3: I hear you're the border commander and he said, oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: And I was like, well, Rassia just invaded Ukraine like
Speaker 3: three weeks ago. Are you concerned about anything happening up there?
Speaker 3: And he's like no, why are you so certain? And
Speaker 3: he said when is your peace coming out? I don't know,
Speaker 3: like a year or longer. And he said, well, if
Speaker 3: it's that long, the truth is that we can see
Speaker 3: the activity on the other side, and we know who
Speaker 3: our counterparts are, and we've seen them for a long time.
Speaker 3: We see them train, we see them do everything, and
Speaker 3: they all got deployed down to Ukraine and they're all dead.
Speaker 3: It's like eighty percent of them died in the first
Speaker 3: three weeks of the war. So there's no one to invade.
Speaker 3: They have all the nuclear stuff, but like the actual
Speaker 3: ground forces on the other side of the border basically
Speaker 3: don't exist right now.
Speaker 2: If you've been to some extraordinary places, describe Shirkinness.
Speaker 3: So Checkinus is a small town on the Norwegian Russian border,
Speaker 3: high up in the Arctic, about as high north as
Speaker 3: you can in continental Europe, and yet it's weirdly accessible.
Speaker 3: You can fly there in two and a half hours
Speaker 3: from Oslo, and there's a sort of a daily flight.
Speaker 3: And it's subject to the strangeness of its position, both
Speaker 3: in terms of like geopolitics and in terms of geography.
Speaker 3: So in the winter, like you don't see the sun
Speaker 3: for two full months, it never rises. You do see
Speaker 3: daylight every day, but it's like a livid blue twilight.
Speaker 3: So you might have around the winter solstice, you might
Speaker 3: have about two hours of like blue gray where you
Speaker 3: can see from around ten am to noon and then
Speaker 3: it's black on either side.
Speaker 1: There during this time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I stayed the whole time because I thought it
Speaker 3: was important. Basically, I went on and off for two years,
Speaker 3: and I knew I wanted to set it as a
Speaker 3: count intelligence story. And the whole point of counterintelligence work
Speaker 3: is that you can't see what's around you, even if
Speaker 3: you know that it's there. And that's what it's like
Speaker 3: in Shirkiness. Between sort of mid November and mid January,
Speaker 3: you don't see the sun and most of the time
Speaker 3: it's pitch black, and so everyone sort of eyeing each
Speaker 3: other and no one really can tell what's going on
Speaker 3: physically as well as what's underlying everyone's motivations and behaviors.
Speaker 3: So I thought that was a good place to set
Speaker 3: a cutter intelligence story because it's so ambiguous and strange,
Speaker 3: and to understand the place you have to experience I
Speaker 3: think a proper polar winter, because you can't really feel
Speaker 3: what it's like to live through that place unless you
Speaker 3: go through the vitamin D deficiencies and the depressive qualities
Speaker 3: of like not seeing the sun for two months.
Speaker 1: There's a reason they call it Nordic noir.
Speaker 2: But I loved that one of the first sentences in
Speaker 2: your piece, which was to survive the months of snow
Speaker 2: and ice. Predator resort to camouflage and deception, but so
Speaker 2: do their prey.
Speaker 3: It's true the wildlife up there behaves the same way
Speaker 3: as the people.
Speaker 2: And then you had this mission impossible esque experience in
Speaker 2: a navy plane. Please tell me about that.
Speaker 4: Sure.
Speaker 3: So the reason that this place is so geopolitically significant
Speaker 3: is because Russia has a massive coastline in the Arctic,
Speaker 3: but it's not really useful most of the time because
Speaker 3: everything east of Mirmansk freezes in winter, and so it's
Speaker 3: a source of tremendous frustration for the Russians that they
Speaker 3: have to keep their nuclear submarine force within listening range
Speaker 3: of NATO territory, which is Norway, and so in order
Speaker 3: to get into the North Atlantic, those submarines have to
Speaker 3: traverse along the northern Norwegian coastline through the Barren Sea.
Speaker 3: The challenge for the Russians is that they're extremely exposed
Speaker 3: during that transit because the Barren Sea is very shallow,
Speaker 3: which means that you can track submarines from the sky,
Speaker 3: and they can't dive, and they can't hide anywhere, and
Speaker 3: so there's an ongoing, constant sort of cat and mouse
Speaker 3: game between Russian submarines and NATO warships and spyplanes in
Speaker 3: the Arctic. It's happening all the time. It's just a
Speaker 3: game of look at me, looking at you. We are here,
Speaker 3: we have the right to do this. It's international waters.
Speaker 3: But it's pretty uncomfortable for you, and everyone's playing the
Speaker 3: same thing against everyone else. So I joined a US
Speaker 3: Navy P eight spyplane, which is a maritime.
Speaker 1: Patrol aircraft nicknamed the Poseidon, right.
Speaker 3: Yes, the Pight Poseidon US, and the Pight Poseidon is
Speaker 3: basically the most advanced submarine hunting aircraft in the world.
Speaker 3: And you fly over suspected submarine targets and they drop
Speaker 3: hundreds of SONA buoys into the water. And then to
Speaker 3: get the position of a submarine you need to know
Speaker 3: the temperature and the salinity of the water column, because
Speaker 3: the speed of sound travels differently in saltier water or
Speaker 3: colder water. And then once they know that, they drop
Speaker 3: hundreds of others that then sort of fall out a
Speaker 3: pre programmed array at different depths and build out a
Speaker 3: three D sound map of everything below the surface. And
Speaker 3: so that's how you basically try like submarines as they
Speaker 3: go under. The submarines, meanwhile, are constantly sort of hunting
Speaker 3: for thermoclines when the water column has anomalous temperatures for
Speaker 3: all kinds of strange geological reasons, and that way they
Speaker 3: can sort of mask their position. But it's tricky when
Speaker 3: the water is quite shallow. So on this particular flight,
Speaker 3: the US Navy was gathering intelligence on Russian surface vessels,
Speaker 3: auxiliary vessels for the military, a couple of warships, a
Speaker 3: couple of like you know, f SB tugboats and things
Speaker 3: that have spy equipment on board. And so they would
Speaker 3: fly overhead by about a thousand feet, and you know,
Speaker 3: we were flying in the dead of night, but this
Speaker 3: was in polar summer, so everyone can see everything. Oh
Speaker 3: my god, twenty four hours, son, Now how far above
Speaker 3: these ships are you?
Speaker 4: So we flew as.
Speaker 1: Low as three hundred feet. Was that terrifying?
Speaker 4: It was?
Speaker 3: Well, there's a moment where the mission commander, who's like
Speaker 3: a twenty seven year old intelligence officer says to me,
Speaker 3: or put on a life jacket because everytime we go
Speaker 3: below five hundred feet we have to put on life jackets,
Speaker 3: like that's not going to help. We're flying a place.
Speaker 3: The p Posidon is the same airframe as a Boeing
Speaker 3: seven thirty seven. We're flying five hundred miles an hour,
Speaker 3: three hundred feet off the water and a massive plane
Speaker 3: and then doing bank turns like chasing these ships and
Speaker 3: doing flybys and sort of a show of force like
Speaker 3: a life jack is not gonna help in that circumstance.
Speaker 3: And then sort of long afterwards, I thought about it,
Speaker 3: and this is speculation, but my belief is that it's
Speaker 3: probably so they can find the bobes.
Speaker 4: If there is a crash.
Speaker 3: So anyway, we were flying past all these ships, and
Speaker 3: there was like a British warship nearby and a Norwegian
Speaker 3: warship nearby, and they were being tailed by a Russian warship.
Speaker 3: And it just happens every day. So meanwhile, Chicken is
Speaker 3: the air traffic controllers can hear this contact between the
Speaker 3: Americans and the Russians the standard protocols since the Cold War,
Speaker 3: so the Americans would call a Zemily Azemi Azemilia Delta
Speaker 3: Echo Ivory Eagle saying to the Russian control tower, we
Speaker 3: are the American aircraft. And then the Russians reply, you
Speaker 3: know Delta, Echo, Ivory, Eagle, zamily As, Emily Azemia, and
Speaker 3: it's just acknowledging it is us.
Speaker 4: We're here.
Speaker 1: We're not friends, but nor are we here to attack.
Speaker 3: Exactly like we're gonna do our job. You're gonna do yours.
Speaker 3: You're gonna hate us doing our job. We're gonna hate
Speaker 3: you doing yours. And that's how things are always done.
Speaker 2: Tech stuff was was littered, often literally throughout the piece,
Speaker 2: or sometimes literally is say, I.
Speaker 1: Want to start with some of the most mundane.
Speaker 2: Tech elements though, which is how do people and specifically
Speaker 2: soldiers survive this environment.
Speaker 3: So the soldiers live out in these cabins, remote military cabins,
Speaker 3: you know, an hour and a half by snowmobile from
Speaker 3: the town. So if something happens in a white out,
Speaker 3: you basically need to carry on your back enough to
Speaker 3: survive in minus forty in a snowstorm for up to
Speaker 3: forty eight hours.
Speaker 4: So they do.
Speaker 3: They go in pairs on their patrols. They walk usually
Speaker 3: about ten, ten to eighteen kilometers per patrol between remote
Speaker 3: military cabins and sort of every single day, the entire
Speaker 3: length of the Russian Norwegian border is walked on the
Speaker 3: Norwegian side. Wow, it's one hundred and ninety eight kilometers,
Speaker 3: so it's not terribly long. It's not like the finish one,
Speaker 3: but they split it up and every single inch of
Speaker 3: it is walked. And part of that in the winter
Speaker 3: is that you can see from their own tracks if
Speaker 3: anything has moved across those tracks, and in the summer
Speaker 3: they take dogs to if if anything has cossed. But
Speaker 3: in the winter, when it's really really rough, often you'll
Speaker 3: lose your own tracks if it's been blowed over by
Speaker 3: the previous day.
Speaker 2: So the patrols in it are a form of data collection,
Speaker 2: right looking at all the people's footprints, sniffing for other
Speaker 2: people's scent, and of course the Poseidon flight was also
Speaker 2: a data collection exercise. Ultimately, what are some of the
Speaker 2: other kind of physical artifacts or manifestations of data collection that.
Speaker 3: You saw when you get to one of these remote
Speaker 3: military cabins. Usually the stuff out there is so simple.
Speaker 3: They'll have binoculars on a table or maybe a telescope
Speaker 3: like something you could buy in a shop, and when
Speaker 3: it's really wide out conditions. Yeah, some of these guys
Speaker 3: would just open the windows stick their head out because
Speaker 3: they could hear better than they could see.
Speaker 4: Wow. But that's the really remote stuff.
Speaker 3: And then they have these like proper stations that have
Speaker 3: all kinds of proper equipment. Some of that was classified,
Speaker 3: but it's the kind of thing that I sort of understood.
Speaker 3: Can see through darkness, can see through class can see
Speaker 3: through rain and build out a picture presumably involving Keat signatures,
Speaker 3: so you don't need to actually physically be able to see.
Speaker 3: So on the Russian side of the border, there are
Speaker 3: no patrols. Really, there's very few. They don't walk it.
Speaker 3: I never saw any Russians on patrol. So on the
Speaker 3: Norwegian side, any civilian has the right to roam to
Speaker 3: any part of Norway, including up to the border, like
Speaker 3: literally right next to it. On the Russian side, it's
Speaker 3: a closed military zone. It's where they keep a lot
Speaker 3: of their nuclear submarines, of course, but also land based
Speaker 3: nuclear weapons storage facilities. It's one of the most militarized
Speaker 3: places on the planet. So there are no Russian civilians
Speaker 3: who can walk in the border area at all. So
Speaker 3: then it's curious that in an area that has no civilians.
Speaker 3: If you drive along the border road on the Norwegian side,
Speaker 3: you'll often have your cell phone switch to the Russian network.
Speaker 3: They have really powerful like towers that traverse the river
Speaker 3: to basically see I think who's on the other side,
Speaker 3: because your phone will switch your sim card switches. Even
Speaker 3: as I had my phone and airplane mode specifically to
Speaker 3: avoid this, and the clock would change to the Russian
Speaker 3: times on even when it's an airplane mode. I don't
Speaker 3: really understand the technicalities of that, but that was definitely
Speaker 3: a form of collection on the other side.
Speaker 2: After the break, we'll have more from Ben Tao about
Speaker 2: things heating up in the Northern Fleet, including some whale.
Speaker 1: Based counter intelligence.
Speaker 4: Stay with us.
Speaker 2: There's been a lot about fishing boats in the press
Speaker 2: recently as vessels of war in terms of dragging their
Speaker 2: anchors through important cables. But the fishing boats hanging out
Speaker 2: around Chirkenis, these Russian fishing boats may have been for
Speaker 2: surveillance purposes.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, so they are fishing boats. They fish, but
Speaker 3: sometimes they have dual use equipment on board. There have
Speaker 3: been instances where there was a radio hidden in a
Speaker 3: compartment on one of the fishing boats that had access
Speaker 3: to Russian military frequencies. But that doesn't mean it's a
Speaker 3: spy boat, and it doesn't mean that anyone on board
Speaker 3: is actually working for the Russian security services. There are
Speaker 3: innocent explanations, and that's the tricky thing about all of it.
Speaker 3: I was like, well, what's an example of an innocent explanation. Well,
Speaker 3: if they're fishing in the waters near Novaya Zemlia, which
Speaker 3: has a ton of nuclear testing and other activities in
Speaker 3: that military testing as well, they might need to be
Speaker 3: able to access military frequencies so they can get warnings
Speaker 3: and such. The equipment itself isn't proof, but you get
Speaker 3: enough materials at a certain point as things start looking
Speaker 3: really strange.
Speaker 2: And there are these boat fishing which are allowed to
Speaker 2: dock in the Churkenis Harbor.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, so Russian fishing boats can come to Chickeness.
Speaker 3: The fishermen walk around town. They go to the pub,
Speaker 3: the one pub, which is called Pub one. There's Johnny's
Speaker 3: lunch bar where you have lunch served by Johnny. There's
Speaker 3: a Chinese place called Shanghai and a type place called Bangkok.
Speaker 3: Oh in a central cafe called the Central Cafe, so.
Speaker 1: You're able to find your way around.
Speaker 4: It's not too hard. But the I just loved it there.
Speaker 3: I loved it there, and I thought that it was
Speaker 3: a place where the story is the ambiguities. It's something
Speaker 3: that you have to sit with and try to figure
Speaker 3: out slowly, and everything's opaque and also, honestly, it took
Speaker 3: a long time to get the sort of main characters.
Speaker 3: The head of counter intelligence for the region, a guy
Speaker 3: named Johann Rouasnas. Johann suspects that the FSB controls a
Speaker 3: lot of the crew going in on those fishing boats
Speaker 3: and saw a lot of fishing captains and fishermen have
Speaker 3: backgrounds of being sailors with the Northern Fleet, so these
Speaker 3: are former military officers, some of them maybe not former.
Speaker 3: Sometimes it's strange they have these sailor passports which are handwritten,
Speaker 3: and you know, he's like, why is everyone called Sergei
Speaker 3: Ivanov on this boat?
Speaker 4: Right? Are they really just fishing?
Speaker 3: And you know, it's a real concern for the Norwegian
Speaker 3: security services that after the Ukraine War kicked off, suddenly
Speaker 3: instead of being a lot of old dudes who look
Speaker 3: like they fish, there's a lot of young dudes who
Speaker 3: are doing pull ups in the harbor and sometimes strolling
Speaker 3: around town and uniforms that looked like military uniforms.
Speaker 1: Did Valdomir the whale come up and you're reporting my
Speaker 1: favorite the last five years?
Speaker 2: Okay, so do you want to describe to everyone who's
Speaker 2: follow me? The whale is a beautiful white whale, bluga whale,
Speaker 2: bluego whale who turned up in a Norwegian harbor wearing
Speaker 2: a head piece which looked to be like a GoPro camera.
Speaker 2: And there was some confusionist to where Vladimir came from,
Speaker 2: but the consensus was Vladimir was a spy whale who
Speaker 2: unfortunately was recently found dead, fate of many spies.
Speaker 3: You know. I heard that basically one theory was that
Speaker 3: Vladimir had actually been sort of they strapped a GoPro
Speaker 3: on him or harness on him, essentially as a massive
Speaker 3: sigh op that like, people would become obsessed with this
Speaker 3: and it would just from other things. It certainly worked
Speaker 3: on me well. But then it turns out that they
Speaker 3: actually do train blugle whales. But it's not so much
Speaker 3: to go into Norway and spy on Norwegian facilities. It's
Speaker 3: to protect the Northern Fleet. So these journalists at the
Speaker 3: Baron's Observer, which is this fabulous tiny newspaper in Turcuinus,
Speaker 3: two Norwegian guys and three Russian dissidents, they worked out
Speaker 3: and mapped through satellite images that near Severomorsk, where there's
Speaker 3: a big Northern Fleet submarine base, there are these pens
Speaker 3: where there are blugle whales that you can see on
Speaker 3: Google Maps. In them, I can show you there are
Speaker 3: blugle whales in these pens, and they are trained to
Speaker 3: spy on enemy submarines that might enter the Cola Fjord.
Speaker 3: It's a counterintelligence operation. So essentially you have these whales
Speaker 3: like patrolling the fjord and they've been trained essentially that
Speaker 3: if they encounter something anomalous and metal that they then
Speaker 3: come back and say like essentially like flat flat flap,
Speaker 3: give me a camera. Then they go back and do
Speaker 3: it again with a camera on them, and then the
Speaker 3: footage is reviewed. But Vladimir escaped, so he's more of
Speaker 3: a defector than a spy, and he was found dead
Speaker 3: and initially there was reporting that there was a bullet
Speaker 3: in his body. It was a huge sort of scandal
Speaker 3: and concern, but it turns out he died by eating
Speaker 3: a stick.
Speaker 1: Ohado.
Speaker 2: Part of what you report about is two sides trying
Speaker 2: to get as much information as they can on each other.
Speaker 2: But the other part is two sides trying to hurt
Speaker 2: each other, or at least one side trying to hurt
Speaker 2: the other. In the Russian case, this include everything from
Speaker 2: jamming the GPS system of the local airport which almost
Speaker 2: brought a plane down as far as I understand, to
Speaker 2: kind of digitally enable spear fishing and influence operations. So
Speaker 2: talk about some of the kind of technological ways in
Speaker 2: which Russia has tried to disturb life in the Chickenus region.
Speaker 3: They really kind of treat Chickenness as a kind of laboratory.
Speaker 3: It's this remote, isolated place, so essentially they use it
Speaker 3: as a kind of laboratory for various and telligence operations
Speaker 3: to see what's the sort of right alchemy of messing
Speaker 3: with the locals before something breaks. So you have psychological
Speaker 3: and influenced operations, you have a conscription of locals and
Speaker 3: exploitation for espionage purposes. You also have GPS jamming, as
Speaker 3: you mentioned in that case. It began in twenty seventeen
Speaker 3: the Russians were pissed about a NATO exercise elsewhere in
Speaker 3: Norway and started jamming GPS. The GPS jamming didn't affect
Speaker 3: the exercise at all, it was hundreds of miles away,
Speaker 3: but it did mean that for about two hundred to
Speaker 3: two hundred and fifty miles from the border, the area
Speaker 3: around Chickiness, you couldn't have.
Speaker 4: GPS on the ground level.
Speaker 3: It works as a vector, so if you're on the
Speaker 3: other side of a mountain, you're not affected. You can
Speaker 3: drive on Google Maps, but if you're within the vector,
Speaker 3: and particularly in a plane, you lose your position. The
Speaker 3: problem is that the only hospital for about five hundred
Speaker 3: miles is in Checkines, so they have an air ambulance
Speaker 3: that goes out to these remote, tiny airfields, and the
Speaker 3: air ambulance and some of these airfields don't have old
Speaker 3: school navigational equipment. So if they're going to a place
Speaker 3: that's been reliant on GPS, because that's how things are
Speaker 3: done now. Already in the Arctic, because it's close to
Speaker 3: the polls, GPS signals are quite weak and to jam
Speaker 3: them is very very straightforward. There's an electronic warfare system
Speaker 3: in the mountains near Pachenga on the Russian side. Then
Speaker 3: they just beam it and they do it every day.
Speaker 3: Now it's pretty much every day, completely unpredictable, but every
Speaker 3: single day there's jamming. And that's why the air ambulance
Speaker 3: nearly crashed once in Chirkiness, because it sets off all
Speaker 3: these alarms in the cockpit, so it's incredibly distracting to fly.
Speaker 3: So even if you can see and know your position,
Speaker 3: you are so distracted by the alarms going off constantly
Speaker 3: that you kind of you might forget to put down
Speaker 3: the flaps. Even I experienced it driving around in the
Speaker 3: car and lost my position fortually. Yeah, yeah, because I
Speaker 3: was on the mountains, just facing Russia and while I
Speaker 3: was driving along the river, and I didn't know about
Speaker 3: GPS jamming at that point. It was the next day
Speaker 3: that I met with Johann for the first time and
Speaker 3: he told me about this, and I just like, my
Speaker 3: phone's not working, the car's not working, but you know,
Speaker 3: there's like not that many roads out there, so I'll
Speaker 3: find my way back other technical ones. The Globus, oh, yes,
Speaker 3: of course. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Globus is this enormous, essentially data collection facility whose stated
Speaker 2: mission is to monitor space junk. But I read in
Speaker 2: your story that a certain point the cover blew off
Speaker 2: and the antenna wasn't.
Speaker 1: Actually pointing to the space after all.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I was pointing directly at the Northern Fleet.
Speaker 4: So yeah.
Speaker 3: Globus is actually the most advanced radar station in the world.
Speaker 3: They have a series of ones iterations that have been
Speaker 3: built over the past sixty years. Globe is one, two,
Speaker 3: and three in the latest. It's built by the Americans
Speaker 3: but operated by the Norwegian Intelligence Service, essentially so that
Speaker 3: the Norwegians can say to their population, we.
Speaker 1: Don't have any American military installations on our soil.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is not We don't share data in real
Speaker 3: time with the American Okay. But it's in a small
Speaker 3: fishing village called Varda, and it's on a tiny island,
Speaker 3: the easternmost point of Norway. It's north of Chickenus, across
Speaker 3: the fjord. Like looking at Rasha, basically this tiny place.
Speaker 3: It's so far east that you're actually like, you're east
Speaker 3: of his stumble. You don't think of Norway A's as
Speaker 3: east of his dumble, but it's east of his stumble.
Speaker 3: It's used to Saint Petersburg anywhere that you're in the town.
Speaker 3: You can see these huge radar balls that dominate the skyline,
Speaker 3: But all the locals just pretend they're not there, and
Speaker 3: I half of them like have family members who work there,
Speaker 3: whether as intelligence officers or as like cleaning staff.
Speaker 1: We'll be back.
Speaker 2: After a short break with more from Ben Taub about
Speaker 2: how the twentieth century's most terrifying tech hangs over everything
Speaker 2: in the Arctic. Stay with us. You know, you mentioned
Speaker 2: that none of this would be such a big problem
Speaker 2: if you know Russian submarines had access to the Atlantic
Speaker 2: from a different port, which, of course brings me to
Speaker 2: the big tech kahuna hanging over this whole story, which
Speaker 2: is a nuclear bomb.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Arguably the greatest and most terrifying technological innovation of the
Speaker 2: twentieth century, and as far as I understand, really the
Speaker 2: reason why this place that you went is such a flashpoint.
Speaker 3: Yeah, at the end of the day, this place matters
Speaker 3: in the event of escalations, and everything that's done by
Speaker 3: the Russian security services, all the mapping of the infrastructure,
Speaker 3: all the influence operations on the locals is with an
Speaker 3: eye to maintaining or creating the ability to take over
Speaker 3: northern Norway, not because they want it like they want Ukraine,
Speaker 3: but to build out a buffer zone to protect the
Speaker 3: Northern Fleet, to maintain the ability to fire nuclear weapons
Speaker 3: from submarines in the event of all.
Speaker 4: That nuclear war.
Speaker 3: So the delicate cat and mask, all the paight poseidons,
Speaker 3: all the intel collection, all the on the Russian side,
Speaker 3: like mapping out the infrastructure of a tiny Arctic village,
Speaker 3: is just about can we take over northern Norway in
Speaker 3: a flash to build out a buffer to feel more
Speaker 3: confident that we don't need to find nuclear weapons if
Speaker 3: we get into a real conflict with the West. So
Speaker 3: you feel the war in Ukraine in Churchiness, like there's
Speaker 3: a tiny Russian consulate in Churchiness. There's a lot of
Speaker 3: Russian dissidents in Ukrainian refugees living in Churchiness. There's Ukrainian
Speaker 3: flags in the center of town, and like protesting the
Speaker 3: Russian consulate in front of you. So you really do
Speaker 3: feel you feel the Ukraine War in Churchiness because ultimately,
Speaker 3: escalation anywhere in the Baltics, in Poland, in Ukraine is
Speaker 3: always about turning up the temperature on nuclear threats.
Speaker 2: And how much of the nuclear infrastructure nuclear submarines. Nuclear
Speaker 2: weapon delivery system in this area is holdover from Soviet
Speaker 2: Union times, and how much of it is new systems
Speaker 2: that are being developed and invested in and researched in
Speaker 2: this area.
Speaker 3: With the invasion of Ukraine, it became sort of broadly
Speaker 3: clear to the world that the Russian military is using
Speaker 3: all kinds of old Soviet garbage and the personnel, the
Speaker 3: officers are bad and everything sucks, right, But.
Speaker 4: That is not true of the Northern Fleet.
Speaker 3: Putin has invested so deeply in the nuclear submarine capacity.
Speaker 4: This is the state of the art.
Speaker 3: In the nineties, the Northern Fleet was in absolute disarray,
Speaker 3: but in the early two thousands, Putin really really prioritized
Speaker 3: as a strategic matter the development of proper nuclear submarines.
Speaker 3: And those subs are quiet, they're fast, they're state of
Speaker 3: the art, and the weapons systems on board are thought
Speaker 3: to be the same. So there is no obvious asymmetries
Speaker 3: that I'm aware of.
Speaker 2: So more than Ukraine, this is the existential area for
Speaker 2: Russian and self defense.
Speaker 4: That's exactly right.
Speaker 3: The Cola Peninsula is the existential area because this is
Speaker 3: their last resort without nuclear weapons. Russia's economy is that
Speaker 3: Italy with nuclear weapons. You know, they have their way
Speaker 3: in the world. Those subs are highly capable, and they're
Speaker 3: also investing a ton in development systems for delivery of
Speaker 3: nuclear weapons. So the Varda Globus station is really fundamentally
Speaker 3: about the first layer of missile defense. So the Russians
Speaker 3: have threatened the Bombvarda a couple of times. They've flown jets,
Speaker 3: fighter jets at it in strike formation and then peeled
Speaker 3: off just before they crossed international waters. And you wouldn't
Speaker 3: see this if you're a civilian, but like the Varda
Speaker 3: station is monitoring everything and they see these jets flying
Speaker 3: at them to bomb them. And the brilliance of globis
Speaker 3: has a technical matter and the reasons the most advanced
Speaker 3: globalist three radar station in the world is that it
Speaker 3: has the ability I was told to distinguish. When you're
Speaker 3: launching nuclear weapons out of a submarine or aircraft or
Speaker 3: other place, there's multiple ballistic missiles going off at once,
Speaker 3: each of which has several nuclear warheads, each of which
Speaker 3: can go to a different target. So you're talking about
Speaker 3: you know, a single nuclear sub can hit eighty targets
Speaker 3: or one hundred targets or something and destroy.
Speaker 4: An entire nation.
Speaker 3: So the critical thing about Vard station the globis is
Speaker 3: that it can distinguish which ones have nuclear warheads on
Speaker 3: board and which ones are empty ballistic missiles as a distraction.
Speaker 3: But layer one is can you detect which ones to prioritize,
Speaker 3: because if you're dealing with one hundred missiles flying at
Speaker 3: you at once, you need to know which ones to
Speaker 3: really really worry about. And that's what that is all about,
Speaker 3: and that's why the Russians hate it so much. Comes
Speaker 3: back to the beginning of your story in that idea
Speaker 3: of camouflage. Yeah, it's all about detection, and most of
Speaker 3: it doesn't happen in the visual spectrum. Everything's electromagnetic, and
Speaker 3: like everything's done in ways that we cannot physically see.
Speaker 3: That's why again, like you know, you see some equipment
Speaker 3: on a watch tower or in the P eight and
Speaker 3: as a lay person, I don't know what it is.
Speaker 3: But also it would be impossible to explain even if
Speaker 3: I didn't know what it was, because it's like it's
Speaker 3: the kind of thing that.
Speaker 4: Really really really really.
Speaker 3: Matters to the militaries but doesn't really matter to everyday life.
Speaker 2: Just described Trickiness as as a crucible or a testing ground.
Speaker 2: Have you seen any of the technologies or tactics that
Speaker 2: have been deployed.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so it is.
Speaker 3: It's basically the test ground for things that are then
Speaker 3: replicated elsewhere at scale. So the GPS jamming now it's ubiquitous.
Speaker 3: There's a whole sort of host of close calls in
Speaker 3: the Baltics with pilots losing their GPS positions starting again
Speaker 3: last fall. But again this has been tested in Schickeness
Speaker 3: for many, many years before, so it's really become this,
Speaker 3: as you said, a crucible, a place where you test
Speaker 3: the limits of what you can get away with and
Speaker 3: what a Western democracy and society will tolerate, how it
Speaker 3: will try to explain or not explain things to its population.
Speaker 3: And then where the sort of limits are in terms
Speaker 3: of sort of what is a military operation and what's
Speaker 3: merely a phenomenon that's left unexplained.
Speaker 1: What do you think might happen next?
Speaker 4: It's tricky to know, of course.
Speaker 3: Johann described to me the goal of all of these
Speaker 3: operations in Shaickinness as preparations for war. That doesn't mean
Speaker 3: that war will ever happen, or that anyone wants that
Speaker 3: war to happen. But if you're an FSB officer or
Speaker 3: a GRU officer stationed in the Colo Peninsula and your
Speaker 3: job is to prepare a war plan in case we
Speaker 3: do need one, then you need to send people in
Speaker 3: and map all the infrastructure in shackiness and know exactly
Speaker 3: what to hit and exactly how so that you do
Speaker 3: have a plan for a war that you don't want
Speaker 3: to ever get the order to pursue. And I think
Speaker 3: most people hear the phrase preparations for war, they think
Speaker 3: that that's backed by an intention for war. But there's
Speaker 3: a difference, a major difference between preparations and intentions.
Speaker 2: As a closing thought, I think one of the most
Speaker 2: striking lines on your whole piece was when one of
Speaker 2: the sources said to you the Russian ruined a great
Speaker 2: spy game with their war in Ukraine. What does that mean?
Speaker 3: He and I talked a lot about that line, because
Speaker 3: he didn't want to be flippant about the stakes in
Speaker 3: Ukraine and suggesting that that was that it was ever
Speaker 3: for fun. But there is an element of respect among
Speaker 3: intelligence officers where you unravel the other operation and you
Speaker 3: think well done. That was a good one. What are
Speaker 3: we missing? Especially in his job. In his role, he's
Speaker 3: not running offensive operations against the Russians, He's trying to
Speaker 3: figure out what are they doing in Norway to us?
Speaker 3: So like there's a respect among spies for job well done,
Speaker 3: game well played.
Speaker 4: We know you're doing this to us, We're going to
Speaker 4: do the same to you.
Speaker 3: We're going to try to catch who you've sent into
Speaker 3: our territory and try to flip them right back on you.
Speaker 3: He described it to me as a kind of it's
Speaker 3: like playing chess, but you don't know what the rules are,
Speaker 3: where any of the pieces are going, because it's changing constantly,
Speaker 3: and suddenly it became about something else. When the war
Speaker 3: in Ukraine kicked off, it was about aggression. It was
Speaker 3: about planning for war, and it was about hurting people
Speaker 3: and creating the circumstances where things can go really poorly,
Speaker 3: really fast. One of his favorite lines, which I quite enjoyed,
Speaker 3: was that conor intelligence is like playing tennis and you
Speaker 3: see a ball flying towards you, and you're about to
Speaker 3: smash it, and then you just realize that it's an
Speaker 3: orange and so everything you can look so closely at
Speaker 3: something and then only at the last second discover that
Speaker 3: everything you thought was completely wrong.
Speaker 2: BENTAALV, thank you, Thank you Oz. That's it for this
Speaker 2: edition of tech Stuff. I'm os Vloshin and this episode
Speaker 2: was produced by Eliza Dennis, Victoria Dominguez and Lizzie Jacobs.
Speaker 2: It was executive produced by me Kara Price and Kate Osborne,
Speaker 2: The Kaleidoscope and Katrina Novelle for iHeart Podcasts. We've had
Speaker 2: engineering help from the Heath Fraser and City Box. Jack
Speaker 2: Insley mixed this episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song.
Speaker 1: Join us on Friday for.
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