The U.S. Navy Used Super Deep Diving Submarines to Tap Russia's Communications
A Cold War story like no other.
Kyle Mizokami [2]
In 1970, Halibut was again modified to accommodate the Navy’s deep water saturation divers. The following year, it went to sea again to participate in Ivy Bells, a secret operation to install taps on the underwater communications cables connecting the Soviet ballistic missile submarine base at Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula with Moscow’s Pacific Fleet headquarters at Vladivostok.
The taps, installed by divers and their ROVs, allowed Washington to listen in on message traffic to Soviet nuclear forces. Conducted at the bottom of the frigid Sea of Okhotsk, the Ivy Bells missions were conducted at the highest level of secrecy, as the Soviets would have quickly abandoned the use of underwater cables had they known they were compromised.
Source URL (retrieved on August 14, 2017):
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-us-navy-used-super-deep-diving-submarines-tap-russias-21894
