Is Russian meddling hitting new depths?
Questions raised about activity near cables that keep the world connected
Russian ships are skulking around underwater communications cables, causing the United States and its allies to worry President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin might be taking information warfare to new depths.
Is Moscow interested in cutting or tapping the cables? Does it want the West to worry it might? Is there a more innocent explanation? Unsurprisingly, Russia isn’t saying.
But whatever Moscow’s intentions, US and Western officials are increasingly troubled by their rival’s interest in the 400 fibre-optic cables that carry most of world’s calls, emails and texts, as well as US$10 trillion ($13.8t) worth of daily financial transactions.
“We’ve seen activity in the Russian navy, and particularly undersea in their submarine activity, that we haven’t seen since the 80s,” General Curtis Scaparrotti, commander of the US European Command, told Congress this month.
Without undersea cables, a bank in Asian countries couldn’t send money to Saudi Arabia to pay for oil. US military leaders would struggle to communicate with troops fighting extremists in Afghanistan and the Middle East. A student in Europe wouldn’t be able to Skype his parents in the US.
All this information is transmitted along tiny glass fibres encased in undersea cables that, in some cases, are little bigger than a garden hose. All told, there are 997,800km of fibreoptic cable running under the sea, enough to loop around the Earth nearly 25 times.
Most lines are owned by private telecommunications companies, including giants such as Google and Microsoft. Their locations are easily identified on public maps, with swirling lines that look like spaghetti. While cutting one cable might have limited impact, severing several simultaneously or at choke points could cause a major outage.
The Russians “are doing their homework and, in the event of a crisis or conflict with them, they might do rotten things to us,” said Michael Kofman, a Russian military expert at
nonprofit research group CNA Corp.
It’s not Moscow’s warfighting ships and submarines that are making Nato and US officials uneasy. It’s Russia’s Main Directorate of Deep Sea Research, whose specialised surface ships, submarines, underwater drones and mini subs conduct reconnaissance, underwater salvage and other work.
One ship run by the directorate is the Yantar. It’s a modest, 108m oceanographic vessel that holds a crew of about 60. It most recently was off South America’s coast helping Argentina search for a lost submarine.
Parlamentskaya Gazeta, the Russian Parliament’s publication, last October said the Yantar has equipment “designed for deep-sea tracking” and “connecting to topsecret communication cables”. The publication said that in September 2015, the Yantar was near Kings Bay, Georgia, home to a US submarine base, “collecting information about the equipment on American submarines, including underwater sensors and the unified [US military] information network.”
Rossiya, a Russian state TV network, has said the Yantar can not only connect to top-secret cables, but could cut them and “jam underwater sensors with a special system”.
Russia’s Defence Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
There is no hard evidence that the ship is engaged in nefarious activity, said Steffan Watkins, an information technology security consultant in Canada tracking the ship.
But he wonders what the ship is doing when it’s stopped over critical cables or when its Automatic Identification System tracking transponder isn’t on.
Of the Yantar’s crew, he said: “I don’t think these are the actual guys who are doing any sabotage. I think they’re laying the groundwork for future operations.”
Members of the US Congress are wondering, too.
Joe Courtney, a Connecticut Democrat on a House subcommittee on sea power, said of the Russians, “The mere fact that they are clearly tracking the cables and prowling around the cables shows that they are doing something.”
The Yantar’s movements have previously raised eyebrows. On October 18, 2016, a Syrian telecom company ordered emergency maintenance to repair a cable in the Mediterranean that provides internet connectivity to several countries, including Syria, Libya and Lebanon. The Yantar arrived in the area the day before the four-day maintenance began. It left two days before the maintenance ended. It’s unknown what work it did while there.
Watkins described another episode on November 5, 2016, when a submarine cable linking Persian Gulf nations experienced outages in Iran. Hours later, the Yantar left Oman and headed to an area about 100km west of the Iranian port city of Bushehr, where the cable runs ashore. Connectivity was restored just hours before the Yantar arrived on November 9. The boat stayed stationary over the site for several more days.
Undersea cables have been targets before.
At the beginning of World War I, Britain cut a handful of German underwater communications cables and tapped the rerouted traffic for intelligence. In the Cold War, the US Navy sent American divers deep into the Sea of Okhotsk off the Russian coast to install a device to record Soviet communications, hoping to learn more about the USSR’s submarine-launched nuclear capability.
More recently, British and American intelligence agencies have eavesdropped on fibre-optic cables, according to documents released by Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor.
In 2007, Vietnamese authorities confiscated ships carrying miles of fibre-optic cable that thieves salvaged from the sea for profit. The heist disrupted service for several months. And in 2013, Egyptian officials arrested three scuba divers off Alexandria for attempting to cut a cable stretching from France to Singapore. Five years on, questions remain about the attack on a cable responsible for about a third of all internet traffic between Egypt and Europe.