Grosse was referring to the huge US intelligence project in the early 1970s to tap into the Soviet Navy’s undersea cables in the Sea of Okhotsk. At significant risk of discovery, the NSA had dispatched a submarine to wrap a secretly developed twenty-foot-long set of devices around the cables to record all the message traffic. Every month or so divers would slip into the waters, descend four hundred feet, and retrieve the recordings. The operation ran with great success until 1980, when a forty-four-year-old NSA communications specialist with a personal bankruptcy problem walked into the Soviet
...more
