WEBVTT - The Story: Russia’s Espionage ‘Laboratory’ w/ Ben Taub 0:00:00.040 --> 0:00:02.640 Thanks for tuney into Tech Stuff. If you don't recognize 0:00:02.680 --> 0:00:05.440 my voice, my name is Oz Valoshin, and I'm here 0:00:05.480 --> 0:00:08.639 because the inimitable Jonathan Strickland has passed the baton to 0:00:08.720 --> 0:00:12.160 Cara Price and myself to host Tech Stuff. The show 0:00:12.160 --> 0:00:15.040 will remain your home for all things tech, and all 0:00:15.080 --> 0:00:20.280 the old episodes will remain available in this feed. Welcome 0:00:20.280 --> 0:00:23.200 to Tech Stuff. This is the story, and this week 0:00:23.239 --> 0:00:27.600 our guest is the investigative journalist Ben Taub. Every Wednesday 0:00:27.680 --> 0:00:30.360 we bring you an in depth interview with someone who 0:00:30.400 --> 0:00:33.040 has a front row seat to the most fascinating things 0:00:33.240 --> 0:00:37.920 happening at tech. Ben Taube, who writes for The New 0:00:38.000 --> 0:00:41.600 Yorker and has won the Pulitzer and two National Magazine Awards, 0:00:42.000 --> 0:00:45.239 has found himself up close in a tech battle for 0:00:45.360 --> 0:00:49.199 world supremacy, not really by design, but by following a 0:00:49.200 --> 0:00:52.360 good story. For Ben, it all started on the singing 0:00:52.400 --> 0:00:56.440 show The Voice No Really. Ben was an undergrad at Princeton, 0:00:56.840 --> 0:00:58.920 took a little time off to audition for The Voice 0:00:59.240 --> 0:01:02.280 and stashed away the stipend provided to performers on the 0:01:02.320 --> 0:01:07.000 show to fund his first foray into international journalism, traveling 0:01:07.000 --> 0:01:10.160 to the Turkish Syrian border, which gave him the bug 0:01:10.360 --> 0:01:14.319 not just for reporting, but reporting on the periphery of 0:01:14.360 --> 0:01:18.839 international conflict. After reporting in Syria and Chad, he found 0:01:18.920 --> 0:01:22.479 himself drawn to the periphery of a conflict animated by 0:01:22.480 --> 0:01:26.840 the fear of the twentieth century's most fearsome technological innovation, 0:01:27.360 --> 0:01:30.880 the nuclear bomb. Chasing that story took Ben to one 0:01:30.920 --> 0:01:34.560 of the most remote and coldest places on Earth, the 0:01:34.600 --> 0:01:38.560 Norway Russian border, where a complex spy game is underway. 0:01:39.240 --> 0:01:42.920 He saw for himself up close gadgetary and systems that 0:01:42.959 --> 0:01:47.000 are almost blindingly high tech, but also tech as simple 0:01:47.080 --> 0:01:50.200 as a set of binoculars or a snowshoe, a reminder 0:01:50.200 --> 0:01:52.800 that sometimes the best tech for the job might have 0:01:52.880 --> 0:01:57.400 been around for centuries. Ben spent two years reporting, mostly 0:01:57.440 --> 0:02:00.720 from a place called Chukenis, a Norwiedi in town of 0:02:00.760 --> 0:02:03.400 a few thousand people, just a couple of miles from 0:02:03.440 --> 0:02:07.160 the Russian border, where nuclear tentions are a factive life. 0:02:08.160 --> 0:02:10.919 So right after Russia invaded Ukraine, I went up to 0:02:11.000 --> 0:02:15.040 northern Norway to join NATO military exercise called Cold Response 0:02:15.080 --> 0:02:17.520 that happens regularly just to try to understand what are 0:02:17.520 --> 0:02:21.000 the stakes up here, and I was being driven around 0:02:21.040 --> 0:02:24.440 by a Norwegian Army spokesman and we stopped at a 0:02:24.480 --> 0:02:27.240 gas station in the middle of nowhere and he said, oh, 0:02:27.280 --> 0:02:28.200 you should talk to that guy. 0:02:28.240 --> 0:02:28.959 He's the border. 0:02:28.760 --> 0:02:30.920 Commander and it's filling up his gas like on the 0:02:30.960 --> 0:02:32.799 next one over. So I went up to him and said, 0:02:32.840 --> 0:02:35.239 I hear you're the border commander and he said, oh, yeah, yeah. 0:02:35.280 --> 0:02:37.520 And I was like, well, Russia just invaded Ukraine like 0:02:37.560 --> 0:02:40.040 three weeks ago. Are you concerned about anything happening up there? 0:02:40.080 --> 0:02:43.400 And he's like no, Why are you so certain? And 0:02:43.440 --> 0:02:45.560 he said, when is your peace coming on? I don't know, 0:02:45.639 --> 0:02:47.040 like a year or longer. And he said, well, if 0:02:47.080 --> 0:02:49.720 it's that long. The truth is that we can see 0:02:49.760 --> 0:02:52.600 the activity on the other side, and we know who 0:02:52.639 --> 0:02:54.799 our counterparts are, and we've seen them for a long time. 0:02:54.840 --> 0:02:57.560 We see them train, we see them do everything, and 0:02:57.760 --> 0:03:00.240 they all got deployed down to Ukraine in the all 0:03:00.280 --> 0:03:02.520 dead It's like eighty percent of them died in the 0:03:02.520 --> 0:03:06.040 first three weeks of the war, so there's no one 0:03:06.080 --> 0:03:08.280 to invade. They have all the nuclear stuff, but like 0:03:08.320 --> 0:03:10.440 the actual ground forces on the other side of the 0:03:10.440 --> 0:03:12.080 border basically don't exist. 0:03:12.200 --> 0:03:17.840 Right now. If you've been to some extraordinary places, describe chirkinness. 0:03:17.919 --> 0:03:21.520 So Chickinus is a small town on the Norwegian Russian border, 0:03:21.880 --> 0:03:24.080 high up in the Arctic, about as high north as 0:03:24.080 --> 0:03:27.840 you can get in continental Europe, and yet it's weirdly accessible. 0:03:27.880 --> 0:03:29.200 You can fly there in two and a half hours 0:03:29.240 --> 0:03:31.680 from Oslo, and as there's a sort of a daily flight, 0:03:32.160 --> 0:03:37.120 and it's subject to the strangeness of its position, both 0:03:37.160 --> 0:03:40.440 in terms of like geopolitics and in terms of geography. 0:03:40.560 --> 0:03:43.200 So in the winter, like you don't see the sun 0:03:43.240 --> 0:03:46.440 for two full months, it never rises. You do see 0:03:46.520 --> 0:03:49.400 daylight every day, but it's like a livid blue twilight. 0:03:49.760 --> 0:03:52.760 So you might have around the winter solstice you might 0:03:52.800 --> 0:03:55.960 have about two hours of like blue gray where you 0:03:55.960 --> 0:03:59.720 can see from around ten am to noon, and then 0:03:59.760 --> 0:04:01.640 it's black on either side. 0:04:02.080 --> 0:04:03.000 There during this time. 0:04:03.120 --> 0:04:05.080 Yeah, I stayed the whole time because I thought it 0:04:05.160 --> 0:04:08.160 was important. Basically, I went on and off for two years, 0:04:08.600 --> 0:04:10.720 and I knew I wanted to set it as a 0:04:10.720 --> 0:04:13.480 counter intelligence story. And the whole point of counter intelligence 0:04:13.520 --> 0:04:15.240 work is that you can't see what's around you, even 0:04:15.280 --> 0:04:17.400 if you know that it's there. And that's what it's 0:04:17.440 --> 0:04:20.320 like in Shirkiness, between sort of mid November and mid January, 0:04:20.400 --> 0:04:22.280 you don't see the sun and most of the time 0:04:22.279 --> 0:04:25.280 it's pitch black, and so everyone's sort of eyeing each 0:04:25.320 --> 0:04:29.240 other and no one really can tell what's going on physically, 0:04:29.560 --> 0:04:33.479 as well as what's underlying everyone's motivations and behaviors. So 0:04:33.560 --> 0:04:36.080 I thought that was a good place to set a 0:04:36.080 --> 0:04:38.839 counter intelligence story because it's so ambiguous and strange, and 0:04:38.960 --> 0:04:41.200 to understand the place you have to experience I think 0:04:41.200 --> 0:04:45.200 a proper polar winter, because you can't really feel what 0:04:45.240 --> 0:04:47.920 it's like to live through that place unless you go 0:04:48.040 --> 0:04:52.520 through the vitamin D deficiencies and the depressive qualities of 0:04:52.680 --> 0:04:54.719 like not seeing sun for two months. 0:04:54.920 --> 0:04:57.719 There's a reason they call it Nordic noir. But I 0:04:57.800 --> 0:04:59.719 loved that one of the first sentences in your piece, 0:04:59.760 --> 0:05:02.680 which was to survive the months of snow and ice 0:05:03.240 --> 0:05:06.800 predative resort to camouflage and deception. But so do their 0:05:06.839 --> 0:05:08.719 prey line. 0:05:08.720 --> 0:05:11.760 It's true the wildlife up there behaves the same way 0:05:11.760 --> 0:05:12.279 as the people. 0:05:12.880 --> 0:05:17.240 And then you had this mission impossible esque experience in 0:05:17.279 --> 0:05:20.920 a Navy plane. Please tell me about that. 0:05:21.080 --> 0:05:23.600 Sure, So the reason that this place is so geopolitically 0:05:23.640 --> 0:05:27.520 significant is because Russia has a massive coastline in the Arctic, 0:05:28.040 --> 0:05:31.320 but it's not really useful most of the time because 0:05:31.480 --> 0:05:35.839 everything east of Mirmansk freezes in winter, and so it's 0:05:35.880 --> 0:05:38.040 a source of tremendous frustration for the Russians that they 0:05:38.080 --> 0:05:41.720 have to keep their nuclear submarine force within listening range 0:05:41.800 --> 0:05:45.040 of NATO territory, which is Norway, and so in order 0:05:45.080 --> 0:05:47.360 to get into the North Atlantic, those submarines have to 0:05:47.400 --> 0:05:50.599 traverse along the northern Norwegian coastline through the Barren Sea. 0:05:51.400 --> 0:05:54.360 The challenge for the Russians is that they're extremely exposed 0:05:54.400 --> 0:05:57.240 during that transit because the Barren Sea is very shallow, 0:05:57.279 --> 0:05:59.880 which means that you can track submarines from the sky, 0:06:00.080 --> 0:06:03.160 can't dive, and they can't hide anywhere. And so there's 0:06:03.200 --> 0:06:07.279 an ongoing, constant sort of cat and mouse game between 0:06:07.440 --> 0:06:12.279 Russian submarines and NATO warships and spyplanes in the Arctic. 0:06:12.440 --> 0:06:14.440 It's happening all the time. It's just a game of 0:06:14.480 --> 0:06:16.839 look at me, looking at you. We are here, we 0:06:16.880 --> 0:06:19.200 have the right to do this. It's international waters, but 0:06:19.240 --> 0:06:21.960 it's pretty uncomfortable for you. And everyone's playing the same 0:06:22.000 --> 0:06:27.040 thing against everyone else, So I joined US Navy pight spyplane, 0:06:27.040 --> 0:06:28.520 which is a maritime. 0:06:28.160 --> 0:06:31.040 Patrol aircraft nicknamed the Poseidon. Right, yes, the. 0:06:30.920 --> 0:06:35.120 Paight Poseidon, and the pe Poseidon is basically the most 0:06:35.120 --> 0:06:39.159 evanced submarine hunting aircraft in the world. And you fly 0:06:39.400 --> 0:06:42.920 over suspected submarine targets and they drop hundreds of SONA 0:06:42.960 --> 0:06:46.400 buoys into the water, and then to get the position 0:06:46.440 --> 0:06:50.240 of a submarine, you need to know the temperature and 0:06:50.279 --> 0:06:53.440 the salinity of the water column because the speed of 0:06:53.480 --> 0:06:58.560 sound travels differently in saltier water or colder water. And 0:06:58.600 --> 0:07:02.480 then once they know that, they drop hundreds of others 0:07:02.480 --> 0:07:04.800 that then sort of fall out a pre programmed to 0:07:04.839 --> 0:07:07.120 array at different depths and build out a three D 0:07:07.279 --> 0:07:10.200 sound map of everything below the surface. And so that's 0:07:10.240 --> 0:07:13.800 how you basically try submarines as they go under. The submarines, meanwhile, 0:07:13.840 --> 0:07:17.440 are constantly sort of hunting for thermoclines when the water 0:07:17.520 --> 0:07:21.720 column has anomalous temperatures for all kinds of strange geological reasons, 0:07:21.960 --> 0:07:24.440 and that way they can sort of mask their position. 0:07:25.000 --> 0:07:27.080 But it's tricky when the water is quite shallow. So 0:07:27.440 --> 0:07:30.440 on this particular flight, the US Navy was gathering intelligence 0:07:30.440 --> 0:07:33.640 on Russian surface vessels, auxiliary vessels for the military, a 0:07:33.720 --> 0:07:36.400 couple of warships, a couple of like you know, f 0:07:36.440 --> 0:07:38.840 SB tugboats and things that have spy equipment on board, 0:07:39.280 --> 0:07:42.720 and so they would fly overhead by about a thousand 0:07:42.720 --> 0:07:44.480 feet and you know, we were flying in the dead 0:07:44.520 --> 0:07:48.120 of night, but this was in polar summer, so everyone 0:07:48.120 --> 0:07:51.120 can see everything. Oh twenty four hours sun. Now how 0:07:51.120 --> 0:07:53.480 far above these ships are you? So we flew as 0:07:53.520 --> 0:07:54.600 low as three hundred feet? 0:07:54.640 --> 0:07:57.040 Was that terrifying? It was, Well, there's a. 0:07:57.000 --> 0:07:59.880 Moment where the mission commander, who's like a twenty s 0:08:00.160 --> 0:08:02.040 year old intelligence officer, it says to me, or put 0:08:02.080 --> 0:08:04.480 on a life jacket, because every time we go below 0:08:04.520 --> 0:08:06.480 five hundred feet we have to put on life jackets. 0:08:06.480 --> 0:08:09.200 Like that's not going to help. We're flying a place. 0:08:09.400 --> 0:08:11.560 The p Posidon is the same airframe as a Boeing 0:08:11.600 --> 0:08:14.040 seven thirty seven. We're flying five hundred miles an hour, 0:08:14.280 --> 0:08:16.640 three hundred feet off the water and a massive plane 0:08:16.680 --> 0:08:19.560 and then doing bank turns like chasing these ships and 0:08:19.600 --> 0:08:22.200 doing flybys and sort of a show of force, Like 0:08:22.400 --> 0:08:23.760 a life jack is not going to help in that 0:08:23.800 --> 0:08:26.760 circumstance and then sort of long afterwards I thought about it, 0:08:26.920 --> 0:08:29.240 and this is speculation, but my belief is that it's 0:08:29.240 --> 0:08:30.280 probably so they can find. 0:08:30.160 --> 0:08:32.480 The bies if there is a crash. 0:08:32.840 --> 0:08:35.079 So anyway, we were flying past all these ships and 0:08:35.120 --> 0:08:38.040 there was like a British warship nearby and a Norwegian 0:08:38.040 --> 0:08:40.520 warship nearby, and they were being tailed by a Russian warship. 0:08:40.600 --> 0:08:43.480 And it just happens every day. So meanwhile, Chicken is 0:08:43.520 --> 0:08:47.079 the air traffic controllers can hear this contact between the 0:08:47.120 --> 0:08:50.200 Americans and the Russians. There's standard protocols since the Cold War. 0:08:50.520 --> 0:08:54.240 So the Americans would call a Zemia Zemlia, Zemlia, Delta 0:08:54.360 --> 0:08:57.880 echo Ivory Eagle, saying to the Russian control tower, we 0:08:57.960 --> 0:09:01.600 are the American aircraft. And then the Russians reply, you know, 0:09:02.120 --> 0:09:05.360 Delta echo Ivory eaglesamily as Emily Azamia, and it's just 0:09:05.400 --> 0:09:07.040 acknowledging it is us. 0:09:07.280 --> 0:09:09.800 We're here. We're not friends, but nor are we here 0:09:09.800 --> 0:09:10.280 to attack. 0:09:10.520 --> 0:09:13.280 Exactly like we're gonna do our job, you're gonna do yours. 0:09:13.320 --> 0:09:15.160 You're gonna hate us doing our job, We're gonna hate 0:09:15.160 --> 0:09:17.400 you doing yours. And that's how things are always done. 0:09:18.600 --> 0:09:23.439 Tech stuff was littered, often literally throughout the piece, or 0:09:23.480 --> 0:09:26.719 sometimes literally should say, I want to start with some 0:09:26.800 --> 0:09:30.880 of the most mundane tech elements, though, which is how 0:09:30.920 --> 0:09:35.080 do people, and specifically soldiers survive this environment. 0:09:35.800 --> 0:09:39.200 So soldiers live out in these cabins, remote military cabins, 0:09:39.559 --> 0:09:41.560 you know, an hour and a half by snowmobile from 0:09:41.559 --> 0:09:44.520 the town, so if something happens in a white out, 0:09:45.000 --> 0:09:47.520 you basically need to carry on your back enough to 0:09:47.600 --> 0:09:52.000 survive in minus forty in a snowstorm for up to 0:09:52.040 --> 0:09:52.840 forty eight hours. 0:09:53.200 --> 0:09:53.679 So they do. 0:09:53.840 --> 0:09:56.320 They go in pairs on their patrols. They walk usually 0:09:56.360 --> 0:10:01.200 about ten, ten to eighteen kilometers per patrol between remote 0:10:01.200 --> 0:10:04.920 military cabins and sort of every single day, the entire 0:10:05.000 --> 0:10:07.120 length of the Russian Norwegian border is walked on the 0:10:07.120 --> 0:10:07.800 Norwegian side. 0:10:07.880 --> 0:10:08.680 Wow, it's one. 0:10:08.600 --> 0:10:11.120 Hundred and ninety eight kilometers, so it's not terribly long. 0:10:11.120 --> 0:10:13.079 It's not like the finished one, but they split it 0:10:13.200 --> 0:10:16.960 up and every single inch of it is walked. And 0:10:17.000 --> 0:10:18.520 part of that in the winter is that you can 0:10:18.559 --> 0:10:22.040 see from their own tracks if anything has moved across 0:10:22.040 --> 0:10:24.040 those tracks. And in the summer they take dogs to 0:10:24.160 --> 0:10:27.719 sniff if anything has crossed but in the winter, when 0:10:27.720 --> 0:10:30.559 it's really really rough, often you lose your own tracks 0:10:30.720 --> 0:10:32.840 if it's been blowed over by the previous day. 0:10:33.040 --> 0:10:35.760 So the patrols in it are a form of data collection, 0:10:35.840 --> 0:10:40.040 right looking at the peple's footprints, sniffing for other people scent, 0:10:40.360 --> 0:10:42.920 and of course the Poseidon flight was also a data 0:10:42.960 --> 0:10:46.760 collection exercise. Ultimately, what are some of the other kind 0:10:46.800 --> 0:10:50.439 of physical artifacts or manifestations of data collection that you. 0:10:50.440 --> 0:10:53.240 Saw when you get to one of these remote military cabins. 0:10:53.480 --> 0:10:56.120 Usually the stuff out there is so simple. They'll have 0:10:56.240 --> 0:11:00.000 binoculars on a table or maybe a telescope like a said, 0:11:00.200 --> 0:11:02.400 something you could buy in a shop, And when it's 0:11:02.480 --> 0:11:05.160 really wide out conditions, it's some of these guys would 0:11:05.200 --> 0:11:07.360 just open the windows stick their head out because they 0:11:07.360 --> 0:11:08.160 could hear. 0:11:07.960 --> 0:11:09.440 Better than they could see. Wow. 0:11:09.760 --> 0:11:11.520 But that's the really remote stuff. And then they have 0:11:11.559 --> 0:11:15.480 these like proper stations that have all kinds of proper equipment. 0:11:16.320 --> 0:11:18.240 Some of that was classified, but it's the kind of 0:11:18.280 --> 0:11:23.360 thing that I sort of understood. Can see through darkness, 0:11:23.480 --> 0:11:26.240 can see through clouds, can see through rain, and build 0:11:26.240 --> 0:11:29.840 out a picture presumably involving heat signatures, so you don't 0:11:29.880 --> 0:11:32.719 need to actually physically be able to see. So on 0:11:32.720 --> 0:11:35.720 the Russian side of the border, there are no patrols. Really, 0:11:36.000 --> 0:11:38.720 there's very few. They don't walk it. I never saw 0:11:38.880 --> 0:11:41.880 any Russians on patrol. So on the Norwegian side, any 0:11:41.960 --> 0:11:44.640 civilian has the right to roam to any part of Norway, 0:11:44.679 --> 0:11:47.839 including up to the border, like literally right next to it. 0:11:48.240 --> 0:11:50.199 On the Russian side, it's a closed military zone. It's 0:11:50.200 --> 0:11:52.440 where they keep a lot of their nuclear submarines of course, 0:11:52.480 --> 0:11:56.400 but also land based nuclear weapons storage facilities. It's one 0:11:56.400 --> 0:11:59.480 of the most militarized places on the planet. So there 0:11:59.480 --> 0:12:01.480 are no russ civilians who can walk in the border 0:12:01.520 --> 0:12:03.920 area at all. So then it's curious that in an 0:12:03.920 --> 0:12:06.439 area that has no civilians, if you drive along the 0:12:06.480 --> 0:12:09.280 border road on the Norwegian side, you'll often have your 0:12:09.280 --> 0:12:11.080 cell phone switch to the Russian network. 0:12:11.440 --> 0:12:14.640 They have really powerful like towers. 0:12:14.360 --> 0:12:18.760 That traverse the river to basically see I think, who's 0:12:19.000 --> 0:12:21.160 on the other side, because your phone will switch, your 0:12:21.160 --> 0:12:23.640 SIM card switches, even as I had my phone in 0:12:23.720 --> 0:12:26.600 airplane mode specifically to avoid this, and the clock would 0:12:26.679 --> 0:12:28.960 change to the Russian time zone even within it's an 0:12:28.960 --> 0:12:31.800 airplane mode. I don't really understand the technicalities of that, 0:12:31.840 --> 0:12:34.040 but that was definitely a form of collection on the 0:12:34.080 --> 0:12:34.679 other side. 0:12:37.320 --> 0:12:40.480 After the break, we'll have more from Ben tow about 0:12:40.559 --> 0:12:44.600 things heating up in the Northern Fleet, including some whale 0:12:44.600 --> 0:12:53.520 based counter intelligence. Stay with us. There's been a lot 0:12:53.559 --> 0:12:57.320 about fishing boats in the press recently as vessels of 0:12:57.440 --> 0:13:00.880 war in terms of dragging their anchors through I portant cables. 0:13:01.240 --> 0:13:04.240 But the fishing boats hanging out around Chirkenis, these Russian 0:13:04.240 --> 0:13:07.599 fishing boats may have been for surveillance purposes. 0:13:07.160 --> 0:13:10.720 Right, Yeah, so they are fishing boats. They fish, but 0:13:11.360 --> 0:13:15.280 sometimes they have dual use equipment on board. There have 0:13:15.280 --> 0:13:20.240 been instances where there was a radio hidden in a 0:13:20.280 --> 0:13:22.800 compartment on one of the fishing boats that had access 0:13:22.800 --> 0:13:25.640 to Russian military frequencies. But that doesn't mean it's a 0:13:25.640 --> 0:13:27.959 spy boat, and it doesn't mean that anyone on board 0:13:28.040 --> 0:13:31.480 is actually working for the Russian security services. There are 0:13:31.520 --> 0:13:33.800 innocent explanations, and that's the tricky thing about all of it. 0:13:33.920 --> 0:13:36.760 I was like, well, what's an example of an innocent explanation. Well, 0:13:37.400 --> 0:13:39.920 if they're fishing in the waters near Nova'zemia, which has 0:13:39.920 --> 0:13:42.880 a ton of nuclear testing and other activities in that 0:13:43.000 --> 0:13:46.760 military testing as well. They might need to be able 0:13:46.800 --> 0:13:49.920 to access military frequencies so they can get warnings and such. 0:13:50.559 --> 0:13:55.160 The equipment itself isn't proof, but you get enough materials 0:13:55.200 --> 0:13:58.000 at a certain point as things start looking really strange. 0:13:58.120 --> 0:13:59.840 And there are these boat fishing boats are allowed to 0:14:00.040 --> 0:14:01.520 walk in the Churkenni's harbor. 0:14:01.640 --> 0:14:04.040 Yeah, yeah, so Russian fishing boats can come to Chickeness. 0:14:04.080 --> 0:14:07.320 The fishermen walk around town. They go to the pub, 0:14:07.400 --> 0:14:10.040 the one pub, which is called Pub one. There's Johnny's 0:14:10.120 --> 0:14:13.280 lunch bar where you have lunch served by Johnny. There's 0:14:13.320 --> 0:14:16.440 a Chinese place called Shanghai, and a type place called Bangkok. 0:14:16.679 --> 0:14:18.840 Oh in a central cafe called the Central Cafe. 0:14:19.800 --> 0:14:23.000 So you're able to find your way around. It's not 0:14:23.120 --> 0:14:26.480 too hard. But yeah, I just loved it there. 0:14:26.720 --> 0:14:28.680 I loved it there, and I thought that it was 0:14:28.680 --> 0:14:32.760 a place where the story is the ambiguities. It's something 0:14:32.760 --> 0:14:34.960 that you have to sit with and try to figure 0:14:35.000 --> 0:14:40.280 out slowly, and everything's opaque. And also, honestly, it took 0:14:40.400 --> 0:14:42.600 a long time to get the sort of main characters. 0:14:42.640 --> 0:14:44.320 The head of counter intelligence for the region, a guy 0:14:44.400 --> 0:14:49.960 named Johann Rouaznez, Johann suspects that the FSB controls a 0:14:49.960 --> 0:14:53.000 lot of the crew going in on those fishing boats, 0:14:53.240 --> 0:14:57.320 and a lot of fishing captains and fishermen have backgrounds 0:14:57.320 --> 0:15:01.560 of being sailors with the Northern Fleet and former military officers, 0:15:01.760 --> 0:15:05.840 some of them maybe not former. Sometimes it's strange they 0:15:05.840 --> 0:15:11.000 have these sailor passports which are handwritten, and you know, 0:15:11.040 --> 0:15:14.040 he's like, why is everyone called Sergei Ivanov on this boat? 0:15:14.120 --> 0:15:14.360 Right? 0:15:14.440 --> 0:15:18.320 Are they really just fishing? And you know, it's a 0:15:18.360 --> 0:15:22.160 real concern for the Norwegian security services that after the 0:15:22.240 --> 0:15:25.000 Ukraine War kicked off suddenly instead of being a lot 0:15:25.040 --> 0:15:27.840 of old dudes who look like they fish, there's a 0:15:27.920 --> 0:15:29.880 lot of young dudes who are doing pull ups in 0:15:29.920 --> 0:15:33.400 the harbor and sometimes strolling around town and uniforms that 0:15:33.440 --> 0:15:34.720 looked like military uniforms. 0:15:35.080 --> 0:15:36.960 Did follow me? Of the whale come up and you're 0:15:36.960 --> 0:15:45.480 reporting my favorite? Okay, so do you want to describe 0:15:45.480 --> 0:15:48.320 to everyone who've followed me? Of the whale is a 0:15:48.360 --> 0:15:51.640 beautiful white whale, beluga whale, bluego whale who turned up 0:15:51.640 --> 0:15:55.320 in a Norwegian harbor wearing a headpiece which looked to 0:15:55.360 --> 0:15:58.040 be like a go pro camera and there was some 0:15:58.080 --> 0:16:04.600 confusionist to them came from, but the consensus was Valdemir 0:16:04.640 --> 0:16:08.160 was a spy whale who unfortunately was recently found dead. Yeah, 0:16:08.200 --> 0:16:09.640 fate of many spies. 0:16:10.000 --> 0:16:14.600 And you know I heard that Basically one theory was 0:16:14.640 --> 0:16:17.240 that Vladimir had actually been sort of they strapped a 0:16:17.280 --> 0:16:20.280 GoPro on him or harness on him, essentially as a 0:16:20.320 --> 0:16:23.640 massive sy op that like, people would become obsessed with 0:16:23.640 --> 0:16:25.240 this and it would distract from other things. 0:16:25.560 --> 0:16:26.960 It certainly worked for me well. 0:16:26.960 --> 0:16:29.760 But then it turns out that they actually do train 0:16:29.840 --> 0:16:32.280 beluga whales, but it's not so much to go into 0:16:32.320 --> 0:16:37.680 Norway and spy on Norwegian facilities. It's to protect the 0:16:37.720 --> 0:16:40.200 Northern Fleet. So these journalists at the Baron's Observer, which 0:16:40.240 --> 0:16:43.880 is this fabulous tiny newspaper in Tyurcinus, two Norwegian guys 0:16:43.880 --> 0:16:47.920 and three Russian dissidents, they worked out and mapped through 0:16:47.960 --> 0:16:51.480 satellite images that near Severmorsk, where there's a big Northern 0:16:51.480 --> 0:16:55.320 Fleet submarine base, there are these pens where there are 0:16:55.400 --> 0:16:57.400 bluga whales that you can see on Google Maps. In them, 0:16:57.440 --> 0:16:59.680 I can show you there are bluga whales in these 0:16:59.680 --> 0:17:03.400 pens and they are trained to spy on enemy submarines 0:17:03.400 --> 0:17:06.560 that might enter the call of Fjord. It's a counterintelligence operation. 0:17:06.800 --> 0:17:09.639 So essentially you have these wheels like patrolling the fjord, 0:17:10.080 --> 0:17:12.560 and they've been trained essentially that if they encounter something 0:17:12.640 --> 0:17:15.720 anomalous and metal that they then come back and say 0:17:15.760 --> 0:17:18.719 like essentially like flat flat flap, give me a camera. 0:17:18.960 --> 0:17:20.359 Then they go back and do it again with a 0:17:20.359 --> 0:17:23.639 camera on them, and then the footage is reviewed. But 0:17:23.720 --> 0:17:27.080 Vladimir escaped, so he's more of a defector than a spy. 0:17:28.240 --> 0:17:30.520 And he was found dead, and initially there was reporting 0:17:30.520 --> 0:17:32.000 that there was a bullet in his body. It was 0:17:32.040 --> 0:17:34.680 a huge sort of scandal and concern, but it turns 0:17:34.680 --> 0:17:36.000 out he died by eating a stick. 0:17:36.440 --> 0:17:42.560 Oh. Part of what you report about is two sides 0:17:42.560 --> 0:17:45.040 trying to get as much information as they can on 0:17:45.119 --> 0:17:48.520 each other. But the other part is two sides trying 0:17:48.520 --> 0:17:50.280 to hurt each other, or at least one side trying 0:17:50.320 --> 0:17:53.320 to hurt the other. In the Russian case, this include 0:17:53.320 --> 0:17:58.439 everything from jamming the GPS system of the local airport 0:17:58.480 --> 0:18:00.920 which almost brought a plane down as far as I understand, 0:18:01.359 --> 0:18:06.000 to kind of digitally enable spear phishing and influence operations. 0:18:06.000 --> 0:18:09.639 So talk about some of the kind of technological ways 0:18:09.640 --> 0:18:14.399 in which Russia has tried to disturb life in the 0:18:14.480 --> 0:18:15.280 Chickenis region. 0:18:15.400 --> 0:18:18.240 Yeah, they really kind of treat Chickiness as a kind 0:18:18.240 --> 0:18:22.159 of laboratory. It's this remote, isolated place, so essentially they 0:18:22.240 --> 0:18:24.720 use it as a kind of laboratory for various intelligence 0:18:24.760 --> 0:18:27.399 operations to see what's the sort of right alchemy of 0:18:27.400 --> 0:18:30.199 messing with the locals before something breaks. So you have 0:18:30.600 --> 0:18:34.840 psychological and influence operations, you have a conscription of locals, 0:18:34.840 --> 0:18:39.160 and exploitation for espionage purposes. You also have GPS jamming, 0:18:39.160 --> 0:18:43.080 as you mentioned in that case, it began in twenty seventeen. 0:18:43.480 --> 0:18:46.040 The Russians were pissed about a NATO exercise elsewhere in 0:18:46.080 --> 0:18:49.960 Norway and started jamming GPS. The GPS jamming didn't affect 0:18:50.000 --> 0:18:51.960 the exercise at all, it was hundreds of miles away, 0:18:52.160 --> 0:18:53.840 but it did mean that for about two hundred to 0:18:53.840 --> 0:18:56.520 two hundred and fifty miles from the border, the area 0:18:56.520 --> 0:18:59.960 around Chickiness, you couldn't have GPS on the ground level. 0:19:00.160 --> 0:19:02.119 It works as a vector, so if you're on the 0:19:02.160 --> 0:19:04.639 other side of a mountain, you're not affected. You can 0:19:05.200 --> 0:19:08.320 drive on Google Maps, but if you're within the vector, 0:19:08.800 --> 0:19:10.360 and particularly in a plane. 0:19:10.400 --> 0:19:11.320 You lose your position. 0:19:11.800 --> 0:19:14.880 The problem is that the only hospital for about five 0:19:14.920 --> 0:19:17.720 hundred miles is in Checkiness, So they have an air 0:19:17.720 --> 0:19:20.840 ambulance that goes out to these remote, tiny airfields and 0:19:20.880 --> 0:19:23.159 the air ambulance and some of these airfields don't have 0:19:23.280 --> 0:19:26.720 old school navigational equipment. So if they're going to a 0:19:26.720 --> 0:19:29.000 place that's been reliant on GPS, because that's how things 0:19:29.000 --> 0:19:31.600 are done now already in the Arctic, because it's close 0:19:31.640 --> 0:19:34.480 to the polls, GPS signals are quite weak and to 0:19:34.600 --> 0:19:37.800 jam them is very, very straightforward. There's an electronic warfare 0:19:37.840 --> 0:19:41.080 system in the mountains near Pachenga on the Russian side. 0:19:41.200 --> 0:19:44.200 Then they just beam it and they do it every day. 0:19:44.240 --> 0:19:48.760 Now it's pretty much every day, completely unpredictable, but every 0:19:48.760 --> 0:19:51.640 single day there's jamming. And that's why the air ambulance 0:19:51.680 --> 0:19:54.640 nearly crashed once in Chirckiness, because it sets off all 0:19:54.640 --> 0:19:55.679 these alarms in the cockpit. 0:19:55.720 --> 0:19:57.280 So it's incredibly distracting to fly. 0:19:57.560 --> 0:19:59.360 So even if you can see and know your position, 0:19:59.720 --> 0:20:02.160 you you are so distracted by the alarms going off 0:20:02.160 --> 0:20:04.760 constantly that you kind of, you know, might forget to 0:20:04.760 --> 0:20:07.600 put down the flaps. Even I experienced it driving around 0:20:07.640 --> 0:20:10.440 in the car and lost my position fortually. Yeah, yeah, 0:20:10.440 --> 0:20:12.600 because I was on the mountains, just facing Russia and 0:20:12.680 --> 0:20:15.400 while I was driving along the river, and I didn't 0:20:15.440 --> 0:20:17.480 know about GPS jamming at that point. It was the 0:20:17.480 --> 0:20:19.240 next day that I met with Johann for the first 0:20:19.240 --> 0:20:21.960 time and he told me about this, and I just like, 0:20:22.040 --> 0:20:24.760