Operation Ivy Bells and the Russian Hybrid Warfare

Operation Ivy Bells and the Russian Hybrid Warfare
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Problem/ Research Question
The research question that the study seeks to answer is, "to what extent did Operation Ivy Bells end the cold war?" This question arises from the idea that discovering the Russians' clandestine operation alone was not enough to bring a full-fledged cold war to an end. The question inquires whether other factors existed and which contributed to the ending of the cold war. Retrospectively, several factors brought the cold war to an end.
However, it is not easy to identify the extent to which these factors inspired the end of the war. For this reason, this inquiry tries to more if Operation Ivy Bells helped stop the cold war. It also encompasses the Russian hybrid warfare and how the nation uses this approach in the modern-day.
Thesis Statement
Examining the contributions of Operation Ivy Bells to the end of the Cold War. Even though Operation Ivy Bells appeared to have the potential to initiate full-fledged warfare between the US, Russia, and their allies, it did not happen because the Russians feared that Americans were far more sophisticated in technological capabilities than them.[Polmar, Norman. "The Silent War: The Cold War Battle Beneath the Sea." Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 57, no. 5 (2001): 66-66.]
Background
In the early 1970s, the US government became aware of the existence of an underwater communication line running along the bottom of the Sea of Okhotsk and connecting the main base of the Pacific Fleet in Petropavlovsk with the TF headquarters in Vladivostok. At that time, the USSR unilaterally declared the Sea of Okhotsk its territorial waters and introduced a ban on the entry of foreign ships. Numerous acoustic sensors were placed on the seabed to detect submarines. There was constantly patrolling at sea, and regular exercises were conducted by the ships of the USSR TF.[Polmar, Norman. "The Silent War: The Cold War Battle Beneath the Sea." Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 57, no. 5 (2001): 66-66.] [Raymond Ojserkis, ”The United States & the beginning of the Cold War arms race”, p. 79, accessed on http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/2607/1/U615556.pdf]
Introduction
Despite all the difficulties, the leadership of American intelligence made the decision to wiretap the cable. In October 1971, the US specialized nuclear submarine Halibut entered the Sea of Okhotsk. Divers disembarked from the boat, found the cable at a depth of 120 m, and installed a listening device that made it possible to remove information from the cable without violating its integrity. The device, about 6 m long, was equipped with a release mechanism that was triggered when the cable was lifted to the surface. In addition, during the operation, fragments of the Soviet supersonic anti-ship missile P-500 "Basalt" were collected, which made it possible to further reconstruct the product and study its main characteristics.[Raymond Ojserkis, ”The United States & the beginning of the Cold War arms race”, p. 79, accessed on http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/2607/1/U615556.pdf]
The listening device did not have the ability to transfer data, and all information was recorded on a magnetic medium. Once a month, divers were brought to the site to retrieve the tape and install a fresh tape.
An analysis of the records showed that the Soviet command was so confident in the reliability of the cable that most of the messages were transmitted in unencrypted form. Thus, American intelligence gained access to classified information from the main base of the SSBN of the Soviet Pacific Fleet.[Polmar, Norman. "The Silent War: The Cold War Battle Beneath the Sea." Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 57, no. 5 (2001): 66-66.]
In 1980, NSA officer Ronald Pelton transmitted information about the operation to KGB residents in the United States, and in 1981 the eavesdropping device was dismantled by the Soviet side.[Williscroft, Robert G. 2016. Operation Ivy Bells. [Place of publication not identified]: STARMAN Press.]
Over time, eavesdropping devices were installed on other submarine cables of the USSR Navy. The new devices, developed by Bell Labs, had an isotopic power supply and allowed recording for a year. These operations involved US nuclear submarines Parche, Richard B. Russel, Sea Wolf, and others.
Significance of the Study
Exploring the likely cause of the Cold War's end is a critical step for scholars and history lovers. Foremost, it helps historians to develop an understanding of the world. By exploring the research question in the previous section, historians can have a deeper understanding of how governments and military operations work. The cold war was a particularly crucial period in history because it was the first time after the Second World War that superpowers were in a contest to determine the stronger one. Learning about how Operation Ivy Bells ended the cold war is also crucial because it gives a historian a clear perspective of how the two rival sides of the world, capitalism and communism, tore the world into two parts. It is the end of the cold war that countries in the eastern and western hemispheres started having cordial relationships. Therefore, learning about the extent to which the operations brought an end to the war was an imperative step for a historian to understand where the world has come from thus far.[Williscroft, Robert G. 2016. Operation Ivy Bells. [Place of publication not identified]: STARMAN Press.] [Williscroft, Robert G. 2016. Operation Ivy Bells. [Place of publication not identified]: STARMAN Press.]
This research will also bring to the fore the roots of issues that the US and Russia have had over the years, which have severed their relationship in different aspects. Even though the cold war ended, it is open for everyone to see that Russia and the US are not on the best terms. This is evident in how they operate worldwide, for instance, in Syria, where one government supports one factor while another government supports the other faction in the war. It is also true that there may be underlying reasons as to why the two countries have had a strenuous relationship since the Second World War. Some analysts speculate that the cold war ended because the US had accessed certain damaging information or top secrets potentially harmful to their Russian counterparts. It is also speculated that the Russians believed they do much in their communication systems that they saw no need of encrypting the information that passed through cables to various military units. Apparently, they were dumbfounded when they noticed the capabilities of the US. They did not think the US could gain access to the information in such a manner as they did. Therefore, this realization alone gave them the idea that the US could be harboring even more sophisticated tactics that they could unleash if a full-fledged war were brought out. In other words, they were gripped with fear of what technologies America could have been possessing. This research on the extent to which Operation Ivy Bells ended the cold war discusses these aspects of the operation at length, giving critical details about its capabilities.[Carlisle, Rodney P. 2015. Encyclopedia of intelligence and counterintelligence. London: Routledge.] [Dietrich Rueschemeyer. 2003. Comparative-Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.]
Literature Review
This literature review aims at examining how Operation Ivy Bells influenced an end to the Cold War. It examines the existing literature to that effect.
The end of the Second World War was supposed to represent the beginning of a period of peace and quiet for the people in Central and Eastern Europe. The violence and horrors of the war caused by the aspirations of the Nazi totalitarian regime stopped, but the ideology and the ascension of the Soviet Communist Party, which failed to withdraw from the "liberated" territories, led to the division of Europe and of the entire world into two poles of power. The pulling of the Iron Curtain began with the division of Germany and the West Berlin blockade, culminating in the formation of state blocs allied on the basis of political-military treaties. The Western states, led by the USA, joined their forces in 1949 under NATO's security umbrella, while the USSR and its new "satellite states" signed the Warsaw Treaty in 1955. These changes on the political map of the world meant the transition from the TOTAL WAR to the COLD WAR, which did not materialize in a direct armed confrontation between the two political-military blocs but in a permanent search for the enemy's secrets. The main actors were not the armed military forces, but the agencies specially developed to collect actual and timely information. In this paper, we will analyze the specific COLD WAR operational environment in which intelligent assets acted and the factors that led to the change of the American tradecraft from collecting information using the human factor to information collection based mostly on technology.[Raymond Ojserkis, ”The United States & the beginning of the Cold War arms race”, p. 79, accessed on http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/2607/1/U615556.pdf] [Raymond Ojserkis, ”The United States & the beginning of the Cold War arms race”, p. 79, accessed on http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/2607/1/U615556.pdf] [Paperclip Operation managed to recruit over 1600 German scientists, such as Wernher von Braun, who had an important contribution to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Article Willkommen, ‘Operation Paperclip,’ by Annie Jacobsen , accessed on /2014/03/02/books/review/operation-paperclipby- annie-jacobsen.html]
The closed society of the Soviet Bloc applied strict censorship on all public sources specific to Open Source Intelligence-OSINT (such as government reports, libraries, newspapers, radio-TV, and press conferences), which made it impossible for the US to exploit these overt sources, as they did not bring any valuable intelligence. On the other hand, the Soviets considered true intelligence (razvedka) only the information received from secret informants and undercover agents." When the Russians want to know the number of bombers in the air force of a potential adversary, they get the figure, not by doing library research on the productive capability of airplane plants or assembling educated guesses and rumors, but by asking their secret informers within the foreign air force or war ministry and by stealing the desired information from government files." Given these facts, both parties formed tradecraft organizations and intelligence departments covert sources oriented.[Paperclip Operation managed to recruit over 1600 German scientists, such as Wernher von Braun, who had an important contribution to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Article Willkommen, ‘Operation Paperclip,’ by Annie Jacobsen , accessed on /2014/03/02/books/review/operation-paperclipby- annie-jacobsen.html] [Blitz, Matt. "Secrets haunt the still-classified Operation Ivy Bells, a daring Cold War wiretapping operation conducted 400 feet underwater." Popular Mechanics, March 30 (2017).]
During the Second World War, the USA had the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a department responsible for "spying, sabotage, intercepting communications, or conducting paramilitary actions behind enemy lines"[6]. After the war, President Truman appreciated the nuclear capabilities held by the US as sufficient to win any armed conflict. He considered that the intelligence activity was no longer justified in peacetime and signed, in September 1945, the OSS dismantling decree. In the period immediately following the end of the war, 1945-1947, the US intelligence activity was limited to the structural reorganization of the new intelligence departments divided between state and war departments. Moreover, the US did not consider its USSR ally to be an immediate threat, concentrating its subsequent efforts on the search and punishment of Nazi leaders or on recruiting famous scientists or technicians like the ones on Osenberg List. Stalin's subsequent actions, marked in particular by his refusal to withdraw his troops from the territories of the Eastern European states and by the consolidation of Soviet power by imposing communist ideology in Eastern Europe, were the signal that brought the USSR into the spotlight of the US intelligence. The foundation of the Central Intelligence Group (CIG) and the inclusion of the SSU core in it led to the formation of the Central Intelligence Agency CIA, in 1947, with the primary mission to predict Soviet behavior. The CIA's delayed start in the struggle for informational supremacy in Central and Eastern Europe enabled the main opponent, the Soviet State Security body (WW2 and the political changes at the highest level, made the Soviet intelligence services exist under several organizations until 1954 when they were assembled as a well-known Committee for State Security - KGB) to more easily develop their information collection networks and be better prepared for this spy confrontation.[Margolis, Gabriel. "The Lack of HUMINT: A Recurring Intelligence Problem." Global Security Studies 4, no. 2 (2013).] [Intelligence Community Directive number 304 –Human Intelligence, p.6, accessed on https://fas.org/irp/dni/icd/icd-304-2008.pdf] [Young, John R. "VEIL: The Secret War of the CIA 1981-1987." (1988): 120-123.] [Morris, Caitlin. "Operation IVY BELLS: Lessons learned from an intelligence success'." Journal of the Australian Institute of Professional Intelligence Officers 20, no. 3 (2012): 17-29.] [Intelligence Community Directive number 304 –Human Intelligence, p.6, accessed on https://fas.org/irp/dni/icd/icd-304-2008.pdf]
In the early years of the Cold War, the work of US secret services in Germany and Eastern Europe, mainly carried out by OSS residues, was almost null. It was mainly based on collaboration with European intelligence agencies, most of the reports sent to Washington being taken over by French, Italian or English agents. The American HUMINT capabilities that were not withdrawn from Europe did not rise to the Soviet level. Lack of experience, naivety, incompetence, corruption, or the blackmail practiced by the opponent are factors that allowed the KGB to take over the initiative and, subsequently, intelligence supremacy in the early part of the Cold War.[Polmar, Norman. "The Silent War: The Cold War Battle Beneath the Sea." Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 57, no. 5 (2001): 66-66]
The End of the Cold War
And like other complex events in history, the end of the Cold War is unique. The precise set of antecedent conditions and the precise nature of the outcome never occurred before and are exceedingly unlikely ever to recur. So the case cannot be explained in an ideal-scientific manner as an instance of general law. That is, the Cold War's end cannot easily be characterized as a type of outcome generally associated with a particular set of antecedent conditions: "Given such-and-such conditions, international systems tend to be trans-formed; since those conditions obtained in 1987, the Cold War ended as a result."
There are simply too many important novel elements in the Cold War story and too few other events even roughly comparable for an explanation of this type to work. However, if we concentrate on the event itself, we face the familiar problem of too many variables and too few independent observations. International relations theories are almost never mono-causal. The claim is rarely "A, not B caused E" but rather," both A and B caused E, but A was more important." Establishing whether ...