31 May 2007
Innocent Passage
AGI SSV-493 Balzam off Pearl Harbor 1983
The news this morning includes a fanciful tale from Moscow that runs like something from the Cold War. Allegations that former FSB agent Andrei Lugovoi whacked former Soviet KGB officer Litvenenko by means of nuclear poisoning has spiraled into a blather of obfuscation, which includes dark references to MI-6 and dragged James Bond out of retirement.
A resurgent Russia is looking to its back-pages and reinventing itself, it seems, and a nasty scrap with old adversary Britain is a good way to demonstrate who is back on top.
I understand their desire to resurrect the former long arm of the State Security service. Ah, those were the days. There was a gentleman's agreement that the Spooks had in the Cold War. It was an unwritten code, but quite real. You did not whack members of the opposition in the places you were assigned, and you most definitely did not whack their families.
Almost everything else was fair game, and overzealous activity normally resulted in a withdrawal of diplomatic status and deportation. Being declared “persona non grata” was a badge of honor at some stations, and some operators used the number of PNG's as a sort of career metric on both sides.
That sort of great-power professional courtesy began to unravel as the world changed in 1979, when the Iranian militants breached the American Embassy. Other Shia radicals exploited the new model of conduct in Lebanon, kidnapping and murdering with merry abandon.
It is said that only one Russian “diplomat” got caught up in the new asymmetric model of warfare. The response was swift and brutal, and included the families of the radicals. The Soviets were not bothered again.
The Americans did not have the same rules of engagement against the bad guys, and would not until the long series of outrages directed at embassies in Beirut, Dar es Salaam and Nairobi culminated in the 9/11 attacks on the American homeland. The nature of asymmetric warfare, weak against the strong, meant that terror was the weapon of choice, and everyone was fair game.
In the world of the great powers, it was not that way. The consequences were too significant for things in the field to be allowed to spiral out of control. The code extended to the high seas.
We had small Soviet ships that were assigned to follow us around on our big gray ships. They role was to play the tattle-tale. They would pass locating data on us to be used to dispatch bombers to neutralize us. Short of war, we allowed them to do so. The concepts of “Innocent Passage,” even if in waters claimed by others, and “routine operations in international waters” are some of the laws of the sea.
The Russians and the Americans both operated ships devoted entirely to the collection of intelligence. They were unarmed naval ships designated as “Auxiliary General- Intelligence,” or AGI's. They were considered excellent collection platforms, able to sit for weeks on end off foreign shores and monitor everything in the electromagnetic spectrum.
In the early 1980s, the Russians dispatched one of their latest AGI's to the waters off Honolulu. Each day, driving to work, we could see the Balzam slowly transiting along the southern coast of the island of O'ahu, taking up station off the Naval Air Station at Barbers Point, and then drifting with the current back down the coast, harvesting our phone calls off the microwave links and anything else that passed in the ether.
We did not know that our cryptographic codes had been compromised by the Walker-Whitworth gang, and the machines that processed them into intelligible words had been purloined by the Russians.
There was nothing we could do about the Soviet presence, however irritating. Innocent passage, after all.
Laws and custom only work among those who care about such things. In June of 1967, tensions were rising between Israel and its neighbors, and what we know now as the Six Days War was about to occur. In order to provide the most detailed coverage of the unfolding events, the AGI USS Liberty was dispatched to a station in international waters 12 miles north of the Sinai town of al Arish.
You can still get quite a reaction from some sailors when you mention what happened to Liberty. The Israelis attacked the ship over a three-hour period with aircraft and torpedo boats. Thirty-four sailors were killed and one hundred and seventy-three wounded. It was the greatest single loss of life by the Intelligence Community, and surpassed only by the Iraqi attack on the USS Stark in Navy casualties since WWII.
They gave Captain McGonagle the Medal of Honor in a low-key ceremony at the Washington Navy Yard.
The whole unpleasant matter would suggest a policy review was in order. The suggestion that innocent passage in international waters might grant sovereign immunity seemed to be irrelevant to nations engaged in what they considered regime survival.
The Liberty incident was cause for years of discussion. In the moment, though, the lessons-learned were not sufficient to cancel the deployment of another AGI a half a world away. Five months later, the USS Pueblo got underway to proceed to a station in international waters south of Wonsan, North Korea, in the Sea of Japan.
The Commander in Chief in the Pacific assigned the mission a risk assessment of “minimal.” It was to be routine operations in international waters, and no one would quibble with that, right?
Certainly not the Soviets. In fact, the Russian Federation ship Balzam is still around, last I checked, conducting routine operations in international waters.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com