This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

by Nicole Perlroth

In the mid-fifties, the CIA and their British counterpart, the MI6, undertook a monumental effort known as Operation Regal to intercept a buried Soviet cable in East Berlin. They managed to covertly build a 1,400-foot tunnel underneath Berlin, where they accessed East European and Soviet communications for more than a year before the Russians discovered it. Later, in a joint NSA-CIA-Navy operation in the seventies, Operation Ivy Bells, American divers successfully tapped a Soviet communications cable on the sea floor, just north of Japan. Believing the cable was out of American reach, the Soviets barely bothered to encrypt anything that funneled through it. For years the NSA was able to filch Soviet secrets off their cable tap, until a double agent—one of the NSA’s own analysts—tipped the KGB off to the American’s deep-sea intelligence program in 1981.