AK 239: The Enemy Is Already Here

I head back to the sonar room and sit at a station.

I fervently type an encrypted message to ASWOC.

Tad is, sitting nearby, still looking stupid.

“I wouldn’t worry about it. I’ve seen this over and over ever since we got here. I think it’s just an anomaly.”

I ignore him.

USS ALASKA 0922 HOURS

ASWOC URGENT:

ANOMALIES AT OUR LOCATION

REPEATED ANOMALIES

AT OUR LOCATION

PLEASE CHECK AOAIA

OUR SOFTWARE BACKUP

NOT WORKING

PLEASE ADVISE

T. WATSON

I hit send and look at Tad who is, only now, looking a tiny bit concerned.

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):

M.B.D.

THOU SHALT NOT PASS:

SAP CLEARANCE REQUIRED

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.