AK 239: The Enemy Is Already Here

National Security Agency (NSA)

Fort Meade, Maryland (MD)

^{One year ago}

For twenty years the U.S. government didn’t even acknowledge that the NSA existed. In fact, its nickname was:

No Such Agency.

Scores of satellites were put up in space, from all sorts of sister agencies:

Naval Ocean Surveillance System (NOSS),

Defense Support Program (DSP),

National Reconnaissance Office (NRO),

Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) and,

Communications Intelligence (COMINT).

All of them had sent Fred Turner information personally.

Well not personally, but since Fred had named all of his “girls” he felt a personal connection to many key satellites sent into space by various U.S. defense agencies.

Fred Turner has been a civil servant and computer geek his whole life. He worked for the CIA in his early years at Langley looking over satellite images of ships, missiles and infantry movements of the old USSR.

Pretty boring stuff!

But the kind of job that came with a Top Secret security clearance, the highest in government. People will tell you there are all sorts of clearances above Top Secret but they don’t know what they’re talking about.

There are Special Access Programs (SAP) and other mission specific programs that are approved on a need to know basis. With this program the U.S. needed to know if the Russians were living up to their commitment under the New START treaty to dismantle nuclear weapons.

While the NSA doesn’t have optical satellites, the optical satellites from all of the above agencies would send the NSA it’s information to analyze.

So Fred moved over to the NSA in 2010 as part of a team watching Russia dismantle several nuclear ships. While they used to watch the Russians up close, a new chill in the air from Moscow forced them watch from 25,000 miles above Russia!

This created a huge blind spot where Fred couldn’t see what the Russians were or weren’t doing from time to time. And as good as satellites have gotten, the Russians had figured out how to fool American satellites.

The United States in its arrogance had rarely seen the need to use provisions of ‘The Treaty on Open Skies’ where unarmed planes are allowed to fly over an adversary’s territory for surveillance. The U.S. “intelligence” community, in all it’s wisdom, thought: We can monitor the Russians just fine from a satellite 25,000 miles in space.

Fred’s latest SAP clearance was to keep an eye on two Russian Typhoon class submarines, the Arkhangelsk (TK-17) and the Severstal (TK-20) both in dock and scheduled for dismantling ASAP. The military has acronyms for everything.

To show military absurdity, to the Nth degree, someone had put a sign on the Men’s Bathroom Door (MBD):

A little humor at a Pretty Dull Job (PDJ).

These Typhoon class subs, the world’s largest, were a fascination to Fred. They were built for the Cold War and made famous in Tom Clancy’s novel, “The Hunt for Red October.” But with the end of the Cold War, the Russians and Americans had warmed to each other and agreed to several START treaties. Those treaties basically reduced the numbers of nuclear weapons each side could continue to have on land, in air and at sea. The Typhoons were being dismantled as being too big and too expensive to maintain for the limited number of nuclear delivery devices each side could have.

There were six Typhoons originally built. The Typhoon SSBN division was based at Nerpichya, about six miles from the entrance to Guba Zapadnaya Litsa on the Kola Peninsula, close to the border with Finland and Norway.[6]

As far as the Americans knew, three were still in-tact but only one on active duty, the Dmitri Donskoy (TK-208). Aboard TK-208 are twenty Bulava (NATO-code SS-N-30) intercontinental ballistic missiles with each missile carrying up to ten separate nuclear warheads. This gave this one sub an estimated 200 separate targets it could hit. Each missile, had a range of 10,000km or 6,200 miles. Park this off the East or West Coast and it could hit virtually any number of cities in North America.

The Russians had become more and more provocative over the past year sending submarines into the English Channel and up and down the East Coast of the United States. Fred thought it unusual the only area Russian subs had not been reported for years now, was Alaska and the West Coast of the United States.

As Fred opened his tuna fish sandwich for another boring lunch he took a second look at his screen and stopped chewing. He put his sandwich down and started manipulating two large color screens on his desk. Puzzled, he continued to search further and now only now began to chew.

He yelled out with a mouthful of food, “Jerry!”

A voice from the other side of the cubicle, rat maze, answered back, “Ya?”

Fred said, “Come here please.”

Jerry Fredricks was even nerdier than Fred but knew just about everything there was to know about this now antiquated satellite system and its glichy software. Jerry used to work in systems for the National Reconnaissance Office before coming to the NSA. Jerry rounded the corner of Fred’s cubicle.

Fred impatiently, says, “Look at these two pictures. See anything missing?”

Jerry looks at one dry dock screen from Severodvinsk, Russia and then the same dry dock on the next satellite pass. Jerry puzzled says, “Ya, no TK-20 and no TK-17. When was this?”

Fred, “Last month. I was looking to archive the month and happened to see this. Now watch. Next satellite pass the sub is there again. Is it possible the image with the missing sub is another software glitch?”

“Impossible!” says Jerry with the confidence of General Patton since this would be admitting a mistake he should have caught.

Even Fred looks at the nerdy accountant type and can’t believe his confidence.

“That’s not TK-20. Whatever is sitting there is not a complete Typhoon.” Fred points to the front nose cone that’s missing.

“Ya, but aren’t they suppose to be dismantling it?”

But if you take a nose cone off a ship below the waterline here it would sink, right?”

“That’s what I was wondering. Is it possible that’s a decoy?”

You have way too much imagination, TV soldier.”

“So why is it still floating?” Asks Fred.

Jerry says, “I wouldn’t worry about it. They probably tore it apart early and have keel stands under the hull.”

“This isn’t a dry dock, Jerry. How do you get keel stands under a floating sub sitting in nineteen meters of water?

“I don’t know. You’re the expert,” says Jerry. “They can’t get half of their subs operational anyway. It’s not like it disappeared into the ocean or somethin’.

“Say, you gonna eat the rest of that sandwich?”